sehepunkte 7 (2007), Nr. 11

Charles E. McClelland: Prophets, Paupers, or Professionals ?

In this book, Charles McClelland, an historian of professionalization in modern Europe, seeks to write a comprehensive institutional history of German artists as a professional group over the course of 150 years. As the title of the book suggests, McClelland is interested in why extreme variations from wealth to poverty have persisted within the artistic community, and seeks to understand why it has historically been so difficult for artists formally to organize and regulate themselves. He wishes to explore the considerable differences between the historical development of the artistic community and the more normative professions.

To tell this story and answer these questions, McClelland writes chapters on the definition of the artist, on artistic training, on sources of income, on artists' organizations, and on the myths or associations linked to the artist since the early nineteenth century. In the first of these chapters, the author shows the simultaneous openness and hierarchical differentiation of the professional artistic community. In the second, he details the history of German art academies, design schools, and the controversial efforts to reform the former by merging them with the latter in order to stem the growth of a mass of artists - the so-called 'art proletariat' - without the skills to survive in an overcrowded market. In the third, McClelland focuses on the lot of the professional majority who never attained the status of the "art princes" of the late nineteenth century; he describes the low income typical for professional artists, the various kinds of work they might do to survive, and the kinds of competition they had to face on a saturated market for visual images. In the fourth, he discusses the ambitions and realities of the most prominent artists associations of the period, suggesting in particular both the tensions between elitist formations and democratically constituted associations and the disputes between cosmopolitan and nationalist groups that made it impossible for a general professional representation to emerge. In the final chapter, McClelland suggests that the various notions of the artist as an extraordinary individual - heroic, utopian, bohemian, leftist, and cosmopolitan - had little purchase in reality, as artists were in fact for the most part ordinary citizens. Nonetheless, the importance of these notions is without a doubt, as they all hindered, in McClelland's view, the establishment of strong professional institutions. As a result, artists had to struggle with the absence of clear standards, the persistence of overcrowded markets, and the chronic weakness of ineffectual professional associations. In a word, McClelland depicts the modern history of art - including the history of modern art - in large part as an unusual story of disintegration and the loss of control. Compared to doctors, lawyers, and other free professions, artists failed to professionalize.

To focus on the history of the institutions of artistic practice is, as McClelland rightly notes, to challenge the cult of the artist that emerged or spread in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and most spectacularly continue to be reiterated in the biopics of artists that regularly appear in American and European cinemas. Research that focuses on contradictions and conflicts within the institutions that structured artistic practice is an important part of an historical, materialist art history that seeks to break with the persistent discourse of genius and masterpiece. By pointing to the struggles between ideological and aesthetic factions, the shifts in influence and authority within the decisive institutions that were responsible for the cultivation and legitimation of particular forms of art, and the dramatically varying rewards different groups within the artistic community received, institutional histories attune their readers to the power relations that existed among artists. The history of art becomes not simply a narrative of heroic innovation and progress achieved against hidebound academicism and philistine reaction, but rather a story of the invention of new institutional forms to provide the kinds of distinctions thought by some to be needed to make a living, and of resistance to those new forms. Regardless of how their work looked, all artists had to beat the competition in order to succeed. They had to search for markets and other stable sources of income, even as they sought to claim the moral and aesthetic high ground of idealism and autonomy.

As effective as it is in suggesting both some of the unusual character of the artistic profession and the pervasive sense of crisis that had emerged in leading German cultural circles by 1900, McClelland's book is often frustrating to read. Factual errors, misnomers, and questionable characterizations of particular events, artists, and stylistic categories are disconcerting. The book's chapters are filled with facts about a host of topics and include interesting efforts to rethink artistic practice in terms of professionalization, but they do not cohere into systematic analyses of fields of artistic production constituted in specific places and times by the interrelationships of individuals, groups, markets, municipal agencies, and state bureaucracies. The chronological scope of the book, combined with its relative brevity, often results in the truncated treatment of any given topic; the best passages remain only tantalizing tidbits. In particular, one looks in vain for substantial attention to the rapid expansion of the dealer-critic system and its profound effects on artists, both those admitted to and excluded from the gallery networks, and other art-world professionals. By relying on the criteria developed to discuss the development of other professions, McClelland seeks to open a new perspective on artistic practice. In so doing, however, he neglects what in fact were crucial aspects of the "social history of everyday visual artists in modern Germany."

At the outset, the author throws down a disciplinary gauntlet. His aim, he announces, is to write a "work of social rather than traditional art history (9)." In McClelland's view, art historians tend to dwell "on the career or output of a single visual artist or small group of them (9)," subscribe to the cults of "lonely, inspired geniuses" (15, 25), and cock their eyebrows skeptically at the notion of writing a history of the artistic profession as a whole (11). I would agree that art historians often tend to work monographically and to affirm the objects they study, and that such aesthetic investments limit the scope and critical objectivity of their scholarship, however methodologically sophisticated it might be. However, McClelland's sweeping characterization of the discipline of art history fails to take into account the work of such scholars as Robert Jensen and Wolfgang Ruppert, to name only two whose books are directly relevant to McClelland's material. In a book and several important articles, Jensen has detailed the emergence of the institutions, practices, and narratives that supported the establishment of modernism as the hegemonic art of the twentieth century in Central Europe, despite or in conjunction with the agonistic thinking and self-imagery of leading avantgarde painters. [1] Ruppert has analyzed in great detail the type of the "modern artist," paying special attention to the role of artistic associations and academies. [2] The work of Jensen in particular indicates that a critical history of modern German art that takes seriously not only institutions but also those groups that ultimately lost the battle against the modernist elite by no means entails throwing the baby of careful, detailed art historical analysis out with the bathwater of conventional hagiography. Charles McClelland's book draws welcome attention to institutions often neglected by both mainstream art history and even these two exemplary studies. It suggests an interesting, perhaps provocative vocabulary for the defamiliarizing characterization of artistic practice. This history struggles, however, to measure up to recent art historical work, informed by the work of cultural sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, that has done much to enrich our understanding of the history of modern professional artistic practice.

Notes:

[1] Robert Jensen: Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, Princeton 1994; idem: "A Matter of Professionalism: Marketing Identity in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna," in: Rethinking Vienna 1900, edited by Steven Beller, New York 2001, 195-219.

[2] Wolfgang Ruppert: Der moderne Künstler: Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der kreativen Individualität in der kulturellen Moderne im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt 1998.