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Although not well known to the general public, the eighteenth-century French painter and draughtsman Gabriel de Saint-Aubin has long compelled specialists working on virtually every aspect of Parisian social and cultural life. His exuberant depictions took the form of drawings in chalk, ink, and watercolor, as well as etchings and a few oil paintings, while his subjects ranged over most aspects of the cultured world around him: social interaction both high and low; theater; royal ceremony; legal proceedings; portraiture; history; architecture and ornamental design; and the unique product for which he is best known, miniature depictions of other artists’ works sketched into the margins of auction catalogues, books of poetry and prose, and especially the livrets published to accompany the biannual exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Saint-Aubin, in addition, created several ambitious depictions of the exhibitions themselves, works that offer not only a view into how art met its public in eighteenth-century France, but also, more specifically, what works were displayed when, and how they were physically organized and mounted on the walls of the Salon Carré in the Louvre. Despite their enormous importance to scholars, and their witty, humanist appeal, Saint-Aubin’s works have rarely been...
Two weeks after opening its Gates of Paradise exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a symposium to explore various issues surrounding the creation, reception, and conservation of Ghiberti’s masterpiece. An international panel of art historians, curators, and conservators offered a range of general and specialist talks to accompany the remarkable loan of three narrative reliefs and four framing elements from the final set of bronze doors created for the Florentine Baptistery. Ian Wardropper, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Metropolitan’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts (ESDA), welcomed conference attendees. Cristina Acidini, Superintendent of the Polo Museale Fiorentino and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, provided a brief institutional history of the Opificio and an overview of its conservation practices. James David Draper, Henry R. Kravis Curator, ESDA, introduced each speaker. All three praised the extraordinary nature of the collaborative exhibition; expressed gratitude for support of the twenty-five year conservation effort; thanked the Polo Museale for allowing these works to travel to Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and Seattle on their first and last visit to the United States; and emphasized how the exhibition, catalogue, and symposium provided important dialogue between art historians and conservators. The...
In 1936, for the cover of the Museum of Modern Art's Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition catalogue, Alfred Barr famously created a flowchart of modernist movements fueling his two chosen strains of non-geometrical and geometrical abstraction. Barr’s recasting of history, which left out not only those modernist movements that did not fit his formalist history but also any mention of the contexts behind their success might be described as an example of what Van Wyck Brooks termed a “usable past.” In his 1918 essay appearing under that phrase, Brooks rejected the literary history of his day as the product of a “commercial philosophy” that offered little to the creative minds of the present (“On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial [April 11, 1918]: 337–41). Recognizing that the past was a construct that “yields only what we are able to look for in it,” Brooks called for the discovery or invention of one more suited to contemporary writers’ goals. Barr’s internationalism would seem at odds with the politics of Brooks and other “Young Americans.” But a recent conference asserted that the period contemporaneous with his rise to power can profitably be seen as a laboratory for Brooks’s method. The term “usable...
“Public history” is a well-established and familiar sub-discipline to students of history. Many universities offer degrees and concentrations in this or a related field. Historians who train in public scholarship expect to pursue work in places where a relatively broad audience encounters the past, including national parks and monuments, historic houses, and museums. As public historians, they pursue research and author historical materials. They may be involved in curating exhibitions, directing educational programs, and advocating for historic preservation, among other, more general administrative duties. Fundamentally, their job is to interpret history for a range of audiences, and to mediate between the academy and the public. As an art historian and curator who works in museums and thinks about them in an academic setting, I have recently begun to wonder how this professional model compares to the structure of my own discipline. A 1999 conference at the Clark Art Institute on “The Two Art Histories” attested to a gap between the academy and the museum, one that is both wide and strongly felt.[1] At times, this gap provokes some strange points of resentment. A respected medievalist recently remarked to me, in a resigned tone, that more people came across Byzantine art...
On April 22, 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sponsored a symposium to discuss issues surrounding the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797. The symposium brought together a group of experts on the interactions between Venice and Islam. In his introduction to the symposium, Stefano Carboni, curator of the exhibition and administrator of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum, emphasized the three concepts governing the exhibition: to show the reasons why Venice had so many trade relationships with the Islamic world, to examine the relationship between trade and diplomacy, and to discuss Venice’s pragmatic approach to the exchanges of materials and techniques involved in the production and trade of high-quality decorative arts. Patricia Fortini Brown of Princeton University was the first speaker; she presented a paper titled “Reclaiming the Holy Land: Orientalism in the Early Modern Period.” In it, she emphasized the strong presence of the Holy Land and the Islamic East in Venice in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This was initiated by the translation of St. Mark’s relics from Alexandria to Venice in 828. This story is told twice in the mosaics of San Marco: once on a tympanum on the façade and once...
The ninth Clark Art Institute spring conference was organized by Marq Smith, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Visual Culture, along with Michael Ann Holly and Mark Ledbury, director and associate director, respectively, of the Clark’s Research and Academic Programs. In her opening remarks, Holly noted that a handful of those initially invited to speak declined on the grounds that research was simply what they did and there was really nothing much more they could imagine saying about it. Something of this sense is reflected as well in remarks by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai cited by both Smith and Holly: Appadurai notes in particular that research “has the inevitability of the obvious” and that “it is especially hard to use research to understand research.”[1] While this does not seem to me entirely right—Appadurai himself goes on to note the possibility of writing a history of the “huge transformation of our fundamental protocols about the production of reliable new knowledge” before continuing with his argument—it does, I think, usefully indicate how far the conference was inevitably an effort to figure out what it might be to ask a question of “research” and how to ask such a question in ways specific to...
By most accounts, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606, as stated by the Leiden chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers in 1641. Recently, a few close reviews of the documentation have suggested that the date should be moved to 1607, but this revelation failed to stop the juggernaut already set in motion by museums eager to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The “Rembrandt Year” of 2006 witnessed the staging of dozens of exhibitions across the world, both major loan shows and focused opportunities for museums to showcase their holdings of works by Rembrandt and his circle. (For an extensive list, see: www.codart.nl/rembrandt_2006.) Several mini-exhibitions shed new light on individual works, such as the charmingly incontinent Ganymede (1635) in Dresden and the mysterious, late Family Portrait (ca. 1667) in Braunschweig. A variety of museums bravely brought out their near-Rembrandts and paintings by his school, either to trace the history of the collection (Kassel) or to address the persistent challenge of distinguishing works by the master from the many adaptations and copies by his followers (Copenhagen, Moscow). The one major overview of Rembrandt’s career (Rembrandt: Quest of a Genius, Berlin/Amsterdam) juxtaposed well-loved masterpieces with new...
What do we mean when we say “the nineteenth century”? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What does it contain or exclude? How do we make such choices—on what basis? Surveying four major textbooks, this review offers a look back at the ways these questions have been answered over the past two decades, beginning with the first publication of Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson’s 19th-Century Art in 1984 and ending with the second edition of Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s Nineteenth-Century European Art in 2006.[1] Although other forms of scholarship (journal articles, monographs, exhibition catalogues, and the like) perform such work, the textbook’s overt task is to define the field. The textbook, that is, exercises a disciplinary mechanism, self-consciously engaged in the project of canon-building, perpetuation, revision, or reform.[2] The problem of definition is particularly thorny in the case of these four textbooks, since the enduring centrality of the concept of the “long nineteenth century” shapes the ways we study and teach the period. According to this trope, the nineteenth century begins and ends with two equally bloody, paradigm-shifting events, thereby stretching from the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century in France and America to the battlefields of World...
Rediscovering Venetian Renaissance Painting was the closing event of several associated with the exhibition Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, June 18–September 17, 2006. Previous events included a Robert H. Smith Curatorial/Conservation Colloquy entitled Venetian Underdrawing at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Among the participants were Paolo Spezzani, X-ray and infrared specialist from Venice; Jill Dunkerton, conservator from London National Gallery; Barbara Berrie and Elizabeth Walmsley of the Washington National Gallery; and Carmen Bambach, curator of the Metropolitan Museum Drawing Department. On September 10 Juergen Schulz and Deborah Howard delivered public lectures at the National Gallery on the Barbari map of Venice, and on September 15 the Italian Embassy held an all-day conference on Italian history. Curator David Alan Brown opened the Rediscovering Venetian Renaissance Painting symposium Saturday morning, expressing the hope that it would build from and expand the material of the show itself. He articulated the guiding concept of the exhibition and its installation: to focus on a 30-year period, 1500–30, and to organize the material thematically in order to see relationships among contemporary artists and works. The talks that followed...
My work for the last few years has gone beyond defining modernity in Asian art to looking at the circuits for the recognition and distribution of contemporary art in Asia. In particular these involve two simultaneous phenomena.[1] The first is the arrival of contemporary Asian artists on the international stage, chiefly at major cross-national exhibitions, including the Venice and São Paolo Biennales. This occurrence may be conveniently dated to Japanese participation at Venice in the 1950s,[2] followed by the inclusion of three contemporary Chinese artists in the Magiciens de la terre exhibition in Paris in 1989. The trend continued with the arrival of Chinese contemporary art at the Venice Biennale in 1993. This arrival and circulation intensified until 2005 when China opened its first, officially supported exhibition at Venice; in the future, it will have its own pavilion.[3] By 2005, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and indirectly India were regular participants at Venice in addition to Japan and Korea from the 1950s and 1980s respectively. The second phenomenon is the rise of the biennale as an international exhibition form in Asia with the participation of contemporary Asian artists. This actually started with the Biennale of Sydney in 1973 when...
