Dazwischen: Kulturwissenschaft auf Warburgs Spuren - Saecula Spiritalia, 29 - Review

Catherine M. Soussloff traces another historiography of art and its history altogether. In The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept she barely mentions Winckelmann, who appears only along with Immanuel Kant as one of the origins for the idea of genius (p. 74).(7) But Winckelmann had also stated that his history of art was to be distinguished from an earlier history of artists. In contrast, Soussloff argues that the historiography of art history is entirely bound up with the history of the concept of the artist. In explicating this thesis, she provides a different genealogy for the historiography of art and for the notion of the aesthetic.

According to her own autobiography, several details of which she offers in her book, Soussloff herself had begun as a scholar of what might be called the "philological-historical" method,(8) but here she offers a "discourse analysis" that seeks to "denaturalize" the concept of the artist. In her self-styled "new historiography" the "artist exists as the product of art historical methods used to explain the object in culture." Her effort thus "intersects with the question in contemporary cultural theory of how disciplines construct their own objects of study, their own methods, and hence, their discipline" (p. 14). She pairs the idea of the artist with the object he or she produces, the latter notion privileged by the development of 18th-century aesthetics by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Kant (pp. 8-9).

For Soussloff biography thus constitutes history, while artists' biographies, and the anecdotes from which they are formed, construct art history. This pattern is evident in the first written lives of the artists, which are seen as autochthonous developments, the concept of the artist bound up with Florentine politics since the 15th or even the 14th century, in this case. From being a part of nature, the artist is embedded in culture, in the Kulturwissenschaft of Jacob Burckhardt and Warburg. Thence he is displaced to history, in the application of the philological method Soussloff attributes to the Vienna School. This method, which she identifies with Julius yon Schlosser, coincides in time with the early application of psychoanalysis to art history by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, who reveal the makings of myth and legend in the lives of the artists. According to Soussloff, the work of these men, and of their friend Ernst Gombrich, was also inextricably bound up with their Jewish identity and its burdens, just as Sigmund Freud's work on the artist had been influenced by his Jewish identity (p. 131). Finally, Soussloff expounds on how the artist appears in the text, in the form of "rhetorics," largely explained as the use of anecdote, that express the "myth of the artist."

In the light of Soussloff's anecdotes about her own intellectual formation and the evidence of her past work, her book offers many surprises. In the face of the continuing stream of writing on figures like Giorgio Vasari (who in any event is not as evident in her book as one might have expected) and Karel van Mander, her assertion that "there has been a lack of scrutiny of 'naturalized' source materials, that is, the biographies of the artist" is astonishing (p. 10).(9) To choose another example out of many, and to stay with one of her targets, Soussloff argues that "Von Schlosser's student E. H. Gombrich turned toward the object, not the text or the artist. His influential work serves as a prominent example of a pattern of rejection of the deeper implications of yon Schlosser and Kallab's work" (p. 26). But Gombrich wrote his dissertation on Giulio Romano under von Schlosser and has returned repeatedly to this artist.(10) Gombrich's best-selling The Story of Art begins: "There is no such thing as Art. There are only artists." This approach directly resonates with von Schlosser's ideas, even as Soussloff describes them.(11) And much of Gombrich's writing, especially the essays accumulated in his many volumes on Renaissance art, deals with how texts on art alter the presentation of the artist, as in Wolfgang Kallab and run Schlosser.(12)