ABSTRACT 
 
Title of Document: PAUL C?ZANNE AND THE MAKING OF 
MODERN ART HISTORY 
 
Jorgelina Orfila, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 
 
Directed By: Professor June E. Hargrove 
Department of Art History and Archaeology  
 
The application of art historical methodologies to the study of Paul C?zanne in the 
1930s brought about significant changes in the way the artist?s art and biography 
were understood. Art history was institutionalized as an international academic 
discipline under the pressure of the ideological struggle that preceded the Second 
World War. This process promoted the incorporation of modern art as part of the 
disciplinary field. The use of categories of analysis developed for the examination of 
historical manifestations helped to assimilate modern art into a narrative that extolled 
the continuity of the Western tradition.  
This dissertation examines the writings and careers of art historians who published 
books on C?zanne in 1936 in Paris: Lionello Venturi, the first catalogue raisonn? of 
the work of the artist, C?zanne, son art, son oeuvre; Ren? Huyghe, a monograph, 
C?zanne; and John Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, which became the accepted biography 
of the artist. In addition, Rewald?s photographs of the sites C?zanne painted were 
instrumental in introducing space (as perspective) as a category for the analysis of the 
artist?s landscapes, thus helping to establish its link to the Western tradition. The site 
photographs epitomize the new approach to documentation and the changes in 
museography that accompanied the transformation of art history.  
The arrival of ?migr? art historians to the United States favored the identification of 
the hegemonic art historical discourse with an anti-totalitarian ideology. Alfred H. 
Barr Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized in 1936 
Cubism and Abstract Art. The exhibition, which established C?zanne as a key figure 
in the development of modern art, associated modern art with the fight against 
Fascism.   
This dissertation studies a previously ignored period of the history of the 
institutionalization of art history and provides arguments for the debate on the 
epistemological foundations of the discipline and its relationship with museography 
and art criticism. By questioning these foundations, the dissertation disentangles 
C?zanne?s work from the ideological constructs that were affixed to his art by the 
interpretations proposed in the 1930s and suggests new avenues for understanding it.    
 
PAUL C?ZANNE AND THE MAKING OF MODERN ART HISTORY 
 
By 
 
Jorgelina Orfila 
 
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy 
2007 
 
Advisory Committee: 
Professor June E. Hargrove, Chair 
Professor William L. Pressly 
Professor Sally M. Promey 
Professor Brian Richardson 
Professor Joshua A. Shannon 
 
? Copyright by 
Jorgelina Orfila 
2007 
 
ii
The thesis or dissertation document that follows has had referenced material removed 
in respect for the owner's copyright.  A complete version of this document, which 
includes said referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College 
Park's library collection.  
 
iii
Acknowledgements
The Department of Art History and Archaeology of the University of Maryland 
provided the financial help and support that allowed me to do the research for this 
dissertation. The confidence the faculty of the Department demonstrated in my 
project gave me the strength to carry it on.  
I could never praise enough how fortunate I was to have Professor June Hargrove as 
my advisor. Her academic guidance, professional mentoring, and trust in me never 
wavered during my years at the University of Maryland. She not only interceded on 
my behalf in countless opportunities but also helped me in every single aspect of the 
process of writing this dissertation. Also, it would be very difficult to find more 
supportive and generous teachers than Professors Sally Promey and William Pressly. 
I sincerely thank Professors Joshua Shannon and Brian Richardson for agreeing to be 
part of my dissertation committee and for their helpful comments.   
Ania Waller, the department?s Director of Finance, and Deborah Down, the Graduate 
Secretary, have helped me with administrative details so that I could maintain focus 
on teaching and writing. Kathy Canavan, the Graduate Secretary when I entered the 
program, helped me not only as member of the staff but also as a friend. Her sudden 
death in the fall of 2004 still saddens us all. In the International Students Services my 
thanks to Jody Heckman-Bose whose reassurances and expeditiousness helped me to 
navigate the hazardous waters of the F1 visa status. 
How I reached the University of Maryland has its own story and implies a list of 
people to thank for their trust in my project. I came to the United States on a 
iv
Lampadia Fellowship to work at the department of French Paintings, National Gallery 
of Art. In Buenos Aires, Am?rico Castilla from the Antorchas Foundation helped me 
immensely. Faya Causey was then head of academic programs at NGA. Her 
unflagging enthusiasm, support, and friendship still inspire me. Philip Conisbee led 
me to consider the evaluation of nineteenth-century art in the 1930s when he gave me 
as a subject of study the Chester Dale collection. His guidance was fundamental in 
the early stages of this project. At the Archives of the Gallery, where I worked on the 
Chester Dale Papers and the John Rewald Papers, I found not merely a lovely 
workplace but the friendship and support of Maygene Daniels and her family. My 
warmest thanks go to Anne and Don Ritchie, whose love helped me in the darkest 
moments.   
English is not my first language, and I am immensely indebted to my American 
friends for correcting my writing, most especially to Dena Crosson and Kristen 
Regina. Their friendship helped me to finish the manuscript. Jonathan Walz also 
collaborated in the delicate task of correcting my faults while encouraging my efforts. 
My long time friends Mar?a Isabel Heredia and Susana Smulevici have been always 
by my side. Together with my family they helped me to understand what Marcos 
Aguinis has characterized as ?el atroz encanto de ser argentino? (the appalling allure 
of being Argentine). My parents, Marta Elena Roumigui?re and Jorge R. Orfila, were 
my moral compass and orientation. My sister?s love has been a source of inspiration 
throughout these years. With unwavering humor Mar?a Bel?n reminds me of our 
origins and of what it means to have been born in a country like Argentina.  
v
My worldview was shaped by the experience of living in Argentina during the chaotic  
1970s and 1980s. I am thankful to those who helped me to understand those events 
and even to gain a certain wisdom from them. I am also thankful to those who 
encouraged me to keep my perspective and to write about nineteenth-century art 
history from that vantage point. I hope it is useful to others.   
vi
Table of Contents 
Acknowledgements......................................................................................................iii 
Table of Contents......................................................................................................... vi 
List of Figures............................................................................................................viii 
Introduction................................................................................................................... 1 
The Rappel ? l?ordre in the 1930s: A New Humanism............................................ 6 
Setting the Stage: The Documentation and C?zanne?s Early Critical Fortune......... 9 
The Institutionalization of Art History as an Academic International Discipline in 
the 1930s ................................................................................................................. 16 
The History of Modern Art History........................................................................ 28 
Methodological Notes : Ideology, Museography and Hegemony .......................... 38 
Section One................................................................................................................. 48 
Chapter One: Towards a Modern [Humanist] Art History 1929-1939....................... 59 
The History of the History of Art ........................................................................... 61 
Panofsky and the Neo-Kantian Turn....................................................................... 70 
1929 to 1939: From Davos  to America.................................................................. 75 
Art History as a Humanistic Discipline. Humanism in America............................ 86 
Written Art History vs. Plastic Arts ? The Image and the Word ............................ 92 
Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 105 
Chapter Two: Lionello Venturi?s Impressionist C?zanne ........................................ 108 
Italian Foundations: The Dialogue Past-Present, Present-Past............................. 111 
Roberto Longhi?s C?zanne ................................................................................... 119 
Venturi?s C?zanne................................................................................................. 124 
Impressionism, Color and the Representation of Reality ..................................... 128 
Venturi and Modern Art History........................................................................... 141 
Venturi in America ............................................................................................... 146 
Chapter Three: The Nationalist Approach: Ren? Huyghe?s C?zanne ...................... 159 
Art and Nation. The Indissoluble Alliance of North Atlantic Universals............. 164 
Nationalistic Universalism.................................................................................... 175 
The Weakness of the Default Position.................................................................. 179 
The Contemporary and the Modern...................................................................... 186 
Huyghe?s C?zanne ................................................................................................ 193 
Objective Documentation of Modern Art ............................................................. 196 
Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 204 
Chapter Four: Rewald?s Scholarship and the Biography of C?zanne....................... 209 
The History of the Artist Biography ..................................................................... 221 
The Modern Artist Biography............................................................................... 231 
John Rewald?s C?zanne ........................................................................................ 250 
Rewald and C?zanne et Zola................................................................................. 255 
Rewald and MoMA............................................................................................... 267 
Coda: Zola?s Meaningful Joke.............................................................................. 273 
Conclusion : Section One.......................................................................................... 277 
Section Two .............................................................................................................. 279 
Space as Perspective ............................................................................................. 286 
Chapter Five: Photography and Art History. The Site Photographs......................... 290 
vii
Photography and Perspective................................................................................ 294 
Photographs and Site Photographs for the Study of C?zanne?s Art ..................... 305 
Photographs as Documents. Siegfried Kracauer................................................... 315 
Coda. C?zanne and the School of Vienna. Fritz Novotny .................................... 330 
Chapter Six: C?zanne & Perspective ........................................................................ 334 
Space and Perspective in Nineteenth-Century France.......................................... 355 
Chapter Seven: C?zanne: the Father of Cubism and the Grandfather of Modern Art
................................................................................................................................... 382 
C?zanne, Cubism and Perspective ........................................................................ 393 
C?zanne and Perspective in Modern Art History ................................................. 402 
The Ethical Imperative.......................................................................................... 418 
Coda 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art. The Right Ideology at the Right Moment 427 
Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 434 
Venturi?s Alternative Voice.................................................................................. 439 
Between Nation and Self ...................................................................................... 446 
Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 457 
viii
List of Figures
Fig. 1. Book jacket of Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern 
Art, New York, 1936.  
 
Fig. 2. Page of illustrations from Lionello Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi (Bologna: 
Zanichelli, 1926), np.  
 
Fig. 3. Page of illustrations from Lionello Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi (Bologna: 
Zanichelli, 1926), np.  
 
Fig. 4. Flowchart. ?Italian Sources of Three Great Traditions of European Painting,? 
Italian Masters Lent by the Royal Italian Government, exh. cat., The Museum of 
Modern Art, New York, 1940.   
 
Fig. 5. Esplanade of the Trocad?ro at the time of the Exposition Internationale des 
arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937. 
Fig. 6. Postcard. View of the esplanade of the Trocad?ro at the time of the Exposition 
Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937. 
Fig. 7. L?Illustration, May 1937. Plan of the Exposition Internationale des arts et 
Techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937.
Fig. 8. John Rewald and L?o Marschutz ?C?zanne au Ch?teau Noir,? L?Amour de 
l?art 16 (January, 1935), 17, 19. 
 
Fig. 9. The Site des artistes. Aix-en-Provence, France. 
 
Fig. 10. Claude Monet, The Houses of the Parliament, London, Sun Breaking 
Through the Fog, 1904.
Fig. 11. Paul C?zanne, Sous-Bois, 1894.  
 
Fig. 12. John Rewald?s ?Sources d'inspiration de C?zanne,?  L'Amour de l'art, special 
issue. 5 (May 1936), 188. Paul C?zanne, Still Life with Apples, 1893-1894. 
 
Fig. 13. Paul C?zanne, Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1885-1895.  
 
Fig.14. Paul C?zanne, La Piscine au Jas de Bouffan, 1880; id., Nature Morte au 
panier, 1880.
Fig. 15. Glass case, African galleries, Mus?e de l?Homme, 1942.
ix
Fig.16. Sketch by Ren? Huyghe for the exhibition Vincent van Gogh, 1937.  
 
Fig. 23. Entrance to the permanent collection of paintings and sculpture, Museum of 
Modern Art, New York, 1997.  
 
Fig. 24. Illustrations 18 and 19, Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of 
Modern Art, New York, 1936.  
 
Fig. 25. Illustrations 29 and 30, Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of 
Modern Art, New York, 1936.  
 
Fig. 26. Paul C?zanne, La Gardanne, 1885-1886; Pablo Picasso, The Poet, [August] 
1911. 
 
Fig. 27. Paul C?zanne, Still Life with Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl, and Oranges (1902?
06); Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Liqueur Bottle, (1909).   
 
Fig. 28. Installation photograph. Cubism and Abstract Art, Museum of Modern Art, 
New York, 1936. 
 
Fig. 29. Page from Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New 
York, 1936.   
 
Fig. 30. Installation photograph. Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of 
Modern Art, New York, 1936.  
 
Fig. 31. Page from Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New 
York, 1936.   
 
1
Par le degr? chaque fois librement choisi de la libert? du savoir, c'est-?-dire par l?inexorabilit? du 
questionner, un peuple se fixe toujours lui-m?me le rang de son ?tre-la? D?j? dans la fa?on de 
questionner parle l?histoire.  
Martin Heidegger, Qu?est-ce qu?une chose? [1935]
1
C?zanne, cette vache ? lait de la peinture moderne, a conquis le droit d??tre aim? ou ha? pour lui-m?me 
Waldemar George, ?Chroniques? Formes, 1930. 
 
Introduction
This dissertation is about both Paul C?zanne (1839-1906) and how art 
history?s methodology and history have determined the understanding of his art. By 
including art history?s methodology within the field of research, this dissertation 
accomplishes two important intellectual and political tasks. It opens new perspectives 
for the study of C?zanne?s career and art that have been foreclosed by the most basic 
presuppositions that structure the discipline?s theoretical foundations, while 
addressing fundamental issues about the institutionalization of art history itself as a 
discipline.   
C?zanne?s importance for the history of art can hardly be overestimated since 
modernism proclaimed him to be the ?father of modern art.? In the 1930s professional 
art historians took control of the artist?s critical fortune. While compiling and 
evaluating the primary sources on the artist, they set the parameters for interpreting 
the artist?s work and life that still define C?zanne studies. This is no coincidence 
since the 1930s is the decade when modern art was integrated as a subject of study 
 
1
The date corresponds to the year in which Heidegger wrote the manuscript, as this was the subject he 
taught in the winter semester of 1935 at Freiburg University. The book was actually published in 1962 
as Die Frage nach dem Ding.
2
within art history. The institutionalization of art history as an international academic 
discipline, which in this dissertation is referred to as modern art history, implied, 
among other things, the consolidation of a discourse that encompassed within the 
Western tradition Ancient, Medieval, and early modern art together with the art of the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thus, the formalization of a methodology, 
heuristic tools, and art writing genres applicable to all of them.  
The institutionalization of modern art history was spurred by historical 
developments of the inter-war period, which left indelible traces on the discipline?s 
basic outlook. The values of an idealized enlightened Humanism developed at that 
time are embedded within the discipline?s epistemological foundations and, as 
integral components of its research methodologies, are used as standards to evaluate 
and analyze all other areas of study.
2
Despite the many methodological revisions 
proposed throughout the second half of the twentieth century, modern art history?s 
basic principles reflect the worldview of the period in which it was institutionalized.   
In 1936 Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902-1981), then director of the Museum of 
Modern Art, New York presented the epochal exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art,
which assigned a key role to C?zanne in a narrative that stressed modern art?s 
affiliation with the Western tradition. Barr argued that C?zanne?s art had been of 
interest to cubist artists because in his last paintings he had ?Abandon[ed] the 
perspective of deep space and the emphatic modeling of solid forms for a compact 
composition in which the planes of foreground and background are fused into an 
 
2
Georges Didi?Huberman, Devant l?image. Question pos?e aux fins d?une histoire de l?art (Paris : 
Editions de Minuit, 1990) addresses the problem of art history?s humanism.   
3
angular active curtain of color.?
3
Barr?s C?zanne is a theoretical artist in constant 
dialogue with tradition and interested in finding alternatives for what modern art 
history considers one of the symbols of the Western tradition, perspective, and for the 
representation of volumes on the surface of the canvas. This dissertation demonstrates 
that Barr?s interpretation of C?zanne?s art and his characterization of the artist were 
dictated by the role he assigned the master in the development of the history of 
Western art. In addition, the MoMA exhibition redefined modern art as the art of the 
international avant-gardes. In France, for example, the expression ?art independant? 
described a trend within French artistic tradition while ?modern art? was used 
generically to refer both to cutting edge and contemporary (present-day) art. 
Moreover, in the 1930s, mainstream art was not defined by its experimental and 
aggressive character. In the context of this dissertation, we will refer to modern art as 
the art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  
Stephen Melville has called attention to the secret codependency that 
characterizes modern art and art history and has noted that the key to this relationship 
is precisely its being unacknowledged.
4
At first sight it might seem confusing to call 
modern art history the discipline institutionalized after the 1930s, but it makes sense 
 
3
Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, 26. 
4
?The same history that produces the possibility of art history produces the possibility of modernism 
in art, and the two possibilities are linked in the thought, which I borrow form Stanley Cavell, that 
modernism is well defined as the having of the past as a problem. It bears remarking here that these 
twinned possibilities do not and in general cannot face one another, falling as they do on opposite 
slopes of the cusp tat is the becoming explicit or objective of art.? Stephen Melville, ?The Temptation 
of New Perspectives? in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1998), 404?405. 
4
when asserted to have been the one that incorporated a new definition of modern art 
as integral part of its subject of study. 
5
Barr?s text was critical to the new discourse of modern art history, but his was 
not the only scholarly voice at play in the unfolding of modern methodological 
studies of C?zanne. Lionello Venturi, Ren? Huyghe, and John Rewald all published 
texts on C?zanne in the 1936, the same year of Barr?s exhibition. Their books?
C?zanne, son art, son oeuvre; C?zanne; and C?zanne et Zola?represent different art 
historical traditions and demonstrate the ideological and shifting nature of art history 
at a profoundly important historical moment.  
Before turning his attention to modern art, Lionello Venturi (1885-1961), as a 
professor at the University of Turin, had written extensively on Renaissance art. In 
1932 he had emigrated to France after refusing to take the obligatory oath of 
allegiance to the Fascist party that Mussolini had imposed on Italian university 
professors. Venturi wrote the first catalogue raisonn? of C?zanne?s oeuvre. Ren? 
Huyghe (1906-1997), a promising junior curator at the Louvre and the golden boy of 
the French museum establishment, chose the artist as the subject of his first 
monograph. John Rewald (1912-1994) was at the time a young German graduate 
student in art history at the Sorbonne. He had also moved to France in 1932 when his 
father offered him a study trip. C?zanne et Zola would be his dissertation and first 
book, although Rewald had already published articles in L? Amour de l?art, edited by 
Huyghe.  
 
5
The fact that the art historians who rebelled against modern art history called their movement ?New 
Art history? has restricted the choices. 
5
Venturi?s catalogue raisonn? had fallen out of use by the 1990s, whereas 
Rewald?s biography of the artist and the documentation he compiled before the 
Second World War?correspondence, oral testimonies from those who had known 
the artist, legal documents, and site photographs of the places he painted?remain 
fundamental resources. Huyghe?s conservative and nationalist interpretation of the 
artist has been almost forgotten.  
These books and the exhibition attest that in the 1930s professional art historians 
took control of the artist?s critical fortune. The three books, all published in Paris, 
represent different genres of art writing and illustrate three methodological 
approaches in play before the institutionalization of the discipline.
6
This area of 
C?zanne studies has been largely ignored by art historians as the ideological character 
of the discipline?s methodologies remains transparent for most of its practitioners. 
C?zanne?s art, admired as both the consummation of the classical tradition and 
the commencement of artistic modernity, performed a pivotal role in the disciplinary 
readjustments that occurred in the 1930s. Considering the history of the discipline as 
part of the field of study permits us to gain a better grasp of C?zanne?s art and to 
clarify the epistemological foundations of the discipline. This dissertation?s 
methodology, thus, makes visible the ideological formations that were applied to the 
interpretation of modern art when it was molded to fit within the general discourse of 
the history of Western art. More importantly, by unraveling the conflicting ideologies 
 
6
See for example Richard Shiff, C?zanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, 
Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and 
John Rewald, C?zanne and America. Dealers, Collectors, Artists and Critics, 1891?1921 (Princeton, 
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Both books end up their analyses in the 1930s. See also 
Theodore Reff, ?C?zanne et la perspective: quelques remarques ? la lumi?re de documents nouveaux,?  
Revue de l?art 86 (1985): 8?15. This author establishes a brief chronology of C?zanne?s studies that 
begins in the 1930s. 
6
at play in these three books it is possible to gain a new understanding of C?zanne?s 
art.   
 
The Rappel ? l?ordre in the 1930s: A New Humanism
In the 1930s French politics, economy, and culture were pervaded by reactionary 
ideologies as the modernist experimentation, irrationality, and extreme commitment 
to innovation that had characterized the 1910s and the early 1920s were replaced by a 
conservative imaginaire or self-image. This hegemonic trend privileged tradition and 
nostalgia for a reassuring past and appeared in the works of artists who had been 
members of the avant-garde before 1914, like Pablo Picasso and Andr? Derain. After 
the First World War a rappel ? l?ordre (call to order) had already done much to 
reduce the experimental tendencies that had dominated French culture in the pre-war 
years and to place nostalgia and memory, the need for security and continuity, at 
center stage. This sentiment was precipitated by the economic depression that began 
in the United States with the 1929 stock market crash and reached Europe in the 
1930s. Romy Golan summarizes the mood of those years,  
Exacerbated by the disenchantment with technology that accompanied the Great 
Depression,? the turn to the rural, and, in more general terms, to the organic, 
became ever more pervasive in French art during the 1930s.? Predicated on the 
concept of a retour ? l?homme (return to man) which was much more 
problematic than the retour ? l?ordre of the preceding decade, the 1930s were 
marked by the surfacing of a whole array of ideological constructs such as neo-
corporatism, biotypes, and a neo-Darwinian concept of the New Man [emphasis 
added] whose feudalizing and racial implications ran dangerously close to those 
elaborated in France?s neighboring fascist states. This process of ?rusticization of 
7
the modern? continued unabated throughout the years of the Popular Front, from 
1936 to 1938.
7
Golan?s observation that in the 1930s the retour ? l?ordre evolved towards a retour ? 
l?homme succinctly describes the change that took place in those years, when the 
definition of ?Man? and Humanism were at the center of cultural debate. This 
Humanism was a redefinition of an old Eurocentric stance that highlighted the 
centrality of human beings in creation and was associated with the Renaissance. 
France considered itself the inheritor and major exponent of the Humanist tradition. 
This dissertation refers to ?Man? as ?Anthropos,? the philosophical entity that 
epitomizes Western belief in the centrality of humankind in creation and was widely 
used in the documents of the period. 
This retrospective mood was also related to the Great War as France was 
engaged in the task of reconstruction and recuperation from its ravages. Whereas 
Germany had to deal with defeat but with little damage to its national cultural 
patrimony, France was victorious but was left with many historical treasures in ruins, 
not to mention whole villages wiped off the map. As Golan comments,  
victory gave France the luxury of a rappel ? l?ordre (call to order) whose 
political and cultural agenda was largely aimed at repressing the trauma of war. 
As a result, instead of the tabula rasa predicated by high modernism,?we find a 
collective ethos driven toward the restoration of what had been before the war: a 
world stilled, and a vision infused?from the paintings of ex-fauves and cubists-
turned-naturalists, to those of the so-called na?fs, all the way to the surrealists?
by nostalgia and memory.
8
Nostalgia and memory fueled this retrospective mood determining the historicization 
of contemporaneous artistic movements. They were evaluated according to their 
 
7
Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia. Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1995), ix-x. 
8
Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, ix. 
8
relationship with an idealized tradition: the glorious past that the French were trying 
to recover from the ruins. This was accentuated by the country?s contemporary 
politics as a series of internecine political crises and diplomatic setbacks 
demonstrated that France?s days as one of the world powers were numbered.  
1936 was politically a very significant year. In 1935 the Seventh Comintern?the 
acronym for Communist International?following Stalin?s directives, had encouraged 
communist parties to establish broad alliances (Popular Fronts) with socialists and 
even liberal parties in order to confront growing nationalisms. This attempt to foster 
class collaboration and an international alliance of intellectuals was one of the last 
important efforts to oppose Fascism.
 9
 
In France this political junction was conspicuous when the Front Populaire won 
the parliamentary elections, bringing into power the first socialist Prime Minister, 
L?on Blum (1872-1950), who headed the government from 1936 to 1937.
10
 Blum, 
who was personally interested in art and had even written some pieces of art criticism 
in his youth, ordered an exhibition of French art to accompany the Exposition 
Internationale - Art et techniques dans la vie moderne Paris 1937. Blum?s exhibition 
Chefs d??uvre de l?art fran?ais gave pride of place to C?zanne. 
9
This was clearly a maneuver of Stalin to move to the right and to wipe off the extreme left of Trotsky 
without much criticism. Exactly one year later, in August 1936 Stalin began the trials that destroyed 
the last traces of the old-garde of revolutionaries and intellectuals who had fought for the revolution. 
For some acute observers there was no doubt that Stalin would finally turn to Hitler, as he finally did in 
1939. See Duncan Hallas, The Comintern (London: Bookmarks, 1985), especially chapter 7.  
10
 Stefano Valeri mentions a 1936 letter from Venturi that indicates that the scholar had hopes to be 
able to return to his country. ?Lionello Venturi antifascista ?pericoloso? durante l?esilio (1931?1945)? 
in Storia dell?arte 101 (2002), 19. 
9
Setting the Stage: The Documentation and C?zanne?s Early Critical Fortune 
Venturi and Rewald each conceived the project of discriminating the truthful 
documentation that purported an objective approach to C?zanne?s life and oeuvre. In 
1936 scholarship on the artist was literally at a crossroads.
11
 C?zanne was hailed early 
on as a pivotal artist and as a precursor of modern art. He appeared in this role in the 
flowchart [Fig. 1.] that accompanied Cubism and Abstract Art, which served for years 
as the blueprint for the interpretation of the development of the first avant-gardes. At 
the same time, C?zanne?s art was foregrounded in the 1937 Parisian international 
exhibition as the culmination of a French tradition that had begun with the Gauls and 
Celts. As the epigraph by Waldemar George (1881-1955) demonstrates, those 
interested in the artist thought that C?zanne?s art should be assessed according to its 
own merits rather than as the beginning or the end of a process. 
Compared to other artists working at the end of the nineteenth century, such as 
Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, documentation on C?zanne is scarce. In 
addition, the artist rarely exhibited his work before 1895, which implies that there is 
little contemporary criticism for his work. This circumstance determines fundamental 
aspects of his historiography and critical fortune.   
Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, C?zanne was attached to his native 
province. While the artist was in high school he met Emile Zola (1840-1902), who 
moved to Paris in 1858. When C?zanne decided to become a painter, the future writer 
 
11
 See Ren? Huyghe, De l?Art a la philosophie. R?ponses a Simon Monneret (Paris: Flammarion, 
1980); John Rewald, interview by Sharon Zane, 1991, transcript, The Museum of Modern Art Oral 
History Project, New York;  and Lionello Venturi, ?Dr. Venturi Gives Lively Interview On Recent 
Visit.? By Lauri Eglington, The Art News (January 5, 1935). 
10
entreated his friend to join him in the capital. Their correspondence illuminates their 
aspirations and struggles as they both rebelled against the repressive Second Empire 
and the current artistic establishment. The painter was also critical of the leader of the 
artistic avant-garde of the moment: Edouard Manet (1832-1883), whose career Zola 
championed in his role as art critic. In the 1870s, C?zanne followed Camille Pissarro 
(1832-1903) to the north of the Ile-de-France, learning impressionism?s techniques 
and aesthetic principles. C?zanne exhibited in two of the eight group exhibitions: the 
first (1874), and the third (1877). 
In the mid-1880s C?zanne moved back to Aix. Even though he made regular 
visits to Paris, henceforth he had limited contacts with the art world. At the same time 
Zola began to express doubts about the accomplishments of the impressionist 
movement he had so vigorously defended in his youth. In 1895 Pissarro and other 
impressionist artists convinced the art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) to 
organize an exhibition of the art of the Proven?al master, an event that brought about 
his definitive consecration. C?zanne then became something of a legend among the 
young artists who were looking for new sources of inspiration.  
By the time C?zanne?s art gained recognition, the art world had changed, and 
the Symbolist movements of the 1880s had ceded pride of place to new artistic trends 
and a growing interest in tradition, the Latin roots of French culture and art, and 
classicism.
12
 The young poet Joachim Gasquet (1873-1921), whom C?zanne 
befriended in Aix in 1896, as well as Maurice Denis (1840-1943) and Emile Bernard 
(1868-1941), two artists that made the trip to Provence in order to visit the artist at the 
 
12
 Jean Mor?as (1856?1910) the French poet who in 1886 wrote the Symbolist manifesto, founded in 
the early 1890s the Ecole Romane. 
11
beginning of the twentieth century, were already involved in the new aesthetic. They 
were biased witnesses and recorders of the master?s words. After C?zanne died in 
1906, however, the written testimonies they produced became significant sources of 
information. Their credibility and their standing as historical ?documents? are central 
issues for the scholars working on the artist.
 13
 
In 1904 Bernard published in L? Occident ?Paul C?zanne??which C?zanne 
read?and three years later ?Souvenirs sur Paul C?zanne et lettres in?dites? for the 
Mercure de France. Also in 1907 Denis published his ?C?zanne? in L?Occident. The 
fact that two out of three articles appeared in the L? Occident is telling. Founded in 
1901 by the poet Adrien Mithouard (1864-1929), the literary magazine was right-
wing, anti-Dreyfusard, and nationalist. Although its neo-Catholic agenda implied a 
more inclusive definition of Frenchness and the Renaissance than the exclusively 
classical one fostered by the extreme right, L? Occident was a conservative 
publication, where art was valued as a manifestation of a continuous (national) 
tradition.
14
 The magazine only accepted contributors that shared its ideology, and 
both Denis and Bernard were known for their reactionary aesthetic and political ideas. 
Both articles are biased in their presentation of C?zanne, whom the authors 
interpreted in the light of the French classical tradition. The problem for the art 
 
13
 There were others, shorter testimonies that were of difficult access. Most of them incorporate 
information previously published by other authors. The most complete compilation is Michael Doran, 
Conversations avec C?zanne (Paris: Macula, 1978). Denis?s article was highly influential and it is the 
only testimony that Rewald never criticized. See John Rewald, C?zanne, Geffroy et Gasquet, suivi de 
Souvenirs sur C?zanne de Louis Aurenche et de lettres in?dites (Paris : Quatre Chemins, Editart, 1959), 
and  Shiff, C?zanne Impressionism, chapter 9. 
14
 See Laura Morowitz ?Medievalism, Classicism, and Nationalism: The Appropriation of the French 
Primitifs in Turn-of-the-Century France,? in June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam, Nationalism and 
French Visual Culture 1870?1914 (Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 2005). See also the 
exchange between Pierre Hepp, ?Sur le choix des ma?tres? L? Occident 7 (December, 1905): 263?265 
and Francis Lepeseur (Emile Bernard), ?De Michel Ange ? Paul C?zanne,? La R?novation esth?tique 
(March, 1906): 253?259. The authors discuss the place that corresponds to C?zanne in art history.  
12
historian is to determine how this ideology influenced the writer?s recollections of 
their encounter with C?zanne.
 15
 
Gasquet?s C?zanne was published in 1921. At the time of his acquaintance 
with the artist, the poet was attracted by Left-wing politics and even by Anarchism, 
but his political orientation and aesthetic ideas changed dramatically in the next years.  
As Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer noted,   
Gasquet represented the right mix of classical idealism, regionalist patriotism, 
and anti-republican politics. A radical socialist, indeed an anarchist by his own 
admission and a defender of the peasant cause in the 1890s, Gasquet, like Barr?s, 
would eventually convert to a conservative nationalist position by the early 
1900s.
16
 
Allegedly Gasquet had taken notes immediately after his conversations with 
C?zanne and his wife later asserted that he finished the manuscript of the book in 
1912 but no proof validates her claim. Although Gasquet?s highly idiosyncratic and 
idealized portrayal of the artist has been widely contested, his C?zanne remains an 
important source for contemporary art historians.
17
 
These testimonies emanate a powerful aura that derives from the fact that they 
describe ?real? encounters with the artist, and, in the two first cases, by having been 
written and published almost immediately after the meetings with the artist had taken 
place. Furthermore, they are filled with details about the artist?s reactions and 
 
15
 See Rodolphe Rapetti, ?L?Inqui?tude c?zannienne : Emile Bernard et C?zanne au d?but du XXe 
si?cle,? Revue de l?Art 146 (2004) : 35?50. The author compares the letters that Bernard sent to his 
mother immediately after meeting the artist with the article he published later. Bernard later recanted 
from his appreciation of C?zanne in part due to his artistic orientation but especially after he read 
C?zanne?s disparaging comments about him in his letters to his son and other artists. See ?L?Erreur de 
C?zanne,? Le Mercure de France  (May 1, 1922): 513?528. 
16
 Nina M., Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, C?zanne and Provence. The Painter and His Culture (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 217. 
17
 See the studies that accompany Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet?s C?zanne A Memoir with 
Conversations [Translated by Christopher Pemberton. Preface by John Rewald, Introduction by 
Richard Shiff] (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991). 
13
behavior, as well as with a wealth of appealing and easy-to-remember anecdotes. This 
dissertation, by exploring the basic narrative structure of modern art history, 
illuminates the staying power and the attraction that these testimonies have exerted on 
art historians.   
In the first decades of the twentieth century C?zanne?s critical fortune was 
affected by the association of the artist?s name with other artistic movements and 
personalities whose reception fluctuated widely during the inter-war years. The 
answers to the 1905 ?Enqu?te sur les tendances actuelles des arts plastiques? 
proposed by the poet Charles Morice (1861-1919) testifies to C?zanne?s early 
influence among young French painters.
18
 Picasso and the other cubist painters 
expressed their appreciation of his art, which was one of the sources of their 
movement. This association became a liability for C?zanne?s name after the First 
World War, when even Picasso was disavowing his more experimental art and 
turning to a neo-classic style. The avant-garde, and cubism in particular, were then 
under attack as harmful German influences on French art.
19
 C?zanne?s involvement 
with impressionism posed problems as well, since this artistic movement was also 
labeled pro-German and a deviation from the continuous French classical tradition.  
In 1926, George, as editor-in-chief of the magazine L? Amour de l?art, asked 
the British art critic Roger Fry (1866-1934) for a study on C?zanne. The article 
evolved into the famous C?zanne: A Study of His Development, published in English 
 
18
 See Phillipe Dagen and Charles Morice, La peinture en 1905 ?L? Enqu?te sur les tendances 
actuelles des arts plastiques? de Charles Morice (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1986). 
19
 Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: the Art of the Parisian Avant-garde and the First World War, 
1914?1925, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Christopher Green, Cubism and Its 
Enemies. Modern Movements and Reaction in French art, 1916?1928 (New Haven: Yale University 
Press, 1987). See also Laura Iamurri ?La tradizione, il culto del passato, l?identit? nazionale: un 
inchiesta sull?arte francese,? Prospettiva 105 (January, 2002): 86?98. 
14
in 1927. In 1910 Fry had organized the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists 
at the Grafton Gallery in London, and displayed C?zanne?s paintings among the work 
of fauve and cubist artists. Now he commented that the artist?s work belonged with 
Poussin and not with modern art. Fry who had never appreciated impressionism, 
associated it with cubism and referred to both artistic movements as ?excursus? or 
?loops? in the trajectory of French art, which had ?brought back certain valuable 
material into the main current, but...abandoned a great deal of what at the time 
seemed of great importance to its exponents.?
20
 Fry?s formalist approach to C?zanne 
was well-known during the inter-war years, and the authors examined here paid heed 
to his stylistic analyses and opinions. The art critic, an accomplished painter in his 
own right, translated into English for The Burlington Magazine Denis?s 1907 article 
on C?zanne.
21
 In fact, the French artist begins his essay on the older artist stating that, 
if he were in a provincial museum, he would consider placing the C?zannes among 
the old masters and not in the rooms devoted to modern art.
22
 
At the beginning of the twentieth century the story of C?zanne?s friendship 
with Zola acquired a new meaning and relevance. The writer?s name had become the 
symbol of the fight against conservatism and anti-Semitism, since his 1898 J? accuse 
had marked a turning point in the history of the Dreyfus affair and in French politics. 
 
20
 Roger Fry, C?zanne: A Study of His Development (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 31. 
21
 See the introduction he wrote in ?C?zanne?I. By Maurice Denis,? The Burlington Magazine for 
Connoisseurs 8 (January, 1910): 207?209, 212, 215 + 219. 
22
 The writings on C?zanne by the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867?1937) also had an 
international repercussion, as they were translated into English early on. His 1904 
Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. Vergleichende Betrachtungen der Bildenden K?nste, als 
Beitrag zu einer neuen ?sthetik was published as Modern Art Being a Contribution to a New System of 
Aesthetics (London: William Heinemann, 1908).  In 1907 Meier-Graefe published Impressionisten: 
Guys?Manet?Van Gogh?Pissarro?C?zanne. Mit einer Einleitung ?ber den Wert der franz?sischen 
Kunst und sechzig and in 1918 CeQanne und sein Kreis. The author interpreted C?zanne an early 
manifestation of expressionism in art.  
15
In the 1930s modern art began to be associated with freedom and democracy and 
therefore Zola?s ambiguous role in C?zanne?s life and in the critical fortune of 
impressionism became a liability. 
The three art historians analyzed in the first section of this study represent three 
alternate approaches to art and therefore three ways of understanding C?zanne and 
modern art. Huyghe?s monograph on C?zanne did not survive the test of time. If 
Venturi?s catalogue of the artist?s oeuvre was for years a common reference for 
scholars, the monograph that precedes it, where the author expounds his philosophical 
interpretation and the stylistic analysis on which it was based, is seldom mentioned. 
Venturi conceived of documents as peripheral heuristic tools for his work, whereas 
Rewald?s scholarship revolves around them. The German scholar played a key role in 
the compilation, evaluation, and publication of the resources that are used today by 
specialists working on C?zanne. Of the three art historians here examined, Rewald 
was the one who most permanently and profoundly influenced the modern 
appreciation of impressionism and C?zanne. In later years he authored two new 
catalogue raisonn?s of the work of C?zanne: one of watercolors in 1982, and one of 
oil paintings, published posthumously exactly sixty years after the first one, in 1996. 
As Joseph J. Rishel commented in 1996,  
extremely skeptical about the utility of art theory and aesthetics, alert to the 
abuses that follow from adopting an extreme point of view, he [Rewald] focused 
exclusively on matters that could be securely documented. The result is a body of 
scholarship that laid the foundation of modern C?zanne studies.
23
 
23
 Joseph J. Rishel, ?A Century of C?zanne Criticism II: From 1907 to the Present,? C?zanne exh. cat., 
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1996, 59 and n.50. 
16
Rewald?s biography of C?zanne together with Barr?s Cubism and Abstract Art 
established the foundations of the modern studies on the artist. 
 
The Institutionalization of Art History as an Academic International Discipline in the 
1930s
The historical and political circumstances underpinning the institutionalization of 
art history fostered its internationalization. In the nineteenth century the discipline 
had been influenced by the particularities of the culture, educational system, and art 
world of different countries, which favored the development of national?even 
nationalistic?art histories.
24
 In the 1930s, even nationalisms manifested themselves 
as internationalist ideologies. Nazism, for example, was based on racial 
considerations that went beyond Germany?s boundaries. Moreover, the term 
?Fascism? was used to characterize the ideologies that governed Germany, Italy, and 
Spain. Totalitarianism is an umbrella word that refers to regimes in which the state 
controls the life of society, and, as such, encompassed German Nazism, Italian 
Fascism, and Stalinism.
25
 Communism had traditionally aspired to establish an 
international alliance of workers that went beyond national borders. This became state 
policy for the Soviet Union: after 1919, the Commintern issued policies for and 
coordinated the activities of all the national Communist parties. 
24
 See Revue de l?Art 146 (2004) especially Pascal Griener, ?Id?ologie ?nationale? ou science 
?positive? ?,? pp. 43?50 ; and Wilhelm Schlink, ?Enseignement ou illumination? Les histoires de l?art 
fran?aise et allemande dans leurs rapports ? l?iconographie chr?tienne,? pp. 51?60. 
25
 Such is the basic definition provided by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile the ghost writer of 
Benito Mussolini who popularized the term in the 1920s. 
17
Nazism, Totalitarianism, and Fascism were grouped together in the minds of 
those intellectuals and scholars who opposed these ideologies. Concepts and 
categories such as Humanism, respect for the individual, and freedom helped to build 
a common front to contest these political forces and to try to stave off their growing 
influence. This ideological warfare dominated the international stage and precipitated 
the politicization of ongoing debates on art history and the history of art.   
In 1935, during a short visit to the United States, Venturi commented that ?in 
Europe today outside of Paris it is difficult to have a sense of freedom.?
26
 Thus, it is 
not a coincidence that the three books here considered were published in the French 
capital. Venturi was forced to leave Fascist Italy in 1932. Rewald, who was Jewish, 
had left Germany on his own accord that same year, and Hitler?s rise to power in 
1933 made it impossible for him to return. Both scholars had to flee Paris at the onset 
of the war and both found refuge in the United States.  
In 1933 Barr obtained a year?s leave of absence from his post at MoMA. He spent 
this year in Germany. While living in Stuttgart he witnessed the first attacks on art 
galleries and cultural institutions by the Nazis and became acutely aware of the real 
threat Nazism posed both politically and for modern art.   
The first two decades of the twentieth century were characterized by the 
acceleration of exchanges among European and American universities and art history 
departments.
27
 The 1930s saw the massive displacement of scholars to the United 
 
26
 Lionello Venturi, ?Lively Interview,? 3. 
27
 See Kathryn Brush, ?German Kunstwissenschaft and the Practice of Art History in America after 
World War I. Interrelationships, Exchanges, Contexts,? Marburger Jahrbuch f?r Kunstwissenschaft 
(1999): 7?36 and Craig Hugh Smyth, and Peter M. Lukehart eds., The Early Years of Art History in the 
United States Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars (Princeton, NJ: Department 
of Art and Archaeology Princeton University New Jersey, 1993). 
18
States, especially from Germany and, later in the decade, from occupied countries. 
These art historians varied in their backgrounds and level of expertise. Some of them 
returned to Europe after the war, carrying with them their experience in the United 
States.
28
 Venturi, for example, went back to Italy immediately after the war while 
Rewald stayed in the United States.  
The most successful and influential of the ?migr?s was Erwin Panofsky 
(1892-1968).
29
 The founders of the discipline, that is, the art historians who 
developed its basic theories, vocabulary, categories, and its research methodologies, 
were German-speaking scholars such as Heinrich W?lfflin (1864-1945) and Alois 
Riegl (1858-1905). But it was Panofsky who led the way to the modern practice of art 
history. As Stephen Melville observes,  
There is a sense in which we may be tempted to think of Riegl certainly, and 
W?lfflin largely, as ancient history, not yet really art history. With Panofsky we 
seem to step into an altogether different register, one in which the founding of art 
history is an achieved fact. ?
Whereas in W?lfflin, key terms ? can, from paragraph to paragraph and 
often undecidedly, be given variously Kantian or Hegelian inflections, in 
Panofsky, Kant unequivocally presides and the explicit problematic of 
historicality recedes. The ?Kant? in question here is also quite particular: given 
the state of Kant?s German inheritance in the early part of this century, Panofsky 
could, in effect, have moved either toward the neo-Kantian tendencies that 
culminate in the work of Ernst Cassirer or toward the more radical revision of 
Kant set in motion by Heidegger. And Panofsky?s choice was, clearly, for 
Cassirer.  
 
And he concludes,  
 
28
 See Colin Eisler, "Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration," in The Intellectual 
Migration: Europe and America, 1930?1960, eds. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press, 1969); Stephanie Barron, Exiles + ?migr?s The Flight of European Artists 
from Hitler. exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum, 1997. 
29
 Erwin Panofsky, ?The History of Art,? in The Cultural Migration: The European Scholars in 
America, by Franz L. Neumann et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953). 
19
With this, Riegl, and W?lfflin, the speculative past of art history itself comes to 
seem mere prehistory, the protoscience from which art history has elevated 
itself.
30
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Panofsky brought about a ?neo-Kantian turn? in the philosophical foundations 
of art history that was decisive for its institutionalization as an international academic 
discipline. Neo-Kantianism fostered art history?s standing as a scientifically based 
branch of learning able to objectively study artistic manifestations emanating from 
different cultural areas. Moreover, it was this philosophical approach that permitted 
Panofsky to transform Renaissance Humanism into an epistemological paradigm. 
Panofsky?s early publications spanned the years of the Weimar Republic, when he 
was working at the University of Hamburg and the Warburg Institute. They reveal his 
awareness of and interest in the experimental formalism of the School of Vienna 
(Riegl). In 1927 he published Perspective as Symbolic Form, which proposed an 
interpretation of the West based on the way it (hypothetically) thought of and 
represented space. In this way, Panofsky?s scholarship indirectly but most effectively 
influenced the study of C?zanne, as the Second Section of this dissertation 
demonstrates.
Other important developments confirm the 1930s as a decisive decade for the 
process of the institutionalization of modern art history. First, for the first time 
modern art was subject to the same protocols of study as art of the past. This, in turn, 
affected the production of art as it determined the precocious historicization of 
contemporary artistic movements. Secondly, the decade saw the internationalization 
of the circuit of art exhibitions and of the debate about the history of art, which, as 
 
30
 Melville, ?Temptation of New Perspectives,? 408?409. Melville also considers that the history of art 
history is dependent on the history of Germany. See page 405. 
20
noted above, coincided with their politicization. Third, the epistemological 
foundations of art history, the disciplinary boundaries of the specialties devoted to the 
examination and appreciation of the artistic phenomenon, and the conformation of 
study plans in degree-granting institutions were intensely debated in international 
forums. 
Prior to the 1930s, modern art was rarely a subject matter for art historians 
although some German universities were beginning to incorporate it in their 
programs. In the early 1930s Rewald was informed that modern art in the Sorbonne 
extended to Delacroix.
31
 Jonathan Crary points out that Walter Friedlander was 
among the first scholars to apply the vocabulary and methodology used for old 
masters to the analysis of nineteenth-century art in his Hauptstroemungen der 
franz?sischen malerei von David bis Delacroix (1930).
32
 Crary writes,   
The nineteenth century gradually became assimilated into the mainstream of the 
discipline through apparently dispassionate and objective examination, similar to 
what had happened earlier with the art of late antiquity. But in order to 
domesticate that strangeness from which earlier scholars had recoiled, historians 
explained nineteenth-century art according to models taken from the study of 
older art. Initially, mainly formal categories from Renaissance painting were 
transferred to nineteenth-century artists, but beginning in the 1940s notions like 
class content and popular imagery became surrogates for traditional iconography. 
By inserting nineteenth-century painting into a continuous history of art and a 
unified discursive apparatus of explanation, however, something of its essential 
difference was lost.
33
(Emphasis added) 
 
Even artistic manifestations that had been originally thought of as a reaction 
against, difference from, and opposition to tradition were now encompassed within a 
 
31
 See Rewald, interview. 
32
 Interestingly enough, Friedlander (1873?1969) had a Ph. D. in Sanskrit and not in art history. See 
?Max Friedlander,? Dictionary of Art Historians (website). www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/ 
33
 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century 
(Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990), 22?23. See also Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), especially 34 ff. Belting?s analysis confirms Crary?s 
although it does not identify the 1930s as the fundamental decade in this development.  
21
broader category which highlighted tradition?s unbroken continuity and resilience. In 
this way, modern art served to reaffirm the belief in the existence of transcendental 
entities such as Art and the West. As works of art were perceived as the physical 
manifestation of those ahistorical entities, their differences were interpreted as 
variations in a continuous development.  
The rappel ? l?ordre, with its need to classify and create genealogies, 
constantly related present day art movements to past ones. This had the effect of 
naturalizing what had begun as a strategy for the defense of modern art. The 
competition between nations to assert their national art?s anteriority and superiority 
encouraged the comparison of modern and traditional artistic manifestations, which 
conjured up a wealth of associations and relationships that supported the notion of a 
continuous national tradition. The process not only involved finding the roots of 
modern art in the past?as Crary noticed?but also the reading of the past in the light 
of the novelties brought about by modern art in order to proclaim the precedence and 
utmost originality of national schools.  
That the nineteenth century experienced modern [as contemporary or present 
day] art as different from that of the old masters is reflected in the fact that 
contemporary art  was not easily incorporated into museums. In France, for example, 
the mus?e de Luxemburg served as a transitory institution devoted to modern art.
34
 
MoMA was created with the Luxemburg as a model, following the French 
 
34
 Jes?s Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Modernity: the First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800?1930 
(Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, c1998). MoMA also followed the model of the German Kunstverein and 
many other formulas devised in Europe during the nineteenth century for the exhibition of 
contemporary, generally national, art.  
22
institution?s idea that some contemporary works might eventually become part of the 
permanent collection of traditional art museums.
35
 
In 1936, with Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr redefined modern art as the art of 
the European avant-gardes and associated it with the fight for freedom and 
democracy. In this way, he countered the nationalist explanation of art and identified 
modern art with a moral and political ideal perceived as universal. By doing so, Barr 
narrowed the definition of modern art and declared the museum off limits for a great 
percentage of twentieth-century art which, even if of good artistic quality, did not 
reflect the historical development or the ideology that he fostered. This exhibition 
was of fundamental importance for C?zanne?s critical fortune as it presented the artist 
as the antecedent of both cubism and abstract art and as the ?father of the new 
definition of modern art.? MoMA?s success was such that soon other museums 
adopted Barr?s interpretation of the history of modern art as well as his innovatory 
museographic and museological strategies and managerial style.
36
 
In the 1930s, American artists criticized MoMA for its almost exclusive 
concentration on European art, a complaint fed by the progressive arrival of ?migr? 
artists fleeing the continent. While in Europe in nineteenth-century modern art was 
 
35
 In 1933 Barr depicted the ideal collection of MoMA as an evolving torpedo. The idea was that, once 
the oldest works had attained a certain level of acceptability, they would be de-accessioned and 
transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the like institutions so that MoMA would remain as 
a museum of the latest (modern) artistic movements. See Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and 
the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 366?367; 
and Kirk Varnedoe, ?The Evolving Torpedo? in Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity 
and Change (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995). MoMA?s was the ?victim? of its own success 
and Barr had to abandon his project and build a permanent collection of modern art, which, when 
seeing in the light of what the nineteenth century considered to be modern art, is a contradictio in 
adjectio. 
36
 As Christoph Grunenberg commented that ?[t]he institutional nature of art museums ? was 
redefined by the Museum of Modern Art?s deliberate concentration on temporary exhibitions.? ?The 
Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,? in Art Apart: Art Institutions and 
Ideology Across England and North America, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University 
Press, 1994), 195. 
23
virtually synonymous with contemporary national art, MoMA?s new ideology 
fostered an interpretation that was supra-national or international in scope. 
In Europe the League of Nations or Soci?t? des Nations (SDN) provided another 
forum for the internationalization of the debate on art history and for its politicization. 
In 1921 this institution established the Organisation de coop?ration intellectuel (OCI) 
with the mandate of rallying the intellectuals of the world to fight for peace. One of 
its most active branches was the Institut international de coop?ration intellectuelle 
(IICI) whose seat was in Paris and which was supported by the French government. 
France aspired to promote its claims to worldwide cultural hegemony through the 
activities and publications of these organizations.
37
 The debate on culture, thus, 
reflected the international political situation and the ideological warfare that 
characterized this period.  
In spite of being a branch of an international organization, the IICI conceived of 
European civilization as the paradigm for the development of all the other cultures 
represented in it. This particular tradition was predominantly identified with 
Humanism and was used as a banner and catchphrase to confront Totalitarianism, 
especially Communism and the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy. Since the 
Enlightenment, the category ?Man? implied belonging to a race and/or nation, and, 
therefore, the IICI defended and promoted not only a Humanism that was 
unabashedly Eurocentric, but also the idea of nation (in the sense that it reaffirmed 
 
37
 All of its directors were French. England, Germany, the United States, and Russia never participated 
in sponsoring it. Even if the SDN was an American idea the country did not participate actively in it 
and created an organization similar to the IICI, the Pan American Union, which competed with France 
for cultural and political influence in Latin America. See Jean Jacques Renoliet, L?Unesco oubli?e. La 
Soci?t? des Nations et la Coop?ration intellectuelle 1919?1946 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 
1999). 
24
nations as basic human aggregations). This can be seen in the journals published by 
the IICI: Entretiens, which reported on the international debates it sponsored, and 
Correspondances, the exchange of letters among scholars. The following quote, taken 
from the proceedings of the debate about ?Vers un nouvel humanisme? sponsored by 
the organization, exemplifies this point. One of the participants, M. A. Eckhardt 
contended then that,    
Le nationalisme ne doit nullement craindre cette renaissance des humanit?s. 
L?histoire des nations europ?ennes montre jusqu'? l??vidence que, loin de la 
menacer, cette forme de l?esprit international n?a jamais cess? d?alimenter les 
cultures nationales des peuples europ?ens. ?  
Ainsi les cultures nationales ne devront jamais renier leur p?re, l?humanisme 
europ?en, car il est le ciment qui les unit, les emp?che de s??parpiller et de se 
confiner dans un isolement farouche? 
Celui qui renie les humanit?s ne croit ni ? l?Europe, ni ? l?unit? de la 
civilisation europ?enne.
38
 
This interpretation of Humanism was at the foundations of, and coexisted with, 
the more theoretically complex one that Panofsky examined in his studies. Humanism 
was identified with Europe and thus understood as the ideological foundation for 
European nations. Humanism hence served to associate art and culture with a 
category that was beyond and above nationalities, but contained in itself the notion of 
nation. This was a European category and as such historically determined, but was 
presented as universal. This explains how and why inherently nationalist 
historiographies have been able to survive within modern art history.  
One of the most dynamic promoters of the IICI?s program was the French art 
historian Henri Focillon (1881?1943). From 1925 he participated actively in its sub-
commission of art and literature, which was transformed into a permanent committee 
 
38
 V. Broendal, K. C
apek, A. Dopsch... [et al.] ?Vers un nouvel humanisme,? Entretiens 6 (Paris: 
Institut international de coop?ration intellectuelle, 1937), 30.   
25
in 1931. Focillon?s aspiration was to foster communication among countries through 
their art institutions. The initiatives he promoted were oriented towards this goal. At 
the same time, he thought of French culture and art as the epitome of Western 
Humanism and civilization, and all his institutional projects and his scholarship were 
suffused by this conviction.
39
 His first undertaking was the organization of the work 
of museums, which resulted in the creation of the Office international des mus?es 
(OIM.)
40
 Focillon also wanted to coordinate all other institutions related to the study 
and practice of art. As he wrote in 1932, 
l?Office international des mus?es repr?sente dans [ma] pens?e une premi?re 
?tape. Le projet actuel [la coordination des instituts de l?historie de l?art] serait la 
seconde. Une coordination des ?coles de beaux-arts serait l?ach?vement d?un 
plan qui [me] tient tr?s ? c?ur. C?est le jour seulement ou cette triple action aura 
pu se r?aliser que la coop?ration intellectuelle aura fait pour les arts quelque 
chose qui soit digne de la Soci?t? des Nations.
41
 
In 1935 OIM organized the first Conf?rence internationale d'?tudes sur 
l'architecture et l'am?nagement des mus?es d'art. The IICI sponsored the first 
exhibition on museography, installed at the Palais de Tokyo in front of Chefs d??uvre 
de l?art fran?ais at the time of the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1937. The aim 
of this didactic exhibition, curated by Huyghe with the assistance of Rewald, was to 
demonstrate the latest advances in the art of display. It included three pilot exhibitions 
 
39
 A specialist in Medieval art, Focillon had seen the damage the Germans had done to France?s 
cultural heritage during the Great War. His scholarship denotes a strong anti-German bias. Chapter 3 
will analyze his nationalist stance both within and outside the IICI. See Christian Briend, and Alice 
Thomine eds., La vie des formes: Henri Focillon et les arts. exh. cat. (Paris: Institute national 
d?histoire de l?art, 2004), and Relire Focillon : Cycle de conf?rences organis? au Mus?e du Louvre par 
le Service culturel du 27 novembre au 18 d?cembre 1995 (Paris : Ecole nationale sup?rieure des beaux-
arts, 1998). 
40
 The OIM is the direct antecedent of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which in turn, is 
a branch of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 
41
 Archives Unesco, CICI/Perm. L.A./ 2e session/P.V. 1 (1) quoted in Daniel H. A Maksymiuk 
?L?engagement politique au sein de l?Institut de coop?ration intellectuelle,? in Briend, Henri Focillon,
286. 
26
on different subjects: the history of theater, French rural abodes, and the art of 
Vincent van Gogh. In the exhibition of van Gogh, Huyghe devised a documentary 
space, where he displayed the artist?s letters, maps, plans, comparative photographs, 
and Rewald?s site photographs, on panels topped by wall texts.  
The Totalitarian regimes of the inter-war years had quickly exploited the art of 
organizing propagandistic exhibitions and performances in order to rally the masses 
behind their causes.  As George Mosse argues,  
It was the strength of fascism in general that it realized, as other political 
movements and parties did not, that with the nineteenth century Europe had 
entered a visual age, the age of political symbols, ? The populism of fascism 
helped the movement to arrive at this insight: the need to integrate the masses 
into a so-called spiritual revolution which represented itself through a largely 
traditional aesthetic. 
42
 
The new museography exemplified by Huyghe?s and Barr?s exhibitions should be 
understood in this historical context. The institutionalization of modern art history 
was accompanied by significant changes in its attendant manifestations museography 
and museology (more below) which were as politicized as the debate on art history.   
Although it cannot be demonstrated that Barr knew of Stalin?s ?talking museums? 
(1928) or any of the Italian exhibitions organized by Fascist art historians and 
curators such as Ugo Ojetti or Claudio Monti,
43
 he was well aware of the advances 
 
42
 George L. Mosse, ?Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations,? Journal of Contemporary 
History 31 Special Issue: The Aesthetics of Fascism (April, 1996): 247. As Dr. June Hargrove has 
pointedly remarked, art and display were politicized and used as propaganda during the French 
Revolution. Interestingly enough terrorism, mass deception, and dictatorship even a form of 
totalitarianism were all elements of this historical event that signaled an epistemic shift in the history 
of the West. Modern art thus is tightly tied to the new political, economical and social forces that 
established modernity itself.  The date of the end of modernity and the beginning of post-modernity 
and even of the beginning of a new episteme is still a subject of debate. This dissertation affords a new 
perspective to think of this important issue. As it will be explained below outright propaganda became 
after 1930s part of art?s and art history?s ideology. 
43
 See Adam Jolles, ?Stalin?s Talking Museums,? Oxford Art Journal 28 (March, 2005): 429?455. For 
the Fascist exhibitions in Italy see Claudia Lazzaro, and Roger J. Crum eds., Donatello among the 
27
made by the Bauhaus in this field, and of the work of the Futurist and Russian artists, 
photographers, architects, and designers interested on display. These included Mario 
Sironi, El Lissitzky, Aleksander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, among others. The 
parodical installations of the avant-garde, including Duchamp and the Surrealists, 
underscore the fact that display became a conscious strategy in the years before the 
Second World War.   
Well aware of the international activities in this field, Huyghe included reduced 
models of several new museum installations in his 1937 exhibition. In his texts he 
commented on the value of museum display for ideological purposes and propaganda 
(Chapter Three). Therefore, both curators were conscious of the potential of museum 
display for the inculcation of moral value and political ideology.
44
 The objective, 
rational, neutral, document-based museography inaugurated by Barr and Huyghe in 
the 1930s was deliberately ideological (more on this below).  
The IICI also provided a forum for the debate on the organization of the different 
disciplines devoted to the study of art as well as on the epistemological foundations of 
art history itself. At the same time, the Surrealists and the group of intellectuals 
associated with the magazine Documents (1929-1931) and the Mus?e de l?Homme 
focused on the epistemological status of art and Beaux-Arts, the definition of culture, 
and the aesthetic value of ethnographic material. This anti-establishment, anti-
Humanist position must be factored into the internationalization of the debate about 
 
Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University 
Press, 2005). 
44
 The work by Huyghe has not attracted scholarly attention. On MoMA?s approach to display see 
Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum 
of Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 
 
28
art history?s foundations. From the pages of Documents, George Bataille (1897-
1962), Carl Einstein (1885-1940), and many other important intellectuals called for 
an alternative interpretation for the problem of art and the development of a different 
kind of critical approach to it.  
 
The History of Modern Art History 
Jonathan Harris recently characterized the art history that evolved as a critique of 
modern/ist art history as ?radical,? ?critical,? or ?new? art history. New Art History, 
he writes, 
is intended to indicate the recognition that since 1970 art history developed forms 
of description, analysis, and evaluation rooted in, and inseparable from, recent 
social and political activism [May ?68] while it also took up legacies inherited 
from scholarship and political activism from much earlier times in the twentieth, 
and nineteenth century.
45
 
The incorporation of Structuralist, Feminist, and post-Marxist theories for the analysis 
of artistic phenomena involved a serious critique of modern art history?s basic 
presuppositions and methodologies, seen as a ?crisis? in the discipline.
46
 Harris writes 
in the past tense as he acknowledges that the main protagonists of the ?rebellion? had 
settled into academia, therefore institutionalizing and containing the crisis he 
describes.
47
 In 1996 Griselda Pollock warned about the inability of theory per se to 
 
45
 Jonathan Harris, The New Art History. A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2001), 1.  
46
 The ?crisis? was previously debated in the two publications of the College Art Association. In 1982 
Henry Zerner edited a special issue of Art Journal on The Crisis in the Discipline (Winter, 1982). In 
addition, The Art Bulletin published the series ?A Range of Critical Perspectives? between September 
1994 and June 1997.  
47
 For a similar prognosis about multiculturalism and Post-colonial studies see Rasheed Araeen, ?A 
New Beginning. Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,? Third Text 50 (Spring, 
2000): 3?20. 
29
bring about significant change, and about the resilience of modern art history. In her 
answer to The Art Bulletin?s inquiry about ?Art History and Its Theories? she wrote,  
?Art History and Its Theories? suggests two discrete entities and means that the 
debate can only take place within the field defined by an?as yet?unquestioned 
notion of the given identity of something called Art History (which is, of course, 
only the cumulative effect of all the concrete practices in colleges, museums, and 
publishing houses). It already exists and these ?theories? are foreign imports, by 
definition alien. Thus, a fanastic [sic] xenophobia is operative before we even 
begin. What has happened historically in the last forty years has been the 
resumption? of the intellectual movements of modernity: engagements with 
language, meaning, subjectivity, identity, all framed within the terms of 
engagement created by the global consolidation of Western industrial capitalism, 
its contradictory inner forces, and those which it generated to oppose it: 
reformist, radical, revolutionary. Art history seems so little to take its own 
subject, culture, seriously that it fails to see itself as a player in this historical 
field, a reflexive response to modernity with its cultures of self-definition and 
self-mystification, one of what Michel Foucault named the ?sciences of Man? 
which would invent, and then preside over the demise of, this curious fiction.
48
 
Art historians not interested in theoretical issues, as a rule, do not notice that they do 
advocate a theory, one so ingrained within the methodological tools of their practices 
that it has become transparent, that is, ideological. Pollock takes The Art Bulletin?s
editors to task and deconstructs the initial proposal, observing that it pre-determined 
the answers. For these editors modern art history?s theoretical outlook is the 
discipline itself. This mindset prevents other theories from challenging it.
49
 
As Harris noted, one of the strategies of the New Art History consisted of 
revitalizing methodological approaches and points of view of the past. The 
institutionalization of art history in the 1930s brought to an end the experimentalism 
and diversity of methodological approaches that characterized the inter-war years 
 
48
 Griselda Pollock, ?Theory, Ideology, Politics: Art History and Its Myths,? part of the series ?Art 
Theory and Its Theories,? Art Bulletin 58 (March, 1996), 21. 
49
 This is why Martin Heidegger?s epigraph is important: questions shape the answers and it is the 
ability to question outside one?s presuppositions, what determines the scope of the knowledge and 
innovation the answer will provide.   
30
thereby creating a canon of fundamental texts.
50
 This dissertation examines both the 
currents of thought that became the hegemonic art historical discourse (modern art 
history) at the end of the 1930s as well as the theories and methodologies that did not 
become part of the canonical discourse. These last were alternative models for the 
understanding of art and the discipline. By contextualizing them, this dissertation 
challenges their reduction to what the editors of The Art Bulletin referred to as ?Its 
Theories.?
51
 
In order to examine the history of art history this dissertation considers it (like 
Pollock in the quote above) as an integral part of the project of modernity. This 
standpoint has the advantage of highlighting the fact that the organization of 
knowledge in autonomous disciplines is conventional and not organic, that it does not 
reflect the structure of the world, and, hence, that it does not imply the existence of 
the different subjects these disciplines study. In the 1930s art history?s existence as an 
autonomous field of knowledge, its disciplinary boundaries and relationship with 
other subjects, was hotly debated, and was even opposed by such important scholars 
as Aby Warburg (1866-1929), who believed it should be a branch of the history of 
culture.  
 
50
 About the revivals in art history see James Elkins, Is Art History Global? (London: Routledge, 
2007). As this was one topics debated in the roundtable that generated the ?assessments? it is 
considered by almost all the authors who contributed to the volume.   
51
 At the time, there were scholars and intellectuals who were interested in developing ways of thinking 
that were as anti-establishment as the art of the avant-gardes. They proposed anti-rational and anti-
logical strategies that were set aside by Academia or considered ?artistic? or ?poetic.? The work of 
Heidegger, George Bataille, Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin have started to be assimilated into modern 
art history but, as noted above, their theories have been constrained to fit within already well 
established epistemological parameters. In 1996 Pollock noticed that the new theories being proposed 
were selected and manipulated so that they supported a new orthodoxy. Pollock, ?Theory, 
Ideology,?20. I agree with her diagnostic. However, Pollock was thinking of historical materialism, 
whereas I have noticed that the influence of Post-Marxist theories has blocked the debate on faith and 
the inclusion of non-Western epistemologies within the discipline?s theoretical outlook.  
31
Claire Farago has noted that the categories ?art? and ?culture? developed 
simultaneously in the nineteenth century, closely related to the history of 
anthropology and art history.
52
 Michel-Rolph Trouillot?s 2003 Global 
Transformations. Anthropology and the Modern World, a book that sketches the 
history of modern anthropology both as the creation of a subject of study and as a 
discipline institutionalized between 1859 and 1939, provides a useful theoretical 
framework for the examination of the history of art history as it is developed in the 
following chapters.
53
 
Trouillot refers to the West as the North Atlantic, which allows him to underline 
the fact that, to put it bluntly, the West does not exist but is a fiction, a project, ?an 
exercise in global legitimation? the projection of the North Atlantic as the sole 
legitimate site for the universal, the default category, the unmarked?so to speak?of 
all human possibilities.?
54
As the default position it can only be defined by 
contradistinction with what it is not, the non-Western, or the Other. The West as 
North Atlantic is a way of representing things, a world view that is conventional, but 
transparent for those who express it. That is also the reason why it is difficult, if not 
impossible, to define it positively, as it is a way of understanding the world but it is 
experienced as the perception of the (real) world. Trouillot?s definition provides a 
 
52
 Claire Farago, ??Vision Itself has Its History?: ?Race,? Nation, and Renaissance Art History,? in 
Reframing the Renaissance. Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, ed. Claire Farago (New 
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 76, ff.  Donald Preziosi observes that all these sciences were 
dependent on the invention of photography and that made a disciplinary use of it. This will be 
considered in the Second Section. See Preziosi, ?The Art of Art History,? in The Art of Art History: A 
Critical Anthology, ed. Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 511. 
53
 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations. Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).  The book is especially appropriated since it argues that modern 
anthropology has to be applied to the consideration of the North Atlantic itself and not only to the 
study of non-Western populations that are almost non-existent anymore.  
54
 Trouillot, Global Transformations, 1?2. 
32
non-essentialist standpoint that foregrounds the West only as a hegemonic worldview. 
He coins the phrase ?North Atlantic universals? to describe,  
words that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they 
themselves have helped to create. North Atlantic universals are particulars that 
have gained a degree of universality, chunks of human history that have become 
historical standards. 
55
 
Trouillot includes words like nation-state, democracy, freedom, progress, and 
modernity under this category, and observes that even though their meaning is 
historically determined and not constant they are thought of and used as universals. 
The North Atlantic universals are prescriptive, not merely descriptive or referential: 
they imply what is right and good, they present themselves as models of what should 
be; they are ideological (see below). Moreover these words seduce as they suggest not 
only that they are the truth, but that they are rational, even if they are a form of belief 
and thus rooted in emotions.
56
 They have the strength and ubiquy of common sense or 
doxa but are the conditions of possibility of knowledge itself and are therefore 
embedded in the scientific or specialized discourses. As Trouillot comments,  
They do not describe the world; they offer visions of the world. They appear to 
refer to things as they exist, but rooted as they are in a particular history they are 
evocative of multiple layers of sensibilities, persuasions, cultural and ideological 
choices tied to that localized history. They come to us loaded with aesthetic and 
stylistic sensibilities, religious and philosophical persuasions, cultural 
assumptions ranging from what it means to be a human being to the proper 
relationship between humans and the natural world, ideological choices ranging 
from the nature of the political to its possibilities of transformation. There is no 
unanimity within the North Atlantic itself on any of these issues, but there is a 
shared history of how these issues have been and should be debated, and these 
words carry that history. Yet since they are projected as universals, they deny 
 
55
 Trouillot, Global Transformations, 35. 
56
 According to Trouillot ?The more seductive these words become the harder it is to specify what they 
actually stand for, since part of the seduction resides in that capacity to project clarity while remaining 
ambiguous? They evoke rather than define. Furthermore, even that evocation works best in negative 
form.? Trouillot, Global Transformations, 36. 
33
their localization, the sensibilities, and the history from which they spring. 
57
 
(Emphasis added.) 
 
Trouillot?s categories, as applied in this essay, remind us that the colonization of 
the Other was preceded and accompanied by the internal colonization of the different 
cultures of the West by the central powers.
58
 This implies the existence of internal 
dissent and radical difference within the North Atlantic world itself. The North 
Atlantic universals hide their origin and determinations and perform as if they 
constituted a transhistorical point of view. In this way they are easily projected onto 
the past and the foreign, and allow interpreting and rewriting past history and the non-
Western world according to a particular, historically determined ideology: what 
cannot be read as another expression of North Atlantic universals is said to manifest 
the ?difference? that reaffirms them as the standard of value.  
Trouillot characterizes the Renaissance as the ?geography of the imagination? of 
the West as it was the moment when, confronted with the Other, Europeans began to 
think of themselves as the non-other, and to gain consciousness of Europe as the 
?here? different from an ?elsewhere.?
59
 Culturally the Renaissance invented its 
origins in Greece. This link to Antiquity strengthened the concept of the Other as the 
non-Western.
60
 
In the following centuries this ?geography of the imagination? overlapped with 
the ?geography of management,? which transformed the Northern countries into 
 
57
 Trouillot, Global Transformations, 35. 
58
 Significantly, the main book on this aspect is also a product of the 1930s: Norbert Elias?s ?ber den 
Prozess der Zivilisation was first published in 1939 but was only translated into English in 1969 and 
has been greatly influential since then. The book was written in France and London as Elias had to flee 
from the Nazis in 1933.    
59
 It was also the moment when the continent became synonymous with Christendom after the 
recuperation of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, an event that coincided with the 
discovery and conquest of America. See Trouillot, Global Transformations, 20?21. 
60
 Trouillot, Global Transformations, n.17, 143.  
34
powerful entities. The Enlightenment strengthened and theorized this separation from 
the rest of the world and reformulated this tradition according to its own intellectual 
and political practices. This symbolic space, as the ?inherited field of significances,? 
preceded the development of the actual academic disciplines, which formalized and 
organized it. Once institutionalized, they reread and rewrote the history of that 
symbolic space according to the new (modern) definition of the North Atlantic 
universals.
61
 Academic disciplines bear the imprint of the period in which they were 
developed, and in the nineteenth century, the main ideals were nation, race, and 
colonial domination. Trouillot?s model, hence, suggests an explanation for the weight 
that the Renaissance has in modern art history. Panofsky?s Renaissance Humanism 
was an idealized construct, a re-formulation of the historical events according to 
modern ideologies. This dissertation considers this Humanism a North Atlantic 
universal. 
The European totalitarian regimes were supported by powerful ideologies that 
contested some of the most cherished ideals of the Western hegemonic worldview. 
These contrasting interpretations of the Western tradition were honed by the debates 
that took place in the decade that preceded the Second World War. This internal 
confrontation did not affect the way the West presented itself to the rest of the 
international community. On the contrary, perhaps one of the consequences of the 
institutionalization and internationalization of disciplines such as modern art history 
was the reinforcement and naturalization of the Western worldview. This is how a 
 
61
Academic disciplines, ?do not create their fields of significance, they only legitimize particular 
organizations of meaning. They filter and rake?and in that sense, they truly discipline?contested 
arguments and themes that often precede them. In doing so, they continuously expand, restrict, or 
modify in diverse ways the distinctive arsenal of tropes, the types of statements they deem acceptable.? 
Trouillot, Global Transformations, 8. 
35
certain idea of man, the artist, and the scholar, a particular understanding of vision, 
perception, space and time became unquestioned and unquestionable epistemological 
paradigms. These notions are closely associated with other North Atlantic universals 
such as nation-state, race, modernity, and freedom, and they mutually reinforce their 
claim to universal valance. This explains?as Chapter Three makes clear?why it is 
almost impossible to tell them apart and why the use of theories that analyze only 
some of these universals could not amend the foundations of the discipline and ended 
up reinforcing them.   
This is not the place to discuss the effect that these developments had in the non-
Western world, but the benefits of considering the West as the North Atlantic become 
clearer when thinking of the non-West or from a non-Western point of view. Nation, 
for example, is a Western geo-political category imposed per force on most of the rest 
of the world. Several intellectuals from Third World countries have denounced the 
1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as Eurocentric and neo-colonialist.
62
 
Their argument is that not all social groups have freedom as a final goal or have 
attained (or desire to attain) the same degree of separation of religion from the secular 
sphere of life that had become the norm in the West. Western epistemology offers for 
them an alternative at best, not necessarily a goal. These scholars tend to highlight the 
negative aspects of the same Humanism that confronted Fascism and Totalitarianism.  
Characterizing art, modernity, Humanism, nation-state, and democracy as North 
Atlantic universals establishes an anti-essentialist standpoint at the core of the 
 
62
 Among the many denunciations from African countries and the political use of this sensitive issue 
see the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1990 by forty-five Islamic countries. 
http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/cairodeclaration.html. See also Shashi Tharoor, "Are Human 
Rights Universal?," World Policy Journal (Winter 1999/2000). 
36
theoretical framework of this dissertation. This practice foregrounds the historical 
nature, and the conventional and ideological character of these ideas, and warns 
against their blanket application for the scrutiny of the past. This strategy keeps these 
notions at center stage.  
When analyzing the 1930s scholars tend to focus their attention on these 
categories? extreme manifestations (nationalism, racism, Fascism, totalitarianism) 
without discussing their more basic, apparently innocuous and natural expressions 
(nation/hood, race, liberal-democracy, modernism). Trouillot?s perspective permits us 
to underscore the conventional character of these most ideological notions. 
The investigation of the historical development of key art historical categories 
examined in this dissertation, such as the artist, perspective, theories of vision, 
perception, and space, and the codependence of art and nation as ideal entities follow 
Trouillot?s chronology of the development of North Atlantic universals and his 
characterization of the Renaissance as the ?geography of the Imagination? of the 
West. Ultimately, the North Atlantic universals as developed by Trouillot for the 
study of Anthropology, a (Western) science devised in the nineteenth century for the 
understanding of Man as the ?Other,? provide an Archimedean point to evaluate the 
different currents of thought that struggled within the field of art history in the 1930s. 
Was the Renaissance such a fundamental period in the history of the West or did 
the art historical methodologies applied to the examination of the past determine its 
centrality? This kind of analysis might help to explain why C?zanne?s art is linked to 
classicism and to Poussin?s art despite the documentary sources against this claim, 
37
and may stimulate new ways of thinking about his art.
63
 As Crary suggests, the study 
of modern art might benefit from a methodology that does not imply the Renaissance 
as the default position. Putting modern art history?s ideological certainties into 
parenthesis allows other questions to emerge to shed new light on the material.    
Most of what art history pretends to know about C?zanne as a man is the result of 
applying standards of evaluation to the documentation that reflect the hegemonic 
worldview of the North Atlantic universals. Since the 1930s C?zanne?s art has been 
hailed as the breakthrough that marked the end of scientific perspective. This 
dissertation demonstrates that we still do not know how the artist perceived space or 
if he was conscious of it as a three-dimensional volume that contains objects. In 
practical terms, in order to avoid misinterpreting or misunderstanding C?zanne and 
his work, the art historian has to question not only what he knows about the artist but 
his or her own worldview and the one imposed by Academia. The problem, as is well 
known, is to become aware of one?s own ideology. The examination of the history of 
art history from the standpoint afforded by Trouillot?s North Atlantic universals helps 
to uncover major aspects of the discipline?s ideological foundations and, hence, offers 
an opportunity to visualize C?zanne?s art afresh and to address new questions to the 
documentary sources.    
 
63
 In 1960 Theodore Reff demonstrated that the idea that C?zanne wanted to ?do Poussin again after 
nature? was apocryphal, and that all seemed to indicate that the artist had been attracted to non-
classical (and even anti-classical) artistic movements like the baroque and romanticism. Theodore 
Reff, ?C?zanne and Poussin,? Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (January-June, 
1960): 150?174.  
38
Methodological Notes : Ideology, Museography and Hegemony
To consider art history as one of Foucault?s ?sciences of man? and as part of the 
project of modernity is to acknowledge its ideological character. In this light art 
history is part of the apparatus that secures the modern system of disciplinary power. 
The 1930s were crucial years for the politicization of the debate on art history. During 
these years scholars became even more conscious of the power of both art and 
scholarship as propaganda. This was not new, but until then art history had been more 
or less explicitly and overtly national/istic (chauvinistic). In the 1930s, the 
internationalization of the debates and the need to oppose the imperialist views of the 
Totalitarian regimes promoted the identification of art with trans- or inter-national 
categories such as Humanism and freedom, which preserved national particularities 
while claiming the universality of the North Atlantic universals. After the war, when 
the sense of urgency had passed, these provisional constructs became an integral part 
of the discipline, which, in turn, participated in that other war of ideologies known as 
the Cold War.  
Hayden White, following in the footsteps of Louis Althusser and Fredric 
Jameson, has contended that historiography is ideological not because of the subject 
matter it considers or the ideas it fosters through them, but because it imposes a 
certain worldview through the way it presents its material.    
Historiography is, by its very nature, the representational practice best suited to 
the production of the ?law-abiding? citizen. And this is not because it may deal in 
patriotism, nationalism, or explicit moralizing, but because in its featuring of 
narrativity as a favored representational practice, it is especially well-suited to 
the production of notions of continuity, wholeness, closure, and individuality 
39
which every ?civilized? society wishes to see itself as incarnating, against the 
chaos of a merely ?natural? way of life. 
64
 
Art history is disciplinary not simply because of the hidden messages that lurk 
behind the overall organization of its material, but because it translates images into 
words and fosters the notion that art has meaning.
65
 According to White, ideology is,  
a certain practice of representation whose function is to create a specific kind of 
reading or viewing subject capable of inserting himself into the social system 
which is that subject?s historically given potential field of public activity. It is 
obvious that any society, in order to sustain the practices which permit it to 
function in the interests of its dominant groups, must devise cultural strategies to 
promote the identification of its subjects with the moral and legal system that 
?authorizes? the society?s practices.
66
 
White considers historiography together with art and literature as tools for 
convincing the members of a society of the truth of certain doctrines and beliefs. In 
the early 1940s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argued that the notion 
that something, a thing, is an object, already determines a certain subject-position, 
that is, the same decision that transforms a thing into an object converts people into 
subjects. Therefore, the presentation of works of art as objects for visual 
contemplation and as vessels of meaning is ideological. Historiography and 
museography are tightly connected. Moreover, meaning supposes the use of the 
rational mind and the perusal of written texts. Beneath the translation of images into 
words there is a particular conception of the world, space, and time, one that opposes 
considering the world as mere presence, as mere physicality, and imposes the quest 
for meaning.   
 
64
 Hayden White, ?Review? [Historik. By Johann Gustav Droysen] History and Theory (February, 
1980): 78. 
65
 For the ideology behind art history classifications see Robert Nelson ?The Map of Art History,? The 
Art Bulletin 79 (March, 1997): 28?40. 
66
 White, ?Review,? 77. 
40
Donald Preziosi has argued that art history as a modern discipline stems from 
the creation of museums. For Preziosi, the museum is one of the most salient and 
effective disciplinary apparatus created by the Enlightenment. He argues that,  
Museology and the various forms of museography which came to be 
professionally organized since the early nineteenth-century?art history, 
connoisseurship, art criticism?have sustained the particular ideological practices 
and affordances of historicism, wherein the import, value, or meaning of an item 
is a direct function of its relative position in an unfolding diachronic array. Both 
have also operated in a complementary fashion to naturalize certain essentialist 
notions of the individual social subject and its agency: in this regard, both 
?objects? and their ?subjects? may be seen as museological productions.
67
 
As an ideological apparatus the museum is a system of representation that exhibits 
works of art as stand-ins for meaning, as documents. The museum provides both 
instruction about specific issues and topics, as well as indoctrination on how to be a 
citizen and a human being, how to relate to objects and other people.
68
 It is in this 
sense that the exhibitions of modern art examined in this dissertation can be 
compared with those organized by Totalitarian regimes as the art of display was 
enlisted to counter the success of those ideologies. This dissertation demonstrates that 
the institutionalization of art history in the 1930s coincided with that of museography, 
a fact that has escaped attention both of art historians and of critical theoreticians. 
Preziosi contends that by presenting works of art?the paradigm of what the West 
defines as ?object??as meaningful, the discipline shapes people?s understanding of 
the relationship between object/subject (reality/person). The work of art is therefore 
an epistemologically ambiguous object: treasured because of its material uniqueness, 
 
67
 Donald Preziosi, ?Collecting / Museums,? in Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert Nelson and 
Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 282. 
68
 Preziosi, ?Collecting / Museums,? 283. 
41
it is also said to embody a meaning.
69
 Therefore it is both representative of something 
that is outside itself (referentiality)?which justifies that it be surrounded by a 
plethora of documentation that refers to that meaning?and the unique and 
irreplaceable thing (differentiality). Moreover both dimensions are ambiguously 
presented, as ?referentiality is paradoxically both the foreground and the background 
to differentiality and vice versa, in an oscillation or slippage which can never fully be 
fixed in place.? Preziosi adds,  
In rendering the visible legibly (which after all is the point of the discourse on 
?art?) museum objects are literally both there and not there, and in two different 
ways.  In the first place, the object is both quite obviously materially part of its 
position (situation) in the historiographic theater of the museum.? Yet, at the 
same time, it is unnaturally borne there from some other milieu, from some 
?original? situation: its present situation is in one sense fraudulent?. In the 
second place, the object?s significance is both present and absent?its semiotic 
status is both referential and differential, it is both directly and indirectly 
meaningful. 
For the museum user, then, the object?s material properties, no less than its 
significance, are simultaneously present and absent?. Formalism and 
contextualism, as may have been clear all along, are prefabricated positions in 
the same ideological system of representation, codetermining and coordinated 
facets of the sociopolitical project of modernity. 
70
 (Emphasis added) 
 
This ambiguous status of the art object is associated with its disciplinary use. It might 
be argued that in order to apprehend an individual object, it has to be put in a 
context/horizon of reference and that it is the context that determines the character of 
the object thrown within it. The presupposition behind such an assertion is that the 
work of art has to be ?understood? and not just appreciated or contemplated.  
The paradoxical relationship between physicality and (historical) meaning is the 
fundamental problem of art history, one that, nonetheless, is not at the center of the 
 
69
 In the same way a human being is said to be all important but can also represent a country, a gender, 
a social class, and a political party. 
70
 Preziosi, ?Collecting / Museums?, 286. 
42
discipline?s everyday practice but has been relegated to the periphery of the field as 
?theory.? Modern art history conceives of the work of art as an object that has a 
meaning, one that has to be explained, narrated, uttered: the image (which is a spatial 
entity) is indissolubly associated with the word and with the particular temporality of 
the narration.  
 The institutionalization of a hegemonic art history was spurred and shaped by 
the ideological and epistemological battles that took place before the Second World 
War. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have characterized hegemony as a practice, 
a type of relationship, an always incomplete, open ended articulatory process which 
does not emanate from a center but from many different nodal points. In the 1930s no 
overarching discourse organized the multiple currents of thought that were competing 
within the symbolic field.
71
 This might explain the wealth of theoretical approaches 
and the experimentalism that characterized the discipline before the war. After 1945, 
modern art history as formulated in the Unites States became the hegemonic 
international discourse when the success of Panofsky?s interpretative methodology 
established what Martin Warnke has characterized as the ?international style? of art 
history.
 72
 This coincided with the fantastic success of MoMA?s definition of modern 
art and the dissemination of its managerial strategies and museographic style, which, 
in turn, influenced the production of contemporary art.  
****** 
 
71
?We will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity 
is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory 
practice, we will call discourse. We will call moments the differential positions, as they appear 
articulated within discourse, and elements any difference that is not articulated in a system.? Ernesto 
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), 105. 
72
 Quoted in Christopher Wood, ?Art History?s Normative Renaissance? in Allen Grieco, Michael 
Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi, The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century: Acts of an 
International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9?11 1999 (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2002), 86. 
43
This dissertation is organized in two sections with a total of seven chapters. Three 
of the four chapters of the first section are devoted to the examination of Venturi?s, 
Huyghe?s, and Rewald?s texts on C?zanne and to their scholarship in the 1930s. 
While studying the relationship among these books and their authors, the activities of 
the IICI and MoMA are shown to have been of great importance, as the events and 
publications they sponsored reflected and fostered the development of some of the 
more important currents of thought that coalesced at the end of the decade. Although 
they are not the subject of an individual chapter, they serve to weave together the life 
and work of the three art historians examined in this dissertation. Moreover, MoMA?s 
1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art bridges the First and Second Section of this 
dissertation.  
Section I. C?zanne and Humanism. Images and Words: This section 
analyses the conflicting approaches to the art and life of C?zanne in the light of the 
history of the institutionalization of art history as it developed in the 1930s. 
Chapter One establishes the theoretical framework for the chapters that 
follow. It discusses art history as icono-logy, that is, as a particular mode of relating 
images (art, icono) to words (history, theory, logos) that continues and prolongs the 
specific way in which the West understands art since the Renaissance. In addition, the 
chapter provides a sketch of the fundamental aspects of the history of the discipline in 
the 1930s, and summarizes the historical circumstances and theories that influenced 
the debate about art history. It concentrates on the career of Erwin Panofsky in the 
1930s, before and after his immigration to the United States.    
44
Chapter Two examines Lionello Venturi?s C?zanne. Italian art history and this 
author performed a pivotal role in the construction of a unified art historical discourse 
that encompassed both past and modern art. Venturi?s interpretation of impressionism 
and C?zanne was shaped by his early career as a specialist in the Renaissance, his 
reflection on aesthetic issues and on the epistemological foundations of the discipline, 
as well as by his engagement as an anti-fascist intellectual. He criticized art history?s 
excessive reliance on philological methodologies, and the centrality of the 
Renaissance and classicism in it, but his innovative ideas about methodology and the 
organization of the disciplines devoted to the study of art?which he expounded in 
one of the IICI publications?were superseded by modern art history.     
Chapter Three studies Huyghe?s portrayal of C?zanne as the embodiment of 
the most distinctive features of France?s racial stock. His text illustrates the 
nationalist character of France?s ?universal? Humanism, and reveals the close 
dependence between art and nation, both considered as North Atlantic universals. The 
chapter also examines the debate between Henri Focillon and Joseph Strzygowski 
regarding the epistemological foundations of art history, and the innovative use of 
documentation by Huyghe, who not only included site photographs in one of his 
shows but also had them published in L? Amour de l?art. Lastly, it looks into Barr?s 
redefinition of modern art, as its success dated all previous interpretations of modern 
art based on mere contemporaneity.      
Chapter Four analyzes Rewald?s biography of C?zanne as the modern epitome 
of the genre. The title of his 1936 book was C?zanne et Zola, and, even after many 
revisions, the artist?s relationship with the writer remained at the heart of Rewald?s 
45
narrative. This biography illustrates how artist novels, a literary sub-genre developed 
by French men of letters in the nineteenth century, influenced art historical writings 
on the artist. Like many others modernist art historians, Rewald focused on the deeds 
of great men and claimed to be ?objective? and to base his narration on truthful 
documentation. This chapter scrutinizes the epistemological value of the resources he 
compiled for the study of C?zanne, and how their application affected the 
understanding of his art.  
Section II. C?zanne and Perspective. Site Photographs as Images that 
comment on Images: This section demonstrates that Panofsky?s neo-Kantian 
conception of space as symbolic form indirectly, but indelibly, influenced the way 
C?zanne?s art was seen and thought of, and examines the development of a particular 
comprehension of vision and space as North Atlantic universals.  
As James Elkins has effectively argued, Panofsky?s Perspective as Symbolic 
Form reinterpreted the textual and visual sources of the Renaissance according to the 
neo-Kantian philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and projected onto the past a modern 
perception of space as empty volume.
73
 Panofsky?s text established space as a 
fundamental category for the analysis of works of art, and perspective as the symbolic 
form that characterizes and defines the Western tradition. As a consequence, in the 
1930s, C?zanne?s art came to be construed as a new approach to the old problem of 
how to suggest depth in painting. In this way, his work was presented as the product 
of the constant dialogue of the artists with the tradition inherited from the 
Renaissance. Panofsky?s characterization of perspective as a symbolic form hinges on 
the idea of space as the result of human perceptual activity, allowing modern art 
 
73
 James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 
46
history to delve into the most intimate aspects of C?zanne as human being: his mode 
of perception, the emotions that affected it, and the way he conceived of his being-in-
the-World.    
Elkins?s careful analysis of the history of perspective and of Panofsky?s 1927 
treatise concludes that the German scholar redefined the old technical device 
according to contemporary ideas about space and perception going so far as to invent 
an antecedent for it in Antiquity. According to the theoretical parameters established 
above, perspective qualifies as a North Atlantic universal. A thriving discipline in the 
past, the study of perspective today involves the command of many different and 
highly specialized areas of knowledge that are beyond the expertise of any art 
historian. Because perspective is purportedly supported by the hard sciences, the 
physiology and the psychology of perception, and philosophy, it occupies an almost 
mythical place in the discipline. In turn, perspective has spawned and has served to 
support other die-hard myths that are counterintuitive even to bring up as subject 
matters.  
Chapter Five examines the effect of site photographs on the study of 
C?zanne?s landscapes, specifically addressing photography as an invention that 
reflects Western ideas about vision and space. Chapter Six explores the history of 
perspective in the nineteenth century to propose a context for interpreting key 
passages of some of C?zanne?s letters. It also suggests a new way of approaching his 
paintings based on the hypothesis that the artist and his contemporaries did not think 
of space as an empty volume that surrounds objects. Finally, Chapter Seven studies 
the impact of modern art history?s discourse on space as it applied to C?zanne. This 
47
discourse enabled Barr to present the artist as the direct antecedent of analytic 
cubism. As a consequence, Cubism and Abstract Art consecrated C?zanne?s status as 
the father of modern art.  
 
48
The compelling visuality of the work of art resists appropriation by either the cleverness of 
historical explanations or the eloquence of descriptive language. Something remains; something gets 
left over... [T]he discipline is constitutionally fated to suffer from a quiet melancholic malaise. The 
distance between present and past, the gap between words and images, can never be closed. 
Michael Ann Holly, ?Mourning and Method.?
1
When we try to understand it as a document [of the artist life] or of the civilization ? or of a peculiar 
religious attitude, we deal with the work of art as a symptom of something else which expresses itself 
in a countless variety of other symptoms, and we interpret its compositional and iconographical 
features as more particularized evidence of this ?something else.? 
Erwin Panofsky, ?Introduction,? Studies in Iconology.
2
Section One
On April 30, 1896 C?zanne wrote to Gasquet, 
 
[J]e maudis les Geffroy et les quelques dr?les qui, pour faire un article de 
cinquante francs, ont attir? l?attention du public sur moi. Toute ma vie, j?ai 
travaill? pour arriver ? gagner ma vie, mais je croyais qu?on pouvait faire de la 
peinture bien faite sans attirer l?attention sur son existence priv?e. Certes, un 
artiste d?sire s??lever intellectuellement le plus possible, mais l?homme doit 
rester obscur.
3
C?zanne distinguishes the man from the artist and believes that the second is 
different from, or should not be confounded with, the first. In 1937, when working on 
the edition of the artist?s correspondence?the source of this quotation?Rewald had 
to come to terms with this letter and justify his work in the name of a superior right or 
need: that of knowing the man behind the works of art in order to better interpret 
 
1
?Mourning and Method,? in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History, eds. Claire 
Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 158?159. 
2
Studies in Iconology, Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, (New York, 1939), 82.  
3
John Rewald Paul C?zanne?Correspondence (Paris: Grasset, 1978), 249. The art critic Gustave 
Geffroy (1855?1926) wrote a flattering article on the artist in Le Journal in 1894 where he did not 
reveal much of C?zanne?s personality. In 1895 the artist conceived the idea of painting Geffroy?s 
portrait, which he carried on. After Second World War Rewald analyzed the relationship of the two 
men and observed that the art critic?s political ideas and his friendship with the radical politician 
Georges Clemenceau (1841?1929) might have sparked C?zanne?s harsh comment. Clemenceau was at 
the time the owner of the newspaper L?Aurore where Zola would publish J?accuse in 1898. See John 
Rewald C?zanne, Geffroy et Gasquet, suivi de Souvenirs sur C?zanne de Louis Aurenche et de lettres 
in?dites (Paris: Quatre Chemins, Editart, 1959), 18?23. 
49
them. His methodology focused on the compilation of the documentation that would 
allow writing a truthful biography.
4
C?zanne, on the contrary, felt that his paintings 
were the result of his intellectual work and efforts, and seems to have felt that, as 
such, they should not be seen as the product of his personality.    
In a letter to Denis dated January 12, 1939, in which Rewald tries to convince 
the painter to lend him his letters from Gauguin for publication, the scholar dismissed 
C?zanne?s desire to keep his private life out of the reach of interpreters with the 
argument that the artist would have burnt many of the paintings that today make 
?notre bonheur parce que nous retrouvons son g?nie dans la moindre de ses 
esquisses,? and he adds, 
[J]e suis toujours persuad? qu?on ne peut pas s?parer l?homme de l?artiste, sa vie 
de son art. 
Les documents qui nous montrent l?homme, m?me sans se rapporter 
directement ? son art, sont une introduction parfois indispensable ? son ?uvre.
5
Whereas C?zanne distances the man from the artist, Rewald contends that 
they are fused and that understanding of the life of the artist provides access (?une 
introduction?) to his art. Most contemporaneous art historians?especially those 
influenced by psychoanalysis?would say that the artist (body and mind) has left 
traces in the paintings and that his oeuvre reflects his whole being.  
There are many possible ways of understanding C?zanne?s comment. The 
paragraph belongs to a letter in which the artist was justifying himself for having lied 
about his whereabouts and, hence, is part of a strategy to gain Gasquet?s sympathy. 
 
4
This will be analyzed in chapter 4. See John Rewald ?Introduction? to Paul C?zanne?
Correspondence (Paris: Grasset, 1937).  
5
Letter from John Rewald to Maurice Denis, Ms. 9314  1/4,  2?3, Archives Mus?e D?partemental 
Maurice Denis, La Prieur?, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines, Ile-de-France. 
50
Furthermore, it exemplifies C?zanne?s propensity to criticize his earlier acquaintances 
in order to strengthen his relationship with a closer or newer friend. But it is also an 
example of an artist reacting against what he considers an invasive interpretation of 
his art. Notwithstanding its real meaning, the fact is that what C?zanne said was then 
a viable argument. Furthermore, Rewald?s letter proves that Denis shared C?zanne?s 
ideas, since he sought to protect Gauguin?s artistic reputation by hiding letters that 
revealed Gauguin to be less than an exemplary man. In the 1930s, art historians had 
different ideas about this issue: of the three art historians studied in this Section, only 
Rewald?s scholarship was so focused on artists? biographies. He paved the way for 
modern art history and for a new era in C?zanne studies.
6
C?zanne knew the art system of his day and his art was an answer to it, but, as 
the letter to Gasquet indicates, this relationship is not easy to interpret. In 1864 
Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) was appointed professor of Art History and Aesthetics 
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. This was an important milestone in the 
institutionalization and professionalization of French art history. The Proven?al artist 
might have been influenced by Taine?s theories on art and perception. Yet the artist 
was highly critical of the establishment and rebelled against the tradition inherited 
from his forefathers, especially in his youth. The problem for art historians is how to 
gauge this ?originality,? the ?exclusiveness? and ?uniqueness? of his experience.   
6
Huyghe also supported this approach in his curatorial work but not in his scholarship. See below. The 
Austrian art historian Fritz Novotny specifically challenged the possibility of writing a biography of 
C?zanne and its value for the interpretation of the master?s art. In 1932 he wrote ?Das Problem des 
Menschen C?zanne im Verh?ltnis zu seiner Kunst,? Zeitschrift f?r Aesthetik und allgemeine 
Kunstwissenschaft 26 (1932): 268?298, which is a critique of Gasquet?s biography on C?zanne and not 
an art historical book. Novotny?s scholarship is a particular case and is briefly analyzed in Chapter 
Five. Rewald was acquainted with his work as Novotny?s magnum opus C?zanne und das Ende der 
wissenschaftliche Perspektive (Vienna: Phaidon-Verlag, 1938) is based on the site photographs Rewald 
and L?o Marschutz provided to him. The Rewald Papers at the National Gallery of Art, Washington 
D.C., Gallery archives, posses several letters between Rewald and Novotny from this decade.  
51
C?zanne was certainly no advocate of Geffroy?s personality-driven art 
criticism. But at the end of the 1930s, biography as a necessary component to the 
understanding of an artist?s oeuvre had become established methodology for modern 
art history. Art historical discourse runs parallel to artists? art and opinions about art 
and has its own definitions, categories, conventions, and teleological aims. The 
individual artist and his works are particular instances, episodes that the art historian 
evaluates from his or her standpoint in order to incorporate them within art history?s 
general epistemological model. When reading art historical elucidations of the 
meaning of works of art, the question is: Are those meanings in the paintings or are 
they suggested by the text? Who conceived them, the artist or the art historian?
7
Rewald?s letter identifies the artist as the source of art and the art historian as the 
provider of intellectual context and true meaning. W.J.T. Mitchell has observed that 
the command of the word over the image, of the author of words over the 
manufacturer of images, has an almost mythical ascendancy,  
There is an ancient tradition ... which argues that language is the essential human 
attribute: man is the speaking animal. The image is the medium of the subhuman, 
the savage, the dumb animal, the child, the woman, the masses. These 
associations are all too familiar, as is the disturbing counter tradition that man is 
created in the image of his maker. One basic argument of Iconology was that the 
very name of this science of images bears the scars of an ancient division and a 
fundamental paradox that cannot be erased from its workings. 
8
Iconology is the name Panofsky gave to his interpretative methodology, 
although Mitchell gives a much broader definition to the word as he refers it to icono-
7
In this sense art historical writings work as Derridean supplements that are outside works of art but 
determine what is inside them as interpretations. The implication is that the work of art itself is not 
self-sufficient.  
8
W.J.T. Mitchell Picture Theory Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: Chicago 
University Press, 1995), 24. 
52
logos: icon/image plus logos, that in the context of this study serves to summarize the 
different occurrences of the word as comment, criticism, history, and theory since the 
Renaissance. A 1910 text by Fry offers an extreme example of this relationship. 
When writing about an exhibition of the ?art? of the Bushmen he argues that,  
[I]t is curious that people who produced such great artists did not produce also a 
culture in our sense of the word. This shows that two things are necessary to 
produce the cultures which distinguish civilized peoples. There must be, of 
course, the civilized artist, but there must also be the power of conscious critical 
appreciation and comparison. (Emphasis added)  
The author ends up judging the culture and the quality of men on the basis of their 
behavior towards cultural objects that the West was then starting to see as art. Great 
artistic creativity and aesthetic sensitivity are not enough. Art needs an art world, a 
critical apparatus,    
[I]t is for want of a conscious critical sense and the intellectual powers of 
comparison and classification that the negro has failed to create one of the great 
cultures of the world, and not from any lack of the creative aesthetic impulse, nor 
from any lack of the most exquisite sensibility and finest taste.
9
According to Fry then, there can be art even when there is not culture, which means 
that artistic creation does not entail intellect, intelligence, reason. His observation, 
pervaded by the colonialist mind-set of the period, provides a broader context for 
Mitchell?s argumentation.  
The Western definition of art (as Plastic arts or Beaux-Arts) is inherently 
associated with, and even dependent from, the word and in this dissertation is 
 
9
Roger Fry, Vision and Design The original article was published in 1910 in The Burlington Magazine 
and it is thus contemporaneous to the Post-impressionist show the author organized that year in 
London. Both quotations are in Marianna Torgovnic, ?Making Primitive Art High Art,? Poetics Today 
(Summer, 1989), 216 and 218. For an interesting contextualization of this article, other than 
Torgovnic?s Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
1990), see Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, ?Bushmen and Blackface: Bloomsbury and ?Race?,? South 
Carolina Review 38 (2006): 46?64. 
53
considered a North Atlantic universal. This allows circumventing the long discussion 
about the existence of art outside the West without inferring that the problem has 
been solved or does not exit. Furthermore, it suggests that there might have been in 
the past or outside the area of influence of the West other interpretations or ways of 
understanding art that the contemporary definition cannot even contain as 
potentialities.
10
 
The First Section of the dissertation examines modern art history as the last 
episode in this centuries old association of Western art with the word. To think of art 
as a North Atlantic universal and art history as a discipline that both creates and 
studies a certain field of knowledge highlights the fact that C?zanne?s art was alien to 
Rewald?s art history and permits us to include the history of art history as part of the 
field under analysis.  
Iconology as defined by Mitchell, is another manner of referring to art 
history?s paradoxical structure (art and history, synchrony and diachrony), where the 
second term, Logos, controls the first, art. Western Humanism, according to William 
S. Spanos and many other scholars since Heidegger, can be defined as the 
secularization and humanization of the (sacred) Logos,
The humanistic displacement of the theological Logos in favor of the ?logic? of 
Man (whether scientific, or idealistic; Cartesian or Hegelian) does not, ? 
constitute a revolutionary interrogation of the logocentrism in the name of a 
presuppositionless mode of inquiry, but a naturalization of the Word?s 
supernatural status. Making the Logos ?natural??which is to say, ?self-
evident??makes it invisible, an absent presence. That is, it also puts out of sight 
what the Greco?Roman and, especially, Christian cultures merely put out of 
reach of the freeplay of criticism? The ?presuppositionless? problematic (and 
the ?objective? discourse) of humanism thus, in fact, not only bases itself on an 
inviolable ?center elsewhere? but, unlike the problematic (and the objective) 
 
10
 See my ?Southern Perspectives: About the Globalization of Art History,? in James Elkins, Is Art 
History Global? (London: Routledge, 2007), 313.   
54
discourse of the late Greek, Roman, and Medieval Christian cultures, also makes 
this enabling center and the power of informing it difficult, if not finally 
impossible, to engage. Nevertheless, this privileged center .. is not less present in 
humanistic discourse, imposing from the ?end? , ? its repressive power of the 
indissoluble continuum of being , from nature itself to language, consciousness, 
gender, culture, class, law, etc.
11
 
Spanos?s comment endorses the description of Humanism as an important 
North Atlantic universal, and relates it to the ideological role that interpretation and 
meaning have in modern art history. Panofsky?s Humanism is an episode in this long 
history but the institutionalization of modern art history meant the redefinition of 
basic art historical concepts and categories such as art, artist, and even the role of the 
art historian according to idealized Humanist values with evident political undertones, 
precisely at the time when the discipline was gaining true international diffusion and 
global impact. There is no question that art is made by humans. A Humanist art 
history not only implies a certain interpretation of what is a human being (of his   
relationship with God and the world) which does not question and uses as a paradigm 
for the evaluation of individual cases, but also entails the conviction that it is possible 
to know what a human being is.
12
 
In 1938 Panofsky contributed the essay ?The History of Art as a Humanistic 
Discipline? to a book edited by Theodore Meyer Greene, The Meaning of the 
Humanities. Greene was a scholar of Kant at Princeton and a member of a group of 
American intellectuals that shared Panofsky?s mind-set and ideology. His publication 
 
11
 William V. Spanos, ?Boundary 2 and the Polity of Interest: Humanism, the ?Center Elsewhere,? and 
Power,? Boundary 2 On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism (Spring-
Autumn, 1984), 177.  
12
 Feminist art historians have demonstrated that the operative prototype for the artist is the male, 
white, Western man. See Griselda Pollock Vision and Difference: Feminity, Feminism and the 
Histories of Art, (London: Roudledge, 1988.) Nevertheless, Feminists tend to behave as if they knew 
what a woman is and thus loose from sight the problem of the philosophical definition of Man, which 
is the here debated. The notion that women are equal to men is not universal.  
55
was the product of the group?s collaborative effort to confront Totalitarianism.
13
 In 
the Introduction to the book, which Craig Hugh Smyth has noted reflects the 
discussions between the Greene and Panofsky, Greene states that, 
14
 
the contemporary threat to human values lies in the deliberate activities of certain 
individuals and groups whose ideologies are monopolistic and totalitarian and 
who, in one way or another, have acquired autocratic power in our society. These 
men are so powerful, in turn, because they are motivated by well defined 
immediate objectives and because they have succeeded in arousing in their 
supporters a passionate and uncritical devotion to a ?common? cause. The 
modern scene testifies with tragic eloquence to the immediate effectiveness of 
this anti-humanistic strategy.  
In his attempt to combat this threat to human integrity and worth, the modern 
humanist, like his predecessors in other ages and cultures, is at a grave 
disadvantage.
15
 
Greene politicizes Humanism as he demonizes anti-Humanism by identifying it 
with Totalitarianism?s disregard for the centrality of man in society. The author 
characterizes the modern humanist as the reincarnation of a traditional Western 
figure, the Renaissance scholar, who placed Man at the center of the world and 
society. If in Europe Humanism was Eurocentric and thus, ethnocentric, in the United 
States it was associated with the defense of the values favored by the liberal and 
democratic countries.  
Rewald was a much younger German ?migr? working on a different field. The 
first book he published in the United States?where he arrived in 1941, that is, almost 
ten years after Panofsky?was the prodigiously famous 1946 History of 
 
13
 Craig Hugh Smyth, ?Thoughts on Erwin Panofsky?s First Years in Princeton,? in Meaning in the 
Visual Arts: Views from the Outside. A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892?1968), 
ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995). 
14
 Craig Hugh Smyth, ?Thoughts on Erwin Panofsky?s First Years in Princeton,? in Centennial 
Commemoration. See also the book he edited together with Peter M. Lukehart, The Early Years of Art 
History in the United States Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars (New Jersey: 
Yale University Press, 1993,) especially David Van Zanten ?Formulating Art History at Princeton and the 
?Humanistic Laboratory.? 
15
 Theodore Meyer Greene ed., The Meaning of the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
1938), xiv?xv. 
56
Impressionism, a publication sponsored by MoMA. In 1948, when his book on 
C?zanne was translated into English, he commented that the two books were the 
result of the same methodology, i.e. a biographical approach based on faithful 
documentation. Kermit Champa has noted the relationship with Panfosky?s 
iconology. 
Had Rewald?s History [of Impressionism] appeared at a different moment in the 
developing historiography or art-historical writing generally, its effect would 
likely have been very different. ... Rewald?s book entered art-historical discourse 
at the very point when iconology as practiced most impressively by Erwin 
Panofsky was taking center stage, replacing a sort of ill-defined formalism?.The 
traditional ?humanist? underpinnings of iconology privileged reading over 
looking, and, of course, reading as an activity is substantially assisted by the 
presence of things to read?in other words, texts. What Rewald supplied was 
access to texts aplenty, and as a result the scholarly discourse on the history of 
impressionism became a progressively iconological one. 
16
 
Rewald?s art history is a modernist tale of great heroic men fighting against the 
incomprehension of the establishment and the crass society of philistines. This stance 
had then political meaning. In the 1930s an ethical political component was added to 
the definition of modern art and therefore to the characterization of the artist. Venturi 
for example observed in 1935 while visiting the United States,  
art must be completely free from every other spiritual activity. Moral trends, 
however important in themselves, should be divorced from art. In the field of 
imagination, speaking, and writing, freedom is necessary to creative art?. where 
there is no freedom one cannot have art, for without freedom the mind is not in a 
state for creative work. 
17
 
The ideological character of such an association four years before the beginning 
of Second World War cannot be missed, especially since in the article Venturi singles 
 
16
 Kermit Champa, Masterpiece Studies. Manet, Zola, Van Gogh & Monet, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania 
University Press, 1994), 55. Champa comments that Venturi was also interested in documenting the 
history of Impressionism but that he had considered this only reference material; see pp. 54?55. This is 
confirmed by this dissertation?s analysis or the work of the Italian art historian. See chapter 2.  
17
 Venturi, ?Lively Interview,? 4. 
57
out Paris and the United States as the only places in which freedom is still possible. 
Venturi, like Greene and Panofsky, assimilated art to a particular political system and 
used his influence as a professional art historian to support his convictions. 
Art historians became engaged intellectuals and the art and artists they studied 
were adapted to fulfill this new function. The model was Zola, C?zanne?s friend. The 
difference was that these were professional art historians and not art critics, and that 
the message was ideological because it was built within the categories and definitions 
they expounded. Presented as the regime that allowed ?freedom? to the artist to create 
and to think, liberal democracy could be promoted without even mentioning a 
specific country or system of government. As Serge Guilbaut and others have amply 
demonstrated this was the same interpretation of art that was used during the Cold 
War.
18
 The goal of the present text is not to criticize the reasons why Humanism and 
freedom were established at the foundations of modern art history, but, rather, the fact 
that they are still integral to its basic presuppositions while the political situation that 
justified their inclusion has greatly changed.  
 
The first chapter of this Section briefly sketches distinctive periods of the 
history of art history in order to highlight the changes that took place in the 1930s. 
This chapter is of critical importance for this dissertation. The German methodology 
it examines, exemplified by Panofsky, was decisive for establishing C?zanne as the 
 
18
 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Abstract Expressions, Freedom, and 
the Cold War (Chicago, 1983). See also Eva Cockcroft, ?Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold 
War,? Artforum, XII (June 1974): 39?41;  Shiffra Goldman Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time 
of Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and David Craven, ?Abstract Expressionism and 
Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to ?American? Art,? Oxford Art Journal 14 (1991): 44?66. 
58
quintessential paradigm of modern art. Panofsky put an idealized Renaissance 
Humanism at the center of modern art history. This narrow trajectory for art history 
was definitively institutionalized in the 1930s. This model excluded alternative 
interpretations of critical issues for art history such as perspective and historical 
distance. After the Second World War the United States became a powerful political 
and cultural force which secured the dissemination of Panofksy?s Iconology. 
Although it might seem like a digression, this overview provides a necessary 
foundation to the understanding of the powerful role that modern art history assigned 
to C?zanne within the history of modern art.  
None of the art historians studied in the following three chapters was strictly a 
modern art historian, but the study of their work provides a unique possibility to map 
the currents of thought that were competing to become the hegemonic art historical 
discourse. Venturi conceived art as a superior sphere of being that, when attained, 
disrupted the historical horizon and challenged the cultural outlook of a certain 
period. Moreover, even though his work was based on a serious examination of the 
primary sources, his scholarship hinged on the stylistic analysis of works of art. 
Huyghe believed that art manifested the spirit of nations and that it was the exclusive 
possession of the French ?racial stock,? as the nation?s particular ethnic configuration 
had allowed its artists to manifest universal values. Rewald?s scholarship centers on 
biographical and factual data. In his writings, artistic considerations are secondary to 
the document-based narration of the artist?s life.  
59
Art-historical study makes the works the objects of a science?[but] in all this busy activity do we 
encounter the work itself? 
Martin Heidegger, ?The Origin of the Work of Art,? 1935.
1
Chapter One: Towards a Modern [Humanist] Art History 1929-1939
In 1929 Heidegger and Cassirer debated their opposing interpretations of Kant?s 
Critique of Pure Reason in the town of Davos, famous today for hosting the World 
Economic Forum.
2
Panofsky was a friend and colleague of Cassirer, whose work had 
influenced his scholarship in the 1920s. Three years later, Panofsky wrote a paper in 
which he sketched for the first time the interpretative methodology which established 
his reputation while taking a stand against Heidegger?s approach to Kant. This text, 
which Panofsky called his ?methodological article,? was the basis for the 
?Introduction? to the Studies in Iconology published in 1939, which, after further 
revisions, became the first chapter of Meaning in the Visual Arts, one of the canonical 
texts of modern art history.
3
The issues debated at Davos helped Panofsky to 
elaborate Iconology, as he called his methodology ten years later in the United States.   
In November of 1929, just nine days after the Wall Street crash, MoMA opened 
its doors to the public with the first loan exhibition C?zanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van 
 
1
Quoted in Holly, ?Mourning and Method,? 167.  
2
The 1929 encounter was part of a series of meetings, the ?International University Course,? 
sponsored by the French, German, and Swiss governments to foster the reconciliation between French-
speaking and German-speaking intellectuals. The discussion with the French representatives that year 
was obscured by the much awaited confrontation between the two German thinkers. Heidegger has two 
roles in this dissertation: he is quoted both as a philosopher and theoretician and as a protagonist, that 
is, as one of the voices that opposed the art historical trends that would materialize in modern art 
history at the end of the decade. 
3
David Summers, ?Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline,? in Centennial 
Commemoration.
60
Gogh.
4
MoMA played a significant role in redefining modern art and in its 
interpretation as part of the continuous development of the Western tradition. Barr?s 
1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, a key event in this process, situated 
C?zanne?s art as the bridge that linked nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. 
Additionally, the catalogue is a thinly disguised propagandistic defense of modern art 
as the symbol of the fight for freedom against Fascism (Chapter Seven).  
1939 was decisive for MoMA too, as the year when the museum moved into 
the West 53th Street building designed ad hoc by the American architect Philip L. 
Goodwin.
5
The edifice reflected the spirit of the collections, the new approach to 
display, and the innovative managerial style that characterize it to this day. The date 
thus marks the end of the period of experimentation and institutional organization.
6
1929-1939. These dates bracket a critical moment of transition for the 
institutionalization of art history. Panofsky?s interpretative methodology, Iconology, 
is a variation of the traditional Western association of the image with the word and 
was central to modern art history. MoMA?s redefinition of modern art reinforced this 
new way of understanding art history as the museum rose to pre-eminence during the 
same decade.  
 
4
MoMA?s first loan exhibitions gathered works mostly from American institutions, private collections 
and international art galleries. The first loan from a French museum was for Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon 
[January 31?March 2, 1931] and was widely acknowledged by the press. See the press clippings in the 
Chester Dale Scrapbook, Chester Dale Papers, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Gallery 
Archives.  
5
The significance of 1939 for MoMA is in Jes?s Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Modernity, and in 
Christoph Grunenberg ?The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,? in 
Marcia Pointon, Art Apart. Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America (Manchester: 
Manchester University Press, 1994); Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ?From Faktura to Factography,? 
October 30 (Fall, 1984): 83?118; Douglas Crimp, ?The Art of Exhibition? October 30 (Fall, 1984): 
49?81, Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ?MOMA: Ordeal and Triumph on 53th Street,? Studio 
International 194 (1978): 48?57; John O?Brian, ?MoMA?s Publis Reations, Alfred Barr?s Public and 
Matisse?s American Canonization,? RACAR/ XVII (1991): 18?30. 
6
See the analysis of the building in Grunenberg, ?The Politics of Presentation,? 198?207. 
61
This chapter demonstrates the pronounced German influence on modern art 
history. The three books considered in this dissertation were published in Paris and 
were both contemporary and outside the process of modern art history?s 
institutionalization. This chapter contextualizes Panofsky?s scholarship within the 
history of art history, delineating those aspects of it, both before and after his 
emigration to the United States, which frame the symbolic field for the three other 
authors discussed. The Second Section examines how modern art history impinged on 
the scholarship of C?zanne in the 1930s. 
The History of the History of Art 
In 1951 Paul Kristeller published a two part article in the Journal of the History 
of Ideas titled ?The Modern System of the Arts.?
7
The author contended that the  term 
?Art? with a capital A and in its modern sense, and the related term ?Fine Arts? 
(Beaux Arts) originated in all probability in the eighteenth century, ?when several 
treatises used common principles for the consideration of the subject matter and 
offered a systematization of the different arts.?
8
It took almost forty years for 
historians of philosophy to pursue the line of research opened by Kristeller. In the 
1990s several scholars working on the historical context of the Aufkl?rung validated 
Kristeller?s observation and argued that the change he described was an early 
 
7
Paul Kristeller, ?The Modern System of the Arts. A Study in the History of Aesthetics,? (I and II) in 
Peter Kivy,  Essays on the History of Aesthetics (Rochester, NY.: University of Rochester, 1992). 
8
Kristeller, ?The Modern System,? 4. 
62
symptom of the epistemic transformation that would bring about modernism.
9
The 
new definition of art hastened the overhaul of the system of production and 
promotion of the arts that began in the nineteenth century.  
These studies demonstrate that there had been two major ways of understanding 
art, corresponding to two different art histories that span the Renaissance to 
modernism with the Enlightenment as the transitional period.
10
 According to Stephen 
Melville and Bill Readings, the first system of the arts that began in the Renaissance 
was focused on representation and mimesis and was structured around the notion of 
ut pictura poesis.
11
 Subsequently, Kant?s ?Copernican Turn? in philosophy and his 
?refusal of representation? brought about important changes in art writing as attention 
shifted from the works of art to the spectator?s experience, bringing about the second 
period.  
Aesthetics differs from poetics because it understands art primarily in terms of 
the problems posed by its reception rather than its production. Questions of 
representation and its modalities thus give way to a primary concern with the 
distinctness and uniqueness of the art object. ? The aesthetic account ... takes it 
 
9
Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 
1994); Preben Mortensen, Art in the Social Order, The Making of the Modern Conception of Art (New 
York: State University of New York Press, 1997); Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art. A Cultural 
History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 
10
 It is tempting to use here Michel Foucault?s notion of episteme as the historical a?priori that grounds 
knowledge and represents the condition of its possibility within a particular epoch. See Le mots et les 
choses Arch?ologie des sciences humaines (Paris : Gallimard, 1966). A complementary approach 
considers the effects brought about by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution and 
capitalism in the system of the arts. In this interpretation the market rules the system of the art. The 
groundbreaking work of Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White has proven that the system of 
promotion and consecration of works of art switched from one supported by the academy to the art 
critic/dealer system. Nicholas Green has demonstrated that the main changes started in France around 
1830. See Harrison C. White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the 
French Painting World, (New York: Wiley, 1965); Nicholas Green, ?Dealing in Temperaments: 
Economic Transformation of the Artistic Field in France in the Second Half of the Nineteenth 
Century? Art History 10 (March, 1987): 59?78; and this author?s The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape 
and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth?Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 
1990).  
11
 Jacques Ranci?re considers that there are two different art systems (?r?gimes?), which have different 
structural organization and goals: ?r?gime repr?sentatif? and r?gime esth?tique.? Jacques Ranci?re, 
Malaise dans l?esth?tique (Paris: Editions Galil?e, 2004). 
63
that the term ?art? picks out an experience and an order of value that is irreducible 
to the terms of representation in general. Evaluation, rather than cognition, is the 
activity proper to the reception of the work of art. This means that judgment is an 
ineradicable dimension of art historical activity, that art history is fundamentally 
bound to criticism and has no non-evaluative foundations. This position appears, 
on the one hand, to be at odds with the modern ambition of art history to attain 
the standing of science and, on the other hand, to be the primary marker of art 
history?s autonomy over and against its dissolution into a more general field.
12
 
(Emphasis added) 
 
Art gains a new dimension or function which implies that instead of focusing on the 
stories artists represent in their works (the kind of art history Vasari had fostered), 
spectators must pay attention to the effect produced on them by works of art 
conceived as unique and different from other objects, and evaluate their distinctive 
?artistic? qualities. The new approach to art encompasses two paradoxical 
dimensions: its being both historical and extra-ordinary, unique. Therefore, the art 
history that corresponds to this period has two mandates: one puts an accent on 
history and diachronic series and change, that is, on repetition with variations over 
time; the other emphasizes the distinctiveness of the work of art and the artist?s 
individuality.
 13
 
Hans Robert Jauss has contended that until the eighteenth century art history 
consisted in a multiplicity of ?stories? and biographies which had been modeled after 
classical or mythical examples and without any other connection than chronology.
14
 
In 1764 Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717?1768) in his The History of Ancient 
Art, conceived of Greek Classic art not only as the perfect manifestation of art but 
also as an historical product tied to a certain period, a nation, a people, a climate. 
 
12
 Stephen Melville and Bill Readings eds., Vision and Textuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 
1995), 11?12.  
13
 Preziosi considered this two dimensions in the text quoted in the Introduction to this dissertation.  
14
 Hans?Robert Jauss, Pour une esth?tique de la r?ception (Paris : Gallimard, 1978). 
64
Furthermore, he structured the development of Greek styles and artist?s careers as 
part of a natural cycle featuring beginning, development and decadence. This 
approach to the history of art influenced the founders of history and is one of the 
antecedents of the current of thought called Historicism. According to Catherine 
Soussloff, art history and historicism contain both an ideal model (structure) and the 
notion of becoming (diachronic development),   
From the very beginnings, then, the art historical approach to art contained 
within its compass an ideal model?classical sculpture?for the art object that, 
when inserted in the historical account, justified such an idealist conception of 
art. ...As Winckelmann?s text clearly demonstrates, the linking of art to history 
leads to the ontic status of art. The a priori figuration of the material object only 
matters to art and history inasmuch as it becomes art when inserted in the 
supportive historical narrative. Art theorists of Winckelmann?s time held the 
ideal model for art, antique sculpture to be universal and timeless, while at the 
same time insisting that art could be incorporated into a historical narrative 
based on chronology.
From the High Renaissance, Greek sculpture ... had served as the standard for 
visual progress. ? With Winckelmann, Greek sculpture became the material 
embodiment of a concept of historical and visual perfection. 
15
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Historicist art history secures for art an ontic (real) status by bringing together, in 
a narration, objects (said to be works of art) that had been created in different periods 
and places. The discipline demonstrates that art exists as a transcendental entity 
beyond time and space. Paradoxically, the category?s definition was based on the art 
of one period which was considered paradigmatic.
16
 
15
 Catherine Soussloff, ?Historicism? in Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1998), 409. The author, therefore, confirms the analysis of Melville and Readings. 
16
 Some aspects of Historicism and the basic relationship of history with art are considered in Chapter 
Three. In addition to Jauss, J?rn R?sen had extensively worked on the esthetization of history which 
extends Jauss contention that history and art history are codependent. He quotes Ranke?s dictum: 
?history is distinguished from all other sciences in that it is also an art. History is a science in 
collecting, finding, penetrating; it is an art because it recreates and portrays that which it has found and 
recognized. Other sciences are satisfied simply with recording what has been found; history requires 
the ability to recreate.? Leopold Ranke ?On the character of Historical Science, (A Manuscript from 
1830),? in J?rn R?sen, ?Rethoric and Aesthetics of History: Leopold von Ranke,? History and Theory 
65
A specific historical period of the history of art determines the evaluative moment 
of art history described by Melville and Readings. The Enlightenment also imposed 
the idea that art manifests the ?spirit of the people,? which became predominant in the 
nineteenth century. The conception of art as national weakened but did not debunk 
classic art from its place of privilege in the system.
17
 After mid-century, an idealized 
account of the Renaissance replaced Winckelmann?s Greece both as subject matter 
and as paradigm. The transition was easy as this period?which Trouillot defined as 
the ?geography of the Imagination? of the North Atlantic world?had purposefully 
envisioned the restoration of Antiquity?s art and culture. The cultural and ethic values 
of Renaissance Humanism were at the foundations of Bildung, the German approach 
to education that ensured character formation and moral edification through the 
reading and interpretation of classic texts.  
The art history that resulted from the Enlightenment was a German discipline, as 
it first emerged there as a profession. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did 
the founders of art history create the set of principles and categories that allowed it to 
detach itself from other branches of learning.
18
 This was the preamble for the 
definitive institutionalization of modern art history as an international academic field 
in the 1930s.  
Nineteenth-century art history was ?national art history,? and although the 
professionals of each country strove to keep an objective stance and to develop 
 
29 (May, 1990): 190?204. Catherine Soussloff has considered the problem from the point of view of 
art history. See n. 15  
17
 For the most recent approach to this subject matter see the issue of the Revue de l?Art devoted to the 
history of art history, particularly Schlink ?Enseignement ou illumination??; and Griener, ?Id?ologie 
?nationale? ou science ?positive???    
18
 See Michael Podro, The Critical Art Historians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), Udo 
Kulterman, The History of Art History (New York?: Abaris Books, 1993,) and Joan Hart, Roland 
Recht and Martin Warnke, Relire W?lfflin  (Paris : Ecole nationale superieure des beaux?arts, 1995). 
66
scientific methodologies, it unabashedly reflected the particular conception of nation, 
culture and education of the country in which it was practiced. Daniel Adler, for 
example, has established that the category of the malerisch, so important in Heinrich 
W?lfflin?s scholarship, derived from his interest in promoting an intuitive 
comprehension of art that would foster the values that characterized Bildung.
19
 The 
fact that the German professional art historians, like historians, were revered as 
guardians of the tradition and spirit of the nation, explains why their scholarship 
tended to become openly nationalistic.
20
 
Thomas Gaehtgens noted in Germany at the end of the century, a clear division 
between art critics, who dealt with modern art, and art history professors, devoted to 
the examination of the past.
21
 Even if these scholars did not study or write on 
contemporary artistic movements, modern art shaped their perception of the history of 
art. Adolf von Hildebrand (1847?1921) published Das Problem der Form in der 
bildenden Kunst 1893 (?The problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture?), a book 
that opposes the basic principles of impressionism and that influenced most of the 
German art historians of the turn-of-the-century. W?lfflin, in his 1915 Principles of 
Art History, for example, associated the baroque with impressionism and, according 
to Martin Warnke in 1910 projected a book dealing with the reaction against this 
artistic movement.
22
 
19
 Daniel Adler, ?Painterly Politics: W?lfflin, Formalism and German Academic Culture, 1885?1915,? 
Art History 27 (2004): 431?456. 
20
 In his 1931 Die Kunst der Renaissance; Italien und das deutsche Formgefuhl, W?lfflin applied the 
methodology he had used in his 1915 Principles of Art History to characterize two different period 
styles (baroque and classic), to highlight the differences in the art of two racially distinct nations. See 
Joan Hart, Recht, Warnke, Relire W?lfflin. The problem will be briefly addressed in Chapter Three. 
21
 Thomas W. Gaehtgens, ?Les Rapports de l?histoire de l?art et de l?art contemporain en Allemagne ? 
l??poque de W?lfflin et de Meier?Graefe,? Revue de l?art  88 (1990): 31?38. 
22
 See Warnke, Relire W?lfflin, 106. 
67
At the end of the century, the art historians who constituted the School of Vienna, 
strove to remove the Renaissance and Humanism from the place they occupied at the 
center of the discipline as their scholarship aspired to address the difficult reality of 
the multiethnic Hapsburg empire, which included regions from the outermost limits 
of Europe.
23
 They were well aware of the latest developments in modern French and 
Austrian art, which, in general, they appreciated. Riegl, Fritz Wickhoff (1853?1909) 
and other important members of the School of Vienna made abundant use of notions 
derived from their scrutiny of modern art in order to draw attention to non-classical 
periods of art history. These scholars? experimental formalism allowed them to 
examine those styles without using classic art and the Renaissance as paradigms. As a 
result, they were able to understand modern art as a reaction against that tradition.
 
Wickhoff, for example, projected his taste for impressionism in his stylistic analysis 
of the Vienna Genesis. Riegl applied the notion of opticality to advance his defense of 
Late Roman and early Christian art,
24
 whereas Max Dvoh?k in 1905?06 considered 
Tintoretto?s and Titian?s art as impressionist (especially their late periods), and El 
Greco as an expressionist artist.
25
 
23
 See Margaret Iversen ?Style as Structure: Alois Riegl?s Historiography,? Art History 3 (March, 
1979): 62?71; Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).  Lately, 
Christopher Wood has edited The Vienna School Reader. Politics and Art Historical Method in the 
1930s, (New York: Verso, 2000). His thoughtful ?Introduction? has provided material for much of 
what it follows. In 1936 Meyer Schapiro had already published ?The New School of Vienna? The Art 
Bulletin 17 (1936): 258?266. 
24
 On Wickhoff see Michael Ann Holly ?Spirits and Ghosts in the Historiography of Art,? in The 
Subjects of Art History Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, eds. Mark Cheetham, 
Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).  
See also Matthew Rampley, ?Max Dvoh?k: Art History and the Crisis of Modernity,? Art History 26 
(2003): 214?137, and Jaj Elsner, ?The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,? Art 
History 25 (June 2002): 358?379. 
25
 Matthew Rampley observes that ?[m]ore generally, too, the idea that mannerism and the baroque 
stood at the origins of modern ?impressionistic? art had become a commonplace at the turn of the 
century, Wickhoff and Riegl had drawn the connection while, most notably, the Secessionist exhibition 
of 1903 on The Development of Impressionism in Painting and Sculpture included the work not only of 
68
As Christopher Wood notes, 
In German and Austrian universities, the interpretation of the Renaissance, and 
more generally the destiny of the classical heritage in the post-antique West, was 
a major historiographical battleground. Admiration for the giants of Italian 
neoclassical painting ... had been a fundamental premise of nineteenth-century 
academic art. By the turn of the century, artist and critics had tired of the burden 
of academic taste. Scholars eventually followed, and the rejection of any 
idealized normative vision of the Italian Renaissance became one of the rallying 
points of progressive continental art history between the World Wars. Within 
academic art history, the anti-heroic version of the Renaissance had its roots in 
the influential writings of the turn-of-the-century Viennese scholar Alois Riegl 
(1858?1905).
26
 
Woods observes that these scholars thought of the Renaissance in a less 
idealized manner as they tended to evaluate it in the light of modern developments in 
art. 
The new historiography relativized the traditional achievements of the Italian 
Renaissance, and at the same time constructed an alternative Renaissance whose 
claim on modern attention, indeed whose claim to stand at the threshold of 
modernity itself, was grounded not in the rebirth of classical art, but in the crisis 
of representation;? The revival of antiquity, meanwhile, ended up looking 
nostalgic, anachronistic, and conservative; and neo-Platonist iconography looked 
like a humanist superstition. 
27
 
The School of Vienna proposed a revision of the epistemological foundations of 
art history and of the philological and historical methodologies that were at the core 
of the humanist approach to the discipline. These art historians balanced out the use 
 
French artists of the previous decades, but also examples of the work of Rubens, Vel?zquez, Vermeer 
and Tintoretto. As Robert Jensen has demonstrated, this was part of a project to legitimize 
contemporary art and hence make it more marketable.? Rampley, ?Max Dvoh?k,? 222. 
26
 Christopher Wood, ?Art History?s Normative Renaissance,? in Allen Grieco, Michael Rocke, 
Fiorella  Gioffredi Superbi,  The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century: Acts of an International 
Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9?11 1999 (Florence: : L.S. Olschki, 2002), 70. 
27
 Wood, ?Normative Renaissance,? 74. Edward Muir has demonstrated that this kind of 
deconstructive approach was late to enter American scholarship, and that the Renaissance still has 
heuristic value in the history of thought and in art history. Edward Muir, ?The Italian Renaissance in 
America,? The American Historical Review 100 (October, 1995):1117. 
69
of written documentation with an exacting formal analysis of the works of art.
28
 This 
method enabled Riegl to avoid establishing race and nation as exclusive factors in the 
development of art, but some of his followers later adapted his critique to Humanism 
(both in Austria and in Germany) to support the National Socialist ideology.  
As Panofsky?s first articles demonstrate, in the 1920s he was well aware of 
Riegl?s scholarship and, like the Viennese art historians, he was pondering the 
foundations of the discipline and basic methodological issues. These texts were 
shaped by the complicated cultural horizon of the Weimar Republic.
29
 From 1921 to 
1933 Panofsky taught at the University of Hamburg and was a member of the 
Warburg Institute, which was associated with that university. There he met 
Cassirer?a neo-Kantian philosopher interested in the epistemological foundations of 
mathematics, natural sciences, aesthetics, the philosophy of history, and the cultural 
sciences?who also taught in both institutions from 1919 to 1933.
30
 In those years 
Cassirer completed his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which 
influenced Panofsky?s scholarship, especially his 1927 Perspective as Symbolic 
Form.
28
 Christopher Wood has written perceptively on the differences between Strukturanalysis and 
structuralism: ?The premise of Strukturalnalyse is that the work of art has violently refigured reality 
and offers not an image of but an alternative to the world, what Sedlmayr called a kleine Welt, a
microcosm. This virtual, fictional presence of the world in the work is in fact what is designated by the 
term ?structure.? Structure is not an objective property of the material artifact but a projection onto it by 
the interpreter, supposedly symmetrical to the projection performed by the original maker of the 
artifact.? Wood, ?Introduction? in The School of Vienna, 43?44. 
29
 Other than the classic book by Michael Ann Holly Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History 
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), see Anna Mary Dempsey, Erwin Panofsky and Walter 
Benjamin: German Jewish Cultural Traditions and the Writing of History in Weimar Germany (Ph.D. 
diss., Columbia University, 1998). 
30
 Cassirer was member of a rich family. Among his cousins were Bruno and Paul Cassirer the famous 
dealers who introduced modern French art in Germany. He had studied philosophy at the Neo?Kantian 
Marburg university.   
70
Panofsky?s neo-Kantian approach to the fundamental problems of the discipline 
became the foundations of modern art history as it was institutionalized after the 
Second World War. As Warnke has commented, after the war iconology became the 
?international style? of art history, and was known and discussed even by those who 
did not apply Panfosky?s methodology.
31
 If Kant?s Third Critique has opened the way 
for the evaluation of the plastic values of the art object and had promoted the interest 
in analyzing its impact on the observer, Panofsky?s neo-Kantian interpretation of the 
First Critique enabled art historians to dig into the process by which the artist as 
human being confronts, perceives, and understands the world in the act of creation of 
works of art. 
 
Panofsky and the Neo-Kantian Turn
Most of the founders of art history attempted to devise systems that combined 
and balanced the two paradoxical forces that are at the foundations of the discipline 
and that, in a certain way, constitute its name: the structural?or synchronic?(art), 
and the diachronic (history.)  Panofsky began his 1920 famous article ?The Concept 
of Artistic Volition?,
32
 where he commented on Riegl?s kunstwollen, addressing this 
issue,  
It is the curse and the blessing of the systematic study of art that it demands that 
the objects of its study must be grasped with necessity and not merely 
historically. A purely historical examination, whether it goes first to content or to 
the history of form, elucidates the phenomenal work of art only by reference to 
 
31
 Quoted in Wood, ?Normative Renaissance,? 86. 
32
 In what follows I use the English translation by Kenneth Northcott and Joel Snyder. Critical Inquiry 
8 (Autumn, 1981), 17?33.  
71
other phenomena, it does not have any higher order of knowledge on which to 
ground itself: to trace back the particular iconographic representation, derive a 
particular formal combination from a typological history, ... is not to fix it in its 
absolute place and meaning  related to an Archimedean point outside its own 
sphere of being, but it is to remain inside the total complex of actual 
interconnected appearances. 
33
 
When works of art are studied as historical occurrences and contextualized 
within the diachronic, horizontal thrust of history, it is difficult to see them as art, that 
is, as objects of a dissimilar quality whose existential authority needs to be addressed 
as such. In the article, Panofsky discusses different methodologies for the study of 
works of art (historical, psychological, grammatical, logical, and transcendental). This 
last, Allister Neher remarks, is the investigation, ?of our judgments about art in order 
to determine their purely artistic content, that is, in order to unearth the category 
equivalents for art that we impose on experience in constituting something as art,? 
which is basically a Kantian project.
34
 This study would provide the ?Archimedean 
point? that would allow for the concentration on the work of art as art (its structure). 
Panofsky?s goal was to establish art history as an independent humanistic 
discipline for which Kant?s analysis of the sublime and the beautiful in his Critique of 
Judgment (Third Critique) was not especially useful. Influenced by Cassirer?s neo-
Kantian outlook, Panofsky applied the critical methodology Kant proposed in his 
Critique of Pure Reason (First Critique), in order to endow art history with 
fundamental principles and a balanced methodology. The fact that the [German] neo-
Kantian interpretation of this particular aspect of Kant?s philosophy shaped the 
foundations of the art history had significant consequences for the field. The second 
 
33
 Panofsky, ?Artistic Volition,? 18. 
34
 Allister Neher, ? ?The Concept of Kustwollen?, Neo?Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky?s Early Art 
Theoretical Essays,? Word & Image 20 (January?March, 2004), 42.  
72
section of this dissertation examines Panofsky?s 1927 Perspective as Symbolic Form 
to reveal how it affected the reception of C?zanne?s art.
35
 
The Critique of Judgment (1790), in which Kant famously switched the attention 
from the work of art to its affect on the observer, completes and stabilizes the theories 
developed in the first two critiques. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) theorizes 
about the possibility and the limits of knowledge without examining its application as 
practical reason in particular cases. According to Kant?s theory of knowledge, man is 
not able to know the ?things in themselves? as he perceives them through the ?forms 
of intuition? (space and time) and a priori concepts (categories), which structure and 
construe them.  The Critique of Practical Reason (1787) is not a critique of pure 
practical reason, but rather a defense of the possibility of having a behavior that 
overcomes the practical reasoning oriented uniquely on desire.
36
 The Third Critique 
deals with judgments in practical cases, when men are actually in touch with reality 
as nature as well as with real works of art. In order to make his whole system work, 
Kant needs these judgments to be of universal value, that is, valid for all human 
beings. This is the text that determined the way art was understood in the nineteenth 
century. 
 
35
 For the influence of neo?Kantianism in art history see Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German 
mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890?1933 (Cambridge, Mass. Mass.: Harvard 
University Press, 1969), 90?91. Ringer?s is the classical account for the development of the humanities 
in Germany in the last part of the nineteenth century. On the influences on W?lfflin see Adler, 
?Painterly Politics,? and Joan Hart, ?Reinterpreting W?lfflin: Neo?Kantians and Hermeneutics,? Art 
Journal 42 (Winter 1982): 292?300. For the influence of Kant?s philosophy in Panofsky?s scholarship 
see Michael Ann Holly, ?Panofsky et la perspective comme forme symbolique,? and Michael Podro, 
?Panofsky: de la Philosophie premi?re au relativisme personnel,? both in Pour un Temps/Erwin 
Panofsky (Paris: Paris, Centre Georges?Pompidou/Pandora, 1983); Didi?Huberman, Devant l?image;
and Podro, The Critical Art Historians. For a new approach to this question see Neher, ? ?The Concept 
of Kustwollen?.? Nevertheless, Kant?s philosophy has suffused the German academic life in such a 
way that there is no simple way of charting its influence in art history.  
36
 For the relationship of the two previous Critiques with The Critique of Judgment see Jacques 
Derrida, La V?rit? en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), and Salim Kemal, Kant and the Fine Arts. 
An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Arts and Culture (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986) 
73
Neo-Kantianism was so entrenched and omnipresent in the German academic 
environment after the 1880s that it has proven difficult to characterize and study.
37
 
Cassirer belonged to the Marburg School. As the historian of philosophy Alan Kin 
explains,  
For the Marburg School, Kant's great idea ... is the transcendental method 
?.[which] anchors philosophy in facts (eminently the fact of mathematical 
physics), of which philosophy is to establish the conditions of possibility or 
justification (Rechtsgrund). By limiting itself to this task of justification, 
philosophical reason keeps itself from ascending into the aether of speculation. 
At the same time, by discovering the source of scientific objectivity (and thus of 
rational objectivity generally), i.e., by ?clearly exhibiting the law [of objectivity] 
in its purity,? philosophy ?secures science [and rational activity generally] in its 
autonomy and preserves it from alien distraction.? Transcendental philosophy in 
the Kantian spirit, then, is doubly ?critical,? checking itself against metaphysical 
excesses, on the one hand, but also rigorously formulating the ideal grounds of 
the sciences, on the other.
38
 
Therefore, Cassirer?s philosophy focused on Kant?s theory of knowledge (that is, the 
First Critique) buttressed by the information provided by the sciences and the 
disciplines involved in the study of the cognitive process. This is where his project 
intersects Panofsky?s, who wanted to formulate principles for art history that operated 
like Kant?s forms of intuition and categories in the appreciation of works of art: ?Art 
history should search for the ?standards of determination which, with the force of a
priori basic principles, refer not to the phenomenon itself but to the conditions of its 
existence and its being ?thus?.?
39
 Neo-Kantianism, by allying Kant?s epistemology 
with the scientific understanding of the problem of knowledge, proposed a manner of 
 
37
 Klaus Christian K?hnke, The Rise of Neo?Kantianism German Academic Philosophy between 
Idealism and Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Introduction. Although the 
book considers the period that precedes Cassirer it demonstrates the widespread and multifarious 
shapes in which Kant affected the German approach both to sciences and to philosophy. 
38
Alan Kim, ?Paul Natorp,? Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 
 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natorp/#1.
39
 Erwin Panofsky ?Der Begriff des Kunstwollens? quoted in  Neher, ? ? The Concept of Kustwollen,? 
? 42, 
74
comprehending humanity?s relationship with the world and culture.
40
 This new 
philosophical and ?scientific? premise reinforced the notion that art history?s 
methodologies had been discovered instead of construed, and that, like mathematic 
formulas, they might be applied to the examination of the visual products of all 
periods and cultures.
41
 
This is reflected in the 1939 article with which Panofsky began his career in 
America. Wood notices that,     
The art historian could improve on the mere stylistic and thematic analysis of the 
work by applying what Panofsky called ?synthetic intuition? or ?familiarity with 
the essential tendencies of human mind?; and then by tempering this intuition 
with ?insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, 
essential tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and 
concepts.??  
 
This scholar adds, 
 
Form and content were finally and definitively brought into coordination, with 
the help of philological scholarship, only in the fifteenth and early sixteenth 
century in Italy. This reintegration, Panofsky concluded somewhat obscurely, ?is 
not only a humanistic but also a human occurrence.? 
42
 
Panofsky believed that the Renaissance had attained (and one-point perspective 
expressed) a balanced relationship between the object and subject, the mind and 
external reality, and thus he shaped his interpretative system according to an idealized 
understanding of Humanism. In his methodology, the Renaissance and Humanism 
 
40
 K?hnke comments that ?in the fourth volume of his History of the Problem of Knowledge, which 
comprises the era from the death of Hegel to the present (1932), Ernst Cassirer, as though as a matter 
of course, discusses the development of philosophy within an exposition of the scientific?theoretical 
problems of different groups of individual sciences and, in doing so, is able to start from an inseparable 
unity of philosophy and science??  Rise of Neo?Kantianism, 4. 
41
 Several of the authors quoted in this dissertation make this point. The classic analysis is by Michael 
Foucault. See for example his replay of his acute analysis of Nietzsche?s thought in ?Truth and Judicial 
Forms? (1974), in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954?1984: Volume Three (New York: The 
New Press, 2000). 
42
 Wood, ?Normative Renaissance,? 79; 80?81. 
75
were not only the preferred objects of study, but also epistemological models. As 
such, they became standards against which other world views, periods, and styles had 
to be compared.  In Neher?s words, 
What Panofsky is suggesting is that we see in Renaissance art an analogy to 
Kantian epistemology, in that both assign equal significance to the subject and 
the object in the act of apprehension. ? 
?One could even compare the function of perspective,? Panofsky continues, 
?with that of critical philosophy.? Perspective can be compared to Kantianism 
because ?it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, 
as an extension of the domain of the self.? 
43
 
A vague definition of Humanism was conflated with an idealized modern model 
of Renaissance Humanism and established at the foundations of art history. Panofsky 
equates the historical ?scientific perspective? with Kant?s forms of intuition and a
priori categories. What originally was a technical device became the symbol of 
balance, mental order and [human] Kosmos. The Renaissance became the period that 
discovered an epistemological model that reflects the world order, and applied it to 
the creation of art. Panofsky?s analysis implies that the art historian has a scientific or 
philosophical comprehension of what are man and the world that substantiates his 
assessment. Perspective was established by Panofsky as a paradigm and a symbol. In 
this dissertation, it is perceived as a North Atlantic universal.  
 
1929 to 1939: From Davos  to America 
In 1932, one year before being dismissed from his post at the University of 
Hamburg, Panofsky published ?Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung 
 
43
 Neher, ? ?The Concept of Kustwollen,?? 47. 
76
von Werken der bildenden Kunst? (?Concerning the Problem of Description and 
Interpretation of Meaning in Works of Art?) in Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift f?r 
Philosophie der Kultur.
44
 The text grew out of a paper he had delivered at a 
conference organized by a society of Kantian studies in Kiel, which had invited him 
to reflect upon about the necessary principles for the methodology of art history. In 
this article Panofsky sketched for the first time the system of three interrelated and 
internally consistent levels of interpretation for the study of works of art, which in 
1939 he named Iconology.
45
 The text reflects Panofsky?s reaction to the Davos 
encounter of 1929, where Cassirer and Heidegger presented their conflicting 
understandings of Kant?s Critique of Pure Reason.
46
 Kant?s interpretation of the 
?Man? was at the center of the agenda. Heidegger was quite clear when he stated in 
his first presentation,  
I would like ? to place our entire discussion within the meaning?context of 
Kant?s Critique of Pure Reason, and to focus again on the central question: 
?What is man?? Such a question ought not to be asked merely as an 
anthropological one. Instead, one ought to show that man, being the creature 
which is transcendent, i.e., open to being as a whole and to himself, is placed, by 
virtue of this eccentricity, into the whole of being as such.
47
 
44
 This Journal, launched in 1910?11, was, until 1935, identified with neo?Kantianism. Among the 
members of the advisory board were Edmond Husserl, Friedrich Meineke, Heinrich Rickert, Georg 
Simmel, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, and Heinrich W?lfflin. In the first issue, the editors stated their 
intention of constructing a new systembildung which would encompass all humanistic fields of study. 
See Adler, ?Painterly Politics.? In this analysis I will use the French translation of the article directed 
by Guy Ballang? published in Erwin Panofsky, La perspective comme forme symbolique et autres 
essays (Paris: Minuit, 1975), which I checked with the original.   
45
 The authors who have analyzed this text are David Summers, ?Meaning in the Visual Arts as a 
Humanistic Discipline? in Centennial Commemoration, and Didi?Huberman, Devant l?image. 
46
 This explains the mention of Heidegger in the paragraph by Stephen Melville quoted above, n. 28.  
The exchange between Cassirer and Heidegger had started before 1929 as each philosopher had 
reviewed the other?s writings. The bibliography concerning this encounter is quite extensive. See, 
Michael A Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Peru, Ill.: Open Court 
Publishing Company, 2000), and Denis A Lynch, ?Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger: The Davos 
Debate,? Kant?Studien Philosophische Zeischift der Kant?Gesellschaft (1990): 360?370. 
47
 Carl H., Hamburg, ?Discussion A Cassirer?Heidegger Seminar,? Philosophy and Phenomenological 
Research  25 (1964?1965): 220. 
77
In the context of this study, Heidegger?s opening paragraph contains all that is 
relevant to this essay of this complicated discussion. Cassirer thought that it was 
possible to grasp the inner workings of human perception and even to characterize 
periods in the development of people?s perceptual/mental apparatus. Heidegger, on 
the contrary, warned that this kind of analysis was based on false certainties.
48
 He 
considered ?Man? as an ?eccentricity? of Being and thought that philosophy should 
concentrate on answering the question: What is ?Man?? 
49
 
Heidegger explicitly opposed Cassirer?s approach to Kant and philosophy and, 
on the whole, to what he referred to as Anthropological philosophy. Ten years later in 
the article ?The Question Concerning Technology,? he defined this philosophical 
trend as ?that interpretation of man that already knows fundamentally what man is 
and hence can never ask who he may be. For with this question it would have to 
confess itself shaken and overcome.?
50
 This was a basic aspect of Heidegger?s 
critique of the West, which?he argued?behaves as if the question had been 
answered. He observed that scientific and Humanistic disciplines devoted themselves 
to research and experimentation to foster ?knowledge,? but were unable to question 
their own foundations. As Trouillot would remark later, Anthropology, even 
anthropological philosophy, creates its subject of study, in this case, ?Man.? 
Heidegger contended that the Western conception of human being determined 
a certain world view (here as the way the world is seeing.) ?Man? as subject confronts 
 
48
 Even though Trouillot does not list Heidegger among his sources, it is evident that his position is 
related with the scholarship derived from the philosopher?s deconstruction of the history of the West as 
it influenced, among many others, Foucault? thought. See John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The 
Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 
49
 It is not that the human being is not at the center of Heidegger?s endeavors; it is, but it is in a 
different way, as part of the more general Being, thrown onto the ?World? and disoriented.    
50
 Martin Heidegger, ?The Age of the World Picture,? in The Question Concerning Technology and 
Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1982), 153.  
78
the world as object; in other words, the world is the object of perception and 
knowledge for a person who conceives himself as a subject. 
[T]he more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man?s 
disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object  appears, all the more 
subjectively i.e. the more importunately, does the subiectum rise up, and all the 
more impetuously, too do observation of and teaching about the world change 
into a doctrine of man, into anthropology. It is no wonder that humanism first 
arises where the world becomes picture.? Humanism, therefore in the more 
strict historiographical sense, is nothing but a moral-aesthetic anthropology. The 
name ?anthropology? as used here does not mean just some investigation of man 
by a natural science. Nor does it mean the doctrine established within Christian 
theology of man?. It designates that philosophical interpretation of man which 
explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and 
in relation to man.
51
 (Emphasis added) 
 
?Man? conquers the world, which becomes the scenario for his actions; man?s 
attention is directed towards objects/world and, therefore he, the subject, becomes an 
object. Humanism puts this ?Man? at the center of a world that has been transformed 
into a set of images. These are fundamental issues for art history, a discipline that is a 
Humanity, and deals with objects (generally images) that are thought to reflect or 
contain the highest and deepest feelings, sensations and thoughts of their human 
creators.
52
 The Davos encounter and Panofsky?s 1932 article demonstrate that this 
doubt existed, that non-Humanist world views were being discussed, that the 
consolidation of the influence of Humanism in art and art history occurred after this 
period. This opens the door to think that, in the end, the second part of the twentieth 
century might have been much more Humanist than the end of the nineteenth ever 
was.   
 
51
 Heidegger, ?Age Picture,? 133. 
52
 See Donald Preziosi?s interesting analysis of this problem for the understanding on cave art in 
Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 
chapter V.  
79
Shortly after the Davos encounter, Heidegger became a supporter of the Nazi 
party, but in 1929 his relationship with Cassirer, who was Jewish, seems to have been 
highly cordial.
53
 His work, for obvious reasons, was largely banished from American 
academia but today, like the epigraph to the Section indicates, it haunts art historians 
who are looking for alternatives premises for the discipline.
54
 In the context of the 
present inquiry, Heidegger?s refutation of Humanism, Anthropological Philosophy, 
and his radical approach to art and interpretation are the extreme manifestations of 
fundamental critiques of the West that were shared by scholars of different cultural 
backgrounds and political agendas.
55
 By contextualizing those alternative voices, the 
art of the end of the nineteenth century may be considered outside of modern art 
history?s influences. The presentations at Davos indicate that, metaphorically, in 1932 
Panofsky was like Hercules at a crossroads, he had to decide between two paths: 
 
53
 Heidegger?s involvement with the Nazi Party in 1933 has been amply debated and it is still much 
discussed. Michael Friedman has lately called the attention of the collegiality and good relationship 
between Cassirer and Heidegger at the time of the confrontation. See Friedman, Parting Ways, 5?7. As 
commented above I consider that Heidegger?s critique to Western philosophical tradition gives a 
unique opportunity to think about its foundations. Heidegger?s The Origin of the Work of Art (1935) is 
among the most important texts on aesthetics of the twentieth century.    
54
 James Elkins has recently commented that ?The reception of Heidegger (including the refusal of 
Heidegger) varies widely from writers whose work is deeply informed by his texts (for example, 
Stephen Melville) to those who adapt his ideas for rhetorical purposes (for instance, Germano Celant). 
Among the challenges for the current generation of art historians ? is to come to terms with 
Heidegger's place in current understandings of historical art. At the least, a range of contemporary art 
historical and theoretical writings that are in search of embodied truths about the world might become 
more self reflective if they posed their encounter with Heidegger instead of passively embodying it.? 
?David Summers,? 276. 
55
 The first part of Michel Foucault?s scholarship, especially Le Mot et les choses and The Archaeology 
of Knowledge were clearly indebted to this aspect of Heidegger?s thought. What is more, as the 
epigraph demonstrates, his observations have been recently recuperated as guidelines for rethinking the 
history of the discipline and its relationship with art. Donald Preziosi, Stephen Melville, George Didi?
Huberman and Holly owe many of their most refined ideas to a thoughtful reflection of this 
philosopher?s reflection on art.   
80
certainties or doubt, science or philosophy, tradition or experimentalism, meaning or 
presence.
56
 
As the title itself indicates, in ?Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltdeutung 
von Werken der Bildenden Kunst? Panofsky deals with the translation of images into 
words: the written ?description? (Beschreibung) and ?interpretation? 
(Inhaltsdeutung), of ?plastic arts? (bildenden Kunst.)
57
 He uses Gr?newald?s 1515 
Isenheim Altarpiece to explain that no accurate description of an image can be made 
without knowledge of the cultural context in which it was created. The image?s 
opacity and resistance to verbal assault is such that even a description is already an 
interpretation. He does not deem this a problem?and contradicting his own previous 
assessments inspired by Riegl?s scholarship?proposes to step up the research in 
order to have a better understanding of the context. Although Panofsky warns that the 
different stages of the methodology he describes take place simultaneously and 
influence themselves, the material and visual aspect of the work of art becomes 
transparent in the search for the image?s meaning (which is expressed in words and 
derives mostly from the analysis of textual sources.)
 58
 Heidegger, on the contrary, 
 
56
 In 1930 Panofsky wrote Hercules am Scheideweg und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst,
Studien der Bibliotek Warburg, XVIII. 
57
 According to Claire Farago the term ?visual culture,? is not neutral as bildenden Kunst (visual arts) 
was first used by the formalist art historians Fiedler, Hildebrand, W?lfflin and Riegl. Farago, ?Vision 
Itself has Its History?: ?Race,? Nation, and Renaissance Art History,? in Reframing the Renaissance, 
76?77. 
58
 In the 1939 article, instead of analyzing the Isenheim Altarpiece, Panofsky comments on the meeting 
of two men in a street. Joan Hart has demonstrated that this example was taken from Karl Mannheim?s 
?On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung.? By exchanging the rich and complicated image of the 
altarpiece for this simple scene, and by structuring the core of the argumentation around an example 
devised for the analysis of the social world, Panofsky oversimplifies the problematic posed by the  
material, visual aspect of art. The 1955 version is more complex although it does not compare with the 
philosophical sophistication of the German version. Svetlana Alpers have commented on the exchange 
in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
1984). See also W.J.T. Mitchell, ?Iconology and Ideology: Panofsky, Althusser, and the Scene of 
81
always keeps the resistant materiality of the thing/object (he calls it ?Earth?) in the 
foreground of his study as he doubts in the possibility of intellectually grasping it.   
The last level of the interpretation is called Dokumentsinn (documentary sense) or 
Wesenssinn, (essential signification), to which corresponds Weltanschauung (world 
view or history of ideas) as the disciplinary corrective and historical science that 
secures the accuracy of the meaning attributed by the scholar.  
[C]e contenu, c?est ce que le sujet, involontairement et ? son insu, r?v?le de son 
propre comportement envers le monde et des principes qui le guident, ?la 
grandeur d?une production artistique d?pend en dernier ressort de la quantit? 
d??nergie en Weltanschauung? incorpor?e ? la mati?re model?e et rejaillissant de 
cette dernier sur le spectateur (en ce sens, une nature morte de C?zanne n?est 
effectivement pas seulement aussi ?bonne? mais aussi ?pleine de contenu? qu?une 
Madone de Rapha?l), la tache la plus haute de l?interpr?tation est de p?n?trer 
dans cette strate ultime du ?sens de l?essence?. Elle n?aura atteint son but 
v?ritable que lorsqu?elle aura appr?hend? et produit comme ?documents? d?un 
sens homog?ne de Weltanschauung la totalit? des ?l?ments qui produisent l?effet, 
c'est-?-dire non seulement l?objectal et l?iconographique mais aussi les facteurs 
purement formels que sont la r?partition des lumi?res et des ombres, la 
r?partition des surfaces et m?me la qualit? du trait de pinceau, de ciseau ou de 
pointe. Dans une telle entreprise, qui permet ? l?interpr?tation d?une ?uvre d?art 
de se hisser au niveau de l?interpr?tation d?un syst?me philosophique ou de 
l?interpr?tation d?une conception religieuse. 
59
 (My underline) 
 
The visual and material aspects of the work of art are in this system transparent 
and diluted within the [conceptual] meaning, as everything has to conform to the final 
interpretation. Even one of the highest examples of the formal approach to art, a 
C?zanne  still life, is its meaning. The work of art is a (mere) ?document? of an 
abstract Weltanschauung perceived by the ?synthetic intuition? but checked against 
 
Recognition? in Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse, eds. David. B. Downing and 
Susan Bazargan (Albany: State University of New York, 1991). 
59
 Panofsky, ? Problem der Beschreibung,? 251?252.  
82
the results provided by the history of ideas or history of cultural symptoms, that is, 
against the knowledge produced by other disciplines.
 60
 
This hermeneutic task implies the presence of the humanist, the art historian, who 
is able to expose those hidden meanings and to communicate them to others, and 
Panofsky equates his task with that of the philosopher and the interpreter of religions. 
Joan Hart has demonstrated that the author was heavily influenced by Hermeneutics, 
a philosophical theory and methodology for reading sacred texts.
61
 This is the 
opposite of Heidegger?s attitude towards interpretation, and Panofsky makes this 
clear by quoting the philosopher?s 1929 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik: ?
?Bien sur, toute interpr?tation pour arracher, ? ce que les mots disent, ce qu?ils 
veulent dire doit n?cessairement employer la violence,? ? ; ??[m]ais une telle 
violence? ne peut ?tre un arbitraire d?vastateur, la force d?une id?e pr?-existante doit 
diriger et promouvoir l?interpr?tation.??
62
 
Heidegger advocated a subjective and violent penetration into the text/work of art 
in order to fetch a meaning that was unknown even to its author/creator, so that the 
explanation is not tautological, and adds new knowledge. Heidegger used visual 
metaphors in order to underscore the non rationality of the process and Panofsky 
quotes Heidegger at length. Interpretation?s task is,  
?de rendre express?ment visible ce que, par-del? sa formulation explicite, Kant a 
mis en lumi?re dans son formulation m?me; mais cela, Kant n??tait plus en 
mesure de le dire de m?me que, dans toute connaissance philosophique, ce n?est 
 
60
 Each layer of analysis has a historical science as a ?corrective? that allows verification of the 
scholar?s findings. If the penetration into the work?s meaning is thought of as a vertical movement, 
these sciences might be considered as horizontal strata that buffer that drive, which underscores its 
difference from Heidegger?s idea of interpretation. 
61
 Hart, ?Panofsky Mannheim,? 564. 
62
 Martin Heidegger, quoted in Panofsky, ?Problem der Beschreibung,? 248 and 249. 
83
pas ce que celle-ci dit expressis verbis qui doit ?tre d?cisive mais l?inexprim? 
qu?elle met sous les yeux en l?exprimant??  
63
 
Heidegger refers to texts as if they were visual objects that have to be intuitively 
taken beyond their explicit meaning. Conversely, Panofsky proposes to ?read? works 
of art as if they were texts, and looks for meanings through a hermeneutical 
methodology dominated at each step by reason.   
Uninterested in modern art, Panofsky rarely ever referred to C?zanne?s art.
64
 In 
those years Heidegger was also thinking of a still life by a Post-Impressionist artist. In 
?The Origin of the Work of Art,? he famously singled out a painting by van Gogh 
representing shoes, wherein the work of art enabled the true significance of the shoes 
as [human] equipment, and even of the peasant who had used them. Nevertheless, 
words are unable to convey the import of this true epiphany,    
This painting spoke. In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere 
else than we usually tend to be. 
The art work let us know what shoes are in truth. It would be the worst self-
deception to think that our description, as a subjective action, had first depicted 
everything thus and then projected it into the painting. If anything is questionable 
here, it is rather that we experienced too little in the neighborhood of the work 
and that we expressed the experience too crudely and too literally. But? Van 
Gogh?s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of shoes is in 
truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. 
65
 (Emphasis 
added). 
The comparison of the texts by Heidegger and Panofsky is not entirely fair 
according to the modern organization of the disciplines devoted to the study of art, 
even though Panofsky himself equated the work of the art historian with that of the 
 
63
 Panofsky, ?Problem der Beschreibung,? 248?249. 
64
 In 1953 Panofsky briefly mentioned C?zanne?s use of perspective for the representation of space. 
See Chapter Six.  
65
 Martin Heidegger, ?The Origin of the Work of Art? in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, ?), 
35?36. 
84
philosopher in 1932, but it underscores how antithetical were their approaches to 
knowledge and interpretation. 
66
 
By 1932 Panofsky had already published Perspective as Symbolic Form.
Perspective was for him not only a central subject matter, but also an intellectual 
model that implied keeping an ?objective? distance from the [historical] object of 
study.
67
 In everyday language ?to have perspective? means to be at a distance that 
allows seeing something clearly. This is why Panofsky could equate perspective with 
historical distance.
68
 However, to keep the object at a certain distance implies to put 
away its material presence, its tactile values. In Heidegger?s text on the other hand, 
the accent is on ?vicinity,? on being close to the work of art, which might account as 
well for the impossibility of translating the experience into words. Keith Moxey has 
recently observed that Panofsky?s philosophical position towards the problem of 
historical distance was ideological and historically determined. 
[T]hough Panofsky could not consciously have recognized this investment, the 
entire notion of historical distance was a defense of humanist culture and a means 
of keeping history safe from the hands of ?ideologues.? The need to keep 
?civilization? out of the hands of barbarians made him value his scholarship in the 
United States as a means of ensuring the survival of values that were threatened 
with obliteration in fascist Europe.  
Whereas for the nationalist historians the conflation of historical distance was 
important as a way of establishing the continuity of national identity, for 
Panofsky historical distance was a means of validating the purportedly universal 
values of the humanist tradition. If nationalist critics working in a Hegelian 
 
66
 This text has been the object of a long debate. See Meyer Shapiro, "The Still?Life as Personal 
Object?A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh," The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt 
Goldstein, 1878?1965, (New York: Springer, 1968), and Jacques Derrida?s answer to Shapiro in De la 
V?rit? en peinture. Both texts are in Preziosi, The Art of Art History.
67
 According to Melville, Panofsky?s notion of perspective allowed him to transform art history into a 
science: ??Perspective? was never a practice art history simply found within its purview, which is why 
Panofsky?s formulation of it had the power to wrests a discipline from its historical embeddedness and 
transform it into a science.? Melville, ?The Temptation,? 410?411. 
68
 For a consideration of the origin of the metaphorical use of ?point of view? and  ?perspective? and of 
how this use relates with the history of perspective, see James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective 
(Ithaca, 1994), 19?22. 
85
tradition had exploited Hegel?s view that the unfolding of the ?spirit? was best 
observed in the art of different peoples or nations, Panofsky?s debt to this 
philosopher may be discerned in exalting the Renaissance as a decisive moment 
in the self-realization of humanity.
69
 
Historical distance helped Panofsky to counter other models of history that denied 
such distance, as these models reclaimed the past as racial or national legacies which 
only their ?rightful? owners might re-enact in the present: in Germany it was the 
notion of Kultur, and in Italy the Actualist philosophy of Giovanni Gentile. Perhaps 
this is also the context for Panofsky?s insistence on the Renaissance as a re-birth of 
classical Antiquity after a period in which it had been ?dead,? in opposition to 
Warburg?s notion of ?survival? (nachleben.)
70
 In this way, he indicated that the 
Renaissance had made history possible as it had established a ?historical distance? to 
Antiquity. In order to institute this distance as part of art history?s methodology, 
Panofsky transformed Humanism into both an a-historical endeavor and a 
paradigmatic epistemological model for the understanding of art.  
Mosse has argued that historians? disproportionate attention to the historical and 
ideological forces at work in Fascism made them overlook its use of aesthetics as a 
tool that enabled the transformation of a political ideology into a civic religion.  
We failed to see that fascist esthetics itself reflected the needs and hopes of 
contemporary society, that what we brushed aside as the so-called superstructure 
was in reality the means through which most people grasped the fascist message, 
transforming politics into a civic religion. ?. 
The ideal of beauty was central to this aesthetic, whether that of the human 
body or of the political liturgy. The longing for a set standard of beauty was 
deeply ingrained in the European middle classes, and the definition of the 
 
69
 Keith Moxey, ?Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of D?rer and Gr?newald,? The 
Art Bulletin 84 (December, 2004), 757. I would like to thank Dr. June Hargrove for calling my 
attention to this article. 
70
 On the notion of Nachleben (survival) in Warburg and its transformation into re?naissance by 
Panofsky, see George Didi? Huberman, ?Artistic Survival. Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of 
Impure Time,? Common Knowledge (2003): 273?285. 
86
beautiful as ?the good, the true, and the holy? was an important background to the 
fascist cults. Appreciation of the arts played a central role in the self-definition of 
the middle classes and anyone who wanted to be respected member of society 
had to value them properly. 
71
 
Fascism took elements that lay dormant within the structure of common society and 
applied them to foster its own goals. It became a non-traditional faith that used liturgy 
and symbols to produce an immediate response, an unmediated belief.  
 
Art History as a Humanistic Discipline. Humanism in America
?The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline??the article that Panofsky?s 
contributed to Greene?s 1938 The Meaning of the Humanities?starts with an 
anecdote that depicts an old, weak Kant making efforts to behave in a civilized 
manner: ? ?Das Gef?hl f?r Humanit?t hat mich noch nicht verlassen? ? the Sense of 
humanity has not yet left me.?
72
 Panofsky establishes that the historian qua humanist 
is responsible for shaping the present and defending its fundamental cultural values. 
To this end he quotes a 1937 article about the dismissal of professors in Soviet Russia 
as proof that teaching Neo-Platonism, and Humanism in general, is an anti-totalitarian 
activity.
73
 He states that Humanism remains pertinent and warns that the victory of 
the totalitarian threat (?satanocracy?) would bring about a double inversion: it would 
 
71
 Mosse, ?Fascist Aesthetics,? 246. 
72
 Erwin Panofsky, ?The Meaning of the Humanities? in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. 
Theodore Meyer Greene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938), 92.  
73
 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: papers in and on art history (Woodstock, N.Y.: 
Overlook Press, 1974, c1955), 23. In this sense his Humanism is as engaged in the present day politics 
as Kant?s. In a broader sense every book must be engaged in this way and his essay overtly claims to 
be so. The problem arises when these historically determined engagements are institutionalized as 
objective and universally valid and become transparent as ideologies.     
87
provoke the end of the ?anthropocratic? civilization, and bring about a new Middle 
Ages oriented not towards God but towards Hell.
74
 Panofsky?s understanding of 
Humanism had its root in the Weimar Republic, but its success and dissemination in 
the United States after 1933 indicates that it resonated with the needs and orientation 
of American academia.  
The depth of Panofsky?s commitment to Enlightenment ideals and to Humanism 
has been usually associated with his Jewishness. George Mosse has convincingly 
argued that the history of the emancipation of the Jews and of their assimilation to 
German culture was, since the eighteenth century, intimately intertwined with that of 
Bildung.
75
 According to this author,     
several presuppositions of the Enlightenment were basic to the concept of 
Bildung?the optimism about the potential of human nature and the autonomy of 
man; the belief that acquired knowledge would activate the moral imperative; 
and, last but not least, the belief that all who were willing to use and develop 
their reason could attain this ideal... It was the degree of a person?s Bildung, not
his religious or national heritage, which ultimately decided the degree of 
equality.
76
 
The Humanism of the Renaissance was considered a proto-Enlightenment period 
because of its secularism and the development of the ideal of the cultured individual. 
For the German bourgeoisie Bildung was a means to gain access to power and a place 
in the social order. For the Jews, it was also the symbol of their emancipation and 
 
74
 Panofsky, ?Meaning Humanities,? 117. The use of ?anthropocratic? is interesting as it asserts the 
radical authority and centrality of the human being and thus a Western world view. It also has a special 
meaning considering Heidegger?s introductory words at Davos and his indictment of Anthropological 
philosophy. Panofsky?s characterization of the Middle Ages highlights once more the centrality of the 
Renaissance in this author?s mind. 
75
 George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 
1985), 3. 
76
 Mosse, German Jews, 6. 
88
assimilation into German culture.
77
 After Germany lost the First World War Bildung 
became a unifying and cohesive factor that helped to counterbalance the chaotic 
political and economic realities and ensuing dislocation of the social order. The 
Weimar Republic was a period of extreme disorder and constant upheavals, and the 
idea of following a tradition structured around Greek classical ideals was especially 
reassuring. In the wake of defeat, German culture was pervaded by its own version of 
the rappel ? l?ordre and its concomitant mentality and melancholic mood. 
78
 
In the nineteenth century the United States adopted Bildung as the paradigm of 
cultivation and education. Wood has pointed out that ?the very idea of teaching art 
history at the university was a German idea,? as the first professor of art history at 
Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton (1827?1908), had studied in that country.
79
 
In the 1930s, a new interest in reaffirming cultural values centered on Western 
Humanism was gaining momentum in America. The ideal of the free, cultivated 
individual was transformed to correspond with liberal ideology and was used 
politically to oppose Hitler and communism. The Renaissance was identified with 
 
77
 Dempsey, Erwin Panofsky, especially 187 ff. This author believes that Jewish theology and the idea 
of redemption might have influenced Panofsky?s early writings but that later he rejected them to favor 
Kant?s theory of knowledge: ?[H]e never abandons the Enlightenment and the values of Bildung 
associated with them.? 
78
 Melancholy was one of the leitmotivs in Panofsky?s scholarship. His interpretation of Albrecht 
D?rer?s engraving Melancholy I is among his the most famous texts. In 1953 he authored together with 
Raymond Klibansky and Fritz Saxl Saturn and Melancholy; Studies in the History of Natural 
Philosophy, Religion, and Art. See Keith Moxey, "Panofsky's Melancholia," The Practice of Theory: 
Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 65?78 
where Moxey relates Panofsky?s interest in the subject matter with the experiences of the scholars in 
Germany and his life as ?migr?. See also Moxey, ?Impossible Distance.?  
79
 Wood, ?Normative Renaissance,? 64. See Sybil Gordon Kantor, ?Harvard and the ?Fogg Method,?? 
in The Early Years of Art History in the United States Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, 
and Scholars eds. Craig Hugh Smyth, and Peter M. Lukehart (New Jersey: Yale University Press, 
1993).   
89
culture and replaced or reinforced the traditional fascination with classicism.
80
 The 
ultimate goal of this model of education was to counterbalance the growing influence 
of the sciences and technology, a process that the arrival of the German ?migr?s 
accelerated, and to which Panofsky?s scholarship was especially well suited. As Carl 
Landauer explains,  
Panofsky?s definition of the Renaissance?that it was able to view classical 
antiquity with historical distance?meant that the very essence of the 
Renaissance? was its own historicism. If the growing mythologizing of the 
Renaissance in the American academy identified the Renaissance with culture 
and the liberal arts, Panofsky took that mythology one step further by identifying 
historical vision as the fundamental aspect of Renaissance culture. Panofsky?s 
definition of the Renaissance implied that anyone who was working in the 
historical fields?which in Panofsky?s own neo-Kantian definition meant anyone 
working in the humanities in general?was not only indebted to the Renaissance 
but was carrying out the central work of the Renaissance.  
 
And he adds, 
 
Ultimately, with Panofsky?s permanent Renaissance not only is the Renaissance 
still present, but the recovered antiquity is also a living part of our culture. .. It is 
in part this aspect of Panofsky, the inveterate historian, that fed into the 
ahistoricism that marked the growing humanistic mythology of the American 
university? 
81
 
The values of the Enlightenment?self-determination, rationality, the value of the 
individual and the dream of a universal humanity?were projected onto the 
Renaissance and established as the ideal goal of modern education. Panofsky and the 
 
80
 Wood comments that ?[i]t is hard to overstate the depth of the American attraction to the classical. 
Classicism offered a framework for the most basic thinking about what art was and what function it 
had in life. .. Americans tended to focus on art?s ethical and cognitive content. Classical balance and 
decorum were indeed ethical as much as formal ideals, and they helped bridge the vast cultural gap 
separating Americans from Renaissance Italy. Classicism helped Americans overcome their reflexive 
suspicion of Popish spectacle and superstition.? Wood, ?Normative Renaissance,? 69.  For the history 
of the Italian Renaissance in American academia  Muir, ?Renaissance in America.? See also Anthony 
Molho, ?The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA,? in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, 
Imagined Histories. American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press 
1998). 
81
 Carl Erwin Landauer, ?Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance,? Renaissance Quarterly 47 
(Summer, 1994), 273 and 276 
90
?migr?s helped to construe an ideal Renaissance, characterized by a Neo-Platonic 
approach to philosophy and a pre-scientific mentality. This is why American 
historians called this period of history ?early modern,? and art historians argued that 
modern art had its roots in the Renaissance.
82
 The institutionalized discipline, 
therefore, was true to its symbolic field and to the logic of the North Atlantic 
universals. 
The emigration of German, mostly Jewish, art historians to the United States 
hastened the process of professionalization and internationalization of art history, but 
at a price. Their scholarship lost the methodological inquisitiveness, theoretical edge, 
and exploratory character it had exhibited on the Continent.
83
 Wood comments that 
the ?state of emergency seem[ed] to call for a provisional suspension of historical 
relativism and the critical stance toward tradition and received cultural values, the 
scholar?s privileges in normal times.?
84
 Kevin Parker went so far as to equate the 
German ?migr?s? success in the United States with their ability to avoid certain topics 
and issues. Surrounding themselves with the humanist myth of disinterested historical 
scholarship, evident in today?s professional activity, these scholars eschewed subjects 
that ?might have raised questions of identity or politics? and winnowed out 
 
82
 I owe to Dr. June Hargrove as a patient reader to call my attention to this issue.   
83
 Martin Jay, ?The German Migration: Is there a Figure in the Carpet?? In Stephanie, Barron, Exiles + 
Emigr?s The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum, Los 
Angeles,  c.1997). Didi?Huberman notes that ?Il est de m?me remarquable qu?avec l??uvre am?ricaine 
de Panofsky ... le ton critique se soit enti?rement assagi, et le ?n?gativisme?  destructeur se soit 
renvers? dans ces mille et une positivit?s de savoir que le ma?tre de Princeton nous a finalement 
l?gu?es. De l?Allemagne ? l?Am?rique, c?est un peu le moment de l?antith?se qui meurt et celui de la 
synth?se ? optimiste, positive, voire positiviste en certains aspects ? que prend la rel?ve. C?est un peu 
le d?sir de poser toutes les questions qui aura, d?un coup, laiss? la place au d?sir de donner toutes les 
r?ponses. ? Georges Didi?Huberman, Devant l?image. Question pos?e aux fins d?une histoire de l?art 
(Paris, 1990), 127?128. 
84
 Wood, ?Normative Renaissance,? 82. 
91
methodological inquiries.
85
 Panofsky and his contemporaries conceived of Humanism 
as a bulwark in the fight against the most immediate dangers, declaring it of universal 
value, which ultimately implied the naturalization of the Eurocentric ideology of the 
Enlightenment.  
Claire Farago, among other historians, has called attention to the fact that these 
scholars did not use race and nation as categories for analysis of works of art, but 
neither did they extricate these categories from the discipline.
86
 In his 1938 article, 
Panofsky harshly criticizes authoritarians, and ?those ?insectolatrists? who profess the 
all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation, or race.?
87
 
But two pages later, when analyzing the problem of form and content, a fundamental 
issue in Western philosophy, he argues that content,
as opposed to subject matter,? is that which a work of art betrays but does not 
parade. It is the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or 
philosophical persuasion?unconsciously qualified by one personality and 
condensed into one work. 
88
 
The fact that Panofsky avoids listing race in the second paragraph does not 
necessarily imply its absence from a system in which the work of art is said to reflect 
unconsciously (meaning that the person does not have conscious control of certain 
irrepressible or innate drives) the basic attitudes of the members of a nation or 
practitioners of a religion.
89
 More significant, especially in 2007 and for a scholar 
deeply concerned with the fate of non-Western cultures, is the fact that Panofsky 
 
85
 Kevin Parker, ?Art history and Exile: Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky,? in Barron, Exiles 
+ Emigr?s.
86
 Farago, ??Vision Itself?,? 82.  
87
 Panofsky, ?Meaning Humanities,? 93. 
88
 Panofsky, ?Meaning Humanities,? 105. 
89
 Panofsky expressely used ethnicity as a category for the interpretation of works of art in ?The 
Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator? published in 1962.  
92
defines humanitas as both the inheritor of the classical opposition barbaritas-
humanitas, and the medieval divinitas-humanitas, which does not bode well for a 
discipline that aspires to represent universal values.
90
 
This brief survey suggests that when Panofsky lost contact with the theoretically 
experimental standpoint fostered mainly by the School of Vienna, his scholarship fell 
back to the German approach to art history as developed in the nineteenth century, in 
which race and nation were operative categories for the study of works of art. 
 
Written Art History vs. Plastic Arts ? The Image and the Word
Panofsky?s Kantian Humanism was influenced by the ideologies, historical 
circumstances, and particular structures of the epistemological wars of his time. But, 
can a methodology inherently contingent on specific historical events be transformed 
into a universal, timeless, and objective epistemological tool? David Summers 
answers in the positive: 
Panofsky devoted his life to the study of Western art, and his art history 
continued to be, in the classical manner, a rhetoric of praise for those individuals 
who made art and made it possible? But if he insisted upon high philological 
standards for the study of Western art, meaning in the visual arts, as he 
understood it, is in principle universalizable, altogether inclusive and 
cosmopolitan? In Panofsky?s scheme, as we have seen, ?context? is defined by 
what he called his ?objective correctives.? Once this general principle of context 
had been established, it could be extended and refined.
91
 
90
 Greene?s interpretation of Humanism, as the introductory essay to the book demonstrates, was 
profoundly Catholic.  
91
 David Summers, ?Meaning Visual Arts,? 18. Summers general description of Panofsky?s 
methodology would also serve as a characterization of Rewald, as his scholarship is based on a 
93
This would imply that the Western definition of art and art history, even if they have 
been developed by the West, are universal and can be extended to the appreciation 
and evaluation of the visual products of other cultures. The correct use of the 
discipline?s philological methodologies will make it possible to find art?s meaning. 
The question then becomes who has determined that art has meaning?
 
As the question 
determines the answer, the inquiry for the meaning of art produces meaningful art. In 
this model, the answer will be a written or a wordy utterance which secures the 
characteristic Western alliance of word and image. The French philosopher Jacques 
Derrida argues, 
[E]n se demandant ce que veut dire ?art?, on soumet la marque ?art? ? un r?gime 
d?interpr?tation tr?s d?termin?, survenu dans l?histoire: il consiste, en sa 
tautologie sans r?serve, ? interroger le vouloir-dire de toute ?uvre dite d?art, 
m?me si sa forme n?est pas le dire. On se demande ainsi ce que veut dire une 
?uvre plastique ou musicale en soumettant toutes les productions ? l?autorit? de 
la parole et des arts ?discursifs.?
 92
 
Other cultures and some periods of the history of the West did not regard objects 
as meaningful in the same way modern art history does. As observed above, once 
declared ?art? their creators do not posses them any more.
93
 Moreover?and this is of 
primary importance for C?zanne and modern art?some modern artistic movements 
reacted against the influence of the written word on the plastic arts.  
Panofsky?s use of neo-Kantian categories enabled him to reinforce this 
association and to assimilate it with the idea of Humanism. Considered as texts, 
 
philological approach to documentation regarding works of art created by great men, however, Rewald 
was not interested in the specific meaning of works of art. 
92
 Jacques Derrida, La V?rit? en peinture (Paris : Flammarion, 1978), 26.  
93
 The literature on this issue is enormous. See for this particular point in African cultures Christopher 
B. Steiner, ?The Taste of Angels in the Art of Darkness: Fashioning the Canon of African art,? in Art 
History and Its Institutions. Foundations of a Discipline ed., Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 
2002). The installation of sacred American Indian objects has also sparked an interesting and long 
overdue debate.  
94
works of art not only have value, they have also meaning. When Melville claims that 
Panofsky was the founding father of modern art history he recognizes that Iconology 
established the form of relationship between image and word that became hegemonic 
after Second World War.
94
 
Mitchell has observed that Panofsky?s regime of interpretation ?is an iconology in 
which the ?icon? is thoroughly absorbed by the ?logos? understood as a rhetorical, 
literary or even (less convincingly) a scientific discourse.?
95
 Iconology naturalizes 
discourse and makes the resistance of the image to words transparent. According to 
Mitchell only by recognizing how texts and documentary strategies articulate this 
operation will it be possible to recuperate the (power of) images. As in his view the 
?icon? resists the ?logos,? it is necessary to look for the place where the image is 
sutured to text,  
A critical iconology will note the resistance of the icon to logos. ? This is not so 
much a ?history? as a kernel narrative embedded in the very grammar of 
iconology as a fractured concept, a suturing of image and text. One must precede 
the other, dominate, resist, supplement the other. This otherness or alterity of 
image and text is not just a matter of analogous structure, as if images just 
happened to be the Other to texts. It is ? the very terms in which alterity as such 
is expressed in phenomenological reflection.
96
 
Since the Renaissance, this association has mutated along with the definition of 
art. When dealing with the history of Western art, the art historian has to study the 
structure of the system contemporaneous to the art he or she is considering, that is, 
the way image and logos were sutured at the time, keeping in mind that the art history 
we are practicing is the last incarnation of this fundamental alliance.   
 
94
 In a recent article Wilhelm Schlink considers iconography as a neutral, common sense approach to 
art history. See ?Enseignement ou illumination,? 58. 
95
 Mitchell, ?Iconology and Ideology?, 325.  
96
 Mitchell, ?Iconology and Ideology,? 326. 
95
The oversimplified account of the history of art history in the nineteenth century 
sketched above focuses on Germany because the methodologies that shaped modern 
art history were primarily developed in that country at the beginning of the twentieth 
century. This way of thinking about art and its relationship to art history differs from 
C?zanne?s understanding of both subjects but the proximity in time and space tends to 
hide basic discrepancies. It is not that Kant?s philosophy was not known in France but 
it was assimilated in a specific way, distinct from both German neo-Kantianism and 
the interpretation art historians use today. 
Kant?s philosophical writings established a new dimension for art, and tied it 
in an intimate way to a new kind of written discourse that influenced art criticism 
throughout the nineteenth century. Panofsky?s neo-Kantian methodology brought 
about significant changes, and in doing so reinforced this strong dependency of the 
visual on the written word, thus naturalizing Kant?s stance on the subject.
 97
 
Kant?s Critique of Judgment called attention to the formal values of the work 
of art and established a new purely artistic function for Art, which demanded a new 
vocabulary and categories to refer to them.
98
 In the old system literature and history 
provided the subject matter for works of art, facilitating their retranslation into words. 
In the new system other, more challenging abilities were needed, especially since the 
academic standards that had previously secured the criteria of analysis and appraisal 
 
97
 The idea of the naturalization of certain ideas as the result of an unsuccessful or partial revision 
comes from Claire Farago. See her Introduction to her Reframing the Renaissance.  
98
 Podro and Summers have demonstrated that art critics and the public started to pay attention to the 
formal characteristics of works of art during the nineteenth century. The first art historian comments 
that Goethe for example only dwelt on the way figures were represented and on the subject matter of 
the works he described. Michael Podro, Critical Art Historians, 62. David Summers, ??Form,? 
Nineteenth?Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,? Critical Inquiry 15 
(Winter, 1989). See also Bernard Vouilloux, L?Art des Goncourt. Une esth?tique du style (Paris : 
L'Harmattan, 1997).  
96
had been overruled. The informed commentator became a key constituent of this 
[new] system. Kant?s Third Critique had already assigned him an important role 
because what the philosopher considered fundamental in the judgment of taste was 
not the evaluation of the object per se, but the act of making it available for others. As 
Salim Kemal observes, 
Kant insists that communication is crucial, we gain confirmation when subjects 
successfully communicate their feelings of pleasure or displeasure, enabling 
another subject to make the same judgment. ... 
Further, the importance of confirmation through communication also changes 
our focus: we are no longer concerned simply with the object that has aesthetic 
value; instead, the relation to an object becomes secondary to the relation 
between subjects in a community who supposedly confirm the actual individual 
pleasurable judgments. The object seems to lose its independent status.
99
 
(Emphasis added). 
 
Kant needs the judgments of taste to be communicable because in this way he 
can argue that they are universal. His system relegates the work of art to a secondary 
role, as it is covered by the words it suggests to its loquacious spectators. The pure 
formal values are subservient to Logos. The spectator?s ability to reach the sensus 
communis makes this ?opinion? or pleasure a judgment of taste. According to 
Summers this particular sense relates to the basic notion of civility in the eighteenth 
century, the public sphere.
 100
 
Kant adapted and synthesized a number of traditional meanings of common 
sense, uniting them at the highest level in a new, transcendental version of a 
?public? or ?social? sense. His formulation applied in fundamental ways to the 
deeply rhetorical discourse of classical Western art, to which the question of the 
 
99
 Salim Kemal, ?Kant on Beauty,? in Aesthetics Vol. 2 ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1998), 33.  
100
 [B]y the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e.,  critical faculty 
which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in 
order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the 
illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an 
illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgement.? Immanuel Kant, The Critique of 
Pure Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), ? 40.  
97
relation to art to audience was central. The modern audience for art emerged in 
the eighteenth century and Kant?s contribution to the critical questions 
surrounding this emergence defined the audience for art as potentially 
universal.
101
 
The Critique of Judgment is one of the basic texts of the Enlightenment educational 
project. Kant argues that,  
Only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a man, but a man refined 
after the manner of his kind (the beginning of civilization)-for that is the estimate 
formed of one who has the bent and turn for communicating his pleasure to 
others, and who is not quite satisfied with an object unless his feeling of delight 
in it can be shared in communion with others. (Emphasis added)
102
 
The man who is able to attain and express this sensus communis is the one 
who can think for himself (without the tutelage of institutions), putting himself in the 
place of others, to think the way others ?ought? to think, and to do so consistently. As 
Karen Lang observes, this man has reached the ?universal standpoint of judgment,? 
?everyone expects and requires from everyone else this reference to universal 
communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity 
itself.?
103
 Lang notices that the passive contemplator of the Critique is the Kantian 
Weltbaumeister, the subject/architect of a moral world in Kant?s political and 
historical writings. He is the scholar who in Germany and in France was taking the 
place of the representatives of the Church and the aristocracy, the predecessor of the 
professors and teachers of Bildung, the future mandarins of the German university. In 
France he will be the philosophe, the ideologue and, after Emile Zola?s intervention 
 
101
 David Summers, ?Why Did Kant Call Taste a ?Common Sense??? in Eighteenth?Century Aesthetics 
and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Mattick, Jr. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University 
Press, 1993), 121. The classical study on civil society is by J?rgen Habermas The Structural 
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, 
Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 
102
 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 156. 
103
 Karen Lang, ?The Dialectics of Decay. Rereading the Kantian Subject? The Art Bulletin 79 
(September, 1997), 435. 
98
in the Dreyfus affair, the intellectual.
104
 Since the Enlightenment, Aesthetics has had 
an important role in the strategies Western philosophers have developed to influence 
and rule society.
105
 
Almost in the middle of the first part of the Critique (? 40?41), Kant opens an 
excursus, in order to explain that this is a special kind of man.
106
 This is the only 
place in which the philosopher explicitly mentions the Aufkl?rung and abandons 
synchronic analysis to sketch a diachronic development of man?s evolution. It is also 
exceptional in that Kant uses the word ?civilization? two times (out of three in the 
whole book). Traditionally Germans have considered this a French word and concept, 
related to but different from, their Kultur. Whereas the former would refer to external 
manners, the second would mean culture as the reflection of the true inner soul of the 
German people. By using ?civilization? Kant underscores the idea that there are 
various stages of culture?and of humanness?and the possibility of gradual 
development and progress. 
107
 
And thus, no doubt, at first only charms, e.g., colours for painting oneself 
(roucou among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), or flowers, sea-
shells, beautifully coloured feathers, then, in the course of time, also beautiful 
 
104
 For Zola as the first intellectual see Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon. The Literary Avant?
Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 
1999). 
105
 See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters. On Modernity, Post?Modernity and 
Intellectuals (London: Polity Press, 1987.) The author highlights the fact that intellectuals play the role 
that priest have in non?European and pre?modern societies. The author analyzes the process of the 
?internal colonization? of the West from a post?modern point of view. See also Terry Eagleton, The 
Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Blackwell Publishing 1990). For the place of Aesthetic in 
Heidegger?s thought see Jacques Taminiaux, ?Le d?passement Heideggerien de l?esth?tique et 
l?h?ritage de Hegel,? in Distanz un N?he Reflexionen und Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart, eds. 
Petra Jaeger and Rudolf L?the (W?rzburg: Verlag K?nigshausen und Neumann, 1983), 65?90. 
106
 After he defines the characteristic of the ideal spectator he writes ?I resume the thread of the 
discussion interrupted by the above digression, and I say that taste can with more justice be called a 
sensus communis than can sound understanding??  Kant, Critique of Judgment, 123. 
107
 Norbert Elias in La civilisation des m?urs, first published in 1939, noted that Kant already 
considered the word civilization as French. i.e. as manners and external cultivation. In the decade 
under study the difference between these terms was hotly debated.  
99
forms (as in canoes, wearing-apparel, etc.) which convey no gratification, i.e., 
delight of enjoyment, become of moment in society and attract a considerable 
interest. Eventually, when civilization has reached its height it makes this work 
of communication almost the main business of refined inclination, and the entire 
value of sensations is placed in the degree to which they permit of universal 
communication. At this stage, then, even where the pleasure which each one has 
in an object is but insignificant and possesses of itself no conspicuous interest, 
still the idea of its universal communicability almost indefinitely augments its 
value.
108 
(Emphasis added)  
 
Kant regards the man of taste as the epitome of humanness and refuses to other men 
the right of assuming this role, leaving outside his system all those who were not 
cultivated Europeans. Therefore, the selfsame text that defines and gives autonomy to 
the realm of aesthetics declares most of humanity unfit to elaborate ?objective? 
judgments of taste and to communicate them. Kant argues that even the subjective 
experience of pleasure is secondary to its being universally communicable. 
Objectivity is defined as such, on the grounds of its universality. Admittedly, Kant?s 
?universe? was rather small.  
Nineteenth-century France was the century of art and art criticism: Baudelaire, the 
fr?res Goncourt, Emile Zola are among the more important names in an impressive 
roster of writers who practiced this activity. Early in the eighteenth century, La Font 
de Saint-Yenne published Reflexions sur quelques causes de l??tat present de la 
peinture en France (1746) to the dismay of the artists, who considered that only they 
were able to speak about art.
109
 In the nineteenth century these two groups established 
a complicated association. Periods of mutual support were followed by moments of 
 
108
 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, ?41. 
109
 See Annie Becq, Gen?se de l'esth?tique francaise moderne: de la raison classique ? l'imagination 
cr?atrice, 1680?1814 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), and Bernardette Fort ?Voice of the Public: The 
Carnivalization of Salon Art in Prerevolutionary Pamphlets,? Eighteenth?Century Studies 22 (Spring, 
1989): 368? 394.  
100
bitter confrontation, an intellectual turf war over whose field (literature or art) 
dominated the hierarchy of the arts. Chapter Four deals with aspects of this not 
always friendly rivalry, epitomized by the relationship of C?zanne with Zola. 
Coincidentally, Rewald?s 1936 biography of the artist hinged around his friendship 
with Zola, because the art historian, like most modern scholars to date, failed to 
acknowledge the tensions arising from their separate and competing discourses on art.     
The crowds that populated the Salon and the art museums needed guidance from a 
specialized writer. Paradoxically, the progressive independence of the plastic arts 
from literary and historical subject matter resulted in the development of a new, more 
theoretical art writing in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The first abstract 
artists, for example, wrote abundantly to justify the lack of subject matter in their 
works.    
In the system of the arts ruled by the academies and focused on representation and 
mimesis?that is from the Renaissance up to the eighteenth century?the relationship 
of the visual arts and literature was characterized by the principle known as ut pictura 
poesis, or, when they competed for ascendancy, Leonardo da Vinci?s paragone.
110
 
Mitchell has suggested that the principle that rules on the relationship of abstract art 
and logos be called ut pictura theoria. 
[T]he wall erected against language and literature by the grid of abstraction only 
kept out a certain kind of verbal contamination, but it absolutely depended, at the 
same time, on the collaboration of painting with another kind of discourse, what 
 
110
 The traditional source for this subject matter is Lee W. Rensselaer, ?Ut Pictura Poesis: The 
Humanist Theory of Painting,? The Art Bulletin 22 (1940): 197?269. Of special interest in this context 
is John R. Spencer, ?Ut Rhetorica Pictura. A Study in Quattrocento Theory of Painting,? Journal of the 
Warburg & Courtauld Institute 20 (1957): 22?44. The paragone in Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, ?is 
the competition between artistic media for representational superiority. From the Renaissance on, the 
paragone most frequently denoted a rivalry between painting and poetry or words and images.? 
Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, ?Girodet/Endymion/Balzac: Representation and Rivalry in post?
revolutionary France,? Word & Image 17 (October?December, 2001), 411.  
101
we may call, for lack of a better term, the discourse of theory. If we summarize 
the traditional collaboration of painting and literature under the classic Horatian 
maxim, ut pictura poesis ? as painting so in poetry ? then the maxim for abstract 
art is not hard to predict: ut pictura theoria. Or, as [Thomas]Wolfe expresses it: 
?these days, without a theory to go with it, I can?t see a painting.?   
 
And he adds,  
 
?[T]theory? is the ?word? (or words) that stands in the same relation to abstract art 
that traditional literary forms had to representational painting. By ?theory? I mean 
that curious hybrid of mainly prose discourse compounded from aesthetics and 
other branches of philosophy, as well as from literary criticism, linguistics, the 
natural and social sciences, psychology, history, political thought and religion. 
111
 
Moreover Mitchell argues that more than a modern ut pictura theoria/poesia this 
new relationship is a new paragone in which art historians and theoreticians compete 
to explain (with words) what Clement Greenberg called art?s self-criticism which 
paradoxically secures art?s autonomy from other fields, specifically, from 
literature.
112
 In the modern art system, literature surrounds and covers the works of art 
as museum labels, documents, books, newspaper articles and specialist talks in 
museums and art galleries. 
One of the most noticeable aspect of Mitchell?s article is that the epigraphs and 
the examples he analyzes are from the 1930s?Clement Greenberg?s ?Avant Garde 
and Kitsch? (1939), and ?Towards a New Laocoon? (1940,) and Barr?s text and 
 
111
W.J.T. Mitchell, ? ?Ut Pictura Theoria?: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language,?  
Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter, 1989): 354?355. 
112
 Clement Greenberg?s classical definition states that ?The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in 
the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert 
it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the 
limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure 
in what there remained to it.? ?Modernist Painting? in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical 
Anthology eds. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (New York : Harper & Row, 1982), 5. See 
Pierre Bordieu, Les r?gles de l'art, 1992 translated as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the 
Literary Field, (Standford: Standford University Press, 1996). Chapter Four comments the work of Leo 
H. Hoek, Titres, toiles et critique d?art. D?terminants institutionnels du discours sur l?art au dix?
neuvi?me si?cle en France (Amsterdam?Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001). 
102
flowchart for the 1936 catalogue of the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (fig. 1)?
which confirms that the foundations of the new system of the arts were laid was in 
that decade. Mitchell observes that the flowchart established a myth about the 
foundations of modern art that spawned many different narratives on modern art, all 
of them dependent on Barr?s interpretation. With wordy claims of autonomy and 
purity, ?Theoria? masked modern art?s (especially abstraction?s) intrinsic association 
and codependence with the word.
113
 He concludes that both abstract works of art and 
this type of simplified art history are veritable machines to produce words.  
Barr?s diagram, then, is like all abstract paintings a visual machine for the 
generation of language. ? Much of this language may be trivial chatter? Much 
of it may be the refinement and detailed elaboration of myths, as is a large 
portion of the art historical writing that grows out of Barr?s work. But there is no 
use thinking we can ignore this chatter in favor of ?the paintings themselves,? for 
the meaning of the paintings is precisely a function of their use in the elaborate 
game that is abstract art. There is also no use in thinking that we can make an end 
run around the paintings and the discourse they embody into some objective 
?history? that will explain them. Our problem, I would suggest, is to work 
through the visual-verbal matrix that is abstract art, focusing on those places 
where this matrix seems to fracture its gridlike network of binary oppositions and 
admit the presence of something beyond the screen.
114
 
These most famously ?independent? and ?self-referential? works are not ?in-
themselves;? their significance depends on, and is a function of, their interplay with 
theory and the art world.
115
 The exclusive attention to formal values was intimately 
dependent and even fostered by the existence of written texts that supported and 
explained the works of art. MoMA?s strategies reinforced this traditional association 
while changing the character of the association of word and image. This new ?suture? 
(to borrow from Mitchell) became part of a new definition of modern art that became 
 
113
 The flowchart was included in the installation of the show and was the front cover of its catalogue. 
In addition it structured for years the display of MoMA?s permanent collection. 
114
 Mitchell, ? ?Pictura Theoria?,? 367.  
115
 See Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 
103
hegemonic after the war and influenced the artistic production of the modern artistic 
movements that followed. 
In the 1930s modern art was established as the last chapter of the centuries old 
Western tradition. The premise that lies behind this strategy, the unbroken continuity 
of this tradition, disowns (refuses to acknowledge) modern art?s critical foundations 
and radicalism. The discipline imposed a modern definition of art onto the artistic 
manifestations of the past. Concomitantly, it used a methodology and categories of 
analysis derived from the study of a centuries old tradition for the comprehension of 
modern art. This crucial endeavor allowed the institutionalization of the discipline. 
Considering modern art history as icono-logy foregrounds the conventional and 
historical character of modern art history, encouraging us to think of the existence of 
alternative interpretations and reactions against this way of understanding art. 
Like Panofsky?s iconology MoMA?s strategies incorporated new meanings within 
the works of art it exhibited and even suggested meaning for works of art that were 
devised as meaningless.
116
 Mitchell indicates the way to undo Iconology is to unravel 
(unstitch) those ?sutures.? In the 1930s there were scholars and art specialists who 
were against the tendencies that crystallized the institutionalization of modern art. 
Their voices help to comprehend the process that established this new definition.
 117
 
From the point of view of art history the goal is to define the relationship between the 
word and the image that was in the historical horizon of each individual artist in order 
to comprehend his own reaction. This brings us back to C?zanne?s desire?expressed 
 
116
 This is a philosophical problem: to exhibit a meaningless object among meaningful others and to 
explain that it has no meaning transforms ?not having meaning? into a meaning.  
117
 Carl Einstein, George Bataille, Siegfried Kracauer, Aby Warburg,  even Heidegger are some of the 
dissenting voices of the 1930s that began to be recuperated for art history in the last part of the 
twentieth century.    
104
in a letter never intended for publication?that his works were not interpreted as the 
expression of his biography and personality but rather as the result of the exertions of 
his intellect.  
The drive that catalyzed Barr?s powerful synthesis was historically determined by 
political events, as Chapter Seven elucidates. Moreover, modern museography, as 
discussed below, was ideological in itself.  
Panofsky, like most of his German colleagues, was not interested in modern art. 
His methodology was not applicable to the analysis of genres like landscape or still 
life, and least of all, of abstract art. He strove to embed the myth of the Renaissance at 
the center of art history, ignoring the crisis that had taken place at the end of the 
nineteenth century and the reaction of the avant-gardes against those artistic values.
118
 
An acute observer, Panofsky did not fail to appreciate the feat accomplished by Barr 
at MoMA.  In 1955 he commented that art historians in America, 
were able to see the past in a perspective picture undistorted by national and 
regional bias, so were they able to see the present in a perspective picture 
undistorted by personal or institutional parti pris. In Europe where all the 
significant ?movements? in contemporary art had come into being ? there was, 
as a rule, no room for objective discussion, let alone historical analysis.? In the 
United States, such men as Alfred Barr and Henry-Russell Hitchcock... could 
look upon the contemporary scene with the same mixture of enthusiasm and 
detachment and write about it with the same respect for historical method and 
concern for meticulous documentation as required of a study on fourteenth 
century ivories? . Historical distance (we normally require from sixty to eighty 
years) proved to be replaceable by cultural and geographical distance.
119
 
(Emphasis added). 
 
Panofsky uses perspective metaphorically and equates space with time: in Europe it 
was not possible to evaluate modern art objectively. Geographical distance allowed 
 
118
 On this point see Wood, ?Normative Renaissance,? 83. 
119
 Erwin Panofsky, ?Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted 
European,? Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City N Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 328?329. 
105
American scholars to study the (all too recent) history of modern art. Historical 
distance or distance in general, rationality, and order are ideological when they 
explain artistic movements that contest Western epistemology and the very definition 
of art, such as Dada and Surrealism. This perspective (or anamorphosis?) shaped our 
understanding of the art of the end of the nineteenth century.
120
 
Conclusion
Art, defined as a North Atlantic universal, implies a fundamental association of 
word and image that has evolved through time. One of the tasks of the art historian is 
to map the criteria that govern this relationship in the period and region under 
consideration, while keeping in mind that the art historical methodologies and 
categories he uses are North Atlantic universals themselves. This chapter proposes 
that modern art?s autonomy from the traditional association with the word-as-
literature (ut pictura poesis) was fostered by the development of a new relationship 
with logos as word-as-judgment (art criticism), and later by a more fundamental 
suture of the image with the word-as-modern art history/theory (ut pictura theoria).  
The Enlightenment changed the definition of art. By ascribing an aesthetic 
function to works of art, it secured art?s autonomy from other spheres of human 
activity, and promoted the development of specialized disciplines to study it. Kant 
 
120
 Donald Preziosi uses the term anamorphosis to characterize the point of view of the art historian. 
See ?The Question of Art History,? Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter, 1992): 363?386, and Rethinking Art 
History.  
106
believed that society should be guided and oriented by the philosopher/intellectual. 
His Aesthetic was an integral part of his enlightened worldview, as the Third Critique 
made art contingent upon the judgment of a qualified man, the art critic/art historian. 
Neo-Kantianism adapted Kant?s epistemology to the findings of the modern 
sciences, and therefore supported and furthered modern art history?s claims to 
objectivity and universality. A theory of knowledge implies a certain understanding 
of man, and Panofsky?s scholarship embedded the Humanist paradigm within the core 
of the modern art history. Like other North Atlantic universals, this ?definition? of 
Man is often applied without discussion. Moreover, Panofsky?s methodology equates 
the art historian with the Humanist and Kant?s ?civilized? man, who in distancing 
himself from the works of art is able to grasp their meanings. 
In the 1930s modern art history incorporated modern art into its field of study, 
lauding it as the culmination of the Western tradition while containing its radicalness 
and fierce critical edge within safe disciplinary (formalist) parameters. The division 
of the disciplines itself compartmentalized movements such as Dada and 
Surrealism?which consisted of a critique of the foundations of the epistemological 
project of the West that encompassed different areas of culture?within the 
disciplinary boundaries of specialized fields of studies. Furthermore, the views of the 
radical scholars who criticized the nascent modern art history were not included 
within its theoretical outlook. Modern art had to be humanist and foster the ideals that 
were at the core of modern art history. 
C?zanne, ?the father of modern art,? was assigned a paramount role in this 
interpretative model. His art exemplified a new relationship of the image with 
107
documents and the word, and linked the artistic tradition of the nineteenth century 
with the art of the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Given this pivotal 
position, the historiography of C?zanne of the 1930s provides a unique standpoint for 
the critical analysis of the institutionalization of modern art history.  
The next three chapters examine in depth diverging interpretations of the artist?s 
life and oeuvre and therefore three ways of approaching art and art history. While 
Venturi was interested in Art and Aesthetics, Huyghe saw C?zanne as the essential 
Frenchman and considered Art as the expression of Nation. Rewald?s scholarship, on 
the other hand, centered on C?zanne as an historical man. Section Two analyzes how 
this design affected our understanding of the artist?s life and work. 
 
108
?I see no reason why we should treat modern art in a different way from old art; scholarly works are 
just as necessary in this field ? I am, moreover, against over-specialization for the connoisseur. It is 
only through the understanding of many expressions of art that we can truly penetrate into any one. 
Art, after all, is a purification of all the elements that are not responsible for quality; all that is racial 
disappears in the work of art.?  
Lionello Venturi, Art News.
1
?On a r?p?t? cette phrase: ?Refaire Poussin sur nature?. Il est probable que C?zanne ne l?a jamais 
prononc?e. En effet M. Camoin et M. Larguier la rapportent d?une autre fa?on : ?Vivifier Poussin sur 
nature?. Ce qui implique une critique.? 
Lionello Venturi, C?zanne, son art, son oeuvre.
2
Chapter Two: Lionello Venturi?s Impressionist C?zanne
Venturi?s introduction to the 1936 catalogue raisonn? of C?zanne?s paintings, 
watercolors and drawings, C?zanne, son art, son oeuvre, argued that the artist had 
been basically an impressionist artist and that his relationship with the movement was 
the key for understanding his art and his artistic project. This was a bold statement in 
the 1930s when most of the scholarship on modern art either reviled or avoided the 
mention of this movement, and hailed C?zanne as a classic master whose work had 
redressed French art to its true path.
3
The son of the prestigious Italian art historian Adolpho Venturi (1856?
1941)?the founder of the first art history teaching post in Italy and the author of the 
monumental Storia dell?Arte Italiana?Lionello was, at the end of the 1920s, a well 
known specialist in Renaissance painting. In 1931, after being forced to resign to his 
 
1
Id., ?Lively Interview,? 2.  
2
According to Theodore Reff this observation, which was reported by L?o Larguier, is highly 
suspicious. See Reff, ?C?zanne and Pousssin,? 156. Venturi considered Larguier to be a truthful 
source. 
3
In 1984 Richard Shiff confirmed Venturi?s appreciation in his C?zanne and the End of 
Impressionism. Shiff does not analyze the work of the Italian scholar.   
109
position at the University of Turin, he moved to Paris, and started to concentrate 
almost exclusively on modern art.
4
Venturi?s C?zanne reflects not only the author?s well defined political 
ideology, but also his very definite ideas about the epistemological foundations of art 
history and its methodologies, as he was actively involved in the debate about the 
discipline that was taking place at the time.
5
In the 1930s he presented papers on this 
subject matter at international congresses of art history and aesthetics and, in 1935, 
published the article ?Les Instituts universitaires et l?histoire de l?art? in the Bulletin 
of the Office des instituts d?arch?ologie et d?histoire de l?art, which became the 
subject of much debate. The History of Art Criticism?a book that summarizes his 
ideas on these issues?was published in the United States in 1936, the same year as 
the publication of the book on C?zanne. Because Venturi was simultaneously 
engaged in several anti-fascist activities, he was followed by the Italian secret police.
6
This chapter argues that Venturi?s approach to C?zanne reflects both his 
political ideology and his critique of the discipline, and that this is one of the reasons 
why the art historian?s work has not received much scholarly attention outside Italy.
7
4
Golan observes that only a small group of twelve professors denied the oath to the allegiance to the 
Fascist party and that Venturi was the only one among them who was still young and had a promising 
Academic career before him. See ?The Critical Moment. Lionello Venturi in America,? in Artists, 
Intellectuals and World War II The Pontigny Encounter at Mount Holyoke College 1942?1944, eds. C. 
E. G. Benfey and K. Remmler (Amherst Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 122. 
5
In 1936 he stated that he had been thinking of this problem for at least twenty five years, that is, since 
the outbreak of First World War. See the ?Preface? to his History of Art Criticism (New York: E.P. 
Dutton & Co., 1936). 
6
See Valeri, ?Venturi antifascista,? and Laura Iamurri, ?Venturi en esilio,? both  in Stefano Valeri, 
?Venturi orizzonti.? The assassination of the Rosselli brothers in 1937 demonstrated the danger 
associated with these activities.  
7
See especially Maria Mimito Lamberti, ?Lionello Venturi sulla via dell?Impressionismo,? Annali 
della Scuola normale di Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia (1971): 257?277; and her Lionello Venturi e 
la Pittura a Torino 1919?1931 (Turin, 2000); De C?zanne all?Arte Astratta Omaggio a Lionello 
Venturi, exh. cat., eds. Giorgio Cortenova and Lamberto Lambarelli, Galleria Comunale d?Arte 
Moderna, Verona, 1992; Stefano Valeri, ?Venturi orizzonti.? See also the extensive an illuminating 
110
It first considers some aspects of pre-World War II Italian art history that provides 
insight into this scholar?s approach to modern art in general and to C?zanne in 
particular. 
Paradoxically, this sole chapter, even though it deals with Italian art history 
does not reflect on the Renaissance and Humanism as North Atlantic universals. This 
is because Venturi?s understanding of modern art is pervaded by an anti-classical 
stance derived from his opposition to Mussolini?s use of the Italian past as a rallying 
point for Fascism. Venturi?s methodological standpoint was supported by his 
awareness of the writings of the School of Vienna, which was in part due to Italy?s 
historically close ties to Austria. His interpretation of modern art illustrates a Western 
stance that was both anti-Fascist and anti-classical and thus problematizes any 
simplistic approach to the highly politicized chess game that had the Renaissance and 
a philological (humanist) methodology as pawns. 
Two other influences were of paramount importance for the young Italian art 
historians working at the beginning of the twentieth century: the presence in the 
country of the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865?1959), and the 
idealistic aesthetics of Benedetto Croce (1866?1952). Their publications and personal 
approach to art and art history spurred young scholars to examine the foundations of 
the discipline and to develop their own methodologies.
8
Under these influences Italian 
 
work on Venturi by Laura Iamurri ? Lionello Venturi in esilio,? Ricerche di Storia dell?arte (2002): 
59?69; ?Berenson, la pittura moderna e la nuova critica italiana,? Prospettiva 87?88 (July-October, 
1997): 69?90; ?La tradizione, il culto del passato, l?identit? nazionale: un inchiesta sull?arte francese? 
Prospettiva 105 (January, 2002): 86?98; ??Apr?s l?art moderne?: esposizioni, critici e riviste dalla 
crisis dei primi anni ?30 all?Esposizione Italiana del Jeu de Paume,? Les Cahiers d?histoire de l?art 3 
(2005): 125?135. Lately Golan has published ?Critical Moment.? See n. 4 above.   
8
As Argan once commented ?la formazione crociana fu la formazione di tutti I giovani intellettuali 
italiani almeno fino agli anni ?40.? See Augusta Monferini, ?Il gusto dei primitivi de Lionello Venturi,? 
in Storia del arte (2002), 47.  
111
art historians helped to effect the integration of modern art into the overall history of 
art. Venturi?s scholarship affords a unique opportunity to examine how these 
influences determined his interpretation of modern art and C?zanne.  
 
Italian Foundations: The Dialogue Past-Present, Present-Past
Classicism, Humanism and the Renaissance were Italy?s local traditions, and 
even a heavy inheritance, unlike in other countries where such tropes were ideals, 
goals to be attained through cultivation, and objects of desire. Conversely, most of the 
young Italian intellectuals considered modern French art the ideal goal of the 
teleological development of Western art.  
Finding affinities with the work of the old masters was a common modernist 
strategy for the validation of modern experimental art. Emile Bernard, for example, in 
his first article on C?zanne for Les Hommes d?Aujourd?hui in 1892, compared his art 
to Giotto?s.  
As noted in Chapter One, the German founders of art history projected a 
modern conception of art onto the past, but did not deal with it as professionals.
9
The 
founders of the School of Vienna, on the contrary, were more aware of modern art 
and incorporated it as part of their strategies to reappraise non-classical artistic 
movements. Young Italian art historians of the early twentieth century published 
 
9
Gaehtgens, ?Rapports de l?histoire de l?art.? See also Kathryn Brush The Shaping of Art History. 
Wilhelm V?ge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1996, and ?Wilhelm V?ge and the Role of Human Agency in the Making of Medieval 
Sculpture: Reflections on an Art Historical Pioneer,? Konsthistorisk Tidskrift (1993): 69?83. 
112
articles on modern art and intervened publicly on its behalf. Moreover, they used the 
name of the modern French masters to support new interpretations of the work of the 
old masters and to validate the additions they proposed to the canon. Modern French 
art was for these art historians the yardstick against which they confronted their 
national tradition.  
In his 1897 The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance Berenson states 
that the painters of this school were exceptionally gifted with the ability to feel and 
express space. In order to support his argument he remarks,  
Believe me, if you have no native feeling for space, not all the science, not all the 
labour in the world will give it to you. And yet without this feeling can be no 
perfect landscape. In spite of the exquisite modeling of C?zanne, who gives the 
sky its tactile values as perfectly as Michelangelo has given them to the human 
figure, in spite of all Monet?s communication of the very pulse-beat of the sun?s 
warmth over fields and trees, we are still waiting for a real art of landscape. And 
this will come only when some artist, modeling skies like C?zanne?s, able to 
communicate light and heat as Monet does, will have a feeling for space rivaling 
Perugino?s or even Raphael?s. 
10
 
By inserting this kind of comment in his analysis of the art of some of the 
most important artists of the Renaissance, Berenson equated modern artists to the old 
masters at a time when the former?s worth was still very much debated in France. In 
this way he asserted and reinforced the idea of the fundamental continuity of art 
through the ages.  
 
10
 Bernhard Berenson, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: G.P. Putnam's 
Sons: Knickerbocker Press, 1907), 100?101. See Mary Ann Calo, Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth 
Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 76. This author also records a later comment 
in which Berenson clarified his position: ?C?zanne represents that same tradition [Piero della 
Francesca] almost totally transferred to landscape, with his absolutely cubic values of plastic forms 
affirming themselves in a way which never occurred before, and values of ?form? being transferred 
from the country to the sky, which until then had been the background and scenario of paintings. 
C?zanne incorporates the sky with the earth; it forms part of a whole, and is the live interior of a solid.? 
Ibid., 208 n.130. Calo also comments on Rewald understanding on Berenson?s reception of C?zanne. 
Ibid., 77?78. 
113
The novelty of Berenson?s strategy was noted by the Italian scholar Carlo 
Placci (1861?1941), a friend of Denis, von Hildebrand, and Berenson, who in his 
1912 review of Denis? Th?ories observes,  
A guisa dell?e intelligente critico Berenson, che nei suoi aurei volumetti non esita 
un istante ad unire i nomi d?un Degas o d?un C?zanne a quelli pi? venerabili del 
nostro Rinascimento, cos? Maurice Denis, partendosi in senso contrario dai 
propri contemporanei, osa metterli nella medesima schiera di certe sommit? 
antiche.
11
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Whereas Denis incorporated the name of old masters in his comments about modern 
art, Berenson interspersed the names of modern artists in the history of [past] art.   
In 1939, in a letter to Berenson Venturi avows that,   
Ero ancora ragazzo quando lessi il suo cenno sul rapporto estetico tra Giotto e 
C?zanne. Ci pensai su a lungo, e infine capii ch?Ella aveva raggione. Oggi sono 
sempre pi? convinto che senza aver compreso la pittura moderna non si pu? 
intendere la pittura antica. Che cosa d?altronde faceano un Cavalcaselle o un 
Morelli? Giudicavano la pittura antica secondo i principi della pittura moderna. 
Purtroppo per loro la pittura moderna era la pittura academica. Di qui l?errore dei 
loro apprezzamenti, quando il loro ingegno non bast?. 
12
 
This letter demonstrates that Berenson?s scholarship had influenced Venturi?s 
understanding of the discipline and had helped him to realize its fundamental 
anachronism, which he considered in a positive light. The scholar who is aware of the 
proper tendencies of modern art can have a correct comprehension of the art of the 
past. In a previous letter, dated January 4, 1935, Venturi states his intention of 
applying the methodology devised for the study of the past to modern art. The letter 
also establishes the important role photographs played in his approach to art, 
Poich? i pittori moderni non sono stati sinora studiati con la disciplina dello 
storico dell?arte, spero di poter dire qualcosa di nuovo e d?interessante su di essi. 
 
11
 Carlo Placci, ?IL neo-tradizionalismo dei francesi moderni,? Il Marzocco, XVII, 52 (December 29, 
1912), quoted in Iamurri, ?Berenson, la pittura moderna,? 74. 
12
 Quoted in Iamurri, ?Venturi in esilio,? 65. 
114
Sarei molto felice di averLa qui tra le mie fotografie, e di potere discorrere con 
Lei di pittura moderna.
13
 
Even Meyer Shapiro, one of Berenson?s critics, acknowledged that he had 
been the first internationally recognized American connoisseur and art critic, and that 
his scholarship had paved the way for the formalist approach of writers like Clive 
Bell and Royer Fry.
14
 
Berenson had studied at Harvard with Charles Eliot Norton, a friend and 
admirer of John Ruskin. Although the ?Harvard or Fogg method? of formalist 
connoisseurship was established in the mid 1890s, that is, after Berenson had left the 
university, it was based on the same principles that had shaped his education.
15
 This 
formalist approach to art history encouraged Berenson to compare the works of the 
Renaissance with paintings by modern artists. Moreover, he was among the first to 
recognize photography?s value as a heuristic tool and as the catalyst of modern 
connoisseurship.
16
 
Preziosi proposes to consider the Fogg Museum of the period as an ever 
growing archive that kept an almost infinite number of reproductions of works of art. 
The students were trained to develop intellectual models and to create categories that 
 
13
 Iamurri, ?Venturi in esilio,? 61.  
14
 In 1937 Howard Hannay commented that Fry?s ?form? or ?plasticity? corresponded to Berenson?s 
?plastic values.? Fry sketched for the first time his theory of significant form in 1909 in his article ?An 
Essay in Aesthetics,? where he argued that ?Forms themselves generate in us emotional states.? See 
Sandra Phillips, ?The Art Criticism of Walter Pach,? Art Bulletin 65 (March, 1983), 109. 
15
 Berenson received the AB (ARTIUM BACCALAUREAT) in 1887 and later followed his studies in 
Europe. At that time there was no graduate program of art history in the United States. See Kantor, ? 
?Fogg Method?.?  
16
 In 1893 Berenson authored a text praising the positive influence of photography in connoisseurship 
?Bernard Berenson on Isochromatic Film,? in Art History through the Camera?s Lens ed. Helene E. 
Roberts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1995). See also Frederick N. Boher 
?Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of art history,? in Art history 
and Its Institutions ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002). About the use of photographs 
by Berenson see Kenneth Clark, ?Bernard Berenson,? The Burlington Magazine 102 (September, 
1960): 381?386. The use of photographs for the study of art is discussed in Chapter Five. 
115
explained the connections that linked a selected group of images.
17
 Photographs 
suggest more daring visual comparisons and foster the elaboration of abstract 
rationalizations to validate them. Moreover, their use inclines us to think that there is 
a non-problematic continuity between the artistic manifestations of the past and the 
present.  
In 1892, while staying in Paris, Berenson had begun to appreciate modern art, 
as he commented in a letter to a friend, to ?enjoy the art? in the pictures.
18
 At the end 
of the nineteenth century the scholar settled near Florence, where he established a 
friendly rivalry with his neighbor, the American born Italian painter Egisto Fabbri, an 
admirer and collector of C?zanne?s art who might have been responsible for calling 
Berenson?s attention to the art of the master. 
19
 
Even though at the beginning of the century the Italian academia rejected 
Berenson?s scholarship, it was greatly influential among young art historians, 
especially because at that time the connoisseur was preoccupied with the theoretical 
aspects of the discipline and in finding new ways for thinking about art. Croce?s 
?intuizione lirica? was rather undefined and, denied the autonomy of the different arts 
which he considered dependent upon poetry, whereas  ?l?estetica Berenson? afforded 
a way of writing about the more tangible, material aspects of the plastic arts and to 
refer to specific works of art.  
Italy?s political situation and the cultural policies of the Fascist regime also 
affected the way Italian art history was written at the time. Specifically, the dialogue 
 
17
 See Donald Preziosi, ?The Question of Art History? Critical Inquiry (Winter, 1992): 363?386; and 
Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 
18
 See Calo, Bernard Berenson, 37.  
19
 Quoted in Calo, Bernard Berenson, 79. 
116
of past and present had ideological connotations as this ideology favored the fusion of 
past and present: the apprehension of the past in the light of present events and the 
perception of the present as a re-enactment of the past (historicization of the present). 
After 1919 Fascism gained greater strength and in 1922 Benito Mussolini became 
Premier. Culturally, the regime preferred Imperial Roman and classical art but also 
incorporated a watered down, classicized version of Futurism, as most of the artists 
and intellectuals associated with the movement supported the regime.   
The Futurist movement lead by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876?1944) had 
been one of the most provocative and avant-garde movements of the early part of the 
century. Marinetti?s famous call to burn the museums, his violent stance toward the 
past? ?a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more 
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace?
20
?were motivated by Italy?s cultural 
stagnation and the poet?s desire to generate change in a country overwhelmed by the 
weight of its own glorious past. Like the other Futurist the poet subdued his 
aggressive stance after the War. 
21
 
Culture and aesthetics played an important role as part of the regime?s 
strategies to gain the support and blind allegiance of the masses and the middle class. 
The influential Actualist philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (1875?1944) postulated a 
particular conflation of the past and the present in the historic event, and therefore 
contested historicism and the rational approach to the diachronic development of 
 
20
 Filippo Tomamaso  Marinetti ?The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism?, Le Figaro, (February 20, 
1909) in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 
289. 
21
 Already in 1910 Ardengo Soffici a Futurist artist used C?zanne?s ?modern? plastic vocabulary and 
claimed that it was as aspect of the toscanit?, that is, of the tradition inherited from the ?primitive? 
trecento artists. See Mark Antliff, ?Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,? Art Bulletin 84 (March, 
2002), 158. 
117
history.
22
 As Claudio Fogu explains, this approach collapsed the historical and the 
historiographical as it suggested that the present eventful act was historical per se: 
Merging the related notions of eventfulness (event), unmediated presence (site), 
and signification (speech) elicited by the notion of historic-ness, the idea of 
making history attributed to Fascism a historic agency that acted on historial 
facts, representations, and consciousness At the same time, the idea of making 
history associated with the formation of a historic imaginery that declined the 
past in the present tense and inscribed historical meaning under the immanent 
rubric of presence.
 23
 
The strategies derived from this understanding of history referred also to the 
ceremonies and use of images of the Catholic Church.
24
 The cultural policies of 
Fascism and the philosophy of history that encouraged them might have favored the 
reception and even fostered the development of comparisons that involved the work 
of artists from different periods. They were justified as ?intuitive? relationships or as 
?spiritual? kinship. This kind of phrases abound in the art history of the 1920s and 
1930s.  
Moreover Italian Fascism developed a modern and effective museography and its 
approach to display had to be taken into consideration by those who wanted to 
counter the pervading influence of the regime.
25
 Italian art was used as propaganda 
and the Duce himself supported several international exhibitions and secured the loan 
 
22
 This particular understanding of the role of tradition in shaping the present must be understood as the 
Italian equivalent of the German Kultur and Blut und Boden (?blood and soil?). 
23
 Claudio Fogu, ?To Make History Present,? in Donatello among the Blackshirts. History and 
Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy eds., Claudia Lazzaro, and Roger Crum Roger (Ithaca: 
Cornell University Press, 2005), 34. The author analyses the reaction of the regime to Croce?s critique 
to historicism. The philosopher?s stand against Fascism might have spurred Venturi?s political 
engagement.  
24
 Claudio Fogu, ?Actualism and the Fascist Historic Imaginary,? History and Theory 42 (2003), 196?
220; ?Il Duce Taumaturgo: Modernist Rhetoric in Fascist Representations of History,? 
Representations, (1997), 24?51.  
25
 See Fogu, ?History Present,? Claudia Lazzaro ?Forging a Visible Fascist Nation. Strategies for 
Fusing Past and Present,? and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ?Flash Memories. (Sironi on Exhibit),? in Donatello 
among the Blackshirts.
118
of some of Italy?s greatest masterpieces.
26
 The idea behind these exhibits, that 
included the work of modern Italian artists, was that the tradition that had produced 
those works of art was still alive in modern Italy.  
In 1922 the Fascist art critic Ugo Ojetti organized the Mostra della Pittura 
Italiana del Sei e Settecento at the Palazzo Pitti, Florence.
27
 As Francis Haskell has 
noted, even if it was part of a string of mega exhibitions in which nationalism and 
competitiveness among countries had the upper hand, ?it permanently altered the 
public?s perception of the history of European art.?
28
 
In the catalogue Ojetti claimed that the exhibition would give living artists the joy 
?of finding in Italy, of finding even in these two centuries of Italian art, examples and 
teachers more reliable, more sound ? than those that it is fashionable to seek out 
over the Alps.?
29
 Ojetti claimed that modern artists could find in the Italian tradition 
everything that made modern art so attractive for them. As Haskell notes, the 
overambitious organizers,  
[T]ried to argue that their great masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries had not only been of utmost importance to their contemporaries in 
Spain, France, Flanders and Holland, but had also anticipated the ?modern 
movement? of the nineteenth century which had so regrettably confined itself to 
France? Bruised by the apparent marginalization of modern Italian painting, 
Roberto Longhi (and his followers), just as much as Ojetti exalted the seicento 
 
26
 For the political use of the art of the Renaissance at this time see Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral 
Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
2000) and Emily Braun, ?Leonardo?s Smile,? in Donatello among the Blackshirts.
27
 Ugo Ojetti was an ?Influential journalist and art critic, organizer of art exhibitions, member of the 
Royal Academy from 1930, founder of periodicals on the arts (Dedalo, Pegaso, and Pan), and ardent 
Fascist, most vocally and visibly advocated the conservative traditionalist camp in architecture. This 
?ultra-refined conservative aesthete? was also a millionaire, president of Alfa Romeo, and board 
member of major corporations.? Lazzaro, ?Visible Fascist Nation,? 27. 
28
 Haskell, Ephemeral Museum, 130. 
29
 Ugo Ojetti, La Mostra della Pittura italiana del Seicento e el Settecento, a Palazzo Pitti, (Milan, 
1924), 12, as quoted in Haskell, Ephemeral Museum, 135. 
119
and settecento for having ?anticipated? ?. not only Corot and Constable but also 
Courbet and Manet. 
30
 
In 1924 none of these artists needed to be defended in France any longer. Ojetti?s 
claims nonetheless exemplify how the Fascist regime used art history for its own 
nationalist purposes and how this impinged on the history of art history.  Ojetti 
reassessed non-classical periods of Italian art that had been underestimated and 
overshadowed by the contemporary artistic output in other countries. One of the 
scholar?s arguments is that the Italian artists of that period had anticipated both genres 
and stylistic innovations that characterize modern art. His appeal was to 
contemporary Italian artists, whose work he hoped to influence. Ojetti?s efforts 
implicitly reinforced the French claims to cultural superiority but at the same time his 
argument suggested the idea of an unbroken and harmonious development of Western 
tradition throughout the ages.  
 
Roberto Longhi?s C?zanne
Already in 1915 Venturi affirmed, ?Debbo a Bernardo Berenson le idee sul valore 
plastico della pittura fiorentina e del carattere asiatico e mistico de la pittura sienese. 
Debbo a Roberto Longhi la comprensione della prospettiva pittorica comme piano 
 
30
 Haskell, Ephemeral Museum, 136?137. 
120
cromatico.?
31
 (Emphasis added). Like Venturi himself Roberto Longhi (1890?1970) 
had been influenced by Berenson and the writings of the School of Vienna. 
Nevertheless, they had different approaches to art history. As Giulio Argan 
commented,   
[D]u c?t? du connaisseur, dont le chef reconnu ?tait Roberto Longhi, ce dernier a
d?velopp? une recherche qui est tr?s respectable sur les structures figuratives et
l?, on pourrait dire, sur la verbalisation de l?image. Tandis que, de l?autre c?t?, il
?tait surtout question de la recherche des id?es dans les ?uvres d?art.
32
 
Longhi represented the conservative and even reactionary approach to art history 
centered on realism and naturalism that Venturi opposed.
33
 Nevertheless, he had 
befriended the artist Umberto Boccioni and for a very short time before the Great War 
he had publicly defended Futurism before the war, whereas Venturi disliked this 
artistic movement.
34
 
Even though Roberto Longhi did not write specifically on C?zanne, the artist is 
conspicuously ?present? in his article ?Piero dei Franceschi e lo sviluppo della pittura 
veneziana? he wrote for Adolfo Venturi?s magazine L?Arte in 1914.
35
 He was writing 
 
31
 Lionello Venturi, ?La posizione dell?Italia nelle arti figurative,? 1915, quoted in Iamurri, ?Berenson, 
la pittura moderna,? 85. This was a fundamental aspect of Venturi?s analysis of the work of C?zanne. 
See specifically C?zanne son art, 33. 
32
 Their differences, according to Giulio Argan, would influence the history of Italian art history until 
the 1990s. See Giulio Carlo Argan interview by Alain Jaubert and Marc Perelman, Editions Verdier, 
1991. http://www.editions-verdier.fr/v2/auteur-argan-3.html.
33
 Renato Barilli explains: ?[P]er Longhi, [defender of Caravaggio] bisogna combattere il formalismo, 
l?eleganza compositiva, un certo classicismo che noi italiani avremmo nel sangue; e conquistre invece 
la ?pittura della realt??, anche se ci? comporta invitabili dosi massicce di illusione, di fedelt? ottica. Per 
Venturi, al contrario, il nemico capitale da combatiere ? proprio l?illusionismo, la rappresentazione, e 
per ottenere un esito del genere conviene chiedere aiuto ai ?primitivi.?  ??Il gusto dei primitivi? e i 
macchiaioli,? in C?zanne all?Arte Astratta,  52. 
34
 See Claudio Spadoni, Da Renoir a De St?el Roberto Longhi e il moderno, exh. cat., Museo d'Arte 
della Citt?, Ravena, 2003. Concerning Venturi dislike for Futurism see Giacomo Agosti,?Questioni de 
?logica degli occhi? 5 lettere di Lionello Venturi a Roberto Longhi 1913?1915,? Autografo (1992): 73?
84. 
35
 The artist Ardengo Soffici was since 1908 an ardent defender of C?zanne in Italy. Helped by Denis 
he endeavored to organize an Impressionist exhibition in Florence in 1910. There were two 
?spectacular? collections of C?zanne works near Florence at the time: Egisto Fabbri?s and Charles 
Loeser?s and both collectors were friends of Berenson. See Jean-Fran?ois Rodriguez La Reception de 
121
at the same time ?I pittori futuristi? for La Voce and the essay Scultura futurista 
Boccioni, which is noteworthy because in the three texts he uses the same vocabulary 
and categories of stylistic analysis.
36
 
Longhi takes issue with Giorgio Vasari?s interpretation of the Renaissance. He 
argues that Vasari wrongly identified the naturalism of the Florentine art of the 
Quattrocento with ?l?imitazione del vero, e non la trasfigurazione pittorica di esso.? 
Longhi observes that in this way, Vasari stressed the importance of line and volume 
in art in order to argue for the centrality of the art of Masaccio, Andrea del Castagno, 
and Michelangelo in the history of art.  
Longui maintains that perspective was created as a formal device and not as a 
mathematical method that increased the illusionistic/naturalistic effect of paintings.
 37
 
Il sussidio che la scienza d? alla resa prospettica, non ? un sussidio a priori ma a
posteriori e sorge dopo l?artista ha visto prospetticamente;? Essa perci? non ? 
naturalismo, perch? tutti sanno che la prospectiva nella realt? non esiste che in 
determinate situazioni?ci? che fa supporre gi? nell?artista una scelta di 
situazioni?neppure ? scienza, ma si serve della scienza, come di un elemento 
puramente tecnico, non pi? importante della chimica dei pigmenti colorati. 
38
 
Longhi notices that the historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818?1897) had followed 
Vasari?s lead, and concludes that as a consequence art history had overlooked an 
important contemporary artistic current centered on the ?sintetismo prospettico di 
 
l?Impressionnisme ? Florence en 1910, (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 1994), and 
Francesca Bardazzi, ?C?zanne a Firenze,? in C?zanne, Fattori e il ?900 in Italia  (Florence: Artificio, 
1997). 
36
 Florence had a very active cultural modern life. Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini were 
responsible of the publication of three important magazines: Il Lionardo published in 1903 was 
followed by La Voce (1908?1913) that included Ardengo Soffici?s violent articles in defense of 
modern art. As Prezzolini and Soffici were mainly concerned with poetry and art and not so much with 
politics, they founded Lacerba in 1913.  
37
 This is precisely the conclusion of James Elkins in his The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell 
University Press, 1994.) See Chapters Five and Six of this dissertation.   
38
 Roberto Longhi, ?Piero dei Franceschi e lo sviluppo della pittura veneziana,? L?Arte XVII (1914), 
fasc. III, 199.   
122
forma colore.? Longhi?s article considers Piero, an artist that at the time was not well 
known and whose art was undervalued, as the representative of an artistic tradition of 
painting that had opposed the Florentine approach to art. The author opposes 
Masaccio?s spatiality, achieved through an illusionistic plasticity that opened the way 
for chiaroscuro, to Piero?s ?spazialit? architettonica ottenuta con l?intervallarsi 
regolare di volume regolari.?
39
 In and with perspective Piero attains the synthesis of 
form and color.
40
 This art,  
sintetizzava ... sobriamente la terza nelle due dimensioni, riportava lo spazio alla 
superficie per mezzo dei suoi limiti sintetici, e si manifestaba cos? sommamente 
atto allo sviluppo di un grande colorismo....  
?Perch??diceva Piero dei Franceschi nel suo Trattato della prospectiva?la 
pictura non e senon dimostrationi de superficie.? 
41
 
Longhi?s description of this color-perspective and his quote of Piero?s treatise 
derive from Denis famous 1890 statement: ?It is well to remember that a picture, 
before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a plane 
surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.?
42
 The way C?zanne is 
introduced in the article demonstrates that Longhi had also C?zanne?s art in mind.     
Ecco infatti nella Verificazione della Croce i gruppi fermati nelle loro accolte 
impietrate,... ecco in alto il paesello, nel quale, oltre l?arco di entrata, non si 
troverebbe una curva; solidificazione, non pi? raggiunta che da Paolo nella 
veduta di Gardanne. 
43
 
39
 Longhi, ?Piero dei Franceschi,? 200. 
40
 ?[Piero] offriva a chi volesse svilupparlo per nuove attuazioi il risultato complesso del sintetismo 
prospettico di forma-colore.? Longhi, ?Piero dei Franceschi,? 206. 
41
 Longhi, ?Piero dei Franceschi,? 201.  
42
 Maurice Denis, ?Definition of Neotraditionism,? in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 94. 
43
 Longhi, ?Piero dei Franceschi,?  203. In the Battle against Cosroe, Longhi sees that the banner with 
the cross ?appare come simbolo del colore?pi? che del cristianesimo?...e sull?altro di Cosroe la 
figura moresca si distende con un affetto di colore tanto moderno almeno quanto ? la servente affricana 
nell?Olympia di Manet!? Ibid., 204. 
123
The fact that Longhi does not refer to C?zanne by his family name indicates 
that he either thought that the public would be able to recognize the name of the artist 
and mentally visualize the Gardanne painting, or was snubbing his audience and 
suggesting that they should update their taste. 
44
 As Iamurri notices,  
nel saggio di Longhi il pittore provenzale sembra essere la lente attraverso la 
quale mettere meglio a fuoco l?opera di Piero e quella del suo continuatore 
?prospettico? Antonello da Messina. La lettura dell?opera del maestro di Aix 
come reazione all?effimero fulgore impressionista, avvalorata dalla 
pubblicazione degli appunti e delle note prese da chi lo aveva incontrato in 
Provenza negli ultimi anni della sua vita, era nota in Italia attraverso i suggestivi 
accenni di Berenson e gli articoli di Soffici: sulla scorta degli scritti di Emile 
Bernard (e forse anche del saggio di Denis recentemente ripubblicato) ? Longhi 
poteva evidenziare il valore prospettico e il carattere architettonico dell?episodio 
della ?Verifica della Croce? dipinto da Piero ad Arezzo con un esplicito richiamo 
a C?zanne.
45
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Longhi?s interpretation of the art of C?zanne was rooted on Denis?s and Bernard?s 
accounts of what the artist had said and of what his art was about. This traditionalist 
approach to the art of the master that considered that he had reacted against 
Impressionism?s esthetic principles.  
In 1914 Longhi also published Breve ma veridica storia della pittura italiana 
which gives the context for understanding his approach to Piero. The conclusion of 
the book is devoted to the French painting of the nineteenth century, as the formalist 
method allows him to contend that it is the continuation and culmination of Italian art. 
As Antonio del Guercio concludes, 
Un rapporto alla cui base egli pone Caravaggio e i Veneziani, precedenti senza i 
quali Courbet e Manet gli appaiono impensabili, e che egli vede successivamente 
 
44
 In 1962, Longhi defended his article from the accusation of having given a cubist interpretation of 
Piero stating that he had derived the idea of the ?sintesi prospettica di forma-colore? from the work of 
C?zanne and Seurat. See Antonio Del Guercio, ?Roberto Longhi 1913. L?orizzonte critico del suo 
rapporto con l?arte del Novecento,? in Da Renoir a De St?el, 61. 
45
Iamurri, ?Berenson, la pittura moderna,? 83. The author noticed that Longhi?s Antonello da Messina, 
whom he describes telling to a friend: ?Senti: tutto nella natura ? sferico o cilindrico!?, was based on 
Bernard?s account of his visit to C?zanne. 
124
apprisi con C?zanne a un ?testamento che potrebbe essere quello di Piero dei 
Franceschi o di Antonello da Messina.? 
46
 
Longhi finds that the most innovative aspects of modern art had a precedent in the 
Italian past. Moreover, he uses C?zanne to enlarge the canon of the Renaissance. In 
so doing he proposes an alternative interpretation of the history of Western art and a 
formalist elucidation of perspective. Ultimately, Longhi?s scholarship was closer to 
Ojetti?s than to Venturi?s, as the goal of his comparisons was to demonstrate the 
centrality of the Italian tradition even when praising modern French art. More 
importantly, his interpretation of modern art was basically conservative as he did not 
think of this art as the crisis of the artistic tradition originated in the Renaissance but 
as its prolongation and culmination.  
 
Venturi?s C?zanne  
Venturi?s writings on Impressionism and C?zanne, along with the fact that he 
was the immediate predecessor of Rewald as the most eminent C?zanne scholar, 
would alone justify the attention given to him in this study. Furthermore, his case is 
important because it demonstrates that in the 1930s there were other epistemological 
models to construe modern art and the role C?zanne played in it.  
Venturi?s definition of modernity did not hinge on the continuity of the 
Western tradition and on the centrality of classicism and Humanism, as he understood 
 
46
 See Del Guercio  ?Roberto Longhi,? 55?56. 
125
impressionism as the product of a more general epistemological crisis. His 
scholarship proves that there existed in the 1930s what might be called ?non-
humanist? or ?non-classic? models of art history and modernity that were conceived 
as part of the fight against Totalitarianism.
47
 
The result of extensive research and documentary analysis, the introductory 
essay to the catalogue raisonn? summarizes Venturi?s interpretation of C?zanne and 
his approach to the scholarship on the artist. Already in 1937 Rewald commended 
Venturi for his approach to sources and declared that the book opened a new era in 
C?zanne studies.
48
 While Rewald was not interested in aesthetics or in the 
epistemological underpinnings of the discipline, he believed that judicious sources 
could reflect the ?truth.? However, at the time, both scholars considered it important 
to liberate C?zanne?s historiography from the ideologies that had suffused previous 
scholarship on the artist. As Venturi remarks in the first paragraphs of his 1936 
catalogue raisonn?:  
Le moment est venu de nous d?gager de ces pr?jug?s, de demeurer indiff?rentes 
? la ?modernit??, au ?caract?re contemporain? de l?art du ma?tre, de distinguer sa 
th?orie ou son go?t de son art, et l?individualit? de l?homme de la personnalit? 
de l?artiste, pour nous occuper uniquement de la fa?on dont sa mani?re de sentir 
s?est r?alis?e en peinture. Nous devons parler de lui comme de Giotto, de Titien 
ou de Rembrandt. On ne discute pas pour savoir s?ils ont ?t? ou non des artistes; 
on cherche ? comprendre comment ils ont ?t? artistes. C?est l?unique moyen de 
clore la s?rie des chroniques et des histoires oratoires, et de commencer une s?rie 
d??tudes sur la v?ritable histoire de l?artiste.
49
 (Emphasis added.) 
 
47
 Another example of this kind of approach ?although with not so clear political ideology ?with regard 
to C?zanne is Fritz Novotny?s C?zanne Ende. See Chapter Five. 
48
 John Rewald, ?A propos du catalogue raisonn? de l??uvre de Paul C?zanne et de la chronologie de 
cette ?uvre,? La Renaissance  (March-April, 1937), 53. 
49
 Venturi, C?zanne son art, 13. 
126
Venturi?s critique of sources was stringent and based on a long and quasi 
philosophical reflection on the foundations and limits of art history. He went far 
beyond Rewald in doubting the truthfulness of the written sources as he was 
suspicious of the men of letters?s descriptions of the artists and even of C?zanne?s 
own words.
50
 His critical stance towards art history?s philological methodologies 
allowed Venturi to think of the specificity of the two discourses (word and image) 
and to distance himself from the documentation. He argued that, whatever C?zanne 
might have thought he was doing, it is not certain that he consciously understood his 
practice and his experience or that he was able to translate them into words.
51
 
Dans sa peinture, C?zanne  a donc trouv? le rapport entre l?ordre et la sensibilit? 
de mani?re ? les rendre indissociables ; mais dans ses r?flexions sur ce qu?il 
faisait il a constamment maintenu la distinction des deux termes. Il ?tait 
parfaitement convaincu qu?il lui fallait se fonder sur la sensibilit?, et savait 
d?autre part, m?me en 1904, qu?il poss?dait une sensibilit? vive ; mais il voulait 
obtenir l?ordre. S?parant dans sa pens?e ce qu?il unissait dans son art, il se 
mettait dans l?impossibilit? de croire jamais avoir atteint son but. C?est qu?en art 
on ne peut atteindre un ordre absolu, en tant que l?art ne peut-il se donner 
d?autre ordre qu?un acheminement vers l?ordre. ? Quand il peignait, il se 
gardait bien d?en venir ? un ordre abstrait ; mais quand il parlait, il supposait 
qu?il y arriverait et d?clarait au premier venu : ?je ne sais pas r?aliser.? Tous 
confondirent la r?alisation vulgaire, le ?fini des imb?ciles? avec la r?alisation de 
l?ordre comme l?entendait C?zanne. 
52
 (Emphasis added)  
 
C?zanne possessed a strong sensibility which he aspired to control. He was successful 
in that endeavor in his art, but not with his intellect. The mental discourse is 
 
50
 ?La lutte de l?artiste contre la nature, quoiqu?en aient pu penser les po?tes de tous les temps, n?a 
jamais exist? ; ou plut?t elle existe dans l?opinion des artistes, dans leurs paroles (m?me dans celles de 
C?zanne) mais pas dans leur art. La voie de l?art et al voie de la nature sont parall?les; elles ne 
sauraient pas se rencontrer.? Venturi, C?zanne son art, 19. 
51
 In 1939 Maurice Denis manifested the same point of view. C?zanne knew all the theories and he 
would try them all when painting in front of the motif. He would change theories constantly. ?Ah! sans 
doute c??tait un penseur, tous les peintres, ou presque tous, sont des penseurs. C?zanne ?tait un 
penseur, mais qui ne pensait pas tout les jours la m?me chose. Tous ceux qui l?ont approch? lui ont fait 
dire ce qu?ils souhaitaient de lui. ? J?imagine que comme beaucoup de peintres, il se levait le matin 
avec une th?orie en t?te, un plan d?exp?rience ? faire. Seulement son instinct bousculait tout. ? Maurice 
Denis, ?L?Aventure posthume de C?zanne, ? Prometh?e (July, 1939), 195. Denis, who had read 
Venturi?s catalogue, might have taken this idea from him.  
52
 Venturi, C?zanne son art, 43. 
127
qualitatively different from the artistic one. The words of the artist do not translate his 
artistic experience. Therefore, a narration based on the artist?s words and ?truthful? 
written sources cannot portray the creative personality or the true source of art. 
Venturi, as the text indicates, was comfortable with a paradigmatic definition of art, 
and this is the standard he uses for the evaluation of the artist?s words and of his 
oeuvre. Thus, it is Venturi?s aesthetics and his understanding of art itself that must be 
analyzed.  
En regardant les peintures de C?zanne, la v?rit? ?tait facile ? comprendre mais 
l?erreur d?termin?e par la critique et par les ?entretiens? avec C?zanne emp?chait 
de la voir. Le moment est venu d?affirmer que le monde spirituel de C?zanne, 
jusqu'? la derni?re heure de sa vie, n?a pas ?t? celui des symbolistes, ni des 
fauves, ni des cubistes; mais que ce monde s?associe ? celui de Flaubert, de 
Baudelaire, de Zola, de Manet, de Pissarro. C'est-?-dire que C?zanne appartient ? 
cette p?riode h?ro?que de l?art et de la litt?rature en France qui sut trouver une 
voie nouvelle pour arriver ? la v?rit? naturelle en d?passant, en r?alisant, en 
transformant en art ?ternel le romantisme m?me. Dans le caract?re et dans 
l??uvre de C?zanne, rien de d?cadent, rien d?abstrait, pas d?art pour l?art, rien 
d?autre qu?un indomptable impulsion naturelle a cr?er de l?art.
53
 (Emphasis 
added) 
 
For Venturi impressionism had been the culmination of the Venetian tradition 
centered on color. Moreover, as an historical manifestation, this artistic movement 
broke with the dominant artistic tradition liberating art from its dependence on the 
real, and thus had an ethical dimension. Venturi characterized C?zanne as an 
impressionist artist precisely when this artistic movement was underrated and 
disparaged. He also tried to separate C?zanne?s critical fortune from that of cubism 
and other contemporary artists who claimed the artist as their master. The rappel ? 
l?ordre valued form, volume, and stability, and promoted a rational approach to art, 
 
53
 Venturi, C?zanne son art, 45. 
128
and realism and both artistic movements were charged with having destroyed color 
and form through excessive attention to the analysis of appearances.
54
 
Impressionism, Color and the Representation of Reality
Venturi was induced by the Italian cultural environment to develop a theoretical 
model that allowed him to encompass both old masters and modern art. In his 1913 
Giorgione e il giorgionismo, he introduced the interpretative category of ?tono? that 
is, the ?modo figurativo di dare forma al colore,? which, already present in 
Giorgione?s art, had in Manet its highest expression: ?il tono, cio? la quantit? di luce 
e di ombra che ogni colore assorbe, ? propriet? del colore eterogenea alla sua qualit? 
di rosso, di verde, di giallo. ? Colorire secondo il principio del tono significa dar 
forma al colore che ? cosa ben diversa, anzi opposta, a colorire una forma.?
55
 This 
brings to mind the words Bernard attributed to C?zanne, ?Le dessin et la couleur ne 
sont point distincts: au fur et ? mesure que l?on peint, on dessine, plus la couleur 
s?harmonise, plus le dessin se pr?cise. Quand la couleur est ? sa richesse, la forme est 
? sa pl?nitude? ? 
56
 Therefore, Venturi analyzed Venetian painting through the 
lenses of impressionism, just as Longhi had studied Piero della Francesca?s rendition 
of space through C?zanne?s.
57
 These bold associations derived from the fact that these 
 
54
 See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: the art of the Parisian avant-garde and the First World War, 
1914?1925, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Christopher Green, Cubism and Its 
Enemies. Modern Movements and Reaction in French art, 1916?1928, (New Haven: Yale University 
Press, 1987). 
55
 Lionello Venturi quoted in Iamurri, ?Berenson, la pittura moderna,? 84?85. The author does not 
provide the source. 
56
 Emile Bernard, ?Souvenirs de Paul C?zanne,? Mercure de France (February, 1907).  
57
 Iamurri, ?Berenson, la pittura moderna,? 84.   
129
art historians considered French modern art as the teleological argument that 
explained the history of Western art. In turn, this influenced their formalist analysis of 
the works of the old masters, which were made to fit into this construct. The process 
is like a complicated play of mirrors where works of art ?are? what the element of 
comparison suggests they are. The problem was, and still is, to know if C?zanne had 
really said what Bernard reported. 
Benedetto Croce?s opposition to the theory of pure visibility, which he perceived 
as the infiltration of scientific positivism into the realm of art, determined that these 
theories could not be completely assimilated in Italy.
58
 Nevertheless, Venturi, as an 
art historian, could not turn them down, as they were helpful for the study of specific 
works of art. In his scholarship they became an important element for the 
characterization of the artist?s creative personality.
 59
 Roberto Lambardelli 
summarizes Venturi?s stance:  
[Venturi] propone che la pure visibilit? sia visione di uno stato d?animo e non di 
una forma astratta, che venga cio? spiritualizzata, che la decorazione sia 
constituita dalle forme e dai colori concreti di una singola personalit? anzich? dai 
concetti astratti di forma e colore.
60
 (Emphasis added) 
The forms and the colors of a work of art denote the artist?s personality (more on 
this below.) On the other hand, the theory of pure visibility allowed Venturi to think 
of Impressionism as a radically new approach to art, as he considered that neither 
 
58
 Whereas in Germany the problem was the separation of art history from the history of culture and 
the influence of science in the humanities, Italian art historians had to define the relationship of the 
discipline with philosophy.  
59
 ?L?epoca moderna aveva del resto introdotto un nuevo modo di guardare all?art, attestato dalle teorie 
della pura visibiliza, alle quali Venturi guarda con attenzione, contraddicendo le diffidenza che verso 
di esse nutriva Benedetto Croce.? Augusta Monferini, ?Il gusto dei primitivi de Lionello Venturi,? in 
?Lionello Venturi e i nuovi orizzonti,? 47. See Lionello Venturi?s opinion on this subject matter in ?Gli 
schemi del W?lfflin,? L?Esame Rivista mensile di cultura e d?arte ( April 15, 1922): 3?10. 
60
 Roberto Lambardelli, ?Dalla critica della critica alla civilt? dell?arte? in C?zanne all?Arte Astratta,
31. Donald Preziosi has commented that Berenson disliked the personal, biographical approach to the 
artist, i.e. the idea of the work of art as the direct expression of a personality.  Id., ?The Question of Art 
History,?  367, n. 8. 
130
romanticism nor classicism had questioned mimesis in art as impressionism had 
done.
61
 As he explained in 1941 this artistic movement had been neither realist nor 
abstract,  
[the Impressionists] saw every image not in abstract form, not in chiaro-oscuro, 
but in reaction to the reflex of light, either real or imaginary. They had selected 
only one element from reality?light?to interpret all of nature. But then, light 
ceased to be an element of reality. It had become a principle of style, and 
Impressionism was born. (Emphasis added) 
62
 
In an interview that took place in the United States in 1935 Venturi commented 
that ?[t]rends in modern art? are based on freedom from academic tradition and 
freedom from nature. Now the Impressionists are not realists.?
63
 Venturi?s 
interpretation of Impressionism had a moral and political edge as he understood its 
revolutionary potential.  
In his 1926 Il gusto dei primitivi Venturi had previously argued that the 
impressionist artists contested the traditional foundations of art by countering ossified 
?imitation? with ?creation,? defined as epiphanic revelation and mystic inspiration. 
This permitted him to compare them with the masters of the Trecento.
64
 This book, 
written ten years before the catalogue raisonn?, marked a turning point in Venturi?s 
career as it demonstrates his use of the interpretation of modern art both to revise the 
history of art and to foster an ideology. To defend Impressionism in these terms in 
Italy in the 1920s was truly provocative. As Lambardelli comments,  
 
61
 See Lionello Venturi, Il gusto dei primitivi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1926), 223?225; and History of Art 
Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936), chapter 11. See also Monferini, ?Il gusto dei 
primitivi,? 47?50; and Barilli, ?Il ?gusto dei primitivi?.? 
62
 Lionello Venturi, ?The Aesthetic Idea of Impressionism,? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art 
Criticism 1 (Spring, 1941), 35?36.  
63
 Venturi, ?Lively Interview,? 4. 
64
 The book was then contemporaneous to Fry?s C?zanne and to Panosfky?s Perspective as Symbolic 
Form.
131
Venturi si poneva come fine di scardinare un atteggiamento reazionario diffuso 
che, in nome della tradizione italiana classica, o meglio classicistica, impediva il 
progredire della pittura italiana contemporanea sottomessa alle tendenze 
conservatrici degli anni Venti. 
65
 
After the First World War until 1931 Venturi held a teaching position at the 
University of Turin. His involvement with an antifascist group of Turinese artists, 
collectors, and intellectuals spurred him to become an engaged intellectual and active 
polemicist.
66
 Maria M. Lamberti observes that this change can be perceived in his 
interpretation of impressionism,   
la sincerit? e l?immediatezza della creazione degli impressionisti si tramuter? 
nell?autenticit? di un rapporto di libert? con il mondo, il lirismo diverr? 
rivendicazione dell?autonomia dell?artista e della sua arte di fronte alle 
costrizioni ed alle leggi esterne, e la lezione della pittura francese si identificher? 
con quella morale dell?independenza della cultura in una dimensione europea.
67
 
(Emphasis added)  
 
At the time of the publication of Il gusto dei primitivi the forces of reaction 
promoting the return to the classical Italian tradition were on the rise. There was 
among the intellectuals a sense that action was needed and that there was still room to 
maneuver. This is the context for Venturi?s observation, 
La battaglia tra classici e romantici ? finita da un pezzo, eppure si rinnova tuttora 
sotto diversi aspetti, in nome dello stile e delia realt?, della bellezza o della 
verit?, dell?intelligenza o della sensibilit?, della forma o del colore, della 
compozione finita o dell?impressione abbezzata, infine di Roma madre o di 
Parigi amica. 
68
 
65
 Roberto Lambarelli, ?Dalla critica della critica alla civilt? dell?arte,? in C?zanne all?Arte Astratta,
34. The author mentions that the Roman group Valori Plastici to which belonged Giorgio De Chirico, 
blasted the impressionist painters accusing them of being unintelligent.  
66
 In his courses at the University he encouraged the comparison of the art of the past with modern 
French art. In the academic year 1930?1931 he proposed the analysis of the ?theoretical principle of 
deformation? by comparing paintings by C?zanne with Romanic sculpture. Laura Iamurri, ?L?azione 
culturale di Lionello Venturi: L?insegnamento, gli studi, le polemiche,? in Lamberti, Pittura a Torino, 
104?105. 
67
 Lamberti, ?Via dell?Impressionismo,?  266. 
68
 Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi, 2. 
132
Venturi favored the second terms of these equations (the real, truth, sensibility, color, 
impressionism, and Paris) which he associated with freedom, spontaneity, and 
creativity, ?un aspetto essenziale, e quindi eterno dell?arte.? Impressionist artists had 
expressed these values, but the epitome was C?zanne,   
La sapienza del disegno, la sapienza del chiaroscuro, la realizzazione obiettiva 
delle cose rappresentate: ecco la morte dell?arte. Abbandonarsi alle proprie 
impressioni, esprimerle inmediatamente, con slancio, senza punto curarsi delle 
buone regole, n? di quelle imparate a scuola, n? di quelle che la ragione 
spontaneamente suggerisce: ecco la nuova alba dell?arte quale C?zanne 
intravvide? 
69
 
The academic tradition was the ?death? of painting. The impressionists had 
liberated themselves from the norms and restrictions imposed by the Ecole des 
Beaux-Arts and salvaged art. The author could thus present the master of Aix as a 
hero and a moral example. The comment corresponding to fig. 2, exemplifies this 
approach: 
Perci? l?impressione di C?zanne s?impone a noi con una forza eroica e una 
grandiosit?, di cui ci rendiamo conto appena riflettiamo al fatto che il soggetto ? 
degno di una scena di genere, ma che il quadro di C?zanne ? piuttosto una scena 
religiosa.... [when compared with the work of Valentin one realizes the] probit? 
morale e artistica dell?opera di C?zanne, e della viscida falsit? morale e artistitica 
dell?opera secentesca.
70
 
This idea is be repeated in the catalogue raisonn?: C?zanne?s devotion to his art is 
heroic, and that heroism had a moral dimension as will become clear in what follows.    
Il gusto dei primitivi is structured around a string of comparisons of the type 
discussed above, which are held together by the idea that the ?taste? of the primitive 
is an a-historical category. As Golan explains, 
 
69
 Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi,  235. 
70
 Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi,  224?225. 
133
Venturi proceeded from the seminal Crocean premise that the ?classical,? as 
opposed to the style-specific concept of ?classicism,? was a moment of 
inspiration reborn every time art was created. Venturi deployed the primitive as a 
critical meta-historical (as opposed to trans-historical). The primitive was reborn 
each time an artist broke away from the demand for naturalism or from academic 
routine (for Venturi, often synonymous with classicism) in favor of intuition, or 
what Venturi calls ?revelation.?
71
 
Venturi contended that Classicism had been invented by German art history 
and that its application as a category was the result of the misunderstanding of the 
true role of art, aesthetics, and art criticism. The result was that the historically 
determined taste of Winckelmann, for example, had been assigned the function of 
aesthetic law.
72
 His true target, nevertheless, was Fascism which considered 
classicism the treasure and essence of the Italian people. Venturi considered that 
classic and neoclassic art were the product of intellectualizations, as the artists had 
replaced faith and inspiration with attention to laws, conventions, and norms. I gusto 
dei primitivi was against norms and intellectualization in art as much as against the 
organization of the disciplines devoted to the study of art. 
73
 
The book did stimulate a lively discussion in Italian academic circles as it argued 
against classicism?s universal character and superiority, and favored the category of 
the primitive which encompassed both the early Renaissance and modern French art. 
Unacknowledged to most, Venturi must be counted among the art historians who 
fought to counter the influence and centrality of Renaissance Classicism and mimesis 
in art history.
74
 As another specialist in Venturi, Giorgio Cortenova, remarks,  
 
71
 Golan, ?The Critical Moment,? 126. 
72
 See Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi, Chapter Four; and Golan, ?The Critical Moment,? 125.  
73
 See Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi,  16. 
74
 See especially Claire Farago ed., Reframing the Renaissance. The author nonetheless only considers 
the German founding fathers of art history. As mentioned above, the study of Venturi?s scholarship 
134
Il gusto dei primitivi conteneva tutte le premesse non solo per contrastare la 
cultura dell?epoca ma per introdurre una riconsiderazione generale sia intorno ai 
luoghi comuni che essa perpetuava, sia intorno al concetto stesso di opera d?arte, 
di critica e di storia dell?arte, delineando cos? l?inscindibile dialettica che 
costituisce il senso profondo della creativit? e della sua intepretazione. Di fatto 
Lionello Venturi attaccava i cardini stessi di una tradizione e di una metodologia 
del fare la storia prigioniere dei canoni classici e condizionate dal metro 
naturalista e dal mito rinascimentale. Contrariamente a Roberto Longhi, che 
vedeva nella storia la pacificazione e comunque la soluzione logica della 
dialettica, la lezione di Venturi sottolineava la drammaticit? della storia.?
75
 
The book therefore not only questioned the preeminence of classicism but also that of 
art history over art criticism, of the ancient over the modern, and of the traditional 
way of interpreting the history of art. Venturi?s scholarship proposed an alternative to 
palliate the influence of historicism in art history.  
The illustrations are organized according to the compare-contrast method 
established by W?lfflin, one that remains fundamental to the discipline. They might 
also be regarded as the graphic representation of the kind of comments that Berenson 
and Longhi made in their texts, which in turn were influenced by the use of 
photographs.
76
 Venturi seems to have thought visually, as one paragraph of the 
C?zanne catalogue reads like the verbal illustration of fig. 3:  
A partir de 1882 le mouvement de C?zanne vers des effets constructifs 
s?acc?l?re?  observez comme ce programme g?om?trique se r?alise ? travers la 
sensation directe de telle maison, de tel rocher, bien individuels. La sensation est 
m?me tellement intense que la vision semble na?ve. En 1904, C?zanne a ?crit ? 
Bernard qu?il faut ?donner l?image de ce que nous voyons, en oubliant tout ce qui 
a paru avant nous.? Dans ce tableau il a bien r?alis? ce d?sir de devenir ?primitif.? 
 
seems to be limited to the Italian milieu. Venturi himself was well aware of the scholarship of the 
School of Vienna, and his own interest in the history of art criticism and art history might be related to 
the work by Julius Schlosser?s Die Kunstliteratur: ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren 
Kunstgeschichte (Vienna, 1924) translated into Italian, La letteratura artistica; manuale delle fonti 
della storia dell'arte moderna, (Florence, 1935). 
75
 Giorgio Cortenova, ?La rivelazione dell?arte nella metodologia di Lionello Venturi,? in C?zanne 
all?Arte Astratta, 17.  
76
 This was also the kind of comparison encouraged by the Fogg method of connoisseurship. These 
illustrations also bring to mind Andr? Malraux?s Essais de psychologie de l?art I: Le Mus?e 
imaginaire. Geneva: Skira, 1947). C?zanne never referred to the primitive Italian painters or to Giotto.  
135
Confrontez-le avec les fresques de Giotto a Padoue repr?sentant la vie de 
Joachim : m?me r?v?lation de la forme essentielle de rochers et de maisons ? 
l?exclusion de tout le reste.
77
 
As Golan notes, ?the anti-Fascist message of the book lay rather in Venturi?s 
assertion that the drive to the primitive was not a question of style but an attitude: a 
profoundly moral attitude irrepressibly related to the concept of artistic freedom.?
78
 
The ethical component is not in what is represented but in the process of 
representation; it is ideological. As Venturi remarks,    
Ora sappiamo che il sentimento che diviene contenuto dell?opera d?arte non ? 
un?attivit? economica ma un?attivit? morale, in quanto ha bisogno di universalit?: 
e per? si chiama sentimiento morale..... 
Perch? infatti l?artista realizzi Dio in s?, occorre ch?egli aneli al sovrumano in 
quanto sopraindividuale, che ami l?eroico in quanto l?eroismo sia ricongiunzione 
dell?io col tutto, che aneli all?armonia in quanto unit? umana del pensare col fare 
e col sentire, che si elevi sulle disarmonie del volgo per giungere alla vita 
aristocratica.
79
 
The artist is a super-human and a moral hero who is far beyond the common 
man. This is why the artist, as a creative personality and not as man is at the center of 
this author?s scholarship. Modern French artists, according to Venturi, manifested all 
these values: liberation of vision, free intuition, and the autonomy of art.
80
 Venturi?s 
formalism is an ethical formalism. The colors of an impressionist painting originate in 
the sensibility of the artist. They do not abide by the internal laws of the painting and 
are not entirely representational. In 1926 this aspect of impressionism was used to 
defend the art of Amedeo Modigliani and of the Gruppo dei Sei (Group of Six) that 
 
77
 Venturi,  C?zanne son art, 52. 
78
 Golan, ?The Critical Moment,? 126?127. 
79
 Venturi, I gusto dei Primitivi,  234. 
80
 On this subject matter see the end of chapter 7 and Paul Crowther, ?Cubism, Kant, and Ideology,? 
Word & Image 3 (April?June, 1987): 195?201. 
136
opposed the directives and styles supported by the government.
81
 As Lamberti 
remarks,  
A questa data, 1930, dunque si pu? gi? misurare...il valore della prima scelta 
dell?impressionismo fatta dal Venturi, come strumento di intervento e oggetto di 
ricerca, assunto come rivendicazione da alcuni artisti, di fronte alle pesanti 
accuse del fronte avversario. L?importanza di questa esperienza, che rappresent? 
una fase preparatoria e, nel suo significato di polemica in atto, la motivazione 
originaria del succesivo interesse per gli impressionisti del Venturi maturo, sta 
nella rispondenza che essa ebbe in una particolare situazione della nostra storia 
artistica e politica e nella posibilit? di coagulo offerta alle varie componenti 
dell?antifascismo torinese, in particolare agli artisti e ai critici che vi si formarono 
negli anni venti.
82
 (Emphasis added)  
 
Venturi?s scholarship, both in its form and in its subject matter, was at the service 
of his political ideology. Even before his exile he had honed his scholarship (both 
methodologically and ideologically) as a tool against Fascism, and had trained 
himself as a polemicist in public debates with some of the most salient cultural 
representatives of the Fascist regime such as Ojetti and even Marinetti.
83
 Whereas 
intellectuals in France and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and later in United States 
conceived of Classicism and the Humanism of the Renaissance as ideal goals to be 
attained through cultivation, the young Italian art historian viewed them as 
ideological tools of Fascism. Conversely, Impressionism, which in France was the 
synonym of German influence and of the decadence of the national tradition, and was 
criticized for being a realist movement that occluded the spiritual and intellectual 
components of art, meant for Venturi revolution, liberation (and liberalism), and 
freedom. This was what determined his scholarship on the movement and his 
 
81
 The members of this group were the painter Jessie Boswell, Felice Casorati, Gigi Chessa, Carlo 
Levi, Francesco Menzio.   
82
 Lamberti, ?Via dell?Impressionismo,? 274?275. 
83
 The poet accused Venturi of not accepting Futurism as the subject of a thesis. See Iamurri ?L?azione 
culturale,? 101. See also Lionello Venturi Risposta a Ugo Ojetti, L?Arte XXXIII?1 (January, 1930): 
93?97; ?Risposta a Ugo Ojetti,? L?Arte XXXIII? 3(March, 1930): 212?213; ?Divagazioni sulle mostre 
di Venezia e di Monza con la risposta ad Ojetti,? L?Arte XXXIII?7 (July, 1930): 396?405. 
137
understanding and use of documentary sources, and what led him to emphasize 
C?zanne?s relationship with Impressionism.  
There are actually no ?heroic? deeds in the impressionists?s and C?zanne?s life, as 
he even hid during the Franco Prussian war to avoid being drafted. Venturi?s 
conception is not traditional ?civic heroism? but rather an intrinsic value that depends 
on the appreciation of the artist?s style in a given historical context. Therefore, the 
artist?s heroism becomes an intimate affair, a personal rebellion against the 
establishment. It is ?intangible? and cannot be narrated as a ?deed,? but rather has to 
be found or inferred from the artist?s biography, and by comparing his work with that 
of his contemporaries. It is highly ideological. In the case of C?zanne ?ce n?est pas 
contre la nature, c?est contre les pr?jug?s que la lutte de C?zanne a ?t? h?ro?que. 
Aujourd?hui sa t?nacit? nous semble le ton m?me de son go?t.?
84
 On the other hand, 
he also comments that,  
Ce qui distingue l?impressionnisme, c?est un besoin de style fond? seulement sur 
l?intuition des artistes au lieu d?ob?ir ? des lois de caract?re acad?mique ou 
oratoire. Pr?cis?ment l?accord du go?t entre les impressionnistes fut la conqu?te 
d?une double libert? ? l??gard de la tradition acad?mique d?une part? ? 
l?endroit  de la nature d?autre part, dont ils choisirent le seul aspect sensible et le 
fait que leur accord concernant la totalit? de l?esprit humain est d?montr? puisque 
le contenu moral et social de leur art est nouveau. 
85
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Furthermore, according to Venturi, Impressionism as a historical movement was 
in painting what the ?fin des notables? had been in politics: the end of oppression and 
the access to power of a new social class under a republican system of government, 
which becomes in turn the ideal moral environment for the production of art. And he 
adds that the impressionists considered subject matters as sources of colors, ?[m]ais le 
 
84
 Venturi, C?zanne son art, 21. 
85
 Venturi, C?zanne son art, 29. 
138
ton [color] n??tait autre chose que la forme de leur mani?re de sentir, morale et 
sociale, c??tait la catharsis, le moment de la s?r?nit?, d?un nouveau monde en 
gestation.? 
86
 
In 1942 he commented that the best definition of the movement might be found in 
Kant?s Introduction to the Critique of Judgment.
87
 
?[P]leasure is related to the simple apprehension of the form of an object of 
intuition without referring this apprehension to a concept directed toward certain 
knowledge, the representation does not refer to the object, but only to the 
subject.? It is difficult to find a more adequate representation of Impressionism 
than the simple apprehension of the form of an object without the knowledge of 
the object and with reference only to the subject.
88
 
Impressionism meant the end of imitation and illusionism, which was replaced by 
a new approach to painting, a real Copernican Turn that hinged around the 
personality of the artist, as the transformation of subject matter into motif was 
possible only when the artist projected an ideal in the moment of perception of reality 
and conceived of it as form, 
[The Impressionist?s] faithfulness to appearance resulted in their finding a new 
form of appearance without pretending that their form of appearance was the 
form of reality. This pretence would have involved a judgment of reality, an 
approach to criticism of reality which is foreign to art. To them reality meant an 
ideal vision of space, conceived as light and color. ..[t]hey reduced the subject 
matter to the state of motif in order to keep the content of a work of art in the 
state of sensation.
89
 
Venturi?s interpretation of modernism revolved around the notion of an 
unprecedented and liberating epistemological crisis and around a conception of 
history that did not put the accent on diachronic continuous development but on 
 
86
 Venturi, C?zanne son art, 29. 
87
 Venturi?s first article on Impressionism was published in L?Arte in 1935. As he understood that the 
problems surrounding the interpretation of the movement were in part due to the lack of information he 
published in 1939 the Archives de l?Impressionnisme. 
88
 Venturi, ?Idea of Impressionism,? 37.  
89
 Venturi, ?Idea of Impressionism,? 44.  
139
dramatic breaks and on the correspondences among artists from different periods of 
history. As Venturi made it clear when he stated the goals of the C?zanne catalogue, 
his system hinged around the personality of the artist that elevated a creation from 
being a mere reflection of the cultural horizon of his period to the level of art.  
Works of art and historical periods are unique and thus impossible to 
compare. Nevertheless, it is possible to equate the attitude of the artists towards their 
cultural horizon, their ?level? of emancipation from the taste of the period. In 1944 
Venturi summarized his esthetic ideas for an American public, 
Since 1926 I have called taste the elements of a work of art distinguished from its 
whole?. I realize that it is difficult to understand that all the elements of a 
painting belong to the personality of the painter, and have no independent life at 
all. One can suppose that a color exists independently of the artist. But when it is 
really independent it does not belong to the painting? Thus the color belongs to 
the painting only in so far as it is a sign of the activity of the painter. 
90
 
Taste, the ?gusto? of the 1926 book, deals with what is contingent and transitory 
in a work of art, what belongs to a period. When a color, a theme, an idea, appears in 
a work of art it is because it has been chosen by the artist. It does not have artistic 
value in itself and can also appear in non artistic creations.
91
 In Venturi?s words,  
But the critic must also find a standard of judgment which is absolute, against the 
continuous changes of taste. Where will he find it? Not in any object, which is 
only the expression of a soul, but in the soul itself, the soul of the artist. That is, 
the only standard for the criticism of a painting is the reconstruction of the 
artistic personality of the painter. If, in fact the painter, while painting, has 
 
90
 Lionello Venturi, ?Art and Taste,? Art Bulletin 25 (December 1944): 271?272. This text was an 
answer to the negative reviews generated by his book Art Criticism Now which made him realize that 
the misunderstanding was in part due to the fact that ?my concept of art belongs to a tradition of 
thought which is foreign to America.? That is, that his approach to modernism was different and at 
odds with that which was being institutionalized in the country. Id., ?Art and Taste,? 271. 
91
 For the definition of taste in Il gusto dei primitivi, 15?16. What reunites all the artists Venturi brings 
together in the book is their ?taste? for revelation and inspiration. In the same way all the artists of an 
era share for example the taste for certain colors and textures. What reunites Giotto and C?zanne is the 
way they create art through their na?ve faith. In the texts of the 1930s the definition is restricted to the 
notion of ?period taste? and used as a backdrop for the notion of art.  
140
brought his creative imagination beyond intellectual rules, moral standards, or 
economic interests, his product is a work of art. ? 
Where can one recognize the artistic personality of a painter? Evidently in the 
whole of his painting, in that moment of his creativeness when he has 
transformed all the elements he has collected from his tradition and his 
surroundings into a work of art. 
92
 
Taste (gusto) is the horizon from which the artist selects the elements he needs for 
the production of art. As it is not ?artistic,? it can be studied and understood, and in 
this way it provides a parameter for the appreciation of art. As the artist by definition 
is a creator who has broken away from the restrictions imposed by the common 
cultural horizon, he is a moral hero.
93
 The notion of artistic personality afforded 
Venturi a way out from a scholarship based on stylistic analysis and philology, and 
permitted him to compare works of art from different countries and periods of the 
history of art. The category ?Art? allowed Venturi to disregard the historical context. 
What linked together works of art from different periods was the fact that their 
authors had been able to liberate themselves from the historical horizon of their time.   
Venturi believed that art criticism and art history complemented themselves in the 
evaluation and interpretation of works of art: art criticism studied them as unique 
objects, whereas art history analyzed their constitutive elements, which might also 
appear in other works of art (and non art) of the same period: ?[n]ous appelons go?t 
les ?l?ments de l?oeuvre d?art, le moment analytique de l?oeuvre d?art; et nous 
 
92
 Venturi, ?Art and Taste,?  272. 
93
 Venturi comments that already Fiedler opposed this vertical dimension ? the artist?s creativity?to 
the [horizontal] genetic history of art. ?Genetic history sees only the historical nexus, but Fiedler notes 
that the artistic personality, genial and significant, appears unexpectedly and is very much more the 
beginning of a new series than the close of one which is past.? Venturi, History of Art Criticism, 280. 
141
appelons art le moment synth?tique de l??uvre d?art.?
94
 This is not the way modern 
art history understood its mission and its relationship with art criticism.  
At the time he was writing the catalogue raisonn? on C?zanne, Venturi was 
participating as well in the international debate about the foundations of art history. 
Through a series of articles he proposed a deep revision of the discipline?s 
foundations, especially its relationship with art criticism and esthetics. These 
publications clarify the goals Venturi set for his study on the artist: to separate 
C?zanne?s ?theories? and ?taste? from his ?art,? to distinguish between the artist?s 
?individuality? from his ?personality? as an artist, ?pour nous occuper uniquement de 
la fa?on dont sa mani?re de sentir s?est realis?e en peinture.?
 
(See p. 125 above). 
Venturi and Modern Art History
In the 1930s Venturi was very critical of the way art history was being organized 
and institutionalized internationally, as he considered that the discipline was 
organically related to art criticism and esthetics. In 1935 Venturi summarized his 
ideas about the discipline in the article ?Les Instituts universitaires et l?histoire de 
l?art? in the Bulletin of the Office des instituts d?arch?ologie et d?Histoire de l?art,
published by the IICI.   
As noted above, France?s offer to support the establishment of the IICI in Paris 
was part of a political strategy whose goal was to secure and reinforce this country?s 
cultural hegemony. An internal memo issued by the French representative Julien 
 
94
 Lionello Venturi, ?Sur quelques probl?mes de la critique d?art,? Actes du XIIIe Congr?s 
international d?histoire de l?art, Stockholm (Paris, 1933), 295. 
142
Luchaire portrays the assumptions of most French cultural delegates in the 
organization,  
L?expansion intellectuelle est devenue un des principaux articles du programme 
de politique ext?rieure de la France. ? notre expansion sur ce terrain rencontre 
des obstacles de plus en plus grands et assez rapidement sa limite absolue, si elle 
est poursuivie au nom des seuls int?r?ts fran?ais et pour notre seul b?n?fice. Au 
contraire si la France, suivant une ancienne tradition, se pr?sente comme la 
nation la mieux dou?e pour comprendre l?effort intellectuel de toutes les autres, 
pour servir de lieu de rencontre ? leurs produits divers, les harmoniser en les 
mettant ? la mesure de son g?nie et les faire passer ainsi transform?s dans les 
patrimoine commun de l?humanit?; si la France s?organise, suivant des m?thodes 
modernes et avec des moyens suffisants pour ?tre le principal et le meilleur 
centre de coop?ration intellectuelle internationale, alors son influence n?aura 
pour ainsi dire plus de limites.
95
 
This ?nationalistic universalism? characterizes French endeavors in the inter-war 
period. The IICI epitomize the internationalization and politicization of the cultural 
debate during this time. The institution of art history as an international profession 
and the coordination of the programs in degree granting institutions were part of this 
organization?s agenda.  
Focillon, who has already been singled out of one as the most active French art 
historian in this institutional framework, shared this belief. At the beginning of the 
1930s he was invited to the United States to help organize the art department at Yale. 
Focillon saw this as an opportunity to disseminate the French approach to art history. 
Pascal Schandel observes that ?[l]a construction d?un enseignement d?histoire de l?art 
aux ?tats-Unis selon des m?thodes ?prouv?es dans l?universit? fran?aise et dispens? 
en fran?ais, se fait au nom d?une universalit? de savoir d?fendue dans les 
 
95
 Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L?Unesco oubli?e. La Soci?t? des Nations et la Coop?ration intellectuelle 
1919?1946 (Paris : Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 40. 
143
commissions de la SDN.?
96
 The fight for cultural supremacy between Germany and 
France was replayed as a fight for the direction of scholarship and educational 
programs in the United States.
97
 
This was the institutional framework in which Venturi?who in the 1920s had 
confronted the Fascist manipulation of the Italian humanist tradition?debated his 
ideas about the epistemological status of art history. His article was a harsh critique to 
the teaching institutions of the time, which explains the many reactions it provoked. 
Venturi opposed the identification of art history with the mere organization and 
accumulation of data, precisely the kind of activity Focillon fostered at the OIM. 
98
 
Venturi argued that a better organization and exchange of information did not 
necessarily mean that there was a better or more international art history, as 
professionals did not even read the critical essays produced in other countries or even 
those produced at universities with a different theoretical orientation.    
Je sais bien que, pour justifier ce ?tat de choses, on a invent? des distinctions; 
r?cemment m?me, dans une grande capitale, une voix autoris?e a formul? la 
division des domaines divers de l?histoire de l?art, de la critique d?art et de 
l?esth?tique. L?historie de l?art devrait pr?senter les ?uvre d?art, toutes les 
?uvres d?art, sans les juger, sans les commenter, mais avec la documentation la 
plus riche possible. La critique d?art jugerait les oeuvre d?art conform?ment au 
sentiment esth?tique du critique. L?esth?tique formulerait la d?finition de l?art 
dans l?universel. Mais il est ?vident que distinguer ainsi les trois disciplines 
n?aboutit ? rien moins qu?? les vider de tout sens.
99
 
96
 Pascal Schandel, ?L?exp?rience am?ricaine: 1933?1943,? Focillon et les arts, 173. 
97
 The Austrian art historian Joseph Strzygowski had come to America in the same mission in the 1920s. He 
wanted to warn Americans about the pitfalls of humanist art history. See Susanne Marchand, ?The Rhetoric of 
Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: the Case Joseph Strzygowski,? History & Theory 33 
(December, 1994): 106?130.   
98
 Between 1935 and 1937 the Bulletin published seven articles that reacted to Venturi?s. The authors 
were Giulio Carlo Argan, Jacques Mesnil, Gregor Paulsson, Joseph Strzygowski, Ladislas 
Tatarkiewicz, Victor Basch, and Charles Lalo.  
99
 Lionello Venturi, ?Les Instituts universitaires et l?histoire de l?art,? Office des instituts d?arch?ologie 
et d?Histoire de l?art, (July, 1935), 53. 
144
The author most probably refers to Henry Wilenski?s The Study of Art (London, 
1934) which proposed the creation of three separate degrees for those interested in 
art:  esthetics, for the artists and psychologists; art criticism, for those attracted to art 
criticism, journalism,  and  the ?history of art comment;? and art history for owners, 
chemists, archivists, and art historians. These would be different careers and their 
practitioners would not be allowed to trespass the disciplinary boundaries.
100
 For 
Venturi, such separations were impossible and artificial as, he considered that the 
three disciplines were fundamentally interwoven. He invoked Kant?s dictum: 
?concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind? to 
emphasize his argument. Based on the complementary relationship of art and taste he 
even suggested fusing art history and art criticism into what he called the history of 
art criticism. He believed that the main problem was the art historians? lack of culture 
and will to think about the philosophical foundations of the discipline.   
D?o? l??tat chaotique dont nous parlions o? sont parvenus l?histoire de l?art et 
l?enseignement universitaire de cette discipline. De ce chaos, on ne pourra sortir 
que si la pr?occupation des rapports entre l?histoire critique de l?art et 
l?esth?tique devient une pr?occupation g?n?rale dans les instituts universitaires, 
c'est-?-dire si, apr?s avoir rassembl? si brillamment la documentation susdite, on 
commence ? r?fl?chir ? la mani?re d??tudier, de comprendre et de juger les 
mat?riaux recueillis.
101
 (Emphasis added) 
 
100
 See also R. H. Wilenski, ?The Organization of the Study of Art History,? II Congr?s international 
d?esth?tique et de science de l?art, 2 (Paris, 1937), 73?76. 
101
 Lionello Venturi, ?Les Instituts univesitaires et l?histoire de l?art, ? Office des instituts 
d?arch?ologie et d?Histoire de l?art ( July, 1935), 55. In page 58 he states ?[O]n propose ici que l?unit? 
m?thodologique pr?conis?e pour l?histoire de l?art et pour les institutes universitaires o? elle est 
enseign?e soit l?histoire de la critique d?art.?  
145
Venturi believed that there was great confusion about fundamental issues such as 
methodology : ?cette discipline n?a pas suffisamment conscience de sa propre nature, 
de ses propres limites, de ses propres fins.? 
102
 
In 1933 Venturi had presented similar ideas at the XIIIth International Congress 
of Art History in Stockholm, which had nationalism as its main theme.
103
 The tone, 
however, is quite different: what at the earlier date had been described as a ?crisis,? 
had become, by 1935, a ?chaos? in the institutions devoted to the teaching of art 
history. It is as if Venturi was reacting against Wilenski?s or Focillon?s intention of 
organizing the discipline and its institutions without discussing their epistemological 
foundations.
104
 
Joseph Strzygowski (1862?1941) was one of the scholars who answered Venturi?s 
provocative article. An Austrian art historian notorious for his pan-German ideology, 
he criticized the art history fostered by the ICII from the opposite ideological point of 
view and demanded a revision of the fundamentally philological foundations of the 
discipline. Strzygowski also argued against the centrality of Humanism and 
Classicism in modern art history, tropes that he considered were reinforced by the 
methodology applied to the study of other artistic fields. His position is analyzed in 
the next chapter.    
102
 Venturi, ?Instituts univesitaires,? 64. In 1958 the American art historian James Ackerman made a 
very similar observation about art history in the United States. His commentary can be considered as 
the confirmation of the problems Venturi diagnosed before the institutionalization of modern art 
history. See James S. Ackerman, ?On American Scholarship in the Arts,? College Art Journal 17 
(Summer, 1958): 357?362.  
103
 His presentation was published in 1934 ?Th?orie et histoire de la critique (? propos du Congr?s 
d?Historie de l?art ? Stockholm)? in Art et Esth?tique. For the blatant nationalism of the presentations 
in this congress see Venturi?s comments in Art Criticism Now (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 
1941), 39. See also Chapter Three. 
104
 Research in Venturi?s correspondence would perhaps produce more information concerning these 
two publications, which until now have not received scholarly attention.   
146
Venturi?s methodological critique suggest that modern art history is contingent on 
its denial or lack of attention to art criticism as a competing discipline, a problem that 
until now has received little attention.
105
 In the United States Venturi had to confront 
a pragmatic approach to the sciences, the same one that compelled Panofsky and the 
other German ?migr?s to mitigate their theoretical approach to art history. Venturi?s 
scholarship centered on the problem of art history?s relationship with art criticism and 
aesthetics. 
Venturi in America
In 1939 Venturi moved to the United States where he lived until the end of the 
war. Basic aspects of his approach to art history and of his understanding of modern 
art were intrinsically different from those that would coalesce in America at the end 
of the 1930s to become modern art history. His methodology, based on the history of 
art criticism and the relativism of the definition of art, was inherently different from 
Panofsky?s iconology. In addition, and contrary to Barr, Venturi did not consider 
abstract art to be the culmination of modern art. More importantly, his 
 
105
 In 1994 Michael Orwicz argued that modern art history had left art criticism in the periphery of the 
field and adapted it to its needs, i.e. to highlight the agency of the main artist, and as part of the fortune 
critique of the chosen masterpieces. He added that, ?the question of where and how we position art 
criticism in art?s histories will not be solved by simply renegotiating or upgrading its status within 
existing art historical paradigms. Rather it must be based on a critical re-examination of the 
epistemology by which art history writes out a body of questions, problems and relations that it still 
sees to be fundamentally outside the visual field.? Art Criticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-
century France (Manchester, New York, 1994), 5. Orwicz was then interested in reception theory and 
the critique of modernist art history from a post-Marxist point of view. He mentions Venturi?s early 
interest in art criticism but seems not to have studied this scholar?s whole project.  
147
characterization of art as freedom was based on a theory regarding the discontinuity 
of history, which contradicted Barr?s and Panofsky?s conception of the history of art. 
Venturi began his 1941 book Art Criticism Now with this comment,   
Perhaps there are some who hold that an apology should be offered for 
discussing criticism in a University. And I am fully aware that to-day criticism is 
scorned by ?scientific-minded? scholars on the grounds of its subjectivity. But I 
believe that history is subjective too, or else it is not history at all, and the science 
of art is a false science. Art-criticism is our only means of understanding a work 
of art as art. And because the history of art aims at the understanding of a work 
of art as art the final step in the history of art must be and is art criticism.
106
 
This is not what American scholars wanted to hear. Venturi was critical of 
Panofsky?s 1939 Studies in Iconology and of his scholar?s contribution to The 
Meaning of the Humanities. At that time Venturi could only have a superficial 
knowledge of what today is known as Panofsky?s methodology, but his book bring to 
light the main theoretical differences between the two scholars. Their discrepancies 
were also practical as Iconology is quite inappropriate for the study of the kind of 
works the Italian art historian analyzed: landscape art, genre, still life, and non 
mimetic styles.  
Venturi further criticizes Panofsky for not considering modern art, and notes 
that the latter?s methodology is too focused on the study of tradition and the elements 
given by the past (taste), instead of on their reformulation by the creative artist.
107
 
Venturi responds to Panofsky?s disparaging comments on connoisseurs in ?The 
History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,? commenting that ?what Mr. Panofsky sets 
up against connoisseurship is a history of civilization which can never reach the level 
 
106
 Venturi, Criticism Now, ix.  
107
 Claudia Cieri Via, ?Lionello Venturi e le Lezioni americane,? in ?Venturi orizzonti,? 43. 
148
of art-history.?
108
 Furthermore, Venturi suggests that, when considered under the light 
of what other contributors to Greene?s book had defined as Humanism, Panofksy?s 
restrictive methodological approach fails to be sufficiently humanistic.  
Well honed by his experience as an art historian in Fascist Italy, Venturi was 
aware of how repressive humanistic scholarship could be. He clearly makes this point 
in an unpublished lecture ?The So-Called Malady of Modern Art,?  
Modern art reveals the ills of mankind. Because of that it is wholesome, if 
courage and freedom represent health. After the First World War, believing that 
art was sick, painters, sculptors, critics and politicians tried to cure it with drugs 
such as the revival of neo-classicism? the revival of classicism in art was a 
fascist remedy. And history will confirm that it was necessarily fascist: it 
suppresses the imagination.
109
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Venturi respected the horizontal, diachronic development of history but believed that 
it was disrupted by the work of artists, who, in his system, were agents of upheaval 
and change. It was the artist who had the power to transform (historical) elements of 
taste provided by the period into art. 
 
Venturi?s approach to art history (the dichotomy taste/art) enabled him to 
avoid considering race and nation as defining issues. He argued that the influence of 
taste and ?cultural attitudes? fostered the production of good art: ?If we do not 
understand in such a way the ups and downs in the history of art, we must have 
recourse to the theory that Providence sent great artists in one period, and fewer and 
smaller ones in another: an explanation which is utterly anti-historical.?
110
 In the 
1930s Providence was usually understood as nation or race. In his answer to an 
 
108
 Venturi, Criticism Now, 55. 
109
 Quoted in Golan, ?Critical Moment,? 130. 
110
 Lionello Venturi, ?Letters to the editor,? Art Bulletin 24 (September 1943), 270. See C?zanne son 
art,15. 
149
inquiry organized by George in 1931, about the character of the French School, 
Venturi contended that he did not believe there were national schools of art, 
Or, if there was one, it does not fall within the domain of art proper; it should be 
included in the ?Psychology of Nations? this so-called science of which I hear 
much and know nothing. I am more inclined to appreciate and try to understand 
the masterpieces that France has given us, in the light of their eternal esthetic 
value and historical importance. 
111
 
Whereas nation and race as categories for the understanding of art were kept at 
bay but not fully absent from the foundations of Panofsky?s methodology, they are of 
no value in Venturi?s system. His art history was much more relativistic, as he 
considered even the definition of art to be contingent. Venturi?s art history was also a 
history of aesthetics, and art criticism afforded the perspective necessary to evaluate 
the different historical interpretations of art.
112
 Sensibility was a pivotal category in 
Venturi?s methodology. This is the reason why he considered impressionism, and not 
abstract art, as the teleological goal that explained the development of the history of 
modern Western art. Furthermore, sensibility in Venturi?s scheme appeared in an 
artist through his creative personality. Sensibility enabled the artist to link the 
historical realm of taste with the sphere of art. 
According to Venturi C?zanne?s ultimate greatness resides in the fact that he 
liberated himself in a double sense: from nature and from tradition.  In the catalogue 
raisonn? he remarks,  
 
111
 Lionello Venturi, ?A symposium on French Art,? Forms [English edition] (January1st, 1930), 192. 
For an outstanding analysis of this subject matter see Laura Iamurri, ?La tradizione, il culto del 
passato, l?identit? nazionale: un inchiesta sull?arte francese,? Prospettiva 105 (January, 2002): 86?98. 
112
 ?Il n?y a rien de parfait ni de d?finitif, ou plut?t  chaque th?orie est parfaite et d?finitive seulement 
vis-?-vis du moment historique, d?o? elle est sortie , des donn?es qu?elle a trouv?es, des probl?mes 
qu?elle est appel?e ? r?soudre. Donc chaque th?orie est provoqu?e par des oeuvres d?art, particuli?res 
ou par des groupes d??uvres d?art, qu?on veut comprendre et de juger . ?Il y a donc une limitation 
dans la valeur de chaque th?orie esth?tique, qui d?pend des probl?mes concrets de jugement qui l?ont 
provoqu?e.? ?Th?orie et histoire de la critique,? Art et esth?tique 1 (1934), 10. 
150
Aussi devient-il libre non seulement par rapport a la tradition n?o-classique et 
romantique, comme ses amis impressionnistes, mais aussi par rapport ? la nature. 
Parce que nul n?eut plus clairement conscience que lui des voies parall?les que 
l?art et la nature doivent suivre.
113
 
This was the same argument Venturi had used to extol the impressionists 
some pages earlier where he comments that these artists attained the ?double libert? a 
l??gard de la tradition acad?mique d?une part? ? l?endroit de la nature d?autre 
part.?
114
 Another aspect of Venturi?s definition of art, the paradigm he uses for the 
evaluation of C?zanne, is freedom. The artist as a creative personality is a hero 
concentrated on liberating his sensibility from the determinations of the historical 
context. The impressionists and C?zanne are the epitome of freedom from the 
restrictive establishment, from strict attention to nature, from the taste of the period. 
Creative freedom is attained by liberating the most intimate sensations from the real 
and from education. This freedom, in the 1930s, had definite political significance. In 
1935 he commented that, 
[A]rt must be completely free from every other spiritual activity. Moral trends, 
however important in themselves, should be divorced from art. In the field of 
imagination speaking and writing, freedom is necessary to creative art,? where 
there is no freedom one cannot have art, for without freedom the mind is not in a 
state for creative work. 
115
 
Political freedom was part of the historical horizon that secured the creative work of 
the artist. 
The exhibition Italian Masters Lent by the Royal Italian Government was sent 
by Benito Mussolini to represent Italy at the San Francisco World?s Fair, and Barr 
exhibited it at MoMA. Barr?s rationale for the exhibit was that it illustrated the 
 
113
 Venturi, C?zanne son art, 65. 
114
 See Venturi, C?zanne son art, 29. See n. 86 above. 
115
 Venturi, ?Lively Interview ,? 4. 
151
sources of three great traditions of European modernist painting.
116
 Barr again created 
a flowchart (fig. 4) to illustrate his ideas, similar to the one he had devised three years 
before for Cubism and Abstract Art (fig.1). By applying the same methodology for 
the analysis and interpretation of both periods, Barr reinforced the idea of an 
unbroken continuity in Western tradition. 
Barr was a product of the ?Fogg Method.? Although he never received a 
Ph.D., his professor and mentor at Harvard, Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965), recommended 
him for the job of director of the new museum in 1929. Sachs?a personal friend and 
disciple of Berenson?belonged to the second generation of Harvard art historians 
trained in the Method. Sybil Gordon Kantor comments that, ?[i]n his teaching 
methods, Sachs used Berenson?s techniques of concentrating on the object to develop 
a visual memory, of relying on photographs for comparison.?
117
 He was also 
meticulous about tracking down documentation concerning the works of art.  
The emphasis on the formal aspects of works of art, coupled with the need to 
group them according to an established set of relations, is behind Barr?s practice of 
drawing charts and chronological schemes.
118
 Barr, or any given scholar interested in 
creating this kind of chart, had to abstract the main characteristics perceived in the 
works of art under study, and then conceive a conceptual model that elucidated their 
relationship. The model thus provided a rationale for the differences among the 
objects and enabled the scholar to organize and classify the material. Later, this 
 
116
 See Margaret Scolari Barr, ?Our Campaigns,? The New Criterion Special Issue (1987), 58. It was 
published in Defining Modern Art Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. edited by Irving Sandler and 
Amy Newman with an Introduction by Irving Sandler  (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 176?177  
117
 Sybil Gordon Kantor, ?Harvard and the ?Fogg Method?,? in The Early Years, 170. See also 
Preziosi?s analysis of the Fogg method in ?Question of Art History.?   
118
 Sybil Gordon Kantor reports of four important charts. See Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual 
Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 20?24. 
152
scheme had to be tested against competing models and used with a greater amount of 
data. But its explicative authority would give it the power to reshape reality such that 
it was able to fit within its structure. Barr?s diagrams became didactic tools. The 1936 
chart took on a life of its own as the ?true? explanation of the development of modern 
art.
119
 
It has escaped scholarly attention that Barr organized the 1939 chart explaining 
the development of Italian art so that it corresponded with the one he had drawn for 
the 1936 exhibition. Therefore, the 1939 chart further clarifies the rationale behind 
the Cubism and Abstract Art flowchart.  
According to Barr, three formal categories serve to organize the evolution of 
Italian art and in turn modern French art: color and movement [Venice]; classical 
tradition, line and sculptural form [Florence]; and optical realism. The tradition of 
color is at the extreme left and realism at the right, leaving the Florentine tradition, 
the one that implicitly originates the other two, at the center. This is the line of the 
great masters in the Vasari-Burckhardt genealogy that Longhi criticized. 
In the 1936 chart tracing the evolution towards abstract art, the realist trend 
(impressionism) has been eliminated. At the extreme right Barr placed the movements 
and artists for whom the representation of reality was still an issue: neo-
impressionism, the Douanier Rousseau, and cubism. Barr did not consider 
impressionism as an artistic movement engaged with color, but rather with the 
 
119
 In the ?Brief Guide to the exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,? Barr stated that, ?[i]n 
exhibiting these movements the Museum does not intend to foster any particular aspect of modern art. 
Its intention is, rather, to make a report to the public by offering material for study and comparison.? 
Barr, id, in Selected Writings, 93. When used for the explanation of modern art, these guidelines also 
have the power to affect the contemporary production of art. MoMA has long fought against its own 
power to consecrate any artistic trend it exhibits.  
153
representation of light. This explains why there is no straight line connecting 
impressionism with Giorgione and the Venetian painters. As the chart makes clear, 
the post-impressionist artists re-connect art with the Western tradition. C?zanne links 
impressionist art with the tradition of color through Tintoretto and Delacroix. This 
interpretation opposes Venturi?s version of the development of the Renaissance and 
French Modern Art.  
Barr?s insistence on the intrinsic continuity of the Western tradition could be 
understood as the expression of the hegemonic ideal of the interwar years, the 
penchant for order and clarity, and for establishing lines of descent and family trees. 
From Venturi?s standpoint, Barr?s approach would be in the line of Longhi?s and 
Ojetti?s. Nevertheless, Barr?s 1936 exhibition was politically motivated and part of a 
strategy to counter the cultural policies of the totalitarian regimes. 
In 1934 Barr wrote about the impossibility of defining or describing the dominant 
characteristics of contemporary art, pointing out that ?[a]ny attempt to classify 
modern artists must lead to treacherous simplification.? He adds,  
[M]odern art cannot be defined with any degree of finality either in time or in 
character and any attempt to do so implies a blind faith, insufficient knowledge, 
or an academic lack of realism. 
120
 
Two years later, the Cubism and Abstract Art show offered a selection of works 
that were presented as representatives of the classification and categories devised by 
Barr to prove modern art?s orientation towards abstraction. In order to do that he 
altered his evaluation of cubism and exhibited ?old? works of art by artists who had 
already changed their style and in many cases had even recanted their previous 
aesthetic principles.  
 
120
 Barr, ?Modern and ?Modern?,? in  Selected Writings, 83.  
154
Susan Noyes Platt demonstrated that, influenced by the contemporary reaction 
against the avant-gardes in Germany and Russia, Barr changed his appreciation of the 
recent history of modern art. In 1932 Lillie P. Bliss had offered a stressed Barr a 
sabbatical year in Europe. While living in Stuttgart in 1933, he witnessed the first 
attacks against modern art by the Nazis. The Bauhaus he so dearly loved was among 
the regime?s first casualties. Noyes Platt comments, 
Thus, Barr, sooner and more clearly than many other Americans, recognized the 
threat to avant-garde art that totalitarian regimes posed. On his return to America 
in late 1933 he observed also in the United States the widespread resurgence of 
realistic styles, particularly those of regionalism, because realism was seen as 
more appropriate to the desperate economic conditions of the Depression. .. In 
the fall of 1933, just as these attitudes towards realism were coalescing 
throughout Europe and America Barr began increasingly to emphasize Cubism 
and abstract art, and to downplay realism. 
121
 
Around 1935 the two countries Barr knew best were under Totalitarian regimes 
and had completed their turn against modern art. Consequently, he associated politics 
with aesthetics. In the next years this relationship would become even clearer with the 
persecution of intellectual dissidents, the show trials in the Soviet Union (1936-1938), 
and the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Germany (1937-1941) and the measures that 
surrounded it.
122
 Barr dismissed realism on ethical-political grounds (it was the style 
favored by totalitarian governments), whereas abstract art came to epitomize modern 
art and its teleological explanation. Barr associated modernity and abstraction with 
freedom and revolution against established [oppressive] order. As Noyes Platt 
concludes,  
 
121
 Susan Noyes Platt, ?Modernism, Formalist, and Politics: The ?Cubism and Abstract Art? exhibition 
of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art,? Art Journal 47 (Winter, 1988), 290. 
122
 Since Hitler?s rise to power modern art began to be withdrawn from view in public collections and 
it was later deaccessioned. On March 20th, 1939, the Degenerate Art Commission ordered over one 
thousand paintings and almost four thousand watercolors and drawings burned in the courtyard of a 
fire station in Berlin. Other works were auctioned off to the highest bidder at Gallerie Fisher, an 
Auction House in Lucerne, Switzerland.  
155
Cubism and Abstract Art was finally assembled in the art season of 1935-36. 
Barr wrote the catalogue in only six weeks. He drew on his training in detached 
scholarship for his genealogical approach, anonymous treatment of style, and 
lucid connoisseurship of particular works. But he also drew on his concern for 
the threatened condition of the avant-garde. The combination of these 
circumstances gave the exhibition its breadth, universality, clarity, and 
permanence. More than just another exhibition of modern art, Cubism and 
Abstract Art was a vehicle for propaganda for a threatened cause. 
123
 
Looking back at Barr?s 1936 flowchart, one notices that this continuous 
development of modern art includes anti-art movements like Futurism and Dada, and 
thus irons out modern art?s anti-establishment drive and epistemological ?difference.? 
The surface of the paper on which the chart is drawn acts like an equalizer as it 
enforces the notion that the artists and artistic movements listed on it shared a similar 
goal or at least the same conception of art. Even the foreign visual products, marked 
in red in the 1936 chart, are made to participate as ?artistic? influences in the 
continuous development of the Western tradition. These charts like the museum itself, 
smother and annul the intentions and functions the creators intended for their works 
in order to accommodate them as part of the development of the general history of art. 
This is how the method of study and presentation, the questionnaire, determines the 
result of the inquiry and the object of study. The heuristic tools impose fundamental 
meanings onto the works of art, when in fact the tools were devised to objectively 
analyze the art.      
Barr and Venturi had similar political ideals but conceived modern art and the 
epistemological foundations of art history in utterly different ways. There is no proof 
 
123
 Noyes Platt, ?Modernism, Formalist, and Politics,? 291. 
156
that Venturi saw Barr?s 1936 exhibit or read the catalogue, but in 1935 he had already 
criticized MoMA for not beginning the history of modern art with impressionism.
124
 
The reviews of Venturi?s books in American publications, and the letters he 
wrote defending his points of view, demonstrate that his scholarship contradicted 
basic presuppositions about the foundations of the discipline and art. In 1943, for 
example, he answered to a reviewer: ?I pointed out the background for the preference 
for abstract art after World War I: this is Fascism. I suppose that Mr. Alford would 
have preferred me to mention the machine age, aeroplanes, and so on.?
125
 (Emphasis 
added). In a 1941 review of Art Criticism Now, Jeffrey Smith, a professor from 
Colombia University criticized Venturi for separating intellect from perception, and 
for undermining the fundamental unity of the human spirit. In his reply Venturi 
supported his claims with the fact that it radically opposed Gentile?s aesthetics, 
adding that,   
If one accepts the principles of distinction, and speaks of contemporary art 
criticism, the greatest danger in art and criticism today, is the lack of sincere, 
natural feeling and emotion, and the emphasis on intellectual abstraction. The 
intellect of the art critic must perceive the very moment when intellect, instead of 
serving art, goes its own way for its own sake, thus creating false or real science, 
but discarding art. 
126
 (Emphasis added) 
 
This anti-intellectual, pro-intuition stance contradicted the meticulously crafted 
methodology devised by Panofsky as a reaction against Heidegger?s approach to 
hermeneutics.  
 
124
 See Venturi, ?Lively Interview,? 2.  
125
 Venturi, ?Letters to the Editor,? 270. Only after the war, he developed a critical interest in some 
aspects of contemporary art. See Enrico Crispolti ?La sollecitazione al contemporaneo? in C?zanne 
all?Arte Astratta.  
126
 ?On Esthetic Intuition,? The Journal of Philosophy 39 (May 7, 1942), 273. See also the answer by 
Smith in that same issue, 274?275. 
157
The influences on Venturi?s scholarship and career led him to develop a 
distinct understanding of modern art and to propose novel theoretical foundations and 
methodologies for art history. Venturi?s bold use of modern art for the interpretation 
of the past, and his implicit critique of historicism, makes Panofsky?s approach to art 
look much more conservative. As Golan comments,   
Deeply affected, back in the 1920s, by the anti-classical, modernist ethos of the 
Vienna School, Panofsky later came to perceive the radical formalism of the 
Viennese as a dangerously over-interpretive approach to the art of the past. He 
found refuge in the textual documents, and in iconography, a method that even in 
its more intuitive mode, iconology, restricts the range of interpretation of the 
work? Venturi, persona non grata as he might have been to his Fascist co-
nationals, was of course neither Jewish nor German, and so had no need to 
repress the images of fragmentation and disintegration that he had found in the 
writings of the Vienna School.
127
 
Yet Venturi?s writings did not become part of the American tradition. His scholarship 
could not find a place in this new system not only because he opposed fundamental 
aspects of Panofsky?s methodology, but also because the Italian?s interpretation of 
modern art hinged on impressionism and rejected abstract art.  
In 1942 Paul Rosenberg organized an exhibition of C?zanne?s work for the 
benefit of ?those Fighting French whose vindicating day would seem to be at 
hand.?
128
 Venturi contributed then an article for Artnews, ?C?zanne, Fighter for 
Freedom,? where for the first time he expressed doubts about his rejection of abstract 
art. In the catalogue raisonn?, Venturi had already argued that C?zanne?s art balanced 
sensation and order. In the Artnews article he commented that an art in which 
 
127
 Romy Golan, ?The Critical Moment,? 129. 
128
 Artnews? editor, in Lionello Venturi, ?C?zanne, Fighter for Freedom,? Artnews (November 15?30), 
16. In the same issue Rewald published the comparatively innocuous ?Corot Sources: the Camera 
Tells. His Italian Landscapes Seen in Photographs of a Century Later.?   
158
complete order reigned would be abstract art, but added, ?Aren?t you more deeply 
stirred by a painting in which you can feel the sensation of nature that the artist 
experiences??? And went on to write that C?zanne?s art,  
is true abstract art, abstract from nature as well as from literary or historical 
subject matter. But it is not an art abstract from sensation and emotion. Schemes 
and cylinders and cones may exist underneath. But the result, the painted surface, 
above all reveals an emotional energy, epic and sublime,?the nature of a hero 
rather than of a man. 
129
 
In Venturi?s estimation, C?zanne?s claim to fame does not reside in having 
expressed in his art a neo-Platonic world view but rather in his heroic attitude, one 
that could inspire those fighting against Totalitarianism. Both Barr and Panofsky 
would have accepted that argument.  
 
129
 Lionello Venturi, ?C?zanne, Fighter for Freedom,? Artnews (November 15?30), 16 and 17. 
159
C?est quand elle se camoufl? en science que la propagande est la plus perfide, la plus redoutable.  
Pierre Francastel, L?Histoire de l?art instrument de la propagande germanique.
1
[L]e groupe moderne s??parpille? [D]ans ce conte de f?es ? rebours les carrosses sont 
en train de redevenir citrouilles. On ne parle plus que de rentrer, que de retours : retour 
au sujet, retour au r?alisme, retour ? l?humanisme. On dirait d?une arriv?e de trains de 
banlieue, le soir, sous la pluie apr?s un dimanche de f?tes. A peine les voyageurs 
gardent-ils, en leurs bras, quelques bouquets comme souvenirs. 
Ren? Huyghe,  Histoire de l?art contemporain, 1933.
2
Chapter Three: The Nationalist Approach: Ren? Huyghe?s C?zanne
In 1933 the editor of French art magazine L?Amour de l?art commented about 
C?zanne,   
Il n?a pas l?impulsivit? mobile, la curiosit? vibrante et superficielle d?un Monet 
normand, d?un Pissarro, juif, d?un Sisley, anglais. ... C?zanne a en lui la forte 
assise de l??quilibre latin.
 3
 
This argument cannot be considered ?racist,? as it is neither negative nor 
disparaging and, according to modern standards, none of the groups can be 
categorized as race. It could be characterized as ?positive profiling? if it were not 
suggested that the ?Latin? is above the Norman, the Jew, and the Englishman. The 
author bases his evaluation of C?zanne and his art according to the cultural/ethnic 
group to which the artist belongs. The claims Huyghe makes and his categorical use 
of this classification for the interpretation of art, indicate that the readers of the 
magazine?educated upper middle class French and Europeans?shared these ideas.    
 
1
Id., (Paris : Librairie  de M?dicis (Centre d??tudes europ?ens de l'Universit?; de Strasbourg 1943), 
246. 
2
Ren? Huyghe, ?Les Origines de la peinture contemporaine,? in Histoire de l?art contemporain, ed. 
Ren? Huyghe (New York: Arno Press, 1968) [Authorized reprint; Original L?Amour de l?art 1933?
1935, published as a book in 1935], 10. 
3
Ren? Huyghe, ?Peinture contemporaine,? 14. 
160
The author of the article is not one of the many right wing art historians that 
populated the French art world in the interwar period but Ren? Huyghe. Once the 
Second World War started he behaved impeccably. He refused all collaboration with 
the Germans, devoted his efforts to protecting the Louvre?s collection, and even 
participated in the Resistance. Consequently, it is vital to examine his use of what 
today is called ethnicity as an operative category to analyze art.
4
The comment is 
completed by the common disparaging of impressionism as a deviation from the true 
French tradition,  
Le panth?isme impressionniste, ce ?vau-l?eau? de la sensation, cet abandon au fil 
des apparences ont provoqu? imm?diatement une reprise de l?homme latin, 
?ma?tre de lui comme de l?univers.?
5
The Latin is balanced and universal, whereas the Norman, Jew, and English are 
superficial and impulsive.  
Huyghe?s was not an isolated case. In December 1931 George, an art critic who in 
the 1930s was an outspoken defender of Fascism, organized an enquiry about the 
characteristics of the French School in his magazine Formes.
6
Laura Iamurri, who has 
studied the enquiry in detail, noticed that only two of the more than ten curators, art 
 
4
The government of the United States of America uses race and ethnicity in its census as categories for 
the classification of its populations. Ethnicity applies specifically to Latinos. 
http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/cenbr01-1.pdf. Modern art history tends to use these categories 
only for the analysis of non-Western modern art for example, as it imposes on these artists the need to 
have an ?identity.? The bibliography on this subject matter is enormous. See especially Rasheed 
Araeen, ?A New Beginning. Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,? Third Text 50 
(Spring, 2000): 2?20, and Iaian Chambers, ?Art after Humanism. A Comment in the Margins,? Third 
Text 50 (Spring 2000): 83?84. These authors react to and criticize the effects of multiculturalism and 
post-colonial theory on the practice of contemporary art, and therefore help to highlight the resilience 
of these categories as North Atlantic universals.  
5
Ren? Huyghe ?Peinture contemporaine,? 14. 
6
See Matthew Affron, ?Waldemar George. A Parisian Art Critic on Modernism and Fascism,? in 
Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff eds., Fascist Visions Art and Ideology in France and Italy 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and  Laura Iamurri, ?La tradizione, il culto del passato, 
l?identit? nazionale: un inchiesta sull?arte francese,? Prospettiva 105 (January, 2002), 86?98. For the 
art journals in France at the time see Yves Chevrefils Desbiolles, Les Revues d?art ? Paris (Paris: 
Ent?revues, 1993). 
161
historians, and critics from across Europe to whom George sent the questionnaire, 
rejected the association of style with nation?Venturi, as commented in the last 
chapter, and Eugenio D?Ors. This illustrates just how central the style = nation 
connection was at the time. 
7
What is distinctive to French nationalism, as the last part of Huyghe?s argument 
demonstrates, is that it claimed to have universal value: the Latin man was said to be 
the epitome of humaness. The text even presents the Latin as the ?master of the 
universe,? a remark that Algerians, South Asians, Africans, and other subjugated 
peoples were able to understand in its full meaning at the time. French universalistic 
nationalism was based on the idea of France as the cradle of a [universal] Humanism 
that had superseded its historical precedent.   
This chapter explores the alliance of art and nation as North Atlantic universals. 
As French critics and art historians identified both categories they had to find an 
epistemological model within which one could comprehend the art of the present in 
light of the art of the past and vice versa. This entailed assigning moral and civic 
significance to artistic development.
8
The magazines, such as the one Huyghe edited, 
had an active role in this constant revision and rewriting of the past, which ultimately 
led to the historicization of modern art. 
The process of historicization of modern art was also spurred by the international 
and national exhibitions of national art, such as the 1930 Italian Exhibition followed 
by the 1932 Exhibition of French Art, 1200?1900, both at Burlington House in 
London. In France there was the 1935 Exposition d?art italien, de Cimabue ? Tiepolo 
7
Iamurri ?Sull?arte francese,?  92. 
8
The classic texts on this subject matter are Silver, Esprit de Corps; Golan, Modernity and nostalgia.
For a closer analysis see Iamurri, ?Sull?arte francese.?   
162
at the Petit Palais and its complement L?art italien des XIXe et XXe si?cle at the Jeu 
de Paume. These are just a few examples in what was an overt competition among 
countries to establish the centrality of their role in the history of Western art.
9
While Italian art historians had to deal with the overwhelming wealth of their 
glorious past, French scholars had to face the fact that modern art had developed as a 
harsh critique to the French tradition and the academic system of which they were so 
proud. The retrospective mood and the need to exalt tradition were difficult to 
reconcile with the experience of the avant-gardes. France could boast of being the 
cradle of early modern art only up to the First War World. In 1936, Barr integrated 
this tradition as part of the history of the [European] avant-gardes, while at the same 
time explaining modern art as the continuation and coronation of the Western artistic 
tradition. As Christopher Green observes,  
[Alfred H. Barr?s] book and exhibition of 1936 was the first move in the 
globalization of the story of modernism; in the making of a kind of historical 
writing that would represent the succession of movements as supranational, and 
the making ultimately of the global modernism and post-modernism of the late 
twentieth century. The end of the 1930s was perhaps the last moment when even 
the French could exhibit the ?international? development of modern art as the 
dynamic history of modern movement in France.
10
 
Barr?s interpretation of modern art was ideological and indirectly nationalist, as it 
identified the United States with liberalism and democracy, the appropriated 
interpretation for a country that did not impose its supremacy by direct colonization, 
but rather through economic and cultural imperialism supported by military power. 
Whereas in the nineteenth century contemporary and modern art were understood as 
 
9
See Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum; Laura Iamurri, ? ?Apr?s l?art moderne?: esposizioni, critici e 
riviste dalla crisis dei primi anni ?30 all?Esposizione Italiana del Jeu de Paume,?  Les Cahiers 
d?histoire de l?art 3 (2005): 125?135; and Braun, ?Leonardo Smile.?  
10
 Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900?1940, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 13. 
163
the art of the period, MoMA reformulated modern art as avant-garde art and, in 1939, 
became the museum of modern art in this new sense.
11
 
Barr?s characterization of modern art did not hinge on chronology and nation, but 
on a certain qualitative value. He redefined modern art as style and ideology, an 
attitude towards art. This transformation implied and promoted a new methodology to 
study and to display art, as the new interpretation needed a stronger textual support to 
make ?visible? the intellectual model that explained and justified the exhibition. 
Chapter Seven provides an in depth study of Barr?s 1936 exhibition, and examines the 
consequences of this shift on the interpretation of C?zanne?s art. 
Although unacknowledged to most specialists, Huyghe also contributed to the 
?modernization? of the museum display. One year after publishing his C?zanne, 
Huyghe curated the exhibition on museography sponsored by the IICI that was 
presented, together with Chef-d?oeuvre de l?art fran?ais, at the Palais de Tokyo, both 
shows a part of the Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie 
moderne. Thus, in addition to exploring the alliance of art and nation as North 
Atlantic universals, thus chapter examines Huyghe?s conservative scholarship 
together with his innovative museography. By analyzing the relationship of these two 
paradoxical aspects of his career with the history of art history, and with the political 
horizon of the 1930s, the ideological character of the modern use of documentation 
and display will be revealed. 
11
 Lorente, Cathedrals of Modernity examines this point in depth from the perspective of the nineteenth 
century understanding of modern art. The author gives 1939 as the date for this event (which confirms 
my analysis in Chapter One). ?[T]he title ?museum of modern art? ceased to be synonymous with 
?museum of contemporary art? and began to mean instead ?museum of avant-garde art?.? Ibid., 13.  
164
Art and Nation. The Indissoluble Alliance of North Atlantic Universals
In an article published on the occasion of the 1937 exhibit Chefs-d?oeuvre de l?art 
fran?ais in La Renaissance
12
?as the title indicates, a publication more conservative 
than L?Amour de l?art?George commented that,  
Nous croyons avoir d?montr? qu?au XVIe si?cle la France ne pouvait se 
soustraire ? l?action d?un art europ?en, d?expression italienne, sans risquer de 
rester en arri?re et de produire des ?uvres d?une port?e exclusivement locale.
13
 
(Emphasis added) 
 
?La France ne pouvait se soustraire? ? Personalization is a useful device for 
presenting general ideas, and scholars would not criticize others for using such a 
common trope.
14
 What demands attention is the forceful presence, character, and will 
power attributed to ?la France? in this text, as She ?knows? and thus determines with 
prescience and resolve the future of French art.  
In the next paragraph George argues that it was thanks to the King?s decision to 
invite Italian artists to the court that ?l?art fran?ais a ?t? mis au pas. Mais aussit?t 
qu?il f?t en possession d?une grammaire et d?une syntaxe nouvelles, il les a 
r?sorb?es.? 
15
 This is the leitmotiv of the French critics at the time: France?s greatness 
resides in Her capacity to assimilate all the foreign influences without losing Her 
character.   
 
12
 First published in 1913, in 1918 it became La Renaissance de l'art fran?ais et des industries de luxe.
In 1928 it reverted to its original name which it kept until it was discontinued in 1939.  
13
 Waldemar George, ?L?Art fran?ais et l?esprit de suite,? La Renaissance (March?April, 1937), 36. 
14
 It is true that romance language speakers make a wider use of personification than Anglo Saxons. 
What follows refers to the way it was used in France in the 1930s.  
15
 George, ?L?Art fran?ais,? 36. 
165
There are two transcendental entities at play in the concept ?French Art.? One is 
the nation, France, which is physically definite as a territory, but difficult to define or 
characterize as that ?something else? that makes a certain geographic area and its 
inhabitants different from others. The second is ?Art,? an entity that is said to exist 
beyond its manifestation in any particular work of art, but only be perceived in?and 
?as??that kind of object. In both cases there is the presumption that the physical 
element is a materialization of the ineffable, indefinable, transcendent entity.   
In the 1937 exhibition, a selection of more than fourteen hundred works of art, 
spanning more than nine hundred years from its Gallo Roman proto-history, 
demonstrated the unbroken continuity of the French artistic tradition?something 
highly debatable in other fields such as government, religion, customs, ethnicity, and 
even territorial borders. On the other hand, the fact that those objects were able to 
manifest this Frenchness?even when they had been created to accomplish other 
functions (decoration, apparel, propaganda, prayer), were made out of different 
materials, and were all different in appearance?confirmed the existence and 
continuity of the category Art through time. ?French-ness? and ?artistic-ness? or 
artfulness justified the selection of the group of works in exhibition, and at the same 
time confirmed and reaffirmed the validity and actual existence of the transcendental 
entities they were said to express. As the art historian Pierre Francastel (1900?1970) 
manifested in a note of his contemporaneous book on impressionism,    
[L]es math?maticiens d?montrent que la s?rie des nombres compris entre un et 
deux est infinie mais ils admettent l?existence de l?un et du deux comme des 
r?alit?s d?montr?es par les propri?t?s qu?elles poss?dent. De m?me l??tude des 
?uvres d?art reste l?objet pr?cis de nos ?tudes, de pr?f?rence ? l?art en soi con?u 
166
comme une esp?ce de mouvemente continu d?id?es et comme un sorte de r?alit? 
sup?rieure. 
16
 
Francastel?s equation not only portrays Art as a transcendental entity, but also 
suggests its superior, universal value.  
There is no doubt that nation, nationhood, and race are constructed, historically 
determined Western categories, and there is an enormous scholarly bibliography 
dealing with their extreme manifestations in the nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries.
17
 Nation, Humanism, democracy, development, and modernism as North 
Atlantic universals. These words structured the political discourse and propaganda of 
the countries that defeated the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s, and passed almost 
glorified into the post-1945 order. The use of these categories for propaganda during 
the process of decolonization and the Cold War reinforced their ideological character. 
Modern art history hinges around the ideologies developed to fight nationalism and 
racism, but has not uprooted race and nationhood as structuring principles. 
Preziosi?s radical approach to the history of art history, points that [modern] art 
and art history, nation, and ethnicity derive from the same formative ideology that 
shaped them in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, he considers that they were 
agents in the colonization of the world through the spread of essentialist and 
historicist dogmas conceived during the Enlightenment. 
[T]he modernist ideologies of nation-statism, with all their terrors and salvations, 
are naturalized and ?demonstrated? through the apparatus of the museum and the 
 
16
 Pierre Francastel,  L?Impressionnisme. Les origines de la peinture moderne de Monet ? Gauguin 
(Paris: Les Belles lettres,  1937), 41 n. 2. 
17
 For nation see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell Universtity Press, 1983), 
and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 
(London: Verso, 1991). The bibliography on race is also overwhelming. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human 
Diversity Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard 
University Press, 1993) provides a good introduction to the French ideas about this subject matter.  
167
disciplinarity of art. One simply cannot today be a nation-state, an ethnicity, or a 
race without a proper and corresponding art, with its own distinctive history or 
trajectory which ?reflects? or models the broader historical evolution of that 
identity?which bodies forth its ?soul.? 
18
 
Under this interpretative regime works of art are perceived as vessels that embody the 
spirit of nations and ethnic groups, and thus prove their existence and their continuity 
through time. It is important, in the context of this essay to explain how such a 
delicate ideological operation might have been realized.  
As a North Atlantic universal, the modern idea of nation (as nation state) was 
defined during the nineteenth century as a development of the Enlightenment notion 
of ?national cultures.? J?rn R?sen has demonstrated that German historicism?which 
in itself was essentially tied to the development of the idea of nation?fostered the 
?historicization? of art, and the ?aesthetization? of history. He argues that, at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, Historicism implied the notion that the evolution 
of the Geist/spirit, was objectified by men, who, therefore had the power of 
transforming both nature and the world: ?L?histoire marque la progression dans cette 
?volution qui permet ? l?homme de se construire ? travers les manifestations de sa vie 
sociale. L?homme ne devient lui-m?me que par cette transformation du monde.? All 
cultural objects produced in this process made history tangible, but art was considered 
the sphere in which human beings could better express themselves. 
[I]l n?existe aucune soci?t? capable de survivre, m?me physiquement, sans 
identit? collective. Dans les soci?t?s modernes, l?articulation et la formation de 
l?identit? collective sont li?es ? une forme tr?s particuli?re d?historiographie. La 
 
18
 Preziosi adds, ?It is this sense that museology and museography have so very profoundly enabled 
identity and allegiance of all kinds, and in all dimensions, from the ethnic group to the individual. They 
have been so indispensable to modernist identity, whether this is linked to ethnicity, class, gender, or 
sexual politics, that there is today the natural presumption that any conceivable identity must have its 
corresponding and proper (and presumably unique) material ?aesthetic?.? Preziosi, ?Collecting / 
Museums,? 290. 
168
dimension esth?tique de cette identit?  - il s?agit de l?identit? nationale - r?side 
dans le fait que la chose la plus absolument objective, la plus profonde, la plus 
solide, la plus efficace et la plus forte qui existe dans la vie collective d?un 
peuple correspond en m?me temps ? ce qu?il y a de plus subjectif et de plus 
int?rieur dans chaque individu.... Un telle esth?tique, qui voit dans la r?alit? 
historique une sorte de r?v?lateur de l?esprit agissant en elle-m?me, et qui 
conf?re au spirituel une apparence esth?tique?que les historiens transmettront 
aux milieux cultiv?s de leur temps?fait glisser l?objectivit? de l?esprit dans les 
profondeurs insondables de la subjectivit? individuelle. L?identit? nationale du 
XIXe si?cle pr?sentait souvent pour cette raison des caract?ristiques quasi 
religieuses.
 19
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Art, as explained above, could confirm a nation?s continuity through time and 
thus its transcendental character.
20
 Historians on the other hand, as interpreters of this 
tradition, became the custodians of the spirit of the nation, one of the foundations of 
the aura of the mandarins in Germany and the savants in France during the nineteenth 
century. 
At mid-century, Jacob Burckhardt?a disciple of Leopold von Ranke, the father 
of Historicism?established an idealized Renaissance as the most important period in 
the history of modern history, and, assigned to art a much expanded role in history. 
Following Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744- 1803), he understood that the ?soul of 
the people? (Volksgeist) is embodied not only in works of art but also in institutions, 
material products, and even the system of government, and in this way contributed to 
build the essentialist notion of the a-historical ?national spirit.?
21
 Wilhelm Dilthey?s 
 
19
 J?rn R?sen, ?Esth?tisation de l?histoire et historisation de l?art au XIXe si?cle. R?flexions sur 
l?historicisme (allemand),? Histoire de l?histoire de l?art, 188. In this article he continues the analysis 
of this subject matter more extensively considered in his ?sthetik und Geschichte. 
Geschichtstheoretische Untersuchungen zum Begr?ndungszusammenhang von Kunst, Gesellschaft und 
Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976). 
20
 ? [D]ans la pens?e historiciste, l?art est plus qu?un simple r?v?lateur de l?esprit moteur de l?histoire, 
il est aussi source de sens et forme d?historicit??. L?art, par sa nature m?me et son essence esth?tique, 
est le garant d?une perception historique du pass?. L?art garantit le sens et la signification du pass? aux 
yeux du pr?sent. Il garantit le sens historique. ?  J?rn R?sen, ? Esth?tisation de l?histoire,? 187?188.  
21
 See Lionel Gossman, ?Jacob Burckhardt as Art Historian,? The Oxford Art Journal 11 (1988): 25?
32, J?rn R?sen, ?Jacob Burckhardt: Political Standpoint and Historical Hindsight on the Border of 
169
review of the writings of Burckhardt is further proof of how different Burckhardt?s 
interpretation of the Renaissance was from those that had preceded him. He observed 
that Burckhardt proved that ?the Renaissance in Italy grew out of the character and 
relations of Italy itself as a completely spontaneous phenomenon, and that antiquity 
quickly and powerfully brought to maturity only what was already there by nature 
and gave it a coloration of its own.? 
22
 This idealization of the small humanist city 
state was for Burckhardt a way of opposing the development of strong nation states of 
his time (especially Germany).
23
 Paradoxically, his writings later served to enforce 
the [wrong] idea that the nineteenth-century?s view of nationhood had its origins in 
early Renaissance culture. As Claire Farago comments,   
Cultural boundaries defined in opposition to, or in competition with, Italian 
humanist values were an important ingredient in the emerging concept of 
national identity for several hundred years. The rise of centralized, unified, 
bureaucratic states is, however, a modern phenomenon?. 
By producing histories of ?national culture,? scholars helped to manufacture 
the modern idea of a nation as an enduring collective. A significant aspect of the 
problematic of ?nationalism? is therefore, to take into account the role of the 
scholars who produced it. National traditions of historical writing arose in the 
same period that historians began to make use of specific visual sources to evoke 
the economic and constitutional realities of societies.
 24
 
In this way, nation fits in all the characteristics of the North Atlantic universals.  
Historicism must be understood as an epistemology, a historically, and culturally 
determined way of thinking, that implies a methodology. At the beginning of the 
century it fostered the idea of nation and the ?national spirit,? and in this way 
 
Post-Modernism,? History & Theory 24 (October 1985): 235?246, and Claire Farago, ed., Reframing 
the Renaissance.  
22
 Wilhelm Dilthey, ?On Jacob Burckhardt?s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1862),? in 
Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 278. 
23
 That is the reason why he retreated to his natal Basle to teach not only at the university but also to 
the cultural elite to whom he wanted to hand down the humanist values he considered threatened. See 
Gossman, ?Jacob Burckhardt.?  
24
 See Claire Farago, ? ?Vision  Itself?,? 69?71.   
170
undermined the centrality of the Greco-Roman model, and later it established the 
Renaissance as the paradigmatic period in the development of the West. Nevertheless, 
at the end of the century, when the European nations were fighting to establish their 
supremacy, France and Germany claimed a privileged relationship of actual descent 
from the Greco-Roman civilization and from the Humanism of the Renaissance.
25
 
Classicism?as already argued above?was used with nationalistic purposes, and the 
Nazis reclaimed it as the adequate plastic and moral expression of the Aryan man, 
even though some pan-German art historians, notably Joseph Strzygowski (see 
below), denied the centrality and importance of this tradition and developed an 
interpretation of history and a methodology to counter the influence of Humanism in 
art history. On the other hand, the pan-Germanic and Nazi art historians pushed to 
their extreme the notion of the ethnic identity of the visual objects under study.  
The discussion about the centrality of Antiquity, Humanism and the Renaissance 
was intimately related to the problem of nation and nationalism. Farago?s approach to 
the problem allows a new understanding of the situation discussed in Chapter One 
about the lack of discussion on race and nation in the scholarship of the ?migr?s.   
During the interval between them [the two world wars], an older view of 
Renaissance humanist culture, grounded in the Enlightenment concept of 
Bildung, was reinstated at the center of the discipline. Bildung, meaning culture 
or selfcultivation, ? was grounded in the view that art is a defining human 
characteristic of the highest spiritual order, with both universal and historical, 
culturally specific, characteristics. What the continental concept of Bildung did 
not do, because it intentionally sidestepped the issue altogether, was to engage in 
the longstanding debate over the definition of national, or ?racial?, character. 
26
 
25
 The bibliography on French classicism is massive. Alastair Write, gives a good overview for the first 
part of the century. See ?Arch-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History,? October 84 (Spring, 
1998): 44?63. Silver, Esprit de Corps, gives the traditional account. See also Christopher Green, Art in 
France. For the cultural climate in the Weimar Republic there is also a vast bibliography. For the 
issues considered in this essay see, Dempsey,  Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin..
26
 Farago, ??Vision Itself?,? 73. 
171
Moreover, the argumentations of their critics, even the valid ones, were lost due to the 
political affiliations of those who had contested this type of art history.
27
 Pierre 
Vaisse remarks  that even the most theoretically oriented German art historians, when 
confronted with ?practical? problems, gave solutions that were not dependent on their 
theories but on deeply rooted ideologies about the spirit of the North and the South.
28
 
Between the wars, the role of a nation and race became central to art history in a 
different manner. The 1933 International Congress of Art History, for example, had 
as a general theme Die Entstehung nationale Stile in der Kunst. The discussions 
revolved around the notions of Kunstgeographie, and raumstil in art, that is, the 
determination of how works of art reflected their appurtenance to a specific nation or 
region. The period of the Weimar Republic was rife with discussions about Raum,
areas of study where the race, religion and language of their inhabitants, and 
especially the analysis of their material culture, were as important as geography.
29
 
27
 Pierre Vaisse for example considers that the ideology of Southern and Northern types was 
manifested even in Panofsky?s writings, whereas other commentators, like Moxey and Landauer praise 
him for reflecting humanist universal values. From the point of view of this essay what happened is 
that these last authors are thinking of racism and nationalism whereas Vaisse is focused on the 
ideology of nationhood and race. See Pierre Vaisse, ?La r?action contre le positivisme de Semper et de 
Taine, ? Histoire de l?histoire de l?art, 408; and Moxey, ?Panofsky?s Concept of ?Iconology?,?, and 
?Impossible Distance.? 
28
 ?En particulier face ? l?opposition entre le nord et le midi, le monde latin et le monde germanique, 
l?antiquit? classique et les autres civilisations, une opposition qui a structur? pendant longtemps la 
vision de l?histoire et l?art des Occidentaux, et sans une claire conscience de laquelle toute histoire de 
l?histoire de l?art se condamne ? l?aveuglement.? Pierre Vaisse, ?La r?action contre le positivisme de 
Semper et de Taine, in  Histoire de l?histoire de l?art. Tome II XVIIIe au XIXe si?cles, ed. ?douard 
Pommier (Paris: Louvre: Klincksieck, 1997), 408. See also Eric Michaud, ?Nord-Sud (Du nationalisme 
et du racisme en histoire de l?art. Une anthologie,? Critique Revue g?n?rale des publications fran?aises 
et ?trang?res  (March, 1996) : 163?188. 
29
 There was also the idea of the ?right? to the soil and hunger for space, which ?coupled with the older 
expansionist ?right? to exploit raw materials and new markets formed the red thread of Weimar 
geopolitical thinking and the intrusive political backdrop for the v?lkisch historiography of the 1920s.? 
Marchand, ?The Rhetoric of Artifacts,?128?129. 
172
This is why the popular arts were considered representatives of a national style in its 
purest form.
30
 As Lars Olof Larsson notes that, 
Die Aktualit?t der Frage nach nationalen Stilen l??t sich vordergr?ndig als 
Ausdruck daf?r erkl?ren, da? die Kunstgeschichte durch die intensive 
Besch?ftigung mit der Epochen- oder Zeitstilgeschichte seit dem Ende des 19. 
Jahrhunderts f?r die regionalen Stilunterschiede keine positiven Kriterien 
entwickeln konnte.
31
 
If time implies endless variation, the ideas of race and nation attached to a certain 
territory, even if invented, provided a-historical invariants that assured cohesion and 
continuity in the succession of infinite changes. Or, to put it differently, nation and 
race (as woofs) were used to structure and give meaning to the diachronic 
development of art (warp.) These categories replaced or complemented the idea of the 
life of styles. 
The case of W?lfflin is the perfect example of this new attitude to art history as 
there is a noticeable change between his early works and his 1931 Die Kunst der 
Renaissance. Italien und das deutsche Formgef?hl. In his famous 1915 Principles of 
Art History, which laid the basis for an ?art history without names,? W?lfflin had 
mentioned race and nation as significant influences in the production of art, but did 
not base his analysis of works of art on them.
32
 In 1931, these two tropes organized 
 
30
 The popular arts were hotly debated in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas German nationalist scholars 
considered that they manifested the essence of the race in its purest state (without the influence of 
modernism), Henri Focillon in the introduction to the proceedings to the first International Congress of 
the Popular arts organized in Prague in 1928 by the IICI, saw in them the universally shared primitive 
stage of civilization. See Focillon, ?Introduction,? Art Populaire. Travaux artistiques et scientifiques 
du 1e congr?s international des arts populaires Prague, 1928 (Paris : ?ditions Duchartre, 1928). 
31
 Lars Olof Larsson, ?Nationalstil und Nationalismus in der Kunstgeshichte der Zwanziger und 
Dreissiger Jahre,? in Kategorien und Methoden der Deutschen Kunstgeschichte 1900?1930 eds. 
Batschmann Oskar and Dittmann Lorenz (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1985), 169. 
32
 ?[I]t remains no mean problem to discover the conditions which, as material element?call it 
temperament, zeitgeist, or racial character [Rassencharacter]?determine the style of individuals, 
periods, and peoples. Yet, an analysis with quality and expression as its objects by no means exhausts 
the facts. There is a third factor?and here we arrive at the crux of this enquiry?the mode of 
representation as such. Every artist finds certain visual possibilities before him, to which he is bound. 
173
the material, as the title of the treatise itself demonstrates.
33
 W?lfflin considers that 
the Stilbegriff (idea of style) varies according to historical periods, but it is 
fundamentally shaped by national and racial factors. This is why national styles can 
endure the superfluous historical variations that determine period styles.
34
 What is 
more, the compare/contrast methodology that had structured the Principles was now 
applied to support this new argument. As Larsson notes,  
Mit der Epochenkunstgeschichte teilt die Kunstgeschichte der nationalstile die 
Auffassung, da? Stil und Stilver?nderungen psychologisch-biologisch begr?ndet 
sind. Wenn W?lfflin in den Grundbegriffen von einer sich wandelnden Sehweise 
als Ursache f?r die sich wandelnden Darstellungsmodi spricht, so wird von 
Seiten der Kunstgeschichte der nationalstile der Grund f?r die Kontinuit?t im 
Nationalstil in der psychischen Veranlagung der Nation, d.h. im Volkscharakter 
vermutet. So k?nnen die Epochenkunstgeschichte und die Kunstgeschichte der 
nationalstile als einander erg?nzend empfunden werden. 
35
 
Thus, W?lfflin?s Sehweise (ways of seeing), perhaps one of the most important 
overarching categories that helped art history become an autonomous discipline, in 
the 1930s was related to race and blood, and these notions came to complement and 
coexist with the notion of period style.
36
 
Not everything is possible at all times. Vision itself has its history, and the revelation of these visual 
strata must be regarded as the primary task of art history.? Translation from Kunstgeschichtliche 
Grundbegriffe, p.12 in Farago, ? ?Vision Itself?,? 77?78. 
33
 See Joan Hardt, ?Une Vision fictive: la trajectoire intellectuelle de W?lfflin,? in Relire W?lfflin, eds. 
Joan Hardt, Roland Recht and Martin Warnke (Paris: Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts, 1995).  
34
 ?Der Zusammenhang zwischen der Stilauffassung der Epochenkunstgeschichte und der nationalen 
Kunstgeschichte kann am Beispiel eines Hauptvertreters der Epochenkunstgeschichte selbst, am 
Beispiel Heinrich W?lfflins studiert werden. ...Nach der bew?hten Art siner fr?heren Schriften stellte 
W?lfflin auch hier kunstwerke einander gegen?ber , die auf der einen Seite das Plastich-Klare, 
?berschaubare des italienischen Formempfindens und auf der anderen das Malerish-Verflochtene, 
schwer ?berschaubare, Unbegrenzte der deutschen Formauffassung deutlich machen sollte. Den 
Grund f?r die angesprochenen Unterschiede sah W?lfflin in der Veranlagung der jeweiligen Nation ? 
er sprach von einem Element, das vom Boden stammt, von der Rasse?. Larsson, ?Nationalstil und 
Nationalismus, ? 174?75. 
35
 Larsson, ?Nationalstil und Nationalismus, ? 174?75. 
36
 Larsson mentions that Kurt Gerstenberg, one of W?lfflin?s students, considered styles a problem of 
race more than a problem of history. 
174
In the 1930s German and French art historians used the same vocabulary of race 
and nation and similar installation strategies to support their national agendas, even 
though they had different interpretations of nation and of its relationship to culture. 
The French used art to glorify the French nation and its ?race.? Nazi art historians 
associated modern art with a non-German race and defiled and condemned it as a 
threat to German artistic traditions and taste, and as a dangerous influence on society. 
The infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition was contemporaneous with Chefs-
d?oeuvre de l?art fran?ais that was also presented together with the exhibit on modern 
museography on occasion of the Exposition Internationale des arts et des techniques 
dans la vie moderne Paris 1937.
37
 Furthermore, there were grey areas that reaffirm 
these fundamental similarities, like the attacks against the School of Paris for diluting 
and perverting the French tradition; the ?racially pure? exhibition of modern French 
art organized by the French government in Berlin in 1937. On the German side there 
was the Great German Art Exhibition that took place in the new Haus der Kunst in 
Munich in 1937 (at a short distance from the Entartete Kunst), where both the 
building and the display were designed to showcase the merits of the ?national 
tradition.? 
38
 
37
 See James D. Herbert, Paris 1937 Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 
38
 Sandra Esslinger, ?Performing Identity. The Museal Framing of Nazi Ideology,? in Grasping the 
World, The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (London: Ashgate, 2004). For 
the French exhibition in Berlin see Michele C. Cone, ?French Art of the Present in Hitler?s Berlin,? Art 
Bulletin 68 (September, 1998): 555?596. 
175
Nationalistic Universalism
Focillon wrote the introduction to the official catalogue for the 1937 exhibit Chefs 
d?oeuvre de l?art fran?ais (the show on which George commented). Devised to 
demonstrate France?s cultural supremacy, the exhibition hovered close to the site of 
the 1937 international exhibition, whose theme was the favorable influence of art on 
technique and every day life. Focillon, who was not a right wing art historian, argued 
that France?s art had even surpassed Greek and Ancient art, and had created a new 
[French] Humanism.  
Cette richesse m?me est un caract?re permanent; et c'est ? elle que tient 
l'intelligibilit? de l'art fran?ais: Il a cherch? ? saisir l'homme sous tous ses 
aspects; et c'est pourquoi tout homme peut se reconna?tre en lui; transfigur? et 
non d?form?, promu, sans perdre sa chaleur et son accent; aux r?gions 
solennelles? Peut ?tre les civilisations de la m?diterran?e ont elles jadis atteint 
une plus stable harmonie. C'est qu'elles tendaient au type parfait; debout pour 
toujours dans un pierre serein; ?Nous ne nous en sommes pas d?tourn?s, 
toujours ils nous furent chers et sacr?s; et peut ?tre quelque aptitude naturelle, 
quelque finesse de discernement nous approchaient-elles d'eux plus s?rement que 
par des voies th?oriques. Dans cet ordre; de quel pas Poussin n'a-t-il pas pr?c?de 
et d?pass? Winckelmann ....  
[J]e crois reconna?tre ici le trait d?cisif de l'Occident; dans la mesure ou la 
France est Occident; et elle l'est d'une mani?re essentielle. On peut m?me dire 
qu'elle le d?finit; non comme un territoire d'?changes et d'influences, non comme 
un compromis entre le Nord et la M?diterran?e; mais comme une force 
authentique et comme un foyer original. ?[E]lle consent lib?ralement ? toute 
forme de sup?riorit?; elle a le sens des mises au point; elle rend communicable et 
humain ce qui n'?tait d'abord que local et particulier: mais surtout elle invente. 
Elle invente des formes; des pens?es; un ton moral; un certain humanisme dont 
les si?cles colorent les surfaces sans modifier la substance.
39
 (Emphasis added) 
 
There is more in Focillon?s text than the equation of two categories annulling 
themselves in the platitude of broad generalities about humanity and the West. It 
presents as a fact what was a tactic for Luchaire when planning France?s strategy to 
 
39
 Henri Focillon, Chefs-d?oeuvre de l?art fran?ais, exh. cat., Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 1937, xiii. 
176
seize the IICI: it describes France as a crucible and the translator of all cultures into a 
single, common artistic language understandable by all men. France is the West; she 
is the direct inheritor of Antiquity by sensibility and not by theoretical approach (a 
direct attack to the German stance on the subject, reinforced by the allusion of 
Poussin as superior to Winckelmann); she is also the creator of a new Humanism. 
French culture thus, establishes the paradigm of man, an idea that was already in the 
text by Huyghe quoted above.  A particular nation claims to be the North Atlantic 
itself, the West. In this way the transcendental, universal value of Art?exceptionally 
evident in French art?rebounds onto the French nation, thus consecrating her 
particular civilization as ?la civilisation.? 
The French idea of civilisation was based on two opposite notions forged at the 
end of the eighteenth century: the specificity of each nation, and the equality of all 
human beings. Thus, civilisation has two sides, one that underlines the particular 
character of the nation, and the other which focuses on universalism.
40
 The main idea 
beneath this notion is that the civilization of the West, its understanding of man and 
of man?s relationship with nature and other men, is the model and the goal of the 
evolutionary progression of the other races and nations.
41
 This justified the claims of 
these French art historians.  
 
40
 As Marcel Mauss noticed in 1929, the predominance of one or the other aspect in public discourse 
and mentality depends on the historical circumstances. His comments refer to the Western notion of 
civilization that he considers is structured around these two contradictory notions. See Philippe 
B?n?ton, Histoire de mots, ?culture? et  ?civilisation,? (Paris : Fondation Nationale des Sciences 
Politiques, 1975), 135. 
41
 ?Les trois termes civilisation, civilization, Kultur son tr?s li?s? Les notions fran?aises de culture et 
civilisation sont en particulier ? la fois proches et compl?mentaires. Ce sont des concepts unitaires qui 
refl?tent l?universalisme explicite et l??gocentrisme inavou? ou inconscient des lumi?res : le mod?le 
?labor? dans le cadre de la pens?e occidentale est valable pour l?humanit? enti?re. Les deux notions 
embrassent ?galement?les id?es de devenir et de perfectionnement, de mouvement et de progr?s? ? 
B?n?ton, Histoire de mots, 37. 
177
In 1929 Ernst Curtius stated that in France ?toutes les pr?tentions de 
l?universalisme ont ?t? report?s sur l?id?e nationale.
42
 C?est en servant l?id?e 
nationale que la France croit r?aliser une valeur universelle.?
43
 
Nation: c?est que par ce terme, justement, le Fran?ais n?entende pas seulement la 
communaut? forg?e par l?histoire, la langue et l?Etat, mais aussi les liens tiss?s 
par une seule et m?me civilisation? L? o? nous disons: ?deutsche Kultur?, le 
Fran?ais traduit par ?culture allemande? et il ne peut se d?fendre de voir en cette 
expression comme une n?gation m?me de l?id?e de culture. La culture n?est 
pas?se dit-il?par d?finition quelque chose d?universel ? ? Tout en 
s?identifiant avec son id?e de la culture, la France ne parle jamais d?une 
civilisation fran?aise, mais de civilisation tout court.  
C?est par l? que la conscience nationale fran?aise s??largit dans une formule 
universelle et participe ? la noblesse d?une valeur g?n?rale purement humaine. La 
France se d?couvre sous la forme d?une r?alit? nationale, et gr?ce a cette forme, 
elle d?couvre en m?me temps qu?elle est la messag?re d?une id?e universelle.  
Et c?est bien cette ?troite liaison entre le sentiment national et l?id?e de 
civilisation qui explique comment la France se repr?sente ? la t?te des peuples 
civilis?s. 
44
 
Curtius concedes that except for a few people of the extreme right, no French 
intellectual in his time (the 1930s) actually held those ideas. He does acknowledge 
that the belief in equality of all human beings at all times and places implies that there 
is a set of norms that are valid for all, and thus, that there is one civilization that can 
be shared by all men. Needles to say, the French believed that that one civilization 
 
42
 The main period publications on this topic are, Ernst Robert Curtius, ? L?Id?e de civilisation dans la 
conscience fran?aise,? Publications de la conciliation internationale 1 (1929), 2?64, Norbert Elias, La 
civilisation des m?urs, (the first volume of the ?ber den Prozeb der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und 
psychogenetische Untersuchungen originally publised in 1939), and Lucien Febvre, ?Civilisation. 
Evolution d?un mot et d?un groupe d?id?es,? in Civilisation. Le mot et l?id?e Expos?s par Lucien 
Febvre, ?mile Tonnelat, Marcel Mauss, Alfredo Niceforo et Louis Weber (Paris: la Renaissance du 
livre, 1930).  I have greatly benefitted B?n?ton?s, Histoire de mots. 
43
 Curtius, ?L?Id?e de civilisation,? 14?15. 
44
 Curtius, ?L?Id?e de civilisation,? 37. As a German, Curtius had a perfect understanding of the 
fundamental differences between the German and the French notions of Kultur and civilization.
Nevertheless, he was especially interested in the continuity of tradition that is the subject of his 1948 
magnum opus Europ?ische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, and therefore he was far from being 
objective in his appraisal. 
178
was theirs. Focillon?s and Huyghe?s texts are based on those ideas and that is why 
they seem today so hollow. 
James Herbert has argued that at the time of the 1937 exhibition the overlapping 
of the notions of art and nation created a theoretical blind spot,  
A decades-old critical regime founded on the polemics of heated political conflict 
had given way to a massive critical consensus ruled over by the rhetorical figure 
of the oxymoronic platitude? Frenchness in art could claim to embody all 
values and all virtues, each contributing its own bit to an all-encompassing 
national tradition. Through it, French art reached its greatest plenitude, precisely 
by becoming a thoroughly emptied entity. 
45
 
Nevertheless, it was an important tool in the international debate where other 
nationalisms asserted their claim to superiority.  
Figures 5 and 6 show the esplanade of the Trocad?ro at the time of the Exposition 
Internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne, in 1937. Both present 
the axis established by the Tour Eiffel (out of the picture, behind the photographer) 
and the Monument de la Paix that sits beneath the open gap left by the two newly 
renovated museums of the Palais de Chaillot (the Mus?e de l?Homme to the left, and 
the Mus?e national des monuments fran?ais to the right.) Near the Seine are the 
famous Soviet and German pavilions whose profiles, contravening the established 
regulations, stuck out of the roofline established by the other constructions. France 
asserted its claim to superiority and might through its patrimony, culture, and 
museums. The illustrations even suggest this equation as the two museum buildings 
in the background balance out the mass of the two pavilions in the foreground. Chefs-
d?oeuvre de l?art fran?ais?which was not officially part of the event?was exhibited 
 
45
 Herbert, Paris 1937, 99.  
179
at the Palais de Tokyo (fig. 7), a few blocks to the right.
46
 In this international 
context, the affirmation of a particular [French] art as universal takes a strong 
ideological, nationalistic importance, especially since the products of the colonies 
were part of the international exhibition. 
 
The Weakness of the Default Position 
In 1935 the IICI published the fourth book in the series Correspondances, 
Civilisations: Orient, Occident, g?nie du Nord, latinit?. Lettres de Henri Focillon, 
Gilbert Murray, Josef Strzygowski, Rabindranath Tagore. The goal of these 
publications was to foster understanding among the world?s intellectuals so they 
would collaborate in the fight for peace. Deeply dependent on the ideals of the 
Enlightenment as Renoliet explains,
Les ?Entretiens? et la ?Correspondance? insistent sur le r?le de la culture dans le 
rapprochement des peuples et l??tablissement d?un humanisme et de valeurs 
universelles. Les intellectuels affirment d?abord que la culture universelle 
s?enrichit des cultures nationales? La recherche de valeurs communes ? 
l?humanit? ne saurait donc aboutir ? une uniformisation diluant les sp?cificit?s 
nationales mais se nourrit plut?t de ces derni?res pour retrouver l?universel dans 
le national.? Selon l?id?ologie optimiste des Lumi?res, les diff?rences 
culturelles entre les hommes sont donc transcend?es par des valeurs universelles 
v?hicul?es par l?humanisme?qui est le souci de placer l??tre humain au centre 
de toutes les pr?occupations--, qui travaillent au rapprochement des ?lites 
cultiv?es.
47
 (Emphasis added) 
 
46
 See Herbert, Paris 1937 where the author analyses the exhibition and the ideological forces at play. 
On the pavilions at the esplanade. Ibid., pp. 29?36. According to his analysis what is important is the 
fact that both pavilions were contrasted with the Eiffel tower and the monument for Peace.  
47
 Renoliet, L?Unesco oubli?e,  318.  
180
It has already been noted that the universalism fostered by the IICI was based on, and 
thus depended upon, the notion of nation and nationalism. It might be said that it 
fostered a nationalist universalism, which in turn naturalized nation as a cultural 
entity. Renaissance Humanism, was already the result of a biased interpretation of the 
past that had helped to consolidate and reaffirm the concept of nation and ethnicity as 
fundamentally associated with art and culture.  
The title of the fourth IICI book is meaningful as three of the four participants 
were European. The only representative of a non?Western culture was Rabindranath 
Tagore (1861?1941), recipient of the Nobel Prize of literature and perhaps the most 
pro-Western of the Hindu intellectuals of the period but, nevertheless a colonial 
subject. His dialogue with the British scholar and diplomat Gilbert Murray in this 
publication is almost irrelevant to the exchange among the art historians even though 
(or because) Tagore had his own theory about nation and nationalism, which he 
considered part of the (negative) heritage of the colonization by the West. 
48
 
Until recently Joseph Strzygowski (1862?1941) was perceived as a minor art 
historian, known mostly for his attacks on the humanist tradition and his pan-
Germanic politics.
49
 Susan Marchand has demonstrated that he typified a group of 
German speaking art historians who, not coming from wealthy or well-connected 
families, did not find a place in the academic circles dominated by the mandarins. 
Social resentment propelled their pungent criticism of the aestheticism and the 
humanistic worldview promoted by the education based on Bildung. Moreover, he 
 
48
 See Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1917). 
49
 Retired from the University of Vienna in 1934, his pan-Germanic ideas coincided with the basic 
ideology of the Nazi party. Nonetheless, his work has been always well known among medievalists 
specializing in Late Roman Art, and lately Strzygowski?s work (as that of other members of the School 
of Vienna) has begun to attract wider scholarly attention.   
181
was a peripheral member of the School of Vienna, which also opposed the centrality 
of such tradition, although in a less emphatic and more sophisticated way.
50
 
Strzygowski did not believe that classical Antiquity established the foundations of 
European culture, and he manifested great interest in the archeological and 
ethnographical material coming from non-classical areas.
51
 He argued that forms and 
texts develop at different times and follow different routes of diffusion, and therefore 
fostered the development of methodologies that focused on the examination of 
images and not on texts. Strzygowski relied on morphological analysis and 
comparison of works of art, and on intuition.
52
 By criticizing art history?s excessive 
reliance on philology and in the study of stone monuments, he proposed a cultural 
history that would consider and treat objects produced before the invention of writing 
with more appropriate methods.
53
 
50
 In 1909 when Fritz Wickhoff passed, Max Dvoh?k and Strzygowski vied for his chair which ended 
in the creation of another position for the second scholar. See Jaj Elsner, ?The Birth of Late Antiquity: 
Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,? Art History 25 (June 2002): 358?379, and Pierre Vaisse, ?Josef 
Strzygowski et la France,? Revue de l?Art 146 (2004): 73?83.  
51
 ?The case of Rome was especially debated, nevertheless. The neohumanist consensus made the 
culture of pagan (or pre-Christian) Greece its ideal and its point of historiographical departure. This 
revolution in humanistic scholarship, however, did not challenge the conviction of the educated elite 
that European culture was rooted in classical antiquity, and its result was not the abandonment of the 
text-critical methods pioneered by Renaissance scholars but their professionalization.? Marchand, ?The 
Rhetoric of Artifacts,? 108.   
52
 Strzygowski was also a contributor and member of the editorial board for Documents, the famous 
semi-Surrealist publication edited by Georges Bataille, that was composed by a rare mix of 
ethnographers and intellectuals. His original interpretations and ?intuitive? methods fit well in the 
context of Bataille?s lucubrations. For an appreciation of the value of Documents for ethnography and 
Surrealism in the 1930s, see Jean Jamin in ?L?etnographie mode d?inemploi. De quelques rapports de 
l?ethnologie avec le malaise dans la civilisation,? in Jacques Hamard, et Roland Kaehr, eds., Le Mal et 
la douleur (Neuch?tel : Mus?e d?ethnographie, 1986).  
53
 In 1920 Strzygowski came to the United States and repeated his arguments against humanist art 
history, which was also the goal of his Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1923). In 
1936 he intervened in the debate generated by Venturi?s  article with ?L?Avenir des m?thodes de 
recherches en mati?re des Beaux-Arts,? also published in the Bulletin de l?Office des Instituts 
d?Arch?ologie e d?Histoire de l?Art, and vented his disappointment with Focillon and the French 
dominated IICI for not following his suggestions about methodology. In this text, Strzygowski states 
that the Jews are accomplices of the humanists in undermining the study and recognition of the indo-
European thesis. Joseph Strzygowski ?L?Avenir des m?thodes de recherches en mati?re de Beaux-
182
Strzygowski?s text for Civilisations summarizes all his previous claims and 
complaints, both against humanistic and philologically oriented art history and 
against Focillon and the IICI. Such overt political references, were exceptional.
54
 
Fran?ois?Ren? Martin observes that the discussion hinged around overarching 
categories and the definitions of historical periods, which, according to him,    
Correspond d?une part ? une tendance de fond de l?historie de l?art dans les 
ann?es trente, et d?autre part, au contexte institutionnel dans lequel la discussion 
avec Strzygowski prenait place. Il s?agissait en l?occurrence d?une diplomatie 
paradoxale, ambigu?, exerc?e dans une enceinte apparemment pacifi?e o? 
l?univers du savant ne devait pas croiser celui du politique ; un lieu de formation 
d?une conscience supranationale, d?li?e de toute obligation de repr?sentation des 
int?r?ts nationaux, mais o? l?on ne cessait de d?battre de th?mes qui avaient un 
fort contenu g?opolitique, o? les protagonistes rivalisaient dans la construction de 
sch?mas antagonistes d?h?g?monie ou de perfection culturelle.
55
 
In the environment created by the IICI the struggle for imposing a hegemonic model 
for modern art history emerged as a political and semi-diplomatic contest of interests.  
In the letter he addressed to Focillon, which opens the dialogue between the two 
art historians in Civilisations, Strzygowski complained about what he calls the ?cult 
of the Mediterranean.? He argued that it made scholars gauge all structures of thought 
in comparison with the Ancient ones, thus thwarting any possibility of discovering 
new ways of being and thinking, since scholars already had determined that harmony 
and the representation of the human figure were central to art history. 
[N]ous admettons difficilement qu?? d?faut de l?emploi de la figure humaine on 
puise cr?er des valeurs expressives plus substantielles que celles r?alis?s ? l?aide 
 
Arts,? Bulletin de l?Office des Instituts d?Arch?ologie e d?Histoire de l?Art (November 1936?March 
1937), 81. This kind of slandering is absent in the publication analyzed below.  
54
 Daniel H. A. Maksymiuk, ?L?engagement politique au sein de l?Institut de coop?ration 
intellectuelle, ? in  Henri Focillon et les arts, 289. 
55
 Fran?ois?Ren? Martin, ? Le probl?me des terreurs de l?historien de l?art,? in Henri Focillon et les 
arts, 116. 
183
de l?imitation des donn?es r?elles. A cet ?gard l?art de notre ?poque 
(l?expressionisme) nos fait entrevoir d?autres possibilit?s. 
56
 
This use of the modern to validate the past is typical of the School of Vienna. 
Strzygowski affirms that Mediterranean cultures, driven by the will to consolidate 
power and material wealth, relinquished their spiritual life and the values that related 
them to their territory (autochthony) in exchange for territorial expansion and 
domination. 
57
 
This is not the most racist of Strzygowski?s texts, and it is the acquaintance of the 
modern reader with his ideology and racism that makes his stance unacceptable, even 
though individual arguments sound true to the post-postmodernist reader 
knowledgeable of postcolonial theory.  As Marchand notes, 
the redefinition of culture?against philological scholarship and classicist 
hegemony?as an organic entity possessed by the nonliterate as well as the 
literate depended precisely upon the rise to power and prominence of those 
outside what Strzygowski called ?the humanist faction;? ? [t]he emphasis here 
on the coincidence of cultural, linguistic, and racial borders undoubtedly made 
some of those nonhumanists the forerunners of ?Aryan? historiography. But these 
celebrants of primitive culture, and critics of European ?civilization,? can also be 
seen as harbingers of UNESCO universalism, both in the sense that the latter 
would not have been possible without the ridiculous excesses of their biological 
theories, and that the post-1945 transference of politico-moral legitimacy to a 
non-elitist, anthropological definition of culture was prepared in part by the 
underworld?s attacks on classical humanism. As objectionable as the claim may 
seem, we are in many ways Strzygowski?s heirs.
58
 
56
 Henri Focillon, Gilbert Murray, et al., Civilisations. Orient, Occident, g?nie du Nord, latinit?. Lettres 
de Henri Focillon, Gilbert Murray, Josef Strzygowski, Rabindranath Tagore, (Paris : I.I.C.I., 1935), 
108. 
57
 ?C?est de la situation g?ographique, du sol et du ?sang? que le Nord a tir? son originalit?, sa nature 
propre. L?, ces forces permanentes constituent le facteur dominant. Par contre, les puissances 
arbitraires utilisent, par del? ce qui est autochtone, tous les moyens d?asservissement qui se soient 
r?v?l?s efficaces au service du pouvoir. ? le pouvoir a toujours tent?, et cela avec une p?riodicit? 
presque r?guli?re, de d?tourner l?homme de la vie simple et naturelle et de lui imposer l?arbitraire 
inh?rent ? toute domination.? Focillon, Civilisations,108?109. 
58
 Marchand, ?The Rhetoric of Artifacts,? 130.   
184
Strzygowski?s ideas and critique of the foundations of art history and culture based on 
a ?non-humanist? point of view have been more readily accepted outside the field of 
art history properly.
59
 
Focillon?s response to Strzygowski in Civilisations is disappointing as a 
defense of humanist art history. Sidestepping Strzygowski?s accusations Focillon?s 
text reads like a proud reaffirmation of his principles and a dismissal of any need for 
revision. He describes the cultures of the Mediterranean as preservers of a living 
tradition, the product of the superposition of different peoples and cultures that have 
forged a balanced, universal civilization. The Greeks, for example, created 
democracy, and he accepts that they temporarily banished millions of people from the 
definition of human being but he explains it arguing that ?cette sorte de cl?ture 
n??tant qu?une n?cessite d??laboration, la qualit? universelle de la formule est attest?e 
par son extension des rives de l?Atlantique jusqu?? la vall?e de l?Indus.?
60
 Focillon 
defends the Romans, famous for their aggressive imperialism, because, they offered 
?une d?finition de l?homme o? l?homme, de partout puisse se reconna?tre. La latinit? 
r?side peut ?tre moins dans une aptitude morale d?finie que dans une certaine 
structure historique valable pour quelques si?cles.?
61
 It is most disquieting to read that 
just before the outbreak of the war, the defender of Humanism argues that the 
?necessit? d??laboration? justifies racism and injustice?comparable to today?s notion 
 
59
 Strzygowski?s standing is now being revised and there are already publications that reconsider his 
approach to art history. See Annabel  Wharton, ?The Scholarly Frame: Orientalism and the 
Construction of Late Ancient Art History,? chapter 1 of Refiguring the Post Classical City (New York: 
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1?14; and the work by Christina Maranci, author of the 1998 
dissertation  Medieval Armenian Architecture in Historiography: Josef Strzygowski and his Legacy.
My argument is structured on the notion that Strzygowski was not a member of the Nazi party and that 
his ideas were never wholly accepted as in the end Nazism also endorsed the myth of Classicism. 
60
 Focillon, et. al., Civilisations,138.  
61
 Focillon, et. al., Civilisations,140. 
185
of ?collateral damage??and that the widespread diffusion and success of Roman 
[Imperial] art proves its universal value.
 62
 
As Vaisse comments, Focillon recognizes that Latinit?, Northern man, 
Hellenism, etc are myths,  
mais cela ne lui interdisait pas de pr?senter, vers la fin de sa lettre, comme une 
r?alit? historique une autre entit? tout aussi g?n?rale et abstraite que celles de la 
latinit? ou de l?esprit nordique, mais qui faisait couler beaucoup d?encre a 
l??poque: celle de l?Occident. Quoique dans une perspective tr?s diff?rente, 
Focillon se montrait par la, tout comme son aine Strzygowski, l?h?ritier direct et 
le continuateur des grandes id?ologies du XIXe si?cle.
63
 
Focillon?s final argument defends a Latin and Humanist West, precisely what 
the Austrian asked to revise. Focillon had a very specific idea about what the West 
was ? France. In Civilisations he introduced the same ideas he will put forth in his 
catalogue of the Chefs-d?oeuvre de l?art fran?ais two years later. France created a 
new Humanism, one that superseded the Mediterranean culture in its mission of 
providing the world with a common language and a secular ethics. The process had 
started during the Middle Ages with the appearance of a new bourgeois culture (la 
r?volution communale) and continued up to the eighteenth century. Focillon?s defense 
of Western values in the name of universalism is no less nationalist than 
Strzygowski?s well armed critique of it, as it is part of his chauvinistic interpretation 
of art history that, in addition, categorically rejects everything that is not European. 
As noted above, the end justifies the means, and Focillon excuses the restriction of 
 
62
 He states for example that even if the Mediterranean culture is in fact no more than a myth, it must 
be preserved and safeguarded because of its mere effectiveness. A most dangerous affirmation at the 
moment when the Aryan myth and the Indo-European thesis were being defended by the Nazis! 
63
 Pierre Vaisse, ?Josef Strzygowski et la France,? Revue de l?Art 146 (2004), 78.  
186
humane values and harsh occupation in the light of what he considers a worthy goal: 
the creation and preservation of Humanist values.  
 
The Contemporary and the Modern
Three aspects of Huyghe?s scholarship in the 1930s help clarify French art history 
in those years: first, his approach to modern art and modern art history in Histoire de 
l?art contemporain (1933?1935; 1936), from which the second epigraph was taken; 
second, his 1936 monograph on C?zanne; and finally his museographic innovations in 
the 1937 show of van Gogh paintings. This exhibit was planned as a prototype to 
showcase the latest advances in museum display, and it also exhibited for the first 
time Rewald?s site photographs of the places van Gogh painted in Arles. 
64
 
Early on, having studied in the Ecole du Louvre, Huyghe became acquainted with 
the French artistic milieu. In 1929 his mentor Jean Guiffrey, then curator of paintings 
at the Louvre, put him in charge of organizing the 1930 Delacroix retrospective. That 
same year he was promoted to curator adjoint, and in 1937 became chief curator of 
the Louvre?s department of paintings. From 1930 onward he satisfied his love for 
modern art by editing L?Amour de l?art. This magazine was founded in 1920 by a 
group of art amateurs presided over by Albert S. Henraux, (1881?1953), who at the 
time was president of the Friends association of the Louvre and later of the Conseil 
 
64
 Two years before the exhibit, L?Amour de l?art published Rewald?s first article on C?zanne 
illustrated with site photographs. Those images and Huyghe?s innovative use of illustrations in 
L?Amour de l?art, will be analyzed in the second section of the dissertation. 
187
artistique des mus?es nationaux.
65
 In addition, the banker Pierre David-Weill (1900?
1970) sponsored Huyghe to travel around the world to become acquainted with the 
collections and the organization of the most important museums of the world.
66
 These 
experiences allowed Huyghe to present a panorama of the advances in this field in the 
section devoted to museums and museography of the Exposition Internationale des 
arts et des techniques, 1937 whose catalogue was published by L?Amour de l?art.
67
 
Histoire de l?art contemporain was published in installments as part of L?Amour 
de l?art between 1933 and 1935, and as a book in 1936. Huyghe observed that the 
moment of experimentation and innovation in modern art had ended and that, in order 
to help artists liberate themselves from the influence of the masters of the first two 
decades of the twentieth century, it was necessary to think about the avant-gardes as 
the artistic manifestations of the recent past.
68
 Modern art was already old!  
Histoire has an introductory article by Focillon in which he considers the 
paradoxical issues implied by the examination of the present with an historical 
methodology. Like Panofsky, he relies on the notion of perspective to refer to the 
temporal ?distance? that separates the historian from the object of study.    
Mais d??tre trop pr?s d?forme la perspective et brouille la vue? Cela d?pend des 
yeux et des esprits. Au surplus, il vient un temps pour chaque g?n?ration o? il lui 
faut mesurer son pass? imm?diat et tenter de mettre en elle-m?me non un ordre 
abstrait et th?orique, mais une clart? ? laquelle elle est directement int?ress?e. 
C?est un privil?ge fran?ais que de jeter ainsi sur le temps et le moment de vives 
 
65
 For the history of this publication see Chevrefils Desbiolles, Revues d?art, 157?162. 
66
 Huyghe, Art philosophie, 29 
67
 The OIM led by Focillon organized the first congress devoted to this subject matter in 1935. See 
Conf?rence internationale d??tudes sur l?architecture et l?am?nagement des mus?es d?art : catalogue 
de l?exposition : Madrid, 28 octobre?4 novembre MCMXXXIV (Madrid,  1935 ?), which is not a 
catalogue but a compendium of illustrative material. 
68
 Chevrefils Desbiolles, Revues d?art, 163. See also the discussion of Huyghe about the problem of 
closure in ?Soldes d?arri?re saison,? L?Amour de l?art (July?August, 1932): 221?228. 
188
lumi?res. Il s?exerce naturellement dans un domaine o? la France a tant fait.
69
 
(Emphasis added) 
 
This is a most original assertion that makes the writing of the history of modern art 
almost a national or ethnic issue, as if the appurtenance to a certain country provided 
a special right and a privileged point of view.
70
 
Focillon?s scholarship focuses on the ?life of forms? that, as the text of the 
introduction to Histoire explains, is the history of the spirit.
71
 Moreover, he states 
that, ?[o]n croit voir en elles [les formes] l?empreinte de ce que nous appelons les 
races et voici que, par affinit? elles forment des familles et engendrent des 
dynasties.?
72
 The task of the art historian thus, is to perceive how the life of the 
form/spirit manifests itself in the present. ?Prenons garde de ne pas renverser les 
valeurs ?dire l?esprit du temps, ce n?est pas dire sa vie spirituelle.? This history is that 
of the basic ?soul of the race and of men.?  Focillon agrees that there are mutations 
due to historical changes, but historical, economic, and social influences are 
?pr?caires.? In this way, his methodology fits within the characteristics of the art 
history of the 1930s sketched above, as he maintains that race and nation are 
invariants resilient to historical change. What is more, even a biographical approach 
would be secondary to race, 
L?histoire des formes, non par des ? c?t?s de psychologie romanesque, mais, si 
l?on peut dire, fondamentalement, c?est l?histoire de l?esprit, non seulement dans 
les remous superficiels qu?elles laissent para?tre et qui ont leur prix, mais dans les 
exigences profondes. 
73
 
69
 Henri Focillon, ?L?Historien et son temps, ? in  Histoire de l?art contemporain, 3. 
70
 This comment resonates with French art history?s chauvinism and Focillon?s interest on making of 
France the arbiter of art and art history. As previously discussed, this was also the position of 
Francastel in L?Histoire de l?art.
71
 In 1934 he published the book Vie des Formes. 
72
 Focillon, ?L?Historien et son temps,?  3. 
73
 Focillon, ?L?Historien et son temps,? 3?4.  
189
Modern art has contested every single traditional value, but ? ? travers cette 
agitation on voyait se continuer les grandes lign?es permanents, et le pressant instinct 
du moderne r?veillait des qualit?s ?ternelles.?
74
 Focillon thinks that at the moment of 
crisis, his methodology would help locate the place where tradition is at work. 
Confirming what for Venturi was a negative aspect of contemporary art criticism, 
Focillon believes that the teleological end of the present development was classicism: 
?une fois de plus l?on pourra mesurer ce que tout classicisme doit aux p?riodes 
d?exp?riences qui l?ont pr?c?d?.?
75
 
Huyghe also wrote an introductory article to the 1935 Histoire de l?art 
contemporain, where he states that the avant-garde movements of the first part of the 
century had only historical importance, an ?int?r?t documentaire ou experimental.? 
His main idea is that?as the epigraph indicates?modern art movements were 
exhausted and that the contemporaneous ones are of a different kind, which justifies 
the enterprise of writing history   
Est-ce ? dire que l?art moderne soit d?funt? On peut rester vivant et commencer ? 
sortir du champ de l?actualit?? Les d?fenseurs, les repr?sentants de l?art 
moderne sont ? l?apog?e de leur puissance; certains l?ont d?pass?; chacun reste 
d?sormais fid?le ? lui-m?me et adopte sans en plus changer sa livr?e d?finitive 
pour la post?rit?. Chaque ?cole a formul? et d?velopp? sa doctrine comme 
chaque artiste? La g?n?ration nouvelle ne les ignore pas, loin de l?, mais elles 
les consid?re comme un acquit et commence ? porter ailleurs ses pas et ses 
efforts. 
Une histoire de l?art moderne n?est donc pas pr?matur?e. Il s?offre ? nous 
sinon d?finitif, du moins d?fini. ?  
?[L?]?poque moderne?, que l?avenir appellera de je ne sais quel nom, appara?t 
distincte, nette en ses contours: n?e avec le si?cle, elle atteignit son point 
 
74
 Focillon, ?L?Historien et son temps,? 5. 
75
 Focillon, ?L?Historien et son temps,? 35. Venturi commented that the crisis of art criticism derived 
from the fact that ? on veut trouver une mesure de jugement pour tous les artistes dans un id?al qu?on 
appelle classique?. ?Sur quelques probl?mes de la critique d?art,? Actes du XIIIe Congr?s international 
d?histoire de l?art. Stockholm (Paris, 1933), 297. 
190
culminant aussit?t apr?s la guerre et vient glisser, ?tal? comme une vague qui 
s?ach?ve, jusqu?aux ann?es actuelles.
76
 
Huyghe had a close range view of cultural life in Paris, and saw that there had 
been a qualitative change in the definition of art. The great modern masters, for 
example, were at the moment more concerned with their careers and legacy than with 
producing new art. Contemporary art was not ?modern? anymore. Moreover, those 
who came after the first wave of modern art were obliged to take a conscious stand 
with regard to it. Therefore, they could not be moderns in the same [na?ve] way.
77
 
A year later, in 1936, Barr redefined ?modern art? as avant-garde art in an 
exhibition that gathered together works from different European countries. His 
formalist methodology allowed him to present modern art as the latest development 
of the stylistic trends that had started in the Renaissance, in modern art?s evolution 
towards abstraction (the teleological goal). Barr?s open ended flowchart also 
suggested that modern art, like Art, exists beyond its physical manifestations and thus 
cannot have an ?end,? but has to mutate into a new/different manifestation. Barr 
related modern art not to a country, but to a political system and indirectly to the 
country or countries that better exemplified that system. From now on, modern art 
instead of being associated with a particular country that incarnates Western 
civilization, will be related with a political system and therefore with the West?s 
teleologically oriented understanding of history as the progressive evolution towards 
democracy, liberalism, republican values, human rights and other North Atlantic 
universals. The consequences of this ideological shift have been debated in 
 
76
 Ren? Huyghe, ?Les Origines de la peinture contemporaine. Gen?se et position de l?art moderne? in 
Histoire de l?art contemporain,  8. 
77
 See Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art,  Introduction and chapter 1.  
191
relationship to early modern art and contemporary art, but not their impact on the 
study of the nineteenth century. 
78
 
Barr?s and Huyghe?s epistemological models, thus, implied different approaches. 
In the first case, works of art illustrate the abstract construal described by the 
flowchart, which the museum-goer has to ?know.? In Huyghe?s case, all the periods 
of French art are important and of the same value, because every single artistic 
product is the expression of a moment in the life of the nation. The art historian has to 
illuminate the relationship that ties the two entities, art and nation. Therefore he is 
committed to understanding each and every period of this development.  
In the 1930s Huyghe?s task was to provide an interpretation that elucidated the 
new period in the history of French art. He then remarked that the general attitude 
towards art had changed and declared modern art a ?closed? episode. This standpoint 
enabled him to gauge avant-garde?s art ?qualitative? difference from the art of the 
past and to interpret modern art as a reaction against, and a break with tradition, i.e. as 
an epistemological crisis. Barr?s interpretative model, on the contrary, inclined him to 
present modern art as a ?breakthrough? in the evolution of art towards abstraction.  
In his article for the Histoire de l?art contemporain, Huyghe explains modern art 
as a short development that had manifested the epistemological crisis of the end of the 
century, and whose characteristics had been lack of confidence in the accepted 
tradition, an exaggerated sensualism and individualism, and a new cult for life. The 
1870 war brought to an end the optimism and positivism that had characterized the 
nineteenth century and provoked the   
 
78
 See Lorente?s comments on MoMAism in the epilogue of Cathedrals of Modernity.
192
universelle r?vision des valeurs, accept?e par tous apr?s la guerre de 14? Et 
comme les g?n?rations nouvelles, si elles s?insurgeaient contre l?optimisme de 
l?esprit scientifique, restaient du moins impr?gn?es de ses m?thodes, c?est avec la 
rigueur analytique la plus soutenue qu?elles entreprirent cette r?vision. 
79
 
Huyghe evokes Decartes?s methodological doubt in order to characterize 
C?zanne?s critique of tradition. In this light, the practice of revising the foundations 
of the established order before building a new system is profoundly French. Modern 
art, by attacking and breaking the humanist tradition, had provided a clean slate for 
the development of a new interpretation of art. Nevertheless, it had been at all 
moments profoundly and fundamentally French. Modern artists had discovered the 
formal dimension of art and liberated it from the yoke of mimesis. The return to 
realism, to order, and to the human being at the end of the modern period meant for 
Huyghe, the return to extra pictorial, more humane dimensions which had been 
disparaged in the struggle to attain formal purity.  
Modern art had been then, a short, but necessary, crisis that liberated art. In the 
end, his interpretation of the development of modern art hinges around the problem of 
ethnicity.   
Ainsi l?impressionnisme m?me, alors qu?il para?t avec Seurat pouss? ? son 
extr?me, se pr?pare en fait son contraire. Ainsi s?esquisse le principe de dualit? 
qui est au fond de l?art moderne, cette dualit? qui s?est exprim?e pleinement dans 
l?opposition des races latines et des races germaniques. 
80
 
France?s superiority and endurance derives from its ability to absorb and 
assimilate different influences while remaining the same. ?Modern art? is the 
aftermath of impressionism, the result of the domination and assimilation of the 
German influences by the Latin components of French racial stock and culture. By 
 
79
 Huyghe ?Les Origines de la peinture,? 13?14. 
80
 Huyghe ?Les Origines de la peinture contemporaine,?  13?14. 
193
explaining the impressionist crisis as part of the development of French art, Huyghe 
maintains the identification of art and modern art with the nation.  
 
Huyghe?s C?zanne
Huyghe?s C?zanne is an interpretation of the artist and his work based on 
nationality and race. It might be said that it is a nationalist and racial approach if these 
two terms did not imply defamation and slander. According to Huyghe, it is not the 
individual who is behind the art, as Rewald proposes, nor the creative personality as 
posited by Venturi and Berenson, but rather French ethnicity. Where Rewald shapes 
the information about C?zanne?s life to fit within the ?modern artist? type, and 
Venturi explains C?zanne?s project as the expression of art, Huyghe understands the 
artist as the representative of a race.   
The book is organized like a theorem, so for each variable in C?zanne?s art there 
corresponds one racial element that explains it: C?zanne the Latin, the Southern, the 
Mediterranean.
81
 The author presents C?zanne as the best representative of the good 
stereotypes attributed to the ethnic [?] groups that were thought to compose France?s 
racial stock, the perfect combination of the French types. Biographical events are 
secondary compared to the strength of this racial ingredient, the primary force that 
shapes the artist?s character and determines his heroic devotion to art: ?[o]n 
 
81
 ? Un fond agit? de baroque subsista toujours en C?zanne sous les disciplines classiques acquises plus 
tard: le m?ridional sous le latin. ? Ren? Huyghe, C?zanne (Paris : Plon, 1936), 26. 
194
expliquerait beaucoup de son ?tre profond en disant qu?il ?tait un latin, et beaucoup 
de son ?tre ext?rieur en disant qu?il ?tait un m?ridional.?
82
 
For Huyghe, C?zanne is first of all a Latin. Contrary to the man of the North, and 
as a good Mediterranean, he relied mainly on his sensations and spirit,  
Cela encore est bien dans le destin de C?zanne: l?id?e de latin serait insuffisante 
? le d?finir si on n?ajoutait celle de latin de France. La France peu ? peu a 
fa?onn?, d?tach? de l?Italie un latin qui a re?u son empreinte en m?me temps 
qu?il la marquait de la sienne plus tendrement, plus passionn?ment attach? ? la 
r?alit? des choses, sans cependant renoncer ? les soumettre ? ce primat de la 
pens?e, qui est le propre de la latinit??
83
 
And he adds, 
 
Si l?esprit de C?zanne est celui du Latin, et de ce Latin si particulier qu?est le 
Proven?al entr? dans l?orbite de l?intelligence et de la sensibilit? fran?aises, son 
caract?re est aussi cat?goriquement celui du M?ridional.
84
 
The impressionists, the Northern influence, had disparaged the main 
accomplishments that the Latin race had conquered under the Italian impulse: the 
rendering of volume, space, and local color.
85
 C?zanne, who as a Latin could not fall 
into the excesses motivated by the exaggerated fidelity to optical perception, regained 
these elements for painting. When C?zanne adopted the Impressionist technique, he 
was following Descartes?s way: like the philosopher?Huyghe argues?he had to 
abandon the old house and live in temporary lodgings while building a new one on 
well inspected grounds: ?C?zanne en arrivant ? l?exc?s logique, il s?en sauvera encore 
en Latin en comprenant que la sensation doit ?tre ?quilibr?e par l?esprit.?
86
 C?zanne?s 
 
82
 Huyghe, C?zanne, 8.  
83
 Huyghe, C?zanne, 11. 
84
 Huyghe, C?zanne, 14. According to Huyghe the man from the South of France is characterized by 
his ?malice,? his irony, and proclivity to exaggeration. 
85
 ?Pour que la peinture ne soit pas simple harmonie de lignes et de taches, pour qu?elle prenne cette 
assiette et cette r?alit? qu?aime l?esprit latin, il avait patiemment entrepris la conqu?te de l?espace?. 
L?impressionnisme, cet art de septentrionaux, vint tout rejeter dans l?instable tourbillon des illusions et 
des atomes lumineux.? Huyghe, C?zanne, 40?41. 
86
 Huyghe, C?zanne, 49. 
195
classicism strikes a difficult balance between his sensations and the ideas of his spirit. 
His torment was caused by his unwillingness to make concessions in any of these two 
aspects of his art.  
C?zanne?s art is beyond the contemporary skirmishes about style and influences, 
and thus the book ends with a philosophical reflection about Man. It is from 
C?zanne?the French Latin and the Mediterranean?that Huyghe defines and 
evaluates humanness and human values.   
L?heure est venue de ne plus envisager C?zanne comme la justification d?une 
cause actuelle, mais pour son importance humaine, ... L?Homme, ce fugitif 
poursuivi par le Temps, cet ?tre que chaque seconde transforme, et qui de la 
naissance ? la mort est entra?n? dans une ?volution  incessante de ses sentiments, 
de ses id?es?dans l?irr?m?diable ?coulement du monde, il ne songe qu?? 
?laisser des traces?, qu?? l?guer une ?uvre o? il transf?re le mirage de la mort 
vaincue. Ce sans doute le Latin plus que le Septentrional ou le Germain, 
qu?enivrent le transformisme, le devenir. 
Jamais dans l?Histoire de l?Art un homme ne s?est accroch? plus ?prement ? 
l?immuable que C?zanne. Sur les ruines du grand r?ve de stabilit? de la pens?e 
classique, la science a b?ti la notion de l??ternelle transformation de tout. 
L?impressionnisme, .. accepte cette r?v?lation : il abdique, il s?abandonne ? la 
disparition universelle, ? C?zanne r?siste. Il est le dernier sursaut latin, il tente 
de redresser cette s?curit? renvers?e depuis le XVIIe si?cle. 
87
(Emphasis added). 
 
Man performs in Huyghe?s methodology the function that art played in Venturi?s. 
The French art historian uses his characterization of the ?Latin man? as a standard to 
evaluate C?zanne?s persona and art. According to Huyghe, the Latin man is able to 
grasp certain aspects of the meaning of life that escape both Germans and modern 
men. C?zanne is thus the epitome of humanness. Huyghe?s text passes from the racial 
(that is, particular) through the individual (the genius of the group), to the universal 
(humanness). Moreover, the idea of civilisation is here perfectly exemplified, as one 
of its main characteristics is that, contrary to the German (spiritual) kultur, it has a 
 
87
 Huyghe, C?zanne,  60?61. 
196
deep attachment to patrimony, and to the (physical) accumulation of material objects 
that attests to its progression. Already, Curtius had noticed that the French were much 
more fixed on the conservation of heritage,
 
and this was also Strzygowski?s complaint 
against humanist art history: its obsession with stone monuments and ruins instead of 
living popular traditions.
88
 
Objective Documentation of Modern Art
In 1937, one year after the publication of C?zanne, Huyghe organized and 
curated the exhibition on museography sponsored by the IICI at the Palais de 
Tokyo.
89
 The show itself was a demonstration of the principles of museography, its 
history, and the latest advances in the field. The van Gogh show was one of the three 
special exhibits that complemented the main display and proposed prototypes of 
exhibitions in different areas: literature, ethnography, and the arts.
90
 
The van Gogh exhibition, with its supporting scientific apparatus and 
professional approach to art history and display, was hailed as the model of a modern 
 
88
 As B?n?ton commented, ?Soucieux de continuit? le nationalisme fran?ais est un nationalisme 
d?h?ritier fid?le ? ses traditions et attach? notamment ? la civilisation gr?co-latine. En revanche, le 
nationalisme allemand pr?ne le germanisme et r?cuse cet h?ritage.? Histoire de mots, 96?97. It is 
important to remember that most African cultures, for example, did not preserve their ?artistic? 
products in order to secure that each generation repeated the act of creation. The interest on the 
conservation of objects is also particular to the West and historically determined, which reinforces the 
notion that the museum is a disciplinary institution established on Eurocentric standards.   
89
 John Rewald was Huyghe?s assistant for the van Gogh exhibition and went to Arles to take 
photographs of the sites the artist had painted there. See Archives des mus?es nationaux Cote X c. 32 
to 42 ?Van Gogh Exhibition,? and ?Exposition Universelle de Paris, 1937.? I would like to thank Mme 
Nathalie Volle for walking me through this rich collection, and for her insights about the history of 
French museology and museography. 
90
 L?Amour de l?art published the ?catalogues? of all the exhibitions. See issues from March to October 
1937. 
197
exhibition of art. For example, van Gogh?s paintings were framed in white, as the 
artist had expressed in one of his letters the desire to exhibit his paintings in this 
manner. The documentation areas drew most of the critiques. The reaction was so 
strong that the magazine Beaux-Art, published by Daniel Wildenstein, organized an 
?enqu?te? on the subject, which obliged Huyghe to justify the presentation.  
As Georges Henri Rivi?re (1897?1985), then deputy director of the Mus?e de 
l?homme, collaborated with Huyghe in the organization of the general exhibition, 
many commentators complained about the application of methodologies and practices 
developed for the display of ethnographic material to an art exhibit. Several 
specialists further objected that these novelties reflected the influence of the 
exhibitions organized by the Fascists in Italy and the Stalinists in Russia.
91
 The 1937 
international exhibition had been inaugurated by L?on Blum, the first socialist prime 
minister of the III Republic, which exacerbated the harsh tone and strong 
condemnation of the conservative critics, who were eager to find similarities with the 
Russian and pro-communist German exhibits.   
The most articulate critic was George, who complained that, ?[c]ette exposition 
est repr?sentative d?une id?ologie et d?une mentalit?.? His prescient comments enable 
the present reader to realize how novel the new approach to display was. Moreover, in 
such a highly politicized atmosphere, it was immediately perceived as state 
propaganda.  
 
91
 Although this subject cannot be developed here, I am convinced that the creation of the Office 
International des Mus?es  facilitated this kind of interaction. For Russia see Jolles, ?Stalin?s Talking 
Museums.? The author mentions that the ?talking museum? had been analyzed in an article in the 
OIM?s publication, Mouseion, in 1932. For Italy, Claudia Lazzaro, and Roger J. Crum eds. Donatello 
among the Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. A good 
introduction is Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations 
at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1998).   
198
[L]es mus?es dont le nouveau destin a ?t? fix? une fois pour toutes dans un 
article de Georges Rivi?re,
92
 ne seront plus bient?t des bastions de la culture 
bourgeoise! Ils s?ouvriront aux foules qui y seront largement accueillies et 
auxquelles des savants attach?s exposeront, non seulement, les donn?es de 
l?histoire de l?art, mais aussi l??tat d??me des artistes. Les doctrines de Karl Marx 
et la psychanalyse du Dr Siegmund [sic] Freud seront mises ? profit par des 
conf?renciers.   
 
And he adds, 
 
Le XXe si?cle aura achev? son ?uvre et accompli sa t?che lorsque les marins 
partiront ? la p?che un livre de Rimbaud ou de Fargue ? la main et lorsque les 
paysans normands conna?tront, gr?ce aux Mus?es ambulants et au Catalogue de 
Lionello Venturi, la chronologie des tableaux de C?zanne?  
 
The right-wing art critic also highlighted the similarities with the exhibitions 
organized by the communists,   
[P]ersonnellement je me m?fie un peu de cette litt?rature ? tendances 
scientifiques. Elle a pour r?sultat de fausser le sens de l??uvre d?art, au m?me 
titre que les sous-titres ?marxistes? et diverses ?tiquettes dont usent et abusent les 
conservateurs des mus?es sovi?tiques ? 
93
 
Basically, the problem is that museum-goers are infused with ?knowledge? 
about art, and are in turn obliged to know art history, instead of being introduced to 
the appreciation of art. The same year Francastel in his book L?Impressionnisme,
blamed art history for the contemporary undervaluation and widespread 
misinterpretation of this artistic movement?s true meaning, which shows that the 
argument was not restricted to the right. He especially criticized the idea of evolution, 
?la notion d?un progr?s permanent, partiel et insensible,? 
On entend tous les jours commenter les chefs-d?oeuvre des Mus?es de ce point 
de vue anti-esth?tique du ?progr?s? des ?coles. On substitue ? la recherche du lien 
vivant des parties la constatation du savoir-faire et la virtuosit?. Tel est le fruit de 
 
92
 He had published this same magazine in July 10, 1936 ?Le Mus?e fran?ais des arts et traditions 
populaires.? Rivi?re was a vocal advocate of the polities of the Front Populaire. See Herman Lebovics, 
True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900?1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.)   
93
 Waldemar George, ?Que pensez vous de l?exposition van Gogh?, ?  Beaux Arts (August, 27, 1937), 
2. This is perhaps a comment on Stalin?s ? Talking museum,? See Jolles, ?Talking Museums,? 450. 
199
l?action exerc?e sur le grand public par une certaine ?cole qui substitue au 
sentiment de l?art, l?amour de l?histoire de l?art et qui guide la foule vers la 
compr?hension scolaire, et pour mieux dire primaire, des qualit?s de la peinture. 
La peinture elle-m?me s?en ressent que menace un nouvel acad?misme et une 
v?ritable scolastique moderne.
94
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Whether or not Francastel was referring specifically to this show, his comment 
demonstrates that ?professional,? modern art history was perceived as new and 
rejected as the intellectualization of art.  
The art writer Ren? Jean observed that the van Gogh show,  
C?est grossir la foule de ceux qui, d?nou?s de sensibilit?, parlent, et ne savent pas 
regarder, c?est augmenter le nombre des ?rudits incapables d??motion. Notre 
temps est ainsi fait que le ?professeur croit tout expliquer.... Dans cette 
admiration dirig?e qu?on veut imposer ? chacun, ce n?est pas vers le Po?te que 
l?on am?ne la foule, mais vers ses commentateurs; l??uvre est noy?e dans le 
fatras dont on l?accable.
95
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Although the van Gogh exhibit drew some positive reviews, the 
documentation was in general considered an intrusion. The critic of Le Temps, for 
example, sarcastically remarked that if this didactic trend continued, sooner or later it 
would be necessary to take a course in physics in order to bask under the sun, and 
compared the exhibition with a public reading of poems by Verlaine and Baudelaire 
where each line was interrupted by a lesson from a lecturer.
96
 F. de Chiton 
commented on the site photographs asking ?aurait-on l?id?e de comparer une 
 
94
 Francastel, L?Impressionnisme, 44.  
95
 Ren? Jean, ?Que pensez vous de l?exposition van Gogh?, ?  Beaux Arts, (September 10, 1937), 1. 
W.J.T. Mitchell in the article quoted in chapter One starts commenting on Johathan Borofsky?s 
sculpture ?Green Space Painting with Chattering man at 2,841,789? which consists of a talking dummy 
situated in front of a painting. It is tempting to draw comparisons, but it must be remembered that in 
the 1937 exhibit this ?chat? was imposed on van Gogh?s art, whereas abstract artists after the 1930s 
would have known and even worked to foster the proliferation of words about their works. See Fisher, 
Making and Effacing Art.
96
 Anonymous, R-J. ? Van Gogh aux mus?es du quai de Tokio,? Le Temps (June 22, 1937), 8. 
200
photographie de vieux souliers avec ce pur chef-d?oeuvre que Vincent  Van Gogh en 
sut tirer??
97
 
Jacques Guenne, director of the magazine L?Art Vivant, believed that the wall 
texts ?que dicte la p?dagogie artistique? were dangerous, and similar to those 
displayed in Russia and at the German pro-Aryan exhibitions. He warned about the 
consequences of such simplifications that might in the end impose themselves as 
truths, 
[O]n commence par ces comparaisons entre les oeuvre d?art d??poques 
diff?rentes. Plus tard, on conf?re au synoptique la valeur d?une preuve, comme 
si on ne pouvait pas toujours trouver d?apparentes similitudes.
98
 (Emphasis 
added) 
 
This contemporary remark is telling because Barr, for example, regarded the 1936 
flowchart of the development of modern art as provisional and subject to revision, but 
it became the epistemological model for understanding the history of modern art. It is 
still embedded at the foundations of the modern art history. 
99
 
Huyghe twice answered these criticisms. In an article published in August he 
updated Denis?s famous 1890 formalist definition of a painting in order to defend the 
inclusion of documentation.
100
 
Un tableau, tout d?abord, n?est pas simple [sic] arrangement de lignes et de 
couleurs; il est le testament d?une ?me, il a un contenu humain, il est une 
exp?rience v?cue et soufferte, une aventure particuli?re exprim?e en langage 
universel. Quiconque conna?tra ces conditions de la cr?ation multipliera son 
?motion et sa compr?hension. Et quel avantage si au lieu de se fier ? sa m?moire 
 
97
 F. Le Chuiton, ?Que pensez vous de l?exposition van Gogh?, ? Beaux Arts (September 17, 1937), 1. 
98
 Jacques Guenne, ?Que pensez vous de l?exposition van Gogh?,? Beaux Art  (October, 15, 1937), 1. 
99
 See Margaret Scolari Barr, ?Our Campaigns,? The New Criterion Special Issue (1987), 20?74. 
100
?Se rappeler qu'un tableau, avant d'?tre un cheval de bataille, une femme nue ou une quelconque 
anecdote, est essentiellement une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre 
assembl?es.? (?D?finition du N?o-traditionnalisme,? Revue Art et Critique (August 30, 1890).  
201
ou d?attendre le recours ? la biblioth?que, il trouve, l? aupr?s [the documentary 
space], les ?vocations qu?il attend ? 
Mais ce n?est pas tout. D?autres [members of the public] sont peu familiaris?s 
avec l??uvre d?art; arm?s peut-?tre d?une bonne volont? impuissante ? acc?der ? 
son secret, ils sauront, pourvu qu?ils aient, m?me latent, un accent d?humanit?, 
s?int?resser a l?homme, puis par cette voie d?acc?s, aller jusqu'? l??uvre et 
rencontrer cette beaut?? 
101
 
Huyghe argued that documentation affords a less intuitive and more intellectual 
approach to art, as it helps the reader to comprehend the artist?s life and environment. 
Therefore, he suggests that the work of art be considered in its [art] historical 
dimension, as the artist is who manifests art into a physical object. In this way, the 
spectator could at least perceive the man in the artist, and to empathize with him on 
the basis of a shared sense of humanness. This, he thinks, should be a useful 
introduction, an initiation to the sphere of art. Huyghe therefore advances the 
argument Rewald will use two years later in order to induce Denis to yield his 
Gauguin letters for publication: knowing the artist as man would serve as an 
?introduction? for the understanding of his art. 
Three months later, in October, after the barrage of comments and attacks by 
those who felt that van Gogh?s art had been profaned, Huyghe defended again his use 
of documentation, this time in La Revue des deux mondes. As this publication was not 
uniquely devoted to art, Huyghe exposed his thoughts about the museum?s mission. 
He reiterates that documentation offers the viewer the information contained 
in books, and insists on the need to help all visitors?including those unable to reach 
a contemplative attitude?have some kind of appreciation of the art on exhibition. 
 
101
 Ren? Huyghe, ?Que pensez vous de l?exposition van Gogh?,? Beaux Arts (August 5, 1937), 6. This 
?rectification? may be used to epitomize the transition from a formalist reading of C?zanne art in the 
interwar period to Rewald?s almost exclusive concentration on the person of the artist. See the next 
chapter. 
202
But now Huyghe expresses reservations about the heuristic value of the exclusive 
concentration on the formal aspect of works of art, and insists on the need to grasp the 
human content of art, and on the central role of the artist as creator of the work of art. 
In this new revision of Denis?s definition of a painting he observes,  
[L]a beaut? ne r?side pas seulement dans la forme? mais dans une certaine force 
expressive, dans un prolongement humain, dans tout ce invisible que rev?t 
seulement la s?duction du visible. Qui donc oserait dire que son intuition p?n?tre 
toujours ce contenu humain des apparences ? Certes, l??uvre d?art forme un tout 
d?tach? de son cr?ateur, elle doit se suffire a elle-m?me. Avouons, cependant 
qu?il nous faut parfois suivre tout le trajet de son apparition, remonter ? ce 
cr?ateur dont elle fut le fruit, pour reconstituer toute la richesse qu?elle 
rec?le? 
102
 
Thus, the art historian who considered C?zanne the Frenchman as the epitome 
of Man, and in the context of exhibitions that claimed that France was the cradle of a 
new Humanism, defends a new type of museum exhibition and art history based on 
the understanding of art as the manifestation of the humanness of the artist, or, of the 
artist as human being.   
For Huyghe, the power of the image and the installation to affect the 
unconscious of the spectator?who visits the exhibition in a passive mood?must be 
exploited for the ?d?velopment et la sauvergarde de notre civilization.?
103
 In other 
words, Huyghe supports the ?good? use of this power, i.e. for the sake of ?education? 
and the divulgation of ?impartial? contents. In a paragraph that confirms the 
 
102
 Ren? Huyghe, ?Le r?le des mus?es dans la vie moderne,? Revue des deux mondes (October 15, 
1937), 787. 
103
 The word ?civilization? immediately reminds of the other side of this approach to culture, the many 
victims of colonization in the name of the ?mission civilisatrice.? In this perspective Huyghe?s 
understanding of the role of museums is not fundamentally different from the one he criticizes, the 
difference being that he perhaps was not so conscious of the fact that his own ideological program was 
also propaganda and indoctrination. ?[Q]ue l?ont regarde le r?le essentiel de propagande, de direction 
de l?esprit public que certaines nations ? forme neuve, l?Italie, l?Allemagne, et singuli?rement la 
Russie, entendent faire jouer au Mus?e.? Huyghe, ?Le r?le des mus?es,? 781. 
203
postmodern view that considers museums as disciplinary apparatuses at the service of 
the nation-state, and White understanding of ideology, Huyghe affirms that ?[a]u 
milieu des rythmes collectifs, il [the museum] enseigne, par le myst?re enclos dans 
ses chefs-d??uvre, le temps d?arr?t, le repli sur soi, il r??duque les r?actions 
individuelles.? (Emphasis added). And he adds,  
Ce r?le, toutefois, ne peut le remplir que si on ne l?asservit pas aux doctrines du 
moment, que si on ne le met pas au service d?id?es que l?on entend diffuser. Il lui 
faut ? tout prix rester impartial. Le livre peut ?tre suspect d?interpr?tation, mais 
qui se m?fierait de ces salles ou dorment les vestiges des si?cles ?coul?s ? 
Pouvoir d?autant plus redoutable qu?il est moins visible; et pourtant la fa?on de 
pr?senter les objets, de les grouper, de les accompagner d?un commentaire dote 
ces morts de paroles qui tirent d?eux non leur sens, h?las ! mais leur autorit?. 
104
 
(Emphasis added) 
 
Huyghe admits that museums are excellent propagandistic tools, and that they are 
even more effective in spreading ideological contents than books because the public 
does not suspect them. Huyghe understood the museum?s power for indoctrination, 
learned the lessons that the Totalitarian countries were delivering at the time, and 
sought to use them for the diffusion of ?impartial? dogmas.
105
 Huyghe?s optimistic 
commentary about the power of the image, of the consequences of modern life in 
culture?fleeting attention, lack of time and interest in profound analysis?and his 
determination to take advantage of them for a ?good cause? confirms him as the 
antecedent, and perhaps the source, of Andr? Malraux?s modernist cultural 
strategies.
106
 From a postmodern standpoint, it is not so clear that this power can be 
 
104
 Huyghe, ?Le r?le des mus?es,? 781. 
105
 See Tony Bennet, ?The Exhibitionary Complex,? in Grasping the World, The Idea of the Museum;
and Preziosi, ?Collecting / Museums.?  
106
 See Huyghe, De l?Art a la philosophie, and ?Directives,? L?Amour de l?art (Janvier, 1931), 4. For 
Andr? Malraux?s cultural policies, especially after the war see Herman Levobics, Mona Lisa Escort 
Andr? Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).  
204
or was used ?impartially,? especially if considered from the perspective of those who 
suffered under France?s mission civilisatrice.
Huyghe?s exhibition was contemporaneous to the Entartete Kunst exhibit 
organized by the Nazis in Munich together with Great German Art Exhibition at the 
recently inaugurated Haus der Kunst.
107
 
Conclusion 
In 1955 Panofsky equated temporal with spatial perspective (historical with 
geographical distance), and praised Barr for establishing an order and systematizing 
what in Europe was still confusing due to nationalisms, excessive proximity, and 
personal involvement.
108
 This chapter has demonstrated that the difference between 
the two approaches was not the historical or geographical distance, or even 
perspective to evaluate modern art, but the basic definition of what was art, and 
modern art, and its relationship with other North Atlantic universals (nation, 
democracy, person). 
Focillon?who had himself confronted the problem of writing about modern and 
contemporary art in his 1928 volume La Peinture aux XIXe et XXe si?cle: Du 
r?alisme ? nos jours 
109
?and Huyghe, as did most of the European art historians and 
 
107
 Esslinger, ?Performing Identity?. 
108
 See Erwin Panofsky, ?Epilogue: Three Decades of Art History in the United States,? in Meaning in 
the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, c1955). 
109
 For an analysis of this volume see Pierre Vaisse, ?L?Art du XXe si?cle d?Henri Focillon,? Henri 
Focillon et les arts. 
205
art critics who answered George?s 1931 questionnaire, believed in the existence of 
national schools of art, and therefore that art was the manifestation of the spirit of a 
nation.
110
 
It was then almost logical for French art historians to work on the recollection of 
testimonies and documents about contemporary art for the next generations to sift 
through (like the Luxembourg museum in the nineteenth century), and to try to 
encompass as many of the different artistic tendencies of the moment as possible in 
their ?panoramas? of contemporary art. As Huyghe explained in his introduction to 
the book on contemporary art, 
[I]l est trop t?t pour juger, mais non pour expliquer?. On entend bien qu?un 
classement qui satisfasse pleinement soit impossible, et par d?finition, puisque 
tout classement est artifice de l?esprit dont la vie, en sa complexit? mobile, ne se 
soucie pas. Mais un classement peut ?tre au moins une commodit?, un proc?d? de 
d?chiffrage; le n?tre, esp?rons-le, sera plus. 
111
 
This way of defining modern art made them also extremely aware of the 
conventional and artificial character of the intellectual categories they were using to 
study art. This new interest in modern art was for them proof that the experimental 
moment of the avant-gardes has passed and that they had to find new epistemological 
models to explicate ?contemporary art? as the expression of another moment in the 
history of the nation. This was done in the magazines and official art exhibitions 
through a dialogue with the past, and by establishing correspondences between Old 
and modern masters, which affirmed the notion of a continuous national tradition and 
therefore the existence and resilience of the nation. 
112
 
110
 See ?A Symposium on French Art,? Forms [English edition] (December, 1931):183?186. 
111
 Huyghe, ?Les Origines de la peinture contemporain,? 7. 
112
 See  Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, and  Iamurri, ?Sull?arte francese,? 86?98. 
206
When contemplated from the point of view of a modern art history that 
understands modern art as the art of the avant-gardes, this bibliography is just 
outmoded or dated. Nevertheless, this had been Barr?s approach before 1936, when 
he established his new epistemological model and the new teleology to explain and 
evaluate modern art.  
Retrospectively, Huyghe himself believed that theory was the scourge of modern 
art as he explained that it had succumbed ?au mirage des abstractions, des 
programmes intellectuels, jusque dans ce supr?me refuge des artistes, je veux dire: le 
marge esth?tique.? He even commented that the problem had started in the nineteenth 
century, when the caf? replaced the studio as the artists? meeting place as they met 
there with writers and other intellectuals. Much as Huyghe regretted the 
intellectualization of modern art, he did not consider the exhibition techniques he 
himself helped to devise, as part of the problem. ?[L]?art moderne qui, par vocation 
aurait du ?tre un contrepoids ? l?intellectualisme exacerb? de notre ?poque, est tomb? 
sous la coupe d?intellectuels sp?cialises, les critiques d?art, qui ont multipli? les 
doctrines esth?tiques. ?
113
 
Huyghe did not repeat his ?racial? interpretation of art, but rather became 
interested in the psychology of art and on art as the manifestation of a ?soul? of the 
artist. Needless to say, the paradigm or standard he used in his stance was deeply 
Eurocentric. On the other hand, as his approach to museography in the 1930s 
demonstrates, this characteristic of his scholarship was becoming more subtle, more 
ideological, as it was being ingrained at the epistemological foundations of the 
 
113
 Huyghe, Art  philosophie, 58. 
207
discipline that support the methodologies of research and the strategies of museum 
display.  
In 1936, other alternatives were already being advanced for the study and 
understanding of modern art: Barr?s notion of modern art?s progressive autonomy and 
self-criticism, Rewald?s interest in the biography of the artist as hero, that is, the artist 
not as a creative personality or as the member of an ethnic group. Huyghe himself 
was pointing to this last development in his writings. Nevertheless, nation and race?
as Chapter One has established?are implicit and still determine modern art history. 
These notions passed onto the structure of the discipline, and they did not disappear. 
They are used for the consideration of non-Western art and artists and scholars, who 
are expected to manifest a particular ?regional? identity whereas Euro-American ones 
are conceived of as the expression of ?universal? art and art history.  
Nation, nationhood, and race are at the foundations of modern art history, and 
while they have been concealed or even forgotten, they have not been deconstructed 
or written off. Whatever is not examined, especially in movements of great 
epistemological revision as in the last ?crisis? of the discipline, is naturalized by its 
use.   
In the 1930s, with nationalist movements threatening world peace, different 
methodological approaches to art history coalesced into a hegemonic model that 
overcame national differences by claiming the universal significance of an art 
structured and organized around the Humanist values derived from the Renaissance. 
The IICI worked under this presumption and thought that it was the task of the 
intellectuals to make them a popular and effective tool against Totalitarianism. But 
208
the SDN fostered a ?national? interpretation of ?universal? Humanism, that in the end 
is a North Atlantic universal. The French understanding of Humanism could thus be 
transported and even thrive in this new scheme, as did all the other ?national? 
interpretations of art history. 
 
209
?[A] major argument made here is that the artist exists as the product of art historical methods 
used to explain the object in culture. The artist is a naturalized concept, existing in the object, with 
intentions signaled through a self-constructed persona for whom a primary trait is the possession of 
just those intentions capable of artistic realization, or ?expression? invested in the work of art. ? [A] 
genealogy of the artist intersects not only with the concepts of artist, art, and the biography of the artist 
but also with the question in contemporary cultural theory of how disciplines construct their own 
objects of study, their own methods, and, hence, their ?discipline?.? 
Catherine Soussloff, The Absolute Artist. The Historiography of a Concept.
1
Why in the late 1980s this ongoing obsession with the individual artistic creator as the structuring 
principle of art history? Why this deep-set investment in self-expressive individualism? And what 
makes it so difficult to abandon a methodology criticized long and hard for its wanton neglect of 
issues of social determination and effects? With Rewald, of course, we are dealing with one of the 
?grand old men? of an earlier pioneering generation. Men who blanch to see the choice blooms of 
their modernist heroes debased by ?revisionist? association with the common and garden weeds of 
academia and the like. ? With Rewald it is almost fitting that his 1930s study of C?zanne, reworked 
and enlarged, should be republished as an historical artifact; a monument to the crystallization of 
modernist art history in pre-war America.  
Nicholas Green, ?Circuits of Production, Circuits of Consumption,? 1989.
 2
Chapter Four: Rewald?s Scholarship and the Biography of C?zanne 
In the first pages of C?zanne et Zola Rewald observes,   
Il y avait entre Zola et C?zanne, artistes tous deux, des affinit?s qui n?existaient 
pas entre eux et Baille. Des souvenirs de leur prime jeunesse pass?e ensemble, 
une vraie amiti? les unissait tous trois. Mais Baille n??tait pas de la m?me 
essence qu?eux et cela appara?tra de plus en plus ? (Emphasis added) 
3
Rewald?s modernist art history is basically a narrative around the deeds of ?great 
men,? as he conceives of them as intrinsically different from the rest of humankind.
4
This ?difference? explains their life as a constant heroic struggle against the 
 
1
Catherine M., Soussloff, The Absolute Artist. The Historiography of a Concept (Minnesota: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 14. 
2
Nicholas Green, ?Circuits of Production, Circuits of Consumption: The Case of Mid-Nineteenth-
Century French Art Dealing,? Art Journal 48 (Spring 1989): 527?528. 
3
Rewald, C?zanne, 22. 
4
See Paul Smith, ?Pictures and History: One Man?s Truth,? Oxford Art Journal 10 (1987): 97?105, 
and John House, ?Review Impressionism and History: The Rewald Legacy,? Art History 9 (September, 
1986): 369?375. 
210
mediocrity of society. Moreover, as the letter to Denis analyzed in Chapter One 
proves, Rewald was interested in C?zanne as a [historical] man not as a creative 
personality or as the representative of a nation. Whereas the introductory essay by 
Venturi and the monograph by Huyghe have a biographical structure that supports 
their understanding on modern art and ideologies, Rewald?s book is biography.
5
In his 
scholarship even works of art are considered documents that inform us about the life 
of the artist. Moreover, by finding the sites C?zanne represented, the scholar was able 
to reconstruct the itineraries of the artist?s painting campaigns.
6
Rewald did not enquire or explain why C?zanne was a great artist or when he 
began to be one. The book?s goal is the demonstration of C?zanne?s greatness. As the 
paragraph quoted above indicates, the scholar considered the artist and Zola ?special? 
the moment they were born.  
It has not been noticed until now that the centrality of Zola?s friendship with 
C?zanne for the understanding of the painter?s personality and career derives from 
Rewald?s biography. Even if it is fundamentally the same text, the book published in 
1936 as C?zanne et Zola, reappeared in 1939 as C?zanne, sa vie, son oeuvre, son 
amiti? pour Zola; and in 1948 as Paul C?zanne: A Biography.
7
Although their 
relationship was a well known fact, no previous study had given such an important 
weight to Zola in C?zanne?s life. It might be argued that Rewald was among the first 
 
5
Venturi?s introductory article to the catalogue raisonn? is not a biography but a monograph 
structured to support the author?s classification and stylistic analysis of C?zanne?s oeuvre. Historically 
the catalogue raisonn? is a product of the biographical approach to art history.    
6
Site photographs were used by Rewald for an ?iconographical? analysis and classification of 
C?zanne?s oeuvre. This methodology might be considered the antecedent for the work of Robert 
Herbert who analyzed the landscapes represented by the impressionist in order to deduce the social and 
personal meanings those sites might have had for them. His students Paul Hayes Tucker and Richard 
Brettel continued his approach. For the relationship among these scholars see Pollock, ?Don?t Take the 
Pissarro,? 96?103.  
7
Rewald was also the editor of the letters of the artists, which were first published in 1937. 
211
to use the cache of letters kept by Zola, and that a more careful compilation and 
examination of the sources according to scientific standards of objectivity determined 
this new approach.
8
Nevertheless, Gerstle Mack?s 1935 biography was based on 
almost the same sources as Rewald?s, but incorporates the artist?s friendship with 
Zola as just another episode of his life.
9
This chapter analyzes Rewald?s 1936 
C?zanne et Zola, which became the accepted biography on the artist and was the first 
written according to modern art history?s protocols. 
The centrality of the artist in Western modern art has been naturalized in such 
a way that it can be said that this is an ?artist?s art,? namely, an art made by artists. 
Paradoxical and tautological as this affirmation might seem, its meaning becomes 
more understandable when inverted: it is the creator, the genius who, when artist, 
produces ?art? and defines what art is. When art historians ?declare? a non-Western 
product ?art,? they imply that the maker is an ?artist,? and project onto his or her 
personae all the presuppositions about man and art contained in such idea.
10
 The 
category of ?artist? is another North Atlantic universal.  
The artist biography is so deeply ingrained within the foundations of the 
discipline that art historians do not even discuss it as a genre or as an epistemological 
tool and regard it as an ordinary heuristic strategy to deal with the artistic 
phenomenon. Because in modern art history authorial intention guarantees the 
 
8
See Denise Le Blond-Zola, ?Zola et C?zanne, d?apr?s une correspondance retrouv?e,? Mercure de 
France (January, 1931), 39?58, and Rewald?s introduction to the 1936 book. Mme Le-Blond Zola had 
just given the material to the Biblioth?que nationale de France and Rewald obtained her permission to 
use it for the book. See the correspondence from Mme Zola in folder 38/9, John Rewald Papers, 
National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington, D.C.  
9
The same observation can be made about the works by Venturi and Huyghe already analyzed.  
10
 The text by Roger Fry quoted in Chapter One is an example of that practice.   
 
212
legitimacy of interpretation, biographies structure almost all of the discipline?s 
endeavors. They are fundamental for attribution and the delineation of individual and 
even period styles and in this way influence the market value of works of art and 
collectionism.
11
 From the margins of the discipline, this outcast genre manages to 
attract the attention of the general public to art history, which situates biography at 
the place where art history intersects with economic value and plain power. 
What Nicholas Green noticed in 1989 (second epigraph) is valid today as the 
biographical approach to art history has continued to dwarf the most forceful attempts 
to revise the epistemological foundations of the discipline: the post-structuralist 
theories of Roland Barthes (?The Death of the Author,? 1968) and Michel Foucault 
(?What is an Author,?1969), as well as the post-Marxist contextual analysis of the 
1990s.
12
 As Catherine Soussloff?the author of one of the most important studies on 
this subject?observes, these ?anti-humanistic? theories were successfully applied in 
literature and film studies, which disposed of the notion of the author as the heroic 
creator, producer of a universalizing work, whereas art history remains embedded in 
Humanism:  
[W]e cling to the idea of brushstrokes or chisel marks as referents to and of the 
individual artist. The individual artist is deemed to be precisely locatable in 
history and perpetually visible in the work of art? precisely because the texts 
through which the artist and the art are interpreted, the history of art, have not 
 
11
 Although not all art has been created by one artist, the most valuable art for the art historian and the 
market are individual, original, attributed works. See Soussloff, Absolute Artist, 143. 
12
 With respect to C?zanne, see Griselda Pollock, ?What Can We Say About C?zanne These Days?? 
The Oxford Art Journal 14 (1990): 95?101, and Nicholas Green, ?Stories of Self-expression: Art 
History and the Politics of Individualism,? Art History 10 (December, 1987): 527?532. Pollock has 
extensively analyzed this aspect of modernity in her work on Van Gogh (see bibliography). For her 
analysis of Barthes and Foucault, see her ?Agency and the Avant-Garde. Studies in Authorship and 
History by Way of Van Gogh,? Block 15 (1989):4?16. See also J.R.R. Christie, and Fred Orton, 
?Writing on a Text of the Life,? Art History 11 (December, 1988): 545?564. The fact that such acute 
critiques have not been incorporated within mainstream art history confirms the need of a different 
approach to the problem. 
213
been theorized. Semiotics may have shattered the unity of the author, but it did 
nothing to the unity of the artist embedded in the work of art.
13
 
This explains the category?s resilience in spite of the many methodological 
revisions that have taken place since the 1930s: in the modern definition of art, the 
artist is identified with his creation. In addition, this approach to art preserves and 
extends the fundamental paradox that characterizes the discipline, as the artist is both 
an historical being and eternally present in the work of art.  Only through the analysis 
of art history?s humanistic foundations would it be possible to deconstruct the 
essentialist notion of the artist as synonymous to individualism, freedom, originality, 
and, in the end, as a particular understanding of Man, life, and ethical values. Until 
now, the discipline has dismissed most of the experimental approaches to 
methodology that contested or weakened the centrality of the Renaissance and 
Humanism and consequently the individual artist.
14
 
The preceding chapters have argued that Venturi associated freedom with modern 
art and that Huyghe identified art with a race and nation. Rewald?s scholarship 
focused strictly on the artists. This chapter examines the ideology behind the category 
?modern artist? (considered as a North Atlantic universal) and the genre of artist 
biography and the biographical approach that are at the foundations of modern art 
history. Furthermore, it scrutinizes Rewald?s claims to objectivity in the selection and 
use of documentation.  
 
13
 Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 111.   
14
 See Farago, ? Vision Itself?,? The most interesting case would be that of Warburg. See especially, 
Margaret Iversen, ?Aby Warburg and the New Art History,? in Aby Warburg Akten des internationalen 
Symposions Hamburg 1990, eds. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Glass 
(Weinheim: VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, 1991), 281?287. ?It is my view that Warburg?s gift to art 
history is a detrascendentalized model of art and of art history. Unfortunately, it was a gift 
unappreciated and quickly discarded.? p. 283. 
214
In the ?Introduction? to the first English edition of the book, Rewald explicates 
that,   
The method by which this biography has been put together over a period of years 
does not differ from that adopted in The History of Impressionism. It presents 
another attempt to let the facts speak for themselves, to rely chiefly on 
documents and witness accounts, to quote from the originals wherever possible, 
and thus bring the reader into direct contact with the historic evidence. It again 
assigns to the author mainly the role of co-ordinating this evidence and of 
presenting it in the most effective and also the most scrupulously exact way. 
15
 
Whereas Venturi differentiated C?zanne?s art from the artist?s words and 
assessments, Rewald?s scholarship depends almost exclusively on written 
documentation. He conceived of the work of the historian as the unveiling or 
disclosure of a ?truth,? that is, the reconstruction of the past by patiently assembling 
data and filling up with new factual information the gaps in a uni-directional 
narrative.
16
 The key of such methodology is, thus, the verification of the 
documentation. Rewald?s conception of art history was based on a positivist, 
teleologically oriented historicism.
 17
 
As Champa comments, ?Rewald?s documentary treasures have remained 
continuously alluring through the period of art history?s metamorphosis from 
humanist iconology to poststructuralism.?
18
 Moreover, Paul Smith, in an article 
devoted to the critique of Rewald?s scholarship specifies that,  
 
15
 John Rewald, Paul C?zanne. A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948), xv.  
16
 In a late interview Rewald compared the work of the art historian with assembling a puzzle where 
most of the pieces have fallen into the right place. See Paula Span, ?The Quest for C?zanne?s True 
Nature,? International Herald Tribune (Thursday, November, 20, 1986), n/p. 
17
 See Kermit Champa, Masterpiece Studies. Manet, Zola, Van Gogh & Monet (Philadelphia: 
Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), 53?56. It has to be remembered that Historicism, even though 
critical to the rationalism of the Enlightenment also derived from this movement of ideas. 
18
 Kermit Champa Fronia E. Wissman and Deborah J. Johnson, The Rise of Landscape Painting in 
France: Corot to Monet, exh. cat., Currier Gallery of Art, New York, 1991, 58. Champa is the only 
scholar to notice how Rewald?s scholarship is similar to the novel. See below. According to the scholar 
this book reflects the post war mentality of ?fantasies of a truly progressive and evolutionary golden 
215
[M]y concern here will be less with the minutiae of Rewald?s history, since the 
value of his work as a resource is unquestionable; rather it is his method, its 
claim to objectivity and what it may actually misrepresent that needs focusing 
upon. 
19
 
Although Smith rejects the modernist ideology of the narrative, he accepts the 
documentation and sources gathered by the older art historian. However, the 
?resources? are part of and therefore contain the structure in which they belong, that 
is, they reflect the ideology of the discourse in which they are incorporated. To 
question one and not the other amounts to a partial revision of modern art history. In 
the end, Smith?s thoughtful analysis does not consier the category ?modern artist? or 
the discipline?s philological methodologies. 
The fact that art historians who have very different approaches to the discipline?
Champa defines himself as a ?neoconservative, a postformalist and an eclectic,? 
whereas Smith makes abundant use of post-Marxist and post-structuralist theory?
preoccupy themselves with Rewald?s research, demonstrates that the scholarship 
produced in the 1930s is still the source and foundation of the modern studies on 
C?zanne and modern art.     
This chapter questions the value of the documentation gathered by Rewald 
and thus of the biography of C?zanne which is centered upon it.  Documents are 
ideological per se as they belong to an art system that understands that art has a 
meaning that must to be uncovered through historical research and exposed in a 
narrative. They are the minimal but fundamental structural components of an art 
 
past, where the liberal good guys persisted to defeat the reactionary bad guys.? Champa, Masterpiece 
Studies, 57. 
19
 Smith, ?Pictures and History, 97. Smith focuses on the modernist aspect of Rewald?s scholarship 
thus, the claim to objectivity, the belief in a truth that can be unveiled, and underlines the dubious 
character of some of the sources and testimonies Rewald accepted.  
216
history conceived as the alliance (Mitchell?s ?suture?) of the image and logos, and 
they relate with art history?s philological and historicist foundations. The importance 
of biographical information in modern art history reinforces the document?s 
ideological baggage, as they have become key elements for the interpretation of 
works of art.  
Rewald?s biography ignores the fact that C?zanne and Zola represented 
conflicting discourses on art and that their relationship must be studied as an instance 
of their confrontation (paragone.) This aspect of the problem has remained unstudied 
as a consequence of the transparency of art history?s own methodologies, which 
prolong the suturing of the word to the image established by German art historians 
and French art critics in the second part of the nineteenth century.  Therefore, the 
examination of how and why Rewald used the available documentation in order to 
indelibly associate these two personalities helps us to understand the Humanist and 
historicist foundations of modern art history and suggests alternative ways of 
approaching the biography of the artist.     
Most of the eighty letters from C?zanne to Zola belong to the early days of 
their friendship and attest only to the moments when they were separated. 
Furthermore, none are known from the last twenty years of C?zanne?s career. 
Because preservation of correspondence depends upon chance, its existence is not 
meaningful by itself. Moreover, letters are a dubious source from which to draw the 
?psychological? profile of the artist. Letters? meaning is contingent upon the context 
from which they emanate, in this case the relationship the two correspondents had, 
whereas art historians try to deduce the context from the letters themselves. 
217
Therefore, interpretations structured around the correspondence between two persons 
derive mostly from the art historian?s assumptions and not so from much the 
information provided by the material itself.
20
 
As a genre, biography is like an empty but fully structured space as it entails a 
set of presuppositions according to which the writer has to shape the ?historical? 
material. In addition, the author must take into account the entire structure of the 
entire narrative even when there is not enough information, which induces the scholar 
to fill up the blanks with deductions, flashbacks or more or less secure inductions that 
reflect the main lines of the argument.
21
 Furthermore, the genre implies that the 
author will be able to explain the artist?s coherent, consistent personality evolving 
through time.
22
 Biography is by definition an essentialist endeavor. In C?zanne?s 
case, and Rewald?s is a perfect example of this, letters written in the early 1860s 
might be used to support interpretations of works of art produced in 1906, and vice 
versa, as if war and revolution, marriage, parenthood, the death of his parents, and in 
general, experience, had not changed his fundamental understanding of life and art. 
Therefore, the artist biography is a good example of how the instrument, the tool, 
becomes the content.  
 
20
 Perhaps the most lucid analysis of the letters as a problem is in Wayne Andersen, The Youth of 
C?zanne and Zola: Notoriety at Its Source: Art and Literature in Paris (Boston: Editions Fabriart, 
2003). 
21
 To these elements must be added the psychological interpretation, another set of pre-formatted 
interpretative conventions that are applied to the material. This allows filling up the gaps for which 
there is no factual information. Theodor Reff and Meyer Shapiro were the authors who began to apply 
psychoanalytical categories to the study of C?zanne. It was not Rewald?s approach in the 1930s, but 
this tendency might be seen in his ?C?zanne and His Father,? Studies in the History of Art 
(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1971). Psychological interpretation allows the narrator to 
relate even abstract paintings to the life and body of artists. 
22
 This has made it very difficult to write about C?zanne, since his biography has to account for the 
paradoxical ambivalences of his persona and the changes in his behavior and attitude from youth to old 
age.  
218
Rewald?s biography is not only an example of a pure biography but also of a 
modern artist biography, a variation of the traditional genre that has not been 
sufficiently analyzed. This is why it is necessary to start with a brief examination of 
the history of the genre.  
Art history began as biography and therefore it is an important part of the 
history of art history. The history of the artist biography reflects how different periods 
in the history of the West?Foucault?s epistemes?conceived of human life and Man, 
and the diverse modes in which the discipline established the relationship between the 
image and the word. Soussloff has noted that in the eighteenth century works of art 
were identified with the body of the artists to the point that the whole of their oeuvre 
started to be known as corpus. As biographies contained the commentary on the 
works created by the artists, they translated both their life and work into words. As 
she scholar argues,  
Narrative is purely textual and oral. In our culture the artist?s body comes into 
existence as a text, usually in biography, or ? through the work of art itself, the 
commodity. Historically speaking, this happened first in the genre biography. 
Then, when art history developed as a discipline, genres?such as the monograph 
and catalogue raisonn??specific to the discipline, maintained many rhetorical 
structures of the biography, particularly the anecdote, in which body and work of 
art, are joined. 
23
 
As a narrative that encompasses both the life and the body/oeuvre of the artist, 
biography illustrates the strong interdependence of plastic arts and words. Western 
works of art?and thanks to them any single object?are thought of not just as what 
 
23
 Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 143?144.  About the problematic character of the concept of oeuvre 
itself see Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972), Chapter One. 
219
they are, objects per se, but as the containers of a ?meaning? that transcends them, a 
plus that comes from the creator, a separate entity mythically connected to them.
24
 
The powerful status of the artist in the nineteenth-century implied significant 
changes in how biographies were written, as they became instruments for the 
promotion of the artists? work and as epistemological tools for their interpretation. As 
?impression,? ?sensation,? ?effect,? and ?motif? were replacing the traditional focus 
on representation and subject matter, art critics changed their usual vocabulary and 
categories of analysis and focused instead on the technical and stylistic aspects of 
works of art and on biographies.
25
 Zola?s 1866 Mon Salon exemplifies this 
development,    
Le mot ?art? me d?pla?t; il contient en lui je ne sais quelles id?es d?arrangements 
n?cessaires, d?id?al absolu. Faire de l?art, n?est-ce pas faire quelque chose qui est 
en dehors de l?homme et de la nature? Je veux qu?on fasse de la vie, moi; je veux 
qu?on soit vivant, qu?on cr?e ? nouveau, en dehors de tout, selon ses propres 
yeux et son propre temp?rament. Ce que je cherche avant tout dans un tableau, 
c?est un homme et non pas un tableau?  
L?art est un produit humain, une s?cr?tion humaine; c?est notre corps qui sue 
la beaut? de nos ?uvres.
26
 (Emphasis added.) 
 
Zola is against understanding art as an absolute ideal, external and alien to the 
artist. The writer conceives of art as a human product, that is, as an almost physical 
product of the activity/work of the artist. Artists are, thus, the origin/source of art. 
This text includes the famous statement ?la oeuvre d?art est un coin de la cr?ation vu ? 
 
24
 Preziosi contends that this Western notion of art determines the way other cultural objects are 
considered also as holders of a meaning and intentions. See The Art of Art History: A Critical 
Anthology (Oxford, 1998,) especially 520?521. Martin Heidegger is one of the most acute critics of the 
Western inability to leave behind the dichotomy of form/content.  
25
 It will be argued below that there was a mutual influence and that the art critics were actually an 
active part of this process. The work by Nicholas Green remains one of the main sources for the study 
of this issue. See below. See also David Summers, ??Form,? Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the 
Problem of Art Historical Description,? Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter, 1989), 372?406. The scholar 
focuses mainly on German art historians and disregards the important contribution by French art critics 
in creating a new vocabulary and new categories of analysis.   
26
 Emile Zola, Mes Haines (Paris: F. Bernouard, 1928), 212?213. 
220
travers d?un temp?rament,? which hinges on the notion that the artist constructs 
reality when he perceives, and that the work of art manifests his particular way of 
apprehending the world. Modern art was the product of an epistemological crisis that 
involved the redefinition of the notion of art itself and, therefore, a new appreciation 
of the relationship of the artist and the public (represented by the art critic) with the 
work of art. The more the work of art became an object per se and not valuable as a 
representation of a story or event, the more important the identification with the artist 
and his body became. The more the work of art was associated with the subjective life 
of the artist, the more vital the information about the artist?s life became, which 
reinforced the centrality of the art critic or art historian in the system of creation and 
promotion of art. As modern art history considers that the artist?s life experiences and 
intentions are buried within works of art, biographies have a place of honor among its 
interpretative strategies. 
In 1866 Zola was on intimate terms not only with C?zanne but also with 
Manet and the artists who would comprise the impressionist group; therefore his 
writings might reflect some of their ideas on art at the moment. On the other hand, his 
articles influenced the interpretation of modern art that became hegemonic at the turn 
of the century. 
Rewald?s document-based biography of C?zanne hinges around the artist?s 
friendship with Zola. This chapter examines the ideology behind the genre itself and 
the historical circumstances that determined the scholar to associate these two 
personalities. Rewald?s scholarship affords a unique opportunity to study the 
221
historicist roots of art history and the artist biography as the manifestation of the 
icono-logy that is at the foundations of modern art history.   
 
The History of the Artist Biography 
In her work, Soussloff refers to the idea of ?absolute artist,? because of the 
fundamental and fundamentally unstudied role it has played in the construction of the 
discipline.
27
 The ?absoluteness? of the artist is related to the definition of art as a 
transcendental entity since the claim that the artist is an exceptional kind of human 
being reposes on the notion that he is the mediator between the real (and historical) 
and the sphere of art. 
28
 
A Renaissance scholar, Soussloff describes the steady development of the concept 
of ?artist? and biographies since that period. Art history started as biographies of 
artists when Giorgio Vasari published Delle Vite de' pi? eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed 
architettori in 1550. She argues that Vasari put the accent on the autochthonous 
character of the artists in order to highlight Florence?s cultural hegemony under the 
 
27
 ?Following [Milton C.] Nahm I use the world absolute to describe the cultural condition, or lack of 
conditions pertaining to ?the artist? in art history and literature. ? I want to find a way beyond the 
absolute position described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his essay on C?zanne: ?Thus it is true both 
that the life of an author can teach us nothing and that?if we know how to interpret it?we can find 
everything in it, since it opens onto his work?.? Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 4?5. Nathalie Heinich 
has also studied the birth and development of this category from a sociological point of view. Nathalie 
Heinich, L??lite artiste. Excellence et singularit? en r?gime d?mocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005.) 
The classical and fundamental study about the forging of the status of the artist as romantic genius and 
?prophet? is Paul B?nichou, Le Sacre de l??crivain. 1750-1830. Essai sur l?av?nement d?un pouvoir 
spirituel la?que dans la France moderne (Paris, NRF, Gallimard, 1996). 
28
 It should also be remembered that the paradox is reversible and that the absolute character of modern 
art depends of its being produced by the artist. 
222
Medici family. Consequently, he modeled his accounts upon the biographies of Dante 
that accentuated the poet?s appurtenance to Florence and his use of the vernacular 
language. Since its inception then, artist biographies were modeled after types 
developed for men of letters; a variation?almost a naturalization one might say?of 
ut pictura poesis at the level of historiography.    
Soussloff contends that the panels Filippo Brunelleschi created in order to 
demonstrate the use of perspective were devised to work as accurate representations 
of the city of Florence within the visual environment provided by the city they so 
precisely depicted and not as scientific devices. She compares the ?situated realism? 
of Brunelleschi?s art with Dante?s use of the vernacular in his poetry, as both place 
the real?the city, the native language?into the sphere of art.  
Painting what one sees and using the vernacular in poetry in and of themselves 
do not constitute the contributions of the respective arts and artists spoken of 
there. Rather, painting according to perspective and poetry according to number 
or meter are the real contributions of Brunelleschi and Dante. These 
contributions are distinctly entwined with a dense matrix of interrelated topics 
that can be called distinctly indigenous to Florence, her citizens, and artists.
29
 
This way of understanding both Brunelleschi?s and Dante?s art is a product of how 
their biographies were written and of Vasari?s interest in highlighting a certain 
tradition. In his Vite, they are characterized as ?autochthonous,? an idea that refers to 
the chthonic gods and characterize beings born without genealogy. In this way, the 
chronological, diachronic narrative of the development of art is counterbalanced by 
this other, vertical dimension that ensures the artist a ?distinction? from other mortals 
and conjures up the notion that he transcends his own limitations and is the ?origin? 
and source of art. The relationship of the artist to the land, the city, the nation 
 
29
 Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 69.  
223
compels him to transcend his human dimension and create art. History split from 
myth precisely at the moment when biographies passed from the sphere of religion 
(life of the saints) to secular history (great men and artists.)
30
 
When the work of Winckelmann and the aesthetic ideals of the Enlightenment 
changed the way art history was understood, biography was pushed to the margins of 
the field. Nevertheless, Kant?s philosophy established the idea of the artists as a force 
of nature, a genius that creates without rules and thus produces objects that have to be 
taken as models.
31
 
Burckhardt did not write biographies, but used them extensively as primary 
sources and in this way helped to establish the genre as heuristic tool. Moreover he 
developed the idea of culture as the repository of the spirit and actions of men and, 
following Vasari?s lead, reinforced the ?autochthonous? argument, which?as 
commented in Chapter One?will be (mis)interpreted to support the association of art 
and nation.
32
 
Soussloff?s work permits us to understand the Renaissance as the symbolic 
field from which the modern artist biography stemmed and suggests that the genre 
reinforces the association of art with national art. In this light, this association is 
articulated by the individual humanist artist who creates an artistic vocabulary to 
interpret his local environment but produces universally valid works of art. If Longhi 
 
30
 ?The quattrocento argument about the preeminence of the modern Tuscan vernacular in literature 
and the modern Tuscan arte naturale founded on perfect measure (misura) both rely on the concept of 
an autochthonous literature or art. In both the linguistic and the visual fields, this term refers to a style 
without lineage, self-generated and springing directly from the earth. ?[This]is a preliminary way of 
understanding the correspondences in Renaissance art, literature, and history created by the 
autochthonous aesthetic.? Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 44. 
31
 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, especially ? 46. 
32
 ?Ranke [Burckhardt?s teacher] gave history writing a method for substantiating a belief that the past 
could be recuperated objectively. Burckhardt used this as a means of separating one period from 
another, thereby establishing one period?s unique culture.? Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 84. 
224
(Chapter Two) accused Vasari and Burckhardt of imposing the hegemonic 
interpretation of Renaissance art as intrinsically illusionist, Soussloff?s hypothesis 
indicates that this same historiographic approach established art as a category 
intrinsically related to the country or nation in which its creator was born.   
The latest publications on C?zanne, Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer?s 
C?zanne and Provence. The Painter and His Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 2003), and Philip Conisbee?s C?zanne in Provence, exh. cat., National Gallery 
of Art, Washington D.C., 2006, indicate the validity of Soussloff?s analysis. 
C?zanne?s art has been discussed in relationship to perspective as formulated in the 
Renaissance since the 1930s.
33
 Rewald?s site photographs of the places C?zanne 
painted?especially those in an around Aix-en-Provence?were used to provide 
evidence for this interpretation of C?zanne?s art.
34
 The art historian indelibly 
associated the painter with his native land and even explained his art as a sort of 
?situated realism,? arguing that comparing the paintings with photographs of the sites 
the artist had painted or visiting them would improve our understanding of C?zanne?s 
art.
35
 Rewald literally located C?zanne?s eyes/body and Provence at the center of the 
interpretation of his art. The relationship of the site photographs with perspective is 
explored in the second section of this dissertation.  
 
33
 James Herbert has noticed that in the first case the author seems to fail to maintain the theoretical 
goals established in the introduction of her work, as, in the end, C?zanne?s art seems to be over-
determined by the artist?s appurtenance to Provence. ?Book Reviews: Herbert on Athanassoglou-
Kallmyer and Werth,? The Art Bulletin 87 (September, 2005), 545. 
34
 C?zanne?s and Zola?s youth in Aix-en-Provence suggested the argument that the painter?s 
attachment to the city is also due to the memories of the happy days spent with the writer. Roger Fry?s 
C?zanne: A Study of His Development (New York: Macmillan, 1927), and Julius Meier-Graefe?s 
CeQanne und sein Kreis (Munich: R. Piper, 1918) are important examples of the scholarship that does 
not hinge on the painter attachment to Aix.   
35
 Rewald had a fundamental role in saving the sites and C?zanne?s studio from destruction. See John 
Rewald Papers, 38/ 1 and 38/2, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington D.C. For a 
contradictory approach see James Lord, ?Saving C?zanne?s Studio,? Art in America (July, 2002): 25-
27.   
225
Soussloff?s account closes in the 1930s because she realizes that the Second 
World War determined the end of the theoretical speculation about the foundations of 
the discipline and the institution of a hegemonic discourse. In 1934 Ernst Kris (1900-
1957) and Otto Kurz (1908?1975), two young Jewish art historians of the School of 
Vienna and students of Adolph von Schlosser, published Die Legende vom K?nstler: 
ein geschichtlicher Versuch, where they analyzed the category of the artist as a 
construction. They contended that early artist biographies derived from traditional 
myths and legends narrating the life of heroes and saints. As Kris and Kurz 
abandoned this line of research when they went into exile, Soussloff argues that the 
forced emigration of these innovative Jewish scholars stopped the only important 
attempt at deconstructing the category of the artist, which was then naturalized as part 
of the definition of art.  
Soussloff only considers the scholarship of the German and Austrian founders 
of art history and highlights the emigration of these two art historians in the 1930s as 
a crucial point in the history of the genre. Her investigation centers on pre-modern 
artist biographies and how that genre evolved in time and disregards the evolution of 
the artist biography in modern art. Soussloff does not study the changes brought about 
by the modernization of the system of production and promotion of art in nineteenth-
century France. Consequently she fails to realize that the category was enlisted in the 
fight against Totalitarianism, which played against the continuation of studies that 
underlined the conventionality, historicity, and mythical character of the category. 
Her work, nonetheless, provides elements to sketch this development so important for 
the understanding of Rewald?s scholarship.    
226
Kris and Kurz argued that anecdotes had pivotal role in early biographies of 
artists and demonstrated that they moved from one text to the other, their mere 
presence being an indicator that the individual considered in the text was an artist. As 
Soussloff explains,  
[T]he anecdote functions as the carrier of meaning of the ?fixed? or ?typical? 
themes in the consideration of the artist, ? the anecdote is the basis of the 
typology of the genre of the biography of the artist, including origin, naming, 
early talent, elevated patronage, and spiritual old age.
36
 
Anecdotes are also central to nineteenth-century artist?s biographies but their 
function change: they account now for the ?real? or ?historical? character of what 
they narrate. They become what Joel Fineman, in his perceptive article on the subject, 
calls historeme, ?the smallest minimal unit of the historiographic fact.?
37
 
Since the Enlightenment, history?even when upholding a positivist approach 
to knowledge?has been associated with the (poetic) narration of events.
38
 Ranke?s 
history, basically a narrative that links together a series of ?facts,? was deemed to be 
objective and did not acknowledge the inherent contradiction of its procedures. Ranke 
was a major representative of the classical tradition of German historical thought later 
associated with historicism, as well as Burckhardt?s teacher. According to Soussloff, 
in his work,  
[W]e find the contraction in a history writing conceived of simultaneously as 
narrative and objective fact telling.? [T]his contradiction must be kept in mind 
when historians, such as Burckhardt, consider the ?primary literature? such as the 
biography of the artist... For, in all cases, the contradiction adheres when 
 
36
 Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 146. 
37
 Joel Fineman, ?The History of the Anecdote,? in The New Historicism, ed. Aram Veerser (New 
York: Routledge, 1989), 56. 
38
 See Rodolphe Gasch?, ?Of Aesthetic and Historical Determination,? in Post-structuralism and the 
Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1987). 
227
objectivity is believed to belong to the historian who brings it to bear on the 
uncovering and interpretation of the written sources.
39
 
Modern biography is characterized by a concatenation of anecdotes, meant to be 
what ?facts? are in history. Their function in the narrative is to guarantee the 
historical accuracy of the narration. They are expected to unveil something: they are 
the connection with the real, the keepers of the ?reality effect? that takes biography 
out of the realm of narrative fiction to that of history. Whereas in the early 
biographies they moved ?horizontally? (from one biography to the other) in order to 
signify that the person portrayed was an artist, in the modern ones they are meant to 
produce a ?vertical? movement that breaks the development of the [poetic] narrative 
and links it to the real.
40
 As Fineman observes, the anecdote itself has a double life as 
both ?referent to the real? and literary genre,    
These two features, therefore, taken together?i.e., that the anecdote has 
something literary about it, but, second, that the anecdote, however literary, is 
nevertheless directly pointed towards or rooted in the real?allow us to think of 
the anecdote, given its formal if not its actual brevity, as a historeme,? And the 
question that the anecdote thus poses is how, compact of both literature and 
reference, the anecdote possesses its peculiar and eventful narrative force.
41
 
These small stories contain in themselves the structure of the narration, and this is 
why they can be a part of it, but they also reference the real. By definition, they make 
 
39
 Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 79. Burckhardt wanted to be a poet before settling of being an 
historian. This conflation of the two aspects of history reminds us of Haydn White?s analysis of 
history. White has compared the style of different nineteenth-century historians with different narrative 
tropes as ways of representing the imaginary as real. White did not consider art history or biography. 
As Soussloff rightfully comments, in art history ?the poetic moment is never completely in remission,? 
i.e., those mythical modes of linguistic representation that poetry affords to history, might still be 
encountered in art history. See ibid., 143. See also this author?s entry on ?Historicism,? in Aesthetics,
ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). For a modern approach to the anecdote 
in history see Lionel Gossman, ?Anecdote and History,? History and Theory 42 (May, 2003): 143?
168. 
40
 Which, it might be argued, depends on what the historical moment understands as ?real,? as angels, 
fairies and others today thought to be ?fantastic? beings were considered real in the West not so long 
ago.   
41
 Fineman, ?History Anecdote,? 56?57. 
228
the reader believe that what is being reported really happened. Like the photographs 
that illustrate a text, anecdotes have to relate to the text. Conversely, the narrative has 
to refer to the photographs. 
 
As Fineman argues about history,  
Only through the mutual coordination of a particular event and its generalizing 
narrative context?a coordination such that the particularity of the touto, the 
?this? and the generic, representative urgency of the logic of the meta reciprocally 
will call each other up?is it possible to identify or to attribute an historical 
significance either to a ?this? or to meta, for the specifically historical importance 
of either depends upon the way they each co-constitute or co-imply each other.... 
Thucydides?s ?meta touto?, his ?metahistory??. works by collating structure and 
genesis.
42
 
This correlation of the general and the particular is not without relationship to the 
paradoxical structure of art history, as works of art have to be ?incorporated? into the 
narrative [historical] discourse through a description or an interpretation, that is, 
?narrativized.? 
Paul Smith has noted that Rewald?s art history is based on an idealist notion of art 
and that, as a consequence, anecdotes play a very important role in it, because ?where 
social forces are not considered to have profound or determinable causal effects on 
the way a painting looks, anecdotal biographical details will be seen to play a 
significant role in determining this.?
43
 Smith?and with him many contemporary art 
historians?proposes another kind of narrative to account for paintings. His critique 
does not encompass the problem of art history as icono-logy. This is why he still 
considers Rewald?s scholarship valid as a ?resource.? 
 
42
 History thus would be ?[R]epresentative historiography of significant historical events, of events 
joined together by a narrative formation, where events derive historical significance because they fit 
into a representative narrative account, and where the narrative account derives its historical 
significance because it comprehends significant historical events ?? Fineman, ?History  Anecdote,? 
53?54. 
43
 Smith, ?Pictures and History,? 98.  
229
As Soussloff observes in this long but crucial paragraph, anecdotes shape the way 
modern art history is written:  
These small narratives float, and being able to do so, they exhibit a meaning 
dependent on their originary text. The meaning is, in part, preformed, no matter 
where the anecdote may adhere in a new text. When newly situated, the content 
of the artist anecdote also gains additional meaning subject to the contingencies 
of its placement, that is, by what precedes and follows it in the larger narrative. 
These anecdotes are so integral to the criticism of art and the disciplinary 
discourse of art history itself precisely because they can travel so readily and 
inflect so easily the new text in which they are found. The anecdotes and tropes 
are found in the criticism on art and in the discourse of art history removed from 
their original biographical location and inserted in another kind of narrative, 
now known as art history. As a result of the narrative properties specific to artist 
anecdotes, the image of the artist constructed around the anecdotes persists. The 
result is the perpetuation of the myth of the artist in art history itself, carried by 
the form of the anecdote.
44
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Moreover, the anecdote gains authority with each repetition. It can be said that its 
value and authority depend not so much from its veracity but from the amount of 
times it has been repeated and the professional status of those who had used it. In any 
case, anecdotes originated in biographies are used by all the other art historical 
genres.   
If anecdotes have a central role in any artist biography, this is especially true for 
C?zanne?s, where most of the information derives from second-hand testimonies of 
what the artist said or did. In the historiography of C?zanne, the transmigration, 
transformation, and ideological manipulation of anecdotes and statements attributed 
to the artist have reached the point where there are scholarly articles devoted just to 
the study of these developments and their meaning.
45
 
The art historian specializing on C?zanne has to work with a limited number of 
documentary sources. There are about two hundred letters written by the artist and 
 
44
 Soussloff, The Absolute Artist, 149. 
45
 See for example,  Reff, ?C?zanne and Poussin.?  
230
addressed to more than fifteen correspondents that span forty-eight years of 
C?zanne?s life.
46
 As he did not exhibit much until 1895, there was little contemporary 
art criticism until that date. On the other hand, most of the testimonies by those who 
met C?zanne in the last years of his life (especially those by Ambroise Vollard and 
Gasquet, who extended their narrations to cover the whole biography of the artist) are 
full of anecdotes.
47
 In the 1930s Rewald?s work was praised for the wide range of 
sources he had gathered and for his scientific, objective scholarship. Thus, his source 
criticism has to be studied in depth as he considered that this was the basic task of the 
art historian.  
Before analyzing Rewald?s use of anecdotes and documentation, it is necessary to 
sketch the transformations that the nineteen century brought about to the genre itself, 
as it has been argued above that it influences the form and the meaning of the 
anecdotes/historemes that are allowed to be part of the story. In modern biography the 
mythic/ideological content is not in the anecdotes but has passed onto the narration 
itself, as the genre is devoted to the life of the ?absolute modern artist? as the epitome 
of Man.   
 
46
 Just for the sake of comparison, there are some nine hundred letters from van Gogh that were sent in 
nineteen years to only five persons. 
47
 Other accounts are by Louis Aurenche, J. Bor?ly, Charles Camoin, K. E. Osthaus, and R. Rivi?re 
and J.F. Schnerb. With the exception of Gasquet, they had met the artist in the early twentieth century. 
See Michael Doran, Conversations avec C?zanne, (Paris: Macula, 1978). The artist Georges Rivi?re, 
who met C?zanne in the 1870s also compiled his memoirs as a biography of the artist. See 
bibliography.  
231
The Modern Artist Biography
Nicholas Green has proven that artist biographies underwent significant changes 
in France around the 1840s when they began to be written by art critics at the service 
of the dealers interested in promoting the work of modern artists.
48 
Biography had a 
liminal position at the periphery of the art writing of the period due to its obvious 
relationships both with popular journalism and with the art market, albeit most of 
them were based on serious documentation. Landscape, the ?revolutionary? pictorial 
genre that would finally upset the academic hierarchy, was at the margins, if not at 
the bottom, of the academic system. 
The vocabulary and interpretative strategies art critics had developed for the 
appraisal of historical paintings could not be applied to landscapes. When this genre 
started to attract the public?s attention, critics began to comment on the na?ve and 
sincere attitude of landscape painters towards the natural world and, hence, to 
incorporate more biographical information into their accounts.
49
 The strong 
interdependence of the artistic genre with the narrative strategy to analyze it explains 
 
48
 See Nicholas Green, ?Dealing in Temperaments: Economic Transformation of the Artistic Field in 
France in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,? Art History 10, no.1 (March, 1987): 59?78, and  
The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France 
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). I have been unable to incorporate in the text the 
material provided by Mich?le Hannoosh in her recent article ?Th?ophile Silvestre?s Historie des 
artistes vivants: Art Criticism and Photography,? The Art Bulletin 89 (December, 2006): 729?755, 
which confirms my conclusions about artist biographies in the nineteenth century.    
49
 ?Implicitly, the art works were to be read as the reflection or expression of the temperament 
descriptively explored in the written text. ? The choice of motif, weather and viewpoint, the manner 
in which they had been transcribed into paint; all could be traced back to the complex unity of the 
painter?s personality.?  Green, ?Dealing in Temperaments,? 70. 
232
why the rise of landscape to the summit of the hierarchy of the new system of the arts 
implied a watershed in art criticism.
50
 
Together, diversified anecdote and careful documentary ?fact? worked to evoke a 
graphic and sometimes complex picture of the life and character of the artist, 
while having little to say ? apart from description ? about the meaning and 
message of the art images. It was in nature biographies specifically that this 
formula took on the real force of explanation, for critical interpretation had 
traditionally concentrated on these artists? ?na?ve? and ?sincere? dialogue with the 
world. In other words, the given absence of stylistic analysis for nature 
painting?of a vocabulary which could engage with the formal structure of the 
image?opened up the space for the full-blooded entry of biographical 
explanation.
51
 
Contrary to the Academic system that was centered on meaningful masterpieces 
that were exhibited at the annual or biennial salon, the modern system of production 
and promotion of art established after mid-century depended on the copious 
production of original artists. Biographies gave fundamental information to interpret 
the many paintings and drawings they created.  
In order to increase their credibility, art critics applied contemporary scientific 
theories of perception, thus surrounding themselves with the aura of prestige that the 
sciences enjoyed at the time. In addition, the scientific endorsement allowed 
extending the application of the biographical/psychological approach to the 
interpretation of all the genres and subject matters. In this way, biography was 
integrated as part of art criticism. In Green?s words,  
[T]he individualizing schema was formulated from the 1860s through the 
discursive twinning of biographical narrative with a pre-existent aesthetic code in 
which the relation between painter and that which was rendered into paint was 
constructed as transparent. The vocabulary of perception, sensation, expression 
permeating contemporary critical and theoretical art writing consistently 
 
50
 It was a two way relationship and it might also be said that it was the new art criticism which helped 
landscape to attain a new position in the hierarchy of artistic genres.  
51
 Green, ?Dealing in Temperaments,? 70. 
233
registered the transparency of the artist/nature couplet, drawing on the currency 
of experimental science to come to terms with it. Here was an epistemology that 
brought art close to physiological theories of perception underpinning the 
formation of experimental psychology at the very same period. But the use of 
such language was not simply a question of discursive homologies, it was 
materially located in the push for scientific status by the professionalizing art 
historian. Under the impact of scientific definitions the artistic conception of 
nature was steadily enlarged from its standard fields of reference?landscape and 
peasants?to encompass other genres and eventually the artist total relationship 
with the world?external and internal? In the process, the biographical 
approach and its corollary, the cult of creative individualism, became dominant 
throughout the late nineteenth-century art worlds, official as well as avant-
garde.
52
 (Emphasis added) 
 
This long quotation summarizes the process by which changes in all the different 
strata of the field worked together to upset the academic order and institute a new 
system of production and promotion of the arts. This system implied an even more 
fundamental and deep identification of the artist with his work, and a new status for 
biography (narration) as a privileged interpretative tool in the hands of an all 
powerful interpreter (art critic or art historian) who acquired for himself and his 
discourse the aura of the sciences. This is the framework for the text by Zola quoted 
above.  
Green further demonstrated that after 1880 the Third Republic incorporated art 
into the educational system and started to considerer artists, as well as scientists, as 
exemplary citizens. Even avant-garde art was enrolled as testimony of France?s 
artistic wealth and superior cultural values. Still reeling after the defeat by Bismarck 
and the ?German teacher,? the system was inherently nationalist as it prepared the 
country for the Revanche; therefore, biographies of artists had to portray them not 
only as genius but also as heroic citizens. This brought benefits for the ?scientific? art 
 
52
 Green, ?Dealing in Temperaments,? 71. 
234
historians who won positions on official committees and commissions.
53
 Landscapes 
were particularly well suited for this function as representatives of ?situated realism,? 
in a century in which the landscape was redefined as national territory and the 
countryside as the preserver of century-old traditions.
54
 
Art historians have ignored one of the most crucial aspects of the 
transformations undergone by artist biographies as a genre in the nineteenth century: 
they were a manifestation of the paragone. This facet is of consequence for the 
present chapter that studies how the biography of C?zanne (the artist) came to be 
entwined with that of Zola (the writer). This topic has not been considered by art 
historians working on C?zanne but has been discussed in Literary Studies.   
Nineteenth-century French writers produced an impressive number of novels 
and short stories that described the lives of artists or took place in artist studios.
 
Those 
more directly related to C?zanne are Honor? de Balzac?s Le Chef-d?oeuvre inconnu 
[1831, 1837], Peau de Chagrin [1831], and Pierre Grassou [1839]; the brothers 
Goncourt?s Manette Salomon [1867]; Edmond Duranty?s Le Pays des arts [1867, 
1881],
55
 and finally Zola?s L?Oeuvre [1886]. These literary productions became an 
integral part of the cultural horizon of the century. Artists learned from these novels 
how to construct their artistic personas. The reading public also fashioned its 
expectations and assumptions about artists and their art according to these fictions.  
As David Scott has shown these texts confirmed the writers?s power to define and 
 
53
 Nicholas Green, ? ?All the Flowers of the Field?: the State, Liberalism and Art in France under the 
Early Third Republic,? Oxford Art Journal 10 no.1 (1987): 71?84. 
54
 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 
(London and New York: Verso, 1991). 
55
 This book was edited posthumously in 1881. It included the short story ?Le peintre Louis Martin? 
whose first chapter had appeared in 1867 in the magazine La Rue. It describes the atelier of a 
ridiculous provincial painter, Maillobert, which was first a parody of Courbet, but in later versions was 
transformed into a crude parody of C?zanne.  
235
control the image of the painters, which they used to stress the differences between 
the two practices.
56
 Painters are generally described as impulsive, sanguine, carnal, 
irrational men who cannot control their sexual drives or resist their model?s physical 
attractions.
57
 
Art historians and critics knew these novels as well as their readers. These 
texts influenced the way the artists and men of letters who interviewed C?zanne 
understood what the artist did and said, and what they wrote afterwards. C?zanne was 
also aware of the role he was supposed to play and might have adapted his behavior 
as much as his discourse, either to satisfy or to disrupt these expectations. In other 
words, these novels acted as eidetic and/or generic matrixes that determined both 
reality and other literary productions.
58
 These ideological models can be compared to 
the myths and legends that influenced pre-modern biographies. In the nineteenth 
century it was the novel that shaped the biographies of artists written by art critics and 
art historians.
59
 
56
 See Peter Collier, and Robert Lethbridge, Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in 
Nineteenth-Century France, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), and David H. T. Scott, ed., 
Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge 
[Cambridgeshire]; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1988.) 
57
 The reader has just to think of the image he or she  gets from the opera La Boh?me, and the 
adaptation of 1853, Sc?nes de la vie de Boh?me by Henry Murger (a friend of Baudelaire and Gautier), 
to understand this point. Even though all the characters are good, the writer, Rodolphe, is an idealist 
and a self-controlled man who, although passionately in love, is generous to the point of sacrifice in 
order to save sweet and delicate Mimi. The painter Marcel instead, is carnal, sanguine, and jealous to 
the point of physical aggression towards Mussette, who answers in kind and is guilty of all the 
accusations he chides her about. 
58
 See Bernard Vouilloux, Tableaux d?auteurs. Apr?s l?Ut pictura poesis (Saint Denis: Presses 
universitaires de Vincennes, 2004). L?o Larguier for example commented ?Dans L?Oeuvre, ce roman 
que les jeunes hommes de mon ?ge lurent avec d?votion parce qu?on y voyait un calvaire d?artiste. ? 
L?o Larguier, Un dimanche avec Paul C?zanne (Paris: L?Edition, 1925), 62.  
59
 These literary models would act like the discursive tropes that, according to Haydn White, 
determined the narrative structure of historiographical writings. Haydn White, Tropics of Discourse. 
Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 
236
Balzac?s Chef-d?oeuvre inconnu set the standards for this type of novel. 
Bernard Vouilloux has argued that this author in a certain way redefined the genre. 
The success of Winckelmann?s approach to art history precipitated the decline of the 
pre-modern biographies of artists. As the new, historicist art history disregarded the 
biographical material, anecdotes about the artists? lives were left to have a chaotic life 
of their own outside its boundaries, until Balzac?s novel regained them for literature. 
If the genre inaugurated by Vasari described the artist as an ??mule des princes ou des 
orateurs, humaniste, honn?te homme,? 
?Balzac? nomme une certaine mani?re d??crire sur l?art et de raconter la vie de 
l?artiste, de mettre en sc?ne les flux de capitaux et de libido qui les traversent. Son 
?uvre signale le moment o? peut venir pleinement au jour cette question : comment 
raconter ce qui survient dans la vie d?un artiste, ?tant entendu qu?il s?agira de dire 
pr?cis?ment en quoi et comment un sujet est affect? ? ou par l??v?nement de l?art, 
?v?nement total et vital, ?. o? se d?cide jusqu?? ce qui fait l?identit? de l?individu, 
l?index de toute biographie?
60
 
Thus, in the early nineteenth century, together with a new definition of art, the 
artist and art history, there developed in France a literary sub-genre, the artist novel, 
which delved into the artist?s emotions and feelings. In these texts the work of art 
becomes the index of the artist?s body and of its most fundamental drives at the 
moment of the creation, namely, when he manifests the transcendental sphere of art in 
an object. The realist style and the fact that Balzac had asked artists for advice created 
an aura of ?truth? around these texts.
 61
 
60
 Vouilloux, Tableaux d?auteurs, ? 108. 
61
 In 1876 Jules Claretie affirmed that Delacroix had written the artistic opinions that Balzac made the 
protagonist of the story, the painter Frenhofer, expound. Whatever the truth about this now dismissed 
theory, the point is that Delacroix was C?zanne?s favorite painter. What is not known is if he was 
aware of that rumor and if he was, if he had believed it. The only art historian who has mentioned this 
theory is Terence Maloon in Classic C?zanne, exh. cat. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998. The 
bibliography on Balzac?s work is very extensive. See Balzac et la Peinture, exh. cat Mus?e des beaux-
arts de Tours, 1999, Jerrold Lanes, ?Art Criticism and the Authorship of the Chef-d??uvre inconnu : A 
Preliminary Study,? in The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec, eds. 
237
Le Chef-d?oeuvre inconnu hinges upon the visit of two seventeenth-century 
painters, Franz Pourbus and Nicolas Poussin, to the studio of the (fictional) painter 
Frenhofer. The work includes lengthy discussions about art, creativity, the problem of 
representation, the relationship of art to reality, madness, etc. Frenhofer?s statement,  
?[l]a mission de l'art n'est pas de copier la nature, mais de l'exprimer! Tu n'es pas un 
vil copiste, mais un po?te!,? incarnates the Romantic paragone, as Balzac makes 
Frenhofer declare that the painter should take the poet as model.
62
 According to 
Vouilloux, Balzac creates the ?studio? scene, 
La fiction romanesque, avec Balzac, aura ouvert le champ sur l?atelier et sur ces 
si troublants ?proc?s mat?riels de l?art? qu?y d?ploie le peintre: d?s lors que 
l?artiste n??tait plus seulement un personnage auquel il arrive le m?me genre 
d?aventures qu?aux autres individus, d?s lors qu?il ?tait le sujet d?une aventure 
sp?cifique, le h?ros non d?une fiction d?artiste, mais d?une fiction d?art, la sc?ne 
de l?artiste au travail devenait un topos n?cessaire de la litt?rature artistique, du 
r?cit de fiction, mais aussi du r?cit factuel?? plus forte raison, lorsque l?artiste 
ne vivait plus d?autre aventure que celle de son art.  
 
Vouilloux notes that already in the eighteenth century critics had started to pay 
attention to the traces that the work of the artist left on the work of art, such as the 
brushstroke. In the new century the commentator passes beyond the description of the 
painting, to the, ?sc?narisation narrative du peintre au travail, c?est-?-dire sur cette 
sorte de ?sc?ne primitive? qui, normalement ?chappe au regard des tiers (C?zanne 
 
Francis Haskell, Anthony Levi, and Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). See also 
Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, ?Girodet/Endymion/Balzac: Representation and Rivalry in Post-
revolutionary France,? Word & Image 17 (October?December, 2001): 401?411. 
62
 Honor? Balzac, La Comedie Humaine,  Vol. IX ?uvres compl?tes (Paris : Gallimard, 1950), 394. In 
the story Frenhofer is painting the perfect masterpiece, a picture that seems to be as real as the model 
itself. Poussin asks his mistress to pose for the painter in order to learn his secrets, only to discover that 
the artist is delusional and that the chef d?oeuvre is just a scribble of chaotic lines. Frenhofer dies in a 
fire that destroys the studio and Poussin loses the woman he loves. 
238
n?aimait pas ?tre vu en train de peindre) sur ce point, le roman mod?lise le 
document??
63
 (Emphasis added) 
Balzac?s story opens the studio to the curious gaze of the public and, at the same 
time, exposes the creative moment and the subjectivity of the artist to the pen of the 
writer.
64
 Literature influenced history as it invented a subject matter (the artist 
creating in the studio) that became part of the questionnaire posed to art and artists; 
therefore it ?created? the document. The ?meaning? of the work of art no longer lies 
in the pictures themselves but in the artist. What is more, that meaning now sprouts 
from the words the literary narrator puts in the artist?s mouth and from the narration 
itself, as the author describes both the artist in the moment of creation and the 
resulting paintings. The real is somehow already literary, the anecdote articulates 
reality and myth.  
It is not a coincidence then if the visit to C?zanne?s studio forms an important 
element in C?zanne?s historiography and almost a leitmotiv in the artist?s 
bibliography, as the visits themselves, as Bernard Vouilloux has contended, might 
have been stagings of Balzac?s fictitious one. In his 1907 article reporting his visit to 
C?zanne, Bernard includes an anecdote according to which, when they were talking 
about Balzac?s Frenhofer, the artist became very emotional and started choking and 
 
63
 Vouilloux, Tableaux d?auteurs, 102?103. 
64
 The artist?s studio would remain a favorite modernist subject matter?one has just to remember the 
reconstruction of Jackson Pollock?s studio at the 1998 MoMA?s retrospective?that has also been used 
by modern art historians to describe or refer to the mysterious creative act. It is also a subject matter 
for artistic creation. In the 1930s these scenes were a staple both in modern art and in modern art 
history. In 1931, Vollard published Balzac?s Le Chef-d?oeuvre inconnu with illustrations by Picasso; 
starting in 1933 the art magazine Minotaure included articles on the studios of Picasso, Maillol, 
Brancusi, Giacometti and other modern artists, which were profusely illustrated with photographs. 
Rewald and other art historians did the same in scholarly magazines. See Andr? Breton?s ?Picasso dans 
son ?l?ment,? Minotaure 1 (February, 1933): 3?37, and Maurice Raynal?s ?Dieu?Table?Cuvette,? 
Minotaure 3?4 (December 1933): 39?53. See also John Rewald, ?Les Ateliers de Maillol,? Le Point 
17, (1938). The Archives of the National Gallery of Art has an impressive collection of slides of 
modern artist?s studios taken by Rewald.  
239
?frappant sa poitrine avec son index, il s?accusa, sans un mot, mais par ce geste 
multipli?, le personnage m?me du roman.?
65
 The problem thus is to determine if this 
scene really happened, and if it did happen, what is its meaning: did C?zanne identify 
himself with the character and understand his own life ?through? Balzac?s novels? 
Was he incarnating a role he thought Bernard would understand? Was he playing a 
role so that Bernard would relay it to others? Was it Bernard?s way of conveying to 
the public the impression he had received from C?zanne? Was it the way he wanted 
the public to think of C?zanne? Was it what he knew the public was waiting to read 
about the artist? Was he merely interested in counterbalancing and superseding the 
association of C?zanne with Claude Lantier, the protagonist of Zola?s L?Oeuvre, 
(more on this below) as Bernard?s text itself suggests? 
Ah! il y avait loin de ce Frenhofer impuissant par g?nie ? ce Claude impuissant 
par naissance que Zola avait vu malencontreusement en lui ! Aussi lorsque 
j??crivis plus tard sur C?zanne pour L?Occident je mis en ?pigraphe cette phrase, 
qui le r?sume bien en somme et qui le confond avec le h?ros de Balzac: 
?Frenhofer est un homme passionn? pour notre art qui voit plus haut et plus loin 
que les autre peintres.?
66
 
This episode was re-staged and expanded by Gasquet in his 1921 book and since 
then it is part of almost all the texts on the artist.
67
 Vouilloux has perceptively 
analyzed the mise en abyme implied in this scene: in 1904 C?zanne gestures to 
Bernard (who had gone to his studio in order to seek advice, like Poussin) indicating 
that he is (like) the character of a novel written in the 1830s about a fictitious artist 
 
65
 Emile Bernard, ?Souvenirs sur Paul C?zanne,? in Michael Doran, Conversations avec C?zanne 
(Paris: Macula, 1978), 65. 
66
 Bernard, ?Souvenirs C?zanne,? 65. 
67
 In the ?Confessions??a social game, a questionnaire that a friend would give another to fill out?
C?zanne stated that his favorite literary character was Frenhofer. Jean-Claude Lebensztejn in Les 
couilles de C?zanne, suivi de Persistance de la m?moire, (Paris: S?guier, 1995) has successfully 
proven what others had suspected before: that the ?Confessions? by C?zanne were written around 
1897. This is the only document that might suggest that the Bernard anecdote was true. Nevertheless, 
C?zanne ends up the ?Confessions? quoting a verse by Musset by heart.    
240
who, if he had existed would have lived around 1620. In addition, Bernard puts 
himself in the place of the revered Poussin and puts C?zanne in the place of the 
imaginary, almost delusional painter. Balzac?s short story?as an eidetic model?
might have acted upon reality and thus activated itself in the life of C?zanne or in 
Bernard?s narration, that is, to the point of becoming the historical, factual reality art 
history tries to attain. This suggests that Venturi?s suspicion about the testimonies as 
sources and even about the words C?zanne uttered, was well founded, as what the 
artist had reputedly said was most probably already part of a literary discourse on the 
arts.  
In 1886 Zola published his novel about art and artists, L?Oeuvre, in which he used 
his friends and acquaintances as models for its main characters, to narrate the 
struggles of the impressionist group around 1863.
68
 The book belongs to Les Rougon-
Macquart, a series of twenty naturalist novels that follows the fate of the members of 
a family, modeled on Balzac?s La Com?die Humaine.
L?Oeuvre tells the story of Claude Lantier, a painter with the dreadful inheritance 
of the Macquart family, who is torn between the love for his art and his wife. Weak of 
character and incapable of bringing to fruition his magnificent dreams and ideals, 
Lantier ends up hanging himself in front of his canvas. L?Oeuvre was recognized  at 
the time as Zola?s take on the Chef d?oeuvre inconnu, and indeed the novel is a 
variation of the sub-genre inaugurated by Balzac.
69
 
68
 In 1882 Paul Alexis wrote a book on Zola detailing his future plans, in which he also admitted that 
the  characters of Zola?s novels were based on his acquaintances. Even without this text, Zola was 
associated in the mind of the public with the impressionists and that alone would have suggested the 
novel be read as a roman ? clef. See Paul Alexis, ?mile Zola. Notes d?un ami (Paris: Maisonneuve et 
Larose, 2001). 
69
 See, Patrick Brady, ?L?Oeuvre? de ?mile Zola. Roman sur les arts. Manifeste, Autobiographie, 
Roman a clef (Geneva: Droz, 1968). 
241
In the novel Zola contrasts Lantier with the figure of the man of letters, the 
balanced, industrious, hard worker and successful Sandoz; this comparison is an 
outstanding example of the paragone. In fact, it might have caused the final split 
between Zola and C?zanne. Henri Mitterand and William Berg comment that Zola?s 
very visual narrative style directly challenged the superiority of the image for the 
representation of reality.
70
 This was logical at a time when the epistemological crisis 
brought about by the defeat of the Academic system caused the internal re-structuring 
of both fields and initiated a new debate about the problem of objective reality, 
perception, and representation.
71
 
Contemporary documents indicate that Zola and his colleagues were conscious of 
this struggle. Berg, for example, quotes a reputed statement by Zola:  
[J]e n?ai pas seulement soutenu les Impressionnistes, je les ai traduits en 
litt?rature par les touches, notes, colorations, par la palette de beaucoup de mes 
descriptions. Dans tous mes livres j?ai ?t? en contact et ?change avec les 
peintres.
72
 
The publication of the novel itself provoked a spate of reactions and comments 
among the artists and even from Zola. According to Berthe Morisot, for example, 
Degas affirmed that the novel was written ?pour prouver la grande sup?riorit? de 
l?homme de lettres sur l?artiste,? and Degas once remarked that ?en un trait, nous 
[peintres] en disons plus long qu?un litt?rateur en un volume.? George Moore 
reported that Zola observed that ?the theory of his book?namely that no painter 
 
70
 Henri Mitterand, Zola. L?histoire et la fiction (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990,) and 
William Berg, The Visual Novel. Emile Zola and the Art of His Times (University Park: Pennsylvania 
State University  Press, 1992). 
71 For the situation of Zola in the 1880s see Jean Paul Bouillon, ?Manet 1884, un billan critique, ? in 
La Critique d'art en France, 1850-1900: actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand, 25, 26 et 27 mai 
1987,  ed. Jean Paul Bouillon (Saint-Etienne: Universit? de Saint-Etienne, Centre interdisciplinaire 
d'?tudes et de recherches sur l'expression contemporaine, 1989). 
72
 Berg, The Visual Novel, 16.  
242
working in the modern movement had achieved a result proportionate to that which 
had been achieved by at least three or four writers working in the same movement.?
73
 
What was C?zanne?s opinion and attitude? Did this problem influence his 
relationship with Zola? Did he participate in this paragone? The answer remains 
unknown and, more importantly, unresearched because the subject itself has not been 
considered. Since Rewald?s biography established the centrality of the friendship with 
Zola in the interpretation of the C?zanne?s life, art historians have assumed that the 
artist shared the writer?s aesthetic principles, especially in the early part of his career.
 
74
 Even C?zanne?s personality has been drawn from the personae he assumed towards 
Zola, disregarding the evidence that indicates that they had different artistic tastes and 
ideas about life. 
The new paragone pitted the artists against the art critics, who had gained an 
outstanding power to shape the taste of the public. Many men of letters started their 
careers as art critics and pursued both careers, as did Zola, which doubled their ability 
to influence the arts. Therefore, it was not only a struggle to claim representational 
 
73
 Theodore Reff, ?Degas and the Literature of His Time,? in French 19
th
?Century Painting and 
Literature. With Special Reference to the Relevance of Literary Subject-Matter to French Painting, ed. 
Ulrich Finke  (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 198?199. The problem of the paragone to the 
knowledge of this author has never previously included in the bibliography related to C?zanne. 
Rewald, Reff and the other art historians rely on the equipoise of the two fields and the translatability 
of their contents. See also Robert J. Niess, Zola, C?zanne, and Manet A Study of L?Oeuvre (Michigan: 
University of Michigan Press, 1968). The study of the relationship of art with literature is highly 
frustrating, as members of both disciplines take the other?s bibliography as secondary source and true 
derridean supplement.  
74
 It has taken some seventy years for authors like Paul Smith, Steven Platzman, Terence Maloon and 
Roger Cranshaw, and Adrian Lewis to suggest a fundamentally different interpretation of C?zanne?s 
early years. None of these authors has written a new biography though; therefore, Rewald?s 
biographical approach still maintains today its hegemonic power to shape most of the approaches to 
C?zanne. See bibliography. In 2004 Aruna D?Souza distanced himself from the biographical account 
and studied the discourse of the failed artist and decadence and concluded that ?if there has been a 
failure of biography to deal adequately with C?zanne's oeuvre, it is because we have not sufficiently 
recognized that C?zanne's is one of many biographies of failure?stories suffuse with notions of 
degeneration and cultural evolution?to have been written in the later part of the nineteenth century.? 
?Paul C?zanne, Claude Lantier and Artistic Impotence,? NCAW, (2004) 
http://19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn_04/articles/dsou.html 
243
supremacy for one of the artistic fields, but also a fight for prestige and for the power 
to impact society. 
In 1866 Zola stated that the word ?art? displeased him and that what he sought in 
works of art was the temperament of the artist, a personal, original, and subjective 
approach to reality and art. The profound implication of this statement was, as 
Richard Shiff has pointed out, that, together with the ?word art were gone the 
standards for judgments of the art works.?
75
 The Acad?mie des Beaux-Arts had, until 
then, established the parameters used to gauge the degree of achievement and failure 
of the artists. In the absence of general principles issued by a centralized institution, 
each art critic developed his own categories and definitions and used them as basic 
criteria for his analyses and judgments. This ?conception of art? in the end was 
impossible to demonstrate or prove, and was valid as long as the art critic succeeded 
in imposing it on the art world (public, collectionists, museum officials, young artists 
looking for consecration).
76
 
Leo H. Hoek claims that art critics were conscious of their powers, which he 
exemplifies  in Zola?s commentary on Pissarro?s art ?il suffit que demain un critique 
autoris? lui trouve du talent pour que la foule l?admire.?
77
 The same men of letters 
who had helped artists to develop the autonomy of their field from the Academy and 
the official establishment, strove to place artists under their control in a situation that 
Hoek defines as ?un nouvel ?pisode du ?paragone? s?culaire;? as the art critic ?remplit 
 
75
 Shiff, C?zanne Impressionism, chapter IV, especially 30?35. 
76
 See Leo H. Hoek, Titres, toiles et critique d?art. D?terminants institutionnels du discours sur l?art 
au dix-neuvi?me si?cle en France (Amsterdam-Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2001), 208 ff. 
77
 Hoek, Titres, toiles, 209. 
244
d?sormais un r?le de th?oricien et m?me d?id?ologue, en d?fendant ou en attaquant un 
style pictural: il est devenu le l?gislateur et l?arbitre des arts.?
78
 
This new ascendancy of art criticism within the art world was paired with a 
more in-depth advance of the writer within the world of the artists, as the new 
biographical approach to the work of art gave art critics the power to evaluate artists 
as men. The art critic, as Zola stated, sought to go from the surface of the work to the 
artist who had created it.
79
 The artist was not only analyzed as the author of his 
paintings but also as a ?temperament.? Impressionism and the realist and naturalist 
movements in literature reflect the epistemological crisis of the 1870s, which 
determined a more fundamental fusion of word and image
 
in art criticism.
80
 
Isabelle Daunais?s work helps to clarify the process by which these new elements 
entered into the analysis of works of art, as she has called attention to the fact that 
naturalist art critics, especially Zola, considered art as a language. Their 
interpretations are based on the notion that it is possible to ?read? works of art and to 
decode their meaning. In general, the reader of those critical texts does not know if 
the thoughts they expound belong to the artist or to the writer, i.e., if they actually are 
in the painting. When painting is conceived as a language, it becomes something that 
is fundamentally translatable.
81
 
78
 Hoek, Titres, toiles, 245. 
79
 Hoek, Titres, toiles, 266. 
80
 There were different moments in the competition to demonstrate the supremacy of each art?s 
representational potential. Romanticism and Symbolism?two movements devoted mostly to poetry?
were, in general, periods of complicity between the plastic arts and literature, whereas realism, 
naturalism and Impressionism were periods of rivalry. Hoek, Titres, toiles, 152. See also Jo?l 
Dalan?on, ?Le Po?te et le peintre (1870?1885). Les enjeux sociaux et culturels d?un face-?-face,? 
Romantisme 66 (1989) : 62?73.  
81
 ?[L]a communication des arts, appara?t surtout comme un mode d?entr?e dans le tableau, ce que la 
critique recherche dans l?image qui lui permette d?atteindre une couche pr?cis?ment plus ?traduisible? 
de l??uvre, un espace o? elle puisse trouver ? dire. Car penser le tableau comme langage et comme 
245
There are two alternatives. Critical texts can describe a work of art, which is by 
definition ineffable and beyond full comprehension; or they might be the explanation 
or clarification of what paintings state or suggest. In the first case the image would be 
the place, the site where the intention of the artist can be read. In the second case the 
painting is a moment of a process that has to be explained, it is an episode of a 
narration. 
82
This last approach provides art critics the freedom to write their own 
[literary] text. This is why they favored works of art in which there was little to 
describe, i.e., those which did not have (their own) literary content. Daunais 
concludes that,  
Si on voulait ?tablir un rapport entre critique naturaliste et peinture moderne: l? 
o? la surface du tableau s?ordonne et se cl?t autour d?un r?cit et de son point de 
vue la critique ne saurait ?tre que descriptive; l? o? la toile est descriptive et 
ouverte ? tous les moments du regard, la critique est narrative, c'est-?-dire qu?elle 
peut devenir r?cit, quitter la surface du tableau (et son instantan?it?) tout en 
restant ?dans? le tableau.
83
 
To put it plainly: when the painting talks, the art critic is silent and vice versa. In 
the second case, the work of art is a moment in a narration that considers its 
[attributed] meanings and the process of vision and comprehension. In this kind of 
text, words create a process that takes place in time. Moreover, in these texts words 
refer to other words and are not ?tied? to describing what is re-presented by the 
 
traduction, c?est pouvoir le consid?rer ? son tour comme un objet possible de traduction. ? A cet effet, 
les lieux du tableau qui int?ressent la critique seront ceux o? elle peut elle-m?me en tant qu??criture, 
s?arrimer au temps de l?image. Or ces lieux o? la peinture s?ouvre tout au moins au langage qu?est 
l??criture sont ceux ou le r?cit est possible. ? Isabelle Daunais, ?Les r?cits de la critique d?art, entre 
naturalisme et modernisme,? Litt?rature  107 (Octobre, 1997): 23?24. 
82
 In Preziosi?s terms in the first case the work of art is a self-sufficient presence, different from other 
objects, in the second it refers to a meaning. Structuralism would refer to the synchronic and the 
diachronic. 
83
 Daunais, ?R?cits de la critique,? 31. In other words, if the painting represents a narration the only 
thing the critic can do is to describe it. If there is no narration (perspective, actions, stories) art 
criticism can become a narration.  The author is here commenting on Martin Jay?s observations about 
Dutch painting. See also The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of 
Chicago Press, 1983). 
246
image. In essence paintings are now, as Zola?s text clearly indicates, the body of the 
painter, they re-present the artist, his life, his perception. They are his bio-graphy.
84
 
And here it must be remembered that the Greek graphein means both to write and to 
draw. The artist?s oeuvre as corpus, and his real body and life as bio have been 
narrativized, i.e., both have been translated into words. If literature is no longer the 
subject matter of the work of art, it is essentially ingrained onto its surface. The work 
of art, like the anecdote, is a moment of the narration, the particular within the 
general, which can be incorporated in a narration because it is already part of a 
process and not a place, a unique moment. Naturalist art criticism at the end of the 
nineteenth century associated the artist with his work thus opening the way for art 
historians to concentrate exclusively on the artist?s persona.   
This position implies great power, as critics select for consideration and praise 
those works about which they can more easily project their ?conception of art.? 
Daunais concludes that Zola?s defense of modern art simultaneously promoted the 
influence of art criticism over the plastic arts.  
This development, which took place in France at the time when C?zanne was 
creating his work, is different from the German neo-Kantian approach to art history 
that would thrive at the end of the nineteenth century. Berg has noted that Zola?s 
ideas on visuality were similar?but not identical?to those of his contemporary, the 
 
84
 See the text quoted above p. 208 there is ?Le mot r?aliste ne signifie rien pour moi, qui d?clare 
subordonner le r?el au temp?rament. Fa?tes vrai, j?applaudis, mais surtout fa?tes individuel et vivant et 
j?applaudis plus fort. Emile Zola, ?Salon 1866,? quoted in Anita Brookner, The Genius of the Future. 
Studies in French Art Criticism. Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, The Brothers Goncourt, 
Huysmans (London: Phaidon, 1971), 99. 
247
philosopher, Konrad Fiedler, (1841?1895.)
85
 The work of the German thinker 
influenced W?lfflin?s scholarship as well as that of most of the founders of [German] 
art history, who, as it has been commented above, had mixed feelings about modern 
[French] art.  
Vouilloux has demonstrated that the Goncourt brothers not only described the 
subject matter of a work of art, but also the way it was represented and that they 
created a vocabulary appropriate to this task.
86
 Art criticism in France at the end of 
the nineteenth century developed its own discourse about the plastic arts. This critical 
vocabulary and models for the understanding of art were part and parcel of a tense 
relationship with the artists who were influenced by the art criticism but who also 
confronted and contested their validity.
87
 This approach gives another context for the 
letter from C?zanne to Gasquet quoted at the beginning of Chapter Two, where the 
artist manifests his opposition to interpretations of his paintings based on his 
personality or in his private life.  
Two important factors enhanced Zola?s standing as arbiter in the art world. First, 
Zola based his naturalism on a scientific approach, built around the theories of 
Hippolyte Taine, Theodule Ribot and Claude Bernard on perceptual psychology. 
According to Berg, he ?evolve[d] a poetics where literature, painting, and science 
 
85
 Fiedler?s important publications were On Judging Works of Visual Art (1876), Modern Naturalism 
and Artistic Truth (1881) and On the Origin of Artistic Activity (1887). As noted above, this author?s 
philosophy influenced Adolphe Hildebrand and Heinrich W?lfflin. 
86
 See Chapter II  ?Mim?sis et s?miosis,? in L?Art des Goncourt. Une esth?tique du style, (Paris: 
L'Harmattan, 1997). On formal analysis see David Summers,??Form,? Nineteenth-Century 
Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,? Critical Inquiry 15 no.(Winter, 1989): 
372?406.
 
87
 Dario Gamboni has studied Odilon Redon?s negative reaction to art criticism. See Dario Gamboni, 
?Remarques sur la critique d?art, l?histoire de l?art et le champ artistique ? propos d?Odilon Redon,? 
Zeitschrift f?r Schweizerische Arch?eologie und Kunstgeschichte 37 (1982): 104?108; and La Plume et 
le pinceau. Odilon Redon et la litt?rature (Paris: Minuit, 1989). Paul Gauguin was overtly opposed to 
art criticism as his writings clearly show. See Paul Gauguin, Racontars de rapin [Pr?sentation, notes et 
postface de Bertrand Leclair] (Paris, 2003). 
248
intersect in the realm of the visual.?
88
 In this way, he could claim that his literary style 
encompassed both artistic and scientific Truths, and reinforced the prestige of the 
naturalist writers with the aura surrounding the ?savants.?
89
 Secondly, his 
participation in the Affaire Dreyfus in 1898, which established in France?s political 
imaginaire the role of the intellectual as the conscience of the nation, allowed Zola to 
present himself as an ethical standard-bearer. Both developments took place after the 
1860s, the decade in which he was in close contact with C?zanne, but both events 
were in a certain way integral to his approach to literature, society and politics.   
Zola invented the profile of the man of letters anew. This new writer is a 
scientist, not an inspired poet or Vate, and has instead firm ethical standards. Zola had 
an anti-bohemian, anti-Baudelairian stance and held a strong belief in work. He 
praised those men of letters engaged in good political causes for the reform of society 
and the fight for the oppressed.
90
 As he explained in The Experimental Novel,
We shall construct a practical sociology, and our work will be a help to political 
and economical sciences. . . . To be the master of good and evil, to regulate life, 
to regulate society, to solve in time all the problems of socialism, above all, to 
give justice a solid foundation by solving through experiment the questions of 
criminality?is not this being the most useful and the most moral workers in the 
human workshop?
91
 
This attitude foretells Zola?s position in J?accuse, which was published in the 
literary newspaper L?Aurore as a letter to the President of the Republic. According to 
Pierre Bourdieu, the writer transposed onto politics a characteristic of the artistic 
 
88
 Berg, The Visual Novel, 25. 
89
 The ?savant? had become an important personality in French society, especially after the 1870. 
There was the tradition of the philosophe in the eighteen century, and they had  also been related to art 
criticism (the Salons of Diderot were being progressively reprinted and ?discovered? at this time), but 
Claude Bernard and later Louis Pasteur, gave more importance to natural sciences.  
90
 This is one of the reasons why he felt disappointed when the impressionists preferred to exhibit 
outside the official Salon. See Brookner, The Genius of the Future as in n. 83. 
91
 Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel? [Translated from the French by Belle M. Sherman], (New 
York: Haskell House, 1964), 26. 
249
field: the claim to universality. In this way he established the ?condition of 
intervention,? the justification for scientists and artists to assert the right to contest the 
official institutions. Whereas the anti-dreyfusards defended the ?reason of state,? the 
intellectuals claimed the ?irreducibility? of justice and truth,  
Le J?accuse est l?aboutissement et l?accomplissement du processus collectif 
d??mancipation qui s?est progressivement accompli dans le champ de production 
culturelle : en tant que rupture proph?tique avec l?ordre ?tabli, il r?affirme, contre 
toutes les raisons d?Etat, l?irr?ductibilit? des valeurs de v?rit? et de justice, et, du 
m?me coup, l?ind?pendance des gardiens de ces valeurs par rapport aux normes 
de la politique (celles du patriotisme, par exemple,) et aux contraintes de la vie 
?conomique.
92
 
Even though the position of Zola and the other intellectuals might be understood 
as a strategy to foster their position within their professional fields and within society 
at large, they shaped forever the identity of the intellectual as the cultural hero 
opposed to the warrior. The intellectuals were not members of a particular career or 
occupation; what characterized them was a vocation and an attitude, the will to 
participate in the ideological struggle, that in the end secured for them a special 
prestige, that of belonging to the ?intellectual elite.? 
93
 At the time of the Affaire 
Dreyfus intellectuals occupied both sides of the political divide but later on, the 
profile became indelibly associated with the persona of the centrist and leftist 
thinkers. 
In 1936 with the recrudescence of anti-Semitism as war approached, the world 
was in much need of intellectuals ? la Zola. Art historians inherited the role of art 
critics, not necessarily that of intellectuals. The definition of art and the artist being 
 
92
 Pierre Bourdieu, Les r?gles de l?art. Gen?se et structure du champ litt?raire, (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 
186. 
93
 Nathalie Heinich, L??lite artiste. Excellence et singularit? en r?gime d?mocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 
2005). 
250
forged at the time by scholars like Venturi and Barr incorporated a strong 
ethic/political component as it was developed to counterbalance growing 
totalitarianisms. This is also the ideology behind Rewald?s biography of C?zanne, 
which is manifested in the selection and presentation of sources and documentation 
and is most evident in the way he associates the painter with Zola. As 1936 was one 
of the years of the Popular Front, Rewald?s book should be seen as part of the last 
intellectual offensive to defeat Totalitarianism.
94
 
John Rewald?s C?zanne  
John Rewald moved from Germany to France in 1932 in order to study 
medieval art. A chance encounter in Aix-en-Provence with the painter L?o Marschutz 
(1903?1976), a devout admirer of C?zanne, convinced him to shift his focus to the 
study of the artist. Together they discovered and photographed many of the sites 
C?zanne had painted.
95
 
In 1941 Rewald fled to the United States, where he was a curator of many 
important exhibitions (several of them at MoMA) and authored a remarkable list of 
 
94
 The only text by Rewald that explicitly refers to the political situation is ?Hitler et l?Art,? Marianne 
(July 3, 1939), 11, where the author focuses on art historical considerations.   
95
 This material was essentially the basis for Fritz Novotny?s C?zanne und das Ende der 
wissenschaftliche Perspektive (Vienna: Phaidon-Verlag, 1938). Even though the letters at the Archives 
of the National Gallery of Art indicate that they had a good working relationship, Novotny?s Kantian 
approach to C?zanne and his subtle disquisitions about the problem of writing a biography of the artist 
did not influence Rewald?s scholarship. See especially Fritz Novotny, ?Das Problem des Menschen 
C?zanne im Verh?ltnis zu seiner Kunst,? Zeitschrift f?r Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaf 26 
(1932): 268?298 where Novotny deals specifically with the different types of biography and the 
impossibility of knowing C?zanne as a man. For the relationship of the two men see letters from L?o 
Marschutz to John Rewald, letters from Leo Marschutz to John Rewald from 1936 and 1937, folders 
50/6 and 50/8, John Rewald Papers, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington, D.C.  
251
books, like The History of Impressionism (1946) and Post-Impressionism from van 
Gogh to Gauguin (1956), which have been translated into several languages and 
reprinted many times. Moreover, he was also a professor at universities in New York 
and Chicago, as well as an advisor to the Paul Mellon and John Hay Whitney 
collections. In 1956 Rewald acted as the art historical consultant for Vincent 
Minelli?s Lust for Life, a movie that both Preziosi and Griselda Pollock consider to be 
the epitome of the myth of the modern artist that is popular among the public.
96
 
Rewald?s attachment to Germany seems not to have been very strong, as he 
and his family left the country early on. He would later state that ?I never saw the 
Third Reich. Being in France, I stayed home,? and ?I didn?t suffer for one week from 
the change of the situation in Germany, but I couldn?t go back.? 
97
 
Although Rewald wrote his dissertation for the Sorbonne, he did not attend 
many courses nor mingle with other students. Living with distant relatives and 
receiving a monthly remittance from his parents, he worked alone in the libraries. 
Therefore the roots of Rewald?s education have to be found in Germany, where he 
attended high school, the Lichtwarkschule in Hamburg, and two universities created 
in the twentieth century: Hamburg (the one closely associated with the Warburg 
Institute, where Rewald took classes with Panofsky), and then Frankfurt-am-Main.
98
 
The educational program instituted by the Republic of Weimar in 1919 
offered to prospective students many alternatives to the traditional Gymnasium. The 
 
96
 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, and Griselda Pollock, ?Artists Mythologies and Media Genius, 
Madness and Art History,? Screen 21 no.3 (1980): 57?96, and ?Crows, Blossoms and Lust for Death?
Cinema and the Myth of van Gogh the Modern Artist,? in The Mythology of Vincent van Gogh, ed. 
Tsukasa Kydera (Tokyo : TV Asahi; Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1993). 
97
 Rewald, ?Interview,?, 2, 15. 
98
 In the ?Introduction? to the 1946 The History of Impressionism, Rewald mentions doing part of the 
research at the Institute?s library although it is not clear when this might have happened, as his interest 
on modern art started after his arrival in France.  
252
Lichtwarkschule was a pilot school which offered a  more radically modern program 
than the rest of the Deutschter Overshule.
99
 The education at the school centered on 
the Kulturkunde a social-science type of subject that favored the development of 
critical thinking and the analysis of modern culture and society, and pushed to the 
background the classicist and humanist approach to culture fostered by other 
educational institutions of the Weimar Republic. 
Three specific subjects were especially apt to the new didactic approach: the 
examination of capitalism (that is, the socio-economic aspects of contemporary 
society); the history of mentalities and its influence in the arts (literature and plastic 
arts), political ideologies, theoretical thinking and culture of a period; and the art and 
culture of the Middle Ages.
100
 The second one particularly,  
handelte es sich um den Versuch, dem Verst?ndnis der Gegenwart durch 
Auseinandersetzungen mit geistigen Haltungen oder Str?mungen 
n?herzukommen, die entweder dem k?nstlerischen Bereich oder dem der 
politischen Ideologie bzw. der Kulturtheorie entnommen wurden. Die Sch?ler 
besch?ftigen sich dabei nicht nur mit Schriftstellern, sondern auch mit bildenden 
K?nstler. Bei den Schriftstellern standen neben modernen deutschen 
expressionistischen Dichtern wie Toller, Wedekind oder Kaiser au?erdeutsche 
Literaten wie Strindberg, Hamsum und Dostojewskij im Vordergrund, denen f?r 
das Verst?ndnis der geistigen Situation der gegenw?rtigen Gesellschaft 
besonders gro?er Wert beigemessen wurde. Bei der bildended Kunst waren 
sowohl K?nstler der Renaissance (wie D?rer) als auch moderne kunstformen 
(etwa die zeitgen?ssische Architecktur Hamburgs) vertreten. Insbesondere die 
wahlfreien Arbeiten nutzten die Sch?ler f?r Auseinandersetzungen mit Malern 
von der Romantik?Caspar David Freidrich?bis zu van Gogh und C?zanne.
101
 
99
 The project and results evoke those of the Bauhaus, which was active at the same time and shared its 
fate. The building by Fritz Schumacher (1925) followed the most advanced pedagogic reforms, 
including a less strict division between professor and student space, less hierarchical organization of 
classroom space, etc. It was among the first, if not the first school, that offered coeducation (mixed 
classes with male and female students), and was favored by Jews who found there a most favorable 
environment. For the reform see Harold H. Punke, ?Recent Development in German Education II,? 
The School Review 38 (November, 1930): 680?693. 
100
 Joachim Wendt, Die Lichtwarkschule in Hamburg Die Lichtwarkschule in Hamburg (1921-1937) 
Eine St?tte der Reform des h?heren Schulwesens (Hamburg: Verlag Verein fur Hamburgische 
Geschichte, 2000), 115?116. 
101
 Wendt, Die Lichtwarkschule, 119.  
253
Art was considered as a cultural manifestation fundamentally linked with 
literature, and the study of both subjects was oriented towards providing a better 
understanding of the problems of the present. Through the examination of the Middle 
Ages?a period that had developed a strong culture structured around sound values?
the school wanted to foster the development of ideas that would help to solve the 
contemporary cultural crisis.
102
 
The fact that Rewald chose to attend two new universities, indicates how 
removed he was from the traditional education offered by the Gymnasium and the 
values fostered by Bildung. This ?modern? education might explain his move from 
the University of Hamburg and the Warburg Institute, which worked on a highly 
theoretical approach to the Renaissance. Nevertheless, when he moved to Frankfurt-
am-Main he chose to concentrate on medieval art under the guidance of the 
conservative and nationalist art historian Hans Jantzen. Later, he abandoned this 
highly politicized environment?the university housed what is today known as the 
School of Frankfurt?to go to Paris.
 103
 
Rewald expressed a distaste for theory throughout his entire professional life.
104
 
The one name that passes from his school papers to the notebooks he wrote in France 
at the end of the 1930s is that of the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867?1935.) In 
 
102
 Wendt, Die Lichtwarkschule, 121.  
103
 Had he chosen to do so, Rewald might have known or have been influenced by people like Max 
Horkheimer, Norbert Elias, Max Werheimer, Theodor Adorno, or Karl Mannheim, among others. The 
papers that Rewald wrote for the Lichtwarkschule, ?Der Maler Frans Masereel? (non-dated) and 
?Reklame? (November, 1930) confirm that the Lichtwarkschule fostered the study of modern subject 
matters and the use of theory as they include a vast array of quotes taken from Marx, Engels, Le 
Corbusier, Hannes Meier (Bauhaus), Lenin, and many others. See folders 61/4 and 61/8, John Rewald 
Papers, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington, D.C. 
104
 See, among many others, the letter from John Rewald to Dr. Dieter J?hnig, 1
st
 May, 1983, 42/6 John 
Rewald Papers, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington, D.C. See also in the same 
Archive the correspondence regarding Rewald?s relationship with Max Raphael, where he makes his 
position explicit. See folder 53/11. NGA Archives.  
254
one of these notebooks appears for the first time a long quote of Friedrich Nietzsche?s 
Use and Abuse of History that Rewald incorporated in 1936 in the book on C?zanne 
and again in his 1980 ?Pissarro, Nietzsche and Kitsch.?
105
 This philosopher was 
widely read at the time of the Weimar Republic, and the paragraph Rewald selected 
epitomizes the grandiloquent statements that characterize his work, as it ironically 
refers to how great, artistically gifted men have to fight against the mediocre ones 
who idolize monumental history and tradition because they do not dare to create and 
innovate. Both Meier-Graefe?s writings and Nietzsche?s philosophy cultivated and 
encouraged the cult of heroes and geniuses who, being far in advance from the 
common of society, have to fight against its incomprehension.
106
 In addition, Rewald 
included Norbert Elias?s ?Kitschstil und Kitschzeitalter,? published in 1935 in the 
anti-Nazi magazine Die Sammlung, in the bibliography of C?zanne et Zola devoted 
mostly to specialized literature on the artist.
107
 The title of the article describes well 
its content, which only mentions in passing Manet, C?zanne, and Picasso as examples 
 
105
 Reprinted in John Rewald, Studies in Impressionism, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986). See 
John House, ?Review Impressionism and History: The Rewald Legacy,? Art History 9 (September, 
1986): 369?375. 
106
 Julius Meier-Graefe is quoted in ?Reklame.? Rewald used also one sentence by him as the epigraph 
of the paper on ?Der Maler Frans Masereel? See n. 103. The quote from Nietzsche is in the notebook 
?Recontres - Fin.  Recontres sur la route de l?exode,? which Rewald wrote while fleeing France in 
1939. See Folder 61/7, John Rewald Papers, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington 
D.C. The first published quotation is in C?zanne et Zola, 35?36. Another notebook at the NGA from 
the 1930s that has notes on bibliography ??Literatur ?ber C?zanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Manet, 
Monet, Pissarro, Renoir Sisley, Rodin??has extensive quotes from Meier-Graefe?s books. See folder 
73/8, John Rewald Papers, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington D.C. On Meier-
Graefe see Patricia G. Berman, ?The Invention of History: Julius Meier-Graefe, German Modernism 
and the Genealogy of Genius,? in Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889?1910, ed. Fran?oise 
Foster-Hahn (Washington: National Gallery of Art, D.C, 1996). On the influence of Nietzsche in the 
Weimar Republic see Anna Mary Dempsey, Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin: German Jewish 
Cultural Traditions and the Writing of History in Weimar German, (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 
1998.) 
107
 Norbert Elias (1897?1990) was teaching sociology at the University of Frankfurt at the time Rewald 
was attending courses there.  
255
of the incomprehension that surrounded true artists and art in the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries.  
Rewald had the opportunity to engage in a highly theoretical and speculative art 
history but decided to practice a strongly positivist, historicist methodology centered 
on the cult of great men derived from his German education. His scholarship affords a 
unique opportunity to analyze how historicism and the cult of the artist?the most 
resilient and basic components of the art history practiced in the nineteenth century?
passed to modern art history, which explains both the staying power of his 
scholarship and the fact that it has not received much critical attention.
108
 
Rewald and C?zanne et Zola  
In his introduction to the book Rewald states that he felt it was necessary to write 
a biography of the artist because ?on n?a gu?re ?tudi? les sources des reseignements 
que nous possedons sur lui. Souvent des d?formations se sont introduites dans ce qui 
a ?t? publi? sur C?zanne ??
109
 He singles out Ambroise Vollard?s 1914 biography 
for criticism as this book describes the artist as a cranky, foul-mouthed old man and is 
full of?mostly laughable and even ridiculous?anecdotes. It also contains one of the 
most aggressively ironic descriptions of Zola, whom the author describes as a 
 
108
 For the resistance of both historicism and the myth of the artist to analysis and deconstruction see 
Catherine Soussloff, ?Historicism? in Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1998), and The Absolute Artist. The Historiography of a Concept (Minnesota: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1997). 
109
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 3. 
256
nouveau riche enchanted with his own success and material gains, surrounded by a 
tasteless kitschy d?cor.
110
 Rewald dismisses this source even though Vollard had been 
the artist?s dealer and the architect of his success and had himself interviewed Zola 
about his relationship with C?zanne.  
Rewald carefully details his methodological approach and claims historical rigor. 
He enumerates his sources (letters, published souvenirs, souvenirs, paintings, site 
photographs, art criticism) and affirms that,  
[N]ous nous sommes born?s ? ?liminer simplement de notre documentation toute 
indication, toute anecdote qui ne nous inspirait pas confiance ou qui se trouve en 
contradiction avec les lettres de C?zanne, celles-ci ?tant la seule source 
authentique.
111
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Rewald thought that the letters allowed him to know the character and personality 
of the artist and could be used as guides to evaluate the truthfulness of the secondary 
sources. As noted above, this approach implies that the presuppositions inherent in 
the genre and the historian?s own ideas about C?zanne as a man transpire in the 
selection and utilization of the material. After quoting the words Zola said to Gustave 
Coquiot?another early source?Rewald observes,  
Si le fond des pens?es exprim?es par Zola est exact, ses id?es sont sans doute 
rapport?es avec trop de libert?, car cette fausse modestie, ces reproches 
?philistins? que l?on croit sous-entendre dans les paroles du romancier ne peuvent 
r?sulter que d?une mauvaise interpr?tation. Zola n??tait pas homme ? s?exprimer 
avec une pareille piti? de parvenu sur un ami dont il aimait.
112
 
110
 In the introduction to the 1939 edition of the book, he also criticized Joachim Gasquet?s and Emile 
Bernard?s accounts. ?Il faut surtout essayer de d?truire ces personnages du C?zanne-Emile Bernard, du 
C?zanne-Joachim Gasquet, du C?zanne-Vollard-Ubu, dont parle si spirituellement Ren? Huyghe pour 
tenter de d?gager le vrai visage du peintre.? Op. cit., 11; Lebensztejn has noted that Rewald has 
softened some crass words in C?zanne?s letters for publication. See Les couilles de C?zanne, 82 n. 7.    
111
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 4. 
112
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 141. It must be noted that Coquiot?s portrayal of Zola very much 
confirms Vollard?s.  
257
Years of studies on C?zanne have demonstrated that the letters, situated in 
varying contexts, can support almost any claim they are called upon to shore up. 
Rewald conceived them as dots in a single straight line, but they are rather more like 
points of convergence of an infinite number of directions existing in a 
multidimensional space where they can be used to plot countless different figures. 
Rewald, as any other biographer, used the information drawn from the letters to 
validate and reinforce the preconceptions and ideological presuppositions implied by 
the genre (narration) and to materialize his own understanding of the relationship of 
C?zanne and Zola.
113
 
The ?Introduction? starts with the analysis of an 1860 letter from Zola to 
C?zanne, where the writer narrates that he had dreamed about a book written by him 
and illustrated by the painter. Rewald affirms that his own book is the materialization 
of Zola?s dream (although there is no proof that C?zanne shared this dream), and the 
reparation of the injustice brought about by the malignant influence of ?others.? Since 
the beginning, then, Rewald presents himself symbolically as the continuator of 
Zola?s work.  
Even though Rewald acknowledges that this was a rather short friendship, that 
Zola never understood C?zanne, and that they had different characters and 
aspirations, he argues that they were united by their high artistic goals, their 
memories, and their fight against a common enemy: the philistine society and public. 
Although this affirmation is quite abstract and impossible to prove, it is the leitmotiv 
and main line of argumentation that structures the book. It already appears in the 
 
113
 See House, ?Review Impressionism and History,? 369?375, and Smith, ?Pictures and History,? 97?
105. 
258
introduction (?Ils avaient toujours en commun leurs souvenirs et l?hostilit? de 
beaucoup de leurs adversaries,?
114
) and is integral to the first quote of the book. When 
commenting about C?zanne?s first meeting with Zola at the Coll?ge Bourbon, Rewald 
cites a passage taken from Zola?s 1886 novel L?Oeuvre:
?Oppos?s par nature??comme le dira plus tard Zola?ils s??taient li?s d?un 
coup et ? jamais, entra?n?s par des affinit?s secr?tes, le tourment encore vague 
d?une ambition commune, l??veil d?une intelligence sup?rieure, au milieu de la 
cohue brutale des abominables cancres qui les battaient?.
115
 
This is indeed a remarkable occurrence: the art historian in 1936 uses as a 
source a literary text written in 1886 that describes the friendship of two ideal 
characters which might have been inspired by the relationship established thirty years 
before by two real people. To say it another way: Rewald?s (art historical) text uses as 
a document an anecdote extracted from a novel written in 1886 and implies that it 
effectively happened in 1858.   
It has been established above that the relocation and repetition of an anecdote 
in diverse texts was meaningful in itself and that it thus accrues its value. In this case, 
what happens is that one anecdote ?jumps? from a literary text to a historical one, that 
is, to what it is supposed to be an altogether different kind of narration. It becomes a 
historeme. Fiction and literary texts are not listed among the sources Rewald 
mentions in the introduction but he makes abundant use of them throughout the book.                                                    
Rewald?s methodological discourse and the relationship he establishes there 
between the documents and the letters, validates and even naturalizes Zola?s text as a 
documentary source. It is true that L?Oeuvre was also the most autobiographical of 
Zola?s series on the Rougon-Macquart family. Although Rewald, like many art 
 
114
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 2.  
115
 Emile Zola, L?Oeuvre in Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 7. 
259
historians after him, worked with the preparatory notes in which Zola jotted down his 
first ideas for the novel, Zola?s anecdotes and his comments are always part of a 
fictional enterprise, one in which the author is avowedly presenting his version of the 
facts for public scrutiny. Nevertheless, and even if most art historians are conscious 
of the fact that the laws of the (narrative) discourse and the necessity of the plot rule 
over this material, they have often used it as primary source together with the written 
testimonies and the letters.
 116
 To this must be added the conscious manipulation that 
derives from the needs of the narrative plot of the art historical text itself. In the 
paragraph from L?Oeuvre that Rewald quotes, Zola was not referring to Lantier?s 
friendship with Sandoz, the writer, but to the relationship that united the three 
?inseparables? (Zola, C?zanne and Baille): ?Venus de trois mondes diff?rents, 
oppos?s de natures, n?s seulement la m?me ann?e, ? ils s??taient li?s d?un coup et ? 
jamais?? 
117
 As the quotation that opens this chapter indicates, Rewald did not 
consider Baille of the same ?essence? of Zola and C?zanne. Thus he proceeds to edit 
Zola?s text. This suggests that the art historian wanted to underscore the fact that he 
was using the writer?s work as source.  
The question is then: Why Zola?
 
Zola had not only recanted from his former 
support of modern painting, but had referred to C?zanne  as an ?abortive genius? as 
 
116
 The same can be said of the book by Gasquet. Even though the accuracy of the poet?s description of 
C?zanne, as well as the authenticity of the anecdotes and dialogues he describes have been repeatedly 
questioned, the book has been and is still used by almost all researchers working on the artist. Rewald, 
for example, only came to doubt it after the Second World War. Art historians seem to need the 
material it contains and feel they are able to discriminate the part of the text that is true to reality from 
the one that depends on Gasquet?s inventiveness. See Richard Shiff ?Introduction? to Joachim 
Gasquet?s C?zanne: A Memoir with Conversations [Translated by Christopher Pemberton. Preface by 
John Rewald, Introduction by Richard Shiff], (London: Thames and Hudson,, 1991). Shiff comments 
that not only Fry but also Merleau Ponty and Schapiro (who gets the anecdote of the apples in his text) 
have taken fundamental information from Gasquet?s book.  
117
 Emile Zola, L?Oeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 39.   
260
late as 1896 when the artist at last was beginning to be acclaimed.
 118
 There seems to 
be a perverse connection between C?zanne?s and Zola?s critical fortunes: the more the 
painter?s greatness is acknowledged, the more the writer?s standing as progressive art 
critic is liable for his lack of understanding of his friend?s art. C?zanne was almost 
unknown at the moment L?Oeuvre appeared, and therefore his name was not 
immediately associated by the general public with Claude Lantier, its tormented and 
unsuccessful protagonist. At the beginning of the twentieth century this situation had 
started to change. As the paragraph by Bernard analyzed above demonstrates, already 
in 1907 the association Lantier/C?zanne was ?in the air.? The publication of the 
letters to Zola and the study of the writer?s preparatory notes could only reinforce it.  
Zola is not a key character in the accounts written by those who had known the 
artist (Ambroise Vollard and Joachim Gasquet) or in the first monographs written on 
him. He is not important for Venturi or Huyghe. Gerstle Mack?who knew the letters 
the artist had sent to Zola?does not assign to Zola such an significant place in the 
painter?s life. In the introduction to his biography Rewald explains that,  
Notre ?tude ?tait termin?e ? l?exception des trois derniers chapitres quand, au 
mois d?octobre 1935, parut un livre sur Paul C?zanne par Gerstle Mack, o? sont 
publi?es presques [sic] toutes les lettres de C?zanne ? et qui est fond? en partie 
sur les m?mes documents ?Pourtant le but de notre ?tude est assez diff?rent de 
celui que s?est propos? M Gerstle Mack, et notre documentation est assez 
importante, m?me en dehors de ces lettres pour que nous n?ayons pas song? a 
modifier la disposition de notre travail?(Emphasis added).
119
 
118
 Zola commented this in his last piece of art criticism where he recanted from his support to modern 
painting: ?Peinture,? Le Figaro, 2 May 1896. Rewald contended that C?zanne was offended by the 
way Zola had portrayed him in L?Oeuvre ten years before and that the book had been the cause of final 
break between the two friends.  Nevertheless, he argued that the painter was hurt by this last comment: 
?Qu?on le ridiculise, qu?on le calomnie, C?zanne finit par ne plus s?en apercevoir, mais que Zola ce 
m?me Zola qui lui avait jadis d?di? ses po?mes ?.. en vint ? le traiter de ?g?nie avort??. Ceci sans 
doute ?tait pour lui un coup cruel et inattendu.? Rewald, C?zanne  et Zola, 2.  
119
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 5. 
261
This other ?goal? is to study and explicate the life of C?zanne as if it had been 
determined by his relationship with Zola.   
In order to give an historical account of C?zanne?s life, the most important 
and delicate operation an art historian had and still has to confront is to extricate the 
artist from the literary models in which he had been cast?or in which he had cast 
himself?something that it is doubtful Rewald did or that can be done at all.
120
 What 
Rewald did was to explain away the negative aspects of the association 
C?zanne/Lantier, reaffirm the coupling C?zanne/Frenhofer, and to demonstrate that 
Zola had a positive central role in the painter?s life. In the end, compared with 
Venturi?s source criticism, Rewald?s is a step backwards, as he counted among his 
primary sources not only the letters and testimonies but also literary texts inspired by 
the artist.
121
 
Vouilloux has suggested that the association with Balzac might have derived its 
strength from the fact that it was used to transcend the Lantier/C?zanne coupling, 
which provided those who attacked C?zanne a whole range of arguments against the 
painter because it confirmed even the cruelest of critiques. The new literary model 
implied ? l?impuissance ?par g?nie? et non ?par naissance?; la fatalit? du don de 
vocation contre le destin biologique de la lign?e.?
122
 
120
 C?zanne is perhaps the modern painter who has more literary portraits as he not only appears in 
Zola?s oeuvre but also in Edmond Duranty?s ?Le Peintre Louis Martin,? in Le Pays des art (Paris, 
1881), Paul Alexis, Madame Meuriot: moeurs parisiennes, (Paris, 1891) and as Paul Smith has argued 
in a paper presented at the College Art Association Conference New York 2002. Paul Smith has 
announced his forthcoming The Prey and the Shadow, an edition in translation of the 1878 novel by 
Zola?s friend, Marius Roux, whose central character the scholar believes was modeled on C?zanne. 
121
 It must be remembered nonetheless that Venturi was writing a monograph not a biography and that 
Rewald was also affected by the constraints of the genre. 
122
 Vouilloux, Tableaux d?auteurs, 96. 
262
[L]e type qu?incarnait celui-ci [Lantier/Zola] se sera impos? aux biographes du 
peintre comme un contre-mod?le dont la force d?attraction ne pouvait ?tre 
efficacement ?lud? qu?? la condition de lui en substituer un autre?le mod?le 
balzacien, autrement ennoblissant, ou, pour emprunter son terme ? Zola 
?grandissant,?puisque, d?une certaine mani?re, il donnait enfin ? la figure 
romanesque du fou de litt?rature, Don Quichotte, son ?quivalent artistique. La 
substitution, du reste pour ?quitable qu?elle se voul?t, n?alla pas sans entra?ner 
quelques exc?s compl?mentaires, d?j? chez Vollard, ensuite chez Coquiot et 
Gasquet, surtout chez Larguier, le r?ajustement balzacien tourne au r?glement de 
comptes anti-zolien, comme si remettre C?zanne ? sa juste place et reconna?tre 
sa grandeur (balzacienne ou non) ne se pouvaient faire sans abaisser Zola? 
Une historiographie des premiers ?crits sur C?zanne publi?s dans les ann?es qui 
suivirent sa mort pourrait donc aussi donner ? lire une lutte des mod?les: en 
jouant Balzac contre Zola, on l?gitimait une lecture h?ro?que (avec tout ce qu?il 
entre de romantique dans ce moment de la modernit?) de l?impuissance comme 
drame consubstantiel ? l?exp?rience artistique, au ?drame de la peinture.?
123
 
(Emphasis added) 
 
The scholarship of C?zanne in the 1930s can be interpreted as a confrontation of 
contradictory heuristic models that shaped the ?historical? material according to the 
?type? of personality or humanness art historians wanted to extol in C?zanne. The 
figure of Frenhofer implied quixotic heroism and Rewald utilized it to associate the 
painter?s artistic project with Zola?s (more on this below.) As already mentioned, the 
identification of C?zanne with Frenhofer was picked up by Gasquet in 1921 and, 
according to the logic of the anecdote, in this way he naturalized Bernard?s anecdote. 
Moreover, Gasquet expanded the association C?zanne/Balzac adding a scene in 
which C?zanne takes a book by Balzac from the shelves and digresses about art while 
reading the comments he had jotted down while reading the text.
124
 Those notes are 
actually quotations that Gasquet had taken from C?zanne?s letters to Bernard.
125
 
123
 Vouilloux, Tableaux d?auteurs, 96?99. 
124
 Joachim Gasquet, C?zanne (Foug?res, 2002) [Original edition 1921], 366?399. 
125
 Vouilloux, Tableaux d?auteurs, 89. Rewald most disparaging concepts for Gasquet are in C?zanne, 
Geffroy et Gasquet.
263
Rewald reversed the strategy put in place by Bernard, Larguier, and Gasquet in 
the 1910s and 1920s when they dissociated C?zanne from Zola?s critical approach. 
One of the main goals of Rewald?s book was to redeem the writer from his lack of 
comprehension of C?zanne and modern painting, and resituate him as the heroic art 
critic associated with the members of the new school by the common fight against the 
philistine, unjust society and official establishment. The art historian continues his 
work. Zola?Rewald claims?was sincere and fervent. 
La sensibilit? de l?oeil manquait ? Zola, son go?t n??tait pas extr?mement fin, et 
sans doute ?tait-il incapable de trouver une satisfaction int?grale dans une 
r?alisation picturale; mais il avait la belle v?h?mence d?un lutteur d?avant-garde 
et la voix forte pour crier encore plus haut que les d?tracteurs. La nouvelle ?cole 
qui na?tra du SALON DES REFUSES, ?. ne pouvait pas trouver meilleur avocat 
que ce jeune journaliste qui renoncera ? toute finesse de langage, ? toute 
discussion esth?tique pour dire son opinion d?une fa?on ? la fois brutale et 
sinc?re. 
126
 
Rewald in the end does not solve the problem of the literary types but combines 
two of them, as he follows Bernard and Gasquet in associating C?zanne to Frenhofer, 
and even compares, point by point, the painter?s letters with Balzac?s text.  
Si C?zanne avait pu reconnaitre [sic] en Claude Lantier ses propres mots, ses 
gestes, ses troubles devant la r?alisation, il n?y retrouvait pas ses id?es. Ce qu?il 
pensait sur l?art, ses th?ories qu?il communiquera plus tard ? ses jeunes amis 
peintres, il les avait trouv? exprim?s par Balzac dans LE CHEF-D??UVRE 
INCONNU, et il n?avait pas h?sit? ? s?identifier avec le personnage central de 
cette petite nouvelle, le peintre Frenhofer.
127
 
Both models must be considered part of the century-long paragone. If Lantier was an 
impotent and failed artist, the Balzacian painter was idealist and heroic, but mad. In 
 
126
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 40. 
127
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 156. It has been noted that in a certain way Balzac text can support all 
kind of different claims, including some which contradict C?zanne?s aesthetic. See Robert Ratcliff, 
?C?zanne?s Working Methods and Their Theoretical Background,? Ph.D. diss. Unpublished, 
University of London, 1960. 
264
both cases the painters, mired in their dreams and egos, fail to communicate with 
society and to play a role in it.  
Ultimately, if Zola had moved literature and art criticism closer to science and 
claimed to be an objective observer of reality, Rewald?s biography situates art history 
in an area that is in between narration and history. He could not distance himself from 
the narrative sources and from the logic of the anecdote qua historeme by which the 
information is already literary and ruled by the laws of [written] discourse more than 
by their historical truthfulness.
 
As Champa notices, in Rewald?s scholarship there is 
no distance to the literary text,  
I am also considering Rewald?s History [of Impressionism] as both history and 
novel, which I think it is, ... Neither text, Zola?s [L?Oeuvre] nor Rewald?s, is 
purely one thing or another, but Zola?s is the more honestly ambiguous, since it 
deploys its mistakes (its fictions) clearly, while Rewald?s does not. 
128
 
Rewald?s scholarship naturalizes the literary/narrative character of art history, 
as his avowed methodology was to discriminate the documentation and put it together 
so that the reader may be in touch with the past. His evaluation of the sources and his 
decision to highlight Zola?s personality were historically determined and ideological. 
In a period of growing anti-Semitism and social unease, when Germany was already 
governed by Hitler and Stalin was about to start the purges in Russia, the towering 
figure of Zola, the author of the J?accuse, took on a different meaning.
129
 This part of 
the story is posterior to 1886, when the writer?s friendship with C?zanne ended, but 
 
128
 Champa, Masterpiece Studies, 72. Rodolphe Gasch? has noted that according to Baumgarten there 
was a fundamental relationship between history and narration. These discourses are distinguishable 
only because of the different proportion of reality, logic, and imagination implicated in the thematic 
constructions in which the two organize their individual determinations. Rodolphe Gasch?, ?Of 
Aesthetic and Historical Determination,? as in n.38. 
129
 Already in the introduction to Fry?s C?zanne: A Study, Zola is commented upon as author of bad 
literature but the noble writer of the 1898 J?acusse. Evidently the judgment would depend on the 
political orientation of the authors. 
265
Rewald manages to make it significant for the painter. He gives special attention not 
to the Dreyfus affair (C?zanne was anti-dreyfusard), but to an article by Henri 
Rochefort published in 1903 in the anti-Semitic La Lanterne. ?L?Amour du laid? was 
a vicious attack on C?zanne but the author takes advantage of the situation to assail 
the memory of Zola, the intellectual, who had died in 1902. Rewald quotes the most 
vitriolic part of the article in length,  
?Nous avons souvent affirm? qu?il y avait des dreyfusards longtemps avant 
l?affaire Dreyfus. Tous les cerveaux malades, les ?mes ? l?envers, les louchons et 
les estropi?s ?taient murs pour la venue du Messie de la Trahison. Quand on voit 
la nature comme l?interpr?taient Zola et ses peintres ordinaires, il est tout simple 
que le patriotisme et l?honneur vous apparaissent sous la forme d?un officier 
livrant ? l?ennemi les plans de la d?fense du pays. 
130
 
Rewald takes the anecdote from Gasquet?s book: the artist received hundreds of 
copies of the article and even his friends in Aix were harassed after its publication. 
Rewald, who focuses almost exclusively on the negative reviews and articles by the 
popular press, mentions an anonymous article also in La Lanterne where Zola is 
accused of convincing the art dealers to promote C?zanne?s art.
131
 As mentioned 
above, the opposite was true, that is, Zola?s portrait of Lantier was used as a 
corroboration of the idea that the artist was an ?abortive genius,? but Rewald does not 
mention these versions. 
Maintenant que le romancier ?tait mort, C?zanne, ? devenait une v?ritable 
victime de son amiti?. N?est-il pas tragique de voir que le peintre?apr?s toutes 
les souffrances que lui avaient caus?es l?incompr?hension de son ami et leur 
s?paration?soit hant? vers la fin de sa vie par l?ombre de Zola, ?voqu? toujours 
pour l?attaquer? Ami d?vou?, patient et bon, critique d?art sans intuition et 
souvent sans clairvoyante, Zola devient apr?s sa mort une arme pour les 
 
130
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 162. 
131
 See Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 163. Rewald includes the critique by the conservative Jewish art 
critic Max Nordau (1849-1923), even though this kind of comment would not have affected C?zanne.  
266
d?tracteurs de C?zanne qui ne reculent pas devant le mensonge pour pers?cuter le 
peintre. 
132
 
Rewald?s C?zanne combines the figures of Lantier and Frenhofer, and his fate is 
associated with that of Zola, the artist?s friend who had defended him, as he had later 
defended Dreyfus against an unfair official establishment and the general public. 
Rewald the art historian as intellectual takes upon himself the task of interpreting the 
artist?s life and giving it a meaning and an orientation that are in great part 
determined by the genre he uses to write about the artist.  
Rewald?s biography of C?zanne hinges around Zola?s. The artist?s relationship 
with other painters and with painting as an autonomous practice and field, his 
personal decisions to forge his personae as a [professional] painter, the technical or 
stylistic challenges he faced, are secondary to Rewald?s quest for the man. The art 
historian does not pay much attention to C?zanne?s literary tastes beyond his 
acquaintance with Zola and the members of his entourage.  
The final impression is that the artist was always introspective, weak, self-
concentrated, serious, and in constant need of the paternalistic support of his friend. 
The new paragone is here completely developed. As Rewald argued as late as in 
1959, 
Sa religiosit? profonde et sinc?re? correspondait ? un besoin absolu chez cet 
homme r?sign? ? vivre et cr?er dans un isolement quasi total. Mais peu d?sireux 
et peut-?tre m?me incapable d?expliquer ses convictions intimes, encore moins 
enclin ? les discuter, il se repliait automatiquement sur lui-m?me...
 133
 (Emphasis 
added)  
 
The artist must be protected and explained.  
 
132
 Rewald, C?zanne et Zola, 164. 
133
 Rewald, C?zanne, Geffroy et Gasquet, 21. 
267
Rewald and MoMA
In 1935, while Barr was organizing Cubism and Abstract Art, MoMA presented 
its first blockbuster exhibition, Vincent van Gogh, which in its combined venues 
attracted almost a million visitors.
134
 The museum?s advertising and the impressive 
merchandising associated with the show provoked criticism from within the art world 
but secured MoMA?s position among the public. As Steve Spence notes, 
Because MoMA often appears ? as the standard-bearer of an elitist and hermetic 
formalism the suggestion that the museum supported this trend might seem 
surprising. Nevertheless, in the 1930s l?art pour l?art represented only one 
among a diverse array of competing aesthetic faiths, and evidence suggests that 
MoMA encouraged the commercial frenzy that grew around its exhibition.
135
 
The show instigated two reprints of Lust for Life (Irving Stone?s fictionalized 
biography of the artist first published in 1934), a condensed version of which 
appeared in the Reader?s Digest. Spence calls attention to the fact that Stone?s book 
devotes more space to the first part of the life of the artist, his religious crisis, and 
thus, to his realist style. Spence argues that it was the assimilation of the religious 
impulse to the incomprehension of his art and martyrdom that attracted the public. It 
is not known if Rewald was aware of Stone?s biography, but the show demonstrates 
how important the biographical approach was in MoMA?s modernism.
136
 
134
 Interestingly this was the show in which Hugh Troy made perhaps the first creative museological 
intervention when he placed in the installation a box containing an ear molded from meat with a label 
reading, ?This is the ear which Vincent van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress, a French prostitute, 
Dec. 24, 1888.? The painter assumed ? somehow correctly?that the public was more interested in the 
artist?s life than in his art. 1935 was also the year in which the American biographer Gerstle Mack 
(1894-1983) published his work on C?zanne.  
135
 Steve Spence, ?Van Gogh in Alabama, 1936,? Representations 75 (Summer, 2001), 36?37. For an 
acute comment on MoMA and Matisse see O?Brian, ?MoMA?s Public Relations.?   
136
 The solo exhibition and the retrospective were developed at the end of the nineteenth century and 
are typically modernist products. See Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Si?cle Europe 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 
268
When Huyghe?who praised Barr?s van Gogh catalogue and his use of 
documentation in L?Amour de l?Art 
137
?organized his own van Gogh exhibition two 
years later, the marchand Pierre Loeb observed,    
[C]ette pr?sentation possible avec Van Gogh (vie exceptionnellement agit?e, vie 
maudite?) ne le sera pas dans la majorit? des cas. Certains, parmi les plus 
grands, ont eu les vies tranquilles, bourgeoises, sans ?clats. D?autres n?ont laiss? 
que des correspondances insignifiantes. Par quels artifices leur donnerez-vous un 
int?r?t spectaculaire?
138
 (Emphasis added) 
 
The comment confirms that in the 1930s the strategies of display resulting from 
this biographical approach to modern art were new. It fostered the exhibition of 
documentation (letters, maps, dates, certificates) together with works of art and 
structured the museum installation. Biography became part of modern art history?s 
interpretative tools, something the public has to know and the museum has to provide, 
as part of the information that accompanies the exhibition, which amounts to a new 
way of associating the image and the word.   
Considered together, Le Chef-d?oeuvre inconnu (1831?1837), L?Oeuvre 
(1886), and C?zanne et Zola (1936) suggest an intellectual model that helps to 
understand how the idea of the absolute artist came to be an integral part of modern 
art history. In the nineteenth century, men of letters recast the artist biography as a 
literary sub-genre which took a life of its own. These texts, as successful fictions and 
reflections of the period?s imaginaire about artists and poets, in turn became 
ideological paradigms that shaped reality. As the century developed, the aspiration of 
realist and naturalist writers to portray real life gave to these novellas the aura of 
veracity that characterize historical writings. Therefore, anecdotes could easily 
 
137
 Ren? Huyghe, ?Livres,? L?Amour de l?Art 18 (April, 1937), 3. 
138
 Pierre Loeb, ?Que pensez-vous de l?exposition van Gogh?,? Beaux Arts (10 Septembre, 1937), 2. 
269
transmigrate and become part of these last as historemes, the place in which the 
horizontal trust of words reflects the real and thus certify the narration?s faithfulness. 
Rewald?s historicist approach to the biography of C?zanne demonstrates how the 
literary (narrative) sub-genre was integrated into art historical writings. 
Although biographies still occupy a rather peripheral position in the 
discipline, modern art history is intrinsically biographical, i.e., the basic material of 
the biography, severed from its original context is incorporated into other art 
historical writings: the anecdotes as index of the real, refer to the artist as an historical 
being and therefore are of enormous significance for the interpretative task. This is 
the reason why Rewald?s scholarship with its wealth of information about the artist is 
even now considered a valid resource. Rewald?s biography, site photographs, and the 
compiled letters anchor C?zanne in history and may be used to support different 
interpretations.  
In 1978 Rewald collaborated with William Rubin in preparing MoMA?s 
blockbuster exhibit C?zanne: The Late Work, which was later presented in Paris. 
Despite its success the show was harshly criticized by a younger generation of art 
historians who were contesting MoMA?s modernist art history. Eunice Lipton, who 
sparked the debate with a virulent piece in the Art Journal, observed with respect to 
Rewald?s presentation at the symposium organized to accompany the exhibition, 
[F]or Rewald, the central ?facts? are the works themselves; any attempt to explain 
them seems to violate their mysterious, inexplicable significance. If we do deal 
with the facts of his [C?zanne] life, Rewald urged, we must keep them separate; 
they are interesting pieces of information but not in any way formative. As I see 
it, these biographical facts are only cited in order to reinforce the myth of the 
artist, not as a person but as artistic persona. 
139
 
139
 Eunice Lipton, ?Some Reflexions on the C?zanne Events at The Museum of Modern Art,? Art 
Journal 37 (Summer, 1978): 326. 
270
According to Lipton, Reff and Shapiro were trying to introduce a 
psychological approach and to understand the artist through the analysis of the works 
of art: ?for Reff art has intentionality.?
140
 In Rewald?s work, as in that of many 
modernist art historians, works of art are revered for their ineffable quality but there 
is no true interpretation of them, which would imply that the transcendental sphere of 
art might be reached and explained. The only thing the art critic and art historian can 
do is to ?ap-praise? its value. Rewald?s exclusive concentration on the events that 
surrounded the life of the artist served to naturalize ?art? as an ineffable ?gift? given 
to certain special people, and to sever art from its ties to the historical moment thus 
confirming its transcendental character. Rewald?s biography of C?zanne is an 
example of modern biography: while the anecdotes and documents guarantee the 
historical character of the biography, the genre itself establishes C?zanne as the 
incarnation of the paradigm. 
As Griselda Pollock stated just two years after Lipton reviewed the show, 
The preoccupation with the individual artist is symptomatic of the work 
accomplished in art history?the production of an artistic subject for works of 
art. The subject constructed from the art work is then posited as the exclusive 
source of meaning,?i.e. ?art?, and the effect of this is to remove ?art? from 
historical or textual analysis by representing it solely as the ?expression? of the 
creative personality of the artist. ?Art and the artist become reflexive, 
mystically bound into an unbreakable circuit which produces the artist as the 
subject of the art work and the art work as the means of contemplative access to 
that subject?s ?transcendent? and creative subjectivity. The construction of an 
artistic subject for art is accomplished through current discursive structures?the 
biographic, which focuses exclusively on the individual, and the narrative,
140
 Both William Rubin and Rewald answered Eunice Lipton?s virulent attack. The first commented 
that her arguments against those who defend a strict formalism reminded him of Stalin?s assault on 
?bourgeois formalism.? ?Letter to the Editor,? Art Journal 38 (Spring, 1979), 232. Rewald responded 
that her attack made him understand what C?zanne had suffered when his art was criticized. ?Letter to 
the Editor,? Art Journal 38 (Winter, 1978?1979), 152.  
271
which produces coherent, linear, causal sequences through which an artistic 
subject is realized.
141
 
A quarter of a century after these words were written, they are still pertinent. 
The modern biography of the ?absolute artist? not only sutures a specific relationship 
of works of art with the word that interprets them, but also articulates a certain 
definition of modern art with history. In the nineteenth century all the contemporary 
artists were seen as creative personalities and revered as such.
142
 As Green has 
proven, in France at the end of the nineteenth century, artists with very different 
styles and understanding of art, ?all the flowers of the field,? were celebrated as 
national treasures. In the 1930s the same process that redefined modern art as avant-
garde art added a political ingredient to the definition of art, and a heroic ethical 
stance to the persona of the absolute artist. Since then, not all those who practice art 
are absolute artists.   
 As Pollock indicates, the group of paintings that modern art history considers 
important determines how the artist is portrayed. The biography depends as much on 
the data provided by the documentation as on the general discourse that explains the 
development of the history of modern art. Rewald?s historicist and document-based 
scholarship was easily incorporated into MoMA?s project. Historicism and formalism 
complement themselves.
143
 Barr supported the publication of Rewald?s The History of 
 
141
 Pollock, ?Artists Mythologies,? 58?59. See also Chapter Two: Venturi from a different point of 
view reached the same conclusion. 
142
 See Mich?le Hannoosh, ?Th?ophile Silvestre?s Histoire des artistes vivants: Art Criticism and 
Photography,? The Art Bulletin 88 (December, 2006): 729?755, and the analysis of Huyghe?s Histoire 
de l?art contemporain in chapter 3. 
143
 Nevertheless, the pure formalism of an art critic like Clement Greenberg could not accept Rewald?s 
approach to art history. In a letter to Erle Loran written in February 1, 1944,  he stated his own review 
of a book on Seurat by Rewald: ?The book itself was much thinner than I gave to understand [in the 
review], even for Rewald, who is what the Germans call a ?Bibliotheker? and will never be anything 
else. I was moved to go easy with him by a notion that I now think mistaken: that is, get people 
272
Impressionism (1946) and later of his Post-Impressionism, from Van Gogh to 
Gauguin (1956).
144
 As Pollock argues,  
The canonising interpretation [of the new painting] appeared with John Rewald's 
History of Impressionism, (New York, 1946) published by the Museum of 
Modern Art, New York, and following the model of analysis produced by A. H. 
Barr in his first decade of exhibitions as Director of that museum.
145
 
Rewald took from Zola the role of legislator, but his moral and civic message is 
embedded in his scholarship and therefore cloaked and strengthened by historicism?s 
claims to objectivity. In this way his work complemented and supplemented the 
approach of the formalist art historians that established the modernist canon of great 
men.  
In Rewald?s work, style and technique are like mathematic formulas that the 
artist has to ?discover.?
146
 The innovations that the impressionists and C?zanne 
brought to art and their approach and interpretation of nature become the ?right? or 
the ?normal? and are normative and prescriptive as they impose an historically 
determined worldview as paradigmatic. The implications of this development are 
profound, as the new paradigm is imposed as such in the name of freedom. Modern 
art history does not prescribe a certain style, but a way of being a human being, a way 
of seeing, perceiving, feeling and understanding the world. 
 
interested in Seurat no matter what the pretext. It was a poor book even on his own terms.? ?Erle Loran 
Papers,? Reel 1716, no. 14, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 
144
 In 1991 Rewald commented that he had been introduced to Barr in the 1930s but that he was not an 
acquaintance, even though it had been Barr who helped him to flee Europe in 1940. Monroe Wheeler 
appointed Rewald to work for MoMA. See  Rewald, interview, Zane.  
145
 See Griselda Pollock, ?The Homeland of Pictures. Reflections on Van Gogh's Place Memories,? 
LAND2: texts (May, 2005), n. 3. See also her ?Say About C?zanne,? 95?101. 
146
 The words ?discovery,? ?conquest,? and ?revelation? are common stock in Rewald writings. See 
Richard Thomson, ?C?zanne Composition; Studies in Impressionism; C?zanne and the End of 
Impressionism,? The Burlington Magazine 128 (April, 1986): 297?298.    
273
Rewald?s work could, at the same time, provide the anecdotes that support 
?post-modern? interpretation and thus become a ?resource.? From the particular (the 
biographical anecdote, the document), the ?modern? still controls and orients the 
general discourse of art history and secures the imperium of the absolute artists as 
incarnated or embedded into the work of art. Rewald?s historicist scholarship and his 
approach to the biography of C?zanne expanded the paragone of the nineteenth 
century and helped to establish the new alliance of the word and image that Mitchell, 
in the text quoted in Chapter One, called ut pictura theoria. 
Coda: Zola?s Meaningful Joke
In 1869 Zola, struggling to establish himself as a journalist and art critic in the 
Parisian milieu, published in the newspapers Le Figaro and Le Gaulois several poems 
by the recently deceased Charles Baudelaire that he claimed had escaped the attention 
of the editors of the poet?s complete works. As it turned out, this was a spoof, as the 
parodic pastiches belonged to Zola?s friend Paul Alexis, a young Aixoise and aspiring 
man of letters. Baudelaire?s admirers reacted swiftly harshly and Zola retreated in 
order to avoid further damage to his reputation. 
No?lle Benhamou and Val?rie Gramfort have recently analyzed this episode 
and demonstrated that on top of confronting the editors of the works of the poet, Zola 
also wanted to ?malmener Baudelaire.?
147
 
147
 No?lle Benhamou, and Val?rie Gramfort, ?Quand le jeune Zola monte un canular ?,? Romantisme,
116 (2002) : 67.  
274
Ce n??tait pas seulement un acte de r?sistance aux Parnassiens et ? Baudelaire? 
auxquels Zola s?en ?tait d?j? pris plusieurs fois dans ses chroniques?mais aussi 
une d?monstration concr?te que la litt?rature nouvelle s??crivait en prose et que 
la voie ouverte par le po?te des Fleurs du Mal ?tait une impasse. Sous l?aspect 
d?une blague irrespectueuse mais anodine, la supercherie, profond?ment 
subversive, servait la cause naturaliste.
148
 
This episode was part of Zola?s strategies to contest the prestige of poetry and 
establish naturalism and the novel at the top of the hierarchy of the literary genres. 
This documented anecdote would only be that, had not Baudelaire been C?zanne?s 
favorite author throughout his adult life. A set of drawings from the 1860s prove that 
the artist had already read and admired the poet?s La Charogne, a poem that he 
recited by heart into his old age.
149
 This poem is one of the poems that Alexis 
parodied and, in one of the articles Zola wrote trying to explain his faux pas, he
commented, tongue in cheek that, ?ce n?est pas un pastiche, mais plut?t une 
production parall?le, sup?rieure, selon moi ? certains morceaux du po?te de la 
Charogne.?
150
 C?zanne reiterated his unlimited admiration for the author of Les 
Fleurs du mal both as poet and art critic until the end of his life. 
 Zola did not like Baudelaire either as a poet or as an art critic. The poet?s 
style, aesthetics, personality, his bohemianism, political inclinations, and approach to 
literature, contradicted the principles Zola defended.
151
 The problem is that C?zanne?s 
admiration for Baudelaire, his early bohemianism, his acquaintance with Baudelarian 
poets, are incompatible with Rewald?s interpretation of the painter?s life, according to 
 
148
 Benhamou, and Gramfort, ?Quand  Zola,? 72. 
149
 See L?o Larguier, Le Dimanche avec Paul C?zanne, (Paris, 1925), 88 and C?zanne?s letter to his 
son from September 13, 1906, where he writes that is re-reading Baudelaire?s Art romantique. Rewald, 
Correspondance, 326. 
150
 Quoted in Benhamou, and Gramfort, ?Quand Zola,? 68. 
151
 The three volume biography of Zola by Henri Mitterand?Sous le regard de l'Olympia 1840-1870,
L'Homme de Germinal 1871?1893, L'Honneur 1893?1902, (Paris: Fayard, 1999?2000)?makes this 
point clear. See also Brookner, The Genius of the Future. 
275
which the painter shared Zolas?s artistic orientation and esthetics, especially in the 
1860s.
152
 Did they talk about the poet at all? Was Zola?s spoof related to their 
disagreement over the value of Baudelaire?s work? Was this issue part of the 
discussions they had in the 1860s, which almost brought the relationship to an end? 
Did Baudelaire?s poems and art criticism influence C?zanne?s painting and 
aesthetics?
153
 What did C?zanne understand or like of Baudelaire?s oeuvre? 
154
 
Baudelaire is not mentioned in the letters C?zanne exchanged with his friends 
from Aix in the 1860s, which is almost logical, as all of them were also friends with 
Zola, and his name does not appear in those he addressed to the writer himself. If 
Baudelaire was a point of contention between the two friends, it is ?logical? that both 
would have avoided it as a subject matter in their letters. 
The episode demonstrates that, even though C?zanne and Zola were good 
friends, the painter?s artistic project and understanding of life cannot be established 
through the analysis of their correspondence and that they had fundamental 
discrepancies about literature and art. Rewald?s reliance on the letters and the 
identification of the two artistic projects and personalities, his ?certainties? are based 
on the lack of documentation, ?proving? what might have been the greatest and more 
 
152
 See for example the articles by Mary Louise Krumrine and Mary Tomkins Lewis in Lawrence 
Gowing, C?zanne The Early Years 1859?1872, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 
1988, which are based on this line of argumentation inaugurated by Rewald. Wayne Andersen?s The 
Youth of C?zanne and Zola: Notoriety at Its Source: Art and Literature in Paris (Boston: Editions 
Fabriart, 2003), although critical to this tradition, circumscribes his analysis to the relationship of Zola 
and C?zanne.  
153
 The only art historian who has tried to prove this influence is Melina V. Kervandjan, Painted Slang: 
The Caricatural Aspects of French Painting, 1850-1880 (PhD. diss., City University of New York, 
2000). Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, C?zanne and Provence. The Painter and His Culture,
(Chicago, 2003), chapter two, relates both episodes to Proven?al humor.  
154
 The most complete analysis of C?zanne?s readings is Robert Ratcliffe C?zanne?s Working Methods 
and Their Theoretical Background (Ph.D. diss., unpublished, University of London, 1960). The author 
does not pay special attention to the influence of Baudelaire.  
276
lasting stimulus in C?zanne?s art and aesthetic, which is impossible to gauge.
155
 The 
hegemonic role that C?zanne et Zola had in shaping the scholarship on the artist, 
inhibited the consideration of other influences in the painter?s art and therefore other 
potential construals of his artistic persona and biography.   
 All historians know that it is impossible to account for the infinite variables 
and influences that determine an historical event. The case of art history is different 
because the biography established on the base of documentation is a fundamental 
heuristic tool for the interpretation of works of art. This is not the place to write about 
this ?other? C?zanne?who deserves a separate study?or to substitute Zola and the 
naturalist writers with Baudelaire and the Baudelairean poets. This would only 
reinforce the bibliographical approach to art history and of biography as the place 
where the word is sutured to the image, which the present essay intends to expose. 
The episode calls attention to the limited ability of a biography based on this kind of 
documentation to provide elements that could serve to support an interpretation of the 
artist?s work. Although Rewald?s biography of C?zanne is no longer the hegemonic 
account of the artist?s life, the anecdotes and quotations drawn from his scholarship 
still command and orient the interpretative work of modern art history.   
 
155
 This study should consider first the critical fortune of Baudelaire and its uses in modern art history. 
Since the 1980 and thanks to the revalorization of the writings of Walter Benjamin, scholars tend to 
concentrate themselves on his ?The Painter of Modern Art.? Baudelaire?s death in 1867 provoked a 
flurry of publications and the beginning of his consecration. 
277
Conclusion : Section One
This section has examined three authors and three books that correspond to as 
many different approaches to art history and to C?zanne?s art. Only Rewald?s 
biography withstood the test of time, as it established the foundations of the modern 
scholarship on the artist.  
Biography as a genre implies that a person can be known. Even when it 
includes comments about what is not known or is in doubt about the life of an artist, 
the narration is in itself a (positive) statement that conceals the fact that it is based on 
partial and relative information about a certain subject. Because the writer himself 
does not know the extent of what is not documented, he cannot assess the actual 
importance of the material that did reach him. In addition, an immense part of a 
person?s reactions and behavior is irrational and consequently inexplicable. This 
applies even to the cases in which art historians use a psychoanalytic approach, as this 
is yet another epistemological model that ?explains? and makes understandable a 
person?s reactions, actions, and creations. Biography is ideological then, because it 
implies that a man can be intellectually known, comprehended, explicated, and 
narrated. Its final connotation is that men have a fundamental ?essence? that affords 
constancy, coherence, and consistency to their actions, in a word: meaning. 
Rewald?s biography is ideological both as historiography (White) and because 
it reinforces the association of history with literature. Preziosi has observed that, in 
the nineteenth century, the novel and the museum helped to consolidate the idea of 
?nation.? As disciplinary controlling models, both establish narratives that imply a 
278
certain understanding of time and space, objects, and subjects. Therefore, they 
ideologically enforce a historically determined worldview as natural. 
156
 
The documentation that structures the biographical approach and the material 
that derives from it, such as anecdotes, hold in themselves and reflect the ideology of 
the genre?this is the reason why they could be part of the narrative in the first 
place?and carry it over the art historical writings in which they are incorporated. 
Contrary to what Smith affirmed, these ?resources? also have to be questioned. 
Documents ?suture? the word/logos to the artist?s body and life as biography, and to 
the work of art as interpretation. Documents articulate the presence (the image, the 
structure, the synchronic) to the explanation/logos (the diachronic, the historical). 
Documents are epistemological tools for interpretation, the ?site? where mere 
presence is transformed into reference thus transforming works of art into signs.  
The biographical approach is fundamentally modernist and is embedded 
within modern art history?s epistemological foundations, which suggests that the 
discipline itself derives from, and reflects modernism?s ideology. This explains why 
(and how) the core principles established in the 1930s outlasted the crises and the 
revisions that took place in the twentieth century. Without a basic reconsideration of 
the discipline?s foundations there cannot be a true ?post-modern? or truly ?new? art 
history.  
 
156
 Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 511.   
279
[A]dvocates of ? historicist thinking believe that they can explain any phenomenon purely in terms of 
its genesis. That is, they believe at the very least that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing 
the series of events in their temporal succession without any gaps. Photography presents a spatial 
continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum. According to historicism the 
complete mirroring of a temporal sequence simultaneously contains the meaning of all that occurred 
within that time. ?Historicism is concerned with the photography of time.  
Sigfried Kracauer, ?Photography,? 1927.
1
Presence is superceded by presentation, communion by a desperate and sometimes sincere effort at 
communication. 
Georges Duthuit, Le mus?e inimaginable. 1947.
2
Section Two
In 1989 Theodore Reff, published an article on C?zanne?s use of perspective. The 
text begins with an analysis of the historiography of the artist which demonstrates that 
this issue dominated C?zanne studies from the 1930s to the 1980s. Reff examines two 
perspectival drawings sketched by the artist in different periods of his life to conclude 
that they prove C?zanne?s continuous interest in perspective.  
Les documents publi?s ici et l?examen des d?clarations de C?zanne devraient 
suffire ? d?montrer que l?artiste s?int?ressait beaucoup plus ? la perspective 
traditionnelle qu?on a bien voulu le dire jusqu?ici. Tout comme le panorama 
rapide propos? ici devrait suffire ? d?montrer qu?il n?a jamais n?glig? ce moyen 
efficace de sugg?rer l?espace, et qu?il ne l?a pas non plus appliqu? servilement, 
m?me dans ses derniers ?uvres, ? L?id?e d?une ?fin de la perspective? annonc?e 
par C?zanne et consomm?e par le cubisme ressortit autant ? la mythologie du 
modernisme qu?? l?histoire de l?art de C?zanne. Elle participe d?un mythe plus 
g?n?ral, o? la perspective et sa ?fin? jouent un r?le symbolique important : celui 
de la ?fin? de la foi de l?homme moderne en la g?om?trie et sa facult? de donner 
une repr?sentation rationnelle du r?el. 
3
1
Critical Inquiry, 19 (Spring, 1993): 425. 
2
Quoted by Henri Zerner in ?Malraux and the Power of Photography,? in Sculpture and photography: 
envisioning the third dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 1998), 126. 
3
Theodore Reff, ?C?zanne et la perspective: quelques remarques ? la lumi?re de documents 
nouveaux, ?  Revue de l?art 86 (1989): 13. 
280
Reff aimed to reaffirm the centrality of perspective in the tradition of Western art 
and to deny its ?end? at the waning years of the nineteenth. The phrase ?fin de la 
perspective? relates both to Novotny?s 1938 C?zanne und das Ende der 
wissenschaftliche Perspektive (?histoire de l?art de C?zanne?) and to the 1936 MoMA 
catalogue Cubism and Abstract art (?mythologie du modernisme?), where Barr 
asserted that the pioneers of Cubism admired the works of art in which C?zanne 
?abandons the perspective of deep space.?
4
This last paragraph of Reff?s article takes on even greater significance in the light 
of the fact that the ?myth? of the symbolic role of perspective in art history has a 
starting date: 1927. That was the year when Panofsky?s Die Perspektive als 
symbolische Form (Perspective as Symbolic Form), first published in the Vortr?ge 
der Bibliothek Warburg in 1924?25, appeared as a book.
5
However, in a note, Reff 
refers to the 1987 publication L?Origine de la Perspective by Humbert Damisch, 
where the author criticizes Panofsky for restricting the validity of perspective to a 
definite historical period and argues for its value as a paradigmatic epistemological 
model. Damisch was a lonely voice at a time when Marxism, Feminism, and 
postcolonial studies were targeting perspective as the epitome of the Eurocentric, 
bourgeois, white, male ideology. Thus, Damisch?s book led the way for Reff to posit 
once more the centrality of C?zanne in Western Humanism and the universal value of 
this tradition.  
 
4
Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 26. 
5
I use the slightly later date of the book as the starting point for the role of perspective in art history, as 
Panofsky?s book was more widely accessible, than his first abridged articles in the specialized 
Warburg journal. 
281
C?zanne?s use of perspective is this dissertation?s case study, and this section 
examines the process which put C?zanne?s art in the strategic position of bridging 
traditional Renaissance ideas of space and modern art. I contend in the preceding 
pages that modern art history incorporated modern art into the general history of art 
during the 1930s. This was done by applying to the study of modern art the same 
vocabulary and methodologies the discipline had developed for the analysis of past 
(historical) art. As a result modern art came to be considered the latest development 
of the Western tradition.  
Panofsky argued that the formula for representing space devised in the 
Renaissance was the symbolic form of the West. By establishing perspective as an 
epistemological paradigm, he reinforced the centrality of the Humanist definition of 
Man in the discipline. Therefore, the rationale underlying the discussion around 
C?zanne?s perspective reflects the ideology and the methodologies that remain at the 
core of modern art history.  
Panofsky?s book not only instituted Renaissance perspective?understood as 
space?as one of the overarching categories that helped create that link, but also the 
notion that works of art express, and thus might be read as metaphors of, the way 
people understand their being-in-the-world, their perception of space. 
With this tradition in mind, C?zanne?s art was presented as the glorious 
consummation of a tradition that had begun in the Renaissance, while also presenting 
him as the father of modern art. Interpreting C?zanne?s art as a transition between two 
traditions, modern art historians avoided considering modern art as a break with the 
282
past. They concealed most of the avant-garde?s anti-art and anti-establishment claims 
under a formalist reading that insisted on continuity.  
Inseparable from the development of C?zanne as an important transitional artist, 
is the use of site photographs for the study of his landscapes even though Reff does 
not analyze them in his article. 
Dans la premi?re p?riode, qui correspond aux ann?es trente et quarante, les 
auteurs soulignent que l?artiste a refus? ou radicalement transform? l?espace 
perspectif de la Renaissance : une rupture avec une tradition suppos?e immuable 
depuis des si?cles, et m?me perp?tu?e par l?impressionnisme, mais qui prend fin 
d?abord dans son oeuvre, puis de mani?re plus d?finitive, par le cubisme.  
([Venturi, Novotny] tous deux ?tayent leur d?monstration par des comparaisons 
entre des paysages de C?zanne et des photographies des sites repr?sent?s encore 
que Novotny insiste davantage sur la distanciation ainsi cr??e et Venturi sur la 
diversit? des effets expressifs et plastiques. 
6
(Emphasis added) 
 
Reff is right about Fritz Novotny (1903?1983), an art historian of the School of 
Vienna whose C?zanne und das Ende der wissenschaftliche Perspektive depends 
upon the site photographs taken by Marschutz and Rewald.
7
The Austrian scholar, 
who acknowledged the influence of Panofsky?s treatise on perspective, posited that 
C?zanne was able to block all intellectual components from his perception, which 
allowed him to represent the basic perspectival configuration of his sensations. 
Novotny?s book not only established perspective as a key issue for the understanding 
of C?zanne?s art, but also reinforced the notion that perspective reflects people?s 
perceptual disposition and the structure of the world (more on this below). 
 
6
Reff, ?C?zanne et la perspective,? 8. 
7
Fritz Novotny?s book contains a list of 133 sites established by Marschutz and Rewald. See his 
C?zanne und das Ende der wissenschaftliche Perspektive (Vienna: Phaidon-Verlag, 1938), 193?208. 
112 of those motifs correspond to Provence where Marschutz was living at the time. Rewald and 
Marschutz guided Novotny during his trip to Aix, see John Rewald, interview by Sharon Zane, 
December, 1991, transcript, The Museum of Modern Art Oral History Project, and Les Sites 
c?zanniens du pays d?Aix: Hommage ? John Rewald (Paris: Difusion Seuil, 1996).  
283
In contrast, Venturi?s comparisons of paintings with site photographs do not 
extend beyond one and a half pages. The Italian art historian, who followed Longhi in 
his approach to the problem of space, was much more interested in C?zanne?s use of 
color and composition. 
The American artist Erle Loran (1905?1999) was the first to use site photographs 
for the systematic analysis of C?zanne?s art. In 1930 he published ?C?zanne?s 
Country? in the art magazine Arts. Loran had been one of the many artists who 
painted on these same sites, and exploited the site pictures as comparative material to 
support his formalist interpretation of C?zanne?s paintings. While the idea was 
quickly adopted by other scholars, Loran was criticized for manipulating the 
photographs.
8
The artist-writer used this material again in his 1943 C?zanne?s 
Composition, where he expanded his formalist approach to the subject matter.  
Marschutz and Rewald pursued in a more systematic manner the task of tracking 
down and photographing the sites.
9
These site photographs were widely disseminated: 
they illustrate Rewald?s 1936 biography of C?zanne and the articles he published in 
Huyghe?s L?Amour de l?art and, as he lent them to other authors, they appeared in 
 
8
See for example Novotny, C?zanne, 15-16. For information about Loran?s activities in Aix-in-
Provence in the 1920s see letters from L?o Marschutz to Erle Loran June 5 and August 18, 1947. Reel 
1716 no. 163?169, 176?180. ?Erle Loran Papers,? Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.  
9
Marshutz?s criticism of Loran?s use of the site photographs in 1943 might also explain why his 
relationship with Rewald became strained. See ?Erle Loran Papers,? as in note 9. In 2006 the Mus?e 
Granet, Aix-en-Provence, started the centennial commemoration of the death of Paul C?zanne with an 
exhibition on the work by Marschutz. The catalogue explains that in 1928 he visited l?Estaque and the 
countryside around Aix. ?  ?Then on the Cours Mirabeau he thought he recognised [sic] C?zanne?s 
footman - and it was him! Marchutz asked him to take him where his master painted, and before long 
he found himself in front of the very scenery in the painting that had brought him to Aix en Provence, 
at the old entry to the Ch?teau Noir in le Tholonet.? Marchutz rented an apartment on the hillside, and 
settled in Aix-en-Provence. ?Marchutz before C?zanne at the Granet museum,? Kesako. Magazine 
Culture et Tendance  http://www.kesakonet.com/article492.html.
284
many different contexts.
10
 Rewald?the only art historian among the group devoted to 
this activity?applied the site photographs to the analysis of the work of other modern 
artists, securing for them a place among the documentary tools of modern art history. 
Huyghe, as noted in Chapter Three, included Rewald?s photographs of van Gogh?s 
sites in the exhibition he organized for the ICII in 1937.  
Rewald?s scholarship has three main axes: biographies, the compilation of letters, 
and the site photographs. The last were still at the core of his contribution to the 
catalogue of the 1978 exhibition he helped to organize at MoMA, C?zanne: The Late 
Work and of his presentation at the corresponding symposium. Even his last 
published article???Les maisons proven?ales?: C?zanne and Puget,? The Burlington 
Magazine (September, 1990), which he wrote in collaboration with Lawrence 
Gowing?announced the discovery of yet another site and analyzed a painting by 
C?zanne according to the information provided by photographs of the motif.    
Rewald?s use of the site photographs was documentary as he contended that they 
demonstrated C?zanne?s realism. The 1935 article states that the photographs, 
?d?montreront de nouveau que les oeuvres de C?zanne sont des portraits de la nature 
d?une fid?lit? toute exceptionnelle, et faciliteront la compr?hension des quelques 
oeuvres dont les sujets ne sont pas distincts.?
11
 As?according to the scholar?the 
?realism? of the paintings can be better understood by comparing them with 
photographs of the sites they represent, C?zanne?s style would be a variation of what 
 
10
 John Rewald and L?o Marschutz, ?C?zanne au Ch?teau Noir,? L'Amour de l?art 16 (January, 1935): 
15?21; ?C?zanne au Louvre,? L'Amour de l?art 16 (October, 1935): 283?88 ; ?Sources d'inspiration de 
C?zanne,?  L'Amour de l'art 17 special issue, (May 1936): 160?164. 
11
 Rewald and Marschutz, ?C?zanne au Ch?teau Noir,? 18. 
285
Soussloff has called ?situated realism.? The photographs allowed Rewald to 
understand C?zanne?s habits of wandering and his strategies for choosing motifs. 
Reff?s article does not evaluate the site photographs as heuristic tools for the 
analysis of works of art, but lists several articles devoted to C?zanne?s use of 
perspective for the representation of space that were based on them.
12
 The fact is that, 
as their value as resources has not been examined in depth, site photographs, even if 
their use has waned, are still considered valid ancillary tools and have surfaced in 
recent publications and exhibits.
 13
 
To situate perspective at the nexus of C?zanne?s project allowed a presentation of 
him as the bridge that links the art of the late nineteenth century (impressionism, 
synthetism) with Cubism and its aftermath. In the 1930s both perspective and 
C?zanne?s art were established as key developments in the evolution of the Western 
tradition. The assumption that C?zanne was interested in the representation of space 
touches on the ideological foundations of the discipline. The historiography of 
modern art has deferred a serious revision of the premises on which it was built.  
The strategy to establish C?zanne as the antecedent of cubism and of abstract art 
was twofold. First, Barr argued that Braque and Picasso had taken from the master a 
technical device Barr called passages. C?zanne supposedly created passages in order 
 
12
 James Carpenter, ?C?zanne and Tradition,? Art Bulletin 35 (1951):17?20; Christopher Gray, 
?C?zanne?s use of Perspective,? College Art Journal 19 (1959?1960): 54?84; Norman Turner, 
?Subjective Curvature in later C?zanne,? Art Bulletin 63 (1981): 665?669; Boris Rauschenbach, 
?Perceptual Perspective and C?zanne?s Landscapes,? Leonardo XV (Winter, 1982): 28?33; and Jonas 
S. Friedenwald, ?Knowledge of Space Perception and the Portrayal of Depth in Painting,? College Art 
Journal 15 (Winter, 1955): 96?112. To this list must be added, Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception 
and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California, 1983). For an early critical 
appreciation of their use see Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial 
Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 54-58. Published in 1960. 
13
 Paul Smith uses them for a comparison of color in Seurat and the Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale 
University Press, 1997). Rewald?s site photographs were used in the exhibition curated by Magdalena 
Dabrowsky at MoMA, French Landscape, The Modern Vision 1880?1920, exh. cat., Museum of 
Modern Art, New York, 2000.  
286
to reinforce the integrity and flatness of the picture plane, and to simultaneously 
counter-balance any illusion of three-dimensional space and volume. Secondly, Barr 
redefined the first period of cubism (analytic cubism) as a perceptual endeavor even 
though most of the contemporary sources insisted on characterizing it as a mental or 
conceptual approach to art.
14
 
Although today they have been almost forgotten by specialists working on 
C?zanne, the passages were the keystone of the arched bridge that helped to support 
Barr?s formalist interpretation of the history of modern art. This section examines 
how art historians adapted the two areas linked by the passages (C?zanne?s art and 
analytic cubism) in order to secure their association. Picasso, Braque and the artists of 
the first part of the twentieth century openly admired C?zanne?s art and they said so. 
At stake here is how art historians interpreted such influence and how this 
interpretation impinged on the understanding of C?zanne?s art. The site photographs 
played an instrumental role in these developments.  
 
Space as Perspective 
Panofsky?s 1927 treatise is paramount to the discussion of the history of art as 
developed in the 1930s because it redefined and reformulated perspective so that it 
could become the symbolic form of the West, created in the Renaissance but solidly 
rooted in Classical Antiquity. Panofsky?s book is one of the canonical texts for the 
 
14
 See  Green, Art in France, 19?25; 93?95. 
287
definitive institutionalization of modern art history. 
15
 He was working on Riegl?s 
ideas about space but has a different goal. His aim was to secure for the Renaissance 
Humanism a central place at the core of the new discipline, not only as its preferred 
object of study but also as the epistemological model that governed its methodology.  
James Elkins has demonstrated that the Renaissance did not refer to space as a 
volume that contains objects. He quotes for example Peter Collin?s observation on the 
subject: ?It is a curious fact that until the eighteenth century no architectural treatise 
ever used the word space.?
16
 Panofsky redefined perspective as space in a truly 
modern, neo-Kantian way, as perceptual space. 
Chapter Three established that in the 1930s Raum/space became an important art 
historical category as Kunstgeographie and that national (and racial) Raumstile were 
at the center of the international debate. Therefore it might not be a coincidence that 
Panofsky explained space as perspective, that is, according to the abstract, 
mathematical and geometric formula postulated by the Humanist tradition, in 
dramatic opposition to the Raum of the infamous Lebensraum. This might at least in 
part explain the ideological impetus behind Panofsky?s boldest postulations. As 
Elkins remarks, the Latin word spatium refers to the unintuitive spaces of philosophy, 
mathematics, and physics while the German Raum and the English ?room??which 
correspond to the Latin Locus?derive from the Teutonic ruu, which refers to the 
intuitive, everyday space such as  the place occupied by bodies.
17
 
15
 The book provides categories (perspective, space) and ?fundamental principles? for the analysis of 
works of art. Panofsky?s understanding of the writings of Leone Battista Alberti and Albert Durer on 
perspective became the canonical interpretations of these fundamental art historical sources.    
16
 James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 24.  
17
 I am following here the suggestions afforded by Elkins?s text which itself refers to other authors who 
treat the problem in all its density and problematicity. Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 23?25. 
288
Panofsky defines two periods in the history of perspective that correspond to 
two manners of sensing space (Raumgef?hl) and were also ways of sensing the world 
(Weltgef?hl): Antiquity and Renaissance perspective. Ultimately, these are ways of 
understanding or feeling the world that can be characterized as points of view or 
world view: Weltanschauung.
18
 This, as Chapter One commented, was the last and 
critical step of Panofsky?s interpretative system?which was aimed at describing the 
work of art as a manifestation of a world view?and therefore it might be said, a little 
simplistically, that in his system perspective is both part of the methodology and the 
meaning of the work of art.  
Panofsky defined the Renaissance as the period that could ?distance? itself 
from Antiquity and develop a historical perspective, thus creating the possibility of 
history as the objective, distanced observation of the past. The analysis of 
Renaissance perspective calls attention to the fact that vision implies physical space, 
as the eyes can only focus on things that are at a certain distance.
19
 This is why 
Panofsky could equate geographical distance with the ?perspective? afforded by time 
and thus with history. In this light the Renaissance, as the ?geography of the 
imagination,? established paradigmatic standards for the measurement of time and 
space.  
Space became a category for the analysis of works of art in the 1930s. 
Because space appeared in art history as perspective it located the Renaissance at the 
 
18
 See Christopher Wood?s ?Introduction? to his translation of Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as 
Symbolic Form (New York: Zone, 1991), 15?17. For Panofsky?s Weltanschauung see Joan Hart, 
?Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation,? Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring, 
1993): 534?566.  
19
 See Chapter One and Melville, ?The Temptation,? 409. Since Classical times vision distinguishes 
itself from all the other senses by its aloofness, in the sense that it perceives the world without having 
the need to contact it, from a certain distance. 
289
center of the discipline. In spite of Panofsky?s reticence about modern art, his 
reformulation of the history of perspective affected modern art history and C?zanne?s 
place in it. Perspective as Symbolic Form is famously ambiguous in that it states the 
historical validity of perspective while at the same time argues that it reflects a 
scientifically proven model and therefore manifests truths that transcend history. In 
the first case ?scientific perspective? was created in a certain historical moment and 
therefore might end. This is precisely what Barr?s and Novotny?s interpretation of 
C?zanne?s art underscored, and presumably what Reff called in 1989 ?the myth of 
modernity.? In the second case, perspective was discovered and expressed an a-
historical formula. This is what Reff?s article suggests. In both cases perspective is 
used as a paradigm to evaluate C?zanne?s art. 
In this Second Section Panofsky?s work and the influence of neo-Kantian 
philosophy in art history are at the center of the argumentation.  Chapter Five 
analyzes the use of site photographs as heuristic tools for the study of the art of 
modern artists. It examines how these ancillary tools affected the understanding of 
C?zanne?s art. Chapter Six considers the history of perspective. It argues that in 
France at the end of the nineteenth century space was not identified with perspective 
and that C?zanne and his contemporaries were concentrated on the problem of 
representing volumes. Space was mostly perceived as the distance that separates 
volumes. Chapter Seven studies how modern scholars established the nexus between 
C?zanne?s art and cubism, and scrutinizes Barr?s Cubism and Abstract Art, the 
exhibition that established the paradigmatic interpretation of the history of the early 
avant-gardes and confirmed C?zanne in his role of ?father? of modern art. 
290
Photography has been a most productively mixed blessing for art history. Any project to rethink 
the history of art must surely also rethink its relation to photography.  
Frederick Bohrer, ?Photographic perspectives.?
1
Art history as we know it today is the child of photography  
Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy Science.
Chapter Five: Photography and Art History. The Site Photographs
In 1947 Andr? Malraux claimed that ?for the last hundred years art history (if we 
except the specialized research-work of experts) has been the history of that which 
can be photographed.?
2
At the turn of the century, Bernard Berenson praised 
photography as an auxiliary tool that facilitated the work of the connoisseur,
3
while 
Heinrich W?lfflin took advantage of the availability of reproductions to develop the 
compare/contrast method that remains at the center of the discipline.
4
In addition, 
Preziosi has demonstrated that the Fogg Method was based on them, whereas recently 
Frederick Bohrer has argued that the rise of graduate studies of art history in the 
United States coincided with the introduction of the slide projections in universities, 
which led him to conclude that ?[w]hile previously mistress (as in the earlier personal 
and often unacknowledged use of photographs for research), photography became 
 
1
In Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Art History and Its Institutions. Foundations of a Discipline (London and 
New York: Routledge, 2002), 256.  
2
The bibliography on this issue is relatively new as it is closely related with the history of art history. 
See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History; Frederick Bohrer, ?Photographic perspectives,? as in n. 20; Mary 
Bergstein, ?Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture,? Art Bulletin 74 
(September, 1992): 475?498; Barbara Savedoff, ?Looking at Art Through Photographs,? The Journal 
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (Summer, 1993): 455?461; Helene Roberts ed., Art History Through 
the Camera?s Lens (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1995).   
3
See ?Bernard Berenson on Isochromatic Film,? (1893) in Roberts as in n. 21.  
4
See Robert Nelson, ?The Slide Lecture, or The Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical 
Reproduction,? Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring, 2000): 414?435. 
291
proper wife and mother of a discipline.?
5
Preziosi too, as the epigraph suggests, 
considers art history and photography to have a very intimate relationship. 
Photographs alter the sense of proportions, scale, texture, and colors of the works 
they represent. They not only decontextualize works of art but also ignore their 
material objecthood?their three?dimensionality?transforming them into images and 
thus reinforcing the notion of art as a purely visual phenomenon. As everything is 
formatted to fit into the same layout, photographs encourage comparison among 
radically different pieces, formal analysis, and the creation of abstract categories, 
such as style.  
By emptying works of art of their original physicality, photographs transform 
them into illustrations of the narration in which they are incorporated, as their 
meaning depends on the text or script that supports them and on the grammatical 
position they occupy within the discourse. Photographs of works of art occupy the 
same position and have the same function in the art historical narration that anecdotes 
do in modern biographies. This is why Preziosi remarks that photography led to 
?thinking art historically in a sustained and systematic fashion,? and that they ?most 
critically, made it possible to envision objects of art as signs.? 
6
Photography influenced the production of art. In the second part of the nineteenth 
century, photographs of classical sculptures, of old master art, and of the work of the 
most renowned of the contemporaneous academic artists reinforced and helped to 
popularize the taste for traditional art, and therefore were part of the horizon of 
 
5
Bohrer, ?Photographic perspectives,? 249. 
6
Preziosi,  Art of Art History, 522. 
292
established art against which modern artists reacted.
7
Photography at the time was 
especially fitted to record the formal characteristics of works of art with neat 
contours, defined modeling, and clear contrasts. Black and white photographs, as the 
reactionary critic Louis Dimier noted, translate reality into chiaroscuro values. In this 
way they reaffirmed the value of this traditional representational device for the 
depiction of reality.
8
Photography even influenced art criticism, as revealed by this 
comment by Sar P?ladan (1858?1918) ?Il se produit un curieux ph?nom?ne. Le 
peintre oublie les ma?tres et, selon son expression, regarde la vie. Le critique, au 
contraire, s?entoure de chefs-d??uvre, et a chez lui une Pinacoth?que form?e 
d??preuves Braun.?
9
In 1980 Kirk Varnedoe problematized the well established notion that considered 
that impressionist art had been influenced by photography. He observed that around 
1870, photographs conformed to, and thus confirmed, pictorial realism, as 
photographers only slowly dared to liberate themselves from such a prestigious 
model.
10
 The problem, he argued, is that the ?photographic vision? developed by the 
Renaissance was in the nineteenth century disseminated and naturalized by 
photography, and today by hundreds of new media derived from it. Varnedoe 
contended that, as the modern scholar?s vision has been shaped by this convention?
to the point that art historians do not even think of it as a convention?it is very 
 
7
See Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics. A Cultural History 1839?1900 (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114?115. Photography could reproduce better the works of the 
Florentine school ?based on line and drawing ?than the works by the Venetian colorists. 
8
Louis Dimier, ?Le model? dans la peinture et la troisi?me dimension, (? propos des manuscrits de 
L?onard de Vinci),? Revue de m?taphysique et de morale III (1895): 560.  
9
Sar P?ladan, La Revue Hebdomedaire (22 October, 1904) quoted in Ambroise Vollard, Paul C?zanne 
(Paris: Galerie A. Vollard, 1914), appendice 1, 201. Alphonse Braun was the name of a distinguished 
firm that in 1883 secured a thirty-years contract to photograph the collection of the Louvre.     
10
 Kirk Varnedoe, ?The Artifice of Candor: Photography,? Art in America 68  (January, 1980): 66?78. 
293
difficult to evaluate influences, to gauge how a painter interacted with this media and 
to determine to what point a certain art is original.
11
 
C?zanne himself had a complicated relationship with photographs of work of art 
which has not been fully analyzed. He kept in his studio several photographic 
reproductions of works of art.
12
 They were cheap ones, as Vollard records that the 
artist considered those sold by Braun at the Louvre a luxury.
13
 C?zanne based several 
of his portraits on conventional photographs of real people, and once copied a 
photograph of a landscape by Gustave Le Gray (1820?1884) but never repeated the 
experience, suggesting that he was not satisfied with the results.
 14
 
This chapter examines the influence of photography in modern art history with 
particular attention to its impact on the appreciation of C?zanne?s art. If the discipline 
is the child of photography, how can it evaluate the originality of an art that reacted 
against the visual tradition inherited from the Renaissance that photography 
incarnates? Moreover, Shiff states,  
[N]o medium is ever neutral or transparent, but imposes a certain physicality or a 
set of determining and transformative material conditions. A medium? has a 
recognizable effect of its own, a connotation, a differential meaning. That 
meaning transforms, skews, blurs, the mythical, pre-existing meaning of the 
 
11
 In the article Varnedoe acknowledges the influence of the work of Peter Galassi who at the time was 
organizing the exhibition Before Photography. Painting and the Invention of Photography, exh. cat., 
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1981. These works were contemporaneous to the article by Joel 
Snyder that will be discussed below.   
12
 Some of them are still at his studio in Aix-en-Provence. See Theodore Reff, ?Reproductions and 
Books in C?zanne?s Studio,? Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser.6: vol.56 (November, 1960): 303?309. 
13
 Vollard, C?zanne, 154. 
14
 See Richard Shiff, ?C?zanne?s Blur, Approximating C?zanne,? in Framing France. The 
Representation of Landscape in France, 1870?1914, ed. Richard Thomson (Manchester; New York: 
Manchester University Press, 1998). C?zanne copied the MoMA?s The Bather from a photograph of a 
model too. See Terence Maloon in ?Classic C?zanne? where he comments of the especial character of 
this photograph. Instead of choosing an Apollo or another perfect example he opted ?for an 
unprepossessing, oddly proportioned little fellow with big feet and baggy underpants, a sort of ready-
made ?C?zanne? type.? Classic C?zanne, exh. cat. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998, 36, 39.  
294
model, the original meaning a thing is presumed to have in its untouched state, its 
impossible state of perfect resolution.
15
 
Photography and Perspective
If art history is the child of photography, photography is in turn the child of 
perspective, its consummation and final development. The grandchild of perspective 
has to be considered as a by-product of the hegemonic epistemology developed in the 
West in the last five centuries that Heidegger so perceptively described in 1942 as the 
?Age of the World Picture.?  
Perspective and photography are generally presented as ?discoveries? rather than 
as ?inventions,? and therefore they represent the gray area in which art and art history 
are thought to be in close relationship with the sciences as the manifestation of 
universal epistemological paradigms.
16
 Since its beginnings in 1839 photography was 
hailed both as a scientific tool (discovery) and an artistic media (invention). As Mary 
Warner Marien comments, 
The ongoing denotation of photography as a natural phenomenon is evident in 
the persistent, interchangeable use of the words ?discovery? and ?invention? to 
describe photography?s beginnings. For example, Talbot, despite having 
experimented with photography over a long period of time, referred to his work 
as a ?discovery? and as an ?invention.? Contemporary newspaper accounts also 
used both terms. In the mid-twentieth century, the critic Clement Greenberg still 
found it appropriate to use both terms?.
17
 
15
 Shiff, ?C?zanne?s Blur,? 70. 
16
 On perspective see Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 22?29.  
17
 Marien, Photography, 4. 
295
Marien also notes that this dichotomy springs from the Western dream of 
establishing a direct, scientific, objective, representation of reality: ?the idea of 
photography betokened the wish for a universal language conceived by nature and 
appropriate to genuine human progress as well as to scientific pursuits.?
18
 This is 
another way of characterizing Varnedoe?s ?photographic vision.? 
Joel Snyder has contended in his already classic ?Picturing Vision,? that if 
photographs are accepted as mechanical records of what is seen in nature, it is 
because they satisfy a certain understanding of what is vision and of what is the 
[visible] thing in itself: ?the definition of visible thing carries with it the manner and 
means of depiction.?
19
 He adds that the West, 
since the Renaissance, wanted to construct a pictorial equivalent to vision. It is 
this pictorial equivalent to vision which is the source of our unshakable belief in 
the congruence of picture and world.  
The history of Western painting during the past five hundred years has been 
characterized by an attempt to secure a scientific basis for picture construction 
that serves, in turn, to warrant the viewer?s belief in the fidelity of the picture to 
what it represents. Broadly speaking, ?the object? is what we see. But this must be 
understood as a characterized or defined object that has been structured in accord 
with an account of how we see. The primary condition for this kind of picture 
making is the belief that vision is amenable to depiction because it is itself 
pictorial.?
20
 
Perception reflects and is shaped by the worldview of the perceiver. Particular 
cultural assumptions and experience determine vision and modify the sensations 
imprinted on the eye. Since its creation in the fifteenth century, perspective has 
influenced vision and the perception of space both through written explanations and 
 
18
 Marien, Photography, 5. 
19
 Joel Snyder, ?Picturing Vision,? in The Language of Images,  ed., W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 238. 
20
 Snyder, ?Picturing Vision,? 234. 
296
indoctrination and by the dissemination of works of art and images composed 
according to its laws.  
When photography is conceived as a ?discovery,? its conventional and 
historically determined nature becomes transparent. The idea that photographs are the 
accurate representation of reality has become almost a conviction. This aura of 
authenticity is so fundamentally attached to photographs that it has become almost 
counterintuitive to doubt the information they provide.
 
Nevertheless, Snyder argues 
that cameras, and hence photography, are the final result of a long development?
deeply intertwined with that of pictorial realism?by which they were standardized to 
meet specific pictorial requirements.   
[C]ameras do not provide scientific corroboration of the schemata or rules 
invented by painters to make realistic pictures. On the contrary, cameras 
represent the incorporation of those schemata into a tool designed and built, with 
great difficulty and over a long period of time, to aid painters and draughtsmen in 
the production of certain kind of pictures?.[T]he construction of the camera did 
not flow out of the abrupt discovery of the ?image of nature? but rather ?. was 
developed as an aid for the production of realistic paintings [which] provided the 
standard for the kind of image the camera was designed to produce. 
21
 
The popular account of the nature of photography has reversed the story of how it 
was developed: ?The problem for post-Renaissance painters was not how to make a 
picture that looked like the image produced by the camera [obscura], it was how to 
make a machine that produced an image like the ones they painted.?
22
 This is exactly 
why the use of photographs as heuristic tool for the study of paintings that challenged 
the perspectival tradition inherited from the Renaissance has to be carefully studied. 
 
21
 Snyder,?Picturing Vision,? 231, 233. For a similar argumentation see Peter Galassi?s Before 
Photography, as in n. 30. 
22
 Snyder, ?Picturing Vision,? 233. 
297
C?zanne, for example, once wrote that he wanted to ?donner l?image de ce que nous 
voyons, en oubliant tout ce qui apparut avant nous.?
23
 
This mutual relationship of photographs and perspective sheds light on Frederick 
Bohrer?s contention that photography reinforces in a structural way the centrality of 
the Renaissance in the discipline.  
[T]o rely on photography today, even with a sense of its limitations, still 
functionally demands that art objects be evaluated on their responsiveness to 
visual criteria centered on the Italian Renaissance. The centrality of Italian 
Renaissance painting within art history and subsequent emphasis on two-
dimensional linear perspective are not just documented, then, but reified by the 
conditions of photographic rendering.  
In this sense, our uniform and widespread dependence on photography in art 
history works to spread throughout the vast domain of world art the dominance 
of these same criteria. If this sounds like a sort of neo-imperialist project, it is to 
underline that relations of power, cultural and even geo-political, are almost 
inevitably involved in photography. From this angle, an examination of 
photography must consider what is being constrained, or excluded, in our 
acceptance of the photographic vision.
24
 
Perspective and photography produce images of the world as seeing with one single 
static eye but, albeit conventional and unnatural, they have been accepted as records 
of reality and, disseminated and enforced through education, they continue to 
influence and determine vision. Varnedoe?s ?photographic vision,? is for Jonathan 
Crary the ?Renaissance,? ?perspectival,? or ?normative? model of vision (more 
below). This interpretation of vision starts in the Renaissance?Trouillot?s 
?geography of imagination??when were laid the foundational ?conditions of 
possibilities? for the epistemological project of the ?West,? which was later regulated 
by the Enlightenment, and systematized by the nineteenth century.
 
In this light vision, 
 
23
 Paul C?zanne to Emile Bernard October 23, 1905 in Rewald, Correspondance, 314?315. 
24
 Bohrer, ?Photographic perspectives,? 253. 
298
pictures, and photography are North Atlantic universals, which is consistent with 
Heidegger?s characterization of the  West. 
With regard to C?zanne this is what David Reeves calls the ?orthodox 
interpretation? of the artist?s art, that is, the one which derives from the idea that 
perspectival art and photography are basically true renditions of reality. The author 
observes that whereas both Alberti and Descartes after him knew that a painting or 
engraving, in order to be effective as representations, have to be different from their 
model   
[T]he commentators who share an orthodox interpretation of C?zanne?s approach 
naturally take what they believe to be the divergence in his paintings from nature 
between painted representation and that which is depicted to be of a very 
different kind to that which they would consider to be a more appropriate lack of 
resemblance between representation and that which is faithfully depicted when 
painted in accordance with a system of linear perspective. 
25
 
The ?difference? that is the product of a cultural convention is not understood or 
seen as difference. The ?orthodox interpretation? is a particular understanding of 
vision that has perspective imbedded within itself in such a way that it has become 
integrated as part of what is thought to be the ?normal? appearance of reality. 
Conversely it also implies that perspective is an accurate epistemological model that 
reflects the way the world appears to humans.  
Reeves?s concludes that C?zanne painted what he saw as he saw it, and that if the 
?orthodox commentators? perceive ?distortions? and ?errors? in his paintings it is 
because they have been unable to distance themselves from the deep rooted 
conventions that rule Western vision.  
 
25
 David Reeves, The Eye and the Mind of C?zanne (York: Chiasma, 1997), 19. 
299
What has already been said is counter-intuitive and only a careful theoretical 
analysis allows the thinking of it, as most art historians have their own ideas about 
perception, vision, realism, and reality, and do not question how they arrive at those 
decisions or that they have chosen among many possible variables in the first place.
26
 
The influence of photography and perspective in perception were already noted by 
Panofsky who commented in 1927 that because Kepler was trained in perspective, he 
had already had trouble to understand and see the curvature of a comet?s tail. He 
added that the influence of photography in modern eyes and minds was accentuating 
the problem.
27
 Today, the widespread use of diagrams, and computer programs like 
AutoCAD, together with basic training in reading plans and diagrams, as well as the 
instruction provided by art history surveys, have reinforced the validity of 
?photographic vision? both intellectually and visually as much as the notion of the 
existence of space as an empty receptacle that contain objects.
28
 
26
 Moreover the discussion about perspective touches upon the problem of vision, perception and the 
theory of knowledge and thus its discussion becomes part of the oldest debate of Western philosophy: 
the problem of nominalism vs. conceptualism, immanentism vs. transcendental knowledge which 
incarnated in the nineteenth century as nativism vs. empiricism.  
27
 Panofsky comments: ?In an epoch whose perception was governed by a conception of space 
expressed by strict linear perspective, the curvatures of our, so to speak, spheroidal optical world had 
to be rediscovered.? However, in the past, in Antiquity when people saw in perspective but not in 
linear perspective these curves were seen without problems. ?And indeed, if even today only a very 
few of us have perceived these curvatures, that too is surely in part due to our habituation?further 
reinforced by looking at photographs?to linear perspectival construction: a construction that is itself 
comprehensible only of a quite specific, indeed specifically modern, sense of space, or if you will, 
sense of the world.? Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone,  1991), 34. 
28
 Today people live in mostly modern, rectilinear environments, well-measured apartment and 
regulated cities, and are trained to think of them as plans and maps. C?zanne on the contrary was used 
to a different visual environment: Aix is a rather curvilinear city. A contemporary of C?zanne, Georges 
Rivi?re commented on the influence of the Gothic structures in his vision. See Le Ma?tre Paul C?zanne 
(Paris, 1923), 130. Photographic vision is at the same time challenged by these same new technological 
advances (Photoshop and digital media in general). However, the notion that ?the camera cannot lie? 
was taken to task since the beginning as ?combination printings? (photos made from multiple 
negatives) were made in the darkrooms of art photographers as early as the 1850s.  In the 1890s, when 
cheap off-set printing made pictures a mainstay in magazines and tabloids, ?doctored? pictures became 
a daily consumable. Spirits photographs are just one example. For the influence of new developments 
300
Varnedoe maintains that the identification of photographic vision with 
photography has affected the evaluation of the true innovations brought about by 
nineteenth-century artists, but his article fails to inform the reader about the 
problematic character of perspective, photography, and even vision. Each period and 
culture has a different general understanding of vision and of what is visually real. 
Photography disseminates one of the possible approaches and helps to standardize 
vision. Since the 1930s this model is embedded within the methodologies of art 
history.   
Crary, as mentioned above, was one of the few art historians who noticed that in 
the 1930s art history incorporated modern art as a subject of study and that in order to 
make it fit within its categories and methodological approach art historians 
downplayed the avant-garde art?s epistemological aggressiveness and ?difference.? 
His thesis is that the nineteenth century developed a new episteme 
embodied/incarnated by the modern ?observer.? In this way, Crary distances himself 
from the ?myth? of modernity, which he defines as the notion that the experimental 
avant-garde developed an innovative model of vision that the mass of public?still 
faithful to the realist one inherited from the Renaissance and newly reinforced by 
photography?could not understand. 
Even today, with numerous revisions and rewritings (including some of the most 
compelling neo-Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist work), a core narrative 
remains essentially unchanged. ?.[W]ith Manet, impressionism, and/or 
postimpressionism, a new model of visual representation and perception emerges 
that constitutes a break with several centuries of another model of vision, loosely 
 
in vision see Kim H. Veltman, ?Electronic Media, The Rebirth of Perspective and the Fragmentation of 
Illusion,? (1994) System for Universal Media Searching, http://www.sumscorp.com/articles/art13.htm. 
301
definable as Renaissance, perspectival, or normative. Most theories of modern 
visual culture are still bound to one or another version of this ?rupture.?
 29
 
For Crary the myth of modernity has developed the myth of the perspectival or 
normative vision?the continuous unfolding of the realist mode of perception that 
derives from the realism of the Renaissance and that photography and later the 
cinema help to disseminate?as a conventional common standard that allows the new 
vision to stand out by comparison.  
Thus we are often left with a confusing bifurcated model of vision in the 
nineteenth century: on one level there is a relatively small number of advanced 
artists who generated a radically new kind of seeing and signification, while on a 
more quotidian level vision remains embedded within the same general ?realist? 
strictures that had organized it since the fifteenth century. Classical space is 
overturned, so it seems, on one hand, but persists on the other.
30
 
Crary acutely remarks that this is a false dichotomy and that the myth of the 
avant-garde needed to have the gross popular realism as a backdrop that permitted art 
historians to outline and highlight modernism. This strategy?used by both Venturi 
and Rewald?allowed the claim that modern art had an elevated almost ethical value?
even though it does not represent lofty subject matters?and to locate this new value in 
the artist.  
The type of comparison proposed by the site photograph (Fig. 8)?where a 
photograph of a painting is paired with a photograph of the site it represents?
exemplifies the modernist approach Crary characterizes. The documentary image acts 
as the stand in for reality in order to highlight the ?genius? of the artist, either his 
mimetic skills or his original departures from the ?normal.? The ideology behind this 
practice is clear: by using a photograph as the standard of normal vision the discipline 
 
29
 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century 
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), 3?4. 
30
 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 3?4. 
302
reinforces the faith in ?photographic vision? and therefore reconfirms the tradition 
that comes from the Renaissance. The same strategy that praises the breakthrough of 
the avant-gardes reinforces the ?philistine? conception of vision the artists were said 
to be reacting against. The epistemological revolution is thus contained to an episode 
in the history of art. The site photographs indefinitely replay the visual 
?breakthrough? of modern art for the eyes of the reader or the spectator who is invited 
to see the ?difference? between the two representations of reality. In this way art 
history reinforces the centuries old visual tradition that comes from the Renaissance 
and secures the eternal newness and originality of the visual model proposed by 
modern art. With site photographs once again, the medium is the message.  
The theory of modernism implies that people in the nineteenth century shared an 
understanding of vision and space that had been established in the Renaissance, and 
that modern art?s project consisted of overcoming that traditional standard and 
replacing it with a new, truthful model of vision.
31
 Crary?s theory, on the other hand, 
assumes that modernity caused an epistemological crisis in the early nineteenth 
century and that, as a result, observers developed a ?subjective? vision and individual 
modes of perception. Does his theory contradict or invalidate Snyder?s point of view? 
No. Crary?s understanding of modernity actually confirms Snyder?s observations, as 
it posits that in the 1930s modern art history ?created? the idea of an unbroken solid 
visual tradition and imposed it onto the past (including the nineteenth century). 
 
31
 ?[T]he myth of the modernist visual revolution depends on the presence of a subject with a detached 
viewpoint, from which modernism?whether as a style , as cultural resistance, or as ideological 
practice?can be isolated against the background of a normative vision. Modernism is thus presented 
as the appearance of the new for an observer who remains perpetually the same, or whose historical 
status is never interrogated.? Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 4?5. 
303
Panofsky played a central role in this development when in 1927 he rewrote the 
history of Western vision by reinterpreting the perspective of the Renaissance.  
Leon Battista Alberti?s description of a person drawing on a window pane, which 
is part of his 1435 De pictura, may be considered a foundational scene that laid the 
seeds of the ?photographic? or ?normative? vision. Snyder argues that with this image 
Alberti portrayed what he believed was the concerted activity of the eye and the 
brain, which allowed him to prescribe a rational method for the representation of 
reality.
32
 In Perspective as Symbolic Form Panofsky misconstrued Alberti?s text and 
suggested that in the Renaissance perception was equated with depiction. 
For Panofsky, the notion of ?visual experience? is an inherently subjective affair, 
one that defies rationalization ?.Central to Panofsky?s analysis is the principle 
that the depiction of what we see can follow only from a redefinition of 
experienced space?by hypostatizing space it becomes possible to find a rational 
pictorial expression for the inherently subjective experience of seeing.
For Alberti, there can be no issue that involves the ?rationalization? of vision, 
because what we see is established by rational processes. The structure of 
perception is integral?. Indeed the very possibility of science itself is dependent 
upon the principle that perception has a rational basis.
33
 (Emphasis added)  
 
The next chapter studies in depth how Panofsky projected onto the past a modern 
conception of space. Suffice it to say for now that his neo-Kantian misinterpretation 
of the Renaissance?s conception of vision and space, is ingrained in the 
epistemological foundations of the discipline. By reshaping the epistemological 
project of the Renaissance, Panofsky helped to create the myth of the continuous 
model of vision, which he considered the symbolic Form of the West, which?as 
explained above?is integral to the theory and myth of modernism.  
 
32
 ?Alberti? images are completed perceptual judgments about the objects of sense. They are made in 
the mind where one would expect to find them ? in the imagination. What Alberti did was to conceive 
of this mental construct, the image, as a picture?; he also provided a method by means of which that 
image could be projected and copied by art.? Snyder, ?Picturing Vision,? 240. 
33
 Snyder, ?Picturing Vision,? 243?244. 
304
There is no doubt, as Snyder and other theoreticians have contended, that there was 
an hegemonic visual tradition epitomized by perspective and photography that 
progressively affected and still affects the common understanding of vision and even 
visual perception. Panofsky redefined that tradition in modern terms and argued that 
perspective was supported by scientific models. His book explained this device?s 
origins and development, giving it a theoretical importance it had lost over the 
centuries and reinforced the hegemonic standing of the visual tradition associated 
with perspective. This analysis suggests two considerations that must be taken into 
account when studying C?zanne?s vision. Firstly, that the nineteenth century did not 
abide by the ?photographic model of vision? and the standard interpretation of space 
proposed by Panofsky. Second, that the paradigms postulated in the 1930s have been 
reinforced by recent technical developments and cultural diffusion, and naturalized in 
practice. Moreover, they are part of the basic presuppositions of the modern scholar 
because they are embedded in modern art history?s fundamental principles and 
methodologies.   
Modern art history contained modern art?s epistemological revolt by redefining it as 
a visual/formal endeavor. This insinuates that the institutionalization of the discipline 
in the 1930s afforded modern art historians more power to influence the 
contemporaneous art world, which contributed to stymie the most experimental anti-
establishment phase of modern art.  
Considered under this light art history might be seen as a manifestation of the 
reactionary forces of the rappel ? l?ordre as it interpreted the modern movements as a 
new incarnation of a century-old tradition and at the same time fostered the 
305
dissemination of the visual model developed in the Renaissance. The discipline did 
not incorporate the experimental and deconstructive art historical theories of the 
School of Vienna. It also excluded the most radical interpretations of modern art that 
thrived in the 1930s, like those of George Bataille, Walter Benjamin and Carl 
Einstein. These engaged writers pursued in their theoretical work the subversive, anti-
establishment project of the avant-gardes. Their theories have lately received 
scholarly attention and, deprived of their pungent message they had in the 1930s, are 
being grafted onto the specialized discourse of an already well-established modern art 
history.  
 
Photographs and Site Photographs for the Study of C?zanne?s Art 
In 1935 Rewald and Marschutz published in L?Amour de l?art the article ?C?zanne 
au Ch?teau Noir?, which was illustrated with site photographs. This was just the first 
of this kind of publication in Rewald?s long and successful career, as they became 
something of the trademark of his scholarship. They accompanied Rewald in his 
move to America: ?C?zanne au Louvre,? L'Amour de l'art 16 (October, 1935); 
?Sources d'inspiration de C?zanne,?  L'Amour de l'art no.5 (May 1936); ?C?zanne et 
la Provence,? with L?o Marschutz, Le Point, special issue. 4 (August, 1936) ; ?Van 
Gogh en Provence,? L'Amour de l?art 17 (October, 1936); ?Paysages de Paris de 
Corot ? Utrillo,? La Renaissance, special issue. 20 (January-February, 1937); ?Van 
Gogh vs. Nature: Did Vincent or the Camera Lie?? Art News 41 (April 1, 1942); 
?Camille Pissarro in the West Indies,? Gazette des Beaux-Arts ser.6, v. 22 (October, 
306
1942); ?Corot Sources: The Camera Tells,? Art News 41 (November 15, 1942); 
?Pissarro's Paris and his France,? Art News 42 (March 1, 1943); ?Ingres and the 
Camera: Two Precisionists Look at Rome;? Art News 42 (May 1, 1943); ?As C?zanne 
Recreated Nature,? Art News 43 (February 15, 1944); ?The Camera Verifies C?zanne 
Watercolors,? Art News 43 (September, 1944); ?Proof of C?zanne's Pygmalion 
Pencil,? Art News 43 (October 1, 1944).   By taking the site photographs as part as the 
scholarly baggage he brought to the United States, Rewald helped to establish them as 
methodological documentary tools for the study of nineteenth-century art.  
The function of the site photographs determines their appearance, as they are 
taken to record the external aspect of a landscape painted by a famous artist. In this 
way they reduce the ?motif? to a mere external appearance. As they are ancillary 
tools, their value is relative to their effectiveness to accomplish their function; in this 
case, their worth depends on their similarity to the paintings to which they are 
compared.
34
 At the same time, their use originates in the assumption that photographs 
afford an objective and truthful representation of the world: what the photograph 
shows is identical to what the artist saw, any variation in the paintings must be 
explained as intentional or expressive. The site photographs are a general statement 
about vision because they affirm that things can be known and that the camera is able 
to record their true appearance. 
How could such a heuristic tool be used for the evaluation of the paintings of 
artists who worked basically with color, and spent years of their life painting outdoors 
so that their eyes could capture the minimal variations of tone, intensity and hue in 
 
34
 It has to be remembered that in the 1930s the print was not immediately available to the 
photographer.  
307
the atmosphere? The impressionist artists avoided the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and 
strove to un-train their eyes so that they could see the world anew and create a new 
vision.  
Rewald?s use of site photographs for the study of different modern artists helped 
to institutionalize the photographs as scholarly tools because it established them as 
the standard of vision that allows the evaluation of artistic projects and ways of 
understanding perception, space, and vision. C?zanne?s relationship with the 
landscape of Provence, especially in the last years of his life, seems to discourage the 
use of such a tool, as even Rewald commented on the artist?s ?obsession? to paint the 
motifs only when he had a certain light. Other authors have remarked on the artist?s 
attachment and emotional response to certain places he associated with Zola.
35
 
Rewald used site photographs for the study of landscapes of artists who had 
established distinctive relationships with the sites they painted. Van Gogh?s 
approached the sites he painted in Arles almost like a tourist. According to another 
interpretation, the Dutch artist seems to have seen the Proven?al landscape through 
the paintings of native painters like C?zanne or Adolphe Monticelli.
36
 Pissarro, 
finally, was interested in the external appearance of nature and did not develop an 
emotional attachment to the sites he painted. To complicate things even more, 
C?zanne also traveled around France and chose non-Provencal sites as motifs.
37
 
35
 See Paul Smith, ?Joachim Gasquet Virgil and C?zanne?s Landscapes: ?My Beloved Golden Age?,? 
Apollo CXLVII/439 (October 1998): 11?23; Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, C?zanne and Provence. 
The Painter and His Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). In a certain way, only 
Novotny argues against this attachment, but then, he based his analysis on the study of site 
photographs.   
36
 See Griselda Pollock, ?On not seeing Provence: Van Gogh and the Landscape of Consolation, 1888?
9,? in Thomson, Framing France, as in n. 34.  
37
 Theoretically, the site photographs?which afford an ?objective? sight of the different sites?should 
help to dislodge the different approaches to landscapes, but they do not. Site photographs are taken 
308
The only person who ever saw the paintings and the motifs together was C?zanne. 
All the other commentators have worked either with one original and one photograph 
or, more generally, with two photographs.
38
 The comparison requires that both the art 
and reality be thought in relation to the photographic representation of the other: the 
Mount Sainte-Victoire?for example?through the reproduction of a C?zanne, and the 
work of art through the image of the site (fig. 9). Used as a way of attracting tourists, 
they favor the culturalization of nature, as they invite us to appreciate it as an historic 
site or for its similarities to works of art that are now in museums. Therefore, site 
photographs encourage the public to look at the real world as a sign, as if it were a 
picture.  
According to Barbara Savedoff what characterizes photographs of work of art is 
their lack of accuracy in rendering the colors and texture of the original, the alteration 
of their scale, and the volatilization of its physicality. Moreover, they impose a 
different position to the body and head of the spectator, who cannot move closer and 
farther away from it.
39
 Black and white photographs translate color into a gradation of 
values, accentuate the contrast and the lines of division among sectors of different 
tone, and fuse together areas of similar nuance. The photographic image is imprinted 
 
following the indications provided by paintings. Thus the lens, angles and point of view are adapted to 
the information given by them. In the end, the information they offer depends on the reproduction the 
researcher takes to the field and from the ideas, preconceptions or thesis the art historian taking the 
photographs or working with them wants to convey. 
38
 When Rewald went to Arles to take pictures of the van Gogh sites, he took with him the catalogue 
raison?e of La Faille of the paintings by the artist. See letter from John Rewald to Ren? Huyghe, 
March 18, 1937, ?Exhibition van Gogh? Cote X, f. 42, Archives des mus?es nationaux, Louvre, Paris. 
Among the ?Rewald Papers? at the Archives of the National Gallery of Art there is a folder with cards 
with illustrations of paintings by Pissarro glued on them which correspond almost exactly to the site 
photographs Rewald shot in Rouen. I suspect they were used as references for the photos. See Folder 
75/8 National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington DC.  
39
 Savedoff, ?Looking Through Photographs,? 458?460.  
309
onto an emulsion that generalizes, simplifies and selects the information according to 
its sensitivity. 
Specialists in nineteenth-century art, particularly those working on impressionism 
and post-impressionism, are especially affected by the shortcomings of photographs 
as these artistic movements emphasize all the parameters that photography at the time 
was not able to reproduce: color, texture, subtle gradation of hues, optical mixture. A 
long contemplation of the contourless areas of color of certain late paintings by 
Monet, for example, favors the continuous adjustment of the eyes to the colors, which 
seem to change and mix in infinite subtle variations that no reproduction can record 
(fig. 10).  The in-determinacy and blurriness of shapes in some C?zanne paintings 
make the color ?vibrate,? something that is also lost in the photographs of them (fig. 
11). 
These problems multiply endlessly when the comparison with photographs of the 
landscapes is added. Reeves observes, for example, that a landscape painter has to 
consider the relationship between the peripheral and central areas of the motif as he 
does not see them with the same neatness. The photograph of the landscape will 
reduce the fuzziness of the peripheral areas and the photograph of the painting 
representing the landscape will do the same. Therefore, the photograph of the painting 
will not help to find the point of view of the artist even when the photograph of the 
picture is analyzed in the site.
40
 Art historians seldom comment on the sources on 
which they base their remarks. On the other hand, when scholars confront the 
 
40
 Reeves, Eye and Mind, 55. Novotny argued that C?zanne had tried to avoid this phenomenon by 
concentrating his view in the middle distance, i.e. as if he had seen the motif through a tele-objective.  
310
paintings and the landscapes after studying photographs, they expect the originals to 
confirm the observations that they have suggested.   
C?zanne worked directly with colors?as many unfinished paintings and 
watercolors demonstrate?and subtle gradations of hue. Nevertheless, the 
acquaintance with these black and white photographs intimates that the artist studied 
first the volumetric objects and their situation in space, and that he added color to this 
structure, which in the end is the way the spectator using the photographs is 
apprehending C?zanne?s art. This contradicts all that is known about the way the 
artist worked and what it is known about his approach to painting.  
Even if the ?originality? of the modern artist?s vision is exalted in this way, that of 
the public is limited and reduced to evaluate the comparison proposed, which is 
mediated by the camera. The photographic image of the sites naturalize as ?normal,? 
standard vision, the simplified view provided by one single static eye, i.e. the one 
adopted by perspective in the Renaissance, which becomes the paradigmatic model of 
vision. Therefore, site photographs even when used to demonstrate the ?end of 
scientific perspective,? help to establish the notion that perspective is the innate, 
normal way of seeing. Moreover, this implies that C?zanne?s art represents a new?
modern?understanding of space and vision. 
Nicholas Green has successfully demonstrated that since the 1830s there was a 
cosmopolitan conception of nature as ?spectacle? for the entertainment and 
satisfaction of the dwellers of the modern metropolis, whose vision was influenced by 
the changes in the cityscape, the illustrated magazines, and the ?advances? 
311
determined for the most part by the influence of photography.
41
 This scopic regime 
situated the spectator in a new relationship with objects and suggested a new 
understanding of their own bodies. Nature was then a construction of the 
cosmopolitan gaze, as much the product of the city as of the artist that reflected it.   
Was C?zanne a ?modern? artist in this sense? The artist not only opposed 
modernity but also avoided representing modern subject matters and even steered 
clear from the modern neighborhoods of Paris. He was deeply attached to Aix-en-
Provence and the city is anything but the epitome of modern urbanism. So, what kind 
of ?vision? did he have? It might be said that, although he was not a ?modern? artist, 
he was reacting against modernity, and that his vision was even more modern than 
that of the impressionists precisely because he surpassed them.  But was his ?vision? 
modern in the same way that Seurat?s, for example, or Gauguin?s, or even van Gogh?s 
was? Was his ?vision? shaped by the few courses he took on academic art or by the 
strange and fascinating monuments of Aix? Was C?zanne?s conception of space 
affected by his readings on perspective? How did the experience of painting in front 
of nature affect his vision? In 1905 the artist wrote ?l??tude modifie notre vision ? un 
tel point; que l?humble et colossal Pissarro se trouve justifi? de ses th?ories 
anarchistes.?
42
 How did he think of space? More importantly: did he have a specific 
notion of space? As Reff?s article indicates, the interest on C?zanne?s representation 
 
41
 Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century 
France, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). In his Techniques of the Observer Crary 
concentrated his analysis on the spectator. He examined C?zanne?s art in Suspensions of Perception. 
Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), 281?359. 
Attention is an important aspect of perception and vision but cannot be considered here.  In the end, 
what a person sees depends of his or her attention. One of the most common and frustrating 
experiences of every day life is to ?look? without seeing. The camera, in this account, is always and 
evenly ?alert.? Attention on the other hand is honed by experience: an old sailor at high sea sees many 
more things that a young tourist with perfect eyesight.  
42
 Paul C?zanne to Emile Bernard, possibly 1905, Rewald, Correspondance, 314.  
312
of space began in the 1930s when the site photographs started to be used for the study 
of his art. In other words, art history imposed space as a category for the 
comprehension of C?zanne?s art.    
Both perspective and photography presuppose that what they represent is at a 
certain distance that allows them to be effective. Moreover both were devised to 
create [visual] space in a two dimensions, i.e., to portray the visual field as a space 
decked with objects rather than things populating a space.
43
 In general, photographs 
cannot represent an object without indicating the space in which it sits. It is ?natural? 
then that the site photographs were used for the analysis of C?zanne?s representation 
of space in landscapes but not for the study of his still-lifes, even if the objects he 
used as models remain in his studio.  
In C?zanne?s still-lifes each object is a world in itself and determines the space it 
inhabits. Moreover, the sumptuousness of the artist?s sensitive response to the volume 
precludes us from comparing the paintings with the oversimplified photographic 
images, which can only encompass them from a certain, fixed distance (fig. 12). In 
the same way, if someone had had the opportunity of taking a [instant] photograph of 
one of C?zanne?s sitters at the moment he or she was modeling for the painter, this 
material would not be of very much use either, as the photographs only convey how 
the person looks in a fleeting moment. Why, then, are the site photographs used just 
for the study of landscapes? It would not be logical to assume that C?zanne?s vision 
and intentions were coherent and consistent even if each genre has its own history and 
 
43
 This notion is counter-intuitive because today we are not only used to seeing photographs but to 
producing them and thus our eyes conceive and see the world as a (would be) picture.  
313
tradition.
 44
 The application of site photographs exclusively for the interpretation of 
the artist?s landscapes demonstrates its ideological character: they were used to 
impose space as a category for the analysis of C?zanne art.  
Photographs give a modern rendition of the landscape as pictorial [spatial] view 
because they do not concentrate on the objects that are contained in that space but in 
the general view. But then, the comparison with C?zanne?s paintings suggests that 
this was also the artist?s goal. Therefore the use of site photographs exclusively for 
the analysis of C?zanne?s landscapes has provoked a basic misunderstanding about 
how the artist approached the genre, as they have encouraged the idea that the artist 
was interested in depicting the view and the scenery even though they are 
representations of the elements that compose the landscape: the earth and the objects 
that populate it. The fact that in a landscape C?zanne has to encompass more objects 
from a certain distance explains why site photographs could more effectively be 
superimposed on C?zanne?s paintings and said to represent his vision.   
A careful reading of C?zanne?s letters and the writings of his contemporaries 
reveal that they usually refer to objects and sometimes to their position in space. (See 
next chapter.) In 1927, Fry, for example, observed that in his still-lifes, the artist is 
exclusively focused on the portraying of objects, that their relative position in space 
depends and derives from their form, and that, therefore, the represented space is not 
unified, rational.
45
 
44
 Few specialists have found an interpretation that encompasses all the different periods of C?zanne?s 
activity and or the different genres he practiced. Roger Fry, for example, considered the still-lifes the 
best of C?zanne?s work, whereas Fritz Novotny?s model works almost exclusively for his landscapes. 
45
 Roger Fry, C?zanne: A Study of His Development (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 38?43. 
314
Can a landscape be read as a still life?  In the Mount Sainte-Victoire (Barnes 
Foundation) (fig. 13). receding from the bushes and trees in the foreground, there are 
series of ?objects? to which the artist seems to have paid careful and individual 
attention and depicted mainly through color: the houses, the trees, the patches of 
different colors of the fields, the first hills. The colors that render the plot of land that 
serves as background for the top of the tree at the left highlights its form and volume, 
but makes it difficult to understand the patch of yellow as a continuous surface behind 
the tree. The ridge of the hill that touches the right part of the mountain suggests that 
C?zanne?s interest in stressing its volume paralleled his need to demonstrate how the 
volume of the Sainte-Victoire bulges toward the spectator. Considered in this way, 
the painting looks more as an accumulation of volumes integrated by color than as a 
representation of a whole. Even the mountain can be thought of as a sum of volumes 
whose concavity and convexity the artist has meticulously observed and recorded. 
This might also explain the inconsistencies in the relative sizes of the elements in the 
landscape (fig. 14).    
This model of analysis intimates that the artist focused on painting the land and 
the volumes of the things that are in the landscape and that he built the composition 
around them. The often quoted letter where C?zanne states that,  
[L]es motifs se multiplient, le m?me sujet vu sous un angle diff?rent offre un 
sujet d??tude du plus puissant int?r?t, et si vari? que je crois que je pourrais 
m?occuper pendant des mois sans changer de place en m?inclinant tant?t plus ? 
droite, tant?t plus ? gauche.
46
 
This indicates that C?zanne was not interested in the movement of the body in 
space but in the change of the relative position and attitude of the volumes that 
 
46
 Paul C?zanne letter to his son, September 8, 1906, Rewald, Correspondance, 324. 
315
conform to a landscape and that change with the movement of the head. In the 
example analyzed above, as in most if not all of C?zanne paintings, the artist does not 
suggest an infinite space. 
 Considered as objective registers or stand-ins for ?normal? vision, site 
photographs imply that the world can be known in this way, namely, that it has a 
definite appearance that can be apprehended. The site photographs deny space as a 
non-issue, that is, they disallow the non-interest in space. They impose questions 
about how the artist represented space instead of the more basic one: was he 
interested in representing space?
47
 
Transformed by way of photographs into signs, works of art are ?reduced? to be 
(textual) documents which must be intellectually approached so that their ?true? 
meaning might be understood and shared with others. Site photographs might be 
thought of as the ?correctives? Panofsky conceived to regulate the process of 
interpretation as a reaction against the violence of Heidegger?s more subjective 
alternative.  
 
Photographs as Documents. Siegfried Kracauer 
Ren? Huyghe comprehended early on that the civilization of the book was being 
replaced by that of images. He gave illustrations a place of honor in L?Amour de l?art,
which included sections that consisted almost exclusively in visual material qua
47
 In this they can be compared with the notion of ?art? that is imposed onto objects created to serve 
other functions.     
316
documentation. In 1931 when he introduced the magazine?s readers to the new 
editorial spirit he explained that,  
le d?veloppement du cin?ma, de la photographie, des arts publicitaires ont donn? 
? notre g?n?ration une culture visuelle, une tendance ? appr?hender par les yeux 
plut?t que par la pens?e abstraite, que r?v?le l?abondance des publications 
photographiques, en Allemagne surtout.  
La photographie ne doit donc plus ?tre seulement une image illustrant un 
texte; le texte doit collaborer ?troitement avec elle, parfois la commenter 
seulement; quand elle s?exprime avec plus d??vidence par ses moyens propres, 
l?image doit se substituer au texte. 
48
 
This demonstrates Huyghe?s ?modern??here conceived as opposite to post-
modern?attitude towards photographs as he thought that they were an objective 
representation of the real, and commented, dispassionately, that abstract thought was 
being weakened by the spread of illustrations. In 1980, Huyghe could look 
retrospectively to the meaning of his editorial policies.   
Ma revue L?Amour de l?Art a jou? l? [comparison of photographs] le r?le 
initiateur d?s 1930, en pratiquant l?expos? et la d?monstration par l?image 
auxquels Malraux, qui suivait cette publication, a fait large place quelques ann?es 
plus tard. 
Je pr?tendais qu?il est plus important d?aborder une cr?ation, une ?uvre par 
un choc visuel que par une id?e abstraite. Je pr?sentais certaines id?es sous forme 
d?un cahier de photographies o? les ressemblances et les contrastes entre les 
photos devaient sauter aux yeux. Puis je mettais quelques lignes au-dessous pour 
orienter la r?flexion, le tout introduit par un ?chapeau? succinct, expliquant le 
th?me? [J]e renversais la vapeur ; au lieu de dire : ?il faut ?tablir un syst?me 
d?affirmations, puis les reproductions d??uvre viendront meubler?comme les 
illustrations un livre?les pages de votre pens?e?, j?avais l?id?e qu?il faut partir de 
l?image, laisser parler les images avec leurs contrastes et leurs ressemblances, et 
que c?est de ces contacts visuels qu?on devait a posteriori d?gager la 
connaissance de l?histoire de l?art, et la r?flexion sur elle.
49
 (Emphasis added) 
 
The second paragraph is self-explanatory. The phrase in which Huyghe states that he 
wanted to ?laisser parler les images? is preceded by the idea ?je pr?sentais certaines 
 
48
 Ren? Huyghe, ?Directives,? L?Amour de l?art 12 (Janvier, 1931), 2. 
49
 Ren? Huyghe, Art ? la philosophie, 33. 
317
id?es sous forme d?un cahier de photographies.? The author regarded his publication 
the direct antecedent of Andr? Malraux?s Le Mus?e imaginaire (1947), the book that 
suggested the first epigraph and reminds us of the critiques at the time of the 1937 
van Gogh exhibition.
50
 As Chapter Three demonstrated, Huyghe was conscious of the 
potential utilization of both documentation and techniques of display for ideological 
purposes, which is here enunciated as ?orienter la r?flexion,? (which paired with the 
comment about abstract thought sounds a little ominous). In the end, this new 
?professional,? ?scientific,? and ?objective? approach is the one against which Venturi 
reacted: the OIM and its relentless appeal to documentation, photographing, and 
exchange of data as the most essential of art history?s enterprises.   
Together with Huyghe, George-Henri Rivi?re organized the 1937 exhibit, where 
he installed a special display devoted to French rural abodes. Rivi?re, who was to 
become one of the most important museographers in France?s history, was at the time 
deputy director of the ethnographic museum.
51
 In fact his relationship with 
ethnographers like Marcel Griaule, Michael Leiris, and the surrealists around the 
magazines Minotaure and Documents made him a key factor in the transition of the 
old Mus?e d'Ethnographie du Trocad?ro to its scientific successor, the Mus?e de 
l?Homme inaugurated only some months after the 1937 exhibit had closed its doors.  
The discussion around ethnography, popular arts, and anthropology sparked a new 
debate about the notion of culture, and the place of the Beaux Arts in it.
52
 This 
 
50
 Mary Bergstein considers that it was Malraux who established the ?visual method that determines 
our classroom practice today.? ?Lonely Aphrodites,? 476. 
51
 Between 1948 and 1965, Georges-Henri Rivi?re served as the first acting director of ICOM, the 
International Council of Museums that replaced the OIM.  
52
 The whole title of Documents is ?Doctrines, arch?ologie, beaux-arts, ethnographie.? Rivi?re wrote 
eloquently against the ?imposition? of aesthetic values onto ethnographic objects in Georges-Henri 
318
problem was also related to Rivi?re?s pet project, the Mus?e national des arts et 
traditions populaires, and had great importance at the time when the Popular Front 
was trying to counter the influence of Fascism.
53
 In the context of the Surrealist 
movement, especially those members of the group connected with the activities of the 
Mus?e de l?Homme, this was a debate about esthetics, and the Western 
epistemological organization of knowledge in general.
54
 
The displays of the new ethnographic museum exhibited objects surrounded by 
?documents? (maps and photographs among others) that gave an idea of their use 
value, and reminded viewers of their original context (fig. 15). It is not a coincidence 
then, that a similar strategy was used in the van Gogh exhibition. Maps, photographs, 
and documents helped to contextualize the artist (the producer) as man by bringing to 
the galleries information about the places in which the art had been produced and the 
circumstances that determined its creation (fig. 16).  
The French curators guided the public?s attention away from the objects 
themselves towards the process of creation, the historical moment and the place in 
which they had come into existence, and to the consideration of how the personality 
of the artist had imprinted itself onto them. Huyghe and the defenders of the exhibit 
 
Rivi?re, ?De l?objet d?un mus?e d?ethnographie compar? a celui d?un mus?e de Beaux-Arts,? Cahiers 
de Belgique (Novembre, 1930).  
53
 This was an important element in the almost contemporaneous debate between Strzygowski and 
Focillon.  
54
 Since 1987, when James Clifford published ?Ethnographical Surrealism,? Comparative Studies in 
Society and History 23 (October, 1981): 539?564, this relationship has been hotly debated. See Jean 
Jamin, ?Les objets ethnographiques sont-ils des choses perdues?? in Temps perdu temps retrouv?. Voir 
les choses du pass? au present, (Neuch?tel: Mus?e d?ethnographie, 1985); ?L?ethnographie mode 
d?inemploi. De quelques rapports de l?ethnologie avec le malaise dans la civilisation,? in Jaques 
Hamard and Roland Kaehr, eds., Le Mal et la douleur (Neuch?tel : Mus?e d?ethnographie, 1986). See 
also Denis Hollier ?La valeur d?usage de l?impossible,? in Bataille, Georges and Leiris, Michel, 
Documents n? 1 ? 7, 1929 et nos 1 ? 8 1930 (Paris : Jean-Michel Place, 1991): vii?xxxiv. For Rivi?re 
see Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900?1945 (Ithaca: Cornell 
University Press, 1994).   
319
argued that not all the members of the public were prepared to comprehend the 
aesthetic message or works of art, and that this contextual material allowed them to 
understand at least the art?s historical or cultural meaning. 
The debate about art and culture, together with the organization and 
professionalization of museology by the OIM, favored the consolidation of a more 
uniform method of display. This new contextual approach to high art was 
contemporaneous to the efforts to relate modern art not only to the history of Western 
art but also to the general history of the art of the world.     
The innovative use of visual documentation is noticeable in publications like 
L?Amour de l?art, the original context in which the site photographs appeared. Under 
Huyghe?s supervision the magazine displayed more illustrations, which were assigned 
a determinant role in the transmission of ideas. If in the 1920s the articles were 
illustrated merely with photographs of works by the artist the article referred to, now 
they were joined by comparative material and documentary photographs, x-
radiographs, diagrams, etc. The first page of Rewald?s 1935 article, for example, 
presents at the top of the page a photograph of the main site, the Ch?teau Noir that for 
a period of time was C?zanne?s studio, and beneath it a map of the area with 
topographical indications about the roads, sights and the location of the different sites 
the artist painted (fig. 17).  
The site photographs were incorporated to support a formalist approach to 
C?zanne. In 1938 Germain Bazin published ?C?zanne et La Montagne Sainte-
Victoire.?
55
 The author?s main interest was to associate C?zanne with Classicism, 
French Humanism and especially with the art of Poussin. Knowing the ideology 
 
55
 Germain Bazin (1901?1991) had met Huyghe at the Ecole du Louvre. 
320
behind the article it is possible to summarize it through the illustrations (figs. 18 to 
20). The four images taken from old masters in fig. 18, for example, have been 
cropped and the two at the top are inverted to make the mountains look similar to the 
Sainte-Victoire.   
 The last illustration (fig. 20) is paired with one of Rewald?s site photographs. 
Bazin argues that the last paintings of the Sainte-Victoire do not represent C?zanne?s 
classicism, and that the mountain (the autochthonous  site) stimulated the artist to 
reflect on universal values and the cosmos. The site photographs are incorporated 
among other reproductions as a representation of the majestic site that inspired him.  
The 1936 special issue about C?zanne of La Renaissance (as its name indicate 
a more conservative magazine than L?Amour de l?art) applied the same strategies. J. 
Vergnet-Ruiz in ?C?zanne et l?Impressionnisme? compares C?zanne?s ?synthetic? 
method with the ?analytical? approach of Pissarro (terms most probably taken from 
Fry?s book?published first in L?Amour de L?art in 1926?although they were quite 
common at the time in the context of the consideration of cubism as it will be seen 
below).
56
 The author uses one of Rewald?s site photograph in order to ?demonstrate? 
that the artists had a different way of understanding reality (fig. 21). The site 
photograph is between the reproductions of the two works of art in the same diagonal 
format adopted by L?Amour de l?art. A careful examination of the material 
demonstrates that it does not answer basic questions about the relative position of the 
volumes in the landscape and the artists? point of view. Moreover, the site photograph 
does not permit the reader to decide if the artists were more or less inventive, or if one 
was more realist and interested in the accurate representation of what he perceived 
 
56
 J. Vergnet-Ruiz, ?C?zanne et l?Impressionnisme,? La Renaissance 19 (May?June, 1936) :19?22. 
321
than the other. In both paintings the angular volume of the house to the right, for 
example, is high above the horizon whereas in the photograph it is almost at the same 
height than the one that is at the center of the group.    
 L?Amour de l?art also presented more ?scientific? material in this new period: 
raking light photographs, x-rays, diagrams of perspectival constructions, photographs 
with tracing lines to reinforce certain ideas and analysis, etc. This had an equivalent 
in the Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris, 
1937. In the context of the exhibition organized at the Palais de la D?couverte to 
demonstrate the advances of sciences and letters and their relationship with technique, 
Huyghe organized the exhibition Art et Science with the assistance of Jacques 
Lassagne. The exhibit analyzed the close relationship between scientific discoveries 
and the history of art. The accent was put on the Renaissance as the first moment in 
which art and science came together and the display used the kind of material listed 
above profusely.
57
 
In 1931 Huyghe mentioned that photography was a great success and immensely 
influential in Germany, which might explain Rewald?s optimistic and positivistic 
approach to it.
58
 Some of the more acute critiques of the medium also originated 
there. In 1927 Siegfried Kracauer (1889?1966), one of the most important cultural 
critics of the Weimar Republic, published ?Photography? in the leftist Frankfurter 
 
57
 There is little information about this exhibit. See ?Art et Science au Palais de la D?couverte,? Beaux-
Arts (July 7, 1937): 8. 
58
 See Olivier Lugon, ?Photo-inflation. La profusion des images dans la photographie allemande, 
1925?1945,? Cahiers du Mus?e national d?art moderne 49 (Fall, 1994): 94?113. In 1930, that is, at the 
time Rewald was studying with him, Panofsky defended the use of reproductions of works of art. See 
Erwin Panofsky, ?Original et reproduction en fac-simil?,? Cahiers du Mus?e d?Art Moderne 50 (Fall, 
1995): 45?56, and Brigitte Buettner, ?Panofsky ? l??re de la reproduction m?canis?e. Une question de 
perspective,? ibid., 57?78. Photography was an important subject in the curriculum of the 
Lichtwarkschule.
322
Zeitung. He analyzed there the ontological character of the photographic image and 
its relationship with historicism, which, as the epigraph of this section shows, 
Kracauer considered to be concerned with something equivalent to taking 
photographs of the events evolving through time: the idea that a trail of documents 
allows scholars to track down the historical phenomenon, corresponds to the notion 
that photographs record the spatial structure that faces the camera.  
[T]hey believe at the very least that they can grasp historical reality by 
reconstructing the series of events in their temporal succession without any gaps. 
Photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism seeks to provide the 
temporal continuum. According to historicism the complete mirroring of a 
temporal sequence simultaneously contains the meaning of all that occurred 
within that time. ?Historicism is concerned with the photography of time. The 
equivalent of its temporal photography would be a giant film depicting the 
temporally interconnected events from every vantage point. 
59
 
Kracauer?s article, by assimilating documents to photographs, hits the foundations of 
Rewald?s approach to sources and history in general, as the art historian believed that 
testimonies, photographs, and other kind of historical records could be incorporated 
into a narration that reconstructed the life of an artist.
60
 As noted in Chapter Four the 
anecdote and the photograph have a similar function in an historical narration as 
stand-ins for the ?real.? Nevertheless, in order to be integrated as part of the plot, they 
have to contain in themselves, and demonstrate, its main arguments.  
Kracauer argues that the configuration of the photographic image is basically 
(ontologically) different from the (spatial) structure it records. It might be said that 
photographs hollow out or ?denarrativize? the object or event they represent, in the 
 
59
 Siegfried Kracauer, ?Photography,? Critical Inquiry 19 no.3 (Spring, 1993): 424?425. 
60
 Rewald, as Thomson explains, ?prefers a sequential, factual method to interpretation of images. For 
him, pictures exist to establish a chronological framework or to be collected. Iconographical meaning 
is a minor matter.? Richard Thomson, ?C?zanne Composition; Studies in Impressionism; C?zanne and 
the End of Impressionism,? The Burlington Magazine 128 (April, 1986): 298. 
323
sense that they erase its original meaning and the particular way in which it addresses 
the beholder and reduce it to being merely a sign. Formatted in this way, as 
photograph, the reality may be assigned a new meaning and thus inserted into a 
narration.  
According to Kracauer photography differs from human memory?s register of 
reality because it grasps only the spatial continuum, whereas memory images are built 
over time and are the product of the active participation of the receiver in the process 
of perception which determines that everything is loaded with meaning. Every aspect 
of a memory image is consequential and a synopsis of many perceptions.
61
 Thus,   
from the latter?s [the photograph?s] perspective, memory-images appear to be 
fragments but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to 
which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments. Similarly, 
from the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists 
partly of garbage. 
62
 
The spatial organization and structure (closeness, shape, etc) of forms in a 
photograph have different connotations than those in a memory image. They may be 
similar but they are not equivalent.  
Kracauer was concerned with the effects that photographs and illustrated 
magazines had in the way society understands the world under capitalism, which 
explains why the article resonates with Heidegger?s critique of modernity. He 
described a spiraling development in which writers and editors of [illustrated] texts 
reduce nature and works of art to being just [photographic] traces of what they were.  
 
61
 ?The photograph does not preserve the transparent aspects of an object but instead captures it as a 
spatial continuum from any one of a number of positions. The last memory-image outlasts time 
because it is unforgettable, the photograph, which neither refers to nor encompasses such a memory-
image must be essentially associated with the moment in time at which it came into existence.? 
Kracauer, ?Photography,? 428. 
62
 Kracauer, ?Photography,? 425?426. 
324
The assault of these mass images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the 
potentially existing awareness of crucial traits. Artworks suffer this fate through 
their reproductions. The phrase ?lie together, die together? applies to the multiply 
reproduced original; rather than coming into view through the reproductions, it 
tends to disappear in its multiplicity and to live on as art photography. In the 
illustrated magazines people see the very world that the illustrated magazines 
prevent them from perceiving?. Never before has a period known so little about 
itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is 
one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding. ?
The contiguity of these images systematically excludes their contextual 
framework available to consciousness. The ?image-idea? drives away the idea; 
?
63
 
This long quotation shows that in 1927 Kracauer was aware of how photographs of 
works of art might affect the comprehension of art. This text permits the 
contextualization of Huyghe?s evaluation of photography and his determination to use 
it in his publications and installations, as he was aware of the power of images and of 
display to convey meanings to the public. Huyghe?s ?orientation of reflection? is 
Kracauer?s ?strike against understanding.?
64
 
Kracauer thinks of photography is another stage in the history of the 
representation of nature, the one that corresponds to a capitalist mode of production.
65
 
His analysis develops his main argument?photographs, ontological difference from 
paintings and from the way reality is perceived?and affords some elements to better 
understand how the use of site photographs affects the appreciation of modern art.  
 
63
 Kracauer, ?Photography,? 432. 
64
 Panofsky did not know Kracauer, at least while they were in Germany but they became fast friends 
in the United States and shared their thoughts about film. Rewald saw Kracauer many times working at 
the library of the Museum of Modern art, as he recalled later in the Oral history but did not became his 
friend. See Irving Sandler?s ?Introduction? to Irving Sandler and Amy Newman, eds., Defining 
Modern Art Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), and 
Rewald, ?interview.?  
65
 He comments that ?to an ever-increasing degree, European painting during the last few centuries has 
represented nature stripped of symbolic and allegorical meanings. ? Since nature changes in exact 
correspondence with the respective state of consciousness of a period, the foundation of nature devoid 
of meaning arises with modern photography. No different from earlier modes of representation, 
photography too is assigned to a particular developmental stage of practical and material life. It is a 
secretion of the capitalist mode of production.? Kracauer, ?Photography,? 434. 
325
He argues that since the Renaissance works of art represent memory images that are 
the product of a history, as both perception and work develop in time.   
In order for history to present itself the mere surface, the coherence offered by 
photography must be destroyed. For in the artwork the meaning of the object 
takes on spatial appearance, whereas in photography the spatial appearance of an 
object is its meaning. The two spatial appearances?the ?natural? one and that of 
the object permeated by cognition?are not identical. By sacrificing the former 
for the sake of the latter the artwork also negates the likeness achieved by 
photography. This likeness refers to the look of the object, which does not 
immediately divulge how it reveals itself to cognition; the artwork, however, 
conveys nothing but the transparence of the object. 
66
 
According to Kracauer the likeness afforded by a photograph of a landscape 
representing, for example, the Mount Sainte-Victoire and a tree, is not something that 
C?zanne or a bystander might see, as their perception is always already involved in 
the process of creating and modifying memory images. C?zanne?s paintings are the 
result of all those images and processes but are also ?real? objects that appear to the 
spectator?s consideration like the tree and the mountain.   
Time is an important element of C?zanne?s art making. Every painting is the 
product of hard work: C?zanne slowly builds the trunk and leaves of a tree, deals with 
the contours, the local colors, the reflected colors, and the atmosphere and every 
single aspect is translated into painting or created anew. In most of his paintings, 
brushstrokes are identifiable perceptual units and consequently behave like ?forms? 
within the field of colors, especially in those works that do not have a strong 
representational value. Forms and brushstrokes are the result of C?zanne?s activity 
and impinge on the spectator?s attention according to the shape, color, dimensions, 
and the position the artist assigned to them in the painting. In this sense, a tree and a 
 
66
 Kracauer, ?Photography,? 426?427. 
326
brushstroke in a painting by C?zanne have a ?meaning??even if it is just a ?visual? 
meaning?which does not relate anymore with the motif it represents and addresses 
the spectator directly, sparking his or her perceptual process and the production of 
memory images.   
Until the advent of digital cameras, photographs were the result of the chemical 
reaction light produces on a sensitive emulsion, which implies that all the elements 
imprinted on the surface have the same quality and a homogeneous appearance.  Of 
the natural tree or of a painted tree, they show only the configuration, the traces, but 
not the material difference between, for example, rock and tree, brushstroke and line, 
or canvas and color: a tree trunk is of the same material and texture as that of a void 
and a rock. The medium?s limitations (sensitivity of the emulsion, for example) 
produce simplifications and establish relationships that do not exist in the original.  
The physical characteristics of the media determine the kind of attention they 
generate in the beholder. The eye scans the even surface of photographs, where 
everything is evenly homogeneous, and thus of the same value. The photograph of a 
tree records the spatial position of its elements at a certain moment. The photograph 
of the picture by C?zanne representing a tree, on the other hand, only shows the 
spatial distribution of the forms or the color patches, but does not afford the 
opportunity of engaging with them in an active way. The original incites perception to 
develop in time, in a series of memory images and thus to have a ?history.?  In a 
photograph of a work of art the brushstrokes are juxtaposed and evenly placed across 
the surface, they do not have material specificity, thickness, tactile values, etc.  
Moreover, photographs in general annul the painting?s ?history,? which is recounted 
327
by the superposition of different layers of pigment. Thus, the medium fosters a 
superficial approach in which the eyes rush over the surface in order to capture the 
subject matter of the image represented. C?zanne?s art defies the likeness of 
photographs, challenges sleek surfaces, and superficial attention as it is the product of 
a long concentration, focus, and even obsessive attention to nature, exactly the values 
that the work with photographs of sites and works of art discourage. 
67
 
Site photographs are documentary images, ancillary tools, supplements. When 
they are paired with a work of art, they transform it into their complement, as both 
images are considered according to the suggestions the other proposes. Thus, the two 
elements of the comparison are not in themselves but for the other. If the subject of 
the comparison is a photograph of the work of art, art is lost in the photographic 
medium, in the passage from one sleek surface to the other, and attention plays at its 
most superficial. In the end, the meaning highlighted in this kind of exercise is the 
one suggested by the narration/interpretation proposed by the art historian.    
Preziosi has called attention to the fact that the methodologies devised to study 
works of art have encouraged art historians to understand them as signs. Photographs 
are among the heuristic tools that allow them to treat works of art as illustrations. 
Mary Bergstein, argues that art historians used to work with photographs, discover 
better and more elements for their work in reproductions, as if the original had 
something that would impede the same kind of attention.
68
 And Brigitte Buettner has 
 
67
 It might be said that in a photograph space is mere quantity whereas in reality and in works of art 
space has meaning, value, it is quality.  
68
 Mary Bergstein, ?We May Imagine it?: Living with Photographic Reproduction at the End of Our 
Century,? Introductory essay to Roberts, Art History, 8.  
328
commented how Panofsky, for example, would explode against those ?damned 
originals? that dared to disturb his theories.
69
 
This chapter has argued that the use of site photographs extends this effect to 
nature which, culturalized as the ?site? painted by the artist, is transformed into an 
image or a tourist attraction whose meaning is subsidiary to its history. Site 
photographs transform nature into documents/information, whereas it was for 
C?zanne a motif, not just a visual subject matter, but a source of emotions, sensations, 
and impressions. This connects Kracauer?s gloomy but visionary analysis with 
Heidegger?s almost contemporary study of the world becoming world picture, and the 
correlative transformation of the spectator into subiectum.
Photography denarrativizes works of art and nature and transforms them into 
sleek surfaces waiting to be incorporated into a narration which will write on them a 
new meaning: style, biography, history of space, nation, history of form. As true 
signs, they refer to something that is beyond their materiality, their physical 
appearance. Photography is part of the methodology that transforms the work of art?
and the world?into documents, in the same way that the academic ethnography and 
museography developed in the 1930s created a metaphorical position within which 
primitive artifacts became the bearers of cultural totality. Photographs transform art 
and nature into (re)sources. In both cases it is the material presence which is lost in 
the process.  
Melville has observed that the use of photographs and the methodological 
approach to art established by modern art history in the 1930s have both blocked off 
other ways of understanding the world and art. Like Heidegger, the author believes 
 
69
 Brigitte Buettner, ?Panofsky ? l??re,? 57?78. 
329
that art is a key element in the epistemological configuration of Western culture and 
therefore he considers that it could provide the key to comprehending it. ?I would like 
to close by locating the camera on the Heideggerean route not taken by Panofsky? he 
announces. Heidegger thought that modernity has established,   
a flat availability of objects to our view, our calculation, and our research, as if 
we were frozen into a permanent midday? It names this modernity ?the age of 
the world picture? ?. It is a feature of this flat availability of things that among 
the things available are, hanging ?on the wall, like a rifle or a hat,? works of art. 
And because these pictures hang there in just this way, they offer us no access to 
the fact that our world too has come to hang before us like a picture?but it is 
also the case that if we could come to understand what a picture is we might 
come again to understand what a world is. We stand poised for Heidegger 
between a mere aestheticism and some other grasp of the work of art, and what 
poses us there Heidegger calls ?technology.? I am calling it, for now, ?the 
camera.?
70
 
Melville, like Heidegger, believes that only the examination of what produces the 
problem and propitiates ?danger? affords the possibility of an opening and a solution 
as ?there is nothing saving apart of the very danger itself.? What it is most needed is 
not new theories or orientations but a sharp analysis of the history of art history itself 
as a way of liberating the discipline from its own shadows. The site photographs and 
the photographs of works of art help to transform art into just another object, like the 
rifle or the hat on Heidegger?s wall. It might be that the examination of the process by 
which paintings were surrounded by photographs helps to reach a novel 
understanding of modern art.  
The use of site photographs for the study of C?zanne?s art fostered the notion that 
the problem of the representation of space and perspective were central to the artist?s 
endeavors. Stephen Melville has commented that,    
 
70
 Melville, ?The Temptation,? 412. 
330
The camera is most simply a machine for producing automatic linear perspective 
renditions of the world. [Emphasis added]It can of course do other things, 
including give the lie to this automatism? . What matters ? is that in fulfilling a 
certain dream of vision?the dream, more or less, of an eye gazing out upon its 
world?the camera exerts effects that go beyond and turn against that dream: it 
gives us that world as profoundly textual, even in its very moment of appearing, 
or it gives us that world as a source as well as an object of vision. It can compel 
us to return to, reengage with, the early grapplings with the apparent duplicity 
and self-division of vision; it can returns us even to the baroque and seemingly 
gratuitous complexity of the models and experiments through which the 
Renaissance found its way to rational perspective. 
71
 
This is the moment then, in which this essay turns away from the problem of the 
camera to consider the problem of perspective in depth, as according to Melville, the 
post-modern realization of the camera and photography as conventions, afford us an 
opportunity to rethink the Renaissance, art history, and art.  
 
Coda. C?zanne and the School of Vienna. Fritz Novotny 
The case of Fritz Novotny (1903?1983) deserves consideration even though his 
C?zanne and the end of Scientific Perspective (1938) was published after the three 
principal publications examined in this dissertation. This book, which is famously 
difficult to read and was never translated into other languages, influenced a limited 
number of very leading specialists such as Meyer Shapiro.
72
 Novotny?s main 
contention overlaps with Barr?s interpretation of C?zanne?s art. Both approaches 
 
71
 Melville, ?The Temptation,? 411.  
72
 Meyer Schapiro comments at the end of his book that he had profited from the work of Fry and 
Novotny. Paul C?zanne, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962), 30. Novotny?s first article on C?zanne 
was published in 1929 in the magazine Belvedere. His C?zanne und das Ende der wissenschaftliche 
Perspektive was reprinted in the 1970s but never translated. His brief introduction to C?zanne?part of 
a series of illustrated books on great artists published by Phaidon?where he summarizes his ideas, 
was first published in German in 1937. Translated into English in 1947, the book has been reprinted 
many times since then. Joseph J. Rishel?s analysis of Novotny?s approach to C?zanne in the 1996 
catalogue is based almost exclusively on this last publication.    
331
demonstrate that in the 1930 space and perspective had become important art 
historical categories for the analysis of works of art.   
 Novotny studied with Strzygowski before serving as assistant professor with 
Hans Sedlmayr at the Kunsthistorischen Institut in Vienna from 1928 to 1939, when 
he was appointed curator at the ?sterreichische Galerie. Although his political 
orientation in the 1930s is not known and little can be gleaned from his detailed and 
cold writing style, his close association with Strzygowski and Sedlmayr, as well as 
the date of his appointment at the museum, indicate that he did not confront the pro-
Nazi establishment.
73
 
Novotny?s analysis of C?zanne?s work reflects the experimental formalism and 
critical approach to Humanism of the School of Vienna. Moreover, his scholarship 
was not influenced by neo-Kantianism but derives from his own reading of the work 
of Kant?s First Critique. 
74
 His characterization of C?zanne?s art as in-human or 
beyond humanness helps to explain why his work was not fully integrated into the 
Humanist modern art history that became the common lingua after the war. 
75
 In 
 
73
 In 1995 Artur Rosenauer wrote a brief and admiring biographical profile of Novotny, who had been 
his teacher. He affirms that Novotny despised Fascism but this late testimony does not affect the 
previous statement. Fritz Novotny and Artur Rosenauer, The Great Impressionists (Munich; New 
York: Prestel  1995), 148.  
Until more material is found, the subject must be left open. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that 
Jacques Maritain, a Catholic French philosopher accused both Novotny and Sedlmayr of being ?biased 
doctrinaires? and of making ?blind judgments? for detecting in C?zanne the germs of cultural 
degeneration. Alice von Hildebrand, ?Debating Beauty: Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von 
Hildebrand,? Crisis magazine (July-August 2004),
www.crisismagazine.com/julaug2004/hildebrand.htm 
74
 See biography and sources in ?Novotny, Fritz.? Dictionary of Art Historians (website).  
http://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/novotnyf.htm. See also Joseph J. Rishel, ?A Century of C?zanne 
Criticism II: From 1907 to the Present,? C?zanne exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 
1996. Novotny?s use of Kant is most explicit in ?Das Problem des Menschen C?zanne im Verh?ltnis 
zu seiner Kunst,? Zeitschrift f?r Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 26 (1932), 268?298. 
75
 This is why his influence over other art historians like Meyer Schapiro has to be put within brackets, 
as the American author started the pseudo-psychoanalytic interpretation of C?zanne?s art and 
considered him as part of the Humanist tradition. For a critique of Shapiro?s approach to C?zanne see 
332
Wood?s words, Novotny considers that ?En sabotant la structure du syst?me 
perspectif, C?zanne d?stabilise la subjectivit? du spectateur.? 
76
 
According to Novotny?s Kantian interpretation, C?zanne?s extreme and almost 
un-natural concentration permitted him to expurgate non-visual aspects of perception 
and to transcend common vision. Sedlmayr, who was an open supporter of the Nazi 
party, mentioned Novotny?s book in his famous attack on modern art, Verlust der 
Mitte (1948). C?zanne?s art, he argued,  
demands a mode of behaviour which in life can only occur under certain very 
exceptional conditions, it demands a state of complete dissociation and 
disinterestedness on the part of the spirit and the soul from the experiences of the 
eye. This makes it easy to understand Novotny?s calling the art of C?zanne extra-
human and divorced from life (lebensfern), for it is indeed contrary to human 
nature to exclude from the act of perception all the other functions of the human 
mind in favour of pure seeing. 
77
 
Sedlmayr?s summary of Novotny?s book is characteristically accurate, as 
Sedlmayr  was the most acute and intelligent of the few German-speaking scholars 
dealing with modern art after the war, although he used his knowledge for criticizing 
it. As Woods comments, 
The shift from the Kunstwollen to Struktur allowed the followers of Riegl to treat 
the image not as the notation of a perception but as a metaphor for perception, 
and thus to banish all lingering nineteenth-century anthropomorphism from the 
formalist method. Strukturanalyse was thus not only a permanent diagnosis of 
modernism: it was itself a modernist way of seeing. ? 
Panofksy stood by the classical reading strategies?postmedieval and pre-
Romantic?and thus preserved the insulation of scholarship from art; and by the 
end he was perhaps prepared to let art die for lack of any vehement response to it. 
Sedlmayr, by contrast, leaves an impression of terrible inquietude and 
aggrievance. Sedlmayr the Fascist constantly defined marginality, distortion and 
 
Wayne Andersen?s ?C?zanne?s Wish for his Father. An Unlikely Story,? Common Knowledge 4 
(1998): 127?135.  
76
 Christopher Wood, ?Une perspective oblique. Hubert Damisch, La grammaire du tableau et la 
strukturanalyse viennoise,? Cahiers du Mus?e national d?art moderne 58 (Winter 1996), 124.  
77
 Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis, The Lost Center, in C?zanne in Perspective, ed. Judith Wechsler, 
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975), 118. 
333
degradation against an ideal of balance and perfection. ? The ideal is nowhere 
to be found. 
78
 
Like Melville and many other scholars interested in the history of art history, Woods 
insists that the methodological and philosophical orientations left outside the 
foundations of modern art history deserve to be studied and enlisted to balance out the 
obvious problems generated by Panofsky?s formulation of the discipline. In the last 
twenty years art historians have realized that in the 1930s were proposed many 
alternative ways of understanding modernism, art, and art history. 
 
78
 Wood, ed., Vienna School Reader, 52?53. 
334
Our natural art historical tendency to speak of ?pictorial space? might be softened to take into account 
the fact that Renaissance historians, critics, and geometers generally did not speak of pictorial space, or 
even of a unified space within a picture, but of the objects that went into the pictures.  
James Elkins, ?Renaissance Perspectives.? 
1
As art historians, we often write about perspective as if it were at least in part a historically 
relative invention, while retaining the implication that it is in some important sense a true 
discovery, something at once universal and not susceptible to improvement. We have tended to 
base this somewhat unfaithful conception on where we stand in relation to the claims made in 
Panofsky?s essay Die Perspektive als ?symbolische Form? or in the works it inspired.?  
James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective. 
2
Chapter Six: C?zanne & Perspective 
Was C?zanne interested in the analysis and representation of space? Was 
perspective pertinent for him or was it a subject matter imposed by the methodology 
used for the study of his art? In the famous letter to Bernard of April 15, 1905 
C?zanne encouraged the younger artist to,   
[T]raitez la nature par le cylindre, la sph?re, le c?ne, le tout mis en perspective, 
soit que chaque c?t? d?un objet d?un plan, se dirige vers un point central. Les 
lignes parall?les ? l?horizon donnent l??tendue, soit une section de la nature ou, si 
vous aimez mieux, du spectacle que le Pater Ommnipotens Aeterne Deus ?tale 
devant nos yeux. Les lignes perpendiculaires ? cet horizon donnent la 
profondeur. Or, la nature, pour nous hommes, est plus en profondeur qu?en 
surface, d?o? la n?cessite d?introduire dans nos vibrations de lumi?re, 
repr?sent?es par les rouges et les jaunes, une somme suffisante de bleut?s, pour 
faire sentir l?air. 
3
This must be one of the most analyzed, over-analyzed, quoted, and over-quoted 
letters in the history of art.
4
C?zanne actually refers to perspective as a way of 
representing objects in space, whereas after Panofsky?s 1927 book, art history 
 
1
Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (April ? June, 1992): 223?224.  
2
Id., 187?188. 
3
Rewald, Correspondance, 300.  
4
Theodore Reff understands ?lignes perpendicularies ? cet horizon? as vertical lines, whereas in my 
analysis the artist was referring to the orthogonals. See Reff?s ?C?zanne et la perspective,? and 
?Painting and Theory in the Final Decade,? in C?zanne: The Late Work, exh. cat., Museum of Modern 
Art, New York, 1977. 
335
considers perspective as a representational device that reflects an epistemological 
model, namely, a way of perceiving the [real] space that contains objects. The letter 
indicates that for C?zanne ?nature? was ?objects.? True, the artist states that the sides 
of those objects must converge at a point on the horizon, which is not to say that all 
the orthogonals must be coordinated to coincide there. Had he said so, had he 
recommended that Bernard use perspective (and then the question is why he did not 
say: ?use perspective?) this would mean that he was thinking of it as a device for 
representing objects in space. It would not necessarily imply that this was the way 
C?zanne perceived the third dimension. As Reff notes, this method was taught by the 
Academy and many illustrated manuals that circulated among artists. In other words: 
perspective is an efficient device for suggesting a three-dimensional space on a 
surface but this does not mean that the artist who uses it thinks that the world around 
him is organized according to its rules. There is an abysmal ontological gap between 
nature and art, reality and representation. In the letter C?zanne tells Bernard to 
represent the objects in perspective, but when it comes to the notion of space?which 
he does not mention?the artist refers to God as the organizer of nature as a spectacle 
for men to enjoy. He is able to encompass its extension, whereas men can only 
perceive the world as depth. C?zanne differentiated ?nature? from space, intimating 
that human perception?compared with that of the Almighty?was limited.   
In the article considered in Chapter Five, Reff discusses two perspectival 
drawings made by C?zanne in different periods of his life as evidence of the artist?s 
long-standing interest in perspective. He concedes that C?zanne had copied them 
from manuals probably without having read the texts, which were barely 
336
comprehensible in any case. The interpretation of documents (like those two drawings 
and the letters), is determined by the context in which the researcher places them. The 
question then lingers: For what purpose did he draw them? Are two drawings enough 
to prove such an interest? In his paintings C?zanne seems to have disregarded 
perspective. If those two drawings demonstrate the artist?s interest in perspective, 
they also prove that he was consciously subverting it in his paintings.  
In the last paragraph of the article, Reff upholds perspective as the paradigmatic 
epistemological model of the West that Panofsky theorized. There are two issues: did 
C?zanne and his contemporaries perceive or think of space as if it were governed by 
the laws of perspective? Did they deem perspective merely as a technical device and a 
convention inherited from the Renaissance, taught by the Academy, and reinforced by 
photographs? This chapter argues that the first epigraph by Elkins, taken from an 
essay devoted to the study of the Renaissance, might be used to describe the situation 
at the end of the nineteenth century in France: C?zanne and his contemporaries were 
concentrated on the problem of the perception and representation of objects/volumes.    
Photography, more than a ?discovery,? was an ?invention? and, as such, it was 
deeply determined by the epistemological project of the Renaissance.
5
The creation, 
slow development, and popularization of photography coincided with modern art?s 
confrontation with the artistic tradition inherited from that period.
6
Nevertheless, 
 
5
James Elkins, whose eye-opening The Poetics of Perspective guides much of what follows in this 
chapter, has suggested that it might even be that Descartes?s understanding of optics was influenced by 
the art of that period. Poetics of Perspective, 23. 
6
The problem of the influence of photography in the development of modern art is still a subject of 
debate. In the 1960s Aaron Scharf argued in Art and Photography that the new technology had had a 
positive effect. In 1980 Kirk Varnedoe demonstrated that no contemporary photograph actually backed 
Scharf?s claims and that the influence of photography on art was difficult to prove. This dissertation 
underlines photography?s influence in disseminating the Academic taste, that is, its disciplinary use. 
See Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics. A Cultural History 1839?1900 (Cambridge: 
337
modern art?s relationship to the invention is difficult to determine in part because 
modern art history itself is a product of photography.  
The implication behind considering perspective and photography as discoveries is 
that they reflect man?s perceptual apparatus or that they are based on scientific laws, 
and that they produce true representations/reproductions of reality.
7
In addition, 
discoveries tend to be applied ?retrospectively,? as Elkins?s epigraphs suggests.  
 Since when is space an important category for the evaluation of works of art? 
Panofsky?s 1927 The Perspective as Symbolic Form redefined space as perspective 
and established it at the center of modern art history, both as a preferred subject and 
as an epistemological model for understanding its object of study. It was not 
fundamental either for W?lfflin or for Riegl, for example, although they did pay 
attention to visual space. 
As Snyder noticed, Panofsky misunderstood the theories of vision of the 
Renaissance and interpreted them in a neo-Kantian mode. Influenced by Cassirer?s 
Philosophy of the Symbolic Forms, he redefined Alberti?s vision as visual experience,
that is, as subjective vision, and argued that those theories entailed the representation 
of objects immersed in space. Panofsky considered that the experience of the world is 
always mediated by man?s perceptual faculties and cognitive apparatus, and that it is 
possible to establish the laws and the theoretical model that explain the mediation 
 
Cambridge University Press, 1997). For a reassessment of this debate see Alexi Worth, ?The Lost 
Photographs of Edouard Manet,? Art in America (January, 2007): 59?65. 
7
As it will be argued in what follows, there is no definitive answer to this problem. On the problem of 
perception, see, for example ?Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye,? The Journal of Aesthetics and 
Art Criticism 59 (Winter, 2001) especially Arthur Danto?s ?Seeing and Showing,? where the author 
takes issue with Marx W. Wartofsky?s ?The Paradox of Painting: Pictorial Representation and the 
Dimensionality of Visual Space,? Social Research 51 (1984). Both texts were considered in the context 
of Whitney Davis?  five seminars ?Art History and Visual Culture Studies,? organized by Dr. June 
Hargrove at the Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland, April-May, 
2001. 
338
itself.  Consequently, these scientific standards might be used for the evaluation of the 
different representations of the world.  
Perspective as Symbolic Form established space as a category for the analysis 
of artistic manifestations of all periods and regions of the world.
8
Thus a particular, 
historically determined model?perspective?was associated/fused together with the 
more general category?space?which, in turn, is considered to be universal. As a 
category, space became part of the questionnaire imposed onto the subject that the 
discipline studies. In other words, art history does not ask, did a certain culture have a 
word for space? Is there any proof that this artist was interested in space as a problem 
or that he perceived it as a volume independent of objects? The question is: how did 
this culture or artist represent or understand space? This is how the Eurocentric 
epistemology on which the discipline is based determines the subjects and objects it 
studies. Moreover, Panofsky?s neo-Kantian approach?a reformulation of Kant?s 
theory of knowledge that takes it away from metaphysics and transforms it into a 
transcendental method oriented towards the consideration of epistemological issues?
defines space as the product of human perception. Neo-Kantianism placed within the 
field of art history man?s perception: the site in which culture interacts with man?s 
sensory apparatus to shape the most primal, pre-conscious functions that govern his 
basic being-in-the-world.  
 
8
It is impossible to list the bibliography related to this publication. In 1991 Christopher Wood 
published a new translation with comments, which is the text used here. Other than the book by Elkins, 
I have profited from the many publications by Kim Veltman on the subject and from George Didi-
Huberman, Devant l?image. Question pos?e aux fins d?une histoire de l?art, (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 
1990). The book by Hubert Damisch L?Origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), translated 
into English in 1994 rekindled the interest in Panofsky?s book and the problem. Among the last 
publications on the subject is Keith Broadfoot?s ?Perspective Yet Again: Damisch with Lacan,? Oxford 
Art Journal 25 (2002):71?94. For the problem of the evaluation of space see James Elkins, ?David 
Summers ?Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism?,? Art Bulletin 86 
(June 2004): 373?381. 
339
Supported by Cassirer?s anthropological philosophy and philosophy of 
sciences?Panofsky establishes a historical understanding of space and vision as 
epistemological paradigm used to evaluate individual perception. Therefore, the use 
of perspective/space as a category for the analysis of art implies decisions about 
?human? perception where a particular model garners art?s and art history?s claims to 
universality.
9
The previous chapter demonstrates how photography helped to disseminate 
and impose ?photographic vision.?  The present chapter deals with perspective per se,
as in the 1930s, and, thanks in part to the use of site photographs, C?zanne?s art was 
indelibly associated with it.  
 
Panofsky?s Perspective as Symbolic Form
In his study of the history of perspective, Elkins points out that, when Panofsky 
endeavored to study it, perspective had been forgotten, and that later on?and in part 
as a consequence of the success of the 1927 treatise?art historians forgot that 
perspective had been forgotten.
10
 Once a thriving discipline and practice, perspective 
in the nineteenth century was merely regarded as an Academic formula passed down 
by professors who did not even consider it necessary to discuss its foundations or its 
 
9
This, in turn, expands the area of art history?s disciplinary influence as described by Preziosi and 
Bennet. 
10
 ?We forgot perspective slowly, throughout the middle and later nineteenth century and into the first 
decades of modernism, and then we forgot that we had forgotten it, in the revaluations of later 
abstraction and postmodernism.? He mentions, among the first signs of this process, J. M. Turner?s 
reluctance to teach perspective. Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 256, n. 60. This book sprung from the 
author?s three volumes dissertation on this subject matter and much of what it follows depends on his 
brilliant argumentation.  
340
validity.
11
 Art criticism did not concentrate on the problem of space until the 1910s 
and referred to perspective as a traditional technical tool devised for the 
representation of space. As Marisa Dalai Emiliani comments,  
On se limitait ? signaler ou ? d?crire la perspective de telle ou telle ?uvre, ? louer 
l?habilet? d?un artiste ou ? en condamner les erreurs, les incorrections. On ne se 
posait pas de questions sur la validit? effective, du point de vue naturaliste et 
scientifique, du syst?me traditionnel de perspective : si une peinture ?tait 
construite avec rigueur, selon les r?gles, on pensait, par habitude, qu?elle 
r?pondait aussi au but de reproduire fid?lement la r?alit? et qu?elle avait par 
cons?quent une valeur esth?tique positive?c?est seulement avec l?av?nement de 
recherches et d??tudes sp?cialis?es sur la perspective?il co?ncide , et ce n?est 
certainement pas un hasard, avec la progressive d?cadence du concept 
d?imitation comme canon esth?tique fondamental?et avec la cons?quente 
affirmation des valeurs formelles et visuelles de l?oeuvre d?art, en premier lieu 
l?espace au-del? de leur correspondance plus ou moins fid?les avec le r?el ? que 
l?on fut emm?ne ? des positions moins rigides et dogmatiques, plus libres et 
ouvertes. Cette ?volution se fit graduellement ? partir de la seconde moitie du 
XIXe si?cle.
12
 (Emphasis added)  
 
The work of art historians reflects the historical developments of their time and 
therefore it is not a coincidence that perspective attracted critical attention precisely at 
the moment when it was being contested by modern art. Concurrently, as this chapter 
demonstrates, Panofsky transformed perspective into a modern intellectual 
construction, which, in the end, had little to do with its original manifestations.   
Perspective?s claims to be a ?discovery? rest today on the common belief that it is 
the artistic manifestation of mathematical formulas and geometric schemas, that is, of 
a scientific model, which explains its central position both at the ideological 
foundations of the discipline and as its object of study. The notion of ?discovery? 
implies that there is a reality?like America, for example, which pre-existed 
 
11
 See Marienne Marcussen, ?L??volution de la perspective lin?aire au XXe si?cle en France,? Hafnia 
Copenhagen Papers in the Art History No. 7 (1980): 51?73. 
12
 See Marisa Dalai Emiliani, ?La question de la perspective,? in Erwin Panofsky, La perspective 
comme forme symbolique (Paris, 1975), 19?20. Dalai Emiliani argues that already Vasari considered 
perspective as abstract and not natural, but that in time, spectators and scholars became used to it.  
341
Columbus?that precedes and hence allows the act of discovery. Much like in 
mathematics or other hard sciences this idea denies its progressive construction as 
?invention,? and suggests that there is a clear teleology in that process, a progressive 
evolution towards the ?correct? model. Einstein?s theories, for example, surpassed 
Newton?s, which since then are considered just historical antecedent. Elkins gives the 
example of the vanishing points, which was only theorized in the 1600s but is used to 
analyze early perspectival paintings from the preceding century,  
[S]ince ?at bottom? a mathematical endeavor, it is thought not to change as 
completely as other aspects of painting. In some sense it has no history at all, 
only a ?mathematical core? that can be discovered or rediscovered or invented but 
never altered. This is a subtle point. To a certain extent it is true, but the danger is 
that what is anachronistic in our understanding of perspective may make 
perspective itself seem timeless, and historical change may be telescoped more 
than is historically justifiable?
13
 
Once the ?true model? has been formulated, it is uncritically and anachronistically 
applied to the study of the historical manifestations of the phenomena. This is what 
art historians do when they translate into a modern language the findings of past 
scholars, especially when the same word is given a new meaning, like in the case of 
perspective.
14
 
Perspective as Symbolic Form was a milestone in Panofsky?s career, 
especially while he was in Germany mulling over the inheritance of Riegl and art 
history?s main challenge: the articulation of structure and history. The book reflects 
the historical and sociological influences sketched in Chapter One of this dissertation, 
as it was published just before the decade under study.
15
 
13
 Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 8?9.  
14
 Other examples are ornament, ekphrasis, space and, as this essay explained, art and even art history.  
15
 It might be compared with Venturi?s 1926 Il gusto dei primitivi. In 1927 Kracauer published his 
article on photography, and Roger Fry his important C?zanne: A Study of His Development.
342
From the beginning of his career, Panofsky was well aware of the work of 
W?lfflin and derived his ideas about pictorial space from Riegl, who in turn had 
benefited from the writings of Adolph Hildebrand (1847?1921.)
16
 Therefore 
Panofsky?s basic approach to space depended on the post-Kantian and post-Herbatian 
theory of perception spread by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821?1897), which scholars 
of the German-speaking countries had used until then for the creation of art historical 
categories and vocabulary.  
As the title of the book indicates, the main influence on Panofsky?s treatise on 
perspective was the neo-Kantian philosophy of Cassirer as he developed it at the 
Warburg Institute. The Renaissance and Humanism were the Institute?s central 
interests, whereas the members of the School of Vienna, and Riegl in particular, were 
interested in unseating that tradition from the place it held at the core of the 
discipline. Whereas in Hamburg the German scholars were concerned mostly with 
iconographic issues and in a philological approach to the sources, the Viennese 
scholars focused on the analysis of the form and structure of works of art. These 
tensions explain some of the fractures and internal contradictions that characterize the 
book.  
Panofsky?s avowed goal was to locate perspective in the historical period that 
created it. As the book progresses, perspective becomes a ?symbolic form? whose 
validity overflows circumscribed periods of history to become the worldview of the 
West.
17
 Michael Ann Holly observes that in this way perspective gained,  
 
16
 See Wood, ?Introduction? as in n. 16.  
 
17
 Michael Ann Holly comments: ?[i]l avait dans la premi?re partie contest? la validit? de la 
perspective de la Renaissance mais arrive ? la deuxi?me partie, il lui a accord? une sorte de 
343
assez de stabilit? pour ?tre consid?r?e comme une mani?re valable, presque 
empiriquement v?ritable, d?articuler l?espace. Son importance s?est doublement 
accrue. Ce n?est plus seulement une construction efficace de l?espace, mais c?est 
en soi une r?flexion philosophique sur la possibilit? m?me de le construire. 
18
 
This philosophic approach with claims to universality is wholly Eurocentric and 
historically determined. More on this below.   
Both Snyder and Elkins?among many other scholars?have argued that in the 
Renaissance, perspective was merely a technical device for representing volumes in 
space. Perspective was tied to Alberti?s example of the drawing on the window pane, 
and therefore to realism and mimesis. Panofsky redefinition of his understanding of 
vision implied adding the notion of space to the original scene. Through the glass it is 
now possible to see, as Elkins observes, ?an imaginary space, occupied by whole 
objects in apparent succession,?  
Perspective is imagined as an a priori organizing principle that is applied to an 
?area of space.? Panofsky speaks of objects ?in? a certain space, depicted ?with? 
that space, and says perspective gives us ?whole? objects in a ?succession.? Here 
objects are nothing more than necessary examples, things that occur not merely 
in space but because of it: they are knowable because they exist in space. 
19
 
Panofsky?s perspective puts order in a group of objects; paintings are about 
wholes, not just about isolated objects. The glass represents the canvas, and therefore, 
?perspective space? becomes a synonym of fictive space and of pictorial space. 
Illusionism in painting is equated with perspective and the surface of the picture with 
the window pane, and therefore with vision. This was a fundamental step in 
transforming perspective from an object-oriented into a space-oriented device. ?The 
 
pr??minence p?remptoire et a compar? les autres syst?mes spatiaux au standard du XVe si?cle. En 
d?autres termes, comme l?a remarqu? M. Podro, il est en train tout ? la fois, de saper la perspective et 
de la vanter comme un instrument de diagnostic, position contradictoire qui conduit ? toutes sortes de 
difficult?s epistemologiques.? ?Panofsky et la perspective comme forme symbolique,? in Pour un 
Temps/Erwin Panofsky (Paris : Paris, Centre Georges-Pompidou/Pandora,  1983), 90.  
18
 Holly, ?Panofsky et la perspective,? 94?95. 
19
 Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 13?14. 
344
Renaissance painters?Elkins concludes?made perspective pictures without the 
benefit of a concept of space.?
20
 (Emphasis added.) Panofsky projected onto the 
Renaissance?s perspective the modern idea of space conceived in the 
Enlightenment.
21
 The scrutiny of the history of perspective provided the rationale for 
the interpretation of the letter by C?zanne that opens this chapter.  
Moreover, with Panofsky, perspective acquired a metaphorical function: the 
ability to ?refer? to or represent other meanings. Although his book is the product of 
the intellectual development that took place in Germany in the late 1920s, it 
determined a sea change in the approach to the work of C?zanne, as the article by 
Reff proves. The paradigmatic character of Panofsky?s perspective explains that it 
was used?anachronistically?for the study of modern art. 
Elkins? detailed analysis of the first paragraphs of Panofsky?s treatise on 
perspective clarifies how the use of an ever increasing number of similar but not fully 
identical concepts to characterize space, vision, percept, and so on, allows the author 
to implicate an impressive number of disciplines and areas of expertise in the study of 
perspective: optics, mathematics/geometry, psychology, gnoseology, physiology of 
perception, philosophy, art history. In most of these disciplines the problem of 
perception (and therefore of representation) of space is all but definitively settled, 
whereas art history has transformed perspective into a set of fossilized practices and 
simplified formulas that have the upper hand in every day practice.
22
 Moreover, 
perspective?s centrality in modern art history depends on the ?evidence? that those 
 
20
 Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 14. 
21
 Elkins comments that perspective is Janus-faced: there was one practice in the Renaissance that 
predates modern art history but is now understood according to modern notions in such a way that the 
reshaping itself goes unnoticed.   
22
 See Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, Chapter 6. 
345
other disciplines?especially geometry and physiopsychology?are said to provide. 
Elkins proves that perspective falls between the cracks of the modern geography of 
disciplines. This muddled epistemological quality, which makes it unencompassable 
by any one of the many disciplines it touches, allows perspective to be a foundation, 
an origin.
23
 
Panofsky?s maneuver locates perspective in the periphery of art history where the 
discipline relates with other fields of knowledge, which support the epistemological 
claims that Panofsky makes for perspective while remaining out of reach of the 
discipline?s critical apparatus.
24
 In his argumentation Panofsky discusses perspective 
as 
1. a technical device for representing space in works of art; i.e., as a 
conventional constructive formula;  
2. a geometrical, scientific model for the measurement of space; 
3. a symbolic form that characterizes a defined period in the history of 
culture, a notion related with the concept of Weltanschauung,
4. a scheme related to the retinal image,
25
 
5. an abstracted model of what the mind perceives, with the implication that 
it corresponds to the structure of the world.
26
 
Elkins? analysis of the development of the modern understanding of perspective 
coincides with the ?chronology? Trouillot has established for the North Atlantic 
universals. Perspective as a technique for the representation of space and the 
 
23
 See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge.
24
 For the relationship of art history with other disciplines see Cheetham, Kant, Art, Introduction and 
Chapter One. 
25
 Panofsky did not consider that scientific perspective represented the retinal image, as the eye has a 
curved surface.  
26
 See Kim Veltman, ?Panofsky?s Perspective: A Half Century Later,? in Marisa Dalai-Emiliani, ed. 
Atti del convegno internazionale di studi: la prospettiva rinascimentale, (Milan 1977). Points four and 
five are very important for the notion of realism and mimesis. In Idea. A Concept in Art Theory 
Panofsky writes ?L?id?ologie qui se trouve derri?re la configuration de l?espace ne peut plus longtemps 
reposer sur l?hypoth?se na?ve que la peinture en perspective n?est d?aucune mani?re isomorphique du 
monde qu?elle d?crit. Mais comme m?taphore de la perception, la forme de la peinture de la 
Renaissance convient parfaitement ? la vision n?o-kantienne du projet humain.? Quoted in Holly, 
?Panofsky et la perspective,? 96. 
346
embodiment of the Renaissance?s ?dream of a rational vision? confirms that this 
period established the conditions of possibility (the ?geography of the imagination?) 
of the epistemological project of the West. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 
that period?s understanding of vision and space were redefined according to the ideas 
developed since the Enlightenment, and projected onto the past. As Elkins remarks,   
Cartesian space and Newtonian absolute space were not unopposed. Leibniz was 
a principal critic, and Bishop Berkeley thought ?absolute space? was a ?phantom 
of the mechanic and Geometrical philosophers.? Nevertheless Descartes?s and 
Newton?s insistence on space as an independent ?object? of contemplation 
provided the scientific foundation for Kant?s a priori spatial intuition. For Kant 
the a posteriori world of objects is firmly disconnected from the synthetic, a 
priori intuition of space itself. ? Kant?s pure space makes ?the actual appearance 
of objects possible? and is ?the only explanation that makes intelligible the 
possibility of geometry.? 
27
 
In Germany?where Kant?s ideas about education, which placed all learning 
under the aegis of philosophy, were hegemonic?the debate about space, even in the 
field of sciences and empirical psychology, was highly influenced by the 
philosopher?s theory of knowledge.
28
 In the nineteenth century, as the advances in 
science and observation contradicted some of Kant?s and Hegel?s basic assumptions, 
scholars and philosophers had to create new systems that included these findings.
29
 At 
the beginning of the twentieth century, the ascendancy of philosophy started to 
decline.
30
 The neo-Kantian contributions to the discussion of space that influenced 
 
27
 Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective, 24?25. 
28
 This differentiates the German from French system, which separated literature from sciences. These 
last were taught at the ?cole Polythecnique established at the time of the French Revolution.  
29
 A Kantian philosopher like Friedrich Herbart (1776?1841) is today considered one of the founders 
of empirical psychology, together with Gustav Fechner (1801?1887), a physicist whose interest in 
mental measurement was far more metaphysical than scientific. Important for the subject of space was 
the work of Hermann von Helmhotz (1821?1894) whose research was greatly influenced by Kant?s 
philosophy, and of Hermann Lotze (1817?1881) who studied both philosophy and medicine.  
30
 The problem of space and the interconnection of psychology, sciences and philosophy in the 
nineteenth century has been considered by Gary Hatfield who differentiates two general approaches: 
the ?natural? and the ?normative.? ?Throughout the modern period the question of how distance is 
perceived was addressed by virtually all psychological theories of vision. Work on this question led 
347
Panofsky must be understood in this context. Before arriving in Hamburg, Cassirer 
had worked with Hermann Cohen. Michael Friedman writes that,  
Cohen, the first Jew to hold a professorship in Germany, was the founder of the 
so-called Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, famous for interpreting Kant's 
transcendental method as beginning with the ?fact of science? and then arguing 
regressively to the presuppositions or conditions of possibility of this ?fact.? 
Kant was thus read as an ?epistemologist [Erkenntniskritiker]? or methodologist 
of science rather than as a ?metaphysician? in the tradition of post-Kantian 
German idealism. 
31
 
Cassirer?s analysis of space was part of his life-long interest in the theory of 
knowledge.
32
 In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, he acknowledges the influence 
of Ernst Mach?s 1906 Perception and Error, where the author distinguishes 
?physiological space,? i.e., sensual space, from ?metric/scientific space,? and thus 
recuperates from the sciences the problem of perception and knowledge.
33
 As Elkins 
explains, Cassirer ?rephilosophizes and unquantifies a theory born of mathematical 
 
investigators to seek ?cues? for distance in optical stimulation, and to speculate about mental processes 
that might mediate the perception of a three-dimensional visual world on the basis of a two-
dimensional retinal image?.By contrast, during the same period nearly all philosophical treatments of 
spatial perception addressed the question of whether our knowledge of the geometrical properties of 
material objects is based solely on sensory knowledge of the basic properties of matter?.. Inasmuch as 
both sets of questions pertain to mental processes or abilities, they are similar. But they are distinct in 
that the first set concerns the basic functioning of the senses in the perception of space, while the 
second pertains to the cognitive grounds for physical or metaphysical knowledge of the fundamental 
properties of matter.? The author notes that only at the turn of the century philosophy started to be 
displaced from the discussion as outmoded. The Natural and the Normative. Theories of Spatial 
Perception from Kant to Helmholtz, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), 12?13.  
31
 Michael Friedman, "Ernst Cassirer", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2004 
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/cassirer/>. 
32
 Kim Veltam notices that Cassirer had articulated already in 1910 ?a distinction between two 
fundamentally different approaches to science, one which dominated Antiquity and emphasized 
substance (and definition), the other which evolved in the Renaissance and concentrated on function 
(and relation). Cassirer had, moreover, implied the method of Antiquity was linked with notions of 
sensuous space (unhomogeneous and anisotropic) and that the method which originated in the 
Renaissance was linked with notions of mathematical space (homogeneous and isotropic).? 
?Panofsky?s Perspective,? URL= 
http://www.sumscorp.com/articles/pdf/1980/Panofskys/Perspective/A/Half/Century/Later.pdf 2. 
33
 Ernst Mach (1838?1916) was a philosopher and a physicist who was reputed for his contributions to 
the theory of perception and the philosophy of sciences.  
348
and experimental facts.?
34
 This state of affairs allowed Panofsky to rewrite the history 
of perspective as the history of space and to position it in between disciplinary fields, 
and, at the same time, at the core of art history.  
Space was one of the issues discussed at Davos in 1929.  Heidegger had already 
taken issue with Cassirer?s interpretation in his review of the first volume of The 
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.
35
 Cassirer?s theory describes a progressive increase in 
man?s aptitude of acknowledging/perceiving space and objects.
36
 At Davos he 
described the ?atmosphere? of the mythical man,  
laquelle, charg?e de forces demoniques,[sic] exprime les orientations vitales les 
plus sp?cifiques de l?homme lui-m?me. Si l?on consid?re qu?au-dessus de cet 
espace expressif se construisent l?espace repr?sentatif de l?art et finalement 
l?espace significatif propre ? la math?matique et ? la physique, on reconna?t l? 
cette transcendance singuli?re dans laquelle l?homme, gr?ce ? l??nergie 
symbolisante qui lui est propre, se comprend lui-m?me dans son monde et 
comprend le monde en lui.
37
 
34
 Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 25?26. Before the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer had 
published Descartes?Kritik der mathematischen und wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, and Leibniz?s 
System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen. Cassirer's study Einstein?s Theory of Relativity 
Considered from the Epistemological Standpoint appeared in 1921 and included a preface by Einstein 
himself.  
35
 Ernst Cassirer, Cassirer, Ernst, D?bat sur le kantisme et la philosophie: Davos, mars 1929, et autres 
textes de 1929?1931 / Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger (Paris : Beauchesne, 1972). The reviews are 
in pages 84?100. On Cassirer?s position on space at Davos, see pp. 25?26. Cassirer?s Das 
Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der Neueren Zeit has three volumes. The first 
considers the period that spans from the Renaissance to Descartes, the second from Empiricism to 
Kant, and the third the post-Kantian philosophers to Hegel. 
36
 ?Both the intuition of space and the intuition of the thing are made possible only when the stream of 
successive experiences is in a sense halted?when the mere ?one-thing-after-the-other? is transformed 
into an ?at-one-time?.? This transformation occurs when a different signification, a different ?valence? 
is attributed to the factors of the flowing change? [A] variant is stopped, taken as something 
permanent that repeats itself with changes.? Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3, 
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 154. 
37
 Ernst Cassirer, ?II Conf?rences du Professeur Ernst Cassirer,? in Ernst Cassirer, D?bat sur le 
kantisme, 26. Michael Friedman comments that ?Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is 
a concern for the more ?primitive? forms of world-presentation underlying the ?higher? and more 
sophisticated cultural forms?a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed 
primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the mythical view of the world lying at the most 
primitive level of all. For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations of ?symbolic meaning? now 
have an independent status and foundational role that is quite incompatible with both Marburg neo-
Kantianism and Kant's original philosophical conception. In particular, they lie at a deeper, 
autonomous level of spiritual life which then gives rise to the more sophisticated forms by a dialectical 
349
Heidegger, on the contrary, focused on an utterly subjective experience of space 
that impeded any kind of general classification or periodization. In the third volume 
of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer states that,  
What distinguishes our own undertaking from that of Heidegger is above all that 
it does not stop at this stage of the at-hand and its mode of spatiality, but without 
challenging Heidegger?s position goes beyond it; for we wish to follow the road 
leading from spatiality as a factor in the at-hand to space as the form of 
existence, and furthermore to show how this road leads right through the domain 
of symbolic formation?in the twofold sense of ?representation? and of 
?signification.? 
38
 
For Cassirer space affords not only orientation in the world. As Massimo Ferrari 
comments the   
constitution originaire du monde objectif et des diverses formes symboliques qui 
l?articulent : de ce point de vue, le probl?me de Cassirer s?ouvre pr?cis?ment la 
o? celui de Heidegger se cl?t, c?est-?-dire dans la passage du cadre du 
Zuhandenes ? celui du Vorhandenes, et, de mani?re plus g?n?rale, du cadre du 
Dasein  ? celui de la philosophie de la culture. 
39
 
From Zuhandenes to Vorhandenes, distance from things?and therefore space?
becomes of fundamental importance. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is part of a 
Kulturphilosophie, a theoretical interpretation developed on the basis of little factual 
documentation, where space is a ?forme originaire et constitutive de la cr?ation 
spirituelle? and ?le resultat d?un processus de Formation (Formung) symbolique.?
40
 
Cassirer reinterprets the transcendental schematism of Kant?s First Critique, that is, 
 
developmental process. From mythical thought, religion and art develop; from natural language, 
theoretical science develops.? Friedman, "Ernst Cassirer." 
URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/cassirer/>. 
38
 Cassirer,  Philosophy of Symbolic, 149. 
39
 Massimo Ferrari, ?La philosophie de l?espace chez Ernst Cassirer,? Revue de M?taphysique et de 
Morale (July?December, 1992): 472. 
40
 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3, quoted in Ferrari, ?Philosophie de 
l?espace,?  474. This scheme includes language as a form of spatial intuition that allows us to establish 
distance from objects. 
350
the mediation between the sensorial and the knowable. In this way, as Ferrari 
observes   
[D]e forme transcendantale de la connaissance, l?espace s??tend ainsi non 
seulement aux connexions de formes concr?tes de l?exp?rience spatiale, mais 
devient ?galement cet instrument spirituel vou? ? d?terminer l??tre-au-monde de 
l?homme, non sur le fondement de sa finitude existentielle?comme l?aurait 
voulu Heidegger ?, mais sur le fondement de son autonomie spirituelle et de sa 
capacit? a cr?er des formes.  
? [V]oila aussi pourquoi la philosophie de l?espace de Cassirer, ?. s?est peu ? 
peu rapproch?e de l??laboration d?une philosophie de type anthropologique,
modifiant ainsi dans une certaine mesure le plan originaire d?une ?critique de la 
culture? tir?e d?une extension de la ?critique de la raison.? (Emphasis added) 
41
 
Cassirer does not consider perspective but space. One of the alchemical 
transmutations that Panofsky performs in the first paragraphs of his 1927 treatise is to 
adapt the philosopher?s ideas about space and use them to characterize two different 
kinds of perspective in a process that transforms an already Eurocentric argument into 
a wholly ethnocentric system where non-Western cultures have absolutely no place. 
In the context of Panofsky?s goal in the 1920s, this seems quite an innocuous 
manoeuvre, as the author was pushing forward his arguments about Humanism and 
the Renaissance. It had significant implications for the history of art history given the 
post-war influence of Panfosky?s scholarship and the critical fortune of the book. The 
paragraphs in which this gambit takes place must be quoted in extenso.  
After the a long quote from Cassirer that describes Mach?s psychophysiological 
space as opposed to the mathematical, non-natural, constructed one, Panofsky states 
[E]xact perspectival construction is a systematic abstraction from the structure of 
this psychophysiological space. ?. In a sense, perspective transforms 
psychophysiological space into mathematical space. It [perspective] negates the 
difference between front and back? It [perspective] forgets that we see not with 
a single fixed eye?. It [perspective]  takes no account of the enormous 
difference between the psychologically conditioned ?visual image?... and the 
 
41
 Ferrari, ?Philosophie de l?espace,?  476. 
351
mechanically conditioned ?retinal image??. Finally, perspectival construction 
ignores the crucial circumstance that this retinal image?entirely apart from its 
subsequent psychological ?interpretation,? and even apart from the fact that the 
eyes move ? is a projection not on a flat but on a concave surface. Thus already 
on this lowest, still prepsychological level of facts there is a fundamental 
discrepancy between ?reality? and its construction. This is also true, of course, for 
the entirely analogous operation of the camera. 
42
(Emphasis added)  
 
Panofsky lists all that is wrong with perspective, its arbitrariness and the distortions it 
engenders, in order to contrast it with the more natural and truthful curved 
?perspective? adopted in Classical Antiquity, which took into consideration the form 
of the eye. The text is illustrated with drawings by Guido Hauck who, according to 
Panofsky, had established a scientific model for these alternative, more natural 
perspectives.
43
 
Antique optics, which brought all these insights to fruition, was thus in its first 
principles quite antithetical to linear perspective. And if it did understand so 
clearly the spherical distortions of form, this only follows from ? its still more 
momentous recognition of the distortions of magnitude. For here, too, antique 
optics fit its theory more snugly to the factual structure of the subjective optical 
impression than did Renaissance perspective. ? Evidently, [in the Renaissance] 
the contradiction was felt between Euclid?s perspectiva naturalis or communis,
which sought simply to formulate mathematically the laws of natural vision 
??.and the perspective artificialis ?
44
 
As the discussion settles in the differentiation of the two periods and the two 
?perspectives? that are their symbolic forms, space disappears as a problem or, better, 
it is identified with perspective. In Antiquity space would have been understood as 
un-homogeneous, finite, and anisotropic, whereas since the Renaissance the West 
would understand it in a rational, mathematical way, that is, as homogeneous, infinite, 
isotropic, continuous, and systematic. Panofsky calls both ?perspective.? Margaret 
 
42
 Panofsky, Perspective, 30?31. 
43
 On Guido Hauck see Michel Podro, The Critical Art Historians (New Haven: (New Haven: Yale 
University Press, 1982), 186?187. See next chapter. 
44
 Panofsky, Perspective,? 35?36. 
352
Iversen notices that Panofsky posits natural perspective as a repoussoir to highlight 
the system of the Renaissance.
45
 In the process, he confines the analysis to the history 
of the West.   
In the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer contrasts modern to mythical 
thinking (and the notion of space that corresponds to it). The first corresponds to the 
dawn of humanity, and, even if his attitude reflects an evolutionist and Eurocentric 
ideology, he tries to make an objective description, in keeping with his relativist 
approach. 
46
 Conversely, Panofsky?s text eliminates this stage of human development 
from analysis and, thus, from history. His argument alternates between perspective as 
mathematical abstraction, which he equates with the perspective of the Renaissance, 
and the spatial construction of Classical Antiquity, which he also characterizes as 
perspective on the grounds that it was based on geometrical formulations. Perspective 
is never non-rational, and in the second part of the text it takes the attributes, function, 
and role of space. Therefore the author does not make room for non-perspective, that 
is for non-perspectival, space. As explained above, Panofsky?s perspective encloses 
or supposes the modern, post-Kantian notion of space as an empty volume that 
contains objects.  
 
45
 See Margaret Iversen, ?Orthodox and Anamorphic Perspectives,? Oxford Art Journal 20 (1995): 81?
84. This author also notes that Panofsky added to the perspective of the Renaissance a neo-Kantian 
understanding of space. Ten years later she comments, ?[i]n my view, Panofsky naturalises Antique 
perspective as mimesis of the optical impression so that it can serve as a dark cloth against which the 
constructive and rational character of Renaissance linear perspective sparkles like a gem.? ?The 
Discourse of Perspective in the Twentieth Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan,? The Oxford Art 
Journal 28 (February, 2005), 197. 
46
 Iversen contends that Cassirer like Panofsky tried to establish a relativist typology where every 
period has its own value. Both failed and skewed towards a progressive teleological history where the 
latest period is ?better,? ?more advanced,? etc. ?The Discourse of Perspective,? 197. 
353
Panofsky argues that perspective also gives the possibility of reacting against its 
rules, which allows him to encompass even Impressionism as a manifestation of this 
symbolic form. 
47
 Iversen notes that,  
Since?Panofsky tends to adopt the Italian Renaissance as an authoritative 
viewpoint, perspective, for him, encompasses both itself and its other. There can 
be no non- or even anti-perspectival art?only swings between the polarities of 
its two-sided significance: ?it creates room for bodies to expand plastically and 
move gesturally, and yet at the same time it enables light to spread out in space 
and in a painterly way dissolve the bodies.??. Perspective also encompasses all 
variations in the perceptual subject?s attitude to the world?. Because of the 
epistemological status of perspective, the question of the right balance between 
these tendencies must be determined. It would seem that in Panofsky?s view, 
post-Renaissance art that differs substantially from it, is doomed to err on one 
side or the other, guilty either of being too coldly mathematical and objectivizing 
on the one hand, or too warmly expressionist or too eccentrically impressionistic 
on the other. 
48
 
Georges Didi-Huberman noticed in his 1990 Devant l?image that in fact 
Panofsky leaves aside all non-perspectival and non-Western art.
49
 Panofsky?s text is 
claustrophobically European and even within Europe, it concentrates on those 
cultures whose art might be said to use perspective and strive for illusionism. Cassirer 
could not conceive of a human not able to perceive space, which allows him to 
distinguish different periods in history. This is not the case with perspective, taking 
into account that not all cultures sought to represent realistically what they saw or 
conceived of representations as pictures, and that few of them developed 
 
47
 Panofsky like Riegl compared an Ancient impressionism with the modern art movement. He argued 
that the optical effects of the latest movement were supported by the perspectival structure that 
structured the pictorial field. Panofsky argued the art of Antiquity was focused on the representation of 
objects and thus the problem was to reflect the different distances and the representation of the space 
and air separating them. This was the reason why these paintings did not have a consistent or cohesive 
space. Modern Impressionism, on the other hand, could profit from the new understanding of space 
brought about by scientific perspective. Thanks to the formulation of a systematic space it could  
?persistently devalue and dissolve solid forms without jeopardizing the stability of the space and the 
solidity of the individual objects; on the contrary it conceals that stability and solidity.? Panofsky, 
Perspective, 42. 
48
 Iversen, ?Orthodox and Anamorphic Perspectives,? 82. 
49
 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l?image. Question pos?e aux fins d?une histoire de l?art (Paris : 
Editions de Minuit, 1990), 140-142. 
354
mathematical and geometric models of reality. In Panofsky system, the West provides 
the epistemological model for the understanding of space.
50
 Considering Panofsky?s 
perspective as a North Atlantic universal underscores the fact that there have been 
alternative models for apprehending space within the West and that, as the history of 
perspective demonstrates, Panofsky?s perspective is a modern, historically determined 
paradigm. 
Panofsky?s book was also influenced by contemporaneous developments. Space 
appeared on the horizon of art history as perspective at the moment in which the 
theory of relativity and other scientific discoveries were problematizing it, that is, 
bringing it into public consciousness as a problem. To abstract theories about 
mathematical space (Einstein) and organic space (nationalisms) Panofsky opposed an 
idealized characterization of Renaissance perspective as mathematical, rational, 
homogeneous, and isotropic space. His treatise establishes a balance between the two 
extremes and installs perspective/space at the center of the modern Humanist art 
history as rational, measurable distance.
51
 The discussion about space in art history 
even today bears the mark of perspective as the standard against which any other 
manifestation has to be gauged, in the same way that all narrations about events are 
 
50
 Trouillot has argued that, ?As anchor of a claim to universal legitimacy, the geography of 
imagination inherent in the West since the sixteenth century imposes a frame within which to read 
world history. Thematic variations and political choices aside?  this framework has always assumed 
the centrality of the North Atlantic not only as the site from which world history is made but also as the 
site whence that story can be told.  Eric Wolf ... has argued that the human disciplines have treated the 
world outside of Europe as people without history. One can more precisely claim that they were also 
treated as people without historicity. Their capacity to narrate anecdotal parts of the world story was 
always subsumed under a North Atlantic historicity that was deemed universal.? Trouillot, Global 
Transformations, 12. See also J?rn R?sen ed., Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate, 
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). 
51
 See Melville, ?The Temptation of New,? 409?411. This is also Elkins?s argument about Panofsky?s 
treatise, which he characterizes as ?an essay about the concept of the Renaissance and about the 
possibility of art history. The essay is central on account of its thesis regarding perspective, but also 
because it shows with exceptional clarity the anfractuous claims at the heart of the heart of art history.?  
Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective, 204.   
355
assessed according to their similarity or difference to the European interpretation of 
time and history.  Elkins comments,  
It is not merely the foundation of perspective, or even of pictorial realism, which 
is at stake here. It is also the configuration of art history itself insofar as our 
discipline remains dependent on two founding moments, one enfolded in the 
other: the Renaissance, since it arguably remains the discipline?s paradigmatic 
moment, and perspective, since it remains the exemplary achievement of the 
Renaissance. Stephen Melville puts the problem this way:   
?The Renaissance achievement of rational perspective becomes the condition 
of the possibility of the art historical discipline, and we are compelled to its terms 
whenever we look to establish another world view that would not, for example, 
privilege the Renaissance because we can neither ?look? nor imagine a ?world 
view? without reinstalling at the heart of our project the terms only the 
Renaissance can expound for us.?
52
 
This is another inflection of the text that describes photographs as machines for 
the production of perspective and thus, brings this chapter and the essay to the place 
where it started. Let us now turn to the consideration of the case of C?zanne and how 
in the 1930s his art began to be understood as a fundamental chapter in the history of 
the representation of space.  
 
Space and Perspective in Nineteenth-Century France
Although Kant?s philosophy was known in France, his ideas were developed in a 
particular way. Since this theoretical model determined the cultural horizon that 
influenced C?zanne and his contemporaries, its examination might clarify how they 
apprehended space. This is a quite unexplored field, as space as a category for the 
 
52
 Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective,189?90. 
356
analysis of works of art has not been questioned in this context.
53
 This is a book-
length project that cannot be carried out in the context of this essay, but some 
indications will be given below. The goal is to demonstrate that the methodologies 
formulated by German scholars in the 1930s according to their particular 
understanding of vision, space, and perception shaped the basic approach to 
C?zanne?s art.
54
 As these methodologies and the theories are integral to modern art 
history?s foundations, they are ideological and thus, transparent to analysis for most 
art historians. Besides the application of a neo-Kantian definition of space to the 
study of C?zanne?s work, modern art history embedded this interpretation of space 
into its explanation of the artist?s creative process thus implying that C?zanne shared 
it. This in spite of the fact that there is no proof that C?zanne and his contemporaries 
conceived or experienced space as infinite, homogeneous, continuous and isotropic or 
even that they were aware or interested in space as a volume enveloping objects. On 
the contrary, confirming Elkins?s observation, contemporary art criticism and texts 
refer to the perception and representation of objects, to the distance that separates 
them and sometimes to their position relative to the beholder. Perspective, if and 
when it is mentioned, is studied merely as a technical device. The examination of 
three nineteenth-century texts that exceptionally consider the problem of space 
confirms this argument.   
 
53
 Kim Velman lists the authors who criticized the use of perspective and space as a category for the 
analysis of works of art. See ?Panofsky?s Perspective?. 
http://www.sumscorp.com/articles/pdf/1980/Panofskys/Perspective/A/Half/Century/Later.pdf, 9. 
54
 A parallel might be established with the way non-Western visual products were labeled ?art,? and 
thus shaped to fit into the general history of art. The situation is in this case aggravated by the 
intercommunication between the two cultural areas and the use of similar sources and vocabulary 
(sensation, perception, space, art), which are sometimes false cognates that wrongly suggest that the 
terms have equivalent meaning. 
357
Stephen Mallarm??s ?The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,? was published in 
England in 1876. The poet does not analyze the perception of (actual) space, 
implying, on the contrary, that one can become aware of it through art. In Manet?s 
paintings,    
Air reigns supreme and real, as if it held an enchanted life conferred by the 
witchery of art; a life neither personal nor sentient, but itself subjected to the 
phenomena thus called up by science and shown to our astonished eyes, with its 
perpetual metamorphosis and its invisible action rendered visible. And how? By 
this fusion or by this struggle ever continued between surface and space, between 
colour and air.? 
If we could find no other way to indicate the presence of air than the partial 
or repeated application of colour as usually employed, doubtless the 
representation would be as fleeting as the effect represented but from the first 
conception of the work, the space intended to contain the atmosphere has been 
indicated, so that when this is filled by the represented air, it is as unchangeable 
as the other parts of the picture. 
55
 
Mallam? notices that Manet?s paintings are filled with air and light and that the 
artist has indicated the area that contains them. What amazes the poet is that Manet 
actually perceives the atmosphere as positive, not that he conceives of space as a 
volume.  Mallarm? observes that most artists of the past had taken liberties with 
respect to perspective which had been reduced to ?almost conforming to the exotic 
usage of barbarians.?
56
 He is also aware of the influence of cultural conventions on 
vision as he condemns perspective as an artificial device for representing depth, and 
praises the ?natural perspective? of Japanese and Asian art. The paragraph, moreover, 
demonstrates that the poet is only referring to pictorial space.  
Then composition... must play a considerable part in the aesthetics of a master of 
the Impressionists? No; certainly not; as a rule the grouping of modern persons 
does not suggest it, and for this reason our painter is pleased to dispense with it, 
 
55
 Stephen Mallarm?, ?The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,? in Charles Moffet, The New Painting, 
Impressionsim 1874?1886, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco with the National Gallery of 
Art, Washington,  1986, 31.  
56
 Mallarm?, ?The Impressionists,? 31.  
358
and at the same time to avoid both affectation and style. ? If we turn to natural 
perspective (not that utterly and artificially classic science which makes our eyes 
the dupes of a civilized education, but rather that artistic perspective which we 
learn from the extreme East-Japan for example) and look at these sea-pieces of 
Manet, where the water at the horizon rises to the height of the frame, which 
alone interrupts it, we feel a new delight at the recovery of a long obliterated 
truth. 
57
 
Mallarm? calls perspective a technique devised for representing objects in painting. 
He refers to the Japanese bird?s-eye view as natural perspective. In the next sentence 
however he refers to this system as ?artistic perspective,? which implies that he refers 
to the representation and not to the actual perception of space.    
 The examination of two almost contemporaneous texts on art with a 
philosophical penchant, one German and the other French, confirm these 
observations. Adolf Hildebrand?s influential The Problem of Form in Painting and 
Sculpture was published in 1893. The author, a sculptor who advocated a return to 
classicism to counter impressionism, does consider visual space as the container of 
volumes but does not relate it with the experience of real space. Moreover, he deems 
art and nature as wholly different spheres of being. Man?s interaction with an ever-
changing nature provides a fuzzy, unconscious comprehension of space, which makes 
it very difficult to devise a pictorial representation of it. Artists must pay attention to 
the ?few? indicators they might find, so that they can suggest space with lines and 
colors. This activity and realization sets them apart from the rest of mortals but 
through their work they can help others to become conscious of the existence of 
actual space. In the end, it is the representation of objects that matters, because the 
experience of space derives from them. He believes that artists need to envision ?total 
space? by which  
 
57
 Mallarm?, ?The Impressionists,? 31. 
359
we mean space as extending through all three dimensions, or in all directions. 
The essential factor of this is continuity. Let us imagine total space as a body of 
water into which we may sink certain vessels and thus be able to define 
individual volumes?. In an artistic representation Nature must be expressed as 
just such a spatial whole, if it is to contain that elementary impression which 
Nature makes upon us. 
58
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Hildebrand proposes to ?imagine? space as an oceanic, amorphous envelope. He 
does not mention perspective but explains space as the product of stereoscopic vision 
combined with the information produced by the other senses and through experience.  
Artists must translate their perceptions into a language that the eye can decode as [the 
representation of] space. 
59
 
Since the spatial effect of nature is a product of different factors?such as the 
actual form of the object, its proper coloring, the illumination ??a concerted 
effect is produced existing only for the eye, by factors which otherwise are not 
necessarily connected. This concerted effect, or visual unity, shows the separate 
conditions working simultaneously, and thus enables us to grasp the spatial 
relations of a simultaneous exposition. Therefore, the specifically artistic force 
and talent of the painter rest on his ability to discover the visual values of space 
in Nature, and the unity of his image and its power to create in the mind an idea 
of space depend upon these. 
60
 
For Hildebrand no fundamental correlation exists between the perceptual/visual 
space and pictorial space, and that in order to convey the second, attention must be 
paid to what is not important or determinant for the first, as nature and art provide 
different kind of data for the subjective construction of space.  
In 1895 Dimier published ?Le model? dans la peinture et la troisi?me 
dimension, (? propos des manuscrits de L?onard de Vinci)? in the Revue de 
 
58
 Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, (New York: G.E. Stechert & Co, 
1945), 47. 
59
 ?The parallel between Nature and Art is not to be sought in the equality of their actual appearances, 
but rather in that both have the same capacity for producing spatial effects.? Hildebrand, Problem of 
Form, 56. 
60
 Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 55. 
360
m?taphysique et de morale.
61
 The publication of a new edition of the Leonardo?s 
writings provided the author the opportunity to criticize impressionism from a 
?philosophical? point of view. According to Dimier, Leonardo anticipated some of 
the philosophical opinions on the subject.
 62
 He argues that, besides Florentine 
drawing and Venetian color, Leonardo invented a third way for representing reality, 
modeling. In this way he prefigured chiaroscuro: ?c?est-?-dire la repr?sentation des 
formes en profondeur par le moyen de la lumi?re et de l?ombre.?
63
 
Although nature can be perceived only as a colored plane, binocular or 
stereoscopic vision provides indications about depth. Artists can represent these 
effects by a highly artificial resource: the use of black and white. Painting is for 
Dimier, as it was for Leonardo,  ??une philosophique sp?culation qui consid?re les 
qualit?s de formes, airs, positions, plantes, etc? qui sont entour?es d?ombre et de 
lumi?re?.?
64
 As art and nature are fundamentally different, the pretensions of basing 
one on the experience of the other are destined to fail.  He then concludes that it is 
impossible to have a pure sensation: 
Ces r?flexions ont de quoi convaincre de plus en plus d?absurdit? ceux qui disent, 
croyant exprimer le dernier effort de la peinture : Fais ce que tu vois, comme tu 
le vois. Ce que je vois n?est pas faisable, la toile n?en peut donner qu?une 
interpr?tation.
65
 
61
 Louis Dimier (1865? 1943) was a conservative art historian who was among the founders of the 
Action Fran?aise. He abandoned it when the organization became close to fascism and after it was 
condemned by the Pope in 1926. Dimier began then to express doubts about the nationalist doctrine 
itself. Dimier, ?Le model? dans la peinture,? 550?571.  
62
 Perhaps because of the character of the publication, the author refers to the understanding of space of 
the empiricists and phenomenalists. ?[L]e philosophe trouve d?j? chez L?onard le germe et l?indication 
anticip?e de tant d?observations pr?cieuses dont les ma?tres des ages suivants ont tir? leurs plus beaux 
effets.?  Dimier, ?Le model? dans la peinture,? 551?552. 
63
 Dimier, ?Le model? dans la peinture,? 551.  
64
 Dimier, ?Le model? dans la peinture,? 556. 
65
 Dimier, ?Le model? dans la peinture,? 564. 
361
In the end impressionist art cannot be compared with photographs because the 
artist of this movement do not mix their colors, and are thus unable to suggest the 
?character? of objects, another confirmation that the author considers space through 
the volume of objects contained by it. Photography, instead, is a rendition of 
modeling, which he has already defined as conventional.  
These three texts prove that at the end of the nineteenth century Panofsky?s 
notion of space thus was not current and that when mentioned, perspective was 
regarded as a technique. They are even exceptional in that they mention the problem 
of the depiction of space and perspective. Most other texts concentrate on the 
representation of objects and refer to space as the distance among them.  
C?zanne wrote that he wanted to paint what he saw, ?de donner l?image de ce 
que nous voyons, en oubliant tout ce qui apparut avant nous.?
66
 This statement 
corresponds to Monet?s reputed desire to see the world through the eyes of a man 
born blind who had suddenly gained his sight, that is, to be able to paint objects 
without knowing what they were, as a pattern of color patches.
67
 In 1994 Joel 
Isaacson tied these statements to the words of the English painter John Constable 
(1776?1837): ?When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to 
do is, to forget that I have even seen a picture,? which had been translated into French 
 
66
 C?zanne letter to Emile Bernard October 23, 1905 in Rewald, Correspondence, 314?315. 
67
 ?Monet once said that he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight 
so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw 
before him. He held that the first real look at the motif was likely to be the truest and most 
unprejudiced one.? Lilla Cabot Perry, ?Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909,? The 
American Magazine of Art (March, 1927), quoted in Charles F. Stuckey, ?Monet?s Art and the Act of 
Vision,? in, Aspects of Monet. A Symposium on the Artist?s Life and Times. eds. John Rewald and 
Frances Weitzenhoffer (New York: Harry N Abrams, c1984), 108. 
362
at mid-century.
68
 What that author fails to note is that, whereas Constable refers to the 
artistic tradition and remains in the sphere of art, the French artists alluded to their 
perception of the world they wanted to represent. Their statements indicate that they 
were aware of the fact that memory and experience affect perception and that they 
wished to eliminate this influence in order to accrue or purify their 
sensations/impressions. The origin of that theory is much more difficult to pinpoint 
than Isaacson pretends, and it predates both Constable?s Memoirs and Kant?s 
philosophy, which, nonetheless, might have been among the influences that shaped 
the artists?s understanding of perception. Monet?s words clearly elicit what is known 
as the Molyneux problem.  
In 1688 the Irish philosopher William Molyneux (1656?1698) addressed a letter 
to John Locke (1632?1704) posing a question: would a person who had been born 
blind and knew what a cube and a sphere were by touch, recognize them if he could 
see them? The problem involved the relationship of sight and touch, the elaboration 
of concepts, and the theory of knowledge in general, and sparked a debate that has not 
yet subsided.
 69
 
68
 It had first appeared in ?Pens?es d?un paysagiste? in the Magasin pittoresque (August ? October, 
1855). One year later Edmond Duranty published them again in his short lived magazine R?alisme, and 
repeated this sentence in his 1876 ?La Nouvelle Peinture.? See Joel Issacson, ?Constable, Duranty, 
Mallarm?, Plein Air, and Forgetting,? The Art Bulletin 76 (September, 1994): 427?450. 
69
 One of the specialist in the history of the question, Marjolein Degenaar comments ?Molyneux's 
problem is one the most fruitful thought-experiments ever proposed in the history of philosophy, which 
is still as intriguing today as when Molyneux first formulated it more than three centuries ago.? 
Marjolein Degenaar, Gert-Jan Lokhorst, "Molyneux's Problem", The Stanford Encyclopedia of 
Philosophy (Fall 2005 Edition) Edward N. Zalta ed., URL = 
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2005/entries/molyneux-problem/>.  
363
Cassirer stated that the philosophy of Georges Berkeley (1685?1753) ?can alone 
be truly known, when seen germinating from the question of Molyneux.?
70
 In his first 
writings, for example, the English bishop contended that space could not be seen but 
was inferred by the mind according to the data provided by sight and experience. 
When the first successful surgeries were performed, the problem passed onto 
psychology and the analysis of the preconceptions that influenced the reactions of the 
patients, but the results did not bridge the differences or solve the question. An 
operation?more precisely the fact that Denis Diderot (1713?1784) was prevented 
from attending one?moved the author of the Encyclopedia to write the Lettre sur les 
aveugles, ? l?usage de ceux qui voient (1749), where the meditation upon the 
Molyneaux problem acquires philosophical, moral, and political connotations, which 
cost Diderot three months in jail. Blindness had allowed Saunderson, the main 
character, to develop a unique and coherent understanding of life, morals and faith.
71
 
Deeply influenced by Berkeley and the ideas of the British Empiricists?who 
discussed space mostly as distance?Kant?s Copernican turn implied a radical change 
in the understanding of space as he defined it as an a priori intuition which men 
imprint on reality, i.e., not as something perceived but as a category of perception.
72
 
70
 Quoted in Marjolein Degenaar,  Molyneux?s Problem. Three Centuries of Discussion on the 
Perception of Forms (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub., 1996), 90. Much of what follows was taken 
from ideas in this clear explanation of the problem.  
71
 If at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the magazine L?Artiste published excerpts of Diderot?s 
art criticism. His complete works were published in the 1870s. On the occasion, the Revue de Deux 
Mondes published several articles which promoted a new interest in the work of the philosopher. The 
Molyneux problem was also analyzed by Etienne Condillac in his An Essay on the Origin of Human 
Knowledge, Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, 1746.  
72
 It is interesting to point out that Kant?s approach superseded Isaac Newton?s Euclidean 
representation of space as a fixed stage where bodies move. In 1936 surfaced Newton?s private 
religious and alchemic papers but only in the 1990s were they studied in a scholarly manner. Today it 
is accepted that this conception of space had a religious background and support. Stephen D. Snobelen 
comments: ?Newton was keen to avoid what he saw as the major pitfall of the Cartesian mechanical 
philosophy (which he believed was prone to atheistic extrapolations) and in particular the lack of a role 
364
The discussion continued during the nineteenth century. As Marjolein Degenaar 
explains,  
Kant?s theory only referred to space as a necessary representation a priori; it had 
no connection with the question regarding the intuition of empirical space as 
inborn or acquired. This was the central question in the controversy between 
empiricists and nativists. In order to provide solid foundations for their points of 
view, researchers used not only metaphysical and methodological arguments but 
also information on the powers of sight of newly born animals, infants and blind 
people operated on for cataracts, and within this context Molyneux?s question 
once more came up. 
73
 
What in the eighteenth century had been an epistemological problem at the center of 
the theory of knowledge was transformed in the nineteenth into theories of spatial 
perception.  
The French and German educational systems differed widely.
74
 The positivist 
philosophy of Auguste Comte (1798?1857) underpinned the foundations of the 
French approach to education. Although Kant?s philosophy was influential in France, 
without the hegemonic status it had in Germany, it was shaped to fit within the 
French philosophical tradition.
75
 British Empiricism provided another determinant 
 
for spirit (in the Cartesian system, spirit is non-extended and thus cannot be the subject of natural 
philosophy). Newton, in a certain sense, went in the opposite direction, attempting to construct a 
natural philosophy that led inductively to God and conceiving a view of the universe in which God?s 
spirit is infinitely extended. God?s omnipresence (associated with God?s spirit) for Newton helps to 
explain the universality of gravity. ? Similarly, Newton?s concept of absolute space and time relate to 
his notions of God?s infinite extension in space and his infinite extension in time.? ?Newton 
Reconsidered,? (2005) http://www.galilean-library.org/snobelen.html
73
 Degenaar, Molyneux?s Problem, 107. 
74
 See Fritz K. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge. French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective 
1890?1920, (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.) See also Claude Digeon, La 
Crise allemande de la pens?e fran?aise, 1870?1914, (Paris : P.U.F, 1959),  
75
 For the influence of Kant?s philosophy in the French sciences, see Laurent Fedi and Jean-Michel 
Salanskis, Les philosophies fran?aises et la science: dialogue avec Kant, (Lyon : ?ditions de l??cole 
Normale Sup?rieure, 2001.) Fedi has studied in depth the work of Charles Renouvier (1815?1903) who 
was responsible for the dissemination of Kant?s ideas in France. He proposed important modifications 
to the First Critique, which affected the definition of space. See Le Probl?me del la connaissance dans 
la philosophie de Charles Renouvier (Paris: L?Harmattan, 1998, 1998). Heavily involved in the 
defence of democracy Renouvier edited several magazines: L'Ann?e philosophique, (1867?1869) and 
Critique philosophique, (1872?1889) which aimed primarily at the political and moral consolidation of 
the republic and thus attacked the Roman Catholic Church.  J. Alexander Gunn. 
365
influence offering a valid approach to the problem of perception.
76
 Moreover, the 
continuous political turmoil and the progressive advance of democratic institutions 
gave to the philosophical debate a very definite profile. In the preface to J. Alexander 
Gunn?s history of modern French philosophy published in 1924, Henri Bergson wrote 
that  
Dr. Gunn a su ramener toutes ces questions ? un petit nombre de probl?mes 
essentiels: la science, la libert?, le progr?s, la morale, la religion. Cette division 
me para?t heureuse. Elle r?pond bien, ce me semble, aux principales 
pr?occupations de la philosophie fran?aise.
77
 
French philosophers and scholars were closer to the public at largethan their 
colleagues from other countries, as they gave public lectures at the Coll?ge de France 
and contributed to a wide range of periodical publications. Paris had a thriving 
student population that shared the Quartier Latin with an artistic and literary 
bohemia. The professors of the Grand ?coles were influential but their work, except 
in exceptional cases, has not been well studied. Gunn?s classification of French 
philosophy in three main currents?Positivist, neo-critical, and neo-Spiritual?brings 
some of these almost forgotten names to the fore. 
I. Positivist and naturalist current turning upon itself, seen in Vacherot, Taine, 
and Renan. 
II. Cournot, Renouvier, and the neo-critical philosophy.  
III. The New Spiritual Philosophy, to which the main contributors were 
Ravaisson, Lachelier, Boutroux, Fouill?e, Guyau, Bergson, Blondel, and 
Weber.
78
 
http://www.ibiblio.org/HTMLTexts/John_Alexander_Gunn/Modern_French_Philosophy/chapter2-
2.html.
76
 Stuckey?s discussion of Monet?s approach to the problem of the innocent eye highlights the 
importance of the English sources and the constant interest in the Molyneux Problem. See Stuckey, 
?Monet?s Art,? 107 ff. 
77
 Henri Bergson, ?Preface,? in Gunn, Modern French Philosophy. 
 http://www.ibiblio.org/HTMLTexts/John_Alexander_Gunn/
78
Gunn, Modern French Philosophy. http://www.ibiblio.org/HTMLTexts/John_Alexander_Gunn/
366
The ?Table de Mati?res? of one issue of the year 1877 of the Revue 
philosophique de la France et l??tranger (fig. 22) demonstrates that space was an 
important subject of debate. The goal of the magazine, created in 1876 by Th?odule 
Ribot (1823?1891)?one of the founders of French experimental psychology as a 
discipline separate from philosophy? was to discuss the advances of sciences in a 
philosophical context. 
79
 Emile Boirac?s ?L?Espace d?apr?s Clarke et Kant,? for 
example, compares the theories of the British philosopher Samuel Clarke (1675?
1729), who believed that space was an attribute of God, with Kant?s.  Delboeuf?s ?Du 
R?le des Sens dans la formation de l?id?e d?espace. Pourquoi les sensations visuelles 
sont-elles ?tendues? reflects on a successful eye surgery that had given eyesight to a 
young man born blind. The article by Hermann Lotze about his theory of the local 
signs, included material published in a recent book on psycho-psychology and had 
been especially written for the magazine.  
While a similar survey might undoubtedly be done for the German scene, the 
point here is to argue that in France the problem of space was discussed within a wide 
frame of theoretical references not dominated by Kant?s approach to the subject. 
Space was generally considered to be either an emanation of God or the distance 
between objects, and both the Molyneux problem and Berkeley?s theory of vision 
were usually part of the argumentation.  
This variegated and?according to German standards??unconventional? 
understanding of the problem of space was shared by those who were close to 
C?zanne in Aix-en-Provence at the end of the century: Joachim Gasquet and the 
 
79
 Its first volume already included an article by Stuart Mill commenting on the work of Berkeley.   
 
367
group of poets and intellectuals to whom he introduced the artist. In 2003 Nina 
Athanassoglou-Kallmyer?s C?zanne and Provence. The Painter and His 
Culture called attention to the fact that the artist might have been stimulated by his 
periodical meetings with members of this group from 1896 on.
 
C?zanne wrote his 
more theoretical letters around 1900?that is fifteen years after he had addressed his 
last letter to Zola?and presumably the discussions with Gasquet influenced his way 
of thinking or expressing his ideas on art and his experience.
80
 The analysis of the 
work of one of the members serves to outline how this group might have understood 
space and how modern art history has determined the discussion on this issue.   
George Dumesnil (1855?1916) was professor of philosophy at Aix between 1893 
and 1896 and a member of Gasquet?s entourage, as the young poet had a flair for 
establishing close ties with his teachers. A student of the ?cole normale sup?rieure, 
Dumesnil had attended Emile Boutroux?s classes on Kant in 1877?1878, and was 
influenced by the philosopher?s work, at least as it was interpreted in France.
81
 His 
intellectual path?like that of many others of his generation?evolved from 
empiricism to [philosophical] criticism, and, after a ?spiritual crisis? in the 1890s, to 
spiritualism. In 1905 he described this last philosophical movement as ?la v?ritable 
philosophie des Fran?ais,? the effort to renew the true Catholic character of the 
French philosophical tradition broken by foreign influences, and to recover its 
 
80
 See Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, C?zanne and Provence. The Painter and His 
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), Chapter Four. The painter addressed his last 
letter to Zola in 1886 but their relationship had been deteriorating progressively during the 1870s.   
81
 Georges Dumesnil, Le Spiritualisme (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1903), 79.  He was part of a 
peripheral circle of scholars who, because of their religious stance could not find positions in Paris. 
Dumesnil?s activities and especially his publication, L?Amiti? de France, must be understood in this 
context which has escaped most of art historians working on C?zanne. See Paul Harry, ?The Crucifix 
and the Crucible: Catholic Scientists in the Third Republic? The Catholic Historical Review (July 
1986): 195?219.  
368
connections with Saint Augustine?s philosophy through Descartes.
82
 He also stated 
that the essays in the book Le Spiritualisme (Je suis?Dieu est?la Philosophie)  
?restituent les verit?s qui sont l?essence de cette doctrine et la haussent aussi bien au-
dessus des atteintes dissolvantes de l?empirisme que des ?treintes ?nervantes du 
kantisme.?
83
 
Dumesnil?s crisis happened just as he was about to defend his dissertation at 
L??cole normale, published in 1892 as Le r?le des concepts dans la vie intellectuelle 
et morale. Essai th?orique d?apr?s une vue de l?historie, which reflects his reaction 
against Kant.
84
 His stay in Aix-en-Provence coincided with his rejection of 
philosophical criticism and his affiliation with spiritualism?after he wrote Le r?le 
des concepts and before the publication of Le Spiritualisme.
The philosopher?s theory of knowledge centers on the idea that human 
intelligence and knowledge are limited when compared to God?s infinite 
omniscience. While God?s perception can encompass the infinite richness of 
variations and possibilities, human beings can only deal with the finite and limited. 
 
82
 Dumesnil respected Lachelier?s and Renouvier?s interpretation of Kant, noting that both 
philosophers had prepared the way for spiritualism. Nevertheless, he considered as his master Maine 
de Biran (a philosopher from the early nineteenth century rediscovered at this time). Jules Lachelier 
had been Boutroux?s professor.  
83
 Announcement of Le Spiritualisme, in L?Amitie de France, journal de philosophie, d'art et de 
politique (January, 1909), n/p. Dumesnil was the founder and editor of this publication. 
84
 Dumesnil described his crisis in Thomas-Lucien Mainage Les T?moins du Renouveau catholique 
(Paris : G. Beauchesne, 1919), 55?60.  This is related to the crisis that characterized the 1890s and that 
coincided with the transition in art from impressionism to symbolism. Ferdinand Bruneti?re, Maurice 
Denis, Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, among others also had similar experiences. Victor Delbos reviewed 
the 1892 book in Revue de m?taphysique et morale (1893), 218?226. The author comments about the 
serious problems in the argumentation, and the idiosyncrasies of its development. Dumesnil?s Latin 
thesis was De Tractatu Kantii paedagogico. He had spent two years in Germany studying the 
educational system of that country. Dumesnil was also close to the group of Symbolist?s poets that 
gathered in the salon of Jos? Mar?a Heredia and wrote on literature under the pseudonym ?tienne 
Rouvray.  
369
Therefore he believes that human freedom is a manifestation of Divine Grace and the 
Holy Trinity. 
Notre libert?, dans la vie relative, consiste donc pr?cis?ment ? opposer notre 
essence finie ? l?infinie et, sur l?aperception confuse de l?infini, ? d?terminer des 
concepts et des actes finis. Ainsi, l?acte par lequel, sur le tableau noir, c?est-?-dire 
sur un espace suppos? infini, nous tra?ons une figure math?matique, me parait 
une excellente figure de la libert?; car ce tableau contenait une infinit? de figures 
en puissance, mais nous en avons d?termin? une. Et qu?on remarque bien, cet 
acte ne consiste pas seulement ? tracer des lignes ; il consiste bien moins en cela 
que dans une organisation synth?tique des ?l?ments infinis de la figure dont les 
lignes ne sont con?ues que comme la limite. Ainsi la libert? dans la vie consiste ? 
d?terminer, sur le fonds infini des repr?sentations de ph?nom?nes, des concepts 
intellectuels et moraux par l?organisation subjective de ces repr?sentations, c'est-
?-dire par la qualit? que nous leur donnons et dont les concepts ne sont que les 
limites. 
85
 
The image of the man drawing on a blackboard, choosing a figure/concept out of an 
infinite number of possibilities in order to con-figure or con-form what in the end is 
the ?synthetic organization? of a ?infinitude of elements,? is the complete opposite to 
Alberti?s drawing on the window pane. It might be compared to C?zanne?s 
?organization of colored sensations? and some of his other comments, but this is not 
the spirit in which Dumesnil?s theories are being quoted.  
Dumesnil believed that the configurations that were established as a result of 
these operations were in accord with the order God had established in Nature. 
Nevertheless, due to the imperfection of men, there was also a place for 
indeterminacy.  
Ce sont des efforts l?gitimes , n?cessaires  de l?esprit humain pour se mettre au 
point de vue de Dieu et c?est en v?rit? la partie divine de la Raison humaine, 
qu?elle puisse apercevoir qu?il y a un point de vue de Dieu; mais c?est aussi son 
infirmit? radicale, son d?faut originel sans doute, ?. qu?elle ne puisse se mettre 
ad?quatement ? ce point de vue?.
86
 (Emphasis added) 
 
85
 Georges Dumesnil, Du R?le des concepts dans la vie intellectuelle et morale. Essai Th?orique 
d?apr?s une vue de l?histoire (Paris : Hachette, 1892), 203. 
86
 Dumesnil, Du R?le des concepts, 211. 
370
Nature is relative for men who conceive it as discontinuous. In time, they can 
progressively discern its infinite continuity and approximate the point of view of God. 
Dumesnil?s  notion of space is similar to C?zanne?s definition of extension (?tendue)
as ?une section de nature ou, si vous aimez mieux, du spectacle que Pater 
Omnipotens Aeterne Deus ?tale devant nos yeux.?
87
 Nevertheless, the artist?s  
?religious? interpretation of nature might have been just ?a way of saying,? or reflect 
an even more entrenched or ?archaic? understanding of space, like the one supported 
by the Thomist Abb? Edmond Tardif a professor of Aix-en-Provence (a center for 
religious education dominated by the order of the Angelicus) whom C?zanne knew 
and mentions in his letters.
88
 This interpretation of space?completely different from 
Panofsky?s?was contemporaneous to the artist and was taught to the younger 
generation of Aixois. 
89
 
Dumesnil does not mention perspective, though he was an amateur painter 
who sometimes wrote about plastic arts. The representation of space is a non issue in 
his writings and he only refers to space in relation to the perception of objects and as 
nature. He was specifically interested in the problem of the contours as the place 
where objects touch themselves or limit the space that surrounds them. One of the 
main arguments of his disquisition is the non-existence of the void. He argues that   
 
87
 Letter to Emile Bernard, 15 April, 1904 in Rewald, Correspondance, 299. 
88
 See  Edmond Tardif, Nature, origine et valeur de la connaissance humaine (Aix-en-Provence: impr. 
de J. Nicot, 1903). The book is an attack on Kant and Empirism.   
89
 The Biblioth?que M?janes preserves the notes Joachim Gasquet took from Dumesnil?s courses (ms. 
1879?1745). They show how interested he was in Kant and the philosophical problem of space. They 
also demonstrate that he mentioned Hume at the same time he was referring to the German 
philosopher. In addition the notebooks contain notes Gasquet took from the bibliography he consulted. 
They include quotes from Antoine Cros?s ?Le temps et l?espace,? an article that appeared in the 
Symbolist literary magazine L?Hermitage in 1893. Cros was a physician, philosopher and poet, the 
brother of the bohemian poet and inventor Charles Cros, whom C?zanne had probably met at the salon 
of his lover, the famous Nina de Callias. Cros criticizes Kant, and in general, metaphysics in the name 
of pure science and research.   
371
Pour se repr?senter objectivement comment les ?tres agissent les uns sur les 
autres, il faut donc imaginer la rencontre et la p?n?tration r?ciproque de leurs 
limites. Et cela est d?autant plus n?cessaire que toute quantit? d??tre, pour ainsi 
dire, ?tant infinie en si, elle ne peut ?tre d?termin?e et connue ou con?ue que par 
ses limites. ... Mais pour se repr?senter comment les choses finies, les ?tres, les 
atomes agissent les uns sur les autres? [it is necessary to imagine] qu?ils se 
p?n?trent ? un degr? infinit?simal par leurs limites, ce qui laisse ? la Nature 
l??lasticit? n?cessaire pour qu?elle soit, c?est-?-dire pour que les choses soient 
con?ues syst?matiquement par l?opposition de leurs limites finies ? une infinit? 
d?autres choses possibles, et aussi relativement, selon la n?cessit? de notre forme 
de la connaissance. 
90
 
Once again, it would be possible to relate these comments to C?zanne?s passages 
(?the merging of planes with space? according to Barr),
91
 or to the open forms that 
sometimes coexist in his paintings with the obsessive demarcation of borders and 
multiple contour lines.  
In Le Spiritualisme (1905), Dumesnil summarizes Lachelier?s interpretation of 
perception. Boutroux had been a disciple of Lachelier, and the text provides a better 
understanding of the debate about space at the time. Dumesnil highlights Lachelier?s 
differentiation between extension (?tendue), which is a reflection of the logical order, 
and depth (profondeur) which is declared, much like in C?zanne?s letter, the way 
human beings perceive the world. It questions how sensations become objects of 
knowledge. The answer is that perception affords a floating group of elements that are 
organized by thought (perhaps what in 1892 was ?la partie divine de la Raison 
humaine?).  
C?est la pens?e qui en fait une r?alit? vraie, qui a toujours ?t? vraie ? titre de fait 
future, qui le sera toujours ? titre de fait pass?, en ce sens que , des qu?il est 
pens?e ?le groupe enti?re des qualit?s sensibles nous semble sortir de notre 
conscience pour se fixer dans une ?tendue ext?rieure ? elle? ? ?en nous 
 
90
 Georges Dumesnil, Du R?le des concepts, 223. 
91
 See  Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 42. 
372
repr?sentant l??tendue [o? vient se situer la perception] ? ?nous sortons de nous-
m?mes pour entrer dans l?absolu de la pens?e.? 
92
 (Emphasis added)  
Through thought?abstract thinking, la pens?e?man can discriminate the chaos 
of perception and conceive of an independent reality, objective, exterior, 
transcendental, absolute that is manifested as extension, space. But an element of 
understanding acts in perception,  
Il y a une preuve insuffisamment remarqu?e de l?existence d?un ?l?ment 
intellectuel dans notre conscience [d?un ?l?ment propre avant toute exp?rience ? 
situer la perception] c?est la profondeur, troisi?me dimension de l?espace, aucune 
exp?rience ne peut transformer le plan visuel ni le sens de l?effort musculaire en 
une profondeur; la profondeur qui est en d?finitive le fant?me de l?existence,
atteste que d?s avant la perception, la pens?e [logique] ou entendement est a 
l??uvre.
93
 (Emphasis added) 
 
Extension thus corresponds to the sphere of the real which is external to man, 
persists in time, and can only be reached by the intellect, and therefore it is not the 
province of man?s experience. The intellectual element in human perception affords a 
certain version of that order: depth. Orthogonals therefore represent the relative, 
particular mode in which human beings see and understand reality. Depth is the 
?ghost of existence,? or the ghost of extension. These paragraphs suggest another 
interpretation for the letter of C?zanne quoted at the beginning of this chapter, where 
he said that God could see as ??tendue? and men could only see nature as 
?profondeur.? 
94
 
92
 Dumesnil, Le Spiritualisme, 20. 
93
 Dumesnil, Le Spiritualisme, 21.  
94
 Dumesnil, in a note, comments that this point of Lachelier?s theory had been recently contested with 
the argumentation of the man born blind, and that Lachelier?s position might indicate that he wanted to 
?remettre en honneur la th?se de Berkeley, tomb?e en discr?dit et remplac?e par la th?orie empiriste 
qui rapporte l?espace au toucher.? Dumesnil, Le Spiritualisme, 21, n.1. The text demonstrates that both 
Berkeley and the Molyneux problem were still very much part of the discussion about space and 
perception.  
373
Dumesnil knew C?zanne and on one occasion visited his studio. However, no 
document records what Dumesnil ?said? to C?zanne or what the painter understood of 
the philosopher?s theories. These quotations serve to attest that those who surrounded 
C?zanne, although they were preoccupied with a philosophical interpretation of 
space, did not think of it as a mathematical volume containing objects but as a matter 
of volumes and distance. This group countered a deeply religious worldview to 
Kant?s interpretation of space.  
Was the relationship of Dumesnil with C?zanne important? Does his 
philosophy help us to understand his art? As mentioned above, the major credit for 
bringing Dumesnil?s texts to light belongs to Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, who sees the 
philosopher as part of a ?proto-phenomemological? French movement:  
Whereas until now scholars have discussed C?zanne?s paintings as a posteriori 
projections and illustrations of twentieth-century phenomenological thought, I 
argue here for the emergence of a proto-phenomenological school of thought in 
France concurrent to C?zanne (and in advance, presumably, of German 
philosophical developments in that field). For C?zanne as the unwitting 
forerunner of twentieth-century phenomenology, see M. Merleau-Ponty, 
?C?zanne?s Doubt? (1945)?.
95
 
The thrust of this argument impedes Athanassoglou-Kallmyer from considering the 
religious component in Dumesnil?s philosophy, a factor that coalesced in his 
scholarship precisely at the time of his encounter with C?zanne.
96
 The artist himself 
was a devout Catholic and therefore this particular aspect of Dumesnil?s ideas might 
have attracted him. Regarding the visit to the atelier Athanassoglou-Kallmyer asks   
 
95
 Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, C?zanne and Provence. The Painter and His Culture (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2003), n. 77, 282. It is interesting to note that in 1924 J Alexander Gunn 
refers to French phenomenalism in relationship with Renouvier?s philosophy which he links with the 
English school and the work of Hermann Lotze, and not with philosophy. 
96
 Almost all of the participants of Gasquet?s convivium were conservatives and members of the 
political right.   
374
What happened during that visit? Did Dumesnil and Gasquet expound on their 
proto-phenomenological ideas in relation to C?zanne?s paintings. ? 
Dumesnil?s abstract aesthetic appears to have found resonance in C?zanne?s 
paintings and, in turn the painter may have detected analogies between his artistic 
beliefs and the philosophical ideas harbored by his visitor.  
97
 
The lives of Dumesnil and C?zanne coincided in Aix for a short period of time.
98
 
Nevertheless, the publications by Athanassoglou-Kallmyer demonstrate that the 
influence of Phenomenology in art history has led to a growing interest in theories 
that could be considered antecedents of this philosophical movement. Isaacson, for 
example, concludes,   
What the Impressionist landscape painter does,?. is establish what 
phenomenologists call an intentional relationship to the setting in which he 
works. Intentionality refers to the dynamics of perception and human 
consciousness as developed by Husserl at a time when some of the 
Impressionists were still active, and carried on and altered by his followers, 
notably Merleau-Ponty?.
99
 
Most of the scholars working on the history of art history believe that Panofsky?s 
approach to art history blocked the beneficial stimulus of phenomenology on the 
discipline for decades.
100
 Phenomenology is a German philosophical tradition 
founded by Edmund Husserl (1859?1938) at the end of the nineteenth century that 
inspired the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908?1961). 
The latter?s decision to apply his phenomenology of perception to the study of 
 
97
 Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, C?zanne and Provence, 179.    
98
 Dumesnil arrived in Aix in 1893 but C?zanne did not meet Gasquet until?at the earliest?April of 
1896. The artist left Aix for Paris in June of that year and did not return until the beginning of 1897. 
Dumesnil married a widow in Montpellier at the end of 1896 and moved to Grenoble. Gasquet?s 
correspondence at the Biblioth?que M?janes Ms.18160 (1735) demonstrate that in January of 1897, 
Dumesnil was already established in Grenoble. It is true that the philosopher, a friend of Maurice 
Blondel who took his teaching post at Aix, returned periodically to the city to help him with the 
examinations, but there is no proof that he remained in touch with the artist, who himself severed his 
ties with Gasquet around 1901.  
99
 Isaacson, ?Constable, Duranty,? 449. 
100
 See for example Didi-Huberman, Devant l?image, and Melville and Readings eds., Vision and 
Textuality.
375
C?zanne?s life and art had a profound impact on the studies on the artist. This 
approach?as Issacson?s article demonstrates?spilled over into the consideration of 
impressionism and became an influential theoretical approach for the study of modern 
art in general.  
Merleau-Ponty?s ?La Doute de C?zanne? first published in 1945, was later 
incorporated in his 1948 Sens et non-sense. It was translated into English in 1964 but 
its influence on C?zanne?s studies emerged only in the 1970?s, as part of the reaction 
against the modernist interpretation of modern art. Although this problem falls 
outside the scope of this essay it must be briefly examined as a significant chapter in 
the history of perspective itself.  
Merleau-Ponty?s claim that C?zanne had found a sound, unmediated way to 
perceive and understand space and the world was that of an intellectual reflecting on 
Humanism and Man after the horrors of Second World War. Like Mallarm?, he 
considered perspectival space the cultural product of the West.
101
 C?zanne becomes 
in Merleau?s analysis the incarnation and epitome of a phenomenological, primordial 
mode of perception, of a certain mode of relationship with the world that denies 
scientific perspective,  
The outline should therefore be a result of the colors if the world is to be given in 
its true density. For the world is a mass without gaps, a system of colors across 
which the receding perspective, the outlines, angles, and curves are inscribed like 
lines of force; the spatial structure vibrates as it is formed?. C?zanne does not 
try to use color to suggest the tactile sensations which would give shape and 
depth. These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial 
perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally 
learn to distinguish between our senses. The lived objects is not rediscovered or 
constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents 
 
101
 See Hubert Damisch, L?Origine de la perspective (Paris, 1987), 52. 
376
itself to us from the start as the center from which these contributions radiate. We 
see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, ? 
102
 
As Damisch noted in 1987, Merleau-Ponty was among the first to read Panofsky?s 
Perspective as Symbolic Form in France. Moreover, he based his interpretation of 
C?zanne on Novotny?s C?zanne und das Ende der wissenschaftliche Perspektive, 
which had been influenced by the 1927 treatise, and was structured around Rewald?s 
and Marschutz?s site photographs.
103
 That is, the philosopher had taken modern art 
historical writings as his sources.
104
 When Merleau-Ponty affirms that ?[b]y 
remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of perspective, C?zanne 
discovered what recent psychologist have come to formulate: the living perspective, 
that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one,? he is 
actually navigating the text by Panofsky analyzed above in the opposite sense and 
ascribing to C?zanne the perception of something similar to Cassirer?s and Mach?s 
psychophysiological space. Therefore, the artist?s primordial perception is in part the 
product of modern art history?s fossilized perspective.
105
 
According to Wood, Damisch?s enquiry on perspective was suggested by a lecture 
course given by Merleau-Ponty on Husserl at the College de France, in 1959?60, 
where the philosopher dealt with how to recapture ?crude? or ?wild? perception. 
 
102
 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, (Chicago, 1964), 15.  
103
 See Hubert Damisch, L?Origine de la perspective (Paris : Flammarion, 1987), 45. The site 
photographs were in a certain way taken for Novotny?s project.  
104
 As Christopher Wood has commented, Damisch, from a post-Post-modern standpoint could 
understand Merleau Ponty?s modernist trick: by trying to create a more natural point of view the 
philosopher forged an even more civilized C?zanne, the hyper refined primitive. The point is brilliantly 
explained by Wood in his review of Damisch?s book:  Merleau-Ponty, in ?C?zanne?s Doubt,? ?stated 
that C?zanne?s painting ?reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself.? 
?C?zanne was able to revive the classical definition of art: man added to nature.? Except that Merleau-
Ponty failed to see that C?zanne was not subtracting ?man? but adding on more ?man.?? See Wood, 
[Review of Hubert Damisch] ?The Origin of Perspective, Le Jugement de Paris,? The Art Bulletin 77 
(December, 1995), 680.  
105
 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ?C?zanne?s Doubt? in Sense and Non-Sense (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1964), 14. For Panofsky see specifically Perspective, 29?31. 
377
Nevertheless, Damisch?s professed goal was to liberate perspective from the harsh 
criticism it had received in the 1970s from Feminists and Marxists working on film 
studies.
106
 As Wood observes, 
Damisch insists that we are still living in the age of perspective because the 
structure of perspective is the structure of our own modern minds [Emphasis 
added]?Damisch?s art history manages to be historicist?that is, bound to its 
own perspective?and structuralist at the same time; but only because the history 
is a history of the structure, written from a vantage point inside it. Here 
Damisch?s book is almost perfectly continuous with Panofsky?s perspective 
essay.  
Damisch, however, makes an even more grandiose claim than Panofsky did. 
He says that perspective makes visible the act of seeing, and in so doing makes 
possible your subjectivity. Both Heidegger and Lacan presented the integrated 
subject as the interlocutor of the organized and coherent picture, the tableau; and 
not merely as the addressee of the structured picture, but as its true complement. 
107
 
Damisch continues Panofsky?s defense of perspective as a paradigmatic 
epistemological model and uses Lacan to argue that the object of perception 
determines and shapes the observer into a subject.  
There are many folds in this story: in 1927 Panofsky ?creates? scientific 
perspective and projects it onto the fifteenth century; in the 1930s modern art 
historians (Barr and Novotny) use the newly founded importance of perspective to 
proclaim that C?zanne?s art had superseded it, an argument that allows them to 
present the artist as the catalyst of the transition towards modern art; in the 1940s 
Merleau-Ponty uses Panofsky and Novotny as art historical sources in order to build a 
phenomenological approach to the world. He contends that C?zanne had recuperated 
 
106
 See Wood, [Review of Hubert Damisch] ?The Origin of Perspective,? 680. Damisch explicitly 
mentions the Marxist approach in photographic and film studies. Margaret Iversen suggests that this 
author?s targets were Jean-Louis Baudry, ?Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic 
Apparatus? published in Paris in 1970 and translated into English in 1974, and Laura Mulvey, ?Visual 
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film 
theory journal Screen. ?The Discourse of Perspective,? 194?195.  
107
 Wood, [Review of Hubert Damisch] ?The Origin of Perspective,? 680. 
378
a primeval, pure, uncivilized mode of perception, thus reinforcing the modernist 
approach. In the 1980s the philosopher?s work is used to attack modernist art history, 
perspective and the Western tradition. In 1987 Damisch?as part of his project of 
formulating a Lacanian interpretation of perspective that would reaffirm its 
paradigmatic and a-historical value?exposes Merleau-Ponty?s project as dated and 
suggests that the non-Euclidian geometries and pseudo-scientific theories about the 
fourth dimension that had influenced cubism had also led Panofsky to the false notion 
that perspective was relative and tied to a historical period that was coming to an end. 
Damisch?s Lacanian understanding of perspective reopened the debate about 
perspective that had began in the 1930s.  
This analysis helps us to comprehend Athanassoglou-Kallmyer?s characterization 
of Dumesnil?s philosophy. If she could actually prove the existence of a proto-
phenomenological French philosophical movement close to C?zanne and his group of 
acquaintances, she would demonstrate the presence of the model (structure) in 
history, that is, she would provide historical validation to Merleau-Ponty?s 
phenomenological analysis and prove that, more than a model of interpretation, 
phenomenology explains the way C?zanne perceived the world and created his art. 
Merleau-Ponty?s theory becomes a historical fact in C?zanne?s body and mind. This 
is, once again, an example of how art history creates the subjectivity of the artist 
according to its needs. 
Reff embraces Damisch?s theory wholeheartedly without explaining his interest in 
it.
108
 He takes Damisch?s book as a confirmation of Panofsky?s interpretation of 
 
108
 In 1978 Lipton mentioned Reff as one of the art historians who was striving to find new ways for 
approaching works of art. ?Reff is cognizant of the shifting psychological ground upon which an artist 
379
perspective.  By way of perspective, Reff re-claims for C?zanne the position as 
keystone of modern art history. In order to situate his argument, he summarizes 
C?zanne?s historiography describing how each period understood the artist?s 
approach to perspective. Reff argues that in the first stage (1930s and 1940s), 
C?zanne was presented as overcoming perspective; in the second (50s and 60s), the 
site photographs served to show that he had modified it; and finally (70s and 80s),  
La boucle est boucl?e dans les deux derniers articles sur cette question? [art 
historians] s?appuyant sur une connaissance approfondie des ph?nom?nes de la 
perception, font observer que la perspective de la Renaissance est artificielle, et 
donc inad?quate, tandis que celle de C?zanne reste beaucoup plus fid?le ? la 
r?alit? des sensations visuelles? 
109
 
Although Reff does not mention it, this last moment is the one dominated by the 
influence of Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenology of perception. This article 
confirms the 1930s as the moment in which C?zanne?s art started to be discussed in 
association with perspective, and that since then perspective had been at the center of 
the bibliography on the artist. Reff?s article responds  to the ?crisis? of modern art 
history. He uses Damisch to counter the influence of phenomenology within 
C?zanne?s studies. The greatness of Merleau-Ponty?s C?zanne resided in having 
overcome Renaissance perspective. Reff intervenes to reassert C?zanne?s interest in 
perspective, which he believes expresses the capacity of modern man to achieve a 
rational representation of the world.    
 
stands at any given moment. For Reff, art has intentionality. Far from making C?zanne?s vision 
inevitable, Reff reconstitutes a psychological moment in which the painting seems to be the product of 
hard work, chance, and a myriad of unpredictable lived moments. Suddenly C?zanne appears human.? 
Lipton, ?Some Reflexions,? 328. In 1990 Athanassoglou-Kallmyer described the same approach as the 
?sixties? do-it-yourself psychoanalytic speculation.? ?Review C?zanne: The Early Years, 1859?1872,? 
Art Journal 49 (Spring, 1990), 71. 
109
 Reff, ?C?zanne et la perspective,? 9. 
380
Reff was not alone in adhering to Damisch?s defense of perspective, a fact that is 
symptomatic of the changes operated by the most recent ?crisis? of art history in the 
United States.
110
 T. J. Clark?the author of the 1984 The Painter of Modern Life, a
book that epitomizes the crisis of modern art history within the field of nineteenth-
century art?also gave a heartfelt welcome to the translation of Damisch?s book into 
English.
111
 In 1994 he organized a symposium at the University of California, 
Berkeley to discuss it. Iversen, frankly expressed his reaction to Clark?s stance,  
I was initially intrigued and frankly mystified by what Clark?s interest in the 
topic might be, but I gathered that my brief was to represent a position critical of 
perspective informed by psychoanalytic/feminist/ poststructuralist theory. ? I 
was totally unprepared for Clark?s enthusiastic reading of Damisch?s book as a 
vindication of perspective on the ground that perspective contains the seeds of its 
own deconstruction most vividly realized by Cubism. 
?Clark had discovered a modernist, post-Cubist understanding of perspective. 
? For Clark and possibly for Damisch, then, those who criticize perspective for 
its totalizing systematic closure or its rigid fixing of the spectator?s position are 
simply in too much of a hurry to notice the tremors rocking the apparently 
imperturbable ground of its structure. 
112
 
For Iversen, the idea that cubism ?exacerbates the internal tensions of 
perspective to the point of extinction? confirms perspective as symbolic form. 
Therefore Clark?s position reconfirms Panofsky?s and Damisch?s rationale: there is 
no end of perspective. Perspective can be contravened but this does not affect its 
status as paradigm or symbolic form.
113
 
110
 See Henri Zerner ?The Crisis in the Discipline,? The Art Journal 42 (Winter, 1982): 79. See also the 
series of articles devoted to this crisis and the New Art History in The Art Bulletin during the 1990s. 
Both magazines are published by the College Art Association which means that they express a 
hegemonic understanding of the situation of the discipline in the United States.   
111
 For Clark see Harris, New Art History, 64?73. 
112
 Iversen, ?Orthodox and Anamorphic,? 81. She adds that Clark contended that perspective?s over-
controlling impetus and detailed perfectionist measurement emphasized the anomalies and made them 
even more unsettling. On the other hand, the reversibility of the point of view as projected onto the 
horizon made the viewer?s position instable.  
113
 See Panofsky, Perspective, 67?68. 
381
Because the revisions of the discipline have not considered its true 
methodological foundations, art historians at the end of the twentieth century were 
still discussing the vocabulary and categories established in the 1930s. Chapter Five 
demonstrates that far from being objective records of the world, photographs 
are machines for producing perspectives and that they impose onto the subject of 
study a particular worldview. The use of site photographs fostered the discussion of 
C?zanne?s art as an artistic project centered on the problem of the representation of 
space. Space and perspective were established as categories for the analysis of art in 
the 1930s but space (especially as defined in that period) was not on C?zanne?s 
cultural horizon. The next chapter will argue that this strategy transformed C?zanne?s 
art into the link that connects the art of the nineteenth century with the avant-gardes, 
thus consolidating the notion of a continuous history of art as the subject of study of 
the modern art history that was being institutionalized at the time. This transition was 
actually a ?suture.? 
 
382
It is clear that there exists an abyss between art history and the scientific study of art, and that 
both disciplines have become altogether dubious. When art history wishes to be more than a calendar, 
it quite naively borrows ill-founded judgments and ideas. Within these ideas the individual works melt 
into generalities without contours, and the concrete deed dissolves into a sort of vague aestheticism; on 
the other hand, a thousand anecdotes and dates or art history do not touch at all upon technical 
questions of the work of art or on the forms themselves. Ultimately one ends up with an anecdotal 
psychology that transforms the history of art into a novel. As for that pedantic method that consists of 
pictorial description, we wish to point out that the structure of language is such that it breaks up the 
synchronic power of the picture and that the heterogeneity of words destroys the overall impression.  
A psychological method presents other difficulties. ? 
Carl Einstein, ?Notes on Cubism,? Documents, 1929. 
1
Chapter Seven: C?zanne: the Father of Cubism and the Grandfather of Modern 
Art
When did modern art history begin to impinge upon modern art?s and 
C?zanne?s historiography? The answer lies in the period between the two wars, with 
at least three meaningful dates: 1920, 1929 and 1936. The second and the third can be 
explained with just one image (fig. 23), as the opening of the MoMA in 1929 with the 
exhibit C?zanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, and the organization of Cubism and 
Modern Art in 1936, were fundamental events for both developments.
2
C?zanne?s The Bather hung for years at the entrance to the museum?s 
permanent collection of paintings and sculptures and its placement sparked debate in 
2004, when the institution unveiled its new installation after the latest building 
renovations. As John Elderfield explained, ?I worried that the absolute familiarity of 
the C?zanne was making it appear almost like a reproduction of itself. Not a painting, 
 
1
This article appeared in the third issue of the first year of Bataille?s magazine, Documents. I am using 
the translation by Charles W. Haxthausen that appeared in the issue devoted to Einstein in October107 
(Winter, 2004), 160. 
2
1920 was the date of the publication of Henry Daniel Kahnweiler?s The Rise of Cubism and its 
importance will become clear in what follows. 
383
but an image of how the museum began the exhibition of its collection.?
3
This chapter 
analyzes Barr?s interpretation of C?zanne?s art in 1936 as the pivotal connection that 
links nineteenth-century art to the early avant-gardes.   
Cubism and Abstract Art opened at MoMA nine years after the publication of 
Panofsky?s Perspective as Symbolic Form, a book in which, as previously noted, 
modern art is notoriously absent but which established space as a category for the 
analysis of works of art. There would seem not to be a direct connection between 
these two publications, except that in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, 
Barr?s characterization of C?zanne?s art rests on the fact that Braque and Picasso, the 
pioneers of cubism, had especially admired the master?s later work, ?in which he 
abandons the perspective of deep space and the emphatic modeling?.?
4
In this way 
the author established C?zanne as the immediate forerunner of cubism, a role that not 
all the contemporary writers agreed to bestow upon him.  
Barr and the art critics who cast C?zanne as the precursor of cubism shared the 
mentality of the rappel ? l? ordre of the 1920s and 1930s. They not only projected 
onto C?zanne and cubism their own understanding of modern art but also shaped 
them so that they could be presented as the link that relates, and thus sutures, the art 
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   
When, in 1987, Damisch defended perspective as an epistemological paradigm, 
he singled out Panofsky?s 1953 Early Netherlandish Painting for critique because the 
German scholar had asserted that the perspectival system created in the Renaissance 
had been superseded at the beginning of the twentieth century by cubism and 
 
3
See Arthur Lubow, ?Re-Moderning,? The New York Times Magazine (October 3, 2004): 61. I would 
like to thank Dr. June Hargrove for calling my attention to this article.   
4
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, 26.   
384
Einstein?s theory of relativity.
5
Damisch noticed that in 1927 Panofsky had not 
mentioned C?zanne?s breach of the perspectival tradition and argued that in that way 
he had avoided highlighting the historical limitations of perspective because, 
This would have entailed him, as a good neo-Kantian, to begin by undermining 
the pretense of so-called central perspective to restore an image of the objective 
world, showing its value to be entirely relative and strictly conjunctural, on the 
basis of pseudoscientific considerations borrowed form [sic] the physiology of 
vision.
6
(Emphasis added.) 
 
Damisch indicates that whereas in 1927, Panofsky?s neo-Kantian 
understanding of perspective as an epistemological paradigm had triumphed over the 
influence of the ?pseudoscientific considerations? about vision that suggested the 
contingent character of perspective, in 1953 he had historicized and thus relativized 
the value of such a technical device.   
This chapter demonstrates that around 1927 questions about C?zanne?s use of 
perspective or about his interest in the representation of space were simply non-issues 
They were introduced into the consideration of his art in the 1930s, when, mostly 
thanks to Panofsky?s book, perspective started to be understood as a key 
epistemological issue, a symbolic form, and a category for the analysis of works of 
art. Hence, when in 1953 Panofsky argued that cubism brought about the end of 
perspective and noted that even though C?zanne and van Gogh had reaffirmed the 
primacy of the surface, their art had remained faithful to a ?perspectival interpretation 
of space,? he was reflecting the influence of the scholarship on modern art that his 
own work had spawned.
7
As Panofsky?s treatise had established perspective as the 
 
5
Hubert Damisch, L? Origine de la perspective (Paris : Flammarion, 1987), 27?28. 
6
Damisch, Origine perspective, 27?28. 
7
Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 
166?167. In his book on C?zanne Novotny states that Panofsky?s 1927 treatise is the ?fundamental 
385
Symbolic form of the West, to affirm that C?zanne?s art had meant the ?end of 
scientific perspective? was a way of securing for the artist a key role in the history of 
art. This case demonstrates how the narrative establishes the set of questions 
addressed to the subject of study, and hence determines the fundamental meaning of 
the art it considers.  
Because space/perspective as theorized by Panofsky was a category devised 
for the study of Antiquity and the Renaissance, with this chapter this dissertation 
comes full circle. Chapter One has argued that the German founders art history 
projected their understanding of modern art into their analysis of the past; this chapter 
demonstrates that, in the 1930s, a category devised for the study of the past 
determined the way French modern art was approached and therefore understood. 
Space, as Panofsky conceived of it, was not just an external category imposed onto 
C?zanne?s art and artistic personae like classical, primitive, or baroque but involved 
the examination of the most intimate physio-psychological patterns of the artist?s 
perception and mode of understanding the world.  
Most of the scholars who have studied Panofsky?s Pespective as Symbolic 
Form have noted that book needs to be contextualized;
8
nevertheless, only Damisch, 
and later Elkins, observed the book?s relationship with the pseudo-sciences about 
vision and perception that thrived at the time, which were also influencing the critical 
fortune of cubism (more on this below). This observation allows us to suggest that 
Panofsky?s notion that there had been a period in which the West had perceived and 
 
discussion about perspective.? See Novotny?s C?zanne Ende in Vienna School Reader, 424 n. 32.  See 
also Wood?s ?Une perspective oblique. Hubert Damisch, La grammaire du tableau et la 
strukturanalyse viennoise, ? Cahiers du Mus?e national d?art moderne 58 (Winter 1996),122.  
8
See Elkins Poetics of Perspective, 20?23, and Veltman, ?Panofsky?s Perspective.?  
386
thought of space as continuous, homogeneous, and isotropic was a reaction to counter 
the contemporary doubts and questions about it raised by Einstein?s theory of 
relativity. Panofsky?s dream of a coherent understanding of space belongs to the time 
in which the mandarins of the Republic of Weimar pined for the balance and harmony 
of a mythical Renaissance.  
In his meticulous analysis of the first part of Panofsky?s book, Elkins observed 
that the author closes and synthesizes his theoretical presentation affirming the 
existence of a natural, curvilinear perspective?postulated by Guido Hauck at the end 
of the nineteenth century?which Panofsky uses as a backdrop to delineate and define 
that of the Renaissance. Curvilinear perspectives have since the Renaissance been, 
?shadowy rivals? to linear perspective, although, as Elkins comments,  
[t]hey have never been supported by a unified theory? From an art historical 
standpoint, the history of curvilinear perspectives has some connections with the 
mistaken versions of non-Euclidean geometry which circulated among early 
modern artists and also with our ways of thinking and writing about naturalistic 
painting .?
9
These systems were superficially considered by different disciplines but had remained 
as vague hypotheses (which does not mean that they were not influential at given 
moments of history) that contradicted and annulled Kant?s system, as the philosopher 
had postulated the principles and axioms of Euclidean geometry as an example of 
synthetic a priori concepts.
10
 The dissemination of Einstein?s theories prompted the 
popularization of non-Euclidean geometries and theories about the fourth dimension, 
 
9
Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 183. 
10
 The case of hypnosis as analyzed by Jonathan Crary presents many similarities with these pseudo-
sciences.  Suspensions of Perception, 65?71. At mid-nineteenth century, von Helmholtz had offered a 
formulation of space that still accorded with the unified space postulated by Kant.  
387
which came to the attention to the public and artists like Albert Gleizes, who 
mentions them in his 1912 Du Cubisme.
11
 
Linda Dalrymple Henderson?the leading specialist in these theories and their 
influences on art?remarks that the French philosopher Henri Poincar? (1854-1912) 
postulated the existence of a perceptual space that, as the product of visual tactile and 
motor components, was not continuous or homogeneous but finite and anisotropic, 
that is, the opposite of mathematical space. Because it could not be determined if this 
space was three dimensional or not, the door was left open to think of the possibility 
of more dimensions.
12
 This perceptual space was similar to Mach?s, which as 
observed above, shaped Cassirer?s approach to the problem. Panofsky?s book 
manifested and synthesized ideas about space that were literally ?in the air,? which in 
part explains the book?s success and widespread influence.
13
 
The year 1920 is also significant in the developments that led to the establishment 
of a linkage between nineteenth-century modern art and the avant-gardes because it 
was the year that the art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1884?1979), published Der 
Weg zum Kubismus, a text he had first published in 1916 as an article. This book 
marks the moment when the theoretical approach and categories springing from the 
application of the German neo-Kantian tradition to the study of art that would later be 
 
11
 See Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Cubism (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 29 ss. 
12
 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 36. 
13
 Kim Veltman has discussed the common misconception that affirms that Panofsky was the first who 
discussed perspective as a means of analyzing style, listing those who preceded it. The first book in 
this list is a 1878 treatise on Piero della Francesca. Most of the books he lists up to the 1920s consider 
a specific period or artist. Veltman contends that even the idea of perspective as a ?symbolic form? had 
been seriously discussed prior to Panofsky?s famous lecture. L W. Pollack?s, Perspektive und Symbol 
in Philosophie und Rechtwissenchaft (1912) has a chapter entitled ?The Perspectival and Symbolic 
Method in General, ? which explored the usefulness of perspective as an image to describe relative 
viewpoints; Spengler?s influential Decline of the West,(1923) also contained a chapter on ?the 
symbolism of the world view and the problem of space.? See ?Panofsky?s Perspective.? 
388
at the foundations of modern art history, started to be used for the analysis of modern 
art.
14
 In 1987 Yve-Alain Bois discussed the book as a ?breakthrough,? maintaining 
that Kahnweiler had been ?the only critic to give an intelligent account of cubism,?  
If we compare him to the contemporary French critics, we must ask whether any 
of them possessed the means to go beyond the brawling, congenial journalism of 
an Apollinaire (a journalism that Kahnweiler did not esteem very highly). Art 
history was moribund in Paris (or rather, it was vitally concerned with the Middle 
Ages, and not at all with the theoretical-historiographical and perceptual 
problems that preoccupied Kahnweiler in Switzerland). The aesthetic was the 
province of specialists who repeated their investigations of the beautiful or of 
?harmony of the arts.? None of the events in art for half a century seemed to have 
affected the theorists in France, while a W?lfflin or a Fiedler, for example, were 
influenced in their theoretical work by the emergence of impressionism, even if 
they did not refer to it explicitly. 
15
 
Bois does not give much credence to the contemporary local tradition of art criticism, 
which is reduced to the role of provider of context. The application of German 
philosophy and of the categories developed by German art historians enabled 
Kahnweiler to understand cubism. 
As the exclusive dealer of Picasso and Braque, Kanhweiler had been a 
privileged witness to the rise of cubism. Upon the declaration of war in 1914, he went 
to Bern, where he embarked upon serious readings of neo-Kantian philosophy, 
aesthetics, and art history. In the articles he published in different German journals, 
later compiled as Confessions esth?tiques, he discusses the work of Heinrich 
W?lfflin, Joseph Strzygowski, Heinrich Rickert, Conrad Fiedler, Adolph von 
Hildebrand, Georg Simmel, and the philosophy of Kant among others. He returned to 
Paris in 1920, the year of the publication of his book on cubism.   
 
14
 This assertion is valid within the parameters established by this essay that argues that the 1930s 
generated a new art history. The influence of Wilhelm Worringer?s writings on the Expressionist artists 
seems to have been a ?spiritual? connection in which the art historian gave ideas and suggested an 
orientation, much as art criticism and other scholarly books and philosophy had done in the past.  
15
 Yve-Alain Bois, ?Kahnweiler?s Lessons,? Representations 18 (Spring, 1987), 35. 
389
Since Kahnweiler was not prone to advertising and wary of theoretical 
interpretations, his book should be seen as a strategy to counter the 
misunderstandings circulated by art criticism, especially by the so called ?minor 
cubists? like Albert Gleizes. He also had to fend off the association of cubism as art 
boche. The Rise of Cubism?as it was called in English?was conceived as part of a 
larger enterprise, a book written in 1915 but not published until much later, Der 
Gegenstand der ?sthetik. Werner Spies notices that,   
Ce n??tait au fond rien d?autre que l??bauche d?une histoire universelle de l?art, 
se fixant pour but de faire du cubisme son point culminant. Il est clair que 
l?auteur n?a nullement l?intention de se pr?senter comme le contemporain de 
l?avant-garde et de livrer des d?tails sociaux et biographiques. Nous n?y trouvons 
aucune anecdote. L?ambition de Kahnweiler est grande?il d?sire comprendre ce 
qu?il a v?cu et l?ins?rer dans l?histoire de l?art. Dans un essai publi? en 1920, 
?Les limites de l?histoire de l?art?, il trace pour ainsi dire le cadre historique et 
philosophique pour ?La mont?e du cubisme? qui avait ?t? ?crit auparavant. Il 
?crit ?Une r?alit? historique est celle qui ne se produit qu?une fois. Si elle est 
n?cessaire ? la continuit? de la s?rie causale que doit pr?senter l?expos? 
historique en cause, alors elle sera consign?e par l?histoire; sinon elle ne le sera 
pas.? 
16
 
Kahnweiler was well aware of the fundamental problems and the theories being 
discussed at the time.
17
 The art dealer?s goals were similar to those of modern art 
history, as he wanted to secure a place for cubism in the history of art. Conscious of 
the discipline?s paradoxical structure, he rewrote his experiences according to its 
categories of analysis, transforming cubism into a key historical episode so that it 
might be incorporated into the diachronic development of the history of art.   
 
16
 Werner Spies, Pour Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1965), 37. 
17
 In ?Les limites de l?histoire de l?art,? where he confronts the problem of structure against 
historicism, he comments on Simmel?s ?Das problem der historischen Zeit,? a text also used by 
Panofsky, who, in turn, disputed Kahnweiler?s interpretation of Riegl?s kunstwollen in a note of his 
famous article ?The Concept of Artistic Volition.? See Bois, ?Kahnweiler?s Lessons,? 60 n. 21. 
Panofsky comments that Kahnweiler was influenced by Worringer in his interpretation of Riegl. See 
Panofsky?s ?Artistic Volition,? 24, n. 7. 
390
In The Rise of Cubism Kahnweiler contends that, ?[t]he artist, as the executor of 
the unconscious plastic will of mankind, identifies himself with the style of the 
period, which is the expression of this will,? a statement that allows Kahnweiler to 
contend that the modern movement is ?the expression of the intellectual spirit of our 
time.?
18
 As Spies noticed, neo-Kantianism was useful for this German Jew enamored 
of French modern art: 
Kahnweiler tente donc de soustraire le cubisme ? une tradition nationale 
d?termin?e?et c?est pr?cis?ment ce qu?on reprocha au cubisme et aux artistes 
repr?sent?s para Kahnweiler, ? partir de 1914. Kahnweiler lui-m?me n?en ?tait 
arriv? l? que gr?ce ? sa r?volte contre son temps, contre ses origines, sa classe, 
contre les nationalismes. ?[it resolved him to find] une aptitude transcendantale 
? vivre l?art comme un langage qui exige la connaissance de l?objet?mais ne 
n?cessite la connaissance d?aucun idiome national ou historique. 
19
 
Neo-Kantianism helped Kahnweiler, as it would later help Panofsky, to deflect 
some of the influences of the time, especially nationalism as this philosophical 
approach permitted him to relate cubism to the modern theories of perception and 
knowledge that were ?supra-national? and claimed universal validity. As already 
explained, neo-Kantianism had replaced Kant?s metaphysical approach with a more 
logical, epistemological one, which nonetheless kept philosophy?s claim to 
transcendentalism.
20
 
In 1965 the writer and art critic Jean Cassou saluted Kanhweiler?s text as a 
healthy influence on the French artistic panorama, stressing that it meant the use of 
 
18
 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949), 15. 
19
 Spies, Pour Kahnweiler,  39. 
20
 ?Son besoin d?expliquer l?art en dehors de tout motif sociologique et psychologique ? s?est nourri 
de la philosophie fond?e sur la th?orie de la connaissance et l??pist?mologie. L?id?alisme 
transcendantal ou, en l?occurrence, la ?logique transcendantale? qui a pris la place de la m?taphysique 
chez les n?o-kantiens, servit de base ? une compr?hension de l?art sans pr?suppos? psychologique. La 
conscience structurant en synth?tisant fut oppos?e ? tout ce qui ?tait exp?rience v?cue et subjective de 
l?art. L?art devenait une ouverture sur le monde, il ?tait comme un langage, ? ? Spies, Pour 
Kahnweiler, 39. 
391
German philosophy for the understanding of a French artistic movement. In contrast 
to Bois?s eulogy, Cassou?s text shows how the critical frame was fundamentally 
extraneous to the artistic product it analyzed: 
A cette ?clatante explication il avait ?t? pr?par? par l?apparition, si d?terminante 
pour le naissant vingti?me si?cle europ?en, de toute une vigoureuse cohorte 
d?esth?ticiens germaniques, habiles aux m?canismes de la dialectique et de la 
sp?culation, aptes ? lancer de puissantes hypoth?ses, ? ouvrir de vastes 
perspectives, ? inscrire dans une dramaturgie de concepts, c?est-?-dire dans un 
syst?me, l?histoire de tous les arts du monde, jusqu'? ceux des si?cles les plus 
t?n?breux. 
21
 
Kahnweiler was further influenced by the ideas of his longtime friend Carl 
Einstein (1885?1940), born just one year after him and also a German Jew. A poet, 
writer, theoretician of art but also an art dealer, art critic, and advisor to collectors, 
Einstein has lately received more scholarly attention from art historians for his radical 
writings.
22
 As the epigraph demonstrates, his understanding of modern art was based 
on a harsh critique of art history. Einstein had studied philosophy and art history in 
Berlin, attending W?lfflin?s lectures, but, politically involved with the left and the 
avant-gardes in art (especially expressionism, dada, and surrealism), his ideas about 
modern art opposed the Swiss art historian?s formalist theories.  
Einstein?s friendship with Kahnweiler began in 1904?1905, when they met in 
Paris. With the dealer?s help, Einstein became the most renowned German critic of 
modern art. In turn, Kahnweiler was among the first to read the important 1915 
 
21
 Jean Cassou, ?Le po?te et le philosophe,? in Pour Kahnweiler, 38. The work of Alfred Barr, for 
example, was first translated into French in the 1960s. Cassou was a writer and an intellectual who had 
been born in 1897 and in the 1960s directed the Museum of Contemporary Art of the City of Paris.  
22
 His work, especially his ?Negerplastik,? has always been well known, but in the last ten years his 
work has started to be incorporated into mainstream art history. The October group, which has done so 
much for disseminating the work of Bataille, Foucault, and Benjamin, among others, has recently 
published an issue devoted to Einstein. His fate was similar to Benjamin?s. He committed suicide in 
1940 while fleeing the Gestapo and much of his work remained as notes that are now being published. 
See October, (Winter 2004). For the full list of the bibliography on Einstein see 
http://www.carleinstein.de/Index2.htm 
392
Negerplastik, a book Sebastian Zeidler has characterized as ?as much a sophisticated 
manifesto of modernist ?primitivism? as it was an anti-Hildebrandian, and hence an 
anti-W?lfflinian manifesto of sculptural experience.?
 23
 The art dealer, however, did 
not share the radicalism of his friend?s aesthetics nor his enthusiasm for non-Western 
art. In 1928 Einstein moved to Paris where he founded Documents, together with 
George Bataille, George-Henri Rivi?re among others. The group?s interest in 
Surrealism and ethnography affected Einstein?s ideas about art. He contributed 
articles on Cubism to the magazine which were related to his ground-breaking Die 
Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, first published in 1926 and in an enlarged version in 
1931. Einstein was aware of the work produced by the Warburg Institute as he 
contacted its director soliciting contributions for Documents.
24
 
Kahnweiler and Einstein translated cubism into the vocabulary of German art 
history early on, were active in Paris in the 1920s, and had contact with important 
artists and the intellectual milieu.
25
 Barr was not gifted in foreign languages but his 
German was better than his French. The bibliography of the 1936 exhibition 
demonstrates that his work was heavily influenced by the writings on modern art by 
German scholars, notably Kahnweiler and Einstein, whose books he considered 
fundamental for the understanding of cubism and modern art.
 26
 
23
 Sebastian Zeigler ?Introduction,? October 107 (Winter 2004), 5. 
24
 The main source for this data is Zeigler ?Introduction.? It has to be remembered that Strzygowski 
was also part of the editorial board of Documents, given his anti-establishment approach at the time.  
25
 After his return to Paris, Kahnweiler opened a second gallery, the Galerie Simon where he held 
meetings with artists, writers and other personalities, which might be described as a salon. He was in 
close relationship with Juan Gris, over whom he exerted a certain influence.  
26
 For information on Barr see Roob, ?Alfred H. Barr,? 1?19. The 1936 catalogue has a well organized 
bibliography. The three books marked with the asterisk that signals them as ?more important books? 
under the subtitle ?Modern art? are in German. Einstein?s and Kahnweiler?s books are so marked. See 
Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 235?239. 
393
C?zanne, Cubism and Perspective 
At the end of the 1920s Cubism was perceived as dead.
27
 The contemporary art 
critic Guillaume Janneau could claim that the discussions about the movement had 
only theoretical value as ?they beat around a tomb.?
28
 These were the years of the 
rappel ? l?ordre and the association with cubism was not in the interest of any artist. 
In 1936 Barr almost single-handedly gave cubism a renewed life by arguing that it 
was the direct antecedent of the thriving abstract art movement. In the same move he 
established C?zanne as the ancestor of cubism and the division of cubism into two 
stages: ?Analytic? and ?Synthetic.? These denominations, and the way Barr 
characterized them, have a distinct Kantian flavor. The use of these words in 
reference to art was not new but, they do not appear, for example, in the catalogue of 
the 1935 exhibition Les Cr?ateurs du Cubisme organized by Maurice Raynal and 
Raymond Cogniat. 
29
 
Christopher Green has called attention to the fact that the first (mostly French) 
commentators and art critics who analyzed cubism considered that for these artists the 
mind was more important than the eyes. Until 1914 this artistic movement was 
understood as a reaction against impressionism, more interested in geometry and 
mental processes than in the perceptual apprehension of things.
30
 This changed after 
the War, when the first period of cubism started to be interpreted as a perceptual 
 
27
 See Daniel Robbins, ?Abbreviated Historiography of Cubism,? Art Journal 47 Revising Cubism 
(Winter, 1988): 277?283, and  Green, Art in France.
28
 See Christopher Green Cubism and its Enemies  Modern Movements and Reaction in French art, 
1916?1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). For Picasso see Michael C. FitzGerald Making 
Modernism. Picasso and the Creation of the Market for 20th-Century Art (New York: Farrar, Straus 
and Giroux, 1995). The classic account is by Silver, Esprit de Corps. 
29
 Robbins, ?Historiography of Cubism,? 282 n. 19. 
30
 Green, Art in France, 93. 
394
project. Although Green does not mention it, Kahnweiler?s book helped to effect this 
change that coincides with the beginning of the influence of German modern art 
history in the historiography of the art movement. Nevertheless, it was Barr?s 
catalogue which promulgated the notion that cubism?s original project was perceptual 
(analysis) instead mental conception: ?[f]or Barr, despite Gleizes?s or Raynal?s 
claims, cubist painting before the end of 1912 remained based essentially on 
perception: on a process by which things seen were broken down into their 
component parts?a process of empirical analysis.?
31
 According to Green this 
interpretation was still valid in 1989 when MoMA presented Pioneering Cubism 
organized by Rubin. Green states then, that cubism was basically redefined as   
the experience of seeing in depth as the eye tracks tilted facets across a two-
dimensional surface. And a crucial factor in this was a device dubbed passage:
the sliding of one painted surface into another through C?zannian broken 
contours. 
32
 
Barr created a technical term passages??the breaking of a contour so that the 
form seems to merge with space?
33
?to demonstrate that C?zanne and the cubist 
painters had equivalent artistic projects that consisted in the dissolution of volumes 
and perspective into a flat surface, thus opening the door for abstract art.
 34
 
Subsequently the invention of this technique was attributed to C?zanne and used to 
 
31
 Green, Art in France, 95. 
32
 Green, Art in France, 24. 
33
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 30. 
34
 See The Oxford English Dictionary where the term appears with this meaning from the 1960s on; 
and Reginald G. Haggar The Dictionary of Art Terms (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1962), 247. Ralph 
Mayer A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques (New York: Crowell, 1975 c. 1969) does not list it. 
It seems to be an adaptation of the term that appear already in Claude H. Watelet and P. C L?vesque 
Dictionnaire des Arts de Peinture Sculpture et Gravure (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1972) a reprint of 
the Dictionnaire des beaux-arts ... 1788?91. It refers there to a gradual degradation of tones and the 
transitions of colors. See Volume III 729?732. Nevertheless, the dictionary also states that ?[o]n peut 
bien dire auffi qu?il y a des passages qui tiennent ? la compofition & ? la difpofition des objects d?un 
tableau; mais ce qu?on entend pour l?ordinaire et le plus g?n?ralement par le mot passages en peinture, 
& eft fimplement la tranfition d?un ton ? un autre & des lumieres aux ombres. ? op. cit. 730.  
395
?demonstrate? how influential he had been in the creation of cubism. This is an 
example of how the need to create a chronological sequence and to connect different 
episodes (artists or art movements) in a continuous narrative determines the analysis 
of art. The passages served to carry over from the art of the older master a 
problematic that belonged to cubism. Therefore, for the sake of the continuity of the 
history of art both C?zanne?s artistic project and the meaning of cubism were 
reinterpreted to make them fit within this larger project.  
As mentioned in the Introduction to this dissertation, the rappel ? l? ordre favored 
the interpretation of C?zanne as a classic artist, the heir and restorer of Poussin?s art. 
In 1921 there appeared, posthumously, the C?zanne of Joachim Gasquet, which was 
almost immediately taken by art dealers who reissued it, the Bernheim-Jeunes in 1926 
and Paul Cassirer in German in 1930. Georges Rivi?re, who had known the artist in 
his impressionist years, started a flurry of publications with his 1923 Le Ma?tre Paul 
C?zanne, which was later revised and published as C?zanne, le peintre solitaire 
(1933, 1936, and 1943). This author published articles in L?Art vivant (?La Formation 
de Paul C?zanne? in 1925, and ?Les Premiers Essais de Paul C?zanne? in 1929). L?o 
Larguier also published his memoirs in this period, although he was less prone to 
portray C?zanne as a classic master.
35
 As noted  above, in 1926 George then editor-
in-chief of L? Amour de l?art, asked Roger Fry for a study on C?zanne, which later 
developed in one of the most influential interpretations of the artist?s work from 
before Second World War: C?zanne: A Study of His Development.
35
 Le Dimanche avec Paul C?zanne (Paris : l??dition, 1925), Paul C?zanne ou le drame de la peinture, 
(Paris: Deno?l & Steele 1936), C?zanne ou la lutte avec l?ange de la peinture (Paris : R. Julliard, 
1947). 
396
In the many articles devoted to the artists in both L?Art vivant and L?Amour de 
l?art, as well as in the books and catalogues, the representation of space is seldom 
mentioned and never as an important component of C?zanne?s artistic project. When 
perspective is mentioned, it is only considered a technical device. C?zanne?s 
purported classicism depends on interpreting his art as the resurgence of an interest in 
the representation of volumes and in composition. With impressionism and cubism in 
the shadows, this C?zanne became the model for the new generation of artists active 
in the 1930s, an issue that had to be tackled by the authors of the three books 
examined in the preceding chapters.  
This situation changed when C?zanne?s art started to be analyzed in the light of 
the artist?s influence on cubism. A notorious example is the writings of Albert Gleizes 
(1881?1953), a cubist painter who was part of the Group of Puteaux, and who was 
engrossed in the debate of theories about space and time, philosophy, art history, and 
what Damisch calls ?pseudo-sciences.?
 36
 His ?Peinture et perspective descriptive? 
appeared first in 1924 as a special issue of Vie des Lettres et des arts and as a book in 
1927, the same publication dates as Panofsky?s treatise. Gleizes refers to perspective 
in C?zanne?s art, not as the representation of space, but as the point of view that 
explains the distortions that characterize the objects depicted in his paintings. He 
describes it as the artist?s fight to reconcile the circle he would see in the shape of the 
objects he was arranging as models for a still life and the ellipse he perceived while 
sitting in front of his easel.  
Gleizes uses one-point perspective as a metaphor for religious and political 
centralization, a meaning that derives from the analysis of its technical characteristics. 
 
36
 Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, chapter 2 ?Cubism and the New Geometries.?  
397
Perspective corresponds to the kind of order imposed by the Papacy, monarchies, and 
democracy, because since the Renaissance, ?au lieu de rester soumis ? l?intelligence, 
l?intellect adopta le contr?le des sens.?
37
 In pre-modern times men?s eyes were free 
and mobile. Faith provided points of reference and buttressed their instable 
perceptions; the perspective created in the Renaissance tied the eye to one point while 
men were subjected to the central powers. Cimabue is Gleizes?s hero because his eyes 
were still mobile.    
Car ce que nous condamnerions chez Cimabue, c?est une mani?re d??tre, un ?tat 
d?esprit et un mode intellectuel, ?. que nous ne connaissons plus et qui 
cependant furent ceux de notre jeunesse. Nous le reprocherions, d?avoir ?t?, dans 
des circonstances analogues le C?zanne de son ?poque; d?avoir tent? d?accorder 
deux antinomies, les m?mes que celles qui ligot?rent C?zanne. Mais l??poque 
?loignait Cimabue de la terre que devait red?couvrir C?zanne, elle le rapprochait 
par contre de celle que C?zanne aurait voulu perdre de vue.
38
 
C?zanne returned to the real and painted what he saw. In this way he regained the 
mobile and unprejudiced perception that the Italian artists had lost in the Renaissance. 
Although he had brought to an end Renaissance perspective, C?zanne had not been 
able to encourage the transformation of art. Cubism was the reflection in art of the 
crisis that preceded the Great War, 
39
 
Chez eux [cubist painters] reparaissait le m?me conflit de l?immobile et du 
mobile, de l?espace analytique et du rythme qui synth?tiquement resolidarise 
tout, de la raison limit?e et de la foi qui renverse les cloisons. Le drame du XIIIe 
si?cle se jouait de nouveau: saint Ignace et Descartes c?daient ? saint Thomas.
40
 
Cubism had fostered the ?decentralization? and liberation of perception and, in 
this way, had prepared the way for new art. The mention of Saint Thomas brings the 
 
37
 Albert Gleizes, Peinture et Perspective Descriptive  (Sablons : Edition Moly-Sabata, 1927), 22 
38
 Gleizes, Peinture et Perspective, 28?29. 
39
 Gleizes in retrospective considers that Cubism in 1910?11 was a symptom of the crisis that exploded 
in 1914. ? ? [N]?appartient pas ? toutes les ?poques de produire des chefs d?oeuvre. Aust?res et 
pauvres sans ostentation, on leur d?couvrira [in the cubist paintings] l?angoisse de la menace qui devait 
plus tard s?abattre sur le monde.? Gleizes, Peinture et Perspective,  19. 
40
 Gleizes, Peinture et Perspective, 41. 
398
problem back to a religious element in Gleizes?s conception of art, history, vision, 
and space that is completely different from what neo-Kantianism stood for. Gleizes?s 
use of the terms ?analytic? and ?synthetic? is also particular to the French cultural 
environment (more on this below).  
In 1929 Janneau produced one of the first critical histories of the movement, L?Art 
cubiste, a book based on the author?s memories and on the early discussions in the 
French art world as well as on the material he had gathered in an inquiry in the 
Bulletin de la vie artistique in 1924-1925. He took issue with Gleizes, whom he 
accused of manipulating tradition and the problem of space in order to secure his own 
place in history.
41
 
Janneau argues that the painter needs to present Cimabue as a great primitive 
master in order to buttress the argument of C?zanne as a primitive and the father of 
modern art, so that he might claim, for the cubist painters and himself, the role of the 
High Renaissance artists: those who brought to its highest consummation what the old 
master had only suggested. The pawn in these chess game is perspective. In the words 
of Janneau:  
Quant ? la science de la perspective, laissons Albert Gleizes, l?imputer ? 
Cimabue, sous pr?texte qu?il aurait pu la poss?der, puisque C?zanne l?a 
reform?e. Ce ne sont point l? des arguments de critique, mais de partisan. Le 
cubisme est, par lui-m?me et dans son principe original, une expression si neuve 
et si personnelle de la sensibilit? qu?il n?est pas besoin de la justifier par une 
argumentation tir?e des canons classiques ?.
42
 
41
 The book is also marked in Barr?s bibliography as an important source. For an analysis of the book 
see Robbins, ?Historiography Cubism,? 277. Janneau comments, ?Si l?on en croyait les th?oriciens du 
cubisme, C?zanne serait le messie annonc? par les Primitifs italiens, Duccio, Cimabue et Giotto. En 
son ?uvre,  par voie de cons?quence, dans celle de ses disciples, se seraient enfin r?alises et l?id?al 
entrevu par ces vieux ma?tres, et les id?es qu?on leur attribue pour la raison qu?ils ne les ont pas 
appliqu?es.? Guillaume Janneau, L?Art cubiste : Th?ories et r?alisations. ?tude critique (Paris : C. 
Moreau, 1929), 8. 
42
 Janneau, L?Art cubiste, 9.  
399
Janneau contends that C?zanne had discovered the notion of volume, that the 
Mount Sainte-Victoire had taught him to portray what a real volume feels like, 
something the classic masters had lost when they chose to use perspective, a 
technique that does not allow artists to suggest true volumes.
43
 This text indicates a 
reaction against the imposition onto C?zanne?s art of something that had been alien to 
the master?s project, which demonstrates how unusual and ideological Gleizes?s 
lecture was considered to be at that time.   
Janneau notes that Apollinaire does not mention C?zanne in his analysis of 
cubism, and argues that the reason is that Picasso had not been influenced by the old 
master as much as Braque. Janneau was among the first who defended Braque?s 
priority in the creation of cubism. Kahnweiler?s and Barr?s accounts were centered on 
Picasso. It is widely accepted today that C?zanne was for Braque what African 
sculpture was to Picasso.
44
 In both cases the interpretation of the first term of the 
equation was modeled to comply with the second so that the relation could be 
established.   
The discussion was favored by C?zanne?s complex personality and the originality 
of his approach to art and career. He could be portrayed as a classic master, a hyper-
refined character, or as a na?ve, primitive artist. As Rubin comments in an essay on 
the influence of C?zanne,  
Braque was committed to C?zanne the modest artisan struggling to find his voice 
through single-minded dedication; but he also was committed to C?zanne the 
architectonic ?classical? painter of the French tradition. Picasso became attached 
to precisely that ?flaw? in C?zanne?s classicism which makes his art truly 
 
43
 Janneau, L?Art cubiste, 11. 
44
 The article by William Rubin in C?zanne: The Late Work, fully acknowledges Braque?s leading role 
and the influence of C?zanne based on the passages. Barr used a Braque painting in order to 
demonstrate the early influence of the master but did not elaborate on the subject matter.   
400
modern, namely, his malaise?the tremor we detect behind even the most 
outwardly calm and apparently stable of C?zanne?s compositions. ?It?s not what 
the artist does that counts, but what he is,? Picasso told Zervos. ?What forces our 
interest is C?zanne?s anxiety??
45
 
Picasso?s remarks had been published in Cahiers d?art in 1935. Given the particular 
position of cubism and Picasso in those years, they could be exploited to support 
contradictory interpretations of C?zanne.
46
 
Jeanneau?s and Gleizes?s texts demonstrate that in the French art world before 
1930 the analysis of C?zanne?s art was focused on his representation of volumes even 
if artists influenced by the new theoretical debate about space and perspective were 
bringing up this subject matter in relation to his work. More interestingly, even 
though C?zanne?s project was understood as involved with perception and vision and 
cubist style as the product of an intellectual analysis of volumes and space, the effort 
was being made to bring them together and to understand them as part of a diachronic 
development.
47
 Gleizes expounded his arguments in art historical terms, as 
Kahnweiler had done in 1920, realizing that this was the path to secure the critical 
fortunes of the art movement. Gleizes did not use the critical apparatus developed by 
German philosophy and art history but the nationalist approach of French art 
historians, like Emile M?le, whom he mentions in his text.  
 
45
 William Rubin, ?C?zannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism,? in C?zanne: the Late Work (New 
York, 1977), 188.  
46
 See, for example, the article by the conservative art critic Jacques Combe ?L?influence de C?zanne? 
in the special issue of La Renaissance, analyzed in Chapter Five. Combe argues that the first twenty-
five years of the century had been dominated first by the creative experimentation and inquietude, later 
by mannerism, and since 1925, by a new need for classical order. C?zanne, in his opinion, was 
consumed by two different energies that were in balance: the classical and the baroque. The early 
avant-garde would have been attracted to the second one. It is tempting to suggest that the critic?s 
opinion had been shaped by Picasso?s comments.  
47
 See Gleizes, Peinture et Perspective, 41. 
401
The debate parallels one that was taking place in Italy, with the difference that in 
France the past was brought about to explain the present or, better, the recent past, as 
cubism was then only ten years old. In 1914 Longhi had used the formalist 
interpretation of modern art to reconsider the art of Piero de la Francesca and the 
Venetian painters; whereas Gleizes reconfigures the history of Western art to explain 
the place cubism had had within it. Huyghe lamented the influence of theory and 
intellectual abstractions on art and artists. Gleizes?whose first book length essay on 
cubism had appeared in 1911? was himself an artist. 
Michael FitzGerald observed that at the beginning of the century there had been 
an acceleration of history, as the post-impressionist artists won consecration and 
acclaim before the impressionists.
48
 Laura Iamurri remarked that Christian Zervos 
started the publication of Picasso?s catalogue raisonn? in 1932, the same year that 
Manet?s was published; that is, four years before Venturi authored C?zanne?s.
 49
 The 
study of these rhythms seem to demonstrate that the 1920s and especially the 1930s 
were the decades when art history caught up with modern art and started to affect the 
way it was produced, as Huyghe, Francastel and other perceptive critics noticed.  
 This process came to fruition in 1930s with the redefinition of modern art as 
the art of the avant-gardes and the establishment of a blueprint that explained the 
development of international modern art. The epistemological model that supported 
such an interpretation results from the application of the methodology and categories 
of analysis developed mostly by German art historians for the study of past art.  This 
 
49  FitzGerald, Making Modernism, Introduction.  
49
 Laura Iamurri, ?Un problema della modernit? tra la due guerre: l?impressionismo dai souvenirs alla 
storia dell?arte.? Unpublished manuscript, 4. I would like to thank Dr. Iamurri for sharing her text with 
me.  
 
402
is why Kahnweiler?s and Barr?s texts are today recognized as ?modern? and basically 
adequate to the problem they study. This dissertation, to the contrary, studies how the 
application of these methodologies of study and categories affected the appreciation 
of the art created before this period.  
 
C?zanne and Perspective in Modern Art History
Cubism and Abstract Art created the blueprint for interpreting the history of 
modern art. While Rewald focused on writing C?zanne?s biography according to 
factual documentation, Barr consecrated him as the father of modern art. C?zanne?s 
post-war critical fortune was decided by these two approaches.  
Barr?s catalogue also established cubism?s division in ?analytic? and ?synthetic? 
and redefined the first phase of the movement as a perceptual endeavor. For the first 
period, the analytic, Barr introduced the concept of passages and defined them as 
both representational entities or/and as plastic entities whose function derives from 
the formal structure of the work of art.
50
 This reinterpretation of cubism has to be 
analyzed in depth. It started with Kahnweiler?s introduction of neo-Kantian categories 
for the analysis of this artistic movement, as the dealer?s book influenced Barr.
51
 
According to Kahnweiler modern art found a new balance between representation 
and structure superseding the Renaissance?s almost exclusive interest in illusionism. 
 
50
 In Cubism and Abstract Art Barr defines the passages twice. In the first definition (page 31), they 
break a form that has figurative value, while in the second (page 42) they have a purely formal 
function.  See below. 
51
 See Robbins, ?Historiography of Cubism,? 277?283. 
403
The Rise of Cubism does not consider the problem of the representation of space but 
that of objects. 
The nature of the new painting is clearly characterized as representational as well 
as structural: representational in that it tries to reproduce the formal beauty of 
things; structural in its attempt to grasp the meaning of this formal beauty in the 
painting.  
Representation and structure conflict. Their reconciliation by the new 
painting, and the stages along the road to this goal, are the subject of this book.
52
 
(Emphasis added) 
 
?Things? are at the center of the new painting, both as the subject of the 
representation and because the structure of the painting stems from their form. Space 
is only considered as pictorial space in relation to them. C?zanne?s only limitation, 
for example, was that he never completely rid himself of the impressionist light.
53
 
His art was lyric. In it there was no longer any motivation other than delight in 
form. He struggled with the object, trying to capture it in all its beauty and carry 
it into his painting. Where his friends the Impressionists saw only light, he used 
light to shape the three-dimensional object.
54
 
The artist aimed to better depict the structure of the objects. He chose high points 
of view that afforded him a better view of the subject matter while allowing a 
?penetrating delineation? of their forms that conformed to the structure of the 
painting.
55
 According to Kahnweiler, C?zanne?s influence determined cubism?s 
 
52
 Kahnweiler, Rise of Cubism, 1. ?When Kahnweiler wrote ?representation and structure conflict, their 
reconciliation by the new painting, and the stages along the road to this goal, are the subject of this 
work,? he set himself essentially a task of philosophic transposition, having borrowed the whole 
dichotomy, not from the tangled issues of early twentieth-century science and historical consciousness, 
but, from the remote yet clearer accomplishments of a century earlier, as taught in gymnasium and 
university. Robbins, ?Historiography of Cubism,? 281. (Emphasis added). 
53
 Kahnweiler considers that impressionism was the last incarnation of this representational impetus, as 
they concentrated on light.  
54
 Kahnweiler, Rise of Cubism, 3. 
55
 Kahnweiler called this perspective, which thus is conceived as point of view. Kahnweiler, Rise of 
Cubism, 4.  
404
concentration on the problem of the articulation of form and color on the 
surface/plane. C?zanne is the formalist father of modern art.  
Like in Barr?s catalogue, the problem of space appears only when the art dealer 
explores cubism. After abandoning The Demoiselles d?Avignon in 1908, Picasso 
introduced into his art something different, something not in C?zanne?s art.    
[H]e [Picasso] had to begin with the most important thing, and that seemed to be 
the explanation of form, the representation of the three-dimensional and its 
position in space on a two-dimensional surface. As Picasso himself once said, ?In 
a Raphael painting it is not possible to establish the distance from the tip of the 
nose to the mouth. I should like to paint pictures in which that would be 
possible.?
56
 
Braque was thinking of the same problems and solutions in the South, in 
L?Estaque:  ?They sought to make these objects as plastic as possible, and to define 
their position in space.? This last addition is important because in 1910 the art critic 
Roger Allard had suggested that cubist artists synthesized in the image the result of 
the impressions they received when moving around the objects.
57
 This notion might 
have been influenced by the ?pseudo-sciences? Damisch criticized, or as Mark Antliff 
contends, by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Whatever the case, it made a great 
impact on the French art criticism that Kahnweiler was confronting.
58
 After the 
breakthrough of 1910, the author continues, Picasso and Braque  
limited the space in the background of the picture. In a landscape, for instance, 
instead of painting an illusionist distant horizon in which the eye lost itself, the 
 
56
 Kahnweiler, Rise of Cubism, 7?8. 
57
 Roger Allard?s 1910 article noted a painting by Metzinger. The notion was taken by the so called 
?lesser cubists? and through their texts influenced the scholarship on cubism. Roger Allard, ?At the 
Paris Salon d?Automne,? in Edward Fry, Cubism (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1966), 62?63. 
58
 ?Scholars who interpret such multiple views as entailing a Kantian desire to represent the thing-in-
itself, misinterpret the Cubist notion of immediacy. They shift our focus from statements on the 
assimilation of objects into perceptual duration to a concern with the portrayal of objects as objects 
quite apart from the cubist dialogue on consciousness. In fact, the cubists rejected single-vanishing-
point perspective in order to develop an intuitive rather than intellectual means of representing the 
self.? Mark Antliff, ?Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment? Art Journal 47 (Winter, 1988), 347. 
405
artists closed the three dimensional space with a mountain. In still life or nude 
painting, the wall of a room served the same purpose. This method of limiting 
space had already been used frequently by C?zanne.
59
 
When Kahnweiler begins to consider space he turns to C?zanne?s art and projects 
his observation onto the painter?s oeuvre. The implication is that the artists used 
analogous formal devices because they had similar intentions. Nevertheless, the 
forward projection of the cubist paintings, which Kahnweiler accurately describes as 
the product of the process of creation (the cubist artists painted from memory and 
from the background to the foreground) cannot be found in C?zanne, as the master 
worked in front of the motif and according to his sensations. (For reference and 
illustration, see below the comparisons suggested by Barr. Figs. 24 and 25).   
Kanhweiler explains cubism according to the basic principles of the theory of 
perception, thus endowing the artists? work with the significance of a philosophical 
investigation.
60
 He mentions Kant just once, in a convoluted paragraph that starts with 
the analysis of the primary and secondary qualities of reality as posited by Locke. 
61
 
In painting these are: the object?s form, and its position in space. They [the cubist 
painters] merely suggest the secondary characteristics such as color and tactile 
quality, leaving their incorporation into the object to the mind of the spectator.  
This new language has given painting an unprecedented freedom. It is no 
longer bound to the more or less verisimilar optic image which describes the 
object from a single viewpoint. It can, in order to give a thorough representation 
of the objects? primary characteristics, depict them as stereometric drawing on 
the plane, or through several representations of the same object, can provide an 
analytical study of that object which the spectator then fuses into one again in his 
mind. The representation does not necessarily have to be in the closed manner of 
the stereometric drawing; colored planes, through their direction and relative 
position, can bring together the formal scheme without uniting in closes forms. 
Instead of an analytical description, the painter can, if he prefers, also create in 
 
59
 Kahnweiler, Rise of Cubism, 10. 
60
 It should be noted that when French art critics argued that cubism was a conceptual art movement 
they situated it far above mere sensation. Kahnweiler?s philosophical approach was based on neo-
Kantian philosophy, i.e., a theory of knowledge and an epistemology in which Kant?s metaphysical 
consideration of the process of perception is concentrated on the structuring consciousness.  
61
 For Locke, qualities were non-mental characteristics of reality that could cause ideas in the mind. 
The perception of qualities is mediated by ideas, which represent them to the mind. 
406
this way a synthesis of the object, or in the words of Kant, put together the 
various conceptions and comprehend their variety in one perception. 
62
(Emphasis 
added)  
 
Kahnweiler notes that cubism was focused on the problem of representing objects in 
space and that it had overruled perspective (the description of objects from a single 
viewpoint). He describes a cubist technique similar to what Barr will call passages, a
series of non representational color planes that build the formal structure of the 
painting while suggesting the presence of an object.
63
 The whole is bracketed by 
categories taken from two important theories of knowledge from the Enlightenment, 
but Kahnweiler?s approach has a distinctive neo-Kantian tone. Even the titles have a 
function within this system: they facilitate the apprehension of the visual information 
given by the paintings.  
The catalogue for Cubism and Abstract Art was published sixteen years after 
Kahnweiler?s book. This was not the first time Barr was writing on C?zanne or the 
cubist artists, but space, perspective and passages were absent in his previous 
analysis. Moreover, up to 1936 Barr was among those who relegated cubism in favor 
of a revived tendency towards realism.
64
 The abrupt change of ideas was determined 
by the historical events described in the Introduction of this dissertation and 
accelerated by Barr?s examination of the latest bibliography on the subject matter.
65
 
62
 Kahnweiler,  Rise of Cubism, 12. 
63
 Christopher Green considers that Kahnweiler in this paragraph is referring to the passages. Art in 
France, 24.  
64
 See the catalogues: First Loan Exhibition, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1929; 
Painting in Paris from American Collections, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1930; 
Brief Survey of Modern Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1932. For an analysis 
of Barr?s development of his ideas on Cubism see Susan Noyes Platt, ?Modernism, Formalism,? and 
her Art and politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism: A History of Cultural Activism 
During the Depression (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1999.) 
65
 See the bibliography in Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 234?249. 
407
Barr closes his brief survey of the nineteenth-century ancestors of modern art 
with C?zanne, whose art he extols for its impact on the pioneers of cubism who  
developed more literally and much further [emphasis added] than his [sic] perception 
of the geometrical forms underlying the confusion of nature. They admired too, 
C?zanne?s frequent choice of angular forms in his subject matter as in the Town of 
Gardanne (fig 29) but above all they studied C?zanne?s late work (figs. 18 and 24) in 
which he abandons the perspective of deep space and the emphatic modeling of solid 
forms for a compact composition in which the planes of foreground and background 
are fused into an angular active curtain of color. 
66
 
The catalogue characterizes C?zanne?s art in terms of his value as predecessor, 
which incidentally implies that cubism did not initially transform art.
67
 This link is 
reinforced by the fact that the text refers to the illustrations of C?zanne?s work (four 
of them, more than for any other nineteenth-century artist mentioned in the catalogue) 
that are paired with cubist paintings farther ahead in the essay. Everything suggests 
continuity. Barr presents a formalist interpretation of C?zanne?s art according to 
which the interest in representation is progressively overridden by structure. Only in 
1908 were Picasso and Braque able to master C?zanne?s lessons,   
A comparison of the Seaport (fig. 19) done by Braque in 1908 with the Pines and 
rocks, (fig. 18) of C?zanne painted only about a decade before, shows how 
Braque had studied C?zanne?s late style. In both paintings the surfaces of the 
natural forms are reduced to angular planes of facets, depth is almost eliminated 
and frequently the foreground and background forms are fused by means of 
passages?the breaking of a contour so that the form seems to merge with space 
[emphasis added].
68
 
Barr uses the four illustrations to hammer the same idea home: C?zanne 
purposefully denies depth by knitting forms and background/space. The term 
 
66
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 26.  
67
 Barr, like Kahnweiler and many other scholars, considered that impressionism remained a ?truthful 
imitation of natural appearances.? ?Impressionism was however too boneless and too casual in its 
method to serve as more than a technical basis for the artist who transformed or abandoned its 
tradition. Yet in spite of conscious reaction against Impressionism, something of its attitude and 
technique persisted.? Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 20. 
68
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 30?31. 
408
passages appears for the first time in this paragraph (fig. 24), where the author 
proposes that they were invented by the older artist. Barr?s matter of fact treatment 
plays down the obvious primacy of Braque in the development of this paramount 
breakthrough. 
69
 
The comparison is weak, as too many things differentiate the paintings. Only the 
leaves of the trees in the C?zanne seem to merge with space, which might ?represent? 
their movement in the breeze. Braque materializes the space and thrusts his forms 
towards the foreground, whereas in the painting by the older artist the volumes recede 
into the background. There are small light blue brushstrokes overlaid on those 
representing parts of the tree but nothing like Braque?s protruding shapes. If we 
accept that the same technique (passages) occurs in both paintings (it is actually hard 
to find in the work by C?zanne), that would imply that both artists had the same 
purpose. C?zanne?s work, however, looks like a much more faithful rendition of 
nature. The subject matter is different too (which can explain many of the formal 
differences): a seaport on the one hand, and a corner of an unpopulated forest on the 
other. This is not to say that Braque had not paid attention to C?zanne, or did not have 
a formal approach to art; but C?zanne?s art is not about what Braque did with it. 
In the second comparison, Barr repeats the strategy:  
In spite of the abstract character of Analytical Cubism it remained throughout 
closely linked to the modified Impressionism of C?zanne. There is a superficial 
 
69
 Seaport is one of the few works of art reproduced in the catalogue that was not in the exhibition, 
which attests to the importance of the painting in the development of Cubism. As John Golding in his 
classic interpretation of Cubism explains, ?This particular feature..., the solid, almost tangible, 
treatment of the sky, had been developed first in Cubist painting by Braque as a result of his new ideas 
about pictorial space. It is particularly noticeable in the Harbor in Normandy, a work painted from 
memory in the spring of 1909. In the late landscapes of C?zanne the sky is often treated in much the 
same way?as a complicated system of small, thickly painted facets or planes inextricably fused, and 
having a quality of weight and material existence.? John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis 
1907?1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 76.  
409
resemblance between Town of Gardanne (fig. 29) compared to the Poet (fig. 30) 
because the shapes of the houses resemble Picasso?s geometrizing technique; but 
there is also a fundamental resemblance in the relations between line and tone, 
between light and dark, and between the passages, the merging of planes with 
space by leaving one edge unpainted or light in tone?
70
 
Although Barr acknowledges that this is a ?superficial? resemblance (fig. 25), 
conceding that a different mindset might have facilitated this kind of formalist 
comparison at the time, this example does not withstand analysis. The volumetric 
Gardanne (a landscape) seems to retreat intently into the distance, whereas the shape 
of the Poet (a portrait or genre painting) protrudes and opens towards the foreground, 
barely distinguishable due to the fact that it is built out of a myriad of non-referential 
planes.
71
 
As the installation view of the exhibit (fig. 28) shows the paintings were actually 
displayed in this way in the 1936 exhibition. The color (see a suggestion in figs. 26 
and 27) and actual size of the paintings must have made the comparison even more 
difficult to grasp. This reveals how this approach to display was theoretical and 
ideological because it depended heavily on textual support for the [intellectual] 
elucidation of the proposed visual comparisons. This kind of installation leaves little 
margin for a personal understanding of the material in the exhibition, and presupposes 
that the viewer is informed of the theoretical principles that support the display. 
The comparison of the backgrounds of the two still-lifes proposed by Barr (fig. 
27) exemplifies the contrasting ideas that Picasso and C?zanne had with regard to the 
 
70
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 31. 
71
 A somewhat similar comparison appeared in Am?d?e Ozenfant?s Foundations of Modern art. The 
author crops the sky of the same painting of Gardanne and compares the result with the Rio Tinto 
Moulin d?huile by Picasso. Ozenfant does nor refer to the problem of space but considers invention and 
color. He calls this period ?super C?zannisme? and says that ?all that is given to Picasso, I give it to 
C?zanne.? The book was published in French in 1928 and translated into English in 1931. It appears in 
Barr?s bibliography but without the asterisk that marks the books that he considered important. See 
Foundations of Modern Art (London: John Rodker, 1931), 68?69. 
410
representation of space: whereas the objects in the painting of the older master stand 
out in front of an undifferentiated setting, those in the Picasso mingle with the busy 
background. Like the unfinished areas of La Gardanne, this reveals that C?zanne?s 
attention was focused on the representation of objects.
72
 
Whereas for Kahnweiler the open forms were a consequence of the analysis and 
reconstitution of the object, for Barr they effect the entwining of the objects with the 
background, dissolving deep perspective (space). Barr?s passages are integral to his 
idea of the ?curtain of colors? and involve the whole structure of the painting, as they 
become plastic components that connect the form with the non-form. The operation 
of linking C?zanne and analytical cubism?a true ?passage??assumes that 
C?zanne?s goal was to abandon traditional ways of indicating space and to call 
attention to the surface of the canvas, even though his art is famous for the sense of 
volume that inhabits the forms represented in his paintings. 
The use and fate of the passages deserves some attention. Even if the art 
historians who mention them agree that this device was invented by C?zanne, they are 
seldom mentioned by the specialists working on the painter, perhaps because the 
passages suggest an orientation towards abstraction that does not accord with the 
interpretation of the work of C?zanne outside of the larger context of the history of 
modern art. These scholars refer rather to brushstroke, taches, color notation.
73
 
72
 It might be argued that Barr could no secure the loan of works of art from C?zanne?s late period, the 
one he says the pioneers of Cubism appreciated, and that this is why the comparison looks ?forced.? 
This would imply that the need to establish these connections overcame the fact that he could not offer 
the visual demonstration of his thesis. Once again, the ideology of the narration is imposed on the 
works of art.  
73
 Different authors have also redefined them according to their needs. Stephen Einseman for example 
calls the ?tectonic facture? in itself passages. Stephen Einsenman Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical 
History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 347. See also Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New 
York: Knopf, 1991), 29 where the author describes the technique but does not call it passages. On the 
411
Passages is a term that surface in the work of generalists?even those who have left 
behind a formalist interpretation of the history of art?and in the surveys that 
introduce C?zanne as the antecedent of cubism. In the 1996 Interpreting C?zanne,
Paul Smith mentions them only when he considers the influence of C?zanne on the 
Demoiselles d?Avignon, defining them as ?spatially indeterminate planes.?
74
 William 
Rubin in the article he wrote for the 1978 C?zanne exhibition organized at MoMA, 
ascribes the invention of the passages to C?zanne, without specifying how the artist 
used them or the function they had in his work. Rubin recognizes in Braque the true 
inventor of cubism when he ?extrapolated from possibilities proposed by C?zanne.?
75
 
The cubist artist was able to carry on the ?full assumption of the modernist 
possibilities of C?zannian passages.?
76
 Rubin defines the ?passages of planes,? as the 
place where broken contours allow the planes to ?spill or bleed into adjacent ones.?
77
 
He continues,  
Braque concentrated on the problem of painting what he called the ?visual space? 
that ?separates objects from each other.? Thus Braque described as a 
?materialization of a new space??making space as actual, as concrete and 
perceivable pictorially as the objects themselves?was, in effect, the explicit 
articulation and radicalization of a C?zannian idea. From autumn 1907 until 
autumn 1908 ? Braque began to regard interstitial space as virtually ?tactile.?
78
 
other hand, Marilyn Stokstad?s Art History (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001) mentions them 
as C?zanne?s invention when she is discussing cubism (page 1076) and lists them in the glossary (page 
10). This author avoids mentioning the problem of space and refers to the ?blending of adjacent 
shapes.? For a recent comment on the relative value of the passages, see Kathryn Tuma, ?La Peau de 
Chagrin,? in Jeffrey Weiss, The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier, exh. cat., National Gallery of 
Art, Washington D.C., 2003, 156.  
74
 Smith,  Interpreting C?zanne, 73. 
75
 William Rubin, ?C?zannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism,? in C?zanne: the Late Work exh. cat., 
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1977, 156. 
76
 Rubin, ?C?zannisme,? 154. 
77
 Rubin, ?C?zannisme,? 165. 
78
 Rubin, ?C?zannisme,? 169. Although Rubin does not mention it there is an antecedent for this 
interpretation in Jacques Rivi?re, ?Present Tendencies in Painting,? [originally published in 1912] in 
Fry, Cubism, 77?78.  
412
Forty-two years after they debuted in MoMA?s catalogue, the passages serve to 
materialize the space in between objects. The article manages to preserve this 
technical device in the field of C?zanne?s studies and to reaffirm the connection with 
cubism but radically modifies its original function: instead of dematerializing the 
form in space the passages now concretize space. This breakthrough is, once again, 
attributed to C?zanne.    
 Like the exhibition itself, Rubin?s contribution to the catalogue and his 
analysis of the passages generated controversy. In 1979 he and Leo Steinberg sparred 
in the pages of Art in America over the role played by Braque and Picasso in the 
development of cubism.
79
 Steinberg gave priority to Picasso and argued against 
Rubin?s (and MoMA?s) approach to art history. Rubin?s notes demonstrate that he 
conferred with Rewald, whereas Steinberg acknowledged the collaboration of 
Rosalind Krauss.
80
 The passages were central to the argument. Steinberg, who had 
been educated in Europe, confessed not understanding the term and tracked its origins 
to Barr?s texts. Rubin contended that it was a common term at the end of the 
nineteenth century, but the note that supports this affirmation only mentions two 
references in Pissarro?s letters and one in Paul Signac?s 1898 D?Eug?ne Delacroix au 
N?o-Impressionisme referring to Pissarro?s art. In all cases passages relates to color 
and not to a transition of spatial planes.
81
 
79
 Leo Steinberg published ?Resisting C?zanne: Picasso?s ?Three Women?,? in the November-
December 1978 issue. At the end of the article he announced the second part that appeared back to 
back with Rubin?s reponse in the March/April issue: Leo Steinberg ?The Polemical Part,? pp. 115?
127; William Rubin, ?Pablo and Georges and Leo and Bill,? pp. 128?148.  
80
 Steinberg?s article was a continuation of his famous ?The Philosophical Brothel? Art News 71 
(September 1971): 20-29, part II (October 1972) which was reissued in an enlarged version in October 
44 (Spring 1988): 3-74.  
81
 See Rubin ?Pablo and Georges,? 146 n. 38. See also Signac D?Eug?ne Delacroix au N?o-
Impressionnisme (Paris: H. Floury, 1911), 67, Camille Pissarro, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro 
413
Barr?s exhibition and catalogue established the division of cubism and imposed 
two Kantian terms to designate them, ?analytic? and ?synthetic.? Whereas for 
Kahnweiler these were two consecutive stages of the process of creation or even two 
alternatives for the artists?a secondary meaning Barr retains?the American curator 
uses them to characterize the historical development of the movement.
82
 This double 
application conveys the idea that these terms, because they are able to characterize 
both an historical process and the individual act of perception and the process of 
creation, have a transcendental or metaphysical character. As it will be analyzed in 
some depth below, philosophy is most coveted by art historians and art critics looking 
to invest art and their texts with suggestions of transcendentalism.  
Whereas the passages remained unscrutinized at the center of Barr?s argument, 
scholars dealing with cubism usually comment on this problematic classification only 
to conclude that the terms analytical and synthetic are so entrenched in the tradition of 
art history that it is impossible to dispose of them. Confirming the ideological use of 
the terms Green observes,  
The two-stage theory of the process of making art, beginning with analysis and 
ending with synthesis, was adapted to define two stages in the history of Cubism 
altogether... For Barr, despite Gleizes?s or Raynal?s claims, Cubist painting 
before the end of 1912 remained based essentially on perception: on a process by 
which things seen were broken down into their component parts?a process of 
 
ed. Janine Bailly-Herzberg T. II (Paris : Valhermeil, 1980), 266, and  id., Camille Pissarro. Letters to 
His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald (New York: Paul Appel, 1972), 134-135. In 2004 Pepe Karmel 
referred to Rubin?s article to affirm that the term passages was of common use at the turn of the 
century, although acknowledging that ?passage has become associated with C?zanne as a precursor of 
Cubism.? Karmel, ?The Lessons of the Master C?zanne and Cubism. Braque?s C?zanne and Picasso?s 
C?zanne,? in C?zanne and the Dawn of Modern Art, exh. cat. Museum Folkwang, Essen, 2004, 185. 
Karmel adds another reference: Camille Mauclair, Trois crises de l?art actuel, 1906, pp 277?278: ?If 
you study the way that the leaves of a tree merge into the air around them, you will discover that tyou 
cannot see their borders, which is to say that that ?universal passages? are the only way to describe 
them truthfully. You can find these passages in the work of very different paintings, for example, in 
Claude Monet, ? M. le Sidaner ? in Eug?ne Carri?re.? See Karmel, ?The Lessons,? 184-185 
82
 See Robbins ?Historiography of Cubism,? 279.  
414
empirical analysis. According to this scenario, only with the introduction of 
simpler, more schematic ways of representing things as a result of Braque?s and 
Picasso?s development of Cubist papier-coll? and construction did synthesis 
properly speaking take over. By this Barr meant the building up of compositions 
using entirely conceptual components?abstract form and invented signs.
83
 
Kahnweiler had discussed the first part of cubism, inflecting these terms with a 
neo-Kantian meaning. In Barr?s text, these newly shaped categories characterize not 
only the artist?s method but also the two different periods of its history. In this way 
Barr secured cubism?s position in the development of the history of modern art. 
Analytic and synthetic cubism explain the movement relationship with the forebears 
and with the art movements that followed. As in the case of anecdotes and 
photographs, the overarching narrative determined the characterization of the artistic 
manifestation itself.  
In 1936 the words ?analysis? and ?synthesis? already had a long history in the 
tradition of French art criticism and had been used in reference to the art of 
C?zanne.
84
 Some art critics, for example, considered that cubism applied to forms and 
volumes the same kind of analysis that the impressionist had employed for color. On 
the other hand, synthetism had been the title of one of the artistic movements that 
paved the way for symbolism. Gleizes interpreted cubism itself as synthetic, because 
it had broken the mold of the cold analytic space imposed by one-point perspective.
85
 
83
 Green, Art in France, 95. 
84
 Maurice Denis, for example, already mentions C?zanne?s power of synthesis in his 1907 ?C?zanne? 
Th?ories 1890?1910. Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre Classique, (Paris : L. Rouart 
et J. Watelin, 1920).  
85
 See fig 21 of chapter 5 where J. Vergnet-Ruiz compares the analytic eye of Pissarro with C?zanne?s 
synthesis.  
415
Kahnweiler was not the first to mention Kant in relation to Cubism either.
86
 That 
honor belongs to Olivier Hourcade, the author of  ?La Tendance de la peinture 
contemporaine? published by La Revue de France et des pays fran?ais  (February, 
1912). However, as Robbins observes ?Hourcade?s understanding of Kant, ? seems 
tinged with Bergson, for in quoting from Schopenhauer he emphasizes that ?between 
the thing and us, there is always the intelligence.?
87
 Bois makes a similar remark 
about Maurice Raynal, who refers to Kant in his 1912 ?Conception and Vision.? The 
problem, Bois notes, is that Raynal also mentions Berkeley, ?while Kant?s refutation 
of Berkeley?s ?dogmatic idealism? stands as one of the most famous passages of the 
Critique of Pure Reason.?
88
 
Hourcade?s and Raynal?s texts confirm the claims of Chapter Six: in France, 
Kant?s philosophy had been associated with a particular tradition and integrated into a 
cluster of ideas that were not those upheld by the German neo-Kantian approach. Bois 
belittles French Kantianism from the standpoint of his [presumably correct] 
understanding of Kant?s philosophy, and in order to underscore the importance of 
Kahnweiler?s book. He quotes Koyre?s idea that the possession of a theory?even the 
wrong one?gives orientation to thoughts and promotes advances in thinking.  
 
86
 Bois comments that even though the name of Kant appears just one time in Kahnweiler?s text on 
Cubism, it appears in a more consistent form in the other texts. ?If Kahnweiler ?effaced? almost all 
direct reference to Kant in The Rise of Cubism, it is noteworthy that Kant?s name occurs much more 
frequently in Der Gegenstand der Aesthetik, at the same time that Kahnweiler was undergoing his 
philosophical apprenticeship. Here, Kahnweiler refers most frequently to the Kant of the Critique of 
Judgment, while later references more frequently concern the first two critiques. ? A rigorous analysis 
of Kahnweiler?s Kantianism should examine the privilege granted the two first Critiques over the third, 
and the line there may be between this (neo?Kantian) privilege and Kahnweiler?s theory of perception, 
in that it contradicts certain of Kant?s propositions in the Critique of Judgment.? Bois, ?Kahnweiler?s 
Lessons,? 60 n. 16. 
87
 Robbins, Historiography of Cubism,? 283 n 22. 
88
 Bois, ?Kahnweiler?s Lessons,? 35. 
416
Kahnweiler read Kant by way of his followers? works?on perception, on 
history, on art and art history?texts that supplied him with concepts. He set 
these concepts in play without having to brandish their ultimate source each time 
like a trophy. Kahnweiler?s Kantianism would have little consequence had it not 
been the springboard that enabled him to conceptualize cubism, just as it led him 
to an occasional error of appreciation. 
89
 
In the end,  
 
For Kahnweiler, German aesthetic Kantianism authorized the emergence of a 
formalist criticism in the best sense of the term (attention to methods, to the 
means by which a work of art produced itself). The Kantianism of German art 
history provided him with a distinct consciousness of the historical implications 
of all artistic production.
90
 (Emphasis added) 
 
According to Bois, the neo-Kantian approach helped Kahnweiler to redirect the 
attention from the work of art to the understanding of the process of creation as 
related to an epistemological problem. What Kahnweiler really did was to interpret 
cubism so that it fit within the theoretical frame that shaped the foundations of what 
would become modern art history, which is not the same as having provided the 
correct interpretation. Raynal?s and Hourcade?s understanding of Kant were probably 
historically closer to what the artists were trying to do. Interestingly enough, Bois 
praises a 1971 article by another member of  the October group, Rosalind Krauss, in 
which she suggests that Berkeley?s philosophy opens a whole new way of 
understanding cubism without realizing that perhaps the true problem was that, since 
1920 art history had forced a neo-Kantian understanding of perception.
91
 As 
 
89
 Bois, ? Kahnweiler?s Lessons,? 35. 
90
 Bois, ? Kahnweiler?s Lessons,? 37. 
91
 See Bois, ?Kahnweiler?s Lessons,? n. 15, 60. The article in question is ?The Cubist Epoch,? 
Artforum (February 6, 1971): 32?38, where the author inflicts a harsh critique of a ?modernist? 
exhibition organized by Douglas Cooper. She feels that Picasso was ?plagued by skepticism about 
vision from which there was more fear than pleasure to be derived. ? And the fears seem to have 
come from the question about whether there can even be direct access to depth through vision?
whether anyone can really see depth?. The skeptical argument about depth reasons that vision 
417
commented above, Berkeley?s theory of vision and the Molyneux question were 
constantly debated in France as part of the problem of space.   
There are three Kants in operation in this case: First, the modern, politically 
correct understanding of his philosophy that Bois advances.
92
 Second, there is the 
German neo-Kantian tradition of the beginning of the century, the one Kahnweiler 
applied to cubism, which is not identical to the first but is compatible with it. Third, 
there is the historical interpretation, the local school of thought that is closer to the 
phenomena but does not fit with the two others. This is the ?historical Kant.? 
93
 
What seems decisive then is that Kahnweiler pre-patterned the understanding of 
this artistic movement by explaining it ?? la neo-Kant,? and thus according to the 
theoretical frame that will come to dominate modern art history. This interpretation, 
on the other hand, allowed it to become one of the girders supporting Barr?s 
ideological construction.  
The discussion about the meaning and suitability of the Kantian categories to 
describe cubism involves a myriad of variants already mentioned and cannot be 
considered fully here.
94
 As Daniel Robbins observes, they allowed the elaboration 
and still support, the notion of an evolution of modern art from C?zanne to cubism, 
 
registers extension only; that depth, because it is not a shape spread laterally across our visual field, is 
forever invisible.?   
92
 The point here is that the interpretation of Kant will continue evolving like it has been doing since 
the beginning of the nineteenth century.  
93
 See Cheetham, Kant, Art History, 78?84. There would be a fourth Kant: what the artists understood 
of his philosophy, which should be the one art historians pretend or should pretend to attain. In one of 
the dialogues reported by Gasquet, C?zanne asks him about Kant?s philosophy (something that is 
somehow confirmed by a note in the 1909 article Elie Faure wrote on C?zanne which was based on 
information Gasquet provided to him at that time). The question is then: what did Gasquet explain and 
what did the artist understand of his explanation? The same might be said about the Kant, whom 
Kahnweiler explicated to, among others, Juan Gris, who reportedly stated his wish to read Kant before 
dying. See Elie Faure, ?Paul C?zanne,? Portraits d?Hier 2 (May, 1910): 113?128. 
94
 Besides Robbins, Green, and Cheetham, see Lynn Gamwell, Cubist Criticism, (Ann Arbor, 1980); 
and Paul Crowther, ?Cubism, Kant, and Ideology,? Word & Image 3 (April?June, 1987): 195?201. 
418
from cubism to abstraction, and from there to American modern art.
95
 This is a 
practical demonstration of how the frame molds its content, and proves that in the 
1930s were established the foundations and most basic ideology of the discipline as it 
is currently practiced. Philosophy?s pure theoretical approach buttresses the art 
historian?s claims and classifications, like geometry and sciences are said to explain 
perspective, and chemical processes and physics support photography?s claims be a 
truthful representation of reality.  
 
The Ethical Imperative 
?Why is it that art-historians and critics have persisted in using such an unhelpful 
interpretative scheme??
96
 Paul Crowther poses this question in a scathing article 
attacking art historians? use of philosophical categories: 
97
 
When an artistic style is thus labeled and discussed primarily in terms that 
concentrate attention on method [analysis-synthesis], there is a strong temptation 
to suppose that this in fact is what such works are ultimately ?about?  ? [W]e 
take the pictorial means of Cubism to be its artistic end. Now construed in these 
terms, Cubism fits very comfortably into the key overarching concept of the 
modern critical idiom, namely the notion of ?Modernism? itself.  ? [A] tendency 
in art from about the time of Impressionism onwards, to draw increasing 
attention to the means by which images are realized, and, ultimately to heighten 
our awareness of the intrinsic or essential properties of the medium of painting 
itself. 
98
 
95
 Barr?s application to the terms had the qualification both of describing sequential phases and of 
characterizing style. His historical imposition has acquired not only the weight of conceptual truth but 
also the convenience of a universally accepted descriptive code. Nearly every writer who has discussed 
cubism since 1936 has used the terms ?analytical? and ?synthetic? in a paraphrase of Barr?s original 
text.? Robbins, ?Historiography of Cubism,? 278. 
96
 Crowther, ?Cubism, Kant,? 200. 
97
 Cheetam argues that Kant conceived of the philosopher as the arbiter that controls the other 
disciplines; in this case, it is the art historian who presents himself as the arbitrer shielded in the use of 
philosophy for his or her own aims. See Cheetham, Kant, Art, 78?84. 
98
 Crowther, ?Cubism, Kant,? 200. 
419
In the end, labeling the artistic movement with neo-Kantian terms that refer to the 
perceptual processes of the artist is another tool of modern formalism to focus the 
analysis on the production of works of art instead of on their presence. Modernism 
thus exalts the connection between the work of art and its creator, whose way of 
thinking and perceiving is extolled. In this way modernism incorporates the absolute 
artist as Man into the disciplinary field of study. Formal analysis has become the 
complement of the [subjective] biography of the artist, and interpretation centers on 
understanding the person, whose ?intentions? or subjective drives the work of art 
expresses. This is even the case of Merleau-Ponty?s phenomenological approach to 
C?zanne, as in the end the philosopher postulated another way of understanding 
C?zanne?s perception and being-in-the-world in order to interpret his oeuvre. Bois 
singled out Kahnweiler?s interpretation of cubism for praise precisely on the grounds 
that it focused on the artist?s creative process (method). Furthermore, Green noticed 
that modern art history had replaced conception with perception as the key concept to 
understand the first period of cubism.  
Crowther comments that modernism might have been the general tendency and 
some of the main artists might have wanted the spectator to become aware of his 
methods but, 
there is no other reason (other than critical convenience) to suppose that this is 
the fundamental meaning the artist desired us to find in his work, nor indeed is 
there any ground for asserting that (irrespective of the artists? intentions) this is 
ultimately how ?modernist? works must be found significant. To establish such 
claims would involve a concrete historical and philosophical analysis of 
particular works in the context of their particular conditions of production. In 
relation to Cubism, I would suggest that this undertaking has been hampered or 
distorted, because the fundamental Analytic/Synthetic distinction predisposes us 
to the supposition that Cubism is ?about? the artist?s method. 
99
 
99
 Crowther, ?Cubism, Kant,? 200. 
420
Crowther underscores once more the fact that art history not only imposes its 
categories of analysis on the works of art as interpretation, but also projects them on 
the artist?s self by focusing on the process of creation. The explanation of a work of 
art on the basis of method involves reflecting on the artist?s perception and intentions. 
This is the approach fostered by the use of site photographs for the study of C?zanne 
and the analyis of his art in the light of perspective. The neo-Kantian turn of modern 
art history favored the interest on C?zanne?s perception even though the artist had 
protested an interpretation of his art based on his personality.  
Which takes this dissertation back to simple questions about C?zanne?s art: What 
did he think of or how did he perceive space? Was he focused on its representation at 
all? Did he conceive of it as infinite and homogeneous? Was his letter formulaic or 
did he believe in nature as a spectacle God staged and commanded? Did Zola and 
C?zanne compete as professionals belonging to different artistic fields? How deep 
was or what was the nature of their friendship? Did Zola?s theories and literature 
influence C?zanne?s art? These questions do not belong to the prescribed formula that 
purports that they have already been answered. Moreover, C?zanne?s art might be, as 
Novotny suggested, in-humane or anti-humanist, in which case, modern art history 
will be unable to accurately interpret his work, as long as the discipline does not 
revise its humanistic foundations.
100
 
The modern art world, as explained in Chapter Four, is structured around Logos,
which affords to the art critic/art historian, as proprietor of that word as interpretation, 
 
100
 The bibliography on this subject is rather scant, see Micheline  Tisson-Braun, La Crise de 
l?humanisme. Le conflit de l?individu et de la soci?t? dans la litt?rature fran?aise moderne (Paris : 
Nizet, 1958); and Alan Gowans ?A-Humanism, Primitivism and the Art of the Future,? College Art 
Journal 4 (Summer, 1952): 226?239.  
421
the power of being legislator and arbiter. The relationship of art history with 
philosophy has a history, which parallels the one that relates the discipline with 
literature. Both are part of what Mitchel calls ?theoria.?
 101
 After the Enlightenment, 
and thanks to Kant and the philosophes, philosophy took a new role in the 
organization of the disciplines and fought with art for the place religion had left void 
in society, especially as its moral compass.
102
 By applying this philosophical 
terminology, Barr, and art historians in general, link art with a desirable high, 
metaphysical aspect of human experience. Before impressionism, art would claim to 
reach such sphere through its uplifting content or as the incarnation of the Ideal. 
Crowther argues that,  
From Impressionism onwards, however, these two aspects [content and Ideal] are 
increasingly underplayed, leaving us with canvases that are valued primarily as 
aesthetic objects or as examples of the particular artist?s unique vision of the 
world. Such qualities are, ? authentic grounds of artistic value but they do not 
accord art quite the overtly exalted or ?High? status which it had previously 
enjoyed. Now viewed in this context, the neo-Kantian jargon that surrounds 
Cubism takes on an interesting new significance. .. [it] vindicates the unusual 
appearance of Cubist works on the basis of an interpretative schema which 
restores art to its ?High? character as a profound metaphysical enterprise.  ?. 
Analysis and Synthesis as such connote not simply method but specifically the 
method of austere quasi-philosophical investigation. The use of such terminology 
gives Cubism, ... a certain technical glamour in keeping with its canonical role in 
twentieth-century art ? but not ? in keeping with the nature of Cubism itself. 
103
 
Modern art history as primed in the 1930s and practiced after Second World War 
galvanized the art world that had been in the making for almost a century. In the 
resulting definition of art the ethical component could not be external to the work of 
 
101
 Taking again Crowther?s words, ?One reason for the neo-Kantian schema?s survival is because it 
enables the critic to achieve a more complete appropriation of Cubism, within the broader and 
critically satisfying (but ultimately ideological) notion of ?modernism.?? Crowther, ?Cubism,?  200. 
102
 See Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters, and B?nichou, Le Sacre de l'?crivain, See also Nella 
Arambasin, La conception du sacr? dans la critique d'art: en Europe entre 1880 et 1914, (Gen?ve: 
Droz, 1996).   
103
 Crowther, ?Cubism, Kant,?  200. 
422
art, as it had been during the Ancien R?gime, but had to be embedded within it, even 
beyond art itself, within the artist.
104
 The application of a philosophical vocabulary 
for the consideration of the artists? creative processes associated modern art with 
superior ethical standards and elevated spirituality and, in turn, with the political 
ideology that allows artists freedom to create. Barr?s choice of Kantian terms to 
characterize modern art advanced those ideas even though this condoned 
misrepresenting other meanings or the artist?s explicit intentions. 
The professional art historians, who saw themselves as intellectuals, felt their 
mission was to secure this elevated position for art and the artists, which?as in the 
nineteenth century?rebounded in the consolidation of their standing within the field 
as interpreters and keepers of art?s true meaning.
105
 As the son of a Presbyterian 
minister Barr manifested a zeal in disseminating modern art comparable to that of an 
evangelist converting philistines to the new faith.
 106
 
The early nineteenth century had portrayed the artist as a genius and hero. The 
1930s added other traits to the type: the artist as intellectual and as politically engaged 
fighter, which artists themselves were quick to assume.
107
 In the 1930s this approach 
led to paradoxical situations because not all the artists?even within the avant-
 
101
 The original source of this way of thinking modernity is Michael Foucault, Surveiller et punir: 
Naissance de la prison (Paris : Gallimard, 1975), see also Tzvetan Todorov, Le jardin imparfait: la 
pens?e humaniste en France, (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1998). 
105
 See the scathing critique by Jean Clair in Paradoxe sur le conservateur ; pr?c?d? de, De la 
modernit? concue comme une religion (Caen : L?Echoppe,  c1988). See also Jean Gimpel Contre l?art 
et les artistes, ou la naissance d?une religion (Paris : Seuil, 1968). For a more detailed account of the 
importance Picasso?s behavior had for Barr see Noyes Platt, Art and politics.
106
 See C. FitzGerald Making Modernism, and Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr. For an approach from 
the history of American art, see Sally Promey, ?The Visual Culture of American Religions: An 
Historiographical Essay,? in Exhibiting The Visual Culture of American Religions, exh. cat., Brauer 
Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Indiana, 2000 and ?The ?Return? of Religion in the scholarship 
of American Art,? The Art Bulletin 85 (September, 2003): 561-603. 
107
 Michael FitzGerald, ?Reports from the Home Fronts: Some Skirmishes over Picasso?s Reputation? 
in Picasso and the War Years 1937?1945 exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1999.  
423
garde?filled this role. Moreover, this way of understanding art undermined other 
approaches, especially those that concentrated on the mysterious physicality of works 
of art and not on their meanings. Crowther concludes,    
Cubism does more than just break with perspective, it breaks with the very 
conventions which make pictorial representation inter-subjectively intelligible. .. 
like any self-representing artist, he [the cubist artist] wants his world to speak for 
itself, without being propped up by verbal explanation. On the other hand, if he is 
drastically revisiting existing conventions, the nature of the change will only be 
understood if accompanied by very systematic verbal explanation? 
108
 
He considers that cubism proposed a major transformation in art and that it attacked 
the foundations of Kant?s definition of art, the communicability of the judgment of 
taste. True originality, true avant-garde art breaks conventions in such a way that 
makes verbal explanation unnecessary or inadequate.  
 If this opinion were to stand as the final word, this dissertation would be 
compromising its own principles by simply embracing another theory for the 
interpretation of the past. In 2006 the high moral status of art and the absolute artist 
are embedded in the definition of both terms and, therefore, Crowther?s analysis 
offers another view of the problem without challenging the fundamental 
presuppositions on which modern art history stands. The fact is that in the 1930s at 
least one author?whom Kahnweiler and Barr knew perfectly well?was defending a 
similar interpretation of modern art: Carl Einstein.  
Even if Einstein?s work was shaped by the same current of ideas and influences 
that are at the foundations of modern art history?including neo-Kantian philosophy?
he used them to build a corpus of radically anti-establishment writings that did not fit 
 
108
 Crowther, ?Cubism, Kant,? 201. The author comments something that resonates with Huyghe?s and 
Venturi?s contemporary observations: the perception that the philosophical vocabulary early on 
infected the artist who followed the phenomenon.  
424
within the disciplinary project of modern art history. He believed that modern art 
helps men to realize the conventionality and artificiality of Western society but that 
the mimetic naturalism of yesteryear had just been replaced by an optical naturalism 
which denied the individual his active role in shaping the world.  This author thought 
that only cubism afforded a real challenge by upsetting the spectator?s perceptual 
expectations and provoking their disorientation, which in the end would facilitate the 
breakdown of peoples?s most basic certainties. Einstein did not consider 
impressionism or C?zanne?s art to have been major breakthroughs. As the epigraph to 
this chapter shows, Einstein was aware of how art history misinterpreted the artistic 
phenomenon and uttered a sharp warning about the word?s power to counter or 
weaken art?s significance:  
Ideas change as rapidly as fleas change humans. In the first place one would have 
to write the history of aesthetic judgments to bring some order into this museum 
of arbitrary terminologies, and begin to discern the foundations of these ideas and 
these judgments, in order ultimately to determine whether a hierarchy of such 
values exists at all. In general we believe that a painting, which is a concrete 
realization, disappears in the act of criticism because it serves a mere pretext for 
generalized formulas whenever someone wishes to endow a risky opinion with a 
universal value by the trick of generalization. The result is nothing more than a 
witty paraphrase, thanks to which the work of art is neatly inserted into its 
cultural context, where it disappears as a mere symptom, losing its technical 
specificity.
109
 
Einstein?s scholarship epitomizes the kind of thinking, approach to knowledge, 
and understanding of art that modern art history barred from itself. According to 
Sebastian Zeidler, Einstein?s project was aimed at countering the assumption that  
a subject was fundamentally an unchanging self-identical kernel to which a set of 
properties was attached: properties which would then change over time even as 
the kernel itself remained unaffected, thus ensuring the seamless temporal 
 
109
 Einstein, ?Notes sur le Cubisme,? Documents (1929), 148. I am using the translation by Charles W. 
Haxthausen that appeared in the issue devoted to the scholar October 107 (Winter, 2004), 161. 
425
continuity of a subjective identity that is here not so much transformed by 
experiences as it ?has? or ?makes? them. And second, and by the same token, that 
the objects of the phenomenal world were themselves so many identities with 
properties, waiting to be explored by a subject: a subject who, by thus identifying 
them, would constitute, in one fell swoop and even anew in every act of 
experience, the world as world and himself as subject, and who would thereby 
possess this world as his experiential property, for it would be complete only 
through the synthesizing power of his mind. Einstein never seriously studied the 
work of Martin Heidegger, but his project is a response ? to the same diagnosis 
of subject formation in modernity: ?That the world becomes picture is one and 
the same event as the event of man?s becoming subiectum in the midst of that 
which is.? 
110
 
According to Zeidler, Einstein from the far left joined the anti-Humanist currents of 
thought that in the 1930s were opposing the trends that were about to crystallize in 
modern art history. Einstein?s uses neo-Kantian vocabulary and art historical 
categories to yield a harsh critique of the West and of art history as a disciplinary 
narrative, in terms that are eerily similar to Preziosi?s and Bennet?s most recent 
arguments. Works of art were for Einstein a challenge. By disrupting mental habits, 
they were able to unseat lazy preconceptions about the world and the process of 
perception/knowledge commonly applied to its interpretation. Already for this author, 
modern art history as a discipline enveloped within theory, interpretation and the 
diachronic narration, (that is, encroached into logos) the materiality of the works of 
art, their true presence and ineffable essence.  
Heidegger in 1935, Einstein in his multiple writings on cubism and modern art, 
even Phenomenology at the time with Husserl?s 1936 Crisis of the European 
Sciences, offered alternatives to the Humanist approach to tradition, culture, and 
sciences. They called attention to the material aspect of the world and of art, and tried 
to liberate them from traditional interpretations. The first two were exceptionally 
 
110
 Sebastian Zeidler ?Introduction,? October 107 (Winter, 2004), 4?5. 
426
open to non-Western ways of thinking and their aesthetics were part of a critique of 
the ideology that shaped modern art history.
111
 
Modern art history imposes on works of art a new function, calls attention to the 
method or process by which they were created, and relates them to the biography of 
their makers. As Preziosi argues, the discipline?s methodologies transform works of 
art into signs. As such, they refer to a meaning that lies beyond them in the narrative 
into which they are incorporated.
112
 
The neo-Kantian metaphorical understanding of space exemplifies this move. 
Imposed as a stylistic category for the interpretation of works of art, it allows art 
historians to ?understand? and ?evaluate? the way in which the artist perceives the 
world and comprehends his being-in-the-world. As a consequence, the work of art is 
replaced at the center of the discipline by the artist and the art historian. This 
reinforces the primacy of Logos over the work of art. The problem of space, for 
example, is no longer central to C?zanne studies. Nevertheless, while specialists 
recognize that space was not part of the artist?s project, the survey books and 
manuals, which reach a broader scope of the public, rehearse the categories 
established in the 1930s.
113
 Moreover, these publications shape the basic definition of 
art held by the scholars who work on C?zanne.  
 
111
 See Reinhard May, Heidegger?s Hidden Sources East-Asian Influences on His Work (London: 
Routledge, 1996) and Graham Parkes, Heidegger and Asian Though (Honolulu: University of Hawai 
Press, 1990.) 
112
 In The Poetics of Perspective Elkins demonstrates how modern art history, by imposing another 
function on Renaissance art, causes a series of interpretative misunderstandings that impinges on the 
evaluation of even the most technical aspects of the works.   
113
 In the case of C?zanne see Tuma ?La Peau de Chagrin.? As for general works explaining C?zanne?s 
art as basically related with the problem of the representation of space see other than the books 
mentioned in note 73 see Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, Nineteenth Century European Art (New York: 
Prentice Hall, 2003.) 
427
Coda 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art. The Right Ideology at the Right Moment
In the final analysis the 1936 catalogue and exhibit were written and organized 
under the pressure of historical events that gave Barr the sense of mission and 
urgency necessary to accomplish such an immense and bold task.
114
 The detailed 
examination of the catalogue confirms many of the arguments expounded in the 
previous chapters of this dissertation, taking us back to where we began in Chapter 
One.  
The ?Preface? states that the show was ?conceived in a retrospective?not in a 
controversial spirit.? Its claim to be based on an objective consideration of the 
material is not new. Its novelty and the ideological content lay in the selection of art 
presented to the public and in the way the show was organized and displayed.
115
 The 
catalogue?s text assumed a truly indispensable character because more than a simple 
aide and textual support, it was, perhaps for the first time, the intellectual justification 
for the choices of works and the organization of the display. Whereas the artist?s 
biography structured the museographic discourse of the van Gogh exhibit organized 
by Huyghe in 1937 and a preconceived conviction about France substantiated Chefs-
d'oeuvre de l?art fran?ais, Barr?s exhibition was buttressed by an abstract construct 
that explained the development of modern art in Europe since the end of the 
nineteenth century. 
116
 
114
 The novelty of Barr?s approach is proven by the criticism it provoked among the artists themselves. 
See Susan Noyes Platt, ?Modernism, Formalism,? where the author analyzes some of the reactions to 
the show.  
115
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 9. 
116
 It is instructive in this sense to compare the three catalogues: Chefs?d'oeuvre de l?art fran?ais; Van 
Gogh: Exposition Internationale de 1937, Groupe 1, Classe III (Paris, 1937); and Barr?s. 
428
Barr proclaims his intention of considering only those movements that had been 
influential in more than one country. With Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin in power, and 
given that art was generally understood as the manifestation of the spirit of a country, 
to praise German, Italian, and Russian modern art would have been problematic. 
Consequently, even this internationalist approach to modern art must be thought of as 
determined by the historical situation and based on political considerations. This 
internationalism also fit within the idea of a common fight against Totalitarianism as 
encouraged by the Popular Front and the ICII in Europe.
117
 As Barr explains,  
in general, movements confined in their influence to a single country have not 
been included. In several cases the earlier and more creative years of a movement 
or individual have been emphasized at the expense of later work which may be 
fine in quality but comparatively unimportant historically?
118
 
The art historian determines the parameters of the exhibition: historical 
significance and wide (geographical) influence supersedes artistic value. When the 
spatial coordinates are analyzed, Barr?s flowchart (fig.1) looks like a cornucopia with 
its concave cocoon placed on top of the diagram. From France (the crucible where 
Japanese, African and Near Eastern art flow in) the flux of modern art moves to 
incorporate Munich, Berlin, and Milan and, from there, gushes forth to encompass the 
rest of the world. The bottom of the chart includes the year 1935 and implicitly 
indicates the viewer?s location, that is, the United States.
119
 
Barr?s temporal coordinates are also telling, as he recognizes that around 1926 
abstract art was considered dead in Europe, yet concomitantly he admits?somewhat 
contradictorily?that the plan for the show was inspired by the material gathered 
 
117
 For an analysis of that period in the United States, see chapter 1 and Guilbaut, How New York Stole 
the Idea of Modern Art.  
118
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 9. 
119
 It has to be remembered that the chart was displayed as part of the exhibit.  
429
during his 1927-1928 study trip to Europe. His explicit goal was to prove that this art 
was still meaningful. To do so, he negates historical time claiming that abstract art 
was already postulated by Plato. In this way he anchors the latest artistic 
developments in the ideal roots of the North Atlantic universals and Western 
civilization; he anoints modern art with the sanction of Greek philosophy, confirmed 
by the Kantian terminology he employs later in the text. This last philosophical 
approach seems to envelop or merge with a Platonic worldview, which was also the 
case for Panofsky?s Humanism as presented in his 1924 Idea, A Concept in Art 
Theory.
120
 Barr?s proposition that the pioneers of cubism ?developed more literally 
and much further than his [sic] [C?zanne?s] perception of the geometrical forms 
underlying the confusion of nature,?
121
 (Emphasis added) suggests that Barr?s own 
worldview had a pronounced Platonic component. The curator uproots abstract art 
from its national origins and historical determinations in order to elevate it to the 
transcendental dimension of the universal and eternal world of metaphysics and 
perfect Ideas. This a-historical dimension reconfirms abstract art as the teleological 
goal of the diachronic development of art.  
The notion that art, in this case a formal interpretation of art, stands for a political 
ideology is clearly stated on page 10 (fig. 29), where Barr displays two posters 
designed for a 1928 international exhibition. The message is that, at the time of the 
event, the Anglo-American public was not ready for modern design while the 
Germans were, but ?[t]oday times have changed. The style of the abstract poster, 
 
120
 For Panofsky and neo-Platonism see chapter 1. See also Robbin?s analysis of the catalogue in 
?Historiography of Cubism.?   
121
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 26.   
430
which is just beginning to interest our American advertisers, is now discouraged in 
Germany.? 
122
 
The connection of modern art with political affairs is directly addressed in the 
sub-section ?Abstract Art and Politics.? Barr considers almost exclusively the 
situation in those countries with totalitarian governments. The Netherlands is not 
mentioned, and France appears as Paris, a place where ?everything goes.? Therefore, 
after locating abstract art beyond time and space, in the realm of transcendental 
truths, Barr lists the political systems which reject it. Tellingly, he does not mention 
the crimes these regimes were perpetrating but only that they persecute the artists the 
show exalts. Acceptance of this art, the catalogue seems to say, is the index of the 
goodness/evilness of the countries. By default the United States stands as one of the 
?good? countries (the effect is more powerful because the others that would fall 
within this category are not identified) simply by being the venue for the exhibition.  
The case is explicit when Barr analyzes Italian Futurism. As noted in Chapter 
Three, he quotes some excerpts of the 1909 manifesto by Marinetti that include the 
famous quip that ?a speeding automobile? is more beautiful that the victory of 
Samothrace?.? Nevertheless, he exhibited Boccioni?s Unique forms of continuity in 
space together with a plaster cast of the Victory of Samothrace (fig. 30). The 
catalogue states that ?the lines of force are visualized as a cloak of swirling 
streamlined shapes which have much the same effect of the drapery of the Winged 
victory of Samothrace? (fig. 31). Barr expressly contradicts Boccioni?s ideas about art 
and tradition, which the artist clearly articulated in the manifestos he wrote before the 
Great War.   
 
122
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 10. 
431
The explanation of this conspicuous treatment of the modern sculpture lies in the 
political alliances of Marinetti and Futurism, which Barr defines as politically ?proto-
Fascist; philosophically Bergsonian; ethically Nietzschean??
123
 
Marinetti is now a Senator, but the old guard of Futurist Artists is dispersed?.  
The Winged victory of Samothrace, which Marinetti found less beautiful than 
a speeding automobile, still holds its own against Boccioni?s Forme uniche della 
continuit? nello spazio, and the speeding automobile itself is perhaps a finer 
Futurist work of art than Russolo?s Dinamismo (automobile).? 
124
 
Clearly both the text and the display were determined by Barr?s extra-artistic 
ideological concerns, a case in which he could neither control nor disguise them. 
Only this can explain the pairing of the Boccioni?transported from Milan for the 
exhibition?with a scaled-down plaster of the Victory. Although it is somehow 
extraordinary that a curator explains to the public that the art in exhibition is 
mediocre, it is consistent with Barr?s statement that the selection of works was based 
on their historical value and not their quality.     
In this modernist approach, works of art are said to be an ethical manifestation 
per se and this might be the reason why Barr needed to disqualify the Boccioni. At 
the same time an impressive array of documents and didactic material secured that the 
public achieved the ?correct? understanding of its value. The catalogue, labels, 
flowcharts, and even the way the art was displayed assigned a new significance to the 
works of art.  
 
123
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 56. 
124
 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 61. 
432
It is almost logical, given the world?s situation in 1936, that Einstein?s radical 
views were not integrated within the cluster of concepts that formed modern art 
history. It is all the more natural too that a culture develops strategies to defend a core 
of basic foundational principles that secure the group?s survival, especially in times of 
crisis and debacle. This was precisely the case in the 1930s when the West was about 
to manifest its darkest tendencies. But if a culture cannot discuss, relativize, and 
modify its fundamental presuppositions, it must renounce the aspiration of 
representing universal values. If it does not do so, it transforms those principles into 
dogma, as their defense is based not on reason but on belief.  
Art history will be accused of being disciplinary as long as it continues 
presenting as certainties what is still the subject of much debate in the other 
humanistic disciplines. The challenge is to find a methodology of analysis that does 
not diminish or predetermine the reactions that works of art inspire and that 
encourages us to engage in the quest for meaning through Art. Heidegger proposed to 
go back to the mystery of the physical object and to the basic questions forgotten by 
centuries of civilization. Salvation from danger, the philosopher remarked, would 
come from the consideration and overcoming of the element that had precipitated the 
fall. For Heidegger was Gestell?as technology. Following the philosopher?s ideas 
Melville believed that reflecting up on the camera/photography, it would be possible 
to rethink modern art history (see the end of Chapter Six). I propose to think of the 
relationship of the image to the word.
125
 This dissertation, is ultimately about 
 
125
 For Ge-stell see Martin Heidegger ?The Question Concerning Technology,? in The Question 
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, (New York: Harper, 1982), 20. Melville, ?The Temptation 
of New,? 412.  
433
breaking patterns of thought, or ways of thinking about art so that the image might be 
liberated from them. Paul Smith said something similar:   
But this is not to say that it is inappropriate to try to interpret verbally what 
C?zanne painted. In fact the opposite is true. For one thing, we cannot see the 
work for what it is without interpreting it with the aid of appropriate concepts. 
However, the rub here is that saying what a radically original work of art 
expresses is not simply a matter of inventing words with which to describe its 
effects. It also involves developing new social practices and institutions in which 
these words can have currency and meaning,?after all, a word cannot mean 
anything unless there is a social context in which it can be used. ? This means 
that seeing and interpreting C?zanne ultimately involves a challenge to ours 
politics.
126
 
126
 Smith, Interpreting C?zanne, 75.  
434
It is the imagination of the pilgrim which creates the enchanting and sublime landscape.  
These principles are confirmed by the recollection of what has happened in the last seventy years to 
man?s reaction to the landscape of Provence. Painters, amateurs, and simple tourist have come to look 
at it ?with the eyes? of C?zanne. It was C?zanne who created the landscape of Provence as a work of 
art. 
Lionello Venturi, ?Art and Taste.? 
1
Conclusion
This dissertation has examined the process of the institutionalization of art 
history in the context of the epistemological struggles that preceded the Second 
World War and seeks to present an argument concerning the influence of this 
development in the historiography on C?zanne, one that provides a new 
understanding of his art. 
 Two main subjects have been developed together: the institutionalization of 
the discipline and the changes that affected C?zanne studies. Their study exposed the 
conventional and ideological character of the choices made by the art historians of the 
period under study. Placing the problem of space between brackets allowed us to 
liberate C?zanne?s works from the connotations imposed onto them by the use of this 
category of analysis.     
One contemporary document exemplifies how the application of new art 
historical methodologies in the 1930s changed the way C?zanne?s art and life were 
contemplated. In July 1939, in commemoration of the centennial of C?zanne?s birth, 
but two months before the start of the Second World War, Maurice Denis wrote, 
?L?Aventure Posthume de C?zanne? for Prom?th?e. This magazine was the last 
 
1
Venturi, ?Art and Taste,? 272. 
435
incarnation of L?Amour de l?art, which had adopted the new title in February of 1939 
and folded at the end of the year. The demise of the magazine was due to the editorial 
decision not to collaborate with the Nazis, who had offered an association with the 
German magazine Weltkunst.
This was Denis?s last article on C?zanne and expressed his reaction to the 
changes that had taken place in the 1930s. He had met the artist thirty five years 
before and had authored one of the most influential ?testimonies? about C?zanne in 
the first years of the twentieth century. Since that time, Denis had been a major player 
in the making of C?zanne?s critical fortune. His 1939 article reflects how the art 
historical writings produced during the decade modified his views on the artist and 
moved him to reflect on his own experiences. The three authors analyzed in the First 
Section of this dissertation acknowledge Denis?s contribution to promote C?zanne 
and thank him for cooperating with them.
2
The progressive historicization of art changed Denis?s understanding of the place 
of C?zanne in history and of the history of art itself. In the 1890s Denis had thought 
that C?zanne had discovered ?la peinture pour elle-m?me.? In 1939 he realizes that 
C?zanne had only expressed more clearly than any other artist one of the defining 
characters of art.  
Je pense maintenant que cette conception n?est pas aussi nouvelle que nous 
l?avons alors cru. Tous les peintres, et surtout les coloristes, ont traduit la nature 
en taches de couleur ; Tintoret par exemple, dont le chromatisme est dans 
certaines natures mortes identique ? celui de C?zanne.  
 
2
Maurice Denis, ? L?Aventure posthume de C?zanne,? Prometh?e (July, 1939): 193-196. In page 195 
Denis explicitly contradicts ?mon ami? Huyghe?s comparison of C?zanne with Descartes. The most 
eloquent acknowledgement is in Robert Rey?s, La Renaissance du sentiment classique dans la peinture 
fran?aise ? la fin du XIXe si?cle. Degas-Renoir-Gauguin-C?zanne-Seurat, Th?se pour le doctorat es 
lettres Facult? des Lettres de l?Universit? de Paris (Paris, 1931). 
436
R?duire la nature ? n??tre qu?un syst?me de taches color?es est une n?cessite 
primordiale de l?art de peindre sous entendue chez les Ma?tres, ? cause de la 
complexit? des ?l?ments repr?sentatifs et psychologiques du tableau. Personne ne 
l?a manifest?e plus clairement que C?zanne.
3
(Emphasis added) 
 
In 1907 Denis believed that a painting by C?zanne fit better among old masters than 
among modern works of art. At the end of the 1930s, instead of considering C?zanne 
in the light of tradition (the continuation of the past in the present) he regarded him as 
an innovator who had brought to plain light what had only been vaguely realized in 
the past (the present as the parameter for the evaluation of the past).  
Denis acknowledged that his previous writings on C?zanne had been influenced 
by his own ideas about art and that he, like the others who had written on C?zanne 
(Paul Serusier and presumably Bernard, although he does not mention him) had 
defined C?zanne in opposition to impressionism. 
C?zanne lui?m?me avait ?volu? dans le sens d?un impressionnisme ordonn?; il 
devenait [in our interpretation] le repr?sentant d?un nouvel ordre classique. Mais 
il s?agit de savoir lequel. Et je me demande si dans tout ce que nous avons ?crit 
les uns ou les autres sur ce sujet, nous n?avons pas un peu mis le grappin sur 
C?zanne.
Ce que nous recherchions dans ses oeuvres et dans ses paroles, c??tait ce que 
nous paraissait en opposition avec le r?alisme impressionniste, et la confirmation 
de nos propres id?es, de celles qui ?taient dans l?air, du c?te de Puvis de 
Chavannes comme du c?te de Gauguin.
4
(Emphasis added) 
 
The three books written in 1936 devoted pages to the evaluation and analysis of 
the sources and Denis seemed to answer to them. He doubted the accuracy of the 
memoirs. Were the interviewers really able to hear and understand what the artist had 
told them?  Denis?s commentary is closer to Venturi?s considerations on the value of 
the testimonies and the artist?s letters: did C?zanne?s words translate his intentions? 
 
3
Denis, ?Aventure posthume,? 193.   
4
Denis, ?Aventure posthume,? 195. In the last years of his life C?zanne was reputedly concerned about 
people interested in taking advantage of him. The expression also appears in C?zanne letters. The 
anecdotes concerning the ?grappin? had taken a life of their own. 
437
Was the artist capable of conveying his artistic experience in words? Was he 
expressing something he had thought but had not applied in practice? C?zanne knew 
all the theories, and perhaps went to the motif with the intention of applying them. 
But once he was painting, he would try them one after the other and would alter them 
as he worked.   
Ah! sans doute c??tait un penseur, tous les peintres, ou presque tous, sont des 
penseurs. C?zanne ?tait un penseur, mais qui ne pensait pas tout les jours la 
m?me chose. Tous ceux qui l?ont approch? lui ont fait dire ce qu?ils souhaitaient 
de lui. Ils ont interpr?t? sa pens?e ?
J?imagine que comme beaucoup de peintres, il se levait le matin avec une 
th?orie en t?te, un plan d?exp?rience ? faire. Seulement son instinct bousculait 
tout.
5
(Emphasis added.) 
 
Denis observed that in the 1930s attention had moved away from the works of art 
themselves, and had shifted towards C?zanne as a man. He also noticed that 
information about the artist?s life was being organized to prove a thesis: that C?zanne 
had been a heroic (modern) artist. Denis admonished that C?zanne?s art should not be 
interpreted on account of his suffering, which had not made him exceptional, as this 
had been a common denominator in the life of most modern artists. Yes, C?zanne had 
agonized about his art and felt discouraged but,  
[A]u lieu de lui faire un titre de gloire de son pessimisme et de ses acc?s de 
d?couragement, il est plus sage de constater qu?en d?pit de son impuissance et de 
ses ?checs, il a realis?. ?.  
? personne n?y est plus sensible que moi [to his suffering], mais, je le r?p?te, 
cela importe peu ? la qualit? de sa peinture: cela peut tout au plus en expliquer 
les lacunes.  
 
And he adds,  
 
J?aimerais qu?on oubli?t un peu la vie, les mots, le caract?re de C?zanne, et qu?on 
renon??t a lui attribuer cette sorte de fraternit? de tout l?art d?aujourd?hui. 
J?aimerais, que au lieu de le consid?rer comme un phare, comme un tournant de 
 
5
Denis, ?Aventure posthume,? 195. 
438
l?histoire, on devint plus attentif aux qualit?s de sa peinture, solide, subtile, 
nuanc?e, d?une justesse incomparable de ton, belle et noble par elle-m?me, ? 
6
Two months after Rewald had written to Denis trying to convince him of the value of 
the biographical approach, the artist maintained his position. Contradicting Rewald 
and Huyghe, Denis observed that Vollard?s description of the artist as an ill tempered 
and somehow ridiculous old man was accurate: ?Seul M. Vollard, s?est content? de 
faire un portrait pittoresque, et d?ailleurs fort ressemblant. Tous les autres, et moi le 
premier?ou le second?nous l?avons mis dans notre jeu.?
7
Denis?s reaction demonstrates that the changes in the approach to C?zanne?s 
art that took place in the 1930s were noticeable for concerned observers. He, who had 
known the artist, did not recognize him in the portrayals provided by the art historians 
writing about him. Denis acknowledged the limitations of both his memory and his 
writings on the artist and of the new methodologies applied to the study art history. 
Although Denis was a hardly disinterested witness, his observations demonstrate that 
in the 1930s there were significant changes in the scholarship on C?zanne and 
modern art.   
 
6
Denis, ?Aventure posthume,? 196.  
7
Denis, ?Aventure posthume,? 196. The last line indicates that Bernard?s texts were in Denis?s mind, 
as he had been the first who had written an article on the artist. At the time he was a harsh critic of the 
artist. Bernard and Fry also praised Vollard?s book. It must be taken into account that Vollard was a 
powerful art dealer and that artists and art historians needed his support. For Rewald?s opinion on the 
art dealer in the 1930s see the unpublished article ?Ambroise Vollard? in the notebook ?Rencontres 
d?un critique d?art? in ?John Rewald Papers? 61/5 National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, 
Washington D. C. See Emile Bernard ? Sur Paul C?zanne,? Le Mercure de France (Juin, 1915): 403-
408. 
439
Venturi?s Alternative Voice
Considering the basic categories applied to the study of art history as North 
Atlantic universals?namely as historically determined and progressively evolving 
conventions?permitted us to foreground their conventional character. In the 1930s 
the symbolic field of art history thrived in competing experimental methodologies 
and theoretical models. Concurrently, the politicization of the ideological debate 
favored the formation of master narratives that would, at the end of the decade, favor 
the institutionalization of a hegemonic discourse.  
Venturi?s scholarship was based on a sophisticated reading of both the 
scholarship on C?zanne and aesthetics, and of the epistemological battles preceding 
the institutionalization of art history. In the context of this dissertation, the analysis of 
the texts he wrote in the 1930s served to outline more radical and experimental 
approaches not incorporated into modern art history.
8
It is telling that an Italian 
scholar such as Venturi conceived a methodology that countered the art historical 
approach that placed a much idealized interpretation of the Italian Renaissance at its 
heart.  
Venturi?s scholarship was influenced by the connoisseurship of Berenson and the 
idealist aesthetics of Croce, that placed art in the mind and soul of the artist. The artist 
as a creative personality was at the center of Venturi?s scholarship. As the epigraph 
makes clear, Venturi was not interested in C?zanne?s (human) vision and actually 
paid little attention to the psycho-physiological explanation of perception. In his 
 
8
Carl Einstein did not dwell on the analysis of C?zanne whose art he did not consider revolutionary. 
He analyzed C?zanne in relationship with Derain. Chapter Five has summarized Novotny?s radical 
interpretation of C?zanne?s landscapes.  
440
system, the key factor was the artist?s sensibility. Venturi?s aesthetization of the 
landscape is a far cry from the topographical and documentary analysis of the sites 
fostered by the use of site photographs. Venturi?s Provence, more than the definite 
place (?situated realism?), is the creation of men whose eyes had been steeped in the 
contemplation of C?zanne?s art. In addition, Venturi had explicitly embraced 
Longhi?s color-perspective.  
In light of Elkins?s study on the history on perspective (Chapters Five and Six), 
Longhi?s 1914 article on Piero della Francesca gains a new meaning. Longhi 
challenged the interpretation of perspective as a scientific device and as a method 
used exclusively for the representation of the third dimension on a surface. He also 
criticized an art history structured on the genealogy established by Vasari-Burckhardt 
and on art as mimesis. Soussloff and Farago and other contemporary scholars have 
singled out these tropes as basic ideological constructs that, beyond their valence in 
the construction of the myth of the Renaissance, are at the core of modern art history.
9
In the context of this dissertation Longhi?s article is a document that confirms 
Elkins?s account of the history of perspective and helps to situate Panofsky?s treatise 
in time as much as the texts quoted in Chapter Five.   
Venturi was critical of the influence of German art history in the evaluation of 
impressionism.  In his first article on the subject he quotes a text written in 1895 by 
Jules Lema?tre ?l?art, m?me naturaliste, est n?cessairement une transformation du 
r?el,? and comments, 
? questo un punto fondamentale per comprendere le opere impressionistiche. 
Disgraziatamente nella critica d?arte, anche recente, questo punto non ? stato 
capito e per? si ? giunti a teorizzare (in Germania) l?arte impressionistica come 
 
9
See Farago, ? ?Introduction?,? Soussloff, Absolute Artist.
441
arte della pasivit?. Il ?puro pittore?, quale resulta nella critica di Zola su Manet, ? 
un equivoco, utile nel 1867 nella polemica contro la falsa letteratura, dannoso 
anzi deleterio poi, in quanto ha impedito di vedere la totale umanit? 
degl?impressionisti. 
10
 
Venturi was critical of the excessive reliance on texts and thus of philological 
methodologies as well as of the influence of German formalism. The text 
demonstrates the complexity of Venturi?s anti-classical position: he opposed the 
manipulation of the Renaissance Humanism by Fascist art historians but did not 
disavow the Eurocentric Humanism that is at the base of the concept of the West. His 
scholarship, if Il gusto dei primitivi is a valid indication, was based on a religious 
worldview.  
Venturi?s scholarship focuses on the formal analysis of works of art and hinges 
around the notion that art belongs to a sphere separate from the historical dimension 
of everyday life. He conceived of the artist as a Janus-like being: one face is that of 
the historical man, and the other that of the creative personality. The artist, as a 
creative personality, is able to alter history. Moreover, Venturi applied Kant?s Third 
Critique to his analysis of impressionism. Evaluation and judgment were, for him, 
more important that a purely historical approach.
11
 Venturi?s Il gusto dei primitivi 
epitomizes one of the experimental non-historicist models of art history proposed at 
the time, even if, and perhaps because, his scholarship was devised to counter the 
Fascist critique of historicism. This way of thinking about the history of art pervades 
his interpretation of C?zanne?s art.  
Venturi?s scholarship thus presents two main points of contention in 
opposition to Panofsky?s art history. First, that Panofsky?s scholarship was based on a 
 
10
 ?L?Impressionismo,? L?Arte XXXVIII (May, 1935), 121.  
11
 See Melville and Readings in Chapter One, p. 63. 
442
neo-Kantian model, in itself a reinterpretation of Kant?s First Critique. Second, that 
his contextualist and document based analysis of works of art is fundamentally 
historicist.  
As Melville notes, Panofsky?s breakthrough was the incorporation of Kantian 
categories for the interpretation of the history of art.
12
 Panofsky?s methodology 
countered the different models elaborated in the 1930s to confront historicism, such 
as Heidegger?s philosophy, but also Warburg?s basic approach to the history of the 
Renaissance.  
According to Didi-Huberman, implicit in Panofsky?s scholarship was a major 
review of Warburg?s innovative approach to the Renaissance, and history, based on 
the notion of Nachleben.
13
 This temporal model implied memory and all kinds of un-
recordable modes of transmission as well as the influence of belief (magic, faith). 
This system entailed a radical opposition to historicist and humanist art history. Didi-
Huberman argues that Panofsky ?deliberately misunderstood? Warburg?s non-
evolutionary, non-teleologically oriented model and his deep critique to historicism: 
?Gombrich himself acknowledged that Panofsky invalidated the concept of 
Nachleben for generations of art historians to come.?
14
 
Panofsky was adamant in denying the importance of earlier (medieval) 
Renaissances and defined the ?Renaissance? as the re-birth of Antiquity in fifteenth-
century Florence. Historical distance, allowed the Humanists to retrieve Antiquity 
 
12
 Melville, Introduction, p. 19. Podro?s Critical Art Historians, analyzes the Hegelian roots of art 
history.   
13
?Formed within the context of Renaissance studies?a field associated by definition with revival and 
innovation?Warburg?s concept of survival assumed a temporal model for art history radically 
different from any employed at the time.? George Didi-Huberman, ?Artistic Survival. Panofsky vs. 
Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,? Common Knowledge (2003), 273. 
14
 Didi-Huberman, ?Artistic Survival,? 277. 
443
within the theoretical frame they prescribed. Panofsky?s multilayered system not only 
muffled Heidegger?s violent interpretation within a thick layer of documentation and 
?scientifically? proven rationalizations, but also the unconscious, oceanic survival of 
the past in the present, Warburg?s Nachleben.
The recoil from ?survival? as a category of art historical attention is attributable 
to its basic impurity; Nachleben is impure in much the way Leben itself is. Both 
are messy, cluttered, muddled, various, haphazard, retentive, protean, liquid, 
oceanic in scope and complexity, impervious to analytical organization. There is 
no doubt that Panofsky sought to understand the meaning of motifs and images, 
but Warburg wanted much more, to understand their ?life,? their ?force? or 
impersonal ?power??these are the terms (Leben, Kraft, Macht) that Warburg 
used but studiously refrained from defining. 
15
 
A chronological concept of time is in itself ideological, and in the case of 
Panofsky a choice, one that placed ?life? and ?culture? outside the limits of art 
history.
16
 Didi-Huberman suggests that this was anticipated by Warburg?s master, 
Burckhardt, in his little-read books on the theory of history. According to Didi-
Huberman, Burckhardt,   
would go so far as to say that authentic history is deformed, not just by ideas that 
issue from preconceived theories, but even or especially by ideas that issue from 
chronology itself. History should be, he argued, an effort that dislodges us from 
our fundamental incapacity to ?understand that which is varied and accidental?? 
This conception of temporality is unusual in that it has no need for the 
concepts ?good? and ?evil,? and no need for either beginnings (sources from 
which all else must derive) or ends ( historical meanings on which all else must 
converge). Good and evil, beginnings and ends, are not essential to accounting 
for the complexity, the impurity, of historical life. Temporality on this model is a 
dialectic of rhizomes, repetitions, symptoms. Localized history?patriotic or 
racial history? is completely foreign to it, because contextualist historiography, 
like contextualist philosophy and anthropology, has been incapable of theorizing 
relationships of difference with any cogency and conviction. 
17
 
15
 Didi-Huberman, ?Artistic Survival,? 282. 
16
 See J?rn R?sen ed., Western Historical Thinking An Intercultural Debate (New York: Berghahn 
Books, 2002). 
17
 Didi-Huberman, ?Artistic Survival,? 284?285. 
444
Warburg?s position, so much influenced by anthropological theories, is important 
in this context not only because his books have recently gained scholarly attention 
denied to them for decades, but also because of the unusual character of his thought. 
Warburg?s well-studied interest in the Pueblo Indians signals a much more haunting 
message: the aspects of the West not reflected by the North Atlantic universals. Real 
North Atlantic men and women might be as different from the Humanist notion of 
?Man? as the ?Others.?
 18
 
Situating the history of art history as part of an object of study demonstrates that 
in the 1930s there was a shift in the definition of basic categories used for the analysis 
and understanding of art. These categories have since been naturalized as integral to 
the foundation of modern art history. The 1930s was a period of consolidation and 
reaffirmation of traditional values, and modern art history reflects this ideology. 
Illuminating this epistemological shift allows us to underscore the distinctiveness and 
otherness of C?zanne?s world.   
In 1996 Pollock complained that Academic art history disregarded the most 
radical materialist theories that challenged the foundations of the discipline. Didi-
Huberman points to another side of this phenomenon and to other theories: the 
methodologies and models of interpretation of art that were discarded in the process 
of the institutionalization of the discipline.  
The preference for contextualist (localized) history results from an eagerness for 
convenience?for information that can be coped with, labeled, managed, 
packaged?but its accessibility depends on an optical illusion, and the eagerness 
may be accompanied by willful blindness. The capacity to tolerate and deal with 
 
18
 His use of anthropological methodologies and categories for the study of High Art and the 
Renaissance even antedates Trouillot most modern contention that Anthropology must be used for the 
study of the West.  
 
445
an absence of differentiable periods and episteme (to live with an oceanic, 
unanalyzable unity, lacking beginning, end, and formulable meaning) is to say 
the least a rare power. Those who, like Burckhardt and especially Warburg, can 
see their way to tolerating historical impurity are often moved aside, with the 
subtlest gestures, by other scholars who do not share or understand that power. 
? Some of the finest sensibilities have in this way been ?corrected? off the map 
of our intellectual life.
19
 
Under a new regime, the discordant voices are generally read as faulty methodology, 
imperfect scholarship. In the field of C?zanne studies, that is the case with Venturi?s 
scholarship on the artist.  
Panofsky recognized the importance of Barr?s enterprise and equated 
geographical distance with history: in both cases distance afforded the opportunity of 
an objective approach to the artistic phenomenon. In this light, the homogeneous, 
measured, isotropic space of Panofsky?s perspective might be equated with the neat 
compartmentalization of time in chronology and with Panofsky?s disavowal of 
Nachleben. The problem is the application of these two parameters to the study of 
modern art and the integration of anti-art, and anti-traditional artistic movements as 
part of tradition. Chapter Seven has micro-analyzed how Barr construed the transition 
from C?zanne to cubism, how he leveled both artistic manifestations until they 
become equivalent. Barr?s formalist approach to art, his understanding of modern art 
as the continuation and culmination of the Western tradition, allowed him to integrate 
into his flowchart artists and artistic movements with widely different goals and 
aesthetics.  
Einstein wanted to obtain contributions from the specialists of the Warburg 
Institute for Documents. To browse this magazine, where articles by art historians like 
Strzygowski, and art critics like Einstein, share space with articles on the history of 
 
19
 Didi-Huberman, ?Artistic Survival,? 285. 
446
music, ethnography, anthropology, authored by personalities like Bataille, reminds us 
of the methodological debate and the experimentalism and malleability of the 
disciplinary boundaries that characterized the period. These different experiments are 
a sobering reminder of the historicity and conventionality of the most basic 
disciplinary paradigms.  
 
Between Nation and Self 
This dissertation contextualizes Huyghe?s C?zanne both within the art 
historian?s career and within the history of art history. To dismiss his monograph as 
dated occludes the fact that race/ethnicity and nationhood are still valid categories for 
the consideration of works of art. As demonstrated in Chapter One, they are integral 
to the historical context theorized by Panofsky. Moreover, the definition of 
Humanism debated in international forums such as the IICI demonstrates that the 
category itself reinforces the idea of nation as a fundamental entity and that the 
Western definition of Man considers him as ?national.? Preziosi, among other 
theoreticians, even thinks of art history and museography as integral to the 
disciplinary apparatus that buttressed the development of the  nation-state in the 
nineteenthcentury.  
Nation-state, together with art, the category ?artist,? and Humanism are North 
Atlantic universals and their development throughout modern history is tightly 
447
intertwined. In this light the two aspects of Huyghe?s career analyzed in this 
dissertation find a common ground. Man is the representative of an ethnicity or a 
nation, so the individual becomes an archetype of a group. Put schematically, 
Man=Nation equates to Nation=Art. In the 1930s nation came to the fore as a 
defining art historical category. Huyghe?s curatorial approach to a non-French artist 
like van Gogh considered the artist not as the representative of an ethnical group or 
nation but as an individual man. The exhibition was structured around the artist?s 
biography.   
The reactions to Huyghe?s exhibition and the ensuing debate demonstrate that 
the concentration on the artist as a historical being was still controversial. Huyghe 
justified the documentation concerning the artist?s life as an introduction to art for 
those unable to contemplate it. Rewald used this is the same argument to convince 
Denis of the value of his letters from artists.  
Huyghe?s scholarship considers the artist both as the representative of a 
transcendental entity and as a historical being. In this way it establishes the transition 
between the chapters devoted to Venturi and Rewald, as the latter focused exclusively 
on the life of artists and historical facts.   
Considering the association of art and nation and the historicity of these two 
categories allows this dissertation to contextualize Huyghe?s innovative installation 
within the inventive strategies of display used by the Fascist and Totalitarian regimes. 
Furthermore, in the 1930s museography developed as an autonomous practice 
pertinent to different kinds of museums. Huyghe?s argument in defense of his 
448
exhibition provides a rare glimpse into the moment in which conscious choices and 
specific ideas about documentation and display were being naturalized as ideology.   
Rewald?s scholarship contributed to the historicization of C?zanne. He was 
among the first to apply the methodological protocols that would characterize modern 
art history to the study of C?zanne?s art. Barr?s contemporaneous Cubism and 
Abstract Art, as explained in Chapter Seven, was fundamental to establishing 
C?zanne as a key protagonist in the history of modern art. Both approaches 
complemented each other. Rewald?s scholarship provided the basic orientation and 
resources for C?zanne to art historians whose scholarship followed the main 
guidelines provided by Barr?s flowchart. By focusing on the scholarship of the 1930s, 
this dissertation provides a model for understanding the integration of the art of 
C?zanne into modern art history that might open the way to further research on the 
subject. 
While in France, Rewald worked almost exclusively on post-impressionist 
artists. Nonetheless, his first major publication in the United States was the 1946 
History of Impressionism followed in 1956 by Post-Impressionism. From van Gogh 
to Gauguin.
20
 Both books were sponsored by MoMA. Rewald?s original plan was to 
write a third book that would focus on C?zanne. The death of Venturi in 1961 and 
Rewald?s subsequent involvement in the preparation and edition of a second 
catalogue raisonn? of the artist altered his career path.  
 
20
 Venturi and Rewald were interested in almost the same subject matters. Both wrote about Pissarro 
and C?zanne. Venturi published the Annales de Impressionnisme before fleeing France. This book is a 
compilation of documents even though the scholars distrusted them. He considered that the 
undervaluation of the movement was related with the lack of truthful information available. He mined 
the archives of the Gallery of Durand Ruel. During his exile Venturi did not have a fixed source of 
income. This in itself might have helped to determine the project.  
449
The importance of these two books cannot be overestimated. Robert Herbert 
considered the History of Impressionism ?the fundamental work whose first edition 
set the conditions and the vocabulary of its [Impressionism?s] history.?
21
 As noted 
above, in 1948 Rewald stated that he had applied to the subject matter the same 
methodology he had used in his C?zanne et Zola. The book on impressionism follows 
a clear chronological order, and is structured around the group exhibitions and the 
biography of the main artists.  
These immensely popular and influential books, edited and distributed by 
MoMA, and translated in many languages, reinforced Rewald?s account of C?zanne?s 
art and life. The scholar?s involvement in the movie Lust for Life, his career as 
professor at two of the most influential American universities, and his many other 
publications and endeavors are the context for understanding the pervasiveness of his 
influence. His books on impressionism and post-impressionism, like the biography of 
C?zanne, afforded a wealth of documentation, information, and anecdotes that 
oriented the general scholarship on these subject matters for years to come.   
 History of Impressionism examines the artistic movements that precede those 
represented in Barr?s flowchart and in the museum?s permanent collection. C?zanne?s  
The Bather was painted around 1886, the year of the last Impressionist exhibition. 
The first chapter of Post-Impressionism. From van Gogh to Gauguin, revolves around 
the events that took place in that year. Rewald?s portrayal of the heroic struggle of 
modern artists fits perfectly in MoMA?s interpretation of modern art. Furthermore, 
the clear organization and neat chronology that structure the books?synthesized in 
 
21
 Robert Herbert, Impressionism. Art Leisure, & Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1988), 314.  
450
graphics in the back?can be compared with the lines of development of modern art 
in Barr?s flowchart where uniqueness of the different artistic manifestations is 
flattened and equalized as instances in the thrust of the teleologically oriented and 
continuous development of modern art.   
Despite the paradox in associating Rewald?s scholarship with Panofsky?s, 
considering that Rewald attended Panofsky?s classes but left Hamburg in order to 
pursue his career in Frankfurt-am-Main, Champa rightly underscores the similarities 
between the two approaches to the discipline.    
Rewald?s highly unusual education was not based on the traditional German 
system (bildung) centered on the study of the Classics and an intuitive approach to 
culture and works of art. Daniel Adler has convincingly argued that formalist art 
historians, such as W?lfflin, developed their methodologies in order to foster this 
intuitive, idealist approach to education and to counter the influence of positivism and 
rationalism that ?regarded knowledge as the product of precise instrumentation and 
strict emphasis on the empirically ?given? (Gebene) as directly observable causal 
relationships.?
22
 Formalist art history became widely popular. As Schlink states, 
Une histoire de l?art de ce genre, ne jurant que par la supr?matie de l?oeil et par 
la rencontre imm?diate avec l?oeuvre d?art, ne tarda pas a recueillir des appuis de 
tout bord. D?un c?t?, il y avait ceux que se laissaient inspirer ? la fois par l?id?e 
de ?Volkstum? (nationalit?) des romantiques et par le nationalisme recrudescent 
de l??poque imp?riale, de l?autre, cette conception fut soutenue par une certaine 
hostilit? qui se manifesta contre la science dans les ann?es 1890?
23
 
Schlink also notes that in this environment iconography and the experiments of the 
Warburg Institute were not only little known but also disparaged as the specialty of 
Jewish art historians?iconography does not respect strict national boundaries. These 
 
22
 Adler, ?Painterly Politics,? 432. 
23
 Schlink, ?Enseignement ou illumination,? 54. 
451
observations provide a more ample context for Panofksy?s interpretative 
methodology, his amendments of Warburg scholarship, and his reaction against 
Heidegger?s ideas. Panofsky?s contextualist methodology and Rewald?s biographical 
approach share rationalism, aspiration to scientific clarity, and historicist foundations. 
Their methodologies are less experimental than other alternatives proposed at the 
time, and secured the transmission of basic aspects of the Hegelian art history of the 
nineteenth century to modern art history. In this context Venturi?s scholarship with its 
anti-classical stance and anti-historicist structure together with his reservations about 
the value of the written word might be considered one of the experimental approaches 
overcome by the institutionalization of one hegemonic model.  
Art historical and literary narratives are intimately intertwined in Rewald?s 
scholarship, as they had been in Ranke?s history. His biographies of modern artists 
incorporate the literary sub-genre developed by the French novelist of the nineteenth 
century. Rewald?s self presentation as the continuator of Zola?s dream epitomizes this 
subtle alliance. Furthermore, Rewald incorporated Zola?s stance as art critic and even 
as an intellectual in his own methodological approach. French modern art criticism 
and literature are not only Rewald?s subject matter but an integral component of his 
scholarship that has passed into modern art history. Modern art?s ethical value rises 
above personal affiliation and justifies modern artists? defects. In Rewald scholarship 
the (literary) myth of the modern artist is theoretically substantiated by ?objectively? 
evaluated documentation. Preziosi is among the scholars who have underlined the 
ideological character both of historiography and novels, which emphasizes the 
significance of Rewald?s approach. 
452
This dissertation proves the ideological character of both Rewald?s use of 
documentation and of his biography of the artist. Although this biography and the site 
photographs are no longer central, Rewald?s scholarship continues to affect the field 
through the documents and information he compiled, which his work sanctioned as 
valid sources. When incorporated within other art historical writings, they carry with 
them the ideology of their original context.  
Rewald legitimated Zola?s novels and novels in general as historical sources. 
The closeness of his scholarship to literature allowed the transformation of anecdotes 
into historemes. Furthermore, the sheer number of letters addressed to Zola 
established this friendship at the core of C?zanne?s biography. Zola?s writings and his 
authorial voice cover C?zanne?s undocumented voice, his silence. Integrated as part 
of the interpretation of C?zanne?s paintings, Zola?s words and theories are projected 
onto these paintings? subject matter and even style.  
C?zanne?s friendship with Zola is the fundamental topic of Rewald?s book, 
one that determines the selection and presentation of the documents incorporated in it. 
They are made to substantiate the ideology of the book. As a thesis to be proven this 
orientation suffuses the narrative of the periods for which there is no documentation 
and even that of the years in which the friends were actually distanced. 
The centrality of Zola in C?zanne?s life argues against considering other 
important influences in C?zanne?s art such as Baudelaire?s. The psychological 
portrait of C?zanne, the paradigm used to deduce his reactions, what is possible or not 
in the artist?s life and personality, is mostly the product of the information drawn 
from his correspondence with the novelist. Rewald?s methodology disavows the 
453
exploration of other perspectives that cannot be documented even if, as in the case of 
Baudelaire, they are known to be of consequence. The acceptance of those other 
influences is contingent on the development of other heuristic tools, other paradigms, 
an art history whose regime of truth is not based on philological methodologies. 
Modern art history counters non-essentialist theories that do not deem man as a 
narratable being whose coherent, consistent personality develops in time. This is what 
Didi-Huberman characterized as the oceanic, messy, unruly life developing in the 
tangled web of time.  
Rewald?s use of the site photographs was topographical, as he relied on them 
to determine C?zanne?s itineraries and to prove the realism of his art. He did not 
exploit them for the analysis of perspective, even though the project of photographing 
the sites was integral to the elaboration of Novotny?s book. Rewald?s scholarship is, 
literally, at the threshold of modern studies on C?zanne.  
The site photographs are highly ideological: they imply that photographs 
represent the appearance of the world as they reflect the main premises of Western 
principles of vision. They reinforce the photographic vision that C?zanne?s art 
contests. 
Those pictures that represent an identifiable southern site have extra value for 
art historians as they have more narrative potential than the others. Taking into 
account Daunais?s analysis of naturalist art criticism, paradoxically, the site 
photographs, although they are about place/space, situate C?zanne?s paintings in time 
as they provide an excuse for developing a (narrative) interpretation of them. 
Narrations evolve in time and the act of comparing and evaluating the differences 
454
between the two images involves time. Site photographs are stands-in for C?zanne?s 
eyes and therefore incorporate into his paintings the chronology of his life and his 
oeuvre, the history of his relationship to the site. In the end, site photographs 
contribute to transform works of art into anecdotes within a narrative, into signs. Site 
photographs disavow the physical presence of works of art. They impose meanings 
on them. They are images that spawn words.  
The use of site photographs strengthened the association of C?zanne?s art and 
life with Provence. No stylistic trait can be unmistakably attributed to the influence of 
his native land. When there is no identifiable site, specialists are not able to know if 
the paintings were painted in the South or not. Nevertheless, visiting the sites and 
comparing his art with photographs has become a leitmotiv in C?zanne?s studies. 
Bazin?s use of Rewald?s site photographs in his 1938 article for L?Amour de l?art 
(Chapter Five) has been more successful than Venturi?s interpretation of the appeal of 
the Proven?al landscape. Looking back at Venturi?s epigraph, the difference of 
approach becomes evident and can even be called a Copernican Turn: whereas 
Venturi is interested in how the appreciation of C?zanne?s art has created the 
landscape of Provence, the site photographs stress the influence of the landscape in 
C?zanne?s art.  
Gasquet was a member of the Proven?al regionalist movement. The letters 
C?zanne wrote to the poet have been used to establish the artist?s attachment to the 
province. Gasquet?s highly questionable C?zanne has also played a defining role in 
this development. This dissertation suggests that Vasari?s biographies of 
455
?autochthonous? artists are in the end the prototype that favors this entrenched 
association.   
Site photographs fostered the projection onto C?zanne?s art of the modern 
understanding of space and perspective and thus the linkage of C?zanne?s art with 
tradition. Given Panofsky?s neo-Kantian definition of perspective this association also 
entailed consideration of C?zanne?s perception. This extends Crowther?s analysis of 
modernism to the case of the Proven?al artist. The site photographs induce reflection 
on how the artist transformed the visual information into art. In this way they 
implicitly take us back to C?zanne creative act, to the working process, to the 
archetypical scene in the studio.  
This attention to method and process has helped to transform C?zanne?s ideal 
portrait into that of a philosopher, a scholar, which reconfirms Crowther?s views. 
Concomitantly, the artist?s letters are now said to provide an approximation to 
C?zanne?s artistic ?theory.? Thus, the site photographs were instrumental in shifting 
the attention from the artist?s paintings to the artist and to a deferred meaning. They 
complement Rewald?s biography of C?zanne. 
Site photographs also encouraged the discussion of his art in terms of realism 
and mimesis as they forced us to think of C?zanne?s paintings in relationship with the 
sites. In both cases the parameters for the evaluation of C?zanne?s paintings pertain to 
the Renaissance as the ?geography of the imagination.?  
Kracauer?s ?Photography? associates two fundamental aspects of Rewald?s 
scholarship, the basic historicism of his scholarship and his modernist use of 
photographs. They imply an approach to life and history, vision and space, in short, a 
456
paradigmatic understanding of what is man and of his relationship to the world that 
are North Atlantic universals and, thus, have no referent in reality. Memory images in 
Kracauer?s text might be linked in this context to Didi-Huberman?s analysis of 
Warburg?s Nachleben.
Kracauer?s article also helps to contextualize Rewald?s scholarship within the 
debates that took place in the 1930s as his cultural critique resonates with Einstein?s 
militant scholarship on modern art and with Heidegger?s ominous analysis of the 
West in his ?The Age of the World Picture.? 
 
457
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