Racializing Art: A Baleful Genealogy
As a member of the graduate faculty in the History of Art at the University of Pittsburgh, I have taught our graduate seminar on Historiography three times. Pitt is fairly distinctive in our approach to this material because we separate Historiography and Methodology into different classes. Teaching historiography is intimidating but fulfilling. It is, of course, impossible to cover the entire history of the discipline in 15 weeks, so the instructor is forced to construct a selective but coherent intellectual itinerary. In this class, I look to instill in our students an understanding of the intellectual genealogy that they have inherited, and in presenting that genealogy I try to help them see how they can reshape that heritage moving forward.
As much as I enjoy teaching the history of the discipline, I must admit that over the years I have become increasingly wary of many of the titles that often populate the syllabus. It can be exciting to explore with students Heinrich Wölfflin’s 1915 claim in Principles of Art History: The Problem of The Development of Style in Later Art that “vision itself has a history,” particularly how this idea helped give rise to new modes of interrogation, including the fields that we now call Visual Studies and Visual Culture. However, the first time I taught historiography, I remember being stopped in my tracks by this phrase: “. . . it remains no mean problem to discover the conditions which, as material element—call it temperaments, Zeitgeist, or racial character—determine the style of individuals, periods, and peoples.” What exactly did the author mean when he offhandedly included “racial character” as a “material element”? This was an issue that I knew the students would want to discuss, and at the time I had little perspective to offer other than platitudes about how Wölfflin was a product of his time and therefore shared many views that we now find noxious.
Éric Michaud’s recent book, The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art, does not avoid the discomfort that I felt, but instead brings to the surface the distasteful strands of racism, white supremacy, and colonialism that have helped give modern art history its shape. In so doing, Michaud does a serious service to the discipline: it is no longer possible to ignore or undersell the impact that racialized and overtly white supremacist ideas have had on our discipline. Acknowledging this truth does not mean that the discipline is bankrupt, but, as Michaud demonstrates, it does mandate that certain “classical texts” in the historiographic canon be treated with caution and subjected to scrutiny in the classroom.
This book, originally published in French in 2015 and deftly translated by Nicholas Huckle, tracks the major developments in art history from about 1700 until the middle of the twentieth century, and shows how art history pivoted from thinking primarily about individual artists and local schools to considering the national character of artistic production. The stakes of this shift could not be higher, for notions of race suffused the discipline under the guise of “the nation.” The pivot coincides chronologically with historical developments like the emergence of the modern nation-state, the rise of colonialism, and the emergence of scientific racism, and Michaud makes a forceful argument that this combination of influences must be given serious consideration when studying the emergence of art history as an academic discipline.
The book unfolds over five chapters. Chapter 1 begins with early art historians like Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Artists, 1550/1568) and Giovanni Bellori (Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1672), who focused on local artistic “schools,” which was a useful concept because it described the obvious stylistic difference between, say, paintings by Francesco Salviati and Titian, who were taken as emblematic of the Roman and Venetian schools, respectively. Vasari, Bellori, and others like them were interested in articulating the differences between artists operating in relatively close geographical proximity (i.e., the Italian peninsula) as opposed to imposing a unifying theory of “national style” onto them. Michaud shows that Roger de Piles’ short essay “Of the Taste of Several Nations” (1699) marks a monumental shift in approach and encouraged critics to think in terms of “national” style rather than local schools, an approach that reached its apogee in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). For Winckelmann, an artistic style corresponded to the life of a people: it was biological. Once this linkage had been made, “it became customary to see art not simply as a social activity,” Michaud argues, “but as a peculiarly natural function of the body of a people: i.e., as a sort of bodily secretion of the nation as a whole.” A nation cannot help but produce art that reflects its national identity.
Winckelmann’s belief (shared by many others!) that the beauty of ancient sculpture was a direct reflection of the physical beauty of the ancient peoples who produced the work of art serves as the focal point of Chapter 2. For Winckelmann, the development of the ideal “Greek profile” was not taken simply as an artistic achievement, but evidence of a biologically distinct race that exhibited superior qualities with respect to other groups. This is, of course, not how representation works, and this grave misunderstanding of the disjuncture between images and the things they purport to represent had a serious impact. Fallacious art historical speculation (one hesitates to call it research) was used as “evidence” to support anthropological theories about the differences between various races: the social sciences raised themselves to their racist conclusions by grabbing onto their art historical bootstraps.
The title of Michaud’s book is explicated in Chapter 3. Early histories of art, especially those written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Vasari and his contemporaries, saw the Barbarian Invasions of the Roman empire in the fifth and sixth centuries as catastrophic events marking the extinction of the tradition of Greco-Roman art at the hands of foreign invaders. For those authors, this was self-evidently a bad thing, only remedied in the Renaissance, when Italian artists began the long process of consciously reviving the Roman tradition of art making. Of course, this is an ideological narrative that does a serious disservice to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, the instrumentalization of the Barbarian Invasions during the Romantic period took on an ideological valence that was more sinister, as the perpetual opposition between Latin and Germanic “races” was framed as the driving force behind Western culture. This argument has its roots in authors like Hegel and Gibbon, but it is strongest in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, who proposed that the young and vibrant populations of the Germanic north helped revitalize the failing, effeminate culture of the Latin world. As Michaud shows, the cleaving of the “Germanic tribes” from the “Latin peoples” filtered throughout the discipline and gave impetus to one of the most influential texts for recent generations, Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry (1901), in which the author developed the notion of Kunstwollen, essentially a given culture’s “will to art.” This idea is, Michaud demonstrates, rooted in a deeply racialized understanding of cultural difference. Kunstwollen is not a product of culture but biology, and Michaud suggests that art historians who have embraced this term should reconsider.
The noxious implications of a biological understanding of race and artistic production are carried forward in the next chapter, which considers how the racialized history of art that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could not assimilate Jewish art into its framework. Thoroughgoing anti-Semitism necessitated that Jews be excluded from European cultures, and art history offered a justification (the fact that other disciplines reacted similarly does not diminish art history’s failing). One route for excluding the Jewish people was to deny them an artistic instinct, a Kunstwollen, as it were. Michaud shows how art historians banded together and “the Jewish people were suddenly declared to have no art; they were ‘artless.’” Art historians systematically undercut or refused to acknowledge a series of important archeological discoveries demonstrating the long and storied existence of Jewish art. The most important of these was undoubtedly the discovery of the painted synagogue known as Dura-Europos in 1932. However, there were a number of other important publications that clearly showed long-lived traditions of metalworking, book arts, painting, and sculpture among various Jewish communities. All of this research was disregarded in the service of a racial ideology that could not permit the Jews to participate in the production of art alongside other European “races.” Michaud makes plain that it is not possible to dismiss this line of argumentation as a Nazi fantasy: it pervaded the entire discipline of art history.
The final chapter brings these ideas together and shows how scholars in the early twentieth century attempted to use ideas of “racial mixing” and cultural hybridization as a means of explaining cultural production. In these arguments, when a pure race imposes its artistic style on another culture, the result is a creative destruction that signals cultural progress. The Barbarian invasion of Rome becomes the paradigm to which scholars molded historical evidence. Michaud uses the long-standing debates over the “origins” of Gothic art and architecture to illustrate this point. Mid-twentieth-century scholars argued it was a style developed by a Germanic tribe and imposed on a French populace whose own will-to-art was weaker. When put in such terms, the claim seems obviously absurd, but Michaud shows the staying power that this argument exerted on the field. It did not fade away after the second World War. Rather, it was simply dressed in news clothes: after the Holocaust, arguments about race were considered gauche and dangerous, but arguments over “national styles” were perfectly acceptable among those holding art history PhDs in the 1960s.
The book concludes with a brief epilogue that explores the contemporary implications of the genealogy of racialized ideas in the history of art that Michaud has meticulously reconstructed. The ideas expressed here at times become uncomfortable. For instance, Michaud turns to evaluate the argument advanced by Svetlana Alpers in her monumental 1983 book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), which is often presented in graduate seminars as an excellent example of how to forge a new method of art history. In light of the historical analysis offered throughout the book, Alpers’ claims about how different modes of seeing fall along national lines gloss differently and are attached to an uncomfortable intellectual genealogy. Moreover, Michaud suggests that exhibitions of “Black,” “African-American,” “Latino,” or “Native American” (the quotation marks are Michaud’s) art “are meant to show, once again, that art and culture are primarily a matter of race.” This approach does not account for the fact that these communities have been historically underrepresented, and the coincidence of race and culture in these exhibitions is often a case of artistic agents employing what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would call “strategic essentialism” to attain certain goals. While Michaud’s historiographic analysis sheds unpleasant light on the history of art history, I cannot help but feel he has misfired in his analysis of the contemporary situations.
Illustration of the main human races, German School (19th century)
Although this book was first published more than five years ago, it speaks directly to this cultural moment, when disingenuous arguments about “Critical Race Theory” dominate the cultural sphere. Because it was written by a French author, it does not cite, as far I could tell, any anglophone texts related to Critical Race Theory, Black Studies, Black Marxism, or any other strain of thought that is explicitly activist in its disposition. Instead, this book is an exceptional example of how a purely descriptive account of art history’s history reveals the rank white supremacy that underwrites many of the founding texts of the discipline, which contributed to the development of the notion of the “Caucasian race.” This book is an example of critical genealogy at its best, and it shows that art historians must grapple with the racist genealogy of their discipline. The book, therefore, raises a question about the current culture war: if an honest accounting of the past reveals lineages of white supremacy that are barely concealed, at what point does the simple act of historical inquiry coincide with the Right’s caricatured version of Critical Race Theory? Either way, this book will help me re-frame the way I present the history of the discipline in my department’s Historiography seminar the next time I teach. Critical genealogies, I hope, can also reveal pathways forward.
Christopher J. Nygren is associate professor of early modern art history at the University of Pittsburgh, and will be the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studying in the Visual Arts for AY 2021-22. His book, Titian’s Icons: Tradition, Charisma, and Devotion in Renaissance Italy was published in 2020.