Page - 261 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

sedlmayr and schapiro correspond 261 the world between their conceptions of society and the driving forces of history. Taine presents us the various arts as reflections or expressions of given societies and environments (or races); but he cannot explain why society changes; he lacks an historical dynamic. He is a positivist with certain romantic notions of culture as an expression of social individuality, but he is not an historical materialist. I am aware of certain difficulties in the theory of historical material- ism, but I do not consider them inherent in the theory; they belong rather to certain narrow and mechanical formulations. I accept it as an hy- pothesis for approaching history and society, in which art is one element.74 The lack of a model for history is, moreover, in- separable from a reliance on irrational concepts: In several of the articles we meet with spiritu- alistic conceptions and with allusions to quali- ties or causes that we have no means of verify- ing. The authors often tend to isolate forms from the historical conditions of their devpt, to propel them by mythical, racial-psychological constants,75 or to give them an independent, self-evolving career. Entities like race, spirit, will and idea are substituted in an animistic manner for a real analysis of historical factors. […]76 We encountered the kernel of this in Schapiro’s critique of Andreades in a letter to Sedlmayr. 19 December 1932 Sedlmayr quoted Schapiro back to him: I am dissatisfied with stylistic analysis which describes the object admirably but terminates in a more or less mystical explanation of their his- tory. (Note mythical and mystical are used inter- changeably.) Sedlmayr responds: Was ich einfach unterschreibe. Sedlmayr agreed – and would, in an act of projective identification, turn the criticism on Pächt in 193677 – but in the review Schapiro would find Sedlmayr guilty of the same, with the critique of Andreades now applied to Sedlmayr’s essay on the architecture of Justinian: This neglect of concrete relationships is masked by the brilliant variety of aspects, largely formal, treated briefly by the author. The appearance of comprehensiveness conceals the lack of histori- cal seriousness in such writings. We reproach the authors not for neglecting the social, economic, political and ideological factors in art but rather for offering us as historical explanations a mys- terious racial and animistic language in the name of a higher science of art.78 And more specifically: Dr. Sedlmayr explains to us that the system of Justinian, being ‘rational, could not last more than thirty years, whereas the succeeding 74 The letter is reprinted in W. B. Cahn, Schapiro and Focillon, in: Gesta, 2002, pp. 129–136. 75 For Schapiro’s elaboration on the danger of national and racial constants in his 1936 essay ‘Race, Nationality and Art’ that appeared in: Art Front in March 1936, see P. Hills, Meyer Schapiro, ‘Art Front,’ and the Popular Front, in: Oxford Art Journal, 17, 1994, pp. 33–34. For further examples in Schapiro’s reviews of the mid 1930s and his preoc- cupation with the problem into the 1940s see C. L. Persinger, The Politics of Style: Meyer Schapiro and the Crisis of Meaning in Art History, unpub., Ph.D. Diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2007, pp. 68 ff., pp. 124–125. My thanks to Cindy Persinger for allowing me to read her dissertation. 76 Schapiro, The New Viennese School (cit. n. 11), p. 259. 77 Schon 1936 hatte er Pächts ‘Österreichische Tafelmalerei der Gotik’ (1929) wegen der ‘extremen’ Ausklammerung der Realgeschichte kritisiert (er hatte genauso gut seine eigene ‘Österreichische Barockarchitektur’ von 1930 oder andere Früh- schriften nennen können). The reference is to H. Sedlmayr, Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte, in: Mitteilungen des Öster reichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung, 48, 1936, pp. 193–95, noted in Aurenhammer, Zäsur oder Kon- tinuität (cit. n. 2), p. 45. 78 Schapiro, The New Viennese School (cit. n. 11), p. 260.