Who Cares If You Look?

The painter Alice Neel, from the Met restrospective exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First.

Why is it so hard for academics to write for a general audience about something as omnipresent and so appealing as visual art?

I had planned to write an essay about a recent book on an American artist, a woman whose paintings have long deserved more attention than they’ve gotten, but I was so dismayed by the writing that the book defeated me. I like to argue that reviewers should tell you whether a book succeeds or fails in doing what it is trying to do, rather than telling you why it meets some abstractly fixed criteria. But writing about art means that you must, at the same time, pass judgment. Not all art is equally good – just as not all work by the same artist is equally good. This book, though, attempted the impossible task of pleading for sustained attention to an artist, reproducing examples of her work, and at the same time avoiding any judgment about the art itself, which was barely even described. But more on that below.

Unfortunately, my disappointing reading experience wasn’t an exception. There are so few places to read art criticism for a general audience, and so much art worth seeing, that I’m more relieved than happy when I find good art writing. That’s true of other forms of criticism, too, but because music and literature are so much more accessible to a general audience–less expensive to own or experience in person, more widely distributed through more channels–more writers will try their hand at writing about a book or album or song than about an art exhibit or artwork. Of course, it’s not all great writing, but there’s a lot of it, and a portion of it is good. Art criticism for a general audience is comparatively rare, and only a sliver of it is good.

When an expert, usually an academic or a curator, writes about an exhibit or artist, I can expect three common problems. The first is simple: a lack of detailed description of the work. Formal description is central to art writing. There’s no reason to trust an art historian or curator to place a work in its cultural and historical context if the writer doesn’t even describe the work of art adequately. Line, color, shape, pictorial space, and texture are the building blocks of painting composition, and they should be part of any substantial discussion of something made out of those elements. Describing a work of art in terms of its formal qualities is not some arcane technical exercise, it is essential to art writing and omitting it undermines the entire endeavor. But whether from fear of alienating a wider audience with technical language or perhaps even impatience with this ordinary task, too many writers leave this out. In the case of this particular book, the reader was confronted with page after page of high-quality reproductions and no close analysis of any of them. It’s a bewildering stance for a text based on a museum show. Why go to see an exhibit if even its curators don’t think the work needs to be looked at very carefully?

The second problem arises when art writing turns to biography, history, or social history, but fails to explain the connection to any artistic choice. Perhaps the writer assumes readers aren’t that interested in the art itself, or perhaps they simply get lost in their own research. Whatever the cause, the writer goes into elaborate detail on the artist’s life story, contemporary political movements, social questions, the artist’s love life, her political activism, her physical and mental health, and so on. But, apart from rudimentary context description, we learn next to nothing about what kinds of artistic choices she made or why. While popular biographies often dwell on individual psychology, art writing breaks down when that become the prime mover, the thing that creates the art. An artist may have many of the same opinions, feelings, and concerns as those around her, but she distinguishes herself for us by what she makes. Art writing has to spend time on art making.

The final problem is, as I said at the outset, the refusal to make value judgments about the work. It’s both the most intractable, since it’s central to academic art history, and yet the deadliest to engaging and convincing writing. In an academic text, it’s perfectly ordinary to avoid any suggestion that the author thinks one work is better than another. The usual strategy is to pass that responsibility on to something called the work’s reception, bringing in contemporaries or fellow artists who praised a particular work, displayed it in a prominent place, paid a large amount for it, or made copies of it. There’s nothing wrong with offering the history of value judgments, but it does leave a rather obvious blank spot in the present. This artist was once admired. This artist was once overlooked. And now? Why this show, why this article, why look again at the work in this present moment?

Any publication reveals its author’s opinions and value judgments in the choice of reproductions, in the quality of images (which are largest? what’s on the book cover? etc.), and in the author’s attention (what period of the work gets the most space? what subject matter is discussed at length? etc.). No one who writes about art and artists actually believes that everything called art is of equal interest and rewards equal attention, though academic writers obscure that fact. They may become timid even about offering their own insights. But every now and then in an academic work, it does happen that the reader hears the author’s voice. In the midst of cool and distant analysis, there will be a remark, a comment, something that reveals a specific human behind the wall of documentation and method. The jarring liveliness of these moments reveals what we may be losing in the striving toward perfect objectivity.

It isn’t necessary to declare that you love or hate the work you write about. We aren’t in the eighteenth century and the space for subjectivity doesn’t have to be filled with sighs or tears. But even academic writers can dig into the details and by focusing on the work itself, its creation, and its qualities, attempt to convey something about the sum of its effects. The artist I mentioned at the start of this essay deserves a wider audience than she has had until now. She deserves someone to plead for her work, to engage with the objects she created, to point to their strengths and help viewers understand the extent of her work’s artistic power. If more academic writers saw themselves in that role, it would be better for their writing, and better for the art they care about.

Love Everyone in the Frame. Ingrid Rowland’s Vasari and Jim Jarmusch’s Taxicabs.

Night on Earth. Jim Jarmusch

“[I]n these Italian films . . . they love not just the lead characters, they love everybody in the frame, . . . they love everybody, warts and all.”

  • Director Alexander Payne on Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (1962) and Italian cinema

Does a writer have to like the artist he or she writes about? I think the obvious answer is no. A good subject needs many qualities, but lovability is asking too much. The trouble is that writers still have to figure out how to write about a time or place or work they do care about – or else why write? – and about people who range from the saintly to the despicable. Alexander Payne creates films in which he shows an almost divine attentiveness to his (often unappealing) characters’ humanity, but there are other ways to love a subject, too. 

I thought about this while reading Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney’s The Collector of Lives, her book Giorgio Vasari and his Florentine contemporaries. It’s a book aimed at a general audience, and one of the easiest paths to popular success is to focus on a charismatic subject, particularly one who wins the reader’s admiration and sympathy. Renaissance Florence was full of admirable artists, but a little short on sympathetic ones. The television series Medici made the most of the title family’s rapaciousness, intrigues, and murderous tendencies, but neglected the art that’s the main reason we still care about them. Apparently, lovable figures and great art don’t go easily together in dramatic form. But Rowland and Charney find what seems to me an elegant solution: they love everybody in the frame.

But that doesn’t mean approving of them. Let me illustrate this by talking about how film director Jim Jarmusch loves minor characters. In his film Night on Earth, we hop from Los Angeles to New York, then Paris, Rome and Helsinki, each time sharing a single taxi ride with driver and passenger late at night. There is no connecting narrative and no unifying idea, just a framing device, the nighttime taxi rides. Jarmusch’s characters give viewers plenty of reasons to dislike them: argumentative riders who start yelling matches, arrogant jerks who mock the working stiff at the wheel, and even a heedless cabbie who fails to notice his passenger having a heart attack. What’s more, all the characters are little more than sketches. The key is that they all have something at stake and their struggle to get that something starts to matter. We know almost nothing about these drivers and passengers, but they are alive enough that we want Helmut (the driver who can’t drive) and YoYo (the passenger who won’t stay in the back seat) to get to Brooklyn, even if it’s just to put both of them out of their shared misery. 

Rowland and Charney give the reader greater depth on Vasari, of course. The studio system, the role of ancient texts, the system of artistic patronage, and Vasari’s various projects all appear in due course. But the authors also paint dramatic pictures of the scene in a typical artist’s workshop or the childhood of a young artisan, they quote from cranky letters by Vasari where he argues with a stingy Medici, they recount the jealousies and resentments among artists or between teachers and apprentices. Lengthy quotations give the reader a sense of individual voices as they explain, inveigh, brag, and wheedle. 

This is more than just a way of making the era come to life or “show don’t tell.” It’s a strategy that gives humanity to all the figures in the scene, as we observe them bustling around the city, pausing to gossip, nursing a long-held resentment, or contemplating their approaching end. When we get away from the “lead characters”, the whole scene comes alive, so that the people at the center seem to breathe real air– the breeze through the window and the stench from the trash heap– and become more vivid, as well. It’s a strategy many biographers should learn from.

F for Fake and R for . . . Rembrandt? Looking Closely with Svetlana Alpers

If you want to write about art for a wide audience, you may find yourself needing not just an argument about your particular art works, but one for art itself. Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1975) tells several stories. The first is about an art forger, the next is about his equally deceitful biographer. But through it all, Welles’ film creates an essay in images arguing in defense of our desire to be beguiled by sight. Though the film repeats the claim that the art market creates forgers, its main point has nothing to do with the economics of art. In fact, Welles interrupts his tale of fakes and deals to meditate for several minutes on the cathedral of Chartres, its anonymous and long-dead artists, and art as a human achievement that outlasts temporal concerns. 

What does Welles have to do with Svetlana Alpers and Rembrandt? Both F for Fake and Alpers’ Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market grapple with the issue of individual artistic mastery as expressed in disputes about authenticity. Welles shows us an art forger creating a Picasso, a Matisse, a Modigliani, and then tossing them onto the fire. He praises anonymous artists, smiles at experts, and all the while leads the viewer masterfully by the nose as only an artist of Orson Welles skill can.

Alpers begins with the popular image of Rembrandt as a standard of quality (luxury cars and celebrity faces are compared equated with Rembrandt’s work, etc) and the source of repeated disputes about attribution. In both cases, the idea of artistic genius is both deconstructed and reconstructed. For Welles, the genius of the forger is identical with the genius of art. It rests on the ability to transform our way of seeing and is both individual and collective. For Alpers, Rembrandt’s mastery is both socially constructed through his marketplace strategies and present in his work. Rembrandt creates something great, says Alpers, because he shapes the definition of artistic greatness in his time and in ours.

What’s more, all of our contemporary Rembrandt anxiety–about dizzyingly high prices for his work, about the proliferation of fakes or misattributed Rembrandts, and about the rather shifty man behind it all–are Rembrandt’s own doing. The painter emerges as a master of the marketplace and of the studio, one who creates and manipulates the standard of success in both realms.

[H]is works are commodities distinguished from others by being identified as his; and in making them, he in turn commodifies himself. He loved only his freedom, art, and money, to recall the words of Descamps. Or, put differently, so as to bring out connections between the terms, Rembrandt was an entrepreneur of the self. (Alpers, p.118)

Alpers’ stylistic and structural triumph in Rembrandt’s Enterprise lies in her ability to show us the individual thoroughly embedded in the market while attending equally to the artist as an individual. And like Welles, Alpers makes value judgments. 

It is now generally acknowledged that the nineteenth century shaped its myth of the lone genius out of a selective reading of Rembrandt’s life and his art. But are there not things about the paintings that accommodate them to such a view? (Alpers, p. 3)

Rembrandt’s work is better, she argues. It deserves to be in its own category. And as for the copies and school-of-Rembrandt paintings, Alpers is arguing that a painting that resembles a Rembrandt partakes of its greater artistic mastery. In fact, it’s surprising to see critics of Alpers who charge her with attempting to diminish Rembrandt’s artistry. The idea that economic interest must be opposed to artistry, rather than intertwined with it, may lie beneath that criticism. 

Welles boldly challenges the viewer to consider whether the forgers spurred on by the art market aren’t also great artists. Alpers insists that sharp economic calculation might be as inspiring as the artist’s muse. Both offer viewers a new way of looking closely at art and seeing another human dimension in it. 

Style in Art History Writing: Looking closely at Zurbarán with Florence Delay

St Elizabeth of Portugal. ca. 1635. Francisco Zurbarán. Museo del Prado

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

Death and the Historian

Thomas Couture (1815-1879). “Jules Michelet (1798-1874), historien français”. Huile sur toile. Paris, musée Carnavalet.

Great historical writing paints vivid pictures, but also draws meaningful conclusions from those images. The dullest historical writing sinks into a heavy mass of abstraction: representative individuals are molded by the forces of their times, like so many pieces of cheap pottery made from the same thin mixture poured into a mold. Jules Michelet’s style shocks a modern reader by insisting both on the meaning of historical interpretation and the uniqueness of the individual:

“Wonderful virtue of death, which alone reveals life! The living man is viewed by each from one side only, according as he benefits or injures each. Does he die? We then see him in a thousand new lights, and distinguish the numerous ties by which he held to the world.”

Death, the historian’s key, permission to begin the work! Michelet is writing here about the 1407 assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orléans, but he’s pointing out several things to the reader. First, history takes advantage of the opportunity death offers. We are at last able to discover what life blinded us to, we can begin to judge without the constraint of a particular set of interests. Next, once freed of a personal calculation, we can start to see more clearly, and recognize the individual as part of the larger web of life. 

“So when you tear the ivy from the oak which supported it, you perceive that it leaves behind innumerable vivacious filaments, which you cannot tear from the bark on which they have lived: they will remain broken, but still they will remain.”

In a footnote, Michelet says “I remarked this the other day, in the forest of Saint-Germain, September 12, 1839”, which seems a rather excessive precision, until one imagines the author himself strolling through the woods, glancing up at the twining ivy and suddenly remembering the reckless gallant of the Bal des Ardents hacked to death with axes and pikes. The historian gazes at the little threads that attach the vine to the tree and thinks about what has been left behind when life is over. Of course, that’s why we read history, or it’s one reason. What remains of all that was? And see how personal Michelet is, but without narrowing his scope! HIs walk in the woods is a model for his method.

Louis I, Michelet goes on to say, was a charmer, cheated on his wife and left her a bastard son, but his death provoked real mourning among those shocked by this gallant young man struck down so gruesomely. And in private, the handsome rake had been truly pious. Many historians can’t resist insisting, over and over, on the prevailing practices of the age under study. They perhaps hope to make a particular story more meaningful by showing that it was typical. Michelet writes with a sense of the universal, but manages at the same time to regard each tombstone as marking a real human life, one no historian can recover.

“Each man is a humanity, a history at large. . . And yet this being, with whom was intertwined an infinite generality was at the same time a single type, a special individuality, a unique and irreperable being, who cannot be replaced. Nothing like him has preceeded, nothing like him will follow; God will not begin his work anew.

Others will come, no doubt; the world, which is untiring, will bring to life other persons, better perhaps, but like–never, never.”

[Chaque homme est une humanité, une histoire universelle . . . Et pourtant, cet être en qui tenait une généralité infinie, c’était en même temps un individu spécial, une personne, un être unique, irréparable, que rien ne remplacera. Rien de tel avant, rien après; Dieu ne recommencera point. Il en viendra d’autres, sans doute, le monde, qui ne se lasse pas, amènera à la vie d’autres personnes, meilleures, peut-être, mais semblables, jamais, jamais . . .] 

Michelet reminds me that history can show the vast distance between ourselves and the past, and the closeness in humanity at the very same time.

Note: I’ve been meaning to write about excellent style in history, so thanks to the 2022 Nonfiction Reader Challenge and @bookdout for inspiring me to get going!

* I remarked this the other day, in the forest of Saint-Germain, September 12, 1839

Jules Michelet. Histoire de France. Vol. III, Book VIII