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How do
you tell the history of a painting? For example, in the mid-1870s, Catherine
Lorillard Wolfe, a prominent member of New York high society and a noted
philanthropist, travelled to Paris to sit for a portrait by Alexandre
Cabanel. The half-length portrait (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
shows her in the height of French fashion: a white satin evening dress
trimmed with what looks like either fur or feathers. The museum's website
tells us that contemporary viewers admired the sitter's elegant hands and
pose for their evocation of 'a hostess receiving guests [...] full of
flexibility and pliant, willowy grace, entirely American in its distinction
and sensitive responsiveness.' The portrait is, then, both a product and a
producer of a complex cultural and social scene from which we can select a
few facts. It took a French painter to produce something 'entirely American'.
Wolfe was the only woman among the 106 founding members of the Museum. On her
death in 1887 she bequeathed her art collection to the Museum as well as
leaving an endowment to the Grace Church in Manhattan to promote 'women's
work'. This led to the foundation of the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club
which is still active today in offering opportunities to women artists.
Her 1887 bequest to the museum included the Cabanel portrait and a wide range
of other paintings that tell us much about late-nineteenth century American
taste in contemporary art. One such painting was Gabriel Max's The Last
Token which portrays a Christian girl in
the Roman arena, about to be eaten by lions and holding a rose thrown by her
lover in the crowd. Max's painting was hugely popular in the late-nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The New York Times for February 22, 1903 reports that Mrs George J. Gould
hosted a charity bazaar which included a series of tableaux vivants which
'was an enjoyable feature of the entertainment'. Marjorie Gwyne Gould, aged
12, 'posed as 'The Christian Martyr', after Gabriel Max's famous painting
'The Last Token''. And Max's painting was the cover illustration for The
Christian Herald of Jan 17th 1912. Edith
Wharton wrote an ekphrastic poem about the painting which she would have seen
in Wolfe's house.
Wolfe and her portrait are, then, nodal points in different but mutually
reinforcing narratives of capital, art, and the social staging of femininity.
For the twenty-first century writer there is a challenge about how to tell
the story of the Cabanel portrait and its surrounding scene. The account I've
sketched is conventionally framed. The point of Grant and Rubin's collection
of ten essays is to find new ways of writing art history. The title of the
collection is slightly misleading and you will be disappointed if you are
expecting a book about creative writing. What Grant and Rubin have gathered are essays that explore how to be critical and
creative. This is important for a number of reasons. First, art history has
remained largely immune to the theoretical and post-theoretical turns and to
the self-consciousness about methodology that have dominated film studies and
literary criticism for the last forty years or so. Second, as one contributor,
Gavin Parkinson, points out, to think and write about, say, cubism, dada,
surrealism, Duchamp, Fluxus, or conceptual art 'through the realist and
rationalist means that constitute academic writing is to drag them into the
very forms of knowledge that such art repudiates, criticizes, questions,
seeks to overthrow, or at least considers limited.' Such art, he continues,
'opens out onto lack, absence, and disorder.' Art history is heavily invested
in explanatory and representational narratives similar to the one I sketched
around the Wolfe portrait and such narratives risk making the nature of
modern art (an art often focused on absence and lack) consumable and
harmonious.
The contributors to Creative Writing and Art History offer alternative forms of knowledge. Catherine Grant
explores how Double Game (1999), a
collaboration between Paul Auster and Sophie Calle, breaks down the usual
demarcations between artist and writer. Francesco Ventrella, in one of my
favourite essays here, looks at how art history as a discipline originates
with the iconic figures of Bernard Berenson, Irwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg;
and how all three were often photographed wearing distinctive hats. Nicholas
Chare brings a variety of perspectives (Lacan, archaeology, prehistory, queer
theory, personal account) to bear on the megalithic Rollright Stones in
Oxfordshire. Linda Goddard looks at how Paul Gaugin's Diverses choses (the appendix to his Tahitian memoir Noa Noa) use fragmentary modes of writingÑrepetition, anecdote,
quotation, press cuttings, reproductions of artÑto suggest a response to art
that bases interepretation on creative responses. And C. F. B. Miller traces
Bataille's reworking and reimagining of the solar myth in Picasso's art.
So, there is much to enjoy and be provoked by here. Some of the writing will
necessarily be a little opaque for the non-specialist in its range of
references. But, in general, this is a book that will offer a range of
unusual options for anyone interested in different ways of writing. Oscar Wilde
wrote that 'To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present
is the task of Historian'. The best contributions here suggest that the task
of recreation is best achieved when the historian synthesises fragments of
different approaches and/or recognises the changing nature of the critical
self in relation to a work of art. One of the most interesting books I've
read in some time.
© David
Kennedy 2012
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