Review of Michael Ann Holly's "The Melancholy Art"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

In “The Melancholy Art,” Michael Ann Holly charts an entire constellation of concerns in relation to art-historical (and art-historiographical) writing. Her grasp of philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis is every bit as sophisticated as her grasp of art history (her area of formal academic training). It takes a certain kind of pensiveness and humility to criticize your entire field – for that’s partially what this book sets out to do – with Holly’s active, voracious, but always judicious, interdisciplinarity.

First, a note on the book itself. I ordered the hardback edition directly from Princeton. It has an especially beautiful cover with a close-up of Giovanni Bellini’s “Christ Carrying the Cross.” The book is printed on thick, glossy paper with a generous number of black-and-white reproductions, ranging from Freud’s couch in Vienna to a picture of Reimenschneider’s “Altar of the Holy Blood.” Whoever put the book together was smart in seeing how the format and design of the book could wonderfully sing in tandem with its actual content.

The content is just as beautiful. It’s a collection of five highly interrelated essays, all centering around the intimacy, existential quality, and experience of the aesthetic with an emphasis on how these have been treated in art history writing in the past. At its heart, these essays are meant to, as I said above, criticize in several penetrating ways some contemporary assumptions about art history and the writing of it. Holly argues that art history has an unfortunate inclination toward overt positivism that focuses on analytical reconstruction, and often has a wonderful self-confidence that it can completely and totally represent the work in question, its content, context, and significance; these assumptions will be familiar to anyone familiar with nineteenth-century historiography. 

Holly suggests our art-historical encounter with objects is just as full of melancholy, loss, displacement, and gaps that can never be fully bridged – and, most importantly, that acknowledging this will make for a truer, more authentic historiography. She quotes Frank Ankersmit’s “Sublime Historical Experience”: “How we feel about the past is no less important than what we know about it – probably even more so” (p. 7). The object relations theory of Melanie Klein is used to smartly situate the experience all art historians find themselves in: analyzing and attempting to reconstruct something ( i.e., Klein’s “object”) that is inevitably lost and unable to be reconstructed. 

Above all, I think Holly is concerned with making the writing of art history phenomenologically and existentially rigorous, to reinvigorate it with a kind of élan vital that positivism saps from it, and that only a pensive melancholy can even partially restore. She wants art historians to recognize loss for what it is and for what it means, instead of trying to cheaply paper over it with the meretricious claims of sentimentalism. Above all, art historians must know that their task is an impossible one: that of working toward a goal that can never be fully completed or realize. We will always have something to say about that diptych, or this altarpiece. Meaning abides and never exhausts itself – and this is the source of our melancholy. 

Holly quotes one of Whitney Davis’ articles on Winckelmann, a quote more than deserving of full repeat here, for it sums up the entire spirit of Holly’s project: “The history of art is lost, but art history is still with us; and although art history often attempts to bring the object back to life, finally it is our means of laying it to rest, of putting it in its history and taking it out of our own, where we have witnessed its departure. To have the history of art as history - acknowledging the irreparable loss of the objects – we must give up art history as a bringing-to-life, as denial of departure. If it is not to be pathological, art history must take its leave of its objects, for they have already departed anyway” (p. 21). 

If I have one small criticism of the book, it is that she does not seem to recognize the expansiveness of its implications. I quoted her quoting Frank Ankersmit above, not an art historian but a historiographer, so she knows that these ideas have already been touched upon. Dominick LaCapra, Hayden White, Cathy Caruth, and other historiographers have written on similar topics. However, while acknowledging her intellectual debts, she makes unique contributions of her own, but never applies them outside of art history, when they are extremely applicable. Without ever becoming insular, she keeps the explicit implications for her work within the realm of art history, and the result is a work of undiminished thoughtfulness, rigor, and melancholy in its own right.