Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams, The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 168. £17.49 (paper) (original) (raw)

2020, History of Humanities

This work by Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams examines the intellectual basis for positioning art and architecture together within the academic discipline of art history (6). It proposes a history of the interconnection between the two disciplines (history of art and history of architecture) and its dissolution in the course of twentieth-century historiography. The main question is, when and "why the dissolution of the link happened, why it was so little commented on," a point that has inexplicably been neglected in earlier historiography: "one kind of evidence is how unconcerned with this theme are even those who have reflected most cogently upon the nature of the discipline [of art history] in recent decades" (9-10). In the contemporary historiographical context, as the authors state, the separation between art history and architectural history, if acknowledged at all, is simply assumed as a matter of fact, unquestioned and untheorized. The authors sketch the cultural reasons for the loosening of this nexus in a digression that starts in the German-speaking academic world in the last decades of the nineteenth century (11). The union of the two disciplines is in fact one of the main features of Kunstwissenschaft, and it is tightly connected with the categories at the basis of the German art historical tradition, since art and architecture were seen as primary expressions of Stil, Zeitgeist, or Kunstwollen. As Crinson and Williams point out, the imbrication of architecture and art is deeply rooted in a nineteenth-century philosophical and cultural background that transcends the work of individuals who worked as both artist and architect (13). The narrative focuses then on the cultural context generated by the diaspora of German academics toward English-speaking universities in the 1930s. In the postwar decades, the idea of the imbrication of art and architecture seems to disappear. The main explanation for this could be the vulnerability of the categories of Kunstwissenschaft to cultural simplifications during the Nazi period (16). This ideological bias, together with an often only indirect knowledge of the written work of German-speaking scholars (like Alois Riegl) in the English-speaking academic world, contributed to the abandonment of a kunstwissenschaftlich methodological approach and, as a consequence, of the connection of art and architecture that it implicitly supposed. The volume examines the absence of this nexus relative to the work of two art historians, Leo Steinberg and Michael Baxandall, who were pupils of German diasporic scholars. History of architecture is read as a "ghostly" and "unconscious" presence that haunted the written work of both, even if studiously avoided as a distinct subject of research.