9/SM1 - Journal of Art Historiography

Stefan Muthesius
Towards an ‘exakte Kunstwissenschaft‘(?)
that Prange’s analysis of the writings of Justi, in particular, had prepared the ground
for Rößler at least in a few respects. However, Rößler’s critique gives a good hint as
to how he wants to see things himself.
How to write the New Art History (Rößler)
Rößler’s title ‘The poetics of art history’ first of all comes as a hefty provocation. It
would probably have sounded deeply disturbing to at least one of Rößler’s two
protagonists, Anton Springer, who was considered the pioneering arch-empiricist
among his colleagues. As has just been stressed again, the starting point of all the
three books is the rejection of a categorical kind of division between ‘aesthetics‘ and
‘history’ - of the attempts to play them off against each other. Locher’s proposal -
reported at the beginning as setting the tone of this report - was that absolute valuefreedom
was never actually achieved. Rößler takes a further step in this direction:
‘The crossing point between historicisation and aesthetics finds its place in the art
historian’s ways of presenting his or her material and findings.’ 118 Here
‘presentational method’ actually refers to a broader notion of writing, anything that
concerns methods in general history writing and even in fictional writing. A key
literary term is ‘the organisation of the text’. 119 Rößler thus blurs the borders
between history, including art history, and fiction in a way reminiscent of the work
of Hayden White. Rößler’s subtitle: ‘Anton Springer, Carl Justi und die ästhetische
Konzeption der deutschen Kunstwissenschaft’ can thus be taken to deal with both
philosophical aesthetics and with the literary nature of the writings, that is with the
‘presentational [darstellungsaesthetisch[en] qualities’, with the literary-aesthetic
qualities of art historical text as such. Here, one may cite Prange who indicates a
similar kind of thinking where she refers to Hegel who uses ‘pictorial and narrative
kinds of aesthetic methods to bring the past up to the present’. 120
Rößler’s book comes as a double monograph, or biography. A further
mighty contemporary figure, Herman Grimm, the new Ordinarius, or full professor
in Berlin from 1873, chiefly known as the writer of powerful biographies of
Michelangelo and Raphael, is partly dealt with by Rößler here. Suffice it to mention
Grimm’s desire to attain literary grandeur, seemingly to the detriment of factual
precision, for which some of his colleagues, including Springer, would not forgive
him. 121
The first, more important and more multifaceted figure is Anton Springer.
While always being mentioned with respect in the older histories of art history,
Springer was never given the ranking of Rumohr, Schnaase or Burckhardt, thus he
is missing from Pfisterer’s choice of 2007, too. Partly this was due to way in which
there appeared little to say about his assumed strict empiricism; empiricism was
treated as a methodological virtue but not as a genuine methodological innovation,
118
‘Die Schnittstelle zwischen Historisierung und Ästhetik [...] findet ihren Ort in den
Darstellungskonzeptionen der Kunsthistoriker’. Rößler, 6.
119
‘Textorganisatorisch’, Rößler, 111.
120
‘Ein ästhetisches Verfahren der bildlichen und narrativen Vergegenwärtigung des Historischen’,
Prange, 98.
121
For Grimm see also Johannes Rößler, ‘Erlebnisbegriff und Skioptikon: Herman Grimm und die
Geisteswissenschaften and der Berliner Universität’, in Bredekamp / Labuda 2010, 69-90.
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