How does an art historian get the audience of her book to approach a painting? What stylistic form serves as the gesture that, in the gallery, bids visitors to take a step closer and look again? I want to look at work by two very different art history essayists, Svetlana Alpers and Florence Delay. Both attract an audience outside of the university. Both write books you might find in the museum gift shop, the public library, or a good bookshop near you (if you still have those!). The thing I’d like to focus on is their style and, through it, their ability to educate the reader’s eye.
Visit almost any major museum and you’ll find explanatory texts, either in an audioguide or as wall text, that whisk you away off to the library, instead of drawing you closer to the object in front of you: “[Event or story] was a particularly popular subject for paintings in [time/place]. Note the especially fine [aspect of the painting] typical of [painter]” or again “[Artist] was born in [place/time]. [Artists’s] work reflects the social and political conflicts of the era in this location.” The label pretends to be a lesson, but what sort of dreary exam is this lesson preparing us for?
What need do we have for a set of facts that would apply to almost any painting by a particular artist, and often to almost every painting hanging in the same room? We didn’t even need to come to the gallery to learn this stuff. Are we supposed to look back at the painting or sculpture and say, “Oh right, I see now that this is a serious subject and apparently the artist is supposed to be good at this sort of thing.” Again, why are we here with the work if, as the wall text suggests, this is what we get out of looking at it?
A reader who wants to learn how to look at particular paintings needs a different kind of help. At some point, the art historian must guide our gaze so that we can assemble with her the details she uses to build her interpretation. Here is Florence Delay, actress, novelist, dramatist, and member of the Académie Française, writing about Francisco de Zurbarán:
“In Seville, a group of young saints is putting on a haute couture fashion show. Dark-eyed, dark-haired Andalusian beauties model full-length dresses, with or without capes, pourpoints in varying styles, casaquins, camisoles, and basquines (a kind of short over-skirt). The cut of their clothes, the elegance of these taffetas, of the silks figured with gold and silver, the daring jolt of color contrasts, yellow backed by violet, lilac on green, carmine married with lemon, the sophistication of the detail, dalmatics embroidered with flowers, veils clipped by a jeweled pin to the shoulder, pleated ruffs, virago sleeves, billowy sashes, ribbons fluttering from their tresses, braided trim running about skirt hems, everything combines to create the illusion of a high fashion catwalk in the Spanish Golden Age.
Certainly that was my illusion when I first visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville. My youth was most likely to blame. But the illusion melts away as soon as one draws closer.”
Florence Delay. Haute couture.
Some of the hallmarks of popular art writing are here: accessible if anachronistic comparisons (the fashion show), personal touches (my illusion; my youth was. . . to blame), and no pausing to cite sources. But Delay’s great accomplishment here is the way she shines a light on Zurbarán’s canvases. We follow her as she considers a subject, women’s clothing, that needs some specialized knowledge for its description, supposing that most people can’t identify dalmatics and may have only a vague idea of the virago sleeve, but very little for its appreciation. Our eye needs only a little direction, a finger pointing to the bold colors and fine details, to find Zurbarán’s effects pleasing. Her book, Haute couture (alas, not yet translated) has no pictures, which seemed at first like an inexplicable flaw. But I’m convinced it’s best to go back and forth between her essays and the pictures themselves (available in reproductions online, too).
For those who, like me, know Zurbarán mainly as the painter of St. Francis – how many of his have I seen in person? – Delay’s book is a surprise. And without explicitly stating her case, she persuades the reader that the female saints in their festive gowns deserve as much of our attention as Zurbarán’s pale and anguished monks. There’s a very Protestant attitude toward attractive young martyrs that sees them as mere painted dolls, a sentimental distraction from real piety (or the ever-important “social conditions”). Delay insists on their beauty as part of the story of women who were “desired violently” by men, often the same ones who brought about their torture and death. Each gorgeously dressed saint stands alone, accompanied only by the instruments of her martyrdom, and Zurbarán’s attention to her very earthly beauty only emphasizes the qualities of the saint. She was briefly granted a female body, suffered as many women do for having it, and unlike her sisters, has now been translated into a timeless form. The generic saint’s adornment becomes an expression of women’s fate.
Delay’s approach not only educates our gaze, it also models a method for examining our own preferences. She writes on Zurbarán, because she has loved his work from an early age. But that love is more than a set of preferences. It comes from living with his work, revisiting it, considering it from new angles. When Delay includes an anecdote about herself, a flattering one in which she’s granted access to an otherwise closed gallery in the Louvre, visiting a Zurbarán you and I can’t see, the event sheds more light on the artist than it does on Delay. She’s already noted that “the heart contracts” when reading the inventory of Zurbarán’s paltry last possessions. Here, while we might envy the art historian her exclusive access to great museums, the moment is tempered by the reminder that Zurbarán is still minor enough to be more or less shoved into storage when the money for museum guards is short. And it’s followed by chapters recounting the dispersion of Zurbarán’s paintings over the centuries.
Delay’s short book (104 pages of mid-sized type in pocket format) closes with a chapter on the artistic resonances between Zurbarán and the Spanish fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. While the latter never explicitly cited the former, Delay links both through her personal affection, as well as for the two artists’ sensitivity for texture, color, and dimension. The turn toward an actual fashion designer, after pages spent with a painter, also presses the reader to take this discussion of style more seriously. If Zurbarán is an artists and creates fabric with paint, surely we must admit that Baleciaga, who designed with real fabric and thread, is an artist as well.
I’d say that successful art history writing makes us look more carefully, and Delay accomplishes that both for her main subject, and the underlying one, haute couture itself.
I’ll close by saying how unfortunate it is that writing like this isn’t appreciated by English-language publishers as it should be. Here’s a book that could appeal to a wide audience in English (think of all those museums where Zurbaráns hang and those museum book shops!); it’s short, jargon-free, and informative. It’s just the thing you’d want to bring with you when visiting the works themselves.
Next: Svetlana Alpers