The Mystery of Art History: Patocka and Ingarden

Abstract

To come up with a satisfactory explanation for the gradual shifts between artistic styles and eras in art and architecture would be like finding the holy grail of art history. Winckelmann, Riegl, Wolfflin, and Semper, for example, attempted to go beyond simple description of composition and theme in art, suggesting, instead, that changes in style could be explained by means of general principles. This step transformed art history from simple expertise into genuine scholarship. In his articles from the 1960s Jan Patocka sketched his own phenomenological conception of art history. He did so by frequent reference to Hegel and Heidegger. Nevertheless, Patocka's categorisation of art into periods of imitation and periods of style seems incompatible with his other categorisation of art history into the artistic and the aesthetic era. Moreover, his essays leave one question unanswered - namely, whether the difference between any two periods originates exclusively from various interpretations and cultural contexts or rather from more profound ontological reasons. In this article, I suggest that the critical reception of Ingarden's aesthetics in Patocka's essays from the 1970s deals with some of the problems of his previous conceptions of artistic styles and eras.