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Hegel's Art History and the Critique of Modernity & Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. . - book review
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2002 by Jonathan Gilmore
Hegel finds the second and highest stage of art's development in Classical Greece. Here, only with sculptures of the human figure--albeit divine figures given human shape--was inward Spirituality revealed in outward sensuous form. In contrast to the symbolic art of the East, in which the form of the pyramids, for example, pointed toward an Other that remained a mystery, Greek sculpture symbolized nothing extraneous, simply itself. In other words, if in Eastern art Spirit's lack of clarity regarding itself was commensurate with only an opaque form of expression, in Greek art Spirit's more lucid knowledge of itself was appropriately expressed in the manifestly intelligible human form: human form was the best image there could be at that moment of the divine.
Hegel believed, however, that this moment of perfect adequacy--between the state of Spirit's knowledge of itself and the means by which it represented itself-was fleeting. In late Greek art, Hegel finds an "air of affliction" suggesting a dim but undeniable sense that there was more to Spirit than what sensuous beauty could express. (3) This leads to the third stage of art history, what Hegel calls the "romantic" (not to be confused with the much later movement of Romanticism). Here, the unity of form and content, or, more specifically, the unity of the Idea and its material shape, is sundered. The Classical form of art attained, Hegel says, "the pinnacle of what illustration by art could achieve"; its sole defect was the defect of art itself: art takes Spirit as its subject matter in only a sensuously concrete form. However, Hegel says, while the Classical period's understanding of Spirit was adequately represented in the bodily shape of a man (corresponding to the way in which Greek gods were the object of "sensuous imagination" alone), the later period of romantic art corresponded to a realization of Spirit (within Christian thought) that can be expressed not in the realm of the natural and sensuous but only in the realm of inward faith and devotion. (4)
In this transition from the Classical to Romantic epochs of art, Hegel discovers the "end of art." This thesis, often misunderstood, is that art at the end of the Classical age had reached its limits insofar as it stood as a cognitive vehicle through which Spirit could know itself. Wyss somewhat misleadingly treats the thesis of the end of art as if it proclaims a falling-off of artistic quality or significance, but this is far from Hegel's view. The end of art is for Hegel only the end of art's capacity to continue to serve as the source of absolute knowledge, being too bound up as it is with material matters to achieve a purely conceptual form. Hegel sees art as unable to offer truth about the world in anything other than sensuous appearance. In the romantic period of "art after the end of art," religion and philosophy, free of the constraints attending to material forms of expression, can best serve as the modes through which we represent our knowledge, subjective and abstract, of ourselves to ourselves. A rt no longer serves as the primary vehicle through which Spirit is self-conscious.
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