Art History Today

New Blog: Old Masters in the New World

I will continue to trickle out these posts on art history and world art, but for those in need of more traditional fare I’ve created a blog to accompany a course I’m teaching on museums, collectors and connoisseurs in the U.S.A. I’ll be looking at the critical fortunes of such famous paintings like Titian’s Rape of Europa in the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. The first post, however, deals with another Boston museum: the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. University.

The Elephant in the Room

I only recently caught up with Christie’s attempt to sell Poussin’s Hannibal Crossing the Alps on a Elephant in July. I’ve been neglecting the art market of late, so I didn’t hear about the auction until this month. My first thought was that it was a shame to separate the Hannibal from its two other Poussins at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

When I told another Poussin scholar about this, he expressed reservations about how the valuations of paintings are disconnected from scholarship, which to him is the elephant in the room, the thing nobody seems to want to talk about. I had to agree. The picture was purchased by one of the most perceptive connoisseurs and patrons of the 17th century: Cassiano dal Pozzo, who was extremely knowledgeable about leading artists like Titian and Leonardo. He clearly saw something in this canvas which led him to pay a sizeable amount for a struggling painter with great potential. And it was one of the twentieth- century’s finest baroque scholars Sir Denis Mahon who included it in an important exhibition of 1999 on Poussin’s early years in Rome. To put this in context, Mahon connected the Hannibal with an undated letter to Cassiano in which Poussin says he has made drawings of the elephant, not an elephant, which he had the impression that Cassiano wanted, and so would make him a present of it. As this letter was a “pathetic, though dignified plea” ( to use Mahon’s words) by an ill and penurious young painter, Mahon argued that the letter motivated Cassiano to tactfully help the painter by paying 40 scudi, a large sum for a work by an unknown artist who had arrived in Rome in 1625, the likely date of this work. Yet although Cassiano showed charitable sentiments, he would not have bought the painting if he had had doubts about Poussin’s abilities.

I doubt if Cassiano bought the Hannibal because it was an “unusual” and “unconventional” subject. From reading the remarks of the Christie’s representative, the picture is presented as a curio, a pictorial oddity that might appeal to a modern patron on the lookout for “unusual” subjects that Poussin rarely painted. That is obviously the view of someone who doesn’t know much about Poussin. A lot of his subjects, both famous and lesser-known, are unusual; many famous landscapes have unusual iconography like philosophers discoursing in groups. And the renowned Mercury consigning Bacchus to the Nymphs/Echo and Narcissus, one of Hannibal’s companions at Harvard, is very unusual. To say that Poussin painted “mostly mythological and religious subjects” is to demean his inventive powers. What about allegories, animals and natural history, battle-pictures, landscapes, philosophical subjects, self-portraits and a plethora of other topics on canvas and on paper. Please Christies, valuations based on real scholarship next time.

These views are reported in this article by Reuters. I’m not surprised that the press would take this line after hearing Christie’s half-hearted “endorsement” of the Hannibal. As for the sale, I may be wrong but I bet it didn’t sell for 3.5 million. Doubtless they were hoping that Poussin’s name would boost interest, not to mention the 21^st equivalent of a Cassiano dal Pozzo with an eye for an “unusual” picture turning up to bid. Perhaps Christie’s thought that if “minor masters” like Scipione Pulzone could fetch 3 million or thereabouts, the same for work for a neglected painting by a major master like Poussin.

I took a photograph of the Poussins when I visited the museum in 2006, though sadly my snap of the Hannibal didn’t come out. I hope the real elephant does stay in this particular room after its travels. There’s too much art wrenched out of museums and propelled around the world.

 

Evolutionary Perspectives on Art History.

My last post may have given the impression that Gombrich favoured the idea of magical power over evolutionary models when applied to world art, but the situation was more complicated than that, as he demonstrated in Art and Illusion (1960). Showing how versatile his thinking could be, Gombrich turned to Darwin's ideas on natural selection when pondering the inconsistencies of stylistic development. It would be nice to think that Gombrich knew of Darwin's use of connoisseurship in that book. In one telling example, Darwin compares the observational skills of breeders of merino sheep to the visual skills of connoisseurs of painting: every detail must be noted in order to detect the quality of the animal.

Assigning this evolutionary method to the problem of style, Gombrich asked himself, why I see the presence of motifs associated with Greek sculpture of the sixth century in an Egyptian relief of the Old Kingdom style of 2,400 BC. In answer Gombrich wrote. The reliefs "..do not become part of the tradition to be improved and extended, as they do in Greece. On the contrary, one has the impression that they are accidents, random mutations which are weeded out by a process of natural selection." Such a contorted figure looks so alien to Egyptian art which is deliberately static, and without any artistic legerdemain at all. Famously, the philosopher Plato preferred Egyptian calmness to the ambitious figurative styles of his own time which must have seemed like modern art to the author of The Republic who disapproved of figurative distortion or pictorial tricks such as we see in one of the labourers on the Egyptian relief. For Gombrich, the subsequent elimination of such a "mutation" as the Egyptian figure might be caused by taboos which may have driven this "sorting-out" process rather than some stylistic ascent towards perfection. Refusing to completely relinquish the magical dimension of art history, he wrote that "the very fact that certain images had survived for immeasurable periods must have appeared as a token of their magic potency."

In a similar way to Gombrich, though without the slant on magic, the baroque specialist Rudolph Wittkower considered the problem of artistic style in relation to evolutionary paradigms. His view was that stylistic shifts throughout history could be explained by two guiding concepts: diffusionism and spontaneous creation. Dealing with the latter first, we have already encountered this with Gombrich's meditations on how ancient man formed patterns and shapes out of the confusing mass of physical and sensory data surrounding him. Within the global context, spontaneous creation would explain the eruption of cultures in different parts of the world that were seemingly unconnected to other societies. How, for example could we account for Cycladic culture of 2,500 BC (about 2,000 years earlier than Classical Greece) whose art seems closer to the sculpture of Henry Moore and Brancusi in the early twentieth-century than ancient art (Colin Renfrew, Figuring it Out: The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists, 2003). Such outbursts of culture and art would be suitable for a pre-literary civilization which had little means of communicating their ideas to other races or cultures. This is where diffusionism comes in since it is defined as an evolving pattern of cultural transmission of ideas and art forms. Wether diffusionism would explain the stylistic anomalies of early Egyptian art that Gombrich identified, or the Cycladic phenomenon, is another matter. Gombrich did observe however that the arts of the Orient were not as static as Plato would have us believe; but despite this nod in the direction of diffusionism, Gombrich stressed that it was the survival factor within an evolutionary story that was important here. The style that we immediately connect with Egyptian art, flat, emphasis on frontality and severe delineation, survived because it was stronger than the stylistic strains which died out. As for Cycladic art, they developed from “Neolithic prototypes, especially the folded arm figure” and evolved outside the mainstream of art history. Perhaps this was another factor in their favour when modernist sculptors re-discovered them in the early twentieth-century; despite their Greek origin they departed substantially from the classical Greek canon.

Wittkower's dual model of cultural development owed something to evolutionary ideas in the nineteenth-century. In an essay "East and West: the Problem of Cultural Exchange" (Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, 1977) Wittkower admitted that this idea was taken from the German archaeologist Adolf Bastian. Though thoroughly trained in the scientific tradition, Bastian’s research had a romanticist inclination meaning that his ideas on anthropology and evolution were intuitive and speculative in nature. Bastian borrowed heavily from the Austrian psychologist Carl Jung, and was the first to introduce the idea of a "psychic unity of mankind" which would influence the "archetype" school of art history enquiry, of which Wittkower was one of the pioneers with his concept of "Allegory and the Migration of Symbols." With his interest in the symbolic material of cultures mapped out and plotted in evolutionary narratives, Wittkower shares something of Gombrich's anthropological approach to animal symbols mentioned in the last post. However, Wittkower's interest in the migration of symbols along the thoughtways of world civilizations owes just as much to Bastian's researches into the evolution of world cultures as the iconography revolution in art history institutionalised by the Warburg scholars of the post-war period. Bastian claimed that the world was divided up into different geographical areas which followed the same stages of evolutionary development, a concept that Wittkower openly embraced. He insisted that accepting the idea of diffusion did not "..preclude the possibility of convergence and parallelism of cultural phenomena." The map that Wittkower compiled of the geographical routes that cultural commerce followed (such as the “Silk Road”-http://www.silkroadencyclopedia.com/Images2/MapExplorationRoutes.JPG ) on the terrestrial globe might be paralleled by a psychic one along which ideas and symbols travelled, and which freed from the constraints of space and time, re-emerged in contexts like the modern museum, completely divorced from their original locations, traditions and associations.

The museum is the culmination of rational principles applied to the organization and presentation of art objects. The origins of this overlap of art and science can be traced back to the early nineteenth-century which was heavily influenced by the systematic classification of botanists and zooologists. Something of this is captured in the self-portrait of the American artist Charles Wilson Peale, better known as The Artist in his Museum (1822). Standing at the threshold to his museum in Philadelphia he is the artist, scientist and showman all in one. To his rear are stacked huge packing cases with stuffed birds such as the American eagle which in the symbolic pecking order has been replaced by the humble turkey lurking in the foreground doubtless brooding on its bleak future in the museum. Slightly behind Peale to his left is his palette on a table beyond which looms the bulky form of a skeleton of a mastodon he and his family dug up, an event commemorated in another painting. Knowledgeable about the classificatory method of Linnaeus, Peale presents his museum of different species to the spectator who are edified and astonished by it in equal measure. (Roger B. Stein, "Charles Wilson Peale's Expressive Design: The Artist in his Museum" in Reading American Art, 1998).

Such arrays of creatures would inspire more artists and curators to draw comparisons between natural history and art history as the museum was subjected to the rule of reason, but the idea of evolution explored in this post emerged outside the museum within classrooms, lecture halls and publications. However, this methodology that took evolutionary metaphors from the social sciences was marginal to the discipline of art history. Gombrich even published an article on style in an encyclopaedia of the social sciences, which attests to how unaccommodating art history could be to Gombrich's multi-discipline endeavours. In that article Gombrich wrestled with the problem of how styles such as mannerism and the baroque evolve, become overripe, exhausted and finally disintegrate "when other permutations have been tried." Wittkower had had similar thoughts when pondering the emergence of new styles in the baroque, a style epoch that he made his name in. Using terminology borrowed directly from biology and evolutionary studies, Wittkower described examples of baroque sculpture as "species" or "half-species" in the latter case even situating the biological concept within issues of the spectator and the work of art. Commenting on Algardi's sculptural relief Pope Leo I and Attila, Wittkower said "After Algardi created this prototype; such reliefs were preferred to paintings whenever circumstances permitted it. This was probably due to the fact that a relief is a species half-way, as it were, between pictorial illusion and reality." (Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, 1958, 176). This should not be mistaken as a clever rhetorical device inspired by another area of expertise. Wittkower deliberately chose words like “species” and frequently used them during his canonical survey of baroque art and architecture. Its most famous occurrence is in his discussion of the crowning glory of baroque sculpture, Bernini's St Theresa, in which a dumbfounded Wittkower simply noted that a new species had been created without artistic precedent, and no adequate vocabulary as yet existed to describe it.

What I have explored here ( in a highly speculative way)  are the lineaments of an approach that can be detected in writings on style by a certain generation of art historians aware of developments in archaeology, anthropology and the life sciences, namely the post-war cohort of art scholars trained in interdisciplinary practices. These scholars also, significantly, were well versed in world art and cultural history. Their evolutionary pathways were created at a time when the intellectual climate was favourable to these forays into uncharted territory. Nowadays such approaches would be difficult to pursue given the narrowly specialized parameters of art history which exercises its own form of Darwinian selection where ideas and trends are concerned. An art historian teaching the problem of styles in art today would be dissuaded from turning to the life sciences; instead, they would be encouraged to focus on form rather than consider style in terms of evolutionary pathways- Wöfflin as opposed to Darwin. Yet Gombrich used both, the evolutionary perspective derived from Darwin, as well as Wöfflin’s formal analysis of different stylistic epochs. However Gombrich knew the limitations of this "formalist art history" which is why he felt obliged to turn to other fields to find serviceable methodological tools that would enable him to introduce fresh perspectives on old problems. Perhaps it’s time to re-visit Gombrich’s and Wittkower’s musings on evolution and style in  order to gauge their usefulness in teaching the complex topic of style in art history.