Lippert on Goddard (2012)

Inter-arts rivalry, otherwise known as the paragone, pertains to all eras and media, as W.J.T. Mitchell demonstrated in his text Iconology of 1986; nevertheless, scholarly examination of rivalry has been a bit of a difficult issue, as its study is sometimes erroneously construed as promotion of hegemony.  Linda Goddard's Æsthetic Rivalries goes a long way to demonstrating why this should not be the case.

The primary goal of Goddard's study is to assess competition, both theoretically as well as actionable, largely between poets or art critics and painters, who were operating in the window of artistic production at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on such figures as Gauguin, Mallarmé and Picasso, among others. Laid out chronologically, the author endeavors to demonstrate the variety and breadth of relationships between artists of diverse textual and visual media through topical case studies of specific ideological competition, which was often evidenced through artistic products. This historic window is aptly chosen to reflect a period when synæsthesia in the arts was in a frenzy, and it allowed the author to chart an important junction in æsthetic debates when painting was shifting with force towards both abstraction and conceptual tenets, which she observes saying that "For many, the margin between these opposing concepts of the 'literary' was narrow and unstable, so that painters had to achieve a delicate balance between representation and abstraction to avoid transgressing in either direction" (115). Conceptually, synæsthesia was a phenomenon whereby artists tended to draw inspiration from a closed circuit of inter-arts references, and generated works and critical responses that were artificially referential, rather than focusing on copying nature, as has been well discussed by Elizabeth Prettejohn.  

Also quite appropriate is the "case study" approach to the issue of artistic rivalry. The history of competition amongst the arts is difficult to study because the motives and circumstances that prompt competitive responses between specific artists or factions of the art world are often the result of nuanced environments. One artist's reasons for inciting a duel are typically quite unique to his/her entourage of mentors, students, critics, viewers and patrons. For example, one might well imagine that Leonardo da Vinci would not have been such a poster-child for the paragone had it not been that, much to his dismay, painting was not yet afforded a position among the heralded and codified list of liberal arts during his time. Because the acknowledgement of rivalry is not just about identifying historic phenomena, but rather is a scholarly approach to the study of how competition has impacted art and related disciplines over time, Goddard's book would benefit from a stronger acknowledgement of this tradition, despite her great facility with this approach. The text tends to be light on pre-1880s primary sources that impact the debate over the hierarchy of the arts at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as secondary sources from scholars who study the paragone in the nineteenth century, including Peter Cooke, George Mras and Alexandra Wettlaufer, to name a few. Whether this is demonstrative of publishing restrictions or the author's methodology is unclear, though she goes further than most in using the appropriate historical term and context. Additionally, Goddard does mention a few luminaries of the debate, such as Leonardo and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and it is worth observing that the long history of inter-arts rivalry makes it virtually impossible to summarize, especially given the current limitations in humanities publishing (9). So, perhaps there was wisdom in the author's approach by not opening this can of worms.

As a study of artistic competition, Goddard demonstrates conceptual mastery of the variables most central to this kind of scholarly inquiry. The scholar of artistic rivalry typically focuses upon such issues as how hierarchies of, and supposed limits for, the arts are developed, expounded, enforced and rejected, as well as how such hierarchies have been tied to those of the senses. A good example may be found in Goddard's exploration of Gauguin's work. Here, she provides solid evidence corroborating Gauguin's abhorrence of many art critics, and reveals how he developed both visual and literary products that were intended to challenge the notion that poetry alone held sway over the ability to capture the much esteemed idée (70, 99), relating to the age-old debate regarding the relative ratio of intellect versus labor in the creation of visual media. Demonstration of her grasp of the issues most seminal to studying artistic competition is also pervasive throughout the text, which is best seen in her repeated acknowledgement of how neoplatonic theory still permeated late nineteenth-century discourse regarding the hierarchy of the senses (54). Additionally, the author is successful in confirming that inter-arts contentiousness was ubiquitous in the culture of both visual and literary fields at this time.

Goddard capably demonstrates the diversity and breadth of rivalry at the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries through exceptionally detailed study of appropriately-selected, primary-source material. Still, at least in the sections on Gauguin, one direction of inquiry seemed under-developed in the discussions of semiotic thought in fin-de-siècle France, although it may have fallen outside of the author's objectives. In her treatment of Gauguin's Noa Noa (1893), the author posits that the artist's references to an Oriental vocabulary, and to the harmonies of the Oceanic language to which he was exposed in Tahiti, were integral to his own literary and painterly products (38, 79). Largely omitted from this chapter is the advent of language studies, and the quest to invent a new 'universal' type of language, which became popular in the 1880s and 90s. For instance, Natasha Staller's work in this area would have been appropriate, (Staller is cited later briefly in the Cubism investigation) (165). 

Regarding the publication format, Æsthetic Rivalries is admirably replete with several dozen beautifully presented color illustrations. Although somewhat difficult to access, being separated from the text, the quality is a commendable feature of Peter Lang's production. It is certain that Goddard's work offers a worthy and notable example of the academic fruitfulness of studying the historic artistic competition that impacted specific artists, theories and trends. Often, art historians, philosophers and scholars from diverse fields tend to study æsthetic theory as though it has operated in a vacuum, as though separate from the central concerns of practicing artists. Æsthetic Rivalries helps to combat this silo effect of academic investigation by offering tangible and specific examinations of how artists from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appreciated no such strict separation of theory and practice, and in fact engaged viscerally and deliberately with the prevailing, if disputed, æsthetic theories of their time.