Two Books about Art History Examine a Discipline in Crisis

“A discipline enters into a state of self-consciousness, writes its own history, and theorizes its practices when something is unresolved,” the New York University art historian Christopher S. Wood, a preeminent scholar of the German Renaissance, writes in his new book, A History of Art History. His observation refers specifically to the first historiographies of art that emerged in 1920s Germany, once art history had been absorbed into the university and fully professionalized as a