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Sypher's Cipher: 'Paradoxes of Conduct' in the Reception Of Sypher’s Cipher: ‘Paradoxes of Conduct’ in the Reception of Mannerism, 1954-1973 Jacob Stewart-Halevy Long since relegated to the margins of American letters, Wylie Sypher was an influential post-war intellectual capable of reaching audiences in and out of the academy. After publishing his dissertation on eighteenth century British anti- slavery literature, he served as a professor in the English department at Simmons College, eventually spending summers among the writers at Bread Loaf. Today, he is arguably most well known for introducing Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy to English-speaking audiences. Yet he also had pretentions toward art history, which were tied less to his own expertise than a commitment to the humanities and their vital role in liberal arts pedagogy. In 1969, the president of Middlebury College described him as a ‘humanist, humanitarian, and historian’ who ‘unites the breadth of scholarship with clarity and perspective and transcends parochial time and arbitrary critical boundaries to find unity in literature and the arts, criticism, film and technology itself’:1 the type of post-war intellectual with fingers in every pie, scarcely recognisable among the specialists of today. One of Sypher’s most famous works, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (1955) (fig.1), was widely read, but ill- reputed for what we might call its ‘middlebrow Mannerism’, a genre that used the literature and artifacts of sixteenth century courtier society to allegorize post-war middle class aspirations: the cultivation of moral sophistication and self-doubt, the ironisation of popular and commercial media, and the democratisation of elite culture. Like other forms of middlebrow art and literature, middlebrow Mannerism played an important role in reframing Modernism and the established institutions that supported it. Although scorned by scholars including Erwin Panofsky and Meyer Schapiro, Sypher and his mid-century peers’ over-reaching belletristic syntheses had lasting, if unanticipated, consequences for the future of post-war art. Sypher’s writing shows up in key manifestoes of the period including Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ as well as Peter Hutchinson and Robert Smithson’s treatises on entropy, abstraction, and Mannerism itself. Ultimately, middlebrow Mannerism provided artists and critics with the tools to wage a proxy struggle against High Modernism while prompting them to scrutinize their own roles and behaviours within the ‘court’ of the mid-sixties art world. 1 James I. Armstrong, ‘Wylie Sypher’, Middlebury, Vermont, August 12th, 1969. Wylie Sypher Papers, Simmons College, Boston. Journal of Art Historiography Number 20 June 2019 Jacob Stewart-Halevy Sypher’s Cipher: ‘Paradoxes of Conduct’ in the Reception of Mannerism, 1954-1973 Whereas the middlebrow is often relegated to material culture or appropriation in the field of art history, literary and cultural historians have recently published a raft of scholarship on the topic.2 Studies range from analyses of the marketing institutions that promoted and distributed middlebrow literature, to the cultures of self-improvement and aspirations toward cultural capital bound up with its middle-class reception. While Beth Driscoll discovers that ‘middlebrow writers defined themselves…against the empty rebellion and vacuous radicalism they saw in Modernism’, Tom Perrin argues that ‘middlebrow literature semi-consciously organized itself into an aesthetic movement by repeatedly defining itself against a hegemonic modernist culture it productively misread as both homogenous and incoherent’.3 If ‘[s]cenes of opposition between modernism and the middlebrow [...] are characteristic, even defining, features of middlebrow novels’ of the post-war period, we might ask whether they, too, found their way into the contemporaneous polemics of art and art history. Indeed, it seems that they did, but at a certain remove, and certainly not within the realist tradition employed by the novelists.4 Smithson and Hutchinson, for instance, were not exactly middlebrow; they were not popular artist-illustrators, themselves, in the vein of Norman Rockwell or Smithson’s teacher, John Groth. Rather, as they formed part of a small secessionist cadre within the sixties-era New York art world, they sought to trope on middlebrow tastes and mores, aligning their pedantic reverence for generalist histories of Mannerism like Sypher’s with their intimate knowledge of commercial television, advertising, and other forms of popular culture. By adapting middlebrow genres to fit their aesthetic program, they managed to eschew the ‘canonisation of Modernism,’ while shifting the norms of artist conduct at the time.5 Sypher and his enthusiastic readers in the art world muddied the boundaries that had separated artists, historians, critics, and their audiences, forcing them to renegotiate these divisions through competing understandings of the art and culture of the sixteenth century. The intellectual history of middlebrow Mannerism, therefore, pushes us to reconsider processes of lamination in which artists, critics, and historians key one historical frame to another, not merely as a form of subversive self-fashioning, polysemous postmodern allegory, or a performed identification with the past, but also to collectively sort out the direction and values 2 Cecilia Konchar Farr and Tom Perrin, ‘Introduction: Inventing the Middlebrow’, Post 45, published 07.01.16. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/07/introduction-inventing-the- middlebrow/ Last accessed, 4.13.2018; Alongside publications, scholars have formed a working group called ‘Middlebrow: An Interdisciplinary Transatlantic Research Network’, https://www.middlebrow-network.com/. Last accessed, 4.13.2018. 3 Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century, New York: Palgrave, 2014. Tom Perrin, The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular US Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945-1975, New York: Palgrave, 2015. 4 Tom Perrin, ‘Rebuilding Bildung: The Middlebrow Novel of Aesthetic Education in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States’, Novel, 44, no.3, 2011, 384. 5 Raymond Williams, ‘When was Modernism’? New Left Review, 1/175, May/June 1989, 51. 2 Jacob Stewart-Halevy Sypher’s Cipher: ‘Paradoxes of Conduct’ in the Reception of Mannerism, 1954-1973 of their field and their roles within it. The case suggests how mid-century middlebrow culture extended beyond moralising literary devices tied to the realist novel to encompass an iconography of symbols and gestures in the visual arts. In turn, the discovery of middlebrow Mannerism moves the field of art history away from reductivist glosses of la culture moyenne, where accessible art is treated exclusively in terms of the social stratification of taste.6 Figure 1 Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700, 1955 1. Four stages March 11th, 1954. Writing from his office at Doubleday Publishing on Madison Avenue, Andrew Chiappe — literary editor and Shakespeare professor at Columbia University — assessed the first draft of a chapter from a new book under contract: Four Stages. The book was Sypher’s; the chapter on Mannerism. ‘You are right’, his review letter began, ‘this is the heart of the book and the originality of your study most centers here’. But Chiappe was forced to hedge: ‘Readers will more often disagree with your conclusions in this chapter than those in the preceding ones’; ‘“Mannerism” is far more difficult to explain than “Classicism,” and the age you are dealing with refuses to reduce itself to too simple a formula, even the formula of complexity’.7 Sypher was in thorny territory. Doubleday was the largest publisher in the United States; his book meant to reach a general audience. But there was little 6 Pierre Bourdieu, Un art moyen, Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1965. 7 Andrew Chiappe, ‘Letter to Wylie Sypher, March 11th, 1954’. Sypher Papers. 3 Jacob Stewart-Halevy Sypher’s Cipher: ‘Paradoxes of Conduct’ in the Reception of Mannerism, 1954-1973 consensus about Mannerism as a coherent movement. To draw the irreconcilable views of cultural critics and literary, music, and art historians into a banal statement about regnant discord over the sixteenth century would be vague and reductive. Sypher wanted to show how Mannerism marked the subjection of individuals to abstract psychological, political, economic, and moral structures, but the terms in his toolkit: Nikolaus Pevsner’s ‘bad conscience’ and T.S. Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ had been meant for the Counter-Reformation and Modernism.8 ‘Anything you can do to make your central definitions of Mannerism stand out more vigorously and clearly would be to the good’, Chiappe chided. Even worse, Sypher’s writing seemed to suffer its own convolution: ‘Your style and presentation appear themselves to grow slightly “mannerist” here, affected perhaps by their subject’.9 Sypher began his revisions. By the autumn, everything seemed to have resolved itself; Chiappe complemented Sypher on writing an ‘important and daring book’, and in January, it was off the press.10 Nevertheless, when we look back at Four Stages, Chiappe’s assessment was on the mark. Sypher’s synthesis of Mannerism was roundabout, defining the movement through privation at every turn: ‘malaise’, ‘distrust’, ‘dissociation’, ‘irresolution’, ‘disequilibrium’, ‘disintegration’, ‘contradiction’,
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