Ways Around Modernism (Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts)

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Author: Stephen Bann

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Volume 1 Master Narratives and Their Discontents James Elkins

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New York London

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

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Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97422‑4 (Softcover) 0‑415‑97421‑6 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97422‑6 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑97421‑9 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechani‑ cal, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com

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Contents

Series Preface / 1 Introduction by Margaret MacNamidhe / 7 Ways Around Modernism / 29 1. Strange Encounters / 43 2. Curiouser and Curiouser / 103 Seminar / 173 Index / 223

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Series Preface There is a gap in accounts of modern art. Some of the best historical work has been done by scholars who have not wanted to contribute to the large-scale questions of what Modernism might be, or how nineteenth-century art might fit in the lineages that lead to Postmodernism. That is one side of the gap. On the other is a common pedagogic literature intended to introduce Modernism to beginning students; it is generally not written by the scholars whose work is central to the developing discipline, and it is not often cited. Between these two extremes, there should be a kind of writing that is at once attentive to the grain of history and responsive to the different and often contentious accounts of Modernism as a whole. Such writing is rare, for a variety of reasons—some of which are embedded in the ways Modernism itself has been understood. So far there have only been a few exceptions, notably T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea and the multi authored Art since 1900. Aside from those two enormous, contentious, and problematic texts, there is almost nothing between the sides.

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Ways Around Modernism

In this series, major scholars in the field consider the shape of the twentieth century: its essential and marginal moments, its optimal narratives, and the strengths and weaknesses of its self-descriptions. I hope that the series as a whole will be helpful for those who find, as I do, that it can be revealing to put a little pressure on the assumptions that are made in recent scholarship regarding what is or isn’t crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century art. There is a growing literature, for example, on Surrealism and its afterlife. In what ways does that scholarship imply that a version of Surrealism is central to a description of some contemporary art? Or, to take another example: how does Cubism sit with accounts that rely on Modernism’s political aspirations? Where is Greenberg, his ghosts or avatars, in current historiography? Large questions like these are the subject of this series. If we do not try to assemble the best theories, winnow the worst, and prepare a clear collation, then what does it mean to continue to write about art in an age of increasing pluralism? I hope it means more than playing in an era that is happily “after the history of art,” in Arthur Danto’s phrase. I have mixed hopes for this series. On the one hand, I doubt the ideas these authors set out will comprise a consensus, or even a satisfactory survey. On the other hand, I believe that there is not an indefinitely large number of cogent, informed, and committed versions of how the century went: on the contrary, I think only a handful of separate and simultaneous conversations

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Series Preface

sustain our sense of what Modernism was, or is, and it is possible to gather and compare them. A parallel might be made to physics here: physics turns on what are called GUTs (grand unified theories) and TOEs (theories of everything), in the sense that physicists work with those possibilities always in mind, so that the smallest theoretical demonstration or technical innovation gains significance by its potential connection to the literally larger questions. In any event, many things may happen before the small-scale result can ever affect its ideal theoretical impetus, but that does not vitiate the fact that in physics it is absolutely crucial that large-scale theories exist to drive local inquiries. Art history is different in many ways, not least in that art historians need not think of large-scale problems at all. Yet in art history reticence regarding larger problems is sometimes taken as a virtue, and that, I think, is questionable. It is as if the most prominent physicists—the Steven Weinbergs or the Stephen Hawkings—were silent about the basic laws of physics. Or as if the most active and creative physicists were committed to looking only at specialized phenomena, leaving the form of the physical world, and the direction of physics, to others as a matter of speculation. What I mean to suggest is that there is a point beyond which attention to the fine structure of historical events is no longer the necessary virtue of good historical work, but rather becomes a strategy of avoidance that can threaten the coherence of the enterprise as a whole. In that sense, “larger”

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questions are not unhelpfully large or irrelevantly large, as they tend to be taken to be, but crucially large. The risks of avoiding going on the record about larger questions of twentieth-century art are nicely illustrated by a recent exchange involving the English critic Julian Bell, the American art historian Michael Fried, and the nineteenth-century German realist painter Adolf Menzel. In the London Times Literary Supplement, Bell reviewed Fried’s book on Menzel, praising Fried’s readings of individual works and his rigor, but remarking that it is unfortunate Fried chose not to connect this book, his first on a German artist, with his decades of work on the French tradition. How is Menzel linked, Bell wonders, to the sequences of French painters that Fried has studied in the past? How is Modernism affected, if at all, by this alternate genealogy? They are good questions, hastily posed but essentially accurate. Menzel is not, and cannot be, an isolated figure somehow beyond the streams of Modernism, if only because the critical terms Fried has brought to bear on Modernism figure throughout his book on Menzel, driving Fried’s inquiries and informing his judgments. It is the aim of this series to provide a space where challenges like Bell’s can be taken seriously without becoming either ephemeral polemics or floating generalizations of the sort most useful to first-year students. The first four books in this series were originally lectures, each given on two successive evenings, at the University College

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Series Preface

Cork, Ireland, over a period of three years from 2004 to 2006. Each pair of lectures was followed by a seminar discussion, part of which is included in each book. The authors were encouraged to respond to previous efforts: the notion was that the series might grow to resemble a protracted exchange, in which each person has months or years to consider how to respond to what has been said. That speed seems entirely appropriate to a subject as intricate, and as prone to overly quick assertions, as this. I wrote the first book in order to provide a preliminary survey of the field, although I avoided describing the work of the authors in the series. That absence should not be taken as a lack of interest (the opposite is true): it is meant to provide a fruitful starting place for meditations I hope will follow. Readers may begin the series with any book, but taken as a whole, and read in sequence, the series is intended as perhaps the world’s slowest, and I hope best-pondered, conversation on Modernism. — J.E.

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Introduction

The opportunity to introduce Stephen Bann’s work generates a particular scrupulousness on the part of a commentator. Of course, it is not one’s first response: that would be frailty, an effect of his productivity. Deborah Cherry, introducing the recent issue of Art History devoted to his scholarship, protested that even the extensive collection of essays she had assembled could not reflect its range. In addition, for Bann, scholarship is a capacious term that includes works of translation as well as artworks. Yet if the prospective commentator can keep the awareness of inadequacy at bay, a sense of responsibility to the stakes of Bann’s oeuvre

Deborah Cherry, “Introduction: About Stephen Bann,” Art History 28 (November 2005): 577, 578. See, for example, Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 3 (1981), 3–20; René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); and Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Bann also contributed an introductory essay to the third of these titles. While most of Girard’s text (which is substantially constituted by interviews with two psychiatrists) was translated by Bann, its first part was translated by Michael Metteer. For a selection of Bann’s artworks and artistic projects (many of them in the form of poem cards), see Stephen Bann, “Poem Prints,” Art History 28 (November 2005): 649–56.

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becomes preeminent. This sense is indebted to what Wolfgang Ernst has described as Bann’s commitment to “the special role of subjectivity in the whole process of historical representation.” I attempt to do this commitment some small justice in this introduction. I discuss it in relation to one of the most characteristic features of Bann’s work: his demurral about sharp breaks and confident historical orderings. In evoking Bann’s importance for any scholar working today concerned with issues of historical representation, the valiant contributors to Art History ranged across the spectrum of different topics in Bann’s texts. Nevertheless, there was a concentration on the nineteenth century in France, especially the development of its art and architecture. My commentary gravitates toward earlier periods and looks at two individuals. Toward the end of this introduction, however, I turn to some exemplary moments in Bann’s scholarship on nineteenth-century French art. I discuss an aspect of his method relevant for this volume: how his arguments develop within, and take their critical power from, an attention to what he has called the “close grain of historical detail.” Ernst’s remark bears on Roland Barthes’s challenge to the serenities of modern historiography. With his distinction between discours and histoire, Barthes questioned the privileged

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Wolfgang Ernst, “Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines,” Art History 28 (November 2005): 599. Stephen Bann, “Questions of Genre in Early Nineteenth-Century French Painting,” New Literary History, special issue “Theorizing Genres II” no. 34 (2003): 501–11, quotation on 501.

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Introduction

signification of histoire by nineteenth-century historians. Enabled by Émile Benveniste’s disclosure of enunciative modalities (to use Louis Marin’s expression), Barthes identified how the narrative role of histoire as impeccably determinate depended upon the sly efficacy with which discours had been expelled from the field of representation. As has been well noted, Barthes has been a figure essential to Bann’s work. But the judiciousness of Bann’s engagement bears repeated emphasis. In his Romanticism and the Rise of History, the interpretative potential of discours is carefully won. A move away from Barthes’s terms is apparently signalled early on in the text—but only to insert distance from Barthes’s inaugural framing of the contrast, in which he tried to surpass histoire as if by fiat. Profiting from Barthes’s distinction does not mean resorting to it as a template. A point made in the same book about the status of the photograph depends upon a similarly leavened refusal. As little quarter is given to a teleological history of photography as in the important revisionary pages of his book Parallel Lines. When Bann argues that the photograph will always be a matter of histoire, he is not lamenting that histoire is its inevitable lot. Benveniste’s different denominations of tense are accommodated by the

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Roland Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire,” Social Science Information 6 (1967): 65–75. My description depends on Bann’s account of this text. While he carefully distinguishes between the different facets of Barthes’s writings, and underlines the changes in his thinking over the course of his career, this essay has provided Bann with a major source for Barthes’s thinking on this distinction. Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne, 1995), 40. Further references will be abbreviated RRH in the text.

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photographic process itself. In the instantaneous registration of light and detail, no lag is available in which a more subjective view might occur. The question is not one of opening enunciative modality. In fact, for Barthes, as Bann points out, the photograph seemed to offer a plausibly assured version of histoire, one that easily trailed clouds of myth in its promise to seize and fix an impression. Barthes himself broadly identified this capacity while also falling prey to it. In Bann’s elaboration of Barthes’s contrast, discours never operates as a liberatory principle. Tracing Bann’s use of theoretical sources tends to flatten out the texture of his work, however. The writing often thickens into an intricate weave between observation and a meditation upon the value of his sources. This meshing helps explain the reason why Ernst referred to “the special role of subjectivity” and why Cherry and Michael Charlesworth could so readily remark on an ethical dimension to Bann’s work. It is also why Barthes’s contrast is instrumental in Romanticism and the Rise of History. This book is concerned with the magnitude of the changes wrought during the Romantic period in the nature of our relationship with the past. A fascination for history emerged in and across an array of differently individuated expressions, intensifying into a

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Bann elaborates on Barthes’s response to photography, especially in Camera Lucida; Barthes observed that history and photography were both inventions of the nineteenth century, and Bann emphasizes Barthes’s assertion that the photograph fixes an image: “a sure testimony, even if a fleeting one.” Bann, Romanticism, 42, 125. See also Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). Cherry, “Introduction,” 575; and Michael Charlesworth, “The Imaginative Dimension of an Early Eighteenth-Century Garden: Wentworth Castle,” Art History 28:626.

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Introduction 11

phenomenon of such vividness—an “historical-mindedness,” to use Bann’s term—that its smooth absorption into longer range developments, as has been the case in some scholarly accounts, is opposed by Bann (RRH, 6, 89). What, then, of his sensitivity to sharp historical breaks and orderings? Romanticism and the Rise of History reveals that for Bann, the question is not the impossibility of countenancing decisive breaks but of adjusting our perceptions about how such breaks occur. The array of differently individuated expressions of the past in Romanticism was not a set of symptoms betokening an underlying change. The interventions were themselves the change. In the radical extension of Barthes’s terms undertaken by Bann, we see how the transformations of Romanticism were accomplished through a variety of discursive articulations (RRH, 80–81). Romanticism and the Rise of History therefore offers especial pertinence for a book by the same author addressing Modernism. As Bann discusses in the first part of this book, the ways in which this particular date or that particular painting from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries becomes charged with significance itself accrued contested importance. Even the variety of images and similes, analyzed by Bann with considerable precision, which have done eloquent (or not so eloquent) service in describing modernist painting’s changes, shifts, and advances, testify to a polemical restlessness about the perceived breaks that may have marked its beginnings. This has not prevented

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the hardening of some explanations, barnacle-like, around individual achievements or contexts. Throughout Bann’s account, therefore, there is a deep recognition of what Stephen Melville has identified as the “inner openness to controversy” that lies at the heart of the modernist project. That is as much as I want to say by way of anticipating Bann’s arguments in this book. Instead, I turn to an earlier historical context that has been discussed by Bann, one that includes reference to a moment prior to the development of a “historical-mindedness.” It presents a foil against which to appreciate his argument for the decisiveness of the break—one of such import that contemporary Western attitudes to the past cannot be understood without acknowledging their debt to the Romantic period. My example is a contrast Bann has drawn between two figures, both of whom have featured in a number of his writings. Both individuals were from Kent, a part of England that has provided Bann with a rich seam of historical material.10 The first is John Bargrave, canon of Canterbury Cathedral in Kent at the time of his death in 1680, whose earlier life had been much given to travels in continental Europe and as far afield as Algiers. The second is an eighteenth-century provincial clergyman called Bryan Faussett. Both Bargrave and Faussett were motivated by the

10

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Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Re-emergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism,” October 19 (Winter 1981): 65. See, for example, Ernst’s remarks on Bann’s artwork A Mythic Topography (1980), in Ernst, “Let There Be Irony,” 597.

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Introduction 13

strongest of desires to gather and conserve collections of objects. Yet a present-day observer is liable to find one collector appealing while the other remains distant, and in more ways than one. The unexpected, affective strength of this contrast infuses Bann’s analysis of each individual’s relation to the past. Faussett was impelled not only to rescue an array of damaged and fragmentary historical objects from rural oblivion, but also to dignify these beleaguered remnants of earlier periods in his county’s history by a “small brick structure” built to house them.11 The industrious Faussett also devised six inscriptions that commemorate his efforts on their behalf. In his book devoted to Bargrave, Under the Sign, Bann distinguishes these inscriptions from Bargrave’s catalogue entries on his own heterogeneous objects, collected over the course of his travels. We might expect the differences between these two series of texts not to run especially deep. After all, each can be accurately described as memorial records left behind by two apparently similar individuals—located in the same part of the world, separated in time by not too many decades—towards sets of objects in their care whose amassing had evidently absorbed the energy of both in significant albeit different ways. Indeed, a present-day reader might anticipate that the pondering of each series of texts 11

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Bann, Romanticism, 90. The “Fausset Pavillion” was still standing until the 1950s. Stephen Bann, Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 101. Subsequent references will be abbreviated UTS in the text. See also Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 100–47.

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would enhance a familiar cultural prospect: erudite amateurs delightfully pottering around the objects of their enthusiasm. (Needless to say, the comfort with which the latter image takes up its abode in our expectations of individuals such as Bargrave and Faussett has not gone unnoticed by Bann.) Bargrave’s apparently recalcitrant and brittle catalogue entries try the patience of a reader with such fond imaginings. They dispense seemingly inert information about his acquisition of extremely heterogeneous objects. Faussett’s inscriptions appear far more permeable. They project, as Bann emphasizes, a yearning to care for the fragments they purport to identify. Faussett’s solicitous texts record his distress at the previous degradations suffered by his damaged antiquities along with speculations on their perhaps venerable origins. The suggestion that Bargrave’s often meticulous descriptions of objects in his collection can be assimilated to a rudimentary positivism is fended off by Bann (UTS, 103). Such an approach would nicely integrate them in a progressive development of disciplinary boundaries from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Bann has taken pains to disavow this “gradualist approach” to historical developments, especially in relation to the “specific epistemological fields” required by investigation of “the collecting practice” (RRH, 89; UTS, 8). Bann refuses the suggestion, one also reliant on interpretations honed on later contexts, that the apparent fussiness of some of Bargrave’s entries can be explained as responses to an object’s “secondary sensuousness.”

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Introduction 15

The phrase is Theodor Adorno’s, and it comes from his essay on Walter Benjamin’s self-positioning in respect to philosophical traditions. Bargrave was hardly impelled by a desire to avoid his collection’s ensnarement in the “conventional conceptual net” from which Benjamin sought escape. Bargrave’s analyses were not Benjamin’s meditations on wayward or overlooked objects; their qualities satisfyingly expanded as if to exempt him from justificatory systems of overall ordering. (The two arguments bear on the various explanatory attempts to enclose the “phenomenon of curiosity” that Bann discusses in the second part of his book [UTS, 76–77, 103–4].) Within the parameters of Bargrave’s collection, a further distinction needs to be made. Unlike Faussett, Bargrave collected both contemporary and historical objects. When it comes to those catalogue entries describing objects steeped in antiquity (a Roman figurine in bronze; a pottery lamp, also Roman), Bann emphasizes that Bargrave’s annotations contract to even less obliging dimensions. They seem adamant in their refusal to kindle historical interest in a form that we would understand (and warm to). Bargrave’s visits to Rome furnished his collection with objects whose pedigree he proudly verified as historical, but only, according to Bann, as a pronouncement on their “status and value.” The objects themselves are never used by Bargrave as “shifters to a bygone age” (UTS, 101). By contrast, Faussett was impelled by a need to tell not only his own story but also those of his objects. In the contrast

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between Bargrave’s seemingly noncathected relation to history and Faussett’s enthusiasms, Bann figures the distance between the eighteenth-century antiquarian and the seventeenth-century assembler of a curiosity cabinet. Faussett radiates appeal because, as Bann points out, he embodies sympathy (UTS, 103). Faussett presents us with far more comprehensible and even endearing a character, while the chillier Bargrave remains altogether more remote. Although he appeared on the same landscape a hundred or so years before Faussett, Bargrave remains outside our ken. But his landscape remained unbroken by the antiquarian’s spade. Even Kent’s Roman remains failed to engage this seventeenth-century aficionado of Rome. That Bargrave appears inaccessible to our ready assimilation testifies to the immensity of the change brought about by “historical-mindedness.” If Faussett’s inscriptions convey a mingling of self-memorializing and investment in history that seems eminently familiar to us, it is because Romanticism’s relation to the past has made it so. The ties that bind Faussett to a Romantic sense of the past have yet more to tell us. Antiquarians feature as intermediaries in modern historiography, precursors to more rigorous professionals who, the impression is given, stepped in and smartened up the haphazard practices of Faussett and his ilk. Bann stresses the radicalism of this tradition, however, especially as it developed in an English context. When he challenges the smooth accounts that progress from century to century (as in some of the accounts mentioned in volume one of this series), it is the contribution of

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Introduction 17

the antiquarian that he specifically cites.12 Friedrich Nietzsche, as Bann points out, had already awarded the antiquarian’s relation to the past its modernity: theirs was an urgent attachment to history conceived of as a necessary attachment, one formed by an investment in beloved objects. For Nietzsche, the antiquarian’s approach is modern compared to a “monumental” sense of history (RRH, 66). The former conceives of the past through the objects he reverently conserves, but the latter is bound to tradition and describes large, repeating historical cycles. For Bann, Nietzsche’s analysis is all the more important given the fact that by the late nineteenth century, the province of befuddled, “disreputable” history had been already given over—with a horrified shudder—to the antiquarian (RRH, 65). This was especially true of England and Germany with their long traditions of antiquarian activity (RRH, 66). A veritable craving to supplement that which remained ruined or lost became a familiar impulse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bann has described how Johann Winckelmann’s discursive intervention in the past was underwritten by a compensatory relation to the damaged Roman copies of Greek sculpture about which he wrote. According to “gradualist” accounts, the antiquarian should obediently spin a provincial variation on this theme. In another effective contrast, Bann considers Winckelmann in relation to the lowlier Faussett in order 12

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James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents, vol. 1 in the series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2005).

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to reveal the latter’s inherent radicalism. Winckelmann was compelled to fill out well-nigh palpable wholes for the fragments he described. Faussett remained content to provide a fragmentary historical hinterland for his disconsolate sculptures. It was not the case that Bargrave’s special relation to history as he was working on his catalogue was one of disinterest. Least of all was it one of noncathexis. Bann’s generative extension of Barthes’s distinction achieves, as Ernst points out, special purchase when applied to the period from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The case of the antiquarian discloses Bann’s emphasis on the enormity of the break opened up between Romanticism’s relation to the past and the conceptions of history held by the representatives of periods prior to the development of “historical-mindedness” from the late eighteenth century onwards. (Faussett, for example, died in 1776.) The case of Bargrave, a survivor of the English Civil War (1642–c. 1651), shows that a commitment to “the special role of subjectivity in the whole process of historical representation” applies to the entirety of Bann’s oeuvre. Oblivious to the potential for imaginative investment held by those historical objects in his possession, John Bargrave was unmoved by any wish to experience past ages in vivid, concrete ways. He would not have seen any point in whiling away his time speculating on the lives of those Roman citizens who might have “brushed up” against the unassuming antique artifacts he had acquired. (As it happens, the present-day town of Canterbury

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Introduction 19

includes a historical recreation of the time of The Canterbury Tales, a strenuous example of an “historical resurrection” that has become increasingly widespread. This version of The Canterbury Tales is mentioned by Bann as he investigates variously modulated desires to “live the past” and “bring the past to life” in Romanticism and the Rise of History. So avid have its creators been to conjure an impression of the famously earthy fourteenth-century milieu of Geoffrey Chaucer that their promises of tangibility extend, rather uninvitingly, to olfactory accuracy [RRH, 149].) According to Nietzsche’s remarks, quoted by Bann in Romanticism and the Rise of History, the antiquarian “looks back to the origins of his existence with love and trust” and “the history of his town becomes the history of himself” (RR, 65–67). This aspect of Nietzsche’s conception is clearly applicable to Faussett’s discours. So dismayed was Faussett by the contemporary treatment inflicted upon the centuries-old fragments turned up not too far away from his doorstep that he gathered them into his care. Bargrave’s experience of personal and familial dispossession placed him worlds away from this contented appreciation of earlier flowerings in the history and architecture of one’s own place. In Bann’s account, Bargrave inches his way towards a reconstructed sense of self after a life marked by the religious polarizations of the seventeenth century. It is ironic if the longer of Bargrave’s catalogue entries convey to a present-day reader the impression of a personality snared in the minutiae of his objects’ acquisition or their intricate structures. This belies the ability of the historical

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Bargrave to erase from his texts, when necessary, all sense of the particular. He provided but a terse Latin inscription for his family’s memorial. This text dramatically and enigmatically condenses their tragic history over the course of two generations devastated by the Civil War to one “extraordinarily sweeping message” pronouncing on the demise of his “Family” (UTS, 24–26). In Under the Sign, Bargrave’s sense of loss is located at the deepest of levels. The compiling of a catalogue for his prized objects appears as one of a number of strategies centered on his collection in which his libidinal attachments to his family and former status seem to have been reconstituted by new objects. Bann turns here to Sigmund Freud’s theory of mourning. The libidinal economy of reattachment, which seems emblematic of the later stage in Bargrave’s life, included a newly fortified sense of his purview as an author—not least the claim to his own collection. After all, Michel Foucault did identify the seventeenth century as the inaugural period of identifiably authored texts (UTS, 21–22, 78). The stories of Faussett and Bargrave show Bann’s ability to use intensively researched evaluations of specific contexts to oppose long-standing perceptions about historical progress. Such research underlies the remarkable range of objects, historical personalities, places, and works of art that have come under Bann’s gaze: Pierre Loti visualizing the past in his lavishly appointed salle gothique, Machiavelli donning “royal and curial robes,” Paul Delaroche dispensing charity to less successful

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Introduction 21

artists, Hubert Damisch unburdening himself about his curatorial experiences, Jannis Kounellis’s encasing of the precipitous central staircase of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.13 The range of objects is no less remarkable: paintings, prints, plates, caddis-fly cases, an “artificial rainbow,” the monstrous taxidermy of Charles Waterton, or Wolfgang Laib’s shimmering chambers of beeswax.14 We have already seen how the critical mass that develops in Bann’s discussions of particular figures and contexts can challenge plausible and entrenched historical arguments. Consider, then, an example from the nineteenth century: his fissuring of the reverentially received narrative of Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” in Parallel Lines,15 a book that has become as influential as Bann’s earlier study of the nineteenth-century French painter Paul Delaroche. Bann’s account of Delaroche wrests this artist from over a century’s 13

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Pierre Loti and Machiavelli: Bann, Romanticism, 152–60, 132, 151; Hubert Damisch: “Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann: A Conversation,” revised and corrected by Hubert Damisch, Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 2 (2005): 155–81; and Stephen Bann, Jannis Kounellis (London: Reaktion, 2003), 49–50. Caddis-fly cases: Stephen Bann, “The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum Display,” in Art and Its Publics, edited by Andrew McClennan (London: Blackwell, 2003), 128. (Hubert Duprat’s work with caddis flies is also discussed in the second part of his volume.) An “artificial rainbow”: Bann, Under the Sign, 16–17. (This “artificial rainbow” had been part of Bargrave’s collection of “optical devices” capable of conjuring visual effects.) Charles Waterton: Stephen Bann, “Introduction,” in Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity, edited by Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion, 1994), 1–12; and Wolfgang Laib: Stephen Bann, “The Framing of Material: Around Degas’s Bureau de Coton,” in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essay on the Boundaries of the Artwork, edited by Paul Duro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151–52. Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Further references will be given as PL in the text.

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22


worth of encrusted condescension. Delaroche’s rearticulations of prior art and of nineteenth-century visual culture are uncovered in his paintings’ scenographic originality and their fashioning of artistic selfhood.16 Inter alia, Parallel Lines releases the reproductive technologies of the nineteenth century from their long march towards the truth of photography. Bann makes no claim to “demythologize” Benjamin’s essay (PL, 16). This book is a lavish account in which the different kinds of reproductive images—répétitions or replicas, versions, and engravings—circulating in nineteenth-century France regain their place in the artistic world from which they came. In the received account, a cult value was invested in the original. The original, according to Benjamin, had its aura extinguished—or, rather, that aura was taken from it—by the merciless onslaught of photography. Copies, it is implied, were intended to make images of great works of art available to everyone who could afford them, and yet they were a debasement contaminating the original images. Bann shows that in the nineteenth century in France, individual paintings failed to receive the sacred dues that Benjamin assumed were their right. Indeed, any ambitious French painter worth his salt would be greatly troubled if one of his more prized canvases languished as only a single cultic object, largely lost to future viewers. Generally speaking, if he had enjoyed Salon success, his masterpiece would not be left in 16

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Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche: History Painted (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). I have limited myself to a laconic description of a complex text.

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Introduction 23

splendid uniqueness. It was in the painter’s best interest that versions of his painting remain in the public eye. In fact, as Bann points out, the canonical figure of Eugène Delacroix was fortunate that his later reputation did not suffer the vagaries of reception afforded many of his fellow painters from the Restoration and later. That was because Delacroix remained unusually phlegmatic about the necessity of ensuring that copies of his most famous paintings were disseminated in the form of reproductive engravings (PL, 116). The necessity of ensuring a painting’s longevity was an important reason why an extensive, complex world of printmaking technologies and skills flourished throughout the nineteenth century in France. As Bann brings out in compelling detail, the task of engraving celebrated works (whether from the Italian Renaissance or the contemporary French school) with a burin onto a copper plate was astoundingly time-consuming and technically demanding. Little wonder a special status was awarded to engravers. Debate flourished on the nature of their exhausting vocation and their capacity to immortalize and improve paintings, while their fabulous skills and often glacial progress withered the patience of publishers, painters, and public. Benjamin’s famously persuasive trajectory, however, left the impression of a pre-photographic world in which printmaking was marginal and artisanal. Benjamin could only conceive of a copy, and most particularly a photographic copy, as a force for irreversible and ultimately lamentable change. Oil painting

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reigned in cultic splendor until its world was shattered by the sudden arrival of the full-fledged perfection of reproductive technologies enabled by the new medium of photography. For Benjamin, the rise of these technologies swept all behind them. In Bann’s account, not one of these interpretations survives extended scrutiny. His extended analysis of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s fraught relationship with the idea of reproductive engraving, or the role of Robert Jefferson Bingham, a “specialist in photographic reproduction,” yields a view of nineteenth-century France’s artistic culture as one of many interlinking communities.17 Benjamin’s problematic devotion to the sequestered and precious original, and his idea of the fallen copy, give way to an appreciation of the close relations between artists, engravers, lithographers, explorers of the daguerreotype, experimenters with mixed-media techniques (such as dessins-fumées), publishers, authors, critics, and photographers. Exchanges between these individuals operated not on the basis of time-immemorial Platonic hierarchies but in terms of a “fecundity” of images that should be conceived, Bann argues, as sharing in the Byzantine idea of “divine economy”—“economy” understood here as the gift of God the Father in the living image of his Son (PL, 30). The appeal of Benjamin’s argument, and the longevity of its authority, was due to the fact that it seemed masterfully to gather the scattered threads of technological developments in the 17

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Bann, Parallel Lines, 117, 120.

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Introduction 25

modern period. Readers were given the impression that Benjamin had taken stock of the history, both in detail and in general. The erosion of these claims in Parallel Lines is not accomplished by anything as unilaterally philosophic. Rather, it is demonstrated by the painstaking analysis of strata within the history of Modernism whose range and complexity had not been suspected.18 A second example from the nineteenth century also shows how Bann acknowledges notions of rupture or break as integrated into convincingly nuanced historical frameworks. In this example, a break is assimilated to neither freedom nor limitation. Bann approaches the hierarchy of genres in the nineteenth century in a way that contributes to the recent appreciation, the work of a number of scholars, of the hierarchy as persistently relevant over the preceding two centuries.19 The hierarchy of genres in general, and the category of genre painting in particular, has been awarded a concerted attention that has largely, and thankfully, deprived them of their previous associations. (Roughly speaking, the hierarchy of genres was denigrated as a creaking, increasingly obsolete set of rules taunting progressive French painters.) If Édouard Manet’s distinctive genius in invoking the 18

19

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See further, for example, the discussion in Stephen Bann, “Meaning/Interpretation,” in Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 128–42. See, for example, Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Paul Duro, “Giving Up on History? Challenges to the Hierarchy of the Genres in Early Nineteenth-Century France,” Art History 28, 689–711; Paul Duro, ed., The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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hierarchy of genres at the same time as he utterly changed its strictures has been well elucidated, it still remains the case that a painting from the Bourbon Restoration (1815–1830) is less likely to be approached with the expectation of uncovering similarly thoroughgoing changes. Even in 1817 (the date of Abel de Pujol’s Prédication de Saint Etienne), however, there were paintings that already occupied interstices in the hierarchy, and were recognized and even honored as doing that. (De Pujol’s religious scene earned him a prize for history painting, as Bann discusses in this volume.) Painters, Bann argues, were already opening supposedly locked doors in terms of subject matter. In the history of nineteenth-century French painting, artists were inextricably linked to institutional structures, as epitomized by the degree to which they were bound to the Salon system of public exhibition. Ever resourceful, they developed radical and advanced practices within the system. Here Bann again turns to Foucault, on this occasion invoking Foucault’s perception that multivalent and complex sexualities were able to thrive and develop within a nineteenth century hallowed as the most repressive of periods. The categories of genre and history painting were already being expanded in the Restoration by Delaroche, Léopold Robert, and various other surprisingly innovative painters. Institutions and critics alike were obliged to reconfigure their expectations of history painting. The limited analogy with Foucault prompts a recasting of a hierarchical system whose resistance to change gave artists, in this case,

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Introduction 27

the constraints and interdictions against which they were able to develop. Configuring this change of practices, a schematic rupture or break would undervalue the consistently sophisticated artistic culture, one steeped in the nuances of French pictorial language, within which advanced artists continued to work. The criticality of what made for a successful genre painting depended on this process, whether in 1817 or 1831 (the date of Léopold Robert’s Les Moissonneurs dans les Marais pontins, a painting so acclaimed at the Salon that it was all but celebrated as a history painting). Bann’s work has pertinence for historians working on an array of topics, from Paolo Uccello to Elizabethan Anglicanism, from the popular press of the nineteenth century to the “honeycomb” of sites for installation art. He proceeds not by galvanizing large assumptions and claims, but by reflecting on specific instances and works of art that turn out, through the quality of his meditations, to open up—to perforate—settled boundaries. In the case of Barthes, for example, Bann was drawn to the justly celebrated contrast between discours and histoire. But he extended it beyond the literary constellations or dated political imperatives to which its author had imagined it most suited. In Bann’s analysis, recognizing history’s operation as discourse becomes a well overdue means of accounting for the scale of the Romantic investment in the past—with all its messy, melodramatic, nationalistic, and idiosyncratic excesses very much included. As Bann has observed, these latter elements are hardly unfamiliar in

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a present-day milieu. In looking back, then, on Romantic discursivity, it is hardly from a decathected modernist realm. In Bann’s response to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” there is also the sense of a reappraisal, a reevaluation of the vast and melancholic certainties of Benjamin’s argument. But in both cases, Bann’s polemics take on the full potential of the given thesis. He is determined to locate the argument’s full force, in all its permutations, preferably in the “close grain of historical detail,” rather than on the level of large assumptions.20 Margaret MacNamidhe Cork, Ireland Margaret MacNamidhe is Government-of-Ireland IRCHSS PostDoctoral Fellow in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin. She has published on Xavier Sigalon and Stendhal, and is currently completing The Dilemma of Painting in the 1824 Salon. Note A full list of Stephen Bann’s publications can be found in About Stephen Bann, edited by Deborah Cherry (London: Blackwell, 2006).

20

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Bann, “Questions of Genre,” 501.

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Ways Around Modernism As the second author to contribute to this series, I should start by acknowledging the stimulus of the general editor who also launched the project with his own two lectures and the subsequent book, Master Narratives and Their Discontents. James Elkins began his inquiry by detecting four master narratives in a very broadly conceived, panoramic survey of the different modalities through which the history of Western painting has generally been interpreted. He was especially attentive to the ways in which modernist criticism has tacitly adopted certain criteria and modes of interpretation, but entirely rejected others, despite their evident accessibility and their relevance on a popular level. I shall be adopting a less panoramic viewpoint, and sacrificing the important insights that prompted him to discuss, for example, the “Importance of Skill” (or the absence of it) as a criterion in

I should also acknowledge here the generous hospitality of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where I completed the revisions of my text. As Edmond J. Safra Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts for the fall of 2005, I was privileged to enjoy the collegial spirit and splendid library facilities of that institution.

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the estimation of modern art. I shall be focusing upon more specific conjunctures in the history and criticism of Modernism. I also make no apology for discussing postmodern tendencies in the light of some recent artistic achievements that are, as yet, very little known. Indeed, the second part of my own inquiry will entail a backward look at some of the stages in my own personal history as a critic and art historian. But I hope that this perspective will also provide an alternative way of framing the wider picture that James Elkins has, quite rightly in my view, judged to be important. In the first instance, I shall be looking principally at the vexed question of the “origins” of Modernism. As Elkins characterizes it, there are some critics and historians who situate the modernist break in the period of late Cézanne and Cubism, others who locate it with Manet, yet another group who favors tracing it to the turn of the eighteenth century, and finally those who are inclined to go back as far as the period that our nineteenth-century forebears decided to call “the Renaissance.” That is a long enough list for the moment. Yet the medievalists have every right to claim that the first moderns so called were the Scholastic philosophers who advanced their arguments against the latter-day defenders of the heritage of Classical Antiquity. Within the scope of this brief study, I can do little more than gesture at the wider context that I believe to be necessary in formulating such an issue. I should say from the outset that my preferred tactic is to give some weight to all of these diverse constructions of the past, but to place the main emphasis on

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Ways Around Modernism 31

understanding the overall logic of this eternal regress. Hence, I do not propose to defend the validity of any one interpretation. On the most basic (and admittedly the most schematic) level, the phenomenon of periodization in which a concept like Modernism is embedded is inevitably a retrospective construction, deriving in part from our acquaintance with the existing conventions for the historical display of works of art. The division of the past into “centuries,” for example, has done sterling service over the relatively recent time span in which art has been deemed to merit a historical treatment. Undoubtedly this convention of grouping works of art into blocks that cover a hundred years can be related to a unique development in museum display. When Alexandre Lenoir set up his Musée des monuments français at the time of the French Revolution, it proved a masterstroke to redistribute the various architectural and sculptural exhibits salvaged from buildings like the royal abbey of SaintDenis into successive “century” rooms in the former Parisian convent of the Grands-Augustins. For the first time, and in this particular complex of buildings on the site of the present École des Beaux-Arts on the left bank of the Seine, the grouping of objects was subject to a historical as well as a spatial logic. It would be hard to overestimate the implications of Lenoir’s system. The museum itself was closed after the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, and many of its objects returned to their former sites. Yet, for a brief period, the passage of time had been materialized in the form of a sequence of distinct stages made

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palpable by the display of the venerable objects. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the architect Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc would perfect, and codify, such a discontinuous system of classification in the line engravings for his Dictionnaire du mobilier français. In these studied drawings, the main living quarters of a “typical” French château were represented over a series of centuries, so that readers were able to single out successive innovations in the styles of furnishing, decoration, and dress. Of course, the clarity of the exposition depended on the draughtsman’s ability to indicate significant differences from century to century. No account could be taken of the inconvenient point that objects have a tendency to continue in being from one century to the next. The domestic environment was certainly not transformed, like Cinderella, by the stroke of midnight at the conclusion of each ninety-ninth year! This is a very obvious point, and the response to it comes no less obviously. We benefit enormously in our grasp of historical change from the system of distinctions that is obtained by this type of “averaging” process. The “century” room is of necessity a differential concept, and thus requires the enhancement of all forms of specific difference to establish its individuality. But it is nonetheless important to remain skeptical about category distinctions that are based on the arbitrary divisions of chronology. “Art since 1900”—to take the name of a rightly acclaimed recent publication—points to just such a category distinction. It is a book title, and perhaps no one would be inclined to expect

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precision in such a handily contracted form. But the difficulty arises when such a working definition presents itself as being virtually synonymous with a broader and more elusive concept like Modernism. Though it may be a great convenience to encapsulate Modernism in such terms, the corresponding act of exclusion raises more difficulties than it can be expected to resolve. Here, there is an implicit conflict of interest not just between historians of the nineteenth century and historians of the twentieth century, but also between historians from the academic world and those working in museums and galleries, who rightly assume the role of interpreting historical findings for the benefit of a wider public. There is an understandable reluctance on their part to follow the historian wherever the logic of a particular position may lead. But again there is a price to pay for denying that logic. I am reminded of a recently published conversation that I held with the French art historian and critic Hubert Damisch, who spoke very frankly about his experience in trying to formulate a plan for an exhibition on the subject of abstraction. The passage needs to be quoted in full, since it illustrates very precisely the way in which innovatory historical thinking can come up against an immovable institutional barrier: Several years ago, I was asked by the president of the Centre [Georges] Pompidou to curate a major exhibition on the theme [of abstraction]. Eventually it didn’t work out because the staff didn’t like the idea that abstraction could be an issue that would not be restricted to the twentieth century. They wanted me to deal with

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abstract art as it developed during the twentieth century, intimating that it was now over, and that we needed to get rid of all these questions. . . . My idea was to develop the notion that abstraction started long ago, two thousand years ago in Greece, with the origin of geometry. And we would have dealt with abstraction as understood by mathematicians, with a special concern for the Middle Ages—we would also have dealt with what abstraction means in general. We would have developed the idea that, in a way, abstraction always formed part of the general process of Western art, and that some sort of a crisis developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, to be paralleled with the crisis in mathematics that was looking for its own fundamentals. In the same way that painting was looking for its own specificity, its own fundamentals. Due to such a crisis—abstraction was turned into the central issue of art. And this would have corresponded to the main axis of the exhibition.

It is important to underline the point that Damisch is very far from denying the existence of a twentieth-century break. Indeed, he points specifically to “some sort of a crisis” that coincides with the passing of the old century. The difficulty is that such a crisis, being integrally linked in his view to parallel developments in another branch of knowledge, requires another, much more long-term history to be brought into account. Damisch himself had already demonstrated many years before in his essay on Paul Klee’s Equals Infinity (1932; Museum of Modern Art, New

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“Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann: A Conversation,” revised and corrected by Hubert Damisch, Oxford Art Journal 28, no 2 (2005): 169.

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York) that a compelling case could be made for the connection between a celebrated modernist work of abstraction and contemporary mathematical thinking. It would surely be defeatist to assert that the exciting historical panorama sketched out in his statement could not have been manifested in a visual display. The telling factor here, from my point of view, is that resistance to Damisch’s historical concept, at least on the explicit level, took the form of fetishizing the notion of the “century of modern art.” For the curatorial staff of the Centre Pompidou, the concept behind the show had to have been of relatively recent origin, and it had to have reached its “sell-by” date. “Abstraction” was not to be presented as a universal tendency of Western thought that had come to the fore in the theory and practice of the visual arts at certain periods, but as the lowest common denominator that would provide a measure of common identity for the works of visual art produced during the twentieth century. I have to admit here that I was myself a willing accomplice in writing an essay for a weighty catalogue published to record one of the spectacular exhibitions of the visual arts that adopted the end-of-century theme: The Age of Modernism: Art in the 20th Century (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 1997). Here the conflation between Modernism and the “century” was complete, at least for the headline. But I chose to be a bit of a malcontent. I used the opportunity precisely to reflect on the previous history

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See Hubert Damisch, “Equals Infinity,” translated by Robert Olorenshaw, in 20th Century Studies 15–16 (December 1976): 56–81.

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of the century concept, and wondered if it was conceivable that any subsequent “century” would be treated in this global way. I also mentioned the essentially nineteenth-century precedents that lie behind virtually all our “modern” conceptions of exhibition and display. There can be no doubt that the whole issue of “Postmodernism” is integrally linked to this wish to bracket off the modern phase, so to speak, and to extract it from the flux of history. Yet no one seems willing to argue that Postmodernism only comes into its own with the twenty-first century. On the contrary, its origins are often tracked down to the 1960s and 1970s, and its first manifestations assessed from a multiplicity of different points of view. Seemingly, the very concept of Postmodernism is fated to be a fragile one in historical terms, to the extent that the postmodern is defined as existing in a relationship of exclusion vis-à-vis the modern, and not in a dialectical relationship to the past that would take into account the multiple determinations to which Modernism itself was heir. This is an easy point to make. But how can it be taken beyond the level of carping criticism, and eventuate in a usable methodology for understanding the recent history of art? In response to this question, I can still see no better guide than the stirring words of advice proffered by Nietzsche, under the title “A few steps back,” which I have already

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See Stephen Bann, “The Premises of Modern Art,” in The Age of Modernism: Art in the 20th Century, edited by Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal (OstfildernRuit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997), 517–24.

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used as an epigraph to my study, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition. Nietzsche is admitting as an incontrovertible proposition the arrival of what is often known as the Enlightenment; that is, he concedes the liberating consequences of the movement of political, social, and philosophical ideas whose origins we can trace back to the eighteenth century. He makes this clear: “One, certainly very high level of culture has been attained when a man emerges from superstitions and religious concepts and fears.” Yet from that very point, Nietzsche argues, a new strategy is necessary: “he needs to take a retrograde step: he has to grasp the historical justification that resides in such ideas.” What is being put forward here as the historically minded philosopher’s antidote to all unthinkingly forward-looking ways of thought is, surely, especially apt when applied to the concept of Modernism. Indeed, Modernism in its arts, as in all other domains of social and cultural practice, implicitly assumes the endorsement of such an unqualified view of progress. We can easily transpose into the specific context of art history the message of warning that Nietzsche delivers to those who confine their attention exclusively to the contemporary scene: I see more and more who are making for the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but still few who are taking a few steps back; for one may well want to look out over the upmost rung

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See Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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of the ladder, but one ought not to want to stand on it. The most enlightened get only as far as liberating themselves from metaphysics and looking back on it from above: whereas here too, as in the hippodrome, at the end of the track it is necessary to turn the corner.

Nietzsche’s lesson is not hard to interpret. Standing on “the upmost rung of the ladder” is not a recipe for clear-sightedness, but rather for becoming off balance (perhaps fatally so). Yet so many current commentaries on Western art, and particularly those that are closely engaged with theories of Postmodernism, seem to amount to standing on that topmost rung. Taking “A few steps back,” in Nietzsche’s terms, is not just a matter of straightforward historical procedure, but the best way, in my opinion, to keep a clear head in the contemporary period. To take a few steps backward is not, however, to retrogress. The aim is still to “look out over the upmost rung of the ladder”—in other words, to contribute to the development of the critical discourse of the present day. The further dividend is that the two vantage points on the ladder—historical and contemporary—are not mutually exclusive but reciprocal. Here again, I would like to introduce the example of Hubert Damisch, whose writings have always testified to the inseparable connection between historical thinking and an informed awareness of the present day.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 22–23.

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In the conversation quoted previously, Damisch also took the opportunity to emphasize what he learned in this respect from two of the leading art historians of the previous generation, the one French and the other American. “It is through [Pierre Francastel], and later on through Meyer Schapiro, that I learned that in order to get access to the past, one first has to deal with the present, to make [one’s] way through the present and what is at stake in it.” What this might mean in practice can be demonstrated only through specific examples of interpreting the relationship of works of art on either side of what we could call the modernist divide. In the first of these essays, I shall draw on such specific insights from the writings of both Schapiro and Damisch, as well as from those of Michael Fried, who also displays this inclusiveness of perception to a high degree. In the course of the opening essay, then, I shall be moving from rung to rung on the ladder that supports the trajectory of “modern painting.” Personally, I would not have any quarrel with the specific focus on painting that James Elkins took care to defend in the discussion that followed his original lectures. Indeed, my own view coincides very closely with his, since I would also argue that painting has provided (and continues to provide) “[t]he most interesting historically informed discourse on Modernism.”

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“Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann,” 158. James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents (New York: Routledge, 2005), 161.

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Of course, the fact that architectural criticism led the field in putting forward a theory of the postmodern should not be forgotten. My opening example brings up a specific and illuminating case of an architectural commentator who puts on record his attempt to establish the precise chronology of the postmodern break. This reference to the domain of architecture has the advantage of exposing several of the relevant issues with a measure of clarity. Yet it is still in the rich, “historically informed” tradition of Western painting that these issues achieve the highest, and most satisfying, degree of complexity. The fact that modernist painting has almost as many possible points of origin as the mythical birthplaces of Homer is a powerful aid to reflection. Among the different candidates for primacy, it is, however, Manet and Ingres who will receive most attention here. In the second of these essays, I intend to cover the ground in a rather different way. I will be concerned with three-dimensional objects rather two-dimensional pictures. Apparently this rather crude division turns out to be virtually the only manageable way of differentiating between the different modes of contemporary art, now that national and generic divisions have been superseded. But it is not for this reason that I adopt it. What I propose to do is to investigate the historical basis for a particular kind of attention devoted to the three-dimensional

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Having recently been a member of the international advisory committee of the Bibliography of History of Art, I noted this point as being agreed by the academic members and the library representatives. It was evident that no traditional divisions by national schools, or specific techniques, were useful for the period beginning roughly in 1970.

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object. So it will not simply be a matter of shifting from the high art of painting to the high art of sculpture. Instead, I will seek to trace some of the early antecedents and contemporary repercussions of the historical phenomenon of “curiosity,” as it has evolved and mutated over several centuries from the late Renaissance onwards. The term “curiosity” has often been used to describe practices of collecting and creating objects that are set apart from the hegemonic order of “high” or academic art. Often, the term has attracted a derogatory connotation. This was the case, for example, with the scientists of the early modern period, who distrusted the notion that passionate attention should be paid to individual objects, and favored the general observations that would demonstrate the laws of nature. It was also the case with the “scientific” historians of a later period, who dubbed as “antiquarian” a comparable preoccupation with the idiosyncratic products of the material world. Nevertheless, there have always been exceptions to this pattern of exclusion, not least in the nineteenth century when “curiosity” became identified with a new aesthetic close to, if not identical with, that of the “modern.” Significantly, the French poet Charles Baudelaire, by any account one of the foremost harbingers of modernity, called his most important critical collection Curiosités esthétiques.10 10

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See Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques et autres écrits sur l’art, edited by Julien Cain (Paris: Hermann, 1968), 27–28. Although the collection appeared posthumously, Baudelaire had selected its title.

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I will make no claim to summarize here the many mutations that the concept of curiosity has undergone over the centuries. What interests me, however, is the decisive way in which curiosity has resurfaced as a widespread and noteworthy feature of present-day art, connected not only to the creation of objects but also to a discernible shift in museological practice. This emergence, or remergence, of curiosity has also raised the possibility of reinterpreting some of the central aspects of Modernism, in such a way that they take on a more long-term historical significance. It would be absurd to attempt to reduce Surrealism to being no more than a latter-day manifestation of curiosity. Nevertheless, the fact that the contemporary practice of an artist like Mark Dion brings the heritage of curiosity and Surrealism into a felicitous and thought-provoking conjunction leads us to think again about the permeability of the modernist enclosure. In this second section of the book, then, it will be a question of following a form of discourse that cuts across, and implicitly reinterprets, what is bracketed within the modernist paradigm. The artists selected for discussion will be mainly contemporary, and will include in particular Hubert Duprat, from France, and Gerhard Lang, from Germany. Although these two artists differ considerably in their aims, they have this important point in common. Their orientation with regard to curiosity brings to the surface the broader question of the shared heritage of art and science.

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1. Strange Encounters When and where did Postmodernism begin? I want to start by acknowledging the relevance to this question of an area of the arts that has a good claim to have launched the first debate about the era of the postmodern, and to have offered an exemplary way of understanding what was entailed in the shift from Modernism. At a recent exhibition of plans and drawings by contemporary architects from the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, my attention was taken by an elegant line drawing credited to the architect Léon Krier (Figure 1.1). This was tantalizingly captioned with a set of queries by the architectural commentator Colin Rowe: So exactly when did [James] Stirling buy his first piece by Thomas Hope which quickly became so celebrated by the Leon Krier perspective for the Olivetti interior at Milton Keynes? Was it ’69 or ’70? This was surely a watershed.

Rowe’s rhetorical question is addressed, we may conclude, primarily to the architectural cognoscenti. It takes for granted that 43

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Figure 1.1 Leon Krier, draftsman, and James Stirling and Michael Wilford, architects, interior perspective for Olivetti Headquarters, Milton Keynes (1969–1970). Collection Centre Canadien d’architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

they are already aware of the mythic occasion when a specimen of the neoclassical furniture of the early nineteenth-century connoisseur and designer Thomas Hope, which had been bought by the well-known contemporary architect James Stirling, was then incorporated wholesale in an otherwise seamless modernist design, the Olivetti headquarters for Milton Keynes. The drawing by Krier (who was at that point working in Stirling’s office) shows the modern office building in a receding perspective, unexpectedly tenanted by two elegant armchairs, a classical herm, and a table that would not have been out of place in the line engravings published to accompany Hope’s “classic style book of the Regency period,” first published in 1807 (Figure 1.2). Rowe’s comment celebrates the visual encounter between the contemporary interior

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See Thomas Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Bolt-Court, UK: Longman, Hurst & Orme, 1807), reprinted with a new introduction by David Watkin (New York: Dover, 1971).

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Figure 1.2 Interior perspective from Thomas Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Bolt-Court, UK: Longman, Hurst & Orme, 1807).

and the apparently ill-matched furnishings, and indicates that in this juxtaposition, precisely, is to be found the “watershed.” He calls attention to the point in time when such a mismatch was not regarded as a mistake or an anomaly, but accepted as a testimony to a wholly new conception of contemporary style—as a premonition of what would shortly be termed “Postmodernism.” It is interesting to observe the precise terms in which Rowe’s retrospective judgement has been couched. The “event” in question is so exceptional that it cries out to be tethered down to a particular year. “Was it ’69 or ’70?” That the difference should matter is partly a question of squaring the relationship between Krier and Stirling, on the one hand, and other claimants for

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primacy in advancing the theory of Postmodernism, such as the architect Roberto Venturi, who published his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966. But, on a more fundamental level, it is surely a symptom of the need to enhance the mythical moment by anchoring it within a lived history. No doubt, the planned Olivetti HQ was never destined to be filled with furniture in the style of Hope—though Stirling certainly shocked many modern purists with the classicizing rotunda that he installed at the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in 1984. However, Krier’s image gives just sufficient grounding in reality to the project for us to imagine that abrupt intrusion of the historicizing pieces of furniture. In the ghostly form of the line drawing, they have so strangely violated the functional world of the bulky receptionist, and interrupted the blandly receding perspective of the modernist interior. Lunch on the Grass

We might say that the emphasis that is still placed upon the shock value of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’ herbe (Lunch on the grass) (Figure 1.3) can be compared with this recent example. However, it remains essentially different. Manet’s muchreproduced painting is, of course, infinitely more securely grounded in time and space than the architectural drawing

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Stirling intentionally related this important new museum building to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, substituting the open rotunda for Schinkel’s central pantheon. See James Steel, ed., Museum Builders (London: Academy Editions, 1994), 235.

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Figure 1.3 Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

that Colin Rowe hesitated to place in one year or the succeeding one. There can be no doubt at all about the place and date of its first public showing in Paris, which was at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. Nor does the work require us to make the imaginative leap of reconstruction that Krier’s architectural sketch invites us to perform. This is a painting, and we can easily take a trip to view it in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, or see the reduced version in the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London. However, the differences may not perhaps be so absolute as would appear at first sight. Can we in fact recover the full sense of what it was that would have seemed so out of the ordinary—

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to the point of being a “watershed”—in the first appearance of Manet’s painting at that particular date? Michael Fried appears to put that issue directly on the line, when he writes in the last couplet of a poem dedicated to T. J. Clark, and also entitled “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” When at the age of eighteen I first stood staring and breathless in the Jeu de Paume what most astounded me was that the paint appeared still wet.

In this text, let us bear in mind, Fried is speaking as a poet who is imaginatively reliving his own earlier life, and not as an art historian. He is reconnecting with his own vivid memory, and allowing that memory to resonate, perhaps, with the mythic moment when Manet’s contemporary audience might have been similarly startled. But he has no intention of persuading us that the shock produced by the Déjeuner sur l’ herbe, at the time of its first showing, would also have been registered by the Parisian viewers in terms of the canvas “appear[ing] still wet.” Maybe that would have been a banal impression at a nineteenth-century viewing, since the first sight of such works would usually have been at the vernissage, or varnishing day, when the artists were wont to apply their finishing touches. Contemporary critical evidence does not record that people were shocked by the painting for this particular reason, or indeed tried to translate their experience into verbal expressions congruent with such an impression.

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As a historian, Fried knows this well—hence his concern in his historical study of Manet’s Modernism to demonstrate that the radical nature of the painter’s work can be defined in another, less context-bound manner. It resides in an aesthetic property that can be closely correlated with the observations of a few, especially perceptive contemporary critics. But in order to be appreciated fully, it must also be appreciated in the light of the broader developments in nineteenth-century painting to which Manet and a number of contemporaries were heirs. So Fried as a historian gives himself the task of endeavoring to trace—through a century of formal development—the practical application of a concept that he terms “facingness.” This concept, in particular, needs to be taken into account in determining why the painting of Déjeuner sur l’ herbe was so crucial to the achievement of “Manet’s Modernism.” In his poem, Fried comments quite elliptically on this point, It was a moment in the history of the art of painting when the weight of the broken water rushing out to sea exactly counter-balanced the force of the waves rushing in.

Such a powerful image as this could imply a critical revision of the concept of the “watershed,” as it was used by Colin Rowe. For a “watershed” is a familiar term denoting in the strict sense

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See Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 269–70 and passim. Michael Fried, The Next Bend in the Road (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 71.

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“a narrow elevated tract of ground between two drainage areas” (OED) that is instrumental in feeding streams and rivers on either side of the eminence. The original term, which was evidently borrowed from an analogous German usage around 1800, has entered common parlance in the sense of a line or division between two systems of culture and thought. In this respect, it tacitly takes for granted the traditional equation between a high viewpoint and extensive knowledge of a field (considered metaphorically) that was prevalent in Western thinking about landscape from the early modern period onwards. Yet the lesson of Nietzsche’s ladder should again be applied here. The observer who is perched perilously high is not necessarily best placed to see into the future. Fried’s powerful image of “counter-balanc[ing]” waters, on the other hand, evokes the collision of mighty currents in a turbulent sea. From the observer’s point of view, the surprise is that the force of the incoming waves is “exactly” matched by that of the undertow, which pulls the “broken water” in the reverse direction. Instead of an even distribution of supply—extending towards the future and the past— we have a kind of maelstrom in which conflicting currents meet and part in different directions. But the burden of this surprising image is that the painting is held to have arrested these conflicting movements, and fixed them in a kind of dynamic stasis.

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For an extensive discussion of such metaphors, see John Barrell, “Public Prospect and Private View,” in Reading Landscape: Country—City—Capital, edited by Simon Pugh (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 19–40.

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Particularities of verbal figuration—poetic expressions that seek to describe the effect of paintings—are not to be disregarded when we try to make sense of the history of art. This watery simile is, surely, especially apt in the case of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’ herbe. We talk rather loosely about finding the “sources” for paintings, as though they were waterways that derived from distant springs. No one today disputes that one of these faraway outlets that found its way into Manet’s painting was the Renaissance artist Marcantonio Raimondi’s print after Raphael’s now lost Judgement of Paris. The relationship might well have been noticed by the more artistically literate members of his audience, but it was not formally spelled out in writing until an article on the subject was published in 1908. An alternative source springing from the Concert champêtre in the Louvre (at the time attributed to Giorgione) was more openly avowed by Manet, according to his chronicler Antonin Proust, who specifically described his friend as intending to create a modern Giorgione. But these far-removed, so to speak, deep sources should not necessarily be privileged over the shimmering crosscurrents that animate the surface. While discussing the German art historian Aby Warburg’s engagement with modern art in a recent article, Sven Lüttiken paid tribute to his intense interest in the link between Raimondi’s composition after Raphael and the Déjeuner sur l’ herbe. But then he added as a small reservation,

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See the entry by Françoise Cachin in Manet, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1983), 168.

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“[T]he thought that Déjeuner sur l’ herbe can also be seen as an avant-garde blague, an irreverent take on tradition from the age of Offenbach, was far from [Warburg’s] mind.” In other words, Warburg had indeed become fascinated by the remote Renaissance source, but he had ignored the point that this icon of Modernism was also thoroughly immersed in the codes of its own day. Such a point, perhaps, is what Fried’s poetic simile of the waters also implies. Fried’s poem infers that Manet shows an almost willful displacement of interest from the human subjects in their Raphaelesque positions to the thoroughly contemporary manner of their dress (and undress): The other woman, naked, seated on the grass and twisting her rubbery neck to look at us, is no beauty. But try to ignore her. In contrast the men are expendable. There is nothing going on in their heads, their gestures are vacuous, their wide-open eyes gleam meaninglessly. Only their brilliant accoutrements reward our attention, especially the clay-gray trousers, miniature cane, rose cravat and black pillbox cap of the type on the right.

Here, then, is another fashion of comparing the “watershed” of the Olivetti interior with the complex and “counter-balancing” forces in the Déjeuner sur l’ herbe. Krier’s drawing explictly evokes

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Sven Lüttiken, “‘Keep Your Distance’: Aby Warburg on Myth and Modern Art,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 58.

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the line-engraving style of Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture, as it distributes the precious neoclassical furniture around the functional space of the corporate headquarters. Manet brings in references to Raphael and Giorgione, no doubt, but the signs of their intrusion are not so blatant, since they are partly effaced by the multiple markings of contemporaneity. Colin Rowe asks, “Was it ’69 or ’70?” The need to place this “watershed” in a precise historical context is imperative, since Postmodernism must be credited with a beginning in time. Yet the architectural image in itself provides little in the way of clues that will allow us to resolve the issue: the clothing of the Olivetti operatives is anonymous, to say the least. Manet, by contrast, bombards us with highly visible clues that are integrally related to contemporary debates about “contrast” between the sexes, and specifically recall the ambivalence of the popular illustrated press of the day towards the new bohemian lifestyles. Was it 1862 or 1863? We should have little difficulty in understanding why this was the particular moment for the pictorial manifesto of Modernity. A dessert plate produced in Bordeaux by Vieillard epitomizes the way in which the female fashions of the nineteenth century were correlated exactly with changes in date, and so condensed a new form of precise contemporaneity (Figure 1.4). The caption “1862 & 1863: not being able to look at each other without laughing”—highlights the supposedly risible contrast between the full crinoline billowing out with all its extravagant appurtenances and the natural drape that typifies the year of the Salon des

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Figure 1.4 Dessert plate with transfer design, Vieillard factory, Bordeaux (c. 1863). Private collection.

Refusés. The gentlemen in the background repeat the contrast in a less egregious fashion, with the sprucely tailored, tightly waisted style of dress being juxtaposed with the baggy, relaxed, and evidently more comfortable one. It is hardly necessary to pursue the question of what type of clothing the naked lady in the Déjeuner sur l’ herbe would have been wearing, had we had been able to observe her dressed! The garments that have been cast aside, and lie limply on the ground to the left of the painting, were never laid out across the ample frame of a crinoline. Changes in fashions anticipate (or at least provide powerful visual metaphors for) the transformations that bring greater freedom for the arts. At least, that is one of the messages of Modernism, and Baudelaire’s essay on the “Painter of Modern Life” is its harbinger.

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The point is nicely reaffirmed at a later stage in the broadcasting of the modernist creed when Pierre Albert-Birot, friend and associate of Guillaume Apollinaire, slips a woodcut into his magazine SIC for March 1917 with the caption “No corset! . . . [Y]ou well know that what is most valuable in this world is precisely that which holds itself up on its own” (Figure 1.5). Yet already in the 1860s, the changing fashions of the day feed into a sociocultural discourse in which sexual anxiety is not far from the surface. Alphonse Karr’s article “Sous les orangers de Nice,” published in the popular illustrated journal Musée des familles in February 1862, is illustrated with a drawing by Gérard in an elegant manner that the Bordeaux transfer artist might well have chosen as a model (Figure 1.6). It puts on display what is without any doubt the pre-1863 mode of female dress with its opening image, “La femme comme il faut” (Woman as she should be), and then takes delight in developing a set of contrasts that exemplify different ways of upsetting the desirable equilibrium of the sexes: first, through literally giving the woman the whip hand, and secondly, by transforming her from an angel of mercy into a beast of burden. These eloquent images are intended, of course, to enhance the jottings of the fashionable columnist Karr on the subject of the “war between men and women,” which include a fortright defense of the crinoline and an ironic restatement of the proverb that “the less a woman is clothed, the more she is dressed.”

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Musée des familles (February 1862): 145–46.

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Figure 1.5 Woodcut from SIC (Sons, Idées, Couleurs), edited by Pierre Albert-Birot (April 1917): back cover.

Are we then obliged to choose, as Sven Lüttiken’s comment might suggest, between viewing Manet’s “watershed” painting as a noble enterprise drawing upon Renaissance sources, and deciphering it as a privileged point of convergence between contemporary codes? Surely we need not commit ourselves to

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Figure 1.6 Gérard after Breton, Les femmes. Wood engraving accompanying Alphonse Karr, “Sous les orangers de Nice,” from Musée des familles (February 1862).

any such choice. We might, however, concede at the same time that the very concern to pin a visual work of art to a precise date is in itself a symptom of the accentuated awareness of contemporaneity that enters Western consciousness with the proliferation of the illustrated weekly press in the mid-nineteenth century. It is notable that the paintings of Manet, which are integrally bound to that consciousness of time on the one hand, are in no less clear a fashion engaged in disavowing, or at least in leaving ambivalent, the competing messages that are being diffused throughout these contemporary media.

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To this extent, I am again in agreement with James Elkins that the “indeterminate” Manet remains the acid test for any diagnosis of “Modernity” and perhaps, by the same token, of “Postmodernity.” As he puts it, with Manet, “everything is at stake.” But I also agree with Elkins that Fried’s writings—from his early investigation of “Manet’s sources” to his later incorporation of these findings into a more substantial analysis—point the way to a synoptic view of Modernism and its antecedents, which is capable of incorporating and subsuming other models. In other words, I believe that we can achieve new insights into Modernism, and the entire Western tradition in painting, by rightly identifying those particular trace elements that were obfuscated as a result of the mythic effect of novelty propagated by Modernism. Instead of fixing our fascinated gaze on 1863, we need now to take a look at the continuing process of transformation in which so much nineteenth-century painting—both avant-garde and “academic”—was involved. We need to go further into what Fried himself has termed the painter’s “structures of repetition.” Lunch in the Studio

Without abandoning Manet for the moment, it will help to take the argument further if we move on a year or two from 1863 and the Salon des Refusés, passing over the appearance of his Olympia at the official Salon of 1865, to investigate

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James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents (New York: Routledge, 2005), 40.

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Figure 1.7 Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner (dans l’atelier) (1868). Neue Pinakotek, Munich.

another “lunch” painting that has not generally been regarded as forming a “watershed”: the Déjeuner (dans l’atelier), or Lunch (in the studio) of 1868 (Figure 1.7). I choose this work partly because it has the exotic status of being a long-term exile from France, forming part of the collection of the Neue Pinakotek in Munich, and partly because, when recently exhibited at the Courtauld Institute in London, it so struck myself and a group of colleagues that we were left searching for ways of expressing its freshness of impact in terms that evoke the recollections of Michael Fried’s poem. This work is acknowledged, moreover, as a paradigm case of Manet’s reluctance to disclose

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a clear narrative message—even the bracketed words “in the studio,” with which he supplemented the original brief title, appear to have been inserted only in response to the complaint that an obtrusive pile of armor was not an obvious property to accompany a lunch. The question remained: whose studio and why?10 I note that at least one art historian has tackled this problem by interpreting the picture as a personal statement in which the successive stages of Manet’s artistic career are placed in sequence, rather as Gustave Courbet had done in his allegorical “studio” painting—L’Atelier (1855). Reading from the left, according to this account, we have a reference to the “Romanticism” of his first period in the collection of armor, an evocation of “Modernity” through the presence of the black cat that recalls the Olympia of 1865, and finally a “proto-impressionist” section to the right, in which Manet anticipates becoming a contemporary realist in a manner comparable to Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir.11 This ingenious interpretation has the incidental merit of recalling a judgement from half a century before, when the writer and critic Stendhal singled out the characterizations of the three protagonists in Pierre Guérin’s Phèdre et Hippolyte (Salon of 1802) (Figure 1.8) as establishing a similarly precise range of stylistic references. For Stendhal, who returned several times to 10

11

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See Manet 1832–1883, exhibition catalogue, Grand Palais, Paris (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1983), 290. Ibid., 293. The article in question is B. W. Collins, “Manet’s ‘Luncheon in the Studio’: An Homage to Baudelaire,” Art Journal 28 (1972): 17–31.

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Figure 1.8 Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Phèdre et Hippolyte (reduced replica, 1813, after 1802 original). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

the discussion of this work, “Hippolyte [on the left] belongs to antique beauty, Phèdre [on the right] to modern beauty, and Thésée [central] to the Michelangelo taste.”12 Stendhal’s reading is certainly an interesting one, if only for the reason that, several decades before Baudelaire, it reveals the critic’s desire to locate the “modern” in a distinctive feature of a specific work of art. Nevertheless, for Stendhal, the “modern” is synonymous with what would later come to be called “Romanticism,” and his criterion for “modern beauty” is the intensity of “expression” that he discerns in Phèdre’s face, rather than any formal feature of 12

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Stendhal, Du romantisme dans les arts, presented by Juliusz Starzynski (Paris: Hermann, 1966), 110.

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the composition.13 By contrast, it is precisely the insistence of the formal aspect of Manet’s Déjeuner (dans l’atelier), and the virtual absence of “expression,” that militates against any such piecemeal dissection of the work, let alone a judgement that would take modes of expression as its main criterion. I also focus on Déjeuner (dans l’atelier) at this stage because one of the colleagues who shared my strong reaction to its presence at the Courtauld was the art historian largely responsible for borrowing the work from Munich, John House. He has contributed to the catalogue of the exhibition with a major essay on Manet’s painting, summing up the previous scholarship and commenting illuminatingly on specific features like the stray armor. As he suggests, there is indeed no reason to invoke any connection with Romanticism in this case, and every reason to relate its appearance in the work to the contemporary prominence of the notion of “curiosity.”14 Both the comte de Nieuwekerke, Napoleon III’s director of cultural affairs, and the emperor himself—who took a direct interest in the Salon des Refusés—were extremely enthusiastic collectors of arms and armor, which fell under the general rubric of “curiosity” (the central theme of my

13

14

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See ibid., 90, where Stendhal returns to consideration of Guérin’s work at the Salon of 1817: “This great artist is making progress in the science of expression.” See John House, “Face to Face with Le déjeuner and Un bar aux Folies-Bergère,” in Manet Face to Face, edited by James Cuno and Joachim Kaak, exhibition catalogue, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Neue Pinakotek, Munich (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 2004), 55–85. See also John House’s valuable essay, “Curiosité,” in Impressions of French Modernity: Art and Literature in France, 1850–1900, edited by Richard Hobbs (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998), 33–57.

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Figure 1.9 Gérard after V. Loutrel, objects from the Musée Napoleon III, Paris. Wood engraving from Musée des familles (1863).

second essay). The establishment of the Musée Napoléon III, containing a wealth of heterogeneous objects including armor (as pictured in a contemporary print from the Musée des familles; see Figure 1.9), is thus precisely contemporary with the emergence of Modernism in France. House is right to emphasize this point. But his essay also involves summarizing and, in the main, rejecting an ingenious reading of Manet’s painting by Michael Zimmermann, which I

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Figure 1.10 Gustave Le Gray, salt print after Ary Scheffer, Le Coupeur de nappe (1851). Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht.

believe to be rather less easy to dismiss.15 Since this hypothesis opens up the question of repetition—and repetition precisely across the modernist break—I want to consider it further. I pursue this argument not in the spirit of confirming the “right” answer, but in order to frame the important question. What would be the implications for understanding Manet’s work, and maybe reinterpreting the genesis of Modernism, if Zimmermann’s claim were to be accepted?

15

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See Michael F. Zimmermann, “Présences de l’absent. Le jeu des identités dans la peinture de Manet,” in Où en est l’ interprétation de l’oeuvre d’art? edited by Régis Michel (Paris: BIEF, 2000), 159–204.

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Zimmermann’s essay posits a close relationship between Manet’s Déjeuner (à l’atelier) and a painting now only very rarely brought out into the open, but regarded in the mid-nineteenth century as possibly the masterpiece of one of the most internationally celebrated of French academic painters: the Dutch-born Ary Scheffer’s Le Coupeur de nappe (1851) (Figure 1.10). I will not go much further into the curious contemporary evidence for Manet’s attitude to Scheffer’s work. It is sufficient to record that, according to the testimony of his friend Antonin Proust, he was on the way to enroll as a student in Scheffer’s studio when Manet persuaded him to change his allegiance to Thomas Couture instead!16 Nor will I pursue the question of the clear visual parallels between the two striking compositions, particularly as regards the possible effect of the prominent position allotted by Scheffer to the unfortunate son of the count of Wurtemberg, both formally and symbolically cut off by the ageing father who enacts the operation with his knife. There is no armor in this particular painting by Scheffer. But Le Coupeur de nappe’s even better-known pendant, Le Larmoyeur (first version, Salon of 1834), had displayed the young man in his subsequent guise as a dead

16

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Antonin Proust, Edouard Manet—Souvenirs (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1913), 13–14. The incident is illuminating not only because Manet took the side of Couture, but also because Proust had previously discussed the matter seriously with Parisian contacts, including the landscape painter Cabat, and it was generally agreed that “the greatest French painter was Ary Scheffer” (13). This evident notoriety around 1850 of an artist who is rarely mentioned today points to the virtual certainty that Manet would have been well aware of the standing of Scheffer’s works, in the knowledge of which he dissuaded his friend from enrolling with him.

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warrior clothed in full armor, now belatedly being mourned by the repentant count. House reconsiders Zimmermann’s comparison of Manet’s Déjeuner (à l’atelier) with Le Coupeur de nappe, and notes in particular that there is no hint in Manet’s scenario of the intense psychological relationship created between father and son in Scheffer’s work. This is undoubtedly true. The male figure behind the table in Manet’s work is so sketchily indicated as to be devoid of any expressive feature whatever. Furthermore, the knife on the table in Manet’s painting is not the dread agent of paternal rejection, but a teasingly prominent feature of a still life, reminiscent of so many such compositions in Dutch tradition. Then again, the boy who stands to the front of the Déjeuner à l’atelier, reputedly based on Manet’s adopted son, Léon KoellaLeenhoff, indeed appears to be expressing nothing in particular, except perhaps a hint of the dandified nonchalance appropriate to a youth who is sporting his smart new leisure clothes. House concludes in the end that, if Manet really did mean to allude to Scheffer’s work, it could only have been in a spirit of “parody.” It is here that I have to part company with his interpretation. Surely it is no accident that this suggestion of a “parodic” relationship to a past work is being put forward today—in a period when parody has often been taken to be a generic feature of contemporary work, indeed as the very hallmark of “Postmodernism”? Yet it is far from clear that this would have suited Manet’s situation vis-à-vis Scheffer. We do, of course, have clear

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parameters from within Manet’s own period for that popular variety of visual parody that could be classed broadly as caricature, such as the well-known rendering of Manet’s Olympia by the cartoonist Bertall—just one of a crop of similar versions and perversions of salon works that graced the illustrated magazines of the period. In this case, parody consists in the exaggeration of certain features of the original work, such as the supposedly staring face of the model, and the obtrusive black cat, in line with the original definition of caricature as a visual “loading” of the motif. Whatever the relationship of Manet’s painting to Scheffer’s may be, it is clearly not of this type. There is another acknowledged, and perhaps more pertinent, way in which Manet’s works assume references to an earlier period. This is by the inclusion of singular motifs that can function as “shifters” to another framework of reference. This is the pictorial convention derived from heraldry and known as the “mise en abîme.” This implicit framing of one scene within another can be seen in many Western paintings from the Renaissance onwards. A good example would be Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Medallion (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), where the “medallion” is in effect a fragment of an earlier, possibly Sienese, portrait of a saint inserted within a circular painted frame. In the case of Manet’s Déjeuner (à l’atelier), Fried has drawn attention to the appearance on the coffee pot of an initialled “V” for Vermeer, and suggested that this reference can be bracketed as a knowing evocation of the

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contemporary revival of interest in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century. Although this motif is not specifically framed within the composition, it could be seen as an updated instance of this tendency to suspend one scene within another.17 But Manet’s reference to Le Coupeur de nappe—if it exists—is not located in the specific detail, any more than it can be reduced to a question of caricature, in any meaningful sense. Surely we need a stronger concept to elucidate what could lie beneath the apparent similarity? Be yond Pa rody

I should restate at this point the main contention of this essay, which is that the preconditions of Postmodernism cannot be understood without reference to the preconditions of Modernism, and that these in their turn are misunderstood if we are only imperfectly aware of Modernism’s structural connection to what went before. This might involve retracing the historical antecedents of Manet in a less perfunctory way. There can be little doubt that Modernism in painting emerged out of a specifically French development in the previous period. Yet we still know relatively little about the general development of French painting in the first half of the nineteenth century. What we do know is largely confined to those comparatively few artists like Delacroix and 17

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See Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 497, for the suggestion that Manet adapts for his purposes the Vermeer monogram that he could well have known through the contemporary writings on Dutch seventeenth-century painting by Thoré-Burger.

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Ingres, who have preserved and indeed enhanced their reputation over recent years. But even the mass of scholarship pertaining to these major artists is inevitably vitiated by the lack of a broader historical context. The very persistence of retrospective constructions of history according to a simple binary formula, such as the mythic rivalry between Delacroix and Ingres, has tended to obstruct more probing assessments of the situation.18 Michael Fried has rightly drawn attention to the comparative lack of concern for “sources,” which was a feature both of the “largely socio-historical” readings of Manet’s work beginning in the 1960s and of the more recent writings (produced partly in reaction to the earlier group), which are concerned with reinstating “a normalized ‘painterly’ Manet” placed “unproblematically in the standard history of nineteenth-century painting.” In accordance with his argument, “[V]irtually all Manet’s cohort of advanced painters engaged in some version of citing or conspicuously adapting the art of the past.” However, there is an “almost universal tendency to treat [the question] as of no particular consequence.”19 The problem may indeed be more serious with regard to Manet’s involvement in the recent past than it is for his debt to the old masters. As with the case of Manet’s citation of Jan 18

19

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For a persuasive account of how this supposed rivalry became a dominant myth in the course of the 1830s, see Andrew Carrington Shelton, “Ingres versus Delacroix,” in Fingering Ingres, edited by Susan Siegfried and Adrian Rifkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 76–92. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 12–13.

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Vermeer, an examination of the critical writing of Manet’s contemporaries often points very clearly to those of the stellar predecessors in the history of Western painting who would have been to the fore at the appropriate time. With the more recent painters, however, the difficulty of tracking the myriad works exhibited at the annual Paris Salons, and other contemporary exhibitions, is enormous and perhaps indeed insuperable. Even those paintings that were highly acclaimed at the time—and most likely to have impressed (or indeed antagonized) a budding painter—have frequently perished without leaving a trace. A contemporary line engraving of a forgotten work like Alexandre Guillemot’s Eristratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus’s Disease, for which he received the Grand Prix de Rome for painting in 1808, immediately calls to mind one of the long-pondered and celebrated compositions of Guillemot’s fellow student, Ingres—author of a contemporary drawing on the subject, which ultimately resulted in the painting Antiochus and Stratonice (1842), commissioned in the 1830s by the duc d’Orléans.20 The original painting by Guillemot remains in the collection of the École des Beaux-Arts, as does the earlier work on the same subject by David (the master 20

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The line drawing by E. Lingée appears, together with a mention of the work’s success, in Landon, Annales du Musée—Salon de 1808 (Paris, 1808), 109. The drawing by Ingres, conjecturally dated circa 1807, is illustrated in the excellent catalogue, In pursuit of perfection: The Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres (Bloomington: J. B. Speed Art Museum, with Indiana University Press, 1983), 61, which however makes no mention of the painting by Guillemot in describing the evolution of Ingres’s composition. The more recent and authoritative catalogue Maestà di Roma—D’Ingres à Degas (Milan: French Academy at Rome with Mondadori Electa, 2003), 501, briefly notes the remarkable similarity between Ingres’s drawing and the painting, but credits the latter to a “Guillemet” otherwise unknown.

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of both Ingres and Guillemot), who had won the Grand Prix de Rome with this painting in 1774. How does Guillemot’s painting fit into this pattern of descent and filiation? At present, even the most extensive discussions of Ingres’s work that are on record more or less ignore it.21 Clearly, there is no space here to try and remedy such problems of omission. The preceding example was offered, however, on the assumption that a prize-winning work by a member of a young artist’s immediate peer group might have been particularly influential in prompting a complex, if anxious, response. Equally, a major contemporary work by a painter whose leadership the young artist had explicitly challenged—as Manet contested Scheffer’s reputation in Proust’s account—could surely have provoked a revisionist strategy of antagonism.22 “Parody” is a term that seems to imply a merely irreverent reference to the earlier 21

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Ingres’s preoccupation with this subject did not indeed end with the delivery of the commissioned work to the duc d’Orléans in 1842, and one of his earliest biographers recounts that he was working on a sketch for a new version at the time of his death. See Olivier Merson, Ingres, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1867?), 29. It is interesting to note that, while Scheffer’s original Le Larmoyeur (Salon of 1834) was exhibited in the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg, the enlarged version (1853) together with the original Le Coupeur de nappe (1851) entered the collection of the noted Dutch collector from Dordrecht, Herman de Kat, where they joined other major contemporary paintings of the French school as a complement to his substantial holdings of classic seventeenth-century Dutch art. Manet would not have been able to see the latter pair in Paris at this early date, though he could well have viewed the de Kat collection on one of his visits to Holland, or otherwise acquired some familiarity with the two Scheffers by way of their engraved and lithographic reproductions. The two works were also shown in Paris at the sale of de Kat’s collection at the Salle Drouot in May 1866, when Manet was certainly in the city. It seems inconceivable that Manet would not have taken the opportunity to see (or to revisit) such an important collection of Dutch paintings on this occasion, just over a year before he would begin the Déjeuner (à l’atelier). See Leo Ewals, Ary Scheffer 1795–1858 (Zwolle: Waaanders Uitgevers with Dordrechts Museum, 1995), 14, 288–93.

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prototype, rather than any more profound level of identification. We might, however, discover in the arsenal of terms assembled by the literary critic Harold Bloom a number of concepts more adequate to the task of defining relationships like that between Manet’s Déjeuner (à l’Atelier) and Scheffer’s Le Coupeur de nappe. Bloom is also specifically concerned with the artistic culture of the nineteenth century, though he addresses the poetic rather than the pictorial tradition. He adopts a bold approach when he interprets what he calls “the Post-Enlightenment crisis-lyric of major ambitions” in terms of a dialectic that is derived from the Lurianic version of Jewish theology. In his terms, the “latecomer initially swerves . . . from his poetic father” by a process called clinamen, and so “brings about a contraction or withdrawal of meaning from the father.” The text that has temporal priority is thereupon processed through a series of what Bloom calls “revisionary ratios,” which include that of kenosis or “undoing as discontinuity.”23 In principle, there is no reason why similar structures should not be detected in the tradition of French painting over the same period. Indeed, there have been a number of interesting attempts to interpret Ingres’s anguished relationship to the past in broadly psychoanalytic terms, in the writings of Norman Bryson and Susan Siegfried, for example, not to mention Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an art. But it still seems the case that relatively little 23

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See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 96–7.

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attention has been given to defining Manet’s relationship to his academic predecessors, in respect of the positive significance attached to his “withdrawal of meaning,” or “undoing as discontinuity,” vis-à-vis certain earlier paintings. This appears especially strange if we consider that this is a period in which the most profound attention was being given to the problem not of parody, but of irony. Another quote from Bloom, taken from Hegel, powerfully conveys what was seen as the positive charge in the Romantic ironist’s apparent negativity: “Irony is not so much apathy, divested of all tender emotions of the soul; instead it is more like vexation over the fact that others also enjoy what it desires for itself.” That “irony” is the product of desire (albeit frustrated desire) rather than apathy is surely a qualification more apposite to Manet’s work than the labelling of his painting as parodic. Nevertheless, in drawing attention to this striking underestimation of the stakes invested in repetition in the visual domain, I may also be identifying what it is that makes Manet the exemplary modern artist. Quite precisely, he almost succeeds in making us forget all that he has invested in the contestation of tradition. And this may be the case not only in the matter of Manet’s relationship to the idealized paternity of his artistic predecessors, but also in that of his biological paternity, which must have been an omnipresent feature of his psychological life. It is now generally accepted that Léon, the model for the young man so prominently advertising his presence in the Déjeuner (à

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l’atelier), was none other than the natural son of Manet’s father. Manet agreed to bring up his half-brother, having previously accepted as his wife the boy’s mother, who had initially entered the household as a servant. This is indeed powerful stuff. Yet there have been few attempts to incorporate biographical data of this kind into the analysis of Manet’s work. Indeed, no biographical study of a really searching kind exists in his case. Again, this appears all the more remarkable because Richard Wollheim has done so convincing a job of meshing the family relationships of Ingres with his choice of pictorial themes, one of which being precisely the often repeated subject of Antiochus and Stratonice, which thematizes the father’s grant of his young wife to an ailing son. Wollheim has founded his extremely persuasive interpretation of Ingres’s achievement on the argument that the artist has a psychological requirement that he has fully internalized: “The father must melt.” This psychoanalytically charged assumption is related by Wollheim not only to Ingres’s preoccupation with the theme of Antiochus and Stratonice, but also, most astutely, to his lengthy sittings for the portrait of Monsieur Bertin.24 Yet when Wollheim proceeds, in Painting as an Art, to look long and hard at the mechanics of Manet’s work, no explanation of this kind is offered. Nothing of the sort is produced to bridge the gap between his advanced pictorial strategies and his

24

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See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 277–83.

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personal and institutional relationships.25 The absence is made all the more surprising, I should add, by the fact that a subsequent study of artistic filiation and painterly tradition in the revolutionary and imperial epochs, Thomas Crow’s Emulation, also begins with the firm assumption that such personal relationships are thematized and worked out in the major paintings of the artists of the earlier period.26 For the period preceding Manet, however, nothing of the kind is yet on record. Perhaps we should conclude that Manet has timed his swerve—his clinamen—all too effectively. Renaissance and Modern

Still, the answer may not be to seek assiduously to fill in the gaps in Manet’s biography, or to develop even more compelling historical arguments about his obscure relationship to a predecessor like Ary Scheffer. It might be a question of looking once again at the pictorial mechanisms that enabled Manet to achieve his feat of “undoing by discontinuity.” This necessarily involves placing them within the context of a broad historical view of the emergence of systems of pictorial composition in the West. Here, it should be said, we come up once again against the question raised by James Elkins about the elusive “origins” of 25

26

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Wollheim does indeed draw a contrast between Ingres and Manet, on the basis that Ingres represents a space that he has entirely mastered, whilst Manet leaves the pictorial space open. This is an imaginative formulation, but it does not lead him to offer any psychoanalytic basis for the second strategy. See Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–2 and passim.

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Modernism—whether it is contemporary with the mature production of Manet, or with that of David or Ingres, or indeed if the question involves reaching all the way back to the Italian Renaissance. If it is a matter of composition, in the strict sense, then this dizzying extension of the problematic of Modernism comes to seem a little less daunting. For there are indeed clear links between the choices available to Renaissance artists and those that were adopted, or perhaps strategically rejected, by major painters in the sequence that leads from David and Ingres to the early twentieth century. In fact, there is a relevant example from the High Renaissance that is noted in the catalogue to the recent Raphael exhibition (2004) at the National Gallery, London. Raphael was engaged in making a number of drawings for the set of frescoes illustrating the journeys of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later pope, which were to be installed in the cathedral of his native Siena. Yet the final paintings were substantially revised and completed by Pinturicchio. As mentioned in the catalogue, Raphael himself produced a drawing for The Journey of Enea Silvio Piccolomini to Basel, which placed the emphasis on the dynamic of diagonal movement throughout the pictorial space: the horses and riders were sketched out as objects moving obliquely across a shallow visual field. However, Pinturicchio, in his last fresco deriving from the Raphael drawings, completely revised this system of subtle recession, introducing a predominant emphasis on parallel planes. One of these—which is specially striking to the

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spectator—is the plane constituted by the perfectly poised hunting hound who occupies the left foreground. This difference of approach is interpreted, by the authors of the catalogue, as an index of the genius of Raphael compared with the more plodding character of Pinturicchio.27 No account is taken of the possibility that the much-increased scale of the fresco might have determined, or at least substantially influenced, such significant changes to a composition that does indeed come alive in the original form of Raphael’s highly worked, monochrome drawing. Yet Raphael has obtained his subtle and vivid atmospheric effects through the skillful use of pen with brown ink, and brush with brown wash, also using heightening touches over traces of black chalk. Could such nuances have possibly been transposed given such a vast increase in scale, let alone the very different medium of the fresco? These considerations apart, it does in the end come down to the question of two alternative methods of ordering pictorial space: in Raphael’s case, by interfusing multiple connections through a homogeneous space; and in Pinturicchio’s case, by forming parallel planes that are defined by blocks of color. The second procedure is assumed by the Renaissance scholars to be retrograde and inferior. But then this is precisely the one that recalls the practice of Manet. 27

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See Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry, and Carol Plazzotta, Raphael from Urbino to Rome, exhibition catalogue (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 25: “[Pinturicchio’s] facile simplicity . . . only emphasises the spatial sophistication of Raphael’s original solution.” The fresco in question is The Journey of Enea Silvio Piccolomini to Basle, and measures 700m × 260cm, as opposed to 70.5 × 41 cm for the drawing (Uffizi, Inv. 520 E).

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While it might be interesting to think further about the Renaissance art historians’ depreciation of a system adopted by the pioneer modernist, it does not get us much further. Yet similar considerations of how compositional systems developed over the nineteenth century, and into the modern period, will enable us to put Manet’s innovations within a wider framework. For the remainder of this essay, I will be looking again, and from another angle, at the periods preceding Manet. These will also provide a vantage point on the indubitably modernist productions of the twentieth century. For—in line with my original hypothesis—it is only through examining the conditions under which Modernism was bracketed out that we can determine what it means for the bracket to be removed, with the advent of Postmodernism. I would argue that there were several distinctive new pictorial strategies at work in French painting in the period between 1800 and 1900, most of which were obscured from view when Modernism entrenched itself as the master discourse. If it proves necessary to bring some of them up again, this is the reason that they did not simply atrophy. Ingres is undoubtedly the key artist in this connection, since he develops more than one such strategy in the course of his lengthy and conflictual career. In his case, particularly, it is not just a matter of free plastic invention, but of adopting an attitude to the development of Western art since the Renaissance. Ingres relentlessly teases out—usually over a lengthy period of time—the possible configurations of pictorial space. He both borrows from, and identifies with, earlier work

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from his own period—on occasion (as I shall suggest) with work that is barely known today. In this fashion, he is able to enunciate not just one solution, but a range of alternative solutions that will be tested throughout the century, and indeed beyond. Ingres’s first major triumph at the Paris Salon in the Restoration period was his Voeu de Louis XIII, painted in Florence between 1820 and 1824, and installed in the cathedral of his hometown of Montauban from 1826. This work is (in the terms that I used earlier) a composition whose trope upon the previous history of painting is the undisguised mise en abîme of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. It is to her that the seventeenth-century French king extends his supplicating hands. In the same process, the pictorial construction achieves a subtle liaison, overriding what appears at first sight to be the planar separation between the two scenes. Through his careful draughtsmanship and in particular the achieved foreshortening of the king’s outstretched arms, Ingres has provided just enough of a passage to suture the two scenes together. Yet he was apparently left unsatisfied by this achievement, partly because the painting was from 1826 inaccessible in its provincial location. The fine reproductive engraving of the work by Luigi Calamatta on which he set great store was begun in the mid-1820s, but published only in 1837.28 Conscious as he was of responding to the aspirations of a phalanx of younger artists and admirers, Ingres began to work on another 28

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See Stephen Bann, “Ingres in Reproduction,” Art History 23:5706–25.

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Figure 1.11 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien (Salon of 1834). Cathédrale d’Autun.

great composition, which after immense labor (and not a little impatience among his supporters) was finally unveiled at the Salon of 1834: Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien (Figure 1.11).29

29

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For an informative account of the genesis and reception of the work by Georges Vigne, see Scandale au Salon de 1834! Papiers d’Ingres, Collections graphiques du Musée Ingres de Montauban, no. 20 (Montauban, 1998).

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In my view, the radical nature of this work, which was commissioned for the Burgundian cathedral of Autun, can be appreciated particularly through a close comparison with another major religious painting by one of David’s pupils. This is Abel de Pujol’s Prédication de Saint Etienne (1817), which was commissioned for the Parisian church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, but now hangs in that of Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Figure 1.12). Abel de Pujol’s star has waned (to put it mildly), but in 1817 it could scarcely have been brighter, since the painting had tied for first prize in the category of history painting in the first (and last) major competition of the Restoration, supervised by the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the request of the king himself. In other terms, Abel de Pujol’s work had achieved in 1817 just the measure of official acknowledgement that Ingres was looking for (though not finding) before his success with Louis XIII at the Salon of 1824, and his election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the following year. What must be stressed in relation to Abel de Pujol’s achievement in Saint Etienne is the point that he has effectively referenced a well-known triptych of the same saint’s martyrdom by Rubens. This would certainly have been a feature of his early life, since the work was removed from its original location in the Abbey of Saint Amand and placed in the museum of his native city of Valenciennes in the course of the revolutionary period. Armed with a commission for a single altarpiece, Abel de Pujol has in effect condensed the activities shown in two of the parts of Rubens’s triptych into one composition.

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Figure 1.12 Abel de Pujol, Prédication de Saint Etienne (1817). Eglise Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Paris.

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Figure 1.13 Peter Paul Rubens, Le Martyre de Saint Etienne (central panel of triptych). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes.

Rubens showed Saint Stephen preaching in the left panel, and Saint Stephen being stoned to death in the center panel of the three (Figure 1.13). Abel de Pujol, whose direct homage to Rubens is ostentatiously signalled by the mise en abîme of angels proffering the martyr’s crown, has shown Saint Stephen in the process of preaching and simultaneously being stoned. This concatenation of successive stages entails what might be termed a surplus of gestural language. The audience’s egregious stopping of the ears, their contrasted aggressive and restraining movements of the arms, and the saint’s own wide-armed acquiescence in his heavenly destiny all crowd and complicate the pictorial space.

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I would suggest that Ingres saw this work not as a mistake, but as one that presented a special kind of challenge. It was reported that the terms for his composition were laid down by the bishop of Autun, who was eager to commemorate a local, early Christian martyr after his flock had emerged from the trials of the revolutionary period. It was part of Ingres’s brief that Saint Symphorien should be shown outside the gates of the original Gallo-Roman city. But the bishop would almost certainly have been familiar with Abel de Pujol’s work as one of the first and most noted of Restoration Christian images. Ingres needed no special license to adopt several features of Abel de Pujol’s composition, even to the positioning on the ramparts of Saint Symphorien’s mother, who adopts much the same posture as the grieving woman who witnesses Saint Stephen’s incipient martyrdom.30 30

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It should be said at this point that there is a likelihood that both Abel de Pujol and Ingres were aware of one or both of the related versions of the Martyrdom of Saint Stephen by Bolognese painters, which were both in France at the time. The version by Annibale Caracci (Musée Condé, Chantilly) has a castellated background comparable to that of Ingres, and a cloud-borne heavenly group bearing the martyr’s crown, which Abel could have transposed with his reference to Rubens. The smaller work, then thought to be by Domenichino but now attributed to Antonio Caracci, is presently in the National Gallery, London, but was in the collection of Lucien Bonaparte. Again, it shows small figures overlooking the scene from the battlements of an antique city. Ingres might well have taken note of the stalwart standing figure on the extreme right. However Abel de Pujol’s complication of the action is clearly the result of his fusion of the two successive scenes depicted by Rubens. In this way, he produced the striking discordances where Ingres by contrast chose to intensify, rather than simplify, the excess of gesture. It is interesting to note that Abel de Pujol’s Saint Etienne was included in the Paris exhibition of 1855, at which Ingres’s Saint Symphorien was also finally presented again to the public. Delécluze called the former “one of the last works deriving directly from the principles of the school of 1775 [i.e., the School of David],” but criticized its default of “bold draughtsmanship, striking effect, solidity of modelling and grandiose character” in the face of Ingres. See Étienne Delécluze, Les Beaux-Arts dans les deux mondes (Paris: Charpentier, 1856).

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What is strikingly new, however, is Ingres’s reinterpretation of the gestural language in such a way as to reposition the mass of pictorial incidents in space. Abel de Pujol seems to be uncertain whether he wishes to create a continuum of diagonal emphases in the way that Rubens conspicuously did, or to construct the work as a series of receding planes. Ingres has not so much resolved as exacerbated this dilemma, switching the saint’s outstretched arms—and, bizarrely enough, those of his mother—in such a way that they form parallel planes, but also accentuating the spatial paradox that is created through the drastic foreshortening of the centrally positioned arm of the praetor. Not surprisingly, this picture was little understood or appreciated in 1834, even by Ingres’s most ardent supporters.31 It continued throughout the nineteenth century to provide a stumbling block, since it was undoubtedly one of the paintings into which Ingres had put the most effort, but seemingly without achieving the proportionate dividend. It was included in the great retrospective exhibition of French painting over the century following the Revolution, which took place in 1889. On this occasion, the leading contemporary critic Paul Mantz expressed his view of it in forthright terms: [I]t is difficult to find in Saint Symphorien, where so much science is accumulated, a model for composition. The system to which Ingres 31

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See ibid., 2–3, for the response of Ingres’s pupils, especially the interesting letters from Louis Lacuria to Paul Flandrin, dated 18 February 1834, and from the same writer to Hippolyte Flandrin, dated 22 March 1834.

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has had recourse, is one of piling up (entassement): all the personages are packed one against the other. The painter seems to have wished to forbid them any freedom of action and fix them, ne varietur, in the movement they have adopted. The picture is absolutely closed and airless. It brings together select fragments (morceaux) stifling in an absolute huis clos. . . . [A]ll told, the picture is confused, emotionless and devoid of light. The future will be astonished at the excessive interest that our fathers attached to this composition, a work of ill digested italianism.32

It should be noted that Mantz is giving a judgement on the painting, which faithfully follows the criticisms once made by Ingres’s own students. Louis Lacuria had indeed exclaimed in a long letter to Hippolyte Flandrin that “there is no air in [this] painting.”33 On the threshold of the last decade of the twentieth century, Mantz appears confident in consigning Saint Symphorien to a superseded phase of misdirected academicism, all the more reprehensible in so far as its “ill digested italianism” offends the national genius. Yet Mantz’s comments can be read, in spite of himself, as acknowledging a certain kind of bizarre compositional achievement, whose implications were as yet imperfectly understood. With hindsight, we can well understand how the artist whose system of composition was in 1889 excoriated for its confusion would become, in a mere fifteen 32

33

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See Louis Gonse and Alfred de Lostalot, eds., Exposition Universelle: Les Beaux-Arts et les arts décoratifs: l’Art français retrospectif au Trocadéro (Paris: Journal le Temps, 1889), 40. Scandale au Salon de 1834, 4.

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years, a paradigmatic example for the most advanced forms of Modernism. Ingres Meets Picasso

Meyer Schapiro was surely the first person to pinpoint this connection exactly, when he drew attention to the striking link between Ingres’s Tu Marcellus Eris of 1819 (Figure 1.14), and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Fan of 1905 (Figure 1.15). “Is it possible to doubt the inspiration of this work in Picasso’s painting of 1905?” he asks.34 The comparison then becomes a hinge on which Schapiro hangs a powerful hypothesis about Picasso’s radical change in compositional procedures: The painter of passive dolorous figures becomes, not long after, the farreaching innovator, the revolutionizer of modern art, at first through more compact and austere, strongly cohesive forms, then through vehement, angular, abrupt shapes of a savage intensity, with brusque contrasts of rose, blue, and grey, as in the Demoiselles d’Avignon.35

There are several aspects of Schapiro’s argument that could be glossed here in relation to my overall argument. Crucial to his case, and an undeniable factor in securing the link to Woman with a Fan, is the point that this painting is a reduced section 34

35

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Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Braziller, 1978), 112– 13. The connection is endorsed in the most recent, and remarkably well documented, study of Picasso’s style and sources, where it is however noted that in 1905 Picasso could only have known this work of Ingres through photographs. See Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso Style and Meaning (London: Phaidon, 2002), 138. Schapiro, Modern Art, 117.

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Figure 1.14 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Tu Marcellus Eris (1819). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

from a larger project that Ingres continued over several decades through the different media of drawing, painting, and engraving. As Schapiro rightly underlines, the elision of the poet Virgil who reads his Aeneid to Augustus in the complete painting imbues the remaining figures with “a grander, more concentrated sculptural form.”36 He then singles out as particularly relevant to the connection with Picasso’s Woman with a Fan the implied “transformation of a listening majesty into an active commanding one,” 36

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Ibid., 113.

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Figure 1.15 Pablo Picasso, Lady with a Fan (1905). Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

which Ingres achieves by simply eliminating the figure of the poet, and Picasso by revising and enhancing his original sketch. My only quarrel with this interpretation is that, in the overall composition as it features in Ingres’s large painting and Pradier’s

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engraving, the emperor is not by any means just a “listening majesty.” Augustus has lifted up his hand to arrest the flow of the poet’s reading at the very moment where the mention of a murdered member of the imperial family has caused his relatives to react in contrasting attitudes of grief and guilt. Both in this large version of the subject reworked by Ingres in the 1830s (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse) and in the engraving to which he contributed pencil drawings at the proof stage, the seated emperor rather than the standing poet appears as the evident source of authority (Figure 1.16). This is not, of course, to deny the plausibility of the connection between the Brussels version and Picasso’s Woman with a Fan, which is so forcefully argued by Schapiro. But it is to suggest that there is a further dimension to Ingres’s portrayal of the subject that is accentuated, and not lost, in the other versions of the composition. For the inclusion of both poet and the emperor together dramatizes a startling feature of Ingres’s approach. The point is that Augustus’s gesture, “commanding” though it may be, is also shown to be quite futile. Virgil has already spoken the words that predict the future of the murdered Marcellus; indeed, they are written—clear for us to see—on the poet’s script that is visible in the Toulouse painting. The work thus succeeds in becoming performative not through endorsing the gesture of the censoring authority, but through asserting the unimpaired integrity of the written script: Tu Marcellus Eris is a history painting that deconstructs and also reconstructs itself.

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Figure 1.16 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Tu Marcellus Eris (1812). Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.

I have to admit that this interpretation in part depends on my own personal stake in the promotion of the Toulouse version. As a member of the comité scientifique of an exhibition featuring the contemporary collection of Yvon Lambert, I myself arranged for it to be temporarily exhibited in the refectory of the Jacobins at Toulouse a decade ago. Here it was placed in the immediate vicinity of Roman sculptural pieces from the nearby Musée lapidaire, and some exquisite watercolor sketches by Cy Twombly that involved classical references in handwritten script. It

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appeared appropriate to juxtapose the written record en abîme of the poet Virgil’s interrupted recitation of the Aeneid with Twombly’s lyrical retrieval of the classical name as a vehicle of plastic interest.37 In Conclusion

The argument that I have been tracing in a circular way needs to be summarized at this stage. I began by recognizing, as James Elkins had done, the plurality of different explanations pertaining to the origins of Modernism. In line with Nietzsche’s advice, I saw every reason to go back beyond the beginning of the twentieth century. But my aim was not simply to present through alternative readings the different conjunctures that have been accepted as marking the modernist breach with the past. Beginning with the paramount example of Manet, I have tried to suggest that there can be an underlying logic in the quest for Modernism’s origins, and the corresponding arrival of Postmodernism. What happens if we shift our focus from one Déjeuner by Manet to another? The Déjeuner sur l’ herbe, admittedly, answers exactly to the preconditions—aesthetic, social, and historical— that are necessary for a “watershed,” though I indicated a preference here for Michael Fried’s less hackneyed aqueous simile. 37

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For the relevance of Cy Twombly’s work to this issue, see also Stephen Bann, “‘The Mythical Conception Is the Name’: Titles and Names in Modern and Postmodern Painting,” Word & Image 1: 2, 176–90.

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But the comparatively less well-known Déjeuner (à l’atelier), whose exhibition history is much less significant, has the advantage of bringing out the enormity of what is being repressed and excluded in Manet’s relation to tradition, as embodied not only in the longer-term references to Italian and Dutch painting, but also in the hypothesized relationship to a master of the previous generation. If there is a relationship between this painting and Ary Scheffer’s Le Coupeur de nappe, I suggested, this is not just one of “parody,” but of kenosis, or “undoing by discontinuity.” However, the very conditions under which this relationship might possibly exist prevent us from asserting its existence with any great confidence. In Manet’s case, one suspects, fatherhood of any kind is destined to remain an enigma. It is tempting to move directly from Manet to Ingres, on the pretext that Ingres is not certainly the founder of Modernism. But he offers a focus for what it may be that passes through Modernism and emerges on the other side as Postmodernism. Here, admittedly, we are not concerned with the quality of “facingness” that Fried traces to Manet and his contemporaries, but with what is probably a cruder and more attenuated pictorial effect. I pointed out the interesting, though doubtless unconscious, prejudice of the Renaissance art historians in favor of Raphael’s subtle, dynamic pictorial field as opposed to the advancing frontal plane composed by Pinturicchio’s superb yet static hound. Ingres does indeed derive from his master David’s Neoclassicism an emphasis on strict planar composition. But his restless need

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to alter his compositions can result in a dramatic foregrounding of the planar effect, even at the price of what Susan Siegfried has called the “Undoing of Narrative.”38 Meyer Schapiro’s related insight into the link between the reduced version of Tu Marcellus Eris and Picasso’s Woman with a Fan, written several decades ago, remains a striking index of the possibility of arguing outside the parameters of Modernism as it has traditionally been conceived. He points out that Ingres proceeds by “subtraction” (the removal of the imperial family from the scene), whilst Picasso proceeds by “addition” (the working up of a figure drawing). The sequence is instructive. It is as if the age-old tradition of history painting had been wound down, so as to provide the conditions for a new beginning. It is indeed a vindication of Schapiro’s essay that the scholar’s inspired juxtaposition of the two artists has been, in the recent past, confirmed as a significant connection, and as such acclaimed by the general public. The Ingres / Picasso exhibition, shown in the Musée Picasso, Paris, and the Musée Ingres, Montauban, in 2003–2004, established unambiguously that such a comparison now seems to make good sense. In other words, visitors are not disorientated by an extended comparison between the nineteenth-century artist regarded as the “academic” par excellence and the artist of the succeeding century who epitomizes the novelty of Modernism. It would be wrong to base too 38

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See Susan Siegfried, “Ingres’s Reading—The Undoing of Narrative,” in Fingering Ingres, edited by Susan Siegfried and Adrian Rifkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 4–30.

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much on the liberating consequences of one exhibition. But, at the very least, this was an effective pointer to the ways in which the historical development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting could be appreciated in a less syncopated fashion than previously. Nonetheless, as I have indicated previously, the link between the Brussels reduction of Tu Marcellus Eris and Picasso’s Woman with a Fan seems to me to attenuate the full potential of Ingres’s contribution to the future development of Modernism, and its postmodern sequels. The narrative of Ingres’s lengthy engagement with the subject, most clearly culminating in the reworked Toulouse version and the print by Pradier, indicates a constitutive ambiguity of the image rather at variance with the “active commanding” presence detected by Schapiro in the Brussels reduction. Significantly, the posture of the emperor’s head in the latter is upright, whereas the sequence of related studies, including a fine drawing of around 1830, show it as being bowed and almost submissive.39 In other words, Ingres’s emperor is finally too late to interrupt the poet’s recitation. Or, to be more precise, he is too late to prevent us from tracing the fateful words, and, by extension, the locus of authority is transferred from him to the words of Virgil as harbinger of the classical tradition. To a certain extent, 39

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See Virgile lisant l’Enéide, Papiers d’Ingres, Collections graphiques du Musée Ingres, no. 5 (Montauban, 1991), 1 (illustration of drawing INV. 867. 2407, Momméja 178) and passim.

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this appears as yet another example of the scenarios described by Wollheim in which Ingres insists that “the father must melt.” But it is an odd, and indeed thoroughly ambiguous, example in so far as Augustus has been powerless to prevent the murder of Marcellus, the shining young hope of the imperial family who has perished as a victim of jealous intrigue. In Antiochus and Stratonice, the son is indeed saved from decline by the father’s magnanimous grant of his own wife. In Tu Marcellus Eris, it is only through the intermediacy of what has been written by Virgil the poet that the dead hero can gain the prospect of a fictive immortality. Perhaps it was this very complication that secured Ingres’s continued engagement with the pictorial project, but in the last resort also prevented him from completing the Toulouse version to his own satisfaction. Yet equally, this is the feature that commends the project to us today, when the resurgence of the classical reference despite the demise of history painting is an incontrovertible, if contested, aspect of the postmodern scene. Cy Twombly’s work, as already mentioned, offers sufficient proof of the energizing power of the letter. Other notable artists as disparate as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Jannis Kounellis have corroborated the message in their different ways. Yet, in my view, this is by no means Ingres’s only legacy to what might be termed the “postmodern consensus.” Besides this exemplary case of an unfinished work, there is also the case of the misunderstood masterpiece that needs to be considered again.

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I quoted at length Paul Mantz’s damning judgement on Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien, which was delivered on 1889, on the occasion of the centennial retrospective of the history of French painting. Mantz rejected in forthright terms what he described as Ingres’s “ill digested Italianism.” This was a predictable insult in the context of a frankly nationalistic show, held at a period when critics were keen to identify and promote the French national genius. But Mantz also commented with great precision on what he felt to be obnoxious in the construction of this painting. It demonstrated an “accumulation” of science, but offered no “model for composition,” being a prime example of entassement, that is to say, of “piling up” or “cramming in.”40 Despite his disparaging rhetoric, Mantz was clearly responding to the work as having achieved an extreme state of self-containment. As he expressed it, “The picture is absolutely closed and airless. It brings together select fragments that stifle in an absolute huis clos.” There seem to me to be two ways in which Mantz’s judgement can be developed—indeed turned on its end—in order to show why Saint Symphorien is not just the end of a tradition (“ill 40

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It is interesting to note that the application of the word entasser to Ingres’s Saint Symphorien goes back at least to Olivier Merson’s essay on his work, published shortly after his death, where it was by no means used pejoratively. Merson writes that this painting “as far as drawing and modeling are concerned sums up all the difficulties that could be imagined; the sole project of piling them all up in one and the same work betrays an intelligence that is out of the ordinary” (“en point de vue de dessin et du modelé résume toutes les difficultés imaginables; le projet seul de les entasser [my italics] dans une même oeuvre trahit déjà une intelligence hors de pair”). See Olivier Merson, Ingres, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1867?), 76.

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digested Italianism”) but also a portent of a new kind of pictorial order, which will not only inform but also outlive the reign of Modernism. First of all, there is the very general sense in which the effect of entassement signalled by Mantz can be equated with a new organizing protocol, one which is however at variance with the rationality implicit in the procedures of High Modernism. Reaching back into the past for a parallel, it could be claimed that, in this respect, the postmodern relates to Modernism in the way that the Baroque related to the High Renaissance. The Greek-Italian artist, Jannis Kounellis, signals this kind of connection when he calls attention to Bernini’s sculpture, sited outside S. Maria sopra Minerva in his native Rome, as “an example of accumulation.” This composite work of urban sculpture does indeed combine “a little Egyptian obelisk” with an elephant sculpted by Bernini after a drawing by Raphael (Figure 1.17). It involves the appropriation and conversion of an antique object, by way of an exotic carrier that is itself derived from a High Renaissance master’s design. Yet Kounellis does not just choose this work as a historical example. He also makes use of it to emphasize the irreducible difference between his own work and those of the “American artists” in the 1970s. The latter, he claims, have “by their own choice eliminated the idea of accumulation,” choosing “another sort of logic.”41

41

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See Stephen Bann, Jannis Kounellis (London: Reaktion Books, 2003).

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Figure 1.17 Obelisk, Piazza della Minerva, Rome. Photo Anderson/Alinari.

The “logic” from which Kounellis differentiates himself here is very precisely the theory and practice of American minimalism, which can be taken as an exemplary extension of modernist practice in this respect. Kounellis’s own work (as indeed much of

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that produced by his colleagues in the Italian Arte Povera movement) lays claim to more profound depths of historical resonance in the very process of “piling up” its constitutive elements. At the same time, Kounellis’s remarks seem to coincide on a very different level with the widespread aspiration to create an international, postmodern art that will neither imitate nor repudiate the hegemonic styles of Modernism. The Nigerian critic Okwui Enwezor has argued eloquently for a non-Western art that will not “displace” but “add to” the European and North American models.42 These last examples may seem to be stretching Mantz’s original concept in too fanciful a way. Yet it is surely right to pay attention to the many artists and critics of our own period who are trying to redefine their changing relationship to artistic tradition. I will myself end, however, on a theme that is more consistent with the argument that has been conducted here. I will reconsider the diagnosis of entassement in Saint Symphorien strictly in relation to pictorial composition, and suggest how we might think differently today about what Mantz deprecates as the “absolute huis clos”—the closed system—of the painting. As emphasized before, no European critic or art historian of the past half-century has done more to open up the question of Modernism in respect to its Renaissance affiliations than Hubert Damisch. Equally, no one has conveyed so forcefully the point that the achievement of 42

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See Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999–2000.

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a painter like Jackson Pollock (and, for that matter, his European contemporary Jean Dubuffet) lay not so much in any ultimate triumph of “flatness,” but, on the contrary, in the achievement of a compelling effect of “thickness” (épaisseur). I quote from an article initially published in 1983, which refers in such terms to the paintings of both these artists: The tableau is no longer that window open in the wall spoken of by Alberti, through which the spectator would be admitted to contemplate what the painting offers to be seen. It is no longer a hole, but it does not for that reason become a wall, pierced as it is by a multitude of fissures or looks, in the technical sense of the term, which have to be sealed off, one after the other, so effectively that the painting no longer has any other way out, but to circulate in the very thickness of the tableau. (288–89)

Surely this way of characterizing the work that we know so well could be regarded as a direct transformation of Paul Mantz’s comments on Ingres’s Saint Symphorien? The difference is that, writing in the years before 1900, Mantz could only put his judgement forward in negative terms, discomfited as he was by Ingres’s rejection of the lucid scenography desiderated for traditional history painting. For Damisch, by contrast, it is clear that painting “no longer has any other way out.” It circulates in what Mantz called the huis clos but Damisch interprets as the notional “thickness of the tableau.” The shift from a premodern to a postmodern

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description indicates that the same issue was fundamentally at stake. But the new perspective assumes a less straitened vision of the history of Western painting from the Renaissance to the present day. That is the dividend of being postmodern.

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2. Curiouser and Curiouser I mentioned in my preface that it is now becoming acceptable to divide the field of contemporary art into two broad categories: two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Most of the preceding section was focused on works of art in two dimensions: on paintings that picture the world. The transition from two works by Manet to the earlier case of Ingres introduced a new dimension, in the sense that it revealed the parameters of the historical tradition to which he considered himself to be the heir. The reason why a premodern artist like Ingres excites a special interest today (in the context of Postmodernism) is no doubt not very far removed from the cause of his continuing prestige in France throughout the nineteenth century. It is a question of his absolute dedication to the Renaissance tradition of disegno—a word covering both “drawing” and “design”—as the sovereign system that overarches and indeed unifies the disciplines pertaining to all the fine arts. This has the consequence that his message is not solely, or essentially, one that can be conveyed by the sight of an individual 103

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painting. Where Manet surprises us with the startling presence of the individual painted masterwork, Ingres’s effect is consistent with a working process that characteristically involves a relentless pursuit of stylistic perfection. This not infrequently resulted in a series of successive versions, none of them definitive, of the same concept and composition, as with Tu Marcellus Eris. Where a work was be completed for a commission, such as Saint Symphorien, its full effect was still difficult to separate from the extensive drawings that had preceded it, or indeed from the reproductions that derived from it. A simple line engraving conveyed the essential of what was so challenging in Ingres’s work. When, in 1851, his pupil Magimel gained permission to sum up the master’s career to date in a compendious volume, it was Anatole Réveil’s fastidious method of steel engraving that was used to produce the image, rather than the more tonally responsive medium of lithography—let alone photography, which was just becoming available as a medium for reproducing paintings. However, for Ingres, as for many of his academic contemporaries, it was the long-term investment in the more costly and labor-intensive techniques of burin engraving on copper that definitively established the currency of the image. Charles Blanc, whose Grammaire des arts du dessin was the most influential overall synthesis of academic doctrine produced in the late

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See Oeuvres de J.A. Ingres . . . gravées au trait sur acier par A. Réveil (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1851).

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nineteenth century, defended the point with reference to the practice that had been given a new lease on life by his Gazette des beaux‑arts: “It is the privilege of the classic masters and those who will become such, that their works as translated by the engraver’s burin preserve and immortalise what is the most essential element among their qualities—drawing—and what is most elevated in the art—style.” This recognition pinpoints the element in Ingres’s work that is primarily conceptual by nature. It also helps to account for the strong appeal that he has exerted in the contemporary period over a conceptually orientated member of the Italian Arte Povera group like Giulio Paolini. When Paolini conflates the image of a Raphael self-portrait with Ingres’s slightly discrepant version of the same work in L’invenzione d’Ingres (1968), he could be said to problematize the continuing vitality of the idea of the “classic” as asserted by Blanc. The evidence that Ingres has modified, however slightly, the contours of the Uffizi portrait is a measure of his (re)invention of the classic. However, this need not be taken simply as an ironic gesture. When, in 1970–1971, Paolini again borrows from Ingres in the installation entitled Apoteosi di Omero, he effectively pluralizes Ingres’s select Homeric company and throws the meeting open to a potentially infinite number of

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Charles Blanc, Ingres—sa vie et ses ouvrages (Paris: Vve Jules Renouard, 1870), 11. The work is illustrated by an engraving after Ingres’s 1804 self-portrait by Léopold Flameng, and by twelve other reproductive engravings after major works, all of which had previously been published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. See Stephen Bann, “Giulio Paolini,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, edited by Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 169–85.

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named characters, from past and present. But in moving from the highly organized perspectival view of Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer to the informal grouping of individual photographs mounted on music stands, he also effects a deconstruction of the different elements that are combined in Ingres’s academic vision. As he puts it, “Theatrical, classic, modern are three incongruous givens up to the point where the value of the unknown is known.” It is precisely the open character of the installation work that departs from Ingres in the very process of identifying with him. We could interpret Paolini’s Apoteosi as having created a “theatrical” setting in which “classic” and “modern” are juxtaposed in a suspended dialogue, as opposed to the entassement in Ingres’s system of composition. Moving outside the huis clos of pictorial space into the threedimensional field does indeed entail a set of questions different from those that have been considered here. In fact, the problematic status of the liberated “object” has proved to be one of the recurrent issues—perhaps even a defining issue—that marked the shift from modern to postmodern. The American critic Harold Rosenberg entitled his collection of essays on contemporary art published in 1964 The Anxious Object. Just a few years after celebrating the triumphs of what he had baptised American “action painting,” he was making dire prophecies about the future of contemporary art and the audience for it. In the section

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See exhibition catalogue, Giulio Paolini: Correspondances, French Academy at Rome, March–April 1996 (Turin: Allemandi, 1996), plates 3, 4.

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of his book specifically concerned with “the art object”—which began by referring to Lenin’s tomb in Moscow—Rosenberg proclaimed the tomb in general to be “the world’s greatest collage; it incorporates a non-art object, the body, into a traditional esthetic structure.” Confronted with “Pop and Gag” (as he dubbed the new trends of the decade), he worked hard to assimilate them into a broadly realist tradition. In his own words, “The transformation of things by displacing them into art and of art by embedding it in a setting of actuality is the specifically twentieth-century form of illusionism.” Michael Fried’s seminal essay of 1967, “Art and Objecthood,” placed the problem of the object in a quite different register. Consigning the phenomena of Pop and Op Art explicitly to the “history of taste,” he confronted a new artistic phenomenon of the 1960s that had not yet acquired a definitive label. His first sentence read, “The enterprise known variously as Minimal Art, ABC Art, Primary Structures, and Specific Objects is largely ideological.” The ideology in question, according to Fried, was one of literalism as opposed to illusionism, and implied a stance that was directly opposed to the painting and sculpture of Modernism. Emerging from this initial judgement came the conviction that literalism, or the unmediated relation to objects that Fried termed

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Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience, English ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 61. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 116.

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“theatricality,” was at war “not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture) but with art as such.” It was only to be expected, given the force of the ideological challenge, that Fried should have chosen from this stage onwards to extend his concern with art and “theatricality” into a deeper historical perspective: in effect, to retrace the history of Western art in terms of the opposition between theatricality and what he soon came to call “absorption.” From this historical perspective, as he has clearly pointed out, the conflict between theatrical and absorptive modes does not necessarily assume the black and white character of the contemporary situation as he diagnosed it in 1967. The development of absorptive painting (which he traces ultimately to Caravaggio, having already followed it through a sequence of major French painters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) is radically bound up with the conventions of history painting and their implicit grounding in scenographic display. The achievement of the “absorptive” artist is therefore characteristically one of subverting the theatrical relationship, that is to say, of making the viewers aware of being excluded from the scene by the same token as they are solicited to involve themselves in the action. This effect is surely comparable to what has been suggested here in relation to Mantz’s criticism of Ingres’s St Symphorien. For the perception of entassement—the sense of the picture being

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Ibid., 139.

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a huis clos from which nothing can escape—is also intrinsically antitheatrical. Governed by the logic of Ingres’s draughtsmanship, the mass of juxtaposed bodies appears to constrain and compress the pictorial space. The experience makes us intimately aware, through the pent-up energy that is registered, of the lack of continuity between the compressed pictorial space and the diffuse spatiality that we as spectators inhabit. There is a sense that the painting would almost have to explode, showering us with an awesome cargo of disjointed limbs, for the mismatch between the tension in the two spaces to be resolved. It is in the light of this connection that I want to take another look at the issue of “objecthood” as it has reemerged in postmodern criticism. The terminological confusion that originally existed among the defenders of “literalism” has, by and large, been dissipated. In a recent issue of the journal Res significantly devoted to “Polemical Objects,” Rosalind Krauss took the artist Donald Judd to task for his misconceived analysis of what he called “Specific Objects.” Judd proclaimed at the outset of the minimalist movement that the “best new work” was “neither painting nor sculpture,” but a hybrid form—“a picture [which] stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object.” He continued by reiterating that the “specific object” only needed the “real space” of three dimensions to exist, and committed himself to combatting illusionism, which he saw as the “riddance

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Quoted in Rosalind E. Krauss, “‘Specific’ Objects,” Res 46 (Autumn 2004): 221.

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of one of the most salient and most objectionable relics of European art.” Yet, as Krauss sensibly maintains (following Thierry de Duve), this literalist notion of objecthood is “misnamed, since what he is supporting cannot be the specific object but is, instead, the generic one: Art-as-such, rather than painting, say, or sculpture.” Rephrased in this way, Judd’s polemical statements hold good as a recipe for understanding an important aspect of Modernism. De Duve has argued, in brief, that the failure of Manet’s work to measure up to the specific criteria desiderated by the Salon jury was compensated by his successful inauguration of the new category of “art in general.” Existing from the 1860s onwards, this heterodox type of production portended the arrival of a new art form, whose fulfillment would be the “ready-made” of Marcel Duchamp: the found object as gallery art. Against this background, Judd’s ill-tempered rejection of “European art” in favor of the “specific object” in “real space” does indeed appear misplaced. The space that his objects would inhabit was in no significant sense “real.” It was a symbolic space that had been secured by the efforts of the nineteenth-century avant-garde, who first succeeded in validating the concept of an exhibition space apart from the official Salon—a “Salon des Refusés.” Within this symbolic space, the problematic art object could indeed constitute a genre.

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Ibid. The reference is to Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 230ff.

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However, I would argue that this interpretation of a dynamic crucial to Modernism is also an example of an analysis that belongs specifically within the modernist frame. As the present essay is addressed to the wider historical context, it is necessary to leave it for a moment in suspension. Is it in fact meaningless to speak of “specific objects” where art is concerned? Or, to put the matter more broadly, is it legitimate to trace the history of discourses where the “specific object” has an important place, and to analyze their relationship to the overall development of the concept of art in the West, culminating on the emerging practices of the recent period? Postmodernism may well be in need of such an analysis. But, again, it can only be secured at the price of going “a few steps back.” The answer to this rhetorical question lies, for the purposes of this essay, in the concept of “curiosity.” While Manet was questioning received notions of narrativity and painterly finish in his works of the 1860s, the career of Ingres was being celebrated in the pages of a newly founded magazine that had immediately gained an unprecedented authority: the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The belief of the editor, Charles Blanc, that engravings could convey the message of a master like Ingres has just been mentioned here. What has not been noted is the intriguing subtitle that Blanc attributed to the Gazette: it was called the Courrier Européen de l’Art et de la Curiosité. In specifying the notion of curiosité in this way, one may suppose that he intended to make a distinction between “high” art

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and what was not high art—that he wished to comprehend in that way a whole range of other topics and categories discussed in the magazine. But it would be wrong to infer that this entailed an unequivocal judgement of value. “Art,” for Blanc, meant the group of hegemonic practices legitimized by the Western tradition and bound together by the overall concept of design and draughtsmanship (disegno/dessin). Yet the Gazette also contained articles on such topics as “Chinese curiosities exhibited in the Tuileries,” the French metalwork of the Middle Ages, and the new technical applications of the modern period, such as photography and chromolithography. “Curiosity,” their common denominator, was the term long used to denote diverse practices of collecting and connoisseurship that dated back into the Renaissance and early modern periods. I will look at the heritage of curiosity in this essay in order to clarify its applicability to some of the most individual art of the present period. Curiosity has a history of having rubbed up against some of the major discourses of Western culture, and it is precisely for this reason that it offers a rich contextual field in which to place some of these impressive contemporary works. It would be foolish, however, to set a point of origin for curiosity as a counterdiscourse. It was already being condemned, in a specifically artistic application, by figures of authority in the medieval church. In 1450, the archbishop of Florence declared, “It appears vain and superfluous in the stories of Saints or in churches to paint curiosities [curiosa], which do not serve to

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excite devotion, but laughter and vanity, such as monkeys and dogs, and the like, or vain adornments of clothing.”10 But it was in the period following the Renaissance that the field of curiosity became extended to encompass a new domain of collecting. No longer just a matter of monsters on the margins, or superfluous decoration, it acquired a space of its own: the collector’s cabinet. The new status of curiosity did not, however, ensure its acceptability. It was well enough recognized to be roundly condemned again in the seventeenth century. The French moralist Jean de la Bruyère identified its insidious effect in a revealing comment: “Curiosity is not a taste for what is beautiful, but for what is rare, unique, for what one has and what others do not have; it is not an attachment to what is perfect, but to what is in demand, what is in fashion.”11 By this point, however, it is not just a question of associating curiosity with personal vanity and passing fashions. There is also the more pointed accusation that, in laying stress 10

11

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Quoted in Alexander Nagel, “Fashion and the Now-Time of Renaissance Art,” Res 46 (Autumn 2004): 48. This reference to “curiosity” in the Middle Ages prompts me to mention a fascinating collection of essays brought together by Jean-Philippe Antoine under the title Les “Moyen Age” de l’art contemporain, no. 17, February (Lyon: Cahiers de la Villa Gillet, 2003). This deals precisely with the question of a ricorso of contemporary art to the Middle Ages, and examines the case of Joseph Beuys in this respect. Antoine argues convincingly that the parallel between the display of relics in medieval churches and Beuys’s collected objects in vitrines at the Darmstadt Museum is a deceptive one. Medieval relics were only displayed under strictly controlled conditions, on the one hand. On the other hand, the use of vitrines in contemporary art museums possesses a history of its own dating back to the 1960s, and not excluding the contribution of Beuys (117). My argument is that the role of curiosity was precisely to expand the earlier conditions of display, so that these no longer depended on external constraints like the church calendar, but on the free will of the collector and his or her (admittedly restricted) audience. In this way, curiosity functioned very broadly as the mediator between modes of display in the medieval world and those of the modern museum. “La Bruyère XIII,” entry in Littré French Dictionary.

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on the “unique” object, it distracts the collector from ascertaining general laws about the properties of the natural world. It encourages the tendency to abstruse and even perverse forms of knowledge, rather than favoring the progress of science. The great pioneer scientist Francis Bacon stigmatized a dubious experiment in these terms: “There hath been practised also a curiosity, to set a Tree upon the North side of a Wall.”12 Arboriculture in general was not likely to profit from this flagrant defiance of the laws of nature! Of course, it is precisely by occupying this equivocal position between useful knowledge and knowledge for its own sake— between the attachment to “specific objects” and the desire to arrive at general laws—that the dynamic of curiosity veers in the direction of art. In other words, curiosity alerts us to the interface between art and science, with the “object” being suspended somewhere between the two. This is not irrelevant to the issues already raised here. In his chapter on “The Art Object” included in the Anxious Object collection, Harold Rosenberg cited the case of a modern artist claiming that his work was designed to evoke the same response as an object in the natural world. “[ Jean Arp] contended that his sculptures ought to be come upon as one comes upon a stone polished by a stream; that is to say, that his creations were on a par with those of geology.”13 Rosenberg’s gloss 12 13

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Bacon, Sylva 431, entry in OED. Rosenberg, The Anxious Object, 61.

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on the statement is, however, not very appropriate. “[O]n a par with those of geology”—Arp’s wish was clearly not to assimilate his sculpture to a generic class of stones as determined by geology, but to single it out in its specificity. Not just a stone, but this stone—that is, this particular sculpture designed to be appreciated with the same attention as we focus on (and perhaps decide to handle) a pebble washed and “polished by a stream.” Curiosity, not geology, is the discourse that has traditionally validated such an attitude. Nevertheless, it is the edgy relationship of curiosity to science (as indeed to art) that makes it significant as a harbinger of postmodernism. Modernism a nd E xperiment

I mentioned in my preface that part of this study would involve a personal agenda. This is the moment to strike that note by referring to a book that I published in 1970, drawing upon my experience of the previous decade. The study was entitled Experimental Painting.14 I did not really choose this headline title, though I was responsible for the different sections covered by the subtitle: Construction, Abstraction, Destruction, Reduction. It was from the third of these categories that the publisher elicited the striking cover, centered upon an image of an auto-destructive nylon painting by Gustav Metzger. The very fact that I had been asked to contribute to this new series of studies that put the emphasis 14

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Stephen Bann, Experimental Painting: Construction, Abstraction, Destruction, Reduction (London: Studio Vista, 1970).

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on the element of “experimentalism” across the whole range of the arts—including music, drama, and film—was a sign of the times around 1970. For the second half of the 1960s, I had been a coeditor of Form, a quarterly magazine devoted in part to the reappraisal of the Modern movement, and its resurgence in current European and American art practice.15 My colleagues were sufficiently attuned to the contemporary resonances of Modernism to make sure that, when Marcel Duchamp died, we published an obituary by one of the few remaining giants of the avant-garde, Hans Richter.16 In the same issue, we welcomed the recent publication of the complete facsimile reedition of De Stijl, whose original run we had ourselves indexed in previous numbers.17 In light of these varied interests, I had readily responded to the assignment of a study that placed the concept of “experiment” at the core of a new reading of contemporary art. My bête noir in this project was E. H. Gombrich, who had decided to class the whole production of the twentieth century to date under the heading of “Experimental Art” in his highly influential Story of Art. It seemed to me disingenuous to claim, as he did, that no one yet had the authority to decide whether modern art was successful or not—and to argue that, if it finally 15

16 17

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Form no. 1 was published in Cambridge in the summer of 1966 by Philip Steadman, who was also the designer and presiding editor. Mike Weaver was the third editor, initially based in the United States. The last number, Form no. 10, appeared in October 1969. The whole series has been republished in a complete volume by Kraus Reprint (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1974). Hans Richter, “In Memory of Marcel Duchamp,” Form, no. 9 (April 1969): 4–5. See Form, no. 6 (December 1967), 29–32; and Form, no. 7 (March 1968): 25–32.

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succeeded in converting the public, it would cease to be “experimental.” Yet this passing irritation was in part the result of my admiration for the more theoretical aspects of Gombrich’s writings, which seemed by contrast to offer useful concepts for understanding the strategies of many contemporary artists, from the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg to the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay.18 Despite its realist assumptions, Gombrich’s Art and Illusion was also helpful to me in setting out a broadly evolutionary view of how the works in my survey might be understood, which was determined by criteria other than mere historical sequence. Where I differed sharply from Gombrich was over the proposition that public acceptance was the necessary and sufficient measure of the avant-garde’s success. What I endorsed, by contrast, was the idea that the painter’s experimental approach had to put aside “any possibility of successful resolution. . . . [It was] a search which [was] bound to be self-justifying, since there are no objective criteria for assessing success or failure.”19 In this spirit, my opening section on “the experimental approach” gave a prominent place to the cloud paintings of Constable, and examined the implications of the visionary question that he had posed a few months before his death: “Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural

18

19

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See for example my article, “Communication and Structure in Concrete Poetry,” in Image, no. 13 (1964), 8–9. This owed a great deal to the analysis of representation developed by Gombrich in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon, 1963). Bann, Experimental Painting, 10.

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philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?”20 For me, the kind of “open research” epitomized by these adventurous studies, and also by the later series paintings of Monet, formed an effective precedent for the new directions of the 1960s. My examples from the recent past were the proliferating groups of that decade, who were working under the aegis of modernist precursors like László Moholy-Nagy, and chose collective titles like Nouvelles Tendances and Groupe de Recherche d’art visuel. As the Italian theorist associated with the Nouvelles Tendances, Bruno Munari, had put it, this current of artistic activity encouraged a transcendence of the individual artwork by the very process of experiment itself: the work was henceforward to be “a sphere in which events may take place, an area of a previously unknown world of creation, an aspect of a new reality to be observed through all its variations.”21 If I take a rather different view of the relation of modern art to experiment at the present day, this is because a number of the artists who have interested me in the interval (and still do so) offer very different data to be understood and evaluated. However, it is also because, over the same period, my own historical studies have led me in new directions, taking in the various ways in which collections have been formed, and museums have come into existence, from the early modern period onwards. Everyone now takes for granted the point that these economic and 20 21

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Ibid. Ibid., 19.

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institutional frames are hardly neutral—that there is a productive synergy between art and its institutional context, which may occasionally erupt into open conflict. The framework of Postmodernism implies, at the very least, that we can no longer use a simple evolutionary approach in the tracking of these processes, any more than we can accept explanations based on experimental psychology for the changes in art over the period from the Renaissance to the present day. In my view, it is becoming very apparent that art (in the broadest sense) is subject to kind of a recursive movement, a ricorso: to use another marine metaphor, there is a kind of undertow that counteracts, and will perhaps ultimately defeat, the expectation of progress that is built into the modernist mind-set. This view is not incompatible with de Duve’s concept of an “art in general” that emerges from the trangressive pictorial strategies of Manet. But the focus is changed, with the result that the generic appeal of Duchamp’s “ready-mades” is understood within the context of a much more long-term engagement with the “specific object.” Certain artists of my acquaintance—two of whom I will mention particularly here—appear to be moving back in a loop in order to develop working procedures that can be traced back to much earlier, apparently superseded strata of collecting and museological activity. The term that concretizes this ongoing activity, in such a way as to provide it with a historical alibi, is indeed “curiosity.” In my first essay, I pointed out structural continuities in the compositional strategies of nineteenth-century French history

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painting that may eventually seem no less significant in anticipating the two-dimensional artworks of the late twentieth century than the enduring myth of a modernist break. The “return to curiosity,” as I have termed it elsewhere, implies a different, but comparable shift as regards the epistemological status of the art object.22 It emphasizes the role of the artist as a wild custodian of realms of knowledge previously relinquished to the scientist—at least since the end of the first vogue of “curiosity” whose assumptions were challenged by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. This aspect will be common to virtually all the works that I shall discuss, and it is a component that identifies them as being specifically postmodern. Yet one must make a distinction right away between works that simply evoke the tradition of curiosity in an engaging but tangential fashion, and those that entail the adoption of qualitatively different processes and practices by the artist in question. Katharina Fritsch’s large-scale installation, Rat-King (1994), which consists in a vast circle of gigantic rats turned outwards towards the viewer, is designed for a neutral gallery space. I saw it displayed to great advantage on its first appearance in the large ground-floor gallery of the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea, New York. It is a disturbing feature of the impact of this ring of monster rodents that the viewer who comes right up to them, and 22

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See Stephen Bann, “Un retour à la curiosité? Sur certains aspects de la situation actuelle,” in Histoire de l’art et les musées, edited by Dominique Viéville (Paris: École du Louvre, 2005), 21–28.

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peers through into the inaccessible center, discovers that all of them are tied fast together by their tails. In this all-important detail, Fritsch explicitly evokes what seems to be the exclusively German phenomenon of the Rattenkönig. This is a phenomenon that occurs in natural circumstances when the baby rats in the nest get their tails tangled in a knot and ultimately perish in the imbroglio. It is still possible to view on exhibition in the Natural History Museum of Altenburg in Lower Saxony what claims to be one of the largest and most spectacular of these gruesome objects ever to be unearthed on German soil. But Frisch is not particularly interested in underlining the point that such a spectacle would normally be viewed in the vitrines of a natural history museum. On the contrary, the work claims this phenomenon for her own mythology, since she has personally extracted this rarity out of the German folk memory. Moreover, her installation depends first and foremost on the bodily reactions of the spectator, who acts in accordance with the sense of scale provided by an impeccable contemporary exhibition space like the Dia Gallery. The “curious” connotations of the fabricated “rarity” are obviously attenuated in this environment. By contrast, a work by the French artist Hubert Duprat, composed of Costa Brava coral and bread pellets, hardly differs in scale from an early modern work that also employs branches of coral (see Figure 2.1). It could be compared to Abraham Jamnitzer’s drinking vessel in the form of a Daphne housed in the Grünes Gewölbe Treasury at Dresden. Both works present

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Figure 2.1 Hubert Duprat, Untitled (1994–1998), polished coral and bread crumbs. Installed at the Musée Gassendi, Digne-les-Bains.

themselves as intricate and precious objects that marry strikingly different materials, and we would expect them to be displayed in appropriate conditions of lighting and display. The connotations of eating and drinking are common to both, though they register rather differently in the two cases. Jamitzer’s Daphne is actually designed as a drinking vessel, though for many years it has existed solely to be looked at. Duprat has used edible pellets of bread to suture the fragile stalks of coral, but any oral connections have again been suppressed in the interests of pure visibility. Having said all of this, there is a major point of difference that appears to override these common features. These two objects undoubtedly belong, despite their common materials, to different

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epistemological spaces. At least, so we might believe from a broad interpretation of Michel Foucault’s concept of regimes of knowledge. The Jamnitzer vessel is strongly evocative of the epistémè of the Renaissance, in Foucault’s terms. At this stage in history, the abiding popularity of a text like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where we read the story of Daphne’s transmogrification into a tree, is testimony to the overall view of the universe as a site of meaningful analogies. The device of using coral to represent the tree form into which the nymph is being metamorphosed is indicative of a world where there is reciprocity between the branching of trees rooted in the earth, and the analogous forms of coral growing beneath the sea. This “curiosity” is not just a singular object, a product of the artist’s ingenuity and skill. It also performs what is almost an act of divination. It makes manifest the condition of the visible world as a site of meaning. Can we say anything at all comparable about the work by Duprat? Curiosit y in Context

It is tempting to answer this rhetorical question right away in the negative, and to search for some comparable, but much more recent, genealogy for Duprat’s work, such as the cult of the rare and disconcerting object in Surrealism. I shall return at a later point to discussing this connection. But I want to pause briefly on the issue of the possible context for a revived “curiosity.” For there are in fact many examples of the conjunction of such contemporary works with the surviving milieu—if not the

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epistemological framework—of the early modern period. These should be considered as empirical examples of an affinity that merits serious attention. An example of the coral pieces by Duprat that were described previously, Untitled (1994–1998), is currently installed in a room of the Musée Gassendi at Digne-les-Bains in HauteProvence, where it shares an intimate space with a small collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. These include an early French copy of the Laocoön sculpture group, one of the first visual records of this great classical work that was rediscovered through excavation in the early modern period. The Laocoön group might serve as a paradigm of the way in which a single work of art can inspire a host of different readings, each in turn adjusted to the cultural and aesthetic circumstances of the day.23 To see Duprat’s work in the center of this space, profiled perhaps against the seventeenth-century Venetian painter Francesco Ruschi’s Between Vice and Virtue (Figure 2.1), is to experience a similar but surprisingly reversed process: that of being able to read back from the contemporary “curiosity” into a world whose culture of materials seems directly attuned to the intricate facture of the newly crafted object.

23

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I am thinking, of course, of the use made of the Laocoön in the eighteenth century by Winckelmann and Gotthold Lessing, and of Clement Greenberg’s essay, “Towards a New Laocoon,” which reinterprets the message of medium specificity to suit the circumstances of post-1945 American painting and sculpture.

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The initiative of the Musée Gassendi can be related to an earlier, and highly innovatory, development in French museum policy, when the Château d’Oiron, a noted Renaissance building in Poitou, was designated as a place for the exhibition of contemporary art, under the specific rubric of “curiosity.” Jean-Hubert Martin, former director of the Centre Pompidou and also curator of the major exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre, ensured that this magnificent building should be devoted to semipermanent installations by contemporary artists, and that the criterion for inclusion should be a demonstrable connection with this symbolically charged concept. In this way, the development of Oiron took a different course from the other recent examples of the adaptation of historic buildings for contemporary display, such as was achieved through Rudi Fuchs’s inspired curatorship at the Castello di Rivoli, near Turin. At Rivoli, work by a broad cross section of the most important contemporary artists—Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, and Mario Merz—was displayed in the dilapidated grandeur of this immense palace built by the Savoy dynasty. It was exhilarating to discover how very differently their impact could be registered in the faded but exquisite salons that contrasted so dramatically with the impeccable white cubes found in contemporary museums. At Oiron, however, the stakes were raised. Already on hand throughout the building were important fresco cycles dating from the Renaissance school of Fontainebleau, and magnificent sequences of emblems that had been installed in the sixteenth

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and seventeenth centuries. The artists invited to contribute were those whose work showed a clear affinity with this rich visual context, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, who had invented contemporary emblems for the inscribed stones in his garden at Little Sparta near Edinburgh, and Hubert Duprat, whose work involving caddis-fly larvae will be discussed in a later section of this essay. Finlay’s emblematic portrayal of the Battle of Midway, installed at Oiron, incorporated stone hives, with tapes conveying the sound of bees, which symbolized the American aircraft carriers and their planes engaged in this Second World War battle; the ships of war metamorphosed into beehives became a Georgic scene, interspersed with rose trees in tubs that represented the ocean. Duprat was given a room in which to display the whole life cycle of his subaqueous larvae, as they patiently went about their construction of shells from precious stones. The contribution of the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri was specially important in stressing the motif of curiosity at the Château d’Oiron (Figure 2.2). Known especially at first for his Topographie anecdotique du hasard, which typically involved food and table settings preserved and displayed vertically on the wall, Spoerri has greatly expanded his range with assemblages that have little of the everyday about them. Installed around the largest chamber at Oiron, these complex objects evidently mimic the collections of arms and armor seen in similar positions in baronial halls, but do so with a flair for the unexpected juxaposition and metamorphosis of element that recalls the Renaissance paintings

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Figure 2.2 Grande salle du Roi (also known as Salle d’armes), Château d’Oiron, Poitou. Photo Laurent Lecat.

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of Arcimboldo. Spoerri also purchased a complete collection of “curiosities” or, to use the German term, a Wunderkammer, that was formed by a mysterious Saxon lady, Madame von Wendelstadt, in the course of the nineteenth century. One room at Oiron is entirely devoted to the small-scale objects that she collected, with their original descriptive labels—one is a tiny fragment of the flag that flew over Frankfurt during the revolutionary uprising of 1848, another a bullet collected from the battlefield of Waterloo. . . . All these fragmentary objects are individually displayed in wooden box frames. The direct incorporation of the Wendelstadt collection into the display of the Château d’Oiron raises questions about the revival of curiosity on more than one level. It is of course a lately formed collection, which came two centuries after the Baroque heyday of the Kunstkammer, and its contents appear to be virtually devoid of any intrinsic worth, compared with the precious rarities of the earlier period. These are objects whose value resides almost exclusively in their powerful and often historic connotations—a large proportion was simply donated to the collector by friends and acquaintances who must have been aware of her tastes. This aspect is worth bearing in mind as an antidote to the commercial interest that the “return to curiosity” already seems to have generated. On a visit to New York, in November 2004, I was quite amused to discover that a prominent Soho gallery was hosting an exhibition originating in Munich, A Collector’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Objects for a Wunderkammer from the 16th

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to 19th Century. Both the situation of the gallery itself, and the approach adopted for the descriptive handout, made it clear that this was an initiative addressing collectors of contemporary art in particular, and perhaps hinting that they would do well to shift their allegiance: “Making a great collection demands connoisseurship, founded in long hard study, whether it is a collection of Kunstkammer objects or a collection of Pop or Minimal art.” This was in fact the month in which the newly remodeled Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in a nearby district of Manhattan. There was little evidence in that new display that the panorama of the modern movement might accommodate a contemporary interest in curiosity. But there was a critical consensus at the time of MOMA’s reopening that no clear direction had yet emerged for the further continuance of the modernist narrative. Might a collector be tempted at this juncture to take a plunge into the past? I draw attention to this recent exhibition only because it seems symptomatic of a passéiste phase in contemporary taste.24 A related but more serious issue is the extent to which curiosity as a postmodern theme may be enhancing our awareness of the 24

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Another straw in the wind is a recent newspaper article by Paula Weideger that states, “Even amid the loftier areas of the collecting market, the art of the kunstkammer, which encompasses objects from all corners of the world and periods that are often relatively small but always exceptionally fine, is gaining ground” (Financial Times, 3–4 December 2005, W12). The fact that this piece shared a page with another item that anticipated the ill effects of applying the droit de suite on sales of contemporary art lends an added piquancy. My argument does not seek to polarize things in this way, but, on the contrary, to suggest how certain artists are concerned with mediating the difference between the Kunstkammer and the contemporary.

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collecting habits of early modern culture in ways that the rise of the modern museum as an instutition has inevitably obscured. There is now a marked tendency in museological studies to try and recover what could be called the performative dimension of the museum—to search for such evidence as may be found of the original agency of the collectors who first assembled the objects that have found their home in present-day collections. Such a movement can often lead to a productive revaluation of the objects, and indeed the resurrection of previously neglected features of the collection, so as to reconnect with earlier patterns of connoisseurship, and indeed “curiosity.” To take just one case, the Holburne Museum at Bath bears the name of its founder, Sir William Holburne, who brought together the various objects in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recent research on his life has led to the rediscovery and display of the precious stones and mineral specimens that had been relegated as being of virtually no interest in the intervening period. In this respect, the return to curiosity functions not just as a paradigm for the work of some contemporary artists, but also as a sign of the new willingness to learn about the genealogy of our museum collections. This renewed interest is certainly evident in the fascination that now attaches to the few great cabinets of curiosities that still survive from the early modern period. In Stockholm, the design of the recently opened period galleries in the Royal Museum now gives pride of place to a magnificent series of these prestigious pieces of furniture. But, for all the attraction of their semiprecious

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inlays and their allegorical adornments, they are condemned to be no more than pieces of furniture, whose original function has become a tantalizing puzzle now that the original contents are irremediably lost. The enthusiast must leave Stockholm, and pay a visit to the Museum Gustavianum of the ancient university in nearby Uppsala, to observe what must surely be the finest and best preserved Cabinet of Curiosities in the world. This was originally commissioned in Nuremberg in the early seventeenth century for the Swedish warrior king Gustavus Adolphus, who however did not live long enough to observe its final delivery. Three cabinets of comparable size and splendor were made in Nuremberg in the early modern period, one of which was sent to the Medici in Florence—but has now lost its contents— and another to the dukes of Pomerania, which has disappeared, though its original contents remain. The cabinet in the Gustavianum is complete. It is surrounded with vitrines displaying the many ingenious and extraordinary objects that have emerged from its drawers and secret compartments like a hen among her chickens. Yet it is the cabinet itself, with its stupendous crown of mineral rarities, that remains the focus of attention. Coral branches are there in abundance, fulfilling their analogical role as the arboreal growth of the ocean. But the centerpiece is an enormous nutshell, such as was occasionally gathered from the sea by awestruck voyagers, convinced that it had risen to the surface from some great tree planted on the sea bottom. Defying what would later be known as the law of gravity, this mysterious

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growth had cast its fruit upwards to testify to the mysterious symmetry of the divinely created world. It is spectacular displays like this that most clearly illustrate the allure of curiosity in its historical form. Their appeal can be calibrated against the realization that Modernism, too, is a historical phase, and not an abiding cultural condition that blocks out such a response to the premodern world. It is worth recalling once again that curiosity had a historical pedigree, even in the period of High Modernism, and this far transcended even the splendid achievements of the period beginning with the Renaissance. I referred earlier to the derogatory use of the term curiosa in the vocabulary of the medieval church. The nineteenth-century contemporaries of Charles Blanc were not scrupulous about taking this pathway to mortal sin, and compounded the offense by boldly eulogizing the errors of their forebears. Writing in 1878, Edmond Bonnaffé firmly stressed the point that “curiosity in France is not, as many people think, a modern malady.” He drew the modern devotee’s attention to the well-stocked monastic treasuries and princely accumulations of the Middle Ages, taking the tradition as far back as the pronounced taste for goldsmiths’ work shown by the Merovingian King Chilperic. Yet, by a happy coincidence for our purposes, his most detailed evidence of the age-old malady was drawn from the documents recording the protracted sale, in 1572, of the celebrated collections belonging to the Grand Ecuyer de France, and proprietor of the Château d’Oiron, Claude Gouffier. This sale of the furnishings and

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plate from his Parisian residence had apparently taken place over no less than seventeen days.25 The French attachment to the heritage of curiosity in no way faltered under the impact of modernity. Indeed, it was encouraged by certain features of the modern taste. Writing just after the end of the Second World War, Léo Larguier again made a broad historical sweep. According to him, curiosity had existed “long before the Church had placed it among the venial sins. Rome had its Hôtel des Ventes, and Cicero tells us that Sulla organised the first auctions.”26 Yet Larguier leaves us in no doubt that the modern cult of curiosity found its patron saint in Charles Baudelaire. Quoting a line from the Fleurs du mal (“But the lost jewels of antique Palmyra”), he proclaims, “This immense line from Baudelaire, full of nostalgia, and of fabulous buried treasures, says more about curiosity than all the volumes that could have been written.”27 The message could not be clearer. Curiosity is as old as classical antiquity, but it is epitomized in the contemporary world by the modern sensibility as defined by Baudelaire. Similarly, John House has effectively unearthed the multiple connotations of the concept in mid-nineteenth-century French art and criticism. But he also allots the central role to Baudelaire inasmuch as he creatively reinterpreted curiosity and placed it at 25

26 27

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Edmond Bonnaffé, Causeries sur l’art et la curiosité (Paris: A. Quantin, 1878), 76, 83–87. According to Bonnaffé’s account, this last representative of the family that raised Oiron to its greatest glory was so dedicated to artistic patronage that it was necessary to sell all his goods after his death. Léo Larguier, La Curiosité et les curieux (Paris: Editions de la Tournelle, 1946), 13. Ibid., 11.

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the heart of his aesthetic creed. “In earlier writings, notably the ‘Salon of 1846,’” House writes, “he had posited naïveté as the key to his definition of modern ways of seeing. In ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne’, by contrast, the key term for the modern vision of the world is curiosité.”28 This French espousal of curiosity as an integral feature of modernity contrasts somewhat with the situation across the Channel, and indeed with earlier judgements in France itself. In Baudelaire’s own period (to take a striking example), the frontispiece engraved by John Leech for Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop (1841) simply equates “curiosity” with the more dubious aspects of antiquarianism (Figure 2.3).29 The eponymous shop that provides scant support for Dickens’s heroine, Little Nell, is overcrowded with ungainly antique objects of questionable interest and value. The elderly relative who owns the shop and is responsible for Nell is addicted to gambling, and his frustrated passion for the acquisition of gold is on a par with this pointless accumulation of unprofitable antiquities. Dickens’s moral message about the cult of objects indeed recalls that rather superior, though equally cluttered, emporium of curiosities on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, which a desperate young man enters at the outset of Balzac’s Peau de Chagrin (1831), with eventually fatal results. 28

29

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John House, “Curiosité,” in Impressions of French Modernity: Art and Literature in France 1850–1900, edited by Richard Hobbs (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1998), 33. See Stephen Bann, “The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum Display,” in Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, edited by Andrew McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 17–30.

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Figure 2.3 John Leech, engraved frontispiece for Charles Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop (London, 1841).

For both Dickens and Balzac, one might say, the world of curiosities is represented as a threatening one, from both a social and psychological point of view. It consists of an array of objects with no discernible hierarchy and consequently no assurance of stable value. It is a threat to homely morality in the case of Dickens. In Balzac’s case, however, it takes on darker hues. The “shagreen skin” of the title confers omnipotence on its owner, but at the price of shortening his life by visible stages on each occasion that he performs an act of will to satisfy his desires. For Balzac, then, the curious object may conceal a metaphysical trap. It can precipitate its unwitting owner into the realm of the uncanny.

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One imagines that such connotations did not stop a poet and critic like Baudelaire from viewing “curiosity” as emblematic of the exquisite sensations of modern life, or from entitling his collected writings on art Curiosités esthétiques. On the contrary, they must have made the concept all the more enticing. C u r i o s i t y, R e l i g i o n , a n d S c i e n c e

However, my argument deliberately goes beyond this conflation between curiosity and the modernist aesthetic. I want to retrieve the idea of “curiosity” as in some sense a counterdiscourse, one that potentially threatens, and in all events is distinct from, the Western academic tradition. By the “Western academic tradition,” I mean not only the system of high art, which was my concern in the first of these essays, but also the perpetuation of the academic hierarchy through the dominant conventions of museum display. In order to retrieve this counterdiscourse, I need to move back from the nineteenth century and return once more to the specific concerns of early modern period. This will entail further consideration of the most important and influential body of writing on curiosity, which has accompanied and greatly encouraged the revival of this hitherto neglected phenomenon: I refer to the work of Krzysztof Pomian.30

30

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The major essays are available in English translations in Krzysztof Pomian, ed., Collectors and Curiosities, Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Porter (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990). See also in particular Krzysztof Pomian, “Curiosity and Modern Science,” in Nouvelles curiosités (Digne: Musée Gassendi, 2003), 27–56.

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At the end of one of his most thought-provoking essays, Pomian makes the epigrammatic comment that curiosity was “an interim rule between religion and science.” This is an immensely stimulating proposition, and one that encapsulates the liberating influence of Pomian’s ideas on recent research into collecting in the early modern period—not least because it dovetails well with Foucault’s theme of epistemic discontinuity as it was elaborated in Les Mots et les choses. Pomian’s distinction is especially valuable because it proposes in a lapidary formula the point that curiosity implied a specific status for the object in a world suspended between the regimes of “religion” and “science.” To this extent, it sets an agenda that is still challenging, though Pomian himself has since expanded considerably on the precise ways in which curiosity came into conflict with pioneers of the natural sciences, such as Francis Bacon.31 The challenge, and for me the problem, of this earlier formula is that it oversimplifies what is surely one of the chief features of seventeenth-century curiosity, and one of the chief reasons for taking into account its continuing influence upon the collection and consideration of objects. This is the capacity of curiosity to accommodate hybrid or multiple meanings, often transgressing 31

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Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, 12, 22 in particular. Pomian puts forward Gassendi, among others, as a spokesman of the “new curiosity.” His definition of the latter mentality is specially relevant to the argument of this essay: “The desire for knowledge becomes curiosité in this sense of the word when it is oriented towards things that are difficult to know because they are distant in space or in time, or because they are very rare, very fragile or elusive, very small or even invisible to the naked eye. One immediately sees the connection of such a curiosity with the collecting of rarities.”

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the different registers that, in Pomian’s formula, are placed in opposition to one another. Drawing on Freudian terminology, I would prefer to rephrase the formula in the following way. Religion constitutes the return of the repressed for the regime of “curiosity,” just as “curiosity” is the return of the repressed for science. Historical collections—and, in contemporary terms, works produced by the contemporary artist as collector—can be seen as sites for staging that return of the repressed, whether it be science or religion. I can give a clear instance of how this reformulated principle works in practice, as it relates to the cabinet of John Bargrave, the Kentish traveller, collector, and churchman on whom I have already written extensively.32 One of the objects in his cabinet— which happens to be probably the best preserved, if not the most prestigious, of all such collections in Britain—is an item bought in Venice in the 1640s from “a High Dutch turner” (Figure 2.4). It unscrews and reveals no less than fourteen interlocking pieces of “ivory and horn.” Entry number 34 in Bargrave’s manuscript catalogue, preserved in the archives of Canterbury Cathedral, describes it as “[a] very artificial anatomy of a human eye, with all its films or tunicles . . . together with the optic nerve which runneth into the brain, from which nerve the brain receiveth 32

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See Stephen Bann, Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); and Stephen Bann, “Scaling the Cathedral: Bourges in John Bargrave’s Travel Journal for 1645,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15–35.

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Figure 2.4 “A very artificial anatomy of a human eye,” from the Cabinet of Curiosities assembled by John Bargrave (1610–1680). Canterbury Cathedral Archive, courtesy of the Dean and Chapter.

all its several motions.”33 Bargrave’s knowledge of the scientific basis of what he is describing is attested by his brief attendance at experiments in the University of Padua, where he took care to be matriculated (as was his right as a Cambridge master of arts) on one of his journeys through Italy. He can speak authoritatively about the correspondence between the object in his collection and the experimental discoveries of the renowned Padua anatomy school: The usual way of anatomizing an eye, longways, by turning the films flat over one another, could not be so visibly imitated by art; but 33

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James Craigie Robertson, ed., Pope Alexander the Seventh and the College of Cardinals. By John Bargrave, with a catalogue of Dr. Bargrave’s museum. (London: Camden Society, 1867), 126.

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this, or roundway, was the invention of the College of Physicians at Padoüa [sic], where an artist of High Germany employed his skill in turning according to these doctors’ orders, and at length produced this excellent piece of art—this anatomy of the human eye.34

Bargrave’s commentary implies a neat equivocation in respect to the status of this intricate and appealing object. It is “art,” but it is also science. It may look as if Bargrave was taking on trust the assurance that the “turner” had faithfully responded to the commission of the Padua “doctors.” But in fact, he cannot be accused of failing to justify his confidence in experiential terms. As he takes care to inform us, “I went a double share in two Anatomizes, a man’s body and a woman’s, chiefly for this eye’s sake, and it was found to be very exact.”35 In this particular case, any putative opposition between the “regimes” of curiosity and science breaks down when we recognize that the curious object is also the product of close observation, both verifiable and verified through scientific experiment. Like a Russian doll, it provides us with the pleasure of being able to take apart and put together again its ingeniously crafted elements (and Bargrave makes a point of telling us so). But there is also the scientific dividend, which consecrates it as an object standing for all human eyes, as it transpires both male and female. We can reasonably speak of the hybridity of such an object, since its dual 34 35

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Ibid. Ibid. This passage has been amended with reference to the original manuscript in the Archive of Canterbury Cathedral.

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Figure 2.5 “The finger of a Frenchman,” from the Cabinet of Curiosities assembled by John Bargrave (1610–1680). Canterbury Cathedral Archive, courtesy of the Dean and Chapter.

roles as art and science are not mutually exclusive, but dependent on the specific context for its use. If this is curiosity pointing forward towards (and endorsing) the regime of science, then another of Bargrave’s curiosities possesses a rather more unsettling relationship with the earlier regime of religion. Item number 44 in his catalogue is described simply as “the finger of a Frenchman, which I brought from Tholouse, the capital of Languedoc, in France” (Figure 2.5).36 This is not, however, some limb wrenched off in a seventeenth-century brawl, but a body part acquired in a totally legitimate and orderly way. When Bargrave was paying a visit to the “great monastery of Franciscans” (the now destroyed Cordeliers, of which only a 36

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Ibid., 130.

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vestige remains), he became acquainted with the unusual fact that the bodies buried in their cloisters did not corrupt, but were naturally mummified, with the result that they had to be removed from the ground, and placed in adjacent vaults. These remains then became a spectacle for visitors, who were urged to take their pick of the superfluous bodies that the friars had rearranged in entertaining postures. As Bargrave relates, “They proffered me the whole body of a little child, which I should out of curiosity have accepted of, if I had then been homeward bound.”37 As it was, the traveller’s discretion about surplus baggage overcame his curiosity, and the “Frenchman’s finger” became the modest substitute that Bargrave took with him as far as Italy, and back again to England, eventually housing it in the cabinets of his prebendal house in the cathedral close of Canterbury. Bargrave hangs no experimental findings on this body part. But it should be borne in mind that, on his travels throughout Europe, he would have had ample opportunity to observe the elaborate arrangements for the veneration of the body parts of saints. His only surviving travel journal, which dates from a visit to Bourges in 1645, contains a series of careful sketches of the relics on display at the now destroyed Sainte Chapelle of that city.38 Such displays did not simply reflect the practices of the past. Collections still extant such as the treasury of the Benedictine

37 38

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Ibid., 130–31. See Bann, “Scaling the Cathedral.”

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monastery of Essen indicate that elaborate reliquaries were still being dedicated in the 1640s. Moreover, Bargrave would have been well aware as a member of a family closely linked to the cathedral establishment of Canterbury that the famous shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket, once the focus of a pilgrimage cult renowned throughout Christendom, had been demolished by Henry VIII hardly more than a century before, its precious metals being melted down for the benefit of the royal treasury and its cargo of previously venerated relics evidently thrown to the winds. The only record of the pilgrimage cult remaining at Canterbury was the visual testimony of a single stained-glass roundel in the north choir aisle, and indeed the prominent architectural feature—directly observable from the house where Bargrave lived after 1662—of the so-called Becket Corona at the East End. Bargrave’s personal sentiments about religion and the cult of relics can be implied from what we discover elsewhere in the course of his passionate denunciations of the Counter-Reformation papacy. In the listing of his collection, they are perhaps noteworthy by their very absence. It is as if the motive of curiosity empowered him to treat the “finger of a Frenchman” as a kind of enigma, suspended between the hostile regimes of religion and science. There is no such difficulty with the other mummified specimen included in Bargrave’s collection of curiosities. This is a souvenir from his last and most adventurous journey overseas, to the court of the redoubtable dey of Algiers. Bargrave performed this

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very delicate diplomatic assignment in 1662, when King Charles II regained the throne of his father, and consented as a mark of gratitude to ransom a company of Christians who had been captured and enslaved by the Moors. Bargrave had the presence of mind to employ a local Italian slave to sketch this unpredictable potentate during the lengthy negotiations. His fraternization with the local inhabitants resulted in him being presented with a live chameleon as a parting gift. Here the scientific motive returns once more to the fore. Bargrave had evidently learned from the existing authorities on natural history that such creatures lived on air. This was flatly contradicted by his Moorish acquaintances, who taught him how to catch flies on sugared paper, and so provide necessary sustenance for the creature. “So soon as it seeth the flies at the sweetmeats it darteth forth that toung at a great distance, and with the viscous matter pulleth the fly to her mouth, and eatheth it.” Bargrave’s observation of the chameleon continued happily as long as his departing ship remained cosseted by the balmy air of the Mediterranean, where there was a “store of flies.” But on the ship’s approaching the “more cold and northern climates,” the “flies failed,” the chameleon sickened and died, and the ship’s surgeon was then commissioned to embalm it.39 I have brought in this brief discussion of Bargrave’s practice as a collector, since his case so clearly demonstrates a crucial point 39

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Craigie Robertson, Pope Alexander the Seventh, 137–38.

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about the tradition of collecting curiosities in the early modern period. This remains relevant to the way in which we might employ the concept of curiosity at the present day. Curiosity is not, according to this reading, a chronologically distinct epistemic regime. It corresponds to a recurrent manner of collecting, in which objects characteristically acquire a status of semiotic hybridity, combining several different strands of signification. The conditions for this multiple of signification are twofold, and they should be clearly contrasted. First of all, the object is narrativized, implicitly as a souvenir of the peregrinations that have led to its acquisition, and explicitly through the particular stories that are told in the collector’s journal or catalogue. Secondly, it must be housed. It must receive its place in the collector’s cabinet, where it is contextualized by the presence of other objects, and possibly by the cultural and geographical features of its new locale. I will finally use this very broad characterization of resurgent curiosity to analyze the two, rather different examples of contemporary artistic practice that I mentioned at the start. But before doing that, I want to make some further general remarks on the period intervening between the seventeenth century and the twentieth, which is of course the period of the dominance of academic art in Europe, and its enshrinement in the form of the historicized Museum of Fine Arts that took place over the course of the nineteenth century. I alluded earlier to the rigorous distinction between the fine arts and curiosity that was maintained throughout this later period, even though the rising aesthetic

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prestige of exotic (as well as historical) objects had begun to challenge the hierarchical consequences of such a distinction. Curiosity also languished over this period as a result of the prohibitions imposed upon it by the new experimental sciences. Bargrave had contrived to have his cake and eat it when he collected an ingenious piece of carpentry that could also be a trigger for an exercise in experimental verification. As scientific method progressed, general laws and systems of classification became the determining factors that governed the acquisition and testing of knowledge. The status of singular objects inevitably became more and more problematic despite, or indeed because of, their being anchored in personal histories. Surrea lism a s Curiosit y

Enough has been said already about the point that Baudelaire effectively encapsulated curiosity within his concept of the modern. Paradoxically enough, this strategy portended a wholesale recuperation of modern painting for novel purposes, rather than any validation of the “specific object.” Once again, House has written illuminatingly about the way in which this was achieved through the paintings of Manet. The critic Théophile Thoré detected as an example of “vice” Manet’s cultivation of “a sort of pantheism which places no higher value on a head than on a slipper . . . which paints everything almost uniformly—furniture, carpets, books, costumes, flesh, facial features.”40 As 40

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House, “Curiosité,” 53.

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House puts it, “This seemingly depersonalised curiosité could be viewed as the triumph of materialism in art and as the essence of a new ‘modernity.’” Manet’s “materialism” thus consisted in the medium of oil paint becoming the common denominator for a nonhierarchical extensive range of objects, rather than in any individual specification of the objects themselves. This may seem to be a banal observation. But it is perhaps excused by the fact that Modernism does indeed, in the fullness of time, generate its own avatars of curiosity in the form of objects. With the advance of the modern movement into the twentieth century, there are many signs of the eruption of the object, which goes pari passu with the crisis of traditional media. Picasso causes the new techniques of collage and assemblage to infiltrate painting and sculpture. The Dadaists then begin to call into question all art forms, genres, and media, while welcoming the playful, the performative, and the concrete. Thierry de Duve may be right when he traces the “ready-made” of Marcel Duchamp back to the undifferentiated category of “art” as inaugurated by Manet’s paintings. But there remains an irreducible distinction between Manet’s “pantheistic” appropriation of the diversity of the world in terms of paint, and Duchamp’s equivocal placing of the selected object at the borderline between specificity and genre. I would maintain, however, that the most consequential attempt to raise the bar on curiosity occurred in the movement of Surrealism. This is not simply because the surrealist cult of the magical and uncanny soon resulted in wild, individual, and extravagant

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creations as opposed to the deadpan objects chosen by Duchamp. It is because this new movement was rooted in a genuinely interdisciplinary apprehension of the development of Western art and literature, involving a willingness to explore their traditional involvement in the discourses of science and the exotic. In particular, the Surrealists reinstated the ambiguous and yet fruitful connection between art and contemporary scientific discourse that I noted as being a feature of the cult of curiosity, in its early manifestations. Looking back at the reign of scientific rationalism, they too care to recuperate what might be called the “relics” of science: that is to say, the objects left over from experimental use, which possessed a strange charm precisely because they no longer fulfilled any function. Yet the artists of the movement were often inclined to domesticate these disconcerting relics through traditional representational strategies, rather than underlining their abject status as objects. Paul Delvaux’s paintings from the early 1940s, such as Les grands squelettes (1942) and Le musée Spitzner (1943), make direct reference to the intriguing collection of specimens originally used for medical education that had been put on show in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century by the so-called Dr. Spitzner. This engrossing spectacle, which involved colorful wax models of body parts and the occasional monstrous medical specimen, was still being toured through the cities of Belgium in the early part of the twentieth century, and so proved a highly memorable feature of Delvaux’s childhood. Dr. Spitzner had, first of all, wholly reinterpreted the status of

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these superseded medical models, so that they turned into exotic and often disturbing objects, while still testifying to their scientific origins: in other words, he had reconstituted them as “curiosities.” Delvaux, in his turn, had assimilated the spectacle of the Musée Spitzner in his youth, and given it a pictorial treatment that was an essay in traditional scenographic perspective, as well as a reenactment of the source of his childhood wonder. Through this process, however, he has inevitably tended to neutralize the unsettling power of the objects themselves. It is interesting to note that the Spitzner collection still exists, though it has been in store for many decades. I had occasion to take part in a symposium held in Montpellier at a time when the Yvon Lambert collection of contemporary art was destined to be housed in a newly converted museum in the city. There was a possibility that the Spitzner collection would have been exhibited in the same, formerly monastic building. What complicated the issue was the fact that Montpellier already possessed a museum of medical models that was linked to the long-established medical faculty of the university. At our joint meetings with the distinguished representatives of the faculty, some skepticism was expressed about the credentials of “Dr.” Spitzner. The scheme had no practical outcome, and the Spitzner collection remained in store. But, in spite of the professional skepticism, an important point had been made. Contemporary art had evolved to the point where such objects could sit perfectly well with works produced by living artists. The Lambert gallery was also about to exhibit the large Cibachrome

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Figure 2.6 Salvador Dali, Oiseau (1928). Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh.

photographs of bodies in the morgue by the American artist Andres Serrano. Unlike Delvaux, Serrano pulled no punches in his shocking magnifications of charred and disfigured flesh. My intention here is not to depreciate the interest of Surrealism in this connection, but simply to suggest an evolution to a point where the object escapes its modernist frame. To take another pictorial instance, Salvador Dali’s early work, Oiseau (1928; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), explores the age-old theme of metamorphosis by representing in material form the constituents of a dream experienced by André Breton (Figure 2.6). Breton dreamed that the dead birds washed up on a beach had been transformed into cows or horses. Dali has chosen to place particular emphasis on the physicality of the

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shingle that creates the ground for the emergence of this monstrous creation. He has incorporated the grainy material, just as Picasso incorporated plaster and sand into the surfaces of his Cubist works of the previous decade. But in Dali’s case, the literal treatment of the surface jars with a respect for the traditional framing of the image. It is not so much the process of metamorphosis that holds our attention, as the decision to problematize the laws of perspective—laws that Dali will, of course, repeatedly reaffirm in his later work. I detect here a sharp contrast with the postmodern “curiosity” as it is found in the work of one of the artists who has most consistently taken this direction. Cornelia Parker’s work Embryo Firearms (1996) illustrates the unfettered power of the unlikely object to generate fantasies of metamorphosis on its own (Figure 2.7). A product of the artist’s temporary residence in the Colt Gun Factory in Hartford, Connecticut, this is a work that brilliantly demonstrates the novel possibilities of an art of curiosity. Of course, there lies behind such a presentation the modernist precedent of Duchamp’s “ready-mades.” But Parker is not content simply to transfer the object from one site to another. She invites us to see these innocent matrices in the light of their potential transformation into deadly instruments. At the same time, she makes use of the metonymic connection between hand and the gun to lend the nascent object an almost physical closeness. We react with strong, almost protective feelings to the exposed state of the twin, “embryonic” elements. Cornelia Parker’s intervention is

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Figure 2.7 Cornelia Parker, Embryo Firearms (1996), Colt .45 guns in earliest stage of production.

both decisive and unforced. By gently anticipating the processes of the industrial assembly line, she also inhibits the process of generic production and reveals the object’s singularity. The teleological implications of this comparative judgement should not be overstressed. It is not my intention just to assert the superiority of contemporary works over the achievements of the modern movement. On the contrary, it is a matter of isolating how we might now wish to reinterpret aspects of Surrealism in light of curiosity. The postmodern frame entails that we look for structural continuities instead of utilizing the rhetoric of historical rupture. The overriding reason for adopting this frame

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is, indeed, that so many contemporary artists have themselves, implicitly or explicitly, already endorsed it. It is the character of this new work that prompts such a reappraisal, rather than the urge to rediscover a remote historical phenomenon. It would be hard to find a more convincing recent proof of this point than a recent installation of the American artist Mark Dion. This was created in connection with the program of the AHRB Centre for Studies of Surrealism and Its Legacy, which has one of its bases in the University of Manchester. It is much to the credit of the scholars running this center that they should have agreed to commission an artist to work in parallel with their historical and critical research. Dion’s project has involved an extensive period of combing the Manchester Museum for objects that have been neglected and sidelined in the current installations—in his own words, to “‘turn the museum inside out’ by putting the backrooms on display.”41 His resultant work, which opened in the museum in March 2005, consisted of a room densely packed with the specimens of the many different categories of object covered by the museum’s collections. In the same process, it drew attention to the operation of the museum itself, as a system of protocols and classifications whose hierarchies had been, for the moment, relinquished. What emerged as a result of this “inside-out” view of the museum was precisely the excluded object, or the object in its nongeneric form. 41

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Mark Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy (Manchester, UK: Book Works/AHRB Centre for Studies of Surrealism and Its Legacies, 2005), 7.

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Dion’s installation established a useful alibi through its title: Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy. It adopted in a modified form (and pumped full of fresh significance) the title of the Bureau des recherches surréalistes that Breton and his colleagues inaugurated in Paris in 1924. In his lively introduction to the publication recording the work, David Lomas was right to point out that Dion’s contribution was not just a question of surrealist “influence” but also “the product of a convergent set of interests and artistic strategy uniting the historical dada and surrealist avant-gardes with the fields of contemporary art practice.”42 He also went on to argue that “the surrealists were the first to discern a revolutionary potential in the obsolete and outmoded, in the material by-products and refuse of modernity.”43 Yet this judgement refers to the achievement of the Surrealists specifically within the context of Modernism. There have indeed been earlier periods when the dedicated retrieval of “the obsolete and the outmoded” emerged as a cultural mission, not the least being the age of High Romanticism when the creators of historical museums went out of their way to defy the negative connotations that hung accusingly around the practice of “antiquarianism.” The French photographer Nadar memorably characterized this activity as he remembered it from his youth in the 1820s, when avid collectors were able to pick up medieval and Renaissance rarities in the run-down but still heavily built-up 42 43

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Ibid., 6. Ibid.

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area around the Place du Carousel. Hardly a stone’s throw from the Louvre, which had already established itself as the progenitor of the great museums of high art, the debris of earlier periods was being salvaged with a view to creating a quite different type of museological experience: “With coins of forty sous, Du Sommerard and Sauvageot are there fitting up [the museums of] Cluny and Carnavalet.”44 Mark Dion’s installations, and the works of other kindred artists, thus gain their fullest resonance not from any privileged affinity with the modernist avant-garde, but from their declared engagement with museological issues that date back to much earlier phases of cultural activity. In sum, they recall the nexus of collecting pursuits and scientific enquiry that first came to the fore in the age of curiosity. The additional point that Dion has recently been involved in major projects for two of the important sites of contemporary patronage mentioned here—the Château d’Oiron and the Musée Gassendi at Digne-les-Bains—is a further indication of the way in which such work is being seen as part of a coherent phenomenon. Curiosity supplies a historical dimension to the postmodern context. T h e A r t i s t ’s B r i e f

I have been setting out a specific and ambitious brief for the present-day artist in respect to curiosity: that the practice in question 44

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Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), Quand j’ étais photographe (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 344.

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should combine the process of experiment with the irreducible appeal of the singular object; that the artist should seek to adopt, and of course to revise, historical precedents reminiscent of earlier conjunctures between art and science; and that our attention should be drawn to particular, appropriate types of locale for the work. This is a type of practice as far distanced as possible from the generic status of the framed picture. The career of Hubert Duprat demonstrates in an exemplary way how all of these criteria may be met. To take the last point first, what would be the ideal locale for his work, accepting that as a rule it still has to be exhibited in conventional museums and galleries? The problem of the Musée Spitzner, nostalgically evoked in Delvaux’s surrealist paintings, is that it is condemned to be homeless. The conditions do not yet exist for using this remarkable survival to provoke new thoughts about the interaction between spectacle and science. By contrast, the placing of Duprat’s coral construction in the gallery of early paintings at the Musée Gassendi has already given us an example of new curiosities in context. It should be mentioned that this is not the only initiative by this enterprising museum that involves the strategic juxtaposition of works from the collection, and a specially commissioned example of contemporary art. Andy Goldsworthy’s River of Earth (1999) has been designed to wall off one end of the gallery in which the museum’s holdings of nineteenth-century landscapes by Provençal painters

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are displayed.45 By deliberately blocking out what might otherwise have been a point of view onto the mountainous country surrounding the town, Goldsworthy hopes to alert the spectator to a different form of response to the local landscape. The whole wall is plastered with reddish clay from a nearby riverbed, and has cracked in intricate patterns resembling the craquelure of oil paint. Duprat aims to divert and instruct the spectator in a rather different way. Like Goldsworthy, he often calls into question the conventional assumptions of viewpoint and scale. But rather than invoking the visual scale of the landscape prospect, he prefers to focus attention on the production of intricate objects, which owe as much to art as to nature, and often problematizes the relationship between the two. His most recent work for the Musée Gassendi, the result of a residency in Digne, is a long, hollow, white-painted structure closely resembling the stripped branch of a tree. However, the inside surfaces are covered with a mass of small hematite pebbles, imported from South America. With their high content of iron ore, these objects combine to create a kind of metallic sheen, which is imperfectly visible as a result of the limited light that penetrates the long, winding tunnel. Exotic, mysterious, and oddly combining features of the mineral and the vegetative world, this can only be described as a curiosity, tailor-made for the contemporary Wunderkammer. 45

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Illustrated in Nouvelles curiosités, xxv.

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Equally fascinating, and certainly best known among Duprat’s works, are the tiny casings constructed by caddis-fly larvae under his supervision. These are occasionally exhibited on their own, and are easy to miss in a show where they are placed alongside a roster of more spatially expansive contemporary works. They seem to demand an instant narrowing of our attention, a shift from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic domain. What is so appropriate about the housing of this project in the Château d’Oiron is the point that the full life cycle of the larvae can take place there. The collection specifically welcomes such long-term exhibits that will change and develop according to the round of the seasons. The emblem cycles dating from the early modern period provide a responsive context for such installations, since they, too, embody allegorical reflections upon the flora and fauna of the natural habitat. Duprat’s contribution to the compendium of curiosities at Oiron is thus a room in which—each year at the appropriate season—the caddis-fly larvae start their life cycle. They patiently set about constructing a shell from the fragments of precious material that are scattered throughout their aquatic environment (Figure 2.8). Each larva, programmed to increase its weight and rugosity as a defense against the predators that usually lie in wait for it, is attracted to the shiny objects—specks of gold, pearls, and turquoises. It builds them progressively into a spiral structure, using a glue secreted by its mouth. Eventually, it is bound to vacate the shell, and emerges as a full-fledged fly to complete its life cycle.

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Figure 2.8 Hubert Duprat, caddis-fly larvae with their cases. Expo Frac Limousin (1998). Photo Frédéric Magnoux.

It is interesting to note that, in the domain where art is most concretely identified with locale in the Western tradition—the art of the garden—this idiosyncratic life cycle has recently been celebrated in an emblematic way. Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose long-standing interest in emblems could itself be taken as a preliminary signal of the return to curiosity,46 installed a small fountain feature at his garden of Little Sparta, near Edinburgh, which celebrates the “caddis” as “goddess.” The humble larva from the bottom of the pond, prone to adorn its shell with fragments of mica before ascending to its miniature apotheosis, is compared to the goddess Aphrodite rising from her shell and borne up by the waves. Duprat’s caddis flies depart and relinquish their tiny 46

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See Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ron Costley, Heroic Emblems, with introduction and commentaries by Stephen Bann (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1977).

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shell, no more than 2.5 cm long, leaving it as evidence of their self-protective (and incidentally aesthetic) quest. There are aspects of Duprat’s work that may be associated with more general developments in the domain of contemporary sculpture. Such would be the current interest in rare and precious stones exemplified by Stephen Cox’s work in solid porphyry, aptly named Chrysalis (1989, Tate Gallery, London). Cox has pioneered the use of such rare, semiprecious materials as porphyry, fashioning small as well as more substantial objects that often take on forms reminiscent of ancient bowls and figurines. On one level, this interest can be related to the modernist tradition in British sculpture, and the concept of “truth to materials,” which inspired artists like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth to select, and carve directly into, specific types of stone. But the deliberate selection of materials that are redolent with rich symbolic and historical connections provides a dimension quite foreign to the modernist ideology. Such works in fact complement the renewed interest in the history of the culture of semiprecious stones that is distinctively contemporary. Suzanne Butters’s learned study of the Renaissance use of porphyry includes a section on the porphyry sculpture of Stephen Cox.47 Some of Duprat’s larger-scale creations, such as his rose-colored marble floor installation reproducing a section of the medieval 47

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See Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptor’s Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence, 2 vols. (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1996). For a more general account of Stephen Cox’s work, see Stephen Bann, The Sculpture of Stephen Cox (London: Lund Humphries, 1995).

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paving of Siena Cathedral, relate to the environmental scale of the majority of Cox’s works.48 In this case, it is worth remarking that Cox in fact used the public space in front of the cathedral for an exhibition showing several different types of rare marble, such as the local giallo da Siena. But, for our purposes, it is Duprat’s adoption of the life cycle of the caddis fly that produces the most striking dividend in the form of a comparison with a historical precursor who anticipated his work from within the domain of natural science. Although he was entirely unaware of the fact at the outset, a Victorian lady appears to have shared his interest in the programmed production of ornamented larva cases. Miss Elizabeth Mary Smee, born in 1843, is a rather less shadowy figure than Spoerri’s Madame von Wendelstadt. She eventually married William Odling, Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and her descendants are still traceable as a result of the distinctive double-barreled surname of OdlingSmee. However, in the early 1860s, when her experiments with the caddis flies were evidently conducted, she was still living at her father’s house in Wallington, near Purley in Surrey, and the River Wandle ran through a portion of the family garden. Her father, Alfred Smee, certainly provided some of the impetus for her independent research. In 1842, he had published a work entitled Elements of Electro-Metallurgy, and he would experiment successfully with a process of coating perishable objects in metal. 48

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For a general overview of Duprat’s work, see Hubert Duprat, exhibition catalogue (Antibes: Musée Picasso, 1998).

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This was later used for the plates printing the banknotes issued by the Bank of England. The connection between Duprat as a contemporary artist and his adventitious discovery, Miss Elizabeth Mary Smee, is an engaging one, and Duprat himself intends to make his Victorian counterpart the subject of a future publication. Without forestalling this account, one might begin to suggest, for a start, that they embody different but complementary positions in respect of the balance between “experimentalism” and “aesthetics.” Miss Smee certainly noted down, but left without any further comment, her finding that the larvae were attracted to precious stones: “The worms succeeded well when they were supplied with pieces of glass, amethyst, cairngorm, cornelian, onyx, agate, coral, coralline, marble, shells, jet, brass shavings, gold-leaf, silver-leaf, when existing as small fragments.”49 Only incidentally did she then reveal her technique for getting the “worms” to vacate their “houses,” and so point out that these could be preserved “without causing injury.” For Miss Smee, the cases left by the larvae were no doubt not of very great interest as such. However, she was deeply involved in tracking down and recording the patterns of behavior of these enterprising insects. They proved, in her own words, “so excessively pugnacious that I [was] always obliged to keep each in a separate 49

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Letter of Elizabeth Mary Smee, dated 24 February 1863, in American Magazine of Natural History, 3rd series, vol. 12, 399. I am grateful to Hubert Duprat for supplying me with a copy of this document.

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vessel.” Only as a result of this precaution were the caddis flies left free to concentrate on “peaceably constructing their houses,” since any encounter would inevitably result in “fierce warfare” and “the death of the weakest party.” This proto-Darwinian theme is not, of course, included as an element in Duprat’s presentation. What still comes to the fore in the comparison is thus the asymmetrical historical relationship between the contemporary artist and the amateur scientist, both of whom have happened by chance upon the same natural, but humanly assisted phenomenon. Through his further research, Duprat certainly intends to continue to probe this relationship, and it will eventually be assumed as an important contextual dimension of the whole project. One can predict the result will not be a travesti mirror image, like Duchamp’s “Rose Sélavy,” but the fiction of a historically based “alter ego” reciprocating the experiments of the contemporary practitioner—as Duprat now puts it, “Miss Smee, it’s me.” In this project, as in many others, Hubert Duprat is one of the present-day artists who makes us specially aware of what resides in curiosity as a historical ricorso. His approach does not so much negate as ceremoniously bypass the high road of Modernism. He picks its own way around history, and he does so partly by retracing the some of the odder pathways that have run parallel to the experimental track of modern science. He persists in reminding us that it is the by-products of experiment that will often prove to be the most important dividend, at least for the artist. Many artists at the present day have become familiar with the concept

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of “practice as research.” Duprat reminds us how resourcefully this general principle may be contextualized, and enriched, in terms of the historical record of curiosity and its equivocal relationship to the discoveries of natural science. In writing about curiosity in this second part of my study, I have underlined that it is a recurrent practice attaching to the rare and the specific. I have suggested that it now makes sense to take curiosity back to the seventeenth century, where its ambiguous connection with science and experiment becomes evident, rather than to accept its Baudelairian encapsulation in the modernist aesthetic. I would not go so far as to claim that curiosity is the defining feature of Postmodernism. It is simply that the weakening of the modernist paradigm has given currency to new forms of artistic practice, and encouraged us to see this one, in particular, in a deep historical context. Duprat is one artist who undeniably prompts this connection. My concluding example is an artist from the following generation who takes a similar circuit around Modernism. I mentioned earlier my own early thoughts about “Experimental Painting,” and the starting point that I chose for my book of 1970, which was the series of Cloud Studies by Constable. “Why, then,” Constable asked, “may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?”50 The young German artist Gerhard Lang 50

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Bann, Experimental Painting, 10.

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became known to me when I acted as his advisor on a postgraduate dissertation at the Slade School of Art in London. This dissertation covered Constable’s Cloud Studies, and the related meteorological material in Luke Howard’s Climate of London, both of which emerged around 1820. The “Cloud Walks” that Lang undertook in the late 1990s emerged out of this research into the experimental nature of Constable’s studies, and their relationship to the tradition of natural philosophy. As a German artist, coming from a background of Green politics and the political happening (aktion) of the late 1960s, this represented for him a congenial, if historically remote, foyer of research. However, the way in which he began to design his own artistic experiments bore clear parallels to a more recent manifestation of the English preoccupation with landscape. He adopted the new generic landscape form of the “walk,” which had been developed by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, the two major British practitioners of “Land Art,” and also by his Swiss mentor, Lucius Burckhardt. Cloud Walk 5, a walk by Lang on Ben Lomond in Scotland, took place on 21 December 1997. It was one of a series of similar ventures undertaken across the British Isles, from John O’Groats to Land’s End. The purpose of each walk in this series was not just to observe the cloud, or to document and represent distinctive cloud formations as in the studies of Constable. Nor was it Lang’s objective to classify clouds according to the accepted typology, which had been devised by meteorologists like Howard

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over the same period. Lang aimed to capture a cloud—or at least to capture part of a cloud. For this purpose, it was necessary to devise the right equipment. It has to be taken on trust that there is a lengthy, and mostly fruitless, reconnoitre that takes place on the designated territory before the artist calculates that he and his support team can reach the high ground before the cloud in question disappears. Once the omens are judged to be good, the main road is abandoned, and the long climb starts, with the party taking whatever pathway happens to be available. The artist finally gets to the point of transition. He enters the cloud, taking with him the specially prepared glass vessel. Then the cloud sample can be taken (Figure 2.9). This is done by sucking the cloud into the separating funnel, and by the same process expelling the air that it contained previously. From the artist’s position inside the cloud—that is to say, surrounded by the system of very small water droplets of which it consists—there is no way of observing the cloud as it enters the bottle. As Lang has stated, “[Y]ou have to imagine it.” This is the most important part. But the capture of the cloud must then be fully documented. A map is used to indicate the route taken, and the exact location for the sample. Its characteristics are exhaustively documented. But these are not amenable to scientific description, and rely on a system of wild classification that requires subjective and even meaningless judgements of a type familiar to all who have filled in questionnaires. Is the

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Figure 2.9 Gerhard Lang, Cloud Walk 5: a walk on Ben Lomond: the artist takes the cloud sample. Photo courtesy of the artist.

cloud “male” or “female,” for example? As a final stage, the specially designed bottle, initially sealed on the mountain, is sealed more durably in the studio by the use of a special technique, and the cloud is identified on the capsule by a special cloud stamp. As exhibited in a gallery, the bottle is further embellished by being packed in a “Cloud Walk Box,” lined with blue velvet (Figure 2.10). Nearby is exhibited the artist’s walking stick, as originally cut to suit his height at the traditional emporium of James Smith & Sons in New Oxford Street, just a few minutes’ walk away from the Slade School of Art.51

51

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See Gerhard Langs Spazierstock, An Inquiry by the Strollologist Lucius Burckhardt (Otzberg, Germany: Gerhard Lang, 1997).

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Figure 2.10 Gerhard Lang, Cloud Walk Box, with artist’s walking stick. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Gerhard Lang has focused his Cloud Walks on the landscape of the British Isles. It is not the air of the city that he bottles, let alone the emanations from the capital of Modernism like the 50 cc. air de Paris that Duchamp produced in an edition of 300 phials to stock his Green Box in 1940.52 One of his signposts is Constable. His walking stick is an emblem of the fact that he does not plough, or defend, the landscape, but enjoys it with the disinterested emotion commended by Immanuel Kant.53 But just as he refreshes the Romantic skyscape with a contemporary reference to Land Art, so his walking passes by way of a number of other locations in the premodern past. The Musée Gassendi takes its name from Pierre Gassendi, a seventeenth-century philosopher born near Digne, who argued against Descartes and was ironically credited by the latter with a revised version of the cogito: not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I walk, therefore I am.” Ambulo ergo sum is the inscription placed by the Dutch artist herman de vries at the entry to his enclosed “sanctuary,” perched high up on the escarpments of the Vallée du Bès, in the vicinity of Digne. Just as Lang’s “capture” of the cloud amounts to nothing much except the very process of trying to capture the invisible, so de vries makes a fenced enclosure that protects nothing 52 53

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See Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 201–2. From Langs Spazierstock, An Inquiry, 2: “Finally the stick refers to Kant’s precondition for aesthetic perception: it is without interest. While the farmer has his dung fork and rake and the earl his sword, the citizen walks along with a stick, for he does not intend to till the fields or discover why the farmer does not pay the rent, he just likes to enjoy the landscape.”

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in particular, but celebrates the achievement of reaching that remote and elevated site. Lang could be said to exploit the satirical possibility of the object of study that is not an object, and the container that elaborately assumes the place of the contained. But in the present context, it is also worth noting that the “cloud” as a figure in pictorial research goes back a long way beyond Constable, being relevant to the very first experiments in the development of “legitimate perspective” at the time of the early Renaissance. As Hubert Damisch has clearly shown in his “Theory of /cloud/,”54 the “cloud” in art may be regarded not just as a natural phenomenon, but also as a semiotic shifter that epitomizes what cannot be brought within the parameters of linear perspective. Filippo Brunelleschi recognized that the panels on which he sketched out the system of lines culminating in a single vanishing point required the sky to be left out, or simply rendered as a mirror reflecting the real world. But what could not be encompassed by perspective served precisely as a challenge to some of the most adventurous painters in the Renaissance tradition. Insistent on capitalizing on the nondefinable aspects of space, they were tempted to new and adventurous solutions, such as the domed ceilings of Correggio with their encircling clouds that

54

See Hubert Damisch, Théorie du nuage: pour une histoire de la peinture (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

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inveigled the eye into vaporous heights. Capturing a cloud is not an irrelevant pursuit in this connection, though as stressed before, the project will be vindicated only by what the imagination conceives. Compared with Lang, Duprat may appear more firmly situated in the realm of curiosity. His pursuit of natural “wonders” seems directly comparable to the enterprise that filled the cabinets of early modern collectors. But it is worth bearing in mind that his career as a whole has embodied a comprehensive critique of the mechanisms of Western artistic theory. In particular, he has worked on the concept of the studio as the site of the artist’s work, and the transplantation of that site into a medium of display. At an early stage, he set up his working space directly as a camera obscura, using a pinhole to project upon the walls the inverted image of the other side of the street, and recording the results in photographs. He has also created solid casts that replicate such originary spaces in a material form that combats the spatial constraints of the gallery. These strategies have clearly led to his opting for alternative exhibiting sites, like the Château d’Oiron. He has in fact developed an openness to site and medium that stretches the genealogy of Western art as far as its mythic origins. A future project for the Musée Gassendi anticipated in the writings of the Renaissance ceramicist Bernard Palissy might be the vitrification of the inner surfaces of an entire cave. Though horrendously difficult from a technical point of view, this project

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is hardly of a different order to some of the challenges that he has already set for himself, and resolved. In sum, both Duprat and Lang can be seen to have shifting modernist protocols in the direction of a venturesome creativity, which goes beyond the antithesis of arid conceptualism and art as a craft driven by skill. The engagement with what could be called the genealogy of Western representational practices is fundamental to both. On terms such as these, perhaps, Modernism may ultimately cease to be the idol that it has been for more than a century, and postmodern art may move in new directions whilst reasserting its historicity.

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Seminar This conversation was recorded May 28, 2005. Stephen Bann, History of Art, University of Bristol; Paul Hegarty, French Department, University College Cork; Sabine Kriebel, History of Art, University College Cork; Margaret MacNamidhe, Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow, University College Dublin; James Elkins, University College Cork. James Elkins: I’d like to start by talking about the structure of your lectures, and to begin with, the introductory pages on fashion. I took your observations about fashion, and the poetic notion of paint that seems wet, as examples of unreliable criteria of innovation. I wonder about such observations as an expandable category. Were you thinking of those examples as the beginnings of a whole series of unreliable criteria, and in that case how would those criteria be shaped? What theories of Modernism might they address? Would an expanded list comprise a nameable category of unreliable criteria? 173

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Stephen Bann: Yes, as you rightly say, those were the tip of an iceberg which is in a sense infinitely large. The fashion environment is very much concerned with the difference between, say, 1862 and 1863, so that we might suppose that we can find clues within the generalized consumption of a bourgeois society, clues from which we might extrapolate to form a generalized notion of what Modernism is. If I had been able to expand that, I suppose I would have said that in my view, the iceberg, if it could be prolonged, could potentially include a large part of what we call the social history of art. JE: That’s what I was wondering, because it didn’t seem that you were after Gombrich’s fashion “logic”— SB: And that therefore we would have an almost infinite potential mass of data—I took the dessert plate as a kind of limit example, as evidence. But those examples would not, in the end, tell us the answers to what would seem to be the most important questions. They would answer all sorts of other questions, but not what might have resided in the modernist break. JE: It was an interesting move to do exactly what you did, and nothing more. Because if you go down that road, you might find yourself in the interesting position Michael Fried finds himself in, when for example in the Menzel book, he says in response to T. J. Clark, “I am very interested in all these

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Ernst Gombrich, “The Logic of Vanity Fair,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, edited by Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974).

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things, but in the end I am more interested in this”— the this being something explicitly other than any amassing of social art historical data. It’s a long and complex conversation that Michael reports on in that book, but it has a direction, and specific ending points. I can imagine that going too far down that road of accumulating unreliable criteria might create such a problem of definition. SB: Well, it wouldn’t present a problem for me. It depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to look at theorization, and at what is invested in the theories of Modernism and Postmodernism, then it might . . . but I am not, as it were, trying to solve all the problems of the history of art! I would be absolutely in accord with Michael about this. All these things are extraordinarily fascinating. I have copies at home of the Musée des Familles from 1862, just the year in which Manet is planning these great coups, and there is so much about the “war of the sexes,” seen in relation to modes of dress. What do those tell us about contemporary society? Clearly they have a tremendous relevance to the kind of stylization and the sorts of oppositions that Manet is putting into his work of that particular period: but I don’t think that really tells us much about Modernism.

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Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 76, 232, discussed in my The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 2004), [ ].

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JE: I could see fashion being epiphenomenal on something you might want to call Modernism (if, as you say, the purpose of the inquiry is to understand the theorization of Modernism). But I could also see someone saying, “But isn’t there an equal unreliability to those other exempted criteria?” In other words: how can we be sure the list that begins, as it were, with fashion comprises the phenomena we want to call ancillary to the object we wish to call Modernism? SB: We would have to do that by testing the other criteria. The issue is complicated very much by the fact that the way in which Manet is interpreted as the forerunner is not entirely his own doing; it is dependent on the ideology that Baudelaire puts forward in “The Painter of Modern Life.” That is precisely the text that puts modernity in the category of fashion, cosmetics, and changes in appearances. In a way, I think this is a kind of massive displacement. For practically all artists, it did not hold true. The displacement that Manet effected has been backed up by the fact that Baudelaire’s criticism has great currency, and these two things together make it necessary to have a different strategy for looking at what happened in the modernist break.

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Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, translated by P. E. Charvet (New York: Viking, 1972), 395–422, http://www.idst.vt.edu/modernworld/d/ Baudelaire.html.

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JE: Exactly. Roads wind, and they don’t go straight to their apparent destinations. SB: That is why I tried to spend a little time introducing the fashion alternative before trying to deflect attention to something that seems much more important. Paul Hegarty: Baudelaire also says, in the “Salon of 1859,” that the problem with painting today is fashion: that fashion is used as an overly convoluted title for bad academic painting; and that if there is to be a modernist painting, it must somehow get over that. Baudelaire is contradictory in his own practice, in comparison to the society around him. The widely held view is that 98 percent of artists aren’t interested in the avant-garde; but if we are reading for the avant-garde, I think we’d have to say that Manet pays attention whether he agrees with Baudelaire or not. I’m not the “first in decrépitude of art,” he says, but he does pay attention. SB: Yes, undoubtedly he does. The problem for me with Baudelaire is that there is the great intervention of the “Salon of 1846,” and then afterwards you have lapidary remarks. “The Painter of Modern Life” is overwhelmingly the text people have fastened on as characterizing that moment, and it is well known that the actual commentary about Manet by Baudelaire that we might have had as the 1860s unfold is not there, because Baudelaire’s attention is elsewhere. That’s why if one looks at the critical commentary,

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the great glaring omission, which is being gradually rectified, is [Théophile] Gautier. Over the span of roughly thirty years, he wrote in volume and in quality more than any other critic of the time; until the large edition (which is under preparation) appears, I don’t think we will have a chance to see how that borderline between fashion and tradition is negotiated. The notion of the avant-garde is a problem for me, because you don’t explain Modernism through a concept of the avant-garde; they are dependent on each other. It becomes a matter of mirror imaging, really. You have to explain Modernism, or indeed the avant-garde, in relation to some notion of what might be called the totality of what is going on. That is why I think the strategy has to be to look at people who were not avant-garde from any general point of view, but innovative and important artists in their time, and to consider what they thought was going on. I have found for example a little-studied artist, Lecomte de Nouÿ; he becomes visible, as do so many of these artists, only when people discuss Orientalism, so he is preconstrained, as it were, in that category. He has a very interesting take on painting: all that concerns him is, first, [Jean-Léon] Gérôme; and second, what Gérôme derives or does not derive from Delaroche, and Delaroche’s dispute

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The reference is to the critical edition of Gautier’s full Salon criticism, currently being prepared by an international team of scholars.

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with Ingres. Those are the issues that his painting comes to grips with in the 1870s, and he later formulates it directly. You might say that his position is a result of being secondrate or ignorant, or a combination of both, but the fact that he does not see Manet as relevant is interesting. PH: Gaëtan Picon talks about this in his book 1863, to argue that 1863 was never really what we think it was, but has become so. Do you think we can’t find or restore the “real” Manet? Because that’s what the first half of that book claims. SB: Yes, he’s right. And anyone who looks as closely as he did at 1863 feels that way. I was studying 1863 in relation to an engraver I have been writing about named Ferdinand Gaillard, who was a young man in that year, but had already won the Grand Prix de Rome; the engraving he produced was also put in the Salon des Refusés. In general, the idea of a Salon des Refusés as being the apotheosis of Manet is quite unrealistic, because so many things were put in, reproductive engravings among them. When the Salon was discussed at the time, for example in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts—by Philippe Burty and others— the painting that was seen as presenting the real challenge,

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See Roger Diederen, From Homer to the Harem: The Art of Jean Lecomte de Nouÿ (New York: Dahesh Museum of Art, 2004), 68ff. Gaëtan Picon, 1863 [i.e. Dix-huit cent soixante-trois]: naissance de la peinture moderne (Geneva: Skira, 1974). See Stephen Bann, “Photography by Other Means? The Engravings of Ferdinand Gaillard,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1: 119–38.

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the painting that fascinated them, was Whistler’s Woman in White. That’s the one that struck people. I looked very carefully through the Gazette des Beaux-Arts: absolutely no references to the Déjeuner sur l’ herbe. You can take that it was too shocking even to mention: but really, as you say—and I agree with Picon here—the point is that 1863 has been made the watershed by a process of retrospective building. PH: That is then what we have. But can we then pretend that 1863 is not the case? We have this huge accretion. . . . SB: But isn’t it rather like, let’s say, the French Revolution? When Tocqueville writes L’Ancien régime et la révolution, he says, Let’s look at this very carefully; we the French nation have so much invested in the French Revolution, and it has had all sorts of consequences, but if you consider it analytically, things that supposedly date from the Revolution were well prepared from Louis Quatorze onward. That is the sort of move that is necessary. It doesn’t in any way destroy the effect of the break or its consequences, but it means you restore a kind of continuity and understand it better for that reason. PH: Maybe you’re telling us quite a lot about your approach by citing Tocqueville in particular. SB: Yes, I think so.

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Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la révolution, http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/ tocqueville_revolution_1.html (in French).

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JE: These critiques of received ideas about change and the avant-garde are correctives to some of the accounts I report on in my book (volume 1 of this series), but I wonder if some are mere adjustments of the principal conceptualizations rather than potentially new conceptualizations. That problem is connected with what I wanted to ask about the large middle portion of your first lecture. This may be an overreading, but as I listened to the account of alternate genealogies of Modernism that could take account of artists such as Delaroche and Ingres, I became aware of an undercurrent that might pull back in the other direction, making the alternate genealogy itself suspect. In other words, I began to wonder if you might be saying, at one and the same time, “Here are interesting new understandings of Modernism in painting” (having to do with such things as the absent center) and also “Here are reasons to doubt those understandings, just as one might doubt certain assertions about 1863.” I felt that undertow for two reasons. First because of the parallel between Ingres and Picasso, which you had worked on previously; its appearance in that lecture could be read as a sign of skepticism, because it would be an opportunity to recognize that what seems “modern” in Ingres is seen through a certain reading of Picasso. Second, because the preamble concerning fashion, and its skeptical lesson, could be read as extending into the text, as an implicit proposal that any

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number of criteria of Modernism might be ones we are predisposed to recognize. In other words, I thought I could hear something of a general critique of the discovery of moments of origin, which would make it impossible to simply propose an alternate genealogy, for instance the one involving Ingres and Delaroche. I know you weren’t proposing the Robert Rosenblum “let’s-bypass-Paris” kind of alternative, but it seemed you also weren’t quite saying that these new strands could have the same strength as ones already in place. SB: In part, the reference to Picasso was an opportunity to discuss something I thought was historically important, namely Schapiro’s noticing of the parallel between Ingres and Picasso, and what he made of it, at a time when such a juxtaposition would have seemed very difficult to make. One could say that for a long time, the historiography of Picasso assumed a rupture, coupure, with Cubism; and yet at the same time people knew very well how much the great exhibition of Ingres at the Salon d’Automne of 1905 made a great impression on Picasso. It’s only recently, with Elizabeth Cowling’s book, that it becomes clear that virtually every move Picasso made can be correlated with some point of recognition of the past tradition.10 It’s a

10

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Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New York: Harper, 1975). Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London: Phaidon, 2002).

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marvelous book, parallel in a way with Michael Fried’s work on Manet; in Cowling’s book, one sees that what was vulgarized in John Berger’s Success and Failure of Picasso—the notion of Picasso going off the boil, and then downhill—is very wide off the mark.11 It becomes apparent that middle-period and even late-period Picasso form an interesting and continuous evolution. Now, in relation to Delaroche and Ingres: people have said again and again that Ingres can be seen as a weird, mixed-up neoclassical artist (which in effect he was!), but now he can be seen as being of compelling interest. This was evident, for example, in the recent portraiture show, where dress historians had a field day—and rightly so, given Ingres’s precise attention to the details of dress. But I don’t think that anyone before Susan Siegfried has tried to see what was at issue in the kinds of conflicts Ingres was negotiating.12 I think the Ingres-Delacroix thing is a kind of useful fiction built up retrospectively; it appears so especially when one sees how Delacroix was written about at the time. Obviously Delacroix’s reputation is secure, and there is no reason or possibility for dislodging that; but the idea that such an opposition was the only issue exercising these artists in the 1830s and 1840s is just a 11 12

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John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso (Magnolia, MA: Peter Smith, 1992). Susan Siegfried, “Ingres Reading: The Undoing of Narrative,” in Fingering Ingres, edited by Susan Siegfried and Adrian Rifkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 4–30.

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fantasy. It is precisely at that point that such a division fails to occur. The entire idea of the juste milieu, or that alternatively you’re either for color or line, seems again a gross oversimplification that later entrenches itself. It is, however, always a question of competing strategies for organizing and reorganizing space, which go back to the partly unstated but firmly inculcated compositional principles that derive from the original formulations of [Leon Battista] Alberti and the French Academy. . . . JE: Well, I’m relieved to hear that, and I see I was overreading. For me, the Schapiro example also resonates with Michael Camille’s proposal that Schapiro was partly projecting a modernist Romanesque (parallel, Camille says, to his “postmodern gothic”), and so I thought you were leaving open the door for a critique of all theories of origins.13 (And ultimately, but not here, to a critique along the lines of Mieke Bal’s account of Caravaggio, or [Jacques] Derrida’s in The Post Card.)14 I would think—I would hope!—that most of the accounts in my contribution, Master Narratives, are open to the charge of being too simple and clear. But I thought I could hear in your lecture a different kind of critique, in which all accounts of origins are potentially partly projections, governed and directed by notions born of Modernism. 13

14

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Michael Camille, “How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art’: Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro,” Oxford Art Journal (special issue on Meyer Schapiro) 17, no. 1 (1994): 65–75. “Paradoxical histories” are discussed in my Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002), 33–35.

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SB: The title, Ways Around Modernism, is meant to have two meanings: that you go in a circle, or that you find your way around. In this case, it’s more in the sense of finding one’s way around, the way you find your way through a town, to the major monuments or the shopping center . . . and I think that it’s part of the tremendous richness of the nineteenth century that many of those tracks, even ones to the center, have been left untrodden. Margaret MacNamidhe: I think in a certain way you are always suspicious of “master narratives,” and rightly so. I am thinking of the latest book, Parallel Lines, with its initial argument against Benjamin—the moving image sweeping all before it, and so forth.15 I thought it was interesting, in that respect, how Benjamin is discussed along with Eric Auerbach’s theory of mimesis. So I recognize that suspicion. I remember when the Delaroche book wasn’t quite written yet, you were talking about the 1820s as a possible cut or coupure, and about Jonathan Crary’s ideas about a kind of phenomenological upheaval in notions of embodiment and modes of vision. Then, reading your more recent article on genre, I noticed that you talk about how new wine is put into old bottles of genre, and you pursue a total concentration on history painting and its tradition.16 It is 15

16

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Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth entury France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). C Stephen Bann, “Questions of Genre in Early Nineteenth-Century French Painting,” New Literary History 34, no. 3: 501–11.

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interesting to see that move in your thought: you didn’t follow up on Crary’s grand theories. You went for a much more potentially powerful way to get at the 1820s than Crary’s theories—the “change in the beholder” sort of formulation—would allow. SB: That’s a big question; in terms of Crary, his work was influential in general terms, and for my thinking at that stage. Not because I saw it as deflecting attention from hegemonic modes of attention or high art, but because it led me to broaden the field of investigation into a field that he does not consider: the whole realm of printmaking, reproductions, and the illustrated press. In a way I parted company with him because the later work moved far on into the century—he started to look at [Georges] Seurat and other people at the end of the century. Whereas it seemed to me that what he needed to do was move transversally, and to look in different areas of the early nineteenth century, because that was the period that particularly needed that kind of investigation. JE: As an observer of the field of nineteenth-century studies, I am continuously surprised by the radical revaluations that have taken place—the enormous differences between the values originally placed on both major and minor figures, and the values they are accorded today. It is surprising in relation, for example, to the list of fifteenth-century painters Michael Baxandall published, which reads almost like

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a list that might have been drawn up in the mid-twentieth century.17 The comparison I make in volume 1, between the reception of Titian and Manet, is meant as a rough guide to that difference. When I hear of perfectly plausible alternate genealogies in nineteenth-century painting, I wonder how much the existing narratives might be stretched, elided, combined, or multiplied. Would it actually be possible to almost, but not quite, make the Bob Rosenblum experiment, and write a history that has a significantly different set of trajectories and crucial moments? (He wants to “avoid Paris,” something we won’t be doing here!) In our case, would you end up in a place where people might acknowledge and follow a number of different streams? Would the interest in Manet, since that’s where we started, begin to appear as a particular concern of the later twentieth century? How isolated could the stories of Manet become? SB: This relates to your own work, not only in Master Narratives, but also on center and periphery.18 (What does it take to look at a Hungarian Symbolist, for example?) I can see that comparison being made, but I would see this as a different order of problem. Fundamentally, it is not a matter 17

18

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Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), [ ]. For example, the review of Steven Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, in The Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (2000): 781–85; with response in The Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 539.

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of eliding Paris. In the essay on genre, I use the metaphor of a dark cloud to characterize prevalent assumptions: the Academy is viewed as a kind of black cloud, looming over the artistic scene.19 Finally it is blown away, with Impressionism, Cubism, and so on. Obviously, the Academy in France is the most regulated of all in terms of genres, privileges of académiciens, schools, and so on. But that effectively opens up the possibility of transgression, and it does so in precise ways. What is a morceau? What is a tableau? and so on. Therefore, the French Academy gives meaning to revolt. That is why you can’t possibly elide Manet, because he managed to walk the very narrow path between transgression and acceptance in such a systematic and planned way. It is, however, equally wrong, in a sense, to ignore people who didn’t do so, or who transgressed in other comparably important ways. JE: Again, as an observer of scholarship on the nineteenth century, and on the analogy of my own interest in national schools of twentieth-century painting, I’d say that in some cases the difficulty is perceiving the transgressions as transgressions, in valuing them as transgressive. Thinking of Gérôme, for example: there are very persuasive and interesting things to be said about his work, but the work might not always be perceptible as transgressive. 19

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Bann, “Questions of Genre,” 502.

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Such observations would be parts of other conversations, using other criteria: and those conversations might be critically detached from some more central conversations. Transgression cannot become homeopathic. Nor can a story that depends on transgressions, as you say, always recognize itself or its purpose in very different contexts. SB: Well, the question is what precedes the transgressive work. I see Marc Gotlieb’s work as being especially innovative in that regard; his work on Henri Regnault, I think, is absolutely extraordinary. But in what you might call the mainstream interpretation of nineteenth-century painting, people throw up their hands at Gérôme: John House, looking at Gérôme, says it must be parody! There has to be another way of explaining the work: it is artful; you cannot say it is unplanned, or unintelligent, or unpopular. (Quite the opposite: it becomes far more widely diffused than anything Manet was doing at the time.) It is clear that one of the things Gérôme does again and again is use the device of the prostrate corpse and the departing crowd, as for example in a whole series of works on Caesar. In the Delaroche book, I use the example of the Calvary, in which only the shadows of the crosses are seen— JE: Yes, it’s an amazing painting— SB: Now, where does that painting go, as it were? Is it simply a dead end? In early critiques of photography like that of Sadakichi Hartmann, that’s the kind of painting that is of

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interest. He is not interested in Manet; he’s interested in paintings like the Calvary and The Death of Marshal Ney, because he is attentive to their compositional strategy;20 and the same applies to the pioneers of early cinema— JE: Well, so here I have to interject my own wild genealogy. For me, the afterlife of innovations like Gérôme’s lies partly in cinema, and partly in what is now called fantasy art, in artists no one in academia wants to look at—people like Frank Frazetta or Tim and Greg Hildebrandt.21 They painted tremendously skillful narrative scenes, in oil, of barbarians and science-fiction creatures, using the full technical repertoire of the French academy, including the hierarchy of genres, the compositional protocols, and the mastery of physiognomy and anatomy. This unwanted inheritance comes, also, from the painters of the 1880s who were engaged with prehistory, for instance Fernand Cormon—the person who painted the enormous Caïn in the Musée d’Orsay. (Like Gérôme, Cormon is a painter Marc Gotlieb pointed me toward.) Now there is an occluded genealogy; but one reason for its absence from serious scholarship is that at some point, these people forgot, or stopped caring, about more and more, until they reached a point where from an art 20

21

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See Sadakichi Hartmann, “On Composition” (1901), in The Valiant Knights of Daguerre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 71–78. Betty Ballantine, ed., Frank Frazetta (New York: Pan Books, 1978); and Ian Summers, ed., The Art of the Brothers Hildebrandt (New York: Ballantine, 1979).

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historical point of view they seemed not to care about Modernism at all. It’s not even that they were reacting against it, or even actively avoiding it. After a point, they thought so little about it that they themselves have disappeared from the art historical record. That is the problem I want to point to by asking about the limits of alternate genealogies. And when was that point, when they became irrelevant? Right around the 1880s, with Cormon and the first dinosaur painters? The ones Tom Mitchell has studied?22 SB: Well, for me the point would be what is seen to be the undue commercialization of the work of people like Gérôme. Delaroche was a pioneer here, but his student Gérôme very much follows him up: both ensured that their work would have the maximum possible dissemination: it traveled to America, for example to the Walters collection in Baltimore, formed from the 1860s largely of this kind of art. By comparison, the number of Americans who would have seen a Manet was very small; they were not reproduced or sold to that extent at the time. That accounts for such films as Ben-Hur, where the amphitheater is constructed in clear analogy with the ones in Gérôme. PH: Much as I like that passage, it doesn’t actually get rid of the line Manet–surrealist film–Renoir–Godard. Even if 22

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For example, Charles R. Knight; see Tom Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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we construct people deemed to belong to different lineages, aren’t there still different questions being asked by the people in each? Perhaps the differences are in the ways they use their sources. . . . SB: Yes, that’s clearly so. The reason for, shall we say, putting the previous narratives of Modernism into suspension, is that in the end we don’t do Manet a service through them. What I think is so fascinating about Manet is that whatever you think of this wider panorama, Manet made it possible for us to ignore it. There is an extraordinary narrative attached to Manet, which never gets told. People like Tom Crow have produced very plausible and instructive notions about the psychological involvement, notions of patriarchy, and so forth that are involved in the Davidian school, but then it kind of stops. Nobody has written what might be called a genuine biography of Manet, and they haven’t because he designed his life and career in such a way as to make that impossible. Manet therefore turns out to be more interesting, not less, on account of this approach. JE: I would like to turn to the two models you’ve chosen for the lectures. For the nineteenth century, there’s a center that defines transgression and also a number of alternate coexisting lineages. The second lecture proposes a wholly different model. An initial question might then be, Is that a temporally constrained difference? Would there be ricorsi

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to be found in the nineteenth century, and if not, what structures of history made it possible to take the twentieth century as the occasion that permits ricorsi, and not the nineteenth? SB: The person closest to the position I am working toward is Hubert Damisch. He is important because he has always had two strong focuses of attention: his personal acquaintance with, and knowledge of, artists like Jean Dubuffet; and his interest in the founding moment of Brunelleschi, the tavola, and the various versions of what he takes to be works and positions related to the primal moment of the showing of the tavola on the steps of the Duomo in Florence. In the first lecture, everything I said is consistent with the idea that, in terms of your Master Narratives, the only structure that can really be sustained in the end is the one where the long stop is the Renaissance. Hubert manages very clearly to set out why he is opposed to Rosalind Krauss’s idea of the grid, even though it might seem similar to his idea of the chessboard; and the progression from there to Dubuffet is a seamless one.23 Within that pattern, what seems important is to understand that already, when the standards of perspective and the models of Renaissance art are being developed, there is what could be called a counterdiscourse, and that is 23

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“Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann: A Conversation,” revised and corrected by Hubert Damisch, Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 2 (2005): 172.

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the discourse of curiosity. The two are not, as it were, in conflict: in fact decisively not, because perspective is treated by people in northern Europe, as indeed by people in Japan, as being a kind of trick; and it is only with the French Academy that it becomes the model for the high art of painting. So what seemed interesting to me to do was to follow through a kind of investment in the object which was completely different from the mathematical planning of perspectival schemes. Hubert once mentioned to me, in a conversation we had that appears in the Oxford Art Journal,24 that he was asked by the Centre Pompidou to do an exhibition on abstraction. He said he would, and of course it would start with the Renaissance! Sorry, they said: it has to start in the twentieth century—and the exhibition was abandoned. I would agree with his judgment: anything of that kind that begins in 1900 is foredoomed to turn and bite its own tail. We now have history painting coming back in the form of light boxes, as Michael Fried argues; but we also have people like Hubert Duprat putting caddis flies to work in creating their shells. The two things have equally deep roots.

24

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Ibid.

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JE: From my point of view, of course, Renaissance perspective would be much more entangled with what you call curiosity, from the very beginning. It wouldn’t be necessary to go north of the Alps to see curiosity enmeshed in all its operations.25 So I would have a different take on that, but it would not imply an alternate genealogy. There are questions to be asked about Damisch’s sense of perspective, but let me leave that. In respect to our conversation: are we talking then about what Panofsky called the “expanded Renaissance”? Would it be possible to conceive of a ricorso that began, say, in 1900, repeating something from 1800? Or is it only possible to conceive a ricorso in this sense as beginning in the Renaissance, and looping forward to Modernism or Postmodernism—for the structural reason that the Renaissance is then conceived as the place where concepts that make ricorsi possible were defined? For example, the Gothic revival, which could then be conceived as a ricorso that spans an equivalent number of centuries? SB: Yes: the important thing is not so much the Brunelleschi-tavola moment on its own, but the fact that it was codified in the practice of the French Academy, and to a certain extent in other academies. It becomes a model that 25

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James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); I also think in this context of Lorraine Daston’s work, for example “Curiosity in Early Modern Science,” Word and Image 11, no. 4 (October–December 1995): 391–404.

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is integral into the status of the artist. Paul Duro’s essay on the French Academy in the collection Rhetoric of the Frame shows not only how the frame defies architecture, but also how the painting becomes established thereby as the primary art, the one that involves genius and other intellectual properties.26 There are two ways in which the Renaissance is itself a ricorso. Damisch rightly talks about the Roman ius fetiale, how they would map out a territory in geometrical form before they conquered it. It’s the concept of repetitio rerum, and it relates to Brunelleschi’s subsequent setting up of pictorial space. There is also a ricorso involved in taking the kinds of objects that had been venerated in the Middle Ages and making them into objects of curiosity; for me, that is specifically a matter of the generalization of the notion of the collector, from the monarch or prince to the cultivated middle-class scholar. It is very much dependent on the story of the rise of the bourgeoisie from the seventeenth century onwards. JE: There really is a Lecture Zero before your Lecture One! It would be about the Renaissance, and it might begin with a discussion of Hans Belting— SB: Yes! 26

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Paul Duro, “Containment and Transgression in Seventeenth-Century Ceiling Painting,” in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, edited by Paul Duro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 44–62.

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JE: Let’s turn to the concept of curiosity. Sabine and I were talking yesterday, after your lecture, about something that may be connected to this question of the German or Dada axis in relation to your thesis. I was noting what I call the aesthetization of objects in the current revival of the Wunderkammer. Mark Dion’s work is always very neat; Rosamund Purcell neatens the vials and vitrines she photographs by zooming in and by using the shallow focus that is also found in fashion and food photography. (Martha Stewart also likes that kind of shallow focus.) Even though Purcell has Stephen Jay Gould’s imprimatur, her work is decidedly not seventeenth century in its aesthetic.27 To judge by your slide, the artist who takes cloud samples also produces gorgeous boxes, with velvet lining, brass latches, and leather straps. On the other hand, in the original curiosity cabinets, the ones that survive unnoticed as it were, there is no aesthetization of that sort. I am not thinking of those preserved as curiosity cabinets, but those that are not yet conserved as such, including the wax models of skin diseases in the Musée de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, or the Musée de l’École Vétérinaire de Maison Alfort.28 When there is dust in contemporary art, it is studied dust, carefully arranged. Or 27

28

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Rosamund Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). Discussed in James Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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the lighting is kept just a little too low, as in the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The original Wunderkammern were not anti-aesthetic— that would be an anachronistic notion—but they were nonaesthetic in the specific sense that they were not aestheticized. Sabine Kriebel: I’d like to find out what you are having curiosity do when it comes to, say, 1900–1930, or the period we might call modernist. It occurs to me that most of these examples are framed by discussions of museum displays, museum practices, and the notion of provoking curiosity. One of my problems with these narratives is that they are so insistently Francophilic, and overlook or bypass significant avant-gardist contributions in Germany, the Soviet Union, and Italy. So let me move us eastwards and propose an alternate model. Let me propose four different but related examples involving Dada and the provocation of curiosity. First, in Berlin, in 1920, at the First International Dada Fair. This was installed in an art gallery, which is important in our context, and we have a juxtaposition of a number of visually and politically provocative Dada collages and paintings with a sculpture, hanging from the ceiling, made of a stuffed officer’s uniform and a plaster pig’s head appended to his face. It was meant to shock and provoke—we might, in the context of this discussion, call

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it a kind of curiosity cabinet with a political point. The show operated as a satire of the Weimar Republic, and a critique of World War I. They were fined for slandering the German military. Second, there is Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, and the aesthetics of detritus. It too was a curiosity, in the sense that it was an assemblage of objects collected or found in the gutter and the street, and manufactured into a kind of cathedral, complete with grottoes. It wasn’t an official site, like the gallery in Berlin, but his home. People visited it. It was bizarre, fantastic, curious, and a critical commentary on the conditions of society in interwar Germany. The third and fourth examples are in Cologne; Max Ernst spearheaded two exhibitions there. The first was called Section D, and was meant to shock the bourgeoisie; it included a range of objects from a fraternity pipe hung over the door to Dada collages to children’s illustrations. Again, then, a curious assemblage of objects that were intended to critique and provoke, given the specific historical necessities of the moment after World War I. And fourthly, the final Dada show in Cologne, in a pub, past the men’s urinals, where a girl in communion dress recited lewd poetry. The viewers were provoked by various art objects and assemblages, meant to incite curiosity but also distress. In these examples, the combination you are positing of science and aesthetics isn’t imperative, because the meshing

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[of] aesthetics and capitalism, or aesthetics and politics, is more politically crucial at this historical juncture. This is also different from your account in that yours involves a leap from the nineteenth century to the 1960s. I am wondering what you are having curiosity do in relation to the debates on Modernism and Postmodernism. SB: Well, that’s a very interesting question. I’ll try to answer it provisionally. I started in the 1960s because the lecture series as a whole has to do not only with Modernism but also with Postmodernism, so one is having to search for a point at which that junction, which is generally held to have taken place in the 1960s, can be addressed. The other reason why I referred to various surrealist objects was because I was trying to differentiate between the role that curiosity played then, and the role it plays now. I would formulate it in this way: certainly in Kurt Schwitters’s collages or Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, there is a sense in which the action implies a return of the repressed, and the object coming back in a new and transgressive form. I can only outline this in a schematic way, but both are indicative of a sense of curiosity with regard to what has been rejected by disciplinary norms (those of the archaeologist and the historian, and so forth). Both illustrate the displacement of expected functions into an area where the object seems both gratuitous and compellingly unusual.

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The clearest example of how this phase differs from the postmodern examples lies in the case of the Musée Spitzner and Paul Delvaux’s painting of the same title. There is a divorce between what Delvaux does to the specimen, and the specimen itself. He brings the specimen within the norms of the picture. By contrast, in Hubert Duprat and in Gerhard Lang, instead of trying to express the strangeness of the object in terms of a pictorial norm, the object is annexed to a form of—let’s say—rule-governed activity, which borrows from the norms of natural science. This seems significant because in the classic avant-garde, despite its interest and the social role it had at the time, this distinction is blurred. In Dalí’s career, one sees this clearly: he worked increasingly toward pictorial conventions that were indistinguishable from academic norms, in order to create shock value in relation to those norms. I am not implying a value judgement here, but rather I’m noting that more recently those strategies have come apart. So it is as if the recent work involves another kind of ricorso, because in the seventeenth century there was a close identity between the notion of exploring the world and the activity of collecting objects. The contemporary artists are both internalizing the processes of scientists and also inventing new modes of display and exhibition of objects. SK: It’s complex, because Kurt Schwitters was often different from many of the avant-garde in Germany. He took on

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a bourgeois persona and then did these strange explorations of material form. It was less about scientific exploration than about capitalism and its dissolution. Max Ernst might have worked closer to established aesthetic norms, especially when he went to Paris and became more invested in the return of the repressed, though it is certainly not absent in his Cologne Dada works. I think there is a story to be told here, in the Dada moment, about curiosity, and it does not link to the anti-aesthetic (that’s the easy, Hans Richter route); it has to do with politics and particular social conditions. SB: When I think of Schwitters, I think of the person I knew who knew him well: Stefan Themerson, the Polish artist who created the Gaberbocchus Press, after having been a leading filmmaker in Poland in the interwar period. He produced a book called Kurt Schwitters in England, which was one of my first big investments when I was a student in Cambridge in the early 1960s.29 It was a wonderful book; it included Schwitters’s grinning cat collage. Stefan used to talk about how he had attended a lecture with Schwitters, just after the war. Schwitters had got hold of a piece of wire, and was bending it; finally, he made his object and gave it to Stefan. I remember also that there was a tour he did in Holland, where he made the audience so apprehensive 29

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Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters in England (London: Gaberbocchus, 1958).

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with announcements of the Dada poet’s impending performance that when he took the stage and simply coughed, some women in the audience fainted and had to be carried out. He was always responsive to every phase of the social and political circumstances in which he lived, and so to situations which were terrifically diverse. So I am not in any way challenging or disagreeing with your idea, Sabine, that Schwitters is worthy of full attention, but at the same time it is important to understand what is going on in the contemporary situation, because it is so different. Regarding the point you make, James, about aesthetization: I would see aesthetization more in terms of the danger of succumbing to academic norms of picture making where those are no longer appropriate. JE: The slip between aesthetic and aestheticizing is parallel in some respects to another slip that I would see between the original sixteenth-century maniera and the contemporary artists’ mannerisms. Much of the contemporary revival of curiosity is terribly mannered: there’s always the step too far, the object too many, the velvet lining, the perfectly poised magnifying glass . . . one could certainly be mannered in the court of Rudolph II, but the contemporary work is intentionally mannered, and I find that to be a different orientation. What I am getting at with these near-misses between aesthetics (or proto-aesthetics) and aestheticizing, or between

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maniera and mannerism, is the shape of the ricorsi. Obviously no return is a perfect one, unless it’s Nietzsche’s! But how much of a transmutation would you want to allow, and still find the ricorso to be a useful concept? The terms of the synonymies we’re proposing are very open, I think. SB: Partly I am trying to suggest that the ricorso carries most weight when it foregrounds the relation between the process and the work: not making the object into an exhibit (as, I must say, in much of Mark Dion’s work) but visibly part of a process, both in terms of the art itself and of the artist’s working. Even though I only mentioned Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work in passing, I think that the art of the garden becomes especially important in this context. A garden is in a general sense an exhibition space, but also a place where objects like sundials are displaced from the ordinary locus of exhibition. Their context changes with the time of day and the seasons; it can be integrated within the symbolic world of the artwork itself. Hubert Duprat has done work in the Réserve géologique de Haute-Provence, where the Musée Gassendi is located. Duprat’s project there is to create something that is mentioned in the notebooks of Bernard Palissy, but which was for obvious reasons not carried out: he intends to vitrify a cave. Palissy had this marvellous idea of covering the cave with— JE: —with amphibians, like Palissy’s work?

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SB: Well, essentially to create a furnace that will actually cover the entire cave with a glass or porcelain covering. I like Duprat’s work because he constantly sets himself new tasks that are virtually impossible. Some of his latest works use small pebbles called hematites, which he imports in vast quantities from Brazil. He carefully installs them in branching structures, in such a way that we can only just see them gleaming from within the interior tube-like space. It’s a search for things that are rare, and that also look rare. . . . JE: I have more items on a list of things that would make the ricorsi imperfect or transformative. Another one that occurs to me has to do with the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I am not a fan of that museum partly because it has a mixture of wonder and a desire for wonder that leads Wilson to concoct things and then lie about their veracity. That’s a strong word, but that’s what happens. I am also not saying that as a value judgment about the museum as a work of art; but the necessity of fabricating and dissimulating is a marker of a difference between the Museum of Jurassic Technology and at least the plurality of Wunderkammern where the wonder was genuine (even if they were duped by unscrupulous merchants selling unicorn horns). That process in turn opens the door to a kind of historicizing impulse. The book Ren Wechsler wrote about the museum is a journalist’s effort to figure out what’s true

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and what’s false. He discovers a lot of Wilson’s fabrications, and misses others, and finally gives up on some.30 What bothers me in that is the very idea of responding to the exhibits by trying to give them historical contexts and definitively solve them. I wonder if that desire to solve might not be inappropriate from the point of view of a seventeenth-century Wunderkammer, and I wonder if it might not be another sign of the imperfect ricorso. SB: Perhaps the essence of these procedures of ricorso, in particular with regard to pseudoscience, is in their placing. You may be right to stigmatize such a very knowing use (or abuse) of them. I focus particularly on what are perhaps privileged examples of placing, like those of the Château d’Oiron and the Musée Gassendi. Here one has the feeling that the works cannot be transplanted, and they coincide effectively with the particular itineraries that people (and artists) take. JE: Let me turn to another feature of the theme of curiosity. Sabine, you and I were also talking yesterday about examples of curiosity that might be said to have survived through Modernism, instead of swerving around it. I mentioned Beuys, with his jars of dead bees or dried moths. SK: He also displays those objects in vitrines.

30

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Ren Wechsler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (New York: Pantheon, 1995).

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JE: I was wondering, then, if there might be other examples of curiosity extending through Modernism. SB: I don’t think it’s as extreme as that, because Beuys, by any standards, is liminal. He stands very much outside of Modernism, not least because of his choice of sacrificial role, which is an extraordinarily strong Christian trope— JE: That’s true— SB: Jannis Kounellis took part in a roundtable with Beuys, which I think is one of the great documents of postwar art. It is precisely determined by the different positions of the participants: in Beuys’s case, the notions of the periphery, the nomadic, and so on; and in Kounellis’s, the idea of the center, or the central point. (And someone who lives in Rome is to some extent bound by that strategy!) The reason why Kounellis is more forward-looking than Beuys at that particular stage in his career is because, in formulating this notion of accumulation and working in accordance with it, he does what Beuys does not really do—he provides what seems to be a very perceptive critique of American art—as opposed to the contemporary art of “Old Europe.” Although Beuys does that to a certain degree, he does not do it in a way that is so closely competitive with the logic of Minimalism.31 31

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See Stephen Bann, Jannis Kounellis (London: Reaktion, 2003), 121–79. The discussion between Kounellis, Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and Enzo Cucchi (discussed here passim) was partly published in English in Flash Art 128 (May–June 1986): 36–39.

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PH: But surely there are more curiosities lurking in Modernism, with Duchamp, J. K. Huysmans, and Raymond Roussel. . . . I also wonder if we’re relating to curiosity differently now than we did under the aegis of Modernism. I wanted to ask about experiment and Modernism: is experiment an overly rationalist way of thinking, one particular to Modernism? Or is it something that can become part of curiosity? SB: In terms of Modernism, curiosity and experiment are kept apart by the binary logic of Modernism, which is, on the one hand, Dada and Surrealism, and on the other, Constructivism. It’s people like Moholy-Nagy who say, “I’m above all an Experimentalist, close to the sciences, using new materials,” and so on. This conflict is played out in the dissensions between Surrealists and Constructivists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. JE: Not to mention the internal culture of art history, where it is played out as methodological debates! SB: Yes, and what seems to be the difference, now, is that effectively, and in a curious way, the two things have become fused. There are still artists who could be seen as die-hard Constructivists, or die-hard Surrealists, but that gap has by and large been closed. PH: I’m interested in science in England in the seventeenth century, so let me bring in, as an “arbitrary” example,

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Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. It sold out, and was seen as an artwork—that’s a very different way of combining, or getting out of, different discourses than, for instance, Gerhard Lang’s project. Could that be said to have provoked the same kind of curious reaction we have? SB: Obviously, Hooke and Lang are different in many ways. Yet in both cases, there is a distinctive affiliation, in Hooke’s case with the early days preceding the Scientific Revolution, and in Lang’s case with that fascinating period at the opening of the nineteenth century, when so many things had not quite been discovered, and people believed as much in magnetism as they did in the future of electricity. Metallurgy, electricity—virtually all such new areas of scientific inquiry had a period in which they were just as much the province of amateurs as of professionals. That link is the one that is important, just as it is in the case of Duprat’s identification with the remarkable Miss Smee, carrying out her proto-Darwinian exercise with the tricoptères [Trichoptera] in the gardens of her father’s house in Surrey. JE: I would be happy to think there may be all sorts of transformative possibilities of the ricorso. I’m also glad we’ve reached this point in our conversation without mentioning Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the high and low methods,

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which supposedly go back to prehistory.32 That entire essay has to my mind been tremendously overused, especially given that it is such a problematic thesis. What I would like to do is ask, “Why did it become possible for Ginzburg to write that essay at that particular moment?” It’s a moment we are very close to here, a moment in which it seems possible to look back in history and see larger-scale structures such as ricorsi. One would have to be at the end of a postmodern revival of curiosity in order to start to see the phenomenon, to think of it as we are now. SB: Yes, I think that’s a very good point; I rarely attack a fellow scholar in a direct way, but Carlo Ginzburg seems to me still to have these kinds of binary structures embedded in his analyses. For example, he has been working on the history of the translation of [Giorgio] Vasari into French in 1839–1842, by Philippe-Auguste Jeanron.33 We happened to be at a conference together, at which we were also talking about the Delaroche Hémicycle in the École des BeauxArts. He later wrote of the Hémicycle, rather firmly, that that is academic, while Jeanron is new, revolutionary.34 It 32

33 34

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Carlo Ginzburg, “The High and the Low,” in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989). Giorgio Vasari, Vies des peintres, sculpteurs et architectes . . . (Paris, 1839–1942). See Carlo Ginzburg, “Battling over Vasari: A Tale of Three Countries,” in Michael F. Zimmermann, The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 48. Stephen Bann takes up this issue in more detail in “Paul Delaroche à l’hémicycle des Beaux-Arts. L’histoire de l’art et l’autorité de la peinture,” Revue de l’art 146 (2004): 21–34.

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seems to me this is a misconception, arising from the need to sort things out into binary categories. It doesn’t correspond at all to historical processes. JE: One would have to be at a cusp in historical understanding to have the kind of conversation we are having. Twenty years ago, it would not have been possible to think in these terms, because the pieces of the tradition you are talking about were just getting underway. There would have been the odd book, of course—for instance Jurgis Baltrusaitis’s work,35 and the “rediscovery” of mannerism—but there wouldn’t have been much. Sabine and I were also talking about the possibility that there may be other ricorsi that do not have to do with curiosity: other end runs around Modernism. The one that immediately came to mind is Robert Mapplethorpe, who might stand for an entire practice of late-twentieth-century photography. His sources are cabinet photographs of the 1880 and 1890s, and occasional references further back— for instance, to Hippolyte Flandrin’s Young Man by the Sea in the Louvre. Mapplethorpe looks at sources like those, and then pretends that the whole project of Modernism never existed. Photography allied to his is a much smaller phenomenon than the revival of curiosity, but it makes me wonder if there might not be yet other examples. 35

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Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Aberrations, quatre essais sur la légende des formes (Paris: Olivier Perrin, 1957).

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Also, and this is a separable question, I wonder if all ricorsi have to go as far beyond Modernism to find their points of origin as the revival of curiosity does. Some ricorsi, like Mapplethorpe’s, might be willful blindnesses to specific moments in Modernism; they would not need to get back as far as the seventeenth century. Postmodernism might be the moment that allows such moves to make sense. SB: I don’t disagree with what you say, but with the way in which you presented it. Clearly, there are kinds of ricorso, and Mapplethorpe may be a good example, that might be said to be limited in their range or scope. Pretending Modernism didn’t exist, as you put it, is not a very productive strategy, at least from the point of view of the problems set by this series of lectures. Therefore that kind of evidence would not particularly advance the argument. I can’t really see any other example of a strategy of ricorso that would have the same kind of breadth of reference as curiosity, or the same strategic relationship to the growth of pictorial theory in connection with the development of experimental methods. MM: The way your logic there is going is that the ricorsi become a series of rivulets running through Modernism, so you can pluck out individual ricorsi; that might be sapping the energy of the more central question of curiosity.

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SB: Yesterday I visited the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, and saw the plaster cast collection.36 When I see things like that, I often ask myself why I find them so moving. Part of it is the sense that a plaster cast seems like just the kind of removal from an original that parallels one’s own relationships with historical materials. JE: That’s what Michael Camille said; that’s why he preferred the Musée des Monuments Français to all other museums.37 SB: For another example, Malcolm Baker has written about the plaster casts in the Victoria and Albert, and how they were all going to be trashed for lack of interest. As so often in England, things began to drag on, until at last opinion shifted and the casts were retained. (It’s like the case of Les Halles: the French pulled down Les Halles; the English were going to pull down Covent Garden, but by the time they got round to it no one wanted them to.) The cast court in the Victoria and Albert is now one of the most popular parts of the museum. That shift has taken place over a quite short period of time. Lots of things were involved in it—a reconnection to classical culture, for one thing, and perhaps also acquaintance with the ways in which Arte Povera has mobilized the plaster casts as a complex historicizing statement. 36

37

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The collection was made under the supervision of Antonio Canova, as insurance against the plunder of the papal collections anticipated by Pope Pius VII (editor’s note). Michael Camille, “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters: Rethinking the Canon,” The Art Bulletin 78 (June 1996): 198–201.

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That phenomenon would have to be taken into account to complete the historical picture, if one were to look for modes of ricorso that were distinct from the theme of curiosity. SK: I wonder, in this context, about photography. As Susan Sontag said, photographs become your memory—they become a replacement memory, anaesthetizing and replacing experience. This has repercussions for the methodology of the ricorso, because they are a method of entering into a past: what about the role of photography in the search for ricorsi, when you seem to have a skeptical relation to photography? SB: It’s a very conflictual relation. Two things seem to me the case regarding photography in Kounellis. I decided to write on him partly because I had seen his work for a period of thirty years or slightly more, and that degree of lived experience seemed relevant. But I also chose to write because I saw the awful process that artists get into these days, in which sumptuous catalogs are produced—with illustrations bled, in sepia, and so on—but there is no attempt to relate these photographs to their moment of production. In many cases, that’s unavoidable. But in the case of Kounellis, he had this photographer whom he had known since the age of nineteen, and who had taken photographs all the way through Kounellis’s career. One could create a record that would be anchored in the points of origin; what I was trying to do was retrieve the concept of

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a photographic record, and anchor it back in specific occasions. The strategy of the book was quite carefully planned in that sense, because we began with color reproductions of a recent exhibition, but consisting of works recreated for the occasion; then the book plunged back into photographs derived from the dates at which the objects originally appeared. Photography is not in the state it was when Sontag and Barthes were writing: we can’t issue it with a blank check, and treat it as an unproblematic acquisition to the human mind and memory. It has to be saved from itself to continue to be used as such. SK: What is the relation, then, between photography and curiosity? Given what you’ve said, I am surprised it was not problematized when you were talking about Wunder; I wonder why photographs wouldn’t dampen your audience’s reactions in that regard. SB: That’s a very interesting question. Mark Haworth-Booth became interested in the enormous collection of photographs in the Victoria and Albert; he found there was no curator of photography, and that most of the photographs had arrived as curiosities. Partly because of Mark’s work, the Victoria and Albert became one of the major museums of photography. I do not find that the various photographs that I have had taken, for example of the Bargrave cabinet, diminish

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the effect of the objects. In a certain respect, the opposite is true: the Frenchman’s finger, for example, is nearly impossible to exhibit, but if it is photographed—for example, as a potential image for the Internet—the effect might be an appropriate one, because it facilitates juxtapositions that would not be possible with the actual physical object. JE: One last kind of ricorso occurs to me, because I have been thinking about the development of this series of books, and that is the ricorso of skill. I remember Richard Shiff’s interest in skill, and the fact that the value of representation skills, and skill in a general sense, have been widely expunged from Modernism, as Tim Clark and others have said.38 With Richard’s book, it might be possible to speak about a ricorso of skill into Modernism or Postmodernism, and I tried to do the same in a more populist sense in my own book. This ricorso would be occupied partly by unsavory people like Odd Nerdrum, but also in slightly more central contexts such as the IRWIN group [Vitaly] Komar and [Alex] Melamid; and it could be exemplified by the place of naturalistic skill in [René] Magritte and Duchamp (as I tried to do), or the laying down of skill in [Willem] De Kooning (as Richard does). I don’t have anything to add to this observation: I just want to keep the theme of skill 38

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Richard Shiff, Doubt (New York: Routledge, 2007), vol. 3 in this series.

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alive; as I said to Richard in the discussion following his lectures, I think it might be the hardest theme to bring through this series. SB: It’s interesting you should mention that, because in a way curiosity implicitly displaces the idea of skill: the world is created by the great Artisan, and we have no part in its fabrication. To that extent, it is a matter of finding things; it’s the objet trouvé, not the made object. Also Duprat tries to find skills that don’t exist. He tries to work flint, which is virtually impossible to carve. JE: That reminds me of Tom Friedman’s pointless virtuosity. SB: But it is not pointless, because when you see such an object, you say, That’s amazing! It’s just that the point isn’t harnessed to any functional project. PH: I agree that the two stories, skill and curiosity, don’t have to go together. But that’s because I’m not really sure that skill is around now. I think curiosity displaces skill. It occurs to me that conceptual art requires the audience produce some level of skill, something different from what is required of an audience that is, say, reading symbols. Might conceptual art then bring a return of skill and curiosity to Modernism? Is an audience then regarding a lot of Modernism as a curiosity anyway? People rambling around the Tate tend to treat Modernism anecdotally, as a kind of curiosity, even though it wasn’t intended as such.

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JE: To conclude, then, on large themes. Over the past few days, we have been talking about various synonyms for curiosity, including Wunder and wonder (although in English the word sounds a bit too directly religious). A synonym that might be drawn from Surrealism, and from the circle of writing around October, is the irrational. It might find its locus in Rosalind Krauss’s Optical Unconscious, where she tries to ground it in Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of the matrix.39 It is a very inexact parallel, but I wonder how far from it we can get, given that many of the modern examples are shared by the literature that prefers terms like “the irrational.” SB: I myself would not quite see how the irrational would advance the argument. The problem, and it seems endemic in a lot of Rosalind Krauss’s work, is a kind of binarism. Irrationalism posits a kind of rationality, and a complicity between the rational and the irrational. It’s the dilemma one might have thought Foucault had displaced in his discussion of the historical application of the concept of the irrational. He made it possible not to have to go back to those terms. SK: I am wondering about your notion of curiosity vis-à-vis Modernism, as the term “curiosity” is quite mild, and suggests a pleasant experience before an object. Does your 39

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Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 217.

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understanding of the term include psychological experiences that attempt to shock the sensory apparatus, that try to provoke a new consciousness? Does it include a negative frisson? Does curiosity offer any sort of critique—ideological, social, or otherwise? I am interested in the examples that you chose but also some you avoided. You began with Katharina Fritsch’s rats, and you said that the experience of curiosity was upstaged by the neutral conditions of the gallery exhibition. But isn’t the experience of viewing giant rats supposed to elicit a sense of mild terror or even revulsion? I wonder, for example, if the work of Damien Hirst would fit into your framework—or, Rosemarie Trockel’s surreal sculptural objects of the late 1980s, which produce an effect of curiosity through their odd, provocative juxtapositions of archaelogical specimens and commodities, but are meant to provoke thought of a feminist sort. SB: Of course you are quite right to raise the question. And I should state that in my terms, “curiosity” is certainly not just a concept covering mild and pleasant reactions before an object. In present usage, it may have come to be associated with that range of emotions. But my whole point has been to trace its genealogy in such a way that the profound connection with science and knowledge comes to the fore. Indeed, its role has generally been regarded as transgressive with regard to prevalent norms of classification. It is in this connection that curiosity makes common cause with

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art, and Damien Hirst’s work with all its intimations of “memento mori”—why not? SK: I can’t seem to get past the fact that the concept of curiosity strikes me as such a mild term with which to discuss, or even get around, Modernism. I agree with T. J. Clark’s reading of Modernism that he offers so lucidly in his essay “Modernism, Postmodernism and Steam,” in which he argues for the sense of purpose, depth, meaning in Modernism—for its volatile highs and lows, for Modernism’s serious core.40 Modernism’s pleasure is inseparable from its agony. Curiosity as a guiding metaphor doesn’t seem powerful enough to get at what’s at stake in modern art. SB: I am very sympathetic to, and supportive of, Tim’s work. But couldn’t you say that having overinvested in Modernism, having placed all of that in Modernism, he has got to the point where he has abandoned Modernism? With his wonderful writing on [Nicolas] Poussin, for example: it’s there that Modernism now has to be located, and so he has made his own ricorso. JE: Whenever I am reading Farewell to an Idea (I have been teaching it for several years now), I tend to come back to the question of its melancholy, or pathos— SB: We invited Tim to Bristol to give him an honorary degree, and he gave a lecture on Brueghel, with the same passion 40

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T. J. Clark, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 154–74.

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with which he had talked about De Kooning a few years ago. In the De Kooning material, he always turned back in the end, and problematized it. With Brueghel, he does not need to have that final moment of doubt. SK: The work on Brueghel is, to me, very compelling work; and in fact he was working on Brueghel and Poussin while he was writing Farewell to an Idea and wondering about [Camille] Pissarro in 1891. I agree there are ricorsi in Tim’s work, and that he is continuously finding Modernism’s roots further and further back in history. That is why his work puts in question any attempt to say, “Here we are, finally arrived in Modernism!” He shows the categories are messy. But concerning curiosity, and the fact that we seem, here, to be leaping over Modernism: I am interested in the possible ways that curiosity works in and through this idea of Modernism. Does it? Can it? SB: I believe so. That is something I shall have to elaborate further in the refashioning of my lectures for publication as a book. JE: The moment in Farewell to an Idea that strikes me is the one at the end of the introduction, where he says, Some of my friends have told me there’s a melancholy tone in this book. To have someone as intensely self-reflective as he is say that the melancholy is somehow an effect of the writing, especially given the themes of nihilism, pathos,

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bathos, and failure that thread through the book, seems, well, unreadable. There is something bizarre about taking those few sentences as an adequate description of a mourning that takes place, continuously, throughout the book. SK: It seems he couldn’t find an explanation for his melancholy—or at least one he wanted to offer up publicly in his book. But in the “Steam” essay, he does suggest that melancholy is an element of Modernism. [Silence.] JE: Ah, the melancholy of ricorsi: I suppose that’s a nice sad note on which to end.

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Index

A absorptive artists, 108 abstraction, 33–35 Adorno, Theodor, 15 aesthetization, 203–204 Age of Modernism (Bann), 35–36 Albert-Birot, Pierre, 55 antiquarians, 16–20, 41 Apoteosi di Omero (Paolini), 105–106 architectural criticism, 40 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 107–108 art objects, 106–115 See also curiosity assemblage, 147 avant-garde, 177, 178, 181, 201

B Bacon, Francis, 114, 137 Baker, Malcolm, 213 Balzac, Honore de, 134–135 Bargrave, John, 12–16, 18–20, 137–144 Barthes, Roland, 8–10, 27 Baudelaire, Charles, 41, 133–134, 136, 146, 176, 177–178 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 21, 22–25, 28 Benveniste, Émile, 9 Beuys, Joseph, 206–207 Bingham, Robert Jefferson, 24 Blanc, Charles, 104–105, 111–112, 132 Bloom, Harold, 72 Bourbon Restoration, 26

breaks. See historical breaks Breton, André, 150–151 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 170 Bruyère, Jean de la, 113

C Camille, Michael, 184 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 19 Castello di Rivolu, 125 centuries, as division, 31–36 Charlesworth, Michael, 10 Château d’Orion, 125–128, 158, 171, 206 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19 Cherry, Deborah, 7, 10 chronology, as categorization, 31–36 Clark, T. J., 48, 220–222 Classical Antiquity, 30 classification systems, 31–36 Cloud Studies (Constable), 164–165 Cloud Walks (Lang), 164–172 collage, 147 Complexity and Contradiction of Architecture (Venturi), 46 Constable, John, 164–165 copies, 22–24, 104–105 Courbet, Gustave, 60 Cowling, Elizabeth, 182–183 Cox, Stephen, 160–161 Crary, Jonathan, 185–186 Crow, Thomas, 75 curiosity, 41–42, 62–63 concept of, 197–198, 218–222

223

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Index

224 Dada, 198–200 displays of, 123–136 experimentalism and, 119–123 heritage of, 111–115 Modernism and, 132–136, 206–208, 218–222 photography and, 214–216 Postmodernism and, 151–52, 164 religion and, 137–144 science and, 136–146, 208–209 skill and, 216–217 Surrealism as, 146–155, 200–201 tradition of collecting, 144–146

D Dada, 147, 198–200, 202, 208 Dali, Salvador, 150–151, 201 Damisch, Hubert, 21, 33–35, 38–39, 101, 170, 193 Daphne (Jamnitzer), 121–123 Déjeuner (dans l’atelier) (Manet), 58–68, 93 Déjeuner sur l’ herbe (Manet), 46–58, 92 Delacroix, Eugène, 23, 68–69, 183–184 Delaroche, Paul, 20–22, 178–179 Delvaux, Paul, 148–149, 201 Dickens, Charles, 134–135 Dion, Mark, 41, 153–155, 197, 204 discours, 8–10, 27 disegno, 103 divine economy, 24 Dubuffet, Jean, 193 Duchamp, Marcel, 110, 119, 147 Duprat, Hubert, 121–124, 126, 156–164, 171–172, 194, 201, 204 Duro, Paul, 196 Duve, Thierry de, 147

E Elkins, James, 29, 39, 58, 75–76 Embryo Firearms (Parker), 151–152 engraving, 23, 104 Enlightenment, 37 enunciative modalities, 9, 10 Enwezor, Okwui, 100 Equals Infinity (Klee), 34–35

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Eristratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus’s Disease (Guillemot), 70–71 Ernst, Max, 199 Ernst, Wolfgang, 8 experimentalism, 115–123, 163–164, 208 Experimental Painting (Bann), 115–118

F facingness, 49 fantasy art, 190 Farewell to an Idea (Clark), 220–222 fashions, changes in, 53–55 Faussett, Bryan, 12–19 female fashions, 53–55 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 126, 204 Foucalt, Michel, 20, 26–27, 123, 137 found objects, 110 Francastel, Pierre, 39 France curiosity in, 132–134 nineteenth-century, 22–23 Restoration period, 26–27 French Academy, 188, 195–196 French painting development of nineteenth century, 68–75, 78–87 genealogy of, 186–192 Manet and, 46–58 French Revolution, 180 Freud, Sigmund, 20 Fried, Michael, 39, 48–49, 52, 69, 107–108, 174–175, 194 Fritsch, Katharina, 120–121 Fulton, Hamish, 165

G Gaillard, Ferdinand, 179 Gassendi, Pierre, 169 Gautier, Théophile, 178 genres, hierarchy of, 25–27 Gérôme, Jean-Leon, 190, 191 Ginzburg, Carlo, 209–210 Goldsworthy, Andy, 156–157 Gombrich, E. H., 116–117 Gotlieb, Marc, 189

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Index

225

Guérin, Pierre, 60–62 Guillemot, Alexandre, 70

H Haworth-Booth, Mark, 215 hierarchy of genres, 25–27 High Modernism, 98 High Renaissance, 76–78 histoire, 8–10, 27 historical breaks, 11–12, 25 delineation of, 31–36 postmodern, 40 historical detail, 8 historical-mindedness, 12, 16, 18 historiography, 8–9 history periodization of, 30–36 viewing, through present, 36–39 Holburne Museum, 130 Hooke, Robert, 209 Hope, Thomas, 44, 53 House, John, 62–64, 66, 133–134, 146, 189 Howard, Luke, 165

I illusionism, 107–108 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 24, 68–71, 74, 78–80, 85–86, 93–94 appeal, 103–106 Delacroix and, 183–184 Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien , 80–81, 97–98, 100–101, 104, 108–109 Picasso and, 87–92, 94–96, 181–183 Tu Marcellus Eris, 87–92, 94–95, 104 irony, 73

J Jamnitzer, Abraham, 121–123 Judd, Donald, 109–110

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K Kant, Immanuel, 169 Karr, Alphonse, 55 kenosis, 72 Klee, Paul, 34–35 Kounellis, Jannis, 21, 98–100, 207, 214–215 Krauss, Rosalind, 109–110, 218 Kriebel, Savine, 198–200 Krier, Léon, 43–46, 52–53 Kunstkammer, 128–129

L Laib, Wolfgang, 21 Lang, Gerhard, 164–172, 201, 209 Laocoön sculptures, 124 Larguier, Léo, 133 Le Coupeur de nappe (Scheffer), 65–68, 93 Leech, John, 134 Le Martyre de Saint Symphorien (Ingres), 80–81, 97–98, 100–101, 104, 108–109 Lenoir, Alexandre, 31 Les Moissonneurs dans les Marais pontins (Roberts), 27 light boxes, 194 literalism, 107–108, 109 lithography, 104 Long, Richard, 165 Loti, Pierre, 20 Lunch (in the studio) (Manet), 58–68, 93 Lunch on the Grass (Manet), 46–58, 92 Lüttiken, Sven, 51–52, 56

M Machiavelli, 20 MacNamidhe, Margaret, 185–186 Manet, Édouard, 25–26, 192 Déjeuner (dans l’atelier), 58–68, 93 Déjeuner sur l’ herbe, 46–58, 92 interpretation of, 176 materialism of, 146–147 relationship of, with predecessors, 69–75 Manet’s Modernism (Fried), 49

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Index

226 mannerisms, 203–204, 211 Mantz, Paul, 85–86, 97–98, 100 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 211–212 Martin, Jean-Hubert, 125 materialism, 146–147 Melville, Stephen, 12 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 123 Middle Ages, 132, 196 “mise en abîme,” 67 modern criticism, 29–30 Modernism criticism of, 29–30 curiosity and, 132–136, 206–208, 218–222 experimentalism and, 115–123, 163–164 as historical phase, 132 objecthood and, 106–115 origins of, 30–31, 36–38, 75–76, 92–102, 181–182 preconditions of, 68–75 theories of, 175–176 modernist divide, 39 modernist interiors, 43–46 mourning, 20 Munari, Bruno, 118 Musée des monuments français, 31–32 Musée Gassendi, 125, 169, 171–172, 204, 206 Museum Gustavianum, 131–132 Museum of Jurassic Technology, 205–206

N Nagel, Alexander, 113 narratives, master, 29–30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 19, 36–38, 50 Nouy, Lecomte de, 178

O objecthood, 106–115 See also curiosity Oiseau (Dali), 150–151 Ovid, 123

RT4224X.indb 226

P Painting as an Art (Wollheim), 74–75 paintings See also specific paintings hierarchy of genres in, 25–27 modernist, 39–41 reproductions of, 22–24 Paolini, Giulio, 105–106 Parallel Lines (Bann), 9–10, 21–22, 25, 185–186 Parker, Cornelia, 151–152 parody, 66–67, 71–72 periodization, 30–36 personal relationships, expressed in art, 74–75 Phèdre et Hippolyte (Guérin), 60–62 photography, 9–10, 22–24, 104, 211–212, 214–216 Picasso, Pablo, 87–92, 94, 147, 181–183 Pinturicchio, 76–77 plaster casts, 213 Pollock, Jackson, 101 Pomian, Krzysztof, 136–137 positivism, 14 Postmodernism, 101–102, 200 beginnings of, 43–46 concept of, 36–37 curiosity and, 151–152, 164 origins of, 36, 53 preconditions of, 68 theories of, 175–176 theory, 40 Prédication de Saint Etienne (Pujol), 81–85 printmaking technology, 22–24 Proust, Antonin, 65 Pujol, Abel de, 26, 81–85

R Raimondi, Marcantonio, 51 Raphael, 76–77, 79, 93 Rat-King (Fritsch), 120–121 ready-mades, 110, 119, 147 recursive movements, 119 Regnault, Henri, 189 religion curiosity and, 137–144 science and, 137, 143

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Index

227

Renaissance, 76–78, 98, 194, 195, 196 repetition, 63 reproductive images, 22–24, 104–105 See also photography Restoration period, 26–27 retrograde steps, 36–38 revisionary ratios, 72 ricorsi, 192–196, 201, 204, 206, 210–212, 216 River of Earth (Goldsworthy), 156–157 Robert, Léopold, 27 Romanticism, 10–12, 18, 61–62 Romanticism and the Rise of History (Bann), 9, 10–12, 19 Rosenberg, Harold, 106–107, 114–115 Rowe, Colin, 43–46, 53 Rubens, Peter Paul, 81, 83

S Salon des Refusés, 179–180 Salons, 70 Scapiro, Meyer, 87–88 Schapiro, Meyer, 39, 94, 184 Scheffer, Ary, 65–68, 71–72, 93 Scholastic philosophers, 30 Schwitters, Kurt, 199, 201–203 science curiosity and, 136–146, 208–209 relics of, 148 religion and, 137, 143 Scientific Revolution, 120 sculpture, 40–41 Serrano, Andres, 150 sexuality, 26–27, 55 Shiff, Richard, 216–217 Siegfried, Susan, 94, 183 skill, 29–30, 216–217 Smee, Elizabeth Mary, 161–163, 209 Sontag, Susan, 214 specific objects, 110–111, 114, 119, 146 Spitzner, Dr., 148–149 Spoerri, Daniel, 126, 128 Stendhal, 60–62 Stirling, James, 44–46 subjectivity, 10 Surrealism, 41, 123, 146–155, 200–201, 208

RT4224X.indb 227

T theatrical modes, 107–108 Themerson, Stefan, 202–203 Thoré, Théophile, 146–147 three-dimensional objects, 40–41, 106–115 See also curiosity Tocqueville, Alexis de, 180 Tu Marcellus Eris (Ingres), 87–92, 94–95, 104 two-dimensional art, 103 Twombly, Cy, 96

U Under the Sign (Bann), 13, 20

V Venturi, Roberto, 46 verbal figuration, 51 Vermeer, Jan, 69–70 Viollet-Le-Duc, Emmanuel, 32 visual paraody, 66–67 Voeu de Louis XIII (Ingres), 79

W Warburg, Aby, 51–52 watershed, 49–50, 53 water simile, 50–52 Waterton, Charles, 21 Wechsler, Ren, 205–206 Western academic tradition, 136 Winckelmann, Johan, 17–18 Wollheim, Richard, 74–75 Women with a Fan (Picasso), 87–92, 94–95 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” (Benjamin), 21–24, 28 Wunderkammer, 128–129, 157, 198, 206

Z Zimmermann, Michael, 62–67

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RT4224X.indb 228

11/13/06 3:09:22 PM

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