CIHA as the Subject of Art Theory

The Methodological Discourse in the International Congresses of Art History from Post-War Years to the 2000s

Jennifer Cooke

Abstract
The title of this article recalls a session of the 2012 CIHA congress in Nuremberg – 'CIHA as the Object of Art History' – that analysed the role the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art in the development of art history as a discipline. Only a few years earlier, Heinrich Dilly had drawn an overview of the International Congresses of Art History, together with specialists of other fields. Dilly explained the lack of interest of art historiography for the import of such conferences with the fact that they were 'too big a matter', as the papers had rapidly multiplied, and also 'very large a matter', in the sense that the debate was difficult to frame and, more often than not, the choice of participants depended on a political agenda rather than scientific reasons. This article thus endeavours to tackle this very large matter as a vantage point on the methodological reflection, in the attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities of the theoretical discourse insofar as discussed in CIHA meetings, from the Lisbon conference in 1949 to that held in Nuremberg in 2012.

Lieux de légitimation, lieux de pouvoir aussi où la prise de parole et le jeu de présence/absence ont tout un sens, les Congrès sont aussi des lieux où s'établissent parfois de vrai débats.¹

[1] The title of this article recalls a session of the 2012 CIHA congress in Nuremberg – 'CIHA as the Object of Art History' – that analysed the role the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art in the development of art history as a discipline.² Only a few years earlier, Heinrich Dilly had drawn an overview of the International Congresses of Art History, together with specialists of other fields. Dilly explained the lack of interest of art historiography for the import of such conferences with the fact that they were 'too big a matter', as the papers had rapidly multiplied, and also 'very large a matter', in the sense that the debate was difficult to frame and, more often than not, the choice of participants depended on a political agenda rather than scientific reasons.³ This article thus endeavours to tackle this very large matter as a vantage point on the methodological reflection, in the attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities of the theoretical discourse insofar as discussed in CIHA meetings, from the Lisbon conference in 1949 to that held in Nuremberg in 2012.⁴

[2] Since the first one held in Vienna in 1873, these international meetings promoted the dialogue between scholars and museum professionals as art history was establishing its status of academic discipline, although it was not until the Rome conference of 1912 that they became truly international in participation.⁵ During the congress held in Brussels in 1930 CIHA was officially formed, and its statutes clearly stated that the goals of the Committee were to focus the attention on problems of method, raise awareness of art appreciation among scholars specialised in other 'moral and historical' sciences, and share practices in the field of art conservation, museography and publishing.⁶

[3] The post-war years were marked by an increase in number of CIHA members, with a wider representation beyond Western countries, as well as of national and intercontinental meetings.⁷ In order to befit this growing participation of countries (as well as an expanding notion of art objects) the statutes were progressively amended between 1961 and 1979. Another significant change was placing CIHA under the aegis of the CIPSH (Conseil International de la Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines) in 1961, thus forging a connection with UNESCO that would further prompt internationalism in the coming years.

[4] The new by-laws listed as the Committee's principal goals to develop the study of artistic phenomena, promote a permanent connection among art scholars, and disseminate information about ongoing research.⁸ Fostering communication in the scientific community was evidently perceived as a main purpose, and to that end two colloquia were organised in the interval between the main international congresses (whose periodicity shifted between three and five, and was finally brought to four years)⁹, and a house journal was created, the Bulletin du CIHA, reporting on the activities and symposia promoted by CIHA and its national committees.¹⁰ The Comité's efforts also went into the extensive and systematic cataloguing of art works and monuments, launching ambitious corpora such as the Corpus Vitrearum, the Corpus des Peintures Murales du Moyen-Âge, and the Répertoire et guide photographique.¹¹

[5] As CIHA's organisation became more structured in post-war years, so did its congresses. As already prescribed in Brussels in 1930,¹² they revolved around a general theme which had a specific connection to the hosting city or country, following a practice that was first introduced in the 1912 conference in Rome.¹³ The by-laws drafted in 1971 clearly prescribed that each conference be devoted to a main topic, although this prescription appeared to have been tempered in the final version.¹⁴ However, the General Assembly held in Copenhagen in 1975 proposed to abolish a general theme altogether and replace it with six subjects dealing with the principal trends in art research, a solution that was applied to the following congresses in Bologna (1979) and Vienna (1983).¹⁵ With regard to the conference programmes, they often featured a panel dedicated to the anniversaries or centenaries of celebrated Western artists – or art historians in the heyday of art history's self-reflexivity – while other sessions were generally articulated according to the traditional art historical periodisation. Per contra, since the 1980s the sessions increasingly reflected a less traditional – i.e. chronological and geographical – approach, and the choice of main topics, too, progressively took on the cross-cultural turn of art history in the last three decades.

[6] How questions of method were addressed in these congresses must be considered within this 'institutional' framework. Prompting an exchange amongst scholars on such matters was significantly stated as the first objective of the Comité in the statutes approved at the Brussels congress, and the next meetings followed suit.¹⁶ Under the stimulus of Lionello Venturi, the 1933 Stockholm conference featured a session on principles of art criticism, where he discussed current methodological problems and focused on the Crocean approach and the concept of taste.¹⁷ And the next Swiss meeting in 1936 included the panel "Théorie et histoire de la critique d'art", again chaired by the same Venturi.¹⁸

[7] In the London gathering of 1939, only weeks before the war broke out, the title of the session was quite tellingly "Sciences accessory to the history of art: The history of criticism".¹⁹ One could stress 'accessory' as the operative word, since methodological problems were marginalised when CIHA conferences resumed after the war, at least until the meeting in Bonn in 1964 which again featured a panel specifically devoted to the main approaches to artworks.²⁰ This formula would be replicated in the following congresses of Budapest (1969), Granada (1973), Bologna (1979) and Vienna (1983), mainly discussing the formalist, iconological and contextual approaches while considering structuralism as a viable alternative to the form vs. content dichotomy. At the Strasbourg (1989) and Berlin (1992) conferences the critical reappraisal of art history's founding fathers (such as Warburg) went hand in hand with the discussion on canonicity in the postmodern age and reflected the crisis in the discipline. The shift from a Western to a global perspective that brought on the collapse of art historical canons was prefigured in the Washington congress (1986) and would dominate CIHA's meetings in the new millennium, in which an oblique and comparative perspective replaced the more markedly historiographical analysis of methods.

From Lisbon to Paris: the Congresses in the 1950s

[8] The first post-war conference was organised by Reynaldo dos Santos in Lisbon in 1949 (instead of 1942) where a reduced number of delegations – with the obvious absence of Germany – gathered around the main theme of Portuguese art and architecture.²¹ Under the promising title of 'Problèmes concernant l'histoire de l'art' no significant theoretical contributions were made, as the more pressing issues of heritage conservation were understandably given prominence.²²

[9] The following meeting took place in Amsterdam under the chairmanship of Jan van Gelder in 1952, and once more matters of a strictly methodological nature were not addressed.²³ However, the iconological school was the most represented one with papers by Erwin Panofsky, Millard Meiss and Henry van de Waal. Panofsky, in particular, spoke of the 'Renaissance-Dämmerung' ensuing from the contention posited by science historians that there had been no real Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a position which the German art historian attempted at reconciling with the views of art scholars.²⁴ Ernst H. Gombrich, who on that occasion outlined the idea of artistic progress in fifteenth-century Italy, later recalled that people in Amsterdam were beginning to grow sceptical of the idea of Renaissance embodied by Jacob Burckhardt. Panofsky, especially, was very displeased about it and emphasised the remarkable thaw the Renaissance had brought.²⁵

[10] The relations between Venice and Europe were the topic of the conference Lionello Venturi organised in the Serenissima in 1955. Once again, the procedures and aims of the discipline were not foregrounded, in spite of Venturi's sensibility for the matter. An interest that was evidenced in his inaugural speech, where he delineated the development of art criticism since the 10th International Congress, which his father, Adolfo, had chaired in 1912. While the philological-documentary approach had not substantially changed, he remarked that the contextual study of the work of art against its religious, political and philosophical background had conversely made significant progress and even more so the study of the evolution of artistic form.²⁶

[11] The 19th conference in Paris chaired by Marcel Aubert re-proposed the topic of artistic connections between national and European art and, like in the Venetian precedent, methodological discourse was not a subject of debate. Noteworthy is the attention devoted to Mannerism – foreshadowing the next New York congress – and to the relations with Eastern Europe, an aspect which would have resurfaced a decade later.²⁷

[12] In the 1950s, the methodological debate was developed in a separate forum from CIHA. Lionello Venturi, along with André Chastel and Giulio C. Argan, were amongst the key-promoters of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), whose first two meetings were held in Paris in 1948 and 1949.²⁸ And after Venturi organised the third conference in Venice in 1950, AICA was officially established and placed under the aegis of UNESCO.²⁹ Indeed, the vocation for contemporary art lent itself to a more forward-thinking stance of AICA meetings when compared to the germane CIHA conferences. Matters such as contemporary aesthetics, the debate between realism and abstraction in the 1950s, the relations between art and new media in the 1960s-80s, and more importantly the decentralisation of culture and the developing countries since the 1970s, testify to an awareness that resonated with the Comité only years later.

New York – Bonn and the Consecration of Iconology in the Western Bloc

[13] The first one convened outside of Europe, the conference in New York in September 1961 organised by Millard Meiss marked in some ways a new course for CIHA.³⁰ The first participation of American art historians in the international congresses dated back to 1921, attesting to the increasingly central role the United States were to play in art scholarship, as well as in the global political arena, in the following decades.³¹ When Hitler shook the tree of art history, America picked the apples in the 1930s and 1940s, as Walter W. S. Cook's well-known motto recited, fostering that 'golden age' of art historical studies across the Atlantic that Erwin Panofsky – the ripest apple of them all – described in 1953.³² And indeed, this congress celebrated the uprooted school of iconology whose foremost American disciple was Meiss himself, who was to succeed Panofsky at Princeton in 1963.³³ Upon recalling Panofsky's notorious scepticism towards theoretical speculation – a tendency he had disavowed when he came into contact with Anglo-Saxon pragmatism – one could possibly relate the absence of a session devoted to methodology to the long shadow cast by the German art historian.³⁴

[14] A few remarks can however be surmised from the nature of the sessions topics and the papers presented. While connoisseurship was pushed to the margins – even Richard Offner discussed problems of restoration rather than attribution – the iconological approach was dominant by large and far. The 'Nachleben', or rather its 'survival'/'revival' Anglo-Saxon historicisation, was the main interpretative framework under the weight of Panofsky's recently published Renaissance and Renascences.³⁵

[15] As is known, the founding myth of iconology was closely linked to CIHA congresses insofar as Warburg famously spoke of "critical iconology" at the tenth conference in Rome, but the name of the Hamburg art historian was overshadowed by "il duca signor e maestro", Panofsky.³⁶ The latter delivered a lecture on Correggio's Camera di San Paolo, anticipating the forthcoming book on the fresco cycle written in response to Roberto Longhi's formalistic interpretation.³⁷ Whereas Kenneth Clark took a more methodological standpoint in his lectio magistralis that discussed motives – a conjunction of form and content similar to Panofsky's Typus – as a possible alternative to resolve the dichotomy between formalism and iconology.³⁸

[16] In spite of the climate of détente advocated by Khrushchev's principle of Peaceful Coexistence, events had escalated in 1961 – the Bay of Pigs Invasion had taken place in April and the Berlin Wall would have been completed in November – which ultimately led to exclude participants from beyond the Iron Curtain, with the sole exception of Poland, Czechoslovakia and non-aligned Yugoslavia.³⁹ All the more significantly, the topic chosen, 'Studies in Western Art', was a clear declaration of intent. And the new statutes of CIHA presented on this occasion, and later ratified in Madrid, clearly emphasised that the goal of the Comité was to develop the systematic study of artistic phenomena "with regard to the post-classical West and its connections with world art".⁴⁰ The relations of the West to world art (yet still in the Western hemisphere) were explored in the session on pre-Colombian and colonial art in Central and South America chaired by George Kubler, who only a year later would have published The Shape of Time, a cornerstone of the following debate on the geography of art.⁴¹ In his introduction to the session, Kubler offered an explanation of Latin American metropolitan schools in terms of "fast and slow happening" in the centre/periphery, a paradigm which would be further expounded in the next CIHA conference held in the New World.⁴²

[17] The New York congress is also remembered for the section on Mannerism chaired by Ernst H. Gombrich, which notably led to a critical reconsideration of that period. Although perhaps a far-fetched hypothesis, this interest in Mannerism could be tinged with Cold War tensions since Mikhail Alpatov had strongly criticised the Western 'bourgeois' art historians who studied this period of decline undermining Renaissance culture.⁴³ Along this line, the fact that, in his opening introduction, Gombrich attacked Dvořák's "Hegelian dogma" – a not so veiled remark against Geistesgeschichte – may take on a different relevance if linked to the scholar's open criticism of the materialist/Marxist notion of history.⁴⁴ Finally, the sessions on the reactions to Impressionism chaired by Meyer Schapiro, on Frank Lloyd Wright organised by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Van Regteren Altena's on drawings, represented the strands of research that art history in the United States had been pursuing in the past decades.⁴⁵

[18] In 1964 the CIHA congress significantly took place in Bonn under the presidency of Herbert von Einem, and the theme chosen was "Style and Tradition in the Art of the West". It was the first meeting on German soil after the war, and for many émigré art historians the first chance to return to their motherland and meet the new generation of compatriot scholars.⁴⁶ A heretofore missing self-reflexivity of the discipline finally entered a CIHA conference as two of its founding fathers were celebrated, Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg.⁴⁷

[19] Although most papers focussed on specific case studies rather than broaching broader frameworks, special attention must be accorded to the session on style and iconography chaired by Jan Białostocki.⁴⁸ The Polish art historian championed an iconologically-oriented approach as a means to contrast both the history of style and the Marxist perspective on art, as well as a way to remain in the orbit of Western culture.⁴⁹ Moreover, Białostocki was an advocate for a return to the original formulation as opposed to the recent contemporary applications that had been dubbed as 'trigger-happy' iconology.⁵⁰ This view was clearly reflected in the Bonn session whose opening paper harked back to the genesis of the iconological method as formulated by Aby Warburg – a name that had been not mentioned in the New York conference.⁵¹ William S. Heckscher closely analysed how Warburg developed his Kulturgeschichte approach between 1907 and 1912, and how his famous Schifanoia lecture was received by his colleagues patrolling the disciplinary boundaries of art history.⁵² Warburg's oeuvre and theories would be fully expounded at the Strasbourg congress in 1989, but Heckscher’s paper of 1964 marked a turning point in his critical fortune.⁵³

[20] The other contributions on style and iconography were pieces of textbook iconology, namely those by Otto Pächt and Millard Meiss.⁵⁴ The latter, in particular, explored the effects of form on iconography, i.e. how a certain subject thrived in connection to a specific style, providing a different angle on the clear demarcation of the two outlined by Panofsky – who incidentally welcomed this paper in "real admiration".⁵⁵ Panofsky did not attend the conference (he would set foot in Germany only in 1967) and in those years was growing sceptical of the popularity of his method⁵⁶ – so much that in a letter to Herbert von Einem dated 1962, he preferred to define his approach as 'eclectic', owing much to Vöge, Riegl, Goldschmidt, Warburg and even a little to Wölfflin.⁵⁷

[21] The many-sidedness of his formulations was further underscored when Panofsky replied to Michael Podro's popularised piece of criticism of 1965 that presented him as the father of iconology by pointing out that Warburg and Giehlow ought to be credited with that role, instead.⁵⁸ And only two years later, mindful of the recent applications, he was even reluctant to use the term iconology favouring the less 'esoteric' iconography, as remarked in the preface to Essais d'iconologie.⁵⁹ Furthermore, whilst the Bonn conference was celebrating the iconological method also a debate on the notion of style, sparked by 1962 Ackerman's A Theory of Style and Kubler's The Shape of Time, was underway.⁶⁰

[22] Within this framework, one must also consider that iconology was beginning to be targeted as a 'maximalist' method.⁶¹ And in the same 1964, Susan Sontag was arguing against the interpretation "based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content", which ultimately violates art in that form and content are separated. Although she did not take overt issue with Panofsky (mentioned only for his essay on films), the "shadow world of 'meanings'" that interpretation sets up seems to constitute quite explicit a critique.⁶²

The Heyday of the Discussion on Methods from Budapest to Vienna

[23] The formula of a methodological session became of age with the 1969 congress in Budapest about the interplay of general evolution and regional development in Central Europe⁶³ – a significant attempt at challenging the commonplace centre vs. periphery assumption, in the words of its organiser Lajos Vayer, and at restoring relations with the Eastern Bloc, even though the Cold War had admittedly passed its acute phase.⁶⁴ Actually, CIHA had at first envisaged the possibility to organise the next congress in Moscow during the Bonn meeting (in which two Russian scholars, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Fyodorov-Davydov and Mikhail Jakovlevich Libman, took part), and had made several appeals to the Soviet Union to form a national committee but to no avail.⁶⁵

[24] Russian participants were however welcome, and the appointment of Mikhail Alpatov as chairman of the session 'Art History and the Other Human Sciences' could be seen as another sign of reconcilement.⁶⁶ The reference to interdisciplinarity implicit in the very title indicates the addressed methodological bone of contention, i.e. the social history of art, which at the previous congress had been glossed over and basically subsumed under the umbrella of iconology avoiding all reference to Marxist theories.⁶⁷

[25] The (now) tripartite methodological framework offered by the Bulgarian art historian Atanas Stojkov included formal and iconological analyses alongside the sociological one as represented by Wölfflin, Panofsky and Hauser.⁶⁸ Stojkov underscored the limitation inherent in all three approaches, which failed to adopt a universal perspective encompassing non-European art. And specifically, while Wölfflin's formalism did not account for any link between spiritual life and style, Panofsky's iconology undermined aesthetic appreciation. Emphasising the connection with Dvořák's Geistesgeschichte, Hauser's sociological interpretation was highly praised, even though Stojkov also warned against the perils of simplistic economic relations. Finally, the speaker stressed the importance of the Soviet contribution to Marxist art history, namely citing the work of Boris Vipper, Mikhail Alpatov, Viktor Lazarev and Aleksey Aleksandrovich Fyodorov-Davydov.⁶⁹ Stojkov's enthusiasm for the social history of art was tempered by Roberto Salvini's following appraisal of its limits. Assessing the theories of Budapest-born Antal and Hauser, Salvini remarked that the strict determinism of the artwork mirroring the socio-economic conditions could not account for the artist's individuality, nor for artistic traditions. Hence he proposed a social history of figurative language wherein formalism is intended in a linguistic sense in that it is shaped by both an expressive individual aspect and a social communicative one.⁷⁰

[26] José-Augusto França took an even more overt structuralist turn in his paper by introducing a dynamic and multi-layered social history of art that intersects a "conscience gestaltique" and an "intégration socio-culturelle axée sur un processus structuralisant".⁷¹ Similarly, Lajos Németh verified the applicability of a structuralist interpretation to modern art, building his argument on Erwin Panofsky's Dokumentsinn and Hans Sedlmayr's Strukturanalyse.⁷² Moreover, another plea for a contextual modus operandi came from André Chastel, who in the session on museums offered a historical outline of attributionism and admonished that only if combined with an attention to the cultural milieu would this approach rise above mere classification.⁷³ This critical assessment of the social history of art was, on the one hand, a tribute to the hosting city, Budapest, home to the famous Sunday Circle and to the two members that were its principal proponents, viz. Antal and Hauser. At the same time, this interest may also reflect the revival of Marxist-oriented theories encouraged by the social movements in reaction to Cold War formalism, which – as Donald Preziosi noted – led to pursue a socially-minded discipline, coupled with a widespread nostalgia for the theoretical perspectives of the 1930s.⁷⁴

[27] All the same, apart from Stojkov's, the assessments presented in Budapest did not wholeheartedly embrace a sociological art history but rather set forth a version tempered by stylistic analysis, also considering a semiotic approach as a viable reconciling course. Even Alpatov's closing remarks were quite ecumenical as he appealed to a far-reaching approach that went beyond the sole stylistic analysis, although sociology, iconology or psychology ought to be considered in the light of the pre-eminence of artistic values.⁷⁵

[28] Significantly, Alpatov's 'Cold War twin', Ernst H. Gombrich, whose absence at the conference is quite telling, was in those years taking overt issue with the Hegelian paradigm underlying that physiognomic fallacy whereby art mirrors the Zeitgeist.⁷⁶ According to Gombrich, historical determinism had fostered that idea of collective identity which had ultimately led to National Socialist and Soviet ideologies, and therefore he strongly attacked the a priori character of the strict interdependence between art and society.⁷⁷ In this sense, the reference Salvini made to artistic tradition may thus be taken as a possible indication of Gombrich's influence, for it closely recalled the idea of artistic creation based on the convergence of tradition and illusionistic devices the Austrian-born scholar had posited in The Story of Art (1950), and further expounded in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960).⁷⁸

[29] The 1973 congress was held in Granada and organised by Xavier de Salas.⁷⁹ One hundred years after the first conference took place in Vienna, de Salas traced a brief outline of CIHA meetings in his introduction and focused on the critical misfortune of Spanish art whose identity was the conference's main theme.⁸⁰ Jan Białostocki once more chaired a session on the problems of interpretation and historical classification. In his introductory overview, the Polish art historian concentrated on the impact on other disciplines of the epistemological models formulated in art history, from the aesthetic element adopted by Huizinga's historical thinking to the Warburgian study of symbolism developed in cultural anthropology, linguistics and ethnology.⁸¹ Białostocki concluded by observing the return to the analysis of the single work of art dominant in current art history and the reliance upon function and meaning rather than form.⁸² Lajos Németh then examined the notion of epoch explained in terms of style or as the spirit of an age, and formulated a complex definition of society borrowing Bourdieu's idea of the 'cultural field', in which style is only one of the many variables.⁸³

[30] Piotr Skubiszewski, on the other hand, described the methodological foundations of art history as articulated in two possible approaches, one explaining the single work of art in itself and the other one as a part of a historical process. The epistemological model he was proposing relied on the notions of structure and seriation, as postulated in the theories of Erwin Panofsky, Hans Sedlmayr, and George Kubler, especially.⁸⁴ This meant a structuralist framework that was to encompass all genetic and functional interpretations of artistic phenomena. Skubiszewski believed such a paradigm could offer a viable definition of the discipline and its relations to other human sciences and overcome the conflicting multiplicity of current methodologies.⁸⁵

[31] While the other speakers examined only specific problems of historical interpretation or periodisation, these two papers attempted at finding new epistemological variants for a discipline that was beginning to face an identity crisis. The winds that had been shaking the objectivity of historical account since the 1960s, and namely with the oeuvre of Michel Foucault, were now endangering the positivist Hegelian foundations of art history, too.⁸⁶ A crisis that was barely detectable in the CIHA conference but that in those years was widely echoed in less conservative venues such as journals of neighbouring disciplines, like New Literary History.⁸⁷ A certain concern for CIHA's critical myopia in this sense was beginning to grow amongst its foremost members, like André Chastel and Millard Meiss.⁸⁸ For this reason, Chastel had proposed at the General Assembly convened in Lisbon in 1972 that methodology be accorded more prominence in the following Granada international conference.⁸⁹

[32] The congress Cesare Gnudi chaired in Bologna in 1979 marked a significant turning point in broadening the scope to non-Western countries, coincidentally in the same year when Edward Said published Orientalism, unanimously acclaimed as the beginning of the awareness of non-European art.⁹⁰ Unlike the previous meetings, there was no main topic in this conference and a range of subjects was considered.⁹¹ The first plenary session was chaired by Shuji Takashina, who spoke of the reception of European art in Japan from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century.⁹²

[33] Equally noteworthy were the session on the influence of salons, museums and galleries on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and that on the role of prints as stylistic vehicle, chaired by Francis Haskell and Henri Zerner respectively.⁹³ The importance of studying the "collective taste" that França had stressed in Budapest had come to fruition in Bologna, where problems such as collecting, the critical appreciation of primitives, the role of museums and art exhibitions were addressed in resonance with Haskell's studies.⁹⁴ The session on prints dissemination allowed for a research on a wide spectrum, including peripheral areas like Dalmatia and South America, and also featured a paper by David Freedberg that focused on the function (one could say 'power') of images in shaping taste and the beholder's share – an anticipation of later avenues.⁹⁵

[34] Lajos Vayer organised a meaty methodological panel (in the light of the Bonn, Budapest and Granada precedents) on style problems, iconology, interdisciplinarity and internationality as 'conditions of existence of a history of art'.⁹⁶ Vayer decried the schizophrenic syndrome affecting contemporary art history, where custodians and art scholars were primarily concerned with minute studies on heritage and overlooked the methodological discourse. The stagnating theoretical debate, Vayer claimed, was dominated by the opposition of style and iconology preventing any synthetic and more effective perspective.⁹⁷ To the Hungarian's mind, the foundations laid by modern time fathers, like Panofsky, Argan and Sedlmayr, were to provide a bedrock in establishing the forms of a universal art history encompassing the world at large.⁹⁸ Although a certain disinterest of the congress participants in the methodological panel was reported,⁹⁹ Vayer's alarming tone echoed that plea for a re-foundation of art history as the discipline had plunged into a "state of genteel dissolution".¹⁰⁰

[35] The loss of identity ensuing from an interdisciplinary horizon was the underlying peril of sociological and cultural theories, according to Roberto Salvini. The Italian art historian proposed to consider the ideological content from the point of view of the impact it has on the artist who transposes it into poetry. This overarching Kulturgeschichte approach, combined with his Crocean background, was the same methodological perspective he had expounded in Budapest in 1969.¹⁰¹ Similarly, Peter H. Feist argued in favour of a history of art as history of culture, in spite of the general fear that the former would hence lose its own subject.¹⁰² Grgo Gramulin conversely believed that the answer to a vacillating discipline was a thorough re-examination of style categories and their application to art along both a horizontal and a vertical axis.¹⁰³

[36] Hans Sedlmayr, one of the beacons frequently invoked, discussed the concept of critical forms as basic structures that determine recurring types, generating principles of forms that define an epoch thus allowing for a Strukturgeschichte.¹⁰⁴ In the same panel no less, Sergiusz Michalski put Strukturanalyse and Gestalt theory under scrutiny linking them to the framework Kubler postulated.¹⁰⁵ França re-proposed a combination of a sociological history of art and a semiological perspective taking the art object as a system of signs and relations, thus venturing into a viewpoint he defined as anthropological.¹⁰⁶ Georg Kauffmann, too, opted for an approach that largely drew from linguistic models.¹⁰⁷ And along this line, the Saussurian distinction of langue and language as a viable paradigm to achieve a universal perspective on art was discussed in André Chastel's paper on the relationship between verbal and visual communication.¹⁰⁸

[37] Atanas Stojkov, in his turn, explored the limits of a strictly sociological approach and argued for a more complex interpretation of the work of art and stylistic developments against a complex socio-cultural background à la Baxandall, but also in the light of artistic value.¹⁰⁹ Iconology was no longer acclaimed as the methodological forefront of art history but scrutinised from a critical point of view. Feist, for instance, remarked how it had failed to account for artistic creation as a whole, focusing on particulars instead.¹¹⁰ According to França, Panofsky had remained prisoner of a conservative understanding of symbolic values.¹¹¹ Chastel, in turn, emphasised how iconology presupposed stylistic stability, and cautioned that this had to be constantly reviewed.¹¹² On the other hand, Białostocki, echoing what Argan had remarked, saw in iconology the potential to transcend the Eurocentric limits of the history of art and offer a modern historiographic perspective.¹¹³

[38] Jan Białostocki's proposition of a comparative international history of art was the paper with the most far-reaching critical relevance. The role CIHA ought to play in promoting a history of art beyond European (or Western) borders was a point that Białostocki and Chastel had both raised in those years.¹¹⁴ And to that effect, the Comité had indeed changed its statutes in 1977 and eliminated the prior reference to post-classical Western art, upon several solicitations both on UNESCO's part and of the CIHA secretary, Jacques Thuillier.¹¹⁵ In Bologna, Białostocki proposed to adopt a comparative approach to artistic production, drawing from the model formulated in literary history, and trace an overarching world art history of the influences, evolutions, revivals. Far from fathoming a homogeneous development, this universal art history would have to account for the specific functions, meanings and aesthetic appeal works of art hold in the different cultures. And for this reason, Białostocki resorted to George Kubler's notion of prime object and series alongside Gombrich's comparative approach to decoration.¹¹⁶ Then Teddy Brunius addressed the applicability of a vocabulary shaped on European artistic phenomena to non-Western art, from the very notion of art to the stylistic terms based on psychological reactions, anticipating an ongoing debate that started in the 1990s.¹¹⁷ On the other hand, Zdenka Volavka reminded that non-European art had had a place in the discipline from its very inception, and namely in the studies of the Vienna School, a point Arthur Rosenauer also made in his analysis of Riegl's studies.¹¹⁸

[39] The Vienna School of Art History was paid tribute in the next congress of 1983 convened by Hermann Fillitz and Martina Pippal in Vienna – the hosting city of the first international conference of art history in 1873.¹¹⁹ There a session chaired by Leopold D. Ettlinger dealt with such key figures as Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, Heinrich Wölfflin and Julius von Schlosser, and a representative of the younger generation of Vienna-trained scholars, Ernst H. Gombrich, gave a vivid memory of his formative years.¹²⁰ At the time the scholars gathered in Vienna were commemorating their founding fathers in a moment of self-reflexivity with respect to the discipline, art history had been shaken from what some perceived as a state of lethargy and was seriously questioning its role and future direction.¹²¹

[40] In 1981 Hervé Fischer published a book that effectively proclaimed the end of art history as it were, vouching for a turn to anthropology and sociology in search of new methodological possibilities.¹²² In 1982 the expression "New Art History?" was used for the first time at a colloquium organised by the editors of Block, a radical journal published at Middlesex Polytechnic.¹²³ And in the same year, Henri Zerner launched a survey on the Art Journal about how the discipline could rethink its object outside of the artwork/artefact dichotomy and reconsider its historical character, thus leading to a new art history concerned with the material conditions of production as traditional approaches like connoisseurship and philological study would coalesce with anthropological theories.¹²⁴ In his reply to Zerner's survey, Donald Preziosi remarked that, faced with the collapse of old paradigms, art critics and theorists did not turn away from history but rather critically re-examined it in search for new perspectives.¹²⁵

[41] The Vienna congress was indeed a case in point as reflected in the session on the historical methods of the Wiener Schule in which the historiographical analysis was more or less overtly directed at finding new epistemological possibilities. Margaret Olin, for instance, compared the strive to new theoretical constructs in fin de siècle Vienna to the contemporary predicament.¹²⁶ And Joan Hart, in both the Art Journal issue and the congress, turned to Heinrich Wölfflin for an epistemological model.¹²⁷ Also Jan Bakoš's penetrating analysis of the theoretical constructs of Riegl, Dvořák and Schlosser disclosed a critical reflection on art history's preconceptions and prejudices resonating with the challenges posed in the modern day.¹²⁸ A more optimistic view was that of John Shearman, who thought the "unnecessary panic" of a methodological crisis was altogether unfounded.¹²⁹

[42] Another contributor to the aforementioned Art Journal issue, Oleg Grabar, also chaired a session on European art and Islam between the fifteenth and eighteenth century, and in his introduction touched on the issue of formulating an interpretative scheme for world art that would not be a form of cultural imperialism. Reiterating what he had fully expounded in the American journal, Grabar claimed a universal history of art was a past vestige which had now to be replaced with a centrifugal model, insofar as each art history developed its own method.¹³⁰ The Vienna session on "Problems and Methods of Classification" chaired by John White, in turn, mostly featured single case studies rather than general theoretical issues. However, the interplay between geography of style and regionalism and the meaning of stylistic categories and schools were the most debated topics, targeting the pitfalls of oversimplifications based on ideological or hierarchal grounds.¹³¹ After all, even Hans Belting tentatively added a question mark to his Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? published in the same 1983, contributing – as he later admitted – to a long list of apocalyptic proclaims on the dissolution of the universal significance of Western art and historiography as in the meantime Arthur C. Danto would also theorise.¹³²

The Two W's from Washington 1986 to Amsterdam 1996: Warburg and World Art

[43] Because of its excessively materialistic or excessively mystical tenor, our young discipline denies itself the panoramic view of world history.¹³³

In the 1980s and 90s, the reconsideration of Warburg's methodological legacy as a source of renewal for modern art history went hand in hand with the attempt to expand the horizons of the discipline to non-Western cultures. And these two instances were perfectly matched in the twenty-sixth congress of 1986 in Washington on "World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity" (a significant shift since the 1961 "Studies in Western Art").¹³⁴ That this conference was a watershed charting a new course of CIHA's "ecumenical mandate" was clear in the inaugural speech of its organiser, Irving Lavin, who had already proposed that a congress be held in the United States in 1979 after changes were made in the Comité's by-laws to include all art instead of Western art from Constantine to Modern.¹³⁵ The opening lectures were delivered by André Chastel and George Kubler who touched on some aspects of this new inclusive perspective, however failing to address the issue of world art per se – as Thomas W. Gaehtgens would later note.¹³⁶

[44] In the name of the interdisciplinary outlook, Lavin had intended to introduce dual sessions chaired by a scholar from another field, but in the end the second chair was filled by another art historian of a different specialty. And in the sake of diversity, each panel had to include papers on art of at least three continents and epochs, thus doing away with the more traditional chronological order. No specific session dealt with methods, although Lavin recalled that the matter had not been entirely ruled out.¹³⁷ After all, the impasse of theoretical formulations was still a cogent matter, as in the same 1986 Donald Preziosi published his famous Rethinking Art History, Victor Burgin was proclaiming the end of art theory as an independent form of art history, aesthetics and criticism, and A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello were furthering The New Art History.¹³⁸ The first panel in Washington on centre vs. periphery chaired by Enrico Castelnuovo was de facto a methodological session in that this schema was proposed as a possible paradigm for the transmission of style. Challenging the notion of a one-way propagation of the dominating style from the centre to a passive periphery (as championed for instance in Kenneth Clark's outline of European art), Castelnuovo introduced the difference between delay and resistance.¹³⁹ Jan Białostocki, an early promoter of world art, explored the concept of provinciality in Eastern European art and architecture resorting to Kubler's notions of prime object and slow and fast happening.¹⁴⁰ Kubler had reappraised The Shape of Time in 1982, returning on its key concepts in connection with the problems criticism had raised¹⁴¹ as well as on the reasons of the critical fortune of his book – namely the critique of positivist Western art history "from a point of view shaped in part by anthropological methods" that had made it the gospel for both the crisis of paradigms and the wider spectrum of world art.¹⁴²

[45] The discussion on possible universals from a cross-cultural perspective was the topic of the two following sessions of the congress on diagrams and geometric patterns and on art and language, while the history of the artist was for the first time considered in a CIHA congress. Moreover, the Warburgian theme of 'art and ritual' was dealt with in the all-encompassing section chaired by John Onians with examples spanning different civilisations and periods.¹⁴³ The conference in Washington was the stepping stone of a critical debate on world art that would continue in the following decades. So much that while William Rubin's 1984 controversial exhibition on primitivism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was still guided by an ethnocentric colonialist point of view, in 1988 Susan Vogel's show in the New York Center for African Art disputed this antiquated notion, followed a year later by Jean-Hubert Martin's famous "Magiciens de la Terre" in Paris. And the 1989 Art in America July issue ominously titled 'The Global Issue' containing statements on the new globalised art scene clearly indicated that the matters discussed at Washingston had now become centre-stage.¹⁴⁴

[46] Only two months prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, art historians convened in Strasbourg for CIHA's international congress on "Art and Revolutions" organised by Albert Châtelet – evidently commemorating the Storming of the Bastille. However, another centenary had also determined the choice of Strasbourg since Aby Warburg studied at the local Art Institute from 1889 to 1891.¹⁴⁵ Whereas the debate on world art was not addressed, a methodological section was resumed under the chairmanship of Harald Olbrich, with the intent to critically assess the developments of art history from Warburg to the present day. Not only had the 1980s and early 1990s brought an epistemological quandary but also a wealth of studies on the history of the history of art – from Michael Podro's The Critical Historians of Art (1982) to Germain Bazin's Histoire de l'histoire de l'art (1986), Heinrich Dilly's Altmeister der modernen Kunstgeschichte (1990), Eduard Hüttinger's Porträts und Profile. Zur Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte (1992), Vernon H. Minor Art History's History (1994) and Gianni C. Sciolla’s La critica d'arte del Novecento (1995).

[47] Although the international symposium that took place in Hamburg in 1990 would mark the definitive consecration of Warburg's critical fortune, the Strasbourg conference was an important milestone of his critical reassessment in the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁴⁶ In his paper, Konrad Hoffmann outlined Warburg's thought in the light of Ginzburg's and Gombrich's accounts, which had drawn attention to the multi-faceted nature of the methodology (and – according to Martin Warnke – foregrounded those psychological aspects that had partially outshone the scholar).¹⁴⁷ Warburg's theories, whilst lending themselves to an irrationalist interpretation current in the relativist approach, were regarded as a possible reference point for cultural studies, namely as concerns their anthropological outlook on cultural phenomena.¹⁴⁸ To no one's surprise, the same Gombrich, prefacing the second edition of his Intellectual Biography of Aby Warburg in 1986, had warned against any misguided interpretation of Warburg that would justify an oppositional art, a peril that was lurking behind this surge of interest in the father of iconology.¹⁴⁹ The actualisation of Warburg's theories as the pre-figuration of the postmodern was the main argument of Eveline Pinto's paper. Namely, she linked the concept of revival to the transhistoricity of the aesthetic postmodern, along with Warburg's notion of desacralised art, his rejection of a teleological development of artistic expression, and his willingness to go beyond the limits of the discipline.¹⁵⁰ Likewise, Michael Ann Holly emphasised the interdisciplinarity of Warburg's studies and rebuked so-called 'new' art historians for forgetting the innovative aspects of his approach.¹⁵¹

[48] Almost a decade after the crisis had been proclaimed, Holly proceeded to chart the different theoretical trends that had appeared in the meantime: the revision of iconology of Gombrich, Alpers and Baxandall, the semiotic framework of literary critics like Norman Bryson, the reception studies of T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Keith Moxey and Janet Wolff, and lastly the feminist turn spearheaded by Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Lisa Tickner.¹⁵² A year later, Holly would take her argument further at a symposium on iconography in Princeton where she discussed Warburg's broader notion of iconology (as opposed to Panofsky's narrower humanistic application) and hailed him as the forefather of the investigation of visual culture, bolstering the so-called iconic turn.¹⁵³ Along these lines, other papers in Strasbourg traced the methodological turning points in art historiography, stressing the epistemological changes from the positivist paradigm – from Dvořák's interests in modern art and his principle of discontinuity as opposed to Riegl's evolutionism, to Sedlmayr's Verlust der Mitte, to Max Raphael's approach combining Strukturanalyse and Marxism, to the Baroque studies in 1930s Germany as proof of the inadequacy of historicism.¹⁵⁴ Moreover, in defence of connoisseurship spoke Jaynie Anderson, who outlined Giovanni Morelli's technique of attribution in the light of the influence of Cuvier's comparative anatomy. She claimed that in the recent debate connoisseurship had actually fared better than cultural history for it directly studied the work of art itself.¹⁵⁵

[49] Elzbieta Giersztor-Milobedza, on the other hand, proposed a definition of crisis in Kuhnian terms, that is an interregnum when the old epistemology is deemed obsolete and the new one is yet to be formulated. Namely, she sketched the present predicament as a discipline torn between contextualism (viz. New Art History) and formalism (viz. visual studies) and called for a complementary approach befitting the fragmentary pluralism. Once more, New Art History was ruled out as the new paradigm insomuch as it reproduced the orthodox ontology. Rather than a methodological revolution, to Giersztor-Milobedza's mind, a more natural shift embracing continuity intertwined with discontinuity would have proved more effective.¹⁵⁶ Keith Moxey, who together with Holly and Bryson was a key proponent in the American front of visual studies, expounded a semiotic approach to ideology that would overcome the dichotomy of sociological vs. formalist art history. The Russian derivation of Saussurean linguistics could provide the basis for a history of visual representation where the sign could draw its meaning from the context that produced it. Within this framework, the interpreting process is considered an ideological one, hence merely a preference for one interpretation over the other. In this sense, Moxey found in Panofsky's iconology and Baxandall's period eye viable heuristic devices.¹⁵⁷ This point would have been explored also in the afore-mentioned Princeton symposium, where Moxey argued for an iconography from a semiotic perspective as "the study of the conventions used by a particular culture to encode the values that structure its identity".¹⁵⁸ And in a later article, Moxey explained that a semiotic iconology would have to forego its idealist epistemology inherent in the notion of intrinsic meaning and decentre the role of the art historian to that of merely another sign in the interpretative process.¹⁵⁹ Moreover, Moxey's critique of the contextual approach tout court echoed an ongoing debate (on what had now become an orthodox method), which in 1985 had led Svetlana Alpers to pose the provocative question "Art or Society: Must We Choose?".¹⁶⁰

[50] This session on the revolutions in art history thus perfectly exemplified that centrifugal tendency in the discipline. This was how Stephen Bann would describe in that same 1989 the condition of an art history that had "identified with history, repudiated connoisseurship, and ignored criticism".¹⁶¹ Furthermore, compared to Warburg's rising star, in Strasbourg that of Panofsky seemed to shine not as brightly, a reflection of the revision his iconology was undergoing in the 1980s. Svetlana Alpers as early as 1977 decried the inertia of art historians as mere providers of falsely objective frameworks in the likes of iconology.¹⁶² In 1983 with The Art of Describing, Alpers delivered her final blow to Panofsky, disproving his theories as laden with a humanistic bias.¹⁶³ And according to Donald Preziosi, William J. T. Mitchell's Iconology brought the arc of the interest in Panofsky to earth for good in 1986.¹⁶⁴ The fact that Mitchell mentioned Panofsky only in passing whilst focusing on Nelson Goodman, Ernst Gombrich and Marxist theories, instead, spoke volumes.¹⁶⁵ In this picture, Michael Ann Holly's book on Panofsky (1984) did little to restore the critical fortune of the German scholar.¹⁶⁶ To Preziosi's mind, in fact, Holly failed to account for the semiological correlation and forced the hand of interpretation in aligning him with contemporary criticism.¹⁶⁷

[51] An atmosphere "laden with great expectations" surrounded the 1992 congress in Berlin on artistic exchange.¹⁶⁸ As chairman Thomas W. Gaehtgens remarked, it was a different Germany since the last conference in 1964 and the opening of East-West borders understandably resonated throughout the congress. The presence of many scholars from the former Eastern Bloc was parallelled by the special focus on Central and Eastern European art as well as by a session on Constructivism and political propaganda.¹⁶⁹ Moreover, after the matter had been partially overlooked in Strasbourg, world art was once more addressed in terms of ethnicity and national identity with regard to Asia especially.

[52] A newly reunited Germany was re-entering the international forum after twenty years of marginalisation. In 1970 at the famous Cologne conference "Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung", German art historians convened to discuss the relationship between scholarly objectivity and ideology, raising some issues on the continuity of German art history through the Nazi period.¹⁷⁰ After the 1970s, radical art history had waned and Werckmeister claimed that the rediscovery of Warburg led way to new possibilities for a discipline that had lost its direction. Martin Warnke and Horst Bredekamp in the following two decades redefined their Marxist leanings to a more depoliticised social history of art that had found in the works of Aby Warburg its "new, compelling paradigm". The Hamburg conference commemorating Warburg, as Werckmeister wrote, had celebrated him as the forefather of a "supra-historical science of images and an anthropology of artistic culture".¹⁷¹ It was a betrayal of Marx for Warburg, according to Werckmeister, a view that Horst Bredekamp strongly contested.¹⁷² At the CIHA conference the name of Warburg was evoked in connection to the speculation on primitive art from an anthropological perspective by Carlo Severi and Salvatore Settis, both referencing to his most interdisciplinary studies on Hopi and Pueblo rituals.¹⁷³

[53] At the same time, 1992 can be assumed as the year of the pictorial turn as proclaimed by William J. T. Mitchell in his well-known postmodern critique of visual culture defined as "a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality".¹⁷⁴ Echoes of the pictorial turn can be found in the Berlin conference, too, especially in Victor I. Stoichita's and Fred Licht's panels on mimesis and iconicity, featuring papers of David Freedberg, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Daniel Arasse.¹⁷⁵ Alongside Freedberg's The Power of Images (1989), Hans Belting's most influential Bild und Kult (1990) – a cornerstone for the development of Bildwissenschaft – and its far-reaching methodological implications prompting an anthropology of the image, indeed casts a shadow on the congress, as can be inferred from the session on the body in Mediaeval secular art.¹⁷⁶ In 1994 Gottfried Boehm would publish Was ist ein Bild?, an anthology that set a touchstone for German Bildwissenschaft.¹⁷⁷

[54] However, as recently observed, the German iconic turn – represented by the three B's, Belting, Bredekamp, Boehm – was rather fluid and lacked a specific and, more importantly, unified methodological approach, when compared to its Anglo-American Visual Studies counterpart.¹⁷⁸ Albeit the differences in the two strands are blurred – Visual Studies more often than not focused on pictures and referred to Panofsky, whereas Bildwissenschaft set priority on the body as a medium harking back to Warburg –, one was rooted in sociology whilst the other in anthropology.¹⁷⁹ Not only did the papers presented in Berlin give evidence to the contrast between these two camps, but the session on theory in art history saw the predominance of the American group.¹⁸⁰

[55] It was indeed chaired by Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, the key proponents in those years of Visual Studies. In 1987 and 1989, Holly and Moxey, along with Norman Bryson, had organised two important symposia in the United States about the theory and interpretation in the Visual Arts.¹⁸¹ They were positing that the history of art be replaced by the history of images, moving away from the Western canon of masterpieces towards a broader understanding of the cultural significance of artworks.¹⁸² Moreover, they were proposing a semiotic notion of representation that overcame the pitfalls of the Marxist structure/superstructure paradigm, not only accounting for class but also gender issues.¹⁸³ This theoretical framework informed the panel in Berlin, too. As stated in their introduction, Holly and Moxey argued for an interpretation shaped by the socio-political conditions of the present, which did away with the "dream of transparency" and embraced the otherness of the past.¹⁸⁴ And a significant number of scholars from the American symposium were invited to Berlin, the majority of which in this methodological session, such as Wolfgang Kemp, Whitney Davis and Lisa Tickner, and others, like Thomas Crow, in other panels.¹⁸⁵

[56] The prime representative of Rezeptionsästhetik, Wolfgang Kemp, delivered a paper on the text/context model introduced by structuralists and semioticians. Kemp raised two objections to the "catchall term" 'context': first, against the idea that there is an Urkontext which can be isolated, for the freedom of choice is almost infinite; second, against the assumption that a context can be referred to a text, while he rather preferred Foucault's notion of circulation of discourse.¹⁸⁶ Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal, too, were in those years challenging the semiotic notion of context as a predetermined set of factors giving meaning to the sign, and opted for that of a result of interpretative choices attempting at 'framing' the sign.¹⁸⁷ Kemp had lain the foundations of his reception aesthetics in his seminal Der Betrachter ist im Bild (1985), whose second edition was published in the same year as the Berlin conference. In the book Kemp postulated the notion of an implicit beholder, referring to the function of the beholder prescribed in the work of art which establishes an intra-painting communication that must be interpreted in connection with socio-historical and aesthetic statements.¹⁸⁸

[57] The paper Stephen Melville delivered in Berlin attempted at a structuralist revision of the aesthetic judgement in order to overcome the positivist Panofskian construct of meaning.¹⁸⁹ The American historian was then working on a deconstructionist perspective on theory, postmodernity and historiography, also retrieving the link between art history and modern art as well as between vision and textuality.¹⁹⁰ A similar view of the loss of the history of art was that offered by Whitney Davis, who studied Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums and his bringing-to-life of a lost beauty as the bias coexistent with art history.¹⁹¹ Keith Moxey, in his turn, revisited the centrality of the iconological approach analysing the humanist prejudice in Panofsky's theories, whose assumption of a universal aesthetic value matched a Eurocentric epistemology in an age of colonisation and imperialism.¹⁹² The validation of historical narratives and the problematic of meaning in modern art were also the focus of the two following papers.¹⁹³ Finally, Holly investigated the optimistic historical perspective of the iconologist, based on the transparency of the work of art, and juxtaposed it to the opacity of the post-structuralist's view. Proposing a fusion of horizons in a Gadamerian sense, Holly championed an interpretative process where the viewer is challenged by the work of art to engage in a game with it – thus echoing Kemp's implicit beholder.¹⁹⁴ This reinterpretation of Panofsky's iconology from the standpoint of visual studies came to the fore in the commemorative symposium on the German art historian held in Princeton in 1993, where his approach was intersected with anthropology, history, literature, science, music and film. Specifically, the investigation of the relation between words and images made Panofsky the forerunner of Visual Studies, according to Mitchell.¹⁹⁵

[58] On that occasion, Horst Bredekamp linked the recent revival of Wölfflin, Panofsky (the Hamburg years) and Warburg's Mnemosyne to a return to the beginnings of the linguistic paradigm.¹⁹⁶ In the moment when Visual Studies were coming of age – Mitchell in Princeton had enthusiastically outlined a manifesto of visual culture based on multiculturalism and cultural democratisation –, this approach was however already showing its problematics. The fragmented picture that the famous questionnaire on Visual Studies in the 1996 summer issue of October gave, was indeed telling in this respect. Its proponents had drawn attention to the theoretical tenets of Visual Studies, i.e. the ahistorical model of anthropology adopted and the concept of disembodied image underlying the interdisciplinary paradigm.¹⁹⁷

[59] The lingering scepticism of the October group¹⁹⁸ would be remarked by James Elkins, who described the impression given of visual culture as "a disorganized, possibly ineffectual, illegitimate, and even misguided extension of art history and other disciplines".¹⁹⁹ In the English-speaking world, Visual Studies were taking on an overarching definition which progressively marginalised art history for its failure to confront modern media.²⁰⁰ The widespread call for disciplinary trespassing prompted the reflection on canonicity and, in the same 1996, the June issue of The Art Bulletin featured the survey "Rethinking the Canon".²⁰¹ But this survey is most famously remembered for the first definition of World Art Studies that John Onians posited.²⁰² Ten years after the Washington conference, Onians expounded a comparative, anthropological approach to a "natural history of artistic activity" that would expose "the underlying disunities and incompatibilities" within the Western canon itself, thus bringing forth the need to create a "larger disciplinary frame".²⁰³

[60] A global perspective along with multidisciplinarity were at the base of World Art Studies, focusing on aspects like the origins of art, the intercultural comparison of art in the context and interculturisation in the arts, and drawing from philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience.²⁰⁴ And indeed, again in 1996, Hal Foster was speaking of an ethnographic turn in art theory brought on by the awareness of other cultures, and of the relativity of art historical paradigms.²⁰⁵ In those same years, a similar debate on the need to broaden disciplinary horizons to non-Western areas animated history studies, too, which increasingly referred to 'global history'.²⁰⁶

[61] The next CIHA congress of 1996 was held in Amsterdam under the rubric of a very Warburgian title, "Memory & Oblivion". In the words of its organiser, Wessel Reinink, this vertical topic sought to retake the course opened by the Washington 1986 meeting.²⁰⁷ At the Amsterdam conference the strictly speculative debate on art theory was not developed, but Gerhard Wolf's session on "The Memory of the Art Historian" was significant from a methodological standpoint. The discourse on world art (history) returned to the fore as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann analysed the Eurocentrism in art history, and two papers concerned the development of art history in Mexico and South Africa.²⁰⁸ Dealing with memory obviously conjured Warburg, whose approach to cultural problems was read in an oblique perspective and linked to anti-Semitism by Charlotte Schoell-Glass.²⁰⁹ And for the first time since Bologna 1979, Antal's social history of art was re-addressed and considered in the light of the impact Cold War ideology had on its reception.²¹⁰ Postmodernity and the culture of images were the subject of the three concluding papers of the session.²¹¹

[62] Jean-Hubert Martin's "Closed Circuits?" was another methodologically-laden panel for it dealt with contemporary art and non-Western cultures. Martin had chosen the title in open polemic against the "Aperto" section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, which to his mind had failed to overcome Western stereotyped views.²¹² The notion of outsider was referred not only to non-Euroamerican artists, but also to queer and gender perspectives in Western art.²¹³ This meant that after being adumbrated in the papers delivered by Thomas Crow, Rosalind Krauss, Lisa Tickner and Whitney Davis in Berlin, gender and queer studies were now making their way into a CIHA congress.²¹⁴

[63] Finally, probably an indication of the tensions evidenced in the October questionnaire, the Amsterdam CIHA congress remained silent on the ongoing debate on Visual Studies. Also noteworthy is the fact that the two art historians universally acclaimed for fathering visual culture, Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, never took part in a CIHA conference – though their names were often evoked. Actually, Alpers 'The Art of Describing had been received by rather critical reviews in the 1980s, and even the more positive ones stressed that it was not a book on art history but on cultural tradition à la Baxandall, which could be indicative of a certain marginalisation.²¹⁵ In 1990 a German translation of Baxandall's Patterns of Intention had appeared, but although the "unacknowledged poststructuralist foundation of subjectivity" of Baxandall's inferential criticism was in keeping with the debate on art theory as formulated in the Berlin conference, reviews at the time were rather tepid.²¹⁶

The Congresses of the New Millennium

[64] The new millennium opened with a CIHA conference in London chaired by Nigel Llewellyn around the momentous theme of time.²¹⁷ On the one hand, echoing the reflections on revivals in art of the previous congress, the topic was an overt reference to Kubler's theories, on the other.²¹⁸ One may in fact think of Didi-Huberman's contemporaneous studies on the latencies and resurgences in art and the image conceived in anachronistic terms.²¹⁹ The organisers set out to develop the topic along three main lines, how and which time is represented, time and place as a topos for art historical writing, and the connection between theory and creativity.²²⁰

[65] The symbolic representation of time in art history was the subject of a section whose approach was both iconographic and contextual, revolving mainly around Western tradition but also with forays into African, Asian and Arabic art.²²¹ The discussion on time and spectatorship, both in terms of immediate response and of long-term reception, continued the examination of Visual Studies and Rezeptionsästhetik, involving John Shearman, Wolfgang Kemp and Oskar Bätschmann, amongst others.²²² The impact of digital media on art history, already partially explored in the previous conference, was further expounded in the session "Digital Art History Time", which constituted a benchmark for the relevance of new technologies.²²³ The first session chaired by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann revolved around the geohistory of art, and its proceedings were later published separately.²²⁴ This return to the geography of art was connected to a reconsideration of the role of the national, which since the 1990s had once again become a safe topic of investigation, according to Kaufmann. A case in point, the Amsterdam CIHA congress (1996) was initially supposed to be about national styles.²²⁵ The reflection on cultural and artistic landscapes and borders was prompted in those years by World Art Studies, as John Onians was undertaking his project Atlas of World Art.²²⁶

[66] The peripheral regions in Europe were in themselves a perfect case-study for the negotiation of identity in terms of "multi-trajectivity" rather than a one-directional culture radiating from the centre of the Continent, as shown by Piotr Piotrowski in his critical geography of Central Europe before and after the Cold War.²²⁷ Dario Gamboni framed the alternating polarities of the insularity of art works and the opposite contextualisation within a national spirit from the eigtheenth century to the present.²²⁸

[67] David Summers, in turn, analysed the arbitrariness of the concept of chronology and reversed the causality between national/local identity and style. According to Summers, style is in fact the institutionalisation and continuation of a set of characteristics that a group gives authority to, insofar as they suit local purposes. As a consequence, the notion that culture affects the visual character of the art of a group must be refuted based on the scheme of arbitrariness and authority.²²⁹ Summers had begun his studies on the transformative use of the theoretical constructs of Western art history in 1987 with The Judgment of Sense.²³⁰ Under the influence of his professor George Kubler he worked around the concept of defect of distance, in that art's purpose is to make present what is absent and thus become a locus of loss and remembrance experienced in the viewer's body.²³¹ This was the theoretical cornerstone of his later controversial book Real Spaces, which became the bone of contention addressed in the following CIHA congresses on world art.²³²

[68] Indeed, the impact of the study of non-Western artistic phenomena on the formulations of new methodological postmodernist frameworks was touched on by Belting in the contemporaneous Art History After Modernism.²³³ Along with Kubler and Baxandall, Belting was in fact taken as an example by Summers for a post-formalist art history that discloses intercultural possibilities. Summers overtly took issue with the linguistic turn insofar as it relied on an ethnocentric notion of representationalism, and he proposed a semiotic model hinged on indexicality and facture, i.e. that every artefact is a record of its having been made, congruent with Baxandall's inferential criticism. Rather than vision, corporeality and spatial existence were assumed as the universals underlying artistic creation instead; hence spatial arts, and not visual arts were deemed a more appropriate category. From this followed the concept of real space, the space people share with objects and other people, and virtual space, the representation of such space.²³⁴

[69] In 2002, James Elkins forcefully argued the opposite point of view, i.e. that a universal multicultural art history was a mere utopian dream stemming from a postcolonial form of guilt.²³⁵ He believed that the Hegelian thought art historiography rested upon was unavoidable and that art history was essentially a Western enterprise.²³⁶ Elkins addressed the debate sparked by World Art Studies in his lengthy review of Summers' Real Spaces, credited with being the only attempt to encapsulate the matter in one book.²³⁷ More in general, the reviewer pointed to the conceptual disarray in referring either to world art or global art or multiculturalism or visual culture – a similar problem also Belting, amongst others, would have remarked.²³⁸ Elkins argued that the notion of space was rooted in Renaissance Western thought and therefore held little validity when applied to pre-Renaissance or non-Western art.²³⁹

[70] Finally, Elkins attempted at subsuming the multifarious debate on world art into five options which effectively provided a viable framework for the different positions reflected in the following CIHA congresses that are hence worth enumerating. First, art history may simply extend its area of research whilst remaining substantially unchanged. Second, art history could adjust its working concepts to fit non-Western art. Third, art history ought to find indigenous critical concepts to discuss other cultures. Fourth, art history should also avoid Western interpretative strategies. Fifth, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and subdisciplinarity may dissolve art history as a discipline and turn it into a multidisciplinary approach to visual studies.²⁴⁰

[71] The mapping of a world art history was given full prominence in the following two CIHA conferences in Montreal and Melbourne, held in 2004 and 2008 respectively. The growing interest in geohistory is reflected in the very title of the former, "Site and Territories of Art History", organised by Ruth Philipps.²⁴¹ Significantly, in 2004 John Onians was publishing his worldwide survey text, Atlas of World Art, and a year before he had chaired a session on this topic at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association.²⁴² In consideration of Summers' book, space was assumed as a cross-cultural topic for the conference in Montreal.²⁴³ Urban, utopian, shared, virtual, invaded, genderised spaces were discussed along with national narratives and the North as art historical constituting ideologies. A panel dealing with interdisciplinarity as the new disciplinary paradigm, and another one with the body as space, were an indication of the currency of these two subjects pointed out by Elkins.²⁴⁴ In 2007 he published a volume titled Is Art History Global? – with a Belting-like question mark – once more stressing the topicality of the debate on whether art history could be globalised while not losing its current recognisable shape.²⁴⁵ Elkins essentially re-stated his views that art history relied on a stable narrative and depended on Western schemata, and hence that there was no non-Western tradition of art history as such.²⁴⁶ 2007 was a momentous year for the discussion on world art, as a CIHA colloquium on the relations between art history and anthropology was held, followed by the symposium "Challenges of World Art History" at the Clark Institute and by the conference "How to Write Art History – National, Regional or Global?" in Budapest.²⁴⁷ The following year was graced with another survey book on the global turn in art history, World Art Studies, under the aegis of the eponymous department at Leiden University chaired by Wilfried van Damme, which would feature some of the key speakers of the CIHA conference in Melbourne, and also David Carrier published A World Art History and Its Objects.²⁴⁸

[72] The Australian conference was perceived as a "boomerang-answer" to the question posed in the Budapest symposium.²⁴⁹ In fact, there Jaynie Anderson had illustrated the antipodean perspective on art history that would be explored in Melbourne.²⁵⁰ And like in Budapest, the global observation extended its boundaries towards the East rather than Africa, which was only considered in relation to Europe. In this clime of contestation over the West-centrism of art history, the thirty-second congress of art historians convened in Melbourne around the theme "Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence". For the first time outside of the Western world, this CIHA conference received an unprecedented global response, with participants from as many as fifty countries.²⁵¹ As its organiser Jaynie Anderson clarified, crossing cultures was preferred to multiculturalism, which rather implied a Eurocentric vision, and she optimistically proclaimed the Melbourne conference the gateway to the achievements of a world art history, wherein Australia could play a prominent role.²⁵²

[73] The session chaired by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann "The Idea of World Art" provided the methodological foundation of such discourse. The current debate sparked by David Summers and James Elkins, as well as the history of Kunsttopographie present since the inception of art history, were taken as the gauge of the coming of age of a global art history. Kaufmann also referred to the terminological distinction between global and world art and warned against the danger inherent in the old centre-periphery paradigm.²⁵³ A similar concern was voiced by Peter J. Schneemann, who rather drew attention on cultural hybridisation and migration as the heart of a new approach.²⁵⁴ John Onians ventured into neuro-art history to explain previously unknown areas of human activity and study the art of all places and times with an unbiased look.²⁵⁵ Piotr Piotrowski deconstructed the universalist myth of modernism as opposed to the local identity enforced by post-modernism, and argued for a horizontal art history hinged on transnationality rather than internationality. Within this framework, the oblique perspective of the periphery would effectively also lead to the relativisation of the Western canon itself.²⁵⁶

[74] Jan von Bonsdorff considered the macro-stylistic area of 'artedominium' theorised by the Swedish art historian Johnny Roosval in the 1920s and 1930s as a viable tool to describe global artistic phenomena, provided its static connotations were overcome.²⁵⁷ Paul D. Mukherji, in turn, criticised the relativist tendency to underscore the otherness of non-Western art. Most world art survey books, he claimed, overlooked the convergence with occidental paradigms, and he thus proposed a comparative aesthetics for multiculturalism, instead.²⁵⁸ As can be expected, the other sessions of the conference were urging a revision of pre-established canons. This was particularly evident in the provocative exploration of the concept of Renaissance from a hybrid point of view that called into question the classic history-minded Renaissance formulated by Panofsky.²⁵⁹ Claire Farago, indeed, proceeded to an open attack against Panofsky's "erudition and cosmopolitanism" that served Americans' new cultural identity after WWII. The very concept of intrinsic meaning had proved completely obsolete in a broad analysis of art objects that were the result of hybridisation.²⁶⁰ A similar standpoint was that of Keith Moxey, who questioned the very need of the concept of Renaissance rooted in Hegelian (and Panofskian) teleological development, whereas a Foucaultian paradigm based on discontinuity would have been more effective.²⁶¹ Even if Panofsky's theories had already been reconsidered in CIHA congresses – albeit always acknowledging his legacy –, criticism against the German scholar had never been so overt. Panofsky's anecdote of the Australian bushman equated to the primitive man who cannot understand art was often evoked as the epitome of an antiquated and colonialist view no longer applicable to an overarching artistic investigation.²⁶²

[75] A comparative view on cross-cultural phenomena characterised the rest of the panels in the conference, such as colonialism and cultural exchange, the representation(s) of nature, the sacred, materiality and techniques, the creation of identity, migration, art and war. A revision of the canon of Western modernism was proposed in dealing with Global Modern Art from a peripheral standpoint. Also, the emergence of new contemporary art centres in a globalised market was analysed in connection with the role of post-modern museums in negotiating identity. Overall, the congress in Melbourne was casting a positive light on the prospect of a world art, although criticalities in formulating an all-encompassing approach still lingered. And Hans Belting, only a year later, was stating the impossibility of a global art history, for universalist explanations would always be at odds with local phenomena. To his mind, more often than not, the Western art discourse went beyond its borders only insofar as other visual cultures reflected an influence of Euro-American art.²⁶³

[76] Furthermore, some remarks must be made about the fact that while the debate on Visual Studies dominated the CIHA conferences in the 1990s, it appears to be marginalised in the new millennium. The 1996 October's infamous questionnaire, in this sense, had unveiled a general discord on Visual Studies. The lack of consensus on what the nature and scope of Visual Studies (and the pictorial turn in general) were, dominated amongst their promulgators and opponents alike. This situation is evidenced in the pages of the newly-founded Journal of Visual Culture, which since its very inception in 2002 voiced the divisions within its field.²⁶⁴ After all, in 2003 James Elkins called his introduction to Visual Studies 'skeptical' inasmuch as it touched on the criticalities in defining the object and scope of this interdiscipline.²⁶⁵

[77] The 2012 CIHA congress chaired by G. Ulrich Grossmann was held in Nuremberg under the title of "The Challenge of the Object", which intended to continue the cross-cultural perspective in the formulation of the art object set forth in Melbourne.²⁶⁶ The 21 sections were for the first time conceived so as each would not concern one single genre, style or continent, thus attempting at overcoming narrow categorical limitations and prompt a cross-cultural approach.²⁶⁷ And almost echoing the afore-mentioned debate on the nature of Visual Studies, the first section chaired by Horst Bredekamp is methodologically relevant for it questioned the object of art history.²⁶⁸ Audrey Rieber showed that there never was a univocal notion of said object, since even the founding fathers were divided between a formalist and an iconological camp.²⁶⁹ Assimina Kaniari, on the other hand, challenged the recent acclamation of Kubler as a theorist of a proto-world art history (mostly propounded by Summers), placing The Shape of Time within the context of American art history in the 1940s-1960s.²⁷⁰ Significantly, Michael Yonan critically reconsidered the primacy of vision championed by Visual Studies as a typically Anglo-American phenomenon linked to the strong underlying Neo-Platonic tendencies. He claimed materiality had been too readily overseen, even when accounted for in art historians' theories – like in Baxandall's for instance.²⁷¹ Along the same lines, the issue of reconciling modern anachronicity with an art historical narrative based on chronology was addressed in a session on the anthropological turn by Keith Moxey.²⁷²

[78] Coming full circle, the final session examined the topic of CIHA congresses as an index of the discipline's development.²⁷³ Thomas W. Gaehtgens identified the transition from a Western to an international to a global perspective as the key characteristic of the Comité's history.²⁷⁴ And Hans Belting's concluding remarks on the terminological and historical difference between global and world art evidenced a confusion which the previous Melbourne congress had failed to clarify. Specifically, he claimed the need to formulate new narratives with a local perspective free of the colonial gaze, and conversely to recover self-referential narratives of Western art with an outside perspective.²⁷⁵ Such relevance of the cross-cultural definition of terms and paradigms was indeed becoming a much-debated issue and was actually made the topic of the 2016 meeting held in Beijing chaired by Qingsheng Zhu.²⁷⁶ The concluding remarks he made at the end of the conference are extremely telling of the role played by CIHA as a locus of the cross-cultural redefinition of the art historical canon:

Shall we still apply the methodology of linguistics and the study of styles, or that of iconography, or other traditional approaches of art history to study the new situation and new phenomena? Are the approaches of the Humanities and the logical deduction of causality themselves susceptible to doubt? Perhaps now is the time to use images/pictures to explain images/pictures.²⁷⁷

A Possible Trajectory

[79] If methodological themes dominated the cognate international congresses of historians discussing since their inception alternative theoretical approaches, the story of the CIHA conferences was a different one. However, one can safely say that until the late 1960s the international congresses of art history gave little prominence to art theory. Following this (sometimes subterranean or laconic) debate in the post-war years, a trajectory of the directions taken by the discipline may be traced. The framework that thus emerges befits, how Gisela Koch and Heike-Barbara Weber described these international meetings at the conjunction of scholarly discipline and public ("Fachwissenschaft" and "Öffentlichkeit"), a Janus-faced creature both conservative and progressive.²⁷⁸

[80] As an expression of the art historical establishment and a representation of the discipline's state of the art, CIHA's contribution to shaping the methodological debate in post-war years could be described as a Kublerian 'slow and fast happening'. The rise and fall of Panofsky's iconology is the first phenomenon that can be surmised. Celebrated in Bonn as a possible unifying paradigm in the Euro-American bloc of art history, evoked in Budapest as one of the principal methodologies, re-interpreted with a structuralist corrective in Granada and Bologna, iconology did not stand the test of the questioning of the discipline's epistemological models in the 1980s and 90s. Moreover, as art history moved on to a world and later global perspective, Panofsky's intrinsic meaning, based on the reference to a textual culture and a representational art, had become the symbol of Westcentrism. Conversely, CIHA's congresses greatly contributed to build Aby Warburg's critical fortune. Leading the way to his rediscovery in the 1960s, Warburg progressively became the beacon of the new orientations in the 1980s and 1990s. The collapse of the Hegelian teleological narratives that opened up a crisis in the discipline in the 1980s was mirrored by a re-investigation of its methodological tenets in Vienna 1983. And in the following two meetings of Strasbourg and Berlin, Warburg's defiance of disciplinary boundaries made him the tutelary deity of the modern commitment to interdisciplinarity. His Bilderatlas and essays on American natives were taken as anticipations of post-modern visual and anthropological turns. The reflection on methods between Budapest and Bologna conferences was under the spell of structuralism and semioticism exploring the methodological possibilities when applied to iconology and the social history of art. As a matter of fact, George Kubler's duration and seriation and Hans Sedlmayr's Strukturanalyse were considered as possible solutions to what was perceived as a stagnating theoretical discourse.

[81] The early social history of art was significantly addressed mainly in those years foregrounding the limitations of Antal's and Hauser's deterministic theories. The more radical strands of the 1970s as exemplified by German radical art historians were, conversely, mostly left out of the debate. As was the case with British leftist proponents of the New Art History, whose anti-establishment proclaims earned them strong criticism in the sessions on art theory chaired by Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey in Strasbourg and Berlin. And while visual culturists led the way in those two instances, their stronghold faltered in the next conferences. As the 1996 October questionnaire marked the crisis of Visual Studies, in the pages of The Art Bulletin John Onians was theorising world art history. Finally, World Art Studies constitute the last (or rather the latest) leg of this trajectory. In fact, the definition of national and regional stylistic identities is the very heart of the history of CIHA meetings, especially if one follows Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's geohistorical perspective. While the process of decolonisation was underway, CIHA fulfilled the pleas to internationality resounding within its members by changing its statutes to encompass a broader notion of art history no longer limited to the West.

[82] In this sense, the Washington conference on world art set the tone of the conferences in the new millennium. The CIHA congresses of London, Montreal and Melbourne were crucial in the debate on world/global art. Yet the more watchful views on the broadening of horizons that were morphing art history were voiced outside of CIHA's meetings. On the whole, the more recent developments show that CIHA congresses have come a long way in keeping up with the current problems of the discipline, perhaps as their key players have somehow answered the wishes one of its most active members, Millard Meiss, proffered in the early post-war years:

We must all attempt to change it from a simulated diplomatic corps to a gathering of scholars more or less impecunious but possessing a sense of humor and living – at least some of them – in the 20th century.²⁷⁹

Local Editor
Andrea Lermer, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich

Reviewers
Veerle Thielemans, Terra Foundation for American Art, Paris
Michael F. Zimmermann, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

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The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0