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T. J. CLARK:
For Luca del Baldo
What is it they say? – ‘Every picture tells a story.’ Or maybe it cannot itself tell
the story, and waits patiently to hear one told about it, true or false – waits for the proud
old proprietor to turn aside in the corridor and say: ‘They say the lady in the painting
belonged to a family with lands above Trento, and she came down to Bergamo in search
of a husband, and when she was twenty-two or twenty-three, alas…’
My story does not have an unhappy ending. The photograph I sent Luca del
Baldo was taken two or three years ago, in a place I love: a great sweep of hills and forest
by the Pacific, with whales going by, and paths where you can walk for an hour and see
no one. For twenty years it was where I walked with my wife at weekends. It is very far
away now, and I miss it, and we go back from time to time. The photo shows me sitting
in the sunshine. I remember I was planted on a great fallen branch of a tree – the
shadows of still living branches are visible on the grass. The tree stands above a stream
running down to the beach – the Pacific is a few hundred yards away. I think the tree is a
cottonwood. It is a massive, isolated, feathery thing; a landmark; you come over the hills
from inland and see it below you against the ocean.
I understand why Luca chose to edit the photograph I sent him, cutting away the
right-hand third and concentrating on the creases on my face. The whole photo is (as
they say) ‘too anecdotal’. As I was sitting on the whitened branch, a crow flew down
from the cottonwood and perched on the branch close beside me. We held our breath.
The bird sat still. I heard my wife reaching for her i-phone – I think the slight
atmosphere of worry about my face must be partly me hoping the moment would last
long enough to be recorded. It did. The crow was an entirely benign presence – both of
us who saw it that morning had no doubt of that. It was welcoming me back to a land I
cared for. If its blackness had a tinge of mortality to it – and I suppose that even in the
charmed moment there must have been a faint sense of that in the background – it was as
tactful, as gentle, as reasonable a harbinger as anyone could wish for. We were in
America, but not the America of Poe.
I know my face has its fill of wrinkles, and maybe my mouth looks a bit sour and
skeptical. But these are superficial, or anyway banal. It is Baudelaire who asks
somewhere (I’m quoting from memory, and probably making him too sunny): ‘Qui n’a
pas connu l’un de ces beaux jours de l’esprit…?’ – a day when air and color flood in as
never before, and time stops, and all the world is a Delacroix. Let my face – absurdly,
counter-factually, I concede – be the face of such a moment.
There is one more thread to the story. I said that often while walking the hills my
wife and I were more or less alone, but earlier that morning we’d rounded a bend and
come face to face with someone we knew well – someone we’d lost touch with, and
never really expected to see again. She had been one of our students. One of the best:
she ended up writing a wonderful study of Mayakovsky and Rodchenko. I say she was
one of the best; but she had not been one of the happiest. I believe – the matter was never
talked about explicitly – that something dreadful, something violent, had been done to her
in the past. She was courageous and humane: I know she spent years as a valued
counselor in a Rape Crisis Center. So you can imagine what it meant to us to see her
accompanied on the path by a beautiful small boy, whom she introduced as her son. His
name, she said, was Zephyr. They were returning from a night in a campsite by the
ocean. Please then, when you look at my portrait, see me still basking in life’s occasional
good luck.
T.J. CLARK , 2018
(copyright by T.J. Clark . All rights reserved)
DAVID CARRIER:
Luca Del Baldo's portrait paintings
In
Europe, the old master tradition was dominated by history paintings.
Grand scenes from Greco-Roman history or Scripture, these were the most
highly approved subjects of art. Nicolas Poussin, who was a history
painter reluctantly did a self-portrait in 1650 under pressure by a
patron. Normally he was too ambitious and too busy to bother with
painting portraits.
Like the pure landscape and the still life, the portrait was in the seventeenth-century an odd marginal artistic genre.
In
the eighteenth century, in his lectures for the Royal Academy Sir
Joshua Reynolds praised the history paintings of Michelangelo and
Raphael, while admitting that in his own culture the most important art
forms were the landscape and the portrait.
This self-portrait
dates from 1780. In Protestant England, the gentry purchased old master
religious art, but there was little market for large-scale contemporary
sacred art or for history paintings. Landscapes and portraits were the
dominant genres for English artists.
Modernism, with its
emphasis upon the painting of scenes of contemporary life effectively
killed history painting. Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian
(1867-69) treats that contemporary event with all of the seriousness an
old master would give to a historical scene. Like the other
Impressionists, he also painted some important portraits. The important
subjects for an artist of contemporary life were café scenes, cityscapes
landscapes, and the individuals shown in portraits.
In the
twentieth century, portraiture again became a relatively minor genre.
Pablo Picasso’s great Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910), a
marvelous exercise in cubism, shows his patron and dealer in a style in
which few sitters, even the most adventuresome, would find attractive.
Henri Matisse, similarly, though he painted some portraits, did not
develop a mode of visual thinking well suited to doing images of
recognizable individuals. And then such varied styles of painting as
Futurism, Surrealism, and, most especially Abstract Expressionism and
Minimalism did not support portraiture. When corporate CEOs or political
officials retire, they have their portraits painted. But the artists
who made such pictures were not generally of much importance within the
art world.
The most important late modernist to do portraits was
Andy Warhol. When in the 1970s he did portraits of fellow artists,
movie stars and anyone who was rich enough, he was highly criticized for
being so very commercial. Logically speaking, that complaint makes no
sense. All artists, from the most serious abstractionists to the frankly
commercial decorators depend upon art market sales. But while many
critics were willing to admire Warhol’s portraits when he made
self-portraits, or images of celebrities like Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn
Monroe, works that could be interpreted as modern history paintings,
they did not take seriously his commissioned portraits, which in fact
have much in common with Reynolds’s presentations of his patrons.
Luca
del Baldo came of age, then, at a time when portraiture was a
relatively marginal genre. He does, of course, make images of varied
subjects, paintings about death for example, but here I focus
exclusively on what I know best, his portraits. More exactly, since I am
fortunate enough to possess a portrait of myself by him I focus on that
one painting.
The Swiss-German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin
pioneered the traditional art history lecture procedure, employing
parallel dual-slide comparisons. You can learn a lot about the baroque
by comparing classical art, and much about German painting by
juxtaposing Italian pictures. Emulating that procedure, I show another
portrait of me, this one by the American artist and art historian
Jonathan Weinberg.
How astonishingly different are these two
images. Del Baldo works from photographs; he painted my portrait before
we met. Weinberg works from life. Three years ago at the Clark Institute
I met him. He is a magnetic personality and so, after we talked
frequently at length I wanted that he paint my portrait. When working he
allows you to talk, but you need to sit still. After he did an initial
version of the painting, he took a photograph, which he used to revise
the painting. His painting, which is much larger than del Baldo’s, poses
me before some works of art. Recently I’d lectured in India, and so the
colorful little pictures I’d brought back made a nice contrast to my
dark sweater.
Consider, finally, two other portraits of me. Both
of these are photographs. When I published my account of comics my
mother unearthed a photo. There I am, ten years old reading a comic.
The
inventive designer uses a thought balloon to enclose the title of my
book, as if to show that long ago I was already thinking of publishing a
book about comics. (That of course is a fiction.) And twelve years ago
when I moved to teach in Cleveland, I posed for my faculty photograph in
the Cleveland Museum of Art.
I chose to appear in front of Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of St. Andrew (1610) because I have published a long essay about him.
These
four portraits, the two paintings and the two photographs, are all
recognizably of me, but how different they are! Weinberg’s and del
Baldo’s paintings express very diverse sensibilities. Weinberg, an
important pioneering scholar devoted to ‘queer studies’, has written
extensively about gay male art.
You need only compare the covers
of his books and paintings with the art illustrated on del Baldo’s
website to see that they are very different sorts of persons and
artists.
As for the two photographs of me, they illustrate very
different stages of my life. I remember little of my childhood in
Southern California, when I enjoyed reading comic books. I recall more,
obviously!, about my life circa 2000 when I moved to Cleveland to teach
art history. At that time, I had recently written about the paintings of
Caravaggio and the other artists, Poussin amongst them displayed in the
local museum. Soon enough, however, I moved on to other very different
interests. I wrote a study of the museum, with a special focus on the
Cleveland Museum of Art. And, then, did a study of world art history,
which took me to India, where I purchased the little pictures
illustrated in Weinberg’s portrait of me. I am thankful to these two
painters, whose images of me are the occasion of happy daily reflection.
(Both paintings are in my house.) And to my mother, Louise Farcher
Carrier, who fifty six years ago took the photograph of me. This essay
is dedicated to her memory. With love.
DAVID CARRIER , 2010
(copyright by David Carrier. All rights reserved)
GRISELDA POLLOCK:
To encourage me to write a piece, Luca del Baldo kindly sent me some examples of writings by his other sitters. I recognized many of the strategies that had passed through my own mind as I wondered: ‘What does an art historian do when asked to write about a portrait that is undertaken as a portrait of a thinker or a writer?’.
As it happens, in my capacity as feminist writer on art, I have pondered a very specific question. What are the visual tropes that are available to signify the conjunction of the terms woman and thinker, let alone and creative artist. Feminist studies long since identified the profound correlation between image and woman, which is not only commonplace in our popular culture but has its roots in the art theory of the sixteenth century.
In a series of brilliant articles the American art historian Mary Garrard analysed two remarkable self-portraits: one by Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) of Cremona in and another by the Roman painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656). Both play a subtle intellectual game with the viewer. Anguissola paints a picture of a painter at work on a canvas. The painter is a man, Bernardino Campi, who is named in the title. Thus we have a portrait of a painter at work. This is signified by the painting before his on his easel , the image of a woman on the canvas, and both his posture and gesture. The canvas bears, however, the image of a noble woman, the presumed sitter whose exquisitely embroidered robe he is currently painting although he has turned from the canvas to look across his shoulder, out of the picture space, at the dress of the imagined sitter. Yet the author of this painting of Bernardino Campi painting a beautiful woman is, in fact, the beautiful noblewoman herself, namely the painter Sofonisba Anguissola. Why, however, would one artist paint another artist painting her in such a way as to place her self-image in the imaginary space of another’s artistic creation?
Careful analysis of the distribution of luminosity versus shadow and the different intensities of the painted gazes allows Mary Garrard to argue that Anguissola is negotiating, by means of this double portrait, the complexity of her position as aristocrat, woman and painter—already a novel but not impossible configuration in the mid-sixteenth century. More Importantly she is cleverly playing back to her imagined audience aspects of contemporary art theory. That theory held that the most beautiful form of painting as the formulation of beauty is the painting of a beautiful woman. Can Anguissola represent her quality as an artist by demonstrating her own ability to produce this equation through her skill as a painter while reclaiming, at the same time, the more significant role as the creator of beauty, the artist, reducing the masculine artist Campi to being the product and image of her creativity.
In the painting now labelled Self Portrait as La Pittura (London: Royal Collection, 1638-9), Gentileschi also played back to the contemporary artworld a similar entanglement of image, iconography and the problematic position within both of the woman who makes art. ‘La Pittura’ is the allegorical figure of painting or image. According to Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, La Pittura is to be represented as a woman with dishevelled and wild hair ( inspiration) in a beautiful multi-toned dress of scintillating colours, with a necklace bearing an image of a mask representing imitation, at work with a palette and brush. She should also have a bridle on her face covering her mouth to indicate the muteness of painting.
Gentileschi dispenses with that silencing gag; but she conforms to all the other requirements. As a result in older, sexist times that is until 1962,, the image hung in the Royal Collection as an anonymous representation of this allegory. Then cleaning revealed the signature linking the painting to Artemisia Gentileschi also known as Lomi, who had come to the court of Charles I to work with her estranged father Orazio. Once art historians looked harder at this work and bothered to study Gentileschi’s considerable oeuvre it became clear that the artist had used her own features, disrupting the allegorical by claiming for the image of painting as a woman, an image of a woman painting. Using her features does not make it a Self Portrait because this device is more complex.
Garrard places this work in conversation with Velasquez (1599-1660), Las Meninas (1656) as examples of grand painterly statements by seventeenth century artists asserting, to their royal patrons, the importance of the painter. The artist no longer perceives her or his worth in terms of being a royal servant or of being the vessel of a divine spark. Instead, Garrard argues both paintings assert the correlation of art with work, with a special kind of work, however, artistic work which can only be represented by both the exercise of material making and the invention of the image as the paradoxical object that is both product and image of production.
Gentileschi’s problem is different from that of Velasquez, who shows himself creating the image of the very sovereign power he is quietly contesting by representing his gaze observing his sitters in order to create an image neither his sovereign nor his viewers can see, even as this painting makes him the de-centred subject of this vast work.
Gentileschi had to negotiate an ideology already inside the image itself, which could and did indeed collapse image and act so as to efface the creative woman in her image for many centuries to come.
Unlike the many essays I have read of men who have been portrayed, who symptomatically struggle with the exercise of looking at images of themselves, my conversation with Luca del Baldo in relation to his portraits of me involve a different relation between my gender and the image as well as a different iconographical and semiotic relation between woman and intellectual. One of my projects, many years ago, solicited by an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of Self Portraits by artists who are women, was a rambling exploration of the problem of the missing iconography in western art of woman as intellectual, let alone as creative artist. The woman as intellectual does not have what the artist has at her disposal: the means to refashion the existing iconography, not always successfully in terms of recognition as I have suggested in the case of Gentileschi’s doubly misnamed painting. (First it was just La Pittura, now it is Self Portrait as La Pittura: neither catches what is really going on and no title could name the disruption that is being performed).
I sent Luca two photographs, first one and then he requested a second one to do a second portrait. Something in the first felt not quite right. The first was a snapshot taken by my daughter as I sat at my desk turning away from my computer. I like this image because of the intensity of the gaze. Was that possible between two women both of whom are acutely aware of the conventions by which women are represented? When you have a passport photo taken you are required not to smile, not to open your mouth to look straight ahead. We know what kind of horrors that formulation can produce. Now face recognition technology used in passport control requires the same expressionless offering of the face to the inhuman look of the digital scanner. The other image was a commissioned portrait photograph taken several years later in which lighting and background produce the falsity of the formal look. You stand sideways on, head slightly cocked and avoid beaming smiles that crinkle up the eyes while having to soften the face with a hint of a warmth in an incipient smile. The second photograph, the older version, betrays a surprising sense of uncertainty, a shadow of the anxiety of offering oneself to this process of having an image taken. It becomes a performance of a certain ‘femininity for the camera’, whereas the earlier image has a directness, frankness, even a certain intensity delivered because it is less self-conscious. The difference between the two, as I read them as a feminist analyst of the image, is a difference between an image of a gaze and an image offered to a gaze. In this case the forthright gaze, intensified by the close crop excluding the cluttered background of my study becomes the visual signifier of intellectual activity.
In the age of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, a different iconography was generated for the new secular intellectual. Louis-Michel Van Loo (1707-71) painted Encyclopaedist Denis Diderot (1713-84) in 1767. Wigless, in a wonderful purple silk dressing gown Diderot sits at a desk, quill in hand, poised above the paper on which he is writing. He has paused in mid-stream to look up but away from the painter, as if absorbed in inner thoughts, a condition further indicated by his left hand raised and almost pointing to the invisible point of the gaze the thinker processing the thought that will soon be set down on the paper. Closer to home (art that is) Anton Maron (1733-1808) portrayed the founder of art history, Vatican library Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) also in 1767. His indoor robe is even more glorious—an enviable salmon pink, fur-lined silk robe with an almost matching turban to warm his hairless head. He, too, is at his desk, quill in hand, resting on his manuscript. He is studying and writing about an engraving of Emperor Hadrian’s beloved, Antoninous. He has stopped writing to look out, his gaze directed at the point at which the painter once and the viewer now stands. As if opening the conversation, his left hand is also ‘talking’ with its open demonstrative gesture. Both of these portraits locate the visually gorgeous in the accessories—the costume—while gaze and hands indicate thought or analysis. The intellectual also has attributes of work: the materials for setting down thought— writing—and in the case of the art historian as intellectual, he is given the object of both analytical (and erotic) gazing. Winckelmann’s outward gaze is a steady as Diderot’s is inwardly activated by being shown as outwardly distracted from the immediate world of things.
In neither of my portraits are there the tools of my trade nor the objects of my professional activity. Neither are there any devices such as we see in Anguissola’s or Gentileschi’s calculated artistic gambits that undo the dominant ideological tropes that render their gendered creativity invisible even as they might become the sign of the visible image as woman. What you are seeing then in these two images is not the visual sign of GRISELDA POLLOCK, an author name, a name associated with the spines of books or academic citation. But then what relation is she to a woman sitting in her study being photographed by her daughter, or a woman being professionally photographed for her university’s compensatory, patronising, possibly reparative exhibition of ‘Women of Achievement’. We form a gallery in the great Parkinson Court of the University of Leeds in a context where the Council Chamber like so many academic institutions surround the room with portrait after portrait of the men who have run the world for ever. None of them smile shyly. They are stern and steadfast to a man. It is a confusing situation. Be visible under a rubric that sets you apart as the exceptional ‘Women of Achievement’ or remain invisible. Of course things are changing and there are portraits of Vice Chancellors who are women. There are even portraits of women as political leaders. But there again we find the problem. A Man in a suit is the Prime Minister or President. The Woman in her suit is an object of press trivialisation and comment for the price of the suit or the shoes, the designer, the style: in a word fashion and attractiveness.
I think Luca likes the second portrait better as it is probably a more’ human’ portrait. For me the originating photograph is pierced by complexity and political unease. The composition of the first portrait feels bolder because there is so little space around the face to contain the figure. It is a portrait that relentlessly brings the viewer face to face with… just that a face, but also a head, without the body, with little flesh or fleshiness, with look that that signifies more closely what I do: look, study, analyse, examine, closely. As an image of an art historian, it does not create the kind of additional signs that we find in Maron’s image of Winckelmann. It embodies the act of intense attentiveness in a gaze that matches the incoming look at it as a painting. The effect of the older portrait now comes to me as quizzical, with a hint of the first image in the liveliness of the look. But scale, setting and the wonderfully rich painterly realization of skin tones and the signs of time and laughter written on the face make an image that is more containable as a portrait of a woman, mature, solid, direct. Yes, indeed. But the intensity of the earlier portrait with its frontality, its leaning forward to meet the incoming look of the spectator and the focus of the image in the eyes speaks to me as an art historian wondering how images can loosen the bond between concept of the feminine as that which is looked at and fashions itself to be looked at, and, on the other hand, the concept of the thinker, the intellectual, the writer who is not only a woman but a feminist, a woman who professionally interrogates such questions.
I am glad there are two images. I am happy to have had this (one-sided) conversation with this remarkable painter.
One final comment. Some years ago, in 2002, in a curious twist of time I returned to Florence/ Firenze for the first time since 1964, the year my mother tragically died very young. The journey was heavy with that memory of a summer of sun- and art-filled mourning. For reasons that cannot be explained I had come equipped in 2002 on this return with paints, paper and brushes and with the intention of painting the Tuscan landscape. Thus I took up painting, untrained but probably inspired by what I call painting-envy, having spent so many decades analysing and explaining and teaching generations of fine art and art history students to ‘see’ painting. After sating myself visually on olive groves and lavender fields, I continued to paint when I returned home. Now I turned to memory rather than te world outside. I drew on the family’s photo album discovering a r treasure trove of images created by doting parents of tiny, now grown, children. As an art historian who had studied long and written many times on the work of the nineteenth century Paris-based American painter, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), I found myself in renewed dialogue with that painter’s attentive study of the strange qualities of the infant and child as ‘becoming-humans’. It was Cassatt who had noticed how strange and different babies and small children are compared to adult’s in terms of bodies, faces and their gestures. As a painter, I was infected with Cassatt’s scrupulous attention to their unformed faces and soft uncoordinated differently proportioned bodies as much as their perplexed or inquiring gazes at a world as yet dimly understood. I was not, however, as was Mary Cassatt, observing the living, wriggling child before her as model. My sources were already stilled by photography, which means, in many cases, they were captured looking directly at the photographer, being photographed.
My home is now filled with the awful products of this obsession. This means that the imaginary creatures look at me and at any visitor with the relentless gazes of many eyes. Indeed, when visiting my house, the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev commented specifically in this curious effect of being looked at from every wall. This is the effect of my translation of what is normal, of course, in a photograph, but disconcerting when it is re-materialized into the conventions of painting. The gaze of the photograph is a transaction between something offered to a photo-mechanical gaze even if there is a photographer behind the camera. The gaze in the painting is produced by an observation searching through the artistically trained eye for the details that, if faithfully followed or materially registered will construct an image that is rebuilt stroke by stroke, wash by wash, passage by passage. Thus painting from photographs which formally also ‘build’ a picture means painting a stilled, freeze frame rather than watching the unstable living other over time to distill a composite ‘sense’ of this other in one’s own pictorial mode.
Perhaps this explains my love of the first image from which Luca del Baldo painted his first portrait. It has that same strange starkness that comes from the original photograph. It is something I reproduce in my paintings, seeking to see if the process of painting, another form of prolonged looking can pierce the momentary flash (archaic idea I know) that ‘took’ the photograph and take us closer to the presence that the eyes alone reveal in a human face.
What are these coloured orbs? What is it they do in a face? The great and genuine portraitist finds her or his sitter in every feature, every trace of time written on the skin, every jut of the jaw, every curl of an ear, every, fall of the hair, every swell of the nostrils. The person is the face as a whole. For me, because these features in children are so softened and formless, it is the eyes that that indicate the person already present even in an immature and changing form. So it is that the first portrait remains strange but wonderful, while the second, a real portrait, remains estranged from me. This replicates my feeling about the two photographs from which both are taken. The second portrait tells more of what I look like perhaps, while the first in its abrupt present-ness and direct gaze battles against the conventions of representation, ideology, tradition posing the question of what is good as art and what is good when it breaks through the deepest relations between art and the visual politics of gender.
(copyright by Griselda Pollock. All rights reserved, 2018)
ARTHUR C. DANTO :
"Three careers"
In
consequence of luck and longevity, I have had three overlapping
careers. The first career, that of an artist, was facilitated by the
circumstance of serving as a soldier for nearly four years in World War
II. The experience helped straighten out the muddle of my youth, but
practically, I benefited from the GI Bill of Rights, under which I had
four years of free tuition in whatever university that would have me. In
Detroit, where I grew up, culture was embodied in two white marble
buildings, the main library of Detroit, and, across Woodward Avenue, the
Detroit Museum of Art. Wayne University was a constellation of
buildings behind the library. But for as long as I can remember, I
wandered the galleries of the various collections, and decided early on
that I would be an artist, so really, the DIA, as it now is called, gave
me my education. The art program at Wayne in those years was fairly
bland, but the remarkable collection of German Expressionist art, and
particularly the prints made by Schmitt-Rothloff, Kokoshka, Pechstein,
Nolde and the others, were my texts. I began to carve the end-pieces of
fruit boxes, and taught myself print-making. I did some painting but I
had no gift for color. I did, however, show the woodcuts at a gallery on
West Grand Boulevard. And I submitted my prints to national and
international exhibitions, which landed them in important collections.
I
completed my education in two years, since I was given credit connected
with my military service. I had learned French in Morocco, Italian in
Italy, where I made the landings near Battipaglia before being taken in
trucks to Naples. The Germans had moved out, but forced a battle in
Monte Casino. I had two years remaining on the GI Bill, so I decided to
move to New York and - this is characteristic of my life - I decided to
use the time to study philosophy. As an artist, I had little difficulty
finding galleries in New York, and Columbia accepted me on probation,
since I had not been able to take the introductory course in philosophy
at Wayne. I also applied to NYU (New York University), which turned me
down unless I took sixteen hours of undergraduate work. Naturally I
chose Columbia despite the probation, though I have to admit that I was
pretty much at sea. As there was little likelihood of becoming a
professor anyway, I learned what I could, meanwhile building my art
career. I thought I would probably wind up an art teacher somewhere,
though my work was bought and shown and reviewed.
I studied with
Suzanne Langer, the author of Philosophy in a New Key. Her mentor, Ernst
Cassirer, who had come to Columbia as visiting professor, died abruptly
in front of the Faculty as he turned to answer a student?s question,
and the department appointed Suzanne to finish his courses. She was
attractive and European, and entered the classroom with a cello. I wrote
a paper on Kant?s Third Critique for her, which she liked a great deal.
But the department was not especially supportive of her, since she was a
woman. Male professors of no great distinction said that women were
just not able to do philosophy. But in truth, I must admit, I could see
very little connection between the philosophy of art as written by
philosophers down the ages, and the great art that was displayed in the
few galleries that promoted Abstract Expressionism - Betty Parsons,
Sidney Janis, and Samuel Kootz - were the main sponsors. In April, 1949,
there was an article in Life magazine on Jackson Pollock, whom it
implied was the greatest living artist. That article was what drew me to
New York. I decided to superimpose Pollock's style on the German
expressionist style I had adopted. But I found that I had a gift for
philosophy, and began to publish articles in Mind, The Journal of
Philosophy, the Review of Metaphysics etc. I wrote a worthless
dissertation. I wanted to do a piece of real philosophy, but I was not
yet up to that. I certainly had no interest in writing on aesthetics,
since it had so little to do with the art that engaged me. I got
interested in the philosophy of history, and applied for a Fulbright
Fellowship in the first year that they were offered, and won a year in
Paris, where I naturally got interested in Existentialism. Paris was
pretty much the same as it was entre les deux guerres. Naturally, I wore
a beret.
Meanwhile, the universities, which expanded to
accommodate veterans, were hiring teachers, and I was able to find a job
at the University of Colorado. I found two recently hired philosophers,
Christopher Jackson, who was a student of Gilbert Ryle, and John
Nelson, who was a student of Norman Malcolm, a student of Wittgenstein. I
learned analytical philosophy from them, which I knew nothing about
from the classes at Columbia. That really was my philosophical
education, since Malcolm sent us mimeographed copies of the Blue Book,
the Brown Book, and the Mathematical Notes by Wittgenstein, and we
studied these together.
Unfortunately, the job lasted only a
year. The veterans had run out, which coincided with a generation of
students born at the height of the Depression. Back in New York, I
completed my dissertation, and had a piece of exceptional luck. I met
one of my professors, Justus Buchler, in the book store, He offered me a
job teaching in the great general education course, Contemporary
Civilization. I phoned my wife, Shirley Rovetch, who had stayed in
Detroit, to tell her that I had a job at Columbia. She told me that she
was pregnant. Any job was precarious until one had tenure, but I jammed
my foot in the door and received tenure in 1961. We took our two
daughters, Elizabeth and Jane, to Paris. France was at war with its
colony, Algeria. Sometimes the Seine carried the bodies of Algerians,
killed by the OAS (The Secret Army Organization) who also blew up
buildings around St Germain, and began to use torture in Algiers. It was
no place for children, so we drove south to the Cote d?Azur, where we
found a marvelous villa on the Escalier de la Gendarmerie. I wrote my
first book, Analytical Philosophy of History there Once finished with
that, we moved to Rome, where we found an attico on the Via Fogliano. I
spent time in the German Library, reading the bound volumes of
Nietzsche's correspondence. which led to my second book, Nietzsche as
Philosopher. Both books were published in 1965. I loved writing books.
At the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, someone asked
if I was really publishing two books. He said he supposed they were
anthologies, and I answered that they were real books. I felt that the
era of articles was coming to an end.
But In 1964, I wrote an
essay, "The Art World". It raised but hardly answered the question of
the difference between art works and real things, if they look
indiscernible. The question arose with Andy Warhol's show at the Stable
Gallery, which consisted of copies of grocery boxes, and most
particularly the Brillo Boxes, which captured my imagination. That essay
changed the direction of aesthetics, but I was not to write further on
the subject until 1978, the year Shirley died.
The mid-sixties
was a very productive time, roughly my forthieth year, which the
ancients considered the prime of life. I decided to carry forward a
somewhat Hegelian agenda: to write a five volume work on analytical
philosophy. The unifying concept was that of representation. Analytical
Philosophy of History introduced what I termed "narrative sentences".
They accounted for the difference between stages of culture - between
the Age of Enlightenment and Modernism - though there was
nophysiological difference between persons in the Eighteenth and
Twentieth centuries. But I also developed a philosophy of action and a
philosophy of knowledge. The fourth volume would be on art and the final
volume on mind. So when I entered the Stable Gallery, my head was full
of advanced philosophy, by contrast with any art historian in the world.
By time I was ready for my book on art, I was tired of what was
happening in analytical philosophy. I called my book The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace, a title I encountered in a novel by Muriel Spark.
Basically it advanced a definition of art as an embodied meaning. It
became a base for a whole new way of thinking, and has been translated
into seventeen languages.
The Transfiguration brought another
piece of luck. Betsy Pochoda, who had returned to the Nation magazine,
after a stint at Vanity Fair. The Nation is the oldest magazine of
opinion in the United States, and from the beginning published art
criticism. Frederick Olmstead, the visionary designer of Central Park,
was one of its first art critics. Clement Greenberg wrote for it in the
Forties. But the critic, Lawrence Alloway, had gotten sick, and no one
replaced him. When Betsy returned, she was bent on Lawrence, and asked
around for suggestions. Ben Sonnenberg, the editor of Grand Street,
suggested me. Betsy phoned one day, and invited me to write about art
for the magazine. I had never thought of writing criticism, but of
course I said "Yes!" I reviewed a wonderful show at the Whitney Museum:
"Blamp! New York Art 1957-1964" and Betsy murmured "What a thrill!" when
she read it. It was great to be paid for writing, and for prompt
publication. I was the art critic for the next 25 years.
Most
critics in New York were extremely conservative. John Canaday and Hilton
Kramer at the New York Times were savage. Time Magazine hissed at
Jackson Pollock. My interest was in the new, as in the movements of the
Sixties: Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, after which
movements more or less vanished, and the interest turned to single
individuals who were thought to be promising. My interest was in
explaining the new work, which brought an art-world readership to the
magazine. I loved being a critic, and feel that the essays I published,
combined with the Transfiguration of the Commonplace, is what I shall be
remembered for when I am gone.
If one lives long enough and has a
bit of luck, everything works out. A distant colleague in the American
Society of Aesthetics, Ewa Boltuc, a Polish aesthetician, is a print
collector as well as a philosopher. She spotted one of my prints for
sale on the Internet, and wrote me about it. I invited her to stop by
when she next came to New York. Ewa was very taken with the work, and,
as a woman of action, organized an exhibition at the museum at her
university in Springfield Illinois. That is not far from the University
of Illinois, whose director, Randy Auxier, went to see that show, and
decided that his museum must have it. All that took place in 2010. Randy
felt that some of my work should be printed in the forthcoming book,
The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto. I at first resisted, arguing that the
art had nothing to do with philosophy. But in the end, I came around.
In 1962, I had dismantled my studio, and devoted myself to philosophy
and later to criticism. But the director of the collection at Wayne
State asked me to make a gift of my woodblocks, which had been gathering
dust for half a century. I gladly donated them. I certainly have
neither the strength nor the drive to do art any longer. But it is part
of what I am, along with the rest.
For some while, I have been in
correspondence with Luca Del Baldo, a remarkable artist. In fact I
believe him to be the greatest portraitist in the world. He did an
astonishing portrait of me, and all who saw it were astonished.He has
now undertaken to do portraits of philosophers of art, and publish these
portraits in a book, to accompany an exhibition. I have seen several of
the portraits by now - of David Carrier, Hans Belting, Richard
Shusterman, and Lydia Goehr. All of these have captured their
expressions beyond the possibility of photography.
I am thrilled
to have been witness to this outpouring of great painting, and I would
like to do what I can to give his work the recognition it deserves.
Whoever sees these heads, luminous with truth, will acknowledge Del
Baldo's exception gifts.
ARTHUR C. DANTO, 2011
(copyright by Arthur C. Danto. All rights reserved)
W.J.T. MITCHELL :
"Portrait or Self-Portrait?"
My
first impression when I unwrapped Luca Del Baldo’s wonderful oil
portrait of me was completely divided: the face was mine, but the
expression felt unfamiliar.
Every detail of the portrait seemed
to me accurate. The Italian painter’s fine, careful touch had captured
every blemish, every wrinkle and fold of aging skin, every stray wisp of
thinning, graying, mussed-up hair. Even the two little dark spots on
the left side of my forehead had been faithfully reproduced. Everything
that too many years of sunshine had imprinted on my fair Irish
complexion had been snared by the keen eye and hand of the painter.
But
what was strange or uncanny about the expression? It was an entirely
faithful rendering of the photograph that I had sent to Luca Del Baldo.
And that photograph was in a certain technical sense a self-portrait, or
what the contemporary jargon refers to as a “Selfie.” That is, I had
composed it carefully on the screen of my aptly named “iPhone.” When I
was satisfied with my expression, I saved the picture and sent it off to
Luca. My double take at the painting then, was registering a dissonance
at the level of authorship. Was it a portrait? Or a self-portrait?
Clearly it is both. The painting is a portrait, but the image reproduced
from the photograph is a self-portrait. And that is precisely what is
disturbing about it, for I read the expression (now rendered in gorgeous
oils) as one of composure, complacency, confidence, and (in my darkest
moments) a kind of smugness. It is, in other words, an expression of
someone who has conquered his own doubts, and achieved a kind of
triumphal assurance about life.
Of course nothing could be
further from the truth. The reality is that I am constantly beset by
doubts, second thoughts, secret questions and private fears. Luca could
not possibly know any of this. He based his generous offer to paint my
portrait on my reputation as a writer and scholar. We have never met
face to face. In a way, his picture is of a writer’s mask, a persona
constructed carefully by the agonizing work of arranging words on a page
until they seem to capture a truth, convey an insight, or tell a
compelling story. It is thus uncannily appropriate that it is a painting
based on a Selfie, of a composed self-image. It is not “painted from
the life,” but from a carefully constructed façade.
George
Bernard Shaw says somewhere that “every man over forty is responsible
for his own face.” But does this apply to portraits? Or to
self-portraits? Luca del Baldo’s beautiful painting is both. I will
treasure it in some not very public place, where it will be my secret
answer to the portrait of Dorian Gray. As I age into decrepitude, I will
gaze at it to remind myself of how the magic of oil paint on canvas can
sparkle with vitality, and how, for just a moment, I managed to project
a calm air of clairvoyance. Or perhaps the more precise word would be
acceptance, a resignation to the tragic death at age 38 of my son,
Gabriel Mitchell, which occurred around the time this painting was
commissioned. This seems to me visible in the eyes, which I recognize as
my own. What does this picture want? Nothing, really. It has everything
it needs, for as long as it lives.
W. J. T. MITCHELL, 2014
(Copyrights by W. J. T. Mitchell. All rights reserved)
M I E K E B A L :
"Allo-portraits: Collaboration Between Mirror and Mask "
I see all people behind their masks. Smiling, peaceful faces, pale and silently hurrying along a weaving road where its end is the grave. Edvard Munch 1
Does a portrait present us with the person depicted – a ‘likeness’? That remains to be seen. The portrait is a classical genre. The genre of portraiture is usually discussed without reflection on the affiliated genre of the self-portrait. I will argue that in the fissure between these two, we can see the most characteristic feature of both: the presence of otherness. The term “allo-portrait” can thus be deployed to think about both. They are equally strongly anchored in the representation of a face. What allo-portraits have in common is the questioning confusion of self and other – a confusion conducive to thought. This is the basis of their philosophical relevance. That variety alone undermines the humanistic certainties regarding the face, its depth, and its individual uniqueness. Many portraits are self-portraits, and some of the greatest artists – Rembrandt, Munch – are near-obsessive self-portraitists. Yet, there is one key difference between the two genres: the primary tool of the self-portrait is the mirror, which is entirely irrelevant in portraiture. Portraiture, on the other hand, is based on what the artist sees. This may be the friendly face of someone he or she knows, but it may also be, and has often been, the way the sitter wishes to be immortalized. That is, at least, the premise of most studies of the portrait. Perhaps the last classical account of this classical genre is Richard Brilliant’s 1991 book on the subject, which entirely rests on those premises that the twentieth century portrait has vehemently rejected.2 Edvard Munch, in the scribble that is my epigraph here, sees the portrait more as a mask – which is hiding, rather than revealing, whatever “essence” – personality or character – a person might possess. In accordance with my view that later art “remakes” older art, in the sense that the latter cannot be seen without the screen of the former modifying what we see, contemporary or more broadly, modern art changes the portrait, even the much older instances of it. In an essay that is crucial for the understanding of modern portraiture, Ernst van Alphen distinguishes portraiture from common presuppositions. One of those is the affiliation, in classical depictions, with royal, noble, and bourgeois self-importance; another is the mimetic or realistic presupposition, the idea of likeness; a third is the idea that portraits capture a person’s essence. Van Alphen alleges many important portraitists from the twentieth century who all, in different ways, undermine these classical notions. Instead, as the final sentence of the essay has it: “Portraiture as a genre has become the form of new conceptions of subjectivity and new notions of representation – a genre that does not take its assigned place in history but embattles what history has naturalized” (2005: 21-47).3
But what is it that history had naturalized, but shouldn’t have? A discussion of the authenticity – or not – of self-portraits by Rembrandt in the double-voiced catalogue with the exhibition Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt, held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995 in New York, sheds light on the relationship between portraiture and self-portraiture on the basis of the concepts van Alphen and the artists he discusses, emphatically reject. Some of the paintings included in the Rembrandt exhibition were self-portraits. The discussion of these demonstrated that the definition of that genre, as all genre definitions, affects judgments of value and decisions of attribution, of authenticity. Briefly put, the “self” of the face and the “self” of the hand are merged, as if they were of a single interest. There lies the presupposition I would like to use as a wedge. For example, in volume II, curator Walter Liedtke wrote about a beautiful selfportrait from 1660: “Rembrandt here reveals an extraordinary ability to describe physical qualities (which presumably were studied in a mirror) and simultaneously to suggest character” (1995: 76). This statement nicely sums up what the standard view of self-portraiture stipulates as features of the genre: description as mode, mirror as tool, and self as subject, the last being conceived as character, inner self, or personality, readable in facial features. What passes unnoticed is the theory of the face this implies.4
Van Alphen’s view that the modern portrait corresponds, rather, to new conceptions of subjectivity can be taken to allude to, or at least, to include Lacan’s famous brief but crucial explanation of the function of the mirror-stage in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than bringing the viewer or painter closer to the self, the mirror alienates from the self. Distance, reversal, and, most of all, seeing your own face as other, produce the estrangement that makes full subjectivity possible. In other words, the authenticity debates are based on the pre-mirror stage, the pre-symbolic imaginary. Genres consist of the self-evident definitions people “think in” or “live by” rather than of well-theorized categorizations. (Self-)portraiture is no exception. Because we think we know what a portrait is, we don’t question the notion of whether there is enough theoretical substantiation for such a category. 5
It is a further note by Liedtke that is the occasion for my approach to portraiture in this brief essay. The curator quotes a remark by Joshua Bruyn that demonstrates the need to revise the classical conception. Bruyn is quoted to have said that in this picture “only the face is by Rembrandt.” It is a profoundly intriguing remark that put on the table the intersection of the two issues of authorship and genre, which are at the heart of any discussion of (self-)portraiture. I shall retain the place of the face in this remark. Incredibly, and apparently on the basis of this opinion of the then-leader of the Rembrandt Research Project, Christian Tümpel de-attributed the painting and catalogued it as “Circle of Rembrandt.” Given that in the nineties, the possible de-attribution of The Polish Rider also centered on the autograph face versus allo-graphic rest, this decision on Tümpel’s part is an astonishing but potentially important contribution to the discussion of the centrality of the face in figurative art in general, and (self-)portraiture in particular. Liedtke’s remark about the artist’s accomplishment would predict his disagreement with his colleague. At stake is not only the contestable issue of coherence, but more precisely, the centrality of the autograph face as a distinctive feature of the genre of self-portraiture. This centrality, plausible as it may seem, is not “natural” enough to be accepted without some reflection. 6
The face is not simply a part of the human body. It is the one that facilitates connections between people and thus constitutes the interface of sociality. The face is, in this sense, both over-estimated and under-estimated. In order to get out of the kind of discussions in which Bruyn was able to make such a farcical even if at the same time, potentially profoundly productive, because so contestable, judgment of authenticity, and based on which, in turn, Tümpel was able to deprive the public by dis-attributing the painting, I propose to focus on the performativity of the face – the way it acts. This allows us both to consider self-portrait and portrait together, and to avoid essentialist views of what the face “expresses”. For this I shift for a moment to the significant verb “to face”. To face is three acts at once. Literally, facing is the act of looking someone else in the face. It is also, coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down by looking it in the face rather than denying or repressing it. Thirdly, it is making contact, placing the emphasis on the second person, and acknowledging the need of that contact simply in order to be able to sustain life.7
This view leads completely away from the mirror (tool for self-portraiture) and, or versus, the mask, as a tool for sitting for portraiture, withholding self-revelation, replacing it with selfpresentation. It makes the distinction redundant. If we just assume that the self-portraitist also poses – wears a mask – since he or she presents the self self-consciously for a public, the mask is just as relevant as the mirror. And the disputes in Rembrandt scholarship make more sense when we consider, in terms of facing, the possibility of that intermediate genre, the selfportrait made by someone else, commissioned or not. In both cases – of the doubted selfportrait and the overly-posed portrait, hence, a portrait of another, whether or not the features on the painting resemble either the sitter or the artist – we can call the result an “allo-portrait”. This would be the reverse of Leonardo’s famous claim that all painting is, unconsciously, selfportraiture.8 I would like to complement this view with the thesis that all portraiture is allo-, in relation to the self as well as to other sitters, even in the case of self-portraiture, and hence, that a selfportrait commissioned from another artist, or done by s