On the question of the periodization of the history of Western art criticism

Popov Denis Aleksandrovich Doctor of Art History Professor; Department of Theory, History and Pedagogy of Art; Saratov National Research University named after N. G. Chernyshevsky 410012, Russia, Saratovskaya oblast', g. Saratov, ul. Astrakhanskaya, 83 pvden@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The creation of a periodization of the development of any science is one of the evidences of its maturity and an important methodological technique that allows us to reflect on its initial foundations and research principles. For any scientific discipline, a critical assessment of the evolution of one's own research attitudes, conducted on historical material, is one of the main ways to prove the status of "scientific", since science remains a science, only constantly comparing the transformation of one's own paradigms, views, theories and research techniques with the ideals and criteria of scientific character.

Introspection in historical science has a long tradition and manifests itself, first of all, in the form of creating a large-scale historiography, which is not only a description of the works of outstanding predecessors, but also their analysis, as well as classification and periodization based on the change of leading methodological attitudes. Mastering historiography on any historical issue is a prerequisite for studying it by a historian, while he must understand the logic of changing some historical concepts by others and the driving forces of this process.

But if historical science as a whole has long made historiographical research a common practice and the identification of individual stages of its own development has become a familiar methodological technique for it, allowing it to understand the change of initial paradigms and their causes, then in the field of studying the history of art we observe some lag. And if the creation of periodizations of the history of art is a long—standing art criticism tradition, then art criticism has been engaged in reflection on its own development relatively recently. J. Bazin's work on the history of the history of art dates, for example, to the end of the XX century (1986) ^[1], and similar works by domestic authors, V. G. Arslanov (2003) ^[2] and V. P. Shestakov (2008) ^[3] were published already at the beginning of the XXI century.

The very appearance of these works can be considered significant, thanks to them, art criticism began the transition from a simple study of its subject to reflection on its own methodological foundations. However, it is obvious that we are only at the first stage of creating a true historiography of the history of art. First of all, the works under consideration are empirical, i.e. descriptive character, which, of course, is inevitable at the first stage of the formation of historiography. Their "history of the history of art" is a history of the names of individual outstanding art historians, their concepts and views. At the same time, the real scientific history begins where, instead of describing the achievements of individual outstanding authors and their individual contribution to the process under study, they begin to see broader patterns of socio-cultural origin. The works in question do not demarcate scientific and non-scientific art criticism, as a result, they present a wide panorama of various approaches to the study of art, including those not based on scientific methodology. In addition, these works do not aim to see the development of art studies in a broader context, to identify those general cultural and general scientific factors that determined the change of its paradigms. And finally, due to the personal nature of the "history of the history of art", there is naturally no periodization in it.

Of course, creating a historiography of the history of art is a long process. However, the material presented in these fundamental works already makes it possible to propose a certain periodization of the history of art studies, taking into account the broader contexts of the development of humanitarian knowledge, in particular large-scale general scientific and general cultural processes, which in many ways set the impetus for its development.

One of the first variants of the periodization of the history of art studies can be found in the works of G. Zedlmayr, who identifies four stages of the formation of the history of art as a science: 1) the history of art within the general history (XIX century); 2) the history of art as a history of styles (1900-1925/30); 3) the history of art based on structural analysis (1930-1950); 4) the modern history of art studies (since 1950) ^{[4, pp. 21-26]}. However, this periodization solved quite specific tasks, with its help G. Zedlmayr justified his own methodology as a result of the development of all art criticism, and, of course, by now it is outdated.

It should be emphasized at once that any periodization is initially conditional, since it has an ideally typical character and levels the diversity of individual author's views on the history of art. At the same time, she organizes the material, setting reference points for its vision. In our case, the criterion that allows us to identify individual periods in the history of art studies is the predominance of one or another methodological approach, which, in turn, is determined by the change of general scientific paradigms in humanitarian knowledge.

We also note that the approach we have proposed is not the only possible one and allows for the existence of other periodizations dictated by other research goals and objectives.

The methodological criterion proposed by us allows us to immediately cut off the "pre-scientific" stage of art criticism from the "scientific" one. The conditional boundary between them becomes approximately the middle of the XIX century. Until the middle of the 19th century, there was no question of the scientific status of art criticism at all, and those who wrote about art, in most cases, did not perceive themselves as scientists. From the point of view of methodology, this period is characterized by the absence or randomness of the applied research methods, which can only be characterized as "scientific" with great conditionality.

The situation in the social sciences and humanities radically changed in the middle of the XIX century with the advent of positivism, which put forward the idea of scientific study of society, including its artistic culture as an integral component. Significant for the first period of scientific study of art are the works of Hippolytus Teng and the cultural and historical school that arose under his influence. Although the cultural and historical school concentrated primarily on the study of literature, and therefore is quite often not considered by researchers as "art history", in those cases when it turned to the study of fine arts, it adhered to its own, rather strict research program.

Typical for this stage of the development of art studies are:

1. The dominance of the historical and genetic method, the derivation of the features of art from the general factors of the environment, race, moment, cultural situation, historical circumstances, etc.

2. Evolutionism as the dominant paradigm in the social sciences defines the vision of the development of art as "progressive", constantly accumulating artistic achievements and moving each time to a new, higher level together in the whole society.

3. Factography, the collection of all kinds of facts about the artist, school, direction, work in order to possibly build cause-and-effect chains uniting them in the future.

4. Increased attention to secondary authors, with the help of which it is easier to illustrate cause-and-effect relationships in the development of art.

5. "Literary centrism", when the development of literature and the patterns found in it become reference for other arts.

The dominance of the cultural and historical school is accompanied by the predominance of naturalism and realism in the art of the second half of the XIX century, since the arts themselves perceive themselves as conditioned by "reality", reflecting it and interacting with it. The art system itself during this period is "literaturocentric", i.e. literature dictates its aesthetic principles to other arts, building them around itself ^[5].

The boundary between the first and second stages of the development of scientific art becomes the boundary of the XIX and XX centuries. The turn of the century is marked by the crisis of the straightforward positivist paradigm in the social sciences, as well as a certain fatigue from realism and naturalism, the spread of ideas of the "autonomy" of art, "art for art", the search for internal rather than external stimuli for its development. Awareness of the independence of plastic arts as a special sphere of artistic activity leads researchers to the conclusion that they should be studied based on their own specifics, and not by analogy with literature or other arts.

The second stage of the development of scientific art studies is thus associated with the predominance of the methodology of the formal stylistic school, replacing the cultural and historical one.

The activity of the formal stylistic school is marked by a number of important achievements. It is often considered the first real scientific school in art history, since it focused its attention specifically on the visual arts, emphasizing the uniqueness of its subject and the need to take it into account in research strategies. The characteristic features of its methodology are:

1. Search for and highlight the specific features of plastic arts, which are defined as an "artistic form".

2. The refusal to study the cultural determination of "artistic forms", or the use of impulses inherent in art itself to explain its development (the artistic will of A. Rigl) ^[6].

3. Instead of the historical and genetic method, formal analysis is used, the artistic form is separated from the content and is considered as the only subject worthy of study.

4. The rejection of evolutionism, the history of art appears as a change of non-historical eternal artistic forms, each of which is self-sufficient and complete. Hence the inevitable cyclism in the description of the history of art, which replaces "progressivism".

5. Replacing the "biographical" history of art with a "stylistic" one, since reducing the history of art to an alternation of the same "eternal forms" puts the artist's personality "outside the brackets" of research. Artistic forms lead an existence independent of a particular creator and do not need it.

The dominant position of the formal school during this period does not mean that the supporters of the previous approach have completely lost their positions. Of course, the cultural and historical school could no longer exist in its former form, but, having disintegrated, it gave rise to a number of research areas that continued many of its methodological traditions. First of all, in the 20th century, Marxist art studies were formed and actively developed, inheriting much of the methodology of the cultural and historical school: evolutionism, a view of art as a product of non-artistic (in this case, economic, political and social) realities, attention to the reflection of various social and cultural processes in art.

The sociology of art arises as a separate research area, the purpose of which is to study artistic activity in a broad social context, its relationship with various social phenomena and processes.

There will also be art historical concepts trying to reconcile and harmonize cultural-historical and formal-stylistic views on art, for example, a similar synthesis was proposed by Arnold Hauser ^[7].

Finally, there will be models of art development that stand apart from both the formal stylistic and cultural-historical approach, here we can recall the works of Max Dvorak ^[8].

At the same time, all of the above does not negate the dominant position of the formal school in the period under review, since all other concepts will somehow take into account its experience, its developments and build on them. Even Marxist art studies will assert itself in a polemic with "formalism", which meant both the art historical concepts of the formal school and the artistic phenomena close to them.

In the artistic life of the period under review, art is experiencing the peak of pure form-making, which has reached the limit of its development in suprematism and abstract art. The views on the art of Kazimir Malevich ^{[9, p. 108]} and Vasily Kandinsky ^{[10, p. 14]}, who acted not only as artists, but also as theorists, unexpectedly converge with the ideas of academic art studies of this period, which reduced artistic activity to the transformation of forms.

The transition to the third stage of the development of scientific art studies takes place in the middle of the XX century. By the 50s of the last century, there was a crisis of formal art criticism associated with the discovery of the meaninglessness of forms and the one-sidedness, narrowness of the formal view of art solely as "form-making". At the same time, there is a radical change in the general cultural situation associated with the beginning of the postmodern era and the end of the period of avant-garde experiments in art. A "linguistic turn" is gaining strength in the humanities ^[11], expressed in increased attention to language and the interpretation of culture as a linguistic phenomenon and "intertext". The prerequisites for the "linguistic turn" were formed at the beginning of the 20th century, when the structures of language began to be interpreted as universal phenomena found in all areas of cultural activity. However, if earlier when learning a language the emphasis was on its "forms" and "structures", now the "meanings" of its individual units come to the fore. Semiotics is established as a universal research program in the cultural sciences, and iconology becomes its analogue in art studies, since the latter has engaged not only in the study of the evolution of images, but also their content.

Thus, the third stage of the development of scientific art studies can be characterized as iconological. Its features are:

1. The dominance of the hermeneutical method and interpretation as a research strategy.

2. The purpose of the study is to clarify the deep meanings inherent in the work through the identification of various meanings of artistic images.

3. The history of art becomes the "history of images", their transformations, as well as transformations of their meanings.

4. The main tool for correctly interpreting an artistic image is the context that allows you to discover it and understand its meaning: religious and literary primary sources, memoirs, letters, diaries, a wide variety of texts belonging to the era, etc.

The heyday of the iconological school in art criticism is accompanied by the establishment of postmodernism as a general cultural and artistic phenomenon with its endless search for meanings and the generation of new ones.

At the same time, the third stage of scientific art criticism turns out to be its last stage. Postmodernism, which initially promotes the affirmation of the "iconological" vision of art, is initially hostile to science, it is not interested in the true meaning of the work (which does not exist in the space of postmodern consciousness), but in the endless generation of meanings, each of which has the right to exist. Iconology as a scientific field quickly faced the problem of various ways of "reading" a work, as well as the problem of the reliability and validity of its interpretations. From the initial desire to reveal the true meaning of the images laid down by the author, iconology gradually moved on to the analysis of all possible ways of reading the work by the public, and then simply to arbitrary interpretations. At the same time, the level of reliability of her conclusions decreased: from unambiguous statements about the meaning to the gradual predominance of the "probable", "presumptive", and then to the rejection of unambiguous statements. The "death of the author", proclaimed by postmodernism, completely made sense of the iconological study of the work: if initially no meaning was put into artistic images by the author, how can it be "scientifically" and "objectively" established?

Currently, we can talk about "post-scientific" art criticism, which is itself postmodern through and through. It does not analyze the work, but deconstructs it ^[12] and completes it at its discretion, being no longer a scientific, but a creative activity.

At the same time, it cannot be said that the history of scientific art criticism has ended. It continues to function based on the experience of all previous schools and uses it in its work. As an example, one can point to the synthetic approach of G. Zedlmayr, who considered all the established scientific approaches to the study of a work of art as a study of its individual aspects, which ultimately leads to the discovery of its "center" ^{[4, p. 149]}. Art criticism continues to use general scientific methods and procedures in its work, establishing facts related to art, cause-and-effect relationships, identifying common and special things in works of art. At the same time, the scientific approach in modern postmodern culture is becoming only one of the possible ways of mastering art, giving way in part to other, "unscientific" ways of interacting with it. In the future, this situation will continue due to the continuation of the postmodern era.

Our proposed periodization ultimately looks like this:

1. Pre-scientific art criticism (before ser. XIX century).

2. Cultural and historical stage (ser.- Con. XIX century)

3. Formal and stylistic stage (I floor. XX century).

4. The iconological stage (II floor. XX century).

5. Post-scientific art criticism (beginning of the XXI century).

This classification allows us to present the history of scientific art studies as a natural and consistent process of changing the dominant methodologies from the formation of a scientific approach to the study of art to the present time, when the very possibility of its application was questioned by the postmodern worldview. It may be useful for understanding the history of art studies and the prospects for its further development.