The good thing about revisionist art history, besides its providing desperate graduate students with topics for theses, is that it broadens our understanding of the past by adding subtlety to oversimplified conceptions. At best, revisionism allows us to reconsider serious, gifted practitioners who have been eclipsed by shifts in taste or changes of fashion; at worst, it dredges up forgotten artists who have little to recommend them but their obscurity. Either way, though, it is useful to be reminded that art history is not a tidy progression of easily categorized “isms,” but (the undeniable phenomena of period and national styles notwithstanding) something far more interesting: a messy, unstable accumulation of individual efforts. I am thinking of a phrase used by the late E. C. Goossen—always a perceptive art historian and critic—to admonish colleagues who grouped things too neatly for his taste: “No movements, only artists!
...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase