| Summary: | This essay reviews Robert Bagley’s intellectual portrait of Max Loehr, one of the founding fathers of the western study of Chinese art. Bagley’s book centers on the prolonged controversy between Loehr and Bernhard Karlgren over the history of ancient Chinese bronzes. Karlgren, an eminent philologist, tried to extract chronological information from a classification of décor motifs, an approach that he and many of his readers considered to be scientific and objective. Failing to detect any pattern of change in his material, he declared that all extant bronzes were made during two or three centuries of artistic stagnation, centuries that merely repeated designs invented in some earlier and more creative period that is unknown to us. Loehr by contrast succeeded in tracing a clear sequence of evolving styles in the same corpus of material. These positions were first staked out in the 1930s; most observers sided with Karlgren until the 1960s, when archaeology confirmed Loehr’s sequence. What makes the controversy interesting and instructive is that the right answer did not come from the approach that to this day strikes most readers as the scientific one, it came from a seemingly subjective and intuitive art-historical analysis. In part Bagley explains this unexpected outcome by showing that science as Karlgren conceived it—a rule-bound and mechanical procedure that excludes intuition and judgment—is a layman’s misconception; in essential ways, he shows, it was Loehr’s approach rather than Karlgren’s that was scientific. At a time when the prestige of the hard sciences continues to inspire attempts to import scientific methods into the humanities, Bagley has illuminating things to say about the real substance of those methods. He also has much to say about artistic invention and intentionality, and he clarifies one of art history’s most constantly used yet most ill-defined concepts, the concept of style, by arguing that it is not an intrinsic property of an object considered in isolation but only a shorthand way of talking about comparisons.
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