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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Theatre historians often turn to art history, not only for information about source images that can help with the speculative reconstruction of lost performances, but also for lessons in historiographic method. Historians from both disciplines have long shared the difficulties of ‘ekphrasis’, i.e. the translation of nondiscursive images into descriptions, and vice versa, as well as other vexing problems of general history like periodization, documentation of events, and so on. Unlike theatre history, art history has a recognized pantheon of interpreters, which has been subjected to overview studies like Michael Podro's The Critical Historians of Art as well as specific treatments of major critics and their influence, like Michael Ann Holly's work on Panofsky. Theoretical concerns about historiography, sometimes assumed by literary critics of ‘master narratives’ to be synonymous with postmodernism, developed somewhat earlier in art historical writing, which would appear to be an advantage.
1 Perhaps the first great modern theatre history book deriving performance history from artistic conventions was Kernodle, George R.From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1944).Google Scholar In 1992, issues of theatre and iconography were the theme of the annual meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research.
2 For the best theoretical statement of the problem, see Krieger, Murray, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).Google Scholar David Carrier supposes that ekphrasis has been replaced by an emphasis on interpretation, though this is by no means a simple substitution; , Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
3 Thomas Postlewait uses art history for his examples of these problems in his now-standard essay, ‘Criteria for Periodization in Theatre History’, Theatre Journal, 40, 3 (October 1988], pp. 299–318.Google Scholar
4 , Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Holly, Michael Ann, Panofskv and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
5 Wolfflin, Heinrich, Principles of Art History: The Development of Style in Later Art, 7th ed., trans. Hottinger, M. D. (New York: Dover, 1932).Google Scholar For a convincing analytic breakdown, see Brown, Marshall, ‘The Classic is the Baroque. On the Principle of Wolfflin's Art History’, Critical Inquiry, 9.3 (December 82), pp. 379–407.Google Scholar
6 , Berenson, Aesthetics and History (NY: Pantheon, 1948)Google Scholar; , Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961).Google Scholar Berenson still seems to command a measure of respect for his work on attribution, as for example in Roskill, Mark, What is Art History? (Amherst, MA: Massachusetts University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, but Greenberg is often attacked—sometimes by former students—for his evaluations; for a reasoned exchange, see Greenberg, ‘The Notion of Post-Modern’, and Kuspit, Donald B., ‘The Unhappy Consciousness of Modernism’, in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy, ed. Ingeborg, Hoesterey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
7 See for example the description of Beuys's influence by Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art—Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall, revised ed. (New York: Knopf, 1991).Google Scholar
8 ‘Art and Objecthood’ in Gregory, Battock, ed. Minimal Art (New York: Dutton, 1969).Google Scholar See how much more sanguine Rosenberg, Harld, a critic of action painting, can be about the same situation, ‘Mobile, Theatrical, Active’, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Collier, 1966).Google Scholar
9 The conundrum is figured in terms of the ‘rabbit, duck or drawing’, problem in Pt 2, xi, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (New York: Macmillan, 1958)Google Scholar; David Carrier comes close to this assessment when he talks about Fried's theory as a kind of indexical self-evidence in Artwriting (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1987), p. 76.Google Scholar
10 , Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 1974).Google Scholar See also Danto, Arthur, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, who solves Warhol's boxes differently, in terms cf an almost theatrical expressivity (which is quite different, from the early Danto essay, ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, 15 October 1964, pp. 571–84Google Scholar, that inspired Dickie).
11 , Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: California University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
12 I have explained in an article on Watteau that Fried's is not a necessary dichotomy, on the basis of an example of figures ‘absorbed in theatrical performance’, , Quinn, ‘Watteau's Commedia and the Theatricality of French Painting’, Commedia dell'arte Performance: Contexts and Contents, Theatre Symposium 1 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), pp. 77–93.Google Scholar Others have made similar arguments about Manet's Olympia (Bernheimer).
13 Fried, Michael, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990).Google Scholar Fried had an interesting argument with the feminist historian Linda Nochlin over the issue of gender and identification in Courbet, see their essays in Courbet Reconsidered, eds. Sarah, Faunce and Linda, Nochlin (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1988).Google Scholar
14 , Fried, Realism, Writing and Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
15 Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words ed. J., Urmson and M., Sbisa (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also the very interesting theatrical application, Saltz, David, ‘How to Do Things On Stage’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XLIX, 1, Winter 91, pp. 31–45.Google Scholar
16 , Féral, ‘Performance and Theatricality: The Subject De-Mystified’, Modern Drama 25, 1, March 1982Google Scholar and, more recently, Auslander, Phillip, ‘“Presence” and “Theatricality” in the Discourse of Performance and the Visual Arts’Google Scholar, presented at the 1992 meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research, Newport, Rhode Island.
17 , Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The studio and The Market (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 35.Google Scholar
18 Alpers, p. 55.
19 See, for example, Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Kant, Immananuel, The Critique of Judgement, trans. Bernard, J. H. (New York: Hafner/Macmillan, 1951), p. 145.Google Scholar
21 ‘Artistic Crimes’, in , Dutton, ed. The Forger's Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art (Berkeley: California University Press, 1983), p. 181.Google Scholar
22 Crow, Thomas E., Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press 1985)Google Scholar; for another performative view of Watteau, see Vidal, Mary Paula, Painted Watteau's Conversations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
23 Compare Crow with Carlson, Marvin, ‘David's Oath of the Horatii as a Theatrical Document’, Theatre History Studies, 10, 1990, pp. 15–29.Google Scholar
24 , Kemp, ‘The Theatre of the Revolution: David's ‘Tennis Court Oath’, in Bryson, N., Moxey, K., and Holly, M., eds. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation (Hanover, MH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).Google Scholar This volume contains papers from the 1989 University Press, 1994). This volume contains papers from the 1989 University of Rochester NEH Institute on the theory of art history, for which I prepared an unpublished commentary on Kemp's paper, ‘Theatricality in David's Tennis Court Oath’. Crow comes to something like the same conclusion about performing subjectivity in his essay ‘Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol’, in Serge, Guilbaut, ed. Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York. Paris and Montreal, 1945–64 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).Google Scholar
25 Herbert, Robert L., Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 104.Google Scholar
26 , Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 15Google Scholar; see also his The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–51 (London, 1973)Google Scholar and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London, 1973)Google Scholar, in which the Marxism is a little less complicated and less theatrical.
27 See Berger, Maurice, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (NY: Harper & Row, 1984)Google Scholar; Schneemann's voice can be sampled in the interview with Juno, Andrea, ‘Carolee Schneemann’, Angry Women (San Francisco: RE/SEARCH, 1991), pp. 66–77.Google Scholar Also note Charles Bernheimer.
28 See for example Augier, Emile Olympe's Marriage, trans. Clark, Barret H. in Camille and Other Plays, ed. Stanton, Stephen S. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957).Google Scholar
29 This thesis becomes perfectly clear in her The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993)Google Scholar, when she adopts an autobiographical (therapeutic?) tone for her sustained attacks on her mentor, Clement Breenberg.
30 , Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
31 , Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 69.Google Scholar See also, most recently, Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
32 This is just a standard way of testing theories, described in The Logic of Scientific Discoveries, trans. Popper, J. Freed and L., Freed (New York, 1959).Google Scholar
33 , Bal, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; , Bal and , Bryson/‘Semiotics and Art History’, The Art Bulletin, XXIII, 1, June 1991; pp. 174–208.Google Scholar
34 , Bal, ‘On Looking and Reading: Word and Image, Visual Poetics and Comparative Arts’, Semiotica, 1989.Google Scholar I am quoting from a galley copy, p. 26.
35 ‘On Looking and Reading’, p. 25.
36 , Freedman, Staging the Gaze, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).Google Scholar I have tried to demonstrate the difficulty of creating closure in both theatre and painting by comparing Italian art and drama; see my ‘The Comedy of Reference: The Semiotics of Commedia Figures in Eighteenth-Century Venice’, Theatre Journal 43, 1 (March 91): 70–92.Google Scholar
37 , Diamond, ‘Mimesis, Mimicry and the “True-Real”’, Modern Drama, 32, 1 (1989), pp. 58–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or more generally, Burns, Elizabeth, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in Theatre and in Social Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).Google Scholar
38 See for example Luke, Timothy W., Shows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Peter, Vergo, ed. The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989).Google Scholar
39 As someone who uses theatrical ‘trappings' to locate literary theatricality, but never supposes that such trappings might be authentic art, see, for example, Marshall, David, The Figure of Theatre: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
40 , Hollander, Moving Pictures (New York: Knopf, 1989).Google Scholar
41 Mitchell, William J., The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992).Google Scholar
