Connoisseurs Comes Into Renewed Durkheim, Weber, and Garﬁnkel, Chapel Hill, North Focus

FOCUSINON Fahlman aptly compares the tone of Pène du Bois’ paintings SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING and commentary—“ironically humorous rather than bitingly sarcastic”—to the tone of The New Yorker magazine. That The Cortissoz, Royal, Guy Pène du Bois, New York, 1931. New Yorker caters to the economic elite can be discerned just from perusing the gift suggestions and ads for $20,000 bracelets. Fahlman, Betsy, Guy Pène du Bois, Artist About Town, exhibition It also caters to the well-educated, as indexed by literary catalogue, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980. references, and even cartoons that are occasionally impossible to Fahlman, Betsy, Guy Pène du Bois, Painter of Modern Life, New decipher without insider knowledge. Yet the magazine is directed York, 2004. to general audiences and seems to make well-targeted fun of the Fahlman, Betsy, “Imaging the Twenties: The Work of Guy Pène very culture in which it travels. It is a well-intentioned, self- du Bois,” Guy Pène du Bois: The Twenties at Home and denigrating fun, and it is the kind of fun general audiences like to Abroad, exhibition catalogue, Sordoni Gallery, Wilkes see being made of the cultural elite. Tending to the left of the University, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 1995. political spectrum it is a “people’s magazine,” but it is also an Garfinkel, Harold, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Cambridge, artifact of privilege to which most of its readership could not England, 1984. possibly aspire. Occasionally it publishes articles explaining previously indecipherable cartoons, but it does so in a high Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, cultured way that does not appear to denigrate any reader’s London, 1969. intelligence. Hilbert, Richard A., The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodology: Against this backdrop, Connoisseurs comes into renewed Durkheim, Weber, and Garfinkel, Chapel Hill, North focus. It is a painting of the very world that gives rise to Carolina, 1992. paintings. It might be criticism, it might be endorsement; Pène du Bois, Guy, Artists Say the Silliest Things, New York, probably it is neither, or both. In any case, it is about art, and it 1940. is about men who view art in luxurious settings and talk about it, Pène du Bois, Guy, “The Spirit and the Chronology of the or analyze it, or critique it, or show off their knowledge about it Modern Movement,” Arts and Decoration, volume 3, to one another, or pretend to esoteric knowledge, or number 5, March 1913, pp. 151-154, 178. just...appreciate it. Then again, we cannot see distinctly the inner painting that the men are talking about...if we can see it at all: is Schutz, Alfred, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality this a sailboat, something else entirely, or do we see light (edited and introduced by Maurice Natanson, preface by H. reflecting off of the glass, concealing any possible knowledge at L. Van Breda), The Hague, 1962. all of the inner painting? And whatever it is, is this a quality Wieder, D. Lawrence, Language and Social Reality: The Case of piece? Or could it be a knockoff collectors’ item such as a Telling the Convict Code, The Hague, 1974. Thomas Kinkaid painting, or the kind of thing one finds hanging in motel rooms? Do the “connoisseurs” even know or care about the quality of the painting they are examining? And either way, do these men like the painting or might they be faulting it or laughing at it? Arguably no amount of background information or extrinsic material can disambiguate this painting to absolute clarity, and that includes whatever commentary the artist himself might have provided. GUY PÈNE DU BOIS’ Richard Hilbert, Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Hillstrom Museum of Art Donald Myers, Director, Hillstrom Museum of Art, and Instructor, Department of Art and Art History Events are free and open to the public. CONNOISSEURS Regular Museum hours: 9 a.m.–4 p.m. weekdays, Richard Hilbert and Donald Myers 1–5 p.m. weekends. gustavus.edu/finearts/hillstrom/ Hillstrom Museum of Art FOCUSINON viewing the painting—is part of the objectively available painting of art, art history, what artists in general try to convey in their on hand for inspection even as the objective painting-as-described works, what this particular artist generally tries to convey and might informs as to what the viewer could possibly be talking about. be conveying here in light of his or her other works, the artist’s Vast energy has been expended by social scientists to defeat biography and personal detail, the artist’s place in history—the list reflexivity, to overcome common-sense practices and to replace is essentially without limit and without pre-determination them with professional practices, all to no avail. To treat the concerning what kinds of matters might become relevant in the sloppiness of everyday accountability as troublesome or as course of an informed discussion about an artist’s work. something to be repaired or eliminated, Garfinkel wrote, is like In various ways, Connoisseurs can be seen as typical of Pène du trying to tear the walls of a room down to see what holds the Bois’ paintings. He was particularly fond of painting people ceiling up. Social scientists implicitly realize this but often find it together in public places, places he had visited, and he painted disturbing. When conducting research, they continually recognize a mostly from memory without live models. According to art familiar gap between what they are writing about and what they historian Betsy Fahlman, whose many publications on the artist actually have on hand. When they occasionally acknowledge this rank her as the authority, the artist showed little interest in painting gap professionally, it’s considered a methodological problem to be still lifes or nature scenes, and his interest in social settings seems fixed in future research, or it’s attributed to the youth of their focused on dramaturgical aspects of settings available for immediate disciplines or to human error, or it’s handled in footnotes or viewing, as opposed to documenting more global themes, for methodological appendices. Inevitably, though, whenever they example political categories such as social justice. But he does discuss this familiar gap, it chronically reasserts itself in familiar ways appear to have a wit about him that perceived people locked into that escape description even in the very texts in which they write social roles out of which they can scarcely find their way. As about it. Fahlman has noted, Pène du Bois “occasionally depicted his figures An important difference between describing events in a painting as mannequins, deliberately emphasizing the inflexibility of the such as Pène du Bois’ watercolor, as opposed to describing actual possible courses of action open to them.” Indeed, one of the social events, is that nobody inside a painting is actively producing students asked about the Hillstrom Connoisseurs saw it as a painting the depicted routines in real time even as they, perhaps, can be seen of a wax museum display, while another saw the men who were to be actively producing them. For example, although the men in standing as trying to figure out what to do with the dead body in Connoisseurs appear to be talking about topical relevancies, our the chair. Featured urban settings for finding such rigid displays inability to access transcribed tapes of the discussion is not simply a include restaurants, theaters, and other public places, but technical limitation but an essential one: nothing is, in fact, being particularly conspicuous among Pène du Bois’ work are his many Guy Pène du Bois (1884- said. This turns the entire focus on “what’s really happening in the paintings depicting the art world. 1958), Connoisseurs, 1938, painting” over to us, the viewers. It can also turn the focus to the It will surprise no one that an artist would inhabit the art world, watercolor on paper, 5 5 intended sense of the artist insofar as we the viewers have access to but, as with Pène du Bois, there is often tension in the artist’s 13 ⁄8 x 11 ⁄8 inches, gift of Reverend relevant knowledge of Pène du Bois that we can mobilize relation with that world: is he in and of it, a true native to it, or Richard L. Hillstrom strategically in the production of here-and-now practical, that is, does he stand outside it viewing it with a kind of anthropological accountable, viewing. detachment? It seems that we have both here, a kind of ambivalence— Pène du Bois enjoyed associating with the artistic elite, but he often worked in solitude and relative anonymity. His HOW THE HUMANITIES VIEW ingratiation to the art community can hardly be doubted—he GUY PÈNE DU BOIS’ CONNOISSEURS began his career as an art critic, became a full-time artist, and then PAINTINGS later returned to writing about art when changing fashions limited Richard Hilbert and Donald Myers sales of his paintings. He was a regular at artistic gatherings and Historically, the humanities have been more tolerant of natural major literary and artistic events, and he had routine access to ambiguity than have the sciences or the strictly rational professions. artists, galleries, dealers, museums, and, especially, patrons. At the Hence art critics and historians will not despair of an inability to same time, however, one can hardly doubt his simultaneously describe a painting objectively or in a once-and-for-all manner. And detached view of the art community. After all, the name of his FOCUS INON yet there remain professionally presumed standards for negotiating, autobiography was Artists Say the Silliest Things, where, as Fahlman FOCUS IN/ON is a program of the Hillstrom Museum of Art that engages the expertise of Gustavus Adolphus College community members across the case by case, a for-all-practical-purposes rational clarity when points out, his commentary about art galleries borders on social curriculum in a collaborative, detailed consideration of particular individual works from the Hillstrom Collection.

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