‘Emotive propaganda’: that is how R.H. Wilenski dismissed Classical art in his classic 1932 book, The Meaning of Modern Sculpture. For Wilenski, as for numerous others, twentieth-century sculpture had to be radically different. ‘A racing car … is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’, as Marinetti's 1909 ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ famously put it. Still pithier was Gaudier-Brzeska's riposte: ‘those damn Greeks!’
In her wide-ranging and scintillating book, P. sets out to challenge this ideology, demonstrating the manifold interconnections between the study of ancient sculpture on the one hand, and the production of modern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the other. Although the underlying thesis is not wholly new (one thinks, among other interventions, of B. Latour's 1991 Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: essai d'anthropologie symétrique), P.'s real provocation lies in her broader methodological reflections. Taking its lead from the ‘Bristol school’ of ‘reception studies’, P.'s brave monograph sets out to recalibrate our sculptural timelines of ‘antiquity’ and ‘modernity’ tout court.
The book consists of a general introduction and three interconnected essays. P. begins with Winckelmann, using his 1764 Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums to trace a ‘ying’ and ‘yang’ of subsequent modern (which is to say ancient) art history. Since the late-eighteenth century, P. argues, there has been a deep-set art historical tension between chronological narrative and aesthetic exemplarity: on the one hand, art history responds to the essential presence of the object it describes (‘art’); on the other, its historicist impulse is to impose a systematic sort of ‘past’ (‘history’). ‘Reception theory’ is said to offer an alternative aesthetic paradigm, one which collapses chronological strictures, structuring analysis around a different set of variables (pp. 35–7).
The first chapter elaborates this idea with regard to the collection and canonisation of Greek sculpture in Winckelmann's wake. P.'s focus is richly pan-European, structured around nineteenth-century attitudes towards the Parthenon marbles in London, the Aegina pediments in Munich and the Vénus de Milo in Paris. One narrative here concerns different modern constructions of an ‘ancient’ sculptural corpus, bound up with different ideologies of politicised display. Another is about contemporary visual responses in the nineteenth-century – ancient sculptures acting as ‘catalysts’ for artistic innovation (p. 73). A final discussion of the Vénus de Milo weaves together the various arguments: on the one hand, that historicist attempts to understand the statue ‘as it really was’ are futile (pp. 76–8); on the other, that the Venus' nineteenth-century artistic ‘receptions … are also serious explorations of the ancient sculpture itself, including all the problems that have troubled the scholars’ (p. 95).
‘The artist, ancient and modern’ is the subject of the second chapter. A growing nineteenth-century interest in artistic personalities, P. suggests, went hand in hand with contemporary academic debates about ‘personal styles’ in ancient sculpture. (P. leaves it to others to develop this interesting theme: one might think, for example, of contemporary attempts to attribute the four ‘sides’ of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, as well as Sir John Beazley's subsequent ‘Morellian’ attributions of Greek vases). P. makes no secret of her disdain for nineteenth-century ‘positivism’. While dismissing the attributive work of German archaeologists like Adolf Furtwängler (‘the painstaking efforts of the later-nineteenth-century scholars would seem to have been in vain’, p. 138), P. uses an array of male sculpted nudes from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to shed different light on ancient sculptural styles. ‘I do not want to limit the possible relationships among these ancient and modern artists to “influences” in either direction’, she concludes (p. 169); ‘my argument is that no temporal lapse, however long, should be permitted to impede our explorations of ancient sculpture’ (p. 170).
Progressing chronologically forward, a third chapter turns to examine twentieth-century ‘modernism’. P. brilliantly showcases the symbiotic connections between new archaeological rhetorics of the ‘Archaic’ and the rise of ‘modernist’ sculpture: ‘modern art never purged itself of the habit of reference to ancient sculpture’ (p. 177). In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how modern materials might illuminate our approaches to ancient sculpture, with particular reference to Picasso. Here, as throughout the book, P. champions a residual Kantian aesthetic, founded on the idea that both ‘Greek art’ and ‘modernism’ ‘still give us aesthetic pleasure’ (cf. p. 246). We need to consider both sets of artefacts each alongside the other, P. continues, because both initiate ‘the free play of imagination’ (p. 243): ‘the beholder has a transformative role to play’ (p. 251).
What to make of the overall argument? P.'s model of ‘reception’ has much going for it: it prioritises the materiality of objects (both ancient and modern), prompting us to look more closely, as indeed from a greater distance; it pitches the ‘Classical tradition’ as something inherently fluid and changing; it challenges some of the most endemic and positivist assumptions of post-Enlightenment art history. This book consequently makes for one of the most daring, challenging and innovative interventions on Greek sculpture this side of the millennium. As a declaration of method, though, it fails to convince.
For me, the inherent problem lies in P.'s slippery conflation of two anti-historicist positions. On the one hand, the book posits that the historical study of Greek sculpture is impossible. On the other, P. argues that, when it comes to art, historicism is redundant and unnecessary. I would take issue with both.
Unlike P., who seems to think that historicism is untenable when it comes to antiquity, but all well and good for Victorian England (an inconsistency which she herself admits, pp. 163–70, and which drives the chronological organisation of her three chapters), I would say outright that we can never see as others saw – whether in the context of the fifth century b.c., or indeed the nineteenth century a.d. But to give up that historicist quest strikes me as hopelessly reductive. As ever, it all depends on how one goes about one's historicism. P., it seems to me, comes dangerously close to suggesting that, failing an ancient textual reference (more specifically, a gloss in Pliny's Natural History …), we cannot know anything about ancient sculpture. This is patently untrue, and one might do well to recall Leo Steinberg's complaint about text-led art history – the residual assumption that ‘where no text exists, interpretation is vain’ (The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, second edition, 1984, p. 330). There is good postmodern precedent for vilifying Furtwängler, especially in the Anglophone world. But whatever else we make of it, Furtwängler's formalist (and culturally situated) project demonstrates just how much we can learn historically from looking closely at what we see. Perhaps I am hopelessly optimistic. But to say that we cannot know everything about Greek sculpture's historical context is not to say that we can know nothing (P.'s relativist talk of a ‘fantasy-land’ strikes me as particularly unhelpful: p. 165). We may not be able to date the Laocoon, even to locate it within the ‘correct’ century; it does not follow, though, that the statue has no date at all, as P.'s captioning policy might imply (p. ix).
What, then, of P.'s second claim: is historicism unimportant? Fundamental to her polemic is the Kantian quest for aesthetic ‘emancipation’: the presence of the object is prioritised over its situated past. But to deny an image's past seems to me at least as reductive as denying its presence; what is more, in my view, that denial is itself historically interested, invested in a certain (culturally situated) ideology which it in turn seeks to deny. Good Kantian as she is, P. assumes a framework of significance beyond the historical. By doing so, however, does not her model of ‘reception studies’ end up implying the sort of ‘God's eye view’ it seeks to overturn?
To take issue with P.'s aestheticising framework is not to advocate a return to the ‘dryasdust world of positive fact’ (p. 165). In fact, I would agree wholeheartedly with much of P.'s polemic, as reflected in my own book (The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy [2011]). Our interpretative difference, it seems, lies in how we integrate the ‘ancient’ with the ‘modern’: rather than simply collapse chronology, my aim was to showcase the manifold bonds between Greco-Roman materials and western cultures of seeing (and vice versa); this critical proximity-cum-distance, I would suggest, can illuminate both similarities and differences – not outside history, but rather within it. If P.'s mode of ‘reception studies’ champions Kant, mine would put greater store by Gadamer (not to mention Hegel): Greco-Roman materials give us a historicist Blickwechsel (‘exchange of glances’) for studying the whole trajectory of Western art (for the term, see Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science [2011], esp. pp. 1–12).
For all our disagreements in approach, let me make clear that dissent by no means implies disapproval. In an institutional environment that still segregates ‘Classical archaeology’ from ‘art history’ (thanks in large part to the ‘modernist’ rhetoric which P. so effectively unravels), P.'s book delivers an important and welcome corrective. I might not always see eye to eye with P.'s Kantian idealism. But I very much agree with her motivating drive: namely, that ‘the enforced segregation of ancient sculpture and modern art in our scholarly disciplines … [is] not merely empirically dubious, but also intellectually reductive’ (p. 6).
