Art of Illusion

Kunstgeschichten der Gegenwart 4

Art of Illusion

The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond Second Printing

von Dan Karlholm

1. Auflage

Art of Illusion – Karlholm schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Peter Lang Bern 2006

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 958 6

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Art of Illusion – Karlholm Introduction

Historiography (that is, “history” and “writing”) bears within its own name the paradox – almost an oxymoron – of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse. Its task is one of connecting them and, at the point where this link cannot be imagined, of working as if the two were being joined. Michel de Certeau

Just as “our apprehension of the world is always mediated by representation,”1 so the cultural world of art in the name of art history is mediated for us through various representational strategies. The fact that art history, in this formulation, is mediated and represented, however, must not be understood naively: such ‘mediation’ is part of the construction that art history is, part of the intrinsic ‘as if’ of art history.2 The following interconnected essays are devoted to some of the multifaceted forms of representation that art history is and produces, with examples from its inception in the nineteenth century till today. From this perspective, art history is both a discursive practice, still seemingly doomed to representation, and a discursive product of

1 Kaja Silverman, referring to Lacan, in her The Threshold of the Visual World, New York & London, 1996, p. 155. 2 This is well put by Donald Preziosi: “The modern practices of museology – no less than those of the museum’s auxiliary discursive practice, art history (let us call this here museography) – are firmly rooted in an ideology of representational adequacy, wherein exhibition is presumed to ‘represent’ more or less faithfully some set of extra-museological affairs; some ‘real’ history which, it is imagined, pre-exists its portrayal; its re-presentation, in exhibitionary space.” “The Art of Art History,” in Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford & New York, 1998, p. 507. Cf.: “…we arrive at that paradox which governs the entire pertinence of historical discourse (in relation to other types of discourse): fact never has any but a linguistic existence (as the term discourse), yet everything happens as if this linguistic existence were merely a pure and simple ‘copy’ of another existence, situated in an extra-structural field, the ‘real’.” Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, New York, 1986, p. 138.

11 such semiotic work. The constant conceptual slippage between the site of representation and its outcome is symbolically signified by the shared name. The term art history, of course, refers to a threefold phenomenon: a collective producer (the community, institution or discipline of art history) produces representations (art history texts, picture compendia, etc.) of what is allegedly an actual history of art (or art history) that exists beyond these discursive phenomena.3 Throughout these chapters, I will focus on art history in its most general, world-historical form, which is a most specific historical formation. General art history [allgemeine Kunstgeschichte], most often spelled without the prefix, has been so successfully naturalized and disseminated within the discipline as to be almost imperceptible as such. When explicit reference is made to this peculiar form of art- historical meta-narrative, it is often labeled historicist, evolutionary, modernist or Hegelian, and is typically considered to be superseded by more advanced contemporary practices. Such assumptions, however, may serve to veil the extent to which this most literally basic (basically literary) form of art-historical representation continues to pervade the bastions of academic art history today. All four chapters are based on empirical material emanating from the historical and intellectual milieu in Germany from around the time of Hegel’s death (1831) to the period of Nietzsche’s early work (1874), when art history was first constructed as a unified (general) field of knowledge. It is in this period, which has been characterized as an “unphilosophical ceasura” in German Wissenschaftsgeschichte,4 specifically in Prussia, that the academic discipline of art history is

3 In German, these levels may be distinguished by three different terms. Art history in the first sense (Kunstwissenschaft) works with art history in the second sense (Kunsthistorie) to make sense of art history in the third sense (Kunstgeschichte), and is thus involved in a rather complicated game of representation. It is certainly not coincidental that the most problematic and evasive third sense of “art history” in what may be regarded as the mother tongue of the discipline is designated by the most frequently used alternative. 4 Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker. Zweiter Band. Von Passavant bis Justi, Leipzig, 1921, p. 119. The perception appears to derive from Max Lenz (Geschichte der königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Halle, 1910), who terms the cultural epoch after Hegel “the unphilosophic age” (“das unphilosophische Zeitalter”). Cit. from Timothy Bathi, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel, Baltimore & London, 1992, p. 66.

12 eventually institutionalized. This time-frame overlaps in part with what Hayden White has identified as the “golden-age” of history: “the period between 1800 and 1850.”5 The reference is certainly not to imply that the formative phase of German art history amounts to something like a golden age, deserving of either resuscitation or nos- talgic commemoration. What I do imply is that these decades, par- ticularly the 1840s and 1850s, merit as much critical attention as has been granted the more well-known phases of disciplinary activity from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.6 Finally, representations of art history from the first part of the nineteenth century may be aligned with the rhetorical category of “realist historicism”7 with which White associates history. The label would only be mis- leading if we forgot that this category is simultaneously idealist throughout and has a much longer applicability.

Reflecting upon some hitherto underevaluated, and undertheorized, examples of the disciplinary past of art history, I will systematically relate my argument to present practices, discussions and concerns. While some parts focus on the textual practices of art history and others on the more visual culture of art history, all chapters consider these formations in relation to the general historical reflection or “history culture”8 of their time, as it may be perceived today. Instead of

5 Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore & London, 1978, p. 48. 6 In fact, the formation of a general art history, which takes place in Germany in the 1840s, is the practical and theoretical precondition for the more well-known theorizing activities towards the end of the century and beyond (Burckhardt, Riegl, Dvorák, Warburg, Wölfflin, Panofsky). No matter how radical and revisionist a historiography of the field purports to be, if the historical and aesthetic circumstances of the constitu- tion of the field of (general) art history itself are not acknowledged, analyzed and inter- preted, this critique is likely to reinforce rather than question the bases/basics of tradi- tional art history. 7 White, 1978, p. 49. See also White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nine- teenth-Century Europe, Baltimore & London, 1973, esp. part two. 8 This term is borrowed from Wolfgang Hardtwig, Geschichtskultur und Wissenschaft, Munich, 1990, pp. 8–9. See also Jörn Rüsen, “Was ist Geschichtskultur? Überlegungen zu einer neuen Art, über Geschichte nachzudenken,” in Klaus Füssmann, Heinrich Theodor Grütter and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Historische Faszination. Geschichtskultur heute, Cologne, Weimar & Vienna, 1994, pp. 3–26.

13 tracking origins or seeking sources of visual influence for my empirical samples,9 I have opted for the opposite tactic: to seek out certain traces of effect, repetition, repression and reproduction. My primary reason for studying this historical material is that it is in a sense still here, still quietly provoking action and reaction. And thus, compara- tively contemporary artistic analogies, from Andy Warhol to Anselm Kiefer, turn out to be relevant material. What first brought these ‘modern artists’ into my argument was their proximity to both the issues and/or actual images of the ancient regime. Subsequently, their main role became to concretize and dramatize the historical distance, despite certain apparent effects of continuity, between our own times and those of mid-nineteenth-century Germany. My methodological approach is to take as little as possible for granted in processing the material, especially with respect to com- mon knowledge. Employing a strategic naïveté and a certain con- trolled anachronism, in order to illuminate an estranged past and effaced contemporary practice, I persistently read the varied ‘monuments’ as I receive them today, as they speak to me and direct my eyes. Instead of conventionally registering my material as ‘documents’ of what produced them, I am interested in what is (and continues to be) produced in and by them. I speculate about their appeal, direc-

9 The problem of influence haunts art historiography just as much as art history. In the still dominant mode of historical writing, certain historical units or instances are in- vested with the capacity to influence, act on, release, have repercussions on, anticipate, give rise to, herald, prefigure, set in motion, foreshadow, and so on, succeeding units in the narrative sequence. Criticism against this configuration of history has been deliv- ered by such different scholars as Georges Canguilhem, “L’Object de l’histoire des sciences” (1966), trans.: “Der Gegenstand der Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” in Canguilhem, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie. Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Wolf Lepenies, trans. Michael Bischoff and Walter Seitter, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, pp. 22–37; and Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, New Haven & London, 1985, pp. 58–62. However, when Michael Ann Holly states that “representational practices encoded in works of art continue to be encoded in the commentaries,” and the “temporal and spatial ways in which the figural patterns of meaning or syntac- tical ideology of a work of art ‘sneak into’ the structure of argumentation of the art historians” she offers a radical perspective that vigorously upsets all lazy assumptions and received wisdom regarding ‘influence’ and establishes a new point of departure, and a challenge, for critical art historiography. Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image, Ithaca & London, 1996, pp. xiii, 9–10.

14 tions, functions and effects, then and now. It has appeared fruitful, for example, to read the literal figuratively, and the figural literally, in order to explore the connotational complexities of the objects of study. Although my project may resemble a genealogy, as defined by Michel Foucault, I hesitate to adopt that term. What I am trying to achieve is better described as a tacit critique10 of some of the most ingrained disciplinary conventions and hegemonic ‘identity politics’ of art history. I proceed, in principle, through a rhythmic reading of the historical work and a non-systematic meditation on residues and ‘after- images’ in the contexts of its own site of production and of its subsequent historio-graphic production.

The first chapter presents the first text of/in general art history: Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte [Handbook of Art History] (Stuttgart, 1841–42) by Franz Theodor Kugler (1808–1858). My focus is on the genre, scope and general ambition of this problematically groundbreaking textual endeavor, including its limp historical reception as but a convenient aid or tool. I proceed to recount the most basic story line and largely veiled plot structure of the narrative, with a specific interest in the conclusion of the work and the perceived crisis of contemporary art that it almost succeeds in concealing. Before reviewing one of the first images ever made of (the text of) general art history, the metaphorical staging of art history as an image of an image is discussed. The image of art history that forms the thematic center of the remaining chapter is the frontispiece decoration to the visual supplement of Kugler’s non-illustrated history, the folio collec- tion of engravings entitled Denkmäler der Kunst [Monuments of Art] (1845–56). A reading of the montage structure of elements and the pictorial frame itself is interrupted by modern echo effects in Ameri- can pop and German post-pop art (uniquely in tune with issues con-

10 For the distinction between genealogy and critique, see Michel Foucault, “L’ordre du discours” (1971), republished as “The Discourse on Language” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London, 1972; and the essential “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed., with an Introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca, New York, pp. 139–164.

15 cerning representation, mass culture and the loss of aura). I conclude with deliberations on the rhetoric of framing, the implications of the national bias of this project, and the commodity character of this series of engravings. The frontispiece of the first chapter also serves as a functional forefront to chapter two, which primarily deals with the first systematic pictorial representation of the history of art in general, originally produced as an illustrative supplement to Kugler’s handbook. The impact of this pictorial “atlas,” early on metaphorized as a virtual “museum,” is connected to comparable visual regimes of a later date, such as André Malraux’s photographic musée imaginaire and Aby Warburg’s “Memory Atlas” as well as the open-ended possibilities of post-photographic practices and the Web. I underline the double meaning of the root graphein in ‘historiography’ in order to empha- size the writing but also the drawing of (art) history. At issue here is the understanding of art history as both a verbal and a visual (often combined) formation of signs. Intersected is an argument with Arthur Danto’s Hegelian “end of art” thesis, which concludes by offering a more closely contextualized understanding of the notorious end of art history from our own media saturated viewpoint. It all begins with Warhol’s postmodern version of Raphael’s vision and the aesthetic peak of general art history: the Sistine Madonna.

The third, perhaps most light-hearted chapter, starts from a close reading, so to speak, of a metaphor of Kugler’s, whereby art is config- ured as a piece of land, covered by the textbook as a guidebook. Be- yond all the figures of speech encountered in the text is an actual proposal to use Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte as a cicerone on a real journey. This testifies to a deep desire to face the facts, to approach the source of representation and fuse all pre-conceived and imagined images with the radiating real. The chapter describes an itinerary through related travel literature by John Murray and Karl Baedeker, Jacob Burckhardt and Ernst Förster, new means of communication and transportation on the threshold to modern sightseeing and tour- ism, including visits to the novel existence of Phileas Fogg, a postcard from Florence and a postmodern temple. Fundamental art-historical practices, based on a conviction of the empirical approach, are re-

16 lated to a theory of sightseeing, to wind up in front of the heterotopic spaces of the museums and galleries of Europe. Chapters two and three pave the way for a discussion, in the final chapter, of the real museum of art in Germany, exemplified by August Voit’s Neue Pinakothek in Munich, the first museum devoted to contemporary painting, and the extension to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s (Altes) Museum in Berlin: Neues Museum, by Friedrich August Stüler. An introduction to the locus of interest in this chapter is provided by Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1855). I am interested in how the museums of art in the era of historicism functioned as framing devices for the pragmatic provision for en- joyment and learning, within a sphere of national and royal celebra- tion. It is also important to consider the means with which they di- rected, for the purpose of cultivation or Bildung, the experiences of their visitors. One artist in particular is featured here, since he was responsible for two of the largest and most costly museum painting jobs of the nineteenth century, the now relatively forgotten Wilhelm von Kaulbach. This highly controversial cartoon painter and illus- trator was employed by the kings of Bavaria and Prussia to decorate their houses of art-historical representation with large-scale murals. His “symbolico-historical” work on the walls of these museums of art, received as scandalous satire or misplaced philosophizing politics, are supremely revealing for the aspirations and conundrums involved in representing art history in Germany just before the historical outbreak of modernism in art. Although neither these painting programs nor their conceptual support exist today, the museological desire to picture, narrate and make room for art in various media is stronger than ever. We have only begun to investigate the manifold ways in which these monuments of art relate to disciplinary practices of art history and the making of art, then and now, in the ex- panded field of historiography. To illustrate my broad definition of historiography, including some of the central terms and issues of this book, I would like to conclude the introduction with the presentation of an image-text (Plate 1). This well-known lithograph seems stuck within the realm of re- portage, as a mere visual presentation of the greatest German philosopher of his age: Kugler’s “impression of Hegel at the lectern is a

17 Plate 1: Franz Kugler, Hegel am Katheder [Hegel at the lectern], lithograph, 1828 familiar document of the period.”11 Even art historians have very little to say about this image as an image, print or work of art, let alone as a sign or monument.12 The fact, however, that the immensely

11 Peter Paret, Art as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-Century Germany, Princeton & New Jersey, 1988, p. 17. Although what is documented in Paret’s formulation is hard to pin down (is it the ‘Hegelian’ period, Hegel at the lectern or Kugler’s impression?), I find this particular ambiguity constructive and thought provoking. 12 The drawing is in the collections of the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf, and is reproduced, for instance, in Otto Pöggeler, ed., Hegel in Berlin. Preussische Kulturpolitik und idealistische Ästhetik. Zum 150. Todestag des Philosophen, exh. cat. no. 16, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 1981; by Leonore Koschnick, Franz Kugler (1808– 1858) als Kunstkritiker und Kulturpolitiker, Diss., Berlin, 1985; Beat Wyss, “Der letzte Homer. Zum philosophischen Ursprung der Kunstgeschichte im Deutschen Idealismus,” in Peter Ganz, Martin Gosebruch, Nikolaus Meier and Martin Warnke, eds., Kunst und Kunsttheorie 1400–1900, Wiesbaden, 1991, pp. 231–255; and Hubert Locher, Kunstgeschichte als historische Theorie der Kunst 1750–1950, Munich, 2001, p. 245. None of these sources offer a more extended commentary. An equally famous lithograph of Hegel, from the very same year, is Julius Ludwig Sebbers’s “Hegel in seinem Arbeitszimmer” [Hegel in His Workroom], reproduced in Pöggeler, 1981, p. 111. The image is briefly commented on in a study devoted to the representation of history in the early 19th century, which has been an important source of inspiration for my own attempt: Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, New York, 1997, p. 97.

18 productive author of art history was himself artistically active is in- teresting to note. Indeed, the range of Kugler’s scholarly and aesthetic practice is quite astonishing. Apart from his main work as a historian (of art and culture), critic, professor and politician, he also drew, wrote short stories, poems, songs and plays, acted briefly, sang and appears to have been a virtuoso french horn player.13 The no less remarkable fact, moreover, that one of his most famous works of art depicts Hegel of all people simply demands commentary. Surrounded by four male students in semi-circular formation, the lecturer is pictured behind his elevated desk, calmly looking through his manuscript. Despite the close proximity of towering teacher and attentive pupils, and the relative intimacy of the scene, there is no obvious communication here between these two levels of the academic exchange. The distance between them is, if anything, rhetorically emphasized by the thinker’s dark jacket and the romanti- cally outfitted students’ bright coats – signifying saturated experience versus the clean slate of the novice? – and the distance between the present philosopher and his absent portraitist seems greater still. Hegel is captured at the perhaps most pictorially correct moment: with his mouth shut. What Kugler draws is actually a pause, a moment of silence or pensive interlude in a lecture constituted by the teacher’s reading aloud, accompanied by note-taking students. Kugler is obviously in this class, if not involved in it academically. Kugler is in the room, somewhere behind the ambitious students up

13 Among Kugler’s activities, those in other spheres than academic art history are best documented. The research on Kugler covers, most importantly, Koschnick, 1985 (and bibliography); Wolfgang Frhr. v. Löhneysen, “Kugler, Franz,” Neue deutsche Biographie, 1982, pp. 245–7; Paret, 1988, esp. pp. 13–26; Wilhelm Treue, “Franz Theodor Kugler – Kulturhistoriker und Kulturpolitiker,” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 175, 1953, pp. 483– 52; Ehrenfried Kaletta, Franz Theodor Kugler 1808–1858. Dichtungen, Diss., Berlin, 1937; Waetzoldt, 1924, pp. 143–72, and “Franz Kugler, Preussens erster Kunst- dezernent,” Kunstchronik, no. 4, 1917, pp. 41– 46; and Friedrich Eggers, “Franz Theodor Kugler. Eine Lebensskizze,” in Kugler, Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei, 3rd ed., Stuttgart, 1867, pp. 3–34 (this is the source for many subsequent documentations of Kugler). See also Udo Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte. Der Weg einer Wissen- schaft (1966), 2nd rev. ed., Munich, 1990, pp. 91–92; Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution. Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin, Diss., Frankfurt am Main, 1979, passim; and Locher, 2001, esp. pp. 244–254.

19 front, as if watching the lecture from outside. His patient empirical documentation of the performance (“drawn from nature” according to the lithographed inscription) certainly prevents him from taking notes himself. The noted activity of Kugler, which this image documents along with its motif, would normally be prohibited in the educational context: drawing in the philosophy class. As long as Kugler studies Hegel’s features, and the lecture as spectacle, he inevitably neglects the lecture as a learning experience and transmission of knowledge. His drawing precludes his writing. He studies the lecture, as any draftsman would, in terms of its physical shape. He is twenty years old and he copies the philosopher, not the philosophy. To as- cribe symbolic weight to this neglect, and have it testify to Kugler’s subsequent disdain for speculative philosophy in favor of a form ori- ented approach,14 would be a little facile, however. What is documented by, if not in, this very image is that while Hegel lectures, Kugler draws. But it could also be said of this work that the one exists on account of the other: Hegel lecturing is Kugler drawing, which would suspend the distance between them. As if the temporal unfolding of the lecture, its spoken words and sentences, were synaesthetically transcribed into a syntactic conglomerate of lines and dots. As if the resonating voice of reason (Logos) was recorded pictorially, in order to be played out in the form of an almost tan- gible silence. As if Hegel’s spiritual discourse materialized in Kugler’s art form: Kugler drawing is Hegel lecturing. Not only did Kugler draw Hegel, he also wrote Hegel. In addition to the drawing, with its thin signature byline, the final lithograph contains an ‘autograph’: “GWFHegel.” But while the drawing is an autograph work, the autograph is a copy.15 The ‘autograph’ is part of

14 Cf. Koschnick, 1985, pp. 20–21, 39–40. 15 Nor is this part of the print “autographic” in Nelson Goodman’s sense, but non-autographic or “allographic.” In order to single out an autographic work of art, according to Goodman, we may ask whether it matters if it is a forgery or an original. If this issue is at all significant, like in the case of painting but not with most performing arts, the work is autographic, dependent upon the unique “signature,” so to speak, of its author/ artist. Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis & Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1976, p. 113. This is clearly not the case here, since Kugler or somebody else could have drawn (faithfully or fancifully) this ‘autograph.’ The copy

20 the genre conventions of this kind of portraiture. It is not a title nor a signature, but the sign of a subject. The title of the lithograph “Hegel am Katheder” is thus supplemented by the name tag of “GWFHegel.” But since the name is not there to inform or identify (a task fulfilled by the title), it must be regarded as another portrait, thoroughly symbolic in order. Without being indexical (with reference to Hegel), i.e., signed, the name/sign is designed to look like a signature, by way of its handwritten character. It is the iconic representation of an alien signature, the drawing of a foreign name. It is hardly a piece of writing but an image of a signature as the sign of a man and his will.16 This print has been regarded as the most realistic image we have of the idealist philosopher, however that is to be measured or con- firmed. Since Hegel died in 1831, there are no photographs which could settle a dispute about his real appearance. But it is precisely such expectations of physical resemblance that interfere with the point of what is going on here, both from the lectern and in front of it, and render the reading of this image to a snapshot avant la lettre. What Kugler has documented in and by this drawing is not simply the static face of “GWFHegel” at a certain moment in time but the temporal unfolding of Hegel in office, at work – of the professor professing. This is, arguably, what “at his lectern” means. Apart from the purely de- scriptive designation – the wooden desk – the lectern is also a synechdoche for the recently foregrounded philosophical faculty within the Berlin state university, founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt and inaugurated in 1810. And it was from this piece of wood that the first modern professional historians arose. Not only was Hegel himself by far the most important philosopher in Prussia and all of Germany at

would not even have to be good, but only seen as such, for the purposes of this conven- tionalized picture to work. This particular autograph, however, is most certainly a faith- ful reproduction of the philosopher’s signature, to judge from one of his manuscripts dated 1831, reproduced in Pöggeler, 1981, p. 242. 16 It is worth recalling what Jacques Derrida has stated concerning the act of signing: “…the signature is something other than merely writing down one’s own name. It is an act, a performative by which one commits to something, by which one confirms in a performative way that one has done something.” Peter Brunette and David Wills, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Brunette and Wills, eds., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts. Art, Media, Architecture, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 9–32, esp. p. 17.

21 this point, but his philosophy was the philosophy of history. He has even been perceived as “the figure of historical Wissenschaft.”17 The historical discipline, which was institutionalized in the 1820s by such scholars as Leopold von Ranke, Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Humboldt himself, was founded, by contrast, upon a virulent denunciation of philosophy as part of historical inquiry.18 Kugler’s conception of art history was directly linked to this discipline of history.19 The name of Hegel, however, was increasingly discredited and his philosophy was purged from Prussia after his death, although various schools of Hegelians, in the strong sense of followers, continued to ‘do’ Hegelian philosophy on the basis of their differing interpretations of his legacy.20

17 Bahti, 1992, p. 69. 18 The literature on the establishment of the Berlin university and the historical discipline is overwhelming. See, for example, Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed., Hanover, New Hampshire, 1983, chaps. 3–5; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ed., Leopold von Ranke und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, Stuttgart, 1988; Reimer Hansen, “Die wissen- schaftsgeschichtlichen Zusammenhänge der Entstehung und der Anfänge der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Reimer Hansen and Wolfgang Ribbe, eds., Geschichts- wissenschaft in Berlin im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Persöhnlichkeiten und Institutionen, Berlin & New York, 1992, pp. 3–44, esp. p. 17; Iggers, ed., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse, New York, 1990. 19 Kugler received his Ph.D. in 1831, gained a lecture post as Privatdozent at the Berlin university in 1833, and was appointed professor at the Academy of Art in Berlin in 1835. His first groundbreaking survey text was Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei von Constantin dem Grossen bis auf die neuere Zeit, 2 vols., Berlin, 1837. In the preface (p. VI), the author identifies his scholarly position with the work of Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, who is conventionally credited with introducing into the field of art history the principles of source-criticism, which he had learned from Barthold Georg Niebuhr. (See Julius von Schlosser, “Carl Friedrich von Rumohr als Begründer der neueren Kunstforschung,” in von Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen (1827–31), ed. Schlosser, Frankfurt am Main, 1920, pp. VII–XXXVIII; Waetzoldt, 1921, pp. 292–318; and for a critique of this: Gabriele Bickendorf, “Die Anfänge der historisch-kritischen Kunst- geschichtsschreibung,” in Ganz et al., eds., 1991, pp. 359–61). Kugler’s second innova- tive survey was Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, Stuttgart, 1842, where his (new) art history is, in part, legitimized with a reference to the field of history (addressed in chapter two). By way of anecdote it can be mentioned that Kugler wrote a book together with Ranke (in 1838) and that he knew and socialized with Wilhelm von Humboldt and Droysen. For references, see note 13 above. 20 An excellent overview of the philosophical hard-edge Hegelians is afforded by John Edward Toews, Hegelianism. The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841, Cam- bridge, 1980.

22 There were also Hegelians, in the weakest, most ambiguous and inter- esting sense, with stakes, typically, in the enormous field of cultural history [Kulturgeschichte], with which art history positively identified as a discipline throughout most of the nineteenth century.21

Let us revisit, finally, this document of Hegel as a Kugler signed monument. We know what Kugler saw here, since we see what he drew, and more or less what Hegel said (he lectured on aesthetics during the winter semester of 1828). But what did Hegel see, apart from his own writing? A young modern artist, dabbling away at a drawing, after the end of art, “not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is”?22 Or for knowing artistically what philosophy is? Is not the silent philosopher, after all, the most realist and realized artistic representation conceivable of (a) thinking consciousness as such, a vision of such an invisible form/content as philosophy at work? The act of drawing, presented to us, captures and represents the act of thinking, in turn the propaedeutic precon-

21 We seem to lack a practice for distinguishing between a Hegelian, in the sense of disciple (not just student), to which the German word most often refers, and the more implicit sense, prevalent in Anglo-American discourse. In the latter, Hegelian can refer to almost any kind of phenomenon which betrays an idealist, holist, evolutionist or “historicist” notion of history. Ernst Gombrich bears partial responsibility for this diluted termino- logical practice within the field of art history due to his seminal essay “In Search of Cultural History” (1967), reprinted in his Ideals and Idols. Essays on Values in History and Art, Oxford, 1979, pp. 24–59. For a critical attempt, see my essay “Gombrich and Cultural History,” in Nordisk Estetisk Tidskrift, no. 12, 1994, pp. 23–37. The self-pro- claimed status of art history as an auxiliary discipline to cultural history, as Heinrich Dilly first noted, is spelled out in the definitions of Kuntgeschichte from 1830 to 1890 in the great Allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände, published by Brockhaus, Leipzig. Dilly, 1979, p. 81. I made use of this information for a Foucaultian argument regarding the specific identity and/or episteme of art history in Germany during most of the nineteenth century (as opposed, on the one hand, to the lingering paradigm of natural history, still directing the “history” of Winckelmann in 1764, and, on the other hand, to Wölfflin’s 1915 attempt to ground art history as an autonomous science with the assistance of psychological laws of vision). Karlholm, Handböckernas konsthistoria. Om skapandet av “allmän konsthistoria” i Tyskland under 1800-talet, Diss., Stockholm & Stehag, 1996, pp. 23–58. 22 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1, Oxford, 1988, p. 11 (“…nicht zu dem Zwecke, Kunst wieder hervorzurufen, sondern, was die Kunst sei, wissenschaftlich zu erkennen”).

23 dition, according to Hegel, for the modern philosophy governed university.23 I imagine this lithograph to be at the base of Kugler’s historiography of art, which, I will argue, provides the basis for art history in general. At the bottom of his resourceful drawer is a drawing of the enemy. The subsequent non-philosophical work of Kugler seems predi- cated upon a piling up, crossing over and symbolic eradication of this artistic testimony – an act which pretty well illustrates art history’s deep but problem-ridden historical relationship to philosophy.

23 Hegel, “Über denVortrag der Philosophie auf Universitäten” (1816), in Ernst Müller, ed., Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten von Engel, Erhard, Wolf, Fichte, Schleier- macher, Savigny, v. Humboldt, Hegel, Leipzig, 1990, pp. 286–290.