P R O B L E M S O F T H E S O C I O L O G Y O F A R T

T H E W O R K O F P I E R R E F R A N C A S T E L
I
LI KE 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 trans-
lated 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 fruit-
fulness.
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 XIX
e
et XX
e
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 (2) Little has been written about Fran-
of European art', is translated in G. S. ME- castel, but an interesting article is S.
TRAUX and F. CROUZET, The nineteenth- PEROTTINO, La notion de structure dans
century world (New York 1963), and a sec- l'ceuvre de Francastel, La Pensie (1967),
tion from his essay on "the destruction of a n 135, pp. 153-164..
plastic space" is translated in W. SYPHER (3) P&S, p. 45; F&L, p. 28. Here and
(ed.), Art History (New York 1963). elsewhere the translations are my own.
Arch, europ. social., (1971). 141-154.
PETER BURKE
art-as-language metaphor is to make it clear that the'innocent eye' is impos-
sible, 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 la figure ; 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 solu-
tion 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 'disanalogies' is M. MOTHERSILL, IS art a
plastique, vision theatrale et signification language ? The Journal of Philosophy, LXII
humaine", repr. in RF, pp. 211 sq. (1965)1 559-572.
(5) On the grammar of art, F&L, p. 144. (6) P&S, p. 7.
The analogy with Barthes and Levi-Strauss (7) A. WARBURG, Sandro Botticellis Ge-
on the languages of clothes, food, and hurt der Venus und Friihling (1893), Italian
kinship is obvious. A discussion of the trans, in his La Rinascita del Paganesimo
142
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART
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) some-
thing '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 cate-
gories 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 expe-
rience 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. PA- turies throughout A&T. Classic expressions
NOFSKY, Die Perspektive als symbolische of the attitudes he attacks are L. MUMFORD,
Form, in Vortrdge der Bibl. Warburg, 1924- Technics and Civilisation (London 1934), and
1925, pp. 258-330 G. CHARBONNIER, Entre- S. GIEDION, Mechanization takes command
tiens avec Claude Li'vi-Strauss (Paris 1961), (New York 1948). For positions similar to
esp. the 5th and 8th interviews. Francastel's, see G. FRIEDMANN, Problemes
(8) Francastel makes his general position humains du machinisme industriel (Paris 1946),
clear in the essay "Technique et esthe- and A. KOYRE, Les philosophes et la raa-
tique", repr. in RF, pp. 58 sq. Detailed chine, Critique, IV (1948),334-333, 610-629.
discussion of the XlXth and XXTh cen- (9) P&S, p. 29.
H3
PETER BURKE
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 discov-
ered 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 inter-
est and belief from the objective to the subjective, from absolute values
to relative ones. The "great adventure of the modern world" is phenomen-
ology, 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 pros-
perity and stability, liberality and good government; in short, that it idea-
lised Medicean Florence. One of the social functions of art is propa-
ganda. Again, he suggested that the tree in Piero della Francesca's Baptism
of Christ symbolised the tree of life. Myths and symbols are the material-
isations 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 criti-
cism 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 art-
historians. 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).
I44
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART
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 art-
history 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 authori-
tarian, 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 develop-
ment 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 counter-
movements 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 techn-
iques ; 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. FRANCAS-
propagande 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 cen-
de Ruskin et les archfelogues, in C. PELLE- tury, P&S, pp. 119 sq.
GRINI (ed.), Venezia nelle letterature moderne
H5
PETER BURKE
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 et les arts, repr. in RF, esp. pp. 384 sq.,
Art et sociologie, repr. in RF, pp. 29 sq. and Un mythe poetique et social du Quattro-
(17) P. FRANCASTEL, Baroque et clas- cento, repr. in RF, pp. 272 sq.; and A. VARA-
sique, Annales, XII (1957), 222-207. GNAC, Civilisation traditionnelle et genres de
(18) P. FRANCASTEL, Girardon (Paris vie (Paris 1948).
1928); L'humanisme roman, op. cit. pp. 143 sq. (20) This case is argued in the essay,
(19) See the essays La Contre-Relorme Art et histoire, repr. in RF, pp. 73 sq.
146
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART
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 dis-
agreements with other scholars too seriously. He always tended to over-
estimate 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 more generous; see RF, p. 82. He attacked
in A&T, pp. 137-138. Barthes (RF, pp. 75 sq) though Barthes'
(22) See the essay, Imagination et realite emphasis on structure and on myth is
dans l'architecture civile du Quattrocento, much like Francastel's. See R. BARTHES,
repr. in RF, pp. 290 sq. Mythologies (Paris 1957), and Elements de
(23) Francastel discovered Lukacs late, simiologie (Paris 1964), trans, as Elements
and, when he had actually read him, was of Semiology (London 1967).
147
PETER BURKE
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 anthro-
pology, 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 subject-
matter 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 Renais-
sance for example. He could be a sharp critic of the work of his colleagues
(24) For Febvre's conception of art his- McLuhan, in La religion de Rabelais (Paris
tory see his Combats pour l'histoire
%
(Paris 1942), PP. 461 sq. His views are them-
1965), pp. 295 sq. selves discussed in Z. BARBU, Problems of
(25) A&T, pp. 123 sq. FEBVRE discuss- historical psychology (London i960), pp. 21 sq.
ed the history of perception, long before
I48
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART
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, (27) A&T, p. 255 denounces Antal and
p. 77. Hauser.
149
PETER BURKE
is part of a changing world-view. On account of this interest in generalisa-
tion 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 sociol-
ogists (C. White and H. White, for example). These studies do not
usually attempt to generalise (29).
(28) P. FRANCASTEL, Problemes de la guard Artist (Chicago 1965); H. C. WHITE
sociologie de 1'art, in G. GURVITCH, Traite" and C. A. WHITE, Canvases and careers
de sociologie (Paris i960). (New York 1965), F. HARTT, Art and Free-
(29) M. GRIFF, The commercial artist, dom in Quattrocento Florence, in L. F. SAN-
in M. R. STEIN, A. J. VIDICH, and D. M. DLER, Essays in memory of Karl Lehmann
WHITE, Identity and Anxiety (Glencoe (New York 1964); F. HASKELL, Patrons and
i960); M. GRIFF, Conflicts of the Artist in Painters (London 1963); E. H. GOM-
Mass Society, Diogenes, XLVI (1964), 54-68; BRICH, The Early Medici as Patrons of Art,
B. ROSENBERG and N. FLIEGEL, The Van- repr, in his Norm and Form (London 1966);
THE SOCIOLOGY OF ART
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 frag-
mentary 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 move-
ment 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 reaction-
ary, 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 emphas-
ises the mediating role of world-views, and his detailed discussion of the
M. MEISS, Painting in Florence and Siena (Cambridge, Mass., 1939).
after the Black Death (Princeton 1951); (30) E. FISCHER, Von der Notviendigkeit
G. PELLES, Art Artists and Society (Engle- der Kunst (Dresden 1959), English trans.:
wood Cliffs 1963); and, among his other Harmondsworth 1963, esp. pp. 118, 147.
articles, M. SCHAPIRO, The Sculpture of (31) F. ANTAL, Florentine Painting and
Souillac, in W. R. W. Koehler, Medieval its Social Background (London 1947), esp.
Studies in Memory of A. Kingley Porter 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 anthropol-
ogists 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 specula-
tion. 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 remote-
ness 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 cross-
cultural 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 pur-
sued, even though it runs up against two great obstacles, the need for satis-
factory 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 anthropolo-
gists such as Paul Bohannan and Jean Guiart which could be drawn togeth-
er 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, Renaiss-
ance painting, Japanese woodcuts, Chinese ink-painting, Indian tem-
ples, 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 typol-
ogies 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 Duvi-
gnaud 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 be-
tween art and society ? Is it direct or indirect ? Does the artist have a
(33) H. WOLFFLIN, Kunstgeschichtliche whole symposium is extremely relevant to
Grundbegriffe (1915), English trans.: Prin- this problem. J. GUIART, The Arts of the
ciples of Art History (New York 1950); South Pacific (Paris/London 1963).
E. D' ORS, DU baroque (Paris 1935). (35) J. DuviGNAUD, Sociologie de Vart
(34) P. BOHANNAN, Artist and Critic in (Paris 1967). G. GURVITCH, Ditermi-
an African Society, in M. W. SMITH, The nismes sociaux et liberty humaine (Paris 1955),
Artist in Tribal Society (London 1961); the part iii.
153
PETER BURKE
limited autonomy, or none at all ? Duvignaud implies that society affects
style via aesthetic attitudes, and he produces a typology of these, includ-
ing 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 con-
ceptually separate. Another interesting point of Duvignaud's is his devel-
opment 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 sociolo-
gists 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 systems is put forward by J. M. B. EDWARDS
and Kavolis focus on the macrosocial, in D. L. SILLS (ed.), International Encyclo-
while Gombrich and Haskell discuss the paedia of the Social Sciences, vol. Ill
microsocial. But a typology of patronage p. 452.