Modern Art: Selected Essays 9780226824260, 9780226824932

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Art Conquers All: Th e Unloved Wife
2. Cézanne’s Barnes Bathers & Co.
3. Thoughts on Monet
4. Matisse: Music
5. Max Ernst: This Is a Test
6. “Jasper Johns”: For the Record
7. Encounters with Rauschenberg
8. Some of Hans Haacke’s Works Considered as Fine Art
9. The Statue in the Taxi: The Ins and Outs of Modern Sculpture
10. Art Minus Criticism Equals Art
11. Exit Clown, Speaking Anything
Notes
Leo Steinberg: Chronology
Leo Steinberg: Publications (1947– 2010)
Photography Credits
Index

Citation preview

m oder n art

essays by leo steinberg Edited by Sheila Schwartz

Modern Art s e l e c t e d e s s ays

leo steinberg edited by Sheila Schwartz

the university of chicago press | Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2023 by Sheila Schwartz Introduction © 2023 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2023 Printed in Italy 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-82426-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-82493-2 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226824932.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steinberg, Leo, 1920–2011, author. | Schwartz, Sheila, editor. | Steinberg, Leo, 1920–2011. Essays. Selections. 2018. Title: Modern art : selected essays / Leo Steinberg ; edited by Sheila Schwartz. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Series: Essays by Leo Steinberg | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022046242 | isbn 9780226824260 (cloth) | isbn 9780226824932 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Art, Modern. | Art criticism. Classification: lcc n7445.2 .s73 2023 | ddc 709.04—dc23/eng/20220926 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046242 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

contents

Preface and Acknowledgments, Sheila Schwartz vii

Introduction, James Meyer xi 1.

Art Conquers All: The Unloved Wife 1

2.

Cézanne’s Barnes Bathers & Co. 27

3.

Thoughts on Monet 33

4.

Matisse: Music 61

5.

Max Ernst: This Is a Test 65

6.

“Jasper Johns”: For the Record 69

7.

Encounters with Rauschenberg 73

8.

Some of Hans Haacke’s Works Considered as Fine Art 111

9.

The Statue in the Taxi: The Ins and Outs of Modern Sculpture 123

10.

Art Minus Criticism Equals Art 155

11.

Exit Clown, Speaking Anything 185 Notes 191 Leo Steinberg: Chronology

203

Leo Steinberg: Publications (1947–2010) Photography Credits 213 Index 217

207

preface and ac kn ow le d g m e n ts

L

eo Steinberg greeted the turn of the millennium with a new venture in mind: the republication of about a dozen of his most important Old Master essays in a single volume, a companion to Other Criteria, his 1972 compendium on modern art. But, as he passed eighty, the burden of time began to weigh upon him and instead he opened files on unpublished matter, eager to work up what had not yet been scripted and engage in fresh writing tasks. In the two years before his death in 2011, however, another, larger project evolved: the posthumous publication of essays in all fields written during his six-decade career, along with some unpublished lectures.1 His hope was that I would bring off what he had neither the years nor the inclination to do. The present volume, following upon Picasso, is the fifth and final in the series, covering other modern and contemporary artists. Of the eleven chapters, four are unpublished lectures (chs. 1, 3, 9, 10), two unpublished texts (chs. 2, 4). The final chapter strays from art history to present Steinberg’s wit—his forays into donnish humor composed as an escape valve from the pressures of professional writing. Excluded here is the landmark Jasper Johns essay, first published in 1962 and republished with revisions in Other Criteria (1972).2 Other Criteria remains in print, whereas unpublished or less readily accessible works needed accommodation. Omitted for the same reason are other essays in the book.

I leave to James Meyer an explication de texte, addressing instead the biographical origins of Steinberg’s arthistorical method.

Steinberg had a well-earned reputation as a writer of fine prose, which won him both praise and blame from fellow art historians. He often recalled Walter Friedlaender’s judgment at a faculty conference during his graduate studies at the Institute of Fine Arts: “I don’t trust Leo Steinberg, he writes too well.”3 Anyone concerned with style could not be concerned with scholarship; if it doesn’t sound like art history, it isn’t. Steinberg’s dedication to English style was that of a foreigner who had to learn what native speakers took for granted. English was his fourth language, preceded by Russian, Hebrew, and German. He arrived in London from Berlin in May 1933, not quite thirteen years old, fluent in German, able to mimic half a dozen dialects, but without a word of English. He quickly came to resent English as the “instrument of my impotence” and “humiliation.”4 At age seventeen, however, he decided that English would be his language and began to school himself in its literature—Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Browne, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Dickens. English, he soon realized, was as noble a language as German. He memorized Shakespeare sonnets, pages from Paradise Lost, and long prose passages from other favorite authors, “reciting them to myself in order to internalize the rhythms of English prose and verse.”5 A friend gave him a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, which became his cicerone to English. “I had the naive notion that any word or turn of phrase in Ulysses that was unfamiliar to me was unfamiliar because I was a bloody foreigner, and of course any native English speaker would know words like ‘tholsel’ or ‘inkle.’ I would look every one of them up.”6 Late in life, he still knew pages of Ulysses by heart.

preface and acknowled gments [viii]

This internalized vocabulary—and syntax, styles, and structures—of great English literature became a vast linguistic resource. And writing, he taught me in the more than four decades we worked together, was thinking. Ideas and narrative structures evolve and are refined—or forsaken—in the search for the most precise and expressive locution. Put into the service of art history, his prose illuminated the subject, revealing what a more pedestrian style would keep hidden. Richard Shiff put it well: “Leo’s writing has the freshness of speech, even though he fussed over choice of word, syntax, and meter, just as a painter might fuss over nuances of color and the rhythms of strokes, without detriment to the overall picture. His models included Shakespeare and Joyce, writers who took delight in sound without losing the deeper reaches of sense. . . . Such sonorous writing risks striking its reader as selfindulgent, too finely orchestrated, leaving the impression that the rhetoric is the message. . . . [But] his descriptive terms and analytical concepts bore an organic relationship to whichever art objects he brought under investigation. He set eye and mind to the immediate task, as opposed to administering a fixed vocabulary, a fashionable method, or a hierarchy of values.”7 The roots of Steinberg’s art history lie equally in his training as an artist. He enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art, London, age sixteen. At graduation four years later, a skilled draftsman with prizes in hand for drawing and sculpture, he “had the good sense to know” that a career as a professional artist was not for him.8 But he continued to draw from the model and sculpt portraits of friends. In 1948, looking for a way to support himself in New York, he got a job teaching life drawing at Parsons School of Design, adding art history lectures to his course load in 1951. He taught at Parsons through the 1950s, drawing along with the students, even while studying art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, writing contemporary exhibition reviews for Arts Magazine, and becoming renowned for his lectures at the 92nd Street Y and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Long after he was an established art historian, he would now and then join artist friends for drawing sessions with a live model.9

Steinberg brought his artist’s eye to the study of art history. To understand a painted composition, sculpted figure, or building, to follow the creator’s thought, he drew it, in whole and in part, over and again. He respected every inch of a work as the product of an artist’s decision. Nothing, even if unsuccessful, was accidental or casual. Thus too the alterations made to great works of art by copyists: he saw these alterations not as incompetence, but as negative criticism, visual corrections of perceived flaws that serve to reveal the intentionality of the original. Comprehending an artwork extended beyond twodimensional replication. Steinberg often said that he didn’t trust art historians who’d never drawn and never danced.10 He didn’t mean those who’d never waltzed, but rather those who never tried to translate looking into physical equivalencies, to animate static art with gestural simulations. He taught his students that mere looking was never enough. They had to hold the figure’s pose “till the strains of it become an inward intuition.” “At stake is the identity of an action, its feel and import. It has to be danced to be known.”11 Drawing, writing, dancing painted and sculpted figures—all this built the foundation for Steinberg’s art history. We see it in the indefatigable conjunction of form and content. Nearly everything Steinberg wrote includes passages of old-fashioned formal analysis.“The very distinction of form and symbol, insofar as it suggests different things, appears as an imposition, a projection from habits of language.”12 Looking long and hard, reaching into his verbal storehouse, he describes what is seen—and drawn and danced. But in Steinberg’s work, such description becomes the basis for interpretative erudition. However learned his footnotes or discussions of difficult theological and critical issues, these textual reinforcements always followed visual analysis. He went to the museum before he went to the library. The primacy of the visual is a credo of Steinberg’s thinking about art. He titled the series of six Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1995–96 “The Mute Image and the Meddling Text,” pleading against what he elsewhere called the “tyranny of the written word.”

preface and acknowled gments

His writings are punctuated with such statements as “let thinking take off from what comes in at the eye.” Or “the primary problem is simply our educated reluctance to take seeing seriously; for it is easier to read and rely on one’s reading than to keep vision alerted and trust appearances. Reading discursive prose we feel confident that the vehicles of signification are guaranteed, that meaning is promoted . . . by dint of words. . . . In parsing a painting one stoops to inferior orders of certainty, and it is understandable that folks who seek surety while looking at art reach for collateral reading.”13 Finally, at the end of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, he explains one of the reasons why he risked hypothetical interpretations: “to remind the literate among us that there are moments, even in a wordy culture like ours, when images start from no preformed program to become primary texts. Treated as illustrations of what is already scripted, they withhold their secrets.” Peppering the critical objections to Steinberg’s art history is the accusation of overinterpretation, of claiming more than the artist could have intended. Let Steinberg again speak for himself: “A word needs to be said about the limits and license of interpretation. I am aware of the position that frowns on excessively free speculation at the expense of the masters. But there are, after all, two ways to inflict injustice on a great work of art: by over-interpreting it, or by under-estimating its meaning. If unverifiable interpretations are rightly regarded as dangerous, there is as much danger of misrepresentation in restrictive assertions that feel safe only because they say little. . . . [T]he probity of resisting interpretation is not the virtue to which I aspired. . . . [N]othing would seem to me more foolhardy than to project upon [an artist’s] symbolic structures a personal preference for simplicity.”14

Notes to the Texts The chapters are sequenced in the approximate chronological order of their subjects and incorporate notes and revisions Steinberg made in the years subsequent to

each publication. In the case of lectures, I have added endnotes from material in his files. A word about these previously unpublished lectures. From the early 1950s on, Steinberg was a sought-after lecturer in museums and institutions here and abroad. He used the occasion of a lecture to work out and test new ideas, in the expectation of eventually publishing them. Sometimes he did manage to publish; but more often, his speaking schedule as well as teaching obligations kept important lecture material from reaching the printed page. Steinberg poured as much effort into lectures as he did into published books and essays, though such effort took time away from writing. But he felt a sense of responsibility to his listeners, a conviction that they deserved his very best. Even when a lecture was repeated over the years, he revised it for each venue, updating and improving it. Moreover, he treated the spoken word differently from the written: “I try to write the lecture not as publishable prose, but as speech to a living audience. It’s written the way a playwright might write dialogue, to sound spontaneous.”15 Little wonder that he usually played to packed houses. Lecture texts originally took the form of typed notes on small cards, with much adlibbed. But around 1980, with his reputation as a lecturer secure, he began to write out his lectures in full, every word, every impromptu aside, with notations for emphasis and pace—all so as not to disappoint the audience’s expectations, no less than to avoid the clichés born of improvisation.16 It is these lectures that he authorized me to include in the present series. The literature cited or discussed by Steinberg reflects what was relevant to him at the time of publication. If his post-publication notes contained comments on or references to later literature, they have been included. The attentive reader will observe that some literature which Steinberg must have known goes unmentioned. These omissions were intentional, for they often involved text-based interpretations completely at odds with his image-based principles. No point, he felt, in arguing apples and oranges. He would dismiss such literature in the spirit of Dante, guarda e passa.

[ix]

preface and acknowled gments [x]

Acknowledgments Ever since Steinberg published “Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun” (1980)—“a mischievous satire” to divert those who have been “struck by a certain selfaddressed puffery amidst the ostentation of thanks”— I’ve been aware of how easily the form can slip into inadvertent parody, though the acknowledgments he wrote for his own books raise the prefatory convention to a literary level. No matter the challenge, these volumes would not have seen print without the pragmatic and affective support of those who follow. Steinberg’s dear friends Paula and Herbert Molner and Kate Ganz cheered me on as I made the transition from working with Leo to working without him. Jack Flam, Richard Shiff, and Paul Hayes Tucker read parts of this volume, offering astute counsel and catching errors that slipped in during its preparation. Among those who nourished the series from the outset was Olivia Powell, Steinberg’s last research assistant, who made responsive and intelligent comments on parts of the typescripts. Christine Smith, professor of architectural history at Harvard and my good friend for decades, answered pesky questions on architectural affairs with patience and expertise. Another old friend, Charlotte Daudon-Lacaze in Paris, stepped in to help with matters Greco-Roman. Renaissance man John Cunnally, Leo’s student and assistant at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s and now a longtime professor at Iowa State University, delivered insights throughout the volumes as well as difficult Greek and Latin translations. Alexander Nagel, who wrote the introduction to the volume on Michelangelo’s paintings, has been a stalwart advocate of the entire series. My meetings and email exchanges with Daniele Di Cola have added immeasurably to these volumes. Di Cola’s now published PhD thesis for the Sapienza, University of Rome, explores the foundations and intellectual context of Steinberg’s art history; he was also the moti-

vating force behind the May 2017 symposium in Rome, “Leo Steinberg Now,” whose proceedings have recently been published by Campisano Editore.17 I was fortunate to have the aid of James Whitman Toftness, formerly assistant editor at the University of Chicago Press, now the publications manager for the Savannah College of Art and Design, whom I enlisted to oversee the messy business of securing images and permissions; his technical expertise helped ensure the quality of the reproductions. Christine Schwab’s sharp eye guaranteed editorial consistency in a disparate volume. Susan Bielstein, recently retired executive editor at the press, arrived there in 1996, just as the revised edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion was going into production. She saw the book to completion with patient skill and soon became Leo’s supportive confidante in the publishing world. It was with great pleasure that I put this project in her proficient hands. Others have made key contributions to this endeavor with timely responses to questions or with references and photos. I list them here in alphabetical order, but with unsequenced gratitude: Yve-Alain Bois, Loretta Howard, Helen Hsu, Miriam Charney Maltby, Dorothy Jean McKetta, Lauran Rothstein. My largest debt is to Prudence Crowther, a staunch and devoted friend to Leo in his last decade. She has been a constant companion in this publication venture, offering both encouragement and wise editorial feedback. But my debt to her began at Leo’s death. The job of closing his apartment was a melancholy one. His presence, and his absence, abided in every pile of papers, every book, in his scattered jars of pencil stubs and the dust layers on long-abandoned projects. For fifteen months, Prudence worked closely with me in the excavation of a man’s life, helping to sort, organize, or recycle thousands of documents and sustaining me with sound advice, welcome humor, and shared emotions. It would have been an impossibly lonely job without her. Sheila Schwartz new york, 2023

introduction James Meyer

T

he final volume of Leo Steinberg’s writings published by the University of Chicago Press, this selection of essays on modern art dating from the 1980s to 2009 is the bookend to Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972), Steinberg’s very first book. Published when Steinberg, a self-described “late bloomer,” was forty-two, Other Criteria consolidated his reputation as a critic of the highest importance at a time when criticism resonated to a degree that seems unimaginable today. In the title essay of Other Criteria, Steinberg had presciently observed that the dictates of the market were quickly displacing critical opinion.1 He revisited this question some thirty years later. Invited to speak at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during an exhibition of a collection of blue-chip art, Steinberg quoted a breathless news report on the “stunning price” fetched by Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles (fig. 10.24) at auction (a rather daring intervention, given that the Koons was on display down the hall) as well as a vapid description of a Damien Hirst from a Sotheby’s catalogue (pp. 156–57). We can almost hear the audience burst into laughter as Steinberg recites a cataloguist’s paean to Hirst’s “highly intelligent” arrangement of “Judd-like” cubes half-filled with formaldehyde, a work allegedly “as much about the presence of life as it is about the inevitability of death.” Steinberg’s frustration is palpable: “To one who once tried his hand at critical writing, it’s still a shock to witness the displacement of critical thinking by promotional copy” (p. 157). What is a critic to do when the language and formats of a once-respected literary genre have been thoroughly instrumentalized by the market? What is

the purpose of “criticism” when there is no longer an audience for it, when critical thinking “no longer matters”? If “Other Criteria” is an emblem of High Criticism, the LACMA lecture is its elegy. The achievement of Other Criteria—a sweeping study of modern art from Monet to Johns—is especially notable when we recall that Steinberg was not a trained specialist in modernism, and most art historians frowned on contemporary practice.2 Having enrolled in the PhD program at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1954, at the age of thirty-four, Steinberg published his pathbreaking study of Caravaggio’s paintings in the Cerasi Chapel in Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo in 1959 while completing a dissertation on Borromini under the supervision of Wolfgang Lotz.3 The 1972 publication of Other Criteria exposed his “secret life” as a critic, Steinberg observed.4 I beg to differ. After all, he began to frequent New York galleries and museums during the late 1940s after immigrating to the US and had published reviews of contemporary shows as early as 1955.5 In 1962, he published the polemic “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” on the modernist theme of the challenge posed by new art to its viewers, and he participated in a now famous panel on Pop Art with the likes of Henry Geldzahler and Hilton Kramer at the Museum of Modern Art.6 He presented the lecture “Other Criteria” at MoMA in 1968. This rising scholar of the Renaissance and Baroque had all along been a habitué of downtown art clubs and studios; he could as comfortably write about Mondrian or his friend Paul Brach as solve the riddle of the missing leg in Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà.

introduction [xii]

His essay “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” whose publication is described in chapter 6 below, quotes conversations with the artist, a device used to powerful effect in “Other Criteria” and “Encounters with Rauschenberg” (ch. 7 below). Bringing us imaginatively into the studio, Steinberg’s writings on Rauschenberg and Johns, and his writings in general, eschew the stern proviso of distance of “proper” history as Hayden White described it—the “myth of objectivity” that banishes the scholar’s voice or personality from the writing of history.7 This “disdain for subjectivity” troubled Steinberg: “When I was a student, a great art historian advised me to never tell my readers or listeners how I came to a problem, or by what steps I proceeded, but to come clean with my findings. His advice has remained so much alive with me that it has urged me ever since to pursue the opposite course. I admire the art historian who lets the ground of his private involvement show.”8 Showing one’s “private involvement” was no simple matter. It demanded a type of writing that could convey to a reader the experience of looking at an artist’s work during the course of repeated encounters and exchanges (the title “Encounters with Rauschenberg” perfectly captures this approach). It suggested a mode of interpretation informed equally by archival research and iconographical and textual analysis on the one hand and by acts of viewing and sketching on the other, yielding readings so original and rhetorically seductive as to invite skepticism (“I don’t trust Leo Steinberg. He writes too well,” remarked Walter Friedlaender).9 By the same token, Steinberg brought to his writings on modern art an uncommon erudition and a Pragmatist faith in the priority of his own experience. “The opinion of people who look at evidence only to confirm a preformed decision is hardly worth having,” he averred (p. 163). This insistence that interpretation must attend to different kinds of evidence emboldened Steinberg to question received readings of canonical works of art and dominant narratives of modernism, namely the Anglo-American formalist tradition that extends from Roger Fry to Clement Greenberg, the most influential figure of modernist criticism in the visual arts. Formalism, he argued, overlooked the subject matter of

Old Master and modernist art.10 Greenberg’s theory of modernist painting as an asymptotic search for “flatness” had reduced the history of art of the last hundred years to an “elegant one-dimensional sweep,” an untroubled tale that leads from Monet’s lily pond to Pollock’s East Hampton barn.11 Worse, modernist theory could not account for the most compelling contemporary endeavors: works that didn’t fit into Greenberg’s monistic narrative; works that cause us to doubt the stories we have been told about art, about everything—even ourselves. He wrote eloquently about Johns’s Target with Four Faces (fig. 10.3): “They are without end, these questions, and their answers are nowhere in storage. It is a kind of self-analysis that a new image can throw you into and for which I am grateful. I am left in a state of anxious uncertainty by the painting, about painting, about myself. And I suspect that this is all right.”12 Where Johns’s inscrutable Flags and Targets challenged the epistemological certainty of Greenbergianism, the Combines of Rauschenberg produced a “radically new orientation,” inverting the upright perceptual arrangement of Western art from Renaissance painting to the Color Field canvas. The “flatbed picture plane,” as Steinberg famously called it, evoked the world beyond the picture plane, the spaces of contemporary experience (“tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which . . . information may be received, printed, impressed,” p. 87). Steinberg dared to call Rauschenberg’s art “post-Modernist.”13 If Johns and Rauschenberg heralded modernism’s obsolescence for Steinberg, the battle over modernism’s origin commenced with Monet. I cannot stress enough the importance of Monet’s example in instigating Steinberg’s skepticism of Anglo-American formalism.14 An encounter with a Nymphéas at the Museum of Modern Art and repeated visits to the Orangerie in Paris inspired the remarkable short essay published in 1956, included as an appendix to the 1998 “Thoughts on Monet” (pp. 58–60). In a startling passage written in the second person, Steinberg captures what it feels like to stand in front of the Water Lilies canvases and the tantalizing impossibility of locating oneself in Monet’s dreamy spaces: “You can invert the picture or yourself

introduction

at will, lie cheek to cheek with the horizon, rise on a falling cloud, or drift with lily leaves over a sunken sky.” Monet’s Nymphéas provide few if any points of stability anchoring our perception: lost in the topsy-turvy world of the lily pond and its relay of reflections, we find ourselves “cheek to cheek” with the horizon as we “drift” above a sky that almost appears to float beneath us. “The whole world is cut loose from anthropomorphic or conceptual points of reference,” he concludes. “Those points are still available, but they no longer constitute the world.” As Steinberg argues in “Thoughts on Monet” (pp. 43–44), already by the 1890s a structure of reversibility may be seen in the painter’s depictions of poplars and river bends, as if these works could almost be viewed upside down (“like playing cards, or chessboards, or some Mondrians”). The Monet of modernist theory is a prophet of “flatness” and abstraction, a way station to Rothko and Pollock.15 Steinberg’s Monet is more daring, and less resolved—an artist who dismantles the very binaries verticality/horizontality and illusion/flatness that modernist theory took as an absolute given. With the publication of Other Criteria Steinberg retired his critic’s quill, more or less. He turned his sights to the Old Masters in his monographs The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983) and Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (2001); in his voluminous writings on Michelangelo; and in his studies of such figures as Mantegna, Pontormo, Guercino, Steen, Salviati, and Velázquez. Within the terrain of modern art, he focused his attention almost exclusively on Picasso.16 The contents of the present book comprise much of what Steinberg had to say about nineteenthand twentieth-century art in later years. Many of these texts are previously unpublished. Half are lectures, or began as such. A Steinberg essay “is never far from the spoken word,” one of his most astute commentators has observed.17 Rare among art historians, Steinberg was able to imbue his written work with his voice. Eschewing the conventional formulas of academic prose, he worked tirelessly to make his writing “a little more breezy, a little more reader-friendly,” to “get off a sentence that I actually like.”18 As exactingly constructed as his published

essays, Steinberg’s lectures were meant to be read out loud, like scripts, Sheila Schwartz reminds us. Every anecdote, every aside, every morsel of wit was planned in advance, preempting any need for improvisation and the anxiety this could bring.19 Preparing his talks with such care allowed Steinberg to cover more ground and to impress his listeners with his command of art history and other disciplines. Chapter 9, on the dialectic of interiority and exteriority in sculpture, runs at a gallop from the Elgin Marbles to Tony Smith.20 “Art Conquers All: The Unloved Wife” discusses Dürer, Holbein, Manet, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and a dizzying number of literary and art-historical references in an hour-long lecture. Steinberg’s love of language and verbal invention is also on display in the medley of humor poems and other texts in chapter 11 selected by Schwartz especially for this volume. The “Ten Irreverent Rimes” composed in the AABBA rhyming scheme of the limerick popularized by Edward Lear and accompanied by suitably irreverent footnotes offer a taste of Steinberg’s connoisseurship in the graphic arts, cultivated during a lifetime of collecting and study.21 Steinberg also took on the more challenging double dactyl, a novel poetical form invented by the American poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander.22 Demanding inventiveness within strict parameters, the double dactyl was well suited to Steinberg’s sensibility. Who else would invoke the medieval historian William of Malmesbury in a humor poem, or Doctor Mellifluus, the title of Pius XII’s encyclical on St. Bernard of Clairvaux? Who but Steinberg would conceive the Swiftian “Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun” containing some fifty-eight made-up proper names, each an anagram of Leo Steinberg and each an absurdly stereotypical surname representing the countries where his fictional alter ego, Ort Eigenselb (“Place Oneself ”), has conducted his research? The long list of sycophantic thank-yous declines into a list of grievances. References to such unfortunates as “Terese Goblin” and “Teborg Senile” conclude the satire. How does this book enlarge the account of modernism presented in Other Criteria? How is Steinberg’s thinking

[xiii]

introduction [xiv]

impacted by encounters with old favorites or heretofore unfamiliar works? If the viewer’s experience is pivotal for Steinberg, how might this alter as the viewer undergoes the inevitable transformations of age? Steinberg possessed an exacting sense of “biological time,” Reinhart Koselleck’s idea that our lifespans—the time when we are born and the times we live through—indelibly mold our perception.23 Steinberg observes that his second published essay, “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind,” is a product of “the author’s youth,” and that his attraction to Johns’s art “had to do with the portents of middle age.”24 In the LACMA talk (ch. 10), he acknowledges his “retardataire taste,” and chides his younger hosts for “the absurdity of inviting an octogenarian to comment on contemporary art” (p. 175). He seldom wrote about contemporary art after publishing Other Criteria; his essay on Hans Haacke and discussions of Haacke and Koons in chapter 10 are exceptional. He maintained that “all given criteria of judgment are seasonal; that other criteria are perpetually brought into play by new forms and fresh thought.”25 We each reach a point as viewers when the aesthetic principles that have guided us can no longer account for what we see—when we can no longer embrace the new “criteria.” If the “plight of the public” theorized in his early essay is a recurring theme of modernism, Steinberg now describes the viewer’s alienation from the contemporary as a private discomfort from which none of us is immune. He recalls how the middle-aged Cézanne was so attached to the work of his predecessors (such as Napoleon’s court painter, Baron Gros) that he found little to admire in the work of his peers: Monet and Renoir alone passed muster. The “Baron Gros factor” is Steinberg’s term for this resistance to the new, the crisis of taste experienced by “lifelong art buffs as they fade into obsolescence” (p. 173). It is the sad realization that art has moved past us. Jeff Koons is Steinberg’s Baron Gros factor. This is not to say he dismisses Koons’s art. On the contrary, he discusses several works from Koons’s Banality and Made in Heaven series from a variety of angles—as souped-up readymades (Koons “outplunges Duchamp”), as kitsch, as merchandise, as a kind of sanitized pornography, finally admitting his incapacity to find any lasting in-

terest in these works. “With Jeff Koons I acknowledge my inability, or reluctance, to stay the course” (p. 173). We are creatures of our own time, Steinberg insists. A reader is especially aware of this when reading chapter 1, a lecture delivered by Steinberg shortly before his eighty-fifth birthday on the representation of painters’ spouses in Western art. The world evoked in his essay is rigidly patriarchal and heteronormative. Women are “wives,” injured parties, neglected and unwanted by their ambitious husbands. Descriptions of Mrs. Benjamin Franklin as “plain,” of the “poor, bug-eyed” Agnes Frey (Frau Albrecht Dürer), or of the garrulous Hortense Fiquet, her “motormouth running” as she patiently sat for Cézanne during some twenty years of tedious modeling sessions, have not worn well. But “Art Conquers All” is a searing critique of the patriarchal system that produced such masterpieces, and the psychological toll of creative genius. Steinberg’s sympathy is with the “unloved.” Recalling Fiquet’s dismissive remark to Matisse that Cézanne “didn’t know how to finish his pictures,” Steinberg seems to take Fiquet’s side (“So the disrespect between the Cézannes was at least mutual,” p. 9). He judges Franklin sharply for abandoning his wife Deborah and for his “chilling” replies to her heartbreaking, “near-illiterate” letters, and takes umbrage at Matisse’s remark that he would have preferred to have been a monk, “alone in his cell, dedicated solely to his work” (“Was that a nice thing to say in front of the wife, three years into their marriage?,” p. 18). His descriptions of Monet painting the dejected Camille on her deathbed (a “moment of professionalism at its most callous,” p. 14) and of Amélie Matisse weeping over her husband’s portrayal of her “coalsack eyes” and “tarred lips” in the Hermitage Madame Matisse (pp. 19–21) are powerful and poignant. Steinberg once remarked that the greatest contribution an artist can make is to reimagine how we see.26 His epiphanic encounter with Caravaggio’s paintings in the Cerasi Chapel as a student triggered that awareness: Caravaggio, he discovered, intended his depictions of St. Peter and St. Paul to be seen at a slant as a visitor enters the chapel. By reimagining how his works could be beheld, Caravaggio invented a new kind of viewer

introduction

who no longer occupies a “privileged viewing position” w but is rather “unlikely to be perfectly placed.”27 Steinberg’s most important writings on modern art—his ravishing account of the Water Lilies, his rigorous study of the Demoiselles d’Avignon, his famous analysis of the “flatbed picture plane”—followed from this insight. This attention to the spectator also informs his essay “Some of Hans Haacke’s Works Considered as Fine Art” (ch. 8). Haacke’s work qualifies as “fine art,” suggests Steinberg, because it brings a subject matter that was external to art into the domain of aesthetic experience. Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 “cross[ed] the barrier of permissible clowning” traditionally afforded by patrons and museums to artists, just as court fools were allowed to make jokes at the ruler’s expense (p. 113). And by locating the spectator at the center of this encounter, Steinberg argues, Haacke forces us to experience his works not as political statements but as art. As he notes, Haacke’s Oelgemaelde: Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers places a viewer on a red carpet running up to a hand-painted portrait of President Ronald Reagan installed behind a velvet rope; on the opposite end of the carpet Haacke mounted a photo frieze of antiwar activists protesting the presence of US missiles in Germany (pp. 114–15). Drawing a comparison of this work with a Renaissance-era chapel where a viewer is “caught” between Rinaldo Mantovano’s paintings of St. Sebastian on one wall and archers pointing their bows and arrows at the martyr on the other, Steinberg argues that both artists place the spectator in a perceptual space of moral conflict. Several of the chapters reveal another aspect of Steinberg’s project, typically unmentioned. Pleasurable as looking at and writing about art surely were, something more had to be at stake. “I don’t write about a work of art until I have found the angle that gives it some spiritual or moral justification,” he noted.28 This moral imperative is felt whenever Steinberg corrects a

faulty interpretation, such as the various misreadings of Max Ernst’s The Virgin Chastising the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: A.B. [André Breton], P.E. [Paul Éluard], and the Painter (ch. 5) that fail to grasp that Ernst’s picture positions the viewer as the embarrassed witness of the bizarre scene. Or when he rues the market’s denaturing of criticism as a literary form, or describes Haacke’s exposures of the seamy collusions of the New York art world and real estate industry, museums, and corporations. We feel it when Steinberg imagines Monet gazing at his lily pond “through dimming eyes . . . with a spiritual courage for which language has only physical analogies” (p. 59), or judges Holbein, Monet, and the others for neglecting their wives, and even Rauschenberg for producing works of less-thanstellar quality—“Not a good move; an unfunny gesture too trite to be interesting,” he writes of Pneumonia Lisa’s banal repetition of Mona Lisa’s face, replaced in one instance by that of Botticelli’s Venus (p. 104). Steinberg drafted the first version of “Encounters with Rauschenberg” a quarter century after Other Criteria. His experience of Pneumonia Lisa isn’t edifying or interesting, and he doesn’t shy away from saying so. Steinberg once described criticism as “a melancholy profession.” The critic, he observed, is too often the progenitor of tomorrow’s cliché, “saying no more in his best moments than what everyone in the following season repeats.”29 Or their work is forgotten soon enough. As it stands, a good number of Steinberg’s texts remain classics in their fields. And while it is sometimes said that he created no school—his way of working was too personal, too original to be copied—Steinberg does offer art historians a model for emulation. What does he teach us? To attend to the experience afforded by our eyes and bodies. To make apparent what is at stake for us in writing about art. To show the ground of our “private involvement.” To risk making “mistakes.” The encounter is the thing, and all we can learn from it.

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Art Conquers All The Unloved Wife

I

f there was ever a conflict in the home of a painter, his wife’s portrait would be the last place to confess it. From antiquity on, depictions of the missus usually proclaim that all is well; they display connubial bliss, or pride, or tenderness, or contented affection. But there are hints, as early as the Renaissance, that all was not always well, especially when the artist’s work interfered with the obligations of marriage. Consider this gossipy tidbit at the end of Vasari’s biography of Paolo Uccello, who died, aged seventy-eight, in 1475. Uccello, we learn, sits up all night tracking the precise visual effects of fixed-focused perspective, until Mrs. Uccello appears at the studio door and calls him to come to bed. To which he responds: “Oh, what a sweet thing this perspective is!”1 The anecdote was a century old when Vasari recorded it; the Florentines must have thought it amusing that a man would forgo the delights of the bed for the rigors of projective geometry. But how did this little nocturne become public knowledge? Vasari informs us that it was she who kept telling the story— and this I am glad to hear, for it suggests that Mrs. Uccello did not resent her husband’s response, thinking it perhaps rather lovable. And Uccello, for all we know, returned her affection. It’s just that perspective seemed sweeter. Beyond the art world, history records other instances of spousal neglect. One, from three hundred years later, involves Benjamin Franklin, a husband so dedicated to public service that he managed to spend fifteen of the last seventeen years of his marriage away from his plain Philadelphia wife. In 1774, even as Deborah suffered

sickness and loneliness, begging him to come home so she could see him once more before she died, he stayed on in London, hoping to prevent the breakup of the British Empire.2 Deborah’s near-illiterate letters to Franklin are a heartbreak to read; his tardy responses are chilling. He signs “Your affectionate husband,” but his affection for London was greater. Fast forward to William Randolph Hearst’s father, Mr. George Hearst, whose booming business in California was mining. Russell Baker reports that the elder Hearst set up his wife and children in elegant style on a San Francisco hilltop, from which he mostly absented himself. As Baker puts it: “George loved them but loved mining more, and mining was a business that kept a man far from home most of the time. Or so he explained.”3 And I thought—what a coincidence! The phrase “he loved them but loved mining more” sounds just like Matisse’s wooing of his future wife: “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more” (see p. 18). You see what I’m getting at: painting, mining, diplomatic service, and projective geometry don’t have much in common, except that each may be demanding enough to excuse an absentee husband and make his delinquency feel heroic, or at least virtuous. Art differs from those other distractions: if the unloving husband is a good painter, he can make lacklove his subject; chanA lecture delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, April 26, 2005, under the title “The Unloved Wife.” The lecture evolved from Steinberg’s work on the 2002–3 “Matisse Picasso” exhibition (see p. 194, note 38) and from an earlier engagement with a Cézanne portrait.

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nel the misery of failed marriage into products of high cultural value. But in fact this does not seem to have happened before the later nineteenth century—except in the work of two German Renaissance masters, one of them Dürer, who did not love Agnes Frey (fig. 1.1). The Dürers were married in 1494. Shortly before, having turned twentythree, Dürer portrayed himself holding an eryngium (thistle), the flower associated since antiquity with “luck in love” and felicitous marriage (Self-Portrait, 1493, Louvre). But, as Panofsky put it: “The promise of the Eryngium was not fulfilled.”4 Across the top of the panel, Dürer wrote in what sounds like fatalistic resignation: “my affairs will go as ordained on high.” Within a year or so, he drew Agnes sitting at a table—a pen sketch unusually free and fast (fig. 1.2). I’ve

figure 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Agnes Dürer, c. 1497. Formerly Kunsthalle

Bremen.

always loved it; millions have. But now, looking at it again, I wonder about her left arm and hand, drawn with a heavier load of ink—and surprisingly sloppy, incompetent. It must have been added later, probably after she’d roused herself, perhaps left the room. Just look at that crippled arm, crudely hatched over nothing—no elbow to bend—but terminating in a clenched fist—as no wife’s hand was ever depicted. Try imitating her posture: this girl is the most alone in all Nuremberg. And at the bottom Dürer writes: “Mein Agnes.” In a later drawing of 1521, her somewhat protruding eyes cast to the left (fig. 1.3). Not an image of feminine charm. But then, it has been conjectured, with reason, that Dürer was probably gay, and his childless marriage was sadly dysfunctional. Our most reliable witness is the diary Dürer kept of his yearlong travels in the Netherlands, 1520–21, when

figure 1.2. Albrecht Dürer, Mein Agnes, 1494. Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina.

art conquers all

he was almost fifty—and famous. It was the only time Agnes traveled with him, along with her maid; and the diary documents her rejection. It records how he often dined with some of his many admirers, but when none were around, dined, as he writes, “by himself ”; while his wife and the maid cooked and ate “in the upper kitchen.” Occasionally, the diary records: “I have again dined once with my wife.”5 During that trip, Dürer drew many portraits, including figure 1.3, of poor, bug-eyed Agnes: twenty-six years of misalliance have taken their toll.6 The same, alas, may be said of Hans Holbein’s wife, Elsbeth Binsenstock-Schmid, four years his senior. When the twenty-two-year-old Holbein married her in about 1520, she had long been a widow of wealth, able to help him set up as an independent master in Basel; so it was a good career move. In 1521, their son Philipp is

figure 1.3. Albrecht Dürer, Agnes Dürer, 1521. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett.

born; five years later, a girl, Katharina. Whereupon Holbein takes off for England, alone—and stays away for two years. Back in Basel in 1528, he purchases a house, paints a masterpiece (fig. 1.4), and, soon after, leaving his folks behind, returns to London for the remaining twelve years of his life, during which two more children are born to him out of wedlock. In 1543, in his midforties, he is carried off by the plague, having made his will, wherein he provides for his illegitimate children, without mentioning the folks back in Basel. Nor do we know anything more of the Holbeins’ feelings for one another. We have only the marvelous painting in Basel. Whether the biographical matter I’ve just recited helps or hinders what you receive from the picture, I leave you to decide. From the rest of the sixteenth century, I know of no other individualized images of un-

[3]

figure 1.4. Hans Holbein, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and Two Elder Children, 1528–29.

Kunstmuseum Basel, Amerbach-Kabinett 1662.

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loved wives. The poet Ariosto could ask rhetorically, “how comes it that we find twixt man and wife continual jars?” (Orlando furioso, opening of canto V). But such generalizations, common stock for popular broadsheets or comedy, have no bearing on the way an artist portrays his one and only. At least until the candors of modernism made it okay. Of course, the old habits of affectionate portrayals persist in academic painting throughout the nineteenth century. But as early as 1815, Turner writes to a friend: “I hate married men, they never make any sacrifice to the Arts, but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families, or some rubbish of that sort.” Baudelaire later writes approvingly of Delacroix that he “made Painting his only muse, his only mistress, his sole and self-sufficient voluptuousness. . . . Long before his death, he had expelled women from his life.” To the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, “serious marriage is too primitive.”7 In painting—so far as I can see at this moment—a change begins to register after the 1860s, suggesting that the pious idealization of marriage could not withstand the onslaught of the new realism. I see it happening in the work of Manet, Cézanne, and Monet, when each had behind him some twenty years of conjugal plight.

In the wives’ portraits produced by these masters— precedents for both Matisse and Picasso in their least loving streaks—common gallantry gives way to the subtheme of extinguished desire. The case of Manet is somewhat problematic. Though his painted couples often seem insulated, alienated from one another, his portraits of his wife merit a separate look. His output includes more than a dozen takes of the young pianist he eventually married, the plump, Dutch, ever-loving, older-than-he, all-forgiving Suzanne Leenhoff, who stayed out of the studio so as not to disturb. The Manet literature harps on his affection for her, as if to forestall contradiction—perhaps with justice. Manet may well have cherished what, in a letter written in October 1870, he called “your good face.” So he had painted her good face five years before: a middle-aged wife whom age could not wither (fig. 1.5).8 But around that same year, 1865, this “honest eye” painter (as Zola called Manet) was thrown a challenge. His friend Degas had given him a superb doubleportrait just painted of the Manet couple at home— Suzanne, age thirty-five, at the piano, Édouard at left, sprawled on a couch, listening. Shortly after making his gift, Degas was appalled to discover that Manet had

figure 1.5. Édouard Manet, La lecture,

1865. Paris, Musée d’Orsay.

art conquers all

sheared off and destroyed the right third of the canvas, slicing right through Suzanne’s “good face” (fig. 1.6). Did Manet flinch at her unflattered likeness as seen by the honest eye of Degas? Manet’s feelings in removing Suzanne from his presence in this superb painting are as unknowable as Manet’s response to his wife’s music. Françoise Cachin assures us that he “took great pleasure in hearing her play.” But Manet’s close friend, Antonin Proust, records in his Manet memoir that “Edouard had hardly any taste for music [and] was bored by it.”9 To resolve the contradiction we’d need to assume that Manet took great pleasure in being bored. Two years later, having undone Degas’s portrait of Suzanne at the piano, Manet, his wife now thirty-seven, tackled the subject himself (fig. 1.7). In the words of Cachin (p. 287): “Suzanne’s profile, less than felicitous in this painting, must have given Manet some trouble.” No wonder that, in its next appearance on canvas (fig. 1.8), this troubling profile is turned away, more than “lost”; and that this same “good face” disappears, veiled, slurred, and averted in On the Beach, 1873 (fig. 1.9). Then, an

about-turn: Manet’s pastel of 1874, Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa (fig. 1.10) portrays Suzanne in street clothes, reclined on a sofa in the posture of Manet’s notorious Olympia (1863), miming the courtesan’s pose as best she can (crossed ankles need slimmer legs). This backreference to Olympia—elbow out and one hand in her lap—usually goes unacknowledged. Only Cachin mentions it as “interesting,” and promptly changes the subject (p. 366); to dwell on it would have been rude. The picture, hanging in the Musée d’Orsay, presents a mid-forties wife in a parody of her husband’s most infamous provocation—the outrage that had scandalized Paris ten years before and which, unsold, was still in the studio. The parody is deepened by the fingering of the left hand. Why this unseemly jest, and is it relevant that Degas became the picture’s first owner? Is the picture, as the literature explains, Manet’s early exercise in the use of pastels, or is it a stags’ joke on Suzanne? Twice more he depicted her. There was a profile painted in 1879, now known only from X-ray photographs: Manet scraped it away, and overpainted his own idealizing Self-Portrait with a Palette.10 And that same

figure 1.6. Edgar Degas, Édouard

Manet with His Wife Suzanne, c. 1865. Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum, Japan.

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figure 1.7. (top) Édouard Manet, Madame Manet at the Piano, 1868. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. figure 1.8. (middle) Édouard Manet, Interior at Arcachon, 1871. Williamstown, MA, Clark Art Institute. figure 1.9. (bottom) Édouard Manet, On the

Beach, 1873. Paris, Musée d’Orsay.

figure 1.10. (top) Édouard Manet, Madame

Manet on a Blue Sofa, 1874. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. figure 1.11. (bottom) Édouard Manet,

Madame Manet in the Conservatory, 1879. Oslo, Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst.

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year he produced Madame Manet in the Conservatory (fig. 1.11), of which Cachin remarks: “Mme. Manet had put on weight, and her kind, placid features, always somewhat ruddy, had coarsened. Manet portrays her with realism and affection.”11 Affection and realism in a portrait mix well enough, but not necessarily in equal parts. When Manet—in the substitutive Self-Portrait of that same year—subtilized his own stocky appearance, the affection he brought to the subject produced a model of masculine grace, keeping realism in check. A similar check had been exercised in the 1865 portrait of Suzanne seated on a couch (fig. 1.5). There Manet had followed custom in applauding the wife’s unfading youth and the husband’s good judgment in choosing a mate. Now, fourteen years later, the Conservatory portrait gives realism its head. The picture lends substance to Berthe Morisot’s heartless gibe, “fat Suzanne.”12

figure 1.12. Paul Cézanne, Seated Woman in Blue, 1902–6. Washington, DC,

Phillips Collection; acquired 1946.

Manet’s tenderness for Suzanne’s person is—like his feeling for music—beyond certain knowledge. Some may trust the Souvenirs of his loyal friend Joseph de Nittis, who protested, twelve years after the artist’s death: “Faithful he certainly was, despite all appearances.”13 What are these “appearances,” which we are urged to discount? They include childless marriage, flirtations galore, and death by syphilis at age fifty-one, the artist leaving his wife all his worldly goods plus twenty-three years of viduity. To pry a man from his wife, even posthumously, is, of course, mischievous; the more so where affection, on the husband’s terms, may have been slightly genuine. But defunct feelings, unlike extant master paintings, are inapparent. And Manet’s late takes of Suzanne seem at least disillusioned. I see them usher an increasingly dire procession, a sequence that runs crescendo from disillusion through alienation to aversion and execration. In the history of portraiture, this is a new kind of parade. Prominent in the cortège are Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense Fiquet—as unloved a wife as ever put up with a painter.14 It was her husband’s work that led me to this dismal subject nearly three decades ago; more precisely, it was the jolt of this picture in the “Late Cézanne” exhibition at MoMA in 1978 that got me thinking about the image of the unloved wife, even though this portrait is not of Mme. Cézanne (fig. 1.12). Like everyone else of my vintage, I had been educated to view Cézanne exclusively in formal terms; it was then the only acceptable way. To find expression or symbolism in Cézanne’s mature paintings would have seemed uninformed. But this picture started me wondering. The model wears cold, somber blue; buttoned down to the wrists and up the throat, eyes lowered, lips clenched and locked knees; the whole body sealed off. And on her lap, a book closed, its closure emphasized by two listless hands. It occurred to me that Cézanne’s portraits—his individualized close-ups of men or women, who are always alone, even when playing cards—that these portraits embodied a vision of human beings forever parted from one another. And this vision includes his nearly thirty portraits of Hortense, produced from 1877 to the mid-1890s, when they began living apart (fig. 1.13).

art conquers all

But for near twenty years she would sit for him, her motormouth running, and Cézanne grumbling, “be still, my dear, you are only talking nonsense,” while projecting upon the canvas the image of a lone, unloved woman.15 After Cézanne’s death in 1906, Matisse heard Hortense say that her husband had been an “old fool [who] didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know how to finish his pictures.”16 So the disrespect between the Cézannes was at least mutual. And maybe Cézanne’s penchant for painting outdoors owes something to the situation indoors. It’s a thought, isn’t it: that Cézanne may have embraced Mont Ste.-Victoire from the same motive that drove Socrates and Benjamin Franklin to exert their wisdom in public places, away from home.

figure 1.13. Paul Cézanne, Madame Cézanne, 1885–86. Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967.

figure 1.14. Claude Monet, Camille, 1866.

Kunsthalle Bremen; Erworben mit Unterstützung des Galerievereins 1906.

I proceed to Claude Monet in his triangular ménage, i.e., himself, his companion then first wife, Camille Doncieux—painted here in 1866, shortly after they met—and his true spouse, the daily practice of painting (fig. 1.14). They had met when she was eighteen and he twenty-five. For five years, they lived together, and had a son, both sets of parents disapproving their liaison. But they would separate whenever the indigent young Monet had to return to Le Havre to stay with his parents or with an aunt. How Camille managed during these separations is not recorded. Throughout these years, Camille models for Monet’s paintings— half the time in lost profile, and sometimes faceless, so as not to drain attention from the spread of the whole

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(fig. 1.15). Finally, on June 26, 1870, Claude married Camille (some say to avoid the draft)—they honeymooned on the Normandy coast just as the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Whereupon Monet, like many other draft dodgers, took off for London—where he painted a brooding Madame Monet on the Sofa (fig. 1.16). Back home after the end of the war, he deployed her in the lovely painting in Cleveland entitled The Red Kerchief—Madame Monet (fig. 1.17). It’s snowy

outside and she’s dressed for the weather. The composition is unusual for Monet in being perfectly centered—so that Camille is its single excentric feature. And as the painter looks out from indoors, she is viewed through a transparent divide. The localized red of her cape finds no echo; more separation. Is this image confessional? All I dare say is that if I had to illustrate the common phrase “left out in the cold,” this painting would be my choice.

figure 1.15. Claude Monet, On the Bank of the Seine, Bennencourt, 1868. Art Institute of Chicago; Potter Palmer Collection.

figure 1.16. Claude Monet,

Madame Monet on the Sofa, 1871. Paris, Musée d’Orsay.

figure 1.17. Claude Monet, The Red Kerchief—Madame Monet, 1873. Cleveland Museum of Art; Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.

figure 1.18. Claude Monet, Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, 1873. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 2002, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002.

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figure 1.19. Claude Monet, Camille at the Window, Argenteuil, 1873. Richmond,

figure 1.20. Claude Monet, Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil,

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

1876. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 2000, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002.

In 1873, having begun to sell well—and living comfortably near Paris at Argenteuil, in a rented house with a spacious garden—Monet produced a small masterpiece (fig. 1.18); again exceptional in his oeuvre, since it suggests a tense psychological situation: at upper left, a standing woman holding an umbrella, her presence never fully explained, watches the two figures at the bench—the woman, posed by Camille, ill at ease; and a smiler leaning over the back of the bench, looking (to me) like a modern-dress satyr. Monet represents his wife as anxious and troubled and, not for the first time, as the object of another man’s interest. Occasionally, Monet paints Camille as a contented young mother. More often, she serves as staffage—the generic female presence which a saleable picture requires. Sometimes she blurs into her ambience (figs. 1.19, 1.20)—as mod-

els will in later pictures by Matisse and Bonnard. But Camille must keep posing. When Manet and Renoir come to visit Monet in his rented villa at Argenteuil (summer 1874), she sits for the three of them, twice for Renoir.17 How she felt about these long sessions is not recorded—none of her letters survive—though we have more than 3,100 letters from the hand of Monet. Camille’s correspondence he must have destroyed, as he later destroyed the letters received from his second wife.18 I suspect that Monet found these letters unfit to confirm the image he wished to leave to posterity. So we don’t know how Camille felt about anything, including her husband. Looking at the pictures of the first Mme. Monet, I figured that all was not well in that household. The pictures prodded me to ask intimate questions, about

art conquers all

Monet’s studio boat, for example, his floating studio.19 Monet got the idea of the bateau-atelier from his older friend Daubigny, but he added one novel feature— sleeping accommodation, so he could rise with the dawn and paint before breakfast. Whether this convenience was designed to sleep one or two is unknown. But I suspect that Monet abandoned the marriage bed for a cot on the boat; and that Camille would have recognized her competition. She may have recognized it even before they married, when the penniless Claude abandoned her while she was pregnant. And this suggests a recurring pattern: in the summer of 1876, while the family was living comfortably in Argenteuil, Monet accepted an invitation from Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy Paris department store owner, to paint four large decorative panels for the man’s grand country château. Monet complied, and went off to work at the château for half a year, without wife and child—just like Holbein or George Hearst the miner—and probably began his liaison with Alice Hoschedé. Returning home that December, Monet at once arranged to remove to Paris, where, by mid-January, he was lodged in a rented one-bedroom apartment, from which he sallied daily to paint the twelve pictures of the Saint-Lazare railroad station for the Third Impressionist Exhibition, scheduled to open in April 1877. The following year, Camille gave birth to another son, sickened, and died, possibly of an ulcerated uterus, eighteen months later, aged thirty-two—modeling just once more for her bereaved husband. Which brings me to Monet’s best-known reference to his wife. Monet was talking to Georges Clemenceau. He had probably met Clemenceau, then a young political journalist, in the 1880s. The two men remained friends for forty years, during which “Tiger Clemenceau,” as he came to be called, rose to become premier of France, steered his country through the last years of World War I, and, with Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson, presided over the Treaty of Versailles. In 1928, following Monet’s death two years earlier, Clemenceau published a book about his painter friend; and there he records this conversation, which

must have occurred in the 1920s, when these two octogenarians were photographed shuffling through Monet’s gardens at Giverny. As he describes the exchange from recollection, Clemenceau tells his friend what it is that makes Monet’s perception unique: My eye stops at the reflecting surface and goes no farther. It is different with you. The steel ray of your vision . . . pierces the shell of appearances and you penetrate to their deeper substance in order to break that down into luminous media. . . . When I look at a tree, I see only a tree, but you, you look through half-closed eyes and think, “How many shades of how many colors are there . . . in this simple tree trunk?” Then you break down those values to rebuild the ultimate harmony of the whole—and for all of us. And you torment yourself . . . you doubt yourself, you are unwilling to understand that you are hurtling like a missile toward the infinite.20

Clemenceau has tried to describe what he thinks Monet is doing; wants his friend to feel good about it; and his chosen example is that of a tree, appropriate to a painter of landscape. Monet responds strangely by recalling not the last time he painted a tree but a moment forty years earlier, when he was portraying the corpse of Camille (fig. 1.21). “You cannot know,” Monet says, “how close you are to the truth.” What you describe is the obsession, the joy, the torment of my days. To the point that, one day, when I was at the deathbed of a lady who had been, and still was, very dear to me, I found myself staring at the tragic face, automatically trying to identify the sequence, the proportions of light and shade in the colors that death had imposed on that motionless visage, tones of blue, yellow, gray, and what not. . . . This is what I had come to. It would have been perfectly natural to have wanted to portray the last sight of one who was to leave us forever. But even before the thought occurred to set down the features to which I was so deeply attached, an automatic reflex made me tremble at the shock of the colors, drew me, in spite

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gests an event recalled from the distant past, it remains keen enough to stamp his self-image. But what was he lamenting? Not what had become of Camille, but what he had become—a slave to habit, who could not, even in such extremity, restrain the “joy and torment” of his métier. We know from his letters that Monet read the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. One of them, called “The Oval Portrait,” tells of a “maiden, lovely and full of glee,” newly wed to the painter she loves. Poe describes her as

figure 1.21. Claude Monet, Camille on Her Deathbed, 1879. Paris, Musée

d’Orsay.

of myself, into the unconscious operation that is but the daily grind of my life—just like a beast turning its mill. Pity me, my friend.

Monet’s response—as Clemenceau records his memory of it—is startling. As an instance of his obsession with color change, he cites one of his most monochromatic paintings, where facial features are drawn in black, and skin is rendered in strokes of pale blue alternating with ocher—the color of the toned ground. And, by a curious compunction, the lady to whom the speaker had been so deeply attached is not named. But the memory of contemplating Camille on her deathbed persists. Where his friend had exampled a tree, the painter recalls a guilt-laden moment of professionalism at its most callous. Even though his reference to Camille as a lady who had been very dear to him and still was sug-

all light and smiles, . . . loving . . . all things; hating only the Art which was her rival. . . . It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to portray his young bride. But she was . . . obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark high turret-chamber where the light dripped . . . only from overhead. But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on . . . from day to day. And he was a passionate . . . and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light . . . in that lone turret withered the health . . . of his bride. . . . And when many weeks had passed, and but little remained to do, . . . the painter stood entranced before the work . . . he had wrought; . . . and crying out with a loud voice, “This is indeed life itself!” turned suddenly to regard his beloved—she was dead!

End of story—which Monet could not have read without pangs of self-recognition. We are to understand that the painted canvas, like blotting paper, had sopped up her life. Whether Poe’s painter was sorry, we are not told. But we know, and the story’s protagonist knows— and the victim knew—that, given the chance to produce a masterpiece, he’d do it again. There was no alternative. His painting demanded that all-out devotion which formerly had been exacted by religion of the religious—a call too absolute to permit emotional leakage into human attachments; an absolute for which the pattern is set in St. Matthew’s gospel (8:21–22) by Christ: “And another of his disciples said unto him, ‘Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said unto him, ‘Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.’ ”

art conquers all

In the aestheticism of the nineteenth century, this absolute, which had been the privilege of religion, was arrogated by art. It’s a recurring theme in nineteenthcentury literature: the artist subjected to an imperative that admits no rival affections. The theme is sounded in Balzac and Zola and in Chekhov and Henry James, and in a little book of woeful stories by Alphonse Daudet, called Artists’ Wives.21 In Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), for those “who strive to create the beautiful,” love “amid all other thwarting influences . . . interposed to steal the cunning from [the artist’s] hand.” Amor vincit omnia, love conquers all, they used to say; in Hawthorne’s story love cripples. In Henry James’s story “Collaboration” (1892), love of woman is sacrificed to the prospect of creating great art. In his novella, The Author of Beltraffio (1884), the artistwriter describes his working obsession, which indirectly causes the death of his son, and utters the very formula Monet addressed to Clemenceau—“joy and torment,” torment and joy. The phrase had been used earlier by Monet’s first professional mentor, the landscape painter Boudin, who writes in his diary: “To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds, . . . to make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment!” And it wasn’t Boudin who invented that coupling. A generation earlier, in June 1824, Delacroix wrote in his journal: “As long as my imagination continues to be my torment and my joy, what does it matter whether I am rich or poor? ” 22 The “joy and torment” Monet confesses in his cri de coeur to Clemenceau—which he knew would be published—was evidently a standby. Nineteenth-century painters talk like characters in contemporaneous fiction—whose authors may have been listening to the way artists talk.23 Monet’s speech about Camille’s corpse was surely sincere. But it’s sincerity in period style, a stylish sincerity. What reaches us through Clemenceau’s prose is a self-presentation— the artist coming on as the type of compulsive genius. He is still using Camille. The painters of unloved wives ennoble their practice not only by painting superbly well, but by comparing themselves to holy men of past times. The aesthete

hero of Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) dreams of creating a “monastic cell” in which to pass his days.24 Monet claims to have brushed his canvases as the monks of former times illuminated their missals, only solitude and silence collaborating.25 The married Matisse will strike the same monkish note: Oh, but to live “alone in his cell” (see p. 18). In such a mindset, which makes uxorious attachment seem petty bourgeois, and “serious marriage is,” according to Mallarmé, “too primitive,” the bondage to art—thought of as a martyrdom freely chosen— can feel like a grab at sainthood, with all the privileges thereto pertaining, including the right to exhibit one’s wife as renounced. Which introduces Matisse. There’s been a mighty shift in the way his most ardent champions express their enthusiasm. Matisse’s favorite critic, Marcel Sembat, had written in 1913 that “Matisse keeps his sorrows to himself! He does not wish to broadcast them. He wants to offer others only peace of mind.”26 Sixty years later (1979), for Lawrence Gowing, this same Matisse is “the painter of the . . . maladies of a marriage.” Gowing was referring to the large canvas in the Hermitage, a painting begun in 1908, labored over on and off for four years, then in 1912 briefly exhibited in London and promptly packed off to Moscow to enter the expanding Matisse collection of Sergei Shchukin. The painting is known as Conversation (fig. 1.22), but conversing is just what these contenders don’t do. Grim silences facing off: she, seated at right in stern disapproval; he, ramrod straight, his stiff neck taking color and inflexibility from the nearest tree trunk, his hands tucked in the pockets of striped pajamas. Why pajamas? Did the model get caught in them when this four-year exposure was snapped? Was the painter thinking of prison garb? Or was it because pajamas are worn to dream in? The man dreams “I want out”; the “out” in question being centrally diagrammed in the view out the window, a Matisse in the offing. Since Matisse had long been admired as a purveyor of pure sensuous delight, it was a shock to have Gowing write that Conversation “gives us . . . the painter of the self absorbed in self-hood. Matisse is seen to be the

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figure 1.22. Henri Matisse, Conversation, 1908–12. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

painter of the emotional contretemps and the maladies of a marriage. . . . [Edmond] Cross had called Matisse madly anxious but he could not have foreseen—we hardly realize even now—that he was to be the painter of anxiety.” Similarly, the Matisse scholar Jack Flam: “Conversation represents Henri and Amélie Matisse confronting each other early on a spring morning. . . . Neither . . . is about to budge. . . . This extraordinary image of isolation is intensified by the realization that this is the first of Matisse’s paintings in which two people actually face each other.”27 Conversation, as I mentioned before, was quickly banished to remote Muscovy. For his public, the painter thought it more prudent to present a brave bourgeois front. On the occasion of a 1913 exhibition in the US, he told an American interviewer: “Do tell the American people that I am a normal man. I am a devoted hus-

band and father. I have three fine children. I go to the theater, ride horseback, have a comfortable home . . . just like any man.”28 In his recent book on Matisse Portraits (2001), John Klein tracks the “devoted husband’s” recoil from his wife back to two well-known portraits of 1905: Femme au chapeau (fig. 1.23) and The Green Line (Copenhagen). These two pictures, Klein writes, “are only the most famous of Matisse’s many representations of his wife that compromise her individuality in the service of his artistic goals.”29 He goes on: Matisse’s portraits of his wife are sometimes marked quite clearly by animus. . . . The attack on artistic convention at the heart of Fauvism, and the attack on social convention as represented by the bourgeois

art conquers all [17]

figure 1.23. Henri Matisse, Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), 1905. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Bequest of Elise S. Haas.

portrait, is also in Matisse’s portraits of his wife an assault on an individual. . . . Matisse went too deep and said too much, and no amount of formal invention can hide . . . the personal disaffection expressed in his construction of her.

Such candor stayed out of print while Matisse’s immediate family was alive; and perhaps because, in the common view, the monopoly on misogyny was held by Picasso. But in this as in other regards, Matisse holds his own. The 1905 Femme au chapeau is a savage picture; color riots in Amélie’s harried face and at her right arm, braced like a gauntlet, though it’s only a lady’s fan; and overhead, appropriate trophy for the recent patronne of the hat shop she ran to eke out the family budget, a mountainous heaping of millinery fit

figure 1.24. Henri Matisse, La japonaise: Woman beside the Water, 1905. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Purchase and anonymous gift.

to crush a caryatid. Femme au chapeau is Amélie under duress—a victim of raw paint and Fauvism. In the same year, 1905, Matisse painted La japonaise (fig. 1.24), where the sitter with her characteristic chignon is again Amélie. Flam writes: “The brushwork is . . . so dynamic that the figure is virtually submerged, and the surface . . . becomes a field of linear energy trails that play against each other. . . . The brushstroke . . . takes on a life of its own, virtually independent of what is . . . being represented.”30 This paragraph, written in 1986, is an eloquent statement of the artist’s objective from a painterly point of view—and from this formal viewpoint any question concerning Matisse’s attitude to his wife becomes absurdly irrelevant. Now that the exclusionary claims of formalism have lost their authority, questions arise that once seemed

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impertinent. For instance: Throughout his life, Matisse kept saying that his painting expressed his emotions. Were these emotions so compartmentalized that his libido and his attitude to domesticity never intruded? Painting La japonaise in 1905, was the artist aware that he was disappearing his wife? Revert even to 1904, when Matisse painted Luxe, calme et volupté (fig. 1.25). A pointillist beach visited by a Venus Anadyomene and her retinue just disembarked; while a caretaker off to the left presides over a picnic. Jack Flam identifies her as Amélie; John Elderfield reads the scene more abstractly as domesticity sidelined by volupté, or as “escape into the arms of aphrodisia.”31 Most revealing is a remark Matisse dropped as early as 1900 while entertaining a painter friend, Jean Puy. I quote from Hilary Spurling: Henri’s friends liked Amélie . . . [and] sometimes pitied a wife who now had two babies as well as a shop to look after, while her husband stayed out till all hours, shut up in his studio or visiting the Montmartre music halls. . . . Jean Puy . . . was charmed by the . . . simplicity of the little dinners for the three of them over which Mme Matisse presided. Henri’s

enthusiastic account of his researches was irresistible as always, but Puy was shocked to hear him say in front of his wife that he would have liked to live like a monk, alone in his cell, dedicated solely to his work.32

The incident prompts Spurling to comment on Matisse’s “heroic self-denial.” Sounds like self-assertion to me. And anyway, was that a nice thing to say in front of the wife, three years into their marriage? One wonders why they got married. Spurling writes that the twenty-five-year-old Amélie Parayre was “deeply moved” when Matisse courted her: “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more.”33 The couple’s ever-growing estrangement is sufficiently documented. In 1908, when Matisse turned professorial to run a short-lived “academy” for some forty aspiring imitators, foreigners for the most part, he strayed into a liaison with a young Russian student, the blonde Olga Merson—to the distress of his wife. In the words of an outstanding Matisse scholar, the affair marks “the triumph of love over female domesticity.”34 Sixteen years later, she wept over the last painting Matisse made of her, the Madame Matisse of 1913 in the Hermitage (fig. 1.26).35

figure 1.25. Henri Matisse, Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’ Art Moderne. On extended loan to the Musée d’Orsay.

figure 1.26. Henri Matisse, Madame Matisse, 1913. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

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The portrait defines a marriage in its inward extinction, and both parties aware. Its presiding motif is the pale mask of the face and the blackout of Amélie’s eyes and lips. Jack Flam relates this chalked face directly to a West African chalk-face masks.36 Did Matisse know that in tribal ritual such chalking reduces the wearer to a bodiless spirit? Did he know that, in some ancient cultures, victims of human sacrifice had their faces chalked white? Given Matisse’s normal aversion to metaphor, we can’t be sure. He renders the eyes as black apertures, edged like the peepholes of a mask, or of skulls, or of antique bronzes robbed of their original inlays; such as the Archaic Piombino Boy in the Louvre (fig. 1.27), a plaster replica of which stood in the studio of Matisse’s Academy—all equally inappropriate to the occasion: a painter’s wife sitting for him in the back garden of the family’s suburban home at Issy-les-Moulineaux.

figure 1.27. Piombino Boy (Apollo of Piombino), 5th century BC. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

figure 1.28. German engraving, Death with a Crossbow,

c. 1635. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Leo Steinberg Collection.

Some commentators call these eyes blinded, wrongly, I think. “Pupil and white swamped in the dark iris gone black as night” is how Beckett (moved by a halfremembered El Greco) describes the motif.37 Coalsack eyes, I will call them, borrowing the astronomers’ term for the deep sable spaces left in the Milky Way by a total absence of stars. Remember the familiar skeleton man (fig. 1.28), whose eyes have similarly vacated their sockets, but who sees sharp enough never to miss his mark. Just so, Amélie’s glance lingers on, transmitted now by courtesy of the body, by its inclination, its gentle forwardness, and muted address. A wife alert to her husband’s cold scrutiny. Her gaze still arriving. The emotion conveyed is unusual for Matisse, who normally insulated his art against the intrusion of sentiment. But as this portrait kept changing through more than one hundred sittings, it underwent spooky muta-

art conquers all

tions, including the blight of the eyes, wads of white hair, tarred lips (“and would you have us kiss tar?” asks a character in As You Like It, III, ii), and a nose, like the dying Falstaff ’s, “as sharp as a pen” (Henry V, II, iii). And so from the whited mask down to the wilted arms and the slicing at lower left of the fleshiest portion. Even the feather in her cap resembles fishbone more than a plume. We read that Mme. Matisse wept over the loss of the picture’s earlier, friendlier phases. Well may she have wept at the outcome, witness of a husband’s recoil. How cold it is, this blue-violet exhalation, as if from a revenant, one returned from the shades. The picture, in the words of Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, gives “an impression of almost funereal melancholy, as if this figure leaning slightly forward . . . had come from a . . . distance, perhaps even from beyond. . . . the portrait of Madame Matisse, as a well-wishing ghost or a Eurydice on the point of returning to the netherworld.”38 Such intimations are perhaps best left to poets— even to such as never laid eyes on this picture. I quote from Coleridge: “The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.” Thus from the man’s vantage. But here are lines from John Donne that speak as from the woman: The sun is spent, . . .  The world’s whole sap is sunk. . . . He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.39

Never again, after this picture, will Matisse paint in Amélie’s presence. And she? I don’t mean Mrs. Matisse, the patronne of the hat shop that had helped sustain the family in its leanest years (1899–1903) when her products sold better than his. I mean the specter on this Hermitage canvas. What brings it here? Dress and bearing alone suggest no unusual occasion; the figure could be a visiting neighbor, confident of her poise. But coincident with her self-possession, I think we are meant to acknowledge a suppliant, one hoping to please, to find favor in the gaze pinned upon her—a woman guiltless of the discoloration imposed by her husband’s merciless palette.

What makes this spare portrait complex is the concretion of conflict embodied in its painterly resolution. Late in 1913, when Paris got a brief glimpse of the picture before it was packed off to Moscow, André Salmon described it as “quite a harmonious nightmare.” Sixty years later, Lawrence Gowing concluded about Conversation, “color washed the conflict away.”40 He did not mean that Matisse’s color mended his marriage but that, in his painting, difference is resolved, even such difference as that between figure and ground. So in Madame Matisse, a violet gloom condenses in Amélie’s suit—or, vice versa, the hue of its fabric colors the air. And it’s not only color that reconciles. Look at the upright green at dead center. Disguised as a blouse, but flat as a slab of jade, it is the diagrammatic epitome of the overall format, mediated by the back of the chair. This blouse is the centerfield of the system, steadying a concentered design. Or, rather, it both steadies and activates. Narrowing as it descends, this midmost green initiates a discrete diminution, a diminuendo so commanding that it overrules anatomic proportions. Look down from the immense spread of the shoulders—scaled not to the sitter’s person, but to the back of her chair; then see everything dwindle from the waist down. If the result belittles the subject’s womanly assets, its pictorial function is the steeping of a perspective that narrows from hat to haunch to confirm the upper body’s approach. It was the requisite hithering of head and shoulders that necessitated the slicing of the right thigh and the reticence of the knee. The disproportion achieved— hefty shoulders overhanging a shrunken lap—would be grotesque if one noticed it. Similarly, the right forearm with that lifeless flap hung from the wrist: a withered limb, if you will, but why not rejoice at its felicitous rhyming with the orange scarf opposite? Complementary colors in identical swerve to produce a vital left/ right correspondence. Then see how the fall of the other arm parallels the length of scarf off the right shoulder. As for the inapparent left hand, its absence may be excused without imagining loss of limb. I see this retired hand lending its site to select wipes from the palette, commemorating those rosy tints which the picture forswears.

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In this sort of formal analysis, even the blacks in Amélie’s face, the “tarred lips,” and extinguished eyes, may be tallied as stepping stones transitional between velvet collar and hat. Black is what they have to be, because the painter is—as he said on another occasion— “not creating a woman, but making a picture.”41 But that’s ducking out. Matisse has created the image of a woman in the eyes of her man, himself pleading no less than she, as if to say, would you have me kiss tar, brave the sting of that nose, the bane of these eyes? Charm and abhorrence harmonized in what is surely the most chilling portrait that ever distanced a wife, and unspeakably beautiful—to my mind the greatest portrait produced in the twentieth century. I suggested before that portraits of artists’ wives had long been celebratory or at least sober—until af-

ter 1860, when the image of the Unloved Wife makes its modern debut. In this sense, Madame Matisse could be placed in series. But none of the earlier instances stage a comparable reciprocity. They exhibit compliant models or, in Monet’s Camille, one safely locked out in the cold. Whereas Amélie, leaning out of the picture as she proffers her ghastliness, is all agent, and, mirabile dictu, conciliation. There exists a photograph taken in the Hermitage in 1987. It shows three generations of seated Matisses— granddaughter Jackie and her father, Pierre, basking in the salutation of Amélie, grandam and mother.42 If the husband who created this portrait had grown unloving because “he loved painting more,” his art secured the sitter a role larger and longer lasting than that of spurned bedmate and spouse.

figure 1.30. Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman with Self-Portrait (Olga), 1929.

Private collection.

figure 1.29. Pablo Picasso, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1923. Private collection.

art conquers all

The photograph joins image and viewers in a close metaphoric embrace: the depicted ancestress (thanks to some of those “formal” devices) inclining toward her kin. Seven decades since Amélie wept to see herself seen as a ghoul, the picture relents into solace. As Samuel Beckett observed, “Extraordinary how everything ends like a fairy-tale.”43 Lastly, a few words on the ill-wed Picasso, whose surreal fury at poor Olga Khokhlova, married to him since 1918 and within a decade detested, brings up the bitter end of the trail: it is within this trajectory that I would read the transmutation of the first Mme. Picasso, the Russian Olga Khokhlova, into a monster (figs.

figure 1.31. Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, Montrouge, spring 1918. Paris, Musée national Picasso.

1.29, 1.30).44 They had met in 1917 in Rome, while he was designing the set and costumes for the Diaghilev Ballet. Olga was in the troupe, and the thirty-six-yearold Picasso couldn’t take his eyes off her. He took her to Barcelona to meet his mother, who warned: “You poor girl, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. . . . I don’t believe any woman could be happy with my son. He’s available for himself but for no one else.”45 Of course, no one takes that kind of advice. The following year ( July 1918) they were married (fig. 1.31); some said because she wouldn’t sleep with him unless he did; so, you see, he had no choice in the matter. Thereafter, Picasso celebrated her charm as

figure 1.32. Pablo Picasso, Woman Seated in an Armchair, 1920

(Z.IV.136). Private collection.

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old convention dictates—and as convention ruled her. For she grew bored—bored by his work, his friends, and, I suspect, his libido. Picasso’s many takes of her record creeping tedium and lassitude and his need to put distance between them—“distance inexpressible by numbers that have name” (Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, 112–13). To me, the most ominous early proof of their estrangement is a drawing of Olga, sitting as always with legs crossed, apathetic and bored; and, by means of accelerated perspective, irrevocably distanced (fig. 1.32).

Finally, by the late 1920s, her nagging and his distress transformed their relationship and produced the cruelest image yet of the unloved wife (fig. 1.33). If Matisse’s weirdest rendering of Madame became transcendently beautiful, Picasso’s record of alienation from Olga is surely the most disagreeable. The best I can say for it from a moral viewpoint is that it’s not her portrait or caricature as a live-in ogre but the symbolic form of experienced revulsion. The subject is Picasso’s recoil from her presence,

figure 1.34. Pablo Picasso, L’étreinte, 1971

(Z.XXXIII.43). Private collection.

figure 1.33. Pablo Picasso, Large Nude in a Red Armchair, Paris,

May 5, 1929. Paris, Musée national Picasso.

art conquers all

and the means of expression is once again change of substance—hers into an invertebrate, squid-like, overgrown mollusk or tapeworm infesting the parlor; his, as the anthropomorphic armchair beset by a clinging fiend—its toothed snout gnawing and ravening inside his head. Not a representation of her, but of a state of mind in undergoing the unendurable. Poor Olga, who should never have married an artist, died an unhappy woman. Picasso, after two or three byblows, remarried, doted on the second Mme. Picasso, and would have lived happily ever after but for his untimely death in 1973. After some years as his widow, Jacqueline Rocque, unwilling to go on living without him, killed herself. Not long before his own death, the ninety-year-old Picasso drew this amorous couple (fig. 1.34): coitus at the base, cooing above; mutual love expressed by four hands caressing, and in a sequence of

delicious puns down the interface of their fellow-faces. The drawing is signed and conscientiously dated, unfortunately without indicating how long these two have been married. Aside from Zeitgeist and temporal overlap, the items assembled here have little in common; the works adduced, those of Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Matisse, and Picasso, refuse to march in procession. They consort nowhere but in the present paper under one dismal rubric. Does that imperil the rubric? Not if we recall the famous opening lines of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy would expect all failing love to be an original failure. And so, every image that converts such failure into a positive No, settling somewhere, dissimilarly, between lacklove and revulsion, is its own kind.

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figure 2.1. Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1895–1906. Philadelphia, Barnes Collection.

t wo

Cézanne’s Barnes Bathers & Co.

April 28, 2009 On April 27, 2009, the Philadelphia Museum, venue of a major “Cézanne and Beyond” exhibition, convened an international summit of Cézanne fans. Formal proceedings commenced in sight of three Cézanne’s Bather paintings, including the large London version and—surpassing all others in majesty—Philadelphia’s own. Then the scene shifted to the Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion, where the famous Barnes Large Bathers, for once off the wall, brought down to eye level, sustained another round of discussion. Cézanne’s Large Bathers at the Barnes (fig. 2.1) raises two instant questions. First, what is the action, the plot, the picture’s subject? Second, whether this first question is even worth asking, seeing that it’s a Cézanne. Third question: is this a glade or some dark hollow lit up by girlflesh? The source of light? It’s the painter’s palette, of course—inquire no further, and revert to Q. 1. All but one of these water-shy bathers fuss about scraps of blueing white cloth. Behind them soar two pillars of would-be cloud, vaporizing the stuff coming up from below; same tone and color. What, then, are we to make of the attention lavished on these ubiquitous fabrics, which cannot be thought away as mere towels, nor as apparel? Are these bathers getting undressed, or vice versa, or what? Enter at left a huge, mindless she-monster, dragging up, up from deep under, a vast haul of cloth and more where that came from. The arriving glut is made to seem bottomless, and its users—excepting only the recoiling redhead at center—could be checking out what to do with this surplus, trying it on here and there, around knee, neck, or elbow. The two-legged sitter at

right seems, like the rest, unaccustomed to clothing. In the pair at left, the one facing us has a sheet crossing her beam—with disastrous effect on the integrity of her thigh, which may as well be the lower leg of her dorsal companion, because once you start draping a lady’s bare parts, there’s no telling what the drapery hides. I suspect they’re not stripping but getting outlandish gear to denature their nakedness—a predicament never visited on Cézanne’s male bathers, many of whom wear swimming trunks and no problem. The female Barnes picture could be rehearsing a first intrusion of clothing. Which brings up some important distinctions. A world of difference separates Woman from the Female Nude. The former is a biological fact, the better half of a deplorable species. The latter is an artifact calling for further discrimination. Commonest in Cézanne’s day was the best-selling item issuing from the studios of the pompiers: the female nude as an improvement designed to guarantee standard proportions, hard-candy consistency, immunity to what flesh is heir to. To this simulacrum, fabrics were a welcome accessory, serving both titillation and modesty. Meanwhile, avant-garde artists, painting against the likes of Bouguereau and Gérôme, plotted to mortify the pretender. They questioned its cunning, and how, under what pretense, female nudity could survive the evidence of modern life, whose every phase, from diapers to graveclothes, supports the textile industry, leaving the “altogether” to gloat in metaphoricity, where naked This essay, never published, was written the day after Steinberg attended the meeting described in the first paragraph.

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sword, naked eye, and naked truth roam.1 Il faut être de son temps was the cry of the century. Therefore, away with your female nude, unless found in uncharted places and unexplored shape: younger and plumper (Renoir); in the tub or the stews (Degas); overseas (Gauguin); or in the seclusion of the atelier (Seurat, Rodin). None of this for Cézanne, who fantasizes himself stumbling on a slew of them bathing outdoors. A fragile fantasy, increasingly under threat as all this bulk nakedness, accosted by insidious towels, appears doomed to eclipse. So then, in the Barnes Bathers, that leftmost ogre under her manful crest enters as if to say, time’s up, here’s garb to put on and so much for the female nude. Which could explain the remonstration of that middlemost redhead.

Is this now a plausible reading? The perceived dress rehearsal may not square with the literature on Cézanne, but I am trying to read this one picture, though I can’t help recalling some others which Cézanne would have known. Classic bathers covering up come to mind. Michelangelo’s Bathing Soldiers; Diana’s nymphs at the appearance of Actaeon; Minerva after losing the beauty contest at the Judgment of Paris. The drama of getting dressed occurs often enough in the museum art Cézanne admired. In many of his own Bather pictures, the intent, whether doffing or donning, remains uninterpretable. The large Bathers in London (fig. 2.2) leaves it unclear whether the looker third from the right fumbles to get into or out of the flurry about her limbs; or whether her

figure 2.2. Paul Cézanne, Bathers, c. 1894–1905. London, National Gallery; Purchased with a special grant and the aid of the Max Rayne Foundation, 1964.

c é za n n e ’s ba rn e s bather s & co.

crouching next is drying her feet. In the version Picasso owned (fig. 2.3), the rag in use at upper center may be a napkin-size towel, but down below, a bolt of white cloth unrolls past the threshold, sufficient to wrap all her kind. Why so much of it in reserve? These stuffs intruding on nudity do their connoting in secret. Nor will we ever know whether the ultimate Philadelphia Bathers (fig. 2.4) intended white linen at lower center. The three women gathered about it could remind an enterprising source hunter of Mantegna’s Crucifixion

figure 2.3. Paul Cézanne, Five Bathers, 1877–78. Paris, Musée national Picasso.

predella (Louvre): three crouched soldiers in the foreground throwing dice for the garments of Christ. In the Cézanne, the crouchers could as well be unpacking their lunch. This isn’t the sort of thing Cézanne wants to clarify. Reverting to the Barnes painting: what is the raison d’être of the basket of fruit bottom left? One might answer that even female nudes have to eat. Or that the basket’s arched handle in its present obliquity helps breach the façade of bare flesh. Or that these comestibles (to

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figure 2.4. Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1900–1906. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1937.

say nothing of the dog) were needed to subvert the exegete’s confidence in his exegesis. Call me naive, but I’ve just spent two hours within two feet of this painting, staring ever again at its bleak entrance, where that textile importer, bringer of gloom, harries the clouds and threatens the spectacle with her merchandise. Which brings me to my last point—the lone tree trunk at right, tipping inward to expose skeletal limbs, blighted perhaps. And a timber-faced nude leaning against it, sharing its tilt, hands and left leg evanesc-

ing, in process perhaps of being resorbed, like a dryad when her tree dies. A haunting presence, this clinging physique—here in Merion, and again in the Chicago (fig. 2.5) and London versions; and in the Philadelphia picture, where two arborescent end figures coincide in spectacular symbiosis with converging tree trunks behind. Cézanne’s male bathers are never so trapped. Only these dryads rhyme with their proper trees—overlapping, coincident, at last intussuscepted. The Chicago version catches a

c é za n n e ’s ba rn e s bather s & co.

figure 2.5. Paul Cézanne, The Bathers, 1899–1904. Art Institute of Chicago; Amy McCormick Memorial Collection.

toppling tree in the act of ingesting what’s left of its lifelong companion. (So, too, dies the Female Nude when the once-sturdy growth of the Academy withers away.) At the Barnes, our picnicking nudes enjoy equal footing with dryads—semi-divinities of limited immortality, deathless so long as their foster tree stands. They mingle wherever brave midinettes on their day off impersonate sylvan nymphs under the watchful eye of old Actaeon at his easel. More than ten years he spent on this picture.2

figure 3.1. Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Collection

of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

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once spent a half hour watching this picture of Monet’s first wife, Camille, Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875, in the National Gallery, Washington (fig. 3.1). On the back of a postcard I bought is this scribbled note: “a great painting (except for the boy’s eyes).” What first startled me was the yellow under the woman’s arm. Where on earth did it come from? Ah, it’s the buttercups sprinkled against her skirt; they send vapors of yellow up her dress to condense at last under that arm. And much the same happens to master Jean, Camille’s little boy, born out of wedlock, wearing his mother’s colors; he too stands amid blossoms that yellow even on his shoulder and hat. I was struck by the greens inside the parasol—alternating with blues, of course; it’s the grass that gives rise to these hues, whatever the local color. The woman stands between decks of green— supported and canopied. Meanwhile, Camille’s sky-color outfit manages quite remarkably to stand out from the sky-color background; how does that come about? First, I would say, by sheer luck, since an intervention of clouds arrives just in time to set off her upper body—one helpful cloud actually changing course to contour her back—while more of the white stuff comes spilling down to bleach her fluttering bustle. But it’s not just the clouds that do it: the whole backdrop sky cooperates by descending in diminishing saturation, so that the woman’s full skirt and the boy’s suit stand out against thinning blue. Still looking, I took the liberty of ogling the windswept fringe of her skirt—brushwork leaping out of the shadow that falls on the grass, celebrating a hem. As for the wind that blows ribbons across Camille’s face, it

Thoughts on Monet

suggests—as does the drift of the clouds—rightward motion. Hence the protective angle of Camille’s parasol, steadied against the breeze. And yet her skirts blow the other way, as do the grasses and buttercups at bottom left. Could it be that the wind made a U-turn about Monet’s wife? More likely that this pseudo-wind is not anemographic but painterly, generated on canvas within an open-air painting, whose white clouds, as along the right margin, state a down-to- earth truth: so careless are these clouds of their ostensible representational function that they could be wipings of the brush to clean off excess pigment—like Monet’s sloppiest predecessor, Velázquez, who habitually wiped his brushes against the margins while working the middle. These wipings hover semantically between paint and Painting; a situation that always makes me think of Picasso’s Yo Picasso of 1901 (fig. 3.2), where messy reds migrate direct from the palette to the cravat, to the lips, the ear, the hectic discoloration under a sleepless eye; and where Pablo’s mustache turns green for the same reason that Camille’s sleeve turns yellow—to correspond. About the charm, the freshness of this Monet of 1875, I need say nothing, because these qualities soon

A lecture delivered at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, November 19, 1998, on the occasion of the exhibition “Monet in the 20th Century”; again, with revisions, at the New York Studio School, October 29, 2003—the version used here. A long section on Monet’s relationship with his first wife, Camille Doncieux, appears here in reduced form. The full version can be found in chapter 1.

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became accessible to late nineteenth-century taste converted to Impressionism in painting. I have tried instead to offer the kind of description—above all the notion that the work is about its own making—which reflects a twentieth-century viewpoint. If Cézanne is credited with calling Monet “only an eye, but my God, what an eye”—implying that he looked more keenly than any to record instant visual impressions—viewers of my generation saw not only an eye at work, but the virtuosity of a pace-setting hand and a sophisticated intelligence controlling the process of making.1 The kind of description you’ve just heard is fairly typical of what a man of my years has to offer. Which leads me to a bit of autobiography. One midsummer, in the early 1950s, I went to Greece; the worst time of year. In the sun, the temperature in Athens was over 120 degrees. Stepping out of the shade, you felt like a madman walking into a furnace. And Delphi, where I went next to pay my respects to Apollo, was worse. I’d

figure 3.2. Pablo Picasso, Yo Picasso, 1901. Private collection.

stand in the shade of some Archaic treasury, wondering whether I could bring myself to dash through the heat for the next bit of shade. And, of course, the place was deserted; I was the only lunatic there—or so I thought. But after two minutes or so, suddenly a couple materialized out of deep shadow, raced for the nearest shade, and disappeared. Then, from somewhere else, a guy in shorts; then two girls holding hands, running as if to escape; and so on and on. Ten minutes into my visit to Delphi, I realized that the place was infested with tourists, and that I was part of that infestation. It could be the story of my life, somewhat abridged. In 1955, under very different circumstances, involving Monet, the pattern seemed to repeat itself. I was in Paris and walked into the Orangerie, where two large oval rooms display Monet’s huge Water Lilies paintings, the Nymphéas, donated by him to the French state after World War I. Not that the thought of Monet in 1955 held out much promise; when I was growing up, old Claude Monet was thought of as a stubborn has-been, still painting Impressionist pictures, even to his death in 1926, ignoring the excitements of modernism, where the action was. But what I saw that day at the Orangerie swept all those critical cobwebs away and gave me a fine feeling of having arrived at my own personal judgment. Only to discover—a few weeks later when I was back in New York—that Alfred Barr had just acquired a magnificent Monet Nymphéas for the Museum of Modern Art and that the Monet reappraisal was everywhere in full swing.2 So when I published a brief piece on Monet a year later (see appendix), I was arm in arm with the Zeitgeist, moving along with what Harold Rosenberg called “the herd of independent minds.” Not all that different from my experience at Delphi. And as I did not for many years revisit Delphi, so I did not return to Monet for the next forty-three years. Then in 1998 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, mounted a big show called “Monet in the 20th Century.” And the organizer of the exhibition, Professor Paul Tucker—whom I did not know—suggested to the museum that I be invited to speak at the opening. In his letter to me, Tucker explained that he chose me because he remembered my little Monet piece, which he had

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read as a student. I accepted his invitation, partly because the title of the event, “Monet in the 20th Century,” seemed so generously ambiguous. It refers, of course, to the work Monet produced after he had passed sixty— roughly from 1900 to his premature death at eighty-six. But the title could as well mean all or any part of Monet as perceived in the twentieth century—which will be the theme of this talk. My formal analysis of a picture painted in 1875 would be an instance of one twentiethcentury approach to Monet. Another comes from an outstanding scholar in the field, the Yale professor emeritus Robert Herbert. A

deservedly famous article of 1979, called “Method and Meaning in Monet,” studies Monet’s technique of elaborate layering to help quash the myth of Monet’s spontaneity. The second part of the article, which Herbert developed in subsequent publications, turns to a different topic, arguing that Monet’s simplest-seeming transcriptions of visual data may be loaded with sociological comment.3 Consider the Garden at Sainte-Adresse of 1867 (fig. 3.3). The seated gentleman in the foreground is Monet’s father, Adolphe Monet, looking “in the direction of Le Havre,” where the family lived. This, says Herbert,

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figure 3.3. Claude Monet, Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Purchase, special contributions and funds given or bequeathed

by friends of the Museum, 1967.

thre e [36] figure 3.4. Claude Monet, Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, 1873. Philadelphia Museum of Art; John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

“is only as it should be, because his vacation at SainteAdresse [the city’s beach resort across a bay] was earned by his selling of maritime wares in the nearby city. The terrace, in other words, represents earned leisure set abruptly against the sea, so that the cycle of work and leisure is incorporated in one composition.” Along the horizon, we are to discern local fishing smacks and the sailboats of vacationing city folk as well as steamers on serious business. It’s a “social story” Herbert finds in the picture. For him, “the terrace speaks for the incursion of modern forms of organization into this fishing village. It is cast up starkly against the sea, a one-to-one confrontation of leisure and commerce.” Herbert then cites Monet’s painting of the railroad bridge at Argenteuil (fig. 3.4), where the Monets lived during the 1870s, and inserts the work in its sociological context. He credits his former student Paul Tucker for his “thorough and imaginative treatment of the actual changes in Argenteuil, in relation to Monet’s paintings there.” Argenteuil, we learn, “had been profoundly altered by recent changes. Its agricultural products were rapidly giving way to industry, and its riverbanks were not peopled by local fishermen, but by boaters from Paris. . . . Monet

chose a new bridge and a sailboat that represents the new industry of leisure.” All this is interesting and, in view of Tucker’s and Herbert’s meticulous documentation, undoubtedly true. But nineteenth-century criticism of Monet that broached sociology was long suppressed.4 Monet himself called the Sainte-Adresse picture, because of its flattened shapes and bold colors, his “Chinese painting.”5 It is an aspiration of modern academic art history that leads these Yale scholars to put art in its social context, thereby seeing in the pictures what to most of Monet’s contemporaries was either irrelevant, or perhaps invisible because too obvious to register. The pictures indeed are of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, but the sociology in which Herbert and Tucker invest them gives us once again “Monet in the 20th.” There’s a third way of looking at nineteenthcentury painting that is equally characteristic of our preoccupations—the biographical, which seems peculiar to our thinking, infected as we are with psychobiography, feminism, and awareness of sexuality, whether direct or displaced. I have in mind the trian-

thoughts on monet

gular ménage of Monet, his mistress then first wife, Camille Doncieux, and his true spouse—the daily practice of painting. This spousal metaphor is not my invention. In 1846, Baudelaire wrote of Delacroix that he “made Painting his only muse, his only mistress, his sole and self-sufficient voluptuousness. . . . Long before his death, he had expelled women from his life.”6 Monet and Camille had met when she was eighteen and he twenty-five. For five years, they lived together, and had a son, both sets of parents disapproving their liaison. But they would separate whenever the indigent young Monet had to return to Le Havre to stay with his parents or with an aunt. How Camille managed during these separations is not recorded. Throughout these years, Camille models for Monet’s paintings—half the time in lost profile, and sometimes faceless, so as not to drain attention from the spread of the whole (fig. 1.15). Finally, on June 26, 1870, Claude married Camille (some say to avoid the draft); they honeymooned on the Normandy coast just as the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Whereupon Monet, like many other draft dodgers, took off for London, where he painted the brooding Madame Monet on the Sofa (fig. 1.16). Camille kept posing until (and after) her death at thirty-two in 1879, and Monet’s pictures of her reveal an artist more engaged with his profession than with his wife.7 In The Red Kerchief—Madame Monet (fig. 1.17), painted after they returned to Paris, Camille, viewed from indoors, stands outside in snowy weather, the localized red of her cape finding no echo. If I had to illustrate the common phrase “left out in the cold,” this painting would be my choice. Camille Monet on a Garden Bench (fig. 1.18), suggests a tense psychological situation. Monet represents his wife as anxious and troubled, seated on a bench while a smiler leans over the back, looking (to me) like a modern-dress satyr; she is the object of another man’s interest. As she had been at least once before in Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a picture of the mid-1860s, shortly after they met.8 Although occasionally Monet paints Camille as a contented young mother, she more often serves as staffage, sometimes blurring into her ambience (figs. 1.19, 1.20). Like a hired model, she even posed for her

husband’s friends in the summer of 1874, when Manet and Renoir visited Monet’s rented villa at Argenteuil. We don’t know how she felt about these long sessions— none of her letters survive; Monet probably destroyed them, as he later destroyed the letters received from his second wife.9 Monet possibly found her correspondence unfit to confirm the image he wished to leave to posterity, which needn’t know that all may not have been well in the Monet household. And what about Monet’s studio boat? He got the idea of the bateau-atelier from his older friend Daubigny, but he added one novel feature—sleeping accommodation, so he could rise with the dawn and paint before breakfast, as he did in the 1890s.10 Whether this convenience was designed to sleep one or two is unknown. But I suspect that Monet abandoned the marriage bed for a cot on the boat; and that Camille would have recognized her competition—as she must have from the beginning, when the penniless Claude abandoned her to live with an aunt in Sainte-Adresse while she was pregnant in Paris. What seems to be a pattern of abandonment recurred in the summer of 1876 when Monet, living en famille at Argenteuil, accepted a commission from Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy Paris department store owner, to paint four large decorative panels for the man’s country chateau at Rottembourg. Monet went off to work there for half a year, without wife and child, during which time he probably began his liaison with Alice Hoschedé and may even have fathered her youngest son. After Ernest went bankrupt in 1878, the Hoschedés and their six children took up residence with the Monets in their successive country households, with Ernest spending much of his time in Paris. Monet had returned home to Argenteuil in late 1876 but by mid-January 1877 was lodged in a one-bedroom apartment in Paris, working on the series of SaintLazare paintings for the third Impressionist exhibition, opening in April. The following year, Camille gave birth to another son, sickened, and died, possibly of an ulcerated uterus, eighteen months later, age thirty-two. Camille modeled just once more for her husband, in a death portrait that occasioned Monet’s best-known reference to his wife (fig. 1.21). Late in life, probably

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in the 1920s, he was walking through the gardens at Giverny with his old friend Georges Clemenceau, who recorded the conversion in his tribute to Monet, published in 1928.11 What makes Monet’s perception unique, Clemenceau says, is that “When I look at a tree, I see only a tree, but you, you look through half-closed eyes and think, ‘How many shades of how many colors are there . . . in this simple tree trunk?’ Then you break down those values to rebuild the ultimate harmony of the whole. . . . And you torment yourself . . . you doubt yourself, you are unwilling to understand that you are hurtling like a missile toward the infinite.” Monet responds strangely by recalling not the last time he painted a tree but a moment forty years earlier, when he was portraying the corpse of Camille. What you describe is the obsession, the joy, the torment of my days. To the point that, one day, when I was at the deathbed of a lady who had been, and still was, very dear to me, I found myself staring at the tragic face, automatically trying to identify the sequence, the proportions of light and shade in the colors that death had imposed on that motionless visage, tones of blue, yellow, gray, and what not. . . . This is what I had come to. It would have been perfectly natural to have wanted to portray the last sight of one who was to leave us forever. But even before the thought occurred to set down the features to which I was so deeply attached, an automatic reflex made me tremble at the shock of the colors, drew me, in spite of myself, into the unconscious operation that is but the daily grind of my life—just like a beast turning its mill. Pity me, my friend.

Monet’s response—as Clemenceau records his memory of it—is startling. As an instance of his obsession with color change, he cites one of his most monochromatic paintings, where facial features are drawn in black, and skin is rendered in strokes of pale blue alternating with ocher, the color of the toned ground. And, by a curious compunction, the lady to whom the speaker had been so deeply attached is not named. But the memory of contemplating Camille on her deathbed per-

sists. Where his friend had exampled a tree, the painter recalls a guilt-laden moment of professionalism at its most callous. Even though his reference to Camille as a lady who had been very dear to him and still was suggests an event recalled from the distant past, it remains keen enough to stamp his self-image. But what was he lamenting? Not what had become of Camille, but what he had become—a slave to habit, who could not, even in such extremity, restrain the “joy and torment” of his métier—like the painter in Edgar Allen Poe’s tale “The Oval Portrait.” Monet had read Poe’s tales, and he surely remembered the “maiden, lovely and full of glee,” newly wed to the painter she loves, “hating only the Art which was her rival.” She obediently sits for a portrait in an ill-lit chamber for many weeks, the painter not seeing that her health was withering. Entranced before the finished work, he cries out “This is indeed life itself!” and turns “suddenly to regard his beloved—she was dead!” Monet could not have read the story without pangs of self-recognition. We are to understand that the painted canvas, like blotting paper, had sopped up her life. Whether Poe’s painter was sorry, we are not told. But we know, and the story’s protagonist knows—and the victim knew—that, given the chance to produce a masterpiece, he’d do it again. His painting demanded that all-out devotion which formerly had been exacted by religion of the religious—a call too absolute to permit emotional leakage into human attachments. And the “joy and torment” Monet confesses in his cri de coeur to Clemenceau was a literary standby (see p. 15). Though the speech about Camille’s corpse was surely sincere, what reaches us through Clemenceau’s prose is a self-presentation—the artist coming on as the type of compulsive genius. Monet is still using Camille. So much for the biographical, following the socioeconomic and the formalist approaches characteristic of the twentieth century. And there is yet another. A while back, I made a promising reference to sexuality. If Freud was right to phase human sexual development, from infancy to puberty, in terms of the body’s functions or zones—from anal through oral to

thoughts on monet

genital—then Monet’s sexuality sublimates to the visual, the ocular. Or let’s say it becomes a rhetorical mode of our time to so describe Monet’s libido. Intimations of this eroticizing of Monet’s art occur in earlier texts, such as this of 1898 by Léon Bazalgette, speaking of the Rouen Cathedrals: “From his canvases life spills out. . . . It is there in front of us, trembling and naked.” Monet’s Rouen series of 1894 are, says the author, untroubled by “occult meanings” or “Christian symbols.” It was “the caress of light . . . , this union of venerable stones and the always living sun, [that] captivated all his being.”12 In more recent writing, the erotic suggestiveness of the rhetoric grows more explicit, as in this remarkable article written by the young Kirk Varnedoe for the New York Times Magazine in 1978. Monet . . . was a man in whom the most profound emotions, such as those of watching his first wife die in 1879, produced a sharpening of the powers of observation, a heightened perceptual sensitivity. . . . Conversely, before certain atmospheric conditions he seems to have experienced a kind of sensual-emotional “high” that permitted his artistic powers their fullest expression, and made him oblivious to discomforts such as wind and snow. This quality in Monet’s psychic makeup might be seen, at least in analogy, as a kind of eroticism. Never a painter of the nude, Monet had an exceptionally keen sensual response to the color, light, and atmosphere of nature. The satisfactions he derived were intense but ephemeral, the deepest gratifications extremely elusive, and his resultant craving was imperious: He frequently gave way to appalling fits of frustration—slashing canvases, sulking in his room for days—when he could not [in Monet’s own words] “consummate the relationship” through painting. . . . In the later 1880s, Monet tried every trick of the lover’s trade, . . . attempting . . . to renew the spontaneous freshness that was essential to his highest pleasure. . . . Finally, after age 55, he turned more and more exclusively to the harem of nature he had created in his gardens at Giverny.13

Varnedoe conveyed his intuition by allusion and canny word choice—the sensual “high,” “consummate

the relationship,” “trick of the lover’s trade,” “highest pleasure,” “harem of nature.” But he may have been on to something, discerning in Monet the kind of displaced eroticism that left Camille out in the cold. Andrew Forge, in 1984, said it discreetly: “Nothing in Monet’s work suggests that he had any deep interest in the figure as such, either as an autonomous psychological being or as a focus of desire. . . . The nude is unknown in his work. Libido flows elsewhere.”14 Robert Herbert, reviewing the Forge essay, writes: “For Monet, . . . nature was . . . feminine, meant to be conquered.” And Herbert quotes Monet’s friend, Octave Mirbeau, who described Monet’s painting as “living nature, conquered and tamed,” conducive of “dream, with its warm breath of love and its spasms of joy.” In 1986, Steven Levine had Monet “working directly upon the body of nature herself, as it were.”15 You see, poor Camille never had a chance. And now, let me too join the pack, still arm in arm with the Zeitgeist, using sexual metaphor in connection with—of all things—Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral. But first, a word on the Haystacks. On the phone to Richard Shiff—the Cézanne-Monet scholar in Austin, Texas—I repeated an observation made by the sculptor Grace Knowlton about the shadows cast by the stacks in the picture at the Met (fig. 3.5) or the one in the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan. In each painting, the two shadows diverge unaccountably— which seemed to prove once again that Monet was quite capable of disregarding both natural law and direct perception. Richard’s response was unexpected—and unforgettable. “But you know,” he said, “for Monet the sun is very close.” How close? As close, perhaps, as a table lamp, making objects that are inches away cast divergent shadows? This felt proximate presence of the light source is crucial, as if Monet held the sun close enough to manage its beam, and his painting arm striking home as the sun’s agent. Something of Monet’s possessiveness in identifying with what he paints out of doors was sensed by Maupassant when he described watching Monet at work (fig. 3.6): “I have seen him thus seize a glittering shower of light on the white cliff and fix it in a flood of yellow tones which, strangely, rendered the . . . fugitive

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figure 3.5. Claude Monet, Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun), 1891. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; H. O.

Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

figure 3.6. Claude Monet, Beach at Pourville, Sunset, 1882. Paris, Musée Marmottan-Claude Monet.

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effect of that unseizable and dazzling brilliance. On another occasion he took a downpour beating on the sea in his hands and dashed it on the canvas.”16 A downpour from his hands dashed on the canvas. The wet and the heat, rain or shine, whether found in the picture, as in the Haystacks, or dispatched from out here, as in the Cathedrals, arrives always from close at hand. Solar action straight from the shoulder passes through arm and brush deep into field, water, or stone. It was stone that built Rouen Cathedral—which Monet’s light transubstantiates. Most of the Rouen work was done from rented rooms, and from those fixed stations Monet painted the view many times over.17

figure 3.7. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Façade, 1894. Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston; Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection.

Twenty of the canvases he exhibited in 1895 at DurandRuel, where they quickly sold at staggering prices. Now the façade of a building implies, by definition, a rearward space screened: the portals as well as the rose window behind the high pointed gable lead inward. In Monet’s façades, this implicit interior, which is the church in its pastoral and liturgical function, gets no part in the action (fig. 3.7). The action, the picture’s high energy, is the impact of color in the arrival of light, an invasive radiance that comes as an onslaught—not to destroy, but to convert, making the masonry shudder or, like Pygmalion’s Galatea, blush at the gift of life.

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figure 3.8. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, the Façade in Sunlight, c. 1892–94. Williamstown, MA, Clark Art Institute; Acquired by the Clark in memory of Anne Strang Baxter, 1967.

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Monet’s previous series had been the Poplars. But trees are organic, like flesh. Here, in the Cathedral series, Monet takes up the tougher challenge of softening up obdurate stone (fig. 3.8). And he does it by impersonating the sun, which, you remember, is male, just like Monet. We can only guess why he chose to paint stone. Perhaps for the same reason that had made him paint the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877—because the subject was at the opposite pole from what he’d been doing: instead of open land- or seascape, a space caged in iron and steel. Now, fifteen years later, he finds his significant other in a masonry cliff, a stone wall close up. The task now is to convert that into a light show, aerial and luminous; or make it bubble like molten slag. In short, to ravish the most opaque and resistant by identifying his impact with irresistible light. And here’s the sexy part—as I wrote it in draft: the cathedral stonework is made to undergo a responsive ecstatic experience. In figure 3.8, the hot light lodges deep in the portals, kindling internal glow, as if the inward of these embrasures were newly opened to penetration. Monet in this reading becomes a womanizer in the literal sense that he enwomans the stone, makes it receptive to the virility of the sun. Well, that’s what I wrote. You see, in trying to think—in order to speak—about these Monets, I found myself riding the erotic analogy, as others had done before. But analogies of this sort are tricky. It’s not that I was faking it or hoping to titillate. The sex analogy did seem to promise some approximation to the inexpressible. But the process is self-deluding. The very act of formulating your metaphor half persuades you it’s true. But the half of you that remains unpersuaded says, “Cut it out, you know that there are other versions of Rouen Cathedral which you kept off the screen, because they wouldn’t support your agenda—like the ones in Paris or Basel—or the one at the Met, which I especially love, not only because it’s nearest to where I live; and not only because it’s the rare Impressionist painting that has never been varnished.” The truth is that Monet’s work, like Cézanne’s, is irreducibly visual, unliterary, stubbornly untranslatable.

And that puts us phrasemakers in a difficult bind. To keep the work in focus, in communion with others, we must talk about it. No use kidding ourselves on that score. When the talking stops, when a thing ceases to be the subject of discourse, it subsides into oblivion. What, then, do you say? What are some of the options? You can do formal analysis, though such exercise is now out of style. You can discuss the work as a biographical item. When and where was it made, for which patron or exhibition, and how well did it sell. Or point out that it never occurred to Monet to step inside the cathedral while he belabored its front. Only when a friend sent him an expensive ticket to a concert with a three-hundred-strong chorus to be performed in the cathedral did he venture inside—and was surprised to find it so beautiful.18 You can treat the work as a document in the history of taste, or of criticism, and assemble everything written about it in the papers—this has long been a flourishing academic enterprise. Then again, you can discuss the paintings as a symptom of socioeconomic trends, or of cultural politics, liberal versus conservative. In the case of Monet’s Cathedrals, it has been observed that the painter, fervently anti-clerical as he was, usually trimmed the façade just under the cross that surmounts the central gable, as if to insist that this erstwhile Catholic sanctum was now a monument of historic national culture.19 Monet will have secularized the Rouen façade, going at it with a personal ardor rarely matched by religious observance. The Cathedral series thus takes its place in the culture war between disestablished Church and secular state. To the work Monet produced in the twentieth century, Paul Tucker brought another insight—new, so far as I know. He interprets Monet’s withdrawal to his property at Giverny as, in part, a response to the Dreyfus Affair that exploded in 1898 and ripped France apart; when the army and church, to protect their status, dishonored themselves by taking the side of injustice. Unlike Degas, Cézanne, and Renoir—all conservatives—Claude Monet, friend of Zola, was a liberal; and Tucker sees him turning his back on the tarnished glory of France, on the French national symbols

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he had long painted, to redefine himself by cultivating his own garden.20 Tucker’s reading thus injects—or discovers—an unsuspected factor in Monet’s retreat and efforts to redefine himself in 1899. This is interesting, and I am personally delighted to hail a fellow liberal in Monet. But not everyone will acknowledge the relevance of Monet’s politics to his art. Tucker loves his Monets in their actual physical presence. But as a historian, he wants them known in their own timely niche. Others, meanwhile, pursuing other agendas, lodge the work in a timeless psycho-mythology. Steven Levine’s 1994 book, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection, makes only one fleeting reference to the Dreyfus Affair—designed to dissociate Monet from it, so as to preserve the book’s elaborate metaphor of Monet as Narcissus. There is his shadow, falling over the lily pond, in a photograph, taken by Monet himself; it makes the cover of Levine’s book (fig. 3.9). In these matters, there is no clear right or wrong—any more than there was in that erotic analogy, for which I picked compliant examples, drawing out from the corpus whatever strain would best support what I was trying to say. But selectivity to serve one’s own program is the name of the game, whoever plays it. It is what avant-

garde painters of the New York School practiced in the 1950s, when they welcomed the revaluation of Monet’s long-neglected late masterworks. Highlighting certain features while dimming others, they saluted the late Monet as the begetter of serialism, of all-over and Color Field painting, and, above all, of abstraction. New York’s abstract painters in the 1950s were glad to see late Monet rediscovered and honored—like foundlings finding themselves nobly sired.21 Now that the avantgarde is off in other directions, there’s no longer that psychic need to claim late Monet for abstraction. But forty years ago—in the heat of that American moment, when I was writing my piece on Monet—I briefly wondered whether the abstract element in late Monet might not be more interesting than the representational. I liked the look of this riverscape of 1872 turned sideways, 90 degrees, with the sails at bottom (fig. 3.10). I soon dropped the idea, but what put it in my head was this observation: that many Monets were so structured as to work as well upside down—like playing cards, or chessboards, or some Mondrians (fig. 3.11). (I can see that the picture is better balanced the way Monet had it; but as a representation it could function the other way.) So, half a century ago, this apparent invertibility

figure 3.9. Monet’s shadow on a

pond. Private collection.

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figure 3.10. Claude Monet,

Regattas at Argenteuil, c. 1872. Paris, Musée d’Orsay.

figure 3.11. Claude Monet, The Four Trees, 1891. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

thoughts on monet figure 3.12. Claude Monet, Peonies (Pivoines), 1887. Private collection.

of the image seemed to me to anticipate abstraction, or even the ideal of “objecthood,” which would soon take hold in American art. It was the Poplars of 1891 at the Met that started me on this track. And I gathered further examples. Which way, would you say, is up in figure 3.12?22 Of course, Monet had always loved reflections in water, but without losing his head over them. The real and the reflected corresponded, without claiming equivalence (fig. 3.13), not even as late as 1901 (fig. 3.14). But by the beginning of the nineties, a kind of equivocation sets in and grows ever more emphatic (figs. 3.15, 3.16). And by 1896, depicting a bend in the river, always from the same station (figs. 3.17, 3.18), he loves to see the dividing line between the real and the illusory vanish, give way to parity—in his painting, if not out there (fig. 3.19). These “invertibles” of the nineties are haunting, perhaps mildly unsettling, but not, I think, as portents of abstraction or objecthood, because they are still about the world, or about an experience of it. Hence the paragraph I wrote back in 1955: Most of his life the painter had been fascinated by reflections in water. Then, in his later years, he seemed to have found the cause of that fascination and to

have faced what it implied: that a groundline which arbitrates between the actual and its mirror image separates two perfect equivalents. For this painter who is “only an eye,” the hierarchy of things more or less real is not determined by degrees of tangibility; for him, those things are real which fully form the content of experience.

Sounds a bit pompous now, but at least it discards the abstraction idea. Monet once told an American painter that he was now pursuing “more serious qualities” in his paintings— qualities that would allow people to “live longer” with his pictures.23 Hard to say what exactly he had in mind. He didn’t mean that we should hold on to his paintings, live with them longer before cashing in on their appreciation. He must have meant prolonging the act of looking, abiding in whatever feeling they generate, and perhaps giving it thought. Nowadays, the average time spent looking at a museum picture is roughly thirty seconds—or until the Acoustiguide moves on to the next. If Monet wished for a longer exposure, what was his measure? Three minutes? A half hour? A life? And just what does Monet want of his viewers as they confront the picture’s “more serious qualities”?

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figure 3.13. Claude Monet, The Seine at Lavacourt, 1880. Dallas Museum of Art; Munger Fund.

figure 3.14. Claude Monet, Vétheuil, 1901. Art Institute of Chicago;

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.

figure 3.15. Claude Monet, Poplars

on the Epte, 1891. Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland; Purchased 1925.

figure 3.16. Claude Monet, The Seine at Port-Villez, 1894. London, National Gallery; On loan from Tate: Purchased 1953.

figure 3.17. (middle left) Claude Monet, Morning on the Seine, near Giverny, 1896. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Julia Cheney Edwards Collection. figure 3.18. (middle right) Claude Monet, Morning on the Seine, near

Giverny, 1897. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gift of Mrs. Walter Scott Fitz.

figure 3.19. Claude Monet, The Seine at Giverny, Morning Mists, 1897. Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art; Purchased with funds from the Sarah Graham Kenan Foundation and the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest).

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Here we run into sharp disagreement. For writers around 1900, Monet’s late paintings induced “reverie and withdrawal.” And even in 1998, in the big book that accompanied Boston’s “Monet in the 20th Century” exhibition, the British Monet scholar John House wrote that there was “nothing to disturb the viewer’s solitary immersion in the private experience of viewing.”24 “Nothing to disturb.” Yet Robert Herbert, one of the foremost American connoisseurs of Impressionism, associates Monet’s paint surface with aggression. From Monet’s “aggressive brushwork” in the Nymphéas paintings he concludes that “the work does not induce serenity in the viewer” but “anxiety produced by the contrast between the subject and its rendering.”25 In the Nymphéas pictures, Herbert finds things that “float disturbingly among the floral nymphs,” the painter giving “disturbing substance to ephemeral incarnations . . . on the surface of water” (fig. 3.20). These disquieting incarnations are not pests, such as stingrays or leeches, but aggressive strokes of the brush. So, then, do these placid waters hosting vigorous brushwork trouble or tranquilize? Induce serenity or anxiety? Will we ever know, without exit polls? I suspect that the apparent conflict here is illusory, due to the seduction of language, the reliance on dis-

crete abstractions, on words such as “anxiety” or “serenity,” which are designed to exclude one another. Suppose I lay a hand gently down on the table, as Erasmus did, posing for Holbein (fig. 3.21). Should the rendering of this lax, peaceable gesture be somewhat loose, soft focus, hazy or negligent, to accord with the subject of relaxation? What then shall we make of Holbein’s wiry contour, his razor-sharp line, like a surgeon’s incision, scarring the paper to define digits and fingernails; or of these extremes of chiaroscuro plunging abruptly from brightness into deep-lurking, stygian shadow? And the way those relentless prongs keep coming at you, isn’t it creepy? I trust Holbein’s drawing now has you properly terrified; if not, blame it on defective rhetoric; I have done what I could to apply scary verbiage. But suppose I now substitute the term “energy” for anxiety-causing “aggression.” Insofar as this hand seems alive, it is big with potential motion; charged with alertness, even with thoughtfulness, to say nothing of inward cohesion and density. The given appearance may be a state of contented rest, but without diminution of energy— and “energy,” in William Blake’s definition, is “Eternal Delight.” So it’s not one or the other, activity or repose, because, as George Eliot has it, “All force is Twain in

figure 3.20. Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1916–19. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Louise Reinhardt Smith, 1983.

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one.” And there is this marvelous line in St. Augustine, describing the state of the Blessed in the afterlife— “where no want stimulates labor, and no lassitude slackens desire.”26 This resolution—the delight of energy in repose—seems to me more appropriate to this drawing or to late Monet than the conceptual opposition of serenity and aggression. But notice what I’ve just done—quoting St. Augustine, William Blake, and George Eliot. I’ve been wiling the time away, as I try to “live longer” in the sight, or with the thought, of these pictures. And that poses a problem. How is time filled, or killed, or wiled away as we “live longer” in the sight, or with a thought of the picture? Inevitably, as we look, we make associations, each mind pursuing its own—like this museum visi-

figure 3.21. Hans Holbein, Study of a Hand and Head for the Portrait of Erasmus, c. 1523, detail. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, inv. 18698.

tor in a Saul Steinberg drawing, looking at a Braque of about 1912 (fig. 3.22). Of course, this free associator is at leisure, idling. If professionally engaged, the associations made would get hitched to a program, published, and become matter of dispute. While the pictures are mute, the professionals argue. One scholar thinks another’s associations irrelevant; their own, indispensable. Here again, Robert Herbert, my bête noir this evening, provides an instructive example. Back in November 1998, he reviewed the Boston Monet exhibition for the New York Review of Books and severely censured Paul Tucker’s essay in the accompanying catalogue volume. After some words of perfunctory praise for his former student, he lets fly a volley of criticisms, draw-

figure 3.22. Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1969. Drawing for the cover of the New Yorker, October 18, 1969. Private collection.

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ing on his own associations which, he thinks, should have been Tucker’s also. “Tucker,” he writes, “sometimes concentrates too narrowly on Monet. A few pictures cry out for comparisons with other artists.”27 Is that a fact? Herbert continues, “some of the paintings of [London’s] Waterloo Bridge”—which Monet had painted in 1900 and 1904—“make one think of Pissarro” and “Pissarro had painted Charing Cross Bridge in 1890, well before Monet”—so there! The cry raised by these pictures, as Herbert hears it, is “Look, we are latecomers; someone’s been here before.” Concerning Monet’s Venetian pictures of 1908, Herbert thinks that Tucker should have associated them more closely with the Venetian pictures of Turner and the writings of Ruskin; and could “usefully have taken more account” of Canaletto and Guardi. “Similarly . . . he fails to mention Whistler.” And so on and on. The list of associations Tucker has failed to make grows longer and longer. “Tucker also misses the opportunity to link Monet’s late painting of his floral gardens” with two of his early influences, Delacroix and Théodore Rousseau. Here, says Herbert, “the viewer can see conspicuous links,” and since the reviewer can see these links, they should have been pointed out by the author. Finally, Herbert regrets that Tucker’s essay fails to make “any reference to the current preoccupation with ‘nature’ as having connections with gender.” In other words, everyone’s talking about macho Monet manhandling Dame Nature, so why isn’t Tucker? Again, one person’s compelling associations are another’s irrelevance. Armed with this conclusion, I proceed to some of the associations that popped into my own head, as I kept thinking about Monet. Concerning the serial paintings—the repeated views of the Seine, the haystacks, the poplars, the cathedral façades, Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridge, and so on: some commentators read this repetitiveness as evidence of obsession. But I recall Jasper Johns’s answer, when asked why he had repeatedly painted the American flag: “Using the design of the American flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it,” leaving him “room to work on other levels.”28 Johns was doing what scientific experimenters do when they control every variable

but the one they want to measure. So, in the cathedral façades or London bridges, Monet freezes the variables of design, scale, angulation, keeps them constant, so as to free the variable of colored light. The procedure is utterly rational, and I find the Johns association, or the association with scientific experiment, useful in helping to shift Monet’s series out of alleged obsession back into good, purposeful practice. Such personal associations—the kind that come unbidden as you live with the work—may enter from anywhere, often from outside the purviews of painting. A phrase snatched from one’s reading closes briefly with Monet’s pictures. As when Dickens, in the opening of Bleak House, describing a London fog, has “chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog” (fig. 3.23). Reading a poem of Wallace Stevens, I stopped at this marvelous line: “the high interiors of the sea” (“The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage,” 1919), and wondered how the poet came to write “high” to convey watery depth (fig. 3.24). Of course, he knew Latin, where the word altus means deep as well as high. Was Stevens, then, sounding that psychic ground of undifferentiation whence altus first entered the language—signifying remoteness from your own station, irrespective of up or down? I thought of Debussy’s piano prelude La cathédrale engloutie—the music evoking the legend of a sunken cathedral that rises mysteriously from under water, bells tolling, then submerges again. Or had the poet of “the high interiors of the sea” been looking at Monet’s Nymphéas (fig. 3.25)? Monet offers no actual high sea; he has only his pond to paint. But within the picture its shoreless reach is unbounded—roomy enough for a sky’s somersault. And here’s one more offbeat association— Caravaggio’s painting of 1604, known as the Madonna of Loreto, or The Madonna of the Pilgrims—appropriately named, for the picture is not a museum piece; to see it, you pilgrimage to the Roman church of Sant’Agostino, first left-hand chapel, for which the picture was painted, and from which it has never stirred (fig. 3.26). The painter assumes that we know the story. Since the Holy Land, including the Virgin’s house in Nazareth,

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figure 3.23. (top left) Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk, 1904. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. figure 3.24. (top right) Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1907. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Gift of Mrs. Harry C. Hanszen. figure 3.25. (bottom) Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1914–26. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.

had fallen into the hands of the infidel, angels miraculously loosed the house from its foundation and flew it to the Italian town of Loreto, halfway up the boot near the Adriatic, where it became a pious cult object. And that’s Caravaggio’s subject. A peasant couple, perhaps a mother and son, arrived at their goal, kneel at the door-

step of Mary’s house, from which she and the child have issued to acknowledge their homage. What interests me here (among other things) is the painter’s compression of space and time; foregone duration—the mileage of country road left behind and the Virgin’s issuance from indoors—both collapse in

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figure 3.26. Caravaggio, Madonna of Loreto, 1604. Rome, Sant’Agostino.

Now Here. We know that the house extends inward, and that it is old; witness the chipped stone of the sill, lower left, and the crumbling of tinted stucco revealing the brick. And we know from their walking staffs and their dusty feet that these worshippers have traveled some way. So then, the present encounter takes place in a shrinking, an interface—a sort of spatial implosion to which all this muted action contributes. Both mother and child lean outward as far as they may without losing balance; while the kneeling couple strain inward, the man’s fingertips and the child’s dangling toe almost touching. The depth of depicted space is of a miserly shallowness, but within this compression, low and high,

rustics and majesty, actual and visionary, meet in arrival from deep within and from far afield. No one needs to be told that there are differences between Caravaggio and Monet. I make the association only to emphasize in late Monet certain defining traits, which, I think, need protecting from false associations with modernism—such as abstraction, negation of spatial illusion, flat Color Field painting, etc. In at least one important sense, Monet’s late pictures are profoundly non-modernist. They are as much about spatial illusion as was Old Master painting, though Monet rejects the two standbys on which Renaissance art used to depend, perspectival recession and chiaroscuro. Monet achieves illusionism with a different subject and with different means. The motif he finally settles on after age sixty— the lily pond, with its reactive surface and generous reflectivity—gives him the spatial amplitude which much of modernism tended to crush. The two-way extension which Caravaggio staged on an orthogonal— the implied depth of the Virgin’s house and the implicit approach of the pilgrims—this spatial reach Monet incorporates on a perpendicular, so that clouds, homing in “nether skies,” plummet to “high interiors.” And only the scatter of lily pads tells where the action is, at the interface of aloft and below. I believe that these paintings finally gave Monet the vision of space he had been craving for decades past. In his mid-twenties, Monet produced good, solid work, in which the normal distinction between level and upright is never questioned (for example, fig. 3.27). Verticality corresponds to the human posture, horizontality to the ground underfoot. As things recede into distance, they pass out of reach, and Monet continues to reproduce such views through the 1870s and ’80s (fig. 3.28). But as early as 1869, the normal distinction between level and upright is—as they say in critical jargon— “problematized” (fig. 3.29). The central tree, here the focus of all orthogonals, sinks its stem right down the middle to check the horizontal recession. At lower right, dark reflections keep even the waters erect. During the 1870s, Monet’s will to forestall recession becomes more pressing (fig. 3.30). Pictures are carefully structured to

thoughts on monet figure 3.27. Claude Monet,

Woodgatherers at the Edge of the Forest, c. 1863. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Henry H. and Zoe Oliver Sherman Fund.

figure 3.28. Claude Monet, Meadow

with Poplars, c. 1875. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Bequest of David P. Kimball in memory of his wife Clara Bertram Kimball.

deny distance its effect of removal. Reflections grow more assertive, so that the water level itself becomes optically ambiguous. Without distortion of what is laid out, horizontality shrinks to a minimum. And sometimes the impulse to do away with horizontality altogether takes over—so that, as in an 1875 painting in Prague, you can’t see the picture for the flowers (fig. 3.31). Not a picture I like; it reminds me of Yankee Doodle’s report on his visit to New York City: “He swore he couldn’t see the town / There was so many houses.”

In some paintings of the late eighties, the water level tips up, as if to demonstrate the irrelevance of horizontal recession to painting (fig. 3.32). Meanwhile, during the years he spent at Vétheuil, most bravely during the severe winter of 1879–80, Monet produced his paintings of ice breaking up. He returned to the subject in the winter of 1883–84—intermittent depth of reflection interwoven with the disintegrating horizontality of the ice floes (fig. 3.33). The role played by these ice floes will be played eventually by water lilies.

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figure 3.29. Claude Monet, La grenouillère, 1869. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

figure 3.30. Claude Monet, Ships in a Harbor, c.

1873. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Denman Waldo Ross Collection.

figure 3.31. Claude Monet, Two Women

among the Flowers, 1875. Prague, Národní Galerie.

figure 3.32. Claude Monet, Canoe over the Epte, c. 1890. Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Purchase, 1953.

figure 3.33. Claude Monet, Morning Haze, 1894. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Bequest of Mrs. Frank Graham Thomson, 1961.

figure 3.34. (top) Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1904. Denver Art Museum; Funds from Helen Dill Bequest, 1935. figure 3.35. (bottom) Claude Monet,

Water Lilies: Green Reflections, c. 1914– 18, detail. Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie.

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And so to the Haystacks of around 1890 (fig. 3.5), whose fabulous shadows devour the level ground; and more emphatically, the Poplars series (fig. 3.11), and, of course, the Rouen Cathedral façade (figs. 3.7, 3.8)—slanting against the picture plane and forbidding recession. Within these ten years—from 1885 to 1894—Monet’s subjects had moved from all horizontal extension pulling away from us, to a predilection for the perpendicular. The end stage is the lily pond (fig. 3.34). A space that annuls the distinction of upright and level; where horizontal and vertical meet in one interlaced mesh— canceling the distinction between erect and supine that pertains to our functioning body. The vision achieved

is that of an eye that has supplanted the body, which gives a redoubled meaning to the old saw that “Monet is only an eye.” But the result is no beatific vision projected into an afterlife; it is no mystic release. On the contrary, everything is carnally present, as the familiarity of the scene and the physicality of the brushwork attest (fig. 3.35). These paintings seem to me deeply secular, of this world. Looking at one of my favorite Monets at the Metropolitan Museum (fig. 3.36), I catch myself once again at this business of forming associations: a lifesize painting, nearly 80 inches tall, that shows nothing but a short stretch of serpentine garden path. It is one of four Monet did of this subject; one left

figure 3.36. Claude Monet,

The Path through the Irises, 1914– 17. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 2001, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002.

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unfinished. But all of them private pictures, never exhibited or offered for sale. The path lies somewherebetween, between banks of irises, between an unrecalled start and an unreached destination, pressed on each side by what’s already outpaced— objects of inattention. So the picture seems to be about nothing that is; caught in midstep between past and future, between steps left behind, and others yet to be taken, a point in a passage, somewhat like the present tense, which has no extension. And I thought of Stephen’s interior monologue in episode 9 of Ulysses: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” Maybe this “holding” is all Monet meant when he hoped that we’d live with his pictures a little longer.

New York, 2003 Well, this is where I stopped in Boston. But because I love this picture, I wanted to linger with it two or three minutes more. And so I wrote an alternative coda. Why this picture arrested me, I’m not sure; nor how to explain why I stopped. Of course, I could play the association game: point out that irises had been depicted by others, such as Ogata Korin in Japan or Van Gogh. I can make such comparisons, because I’ve gone to school where they teach you how to ricochet off a picture so you don’t have to stay alone with it. Or I could show you a plan of the Giverny gardens to identify the precise patch Monet chose to depict. But here we are at the Met, only a minimum showing. A walk up a garden path. Ask where we are, and the picture answers: midway—from whence we don’t know, and no destination in sight; blindsided on either hand by what’s overlooked, for we look ahead as we walk, not at shrubs being passed. The picture, then, is a fleeting between—a swerve transitional between past and future, wanting extension, risking nonentity, yet close packed, rife with energy. And it occurred to me that the picture’s subject may be no more than, or nothing less than, the present tense, the alert which the present tense is. Of course, here again I was making an association.

What I found myself thinking of was a long section that comes late in St. Augustine’s Confessions. Not in the popular early part where the forty-three-year-old bishop confesses the sins of his youth, like going to church to pick up girls; but in book 11, chapter 28, where he meditates on the nature of time. Time, he discovers, is a psychological function in creatures such as ourselves. We parse time as past, present, and future. But the past, being gone, no longer exists, except only as memory. And the future exists not yet, except as expectation. And does the present exist? How long does the present last? A week? A split second? Ponder it and it dwindles into non-being. Pinched between memory and expectation, the present is nothing but what Augustine calls consideration. “Who,” he writes, “who denies that time present wants space, because it passes away in a moment? But yet our consideration endures.” Time, for Augustine, is not an absolute that exists independent of us; it is a mental state compounded of not yet, of no longer, and of present attention. Attention, then, is all we’ve got. Now nail that to the stretcher! These musings may be annoying to some, I hope tolerable to others. All I’m sure of is that, keeping the picture up for attention, I “live with it longer,” as Monet wished us to do. When you next look at it at the Met, you will spin out your own associations. If you’re a painter, you may find something to marvel at in the brushwork at lower right. And try not to see the picture’s expensive, carved gilded frame, which, I think, is god-awful.

Appendix: Monet’s Water Lilies (1956) We read of the aging Monet that he lost confidence in his late works and thought of burning them. We have been told that “Monet’s later pictures are not very successful . . . when he lost his precision of eye he could not compensate for this with a like precision in design.”29 Originally published in Arts (February 1956); republished, with revisions, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with TwentiethCentury Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 235–39. The version of Water Lilies discussed here, then recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, was destroyed in a fire in 1958.

thoughts on monet

And we hear from Monet himself: “I have taken up some things which it is impossible to do: clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It is wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.”30 One of these paintings that were impossible to do has just been bought and hung by the Museum of Modern Art. And it is wonderful to look at for an hour or so at a time, for you can do things to it with your eyes— tip it into a horizontal plane, then let it snap back to an upright sheet; gaze along placid surfaces, then look through them, five fathoms deep. Search opaque waters for diaphanous shrubs, and find a light source at its destination. You can invert the picture or yourself at will, lie cheek to cheek with the horizon, rise on a falling cloud, or drift with lily leaves over a sunken sky. And yet this is no daydream; every inch is true, so that one looks and stares with a sense of discovery. The canvas—roughly eighty inches wide by twenty deep—forms one of the Nymphéas, or Water Lilies, series which occupied the septuagenarian painter during seven years, and of which the best known, thanks to Clemenceau’s insistence, decorate two large oval rooms at the Orangerie behind the Place de la Concorde. Monet’s immediate inspiration had been the lily pond in his own garden at Giverny. By 1914 he had decided to embark on a vast decorative cycle based on that theme, had ordered fifty enormous canvases and the building of a new studio; and while younger Frenchmen trained their sights on German trenches, Monet gazed at his lily pond through dimming eyes and with a spiritual courage for which language has only physical analogies. These scenes offer just enough of the lake to be inadequate for perfect orientation. They come close to a direct intuition of space, purposely suspending those locatable objects which our minds habitually use as resting points, markers for space calibration. Only now, after a lapse of thirty years, are we quite ready to accept these veiled, moist, unconfigurated ambiguities, and to perceive that the leap Monet made in his last years puts him closer to Mondrian than, say, to Corot. Before seeing the Paris Nymphéas I had been wondering for some time at his Poplars in the Metropol-

itan Museum, painted in the early nineties (fig. 3.11). Four tree trunks, slicing down the canvas, parts of them “real” and the rest in reflection, while a single horizontal, traced by the river bank, steadies the design and lends the scene a temporizing plausibility. But the river bank is a thinning line, a last valedictory hint at that extended underprop of space which was Masaccio’s gift to art, on which in former times all bodies had found rest, on whose gravitational pull you could count as on a reassuring constant. It means after all a great deal to have ground under your feet, to know even in the rapture of a jump that such a ground exists, and preferably not too far away. In Monet’s Poplars that base of certainty is in suspense; it promises the perils of a tightrope, and one-half its value is a watery illusion. Most of his life the painter had been fascinated by reflections in water. Then, in his later years, he seemed to have found the cause of that fascination and to have faced what it implied: that a ground line which arbitrates between the actual and its false mirror image separates two absolute equivalents, like the midline of a Rorschach blot; that the hierarchy of things more or less real is not determined by degrees of tangibility; that all those things are real which fully form the content of experience. It is not only because the picture consists of vertical and horizontal lines that I invoke Mondrian’s name. For the affinity goes further, further even than the shifting play of space between the bars of the resulting grid. Both men were drawn to the painting of trees. And a tree, as everybody knows, is a rising vertical that spreads wide at the top. Mondrian suppressed the verticality and turned the tree into a total field. Monet, I believe, did the opposite, but for a similar purpose. He truncates the thing, leaving some shoots on it admittedly, but nonetheless chopping it down to a near-abstract vertical. He has disengaged such a fragment as will not tally with our concept—so that, as we faintly recognize a row of trees, we the more surely recognize a set of upright lines. The painting can still pass as a topographical portrait; but from the viewpoint of convincing likeness to a country scene it can, without loss, be turned upside down; only its pictorial balance will be shaken. So then

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thre e [60]

the apparent right-side-upness of natural things is but a projection from our human posture. And the pictorial form arrogates to itself that meaningful necessity which used to belong to the objects depicted. What could have led Monet to place his verticals over clear water? The effect is to make the recession of the horizontal water level little more than a transparent hoax. What we are more tangibly given is the continuity of verticals in a plane parallel to that of the picture. Just so, the acid shadows of his Haystacks at the Metropolitan Museum seem to dissolve the spreading ground in front, presenting once again a mirror image in plumb-line descent. But I suspect that there is more in the curtailment of his poplars than the picture’s abstract self-assertion. For all his fabled and acknowledged realism, Monet now looks in nature for those fractions in which—torn from all mental moorings—the appearance becomes apparition. There is a vision here beyond the scope of finite forms, and we receive a glimpse of boundless extension. No clues are given as to when or where these beams will stop developing; no limits are set to their self-propagation—and the effect is infinite. Which brings me back to the new picture at the Modern. Monet has found infinity in his back garden

by the lily pond—and this is what I meant before when I said courage. Like Cézanne, he came to doubt whether his latest painting still made sense, and whether it might not as well be burned. He had set out to formulate a twentieth-century vision in the fine, cultivated idiom of the nineteenth—in his own words, “to produce an illusion of an endless whole, a wave without horizon, without shore.” And so, in the Water Lilies, the law of gravity—that splendid projection of the human mind lodged in its body—is abrogated, as in the underwater movies of Cousteau. The only horizontals are festoons of algae, leaves, and reeds placed very high. The bright, languid cloud in the lower center falls at a rate determined by its shape and hue alone, indifferent to any general law governing falling bodies. And near at hand, grasses and rushes rise and levitate in full defiance of our experience of space. The whole world is cut loose from anthropomorphic or conceptual points of reference. Those points are still available, but they no longer constitute the world. If we must put them in, we may; for the picture is willing and the world pliant enough to accommodate any construction that will serve our needs.

fou r

Matisse Music

M

atisse is a representational painter, and his pictures are loaded with, yet conspicuously empty of, identifiable subject matter. What chiefly stays out of his compositions is the encounter of humans with one another. Figures may assemble to shape up a dance, but not to commune on a personal level. The ban on mutual involvement in his work appears surprisingly early. A painting he did as an art student in his mid-twenties depicts his master’s studio with the model holding her pose (fig. 4.1); models worked hard in those days, holding poses for forty-five or even sixty minutes. But as Matisse renders the scene, not a soul cares, not even the statue. The characters are too selfinvolved, or too work-involved, to notice each other, or to glance at the nude—whom only the painter sees. And for this seeing, he wants undisturbed privacy. No one shall share his attention; let them wait and admire the picture when finished. There are hundreds of earlier pictures of a life class in action; not one so asocial as this Matisse. Thereafter, any human presence admitted into his compositions will be there for himself alone. In Matisse’s pictures, people exist as they do for an infant—in relation to it—never to one another. This prohibition governs Matisse’s lifelong production—except for a handful of important experimental departures. In the great turning point picture of 1905–6—the Joy of Life—the lovers’ clinch at lower right is quite exceptional. Such reciprocity Matisse’s art will not suffer again for the next forty years. It’s one thing to intermix drawing and painting; but men and women—no way! In the Dance and Music murals of 1910, the female

figure 4.1. Henri Matisse, The Atelier of Gustave Moreau, 1895. Private collection.

dancers and the male music makers were strictly segregated, meant to be seen on successive levels of a stairwell in the Moscow palace of Matisse’s first major patron, Sergei Shchukin. A photograph taken while the work was in progress shows that the Music panel originally included a female at upper right—she was evicted (figs. 4.2, 4.3). And the figures at first turned more toward each other, as people are wont to do. But, says Matisse, this has to stop!

Written in 2005. Steinberg’s insight into Matisse’s painting emerged during his work on the 2002–3 “Matisse Picasso” exhibition; see p. 194, note 38.

figure 4.2. Photograph of Music in progress. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale.

figure 4.3. Henri Matisse, Music, 1910. St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

mat is s e : mu sic

figure 4.4. Opening notes of Beethoven’s First

Razumovsky Quartet, cello.

For years, I had trouble with Music. I was baffled by the childlike crudity of the drawing; by the unsexing of these young innocents; their spaced disconnection; the absence of natural light, and the unnatural color— vermilion on complementary green against, or under, a starless sky. No time of day specified, as no place is: only the slope of an ascent. Then I read Jack Flam’s Matisse book of 1986, including this comment: “The picture not only represents musicians in the act of making music but contains within its formal structure a metaphorical embodiment of that music. The standing violinist at the left . . . acts as a G clef at the beginning of the bar of music in which the other four figures embody musical notes.”1 Well, I thought, we’re all entitled to our associations. But Flam’s notion must have impressed me more than I knew, for the next time I looked at the picture, I found myself reading it like a score, as if these figures were positioned as on a musical stave—and heard myself humming do, re, mi, fa, do. Surprise! I was doing the opening of Beethoven’s First Razumovsky Quartet, played by the cello, beginning on the C below middle C (fig. 4.4). Could that be relevant? Why Beethoven? Why of all things this Opus 59, No. 1, in F major? But why not? In 1806, Count Razumovsky was Russia’s ambassador to the Court of Vienna. An ardent lover of music, he commissioned Beethoven to write three quartets— into which, as a compliment to his patron, the composer would incorporate Russian folk tunes. These

Razumovsky Quartets have ranked ever since as masterpieces of chamber music. More to the point, they exemplify, as nothing else does, great Russian patronage of a great Western artist. And now, if my hunch is correct, Matisse—exactly one hundred years later— would be paying Sergei Shchukin the compliment of likening his role as a patron to Count Razumovsky’s; and incidentally ranging himself with Beethoven. The compliment, the grace of the dedication, is sounded in the disposition of figures. Let me add that Matisse played the violin as a boy, that he played it in adult life as a hobby; that he had learned to read music; that the violin figures in several of his paintings; that he collected classical phonograph records—with a few popular items thrown in for his nurses; and that a large phonograph, or gramophone, sits in at least one of his paintings (Interior with a Phonograph, 1924, private collection). No question but that he knew the First Razumovsky Quartet, and the shape of its opening melody on the page. All this could help explain what had long seemed a puzzle. I don’t mean the mere absence of identifiable time of day or locale—analogous to the time-space of music. I mean the regularity of these crouchers: the sibling likeness and disconnectedness of five sexless boys—who are not persons but voices, having no other being than pitch, duration, loudness, and color. They are notes standing for interrelated sounds, conspiring only to assemble a melody. Think them midway between singers and signs—young crotchet-choristers and crotchets repleting a bar of music. Their companionship is transpersonal, suggesting—as John Elderfield suspects for Matisse’s people in general—their humanity may be mysterious, ambiguous, deflective. It is certainly problematic, especially in the artist’s reluctance to bring male and female together.

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figure 5.1. Max Ernst, The Virgin Chastising the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: A. B. [André Breton], P. E. [Paul Éluard], and the Painter, 1926. Cologne, Museum Ludwig; Acquisition 1984.

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Max Ernst This Is a Test

1993

A

Virgin Mary earnestly spanking her son is hard to imagine and theologically absurd, somewhat like Santa Claus engaging in child abuse, or Uncle Sam desecrating the flag (fig. 5.1). Since Jesus cannot have misbehaved, and Mary cannot chastise unjustly, a picture of the subject, especially one over life-size, pretending to real presence, is intrinsically impossible. And if we find such a picture in the current Max Ernst exhibition at MoMA,1 then we are either hallucinating or thinking heresy and consenting to blasphemy, whereas we should be alerting the Holy Office and the police. The duplicity of Ernst’s picture encourages no such simple reflex. For one thing, the kind of domestic disturbance Ernst has invented ought to proceed in the intimacy of the home, indoors, as in Dutch genre painting. The boy’s imputed delinquency should be corrected in private. Yet this immense, glassy-eyed giantess sits like a monument between freestanding walls under an open sky, straddling a public space. And she sits (quite like Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna) on an upright block placed on a plinth. Could it be that we are shown not a woman but an effigy in weird animation, a statue forgetting itself because it thinks there is no one to see? Hardly. Since 1926, when this outrage first broke on a scandalized public, the ontological status of the punishing mother has never been questioned. So then it’s the holy Virgin herself caught in a hitherto unpublicized moment. With her naked boy (who seems to be about five years old) sprawled on her lap, she flails at his blushing buttocks, while his halo rolls free, and the painter signs its diameter (fig. 5.2). Hallowed be his name.

The “Max Ernst” signature inside Christ’s aureole could be a clue, a hint of the artist’s self-involvement in the whole enterprise. Accordingly—though the subject, Ernst said, had been proposed to him by André Breton—recent writers on the picture have chosen the psychoanalytic approach, hoping to discover the motive for it among the artist’s own primal traumas and Oedipal fantasies. One studies the artist’s biography, his notebooks, his confessional doodles—anything that will permit one to disregard the picture itself and, as we shall see, one’s insinuated complicity in it. Who, in fact, is watching the action? The title tells us, but in a way that seems slyly misleading. Ernst called the picture: The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Child Jesus before Three Witnesses: A. B. [André Breton], P. E. [Paul Éluard], and the Painter. On this cue, being summoned as witnesses, the three men behind the rear wall should be paying attention. So the 1986 catalogue of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, which owns the painting, speaks of “the witnesses to this unholy act, who look in on the foreground scene through a rear window.”2 A distinguished historian has them obligingly “looking through the window at an unusual scene”3—as befits the role assigned to them by the title. But that’s clearly wrong, and the catalogue to the present show (the relevant passage written by Walter Hopps) takes a long step Originally published in the New York Review of Books, May 13, 1993, on the occasion of a traveling Max Ernst retrospective. In 2005, another retrospective gave Steinberg the opportunity to update the essay with post-publication material in a letter to the editor, published in the September 22, 2005, New York Review.

fiv e figure 5.2. Detail of fig. 5.1.

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in the direction of accuracy by setting the artist apart: “Of the three only the gaze of Ernst focuses directly on the event transpiring.”4 But is it the foreground event that the keen-eyed painter is looking at? Try again. A square aperture in the rear wall reveals the three “witness” faces, foremost the profiles of Breton and Éluard. And they, unlike you and me, ignore the spectacle with surreal disdain, spurning the privilege to which the picture’s title entitles them. The startling contrast between their indifference and our gawking is what defines us. How you and I, away from the picture, actually feel about it is irrelevant, because extraneous to the encounter. The point is that the depicted “witnesses” display a coolness which we, as we stand there and stare, and by virtue of staring, are rendered incapable of. The very attention we bring to the scene is shamed into prurience by the proffered alternative, the insouciance of the two poets. Behind them looms the full face of the painter—too remotely recessed and too oddly angled by the obliquity of the wall to see what he knows us to be seeing. From his distant vantage, the window contracts to a slot, and the divine comedy in the foreground, for want

of a periscope, is out of his sight. Yet his eyes are wide open and their fixed glance is on us, on me, measuring my reaction. This is a test. The painting is engineered to embarrass: so long as I look, I am exposed to the artist’s accusing gaze as he watches the churl in me trapped in the act of ogling a sacrilege—a provocation which my betters scorn to acknowledge. It’s a cruel jest and a no-win situation all around— for Jesus, his mater, and us voyeurs. Unless we fly to aestheticism to restore self-respect. Though the draftsmanship seems a bit lax here and there, it’s not a bad painting.

2005 More on Max Ernst’s dire blasphemy of 1926: his overlife-size tableau of the Virgin Mary spanking her son, on view in the Ernst retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and lately reviewed by John Updike (New York Review of Books, May 26, 2005). Twelve years ago, in response to my own piece on the Ernst outrage, a kindly reader sent me the following: “This heresy did not originate with Mr. Ernst. There is a remarkable

max ernst : this is a test

Scots cum Appalachian ballad, ‘The Bitter Withy Tree,’ in which Jesus curses the tree for providing the switch with which Mary beats him for murdering three young boys. They had refused to play ball with him. We are sons of lords and ladies all And born in bower and hall While you are only a Jew maid’s child Born in an ox’s stall. He builded a bridge from the beams of the sun And over the water danced he, There followed him those rich young men And drownded they were all three.

Somehow, it doesn’t sound heretical when you sing it.” Signed: Robin Roberts (a folk singer who had worked closely with the eminent folk song collector Alan Lomax). Further correspondence with Ms. Roberts adduced copious scholarship (from the Journal of the Folk- Song Society, London, vols. 2, 1905–6, and 4, 1910–13) concerning text and tune of “The Bitter Withy.” The legend sung in this carol probably dates from the fourteenth century. It has the five-year-old Jesus told by his mother that playing ball requires a playmate; whereupon Jesus goes forth, meets three young fops, asks whether one would play with him, and suffers rebuff on account of his lowly birth. Jesus retaliates by knitting sunbeams into a bridge, which he passes over, followed by the three snoblings, who promptly drown.

Then Mary mild fetched home her child And laid him across her knee, She took a switch from the withy withy tree And gave him slashes three.

In the concluding verse, Jesus curses the withy (or willow) tree— That causes me to smart The withy shall be the very first tree to perish at the heart.

One scholar suggests that the curse corresponds to a “fact of nature: the quick decay of the willow.” The fantasy of a disagreeable Christ Child, fully deserving of the correction he receives in Ernst’s picture, came not ex nihilo. It surely evolved from Apocryphal Gospels such as the Pseudo-Matthew and the earlier Gospel of Thomas. About the latter, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (1957) has this to say: “Its collection of stories of the boyhood of Christ presents us with an unedifying picture of a conceited, and frequently even malicious child who uses his miraculous powers for the satisfaction of his whims.” Is there a French cognate to the English carol? Had its irreverence somehow infected André Breton, who suggested the subject of the chastising Virgin? Mr. Updike is right to say that “this scene cannot be enrolled in Christian iconography—it has no Gospel authority.” But enrolled it may be in the iconography of medieval folklore, drawing authority, not from the canonic, but from Apocryphal Gospels.

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si x

“Jasper Johns” For the Record

A

bout the genesis of my Jasper Johns essay, now more than three decades old.1 A fictional version of it, which reads like a tale of moral corruption, keeps popping up in print here and there, mostly in Europe.2 It runs as follows: a hired pen, mhs (my humble self ), accepts a commission from MD (manipulative dealer) to puff one of his artists ( JJ). MD orders the article for publication in Metro, mhs demanding a $1,000 fee, since the piece would take him several months to do and he needs that much per month to live on. Not quite how it happened. My Jasper Johns essay (as I confessed ten years later in the preface to a book called Other Criteria) had been undertaken by a late bloomer just out of graduate school: “To me,” I wrote in 1972, “the enigma of Johns’s work offered an immediate occasion to subside into middle age. . . . My effort to stay with the enigma was a campaign to stave off the psychology of avoidable middle age for a while.” Trying to come to terms with Johns’s art, I embarked—August 1961—on a project that would take well over six months to complete, because I write slow. By October, I felt sufficiently well informed to call Johns about coming down to his studio; and mentioned what I was working on to Margaret Scolari Barr, who in turn mentioned it to Leo Castelli.3 He asked where I intended to publish. Hadn’t thought about it, I said; first have to make sure I can bring it off. Castelli said he could get the piece into Metro (never heard of it), which would provide stately layout, color, etc. What sort of a fee would I want? I suggested one grand for that half-year’s work (not a bad take for a recent student accustomed to lunching deliciously on a five-cent bag of peanuts). Without a

moment’s hesitation or haggling, Castelli agreed, not letting on that he would be adding his bounty to Metro’s scant budget. And not until several years later did he begin to recall that deal as an example of proud princely patronage. But the deal was struck when New York’s vital art world was all camaraderie—or seemed to be. It predates the later marriage of art and money—a love match which, as marriages go, seems to have lasted well. Some furtive flirtation may have been under way by 1961, but it was not apparent—at least not to me, brooding over Johns’s paintings in a way that seemed continuous with the student work I had been doing on Caravaggio and Borromini. There were several long meetings with Jasper, talking hours on end, because, whenever one of my questions got an elliptical answer—and I could not be sure that I had understood—I would keep questioning him on his answer and not let go until that answer was clarified. Didn’t matter to either of us how long it took. My friend Joan Hoddeson was with us on one such occasion, just listening. And when we left Jasper’s studio at 128 Front Street, she said: “You know, after your first two hours I suddenly had the sensation, my God,

Originally published as “Back Talk from Leo Steinberg” in Jasper Johns: 35 Years: Leo Castelli, ed. Susan Brundage (New York, 1993), n.p., as a corrective to the publication history of Steinberg’s 1962 Jasper Johns essay. In 1996, Steinberg deposited his Johns papers at the Getty Research Institute, accompanied by an updated summary of the essay’s history. Those updates are included here. A supplementary corrective appears in the editor’s appendix, pp. 70–71.

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they’re communicating, and the feeling that I’d never before witnessed anything like it.” Johns put it differently, and I herewith acknowledge his generosity. In an interview with Vanity Fair (February 1984, p. 65), he said: “It seemed to me that [Leo Steinberg] tried to deal directly with the work and not put his own map of preconceptions over it. He saw the work as something new, and then tried to change himself in relation to it, which is very hard to do.” One more point of information. During these exchanges, no tapes were used. The dialogue between Q and A on p. 32 of Other Criteria was patched together from things Jasper had said to me or to others in published interviews, supplemented by things I thought he would say, given the right provocation. The made-up answers were shown to Jasper, and when he agreed, “Yes, I could have said that,” the catechism was sealed. To convey a sense of Johns’s far-out position, I cast myself in the dialogue as a slightly bewildered stooge, not an easy role for mhs to adopt.

Editor’s Appendix: 2022—Finale Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether Castelli commissioned Steinberg’s article to boost one of his artists or whether Steinberg published an independently written piece, and how and when Castelli paid Steinberg’s fee.4 But since 2007, with the deposit of the Leo Castelli records at the Archives of American Art (digitized in 2015), it is no longer necessary to depend on he said/he said accounts. An analysis of those records, particularly the folder “Alfieri, Bruno (Editoriale Metro), Milan 1960–1965” (Alfieri was the publisher of Metro), supplies us with documented facts.5 (Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of AAA records are to this folder, followed by the online scan numbers.)

The Genesis of the Metro Essay

The documents confirm that LS (for convenience I now switch to initials) was writing his essay (begun, as he notes, in August 1961) long before he mentioned it to Barr in October. In late September, LS’s work on Johns

was unknown to both LC and BA. BA discusses with LC the possible contents of the Johns issue, scheduled for Metro, no. 4 (BA to LC, September 27, 1961, scan 59). He asks whether Johns himself can write, or at least respond to questions. “And then we could publish a text, perhaps by Gillo Dorfles [a frequent contributor to Metro], or an American, if you prefer” (“e poi potremmo pubblicare un testo, forse di Gillo Dorfles, o di un americano, se tu preferisci”). As late as November 9—the day LS visited LC (note 3) and had been writing for three months—BA still knows nothing about LS’s essay, suggesting that Metro include “un articolo importante su J.J. (può forse farlo Gillo Dorfles)” (scan 63). BA arrived in New York to meet with LC and his artists on December 12 (BA to LC, December 4 and 5, scans 64 and 65). LS’s appointment book for December 13 notes: “7pm at Leo Castelli dinner/Alfieri.” It must have been at this dinner that BA agreed to publish LS’s essay and discussed payment terms with him (see below). BA already knew that LS was a young critic of note. In a letter to LC of July 1, 1960, about the contents of Metro 1, on Edward Higgins, he suggests LS as one of the people who might conduct an interview with Higgins.6 LS’s Johns essay, however, was not yet in BA’s hands in late December 1961. Upon his return to Milan, BA writes to LC (December 28, scan 66), thanking him for his hospitality and adding a P.S.: “If you want to send me some of the [ Johns] material in the meantime, for example, everything except the J.J. of Steinberg, maybe that’s better” (“Se vuoi mandarmi intanto una parte del materiale, per esempio tutto quanto meno il J.J. di Steinberg, forse è meglio”).7

Payments: For What and When

By his account, LS was paid $1,000 for his essay in Metro. In the surviving documents, LC says he paid LS $800, which matches his claim in 1966 that he “put up the other 80 percent.”8 The remaining 20 percent ($200) from BA was probably arranged during BA’s December visit, though whether directly or through LC is uncertain; no financial records or relevant correspondence survive. This latter amount would justify LC’s remark

“jasper johns”: for the record

to LS that he was “adding his bounty to Metro’s scant budget.”9 LS always remembered that $1,000 fee—it was the first time he had received serious money for a publication. By early 1962, LC and BA are talking about printing extra pages of the Metro issue, to be bound, with a new cover, and published as a book. They both want to add plates to Metro, so as to make the book handsomer and more saleable. Much of the correspondence that ensues involves what should be added, especially color plates, and when BA will receive the transparencies and other material from LC. BA keeps pressing for a decision about the contents and the number of copies needed because he wants to print the pages for Metro and the book simultaneously to save printing costs.10 Reading the documents, one has to keep in mind that both BA and LC often use “article” and “book” interchangeably, which conflates the two publications.11 The most recent result of that conflation appears in Louis Menand’s The Free World, p. 283 (above, note 4). Consulting only box 20, folder 39, among the AAA Castelli records (“Steinberg, Leo, 1960–1962”; not online), he refers to a final invoice, dated November 8, 1962, from LC to LS for the purchase of Johns’s Shade as proof that “Steinberg knew perfectly well who was paying his fee, because Castelli’s eight-hundred-dollar supplement [to Metro] took the form of a discount on a work of Johns’s called Shade, which Steinberg purchased. The sale was finalized in November, shortly after the Metro article appeared.” But as the correspondence in box 1, folder 15, testifies, Metro was published six months earlier, in May.12

There is no connection between the Metro article and the Shade “discount.” LS had seen Shade at Castelli’s “Jasper Johns” exhibition in February 1960.13 Unable to afford the full price of $2,200, LS asked his friend Victor Leventritt to buy the painting jointly, which he did, and both paid on an installment plan. Letters from LS to LC in June and October 1960 and January 1961 record payments sent (also box 20, folder 39). The final invoice from LC (November 8, 1962) lists the price, along with all monies received from LS and VL to date. The outstanding balance is $800, which LC records as “Credit to Leo Steinberg for his article on Jasper Johns” (not a “discount”). Castelli’s use of “article” misleads Menand to assume a reference to the Metro publication. But in late 1961, when the article was accepted, LS, though well known in the New York art world, was a newly minted, still impoverished PhD, just starting a half-time teaching job at Hunter College. He would have been in no position to turn down what was then the sizeable sum of $800. The credit had to have been in lieu of payment for the book. Since LS had given Metro only “magazine publication rights,” he was entitled to a supplementary royalty for the book14; the project could not have proceeded without some agreement between LS and LC concerning that royalty. Whether LC initially offered cash or a credit for Shade is unknown. But by November 1962, months after Metro had been published, the open debt was more than two and a half years old, and LS probably welcomed the opportunity to erase it.15

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his is going to be a frankly personal lecture— as much about me as about Rauschenberg. And I’ll begin by confessing to a little game I sometimes play while I read—checking off in my mind whatever traits I have in common with world-famous men. St. Augustine, for instance, ends one of his letters by regretting that he cannot respond to all his friend’s questions because he’s mislaid his friend’s letter. “It has somehow or other,” he writes, “gone astray at this end, and cannot be found after long search.”1 And I say to myself: See? St. Augustine and I cultivate the same sort of filing system. Then, the other day, reading the diaries of Franz Kafka, I was struck by these entries: June 1, 1912: “Wrote nothing.” June 2: “Wrote almost nothing.”2 Here I marvel at the close match of our respective work habits. Finally, there’s something I share even with Rauschenberg—I mean the way he came across at the grand opening of his retrospective, September 18, 1997, at the Guggenheim SoHo in New York. Having arrived thirty minutes late to address some two hundred impatient journalists and a dozen television crews, even from Mexico to Japan, Rauschenberg announced—“I don’t have anything to say.” The very words I too had used when Walter Hopps, coorganizer of this retrospective, requested this lecture. Walter’s letter, dated July 29, said that what the exhibition organizers and Rauschenberg wanted for the

Encounters with Rauschenberg

occasion was “a public lecture . . . on the full spectrum of Rauschenberg’s career,” and they thought I should deliver it. Why me? Because—the letter went on to say—beginning in the late 1950s I had championed Bob’s work, and because I had written about it in the early 1970s. But, I thought, that was a lifetime ago. Since then, I’ve been variously distracted, and as for personal contacts, Bob and I have hardly said “Hi” to each other in twenty-five years. So I picked up the phone to convey my regrets. Unfortunately, something at the back of my mind keeps interfering with better judgment and makes me ask—even as I say No—what I would have done, had I said Yes. And so I told Walter Hopps that the most I could possibly manage, were I to do it, would be to reminisce for half an hour or so about former times, when I knew Rauschenberg slightly; actually talked to him once or twice. Walter said “Great!”—and thus produced the predicament we are to share these next ninety minutes, while I talk about days of yore, when everybody was young and a New York subway ride cost 5 cents instead of First delivered as a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21, 1997, on the occasion of the exhibition “Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective” and, with revisions, at the Menil Collection, the show’s second stop, on May 7, 1998. In 2000, it was published in book form by the Menil Collection and the University of Chicago Press, with an added author’s note: “I have left [the lecture] largely as delivered and have not purged it of quips and by-blows which listeners to a live speaker are more likely to tolerate than readers of cold print.”

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$1.50 and an exotic couple called John and Dominique de Menil were settling into the boondocks of Texas. My first encounter with Rauschenberg’s work was inauspicious. A young man named Hilton Kramer had just invaded New York to become editor of Arts magazine, now defunct. He had come out of Chicago and out of literature, bringing with him a keen appreciation of T. S. Eliot and a determination to rid the art world of everything in it that was obviously sham—like Abstract Expressionism. Because of some theoretical work I had published, Hilton invited me to write a monthly column on the New York gallery scene; and I agreed, though I would prove a bitter disappointment to him. My first piece was a rave review of de Kooning’s Woman paintings—and

Hilton was dismayed to see me take that stuff seriously. Next month I covered a group show organized by Tom Hess at the Stable Gallery, December 1955. It displayed recent work by twenty-one young New York painters, some of whom, Joan Mitchell among them, I liked a lot. Hilton was shocked by my praise of these painters. All he approved of was my brief dismissal of an entry by one Robert Rauschenberg—not a painting, but an upright contraption, with cutout pictures pasted on inside and out, and a stuffed American hen in the open box, lower right (fig. 7.1). The artist called it a Combine and I dismissed it as follows: On the merry work of Robert Rauschenberg the kindest comment I can make is that some of my friends, whose (other) judgments I respect, think it

figure 7.1. Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, c. 1954/1958. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Panza Collection.

encounters with rauschenberg

not out of place in an art exhibition. . . . [I concluded by invoking the great prankster of legend:] Till Eulenspiegel is abroad again, and one must be patient.3

These lines were written by a graduate student deep in the study of Romanesque architecture and just starting out as a moonlighting critic. His remarks were meant to sound knowing, faintly condescending, but not wholly unkind. He was in good company. A similar note of benign condescension had been struck by Marcel Duchamp looking at a Rauschenberg Music Box at the Stable Gallery about two years before; a rough wooden box filled with nails of different caliber and intended for rattling to produce “clinks and thumps” (fig. 7.2). Invited to try it, Duchamp obediently shook the box against his ear;

then, putting it down, quoted a familiar musical title: “It seems to me I’ve heard this song before.”4 Years later, but still in a similar spirit, Robert Motherwell said of Pop Art: “I like to see young artists enjoying themselves.” So, when I briefly dismissed Rauschenberg in 1955, I was coming on as a wise elder. And remember who else was then making art. In 1955, Matisse had just died, but Léger, Chagall, Miró, Giacometti, and Dubuffet were around; Picasso was indestructible; and in America, Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning were making a new kind of painting that demanded attention, hard thinking, and lots of defending if you thought well of it. I say “defending” because this new abstract painting was then widely denounced, not just in the New York Times but by battalions of prominent artists. I recall three of them ganging up on me at a party for having praised Philip Guston. Painters of Guston’s generation were only just out of their youth, and they still needed advocates. In that embattled moment, it might have seemed disloyal to accept interference from a cadet like Rauschenberg. My strained relations with Hilton Kramer soon reached the breaking point, and I stopped writing reviews. But I kept looking, and two years later, standing before some new Rauschenbergs at Leo Castelli’s gallery, I received what felt like a revelation. Accordingly, in March 1958, I dashed off a letter to Arts. It read: Two years ago, in these pages, I wrote a brief and somewhat scathing paragraph on what I called “the merry work of Robert Rauschenberg.” “Eulenspiegel,” I concluded,“is abroad and one must be patient.” These last four words are all right; the rest I regret. And I want to take this opportunity to say that Rauschenberg’s latest show at Leo Castelli’s seems to me to include two or three pictures of remarkable beauty.5

figure 7.2. Robert Rauschenberg, Music Box (Elemental

Sculpture), 1953. Lost.

Rereading this letter now, more than forty years later, I wonder most at its mildness, and am surprised to find it referenced in print by Walter Hopps. Hopps describes the negative criticism Rauschenberg’s work was getting

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during the 1950s—even from “unusually intelligent and knowledgeable observers.” And then remarks: “Virtually not until May 1958, when Leo Steinberg, in a letter to the editor of Arts magazine, recanted his previously expressed negative reaction to Rauschenberg’s work, did the general tide of adverse opinion begin to change.”6 This much in historical retrospect. The immediate response to my letter was a chilly note from Hilton Kramer, dated March 26, 1958: Dear Leo: It pains me to read your Letter to the Editor, and it pains me to publish it, but of course I shall publish it. I do hope that this is not the beginning of a series of such letters in which past criticisms are to be footnoted and up-dated. Sincerely, Hilton.

Unbeknownst to my correspondent, I had a secret agent in his office, and she leaked to me Kramer’s further remark: “This will ruin Leo Steinberg as a critic.” He was mistaken: it wasn’t the letter that did it. There were three more responses. First, a note from Alfred Barr congratulating me on having set a great precedent. This really astonished me. Wasn’t it the natural thing to do? If you had put down a young artist and then found that there was more to him than you thought, wouldn’t you want to straighten the record— for his sake as well as your own? The next response to my second thoughts was a postcard from a friend, saying: “I saw your humble pie letter in Arts.” And I thought, “Humble Pie?” Why not rather the opposite? She should have written: “I never saw such conceit! What on earth makes you think that anyone remembers what you wrote years ago, or gives a damn?” The third response was nonverbal. It took the form of a smile on Rauschenberg’s face as I happened to pass him sitting with a couple of friends outside a Greenwich Village café. No words were exchanged. We had talked briefly just once before—in December 1954, when I saw his show of Red Paintings at the

Charles Egan Gallery. Rauschenberg had previously shown all-white pictures, and he had done all-black ones. Now he was into red (fig. 7.3). The show at Charlie Egan’s was sparsely attended; not one TV crew. Only two people were there—Bob himself and a young woman of unknown provenance and serious beauty. She stood perfectly still, centered on the gallery floor, looking at one of the pictures. Rauschenberg came up and said “Hi”; and I—not yet a critic and therefore under no professional obligation to form an opinion of the paintings—offered instead my opinion of the young woman: “What a beautiful girl!” At which Bob, with instant enthusiasm: “Yes, and you know I found her myself.” It seemed an odd thing to say. What I think Rauschenberg meant was that she was not an artist, or art student, not someone’s girlfriend or wife, not gallery staff or art groupie, but a person from out there in the real world, waiting to be found by him and brought in—an objet trouvé, so to speak—a living exemplar of what his art was about. And I don’t mean the girl, you understand, but the induction process. Rauschenberg then turned to those all-red paintings and said: “I am always wondering what will look good in a picture. Is it color? So I’m trying that now.” Spoken with a kind of primordial innocence—like a born-again pediatrician checking out what newborn babies might like to eat: “Do you suppose they’d go for milk? So I’m trying that now.” But Bob’s remark, so disarming the way he just tossed it off, was far from innocent. Though it seemed bland enough at the time, it was deadly. Because all of Rauschenberg’s work questions what it is that looks good in a picture—with devastating effect on ancient orders of privilege. Once that question is posed, it turns out that oils and acrylics come off no better than, say, gold or dirt—Bob had covered both bases.7 Where painting presumes no distinction of value between a good-looking smudge and an image, anything goes, anything may get in, even something so outlandish as color. (Well, perhaps not anything; you may notice that trees, for instance, rarely enter Rauschenberg’s repertoire, not even in his photography. They

encounters with rauschenberg figure 7.3. Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled,

1954. Los Angeles, The Broad.

do not exemplify, as smudges may, what Oldenburg calls “city nature.”) At a party, fall 1961, I was sitting with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and we were talking about the problem young artists face when they find themselves doing what someone else has been doing already. Jasper said, well, you change course and do something else. And then Rauschenberg added: “You see, you don’t want to disturb.” That comment still strikes me as memorable. Bob was saying that you veer away not to escape the charge

of being a copycat, but for the sake of the other. He didn’t on that occasion spell out what he meant, but I wondered, later that night, just how you would be disturbing someone if you imitated their work. You might, for instance, do the thing better and so make the other look redundant and weak. Bob’s remark struck me as unexpectedly ethical, and it stuck. As I was putting my recollections together for tonight’s talk, I suddenly realized that Bob’s Do Not Disturb sign sits in an essay I wrote thirty-eight years ago on the young Jasper Johns. The paragraph reads: “Becoming a painter is like groping one’s way out of a

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cluttered room in the dark. Beginning to walk, he stumbles over another man’s couch, changes course to . . . butt against a work table that can’t be disturbed. Everything has its use and its user, and no need of him.”8 This “can’t be disturbed” is sheer Rauschenberg, and I’m glad to acknowledge the debt. I said just now that Rauschenberg’s moral concern for the other surprised me. It shouldn’t have. Early in 1955, he was invited to participate in the “Fourth Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture” at the Stable Gallery; some younger artists he wanted included were not. So Bob made a Combine—he called it Short Circuit—which incorporated works by the refusés: Jasper Johns and Bob’s former wife, Susan Weil (fig. 7.4). In a sense, he was still questioning what it is that will look good in a painting: a small Jasper Johns Flag maybe? a Judy Garland autograph? or a John Cage concert program? It was a fine moral gesture, made possible be-

cause his invention of the Combine had given him an appropriate vehicle. Of course, the trick is to perform a moral gesture with wit, and that takes imagination. To return to the party. Jasper had got up and left, leaving Bob with only myself to talk to. He’d heard from Leo Castelli that I was writing something on Jasper Johns; what was I doing with it? Well, coming from Jasper’s close friend at the time, that’s all the prompting I needed. No use telling Bob how the essay analyzed Jasper’s paintings. I told him instead of the terrible problem I faced near the end, having posed the rhetorical question: “How improper is it to find metaphorical or emotional content in Johns’s work?” Remember, we’re in 1961, when Johns’s claim for his work was deadpan impersonal objectness, and that emotional content was neither overtly nor implicitly present, as in Drawer (1957). This to me seemed mere

figure 7.4. Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit, 1955. Art Institute of Chicago; Through prior purchase of the Grant J. Pick purchase fund; through prior bequest of Sigmund E. Edelstone; Frederick W. Renshaw Acquisition Fund; Estate of Walter Aitken; Alyce and Edwin DeCosta, Walter E. Heller Foundation, and Ada Turnbull Hertle Funds; Wirt D. Walker Trust; Marian and Samuel Klasstorner, Mrs. Clive Runnells, Alfred and May Tiefenbronner Memorial, Boles C. and Hyacinth G. Drechney, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection, Mary and Leigh Block Endowment, Gladys N. Anderson, Benjamin Argile Memorial, Director’s, and Joyce Van Pilsum Funds.

encounters with rauschenberg

up-to-date rhetoric—it’s how Frank Stella also would talk, and, of course, the gray eminence behind them all, the composer John Cage. Whereas Johns’s early work, the longer I looked at it, seemed to grow evermore secretive and confessional; it spoke mutely of solitude, abandonment, desolation. And that put me in a difficult bind, since nothing in the art talk of the day jibed with what I was seeing. So I blurted it out—and Rauschenberg listened. He listened as few artists will, if you’re tactless enough to talk to them about someone else. And when I had done, he said quietly and in dead earnest, “I think you are very close.” Bob won’t remember this; nor could he have any idea how that simple phrase of his fortified me to stand up even to Johns himself. When I told Johns that his early works seemed to me to be about human absence, he replied that this would mean their failure for him; it would imply that he had “been there,” whereas he wants his pictures to be objects alone. “Well then”—I wrote in the essay that came out the following year—“well then I think he fails; not in his paintings, but as their critic.” And I proceeded to articulate some of the feeling that I saw emanate from a work such as Target with Four Faces (fig. 10.3). And Johns said to me—it was the last time we really spoke to each other—“Well you know, John didn’t like that part at all.” “John,” of course, being John Cage. Decades later, Jasper came clean. He confessed in a 1984 interview: “In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly to do with my feelings about myself and partly to do with my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.”9 That experience confirmed me in a guiding principle of critical conduct: “If you want the truth about a work of art, be sure always to get your data from the horse’s mouth, bearing in mind that the artist is the one selling the horse.” And did I abide by my principle? I should say not! My longest conversation with Rauschenberg occurred c. 1957, when I first heard about something outrageous

he’d done some years before. And rather than going after the outrage—the horse, as it were—I called the trader. The work in question was Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 (fig. 7.5). The piece had not been exhibited; you heard of it by word of mouth. I did, and it gave me no peace. Because the destruction of works of art terrifies. How could Bob have done it; and why? The work is often, and to this day, referred to as “a Neo-Dada gesture,” but that’s just a way of casting it from your thought. Obvious alternatives to NeoDada suggested themselves at once. An Oedipal gesture? Young Rauschenberg killing the father figure? Well, maybe. But wasn’t it also a taunting of the art market?—an artist’s mockery of the values now driving the commerce in modern art? As Rauschenberg said in a recent interview, “Business sure screwed up the art world.”10 And the early fifties is when the screwing up got under way. I recall the frisson, the thrill that went through

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figure 7.5. Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953. San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis.

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the New York art world at the news that a de Kooning painting had just sold for $10,000. Wow! More than most of us earned in a year. Some fellow artists instantly raised their prices by a few thousand—not in the expectation of sales, but from self-respect. Among the moderns, it was de Kooning whose work now fetched money. And that he was the best draftsman around, everyone knew. And here was young Rauschenberg saying in effect—so you think it’s worth money, do you? And because art translates into money, we ought to cherish the art? And so he proceeds to destroy it, like Cleopatra dissolving a priceless pearl in vinegar to flaunt her disdain of mere treasure. Someone once pointed out that God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind of people he selects to receive it. St. Francis showed a like disesteem, but contrariwise, giving all he had to the poor. Rauschenberg— assuming the above interpretation correct—would have shown it more economically with a battery of erasers. But that gave his destructive gesture two motives: the anti-commercial and the Oedipal one. And the two did not seem to agree. Killing the father is not the same as demonstrating contempt for wealth. It would have to be one or the other, unless both hunches were wrong. So I picked up the phone and called the horse trader himself. And we talked for well over an hour. Occasionally, thereafter, I considered writing up what I remembered of our talk, but then Calvin Tomkins discussed the Erased de Kooning Drawing in his Rauschenberg profile in the New Yorker, and he did it so well that I thought, “Good, that’s one less thing I have to write.”11 But I don’t mind talking about it and recalling whatever I can of that phone conversation. First, being asked how he came to do the piece, Bob said he’d been working with an eraser, using it as a graphic, or anti-graphic implement. But he found that the process always left him depressed, a condition not conducive to work. So, since the erasure of his own drawing was such a downer, it occurred to Bob that, though there was nothing wrong with the tool he was using, it was seeing his own handiwork fade that depressed him; and that things might cheer up if he

erased someone else’s. At least that’s what he said. And I thought: Okay. A man in touch with his feelings and willing to act on them. But why pick on de Kooning? I decided to elicit his answer by indirection: “Would you have done it to a drawing by Andrew Wyeth?” “No, of course not.” “Why not?” “Because I don’t relate to him.”

Ah hah; that might confirm the Oedipal theory; the man you wipe out must be related. Next question: would he have done it to a Rembrandt drawing? No again, and when I asked why not, Rauschenberg’s answer surprised me. He said: “That would have been too simple.” Now, unfortunately, I cannot remember whether Bob then explained what he meant. I think he meant that in erasing a Rembrandt the factor of vandalism would be so overwhelming that nothing else, no other motive, would count for much. In this sense, the gesture would be too one dimensional, or, as he put it, “too simple.” Rembrandt, after all, doesn’t make any more drawings, unless by misattribution. Whereas Bill de Kooning was still around making them, lots of them. So then, complexity of motivation had to be part of the deal. It was not just that effacing someone else’s drawing would be less saddening than erasing your own: this other guy had to be someone you knew and admired. And furthermore, the work you destroyed had to be his donation—not only because Bob at the time could not afford to buy a de Kooning, but because the gift, freely surrendered, would convert the transaction into vicarious self-immolation. Rauschenberg had contrived a tense psychological moment. He was twenty-seven, had been working professionally for only three years, and he was asking the master of the new movement in American painting to collaborate in ritual self-slaughter. “Why,” I asked, “did Bill give you a drawing when he knew your plans for it?” Bob replied as if the answer were perfectly obvious:

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“He would not have wanted to hinder me in my work, if that’s what I wanted to do.” De Kooning, Bob said, was annoyed, but untied a portfolio of drawings and started rummaging; came up with one, then another, and shoved them back because they were too lightly sketched. Finally chose a particularly dark one in pencil and crayons, saying, “We might as well make it harder for you.”12 There is another reason, I think, why Bob lit on de Kooning. I live with a de Kooning drawing from the early 1950s—it’s of a seated woman, frontal, legs crossed (fig. 7.6 [now in a Chicago collection]). The face was drawn, then erased to leave a wide, gray, atmospheric smudge; and then drawn again. And here is Tom Hess’s account of Bill de Kooning’s working method. I’d like to read you a paragraph from Tom’s book Willem de Kooning Drawings (1972), and I’m encouraged to do this by the example of Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit Combine, which, you remember,

figure 7.6. Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman, early 1950s. Collection of Herbert and Paula Molner.

brought in some of Bob’s friends piggyback. Tom Hess was a friend; hear him describe de Kooning’s habit of draftsmanship. I remember watching de Kooning begin a drawing, in 1951, sitting idly by a window, the pad on his knee. He used an ordinary pencil, the point sharpened with a knife to expose the maximum of lead but still strong enough to withstand pressure. He made a few strokes, then almost instinctively, it seemed to me, turned the pencil around and began to go over the graphite marks with the eraser. Not to rub out the lines, but to move them, push them across the paper, turn them into planes. . . . De Kooning’s line— the essence of drawing—is always under attack. It is smeared across the paper, pushed into widening shapes, kept away from the expression of an edge. . . . [T]he mutually exclusive concepts of line and plane are held in tension. It is the characteristic open de Kooning situation . . . in which thesis and antithesis are both pushed to their fullest statement, and then allowed to exist together.13

This much Tom Hess. In view of such working procedure, one might toy with this further reason why Rauschenberg’s partner in the affair had to be de Kooning, rather than Rembrandt or Andrew Wyeth. De Kooning was the one who belabored his drawings with an eraser. Bob was proposing a sort of collaboration, offering—without having to draw like the master—to supply the finishing touch (read coup de grâce). But no, that’s frivolous—even more frivolous than Bob’s offhand answer, when I first asked why he had committed this felony. In an interview with Barbara Rose (1987), Rauschenberg said—and here I trust him—that in his early years, he “loved to draw.”14 It now occurs to me— looking over Rauschenberg’s work after 1953—that he hardly draws anymore. Even his brushwork, when he spreads paint on a surface, is never an Abstract Expressionist stroke, which usually forms a trajectory. Rauschenberg’s laid-back pigments are the cool substance of paint, never describe anything, refuse to

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transfigure. In a word, no draftsmanship. And even in 1953, he sensed where he was heading—toward a visual art that had no further use for the genius of drawing. He may himself have begun to use the eraser, not in de Kooning’s manner, constructively, but to see drawing expunged. He was on a perilous course. From Leonardo down to Matisse and de Kooning, drawing had been what Vasari defines as the indispensable common ground of painting, sculpture, and architecture—disegno. And now Rauschenberg says: not in my book. He was expelling from the art of painting what for five hundred years had been its soul; and he wanted de Kooning’s consent—implicitly a benediction—to speed him on. He was staging a ritual of supersession that required two parties. As if he could clear the field honorably only with the master’s acquiescence and so lay the grounds for new art. More than thirty years later, Bob explained: “I was trying to make art, and so therefore I had to erase art.”15 Taken literally, the statement hardly makes sense. Art is not nullified by subtracting one from a thousand de Kooning drawings. Nor, objectively speaking, does the making of art demand that foregoing art be unmade.

Rauschenberg’s logic makes sense only on the level of metaphor, as a symbolic gesture to mark a personal rite of passage. And perhaps more than that. Let me suggest what I think the young Rauschenberg’s intuition then prophesied. Here is one of my favorite Michelangelo drawings (fig. 7.7)—a quick private notation in which the sculptor records the dimensions of a marble block he had quarried for a river god figure. The work was intended for the Medici Chapel but never executed. It takes sharp looking to realize that the two drawings on the sheet are of the same figure, seen from different angles. And this is what has always filled me with awe: the power of Michelangelo’s whirling imagination that enabled him to visualize a complex system simultaneously from two points of view. But this power, which so impressed me ever since my teenage days in art school—this virtuoso capacity for three-dimensional visualization—is now child’s play. Given the present resources of computer graphics, anybody can do it at the click of a mouse. The skills of this mouse were not foreseeable to an artist in the early 1950s. Yet, it seems

figure 7.7. Michelangelo, detail from a sheet of studies, 1525. London, British Museum.

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to me that Rauschenberg then foresaw the ineluctable obsolescence of the power of mind and hand embodied in this Michelangelo drawing. His erasure opened the portals of art to all wannabe artists with no talent for drawing. This open-door situation would have arrived anyway, what with digitized animation, video, installation, etc. But Rauschenberg anticipated and legitimized the process from within art. Now the dexterity of the hand may still be admired in piano playing, shoplifting, or knitting, but in the production of images, dexterous draftsmanship is passé. In this sense, Rauschenberg was killing off more than de Kooning. Meanwhile, Bob and I are still on the phone. And Bob says, “This thing really works on you, doesn’t it?” I doubt that he was as interested as I was in pursuing the subject; I think he donated his telephone time in the same spirit that had moved de Kooning to part with a drawing—if that’s what I wanted to do, he would not hurry or hinder me. Finally, I asked: “Look, we’ve now been talking about this thing for over an hour, and I haven’t even seen it. Would it make any difference if I did?” He said: “Probably not.” And that’s when it dawned on me—it’s easycome now, but the thought had its freshness once—I suddenly understood that the fruit of an artist’s work need not be an object. It could be an action, something once done, but so unforgettably done, that it’s never done with—a satellite orbiting in your consciousness, like the perfect crime or a beau geste.16 Since then, I’ve seen the Erased de Kooning Drawing several times, and find it ever less interesting to look at. But the decision behind it never ceases to fascinate and expand. It now seems to me that Rauschenberg has repaid de Kooning’s gift to him. For though we all know de Kooning to have been a great draftsman, I can think of no single de Kooning drawing that is famous the way some of his paintings are, except the one Bob erased. Famous as the Library of Alexandria is famous, and for the same reason. Please forgive me for having spent so much time on a negative entity. The erased de Kooning was a one-

time exploit, quite unlike the mass of Rauschenberg’s work, which revels in visibility. To champion that body of work in its emergence during the 1950s, one had to confront the then-reigning orthodoxy, the rule, or the tyranny, of Clement Greenberg. Remember: performance art, conceptual art, appropriation, environmental, and installation art were as yet hardly thought of. They had neither name, nor status, nor likely prospect. The future, according to Greenberg, belonged to Color Field painting. Painting was it, and good painting, in his aesthetic, had to be color coincident with the flat ground—and no concession to extraneous blandishments, such as representation or the titillations of human interest. To Greenberg, one zip by Barnett Newman outweighed all the sentiment of, say, Edvard Munch, whose work, though allowed to be actually moving, must be respectfully relegated to the sidelines because it failed to boost the millennium of Color Field painting, while Rauschenberg’s sideshows were officially dubbed “Novelty Art.” What astonished me then—and still does—is how battalions of artists, critics, collectors, and dealers rallied to Greenberg’s colors. And I still feel that the chief reason for the enormity of his influence was psychological. He came on with unshakable self-assurance, slowed by no inkling of doubt or uncertainty about an unpredictable future. In a world of enfeebled traditions, only Greenberg knew what was what. So you felt strong in the possession of strong convictions if you sided with Clem. If you did not, you were out. When William Rubin happened to mention to Clem that I was writing on Jasper Johns, Clem shook his head sadly and said: “How can one be interested in Johns who is so big”—holding his facing palms up two inches apart—“when there is Kenneth Noland who is So Big”—arms out at full spread. He had every artist’s measure, and, of course, no spare inch for Rauschenberg. By 1959, I would bring Rauschenberg in whenever I lectured on current art (which I did so much of that a very young niece of mine, asked what her uncle did, said he was a lecherer). In a talk at MoMA in March 1960,

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I commended Rauschenberg for evading the rhetoric of the day. Giacometti, in an interview with LIFE, had said: “If my sculptures become elongated, it is purely involuntary . . . in spite of me they come out like that.”17 Just so, in the New York avant-garde, every self- and Greenberg-respecting painter was claiming to paint to the beat of the sacred Unconscious, so that each stroke of the brush landed with the necessity of a natural phenomenon. The artist was the mere medium through which mightier forces asserted themselves. Against this pretension that you worked without the intervention of judgment or choice, young Rauschenberg wonders naively what it is that will look good in a picture. How about this necktie? And in it goes.18 At the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, I went on to cite a point made more than thirty years earlier by the great formalist critic Roger Fry. Fry had written that nothing insults a painter more than your saying, as you look at his latest landscape, “What beautiful country!” Because, if you care about art, you see formal relations on canvas, not countryside. You’re not supposed to regard an outdoors scene by Corot or Cézanne as real estate; you are to look past the subject and see “plastic sequences.” By this test, Rauschenberg was pitiably unartistic, because if you pointed admiringly to a necktie, or a stuffed bird in one of his Combines, or to the paisley cloth in Hymnal, 1955 (private collection), saying “what lovely fabric,” Bob would respond with enthusiasm, “Yes, isn’t it—I just had to put it in.” My old notes turned up an interesting clipping, dated January 1960—the art critic of the New Yorker, Robert Coates, reviewing MoMA’s “Sixteen Americans” exhibition. An entry by Rauschenberg (fig. 7.8), one of the sixteen exhibitors, failed to please Mr. Coates: “The picture area, he wrote, is pretty much of a dribble, and [there is a] pheasant mounted on . . . top of the canvas. At this writing, the reason for its being there escapes me.”19 Of course, the first reason for its “being there” is that Rauschenberg liked it. But then a critic might want to know why Rauschenberg liked it enough to let it intrude on this work. And he might learn that the stuffed pheasant resonated for the artist with some childhood

memory. But no one pursues such associations until an artist has been acclaimed. Who cares about a man’s childhood if his maturity is of no interest! Research of this kind was unthinkable in 1960. In May of that year, at Washington University in St. Louis—at the inauguration of Steinberg Hall (no relation)—I told an audience that Abstract Expressionism was history and that the next wave had come in with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. It was the last time that I offered anything approaching a market tip, but the sponsors, and then the press, thought I was cuckoo. Five years later, the tide had begun to turn. Bob had taken first prize at the Venice Biennale, and when I spoke of him in Louisville, Kentucky, the press was respectful. Among my old notes, I find this clipping, dated April 22, 1965. It reads in part: For the bewildered who may still feel that the “combines” and paintings of Robert Rauschenberg are irreverent practical jokes, a message from Leo Steinberg came through sharp and clear in his lecture at the Speed Museum Thursday night. . . . Though not of his doing, Steinberg’s lecture had for Louisvillians aspects of a lively rebuttal. Another New York critic, Clement Greenberg, speaking at Speed hall last fall, had no praise, but a sniff, for Rauschenberg. If Greenberg strengthened anti-Rauschenberg feeling, Steinberg’s eloquent case is the kind that draws converts.

I’ll spare you the rest. What was needed in the mid-sixties was resistance to Clement Greenberg, and I figured that to do it effectively, to champion Rauschenberg, required a special strategy. Mine was to campaign on Greenberg’s own turf, on enemy territory, as it were—not in defense of Rauschenberg’s subject matter, or kooky procedures, or puckish invention—but on formalist grounds and precisely in terms of the picture plane. A book published in 1972 finally summarized what I’d been saying—and that ended my involvement with Rauschenberg’s work, because by then my beard was graying, and I decided that one of the functions of aging is to leave others their chance to be young.

figure 7.8. Robert Rauschenberg, Satellite, 1955. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Gift of Claire B. Zeisler and purchase with funds from the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund.

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I’d like to read a few passages from what I published in 1972 before checking out, even though most of it is now old hat.20 Take, for instance, my case for the role of the spectator. In Greenberg’s then-dominant system, a picture was self-sufficient. I argued that any new art changes its relationship with the spectator, altering—in a phrase I was surprised to find in George Eliot (Middlemarch)—“altering with the double change of self and beholder.” To me, this induced change seemed crucially part of the work. Pictures, I wrote, create their own viewer, project their peculiar concept of who, what, and where he is. Is he a man in a hurry? Is he at rest or in motion? Is he one who construes or one who reacts? Is he a man alone, or a crowd? Is he a human being at all—or a function, a specialized function or instrumentality, such as the one to which Rauschenberg’s Soundings (1968; now Museum Ludwig, Cologne) reduced the human agent. (A room-size transparent screen whose illumination was electronically activated by sound; the visibility of the chairs which constituted the im-

age depending on the noises made by the viewers— their footfall when entering, their coughing or speaking voice.)

All this, in our present phase of performance and installation art, will seem obvious enough. And so, perhaps, will my musing on the nature of pictorial surface—for most artists now a moribund issue. The issue was, in fact, deadened around the time my book Other Criteria appeared. In 1972, Jannis Kounellis mounted a show at the Galleria L’Antico in Rome, two years later at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York: the show consisted of the artist himself sitting on a live horse with a mask of Apollo held to his face (fig. 7.9). Rumor has it that Clement Greenberg, about to enter the gallery, stopped in the doorway, momentarily stunned; and a gallery staffer, passing the baffled critic, said: “What’s the matter, Clem; having trouble with the picture plane?” Whatever your opinion of such horseplay—I admit that the visual record of it is unimpressive; we have seen nobler steeds—still, Kounellis deserves a bow as the

figure 7.9. Jannis Kounellis,

Untitled, 1972, at the Galleria L’ Antico, Rome.

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artist who once bewildered Clem Greenberg. And given the date of the Kounellis performance, you realize that what I am about to read—from a section of my “Other Criteria” essay headed “The Flatbed Picture Plane”— came, like most criticism, with built-in obsolescence. But this is how I then conceived Rauschenberg’s hinging role in art history.21

The Flatbed Picture Plane I borrow the term from the flatbed printing press— according to Webster, “a horizontal bed on which a horizontal printing surface rests.” And I propose to use the word to describe the characteristic picture plane of the 1960s—a pictorial surface whose angulation with respect to the human posture is the precondition of its changed content. In the foregoing Western tradition, pictures were conceived as representing a world, some sort of worldspace that reads on the picture plane in correspondence with the erect human posture. The top of the picture corresponds to where we hold our heads aloft; its lower edge gravitates to where we place our feet. Even in Picasso’s Cubist collages, where the Renaissance worldspace concept almost breaks down, there is still a harking back to implied acts of vision, to something that was once actually seen. A picture that harks back to the natural world evokes sense data which are experienced in the normal erect posture. Therefore the Renaissance picture plane affirms verticality as its essential condition. And the concept of the picture plane as an upright surface survives the most drastic changes of style. Pictures by Rothko, Still, Newman, de Kooning, and Kline are still addressed to us head to foot—as are those of Matisse and Miró. They are revelations to which we relate visually as from the top of a columnar body; and this applies no less to Pollock’s drip paintings and the poured Veils and Unfurls of Morris Louis. Pollock indeed poured and dripped his pigment upon canvases laid on the ground, but this was an expedient. After the first color skeins had gone down, he would tack the canvas onto a wall—to get acquainted with it, he used to say; to see

where it wanted to go. He lived with the painting in its uprighted state, as with a world confronting his human posture. It is in this sense, I think, that the Abstract Expressionists were still nature painters. But then something happened in painting—most conspicuously (at least within my experience) in the work of Rauschenberg and Dubuffet. We can still hang their pictures—just as we can tack up maps and architectural plans, or nail a horseshoe to the wall for good luck. Yet these pictures no longer simulate screens rising from base to top, but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes (figs. 7.10, 7.11). To repeat, it is not the actual physical placement of the image that counts. There is no law against hanging a rug on a wall, or reproducing a narrative picture as a mosaic floor. What I have in mind is the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation, and I tend to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture. A shift of such magnitude does not come overnight, nor as the feat of one artist alone. Portents and antecedents become increasingly recognizable in retrospect— Monet’s Nymphéas (fig. 3.34), or Mondrian’s transmutation of sea and sky into signs plus and minus. And the picture planes of a Synthetic Cubist still life or a Schwitters collage suggest like-minded reorientations. But these last were small objects; the “thingness” of them was appropriate to their size. Whereas the event of the 1950s was the expansion of the worksurface picture plane to the human-size environmental

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figure 7.10. Robert Rauschenberg, Overdrive, 1963. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Promised gift of Glenn and Eva Dubin.

figure 7.11. Robert Rauschenberg, Windward, 1963. Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Sammlung Beyeler.

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scale of Abstract Expressionism. Perhaps Duchamp was the most vital source. His Large Glass, begun in 1915, or his Tu m’ of 1918, is no longer the analogue of a world perceived from an upright position, but a matrix of information conveniently placed in a vertical situation. One detects a sense of the significance of a ninetydegree shift in relation to human posture even in some

of those Duchamp “works” that once seemed no more than provocative gestures: the Coatrack nailed to the floor and the famous Fountain, a urinal tilted up like a monument. Here one might include even Duchamp’s outrageous proposal to “use a Rembrandt as an ironing board”—another ninety-degree shift, this time from nature to anti-culture.

figure 7.12. Robert Rauschenberg,

The Lily White, c. 1950. Collection of Nancy Ganz Wright.

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But on the New York art scene the great shift came in Rauschenberg’s early work. Even as Abstract Expressionism was celebrating its triumphs, he proposed the flatbed or work-surface picture plane as the foundation of an artistic language that would deal with a different order of experience. The earliest work which Rauschenberg admits into his canon—The Lily White (fig. 7.12) was painted c. 1950 in a life class at New York’s Art Students League, the young painter turning his back on the model. Rauschenberg’s picture, with its cryptic meander of lines and numbers, is a work surface that cannot be construed into anything else. Up and down are as subtly confounded as positive-negative space or figure-ground

figure 7.13. Robert Rauschenberg, Growing Painting, 1953. As installed at “Third Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture,” Stable Gallery, New York. Photo by Rauschenberg. No longer extant.

differential. You cannot read it as masonry, nor as a system of chains or quoins, and the written ciphers read every way. Scratched into wet paint, the picture ends up as a verification of its own opaque surface. In the year following, Rauschenberg began to experiment with objects placed on blueprint paper and exposed to sunlight. Already then he was involved with the physical material of plans; and in the early 1950s used newsprint to prime his canvas—to activate the ground, as he put it—so that his first brushstroke upon it took place in a gray map of words. In retrospect the most clownish of Rauschenberg’s youthful pranks take on a kind of stylistic consistency. Back in the fifties, he was invited to participate in an exhibition on the nostalgic subject of “nature in art”—the organizers hoping perhaps to promote an alternative to the new abstract painting. Rauschenberg’s entry was a square patch of growing grass held down with chicken wire, placed in a box and hung on the wall (fig. 7.13). The artist visited the show periodically to water his piece—a transposition from nature to culture through a shift of ninety degrees. When he erased a de Kooning drawing . . . he was making more than a multifaceted gesture; he was changing—for the viewer no less than for himself—the angle of imaginative confrontation; tilting de Kooning’s evocation of a worldspace into a thing produced by pressing down on a desk. The paintings he made toward the end of the fifties included intrusive non-art attachments: a pillow suspended horizontally from the lower frame (fig. 7.14); a floor-based ladder inserted between painted panels (fig. 7.15); a chair standing against a wall but ingrown with the painting behind (fig. 7.16). Though they hugged the wall, the pictures kept referring back to the horizontals on which we walk and sit, work and sleep. When in the early 1960s he worked with photographic transfers, the images— each in itself illusionistic—kept interfering with one another; intimations of spatial meaning forever canceling out to subside in a kind of optical noise. The waste and detritus of communication—like radio transmission with interference; noise and meaning on the same wavelength, visually on the same flatbed plane.

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s eve n figure 7.14. Robert Rauschenberg,

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Canyon, 1959. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of the family of Ileana Sonnabend.

This picture plane, as in the enormous canvas called Overdraw (fig. 7.17), could look like some garbled conflation of controls system and cityscape, suggesting the ceaseless inflow of urban message, stimulus, and impediment. To hold all this together, Rauschenberg’s picture plane had to become a surface to which anything reachable-thinkable would adhere. It had to be whatever a billboard or dashboard is, and everything a projection screen is, with further affinities for anything that is flat and worked over—palimpsest, canceled plate, printer’s proof, trial blank, chart, map, aerial view. Any flat documentary surface that tabulates information is a relevant analogue—radically different from the transparent projection plane with its optical

correspondence to our visual field. And it seemed at times that Rauschenberg’s work surface stood for the mind itself—dump, reservoir, switching center, abundant with concrete references freely associated as in an internal monologue—the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external world, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged field. To cope with his symbolic program, the available types of pictorial surface seemed inadequate; they were too exclusionary and too homogeneous. Rauschenberg’s imagery needed bedrock as hard and tolerant as a workbench. If some collage element, such as a pasted-down photograph, threatened to evoke a topical illusion of

figure 7.15. Robert Rauschenberg, Winter Pool, 1959. New York, Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

figure 7.17. Robert Rauschenberg, Overdraw, 1963. Kunsthaus Zürich.

figure 7.16. Robert Rauschenberg, Pilgrim, 1960. Private collection.

s eve n [94] figure 7.18. Robert Rauschenberg, Third Time Painting, 1961. Private collection.

depth, the surface was casually stained or smeared with paint to recall its irreducible flatness. The “integrity of the picture plane”—once the accomplishment of good design—was to become that which is given. The picture’s “flatness” was to be no more of a problem than the flatness of a disordered desk or an unswept floor. Against Rauschenberg’s picture plane you can pin or project any image because it will not work as the glimpse of a world, but as a scrap of printed material. And you can attach anything whatsoever, including paint, so long as it bedded down on the work surface. The old clock in Rauschenberg’s Third Time Painting (fig. 7.18) lies with the number 12 on the left, because

the clock face properly uprighted would have illusionized the whole system into verticality—like the wall of a room, part of the given world. Or, in the same picture, the flattened shirt with its sleeves outstretched—not like wash on a line, but—with paint stains and drips holding it down—like laundry (or like Duchamp’s Rembrandt) laid out for pressing. The consistent horizontality is called upon to maintain a symbolic continuum of litter, workbench, and data-ingesting mind. Perhaps Rauschenberg’s profoundest symbolic gesture came in 1955 when he stood his bed against the wall and smeared paint on it (fig. 7.19). There, in the upright posture of “art,” it continues to work in the imagina-

figure 7.19. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955.

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of Leo Castelli in honor of Alfred H. Barr Jr.

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tion as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, and dreaming. The horizontality of the bed relates to “making” as the vertical of the Renaissance picture plane related to seeing.22 I once heard Jasper Johns say that Rauschenberg was the man who in this century had invented the most since Picasso. What, I think, he invented was a pictorial surface that let the world in again. What sort of world? Judging by the critical fortunes of Bed, a world of the ordinary, yet somehow perplexing enough to arouse passions and generate myth. On July 10, 1964, LIFE magazine—to whose art editor, Dorothy Seiberling, I was then married—ran a story on “the lanky Texan” who had just won the grand prize at the Venice Biennale. The piece was headed, “Europe Explodes as American Takes Prize,” and it reported as follows: The judges wrangled for three days, then declared Rauschenberg winner over some 500 artists from 34 countries. The award brought forth European headlines of treason at venice and blasts at the American’s “grotesque pieces of junk and trash cans. . . .” The Patriarch of Venice ordered Catholics to stay away from the show because works like Rauschenberg’s “offended human dignity.” The artist himself calmly accepted the $3,200 prize. He had already explained his Bed: “I think of it as one of the friendliest pictures I’ve ever painted. My fear has always been that someone would want to crawl into it.”

Time magazine took a different view. An article on the artist, entitled “Most Happy Fella,” reproduced Bed full page in color, with a caption reporting (presumably on the artist’s say-so) that “BED was made during a lean period in 1955, when Rauschenberg had nothing to paint on. Viewers may suspect vestiges of ax murder.”23 This raises two questions. 1. Nothing to paint on? So Rauschenberg told it again to Barbara Rose more than thirty years later.24 Had he come to believe his own legend? Unable to afford can-

vas in 1955, and no place to lay his paint on, he could have frescoed his walls and ceiling, following respectable precedent. The poverty plea to explain why the bed was preferred strikes me as deflective PR. The jolt one might feel at seeing a bed so ill used is softened by the tale of the Indigent Artist, a romantic standby of such tenacious banality that we give it instant assent. Assenting, we hardly notice how perversely the “explanation” reduces Rauschenberg’s involved bedding to inconsequential neutrality, as if Bed were a paint surface like any other, a ground that might as well have been a blank canvas, if only the artist that day had not been out of pocket. (History does not record where Bob slept that night, or how soon his bed was replaced.) 2. Vestiges of ax murder? So even Leo Castelli— Rauschenberg’s dealer who had purchased Bed in 1958 and in 1989 donated it to the Museum of Modern Art— described it in a 1984 interview: “A real pillow and quilt heavily splattered with paint, in which some horrible act—a rape or murder—seemed to have occurred.” The charge still hangs on. American Visions by Robert Hughes describes Bed as “so slathered in red paint that it might have been the site of an ax murder.” And Francine Prose, reviewing the Rauschenberg retrospective for the Wall Street Journal, described Bed as “a quilt, sheet and pillow slathered with paint . . . it suggests the scene of a grisly crime or sexual encounter.”25 This is in tune with the Zeitgeist but out of sync with the picture. For thirty- odd years critics have sought to nudge Bed into confessing vice or atrocity, hoping to move it from its own startling presence to a more familiar scenario of antecedent horror, homo or hetero. So the dribbled red paint and fingernail polish beneath the pillow are said to suggest freshly spilled blood, because they are red. But why stop at one color? Why overlook the similar drips of blue paint to the right? What would a conscientious sleuth deduce from that clue? Recognize it, perhaps, as the gore of someone blue-blooded, shed by a second victim, this one of royal lineage; while all that dripping white paint might indicate a lactating princess. You see, the plot thickens; Rauschenberg’s “friendly” piece becomes quite a thriller. As for that ardent sex act, I note that the bed is a

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single bed, remarkably narrow, just wide enough for one pillow. So if Bed makes you think of sexual abuse, it allows only for self-abuse. But even that seems ruled out, since the quilt coverlet, the lower half of the picture, is undisturbed, spread smooth as on a bed neatly made. It signals no recent occupant; and there goes your thriller. Besides, all the paint trickles down, so that it must have been applied when the thing was already in upright position. In other words, not like a bed receptive to weary limbs, but like a panel to dripping paint. Please don’t think me prudish on this account. Like the rest of the nation, I cherish murder and transgressive sex as great entertainment; I just miss them in Rauschenberg’s Bed. And by the way, having reexamined the work, I have more reason to doubt the legend of the destitute painter deprived of canvas and resorting at last to his sleeping accommodation. The work consists of bedding and pillow carefully nailed to a wood support, but no actual bed. Meanwhile, the smears and drips work here pretty much as they do elsewhere in Rauschenberg. They are what you see—drips and smears. Red paint reeks no more of bloodshed than white invites crying over spilled milk. Therefore, I cannot agree with Robert Hughes, who sees “the crusty pigment” in Bed as “a manifesto of impurity and violence.” Questioning Rauschenberg’s work for likely meanings, I would, if possible, distinguish works produced in solitary from those done in collaboration. Bed looks private to me, hence, perhaps, more resistant to interpretation, which may be what makes it so irresistible to interpreters. Let’s take one more stab at it. You remember Rauschenberg’s oft-quoted remark that he wants to operate in the gap between art and life. In between. Can we make the interval spanning these spaced-out poles palpable? What would a concretion of that gap look like? I would begin by reflecting that art, for an artist, is not primarily what museums curate, but what he is doing, day in, day out. In his routine, art equals work, so that art and life interpenetrate. If Rauschenberg’s remark puts these terms in opposition, he must have in

mind life situations when he’s not actually on the job— answering the phone, paying his bills, accepting prizes, or living it up and at last dozing off. Only in this sense does “life” in Rauschenberg’s dictum oppose itself to the notion of “art,” the two as distinct as work is from distraction, from interruption, or from sleep, rest, repose. Now imagine Rauschenberg up late and still working, catching sight of his bed and foreseeing himself stretched out on it, or better still, cuddled inside. “My fear,” he said, “has always been that someone might want to crawl into it.” We take that “someone” to be someone else, but the speaker need not be excluded. It is he, after all, who nightly crawls into it, letting go of his art to cross the divide which, he says, his art wants to engage. In Rauschenberg’s Bed, as I see it, the art-life distinction appears in collapse. Since it’s an artist we are talking about, I propose to identify paint, the deposition of pigment, as the witness of his professionalism, his working token of art. And let Bed stand for life lived in moments other than work; it’s where he naps and goofs off. (I am aware that some folks, like Marcel Proust, work in bed, but for a painter, the bed is not typically the workplace.) And now Rauschenberg’s Bed abrogates the distinction between work and non-work, between work and whatever stoppage or dalliance a bed may be host to. The artist has crunched what custom and discipline keep apart. Life and art abed in shocking cohabitation. The question may now be rephrased: when Rauschenberg uprights his couch into the posture of Art and daubs it with paint, what is he doing? He is not, I think, soiling the bed and propagating “impurity.” (To an artist, oil paint is not a pollutant.) I rather see him collapsing a notorious oscillation, i.e., the periodicity of our circadian round. On the one hand, the phases of life passed in bed, on the other, his wakeful activity (application of paint)—these are no longer estranged but at one. Rauschenberg is consummating the nuptials of Life and Art by mating their kinds, and without prejudice to their respective identities. Whether this happy outcome exhausts Bed ’s inner meaning is questionable. The proposed iconography sounds too rational. But it at least keeps in sight

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what we are visually given instead of having us muse on absentee cutthroats and murderees and encouraging fantasies about body fluids red, white, and blue. Nor need we worry about reducing the work to lucidity. If my patter makes it sound logical, the picture, being a Rauschenberg, doesn’t look it. Its deposits of paint— never descriptive or representational—signify only as the signature of the painter, the mark of his passage. In the present instance, they leave behind unresolvable paradox. Dripping oil paint is the last thing you want on a bed—well, then, the last shall be first. And a bed vertical is a contradiction in terms. Contradictory, too, is the conflation of private and public, for what is more private than your sleeping retreat, or more public than your place on a gallery wall? Rauschenberg is coaxing opposites to cohabit. Perhaps that is why he called Bed one of his “friendliest” pictures. The message, then, is neither violence nor impurity, neither holy poverty nor sexual mayhem, but simply—Rauschenberg passed this way, unmaking distinctions. Of course, the life-art distinction doesn’t hold in the long run. Rauschenberg’s Bed now hangs on a MoMA wall—art all the way. But the work was a happening once, a conceptual piece. It served the artist as a ritual performed, a private closure of that famous art-or-life gap. So here we are, forty years on, gathered at this demure retrospective of Rauschenberg septuagenarian, and your revenant, rubbing his eyes, returned to the scene of an earlier enthusiasm after a quarter century’s slumber. To catch up on things, he reads the reviews, noting a massive shift from formalism, picture planes, Cubist grids, color fields, etc. to iconography and the decoding of symbols. How then should he deal with a Rauschenberg Bicycle, whose every contour is outlined with neon tubing (fig. 7.20)? It luminates. Why, what’s the point? A resourceful critic might want to give the thing meaning—pour l’approfondir, if he were French, and perhaps Roman Catholic. The artist, you see, is investing the bicycle with a halo. As if to suggest not only—as John Cage wrote about Rauschenberg in 1961—that “beauty is now underfoot,” but that even holiness is;

and that in Rauschenberg’s leveling, a bicycle is as sacrosanct as any saint’s tooth in a reliquary. Well, that would make it a meaningful statement, but I wouldn’t buy it. I would rather relate that neon surround to earlier Rauschenberg practice, as when he surrounds a dangling car key with a wide swath of pale blue (fig. 7.21). I see such framing as the mark of personal appropriation, taking possession of objects he likes, or claims to be his—like Vasari, the first collector of master drawings, who surrounded each select item with a hand-drawn cartouche to accession it for his own.26 Except that Rauschenberg does it with inversion of traditional reverence. High-culture icons lose caste. What is raised on a pedestal, arrayed in light, is the bicycle. But this again verges on meaningful interpretation, the trap set for us by so much of this work. Rauschenberg iconography has become a field to be mined, an expanding minefield. We shall have dissertations galore, including perusals of the fine print in the newspaper scraps that abound in Rauschenberg’s pictures. Undoubtedly, many secrets will be exploded, mostly with respect to the artist’s sexual orientation. Last fall, a sensitive article on Rauschenberg in the New York Times, written by Martin Duberman, discussed the growing awareness, since about 1980, of Rauschenberg’s same-sex iconography. The author argues that the homoerotic symbols in the work matter crucially to an understanding of Rauschenberg’s art.27 That tokens of covert self-revelation are scattered throughout no one denies. But Duberman’s opposition of private and public may need refining to admit esoterica, signals aimed at an inner circle. Such insider allusions become interesting to a wider public only to the extent that the artist is. Once he is famous, the work is minutely searched—not to find what makes it deserving of fame, but because celebrity incurs this kind of attention. Let me try to explain by way of one outstanding example—Rauschenberg’s Combine of 1955–59, which he called Monogram—the infamous stuffed Angora goat with the automobile tire about its midriff (fig. 7.22). The animal stands on what jesting Rauschenberg called

encounters with rauschenberg

figure 7.20. Robert Rauschenberg, Bicyloid III, 1993. New York, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

its “pasture”—a square platform, mounted on casters, covered with collage elements. So the goat stands on a work of art. To say it like Cage: “Art is now underfoot.”28 When I first saw the goat—nearly forty years ago, before it migrated to Sweden—I wondered briefly whether any of the components, flat or 3D, spelled a coherent theme. There was a collaged child’s footprint, small wheels under the board, a rubber tire, and a news photo of (I think) a helicopter or parachutist—all surrounding that famously sure-footed beast. What follows? Since modes of transportation always fascinated the artist, was he perhaps thinking of the evolution of travel—from walking, to the invention of the wheel, to motoring, to aviation? You’ll be glad to hear that this

figure 7.21. Robert Rauschenberg, Breakthrough II, 1965. Private collection.

copious hypothesis collapsed in two seconds. You can Rorschach this sort of thing into the work, but then it’s the next patient’s turn. Now Martin Duberman, in that New York Times article, argues that Rauschenberg’s work is loaded with encoded messages, same-sex iconography, gay signifiers; and that these “once revealed”—I quote his conclusion—“rip off the masks and challenge the prescribed formulas that have tyrannized our understanding, letting all sorts of alive things breathe at last.” How does this prospect apply to Monogram? In an excellent review of this Rauschenberg retrospective by Mark Stevens in New York magazine, Monogram is called—“a rude sexual joke.”29 Here Stevens seems to

figure 7.22. Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955–59. Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Purchase 1965 with contribution from Moderna Museets Vänner/

The Friends of Moderna Museet.

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endorse an interpretation of Monogram that surfaced in print almost two decades ago, when Rauschenberg’s tired goat was over twenty. In 1981, Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis published, in the British journal Artscribe, a perceptive essay entitled “Re-reading Rauschenberg.” Observing that automobile tires serve symbolically in subsequent Rauschenberg works and performance pieces, the authors wrote: Monogram is a particularly excellent example of the semantic loading of the tyre as signifier. The bizarre silhouette of the goat is contrasted with the geometric regularity of the tyre. The goat’s static rootedness is contradicted by the tyre’s dynamic associations. . . . [E]xoticism (Angora goat) is compromised by banality (tyre). . . . At another level, the goat penetrates the tyre as orifice. Again, however, we are faced with an inversion of the norm, since the goat, clad in its shaggy fleece, appears soft relative to the erect rigidity of the tyre. We have suggested that the goat inside the tyre can be read as a sign of sexual penetration.30

Here follows a footnote, in which Cranshaw and Lewis acknowledge that such unilateral reading contradicts a general principle of Rauschenberg’s practice. In the artist’s own words: “If I see any superficial subconscious relationships that I’m familiar with—clichés of association—I change the picture.”31 The footnoted quotation is intended to caution against taking the homosexual denotation too literally. But it’s probably too late to rescind. Robert Hughes had already aired his reading of Monogram in The Shock of the New (1981): Goats are the oldest metaphors of priapic energy. This one, with its paint-smutched thrusting head and its body stuck halfway through the encircling tyre, is one of the few great icons of male homosexual love in modern culture: the Satyr in the Sphincter.32

More recently, in American Visions, Hughes reiterates, calling Rauschenberg’s tire-girt goat a “sexual fetish.”

Monogram remains the most notorious of Rauschenberg’s combines: a stuffed Angora goat . . . girdled with a tire. The title is self-fulfilling: it is Rauschenberg’s monogram, the sign by which he is most known. But if one asks why it became so famous, the answer can only lie in its power—funny but unsettling too . . .— as a sexual fetish. The lust of the goat, as William Blake remarked, is the glory of God; and this one, halfway through the tire, is an image of anal sex, the satyr in the sphincter.33

This is strong and seductive prose—especially deft in enlisting both Blake and God at just the right moment. Yet I find the proposed reading too reductive to persuade. In place of an ever-astonishing incongruity, we are given the notion of a close fit. For what Rosalind Krauss calls an “uncontainable network of associations,”34 we are offered one overwhelmingly single meaning, making the work and its motivations—as Rauschenberg put it on an earlier occasion—“too simple,” too single minded. The thrill generated in Rauschenberg’s work of the fifties by the unpredictable, the perilously uncontrolled, the indeterminate connotation, has been replaced by one naughtiness—excitement of a different order. Hughes is a writer I admire,35 but must we believe that anal sex is what Monogram signifies? Consider the genesis of the piece. Rauschenberg had bought the stuffed goat in a Manhattan used-furniture store in 1955 for $35, not certain as yet how he would use it. What made him buy it? It may or may not be relevant that Bob keeps a sad memory of a pet goat he had as a child in the Texan oil-drilling town where he grew up; and of his weeping when, returning from school, he found that his father had wantonly slaughtered his pet. Robert Hughes cites the story in connection with Monogram. But if it was this childhood trauma that resurged at the sight of the goat in the Manhattan furniture store, then Hughes’s linkage of goat and priapic energy seems inappropriate. In fact, Arthur Danto offers a very different association:

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Utterly familiar as tires and goats are—so familiar that they could be images in an alphabet book for children (T is for tire, G is for goat)—no one had ever seen a goat wreathed with a tire before, as in Rauschenberg’s signature work, Monogram. Who could say what it meant? The goat is, to be sure, a sacrificial animal, so it is entirely thinkable that it would be wreathed with laurel when led to the altar. Monogram is an exceedingly evocative and at the same time a very funny work. Who knows what Rauschenberg was thinking? All one knows is that nothing like it had been seen in the entire history of art, and that goat and tire had identities so strong as to counteract any tendency to think of them as other than what they were. . . . The power and absurdity of the combination suggests that his gifts of adjunction surpassed entirely his—our—capacity to interpret.36

Well then, are we seeing “a symbol of priapic energy”; a memento of childhood loss; a sacrificial animal wreathed; or material identities too strong to be anything other than what they are? The great Cabalist scholar Gershom Scholem was speaking of Kafka when he offered his notion of the canonical: that kind of text which through its intrinsic character compels endless exegesis.37 It is in this and no weaker sense that Monogram assumes canonical status. Having bought his stuffed Angora goat, Rauschenberg tried on and off for some years to use it in various combinations.38 The thing needed mating; what would partner it? Would an intrusive ladder (as used later in Winter Pool, fig. 7.15) be incongruous enough? No, the intrusion needs to be irremovable, closer, more intimate. Well, then, gird the beast with a tire and make it art by mounting it on a standard plinth, rumpwise against an upright collage. In this arrangement (fig. 7.23), the Combine does indeed look respectably statuesque, quite a museum piece. But it was not until the following year, four years after the purchase, that Rauschenberg found the satisfactory combination. According to the retrospective catalogue, it was Jasper Johns who suggested planting the hooped animal upon a picture-pasture laid on the floor.39 So underpropped,

so attired, the goat was declared comme il faut and the piece given a name. Is the title a clue? The catalogue states that “the title results from the union of the goat and tire, which reminds Rauschenberg of the interweaving letters of a monogram.”40 Similarly, Arthur Danto: “The combination reminded the artist of a monogram, with the tire as O. Hence the title.” But on inquiry, the matter turns hazy: no extant record has Rauschenberg saying that the tire-goat combination reminded him of intertwined letters. What he did say to Walter Hopps is somewhat different. Discussing the alliance of goat and tire, Rauschenberg said, as if the matter were self-evident, that it recalled a monogram ring—not any ring, but one that

figure 7.23. Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, second state, in his Pearl Street studio, 1958 (dismantled).

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might include ligatured letters personal to the wearer. This gloss seems to analogize the tire-goat combination to a ringed finger, but it is hard to believe that the artist—ignoring horns, shag, and hooves—thought his goat comparable to an impaling shaft. More likely that the title refers to his own consummating appropriation, his ringing the animal’s trunk the way a betrothed finger is ringed. Thus the goat got entitled to commemorate the moment of its investiture, which reminded the artist of a ring circling a finger. But as Mark Stevens observes of Monogram: “It is, before anything else, funny.” Danto calls it “a very funny work”; Hughes calls it “funny, but unsettling, too.” Think how much funnier the work would have seemed forty years ago, before it became an international icon. When first assembled, it must have been joked about among Rauschenberg’s friends. And it is my hunch that some of these friends, high on liquor and ribaldry—or, as Milton puts it, “flown with insolence and wine”—produced the phallic association to improve on the finger: an insider joke, made ex post facto, and discounting, for the joke’s sake, those fierce horns and the historical fact that the goat never passed through the tire but got encircled. Suppose the joke cracked around 1960. Since then, the Zeitgeist has donned a new aura, and what would have begun as a closeted in-joke is now blithely outed —to the delight of iconographers who need meanings to thrive. But iconographers have many options. Italophiles might notice that the goat’s muzzle has paint on it, and that these pigments are predominantly red, white, and green, which are the colors of Italy, where Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly had been traveling just two years before the goat was acquired. This Italian connection might give an opening to researchers whose scholarship inclines more to Italy than to sodomy. It depends on the baggage you bring. A Colonial New Englander, taking the goat to be pilloried, might have wondered, paraphrasing King Lear (II, iv), “How came my pet in the stocks?” Modern Haitians with memories of rough popular justice might recall the use of automobile tires as ignitable “necklaces.” Friends I have listened to find the conjunction of goat and tire

poignant and tragic, the poor beast in straits, beset by industrial waste. Or is it a hula hoop? Myself, trapped in old habits of formal analysis, look at the respective directions of goat and tire—the goat facing hither, the tire, given its normal roll, running at right angles to it. In other words, the interlocked elements at cross-purpose, so that their misalliance suggests duress rather than gratification. But here I go again, abstracting directional vectors the way I once abstracted verticality and horizontality from Rauschenberg’s Bed. In a more serious vein, I tend to see the imposition of the tire as another act of appropriation. It was the tire (sporting a narrow band of white paint) that converted the store-bought, secondhand goat into a Rauschenberg asset and made it private, like a monogram ring. As the artist would later encircle a car key with paint, and a bicycle with neon tubing, so here—to make it his own. The goat alone—even with signature paint on its muzzle—did not look Rauschenbergian enough, until joined with its tire in definitive incongruity. If some now reverse the process to declare the goat the penetrant agent—like a cork plugging a bottleneck or a finger passed through a ring or your car clearing a tunnel—if analogical thinkers now connect such goings-on with sexual congress, bully for them. As Motherwell might have said: “We like to see young iconographers enjoying themselves.” But in my view, Monogram is ill served by the sphincteral interpretation, which strikes me as a retroactive impoverishment inflicted on Rauschenberg’s work. I prefer the formulations offered in 1981 by Cranshaw and Lewis: “We are faced with an abundance of competing semantic possibilities”; and again, in one elegant summary: “The works invite decodification, but frustrate its operation.”41 The influence of dumbing-down iconography is bound to affect future criticism and may have already seduced the artist himself to propound in his work more flatly readable correlations. Wherever I see this happen, I feel that something of Rauschenberg’s unique gift has been traded in for the commonplace of mere meaning. The New York Guggenheim venue of the 1997–98 retrospective displayed—as in a three-sided chapel—

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three large works of the early eighties called Japanese Recreational Clayworks: huge high-colored, high-fired ceramics that cheerily mutilate Old Master paintings. High-priced hijinks generated by money to burn.42 To my eye, Rauschenberg’s three chosen paintings are too strong for the banter he puts them to; I see them prevail, defeating their mocker. On one wall, a work called (I dislike saying it) Pneumonia Lisa—the Mona Lisa fourfold (fig. 7.24), except that in one of the four, the face of Botticelli’s Venus displaces the Leonardo. Not a good move; an unfunny gesture too trite to be interesting. And why, once again, that same wellworn smile? Why pick on the face that launched a thousand slips to add yet another? It’s one thing to salvage a throwaway newsprint reproduction of Mona Lisa, as Bob used to do when he was poor.43 But Rauschenberg, bless him, has prospered. So now the Leonardo face is expensively reproduced, full color, full size—and it radiates. Despite the accosting paint, I see the Renaissance image still unpossessed, winning hands down. Speaking of hands. The second panel (fig. 7.25) is called All Abordello Doze 2; “all aboard—bordello”—get it? The panel cannibalizes Courbet’s lesbian sleepers at the Petit Palais, Paris (fig. 7.26). I know you’re supposed to look at the ass, but, if you can take the distraction, do look at the way Courbet draws women’s hands.

I mentioned the ass because this feature, excerpted, turns up twice more in the third of this group, a huge, high-gloss “recreation” dissing Napoleon and his painter, Jacques-Louis David (fig. 7.27). Rauschenberg’s piece mocks David’s icon of 1800, wherein the young Napoleon Bonaparte appears crossing the Alps for the conquest of Italy. Single handed, of course. In this third Japanese Recreational Claywork, called Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba (God, I hope Bob is innocent of these titles), David’s image of the heroic rider is intermixed with a predictable excerpt from Courbet’s sleeping nudes, the ass cleaving at upper right, and the same prize again, upper center, so that now the hero’s hand, instead of pointing to Alpine summits, or to manifest Destiny, targets an alternative destination—a gag worthy of a twelve-year-old. But the artist must know that. Is it his top-secret message that what the conqueror really goes for is pussy? Or that a heterosexual orientation aimed at a female crotch is essentially immature? Or that a high school snicker is no less worthy of celebration than a great feat of arms? Or that the manufacturer of this high-flying crud had it coming? Whatever the artist’s intention, the work settles at a level of meaning so shallow that I’m almost tempted to revert to the dismissive sentiment I published in 1955

figure 7.24. Robert Rauschenberg, Pneumonia Lisa ( Japanese Recreational Claywork), 1982. New York, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

figure 7.25. Robert Rauschenberg, All Abordello Doze 2 ( Japanese Recreational Claywork), 1982. New York, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

figure 7.26. Gustave Courbet, Sleep, 1966. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais.

s eve n [106] figure 7.27. Robert Rauschenberg,

Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba II ( Japanese Recreational Claywork), 1985. Private collection.

about the prankster in Rauschenberg. Meanwhile, I suspect that much of the later work I have trouble responding to may be collaborative. As you can see, there are stops in this huge retrospective where my admiration for Rauschenberg falters. But were I to pursue this line, you might as well have had Hilton Kramer deliver this lecture. Thirty years ago, I wrote joyously that Rauschenberg’s art “let the world in again.” Whether this was an altogether good thing largely depends on what you think of the world. If Hamlet was right to exclaim, “Fie! ’tis an unweeded garden” (I, ii), then there might be some merit in such earlier art as kept the world at a distance, or sifted its contents before letting it in.

But this may be the cracked voice of senectitude. My present distance from Rauschenberg was borne in on me when I read, in his latest interview, that he loves television and keeps it on (without sound) all the time. I don’t own a set. I stopped in renewed admiration before a very large picture of 1990 called Washington’s Golden Egg (fig. 7.28)—looked at it a long time; more than once. Reproductions of it are no good—you have to confront its full breadth, including your own interfering self as it reflects and distorts in the stainless steel slab, nearly 16 feet wide. To the left, a crumpled sheet of aluminum slides off the main panel, bearing away the vestige of a transferred

encounters with rauschenberg

figure 7.28. Robert Rauschenberg, Washington’s Golden Egg / ROCI USA (Wax Fire Works), 1990. New York, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

photograph of a once-elegant Corinthian colonnade; now crushed the way you’d crush a brown paper bag. Who, or what, totaled this metal, or to what end, if any, would be interesting to know. You vaguely wonder what happened. But why I should think this an interesting question puzzles me even more. Perhaps because this exiting feature, now bound for the dumpster, bears away so much preexistence—so much cultural drift, all the way from the invention of the Corinthian column to the compactor. It’s the apogee it has reached, its garbage status, that makes it disposable.44 Nearby, near center, stands Rauschenberg’s loyal hen—unscathed and monumental enough to trivialize Corinthian columns. What might be its raison d’être ici? 45 A revelation of avian nature to embarrass the sorry culture at left? Nonsense; this chicken started out stuffed. Bob accessioned it, took its picture, and silkscreened the product, manipulating its size and color, printing it in monochrome green. The chick is no less an artifact than the colonnade, or, as Shelley rightly observed, “Bird thou never wert.” And just to drive the point home, the same poultry—a doppelgänger reduced

and printed in red—struts in another file, systems away to the right. The redoubled fowl polarize about a stack of four superposed photographs, inked in dissonant hues and unrelated to one another. Finally, against the right margin—a tapered strip of flavescent paint, actually brushed on by hand, like in the old days: it recalls the strips with which Jules Olitsky formerly margined his paintings—paintings once hailed by the vatic Clem Greenberg as ensuring the perpetuity of Color Field painting. The end result is the kind of picture which Hilton Kramer, reviewing the Rauschenberg retrospective for the New York Observer, execrated as incoherent and vacuous.46 But this misses the point. It’s like complaining that ambiguity is two faced, or that indirection isn’t forthright enough. The point is that we stare at a nohen’s-land, wherein nothing neighbors. In its openness, scale, and shiny precision, a picture like Washington’s Golden Egg obviously differs from the intimate disarray of Rauschenberg’s earlier works. But it distills from their chaos the principle of disconnection.

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Its parts are immiscible—which means, according to Webster, “incapable of mixing or attaining homogeneity.” (Non-chemists find few occasions to use the word, and I thank Rauschenberg for this rare opportunity.) The picture blazons the incompatible, parades it with such boldface illogic that Near and Next admit no felt neighboring, only disjunction by juxtaposition. The more closely pressed, the keener the dissociation. Items

estranged by adjacency, like renters in urban apartments, or travelers, economy class. Where Rauschenberg’s earlier work had tended to jumble things in what seemed a random mêlée, a work such as Washington’s Golden Egg “solders close impossibilities,”47 abstracts with unfeeling candor the rule of alienating togetherness. Of course, this triumph of the Immiscible accuses the world, epitomizes experience; could even light the

figure 7.29. Robert Rauschenberg, The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr), 1981. New York, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

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mind into self-recognition. Because consciousness, whether inner- or outer-directed, seldom presides over the kind of connectedness that high art used to idealize. One ideal human condition is companionship, conviviality: imagine two people sitting opposite one another, knees touching, on facing chairs. It takes Rauschenberg’s monumental irony to raise this precondition for a convivial tête-à-tête to the summit of impossibility (fig. 7.29). I refer to his stepped-pyramid pile that culminates in a tryst of contentedly thwarted chairs. “Contentedly thwarted” is gibberish, isn’t it? What thwarts a chair; what contents it? What puts two seats at once in both states? Only Rauschenberg knows— and entrusts his news to the speechless dialect of the Combine. I suspect a substrate of disappointment in

Rauschenberg, of which the recurring motif of unoccupied chairs may be one expression—never more expressive than here. The more these homely amenities approach one another, the more they disallow seating. And as they peak, the irony deepens. Two vacant chairs, made to be sat in and made for each other, appointed to complement one another’s frustration. They can’t even copulate—all they can do is abut. Mated for instability, they look hoist enough to collapse, but we know they won’t. Moment to moment, Rauschenberg’s arch construction reinherits stability. His coupled chairs hover high throned, bestowing dependency on each other, seat to seat, partnered in emptiness and mutual repulsion. A match visibly made in heaven or thereabouts. Rauschenberg assembled the piece in 1981 and called it The Ancient Incident. I’m glad to have seen it.

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figure 8.1. Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971, detail. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Purchased jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York with funds from the Director’s Discretionary Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee, and the Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

eight

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s young Roy Lichtenstein put the case in a famous interview, the problem for a hopeful scene-making artist in the early sixties was how best to be disagreeable. What he needed was subject matter sufficiently odious to offend even lovers of art. And as everyone knows, Lichtenstein opted for the vulgarity of comic book images. Here’s what he said to Gene Swenson in November 1963: “It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it—everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everyone was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn’t hate that enough either.”1 That last reflection sounds faintly rueful, as if Lichtenstein thought he had failed. Indeed, he had missed his declared objective. If he’d been looking for what no one would hang, he had quite underestimated his public. And his subsequent career has progressively deepened his “failure” (though perhaps not beyond consolation). Meanwhile, just eight years later, success came to Hans Haacke, who, upon invitation, produced three unacceptable pieces, which the Guggenheim Museum refused to install. Chief among the rejected works was Haacke’s now famous Manhattan project: gray matter all over and a slow, plodding title—Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (fig. 8.1). Obviously, neither the title nor the aspect nor the size of Haacke’s huge documentary were meant to delight. Like a good realist, the artist was putting factuality first, and like a conscientious designer, he was making form follow function; you can’t quarrel with

Some of Hans Haacke’s Works Considered as Fine Art

that. What caused the alarm was the function itself: the delivery, to the wrong address, as it were, of information gathered on New York streets and in the County Clerk’s Office, itemizing the buildings controlled by one major Manhattan landlord. The proposed exhibit was a wall-size chart composed of a marked city plan and small architectural photographs accompanied by typed data sheets. No selectivity, such as one wants in a work of art; rather an overplus, more than the eye could take in; and that, presumably, was the point, since each of these plots and tenements stood for a source of income.2 Now, in works of art, as in living organisms, “more” is not necessarily an unqualified good—excess may spell glut and surfeit. But money talks, plethora is an absolute blessing, always preferable to somewhat less; so that here the normal creative procedure of culling a representative sample to avoid the drag of a full inventory would be mere depletion, spoiling the total. The owner of these prolix properties—142 buildings that included a generous portfolio of slums—was evidently a man of substance, probably a philanthropist, a donor perhaps to this very museum. If so, visiting art buffs, profiting from the squalid rents of the poor, would find themselves in connivance with social conditions which, from an aesthetic perspective, are not in good taste.

Originally published as the introduction to Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, exh. cat. (New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), pp. 8–19; reprinted, with minor revisions, in Hans Haacke, ed. Rachel Churner, October Files 18 (Cambridge, MA, 2015), pp. 91–106. The present text follows the latter version.

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But as they say in New York—“And what else is new?” The motif of morally tainted money has had its day; it was intriguing when socialism was the dernier cri, and before one had learned to make and sell art for art’s sake. Think of old Ibsen. Or read George Bernard Shaw’s Plays Unpleasant, three plays written when he first tried his hand as a dramatist. Shaw, however, never used real names. His characters were archetypal and their actions symbolic. It is one thing for the dainty suitor in Widowers’ Houses (1892) to learn with dismay that the money his bride would inherit was being made by rent gouging; it is quite another to be informed by a museum exhibit how Mr. Shapolsky and his troop of seventy corporations came by their money “as of May 1, 1971.” In the view of the museum director who canceled the show, Haacke’s piece, being essentially a “muckraking venture,” had forfeited “its status, or at least its immunity, as a work of art.”3 The argument was not unreasonable, but it backfired. For if Haacke discovered what Lichtenstein had searched for in vain, to wit, what could not be hung and where the limit of the acceptable runs; if he had located one inhibition that art must not violate, then he had (with assistance from the museum) implanted a significant moment in the history of art. He had created an object that was making art history. Isn’t that what most artists hope to bring off ? The question “Is it Art?” usually comes in the rhetorical mode, as if there were a categorical answer. Yet with its built-in assumption that the area covered by “art” is prefixed and foreknown, it’s an odd question to be asking these days. Do Duchamp’s famous readymades now exist as anything but works of art—the store-bought snow shovel, the bottle rack, and the rest? As exhibits on museum display they embody an artist’s choice whether to fabricate something or make a decision. And they have come to be regarded as art because they were (a) accommodated in art galleries and art books; (b) taken no notice of by anyone on the outside; and (c) addressed to questions hotly discussed by insiders. And since Duchamp’s day, “when [as Joyce pointed out] we were jung and easily freudened,” we have admitted under the heading of art grosser improbabilia—artifacts

whose aesthetic presence was as nothing compared to their unforgettable impact as facts. Would someone please write the history of “The Box” in latter twentieth- century art? Frank Lloyd Wright despised rooms with four walls and could think of no grosser insult than calling them “boxes.” And how that degraded thing has been exalted in sculpture! The plain wooden box accompanied by a playback of the noises made in producing it; the minimal cubes, uncertainly solid or hollow; Haacke’s own Condensation Cubes; Brillo boxes indistinguishable from their prototypes in the supermarket. Et cetera. Remember how the canvas became its own worthy subject? The canvas of solid color, introducing Inaction Painting; the canvas scored by a single knife slash; a two-backed pair of them mated like kissers—in privacy before any visitation by paint. Was it the idea of privacy that furnished the subject? And what about the idea of scale, scale as such: an immense clothespin, straddling the urban scene like a colossus; a mile’s stretch of rocky coast temporarily wrapped in cloth at a staggering cost defrayed by the artist with project-engendered funds; followed by art works that ran on for miles and miles. Some of these exploits had to be seen; others traveled by rumor. Deeds once performed, they exist sufficiently in recall. What matters is that they happened, and that one remembers. Who could forget the self-destructing machine that broke down on a rainy night at MoMA twenty-five years ago?4 Harold Rosenberg’s famous fantasy that the works of the Abstract Expressionists were not pictures but “action painting,” encounters in an arena, had made a whole generation sit up. Younger artists concluded that if what mattered was the encounter, then why corner it within the “arena” of a stretched canvas? They went on to produce in fact what Rosenberg had heralded in a figure of speech, that is to say, they staged actions as art. Hence the happenings and performance pieces throughout the land—events that distilled from foregoing art the variables of decision and doing. Let whoever lives in the aftermath of the sixties relish their own anthology: here one artist serves his time in the gallery by sitting on a live horse with a mask held

some of hans haacke’s works considered as fine art

to his face (fig. 7.9); another, under a sloping plank, masturbates to defeat shame and fear; a third hangs himself on a gallery wall, suspended inside a sack between Old Master paintings; or, with supreme economy, puts a bullet through his arm (biceps replacing canvas as the “arena”). Lastly, the artist reduced to a voice at the other end of a telephone, a voice without message, except to entreat you to say something, anything whatsoever, just to say something. Meanwhile, the emerging conceptualism of the sixties was opening other outlets to action art, among them the divulging of information, not excluding financial accounting. Most of it came deadpan in the formal dress of framed pictures—formalism-formalitymockery. One such piece, a serial by Robert Morris called Money, entered a 1969 Whitney Museum show. It consisted of eight foolscap sheets of correspondence concerning a sensitive transfer of funds, climaxing in the denouement of a canceled check. Observe that our teleological construct begins to approach the Haacke aesthetic. But the Whitney work was small scaled; the funds involved were at the artist’s own disposition; and the tang of narcissism, as in most such disclosures, was inescapable. Haacke, in his non-Guggenheim piece that came two years later, gained on all counts by displacing his modest self and shifting to bigger stakes, yet still within a given art context. From a synoptic viewpoint, those earlier sorties beyond the home limits of art (the 1971 Guggenheim International showed a fair number) seemed to give Haacke all the franchise he needed. His work fitted in. What, then, made his Real-Time Social System so welcome-proof, so sure of being cast out? In what sense was he not playing the game? What did he do that was so absolutely forbidden? It appears that the freedom enjoyed by modernist art in this century was circumscribed after all. Seen from the centers of real power, even the license to épater le bourgeois was confined to clowning inside the ring. Because whatever artists did within their profession, whatever they might inflict on themselves or their peers, or on Art itself; whatever fantasy, privacy, or obsession they chose to lay bare, to those at the social controls,

these “histrionics of the art world” (Haacke’s phrase) were harmless stuff, like the capers formerly permitted to mummers and mountebanks, fire-eaters, swordswallowers, and their kind. Artists, like fools in motley at the courts of bored princes, had a protected right to their antics—within certain limits. For the old jesters too would take risks and could joke even at their patrons’ expense; but never about their patrons’ sources of revenue. They could peer into the human heart, but not into ledgers; snoop from under the bed, but keep out of the countinghouse. Such were the rules of the game; then and now. And Haacke, in breaking them, was not playing fair—not with the rich, nor with the art institutions that compete for their gifts, nor (let’s remember the neediest) with the producers of art. He was stepping out of the ring, crossing the barrier of permissible clowning. And we perceive where, for most of us, the forbidden resides. We gladly allow derision, blasphemy, kinkiness, smut; these are—well, keep ’em coming. Our art indulges banter, pastiche, even shameless incompetence. In fact, we proscribe nothing that merely exposes the artist and that shakes up no more than the inner circle. For us, the one sin that can still be contracted lies in asking how money that might be diverted to art is actually made. Sin of ingratitude. Has the artist forgotten that money wrung from the poor is ennobled when a pittance of it is turned over to art? Why then revert to its ignoble source? It is here, in the prurient reversion to the sources of wealth, that we recognize the obscene, the unacceptable which Lichtenstein missed. And Haacke has hit upon it. What a felicitous find! In a climate of growing artistic compliance, with abundant pleasers adorning the lobbies and boardrooms of corporations, Haacke’s Real-Time Social System prolongs for yet a little while that nonconformist tradition which consists in taking art where it had not previously ventured, i.e., into a factual reality so specific, so unappealing and potentially libelous that one is forced either to refuse it the status of art or, once again, to rethink definitions and erase previous limits. This is what artists committed to realism have always compelled their contemporaries to do. Haacke’s piece,

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then, is art—at least for the present—because it sustains against the odds an important artistic tradition.5 To the Documenta 7 exhibition in Kassel, 1982, Haacke contributed Oelgemaelde: Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers (figs. 8.2, 8.3). On one gallery wall he hung a hand-painted portrait of President Reagan, done from a photograph and very professional. The facing wall displayed a room-size blowup from a photographic contact sheet: it showed a crowd of demonstrators hoisting a placard with the rude slogan, “Reagan, Hau Ab” (“Reagan, Get lost!”). Visitors found themselves middling between the lone leader and the clamorous mob protesting the proposed deployment in Germany of American missiles. (A year later, at the John Weber Gallery, the crowd photograph was that of the 500,000 protesters who had marched against nuclear armament in New York City on June 12, 1982.)

Worlds apart: the overblown news photo was obviously uncomposed, mass-produced, and disposable; not even the marginal sprockets and serial numbers had been masked out to dress it for exhibition. A far cry from the expensive oil picture opposite. Haacke must have spent many hours rummaging for the right image of Mr. Reagan. What he produced was a bust portrait in glamorous contrapposto: head tossed defiantly over one shoulder, like the head of the Emperor Caracalla, or the kingly peruke of Louis XIV in Bernini’s marble bust at Versailles—commanding portraits in the heroic vein, their hundred-yard stare slightly skyward, o’erleaping remote horizons and assuring the plebs of the leader’s superior vision. Nor was this all. Tastefully framed, the portrait of Mr. Reagan had a picture light overhead, a brass label beneath, and before it a velvet rope suspended between shiny stanchions such as museums use to direct visitors to what counts. Finally, on

figure 8.2. Hans Haacke,

Oil Painting: Homage to Marcel Broodthaers (Oelgemaelde: Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers), 1982. As installed at Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany, 1982.

some of hans haacke’s works considered as fine art

the floor, a red carpet, stopping just short of the rope. In a word: Apotheosis. The irony here seems broad enough, and the political message could not be clearer. But the question returns—Is it Art? Well, we could call it art by analogy. In the great church of Sant’ Andrea in Mantua, in the Saint Sebastian chapel (third on the right), a sixteenth-century follower of Giulio Romano, Rinaldo Mantovano by name, engaged—just like Haacke—the two lateral walls of his exhibition space in a single confrontational set (figs. 8.4, 8.5) Entering the chapel, you see the pincushion saint on your right, bound to a tree. On the left-hand wall are the archers, aiming, as it were, across the space of the chapel. And you have stumbled into the firing zone. Which side are you on? Unfortunately, we know little about this Rinaldo of Mantua. Like some of his fellow Mannerists, he may

have intended only a playful titillation of fright. On the other hand, he may have meant to imply, symbolically, that every Christian lives in the line of fire, either siding with, or exposed to, the barbs of Christ’s enemies. The contrived staging dramatizes an enduring predicament. Space becomes danger-fraught, not because we’ll be shot by the picture, but as an existential dilemma. And the analogy with Haacke’s installation in Kassel (or at John Weber’s, New York) is irresistible, since here too the terrain between facing walls is under fire. Granted that Haacke’s iconography differs and that the victimized in his installation have the advantage of number. But the arrangement, you must admit, is very close. That arrangement—in the way it crosscuts the room, in the tension it generates between opposed walls and wills, between the multitude and the One, between diffused impotence and personified power, the news photo up against the precious oil picture, and the burden of

figure 8.3. Hans Haacke, Oil Painting: Homage to Marcel Broodthaers (Oelgemaelde: Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers), 1982. As installed at Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany, 1982.

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figure 8.4. Rinaldo Mantovano, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (left side), 1530s. Mantua, Sant’Andrea, Cappella di San Sebastiano.

self-definition thrust on the innocent in the middle— all this, to say nothing of the art-historical dignity of the Mantuan precedent, is enough, I should think, to make the work art. In January 1984, in an exhibition held at the public mall of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Haacke showed U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 (fig. 8.6).6 There wasn’t much to it: an unpainted cube, hastily hammered up, about eight feet high; narrow window slits near the top, some small ventilation holes here and there, and, on one of its sides, in large stenciled letters, the words: “Isolation Box As Used by U.S. Troops at Point Salines Prison Camp in Grenada.” Writing in the New Criterion, Hilton Kramer commented: “A parody of the Minimalist sculpture of

figure 8.5. Rinaldo Mantovano, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (right side),

1530s. Mantua, Sant’Andrea, Cappella di San Sebastiano.

Donald Judd, perhaps? Not at all. This was a solemn statement . . . attacking President Reagan. Such works are not only devoid of any discernible artistic quality, they are pretty much devoid of any discernible artistic existence.” 7 So it’s not art. But perhaps the formal resemblance of Isolation Box to the art cubes of Judd and Tony Smith (fig. 9.78), and to Haacke’s own weather cubes of the sixties, should not be dismissed out of hand. During the 1960s, you remember, those Minimalist works lodged themselves firmly within twentieth-century art, making other sculpture appear needlessly fussy; for as T. S. Eliot warned long ago, new work continually changes our perception of earlier art. And now comes Haacke, not to parody Judd (a notion Kramer rightly rejects), but to accuse those Minimalist box sculptures of lack-

some of hans haacke’s works considered as fine art figure 8.6. Hans Haacke, U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983, 1984.

ing air holes and labels, that is, of being hermetic—the blind, deaf-mute icons of a reductive aestheticism. By way of invidious comparison, their autotelic stance is made more ineloquent than their producers intended. Haacke’s Isolation Box is an accusing object, and, as befits its foursquare presence, it levels its broadsides four ways: at the US Army for violating the Geneva Convention on human rights; at the complicit silence of public opinion; at the know-nothing aloofness of those Minimalist works ensconced in the immune safety of art; and finally at the discerning critic. For if Haacke’s piece—despite its stylistic kinship with Minimalism—is classified as non-art on the grounds that the lettering on it betrays a propagandistic intention, then the critic stands self-accused of being wholly distracted by subject matter, and thus ipso facto disqualified from aesthetic judgment. Or look at it this way. Had Haacke’s piece lacked the stenciled inscription, it would have been a Minimalist sculpture of a late academic sort—art, yes, but wanting the charm of originality. With the label displayed, it becomes, you say, not even bad art—merely

crude anti-government propaganda. But if it was an art event when Judd and Smith inducted plain cubes into art, then it is likewise an art event when another specimen of the class solicits its own expulsion from art by reminding us that just such minimal boxes are used by US invasion forces to confine enemy prisoners. The reminder proceeds from the legend on one side of the cube. Well, then, suppose we whitewash the legend, or (as the CUNY administration at the Mall tried to do) turn its face to the wall. Have we thereby converted a non-art object (a piece of crass propaganda) into a passable sculpture? What an ingenious, user-friendly device for instant art Haacke will have invented! Think of it: an artist fashions a non-art object which any member of the Art Handlers Union may win for art by rotating it through 180 degrees. Why, it’s a magic box! The consequences of this “magic” for the most similar-seeming genres of twentieth-century art could be deadly, though Haacke avows no unfriendly intention. “When I read about the isolation boxes in the New York Times,” he said in an interview, “I immediately recognized their striking similarity to the standard Min-

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imal cube.” Then, referring to the piece inspired by the report, he added: “You see, one can recycle ‘Minimalism’ and put it to a contemporary use.” 8 But Haacke was not merely “recycling minimalism”; he was implicitly chiding its uselessness, for if Minimalism lacked “contemporary use,” what other use could it offer? Haacke confesses to having “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art,” yet he reserves his insider’s right to criticize “its determined aloofness, which, of course, was also one of its greatest strengths.” But will those “standard Minimal cubes” retain their untested strengths in the presence of their politically engaged kin? What once looked aloof may come to look catatonic. Is not Haacke perhaps reversing the movement initiated by Duchamp? Where the earlier ironist, working from within art, had dared the art public to spurn his piss-poor readymades, Haacke, working again from inside, and with an irony no less deep, double-dares that same public to persist in worshiping hardware. And what if we should come to see that the most reductionist, self-referential-minimal-autotelic works of this century—that precisely these were in fact highly politicized in terms of art politics, drawing strength from their posture of militancy within the art world, their validity wholly dependent on the powers of suasion and influence, and intelligible only as exemplars of embattled critical theory? Then the difference is not between apolitical and engaged, but in the chosen engagement. Politics may be played wherever interests clash—in lovers’ quarrels, family tiffs, generational conflicts; economic and professional rivalries, in the class struggle, or in preparations for global war. And works of art, however neutral their seeming, may be “political” on any plane. Haacke’s partisan message is clear, and if he had placed it in a normal political context, such as a radical journal, it would have gone by unnoticed, like camouflage. Intruded in the supposed apolitical context of art, and couched in the familiar idioms of late modernism (Constructivist, Minimalist, or Conceptualist), his political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill—but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect

on Minimal art may well be profound. Haacke may be more threatening to the continuance of modernism than any postmodern of the new figuration. For the death blow to a given tradition is most effectively dealt from within by a practitioner within that tradition who so quickens its means that earlier practitioners in it come to seem bland and innocuous. In the final account, Haacke’s Isolation Box will embarrass the Minimalists more than the military, and that’s why it’s art. Haacke’s recent works have gained in scope, clarity, and economy. Looking back to the 1971 Real-Time Social System, one perceives that it was by comparison somewhat murky. Its motives were less than clear. The work had been designed for a solo show at the Guggenheim; but no connection had been drawn between the museum and the city properties itemized. A New York landlord was pilloried, but why he? Was he a benefactor, an accomplice of the museum? Originally, the piece had been conceived as part of a threefold systems analysis. The projected cluster was to juxtapose inorganic systems (e.g., condensation chambers), biological systems (e.g., ant colonies), and a social system exemplified by an empire of slums. But what made the artist finger “Shapolsky et al.” rather than, say, Trump (senior) or Helmsley? No doubt, Shapolsky was honored because he ranked at the time as the top private real estate tycoon in the city, with the extra distinction of an indictment for bribing building inspectors and a conviction as a rent gouger. But these personal data were not in the piece, the artist having failed to reflect that folks who had heard of Kandinsky might never have heard of Shapolsky. Yet the name, even if unfamiliar, would resonate. Hearing the ethnic ring in it, some museumgoers might wonder: must one choose a Jew’s property to illustrate “social systems”? Did this exposé of a Jewish landlord express the old gut reaction that resents a non-Aryan presence among holders of wealth, or was this the updated anti-Semitism of the New Left? When the project was vetoed for citing the actual name of an individual culprit, the artist offered a “compromise.” The compromise replaced the name of the real slumlord by a “fictionalized personal name” set off between quotes,

some of hans haacke’s works considered as fine art

a name that retained the initials and the telltale ethnicity of the original. Harry Shapolsky became generic as “Harvey Schwartz,” as if to say, any substitute, so long as it’s blatantly Jewish, will do.9 Presumably, Haacke’s reasoning here was determined by notions of verifiability and sociological accuracy, as important to him as naming the correct species of ants in his biological system. But in effect, his substitutive “Harvey Schwartz” made Harry Shapolsky’s personal culpability recede behind the odium of a collective guilt. Such insistence on ethnic stereotypes, however intended, could have awkward consequences. What if a sedulous reader of Haacke’s system observed that a female president of a “Schwartz”-controlled corporation appeared under the made-up name “Peggy Schwartz”? A colluding relative of the infamous Harry Shapolsky gets a given name that happens also to be the name of the first female Guggenheim relative likely to come to mind. Was the name suggested by the fact that the patriarch of the Guggenheim clan early in 1971 was Harry Guggenheim? A

subconscious association? Or were these fictive names meant to insinuate an affinity between Guggenheim and “Schwartz”-Shapolsky? Did the fact that the museum bears a Jew’s name enter into the iconographic program of this Real-Time Social System, or was one supposed to blink it away? In short, was the odor of anti-Semitism here a part of the message? Was it a variable that had got out of control—or what Haacke elsewhere calls “fallout at a secondary level”; or was it entirely unintended? These unresolved questions are interpretable as stylistic flaws, not uncharacteristic of early works—and Haacke in 1971 was a novice at political art. His subsequent pieces were to be less ambiguous. Though the systems confronted have grown in range and complexity, the focus is sharper now, the fallout more carefully managed. MetroMobiltan (1985) is a compact construction requiring some scanning of type, but still intelligible at a glance, like an altarpiece (fig. 8.7). It deals with

figure 8.7. Hans Haacke, MetroMobiltan, 1985. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne.

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the partnership of two major American institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Mobil Corporation, whose South African subsidiary, we learn, supplies the police and military of its host country with about twenty percent of their fuel needs. Haacke’s wall-size assemblage displays three banners hung over a photomural that records a funeral procession for Black victims of the police. The middle banner advertises a Mobil-funded show of ancient Nigerian art at the Met. On the outer banners are statements from the management of the corporation, fending off criticism by explaining (a) that Mobil’s South African operation represents but a small part of its total sales, and (b) that it would be unmannerly for the corporation not to cooperate with its host. Since Haacke’s banners are too narrow to screen the whole field, the gaps in between permit intermittent glimpses of the subtext, the news photo of the cortège, which renders the formal effect somewhat jumpy. Fortunately Mobil’s logo, prominent on all three banners, maintains thematic and visual continuity. Furthermore, harmony is assured by the crowning feature—a classical, nicely crested entablature, whose center is solemnized by an inscription. An eight-piece platform in front of the work furnishes aesthetic distance. No such distance is granted by the verbal components of the design. The flanking statements mobilize such large reserves of moral obtuseness that one stares helpless into the gulf between simple decency and the rationalizations of multinational enterprise. Most telling is the inspirational plaque overhead: excerpted from the Met’s come-on to industry (a leaflet entitled “The Business Behind Art Knows the Art of Good Business”), it reminds corporations that investment in art exhibitions is cost-effective PR—“particularly where . . . consumer relations may be a fundamental concern.” In other words, if some potential clients deplore the company’s de facto support of apartheid, why not fund a blockbuster to regain their esteem? The cynical drift of this exhortation, set off on the architrave, is both comic and sad, the more so since its certain efficacy far exceeds that of the famous two-word appeal (Know thyself ) formerly blazoned on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

No one is likely to mistake the message of MetroMobiltan—that we are facing a tightening interlock between corporate power and dependent art institutions. And the point is made with some visual sophistication, the entablature being an especially happy invention: benign and impartial, its embrace reconciles economic power with culture—a black dirge with the unctuous self-satisfaction of the oilmen. But it is not such felicities of design that make the work art. That status accrues to it rather by virtue of its certain futility in Realpolitik and its effectiveness somewhere else. One might almost call the piece apolitical, since it is hard to conceive any action resulting from it. The artist knows perfectly well that Mobil will not be induced to retreat from its South African market; that its shareholders will continue to expect maximum earnings; that no museum can refuse money, no matter where or how it was made;10 and that few museumgoers will forgo an interesting art exhibition just because it was funded by a corporation whose politics differ from theirs. In short, nothing practical can or will come of it, because Haacke’s MetroMobiltan is wholly addressed to the mind and eye, to imagination and feeling. Haacke says his works produce flow and reception of information. But surely the energy of a work like MetroMobiltan lies not in the information conveyed, but in forcing an inward desegregation of mental categories. If our mental life is normally organized like the Sunday paper, with “Business and Finance” well removed from the section called “Arts and Leisure,” then Haacke’s work confounds the sections; the sanitizing partitions are swept away as things insubstantial, deceptive. It is this troubling of the art lover’s psychic life that makes his work art. One ends up wondering whether Haacke will not eventually join Lichtenstein in his “failure”—that failure which the tolerance of our system can still bestow. For those unacceptable Guggenheim pieces are now being shown after all. Interest in his work—within the art world, that is—continues to rise. I see that someone from an Ivy League university is doing a piece on him; and that a traveling Haacke show is being organized by a New York museum, with scheduled stopovers in

some of hans haacke’s works considered as fine art

seven American cities, for each of which the artist proposes to make something ad hoc, attuned to the muck of the place; seven cities in this land of the brave waiting to welcome each its own outrage. And guess who is funding it?11

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figure 9.1. Ernö Vadas, Connoisseur (Budapest), n.d.

figure 9.4. Rembrandt, Man Drawing

from a Cast, c. 1641. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet; Mr. and Mrs. De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland.

figure 9.2. Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin looking at the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, 1966.

figure 9.5. Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea Odoni, 1527. London, Royal Collection Trust.

figure 9.3. Giovanni d’Alemagna, St. Apollonia Destroys a Pagan Idol, c. 1442–45. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Samuel H. Kress Collection.

figure 9.6. Honoré Daumier, The Connoisseur, c. 1860–65. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

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The Statue in the Taxi The Ins and Outs of Modern Sculpture

T

raditional sculpture can be looked at in more than one way: in wonder and incomprehension, for instance (fig. 9.1); or in stern disapproval, like this Soviet diplomat in the 1960s on an obligatory visit to the Louvre (fig. 9.2). A third, not uncommon approach is to scorn sculpture on religious or ideological grounds, leading often enough to outright destruction.1 We read in the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew that the Holy Family’s arrival in Egypt caused all the pagan statues in the temple to instantly crack and crash to the ground. And where the Holy Family is not available, you do it yourself, like this good Christian saint, climbing a ladder, hammer in hand, to demolish a pagan idol (fig. 9.3). Or like the Hungarian lunatic in St. Peter’s, Rome, who in 1972 struck hammer blows at the head of the Virgin of Michelangelo’s Pietà, yelling, “I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.” The damage to her face, despite subsequent restoration, is permanent. A fourth, complementary approach might be that of the healer, the restorer who repairs the injuries inflicted by hostility, accident, or neglect. But this approach is strictly professional; and so is that of the artist apprentice—looking at sculpture to learn (fig. 9.4). Yet another approach to sculpture is to welcome it as a source of profit—like the early art dealer in a painting of 1527 by Lorenzo Lotto (fig. 9.5). Or, number seven, you can look at sculpture with the satisfaction of a possessor—like Daumier’s connoisseur (fig. 9.6). Or, eight, like this wise American child—with empathy, looking at a sculpture as something to emulate (fig. 9.7). So these are eight different ways to regard sculpture; there probably are eight hundred more.

figure 9.7. National Gallery of Art advertisement with George Segal’s

The Dancers.

But since this lecture must not run more than an hour, I will consider only a ninth approach—one that seems peculiarly modern: wondering, as you look at a sculpture, about its inside; as Salvador Dalí does in a painted plaster of 1936, entitled Venus de Milo with Drawers (fig. 9.8). The work projects a penetrating idea that would not have occurred to Daumier’s connoisseur. It seems to be a new question addressed to the A lecture delivered at the University of Porto, School of Art, Porto, June 20, 1997, on the occasion of the International Conference on Contemporary Art Studies, during the session “The Figure in 20th-Century Sculpture.” Steinberg delivered the lecture again, in slightly revised form, at Boston University, March 31, 1998. The text here is based on the latter version. Notes have been added from material in Steinberg’s files. Steinberg interpreted the assigned topic somewhat loosely, discussing both allusions and resistance to representing the human body, while emphasizing the issue of interiority.

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sculptured object—whether it’s empty inside or solid, penetrable or resistant, internally homogeneous or diversified. At a certain moment, some people gazing at sculptured form began to question what lies under the skin, what the surface concealed, and how the outside relates to the interior. The topic was suggested to me by Alberto Giacometti, whose early Surrealist work renders the female body as a hollow, a spoon, an open receptacle (fig. 9.9). In 1964, two years before his death, during a long interview with David Sylvester, Giacometti tried to explain why his later figures and heads had grown so thin, so attenuated (figs. 9.10, 9.11): If I copy exactly the surface of a head in sculpture, what has it got inside it? A great mass of dead clay!

figure 9.8. Salvador Dalí, Venus de Milo with Drawers, 1936. Art Institute

of Chicago; Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman.

figure 9.9. Alberto Giacometti, Reclining Woman Who Dreams, 1929. Paris, Fondation Alberto &

figure 9.10. Alberto Giacometti, Tall Thin Head, 1954.

Annette Giacometti.

Private collection.

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In a living head, the inside is as organic as the surface, isn’t it? So a head that looks real, a head by Houdon, for instance, . . . looks like a head but you have the feeling that the inside is empty, if it’s in terracotta. And if it’s in stone, that it’s a lump of stone. But the fact that it’s empty or a lump of stone already makes it false. . . . Therefore, in a certain sense, heads that are narrow have just enough clay to hold them together: the inside is absolutely necessary. It’s necessarily more like a living head than if it were a copy of the outside. . . . This very afternoon at the British Museum, looking at the Greek sculptures, I felt that they were huge pebbles [énormes cailloux]—huge stones, but dead stones. . . . The very weight of the mass is false. . . . So one of the reasons why I have made life-size figures that became extremely thin must be that for them to

be real they needed to be light enough to be picked up with one hand and put in a taxi next to me [fig. 9.12]. Whereas with a . . . life-size sculpture . . . , if it takes four men with machines to move it, isn’t that already enough to make it false?2

Now, many of us, myself included, love Giacometti’s work, so that any verbal record of his thinking is of great interest. And this statement we have just heard fascinates me for several reasons. First, because, objectively speaking, what he says about those Greek marbles is rather mean. Are they “dead stone”? That’s what they became in the Early Christian era, which started a thousand-year industry of burning such marbles down in lime kilns—reducing the sculptors’ work to white powder to furnish excellent

figure 9.11. Alberto Giacometti, Four Figures on a Pedestal, 1950.

figure 9.12. Alberto Giacometti, Tall Woman Seated, 1958. Paris,

Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art; Purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Henry J. Heinz II.

Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

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mortar for building. Throughout the ancient world, stones such as those Giacometti saw in the British Museum were routinely incinerated by people who saw them only as huge lifeless pebbles, “énormes cailloux.” So, as commentary on Greek marble sculpture, Giacometti’s remarks seem to me counterproductive. But as commentary on his own work, these same remarks are marvelously illuminating. They explain what I saw Giacometti do, when, on August 20, 1962, he invited me to his Paris studio and kept talking and talking as he fingered the clay, hardly looking at it, but squeezing and pinching continually along the length of the form, to stay palpably close to its interiority. The contrast he drew between the ponderous bulk of past art and his necessary economy describes, and justifies, his own operation. His statement is interesting for what it suppresses. Traditional portraits, like those by Houdon, are presented as either empty headed or as blockheads—material objects that are either empty

shells or solid clods. And Giacometti refuses to be seduced by a lively expression. Instead, he might urge you to cover the face and just look at the forehead: what underlies this façade, he wants to know. And invites us to agree that such sculptures can possess no significant inwardness, being either vacuous or impacted. Both these alternatives, hollow or solid, set off Giacometti’s own works, which allow neither inorganic mass, nor inorganic emptiness. The artist has offered a rationale for the tenuous humanity he creates. And he has done it without reference to the psychological urgency of his creatures, their overwhelming expressiveness. The leanness of his figures is explained in terms of realistic perception, as if the inward contraction of Giacometti’s faces and figures—the sense they convey of survival at an insurmountable distance, at a distance that can never be closed—had no emotional resonance. Yet David Sylvester wrote in 1955: “What matters most is . . . that, in arriving at proportions which give effects

figure 9.14. Parthenon, east and north façades, 5th century BC. Athens, Acropolis.

figure 9.13. Columns from the Great Temple of

Amun-Re, New Kingdom Egypt. Karnak, Thebes.

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beyond the normal range of sculpture, Giacometti creates a mysterious and poignant image . . . fragile, lost in space, yet dominating it.”3 This is sympathetic criticism—feeling along with the work, whereas Giacometti’s perception of the Greek marbles in the British Museum as “dead stone” merely accuses the ancient sculptor of failing to solve the problem of the interior in the Giacomettian way. Which confirms a general principle: that when creative artists speak, ostensibly, about other art, what engages their mind is still their own operation. Giacometti’s critique of Greek art is relevant only to the making of a Giacometti; and only one man has ever done that. Giacometti’s sense of the deadening effect of smooth outer surface made me wonder when the surface of sculptured artifacts was first thought of in contrast to the volume contained. Perhaps the earliest signal of such discrimination is a remarkable insight by the nineteenth-century Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt’s guide to Italian art, 1855, includes a discussion of the Archaic Greek temple. Unlike the Egyptian temple, which enclosed its colonnades within massive walls, the Greek

figure 9.15. Statue of the Steward Au, Egyptian, c. 1925–1900 BC, detail. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rogers Fund, 1933.

architect disposed his columns outside. Burckhardt calls this surrounding peristyle a doubling of the interior walls, but the wall loosened, intermittent, and animated. He then turns to the Greek column, very different from the pillars of ancient Egypt, whether monolithic, or built up in drums, or bundled (figs. 9.13, 9.14). The Greek column is vertically articulated by concave channels, called fluting. And of this fluting Burckhardt says in one sentence, “it suggests that the column thickens and hardens inward, as though collecting its strength”—in other words, as if the column centered on a backbone, a spine; in terms of fruit, less like a banana or nut than a cherry.4 Burckhardt sees the undulation of surface as a pliable coating that implies a harder, sustaining interior. A superb insight—and it seems to work for Greek sculpture regardless of subject. Compare, for instance, a full set of Egyptian toes with a Classical Greek sample (figs. 9.15, 9.16): the Egyptian toes, along with the feet and legs, are homogeneous substance throughout, maintaining the same dense consistency as the base they rest on. Whereas the Greek toe shows the flesh compressible, responsive to weight and pressure, yet still acknowledging the controlling skeletal structure.

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figure 9.16. Diadoumenos, Roman copy (1st century AD) of a Greek

bronze by Polykleitos, c. 430 BC, detail. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fletcher Fund, 1925.

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When the subject is the human body, this stylistic distinction of Greek sculpture could be attributed to advancing anatomical knowledge. But in the early 1920s, a German scholar of Hellenistic art, Gerhard Krahmer, showed that anatomy is only a special case in a larger development.5 As a measure of stylistic change within Hellenistic sculpture from 300 to 150 BC, Krahmer proposed a dialectic between outside and in, and discerned increasing autonomy on the outside. The surface continues to acknowledge a determining inner structure, yet declares ever more independence. Krahmer recognized this development in various manifestations—in the evolution of relief sculpture, for instance. A mid-fourth-century carving keeps every

form, no matter how animated, close to the plane support (fig. 9.17). In the Pergamon relief, produced some 170 years later, the supporting plane is still remotely effective, but full-bodied forms now strain away and spill over (fig. 9.18). A similar distancing from internal structure occurs in contemporaneous architecture. The traditional Greek temple design housed a walled interior rectangle, the cella, which the outer procession of columns repeats (fig. 9.19). In the mid-Hellenistic period, c. 150 BC, the columns celebrate a population explosion (fig. 9.20). They still parallel the interior plan, but so multiplied that one finds oneself entering as in a forest proliferating at its own pace (fig. 9.21).

figure 9.17. Battle of the Greeks and

Amazons, Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, c. 350 BC. London, British Museum.

figure 9.18. Athena fighting Gaia’s

sons, Pergamon altar, west frieze, 150– 100 BC. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antikensammlung, Pergamon Museum.

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figure 9.19. Plan of the Temple of Hera, Paestum, c. 460 BC.

figure 9.20. (top right) Plan of the Temple of Apollo, Didyma, 3rd–2nd century BC. figure 9.21. (bottom right) Temple of Apollo, Didyma, reconstruction of the entrance by

Georg Niemann, 1912.

Now, if the principle holds for both architecture and relief sculpture, it applies preeminently to the Greek treatment of drapery. In ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian art, the drapery always clings close (fig. 9.22). But as Greek figure sculpture evolves from Archaic through Classical (fig. 9.23) to Hellenistic, the fabric becomes ever more self-assertive—without repudiating the body’s control (figs. 9.24, 9.25). Even when the body stands still—as in majestic draped female figures— there is a layering of distinct fabrics suggesting a kind of inward stratification over the armature of the invisible body (fig. 9.26). And so, finally, the principle holds for the relation of flesh to bone. In an old man, flesh and skin crease, rumple, and slide over the skull like loose

fabric. In a young face, the flesh rises—like a soufflé (figs. 9.27, 9.28) So what Krahmer found in contemplating Greek marbles differed from the insight of Giacometti, who saw the Greek work the way the Greeks would have seen the Egyptian—as stone uniformly solid throughout. And Giacometti would have argued that the inwardness noted by Krahmer did not reach deep enough to redeem the stoniness of the interior. What the two shared—the creative artist and the probing historian— was a refusal to let vision rest at the surface. But why not? What caused the long-beloved surface, the thing we caress when we love, to lose its appeal? No doubt many influences were at work. But within

figure 9.22. Torso of a woman from Tell el-Amarna,

figure 9.23. Peplos torso, 470–460 BC. Rome,

c. 1350 BC. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.

figure 9.24. Timotheus, Nike Epidauros, c. 380 BC.

figure 9.25. “The Budapest Dancer,” c. 240–220 BC. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts.

Athens, National Archaeological Museum.

figure 9.26. Klio, Muse of History, Roman copy of Hellenistic original, 3rd century BC. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.

figure 9.27. Head of an Old Man, 2nd century BC. Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg

Glyptotek.

figure 9.28. So-called Beautiful Head from Pergamon, 190–180 BC. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antikensammlung, Pergamon Museum.

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sculpture, the most upsetting factor was surely the art of Rodin, born in 1840; his work forms the bridge to twentieth-century sculpture (fig. 10.28). Rodin still works with the human anatomy—and heightens the

emotional charge, so that modernist critics often dismissed him as sentimental, theatrical, melodramatic.6 But like no sculptor before him, Rodin presented his human specimens as artifacts, sometimes as fragments,

figure 9.29. Auguste Rodin, Torso (Study for Ariane without Arms), c. 1900–

figure 9.30. Auguste Rodin, Les trois faunesses, 1900. Fine Arts Museums of

1905. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Auguste Rodin, 1912.

San Francisco, Legion of Honor; Gift of Adolph B. Spreckels, Jr.

figure 9.31. Auguste Rodin, Three Shades, 1881–86 (cast 1969). Paris,

Musée Rodin.

figure 9.32. Auguste Rodin, plaster montage of Mouvements de danse B. Meudon, Musée Rodin.

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fragile, vestigial—capable of being assembled, repeated, combined (figs. 9.29–9.32). He introduced seriation, the replication of unique identities, setting up new tensions between the emotionally charged human presence and the evidence of fabrication. In Les trois faunesses, the threefold repetition of a unique figure is circular; in the

Three Shades, it is radial; in the Mouvements de danse, staggered in echelon. Rodin’s stress on recognizable human feeling must be seen along with this novel assertiveness of the sculpture as artifact, the sculpture as a material object with its own melancholy record of damage and loss (fig. 9.33).

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figure 9.33. Auguste Rodin, La terre, petite modèle, 1893–94. Paris, Musée Rodin.

figure 9.34. Auguste Rodin, Torso, c. 1887. Paris, Musée du

figure 9.35. Auguste Rodin, L’homme qui marche, 1906. Paris,

Petit Palais; Gift of Sir Joseph Duveen, 1923.

Musée d’Orsay.

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The mishaps undergone by the clay, plaster, or bronze parallel the pathos of human affliction (fig. 9.34). Accidents occurred in the casting of the magnificent Torso—at the left shoulder, the right pectoral. And Rodin not only left them this way, but in his Walking Man (L’homme qui marche), which plants this torso on legs, all the mutilations that had befallen the original work were preserved; they were its biography (fig. 9.35). And so again in the Figure volante (figs. 9.36, 9.37): something had scraped against its back when the clay was wet, carrying off all the fine modeling; then the plaster bubbled in the casting, leaving the upper back shapelessly humped and gouged. Yet this is how Rodin had the figure enlarged and cast in bronze—not only with missing members,

figure 9.36. (top left) Auguste Rodin, Figure volante, c. 1887 (cast 1962). Private collection. figure 9.37. (bottom left) Back view of fig. 9.36.

those not needed for flight—but with all the mutilations intact. His most characteristic remark is this: “More beautiful than a beautiful thing is the ruin of a beautiful thing.” Among the beauties of ruins is the visual access they give to the interior—and their revelation of genetic process. In an antique metal cast sculpture, a hole that opens on a vacant interior is merely unfortunate (fig. 9.38); we try to think it away. In Rodin’s Figure volante, such a hole is a birthmark, an episode in its genesis. You know it was always there—the blemish, the injury, the failure of the protecting integument. Rodin found a terrible beauty in discovering that the integrity of the body—so dear to classical art—had become a modern impossibility.

figure 9.38. Greek or Roman, bronze torso wearing a cuirass, 2nd

century BC–2nd century AD. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bequest of Bill Blass, 2002.

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So much for Rodin. But the impact of Cubism and the power radiating from the work of Picasso were more compelling. Picasso’s early sculpture (fig. 9.39) hardly indicates that this artist would soon break up the monolith, so as almost to banish volumetric mass from the agenda of twentieth- century sculpture. Picasso himself continued to move back and forth between his invention of constructed sculpture as open system (fig. 9.40) and the traditional monolith— of which the greatest specimen in this century may be the Death’s Head of 1943.7 But go back to the Cubist moment (fig. 9.41): by 1909, Picasso was rethinking the human head in depth, so that surfaces became symptoms of expanding pressure pushing up from below—like mountain ridges heaved up on the terrestrial surface by geologic upheavals. By about 1911, at the high tide of Cubism, Picasso

drew heads like these, paradoxical figurations that present compact density-to-see-through (fig. 9.42). And by 1912, he produced the Guitar, where surface abdicates, half cut away to reveal the layered life of the interior, even to the hindmost plane (fig. 9.43). Such Picasso sculptures that pervade solids against no resistance of mass are inseparable from his drawings—such as this thought of a human head— rendered with minimal interference from sight or remembered touch (fig. 9.44). The outer circle posits the roundness of it, which accommodates ears and eyes— the eyes being connected to one another internally. And externally—in the zone of the forehead—one dipping curve denotes the convexity of the face as a separable conceptual datum. Most interesting to me is the mouth, extruded from the interior to project the recognizable outline of lips.

figure 9.39. Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman, 1902. Paris, Musée

figure 9.40. Pablo Picasso, Figure (Proposed Monument to Guillaume

national Picasso; Dation Pablo Picasso.

Apollinaire), 1928. Paris, Musée national Picasso; Dation Pablo Picasso.

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figure 9.41. Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman

figure 9.42. Pablo Picasso, Head of a Man, Paris, 1910–11

(Fernande), Paris, autumn 1909. Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Edmund Hayes Fund, 1948.

(Z.XXVIII.81). Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler.

figure 9.43. Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Paris, October– December 1912. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of the artist.

figure 9.44. Pablo Picasso, Head, 1913. New York, Museum of

Modern Art; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Bequest.

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In what sense is this a mouth? The answer depends on what the notion of “mouth” gives one to think: when Man Ray, in the 1930s, spread familiar lips across heaven, he was not thinking “mouth” like a dentist, or like Ribera (figs. 9.45, 9.46). The mouth in Picasso’s drawing partakes of—and repudiates—both these alternatives. Picasso traces two parallel oblique lines from the corners of the mouth inward—so that the lips become the outpost of an internal passage. Instead of the clinical orifice of Ribera’s etching, or Man Ray’s sexy

figure 9.45. Man Ray, À l’heure de l’observatoire— les amoureux, 1932–34. Private collection.

figure 9.46. Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of nose and mouth, c. 1630– 40. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

sky, Picasso contemplates the relation of lips to oral depth. What matters here is that the lips we normally see emerge from within to interface with the outside. The human head as a process and as a complex of interrelations is similarly the theme of a great modern sculpture by Picasso’s Catalan friend Julio González (fig. 9.47). The sculptor—“drawing in space,” as he called it—traces the containing curve of the cranium with a crest of hair at the top; within this orbit he erects the disk of the face as façade; and projecting from it,

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figure 9.47. Julio González, Head, c. 1935. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Purchase.

figure 9.48. David Smith, Aerial

Construction, 1936. Washington, DC, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972.

figure 9.49. David Smith, Hudson River Landscape, 1951. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Purchase.

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two rods fanning out, the darting glance of the eyes. Finally—most aggressive, most predatory—the toothed mouth, outer directed. This work of 1935 was purchased two years later by the Museum of Modern Art in New York—the first work by González ever acquired by a public museum; and it helped revolutionize American sculpture. The González head inspired and encouraged the American David Smith in his turn to open constructed sculpture—to “drawing in space” (fig. 9.48). But with this crucial difference: that the 1936 Aerial Construction of David Smith is centerless, bodiless—or, as Rosalind Krauss puts it, “unpossessable”—a sculpture as spatial dispersion. Fifteen years later, Smith proposes a river landscape in steel (fig. 9.49).8 Meanwhile, Picasso was putting his formal inventions to other uses. In 1937, along with his work on the Guernica mural, he produced an astonishing series on the subject of the Weeping Woman (fig. 9.50). Now,

there was never a shortage of weeping women in traditional Western art. One thinks of representations of the grieving Madonna or the penitent Magdalen (fig. 9.51). Invariably, the painter (or sculptor) conveys the weeping with a few teardrops shining on glossy cheeks. And this remains normative. It is Picasso who changes the rules by invading the body’s interior to witness the feeling within. Having mastered those once-formal resources of penetration, he now symbolizes inward experience through an invented system of internal strains, moving his gift of compassion into the age of the radiograph and the sonogram. But then came World War II, giving the world other matter to think about—and weeping women in tens of millions. When sculptors got back to work, the human figure gradually fell out of favor. Picasso, Giacometti, Germaine Richier, Marino Marini were among the few who still dealt with the figure; and their image of the human body—as in these two works of the early

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figure 9.51. Ercole de’ Roberti, Mary Magdalen

Weeping, 1478–86. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

figure 9.50. Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937. London,

Tate Gallery. Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax with additional payment (Grant-in-Aid) made with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, and the Friends of the Tate Gallery, 1987.

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figure 9.52. Marino Marini, Horse and Rider, 1951. Dallas, Meadows Museum,

figure 9.53. Pablo Picasso, Little Girl Jumping Rope, 1950.

Southern Methodist University; Elizabeth Meadows Sculpture Collection.

Paris, Musée national Picasso.

1950s—projected deepening irony, or deepening pessimism (figs. 9.52, 9.53). It was left to film, photography, and athletics to celebrate the body’s efficiency. Popular images, of course, follow another track. They still use the body to express fantasies of empowerment, whether for effective seduction or for ridding the world of evil (figs. 9.54, 9.55). Such images assure us that the powers of darkness always eventually yield to the right sort of physique. Even sculpture, even today, given the right clientele, idealizes the body to flatter official optimism. Look at the confident posture of these young Canadian peacekeepers on a monument erected in downtown Ottawa in 1992 (fig. 9.56). You don’t have to be a Giacometti to find hollowness in this sort of sculpture.

Among more thoughtful artists since World War II, few believed in the body’s integrity, strength, or freestanding autonomy. Consider the following three works produced in the 1950s—in Belgium, France, and America (figs. 9.57–9.59). In the Magritte, body substance becomes problematic: is a naked woman solid or fluid?9 Does her body have its own proper shape, or is hers borrowed from her container? Is she bottle-like, in the sense of being, like Giacometti’s spoon woman, a receptacle? Or is she the genie inside the bottle, the repository of desire? Is she an out- or an inside? In that same year, Ipoustéguy found the human body, for all its rocklike pretension, too brittle to protect its interior; it cracks. And still in that year, the young Mark di Suvero in America launched his career as an abstract

figure 9.54. (top left) George Petty, Gal in Black, 1955. figure 9.55. (top right) Supergirl

cover, Adventure Comics, 1970s. figure 9.56. (bottom) Jack Harman, Reconciliation: The Peacekeeping Monument, 1992. Ottawa.

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figure 9.57. René Magritte, Femme-bouteille,

1950s. Private collection.

figure 9.58. Jean Ipoustéguy, David, 1959. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art; Patrons Art Fund; anonymous gift.

sculptor with a valedictory image of vulnerability: the human body still serviceable, but, like the Incarnation itself, best fitted for Crucifixion. The substance of the human body had become either too frangible to survive, or else, says de Kooning, too mushy—a pile of mud (fig. 9.60). Today, in American sculpture of the 1990s, where the body’s exterior is allowed to be flesh—as in a recent sculpture by Kiki Smith—the flesh is entitled only to suffer (fig. 9.61). In the sculpture of the present decade, the human body is a rare phantom, come to recall the passing of something lost. This, I think, is the political (or the humane) message of the Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, who matured in a Poland adjoining the

figure 9.59. Mark di Suvero, Hand

Pierced (with Spike Bed on Wood), 1959, original cast.

Soviet Union: humanity as a multiplication of bent backs—hollowed out and depleted—or standing to attention for use in quantified anonymity (figs. 9.62, 9.63). The human body in the age of genocide and statistics. No wonder many informed art lovers today reject such work—the way Rodin’s work was rejected in the heyday of formalism—as sentimental. To step behind these clones, finding them to be disposable shells, is disconcerting and ominous. Let me revert to the question of sculpture’s hidden interior. I referred earlier to Giacometti and Krahmer—Krahmer posing the question in the 1920s, Giacometti forty years later; one happy to find a solid core in Greek art, the other finding only

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figure 9.60. Willem de Kooning, Clamdigger, 1972. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Gift of Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd.

figure 9.61. Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992. Art Institute of Chicago; Twentieth-Century

Discretionary Fund.

a solid lump all the way. But it now seems to me that this questioning of the interior had been going on since the start of our century in hundreds of ateliers. And it usually led to a probing that discovered no central core—like peeling an onion, or digging for a reassuringly solid nucleus in the atom. When and where did this quest begin? Surely not in Romania, where a talented art student, later known as Brancusi, produced an admirable Écorché as a study piece in 1901.10 He soon emigrated to Paris and, from 1907 onward, became obsessed by the theme of the kiss: a man and a woman embraced, composing a compact cube, but the kiss itself, the event, the inward focus, inaccessible to visual perception (figs. 9.64, 9.65). The

sculptor is thinking his way into the mass. Starting from an all-sided cobblestone, he converts the dead boulder into what Shakespeare’s Iago calls “the beast with two backs” (Othello, I, i), enclosing interior flame. Brancusi always respected the hidden. The disappearance of the inside from twentieth-century sculpture was not due to him. By 1914, following the Cubist explosion, the Russian Alexander Archipenko dematerialized the female corpus, replacing convexities by concaves (fig. 9.66); then, using acrylic glass, he dissolved even these into what he called Seated Figure, Modeling of Light, The Spirit of This Century (fig. 9.67). Here, where all was exposed, Giacometti would not have wondered what was inside.

figure 9.62. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Backward Seated Figure, 1992–93.

figure 9.63. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Infants, 1992.

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figure 9.64. Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1907–8. Dallas, Nasher Sculpture

Center; Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection.

Nor would he, at the sight of Jacques Lipchitz’s Acrobat on a Ball of 1926 or Pablo Gargallo’s Great Prophet of 1933 (figs. 9.68, 9.69); or confronting the work of the Constructivist brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner (fig. 9.70). Giacometti’s problem of the lifeless interior disappears when the subject matter of sculpture shifts from body to lines of motion, abstracted gesture, trajectories (fig. 9.71). A trajectory has no interior. You might say that the subject matter of twentieth-century sculpture became that which has no inside. During the last thirty or forty years, most serious sculpture abandoned the human figure, which had still served, say, Matisse or González. Rejected as well was the faith of these earlier modernists that there existed some durable inner core, like that central stem which Burckhardt had discerned inside the Doric column. For younger sculptors in the 1950s, the organizing prin-

figure 9.65. Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1916. Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950.

ciple was the rule of dispersion: no core, no center of gravity, no solid place, but rather perpetual transit. So Alexander Calder, or David Smith, or Mark di Suvero (figs. 9.72–9.74), or—as we will see in a moment—the enormously influential British sculptor, Anthony Caro. Some sculptors of the mid-1960s put sculpture in motion—among them the American George Rickey, who monumentalized instability, exposing slender rods, precariously mounted, to the action of wind (fig. 9.75). The interest of the sculptural form accrues to it from its exposure to energies, such as air currents, outside itself. Never before was sculpture so exclusively outer directed. To put it in political terms, you might say that the new sculpture had a foreign policy, but no ministry of the interior. This centrifugal orientation became deliberate in the Minimalist sculpture that dominated the 1960s.

figure 9.66. Alexander

figure 9.67. Alexander Archipenko,

figure 9.68. Jacques Lipchitz, Acrobat

Archipenko, Woman Combing Her Hair, 1915. Private collection.

Seated Figure, Modeling of Light, The Spirit of This Century, 1947. Private collection.

on a Ball, 1926. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg.

figure 9.69. Pablo Gargallo, Great Prophet, 1933. Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

figure 9.70. Antoine Pevsner, World, 1947. Paris, Centre Georges

figure 9.71. José de Rivera, Homage to the World of Minkowski, 1954–55.

Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne.

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fletcher Fund, 1955.

figure 9.72. Alexander Calder, Seven-Legged Beast, 1957. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Gift of Louisa Calder.

figure 9.73. David Smith, Stainless Network I, 1951. San Antonio, McNay Art Museum; Bequest of Evelyn Halff Ruben.

figure 9.74. Mark di Suvero, Amerigo for My Father, 1963. Philadelphia

figure 9.75. George Rickey, Column VI, 1965. New York, Whitney

Museum of Art; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David N. Pincus, 1981.

Museum of American Art; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Diker.

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The sculpture of Tony Smith, for example, is reduced to a minimum of decisions, a minimum of arresting interrelations, so that the work is receivable only in its outward relation to space (fig. 9.76). The work stations itself at the furthest remove from traditional sculpture, which traps the beholder’s gaze and holds on to it (fig. 9.77). The gaze that lands on a Michelangelo figure tends to stick fast, like a fly on fly paper. The gaze that strikes the Smith sculpture is meant to slide

figure 9.76. Tony Smith, Playground, 1962.

off and pass on. Mere muscle power is put at a distinct disadvantage. The concept culminates in a steel cube, which Tony Smith ordered over the telephone from a foundry— specifying dimensions—6 feet each way (fig. 9.78). The cube sits slightly above ground, but offers no further incident; it is hollow, of course—but no kissing inside; no nervous system, no circulation. The artist’s title for the work was a deep pun: he called it Die, which is an innoc-

figure 9.77. Michelangelo, Model of a River God, c. 1525. Florence, Casa

Buonarroti.

figure 9.78. Tony Smith, Die, 1962. Washington,

DC, National Gallery of Art; Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2003.

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uous English synonym for a cube. “The die is cast,” we say, referring to a throw of dice. But when heard alone, without cushioning syntax, the word “die” inevitably connotes the idea of dying—die, in the imperative— which is grammar at its most outer directed. Tony Smith was a man of sophistication and a lover of language. James Joyce, the greatest punster in the history of literature, was his favorite reading. And Tony was a sweet man, friendly and gentle. But when he called his piece Die, he knew what he was doing: that the implied imperative of the title was not aimed at space, which, so far as we know, never dies, but at such as do die, including himself. Minimalism served him as the protective mask of aggression. I suspect that much of the Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s involved fantasies of command—along with a good dose of hostility. One example, more strident than

Tony Smith ever could be, is, I suggest, Ronald Bladen, setting out deliberately to belittle, to humiliate, and to overwhelm the architectural setting for which the work was designed (fig. 9.79). Bladen’s piece of 1967, entitled X, placed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, in 1970, reduces the Doric colonnade of the museum’s main hall to a prim, insipidly European, and feeble procession (alas, poor Doric!).11 The colossal X may not be as intrinsically interesting as Michelangelo’s River God, but it troubles its genteel milieu more effectively. It does indeed “bestride the narrow world like a colossus,” as Shakespeare describes Julius Caesar (I, ii). And don’t forget that X in American English—to x, to x out— means to cancel, obliterate. Minimalism had a short run. Its polemical spareness and reduction of visual incident; its determination to achieve absolute exteriority; and its high moral

figure 9.79. Ronald Bladen, X, 1967. As

installed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. No longer extant.

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earnestness—such attitudes could not be indefinitely sustained. In 1965, Donald Judd produced the first of his Stacks: repetitive units of clean-cut galvanized iron, cantilevered from the gallery wall—an invasive, unyielding, quasi-industrial presence—its purpose unknown (fig. 9.80). To describe it, the criticism of the last thirty years resorts to negations. Donald Judd, we are told, set out to eliminate from his work every trace of illusionism, of metaphor, gesture, or human reference. And, I would add, eliminate the last vestige of Eros—of Eros in its original mythical sense—the desire of all primitive matter to move, to merge, to become. Judd’s Stacks abide in self-sufficient inertia— their parts indestructible because replaceable. Like Roman milestones, a Stack directs you away from itself, itself unshakably stable.

Four years later, 1969, Richard Serra offered his Stacked Steel Slabs—I think as an ironic comment (fig. 9.81): he reintroduced a center of gravity, Burckhardt’s internal spine—but to dramatize its insecurity, and the danger it posed to the environment. It was perhaps inevitable that the next major step taken by former sculptors or painters would be Installation, the milieu re-created—where you don’t ask whether the inside is centered, solid, or empty. The artists seem rather to be telling the viewer: I dare you to find this work centerless. Its center is you! It seems likely that the Minimalist phase of aggressiveness is already passé, and that the present generation of sculptors is more inclined to cooperation. The Argentinian architect César Pelli, long resident in the United States, has just built Washington’s National Airport, commissioning a dozen prominent American

figure 9.80. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965. Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Purchase 1966.

figure 9.81. Richard Serra, Stacked Steel Slabs (Skullcracker Series),

1969. Temporary site-specific installation at Kaiser Steel Corporation, Fontana, California.

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artists to provide decoration. Pelli says: “I don’t subscribe to the distinction between architecture and the other arts. They are one and the same.” But it is easy for an architect to be generously fraternal when he is in control and allows his chosen sculptors only marginal ornamentation. Now I am eager to see how the Portuguese architect, Alvaro Siza, copes with the problem. As you know, Siza designed the sculpture terrace on the roof of the Center of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela, proposing to integrate sculpture with architecture. I hope to be seeing this work next week. Meanwhile, I read this statement from Mr. Siza: “I like to deal with a sculptor who puts volume into his space. It is the same world of thinking. Artists and architects are friends, we work in the same field.”12 Of course, I read Mr. Siza’s words in English—probably in translation. But his preference

figure 9.82. Anthony Caro, Sculpture Two, 1962. Private collection.

figure 9.83. Anthony Caro, The Descent from the Cross (after Rubens), 1987–88. Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum; Museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund.

for the “sculptor who puts volume into his space” is intriguing. And I am eager to learn: was he thinking of Minimalist sculpture, or of a return to sculpture that affirms its own volumetric core?13 Radical changes are indeed coming. Change is apparent in the recent work of the British sculptor William Tucker, turning from open constructions to primitive body-like masses. Critics who admire Tucker’s work describe them as “Body Doubles” and speak of “The Fated Return of the Body.”14 Even Anthony Caro’s work of the last ten years takes a new turn. Caro’s early fame rested on works that used industrial elements: prefabricated I-beams crawled, lifted off, and spread centerless over the ground (fig. 9.82). He was widely, often naively, imitated. But more than two decades on, Caro produced a steel sculpture whose forms not only look organic, but converge on a magnetic center (fig. 9.83). And it turns

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out that this piece is Caro’s acknowledged reprise of a composition by Peter Paul Rubens, a Descent from the Cross, in which eight actors converge on the body of Christ. One could not ask for a more emphatic rejection of the rule of dispersion. Let me end with the work of an American sculptor, a woman now in her sixties—Grace Knowlton

[died 2020]. In the 1960s, the moment of Minimalism, Knowlton began to make spheres—in terracotta at first, then, as they grew to 2.5-meter diameters, in reinforced concrete (figs. 9.84, 9.85). The forms were self-evident, not intrinsically interesting, and their arrangement was random; you rolled them about if the lawn needed mowing. Knowlton later realized and

figure 9.84. (top) Grace Knowlton, Spheres, 1971.

Private collection. figure 9.85. (bottom) Grace Knowlton, Untitled, 1973.

The Newark Museum of Art.

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confessed that these closed spheres first appeared in her work while she was pregnant.15 By the mid-1970s, her spheres became more irregular—she called them “boulders”—like Giacometti’s “huge pebbles.” Then, by the mid-1980s, she began to allow them to crack; put the shards back together, leaving big holes through which you could see that some of the shards were painted on the inside (fig. 9.86).

Finally, Knowlton’s spheres became ruins of their former selves (fig. 9.87). To a recent little book that reproduced her sculptures and drawings, she added this single sentence: “My view of myself has changed over the years, from a woman containing a secret, closed womb, full and whole, to a person formed from mismatched parts—broken and repaired.” In other words, Knowlton sees the progression of her sculptures as con-

figure 9.86. (top) Grace Knowlton, Broken

Sphere, Mended, 1996. Private collection. figure 9.87. (bottom) Grace Knowlton,

Brookline Maine 7 and 9, 1996. Shafer, MN, Franconia Sculpture Park.

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fessional autobiography. The Minimalism that propelled her beginnings became maximized by absorbing intimate personal associations. The question for the viewer is—how much of the meaning which these works hold for the artist inhabits the work? But this problem applies to most abstract art. In terms of recent history, what matters is that the

emotion Knowlton brings to these pieces—her experience of stress and aging, of survival and grace under pressure—that these belong not to the mechanistic, industrial celebrations of so much Minimalist and Constructivist sculpture, but to the consciousness of the self in the body, alternately empty and full, even as we breathe in and out.

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must tell you about the origin of this lecture, to reveal its contents, its rambling structure, and title. In the early summer of 2001, I got a call from Kevin Salatino, then curator of prints and drawings at LACMA. During the 1980s, Kevin had been my student at Penn, and we’re still friends. One of his projects was to have me give a lecture at LACMA, though he knew that I had come to hate lecturing almost as much as flying. So he called and said: “How would you like to fly out to LA on a private jet; you can smoke all you want and we’ll pay your usual fee.” So I agreed—before I had any idea what the occasion for this lecture would be. Lynn Zelevansky, the LACMA curator whom I had known long before when she was working at MoMA, then asked for a title, and I blurted out: “Art Minus Criticism Equals Art.” I might as well have said, “Art Minus Witticism Equals Art,” because you don’t accomplish a thing by joking about it. And then I learned what the occasion would be: an exhibition of works from the collection of postwar art formed by Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe. I had not previously heard Eli Broad’s name but soon learned that on Forbes magazine’s list of the four hundred richest men in the world, he ranked number thirty-five. I don’t know how gratifying it is to be the thirty-fifth on a list, but I guess there are compensations. The Broad Collection is remarkable: when the couple committed themselves to an artist, they collected in depth. In the collection are, among others, eight works by John Baldessari; twelve Andy Warhols; Jean-Michel Basquiat, fifteen; David Salle, fourteen; Jasper Johns, twenty-three; twenty-seven paintings by Roy Lichten-

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stein; 108 works by Cindy Sherman. The LACMA show, whose opening was to be accompanied by my talk, would be a selection, to be called “From Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons.” That presented several problems. First, since I had given no serious thought to most of the artists represented—many of whom would be attending the opening—would I be giving offense to those I leave out? Lynn said—no problem; just talk about whatever artists you grappled with back in the sixties, like Jasper Johns. Second problem: since I dislike some of the work in the show—and don’t have imagination enough to lie about it—how can I avoid offending the artists, their proud collectors, and the exhibition organizers? That problem, too, was resolved when Mr. Broad unexpectedly telephoned me to confirm an invitation to a celebratory dinner at his home. As we chatted, I expressed my fears about giving offense, and he said, go right ahead, we love controversy. I finally told him that, given his bio, I had expected to hear the voice of a drill sergeant—not that of a turtle dove. He said, “Oh, I can raise it when necessary.” I thought, nice guy, even if he is only number thirty-five. And so, in the late summer of 2001, I started preparing a fall lecture for the opening of “From Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons.” Then came September 11—less than a A lecture delivered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 6, 2001, on the occasion of the exhibition “Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections”; delivered again, in revised form, at the New York Studio School, October 3, 2002. The present text follows the latter version, with additions from Steinberg’s notes.

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month before the lecture was due. Here’s more or less what I said, beginning with an apology for that title, “Art Minus Criticism Equals Art.” It reminded me of a story told about Robert Browning. Asked to explain a line in one of his poems, he read it, read it again—then said, “you know, when I wrote that line, only God and I knew what it meant; now only God knows.” The title seems to suggest that criticism is extraneous to art; leaves art unaffected, the way rain or shine remain unaffected by opinion. But the wording turns out to be tricky, because the “minus” in “Art Minus Criticism” subtracts criticism from art; which would make criticism part of the original package, part of the principal, without which art would be somehow diminished. So which is it? Is criticism integral to art or, like shrink-wrap, disposable? God knows. All I know is that it’s always around. It starts with the maker in the very process of making. For the rest of us, it’s a way of being sociable; we have to talk about something to talk at all. Some of us go on and on about art, as others do about sports or the market. Except for this difference: The performance of an athlete or of a company stock is quantifiable. It’s harder to quantify the performance of, say, Cézanne—at least, that’s what we used to think, before the market

took over. As of last spring, a decent Cézanne comes at around thirty million—still ahead of Bouguereau, but trailing Renoir. No need for critical judgment. We have the figures. A signal example is Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles ceramic (fig. 10.24) Like most Koons sculpture, it had been produced in an edition of four, one artist’s proof and three for the trade, one of which was in the LACMA show. Another sold on May 15, 2001, at Sotheby’s, New York, for $5.6 million. Reporting the sale, the Art Newspaper wrote: “In an extraordinary marketing decision, which enhanced its iconic status as well as the position which it occupies in the artist’s career, the lot had been awarded its own catalogue, but justified the house’s promotional efforts by fetching an absolutely stunning price.”1 They say—or they used to say—that actions speak louder than words. But I think they meant auctions. And maybe that’s all I had in mind when I wrote “art minus criticism.” The title would have reflected my sense that literary criticism, as it was practiced from, say, Diderot to Clement Greenberg and Peter Schjeldahl, no longer matters. Now the shots are called by collectors, curators, dealers, and auction houses. Let me read you the text that accompanied a classic Damien Hirst piece called Anaesthetics (fig. 10.1), from the auction catalogue of Sotheby’s, London, June 27, 2001. It intrigues me for

figure 10.1. Damien Hirst,

Anaesthetics (and the Way They Affect the Mind and Body), 1991. Private collection.

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the enormity of the claims made on behalf of a work offered for sale:

the fragile suspension of life and the temporary loss of meaning.

Entirely unique in the history of portraiture, this highly intelligent work is as much about the absence of its subjects as it is about the presence of the tanks, and by extension, it is as much about the presence of life as it is about the inevitability of death. . . . Hirst has here depicted two subjects who, under the influence of drugs, have disappeared from view. . . . What we are left with is the two identical containers, whose geometry frames all of our lives. . . . The presence of two containers, arranged with Judd-like economy and beauty, serves to exacerbate the silence, but the vacuum of their emptiness sucks in the mind and body of the viewer, as we are forced to contemplate

Sotheby’s estimate in US$ was 250,000–350,000 (the work was bought in). To one who once tried his hand at critical writing, it’s still a shock to witness the displacement of critical thinking by promotional copy. When I briefly served as a critic in the mid-1950s, fresh art had no market. Most of it was ignored by all but a few personal friends and a small band of champions who argued that the work of a newcomer—say, Jasper Johns—was serious art, though most of the established artists denied it. So, in 1961, I wrote a long essay on the young Jasper Johns, starting with Liar (fig. 10.2). A few other writers had found Johns’s work interesting, and, between us, we probably

figure 10.2. Jasper Johns, Liar, 1961.

Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz.

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did make a difference—though not necessarily because what we said was correct. What mattered is that criticism kept the work up for attention. In retrospect, it hardly matters whether one was right or wrong on this or that point. I now know, for instance, that in writing about Johns’s Target with Four Faces, I missed something essential (fig. 10.3). Forty years ago, the work seemed to me haunting, desolate, and inexpressibly sad; and I thought it imperative to declare how my response arose from what was actually there in the work. I hope the passage I’m about to read you doesn’t sound too much like Sotheby’s sales talk about Damien Hirst. Anyway, I did it first. The content in Johns’ work gives the impression of being self-generated—so potent are his juxtapositions. Here in this work the rigid stare of the bull’s-eye is surmounted by four eyeless casts of one face. Suppose the juxtaposition performed without expressive purpose. Then within the frame of this picture, the values that would make a face seem more articulate than a target are not being held anymore. And this is neither a logical inference nor a sentimental projection. It is something one sees.2

I noticed some strange inversions: The target appears in its true colors, but the face is orange all over. The target is whole; but the face is cut down. The target, of which one tends to have many, is single; the face, of which one has one alone, has been multiplied. . . . So then, if target and facial casts had no correlative meaning when the artist first put them together, the life they now share in his picture gives them a common constraint. They seem to have traded their respective holdings in space. For the target that belongs out there at a distance has acquired absolute hereness. And the human face, which is experienced as here, has been dismissed to up there. As if the subjective space consciousness that gives meaning to the words “here” and “there” had ceased to operate. . . . The objects, as Johns presents them, acknowledge no liv-

ing presence; they are tokens of human absence from a man-made environment. . . . Familiar objects, but Johns has anticipated their dereliction.

Well, that was written in 1961. Thirty years later, Kenneth Silver published a brilliant paper in which this same work, along with several others, appeared steeped in “homosexual thematics.” According to Silver’s maturer vision, Johns in his early years was engaged in “the mapping of gay desire”—“forging a gay identity in his art.”3 And he convinces me. But none of this was apparent, thinkable, let alone speakable, before Gay Liberation. Reading Ken Silver now, I see that on this crucial point my old essay is superseded. No matter; it had served its purpose in helping persuade an earlier generation that Johns’s work was worth looking at. What I just read you about Ken Silver’s improving insight was written last summer [2001]. Two days after September 11—when New York’s Twin Towers and three thousand of their occupants perished—I looked again at Johns’s Targets and suddenly saw them with accrued relevance. In my fantasy, the juxtaposition of target and human fragments appeared to be symbolizing the psychic state of the terrorist pilot as he closes in on a World Trade Tower in Lower Manhattan: the target’s “absolute hereness,” the human waste, faces reduced to statistics, the anticipation of dereliction. Of course, it would be madness to think that such meanings are objectively present in these works of 1955. What I reacted to forty years ago was the potency of Johns’s adjunctions, and now, in the aftermath of September 11, I see their power resonate far beyond “homosexual thematics.” The pictures become a metaphor of what happens to the human when a target becomes absolute. But that may just be the rambling of a traumatized New Yorker, not rational criticism. So, back to the gentle sixties, when Pop Art came along. Criticism of the engaged kind was taken so seriously that when MoMA staged a symposium on Pop Art on December 13, 1962, the invited participants included not one collector or dealer. The panel was chaired by Peter Selz, and the speakers were Stanley Kunitz, a recent

figure 10.3. Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull, 1958.

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poet laureate, now well in his nineties; Dore Ashton; and Hilton Kramer, whose performance a member of the audience, one Marcel Duchamp, later characterized as “insufficiently light-hearted.” All but two of the speakers derided Pop Art. The one fervent advocate was Henry Geldzahler. Myself taking a left-leaning middle position.4 I take no pride in my input that day; yet I do think I was on to something. Speaking of Roy Lichtenstein (figs. 10.4, 10.5), I confessed that I could not yet judge his paintings as paintings, “because the pressure of subject matter is so overwhelming.”5 I noted the massive reentry of content in what was then avant-garde painting—subject matter so insistently present that traditional formal concerns seemed, all of a sudden, irrelevant. Lichtenstein—especially in his later work— proved me wrong, but not about the general drift of latter twentieth-century art. He himself, having delivered his initial knockout with subject matter that seemed brutally cheap, went on to produce strong paintings

figure 10.4. Roy Lichtenstein, Aloha, 1962. Private collection.

whose formal rigor was no more relaxed than Poussin’s (figs. 10.6, 10.7). Let me stay with Roy Lichtenstein for a while (ten of his pictures are in the present show). In September 1963, less than a year following that symposium, Erle Loran, the senior art professor at Berkeley, published what he thought would be a devastating exposé of Lichtenstein’s plagiarism. The article appeared in what was then, along with Artforum, the most influential art-critical journal, Art News. The piece was called “Pop Artists or Copy Cats?” and subtitled “A documented dissent from the chorus of promoters who insist that Pop artists transform their subject matter.”6 Loran reproduced a large Lichtenstein oil on canvas (67¾ inches high), “recently exhibited and sold to a private collector by the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles” (fig. 10.8), whose moving spirits were Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, both still very active. And Loran showed that this black-and-white oil on canvas was merely a copy of a half-page diagram in Loran’s widely used book Cézanne’s Composition, first

figure 10.5. Roy Lichtenstein, Zipper, 1962. Private collection.

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published in 1943 and twenty years later in a third edition (fig. 10.9).7 He scoffed at the claim that Lichtenstein’s blowups of comic strips or, in the present case, of a didactic diagram, transformed their originals. He reproduced his diagram and Lichtenstein’s painting side by side to prove that there had been no transformation. He would be perfectly happy, he wrote, to use the painting instead of his own original in any future edition of the book. Three months later, December 1, 1963, I gave a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum, “Pop Art as Art or as Controversy, ” most of which was on Lichtenstein; the artist attended and seemed to enjoy it—at least that’s what he told me.8 He was, in fact, doing something new with respect to his critics. Where earlier talkative artists—Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still—talked their art up to heights which no non-artist could be expected to reach, Lichtenstein, when asked whether he thought his work was understood, answered: “at first, people seemed a bit puzzled, but now, I think, they get

it—yes, I think they get it.” That, for a modern artist, was an original stance—cool, unpretentious. Roy did not feel diminished in approving a critic whose commentary seemed helpful or interesting. Soon after that Guggenheim talk, my old friend and fellow graduate student Robert Rosenblum asked me to repeat my Lichtenstein lecture at Princeton. That’s where Bob was then teaching, and hating it. He thought his students were a bunch of spoiled snobs; they would settle into his classes as if to say, go ahead, amuse us, if you think you can. Worse still was a Princeton philosopher—specialist in aesthetics, who argued that Lichtenstein’s exact replications had no claim on the title of art. Bob suggested that I go down to Princeton to silence this guy. Which I did, on May 4, 1964, repeating the Guggenheim lecture. My strategy was to outflank the enemy, catch him off guard in the rear. The first slide to hit the screen was a Velázquez portrait, Juan de Pareja, a work not yet widely known. For a few seconds, I left it up without comment,

figure 10.6. Roy Lichtenstein, Torpedo . . . Los!, 1963. Private collection.

figure 10.7. Roy Lichtenstein, Female

Figure, 1979. Los Angeles, The Broad.

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figure 10.8. Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Madame Cézanne,

waiting for its obvious irrelevance to produce the intended bewilderment. At last, I confessed that what they were looking at—a picture in New York’s Hispanic Society—was a pedestrian copy of a masterpiece then still privately owned by the Earl of Radnor—a slide of which appeared at once next to this replica. (As we all know now, the original was subsequently acquired, in 1971, for $4 million by the Metropolitan Museum.) With the pair of them side by side, I then accused the audience of eagerly matching the images on the screen, searching for differences between them, because these differences, however minute, would make one fetch a handsome price, the other, with luck, a low figure. Everyone present had a personal stake in the outcome, a strong incentive to detect where these works differed, to reassure themselves that they would not be taken in by an impostor.

1962. Private collection.

figure 10.9. Erle Loran, diagram of Madame Cézanne, 1943 (left), Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, 1962 (right). As published in Art News,

62 (September 1963), p. 49.

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And then I showed the Erle Loran diagram of Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne (Barnes Foundation) next to Lichtenstein’s painting of it—the way the two had been reproduced in Loran’s Art News article of the previous year. Loran’s purpose in coupling these pictures was to argue their perfect identity, to demonstrate that there had been no transformation; nothing but servile copying, not original art. And the philosopher who denied Lichtenstein’s painting the status of art was similarly programmed to confirm his foregone conclusion— emotionally driven to discount differences. In other words, his incentive here was the opposite of what would have urged him to register the least variation between the two versions of the Velázquez. I concluded that the opinion of people who look at evidence only to confirm a preformed decision is hardly worth having. Next I suggested ways in which Lichtenstein did transform. It ran something like this. Some of it now sounds banal; there was a time when these things needed saying. First, there’s the change of venue. Translocation alone does make a difference, as Duchamp demonstrated in 1917 when he submitted a piss pot to an art exhibition; and as the cover of my latest book demonstrates, with Leonardo’s Last Supper mural promoted to Route 3, New Jersey (fig. 10.10). Second, there’s the shock of changed status, substance, and scale—as Saul Steinberg demonstrates in this drawing of 1945 (fig. 10.11); as Claes Oldenburg showed when he monstered a three-way plug (fig. 10.12); or Jeff Koons, when he raised his floral Puppy house high in front of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. So Loran missed the point when he reproduced on one scale, side by side, his own bookish diagram and Roy’s large canvas. In fact, the framed picture engineered an about-turn. Erle Loran had reduced a Cézanne painting to printed matter. Lichtenstein reversed the process: from the massproduced back to the handmade unique. Turn next to the internal changes. They’re slight, and the question is not whether changes were made, but whether the changes made are worth noticing. Lichtenstein has tidied up Loran’s dotted lines at the corners and ends. He has enlarged and evened the letters—

surely more elegant than the mean C and D of the original. He distinguishes the figure’s light outer contour from the arrow inside; and he shifts his thickened arrow off axis in relation to the head, making it less spinelike, hence less integral—more of a foreign body, an imposition. You may not find these alterations remarkable; but they do show the artist making decisions. My last points fall under the head of polemical or satirical. Lichtenstein here as elsewhere was calling the bluff of generations of avant-garde formalists who belittled all subject matter in order to focus on what really mattered in painting: “plastic sequences,” push-and-pull, picture planes, Cubist grids, flatness, color coincident with the ground, and so on—all those formal values which alone were permitted to count. I was raised on those values, faithful to the great Roger Fry, who, when he analyzed a Renaissance Crucifixion, never acknowledged the identity of the crucified figure, referring to the victim rather as the “central element”—whether this central element represented Christ or Houdini was not supposed to make any difference. If you were hip about painting, you pretended that the subject, for you, did not exist. Lichtenstein’s paintings of the early sixties were testing the sincerity of this pretense, needling the sophisticates to “just try! I dare you to unsee the subject.” The original Loran diagram, first published in 1943 in the heyday of formalism, could be read as a formalist text. The diagram could be taken to argue that what mattered in the Cézanne painting of Madame Cézanne was not the sitter, the likeness, the painter’s attitude to his spouse, or hers to him, but lines of force, dynamic tensions. These, wrote Loran, lend the portrait a “monumental quality having little . . . to do with the human character of the sitter.” Now the Lichtenstein inverts the message. Subject matter takes over! The subject of his painting is formalism as exemplified in the professor’s demonstration of Cézanne’s method. If the original diagram resolved Madame Cézanne into directional vectors, Lichtenstein’s subject is the vacuousness of diagrammatic abstraction, the dumbing down of art through art education—which is, in fact, what Roy said five years later. Asked in a 1967 interview why he had chosen that Erle Loran diagram “as a basis for

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figure 10.10. (top left) Cover of Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (Zone Books, 2001). figure 10.11. (top right) Saul Steinberg, Exit, 1942. Whereabouts

unknown. Originally published in the New Yorker, September 28, 1942.

figure 10.12. Claes Oldenburg, Giant Three-Way Electric Plug, 1970. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Purchased with the Fiske Kimball Fund and with funds contributed by the Daniel W. Dietrich Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. David N. Pincus, Dr. and Mrs. William Wolgin, and anonymous donors, 1983.

a painting,” he replied: “It is such an oversimplification trying to explain a painting by A, B, C, and arrows, and so forth. . . . The Cézanne is such a complex painting. Taking an outline and calling it ‘Madame Cézanne’ is in itself humorous, particularly the idea of diagramming a Cézanne when Cézanne said, ‘the outline escapes me.’ ”9 Of course, Roy was speaking off the cuff and without Loran’s book at his elbow. Still, his remarks now

seem a little unfair. Loran did not, as Roy claims he did, take an outline and call it “Madame Cézanne.” It was the full-page reproduction of Cézanne’s painting that Loran captioned, “Portrait of Madame Cézanne.” The facing half-page diagram he called a “diagram.” And Cézanne’s famous saying—“the outline escapes me”—is perversely irrelevant. Cézanne may have meant that he was ever conscious of the elusiveness of the contour, not

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that he didn’t finally nail it down in this as in hundreds of other works. Roy was touting a text, something he’d read, instead of minding the painting. And he must have recognized his unfairness, for he added at once: “There is nothing wrong with making outlines of paintings. I wasn’t trying to berate Erle Loran, because when you talk about paintings you have to do something.”10 Exactly. “When you talk about paintings you have to do something.” Like what? Like gesturing with your hands? Suppose we were facing the original picture, and one of us pointed out that Cézanne had departed from the convention of keeping a sitter’s spine upright— gesturing at the same time to demonstrate what Loran called “axial tipping.” No one would accuse the speaker of pedantry, or of “oversimplifying” the picture. But the educator runs into trouble when that harmless gesture hardens into a diagram. And then, if that gesture, for the sake of economy, gets compounded with others, all of them labeled from A to E, the resulting chart becomes somewhat chilling. Even so, hardly worth making a monkey of. “I wasn’t trying to berate Erle Loran,” Lichtenstein said in his interview, as if he regretted the ad hominem edge of his mockery. Yet mockery is what Loran inherited—and lived with the rest of his life. Now there are two ways of describing this 1960s Loran-Lichtenstein confrontation: the one you’ve just heard, looking back from 2001, does not put Roy in the best light—a painter of world renown jumping on a poor, well-meaning professor. But project yourself back to the sixties, when the odds were stacked rather the other way; when Roy was a young challenger, while Loran was the author of a famous book, then in its third edition, a book which the infallible Clement Greenberg had hailed as a work of genius. This genius I never met—what I now know of him comes off the internet. Born in 1905, Loran became a painter, enthusiastic about Cézanne. In his twenties, he went to the south of France, rented Cézanne’s studio at Aix-en-Provence; lived and worked in it for three years, roamed the countryside around Aix; and pioneered the idea of photographing Cézanne’s landscape motifs, to show, as he put it, “what transformation means.” Returned to the US in 1936, he became art professor at

Berkeley, where he taught until his retirement thirtyseven years later. His only book—Cézanne’s Composition of 1943—was clearly based on his teaching. After retiring, Loran continued to paint until his death at age ninety-three in 1999. I can imagine him during his last thirty-six years, watching the rise of Lichtenstein’s star, while he himself, thanks to that luckless diagram, was immortalized as a creep. On the other hand, my web printout says “he died peacefully” at his Berkeley home. I hope he died serene, weighed down by no grudge. About Lichtenstein, who died in 1997, I never published —there was no need to, because, as he himself said, the work was soon understood. But then I got interested in Hans Haacke, and, writing about some of his work, I introduced him by way of another Lichtenstein quote, which you will hear in a moment. I started to think about Haacke back in 1979, when Martin Friedman of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis asked me to do a lecture about the art scene, and of course I declined, because I was no longer with it. As he pressed on, I said in exasperation that the only sort of talk I could give on the subject would be one entitled “Why I Am Unfit to Discuss Contemporary Art.” And Friedman said, “Fine; we’ll have that.” So I gave the lecture (October 22, 1979), subtitled “Regards to the Avant-Garde,” much of it dealing with Haacke and using Lichtenstein as a foil.11 Years later, when the New Museum, New York, organized a traveling Hans Haacke show, I wrote the catalogue’s introductory essay, and that’s how this Haacke material got published in 1986 (see ch. 8). The piece opened with a statement from a famous Lichtenstein interview. According to Roy, the problem for an aspiring artist in the early sixties was how best to be disagreeable. What he needed was subject matter sufficiently odious to offend even consumers of art. And as everyone knows, Lichtenstein opted for “funny pitchers.” Here’s what he said to Gene Swenson in November 1963: “It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it—everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everyone was

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accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn’t hate that enough either.”12 It sounds as if Lichtenstein thought he had failed. He had, in fact, missed his declared objective. If he’d been looking for what no one would hang, he had quite underestimated the tolerance of his public. Meanwhile, just eight years later, success came to Hans Haacke, who, upon invitation, produced a string of unacceptable pieces. One of them itemized the holdings of a named New York slumlord, and this the Guggenheim Museum, fearing a libel suit, refused to install (fig. 8.1). Soon after, in 1974, Haacke proposed a work for an exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in

figure 10.13. Hans Haacke, Manet-Projekt ’74, 1974, detail. Cologne,

Museum Ludwig.

Cologne, and again managed to get it refused. The Manet-Projekt ’74 included a panel listing the financial assets of Hermann J. Abs, the museum’s most esteemed donor, who had helped to run German banking and industry under the Nazis and organized the forced sale of Jewish businesses (fig. 10.13). Abs had recently raised the funds for the museum’s acquisition of Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus.13 This could be awkward. Suppose German art lovers learned that the show they were taking in at their favorite museum was paid for with income from money originally made by manufacturing, among other things, poison gas for use at Auschwitz. Would that revelation be part of the history of art? It wouldn’t have been in the old days when art history was written by formalists. But now it’s patronage, and art’s social setting, that thrills art historians. And that makes it pertinent to modern art history when Haacke raises the specter of the Holocaust or slave-labor profit in a trustee’s financial background. Of course, this was going too far. Haacke had found what Lichtenstein’s plunge into Pop culture had missed—the unacceptable, the last hideout of the obscene; publicizing unseemly sources of wealth of named individuals who might be pillars of a museum. A transgression far more indecent than routine pornography. From the early seventies on, all of Haacke’s art was political—anti-militarist, anti-apartheid, anti– corporate power in its drive to maximize profits and its exploitation of art through the funding of prestigious blockbuster shows. All this seemed to me politically appealing. But I thought that in writing as a critic or art historian, the question to be addressed was whether Haacke’s stagings were art, or propaganda exploiting the convenience of art. Well, the Haacke pieces I chose to discuss all earned a positive answer; I’ll cite the piece included in the LACMA show: Oelgemaelde: Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers (figs. 8.2, 8.3), dating from the Reagan presidency and the Cold War.14 Haacke made the work originally for the Documenta 7 exhibition in Kassel, 1982. On one gallery wall he hung a hand-painted portrait of Reagan, done from a photograph. To bring it off, Haacke said, with a grin, he had to relearn oil

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painting—which he hadn’t tried since his first year in art school. The facing wall displayed a room-size blowup from a photographic contact sheet: it showed German demonstrators hoisting a placard with the rude slogan, “Reagan, Hau Ab” (“Reagan, Get lost!”). Visitors found themselves between the lone leader and the rabble protesting against the proposed deployment in Germany of American missiles. (A year later, at the John Weber Gallery, the crowd photograph was replaced by another: it now showed the half million American protesters who had marched against nuclear armament in New York City on June 12, 1982.) Worlds apart—those two walls: the overblown news photo was obviously uncomposed, cheap, and ephemeral; not even the sprockets and serial numbers had been masked out to dress it for exhibition. A far cry from the expensive oil picture opposite. Haacke must have spent hours rummaging for the right image of Reagan. What he selected was a bust portrait in glamorous contrapposto—head cocked in defiance, a commanding icon in the heroic vein, its stare slightly skyward, o’erleaping remote horizons and assuring the mob of the leader’s superior vision. Nor was this all. Tastefully framed, the portrait of Mr. Reagan had a picture light overhead, a brass label beneath, and before it a velvet rope suspended from shiny stanchions such as museums use to signal their best. Finally, on the floor, a crimson carpet, stopping just short of the rope. In a word: Apotheosis. The irony comes through all right, and the message could not be clearer. But is it Art? Well, I argued in favor by way of analogy. In the church of Sant’ Andrea in Mantua, in the St. Sebastian chapel (third on the right), a minor sixteenth-century painter, Rinaldo Mantovano by name, correlated—like Haacke—two mutually opposed walls (figs. 8.4, 8.5). The saint on the right, bound to a tree. On the lefthand wall the archers, aiming across the space of the chapel. And the beholder has stumbled into the firing zone. I think the painter, or the commissioning patron, meant to imply, symbolically, that every Christian lives in the line of fire, exposed to the barbs of the enemy. Real space becomes danger-fraught, not because we’re

threatened by painted figures, but to symbolize an existential condition. To me, the analogy with Haacke’s installation seems fair enough. Here, too, the terrain between facing walls is under fire. But psychologically—and politically—the situation is more complex. In that Mantuan chapel, no one sides with the villains. But in President Reagan’s confrontation with a protesting crowd, the contest is close. People may disagree as to which is the threatened party. Is it the hero beset by the plebs or a population trapped into nuclear politics? Granted that Haacke’s iconography differs from that in the St. Sebastian chapel. But the arrangement is surely analogous in the way it crosscuts the room, in the tension it generates between opposed walls and wills, between the multitude and the One, between diffused helplessness and personified power, the news photo up against the precious oil picture, and the burden of self-definition thrust on the undecided midway. All this, and the prestige of the Mantuan precedent, is enough, I should think, to make this memorial of the Cold War a work of art. But as that war was won, and we prospered into the later nineties, Haacke’s work—though it still annoys politicians, as it recently did in Berlin (Der Bevölkerung)—fell out of step. For all its pretended cool, it was too earnest, too well meaning in its commitment to moral causes. In postmodernist corporate media culture, the teenage thing to do is not to protest, but to buy into it. Thus Haacke’s enterprise—doomed to lose on the political level—seems to lose out as well on the art scene. His attempts to invest art with real sociopolitical energy become news items; from the perspective of art, outer-directed sideshows. They may use postmodernist means, such as installation, but they do not address art’s ingrown preoccupations—like manipulating perception, mocking consumerism or earlier art, or capitalizing on the pulling power of incompetence and low-level taste. I say “low-level” because slippage, the appeal of abjection, the urge to leave the high ground of culture ever farther behind, has long engaged much of the livelier art. It is almost a hundred years since Marcel Duchamp pioneered when he introduced workaday objects, un-

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touched by aesthetic intention, into a gallery space. But, by his own admission, Duchamp, like Lichtenstein, was not wholly successful. It’s as if, casting about for nonart and coming up with a shovel, he’d been shopping in the wrong store. When a friend told him that despite his avowed aim to choose objects devoid of aesthetic quality, his choices were, after all, beautiful, Duchamp replied, “Well, no one is perfect.” Perfect or not, Duchamp’s choices—a coat-, hat-, or bottlerack, a urinal, or a bicycle wheel—betray a sentimental nostalgia for the simple life. None of them acknowledges the complexity which machinery had attained by 1900. His readymades were plain, functional items, the kind which the American painter Robert Henri claimed to admire when he wrote in 1923: “I love the tools made for mechanics. . . . They are so . . . simple . . . and straight to their meaning. There is no ‘Art’ about them, they have not been made beautiful, they are beautiful.” 15 To scorn such objects for reeking of common use, common labor, or of the men’s room, would be genteelism, snobbery, hateful elitism. What Duchamp sought to subvert was the status of unique handmade art objects, challenging these tokens of privilege to accept as their peers the store-bought output of mass production. Much of the art that followed associated itself with whatever earlier artists would have despised— the products of industry, of mass entertainment, mass marketing. Andy Warhol praised Campbell’s soup, and proclaimed “good business is the best art.” Oldenburg longed for “ugliness” to mimic “the scrawls and patterns of street graffiti.” Like Dubuffet, he wanted to “celebrate irrationality . . . and stunted expression—the damaged life forces of the city street.” Lichtenstein’s generation performed their momentous stoop by fraternizing with commercial pop culture. Kirk Varnedoe, with Cy Twombly in mind, writes of “the defiling urge toward what is base.”16 The trend was documented and studied in MoMA’s 1990 “High and Low” exhibition and catalogue.17 And the attraction to whatever is thought to be undermost— such as Gilbert & George’s Naked Shit Pictures of 1994 —remains irresistible.18 In 2001 they were showing their huge New Horny Pictures (fig. 10.14). The pictures

magnify British newspaper ads by male prostitutes offering sex to order, accompanied, as usual, by the artists’ own formal portraits. In a recent interview, Gilbert & George explained: “We are anti-elitist; we dislike art that only the art world can understand.”19 This professed anti-elitism puzzles me; surely the work of Gilbert & George is addressed to, and congenial to, none but the art world elite. Their pictures appear only in galleries, museums, and art magazines, selling to wealthy collectors (not Eli Broad, by the way). The game is to stick it to the elitists, to degrade their haunts and coarsen their company. In Gilbert’s words: “We have to make these people art, because at the moment they are so overlooked.” So these New Horny Pictures bring in “these people,” the overlooked, bonding through art with professionals widely regarded as underclass— the more lowly the better. The search is on for the nadir—a pursuit which, however, “only the art world can understand.” I am reminded of some 1920s culture— Georges Bataille’s celebration of abjection; Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry; Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Beggar’s Opera, before the Fascist backlash. There is a tale told by Jorge Luis Borges—than which, you may feel, nothing could be more remote from the issue at hand. But I retell the story to remind us how radical the will to abasement may be. Borges invents a Swedish theologian, Nils Runeberg, who meditates on the persons of Judas and Christ, fancies that he alone divines Judas’s true identity, and consequently goes mad. The argument runs as follows. Judas was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to announce the kingdom of heaven, to cure the sick, . . . to raise the dead and cast out demons. A man whom the Redeemer has thus distinguished merits the best interpretation we can give of his acts. To attribute his crime to greed . . . is to resign oneself to the basest motive. Nils Runeberg proposes the opposite motive: . . . an unlimited asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, . . . mortifies his flesh; Judas did the same with his spirit. He renounced honor, morality . . . and the kingdom of heaven, just as others, less heroically, renounce pleasure. With terrible lucidity

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fect. . . . To limit what He underwent to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. To maintain that he was a man and incapable of sin involves a contradiction.

Runeberg cites the ancient prophecy of Christ: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief ” (Isaiah 53:2–3). And he interprets this text, not as the “punctual prophecy” of one afternoon’s grief, “but of the whole atrocious future, in time and in eternity, of the Word made flesh.” He concludes: God made Himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy. . . . To save us, He could have chosen any of the identities which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander the Great, or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.

figure 10.14. Gilbert & George, West End, from New Horny Pictures, 2001.

he premeditated his sins. In adultery there is usually tenderness . . . ; in homicide, courage; in profanity and blasphemy, a certain satanic luster. Judas chose those sins untouched by any virtue: violation of trust and betrayal. He acted with enormous humility, he believed himself unworthy of being good.20

Who was this man? And here comes what Borges calls Runeberg’s “monstrous conclusion,” a conclusion that points directly to Christ. “The Word, when it was made flesh, . . . lowered itself to mortal condition.” So far—standard Christian theology: the Incarnation is understood as a descent. In assuming a human nature, God humbled himself. But now Runeberg: in abasing himself to become man, what sort of man did the Incarnate choose to become? God, Runeberg argues, lowered Himself . . . for the redemption of humankind; we may conjecture that His sacrifice was per-

So in Runeberg’s insane revelation, the historical Jesus remains a mere human prophet. The incarnate Savior is to be recognized in the person of Judas. Borges ends his tall tale as follows: Drunk with insomnia and vertiginous dialectic, Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmö, begging at the top of his voice that he be granted the grace of joining his Redeemer in Hell.

Borges’s fantasy presents self- abasement in extremity—performed by a self-sacrificing god to redeem his creation; and now craved by his votary, so as to be at one with his savior, albeit in hell. In less extreme form, the impulse to self-abasement, to companion the nethermost, or to promote a general degradation— this felt imperative, which the French once called nostalgie de la boue—yearning for the mud—drives artists also, urging some of the boldest into competing one-downmanship. In this enterprise, Jeff Koons is a master. He outplunges Duchamp, Warhol, the Pop school of the sixties, and Gilbert & George. If the task is to appall cultured taste, then Koons’s work in what it hugs and befriends

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is more radical than Duchamp’s honest urinal, which, after all, once served a need; more fatuous than Warhol’s nutritious soups; more offensive than Lichtenstein’s recycled comics, whose originals delivered unpretentious vernacular entertainment; more frivolous than Gilbert & George’s salute to horny rent boys who are making a living as best they can. Jeff Koons found subject matter far more insidious. Like that fantasy Judas, who chose a sin untouched by any virtue, Koons embraced what appeared to lack any redeeming feature (Doctor’s Delight, String of Puppies, Popples, among others). In the words of his enthusiastic admirer Robert Rosenblum, describing his first encounter with Koons’s work, these new offerings to the art world were “lovingly hideous and accurate reconstructions of the lowest levels of three-dimensional kitsch.”21 According to another enthusiast, Adam Gopnik: “Koons discovered an Ur-

figure 10.15. Advertisement by Jeff Koons, published in Flash Art, no. 143 (November–December 1988).

kitsch beneath kitsch” (fig. 10.21).22 Of course, there is no such thing as Ur-kitsch. Kitsch by its nature is degenerate and inauthentic, never primordial. Gopnik’s “Ur-kitsch” is mere wordplay, like the underside of rock bottom. Koons himself, in his published pronouncements, makes free with metaphors of descent. “Many times,” he writes, “I will go to the depths of hypocrisy and resurface without making any direct moral judgment.”23 Or this: “My surface is very much a false front for an underlying degradation.” Of an advertisement he designed for one of his shows, he writes: “I wanted to debase myself and call myself a pig before the viewer had a chance to, so that they could only think more of me” (fig. 10.15). Koons is pleased to have reached what he calls “the bourgeois class,” because “debasement is what gives the bourgeois freedom.” I take this last statement to mean freedom from having to pretend a liking

figure 10.16. Jeff Koons, Stacked, 1988.

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for Mondrian or Matisse, when it’s schlock we secretly want. It’s what we’d all confess to, if we were candid. So, instead of épater le bourgeois, the cry of modernism in its beginnings, let us concede that we are the bourgeois— all of us, all of the time, happily shopping. Here’s Koons’s commentary on a 1988 polychromed wood sculpture he called Stacked (fig. 10.16): “I’ve tried to make work that any viewer, no matter where they came from, would have to respond to, would have to say that on some level, ‘Yes, I like it.’ If they couldn’t do that, it would only be because they had been told that they were not supposed to like it. Eventually they will be able to strip all that down and say, ‘You know, it’s silly, but I like that piece. It’s great.’ ” Revert to Borges’s infernal metaphor, bearing in mind that hell is not a place but—as even the pope recently granted—a state of mind.24 I see Koons hellbent, touring the underworld, not to suffer its inconveniences in the manner of Dante, but, following his father’s profession of interior decorator, doing it over, substituting for old-fashioned hellfire eyesores eternal and glitz, as in the stainless steel Rabbit. As for Koons’s self-advertised sexuality, here is his confession of what preceded the series of photographic transfers and life-size sculptures which he called Made

in Heaven (fig. 10.17): “I went through moral conflict. I could not sleep for a long time in the preparation of my new work. I had to go to the depths of my own sexuality, my own morality, to be able to remove fear, guilt and shame from myself. All of this has been removed for the viewer. So when the viewer sees it, they are in the realm of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”25 In Christian tradition, this Sacred Heart is invariably depicted as wounded (fig. 10.18). Hard to recognize here. The phrase “to remove fear, guilt, and shame from myself ” reminded me of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, a performance piece of 1972: the artist masturbating— unseen—under a sloping floor—to prevail, he said later, over “fear and shame.” Visitors to the event listened to the sounds produced by the artist, among them, his fantasies. Acconci conceived this body art piece as an ordeal, an exercise in abjection, or self-abasement, even in a literal sense. At the opening, I was told, a young woman jumped on the board and trampled on it. For the artist below, offering nothing for sale, a spiritual mortification—“the most painful experience of my life,” he said of it. Twenty years later, Koons appropriates the notion of extinguishing fear and shame and adds: “I had to go to the depths of my own sexuality.” How far down

figure 10.17. Jeff Koons,

Ilona on Top (Rosa Background), 1990.

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figure 10.18. German woodcut, Arma Christi, c. 1455–70. Munich, Staatliche

Graphische Sammlung.

is that? Given the images he produced—and showed in 1990 and 1991—that depth of his sexuality was a shrewd assessment that his exhibitionism was marketable, that his marriage to Ilona Staller in her porn model’s uniform offered photo ops to be staged, as he says, “for the viewer.” A word about Ilona, known in Italy as La Cicciolina, whom Koons has long since divorced. He comments on this marble sculpture, which reminds me of a little eighteenth-century French bronze I once saw in the Wallace Collection (figs. 10.19, 10.20): “Ilona and I,” he explains, “were born for each other. She’s a media woman. I’m a media man. We are the contemporary Adam and Eve. I believe totally that I’m in the realm of the spiritual, now, with Ilona. Through our union, we’re aligned once again with nature. I mean we’ve become God. That’s the bottom line—we’ve become

God.”26 That goes Milton one better. Marriage, wrote Milton, “is the nearest resemblance of our union with Christ.”27 In the Made in Heaven series, Koons has no use for the surrogate of “resemblance.” His fucking with La Cicciolina supplants God where it counts—in the art trade. Red Butt (Distance), one of his life-size silkscreened photos of himself and Ilona—in the act of becoming God “for the viewer”—recently sold to an anonymous bidder for $369,000.28 The critic Peter Schjeldahl, who admires Koons, had reservations about these Made in Heaven pieces, because, he wrote, they had “too little presence as art works.”29 Whatever that means. To me their presence seems more like advertising; Koons savors sex like a celebrity hyping a sponsor’s product. But there is evidently another angle to see this from. A letter from Robert Rosenblum, dated September 10, 2001, closes with this brief coda: “I’d be curious to know how you feel about Koons’ work. I am a big fan, and think he’s got a whole new version of the erotic muse. All fond wishes, Bob.” What Bob has up his sleeve is not yet public. Last year, when he spoke at the New York Studio School on Jeff Koons, no “new version of the erotic muse” seemed to come up. But I can imagine an argument somewhat as follows. In Christian tradition, sexual union, originally conferred as a blessing upon Adam and Eve, was corrupted by their disobedience. In punishment, God afflicted them with sexual desire, uncontrollable lust. Had they not sinned, St. Augustine explained, the act of procreation would have been wholly rational, performed without lust or attendant shame—like a handshake.30 But as you know, this Edenic state did not last. Sexual union became the act of darkness—until Jeff Koons retrieved it for the light, the lighting of an art gallery, undoing the effect of Original Sin, restoring sex to its innocence, passionless, public, and cool as a handshake. Observe that Ilona, Jeff ’s “contemporary Eve,” wears stiletto heels even before the invention of the fig leaf. That’s the best I can do for now. Meanwhile, it seems fair to ask once again who these works are designed for. As pornography they are hardly functional—not furtive enough and too frigid. And the claim that such

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figure 10.19. Jeff Koons, Bourgeois Bust—Jeff and Ilona, 1991. Art Institute of Chicago; Gift of Edlis Neeson Collection.

figure 10.20. Jean-Antoine Houdon, Le baiser donné, 1790s. London,

Wallace Collection.

work is democratic, addressed to some silent majority who have been too long snubbed by the art establishment, seems to me wholly untrue. The so-called establishment, the bugbear that serves as well Gilbert & George, is not one body. It is not some fortified fastness which brave Koons takes by assault. Quite the contrary. It’s the establishment that dances him in. And if its welcome is not unanimous, the reason is that there’s more diversity within the establishment, and more appetite for shock and reversal of values than you’ll find among those multimillion consumers whom Koons claims to be targeting. Koons sells through pricey art dealers, not at Walmart. His bullying argument that deep down, freed from hypocrisy and indoctrination, we prefer a Koons back view (fig. 10.21) to one by Matisse (fig. 10.22), can mean one of two things: either that any preference for the Matisse must be sham; or else—if indeed there are folks who

prefer good painting to sleaze—then such folk are statistically nonexistent. Well, I have referred to five artists in this exhibition. About Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Hans Haacke, I wrote or spoke publicly early in their careers, thinking that I understood something of what they were doing. With Jeff Koons I acknowledge my inability, or reluctance, to stay the course. This wider topic engages me now, and may, eventually, engage some of you: the problem faced by lifelong art buffs as they fade into obsolescence. Many years ago, I wrote that modern art continually shakes off its aging admirers (p. 183). This seems most true where these seniors are themselves artists—good ones especially. No one scorns newcomer art the way mature artists do. Let me quote a characteristic remark of Cézanne’s, delivered when he had passed his mid-fifties—one

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figure 10.21. Jeff Koons, Pink Panther, 1988. New York, Museum

figure 10.22. Henri Matisse, Seated Nude, Back Turned, 1917. Philadelphia

of Modern Art; Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser.

Museum of Art; The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967.

short sentence that ends by dismissing as “worthless” the work of all his younger contemporaries—Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and so on. The sentence begins by naming a painter who had been dead sixty years—Baron Gros, Napoleon’s court painter; I was delighted to find that LACMA owns one of his pictures (fig. 10.23): a portrait of the nineteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Charles Legrand, killed in Madrid on May 2, 1808—the day the French occupation forces suppressed the rebellion of the Madrileños, an event commemorated from the Spanish perspective by Goya. Baron Gros, commissioned by the boy’s bereaved parents, commemorates one of the French in an idealized posthumous portrait. But to return to Cézanne. He is knocking the tiresome work of the run of Impressionists, and the stuff

produced by their successors: “I like Baron Gros, how can I take these farces seriously?”31 He means it. In a letter of July 8, 1902, Cézanne writes: “I despise all living painters except Monet and Renoir” (both his own age). And then he says: “There are no longer any true painters these days . . . [only] jokers who feel nothing, who perform tricks.” And what is it that makes Cézanne dismiss all new art with contempt? It’s his loyalty to Baron Gros, and to Veronese, and Rubens, Poussin, Chardin. It’s not just vacant incomprehension that Cézanne brings to the New; it’s the Baron Gros factor in him—the intensity of his prior attachments—that stands in the way. And now—having cited Cézanne’s talent for incomprehension to give mine a brother—I must tell how the Baron Gros factor works within me. This requires a brief detour into historical art—not what

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oughgoing solidity or a hard outer crust, like the shell of a turtle (fig. 9.13). That sentence in Burckhardt made an immediate and lasting impression. I realized that a sculptured surface, or a painted one, could be seen the way a geologist sees mountains, as the outward of interior forces. And that this interrelation of inside and out could be brought to attention, described. Burckhardt’s one-liner helped me see what those ancients had done, and what criticism could do; that you could stay with the outward form; or see all the way through, the way the Cubist Picasso penetrates a human head—hard as a bullet, yet transparent to the mind’s eye (fig. 9.42). Years later, I found this same issue articulated by Giacometti (figs. 9.10–9.12).32 Shortly before his death in 1966, during a long interview with David Sylvester, Giacometti tried to explain how his famous bronzes got to be so attenuated:

figure 10.23. Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Second Lieutenant Charles

Legrand, c. 1810. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Gift of California Charities Foundation.

you came to hear about. But please address your complaints to the management. The absurdity of inviting an octogenarian to comment on contemporary art was their idea. Now imagine me as a young learner. Back in the 1950s, when I was a graduate student, reading oldtimers like Jacob Burckhardt, 1855, I was impressed by a remark he makes about the character of the Greek column, specifically, the effect of the concave fluting that runs up its shaft (fig. 9.14). “It suggests,” he says, “that the column thickens and hardens inward, as though collecting its strength”—in other words, as if the column centered on a hard spine or core (see p. 127). Burckhardt sees the column’s fluted surface as pliable, undulant, surrounding an inward concentration of density—unlike the pillars of ancient Egypt, which display either thor-

If I copy exactly the surface of a head in sculpture, what has it got inside it? A great mass of dead clay! In a living head, the inside is as organic as the surface, isn’t it? So a head that looks real, . . . looks like a head but you have the feeling that the inside is empty, if it’s in terracotta. And if it’s in stone, that it’s a lump of stone. But the fact that it’s empty or a lump of stone already makes it false. . . . Therefore, in a certain sense, heads that are narrow have just enough clay to hold them together: the inside is absolutely necessary. It’s necessarily more like a living head than if it were a copy of the outside. . . . So one of the reasons why I have made life-size figures that became extremely thin must be that for them to be real they needed to be light enough to be picked up with one hand and put in a taxi next to me. Whereas with a . . . life-size sculpture . . . , such as Maillol, if it takes four men with machines to move it, isn’t that already enough to make it false?33

So Giacometti arrived at his haunting figures by sensing their inwardness, much like Cézanne, who told Émile Bernard on April 15, 1904, “Nature exists for us . . . more in depth than on the surface.”34

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Could you make a case for the opposite? Jonathan Swift tried, in 1704, in a comic mock argument that runs as follows: The two senses to which all objects first address themselves are the sight and the touch; these never examine farther than the color, the shape, the size, and whatever other qualities dwell . . . upon the outward of bodies; and then comes reason . . . offering to demonstrate that they are not of the same consistence quite through. Now I take all this to be the last degree of perverting nature; one of whose eternal laws it is, to put her best furniture forward. And therefore, . . . I do here think fit to inform the reader that . . . in most corporeal beings which have fallen under my cognisance, the outside has been infinitely preferable to the in: whereof I have been farther convinced from some late experiments. Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse. . . . [Therefore, Swift concludes,] he that can . . . content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man, truly wise, creams off nature, leaving . . . the dregs for philosophy . . . to lap up. This is the refined point of felicity, called the possession of being well-deceived.35

Why “must”? Because DFN was betting on the foreseeable future, which, until September 11, 2001, did seem foreseeable. And so, I think, it must have seemed to Jeff Koons, when he proclaimed, some twelve years ago, that he was taking art “out of the twentieth century.”36 He could not have been so confident of his destination without some notion of what the twenty-first century would be like, and what sort of art it would have an appetite for. In 1988, Koons had produced his well-crafted gilded ceramic Michael Jackson and Bubbles—Bubbles being the pet chimpanzee (fig. 10.24). The name is felicitous, since bubbles are absolute surface. And so the sculpture implies nothing under its gloss. The composition, the scalene triangle formed by the overall contour, vaguely recalls the Dying Gaul expiring in a Roman museum (fig. 10.25). The cocked right foot reminds me of a later version in Naples, a figure straining simultaneously to left and to right, forward and rearward—preserved, unfortunately, only in a coarse Roman copy (fig. 10.26). The Hellenistic sculptor of the original would have achieved a more penetrating differentiation of flesh and bone structure. Koons’s hollow-man, rid of all that, is content with the cosmetic sheen of skin bleach, lipstick, mascara. Superficiality here bubbles triumphant in every sense. Winking at some antique prototype, the

Swift, of course, was writing satire. A recent art document, dating from December 1998, tries to cash in on his argument. It comes from a press release distributed by the DFN Gallery, New York—DFN, I am sorry to say, stands for Downtown Financial Network. Here the DFN Art Gallery is advertising its exhibition “Surfing the Surface,” December 10, 1998–January 30, 1999. You don’t have to go any further than the surface of things to get all the meaning you will ever want in life. “Surfing the Surface” includes 29 artists who scrutinize the glittery, changing surface of . . . life. . . . “Surfing the Surface” argues that the word superficial must be taken as the highest compliment. . . . The best contemporary art right now must strive to be superficial.

figure 10.24. Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988. Los Angeles, The

Broad.

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work celebrates the celebrity of a superstar—not the performer, but the whited manikin Jackson had made himself into. And this is where the Baron Gros factor in me starts up. My retardataire taste enjoys the complexity of simultaneous surface and depth more than in-your-face shallowness. The Michael Jackson piece may well be significant—not, I think, as sculpture, but as a sock to the art world, a summons to swing along with the gay nineties and the even jollier prospect of this twentyfirst century. The work called on seasoned art experts to change allegiance, to join the artist in homage to a teenage idol and the values of gift shop kitsch. There must be more positive virtues in Koons that I miss; unlike the critics Adam Gopnik, Peter Schjeldahl, and Rosenblum, whose foresight ten years ago hailed Koons as the man of the future; unlike my late friend David Sylvester, whose interview with Jeff Koons has just been published posthumously.37 And unlike the collector who acquired the piece, when I would have found no room for it in my heart or apartment. It’s the Baron Gros factor that hobbles me, so that I find the work of a sculptor who died before I was born more appealing to look at. I’m almost done—just one page left of the lecture I wrote last July, when I meant to end with two images (figs. 10.27, 10.28), and to present any contest between

figure 10.25. Dying Gaul, Roman copy of a Hellenistic bronze. Rome,

Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo.

them as a standoff, a draw. Let me read you what I then wrote, to be followed by a few words written after September 11. Here’s last July’s text. I am showing Rodin’s Jean d’Aire—to me the finest of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais—the head in the original plaster, taken directly from the modeled clay, unlike the gross posthumous bronzes one sees around. The picture was taken in Paris in 1960, myself and the LIFE magazine photographer Farrell Grehan collaborating. I’ve had it up in my place, inconspicuously, these forty years. How would the sculptor have thought of the subject?—the chief citizens of Calais in 1347 forced to deliver the keys of the city to the conquering English. Imagine a modern national capital suddenly overpowered and the chief executives, in a ritual of humiliation, compelled to surrender the box that controls the nation’s nuclear arsenal—something like that is what Rodin visualized; and I humbly approve the result. To paraphrase Cézanne—“I like Rodin, how can I take these farces seriously?” I have chosen these two images, with their respective nose jobs, to let them compete on the screen. Think of them as rival appeals—like the opposed walls featuring Ronald Reagan and a protesting crowd in the Haacke piece I cited earlier (figs. 8.2, 8.3). You can vote either way. Dismiss the Jeff

figure 10.26. Wounded Gaul, Roman copy of a Hellenistic bronze. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

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figure 10.27. Detail of fig. 10.24.

figure 10.28. Auguste Rodin, head of Jean d’Aire from the Burghers of Calais,

detail of the original plaster cast, 1889. Paris, Musée Rodin.

figure 10.29. “A Time to Remember,” New Yorkers outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in mourning for those killed on September 11. New York Times, September 17, 2001, p. A9.

Koons as a bauble while bowing your head before the pathos of Rodin’s Jean d’Aire; or else—think how the Rodin would be mocked by, say, Oscar Wilde or Mel Brooks—recoil from Rodin’s maudlin selfpitying sentimentalism; “insufficiently light-hearted,” to repeat Duchamp’s phrase—while joining Koons in his hug of success. Michael Jackson and Koons make a good match: you can dance at their wedding, or go mope with Rodin. You can shuttle between them, to

suit the occasion, your temperament, or the time of your life. That was to be the end of my talk. Then came September 11 and the procession of thousands of grief-stricken faces (fig. 10.29). Seeing so many, and this head of Jean d’Aire on my mind, it occurred to me how resistant the bony parts of the human face are to the expression of grief—the reason, perhaps, why Greek actors

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wore masks. Too much of the human face remains inert anatomy—the nose, for instance, about which I joked a moment ago. As if the warped nose of Jean d’Aire were comparable to the fix of the other. And that mouth: I know of no other in art that so frankly confesses the skull. In Rodin’s sculpture, bereavement and sorrow are driven deep into the structure, and that, for this moment, seems right. An hour ago, I spoke of Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces; how that merciless combination suddenly leapt into actuality, making me think of humanity marked down by a terrorist’s target. That early Johns, now half a century old, could become momentarily topical because, whatever its original private meaning, the symbol came de profundis. And so the Rodin. It’s as if this Burgher of Calais had, at least

for a month or so, become an American citizen, shown us our other face.

Appendix: Buoyant Weight/Radiant Density Here’s a Cézanne still life of about 1888–90 (fig. 10.30). In December 1999, the picture sold at Sotheby’s, London, for just under $30 million.38 There are two stories I’d like to tell you about this still life. One deals with its now public history; the other concerns only myself. The material in this appendix had to be cut from the lecture because of time constraints. —Ed.

figure 10.30. Paul Cézanne, Pitcher and Fruits (Boulloire et Fruits), 1888–90. Private collection.

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The public story of the picture, in brief, runs as follows: back in the 1960s, it hung in the dining room of the Bakwin family’s Manhattan apartment. The parents who had formed the collection parceled it out to their children, and Cézanne’s Pitcher and Fruits (Boulloire et Fruits) passed to Michael Bakwin, who had bought a house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. From there, in June 1978, the picture was stolen, its whereabouts unknown for the next twenty-one years. Meanwhile, in 1990, the Art Loss Register was founded, an international agency based in London. Its database tracks tens of thousands of missing art works—among them, Cézanne’s Pitcher and Fruits. On January 18, 1999, the Art Loss Register’s office got a local phone call from Lloyd’s of London; they had received an inquiry about the cost of insuring the shipment of a Cézanne still life from Russia to England. It is believed that the painting was then in a Russian bank vault, held there as collateral against an unrepaid loan; and that the bank hoped to recover by selling. Complicated negotiations, most of which remain secret, followed. Eventually, October 25, 1999, after almost a year’s work, the painting was recovered in perfect condition in a law office in Geneva, Switzerland. It was returned to the Bakwins, who decided to have it auctioned at Sotheby’s, London—as indeed it was, that December. If you want fuller details of the story—which involves drug traffickers, gamblers, one murder, and detectives threatened with murder unless they backed off—you will find it online.39 So much for the public record. My personal story, without so much as one homicide, is bound to be a bit of a letdown. Some forty years ago, I met one of the Bakwin daughters, and she invited me to her parents’ Manhattan apartment. There, on a dining room wall, hung this Cézanne, and they left me alone to look at it for an hour or so—not a dull moment. What it was that so held my attention I could not have said at the time. But I remember marveling at the pent-up energy and insistent weight of those innocent apples.40 Suddenly, I recalled an article I had read about astronomy— about the largest known concentrations of matter in the universe—red supergiant stars. When they explode in

a supernova, the residual core of these supergiants implodes on itself, collapses under such pressure that a sample of it—the size of a pinhead—would weigh more than a million tons; so that by comparison, the densest matter on earth, such as lead, would be porous, mere fluff, or froth. And I thought, is density, then, a quality that has an infinite dimension, like length, or duration? Is there infinite density? And is this what keeps me in awe before this Cézanne still life—how the clench of its particles makes each of these apples seem infinitely compressed? Gradually, their apparently random attendance on the pewter jug came to seem so determined that I thought any one of these apples knocked out of orbit must detonate an explosion. Since then, I have read a little in the history of Cézanne criticism, and learned that my response to the fruit in this picture was fairly standard. In the 1890s, the painter himself proclaimed: “I will astonish Paris with an apple.” By 1908, critics spoke of “those famous apples.” An artist who had visited Cézanne in 1904 later recalled: “Cézanne’s apples were explosive.” Our own Barnett Newman, in a 1970 interview, called them “superapples,” and added: “I saw them as cannonballs.”41 What is this contained inwardness that activates whatever the old Cézanne paints, and that continues to fascinate people who still care about painting? There is a story told by Cézanne’s dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Vollard had been sitting to Cézanne for his portrait— under orders to keep still as he resumed the pose day after day through 115 sittings. 115 seems a lot, but that’s what Vollard says, and art dealers don’t lie. At last, the sitter’s patience wore out. The picture seemed finished, except for two spots of blank canvas at the knuckles of the right hand (fig. 10.31). Vollard pointed to them, hoping that these tiny gaps might be quickly filled and the picture done with. The painter was shocked. “Don’t you see, M. Vollard, that if I put something there at random, I might have to repaint the entire picture, starting from that very spot.”42 But, Cézanne added, he was going to the Louvre next day and might get an idea about the exact hue and tone needed to fill those blanks. Well, they never were filled, and show blank to this day.

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The anecdote tells us about Cézanne’s rigor, and that his secret must be sought in the way the totality of the picture depends on what happens at the cellular or molecular level—i.e., the eventful encounter of any adjacent brushstrokes in a Cézanne. This was recognized early. Renoir said, “He can’t put two strokes of color on a canvas without it already being very good.” Picasso said of Cézanne: “the moment he begins to place a stroke of paint on it, the painting is already there.”43 By which he meant, I think, not one initial brushstroke, but rather any following stroke. Both he and Renoir marveled at the way two brushstrokes in Cézanne’s paintings instantly mesh at the same time, promote or propel one another. The result is a state of compactness that never clogs—density on the move, radiant density. And it is this challenge, this coincidence of the diaphanous and the compact, that Picasso takes up in a series of charcoal drawings of a male head, datable

about 1909–10 (fig. 9.42). It’s recognizable as a head, from the cranium down to the jowl, lower right, and a nose down the middle: a tough head, hard as a bullet, yet loose and transparent, because each sample of surface is only a flake of itself, so that you see the head’s mass front to back; not surface but sturdy bulk through and through. It’s this mysterious paradox of weightless heft, of impending weight and wafting lightness that thrills or intrigues or amuses me wherever I find it— even in some Old Masters. In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, one of the resurrected—a heavyweight rising as on a thermal updraft— gets help from a wingless angel, who lifts him with the curl of a finger—tenderly, as one would an eggshell. In Rubens’s Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (fig. 10.32), the girls look well padded, and the modern consensus is that Rubens’s women are too fat. But the urgent question is, too fat for what or for whom? They seem more

figure 10.31. Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1899. Paris,

figure 10.32. Peter Paul Rubens, Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. 1618.

Musée du Petit Palais.

Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

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figure 10.33. French postage stamp, 1990s, with two of Matisse’s Blue Nudes.

figure 10.34. Henri Matisse, Blue Nude

II, 1952. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne.

than acceptable to the boys, who happen to be Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. According to the best ancient sources, these Gemini alternate in twenty-fourhour shifts between the underworld of the dead and celestial immortality. Hence, I think, the manifest circulation. You can see one of the twins, the one on the dark, infernal horse, reaching down, while his brother lifts his bride-to-be against a rearing white horse. So that the whole system rotates before us, and the bulk of these daughters is no more of a drag than the tonnage of an orbiting satellite. To this principle of buoyant weight, the wonder of weight in flotation, I seem to respond in works of art regardless of style, period, or subject. I welcome it most of the time in Matisse and Picasso, in Giacometti and Jackson Pollock. The aged, bedridden Matisse assembles a woman from snips of blue-tinted paper, and the result? Well, it yielded the loveliest postage stamp ever made—appropriate to airmail (figs. 10.33, 10.34). She sits and diffuses, coils and distends, levels the ground and upholds the sky; and within her, any one thing next to another becomes an event, a moment of transforma-

tion. Though the whites in the picture are in fact merely the color of the paper support, every white against blue arrives with changed function: between the raised arm and head, the white is bright air, like all the surround at the top. At breasts and head, the same white serves as contour. Between left arm and torso, a frond of that same white becomes part of her body, as if opaque; we do not imagine this main stem of blue to be all there is of her trunk. And looking down, as between thigh and calf, the white solidifies into sustaining ground. There’s really no need to spell it out, as I’ve just done. We see solid flesh sprouting, lacing or leaping like spray; and the enchantment is wordless. Something of my enjoyment of coincident opposites must have carried over to my viewing of Pollock’s Echo (fig. 10.35), about which I wrote a brief concluding paragraph at its first showing in 1955. I called the picture “hypnotic”: A huge 92-inch world of whirling threads of black and white, each tendril seeming to drag with it a film of ground that bends inward and out and shapes itself

a rt m i n u s c r i t i c i s m e qua l s a rt [183] figure 10.35. Jackson Pollock,

Echo: Number 25, 1951, 1951. New York, Museum of Modern Art; Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange) and the Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller Fund.

mysteriously into a molded space. There is a real process here; something is actually happening. Therefore the picture can afford to be as careless of critique as the bad weather is of the objections of a hopeful picnicker. . . . This satisfies the surest test I know for a great work of art.44

Well, that was written nearly half a century ago. And now the value I set upon this coincidence of weight and ethereal motion—this Baron Gros factor in me—interferes when I encounter the work of, say, Cy Twombly. I know the sincere admiration his work can arouse. Unfortunately, what I tend to see in Twombly is not what he intended, but flimsiness, mocking my enthusiasm for density. A spread of apparently random dispersal, where nothing attracts or inflects anything else; nothing in necessary mutual engagement.45 The

ideal of the close-knit has been sent packing—too gross to survive our shift into cyberspace and the age of the internet. And the critic hung up on his ancient preference finds himself out of it. Fortunately, I long ago saw this coming. My first book, published thirty years ago, was called Other Criteria, a title I explained as not a claim so much as a confident expectation. “All given criteria of judgment,” I wrote, “are seasonal; other criteria are perpetually brought into play by new forms and fresh thought.”46 One ominous line in the book declared that it is in the nature of modern art to “shake off ageing admirers”— which seems to be true of art, though not of, say, baseball. There an octogenarian fan has no trouble staying abreast of the game. Perhaps because the game’s rules and objectives do not change every few years. In art they do.

e l ev e n

Exit Clown, Speaking Anything

High Office Speech: From the Desk of Leo Steinberg (2009–10) Final first draft of a speech to be delivered upon being elected to high office. Let me be perfectly clear. In the last analysis, at the end of the day, when push comes to shove and all’s said and done, mindful of the dire consequences of inaction, and that, come what may, all things considered and all other things being equal, we the people—second to none in saluting the Holy Grail of leading economic indicators—are resolved, weather permitting, to scale the tip of the iceberg through thick and thin, going forward against all odds to toe the bottom line on a regular basis in any way, shape or form, per se and as such, if you will. My agenda at this particular point in time, seeing that the handwriting on the wall impacts negatively for better or worse, is, first of all, to say the least. Second

of all, it would seem by no means beyond the realm of possibility that we seize the lion’s share of the emperor’s new clothes literally by the reins, so to speak, and, ipso facto, level the house of cards on the playing field at the end of the tunnel, where, you know, the vast majority of key fundamentals (to name a few) basically muddies the waters in the full sense of the word. Then let there be no mistake: The fact of the matter is—and it cannot be too often repeated or too strongly emphasized—that we sink or swim in no uncertain terms on both sides of the aisle, tolerating no elbowroom as we stand shoulder to shoulder right on the money, under God, and over the top like there’s no tomorrow. —Applause

To relieve the intensity of scholarly writing, Steinberg sometimes penned donnish humor for his own amusement. The chapter title, which he once playfully proposed for a collection of his essays, comes from a stage direction in an obscure Elizabethan play of 1605, The Tryall of Chevalry.

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Ten Irreverent Rimes [Originally published in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, 5 (October–November 1974), p. 85. In 1997 and 2008, Steinberg edited some of the limericks and added explanatory notes for non-print specialists, which appear below in the right-hand column. This revised version is the one published here, along with one verse originally published elsewhere. —Ed.] After reading Amy N. Worthen’s “Prints in Words” in your July–August 1974 issue, and noting her closing remark that she had never yet seen a limerick on the subject of prints, I was moved to make up a few. It is so rarely that one gets to write with a sense of filling a need. There was a young man called E.S. who refused to leave name and address. Poor 1466 suggested they mix— “E.S.,” he said, “let’s coalesce.”

Master E.S. (fl. c. 1450–70), originally known as the Master of 1466, was a prolific, still unidentified and unlocalized fifteenth-century German engraver, the first to achieve a distinct personal style.

Forget the ascetic Jerome, who renounced soap and water and comb. “I know he’s a hermit, but with Pirckheimer’s permit,” said Dürer, “I’ll keep him at home.”

St. Jerome (c. 342–420), an early Church Father who sought the pangs of the wilderness to escape the amenities of his study. Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530), Renaissance humanist and Albrecht Dürer’s fat friend and learned adviser. Dürer, a Nuremberg engraver who wrought valiantly to keep generations of cataloguers employed and in 1514 produced his famous engraving St. Jerome in His Study.

A Formschneider time out of mind left all of his woodcuts unsigned. Not so much as an emblem can be found to resembl’em (see “anon.” in the index of Hind).

A. M. Hind (1880–1957), whose influential study, An Introduction to the History of Woodcut (1935), is still being read today.

Passavant, Meder, and Bartsch, burning midnight oil April through March, wrote descriptions unstinting of variations in printing Maximilian’s Triumphal Arch.

J. D. Passavant (1787–1861), Joseph Meder (1857–1934), and Adam von Bartsch (1757–1821), lifelong cataloguers whose indefatigable initials still cleave to a million prints. Maximilian’s Triumphal Arch (1515), an immense woodcut made from 195 blocks under Dürer’s direction—the largest print ever made before the advent of Anselm Kiefer.

Michelangelo Buonarroti furnished themes convoluted and knotty for engravings galore which we rightly deplore, since their charm is (to say the least) spotty.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), not a printmaker himself, being otherwise engaged.

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An unruly young lad of Lorraine hit the road with a Romany train. Being brash and gung ho, it’s no wonder Callot never was heard of again.

Jacques Callot (1592–1635), born in Nancy and, not long thereafter, joining a band of gypsies, made it to Italy, where he learned to etch, perfected his art and, back home, attained such well-deserved popularity that the closing line of the above versicle is not to be believed.

If an etcher named Jacques de Gheyn anticipates Rembrandt van Rijn, is the latter belated or the former pre-dated? Please answer Ja oder Nein.

Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629), engraver and preRembrandt etcher of astounding anticipatory precocity.

The methodical Abraham Bosse confessed himself sore at a loss: “It me bewilders to pay hundred guilders for scratchings to, fro, and across.”

Abraham Bosse (1604–1676), French buriniste, renowned for the regularity of his hatching. Rembrandt (1606–1669) was notorious for the liberties of his etching needle and for the price fetched for one of his etchings, now known as The Hundred Guilder Print.

(Advertisement) A fastidious collector named Tate requires an intermediary state to close a connection in his Rembrandt collection between early Basan and late.

Tate, a print collector, namesake related to the founder of a respectable London museum, otherwise unrecorded. Pierre François Basan (1723–1797), a resourceful French dealer who managed to market worthless impressions pulled from long-worn and reworked Rembrandt plates; formerly offered in junk shops at roughly 25 cents and now back in brisk business.

Like good kids well-behaved (and preferred), things in prints should be seen and not heard, except for the twitter of the tiniest critter in the Master I.B. with the Bird.

Master I.B. with the Bird (Giovanni Battista Palumba), a northern Italian printmaker of the early sixteenth century with a small but sophisticated output. Most of his prints are signed with the monogram IB followed by a tiny bird.

When a landscape produced at L’Estaque reveals modernist trends in Georges Braque, it takes but a minute to find something in it for the anti-Picasso Braque claque.

Originally published in Steinberg, “Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women,” Art in America, 66 (November– December 1978), p. 131, n. 9, concerning the claimed priority of Braque over Picasso in the invention of Cubism.

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A Decade of Double Dactyls (1996) [Inspired by Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, edited by Anthony Hecht and John Hollander (1966; 2nd ed., New York, 1983), Steinberg tried his hand at the poetic form, beginning in the early 1980s and continuing into the next decade. (A dactyl is a metrical foot consisting of a long syllable followed by two short, as in “anything.”) The first one here was published in the second edition of the book. Steinberg introduced variations to the double dactyl rules, including enjambment and an opening line (conventionally “higgledy-piggledy”) that was not fixed or necessarily nonsensical. —Ed.] Higgledy-piggledy Remus and Romulus (filed out of sequence in order to scan)

Hell and high water, Francesca da Rimini Flies through the air in the Greatest unease;

Ended their twinship in Disequilibrium: One became famous, and One also ran.

Swept by a scandalous Insatiability No Malatesta can Hope to appease.

Nonagenarian Patriarch Abraham Offered the Lord his sole Son by his crone;

Higgledy-piggledy Tristan and Juliet Wildly mismatched at a Versemonger’s whim:

Offer declined, since by Parthenogenesis God planned to procreate One of His own.

What on earth—given their Idiosyncrasies— Would he have seen in her, Or she in him?

Verily, verily Jesus of Nazareth Scorned in his lifetime to Publish a word;

Bravery knavery William the Conqueror Least to my taste of the Williams I ken.

Speaking in parables Polysemantical Dear to the Schools for the Glosses incurred.

Give me the Silent, or— Anticlimacticly— William of Malmesbury or even Penn.

exit clown, speaking any thing [189]

Truculent succulent Doctor Mellifluus* Predicative till his Throat was a goner,

Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci was Asked by his Duke to design a latrine;

Soothed it delivering Uninterruptedly Eighty-six sermons anent the Madonna.

Thanks to a promise of Confidentiality, Strictly enforced, it remains to be seen.

Th’incontrovertible Doctor Angelicus, Otherwise known as St. Thomas Aquinas,

Mechthild of Magdeburg, Emily Dickinson, Helena Rubinstein Packaged together

Preened as the Paraclete’s Plenipotentiary, Just to annoy his Franciscan maligners.

Serve that obsession with Double-dactylity Which can’t discriminate Birds of a feather.

Miles naufragus, Erasmus of Rotterdam Plied navigation in Latin and Greek,

Ladies and Gentlemen, Pico Mirandola —if his “della” be allowed to elide—

Till a recalcitrant Hapax legomenon Grounded and left him for Lost up a creek.

Satisfies every Interinhibitive Rule for these versicles, Content aside.

* The formal title, as Doctor of the Church, of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. His eighty-six sermons were those he preached on the Song of Songs.

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Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun [Originally published in October, no. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 101–2.] A mischievous satire wherein the author’s name is ingeniously anagrammatized fifty-eight times; composed with the aid of Scrabble tiles for the diversion of readers who, in the perusal of scholars’ acknowledgments, have been sometimes struck by a certain self-addressed puffery amidst the ostentation of thanks. Among the pleasures of completing a book, there is none more gratifying than that of advertising the favors received at home and abroad. First and foremost, my thanks go to Lester Boeing and Gert Eisenlob for their selflessness in applying themselves to my needs. It was the former’s attention to my agent Rose Tengible that speeded my flight to Brussels, where the brevity of my stay was warmly applauded by Ibert Genoels, Stereo Belgin, and Leerens Bigot; as my subsequent sojourn in London as houseguest of Reg Tinsel, O.B.E., was hastened by his famulus Ernest Oblige. In Paris, where a meeting of minds with Tesile Borgne and Bêtise Lorgné exerted a lasting influence, I was everywhere well received, and recall with satisfaction the hospitality of Bénite Legros, Besoin Legret, Lésine Bergot, and Règne Bestiol. At Montpellier I had the eager cooperation of Gilbert Nosée; in Bonn, the solid support of Gretel Osbein and Tilger Ebenso—a splendid team whose insights, embodied in Oberst Liegen, underlie some of my

own. To Stigeon Berle and Elgin T. Erebos, excavating in Greece, I am beholden for the results of their digs; and am grateful to Renée Bigslot and Niobe Legrest for relief after fatiguing itineraries. Through Inge Stroebel of Zurich I became friendly with Terens Goebli and gained access to the international set, fraternizing freely with Sir Ego Blenet, Elite Bergson, Boris Genteel, Ingle Ste.-Bore, Gen. Rob’t Leise (retired), the excellent Ignoster Beel, and the redoubtable Telegrin Böse. Lured to Italy by Gentile Borse and stationed at Leges-onTiber through a grant from the Treble-Genios Foundation, I was fortunate in my tutor Berto Inglese and in the solicitude of the three catering cousins, Lesbe Genitor, Lesbit Erogen, and Lieb Estrogen who, at their Elenge Bistro downtown, introduced me to E. Ting Soberle. I further wish to thank dear Elsbet Origen for showing me proofs of her prolegomena Let Eros Begin. Of Goneril Beest, my editor at Nigel, Este & Rob, Publshrs., the less said the better; as also of Anna Gram, head of publicity, whose penchant to head off publicity, and whose regrettable association with the likes of Irene Goblets, Berte Sloe-Gin, Sot Greenbile, Elboe Stinger, Osteler Binge, etc., allowed my name to get lost in the shuffle. Winding down, I must thank my comrade-inarms Legs Bête-Noir for the shady retreat afforded me by his company. Lastly, for making their presences felt in one way or another, I salute Oleg Tenebris and Terese Goblin, Obese Ringlet and Generos Blite; moreover, Egbert Lesion, Teborg Senile, and Elstir Begone. Ort Eigenselb, 1978

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preface and acknowledgments 1. A full list of Steinberg’s publications appears on pp. 207–12. 2. See ch. 6 for Steinberg’s later remarks on the publication history of the Johns essay. 3. See “The Gestural Trace,” Steinberg’s interview with Richard Cándida Smith for the Getty Research Institute’s Art History Oral Documentation, 2001, p. 21. Available online at https:// ia801707.us.archive.org/18/items/gesturaltraceleo00stei/gestur altraceleo00stei.pdf. All of Steinberg’s papers are now on deposit at the Getty Research Institute. 4. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 19. 5. Ibid., p. 21. 6. Ibid., p. 27. Steinberg’s several editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, all heavily annotated, are now in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. 7. Richard Shiff, “Our Cézanne,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, 31–32 (Summer–Fall 2012), special issue in memory of Leo Steinberg, pp. 27–28. See also Shiff ’s review of Steinberg’s Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, Artforum (May 2001), esp. p. 24; and Yve-Alain Bois’s introduction to Steinberg’s second Norton Lecture at Harvard, October 18, 1995: “his writings reintroduce a dimension of pleasure in the dry and often polemical field of art history—the sheer sensory pleasure of language; as if to compensate, through exquisite linguistic elegance and precise stylistic economy, for the unbridgeable gap between images and words.” 8. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 5. 9. A selection of about seventy drawings, dating from the 1930s to the 1990s, was exhibited at the New York Studio School, January 31–March 9, 2013: The Eye Is a Part of the Mind: Drawings from Life and Art by Leo Steinberg, catalogue with essays by David Cohen and Jack Flam. The drawings were sold to benefit the school’s scholarship fund. Steinberg had long supported the Studio School for its emphasis on primary drawing skills, donating lectures from the 1960s on. 10. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 89, among other places. 11. The quotations are from the revised version of “The Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg Twenty Years After,” Art Bulletin, 71 (September 1989), in Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2018), pp. 154, 137. 12. Ibid., p. 154.

13. These characteristic passages are from Steinberg’s “A Corner of the Last Judgment,” Daedalus, 109 (Spring 1980), in Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2019), pp. 164, 162. 14. Steinberg was here speaking of Michelangelo, but the principle abides in all his studies. The quotation is from the preface to Steinberg’s Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace (1975), in Michelangelo’s Painting, p. 237. 15. “The Gestural Trace,” p. 1. 16. Ibid. for Steinberg on Merce Cunningham, who never allowed his dancers to improvise on stage, lest they fall back on clichés. 17. Daniele Di Cola, Arte come unità del molteplice: I fondamenti critici di Leo Steinberg (Rome, 2021). The symposium “Leo Steinberg Now” was organized under the auspices of the Sapienza, the Centre André Chastel, Paris, the Université Grenoble Alpes, the Académie de France à Rome, and the University of Notre Dame Rome. For the program, see https://international.nd.edu/ assets/233718/programma.pdf (accessed April 2023). The symposium publication, Leo Steinberg Now: Il pensiero attraverso gli occhi (Rome, 2022), includes my introduction, which, although based on the present preface, adds further biographical details.

introduction 1. The title essay of Other Criteria examines a 1955 article published in Fortune distinguishing different kinds of art “investment opportunities” ranging from “gilt-edged” old masters, to lesser “blue-chip” “performers,” to some forty-four living artists deemed worthy of future investment; Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), p. 56. 2. “Few art historians took the contemporary scene seriously enough to give it the time of day”; preface (1972) to Other Criteria, p. xxi. 3. “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel” (1959), reprinted in Steinberg, Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2020), pp. 130–43. 4. Preface (1972) to Other Criteria (above, note 1), p. xxi. 5. See “The Gestural Trace,” Steinberg’s interview with Rich-

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ard Cándida Smith for the Getty Research Institute’s Art History Oral Documentation, 2001, pp. 54–55. Available online at https://ia801707.us.archive.org/18/items/gesturaltraceleo00stei /gesturaltraceleo00stei.pdf. All of Steinberg’s papers are now on deposit at the Getty Research Institute. 6. The other panel participants were Dore Ashton and Stanley Kunitz, and Peter Selz was the moderator (see also pp. 158, 160 above). “A Symposium on Pop Art,” The Museum of Modern Art, December 13, 1962. Published in Arts Magazine, 37 (April 1963), pp. 36–44; reprinted in Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 65–81. “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” first published in Harper’s Magazine (March 1962), appears as chapter 1 in Other Criteria. 7. Hayden White, “Interpretation in History,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), p. 52. According to White, this “myth of objectivity” obscures the methodological stakes of historical narration. White argues for methodological transparency in history writing, an endeavor he calls “meta-history.” 8. “Objectivity and the Shrinking Self ” (1969), in Other Criteria (above, note 1), p. 309. 9. Quoted above, p. vii, from “The Gestural Trace” (above, note 5), p. 21. 10. Steinberg recalls Fry’s hesitation to identify Jesus Christ in Renaissance Crucifixions, preferring to refer to this figure as a work’s “central element” (p. 163). 11. “Other Criteria” (above, note 1), p. 66. Long before he penned “Other Criteria,” Steinberg challenged Fry’s purist account of modernism in “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind” (1953), in Other Criteria, pp. 289–306. 12. “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” (1962), in Other Criteria, p. 15. 13. “Other Criteria” (above, note 1), pp. 84 and 91; revisited above, p. 87. 14. I am indebted to Achim Hochdörfer for this insight; see “Passages: Achim Hochdörfer on Leo Steinberg,” Artforum, 50 (October 2011), pp. 57–58, 60. 15. See William Rubin, “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition,” part I, Artforum, 5 (February 1967), pp. 14–22; part II, Artforum, 5 (March 1967), pp. 28–37; part III, Artforum, 5 (April 1967), pp. 18–31; and part IV, Artforum, 5 (May 1967), pp. 29–33. 16. See Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2018); Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2019); Steinberg, Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2020); and Steinberg, Picasso: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2022). 17. Richard Shiff, introduction to Picasso: Selected Essays, p. xi. 18. “The Gestural Trace” (above, note 5), p. 49. 19. A lesson he learned as a young lecturer at the 92nd Street Y and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he initially spoke extemporaneously from notes; ibid, p. 1. 20. Steinberg recalled that this aspect of his work was inspired by Gerhard Krahmer’s studies of Hellenistic art and architec-

ture, to which he was introduced by his professor Karl Lehmann (“The Gestural Trace,” p. 101). This theme is further explored in “Gonzalez” (1956), in Other Criteria (above, note 1), pp. 241–50. 21. In 2002, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas acquired Steinberg’s collection of some 3,200 prints, one of the finest in private hands. A major exhibition was recently mounted: After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints, February 7–May 9, 2021, https://blantonmuseum.org /exhibition/aftermichelangelopastpicasso/; catalogue forthcoming. 22. John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse, 3rd ed. (New Haven, 2001), p. 47. 23. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York, 2004). 24. Preface (1972) to Other Criteria (above, note 1), p, xxi. 25. Ibid., p. xxii. 26. “The Gestural Trace” (above, note 5), p. 47. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 24. Steinberg made this remark in connection with a recollection of his father’s disdain for the “hedonism” of aesthetic appreciation. 29. Ibid., p. 111; and “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art” (1962), in Other Criteria (above, note 1), p. 23.

one 1. “Oh che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!,” Gaetano Milanesi, ed., Le opere di Giorgio Vasari (Florence, 1906), vol. 2, p. 217. 2. See Gordon S. Wood, “Uncle Ben,” New York Review of Books, December 4, 2003, reviewing Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Wood, “Wise Men,” New York Review of Books, September 26, 2002, reviewing Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin. 3. Russell Baker, “A Boy’s Life,” New York Review of Books, August 10, 2000, reviewing David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. 4. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 4th ed. (Princeton, 1955), p. 6. 5. For the Dürers’ marriage, see Panofsky, pp. 6–7: “Dürer simply outgrew the intellectual level and social sphere of his wife. . . . She could not understand why he left her alone in the house and went off to discuss mythology or mathematics with his learned friends.” The quoted passages can be found in J.-A. Goris and G. Marlier, Albrecht Dürer: Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands (Greenwich, CT, 1972), pp. 62, 67, and 69. 6. Three hundred years later, Heinrich Heine remarked: “A German marriage is not a real marriage. The husband does not have a wife, but a servant—and he continues his lonely bachelor life in spirit—even though it be within his family circle”; The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, selected and edited with an introduction by Frederick Ewen (New York, 1948), “Reflections,” p. 765. 7. For the Turner passage, see James Hamilton, Turner (New York, 1997), p. 180; Turner was speaking of the engraver James Willmore.

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Baudelaire: Charles Baudelaire, Delacroix: His Life and Work (1863), trans. Joseph M. Bernstein (New York, 1947), p. 82. Mallarmé: Julian Barnes, “Prince of Poets,” New York Review of Books, November 9, 1989, reviewing Rosemary Lloyd, Selected Letters of Mallarmé: “He becomes a husband even though he believes that ‘serious marriage is too primitive’ and that the best way to look on the institution is as a means of acquiring ‘a home, that’s to say, a little peace, and tea-maker,’ to quote de Quincey. Happiness lies in the dream and the dream is poetry.” 8. The man reading in the right background of fig. 1.5 is Suzanne’s son Léon Leenhoff, who may have been fathered by Manet, with whom Suzanne was romantically involved for ten years before their marriage in 1863, or by Manet’s father, who had employed her as a piano teacher. The figure of Léon was probably added several years later; see Françoise Cachin et al., Manet 1832–1883, exh. cat. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), p. 259. 9. Ibid., p. 286, for the quotation from Cachin. The Antonin Proust remark about Manet’s taste for music is from Jean Sutherland Boggs, Portraits by Degas (Berkeley, 1962), p. 24 and n. 17. 10. Cachin, Manet 1832–1883 (above, note 8), cat. 164, private collection. 11. Ibid., p. 437. 12. Quoted in Boggs (above, note 9), p. 23, from Denis Rouart, ed., The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot (London, 1957), p. 77. 13. Ibid., p. 24, from Joseph de Nittis, Notes et souvenirs du peintre (Paris, 1895). 14. [Dita Amory, et al., Madame Cézanne, exh. cat. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014) represents a recent effort to rehabilitate Hortense Fiquet, who “has not fared well in the writings of Cézanne, neither as his model nor as his wife. With little understanding of her as a human being, critics have taken the portraits as a platform for character analysis, citing her sour expression and remote, impenetrable demeanor”—observations which have “crafted a wholly undeserved reputation” (Dita Amory, p. x). Ann Dumas (pp. 100–101 in the same volume) discusses the critical shift to rehabilitate Hortense, citing Ruth Butler’s 2010 Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin. Although these investigations have unearthed and applied more biographical data about Hortense, they do little to alter the perception of the portraits as evidence of a strained relationship between Hortense and the husband who spent much time apart from her and, by the 1880s, had cut her out of his will and taken a mistress. —Ed.] 15. Quoted in John Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography (New York, 1986), p. 125, referring to Hortense’s attempts to participate in discussions of art. She was known to be a garrulous conversationalist. 16. Ibid., p. 265, from Marie-Alain Couturier, Se garder libre: Journal 1947–1954 (Paris, 1962), p. 116, recording a conversation with Matisse on June 23, 1951. 17. Manet 1832–1883 (above, note 8), p. 362. 18. See Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (Chicago, 1994), p. 49.

19. For Monet’s paintings of the bateau-atelier, see the canvases of 1874 in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; 1876, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel; and Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. 20. This and the following quotation are from Charles F. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective (New York, 1985), p. 350, from the 1929 English translation of Georges Clemenceau, Monet: Les nymphéas (Paris, 1928). 21. Alphonse Daudet, Les femmes d’artistes (1874), trans. Laura Ensor, Artists’ Wives (London, 1896). All the stories take the tone set out in the “Prologue,” a dialogue between a poet and a painter, where the latter proclaims, “artists ought never to marry” (p. 9) and “It cannot be very amusing to be the wife of a genius. There are plenty of laborers’ wives who are happier” (p. 13). In “Assault with Violence,” a lawyer counsels a woman asking for a divorce, “You have paid dearly for the glory of marrying a famous artist, one of those men in whom fame and adulation develop monstrous egotism” (p. 112). These nineteenth-century fictional artists may have heard the advice of their predecessors. In his Libro dell’arte (c. 1390, ch. 29), Cennini advised that “indulging too much in the company of women” “can make your hand unsteady.” Leonardo: “in order that the well-being of the body may not harm that of the mind, the painter ought to be solitary. . . . If you are alone, you will be all yours. . . . Two masters cannot be served”; Philip McMahon, trans., Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinus Latinus 1270) by Leonardo da Vinci (Princeton, 1956), vol. 1, no. 74. Three hundred years later, in 1801, Washington Allston, writing to a young artist friend from London, cautions, “let me advise you to beware of love. Love and painting are two opposite elements; you cannot live in both at the same time”; Jared Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (New York, 1892), pp. 47–48. 22. For the Boudin passage, see Levine, Monet, Narcissus (above, note 18), p. 3. Delacroix’s words come from his journal entry for June 6, 1824: “Mais tant que mon imagination sera mon tourment et mon plaisir à la fois, qu’importe le bien ou non? ”; Delacroix, Journal (1822–1863), ed. Yves Hucher (Paris, 1963), p. 37. 23. The Goncourts’ Journal records more such talk from Ernest Meissonier, who was anything but a caring husband. “My art before all and above all! . . . In spite of my yearnings for deep affection, I am one of those who could have walked alone in the liberty of work and of creation, I could have forgone marriage.” The true artist should never marry. “Painting is his mistress, and all others must inevitably flee before her”; quoted in Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (New York, 2006), p. 141. 24. J.-K. Huysmans, À rebours, trans. John Howard, Against the Grain (New York, 1922), pp. 109–10 and 112: “He was compelled to design a room that would be like a monastic cell. . . . He could easily imagine himself living a hundred leagues from Paris, far from society, in cloistral security. And all in all, the illusion was not difficult, since he led an existence that approached the life of a monk. . . . Like a hermit he was ripe for isolation, since life harassed him and he no longer desired anything of it.”

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25. Quoted in Roger Marx, “Les ‘Nymphéas’ de M. Claude Monet” (1909), reprinted in Marx, Maîtres d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1914), p. 291: “Ces toiles, je les ai brossées comme les moines du temps jadis enluminaient leurs missels; elles ne doivent rien qu’ à la collaboration de la solitude et du silence, rien qu’ à une attention fervente, exclusive, qui touche à l’hypnose.” 26. Quoted in Jack Flam, ed., Matisse: A Retrospective (New York, 1988), p. 149, from Sembat, “Henri Matisse,” Les cahiers d’aujourd’hui (April 1913). 27. Lawrence Gowing, Matisse (London, 1979), p. 93. Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918 (Ithaca, 1986), pp. 251–52. 28. The interviewer was Clara Taggert MacChesney, published as “A Talk with Matisse,” New York Times Magazine, March 9, 1913; quoted in Flam, Matisse: A Retrospective (above, note 26), p. 144. 29. This quotation and the next are from John Klein’s Matisse Portraits (New Haven, 2001), p. 81. 30. Flam, The Man and His Art (above, note 27), pp. 127–28. 31. John Elderfield, “Moving Aphrodite: On the Genesis of Bathers with a Turtle by Henri Matisse,” St. Louis Art Museum Bulletin, 22 (Fall 1998), p. 30. 32. Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse. The Early Years, 1869–1908 (New York, 2006), p. 205, from Jean Puy, “Souvenirs,” Le point, no. 21 ( July 1939). 33. Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, p. 148. But what is the source? Amélie never recorded it. Spurling’s footnote says: “Information from Lydia Delektorskaya.” Lydia Delektorskaya was the devoted young Russian who had shared Matisse’s life during his last twenty years as his model, secretary, archivist, photographer, assistant, playmate, and perhaps nurse. After the master’s death in 1954, Lydia lived on in Paris, where Spurling sought her out. During their interview in the late 1990s, Lydia recalled hearing from Matisse in the 1940s, by which time his marriage was in shambles, what he recalled having said to his intended in 1897. Whether he had actually said as much fifty years earlier, or interposed a screen memory for what he had felt at the time, is more than we know. Amélie’s reflexive idealism recalls Dorothea Brooke’s response to the wooing of the high-minded Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “Her whole soul was possessed by the fact that a fuller life was opening before her; she was a neophyte about to enter on a higher grade of initiation. . . . Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties; now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind that she could reverence. This hope was not unmixed with the glow of proud delight—the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the man whom her admiration had chosen”; Middlemarch (1871–72), ch. 5. 34. Elderfield, “Moving Aphrodite” (above, note 31), p. 29. 35. Flam, The Man and His Art (above, note 27), p. 371, from a 1979 interview with Marguerite Duthuit. 36. Ibid.

37. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (ed. New York, 1992), p. 174. 38. Isabelle Monod-Fontaine in Elizabeth Cowling et al., eds., Matisse Picasso, exh. cat. (London, 2002), pp. 96, 100–101. 39. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” part 3; Donne, “A Nocturnall upon St. Lucy’s Day.” 40. André Salmon, “Le Salon,” Montjoie! (November–December 1913), p. 4, “un cauchemar assez harmonieux”; English text in Flam, The Man and His Art (above, note 27), p. 372, and MonodFontaine in Cowling et al., Matisse Picasso (above, note 38), p. 100. Gowing, Matisse (above, note 27), p. 93. 41. “Avant tout, je ne crée pas une femme, je fais un tableau,” Matisse said in defense of the 1907 Blue Nude; Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, rev. ed. (Berkeley, 1995), p. 132, from Matisse’s 1939 “Notes d’un peintre.” 42. The photograph, taken by Rosamond Bernier, is reproduced in John Russell, Matisse: Father and Son (New York, 1999), p. 400. 43. Beckett, Dream (above, note 37), p. 109. Beckett’s “fairy-tale” makes me think of Chagall in 1915, when he painted The Birthday (Museum of Modern Art, New York). But he doesn’t belong in this lugubrious lecture because he’s positively ecstatic about Bella, his wife. 44. [For an extended discussion of Picasso’s Olga portraits, see ch. 11, “‘Belied with False Compare,’” in Steinberg, Picasso: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2022), pp. 195–202. —Ed.] 45. Quoted in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York, 1964), p. 140.

two 1. Speaking of the Early Christian Prudentius, Helen Waddell wrote: “His phrases are the naked poetry of religion”; Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929; ed. Harmondsworth, 1933), p. 307. 2. [For the relationship of Cézanne’s Bathers to the Demoiselles d’Avignon, see Lisa Florman, “Insistent, Resistant Cézanne: On Picasso’s Three Women and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, 33/34 (Summer and Fall 2012), pp. 19–26. —Ed.]

three 1. For Cézanne’s remark, see Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art, trans. Harold L. Van Doren (New York, 1926), p. 117. 2. Acquired in 1955, the painting was destroyed by fire in 1958. 3. Robert Herbert, “Method and Meaning in Monet,” Art in America, 67 (September 1979), pp. 96–108. 4. Both Émile Zola in 1868 and Frédéric Chevalier in 1877 saw more than pleasure and nature in Monet. Zola: Monet “has sucked the milk of our age; he has grown and will continue to grow in his admiration of what surrounds him. . . . Nature seems to lose its interest for him as soon as it does not bear the stamp of our customs. . . . Claude Monet loves with particular affection nature that makes man modern.” Chevalier: “The disturbing en-

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semble of contradictory qualities . . . which distinguish . . . the Impressionists. . . . [A]ll of this is not without analogy to the chaos of contradictory forces that trouble our era.” The Zola passage is from “Mon salon: IV. Les actualistes,” L’événement illustré, May 24, 1868; the Chevalier from “Les impressionistes,” L’artiste, May 1, 1877, p. 331. Both as translated in Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (New Haven, 1982), pp. 1–2. That Monet’s paintings yielded more than the formalist approach codified by John Rewald in his History of Impressionism (1946) had to be rediscovered in New Haven. 5. See Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the ’90s, exh. cat. (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1989), p. 125. 6. Charles Baudelaire, Delacroix: His Life and Work (1863), trans. Joseph M. Bernstein (New York, 1947), p. 82. 7. For a more positive view of Camille’s relationship to Monet, see Ruth Butler, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The ModelWives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin (New Haven, 2010). 8. Déjeuner sur l’herbe exists in two fragments, left and center, at the Musée d’Orsay; a smaller version of the whole is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. The other man’s interest is best seen in the left section, particularly in the study at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Bazille and Camille. 9. See Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (Chicago, 1994), p. 49. 10. For Monet’s paintings of the bateau-atelier in the 1870s, see the canvases of 1874 in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; 1876, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel; and Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. 11. The quotations that follow are from Charles F. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective (New York, 1985), p. 350, from the 1929 English translation of Georges Clemenceau, Monet: Les nymphéas (Paris, 1928). 12. Léon Bazalgette, L’esprit nouveau dans la vie artistique, sociale et religieuse (Paris, 1898), p. 376, as translated in Robert Herbert, “The Decorative and the Natural in Monet’s Cathedrals,” in Aspects of Monet: A Symposium on the Artist’s Life and Times, ed. John Rewald and Frances Weitzenhoffer (New York, 1984), pp. 168–69. 13. Kirk Varnedoe, “Monet’s Gardens,” New York Times Magazine, April 2, 1978, p. 40. [A Post-it for posterity. On a yellow flag affixed to the tear sheets of the article, Steinberg wrote: “Dorothy [Seiberling, his former wife who was then deputy editor at the magazine] commissioned this piece from Varnedoe—then an unknown young academic—and had to fight for it against editor Edward Klein, who thought it too professorial.” —Ed.] 14. From Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (New York, 1984), as quoted in Robert L. Herbert, “Monet’s Turf, ” New York Review of Books, October 11, 1984, p. 43. The quotations from Herbert and Octave Mirbeau that follow are on p. 44. 15. Steven Z. Levine, “Monet’s Series: Repetition, Obsession,” October, no. 37 (Summer 1986), p. 67. 16. Guy de Maupassant, “La vie d’un paysagiste,” Le Gil Blas, September 28, 1886, as translated in John Rewald, The History

of Impressionism (New York, 1961), p. 516. For a view of the cliffs in the rain, see Cliffs at Pourville (Rain), 1896, private collection, reprod. in Tucker, Monet in the ’90s (above, note 5), pl. 67, p. 191. 17. For the rooms Monet rented, see Tucker, Monet in the ’90s, pp. 152, 155, 157, and 161. 18. Thus in a letter to Alice Hoschedé, March 23, 1895, ibid., p. 186. 19. For the supersession of Christianity by secularization in the Rouen series, see Robert L. Herbert, “The Decorative and the Natural in Monet’s Cathedrals,” in Rewald and Weitzenhoffer, Aspects of Monet (above, note 12), esp. pp. 167–71; Tucker, Monet in the ’90s (above, note 5), pp. 185–87. 20. For a detailed account of Monet and the Dreyfus Affair, including Monet’s approbative letters to Zola and the artist’s shift in subject matter, see Tucker, Monet in the ’90s, pp. 20–23. 21. For Monet and postwar American art, see Michael Leja, “The Monet Revival and New York School Abstraction,” in Monet in the 20th Century, ed. Paul Hayes Tucker, George T. M. Shackelford, and MaryAnne Stevens, exh. cat. (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1998), pp. 98–108. 22. [Fig. 3.12 was sold at Christie’s, London, February 27, 2018, live auction 15469, lot 39. Another version is in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; a third in the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva. —Ed.] 23. See John House, “Monet: The Last Impressionist?” in Tucker, Shackelford, and Stevens, Monet in the 20th Century (above, note 21), p. 9. 24. Ibid., p. 2. 25. Robert L. Herbert, “Monet Our Contemporary,” reviewing Monet in the 20th Century, New York Review of Books, November 19, 1998, p. 22. 26. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; George Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. 64, epigraph; St. Augustine, City of God, XXII, 30. 27. The quotations in this and the next paragraph are from Herbert, “Monet Our Contemporary” (above, note 25), p. 21. 28. Quoted in Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art” (1962), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), p. 31. 29. Alan Clutton-Brock, An Introduction to French Painting (London, 1932), p. 119. 30. Letter to Gustave Geffroy, June 22, 1890, quoted in Tucker, Monet in the ’90s (above, note 5), p. 68.

four 1. Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918 (Ithaca, 1986), p. 283.

five 1. The painting, 196 × 130 cm (77 3/16 × 51 3/16 in.), lent by the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, provides the climactic big bang to the exhibition “Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 14–May 2, 1993.

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The exhibition then traveled to the Menil Collection, Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition and catalogue are the work of the Menil Collection. 2. Evelyn Weiss, in Museum Ludwig Köln: Bestandskatalog (Munich, 1986), p. 68. 3. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages” (1986), in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), p. 79. See also Daniel Cottom, “Purity,” Critical Inquiry, 16 (Autumn 1989), p. 192: “Ernst’s painting  .  .  . shows the Savior’s mother heartily paddling his bare butt . . . while Breton, Éluard and Ernst look on through a window, full of disdain for the sight before them.” 4. Walter Hopps, “Ernst at Surrealism’s Dawn: 1925–1927,” in William A. Camfield et al., Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, exh. cat. (Houston, The Menil Collection, 1993), p. 158.

six 1. First published in Metro, no. 4/5 (May 1962), then, with revisions, by George Wittenborn (New York, 1963); finally, in Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007). 2. Following Willi Bongard’s oft-quoted Kunst & Kommerz: Zwischen Passion und Spekulation (Oldenburg, 1967), pp. 203–4. For example, the unsigned column “Kunst” in Die Zeit/Zeit Magazin, no. 14 (1987), online at https://www.zeit.de/1987/14/kunst. [See note 4, below, for English-language examples. —Ed.] 3. [Margaret Scolari (“Daisy”) Barr, wife of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was a close friend and supporter of Steinberg from the early 1950s. An entry in Steinberg’s appointment book for October 25, 1961, reads “1pm Daisy here”; November 9: “Castelli” (appointment books held by the editor). Barr’s role appears only in the typed commentary Steinberg wrote when he deposited his Johns papers at the Getty Research Institute in 1996, catalogued as Series IV, box 9, folder 6. —Ed.] 4. Steinberg cites Willi Bongard’s 1967 publication (above, note 2) for the European response, but the main source of the fiction is Josh Greenfeld, “Sort of the Svengali of Pop,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 1966, pp. 45–46, quoting Castelli as having commissioned the article and having put up eighty percent of Steinberg’s fee (see p. 70 re this percentage). Castelli reiterated his financial contribution in an interview with Paul Cummings in 1969; “Oral History Interview with Leo Castelli, 1969,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, p. 102, online at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history -interview-leo-castelli-12370. The same claim was made to Annie Cohen-Solal in the 1990s; she adds that “Castelli arranged to have a magazine commission the piece”; Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (New York, 2010), p. 275. Finally, in 2021, Louis Menand, though he tells both sides of the story, gives more weight to Castelli’s version (see p. 71 above); “the article . . . was engineered by Castelli”; Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York, 2021), pp. 282–84,

in the chapter entitled “The Emancipation of Dissonance.” Each of these assertions is discussed below. A more measured account of the affair, using the Castelli records at the Archives of American Art (also discussed below), appears in Dorothy Jean McKetta, “The Leo Castelli Gallery in Metro Magazine: American Approaches to Post-Abstract Figuration in an Italian Context,” MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2012, pp. 49–50, online at https://repositories.lib.utexas .edu/bitstream/handle/2152/18520/Thesis20Metro.Castelli .pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y. I am indebted to McKetta for her advice and expert knowledge of the relationship between Castelli and Bruno Alfieri, publisher of Metro. Her thesis as a whole makes for fascinating reading. 5. Series 1, box 1, folder 15, online at https://www.aaa.si.edu /collections/leo- castelli- gallery- records- 7351/series- 1/box- 1 -folder-15. 6. BA to LC, July 1, 1960, scan 6. Having suggested that Castelli conduct an interview with Higgins, he then adds: “And get in touch with Steinberg and [Robert] Rosenblum, one of whom could also conduct the interview with Higgins, if you don’t want to” (“E prenda contatto con Steinberg e Rosenblum, uno dei quali potrebbe anche curare l’intervista a Higgins, se Lei non vuole.”) 7. LS delivered the essay for Metro on January 15, 1962, when his appointment book notes “11:30 Castelli.” This would correspond to LC to BA, January 18, 1962, scan 71: “I finally sent you all the Jasper Johns material the day before yesterday.” 8. See LC’s interview with Josh Greenfeld, “Sort of the Svengali of Pop” (above, note 4), p. 46. The figure of $800 is mentioned again in LC to BA, February 28, 1962 (scan 81), and BA to LC, March 5, 1962 (scan 83), in one of their discussions about expanding the Metro issue so that it could be published as a book. “As for additional color plates,” LC writes, “I would be willing to pay for one more, depending on how much credit you are ready to give me for the Steinberg article. I paid $800.00 for it. Just to make myself clear, if you want to contribute $400.00 then I would pay for another plate.” The idea of a “credit” is apparently a new twist. In his annoyed response, BA argues that LC had “commissioned [sic—BA must have been repeating what LC told him], months ago, from Leo Steinberg, an essay for a book on J.J., which you had decided to publish together with a publisher, and you promised him for this work the sum of $800.00. Fine. However, when I asked you for photographs of J.J.’s work to be published in ‘Metro,’ you thought it more appropriate to switch the text to my magazine, saving you further expenses for the book. Excellent idea, but you should not now ask Metro for a contribution to the expenses, because an equally good article on J.J. written by Gillo Dorfles would have cost Metro no more than 50,000 lire ($80.00)” (“Tu hai commissionato, mesi fa, a Leo Steinberg, un saggio per un libro su J.J. che avevi deciso di pubblicare insieme con un editore, e gli hai promesso per questo lavoro la somma di 800.$ Senonchè, quando ti ho chiesto fotografie di opere di J.J. per pubblicazione in ‘Metro,’ hai ritenuto più opportuno passare il testo alla mia rivista, risparmiando ogni altra

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spesa per il libro. Ottima idea, ma non devi ora chiedere a ‘Metro’ un concorso nelle spese, perchè un articolo altrettanto buono su J.J., scritto da Gillo Dorfles, sarebbe costato a ‘Metro’ non più di 50.000.—lire [$80.00]”). 9. Two hundred dollars agrees with BA’s notion of what an American author should be paid. In a letter to LC ( July 22, 1961, scan 55), he discusses the higher rates for US versus Italian authors. Speaking of Dore Ashton, who was writing on Rauschenberg, he suggests a fee of 100,000–120,000 lire (about $160–$195; 620 lire = $1 in 1962–63), hoping that it will serve as a guide for payment to other American authors. 10. BA’s efforts to economize fail. Even though LC hasn’t finalized the additions, BA goes to press, printing an extra 3,000 sets of the pages “for publication in book form”; BA/fp to LC, April 26, 1962, scan 90. (“Fp” is Faith Pleasanton, who arrived in Milan in early January 1962 to help BA with the English-language parts of the Alfieri magazines that Wittenborn distributed in the US. BA to LC [scan 61] says she will arrive on December 8, 1961, but Pleasanton reports that an ear infection delayed her departure; email to the editor, July 30, 2021. She was at the time secretary to George Wittenborn, but no publisher for the Johns book had as yet been finalized. Though BA still occasionally writes directly to LC in Italian, much of his correspondence is now in FP’s English.) These 3,000 sets of pages are ultimately wasted (BA to LC, March 17, 1963, scan 132, though here the number is 2,000), as BA had long known they would be. As early as “6/62,” when Metro has already been published, LC writes a memo listing fourteen Johns works, “Additions to JJ Book (Post-Metro IV-V)”; box 12, folder 51, “Johns, Jasper-Leo Steinberg article,” https://www .aaa.si.edu/collections/leo-castelli-gallery-records-7351/series-1/ box-12-folder-51, scan 3. And on June 9, he explains to FP for BA: “The reason for the delay [in sending promised material] is that neither Jasper nor Leo Steinberg, and last, not least, Wittenborn, were satisfied with just adding a few pages to the existing layout. They all, and I naturally too, wish this publication to be more in the nature of a book rather than a reprint”; box 1, folder 15, scan 95. So BA has to go back to press a second time (scan 132). The book, as published by Wittenborn in 1963, has thirty-three images to Metro’s twenty-two, and adds a list of illustrations, bibliography, exhibitions list, and short biography. (LS also made revisions to the text concerning Johns’s painting Shade, which he then owned, in a handwritten letter to LC from Paris, July 21, 1962, box 20, folder 39, “Steinberg, Leo, 1960–1962.” One other alteration: in the Metro version, Shade is captioned “Collection Leo Steinberg,” but “Private collection” in the book. See p. 71 for more on LS’s purchase of Shade and its implications for the present discussion.) Castelli eventually subsidized the printing costs of the book: advances of $500 in September 1962 (scan 99), $500 in January 1963 (scans 120 and 122). But it later emerges that the money was an advance against a purchase order. In August 1963 (scan 153), after the book was printed, BA invoices LC for an additional 2,125,000 lire ($3,430) for 1,000 copies of the book. A handwrit-

ten note at bottom from the gallery staff indicates “Paid Sept 28 63 on acct $1,000, check 5429.” On that same date (scan 167), LC writes to BA, referring to that payment: “I am afraid I cannot send you the whole amount for the Johns book, but I am ready to make a special effort to send you $1,000 [the amount sent that day]. . . . I must say I was rather appalled at the cost of the book. I really did not expect it to be that much.” After back-and-forth correspondence re credits, the account seems to have been settled by March 1964 (scans 184–86). 11. For example, in the two letters cited above (note 8), LC claims to have paid $800 for the “article,” while BA, in his response, refers to the same payment as for the “book.” 12. BA/FP keep LC informed about the printing of the issue: FP for BA, April 16, 1962 (scan 88), “the actual printing of Metro 4–5 is nearing the final stages”; and LC to FP, May 12, 1962 (scan 92), “I did not receive as yet Metro IV and V, which according to what Bruno told me over the phone should have left almost two weeks ago.” LC wants to see Metro to decide on the layout for the additional material that will appear in the book; see also note 10 above. 13. See the installation shot for the exhibition at https://www .castelligallery.com/exhibitions/jasper-johns9. Shade is in the middle. 14. For LS’s grant of magazine rights only, see LC to BA, January 18, 1962 (scan 71)—“Could you write to [LS] a brief note stating that at this point you have simply magazine publication rights.” The rights are acknowledged in BA to LC, March 5, 1962, scan 83. John Cage had already set a precedent for contributing an article while retaining his book publishing rights for his essay on Rauschenberg in Metro 2: LC to BA, February 22, 1961, scan 32: “Cage tells me that a book of his writing is now in process, and that, therefore, the copyright of the article I sent you should be in his name.” 15. Further on Shade: In 1971, Frances Leventritt, widow of Victor, wanted to sell the work. Steinberg, unable to come up with his share of the current market value, agreed. Shade was sold at Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, on November 17, 1971, for $60,000 and was the evening’s high sale; see Grace Glueck, “60 U.S. Art Works Bring $1-Million,” New York Times, November 18, 1971, p. 56. It was purchased through a dealer by Peter Ludwig and is now hanging in the Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

seven 1. St. Augustine, letter to Bishop Evodius, c. 414, in St. Augustine, Letters, trans. Wilfrid Parsons (New York, 1953), vol. 3, no. 163. 2. Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–13, ed. Max Brod (New York, 1948), p. 263. 3. Steinberg, “Month in Review,” Arts, 30 ( January 1956), pp. 46–47. 4. The anecdote is told in Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York, 1980), note on p. 102,

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though Tomkins gives a different version of the quotation: “I think I recognize that tune.” [The Stable Gallery show was probably “Rauschenberg: Paintings and Sculpture; Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings,” September 15–October 3, 1953. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation does not have a complete checklist of the exhibition; email to the editor from Helen Hau, August 23, 2021. Tomkins dates the Duchamp encounter with Music Box to “a group show in the 1960s,” but this is surely an error. This version of Music Box, as Tomkins reports, was purchased by Rachel Rosenthal from Rauschenberg’s 1953 show at the Stable Gallery; thus it was in a private collection and unlikely to have been included in a gallery sales show, which in any case would have focused on more recent work. In a museum exhibition, Duchamp would not have been permitted to pick up and shake the box. (Rauschenberg later made a subsequent version of Music Box for Jasper Johns, still in the latter’s collection; see https://www .raus chenbergfoundation.org/art/artwork/music-box-elemental -sculpture, RRF 53.027, c. 1955). —Ed.] 5. Arts, 32 (May 1958), p. 9. 6. Walter Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, exh. cat. (Houston, The Menil Collection, 1991), p. 159. 7. See, for example, Untitled (Gold Painting), c. 1953, Guggenheim Museum, and Dirt Painting (for John Cage), c. 1953, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. 8. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with TwentiethCentury Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), p. 21. (The pseudogeneric “he” in the quotation betrays its early date, as do the passages quoted above on p. 86.) 9. From an interview originally published in Vanity Fair, 1984; reprinted in Jasper Johns: 35 Years: Leo Castelli (New York, 1993), n.p. Cf. Vivien Raynor, “Jasper Johns: ‘I Have Attempted to Develop My Thinking in Such a Way That the Work I’m Doing Is Not Me,’” Art News, 72 (March 1973), p. 22. Raynor quotes Johns saying that he had worked so as “not to confuse my feelings with what I produced. I didn’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.” As to the nature of those feelings, it is now clear that my own halting interpretation of them—the best I could do in 1961— has been powerfully superseded by (among others) Kenneth E. Silver. See Silver’s brilliant and wise “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,” in HandPainted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–62, ed. Paul Schimmel and Donna De Salvo, exh. cat. (Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), p. 183; see also p. 158 above. 10. Quoted in the Art Newspaper, no. 73 (September 1997), p. 17. 11. Calvin Tomkins, “Profile: Moving Out,” New Yorker, February 29, 1964. 12. The actual erasing proved to be exceedingly difficult, requiring, according to Rauschenberg’s recollection, fifteen types of eraser and a full month at hard labor.

13. Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning Drawings (Greenwich, CT, 1972), pp. 16–17. 14. Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg (New York, 1987), p. 51. 15. Ibid. 16. I experienced the thought again in 1960, watching Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, his self-destructing machine in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. But Tinguely was seeing his own Rube Goldberg contraptions dismantle and total themselves, which made the devastation psychologically simpler. Simpler still is “the ritual erasing” described in the following paragraph in a recent book by Amanda Vail, Everybody Was So Young. Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story (New York, 1998), p. 100: “the first dada manifestation at the Palais des Fêtes on January 23, 1920 . . . was a kind of multimedia performance-art happening that included a reading and literary discussion by André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault; a recitation by Tristan Tzara of the entire text of a newspaper article he had chosen at random, accompanied by clanging cowbells, clattering castanets, and rattles; and the ritual erasing, by Breton, of a chalk painting by Francis Picabia that hung amid an installation of work by Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and Giorgio de Chirico. The audience, whose initial befuddlement at the proceedings had given way to frustration and rage, went wild, whistling, hissing, and hurling insults at the delighted dadaists.” Breton’s performance bears no more relation to Rauschenberg than a tantrum does to a tantra. 17. LIFE, September 1, 1959. 18. For example, the Combine Levee, 1955, private collection. The necktie in Rauschenberg iconography—and in the wider artistic culture of the period under discussion—still awaits its requisite scholarly treatment. 19. New Yorker, January 2, 1960, p. 60. 20. The passages quoted here are taken from the title essay in Steinberg, Other Criteria (above, note 8), pp. 81–90, with some modifications for the lecture context. [For further on the role of the spectator in Steinberg’s work, see Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville, “The Spectator: Riegl, Steinberg, and Morris,” in their Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (Chicago, 2010), pp. 90–104. —Ed.] 21. [For a recent analysis of Steinberg’s concept of the flatbed picture plane, including its relationship to his other writings, its theoretical connections, and later critical commentary, see Margaret Iversen, “Steinberg’s Other Criteria,” Oxford Art Journal, 43, no. 3 (December 2020), pp. 387–402. —Ed.] 22. This paragraph, dealing briefly with Bed, was recycled from a lecture given at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1965, entitled “Rauschenberg’s Bed.” 23. Time, September 18, 1964, p. 82. 24. Barbara Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg (New York, 1987), p. 50: “I did the piece Bed because I ran out of things to paint on. Everybody thinks it’s a surrealist or Dadaist painting,

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but it was just practical.” And again, p. 58: “When I did Bed I had just literally run out of things to paint on.” 25. Castelli is quoted in Alan Jones and Laura de Coppet, The Art Dealers (New York, 1984), p. 91. But Castelli continued: “Or so we thought at the time. Now it [i.e., Rauschenberg’s Bed] seems very mild, very beautiful.” Robert Hughes, American Visions (New Haven, 1997), p. 517. Francine Prose, “Artifacts of the Age of Anxiety,” Wall Street Journal, September 25, 1997, p. A20. 26. See, among many examples, the sheet owned by the Metropolitan Museum, inv. 1991.190.1, with drawings by Raffaellino del Garbo, Sandro Botticelli, and Filippino Lippi at https://www .nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.74978.html. [The most recent publication on Vasari’s Libro de’ disegni appears in Giorgio Vasari: Le livre des dessins, destinées d’une collection mythique, exh. cat. (Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2022), wherein some drawings in elaborately rendered frames and cartouches are shown to have originated in other collections. —Ed.] 27. Martin Duberman, “Is There Room for Privacy on the Canvas?,” New York Times, September 7, 1997, sect. 2, p. 89. 28. Cage’s pronouncement is ambiguous, whether or not so intended. “Beauty is now underfoot” can mean that beauty is ubiquitous as the ground, or that it’s now trampled on. 29. Mark Stevens, “More Is More,” New York, September 29, 1997, pp. 54–56. 30. Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis, “Re-reading Rauschenberg,” Artscribe, no. 29 ( June 1981), p. 47. 31. The passage is quoted from Dorothy Seckler’s interview with Rauschenberg, Art in America, 54 (May–June 1966), p. 76. 32. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1981; ed. New York, 1987), p. 335. 33. Hughes, American Visions (above, note 25), pp. 517–18. 34. Rosalind Krauss, “Perpetual Inventory,” in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Houston, The Menil Collection, 1997), p. 215. 35. Robert Hughes has never written a boring sentence; he wouldn’t know how. 36. Arthur Danto, “Robert Rauschenberg,” The Nation, November 17, 1997, p. 32. 37. Quoted in Robert Alter’s review of Mark Harman’s translation of The Castle, New Republic, April 13, 1998, p. 36. 38. The phases of Monogram are documented in the Guggenheim exhibition catalogue (above, note 34), p. 555 and figs. 146, 147. I am grateful to Susan Davidson, coorganizer of the retrospective, for putting up with my questions. 39. Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (above, note 34), p. 557, s.v. “1959.” 40. Ibid. 41. See note 30, above. 42. A Japanese manufacturer was apparently marketing fullscale ceramic reproductions of famous pictures at $100,000 apiece. 43. See Untitled [Mona Lisa], c. 1952, private collection, at

https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/artwork/untitled -mona-lisa and Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (above, note 34), cat. 30, p. 68. 44. Deleted, because of the lecture’s longueur, is the history implied: (1) the Corinthian column, the most evolved of the Classical orders; (2) the column multiplied into colonnade and engaged to wall; (3) revival in the High Renaissance; (4) worldwide academic diffusion; (5) discovered by Rauschenberg to be photogenic; (6) his print of it transferred to aluminum; (7) the product crumpled like so much waste; (8) exit. 45. Cf. Christian Morgenstern’s wonderful poem “Das Huhn” (1905), about a misplaced hen at a railroad station. 46. Hilton Kramer, “Glub, Glub! We’re Awash in Trashy Rauschenbergs,” New York Observer, September 29, 1997, pp. 1, 31. 47. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, IV, 3, 388.

eight 1. G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters,” Art News, 62 (November 1963), pp. 25–27. 2. For further discussion of Shapolsky et al., see Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, exh. cat. (New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), pp. 92–97. [An excellent set of installation photos, with details, was published in Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni, eds., Hans Haacke: All Connected, exh. cat. (New York, New Museum, 2019), pp. 134–45. —Ed.] 3. Quoted in Barbara Rose, interview with Thomas M. Messer, “Which Is in Fact What Happened,” Studio International, 182 ( July–August 1971), pp. 34–37. 4. [Steinberg here refers to Jean Tinguely’s performance piece Homage to New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. —Ed.] 5. By calling Haacke’s Real-Time Social System “art—at least for the present,” I am trying to suggest that its art status is contingent on the continuing validity of the modernist enterprise of the last quarter century. I am not claiming that it is art in some undefined timeless sense; only that it passes under the Duchampian legislation. The analogy with the law is not arbitrary. For a given action, say, an immoral tax dodge, may be illegal under one code but legal and admirably ingenious under another. And since Duchamp’s ascendancy around 1960, we have seen huge puffs settled on objects and actions whose principal gift to us was their imputed art status. For myself, I don’t love Haacke’s Guggenheim System, as I love the art of Mantegna; but I respect the ingenuity with which it inserts itself in the cracks of modern aesthetics. 6. The exhibition was organized by Artists Call against U.S. Intervention in Central America. 7. Hilton Kramer, “Turning Back the Clock: Art and Politics in 1984,” New Criterion (April 1984), p. 71. 8. Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation with Hans Haacke,” October, no. 30 (Fall 1984), p. 26. Ibid. for the quotations in the next paragraph.

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9. See Barbara Reise, “Background to the Foreground: The Haacke Exhibition History,” Studio International, 182, no. 935 ( July–August 1971), p. 33. 10. [Thirty years later, Steinberg’s ironic tone would have been modified as museums worldwide rejected support from the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of Oxycontin. —Ed.] 11. [Steinberg here was referring to the traveling itinerary of “Unfinished Business,” then in its planning stages, which in 1987 went to three US museums and one in Canada, supported, like the New Museum show, by Mobil. —Ed.]

nine 1. [Steinberg had earlier discussed the destruction of works of art in the “Bowdlerism” excursus in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983; 2nd rev. and expanded ed., Chicago, 1996), esp. pp. 184–86. —Ed.] 2. Quoted in David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (New York, 1994), pp. 130–31. 3. Ibid., p. 5. 4. Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone (1855; 5th ed., Leipzig, 1884), vol. 1, p. 2: “Sie deuten an, dass die Säule sich innerlich verdichte und verhärte, gleichsam ihre Kraft zusammennehmen.” 5. Gerhard Krahmer, “Stilphasen der hellenistischen Plastik,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung, 38/39 (1923/24), pp. 138–84. 6. [For Steinberg’s extended work on Rodin, see the revision of his 1963 essay in Other Criteria: Confrontations with TwentiethCentury Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), pp. 322–403. —Ed.] 7. See Steinberg, “The Skulls of Picasso” (1971), in Other Criteria, pp. 115–23. 8. Rosalind Krauss, “The Essential David Smith, Part II,” Artforum, 7 (April 1969), describing the “fundamental opposition . . . between the graspable, incorporable object of Surrealism and the formally distanced, unpossessable object of Smith.” 9. [The Magritte Steinberg showed (here fig. 9.57) is datable to the 1950s; see David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné (Houston, 1993), vol. 3, no. 1075. Magritte’s painted Femmes-bouteilles were begun in the early 1940s (Sylvester, vol. 2, no. 690). Although the concept is not postwar, it finds new relevance when seen with the 1950s works of Ipoustéguy and Di Suvero (figs. 9.58, 9.59). —Ed.] 10. A photograph of Brancusi’s L’Écorché is in the files of the Centre Pompidou; see https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ ressources/oeuvre/ckarXj. 11. The work, a painted wood prototype no longer extant, was commissioned for and installed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art for the exhibition “Scale as Content: Ronald Bladen, Barnett Newman, Tony Smith,” October 7, 1967–January 7, 1968. A monumental metal X, commissioned in 1968 by the collector Patrick Lannan, is now displayed on the grounds of the Miami-Dade College Wolfson Campus. So the original setting of X was an event, theater, a performance, a geste, and now a memory. [See

now Robert S. Mattison, Ronald Bladen Sculpture (New York, 2019). —Ed] 12. Quoted in “Portugal’s Top Architect: ‘To Dream, to Discover, to Mould,’” Art Newspaper, no. 68 (March 1997), p. II. 13. Back in New York two weeks after delivering the present lecture, I received a press release from the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela. It concerns an exhibition of the work of Jorge Barbi and includes the following: “In his intervention for the Double Space, Jorge Barbi recreates the inside of the great die which, in turn, contains the exhibition space to become once more the inside of this die and thus ad infinitum. On formulating this metaphor, all the connotations of one space pass over to the other and vice versa, involving also the spectator.” 14. See Robert Taplin, “Body Doubles,” Art in America (November 1996), pp. 84–87, and Donald Kuspit, “William Tucker: The Fated Return of the Body,” Sculpture (September–October 1993), pp. 19–23. 15. For this and other remarks by Knowlton, see “The Importance and/or Meaning of Drawing in My Work,” Drawing, 18 (Spring 1997), pp. 108–9.

ten 1. Art Newspaper, no. 115 ( June 2001), p. 65. 2. Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” essay written in 1961, originally published in Metro (May 1962), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972; 2nd ed., Chicago, 2007), p. 54, for this and the next passage. 3. Kenneth Silver, “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,” in Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–62, ed. Paul Schimmel and Donna De Salvo, exh. cat. (Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), pp. 179–203. 4. The talks were published as “A Symposium on Pop Art,” Arts Magazine, 37 (April 1963), pp. 36–44, including a discussion section. 5. Ibid., p. 43. 6. Erle Loran, “Pop Artists or Copy Cats?” Art News, 62 (September 1963), pp. 48–49, 61. In the same month, Loran published a short “companion” piece lambasting Pop Art as mere copying, lauding Abstract Expressionism for its “transformational” character, and republishing the Lichtenstein painting and his own drawing. Loran, “Transformation in Cézanne and Lichtenstein,” Artforum, 2 (September 1963), pp. 34–35. 7. Erle Loran, Cézanne’s Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs (1943; ed. Berkeley, 1963), p. 85, pl. XVIII. 8. [A transcript of the lecture is now on deposit at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. —Ed.] 9. Interview in John Coplans, Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat. (Pasadena Art Museum, 1967), p. 15; reprinted in John Coplans, Roy Lichtenstein (New York, 1972), p. 89. 10. Ibid.

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11. [The typescript of the lecture no longer exists. By the 1980s, parts of it had been cut up for use in other projects. —Ed.] 12. G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters,” Art News, 62 (November 1963), pp. 25–27. 13. For the Manet-Projekt ’74, see Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, exh. cat. (New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), pp. 118 and 133. 14. Ibid., pp. 242–43. [More recently, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni, eds., Hans Haacke: All Connected, exh. cat. (New York, New Museum, 2019), pp. 78–80, 206–7. —Ed.] 15. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (1923; ed. New York, 1960), p. 56; and Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria (above, note 2), p. 60. 16. For the Oldenburg quotation, see Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” pp. 90–91; Varnedoe’s comments on Twombly appeared in his Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 10. 17. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1990). 18. For the role of scatology and abjection in modern theory, see Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York, 1997), especially Bois, “Base Materialism,” pp. 51–52. In her conclusion, “The Destiny of L’informe,” Krauss, pp. 235– 36, argues against the elevation of Gilbert & George’s Naked Shit Pictures to the principle of abjection, differentiating them “in the strongest possible terms from the project of the formless.” 19. Quoted in “Artists’ Interview, London: Gilbert & George,” Art Newspaper, no. 116 ( July–August 2001), p. 74. 20. Jorge Luis Borges, “Three Versions of Judas,” in Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York, 1964), pp. 97–100, for this and the following quotations from Borges. 21. Robert Rosenblum, introduction, Jeff Koons: The Handbook (London, 1992), p. 15, referring, among other works, to the porcelain Pink Panther (fig. 10.21) and Popples. 22. Adam Gopnik, in Varnedoe and Gopnik, High and Low (above, note 17), p. 396, with reproductions of Pink Panther and Bear and Policeman. 23. This and the next six quotations from Koons are from Jeff Koons: The Handbook (above, note 21), pp. 39, 64, 90, 39, 34, 112, 130, respectively. 24. The pope was John Paul II, in a General Audience, July 28, 1999: “rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God.” For this passage and the tradition of denying the torments of hellfire, see Steinberg, “The Last Judgment as Merciful Heresy” (1975), in Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2019), pp. 130–55 and p. 331, n. 58. 25. [In the lecture, Steinberg showed Jeff in the Position of Adam from the Made in Heaven series—http://www.jeffkoons. com/artwork/made-in-heaven/jeff-the-position-adam and Jeff Koons: The Handbook (above, note 21), pp. 122–23. It was not possible to reproduce the work at this time. —Ed.]

26. Jeff Koons: The Handbook, p. 140. 27. Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Tetrachordon (ed. London, 1820), p. 269. 28. Christie’s, New York, Contemporary Art, November 16, 2000, lot 42. 29. Peter Schjeldahl, “Sympathy for the Devil” (1992), in Schjeldahl, Columns and Catalogues (Great Barrington, MA, 1994), p. 215. 30. For St. Augustine and prelapsarian sex, see Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983; 2nd rev. and expanded ed., Chicago, 1996), pp. 319–20. 31. Quoted in Gustave Geffroy, La vie artistique (1894), in Michael Doran, ed., Conversations with Cézanne, The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley, 2001), p. 6. The next Cézanne quote is from p. 39. 32. An expanded version of the interiority/exteriority discussion appears in chapter 9. 33. Quoted in David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (New York, 1994), pp. 130–31. 34. Cézanne, letter to Émile Bernard, April 15, 1904, in Doran, Conversations with Cézanne (above, note 31), p. 29. 35. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books and Other Satires (London, 1909), section 8, pp. 110–11. 36. Jeff Koons: The Handbook (above, note 21), p. 82. 37. The interview is published in Jeff Koons: Easy Fun— Ethereal, exh. cat. (Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim, 2000), pp. 14– 43. [Among the later anti-Koons critics, see Jed Perl, “The Cult of Jeff Koons: A High-End Purveyor of the Literal and the Obvious,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2014, reviewing the Whitney Museum’s Koons retrospective. —Ed.] 38. Sotheby’s, London, Impressionist and Modern Art, Part I, December 7, 1999, lot 31. [The buyer was S. I. Newhouse. After his death in 2017, the painting was sold to a private collector at Christie’s, New York, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, May 13, 2019, lot 18A, for $59,295,000. —Ed.] 39. Stephen Kurkjian, “Lost and Found,” (Boston) Globe Magazine, December 17, 2000, at http://graphics.boston.com/globe/ magazine/2000/12-17/featurestory1.shtml. 40. Cf. Giacometti’s remark that you see his sculpture “as real because its pent-up energy is what matters. Or its tension. So tension takes the place of movement; it’s as if it were movement”; interview with David Sylvester, in Looking at Giacometti (above, note 33), p. 161. 41. The quotations in the above paragraph are from Doran, Conversations with Cézanne (above, note 31). In order of citation: pp. xx, 6, and xix. The Barnett Newman comment is on p. 216, n. 5, from a 1970 interview with Emile de Antonio, published in John P. O’Neill, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley, 1992), p. 303. 42. The anecdote is recounted and referenced in John Rewald’s catalogue entry to Cézanne: The Late Work, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1977), pp. 387–88.

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43. Renoir, quoted in Doran, Conversations with Cézanne (above, note 31), pp. xxvii–xxviii; Picasso, quoted in Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art (New York, 1972), p. 40. 44. “Pollock’s First Retrospective” (1955), in Steinberg, Other Criteria (above, note 2), p. 267. 45. [At this point, Steinberg showed Nini’s Painting (Rome), 1971, at the Broad: https://www.thebroad.org/art/cy-twombly/

ninis-painting-rome. The Cy Twombly Foundation, having been supplied at their request with this and the following paragraph, found the context “negative” and “misunderstood” and denied reproduction permission, exploiting copyright to control a narrative. —Ed.] 46. Preface to Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. xxii. The next quotation comes from p. 63.

leo ste i n be rg : chronolo g y

A

summary of biographical events, personal and professional, with emphasis on the lesser-known formative years through the early 1960s. The rest of Steinberg’s career encompassed prolific publications and hundreds of public lectures, complemented by various appointments and awards, briefly encapsulated here. A complete list of publications appears on pages 207–12.

1920

1923

1933

Born July 9, Moscow, USSR, to Isaac Nachman (1888–1957) and Anyuta Esselson Steinberg (1890– 1954); given name, Schneur Zalman Ariyeh Lev Steinberg. Older sister, Ada (1917–1956).

1935

His father, a member of the Left Social Revolutionary (LSR) party, had been People’s Commissar of Justice in Lenin’s first, coalition cabinet, but resigned after four months (December 1917–March 1918).

1936–40 Attends the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London; wins prizes in drawing and sculpture. Receives diploma in Fine Art, 1940.

The Soviet government refuses to allow his father to return from an LSR conference in Germany. The family flees to Berlin, where his younger sister, Shulamit (1923–2000) is born. With them is his maternal aunt, Esther Esselson (1892–1947), who always lived with the family. May, while his father is in London, the Gestapo searches their house for evidence of Communist affiliation. The family flees to London. Steinberg had already been thrown off his school’s track team as the Nazis gained power. USSR refuses to renew the family’s passports. The British government issues him a Certificate of Identity as a Russian national, though “Russia” no longer exists.

1933–36

Attends King Alfred School, an independent progressive school. Initially speaks little English; reads English classics in German translation for school assignments. Studies philosophy with his uncle, Aron Steinberg (1891–1975).

Isaac Steinberg cofounds the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, an organization that seeks a secure, culturally autonomous home for Jews outside of Palestine.

1940–41 Lacking British citizenship, is ineligible for military service. During the Blitz, serves as a warden for the ARP (Air Raid Precaution, later Civil Defence Service). Works for the British Council as part of cultural propaganda campaigns; publishes articles on music, art, and political history. 1942–44 1942, for the Ministry of Information, delivers fifteen talks for BBC Empire on the history and geography of Russia. Publishes a series of three articles for the Ministry in Persian Quarterly: “Art and War: The Past, Present, and Future of British Art,” in conjunction with the War Artists Advisory Committee. Four months on the staff of the Associated Press of Great Britain, in charge of the photographic library while working at the night news desk of the British Press Association. Fall 1942, hired by the weekly News Review; spends eighteen months in the foreign news department, specializing in France and the French Empire; also writes feature articles on art, film, and books.

l e o st e i n be rg : c h ro n olo g y

1944, joins Picture Post as staff writer and layout artist.

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1953

Most of these wartime publications are written under the pseudonyms John Avon and Vladimir Baranov. During these years, maintains a small studio where he continues to draw and sculpt. At the request of his father, who is stranded in Australia during the war, speaks about the Freeland League at meetings of British Zionists. 1945

Publishes “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind,” a now classic essay, in Partisan Review. 1954

1947

Translates Jacob Pat’s Ashes and Fire, an early report on surviving Jews in postwar Poland, from Yiddish (New York: International Universities Press).

1948

Begins teaching life drawing at Parsons School of Design, New York (until 1960).

1949

Translates Sholem Asch’s novel Mary, from Yiddish (New York: G. P. Putnam’s).

1950

Naturalized as a US citizen under the name Leo Zalman Lev Steinberg.

Enrolls in the graduate program of the Institute of Fine Arts. 1955–56 Writes “Month in Review,” a column on contemporary art, in Arts Magazine. The columns win him the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. 1957

Delivers first of several lecture courses in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium (into the 1960s); subjects range from Egyptian to Baroque art.

1960

February, delivers “Three Lectures on Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” at the Museum of Modern Art; published in 1962 and revised and reprinted in Other Criteria. Receives PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, with dissertation on “Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism.”

Audits classes at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (through 1953). 1951

1952

Receives BS in Education, New York University. Thinking of studying philosophy, takes summer course with philosopher Paul Henle at Columbia University on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

January, emigrates to New York with his mother, aunt, and younger sister. His father and older sister are already in New York. Becomes contributor to and managing editor of This Month, a pocket journal founded by his sister Ada, devoted to politics, current events, and culture, until it folds in 1947.

Teaches course at Cooper-Union, “Theory of Modern Art.”

1961

Gives lecture courses for the cultural programs of the 92nd Street Y (Young Men’s Hebrew Association, New York) on art and aesthetics (through 1955).

Begins collecting Old Master prints, discovering a pictorial world then generally unstudied by art historians. Realizes that prints played an essential role in the transmission of images.

1961–75

Appointed associate professor, then professor of art history, Hunter College, City University of New York. Teaches half-time to give himself freedom to write.

Publishes his first extended critical essay, “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism,” in the Sewanee Review.

1962

Marries Dorothy Seiberling, art editor at life magazine (later divorced).

Begins to teach art history at Parsons along with life drawing (through 1960).

Writes to his father in May: “I find that I delivered 37 lectures in 6 months [at Parsons and the 92nd Street Y]. . . . Chronologically I ranged from 30,000 BC to current exhibitions. Geographically, I ranged from Japan to the Congo to New York. My subjects included Oriental philosophy, medieval scholasticism, classical and modern physics, the history of photography, the physiology of the eye, the evolution of archaeology, esthetics, art history, and the formal analysis of art works.”

1962–65 Art history lecturer, Sarah Lawrence College summer sessions in Paris. 1968–72 Serves on the Board of Directors, College Art Association. 1970–75 While still teaching at Hunter College, begins giving courses on modern art and criticism at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, art history program, which he had created with Milton Brown.

l e o st e i n be rg : c h ro n olo g y

1972

Publication of Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art.

1984

1975

Delivers convocation address at the College Art Association conference, “The Baldness of God and Other Ills.”

1986–91 Receives MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Appointed Benjamin Franklin Professor of Art History and University Professor, University of Pennsylvania. 1976

Art historian-in-residence, American Academy, Rome.

1978

Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1979

Elected Fellow, University College, London.

1981

Receives Honorary Doctorate in the Fine Arts, Philadelphia College of Art. The first of six such awards, the last from Harvard, 2006.

1982

Delivers A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting.”

1983

Publication of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.

1988

Receives College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism.

Scholar-in-Residence, J. Paul Getty Study Center. Honored as Literary Lion, the New York Public Library.

1991

Retires from the University of Pennsylvania; teaches one semester in the Meyer Schapiro Chair, Columbia University.

1995

Delivers Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University, “The Mute Image and the Meddling Text.”

1996

Publication of the second, enlarged edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.

2002

Named Samuel H. Kress Foundation Distinguished Scholar, College Art Association. His collection of more than three thousand prints is transferred to the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin.

2011

March 13, dies at home, after years of being “afflicted with longevity.”

Receives Award in Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the first art historian to be so honored.

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leo st e i nbe rg : publications (– )

The Selected Essays series includes unpublished lectures and texts. Among the published works listed below, many appear in the series with revisions. They are indicated with the following abbreviations: Michelangelo’s Sculpture (2018), UCP1; Michelangelo’s Painting (2019), UCP2; Renaissance and Baroque Art (2020), UCP3; Picasso (2022), UCP4; Modern Art (2023), UCP5.

books Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Encounters with Rauschenberg (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture). Houston: The Menil Foundation; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. UCP5 Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Originally published in October, no. 25 (Summer 1983), pp. 1–222. 2nd, revised and expanded ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Italian translation: La sessualità di Cristo nell’arte rinascimentale e il suo oblio nell’epoca moderna. Translated by Francesco Saba Sardi. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1986. French translation: La sexualité du Christ dans l’art de la Renaissance et son refoulement moderne. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine, preface by André Chastel. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Spanish translation: La sexualidad de Cristo en el arte del Renacimiento y en el olvido moderno. Translated by Jesus Valiente Malla. Madrid: Hermann Blume, 1989. Polish translation: Seksualność Chrystusa. Zapomniany temat sztuki renesansowej. Translated by Mateusz Salwa. Krakow: Universitas, 2013. Excerpt: In Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader, edited by S. Brent Plate, pp. 73–80. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977. Revised and expanded from 1960 dissertation. Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace. London: Phaidon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. UCP2 Excerpt: “Michelangelo’s Last Painting.” Smithsonian Magazine (December 1975), pp. 74–85.

Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. 2nd ed., with new preface. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Portuguese translation: Outros Critérias. Translated by Celia Evualdo. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2008. Chinese translation: Translated by Shen Yubing, Fan Liu, and Gu Guangshu. Edited by Shen Yubing. Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2011. Russian translation: Translated by Olga Gavrikova. Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2021. Jasper Johns. New York: George Wittenborn, 1963. Revised and expanded from the essay in Metro, nos. 4–5 (1962). Later revised as “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” for Other Criteria. French translation: “Jasper Johns: Les sept premières années de son art.” In Regards sur l’art américain des années soixante, edited by Claude Gintz, pp. 21–32. Paris: Éditions Territoires, 1979. Reprint: Jasper Johns. 35 Years: Leo Castelli. Edited by Susan Brundage. New York: Leo Castelli, 1993.

articles “What I Like about Prints.” Art in Print, 7 ( January–February 2018), pp. 3–28. Based on a 2003 lecture. “Christo’s Over the River: An Act of Homage.” NYR Daily, December 3, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/ dec/03/christos-over-river-act-homage/. “L’Autoportrait de Prague et l’intelligence de Picasso” / “The Prague Self-Portrait and Picasso’s Intelligence.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 101–17. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. UCP4 “Un tour dans le collage de Stockholm” / “Touring the Stockholm Collage.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 165–75. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. UCP4

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Statement in The Ironic Icon: A Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of William Anthony, p. 6. Copenhagen: Stalke Gallery, 2004. “With Perrig in Mind.” In Re-Visionen: Zur Aktualität von Kunstgeschichte, edited by Barbara Hüttel, Richard Hüttel, and Jeanette Kohl, pp. 1–2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002. Comment in Harvey Quaytman, exhibition catalogue. New York: David McKee Gallery, 2000. “An Incomparable Bathsheba.” In Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter, edited by Ann Jensen Adams, pp. 100–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. “In the Algerian Room.” In A Life of Collecting: Victor and Sally Ganz, edited by Michael Fitzgerald, pp. 64–67. New York: Christie’s, 1997. UCP4 “The Michelangelo Next Door.” ARTnews, 95 (April 1996), p. 106. UCP1 “Picasso’s Endgame.” October, no. 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 105–22. UCP4 Revision, 2007, in French and English for the website picasso.fr (no longer available). “Adams Verbrechen.” In Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, Tod, exhibition catalogue, pp. 166–74. Vienna: Graphische Sammlung Albertina, 1995. “Leon Battista Alberti e Andrea Mantegna.” In Leon Battista Alberti, exhibition catalogue, edited by Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel, pp. 330–35. Mantua: Palazzo del Te, 1994. UCP3 “This Is a Test” (concerning a scandalous picture by Max Ernst). New York Review of Books, May 13, 1993, p. 24. UCP5 Italian translation: “Max Ernst blasfemo.” La Rivista del libri, September 9, 1993, p. 21. Follow-up letter to the editor: “Max Ernst’s Blasphemy.” New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, p. 85. “Back Talk from Leo Steinberg” (appendix to “Jasper Johns” essay in Other Criteria). In Jasper Johns. 35 Years: Leo Castelli, edited by Susan Brundage, n.p. New York: Leo Castelli, 1993. UCP5 “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation.” Art Bulletin, 74 (December 1992), pp. 552–66. UCP2 “All About Eve” (response to a letter concerning the above essay). Art Bulletin, 75 ( June 1993), pp. 340–44. “Steen’s Female Gaze and Other Ironies.” Artibus et Historiae, no. 22 (1990), pp. 107–28. UCP3 “Deciphering Velázquez’s Old Woman.” Manhattan Inc. (October 1989), pp. 156–59. UCP3 “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg Twenty Years After.” Art Bulletin, 71 (September 1989), pp. 480–505. UCP1 “Addendum to Julius Held’s Paper” (on a Rubens picture in Pasadena). Source, nos. 8–9 (Summer–Fall 1989), pp. 77–79. “La fin de partie de Picasso.” Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 27 (Spring 1989), pp. 10–38. German translation: “Picassos Endspiel.” In Picasso: Letzte Bilder. Werke 1966–1972, exhibition catalogue, edited by Ulrich Weisner. Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1993.

Revised English version: “Picasso’s Endgame.” October, no. 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 105–22. UCP4 French translation of 1995 version: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. Italian translation of 1995 version: “Il finale di partita di Picasso.” In “Pablo Picasso,” edited by Elio Grazioli, special issue, Riga, no. 12 (1996), pp. 285–318. Portuguese translation of 1995 version: “O fim de partida de Picasso.” Ars (Universidade de São Paulo), 5, no. 9 (2007), pp. 24– 35. https://www.scielo.br/j/ars/a/ctTFYJkPZTwSXrjzLJp V4rc/?lang=pt. “The Philosophical Brothel” (revision of 1972 ARTnews essay, with “Retrospect”). October, no. 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 7–74. UCP4 Excerpt: “Las señoritas de Avignon.” Revuelta: Revista latinoamericana de pensamiento, no. 7 (2007), pp. 44–45. “Le Bordel Philosophique” (French translation and revision of 1972 ARTnews essay, with “Post-Scriptum”). In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exhibition catalogue, pp. 319–66. Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988. “‘How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in London.” Artibus et Historiae, 7, no. 116 (1987), pp. 25–44. UCP3 “Art and Science: Do They Need to Be Yoked?” Daedalus, 115 (Fall 1986), pp. 1–16. Reprint: In Art and Science, edited by Stephen Grabaud. Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Daedalus Library, 1988. “Some of Hans Haacke’s Pieces Considered as Fine Art.” In Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, exhibition catalogue, edited by Brian Wallis, pp. 8–19. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986. UCP5 Reprint: In Hans Haacke, edited by Rachel Churner. October Files 18. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. “The Case of the Wayward Shroud.” In Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective, edited by William W. Clark, Colin Eisler, William S. Heckscher, and Barbara Lane, pp. 185– 92. New York: Abaris Books, 1985. “A New Michelangelo.” Art & Antiques (October 1985), pp. 49– 53. UCP2 “The Seven Functions of the Hands of Christ: Aspects of Leonardo’s Last Supper.” In Art, Creativity, and the Sacred, edited by D. Apostolos-Cappadona, pp. 37–63. New York: Crossroads/ Continuum, 1983. “Essay: On Signs.” Send: Video and Communications Arts, no. 8 (Fall 1983). “Michelangelo and the Doctors.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 56 (Winter 1982), pp. 543–53. UCP1 “Velázquez’s Las Meninas.” October, no. 19 (Winter 1981), pp. 45– 54. UCP3 Spanish translation: “Las Meninas de Velázquez.” Kalías, 3 (October 1991), pp. 10–15. Also in Otras Meninas, edited by Fernando Marías, pp. 93–102. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 1995. Italian translation: “Las Meninas di Velázquez.” In Las Meninas:

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Velázquez, Foucault e l’enigma della rappresentazione, edited by Alessandro Nova, pp. 75–88. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997. German translation: “Velázquez’ Las Meninas.” In Las Meninas im Spiegel der Deutungen: Eine Einführung in die Methoden der Kunstgeschichte, edited by Thierry Greub, pp. 183–93. Berlin: Reimer, 2001. Polish translation: “Las Meninas Velazqueza.” In Tajemnica La Meninas, edited by Andrzej Witko, pp. 151–61. Krakow: Wydawnietwo, 2006. “A Picture by One Jacob Pynas.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 11 (November–December 1980), pp. 171–74. “A Corner of the Last Judgment.” Daedalus, 109 (Spring 1980), pp. 207–73. UCP2 “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting.” Critical Inquiry, 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 411–54. UCP2 Reprint: In The Language of Images, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, pp. 85–128. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. “Remarks on Graduate Education.” Arts Magazine, 54 (February 1980), pp. 132–33. “Guercino’s Saint Petronilla.” In Studies in Italian Art and Architectural History, 15th through 18th Centuries, edited by Henry Millon, pp. 207–34. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980. UCP3 “Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women” (part I). Art in America (November–December 1978), pp. 114–33. UCP4 Japanese translation: Tokio 1920s, vol. 32, no. 467 ( July 1980). German translation (partial): “Cézannismus und Frühkubismus.” Translated by Reinhold Hohl. In Kubismus: Künstler, Themen, Werke, 1907–1920, exhibition catalogue, pp. 59–70. Cologne: Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, 1982. French translation, with revisions:“La résistance à Cézanne: les Trois Femmes de Picasso” /“Resisting Cézanne: Picasso’s Three Women.” In Picasso Cubiste / Cubist Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 71–101. Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007. Due to a publisher’s error, the revised version appears only in the French edition. “The Polemical Part” (part II of “Resisting Cézanne”). Art in America (March–April 1979), pp. 114–27. UCP4 “The Glorious Company.” Introduction to Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, Art about Art, exhibition catalogue, pp. 8–31. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978. UCP3 “Picasso’s Revealer” (with Diane Karp). Print Collector’s Newsletter, 8 (November–December 1977), pp. 140–41. “Eve’s Idle Hand.” Art Journal, 35 (Winter 1975–76), pp. 130–35. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Merciful Heresy.” Art in America (November–December 1975), pp. 48–63. UCP2 “Remarks on Certain Prints Relative to a Leningrad Rubens on the Occasion of the First Visit of the Original to the United States.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 6 (September–October 1975), pp. 97–102. “Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici.” Art in America ( January– February 1975), pp. 62–65. UCP3 “Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo.” Vogue (December 1974), p. 130.

“Pontormo’s Capponi Chapel,” Art Bulletin, 56 (September 1974), pp. 385–99. UCP3 “An El Greco Entombment Eyed Awry.” Burlington Magazine, 116 (August 1974), pp. 474–77. UCP3 “Leonardo’s Last Supper.” Art Quarterly, 36 (Winter 1973), pp. 297–410. “A Working Equation or—Picasso in the Homestretch.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 3 (November–December 1972), pp. 102–5. UCP4 “The Philosophical Brothel” (Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon). ARTnews, 71 (September 1972), pp. 20–29 (part I); (October 1972), pp. 38–47 (part II). See above, 1988. “Other Criteria.” Written for Other Criteria, 1972, pp. 55–91. Spanish translation: “Outros Critérios.” In Clement Greenberg e o debate crítico, edited by Glória Ferreira and Cecilia Cotrim de Mello, pp. 175–210. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1997. Italian translation: “Altri criteri.” In Alle origini dell’opera d’arte contemporanea, edited by Claudia Zambianchi and Giuseppe Di Giacomo, pp. 95–138. Bari: Laterza, 2008. Excerpt: “The Flatbed Picture Plane.” In Art in Theory, 1900– 1990, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, pp. 948–53. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Reprint of excerpt: In Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology, edited by Steve Yates, pp. 197–206. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. German translation of excerpt: “Andere Kriterien.” In Kunst/ Theorie im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 2, pp. 1169–74. Berlin: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998. “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large.” Written for Other Criteria, 1972, pp. 125–234. Excerpts: “What about Cubism” and “Who Knows the Meaning of Ugliness.” In Picasso in Perspective, edited by Gert Schiff, pp. 63–67 and 137–39. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Excerpt: In Picasso & les Femmes d’Alger, exh. cat., edited by Gabriel Montua and Anna Wegenschimmel. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen, 2021, pp. 78–111. Swedish translation: “Kvinnorna i Alger och Picasso i stort.” In Pablo Picasso, exhibition catalogue, pp. 121–205. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1985. “Reflections on the State of Criticism.” Artforum, 10 (March 1972), pp. 37–49. Reprint: In Robert Rauschenberg, October Files 4, edited by Branden W. Joseph, pp. 6–37. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. “Art/Work.” ARTnews, 70 (February 1972). “Rubens’ Ceres in Leningrad.” ARTnews, 70 (December 1971), pp. 42–43. “Mantegna’s Judith in Washington.” ARTnews, 70 (November 1971), pp. 42–43. “The Skulls of Picasso.” ARTnews, 70 (October 1971). Included in Other Criteria. German translation: “Die Totenschädel Picassos.” In Picassos

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Todesthemen, exhibition catalogue, pp. 89–94. Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1984. French translation: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. “Picasso: Drawing as If to Possess.” Artforum, 10 (October 1971), pp. 44–53. Reprint, with revisions: In Major European Art Movements, 1900–1945, edited by Patricia Kaplan and Susan Manso, pp. 193–221. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. UCP4 “Salviati’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist.” ARTnews, 70 (September 1971), pp. 46–47. UCP3 “The Water-Carrier of Velázquez.” ARTnews, 69 (Summer 1971), pp. 54–55. UCP3 “Michelangelo’s Madonna Medici and Related Works.” Burlington Magazine, 113 (March 1971), pp. 145–49. UCP1 “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs.” In Studies in Erotic Art, edited by Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson, pp. 231–335. New York: Basic Books, 1970. UCP1 “Objectivity and the Shrinking Self.” Daedalus, 98 (Spring 1969), pp. 824–36. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Critical Reading and Writing across the Disciplines, edited by Cyndia S. Clegg, pp. 564–73. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988. “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers.” life, December 27, 1968. Included in Other Criteria. French translation: In Steinberg, Trois Études sur Picasso. Translated by Jean-Louis Houdebine. Paris: Éditions Carré, 1996. Revision, 2007, in French and English for the website picasso.fr (no longer available). “Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg.” Art Bulletin, 50 (December 1968), pp. 343–53 (incorporated into “The Metaphors of Love and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pietàs,” 1970). On Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà and Madonna Medici (response to a letter concerning the above essay). Art Bulletin, 51 (December 1969), pp. 410–12. “The Water-Carrier of Seville (by Velázquez).” In Man and His World, International Fine Arts Exhibition, Expo ’67, Montreal, 1967. UCP3 “Paul Brach’s Pictures.” In Paul Brach: New Paintings, exhibition brochure. New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1963. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Toward a New Abstraction, exhibition catalogue. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1963; Art International, 8 (April 1964). Reprint of excerpt: In Art in Process, exhibition catalogue. New York: Finch College Museum of Art, 1965. “Pop Art Symposium at The Museum of Modern Art, December 13, 1962.” Arts Magazine, 37 (April 1963), pp. 36–44. Publication of participants’ remarks at the symposium; Steinberg’s remarks are on pp. 39–41. “Rodin.” Introductory essay to Rodin: An Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawings, exhibition catalogue. New York: Charles E. Slatkin, 1963. Revised for inclusion in Other Criteria.

French translation: Le retour de Rodin. Paris: Éditions Macula, 1992. Excerpt: In Rodin vu par . . . , edited by Séverine Cuzin-Schulte and François Blanchetière, pp. 38–39. Paris: TTN Éditions, 2011. “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public.” Harper’s Magazine, 224 (March 1962). Included in Other Criteria. Swedish translation: “Samtidens Konst och publiikens dilemma.” Bonniers Litterara Magasin, no. 6 (Summer 1962). Translated into several Eastern European languages in Ameryka and Pregled, US State Department publications, 1960s. Spanish translation: “El arte contemporáneo y la incomodidad del público.” Otra Parte [Buenos Aires], Autumn 2004. Reprint: In The New Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966, 1973. Reprint: In The Sociology of Art and Literature: A Reader, edited by Milton Albrecht, James Barnett, and Mason Griff. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, 1976. “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel.” Art Bulletin, 41 ( June 1959), pp. 183–93. UCP3 Introduction to The New York School: Second Generation, exhibition catalogue, pp. 4–8. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1957. “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind.” Partisan Review, 20 (March–April 1953), pp. 194–212. Included in Other Criteria. Reprint: In Reflections on Art: A Sourcebook of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, edited by Susanne K. Langer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958, 1961. Reprint, with revisions: In Modern Essays in English, edited by Joseph Frank. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. “The Twin Prongs of Art Criticism.” Sewanee Review, 60 (Summer 1952), pp. 418–44.

book reviews “Shrinking Michelangelo.” Review of Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images, by Robert Liebert. New York Review of Books, June 28, 1984, pp. 41–45. UCP1 “Leonardo by Carlo Pedretti.” Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1975), pp. 86–89. “Velázquez: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Oeuvre by José Lopez-Rey.” Art Bulletin, 47 ( June 1965), pp. 274–94. “The Berenson Collection.” Harper’s Magazine, 230 (March 1965), pp. 154–55. “Art Books, 1961–62.” Harper’s Magazine, 225 (December 1962), pp. 103–10. “Art Books, 1960–61.” Harper’s Magazine, 223 (December 1961), pp. 87–91. “Four about Rembrandt.” Art in America, no. 4 (1961), pp. 88–91. “Art Books of 1960.” Harper’s Magazine, 221 (December 1960), pp. 106, 110, 112, 114, 116–20. “Professor Janson’s Donatello.” Arts Magazine, 32 ( June 1958), pp. 41–43. “Monuments of Romanesque Art by Hanns Swarzenski.” Arts Magazine, 30 (May 1956), pp. 43–45.

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“Caravaggio Studies by Walter Friedlaender.” Arts Magazine, 30 (October 1955), pp. 46–48. “Le musée imaginaire, c’est moi!” Review of André Malraux. Art Digest, 29 (April 15, 1955), p. 16. “The Alphabet of Creation by Ben Shahn.” Commentary, 20 (March 1955), pp. 310–12. “Modernity from Tombs and Temples” (recent books on Egyptology). Art Digest, 29 (December 1, 1954), pp. 20–21. “The Synagogue’s New Look: An American Synagogue for Today and Tomorrow.” Commentary, 17 (August 1954), pp. 170–72. “Undying Antiquity.” Review of The Survival of the Pagan Gods, by Jean Seznec. ARTnews, 52 ( January 1954), pp. 53, 73–74. “Marino Marini by Umbro Apollonio.” Art Digest, 28 (October 1, 1953), pp. 22–23. “Egypt in New York: The Scepter of Egypt by William C. Hayes.” Art Digest, 27 (September 15, 1953), p. 23. “Sculpture Since Rodin: Sculpture in the 20th Century by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie.” Art Digest, 27 (August 1953), pp. 22–23. “Isaac Kloomok’s Marc Chagall.” Judaism, 1 (April 1952), pp. 190–91. “Perspective Drawing” (animated short). Film News (April 1952), p. 6.

exhibition reviews “Deliberate Speed.” ARTnews, 66 (April 1967), pp. 42–59. “Month in Review,” a column on contemporary art in Arts Magazine, 1955–56: Twelve Americans. Arts Magazine, 30 ( July 1956), pp. 25–28. Raoul Hague included in Other Criteria. Fritz Glarner and Philip Guston. Arts Magazine, 30 ( June 1956). Included in Other Criteria. Recent Drawings USA. Arts Magazine, 30 (May 1956), p. 66. Included in Other Criteria. Franz Kline et al. Arts Magazine, 30 (April 1956), pp. 42–45. Included in Other Criteria. Julio Gonzalez. Arts Magazine, 30 (March 1956). Included in Other Criteria. Spanish translation: In Kalías (October 1990), pp. 97–101. Monet’s Water Lilies, Metropolitan Museum Fountain. Arts Magazine, 30 (February 1956), pp. 46–48. Included in Other Criteria. UCP5 Goldberg, Mitchell, Rivers, Rauschenberg. Arts Magazine, 30 ( January 1956), pp. 46–48. Revision of comment on Rauschenberg as letter to the editor: “Footnote.” Arts Magazine, 32 (May 1958), p. 9. Pollock’s first retrospective, Jules Pascin, Picasso’s Suite Vollard. Arts Magazine, 30 (December 1955), pp. 43–46. Pollock and Pascin included in Other Criteria. Reprint of Pollock: In Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, Reviews, edited by Pepe Karmel, pp. 81–83. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. De Kooning, Modern Sculpture, Morris Graves. Arts Magazine, 30 (November 1955), pp. 46–48. De Kooning included in Other Criteria.

“Bible-Age Relics and Jewish Art.” Commentary, 15 (August 1953), pp. 164–66. “Metropolitan Offers Modern Americans.” New Leader, February 5, 1951, p. 26.

letters to the editor “The King’s Cross.” New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, p. 62. “Max Ernst’s Blasphemy.” New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, p. 85. UCP5 “Your Teeth Are Showing.” New York Review of Books, March 29, 2001, p. 53. On Pacheco and Velázquez. Art Bulletin, 73 (September 1991), pp. 503–5. Letter re response to Carol Duncan on the Demoiselles d’Avignon. Art Journal, 49 (Summer 1990), p. 207. “What Did Cato Mean?” New York Review of Books, July 19, 1990, p. 53. “Saving the Last Supper.” New York Times Magazine, November 24, 1985, p. 162. “A Close Shave” (re beardless angels). ARTnews, 80 (April 1981). Reprint: In ARTnews, 91 (November 1992), p. 97. In support of Christo’s Gates project for Central Park, New York. New York Times, October 24, 1980, sect. A, p. 32. “Gerontophilia.” Art Journal, no. 3 (Spring 1973), p. 370. “Read Kolnik for Kollwitz.” Print Collector’s Newsletter, 3 (September–October 1972), pp. 81–82. “Debate with George Steiner.” Daedalus, 98 (Summer 1969), pp. 726–29, 791–93. “Footnote” (re Rauschenberg). Arts Magazine, 32 (May 1958), p. 9. “Apropros Huntington Hartford.” Art Digest, 29 ( July 1, 1955), p. 4.

other Interview for Jasper Johns audio guide, for “Jasper Johns: Gray” exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007–8. “False Starts, Loose Ends” (publication of talk given at the CAA Distinguished Scholar Award, 2002). Brooklyn Rail ( June 2006), pp. 16–20. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/06/art/leo. “The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting” (synopsis of 1982 A. W. Mellon Lectures). In A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Fifty Years, pp. 135–40. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/CASVA, 2002. “Jacob Kainen” (obituary). Art on Paper, 4 (November–December 1999), pp. 29–30. “Meyer Schapiro” (obituary). CAA Newsletter, May–June 1996, pp. 3–4. “Albert Elsen” (obituary). CAA Newsletter, November–December 1995. Response to “What Is the Meaning of Making a Painting Today with No Recognizable Image?” Tema Celeste, nos. 32–33 (Autumn 1991), p. 65.

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Statement re “The Power of Art.” Art Newspaper (October 1990), n.p. Reply to Paul Gardner, “What Would You Ask Michelangelo?” ARTnews, 85 (November 1986), p. 102. Double dactyl published in the second edition of Jiggery-pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, ed. Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, p. 119. New York: Atheneum, 1983. “Acknowledgments for a Book Not Yet Begun.” October, no. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 101–2. UCP5 Reply to John Gruen’s questionnaire, “Far-from-Last Judgments, or Who’s Overrated and Underrated.” Art News, 76 (November 1977), p. 120. “Ten Irreverent Rimes” (limericks on Old Master prints). Print Collector’s Newsletter, 5 (October–November 1974), p. 85. UCP5 “The Symbolic Process: A Colloquium.” Proceedings of the American Psychoanalytic Association colloquium, December 11, 1969. In American Imago, 28 (Fall 1971), pp. 206–7. Transcript of 1968 New York Studio School panel with Milton

Resnick, Mercedes Matter, et al. In Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School, pp. 213–32. New York: Middlemarch Arts Press, 2003. Tribute, in Leo Castelli: Ten Years, n.p. New York: Leo Castelli Gallery, 1967. “The Cappella Paolina.” One-hour TV program on Michelangelo’s last frescoes, filmed in the Sistine and Pauline Chapels. Broadcast on CBS-TV, Lamp unto My Feet, June 26, 1966, and February 26, 1967. “The Year Gone By: Part 1.” CBS-TV panel discussion, moderated by Ilka Chase. Broadcast December 20, 1959.

translations Mary, by Sholem Asch. Translated from Yiddish. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1949. Ashes and Fire, by Jacob Pat. Translated from Yiddish. New York: International Universities Press, 1947.

photo graphy credits

Figs. 1.5, 1.27. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski. Fig. 1.6. Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.7. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Tony Querrec. Fig. 1.8. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute, clarkart.edu. Fig. 1.10. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Franck Raux. Fig. 1.11. Nasjonalmuseet / Høstland, Børre. CC BY 4.0: https://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. Fig. 1.16. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Gérard Blot. Figs. 1.18, 1.20. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.21. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Patrice Schmidt. Fig. 1.22. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 1.23. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Ben Blackwell. Fig. 1.24. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 1.25. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski. Fig. 1.26. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Pavel Demidov. Figs. 1.29–1.34. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figs. 1.32, 1.34. Éditions Cahiers d’Art. Fig. 3.2. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figs. 3.3, 3.5, 3.11, 3.20, 3.29, 3.36. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. Figs. 3.6, 3.10. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Figs. 3.7, 3.17, 3.28. © 2023 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fig. 3.8. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute, clarkart.edu.

Fig. 3.13. Dallas Museum of Art. Fig. 3.16. © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 3.19. Bridgeman Images. Fig. 3.21. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 3.22. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 3.25. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 3.26. SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 3.34. Photography courtesy Denver Art Museum. Fig. 3.35. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski. Fig. 4.1. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figs. 4.2–4.3. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Archives Henri Matisse, all rights reserved. Figs. 5.1, 5.2. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photograph © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne. Figs. 7.1–7.3, 7.5, 7.10–7.14, 7.16–7.22, 7.24–7.25, 7.27–7.29. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Fig. 7.4. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photograph: Art Institute of Chicago. Fig. 7.6. © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 7.8. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photograph: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Fig. 7.9. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. Fig. 7.15. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photograph: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Artwork credit line: Gift of Steven and Alexandra Cohen and Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, Bequest of Gioconda King, by exchange, Anonymous Gift and Gift of Sylvia de Cuevas, by exchange, Janet Lee Kadesky Ruttenberg Fund, in memory of William S. Lieberman, Mayer Fund, Norman M. Leff Bequest, and George A. Hearn and Kathryn E. Hurd Funds, 2005. Fig. 7.23. © 2023 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 7.26. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski.

photo g raphy credits [214]

Fig. 8.1. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Figs. 8.2, 8.3, 8.6. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Fig. 8.7. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Philippe Migeat. Fig. 9.8. © 2023 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. Figs. 9.9, 9.11. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Figs. 9.10, 9.12. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photograph: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti / Bridgeman Images. Figs. 9.18, 9.31. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.22. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Hervé Lewandowski. Fig. 9.23. © Miguel Hermoso Cuesta. CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creative commons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode. Fig. 9.24. © Marsyasa. CC BY-SA 2.5: https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode. Fig. 9.25. © László Mátyus, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Fig. 9.26. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Fig. 9.27. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Fig. 9.28. bpk Bildagentur / Pergamon Museum / Ingrid Greske / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.30. Photography by Randy Dodson, © Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Fig. 9.36. © 2012 Christie’s Images Limited. Fig. 9.39. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Mathieu Rabeau / Adrien Didierjean. Figs. 9.40, 9.53. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Adrien Didierjean. Figs. 9.41–9.43. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 9.44. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.45. © 2023 Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Fig. 9.47. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.48. © 2023 The Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Cathy Carver, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Fig. 9.49. © 2023 The Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 9.50. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.51. SCALA / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.52. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. Photograph: Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas. Photo by Michael Bodycomb. Fig. 9.54. Courtesy of the George Petty Estate. Fig. 9.57. © 2023 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © 1998 Christie’s Images Limited. Figs. 9.59, 9.74. © Mark di Suvero. Courtesy of the Artist and Spacetime C.C. Fig. 9.60. © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.61. © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery. Photograph: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. Figs. 9.62, 9.63. © The Estate of Magdalena Abakanowicz, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York. Photo by Lance Brewer. Fig. 9.64. © 2023 Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS). Photo by David Heald. Fig. 9.65. © 2023 Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS). Fig. 9.66. © 2023 Estate of Alexander Archipenko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. Fig. 9.67. © 2023 Estate of Alexander Archipenko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of The Archipenko Foundation. Fig. 9.68. All Rights Reserved, Estate of Jacques Lipchitz. Photograph: bpk Bildagentur / Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg / Nationalgalerie / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Roman März / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.69. © Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa–Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Fig. 9.70. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Christian Bahier / Philippe Migeat. Fig. 9.71. Estate of José de Rivera, courtesy Gray Gallery, Chicago / New York. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.72. © 2023 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 9.73. © 2023 The Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 9.75. © 2023 George Rickey Estate, LLC / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Figs. 9.76, 9.78. © Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 9.77. Associazione Metamorfosi, Rome / Photo Scala, Florence / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9.79. © 2023 The Estate of Ronald Bladen, LLC / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

photo g raphy credits Fig. 9.80. © 2023 Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 9.81. © 2023 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Malcolm Lubiner courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Fig. 9.82. © 2023 The Estate of Anthony Caro. All rights reserved. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS / Artimage, London. Photo by John Riddy. Fig. 9.83. © 2023 The Estate of Anthony Caro. All rights reserved. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London. Figs. 9.84, 9.86. © The Estate of Grace Knowlton. Fig. 9.85. © The Estate of Grace Knowlton. Photograph: Richard Goodbody courtesy of The Newark Museum of Art. Fig. 9.87. © The Estate of Grace Knowlton. Photograph: Courtesy of Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN. Fig. 10.1. © 2023 Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved / DACS, London / ARS, New York. Photograph © 2012 Christie’s Images Limited. Fig. 10.2. © 2023 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Art Institute of Chicago, photo by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Inc., Rockford, Illinois. Fig. 10.3. © 2023 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York. Photo by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois.

Figs. 10.4–10.8. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Fig. 10.10. Photograph: William Charney. Fig. 10.11. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 10.12. © The Claes Oldenburg Estate, courtesy Pace Gallery. Fig. 10.13. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne. Fig. 10.14. © Gilbert & George. Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Figs. 10.15–10.17, 10.21. © Jeff Koons. Fig. 10.19. © Jeff Koons. Photograph: Jim Strong, New York. Fig. 10.20. © Wallace Collection, London / Bridgeman Images. Figs. 10.22, 10.33, 10.34. © 2023 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Fig. 10.24. © Jeff Koons. Photograph: Douglas M. Parker Studios, Los Angeles. Fig. 10.25. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 10.26. © Alinari Archives / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 10.27. © Jeff Koons. Photograph: Laurent Lecat. Fig. 10.28. © Farrell Grehan. Fig. 10.30. © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. Fig. 10.34. © Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 10.35. © 2023 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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i nde x

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations. Abakanowicz, Magdalena, 142 Backward Seated Figure, 144 Infants, 144 abjection, theory of, 201n18 Abraham (biblical), 188 Abs, Hermann J., 166 Abstract Expressionism, 74–75, 81, 84, 87, 90–91, 112, 200n6 (ch. 10) Acconci, Vito, Seedbed, 171 aestheticism, nineteenth century, 15 Alfieri, Bruno, 70–71 Allston, Washington, 193n21 anti-Semitism, 118–19 Apocryphal Gospels (Pseudo-Matthew, Gospel of Thomas), 67, 123 appropriation art, 83 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 189 Aragon, Louis, 198n16 Archipenko, Alexander, 143 Seated Figure, Modeling of Light, The Spirit of This Century, 143, 146 Woman Combing Her Hair, 146 architecture, Egyptian, 127, 175 Great Temple of Amun-Re, columns from, 126 architecture, Greek, 127, 145, 175 Parthenon, 126 plan of the Temple of Apollo, 129 plan of the Temple of Hera, 129 Temple of Apollo, Didyma, reconstruction of the entrance, 129 Ariosto, Ludovico, 4 Arma Christi (German woodcut), 172 art, commercial and low-art sources, 160, 165–66, 167–68. See also Koons, Jeff art, money and, 111–12, 113, 119–20, 166 art criticism, 155–83 (ch. 10) art-historical methodology, 42 artists as sources, 79 biographical, 36–38, 42, 65 erotic, 38–39, 41–42 formalist, and formal analysis, viii, xii, 8, 17–18, 22, 35, 42, 84, 98, 103, 113, 142, 163, 194–95n4. See also Greenberg, Clement psychoanalytic, 65 psycho-mythological, 43 sociocultural and -political, 35–36, 42. See also Haacke, Hans

artists’ marriages, unloved wives, 1–25 (ch. 1) Art Loss Register, 180 art market, 79–80, 156–57 Ashton, Dore, 160, 197n9 Augustine, Saint, 49, 58, 73, 172 Babel, Isaac, Red Cavalry, 168 Baker, Russell, 1 Bakwin, Michael, 180 Baldessari, John, 155 Barbi, Jorge, 200n13 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 34, 76 Barr, Margaret Scolari, 69–70 Bartsch, Adam von, 186 Basan, Pierre François, 187 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 155 Bataille, Georges, 168 Baudelaire, Charles, 4, 37 Bazalgette, Léon, 39 Beckett, Samuel, 20, 23 Beethoven, Ludwig von, First Razumovsky Quartet, 63 Bernard, Émile, 175 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 189 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 114 Binsenstock-Schmid, Elsbeth (wife of Holbein), 3 “Bitter Withy Tree, The” (Appalachian ballad), 67 Bladen, Ronald, X, 149, 149 Blake, William, 48–49, 101 Blum, Irving, 160 Bois, Yve-Alain, 191n7, 201n18 Bongard, Willi, 196n2 (ch. 6), 196n4 (ch. 6) Bonnard, Pierre, 12 Borges, Jorge Luis, Three Versions of Judas, 168–69, 171 Borromini, Francesco, xi, 69 Bosse, Abraham, 187 Botticelli, Sandro, xv, 104 Boudin, Eugène, 15 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 27, 156 Brach, Paul, xi Brancusi, Constantin, 143 The Kiss (1907–8), 145

in de x []

Brancusi, Constantin (continued) The Kiss (1916), 145 Braque, Georges, 187 Brecht, Bertolt, Beggar’s Opera, 168 Breton, André, 65–67, 198n16 Broad, Eli and Edythe, 155, 168 Brooks, Mel, 178 Browne, Thomas, vii Browning, Robert, 156 Burckhardt, Jacob, 127, 145, 150, 175 Cachin, Françoise, 5, 8 Cage, John, 78–79, 98–99, 197n14 Calder, Alexander, 145 Seven-Legged Beast, 147 Callot, Jacques, 187 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), 50 Caracalla (emperor of Rome), 114 Caravaggio Madonna of Loreto, 50–52, 52 paintings in the Cerasi Chapel, xi, xiv–xv Caro, Anthony, 145, 151–52 The Descent from the Cross (after Rubens), 151, 152 Sculpture Two, 151 Castelli, Leo, 69–71, 75, 78, 96 Castor and Pollux, 182 Cennini, Cennino, 193n21 Cézanne, Paul, xiv, 26–31 (ch. 2), 42, 60, 84, 156, 173–74, 175, 177, 179–81 marriage to and portraits of Hortense Fiquet, 8–9 works The Bathers (Chicago), 30–31, 31 Bathers (London), 28, 28–30 Five Bathers (Paris, owned by Picasso), 29, 29 The Large Bathers (Barnes), 26, 27–31 The Large Bathers (Philadelphia), 29–30, 30 Madame Cézanne, 9 Madame Cézanne, Erle Loran diagram of, 162, 162–65 Pitcher and Fruits (Boulloire et Fruits), 179, 179–80 Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 180, 181 Seated Woman in Blue, 8 Chagall, Marc, 75, 194n43 Chardin, Jean Siméon, 174 Chevalier, Frédéric, 194–95n4 Clemenceau, Georges, 13–15, 38, 59 Cleopatra, 80 Coates, Robert, 84 Cohen-Solal, Annie, 196n4 (ch. 6) Coleridge, Samuel, 21 Color Field painting, 83, 107 conceptual art, 83, 113, 118 Constructivism, 118, 154 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 59, 84 Courbet, Gustave, Sleep, 104, 105 Cousteau, Jacques, 60 Cranshaw, Robert, 101, 103 Cubism, 87, 135, 143, 175, 187 Dada, 198n16 d’Alemagna, Giovanni, St. Apollonia Destroys a Pagan Idol, 122, 123

Dalí, Salvador, Venus de Milo with Drawers, 123–24, 124 Dante Alighieri, 171 Danto, Arthur, 101–3 Daubigny, Charles François, 13, 37 Daudet, Alphonse, 15 Daumier, Honoré, The Connoisseur, 122, 123 David, Jacques-Louis, 104 Death with a Crossbow (German engraving), 20 Debussy, Claude, 50 de Chirico, Giorgio, 198n16 Degas, Edgar, 4–5, 28 Édouard Manet with His Wife Suzanne, 5 de Gheyn, Jacques, II, 187 de Kooning, Willem, 75, 79–83, 87, 91, 142 Clamdigger, 143 Seated Woman, 81, 81 Woman paintings, 74 Delacroix, Eugène, 4, 15, 37, 50 Delektorskaya, Lydia, 194n33 de Nittis, Joseph, 8 DFN Art Gallery, 176 Dickens, Charles, vii Bleak House, 50 Dickinson, Emily, 189 Diderot, Denis, 156 di Suvero, Mark, 140, 142, 145 Amerigo for My Father, 147 Hand Pierced (with Spike Bed on Wood), 142 Documenta 7 (1982), 114, 166–67 Doncieux, Camille (wife of Monet), 9–12, 9–15, 14, 22, 37–38 Donne, John, 21 Dorfles, Gillio, 70, 196–97n8 Dreyfus Affair, 42–43 Duberman, Martin, 98–99 Dubuffet, Jean, 75, 87, 168 Duchamp, Marcel, 75, 90, 94, 112, 118, 160, 163, 167–68, 169–70, 178, 199n5 Dürer, Albrecht, 2–3, 186 Agnes Dürer, 3 Mein Agnes, 2 Portrait of Agnes Dürer, 2 Self-Portrait, 2–3 Dying Gaul (Hellenistic sculpture), 176, 177 Elderfield, John, 18, 63 Eliot, George, 48–49 Middlemarch, 86, 194n33 Eliot, T. S., 74, 116 Éluard, Paul, 65–66 environmental art, 83 Erasmus, Desiderius, 48, 189 Ernst, Max, 65–67 (ch. 5) The Virgin Chastising the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: A. B. [André Breton], P. E. [Paul Éluard], and the Painter, xv, 64–65, 65–67 (ch. 5) Fiquet, Hortense (wife of Cézanne), xiv, 8–9, 193n14. See also Cézanne, Paul, works Flam, Jack, 16–18, 20, 63

inde x flatbed picture plane, xii, xv, 87, 91–92, 94, 96–98 Forge, Andrew, 39 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 80 Franklin, Benjamin, xiv, 1, 9 Franklin, Deborah, xiv, 1 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 112 Frey, Agnes (wife of Dürer), xiv, 2–3, 2–3 Friedlaender, Walter, vii, xii Friedman, Martin, 165 Fry, Roger, xii, 84, 163 Gabo, Naum, 145 Galatea (sculpture by Pygmalion), 41 Gargallo, Pablo, Great Prophet, 145, 146 Garland, Judy, 78 Gauguin, Paul, 28, 174 Gay Liberation, 158 Geldzahler, Henry, xi, 160 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 27 Giacometti, Alberto, 75, 84, 124–27, 129, 139–40, 142–43, 145, 153, 175, 182, 201n40 Four Figures on a Pedestal, 125 Reclining Woman Who Dreams, 124 Tall Thin Head, 124 Tall Woman Seated, 125 Gilbert & George, 168–70, 173 West End, 169 González, Julio, 145 Head, 137, 138, 139 Gopnik, Adam, 170, 177 Gowing, Lawrence, 15–16, 21 Goya, Francisco, 174 Greenberg, Clement, xii, 83–84, 86–87, 107, 156, 165 Greenfeld, Josh, 196n4 (ch. 6) Grehan, Farrell, 177 Gris, Juan, 198n16 Gros, Baron (Antoine-Jean), xiv, 174, 177, 183 Second Lieutenant Charles Legrand, 174, 175 Guardi, Francesco, 50 Guggenheim, Harry, 119 Guggenheim, Peggy, 119 Guggenheim Museum, 111, 118, 166 Guston, Philip, 75 Haacke, Hans, xiv, xv, 111–21 (ch. 8), 165–67, 173 Condensation Cubes, 112 Der Bevölkerung, 167 Manet-Projekt ’74, 166, 166 MetroMobiltan, 119, 119–20 Oelgemaelde: Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers, xv, 114–15, 114–16, 166–67, 177 Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, xv, 110, 111–14, 118–19 U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983, 116–18, 117 happenings, 98, 112 Harman, Jack, Reconciliation: The Peacekeeping Monument, 140, 141 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 15 Hearst, George, 1, 13 Hecht, Anthony, xiii, 188

Heine, Heinrich, 192n6 (ch. 1) Helmsley, Harry, 118 Henri, Robert, 168 Herbert, Robert, 35–36, 39, 48–50 Hess, Thomas B., 74, 81 Higgins, Edward, 70 Hind, A. M., 186 Hirst, Damien, xi, 158 Anaesthetics (and the Way They Affect the Mind and Body), 156, 156–57 Hoddeson, Joan, 69–70 Holbein, Hans, xv, 3, 13 Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and Two Elder Children, 3 Study of a Hand and Head for the Portrait of Erasmus, 48, 49 Hollander, John, xiii, 188 Hopps, Walter, 65, 73, 75–76, 102, 160 Hoschedé, Alice, 13, 37 Hoschedé, Ernest, 13, 37 Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 125–26, 172 Le baiser donné, 173 House, John, 48 Hughes, Robert, 96–97, 101, 103 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 15 installation art, 83, 150 Ipoustéguy, Jean, David, 142 Iversen, Margaret, 198nn20–21 James, Henry, 15 Jerome, Saint, 186 Jesus of Nazareth, 169, 188 John Paul II (pope), 201n24 Johns, Jasper, xii, xiv, 50, 69–71 (ch. 6), 77–79, 83, 84, 96, 102, 155, 157–58, 173, 179 Liar, 157 Shade, 197n10, 197n15 Target with Four Faces, xii, 79, 158, 159, 179 Joyce, James, vii, 112, 149 Ulysses, vii, 58 Judd, Donald, 116–17, 150 Untitled, 150 Kafka, Franz, 73, 102 Kandinsky, Wassily, 118 Khokhlova, Olga (wife of Picasso), 22–24, 23–25 Kiefer, Anselm, 186 kitsch. See art, commercial and low-art sources Klein, John, 16–17 Kline, Franz, 75, 87 Knowlton, Grace, 39, 152–54 Broken Sphere, 153 Brookline Maine 7 and 9, 153 Spheres, 152 Untitled, 152 Koons, Jeff, xiv, 163, 169–73, 176–78 advertisement published in Flash Art, 170 Bourgeois Bust—Jeff and Ilona, 173 Ilona on Top (Rosa Background), 171 Made in Heaven series, 171–72

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Koons, Jeff (continued) Michael Jackson and Bubbles, xi, 156, 176, 176–77, 178 Pink Panther, 174 Rabbit, 171 Red Butt (Distance), 172 Stacked, 170, 171 Korin, Ogata, 58 Koselleck, Reinhart, xiv Kosygin, Alexei, 122 Kounellis, Jannis, 86–87 Untitled, 86, 112–13 Krahmer, Gerhard, 128–29, 142 Kramer, Hilton, xi, 74–76, 106–7, 116, 160 Krauss, Rosalind, 101, 139, 200n8 (ch. 9), 201n18 Kunitz, Stanley, 158 Lear, Edward, xiii Leenhoff, Léon, 193n8 Leenhoff, Suzanne (wife of Manet), 4–7, 4–8 Léger, Fernand, 75, 198n16 Leonardo da Vinci, 82, 104, 189, 193n21 Leventritt, Frances, 197n15 Leventritt, Victor, 71 Levine, Steven, 39, 43 Lewis, Adrian, 101, 103 Lichtenstein, Roy, 111–12, 113, 120, 155, 160–66, 168, 170, 173 Aloha, 160 Female Figure, 161 Portrait of Madame Cézanne, 162, 162–65 Torpedo . . . Los!, 161 Zipper, 160 Lipchitz, Jacques, Acrobat on a Ball, 145, 146 Lomax, Alan, 67 Loran, Erle, 160–65 Lotto, Lorenzo, Andrea Odoni, 122 Lotz, Wolfgang, xi Louis, Morris, 87 Louis XIV (king of France), 114 Ludwig, Peter, 197n15 Magritte, René, Femme-bouteille, 142 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 4, 15 Manet, Édouard, 4–5, 8, 12, 37 Bunch of Asparagus, 166 Interior at Arcachon, 6 La lecture, 4 Madame Manet at the Piano, 6 Madame Manet in the Conservatory, 7, 8 Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa, 5, 7, 8 Olympia, 5 On the Beach, 5, 6 Self-Portrait with a Palette, 5, 8 Man Ray, À l’heure de l’observatoire—les amoureux, 137 Mantegna, Andrea, 199n5 Crucifixion, 29 Mantovano, Rinaldo, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, xv, 113–14, 115, 116, 167 Marini, Marino, Horse and Rider, 139, 140 Masaccio, 59

Master E.S., 186 Master I.B. with the Bird (Giovanni Battista Palumba), 187 Matisse, Henri, xiv, 1, 9, 12, 15–23, 75, 82, 87, 145, 171, 173, 182 human interaction, lack of, 61 marriage to Amélie Parayre, 15–18, 21–22 violin and, 63 works The Atelier of Gustave Moreau, 61, 61 Blue Nude II, 182 Conversation, 15–16, 16, 21 Dance, 61 Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), 16–17, 17 French postage stamp with two Blue Nudes, 182 The Green Line, 16 Interior with a Phonograph, 63 Joy of Life, 61 La japonaise: Woman beside the Water, 17, 17–18 Luxe, calme et volupté, 18, 18 Madame Matisse, xiv, 18, 19, 20–22 Music, 61, 62, 63 Music (in progress, photograph of ), 61, 62 Seated Nude, Back Turned, 173, 174 Matthew, Saint, gospel of, 14 Maupassant, Guy de, 39, 41 McKetta, Dorothy Jean, 196n4 (ch. 6) Mechthild of Magdeburg, 189 Meder, Joseph, 186 Menand, Louis, 71, 196n4 (ch. 6) Menil, John and Dominque de, 74 Merson, Olga, 18 Metro: International Magazine of Contemporary Art, 69–71 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 120 Michelangelo, 186 Bathing Soldiers, 28 Florentine Pietà, xi Last Judgment, 181 Medici Madonna, 65 Model of a River God, 148, 149 Roman Pietà, 123 sheet of studies, 82, 82–83 Milton, John, vii, 24, 103, 172 Minimalism, 112, 116–18, 145, 149–52, 152–54 Mirbeau, Octave, 39 Miró, Joan, 75, 87 Mitchell, Joan, 74 Mobil Corporation, 120, 200n11 (ch. 8) Mondrian, Piet, xi, 59, 87, 171 Monet, Adolphe, 35 Monet, Claude, xiv, 33–60 (ch. 3), 174 biographical interpretation of works, 36–38 Dreyfus Affair and, 42–43 erotic interpretation of works, 38–39, 41–42 forebear of postwar abstraction, 43, 45, 52 marriage to Camille Doncieux, 10, 12–14, 37 portraits of Camille Doncieux, xiv, 9–15, 22, 32–33, 37–38 sociocultural interpretation of works, 35–36 spatial conception, 52–53, 57, 59–60

inde x works Beach at Pourville, Sunset, 39, 40, 41 Camille, 9 Camille at the Window, 12, 12, 37 Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil, 12, 12, 37 Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, 11, 12, 37 Camille on Her Deathbed, xiv, 13–15, 14, 37–38 Canoe over the Epte, 53, 55 Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 37 The Four Trees, 43, 44, 57, 59–60 Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 35, 35–36 Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun), 39, 40, 41, 57, 60 La grenouillère, 54 Madame Monet on the Sofa, 10, 10, 37 Meadow with Poplars, 52, 53 Monet’s shadow on a pond (photograph), 43, 43 Morning Haze, 53, 55 Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1896), 45, 47 Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897), 45, 47 On the Bank of the Seine, 9–10, 10, 37 The Path through the Irises, 57, 57–58 Peonies, 45, 45 Poplars on the Epte, 45, 46 Poplars series, 42, 45, 57, 59–60 Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil, 36, 36 The Red Kerchief—Madame Monet, 10, 11, 37 Regatta at Argenteuil, 43, 44 Rouen Cathedral, Façade, 41, 41, 57 Rouen Cathedral, the Façade in Sunlight, 41, 42, 57 Rouen Cathedrals series, 39, 41–42, 57 The Seine at Giverny, Morning Mists, 45, 47 The Seine at Lavacourt, 45, 46 The Seine at Port Villez, 45, 47 Ships in a Harbor, 52, 54 Two Women among the Flowers, 53, 54 Vétheuil, 45, 46 Water Lilies (1914–26), 50, 51 Water Lilies (1916–19), 48 Water Lilies (Nymphéas), xii–xiii, xv, 34, 48, 50, 52, 58–60, 87 Water Lilies (Nymphéas) (1904), 56, 57 Water Lilies (Nymphéas) (1907), 51 Water Lilies: Green Reflections, 56, 57 Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk, 50, 51 Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son, 32 Woodgatherers at the Edge of the Forest, 52, 53 Monod-Fontaine, Isabelle, 21 Morgenstern, Christian, 199n45 Morisot, Berthe, 8 Morris, Robert, Money, 113 Motherwell, Robert, 75, 103 Munch, Edvard, 83

Panofsky, Erwin, 2 Parayre, Amélie (wife of Matisse), 15–18, 21–22 Passavant, J. D., 186 Pelli, César, 150–51 Penn, William, 188 performance art, 83, 112, 171 Petty, George, Gal in Black, 141 Pevsner, Antoine, 145 World, 146 Picabia, Francis, 198n16 Picasso, Pablo, xiii, 17, 23–25, 75, 87, 96, 135–37, 139, 175, 181, 182, 187 marriage to Jacqueline Rocque, 25 marriage to Olga Khokhlova, 23–25 works Bust of a Woman with Self-Portrait, 22, 23 Death’s Head, 135 Demoiselles d’Avignon, xv, 194n2 (ch. 2) Figure (Proposed Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire), 135 Guitar, 135, 136 Head, 136 Head of a Man, 136 Head of a Woman (Fernande), 136 Large Nude in a Red Armchair, 24, 24–25 L’etreinte, 24, 25 Little Girl Jumping Rope, 140 Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, 23, 23 Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 22, 23 Seated Woman, 135 Weeping Woman, 139, 139 Woman Seated in an Armchair, 23, 24 Yo Picasso, 33, 34 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 189 Piombino Boy, Archaic sculpture, 20 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 186 Pissarro, Camille, 50 Pius XII (pope), xiii Pleasanton, Faith, 197n10 Poe, Edgar Allen, “The Oval Portrait,” 14, 38 Pollock, Jackson, xii–xiii, 75, 87, 182–83 Echo: Number 2, 1951, 182–83, 183 Pop Art, xi, 75, 158, 160, 166, 200n6 (ch. 10) Poussin, Nicolas, 160, 174 Prose, Francine, 96 Proust, Antonin, 5 Proust, Marcel, 97 Prudentius, 194n1 (ch. 2) Pseudo-Matthew, Gospel of, 123 Puy, Jean, 18 Pygmalion, 41

Napoleon Bonaparte, 104 Newman, Barnett, 83, 87, 161, 180 9/11, 155–56, 158, 178, 178 Noland, Kenneth, 83

Rauschenberg, Robert, xii, xv, 73–109 (ch. 7), 173, 197n14 Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba II ( Japanese Recreational Claywork), 104, 106 All Abordello Doze 2 ( Japanese Recreational Claywork), 104, 105

Oldenburg, Claes, 77, 168 Giant Three-Way Electric Plug, 163, 164 Olitsky, Jules, 107

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Rauschenberg, Robert (continued) The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr), 108, 109 Bed, 94, 95, 96–98, 103 Bicyloid III, 98, 99 Breakthrough II, 98, 99 Canyon, 91, 92 Combines, xii, 74, 78, 81, 84, 98 Dirt Painting (for John Cage), 198n7 Drawer, 78 Erased de Kooning Drawing, 79, 79–83, 91 Growing Painting, 91, 91 Hymnal, 84 Japanese Recreational Clayworks, 104–6 The Lily White, 90, 91 Monogram, 98–99, 100, 101–3 Monogram (second state), 102, 102 Music Box (Elemental Sculpture), 75, 75 Overdraw, 92, 93 Overdrive, 88 Pilgrim, 91, 93 Pneumonia Lisa ( Japanese Recreational Claywork), xv, 104, 104 Satellite, 84, 85 Short Circuit (Combine), 78, 78, 81 Third Time Painting, 94, 94 Untitled (Combine), 74, 74–75 Untitled (Gold Painting), 198n7 Untitled (Red Paintings), 76, 77 Washington’s Golden Egg, 106–8, 107 Windward, 89 Winter Pool, 91, 93, 102 Raynor, Vivien, 198n9 Razumovsky, Count Andrey, 63 Reagan, Ronald, xv, 114, 116, 166–67, 177 Rembrandt, 80–81, 94, 187 Hundred Guilder Print, 187 Man Drawing from a Cast, 122, 123 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, xiv, 12, 28, 37, 156, 174, 181 Rewald, John, 194–95n4 Ribera, Jusepe de, Studies of nose and mouth, 137 Richier, Germaine, 139 Rickey, George, 145 Column VI, 147 Rimini, Francesca da, 188 Rivera, José de, Homage to the World of Minkowski, 146 Roberti, Ercole de’, Mary Magdalen Weeping, 139 Roberts, Robin, 67 Rocque, Jacqueline (wife of Picasso), 25 Rodin, Auguste, 28, 132–35, 142, 177–79 Figure volante, 134, 134 Jean d’Aire, 177–79, 178 La terre, petite modèle, 133 Les trois faunesses, 132, 133 Mouvements de danse, 132, 133 Three Shades, 132, 133 Torso, 133, 134 Torso (Study for Ariane without Arms), 132 Walking Man (L’homme qui marche), 133, 134 Rose, Barbara, 81, 96

Rosenberg, Harold, 34, 112 Rosenblum, Robert, 161, 170, 172, 177, 196n6 Rothko, Mark, xiii, 87 Rousseau, Théodore, 50 Rubens, Peter Paul, 152, 174, 181 Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, 181, 181–82 Rubenstein, Helena, 189 Rubin, William, 83 Ruskin, John, 50 Salatino, Kevin, 155 Salle, David, 155 Salmon, André, 21 Santa Claus, 65 Schjeldahl, Peter, 156, 172, 177 Scholem, Gershom, 102 Schwartz, Sheila, xiii Schwitters, Kurt, 87 sculpture, Egyptian, 127 Statue of the Steward Au, 127 Torso of a woman from Tell el-Amarna, 129, 130 sculpture, Greek, 125–29, 127–28 Athena fighting Gaia’s sons, Pergamon altar, 128 Battle of the Greeks and Amazons, Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, 128 bronze torso wearing a cuirass, 134 “The Budapest Dancer,” 130 Diadoumenos, Roman copy of a Greek bronze by Polykleitos, 127 Head of an Old Man, 131 Klio, Muse of History (Roman copy of Hellenistic original), 131 Peplos torso, 130 So-called Beautiful Head from Pergamon, 131 Timotheus, Nike Epidauros, 130 Segal, George, The Dancers, 123 Seiberling, Dorothy, 96 Selz, Peter, 158 Sembat, Marcel, 15 Serra, Richard, Stacked Steel Slabs, 150 Seurat, Georges, 28, 174 Shakespeare, William, vii, 21, 103, 106, 143, 149 Shapolsky, Harry, 112, 118–19 Shaw, George Bernard, Widowers’ Houses, 112 Shchukin, Sergei, 15, 61, 63 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 107 Sherman, Cindy, 155 Shiff, Richard, viii, 39 Silver, Kenneth E., 158, 198n9 Siza, Alvaro, 151 Smith, David, 139, 145 Aerial Construction, 138, 139 Hudson River Landscape, 138, 139 Stainless Network I, 147 Smith, Kiki, Blood Pool, 142, 143 Smith, Tony, 116–17, 148–49 Die, 148, 148–49 Playground, 148 Socrates, 9 Soupault, Philippe, 198n16

inde x Spurling, Hilary, 18 Staller, Ilona (La Cicciolina), 172 Steinberg, Saul Exit, 163, 164 Untitled, 49, 49 Stella, Frank, 79 Sterne, Lawrence, vii Stevens, Mark, 99, 103 Stevens, Wallace, 50 Still, Clyfford, 87, 161 Supergirl, 141 Swenson, Gene, 111, 165 Swift, Jonathan, vii, 176 Sylvester, David, 124–27, 175, 177 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 189 Tinguely, Jean, 198n16, 199n4 Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina, 25 Tomkins, Calvin, 80, 197–98n4 Trump, Fred, 118 Tucker, Paul, 34–36, 42–43, 49–50 Tucker, William, 151 Turner, J. M. W., 4, 50 Twombly, Cy, 103, 168, 183 Tzara, Tristan, 198n16 Uccello, Paolo, 1 Uncle Sam, 65 Updike, John, 66–67 Vadas, Ernö, Connoisseur (Budapest), 122, 123 Vail, Amanda, 198n16

Van Gogh, Vincent, 58, 174 Varnedoe, Kirk, 39, 168 Vasari, Giorgio, 1, 82, 98 Velázquez, Diego, 33 Juan de Pareja, 161–63 Venus de Milo, 122 Veronese, Paolo, 174 Vollard, Ambroise, 180 Waddell, Helen, 194n1 (ch. 2) Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 166 Warhol, Andy, 155, 168, 169–70 Weil, Susan, 78 Weill, Kurt, Beggar’s Opera, 168 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 50 White, Hayden, xii Wilde, Oscar, 178 William of Malmesbury, xiii, 188 William the Conqueror, 188 William the Silent, 188 Wittenborn, George, 197n10 World Trade Center, terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, 155–56, 158, 178, 178 Worthen, Amy N., 186 Wounded Gaul (Hellenistic sculpture), 177 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 112 Wyeth, Andrew, 81 Zelevansky, Lynn, 155 Zola, Émile, 4, 194–95n4

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