Out of Lascaux

Highlights: 11-02-02

A few notes about Baroque sculpture. Gianlorenzo Bernini, more than any other artists of the time, is the epitomy of the Counter Reformation ideal in art. Make it big, make it spectacular, make it dramatic: in effect, make it theater, and the people will come back to the bosom of the Holy Mother Church. So maybe it didn't quite happen that way, but Bernini's art must have re-captured some of them. His David is so different from Donatello's and Michaleangelo's: the difference is action. All of Bernini's sculptures are moving, twisting, writhing creations the likes of which had never been seen before. They are captured at the height of the event for which they are known, whether it is the act of throwing the stone form its sling, or turning from a beautiful woman into a tree. I have always been very fond of his sculpture of St.Theresa with the Angel for its amazing sensuality, but my favorite is actually a bust. She is Costanza Bonarelli, a lover of Bernini's, and the bust is an exquisite rendering of an obviously passionate woman.

Highlights: 10-26-02

Steve Sailer writes on "Racial Correctness: The Case of Malvina Hoffman" on vdare.com. I had never heard of Malvina Hoffman, but apparently she was a gifted student of Rodin.

In 1930, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago commissioned her to create 91 full size bronzes and 13 marbles depicting in exquisite detail the "The Races of Mankind." She traveled the world to complete this most titanic sculptural project undertaken by any American woman ever.

And the results are marvelous. But the exhibit in the Hall of Man was shut down in 1968 because "well, because it was 1968." The set has been dispersed to a few different locations, although the Field Museum still has some of them.

The magnificent 6'8" Nilotic Nuer warrior, with proportional masculine endowment, was down in the basement next to the dusty souvenir-making Mold-o-Vac and Penny Squeezer machines.

This brings back memories, mostly of the Mold-o-Vac and the penny squeezing machines. I am sorry to say that I don't remember the warrior, perhaps because such a realistic figure might scare the children (and offend the teachers). And I have been to the museum in the last few years. But here's the kicker:

I asked a curator about this neglect. She told me the sculptures deserved to be treated with disdain because they weren't realistic.

AARGH! They are incredibly lifelike. This "curator" obviously has no art background whatsoever. Anyway, read the article and see the pieces. Sailer's point wasn't really about the statues so much as the idea of human biodiversity, but that's his stage.

Stories of Art, Part 2

(Part 1 is directly below this one.) After his discussions of traditional histories of art, Prof. Elkins moves on to "Non-European Stories." Not surprisingly, "A Russian Universal History of Art" focusses on a great deal more of Russian and Slavic art than any western European history.

It's not the preponderance of Russian art that is surprising here, because every history of art privileges what is near at hand. But the outline of chapters paints a very different nineteenth century from the one known in the West. Virtually all European and American books on nineteenth-century art are dedicated to France, with ancillary attention to Germany, Italy, and England. (p.91)

This may seem surprising to him, but after his discussion of different visions of the history of art, it should not. Just as every individual has their own ideas about art and art history, so will every society and culture. It doesn't take much to prove this point as he moves further into non-Western territory with middle-eastern and Indian art histories.

Books like the ones we have sampled in this chapter suggest a wonderful and troubling possibility: that some cultures have a sense of art that will never fit with Western art history. (p. 115)

And here we come to the crux of Prof.Elkins' argument: how do we create a new history of art that gives all cultures and all time periods equal emphasis? How do we create a "Perfect Story" of art that includes everyone and offends no one? At various art history colloquia he has attended, he has been presented with many goals for "an optimal book of art history." Looking at these twelve different and often incompatible goals, one begins to see the dilemma created by multiculturalism. One also begins to see why one particular art historian at Harvard told their president that no “self-respecting” scholar could teach all of art history in one year. In trying to bring everything from Lascaux to Motherwell into one, all-encompassing survey course, coherency is lost. The solution is to find a way to make it coherent.

Mr. Elkins gives us various possibilities in his chapter on "Perfect Stories," including a possibile solution from Kimberly Pinder.

She suggests that textbooks to some extent should dissolve African-American examples in the general mix of periods and styles. The problem with that solution, as she acknowlegdes, is that it pretends identity politics can disappear, and it relinquishes the possibility of affecting "supremacist an patriarchal attitudes." (p.124)

On one level, this is completely wrong. Art History is the study of culture and its history. By ignoring cultural, ethnic and societal differences, we ignore everything that went into making the art what it is. However, if one were to accept this type of study, one would have no choice but to examine the art and ONLY the art. This would clearly take us back to the early years of the 20th century, when the study of art history was only about the art. Somehow, I don't think the current batch of art historians really wants to go back to the old ways, when art history was more a study of the Fine Arts than of cultural history.

So is there a way to put all of art together into one single history?

The single story of art is too flawed to function as the repository for the current sense of art history. It will continue, as ingrained practices do, while the more vigilant and reflective writers steer increasingly wide paths around it. (p.130)

I guess not. But he goes on to point something else out in the rest of the paragraph:

Already the major art historians keep a mile away from survey texts: such books are written, with a couple of exceptions (Gombrich's book, Honour's and Fleming's, Janson's, and Silver's), by minor art historians who are more involved in teaching than in shaping the discipline.

So here's another problem that will probably not be dealt with anytime soon: there is a growing divide between scholars of art history and teachers of it. One would think that they would be the same, but apparently they are not. Prof.Elkins mentions survey textbook colloquia "attended by overworked teachers rather than active historiographers or theorists of the discipline." What's happening, then, is that survey courses are being given to minor, junior professors and lecturers, while the big names are busy re-shaping the field. I guess these would be the "self-respecting art historians" mentioned earlier. This is a dangerous divide, one between theory and practice. Once it becomes a chasm, someone always falls into it, and it's usually the students. My own inclinations are towards the teaching of art history, so perhaps I am overly concerned about what the students may or may not be learning.

Prof.Elkins comes to the conclusion that "art historians do not really want multiculturalsim." I must admit that I was worried about the conlusion he was leading to, but this one is acceptable. I also get the feeling that his inclinations lean towards teaching as well, because he realizes that "the standard Western story is still the backbone of the discipline." In our culture, that's as it should be. If you really want to make a major change in survey courses, don't call them "Art History 101," but "Western Art 101." Then there will be no doubts about whether one should include Hindu monuments or African masks except as influences on western artists. And why not have a "History of Non-Western Art" survey course as well? Who says we can't teach both? However, I think it may be rather difficult to get a class of 100 people interested in non-Western art, and shouldn't that tell you something right there?

Prof. Elkins does see the field changing, perhaps at a glacial pace, but it's happening nonetheless. Perhaps the survey courses of the future will benefit from a "trickle down" effect as the big name art historians continue to re-shape the field. We'll see.

Stories of Art, Part 1

I finally have time to sit down and talk about Stories of Art by James Elkins. This was a very enjoyable book for anyone interested in the field of Art History.

He begins with "Intuitive Stories" of Art History, intuitive meaning how each individual sees the history of art. He presents us with different visions of Art History, from his own constellation in which famous artists are stars loosely configured around a central moon called "natural images," to various types of maps and landscapes. In asking his students to draw these maps, he is finding out how accessable art is to each individual.

For example, imagine standing on a beach and looking out at the ocean, and say that looking out to sea is like looking into the past. The sand at your feet is whatever art you're used to, and the shallow water is art of the recent past. Deep ocean water stands for art that seems very distant. What would your version of such a landscape look like? Which artists or periods would be nearby, and which would be sunk in the abyss? (One student who tried this excercise drew some strange creatures in the deep, and called them "bioluminescent non-Western art.")(p.5)

It's an interesting excerise in seeing art history as non-linear. Those of us who were taught in the traditional manner often don't stop to think that art history is not as linear as it was neatly laid out for us.

He goes on to talk about periods and megaperiods. Most of us know the basic periods: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Modern and Postmodern. But not only are there many ways of breaking these into sections and sub-sections, there are ways to group periods that may not even include some of these at all. A modernist may lump all art before modern into one Pre-Modern block, while a Renaissance scholar may not recognize a difference between modern and postmodern: it's all a matter of perspective.

Another way to see the history of art is as "oscillating history." I find I have a great affinity for the Wolfflinian view of art:

Classical

Medieval (=Baroque)

Renaissance (=Classical)

Baroque

Modern (=Classical)

Postmodern (=Baroque)

Or, in simplest terms:
Classical

Baroque

Classical

Baroque

Classical

Baroque (p.27)

What this means is that art history swings on a pendulum, just as society seems to, from conservative to liberal and back again. Classical art is staid and conservative; Baroque art is emotional and flambouyant. And it works within the subsets as well. My personal tastes run in just this way: I prefer Hellenistic art to Classical Greek art; I prefer Gothic art to Romanesque art; I prefer Baroque art to Renaisance art.

Another way to look at the history of art is as a "Life History." This is an organic model, in which each artistic age has a youth, maturity and elderly decline, just as we see in individual artists themselves. For all these ways of looking at the history of art, we must ultimately come to terms with art history today. What will come after postmodernism? What can come after that?

Art in Qing-dynasty China has only superficial similarities to art in the West, but it is intriguing that the Chinese "Postmodernism" began about two hundred and fifty years ago and showed no signs of ending when it was partly swept away in the revolution. If the parallel has any merit - and such parallels tend to fall apart as quickly as they are made - it does not bode well for our notion that Postmodernism is a period like any other. Rather it implies that Postmodernism is not a period but a state, like a coma, that might go on indefinitely.

...Shudder...

The next two chapters deal with the history of Art History. He first looks at the "Old Stories," those of Vasari and his imitators. Then he discusses the "New Stories" which include art history textbooks that many of us are familiar with from our college days: Gombrich and Gardner and a newer one, Marilyn Stokstad. Gardner has set the standard for the survey course for many years, with a book which clearly defines the history of art in linear, Western terms. You go from Ancient to Medieval, then you can dabble in non-Western before moving on to Renaissance and modern art.

But the interesting thing is the way in which art history textbooks have fallen prey to the same type of multicultural police actions that our high school and grade school textbooks have. (I will have to write a review of The Language Police by Diane Ravitch in which she explains exactly what is happening in the textbook industry.) Authors of survey books are required to be non-judgemental and to give a "fair and balanced" look at all art, western and non-western. I don't see why that should be necesary when we are studying the art of our culture, and like it or not, our culture is Western culture, the culture of dead white men. We may not like the fact that white men formed and shaped our society, but it remains a fact. Women and minorities had small parts to play, and it's fine to mention them, but that doesn't mean that Artemesia Gentillechi should be given time equal to that of Michelangelo. She did not have that great an influence on anyone.

Helen Gardner's text has been changed every few years, and each year it gets more watered down in an attempt to be fair and non-judgemental. Prof.Elkins argues that the non-judgmental aspect is one element that we should be vigilant about:

The neutral tone can help correct prejudices about other periods and cultures; but it also paints an emotionally uniform picture of artworks that were never - in their maker's eyes, or in the judgement of historians - the objects of dispassionate description.... Ideally, books like Stokstad's may help help educate a generation of viewers to appreciate art more widely, freed of the prejudices that colored earlier accounts. But their bloodless descriptions might also promote a pallid enthusiasm where there is no compelling reason to prefer one object over another. Instead of struggling with conflicting claims about history, students are being coached to look with equal interest on every conceivable object. (p.79)

I will continue with the second half of the book in the next post - hopefully later today, but you never know.

Highlights: 10/17/02

I found a lovely site for looking at the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It's another one of those highly clickable sites with lots of pictures and explanatory text. The only thing is that you should really have a large monitor - or at least a browser that fills your screen.

For our Leonardo site, I found this really cool interactive one. Leave it to a science museum to do it right. The Museum of Science gives us lots of movies and interactive explanations of Leonardo's use of perspective, as well as pictures of his artwork.

Leonardo da Vinci is considered to be one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance, by most people. However, Leonardo's greatest achievements were not in art, but in science. He left us anatomical drawings the likes of which had not been seen before - because no one actually drew from the human form. He illegally disected cadavers in order to draw their musculature and veins. His designs for flying machines and siege engines are mind boggling for someone from the 15th century. It always leads those of us with furtive imaginations to wonder if he was not a time traveller of some kind, or at least met one.