“In this unabashedly romantic book, Holly addresses the melancholy that she suggests always accompanies art historians in their research. Erudite and illuminating, The Melancholy Art Illustrated Edition contributes to a lively contemporary debate about the ‘presence’ of past arts in our lives and about the appropriate distance that scholars can or should try to attain in relation to it.”–Whitney Davis, University of California, Berkeley

“It is about time someone wrote a book like this, one that calls attention to what’s so little talked about: namely, the sadness of the art historian’s task. Puzzling over the contemporary state of scholarship about art, Holly’s meditation is wise, gentle, and erudite. It is good that a voice so well-respected, measured, and yet earnestly plaintive should be the one to speak to us about what we’ve mostly forsaken or forgotten.”–Alexander Nemerov, author of Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s

“This superbly written book is a fluid exploration of an undertow of melancholy within art history. Probably the most insistent form of its central question is simply, ‘Why do we write about works of art?’ Holly is surely right that it is a question art history has little current habit of asking, and that nonetheless must be central to the discipline.”–Stephen Melville, coauthor of Writing Art History

Michael Ann Holly is the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and teaches in the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College. Her books include Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image and Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History.

The Melancholy Art Illustrated Edition

By MICHAEL ANN HOLLY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13934-0

Contents

Preface…………………………………xiAcknowledgments………………………….xxiii1 The Melancholy Art……………………..12 Viennese Ghosts………………………..253 Stones of Solace……………………….534 Patterns in the Shadows…………………735 Mourning and Method…………………….95Postscript………………………………117Notes…………………………………..133Bibliography…………………………….165Index…………………………………..183

Chapter One

The Melancholy Art Illustrated Edition

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them…. The persistence which is expressed in the intention of mourning is born of its loyalty to the world of things.

—Walter Benjamin

Writing about visual art, like looking at it, can on occasion console, captivate, and enrapture. The act of trying to put into words, spoken or written, something that never promised the possibility of a translation can sometimes, but not very often, blur the boundaries between author and work, enveloping the writer in a greater world of mutual understanding. Usually language gets in the way. The enchantment that transpires between beholder and work of art has no name because it resists linguistic appropriation. Try as philosophers might, we resignedly call the “feeling” the “aesthetic” and trust that this lone word covers the compelling, unseen, ineffable, mysterious lure of certain objects. Even Bernard Berenson, self-assured connoisseur that he once was, recognized that something more was at work in the contemplation of visual objects than empirical knowledge:

In visual art the aesthetic moment is that fleeting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at…. He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the picture or building, statue, landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness. When he recovers workaday consciousness it is as if he had been initiated into illuminating, formative mysteries.

The experience of visual captivation (when “the two become one,” as Berenson puts it) is transitory, even ephemeral, however powerful its aftereffects. In “workaday consciousness” its consolation lingers, and like the contemplation of ruins across many cultures and several centuries in faraway places, these material objects provoke a sad and romantic yearning for something that has long ago passed away: “The gods adored by nations are now alone in their niches with the owls and the night-birds. The gilded Capitol languishes in dust and all the temples of Rome are covered with spiders’ webs,” according to Saint Jerome. At the close of this past century, the late storyteller W. G. Sebald mused on what troubled Sir Thomas Browne in 1658 as he contemplated a treasure trove of recently unearthed burial urns in Norfolk:

The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow…. The heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature.

Mourning, melancholy, monuments lost, monuments found. The duty of any serious art historian is to discover their many stories and then turn these explorations, through the act of writing, into an ever-growing corpus of visual knowledge. Nevertheless, what kind of scholar is drawn to what objects and why? What psychic role does the act of writing about works of art fulfill? Writing about art of the past is a magical game, full of illusions. On the surface it suggests that we can hold onto the past—tame it, compel it to conform to a reasonable narrative—and that conviction makes us go on. Surely that is not all there is to it. It does not take much insight to recognize that something else pricks this sober veneer of professional commitment. The “aesthetic moment,” for lack of a better phrase, quietly waits in the background, and when it makes itself felt, it so often hurts. What is it that ails us? Or, conversely, sometimes empowers us?

In this chapter, I am going to make a case for bestowing a name on our disciplinary companion: Melancholy. Or perhaps her twin sister, Mourning. Sometimes, despite Freud, it is difficult to tell them apart (I will comment more on the individual character traits of these two phantoms shortly). Other fields of inquiry also engage with benumbed objects, but the history of art invites melancholy to come along in a distinctly concrete way. The works of art with which art historians traffic come from worlds long gone, and our duty is to care for these waifs and strays and to respond to the life still left within them. “The humanities … are not faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would slip away”—argued the great art historian Erwin Panofsky, in contradistinction to the sciences—” but of enlivening what would otherwise remain dead.” If a work of art were indeed “dead” (and here I might argue with Panofsky), art historians could not respond in any affective way. It is not our duty but our nature to react to its continuing presence, however flickering a candle it might appear to be. The philosopher Martin Heidegger once said, “World-withdrawal and world decay can never be undone. The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter there, but they themselves have gone by.” A work of art stands before us, as he would say, in its “thingliness,” hung on the wall as though it were a rifle or a hat, yet so very many of the living, pulsating cords that once-upon-a-time connected it to a live, busy surround have withered away. Nevertheless, something is still undeniably there.

True enough, Shakespeare’s original manuscript of Othello, or a recently discovered fragment of the Sea Scrolls, might, if we were allowed to hold it in our hands, weave similar kinds of melancholic spells around us. So, too, with the score of a Bach partita. For the most part, we encounter these orphans only through reproductions, editions, or many successive printings and performances. An original work of art—a Renaissance painting, for example—exists in our own time and space (even in the artificial ambience of a museum), and it beckons us for corporeal response by dint of its sheer physical presence. The world of the past is metonymically attached to the present through the material stuff it has left behind. By this reckoning, a museum—itself another kind of art historical “writing”—is a place “where the dead, through the care of the living, perpetuate their afterlives.” The kind of professional care with which we respond as art historians resides comfortably in our essays and books, but whence comes the desire to write about these works in the first place? Surely the melancholic awareness of time gone by, the enforced abandonment of place by these material exiles in the present, pricks our professional competence and denies an easy access to the loss that we are struggling to ignore.

A couple of proleptic remarks: this essay is addressed directly to the scholarly commitment of writing art history and only indirectly to the role of evocative and meaningful historical objects in our memories, archives, and attics. No doubt, the key to the Bastille that lies quietly in the French National Assembly, or a fragment of an inscription from a recently excavated Mayan tomb, or even the love letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother in 1918, evince a powerful phenomenological pull all their own. The metonym is the message. Nonetheless, the objects to which I wish principally to allude are those that are represented through the genre of writing acknowledged as the discipline of art history. Works of art almost always come to us already mediated. By crossing the axis of aesthetics (hallowed works) with that of history (time gone by), historians of art have confronted, over the past century, the oxymoronic challenge of turning the visual into the verbal.

Since the eighteenth century, rightly or wrongly, scholars have ennobled certain objects with the mantle of “art,” thereby separating the realm of artifacts from visual objects that bear the impress of a special aesthetic status. It is this historically and epistemologically identifiable genre of writing that I wish to explore. The subject of this essay is writing art history as it has been, or, indeed, still is. Works of contemporary art are nearly as distant from those who write about them as those of the past—most obviously because the effort of translating the visual into the verbal must inevitably fail to reach its aim. The contemporary is never fully with us in any sense of plenitude. So much of it belongs to the past and is swallowed up by the future.

Writing of any sort pushes the raw phenomenological experience further and further into the background. It is an activity that promises warm solace but delivers cool distance. Writing, even that of “ordinary” scholarship, is a product of dread, as the late Maurice Blanchot has reminded us, for one is tormented by the realization that anything to which one has been attached is forever lost. Of course, art historians are a special breed of “suffering” human beings. We children of Saturn, to paraphrase Panofsky, are born wise but not necessarily happy. Since our discipline’s founding over a century ago, as scholars we have striven for objectivity and critical distance when it comes to our chosen objects. We are historians after all, and our mandate is to proceed according to certain established principles of investigation. Berenson, for example, would have been thoroughly convinced of that. No doubt, the foundations of our creed may have been shaken by a powerful series of postmodernist earthquakes at the end of the past century, but most of us have gone on in the hope of finding some element of certainty, or, at least, understanding, in an archive, an attribution, or an analysis. And perhaps that is just as it should be, else historical knowledge would not “progress.” As Georges Didi-Huberman eloquently reminds us, though, sorrow and yearning can emanate from many sources: “Before an image, finally, we have to humbly recognize this fact: that it will probably outlive us, that before it we are the fragile element, the transient element, and that before us it is the element of the future, the element of permanence. The image often has more memory and more future than the being who contemplates it.”

Might we not consider melancholy as the central trope of art historical writing, the conceit that underwrites the deep structure of its texts? How might melancholy, not as a medieval or Renaissance “humor” but as both a metaphor and an explanatory concept in the twenty-first century, help us as practitioners to acknowledge the elegiac nature of our disciplinary transactions with the past? I take it as axiomatic that all written histories are narratives of desire, full of both latent and manifest needs that exceed the professional mandate to find out what happened and when. Given that the focus of the history of art’s labors is always toward recovering that which is almost gone, this primal desire must be labeled melancholic. There is a twist, however, to this easy characterization. The materiality, the very physicality, of the works of art with which we deal is a challenge to ever seeing the past as over and gone. They exist in the same space as their analysts, yet their sense of time is hardly congruent with ours—of that we are acutely aware. And so we work incessantly to familiarize the unfamiliar. In the plaintive writing of art history, we have a “loss without a lost object” (an authentic melancholic predicament) in which the object is both held onto and gone astray simultaneously. As scholars we inhabit a paradox, one that enlivens as much as it paralyzes. Echoing Blanchot, the literary critic Richard Stamelman declares that “writing is loss as it comes to exist in another form…. Language signifies … not the thing but the absence of the thing and so is implicated in the loss.”

In this chapter, I want to shine an oblique light on the busy workaday activities of art history, like the kind of black light that illuminates the wondrous world of moths fluttering about on late summer nights. This reflection on our disciplinary drives must necessarily invoke some tenets of psychoanalysis. Is there an “unconscious” of the history of art? What kinds of spaces, what kinds of time might it occupy? Is it deep, hidden in the darkest corners of our profession, or is it not about depth at all? Does it forever haunt art historical practice; does this melancholic awareness shadow most all of our activities? Or is it simply the other face of this discipline, a different surface of our commitment to writing about incandescent objects—objects, like orphans, who come to us from an unknowable past but beseech us for attention and care in the present? Orphans, above all, have the right to cry.

A well-respected philosopher of history, Frank Ankersmit, has recently written Sublime Historical Experience, in which he offers this earnest assessment: “How we feel about the past is no less important than what we know about it—and probably even more so.” Like Thomas Browne in the seventeenth century, not to mention scores of contemporary thinkers in the wake of postmodernism, Ankersmit wishes to gather the fragments of the past, the ruins lying all around us if we care to see them (and we do indeed see them if we are art historians!), into a semblance of meaning. And their meanings, ironically, reside in their perpetual loss of meaning. What Browne or Robert Burton or John Milton may have once-upon-a-time called “melancholy,” or Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl in their wartime magnum opus later refined to “poetic melancholy” and “melancholia generosa,” Ankersmit names the sublimity of historical experience, which originates from the contradictory emotions of disappearance and recovery in our contemplation of the past.

Melancholy, that “noonday demon,” is a shape-shifter, depending on what historical period it is when “she” makes an appearance. The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, heralded for being the ultimate compendium of all knowledge before the world was split asunder in the Great War, provides a terse characterization (on the eve of Freud writing his oft-cited essay “On Mourning and Melancholia” of 1915). In the Renaissance, for example in the writing of the Florentine Neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, melancholy was classified as one of the “humors,” originally a mental and/or physical condition resulting from an excess of black bile, but by the seventeenth century it was regarded as possessing both a more complex etiology and a greater range of symptoms for abject grief. By the nineteenth century, the personification of melancholy had persuasively braided together seemingly contradictory attributes—neurasthenic suffering and bursts of creative brilliance—and thereby served as a coveted standard for the Romantic sensibility. For many thinkers, the time elapsed between the fourteenth century and the “end” of modernism in the twentieth represents the era of melancholy, a meta-narrative “inaugurated by the Renaissance, refined by the Enlightenment, flaunted by Romanticism, fetishized by the Dec[a]dents, and theorized by Freud” before its reappearance in postmodern critical theory.

Before delving into the complexities of Freudian and post-Freudian thought on the subject, we could no better than heed two formidable philosophers of history, Friedrich Nietzsche and Alois Riegl. These two thinkers, one from the late nineteenth and the other from the early twentieth century—around the same time that the owl of art historical wisdom took wing in German-speaking countries—embody the rueful obsession with history and its baleful effects. Nietzsche begins his “The Use and Abuse of History” by asking us to consider the cows in the field:

[T]hey know not the meaning of yesterday or today; they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with their little loves and hates and the mercy of the moment, feeling neither melancholy or satiety…. The beast lives unhistorically; for it “goes into” the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder. It cannot dissimulate, it conceals nothing; at every moment it seems what it actually is, and thus can be nothing that is not honest. But man is always resisting the great and continually increasing weight of the past…. he cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him. It is matter for wonder: the moment that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a specter to trouble the quiet of a later moment. (my emphasis on the word melancholy)

Haunted by the past, humans turn to history, living with it, killing each other because of it, erecting monuments to it, even writing it down and interpreting it. The danger is an obvious one, for history gives us the conviction, according to Nietzsche, that we are all mere latecomers, vitiated voyeurs to the panorama that is the past. If this pervasive cultural situation can ever be remedied, it will be by knowing “the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically.” One special early art historian attempted just that intellectual feat.

(Continues…)

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