Kant, Art and Art History: Moments of Discipline. (Defeated by Empiricism?).

By Mark A. Cheetham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. [pounds sterling]37.30

I look sometimes with envy but more often with disappointment at the ordered methodological discipline of art history, in comparison with the almost do-it-yourself way in which architecture is written about. This book by Mark Cheetham, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Toronto, is a short, careful investigation of some of the ways in which Kant's ideas have been deployed by critics, usually dependent on several aspects of the philosopher's ideas that they prefer or understand rather than on an appreciation of the full body of his teaching: in the words of the American critic Thomas McEvilley, Kant -- and Clement Greenberg -- 'keep arising from the grave like zombies'. There are two valuable chapters (on Kant in his own time, and on his reappearance in the critique of Cubism), and some decorations: these include a piece on the phrenological investigations of Kant's skull, and a chapter on the sublime, which was both the most easily comprehensible, but also the least interesting part of the book.

This is the second book I have read where only a cameo appearance by Ruskin separates Kant from Nietzsche. My assumption must now be that interest in Kant by artists and critics ceased entirely during the greater part of the nineteenth century, and yet surely Pugin himself faced a 'Kantian' crisis in his final years: it would be good to see that addressed one day. The empirical nature of architecture always seems to defeat philosophical enquiry, and strange lacunae have arisen in architectural history, in which, for example, the sublime is conflated with the 'Picturesque' (with its silly little houses) in England. The mutual exclusion zones set up by philosophers, art historians and English architectural historians are astonishing.

So if you have ever asked yourself what the apparent marriage of Modernist architecture and 'Kantian' modern art was all about, you will find no answers here: this is a disciplined book about specific events in art history, marred by some lazy aspects which are no credit to CUP, who have made a dog's breakfast of some German and Russian words, and provided an inadequate index.