© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
Art History and Visual Studies
in Europe
Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks
Edited by
Matthew Rampley
Thierry Lenain
Hubert Locher
Andrea Pinotti
Charlotte Schoell-Glass
Kitty Zijlmans
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2012
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
CONTENTS
List of Contributors ........................................................................................ ix
Preface and Acknowledgements ................................................................ xv
Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte
Schoell-Glass, Matthew Rampley and Kitty Zijlmans
Introduction  ..................................................................................................... 1
Matthew Rampley
PART ONE
METHODS, DEBATES AND PARADIGMS
Art History, Aesthetics and Art Criticism  ............................................... 17
Antonio Somaini
The Idea of the Canon and Canon Formation in Art History  .......... 29
Hubert Locher
European Heritage: Unity in Diversity? ................................................... 41
Brian Graham
Contemporary Art and the Concept of Art History: Influence,
Dependency and Challenge .................................................................... 59
Peter J. Schneemann
Formalism and the History of Style .......................................................... 75
Andrea Pinotti
Visual Culture and Visual Studies .............................................................. 91
Jan Baetens
Theories of the Image in France: Between Art History and
Visual Anthropology  ................................................................................. 107
Ralph Dekoninck
vi contents
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
Bildwissenschaft: Theories of the Image in German-Language
Scholarship ................................................................................................... 119
Matthew Rampley
Computerization, Digitization and the Internet ................................... 135
Antonella Sbrilli
Technical Art History: The Synergy of Art, Conservation and
Science  .......................................................................................................... 151
Erma Hermens
Dimensions of Dialogue: Art History and the Discourse of
Economics .................................................................................................... 167
Victor Ginsburgh and François Mairesse
Sociologies of Art: With and against Art History .................................. 185
Nathalie Heinich
Museums and Museologies .......................................................................... 197
Dominique Poulot
Art History in a Global Frame: World Art Studies ............................... 217
Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans
The Construction of National Art Histories and the
‘New’ Europe  ............................................................................................... 231
Matthew Rampley
PART TWO
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE DISCIPLINE
Cultures of Interruptions. Art History in the Baltic States: Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania ................................................................................. 249
Krista Kodres, Giedrė Mickūnaitė and Stella Pelše
In Search of a Synthesis: Art History in Belgium .................................. 275
Raphaël Pirenne
contents vii
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
Art History in Bulgaria: Institutional Frameworks, Research
Directions and Individual Scholars ...................................................... 287
Elka Bakalova
Art History in the Czech and Slovak Republics: Institutional
Frameworks, Topics and Loyalties ....................................................... 305
Milena Bartlová
Art History in France: A Conflict of Traditions ..................................... 315
Ralph Dekoninck and Joël Roucloux
Art History in German-Speaking Countries: Austria, Germany
and Switzerland .......................................................................................... 335
Charlotte Schoell-Glass
Art History and Visual Studies in Great Britain and Ireland  ............ 355
Griselda Pollock
Born of a ‘Peripheral’ Modernism: Art History in Greece and
Cyprus ............................................................................................................ 379
Areti Adamopoulou
Art History in Italy: Connoisseurship, Academic Scholarship
and the Protection of Cultural Heritage ............................................. 393
Laura Iamurri
Art History in the Netherlands: The Past and Present of the
Discipline ...................................................................................................... 407
Marga van Mechelen and Kitty Zijlmans
Art History in the Nordic Countries  ......................................................... 421
Dan Karlholm, Hans Dam Christensen and Matthew Rampley
A Marginalised Tradition? Polish Art History ........................................ 439
Wojciech Bałus
In Search of National Traditions: Art History in Romania  ................ 451
Corina Teacă
viii contents
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
Art History in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia .............. 461
Nenad Makuljević
Art History in Spain: A Generational History ........................................ 473
Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis
Art History and the Founding of the Modern Turkish State  ............ 485
Burcu Dogramaci
Bibliography  ..................................................................................................... 493
Dennis Janzen
Index ................................................................................................................... 543
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
THE IDEA OF THE CANON AND CANON FORMATION
IN ART HISTORY
Hubert Locher
Canon: A Critical Term for Art History?
The use of the word ‘canon’ in a critical sense in art-historical literature
is, surprisingly, of fairly recent date. It is explained in one dry sentence
in Duro and Greenhalgh’s Essential Art History: ‘In art the term refers
to works of a given artist, period or school accepted “into the canon” as
genuine . . . by connoisseurs.’1 Although the term is used as a central critical
category in the six-volume series Art and its Histories published by
The Open University in the 1990s, it does not fijigure among the Critical
Terms for Art History.2 Nor does it appear in the Metzler Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft
published in 2003, although ‘Kanonisierung’ (‘canonization’) is
at least mentioned in the introduction, by which the editor refers to the
purportedly canonical status of the one hundred terms selected.3 Eventually
we fijind a short entry in Jonathan Harris’s Art History: The Key
Concepts (2006).4
One reason for this belated appearance might be that the term has
not been understood as a critical concept. Traditionally, questions of the
canon and of the canonical in art were hardly ever discussed in a critical
manner; they were not considered the business of a historical discipline,
the task of which was rather, in the fijirst place, to register and, second,
to interpret what had been done. Its purpose was not seen explicitly as
judging, praising, and fijinally compiling a selective best-of list of works
1 Paul Duro and Michael Greenhalgh, eds., Essential Art History (London, 1992) 73.
2 See Colin Cunningham and Gill Perry, Academies, Museums and Canons of Art
(London and New Haven, CT, 1999); Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shifff, eds., Critical Terms
for Art History (Chicago, IL, 1996). The term does not appear in the revised 2003 edition
either.
3 Ulrich Pfijisterer, ed., Metzler Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft: Ideen, Methoden, Begrifffe
(Stuttgart, 2003) vii.
4 See ‘Canon, Canonicity’ in Jonathan Harris, Art History: The Key Concepts (London,
2006) 45–6. For a more recent discussion in reference to contemporary art see Rainer
Metzger, ed., ‘Über das Kanonische’, Kunstforum International 162 (2002).
30 hubert locher
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
that would eventually be called the ‘canon’ of art history. More commonly
used and intensely debated in other disciplines of the humanities, the
term ‘canon’ is nevertheless fijirmly rooted in the history of art.5 Indeed,
it is its implicit role in framing judgements and decisions within the discipline
that makes the examination of the role of the canon and canon
formation all the more pressing.
As a metaphor stemming probably from architecture, it is a basic
notion in one of the very earliest Western theories of art: ‘Canon’ (Greek/
Latin for ‘measuring rod’, ‘standard’) was the title of a lost theoretical treatise
by the Greek sculptor Polykleitos.6 In his Natural History (XXXV, 55),
Pliny the Elder relates that other artists called one of the sculptures, the
Doryphoros, made by Polykleitos, ‘canon’, because it was considered to be
the perfect, proportioned image of man. The term is also used to refer to
a model in the sense of a guideline, a set of rules, or a schedule or list of
dates serving as reference points. It is important to note that the notion
was very early on connected to law, and, even more signifijicantly, to religion.
Whereas in early Christianity the term was only used in application
to religious law (canonical law), from the fourth century onwards the term
was also used in reference to the defijinitive and authoritative nature of
the body of sacred scripture, a use of the term that classical antiquity did
not know, neither in application to religious nor to secular literary texts.7
The word ‘canonization’ was also used to designate the act by which the
5 A reference to the ‘Western canon’ of literature in an afffijirmative sense can be found in
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages (New York, 1994).
Manfred Fuhrmann, Der europäische Bildungskanon des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt
am Main, 1999) looks back to a once probably functioning ‘Bildungs-Kanon’ (‘canon of
cultivated education’) in Germany, rather than in Europe. For contributions to the more
recent critical discussion see Maria Moog-Grünewald, ed., Kanon und Theorie (Heidelberg,
1997); Gerhard R. Kaiser and Stefan Matuschek, eds., Begründungen des Kanon: Beiträge
aus der Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Theologie (Heidelberg, 2001);
Renate von Heydebrand, ed., Kanon, Macht, Kultur: Theoretische, historische und soziale
Aspekte ästhetischer Kanonbildungen (Stuttgart, 1998).
6 The history of the word is given by Herbert Oppel, ‘Kanon. Zur Bedeutungsgeschichte
des Wortes und seiner lateinischen Entsprechungen (regula—norma)’, special edition of
Philologus 30.4 (1937). A thorough discussion of the problem can be found in Jan Assmann,
Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen
(Munich, 1997) 103–29. See also Herbert Beck and Peter C. Bol, eds., Polyklet: Der Bildhauer
der griechischen Klassik. Exhibition Catalogue Liebighaus, Museum alter Plastik Frankfurt
am Main (Mainz, 1990); Hans von Steuben, ‘Der Doryphoros und der Kanon Polyklets’,
Städel-Jahrbuch 15 (1996) 7–18; Thuri Lorenz, ‘Polyklet: die Geschichte vom “Kanon” ’, in
Festschrift für Götz Pochat zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Johann Konrad Eberlein (Vienna, 2007)
11–19.
7 See the introduction to Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon
Debate: On the Origins and Formation of the Bible (Peabody, MA, 2002) 13, and Eugen
the idea of the canon and canon formation in art history 31
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
Christian Church declared a person to be a saint, or the imposition by
(canonical) law on the whole Church of the universal public veneration
of an individual.
Today a canon is usually understood as a group of works, objects or,
more often, texts, recognized within a defijined social group as being exemplary
and thus embodying a set of binding provisions. Undeniably, some
of the religious connotations remain present in the modern use of the
term; as the Egyptologist Jan Assmann has pointed out, this is evident
when we still understand a canon not only, as in antiquity, as the correct
measure made to the right proportion, but also as the right thing according
to a higher authority.8
Generally, to canonize a set of objects, works or texts, means to declare
that they are of the highest importance as timeless models of their kind.
It is obvious that there are problems if one were to speak in this sense of
canonization and of a canon when art history as a scholarly discipline is
concerned. In the course of the nineteenth century art historians increasingly
distanced themselves from normative judgements, focusing more
and more on the ‘objective’ registration and description of art-historical
‘facts’. This did not mean to deny that certain works should be counted
amongst the ‘Denkmäler der Kunst’ (‘monuments of art’), or that some
‘Masters’ were more ‘important’, or just more interesting than others.
However, art historians usually tried to evaluate not an object’s absolute
value, but its relative or historical value, which became apparent when
an object had been regarded by other artists in some way as a model.
Although such value judgements were widely practiced and accepted,
most art historians still usually avoid addressing these issues in a critical
way, implicitly suggesting that it was not for them to select and decide
about the prominence to be given to an object, but rather to ‘history’, the
‘market’, or ‘the public’.
Even those art historians interested more in what we may call the aesthetic
aspects or aesthetic value of art would not usually see their task in
identifying a list of master models, but rather in describing the specifijic
aesthetic quality of certain works, without indulging too much in questions
of ranking. On the other hand, it cannot be disputed that aspects
of ranking were and still are of considerable importance in the art world.
Ulrich, ‘The Notion and Defijinition of the Canon’, in McDonald and Sanders, The Canon
Debate, 21–35.
8 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 115.
32 hubert locher
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
When, in the thirteenth century in the region of the Île de France, rival
cities each tried to build the highest and most beautiful cathedral, just
to give one obvious example from medieval history, it can be taken for
granted that they were acting in a competitive situation. Likewise artists
of the modern era, from the Renaissance onwards, were constantly looking
at each other’s work, trying to create works of outstanding and exemplary
character, more beautiful, grand or signifijicant than those of their rivals.
This sense of competition is epitomized in the literary work of the artist
and writer Giorgio Vasari, sometimes said to be the father of art history,
who, in his Vite de pittori lists the biographies of Italian artists according to
their achievements, suggesting that all artists were trying to surpass their
predecessors, thus setting up both the idea of progress and a canon of the
most important (Italian) artists of the then past two centuries.9
Art historians of more recent times may argue that while artists have
always striven to create works worthy of universal praise, their own task
as historians was merely to observe, describe and analyse these works in
an appropriate way; according to this view the question of ranking would
be a historical phenomenon, and the role of the art historian would thus
be to discern the evidential record of previous qualitative judgements. But
this approach seems to be too simple in assuming the possibility of a ‘disinterested’
historian. If there are good reasons to distance oneself in arthistorical
practice from partisanship with regard to art production, one
has nevertheless to acknowledge that the art historian inevitably is and
always has been a player in the game. Any historian has to make choices,
deciding which work to think about, to publish, or to exhibit. His or her
choices involve value judgements, which sooner or later contribute to the
establishing of a set of objects that become more visible, are discussed
more, and thus deemed more valuable than others, which results in what
one has called the ‘canon of art history’.
Canon Formation and Collective Identity
A canon, in general, is a system of reference produced in a certain cultural
context. Canon formation as a historical process may occur especially, as
Jan Assmann argues in his survey of cultural memory in early advanced
civilizations, if a society is in crisis. This applies to the formation of the
9 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani, da Cimabue
insino a’ tempi nostri (Florence, 1550; 2nd enlarged edn. 1568).
the idea of the canon and canon formation in art history 33
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
canons of sacred scriptures in ancient cultures, such as Egypt, or Israel, or
in early Christianity. The canon is, according to Assmann, ‘the principle of
a collective constitution and stabilization of identity, which is at the same
time the foundation of individual identity, as a medium of individuation
by socialization, and of self-realization by insertion into the “normative
conscience of an entire population” (Habermas). A canon constitutes a
nexus between the identity of the ego and collective identity. It represents
the society as a whole and at the same time a system of values and
interpretations, to which the single person avows and to which he or she
builds his or her identity as a member of the society’.10 In this sense, canon
formation is concerned with the formation and confijirmation of individual
and group identity. The individual fijinds her- or himself addressed and
represented in the canon. Its function is to give orientation, which can
only be achieved if the reference system is relatively stable.
Whether such a reference system exists in Western art cannot easily
be answered. It seems doubtful that we can reasonably talk of a canon of
Western art in the same sense as we can talk of a canon of sacred scriptures.
It is true that in the art-historical literature of the last one and a
half centuries we fijind certain names and objects time and again. But a
closer look at the history of the formation of this list would show that it is
constantly changing; some names disappear, while new ones are added.
The more established names appear in diffferent narratives, are valued
and interpreted in diffferent ways, according to the relative position of the
writer who is trying to situate him- or herself and his or her social group
by referring to objects within the larger system of art, or rather European
or Western art in general. While these narratives are suggesting or even
explicitly supporting the idea of a timeless and all-encompassing canon of
works of Western art, even of ‘world art’, which is used as a reference system
to establish sub-canons such as national canons, we have to assume
that there is a certain range within which choices are made, and that even
the criteria of selection are subject to change.
Thus, the so called canon of Western art (or the canon of art history)
seems to be permanently under construction, which contradicts the very
notion of a canon, or forces us to introduce the concept of an ‘open canon’.
Even if historians, collectors, dealers or politicians tried to establish ‘the’
canon of art, there is at any time a very broad set of possibly acceptable
canonical objects, which are all artefacts classifijied as ‘art’. From this fijield
10 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 127.
34 hubert locher
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
the objects of reference are chosen and marked as outstanding by critics,
art historians, dealers, and collectors, according to the specifijic interests of
the person acting or the group or institution this person represents, and
laid down in some kind of listing—such as, for example, the national lists
of historical monuments protected by national law, or the Unesco world
heritage list, or, of course, the many art-historical surveys recommended
to students of art history. Moreover we should take into consideration
that not only the selection of artefacts canonized in such ways, but also
the criteria according to which artefacts are classifijied as ‘art’ is mutable.
We have thus not one ‘art-historical canon’ but competing canons, canons
embodying national identity, or canons for groups of individuals within
it, who are trying to develop a specifijic identity, not in contradiction, but
in relation to society at large by using the reference system of art. Each
canon will have its own specifijic history, structure and purpose.
Examples of Canon Formation—Canons of World Art and National Canons
Given this situation we should rather talk of continuous canon formation
than of an open or closed canon of art or art history; or we could
say that, in fact, no set canon in the strict sense (as a closed reference
system) exists but a tradition of canon formation, which is characteristic
for Western culture. Canon formation can be observed in Western culture
since antiquity. Probably the fijirst list intended as some kind of a canon
of works of art was established in the third century bc as the famous
‘Seven Wonders of the World’.11 These Seven Wonders, or objects to be
admired, are usually not ranked, but each example is remembered as a
superior and unsurpassed achievement of its kind. Yet, each one of these
monuments can also be remembered as representing the specifijic cultural
power of one more or less defijined nation playing an important role at
some time within the ancient world. This is certainly how the Roman poet
Martial (40–104 ad) read the list. In his Liber Spectaculorum he mentions
the seven monuments as representing their respective nations, in order
to compare them to the cultural power of Rome, epitomized in a newly
11 See Peter Clayton and Martin Price, eds., The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
(London, 1988); Kai Brodersen, Die Sieben Weltwunder: Legendäre Kunst- und Bauwerke der
Antike, 2nd rev. edn. (Munich, 2004). The fijirst complete list handed down might be that
compiled by Antipatros of Sidon between 150 and 120 bc.
the idea of the canon and canon formation in art history 35
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
added monument, the Flavian amphitheatre.12 This is a characteristic
example of somebody trying to expand and diffferentiate the canon.
When the list of the Seven Wonders was reactivated in the Renaissance,
the canon of antiquity was treated as a fijixed and authoritative reference
system. We can observe now that monuments of the authors’ own time
and nation were added or compared with the canonical wonders of the
ancient world. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the German
humanist Jacob Wimpfeling from Strasbourg referred to the Seven Wonders
in order to glorify the Minster of his hometown as a structure that
surpassed all buildings of Europe.13 Some two centuries later, the historical
perspective became more important. We fijind the Seven Wonders of the
antique world prominently placed on the fijirst pages of Johann Bernhard
Fischer von Erlach’s Outline of a Historical Architecture (‘Entwurf einer historischen
Architektur’) of 1721.14 In this fijirst attempt at a history of world
architecture all objects are allocated to their nations of origin, following
the purpose of showing the ‘building manners’ of each, fijinally leading to
the present time and back to the European world, or more precisely to the
work of Fischer von Erlach himself. We may see in this approach an early
mode of discriminating national styles, which became common towards
the end of the eighteenth century, and a leading category for structuring
the large art-historical handbooks of the nineteenth century. For the present
discussion the most signifijicant aspect of Fischer von Erlach’s text is
his reference to a traditional canon, which was global and international,
in order comparatively to defijine his own manner, connecting his own
and his nation’s works of architecture to the acknowledged monuments
of great art.
Architectural objects are by nature immobile and permanently on public
view and thus often from the outset conceived of as symbols of a local
group. The situation is diffferent when we look at a painting or a sculpture.
Given the fragile character of these works, their mobility and the fact that
a painter or a sculptor usually produced a greater multitude of works in
12 See Kathleen Coleman, ed., Martial: Liber Spectaculorum (Oxford, 2006); see, too,
Brodersen, Die Sieben Weltwunder, 14–15.
13 Jakob Wimpfeling, Epitome rerum Germanicarum (1505) (Marburg, 1562) 70. See
Harold Hammer-Schenk, ‘Architektur und Nationalbewußtsein—Wandlungen vom 16.
bis zum 20. Jahrhundert’, in Funkkolleg Kunst: Eine Geschichte der Kunst im Wandel ihrer
Funktionen I, ed. Werner Busch (Munich 1987) 559-85.
14 Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Entwurf einer historischen Architectur, in Abbildung
unterschiedener berühmten Gebäude, des Alterthums und fremder Völcker (Vienna,
1721).
36 hubert locher
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
a lifetime, it has been common practice since ancient Greece and Rome
to remember, in the fijirst place, the names of the artists, and only in the
second place their works. There thus tend to be lists of canonical painters
rather than lists of canonical paintings. In Vasari’s Vite, important artists
and their biographies are listed in the fijirst instance and only secondarily,
lists of works of art are noted. Their works document, in this context, the
life achievements of artists even when they are meticulously described
and characterized. Paintings and sculptures are therefore treated as exemplary
representations of the work of an artist in its entirety, while this is
the case to a lesser degree with regard to architecture. The exemplary
nature of paintings and statues makes for their status of collectibles that
can stand for wider artistic and cultural contexts, whereas architectural
monuments can only be assembled in their representations (descriptions,
illustrations). Collections of man-made ‘mirabilia’, and, among them,
paintings and sculptures, have been of crucial importance for the formation
of the notion of art in modern times, and substantial to the formation
of the canon of art. Since the sixteenth century it has been common practice
to collect and display paintings as works of art according to national
or regional ‘schools’. One can observe the formation of sub-canons within
these partitions, but the early collectors, in most cases using their galleries
as spaces for political representation, usually did not exclusively collect
just the masters of one school but tried to collect works by important masters
of the most important schools. This concept is developed and reflected
in the literature of art. The small handbook for amateurs of painting, for
example, published by the French painter and writer Roger de Piles in
1699, contains among other texts a historical sequence where a canonical
list of painters from antiquity to the then present time is given.15 This list is
ordered chronologically but also according to regional or national schools.
De Piles mentions the Roman, the Venetian, the Lombard, the German,
the Flemish and, fijinally, the French School. His sequence shows that
typically the canonical listing is used to defijine the writer’s own position,
placing the French school at the end. Since the late eighteenth century
this order became, for some time, the ‘logic of the museum’, its quintessential
example being the Louvre. It was not only the place where the
historical collection of paintings of the European schools were shown—
among them, of course, most prominently the French—but also where
15 Roger de Piles, Abregé de la vie des peintres. Avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages et
un traité du Peintre parfait etc. (Paris, 1699).
the idea of the canon and canon formation in art history 37
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
contemporary French painting was exhibited periodically in the nearby
‘Salon’. Displaying the canonical frame of reference, the modern museum
was to become the most important institution for the formation of arthistorical
canons, and especially the place where the formation of national
canons was staged. In the course of the nineteenth century, these national
canons were to become more and more important throughout Europe.
While many modern artists aimed at ranking themselves among the
‘great masters’ presented in the modern museum, it should also be noted
that any collection is a construction in its own right and variable according
to the will of the institution, the owner or its curator, and does not
necessarily present the frame of reference (canon) observed by the artists
working at the time. With regard to the formation of national canons of
art we can observe that occasionally the foundation of museums was supported
in order to encourage the formation of a local (national) tradition
of painting, or with the intent of diffferencing the art-historical canon, by
canonizing (or musealizing) the local tradition on the understanding that
what could be seen in the museum was part of a canon. In the nineteenth
century the institution of art history naturalized such constructions. It
was then that art history as a scholarly discipline emerged and flourished,
beginning in Germany, with many other countries following in its wake.
The discipline was then also institutionalized in state-funded universities,
as a result of which it could and did serve in its specifijic way in articulating
and propagating notions of national identity.
Interpreting Canons
If one accepts that canons are not given entities but more or less collectively
developed and agreed reference systems, representing sets of values
deemed to be important for society as a whole, or for groups within
it, then canon formation has to be considered as a social and political
enterprise. It is not by chance that the term ‘canon’ in the modern sense
occurred in art-historical literature at a time when some scholars started
to see more clearly and address the fact that their discipline was deeply
concerned not only with the beautiful and the precious, but with society
at large and its values.
One of the fijirst to address the issue was Ernst H. Gombrich. In a lecture
delivered in 1973 Gombrich, as a ‘humanist’, thought it necessary to
defend the appreciation of art and the history of art as the history of great
achievements of ‘great masters’, and thus—he uses the word—the ‘canon’
38 hubert locher
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
of art as the approved list of masterworks serving as models and as an
indispensable reference system against moral and aesthetic ‘relativism’.16
Gombrich’s defence of the canon was directed against those unnamed
social scientists (of Marxist persuasion) who, he thought, considered art
history to be just another social science, or, at best, an ancilla sociologiae.
The most obvious example might have been Arnold Hauser, whose
Social History of Art Gombrich had reviewed in its English translation
two decades earlier, but he might also have been aware of the interest
of a younger generation of scholars who started in these years critically
to rethink art history. From the beginning, the critique of the traditional
canon of the ‘masters’ was a central issue, but there seems to have been
an initial hesitation to use the word ‘canon’; it does not occur, for example,
in one of the seminal contributions by Linda Nochlin, who provocatively
asked in 1971: ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’17 The
critique of the canon in this sense continued to the 1990s—most of the
time without using the term as a critical concept but with the intention to
expand and broaden the fijield of study by including marginalized artists,
in particular women, and overlooked artistic genres. It was the feminist
art historian Nanette Salomon who explicitly criticized ‘the art-historical
canon’ as being ‘among the most virulent, and ultimately the most vulnerable’
of canons within academic disciplines.18 Despite their fundamental
disagreement with approaches like that of Gombrich, radical art historians
rarely went as far as fundamentally reconsidering the principle of
traditional art history, which was, as Adrian Rifkin noticed in 1986, the
production of a ‘series of valued objects’. ‘More often than not’, Rifkin
argued, radical art historians fell ‘into line’ with traditional art history,
‘although they might fijirst insist that the canon gets fijilled out a bit’.19
16 For this see Ernst H. Gombrich, ‘Art History and the Social Sciences’, in Ideals and
Idols (Oxford, 1979) 131–66; Gombrich, ‘Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence
with Quentin Bell’, Critical Inquiry 2.3 (1976), reprinted in: Ideas and Idols, 167–83.
17 Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in Nochlin, Women,
Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York, 1988) 145–78. First published in 1971.
18 Nanette Salomon, ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission’, in (En)gendering
Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, ed. Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow (Knoxville,
TN, 1991) 220–34. A German translation was published in kritische berichte 21.4 (1993)
27–40. The chapter was republished in Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical
Anthology (Oxford and New York, 1998) 344–55; see also, in Preziosi’s anthology, the
explanation of the term ‘canon’ in the glossary, 577.
19 Adrian Rifkin, ‘Art’s Histories’, in The New Art History, ed. Alan L. Rees and Frances
Borzello (London, 1986) 157–63, quoted 159. For an interesting approach to the problem
see Karen-Edis Barzman, ‘Feminists, Postmodernism, and the History of Art’, The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52.3 (1994) 327–39.
the idea of the canon and canon formation in art history 39
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
The problem of the art-historical canon was then brought to the attention
of the readers of The Art Bulletin in 1996, as part of the series ‘A Range
of Critical Perspectives’, where several authors presented their views
on ‘Rethinking the Canon’, which was approached from diffferent areas
of the study of visual culture; this involved not only an expansion of
the traditional canon, but a critical analysis of canons per se and canon
formation.20 Griselda Pollock’s study, published in 1999, attempted to
‘diffference the canon’ by trying to relate a feminist re-reading of canonical
modern ‘masters’ with readings of canonical artists of feminist art
history.21 But even this ambitious book consciously remained a contribution
to the project of expanding and reforming the canon from within art
history, without aiming, as the author underlines, for the ‘more political’
option of abolishing canons altogether, which would imply the inclusion
of all cultural artefacts as having equal signifijicance. This latter option
would in fact mean discarding the notion of the work of art entirely. In
this way, one would dispose of the problem by leaving the fijield of art history
and embarking on the larger project of ‘visual culture studies’. If this
remains an option—and it is surely becoming more attractive in times
when ‘visuality’ is steadily growing in importance as a cultural form—it
seems useful, nevertheless, to concentrate on the still more or less defijinable
and well-institutionalized fijield of ‘art’ in order to analyse and understand
the mechanisms and functions of this protean instance of Western
culture in the multitude of its meanings. This would include, of course,
the study of the institutions regulating and organizing it by studying their
strategies and arguments, among them the process of canonization.
Today, it is generally acknowledged that canon formation is still a
key issue in art history. Donald Preziosi rightly observed that because
of the ‘core interest of the discipline of art history in questions of quality,
taste, and social and historical signifijicance, the systemic institutional
role of “canonization” has remained intact’.22 In his introduction to
20 Michael Camille, Zeynep Celik, John Onians, Adrian Rifkin and Christopher B.
Steiner, ‘Rethinking the Canon’, The Art Bulletin 78 (1996) 198–217; Marlite Halbertsma,
‘The Call of the Canon: Why Art History Cannot Do Without’, in Making Art History: A
Changing Discipline and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth C. Mansfijield (New York, 2007) 16–30.
See, too, Anna Brzyski, ed., Partisan Canons (Durham, NC, 2007), especially Anna Brzyski,
‘Introduction: Canons and Art History’, 1–25.
21 Griselda Pollock, Diffferencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories
(London and New York, 1999).
22 Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 577: ‘Many of the debates over
art-historical “theory” and “methodology” during the last quarter of the twentieth century
also concerned the valorization or canonization of specifijic subject matters worthy of
40 hubert locher
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
The New Art History Jonathan Harris states that he will have to return
‘many times . . . to the defijinition and problems of the canon—that is, the
set of artefacts deemed worthy of study, and by extension to those forms
of study equally regarded as legitimate within the discipline—and to the
ways and contexts in which canons are assembled and maintained’.23 It
seems that there still is some way to go in this direction. In order to understand
what art history is actually about, it still seems useful to explore the
mechanisms and purposes of canon formation, to ask what ‘the’ canon
in art history actually might be or rather, what canons do we have and
why they have been constructed, and how do they work in, for example,
museums, or archives, by representations, reproductions, and images? To
achieve such a critique of canon formation, one needs to broaden the
view, to frame ‘the’ canon, and investigate the inclusions in relation to the
exclusions that have been made. The principle of canon formation being
that of selection, it is important to know the criteria, as well as the pool
of objects, from which selections are made.
Having answered these questions, we might know more about the
use of canons or the canonical, and we might then proceed to the big
question of whether we need something like a canon of works of art at
all. But this is of secondary importance because, obviously, art history still
continues to be very much about establishing or confijirming selections
of symbolic objects, declaring some of them to be of special importance,
more worthy of remembrance than others, more beautiful and desirable
than others—for reasons still to be explained, and, as history shows,
somewhat changeable.
professional or public attention. In this regard, one group’s “masterpieces” and another’s
“politically correct” or “socially relevant” artworks perform equivalent disciplinary roles in
maintaining hierarchical distinctions among cultural objects.’
23 Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London, 2001) 10.