The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe

Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2005 by David Carrier

STEPHEN BANN, ED.

London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. 311 pp. $225

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In 1994, I had the pleasure of attending a conference in Canterbury devoted to Walter Pater. One evening we went on a walking tour to places associated with our subject. When Stephen Bann took us to Pater's house, the current residents were surprised, even alarmed, to find the assembled group of scholars on their doorstep. "We are here," someone explained, "in honor of Walter Pater." "Fine," the woman coming out replied, "but who is Pater?" Even in his own country, Walter Pater is a very specialized taste. Part of the problem is that he is difficult to place. He hoped to be admired for Plato and Platonism, but specialists in ancient philosophy pay little attention to that book. His fascinating Marius the Epicurean, a very odd specimen of Victorian prose, is in my experience almost unreadable as a novel. (1) Nowadays his reputation rests on the essays gathered in The Renaissance, supplemented by the various portraits appearing in Imaginary Portraits. Pater was writing just when the working methodology of academic art history was being established. Compared with the German scholars of his day, though, Pater seems but a gifted amateur. Certainly, his interests are very different from those of present-day art historians. (2)

This new anthology edited by Bann, a publication in the series the Reception of British Authors in Europe, includes essays discussing Pater's reception in Italian, French, German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish sources. We learn about the many translations of Pater and how they were understood. Apart from Bann's very useful introduction, these clear essays by specialists are meant for readers already acquainted with Pater's writings. If you seek a summary or critical evaluation of his arguments or a focused discussion explaining why his writings are still relevant to art historians, then you will find The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe unhelpful. But if your aim is to understand why he appealed and appeals to many very diverse readers in many European languages, then you will find the book immensely illuminating. None of the individual essays in this volume gives reason to modify our conception of Pater, but taken collectively they reveal much about the complex process in which a grand reputation is established.

Recently Pater's great precursor John Ruskin has attracted attention. Thanks to his biographers, we know a great deal about this critic's loving attention to Venetian architecture and J. M. W. Turner's paintings and about his socialism. As George Leonard has shown, there is a pretty obvious direct line between Ruskin's concerns and those of the mid-twentieth-century art world. (3) Ruskin's concern with politics, for example, has been taken up by the many influential writers associated with the periodical October. Like Ruskin, these art critics want to moralize about contemporary visual art. Of course, Ruskin's prose style is very alien to ours, and the theorizing he uses in support of his socialist moralizing is very different from that of Benjamin Buchloh, Thomas Crow, and Rosalind Krauss. But his view that visual art ought to be socially engaged remains very influential.

Along with Ruskin, Pater is the late-nineteenth-century English art historian whose writing and arguments remain of living interest. "Born too late to be of the Renaissance and too early to participate in the cultural rebirth of twentieth-century Modernism that he helped to mold," as Paul Barolsky notes, "he in a sense belongs to neither yet to both." (4) In some ways Pater anticipated the concerns, though not the literary style, of what in the 1980s was called postmodernism. "Allegory is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete," so Craig Owens wrote in his then-famous commentary (he does not mention Pater), "an affinity which finds its most comprehensive expression in the ruin." (5) It is not absurd to argue--as Barolsky has recently done--that Pater's prose should be a suggestive model for present-day art historians. (6) Not surprisingly, Pater attracts historians interested in the genealogy of homosexuality, in modernism and psychoanalytic art theories, and in the Renaissance. And although he seems to have taken little interest in contemporary visual art, Pater appeals to some of our art critics because he is a lucid, very economical stylist. The lyrical art writing of John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, and Peter Schjeldhal has obvious affinities with Pater's.

That said, Pater remains a truly strange thinker and writer. Even we who admire him for being determinedly concise and passionately elliptical are also aware how eccentric his books can seem. In a very sympathetic essay, Richard Wollheim argues that Pater is ultimately disappointing as a critic of the arts. (7) His output was limited, his characterization of individual works of art is tentative, and for someone so concerned with the personality in art he was mysteriously casual about attribution. And not just because he was a classicist and so stands outside the world of academic art history writing. Pater's style, like that of certain other very English writers, Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, for example, always has been a minority taste. Virginia Woolf has become a canonical author, but Firbank, Compton-Burnett, and Pater remain relatively marginal figures. This is one reason why The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe deserves attention.

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The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe

Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2005 by David Carrier

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