A Strong Britain in a Reformed Europe
Review: Hans Sedlmayr’s Art in Crisis
By Franz Pokorny
A friend, an economist from a distant land that a more civilised age would have placed in Asia, once pointed out to me that Joan Robinson (née Maurice) came from a distinguished family of fairly obvious spooks. From the general whose book fired the Dolchstoßlegende, to the intellectual godfather of Christian socialism, to the homosexual uncle who served as Winston Churchill’s PS and patronised the Bloomsbury Group’s lowlights, gens Maurice has an ancient pedigree in gunpowder, treason, and Woke. My friend was perplexed: „Why a group of homosexuals from Cambridge obliterated the Locke-Bentham-Mill complex is out of my understanding“. I can’t help but think the answer is to be found in the playfulness and love of variety inherent to the British character, yet incomprehensible to the continental mind; a whimsy shadowed by a feeling for the impermanence of things, an inner compulsion to annihilate everything that exists and start afresh. A flame of Brexit that the ages shall not extinguish.
This becomes clear when viewing the British character through the eyes of a man who embodied the German disposition like no other. Across the entire width and breadth of the 20th century, Hans Sedlmayr was perhaps the sole individual to whose thought the term totalitarianism might be applied without further qualification. A professor of art history in Vienna and faithful bearer of a torch of German historico-aesthetic theorising passed from Burckhardt to Spengler, Sedlmayr’s magnum opus was a dirge of Mitteleuropean tristesse first published in 1948 as Loss of the Centre and appearing in English a decade later as Art in Crisis to no particular fanfare (its initial American run under Regnery’s imprint sold no more than two hundred and fifty copies). Though the ultramontane Sedlmayr’s warm-cold membership in the Nazi Party (to which his attitude appears to have been that of a sports columnist bemoaning his thirty years chained to the Arsenal) beshadowed his book’s critical and commercial reception, it attracted a niche of influential, albeit not entirely uncritical, admirers beyond his native Austria, not least among them Roger Scruton, whose Aesthetics of Architecture is prefaced by a quotation from the old Viennese Hitlerite. Indeed, Sedlmayr’s swastika’d name, if seldom invoked explicitly, has never wandered far from between the lines of highbrow conservative art criticism, although it is for other reasons that his polemic here interests us.
Sedlmayr’s inner rhythm ticks to a familiar beat of Catholic cultural pessimism; a vernacular which, though not my native tongue, I and no doubt many of J’accuse’s older readers, having come of age in the springtime of tradcath posting on twitter, nevertheless find myself at ease. This is the register of First Things, dark mutterings against the spiritual pollution emanating from a corrupt modern age, a backwards grail quest for the root of the evil, which Sedlmayr, as we shall see, traces to a novel source. This is not to bill to Sedlmayr’s account the obvious blunders made by this school; Art in Crisis is no mere sculpture posting, and he perfunctorily dismisses proto-Conor Lynchian exhortations to build like we used to as hollow classicism, „reactionary and even inhibitory […] at best a form of escapism“; an imposition on the architect of a tedious list of criteria in which, in his own words, the „incalculable form of a true work of art“ is lost. The reconciliation of opposites that characterised old-style Prussian conservatism from Hegel to Ranke is his credo, and the „centre“ he has in mind is that essence which uniquely possesses the capacity to oppose and reconcile: the human person in the image of God. Sedlmayr is also keen to 20th century’s communitarian stirrings and rejects the constitutive binaries laid down by its forethinkers (community vs. the individual, modernity vs. tradition, etc.) as mere sophistry; movements of the same centrifugal forces supposedly awakened by the aggressive individualism and modernism that the proponents of a return to an integral mode of life condemn. A true economist with language, not a single word in Sedlmayr’s polemic is put to waste, and so I will not trouble the reader by reconstructing his thesis in any meaningful depth, for this would be a task too great for this simple feuilleton; one which would only spoil the fun of seeing Sedlmayr lay it down himself in the exhilarating, bowdenesque prose launched at full-throttle from the very first page.
What, then, is the nature of the crisis facing art? We may safely assume that — in the near eighty years since Sedlmayr put pen to paper — a solution has not been forthcoming, and the absence of any serious intellectual defence of modernism, postmodernism, or their less illustrious successors in today’s art criticism (and indeed, the near-disappearance of criticism as an art in itself) suggests the crisis has revved up into a higher gear. Writing when Oswald Spengler’s influence still weighed heavy on the consciousness of the age, and unable to free himself from the prestige that psychology enjoyed at the interwar University of Vienna, Sedlmayr takes for granted that all human history may be reduced to the unfathomable mechanics of man’s stygian drives. This is the crisis’ source; the form it takes is the waning of art as a totalising power at man’s beck and call, a tool through which he may integrate every sphere of life into a coherent and unified harmony. Art performs this function through the identification and solution of a so-called master problem — „the great composite task in which all the arts were employed“. The crisis makes itself apparent in the failure to satisfactorily answer any of the master problems that emerge from the middle of the 18th century onwards, the sole criterion for which, in Sedlmayr’s telling, is the creation of „a thing of such power that it could assert itself to the point of creating a general style for the age“. For Sedlmayr, the paradigmatic example of such a power was the ecclesiastical architecture of the Middle Ages, in which we see the artist, his gaze turned to the heavens, „carrying the image of man high throughout the ages“ — a familiar note of that starry Christian personalism then en vogue amidst Europe’s conservatives.