The Invisible Masterpiece: The Modern Myth of Art - Book Review

HANS BELTING

Trans. Helen Atkins

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 480 pp., 181 b/w ills. $45.00

Hans Belting's Invisible Masterpiece is a study of the idea of the masterpiece as it develops in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, but, as the author explains at the outset, the book is really about the notion of absolute art, an ideal conception of art transcending any individual work. Belting sees this notion as a modern one and its critical interrogation as central to the development of modernism: he presents us with nothing less than a history of modern art from the perspective suggested by it, tracing it from its putative beginnings in the years around 1800, through its increasingly acute problematization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to its apparent demise in the 1960s. The book has the quality of a thoughtfully structured series of lectures for undergraduates: much of the material is familiar, but it is skillfully presented in sequences and juxtapositions that cast the important points into high relief. It will not appeal to many modernists, and there are serious problems with its overall conception, yet it is not without some interesting observations and insights.

One of its best features is the way in which texts are integrated into the account, sometimes to help provide historical background, sometimes to shed light on individual works of art. Honore de Balzac's well-known short story Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu recurs throughout the book. In addition, Belting, who has read widely and perceptively, draws on a range of writings: other stories about artists, Eugene Delacroix's journals, Vincent van Gogh's letters, and theoretical and critical texts. Among the latter are such well-known examples as the Salons of Stendhal, Charles Baudelaire, and Emile Zola and uncommon texts like Marcel Proust's translations of John Ruskin or, more neglected still, Auguste Rodin's Les cathedrales de France. Belting is a good storyteller himself and seasons his speculations with anecdotes and little-known facts. The chapters on the cult of the Mona Lisa (pp. 137-54, 273-93), for instance, include a discussion of a comical silent film made just after the famous theft of 1911 as well as Max B rod's account of a visit to Paris with Franz Kafka a few weeks later--during which they saw the film.

There is certainly nothing original in the idea of using Baudelaire to shed light on Manet, but Belting manages to wrest a few insights from the exercise. His chapter on Edouard Manet (pp. 155-76) culminates in a stab at the old problem of the mirror and its displaced reflections in The Bar at the Folies-Bergere: "the twofold barmaid draws attention to the difference between a mirror and a painting.... The mirror is a static object that nevertheless catches the movement of the world" (pp. 175-76). This feature is referred to in Baudelaire's notion of the two-sidedness of modern art:

The time was long past when people were delighted by the analogy of a mirror and a painting. Manet stressed their dissimilarity in order to emphasize the dualism that, as with Baudelaire, was central to his conception of the work. He still used the ancient medium of painting, thus continuing the tradition of art despite his modernity, but he used it to represent not only a modern. subject, but also a modern way of looking, a look as dispassionate, mechanical, and insatiable as the reflection in a mirror. (p. 175)

The sections on van Gogh make sensitive use of the artist's letters (pp. 177-82, 186-92); the one on Paul Gauguin that follows (pp. 192-201) is disappointing. The chapter on Rodin's Gates of Hell (pp. 216-24) makes a good story. Readers familiar with Rosalind Krauss's essay on the originality of the avant-garde will probably find it conceptually derivative but may yet be intrigued to read that when a plaster model of the Thinker was set up in front of the Pantheon, it was attacked by a man "'who had nothing to eat' and felt himself mocked by the figure's pose" (p. 223).

The first serious problem is that the notion of absolute art is not modern at all. Pliny says of Polykleitos, whose statue, known as the Canon, had become a model for the representation of the human body, that "he was judged to have revealed the art itself by means of a single work." (1) That this verbal formula was something of a commonplace is suggested by his further remark regarding a picture by Timanthes of a hero, "a work of consummate perfection, in which he showed the whole art of painting male figures." (2) Indeed, the existence of such an idea is already plainly documented in the Iliad, with its famous description of the shield of Achilles, the work of the god Hephaestus, in which the entire universe is represented, a literal microcosm that symbolizes the highest potential of art. (3) In the Renaissance, the idea of absolute art is manifest in Giorgio Vasari's remarkable description of Michelangelo's Last Judgment:

And this is to our art that example and that great painting sent down by God to men on earth, so that they may see how fate works when intellects of the highest type descend to earth infused with grace and divine knowledge. This work leads after it enchained all those who believe that they understand their art; upon seeing the signs made by him in the contours of whatever he represents, every bold spirit trembles and is afraid, no matter how skilled in design, and while one looks at the labor of this work, the senses are benumbed just to think what other pictures--those made and those yet to be made--would be if compared to this model. (4)

The notion of absolute art is also evident in theoretical texts of the Renaissance, where it is articulated in a fascinating variety of ways. Giovan Battista Armenini, for instance, put it very pithily, yet managed to indicate just what sort of practical challenges it creates: "He who does not first possess the art entire in his mind can make none of his works properly." (5) Federico Zuccaro, on the other hand, composed a vast treatise. He followed Vasari in claiming that the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture were united by the common principle of design (disegno), but he took care to explain more thoroughly than Vasari how design is a fundamental faculty of mind, the characteristic action of the soul, essential to our very nature as rational creatures. He went further to argue that all human activities--all crafts, all professions, and all sciences--are dependent on design. (6) The notion of absolute art, of art as something extending beyond or existing independently of any individual work, also expressed itself in practice, in the sense of the systematicity of representation evident in the treatment of issues of decorum, for instance, and in the hierarchy of the genres.

Absolute art is thus an ancient idea, revived and elaborated in the Renaissance. Belting's distinction between "premodern" conceptions of the perfection of art and the properly modern notion of absolute art that interests him is overdrawn. Relying for his presentation of premodern ideas entirely on French academic theory of the 17th century as exemplified by a single text, Andre Felibien's L'idee du peintre parfait, he claims that it was formerly believed that art was based on objective rules, and that a masterpiece was understood to be a demonstration of those rules (p. 23), while with the coming of the Romantics, creativity became subjective and "the masterpiece was no longer expected to demonstrate an objective idea. The cult of the idea lived on as the cult of the work," and "the perfection of art thus took refuge in single works" (p. 25). (7) In order to insist on such a simple trajectory from objective to subjective, Belting must ignore the evidence of the Renaissance sense of the limits of rules and of creative subjectivity as well as the way in which even the supposedly isolated works of modern art still employ codes that exist independently of them. The rules did not disappear, they just got rewritten.

The revival and elaboration of the idea of absolute art in the years around 1800 certainly does deserve emphasis, and insofar as Belting makes the case for the importance of Romantic idealism to modernism, he should be applauded, (8) but one wonders whether he has characterized this process as robustly as it demands. Preferring to focus on figures such as W. H. Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, who tend to sentimentalize and fetishize the object, he ignores the sweeping and emphatic way in which a major thinker like Friedrich von Schiller redefines art in relation to politics: The "most perfect of all works of art," the poet wrote in 1793-94, is "true political freedom." (9) For Novalis, writing in the later 1790s, poetry could not but be defined as a deeply rooted human impulse; love itself is "nothing but the highest natural poetry," and in saying that poetry is "the peculiar mode of action of the human spirit," (10) he makes the same claim for it that Zuccaro made for design--even as he is also looking forward to Stephane Mallarme's claim that poetry is "the only spiritual task" there is" and Friedrich Nietzsche's that art is "the highest task and the properly metaphysical activity of this life." (12) Much as Belting stre sses the importance of the Romantics, their redefinition of art in absolute terms may be more vigorous, more comprehensive, and more profound than his account indicates.

Belting instead insists on linking the idea of absolute art to the emergence of the modern museum. In so doing, he establishes a social-or institutional-historical context--not without interest in its own right--but he also overlays one issue on another in a manner that confounds them. The real subject of the book shifts from the idea of absolute art to the way in which that idea has been reconstituted by modern mass culture, yet the fact that what is actually being described is the commodification of art and the role of the so-called masterpiece in that process is never made clear. (13) The author's insistence on the modernity of the idea, combined with his insistence on its relation to museum culture suggest a strong unconscious disposition to regard it as a bourgeois idea, yet he offers little to persuade us that the renunciation of absolute art by modernists has as much to do with the idea itself as with its appropriation by bourgeois culture.

The real climax of the book comes with the "crisis of the object" in the early years of the 20th century, especially as evidenced in Cubism and in the work of Marcel Duchamp. The chapter on Duchamp (pp. 315-34) draws on the artist's own notes, as well as texts by others--from Leonardo da Vinci to Andre Breton. Belting sees the use of a transparent support for The Large Glass as a parody of perspective (literally, "to look through") and the mechanical iconography as a modern parody of traditional pictorial narrative. One of the planned subtitles for the work was Delay in Glass (Retard en verre); Duchamp's substitution of "delay" for painting" gives Belting a further hint into its meaning: our gaze does not "rest" on the work but is only "delayed" while passing through it. "The glass offers our glance only 'infra-thin' resistance before we look into nothing" (p. 328). The late work, Etant donnes, is shown to reflect back on the meaning of The Large Glass and--hidden, as it is, behind a door--to be a distant ech o of the "invisible" masterpiece of Balzac's story.

Belting's larger thesis commits him to a very unilluminating account of subsequent 20th-century art. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he obviously has little sympathy for Minimalism or Conceptualism. (14) One might have expected Minimal art to call forth one of his better efforts, but despite his recourse to all the obligatory texts, he shows no persuasive understanding of the artists' aims and little engagement with the objects themselves. The texts he chooses to help explain Conceptualism serve him even less well, and there is only the barest, most equivocal acknowledgment of the liberating effect Conceptualism has had. (15) Robert Smithson is referred to as Richard Smithson (p. 391). The treatment of more recent art--of Performance art in particular--is spotty and uninformative. Belting the storyteller is unable to present what might have been an exciting story of liberatory innovation as anything but one of renunciation and the disintegration of a tradition.

It is in these last chapters that the price Belting has paid for his unwillingness to deal with the political dimension of artistic modernism in anything like the depth it demands becomes especially apparent. Efforts to imagine absolute art, or to redefine the practice of art in accordance with the highest possible conception of what art can be, have had to address--among other things--the relation of art to the totality of human action and interaction we call politics. As a result, they have repeatedly led beyond the confines of art as we usually think of it--as a kind of object--to action: indeed, one consequence of their combined effect has been to suggest that art can never be adequately defined as a kind of object and, in fact, can only be understood as a practice in some way essentially ethical and/or political. Belting acknowledges the political aims of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century but does not indicate how directly related their concept of art was to action. Aleksandr Rodchenko pu t it simply but clearly: "The man who has organized his life, his work, and himself is a genuine artist. Work for life and not for palaces, cathedrals, cemeteries and museums." (16)

Belting also avoids Surrealism, and this omission seriously compromises the end of his book. The Surrealists might well have been the climax of the story: for them, art could be conceived only as part of an allencompassing strategy for living, a strategy that also included new ways of relating to objects. Their absolute art, we might say, was life itself. They could thus be credited with providing a model for the proper integration of the aesthetic and the political, to have achieved in fact the politicized art that Walter Benjamin thought he glimpsed in Communism. Belting's last chapters might have emphasized the ways in which the legacy of Surrealism contributed to radical thought in the 1960s and has continued to nourish advanced forms of artistic practice ever since.

One gets a sense of Belting as a highly cultivated bourgeois gentleman who enjoys going to museums and who, on some unconscious level, resents forms of expression that do not accommodate themselves to that reassuring institutional setting. He observes that Rodin's book on cathedrals reflects a tendency of the modern mind to "wallow in a sense of loss" (p. 244), yet his whole book is pervaded by a sense of loss, a nostalgia for a time when objects--read commodities--could be counted on to reflect transcendent values. One suspects that the real object of this nostalgia is not art but the prerogatives of bourgeois life. The idea that an individual work of art can succeed in signifying absolute art is no more--nor less--paradoxical or problematic than the idea that any sign can succeed in signifying something. Since even the artists and theorists of ancient times realized that among all the things a work of art can signify is an idea of what art itself is, the achievement of modern artists and theorists would see m to lie rather in their efforts to adapt that realization to their urgent awareness of the various ways in which art was being redefined around them. We should attend to their boldness and resourcefulness and leave bourgeois art history-with its refusal to interrogate the real nature of its investment in objects-to mourn its own inadequacy.

Notes

(1.) Pliny, Natural History 34.55: "artem ipsam fecisse artis opera iudicatur."

(2.) Ibid., 35.74: "absolutissimi opens, artem ipsam complexus viros pingendi."

(3.) Iliad 18.478ff.

(4.) Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, Ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1906; reprint, 1981), vol. 7, 214-15: "E questo nell'arte nostra e quello esempio e quella gran pittura mandata DA Dio agli uomini in terra, accioche veggano come il fato fa, quando gli intelletti dal supremo grado in terra descendono, Ed hanno in essi infusa la grazia e la divinita del sapre. Questa opera mena prigioni legati quegli che di sapere l'arte si persuadono; e nel vedere I segni DA lui tirati ne'contorni di che cosa essa si sia, trema e teme ogni terribile spirito, sia quanto si voglia carico del disegno; e mentre che si guardano le fatiche dell'opera sua, I sensi si stordiscono solo a pensare che cosa possono essere le altre pitture fatte e che si faranno, poste a tal paragone."

(5.) Giovan Battista Armenini, I veri precetti della pittura, Ed. Marina Gorreri (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 259: "chi non possiede prima l'arte perfetta nella mente, non potra mai far bene l'opere loro."

(6.) Federico Zuccaro, Idea dei pittori, scultori, et architetti, in Scritti d'arte di Federico Zuccaro, Ed. Detlef Heikamp (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1961).

(7.) The German version of Belting's book, Dos unsichtbare Meisterwerk: Die modernen Mythen der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), explains the distinction between premodern and modern more explicitly in a lengthy prologue, the contents of which are condensed--almost to the point of incoherence--in the introduction to the English translation. The German text reveals the deeper methodological grounding of Belting's approach, such as his dependence on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's understanding of the Enlightenment (asp. 24-25) and on Adornos concept of the work of art as a "monad,' an autonomous object whose value is a result of its formal integrity. While this is not the place to enter into a discussion of Adorno's ideas, it should be pointed out that his understanding of the autonomy of art is notoriously double-edged: however self-sufficient a work might be, it also embodies objective social conditions. His views are no more an endorsement of formalism than they are of radical contextualism.

Despite the fuller treatment, however, Belting's discussion of the distinction between premodern and modern is riddled with the same oversimplifications: the collapse of the old system of rules leads to the replacement of "objective art-doctrine [objektive Kunstlehre]" by "subjective art-creation [subjektive Kunstschopfung]," 26, the masterpiece is understood no longer as the "product of a master [Produkt eines Meisters]" but rather as the "creation of a genius [Schopfung eines Genies]," 27.

(8.) The German version contains more explicit discussion of this issue as well, and it includes a rather interesting reading of Hegel's announcement of the death of art: "what comes to an end here is not art, but the old concept of art, which art itself had already overtaken [Was hier zu Ende geht, ist ober nicht die Kunst ... sondern ein alter Kunstbegriff, der von der Kunst schon liberholt warden war. ...]." Here the "error [Irrtum]" in Hegel's view of history becomes clear: "To regard 'art as art in itself' was the achievement of the modems and designates exactly the modern concept of art. which [thus] has its origin at exactly the same moment that Hegel understood art to have come to its end ["Die Kunst fur sich selbst als Kunst' zu betrachten wurde dock erst eine Leistung der Moderne und bezeichnete genau den modernen Kunstbegriff, der in dem selben Augenblick entstand, in dem Hegel die Kunst am Ende angelangt sah]" (30).

(9.) Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Ed. And trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 6-7: "mit dem wollkommensten aller Kunstwerke, mit dem Bau einer wahren politischen Freiheit. ..." It is worth pointing out how even this idea has something of a source in antiquity, in Aristotle's claim (Nicomachean Ethics 1.2) that politics is the "master art."

(10.) Novalis, quoted in Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), vol. 2, 83: "die Eigentumliche Handlungsweise des menschlichen Geistes."

(11.) Stephane Mallarme, Propos sur la poesie, Ed. Henri Mondor (Monaco: Editions de Rochier, 1953), 134: "La Poesie ... constitue la seule tache spirituelle."

(12.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragodie, Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), 24: "von der Kunst als der hochsten Aufgabe und der eigentlich metaphysischen Thatigkeit dieses Lebens. ..."

(13.) This remains true in the German version of the book, despite the fact that his motives for emphasizing the role of museums are explained somewhat more clearly there (esp. 25, 28, 35-36).

(14.) At the beginning (pp. 14-15), for instance, he defends Performance art, Conceptual art, and video installation for their "determination to be free from the contradictions imposed by the compulsion to produce works of art" and says that they are "simply art by other means."

(15.) "The dualism that the Conceptual artists promoted, in the and had the mere effect of allowing art to gain new areas of freedom" (p. 400). In the German version, this passage reads " DER Dualismus, an den die Konzeptkunstler glaubten, letztlich eine zeitbedingte Strategie war, um der Kunst neue Freiheiten einzuraumen" (462).

(16.) Aleksandr Rodchenko, quoted in Art in Theory. 1900-1990, Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (London: Blackwell, 1992), 315.

ROBERT WILLIAMS is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara [Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93106].

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