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L I K E others who work on the frontiers between disciplines, the late Pierre Francastel (who died in Paris in January 1970) runs the risk of neglect by both sides, of being considered a sociologist by art historians and an art historian by sociologists. In the English-speaking world, his work is little known*; none of his books and virtually none of his articles have been translated into English, as they have been into Italian, Polish, Spanish and other European languages (1). Yet Francastel well deserves to be known to anyone interested in the sociology of art. His writings cover a wide range of subjects in the history of painting, sculpture and architecture, from the Xlth century to the present day (2). Although he spent his life in studying the arts in particular societies, he was fascinated by the possibilities of generalisation about the relationships (the plural is important) of works of art to the societies in which they were created. The power of his work has a great deal to do with the fact that his insights are not separate but coordinated. His main ideas form a system. This system can easily be misunderstood; it looks more like Marxism and more like some current forms of structuralism than it really is. So it may be useful to summarise Francastel's central ideas as a set of connected propositions before going on to place them in an intellectual and social context and to assess their fruitfulness. 1. Art is a system of signs. Francastel often attacks the view that art (and Renaissance art in particular) is (in Alberti's famous image) a window opened on reality, the representation of things as they "really" are. "A picture is not the double of reality, it is a sign. Paintings can be seen as forming "systems of signs (des systemes de signes) which can be [...] put in parallel with the various languagesverbal, mathematical, musical which societies use to communicate" (3). Art is like language, and looking at pictures is like reading them; to see is to decipher. The point of this

* FRANCASTEL'S best-known works include Peinture et socie'te (London, Audin, 1951); Art et technique au XIXe et XXe siecles (Paris, Ed. Minuit, 1956); La re'alite figurative (Paris, Gonthier, 1965); La figure et le lieu (Paris, Gallimard, 1967). These works are henceforth abbreviated to... P&S; A&T; RF; F&L.
(1) FRANCASTEL'S article, 'Main trends of European art', is translated in G. S. M E TRAUX and F. CROUZET, The nineteenth-

(2) Little has been written about Francastel, but an interesting article is S.
PEROTTINO, La notion de structure dans

century world (New York 1963), and a section from his essay on "the destruction of a plastic space" is translated in W. SYPHER (ed.), Art History (New York 1963).

l'ceuvre de Francastel, La Pensie (1967), n 135, pp. 153-164.. (3) P&S, p. 45; F&L, p. 28. Here and elsewhere the translations are my own.

Arch, europ. social., (1971). 141-154.

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art-as-language metaphor is to make it clear that the'innocent eye' is impossible, and that artists always operate according to a set of conventions. The objects which may be seen in paintings are not a random collection; in each society there is a 'repertory' of objects on which the artist draws. In the art of XVth-century Italy, for example, this repertory includes the rock (as in paintings of St Jerome and other saints in the wilderness); the roof (under which the Nativity is often set); the carroccio or chariot, used in scenes of triumph; and the nuvola or cloud, from which God or the Virgin or saints sometimes appear. These objects are in fact properties from the religious theatre of the time, and so could easily be recognised by contemporary spectators (4). This repertory of objects may be considered the vocabulary of the "language of art". The method of combining objects is also subject to rules or conventionsthe grammar and syntax of the language of art (5). That is, Francastel is recommending that the art-historian pay attention to le lieu as well as lafigure; to the space between the objects in a painting, to the structure or organisation of that space. The subtitle of his Peinture et sodete is "birth and destruction of a plastic space from the Renaissance to cubism". Its point of departure is the idea that linear perspective "does not correspond to any absolute progress on the part of humanity in the direction of an ever more adequate representation of the outward world on a two-dimensional surface; it is one of the aspects of a conventional mode of expression based on a certain state of technique, knowledge and society at a given moment " (6). For example, the paintings of Piero della Francesca do not represent the world as it is, but rather a set of pictorial conventions which include the rule that light must come from a single source, and that pictures should ideally be seen (as in the case of Brunelleschi's famous box) with one eye closed. Renaissance linear perspective, like Euclidean geometry (to which it is closely related) and Newtonian physics, is only one system among possible others. It is as absurd to accept it as the best solution of man's visual needs as to believe that a particular language is the best solution of man's semantic needs. This idea of art as a language is, of course, not unique to Francastel; the idea that paintings contain a conventional repertoire of objects goes back to Aby Warburg at least. He showed, for example, that the fluttering draperies in Botticelli's Birth of Venus derived from Roman reliefs. Again, Erwin Panofsky (in a paper of the 1920s which has not been translated into English) wrote of perspective as symbolic form. Levi-Strauss has written on primitive art as a "system of signs", and Gombrich's Art and Illusion is very much concerned with the "linguistics of the visual image" (7).
(4) See especially the essay "Imagination plastique, vision theatrale et signification humaine", repr. in RF, pp. 211 sq. (5) On the grammar of art, F&L, p. 144. The analogy with Barthes and Levi-Strauss on the languages of clothes, food, and kinship is obvious. A discussion of the 'disanalogies' is M. MOTHERSILL, IS art a language ? The Journal of Philosophy, LXII (1965)1 559-572. (6) P&S, p. 7. (7) A. WARBURG, Sandro Botticellis Gehurt der Venus und Friihling (1893), Italian trans, in his La Rinascita del Paganesimo

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Where Francastel differs from the Warburg school is not so much in his point of departure, but in the direction in which he chooses to travel from that point. For Francastel, that direction is a sociological one; it is the relation of works of art to the "state of technique, knowledge and society at a given moment". His choice of direction aligns him with such writers on the social history of art as Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser; but he differs from them in refusing to take 'realism' as his point of departure.

2. Art and technics are not opposite. Another common view which
Francastel attacks again and again is the idea that art is (or ought to be) something 'fine' or gratuitous or superfluous, something which does not fill a social function. He argues that the opposition between art and 'technique' (it is difficult to know whether to translate this term as 'technique', 'technics' or 'technology'), the opposition between art and the machine, art and industry is in fact a 'pseudo-opposition', because all art contains a technical element, and all technology contains an aesthetic element. He attacks, among others, Ruskin, Mumford and Giedion for seeing the machine as necessarily a threat to man and the enemy of art; for denying the possibility of adapting art to the forms of modern life in industrial society; for thinking of man as an absolute and refusing to admit "even the possibility of a substantial transformation of man's functions". He points out that man's transformation of nature, his creation of his own environment did not begin with the Industrial Revolution. In short he is anti-romantic, hostile to the idealisation of art for art's sake and of the "organic community". He argues that it was no accident that the nineteenth century was a turning point in the history of both art and technology, and, more specifically, that the use of new materials such as steel and concrete transformed modern architecture. But Francastel is not a technological determinist; he suggests that the technical element is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the form of works of art, and that paintings, buildings and tools also express values, ideas and world-views (8). 3. Works of art express world-views. Art is not only related to the technical but also to ideas. Linear perspective, for example, is related to a particular conception of space, and space is one of the fundamental categories of human thought. "Space is not a reality in itself which is simply represented in a different way in different periods. Space is man's experience itself" (9). Like Kant, Francastel suggests that experiences never reach us neat, but only mediated through categories of thought. Like
antico (Florence 1966), pp. 65 sq. E. PANOFSKY, Die Perspektive als symbolische Form, in Vortrdge der Bibl. Warburg, 19241925, pp. 258-330 G. CHARBONNIER, Entretiens avec Claude Li'vi-Strauss (Paris 1961), esp. the 5th and 8th interviews. (8) Francastel makes his general position clear in the essay "Technique et esthetique", repr. in RF, pp. 58 sq. Detailed discussion of the XlXth and XXTh centuries throughout A&T. Classic expressions of the attitudes he attacks are L. MUMFORD, Technics and Civilisation (London 1934), and S. GIEDION, Mechanization takes command (New York 1948). For positions similar to Francastel's, see G. FRIEDMANN, Problemes humains du machinisme industriel (Paris 1946), and A. KOYRE, Les philosophes et la raachine, Critique, IV (1948),334-333, 610-629. (9) P&S, p. 29.

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Hegel, he suggests that these categories change over time. In medieval art, "there is no space independent of things", no fixed point of view or reference system. There are as many spaces as there are objects. This conception of space is sometimes called 'topological space' (10). The new space-conception of the Renaissance was euclidean space, space which could be measured or calculated, cubic space. This new space was the result of the adaptation of mathematical researches to solve artistic problems, but it was also part of something wider, "a new total view of the world", which was now seen as subject to the laws of nature which could be discovered by human reason. There was a shift of interest from quality to quantity, from myth to reason, from the theological to the naturalistic ( n ) . Again, a new conception of space appeared in late XlXth-century French art, in which "what is most mysterious is what is most near". This new space was also linked to changes in world-view, to a shift of interest and belief from the objective to the subjective, from absolute values to relative ones. The "great adventure of the modern world" is phenomenology, the consciousness of the role of the mind in structuring the world, a consciousness apparent in the paintings of, for example, Degas, in which figures are no longer placed symmetrically within the picture frame (and apparent also, one might add, in Francastel's ideas themselves) (12). Art expresses not only a view of the physical world but a set of values, which are communicated by means of symbols and myths. The concept of 'myth' is a central one in Francastel's work. He treats myth as a form of thought in which projection and identification are important; space and time, for example, being the projection of the needs of society. He once wrote an essay on Botticelli's Primavera entitled "A poetic and social myth of the Quattrocento", suggesting that the picture symbolised prosperity and stability, liberality and good government; in short, that it idealised Medicean Florence. One of the social functions of art is propaganda. Again, he suggested that the tree in Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ symbolised the tree of life. Myths and symbols are the materialisations of values; the values of a particular society (13). 4. Art-criticism is a form of ideology. So Francastel sees art as 'ideology' in the sense that it expresses a world-view which is not so much personal to the artist as shared by a society, or at least a group within it. Art criticism is an ideology in the same sense, and also in the sense of being a possible tool for the manipulation of an audience. In 1939-40 Francastel gave a course of lectures at Clermont-Ferrand on art history as a means of German propaganda. His aim was to bring to light latent pan-German or racialist tendencies in Frankl, Pinder, Worringer and other German arthistorians. Thus Pinder wrote of Germany as the mother of European
(10) Compare J. PIAGET, La representation (13) P&S, p. 56, and Un mythe poetique de Vespace chez Venfant (Paris 1948), trans, as et social du Quattrocento, repr. in RF, The child's conception of space (London 1956). p. 272 sq. Compare M. MAUSS, Essai sur (11) P&S, pp. 65 sq. le don (Paris 1925), trans, as The gift (Lon(12) P&S, pp. 129 sq. don 1954).

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civilisation; Frankl described the regional styles of medieval architecture as the result of the racial characteristics of the Celts in Auvergne, for example, or the 'Germans' in Normandy. Francastel's conclusion was that the German art-historians were trying "to annex [...] whole provinces of the past; first Gothic, then Romanesque, then Baroque". Of course, these lectures were themselves a piece of counter-propaganda. Their long-term importance was in making their author aware of the attitudes latent in works of art-criticism and art-history. He suggested, for example, that arthistory began as propaganda, with Vasari's glorification of Florence in his Lives, and that Ruskin's view of art and beauty as eternal values was related to his general conservatism. He characterised Le Corbusier as an authoritarian, and Mumford as an anti-rational mystic. A sympathetic analyst of the myths expressed in works of art, Francastel was a merciless critic of the myths expressed in the work of art-historiansthe "myth of the machine", "the myth of the organic", or Croce's "myth of the individual", the idea that the history of art is essentially the history of individual artists. For Francastel, art is part of society (14). 5. Art is part of society. The "system of signs" and the world-view are not created by individuals, but by groups. In each culture men are taught to see paintings or the world in a certain way. Behind changes in figurative systems or in world-views lie social changes. So Francastel objected to the fragmentation of the Romanesque into regional schools by the art-historians of his day, because this obscured the fact that the development of religious architecture c. 1100 was related to two important social changesthe rising population and the popularisation of the cult of the saints and their relicsand, more generally, that the artistic changes of the time can be related to what Marc Bloch described as the transition from the "first feudal age" to the second. Again, Francastel criticised the tendency to split the main trends of modern art into such movements and countermovements as 'impressionism", 'post-impressionism', 'fauvism', etc., again on the grounds that this fragmentation hid the fact that social change in the later XlXth century "destroyed the possibility of a representation of the universe which conformed to tradition and which was alive" (15). One great danger for anyone who wants to relate art to society is that 'society' is such a vague term. In a wide sense it includes ideas and techniques ; in a narrower sense it refers to social groups and social movements. So far I have been describing Francastel's use of the wider or 'macrosocial' approach, relating paintings to world-views and world-views to whole societies. But one of his great strengths as an art-historian is that he is interested in the 'microsocial' approach as well; the study of artists, patrons,
(14) These lectures were printed, after (Venice/Roma 1961). the war, as L'Histoire de Vart instrument de la (15) On the Xllth century, P. FRANCASpropagande germctnique (Paris 1945). On TEL, L'humanisme roman (Rodez 1942), Ruskin see FRANCASTEL'S essay, La Venise esp. pp. 15, 86, 121. On the XlXth cende Ruskin et les archfelogues, in C. PELLEtury, P&S, pp. 119 sq.
GRINI (ed.), Venezia nelle letterature moderne

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and wider groups of spectators (16). He has relatively little to say about the artist and his place in society; the organization of the arts, though he argues, for example, that the Baroque is an art of travelling artisans, in contrast to Classicism, which is the art of urban milieux (17). He has much more to say about patrons and the wider public. The early monograph on Girardon (1928) prints some of his contracts and discusses the restrictions which the patronage system placed on XVIIth century artists. Again, writing on Xlth century French architecture, he criticises fimile Male for insisting too much on the role of the Church in the development of medieval art, and argues that in this period "religious art ceases to address itself to the clergy alone", for there were important lay patrons like the count of Toulouse and the duke of Aquitaine (18). However, a wider public than the patrons influenced many works of art. One of Francastel's most striking examples is that of Italian art c. 1600, with its new emphasis on the ecstasies of the saints; his theory is that the Catholic reformers, such as the Jesuits, had to support the popular cults of saints and images in order to keep the mass of the population firm in the faith, so that it was the people who converted their missionaries, rather than the other way round. Again, he is sceptical of the Warburg school's exegesis of Botticelli's Primavera, but picks up the suggestion of the French folklorist Andre Varagnac that the central figure is not Venus but the Queen of May, and that "Mercury' and the 'Three Graces' are also characters from traditional May festivities (as they could still be observed in Lorraine in this century) (19). In other words, art is part of history; the moral of that conclusion is that art-historians should study general history more than they do, and that historians should make a greater use of art as a source of knowledge about society as valuable as any written document. For art is not inferior because artists do not work with words (20). 6. Art is autonomous. Art is not subordinate to literature or to ideas; it is autonomous. Francastel insists that art does not 'reflect' anything. It does not reflect realityfor art is a system of signs. It does not reflect society either; Francastel asserts that art is not a 'superstructure' and that it is just as useful to explain society in terms of art as the other way round. Nor does art reflect ideas, even a world-view, in the sense of a world-view being developed by thinkers or writers and then translated into visual terms by artists. On the contrary, art is a specific and independent way of exploring reality and expressing awareness of it. Artist and writer work together at this task. Thus Francastel argues that the optics of Chevreul did not influence the Impressionistsnor he them: that does not mean that there was no link between them, but the link is of another type. Art
(16) On problems of method see the essay Art et sociologie, repr. in RF, pp. 29 sq. (17) P. FRANCASTEL, Baroque et classique, Annales, XII (1957), 222-207. (18) P. FRANCASTEL, Girardon (Paris 1928); L'humanisme roman, op. cit. pp. 143 sq. (19) See the essays La Contre-Relorme et les arts, repr. in RF, esp. pp. 384 sq., and Un mythe poetique et social du Quattrocento, repr. in RF, pp. 272 sq.; and A. VARAGNAC, Civilisation traditionnelle et genres de vie (Paris 1948). (20) This case is argued in the essay, Art et histoire, repr. in RF, pp. 73 sq.

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may be a 'language' in the general sense of being a system of signs, but it is not a translation of verbal language; it is an independent form of thought. Art is connected with ideas and with society, but it cannot be reduced to either. "Only art can express what art expresses" (21). 7. Art is a prefiguration of the possible. If art can be said to 'express' or 'reflect' anything, it is 'thought' or imagination in a wide sense. Pensee plastique is a favourite phrase of Francastel's. So the sociology of art is part of the sociology of the imaginary, the study of the different forms that the imagination takes in different societies. Works of art, like Utopias, may come nearer to reflecting the future than the present or the past. To take an example which brings out Francastel's gift for seeing the general in the particular, when we look at the architectural backgrounds in the paintings of Gozzoli or Ghirlandaio, we probably think of the painters as copying the buildings they saw around them. In fact, it was the architects who followed the painters, for very few secular buildings in Renaissance style existed before 1500, whereas architectural backgrounds of this kind are relatively common in paintings. Does that mean that we should see the art of the early twentieth century as the prefiguration of a world which has not yet come about (22) ? To 'place' Francastel intellectually it is necessary not to take his disagreements with other scholars too seriously. He always tended to overestimate the ideological distance between himself and others, particularly when the others were not Frenchmen. But the intellectual history of the twentieth century should no more be fragmented into movements or schools than Romanesque architecture or modern painting; the social history of art is as much related to its time as the art which it studies. Francastel's interest in relating works of art to world-views and both to social change has much in common with Marxism, which his dismissal of the term 'superstructure' and his acid comments on Hauser, Antal and even Lukdcs should not be allowed to obscure. Again, his approach to the Renaissance is not so very different from that of the 'Warburg school', and his approach to modern architecture is much like that of Lewis Mumford, whom he often denounced. Mumford is interested in the social history of space and time, for example. Roland Barthes came in for some harsh criticism too, but his interest in structure, system and myth is not so different from Francastel's either. But still more important in his development is the one group with which he did identify; the 'Annales school' of French historians (23).
(21) The Chevreul example is discussed in A&T, pp. 137-138. (22) See the essay, Imagination et realite dans l'architecture civile du Quattrocento, repr. in RF, pp. 290 sq. (23) Francastel discovered Lukacs late, and, when he had actually read him, was more generous; see RF, p. 82. He attacked Barthes (RF, pp. 75 sq) though Barthes' emphasis on structure and on myth is much like Francastel's. See R. BARTHES, Mythologies (Paris 1957), and Elements de simiologie (Paris 1964), trans, as Elements of Semiology (London 1967).

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Annales (subtitled Economies Societes Civilisations ) was, and is, a historical journal founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, two gifted historians of whom the second is well known in Britain and the first scarcely known at all. The journal has always been associated with a particular style of history, a social history open to influences from anthropology, economics, social psychology and sociology; a 'total history' showing the interrelations of different human activities taking place in any individual society. Febvre was a sharp polemicist against the kind of literary history, history of philosophy, and art history which did not relate its subjectmatter to the general historical and social background (24). He did not assume that the economy or the social structure determined the style of art, thought or literature in any period, nor did he assume that the culture of any age was necessarily a unified whole (he suggested that painting might be 'out of step' on occasion), but he worked all his life for what he called a 'historical history' of culture which would at least relate it to society. Francastel was a lifelong admirer of the work of both Bloch and Febvre. His book on Romanesque architecture, L'humanisme roman, was an attempt to bridge the gap between art history and the social history of France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as Bloch had written it. A favourite phrase of his, outillage mental, 'mental equipment' was a slogan of Febvre's; it sums up the idea that art is related not only to the tools with which it is made but also to the 'mental tools' of its makers. In a given society there are certain current forms of thought as there are current forms of tool. Writing on architecture in the XlXth and XXth centuries, Francastel suggested that faster travel has modified our perceptions of space and time, and made generous acknowledgement to Febvre for the idea that perception has a history (25). He published a number of articles in Annales, on Poussin, for example, and on "baroque and classicism". When Febvre became head of the Vlth section of the Iscole Pratique des Hautes Iitudes in 1948, he called Francastel to teach the sociology of art there. Francastel makes constant reference to the works of a number of social scientists such as Marcel Mauss in anthropology, Georges Friedmann in sociology, and Jean Piaget in social psychology, and the Annales school do so too. If art criticism and art history are forms of ideology, Francastel's own work is no exception to the rule. His own world-view is apparent in his work, in particular a certain anti-romanticism in personal taste which goes with his dry, astringent prose and his rationalist view of art as primarily a form of thought rather than primarily the expression or communication of emotion. He might also be accused of projecting the non-representational values of twentieth-century art on to the art of the past, that of the Renaissance for example. He could be a sharp critic of the work of his colleagues
(24) For Febvre's conception of art history see his Combats pour l'histoire% (Paris 1965), pp. 295 sq. (25) A&T, pp. 123 sq. FEBVRE discussed the history of perception, long before McLuhan, in La religion de Rabelais (Paris 1942), PP. 461 sq. His views are themselves discussed in Z. BARBU, Problems of historical psychology (London i960), pp. 21 sq.

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on the grounds that they went beyond the evidence, but the same criticism can, on occasion, be made of him. At various points in his arguments, some of them crucial, evidence is lacking and one finds instead "it has become clear to me that [...]" or some such phrase. Francastel objected to the iconographical approach to works of art, mainly on the grounds that this was to deny the 'specificity' of art. "Only art can express what art expresses". Yet he did not draw the moral that we should not discuss art in words at all; he relied on intuitions rather than on texts, which is a very different matter. His own 'mythological' approach ran the risk of being Warburg's iconography without the rigour. For example, his assertion that the tree in Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ is the tree of life, and that columns and caryatids in other paintings carry the same meaning cannot be proved wrong, but certainly lacks the rigour of his usual approach. It is perhaps no accident that the book, promised in 1951, on the social and political myths of the XVth century was never written (26). Francastel stands apart from most art historians. He preferred not to write monographs, on the grounds that "art history is weighed down by monographs and exhaustive catalogues". He did not concentrate on individual artists. He did not study artistic forms, as Henri Focillon did, as if they had a life of their own. He did not study the intellectual meaning of works of art, as fimile Male and Aby Warburg did. One might call him a social historian of art, but here too he stands apart. He did not like the work of Arnold Hauser and Frederick Antal because they described art as if it were "the materialisation of a kind of collective thought via the activity of a man reduced to the role of a pen-holder". Unlike them, he did not discuss art in terms of social classes. On the other hand he did not, like Professor E. H. Gombrich, or Professor Francis Haskell, think of the social history of art as essentially the history of the material conditions under which art is commissioned and created. That, for him, was an important part of the story, but only a part. In other words, he thought that both the 'microsocial' and the 'macrosocial' history of art were worth taking seriously and could be fused, whereas most social historians of art have tended to concentrate on one or the other (27). Another objection to describing Francastel as a social historian of art is that this is to play down one of his most striking qualities : his gift for generalisation, for constructing types, for coordinating his insights. In his book on Painting and society, for example, he shows that scholars working in relatively narrow fields (like G. Kernodle on art and theatre in the Renaissance, or E. Lowinsky on 'perspective' in Renaissance music) have illustrated unaware some extremely general theses about art, ideas and society; the thesis, for example, that artists tend to introduce a conventional repertory of objects into their paintings, or that a changing sense of space
(26) The tree of life appears in P&S, p. 77. (27) A&T, p. 255 denounces Antal and Hauser.

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is part of a changing world-view. On account of this interest in generalisation one might call Francastel a sociologist of art, a title he would probably have accepted, since he wrote an article on problems of the sociology of art for a collective treatise on sociology, and gave his book of essays, La realiti figurative, the subtitle, "Structural elements of a sociology of art" (28). II Now just what is the sociology of art ? It seems reasonable to define it as the study of the relationships between art and society at a general level, thus distinguishing it from the social history of art, the study of the same relationships at the level of the particular. So far the sociology of art looks like other particular sociologies, like industrial sociology, political sociology, or the sociology of religion. However, the sociology of art is asymmetrical, unlike most of the particular sociologies in two important respects. In the first place, it is not primarily the sociology of a kind of behaviourthe creation, commissioning and collection of works of artbut is more concerned with the results or materialisations of that behaviour, the objects themselves. Second, it is a historical sociology. So is the sociology of religion (as defined, for example, by G. Le Bras), but not to the same extent. As for the other particular sociologies, there is in principle no reason why political sociologists or industrial sociologists should not be concerned with societies which existed before 1900, but in practice they usually are not. In the case of art, the variety of past styles and their differences from contemporary styles are so obvious and overwhelming that it would be very hard to limit oneself to the twentieth century. In this field, it is rather the contemporary which has been neglected. Relatively few sociologists have used their normal methods of questionnaire and interview on artists and their publics. Interesting exceptions to this rule are Mason Griff, who has studied art-students and commercial artists in Chicago, and Bernard Rosenberg and Norris Fliegel, who studied twenty 'vanguard artists' in New York between 1961 and 1962. A bibliography of the sociology of art would include few studies of this century but rather more of the past, studies more often made by historians (E. H.Gombrich, F. Hartt, F. Haskell, M. Meiss, G. Pelles, M. Schapiro, etc.) than by sociologists (C. White and H. White, for example). These studies do not usually attempt to generalise (29).
(28) P. FRANCASTEL, Problemes de la sociologie de 1'art, in G. GURVITCH, Traite" de sociologie (Paris i960). (29) M. GRIFF, The commercial artist, in M. R. STEIN, A. J. VIDICH, and D. M. WHITE, Identity and Anxiety (Glencoe i960); M. GRIFF, Conflicts of the Artist in Mass Society, Diogenes, XLVI (1964), 54-68; B. ROSENBERG and N. FLIEGEL, The Vanguard Artist (Chicago 1965); H. C. WHITE and C. A. WHITE, Canvases and careers (New York 1965), F. HARTT, Art and Freedom in Quattrocento Florence, in L. F. SANDLER, Essays in memory of Karl Lehmann (New York 1964); F. HASKELL, Patrons and Painters (London 1963); E. H. GOMBRICH, The Early Medici as Patrons of Art, repr, in his Norm and Form (London 1966);

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What has become of the general theory of the relations between art and society ? Marx sketched one out, but his discussion of the arts is a fragmentary one, leaving important questions unanswered. Granted his theory of 'superstructure' and 'base', it would still make sense to ask whether the relation between the two is the same (a) for all societies, and (b) for all art-forms, and also whether their relation is direct or indirect. An interesting attempt at developing a Marxist sociology of art was recently made by Ernst Fischer, but unfortunately it was not worked out in detail, particularly so far as the visual arts are concerned. Fischer criticises any attempt to make a 'mechanistic oversimplification' of Marx's theory of the base and the superstructure. His own account of the relation of style to society is that it is mediated through content or 'ideology', and that style expresses content not directly but obliquely. A striking example, which Fischer does not pursue, is his suggestion that Romanticism was "a movement of protest [...] against the bourgeois capitalist world" (30). A more fully worked-out Marxist sociology of art is to be found in the work of the late Frederick Antal. At a general level he suggests, for example, that "popular and aristocratic art, both irrational, always show a certain kinship with one another, in contrast to rational upper middle class art". At a more specific level he distinguishes two styles in early fifteenth-century Florence, the simple and the ornate, the styles of Masaccio and Gentile da Fabriano respectively. He suggests that the two styles are related to two world-views, the progressive (rational, sober) and the feudal (irrational, uncontrolled) and to two social classes, the upper middle class and the nobility. At the macro-level he argues that a rational and realistic art is to be found in periods dominated by the upper middle class. At the micro-level he argues that this upper middle class included the most important patrons at a time when patrons told artists what to do. This seems a splendidly testable hypothesis; but in practice it runs the risk of circularity. When he finds Masaccio and Gentile working for father-in-law and son-in-law, Antal, suggests that one class may take up the ideology of another. But if the same middle class can be progressive or reactionary, how can one tell the two wings apartexcept by looking at the paintings they commissioned (31)? A more open approach to the sociology of art is offered by Vytautas Kavolis. In a collection of essays he discusses the possible relationship between style and the economy, the political system, the social structure, images of the universe and social values. Like Antal and Fischer he emphasises the mediating role of world-views, and his detailed discussion of the
M. MEISS, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton 1951); G. PELLES, Art Artists and Society (Englewood Cliffs 1963); and, among his other articles, M. SCHAPIRO, The Sculpture of Souillac, in W. R. W. Koehler, Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingley Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1939). (30) E. FISCHER, Von der Notviendigkeit der Kunst (Dresden 1959), English trans.: Harmondsworth 1963, esp. pp. 118, 147. (31) F. ANTAL, Florentine Painting and its Social Background (London 1947), esp. pp. 310 sq.

PETER BURKE

artistic preferences of different social classes is rather like an attempt to test Antal's central hypotheses. His exposition is lucid and takes account of the conclusions of experimental psychologists and social anthropologists as well as those of sociologists and art-historians. For example, his political chapter discusses the hypothesis that democracies tend to favour art styles of 'informal spontaneity' and an egalitarian treatment of the different parts of the work, whereas autocracies favour art-styles of 'formal rigidity' and the subordination of parts to one dominant element. The evidence Kavolis brings to this chapter includes historical examples: Greece in the age of Pericles and XVth century Flanders among democracies, Louis XIV's France and Hitler's Germany among autocracies. But he also mentions an anthropological study of twenty-nine tribal societies, and some evidence from social psychology to the effect that "a liking for balanced regularity of design has been found to be associated with the authoritarian personality" (32). Kavolis holds a good balance between dogmatism and fear of speculation. He is prepared to make general assertions, and also to treat them as no more than working hypotheses. His system is an open one in that he cites quite a large number of relevant factors, and suggests that their relative importance may differ from one society to another. At the same time, his book leaves one dissatisfied. It gives an impression of remoteness from any actual work of art, like a text-book built on secondary rather than primary sources. This is not an objection in principle to crosscultural comparisons of artistic style. Where Heinrich Wolfflin did it, in his Principles of Art History, it succeeded marvellously, but where Kavolis talks about a 'rigid' or a 'painterly' style he is unconvincing, perhaps because he does not illustrate his generalisations. A similar objection might be made to his treatment of social groups, like the 'upper middle' or 'new middle' class, irrespective of whether the culture is England or Japan. Again, this is not an objection in principle to generalisations about society, but rather to the somewhat mechanical way in which the general concepts are handled. A third objection is that to focus on something as abstract as 'the economic factor' or 'the political factor' is not the most fruitful way of approaching the relationships between art and society. Has the sociologist any alternative ? One might stop and ask: what would Marx, Weber, or Durkheim have done ? All three of them were much more interested in history than many sociologists today, and on the analogy of their work on literature, music and religion it seems reasonable to suggest that they would have concentrated on relating types of art to types of society. This approach is surely the one which should be pursued, even though it runs up against two great obstacles, the need for satisfactory typologies of both art and society. Relatively few art-historians and art-critics have been interested in artistic typologies. A significant exception is Heinrich Wolfflin, with
(32) V. KAVOLIS, Artistic Expression. A sociological analysis (Ithaca 1968).

THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART

his famous distinctions between "linear and painterly", between "plane and recession", between "closed and open form", and so on. Another is Eugenio D'Ors, whose idea that the baroque is a recurrent type of art which can be found in East and West, in classical times and in the XXth century, lends itself to sociological interpretation (33). The second obstacle is the lack of a historical sociology, particularly of a sociology of traditional societies. Suppose one were to try to write a book on the sociology of art which tried to correlate types of art with types of society. The section on primitive society and primitive art would not be too difficult, because there is some interesting work by social anthropologists such as Paul Bohannan and Jean Guiart which could be drawn together into a synthesis (34). Again, the section on art in industrial societies since 1800 would not be too difficult to write; art and society have changed spectacularly and in the same parts of the world, so the only problem would be to find plausible explanations of their inter-relations. Francastel's work on impressionism, cubism, modern architecture and social changes is an illustration of what can be done here; so is Fischer on Romanticism. The real problem is how to deal with everything between primitive and industrial, for which the blanket term 'traditional' is often used. One is confronted with one type of society and an enormous variation in art-styles. Most of the world's great artGreek sculpture, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance painting, Japanese woodcuts, Chinese ink-painting, Indian temples, and so onhas been produced in 'traditional' societies. This may be an argument for the autonomy of art, but it may equally well show that sociologists have been using a concept too crude to be useful, and that what is needed is to distinguish types within traditional society. Here lies the value of Jean Duvignaud's recent essay which is built round typologies of art and society, and performs the service of introducing into the sociology of art the typology of traditional societies put forward by the late Georges Gurvitch (35). His types include the following five: i) "Theocratic societies", such as ancient Egypt and the Inca Empire; ii) "Patriarchal communities", such as the societies in which the Homeric poems and the Old Testament were produced; Hi) "City-states", such as Athens and Florence; iv) "Feudal societies", such as Xlllth century France and Xlllth century Japan; v) "Centralised monarchies", such as France under Louis XIV. There are enormous possibilities here, which Duvignaud did not have the space to develop. As in the case of the Marxian model, one wants to ask: what are the mechanics of the connexion between art and society ? Is it direct or indirect ? Does the artist have a
(33) H. WOLFFLIN, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), English trans.: Principles of Art History (New York 1950); E. D'ORS, DU baroque (Paris 1935). (34) P. BOHANNAN, Artist and Critic in an African Society, in M. W. SMITH, The Artist in Tribal Society (London 1961); the whole symposium is extremely relevant to this problem. J. GUIART, The Arts of the South Pacific (Paris/London 1963). (35) J. DuviGNAUD, Sociologie de Vart (Paris 1967). G. GURVITCH, Diterminismes sociaux et liberty humaine (Paris 1955), part iii.

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limited autonomy, or none at all ? Duvignaud implies that society affects style via aesthetic attitudes, and he produces a typology of these, including i) "absolute communion" as in tribal societies, ii) "illustration of daily life" as in XVIIth-century Holland, Hi) "the esoteric" as in Renaissance Italy, iv) "rebellion", and v) "conspicuous consumption". A point against this typology is that it seems to confuse attitudes to art with functions of art. They may well be related, but it makes for clarity to keep them conceptually separate. Another interesting point of Duvignaud's is his development of the concepts 'anomie' and 'marginal man' to discuss problems of creativity. It is the outsider who can see the world in a way which is new for people living in a particular culture, and social change may make his world-view a more relevant one for the future than that incorporated in tradition. It is most easy to see how this theory applies to literature, but it may be relevant to the visual arts as well. At times, like Kavolis, Duvignaud leaves an impression of thinness. This is partly the effect of his book's being a very short one. It is also partly due to the fact that every typology has its pricethe exclusion of something relevant and the consequent danger of circularity. But some typologies are better than others, and in this field one needs a three-way discussion between art critics, sociologists and historians in order to arrive at the types which do the minimum violence to the art and to the societies studied. When there are more case-studies like the ones by Gombrich and Haskell, Meiss and Schapiro the task of constructing types will be that much easier. But then the case-studies are likely to be sharper and more relevant if their authors have reflected on the general hypotheses that their work might verify, falsify or qualify. There is a particular danger at the moment of a split between the sociological and historical approaches, a danger which has been late in arriving because of the underdevelopment of this field, with its consequence that the sociologists have not yet stopped making use of books written by historians. The dang2r is that historians will concentrate on the microsocial history of art and leave the large-scale changes in structure and values out of consideration, while the sociologists discuss the macrosocial but have little to say about typologies of the artist's role or of the patronage system. If this split is avoided, soma credit will be due to a man whose work expressed his constant interest in both the general and the particular, the microsocial and the macrosocial; to Pierre Francastel (36) *.
P E T E R B U R K E

* I should like to thank Professor Thomas Bottomore and the members of his graduate sociology seminar at the University of Sussex for helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.
(36) Evidence of the split: Duvignaud and Kavolis focus on the macrosocial, systems is put forward by J. M. B. EDWARDS in D. L. SILLS (ed.), International Encyclo-

while Gombrich and Haskell discuss the


microsocial. But a typology of patronage

paedia of the Social


p. 452.

Sciences, vol. Ill

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