PAINTERLY POLITICS: WÖLFFLIN, FORMALISM AND GERMAN ACADEMIC CULTURE, 1885–1915
At the turn of the twentieth century, Heinrich Wolfflin, August Schmarzow and other formalist art historians contributed greatly to the formation of their field's institutional identity. Art history, they believed, was falling prey to a ‘spiritless’ (geistlos) condition that supposedly existed among the student population and which was associated with rapid industrialization and the mechanization of society. Expressing themselves in pedagogical treatises – which have largely been unnoticed by historiographers of art history – formalists focused on the ability of the ‘painterly’ (malerische) aesthetic to convey ‘germanic’ moral and spiritual values to a student population that was being wrongly influenced by an ‘elitist’, traditional art history overly preoccupied with philological and contextual research.
The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art "History" in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that ... permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public.... Nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations-the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film-have had on art [history] in its traditional form.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.