The Origins of Art Criticism
We tend to take art criticism and art critics for granted, as if they were as old as time itself. But it may surprise that art criticism is a relatively recent phenomenon. It begins with the rise of the concept of free speech, the right to an opinion, and the free circulation of ideas. Originating in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, art criticism has to be seen together with a way of thinking of the world as no longer governed by universals but more according to individuals with different opinions and views.
The Beginning of Writing on Art
There is a fine line between writing on art, art criticism, and art history, although critics and historians may disagree wildly, guarding their turf. Generally, art criticism is the commentary on the ground, rooted more in the present before history is made.
It is generally agreed that the origins of writing on art are in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (often abridged to Lives of the Artists), which first appeared in 1550, then enlarged in 1568. Vasari was an accomplished painter and architect. He came from a distinguished artistic family (he was the cousin of Luca Signorelli) and was a friend of Michelangelo, the artist he came to champion above all others.
Written before there was any distinction at all between forms of art writing, let alone art criticism and art history, Vasari’s Lives are a trove of anecdote and opinion. While they form the basis of much that is known of Renaissance artists today, they are also laced with the writer's likes and dislikes, and as a result, many of his portraits of the artists of his time and before are quite distorted. What is more, Vasari concentrates on the artists themselves and less on the works of art they produced.
Photographic reproduction of Giorgio Vasari’s self-portrait. Commons Wikimedia (Public Domain),
The Beginning of Art Criticism: Diderot
Diderot’s Salons (1759-81) mark the beginning of modern art criticism. They were detailed responses to be sold as critical guides to the most popular annual art event in Paris. There is else of his time to compare with them.
Portrait of Denis Diderot by Louis-Michel van Loo. Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louis-Michel_van_Loo_-_Portrait_of_Denis_Diderot_-_WGA13440.jpg
In popular memory of the French intellectuals (who were then called philosophies) of the eighteenth century, Diderot tends to be overshadowed by his contemporary and sometime friend, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was also a very unusual kind of writer, working across fields and styles so as to make him hard to bracket or categorise.
He had a colourful life, including co-editing and writing for the first French encyclopedia and was the librarian of Catherine the Great. Many of the great eighteenth-century works of art in the Hermitage in St Petersburg are acquisitions due to his recommendation.
Flamboyant, persuasive, and moody in tone, as well as being erratically digressive, they are literary tours de force. Diderot (1713-84) mixed description with reverie, diatribe with appraisal, digression with polemic.
His writings on art are dominated by accounts of the biannual exhibitions of art in the Louvre, called the 'Salons'. His writings are like pamphlets that you could buy before or after the exhibition, to serve as a sort of guidebook. A contemporary equivalent is the audioguide, although audioguides are not opinionated, nor do they single out bad works for reproach.
They may be more than two and a half centuries old, but they make rewarding reading, as one witnesses a good-humoured and wide-ranging mind busy at work. For of all the philosophes, Diderot was the most experimental with genre and form.
He finds excuses for discussions of morality and of metaphysics, reminiscences, and speculations. His Essays on painting (1765) were widely admired, including by the great German literary figure, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
In his Salons, Diderot makes no profession to the objective eye, which is an ideal that crept into the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Instead, his critical manner adopts multiple voices: at turns laudatory, hallucinatory, stern, outraged, sneering, jibing, and hectoring.
Diderot was not someone to beat around the bush but a greedy intelligence whose writings seem poised for anything.
Diderot’s Approaches
One of Diderot’s favourite techniques was the perceptual conceit. He would pretend to walk into paintings and participate in their action, or, in one literary feat, he pretended that he couldn’t see Fragonard’s presentation piece for the 1765 Salon High Priest Coresus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe (1765). Instead, he describes a fantastic dream, suggesting that the work's sensory rewards exceed its narrative import.
His scorn for François Boucher—court painter of Louis XV and known for his sweet cherubs and nubile nymphs—is unsparing, while his praise of the work of Horace Vernet and Chardin display his ebullient intelligence to the full. His appreciation of Chardin begins the lineage of awe that is subsequently resumed in full force in the criticism of the poet Théophile Gautier (1811-72) and climaxes with the subtle incorporations of his aesthetic in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1907-22).
Photographic reproduction, Still-Life with Tin Pitcher and Peaches by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Commons Wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Still_Life_with_Tin_Pitcher_and_Peaches_-_Jean-Baptiste-Sim%C3%A9on_Chardin_-_Google_Cultural_Institute.jpg
Developed out of the free-associative style of Diderot, though with less of his verve and brilliance, the styles of the first art critics were seldom specialised within their field in the manner of today's salaried newspaper art critic. The criteria they used for judgment were far more oriented toward personalized 'taste' (a profoundly eighteenth-century concept) than the kinds of standards, orthodoxies, and precedents we have today.
Some critics had close ties with the craft of painting, like Étienne-Jean Délécluze (1781-1863) in France (a student of Jacques-Louis David’s) and William Hazlitt in England, considered the most significant literary critic of his time since Samuel Johnson.
Other Writers
Like all early forms of journalists at the turn of the nineteenth-century, it was customary to write on a broad range of subjects. John Ruskin (1819-1900) is surely the greatest English writer on the relationship between visual art and nature, an inheritor of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Ruskin’s Modern Painters (in five volumes: 1843-60; epilogue, 1888) began as a defense of Turner, spread into four volumes, and encompass his travels and his ruminations on beauty. They are best considered a diary of his sensory evolution as a trained observer of nature, society, cities, architecture, and art.
In Germany, Goethe wrote regularly about art, and his first novel, which launched him to overnight fame, Werther (1774), is a tragic story about a love-lost painter.
At the end of his career, Goethe intended his theory of colour, the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colour, 1810), to be his standing contribution to nature and culture. First the hugely successful novels Werther and Wilhelm Meister, then the pictorially sensuous observations in his Italienische Reise (Travels in Italy, 1786-88), cemented Goethe as the most conspicuous influence of the next generation of writers in German, particularly the Early Romantics of Jena and Berlin. They made a point of including the visual arts in the philosophic-poetic speculations.
The Early German Romantics
Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) regularly included the visual arts in aphoristic fragments to do with aesthetics and politics in the early Romantic magazine the Athenaeum. So did his close friend the prodigy Novalis (1772-1801), who held that one should view the world artistically and that the separation of poet and thinker in his time, the rational age, was the sign of a 'sickness and sickly constitution'.
Wackenroder and Tieck’s Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (Fantasies on art for friends of art, 1799) is a mine of imaginative explorations on art and aesthetic experience, including a bracing, rapturous prose-poem on colour.
One of the early Romantics' preferred literary strategies was to mix up genres: their writings on visual art were tied dynamically to their views on society, science, fashion, poetry, philosophy, and literature.
Art criticism is now a developed and entrenched profession. What is remarkable is the extent to which it has long enjoyed a literary edge to the tradition. Great writers such as John Updike and John Ashbery were also distinguished art critics. It seems that some of the best art criticism has involved literary minds with a proficiency to evoke (new) worlds in words that are on par with the ability of artists to evoke (new) worlds in images.
