232
PARTISAN REVIEW
allowed for no strong sense of intellectual property and individual
originality. The basic change occurs in the Renaissance, when famous
masters like Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian begin to outshine their
patrons, becoming great lords themselves. Mr. Hauser perceives in
Michelangelo "the first example of the modern, lonely, demoniacally
impelled artist . . . who feels a deep sense of responsibility toward his
gifts and sees a higher and superhuman power in his own artistic
genius." Genius, both as cult and idea, is a fundamentally new element
in the valuation of art; implicit in it is the notion that "the work of
art is the creation of an autocratic personality, that this personality
transcends tradition, theory and rules, even the work itself, being richer
and deeper than the work and impossible to express adequately within
any objective form." From this notion it is but a step-though the
Renaissance never made this step-to the notion of the misunderstood
genius and the appeal to posterity against the verdict of the contempor–
ary world. The idea of the autonomy of art parallels the idea of genius,
for it gives expression in an objective manner, that is from the stand–
point of the work, to what is expressed subjectively, from the stand–
point of the artist, in his claim to be a uniquely creative person. But
there is far more content than that in the idea of the autonomy of art.
Indeed, I am conscious of simplifying Mr. Hauser's exploration of this
and other themes, which take him into shifts and modulations of meaning
that depend on elaborate excursions into social and economic history.
His method enforces the constant recourse to the means of analysis
furnished by sociology and psychology, and the use of such means
are indispensable to the fulfillment of his purpose. There are certain
problems and attitudes in art, not open to the direct "intrinsic" ap–
proach, which become accessible through the detour of the approach
from without. An instance of this sort of problem is aestheticism, more
specifically the attitude of
['art pour ['art,
which Mr. Hauser interprets
as being "partIy the expression of the division of labor which advances
hand in hand with industrialization, and partIy the bulwark of art
against the danger of being swallowed up by industrialized and
mechanized life.
It
signifies, on the one hand, the rationalization, disen–
chantment and contraction of art, but simultaneously the attempt to
preserve its individual quality and spontaneity, in spite of the universal
mechanization of life."
Mr. Hauser is quite aware of the limitations of his method. He
knows very well that artistic quality cannot be explained sociologically,
nor does he offer such explanations. And time and again he asserts that
artistic progress-in the sense of movement, change and innovation-
