Art History 40 Image and Memory: 40 Years of Art-Historical Writing

09.30 – 18.30, Saturday 12 December 2015 (registration from 09.00)

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 0RN

Abstracts

Samuel Bibby (Art History, Association of Art Historians UK) The Pursuit of Understanding’: Art History and the Periodical of Late-1970s Britain

This paper proposes a two-fold approach to the historiography of our subject. On one hand, art history can be traditionally conceived as a set of ideas, the evolution of which might be charted through textual analysis of its archives. But on the other, it might be thought of too as a set of material objects lending themselves to an all-too- often-overlooked additional process of visual analysis. This latter avenue of historiographic enquiry, I will argue, is all the more important precisely because of the discipline’s concern with questions of materiality and visuality in relation to the objects of its enquiry. Art History and its genesis is my case in point. I begin by proposing a general framework whereby new journals can be considered – the periodical landscape; when a new title comes into being it is usually because those involved feel that their intellectual concerns and endeavours are failing to be adequately represented within the existing field of serial publications. Thus is born the desire to create a new space – a journal – in order to redress this perceived imbalance. The contours of the periodical landscape remain ever present during this process of coming into being – journals define themselves, and are judged, precisely in relation to pre-existing titles in their field. This situation, I will show, is at once not only textual but also, crucially, both visual and material. Alongside its generally-championed paradigm-shifting methodologies, Art History is here considered precisely in terms of its design and production, and in particular in relation to already-established periodicals of late-1970s British art history, as well as those of adjacent fields. In doing so, I suggest that the process of disciplinary recollection and memory – the pursuit of understanding – should take the form of an historiographical analysis firmly rooted in its own visual and material past.

John Onians (University of East Anglia) Art History on the Couch: How the New Art History remembered its roots and woke up to a Neural future

For nearly forty years Art History has been at the forefront of change in the discipline, productively integrating new approaches from Structuralism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Post-Structuralism and elsewhere. For much of that time the emphasis has been on the merits of theories of ‘social construction’ and the weakness of ‘perceptual’ accounts with their ultimately biological basis. Increasingly this opposition is seen as unhelpful. Leaders of the New Art History such as Bryson and WJT Mitchell have withdrawn their earlier assertions and it has become clear that such pioneers of a social approach as Aby Warburg and Levi-Strauss, Baxandall and Gell always realised that the regularities in the mind’s behaviours that interested them must be founded in the principles of neurobiology. This last point was something people preferred to forget. Now that those principles are increasingly being revealed by neuroscience and a wave of new phenomenological approaches associated with an interest in the somatic and the sensory make them daily more relevant to our enquiries the challenge is to exploit a knowledge of them to ensure Art History retains its role at the head of the field.

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml

Dana Arnold (Middlesex University) Misprisions of London

Early nineteenth-century London is often seen as the poor cousin of other European cities. The backward glance of the historian presents a story of what might have been, rather than what was achieved. Contemporaries viewed things differently; London was 'the new Rome', the first city of a new Empire, and the new classical architecture and urban planning made reference to its ancient counterpart. But Rome was in ruins. For London to equal the status of Rome would it too need to become a ruin? Did its future lie in fragments? My interest is in the relationship between London and its historical misprisions, by which I mean our failure to appreciate the city’s identity. The concept of the ruin is essential here as the veneration of Rome was built on its wreckage and the eternal city inspired the development of early nineteenth-century London. Here I take my lead from the many contemporary writers, artists and architects who projected London in to the future through a vision of its destruction.

Two well-known early nineteenth-century examples are indexical of the ways ruins can project social, political and cultural urban identities. Sir John Soane commissioned Joseph Gandy to depict The Bank of England in Ruins (1830), which he later used in his Royal Academy lectures. The monumentality of both the building and the institution are enhanced through decay. Similarly, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s comment on the ‘And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.’ speaks of decline. But this time the architectural devastation shows us the end of the empire and the then most populated city in the world as deserted.

Images of architecture in fragments are undeniably powerful, but my interest goes beyond the aesthetic of the ruin as an object. Using Walter Benjamin’s idea that ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’, I aim to read the ruins of London as a process rather than an aesthetic. Ruination becomes a critical tool through which we can explore misprisions of London’s past and future through fragments of (invented) memory.

David Peters Corbett (University of East Anglia) Memory and Decreation: George Bellows’ Excavation Paintings, 1907-1909

This paper is interested in the role that destruction and the abject play in the work of the American Ashcan painter George Bellows and in the relation of these things to the perception of memory and the past. It charts the vivid love affair with destruction in a series of four paintings Bellows made between 1907 and 1909. The excavations for a new Pennsylvania Station building in mid-town Manhattan fascinated and horrified New Yorkers for six years and Bellows responded to the compelling spectacle it provided with what has been called the first “great drama” of his career. In the excavation series and particularly in Excavation at Night (1908, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), Bellows offers us an image of destruction as a fantasy of remaking the vanished past. “Decreation” in the sense the term is used by Giorgio Agamben in Potentialities (1999), provides a way into these meanings. I argue that the series amounts to a nuanced interrogation of the impulses and implications of the “rage” to undo both memory and the past.

Genevieve Warwick (University of Edinburgh) Memory’s Cut: ’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608

Caravaggio’s late painting of a Sleeping Cupid has long been recognised as a mimetic engagement, as well as a reversal, of the antique sculptural tradition of sleeping cupids that commonly decorated ancient funerary monuments. Painted in 1608, it was destined for a Florentine patron, Francesco dell’Antella, secretary of state for Italy to the pan-European order of the Knights of Malta, while Caravaggio was a novitiate brother of the order himself. Drawing on the significance of its Florentine provenance, the work has also been understood as intentionally troubling the art-historical legacy of Michelangelo’s famous (now lost) sculpture of this subject. Michelangelo’s rendition was itself bound up with the techne of art-historical memory in its closely-worked simulation of antiquity, to the point of purportedly burying the work in the garden in order to acquire the sculptural surface of a recently-excavated antique. In Caravaggio’s work too, its contrapuntal relationship with art-historical memory is most explicit in the rendering of surfaces – the awkward caress of Cupid’s enveloping feathered wings, but above all the skin marked by ungainly folds and swellings, that together seem to repel touch as much as to invite it. The body of the classical sculptural Cupid, by contrast, was made to solicit the affect of tenderness through a haptic rendering of stone in terms of an idealised smoothness. The skin of Caravaggio’s Cupid is instead semiotically unstable, its references to Caravaggio’s own social world and art of realism in seeming conflict with the established idealising visual conventions of the subject matter, so challenging its own pictorial act of recollection. This paper probes the troubled relationship of Caravaggio’s Cupid with that of his art-historical memory. Caravaggio famously described himself as a painter of the real, without memory. Yet much of his oeuvre, as in this

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml instance, works at the boundaries of art-historical citations that are then vexed, as if to undo the work they seek simultaneously to emulate. The concomitant implications for reframing the significance of the subject matter are therefore leading. In this instance, the child’s body seems to reference not only Caravaggio’s self-acclaimed social as a painter of observed realism, but also the most archaic of Cupid’s ancient identities as a primordial deity of archaic myth, born of Chaos. At the same time, in Caravaggio’s work Cupid’s recumbent body is suffused with mythological references to sleep – Somnus or Hypnos, whose cave was bordered by poppies and through which flowed the river Lethe of oblivion. Yet Hypnos also embodied hallucinations and dreams, those traversals of memory out of the depths of the psyche into a shadowy realm of fleeting figures and signs. For early modern artists the best-known illustrated text pictorializing the realm of Hypnos was the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an early incunabula of 1499 whose wandering narrative unfolds within dream-like of classical ruins. Crucially, the realm of dreams seemingly was, for culture, perceived as one of loss figured through classical ruins and myth. Much later, ancient myth would also configure c. 1900 psychoanalytic understandings of the unconscious, memory, oblivion, sleep, and dreams. What we grasp in Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid is the disturbing incursion of an observed social realism within a recollection of the visual languages of a broken dream of . If the classical mortuary figure of the sleeping cupid was at once a memorial of life’s tenderness and a marker of its passing, Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid is instead like a fractured or ruptured memory, a shifting and unstable dream-like recollection of the past within the present.

Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths ) From Art History to Art Writing: Dominique Fernandez’ or the Ambivalence of Belonging

A brief exchange between Julia Kristeva and a philosopher at a conference in honour of the former, Berlin a few years ago:

P. It’s crucial for a notion of the truth, philosophy can be the only guarantee. JK (impatient) No! No! … Only fiction can do that.

I will discuss a recent novel by the French Academician Dominique Fernandez entitled On a sauvé le monde, (2013). In its concluding pages we understand that it has been the first person récit of a distinguished art historian who, in the 1960s, has fallen into disrepute and neglect after denouncing himself as a Soviet spy. In shifting a version of the ‘Blunt affair’ back by a couple of decades Fernandez is able to create the temporal framing for a gay love affair between two young art historians who meet in Rome following their very different art historical studies. The conservative French man works on Poussin, the son of aristocratic Russian emigrés on Icons and, through the tumult of their becoming experts, becoming agents of the Soviet government, their adventures in fascist Rome and the USSR, the work of Poussin is staged and restaged over and over as the of different and conflicting political and sexual ambitions, predicaments and desires. With some reference to other important fictional accounts of art (Judith Krantz, Vincente Minelli) I will read Fernandez to interrogate the structures of desire barely articulated through, and in many ways repressed by the formations of new art histories from the 1970s, our own lived-out fictions.

Marcia Pointon (University of Manchester / Courtauld Institute of Art) Enduring Characteristics and Unstable Hues: Men in Black in French painting in the 1860s and 1870s.

In his Little History of Photography (1931), Walter Benjamin writes about the reification of a sitter’s clothing in early photographs, and how that fixes the sitter into a kind of permanence. ‘Consider Schelling’s coat’, he exhorts, ‘it will surely pass into immortality along with him: the shape it has borrowed from its wearer is not unworthy of the creases in his face.’ This notion of a man’s dress as a kind of portrait imprint, one that is lasting, is in marked contrast to the preoccupations of the teinturiers responsible for dyeing cloth into dark colours and the tailleurs who cut and sewed that cloth into the fashionable forms of men’s coats, trousers and waistcoats. While black pigment was at this date extremely stable, the dark dyes required for men’s outer garments remained highly unstable. Moreover, the dissemination of fashion along with the contiguous principles of tailoring (all of which underwent fundamental change in the nineteenth century) proselytized an ideal in which folds, crumples, creases and rumples were all but eradicated. Through close examination of a sequence of paintings by Degas, Manet and Fantin-Latour, I attend to the ways in which ideas about stability and impermanence are embedded in these canvases in what is represented but equally in how it is represented. There exists in these images a poetry of the crease, inviting the conclusion that the dialogue between fashion and male portraiture cannot be reduced to the assumption that ' “His” eternally inconspicuous dark suit provides the ideal matt background before which “she” can spring into life with the brilliance of silk, the sparkle of jewels, the shimmer of naked skin ….” (Barbara Vinken, 2005). The aura that Benjamin observes to have ‘seeped’ into the folds of a man’s clothes is powerfully present in paintings that, in their palpable insistence on an intimate relationship between body and dress, open up questions about presence, longevity and the relationship between the materials of painting and those of clothing.

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml

Neil McWilliam (Duke University) Looking Back: Memory, Tradition and Cultural Conservatism in France before World War I

Introducing a survey of attitudes amongst French youth in 1913, the poet and critic Emile Henriot commented: “In no era has respect for the past been greater than today.” Such an assertion seems strangely at odds with a period long identified with modernist experimentation and the repudiation of received ideals in social, political and cultural life. Yet, as historians have increasingly insisted, artistic production and critical debate in early 20th-century France were characterized by a preoccupation with tradition and cultural genealogies that contested the formal and conceptual premises of vanguard practice. In this paper, I discuss anti-modernist artists, critics and political theorists hostile to secular democracy and its allegedly decadent culture of individualism. In calling for a national revival, these groups looked far beyond political reform, and hoped to effect a cultural revolution to rejuvenate collective values apparently enfeebled since the fall of the Ancien Régime. By advocating a return to tradition, conservative writers thus defined the cultural sphere as a vital ingredient in a properly ordered polity and made a bid for their own role as arbiters of collective values.

The paper will focus on art critics associated with calls for a “renaissance française” in the years before 1914 and will explore their understanding of cultural memory and its relationship with differing conceptions of time and tradition. This group, largely made up of advocates of an idealist aesthetic, invoked the authority of the past in the face of what critic Jean Thogorma lamented as “the chaos [that] has invaded the museum, the library, and the theater.” At the same time, they rejected the royalist movement Action française’s advocacy of classical values rooted in the “Grand siècle” as anachronistic and ill-adapted to the cultural temper of the modern world. Their alternative model of traditionalism posited a more dynamic relationship between past and present, identified with an assertion of will by an artistic elite that would usher in what Thogorma described as “a time of joy, a century of living men and heroes”.

Gavin Parkinson (Courtauld Institute of Art) Memories of Brittany: Reviewing Gauguin’s Stereotypes

This paper looks at the reception of Paul Gauguin’s work in France in 1948-53 by a Surrealist group fascinated by histories of Brittany. The Surrealists wrote barely anything on Gauguin in the 1920s and 1930s but from the late 1940s their interest in the artist increased. To a large extent, this was in line with his broader reception in France and elsewhere when important centenary and half-centenary exhibitions took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But it also reflected a greater interest in postwar Surrealism in the Celtic and medieval past of Brittany, which became a focus of writing and curation in the movement from that period. Critical accounts of Gauguin’s stereotypes of Brittany by the New Art History and from elsewhere in cultural studies from the 1980s help explain the flat and reserved tone that now accompanies most writing on the artist and contrasts with the of effusive admiration that took hold in Surrealism. Reviewing some of those accounts, I argue for the inevitability and even necessity of such artistic, literary and cultural clichés – ideological constructs – by means of a comparison of Gauguin’s Brittany with the one that emerged (equally self-consciously, I maintain) in the writing of the novelist Julien Gracq who was close to the Surrealists. This took place in the work of Gracq and the writings of the Surrealists through a dialectic of empiricism and fantasy; that is, through a combination of memory (both personal and historical) with artistic and literary representations. For the Surrealists, such rememoration was the ground of myth, which they placed in the service of the struggle against what they called ‘miserabilism’ or the ‘depreciation of reality … in place of its exaltation.’ Ultimately, as I show, they came to regard Gauguin’s mythic vision as the chief repudiation of miserabilism in the face of Stalinism, socialist realism and existentialism.

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml