The Dalí is in the Details:
Mastering the Old Masters

Born in the small Catalonian city of Figueras nine months and four days after the death of a would-be older brother, Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Doménech struggled to establish his singularity in the eyes of his father, who believed him to be the miraculous reincarnation of the first son, dead before the age of two. Driven by that existential imperative, the youngster now known as simply Dalí (1904-1989) often collided with authority, first at home and later at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Enrolled in the art school in 1922, he earned a suspension for disruptive behavior three years later and in 1926, when the time came for his exams, the twenty-two-year old declared the board unqualified to judge him, and left. Soon after, Dalí set out to turn his drive for uniqueness into a lucrative career as a highly creative artist and writer.

The artistic skills that Dalí developed during his time at the Academia in Madrid probably owe more to the hours he spent at the Museo Nacional del Prado than to coursework. Enthralled by the masterpieces brushed and etched by fellow Spaniards Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1650), Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), and Northern Europeans like Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569) and Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450-1515), Dalí integrated their lessons into his own decidedly distinct compositions. Recognizing footprints of these old masters and others, like the Italians Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) and Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520), in the work of this twentieth-century master motivated the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston to collaborate with The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, on an exhibition called “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion.”

Greeting visitors at the MFA in a dimly lit entrance gallery with black and red decor, a vaguely familiar painting by Salvador Dalí cashed in on the fame of its fraternal twin. Perhaps meant to be the star of an exhibition that was filled with less well known but often more impressive works by the Spanish artist, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (Fig. 1, 1952-1954) was among the many loans from The Dalí Museum sufficient unto themselves to draw a crowd. The Persistence of Memory (1931), from which the later painting derived and which is inextricably linked to its creator in most minds, remained at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, its permanent home.

What began with the prospect of a generous loan of paintings from The Dalí Museum developed into an exhibition about Dali’s engagement with Early Modern European art. In an ideal situation, paintings by Dalí would have been paired with those artworks that prompted them, borrowed from the Museo Nacional del Prado and other venues. Since there were no plans for additional loans, the curators dipped into the MFA’s holdings to find useful comparisons. The strength of the Boston museum’s collection allowed for a visually rich immersion in the art of the old masters, mimicking Dali’s own encounters with it. For a more direct pairing, however, there is value in utilizing the wonders of modern technology to borrow from the Prado, and elsewhere, images of the artwork that spoke so powerfully to the fledgling artist, and to display them here.

The room at the Prado in which Dalí must have spent many hours appears in an early twentieth-century photograph of the Prado’s Velázquez gallery (Fig. 2, 1915-1926). Hanging on the wall, third from the right, is The Infanta Margarita of Austria (Fig. 3, ca. 1665) that inspired Dalí’s Velázquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (Fig. 4, 1958).

Wandering through the palatial spaces of the Madrid museum, eighteen-year-old Salvador found role models to emulate and parental figures to overthrow. Remembering those years, a much older Dalí in 1958 included in the upper left corner of his homage to the other Spanish master and the Prado, a view of a salon-style hang of paintings, in front of which gather assorted classical sculptures (Fig. 5). The sun coming in from upper windows throws rectangles of light onto the gallery floor that become the stripes that decorate the surface of Dalí’s canvas. A figure, presumably Velázquez, stands before a grisaille of the painting of the Infanta Margarita (Fig. 6), whose fragmented ghostly image hovers above the proceedings (Fig. 7).

Dalí’s signature commands almost as much attention as the figure it underlines (Fig. 4), and the black rhinoceros horns and horse’s head decorating the hem of the Infanta’s skirt add his personal iconography to the memory of a Velázquez portrait at the Prado. Visually translating the Spanish Golden Age painting into his own explosive style, the modern artist inserted himself among the greats.

Another revered artist, Fleming Peter Paul Rubens, spent time in Madrid and left behind canvases that include The Three Graces (Fig. 8, 1630-1635), an exercise in portraying various views of a voluptuous female form, candy for the male eye. When Dalí took up the theme in 1938 with Enchanted Beach with Three Fluid Graces (Fig. 9), he posed his female figures facing front, unusual for an artist who often depicted women’s buttocks. Indifferent here to displaying women in the round, he distinguished his Graces by their degree of disintegration. From right to left, their faces and bodies increasingly merge with the enchanted beach.

Using what he called the paranoiac-critical method, Dalí positioned figures on the beach, including one on horseback, into an arrangement that doubles as the head and face of the central female (Fig. 10). The objects defining the head of the woman on the right and the rock marking that of the one on the left don’t succeed near as well as the one in the middle.

Lacking The Three Graces by Rubens, the MFA curators found an apt substitute in Dürer’s engraving of Four Naked Women (The Four Witches) (Fig. 11, 1497). Aside from multiplying the number of naked women an artist could justifiably pack into one rectangle, the several sides that Dürer portrayed situate the graphic arts, and two-dimensional media in general, as intellectually superior to menial sculpture, which requires hard labor on the part of both creator and viewer who must walk around a piece to see it in its entirety. This print and Rubens’s painting offer many views at once for leisurely enjoyment. Known as the paragone [comparison], the conflict about the superiority of painting versus sculpture has yet to be resolved.

In a direct invasion of another artist’s work, in the 1970s Dalí spent three years making idiosyncratic adjustments to photogravure copies of all eighty prints from Goya’s series Los Caprichos [The Foibles], some of which were on display alongside the originals in the exhibition. For Goya’s De que mal morira [Of what will you die]? (Fig. 12, 1797-1798), Dalí replaced the subject of death with that of sleep in his remake, De hibernación [Of hibernation] (Fig. 13, 1973-1977). With the primary colors blue, yellow and red, he enlivened Goya’s monographic etching and drew sweeping lines that form the garment of the golden coiffed woman on the left. Below her, Dalí inked either a cross or weather vane on the middle structure of a townscape comprised of three small buildings. Easily overlooked are the three linear projectiles that fly from the hibernating man’s mouth in the direction of the donkey, perhaps a reference to Dalí’s dreams as source material for his ideas.

Much less intrusive and considerably more obscure, Dalí’s painting Paranonia (Fig. 14, 1935) subjected to his paranoiac-critical method some drawings by Leonardo, which in the 1930s he would have known from books. In the exhibition, the object label included reproductions of two possible sources, Head of a Young Woman (La Scapigliata [The Disheveled]) (Fig. 15, 1500-1505) and Studies of Horsemen for the Battle of Anghiari (ca. 1503) now at the British Museum. Another sketch, Study of Battles on Horseback and on Foot (Fig. 16, 1503-1504) seems to have more of the flavor of Dalí’s horsemen and is pictured here.

All the figures, mounted or not, are essential to establishing the visage of Leonardo’s young woman (Fig. 17). The negative space outlined by the scampering horses in the rocky landscape and the figures on the bust constitutes the facial skin. The shoulders and outstretched arm of Dalí’s shapely left-leaning female make up the young woman’s mouth. Her head is part of the proper left nostril, and the shadow shaping her buttocks is the contour shadow of the chin. To her right, a male delineates the sweep of the chin by extending his right arm. Meanwhile, the right eye of Leonardo’s young woman emerges from the deep shadow on the nearby well-rounded female facing forward and running toward the left. The dark areas of the profile horse-and-rider make up the left eye, and the rest of the herd fashions the hair. In playing with the well-known Leonardo drawing of a woman’s head, Dalí potentiated the old master’s presence by choosing horsemen on galloping steeds, a reference to the many sketches by Leonardo for his now lost battle painting. Visitors at the exhibition who gathered around the painting helped each other pick out the not-so-easily found Leonardo head.

The curators also took advantage of the object label accompanying Dalí’s Two Adolescents (Fig. 18, 1954) to display images of two exceptionally famous works by Michelangelo that served as inspiration for the Spaniard’s provocative painting but could not be moved or simulated by anything in the MFA collection.

The lithe body of the reclining boy owes its pose to the mortal protagonist in The Creation of Adam (Fig. 19, ca. 1511) on the vault of the Sistine Chapel. Dalí described his adolescent Adam with utmost clarity, to the point of giving him the plentiful pubic hair missing from Michelangelo’s first man. The feature proclaims the youth’s sexual maturity even as his boyish physique and oversized head suggest a younger stage of life. The youngster who posed for Dalí would have no trouble finding work today as a model for men’s underwear.

Standing on the right, devoid of facial features and with a blurred body, the second adolescent might be a partner dreamed up by the far more substantial youth on the left. Holding a stone in his right hand, he strikes a pose like that of the monumental David carved by Michelangelo (Fig. 20, 1501-1504) that towers over visitors in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. At the very least, Dalí took up the challenge laid down by the master of the male body to demonstrate his facility with anatomy, although he surely had other meanings in mind when he conjured up this piece.

Obsessed with fitting in among not just the Spanish greats but the Italian ones as well, Dalí found plenty of competitors to best in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. Having borrowed Adam from the vault, the modern artist later appropriated Christ for his ten-foot-tall Ecumenical Council (Fig. 21, 1960). Taken from the huge Last Judgment (Fig. 22, 1536-1541) that covers the altar wall of the chapel, the imposing nude male figure (Fig. 23) in Dalí’s painting looms over a meeting of mostly mitered religious characters.

Gala, in her guise as Saint Helen, founder of the True Cross, poses for the Spanish artist poised before his virgin canvas (Fig. 21). Facing the viewer as he contemplates his first brushstrokes, Dalí envisions an ecumenical council, no doubt responding to the new pope’s announcement that one would soon be held. Not convened until 1962, the historic meeting of Catholic bishops was called by a new pope the year before the painting was finished. Raised Catholic by his mother but not particularly devout, Dalí professed allegiance to Catholicism after his audience with the pope in 1948, perhaps seeking approval from the epitome of a father figure. Given its own space in the MFA exhibition, the Ecumenical Council commanded the same reverence as an altarpiece.

Other large paintings with religious subjects definitely qualify as altarpieces, albeit for particularly progressive churches or privately funded chapels. Preparatory for one of them, a large drawing called Christ in Perspective (Fig. 24, 1950) attests to Dalí’s superb draftsmanship. From the point of view of God hovering above the crucified Christ, the viewer looks down at an image of perfection lacking the customary torn flesh and dripping blood.

This unusual perspective had its origin in a sketch (Fig.25, ca. 1550) by Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) that Dalí had seen and that had come back to him in a hypnagogic hallucination during that dreamy period between wakefulness and sleep. Fertile ground from which he harvested endless ideas, that state was the source of his paranoiac-critical method. The highly accomplished painting of Christ of Saint John of the Cross (Fig. 25, 1951) encapsulates the vision he had of Saint John’s cross suspended over Port Lligat, the title acknowledging its source.

As part of his drive to stand out in a crowd, Dalí approached the much less lofty genre of still-life painting with irreverence and wit, very much apparent in his Nature Morte Vivante (Still Life-Fast Moving) (Fig. 27, 1956), which translates literally to Nature Dead Alive. As the wall text in the exhibition noted, this is “Not So Still Life.” A peach and a cherry whiz in from the right, two cups reminiscent of the ancient Greek kylix levitate above a table dressed in bright crimson geometry and traditional white linen. On the left, Dalí’s hand breaks through the picture frame to add a rhinoceros horn to the tumult of misbehaving objects, among which is a glass bottle emptying its contents upwards in defiance of gravity (Fig. 28).

Despite the visual jokes in this composition and many others, Dalí was deeply serious about his craft. At the Prado he had seen many still-life paintings from all over Europe, like the closely related Table with Desserts (Fig. 29, mid-seventeenth century) by Andries Benedetti (active 1636-1650) with a landscape and broken classical column in the background, white cloth over a green one on a wooden table, and foodstuff scattered amid vessels of varying materials showing off the artist’s skill at rendering textures. To place Dalí’s excursions into this field alongside standard still lifes from Northern Europe and Spain, the curators displayed a number of examples from the MFA collection. This one by Benedetti or another like it at the Prado, however, seems to have moved Dalí to convincingly portray reality as seen with his own peculiar mind sight.

Another foray into this genre, Oeufs sur le Plat sans le Plat (Fig. 30, 1932), a Dalinian combination of still life, landscape and narrative, plays with French words, physical properties and matters of scale, even as it surprises with a man and child in an unfurnished room, peering out a window together. “Oeufs sur le plat” is idiomatic for fried eggs, but word for word means “eggs on the plate” and thus the wordplay occurs in French but not English.

A building bathed in the red light of sunset, probably over Port Lligat, functions as a platform for a plate of fried eggs (Fig. 31) that might remind a viewer of Saint Lucy’s plate of eyes or Saint Agatha’s platter bearing her breasts. The window-shaped highlight on the eggs gives a nod to similar reflections often found on solid surfaces in still lifes but not on squishy ones like the yolk of Dalí’s sunny-side-up egg. To add to the surreality, a thread that begins in the sky beyond the top edge of the picture ends in a knot that secures the white of a dangling egg. The fiery red yolk of that egg looks across at an item related in shape and color, which could be a hot water bottle or a dripping pocket watch, or both (Fig. 32).

On the wall above, something suggestive of a carrot guides the eye to a room where a man and boy stand by a window through which shines the golden sky. Painted just a few years after Dalí was angrily disinherited by his father and banished from the family home in Cadequès, the image of the child and grownup might represent Dalí’s dream of a loving father.

Titian–In the End:
From Wholesome Flesh to
Disintegrating Skin

[To view the slide show in a separate tab, place the mouse pointer over the first slide, right click, select <This Frame>, then <Open Frame in New Tab>.]

https://www.slideshare.net/DFeller2/titian-in-the-end-from-wholesome-flesh-to-disintegrating-skin

[slides 1-5]

Artist riddle:
How many artists does it take to
complete a painting?
Six.
One to do the painting
and five to drag her away from the canvas
when it’s finished.

[slide 6]

When Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) died in 1576 at an advanced age the delimiters of which are as elusive today as form edges in his late paintings, among the detritus left in what was a very busy bottega (workshop), was a large canvas on which paint melted into the story of the Flaying of Marsyas, conflated with the one about Midas, whose life was also turned upside down for errantly judging a musical competition (Fig. 1). In the aftermath of the master’s death from “a fever” and almost simultaneously that of his oldest son and business partner Orazio from plague, the abandoned houseful of art on Birri Grande in Venice became fair game for burglars, who had first pick of the hoard. Before the end of the 1570s, the place along with all its contents had been sold by the surviving younger son Pomponio.

In 1909, after long silence, the Flaying of Marsyas appeared in the art historical record. Since that emergence into contemporary consciousness, the painting has garnered much speculation as to motive, meaning, method, etc. Occam’s razor rules here, starting with incontrovertible givens. Titian loved oil paint. He spent a lifetime applying it to surfaces, mostly canvas, in increasingly complex ways that gained him notice, nobility, remuneration and not a little notoriety, all of which he shaped and fashioned to good effect but that also left their imprint on him. The Flaying of Marsyas is the Prince of Painters’ personal meditation on the choices he made–and clearly continued to make–as the artist he was. By rendering with sumptuous color and brushwork the myths that declared the superiority of divine order and reason–embodied in Apollo and his lyre–over the unfettered sensuality of satyr Marsyas and his pipes, Titian challenged the admonishing message of his subject matter. In the longstanding competitive conversation with Michelangelo’s disegno, this colorito canvas seems to be the Venetian’s attempt to have the last word.

The painting depicts the price of challenging a god at his own artistic game. Oddly, for all the paint and real estate Titian devoted to the Marsyas tale, it was the one about Midas on which Ovid lavished more words, and the character with whom the painter seems to have identified most. Regardless of whether the immediate viewers of the canvas were thieves or discerning collectors, it must have been quite a shock to whoever came upon it for the first time. So revolutionary was the appearance of the Flaying of Marsyas, [slide 7] that they must have wondered what did the great artist have in mind and hand when he chose these stories and rendered them as he did. Even those familiar with Titian’s contemporary works, like the earthy Nymph and Shepherd (early 1570s, Fig. 2)–with its similarly vibrant brushstrokes but (style-wise) backwards-glancing sculpted figures and spatial recession–were confronted with a distinctively different order of painting. Certainly considering much earlier output like his smooth Venus of Urbino (1538, Fig. 3)–with its well-defined forms, perspectival floor and geometric divisions–might have made them wonder how its artist could possibly be responsible for the Flaying of Marsyas. Seizing on the idea of the later painting’s apparently unfinished state, more-or-less erudite viewers had a handy explanation, but Titian declared his part done when he painted his name on the rock in the lower right foreground, a nicety that hasn’t foreclosed debate.

[slide 8]
Titian rendered here not one but two stories about aesthetic discernment versus sensory pleasure, and the potential for unfavorable outcomes. What becomes of the artist who professes his own brand of art to be better than Nature’s, i.e., better than that of the gods? Tied to a tree on the central axis of the composition, the inverted Marsyas suffers under the knives of the partially kneeling golden-haired Apollo and above him, his Phrygian-capped assistant–their crooked elbows echoing each other like tiered chevrons. After Minerva discarded her newly invented pipes, Marsyas retrieved them and perfecting his technique, foolishly challenged the sun god to a musical duel. The god of light chose flaying as the penalty, the pain of which Ovid communicated far more dramatically than Titian did, as evident in the poet’s lines:
[slide 9]
‘No! no! He screamed,/’Why tear me from myself? Oh, I repent!/A pipe’s not worth the price!’ and as he screamed/Apollo stripped his skin; the whole of him/Was one huge wound, blood streaming everywhere,/Sinews laid bare, veins naked, quivering/And pulsing. You could count his twitching guts,/And the tissues as the light shone through his ribs[…]”

[slide 10]
In the other poem, Midas–the only dissenter when all agreed Pan’s pipes inferior to Apollo’s lyre–inflamed the sun god’s ire at “ears so dull,” and suffered their transformation into those of an ass. “Disfigured and ashamed,” the Phrygian king wrapped his new appendages in a purple turban in an attempt to conceal them from his viewers.

Providing musical accompaniment on the Apollo side of the picture, a soloist has just completed a down bow on his lira da braccio, which visually addresses the syrinx hanging from the tree a few inches away, matching seven strings to seven pipes–a restatement of the duel between the instruments. On the other side, lined up diagonally from upper middle to lower right, a satyr enters the scene carrying a bucket, the crowned Midas sits with his hand over his mouth, and a boy holds the collar of a large, open-mouthed dog. A small dog licks up the blood flowing from the open wound of Marsyas–a bit of macabre humor for English speakers, as it is a lap dog.

The leaves in this natural setting, a mix of fiery red-orange and some version of green, echo the colors of the flesh, which are set off by the icy-blue sky, standing-flayer’s apron, bucket’s metal and Apollo’s opalescent drapery. [slide 11] Titian’s red accents ring the composition: Midas’s wrap, the blood-red strips of cloth attaching Marsyas’s left leg and–on the other side–his pipes to the tree, the musician’s garment, Apollo’s boot and [slide 12] the blood that drips down the front of the canvas as though applied to its surface, rather than following the form of the satyr’s arm (Fig. 4)–a self-aware passage that signals the image’s artifice and with it, Titian’s presence as creator/god.

[slide 13]
The composition has as its geometric center the navel of Marsyas, shifted now because of past alterations to the canvas size (Fig. 5). The navel’s central position and the strongly highlighted immediate surrounds guarantee its role as focal point to which relates all narrative action, reminiscent of the Umbilicus/Navel of the World–the axis mundi–mythological center of the world/universe made manifest in the Hellenistic symbol of the Omphalos stone. While it can’t be known whether Titian had these ideas in mind or was more simply, calling upon adolescent geometry lessons, the circular composition does reflect his deliberation on the power of the center. By assigning it to the area of the body associated with emotions, the artist directed attention to the satyr’s visceral nature.

As for the painting’s pictorial magic, technical investigations belie the impression that the Flaying of Marsyas was conceived and executed in a single sitting–or even several. [slide 14] A combination of x-rays from decades ago (Fig. 6), a published copy of an earlier version (Fig. 7) and extrapolation from a state-of-the-art, pre-conservation analysis of the elements of Titian’s Nymph and Satyr, revealed: that the painter applied pigment in complex layers according to intended color effect–in distinct sections–alternating impasto with glazes, a process that required in-between drying time and created Titian’s preferred relief-like surface; that he nonetheless worked the entire canvas at once; that he started with an underdrawing of thin, dark paint; that he exploited the canvas for its effect; and that the novelty of the old man’s style depended less on significant changes in ingredients than on his brilliant deployment of them. Perhaps apocryphal, when asked about his methods, Titian himself admitted, “svelature–trenta o quaranta!” (“glazes–thirty or forty!”). As for the widely quoted possible eye-witness account reported by Marco Boschini–speaking through the mouth of artist Palma il Giovane–about Titian’s painting practice of “vigorous applied [color] with a loaded brush[…who] for final touches would blend the transitions from highlights to halftones with his fingers,” no fingerprints were found on Nymph and Satyr, a painting with many disappeared edges. The Flaying of Marsyas, then, was an important painting to its maker, who lavished on it much time and craft.

The copy’s agreement with evidence from the x-ray that Titian initially had a different idea about the activity and pose of the musician in the upper left, and that the child with the dog was a later replacement for the amphora in the lower right, lends credence to the existence of another version–copy or original–that predated the one left in the artist’s studio when he died. One such was recorded in a sale at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thoughts of a flaying of Marsyas painting–and perhaps its application to the disegno–colorito debate–had obviously been marinating in Titian’s mind for some time, possibly for decades, indicating among other things that the subject itself was not necessarily pegged to the artist’s aging. As Titian neared the end of his life, however, the question of his legacy entered the picture. The myths’ long-standing presence in Titian’s thinking is further supported by his decision to invert Marsyas, an idea that seems to have sprung full grown from the brain of Raphael’s star pupil.

[slide 15]
Awash in antiquities as they were, sixteenth-century artists had a seemingly endless supply of new ideas for subjects and compositions, among them the contest between Apollo and Marsyas–and its prize. Of the motifs used to depict the popular narrative–on ancient sarcophagi (Fig. 8) and vases (Fig. 9), and as at least two types of sculpture-in-the-round of Marsyas tied to a tree in the exceedingly painful strappado position (Fig. 10)–none were known to upend the doomed satyr. During the 1520s and 1530s when Titian worked for Duke of Mantua Federico II Gonzaga, he had ample opportunity to rummage around the prince’s extensive collection of antiquities and while there, to browse that of court painter and architect Giulio Romano, with whom he developed at least a collegial relationship. Possibly among those marbles was a now-lost sarcophagus with the satyr inverted.

[slide 16]
Ideas must have been exchanged between the two artistic giants about compositions for a Flaying of Marsyas because by 1527, Giulio had sketched a scene of the punishment of Marsyas (Fig. 11), which was soon frescoed by him and assistants onto the wall of the Sala di Ovidio (Camera dei Metamorfosi) in Federico’s Palazzo del Te. (Fig. 12) [slide 17] Comparing the composition of the Flaying of Marsyas painting with that of the Apollo Flaying Marsyas drawing reveals how alike the artists’ thinking must have been. Although it’s been suggested that rather than making a copy of the drawing or being gifted one, that Titian sketched from the fresco, considering how high up on the wall the small fresco is, it’s unlikely he would have been able to see it well, even if he knew it was there. Because the drawing obviously precedes Titian’s painting, the assumption has been that the idea originated with Giulio and that proposed lost sarcophagus.

[slide 18]
An alternative hypothesis has Giulio standing in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican under the ceiling fresco designed by his mentor Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael) and looking at Marsyas upside down, either from curiosity or by happenstance. [slide 19] (Figs. 14 and 15) The strappado-twisted arms of Marsyas in the drawing echo those in Raphael’s design, providing strong evidence that the ceiling painting was a convenient source of inspiration for Giulio. When he composed his own version, Titian wisely changed the position of those arms–such tension in arm muscles making no sense in a body hanging from its ankles. [slide 20] However the idea developed, not only did it appeal to Titian but it rapidly became a standard among other artists, who likewise corrected the arms–probably guided by other Giulio or Titian versions (Figs. 16, 17 and 18). When he elected to paint these myths of musical comparison (paragone), Titian entered a conversation already in progress, possibly doing so years before he painted the version that in his lifetime never left the studio.

[slide 21]
The significant ways in which Titian’s painting veers away from the drawings of Giulio and company provide clues to the Venetian’s intentions: Marsyas, strung up by his ankles, facing front, his genitals no longer the target of a flayer’s knife and his skin still mostly attached to his body; Apollo, dropped to one knee and wielding a knife; a musician, playing a lira da braccio taking the place of the man holding the victor’s lyre; the satyr with the bucket, looking at Apollo rather than out of the canvas; and joining the party with two dogs, a child implicating the viewer with his eye contact. Most significantly, instead of covering his eyes, Titian’s Midas–his ass’s ears lost in the shadowed space ringing his head–stares intently at the butchery unfolding before him, dispassionately regarding the face of Marsyas, who no longer opens his mouth in a scream [slide 22] (Figs. 19 and 20), but turns one eye toward the spectator in close-mouthed, strained silence. Where Giulio’s drawing mostly documents the denouement of a competition, Titian’s painting invites its audience to join the artist in reflecting on the contrasting positions, and hence significance, of flayer and victim.

[slide 23]
Giulio’s repeating diagonals from upper right to lower left (arm of bucket-bearer, tree, Marsyas and assistant flayer) create movement toward the left, counterbalanced by the stooped Apollo and the lyre-carrier behind him. Depth is indicated by the profile view of the sacrificial satyr who is turned in space, and by clear views of the legs that overlap each other or as in the case of the Phrygian butcher, disappear behind another form. Titian in contrast compressed his composition by suppressing those usual depth-defining disegno devices of: overlapping forms and distinctive edges, discriminating paint application and layering, and the atmospheric perspective that leads to infinity in landscape settings. [slide 24] His painting is all colorito–evident in a closeup photograph taken under ordinary inadequate museum lighting (Fig. 21), where to the left of the satyr’s right leg, background clouds merge with a patch of red cloth above and a hand grabbing a sliver of hide below. [slide 25] The blue and gold of sky and background trees assert themselves in competition with foreground figures that meet at the picture plane, like the musician atop Apollo’s back, the assistant flayer above the god’s head, and the bucket-carrier abutting Midas.

Compared to the other figures, the centrally-located body of Marsyas is massive, lending credence to observations that in constructing his composition, Titian channeled memories of Christ flanked by holy figures, or more generally the shallow space of sacre conversazioni (sacred conversations), where Madonna and child occupy center stage amid saints and donors bracketing them, and/or recalled archaic reliefs. Such conjecturing raises questions: What additional body of knowledge did Titian draw upon, if any, besides that of his craft? What personal meanings did he cram into this visually crowded canvas?

Clearly Titian knew the myths of Marsyas and Midas, though he conflated the two. How he came by this knowledge remains speculative, with some asserting that early artistic training–beginning at age ten–preempted any formal education, making it unlikely he ever learned to read Latin. That wouldn’t have constituted much of an impediment once he fell in with Venetian intellectual types like Pietro Aretino, Pietro Bembo, Daniele Barbaro and others whose portraits he painted–their conversations teeming with philosophical, literary and artistic content as they must have been. On the other hand, Titian has been characterized as a “cultivated man” who read classical literature–including poetry–and might have known Latin and even Greek, and who was familiar with the Renaissance current of Neo-Platonist and Pythagorean numerical theories, especially those related to music.

[slide 26]
More agreement exists, however, as to the role of Midas as stand-in for Titian, though not about whether it is a self-portrait (Fig. 22). Similarly, some have misread the king’s expression and pose as that of a melancholic, applying to it phrases like: “veiled in sorrow and profound gravity,” “tearfully falls silent,” “Saturnine melancholy,” and “grand and pensive mourner.” [slide 27] Comparing Titian’s Midas (Fig. 23) with the archetype of melancholy in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia I (1514, Fig. 24), forces agreement with assessments of his stance as contemplative. The poses are just not the same.

[slide 28]
What might Titian as Midas have been thinking as he stared at the face of the sensual satyr (Fig. 25) under the knife of the god of divine order in the act of pulling away a slice of skin? [slide 29] With both his eyes and mouth wide open, Apollo seems to be singing (Fig. 26), perhaps in a duet with the musician playing on the Renaissance version of the ancient lyre–the instrument the sun god strummed to maintain the harmony of the spheres. If this was indeed the artist’s intention, it wouldn’t be the first time he subordinated the ear to the eye, setting a scene to music with his colorito.

[slide 30]
In a 1550s composition of a musician and nude woman (ca. 1550, Fig. 27), Titian explored more explicitly the relationship between music and sensuality (i.e., sex). His choice of a pipe organ for the ogling player, who has one hand on the keyboard and the other between his legs as he conjures up his Venus and Cupid in an erotically suggestive embrace, must surely relate to the nefarious reputation of wind instruments, associated as they were with vulgarity and phalluses. Unlike Apollo’s lyre, with its fixed tuning and illustrious Greek pedigree, the pipes of Marsyas–a goddess’s discard–had a structure that enabled a flexible tonal range, its lack of limits threatening to lead its devotees astray.

[slide 31]
In his Flaying of Marsyas, Titian played the open brushwork of Venetian colorito–the unfettered sensuality/sexuality embodied by the satyr’s syrinx–against the lines of Central Italian disegno–the contained order of Apollo’s harmonic strings. Indeed the artist was, quite literally, the poster child for the freewheeling style billed as improving on nature rather than slavishly mimicking it. In the impresa most likely chosen for him sometime before 1562 by close friend Aretino or writer M. Lodovico Dolce (Fig. 28), the painter is likened to a mother bear who licks her formless newborn into something resembling herself. The accompanying poem by Dolce leaves no doubt that Titian was known to have “[…]bested art, genius and nature.” The well-deserved inclusion of this impresa in an engraved anthology devoted to those of princes and other illustrious men of letters recognized Titian as a noble gentleman of refined intellect, placing his art alongside that of literature, seeming to link it with Apollo and his lyrical productions.

[slide 32]
In a picture constructed of riotous patches of color thoughtfully applied by design, inhabited by an unusual-for-Titian amount of bare male flesh, Midas contemplates the emotional response of Marsyas to his fate, with ample reason for identification. When the Phrygian king chose the sexy sound of pipes over a god’s heavenly instrument, he earned ass’s ears as a reward, though at least hung onto his skin. With this painting, the octogenarian painter (Fig. 29)–having already sustained losses to death of several loved ones and suffered some debilitating effects of aging–reflects on his own legacy. Decades earlier, well aware of Michelangelo’s celebrated disegno, Titian had chosen to go his own way, further developing the notorious open brushwork of his Venetian colorito. Would his gift be flayed after he was gone?

By choosing these myths, Titian seemed to bow to the inevitable triumph of the austere and rational over the luxuriant and sensual, watching it be cut to ribbons. Judging from the many philosophical readings (death by a thousand cuts) of this luscious compilation of pigment, and the avoidance of its near-erotic obsession with the flesh of both actors and canvas, if that’s what the old man feared would become of his art, his Flaying of Marsyas even as it pictures defeat, proclaims victory for colorito by its very existence.

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For the full paper including footnotes and bibliography, contact the author at:  deborahfeller@verizon.net

Catalog Entry for
Jusepe de Ribera,
The Holy Family with
Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria

The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria.  Jusepe de Ribera (Játiva [Valencia], Spain 1591 – 1652 Naples), Rome ca. 1606; Parma ca. 1611; Naples 1616–1652.  Signed and dated lower right on side of bench upon which Mary sits: “Jusepe de Ribera, español, accadamico [R.o.no] F. 1648.”  Oil on canvas, 82½ x 60¾ in. (209.6 x 154.3 cm).  Restored in 1979.  Samuel D. Lee Fund, 1934, 34.73.

Function
In a painting of the Holy Family, preceding the date of 1648, Jusepe de Ribera proudly affixed his signature as a Spaniard and Academy member to the end of the stone bench supporting Mary. Other than the secure facts of its dating and creator, little is known with certainty about the history and hence function of the work. A trail of information starts much later in its life with the murky circumstances of its acquisition in Genoa by a French art dealer. Much, however, can still be gleaned from its date, subject matter and physical characteristics.

Pictured on a canvas too large to be handled by one person and hence unlikely to have been intended for private individual devotion, the Virgin Mary holds the Christ child on her lap while Saint Catherine of Alexandria brushes her left cheek against the dorsal surface of the baby’s right hand. Mary’s mother Saint Anne proffers a rose to her daughter and Saint Joseph gazes at the viewer, as does the Madonna. A sewing basket in the lower right corner adds a note of tranquil domesticity, and the absence of mystical haloes renders the scene more conducive to viewers’ imagining themselves participating in the tender adoration of the child on his mother’s lap.

For the elderly participants who frame the central action, Ribera chose tenebristically dark colors, effectively keeping Anne and Joseph in the background. By bathing in bright light the two young women and baby, and clothing them in colorful garments, he brought them forward, directing the audience’s attention to the spiritual center of the composition.

Those viewers were likely to have been members of a wealthy family for whom the painting was created and guests who joined them in their private quarters, where the canvas would have been displayed. In keeping with the mid-sixteenth-century Council of Trent’s dictates, the subject matter chosen and the manner in which it was presented encouraged identification with, and emulation of, the holy personages depicted. Catherine would have provided an opportunity to meditate on her “admirable” qualities of “wisdom,” “eloquence,” “constancy,” “cleanness of chastity” and “privileged dignity.”

Primarily a holy family scene into which Ribera inserted Catherine, the painting presents an Alexandrian princess and Christian convert to whom Christ appeared when her faith was severely tested. Rather than the usual iconography of this saint’s mystical marriage to Christ–in which she is shown receiving a ring from the infant Jesus, here it’s the baby in a passive position, receiving Catherine’s tender adoration.

A popular source of saints’ stories, The Golden Legend left vague the exact content of Catherine’s visions, the second of which occurred during a twelve-day imprisonment without food. In her efforts to convert a ruling emperor to Christianity, Catherine so impressed him with erudite arguments that stumped fifty of his smartest philosophers, that he proposed marriage. When she explained that “He [Christ] is my God, my lover, my shepherd, and my one and only spouse,” the emperor became so enraged that he ordered her jailed. When starvation didn’t shake her faith, he sentenced her to be tortured to death across four spiked wheels, pieces of which later became the symbol of her martyrdom.

Those references to lover and spouse probably contributed to the subsequent myth of Catherine’s dream of the Christ child held by Mary, initially refusing to accept her as his servant because she was insufficiently beautiful, but much later–after Catherine spent time in the desert learning about the Christian faith from a hermit and then being baptized–Christ returned and placed a ring on the future martyr’s finger.

In a related version, also not in The Golden Legend but perhaps a product of the Counter-Reformation’s promotion of images as devotional aids, said hermit gifted Catherine with a picture of the Madonna and Child. Fervent prayers brought the Alexandrian princess a vision of the face of Christ turning toward her and later, when her faith had grown even stronger, Catherine envisioned Christ’s placing a ring on her finger. In a parallel fashion, Ribera created an image that invited similar spiritual engagement.

Techniques and Materials
The large oil-on-canvas painting has suffered damage. Before a 1979 restoration, there was a great deal of paint loss in the light-colored flesh tones. Additionally, what today looks like a well-preserved ultramarine cloak was back then a surface of disconnected flecks of paint before (one assumes) paint consolidation and in-painting. The canvas weave is evident below most of the paint, possibly a result of a relining in the early nineteenth century.

In this late work, Ribera combined the tenebristic effects of his earlier Roman style with a classical mode already apparent in the previous decade, perhaps inspired by contemporary artists Guido Reni, Domenichino, Lanfranco and Artemisia Gentileschi who–settling in Naples during those years–brought with them a classical way of painting. Likewise, the expansion of Ribera’s palette from muted earth colors to vibrant and varied hues might reflect the renewal of interest in Venetian art that spread across Italy during the 1630s.

The painting is imbued with a tenderness that suffuses the interactions among all the actors. Catherine’s intense and private adoration of the Christ child evokes in the baby enjoyment of, and fascination with, her behavior (evident by the slightly upturned left corner of his mouth). St. Anne smiles lovingly as she offers her daughter a rose that perhaps with its many equidistant thorns (curiously confined to only one side of the stem) prefigures the Passion with its crown of thorns. Mary and Joseph knowingly acknowledge visitors with ineffable stares that grasp and hold the viewer’s gaze on Catherine’s actions.

Evident from early on, Ribera’s determination to capture and convey affect evolved into an exceptional ability to paint deeply emotional sacred (and other) pictures well suited for the post-Tridentine precepts of his time. Whether patron-driven or expressive of a personal predisposition, that aspect of his work forever marked him as different from others. The Met’s Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria reflects the culture whence it springs but also the mastery of its creator.

Provenance
Nothing is known about the painting before the nineteenth century when Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun acquired it, but sometime after around 1648 when it left the artist’s studio in Naples as an object of religious devotion, it became an object of art.

An unsigned typewritten note in its curatorial file suggests that after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy and his subsequent secularization of churches, the painting became available and ended up in a Genoese collection either as a purchase or spoil of war. It was picked up in Italy by Le Brun in 1807/08 with the intention of bringing it back to Paris to sell, either purchased from its Genoese owner or obtained illegally elsewhere and given a false provenance. Its exclusion from both Giacomo Brusco’s Description des beautes de Genes (1781) and Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s Descrizione di Genova (1780) strongly suggests that the painting wasn’t commissioned for a Genoese church. A signed and dated work of this caliber was unlikely to have been missed by either writer.

Wherever and however it was acquired, it ended up in France where artist and art dealer Le Brun soon flipped it in an “unverified” Paris sale. By 1824 it resided in the collection of Sir Thomas Baring, a connoisseur and collector of fine art who served in the British government for many years. The painting remained in the Baring family until December 12, 1918, when it was sold at Christie’s in London, to P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., a well-established dealer and gallery founded in 1767.

Colnaghi held the painting till it came into the possession of Henry George Charles Lascelles, of royal heritage like the previous noncommercial owners. When the painting appeared on the market again in 1934 at Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co., Inc. (New York and Paris), it was bought by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Though Ribera spent his entire working life in Italy, because he was Spanish born this painting is displayed in a gallery of Spanish art.

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For citations and bibliography, contact the author at:  deborahfeller@verizon.net

The Long and Short of Displaying Art:
Permanent Collections and Temporary Exhibitions

[To view the slide show in a separate tab, place the mouse pointer over the first slide, right click, select <This Frame>, then <Open Frame in New Tab>.]

https://www.slideshare.net/DFeller2/long-short-of-displaying-art-permanent-collections-temporary-exhibitions?qid=6707117c-6327-4e8c-996e-a3cf348b369f&v=&b=&from_search=1

Permanent: Lasting or intended to last or remain unchanged indefinitely.
Temporary: Lasting for only a limited period of time; not permanent.

On a chilly, rainy September morning in 1978, the thirty-year-old artist found herself well positioned on a line that had grown exponentially behind her since she had arrived early enough to score a ticket for the King Tut show soon to open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fleeting entertainment during an otherwise long and dull wait on Fifth Avenue came in the form of then Governor Hugh Carey emerging from Central Park in running shorts, accompanied by a bodyguard. One had to wonder whether the office-attired chaperone was required to run alongside his charge as the latter enjoyed his morning jog.

On the last stop of its multi-city tour, the peripatetic Treasures of Tutankhamun had attracted crowds and money wherever it opened (Fig. 1), while repeated packing and unpacking had taken its toll on the objects, adding to the already high costs of the exhibition. Such was the power and some of the drawbacks of mounting these high-profile extravaganzas.

So it was that in 1977 when Philippe de Montebello took over the reins of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Thomas Hoving (the man whose name became synonymous with blockbusters like the aforementioned) that the new director, acknowledging his predecessor’s unmatchable contributions to the growth of the museum, staked out his own territory. Where Hoving had expanded The Met with new wings, programs and gallery reconfigurations, de Montebello would take advantage of a new management structure that gave to a president administrative functions and left him, the director:
“[…]to allow for a total concentration on the collections, the activities and programs related to them, and the gifted people charged with their preservation, exhibition and interpretation.”

In that statement, de Montebello reminded his audience of the core functions of a museum, adding:
“The Museum’s basic mission is not only to acquire and conserve great works of art but also to make them more intelligible by recreating their historical context for the visitor[…]to sharpen the aesthetic experience and engage the intellect as well.”
He hoped, too:
“[…]that the public will respond to imaginative presentations and reinstallations of permanently-held works of art with the same eagerness that it now responds to special exhibitions.”

Forty years later, museums seem to have given up on letting art speak for itself, becoming addicted to temporary exhibitions and their accompanying glitzy technology that at times overwhelms the objects. In order to increase attendance to levels necessary for sustaining burgeoning operating expenses of ever-expanding physical structures, some museums have temporarily permitted shows to silence permanent collections entirely.

When The Met Costume Institute’s Manus & Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology took over the Lehman wing, Impressionist and other paintings became inaccessible (Figs. 2 and 3). Likewise, the Costume Institute’s use of the Asian galleries for the display of fashion in the 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass eclipsed the art with discotheque lighting, adding music to further the effect (Figs. 4 and 5).

Museum goers have been enticed, too, with seemingly infinite variations of shows on celebrity artists like Caravaggio, Vermeer, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso, et al. Breaking from the pack, in the fall of 2016–determined to introduce a lesser-known artist to the viewing public–Keith Christiansen co-curated with Annick Lemoine, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio (Fig. 6 and 7).

Showcasing an artist who for years had been of great interest to him, Christiansen resisted the pressure to include one of The Met’s Caravaggios since none of them would have been in the field of vision of Valentin or his Roman cohorts in the second decade of the seventeenth century. The curators couldn’t escape the opportunity, however, to add the name of the better-known artist to the show’s subtitle.

As curator and now chair of The Metropolitan Museum’s European Paintings Department, Christiansen has assembled many old masters exhibits but he has also been at least equally committed to the permanent collection, believing that a “museum redefines itself through its acquisitions and [thus] remakes with equal vigor its visitors’ experience of the great achievements of the past.”

Staying alert for any chance to fill collection gaps, Christiansen acted quickly in the summer of 2008 when learning of the availability of Valentin’s The Lute Player (ca. 1625-26, Fig. 6). Before the end of that year, the painting had become The Met’s only work by the artist. Perhaps the acquisition added fuel to the slow-burning fire of Christiansen’s desire to someday see as many as possible of his artist’s extant works brought together under one roof. In a dream come true, he and Lemoine successfully gathered forty-five of the known sixty, including all six belonging to the Louvre, providing scholars with a feast for their eyes and minds–one of the best justifications for taking the risks entailed in creating such shows.

After joining The Met’s family, Valentin’s Lute Player seems to have had some trouble getting comfortable. It settled for a time in a gallery with three Caravaggios, a location that celebrated Valentin’s Roman residency and Italian Baroque leanings (Fig. 7), but when last seen outside a special exhibition, the painting was living in a gallery with a distinctly French flavor (Fig. 8). Joining other seventeenth-century compatriots with ties to Italy (including Nicolas Poussin), Valentin ceased being acknowledged for his allegiance to Caravaggesque naturalism and dramatic lighting, and became instead identified by his country of origin.

Before appearing with its siblings in the large exhibition, The Lute Player found yet another purpose, appearing with Caravaggio’s Musician’s and Laurent de La Hyre’s Allegory of Music in a boutique show of Met-owned period instruments that were depicted in the three paintings (Fig. 9). The grouping of objects explored the possibility that knowledgeable viewers–then and now–might hear music when looking at the two-dimensional art. Not until the major retrospective would The Lute Player take its rightful place as a constituent of the Caravaggesque oeuvre of Valentin de Boulogne (Figs. 10 and 11).

The peregrinations of Valentin’s painting highlight the impermanence of collection displays and the holes left behind in the wake of special exhibitions that can empty a museum of all the holdings of one artist’s work. In the case of the Valentin de Boulogne show, visitors to the Louvre for several months did without and then when the exhibition relocated to Paris, those at The Met could do no more than take pictures of The Lute Player’s absence.

Encyclopedic museums like The Metropolitan, shelter within their walls thousands of objects, offering infinite possibilities for presentation, all of which express curators’ points of view, acknowledged or not. Each new regime brings with it fresh ideas and though altering so-called permanent installations is like turning an ocean liner, at The Met many did undergo major changes during the thirty-one years of Philippe de Montebello’s tenure as a “curator-director.”

Making good on his promise to recreate for the visitor some sense of the art’s original context, de Montebello supported gallery overhauls of Greek and Roman Art, Byzantine and Medieval Art, and Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia (which despite those heroic efforts gets called “Islamic” anyway). Although there were other reinstallations requiring extensive renovations, these three stand out as particularly effective recreations of original contexts.

Daylight streaming through skylights above Greek and Roman sculpture suggests the original outdoor settings of many of the exhibited works (Figs. 12 and 13). Brick arches–structures already existing under the great staircase–closely approximate the native crypt environments of the displayed objects (Figs. 14 and 15). New designs tooled with age-old techniques by a team of craftsmen imported from Morocco (Fig. 16), lend an air of authenticity and certainly fine craft to the new Islamic art milieu (Fig. 17).

Because of the extensive structural work involved in realizing the visions of de Montebello and his curators, and perhaps because of the popularity of the results, visitors of the future should expect to find these galleries as they are today. But since only change is here to stay, the reinstallations could go the way of the Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture galleries, an area of The Met that has been likened to “a sort of cultural coral reef,” always growing and changing.

In the space of less than thirty years, this ocean liner made three sharp turns. The galleries as constructed for their 1979 debut (Fig. 18) represented a good idea at the time but eventually proved unwieldy. The most frequent visitor complaint was lack of direction. Nothing about the arrangement indicated an order to follow for optimum viewing. From a curatorial perspective, the staccato placement of the tripartite partitions made it impossible to show off the strength of a collection that had the depth to cover the walls of an entire gallery with paintings by a single artist.

There were enough other problems to warrant a redesign and so it was back to the drawing board in 1989, with de Montebello tasking then curator Gary Tinterow and the museum’s senior exhibition designer to come up with a plan. Not surprisingly, the hands-on director had more than a few suggestions. Happily, not only was sufficient funding forthcoming to realize them all, but Walter H. Annenberg and spouse decided to donate to The Met their collection of nineteenth-century French paintings.

The new space that opened in 1993 (Figs. 19 and 20) clarified for visitors both the nature of the art before them and the generosity of the donors behind the art’s presence. Written by Tinterow (with a foreward by the director), the special publication issued to commemorate the new galleries contains a paragraph that begins:
The idea governing the design[…]was to create rooms similar in scale and appearance to those for which the artists created their pictures: well-proportioned rooms articulated with baseboards, wainscoting, cornices, and coves.

He goes on to explain about seemingly neutral contemporary choices:
“A modern room[…]is not invisible: it colors our perception of things within it.” Surely those words flowed from the pen of de Montebello, for whom recreating context always takes center stage.

In 2007, The Metropolitan Museum again announced a reopening of the Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture galleries (Fig. 21). The coral reef had experienced yet another growth spurt.

Not quite as changeable as special exhibitions, but certainly not paragons of permanence, museum collections–in their potential for creative curating–don’t differ all that much from their briefer counterparts. A former Met associate director for exhibitions initially saw no huge disparities between temporary exhibitions and permanent installations. Both shared, for example, practical issues of traffic flow, pacing/rhythm and label content.

On closer examination, however, she noted the difficulties and expenses of securing, insuring, transporting and conserving art for special shows–no minor matters. Francis Haskell devoted the entire last chapter of his Ephemeral Museum to the dire consequences of cherry-picking artworks from permanent collections and amassing them in locations far from their homes.

In addition to the obvious danger of damage to art from otherwise unnecessary handling, there are risks involved with transportation of all kinds. When trains crash, planes go down and/or vehicles spontaneously combust, the presence of a courier affords no protection.

Less noticeable and seldom subject to comment is the hit that scholarship takes when exhibition catalogs masquerade as the latest word on an artist or collection, eating up publishing funds at the expense of more comprehensive research. Since no show can ever contain all of an artist’s work, as witness the huge but still incomplete one on Valentin de Boulogne, the accompanying publication must by its nature fall short of an all-encompassing monograph and catalogue raisonné. One wonders, too, whether the proliferation of typos in these hastily assembled books signals other errors as well.

Securing loans for an exhibition has created its own collection of problems, ensnaring museums in a tangle of demands for reciprocity. Where once a borrowing institution was expected to make a convincing scholarly case for its request, nowadays museums jeopardize their own prospects for future temporary acquisitions if they fail to deliver when asked, even for the skimpiest of reasons.

Despite the many risks and disadvantages inherent in maintaining a robust program of temporary exhibitions, gathering together in one place works of art that ordinarily reside in far-flung places and/or hide away in private collections can be exceptionally valuable–evident in the 2016-17 dual-venue and -title exhibit, Ribera: Maestro del dibujo (in Madrid at El Museo del Prado) and Between Heaven and Hell: The Drawings of Jusepe de Ribera (in Dallas at the Meadows Museum).

Rather than being the raison d’être for a publication, in a rare reversal the exhibitions followed the release of a long-awaited catalogue raisonné of Ribera’s drawings. The chronologically arranged first version of the show, mounted at the Prado by Gabriele Finaldi (the book’s editor), followed an approach inaccessible to catalogue-contributor Edward Payne for his Dallas iteration, where the limited availability of certain artworks called for a theme-based display.

Paintings and prints in addition to drawings graced the walls of each museum, with a core group appearing in both places, and adjustments made to accommodate lenders who were unwilling to expose to light their works on paper for longer than the three months span of one or another exhibit. Other variations seemed more a matter of philosophy than exigency, apparent in lighting, wall text and object labels, and placement of Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas painting (1637, Fig. 25).

Taking pride of place in a publicity shot, at the end of a series of Prado open galleries (Fig. 22), the Capodimonte Museum’s star painting of the sun god relieving Marsyas of his skin, must have been greatly missed by tourists expecting to find it at home back in Naples during its six-month travels abroad. More modestly displayed at the Meadows in a dark room among torture drawings (Fig. 24), Ribera’s masterpiece struck up an incidental conversation with an Early Modern Spanish painting visiting from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Fig. 23).

The tourist-attracting Prado had little to say on labels about each drawing, perhaps depending on interested viewers to seek out explanations in the book. In contrast at the university-based-Meadows, curator Payne filled category-explaining wall text and object labels with observant descriptions and analyses, reading like excerpts from an art history text. The protectively dim lighting and atmospheric dark walls at the smaller museum invited slow looking and quiet contemplation.

Yet it was at the Prado where one Ribera scholar enjoyed the greatest treat. Surprised by a juxtaposition unlikely ever to be seen again–as is often the case with many a temporary exhibition–she stood transfixed in front of a four-by-five-inch compositional sketch (Fig. 24) in which the tentative hand of the draftsman jotted down sketchy fragments of lines, conveying ideas under development for what would eventually be the six-foot-high painting catty-cornered to it, the Apollo and Marsyas (Fig. 25).

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For citations and bibliography, contact the author at:  deborahfeller@verizon.net

[Note: To respect copyright concerns, the slide show that accompanies the following review is available only for private viewing. Interested readers should contact the writer: deborahfeller@verizon.net]

Moving Pictures:
The Moral Aesthetic of
William Kentridge

[slide 2]
“…a drawing is a membrane between the world coming toward us and our projected understanding of the world, a negotiation between ourselves and that which is outside…”
William Kentridge, 2014

Wandering into his father’s study when he was six years old, William Kentridge became curious about the contents of a large, flat, yellow box sitting on the desk.  Thinking it might contain chocolates, he lifted the lid to find not the expected treats, but photographs of victims of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the families of whom his father was representing in court (Fig. 2).

[slide 3]
In recounting the story in 2001, the artist described two of the images, “…a woman with her back blown off” and “someone with only half her head visible.”

Over a dozen years later, he told the story again, with added details and a description of several other pictures, including this sequence of two: “A man lies face downward, a dot and a dark stain in the center of his checkered jacket…the man rolled over…the whole chest disintegrated by the exit wound of the bullet,” and a third, “[a]nother chest…blown apart.”  The resulting jolt of “nonrecognition,” as the artist called it, eventually wore off, leaving in its wake a lifelong yearning to recapture the intense clarity of that childhood moment, before repeated exposures to pictures of “extraordinary adult violence” rendered them too familiar to elicit the same powerful reaction.

The theme of memory and its temporal degradation weaves through Kentridge’s oeuvre, a collection of stand-alone works on paper, drawings turned into animated films, multimedia installations, stage designs, theater productions, puppet shows–even a couple of operas, and a performance piece in which he took the role of narrator.  A prolific and versatile artist, Kentridge–who is white–grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the era of apartheid–a system of laws promulgated by the reigning Nationalist Party–aimed at consolidating white minority rule by exiling people of color to the outskirts of economic and social life.  The “brutal enforcement” of these laws increasingly separated Kentridge’s country from the rest of the world as foreign nations imposed sanctions and limited travel in mounting protest.

An exceptionally accessible and articulate artist, Kentridge has often ruminated publicly about the relationship between his life and his art. Yet in descriptions of his early brushes with the stark realities of apartheid (Fig. 3), his words fall short of the expressive power of his drawings, which render graphically far more dramatically the ravages wrought by the South African government and, indirectly, the profound impact on the artist of living among them for his first forty years.

[slide 4]

Acknowledging a preference for images over “language and logic,” Kentridge explained that among other reasons for his becoming an artist was his need to find a field “in which the construction of fictional authorities and imagined quotes would be a cause for celebration, rather than rustication and disgrace.”  More specifically, noting that his father’s being a lawyer “was not incidental to this narrative,” he wanted to construct a self “impervious to cross-examination.”  Art made it permissible for him to live with uncertainty, and his studio provided “a safe space for stupidity.”

As a young man, even as he reluctantly surrendered to the internal imperative to pursue art as a career, Kentridge wondered whether he had “the right to be an artist.”  With characteristic gravitas and a conceptualization of “art as a moral and philosophical calling,” he believed that to be an artist required “considerable self-examination and maturation.”  That he came from a long line of illustrious lawyers added to the difficulty of choosing such a divergent path, especially one for which he felt undeserving and unqualified.

By the time Kentridge committed to a life of art, he had already earned an undergraduate degree in politics and African studies, had taken courses in art, including printmaking–which he eventually taught–and had spent time working in theater.  Not quite ready to abandon acting for art, he spent a year in Paris studying mime and other theater arts, but quickly returned home to his first love, drawing.

[slide 5]
Over the years, Kentridge has sought to understand both his desire to draw and the images that emerge from his charcoal-smudged hands (Fig. 4), but for the most part he simply surrenders to a process that starts with an impulse rather than a well-formed concept.  He tracks his engagement with art to drawing lessons he took as a nine-year-old, where in answer to his teacher’s questions about what he wanted to draw and with what, his young self replied, “Landscape” and “Charcoal”–answers that a much older self still can’t explain.

Intuitive knowing has always characterized Kentridge’s studio practice, which begins with a desire to draw–usually joined by some vague notion of where he wants to go–and delivers meaning along the way.  He’s learned that “…things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what [he] know[s],” and likens the act of drawing to a mode of thought with the potential to provide new insights on life.

[slide 6]
When the impetus to draw fails to generate action,  Kentridge often paces around his studio for many minutes or hours (Fig. 5), waiting for “…the disconnected ideas and images to pull together,” despite experience having taught him that “…images or ideas will only clarify themselves in action–the charcoal on paper, the ink in the book.”  But still he’ll pace.

By allowing himself this “space for uncertainty,” Kentridge invites unconscious material onto the page–a byproduct of his process not entirely unknown to him.  What else could he be describing when he observes that “…parts of the world, and parts of us, are revealed, that we neither expressed nor knew, until we saw them–when we realized we always did know them.”  That’s exactly what happened with one of the drawings he developed for his film Felix in Exile.  To portray a body on the veld,

[slide 7]
Kentridge used a police photograph for reference.  Only much later did he recognize in his new picture the bloody bodies of the Sharpeville massacre victims that had shocked him as a child (Figs. 2 and 6).  A memory he was sure had lost its power lay dormant until an event reminiscent of the original trauma called it back.

Most artists can’t avoid intrusion of the autobiographical into their work, though the extent of its presence varies depending on their artistic practices. While not deliberately drawing attention to himself, Kentridge usually discovers after the fact–and willingly shares it with his listeners–the ways in which his personal history has melded–in his art–with stories of Johannesburg and its inhabitants.

[slide 8]
Although in the mid-1980s (when he resumed drawing with a passion) Kentridge was inspired by early French artists, later Impressionists, and more recent German Expressionists, he could not keep South Africa from insinuating itself into even these early graphic musings.  In the right panel of his triptych The Boating Party (1985, Fig. 7)–a riff on Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), the flaming tire falling from above directly references the “burning necklaces” used by authorities (and others) to sadistically torture and kill Blacks (Fig. 8).  In the center panel, the tabletop gallows from which hangs a noose requires no additional explanation.

[slide 9]
Future favorites also made their debuts in these early explorations on paper.  The nude man in the background who turns his back on the party-goers as he exits the scene (a la Velazquez’s Las Meninas) in the left panel of the three-paneled The Conservationists’ Ball (1985, Fig. 9) later became Kentridge’s never-clothed alter-ego Felix Teitlebaum.  The binoculars displayed prominently on the table, in the middle panel, foregrounds Kentridge’s future preoccupation with instruments of sight, and leads the eye to the rhinoceros on a serving stand behind it.  The hyena in the right panel further announces the African setting, as does the cheetah on the left.

Of art in the 1960s and 1970s, Kentridge recalled:

“Much of what was contemporary in Europe and America…seemed distant and incomprehensible to me..the impulses behind the work did not make the transcontinental jump to South Africa.  The art that seemed most immediate and local dated from the early twentieth century, when there still seemed to be hope for political struggle rather than a world exhausted by war and failure…one had to look backwards…”

The unique case that was South Africa demanded its own brand of art.  The boy in his grandfather’s car as it drove past a side street in Johannesburg, noticing a man lying in the gutter surrounded by four men kicking him in his body and head, had to “rearrange” his worldview to accommodate this new reality of adult violence.  The same boy, a little older, flipping through that grandfather’s gift book of great-artists’ landscape paintings, had to reconcile the idyllic beauty reproduced in it with the “barbed-wire fences [and] hill with stones and thorns” he encountered on country-picnic outings with his family.

With his heart belonging to both dramatic and graphic arts, and perhaps feeling moved to merge them in the service of potentiating each, in 1988 Kentridge began creating Drawings for Projection, a fifteen-year project that concluded as 9 Drawings for Projection.  Devoting time and energy to the graphic arts had never pulled this artist away from filmmaking and theater.  Nor would work on his new long-term project mean there were not to be other animated films emerging from his studio during those years.  Kentridge has always stayed busy.

Coming at the time that it did–during the last few years of apartheid and several more leading up to the first free elections and later establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 9 Drawings for Projection encapsulates the artist’s personal reflections on his country of birth, its immoral treatment of native Africans and its rapacious exploitation of its mineral resources.  Throughout, Kentridge mulls over witnessing, memory, personal responsibility, love and forgiveness.

[slide 10]
In the first film, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), the artist introduced the dramatis personae for the series, one of which is the city itself (Figs. 10 and 11), about which Kentridge confessed,

“I have been unable to escape Johannesburg.  The four houses I have lived in, my school, studio, have all been within three kilometers of each other.  And in the end all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city.”

Indeed, he is held as captive as Felix in Johannesburg (Fig. 12), simultaneously confounded and enthralled by a city the serendipity of birth made his.  The oddness of this hometown rests partially on a vein of gold–the mining of which has left hills of pulverized stone dotting the land–and the need over a century ago to put to work a surfeit of dangerously unemployed soldiers.  Kept occupied planting a million suburban trees, they created “the largest man-made forest in the world.”

From the first of these films until the last in 2003, Kentridge scattered much charcoal attempting to come to grips with an internal agitation that has never quite left him.  He wrestled with the dilemma of time’s inevitable absorption of the years of apartheid horrors and in the end could find no respite from misery in the middle of an unrelenting AIDS epidemic.

[slide 11]
Drawing on many years of visual material, including his own memories, Kentridge created Soho Eckstein (Fig. 13), only afterwards realizing–as is his way–that the unstoppable capitalist in a pin-striped suit had his origins in an old photograph of his paternal grandfather, sitting on a beach in full business attire.  Kentridge’s name for this hard-hearted entrepreneur–Eckstein means “cornerstone” in German–alludes to the intractability of South Africa, just as does the rock he inserts intermittently throughout the series.

The businessman’s foil, Felix Teitlebaum (Fig. 12)–whose surname derives from a Yiddish/Germanic word for “date palm” and given name resembles that of the artist’s mother’s,  Felicia (both associations inadvertent)–never acquires a wardrobe lest he get fixed in time by the specificity of fashion that a pin-striped suit somehow manages to avoid.  While Soho’s driving passion is acquisition, that of Felix is love, though mostly experienced as reverie and longing.

At the outset, needing Felix to have the same consistency of appearance and personality that the far easier-to-stereotype Soho does, Kentridge turned to the mirror.  With his dreamer taken from his own self-reflection, the draftsman–finding himself inextricably identified with his new character–“had to take responsibility for his actions,” a turn of events that enhanced the autobiographical potential of the film.

[slide 12]
The action opens with lover boy already ensconced in an affair with Mrs. Eckstein, a woman who never develops a name of her own as she moves in and then out of the illicit affair–and unfolds before the desolate Johannesburg landscape traversed by desperate Africans.  Kentridge graphically contrasted the needy tenderness of Felix (Fig. 16) with the greedy hardness of Soho (Fig. 17), although the vulnerable cloak of nakedness worn by the former doesn’t stop him from besting his fully-suited rival in an old-fashioned fist fight.

[slide 13]
The dark cloud of the violent reality of their milieu coalesces into a bookcase stacked with disembodied heads, overflowing onto the surrounding plain (Fig. 18).  A composition originally explored in the etching Casspirs Full of Love (1989, Fig. 19), the subject alludes to the theme of callous impenetrability.  Casspirs are mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles that for decades were used to control the South African populace.  “Casspirs full of love” was a radio greeting sent by parents to their servicemen sons during 1974 military operations protecting the country’s borders against the newly liberated Portuguese colonies next door.  In the end, the bookcase and heads will disappear into the earth, leaving behind a ground unmarked by slaughter.

[slide 14]
In Monument (1990), the next film in the series, Soho aggrandizes himself by unveiling a commemorative statue dedicated to the black African worker.  Bent under the weight of an outsized burden, a flesh-and-blood man petrifies into the statue (Fig. 20), but the stone of his artificially constructed being soon yields to an irresistible urge to raise his head against the weight, lift his swollen eyelids and confront the not-so-innocent bystander.

Sensitive to the history accruing around him, Kentridge embodied within his work–not always intentionally–the story of South Africa’s slowly evolving deliverance from the black hole of apartheid.  Pivotal among the nine films, Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991) and Felix in Exile (1994) reflect the dramatic shifts effected by a 1989 change in the country’s administration, within a year of which freedom-fighter Nelson Mandela was released from prison.  In 1994 free elections were held for the first time.

The release dates of these two films roughly coincided with those developments, capturing Kentridge’s hope for, and adjustment to, a newly imaginable world.  In Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), Felix and Mrs. Eckstein continue their affair against a backdrop of emboldened workers–chanting, carrying signs and parading through the bleak urban landscape.  Soho–torturing himself with erotic fantasies of his errant wife with her lover, humanized in his longing for her, presides over a collapsing empire and cries aloud for his eloped wife to “come home.”

[slide 15]
Early on in the film, Kentridge set a mining mountain and its barren location against the very modern cityscape of Johannesburg (Fig. 22), with its erect buildings in the background.  Later, when Soho’s monument to capitalism dissolves into dust in a scene all too evocative of the still-to-happen demise of the World Trade Towers (Fig. 23), it leaves behind a ghost of imperfectly erased charcoal (Fig. 24), expressive of Kentridge’s consternation over the mind’s ability to normalize absence even in the presence of cataclysmic events.

[slide 16]
Daring to conjure a new reality but still haunted by violent memories not so easily expunged, in Felix in Exile (1994) Kentridge conjures up Nandi, a land surveyor who uses a theodolite to bravely take the measure of her people’s losses.  Alone in a room sparsely furnished with chair, desk, bed, sink and fly-surrounded light bulb hanging from the ceiling, artist Felix rifles through his stash of drawings (Fig. 25), a window into the activities of his new beloved, Nandi.  Seeing through her eyes, quite literally in a mirror scene where each views the other from opposite ends of a double-sided scope, Felix must reckon now with the same carnage that she does (Fig. 26).

Through the power of animation, Kentridge transformed the remembered stills of the Sharpeville massacre into moving pictures of bodies bleeding on the veld.  A seismograph attempts to record the earth’s convulsed reaction but the line remains flat even after a bullet finds Nandi (Fig. 27) and the ground absorbs all traces of her life and violent death.  Throughout the film, a poignant native song cues the desired emotional response.

More redolent still of childhood memories of violence, History of the Main Complaint (1996) finds Soho in a hospital bed under intense internal scrutiny by doctors with their surveying instruments, and by his psyche through an eidetic nightmare that begins with a view through the windshield of a moving vehicle.

[slide 17]
A pair of eyes visible in the rear-view mirror registers the sudden appearance of a Black man lying on the road ahead (Fig. 28), being kicked in the face by two assailants, then subjected to body blows with a stick (Fig. 29), then kicked again and again in the head and body, each strike recording red crosses on related x-rays of torso and skull.  The latter of the two anatomical images soon morphs into Soho’s profile, glimpsed through the car window.  When night falls, taking visibility with it, Soho’s car hits one of a number of figures that dart out in front of him.  The sound of breaking glass wakes him with a start.  Despite the return of these repressed memories, the hospital patient magically mends and returns to his desk to conduct business as usual, albeit with noticeably less frenzy.

[slide 18]
No hint of Felix appears in the rest of the series as Soho becomes increasingly subdued, even self-reflective.  In Stereoscope (1999), amid bright-blue-on-black representations of communication devices and networks, besieged by lists of numbers and reminiscences of brutality (Figs. 30, 31 and 32), Soho is sometimes seen in a split screen that Kentridge left to the viewer to combine into “a true representation of the world,” effectively avoiding the daunting task of integrating disparate aspects of himself.

In its own way chronicling the challenges faced by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the film ends with a block-lettered, blue-on-black “give,” soon joined by its partner “for,” to finally form “forgive,” repeated several times in that order of word appearance (Fig. 33).  In the end, Soho stands with eyes downcast and head bowed, watching water–a recurring motif in these films–cascade from first his breast pocket and then the others, till his sorrow floods the room and threatens to drown him (Fig. 34).

Tide Table (2003), the final film of the series, begins with pin-stripe-suited Soho, like Kentridge’s original reference photo for him, sitting on a beach (Fig. 35).  Children watched by their women caregivers, play in the sand and cavort in the water to the strains of upbeat music.  Within minutes, the tone darkens as these carefree activities come under the scrutiny of military men perched on the balconies of a nearby art deco resort, peering through binoculars.  The scene switches to an overcrowded hospital ward–a medical setting in complete contrast to the spacious private room Soho occupied in the History of the Main Complaint.

[slide 19]
For Kentridge, the AIDS epidemic in South Africa raised the question of “inappropriate mortality, of people dying very young…unnecessarily” because of “the inability of the society to deal with it.”  In vignettes of sick and dying men, the artist conveyed the sorrow of survivors (Figs. 37 and 38) yet still found his way back to up-tempo, wistful shots of a boy playing on the rocks and in the sand, and Soho at the water’s edge, skimming stones across the swells.  The film series ends as the tide takes with it memories of loved ones lost to AIDS, just as the land had consumed all traces of the country’s violent history.

Despite Kentridge’s expressed concern about the unreliability of memory and time’s inevitable dulling of initial shock and/or outrage (a clouding of clarity) in response to traumatic events, when realizing “some months or years later” the connection between the bodies he drew in Felix in Exile and the photographs of the Sharpeville massacre victims, he was “sure that, in a sense, it was trying to tame that horror of seeing those images.”  In using the third person “it” rather than first person “I,” Kentridge unintentionally demonstrated the power of the unconscious to keep unbearable memories at a safe remove.

In this series of nine films, the adult artist deliberately and repeatedly affirmed memory’s inevitable erosion, using the natural behavior of land and water as visual metaphors for the process.  But his child-artist self refused to abide by that precept, consistently ejecting onto the page violent memories that defiantly remained very much alive in the deep recesses of his brain, ready to be summoned by the slightest evocation of those original experiences.

____________________________________

Notes and references available upon request.

A special note of appreciation
for making the films available to the writer goes to:

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
Tel : 212-977-7160

William Kentridge’s art can be visited there.

All That Glitters…
Art Museums Making It Art

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.  But I know it when I see it…¹

When Justice Potter Stewart penned those word in a 1964 concurring opinion on a case involving a motion picture, he had in mind pornography.  Today the statement could easily apply to a certain attitude held by many people toward art, unaware as they are of the vulnerability to manipulation of their belief.

Attempting to define the “kinds of material embraced within that shorthand description” art has been a favorite pastime of deep thinkers from at least as far back as Plato, with neuroscientists recently adding their voices to the cacophony.²  When creative types stepped outside accepted norms (as they are wont to do), they further complicated this age-old struggle to determine the nature of art.

The terminology problem achieved critical mass when in April 1917 Marcel Duchamp–pushing the limits of the Society of Independent Artists’ policy of accepting all proffered objects–presented to its hanging committee a urinal he purchased from the J. L. Mott Iron Works company, having affixed to it the signature “R. Mutt” and anointed it Fountain.³  In another sphere of activity but also during the early part of the twentieth century, a boom in archaeological digs coupled with a proliferation of publications for a general audience introduced yet another set of objects for consideration as art.⁴  Contemporaneously, indigenous works from Africa began to migrate from ethnic collections to art galleries,⁵ setting in motion a reevaluation of comparable items brought from analogous cultures elsewhere.

The legacy of these developments can be found today gracing the interiors of art museums, where (among other factors) a simple change in accompanying label can alter the meaning of an object on display.⁶

 Tucked away in a corner in the American Identities galleries of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York on the wall of a section headed “Everyday Life/A Nation Divided,” behind a framed sheet of glass, a length of coiled hose invites associations with its primary purpose of extinguishing fires.  One could be forgiven for expecting the accompanying wall text to announce, “In case of fire, break glass.”

Instead, the explanatory label begins with a name–Theaster Gates, adds a title–In Case of Race Riot II, and includes a list of materials used in its assemblage.  The story of the piece follows.  The viewer is cued to consider the object a work of art by the box that frames it, the label that describes it, the spotlighting that illuminates it, and the art museum that placed it in the company of other similarly designated pieces.  The power of this image to evoke an emotional response in beholders is enhanced by any personal recollections of the civil rights events of the 1960s to which it refers.  Such reminiscences are encouraged by the declared theme of the gallery, “A Nation Divided.”

Clearly art museums do far more than simply collect and display artwork.  These structures have been variously described as: ritual spaces ”designed to induce in viewers an intense absorption with artistic spirits of the past;”⁷  “philosophical instruments” that “propose taxonomies of the world” and “encourage aesthetic engagement with their contents,”⁸ “optical instrument[s] for the refracting of society;”⁹ places for the “staging of objects relative to other objects in a plotting system that transforms juxtaposition and simple succession into an evolutionary narrative of influence and descent…a configured story culminating in our present;”¹⁰ guarantors of the “artificial longevity” of ultimately perishable commodities,¹¹ which attempt to “contradict the irreversibility of time and its end result in death;”¹² and–most relevant to this exploration–an institution with the purpose of teaching “the difference between pencils and works of art”¹³ or more generally, “works of art and mere real things.”¹⁴

Enter Marcel Duchamp with his readymades and insistence that “‘[a]n ordinary object’ can be ‘elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist,’”¹⁵ which is to say that intention trumps all.  Of course, minus the hallowed halls of art museums and related gallery spaces such pieces would lose the foils so essential to their argument.¹⁶

The heights of absurdity possible when artists (or art museums or the art market) become sole arbiters of an object’s artistic status found dramatic expression in 1998 when Alan Alda played Marc, an outraged skeptic in the Broadway production of Art.  When Marc’s longtime friend proudly displayed the latest (and very expensive) addition to his modern art collection–a totally white canvas, the ensuing conflict over the nature of art (which included a third pal as intermediary) threatened to derail a fifteen-year friendship.¹⁷  Such is the passion invoked by the question, “What is art?”

An alternative way of posing the question–“When is art?”¹⁸–underscores the importance of context.  One can designate as art a found, constructed, fabricated or handcrafted work, but its definitive determination as such seems to rely on its ultimate resting place.  Art museums display art.  Natural history museums house ethnographic collections and archaeological finds.  Design museums celebrate human’s ingenuity.  Large enough encyclopedic museums show it all.  Or so it would seem.

The visitor to a Surrealism exhibit, encountering Duchamp’s snow shovel suspended in the museum gallery, can’t see how it differs from the one that leans against the wall in a suburban garage.  Titled In Advance of the Broken Arm, the readymade proves that “a thing may function as a work of art at some times and not at others.”¹⁹

At the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s Design Museum in New York, ensconced in a vitrine (those ubiquitous glass cases that prepare visitors for an art experience), an oblate spheroid tapering to a point at one end, with the appearance of wood but actually composed of “the first entirely synthetic plastic,”²⁰ rests on a base of metal that functions as a stand.  Relocated to the sculpture wing of a modern/contemporary art museum, this Radio Compass Loop Antenna Housing from about 1940 would nestle comfortably up against the Jean Arps and Henry Moores.  But even more striking is its formal resemblance to the Constantin Brancusi Sleeping Muse II (c. 1926) that resides in the Harvard Art Museums.

This ambiguity is also evident on the first floor of the Cooper Hewitt amid an assemblage of aids to mobility and handling, where a framed gouache drawing by Henry Dreyfuss called Design for Acratherm Gauge presents the observer with a tour de force of trompe l’oeil effect.  This picture’s placement in a room with other useful instruments and its clear designation as a product of design attempt unsuccessfully to differentiate it from an artist’s finished work on paper.

Upstairs at the same design museum, great pains have been taken to ensure that visitors don’t mistake a bona fide artwork for an architect’s rendering of a domestic interior.  The first word on the label for Walter Launt Palmer’s painting of the Interior of Henry de Forest House (1878) is “painting.”

The Cooper Hewitt is filled with objects harboring this potential for dual identities.  A relative of Duchamp’s snow shovel (functional identity)/In Advance of the Broken Arm (art identity) appears in Damián Ortega’s Controller of the Universe (2007) as one element in a starburst of tools through the axis of which visitors can wander.  This central attraction of the design museum’s “Tools” floor makes a solo appearance in a room with white walls in a photo posted on the museum’s website.²¹  Reassembled to fit into an art gallery, this spatially condensed version transforms the viewers’ experience from active participation to passive contemplation of an esteemed work of art.

Likewise, stepping into the Harvard Art Museums–whose august exterior signals visitors to expect an elevated cultural experience, then ambling through acres of paintings, sculptures and less definable objects, and coming upon a vitrine with an array of utilitarian things of venerable pedigree, one is already well primed to see two attractive French salt cellars from about 1550 as works of art.  That impression gets considerable assistance from a painting on the wall immediately behind them–of Martin Luther (1546, from the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder), and an additional boost from an identifying label that calls their maker an “Unidentified artist.”

Less clear is the message communicated by the Brooklyn Museum of Art in its “Connecting Cultures” exhibit, a room hosting a hodgepodge of paintings, sculpture, ethnic objects and useful things from across millennia. Putting aside the impossibility of getting close enough to see some of them (placed on shelves that soar above eye level), one confronts a dilemma in a vitrine containing a twentieth-century American-made, shiny steel Meat Slicer and a two-hundred-year-old, dark-hued Edo period iron-and-wood Pothook Hanger (Jizai-Gake).

Visitors might be less inclined to regard the all-too-familiar deli appliance as art and feel similarly about the slicer’s neighbor, the large hook.  Situate the much older, exotic Japanese piece in the Asian wing of any art museum, hang it on a wall under spotlighting and affix to the display a typical artwork label, and responses will likely change.

Ample evidence of this “museum effect–the tendency to isolate something from its world, to offer it up for attentive looking and thus to transform it into art like our own”²² exists in the University Collections Gallery of African Art at the Harvard Art Museums.  There a select group of products from several countries in Africa, sparsely arranged in various shaped glass enclosures, hangs on the walls–a collection small enough in number for a single wall label to comfortably contain descriptions of all the pieces.

A stunningly beautiful axe, with a wooden handle and complex wrought iron head, shares its glass box frame with a less ornate companion, emitting conflicting messages about its identity.  Everything about the setup, especially the segregation of the axes in their own display cases, emphasizes the uniqueness of each piece, connecting it with the art just seen in nearby galleries.

Shown in an exhibit hall at a natural history museum among many other examples of its type, these implements might be classified as artifacts, things that have “primarily the status of tools, of instruments or objects of use.”²³  In a more inclusive definition, the dictionary describes them as “object[s] made by a human being, typically…of cultural or historical interest,”²⁴ a category that can range from “sophisticated and culturally valuable artworks..to the smallest everyday thing.”²⁵

The pool of opinion on what qualifies something as art teems with dangerous life forms, but the variables of “complex abstract thinking,”²⁶ embodiment of a thought and expression of meaning,²⁷ and evocation of emotions²⁸ that include aesthetic delight,²⁹ serve to classify most of them.  While that last trait is both an unnecessary and insufficient determinant of artistic status, it can easily seduce observers into believing they are in the presence of real art (whatever that might be).  Art museums, intentionally or not, often cash in on that response.

On a wall near the ticket counter at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a glittery silver city bike hangs behind a barrier, its artist Ai Weiwei having given it the noncommittal tag of Untitled.  In the list of materials provided by either him or the museum–“mixed media, primarily stainless steel”³⁰–the word bicycle is conspicuously absence, perhaps in hopes of enticing some unsuspecting bike-riding enthusiast, smitten by the beauty of the artifact glowing before her, to perceive the object as a work of art by world-famous Chinese artist Ai (as the label, lighting, ribbon barrier and placement on an art museum wall encourage) and part with the asking price of $27,500, an amount designed to offset the cost of the artist’s now past exhibition, Ai Weiwei: According to What?

Tooling around the city mounted on this splendid bike might turn it back into a “mere real thing,” diminishing its monetary though not aesthetic value.  Hanging it back on a wall would restore its identity as art, the preference of any art collector (or curator).  But for the rider, whose delight derives from speeding along on wheels, immobilizing such an exquisitely crafted bicycle would rob it of its raison d’être and, incidentally, extinguish the pleasure of exhibiting a prized possession in an arena markedly different from the interior of any art museum.

__________________________________

¹ Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), p. 197.

2 Anjan Chatterjee, The  Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

³ Thierry de Duve, “‘This is Art’: Anatomy of a Sentence,” ArtForum, April 2014, 2.

⁴ Ably demonstrated in From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics, an exhibition at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, February 12- June 7, 2015.

⁵ In 1914, Alfred Stieglitz mounted at his Gallery 291 “what he claimed to be the first exhibition anywhere to present African sculpture as fine art rather than ethnography.”  See Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.  Accessed March 15, 2015, https://www.nga.gov/ exhibitions/modart_2.shtm.

⁶ Chatterjee, The  Aesthetic Brain, 140.

⁷ Carol Duncan, “The  Art Museum as Ritual,” Art Bulletin LXXVII, no. 1 (March 1995): 12.

⁸ Ivan Gaskell, “The Riddle of a Riddle,” Contemporary Aesthetics 6 (2008): 7.

⁹ Donald Preziosi, “Brain of the Earth’s Body: Museums and the Framing of Modernity,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 77.

¹⁰ Ibid., 78.

¹¹ Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008), 38.

¹² Duncan, 12.

¹³ E. H. Gombrich, “The Museum: Past, Present and Future,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 465.

¹⁴ Arthur C. Danto, “Artifact and Art,” in ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (New York: The Center for African Art, 1988), 23.

¹⁵ Museum of Modern Art, catalog entry for In Advance of the Broken Arm.  Accessed March 17, 2015.  http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/marcel-duchamp-in- advance-of-the-broken-arm-august-1964-fourth-version-after-lost-original-of-november-1915.

¹⁶ Groys, “On the New.”

¹⁷ “Art (play),” Wikipedia.  Accessed March 19, 2015: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Art_(play).

¹⁸ Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978), 66.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Object label, Radio Compass Loop Antenna Housing, Smithsonian Design Museum, Cooper Hewitt, New York.

²¹ “Controller of the Universe, 2007,” Cooper Hewitt website.  Accessed March 19, 2015: https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/35460745/.

²² Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1991), 27.

²³ Google definition.  Accessed March 19, 2015: https://www.google.com/ search?q=define:+arbiters+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=define:+artifact.

²⁴ Danto, “Artifact and Art,” 28.

²⁵ Gaskell, “The Riddle of the Riddle,” 4.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Danto, “Artifact and Art,” 32.

²⁸ Chatterjee, The  Aesthetic Brain, 131.

²⁹ E. H. Gombrich, “The Museum: Past, Present and Future,” 450.

³⁰ Object label, Ai Weiwei, Untitled, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.