SUBSTANCE, SENSATION, and PERCEPTION Michael Baxandall
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SUBSTANCE, SENSATION, AND PERCEPTION Michael Baxandall Interviewed by Richard Cándida Smith Art History Oral Documentation Project Compiled under the auspices of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities Copyright © 1998 The J. Paul Getty Trust COPYRIGHT LAW The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. RESTRICTIONS ON THIS INTERVIEW None. LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Assistant Director for Resource Collections of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. * * * Frontispiece: Michael Baxandall, 1998. Photograph courtesy of Michael Baxandall. ii [Page numbers in the Table of Contents and the Index correspond to the bound version of the transcript, not this digital version. Use the Search function of the PDF viewer to find specific names and terms. In 2010 the digital file was migrated from an obsolete version of WordPerfect to Microsoft Word 2007, and the document's formatting and pagination were altered in the process; the PDF file was generated from Microsoft Word.] CONTENTS Curriculum Vitae xii SESSION ONE: 18 APRIL, 1996 (120 minutes) TAPE I, SIDE ONE 1 Childhood in Cardiff, Wales — Father's career as museum keeper — His self-conception as an antiquarian and art critic — Excavations in medieval sites — Primary interest in British modernism and arts and crafts movements — English potters Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach — Roger Fry influence — Pacifist and socialist political attitudes — Parents' dilemma at beginning of World War II — Father's decision to enlist in the air force — Mother's social and intellectual activities — The daughter of an Anglican cleric in Wales — Moral urgency a predominant value in the Baxandall family culture — Family's contemporary art collecting — Baxandall's stay at boarding school during the war — Emotional difficulties during childhood — Father's position as director of a museum in Manchester — His artistic tastes — Baxandall family's attraction to Quaker ethos and style — Baxandall's decision to study classics at Manchester Grammar School not motivated by any intellectual interest in antiquity — A bit anti-intellectual as a teenager — Determination to work in the printing trade rather than go to university — Urged to enroll in Downing College, Cambridge — Friend of father's introduces Baxandall to work of C. M. Bowra and F. R. Leavis — Studying under F. R. Leavis and Harold Mason — Leavis's teaching methods — Exercises in author identification — Discriminations of quality played a very big part in Leavis's approach to literature — The moral and the literary were interfused completely — Learning from other students. TAPE I, SIDE TWO 18 iii Leavis's hostile relationship with the Cambridge University community — Leavis's students formed an "enclosed sect," proudly divorced from other students — Mason hosted weekly readings of Dante in Italian — No direct contact with history faculty — Leavis's approach to social and cultural history — Readings in R. H. Tawney and Gerald Robert Owst — Osmotic influences structured the nature of intellectual growth at Cambridge — Linguistic philosophy "in the air, " but not studied directly — Antiphilosophical stance in Downing English school — Personal readings in art history: Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky — Attending Nikolaus Pevsner's art history lectures — Not particularly interested in the subjects Pevsner discussed — Close friends at Cambridge: Roy Summers and Richard West — Admiration for "mentally agile" people — Frankness highly valued at Cambridge, even to the point of wounding others' personal feelings — Tastes in dress — Vanity centered on intelligence and experience rather than dress or culture — Interest in medieval and Renaissance art — Favorite novelists and poets — Not much interest in Freud, but an avid reader of Jung — A strong feeling for representations of "restraint"— Restraint a dominant value in Baxandall's personal philosophy. TAPE II, SIDE ONE 35 Aware of British New Left writings, but didn't play a large part in his intellectual life — Raymond Williams's Border Country — Ambition to be a novelist — Plans to spend his twenties traveling around the world collecting material for novels — On the role of novels in intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s — Studies at the University of Pavia and at the University of Munich — An external B.A. in art history from the Courtauld — Attending lectures by Edoardo Arslan on Venetian painting and Lanfranco Caretti on Torquato Tasso — Learning how to put together a corpus based on study of stylistic devices — Active social life in Italy — Moving north to University of Munich to spend a year studying with Hans Sedlmayr — Disagreements with Sedlmayr's approach — Move to the Central Institute for Art History — Karl-Ludwig Heydenreich — Importance of discovering Antonio Gramsci and Italian Marxism — Return to London in 1958 — Drifts into the Warburg Institute while looking for a job — Hired by Gertrud Bing to help with the photograph collection — Slight training in connoisseurship — Attracted to the non- theoretical nature of art history. iv SESSION TWO: 26 APRIL 1996 (130 minutes) TAPE III, SIDE ONE 45 No training in archival problems or in philological skills — No real need for specialized skills until work on The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany — Able to call on help from specialists in Germany for particular problems — The university, the museums, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte: three centers for art-historical studies in Munich — Heydenreich's course on Federigo da Montefeltro — Developing opposition to Sedlmayr — Working on the Warburg's photo collection — Gertrud Bing's strong role at the Warburg — The organization of the Warburg library constituted dominant paradigm — Young scholars there formed a study group to master E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion — Learning about projection and the psychology of vision — Introduction to works of Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Erich Auerbach — Influence of Erwin Panofsky — Warburg personnel — Tenor of relation between Germans, Austrians, and Britons at the Warburg — Otto Kurz's breadth of knowledge — More on the Warburg library — Varying fields of interest at the Warburg — Development of anthropological studies — Henri Frankfort and his pupil, Peter Ucko — Bing's accounts of Aby Warburg and the Institute's history. TAPE III, SIDE TWO 61 Teaching art history classes at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Camberwell School of Art — Close interaction between Gombrich and younger scholars at the Warburg — Gombrich directed Baxandall's attention to the problem of humanist writing on art in the Italian Renaissance — Topic coincided closely with Baxandall's long- held interest in questions of "restraint" — Gombrich's seminars for the Warburg staff — Discussions with Michael Podro and Peter Ucko helped Baxandall develop a deeper understanding of Gombrich's ideas — Dabbling in various psychological theories — Influence of Anton Ehrenzweig's Hidden Order of Art — Friendship with Sixten Ringbom — Tenor of relations between the Warburg and Courtauld institutes — Hired in 1961 as an assistant keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum — Assigned to relabel the Italian collection — Shifted to cataloging the German wood sculptures — Interest in museological problems — Continuing reading with Gombrich on rhetoric and other issues in v humanist criticism — Returning to the Warburg in 1965 to develop a course on Renaissance rhetoric — Diverse readings in the Renaissance: Remigio Sabbadini, Giuseppe Bilanovich, Eugenio Garin formed one group, Paul Kristeller and his students, another — More on Panofsky — Jacob Burckhardt — Developing essays for the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes that would eventually turn into Giotto and the Orators — Relation of book to studies in Italian Renaissance art history at the time — Developing interest in anthropological linguistics. TAPE IV, SIDE ONE 76 More on interests in language theory — Not interested in developing a clean theoretical position, but did want to be able to discuss issues with "tact" — Developing a conceptual vocabulary that facilitates making distinctions — Interest in syntax and its relation to perceptual priorities — Indirect encounters with French semiotics through students and attending lectures — Later readings in structural linguistics — Physiological phenomena involved in vision that are independent of language — "The eye is not