ABSTRACT
No discursive institution regulated more persistently the practice of art history in the twentieth century than a certain formalist language, in its commercial, journalistic and academic guises. As a result, and though modified convincingly and forcefully by the “New Art History” of the last quarter of the century, it is easy, except in certain highly visible instances, to gloss over what of substance, especially as history, might obtain for this body of writing. Still, to recover something of the historicist nature of classic art-historical formalism is to try and rehearse something of a long, tenacious engagement with the material appearances of art in Western society since at least the Renaissance.
