Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline.

Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 222.

Immanuel Kant's influence on almost all the branches of speculation that structure the history of Western philosophy during his time and later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is simply piduresqtte. His approach to transcendental aesthetic judgment is still a vast source of critical explorations and elaborations. His contributions to the reflections on the nature of aesthetic experience, aesthetic attitude and aesthetic symbolism are more than legendary. The present author, Mark Cheetham, explores yet another aspect of the Kantian contribution to the theories of art history, as exemplified in the works of Heinrich Wolfflin, Erwin Panofsky; and Clement Greenberg.

Cheetham notices that it is very difficult to discern any important effect of Kant's philosophy outside its own field, particularly in the field of visual arts. "The reception and influence of Kant's thought in art history and the visual arts conforms remarkably to what Derrida has described as the logic of parergon" i.e., "the whole analytic of aesthetic judgment forever assumes that one can distinguish rigorously between intrinsic and the extrinsic" an assumption that Derrida rejects as he rejects all other binary hierarchies. Derrida rejects Kant's notion that art is an ornament (extrinsic) in the structures of buildings. Cheetham does not hold that philosophy is necessary to literature, art or art history, as was Kant's philosophy in general for the Romantics, in an a priori fashion, but it has historically been the primary fulcrum around which these fields have turned and defined themselves. Disciplinary definition and change is not "the process by which something from outside penetrates and alters the inside of a community... when a community is provoked to change by something outside it, that something will already have been inside." Thus when philosophy effects art and art history, it is no more entering to it, it is already an organic part, a plasma of it, Cheetham argues.

Five decisive "moments" of Kant's reception in and influence on the visual arts and art history are traced by the author: The first moment is the circle of Carl Ludwig Fernow (1763-1808) who lived in Rome for <a decade '.only, tart .circulating there Kant's ideas profusely promoting German classicism in Italy through John Winckelmann and Anton Mengs. This Fernow circle is the major channel to influence the German speaking artists in Rome. Cheetham traces an interesting heritage of intellectual association of Fernow with Schiller at the University of Jena, and also traces his zeal for politics that he shared with Kant's republicanism, his support for French revolution and Napoleon. In Fernow's opinion Kant's aesthetics of beauty and political ideas are indeed correlated. Thereafter, Kant's influence is felt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Panofsky and Greenberg invoked Kant's authority to develop their contextual rather than formal understanding of art. Panofsky's humanism was interlocked with the Kantian freedom of the judging subject. Panofsky's uses of Kantian concepts and nomenclature around cubism, and Greenberg's around formalism are committedly Kantian. Panofsky's claim that artistic perception is no more faced with a "thing-in-itself' than is the process of recognition is notably Kantian in spirit. Artist's free choice of perspective is analogous to Kant's a priori intuition of space itself. In the early years of twentieth century there were two Kantian streams--the neo-Kantian stream culminated in Cassirer and the radical division by Heidegger--the two philosophers debating publicly over the appropriate reception and use of Kant. Panofsky's preference to Cassirer had the important consequence that "the explicit problematic of historicality recedes' in Panofsky's art theory and art-historical writings. He prefers the historicality of Kant (Cassirer) to the interest in history, and by this preference he turns away from both Hegel and Heidegger for whom history as a problem was fundamental. (P- 71)

Another moment of Kant's influence is felt in Daniel-Henry Kahnweilu, the most important historian of Cubism representing the works of Braque, Gris and Picasso claiming that the new language of cubism has given an unprecedented freedom to painting--"instead of an analytical description, the painter can ... also create in this way a synthesis of the object, or in the words of Kant, put together the various conceptions and comprehend their variety in our perception." (p. 78) In this regard Cheetham disputes Paul Crowther who denied any link between Kant and cubism. Similarly, Clement Greenberg's formalism is also notably Kantian.

In the chapters four and five Cheetham explores the Kantian influence in the postmodernist treatment of the "sublime," particularly by Derrida and Lyotard. "Derrida and Kant are obsessed with the borders and the legislation of conceptual boundaries. Both thinkers... employ the term 'sublime'-despite its putative boundlessness and uncontrollability... Derrida uses Kant's sublime in The Truth in Painting as a way to think about the authority that philosophical aesthetics and philosophy have had historically over the visual arts... Jean-Francois Lyotard claims, too, that it has been with the vehicle of the "sublime that aesthetics asserted its critical rights over art." (p. 102) Cheetham exemplifies the remarkable range of contemporary visualizations of the sublime in France as well as in other horizons of the Western world.

Tracing the impact of Kantian philosophy in the modern and postmodern art historical writings is an extremely fruitful scholarly venture that was due long since, and the way Mark Cheetham has tackled the issue exhibits the lot of insight and exercise not possible ordinarily unless one has both zeal and sincerity in probing into this serious field. Cheetham's book is the result of a sincere intellectual exercise that extends over a decade and a half. One can easily note the success of the author in correlating history and historical progress of philosophy with the study of art and art history, and can easily find out here a model for investigating other disciplines in their creative and critical moments of healthy and happy correlations.

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Author:	Sukla, A.C
Publication:	Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
Date:	Jan 1, 2006
Words:	981
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