The Art History Newsletter

Next up in our CAA Barr Award coverage, a consideration of Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance: It delivers 484 pages of catalogue-raisonné detail, scholarship-packed analysis, and long-overdue re-evaluation of this neglected artist. It also overstates its case. Nearly every essay protests Gossart’s low reputation and minimizes his failings. “One of the most innovative and versatile artists working in the sixteenth century”; “the revolutionary nature of his art.” In their foreword, Thomas Campbell and Nicholas Penny compare him with Jan van Eyck, but alas Gossart suffers by this comparison, among others. For every stunning Young Princess (1530) there’s a Holy Family (1510), in which the Christ Child’s arm rests on his mother’s breast as if it were a Barcalounger, or a Virgin and Child (1532), where the boy has apparently impaled his genitals and had half his face transplanted to the other side by an early plastic surgeon. Countless Gossart heads seem to have found themselves on the wrong end of a chunk of falling masonry. Blessedly, the catalogue entries take a more nuanced view of the artist, calling him out on many an awkward patch of paint. Overenthusiasm isn’t such a sin anyway, and I’ll treasure this catalogue for some time to come. Be sure to read Homa Nasab’s interview with curator Maryan Ainsworth in ARTINFO and Andrew Morrall’s take in caa.reviews ($) (“It will become the standard reference work on the artist and the starting point of all future research”).

Also in caa.reviews, Katherine Manthorne considers ($) Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject:

[This book is Buick's] anticipated full-length examination of this sculptor’s career. It is a thoughtful, groundbreaking study that should be a must-read for anyone interested in art of the United States and in a nuanced treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. Buick’s book challenges late twentieth-century identity politics of current art history that maddeningly continue to insist that black or Native American or women artists reproduce their race and gender in their work … Buick situates her subject within the culture that shaped and instructed her in the cultures of “True Womanhood” and of “Sentiment.” But most of all, she reinserts her into the context of nineteenth-century American art, devoid of any hyphenated qualifier….

Contained within Buick’s reinterpretation of Lewis is a critique of, or at least a dialogue with, the field of art history itself … This is something that is definitely missing these days; the lively debates and disputes that used to pepper conferences and Letters to the Editors are now replaced with more politically correct and neutral comments … I find this willingness to take on one’s predecessors a refreshing breath of fresh air. Art historians need to recapture some of this give and take, as we shape the field for a new century and a new generation of scholars.

Caa.reviews offers a welcome if belated review ($) of Peter Stewart’s 2008 book The Social History of Roman Art. Brenda Longfellow writes:

In an innovative twist, Peter Stewart embeds a summary of social-historical scholarship into his book on the functions and reception of Roman art … Each chapter focuses on a theme that has received much scholarly attention: artists and workshops, domestic and funerary art, portraiture, political and religious art, and art produced in the provinces…. Stewart advocates focusing on the immediate context of art produced in the provinces and points out that imagery does not always travel from the center to the periphery. New styles, whether found in the provinces or introduced during later time periods, indicate different aesthetic tastes, expectations, purposes, and modes of viewing and should be judged on their own terms, not as failures to meet earlier standards or standards in other parts of the empire…. Accessible to advanced students and scholars in related fields, The Social History of Roman Art challenges many long-held assumptions and inspires the reader to consider new avenues of inquiry.

Meanwhile Sheila Dillon has reviewed Jane Fejfer’s Roman Portraits in Context, also from 2008:

[P]ortrait statues and busts were arguably one of the most important and prominent forms of Roman public art and played a crucial role in constructing and communicating Roman social and political identity. Fejfer’s aim is to focus on the reconstruction of the socio-historical and physical contexts of portraits, rather than on more traditional scholarly concerns of portrait typology, chronology, and stylistic development, although these topics are dealt with as well … Fejfer has assimilated and summarizes a tremendous amount of secondary literature; while this avalanche of data can sometimes overwhelm the reader, there is a great deal here that is new and interesting. Even those whose research specialization is Roman portraiture will learn a lot from Fejfer’s book…. The material is endlessly fascinating and visually engaging, and the many new and provocative observations and interpretations contained in this study should provide fruitful avenues for research in Roman—and Greek—portraiture for many years to come.

Wendy A. Grossman. Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens. Washington DC: International Art and Artists, 2009. 184 pp.; 23 color ills.; 259 b/w. $39.95

Wendy A. Grossman’s thoroughly researched and lucidly written exhibition catalog Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens effectively reveals the process “by which African objects, formerly considered ethnographic specimens, came to be perceived as Modern art in the West” (XII). Photography and Man Ray are both at the center of this process, and given the wide range of interest which converges in the catalog, it will be of great interest to a variety of readers. At the core of the catalog is the argument that the photographs by Man Ray and other photographers of African art objects from the early twentieth century are anything but neutral. Grossman demonstrates that these photographs, in fact, not only serve to elevate the objects photographed from the status of ethnographic artifact to art object, but also to incorporate elements of those objects into the aesthetic and conceptual discourses of Modernism.

One of the most impressive aspects of the catalog is the way in which it is positioned to appeal to a spectrum of readers. For scholars of Man Ray or Modernist Primitivism it is required reading, offering exciting new research into little-explored aspects of these fields. For students of these topics or those with casual interest, Grossman provides concise contextual histories near the beginnings of most chapters which serve to ground the reader in the topic at hand. Several sidebars serve to illuminate aspects of the project not directly explored in the text proper, such as Charles Sheeler’s photographic album of the John Quinn collection, and Man Ray’s cover image for Henry Crowder’s book Henri Music which featured a photomontage of African objects. A “Concordance of African Objects” follows main text, providing substantial context on the African objects themselves and adding yet another dimension to the catalog.

The catalog is organized thematically and largely chronologically, with the first two chapters discussing the relationships between American modernism and African art, and the context for Man Ray’s interest in “primitivism” in his early career. In the following chapters, specific episodes of Man Ray’s work involving African art are discussed in detail. Underlying much of Grossman’s analysis is the contention that the production of meaning in Man Ray’s photographs is based more on their context than any other factor. Given that Man Ray’s work was visible in such a variety of contexts, and to a variety of audiences, this important point is often absent in analyses of his photographs, as Grossman points out.

In her final chapter, Grossman discusses several of Man Ray’s fashion photographs that contain African objects. Here she makes a compelling case for Man Ray’s work as a vital link between the Modernist Primitivism of the avant-garde and trends in fashion and illustration that make use of African art. Others have noted that this final chapter is perhaps less resolved than the others, and may seem a surprising choice with which to end the catalog[1]. I however tend to agree with some that Grossman’s last chapter effectively opens up the topic to further investigation either by Grossman or another scholar.[2]

[1] Rebecca Keegan. “Wendy Grossman, ‘Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens’”. H-Net Reviews. April 2010. Web. 17 December 2011.

[2] Elizabeth Harney, “Wendy A Grossman, ‘Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens’; Maureen Murray, ‘De l’imaginaire au museé: Les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931-2006)’; Peter Stepan, ‘Picasso’s Collection of African and Oceanic Art’”. The Art Bulletin. Vol XCIII, no. 3. Sep 2011, 381.

It’s awards season again. CAA’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Charles Rufus Morey prizes may not be as ballyhooed as the Oscars but they are coveted by members of the American art history academy. This week I begin examining the finalists for this year’s Barr Award, which is awarded to museum catalogues published between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011:

• Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance; the Complete Works (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010)

• Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley G. Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2010)

• Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010)

First up: Imagining the Past in France. If you are feeling sentimental about the fate of the book, in this age of bookstore bankruptcies, digital competition, and limited attention-spans, then take heart. This catalogue will whisk you to an era when the book mattered greatly to its public and received the attentions of top artists. In her introductory essay, Morrison paints a touching portrait of those craftsmen, who struggled to adapt the religious illuminated manuscript to the secular topics increasingly prized by their customers. At first, they amusingly tried to cram complex narratives into drop-caps (“historiated initials”). This had worked with well-known Bible scenes, which can indicated synecdochally, but good luck with the War between Antiochus and Ptolemy.

Four excellent thematic essays follow Morrison’s, then a long series of detailed object entries. I most enjoyed Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s essay, which asks why the aristocratic public demanded secular histories in this moment. She identifies various ideological ends to which history was put, but also finds ways in which books slipped out from underneath and even subverted those ends:

The French aristocracy, no longer able to impose its needs and concerns in the governance of the realm, contributed to the dominant ideology itw own defeated discourse, achieving on a literary level the success that eluded it on the political … It is, perhaps, one of the finer ironies in the history of medieval historiography that the original quest involved in the French aristocracy’s romancing of the past should issue, ultimately, not in an idyll of a lost age but in a new vision of the French nation.

The catalogue is copiously illustrated in color, but the image quality being only average, its greatest strength is its prose, which breaks scholarly ground and addresses the general reader. It is particularly strong on the issue of word-image interaction, which seems increasingly relevant in our age that mixes the two so promiscuously, on- and offline.

[See also this review (pdf) by Mark Cruse, and critic Christopher Knight's review of the exhibition.]

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan

The National Gallery, London, 9 November 2011 – 5 February 2012

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

Tate Modern, London, 6 October 2011 – 8 January 2012

Two great exhibitions currently taking place in London, Leonardo Da Vinci: Court Painter at Milan at The National Gallery (until 5 February 2012) and Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern (until 8 January 2012), offer a telescopic opportunity to consider how artistic concerns in Western culture have (and have not) shifted in the last half millennium. Though the artists are from entirely different eras, these exhibitions share at least two common themes: the primacy of the artistic process, and the exploration of artistic illusions. Where Leonardo’s process is explored through careful presentation of his drawings alongside his paintings, Richter’s process is made explicit in the wall texts that accompany the exhibition. Some of Leonardo’s greatest innovations were his careful studies of nature and the lifelike illusionism of his paintings. Richter’s work on the other hand points to the false nature of illusions, and questions the authority of representation.

The Leonardo exhibition is small and very rich. Each room is dedicated to one or two Leonardo paintings alongside related drawings and works by his followers.  The first room focuses on Leonardo’ Portrait of a Young Man (The Musician) of 1486-7, and frames Leonardo’s innovations in easy-to-grasp terms: he was one of the first artists to break out of the standard profile portrait formula dominant in 15th century portraiture. The Musician has the quality of a film still, as if frozen in some very subtle motion. The nearby Portrait of a Young Man from 1490-1 by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio sets up the theme of using Leonardo’s followers’ works as foils to the master, and that strategy works best here. This comparison heavily favors Leonardo, as his portrait has a sense of liveliness absent in Boltraffio’s picture. However, in some works which appear later in the exhibition, particularly some of the drawings in the room dedicated to the Virgin(s) of the Rocks, Boltraffio’s work is at times quite masterful.

Some of the most celebrated portraits by Leonardo come in the next room, where the Portrait of a Woman (The Belle Ferrioniere), c. 1494, and the Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), c. 1490, are arranged to vie for the viewers’ attention. That the cult of feminine beauty is still so dominant in contemporary culture surely helps these two pictures resonate with viewers. The crowds of visitors gathered in front of these women were practically impassible. In this case, one’s patience is indeed rewarded, as both of these pictures are exquisitely beautiful, with enough mystery to hold one’s attention for long periods. Despite the explanations offered for the awkwardly tense ermine held by Cecilia Gallerani, it just looks unsettling, particularly juxtaposed with the sitter’s delicate expression. The Belle Ferrioniere, however, unnerves you with her eyes. Certainly she is posed, and seems aware of the fact that she is being observed. Yet some clever, defining action appears to be taking form in her head, and we are left to imagine what it might be.

Focusing on Leonardo’s interest in the human anatomy, his unfinished Saint Jerome from c. 1490 is the centerpiece of the following room, with a dozen or so drawings that demonstrate Leonardo’s explorations of the human body. The Saint Jerome is a pleasant surprise simply because of how easy it is to see in this exhibition. At the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Saint Jerome typically hangs in small alcove which is dimly and unevenly lit. It is refreshing to see the work so beautifully displayed in The National Gallery, a rare presentation indeed, given how infrequently Leonardo’s work are lent out.

One little remarked upon advantage of this exhibition is the opportunity to see many of the Leonardo’s drawings from the British Royal Collection in the context of the artist’s practice. In this the case, the curatorial implication is that studies such as those hanging in these room are part of the process of developing paintings, like the one Saint Jerome was en route to becoming. Indeed, virtually all of the drawings by Leonardo in the exhibition are arranged to a provide a sense of the artist’s process, regardless of how tenuous the connection may be between the actual paintings and drawings exhibited in any given room.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the opportunity to view together for the first time both versions of the Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, dating from c.1485 and c. 1508. The earlier Louvre version is presented first, and its dark, mysterious presence is reinforced by the brightness and bolder coloring of the later National Gallery version. Many viewers prefer the Louvre version. It was painted first, and is generally accepted as more purely representative of Leonardo’s concetto. No doubt the sense of mystery that surrounds the Louvre picture is one source of its greater appeal. While it is of course a remarkable painting, I have to take the perhaps unpopular position the National Gallery version provides a better viewing experience in the context of this exhibition. The recent cleaning and restoration of this painting undoubtedly means that in its present state, it creates a viewing experience closer to the artist’s original intent than that of the Louvre version. Yes, the Louvre painting has had a life of its own beyond the grasp of Leonardo, and this history is presumably what the Louvre wants to preserve by leaving the picture in its present state. Yet next to (or across from) the Louvre painting, the National Gallery picture is gloriously crisp, exquisitely detailed, intensely colorful, and radiantly present. The Louvre picture is equally luscious, but heavily yellowed and desaturated. In fact, the stunning success of the National Gallery’s refurbishment hints at the possibilities that lie beneath the grimy surface of the Louvre painting.

The curatorial hand is perhaps at its strongest in the following room, where the painting known as the Virgin and Child (The Madonna Litta) c. 1495, is the focus. To its left hangs a beautiful Leonardo drawing of a woman’s head in practically, though not precisely, the same pose as the Madonna Litta.  The drawing has the effect of making the Madonna of the painting look rather stiff and tired. To the right of the painting, a drawing by Bolraffio of the Christ Child greedily suckling his mother’s breast looks exactly like the version of the child in the painting. There is no conclusion from the way the visual evidence is presented other than the suggestion that the Madonna Litta is in fact not by Leonardo.

The theme of attribution follows the viewer into the next room, where the recently authenticated Christ as Salvator Mundi, c.1499,  hangs, along with several drawings, the Virgin and Child (The Madonna of the Yarnwinder), c.1499, and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (The Burlington House Cartoon), c.1500. In these last two rooms, the question of attribution, which in the case of the Salvator Mundi has been discussed widely in the media, has the potential to distract from pictures themselves. While the top portion of the Salvator Mundi seems remote and distracted, particularly the face of Christ (for which explanations have been offered), the bottom half is exquisite. Christ’s hands are the stars of this picture, both the elegantly shaded right hand in the act of blessing, and the left hand partially obscured by the deservedly much-discussed crystal orb.

Turning to the right, viewers find themselves faced with the large drawing known as The Burlington House Cartoon. Another one of Leonardo’s unfinished works, this one has the distinction of having been exhibited to large, adoring crowds during the artist’s lifetime. It is this aspect of the historical Leonardo that seems to unite his contemporaries with a twenty-first century audience. As the Salvator Mundi attests, Leonardo isn’t done yet. His oeuvre is a work in progress. Hence there is the pervasive sense that despite what we know about this great artist, there are things beyond our grasp which may or may or be made clear in the future.

One gets the sense from the timing and length of the Leonardo exhibition, the ticket price, and the lack of any special accommodation for the massive crowds, that The National Gallery did not foresee the frenetic popularity surrounding the exhibition. The exhibition is overcrowded, making it difficult to actually view the works on display while one is pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with other viewers. Given the institution’s dedication to public service and education, it would not be out of the question to expect some kind of special accommodation for the enormous number of people who otherwise would not get to see the show. I feel very lucky to have been able to see this exhibition, and I hope that The National Gallery could find a way to share this extremely rare opportunity with a wider audience. Of course any show of this nature is going to be crowded, but this one seemed to set a new standard.

While Leonardo Da Vinci: Court Painter at Milan focuses on a small portion of the artist’s career, Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern follows the stages of the artist’s career (thus far) chronologically. Whereas Leonardo is presented and understood as remarkably innovative, indeed practically without precedent, Richter looks to have spent much of his career absorbing the influences of, and reacting to, earlier artists and styles.

The topics around which the fourteen rooms are arranged vary from Richter’s rejection of Abstract Expressionism (though the specific term is avoided), to his interest in the constructed nature of landscape, to his attempts to address the intersections of political and personal history. Over one hundred works are presented in the well-lit, evenly spaced galleries, creating a refreshingly comfortable viewing experience.

Oscillating between the extremes of painterly photo-realism and pure abstraction, Richter’s oeuvre is united by themes of representation and history, or art history. One aspect of Richter’s delicately painterly images drawn from photographs is to question photography’s claim to any sort of truth. They often succeed in stealing back the authority of representation from photography itself. The wall texts emphasize the artist’s process, describing his motivations and techniques in any given phase of his career. In Richter’s case, the wall labels function as the drawings did for Leonardo, creating an overall sense of what the artist was trying to achieve and helping viewers identify with him.

Some of the most simply beautiful paintings by Richter are his large seascapes, such as Seascape (Cloudy) from 1969. One is confronted not only with an elegantly modeled surface, but also with the sense of viewing something much bigger than oneself. The deliberate painterliness of the otherwise precise pictures builds enough visual tension to open the picture to concerns outside of the raw beauty of nature and the viewer’s place in the vast openness. Here, wall texts explain Richter’s large seascapes as his attempt to deal with Romanticism, something about which the artist has serious critiques, but nonetheless can’t seem to write off.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example of Richter’s practice of incorporating elements drawn from other artists into his works is his 1973 repainting of Titian’s Annunciation of 1535, housed at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. The re-presentation is largely faithful, save for the textured softness which for many has become Richter’s trademark. Up close, Richter’s Annunciation looks almost abstract, as pools of color spill into one another. From across the room the picture glows, taking on a cinematic quality and suggesting the sort of mysterious spirituality one imagines that Titian sought to evoke in his own viewers.

On the next wall in the same room hang three large paintings of clouds dating from 1970. Each is colorful, delicate, and comfortable in its status as a painting. At this point in the show the viewer is tempted is to find comparative examples from the history of art in order to explain the cloud paintings. Wall texts help direct viewers toward Dutch landscape painting, but given Richter’s interest in photography I couldn’t help but think of Edward Steichen’s Equivalents series, an early twentieth century attempt to make photographs which would perceived as Art.

Richter’s purely abstract paintings (such as Abstract Painting, 1977) stand out in his oeuvre for his acidic use of color, which at times is quite jarring. These are certainly the loudest of Richter’s works, and they underlie his career-long interest in the tension between abstraction and representation. One curatorial curiosity of this exhibition was the placement of one or two small pictures of flowers (for example, Flowers, 1977) in rooms filled with large abstract paintings. Rather than provide a meaningful counterpoint, they serve to confuse the viewer’s understanding of the curatorial presentation, and no explanation is offered.

Both the Richter show and the Leonardo show continue with additional displays after they appear to have ended. In the case of The National Gallery, Leonardo’s fresco of The Last Supper from the convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, c.1478, is the subject of the additional room (which one finds on the first floor of the main building, entirely separated from the rest of the exhibition). Several drawings from Her Majesty The Queen’s collection set up the viewer for Giampietrino’s contemporary full-scale copy of the work from 1520, on loan from The Royal Academy of Art, London. The awkwardness of the placement of this final room is quickly forgotten, given the power of the works on display. In the case of the Richter exhibition, a final exhibition room appears after exiting through the café and gift shop, and it indeed seems like an afterthought.

Richter has been so successful at absorbing and re-presenting so many different styles that most viewers will find something intriguing on offer at the Tate Modern. Furthermore, viewers should find it easy to step into the artist’s shoes and re-imagine his process. That is, of course, a central source of fascination with Leonardo’s drawings: the opportunity to try and see his mind at work. His finished paintings, of which there are precious few, display his mastery of unsettling illusions, the kinds of illusions that Richter would deliberately deconstruct by painting in a way that is simultaneously photorealistic and painterly. The Richter exhibition is an utterly pleasant experience, with a well-paced presentation and none of the madness surrounding the National Gallery exhibition. The Leonardo show is somewhat of an exercise in patience. Yet the works on display are so rarely viewed in this sort of context, and so fundamentally worth viewing, that one’s patience is indeed greatly rewarded.

An art magazine recently commissioned me to report an article on “global art history,” i.e. Western art historians trying to get the discipline to look outside the West more often. In the end, the magazine and I couldn’t get the article into a form we were both happy with — an indication perhaps of how sticky and controversial a topic this is — so I’m publishing it here in the Newsletter instead:

———

A Chinese artist in the thirteenth century tasked with decorating a traveling coffer happily borrowed his composition from a Middle Eastern book binding, we learn in the opening minutes of “Art Through Time: A Global View”—the public-television series assembled recently by a hundred leading art historians from MoMA chief curator John Elderfield to Asia Society director Vishakha N. Desai. Artistic borrowing is common; what’s striking is how far “Art Through Time” is willing to stray outside Western art history. In most such surveys, everything is seen through a Western lens—African sculpture matters only insofar as it influenced Picasso, for example.

Globalizing art history is “the most urgent task now facing art historians,” says David Carrier, professor at Case Western Reserve University. “Far and away the most pressing problem facing the discipline is the prospect of world art history,” says James Elkins of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says global art history is now an obsession of his and he believes that its positive influence can already be seen in museums. “The Guggenheim now has a curator of Asian art, there are now more museums looking at Latin American art, going beyond obvious figures like Kahlo. The Rubin Museum just did a show comparing Christian and Buddhist icons. There’s a New York Public Library show bringing together works from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”

Art history has moved beyond its blatantly Eurocentric, colonialist origins, when all non-Western art was considered “primitive”—if it was considered at all—but scholars say that serious problems remain. They note that Intro to Art History textbooks may now boast chapters on, say, “Monumental Olmec Sculpture” and “The Buddhist Temples of Korea,” but those make little impact alongside the books’ central narratives, which as always celebrate the long march of Western art from the Greek kouros to Jeff Koons. A recently published modern-art textbook scarcely ventured outside the West at all.

Why are so many art historians now concerned with overcoming the field’s Eurocentrism? Partha Mitter, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, credits globalization: “The world is coming much closer. People like me are traveling all over, living abroad. And with things like Facebook, there’s lots more conversations between parts of the world.” Kitty Zijlmans, a professor at Leiden University in The Netherlands, believes the biggest factor has been the internationalization of the contemporary art world, but also points to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led many to wonder “what words like East and West really mean,” and 9/11, which triggered debates over concepts like “The Islamic World” and “The West.” Mitter also asserts that the wave of decolonization that culminated in America leaving Vietnam inspired a generation of scholars to question “the fact that Western values had been assumed to be universal, global values.” Other people argue that art history simply won’t be complete until it can explain all the world’s art.

Global art history is still very much a work in progress; a unified theory of world art has proved particularly elusive. (Few even agree on the right name for such a project, notes James Elkins.) Potential globalizers lack answers to many basic questions: How is non-Western art to be categorized – by country, by region, by religion? Is there such a thing as “African” art, for example? How do we decide what is worth studying outside the West without inflicting Western bias? What do we make of objects in cultures that lack a concept of art? Is Western art theory – devised to explain Western art – applicable outside the West, and if not, what is?

“We can’t just assume we can take our hammer to every nail; we need to revise our discipline using new frameworks,” responds Kitty Zijlmans to the latter question. This is lucky, she says. “It gives us another impetus to enrich the field.” Art history typically charts art’s “progress,” in mastering perspective for example, and traces the influence of “centers” such as Renaissance Florence upon “peripheries.” Partha Mitter says we need to “de-center” art history, evaluating each place and time period on its own terms. Such revisionism won’t happen overnight, he says. “We can’t dismantle everything immediately; we don’t want to lose the accomplishments of art history.”

We’ll never be able to write a single history of art, says David Carrier. Histories require causation – “Hokusai painted The Great Wave in Western perspective after seeing Renaissance Dutch prints in a friend’s collection” – but the world’s art traditions have evolved quite separately. Before 1522, the year Magellan circumnavigated the globe, they had virtually no contact at all. “Putting the world in a book,” he says, will require “abandoning the historical survey and developing a conceptual analysis.”

David Summers, a Renaissance-art scholar at the University of Virginia, is taking just such an approach. In his book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, he tries to invent a more flexible formal language for describing artworks that will enable scholars to find connections across borders. “People now specialize so much, in single works of art even. I want to devise a method for looking at any tradition of art,” he said. He first got this urge thirty years ago, teaching undergraduate courses in Pre-Columbian art, as the only member of his department to know anything about it. He found that the West’s aesthetic categories were “about as insultingly bad as they could be” at explaining these objects. The Aztec sculpture Coatlicue, for example, had long baffled Western writers. In Real Spaces, he proposes the concept of “planar oppositions,” which he believes explains Coatlicue as well as Western works such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Summers’s book was extravagantly praised by some, but others found it unsatisfying. David Carrier doubts that any one person could pull off such a book: “This is a subject that no one is prepared to do all of the dimensions of.” For this reason, Carrier questions whether globalizing art history will ever succeed. How will a committee ever agree on such a politicized and polarizing subject? “There are as many visions of world art history as there are writers.”

There are institutional barriers, too, for example museum hierarchies, Carrier notes. At a lunch with the Yale University Art Gallery’s curators, “They pointed out they’re all in compartments, that there’s no one in charge of looking across compartments, and that anyway thematic shows that cut across are considered too confusing for the layman.” Yet another problem is that far too few graduate students today choose to study older non-Western art. “Eighty percent of incoming students want to do contemporary,” he asserts, without much exaggeration—in the U.S. in 2009, eighty-three PhD students completed dissertations on twentieth-century art, just one on pre-modern Middle Eastern art. Carrier doesn’t blame the students, noting that if you don’t arrive at graduate school already knowing Sanskrit or Persian or Japanese, say, you don’t have much choice.

Global art history’s biggest obstacle may be academe’s requirement that scholars specialize. Specialists are quick to smack down wanderers, as David Summers learned when he published his book. “I didn’t know the degree to which fields rule the history of art until I stamped into so many people’s fields.” James Elkins points out that when he recently published his Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, some Chinese-art scholars refused even to crack it open, because that he hadn’t read the Chinese-language literature in the original.

Elkins doubts we can write a truly global art history until non-Western countries start writing more of their own art history—they currently do very little, as he’s shown. Even then, he says, art history will remain “in its basic structure and institutional habits, permanently Western.” He notes that non-Westerners who take up art history typically imitate Western models and goes further to say, “The very idea of writing an art history of some country or region is Western.” Philippe de Montebello agrees, arguing that Westerners will dominate any future art history because of their power and money. Nor can they overcome their own biases; the idea that they could is sheer political correctness, he says. “One always sees in one’s own terms. MoMA organized a show of contemporary Muslim art. Somebody had to make a selection. Somebody chose these artists and these works according to what they think is good. You can’t tell me those curators have gotten under the skin of the Muslim world. Anyway, who’s to say that the native necessarily has a better sense for where the best works are?”

Such statements don’t endear global art history to its critics who see it as potentially imperialistic. Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza, who recently organized a conference on “the global turn,” eschew the idea of “seeking a unifying conceptual term or method.” They reject concepts used by globalizers such as “The Islamic World” as artificial and chauvinistic. (Indeed, the very terms Western and non-Western are problematic.) “Art history is seen as a new colonizer,” Zijlmans admits. “It’s true, it’s the flip side of coin. We in art history can be said to sometimes be in service to global tourism, museums, and the market.” De Montebello also says that global art history deserves much of the criticism it’s gotten. “But,” he says, “if you didn’t do it, think of what they would say then.”

Global art history exposed itself to accusations of imperialism partly because of its popularity among Americans. “In Europe there is very little interest,” notes Partha Mitter. Zijlmans concurs, while noting that things are changing a bit, especially in Germany, the site of the last great attempt to globalize art history, in the late 1800s. Why are American scholars so keen to globalize art history? Many seem to regard it as a form of anti-xenophobic politics. About his book, David Summers says, “There was a hope of saving the world, of turning the history of art into a multicultural conversation.” Not everyone sees global art history this way, though. Asked if such hopes meant anything to him, James Elkins gave a one-word answer: “No!”

I asked Elkins if he thought global art history might at least succeed in producing a satisfactory single-volume history of art—“the world in a book.” To my knowledge, no major scholar has even tried since Ernst Gombrich’s famous Story of Art, published in 1950, and who can blame them, considering all the obstacles? Elkins replied, “I am trying.”

Further Reading

• Jaynie Anderson, ed., Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art
• Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums
• David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects
• Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art
• James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global?
• John Onians, ed., Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art
• Mary D. Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration
• David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism
• Philippe Vergne, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age
• Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective
• Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme, eds., World Art Studies

A variety of pluripotentates (not a word, but should be) have changed jobs recently. Among them:

Gary Tinterow is the new director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which has the third largest art-museum endowment in the U.S. The Houston Chronicle welcomed the appointment:

Known as a scholar, Tinterow also has a flair for showmanship. Among the dozens of exhibits he organized are many of the Met’s best-attended shows ever, blockbusters like Degas (1988) and Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge (2006). Last year, his Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew an astonishing 700,000 visitors.

Nicolas Bourriaud has been elected to lead the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The controversial appointment rankled in part because he is a writer/curator rather than an artist, and also because his focus on contemporary art makes some worry he won’t look after the institution’s collections of Old Masters. The Art Media Agency writes (in quirky English):

Even before his nomination Nicolas Bourriaud was in the centre of debates. First of all, he should face a general strike by school instructors should he be elected. This rumour, which was quickly refuted, reflects however the atmosphere of the nomination. Then, after a publication in Journal des Arts, which stated that chairman post had already been reserved for Nicolas Bourriaud by the Minister of Culture, he had to defend himself and send a letter to art historian André Rouillé: “contrary to the fiction published by Journal des Arts, the post of the new director was never engaged to me by the minister who was the first to be surprised. He might have proposed Jean de Loisy but not me. I would like to ask you to change this untruthful statement”

Victoria Coates, who earned an art-history PhD at UPenn and has worked at the Cleveland Museum, is Rick Perry’s chief foreign-policy advisor. I struggle to think of an art historian playing this prominent role in politics since Anthony Blunt. Anyone?

The Noguchi catalogue raisonné begins.

Art historian Semavi Eyice was one of four to receive Turkey’s Presidential Grand Awards in Culture and Arts this year.

The Rose Art Museum is back.

So is the Musée d’Orsay, as France Today reports:

The aim of the new Orsay is to surprise visitors, to make them reflect, says [director Guy] Cogeval. “We will put the artworks into context with other disciplines: history, literature, music, even philosophy and psychoanalysis. The approach will be broader, looking for similarities, for intersections.” That’s something Cogeval has long done. As a curator, he introduced the idea of interaction with cinema as the basis for Hitchcock et l’Art, an exhibit shown in 2000 in Montreal and later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It examined the role of Salvador Dalí’s work in the dream sequences in Spellbound. He returned to cinema in Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney; the 2006 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris spotlighted stories and legends—the sources of inspiration for the Disney team.

“I’d like to have a major exhibit at the Orsay on the birth of cinema,” he says. “Not so much about its technical invention, but its mental invention, what made artists look forward to the possibility of images in movement. Everyone from Degas to Wagner laid the ground for it to happen.”

Several art magazines and journals have sprouted up online over the last few months. Caribbean Art World (CAW) Magazine founded by artist Marcel Wah includes an interview (click “Articles”) with Erica James, founding director of The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, who was recently hired by Yale. (The content is mostly subscription-only, but some article can be accessed through member profile pages.)

I’m happy to see that Sue Ward, the always charming former editor of the sadly shuttered AAH journal The Art Book, is helming a new monthly art publication, Cassone. It is nearly all, alas, subscription-only, but available for an affordable £10/year. Recent topics include the Mougins Museum of Classical Art, Leonardo da Vinci, Beryl Dean, Richard Dadd, Edward Hopper, and Steve Jobs.

A former classmate of mine, San Diego Museum curator Ariel Plotek, has launched a new free online journal of reviews of exhibitions and books, Tabula Quarterly. The first issue considers “Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe,” “Roma Naturaleza e Ideal: Paisajes 1600–1650,” “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” “Bronzino One Year On,” and “Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners.”

Finally, the new journal Modern Art Asia examines the “globalized interdisciplinary context at the intersection of scholarship, criticism, and the market” with “peer-reviewed postgraduate articles, insightful commentary, and international exhibition reviews to encourage a broader vision of art produced throughout Asia after 1700.” In the first issue, Yayoi Shionoiri writes on photographs by Hosoe Eikoh in which images of writer Mishima Yukio are “superimposed upon images of Western painting.” Marci Kwon argues that Takashi Murakami’s work “should be read as an appropriation of the systems that drive capitalist consumption.” Gwyn Helverson examines work ”using traditional Japanese materials and/or incorporating traditional imagery, but invigorated with modern themes from, for example, hip-hop and otaku(geek) culture,” incorporating the “theories of feminist art historian Chino Kaori.”

The Autumn 2011 African Arts (44:3) continues that journal’s tradition of fine reporting on important conferences, with five dispatches from the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium of African Art last March at UCLA, which featured 46 panels. The Triennial’s theme was “Africa and Its Diasporas in the Marketplace.”

Susan Rosenfield writes:

dele jegede, alongside [Sylvia] Forni, and Rachel Nelson provided their panels with optimistic insight regarding progressive alternatives for contemporary African art. Both presenters still warned of this imminent threat of globalization on the African art market, observing that Western aesthetic values cause contemporary art to migrate in a way that jegede described as “eerily reminiscent” of colonialist-era movement. Nonetheless, jegede explored the burgeoning revaluation of the local, arguing that African auction houses and collectors encourage the marketing of indigenous tastes.

Samuel M. Anderson writes:

Several conference sessions were constructed around revisiting broader theoretical concepts of visual culture through African lenses. One such panel looked at Tonye Erekosima and Joanne Eicher’s “cultural authentication” model through a wide variety of visual arts practices … [Another] engaged Bruno Latour’s “iconoclash.” Like cultural authentication, iconoclash attempts to describe the transference of imagery between cultures, but iconoclash is much less systematic, depicting a state of uncertain contradictions rather than a process of incorporation. The panel was divided between two perspectives emphasizing either closure or potential …

This edition of the Triennial was notable for the attendance of many more African scholars than in previous years [whose] presentations demonstrated that approaches to art history education within Africa are as diverse as the continent itself.

With apologies to the Harper’s Index (which I once helped to produce) I present a few statistics regarding CAA’s 2012 annual conference:

Sessions: 203
Sessions with co-chairs: 93
Participation slots (chair, panelist, discussant): 1194
Participants: 1095
Participants playing more than one role: 75
Most roles played by any one participant: 4
People playing that many roles: 3
Participants with no institutional affiliation: 97
Independent artists: 54
Scholars: 24
Curators: 9
Critics: 1
Number of colons in paper titles: 392
Question marks: 37
Exclamation points: 6
Semi-colons: 1
Uses of the word “identity”: 9
“Feminist” or “feminism”: 7
“Queer”: 6
“Race” or “racial”: 5
Papers titled “No Art Historian Is An Island”: 1

Institutions garnering the most participation slots:

NYU: 24
Getty: 21
UCLA: 18
USC: 17
Graduate Center, CUNY: 17
Columbia: 16
UC, San Diego: 12
UC, Irvine: 12
Columbia College, Chicago: 10
Virginia Commonwealth University: 9
LACMA: 9
University of Pennsylvania: 8
Pratt Institute: 8
Indiana University: 8
Yale University: 7
Washington University in St. Louis: 7
University of Texas at Austin: 7
School of the Art Institute of Chicago: 7
Princeton University: 7

The 100th annual conference of the College Art Association convenes February 22-25. Among the sessions I’m looking forward to:

Theorizing the Body
Chair: Jean M. Borgatti, Clark University

• Medusa as “Seduction of Excess”
  Basia Sliwinska, independent scholar

• Body of Work: Stylization and Ambiguity in the Benin Plaque Corpus
  Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, New York University

• Body Networks: Corporeality in Luba Art and Politics
  Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles

• H(ai)rmeneutics
  Shir Aloni Yaari, Courtauld Institute

• Humorous Transformations into Abstraction: Layering Images of Identity in the Art of Shahzia Sikander
  Anneke Schulenberg, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Art History Open Session: Renaissance Art
Form and Function: Art and Design?
Chair: Antonia Madeleine Boström, J. Paul Getty Museum

• The Separation of Form and Function: Challenging the Historiography of Renaissance Pilgrim Flasks
  Annette LeZotte, Wichita State University

• Function, Ritual, and Sculpture: Holy-Water Stoups in Early Modern Tuscany
  Francesco Freddolini, Getty Research Institute

• Treillage in Sixteenth-Century Italy and France: Between Art and Craft
  Natsumi Nonaka, University of Texas at Austin

• “Modern in an Antique Way”: Giulio Romano’s Designs for Living
  Valerie Taylor, independent scholar

• Winds, Farts, and Bellows: The Airy Imagery of Early Modern Ornament Prints
  Madeleine C. Viljoen, New York Public Library

Design, from “California Dreamin’” to “Designed in California,” ca. 1965-2012
Chairs: James Housefield, University of California, Davis; Stuart Kendall, California College of the Arts

• Simulating Spatial Experience in the People’s Berkeley: The Urban Design Experiments of Donald Appleyard and Kenneth Craik
  Anthony Raynsford, San Jose State University

• April Greiman and California’s Technology of Enchantment
  Elizabeth Guffey, Purchase College, State University of New York

• Steve Jobs, Architect
  Simon Sadler, University of California, Davis

• California Design: What Are We Talking About?
  Bobbye Tigerman, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Beyond the Oil Spill: Art and Ecology in the Americas
Chairs: Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Tulane University; Santiago Rueda Fajardo, independent scholar, Bogotá, Colombia

• Landscape Seen through the Eyes of Contemporary Art and Science
  Hugo Fortes, Universidade de São Paulo

• The Land, the Road, and the Freedom to Move On: Allegory vs. Documentary in “Iracema, uma transa amazônica”
  Erin Aldana, independent scholar, San Diego

• Environmental Crisis and Creative Response: Ala Plástica’s “Magdalena Project”
  Lisa Crossman, Tulane University

• The Invisible Beginning: Imagining Trees in the Contemporary Urban Environment
  Gesche Würfel, Goldsmiths, University of London

CAA Distinguished Scholar Session Honoring Rosalind Krauss
The Theoretical Turn
Chair: Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Studies

• Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art

• Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Harvard University
• Hal Foster, Princeton University
• Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Harvard University
• Briony Fer, University College London

No Talking Allowed: Making a Visual Argument about Art History
Chairs: Jean Robertson, Indiana University; Craig McDaniel, Indiana University

• Degas and Italy: A Pictorial Exegesis
  Claire L. Kovacs, Coe College

• Dubai Referents
  Julia Townsend, American University in Dubai

• The Political Ecology of Energy Consumption: An Official Guide
  Matthew Friday, State University of New York at New Paltz

• Overlooked Sites of Neoconcretism: The Newsroom, the Dance Floor, and the Flooded Underground
  Simone Osthoff, Pennsylvania State University

• Superdutch: Photography, Process, and the Internet-Polder
  Jordan Tate, University of Cincinnati

• Who Was Thomas Waterman Wood? Finding the Artist in the Art
  Jo-Ann Morgan, Western Illinois University

• The History of Mystery: Human Representation “Sub Specie Aeternitatis”
  Carol Ciarniello, independent artist

The State of the Discipline
Chairs: Sandra Esslinger, Mt. San Antonio College; Deana Hight, Mt. San Antonio College

• Rebooting Artistry and Its History, Theory, and Criticism
  Donald Preziosi, University of California, Los Angeles

• A Labyrinth without a Thread: Decreating Art History
  Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

• Has Visual Studies Come of Age?
  Bridget R. Cooks, University of California, Irvine

Flying Solo: The Opportunities and Challenges Presented to the Solitary Art Historian in a Small College
Chairs: Laura J. Crary, Presbyterian College; William Ganis, Wells College

• Curricular and Pedagogical Strategies for Solo Flyers in Studio Departments
  Lisa DeBoer, Westmont College

• No Art Historian Is an Island
  Amy Von Lintel, West Texas A&M University

• Between Scylla and Charybdis: One Educator’s Personal Odyssey from Classicist to Generalist in Three Years
  Kimberly Busby, Angelo State University

• The Solitary Art Historian in a Liberal Arts College: Strategies for Aligning Faculty and Student Research
  Gregory Gilbert, Knox College

Best affiliation: Maureen Connor, The Institute for Wishful Thinking (and Queens College, City University of New York).

Without my noticing, my minivacation from blogging turned into a multi-month hiatus. Well, I’m now feeling excited to get back to it, so without further ado I’ll begin what I hope will be the first of many posts this fall. How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art is a new, provocative anthology of writings on Aboriginal contemporary art, edited by Ian McLean. In his introduction, he writes:

While the artworld revolution of the 1980s was momentous, the impact of Aboriginal art should not be overestimated … [In the 1990s] Aboriginal art occupied about 10 per cent of Australian art world discourse when it probably accounts for nearly 50 per cent of production, be this measured in dollar value or number of artists … Andrew Sayers’s Australian art (2001) was the first survey to give Aboriginal art a significant place … [I]ts place in the larger artworld is less certain. Australia, like other places distant from the larger artworld centres, was well positioned to anticipate the radical shifts that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century. However, this new landscape is only slowly dawning on the old centres of Paris and New York. Take the massive scholarly project, Art Since 1900 (2004) … [At the end] the authors make a devastating confession: namely the obsolescence of the previous 700-odd pages. The critical methodologies they employed no longer work, as the Eurocentric world they were designed to access ‘has irretrievably disappeared.’ … [By contrast, Australian critics have found in Aboriginal art] a new way of conceiving and living with difference that is the matrix of today’s globalised world. Thus, these days, Aboriginal art is exhibited effortlessly with other contemporary art. This is the enduring legacy of Aboriginal contemporary art: it has invited us to enter a global world.