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History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Francesco Mazzaferro
From the Old to the New World:
the Anthologies by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves (1945) and by Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (1947)
Part One
Part One
[Original Version: May 2016 - New Version: april 2019]
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| Fig. 1) The anthology "Artists on Art" by Goldwater and Treves in the 1945 edition |
The
availability of art literature texts in the United States made a real quality leap
in the forties, when, almost in parallel, two anthologies of artists’ writings were
published. Thereby, a new vein of art literature was born with specific
American characteristics, which we will try to investigate being guided by
these two texts.
The first
anthology, entitled Artists on Art: from
the XIV to the XX Century, was released in 1945 [1] and covered art from
Cennini to the generation of Edward Hopper. It was the first anthology of texts
by artists published in the United States [2]. It was printed by the New York publishing
house Pantheon Books, founded in 1942 and led by Kurt Wolff, one of the most famous German publishers who had escaped racial persecution, fleeing from Germany.
Wolff had first moved to Italy (a country which he knew very well, because he
had already founded the publishing house Pantheon
Casa Editrice in Florence years
before, in 1924) and, from 1941 onwards, in the United States. Authors of the
anthology were the US modern art critic Robert Goldwater (1907-1973) and the
Florentine architect and scholar of aesthetics Marco Treves (1902-1990), who had
also escaped from Italy for racial reasons.
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| Fig. 2) The anthology of Goldwater and Treves in the Spanish edition of 1953 |
Their work was
regularly reprinted in 1947, 1958, 1966, 1972, 1976, 1987 (and most recently in
1990 by the London publisher John Murray [3]). In 1953, it was also published in
a Spanish translation [4].
Elizabeth
Gilmore Holt (1906-1987) authored the second anthology in 1947, published by
the Princeton University Press under the title "Literary Sources of Art History: An Anthology of Texts from Theophilus
to Goethe" [5]. The fact that the anthology was not reprinted anymore with
the same title should not mislead: the text was, in fact, expanded and revised,
and was turned into a series of three volumes with the name "A Documentary History of Art". It
is still considered crucial to the study of art history in the United States.
The first volume of the Documentary History,
dedicated to "The Middle Ages and
the Renaissance" was released in 1957 in Princeton in hardcover, but
also in paperback edition by Doubleday in New York [6]; the second on "Michelangelo and the Mannerists, the Baroque
and the Eighteenth Century" was issued a year later following the same
procedures [7]. The historian Alicia Faxon [8] says that the need for a
simultaneous publication of a paperback edition which would make art sources accessible
to students was one of the points on which the authoress never had doubts, in
line with her liberal political culture. The third volume, entitled "From the Classicists to the Impressionists:
Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century" was published in 1966
in New York, printed by New York University Press and Doubleday, respectively
in the hardcover and paperback version [9]. In 1972 the publishing house
Feltrinelli also released the "Storia
documentaria dell'arte: dal Medioevo al XVIII secolo" (Documentary
history of art: from Middle Ages to the XVIII century) in Italy; it was reprinted
in 1977 [10]. Here the three volumes were collected in a single tome; confirming
the interest for art literature in Italy, it was the only translation into other
languages. As to the English original, it was still reprinted in the eighties,
by the universities of Princeton and Yale.
 |
| Fig. 3) The 1972 Italian version of the anthology of Ms Gilmore Holt |
We will examine
in the second part of this article the reasons for the renaming of Literary
Sources into Documentary History,
formulating some hypotheses in the absence of an explanatory text by Ms Gilmore
Holt in this regard. For the rest, while the size of the anthology of Ms Gilmore
Holt increased, there was still an almost complete degree of continuity between
the volume of 1947 and those of 1957 and 1958: they had the same original
introduction and the same organization. The volume of 1966 instead offered some
important new features: it provided a significant chronological extension
compared to the work plan in 1947, which had not included the nineteenth
century, and the introduction was also new.
United States and Europe. A meeting in the name
of art literature
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| Fig. 4) A party at the New York Institute of Fine Arts in the forties. Source: https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/about/history-bober.htm |
Elizabeth
Gilmore Holt and Robert Goldwater were important scholars for history of art in
the United States. It is sufficient, however, to read the introduction to their
1945 and 1947 works to realize that their original investigation also benefited
from the meeting with European art historians and especially from the impulse
of two German scholars, Walter Friedländer (1891-1984) and his disciple Erwin
Panofsky (1892-1968), who had fled from Germany in the thirties to escape
racial persecution. They both taught at the New
York Institute of Fine Arts. They brought the seeds of art literature in the
United States, where the influence of Julius von Schlosser was instead lower than
in Europe. Schlosser’s manual on Kunstliteratur (Art Literature) was never translated into English and therefore could only be
accessed by those who knew German (1924) or Italian (1931) [11]. We will try to
understand the specific role of Friedländer and Panofsky in the transmission in
the new continent of the typically (though not only [12]) German tradition to study
the sources of art history.
In short,
the passage of the art literature anthologies from one shore to the other of
the Atlantic confirms, if ever a proof were needed, that the awful events in
Europe triggered a fortunate synthesis of cultures in the US, which steadily
strengthened the new world. In her recent Storia delle storie dell’arte (History of art histories), Orietta Rossi Pinelli
dedicated to the topic some very suggestive pages in the chapter titled "USA: profitable cultural interaction between
refugees and local scholars" [13].
We are
talking, in fact, of a phenomenon that had a much wider scope, allowing us to exit
the narrow range of art literature for a moment, to consider art movements more
generally. American abstract expressionism, for instance, was born by the
meeting of Pollock and Rothko, the American artists, with the Dutch William de
Kooning, who emigrated to the United States in 1926 in search of new impulses.
American expressionism took over from the German vanguard, when the latter was
condemned as degenerate art by Nazism. As in painting, even for art anthologies
what was born as a merger between the two shores of the Atlantic immediately
became a specifically American stream of work. Friedländer and Panofsky brought
the European tradition of anthologies of art literature to America, but soon after
the new American anthologies increasingly witnessed a development as texts
focussing on contemporary art, independent of the anthologies in Europe.
Marco Treves: from Florence to New York
If the
parallel stories of the two anthologies testify to the acquaintance of German and
American scholars in New York art circles, it is true that the biographies of Ms
Gilmore Holt [14], of publisher Wolff and especially of Marco Treves refer to a
common Florentine experience. Marco Treves, the Florentine architect and scholar
of aesthetics, left Italy in 1938 shortly after having published a Trattato d’estetica (Treatise on aesthetics)
with the Florence publisher La Nuova
Italia [15]. He was accepted as a
student in New York by Friedländer [16].
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| Fig. 5) The 1938 Treatise on aesthetics by Marco Treves |
Treves’ Treatise on aesthetics is completely
forgotten nowadays. The man was probably overwhelmed by the events. The printing
of his work was finished on September 22, 1938, while the racial laws were
announced in July and entered into force in November of the same year. Once he
came out from Italy, his just published essay was soon forgotten: I could not
find any single essay, article or quotation in Italian on his text. It was an
ambitious theoretical treatise, which illustrated the themes of aesthetics
(beauty, fantasy, fine art, sentiment, art and morality, art and science) in a
systematic way, covering above all poetry, but also literature and all visual
arts. A second volume, on architecture (Treves’s professional training) was
announced but never completed. What strikes most browsing the text is his
distance from Italian neo-idealism, on those days dominating: there was no
mention of Giovanni Gentile's The
philosophy of art (1934) [17], although he was the main Italian
philosopher and cultural leader in those years and was also based in Florence;
moreover, his comments on the various aesthetic essays by Benedetto Croce (with
several books from 1902 onwards [18]) were are all caustic. Very frequently across the Treatise, he
criticised all major German aesthetic philosophers, from Kant onwards. The
essay was written in the aesthetic perspective as a science in its own right,
independent of philosophy, literature, poetry and art; the basic idea was the
neo-positivist intuition to treat arts (broadly understood as the realm of
fantasy) as sciences, also as a development of the empirical thought of John
Locke. But it would be an illusion to see in the text of Treves a forerunner of
the criticism of the idealistic culture by Karl Popper and the Vienna School.
In fact, the book was full of nationalistic proclamations on the primacy of the
Italian language, and of the leading role worldwide of the aesthetic culture,
poetry and art of Italy (Treves considered Vittorio Alfieri as the father of
modern aesthetics). In short, until 1938 Treves was an Italian nationalist,
with expressions that sometimes recall the harsh tone of the Florentine critic
Ugo Ojetti (1871-1946).
All in all,
there was a clear discontinuity between his Florentine philosophical formation
and the New York experience [19]. Confronted with the new American reality, the
Italian scholar changed focus (from the centrality of poetry in aesthetics to
that of art) and above all had now to cope with a global task, i.e. to
co-author an anthology where the Italian world contributes
to, but does not dominate the development of aesthetic thought. The only
connection was the practice of analysing primary sources, which Treves used as
a source of knowledge (above all on poetry, in the Treatise) whenever he could not organize 'scientific tests' to
proof his aesthetic theses. "However,
there are some facts which are not so easy to experience. These are the
psychological facts, which take place inside the mind of the poet and artist.
On them, since I do not pretend that others believe I am a poet, I can report
the confessions by renowned poets, which really are almost always accurate,
sincere, and trustworthy. And in fact I have collected and examined many of
them." [20]
The anthology as an American genre of art
literature
Just search
art history bibliographies and you will realize that the two anthologies of
1945 and 1947, as well as subsequent revisions of 1957-1958, made school in the
US. All or nearly all of the following collections were inspired by the patterns
"Artists on artists" of
Messrs Goldwater and Treves or "Documentary
history" by Ms Gilmore Holt.
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| Fig. 6) The 1963 anthology by Eric Protter |
In 1963,
for example, a new anthology was edited by Eric Protter, whose title Painters on Painting [21] was clearly
inspired by the title of Goldwater and Treves. Protter’s compilation, published
in nine editions from 1963 to 1997, covered art history sources from Cennino up
to abstract art and focused on the study of how these artists always represented
themselves over the centuries as producers of "new art".
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| Fig. 7) Eric Protter’s anthology in 1997 |
In 1964 followed
Modern artists on art: ten unabridged
essays by Robert L. Herbert, published by Prentice Hall, and centred on the
writings of ten European modern artists between 1910 and 1940, from Gleizes to Moore
[22].
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| Fig. 8) The anthology of Robert Herbert, published anew in 2000 |
Even more
important was the initiative taken by the publisher Prentice-Hall. Among 1965
and 1966, it published fourteen volumes in the collection "Sources and documents in the history of art"
[23] (after the launch in 1963 by the same publisher of an anthology of
Michelangelo's texts [24]). The series was offered in paperback by the publisher
Doubleday, always in the same years (and then reissued entirely, up to the
present day, by Northwestern University Press and Cambridge University Press).
The success was such that the collections "Sources and documents" of Prentice-Hall will be designed to
widen from art to almost every field of knowledge.
 |
| Fig. 9) Some titles in the collection Sources and Documents by the publisher Prentice Hall, 1965-1966 |
For two
decades, the series of Prentice-Hall dominated the American market,
but, at the same time, the interest of that world for contemporary art created
a growing demand for texts that would provide an orderly description of the
enormous corpus of writings and other statements of the twentieth century
artists. In the seventies began the publications of the Archives of American Art. I would like to mention here the Archives of American Art: a directory of
resources: (18th through 20th century) by Garnett McCoy, published in 1972
[25], the Card catalogue of the oral
history collections of the Archives of American Art in 1984 [26] and a
number of specialized publications in those archives on the Franco-American
(1992), Italian-American (1994), and Latin American sources (1996). Today those
resources are partially available electronically by consulting the website of
the Smithsonian Institute: http://www.aaa.si.edu/.
Contemporary art as almost exclusive theme
since the eighties
The series
of Prentice Hall was to date the last major US publishing initiative with the
ambition to cover the entire route of art literature. An influential anthology
on American history of art sources before 1900 was issued recently [27]. There
were, obviously, also other anthological publications focused on specific
periods, with particular attention to the Renaissance [28]. But it is obvious
that the American artistic literature in recent decades has become primarily
the study of the manifestations of thought and other testimonies of modern and
especially contemporary artists. Thus, for example, in 1982 was released the
series Documents of Twentieth Century Art
at the University of California Press, that currently includes fourteen titles,
starting with a collection of the writings of Kandinsky [29]. The focus on
contemporary art extended to the publication of anthologies of art history
sources on very specific subjects, such as art in Japan between 1949 and 1989
[30], and the art of Central and Eastern Europe since 1950 to date [31].
 |
| Fig. 10) The 1982 anthology by Ellen Johnson |
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| Fig. 11) The 1992 Chinese edition of the anthology of Ellen Johnson |
When in
1982 Ellen H. Johnson published her anthology American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980 [32], she still spent a
few lines of the introduction to clarify the crucial role of the two
anthologies of 1945 and 1947 in the development of art criticism in the United
States; she also explained that the choice of the title was a homage to the
text of Goldwater and Treves, the book to which she owed her love for art
history. In 1992 was also published a Chinese version of Johnson’s compilation
[33].
 |
| Fig. 12) The 1985 anthology by Dore Ashton |
In 1985
followed the two anthologies Twentieth-centuryartists on art [34] by Dore Ashton and Twentieth-century
artists on art: an index to artist's writings, statements, and interviews by
Jack Robertson [35]. The first was published by Pantheon Books (the same
publisher of the Goldwater-Treves collection) and contained a quotation of the
1945 text in the introduction, together with the statement that the author wanted
to continue it exactly from where it was concluded. The second provided 14,000
citations of 5,000 artists. Moreover, in 1991 the publisher MIT Press inaugurated
the series entitled "Writing Art",
to ensure to the public the fundamental texts of contemporary artists, starting
with the theoretical writings of Joseph Kosuth, the father of modern
'installations'. They also presented the writings of Louise Bourgeois, the wife
of Robert Goldwater.
 |
| Fig. 13) The collection of writings by Louise Bourgeois, edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans Ulrich Obrist |
In 1996 the
publication of Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings [36], curated by Kristine
Stiles and Peter Selz and published by University of California Press, created
the new global reference book for anyone who wants to deal with contemporary
art literature. Among the latest publications, I am finally recalling the
anthology Art in America 1945 - 1970:
writings from the age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism,
by Jed Perl, published in 2014.
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| Fig. 14) The second edition of the anthology by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz in 2012 |
And what about the previous art literature?
It is
obvious that the Internet, the availability of loan facilities between
libraries around the world, publications from the rest of the English-speaking
world, and many other tools have continued to provide American scholars and
students the access of materials in English on history of art sources in earlier
periods than contemporary art. Yet, try to buy on Amazon some English speaking anthologies on art
literature which are not focused on contemporary art. It is striking you will
be immediately proposed to acquire the Prentice Hall texts of the sixties on the
antiquities market. For fifty years, the American art literature was therefore centred
on a single period of art history, namely contemporary art, at least with
regard to anthologies. The only exceptions were the new releases of the existing
three anthologies (Goldwater and Treves 1945, Gilmore Holt 1947 and Protter
1963).
And yet the
taste for art is naturally cyclical. Sooner or later, what seemed less
important to past generations will regain its charm, and American scholars will
rediscover that their country also had a tradition of anthologies which they
can refer to. This is why in the second part of this post we will focus our
attention on the specific features of the two early American anthologies of
1945 and 1947.
End of Part One
NOTES
[1] Goldwater, Robert and Treves, Marco - Artists on art: from the XIV to the XX century, New York, Pantheon Books, 1945, 497 pages. The original is available at:
[2] Note the very positive review by Clement Greenberg, in The Nation of 20 April, 1946 (Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, edited by John O'Brian, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986, 374 pages. Quote on page 75-76).
[3] Goldwater, Robert and Treves, Marco - Artists on art: from the 14th to the 20th century, London, John Murray, 1990, 499 pages.
[4] Robert Goldwater; Marco Treves; Rafael Benet; Jorge Benet, El Arte visto por los artistas: selección de textos de los siglos XIV a XX, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1953, 503 pages.
[5] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - Literary sources of art history: an anthology of texts from Theophilus to Goethe, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1947, 555 pages.
[6] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - A Documentary History of Art, Volume 1, New York, Doubleday, 1957, 380 pages.
[7] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - A Documentary History of Art, Volume 2, New York, Doubleday, 1958, 386 pages.
[8] Faxon, Alicia, Elizabeth Gilmore Holt: Art Historian and Maverick, in Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 2 No 1 (Spring-Summer 1981), pp. 45-48.
[9] Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth - A Documentary History of Art, Volume 3, New York, Doubleday, 1958, 540 pages.
[10] Gilmore Holt Elizabeth - Storia documentaria dell'arte: dal Medioevo al XVIII secolo, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1972, 523 pages.
[11] Julius von Schlosser had died in Vienna in 1938, and is therefore unlikely there had been direct contacts between him and the authors of the US anthologies. However, his work was constantly cited as a source by Goldwater and Treves as well as by Gilmore Holt. Merrs Goldwater and Treves cited the German edition of Kunstliteratur 1924, Ms Gilmore Holt both the German and the Italian tradition of 1935.
[12] Among the art historians who had an impact on Ms Gilmore Holt there was also Lionello Venturi, often cited in her anthology. Venturi lived between 1939 and 1944 in New York. He had left Italy to France in 1932 in disagreement with fascism. During his years in Paris he worked on a history of art criticism, which he published in 1936 in the United States (in a translation by Charles Marriott), even before his text came out in French in 1938 and in Italian in 1945 only. Venturi, Lionello - History of Art Criticism, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936, 326 pages.
[13] Rossi Pinelli, Orietta, La storia delle storie dell’arte, Torino, Giulio Einaudi, 2014, 514 pages
[14] In the brief introduction to the Italian edition of the Documentary History of Art, published in 1972, Ms Gilmore Holt explains that she returned to Florence to prepare for the Italian edition and thanked Ulrich Middeldorf, the Director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and Paola Barocchi for suggestions. Ulrich Middeldorf, who had worked in Florence since the twenties, was another case of a German art historian who fled from the Tuscan city in the United States in 1935, where he found a university post in Chicago thanks to Bernard Berenson. He then returned to Florence, where he was director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut between 1953 and 1968.
[15] Treves, Marco – Trattato d’estetica, La Nuova Italia editrice, Firenze, 1938, 319 pages.
[16] Treves published in New York also an essay on mannerism, in line with the stream of studies that Walter Friedlander, his German teacher and rediscoverer of mannerism as anti-classical movement, had launched in Freiburg already in the twenties. Treves, Marco - Manner, History of the Word, in: Marsyas, vol. 1, pages 69-84, 1941.
[17] Gentile, Giovanni - La filosofia dell'arte, Milano, Fratelli Treves, 1931, 377 pages. Translated into English in 1972: Gentile, Giovanni - The philosophy of art, Translation by Giovanni Gullace, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972, 292 pages.
[18] Croce, Benedetto - Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale, Milano; Palermo; Napoli, R. Sandron, 1902, 502 pages. Translated in English in 1909: Croce, Benedetto - Aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic, London, Macmillan, 1909, 403 pages.
[19] After World War II Treves was primarily working on biblical exegesis, abandoning the field of architecture and art history. See: http://marcotreves.blogspot.com/.
[20] Treves, Marco – Trattato d’estetica… (quoted), p. 9
[21] Protter Eric - Painters on painting, Mineola, Dover Publications, 1997. See: https://archive.org/stream/paintersonpainti00prot#page/n3/mode/2up
[22] Herbert, Robert L - Modern artists on art: ten unabridged essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1964. 149 pages.
[23] The series includes 14 titles: American Art 1700-1960, by John W. McCoubrey; Impressionism and post-impressionism, 1874-1904, by Linda Nochlin; Realism and tradition in art, 1848-1900, by Linda Nochlin; Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1750-1850 Volume I Enlightenment/Revolution, by Lorenz Eitner; Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750-1850 Volume 2 Restoration / Twilight of Humanism by Lorenz Eitner; Northern Renaissance Art 1400-1600 by Wolfgang Stechow; Italian and Spanish Art, 1600-1750, by Robert Enggass; Italian Art 1500-1600, by Robert Klein; Italian Art 1400-1500, by Creighton Gilbert; Gothic art 1140-c. 1450, by Teresa Grace Frisch; The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453, by Cyril Mango; Early medieval art, 300-1150, by Caecilia Davis-Weyer; The Art of Rome c.753 B.C.-A.D. 337, by J. J. Pollitt; The Art of Ancient Greece, by J. J. Pollitt.
[24] Clements, Robert J - Michelangelo, a self-portrait: texts and sources. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1963, 183 pages.
[25] McCoy, Garnett - Archives of American art; a directory of resources, New York, Bowker, 1972, 163 pages.
[26] Archives of American Art, The card catalog of the oral history collections of the Archives of American Art, Wilmington, Scholarly Resources, 1984, 343 pages.
[27] Burns, Sarah e Davis John, American art to 1900: a documentary history, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009, 1008 pages.
[28] Kristeller, Paul Oskar e Mooney, Michael - Renaissance thought and its sources, New York : Columbia University Press, 1979, 347 pages (last edition in 2010; also published in Spanish); Creighton, Gilbert - Italian art, 1400-1500: sources and documents, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1980, 226 pages; Manca, Joseph - Subject matter in Italian Renaissance art: a study of early sources, Tempe, Arizona, ACMRS, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015, 235 pages.
[30] Chong, Doryun - From postwar to postmodern: art in Japan 1945-1989: primary documents, New York, Museum of Modern Art; Durham, N.C., Distributed by Duke Univ. Press, 2012, 440 pagine.
[31] Hoptman, Laura J; Pospiszyl, Tomáš - Primary documents: a sourcebook for Eastern and Central European art since the 1950s, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2002, 375 pages.
[32] Johnson, Ellen H - American artists on art from 1940 to 1980, New York : Harper & Row, 1982, 274 pages.
[33] 当代美国艺术家论艺术 , 埃伦. H. 约翰逊编 ; 姚宏翔, 泓飞译,上海人民美術出版社, 1992.
[34] Ashton, Dore - Twentieth-century artists on art. New York, Pantheon Books, 1985, 302 pages.
[35] Robertson, Jack - Twentieth-century artists on art: an index to artists' writings, statements, and interview, Boston, Mass, G.K. Hall, 1985, 488 pages.
[36] Stiles, Kristine e Selz, Peter - Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, An Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Book, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1996, 1003 pages.
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