Art and transgression in Edgar Wind: a study on the conceptual armature and reception of Art and Anarchy (1963)

Abstract

This project's purpose is to study the book Art and Anarchy, that was published in 1963 with a reprint with addenda in 1969, written by Edgar Wind (1900-1971), the German art historian who lived in the United States and later in England, whose work and teaching maintained several intersections with philosophical reflection and whose career is inextricably linked to the Warburg Institute. This book, the result of a cycle of six 30-minute lectures broadcasted by the BBC in 1960, in the annual Reith Lectures, deals with the relationship between art and the anarchic forces of the human imagination, seeking to critically analyze the various causes and settings of modern artistic thought. The work offers a rare opportunity to meet and analyze the views on twentieth century art by an art historian who became famous mainly for his research on the art of the Italian Renaissance and the English portraiture of the 18th Ccentury . Such openness is in fact non-existent or poorly recurrent among scholars of his generation whom mainly occupied themselves on issues relating to the Classical Tradition. The purpose here is to follow and interpret the meanings attributed by the author to the immense historical fractures that occur between the artistic tradition and the turbulent 1960s, in which his interventions on the historic and aesthetic problem of artistic creativity are located. The proposed research consists of the following dimensions: a. In its published version, these lectures are enriched by the author himself through very abundant and extensive notes, which act as a true parallel comment to the oral text, or even as long asides with autonomous intellectual value regarding to the text that serves as their pretext. Given these characteristics, our work will be to submit a comment, at the same time, to the text and the notes of the author. Our comment will aim to (1) analyze the impact and reception of the work, (2) explain to the Portuguese reader numerous implicit references to the text and (3) prepare a comment of second degree, aiming for a critical reflection on its statements and theoretical assumptions, as well as the historical context that raises and conditions them; b. A second purpose of our work is to propose an Introduction to these conferences. In it, the aim will be to situate the analysis of Art and Anarchy under Wind's previous works, in order to assess in which extent these conferences dialogue with the main lines of his thought or offer, instead, a late and relatively isolated excursion in his intellectual biography. c. Attached to the Dissertation, it will be proposed a translation to be published next, along with our commentary, in the Palavra da Arte collection of the Unicamp Publishing House. (AU)