ABSTRACT
This is a revised edition of a paper first published in English in Block, 1982(6).
In the essay from which this passage is cited, T.J. Clark described a crisis in art history. He began by reminding his readers of a
happier time, early in the century, when art historians such as Dvorák and Riegl were counted amongst the great and pioneering historians and when art history was not reduced to its current curatorial role but participated in the major debates in the study of human society. Since that time art history has become isolated from the other social and historical sciences. Within the discipline the dominant trends are positively anti-historical. A review of the catalogue by one of the architects of modernist art history, Alfred H. Barr, Jnr., for his exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936, Museum of Modern Art New York) published in 1937 by the American Marxist art historian, Meyer Schapiro, provided a still pertinent critique of modernist art history. Schapiro described the paradox of Barr’s book, which is largely an account of historical movements and yet is itself essentially unhistorical. Barr, he suggested, provides a linear, evolutionary narrative of individual creators grouped together in styles and schools. History is replaced by mere chronology; the date of every stage in various movements is charted, enabling a curve to be plotted for the emergence of art year by year. Yet connections never are drawn between art and the conditions of the moment. Barr excludes as irrelevant to his story of art the nature of the society in which it arose, i.e. the character of the social structures and conflicts, the conditions of social life and exchange and thus the real arena of art’s production and consumption. History, if it does make an appearance, is reduced to a series of incidents like a world war which may accelerate or obstruct art, an internal, immanent process amongst artists. Changes in style are explained by the popular theory of exhaustion, novelty and reaction.1
