James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

12.Susanne Langer And Art Theory

12. Susanne Langer and Art Theory. Response to Jason Kuo, who asked about my occasional references to the writings of Suzanne Langer.

Susanne Langer. I discovered her while at the Freer, 1950-51--or shortly after, can't remember how--and read Philosophy in a New Key and later Feeling and Form with a feeling of having found a theory of art and artistic expression that made sense more than any other I'd read before. She got her ideas of non-discursive expression from her teacher Ernst Cassirer, but I never went back and read him. If Loehr liked to quote Langer, as you point out, it's because he got it from me. (He was widely read in German writers on art, not so much on English-language ones.) Rereading parts of Langer recently (I quoted her in my study of ptgs I think were done for women in Ming-Qing times) I still find it moving, sharp, right. If she doesn't get much attention in writings on art these days, as you suggest, it's to the loss of the writers: I don't know any more coherent & convincing proposal for what artistic expression is all about and how it works. But of course too many people now don't want to operate with a concept of art vs. non-art, or artistic experience and expression--they class all that with fin-de-siecle aestheticism and art-for-art's sake and Walter Pater (burning with a pure gemlike flame) and dismiss it from serious consideration. (That, by the way, is my formulation; few of them know anything about Pater etc.)

I read a lot on art theory (although never so widely, or such abstruse writings, as John Hay for instance) in those early years; also on modern and contemporary Western art, liking especially Harold Rosenberg. Took two courses on aesthetics while at U. Mich., one given by visitor from UCLA named Abraham Kaplan, who used John Dewey's Art as Experience as main text. Kaplan's way of dealing with the problem of value in art seemed convincing, and I used to quote it sometimes in classes. I'm ashamed to say that my reading in later years hasn't been so much in art theory, or cultural theory more generally, although I read Foucault and tried some of the other French theory people during the years at Berkeley, and read about semiotics because that seemed useful to art historians--but even there, I found intelligible accounts such as Jonathan Culler's most convincing (Svetlana reported the view of herself and more advanced colleagues that Culler made it all "too neat.") I read some of Richard Wolheim, whom I got to know (he was in the UCB Philosophy Dept. in his late years). Baxandall, of course, I listened to and talked with and read with pleasure and admiration, and have used and quoted in various ways; but he's something else.

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