By Michael Allen Lowe
It is the art historian’s job, in part, to research, investigate, recognize, understand, and derive significance from evidence; —to evaluate, consider, discover, interpret, determine, and justify a subject. —That we might clarify, inform, instruct, educate, and enlighten. Or, as Frederick Antal has said, ‘to try to understand and explain art in the light of its own historical premises,’ and since its origins, many methods of academic research in this discipline have been employed in that aim.[1] Yet perhaps none, thus far, can aptly discern a debatably integral component of information concerning an artwork, and that is the artist’s intentions. When we have no first-hand account of the artist conveying all that was intended for a specific artwork, art historians are often in disagreement, or even at a complete loss in attempting to approach such a precarious term of historic inquiry.
But, so as not to confuse my aims, intention will first need to be divorced from pretext, and not confounded with its precursor, motive, nor either its progeny, purpose, or meaning. Rather, to give us a target, I will define the artist’s intentions as the premeditated designs of their respective artwork, comprised of its materials, medium, subject, methodology, organization, manner of style, and inherent language, when directed toward the production of a purposeful and determined result. As it is conventionally the artist’s results from which art historians have been left to principally work. Yet, it is true that some notable historians, such as Roland Barthes for example, have had confidence in dismissing the artist’s intentions as simply irrelevant to our understanding of the resultant artwork. Nevertheless, for the purposes of proposing a more effective methodology of modern research, let us suppose that since the emergence of the artist’s surreptitious independent identity in the early modern Renaissance, and perhaps in the proto-Romantic period in Europe specifically, the artist’s intentions were paramount to our understanding of what their artworks were designed to communicate.
By some similar want for communication with authors from history, the historian Stephan Greenblatt wanted to speak with the dead, and pursuant to that want has thusly elevated the late nineteenth-century method of Germanic literary historicism to a modern architype of historical research.[2] Historicism being generally understood as the approach to explaining the existence of certain phenomena, especially social and cultural practices, through the studying of their history, with elements of this idea dating as far back as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne [1533–1592] and the Italian philosopher G. B. Vico [1668–1744], with the term being officially coined by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel [1772-1829], and further developed by the likes of philosophers Hegel and Karl Marx.
Although Brooke Thomas has claimed that ‘Historicism, [as] a product of the imagination, assumes that history will always be made new. [And] As a result, the history of historicism is marked by perpetual claims to newness’, Greenblatt, arrived at his New historicism in the early 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley, which was later disseminated by Berkley historians Lynn Hunt and Michel Foucault.[3] This new form of postmodernism philosophy, when applied to interpretive history, has since yielded expansive possibilities in historical research, and we might well presume similar logical applications to art history, specifically.
According to Anthony Savile, ‘Every [art]work […] affords a unique canonical interpretation or explication of meaning, derived from the attainment of a full or replete understanding of the artist's intentions and couched in a publicly accessible form according to rules known to both artist and audience of the time.[4] Thus, we must consider how Greenblatt’s new historicism, or some newfangled iteration of it, can lead us beyond the standard practices of Art Historical research to yield similar possibilities in determining the artist’s intentions, and, to the degree that it is possible, ascertain what value might be brought to art historical research from this potentially unknowable quagmire.
I will answer the last part first, as establishing some semblance of value to intention, at least in the mind of the reader, is imperative to my premise. Greenblatt would have us look no further than the interpretation of Jesus’ words as quoted in Biblical Scripture, which, since the Reformation, differing interpretations of authorial intention have produced a variety of speculations and distinct Christian subsets[5] For example, Edmund Grindal attests ‘scripture is not so to be taken always as the letter sound-eth, but as the intent and purpose of the Holy Ghost was, by whom the Scripture was uttered. For if you follow the bare words, you will sooner shakedown and overthrow the greatest part of the Christian faith.’[6]
But let us not get bogged down before the checks and brays of religion. For, to my mind, the value of the artist's intentions is no more biblical as it is simply self-evident, as a constructed artwork speaks to at least two distinct concepts of identity for the author, that of the various sensitivities pertaining to the artist, and that of the biographical sensibilities of his or her lived experience. Or to put it another way, in considering the historic work as a product of the human mind, Walter Pater [1839-1894] eloquently addresses the fundamental problem of the historical explanation of intentionally constructed objects thusly:
[…] where beliefs, desires, feelings and phantasies are brought to bear on the process of producing the object, is one of doing justice to the complexity of determination of the object, in this case[,] an art object, so that not only the broad social and economic conditions are discovered but also the formative influence of the artist’s personality, taken in its broadest sense, is accounted for too.[7]
Although, admittedly, this logic cannot very well be applied to all intentional art objects produced throughout human history. In ancient art, by example, where individual artistic intentions can be (and generally have been) viewed as interchangeable with the culture that produced it, the identity of the artist is entirely subjugated. Additionally, some artworks, e.g. early Greco-Roman sculpture, may have had a variety of any number of anonymous or unidentifiable authors for any given artwork. Moreover, I will acknowledge that throughout recorded history artists and artisans have routinely been employed as mere automatonic instruments of talent, to exact only those designs and schemes of a wealthy or ruling class, government, or political/religious régime, which has certainly been pertinacious in Western art for centuries.
It was not until the Italian Renaissance that we began to see evidence of artists’ distinct personalities within their respective artworks. What Clement Greenberg calls the inflections of the personal, and perhaps most recognizably evidenced in the works of the early modern Masters such as Michelangelo and Da Vinci.[8] In writing about these and other artists in his Lives, Vasari chronicles these distinctions, and it is from such points of deviation, from proscribed predetermined aesthetics, that we begin to see some import placed on the artist’s intentions.[9] Indeed, in her article, Svetlana Leontief Alpers reveals Vasari's assumption ‘that art is an intelligible discipline and that the historian can discover the true intention of the artist.’[10] Although from Vasari’s time through the Age of Enlightenment, Europe predominantly maintained its culture of art patronization, under which artists were afforded few strides from institutionalized norms, such as subject choice and manner of style, as determined by the cultural milieu in which they worked. However, the implementation of revolving temporary public art exhibitions in Northwestern Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century saw modern artworks exhibited in various public spaces, and art spectatorship became a cultural happening. As a result, art criticism and the public critique of the arts had become a social activity amongst elite patrons and the mobile volgus alike. During the Romantic age, soon thereafter, we see a development in critical art theory, during which authors and artists were formulating the modern constructs of art criticism when the artist’s intention was among the principal questions of the day.
In Goethe’s examples of three questions for constructive criticism, the very first he asks is ‘What did the author set out to do?’[11] Yet perhaps even more significantly, over a century later, intention is attributed an even greater importance, as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy has argued that in fact there are but two kinds of inquiry concerning an artwork, the first of which being ‘whether the artist achieved his [or her] intentions’, and the second being whether the artwork ‘ought ever to have been undertaken at all.’[12] Even more recently, in his book Patterns of Intention, which is a collection of a series of Una Smith Ross’s Lectures in the Humanities given at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 1982 addressed the questions: ‘If we offer a statement about the causes of a picture, what is the nature and basis of the statement? Or, can we think or speak of a picture in terms of historical explanation as also being a product of intention, and if so, to what end? Moreover, notable historian Michael Baxandall confesses that his interest in addressing pictures was, in part, to make inferences about their causes relative to Intentionality.[13]
Thus, having established both a limited framework of possibility in which to focus (from the early modern period onwards) and previous precedents of interest and import having already been placed on the artist’s intention in both art criticism and art history, we must certainly warrant it some relevance of inquiry here. Accordingly, in the present objective, we will approach intention firstly as modern spectators. What Charles Harrison defines as ‘someone who is not only competent to identify the pictorial theme, and not only disposed to view the [artworks] […] properties as significant of some human intention but also disposed to exert his or her critical and imaginative facilities in pursuit of the intention in question.’[14] But for the artwork to be considered critically, in the activated vantage of the latter, the mantle of mere spectator must be dropped, and that of the critic taken up. Yet, in the notable debate The Intentional Fallacy [1954] between Professors W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, which posited the idea that an author’s intention could be derived from a text, which also signified the source of that text’s meaning’, the intention of the author was argued as ‘neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.’ Yet, it was so universally met with, that the critic’s stance on intention, whether advocating for its relevance or against it, was nevertheless inescapable. During this debate, it was also speculated that for the critic to arrive at intention, exclusively from the [artwork], was ultimately contingent on the success of the author in demonstrating his/her intentions with said artwork.[15] If it was not demonstratively thus, then the critic is consequently forced to go outside the artwork for evidence of an intention that the artwork does not readily convey. Now this is the dominion of the art historicist.
But in order for the possibility of the artist’s intention to be reckoned by art historical means, we first must suppose a format of explanatory history. That is to say, that there is some origination of an artist’s intention in the past that we can seek out through standard art historical methodologies. But presuming that this surreptitious intelligence has any value to our discipline, then the standard methods and practices of realizing it should already produce definitive results in this regard. So, there is already some doubt embedded in this approach. Discussing explanatory history and photography, Ian Jeffrey surmises its drawbacks succinctly:
Explanatory history leads to little deepening of historical consciousness. It gives priority to explanation of origins, and is predicated on a notion of inevitability: the artwork was produced with good or some reason. The good reasons include intentions held by artists and their affiliates. But where these intentions are concealed, kept back or submerged, explanations become impossible, at least within positive terms. Then the only option is to speculate or to try to understand. Rather than to address here whether the artist’s intentions have been concealed, purposefully or not, the supposition that they are unknown to us is evident in our present desire to seek them out.[16]
Therefore, in our effort to stay within the realm of possibility, if we must speculate, then our methodology must also include the practicable supporting evidence of our speculations. It seems logical then to reach from within the limits of archetypal scientific methods of research towards a more historicistic approach.
As Paul Hamilton points out, ‘[…] historicism is hard to eliminate from any interpretive inquiry.’[17] Marjorie Levinson defines the historicist premises as aiming ‘to reveal the past, the object, either as it is/was in itself, or as it is intended in the sympathetic consciousness of the present.’[18] Or Sondra Bacharach more recently characterized historicism as ‘the view that access to the content of an artwork, or to the work itself, depends in part on the historical context in which the work is created.’[19] Although continuously redefined, historicism’s perhaps most mutually agreed upon attribute is the contextual view of the material evidence of all things, even arguably relevant peripheral evidentiary sources; such as those anecdotal, secondary, and ulterior, so-called counterhistories, all in the effort to gain a replete understanding of the past as it was.[20] It is in these subordinate sources that ‘provoke their own contextualizations inside a new teleological narrative’ that were thought to epitomize epochal truths, and yet, according to Greenblatt, only succeed in undermining them.[21] Greenblatt clearly sets out historicism’s methodological implications as:
[…] first, that the present is not necessarily a superior objective vantage point, but is often, instead, a reductive one; second, that realities are often not singular or even reciprocal, but multiple and incommensurable; and third, that the historian must be able to push beyond understanding a past social reality into imagining the social imaginary.[22]
Then, from a methodological viewpoint, historicism’s value to the art historian (to the degree that we can ascribe value to this method) is in large part contingent on the historian's imaginative abilities. However, Tim Milnes asserts that historicism should ‘give up the very thing that Levinson identifies as its main strength: the assumption that [criticism] needs to be underpinned by a “theory” of truth encompassing a “methodology.”’[23]
Nevertheless, as art historical theories and methodologies have a tendency to be seen in evolutionary terms (as any chronological historiography of the subject can demonstrate), let us consider the most recent trend in the past half-century of this type of research, Greenblatt’s so-called New Historicism. Although taken individually, new historicists also appear to be consistently maneuvering to redefine themselves. Brannigan, for example, defines an ancillary trait of New Historicism as ‘a mode of critical interpretation which privileges power relations as the most important context for texts of all kinds. As […] power relations made visible.’[24] While Davies asserts that ‘New Historicists [recognize] the problem of determining the limits of a texts “context” and of “discriminating” the parameters of textual absence; they have also been exercised by the rival claims of “particularity” and “totalization.”’[25] But essentially, in addition to following the methodology of historicism (placing equal historical value on subordinate source material to the artwork, and elevating contextual/environmental concerns of a period in time, as relative to the artist’s supposed experience within that time) when employing those methods, they are essentially considering the past from specifically the artist’s perspective. In a sense, the mantle of the method actor is taken up in a kind of imagined reenactment, to research from the artist’s point of view. Though perhaps obvious, this requires what Mary Erickson calls historical imagination, ‘[…] to suppose to put oneself in the artist’s shoes, […] requires empathy and a complete immersion in all manner of details concerning that time.’[26]
Throughout his treatise on inferential criticism, Baxandall argues that there are a number of inevitable ways in which artworks can be thought of as products of purposeful activity, and are therefore caused, effectively elevating the artist’s intention to a potentially legitimate subject of art historical research. In his book, Baxandall carefully develops his methodology to describe an artist’s aims, relation to his or her culture, peers, and artistic process; including an examination of visual perception in relation to pictures, and the systematic ideas of the artist’s own time. Artworks are also considered in relation to other historical objects of the same period, as is the art historian’s relation to the intentional movements of mind in other cultures and periods. All of this is done in order for him to critically assess the legitimacy of what he dubs inferential criticism.[27] Yet, interestingly, Baxandall has said he is committed to an artist’s intention only when it is of ‘a general condition of rational human action, that [he] posits in the course of arranging [his] circumstantial facts or moving about on the triangle of re-enactment. […] One assumes […] intent or, as it were, “intentiveness” — in the historical actor but even more in the historical objects themselves’[28] Although Baxandall does not identify as a new historicist explicitly, he instead describes his position as ‘a naïve but skeptical intentionalist.’[29] Yet, he nevertheless follows a similar teleological (or idiographic) theory of historical explanation, preferring to set aside the model of the physical sciences to argue that the explanation of human actions may be able to be discovered through the actor’s purposes.[30] New Historicism attempts to understand an artwork by a similar associative reasoning, that in order to understand pertinent contextual concerns of the past, the artist’s perspective increases our understanding of the art object in the present.
Although explicit practitioners of new historicism appear to be rare (perhaps Greenblatt beside), its methods are evident in various works of art historical research of the previous decades. To cite a few specific examples, let us briefly examine two recent works on early nineteenth-century artists in the age of Romanticism, ‘or what goes by the name “new historicism” in nineteenth-century studies.’[31] Of particular importance to New Historicism, it is a period in which, as Tim Milnes points out, ‘one philosophical binary—that of “objective/subjective”— is gradually displaced by another— that of “external/internal.”’[32] As exemplified in Liam Lenihan’s book The Writing of James Barry; where the artist’s perspective is evidently paramount throughout and the contextual factors relative to the power dynamics within the Royal Academy are clearly demonstrated as governing concerns for the artist, ultimately affecting Barry’s intentions in both teaching and exhibiting there.[33] A comprehensive and informative new historicistic work, to be sure, yet, on the other hand, in Luisa Calé’s, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: Turning Readers Into Spectators, the author also consistently contemplates the exhibition of Fuseli’s works from the perspective of the spectator, allowing for suppositions respective to their own concerns and expectations in considering Fuseli’s artworks. To my mind, this provides a far more replete understanding of the potential intentions of the artist in the veritable competition to attract audiences in the spectator space. That is not to say that other parties’ perspectives are not considered in the former work, but only subordinately so, insofar as they were relative to Barry, thereby discounting Greenblatt’s second methodological implication of historicism that ‘realities are often not singular or even reciprocal, but multiple and incommensurable’ (see: above, note 21). Throughout Calé’s work, the spectator is at times an equal consideration of import as Fuseli, himself, through which she comes to justify the failing of his Milton Gallery, at least in part, to be the by-product of steep competition in gaining local spectatorship from a variety of London’s differing curiosities, spectacles, and venues of the day. It occurs to me then, that in premise the singular vantage of new historicism seems comparatively reductive to the very concerns it seeks, as effectively it limits the focus to a single perspective in order to theorize a veritable world of materials, persons, and events to extrapolate from. This is precisely what Judith Thompson cautions against in her Overlooking History.[34]
If we are to take the premise of new historicism as an advantageous one in our own purpose, I should think, instead, that multiple relevant perspectives would provide a more replete understanding of the artist’s supposed intentions. We ought to suppose ourselves, as Calé has done, as spectators, yes, but more rightly, also as specific spectators, facilitators, collaborators, patrons and critics, even casual friends and family members, then we would have a far more complete conception of the artist operating within a context, with the added benefit of a far deeper pool of resources from which to research. Paradoxically then, must pull back our focus to include those other persons within the artist’s scope and reach, each to be considered as equal subjects of a broader more inclusive Epi-historicism, if you will. We can then suppose an ultimate conception of the individual artist’s experience from which we can expect to better mitigate intention.[35] This comparatively novelistic approach will achieve a far more comprehensive insight into the contextual concerns of the artist’s reality and experience, which effectively determine causation.[36] Although, admittedly, it is not by some small irony that this determination is something that Barthes, our would-be greatest critic in the present endeavor, had perhaps known all along —‘[…] since [novelistic] writing is mediate (it presents ideas and feelings only by intermediaries) […] its power is [their] truth.’[37] Barthes argues:
The writer of a novel voices his thoughts and feelings indirectly, by way of the detour of his characters. In doing so, he succeeds in translating the intimacy of his idiosyncratic imagination in a form to which the reader not only has access but in which he is addressed on a personal level, by way of that same detour. [This] invites readers, without pressure, without forcing upon this or that direction or interpretation, to participate in the creative process that joins together the members of the idiorhythmic community of writers and readers.[38]
Perhaps, therefore, we must expect the evidencing of the artist’s intentions not only through the artist’s perspective but through his or her intermediaries. Then, when taken collectively, this additional evidence sourcing will allow us to infer a superiorly informed hypothesis of their intentions, which perhaps the artwork may well verify.
As art historians, part of our job (if arguably not our principal job) is to realize historical explanations of intentionally constructed art objects, we are explicitly placing the semblance of significance upon those objects, and by consequence, also that of their makers; but additionally, also that of their intentions. The artist’s intentions have been historically significant since the appearance of Greenberg’s inflections of the personal during the Renaissance, and although peaking during the Romantic period with the emergence of public art exhibitions and advances in art criticism, it has nevertheless withstood the test of time. Perhaps this is because intention can be considered the missing link between the mutually exclusive modern perceptions of the artist and artwork, whilst presumably possessing explanative intelligence relative to both. Yet, provided the artwork does not readily convey this intelligence, the Intentional Fallacy debate directed our focus to search outside the artwork for evidence of its intention, where, being in agreement with historicism and the significance of historical context, we considered its newest iteration, i.e. New historicism. Although in considering the latter, while focusing on imagining the artist’s experience from the artist’s perspective, we can see that it evidently fails to account for other equal perspectives within the artist’s purview, ignoring a vast subset of researchable subjects and potentially relevant evidence in our pursuit. Thus, in order to do justice to the complexity of determinations for a given artwork (within our given parameters of applicability), the inclination is to look inward to arrive at the artist’s identity, where Pater’s beliefs, desires, feelings and phantasies occur, and wherefrom intention is supposedly derived.[39] But, unexpectedly, we must look inwardly and outwardly, and not merely from one perspective, but from all those relevant. This is clearly necessary in order to reckon the whole of the broader historical, social, and economic conditions of the time and place, which may be potentially integral to the formative influences of the artist’s motivations, in keeping with his or her inherent and evolving identity, personality, and character at any given time; for they are all perhaps complimentary.
My so-called Epihistoricism builds upon its predecessors by not denying the import of their tenets, but in positive terms, whilst employing their methods, endorses even broader contextual research sourcing which may bring us closer still to intention. Yet, it may still be true that art may not require our understanding of the artist’s intentions, but nor does it survive solely by virtue of the richness of its interpretive possibilities.[40] Although such possibilities certainly invigorate our discipline, the resultant multitude of speculations also unnecessarily burdens it. As there can be any number of theories of explanation for the artist’s potential intentions for just a single artwork, much of art history, at present, is encumbered with an abundance of gross over-speculation. This is especially true in the case of the most significant and famous examples (DaVinci’s The Last Supper, and Las Meninas, by Velázquez, immediately come to mind, just to name a few). So, in our legitimate pursuit of understanding an artist’s intentions, in order to presumably attain a replete understanding of an artwork, we should not speculate, but rather infer by the evidence assessed through Epihistoricism. Then, pursuant to its broader context and potential results, we may, at the very least, dispel some of the conjectures and misinformation prevalent in our discipline (which naturally occurs in all speculative reasoning), making room for those new, undiscovered, and more probable. As apprehending the artist’s intentions on our part potentially comprehends precisely what it is that the artist was trying to communicate in the first place, seeking it out contemporaneously should be integral to our correct understanding and explanation of the artwork in the light of its own historical premise today.
NOTES
[1] Antal, Remarks, p.74. For a comprehensive historiography of methodologies see: Hatt, Art History; or D’Alleva, Methods & Theories of Art History. [2] Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p.1; or Pieters, Speaking with the Dead, p.1. See: Greenblatt, Practicing; also, Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); and H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989). [3] Thomas, The New Historicism, p.189. [4] Savile, The Test of Time, quoted by Richmond, in Historicism, Teaching, p.32; also, see: Savile, ‘The Historicist Alternative,’ in The Test of Time, pp.62-66. [5] See: Greenblatt, ‘The Mousetrap’, in Practicing, pp.135-151, and quoting from Greenblatt: ‘On Jesus’ words as figurative speech, see Displaying, p. 271; and Greenblatt, Practicing, p.223, note 16. [6] Grindal, ‘A Fruitful Dialogue between Custom and Verity’, in Remains (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1843) p. 41, Quoted in ‘Hirn’, in The Sacred Shrine, p. 104. [7] Walter Pater, quoted by O’Pray, in Pater, Stokes and Art History, pp.125-126. [8] Greenberg, Clement; John O'Brian. Avant-Garde, p.18. [9] Vasari, Lives of the Painters. [10] Alpers, Ekphrasis, p.211. [11] Quoted by Wimsatt Jr., W.K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Intentional Fallacy, p.6. [12] (ibid) p.5. [13] Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p.vi., p.v. [14] Harrison, Modernism, p.150. [15] Wimsatt Jr., W.K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Intentional Fallacy, (1946) p.3. Lamarque, The Intentional fallacy, p.177. [16] Jeffrey, Photography, History and Writing, p.100. [17] Hamilton, Historicism, p.28. [18] Levinson, Rethinking Historicism, p.2. [19] Bacharach, Toward a Metaphysical Historicism, p.165. [20] See: Thomas, The New Historicism. For more on counterhistories, see: Greenblatt, Practicing, pp.49-74. [21] Greenblatt, Practicing, pp.50-51. [22] Ibid, p.57. [23] Milnes, The Incommensurable Value Of Historicism, p.27. [24] Brannigan, New Historicism, p.6. [25] Davies, Romanticism, pp.5-6. [26] Erickson, Styles of Historical Investigation, p.121. [27] Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p.vi. [28] Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, pp.41-42. [29] Ibid, p.vii. [30] Ibid, p.12. [31] Levinson, Rethinking Historicism, p.5. [32] Milnes, The Incommensurable Value of Historicism, p.15. [33] Lenihan, The Writing, pp.153-177. [34] Thompson, Overlooking, pp.103-125. [35] Not to be confused with epistemic historicism, see: Bacharach, Toward a Metaphysical Historicism, pp.165-173. [36] See: Barthes ‘third form of writing, “neither Essay nor Novel”, but somehow both at the same time’, quoted by Pieters in Speaking with the Dead, p.133-134, p.135, note23; or, see: Barthes, “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure [...]”, in The Rustle of Language, p.281.’ [37] Barthes, quoted by Pieters, Speaking with the Dead, p.133. [38] Ibid. p.134. [39] See: above, note 7. [40] See: Richmond, Historicism, Teaching, p.39.
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