Discourses on Art.

By Sir Joshua Reynolds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 349 pp. $17.

Arthur Danto 

In 1808, William Blake scathingly scribbled what today would be "Bullshit!" in the margins of his edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art: "This man was Hired to Depress Art . . . Sir Joshua and his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves . . ." Blake's exasperated and emphatically post-Enlightenment annotations testify to the continuing influence (if only as an irritant) of the Discourses, which were originally a series of fifteen addresses delivered before the Royal Academy from 1769 to 1790. Reynolds' criticism, by contrast, is unfailingly decorous, as in his running commentary on William Hogarth's The Analysis of Beauty (1753). Hogarth must have been "the person whose opinion, in every thing relating to the arts, carries with it the highest authority" to whom Reynolds refers critically in a discussion of the Laocoon. These interlocking texts, here available in unobtrusively scholarly editions and similar formats, define the philosophy of painting for the eighteenth century. The terms of this dialogue are not irrelevant today. The Romantic view that beauty overwhelms the intellect still vies with the view that an understanding of beauty requires judgments based on reason. "What Happened to Beauty?" has replaced "What is Art?" as the defining question of the moment.

In his 1757 dissertation, Of the Standard of Taste, David Hume declared beauty to be in the eye of the beholder - a formulation standardly cited in support of aesthetic relativism. However, since eighteenth century philosophy held that no sensory qualities inhered in the world, beauty was actually seen as no more subjective than color, warmth, or smoothness - each of which gained its reality from the sensory systems of beholders. When Hume insisted that there is no disputing taste, he meant that there is no disputing sensation. He believed that in order to pass critical judgment one must have undergone a certain aesthetic education and be generally conversant with works of art. At the same time, he thought it inconceivable that there could be substantial disagreement among equivalently qualified individuals - and on this basis he argued that taste is no less objective than judgments based on sense.

The objectivity of taste is the common premise of Hogarth's Analysis and Reynolds' Discourses. Hogarth appeals constantly to "the reader's eye, and common observation," and he proposes to speak on matters of taste with plain common sense, "in the way they are daily put in practice, and may be seen, in every dress that is worn." His text is a treat, in a way that Reynolds' edificatory sentences cannot be today. One of its joys is the opportunity to read it against the two brilliant plates he appended, which are filled with examples of good and bad taste. The "Line of Beauty" - a double tangent - is exemplified by furniture legs, the stockinged legs of dancing masters, the handles of teapots, the figure implied by outer garments, and the way men bow and women curtsy. But this explanation of beauty through his celebrated serpentine line is pretty much aesthetic snake oil, and he knows it: "winding lines are as often the cause of deformity as of grace." His examples of bad taste are comically bad drawings, in which everyone can see what is wrong.

Reynolds' writing was driven by curricular questions concerning the production of works of artistic merit, which he believed required, among other things, training in the kind of art criticism he practices throughout the Discourses. He does not cite Hume, whose skepticism concerning religion he found shocking, but he concurs that sound taste is the product of training, practical or critical, and that "It is the proper study and labour of an artist to uncover and find out the latent cause of conspicuous beauties." These beauties, however, are conspicuous only to those who have undergone instruction in the "general principles" of fine art, which the Academy, and Reynolds himself, sought to bring to consciousness.

Reynolds' aesthetic parallels an ethics that appeals to "natural law" as a basis for true moral judgment, as distinguished from custom or mere fashion. Works that are "built upon general nature, live forever; while those which depend for their existence on particular customs and habits . . . or the fluctuations of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised them from obscurity." Since "the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual," the preferences of the aesthetically undereducated are simply immaterial. "A relish for the higher excellencies of art is an acquired taste, which no man ever possessed without long cultivation."

His agenda is closely modeled on that of the Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, founded nearly a century earlier under Louis XIV; it is easy to believe that his goal was to achieve for his Academy the same monopoly of taste the French school enjoyed. He subscribes to the same ranking of pictorial genres, with historical tableaux at the apex, and he ranks past artists by precisely the criteria enjoined by the Academie: "The Roman, the Florentine, the Bolognese schools . . . have deservedly obtained the highest praise." (They disdained the Venetians because of the opulence of their color, and the Dutch and Flemish because of their slavish dedication to visual detail.) Reynolds believed that imparting these supposed universal principles of art would make British artists the peers of the greatest and the best, and put them in position to stand "the test of ages."

The eighteenth century in England was one of the great periods of good taste, but identifying goodness in art, as Reynolds implied, was a matter of educating critical judgment. Reynolds' discourses, though addressed immediately to his students and colleagues, might have served as a how-to book for lordlings on the Grand Tour who wanted to learn to choose fine paintings for the collections they were expected to form. Art criticism, as Thomas Crow has proposed in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, began in Paris at about this time, and for much the same reasons: to inculcate standards by which Salons might be appreciated.

Hogarth, interestingly enough, aimed at the same audience, though his stance is entirely anti-academic. He addresses his readership with the condescending impatience and infuriating drawl of Crocodile to learn, only something to unlearn - namely, everything the academy stands for. Everyone has good taste unless corrupted.

However they may have been aw'd, and overborn by pompous terms of art, hard names, and the parade of seemingly magnificent collections of pictures and statues; they are in a much fairer way, ladies, as well as gentlemen, of gaining a perfect knowledge of the elegant and beautiful in artificial, as well as natural forms, by considering them in a . . . familiar way, than those who have been prepossess'd by dogmatic rules. . . .

Hogarth's robust appeal to plain common sense harmonizes with the way the great British philosophers of his age spoke, without obscurity or jargon, to honest men and women who have no problems with how the world is unless corrupted by philosophy: "We have first raised a dust," George Berkeley wrote, "And then complain we cannot see."

Reynolds delivered the last of the Discourses in 1790, the year after the Revolution in France, and one can sense that he was living through deep changes in the concept of art. Discourse XIV is an appreciation of Gainsborough, whom he recognized as great despite the fact that he was a painter who broke all the rules. Romanticism was in the wings, and the Academies were to become increasingly receptive to the kind of artistic originality Blake prized. The concept of Taste did not survive unaltered into the next century, which meant that Hogarth was less and less adequate a guide in how to tell bad from good. Reading the two texts side by side is stimulating nonetheless, not merely in making salient the structures of the critical disagreements of their age, but in showing how two gifted critics analyzed the masterworks of their common tradition.

Arthur C. Danto is a contributing editor of Artforum and art critic for The Nation.