But the new barbarian is no uncouth Desert-dweller; he does not emerge From fir forests; factories bred him; Corporate companies, college towns Mothered his mind, and many journals Backed his beliefs. He was born here.
—W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety

It is still deemed civilized to believe in European civilization.
—Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700–1830

In the issue of the London Times Literary Supplement for March 6, 1996, readers of that venerable journal were given a remarkable account of the kind of intellectual license which is now commonplace for scholars in high places to impose upon objects of art-historical study. For those who had not yet fully awakened to the implications of the postmodern assault on the history and criticism of the fine arts, it must have come as a rude shock to discover just how far this bizarre mode of discourse had advanced in its task of deconstructing the great artistic achievements of the European past. For anyone who was already alert to the depredations of the postmodernist juggernaut, this review in the TLS was yet another melancholy reminder of how much ground has been lost to its malign imperatives.

The occasion was the publication by the Yale University Press of a book called The Making of Rubens. The author of this work —Svetlana Alpers—is a professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, and an influential eminence in her scholarly discipline. Among her earlier publications are books on Rembrandt and seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting that were widely noticed and highly praised in both scholarly journals and the mainstream press. The reviewer for the TLS was Christopher Brown, curator of European painting at the National Gallery of Art in London and himself a distinguished scholar and connoisseur of the art that is the focus of Professor Alpers’s study.

So troubled was Mr. Brown by the thesis propounded in The Making of Rubens, the title of which encompasses the kind of obscene pun that has become a hallmark of postmodernist criticism, that he felt obliged to apprise readers of the TLS of some background information on the scholarly debate that had preceded the publication of the book. It is thus necessary to quote at length from Mr. Brown’s review not only for the exact character of Professor Alpers’s project in The Making of Rubens to be clearly understood but for its significance as an example of the larger phenomenon it represents to be accurately assessed:  

At a plenary session of the conference of Historians of Netherlandish Art held in Boston in 1993, Svetlana Alpers discussed Rubens’s treatment of the subject of Silenus, the corpulent, drunken follower of Bacchus, Falstaff to Bacchus’s Prince Hal. It was interesting, she told us, that Rubens had painted and drawn this subject so often, and even more interesting that he had represented this depraved figure in a relatively positive light. So far, so good. She then drew our attention to the fact that close behind Silenus, in Rubens’s painting of the subject in Munich, was a smiling black man who pinches a fold of the flesh of Silenus’s left leg. The purpose of this handhold, she continued, was to enable him to penetrate Silenus. While the audience was trying to come to terms with this metaphor, Alpers made it clear by forceful repetition that it was not a metaphor and that she was telling us that Rubens was here representing an act of homosexual anal sex. She then went on to describe Silenus as a self-portrait of Rubens, although his features bear not the remotest resemblance to those of the artist, well known from more conventional self-portraits. It is a self-portrait in the same sense, we are told, that Degas’s “Woman Looking through Opera-Glasses” is a self-portrait.

In the silence that followed the lecture, the other plenary speaker, Elizabeth McGrath, with ironical understatement, voiced the doubt that “anything untoward” was going on in the picture. During the subsequent discussion, there was amazement that anyone who knew about the historical personality of Rubens and about ideas of decorum in seventeenth-century painting could seriously propose such an interpretation. Alpers’s “buggery of Silenus” lecture has now been published with two others in a short, well-illustrated book with the deliberately ambiguous title The Making of Rubens. It is not, I think, unfair to characterize the lecture in this way because, although there is much else in it, Alpers is aware of the sensational nature of her interpretation. She has toned it down a little for publication. When we first encounter this idea, the black man “follows so close as to appear to be penetrating the huge body from behind.” Later, any doubts that this is what is happening are abandoned.

One of the ideas at issue in this bizarre reading of Rubens’s Drunken Silenus is, of course, the postmodern notion of “intentionality,” which now beckons scholars in many humanistic disciplines to substitute for the verifiable data of historical research politically determined scenarios of their own invention—in other words, historical fictions. In this endeavor, which is designed to deconstruct the historical past for the purpose of bringing it into ideological alignment with the imperatives of postmodern discourse, a concentrated interest in perverse sexuality is a common priority. It derives its intellectual sanction from the new pseudo-disciplines of gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and the even more comprehensive field of cultural studies, all of which have had the effect of transforming history into a mythology that at times bears a remarkable resemblance to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.

About the use which Professor Alpers makes of this slippery notion of “intentionality” in The Making of Rubens, Mr. Brown had this to say:

She writes of the “intentionality of the painting,” suggesting that this is in some way different from the intentionality of the artist. It raises the key point which applies to many of the ideas put forward in this book. What, precisely, is their status? In the case of Silenus, is Alpers telling us that Rubens deliberately threw aside all rules of seventeenth-century decorum? (In a long footnote, she admits to being unable to find any comparable scene in seventeenth-century art.) Does she believe that Rubens subconsciously painted this shocking subject within contemporary conventions and so revealed the feminine aspect of his art for which she argues? Or does she mean this to be a subjective twentieth-century interpretation? At no point is this issue clarified.

It can’t be clarified, alas, because it is not in the nature of postmodern discourse to acknowledge the validity of the kind of distinctions—between, say, a subjective twentieth-century interpretation and an objective seventeenth-century cultural reality—that Mr. Brown was concerned to make in this passage. The only “intentionality” that counts in The Making of Rubens is that which Professor Alpers brings to her critical project. What may be known or reasonably inferred about Rubens’s intentions in the matter are rendered irrelevant to the inquiry.

Mr. Brown nonetheless persevered in offering the readers of the TLS a more conventional reading of Rubens—based, as he wrote, on “the context of [the artist’s] profound understanding of the Antique and his recreation of numerous classical scenes”:

A more plausible explanation for what the black man is actually doing is that he is pinching Silenus’s flesh to show to the amusement of his companions that Silenus is so drunk that he no longer has any feeling in his leg.

For an art historian of Professor Alper’s persuasion, however, such an unproblematic depiction of a satyr incapacitated by drunkenness would hardly qualify as a subject worthy of serious attention. What would there be to deconstruct if the subject of the Drunken Silenus really was taken to be a drunken Silenus? In the lexicon of postmodernist causes, alcohol abuse—unlike buggery, for example—has never enjoyed much of a priority. It just isn’t sufficiently sexy in itself, and lavishing scrutiny on excessive insobriety would in any case risk being seen to support conventional bourgeois morality, which it is also the purpose of postmodernism to deconstruct. So the subject of the Drunken Silenus had to be reinvented to qualify as a suitably sexy object of postmodernist hermeneutics.

It had to be reinvented, moreover, for a mode of critical discourse that is devoid of aesthetic analysis. For what also needs to be taken into account in this postmodernist assault on the history and criticism of the fine arts is the absence of any newly formulated aesthetic judgments in determining the objects of critical scrutiny. The rejection of aesthetics—and of the connoisseurship that derives from the comparative aesthetic analysis of works of art—is indeed fundamental to the postmodern discourse about art.

Postmodern criticism is thus condemned to live, for the most part, off the inherited aesthetic and historical judgments of the very past it seeks to unmask and subvert. By the nature of its essentially political project, it is itself incapable of contributing any new aesthetic intelligence to our understanding of the art of the past. It cannot tell us why Rubens’s painting as a painting is still worth our attention more than three centuries after its creation. It takes Rubens’s importance for granted—granted, that is, by critical precedent—as it exploits his traditional position in the history of art in order to offer us instruction in subjects more congenial to the postmodern agenda. In the case of The Making of Rubens, the real subject turns out to be—what else?—“male femininity,” which Rubens’s depiction of Silenus is alleged to represent. What for 157 pages has been masquerading as art history is actually a postmodern homily on the variety of human sexuality. Professor Alpers gives the whole game away in the closing paragraph of her book:

When there is a rush, as there is today, to recognize and name the subversive, transgressive and the marginal, it is useful to be reminded that complex notions of identity and of identification are not new. It might be that what is now being construed as exceptional is instead fundamental to human nature and to the ways in which it is understood. Rubens’s Silenus gives evidence of this as he confronts the condition of human generation and creativity. But, I must admit, Silenus was a marginal figure.

Unfortunately for anyone concerned about the future of the European past as far as the writing of art history is concerned, Professor Alpers’s intellectual enterprise in The Making of Rubens is anything but marginal. It is, on the contrary, entirely representative of the intellectual catastrophe that has overtaken the writing of art history and art criticism in this last decade of the twentieth century, not only at the higher altitudes of academic specialization and prestige but in the popularization of postmodern discourse that has now insinuated itself into the college classroom, the art museums, and the mainstream critical press.

What a radical coterie of elite academics has been cooking up in learned journals and professional conferences for more than a generation is now being served, cafeteria-style, to masses of unwary students and museumgoers as reliable guides to the experience of art. Out of the postmodern seminars in the universities have come the new cadres of museum curators, who now embark upon their professional duties without the slightest knowledge of the kind of connoisseurship that was formerly the hallmark of their vocation, and they in turn further propagate the postmodern gospel— which is often the only thing they know about art—in the exhibition catalogues and wall texts that now compete for the public’s attention with the art objects on display. For the postmodern assault is nothing if not fiercely didactic in its ideological mission— didactic, that is, about everything but the aesthetic distinctions that separate a work of fine art from the other objects of material culture that our civilization has produced in such profusion.

What this is likely to mean for the future of our understanding of Europe’s artistic past can be gleaned in this recent announcement from the Oxford University Press:

Although art scholarship has undergone a radical change in recent years, this new thinking cannot be found in art book series now on the market. Moving away from the elitist, connoisseurial approach of the past, the Oxford History of Art seeks to clarify and illuminate its subjects by considering art (as well as architecture, photography, and design) in its social and cultural context. Series authors explore the aesthetic merits of a work and seek to answer such questions as: Why was the work created? What was it used for? What did contemporary critics and ordinary people think of it? And while the authors cover all the major artists and iconic masterpieces of art history, they also broaden the scope of their inquiries to include discussions of unfamiliar works often dismissed by traditional surveys and texts. Volumes on neglected subject areas such as Art and Sexuality, Art and Film, Women in Art, Native North American Art, and Menalesian Art will also be included in the series.

The first five volumes on this new Oxford History of Art have now been published, and by the year 2001 a total of some sixty titles is expected to complete the project. The result aspires to provide us with “a comprehensive, accessible library covering all aspects of art and architecture, East and West, from ancient civilizations to Cindy Sherman.”

If the art of Europe continues, perforce, to loom very large in Oxford’s new postmodern multiculturalist History of Art, that carefully chosen reference to the art of the American feminist photographer Cindy Sherman as the terminal achievement to be considered in this comprehensive chronicle of the world’s art puts us on notice that the European past will not otherwise be “privileged,” as they say, in this series. Indeed, to judge by the first two volumes to be devoted to European art in the new Oxford History—Art and Society in Italy 1350–1500 by Evelyn Welch and Art in Europe 1700–1830 by Matthew Craske—the specifically artistic achievements of the European past can scarcely be said to come up for consideration. The real focus of inquiry in these histories is on social, sexual, economic, and political developments, which works of art are merely cited as illustrating but are not discussed within the disciplines of their own creation.

Thus, despite the promise that “the aesthetic merits of a work” would be explored in the series, the new Oxford History is art history purged of all aesthetic analysis. It is art history as the socio-political history of material culture—art history, that is to say, as fodder for postmodernist deconstruction on a vast scale. It is art history with the mind of the artist left out.

Nor do the first two volumes on European art even pretend to explain to newcomers to their subjects—the readers primarily targeted by the series—why some artists have come to be considered “major” and certain works of art have over time acquired the status of “iconic masterpieces of art history.” There are illustrations of certain works by Fra Angelico reproduced in Art and Society in Italy 1350–1500, for example, and some illustrations of Chardin reproduced in Art in Europe 1700–1830, but no discussion of the art of painting in either case.

As for what is discussed in these volumes that are being sold to us as art history, here is a representative excerpt from the section on “Art and the Household” in Evelyn Welch’s Art and Society in Italy 1350–1500:

The phrase used by the Florentine officials, that women were like “little sacks,” was based on their understanding of human biology, one which was quite confused in this period. There were a number of competing theories of human conception and female anatomy on offer in the fifteenth century. The most widely accepted version was based on Aristotle’s writings. According to this philosophical system all living creatures were composed of two basic binary opposites: they were either hot or cold, or wet or dry. Men were generally hot and dry; women were normally cold and wet. A human being was created by mixing the hot, active male seed with the cold, passive female menstrual fluid. This contact acted like rennet on milk, coagulating the fluid and initiating the development of a cheese-like foetus which gradually solidified. If there was enough heat available, the more perfect form, a male child would result; too much cold and damp resulted in a less perfect form, the female or “incomplete male.”

This may not be as inventive as Professor Alpers’s scenario for Drunken Silenus, but it is equally useless as a means of comprehending some of the greatest achievements of European art.

But then, from a postmodern perspective, it may no longer be possible to speak of “European art,” or even of “Europe.” Or so, anyway, Matthew Craske hastens to warn us in the opening pages of Art in Europe 1700–1830. “If to ascribe to and perpetuate the model of ‘European art’ developing through grand and cogent phases can be held to be a matter of belief,” he writes in the Introduction, “this book is declaredly the work of an infidel.” The problem, as Mr. Craske understands it, is what he calls “a cosmopolitan vision of Europe,” which is now said to be outdated. “Europe is assumed to be a distinct civilization which developed in cogent phases. This tendency reflects a tradition of cosmopolitan thought which … stretches back into the eighteenth century; a tradition of associating cultivation of mind, both in scholastic and connoisseurial fields, with the assumption of a cosmopolitan vision of European culture.” Even worse, in his view, is that “it is still deemed civilized to believe in European civilization.” Thus, while professing—or condescending—to write “in a spirit of respect for the faithful,” Mr. Craske nonetheless acknowledges that in Art in Europe 1700–1830 his “text gives priority to the discussion of the social and economic causes of art-historical change.” The result is indeed art history with the mind—and the talent— of the artists left out.

In this wholesale critical deconstruction of the great artistic achievements of the European past the nihilist imperatives of contemporary art in the last two decades of the twentieth century are also, of course, directly implicated. It is from the perversities of postmodernist art, after all, that the revisionist historians have often taken their cues and sanctions—not always openly acknowledged, to be sure—in deconstructing the art of the past. This is especially true in those cases where what Susan Sontag once called an “erotics of art” is given—as it customarily is in postmodern criticism—priority over standards of aesthetic judgment.

Without the radical revision of taste presupposed by the acclaim lavished on the sexually bizarre photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe by the contemporary art establishment, for example, it is unlikely that we should ever have been treated to a spectacle like that of Professor Alpers’s “buggery of Silenus” lecture. In what Professor Alpers called the “rush … to recognize and name the subversive, transgressive and the marginal” in human sexuality, so as to be duly understood and approved as “fundamental to human nature,” the art world’s aggrandizement of the photographs Mapplethorpe devoted to “transgressive” sexuality certainly played a considerable role. Mapplethorpe’s achievement of eminence on the contemporary art scene had a lot less to do with the aesthetic quality of his photography than with its wayward sexual subjects, and the same is true, of course, for the “buggery of Silenus” lecture.

For revisionist art historians determined to bring the past into alignment with a postmodern agenda, Mapplethorpe has indeed become something of a touchstone. The work is just arty enough to pass for having some sort of claim on aesthetic distinction, or “style,” and the subject matter serves as a guarantee of its required “transgressive” character. It is no doubt for reasons of this sort that a Mapplethorpe photograph was chosen to adorn the cover of Graham Clarke’s The Photograph, another of the initial titles in the Oxford History of Art series, placing it firmly within the framework of the postmodern scenario. In the book itself, Mapplethorpe’s work is given closer attention than that of significantly greater photographers—Eugène Atget, for instance, and Walker Evans—for what one can only assume are the same reasons. It is certainly true that neither Atget’s oeuvre nor Evans’s would quite lend itself to the kind of analysis that Mr. Clarke is eager to devote to Mapplethorpe:

Often Mapplethorpe … dresses for the camera—in a tuxedo, in leather, in make-up. Most contentiously, in a 1978 self-portrait he has inserted a bull-whip into his anus as he looks at the camera: an obviously radical and extrovert reversal of virtually all the conventions of the portrait photograph. These photographic portraits place themselves within a larger context of gender and identity, but as photographs they insist upon themselves as part of a continuing metamorphosis in which a single personality does not so much change as reject the codes through which identity, private as much as public, is assumed, determined, and declared.

We are thus dispatched once again to the gender studies seminar, where the mind of the postmodernist is securely anchored to sexual politics and the artistic issues in photography need not be pondered. Not surprisingly, in the chapter which Mr. Clarke devotes to “The Portrait in Photography,” the subject he turns to immediately after Mapplethorpe is Cindy Sherman, of whose pictures he writes: “And just as Mapplethorpe explicitly questions heterosexual codes of being, so too does Sherman question the terms by which woman is to be known and viewed… . In the end there is no literal reality. All is construction and myth and, ultimately, self-enclosed fantasy.” Which, come to think of it, is not an inaccurate way to sum up the quality of the whole postmodern agenda.

One of the questions that must inevitably be addressed about that agenda is whether in the end it really differs all that much from the modernism that preceded its current assault. Wasn’t there, after all, a nihilist strain in modernism as well—and if so, in what ways may the postmodernist assault be distinguished from it?

Now it certainly has to be acknowledged that the nihilist imperative has been a discernible component—and often a deadly coefficient—of the modern movement for at least a hundred years; since, that is to say, the cry of “Merde! Merde!” was first heard in public in the debut performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris in 1896. That was the performance that prompted William Butler Yeats, who was in the audience, to make his famous prediction: “After us, the savage god.” It was beyond even Yeats’s clairvoyant powers, however, to imagine just how savage and perverse the gods of art would become a hundred years later, especially since Yeats’s own art was always—whatever its other peculiaries—to stand at a great distance from “the savage god” he had glimpsed that fateful evening in Paris.

Between the cry of “Merde! Merde!” in Ubu Roi in 1896 and, say, “The Naked Shit Pictures,” which the celebrated postmodernists Gilbert & George exhibited in London to enormous public acclaim in the 1990s, there is an obvious connection, to be sure, but some crucial differences as well, especially in the response accorded to these respective artistic endeavors by respectable opinion. Gilbert & George come to us in a line of descent that can be traced back to the Dadaist mystifications of Marcel Duchamp, who would not himself emerge as an artist-hero beloved by the academy and the art establishment until the early 1960s—until, that is, the advent of Pop Art and its most celebrated mascot, Andy Warhol. Prior to the 1960s, Duchamp was generally regarded as a minor figure in the modern movement —important for his role in the New York branch of Dada, to be sure, and a sideline player in the Surrealist movement later on, but a minor figure all the same. It was only in the 1960s, when Pop Art, Warholism, and the politics of the counterculture combined to give us our first glimpse of what would soon thereafter become the postmodern assault, that Duchamp was elevated to artistic sainthood—the subject of glossy-magazine profiles, museum retrospectives, academic studies, and intellectual hero worship—and the way was prepared for a takeover by his numerous progeny.

Some years ago, in an essay on “The Age of the Avant-Garde,” I had occasion to suggest that the modern movement in the arts —which was what was meant by the avant-garde—was a far more complex cultural phenomenon than was commonly appreciated, that it harbored in fact an “agenda of internal conflict and debate, not only about aesthetic matters but about the social values that govern them”:

If the bourgeois ethos may be said to have both a “progressive” and a “reactionary” side, the avant-garde is similarly divided. At one extreme, there is indeed an intransigent radicalism that categorically refuses to acknowledge the continent and rather fragile character of the cultural enterprise, a radicalism that cancels all debts to the past in the pursuit of a new vision, however limited and fragmentary and circumscribed, and thus feels at liberty— in fact, compelled—to sweep anything and everything in the path of its own immediate goals, whatever the consequences. It is from this radical extreme, of which Dada, I suppose, is the quintessential expression, that our romance of the avant-garde is largely derived. But the history of the avant-garde is by no means confined to these partisans of wholesale revolt. It also boasts its champions of harmony and tradition. It is actually among the latter that we are likely to find the most solid and enduring achievements of the modern era… .

I further characterized the fundamental division of the modern movement as that “between art conceived as a form of guerrilla warfare and art conceived as a vital tradition.”[1] A quarter of a century later, that “guerrilla” movement, having completed its long march through the institutions of cultural life, is what we now mean by the postmodern assault, and the modernism that attached itself with so much conviction and intelligence—and genius!—to the vital traditions of European art and thought has proved to be one of its principal targets.

It was also observed in “The Age of the Avant-Garde” that the dissensions generated by this division “tended to increase, both in ferocity and effect, more or less in direct ratio to the turbulence of the political scene.” I was writing in the direct aftermath of the counterculture of the 1960s, and what has happened in the long interim, of course, is that the ideology of that counterculture is now fully established as the governing spirit of mainstream cultural life. The guerrillas of the 1960s have become the cultural commissars of the 1990s. Whatever they have lost in the realm of electoral politics—and the effect of their cultural conquests does seem to have been a vast increase in the number of political conservatives who achieve election to public office—they have more than made up for in the “culture wars” that are now their principal arena of political action.

The postmodernist assault on tradition— moral tradition as well as the traditions of Western art and thought—is inevitably an assault on the European past, and with each passing year our cultural isolation from that past as anything more than a tourist attraction looks more and more irreversible. It isn’t only in postmodern art histories like Matthew Craske’s Art in Europe 1700–1830 that a belief in “European civilization” is now under attack. Belligerent denunciations of “Eurocentric” educational programs in the service of a politically determined multicuturalist pedagogy are now commonplace and enjoy the sanction of governmental bodies and the even more influential taste-making powers of popular culture. In the realm of art history and the criticism of art, anyway, the ground to be retrieved is already immense.

Notes
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See the introductory essay in The Age of the Avant-Garde (1973). Go back to the text.

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