What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? 9780228000358

Table of contents :
Cover
What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?
Title
Copyright
Contents
1 Introduction: What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?
Part One Human Figures and Human Viewers: Introduction
2 Figuring History at the End of the Renaissance: Notes on Agnolo Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo
3 A Rococo Aesthetic: History Painting and the Self’s Embodiment
4 History Painting Redistanced: From Benjamin West to David Wilkie
Part Two History Painting in the Marketplace: Introduction
5 James Gillray’s The Death of the Great Wolf and the Satiric Alternative to History Painting
6 Historical Distance and Historic Doubts: Representing Napoleon in Exile
7 Landscape and the Problem of History: Thomas Cole and Anglo-Atlantic Modernity
Part Three History Painting after Modernism: Introduction
8 Myth, Melancholy, and History: Figural Dialectics and José Clemente Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization
9 History Painting after Conceptual Art
10 What Is the History in Contemporary History Painting?
11 Unwritten History: William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments, Piazza Tevere, Rome, 2016
12 Reimagining Global Modernity in the Age of Neo-Liberal Patronage: The History Paintings of Julie Mehretu
13 “Earth Death Pictures” as Contemporary History Painting
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History ma rtha la ngfo rd and sa ndra paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong

Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth

Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford

Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton

Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums Kirsty Robertson What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear

What Was History Painting

edited by mark salber phillips and jordan bear

and What Is It Now? McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 isbn 978-0-7735-5895-3 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5896-0 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0035-8 (epdf) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: What was history painting and what is it now? / edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear. Names: Phillips, Mark, 1946– editor. | Bear, Jordan, editor. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190132558 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190132566 | isbn 9780773558960 (softcover) | isbn 9780773558953 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228000358 (epdf) Subjects: lcsh: History painting. Classification: lcc nd1440 w53 2019 | ddc 758/.99—dc23

Contents

1 Introduction: What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? / 3

mark salber phillips

Part One Human Figures and Human Viewers Introduction / 27

jordan bear 2 Figuring History at the End of the Renaissance: Notes on Agnolo Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo / 29

stuart lingo 3 A Rococo Aesthetic: History Painting and the Self’s Embodiment / 50

susanna caviglia 4 History Painting Redistanced: From Benjamin West to David Wilkie / 67

mark salber phillips

Part Two History Painting in the Marketplace Introduction / 87

jordan bear 5 James Gillray’s The Death of the Great Wolf and the Satiric Alternative to History Painting / 90

cynthia ellen roman

6 Historical Distance and Historic Doubts: Representing Napoleon in Exile / 111

jordan bear 7 Landscape and the Problem of History: Thomas Cole and Anglo-Atlantic Modernity / 131

tim barringer

Part Three History Painting after Modernism Introduction / 153

jordan bear 8 Myth, Melancholy, and History: Figural Dialectics and José Clemente Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization / 160

mary k. coffey 9 History Painting after Conceptual Art / 182

james nisbet 10 What Is the History in Contemporary History Painting? / 204

dexter dalwood 11 Unwritten History: William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments, Piazza Tevere, Rome, 2016 / 215

michael godby 12 Reimagining Global Modernity in the Age of Neo-Liberal Patronage: The History Paintings of Julie Mehretu / 234

elizabeth harney 13 “Earth Death Pictures” as Contemporary History Painting / 254

mark a. cheetham Bibliography / 273 Contributors / 295 Index / 299

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What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?

1 Introduction What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? mark salber phillips But it seems to me that there can be no doubt that the great horizon of the past, out of which our culture and our present live, influences us in everything we want, hope for, or fear in the future. History is only present to us in light of our future. Hans-Georg Gadamer – 1966

The elements of what came to be codified as history painting did not materialize all at once, but emerged over five centuries of adaptation and renewal. Such is the longevity of this tradition, however, that it is hard to find an account that traces the full scope of its evolution – the anti-colonial images of William Kentridge (see Michael Godby’s essay in this publication) as well as Eugène Delacroix’s great figure of Liberty; Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (Fig. 1.1) alongside Kent Monkman’s reworking of the same image to memorialize the “Murdered and Missing” Aboriginal women of Canada (Fig. 1.2). Whether our primary interest rests in history painting’s early development or its supposed disappearance in the twentieth century, it seems impossible for any single account to encompass the complete history of history painting. To the contrary, given the ambition that characterizes this genre as well as its variability, what is most lasting is less a matter of specific subjects or conventions than a desire for the public representation of a society’s most significant memories and values. Every period cherishes a special blindness in relation to the virtues of its predecessor. Thus it is hardly surprising if in the great period of modernist abstraction, earlier art forms tended to be reduced to invisibility or re-baptized under new, more acceptable names. (Why is Guernica not widely celebrated as a history painting that brought new life to modernism?)1 In the late twentieth

1.1 Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin. 1604–06. Oil on canvas. Louvre.

1.2 Opposite Kent Monkman. Death of the Virgin (after Caravaggio). 2016. Acrylic on canvas.

century a number of artists revived practices reminiscent of earlier preoccupations – the return to the human figure, for example, along with an urgent concern for political and moral debate, the bold storytelling and large scale of much contemporary photography, the powerful ethical impulses of eco-art, the overt historicism of re-photography, the mix of visual and verbal motifs in some forms of conceptual art. These concerns continue in the early twenty-first century. Traditional forms of history painting these are not, and many are not paintings at all. (Can we call Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party a history painting?) Nevertheless, a good number of the issues they embrace suggest that the time is ripe to revisit the long history of history painting. Given all that has changed since the triumph of the modernist avant-gardes, how can we capture the prestige commanded by this genre, previously the grandest form of Western art, but now the most neglected? So much has changed in more than a century of experimentation that it seems impossible to imagine any real continuity, and yet it is just as hard to accept that none of the fundamentals remain, however expressed or re-worked. This is the dilemma that we confront when we try to grasp history painting’s long and varied tradition. With these challenges in mind we seek to enlarge the understanding of history painting in two ways. First, we present this enduring genre as one that built its self-understanding on the highest ambition, initially with reference to the ancients but later in confrontation with the contemporary. Second, we recognize its global reach and mission and its appropriation to the needs of postcolonial societies. In so doing, we expand the notion of “painting” to comprehend modern and contemporary media. The central question we ask is: what was history painting and what is it now?

What Was History Painting? A Brief Introduction To begin, I want to offer three closely connected observations. First, it is important to recognize that history painting in its classical form was an expression of an early modern society, with all the investment in hierarchical order that this implies. Whether we think of royal splendour or ecclesiastical pomp, of courts of law or the dictates of the academy, every element was tuned to an exquisite understanding of the principal of rank. Second, as the most dignified of all the visual arts, history painting held a position of unique privilege. Other genres were known by the objects and materials that governed their labour. In the language of the day, their skills were considered

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“mechanical.” By contrast history called on powers of human intelligence, thus earning its place among the “liberal” arts. What gave history its elevation could be compared to the dignity of the court or the church – a quality of innate preeminence that was as natural to history painting as nobility was to the crown. As we noted earlier, the full range of the genre across nations and historical periods has not been addressed in any single work. There are, however, many fine studies of individual artists and schools that should be read as a complement to what we offer here.2 Third, though history painting continued to claim this position well into the nineteenth century, the system of the arts was by no means static in a world governed by massive changes in economy and social class. Nonetheless the notion of distance does not lose its usefulness in the face of these changes. On the contrary, it becomes all the more necessary as an instrument for examining new complexities in the evolution of the arts – hence the idea of re-distancing as a way to track changing patterns of representation. Like many cultures, early modern Europe felt a deep desire to canonize its origins. One expression of this impulse lies in its attention to gods and heroes, most notably through its rich visualization of the life of Christ and the saints, as well as a selective mix of figures taken from the Hebrew Bible, classical myth and history, and the great literary epics, both ancient and modern. These exacting subjects provided the essential iconography of the history painting tradition, distinguishing its elevated repertoire from the more private or commonplace subjects associated with lesser arts. A nicely compact definition of the genre comes to us from a seventeenthcentury English commentator, drawing upon French sources of the time. “History painting,” wrote William Aglionby, “is an Assembly of many Figures in one Piece, to Represent any Action of Life, whether True or Fabulous, accompanied with all its Ornaments of Land-skip and Perspective.” History’s essential quality was its dignity or elevation, expressed in Aglionby’s description in terms of a particular emphasis on the painter’s dexterity and good judgement – especially the deceptively easy way in which he marshals a variety of actors without sacrificing the harmony of the scene.3 This sense of mastery (“any Action of Life”) combined with pleasure in nature (“Land-skip and Perspective”) hints at the author’s pleasure in the perfections of Poussin as well as the influence of André Félibien (Fig. 1.3), the great administrator and biographer who canonized the historical genre.4 So too the invitation to embrace the widest scope of narrative in an art that made little distinction between themes taken from the Gospels or Hebrew Bible and those belonging to Greek and Roman myths.

Introduction

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History painting was never without divisions or controversies. The debate over line verses colour for example (“Poussiniste” and “Rubeniste”) occupied first the Italians, then the French, and later the British in turn, always without final resolution. Not so the doctrine of the hierarchy of genres, which became the signature of history painting under the eye of Félibien and his successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unsurprisingly in an art form tied to a celebration of rank, history painting modelled itself on the highest forms of courtly distinction. The result was an institutionalization of taste, especially in genres intended for public display that carried on with little dissent for 200 years. Every art form was allotted its proper place in this elaborate hierarchy – landscape above flowers, the human likeness above the animal, groupings of figures above individual portraits, the dignity of historical and mythical narration above anything low or commonplace. All this would have been easier to manage amongst the idealizations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where the “True” and the “Fabulous” did not appear to clash, but rather to support one another in harmony. However, it

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seems to me indisputable that the gradual loss of interest in myth and allegory put real pressure on an art form that – for whatever reasons – seemed increasingly impatient with overt fables. (More subtle symbolism was quite another matter.) By the following century, indeed, though the idea of history painting continued to flourish, Aglionby’s easy mix of truth and fable had long since disappeared. In this sense the eighteenth century can be seen as a middle ground in which artistic hierarchy remains strong, but often without the buttress of allegory – or at least without the more explicit devices of an earlier age. The impact of Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770), for example, has been attributed to its much discussed contemporaneity, ignoring the two great symbolic strokes that connect the drama of battle to the cycle of time – the ageless majesty of the Indian warrior, observing the passage of empires, as well as the prayerful grouping of disciples giving witness to the scene of noble sacrifice (Fig. 1.4). Wolfe himself lies at the centre, posed in the manner of the dying Christ, his slumped body cradled by his followers, while his unseeing eyes – already lifted to eternity – symbolize a death worthy of a Christian martyr.

1.3 Opposite Nicholas Poussin. The Death of Germanicus. 1628. Oil on canvas. Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

1.4 Benjamin West. The Death of General Wolfe. 1770. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Canada.

West’s achievement is to combine two very different moments – one fully contemporary, the other classically timeless – without any sense of disjunction. By contrast, a rival work, James Barry’s Death of General Wolf [sic] (1776), lacks the required elevation and leaves the lifeless Indian on the ground (Fig. 4.1). In consequence Barry’s work is not only less dramatic, but also smaller in meaning.

History Painting and Distance To deepen the discussion of history painting I want to introduce an important conceptual issue, which I will call the problem of distance. I hope to show not only that the management of distance was key to classic history painting, but also that the need for re-distancing became essential to further changes in the evolution of this genre in subsequent periods. Before anything else, however, I need to offer a brief explanation of what I mean by using these terms. In common usage distance refers to things that are remote or removed, but this only gives us one dimension of this important concept. Distance is far from being merely the linear measure to which it is commonly reduced, nor is it confined to space and time. On the contrary it suggests a much wider range of directions. Whatever our point of reference, distance is a relational term, open to a broad variety of affects and experiences: love and hate, for example, as well as indifference, disdain, admiration, and memory. Given this breadth and complexity, I offer the flexibility of a heuristic of distance rather than the fixity of a theory as a way of approaching history painting’s long history. Every representation of history, I argue, whatever its genre, incorporates elements of making, feeling, acting, and understanding – or, to alter the terms, questions of formal structure and vocabulary, affective impact, moral or political interpellation, and broad intelligibility. Thus a more ramified analysis of historical representation needs to consider problems of historical mediation as they relate to four fundamental distances that shape our experience of history and time. First, we must examine the forms, media, and conventions that give histories their structures of representation, including their aesthetic design and rhetorical address. Second, we should give attention to the work’s affective character, whether (for instance) historical conditions are made accessible to us through cool appraisal or lively emotions. Third, we need to scrutinize the “history’s” implications for action, whether the summons it issues is primarily political, religious, or ethical in nature. Fourth comes the work’s fundamental assumptions

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regarding understanding or intelligibility. These ideas guide historical practice and provide the conceptual grounds on which it depends. Combining in various ways to shape our experience of history and the social, these four overlapping, but distinguishable distances – form, affect, summoning, and intelligibility – provide an orientation to some of the central problems of historical representation. In this more complex meaning, distance enters into all the ways a narrative works to bridge the then-and-now of history, including its formal structures, its affective and ideological demands, and its claims to truth or understanding. Nonetheless, to draw out the full potential of this idea requires a further step. In ordinary speech, “distance” refers to a position of detachment or separation: chronologically a “then” that is remote from “now.” In relational terms, however, these binarisms dissolve into a continuous gradation made up of all positions from near to far. Affect, to make an obvious point, can take many forms: sometimes the warmth of intimacy, other times cool detachment or even an ironic smile. Similarly, understanding, so often identified with objectivity and abstraction, also operates through insights won at close range and absorbed in the finest detail. Redefined in this way, distance becomes the entire dimension of representation rather than one extremity or limit. This leaves “distancing” or “distantiation” to designate movements toward positions that are comparatively remote or detached. What matters is to recognize that all historical representations mediate our engagement with the past, though their distances vary both in type and degree.5 This approach to distance has wide application, but its range and flexibility give it a particular value for an art form like history painting. As a genre associated with high art, history painting is commonly assumed to be uncompromisingly rigid, yet despite its ancient genealogy and lofty ambitions it has proved capable of surprising adaptation and renewal. I would argue that its longevity lies in large part in the capacities of artists to manipulate and vary these four fundamental modes of distance. In practice, to be sure, we do not encounter them in isolation. Rather, the real world will always be experienced as a combination of elements. Nonetheless, it seems useful to be able to distinguish the varied aspects of distance in order to understand how in a given historical moment artists and their societies identify what is most meaningful in historical experience. What I am seeking, I hope it is clear, is the breadth and malleability of a heuristic rather than the rigidity of theory.

Introduction

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Nineteenth-Century Revisions: New Meanings for History As already noted, to the extent that baroque and neo-classical history painting concerned “historical” subjects, these were largely drawn from Christian and classical narratives rather than secular events. The nineteenth century did not abandon these themes altogether, nor did it forgo history painting’s traditional duty to elevation and public life. Yet there was an unmistakable shift away from allegorical devices and timeless images towards more secular themes and common experience – a re-distancing that gave history painting a sense of the historical that is much closer to its present meaning. Like other currents in European life, history painting was becoming historicist in a way it had never been before. From many points of view this embrace of historicism brought new strengths to history painting, expanding its range and audience and enriching its themes, in much the same way that it also inspired the historical novel and the opera. For the first time, we might say, history and what was often called “historical painting” became close cousins, with losses as well as gains for the artistic tradition. Secular nationalism brought a closer, more comfortable relationship to the state, encouraging new avenues of patronage while expanding history painting’s traditional role as the voice of public art. And yet there was reason to fear that the more history painting attached itself to historical factuality, the harder it might be to sustain the old claim to elevation. This potent combination of secular nationalism and historicism gave history a new complexion, easing some difficulties, but aggravating others. Nationalism expanded the scope of public art and added new sites for display – hospitals, municipal buildings, and museums – to a field that had once been the monopoly of princes and bishops. For Protestant Britain especially, with its fear of Catholic ritual, religious sensibilities were appeased by this surge of national celebration. Hence, too, the powerful counter-thrust of the Nazarenes and later the PreRaphaelites, who sought to revive sacred history as a subject for painting and to protect it in some measure from the threat of secular historicism. The portents of change appeared in a variety of forms, but I have room to mark only a few. One rather unusual witness can be found in the writings of Prince Hoare, an English playwright and sometime artist whose Epochs of the Arts (1813) called for government patronage at a time when the great and the powerful showed little interest in this sort of public expense. More remarkably he glorified the achievements of commerce: “It presents to view, not only the heroic, the martial, the ambitious prowess of men, but their domestic enjoyments also and refinements … Every benefit that has been derived to mankind, every good that has been

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1.5 David Wilkie. Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary of Thursday, June 22, 1815, Announcing the Battle of Waterloo. 1822. Oil on canvas. Wellington Museum, Apsley House.

communicated, every [variety of] wealth that has been imported, increases the claim of this country to renown. And what praises can be recorded of Commerce, which do not enrich the fame of England?” “The Commerce of England,” he concluded, “is become the general link of human intercourse.”6 By comparison to Prince Hoare’s vision of a pact between commerce and the state, David Wilkie’s reworking of history painting holds to the ordinary. Wilkie’s career has often been divided into two distinct phases: first an earlier manner characterized by the genre paintings of his youth, including his best known work, The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch; later a more florid style influenced by his travels in Spain and a deeper interest in history painting (Fig. 1.5). The effect is not only to draw a clear line between two moments of Wilkie’s career – one characterized by genre painting, the other by history – but also to build this distinction on the traditional view of history painting, with all its attendant assumptions of hierarchy. An alternative approach would soften the divide between history painting and genre, while expanding the romance of history to include a wider range of lives,

Introduction

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both high and low. As it happens, the father of this more expanded vision of history – albeit in another genre – was a fellow Scot as well as a friend of Wilkie. Even without this personal connection, however, it would seem right to associate “The Author of Waverly” with an artist who could paint The Letter of Introduction (1813) or The Cotter’s Saturday Night (1837). Nor would readers be likely to miss the influence of Scott’s historical fictions on Wilkie’s powerful rendition of the Preaching of John Knox Before the Lords of the Congregation 10th June 1559 (1832), a great addition to the history painting tradition now unfortunately in ruins. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the redistancing I have in mind can be felt in a straightforward comparison between Wilkie’s celebration of the Waterloo victory and Benjamin West’s quasi-sacral treatment of the British triumph in Canada a half a century earlier. As Wilkie’s title makes clear, The Chelsea Pensioners tells its story without any overt reference to the traditional gestures of heroic action so common in history painting. Neither Wellington nor the battlefield is there to be seen, only the Gazette held up in the bright sun for all to read. Instead the scene is occupied by a variety of old soldiers, now long retired from service, along with a medley of wives, food sellers, and shops, as well as an unpleasant caricature of an avaricious Jew whose only interest is in selling his goods, whatever the occasion. In all this, Wellington’s victory is by no means forgotten. On the contrary, his triumph is represented rather than witnessed and the celebration is offered to all. The effect is a redistancing that permits the inclusion of the infirm and the humble, while still commemorating the great. (For a close antecedent we would have to look back to the retched onlookers lining the edges of Hogarth’s Pool of Bethesda – itself a history painting of a most unusual kind and very far removed from the spirit of West.) Wilkie’s affect leans towards a muted tone – one reason perhaps why the strength of his painting has not always been appreciated. In Eugène Delacroix’s painting on the other hand the romantic spirit of the times mixes perfectly with the elevated demands of the history painter, giving his art a sense of the whole that is not often achieved. An early work, The Barque of Dante (1822), stayed close to the pure spirit of the history painting tradition in an image that is both sacred and poetic. What followed was The Massacre at Chios (1824), a work that depicts a scene of such naked cruelty as to rival Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814). Much of Delacroix’s later work, however, like much of nineteenth-century history painting altogether, took its inspiration from literary texts. In some respects, this search for new themes was no more than a natural continuation of history painting’s old habit of incorporating religious and classical stories, but Delacroix’s highly wrought narratives mark an increasing engagement with secular themes distinct from earlier

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traditions. We may debate, for example, whether he intended The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero, or his Death of Sardanapulus, as political attacks on lordly power, but we can be sure that both paintings were mediated by the writings of Lord Byron, not by verses from scripture or a quotation from Ovid. We may prefer other favourites, but in so brief a discussion one painting holds our attention: Liberty Leading the People (1830), a grand-scale evocation of the July Revolution of 1830 (Fig. 1.6). Delacroix’s bold painting is at once more immediately contemporary and overtly symbolic. The foreground is strewn with the dead, but the fighters are drawn from every class – evidence of a new, more democratic age. Still more arresting is the figure of Liberty herself, a woman as fully majestic

1.6 Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Oil on canvas. Louvre.

Introduction

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as traditional history painting required, albeit of an unaccustomed class. She strides through the carnage around her without the slightest hesitation, a solidly built creature from the life of the streets who is also – somehow – the classically clad symbol of the spirit of the nation. Liberty is a great history painting, fully epic in its scope and ambition. Yet it is also a work whose elements leave us aware of contradictions not evident in the smoother transitions of The Death of General Wolfe. By dint of sheer forcefulness, it seems, Delacroix has succeeded in saving history for the epic, thus continuing (and enlarging) the career of history painting in the nineteenth century. Even so, we must not overlook the shift in the character of history painting that complicates our admiration for this painting and its successors. Simply put, Delacroix’s powerful work speaks to the continuities of the history painting tradition, but also to the new role that historicism had assigned to the painting of history – a different matter, it soon becomes clear, from the ancient art we confusingly call history painting.

History Painting Today Twentieth-century modernism has not been kind to history painting, though it is arguable that many continuities remained – the widespread revival of classicism after the First World War (including much of Picasso’s work), the powerful murals of Diego Rivera, the enigmatic canvases of Max Beckmann, Henry Moore’s Londoners taking shelter in the Tube, and Paul Nash’s “Totes Meer” (1940–44). In short, from Stanley Spencer to Philip Guston, Jacob Lawrence, or Jeff Wall, artists of many schools and dispositions continued to be beholden to narrative forms that spoke to an engagement with history. To trace these connections would require a great deal of research without necessarily bringing us closer to the central question I want to raise. If, as seems clear, important features of nineteenth-century history painting continued to thrive in the twentieth century this finding might not be enough to convince us that there is still a living tradition in the present. And if, to the contrary, the evidence for such a tradition seems weak, are we satisfied to say that this proves that no such tradition is still viable? These questions, of course, are deliberately speculative, but no less interesting for that reason. This being the case, I want to conclude by examining a small body of work that can be seen as forwarding a contemporary revival of this ancient genre.

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1.7 Anselm Kiefer. Iron Path. 1986. Oil, acrylic, and emulsion with olive branches. Private collection.

1. anselm kiefer and gerhard richter. When we speak of history painting in the second half of the twentieth century, two names are always put forward: Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. For all the liberating influences coming from abroad (abstract impressionism, Pop Art, the experiments of Robert Rauschenberg) the signature of history painting in this period was surely a determination to confront the histories we have created for ourselves – and who would know these histories better, or feel them more acutely, than the generation of young Germans who came of age after the Second World War? Such at least is the burden we feel contemplating the converging tracks of Kiefer’s Iron Path (Fig. 1.7), or the smiling face of Richter’s Uncle Rudi, proudly dressed in his Nazi uniform (Fig. 1.8). Of the two, Kiefer seems closest to earlier traditions, in that his work is capable of genuine grandeur as well as considerable grandiosity. As a committed modernist he sought out unusual materials – straw for example – along with new forms and effects. Lettering became an integral feature of his work, along with borrowings from the poetry of Paul Celan that gave voice to the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Most of all we are forced to experience the bleakness of the fields, bruised and blackened and devoid of any sign of the human, though we have no way of knowing whether we are to imagine an eventual return to fertility.

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1.8 Gerhard Richter. Uncle Rudi. 1965. Oil on canvas. Lidice Gallery.

1.9 Opposite Judy Chicago. The Dinner Party. 1974–79. Ceramic, porcelain, textile. The Brooklyn Museum.

Against Kiefer’s extraordinary ambition (witness his construction of La Ribaute), Richter seems happier with a more measured affect, giving voice only occasionally to more explicit forms of commentary. His famous technique of “blurring” is intended to open the imagination, but it is also a kind of distancing – indeed a distancing several times over – that tells us something about the stance of the maker. “The painting,” he explains, “needs to reflect the mystery, and, if possible, amplify it.”7 In other hands this repeated device might come to seem simplistic, but for Richter at his best it becomes a way of keeping in view a diffi-

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cult memory and intensifying its resonance. And when the subject is something as charged as the suicide of the Baader Meinhof gang or the destruction of the Twin Towers we are grateful for a mind that holds back from careless sensation, leaving us free – as history painting does – to think on the wider frame. 2. judy chicago. Here I want to insert a familiar work, though not one often cited in this context. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is widely known as a quintessential expression of the feminist movement of the 1970s (Fig. 1.9). Chicago’s creation takes the form of a large triangular table with seating for thirtynine luminaries, ranging in time from ancient goddesses to Georgia O’Keeffe. The mixture of the mythic and the modern, of the fabulous with the fabled, is of course deliberate. Not only does it unite the entire gender in one undivided moment, it also stamps upon all an elevation appropriate for heroes. There is symbolism, too,

Introduction

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in the handiwork that decorates the table settings, but without question what has drawn the most attention is the bold representation of female genitalia that stands for the female body. Taken literally, The Dinner Party cannot be called a history painting, at least not a history painting that the eighteenth century would have recognized. Nonetheless the likeness is unmistakable. Witness its imposing formal arrangement, its elevated feelings, its urgent summoning to a cause, its evident didactic mission. It even realizes William Aglionby’s definition of history painting in its easy combination of myth and history. But perhaps the best measure lies in the responses of admirers and critics – and there have been plenty of both. Should we find The Dinner Party inspiring or largely bathetic? Does The Dinner Party summon us to cherish the grandeur of history painting, or run from its excesses? 3. dexter dalwood is a British artist of a younger generation who combines the Anglo-American coolness of David Hockney’s California with Peter Doig’s attraction to the exotic – and like both he is a painter of great beauty. Where he seems different, however, is in his unapologetic mix of pop culture and broad intellectual reach, a feature of his work that lends both accessibility and depth to the “embedded reference” he regards as an essential feature of history painting. If not exactly the heart of the work, embeddedness is what we might call its lively intelligence – an element of a history painting that I would characterize as offering intelligibility. As might be expected of a modern history painter, Dalwood carries us to recent events and public places – The Poll Tax Riots (2005), Nixon’s Departure (2001), The Brighton Bomb (2006). Yet, as drawn as we may be to these images, we are never allowed the artifice that painting once thrived on – the illusion that we are confronting an unmediated truth. That is why the buildings are left empty of a human face, why the horrific crimes of Milosevic are represented only by a dark and empty field, why under the beauty of the Bay of Pigs there is a swelling current of darkness and fear, but also, in the foreground, a fragment of a work by Picasso (Fig. 1.10). “The viewer must use their imagination to complete my images,” Dalwood explains, “so I create images that trigger memories, or play upon images they may already have in mind about certain events. I like the idea of painting something that you may know a little about … but that you don’t necessarily have a specific image for.”8 One more thought. It is not difficult to see the public significance of The Bay of Pigs, but what is to be done with the parade of minor celebrities – named but faceless – in a series of empty dwellings that recur in his paintings? The blank view of the Betty Ford Clinic, for example, or the corrupt banker partly visible

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1.10 Dexter Dalwood. Bay of Pigs. 2004. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery London / Hong Kong.

under Blackfriars Bridge. In the eighteenth century the human presence was one of the essential features of history painting, but here the reverse seems true. Indeed, the empty rooms of his imagination are among of the most striking features of Dalwood’s work. As witnesses of memory and most often of death, these rooms carry forward a repetitive experience of loss. Awake and alive the names might have retained some individuality. Instead it is their disappearance that is noted, binding each one to the same conclusion. Singly these deaths might not have amounted to much, but rolled out serially, like a filmstrip, they become the unfortunate record of their time. 4. kent monkman. If one of the great themes of nineteenth-century history painting was Western European nationalism, many of the same tools have been adapted to the uses of a powerful anti-colonial critique – a movement going back to Diego Rivera, Jacob Lawrence, and Wilfredo Lam, and continued in Kara Walker, William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibara, and many others.

Introduction

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One of the most fascinating of these figures is Kent Monkman, an Indigenous Canadian artist of great wit and versatility. Like so much anti-colonial work, Monkman’s paintings are often staged as reversals of Western conventions of power. In The Academy, for example, a Native figure taken from Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe is represented in the centre gazing at the Laocoön, while two settlers (the founders of the Art Gallery of Ontario) are left to look on from the margin. Similarly in The Daddies Canada’s “Fathers of Confederation” are seated before Monkman’s nude alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, in a pose suggestive of a model in an art academy. Monkman’s thrust has always been anti-colonial, but a recent exhibition demonstrates his intent to rewrite history more directly. In a powerful manifesto he declares history painting to be fundamental to his work as an artist. In The Scream (2017), for example, he represents the tragedy of Canada’s Residential School policy by confronting us with images of children torn from their parents’ arms by priests and nuns, aided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Equally contemporary in its message, although drawing on a much earlier source, is his

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1.11 Opposite Antonio Gisbert Pérez. The Execution of Torrijos and His Companions on the Beach at Málaga. 1888. Oil on canvas. Museo del Prado.

1.12 Ford Madox Brown. The Last of England. 1855. Oil on wood panel. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Death of the Virgin (After Caravaggio) (2016), a reworking of the great seventeenthcentury painting and a moving evocation of another shameful episode in the country’s racial history: the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Monkman should be left to speak for himself. Referring to a recent trip to the Prado he reports that he was “unexpectedly transported” by The Execution of Torrijos and His Companions by Antonio Gisbert (Fig. 1.11). “Over many years of looking at and studying great paintings … never had a painting reached out across a century to pull me into the emotional core of a living experience with such intensity. It felt as though Gisbert had sent a message into the future, a passionate defence of freedom and a critique of authoritarianism. I was humbled by the effect this deeply political work of art had on me … I could not think of any history painting that

Introduction

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conveyed or authorized Indigenous experience into the canon of art history … Could my own painting reach forward a hundred and fifty years to tell our history of colonization of our people?”9

Conclusion This brief foray into new directions of history painting suggests the need to return one more time to the heuristic of distance, giving emphasis for the moment to its usefulness in understanding the evolution of genres, rather than on the qualities of particular modes – form, affect, summoning, or intelligibility. In practice, of course, the two issues overlap. After all, the long history of history painting would have been unthinkable without the genre’s capacity for transformation – always supple and frequently subtle. Too often we hold to a simplistic understanding of such traditions, as if nothing already established could be expected to absorb new meanings, but to the contrary, much of my attention to distance and re-distancing comes from a conviction that we need to give weight to the broad spectrum of engagements, rather than fixing on one. Instead of reviving old debates about whether Wilkie can be called a history painter, for example, it might be productive to consider the fluency of genres and ask what kind of history painter he was? The change of emphasis brings new freedom to the task, inviting us to look closely at both eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury art without demanding that one conform to the other. So too can we embrace the complex mix of historical realism and divine symbol in Ford Madox Brown’s Last of England – the simple bundle of cabbages at the back of the boat, the unpleasant look of the passengers, the child’s tiny hand barely visible under the mother’s shawl, the contrasting moods of the two parents, the religious implications of the tondo form in an image of mother and child (Fig. 1.12). In his defence of this painting Brown commented with some degree of frustration: “This painting is in the strictest sense historical.”10 By ordinary standards, of course, the remark seems doubtful. Families driven to destitution are not usually associated with history painting. Nonetheless Brown’s claim to history is deep and serious – a justification for his vehement tone, as well as for the pathos that joins mother and child in ancient symbolism. Bolstered by this reference to the Holy Family – if only as symbol, not as creed – The Last of England summons us to honour these unfortunate emigrants, while setting aside distinctions of class for the sake of a bond that is universal. In other

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circumstances we might suspect sentimentality in the affective force of the image, but here the tiny hand completes the quasi-sacred character of the scene – its manner of combining the formal strengths of the composition with the deep understanding (call it elevation or intelligibility) suited to an idea that claims to be historical “in the strictest sense of the word.” When brought together in this fashion, the ancient and the modern seem to merge, creating a necessary redistancing without compromising the fundamental modernity of the everyday. Was The Last of England the last of history painting as well? Conventional wisdom might say yes: surely history painting was nearing its end. (After all, who now talks about history painting in the “strictest sense of the word”?) Indeed, Brown’s emphatic defence of his art as a “history” would seem incongruous if measured against the elevated standards of Félibien, West, or even Delacroix. It is only in recognizing the requirement for redistancing that a still larger horizon is made available. History painting drew much of its strength from its alliance with the dignity of the public realm – initially vested in church and monarchy, now modified by the instruments of the secular state. The attractions of elevation did not suddenly disappear, but Brown is one of a number of examples of a growing movement toward a more troubled or demotic vision. “What made you take such a very ugly subject,” Ruskin is quoted as asking of another painting. “Because it lay outside of a back window,” the artist replied angrily, leaving the room.11 The traditional link between history painting and idealization continued into the twentieth century – witness the powerful influence of the Mexican muralists, or the richly displayed feminism of Judy Chicago – mixed in both cases with a radical populism new to the genre. For other groups of artists, however, the direction taken by Kiefer, Richter, Dalwood, and Monkman has seemed more telling. Diverse though they are in relation to their interests and styles, these artists have found strength in the “ugly subject” that Ruskin decried, but Brown embraced. What the future will hold for this form of history painting we cannot possibly know, but in a moment when abstraction has surrendered its dominance and history once again seems omnipresent, it may be time to set aside the old questions about the disappearance of history painting and ask once again what kind of history painting it is.

Notes 1 There are important exceptions to this pattern, but they tend to qualify the recognition in different ways. Robert Hughes, for example, regarded Guernica as “the last great history painting,” while Herschel Chipp declared it the most important history painting of the

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twentieth century. (Quoted in Russell Martin, Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece that Changed the World, New York: Penguin, 2012.) My point, however, is that, far from being the last, the genre has a continuing history. 2 See for example, Wolfgang Stechow, Rubens and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Oskar Bätschmann, Nicholas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990); Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stephen Bann et al., Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey (London: National Gallery London, 2010); Stephen Bann and Stéphane Paccoud, L’invention du passé : Histoires de cœur et d’épée en Europe, 1802–1850 (Paris : Hazan, 2014); Christopher Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s La Bataille D’Eylau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Roy C. Strong, Painting the Past: The Victorian Painter and British History (London: Pimlico, 2004); Ann Uhry Abrams, The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand-Style History Painting (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985); Patricia Mullan Burnham and Lucretia H. Giese, Redefining American History Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Leo Costello, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012); and David Green and Peter Seddon, eds, History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 3 Aglionby, Painting Illustrated. 4 Pace, Félibien’s Life of Poussin. 5 This brief account of the distance heuristic is partially extracted from my “Introduction” to On Historical Distance, 6–7. 6 Hoare, Epochs of the Arts, 331–2. 7 Schneede, Gerhard Richter: Images of an Era, 20. 8 Berning, “Artist Dexter Dalwood on How He Paints,” Guardian. 9 Monkman, “Brochure Forward,” 3. 10 Brown made this statement in the catalogue for his 1865 exhibition. Quoted in Prettejohn, “Ford Madox Brown and History Painting,” 243. 11 Ruskin was criticizing Madox Brown’s An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead Scenery in 1853, quoted in Treuherz, Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer, 164.

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PART ONE

Human Figures and Human Viewers jordan bear

The study of history painting has been impeded by a number of misunderstandings, but perhaps none as fundamental as the confusion that has dogged the very definition of “history.” From 1435, when Leon Battista Alberti deployed the Latin historia (“story”) to refer to a narrative image with many figures, to the consecration of history painting in academic doctrines two centuries later, the concept had been enlarged to include works that Alberti would never have imagined, let alone encouraged. Yet the seed of ambivalence is present even in Alberti’s canonical explanation of the objectives of historia. While he proposes the painter’s command of narrative as his central criterion, the expression of narrative coherence depends, for Alberti, upon mastery of the human figure, and of the ways in which those individual figures relate to one another and to the story their forms help to convey. By the time of the High Renaissance, these two dimensions of successful history paint-

ing would become impossible to reconcile, since the standing of the artist was increasingly dependent upon his identity as a godlike creator of the human form. Stuart Lingo details in his study how this persona demanded such an emphasis on the articulation of figures that it threatened to marginalize completely the edifying narratives that were the nominal rationale for many prominent commissions. This danger was most fully realized in works of Mannerist art, such as Agnolo Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, where contorted naked bodies ostentatiously compete for the viewer’s attention. As Lingo argues, Bronzino offers us a “witty unraveling of Albertian paradigms,” daring his viewers to resolve an unresolvable conflict at the core of history painting’s initiation. Even from this incipient phase of the genre’s development, immutable didactic ideals competed with the particular demands and possibilities of changing constituencies.

For all the potency of the analogy of the Renaissance painter to the Creator, the creative process that Alberti mandated remained attentive not only to the intentions of the artist, but also to the effects that paintings achieve on their viewers. Indeed, he declared that a painting properly made would “reveal itself to be so charming and attractive as to hold the eye of the learned and the unlearned spectator for a long while with a certain sense of pleasure and emotion.”1 It was not until the turn of the eighteenth century, however, that this aesthetic of sensory pleasure would supplant didacticism as a central goal of history painting. As Susanna Caviglia articulates in her essay, one of the most consequential changes in the genre during this period was precisely a shift in the conception of its viewers. While the traditional aims of moral instruction through the representation of virtuous exemplars presumed an audience in a state of passive receptivity, history painting beginning in the Regency of Louis XV often invited its viewers to participate actively in a phenomenological experience. Situated amidst the mirrored, sparkling interiors of elegant private spaces, history painting was reinvented to offer a sensory engagement commensurate with an emerging bourgeois sensibility. Such innovative history paintings, which implicated and even solicited their audiences so directly, risked lowering themselves from their elevation into the baser world of the everyday. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, this quotidian realm was increasingly the domain of historical representation. The success of historical texts and

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images was ever more linked to their production of a past populated with recognizable objects, figures, and places. Several British painters committed themselves to reconciling an idiom of grandeur with the new prestige of the mundane. As Mark Salber Phillips demonstrates in his contribution, painters from Joshua Reynolds to David Wilkie had to modulate the “positions” in which they located their viewers, alternately drawing them close or distancing them, affectively and physically. Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1822), whose commission by the Duke of Wellington mandated a “parcel of old soldiers at the centre, perhaps outside a public house, chewing tobacco and talking over old stories,”2 interlaced the varying modes of painting the past that were competing for dominance at the time. Wilkie made historical representation itself the subject of his hybrid essay, and the responses it garnered illuminate the pressures on, and the staying power of, the tradition. Throughout its formation, history painting had been regularly reconceived to accommodate new social and political configurations – a mutability that would become its hallmark in the ensuing centuries.

Notes 1 Alberti, De Pictura, Book II, 2. 2 Penrose, The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 214–15.

2 Figuring History at the End of the Renaissance Notes on Agnolo Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo stuart lingo

In a volume of essays on history painting, it appears natural to begin where history painting itself appears to have begun: in the Renaissance. A credible account of the rise of history painting could open with a reading of the new gravity and sensitivity to human motivation that mark the narrative frescos created by the great Florentine painter Giotto around 1300; consider the increasing art theoretical preoccupation with the pictorial “historia” or “istoria” from the early fifteenth century; and arrive at the mature narrative works of Raphael, so important for discussions of history painting well into the nineteenth century. Yet such an account, however compelling, skirts pressing questions. Much modern art history has operated with the assumption (tacit if not explicit) that history painting as a genre is predicated on the representation of edifying narrative dramas in an elevated style; this assumption informs the account above. But how developed was such an understanding during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the term “history painting” was not yet explicitly employed? Indeed, how comprehensive is it for later centuries? And was this, or any other vision of history painting, expressly delineated in the period as a distinct pictorial genre? In posing such questions we encounter a surprise; there are few sustained considerations of them in Renaissance studies. The term history painting is frequently invoked, but generally in passing and in the context of other investigations: of period understandings of perspective, for instance, or of pictorial style and composition, or, critically, of the figure and its expressiveness. Most modern specialists seem hesitant to hazard overt definitions of “Renaissance history painting,” or to scrutinize its development closely. This

may reflect in part the academic prejudice against history painting and its putative associations with power that has prevailed with too little interrogation for too long. But it may equally register an intuition that, while high narrative art was praised and prominent during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some fundamental investments of period art and art theory lay elsewhere. It is this particular question that I pursue in what follows, and to do so, I focus not on Raphael – as might be anticipated in a volume on history painting – but on the circle of Michelangelo, whose artistic commitments complicated the fashioning of straightforward didactic narratives. If one goal of the present volume is to reconsider our inherited assumptions concerning the possibilities and parameters of history painting, beginning with the later Renaissance and the circle of Michelangelo allows us to recover ways in which these assumptions were confused and contested from their origins. Insofar as we view “history painting” as the elevated representation of edifying narrative, one could argue that it finds its fundamental articulation in Leon Battista Alberti’s vigorous assertion of the primacy of the “historia” in his On Painting of the mid-1430s, in which he insisted in a pithy if enigmatic phrase: “the historia, not the colossus, is the greatest work of the painter.”1 It is generally agreed that Alberti’s little book constitutes a polemical and epochal call for a new kind of painting. Yet it remains challenging to clarify exactly what Alberti intended by the term with which he is so strongly associated, for he never offers a programmatic definition, instead describing aspects of composition and appropriate figure types and praising a heterogeneous group of subjects and works of art as effective historie. While some of these are clearly dramatic narratives, and could reinforce an assumption that Alberti’s conception of historia was already predicated upon the august representation of biblical or classical dramas, his examples also include allegories (exemplified in the famed excursus on the Calumny of Apelles) and the Three Graces alongside what we would recognize as historical narratives, or indeed narratives at all. This has led some scholars to conclude that the clear delineation of a theory of history painting would depend upon an articulation of pictorial genres and hierarchies that remained inchoate until well into the sixteenth century. Strikingly, this later sixteenth-century urge to theorize boundaries more rigorously seems to have been critically motivated by post-Tridentine ecclesiastical efforts to better circumscribe parameters for the representation of sacred history, at a moment when it became evident that inherited conventions of medieval sacred narrative art could no longer be taken as givens in the wake of Michelangelo’s experiments.2 The intellectual historian Anthony Grafton has clarified Alberti’s investment in the Ciceronian oratorical concept of historia as edifying narrative; and just as Alberti asserted that the historia was “the greatest work of the painter,” so too had

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Cicero called it the “supreme work of the orator.” But Grafton also makes clear that Alberti deliberately departed from Ciceronian parameters by melding the genres of historia and poetry where Cicero had insisted on their distinction.3 Alberti would register this slippage explicitly in his invocation of the theme of Narcissus regarding his reflection in the pool as the mirror of painting itself. This poetic image from the realm of myth is neither an evident narrative nor a history. Yet in the Italian version of On Painting, Alberti terms it a “storia.” In Alberti’s contemporary Latin version, however, it is a “fabula”: a poem, a myth, a “fable.”4 Grafton’s conclusion, that for Alberti the historia is finally a cerebral image melding concepts from rhetoric and poetics, centred on impressive human figures engaged in some kind of action (but not necessarily a “history”), and ideally of significant scale and for public display, will prove particularly revealing when we consider Michelangelesque painting.5 Beyond these considerations, it could be argued that Alberti’s position as the originator of a precocious theory of history painting is additionally complicated by a bifurcation of focus within his text. On the one hand, the historia is envisioned as the supreme goal of painting, rather than the “colossus”: the monumental figure, presumably the culmination of sculptural achievement. On the other hand, however, Alberti devotes exceptional attention to the painter’s need to perfect the representation of lifelike figures and focuses his analysis of pictorial composition on the creation and relation of individual figures, through whose gestures and expressions the significance of the historia is apprehended.6 This potential tension between the elaboration of individual figures and the cultivation of comprehensive compositional and narrative unity – only implicit in Alberti – became explicit in Michelangelo’s time, when a powerful current in the developing sixteenth-century myth of artistic greatness assimilated the artist ever more closely to the divine Creator. As the character of Michelangelo was made to assert in Francisco de Hollanda’s Dialogos em Roma (1538), “good painting is nothing other than a copy of the perfections of God.” In the same passage, de Hollanda’s Michelangelo insists on the human figure as the greatest of these perfections, and critiques Flemish painting as compromised by its excessive devotion to representing lesser elements of the material world: “fabrics and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadows of trees.”7 This passage has been much discussed, but what has not been noted is the manner in which de Hollanda effectively reverses Alberti. The ultimate goal of painting has now become the imitation of God’s supreme creation, the human figure. What Alberti called the colossus – now implicitly realized in the monumental figures of Michelangelo – threatens to claim pre-eminence. From this vantage, it is less surprising than it might first seem when Michelangelo’s

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contemporary biographer, the artist-historian Giorgio Vasari, writes that the prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Ceiling “is a figure which, when well studied, can teach all the rules of good painting.”8 Vasari’s much-quoted encomium of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (Fig. 2.1) both exemplifies this developing pre-eminence of the figure and links it explicitly to Michelangelo’s investment in the nude: “It is enough for us to perceive that the intention of this extraordinary man has been to refuse to paint anything but the human body in its best proportioned and most perfect forms and in the greatest variety of attitudes, and not this only, but likewise the play of the passions and contentments of the soul, being satisfied with justifying himself in that field in which he was superior to all his fellow-craftsmen, and to lay open the way of the grand manner and the painting of nudes, and his great knowledge of the difficulties of design; and, finally, he opened out the way to facility in this art in its principal province, which is the human body.”9 Vasari’s more general view of the achievements of modern art is complex; he would praise different qualities, for instance, in Raphael. And he obviously understood that the Last Judgment was a grand sacred historia; indeed, immediately before this passage, he noted, “I will not go into the particulars of the invention and composition of this storia, because so many copies of it … have been printed, that it does not seem necessary to lose time in describing it.” Ironically, he would shortly do just that, offering a vivid description of what Michelangelo had achieved when he “imagined to himself the terror of those days.”10 Yet even as Vasari turns in the following pages to an ekphrasis of the fresco, he continues to focus not on the composition as a whole but rather on the power and persuasiveness of particular figures and figure groups, and on their expression of human passions and the concomitant effect on the viewer’s emotions. It is not that composition and narration are ignored; what is telling is rather where the emphasis falls, where the pinnacle of artistic reflection and achievement appear to be located. Just after the unveiling of the Last Judgment in 1541, Nino Sernini, an agent of the Duke of Mantua, sent an excited report regarding the fresco to his lord. Sernini’s letter already exhibits an even more univocal emphasis on the centrality of the artful figure, with none of Vasari’s consideration of the effectiveness with

2.1 Opposite Michelangelo. The Last Judgment. 1535–42. Fresco. Sistine Chapel.

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which these figures reveal their character and passions. Tasked with obtaining a copy of the fresco for the duke, Sernini laments, “I have found no one with enough courage to draw … that which Michelangelo has newly painted as it is a large and difficult work, and contains more than five hundred figures of a kind that to depict only one would, I think, make painters think twice.” Having proceeded to disparage early attacks on the nudity of many of these figures with what seems a rather cavalier phrase – “in scarcely ten of so great a number can one see immodesty” – Sernini then remarks approvingly how Cardinal Cornaro had tacitly answered the critics. The cardinal had not dwelt on the fresco’s theological orthodoxy, nor on the force and emotion with which its powerful figures responded to the final judgment, the achievement highlighted repeatedly by Vasari. Rather, “the reverend Cornaro, who was [there] a long time to look at the fresco put it well, saying that if Michelangelo would give him a painting of only one of those figures he would pay him whatever he asked, and he is right, because to my mind one cannot see these things anywhere else.” This, as Sernini concludes, is because “it is known that Michelangelo put all his efforts into making imaginative figures in diverse attitudes.”11 Such thinking inflected artists’ conceptions of ambitious narrative art in a manner that encouraged the elaborate interlaces of complex figures that articulate many “Mannerist” compositions, in which clear narration is subordinated to the perfection of the actors and the intricacy of their interrelations. It is commonly remarked that the mid-sixteenth century saw not only the ideation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, but also the rise of ever more centralized, proto-absolutist forms of government in both ecclesiastical and secular institutions. While Mannerist art can be read as a court style visualizing the sophistication and power of the new regimes, its investment in amplifying the variety of figural forms and complicating the imbrication of figure and narrative could easily frustrate the desire for ideological clarity frequently shared by both prelates and princes. Indeed, the ecclesiastical critics of Michelangelo – so maligned in art history – perceived this acutely, and their attacks on his art extended well beyond mere aversion to the nude to point up how the focus on artful bodies could undermine reflection on the fashioning of instructive narratives of sacred history.12 In the dedication letter of his 1564 Dialogue on the Errors of Painters concerning Istorie, a sustained polemic against the new art of the body and Michelangelo in particular, the cleric Giovanni Andrea Gilio complained explicitly that “modern artists” invest such effort in filling their putative historie with “twisting” (sforzate) figures that they “think little about doing the subject of their story, if they consider it at all.”13

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Historia and Its Subversions The developing debates around narrative, decorum, and the place of the figure in this period offered one means of approaching a largely unarticulated but profound difficulty, which stemmed from an uncomfortable intersection between the demands of purposeful narrative art and the new myths of the power of the artist and the artistic imagination. If the artist could become a godlike creator, an emulator “of the perfections of God,” it followed that the human figure must be the apex of the artist’s creation, as it was of God’s. Extending the analogy, when figures by these “divine artists” became actors in narratives, an implicit consequence was that they – like those of God – could attain a measure of what we might term “free will.” This autonomy of the figure constituted an intrinsic investment of artists in the mould of Michelangelo. But perceptions that the liberty of the Mannerist body had become excessive emerged as a leading preoccupation of those who feared its potential to confuse or even undermine the fundamentally teleological imperatives of religious or political narratives, and who wished art once again to assume its traditional function as the dutiful illustrator of those imperatives.14 These issues are crystallized and perhaps even self-consciously staged in one of Agnolo Bronzino’s final paintings, the massive Martyrdom of San Lorenzo for the basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence (Fig. 2.2). A ducal commission, Bronzino’s fresco could be envisioned as a Medici-sponsored spectacle of historia in Michelangelesque figural vocabulary. But it has confused and disturbed viewers from its unveiling in 1569 until the present. In the guise of an homage to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Bronzino created a compositional thicket of figures that appear to actively embody those characteristics most critiqued in Michelangelo’s fresco. Nudity is foregrounded, artifice is privileged over clarity, and sacred history is contaminated by other discourses, specifically poetic discourses: this latter issue would prove of particular concern for Gilio as he delimited parameters of sacred history painting, as we will see.15 Moreover, whatever Michelangelo’s transgressions, Bronzino appears to have purposely exceeded them. While Michelangelo had laboured to maintain throughout his fresco that elevated style Vasari hailed as “la gran maniera,” Bronzino overdetermined his historia with figures of allegory, with portraits from the contemporary world, with the juxtaposition of ideal and unideal figures, and with varied genres and levels of poetry, comingling the epic with elements that can only be described as burlesque. I have recently remarked that Bronzino discreetly confirmed the destabilizing nature of his intentions by means of a clue in the right background, where a knot

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2.2 Agnolo Bronzino. The Martyrdom of San Lorenzo. 1565–69. Fresco. Basilica of San Lorenzo. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

of bystanders gawks at a colossal statue of Hercules and a woman is encouraged to gaze up at the giant’s genitalia, ineffectually obscured by his garland of golden leaves (Fig. 2.3). Florence had a strong tradition of snide, subversive responses to public sculptures, exemplified in the vituperation heaped upon Baccio Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus, a heavy-handed Medicean commission for the Piazza della Signoria.16 It may be no accident that Bronzino’s fictive colossus represents Hercules, and employs a style generically reminiscent of Bandinelli’s. The most suggestive comparison for Bronzino’s invention, however, is a burlesque literary satire that involves Michelangelo’s David, which faced Bandinelli’s Hercules at the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio and was itself freighted with Herculean associations. Niccolò

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Machiavelli’s Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere – “Statutes for a Company of Pleasure” – offers a witty parody both of religious confraternities and of the secular compagnie in which men from varied classes, bound by a reputation for ingenuity, socialized together and often ideated extravagant creative projects. Machiavelli’s parodic compagnia is co-ed, and pursues sexual escapades more vigorously than either spiritual or cultural exercises. One of its statutes forbids female members from wearing unduly obstructing clothes, and stipulates that violators will be taken to the Piazza della Signoria and forced to scrutinize Michelangelo’s David closely.17 While the bawdy point of the joke is obvious, David’s assets, still the subject of titillating tourist postcards today, were at the time obscured by a garland with twentyseven gilded leaves.18 The analogous garland putatively covering Bronzino’s Hercules has lost most of these leaves, leaving the giant’s somewhat diminutive manhood largely exposed to the staring woman’s bemused gaze. Based on the tradition of Florentine burlesque responses to public sculpture that had flourished during the first half of the sixteenth century, Bronzino’s vignette hidden in plain sight offers discerning viewers a way of reading his other Michelangelesque nudes that threatens to undermine the Martyrdom’s official status as an authoritative narrative for the Florentine church and the Granducal regime. Indeed, Bronzino – an accomplished poet himself – seems even to intimate a witty unravelling of Albertian paradigms both for a good historia, and for an appropriate “colossus.” While Bronzino’s ostensible subject is the martyrdom of a saint, we are introduced by the peering woman and her companions into a decentring extra-official reading of a particular figure that models an alternate mode of engaging the fresco. Once our viewing is thus redirected, we become aware of how the straining, contorting figures exhibit themselves to our gaze; and given the official historia, we struggle to understand why so many of these figures are nude, including courtiers of the tyrant, like the imperious character striding forward near the head of St Lawrence, who has donned a stylish contemporary hat and grasped his baton of command for the occasion but seems to have forgotten the rest of his costume. Here Michelangelo’s ideal nude is contaminated with fashion and the everyday, and conversely the courtier is stripped of his appropriate habit. This and related figures draw the particular ire of “Il Vecchietti,” the elder interlocutor in Raffaello Borghini’s art critical dialogue Il Riposo, which was published in Florence in 1584, just fifteen years after the unveiling of Bronzino’s monumental painting. In a preliminary reassessment of Il Riposo I have argued that Borghini’s dialogue has too often been read one-dimensionally; it presents distinct, often divergent voices, and the varied perspectives of the four friends are not neatly integrated by an authorial voice at the conclusion of the text.19 But it is

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2.3 Agnolo Bronzino. Detail of The Martyrdom of San Lorenzo. Scala /Art Resource, NY.

certainly true that Vecchietti is repeatedly scandalized by what he perceives as lapses in decorum in contemporary religious art, and he opens his assessment of Bronzino’s Martyrdom with a pointed attack on the courtiers with no clothes: “Bronzino, who felt himself to excel in making nudes, represented the emperor, who directs the torment of the martyr in the frescoed historia of San Lorenzo, surrounded by his barons [who are] completely nude, or with few clothes: a thing that is most inappropriate for persons who serve great princes.”20 Vecchietti’s choice of target is revealing. While he echoes Gilio in implying that Bronzino’s pride in “making nudes” led him to transgress the conventions and decorum appropriate to the historia he recounts, what seems to scandalize him most is a perception of political indecorousness. Despite the fact that he identifies the historia’s subject as hagiographic, Vecchietti’s first preoccupation is that the dignity due the state is threatened by Bronzino’s wilful representations of its authorities. This unexpected shift of the scandal of the nude from the religious and ecclesiastical realm to the social and political tacitly reveals some of the operations of Bronzino’s probing invention. Vecchietti, perhaps subconsciously, appears to have taken the cue of the woman gazing at the manhood of Hercules and realized that the fresco’s ostensibly noble “state-sponsored” nudes may have been opened to entropic and counter-official readings.

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The Active Body and the Power of Art Bronzino’s motives for such pictorial subversion remain unclear, and it is by no means evident that overt political subversion was intended. As I have argued in a recent essay, however, Bronzino does seem to have been invested in an increasingly embattled vision of the Florentine artist – based in part on Michelangelo – that resolutely privileged the inventive imagination, even if this came to sit uncomfortably with the manner in which powerful political or ecclesiastical patrons wished to instrumentalize works of art for their purposes.21 In such a reading, Bronzino’s fresco is a dramatic rearguard action in defence of what Alexander Nagel has termed a quality of “indeterminacy” in much ambitious earlier sixteenth-century painting. This development was encouraged by the contention evolving around 1500 that painting could be a poetry and a philosophy that demanded sustained contemplation. While visually heterogeneous, works marked by pictorial indeterminacy tended to defamiliarize and pare away the conventions and iconographies through which painting had traditionally made its meaning transparent. Nagel argues that Giorgione’s so-called Three Philosophers (Fig. 2.4), for instance, is structured so as to recall an Adoration of the Magi. Yet the holy figures that would clarify the composition as an identifiable religious narrative are absent, leaving the viewer to undertake an excavation of pictorial conventions in which “the painting casts the viewer’s activity as a form of philosophical inquiry.”22 As Nagel stresses, Giorgione’s transformation of assumed expectations means that his “philosophers” become “no longer personages in a Christian story but figurations” of associative ideas. While Giorgione’s wise men are not nude, the picture ultimately comes to be about them as figures rather than functioning principally as a narrative in which they play predictable roles. Such art, Nagel contends, privileges the imaginative power associated with the fantasia, which was at once increasingly valued in the later fifteenth century as the potent image-making faculty of the brain and feared for its labile and irrational nature; over-reliance on the fantasia risked what even a period poet feared could be “the ruin of the soul.”23 Initially, Bronzino’s monumental public fresco appears far removed from Giorgione’s self-consciously idiosyncratic, private painting. In the first place, Bronzino positions the saint we are to venerate exactly where the most punctual Tridentine ecclesiastic would wish: in the centre of the composition. Yet as we have seen, Vecchietti was keenly aware that Bronzino’s artful figures might generate entropic associations and destabilize appropriate iconographical coding. He proceeds from his attack on the nude courtiers to worry about figural types and genres, fretting about the fact that alluring female allegorical personifications

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mingle indiscriminately with historical actors in the fresco’s foreground. Interposing themselves between beholders and the saint, they threaten both to obscure the clarity of the narrative and to distract the devout. And then there is Saint Lawrence himself. While his position may satisfy traditional assumptions regarding the composition of religious paintings, what are we to make of the way his exposed body recalls not only Michelangelo’s Adam from the Sistine Ceiling – an appropriate citation, perhaps – but even more directly the Venus of the Venus and Cupid that Pontormo had painted from a Michelangelo cartoon, and which Vasari had described in a letter as “such hot stuff” (Fig. 2.5)?24 And if we attempt to 2.4 Giorgione. The Three Philosophers. 1506. Oil on canvas. Kunsthistorisches Museum. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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sidestep this unsettling evocation of Venus by privileging the evocation of Adam, why do we find that the life-giving gesture of God the Father in the great Sistine fresco has been reprised in the death-giving gesture of the tyrant? Art historians might wish to rationalize this disquieting tissue of citations as merely an extreme instance of the over-heated Mannerist art of reference.25 And one could certainly contend that the assimilation of Lawrence at once to Venus and to Adam visualized something of the saint’s celestial perfection through the exceptional artfulness and preternatural beauty of his body, formed from the pictorial marriage of two canonical figures designed by the artist many Florentines viewed as the “master of masters.”26 Nonetheless, the destabilization wrought through the purposeful misprision of the Hercules colossus by characters within the fresco itself models other, less comfortable possibilities. Moreover, the fact that discovering this counter-official “key” presupposes an inquiring viewer who carefully considers even apparently marginal background figures points up once again that approaching the Martyrdom as a painting that “casts the viewer’s activity as a form of philosophical inquiry” hinges repeatedly on the close reading of particular figures and their associative valences. Insofar as Bronzino’s painting can appear to privilege the artifice of bodies above straightforward narrative expectations, it resonates with a monumental Florentine work from the beginning of the century that also exemplifies the quality of indeterminacy Nagel is at pains to delineate: Michelangelo’s now-lost cartoon for the Battle of Cascina.27 While Bronzino’s fresco is certainly a response to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, as is generally claimed, the Martyrdom’s tapestry of twisting, overdetermined nudes seems almost intended to provoke an additional comparison to the frieze of acrobatic figures in Michelangelo’s great cartoon. Furthermore, the very theme of Michelangelo’s “historia” – nude men with heroic physiques struggling to pull on modern clothing – appears reprised both in homage and parody in Bronzino’s officious courtier, nude but for his cap. Yet despite Michelangelo’s idiosyncratic composition and choice of dramatic action – which displaces the expected focus of a battle narrative onto a marginal scene of soldiers who strip for a refreshing swim only to hear the alarm of the enemy’s approach – his grand nudes tend to evolve from roots in life drawing toward that ideal that would become his signature. By contrast, Bronzino jumbles a broad range of body types and models together, much as he mingles portraiture, allegory, and the burlesque with sacred history. This jumbling, however, may be to a purpose. At one end of the spectrum, St Lawrence exemplifies the near-infinite recursiveness of what has been called the Mannerist “art of reference”: a figure of artifice created by means of another figure of artifice nested within yet another.

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2.5 Jacopo Pontormo (from a cartoon by Michelangelo). Venus and Cupid. 1532. Oil on canvas. Galleria dell’Accademia. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Bronzino, a consummate master of this “art of reference,” distils here his ability to cite, meld, and transform other works of art into his own.28 While such involved citation has been critiqued since Gilio as referring to little beyond the virtuoso sphere of artful art, in Bronzino’s hands it can become imbricated with the meaning (or the complication) of pictorial narrative. The body itself can assume signifying valences, its appearance or pose becoming as much a vector of meaning as its putative role in a narrative. Bronzino’s strategies here are bound to the conviction that the power of contemporary art, the forza dell’arte, allows style – the means of representation – to drive the representation’s meaning. But his employment of style to shape the character of figures extends well beyond any standard “Mannerist art of reference.” Consider for example the fresco’s other extreme of figural typologies, the workers who stoke the flames of the saint’s martyrdom and bring fuel for the fire; they appear hulking, clumsy, stiff, and stooped. A surviving preparatory study for the bulky porter in the left foreground indicates that life

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drawings were employed in advanced planning for some if not all of these figures, thereby intimating a juxtaposition between their all-too-human bodies and the supreme artifice of the body of the saint.29 And finally, somewhere between these poles of hulking flesh and preternatural artifice strut figures of bombast and dissemblance like the courtier with no clothes, mingling accoutrements of life with pretensions of art. One might conclude that Bronzino was self-consciously drawing connections between bodies and their social and ethical places in a civic and spiritual hierarchy. This seems clear for the outer ends of the spectrum of types, but it leaves the courtier in an intriguing limbo. Might we really imagine that this figure (and by extension his type) is opened to satire in Bronzino’s fresco, given the body of an epic hero but made to look ridiculous by the very markers of his social class, which ill become what could be called his “costume of heroic nudity” and threaten to make him a figure of masquerade?30 Certainly, ambitious artists did express frustration with the expanding courtier class (still a new and uncomfortably defined group in Florence) for whom they often worked. The artist and theorist Giovanni Battista Armenini, for instance, complained in the 1580s of patrons who knew nothing of art and only praised painting that exhibited the gay colours they admired in fashionable clothing. Pointedly, he also remarked that hearing anecdotes of Michelangelo’s sarcastic put-downs of such ignorant people gave him sommo piacere, the “greatest pleasure.”31 Intriguing as such a hypothesis of cultural satire is, however, there may be something beyond satire, beyond even the body’s significance to making pictorial meaning, operative in Bronzino’s cultivation of such a range of twisting, turning, striding figure types. From early in his career, Bronzino had playfully associated the painter’s creative art with the energies of procreation. His rollicking burlesque poem “Il pennello,” published in 1538, spun a web of ludic analogies between the acrobatic artifice of the painter’s brush (pennello) and the antics of an amorous couple engaged in gymnastic lovemaking (pennello could signify at once “paintbrush” and “penis”).32 If, with this in mind, we look again at the surviving drawings for the Martyrdom, we discover another surprise, linked in a suggestive manner to the vignette of the woman who gazes where she shouldn’t before the colossus of Hercules. The muscle-bound hulk of the Tiber river-god in the foreground of the fresco is the statue’s living double, but seems generated entirely from “art;” like St Lawrence, he is a fusion of two canonical works, in this case the Belvedere Torso and Michelangelo’s Day from the Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo itself. In a highly finished drawing, Bronzino considers the figure’s complex pose and musculature (Fig. 2.6). It may come as something of a shock to realize, then, that the artist animates his stony

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sources here by the addition of an impressive penis – larger by far than that of Hercules – that dangles into view between the god’s tightly crossed legs.33 This feature disappears in the fresco, so we would never know of it but for the chance survival of the drawing. Yet it seems revealing for Bronzino’s thinking as he generated the figures that would compose his giant painting. The underlying urge is to animate bodies. Even in those figures most obviously fashioned of artifice, the generative process involves imagining animation, imagining the coursing forces of life. We may begin to sense now another reason the figure of St Lawrence recalls Pontormo’s “hot” Venus. For an artist of Bronzino’s wry inventiveness, the investment in animation could easily embrace ironizing, even burlesque possibilities. Bronzino may well have chuckled – but with a knowing seriousness – when he read his mentor Pontormo’s 1550 letter to the Florentine scholar Benedetto Varchi, who had solicited artists’ perspectives on the paragone between painting and sculpture. At the letter’s climax, Pontormo contended that painters attempt something even God had not. For the goal of art – Pontormo wrote – is to “surpass nature in wanting to give spirit” to represented figures. Yet even God had found animation much easier to achieve by modelling bodies in three dimensions. Only painters have had the temerity to attempt to animate figures on a plane surface – a labour truly “miracoloso e divino!”34 With a similar melding of profundity and irony, Bronzino is dedicated to this art that Pontormo describes. Compelling recent scholarship on Bronzino has tended to read him as a highly independent painter, not the “follower” of Michelangelo he had traditionally been considered. But Bronzino was committed to a fundamental premise in the art of his great Florentine contemporary; his was resolutely an art of the body, and a celebration of the audacious virtuosity inherent in making bodies a supreme achievement of the most ambitious contemporary art. Bronzino, perhaps more than Michelangelo, could assume an ironizing posture in relation to the cerebral and “philosophical” valences of this commitment. But he remained devoted to the art of the body and the authority of the artist nonetheless, and surely perceived that these investments were under increasing pressure.35 It may not be entirely coincidental that Gilio published his Dialogo a scant year before Bronzino, working on his own initiative, persuaded Duke Cosimo to let him commence the Martyrdom: a work that he must have imagined, given his advancing age, would be his artistic testament.36 Gilio was far from the only contemporary critic to assail modern painting’s embrace of the artful nude, of indeterminacy, of the fantasia, and of “art” and “poetics” over the clear narration of institutionally sanctioned subject matter. But Gilio’s critique was among the more sophisticated. As we have seen, he moved

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2.6 Agnolo Bronzino. Figure study for the Tiber in the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo. 1565–69. Black chalk. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

rapidly from the denunciation of nudity to consider how the fashionable fascination with the figure led many artists to neglect, even forget, the figure’s role as an effective actor in a sacred narrative. Yet Gilio went farther still, in a manner that proves revealing for the conceptualization of history painting proper. He excoriated Michelangelo for mingling the fabulae of poetry with the verities of sacred history in the Last Judgment, and flatly asserted that “theology and poetry are complete opposites.”37 The context of the passage makes clear that for Gilio theology and sacred history are indissolubly linked, and that he considers Michelangelo’s proper subject a “beautiful and holy istoria” (“bella e santa istoria”) which has been distorted by poetics, by “fabulae” (“cose favolose e vane”). If one had the temerity to identify the “end of the Renaissance” with a moment, the publication of Gilio’s dialogue could be a persuasive choice. His outburst lobbed a conceptual grenade into Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura and all it represented about “Renaissance” ideals of the harmony of theology with poetry, philosophy, and justice.

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It also unravelled a tradition of thought going back to Alberti. Recalling Alberti’s easy comingling of fabula and historia, we sense the profound transformation of the critical landscape. It is only superficially ironic that Gilio’s violent divorce of poetry from theology and sacred history, which emblematizes the end of the radical cultural experiment we have called the Renaissance, is bound up with his precocious articulation of a theory of pictorial genres that represents not merely a reaction to the audacity of contemporary art but a vigorous reinscription of a fundamental Ciceronian genre distinction. Indeed, as noted at the outset, it could be argued that postTridentine critics like Gilio, by elaborating new theoretical foundations and conceptual delineations for traditional conventions of composition and narration in religious narrative art, in effect fashioned for the first time a framework of pictorial typologies and hierarchies that would prepare the ground for the more delimited seventeenth- and eighteenth-century academic definitions of “history painting” that so often give us our implicit sense of what such art could be.38 A work like Bronzino’s Martyrdom, however, reveals ways in which such distinctions were contested from their inception and from within what Vasari called the “grand manner” itself. In a culture in crisis and an artistic tradition still predicated upon the autonomy of figural discourse, Bronzino’s bodies complicate, even destabilize, the emergence of a unified narrative of history painting at the end of the Renaissance.

Notes 1 Alberti, On Painting, 71. 2 Ibid., 71–96; for further discussion of post-Tridentine writings, see below. 3 Grafton, Alberti, 127–33, and Grafton, “Historia and istoria.” See further Greenstein, “Alberti on historia.” 4 Grafton, “Historia and istoria,” 55. 5 Ibid., 58. Grafton considers at length the manner in which Alberti worked with inherited and contemporary understandings of the term, in both Latin and Italian. 6 See Pericolo, Caravaggio, particularly 36–41, and Puttfarken, Pictorial Composition, 54–60. Pericolo stresses (41): “it is no exaggeration to affirm that for Alberti the human figure is the sine qua non of painting.” Puttfarken (59) goes so far as to conclude: “There seems to me one over-riding reason why Alberti and his friends right into the Cinquecento would have had problems talking about the overall effects of pictures, and that arises from the central role of the human body in their thinking about art.”

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7 De Hollanda, On Antique Painting, 180. For period qualifications and subversions of the narrative of the “divine” artist, see n14 below. 8 Quoted and discussed in Puttfarken, Pictorial Composition, 101. Puttfarken, 59–60, stresses that Vasari was far from alone in the period in perceiving the human figure – as apex of creation and microcosm of the universe – to contain within itself that which was most essential in art. 9 Vasari, Lives, vol. 9, 56 (trans. slightly adapted). 10 Ibid., 58. 11 Letter of 19 November 1541: see Schlitt, “Painting, Criticism,” 120–1, for transcription and discussion. The “diverse attitudes” Sernini celebrates could encompass the expression of emotional states, though these are nowhere highlighted as fundamental to the figures’ appeal. 12 While Shearman, Mannerism, is principally associated with the reading of Mannerism as a “stylish style” of courtly art, Shearman also offered a precocious appreciation of the cultural sophistication of early ecclesiastical critics of perceived excesses in ambitious Michelangelesque art; see 166–9, 178. Campbell, “Bronzino’s Martyrdom,” advances a forceful critique of the perception of Mannerism merely as a passive court style. 13 Gilio, Dialogo, 1. 14 While these concerns are explored further below, they were not the only form of resistance to the idea of the “divine artist.” For acute registration of a range of preoccupations with the nature, status, and sources of artistic inspiration, including artistic concerns, see Campbell, “Fare una cosa morta parer viva,” and Cole, “The Demonic Arts.” 15 An important reading of the painting that stresses these aspects is Campbell, “Bronzino’s Martyrdom.” For more on developing perceptions of genre distinctions, and the concern that mingling poetry with history was problematic, see below. 16 See Lingo, “Looking Askance,” 224. 17 Lingo, “Looking Askance,” 224–5. Working independently, John Paoletti has noted Machiavelli’s text in relation to the David; Paoletti, Michelangelo’s David, 180–1. Paoletti, 91–8, also discusses the associations of the David with Hercules. 18 Paoletti, Michelangelo’s David, 2015, 52–3, and document 93, of 31 Oct 1504 (309–10). 19 Lingo, “Raffaello Borghini.” It should be noted that Gilio also casts his text as a dialogue. But while distinct opinions are expressed, it is hard to read them as much more than opportunities for correction and instruction by authoritatively “orthodox” figures who seem to convey the author’s opinions. 20 Borghini, Il Riposo, 62. For further discussion see Lingo, “Looking Askance.” 21 Lingo, “Looking Askance,” 23–58. 22 Alexander Nagel, The Controversy, 70, developing arguments advanced in Nagel, “Structural Indeterminacy,” 17–42.

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23 Nagel, The Controversy, 70 and 56. For the quotation, Girolamo Benivieni, Commento de Hierony. B. sopra a piu sue canzone et sonetti dello amore et della bellezza divina (Florence: Tubini, 1500), f. XLIIIr. Already in the 1490s, Girolamo Savonarola had decried the way in which the modern painter, reimagining sacred history “according to his own idea (concetto),” worked in a manner akin to “the philosophers.” See Savonarola, Prediche sopra Ezechiele, quoted in Keizer, “Michelangelo out of Focus,” 401–2. 24 See Falletti and Nelson, Venus and Love, 52–3. 25 One scholar who has resisted such readings is Stephen Campbell, who in “Bronzino’s Martyrdom” dwells on the unsettling nature of a number of Bronzino’s figural and gestural citations. 26 The reference is from a letter by Anton Francesco Doni, in which he urges a visitor to Florence to spare no effort to see the Doni Tondo, by “the master of masters.” See Bottari, Raccolta di lettere, vol. 3, 347. 27 See Nagel, Controversy, 49–51. Keizer, “Michelangelo, Drawing,” offers a provocative reading of the cartoon’s claims for the centrality of art. For an extended recent discussion of the cartoon (known through drawings and copies) in relation to Michelagelo’s art of the body, see Cole, Leonardo, Michelangelo. 28 For a reading of Bronzino’s art in this register, see Brock, Bronzino. 29 For the drawing, see Bambach, Bronzino’s Drawings, cat. 59, 214–15 (entry by George Goldner). 30 For the “costume” of nudity in ancient Roman statues that conjoined portrait heads with idealized physiques, see Hallett, The Roman Nude. For issues of masquerade in earlier Renaissance religious painting, see Nagel, The Controversy, 13–29 and ad indices. See as well Lingo, “Looking Askance,” particularly 25–6. 31 See Williams, “Vocation of the Artist,” 526–7, and Williams, Raphael, 210 for discussion of Armenini’s complaints and his appreciation of Michelangelo’s acerbic wit. 32 For discussion, see Parker, Bronzino, 104–7, and Parker, “Bronzino’s Erotic Imagination.” Parker remarks that Bronzino sends up the Albertian concept of figural variety by implicitly equating the love of complex poses and foreshortenings in contemporary painting with the many positions of lovemaking; she also stresses the God-like, engendering force claimed for painting. 33 Without remarking this feature, Carmen Bambach reads the drawing as from life; see www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/370424. 34 Varchi, Due lezzioni, 68. For further discussion of Bronzino’s engagement with these ideas, see Lingo, “Bronzino’s Beauty,” and Lingo, “Agnolo Bronzino’s Pygmalion.” 35 Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized Michelangelo’s recurrent investments in ironization and even perhaps a kind of artistic subversion: see Campbell, “Fare una cosa morta.” Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, 219–31, offers provocative readings of masks and masking in the Medici Chapel.

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36 See Lingo, “Looking Askance,” 217, for the circumstances of the commission, which surviving documents indicate Bronzino initiated. 37 Gilio, Dialogo, 87. The opening chapter of Cole, Leonardo, Michelangelo (particularly 4–17) considers the ascendancy of the figure and concerns about the integrity of pictorial narrative in the sixteenth century, making the case that some post-Tridentine concerns were anticipated in the Leonardo-Michelangelo rivalry during their ideation of the great battle pieces for the Florentine republic at the opening of the century. 38 See Dempsey, “Mythic Inventions,” and Puttfarken, Pictorial Composition, 169–73. See again Shearman, Mannerism, 166–9, 178 (as in n12) for the cultural sophistication and education of critics like Gilio.

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3 A Rococo Aesthetic History Painting and the Self’s Embodiment susanna caviglia

From the late sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, the French crown went through a series of social, cultural, and political transformations in which the modern state would come into being. In each successive regime, the fine arts have played a fundamental role in constructing a royally sanctioned polity through the expression of the kings’ particular ideology and identity. Under Louis XIV, the arts were grounded in the aesthetic of grandeur and they symbolized the magnificence and wealth of France at that time. History painting, which was then defined by the gravitas and intellectual rigour of its content, became a prominent component of the king’s campaign to legitimize his claim of absolute power. Under Louis XV, however, a radical shift occurred in the arts. After a generation of exhausting and economically catastrophic wars, a new politics of peace aimed at bringing social stability to France, both internally and internationally. Responding directly to the subsequent dramatic changes in courtly life and French politics, the new aesthetic turned away from a preoccupation with heroism or military victories and rather concerned itself with expressing the possibility of an ideal and peaceful present. History painting now pursued an aesthetic of elegance, grace, and domestic intimacy that was associated with interior settings conceived primarily for a cultural well-being and pleasure. In this context, the glorification of the Sun King was replaced by a new social relationship characterized by an ideal of harmony, love, and eroticism that extended to include an emerging bourgeoisie. History painting was therefore reimagined to decorate glittering and lively interiors where series of tall mirrors and carved wooden were arranged around the

rooms, conceived as fitting backgrounds to a social life that emphasized privacy and the cult of human relationships. Displayed in these interiors, history painting thus aimed to produce a new kind of reaction in the viewer – one which was no longer based in reason but rather the senses, and could lead to a form of aesthetic embodiment through unique ways of relating to, thinking of, and taking delight in the artwork. It is precisely this new relationship between the viewer and history painting – its mechanisms and social functions – that is the object of this essay. While I will focus on visual representations, contemporary novels will provide a narrative frame for the understanding of the new fundamental role that art played in the individual’s social interpersonal relationships. Thus I start my argumentation by quoting from a contemporary novel: “Jetez les yeux sur ces trois tableaux du fond, vous en serez satisfait. Je m’avançais pour les examiner; il est vrai qu’ils étaient de la dernière beauté; dans le premier on voyait Ariane toute en pleurs, suivre des yeux le Vaisseau du cruel Thésée qui l’avait abandonnée dans l’île de Naxe, le second représentait Ulysse qui se dérobe de l’île d’Ogygie pour revoir sa chère Ithaque; et l’on avait peint dans le troisième Didon sur le bûcher prête à se poignarder de désespoir du départ d’Enée, dont le Vaisseau paraissait encore dans le lointain. Je vous avoue, me repartit Sophie, que toutes les fois que je viens ici, je ne puis m’empêcher de prendre part au sort de ces trois illustres infortunés.”1 In this passage from Jean-Baptiste Jourdan’s libertine novel Le Guerrier philosophe (1744), the narrator is not only recalling the aesthetic beauty of the history paintings displayed in the cabinet he visited with his host, Sophie, in the castle of her uncle and aunt, M. and Mme de Chat. He is also pointing to specific ways of looking at (“Je m’avançais pour les examiner”), of being moved by (“je ne puis m’empêcher de prendre part au sort de”), and therefore of interacting with the paintings he encounters during his visit. As a result, the narrator stresses the intimate nature of a kind of painting that can be fully enjoyed only while in physical proximity, as well as the possibility for this painting to function only through the viewer’s corporeal and psychological engagement with it. To define this particular practice, in which the viewer acts not only as observer but also as interpreter of and participant in the depicted events, Erin Felicia Labbie and Allie Terry-Fritsch have recently explored the concept of “beholding.”2 The two art historians refer specifically to the practice of medieval and early modern devotees who are not “simply viewing, seeing or witnessing images, but instead binding these activities with a multiplicity of phenomenological dynamics in order to interact with the images more profoundly and over longer periods of time.”3 I would like to suggest that the act of “beholding” in the early modern period, defined as such, is not unique to the experience of artistic artifacts in

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religious contexts. Instead, it can be used in particular to explain the shift that took place in the relationship between history painting and viewer during the transition from the reign of Louis XIV (1638–1715) to the Regency (1715–23) and the reign of Louis XV (1723–74). Throughout the seventeenth century, history painting was governed by a didactic goal exemplified by the illustration of virtuous themes conceived for a “passive viewer” taking in a message. From the 1710s, in contrast, history painting became the vehicle for a phenomenological experience of visual images that led an “active beholder” to transgress the boundaries between representation and real presence.

From “Passive Viewer” to “Active Beholder” Completed in 1684, the decoration of the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at Versailles marked the culmination of the type of gallery painting that had prevailed in France since the late Middle Ages (Fig. 3.1).4 This structure displays a complex iconographical program, combining the representation of historical events and allegorical components, both of which allude to Louis XIV and his kingship. Various scholars, the surintendant des Bâtiments (superintendent of the Royal Buildings) Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and the Premier peintre du Roi (King’s Chief Painter) Charles Le Brun worked together to establish an exemplary decoration in which history painting served to glorify not only the king’s military conquests but also his taste for the arts. Visitors needed a printed guide to fully understand the scenes represented on the vaults of the Hall, ensuring that meaning would remain concealed from the viewer when it was politically expedient. This space was indeed conceived as a public area for propaganda and, as such, it was a place for rendezvous, social gatherings, conversation, negotiation, or plotting. It was, most of all, a place of passage for the courtiers who crossed this space several times a day en route from one great wing (the north or the south) to the other. As a result of its functions, the Hall appeared as a big empty space, sparsely furnished by precious objects (tables, guéridons, benches, and stools), the effect of which was not to create a warm and comfortable environment, but rather to reinforce royal prestige. A courtier’s initial attraction to spectacular works of art would inevitably give way to distraction (the call of gossip, a random encounter, a summons for an interview with the king), and leaving the Hall was more common than lingering. The experience of a viewer standing in the Hall of Mirrors was quite obviously very different from the one described in Jourdan’s novel. The paintings evoked by the heroine of the Guerrier philosophe represent amorous subjects instead of

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military feats, and are displayed in intimate private spaces. The emergence of this kind of history painting is linked to new processes of temporal and spatial displacement, with the stationing of the viewer at some proximity to the image, positioning him or her not as a spectator but as an active beholder who is physically present there and then. It is precisely through the act of beholding that the viewer projects themself into the world of the depicted figures. This process is made possible thanks to the open temporality (one that is not a linear progression of past, present, and future) that came to define history painting. Its figures are not represented in momentous actions, as was the case since the Renaissance, but rather engrossed in a range of activities that suspend the story and arrest time (Fig. 3.2). One can notably think of the numerous paintings whose subject is sleep – be it of a god,5 a mortal,6 or a nymph7 – that is to say a condition in which the nervous system is relatively inactive, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness practically suspended. Sleep is therefore to be understood as a particular state of being that overlaps with dream, or with what the eighteenth century will call reverie. As 3.1 Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors). 1678–84. Château de Versailles.

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such, sleep not only blurs the boundaries between different temporalities, between fiction and reality, but also provides a place for the projection of the self into the other. This conceit lies at the heart of Christoph Martin Wieland’s Endymion (1771), a play inspired by the Dialogues of the Gods by Lucian of Samosata. The goddess Diana believed the mortal Endymion to be so beautiful that she granted him eternal youth through eternal sleep. The German writer, who was particularly familiar with French philosophical discourse and criticism, creates a Diana who forces her desires on the sleeping Endymion by instilling her own dreams in him. The Diana and Endymion that Louis Lagrenée painted in 1776 (Fig. 3.3), conceived as a closeup of the two lovers and a putto, exemplifies the way in which artists gave visual form to the goddess’s dreams and to those of her beloved. While looking at the beautiful man asleep, Diana touches her breast – her gaze has fallen on the uncovered part of Endymion’s sex, only partly hidden by a drapery. Endymion visibly shares Diana’s erotic dreams – his entire body appears at the same time relaxed (legs apart and abandoned arms) and ready to receive her (it is entirely open to her), while his face is blushing. Sitting in an intimate space before this kind of painting, the “active beholder” would have entered into the fiction and projected their own reveries into it. This dynamic relation between artwork, viewer, and real world anticipated Denis Diderot’s critical claim, increasingly affirmed beginning with his Salon of 1763, that the spectator should enter the painting and become one of its actors. But while Diderot would describe this new relation in terms of corporeal movement (imagining the spectator physically walking through the landscape depicted on the canvas), the projection of the beholder into rococo history painting is one of the inner self. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art.”8 The result is the overlap and merging of the subject’s and the object’s psychological postures that only specific themes and representations make possible. Let’s turn for a moment to another contemporary libertine novel, Jean-François de Bastide’s La Petite Maison (1758), in which a country house becomes the vehicle for erotic seduction. The characters, Trémicour and Mélite, are silhouettes only

3.2 Opposite top François Boucher. Jupiter and Callisto. 1759. Oil on canvas. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

3.3 Opposite bottom Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. Diana and Endymion. 1776. Oil on canvas. National Museum, Poznan.

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just sketched, while the country house through which they move gradually accrues shape and reality until it incarnates the seductive power of art. Now, when Mélite describes the charms of the paintings that embellish the interior of Trémicour’s country house, she mentions some of the most fashionable painters who decorated the Parisian interiors at that time (such as François Boucher, “le peintre des Grâces et l’artiste le plus ingénieux de notre siècle”),9 and she speaks generally about “sujets galants” (gallant subjects).10 When she finally recalls the subject of one painting that particularly struck her, Mélite evokes Hercules in the arms of Morpheus, woken up by Love, which Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre painted on the vaulted ceiling crowning the bedroom.11 Morpheus is the god of dreams, literally “the one who transforms,” who recasts reality by bringing illusion into it. The awakening of Hercules corresponds to the moment of transition from a state of dreamy unconsciousness to a state of full awareness. It echoes the internal process of the beholder whose gaze alights on this kind of painting and who can mentally travel in space and time, “be held” captive by and exist with the artwork in its unique place. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s opposition between the “concentrated” art viewer and the “distracted” film spectator, W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “Beholding … involves a certain resistance to time and motion, a slowing down of experience in acts of contemplation, meditation, and devotion.”12 This is precisely the effect produced on the viewer by rococo history painting, through the depiction of figures that stage such activities devoid of movement and therefore echo the viewer’s mental and physical attitudes.

Inactivity, Seduction, and Ecstasy In the eighteenth century, inactivity was seductive in itself, seen as securing harmony among beings. Let’s remain with Bastide’s La Petite Maison, where seduction unfolds in the visit to the country house, enacting a tale of emotional affect and physical desire. What charms and eventually overcomes Mélite is Trémicour’s inaction. The reason is that it creates a state of tranquility devoid of fear, which becomes the condition for the blossoming of love. As Bastide writes, nothing was warning Mélite to defend herself, for the simple reason that no one was attacking her, “on l’adorait et on se taisait.”13 The condition of the still body – be it the body of the seducer or that of the seduced being – produces in the other a form of sincere adoration and silent respect. This appears with particular evidence in history painting of the time, in which the still body becomes an object of contemplation

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both within the depicted scene and for the beholder. One can think for example of the mythological theme of Jupiter and Antiope. The beauty of Antiope attracted Jupiter, who, assuming the form of a satyr, raped her. It is usually the act of seduction that the painters illustrated in Europe throughout the seventeenth century, as one can see for example in the two versions painted by Anthony Van Dyck (1620, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) or in France with Nicolas Poussin (whereabouts unknown).14 Van Dyck’s Jupiter, the hanging tongue suggesting his libidinous intentions, is spying on Antiope’s reaction while he pulls away the drapery from her sex. Poussin’s Jupiter is asking for silence from the putto behind him, while similarly pulling away the drapery from the woman’s sex. In eighteenth-century paintings, instead, the god displays a profound astonishment before the beautiful sleeping woman and refrains from any physical contact. One can cite the paintings by Carle Van Loo (1753, Hermitage, Saint Petersbourg), Charles-Michel-Ange Challe (whereabouts unknown),15 or Jean-Simon Berthelemy (1743, whereabouts unknown).16 In all of these works, Jupiter freezes in admiration before the beauty of the young sleeping woman, and his attitude iconographically echoes the codified pose of religious ecstasy in baroque painting (this is particularly true in Challe’s version of the myth). Jupiter before Antiope, Selene or Diana before Endymion,17 together with Jupiter-Diana before Callisto (Fig. 3.2)18 and Psyche before Cupid19 are only some of the gallant themes whose subject became the contemplation of a sleeping beauty. The result is an altered state of consciousness for both the adorer and the object of adoration, characterized by greatly reduced external awareness and expanded interior mental awareness. This form of ecstatic experience that is produced in rococo painting by contact with something or somebody perceived as extremely beautiful can emotionally affect the beholder. “Mélite n’osait plus rien louer; elle commençait même à craindre de sentir (‘fear to feel’),” writes Bastide, describing the way in which the decoration of Tremicour’s country house charmed and deeply touched the young woman. And because the mind and the heart work in concert, Mélite is then enchanted (“enchantée”), moved (“émue”), and eventually made ecstatic (“ravie en extase”).20 A similar state is described by the inexperienced hero of Dominique Vivant Denon’s Point de lendemain (1777), a short tale of a one-night affair. Brought by the countess of *** in her country house, the young man is overwhelmed by the extraordinary effects of illusion created by the painting, together with the mirrors, lights, and perfumes. The painting is thus described as part of a multi-sensory process that characterizes the rococo experience, entirely conceived as an artful spectacle. As a result, the beholder becomes

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fully absorbed in the object of interest, their sense of time and space disappearing, forsaking any senses or physical cognizance of its duration (“Je fus étonné, ravi; je ne sais plus ce que je devins, et je commençai de bonne foi à croire à l’enchantement”).21 Both Vivant Denon’s hero and Mélite have been charmed by art. It is only by transferring to one another the enchanting qualities of architectural interiors, by attributing to one another the tender ideas that come from those places, that the countess and Trémicour succumb to their seducers. (“On y prend des idées de tendresse en croyant seulement en prêter au maître à qui il appartient,” Mélite says when she finds herself in a circular salon whose ceiling and overdoors were decorated by Noël Hallé with gallant subjects.)22 In this new context, art in general and painting in particular are more seductive than human beings.

Illusion and Intersubjectivity The seductive power of the images that decorated the rococo interiors comes from the fact that they represent less a heroic mythology than a choreographed polite sociability echoing the reality of the mondaine world. The depicted figures show the same self-mastered appearances and codified attitudes that characterize the social activities of the French aristocracy of that time. They offer images of grace and leisure, controlled and peaceful interpersonal communication. In a way that parallels the effect produced by art, the collectors of such works served themselves as vehicles for aesthetic pleasure: as Mimi Hellman has shown, elite men and women were not only supposed to embody beauty or grace but also to recognize and experience those qualities. This “cycle of mutual pleasing,” writes Hellman of the psychology of cultivated sociability, was conducted through a repertoire of delightful poses, gestures, and expressions aimed to gratify and ultimately seduce the other.23 Dresses, toilets, and objects were all conceived to shape elegant bodies and promote a process of alluring self-presentation. People, like paintings, understood themselves as recipients of the gazes of others and adjusted their behaviours accordingly. The intimacy and decoration of the interiors play a fundamental role in promoting interpersonal dynamics not only between people, but also between people and the paintings that surround them, as evidenced in the contemporary novels discussed above.24 Eighteenth-century interiors were “densely decorated,” Hellman writes, and many furnishings “were … designed to be used for leisure activities such as conversation, reading, letter writing, handwork, dining and game playing.”25 This means activities that expand in time, bring people together in physical proximity (on a sofa, a méridienne, a bed), and stimulate introspection

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or seduction (sitting on a wingback chair or an ottoman chair – what Mélite describes as a kind of “lit de repos”).26 History paintings contributed to this culture of intimate sociability by privileging themes that inspire and glorify the act of beholding. Among them, the Toilet of Venus offers an eloquent example. During the eighteenth century, the toilette was an extensively practised ritual, in which elite women and many men received visitors while grooming and dressing. The duration of the visitors’ stay, their positioning in space, and the extent to which they were invited to converse with their host reflected different degrees of social intimacy or distance.27 “More than any other elite social ritual, the toilette centered on the aesthetic and social seductiveness of the body,” Hellman writes. But the toilet was also the opportunity to display personal possessions such as jewellery, perfume, or books. It was, therefore, “an important occasion for the game of social seduction through which elite identities were defined.”28 History paintings in rococo interiors that displayed the toilet of Venus played with the boundaries between representation and presence. One can think for example of the overdoor by Carle Vanloo in the Hôtel de Soubise painted for the small bedchamber of the princess (1737–38, Archives Nationales, Paris),29 Charles-Joseph Natoire’s painting for the bedchamber of the magistrate Mathieu-François Molé in his Hôtel de Roquelaure (1742, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux),30 or Boucher’s painting for Madame de Pompadour’s dressing room at Bellevue, her chateau near Paris (Fig. 3.4). These works present close-ups of the goddess seated before a mirror, assisted in her ritual by a few putti or servants. They offer limited spatial and temporal information, permitting the beholder to enter easily into their imaginary worlds. Let’s remain for a moment with Boucher’s painting, possibly the most exemplary of the three for my claim. It stages the seductiveness of the goddess’ naked body, associated with the preciosity of the silk, velvet, and gold damask draperies, the pearls, the carved and gilded rococo sofa, ewer, perfume-holder, and shellshaped objects. In 1750, one year before the canvas was completed, Madame de Pompadour had performed the title role in a play, staged at Versailles, called The Toilet of Venus. Although this painting is not a portrait of the king’s official chief mistress, it is in all likelihood a flattering allusion to her – her beauty, taste, and wealth. The visitor who was admitted to Madame de Pompadour’s dressing room and allowed to remain long enough to engage with the objects displayed there, would become a privileged beholder of the goddess’s toilet. Its location on a marble step fixes a hierarchical relationship between the goddess/Madame de Pompadour and the viewer/visitor. However, the step’s position in front of the viewer suggests the possibility that one (first and foremost the king) might climb it. This

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3.4 François Boucher. Toilet of Venus. 1751. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

kind of history painting offered the prospect of reconfiguring social relations, as well as of projecting oneself into an ideal society.31 It brought the viewer into a space of illusion that interweaved fiction and reality. In describing his visit to the country house of the countess of ***, the hero of Vivant Denon’s Point de lendemain evokes the effect of illusion produced by the mirrors which multiply the image of him and the young woman embracing one another. Thanks to the repetition of this vision, he “saw” (literally “je vis”) an island entirely inhabited by happy lovers.32 Like the mirrors in the countess’s country house, the paintings displayed in spandrels, overdoors, or wall panels created an effect of illusion that would bring the viewer into a shared experience with the depicted figures. In this process, sight plays a fundamental role: first engaging the eyes, the artwork would then reach the heart, the soul, and the mind of the viewer. (This idea is clearly expressed by Vivant Denon’s choice of the verb “voir,” which refers to the act of perceiving with the eyes as well as to the act of deducing mentally from the information that was first discerned visually.) The superiority of seeing

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over other senses had been reaffirmed by the abbé Du Bos’s aesthetic approach developed in his Réflexions critiques (1719) and the maturation of the ethical doctrine of sensualism, which recognized both sensation and perception as the basic and most important form of true cognition.33 Sight had become the entryway to a new aesthetic concerned with pure emotion as opposed to pure intellectuality. The reaction to painting being therefore an instinctive or intuitive feeling, the beholder’s experience was one suspended between illusion and reality. One reads in the Encyclopédie, in the article “Imaginaire” (Imagination), “qui n’est que dans l’imagination; ainsi l’on dit en ce sens un bonheur imaginaire, une peine imaginaire. Sous ce point de vue imaginaire ne s’oppose point à réel; car un bonheur imaginaire est un bonheur réel, une peine imaginaire est une peine réelle. Que la chose soit ou ne soit pas comme je l’imagine, je souffre ou je suis heureux; ainsi l’imaginaire peut être dans le motif, dans l’objet; mais la réalité est toujours dans la sensation.”34 Sensory reality cannot be avoided neither reduced. Art stretches the boundaries of the human imagination and the perception of reality; it gets entangled with life by creating meaning though illusions. This phenomenon finds an eloquent expression in the new fortune experienced by the myth of Pygmalion during the eighteenth century.35 The most familiar episode from Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, it is the story of the Cypriot sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has carved, which the gods, in a moment of great magnanimity, decide to bring to life. Scholars have usually insisted on the philosophical nature of Pygmalion’s fortune, the myth of the living statue being used in the Enlightenment to instill doubt in the divine nature of the creation of the human being: if an artist is capable of animating a sculpture, life is no longer the sole prerogative of God. However, Pygmalion is not only a powerful metaphor for man’s creative abilities. It is also a forceful illustration of the fluidity between art and life, self and other (it is the projection of Pygmalion’s desires on the statue that transforms it into an animate being). In his seminal book The Pygmalion Effect, Victor Stoichita wrote that the woman given by the gods to Pygmalion for a spouse “is a strange creature, an artifact endowed with a soul and a body, but nevertheless a fantasy.”36 Like Pygmalion’s spouse, the depicted figures in rococo history painting represent “a fantasy,” an aesthetic ideal which structures as well the transformation of elite people into living work of art through a strict discipline of their bodies. The shift from inanimate statue to living human being is beautifully illustrated by Jean Raoux in his 1717 painting (Musée Fabre, Montpellier). The lower part of its body is still of marble, while the upper part (touched by Venus) is of the color of life, and the god Hymen, a torch in his hand, is checking its pulse. Disillusioned

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3.5 Jean-Baptiste Regnault. Pygmalion and Galatea. 1785. Oil on canvas. Musée National des Chateaux de Versailles et des Trianons.

by women, Pygmalion created a simulacrum. Raoux gives visual form to the possibility for art to replace life, but he also underlines the extraordinary character of this event. Not only does Pygmalion’s adoring reaction echo iconographically the ecstatic attitude of Jupiter before Antiope in Challe’s painting mentioned above; but also, as Stoichita pointed out, the presentation of the miraculous transformation parallels the repetitive formulae adopted by artists since the Renaissance in the representation of the Immaculate Conceptions (the object of veneration standing in the middle of a vertically structured composition, the clouds in the sky associated with the prodigy, the worshippers kneeling in front of the adored object).37 Partly derived from Raoux’s painting, François Lemoyne’s version (1729, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours) reduces the different degrees of the statue’s animation (a deep shadow surrounds its lower part so that one cannot tell if it belongs to a statue or a person) and replaces the miracle by a spectacle happening here and now (a curtain has replaced the sky and the clouds; Venus has disappeared). The beautiful woman is facing the beholder and offering herself as an object of admiration. The distance between Pygmalion and the beholder is shortened spatially by Boucher (1767, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg). His painting is conceived as a

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miracle taking place in the sculptor’s studio (Venus appears in the clouds, surrounded by putti and servants who assist her while she transforms the statue into a living being). Pygmalion is kneeling on the right side of the composition, behind a balustrade that separates his space from the space of the miracle and instead places him on the side of the beholder. The overlapping of Pygmalion and the beholder is achieved by Jean-Baptiste Regnault (Fig. 3.5). His canvas is conceived as a close-up of the marble statue and the sculptor kneeling in front of it, cropped beneath the knee. Pygmalion is at the same time the sculptor and the beholder, a metaphor of both the power of the artistic inspiration and the power of the artistic creation. A last example must be mentioned to show the other facet of the interweaving of illusion and reality in eighteenth-century history painting: Louis Lagrenée’s 1781 canvas (Detroit Institute of Arts).38 By showing the statue descending from the pedestal to meet with Pygmalion, Lagrenée represents not only the moment after art has become life, but also when artistic action and human reaction give rise to a veritable interaction.

From Art to Life and Back Rococo history painting requires the beholder to have different forms of interaction: physical, via corporeal proximity and prolonged stationary location; imaginative, by fulfilling a contemplative or emotional act; and performative, by conflating the two first types of interaction to engage physically and emotionally with the artwork. From the 1770s, the conception of history painting shifted toward a form of theatricality that excluded the viewer from the depicted scene in order to increase its emotional charge. It is during this time that the practice of the “tableaux vivants” (living pictures) becomes popular in France. Originating as a medieval liturgical drama ending a mass, it was possibly introduced by Madame de Genlis, instructor of the Duke of Orleans’s children, to dramatize important moments of history and literature in order to educate and inform her students.39 The “tableaux vivants” are representations of paintings by actual persons in costumes grouping themselves into pictures, assuming appropriate postures and remaining motionless and silent. Like the painting it was representing, the “tableau” remained a static, frozen moment extracted from an implied narrative. The subjects were well-known works of art from history (Madame de Genlis was known to stage paintings by Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Louis Isabey). The painter Elizabeth Vigée Lebrun recalls in her Souvenirs that while she was in Saint Petersburg in 1795 she favoured serious or biblical themes over all the others.40 For her

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part, Madame de Genlis recalls how “Le célèbre David … trouvait ce jeu charmant, il avait un grand plaisir à grouper lui-même ces tableaux fugitifs.”41 This practice offered the possibility of reestablishing the calm, timeless, mutual contemplation between the viewer and the viewed, the subject and the object. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s report on his travels to Italy from 1786–88 recalls the surprising device that Lady Hamilton used for the representation of “tableaux vivants.” “What struck me, was an open box which stood on the front, whose interior was painted black, surrounded by the most magnificent golden frame. The interior space was big enough to accommodate a standing human figure and this was, we learnt, its destination.”42 The “tableau vivant,” as conceived by Lady Hamilton, thus needed a golden frame and a black box to function. The result was to overturn the process of the rococo painting and to transform the body into an image, a painting, a disembodied fiction.

Notes I am grateful to Nina Dubin for her vision and support and to Nathalie Kremer for stimulating discussions over our shared passions. Translations are mine. Some of the questions discussed here are addressed and developed in my book History, Painting, and the Seriousness of Pleasure in the Age of Louis XV, forthcoming with Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. 1 “Glance at those three paintings in the back, you will be satisfied. I drew up to examine them; it is true that they were of the latest beauty; in the first, one would see a tearful Ariadne following with her eyes the vessel of the cruel Theseus who had abandoned her on the isle of Naxos, the second represented Ulysses shrinking from the isle of Ogygia to see his dear Ithaca again; and it had been painted on the third Dido on the pyre ready to stab herself of despair for Aeneas’s departure, whose vessel still appeared in the distant. I confess, told me Sophie, that each time that I come here, I can’t prevent myself from taking part in the destiny of these three illustrious unfortunates.” Jourdan, Le Guerrier philosophe, 178–9. 2 Terry-Fritsch and Labbie, eds, Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 1–14. 3 Benay and Rafanelli, “Touch Me, Touch Me Not,” 2. 4 On this decoration see in particular Albanel et al., The Hall of Mirrors: History and Restoration. 5 The theme of the Sleep of Venus ascended in popularity during the eighteenth century. François Boucher alone painted at least seven versions of the sleeping love goddess. Three of these paintings (whereabouts unknown) are reproduced in Ananoff 1976, vol. 1, cat. nos 97, 173, vol. 2, cat. no. 610. Three paintings are in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris; and Gemaldegälerie, Berlin, respectively. One painting was recently on the market; see Sotheby’s, New York, 30 January 2014, lot. 125 (ill.).

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6 The Sleep of Endymion has been the subject of a number of eighteenth-century paintings by, for instance, Michel-François Dandré-Bardon (1726, Legion of Honor, San Francisco), Jean-Baptiste Van Loo (1731, Musée du Louvre, Paris), Pierre Subleyras (1740, National Gallery, London), and Anne-Louis Girodet (1791, Musée du Louvre, Paris). 7 I will mention in particular the theme of Jupiter and Antiope, discussed below. 8 Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 239. 9 “The painter of the Graces and the most ingenious artist of our century.” Bastide, La Petite Maison, 20, no. 2. 10 Ibid., 18. 11 Ibid., 12. 12 Mitchell, “Foreword,” in Terry-Fritsch and Labbie, eds, Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, xvii. 13 “One adored her and remained silent.” Bastide, La Petite Maison, 39. 14 This painting was recently on the art market (New York, Christie’s, 15 April, lot 37). Given the presence of Cupid, this painting has also been interpreted as Venus and Satyr. 15 Sold at Drouot Richelieu, Paris, 20 June 2007, lot 49. 16 Sold at Christie’s, London, 7 July 2010, lot 193. 17 In ancient Greek mythology, Endymion’s lover is Selene, the moon. Since the Renaissance, however, Diana has been associated with Endymion, as the moon goddess. 18 Callisto was a follower of Diana whom Jupiter decided to seduce. In order to lure Callisto into his embrace, Jupiter disguised himself as Diana herself. 19 One night after Cupid falls asleep, Psyche brings out a dagger and a lamp she had hidden in the room, in order to see and kill her husband whose true identity remained unknown to her. But as soon as Psyche saw him, she was struck with a feverish passion. 20 “Mélite did not dare to praise anything anymore; she even started to fear of feeling.” Bastide, La Petite Maison, 15, 29, 31. 21 “I was astonished, ravished; I do not know anymore what I became, and I started in good faith to believe in the enchantment.” Vivant Denon, Point de Lendemain, 16. 22 “One gets ideas of tenderness while believing only to credit some to the master to whom it belongs.” Bastide, La Petite Maison, 8. 23 Hellman, “Interior motives: Seduction by Decoration in Eighteenth-Century France,” 17. 24 On the role of rococo interiors over the viewer see in particular Hellman, “Interior motives: Seduction by Decoration in Eighteenth-Century France,” and “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France.” See also Scott, The Rococo Interior. 25 Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,” 16. 26 Bastide, La Petite Maison, 14. 27 See Hellman, “Interior Motives: Seduction by Decoration in Eighteenth Century France,” 20–2.

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28 Ibid., 20. 29 Carle Van Loo’s painting was paired with a Venus at Her Bath by Boucher (Hôtel de Soubise, Archives nationales, Paris). 30 The Hôtel de Roquelaure is currently the French ministère de l’écologie, du développement durable, des transports et du logement. Natoire’s Toilette of Venus was paired with a painting representing Venus at the Fountain (whereabouts unknown). See Caviglia-Brunel, CharlesJoseph Natoire, 306–9. 31 This idea is developed in my forthcoming book (see unnumbered note). 32 “Grâce à ce groupe répété dans tous ses aspects, je vis cette île toute peuplée d’amants heureux.” Vivant Denon, Point de Lendemain, 17. 33 Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. 34 “Which is only in the imagination; so one says in this sense an imaginary happiness, an imaginary sorrow. From this point of view imaginary is not opposed to real; because an imaginary happiness is a real happiness, an imaginary sorrow is a real sorrow. Whether the thing is, or is not, as I imagine it to be, I suffer or I am happy; so that the imaginary can be in the reason, in the object; but the reality is always in the sensation.” Diderot, d’Alembert et al., Encyclopédie, vol. 25, 282. 35 See in particular Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The Animated Statue in EighteenthCentury France”; Schlüter, Das Pygmalion-Symbol bei Rousseau, Hamann, Schiller; Sckommoday, Pygmalion bei Franzosen und Deutschen im 18. Jahrundert; Mülder-Bach, Im Zeichen Pygmalions: Das Modell der Statue und die Endeckung der “Darstellung” im 18. Jahrundert; Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, esp. 112 ff. 36 Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, 3. 37 Ibid., 127. 38 Louis Lagrenée painted at least two other versions of the myth of Pygmalion: one was presented at the Salon of 1773 (whereabouts unknown, but engraved on copper by AntoineFrançois Dennel), while a second version was painted in 1777 (Sinebrychoffin Taidemuseo, Helsinki, Finland). 39 See Elbert, Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, “Godey’s” Illustrations, and Margaret Fuller’s Heroines and Julie Ramos and Léonard Pouy (eds), Le tableau vivant ou l’image performée. 40 Vigée Lebrun, Souvenirs, 125. 41 “The famous David … found this game charming, and he took pleasure in grouping figures himself into these tableaux fugitifs.” Genlis, Mémoires, 146. 42 Goethe, Italienische Reise, 296.

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4 History Painting Redistanced From Benjamin West to David Wilkie mark salber phillips

In 1822 when David Wilkie’s painting of the British victory at Waterloo was revealed to the London public, its huge success was reported in the press. As one journalist wrote: “Wilkie’s picture is so admired that it is difficult to approach it, and the Academy have been compelled to put a bar before it, to prevent its admirers from touching it.”1 That so innovative a painting, which depicts not the glory of battle, but ordinary people and retired soldiers, evoked such a response is evidence of a significant shift that was occurring in history painting during these years. This chapter addresses this important transition by examining ideas and approaches to historical representation in art that can be traced through the work of Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, and David Wilkie, as well as in the writing of Wilkie’s major commentators John Burnet and Allan Cunningham. By common agreement, “history” was the most elevated task a painter could tackle – yet just what constituted a history painting was neither stable nor clear. On the contrary, a general air of taken-for-granted-ness hung over the art, blurring its considerable variety and masking the inevitable changes that are inherent in long-standing traditions. In artistic usage, the term “history/istoria” was elastic. Witness the late seventeenth-century description given by William Aglionby, who writes that “History-Painting is an Assembling of many Figures in one Piece, to Represent any Action of Life, whether True or Fabulous, accompanied with all its Ornaments of Land-skip and Perspective.”2 No one, so far as I know, has carefully studied the stages by which Aglionby’s early modern mixture of “truth” and

“fable” was brought under tighter constraints. Nonetheless, it seems clear that by the nineteenth century history painting had joined history writing in acquiring a broadly modern commitment to secularity and documentable fact. In the process, the “great style” had to relinquish some cherished symbols of grandeur, especially those associated with earlier regimes of church and state. Yet despite considerable changes, the genre did not lose its traditional identification as the most elevated branch of art. On the contrary, as earlier legacies lost currency, history painting (like history writing) built new claims around the political culture of secular nationalism and a vision of history as the sum of social experience. In this way history painting retained its identity as an art form enlarged by public concerns, albeit in an epoch in which historical sensibilities were turning towards the representation of everyday life. In short, though both “distance” and “history” remained essential elements of history painting, there was considerable room for change in both the prevailing idea of history and the modes and degrees of distance.3 Following in the track of Edgar Wind’s classic study of the “Revolution in History Painting,” this essay will examine some issues of distance and historical representation in Benjamin West and David Wilkie, two key transitional figures in British art c. 1800. The comparison, I acknowledge, may seem strained. After all, West has been credited with initiating a “revolution in history painting,” while Wilkie’s experiments with historical subjects have generally been assigned to common life. If a comparison of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters is wanted, why not a professed “historical painter” like Haydon, rather than a difficult hybrid like Wilkie?4 My purpose is not to adjudicate this argument, whether by sustaining or correcting contemporary responses to Wilkie’s art. Rather, pushing against the prescriptiveness that is built into traditional definitions of history painting, I want to approach Wilkie’s divided reception as a sort of diagnostic. My aim is to illustrate the continued importance of elevation as a criterion of judgment, as well as to explore the difficulties that arose from the tension between contrary impulses of distancing and familiarization. By extension – though far more briefly – my conclusion will suggest that Wilkie’s hybridization of history and everyday life bore a significant resemblance to parallel changes in historiographical sensibilities introduced by Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment.5 Thus contemporary uncertainties about how to place Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Despatch (1822) hold a larger interest as a commentary on the evolving relationship between history painting and other forms of historical representation.

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Joshua Reynolds and Neoclassical History Painting Historians of baroque and neoclassical painting routinely admonish their students not to confuse eighteenth-century history painting with the ordinary concerns of modern historians. The “history” in history painting is a special usage, derived from the Renaissance idea of istoria and closer to the religious and dynastic culture of early modern Europe than to the secular nationalism of modernity. Sacred history, ancient myth, dynastic allegories, the memory of Rome or Greece – these loosely gathered “histories” provided the eighteenth-century painter with his subject, not the nationalist imperatives of later generations. Despite some obvious ambiguities, few eighteenth-century artists felt the need to define history painting more closely. Why question a title so rich in prestige? One exception, however, was Joshua Reynolds, who built his idea of the genre on the strict Aristotelian distinction between the particular truths of history and the general truths of art.6 To avoid semantic confusion, Reynolds preferred to speak about the “Grand Style,” while freely acknowledging the painter’s liberty to “deviate from vulgar and strict historical truth, in pursuing the grandeur of his design.”7 Facts and events, he insisted, “however they may bind the Historian, have no dominion over the Poet or the Painter.” The artist is not restricted by a mere imitative idea of truth; instead he bends history “to his great idea of Art.” And yet even Reynolds needed to cede to common usage. “In conformity to custom,” he wrote, “I call this part of the art History Painting; it ought to be called Poetical, as indeed it really is.”8 Reynolds’s pragmatism suited a worldly artist who made his living by painting portraits, not “histories.” As first president of the Royal Academy, however, he championed a strict hierarchy of genres, with history painting at its summit. The “Grand Style” required all the skills belonging to lesser forms of art, but it alone found its home in representing the Ideal. “The Art which we profess has beauty for its object,” wrote Reynolds, “the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart.”9 As the second president of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West followed in Reynolds’s footsteps, but his idea of history painting incorporated a tie to history that was alien to Reynolds. As the familiar story is told in Galt’s biography of West (1816–20), the artist responded to a visit from a skeptical Joshua Reynolds with a ringing defence of the historical grounds for his artistic choice. General Wolfe’s victory in Quebec took place on 13 September 1759, in a region of the world

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unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and at a period of time when no such nations, nor heroes in their costume, any longer existed. The subject I have to represent is the conquest of a great province of America by the British troops. It is a topic that history will proudly record, and the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist.10 Much of West’s celebrity has rested on his decision to portray Wolfe and his comrades in contemporary clothing. Yet when we read this passage from Galt’s biography against the authority exercised by Reynolds, West’s challenge to neoclassical doctrines seems a matter less of dress than of a new relation to historical writing. For Reynolds, after all, the “Great Style” depended upon maintaining a clear, hierarchical distinction between the poetic freedoms of history painting and the commonplace particulars of ordinary history. West’s declaration, however, subsumes the problem of contemporary dress under the requirements of history, thereby separating history painting from poetry and endowing it with a new obligation to the kind of truthfulness that Reynolds dismissed as “vulgar and strict.” As Edgar Wind pointed out in his classic article “The Revolution of History Painting,” West’s invocation of historical truth seems all the more noteworthy because history painting and historical writing had been moving in contrary directions in the second half of the eighteenth century.11 In brief, while neoclassical history painters strove to create heroic images, Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon sought ways to familiarize the past.12 This tension, as will be seen, would become very significant for understanding a painter like Wilkie. More immediately, however, it meant that West’s modification of neoclassical principles would remain a conservative “revolution,” whose blend of grandeur and ordinary history still leaned heavily towards the ideal. And beyond West himself, the same smooth harmony was evident in a number of other Americans, who followed West’s example in endowing recent events with a full measure of the heroic. Witness John Singleton Copley’s massive canvas of the Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar September 1782 in the Guildhall (1783–91), with its echo of the “continence of Scipio”; equally, in his The Death of Major Pearson 6 January 1781 (1783), a minor battle in Jersey is fitted out with Raphaelesque borrowings. In the longer view, however, harmonizing the two histories became harder to manage on such traditional terms. On the contrary, as painting lost its moorings in the sacred histories and dynastic allegories of an earlier era, a new and closer relationship with history writing was forged. In consequence, though West’s own practice was hardly radical, his equation of history painting with historical truth seems prophetic of new directions in nineteenth-century art.

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Distance and Distances in The Death of General Wolfe West’s depiction of modern heroes in contemporary dress represented a challenge to neoclassical conventions, but Wind argues that West’s real originality lay in his strategy for depicting a modern event while maintaining the requisite distance. What West understood was that by exchanging settings that seemed exotic (North America) for those that were venerable (Roman antiquity) he could endow a recent event with all the elevation history painting required. In short, as Wind writes (quoting Racine): “Distance of country compensates in some measure for nearness of time: for people do not distinguish that which is … a thousand years, and that which is a thousand miles away from them.”13 Wind’s proposal is ingenious, but distance is a complex construction, not to be reduced to the measurement of linear time. At best, the proposed substitution of space for time introduces one more marker of distance without adding fundamentally to its plasticity or interpretive value. On the level of artistic practice, however, even a cursory description of The Death of General Wolfe (1770) suggests the variety of ways in which our responses are shaped by its modulations of distance (Fig. 1.3). No doubt the much talked about issue of contemporary dress modernizes the scene and makes West’s heroes appear less remote, yet this sense of increased accessibility has to be weighed against a formal design that pictures the wounded general in the pose of the dying Christ. Witness the pyramidal arrangement, the circle of grief-stricken onlookers, the slumping body supported by a merciful hand (in this case not that of the Virgin but of a doctor stemming the flow of blood). These features summon us by evoking the iconography of Christian sacrifice. Wolfe’s death – familiarized in one way, elevated and distanced in others – is no ordinary military casualty, but a moment of spiritual heroism, its pathos tempered by the recognition that a larger fate hangs over the occasion. Lament though we may, the young soldier’s death is a sacrifice lovingly offered – one we are called upon to admire in its fineness rather than to regret or wish to forestall. Setting off the Christian iconography, West introduces the exotic majesty of the Indigenous warrior. This is the work’s most striking invention, a crucial term in history painting going back to the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. By contrast, in Barry’s slightly later rendering of the same scene (1776), an Indigenous figure lies dead and little noticed at the bottom of the canvas. Here the corpse indicates the location of the battle, but does nothing to raise the grandeur of the scene.14 West, on the other hand, makes the warrior central. Silent and thoughtful, he contemplates the spectacle of death in victory. He is not there to participate in the

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struggle, but to take part in an unspoken dialogue. One of these warriors is mortally wounded, the other is expected to “vanish,” but for a moment the two soldiers jointly hold the stage and give the painting its ideological impact. They are America’s future and past. As in Barry’s painting, West’s Indigenous warrior functions as an emblem of place, but West presents us with a much larger and more historical idea. For all his speechless grandeur, the Native warrior remains an image of thought rather than of action. By his presence, he gives witness not only to the good death of the English general, but also to the larger victory his death brings the nation. Wolfe, we know, has to die on the Plains of Abraham, but so too will the world symbolized by this image of exotic nobility. Crucial as he is to what Alberti called the painting’s istoria, the Indigenous warrior is a vivid personification of the grand historical drama concluded by Wolfe’s sacrifice – the annexation of a great continent to British rule. Like other eighteenth-century painters, West was uncomfortable with the artificiality of traditional allegory, once a common feature of history painting. Instead, he deployed the Indigenous warrior as a natural symbol and added to the realistic effect by copying some items of costume imported from America. The result was a powerful image that was at once highly idealized and historically precise. The same balance characterizes the picture as a whole, allowing West to seek acceptance as an orthodox history painter while also claiming (at least in biographical retrospect) that his work remained faithful to a particular moment of history. No simple formula, it is evident, could account for the full array of gestures – formal, affective, ideological, and conceptual – that mediate our response to West’s painting and confirm its status as a history painting. At the most elementary level, the size and complexity of such a work were prime characteristics of a genre associated with the weight and dignity of public art. Equally, viewers would have been alert to West’s invocation of the pieta just as they understood the intellectual ambition that led him to enrich a historical narrative with allegorical significance. Though no one element alone would have accomplished everything the artist intended, the combination raised the painting above a mere “battle piece” and identified it as a “history.” These formal vocabularies overlap with a variety of other features that work in similar terms, sometimes distancing the scene, other times bringing it closer. What weight, for example, should we give to the emotional resonances of a picture concerned with the death of a young hero so far from home? And what about the conceptual dimension of West’s painting – a matter of the utmost importance in neoclassical discussions of the artistic hierarchy? According to the Albertian for-

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4.1 James Barry, Death of General Wolfe. 1776. Oil on canvas. Accession W1987. New Brunswick Museum – Musée du Nouveau-Brunswick, www.nbm-mnb.ca.

mula, still dominant in eighteenth-century Britain, landscape and portraiture required essentially mechanical skills; only history painting’s faculty of invenzione placed it amongst the liberal arts. As Reynolds put it, the “value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, of the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art, or a mechanical trade.”15 As a liberal art, history painting was expected to educate and enlighten. Like poetry, a “history” could summon the cultivated viewer by offering a strong impression of greatness. Nor would its lessons fade with the ages. As West himself put it in an address to the Royal Academy, “it is by those higher and more refined excellencies of painting, sculpture, and architecture that Grecian and Roman greatness are transmitted down to the age in which we live, as if they were still in existence; although many centuries have elapsed since both Greeks and Romans have been overthrown and dissolved as a people; while those nations, by whom those refinements were not known, or not cultivated, are erased from the face of the earth, without any other monument or vestige to give the demonstration that they were great.”16

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West’s experiment in “contemporary history” has given him the reputation of a cautious modernizer, but this passage – though not directly related to the Death of Wolfe – suggests a wider reflection on the problem of distance and ideology. Not only must the history painter accept the intellectual challenges Reynolds underlined, but his art also carries a special burden of historical memory. For Protestant Britain the consequence was often a deep sense of anxiety, especially in relation to France. If (as everyone agreed) history painting had its roots in religious images, there was no escaping the fact that Catholic Europe had schooled itself in just that class of devotional works that Puritan Britain had banished from its churches and public buildings. When Britons looked far into the future and examined their own artistic record against the achievements of their neighbours, they confronted a bleak failure of representation. What legacy could they offer compared to the glories of Rome, Paris, or Madrid? What memory, if any, would remain?

After Benjamin West – Wilkie’s The Village Politicians and Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Despatch West’s declaration that history painting must be truthful as well as heroic marked a significant modification to Reynolds’s teaching, yet if West succeeded in harmonizing history with grandeur it was largely because elevation still held precedence over faithfulness to the historical record. A generation later, however, these priorities were reversed by David Wilkie, an artist who can be understood as a painter of histories, but not as one who aspired to mix history with the heroic.17 Royal patronage had made West the most visible history painter of the day, but despite his unanimous election to the presidency of the Royal Academy in 1792, he never exercised Reynolds’s authority, nor did he succeed in giving Britain the historical school it so urgently wanted. Wilkie’s carefully detailed pictures of everyday life, on the other hand, found early success, and despite some notable changes of style in later years, he commanded a steady popularity. Significantly, the reproductive engravings that spread his fame largely referred back to his earlier, familiar style, rather than to the Spanish-influenced works that came later. As a consequence, in popular imagination at least, he continued to be associated with art that was felt to be particularly British, rather than classical. If, as commentators often agreed, the power of Wilkie’s imagination raised his work above mere genre painting and made his pictures “national,” his affinity was with Hogarth, not with Reynolds or West.

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Like the Death of Wolfe, Wilkie’s The Village Politicians (1806) depicted a scene that was both contemporary and historical, but it lacked the formal and affective markers that distinguish a “history” in art (Fig. 4.2). Too small, too dark, too obviously influenced by Dutch genre painting, this early effort lacked the dignity that might elevate it to the higher class. A study of rustic manners set in the interior of a common tavern, The Village Politicians offered nothing of West’s elegance or refinement. In this sense the work formed a contrast with Wilkie’s Alfred in the Neat Herd’s Cottage (1807), where the challenge was to signal King Alfred’s nobility

4.2 The Village Politicians, engraving by Abraham Raimbach after David Wilkie oil on canvas of 1806. The Earl of Mansfield. Scone Palace, Perthshire

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without doing violence to the idea that the fugitive sovereign might have passed for a rustic who could be scolded for burning the cakes.18 In The Village Politicians, however, there is no mix of low and high. All the characters are common peasants and their mildly caricatured expressions suggest satire, rather than open sympathy. Distancing is also suggested by the title, with its implication of something absurd in the spectacle of peasant debate.19 According to Albertian tradition, history painting was elevated by an exercise of mind. In this sense, what distinguished Wilkie’s tavern scene from scores of others was a conceptual invention that was all the more powerful for being relocated to the setting of peasant manners. And if part of the fun was to take a poke at uppity peasants, the painting also brought the history of the great Revolution into the intimacy of everyday life. Thus Allan Cunningham – discussed below as Wilkie’s biographer – was not wrong to find in it the germ of a much larger idea by which the sphere of historical representation would soon be redistanced and given new closeness and meaning. “As the painter’s mind expanded,” Cunningham suggested, “the subject expanded also; and before he arrived in London it had assumed, in his fancy at least, a character of national interest, and took its rank with historical compositions.”20 From the Edinburgh newspaper at the centre of The Village Politicians to the similar device in The Chelsea Pensioners (1822) is, I hope, a forgivable shortcut. John Burnet, who engraved this work, ranked it amongst the best pictures of Wilkie’s first manner, along with a number of other scenes of everyday life. In short, Burnet saw The Gazette as primarily a genre study, not a “history.” In truth, The Gazette retains many of the features of crowded liveliness that mark genre painting, though the high importance of the occasion – Wellington’s decisive victory over Napoleon – is also supported by a careful formal design. The stretch of Royal Hospital Road is a busy place, albeit carefully contained by an exterior view that recedes in elegant symmetry towards the point of central focus. Balanced too is the upper register, which sets a carefully drawn terrace on one side against a more distant view of Wren’s baroque towers and the grace of tall trees that seem almost more Italianate than English. In the foreground of the painting we see women in bonnets; men, young and old, in bright-coloured uniforms; infants held aloft to play their part in the spectacle; stray elements of commerce or music; along with multiple contrasts of generation, dress, religion, and skin colour. But unlike the decentred crowd scenes that became popular a generation later – William Powell Frith’s Ramsgate Sands (1854), for instance, or his Railway Station (1862) – The Gazette creates the unity of a moment of hubbub suspended. Everyone turns (or nearly so) to hear the ex-

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traordinary news from Belgium, rushed in by a mounted messenger and just beginning to be read out by an old soldier. As in traditional “histories,” Wilkie shows his formal skills by organizing a complex variety of poses that articulate the sentiments of the gathering. The predominant mood is a burst of patriotic elation, but much comment has also pointed to the alarmed eyes of a young woman, who pushes in to read the news herself, neglecting in her fear the crying baby in her arms. The woman, we understand, will find herself a widow, her child an orphan. The visual focus of the painting, however, does not rest with the frantic woman, any more than it does with the elderly soldier who reads out the message of victory and its heavy cost in lives. Rather it is the document itself – its pages lit up by a bright sun – that immediately strikes the eye. This focus on the gazette is an artifice, of course, yet like West’s Indigenous warrior, it also serves as a natural symbol. In contrast to West’s exotic figure, however, the newspaper is a familiarizing invention, a perfectly commonplace object that draws the crowd together in an eruption of national feeling.

The Reception of Wilkie: John Burnet, Author and Engraver Two Scottish contemporaries (already mentioned) provide the best introduction to Wilkie’s reception.21 Both John Burnet and Allan Cunningham ranked David Wilkie amongst the first artists of the day, but the conflict between Burnet’s neoclassicism and Cunningham’s romanticism made for quite different estimates of Wilkie’s place in the narrative of British art. Both knew their subject well (Burnet was Wilkie’s schoolfellow and later one of his favourite engravers; Cunningham became his biographer), but the clash of perspectives cannot be resolved on simple grounds of factual knowledge. On the contrary, much of the value of the comparison lies in the access it allows to conflicting definitions of “history” in early nineteenth-century painting. In addition to his work as an engraver and artist, Burnet was a frequent contributor to the Art Union, where he wrote a series of essays on the character and history of the British school. Following the conventions of the day, Burnet did not write about Wilkie until after the painter’s death in 1841, at which point he collected the essays and added a supplement on Wilkie under the title Practical Essays on Various Branches of the Fine Arts, to which is added a Critical Inquiry into the Principles and Practice of the Late Sir David Wilkie. Burnet thought Wilkie the greatest artist of the age, yet in a study centred on the failures of British history painting, Wilkie could not be the hero he had been in Cunningham’s biography, published

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just a few years before. For Burnet, Wilkie’s gifts placed him above any ordinary genre painter, but despite occasional ventures into “history,” his affinities lay with the Dutch rather than the high-minded clarity of the Italian masters. Historical themes were certainly present in works like The Village Politicians or The Chelsea Pensioners, but at bottom Wilkie’s genius linked him to Rembrandt or Hogarth, not to Raphael or Reynolds. Burnet wrote from a commitment to neoclassicism, with its stress on the formal and intellectual qualities that conferred dignity on art. Even so, three generations separated Reynolds’s Discourses from the publication of Practical Essays22 – time enough for Burnet to modify Reynolds’s ideas in accordance with the new realities of nineteenth-century nationalism. Driven from the church, the parent of historical painting from the earliest ages, the British artists turned their thoughts to subjects connected with the history of their country, filled as it is with many of the brightest examples of virtue, talent, and courage; paintings such as Copley’s Death of Chatham, Trumbull’s Sortie of Gibraltar, and West’s Battle of La Hogue showed their capability of producing works worthy of being handed down to posterity, and laying a foundation for a school of painting worthy of a great nation.23 Burnet’s account of history painting in this passage reasserts the traditional desire for elevation, but his nationalism places the secular state in the position once commanded by less worldly symbols of the ideal. In the process, history – ordinary secular history – displaces history painting’s traditional roots in sacred history and dynastic authority. This redistancing of what is meant by “history” carries important implications for neoclassicism’s commitment to painting the ideal – a point I will return to in the conclusion. For the moment it seems necessary to add that Burnet shows no sign of recognizing how fundamental a shift his society had experienced, leaving him free to continue to wear the mantle of tradition. From another standpoint, Burnet’s most obvious difference from Reynolds resided in his grudging acceptance of Britain’s continued resistance to public art. Notwithstanding “the formation of the Royal Academy, the excellent lectures of Reynolds, and the enthusiasm of many individuals, historical painting has never rested among us.”24 Even Reynolds himself had failed to lift his own work to the dignity of history, and still less had he been able to raise up the painting of others. Barry too had damaged the cause by loading his cycle in the Adelphi with pompous absurdities. “As a grand attempt to embody the higher qualities in the great Italian frescoes, it fails from a lack of dignity.”25 Nor was Burnet kinder to those of his contemporaries who offended against his principles of simplicity and clarity:

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“Hence solidity, strength, and tone, all highly requisite, and existing in the best historical works, have given place to white-washed crudities and effects of light; works that satisfy and amuse the eye in a transient glance are all that claim attention; hence the absence of true legitimate art.”26 Except for Wilkie’s The Preaching of Knox, his Christopher Columbus (“pictures that would do honour to any country”), and a few others, “historical painting has gradually become extinct; and her higher attributes, which can only be appreciated by a few, are prostituted to the ignorant attractions of the many.”27 Quoting Wilkie’s own fragmentary writings on history painting, Burnet concludes his chapter by reproducing a passage that both accepts the private character of English art and reiterates his longing for a renewal of “history”: “The taste for art in our isle is of a domestic rather than an historical character,” Wilkie had written: “a fine picture is one of our household gods, and kept for private worship. [And yet] … may not the lover of art and England exclaim, ‘What!’ and must we, who take the lead among the nations of the earth in all other departments of human genius abandon the hope of rivalling foreign states, and cease to hope for the production of a series of great historical and devotional pictures, like those that render the Vatican immortal, the Palace of the Luxembourg renowned, and the Escurial famed all over all the earth?”28 By assimilating Wilkie’s text into his own discussion, Burnet recruits Wilkie to the party of those who (like himself) were preoccupied with Britain’s failures in the great style. At the same time, Burnet underscores the discontinuities in Wilkie’s engagement with history by dividing the later, Spanish-influenced pictures from the genre studies of his earlier manner. Thus on one side we are left with The Preaching of Knox (1832) and Christopher Columbus (1835) – paintings Burnet singles out as proper “histories” – while on the other he places works of a “domestic rather than an historical character” leading up to The Chelsea Pensioners.29

The Reception of Wilkie: Alan Cunningham, Biographer Burnet’s Practical Essays possesses a sense of order that is especially notable in a book that began life as a series of periodical essays. Cunningham’s instinct, on the other hand, is enthusiastic rather than critical, cumulative rather than classificatory. He does not segregate his materials into categories, nor hinge his narrative on a series of careful prescriptions. Instead, writing rapidly and in the aftermath of his friend’s early death, Cunningham wants more than anything else for us both to know and to like the man.

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Cunningham’s loosely bundled biography moves easily through his hero’s life, guided by little more than chronology and affection. The result is a book not easily summarized, even by the author himself. Indeed, Cunningham waits until the final pages of his “Conclusion” before attempting a brief synopsis of Wilkie’s style. There what emerges is a romantic rewriting of neoclassical ideas, in which conclusions not dissimilar to Burnet’s prove to be founded upon quite different aesthetic commitments. Like Burnet, Cunningham distinguishes earlier and later styles and confers the accolade of history on a part, but not all, of Wilkie’s bestknown efforts.30 For the romantic biographer, however, history painting no longer seems quite the lodestar it had been for previous generations of artists, and its long-established formal vocabulary counts for much less. Above all, he reinterprets Albertian invention in the light of the romantic cult of imagination. The guiding principal is very simple: “It cannot but be perceived,” writes Cunningham, in reference to two early paintings, “that the conception of The Village Politicians is of the imagination; while the conception of Pitlessie Fair is of fact and reality.”31 For Cunningham what makes Politicians remarkable is Wilkie’s recreation in paint of the rancorous “sentiment” of political dispute. The individual figures are all marked out as plain as if their debate was put into words; no other heads could represent these worthies; they are personifications of their classes, and are perfect in their kind; The Rent Day, The Reading of the Will, and The Blind Fiddler belong to the same class, and may be called historical pictures, from that circumstance. It is otherwise with Pitlessie Fair, with The Waterloo Gazette, and in some degree with the John Knox.32 Cunningham’s judgment sets aside many of the traditional markers of history painting: high social rank, the size and complexity of the canvas, public versus private settings. Instead, he gives primacy to artistic imagination and the passions, while also recognizing that much of Wilkie’s best work formed a hybrid class that “mingled portraiture and history.”33 In The Chelsea Pensioners, he explains, the “business of the painter was selection rather than invention; therefore this noble picture, though it possesses … a deep claim to admiration, cannot take rank with those pure emanations of mind, where the heads are personifications of passions rather than of individuals.”34 The same limitation applies to The Preaching of John Knox, though to a lesser degree. This painting, “though of a loftier order of art, stands in the same rank of conception with the half portrait and half historical pictures of Reynolds and Lawrence, superadding a dramatic effect and power to which their finest conceptions can make but a slender claim.” Despite this mixture of genres, however, Cunningham considered Knox one of Wilkie’s finest works, “an admirable union

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of the high qualities of the Italian school, with the lower, but still valuable qualities of the Dutch … a picture in which Wilkie had extended the boundaries of art, and achieved that which no painter had done before him.”35 Cunningham’s conclusion adds a significant dimension to the biography, but taken as a whole the book remains a personal narrative, not a critique. The model is the sort of life-and-letters narrative that nudges life writing in the direction of autobiography by allowing the subject his own voice.36 One consequence of this structure is that readers accustomed to thinking of Wilkie in terms of clearly differentiated genres and periods may find this informality confusing. The Gazette of Waterloo, for example, is introduced at the start of Cunningham’s second volume amidst a medley of other works – many of them arguably historical in the ordinary sense – with virtually nothing said either to organize them as a sequence or to point to their differences. Thus we learn that Wilkie’s friend Dobree approached him to paint something on the theme of the death of great men. Wilkie, however, was reluctant, saying that “a particular line of study is necessary to paint historical and biographical incidents.” Nonetheless, he eventually found his subject in “the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney.”37 Wilkie’s thoughts turned to “the national picture of The Penny Wedding,” a work in which “the manners and customs and character of old Scotland reign and triumph.”38 Soon after (Cunningham reports), there was much speculation when it became known that Wilkie had been commissioned by the Duke of Wellington to paint something of “a military character.”39 “But no one guessed that out of the wooden legs, mutilated arms, and the pension lists of old Chelsea, he was about to evoke a picture which the heart of the nation would accept as a remembrance of Waterloo.” For many pages we follow the progress of this “great national work,”40 interspersed with others of the same period: the exploration of Highland “manners and customs” in the Whisky Still, for instance, or the Newsmongers,41 with its repetition in miniature of the central visual motif of The Chelsea Pensioners. The most striking juxtaposition, however, comes with a series of journal entries regarding Wilkie’s final touches to The Gazette; the approbation of his patron, the Duke of Wellington; and the painting’s success at the exhibition. All this, however, is followed immediately by an entry recording completion of a sketch for The Preaching of John Knox – a work that Burnet assigns to another time and genre altogether.42 Illness and travels meant that The Preaching of John Knox would not be completed for another ten years. Thus we don’t customarily think of this touchstone of his later style being conceived immediately after the completion of The Gazette of Waterloo. Similarly, we may not notice Wilkie’s continued involvement in the production and marketing of engravings after his earlier, more popular paintings. In

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Cunningham’s narrative, however, these disparate chronologies run together, an arrangement that suggests continuities in Wikie’s art that might be difficult to perceive from Burnet’s prescriptive approach.

Conclusion: Redistancing the Past in West and Wilkie In both Burnet and Cunningham, we see evidence of the unspoken process by which the “history” in history painting was changing its context and meaning. The redistancing that these changes implied was gradual, but unmistakable in its direction, as an art form that had once been associated with dynastic allegories and sacred histories was drawn into more immediate and secular concerns. The result was a mood of ideological urgency fuelled by nationalistic sentiments, disturbing neoclassical decorum and inhibiting the pursuit of a stable marriage between high art and idealized histories. For conservatives like Burnet, ever anxious to cap Britain’s victories with cultural graces, what followed was a slow retreat from the hopes once vested in the future of public painting. Cunningham, for his part, did not so much dispense with the neoclassical hierarchy as recast it in romantic terms. In this context Wilkie’s humane but slightly skeptical realism may seem like an odd style for him to champion. But what Cunningham most valued in his countryman was his ability to endow the most ordinary feelings with their full imaginative weight and consequence. Both receptions carry conviction, just as each raises its own set of problems. The neoclassical view was upheld by much contemporary opinion, but it leaves us with what is essentially a period definition that takes no account of this genre’s extraordinary longevity. How far nineteenth-century styles should conform to eighteenth-century prescriptions has to remain open to question. Conversely, Cunningham’s romantic focus on the imagination sacrifices some of the precision that is neoclassicism’s most obvious virtue, but its more open approach could be more sensitive to important historical shifts, including the crucial issue of history painting’s increasing parallels with historical writing. From a historiographical point of view, after all, The Chelsea Pensioners follows a pattern already familiar since Hume by which history was redistanced towards social and sentimental themes.43 When this convergence is taken into account, our conception of nineteenthcentury history painting needs some adjustment. Wilkie, for one thing, seems less of a hybrid and more plainly a product of the historical sensibilities of his age. Beginning with the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment a half-century

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earlier, British historical thought had become increasingly engaged with the idea that, at the deepest level, society is constituted by the interplay of the passions and interests. The initial effect may have been to put history painting and historical writing on opposite trajectories – one focused on heroic elevation, the other on undercurrents of manners and sentiment.44 And yet, since artists and historians inhabited the same worlds, we cannot wonder that the two narrative forms drew closer together and even merged their vocabularies. As Benjamin West had put it, “the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist.”

Notes This is a slightly revised version of my article of the same title in Modern Intellectual History 11 (2014), 611–29. My work on it was supported by a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (casva) in Washington, dc. I am grateful for the research assistance offered by Nicholas Savage and Mark Pomeroy at the Royal Academy in London and the helpful critical reading of Noelle Gallagher, Robert Goheen, Mitchell Frank, April London, and Jenna Stidwill. 1 European Magazine, and London Review 81 (May 1822): 466. 2 I have examined the idea of distance in a variety of periods and genres in my recent monograph; see Phillips, On Historical Distance. Aglionby, Painting Illustrated, n.p. 3 It is important to stress that I take “distance” to be a relational term that refers to the full spectrum of positions, near as well as far. For this reason, I use “distancing” or “distanciation” to mean putting something at a distance. See Phillips, On Historical Distance, 6–7. 4 For reasons of space I have chosen to focus on West and Wilkie and more generally on the secular and nationalist dimension of history painting. In a wider survey one would want not only to give some account of Haydon, but also to examine the rather different histories of Turner, Danby, and Martin. 5 I have discussed this theme at length in Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing, 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000), and in On Historical Distance, chapters 3–4. 6 For some striking variants on this idea see Henry Fuseli, The Life and Writings, 3 vols (London, 1831) 2: 156–79 passim; and Prince Hoare, “Examination of the Various Offices of Painting,” in Hoare, ed., The Artist, 2 vols (London, 1809–10), 2: 6–26, 255–73. On the latter, see my discussion in On Historical Distance, 161–4. 7 Reynolds, Discourses, 59. 8 Ibid., 60. 9 Ibid., 171.

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10 Galt, The Life, Studies, 47–8. For Galt’s relation to West see Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven, 2001), 274 n4; and Susan Rather, “Benjamin West, John Galt, and the Biography of 1816,” Art Bulletin 86 (June 2004), 342–5. 11 Wind, “The Revolution of History Painting,” 88, in my edition. For the continued currency of Wind’s proposal see David Bindman, “Americans in London: Contemporary History Painting Revisited,” in Christiana Payne and William Vaughn, eds, English Accents: Intersections in British Art, 9–28 (London: Aldershot, 2004). 12 For a fuller discussion see my Society and Sentiment, as well as On Historical Distance. 13 Wind, “Revolution of History Painting,” 88. 14 James Barry, The Death of General Wolfe, 1776, New Brunswick Museum, Canada. 15 Reynolds, Discourses, 57. 16 Benjamin West, Discourse Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy … to which is Prefixed the Speech of the President to the Royal Academicians, on the 24th of March, 1792. (London, 1793), iv. 17 For Wilkie, I am especially indebted to two fine studies: Nicolas Tromans, David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh, 2007); and Lindsay Errington, Tribute to Wilkie (Edinburgh, 1985). 18 See Wilkie’s letter to Sir George Beaumont, 9 Oct 1806: Allan Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie, 3 vols (London, 1843) 1: 125–6. 19 The newspaper has been identified as a radical Edinburgh publication. Contemporary commentary emphasized peasant presumptuousness as its target. For an earlier example, see Edward Penney’s The Gossiping Blacksmith (1769, Tate). I am grateful to John Brewer for this reference. 20 Cunningham, Wilkie, 1: 112–3. In a longer discussion I would want to consider Wilkie’s Alfred, which he explicitly calls a history. See his remark to Beaumont that “the principal object in an historical composition is to lead the mind back to the time in which the transaction happened,” coupled with the recognition that the mind is “always ready to associate elevated ideas with antiquity.” Cunningham, Wilkie, 1: 125–6. 21 I have chosen not to include the reminiscences of Benjamin Robert Haydon, another contemporary. Haydon’s conflicted friendship with Wilkie and his deep self-regard require another kind of discussion. 22 For Burnet’s relation to Reynolds’s thought see his The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds; Illustrated by Explanatory Notes (London, n.d.). 23 Burnet, Practical Essays, 11. Burnet continues, “and had they been painted of a large size, decorating the halls or palaces throughout the kingdom, as in Rome, or Venice, or Florence, they would ere now have been engendering in the minds of the people the most beneficial results.” Instead they are only known from engravings, which have saved them from being entirely lost. 24 Ibid., 34.

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25 Ibid., 37. 26 Ibid., 41. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 44; quoting from Cunningham, Wilkie, vol. 3. 29 There are other works of course from both periods that might be included. Amongst the earlier works, there are a number that seem more conventionally historical, including the Alfred and the Neat Herd’s Cottage and the Philip Sydney; among the later ones, The Peep O’ Day Boy’s Cabin (1836), Napoleon with Pope Pius VII (1836). 30 Nor were the selections always alike. 31 Cunningham, Wilkie, 3: 479. 32 Ibid., 3: 501. 33 Ibid., 3: 506. A further complexity lies in the distinction between painting passions and manners. “When he had to record manners rather than sentiment, Wilkie made faces equally expressive, but of a lower meaning, serve his purpose.” His paintings depicting the latter concerned “honest homespun peasants” and their affect was domestic and humorous. Ibid., 3: 502. 34 Ibid., 3: 502. 35 Ibid. 36 Tom Taylor later composed a similar account of Haydon. On the sentimental element in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century biography see Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 131–46. 37 Cunningham, Wilkie, 2: 6. 38 Ibid., 2: 29. Emphasis added. The term “national” is frequently applied to Wilkie’s works. It is a usage that – like the emphasis on customs and manners – speaks to a wider sense of what constitutes a nation’s history. 39 Ibid., 2: 13. 40 Ibid., 2: 51. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 2: 66, 68–71, 72 successively. 43 Phillips, On Historical Distance, chs 1 and 2. 44 See my Society and Sentiment.

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P A R T T WO

History Painting in the Marketplace jordan bear

The public to which history paintings addressed themselves was never entirely fixed, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the fluidity of that demographic became obvious to all but the most insular artists. The patronage traditionally furnished by the institutions of church and state, for whom history painting’s didactic capacities were beneficial, was increasingly supplanted by other sources of backing. Even where more traditional patronage structures endured, the patrons were increasingly likely to be members of the industrial bourgeoisie, whose appetite for history painting was meagre.1 In Britain in particular there was a relative dearth of support for history painting, not least because the kinds of institutions elsewhere dedicated to the genre’s perpetuation were eclipsed by a far more powerful arbiter of artistic value: the marketplace. By the 1810s, history paintings were as likely to be found amidst garish commercial

entertainments as in the edifying precincts of chapels, palaces, and town halls.2 Some of the features that had made these works ideal vehicles of moral instruction – their dramatic subject matter, large dimensions, and oftentimes immersive spatial construction – made them equally suited to entertainments of a less ennobling variety. The fortunes of James Ward’s monumental essay, Allegory of Waterloo, reflected the ease with which history paintings migrated into the realm of commercial display. The Allegory had its origins in a competition staged by the British Institution, the nation’s most conservative institutional supporter of a rigid hierarchy of genres, where it claimed first prize. But the Allegory quickly made its way to William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, whose walls would be graced not only by other monumental history paintings, but by an astonishing panoply of exhibits. The integration of history paintings into a much broader

terrain of visual display discomfited traditionalists. When the antiquary John Thomas Smith viewed Ward’s gargantuan picture there in 1816, he was chagrined that the painting was displayed “just as a showman in a fair would put out his large canvass to display ‘the true and lively portraiture’ of a giant, the Pig-faced Lady, or the Fireeater.”3 History painting had taken its place among a dramatically different set of competitors than those prescribed by academic tenets. The penetration of historical representations into the commercial sphere furnished a set of opportunities to those artists who possessed both the aesthetic and entrepreneurial ingenuity to turn the new state of affairs to their advantage. James Gillray, the mordant graphic satirist, understood particularly acutely the public desire for images of momentous historical events and the potential of his own métier for providing them. As Cynthia Ellen Roman argues in her essay, Gillray launched a pictorial rejection of the precepts of history painting, and distributed it in a manner that likewise revealed the withering influence of academic traditions. His biting Death of the Great Wolf (1795), a caustic travesty of Benjamin West’s similarly titled icon, heaped scorn on the visual pretensions of the grand history painting. It was sold through commercial print shops, whose storefront windows became an exhibition space commensurate with the changing nature of the audience for such works. Gillray had devised a means of performing the work of the history painting while indict-

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ing that genre’s anachronisms. The shifting of patronage to a public of consumers and publishers embeds the particular fate of history painting within broader changes to the public sphere. This realm was, increasingly, the habitat of history painting in its most experimental mutations. The visual experience of history within this sphere was an unabashedly mediated one. Gillray’s encounter with General Wolfe was filtered through West’s classic work, and it relinquished entirely the pretense of being immediately linked to the events it depicts. This self-aware distance produced a form of historicism concerned not only with the past itself, but with the representational heritage through which that past was constructed. In his account of the visual representation of Napoleon in exile, Jordan Bear examines the role of eyewitness experience in these constructions. Consigned to a remote island in the Atlantic, Napoleon was the most famous man in the world, and also one of the least accessible. The demand for his image in the commercial sphere was unrelenting, compelling painters to confront a much larger challenge of which the absent Emperor was symptomatic: how does one gather knowledge about something that is distant, either in time or in space? The massive variety of visual entertainments and optical devices featuring Napoleon during this period sought novel ways of overcoming these removes, of making the experience immediate and immersive. The fundamental epistemic challenges of history and visual representation intersected in these

spaces, stimulating a number of remarkable investigations of the limits of historical representation. Ambitious history painters increasingly had to strike a delicate balance between the popular and the elevated. The most compelling among these were the artists who accomplished this feat by drawing upon a range of generic conventions, even creating new hybrids through which the problematic status of history painting could be addressed. The Anglo-American painter Thomas Cole drew upon his transatlantic experiences: of the degrading conditions of industry in the old world and the elusive promise of an uncontaminated American wilderness. Tim Barringer makes clear in his contribution how Cole pioneered a “historical landscape of the present day,” in which the resources of landscape painting were marshalled to offer an account of historical change global in its geographic reach and nearly infinite in its temporality. Cole’s uneasy place in the history of art is to a great degree a consequence of his ability to balance unimpeachable academic authorities like Claude with the popular pyrotechnics of John Martin, the panorama, and the diorama. The landscape served well as a stage for meditations on the arc of history, even if the version of landscape that Cole embraced was that of a modern, commercial, and urban visual culture.

Notes 1 On the patronage of art amongst the new middle classes, see the essays in Wolff and Seed, The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class. 2 On this migration of history painting into commercial venues, see Mitchell, “Benjamin West’s ‘Death of General Wolfe’ and the Popular History Piece,” 20–33, and, more generally, Solkin, Painting for Money. 3 Quoted in Altick, Shows of London, 186.

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5 James Gillray’s The Death of the Great Wolf and the Satiric Alternative to History Painting cynthia ellen roman

Centuries-old hierarchies of the visual arts firmly placed history painting and graphic satire at opposite ends of the spectrum of genres. In late eighteenthcentury Britain, “history painting” – elevated narrative art depicting exemplary heroes and events meant to summon a civic polity – held an esteemed status and marked the apex of achievement for any ambitious individual artist, as well as for national schools of art. At the same time, painting (along with sculpture and architecture) was the most highly regarded visual medium. Graphic satire, in contrast, was viewed as the lowest form of pictorial expression and was positioned at the bottom of that aesthetic hierarchy. Engravers were not even granted membership in the Royal Academy during the eighteenth century because their art was considered craft lacking in invention. The sharp contrariety of graphic satire and history painting offers an under-explored opportunity to shed light on the interdependency of the transformations of history painting and the rise of graphic satire. This paper will analyze the shared and opposing features, instances of inter-referentiality, and the distinct and common cultural spaces of the two genres. In late eighteenth-century Britain, ongoing struggles to establish a national school of academic history painting against perceived obstacles coincided with a robust reform of visual satire. The early emblematic treatment of partisan political affairs in satiric prints gave way to a “new pungency of imagery in ‘the caricature stile.’”1 History painting too was undergoing considerable change or “redistancing,” defined by Mark Salber Phillips as the process by which the “history” in “history painting” was changing context and meaning from “istoria” or elevated,

idealized narrative of religion, myth, and allegory to more immediate national and secular concerns.2 Increased attention in recent years from scholars across disciplines underscores the compelling cultural currency wielded by academic history painting even as it faced external pressures to reform. Numerous scholars have built on the groundbreaking work of John Barrell and David Solkin, in particular, who have traced the redefinition of history painting by British critics and the refashioning of history painting in practice as “a mixed manner” that balanced and compromised the ideals of the grand style, which prioritizes general ideas and perfect form, with the particularities demanded by new audiences. Establishing the visual arts as a matter of pressing national concern, subsequent scholars have reinforced the realities of high political and cultural stakes at play for the arts.3 In the words of historian Holger Hoock who asserts the transactional role of art in the fiscal-military state, “the culture of power and the power of culture were interlinked in shaping the character of British public life.”4 Art historian Douglas Fordham recovers the impact of political contingency on the arts at a pivotal moment when the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) exerted a “catalyzing transformational effect” on the national school of art.5 With a more aesthetic focus, Martin Myrone explores the dangers and complexities involved in creating heroic masculine exemplarity against the knowing impossibilities of shoring up the heroic ideal of the grand manner.6 What becomes evident in these various studies is the inventive array of strategies deployed by painters and institutions, printmakers and commercial print publishers, who grappled to overcome obstacles of tradition and meagre opportunity to imagine, to improvise, and to produce history painting befitting the exigencies of national taste and interests and geared to contemporary audiences and markets. At this moment, the consummately skilled, brilliantly inventive Gillray intervened. His graphic satires of important public (political) narratives engaged with and appropriated the subjects, language, and public-facing function of history painting.7 While Gillray’s prints span both social and political subjects, his ambitious political subjects such as the mock-heroic Death of the Great Wolf (1795; Fig. 5.1), an unambiguous parody of Benjamin West’s already canonical history painting The Death of General Wolfe (1770), will be most relevant for this discussion, which shares Ian Haywood’s commitment to assessing “single prints in the same detailed manner in which we look at paintings” thereby asserting comparable aesthetic and ideological complexities to caricature.8 Gillray’s profoundly pictorial satires, replete with literary and historical allusions and references to canonical old master art, contested the prevailing order of visual narrative embodied in Royal Academy doctrine and practice.

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James Gillray and the Royal Academy According to his twentieth-century biographer, Draper Hill – a successful cartoonist in his own right – Gillray himself had early reservations about satire and clearly would have preferred to make a name for himself as an engraver of “serious” highly finished subjects after the example of Francesco Bartolozzi and William Woollett.9 Gillray first entered the print world as an apprentice to a letter engraver (his lettering skill remained a mark of his accomplishment). His greater ambition, however, soon led him to the Royal Academy school, where, in April 1778, as a young man of twenty or twenty-one years, he was accepted for study as an engraver.10 His early training at the academy provided means to acquire deep knowledge of Old Master paintings, as well as of the works of current academic history painters. In addition, he developed his considerable talent as a draughtsman, attending life-drawing classes in which he honed his understanding of the anatomy of the human figure and the narrative potential of gesture, both of which were core elements of history painting fostered by the academy. True to these fundamental teachings, Gillray always rendered convincing the gesture and movement of figures even as he transformed the human body to spectacular, expressive exaggeration in his satiric caricatures – a signature of his genius. While a student, Gillray was privy to the views of academy president Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses codified a conservative academic theory of painting that prioritized history or “great style” painting based on continental traditions. Reynolds’s condemning assessment of the history paintings by England’s first great graphic satirist William Hogarth reveals an irresolvable gulf between the genres: Our late excellent Hogarth, who, with all his extraordinary talents, was not blessed with this knowledge of his own deficiency; or of the bounds to which were set to the extent of his powers. After this admirable artist had spent the greatest part of his life in an active busy, and we may add, successful attention to the ridicule of life; after he had invented a new species of dramatick painting, in which probably he will never be equaled, and had stored his mind with infinite materials to explain and illustrate the domestick and familiar scenes of common life, which were generally, and ought to have been always, the subject of his pencil; he very impudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style, of which his previous habits had no means prepared him: he was indeed so entirely unacquainted with the principles of this style, that he was not even aware, that any artificial preparation was at all necessary.11

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5.1 James Gillray. Death of the Great Wolf. 1795. Etching and stipple engraving with hand coloring. Published by Hannah Humphrey. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In contrast to Hogarth (in Reynolds’s assessment of him), Gillray was equipped by his time at the academy with the knowledge and skills requisite for a history painter. At the same time, his emergence as an artist coincided with the commercial triumphs of reproductive engraving in the 1780s and 1790s following the sensational success of William Woollett’s engraving of West’s The Death of Wolfe in 1776 (Fig. 5.2). It is not surprising then that Gillray, lured by the promise of profit as well as status, aspired to a career as a reproductive engraver of narrative subjects. He made some forays, including stipple-engraved illustrations for Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village published by Robert Wilkinson. Gillray’s work for Wilkinson also ventured closer to subjects that answered public hunger for reportage of dramatic contemporary events. These included depictions of marine disasters, such as the tragic loss of the Nancy Packet (1784), which he rendered after his own invention as the result of a Biblical deluge.12

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5.2 William Woollett (after Benjamin West). The Death of Wolfe. 1776. Line engraving with etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Gillray apparently set his sights even higher. In a letter to Benjamin West from the mid-1780s, he solicited work to reproduce West’s paintings, writing that he would embrace it as “the highest honor of my life” to engrave a series of the painter’s works.13 Gillray had previously failed to secure work to produce a print of the Last Supper, which was engraved instead by Richard Earlom. Gillray was further rejected by John Boydell as one of the team of prominent engravers working to reproduce history paintings for the prestigious Shakespeare Gallery.14 An account by the embittered engraver Robert Strange grieving his ill treatment in a letter to the Earl of Bute (1775) confirms the high stakes and extreme competition for prized reproductive commissions.15 Draper Hill reasonably speculates that prospective commissions for Gillray may have been hampered by his evident, unmistakable style, which already leaned toward satire. Perhaps for this reason, Gillray had also failed in a prospective partnership with publisher W.S. Fores to produce a “straight” portrait of William Pitt: Gillray’s portrayal appeared more a

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caricature than a respectful, flattering portrayal of the powerful statesman. Perhaps a prefiguration of Gillray’s portrayal of Pitt as the central hero in Death of the Great Wolf, the portrait itself verges on a parody of Pitt’s overly thin figure, pinched facial features, and long pointed nose.16 Unsuccessful in his bid for recognition as an engraver of elevated subjects, Gillray turned to a promising alternative – graphic satire – and in so doing achieved astounding success and a thriving clientele. The freedom and liveliness of his etching, which asserted the artist’s unique hand, was perhaps less suitable to reproducing the work of another, which demanded a more neutral and anonymously systematized touch. Once applied to satiric compositions, however, this masterful, idiosyncratic line would serve well to reveal the artful skill of Gillray, the graphic satirist. Ironically, Gillray’s dissatisfaction and ultimate rupture with the academy provided a motivating venom, which he harnessed to brilliant end in his inspired ridicule of contemporary statesmen and heroes. In further paradox, much of his aesthetic arsenal was learned under the aegis of the academy itself. His time in the Royal Academy provided the basic learning that paved the way for forays as a reproductive printmaker, which in turn introduced him to the trade that would ultimately inform and support the narrative satires. His combination of talent and exposure made Gillray the perfect agent to transform the previously amateurdominated idiom of political caricature and satire into a professional pictorial mode. His art, and that of his peers and successors, engaged in open and often confrontational dialogue with the academy overall – its language, its traditions, and its members – and with history painting in particular. Gillray had all the right credentials to lead the ascendancy of graphic satire as an art form: he was a consummate draughtsman; his pictorial imagination, capacity for invention, and instinct for caricature were unsurpassed; his knowledge of art historical canons was deep; and his connections with important intellectuals and politicians provided plentiful insights and guidance on topical subjects.

The Revolution of History Painting and the Reform of Satire Edgar Wind’s seminal 1938 article, “The Revolution of History Painting,” established the still-useful art historical narrative concerning the conflict that arose in eighteenth-century Britain between academic models of the grand style and the innovative alternative of history painting as topical reportage.17 As the former focused on idealized and timeless general representation, the latter, in contrast,

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embraced the specificity and even the familiarity of heroes and events. According to Wind, when Benjamin West painted The Death of General Wolfe, he provided the controversy with its most conspicuous test case. Indeed, West is a key transitional figure in the narrative of British history painting.18 West’s painting commemorates the death of Major-General James Wolfe, who died in 1759 after being mortally wounded while commanding British forces in battle against the French at Quebec. The dying general lies at centre having uttered his supposed last words after the standard-bearing messenger brought news of victory: “Now God be praised, I will die in peace.” Wolfe is surrounded by identifiable figures whose likenesses generally correspond to known portraits: Captain Hervey Smyth, aide-de-camp to Wolfe, kneels to the left and holds his arm; Mr Adair, the surgeon kneeling to the right, who may or may not have been present; Brigadier General Robert Monckton, with his arm in a sling; and Colonel George Williams and Major Isaac Barré. Although it is in fact an artistic fabrication, there is a distinct effect of accuracy. West’s picture is among the earliest and most influential examples of the “revolution of history painting,” whereby contemporary national events were depicted in the exalted rhetoric of the grand style previously reserved for events from a distant past. One of West’s strategies for infusing a recent military event and a contemporary national hero with timeless dignity was to compose the central group of the dying general and his attendants as a traditional pièta. West largely eschewed academic doctrine, which prescribed that heroic episodes from distant history should be represented as an idealized, general idea of the imagined past, with the particular, the familiar, and the individual omitted in order to emphasize the universal moral values central to the tradition of history paintings. In contrast with the academic canon, West’s scene of battlefield martyrdom is rendered with exacting historical detail, including portrait likenesses and modern dress. Each soldier wears a uniform appropriate to his branch of service. The view, too, is true to the topography of the battle site. In this respect, The Death of General Wolfe sparked considerable debate over the possibility of treating a contemporary subject in the grand style without offending decorum. The appeal of West’s Wolfe, Myrone explains, is that “here was a great Briton who had died valorously establishing an empire, in a role of personal leadership that exposed him to immediate danger from the enemy … who was a hero even to imperial subjects … who combined valour and personal grace, and who had risen to high status by his virtuous action alone.”19 West’s revolution in art, Fordham suggests, was the popularity of the Death of General Wolfe.20 With these successes, West’s revolutionary painting also inspired further experimentation.

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Considerable impetus for the new emphasis on experimenting with contemporary subjects came from the financial opportunities of the print market. William Woollett’s engraving after West’s The Death of General Wolfe, published in 1776, reportedly cleared a profit of £15,000 for publisher John Boydell.21 Woollett’s work was not the only engraving that yielded this level of financial gain and others demonstrated that the print market might provide viable financial options for aspiring history painters. The engravings whet the appetite of the print buying public for narrative reportage, with demand in turn feeding the market further. John Singleton Copley, following on from West and with even more impact, transformed history painting into a more broadly popular genre. Copley’s The Death of the Earl of Chatham (1779) and his Death of Major Pierson (1782–84) moved further away from the intermediary style of West to something closer to reportage.22 Copley’s monumental representation of Chatham’s collapse in parliament is essentially a group portrait in a commemorative setting. Building on the successes of West and Copley, many others embraced the innovative discovery that topical subjects of national interest drawn from military campaigns or matters of state could forge a synthesis of two phenomena – informative treatment to please the consumer art market and the painter’s predilection for the grand style. The profound success of history painting in the reproductive print market, particularly representations of nationally significant topical events, opened possibilities for graphic satirists too. While not impeded by the conflicts around decorum, which troubled history painting, early satire similarly sought to address a contemporary appetite for topical narrative. The aristocrat, politician, and amateur caricaturist George Townshend, who served in the British military during the campaign to win Quebec from France, produced a series of sketches on the conduct of his commander in chief, the very same General Wolfe who is the subject of West’s famous pictures. Townshend’s acerbic satires offer up witty derision with none of the elevated aspirations of West or Copley. Instead, Townshend’s drawings operated as “an iconoclastic alternative to the ubiquitous martyr-hero of West’s The Death of General Wolfe.”23 In No Mercy to Captives Before Quebec (1759; Fig. 5.3), Townshend ridicules Wolfe for his alleged obsession with sexual conquest, here played out as a military tactics meeting between Wolfe and two of his officers, Isaac Barré and Robert Monckton. With raised finger, Wolfe announces: “We will not let one of them escape, my dear Isaac – the pretty ones will be punished at Headquarters.” While these drawings were never published and circulated only among a limited and knowing colonial community, Townshend’s satires were disseminated to elite collectors, albeit often without authorship or publishers identified, as etchings in

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the London print market, where his skills as a caricaturist aligned with his skills as an opposition party organizer. Most notable are the orchestrated attacks on Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who served as captain-general of British military forces in Europe, as well as more general attacks on the ruling Newcastle administration that directed the war efforts. These prints were collected primarily by Britain’s political elite, and often prompted knowing gossip about the subjects. Townshend’s etching The Recruiting Serjeant or Britain’s Happy Prospect published by Matthew Darly in 1757 lampoons Henry Fox’s efforts to form a ministry. The recruiting procession is led by Henry Fox (later Lord Holland) who calls for “All Gentlemen Volunters willing to serve under Military Government let ’em repair to my Standard & they Shall be Kindly Receiv’d.” Followers include the Vice-treasurer of Ireland, Welbore Ellis, as the drummer, the Earl of Sandwich, carrying a cricket bat, Bubb Doddington and the Earl of Winchelsea. The Duke of Cumberland stands “fat and vainglorious” in the circular temple in the distance. This etching was issued both as a separate sheet and included as a reduced copy in “A Political and Satyrical History of the Years 1756 and 1757.” The productions of graphic satirists were similarly affected by the transformations of pictorial narrative underway in history painting. The success of reproductions following West’s The Death of General Wolfe, and their widespread currency in the London art world inspired both straight copies and travesties. A relatively modest but skilful political satire by John Boyne titled General Blackbeard Wounded at the Battle of Leadenhall lampooned Charles James Fox during the elections of 1784 (Fig. 5.4). The composition mockingly recalls the pièta-inspired death scene of West’s more serious, high-minded image. The satire portrays the minister wounded by the defeat of his India Bill. He lies in the arms of Admiral Keppel. Edmund Burke, dressed as a monk, offers him a glass. Mary (Perdita) Robinson applies smelling salts, while the Prince of Wales kneels to kiss her unoccupied hand. North, to the right, supported by Portland, swoons with grief, while Sheridan kneels in front of John Cavendish. The early gesture of Boyne’s satire of Fox toward West’s The Death of General Wolfe would soon be transformed by the more ambitious and aesthetically sophisticated James Gillray, whose Death of the Great Wolf offered a full satirical visualization of pictorial reportage in contest – and in cahoots – with academic history painting. Gillray’s satirical prints would flourish brilliantly in the opportunity for invention presented in this inherent paradox of West’s radically new narrative painting. As Fordham asserts, in The Death of General Wolfe “West combined the devotionalism of religious painting, the populism of recent military conquest, and the authority of academic history painting into a sentimental tribute to the

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5.3 George Townshend. No Mercy to Captives Before Quebec. 1759. Ink on paper. McCord Museum.

5.4 John Boyne. General Blackbeard Wounded at the Battle of Leadenhall. 1784. Etching and engraving. Published by E. Hedges. The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

fiscal-military state,” while observing at the same time that “to exhibit a major history painting of a contemporary subject [a Hogarthian precedent] was to allow the demotic idiom of the political print a toehold in the very genre premised on its exclusion.”24

James Gillray’s The Death of the Great Wolf Among Gillray’s masterpieces, Death of the Great Wolf is a carefully orchestrated parody of Benjamin West’s picture specifically, and a lampooning critique of the academy and history painting more generally. With this print, Gillray reveals an artistic genealogy that at once absorbs and rejects both Reynolds’s tenets of the grand manner and West’s modern, neoclassical history painting. Gillray dedicated his print to West – clearly an ironic gesture. Below the image the satire is inscribed: “To Benjn West Esqr President of the Royal Academy, this attempt to Emulate the Beauties of his unequal’d Picture the ‘Death of Gen Wolfe’ is most respectfully submitted, by the Author.” It is of course not respectful except in affirming that West’s neoclassical reportage was something to be reckoned with. Published the day before the Treason and Sedition Bills became law, Gillray’s print mocks the overreaction of the Tory government, which he represents by the massed ranks of ministerial troops that scatter into a feeble body of sans culottes on the distant battlefield. Numerous ministers and supporters of William Pitt ludicrously mimic West’s heroic grouping on the Heights of Abraham. Gillray has replaced the dying General Wolfe with Pitt himself, whose own expiring words – in mocking recollection of Wolfe’s putative dying statement – are recorded in the inscription below the print: “We have overcome all Opposition! ____ exclaimed the Messengers. ____ “I’m satisfied.” ___ said the Dying Hero. & Expired in the Moment of Victory.” West’s portrayal of Wolfe as a dying Christ at the centre of a pièta grouping is here rendered truly absurd by the anti-heroic portrayal of Pitt as the dying martyr. In one heretical gesture, then, Gillray makes an amusing but biting attack on Pitt’s administration, while at the same time obliterating the elevating potential of European canonical masters in which history painting had been so heavily invested. Gillray’s ability to assert the power of the satirist’s visual rhetoric against that of history painting lies in the unambiguous contrast he effects by turning topsyturvy West’s deployment of a Christian motif as a tool of elevated distance to instead a mocking indictment of a contemporary politician.

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Specificity in the historical accuracy of costume and portraiture, which flew in the face of “good taste” and ignited so much controversy over West’s painting, is conversely an essential asset for political satire. Only through familiarity and recognition could the jokes be knowable and the political attack effective. The striking physiognomical similarities of Gillray’s Pitt and West’s Wolfe are telling – cunning perhaps. Yet, to underscore the contrast, the “e” at the end of the general’s name was of course intentionally dropped in Gillray’s title to signify the predatory and untrustworthy canine in contrast to a heroic military leader. The actors are well known and readily recognized. Henry Dundas, replacing the surgeon, does not stop the flow of the hero’s blood, but instead offers from the bottle in his back pocket a large goblet of port, a libation for which Pitt’s fondness was well known. Edmund Burke leans over Pitt on the other side. His much-caricatured profile was also well known to consumers of satire. A document, labelled “Reflections upon £3700 Pr Ann” and referring to two lucrative pensions awarded for his famous treatise, projects from Burke’s pocket. Lord Grenville, with a headdress of snakes, has taken the place of West’s iconic American Indian. Gillray’s image was both an eloquent visual mediation on significant national events of the day and a pictorial triumph. The masterful fluidity of Gillray’s etched line in the Death of the Great Wolf further establishes him as a highly accomplished visual artist as it simultaneously evokes the system of parallel lines and crosshatching of reproductive engraving. These potentially opposing aspects of Gillray’s etching style assert the dichotomy of artful draughtsman and reproductive printmaker, of high and low, that come together in his work. Gillray’s expert draughtsmanship at the same time rivals the skill of canonical old master artists, such as Annibale Carracci, who embraced caricature as a complement to his primary pursuit of ideal classicizing aesthetics just as Gillray’s satiric deployment of caricature spanned high and low art forms.25

Gillray’s Patronage, Audience, and Collectors If Gillray’s satire ultimately eschewed the elevation and emulation sought by academic painting, the idiom nonetheless attracted the attention of the London elite, including the ranks of the increasingly wealthy middle class, who might also be visitors to the annual Royal Academy exhibitions. Although Gillray never exhibited at the Royal Academy, other caricature artists such as the less abrasive William Henry Bunbury and Thomas Rowlandson did. Gillray’s work instead could be

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viewed and acquired through commercial print shops. The artist worked with many significant London publishers including William Holland and S.W. Fores among others, eventually establishing a virtually exclusive arrangement with Hannah Humphrey during the heyday of his graphic satire production. Partly due to her association with Gillray, Mrs Humphrey was among the most successful printsellers of graphic satire at the time and as such, she played a critical role in the economy of cultural expression and exchange that flourished throughout the print market in late Georgian London. Mrs Humphrey established her own print shop (having previously been associated with her brother William’s shop) at 18 New Bond Street around 1778–79. She moved her shop to other addresses, always in the fashionable West End, and eventually in 1797 (just two years after issuing the Death of the Great Wolf), to her famous shop at 27 St James’s Street very near the entrance to St James’s Palace and in fairly close proximity to other important fine art venues, including the Royal Academy at Somerset House and the Pall Mall addresses of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and Bowyer’s Historic Gallery.26 Humphrey’s satiric printshop (among others) provided an important alternative choice for Londoners and even continental audiences seeking visual representations of important historical events of national significance, as well as of contemporary or topical politics. Numerous contemporary prints depicting print shops, especially caricature print shops, published by the proprietors themselves, suggest their popularity and the curiosity of audiences for the latest satires displayed in the windows. Very Slippy Weather (1808) etched by Gillray after a sketch by Rev John Sneyd follows a well-established tradition of images depicting shop windows with a formulaic grouping of diverse spectators ranging from a gentleman with a quizzing glass to a uniformed soldier and a syphilitic figure with skates, all of whom are intently examining images on display, oblivious to the gentleman who has slipped on the walkway. Contemporary testimony sent to the German periodical London und Paris confirms that Gillray’s prints were “very well received by the public … you will always see dozens of people standing outside the shop which sell these caricatures” and that public consisted of persons “of high and low birth alike.”27 In this etching, Gillray depicts Hannah Humphrey’s shop itself with her name boldly lettered in gold on the façade and a number of recognizable Gillray prints on display in the window. Whether the motley gathering accurately reflects the reality of an inclusive clientele who view from outside the shop, or rather an imagined community of interested English citizens, there is a clear demarcation of those visible inside the door and those who remain on the street. Interestingly, this portrayal seems more respectful of these outside spectators than those gathered inside a shop to view an exhibit of paintings in Gillray’s Connoisseurs Exam-

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ining a Collection of George Morland’s (1808). Nevertheless, while the Royal Academy and commercial publishers Boydell and Bowyer complained about the “mixed multitude” at the exhibitions, even to the point of introducing an admission to discourage attendance, images like Very Slippy Weather seemed to register an aspirational expansion of those contributing to public opinion, mediated increasingly by the rising idiom of graphic satire. The traditional civic public for academic art becomes, at the satiric printseller’s window, a modern audience for political art. More recently, David Francis Taylor has smartly cautioned that satirical prints “addressed first and foremost a patrician constituency that was already enfranchised … and that had long occupied the centers of social and political privilege.”28 Powerful politicians and well-placed members of fashionable society, themselves the subjects of Gillray’s prints, frequented the shops for the newest issue and fully appreciated the cultural and political sway of graphic satire. Some even recognized for themselves the promotional value of appearing in a Gillray caricature to validate their high social status, celebrity, or significant role in affairs of state. Even George III sent caricatures of himself back to Germany. The Death of the Great Wolf was apparently designed by Gillray with “the connivance” of the Pittite circle that is mocked in the print.29 When Reverend John Sneyd, a regular advisor to the artist on current topics for satire and a go-between for Gillray and the young statesman George Canning, wrote to the artist to praise The Death of the Great Wolf, he lamented that “Mr Canning did not make his debut in Mrs H’s window in so excellent a print.”30 Mrs H. is of course Hannah Humphrey, whose printshop became a destination for Londoners. Filled as it was with Gillray’s satires, this shop, and the shop window itself, indeed functioned as an exhibition venue – a place to see and be seen (in person and in caricature), eventually becoming an alternative showcase for sought-after historical reportage, in competition with painting exhibitions at the Royal Academy and other commercial venues. Graphic satire became highly collectible for those who could afford to acquire the prints (they were not cheap and so out of reach for all but the wealthy). A viewer is invited to peruse the image at length both for its content and to appreciate the satirical etching as an enduring example of ambitious printmaking. Collectors normally pasted these prints in folios, much as they would old master prints or portraits for sharing with visitors. As political and social satires had particular focus on topical events and functioned as a visual form of historical narrative recording topical events for posterity, these collections typically followed some schema of organization such as chronology or division by political event or fashion-related prints. Satiric prints thus lent themselves to function as a visual form of historical narrative recording topical events for posterity. Collectors commonly annotated satiric prints

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with the identities of persons caricatured as an indication of their privileged knowledge, which is reminiscent of the private circulation of Townshend satires. Folios provided occasion for a social gathering to share news (or gossip) of the day. Parties could browse folios together in a private library or more publicly in a coffee house or tavern. Eventually, folios of prints were available for rent. Prints were also at times exchanged through the post and commented upon in letters. Each of these types of viewing opportunities fostered common experiences and arguably some degree of shared public opinion and community (national) identity.

Historical Narrative and National Identity in the Print Market As John Barrell’s benchmark analysis of the political theory of painting suggests, even Reynolds’s Discourses exhibit a gradual acceptance for history painting of national concerns as a substitute for a civic-minded public.31 Barrell traces Reynolds’s efforts to navigate a defence of history painting or the grand style, suggesting that Reynolds recognized that it was no longer the primary duty of art to create a universal republic of taste but rather a customary community of taste, in order to develop in a people a sense of its nationhood, of belonging to one nation rather than another, and to furnish the justification of social and political privilege which the civic humanist discourse could no longer be relied upon to provide.32 The function of narrative art then shifts so that it is permissible for a painter to represent to a nation its own characteristics and so to confirm the audience’s sense of belonging, no longer just to a civic republic of taste, but also in due measure to a national community.33 Indeed, in eighteenth-century England, narratives about fine art and narratives about national identity were intertwined as the visual arts both reflected and mediated constructions of nationhood.34 For their part, English artists, patrons, and theorists debated the relative merits of history painting to represent the national culture and to express the evolving character of the national polity, which was increasingly inclusive of the middling commercial classes. The failure of English artists to paint history on par with continental traditions was deemed by contemporaries to be a failure of national magnitude. Emulation of continental traditions that had been nurtured by a strong centralized state or ecclesiastical patronage often misaligned with the character of Britain’s national identity and was complicated by the need for artists to negotiate the conflict between aspirations fostered by the academy to paint history and the lack of demand for such subjects. Without

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the support of these patrons, who were more widely available in European countries, opportunities to paint historical subjects were scarce. The challenge then was how to encourage and sustain artists who made historical art that was at once worthy of national honour and representative of changing national interests. Paraphrasing the title of Dias’s book on Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the formation of a national aesthetic, the challenge was how to exhibit Englishness. Benjamin West’s position as historical painter to King George III provided him exceptional support for historical work such as the cycle of paintings about Edward III as part of the project to restore and refurbish Windsor Castle as the chief royal residence. At the opposite end of the spectrum, James Barry’s zealous commitment to history painting inspired him to undertake, without patronage, a monumental cycle of paintings on the Progress of Human Civilization for the Great Room at the Adelphi House of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. Artists aspiring to paint history, who neither benefited from the royal munificence enjoyed by West nor were compelled by the zealous commitment of Barry, had to seek alternative solutions. Resourceful artists adjusted to a shift from the patronage of great men and public institutions of government or religion to the patronage of the anonymous customers, dealers, and publishers following the general commercial character of English culture.35 In fact, the mapping of patronage onto the consumer and publisher was a game-changing development for the arts in Britain as success became a matter of financial speculation for those who conceived and executed their art with a view of the profits to be gained from exhibition and the sale of reproductive prints to a commercial public.36 Even James Barry produced income-generating etchings based on his series for the Adelphi House. Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, characterized by Rosie Dias as “a significant threat to the Academy,” was one innovative attempt to target a mass audience through the market for reproductive prints.37 Frequently praised as a commercial Maceneas for his public spirit and his encouragement of a national school of history painting, the entrepreneurial publisher John Boydell undertook an ambitious program ostensibly to improve the state of the arts in England, particularly history painting, by commissioning exhibition paintings from the leading artist of the day, almost all of whom were also members of the Royal Academy. Even Reynolds contributed a Shakespeare subject to Boydell’s project. The paintings were displayed in a purpose-built Shakespeare Gallery on the fashionable Pall Mall. Revenue came from a small admission charge to view the exhibition and more substantially from the sale by subscription of reproductive prints. Boydell’s celebrated venture

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spawned several imitators including Macklin’s Bible, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, and Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery. The most accomplished engravers earned considerable sums reproducing major historical narrative works by the most celebrated painters of the day. Aspiring history painters made considerable adjustments to the content and manner of their art in order to align their work more closely with the tastes of commercial consumers of reproductive prints. The substantive link between history painting and engraving helped to establish a wider reputation for painters of history. Interestingly, Gillray found occasional opportunity during earlier moments of the French Revolution to revisit work as a reproductive engraver of more conventional history painting. Le Triomphe de la Liberté en l’élargissement de la Bastille, which was engraved by Gillray after a melodramatic composition by the academic painter James Northcote, was published by R. Wilkerson in 1790 and dedicated to the French nation by its admirers James Gillray and Robert Wilkinson.38 Yet, Gillray’s contemporaries found his satires, rather than his more serious reproductive prints, to be more effective vehicles for informing and influencing public opinion. Gillray, the consummate graphic satirist, secured government commissions for narrative subjects, which so many British history painters had fervently sought to little avail. At the height of the first French invasion scare in 1798, Gillray was engaged by Sir John Dalrymple (1726–1810) to execute an ambitious set of plates forecasting the dire consequences of such an invasion. Originally planned to number no fewer than twenty prints, the project, only partially completed, produced just four. Consequences of a Successful French Invasion depicts French soldiers threatening British Liberty in the House of Commons, and again in the House of Lords, enslaving English farmers in a ploughed field, and threatening Irish Catholicism. Letters to Gillray as well as his publisher Hannah Humphrey record the many suggestions for prints that came from well-placed politicians. For example, John Hookham Frere of the Anti-Jacobin Review suggested to Gillray Sneyd’s idea for The Apotheosis of Hoche (Fig. 5.5).39 The artist parodies the absurd funeral of the French general as a mock-heroic travesty of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. In this print, Gillray’s graphic satire appropriates one of the most celebrated artists in the academic canon.

5.5 Opposite James Gillray. The Apotheosis of Hoche. 1798. Etching with hand colouring. Published by Hannah Humphrey. The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Conclusion The print market provided a commercial and cultural space, which fostered a form of dialectic between history painting, in the form of reproductive prints, and graphic satire. Ready juxtapositions made the two pictorial modes more striking in their contrast and commonalities and this shared presentation created conditions that were perfect for Gillray’s ambitions. His work both raised the bar for graphic satire and made an impactful challenge to the Royal Academy and its monopoly on the public function of narrative history pictures. In Gillray Observed, Diana Donald has described caricature (which we can understand to be an instrument of Gillray’s satiric prints) as “both a political instrument and an art form,” and Gillray’s work as evincing a political and artistic sophistication which was unprecedented in the field of caricature.”40 With The Death of the Great Wolf, Gillray masterfully elided two genres, the fine art of history painting and graphic satire. Even as these art categories were separated by aesthetic hierarchy and defined by seemingly opposing functions – one to elevate and one to deride, one to represent the ideal and one to represent the specific and familiar. Gillray bridged the distance through his ability to conceive his graphic satire both in and against history painting’s own terms. While keeping the contrariety of the two genres always present, the heightened aesthetic and rhetorical power of his work to represent narratives (or stories) of national interest could rival the purview of the more elevated genre. In other words, while satire by its nature could not be history painting, it did in fact come to do the work of traditional history painting. In summoning a national community (rather than a civic-minded public), and in forming public opinion and identity in a manner now more conducive to a modern culture, Gillray’s work capitalized on the satirical possibilities suggested by West’s revolutionary transformation of history painting as reportage in ways that continued the evolution of history painting. Thus, Gillray’s Death of the Great Wolf was every bit as revolutionary as West’s The Death of General Wolfe. Together with other seminal pieces in the prolific body of his work, Gillray’s work claimed canonical history painting for satire and effectively offered graphic satire to modern audiences as a viable alternative to traditional history painting. The artist’s profound achievement for narrative graphic satire is further affirmed in Ian Haywood’s assertion that in his “breakthrough print” Sin, Death and the Devil, Gillray claimed Milton’s scene from Paradise Lost for caricature and David Francis Taylor’s interest in elaborating the ways in which satirical prints, Gillray’s prominent among them, thoroughly intertwined cultural and political literacies by making political under-

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standing conditional on a deep and ready knowledge of the English classics.41 It is not surprising then that Gillray’s art today is securely in the canon of graphic satire. Further, the eloquence of Gillray’s art remains profoundly relevant today as satire asserts itself in current political debate.42

Notes I am indebted to the insights gained through many conversations afforded during master classes for graduate students on history painting and satire led collaboratively with Mark Salber Phillips over several years at the Lewis Walpole Library. I am grateful to Louise Roman and Rachel Brownstein for their comments on this essay. 1 From the Morning Chronicle (15 May 1782) as quoted in Donald, The Age of Caricature. Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III, 60. 2 Phillips, “History Painting Redistanced.” 3 John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting and David Solkin, Painting for Money and more recently, Art in Britain, 1660–1815. 4 Hoock, Empires of the Imagination, xviii. 5 Fordham, British Art, 2. 6 Myrone, John Martin, 12–13 and chapter 4 “General Wolfe amongst the Macaroni’s,” 105–20. 7 On the “implicit or explicit” dialogue of Gillray’s works with high art see Hallett, “James Gillray and the Language of Graphic Satire,” 32–3. 8 Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature, 5. 9 Hill, Mr Gillray, 5. 10 Ibid., 19 11 Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R. Wark, 254–5. 12 On Gillray’s attempts at “straight” printing making, see Godfrey, James Gillray, 76–9. 13 Quoted in Hill, Mr Gillray, 27. 14 Donald, Gillray Observed, 31. 15 Strange, An inquiry into the rise and establishment of the Royal academy of arts, to which is prefixed, a letter to the Earl of Bute. 16 Hill, Mr Gillray, 27; and Donald, Gillray Observed, 29–35. 17 Wind, “The Revolution of History Painting.” 18 On West’s Death of General Wolfe see von Erffa and Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West, cat. no. 93 and Solkin, Painting for Money, 209–12. 19 Myrone, John Martin, 119. 20 Fordham, British Art, 237.

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21 Alexander and Godfrey, Painters and Engraving, 33. 22 Prown, John Singleton Copley, vol. 2, 275–91 and 2302–10; and Ballew Neff, John Singleton Copley in England, 38 and cat. no. 18.; and Ballew Neff, American Adversaries West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, 68–75. 23 Dominic Hardy, “Caricature on the Edge of Empire, 11. 24 Fordham, British Art, 236–8. 25 Gombrich and Kris, Caricature, 11–12. 26 See Dias’s extensive discussion “Topographies of Display: Locating the Shakespeare Gallery” on the polite and fashionable location of Pall Mall and St James’s as a suitable place for the display of historical painting, 23–6. 27 Donald, Gillray Observed, 22. 28 Taylor, The Politics of Parody, 35. 29 Donald, The Age of Caricature, 165. 30 Godfrey, James Gillray, 142. 31 John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt. 32 Ibid., 140. 33 Ibid., 151. 34 Roman, “Art and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 201. 35 Pears, The Discovery of Painting, chapter 5. 36 Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy, 38. 37 Dias, “Loyal Subjects?,” 62. 38 Godfrey, James Gillray, 92–3. 39 See Hill, Mr Gillray, 68. 40 Donald, Gillray Observed, xiv, 3. 41 Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature, 14; Taylor, The Politics of Parody, 26. 42 McClennan, Is Satire Saving Our Nation?

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6 Historical Distance and Historic Doubts Representing Napoleon in Exile jordan bear

“‘Napoleon is dead,’ said a passer-by to an invalid of Marengo and Waterloo. ‘He dead!’ cried the soldier; ‘are you sure of that?’”1 This exchange, recounted in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, reveals a general problem in historical representation during the Restoration, and its particular instantiation in the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. “The heart of Europe, after Waterloo, was gloomy,” Hugo declares, and “an enormous void remained long after the disappearance of Napoleon.” The disappearance of the person of Napoleon was, at least officially, supplemented by a concomitant iconoclasm. With the trade in Napoleonic relics banned by the Restoration government, more clandestine means of retaining the emperor’s likeness emerged. It seems inevitable that Hugo’s invalid would have trundled about Paris with the help of one of the walking sticks, which seemed innocent “to all outward appearances” but “bring them near a lighted wall and lo! – a shadowy likeness of Bonaparte, cocked hat and all” would be revealed.2 Such was the visual ingenuity with which this camouflage was turned that these “seditious toys” were inventoried in a compendium of The Wonders of Optics.3 The conjoined vanishing of Napoleon and his likeness makes the invalid’s query a pointed one, for it had become difficult to know with certainty anything about the deposed Emperor, whose dominion had shrunk to the few rooms he inhabited on the distant rock of St Helena. It was its distance from the tempting coasts of Europe that had secured for this pebble in the South Atlantic the honour of imprisoning Napoleon. In sequestering him from view, unplugging him from the networks of communication through which he managed his empire and his image,

Napoleon’s captors had created the ideal circumstances to nurture the skepticism of Hugo’s old soldier. But this disappearance-by-distance activated some much more expansive anxieties about the relationship amongst historical figures, their representations, and their ontological status. Representations of the exile from this period are plentiful, but in its singular economy of pictorial means – its isolation of the deposed figure from all that was once his – Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Napoleon Musing at St Helena stands apart as an image of this disconnection (Fig. 6.1). The sublime vastness of the ocean reminds us of St Helena’s chief amenity. As Lord Liverpool wrote, buoyantly: “The situation is particularly healthy. There is only one place in the circuit of the island where ships can anchor … At such a distance and in such a place, all intrigue would 6.1 Benjamin Robert Haydon. Napoleon Musing at St Helena. 1830. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

6.2 Opposite George Cruikshank. Escape of Buonaparte from Elba. 1815. Hand-coloured etching on paper. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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be impossible; and, being withdrawn so far from the European world, he would very soon be forgotten.”4 Lessons had been learned from the debacle of The Hundred Days, when Elba, near enough to the coast for a Tuscan’s pleasure cruise, proved also to be an ideally situated springboard for the exile’s return. Compare Haydon’s St Helena, engulfed by an unremitting, endless expanse of water, to any number of caricatures of the first exile, when the absurd proximity of Elba allowed a bloodthirsty Napoleon to contemplate the Continent, and even to bound readily over the intervening sliver of the Mediterranean (Fig. 6.2). It must not be happenstance that Haydon’s painting was itself the prototype for another variety of visual representation. The emperor stares longingly at the Atlantic and slowly, before his and the viewer’s eyes, the watery plain dissolves into the scene of a military review, of Napoleon at the height of his powers (Figs 6.3, 6.4). There are several variants of these views, but they all rely upon the compositional structure of Haydon’s picture to achieve their startling transition. These devices, so-called “Protean Views,” express their indebtedness to Haydon’s conceit but also ostentatiously transcend the limitations of his static métier. They harbour the ambition of bridging the temporal and spatial divides that separate Napoleon from Europe, and from those who seek him as an object of history.

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6.3 and 6.4 Protean view: Napoleon on Elba. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.

With these juxtapositions, I aim to bring into contact the metaphorical and spatial dimensions of distance in the creation – and competition – of painting and other modes of visual representation. As Mark Phillips has put it, “since the late eighteenth century at least, Europeans have seen some form of distancing as bound up with historical knowledge. Yet the same condition of estrangement also produces a strong countercurrent, encouraging a widespread desire to recapture a feeling of historical intimacy and connected tradition.”5 For instance, throughout his oeuvre as a historian, Hume endeavours to modulate between these two approaches to historical knowledge, shifting with facility from the grand gesture to the minute detail, calibrating the temporal immediacy of certain modes of historical writing to the desired effect of any particular passage upon his reader. As Phillips has argued, “every historical account must position its audience in some relationship of closeness or distance to the events and experience it recounts.”6 The tendency to formulate this procedure in spatial terms is one that is freighted with real consequences, for “making past monuments close” can enhance the “affective, ideological, or commemorative impact of an event,” while “stepping back from the historical scene” can “emphasize the objectivity, irony, or philosophical sweep of a historian’s vision.” Phillips has insightfully contended that much of later eighteenth-century historiography may be seen as a combination of “distanciating and approximative” impulses. Accordingly, we must attend not only to what Thomas Crow called Napoleonic history painting’s abandonment of “the distance of metaphor,” but also to the often simultaneous embrace of the metaphor of distance.7 As history paintings became increasingly embedded in commercial enterprises in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they found themselves competing regularly with artifacts whose evidentiary status depended quite explicitly on their proximity to both recent and remote epochs.8 The advantages of distance, of a type of historical objectivity required to judge the nature of past events dispassionately, were increasingly rivalled by an immersive experience of history. These spaces of display relied upon proximity both as a metaphor for a particular view of history, and also as a physical strategy for the management of their audiences’ engagement with the objects on display. Bringing oneself near to the past in these decades was an act informed by philosophical debates about how historical knowledge is produced and evaluated, and by the transformation of historical exploration into an increasingly embodied experience. History paintings were thus implanted into an exhibitionary landscape that fundamentally altered the production of historical knowledge. These paintings collaborated and competed with the richest imaginable array of artifacts, testimonies, environments, and living creatures in affecting

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these transformations. In London in the late 1810s, it was possible for a viewer simultaneously to see a titanic history painting depicting Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, sit in his prized carriage captured on that battlefield, caress the mane of his beloved charger Marengo, and converse with his less-than-faithful coachman. Against this surfeit of traces and representations sanctified by their nearness to the Emperor, the remoteness of their referent, across the sea, beyond visual engagement, proved especially troubling. It also suggested some of the fundamental limitations and possibilities for historical representation at the moment when history painting is supposed to have exhausted its utility.

The Half-Open Door of History The British public clamoured for reliable visual representations of Napoleon from the earliest days of his rise to international notoriety as first consul. It is difficult for us to conceive of a moment when there simply were no such images in wide circulation, when the figure of Napoleon was constituted in the public sphere entirely by representations made at a degree of mediation, as well as by an array of non-visual means. Yet as late as 1801 a young painter could still claim, with some justification, to have produced for exhibition “the only likeness, in london, painted from the Life.” John James Masquerier’s Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards was exhibited at 22 Piccadilly, across from Green Park, taking full advantage of the “eager desire on the part of the British public for knowledge of everything relating to Bonaparte.”9 At 27 by 20 feet, Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards evidently succeeded in temporarily satiating its audience, the receipts from some 20,000 paying visitors netting Masquerier a thousand pounds for the showing. This endeavour was not a modest one, and seems to have been swept up in what T.S.R. Boase tartly called “the cult of immensity,” a contest in gigantism in which painters as esteemed as Benjamin West and Jacques-Louis David eagerly participated.10 It was, then, not the magnitude of the picture that set it apart from its competitors, but the terms of its claims to authenticity, to being based upon an eyewitness encounter. In a pamphlet that the young artist published to accompany the exhibition, and in the guise of a descriptive key to the enormous picture, he offered an authenticating narrative of his brush with Napoleon. The exclusivity of an intimate audience with the emperor was crucial, and Masquerier asserted that he had “obtained a Permission, never granted to any British Artist, except himself, to paint a Portrait

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of the First Consul, with the full Advantage of drawing him from the Life, the exactness both of Feature and Expression in this Portrait.”11 Across the channel in Paris, one could hardly have missed the likeness of the first consul, who despite an assassination attempt that shattered the windows of the Tuileries, kept to his regimen of public appearances there. One visitor breathlessly recounted the excitement of the scene observed from the palace: “At length the review ended; too soon for me. The Consul sprang from his horse – we threw open our door again, and, as he slowly re-ascended the stairs, we saw him very near us, and in full face again, while his bright, restless, expressive, and as we fancied, dark blue eyes, beaming from under long black eyelashes, glanced over us with a scrutinising but complacent look; and thus ended, and was completed, the pleasure of the spectacle.”12 Masquerier, for his part, was favoured with a less fleeting, if more unusual point of view.13 The charming polyglot painter had ingratiated himself with Mme Tallien, who contemporary sources assert “shared the prize of beauty with Madame Recamier.”14 Her own charms seem to have been sufficient to entice Bonaparte himself into a private tête-à-tête in the intimacy of her boudoir. And from “a little closet opening out of the boudoir, Masquerier was enabled to watch through the half-open door the young general paying a private visit.”15 The special lifelikeness attributed to the resulting sketch was the result of two dimensions of its conditions of production. On the one hand, the intimacy of the encounter, of the artist’s concealed proximity just steps from the first consul, conferred a conventional warrant of reliability. But at the same time, it was Napoleon’s own obliviousness to being sketched that vouchsafed the authenticity of Masquerier’s representation. One commentator insists that “it is not surprising that the sketch, drawn under such intimate circumstances and without the knowledge of the subject, should be the most life-like.”16 It is striking to note how presciently the spatiality of this anecdote relates to the kinds of pictures that would, in ensuing decades, come to transform the brief of history painting from the grand depiction of momentous instances of public virtue to meticulously researched, intimate vignettes from the lives of the grandees of the past. Napoleon himself, crafting his memoirs at St Helena, had come to understand the transformation in historiography then underway, his awareness of the desirability of intimacy perhaps heightened by the remoteness of his exile. He was initially reticent to allow the publication of his daily conversations with his unofficial secretary the comte de las Cases, “imbued as he was with classical ideas as regards the dignity of literary style and the majesty of history.”17 He was soon convinced, however, that a text whose style and focus bespoke intimacy between the

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emperor and his chronicler would undoubtedly appeal to a broader public than a traditionally didactic tome. When a subsequent collaborator protested that he “cannot see anything extraordinary … in the fact that your majesty should be seated on the sofa in this or that position,” Napoleon retorted, knowingly, “you may not see it, but it is all this talk of a great man that interests people the most.”18 Speaking to his surgeon, he reckoned that “people are curious to know the most trifling circumstances of the life of a man who has played a great part. They like to know what he eats and drinks and are more interested in such nonsense than in studying his good and bad qualities, but as the public is like this we must cater to it and tell it what it wants to be told.”19 The popularity of the genre historique during the Restoration encompasses this set of preferences, in its richness of incidental details, and in its spatial organization of these new values.20 For instance, in Ingres’s Henri IV Surprised by the Spanish Ambassador While Playing with His Children (1817), the founder of the just-restored Bourbon dynasty romps on all fours with his children, the kindly father to his offspring and to his nation. The Iberian dignitary has entered the picture in an unguarded moment, the very kind that the traditional Grand Style of history painting was at pains to banish from the public iconography, but one entirely consonant with the evolution then unfolding. That the king is “surprised” by the appearance of the diplomat indicates a central conceit of Ingres’s painting, for it suggests that the scene is one that might be stumbled upon and viewed with particular affective proximity, even by the outsider. It indicates, equally importantly, that the experience of history in the early nineteenth century was to be one in which the movement in and out of scenes of the past became an embodied, ambulatory procedure. Like the ambassador flinging open the doors of the royal chamber, the student of history was being reconceived as a participant in a spatiotemporal exercise in which physical proximity was doubly potent: as a metaphor for the fluctuating objectivity of representations of the past, and as the organizing principle for the exhibition practices through which these images were to be proffered. Physically, this conception of space is manifested concretely in the exhibitionary milieu that governed the pictures’ accessibility, implicating its viewers in corporeal relationships that allowed them to negotiate through their own bodies the competing possibilities for engaging with history. In the case of Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards the viewer would have been guided in his approach to the enormous canvas by a pictorial key published for the exhibition (Fig. 6.5). While this document performs the traditional labours of such guides, it also secures the First Consul’s role as an object of visual consumption. To the extreme left margin of the scene, four spectators stand on a

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6.5 Charles Turner. Key to Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards. 1801. Engraving. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

balcony viewing the spectacle of the review. The key helpfully labels the labyrinth of visual access mediated by the architectural spaces of the Tuileries: “Buonaparte’s Apartments are in the further Wing of the Palace, and as he comes out, he passes through the Gallery (I) lined with Soldiers, where Strangers are admitted to see him, with tickets. He enters the Court by the Iron-gate (K), which is immediately closed after him; and no person is suffered to appear at any of the Windows, except the central One (L) where some Spectators are represented.”21 Even in its exhibitionary apparatus, the spatial mechanics of eyewitnessing the scene are foregrounded. If, as the key insists, the “great Historical Picture, which is 27 Feet in Length, by 20 in Height, has been studied in every other part with the same

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minuteness of accuracy,” the spectator was surely encouraged to come close enough to witness these minuscule reality effects. This invitation helped to reproduce, in the viewer’s own corporeal engagement with the painting, the linkage between proximity and accurate knowledge upon which the picture so relied. But for all the authenticating amenities of Masquerier’s cloistral proximity to Napoleon, his resulting painting nevertheless had its doubters. Charles Turner, who had produced engravings after Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards, would claim that the picture was a calculated deception, and that “Masquerier never saw Napoleon or any of his Generals.”22 Turner aims to deny the central evidentiary claim of the painting and the basis for its commercial success, averring that the painting was a pastiche of other representations. These mediations are laced with suggestions of moral impropriety, most markedly when Masquerier “made himself agreeable to the valet of a famous French painter, and by bribing his servant he surreptitiously made a tracing of the subject of the review the French painter had executed.”23 Other elements of the picture were supposedly harvested from even less proximate sources: the head of Napoleon based upon a small China bust, those of the generals from cheap prints. Although Turner’s accusations seem to have been primarily motivated by his own financial disagreements with Masquerier, the fact that he would seek to undermine the latter’s painting by denying its origins in an eyewitness encounter is telling. A picture that was merely an agglomeration of other likenesses, ones that circulated widely and could be had in many shops in London, seemed to offer very little in this epistemic climate. Fifteen years later, with eyewitness accounts of Napoleon again at a premium, proximity remained the measure of authenticity, though the means of establishing it had become even more demanding.

“If you will just take a voyage … ” The actual distanciation of Napoleon, far from the historian and the history painter, and the concomitant limitations placed upon knowledge about him, helped to facilitate some rather surprising experiments in historical representation more broadly. The historical figure to which the innumerable relics, testimonies, and visual representations in circulation all referred occupied a position beyond the horizon, beyond the experience of all but a few select visitors. His inaccessibility to visual observation made plain the anxiety attending knowledge obtained in this mediated fashion. This distance in kilometres meant, for virtually every European, that no account of Napoleon could be checked against experience.

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Testimonies and reports lost the sanction of visual confirmation, and settled into an irreconcilable and evidentiarily undifferentiated pile. Keen to dictate the terms of his own historical reputation, Napoleon worked diligently on his memoirs, but also eagerly participated in conversations with visitors who might bring his words back to the Continent. The few legitimate testimonies published by callers to the island were easily outnumbered by a flood of spurious communiqués, which further muddied the waters surrounding St Helena. The titles of a striking number of these specious texts indicate both an almost reliquary authentication by virtue of their proximity to the exile, and an account of their bridging the distance to return the texts to Europe.24 We have, for instance, Pensees et souvenirs de Napoleon, ecrits de sa main, trouves caches dans sa chambre longtemps apres sa mort, et portes en Angleterre par un capitaine de navire (1837).25 The hand of Napoleon, the interior of his room, and the long journey across the sea serve well as the elements of the fundamental ambivalence of the castaway’s remoteness. Not even the grave could provide a respite from these counterfeit texts. Indeed, in at least one instance, Napoleon’s tomb itself appeared to yield a recollection of the Emperor’s posthumous journeys through heaven and hell. For the discovery of this contribution, readers owed a debt to the dubious Xongo-Tee-Foh-Tchi, a “mandarin of the third class,” whose pilgrimage to the island was rewarded with a beam of light, guiding him to “a manuscript half hidden by the grass that grew around it.”26 At its most extreme, this uncertainty manifested itself in texts that made the ultimate charge against the possibility of representation, and of the historical enterprise itself: namely, the notion that Napoleon, the man, had never existed at all. It is challenging not to view these works as premonitory essays in the social construction of historical knowledge, so perspicuously do they interrogate fundamental assumptions. Even when, as in Richard Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819), this inquiry is satirical, the choice of Napoleon as a particularly useful vehicle for examining historical epistemology is revealing.27 Whately’s target in this Napoleonic anti-biography is David Hume’s skepticism of religious witnessing, and particularly the latter’s Of Miracles (1748). With his text, Hume sought to develop a system for assessing the evidentiary value of testimony. Though its intricacies are many, Hume’s system notably privileges the act of eyewitnessing, both as the epistemic form that precedes reliable testimony, and as the measure of evaluating that reliability. Whately, a noted logician and the archbishop of Dublin, pushed Hume’s conception of evidence to its absurd limits. As one observer explained the aim of the Historic Doubts, Whately “attempted to hoist Hume with his own petard by showing that on his [Hume’s] principles the existence of Napoleon could not be admitted as a ‘well-authenticated fact.’”28

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Whately’s text wryly shows how skepticism of the sort that Hume had advocated risks the obliteration of any historical certainty, for it disallows varieties of evidence that must be admitted for history to maintain its grounding coherence. But Napoleon was an especially useful case in point for Whately, precisely because of the particularities of the circulation of information about the emperor that his exile had imposed. “Supposing there be a state-prisoner at St Helena (which, by the way, it is acknowledged, many of the French disbelieve),” whom we cannot view ourselves, Whately wonders, “how do we know who he is or why he is confined there?” The answer offered by an interlocutor merely rehearses the nature of the problem: “‘Sir, there can be no doubt that such a person existed, and performed what is related to him; and if you will just take a voyage to St Helena, you may see with your own eyes.’” The practical impossibility of such a voyage serves to illuminate the limitations of evidence procured entirely on the basis of eyewitness testimony. It is because “‘the man in the iron mask’ could hardly have been more rigorously secluded” by an unbridgeable distance, that his existence in exile was so amenable to searching critiques of historical knowledge and representation in the first quarter of the century.

Testimonies, Relics, and Simulations And yet, for all the shadows of doubt in which Napoleon’s aspect was cast, it simultaneously inhabited the most brightly lit showplaces of London. Paradoxically, but not unusually in this moment, the unique remoteness St Helena was emphasized even when it served as the setting for an immersive spectacle. When a peristrephic panorama of the isle appeared in the Great Room at Spring Gardens in 1825, it was accompanied by a description that highlighted the distance of the place of exile, and implicitly touted the capacity of the illusionistic technology to bring it close enough that it might be entered by the spectator, its “figures the size of life”: “The island of St Helena, when first discovered, presented nothing to the view of the navigator but a mass of rocks, and produced nothing for his use but water. Its position is remarkable, in the South Atlantic Ocean, being at a greater distance from inhabited land than any other spot that can be named, viz. about 400 nautical leagues from the coast of Africa, and 700 from that of America. The passage to it from England is usually accomplished in about eight weeks, although [because of] the constancy of the trade winds always blowing from S.E. it is necessary to make a very considerable circuit to get there.”29

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In Regent Street appeared a simulation of the emperor so lifelike that it invited, and yielded to, the touch of the spectator: “By looking attentively upon it for a few moments the spectator is startled to behold the chest heaving at regular intervals as when the respiratory organs are in action in the living subject. Upon pressing the cheek with the hand it yields as living flesh would, and upon removing the hand the indentation slowly disappears. The same experiment tried upon the arm, the head, the leg, or any other part of the body, is followed by the same result. Every joint bends at pleasure and the limbs may be moved into any position into which the limbs of a living body may be moved.”30 So near did this contrivance bring the body of Napoleon that one new account predicted that were it “exhibited within the territories of the Holy Alliance, [it] would be seized and sent to keep company with the shade of its great prototype in St Helen [sic].”31 This ambivalence has been noted in the context of Romantic collecting generally, and in particular in the case of Napoleon’s carriage, captured at Waterloo and on display at William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall.32 Bullock’s early success was founded upon his adeptness in acquiring objects from the most remote parts of the globe – including a significant collection of ethnographic material brought back by Captain James Cook’s Pacific journeys – and in preserving them.33 His expertise at taxidermy is attested by the survival of some of his stuffed tableaux and by the appearance of his treatise on the subject in 1817.34 That a space typically given over to the display of the far-flung and exotic was, in the case of the carriage, occupied by objects that obtained their interest by virtue of reliquary closeness to their former owner, is revealing. Embodied in this episode is a relatively familiar tension between the respective facilities of proximity and distance. What is relatively unfamiliar, though, is the interlacing of the affective and spatial dimensions of near and far, a linkage made clear by the peculiarities of Napoleon’s sequestration, and of the vital presence of his relics. Judith Pascoe argues that while the carriage was both a “means of literal and imaginative transport,” it was of value only when accompanied by “authenticating stories.”35 The latter were abundant, perhaps too much so to satisfy credulity. In this instance, the Emperor’s coachman, Jean Hornn, his scars from the battle still visible, was engaged by the master showman Bullock to preside over the seized conveyance, and to recount to visitors his vivid experience.36 In his accompanying text, Bullock registers the alternation between presence and absence that the chariot evokes. At times, there is intimate accord between the viewer and Napoleon, for “in approaching the carriage … an immediate connection is formed, with the greatest events and persons that the world ever beheld.”37 There is, also, though,

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an elegiac severing of the link between this object and its former owner: “It is a curious fact, that the fall of this memorable chieftain may be traced to the hour in which he entered the carriage which is now exhibited. The vehicle remains, but what has become of the charioteer? It was this carriage that conveyed Napoleon to the shores of France at his former exile: it was in this that he made his excursions in Elba; in it he returned to his recovered capital; and it was this, which bore him to the fatal field of Waterloo!”38 This fluctuation, between intimacy and estrangement, between the proximity of the object and the distance of its erstwhile owner, demanded a special kind of evidence that was itself pulled between near and far. With Napoleon hors de combat halfway around the world, Bullock traveled to the Continent to engage the authenticating services of Jean Hornn, Bonaparte’s coachman, who had been captured alongside the carriage. The resulting testimony was not intended as a contribution to the “majestic histories” of which the emperor was himself so fond. It was, rather, an attempt to furnish the exhibition-going public with details of Napoleon’s “life or habits,” for Hornn, in his recollections, “is only representing what he saw and knew of Bonaparte as his employer; and disclaims any intention of speaking of his principles or his actions as a public character.”39 Hornn’s affidavit, appended to the text, focused on the authentication by intimate knowledge of objects. The coachman had, for instance, “seen and examined the Grey Surtout Coat, lined with Sable Fur, which is also at the London Museum; and that it is the same which this Deponent hath frequently seen worn by the said Ex-Emperor during the Russian Campaign; and that the parts of the coat which appear to have been burnt and scorched were chiefly so burnt and scorched by the fires, before which it was frequently placed during that campaign.”40 But authentication, even at this level of eyewitness testimony, required establishing the reliability of the witness. Keen to demonstrate the vetting to which Hornn had been subjected by Bullock, the published account sold alongside the exhibition asserted that “in this pursuit he met with Jean Hornn, whose narrative forms the succeeding pages” and had “ascertained in Paris, beyond a doubt, that he had for several years been the coachman of Bonaparte.”41 But more importantly, demonstrating this reliability inevitably took the form of various mediations. Hornn spoke no English, and had not kept a diary of his time in the emperor’s service. A struggle ensues between the immediacy of Hornn’s recollections, and the remove entailed by their transit through the apparatus of translation. So while “every practicable care has been employed to represent, without addition or alteration, the statement of the individual himself,” nonetheless, “it must be accepted as a narrative which has been formed under so evident a disadvantage.”42

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This “disadvantage” was the especially evident alternation between two modes of enunciation: what Émile Benveniste characterized as “histoire,” in which the speaker is absented by adopting a voice of neutrality, and “discours,” in which the speaker makes evident his or her own presence in the process of producing the account.43 That this fluctuation would even be regarded as a “disadvantage” is the product of specific historiographical debates in the first half of the century. Prosper de Barante, a historian who began his professional life as a civil servant under Napoleon, sought to remove entirely all traces of his intervention; as he put it, “the author can refrain from showing himself; he can count on the truth if he has succeeded in telling it naively.”44 Others, like Jules Michelet, held that “the historian who tries to efface himself in writing, to negate himself … is no historian at all.”45 Of course, these represent extreme points on a continuum, and historiographers at the time were compelled to negotiate their own positions of rhetorical distance and proximity according to the demands of their objects and their authorial persona. In the case of the Narrative of Jean Hornn, the incommensurable advantages of distance and proximity are in combat. The physical object – the carriage – might seem the epitome of “histoire”: something of the past that speaks for itself, which requires no supplementary comment. Yet, because of the particular fixation on the authenticity of that object, a testimonial mode of evidence is introduced, and with it a speaker whose assertion of authenticity itself constitutes commentary. And so notwithstanding the insertion as pure “histoire” of Hornn’s affidavit – a document that also claims the mantle of neutrality – and his undertaking to refrain from making any judgments about Napoleon’s actions, the very intimacy of eyewitness experience which grants Hornn’s account authority requires a shift into the mode of “discourse.” This fluctuation between near and far, and its linkage to the linguistic oppositions within historical enunciation, was, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, becoming particularly embodied in visual representation. Indeed, as Gianna Pomata has noted, it was increasingly through pictorial metaphors that these positions were conceived. Romantic historiography held fast to the “ideal of bridging the gap between past and present,” while at the same time remaining “acutely conscious of the irreparable distance between present and past.” For many historians of the period, “a true picture of the past had to convey, like the sense of profundity created by perspective” a sense of distance, and if a writer like Barante came up short, it was “because his text was like a flat picture.”46

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Distant Mourning The success of St Helena as a stage for expelling and surveilling Napoleon can readily be seen as a proxy for the fortunes of the entire British imperial enterprise. The exile inaugurated Britain’s imperial century, but it also made newly manifest the import of what one historian called “the politics of extent”:47 namely, how could political and economic prerogatives be apportioned, let alone controlled, over the vast distance the empire comprised? As one recent study has observed, “the obstacles embodied in particular configurations of time and physical space – and in particular the relative difficulty taken to traverse or, perhaps more importantly, communicate across great distances – have presented a recurring problem for the political imagination.”48 And these obstacles were crucial in the case of the outcast residing on the outermost fringe of the imperial map. In the years following Napoleon’s death, technological innovations helped to re-draw this conceptual terrain. The telegraph and the steamship are typically invoked as the means of transport and communication that helped to affect this shift. Yet, as Simone Natale has argued, “the emergence of photography was informed, as was telegraphy, by a dream of going beyond previous boundaries of space and distance,” participating in the “annihilation” of those boundaries.49 But the effect of photography’s entry into the contested practice of historical representation was not only one of overcoming these confines. Indeed, the particular nature of photography’s objectivity claims – the ease with which it might be assigned to the register of “histoire” – makes it a medium that is especially susceptible to the ambivalence we have noted. A photograph of “Napoleon” by the contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto might be characterized as a limit case of the phenomenon we have traced, enjoying a degree of epistemic impossibility that outstrips even the most outlandish instabilities in historical representation suggested by the Historic Doubts (Fig. 6.6). The medium having been announced only in 1839, some eighteen years after Napoleon’s death, such a photograph confronts us as a counterfactual. But this impossibility has not impeded the photograph’s existence.50 The photograph appears to depict Napoleon on his deathbed at St Helena, attended by no less a mourner than the Duke of Wellington. It abounds with the signs of conventional realism with which we have come to associate photography. Yet we know that Napoleon and Wellington never met one another, and that the duke never set foot on the faraway island. What Sugimoto has offered us, then, is a photograph of an imaginary scene executed in wax for that great repository of historical simulacra, Madame Tussaud’s. The tableau is an eclectic assemblage of images and artifacts,

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6.6 Hiroshi Sugimoto. Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington. 1994. Gelatin silver print. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

for the waxen emperor lies upon the actual bed on which he died, draped in the cloak worn at the Battle of Marengo. The scene, nevertheless, has its origin in a kind of historical encounter between Napoleon and Wellington. The official history of Madame Tussaud’s offers us an anecdote of Wellington’s attendance at the waxworks, and his contemplation of the simulation of his vanquished enemy: “Observing that the visitor was desirous of seeing the effigy, and no attendant being at hand, Joseph Tussaud raised the hangings, whereupon the visitor removed his hat, and to his great surprise, Joseph saw that he was face to face with none other than the great Duke of Wellington himself. There stood his Grace, contemplating with feelings of mixed emotions the strange and suggestive scene before him.”51 No doubt the uncanny fusion of

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the spatial and temporal dimensions of distance was a source of the duke’s “mixed emotions.” So arresting was this encounter that, upon the duke’s own death, Joseph Tussaud saw to it that a wax effigy of Wellington was positioned viewing that of Napoleon, thus reproducing the duke’s engagement with historical representation, and producing the subject of Sugimoto’s photograph. The capacity of this historical representation to assimilate the conditions of its own viewing back into a new scene – one that putatively disavows the distance between the real Wellington and the waxen Napoleon – is extraordinary. Sugimoto, abetted by the specificity of his medium, plunges us into the fictive intimacy of this confabulation, even as our own knowledge of its historical impossibility restrains our engagement. But if the peculiarity of photography heightens this ambivalence into a kind of whiplash, the potential visual power of a meeting of Napoleon and Wellington had already been imagined by Benjamin Robert Haydon himself. In 1839, he produced as a pendant, identical in its dimensions to his Napoleon, a work entitled Wellington Musing on the Field of Waterloo. After the duke complained to Haydon: “I on the field of battle of Waterloo am not exactly in the situation in which Napoleon stood on the rock of St Helena,” Haydon replied defensively that he had merely meant to produce pictures “contrasting the conqueror with the vanquished.” But these “contrasting” paintings are formally and affectively empathetic. The two great rivals, like parenthetical colossi, flank the expanse of the globe that separates them. Across that vast distance the two are joined in their musings, their contemplation of a shared sun, and of one another. This was, in fact, a proximity that could arise only in representation, and not in life. It could acquire meaning only in a milieu where the polyvalence of distance could bind together the spatial remoteness of Napoleon with the metaphorical repertoire by which we express how we come to know things about the past. It was part of an environment that increasingly embraced a visualist conception of evidence, prizing most those visual representations rooted in reliable eyewitnessing. Here, no subject could have been as well suited to defining the visual dimensions of historical knowledge as the twice-exiled emperor, musing just beyond the horizon.

Notes 1 “Napoléon est mort, disait un passant à un invalide de Marengo et de Waterloo. – Lui mort! s’écria ce soldat, vous le conunissez bien!” Hugo, Les Misérables, 125. 2 Evans, The Napoleon Myth, 62.

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3 Marion, The Wonders of Optics, 228–9. 4 Castlereagh, Memoirs, 434. 5 Phillips, On Historical Distance, 2. 6 Phillips, Society and Sentiment. 7 Crow, “Patriotism and Virtue,” 31. 8 Some very important recent work has helped to illuminate the integration of history paintings into commercial contexts, and the consequences of concomitant competition. See, inter alia, Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and the Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 5–25; Dias, “Loyal Subjects?,” 21–43; and Riding, “Staging the Raft of the Medusa,” 1–26. See also the indispensable Altick, The Shows of London, 186ff. 9 Sée, Masquerier and His Circle, 53. 10 Boase, English Art 1800–1870, 21. 11 A Description of the great historical picture, painted by I.J. Masquerier, of the first Consul Buonaparte, reviewing the Consular Guard. Now exhibiting at No. 22, Piccadilly, opposite the Green Park … Admission one shilling (London: J. Nichols, 1801). 12 Opie and Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 111. 13 Bryan, A Biographical and Critical Dictionary, 117. 14 “Obituary. John James Masquerier, Esq.” 541. 15 Sée, Masquerier and His Circle, 51. 16 Ibid. 17 Gonnard, The Exile of St Helena, 12. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 13. 20 On “genre historique,” see Chaudonneret, “Du ‘genre anecdotique’ au ‘genre historique.’” On the spatial construction of many such pictures, see Bann, Paul Delaroche. 21 A Description of the Great Historical Picture. 22 Whitman, “The Strange Revelation of a Great Picture Fraud,” 115. 23 Ibid. 24 Napoleon [Edwige Santiné], Chagrins Domestiques de Napoléon Bonaparte à l’Isle Sainte-Hélène. 25 Napoleon, empereur des Français [pseud.], Pensees et souvenirs de Napoleon. 26 Xongo-Tee-Foh-Tchi, Napoleon in the Other World. 27 Whately, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte was a satire on Hume’s skepticism of religious events, and particularly the latter’s Of Miracles (1748). 28 Pomeroy, “Whately’s Historic Doubts: Argument and Origin,” 62–74. 29 Marshall, Description of Marshall’s Grand Historical Peristrephic Panoramas, 19–20. 30 Exhibitions of Mechanical and Other Works of Ingenuity.

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31 Ibid. 32 On Waterloo tourism and relic hunting, see the excellent Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past,” 9–37. 33 Pearce, “William Bullock Collections and exhibitions at the Egyptian Hall, London, 1816–25,” 17–35. 34 Bullock, A Concise and Easy Method of Preserving Objects of Natural History. 35 Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet, 87, 100. 36 Bullock, The Narrative of Jean Hornn. 37 Ibid., 10. 38 Ibid., 8. 39 Ibid., 60. 40 Ibid., 63. 41 Ibid., 8. 42 Ibid., 10. 43 Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics. 44 Prosper de Barante, Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne, LXXXII. 45 Michelet, Journal. Paris 1959. t. 1, 14. 46 Pomata, “Versions of Narrative,” 8–9. 47 Pocock, The Politics of Extent and the Problems of Freedom. 48 Bell, “Dissolving Distance,” 541. 49 Natale, “Photography and Communication Media in the Nineteenth Century,” 452. 50 Westgeest, “Bridging Distances across Time and Place in Photography,” 13–25. 51 Tussaud, The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s, 116.

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7 Landscape and the Problem of History Thomas Cole and Anglo-Atlantic Modernity tim barringer

It may seem perverse to assert a place for Thomas Cole, the “father of the Hudson River School,” in a volume on history painting. In American Artist Life of 1867, Henry H. Tuckerman claimed: “To [Cole] might be directly traced the primal success of landscape painting as a national art in the New World,” displacing earlier efforts by artists such as Benjamin West, John Trumbull, and Washington Allston to establish a tradition of history painting in the United States.1 A large historiographical edifice has been built upon the idea that Cole’s work emerged directly from an encounter with the American wilderness. In this narrative, Cole became the point of origin of a new school of American landscape painting, a founding figure of an allegedly indigenous American art form without old world paternity, displacing earlier attempts to create an American school in emulation of the European academic model. Yet, as Alan Wallach and William Truettner argued in their classic account of 1994, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, Cole’s ambitions could not be confined by the genre of landscape – whether picturesque or sublime.2 Rather, following the example of Claude Lorrain, Richard Wilson, and J.M.W. Turner, he attempted to formulate in landscape painting a medium capable of engaging with the biblical and historical narratives. To this Cole added an urgent involvement with the political and ecological challenges of his own industrial era. Landscape, in his hands, aspired to the condition of history painting – to engage at a level of self-conscious intellectual abstraction with more complex and troubling themes and narratives than the pastoral can accommodate.

Cole’s historical landscapes, I shall argue, present a limit case for the definition of history painting. Moreover, his entire output can be understood as a selfconscious and highly sophisticated meditation upon, and even an attempt at active intervention into, the global historical processes taking place around him – creating, paradoxically, a historical landscape of the present day. Accidents of biography placed Cole in the crucible of historical change: in his hands, historical landscape became an appropriate medium within which to respond, drawing on the written histories of the era and Romantic theories of history. Cole’s ability to assimilate art-historical conventions, while adding incendiary elements of popular visual culture from the panoramas, shows, and phantasmagoria of the modern city, produced a distinctive hybrid of high and low, historical and modern, that caused unease amongst his contemporaries and that continues to resist easy assessment in the present day.

Landscape and History in the Age of Industry With the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768, a group of British painters led by Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West hoped to secure the status of painting and sculpture as liberal arts, and to usher in a great age of historical painting in the grand manner. This is the project outlined in Reynolds’s Discourses, delivered to the students of the academy between 1769 and 1790. While no substantial intellectual challenge was advanced against Reynolds, at least until the writings of William Hazlitt, the annual exhibitions of the academy confirmed that, in the absence of substantial state or church patronage, history painting in Britain was destined to a role on the sidelines.3 British art did nonetheless undergo a dramatic transformation during the first half century of the ra’s existence. This took place in two of the genres that, following de Piles and the entire edifice of continental artistic theory, were considered inferior to history painting: portraiture and landscape. Landscape will concern us here. The emergence of landscape painting as the defining artistic genre of the Anglo-Atlantic world between 1800 and 1850 coincides with unprecedented levels of industrialization and urbanization. The landscape paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and, in their wake, Thomas Cole and his followers in the United States balanced an ardent celebration of nature with an anxious suspicion of the encroachments of modernity. There were ironies to this antipathy, since their ability to make a living as artists in London or New York was directly linked to each city’s new status as the seat of a global industrial economy.

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More perhaps than any other major artist of the era, Cole experienced at first hand the historical dislocations brought about by rapid industrialization. He was born in 1801 in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England – a town that holds a special place in the history of British manufacturing as the home of Samuel Crompton, inventor of the mule. This technological innovation allowed the production of strong, fine yarn for the new industrial looms, allowing weaving to move from domestic to factory production.4 Such mechanization often caused entire occupational groups, such as the skilled handloom weavers of Bolton, to be cast from relative prosperity to poverty.5 In 1813, when Cole was a boy of twelve, “Luddism” broke out, an anti-industrial movement responsible for sporadic campaigns of arson and machine-breaking, aimed at the protection of the traditional rights and privileges of manual labourers. Bolton became the focus of national attention when, in April 1812, a mill at Westhaughton on the outskirts of the town was burned to the ground because its “weaving by steam” had deprived the handloom weavers of work.6 The mythical leader of the movement, Captain Ned Ludd, appeared in a hostile caricature, The Leader of the Luddites (Fig. 7.1), published in May 1812. The massive figure of Ludd is modelled on the Borghese gladiator, often the model for a heroic protagonist in a history painting. Here the allusion is intended to ridicule and effeminize Ludd, who is shown wearing the very female apparel produced in the factory. But the satire fails: Ludd’s harsh visage and powerful physique retain their menace despite the transgressive attire. The cultural impact of Luddism was profound. Cole was born into a Dissenting family, and independent congregations such as that in which he was baptized contained a strong millenarian strain: in the flames of Luddite rebellion, many saw signs of the end of the world, or at very least, the cyclical destruction of overweening, godless nations and empires, as described in the Old Testament. Historical events in the present carried far-reaching consequences. Following repeated business failures in the post-war depression after 1815 – the period of unrest in the north-west of England that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 – Cole’s father James, educated but now impoverished, emigrated with the entire family to the United States, where his subsequent business ventures came to nothing in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Zanesville, and Steubenville. It was during this period that Thomas Cole embarked upon an artistic career, and his biographers make much of his status as autodidact and outsider. In Steubenville, an itinerant portrait painter, “Mr Stein,” probably John Stein, lent Cole “a British publication on the art of painting” which, Cole wrote, became “my companion day and night.”7 The engraved illustrations of this unidentified text provided a significant means of transmission of the conventions of European painting – probably

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7.1 [An officer]. The Leader of the Luddites. 1812. Hand-coloured etching. Inscribed “The Leader of the Luddites/Drawn from the life by an Officer/Published May 1812 by Messrs Walker & Knight, Sweetings Alley, Royal Exchange.” Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

centred on history painting – to an itinerant artisan working among the mills of the American Midwest. Among Cole’s first efforts at painting were two a biblical scenes made in Steubenville in 1823, Ruth and Boaz and a rendering of Belshazzar’s Feast; both works, strangely, were destroyed in an act of vandalism in which “young boys cut and tore my paintings so as to render them not of the least value.”8 Perhaps the choice of Belshazzar’s Feast derived from the hellfire and brimstone sermons Cole must have heard in Lancashire. However, this subject also links him to two major works of art widely discussed in the press by 1823. Washington Allston and the English painter John Martin created rival versions of Belshazzar’s Feast that offered diametrically opposed manifestos for the possibilities of, and strategies of, historical painting in the nineteenth century.9 Allston’s Belshazzar’s Feast was begun in 1817 and intended as a magnum opus in the genre of academic, figural history painting, a massive figure composition slightly more than twelve feet by eighteen in size. Allston believed himself to be the inheritor of the mantle, and the fulfilment of the project, of Reynolds – “my Sir Joshua,” as Allston called him; “I call him mine, for I feel as if I had a property in his mind; quoad the painter, he has laid the foundation of my own, most of my speculations are built on it, and it is mine by right of settlement.”10 Allston’s Belshazzar represents his attempt at the grand manner, outlined by Reynolds in his Third Discourse delivered in 1770. Insisting that “there are excellencies in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature,” he advocates the “great style” or grand manner in which the “perfect idea of beauty” is manifested in an ideal synthesis of the human body, rather then representation of any individual model.11 Allston greatly admired the Raphael cartoons when in London and was well versed in the canon of French and Italian painting. Belshazzar’s Feast, much discussed, was begun in 1817, but never finished, presents a stiff tableau of larger-than-life-sized figures deployed as if before a theatrical set: at the centre of the group is the prophet Daniel. The work depicts the appearance of the writing on the wall, “mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” which the prophet Daniel correctly interprets: “Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting” (Daniel 5: 25–7). Allston’s bombastic painting fails to capture the full sublimity and drama of the Old Testament subject. The contrast between Allston’s version of this narrative and that by the English painter John Martin was a matter of keen discussion when the latter was shown in London in 1820. C.R. Leslie, later a friend of Cole, wrote anxiously to Allston on 3 March that year, stating that Martin “is now employed on your subject of Belshazzar.”12 Unlike Allston’s heroic, figural work, Martin’s composition is a spectacular historical landscape with the human actors small in scale. It was exhibited at the

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British Institution in 1821, where it attracted such attention that barriers were erected to fend off the eager crowds. The composition was reproduced in a celebrated mezzotint by Martin himself, published in 1826 and circulated widely.13 Martin imagines the Babylonian court as a columned courtyard reminiscent of the massive industrial edifices of the nineteenth century. The feast is seen in the middle ground. Martin published a pamphlet identifying the tiny figures; unlike those in Allston’s composition, they are not easily recognizable without textual assistance. It is not the figures – poorly drawn and distant – that command the viewer’s attention. Rather, as in a stage spectacle, the eye is drawn to the dramatic lighting, the searing light of the magical characters glowing on the wall, and the chaotic scene of storm and darkness beyond. For the critic of the Examiner, this was “a scene so various, so magnificent, portentous, and pathetic, as to gratify all the serious faculties of the mind, and to fill them with wonder and delight.”14 This image gained far more popular traction than any history painting of the era; an impression of the mezzotint was purchased, for example, by Rev. Patrick Brontë, and hung on the walls of the parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire, where it exerted an influence on the literary works of his three daughters.15 The complete absence of natural forms from the teeming cityscape gives the Old Testament subject a palpable link to the violence and drama of the modern industrial world. Martin courted popular success, boasting to Leslie that Belshazzar’s Feast would “make more noise than any picture ever did before.”16 But in doing so he risked straying from the sphere of fine art into that of commercial entertainment. The French writer Joseph Jean Pichot asked of Belshazzar’s Feast: “does this phantasmagoria belong to the lawful resources of art?,” adding that he preferred “the still more surprising … effects of a transparent picture.”17 Martin’s composition was plagiarized in a diorama exhibited at Niblo’s Garden on Broadway, New York, in 1835.18 The historical landscape, in Martin’s apocalyptic vision, veered away from the Reynoldsian high ground of the academy towards the vernacular of the fairground, risking critical disopprobrium – but in doing so it acquired an energetic charge of modernity.

“A Higher Style” Following the success of his early landscapes of Hudson Valley scenery, in the spring of 1828, aged twenty-seven and enjoying a growing reputation, Thomas Cole engaged upon his most ambitious project to date. In May that year he announced to his Baltimore patron Robert Gilmor that among his works currently

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showing at the National Academy of Design “are two attempts at a higher style of landscape than I have hitherto tried. The subject of one picture is the Garden of Eden … the subject of the other is The Expulsion from the Garden.”19 Moving away from the topographical scenes with which he had begun to make his name, Cole had decided to explore the possibilities of “historical landscape.” This term describes intellectually ambitious works of the imagination engaging, like history painting itself, with grand Biblical and mythological themes, but by reducing the dominance of the figures and setting them within a landscape context. Pioneered by Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth century, historical landscape had been revived by the English painter Richard Wilson in Rome in the 1760s.20 Cole knew Wilson’s work through engravings, and cited as one of the “finest pictures that have been produced … that beautiful landscape of Wilson’s in which he has introduced Niobe and her children in an actual view.”21 The subject of Wilson’s dramatic composition is the tragic drama of Niobe, the mortal who, in Greek mythology, was punished for her boastfulness by Apollo and Artemis, who slayed her nine children. The figures, based on a classical sculptural group, are tiny: it is through the sublime landscape, with lightning and storm-tossed trees, that Wilson articulates the intensity of the tragedy. Among American artists, only Allston had experimented seriously with the genre: his Elijah in the Desert, 1818, places the diminutive figure of the Prophet amid a harsh, extensive landscape, clearly derived from close observation of works by the seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa. The leading exponents of historical landscape among Cole’s living British contemporaries were Turner, by the 1820s a leading member of the Royal Academy, and Martin, artists whose work he already knew extensively through the circulation of prints. The two Eden paintings were linked by the grand Biblical narrative of the Fall of Man, offering a contrast between a world of nature without sin and a world defined by it. For the first time in Cole, offers a parable for America: for all its tropical lushness The Garden of Eden is an American scene, the dramatic contours of the landscape recalling Mount Chocorua in New Hampshire where he had travelled in the summer of 1827. Cole feared that the Edenic beauty of America stood soon to be destroyed by over-zealous economic expansion. “We are still in Eden,” he wrote in 1836: “the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our ignorance and folly.”22 As he knew too well, parts of the bountiful pastoral Eden of New York State were already on their way to becoming, like Bolton, a grim landscape of labour, marked by the curse of Adam: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:19). America’s original sin, for Cole, was the despoliation for profit of its God-given natural fabric, the wilderness, by “dollar-godded

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utilitarians.”23 He may also have seen the expulsion of the Indigenous population and perhaps even the continuance of the “peculiar institution” of slavery in the same terms. The composition became widely known through an engraving by James Smillie, made in 1831–32 for an illustrated Bible and through this conduit, influenced a later generation. In 1852, the African American painter Robert Scott Duncanson painted a new realization of the composition, perhaps referencing a long tradition in which the Garden of Eden stood, metaphorically, for a world before slavery.

European Histories Cole had aspired for years to make a journey to Europe: guidance had come as early as 1827 from Allston, who sent the young painter a list of old masters whose work he should study: “Claude, Titian, the two Poussins, Salvator Rosa and Francesco Mola.”24 Cole followed Allston’s advice to the letter. For American artists of this period, London was the major centre for the production and patronage of contemporary art, and especially for landscape. Equally powerful, for different reasons, was the allure of Rome, focal point of the grand tour and a gathering place for artists because of its status as the wellspring of the classical tradition. Cole travelled first to Britain, returning just over a decade after he had first left. The impressionable young man “took a walk to Westminister Abbey.” The medieval building, he wrote to his parents, “far exceeds my expectations: no prints or descriptions can give a true notion of its grandeur.”25 There were no such monuments in the United States. More impressive still was the National Gallery, housed in the Pall Mall residence of John Joseph Angerstein, whose paintings had been purchased by the government in 1824. Cole’s much thumbed copy of William Young Ottley’s art historical guide to the Gallery, published in 1829, survives, with a few of the artist’s brief annotations.26 Cole dismissed Rubens’s celebrated prospect view of his estate at Het Steen in the early morning dew, as “a great display of artistic skill without much truth,”27 quite the opposite of Reynolds’s lament that Rubens “who has painted many landscapes, has sometimes transgressed” by adopting “local principle” above those of generality.28 It was to the distinguished collection of works by Claude Lorrain that Cole paid the closest attention.29 Of particular import for the young artist was the historical landscape Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (London: National Gallery): “I should rate him,” wrote Cole “the greatest of all landscape painters, and indeed I should rank him with Raphael and Michelangelo.”30 Exposure to Claude’s achievements as a

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painter of historical landscapes on a grand scale undoubtedly emboldened Cole’s ambition to attain a “higher style.” One living artist, himself a passionate admirer of Claude, stood as the greatest of all models for emulation. On 12 December 1829, Cole presented himself at the gallery of Joseph Mallord William Turner. At one end of the gallery was Turner’s great Dido Building Carthage, itself a self-conscious reworking of Claude’s “Seaport” compositions. Cole wrote fervently of this “splendid composition, and full of poetry. Magnificent piles of architecture fill the sides, while in the middle of the picture an arm of the sea of bay comes into the foreground, glittering in the light of the sun, which rises directly over it. The figures, vessels &c., are all very appropriate.”31 Like Claude, Turner wished to address profound themes of literature and history in his large-scale works, and Dido bore the subtitle “or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire.” That its pendant, a later work first exhibited in 1817, was The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire indicates Turner’s awareness of the patterns traced by Edward Gibbon’s magisterial history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1770–88), which recounted the rise and decline of a civilization often viewed as a precursor to the British Empire.32 In presenting a vivid sunrise, the canvas flooded with yellow, and a blood-red sunset, pairing a scene of hope with one of despair, Turner mapped the rise and fall of Carthage onto the times of day. Cole was even more deeply impressed by another dramatic composition, which he continued to reference, in attempted emulation, throughout his career: Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (Fig. 7.2). Cole described it as “a sublime picture, with a powerful effect of Chiaro Scuro.”33 Here he found the ultimate manifestation of the sublime: the futile affairs of mankind are reduced to Lilliputian scale under the vastness of the Alps and the great vortex of a storm. At the Royal Academy of 1829, Cole had also seen Constable’s heartfelt meditation on the decline of Britain, Hadleigh Castle: The Mouth of the Thames – Morning after a Storm (Fig. 7.3). Not explicitly a historical landscape, the work nonetheless takes history for its subject. The rugged outline of the castle, which stands by the Thames Estuary in Essex, takes on a tragic dimension: like England, in Constable’s view, and perhaps like Constable himself in 1829, bereaved and deeply dejected, it stood in ruins. The island nation’s traditions have been lost – Constable avows – amid the pursuit of profit through empire, and the worship of trade. The onset of democracy, which for Constable, as for Cole, was a malign force, must undermine all that is valuable in the nation. The castle, symbol of tradition and aristocratic dominion, stands neglected, and the countryside – so immaculately cultivated and managed in Constable’s earlier work – is run to ruin, as cattle wander untended amid the vegetation. It was a vision that appealed greatly to Cole,

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whose pessimism was yet one more trait shared with some of his British contemporaries, but not with the mass of the American public of the Jacksonian era, from whom he felt increasingly alienated. Constable and Cole shared a deep dislike of industrialization and the modern city, Constable because it contrasted so harshly with the scenes of his idyllic “‘careless boyhood’ … on the banks of the Stour;” Cole for the opposite reason: it surely brought back his scarring early experiences in Lancashire.34 Cole left England in May and travelled first to Paris, where French history painting offended his Protestant sense of propriety as well as his conservative aesthetic tastes: “I was disgusted in the beginning with their subjects. Battle, murder and death, Venuses and Psyches, the bloody and voluptuous, are things in which they seem to delight: and these are portrayed in a cold, hard and often tawdry style.”35 Landscape occupied a low position in the hierarchy of genres and he found French examples “poor.”36 He preferred Florence, where he enjoyed the company of American artists including the sculptor Horatio Greenough, who gently guided Cole to improve his work and wrote to Cooper, “I shall always be very proud of having induced him to study the figure.”37 Cole did attend the life school of the storied Academia delle Belle Arti, which rigorously drilled students in the disciplines of drawing from casts of antique sculpture and from the life model. Committed to landscape, however, he never allowed the figure to emerge in his work at the scale demanded by history painting of the kind the academy promoted.

America in History The America to which Cole returned late in 1832 was changing rapidly, in ways that he found deeply troubling. The “market revolution” was well underway, a period during which the United States became a manufacturing centre for iron, steel, textiles, weapons, furniture, and ships, while continuing to cultivate cotton through the labour of enslaved men and women.38 Industrialization had begun to have the

7.2 Opposite top Joseph Mallord William Turner. Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps. 1812. Oil on canvas. Tate. 7.3 Opposite bottom John Constable. Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames – Morning after a Stormy Night. 1829. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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same effects in New York and the textile towns of New England as it had in the Lancashire of Cole’s youth: huge wealth for some, increasing inequality, slums, tension between classes, and extreme vulnerability to the volatility of markets and trade cycles. These processes were heightened by the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson, elected president in March 1829, just before Cole departed for England. Jackson put an end to the politics of consensus and deference, displacing the educated elite that had presided over the United States since the Revolution. His presidency was marked by economic, social, and ideological upheaval. Cole was horrified by the new partisan politics (he abhorred the “shouts of a company of Jacksonmen” that disturbed the peace in 1834), and wrote despairingly that “the moral principle of the nation is much lower than formerly.”39 Increasingly skeptical, Cole foresaw inevitable doom for the Republic and as a painter of history felt the need to inscribe this within his visual productions. Throughout his European tour, Cole had been dreaming of a future magnum opus that would draw together his aesthetic and intellectual preoccupations, a work of great ambition and, especially now, of urgent ideological relevance. Eventually to become The Course of Empire, this work, imagined from the start as a linked series of paintings, gained in resonance and meaning as his travels continued. It also represents the summation of his attempts to produce a new form of historical landscape in a sequential form. In the darkness of the London winter in 1829, Cole wrote a lengthy memorandum in his sketchbook describing: a series of pictures … illustrating the mutation of Terrestrial things. The cycle should commence with a picture of an utter wilderness … The human figures should be savages … indicating in their occupations that their means of subsistence is the chase. The second picture should be a sunrise – partially cultivated country … here & there groups of peasants in the field … The third picture should be a noonday scene – a gorgeous City with piles of magnificent Architecture. A port crowded with vessels – splendid procession &c., & all that can be combined to show the fullness of prosperity (wealth & luxury). The fourth should be a stormy battle & the burning of a city – with all concomitant scenes of horror. The fifth should be a sunset – a scene of ruins, rent mountains, encroachment of the sea, dilapidated temples, &c – sarcophagi … All these scenes are to have the same location.40 It is notable that this narrative took shape in Cole’s mind during his period of residence in London at the heart of the largest maritime empire the world had ever seen, a nation driven by “utilitarian” concerns and the pursuit of wealth and luxury,

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notable also for the degradation and suffering of the poor. Before the series was painted, Cole travelled to Rome, where the picturesque ruins of the greatest empire of the past lay all around him. Noble gives us a fanciful vignette of a moment of rumination as Cole surveyed the Roman forum in 1832 in which “he seated himself on the fragments of a column to enjoy the sunset. As its splendours faded into twilight, all lapsed into a stillness suited to the solemn repose peculiar, at that time, to a scene of ruin … [Speaking to a stranger] he passed from point to point in the series … until he closed with a picture that found its parallel in the melancholy desolation by which, at that moment, they were surrounded. Such was Cole, the poet-artist, at Rome.”41 Cole’s view of the historical cycle, according to which all nations must rise and fall, doomed by the irredeemably fallen nature of man, his inherent greed and avarice, was deeply rooted in the Calvinist thought of his youth as a Lancashire Dissenter. But Cole also subscribed to the fashionable Romantic pessimism shared by many of his contemporaries, not least Turner in his fragmentary epic poem “Fallacies of Hope.” Other possible literary influences include Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), of which Cole owned a copy.42 The publication of the first volume coincided with American independence, an event marking a defeat for one empire and, in the view of some, the founding of another. The most suggestive literary precedent is Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), from which Cole (who had made a pilgrimage to Byron’s home in 1830) quoted lines in his newspaper advertisements for The Course of Empire: “There is the moral of all human tales / ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. / First freedom and then Glory – when that fails, / Wealth, vice, corruption, – barbarism at last. / And History, with all her volumes vast, / Hath but one page.”43 Cole imagined his role as that of the historian, inscribing those pages with the melancholy tale of human folly. The popularity of such speculative historical schemes in the early nineteenth century surely relates to the sheer magnitude of the events of recent history – the American Revolution, the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, and the turbulent social effects of the industrial revolution. These traumatic developments, directly influential on Cole and his family, gave his contemporaries a vivid sense of history in the making. Cole’s title is taken from “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” (1726), by George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne: “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; / The first four Acts already past / A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; / Time’s noblest Offspring is the last.”44 In Berkeley’s poem, written before his journey across the Atlantic, the ruin of a decadent Europe is offset by the limitless potential of the American colonies. Later in the nineteenth

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century it came to be associated with theories of manifest destiny. But perhaps Cole knew that the poem was occasioned by Berkeley’s vision of creating a university in Bermuda, freed from European corruption, and that the scheme foundered owing to lack of funds. Searching for a patron for his great cycle, in 1832 Cole met Luman Reed, who had made a fortune in the grocery business and retired at the age of forty-eight and was involved in decorating a new residence. In September 1833 Cole persuaded Reed to commission, for the large sum of $2,500, the five paintings forming The Course of Empire.45 To complete the cycle was, perhaps, the most sustained act of artistic labour of Cole’s career, offering a creative synthesis of the experience of his European travels. For the first canvas, The Savage State introduces the viewer to the landscape against which Cole’s historical pageant is to be acted out, including the distinctive rocking stone at the top of a nearby mountain. Around a scene of tribal people dancing is a ring of temporary structures resembling Native American tepees. Cole appropriated these objects for his portrayal of generic “savages” in his imaginary imperial civilization. A suggestion of classical dignity attaches to the single figure of a bowman in the foreground, whose arrow has killed a deer. He strikes the noble pose of the Hellenistic Borghese Gladiator. Doubtless there was a cast of this much-admired sculpture at the Accademia in Florence.46 Cole makes clear that the figures in Course of Empire are to be understood as European. This tribe, then, is not a subject people or an ethnic “other”; rather it is the origins of modern society. The white New York viewers of 1836 were contemplating in Savage State their own ancestors – through the prism of historical landscape, they were looking at themselves. For The Arcadian, or Pastoral State, the sublime mode derived from Rosa gives way to the beautiful, in homage to the works of Claude he had seen in London, and the landscapes of the Campagna that he had sketched outside Rome. Human learning is developing: a Pythagorean elder sketches a theorem in the sand; pastoral rustics engage in music and dance and the visual arts are in their infancy. The figure of a woman spinning, the origins of labour, may represent Clotho, the youngest of the three fates, spinning out the destiny of industry and empire. (The spinning of cotton – by hand or by machine? – was a key question for the Luddites.) Significant here is one of the few identifiable topographical features in the entire cycle, the round stone temple in the middle distance, clearly based on Stonehenge. The mysterious English monument exerted a considerable influence over the imagination of Romantic writers and painters, from James Barry in King Lear (a masterpiece of early Romantic history painting) to William Blake in Jerusalem,

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for whom it provided a tantalizing glimpse of Britain’s own distant, pagan antiquity.47 Cole, however, deploys the monument, in an imaginary state of completeness, as an emblem of things to come – a foundational building from which the history of architecture will spring, though here too, by choosing Stonehenge as a point of origin, he projects an arc of history ending in ruin. Dark portents can be found in the severed tree in the right foreground: the cost of human progress is the desecration of nature. More ominous still is the presence of a soldier in what might be Roman uniform, entering the foreground, whose presence intimates violence and war. Even at this moment of society’s infancy, the die is cast. Consummation of Empire, painted on a larger canvas than the other four works, is the centrepiece of the series, the most complex work Cole would ever produce (Fig. 7.4). The imperial capital stands around a bay with the familiar outline of the mountain distantly visible to the right. The natural world has almost disappeared under marble and gold. The noonday sun beats down on a spectacular celebration with a conquering emperor crossing a bridge in the left foreground. The victorious army brings back looted works of art and gold vessels, perhaps an echo of Belshazzar’s spoils from the temple at Jerusalem as envisioned by Martin and Allston.

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7.4 Thomas Cole. The Course of the Empire: The Consummation of Empire. 1835–36. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society.

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The painting distils much that Cole absorbed in Europe. The composition derives, of course, from Claude’s Seaport and Turner’s The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, Cole makes many learned references to Greek and Roman monuments, such as the Erechtheion in Athens, which he probably knew from James Stuart’s publication of 1787, Antiquities of Athens. While scholars have identified Cole’s imaginary city with Rome, hitherto little noticed is the relationship between Consummation of Empire and the London of George IV, the greatest imperial city of Cole’s own age. The weather is Mediterranean, but the creamy fantasy architecture of Cole’s opulent city recalls the theatrical neoclassical stucco of John Nash’s Cumberland Terrace in Regent’s Park, near Cole’s London lodgings. The emperor (a disguised George IV?) is borne in procession on an elephant – perhaps alluding to Hannibal, who crossed the Alps mounted on a pachyderm, seen rearing its trunk in the distance in Turner’s Hannibal Crossing the Alps (Fig. 7.2). In Cole’s day, moreover, the elephant was also a feature of the ceremonial of British India where in durbar processions the nabobs of the East India Company were borne aloft on howdahs, like Mughal emperors before them. The key to Consummation of Empire is luxury and excess. When the series was exhibited in 1836, a critic, probably quoting Cole, noted: “Mingled with the triumph of art is the triumph of the conqueror, and with the emblems of peace and religion we see the signs of war and display of pride and vanity. The ostentatious display of riches has succeeded to the efforts of virtuous industry, and the study of nature and truth.”48 Cole’s Calvinist origins are apparent in the phrase “virtuous industry,” his classical Republican sympathies in the dislike of “pride and vanity.” The excessive population, crowding every balcony and parapet, implied a future catastrophe: such a vast sea of people might invoke population theories of Thomas Malthus, who in a famous essay of 1798 had predicted mass starvation for Britain if the population growth remained unchecked. Emigration and settler colonialism were proposed as solutions. Cole’s vision of the victory procession also includes enslaved Africans. The anti-slavery movement was in full force when Cole was in London – though after the passing of the Emancipation Act in 1833, slavery only ended (with compensation to the slaveholders and not the enslaved) in 1838. For the New York audience, slavery was a divisive issue: there were strong factions in favour of slavery in the city. By associating slavery with empire, greed, and violence Cole seems to suggest sympathies with the abolitionist movement. Cole includes two pensive figures surveying his panorama of excess, a youthful poet and a venerable historian, who foresee the inevitable collapse of the empire

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but whose prophecies are ignored. There is surely a degree of self-identification with these wise figures, as the painter of history. Would anyone heed his jeremiad?49 In Cole’s parable, such hubristic excess must inexorably bring forth nemesis. Thus, on 30 August 1836, Cole wrote to Asher Durand “I have been engaged in Sacking & Burning a city ever since I saw you & am … tired of such horrid work.”50 Although we return, in the fourth canvas of the cycle, Destruction, to the city depicted in Consummation, order has given way to chaos (Fig. 7.5). A headless Borghese gladiator overlooks the scene. The buildings in flames recall the gargantuan architecture of large-scale industry, with the repetition of identical elements across massive facades; when Cole wrote of painting “the smoke and flame of prostrate edifices” he recollected, perhaps, the factory burnings of Bolton in 1811, or the violent riots mounted by the followers of Ned Ludd (Fig. 7.1). In The Leader of the Luddites we see the very same elements: large burning buildings and a massive figure based on the Borghese gladiator, symbolizing the collapse of the social order. Cole’s Destruction of Empire hints at an elaborate narrative of an 7.5 Thomas Cole. The Course of Empire: Destruction. 1836. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society.

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7.6 Thomas Cole. The Course of Empire: Desolation. 1836. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society.

overextended empire attacked by invading barbarians. But Cole surely believed the true danger lay in the people themselves; the vulgar multitude, who could turn, like the Luddites or the New York mob, against the very fabric of society. In the final canvas, Desolation, the ruins of the imperial city recall those of Rome – a favourite Turnerian and Claudean subject, and one that delighted Cole during his travels (Fig. 7.6). Cole’s work here takes on the aspect of an ecological as well as a political parable. Nemesis has followed hubris; human life has vanished, and nature is reclaiming the landscape. Even in this valedictory scene, determining references to Britain, whose empire was far from ruin in 1836 (the year before Victoria’s accession to the throne), can also be found. The composition is a paraphrase of John Constable’s great meditation on the decline and ruination of the nation, Hadleigh Castle, that had so impressed Cole in 1829 (Fig. 7.3). The onset of democracy – for Constable, as for Cole, the rule of the vulgar – has undermined all that is valuable and Desolation becomes a vision of the future as much as of the past. This, Cole avows, is where we will end up after the cycle of greed, excess, exploitation, Luddism, slavery, imperialism has led us from hubris to nemesis.

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The Course of Empire, then, represents the summation of Cole’s journeys and a global rather than a local meditation on history. Cole’s own identity as the father figure of American landscape painting – with its trajectory, in the work of his followers, towards an enthusiastic endorsement of manifest destiny – seems far from secure. The victim of economic and cultural forces of displacement over which he had no control, his love of the American wilderness was tempered by his skepticism about the emergence of the Jacksonian market economy, and the onset of American empire. Moving between empires modern and historical, he was haunted by his recollections of industrial Lancashire, and troubled by the multitudinous energies of modern London; moved by the pathos of the ruins of ancient Rome, he was skeptical of Jackson’s imperial designs, and thus fearful for the future. One thing, however, emerges securely from Cole’s cycle: a belief that a cycle of landscapes, rather than figural history painting (as in James Barry’s cycle The Progress of Human Culture and Knowledge at the Royal Society of Arts, 1777–84), could articulate an analysis and critique of modern civilization. By balancing the legacy of Claude and Turner with the innovations of Martin – the panorama and diorama – Cole created a new medium of historical art.

Notes This essay draws on materials previously published in Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (London: Tate, 2002); Tim Barringer, “The Englishness of Thomas Cole,” in Nancy Siegel, ed., The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011), 1–52; Elizabeth Kornhauser, Tim Barringer, and Chris Riopelle, Thomas Cole’s Journey (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2018); and Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, Sophie Lynford, Jennifer Raab, and Nicholas Robbins, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

1 Tuckerman, American Artist Life, 28. 2 Truettner and Wallach, Thomas Cole. 3 Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting. 4 Farnie, “Crompton, Samuel (1753–1827),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., Lawrence Goldman, October 2007, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6760 (accessed 10 February 2017). 5 Timmins, The Last Shift. 6 Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 38.

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7 Dunlap, History, 352. 8 Noble, Thomas Cole, 40. 9 Hemingway, “The Politics of Style.” 10 Ibid., 124. 11 Reynolds, Discourses, 43. 12 Myrone, John Martin, 101. 13 Campbell, John Martin, 90–1. 14 Hemingway, Landscape between Ideology and the Aesthetic, 161. 15 Alexander, “The Burning Clime.” 16 Pendered, John Martin, Painter, 103. 17 Myrone, John Martin, 104. 18 Avery, “Movies for Manifest Destiny,” and Hyde, Panoramania!, 123. 19 Kelly, Thomas Cole’s Paintings of Eden, 17. 20 Postle, Simon, and Wilcox, Richard Wilson, 18–23. 21 Thomas Cole to Robert Gilmor, 26 December 1826, in Merritt, “Correspondence,” 71–2. 22 Cole, Essay on Landscape Scenery, 12. 23 Wallach, Art Bulletin, 340. 24 “The two Poussins” refers to Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and his brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet (1615–1675). All quotations from Washington Allston to Henry Pickering, 23 November 1827, in Wright, The Correspondence of Washington, 245. The phrase “take him all in all” is slightly misquoted from Othello (I.2.186–7), “He was a man, take him for all in all / I shall not look upon his like again.” See Wright, Correspondence, 247–8. 25 Thomas Cole to his parents, London, 28 June 1829, quoted in Noble, Thomas Cole, 77. 26 William Young Ottley, Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery with Critical Remarks on their Merits (London: J. Poulter, 1829). 27 Annotation in pencil in the margin of Ottley, Descriptive Catalogue. 28 Reynolds, Discourses, 69. 29 Simpson, Turner Inspired, 13–24. 30 Noble, Thomas Cole, 171. 31 Ibid., 81. 32 See Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Turner may also have read Oliver Goldsmith’s The Roman History (1769). On Turner’s intellectual formation and interests, see Gage, J.M.W. Turner. 33 Ibid., 81. 34 John Constable to Rev. John Fisher, 23 October 1810 in Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence, VI, 77. 35 From Thomas Cole, “Notes on Art,” in Noble, Thomas Cole, 89. 36 Ibid., 89.

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37 McGuigan, “A Painter’s Paradise,” 41. 38 For a useful summary see Wilentz, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution” and Larson, The Market Revolution in America. 39 Tymn, ed., The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, 134–5. See also Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 23. The phrase about “Jacksonmen,” from a journal entry of 1834, is quoted in Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America,” 76. 40 Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole, 116. 41 Noble, Thomas Cole, 111–12. 42 Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America,” 83. 43 Wallach, “Cole, Byron and The Course of Empire,” 377–8. 44 Luce and Jessop, Works of George Berkeley, 369. 45 Foshay, Mr Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery, 113. 46 Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 221–4. 47 Smiles, The Image of Antiquity, 165–93. James Barry, King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia, 1786–88, London, Tate; William Blake, Jerusalem, Yale Center for British Art. 48 Morris, “The Fine Arts,” 150. 49 Barrett, Rendering Violence, 33–6. 50 Thomas Cole to Asher Brown Durand, 30 August 1836, quoted in Parry, “Thomas Cole’s ‘The Course of Empire,’” 117.

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PART THREE

History Painting after Modernism jordan bear

It has proven tempting to position history painting and its ostensible decline in the latter part of the nineteenth century as an opposite and equal reaction to the rise of modernism. Like hostile playmates on a seesaw, their fortunes have been inversely linked in a zero-sum contest. Indeed, it is a rare account of history painting’s fate in which modernism plays anything less than a decisive role. And, certainly, it would be untenable to claim that these two histories were not in some important ways intertwined. But understanding history painting exclusively in terms of modernism – and on modernism’s terms – is to be swept up in a redemptive telos whose outcome is never in doubt. The story is now familiar: the academy maintained its grip on art production through an authoritarian management of hierarchies and standards, the most durable of which, at least in pictorial terms, was the hierarchy of genres. Perched com-

placently atop this creaking edifice, history painting had the farthest to fall once the structure began to give way, an inevitability finally precipitated by the salubrious arrival of the avant-garde. This entrenched rendition has advanced a view of the role of genre as fundamentally constricting, as a set of shackles against which more ambitious artists vainly chafed. As Stephen Bann has put it, “in general terms, this traditional view of the Academy has entailed the assumption that the prescriptions of pictorial genre are more constraining than facilitating.”1 But viewing the issue in this way elevates originality over intelligibility, and merely replicates the avant-garde’s own heroic mythos. In now-canonical accounts of modernist painting, intelligibility has become perhaps the ultimate disapprobation for a work of art: at best a sign of timid conventionality, at worst a capitulation to the viewing habits of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, for some historians,

the chief desideratum for a modernist painting is the ability to confound a viewer who operates according to procedures for reading an academic painting. In T.J. Clark’s account of Manet, perhaps the artist’s most powerful achievement is his capacity to “defeat” or “disappoint” the representational conventions for which narrative history painting had prepared audiences.2 In celebrating this failure to signify, as Jonathan Harris has noted, Clark nominates “ambivalence, confusion and doubt … as the eloquent and admirable qualities” of modernism.3 The premium that history painting placed upon conventional legibility – the insistence that the representation communicate didactically – meant that achieving innovation within this domain required a different sort of ingenuity. It required working within the expressive prescriptions of a functioning idiom, rather than inventing a new one, as Manet might be said to have done. Legibility, constrained though it may be, is no less central an aspiration than opacity in art produced in the modern period. Indeed, it is the successful failure to “read” conventionally that makes the most revolutionary paintings of the Parisian avant-garde, in every sense, exceptional. The painter’s basic need for communicative, didactic legibility hardly disappeared in the wake of these innovations. And while undoubtedly diminished and fragmented in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, history painting served as an enduring source for achieving these less exceptional – though nevertheless indispensable – objectives.

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The essays in this final section reveal how many of history painting’s constitutive features endured in unexpected, often mutated, forms. They demonstrate clearly the inadequacy of a simple account of decline. The increasing marginality of history painting permitted a kind of deregulation of its constituent elements. Stripped of the extraordinary institutional authority it had enjoyed in previous centuries, history painting was less a monolithic ideology and more a set of conceptual and pictorial resources available to artists. This period witnessed some of the most extraordinary evolutions and adaptations, in which particular dimensions of history painting could be mobilized in the service of critique. It also gave rise to interrogations of even the most essential properties of the genre: what “history” could mean amidst the turbulence of the epoch, and even whether a history painting needed to be a painting at all. Viewing the fates of history painting and modernism as inversely related becomes particularly problematic in those instances where the two are almost inextricably intertwined. Even as late as the 1920s and 1930s, when so many of history painting’s attributes were primarily regarded with scorn, we note its durable power for a subset of modernism that sought a didactic relationship with a large public. For instance, in Mexico, where modernism became the preferred idiom of state art, it was fused with those features of history painting long prized for their communicative prowess. Thus the extraordinary murals of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro

Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, full expressions of Modernismo, nevertheless avail themselves of scale, materials, and forms of address derived from history painting. Transplanting history painting from a European metropole to a former colonial society that was undergoing its own extended revolution was no mean task, offering both amenities and perils. Mary K. Coffey’s essay in this volume explores one of the most remarkable such instances, in which Orozco strives to employ history painting while simultaneously critiquing its complicity in the colonial enterprise. In his Epic of American Civilization (1932–34) Orozco uses characteristic features of the genre to depict an American history that begins in the preColumbian era, reaches a caesura with the arrival of Cortés in the New World, and concludes with the Christian Apocalypse. The mural cycle thus thematizes the arrival of European modes of representation while interrogating the particular temporal cosmologies upon which those genres tacitly rest. History painting’s global expansion, and the fundamental friction with autochthonous culture it precipitated, here becomes a brilliant embodiment of the challenges of the colonial project at large. Far more damaging to the prospects of narrative painting than modernism tout court was the rise of Abstract Expressionism, a mode that seemed at last to have fully purified itself of any of the pictorial touchstones of history painting. As one of the movement’s chief proponents, the critic Harold Rosenberg, would put it: “The big moment

came when it was decided to paint ‘just to paint.’ The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value – political, aesthetic, moral.”4 It was both Abstract Expressionism’s mainstream cultural dominance and its desire to expurgate these “values” that helped reanimate history painting – not as an establishment practice, but as an antidote to these perceived excesses. The disaffection with modernism’s late triumphalist phase revivified, in particular, history painting’s capacity for critique. The broader insurrection took the form of what the critic Douglas Crimp would pointedly nominate “Pictures.” These were works of art that embraced the futility of searching for “original” forms of representation, instead relishing the repetitious, citational state of contemporary mass visual culture. By overtly – and sometimes brazenly – co-opting the art of the past, many postmodernists participated in a practice at the heart of history painting, where generic repetition insistently takes place even in putatively innovative “originals.” History painting’s emphasis on generic legibility demanded a continuity with the art of the past that often verged on bald quotation. This seems a clear embodiment of what Michael Fried has referred to as “the repetition-structure of European painting from the early Renaissance on,” as virtually every such history painting must also engage with the history of painting to which it is heir.5 Thus, an embrace of these features of history painting could come to serve as a pointed riposte to the elevation of originality at the heart of modernist mythology.

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James Nisbet demonstrates this new capacity in his exploration of the deployment of the iconographic trappings of history painting after conceptualism. The reappearance of “classical order, form, and narrative,” as though quoted directly from the canvases of Poussin or David, could become a surprisingly barbed tool. Stripped of its preeminence, history painting had by the early 1980s securely assumed the position of a “minor” art. As such, reestablishing contact with this moribund genre – long since supplanted by the parade of modernist avantgardes – was to repurpose it as a contrarian, rather than sovereign, mode of visual representation, and to highlight the “repetitionstructure” that nourished even the most apparently sui-generis inventions of the avant-garde. In this revival, whatever history painting lost in sovereignty, it gained in transgressive critical potency. Perhaps the most consequential legacy of these postmodern reanimations of history painting, though, is the migration of history “painting” into other visual media. That some of the preeminent history “painters” of this period were in fact photographers suggests the extent to which some of the fundamental dimensions of the tradition of history painting were increasingly decoupled from the medium of painting. The capacity of artists to liberate various attributes of the genre from its traditional, eponymous medium was the sharpest possible rejection of perhaps the central tenet of modernism. The medium specificity advocated by Clement Greenberg, in which “the unique

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and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium,” formed the criterion by which so much modernist art had been adjudged. If history painting had, over the course of the modernist epoch, declined dramatically within the hierarchies of genres of painting, by the end of the twentieth century it was painting itself whose prestige was rivalled, and often surpassed, this time by other media. Here, the successful transposition of history painting into photography allows us to grasp quite locally the much larger displacement of aesthetic authority from the formal boundaries of a single medium. History painting, it turns out, illuminates fissures at far deeper strata of the modernist terrain. Under these circumstances, the question of the future of painting seemed to many to be urgent and uncertain. Yet, even as Jeff Wall and others reconstituted history painting as a photographic project, a group of European painters explored the continuing relevance of their own medium. They did so precisely by engaging with the very genre that had, to many, signalled the irredeemable obsolescence of painting. As Dexter Dalwood – himself amongst the most insightful contemporary practitioners of history painting – argues, artists like Jörg Immendorf, Rita Donagh, and Richard Hamilton sought to “understand the relation between the history of the painted surface and the problem of the contemporary representation of historical narrative.” The depiction of particular events, if they were to have resonance

beyond the picayune concerns of reportage, demanded the capacity to refer to other works with which an informed viewer could grasp, as Dalwood puts it, “something that isn’t necessarily depicted.” The supposed objectivity of the photographic medium made it far less congenial to this particular mode of citationality. The advantage that painting might maintain over photography was its capacity for subjectivity, its liberation from the circumscribed idiom that an unmediated world could furnish. These debates, emanating from within the realm of artistic production, help to make sense of some of the metamorphoses of history painting over the last four decades. Limiting ourselves to such sources of the genre’s mutation, though, would ignore the tremendous pressure exerted by even more fundamental transformations unfolding in the realm of historiography. With the so-called “linguistic turn,” many of the values and objectives that had characterized the writing of historical narrative for much of the preceding century were under siege. In emphasizing historiography’s subjective and partial facets over its aspirations to neutrality and authority, this approach destabilized many of the assumptions of what constituted history, and in doing so also helped to enlarge the compass of what counted as history painting. In the case of the contemporary South African painter William Kentridge’s halfkilometre-long mural Triumphs and Laments – installed in Rome in the manner of a triumphal procession – chronology, address, and viewpoint are all daringly manipulated.

As Michael Godby notes in his study of this monumental work, figures in the cortège do not merely move forward across the surface of the mural, but begin to scatter and travel in reverse, as if back in time, dissolving the chronological and heroic thrust of a historical victory. In these recent reconfigurations, history itself is subject to a multiplicity of possible unfoldings, each contingent upon the infinite variety of circumstances in which the work is viewed by passersby. Of course, the relationship between the work of art and its viewer was always at the very centre of history painting’s charge. What emerges in this new century, though, is a sense of the contingency that characterizes any such relation, of an intensified empowerment of the viewer relative to the representation with which she interacts. While history painting had occasionally modulated the degree to which a viewer of a didactic image might discern or discriminate that painting’s message, it never fully relinquished control over the making of meaning. Indeed, doing so would have been inimical to its traditional purpose. With the “linguistic turn” in historiography, and the shifting of emphasis in the visual arts from the intentions of makers to the range of experiences of viewers, the authority with which both history and painting once acted was seriously compromised. The adaptation through which history painting has most recently survived has been by seizing upon, rather than merely lamenting, these changes. The realities of art production under the current, if faltering, neoliberal economic

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regime have inflected the role of the viewer in a characteristic way. In her 2009 “Mural,” installed in the lobby of the Goldman Sachs corporate headquarters, painter Julie Mehretu negotiates the question of audience at this most fraught locus of the previous year’s financial crisis. Cloistered within the heart of global capitalism, the abstract tableau offers a kind of historical map of the development of the system at whose physical centre it resides, elucidating the webs connecting slavery, industry, banking, and modernity itself. In Elizabeth Harney’s reading of the mural, Mehretu invokes the spectre of history painting to reveal both continuities with and dislocations from the assumptions of her predecessors. The work addresses disparate audiences: the “1 per cent” financiers who stride past, as well as the service sector workers who guard and clean the building and deliver food to the elites. The fundamental question of the continued viability of history painting and its form of address in contemporary society illuminates the stratifying, fragmenting polity to which it speaks. It might seem that, by intersecting with the political and economic concerns of the present, history painting becomes ever more remote from its original charge. Indeed, it has been argued that the collapse of the genre from its apex is attributable to an insufficiently metaphorical depiction of contemporary challenges, throwing off the grandeur of the past to explore the present too directly. But in doing so today, renewed history painting recommits itself to one of its

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most integral responsibilities: issuing a summons to action. Icelandic artist Rúrí, in a work entitled Archive: Endangered Waters (2003), invests her viewers with particular agency: we are able to see her work only by pulling out one of fifty-two sliding mounts, an action which activates a recording of a particular waterfall’s sound. These natural wonders are now an endangered species, as reservoirs are dammed to provide energy. The responsibility for viewing the waterfalls, and for subsequently returning them to the obscurity of the archive, belongs to us, a poignant reminder of the ethical responsibility for the degradation of the natural world. As Mark Cheetham articulates in his essay, what seems generically to be a work of landscape representation must be understood, too, as being clearly linked to history painting. In its implication of contemporary viewers in the great moral issue of our time, Rúrí’s work makes clear why, in this moment, as Cheetham puts it, “the earth’s history is the most important form of history painting.” The Anthropocene – the historical epoch of greatest human impact on the environment – binds human and natural history together, and demands the interlacing of history painting’s moral force with the subject matter of landscape. As the range of essays in this section makes clear, history painting has endured through the extraordinary artistic disruptions of modernism and postmodernism by a variety of mechanisms. It might be more apt to say that it has persisted in the work of artists who have found in the core dimen-

sions of history painting tools of ongoing utility. And the works that result are anything but arcane revivals or impotent exercises in historicism. Unburdened from a position of prestige and institutional authority, liberated from the materiality of a single medium, the rudiments of history painting have been transformed into a repertoire both precise and adaptable, contiguous with and critical of its own lineage.

Notes 1 Bann, “Questions of Genre in Early Nineteenth-Century French Painting,” 501–11. 2 Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. 3 Harris, “‘Stuck in the Post’?” 4 Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 23. 5 Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 248.

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8 Myth, Melancholy, and History Figural Dialectics and José Clemente Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization mary k. coffey

José Clemente Orozco painted his twenty-four-panel mural cycle, The Epic of American Civilization, between 1932 and 1934 in the basement reading room of Dartmouth College’s Baker-Berry Library (Fig. 8.1). This mural cycle wraps around the west, north, and east walls of the rectangular corridor relaying a vision of American history that originates in pre-Columbian civilization and which seems to culminate in a scene of Christian Apocalypse. The Epic is divided into two wings situated on either side of a reserve desk, which interrupts the wall space, opening up a chasm within the sequence of images that the viewer must navigate both physically and conceptually as she moves through the corridor. This breach marks a space of crisis wherein the Spanish Conquest of the Americas cleaves the Epic in two. In a niche opposite to the reserve desk, on the south wall, Orozco painted a supplement to the cycle entitled Modern Industrial Man where we see a racially ambiguous worker at rest, reading a book much as the Dartmouth student checking out reserve materials might. The supplement is located within the scission between pre- and post-conquest America. As such, it situates the viewer in a charged but ambiguous relationship to the story/history articulated across the cycle. What, Orozco seems to ask, is our relationship to the epistemic violence of the Spanish Conquest? Orozco stated that his intention with this mural was to activate the “prophecy” of Quetzalcoatl, a mythical Toltecan leader who was said to have been banished by his people.1 Upon his departure he prophesied his return in the year 1 Reed to destroy Mesoamerican civilization. The Aztec year 1 Reed corresponded with the

8.1 José Clemente Orozco. Epic of American Civilization (overview showing the corridor and placement of all twent-four panels). 1932–34. Fresco. BakerBerry Library, Dartmouth College. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College.

arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1519, thereby Quetzalcoatl’s promise to return has been construed, since the early colonial period, as a prefiguration of the conquest. Orozco invokes Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy to structure the relationship between the “Ancient” and “Modern” halves of the mural. The west wing sequence chronicles his arrival and departure, culminating with his prophetic vision of conquistadors entering on horseback. The east wing sequence is inaugurated by Cortés’ arrival, a repetition that serves to underscore the difference between the time of myth and the time of history – or, put another way, between Aztec and Judeo-Christian conceptions of history. Orozco’s mural does not ratify the post-Conquest thesis that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl returned, however. Rather, in his mural, Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy has yet to be fulfilled, begging questions about why he would turn to a mythologem that has structured the messianic claims of Empire from the reign of Aztecs through the instantiation of the post-revolutionary state? Moreover, it puts pressure on the positivist claims of history itself, asking us to consider the extent to which our very understanding of history is predicated upon a Judeo-Christian conception of time that is endowed with “apostolic, messianic and providential resonance.”2 This theological conception of time not only underwrote the spiritual conquest of the Americas, but also – as Gesa Mackenthun has shown through a painstaking deconstruction of the colonial texts that helped to constitute the Quetzalcoatl myth – “nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalistic historiography.”3 By making the advent of modern history synonymous with the Spanish conquest of the Americas in his mural, Orozco opens national history in the Americas to decolonial critique.4 Scholar Mari Carmen Ramírez has argued that the 1930s marked a “historicist” turn among Mexican muralists, citing Diego Rivera’s History of Mexico at the National Palace (1929–35) as a case in point.5 I argue here that Orozco’s Epic breaks with historicism and along with it the messianic nationalism of leftist intellectuals working for the modernizing post-revolutionary state. In this respect the cycle partakes of and attempts to contravene an established tradition whereby history painting had been put in the service of the consolidation of political power and nation-formation since the late colonial period. In order to best situate what I view (following German cultural historian Walter Benjamin) as Orozco’s melancholic critique of historicism and the precepts of national history painting, I first elaborate in brief the development of academic history painting in Mexico and the modernist challenges to it at the turn of the twentieth century. Following that, I survey Rivera’s National Palace mural before returning to Orozco’s Epic to better draw out the differences in each artist’s approach to time, history, and visual di-

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alectics. Given the limits of space, my analysis of both murals is necessarily schematic, honing in on key details in order to make speculative arguments about the whole.

The Academy, History Painting, and Nation-Formation in Mexico History painting as a formalized genre of academic art arrived in what was then New Spain in 1792, when Charles IV (1788–08) founded the Academy of San Carlos as part of the Bourbon Monarchy’s decades-long project to reorganize and centralize its American colonies.6 European masters, mainly Spanish, of painting and engraving were installed to instruct local artisans through a rigid curriculum rooted in drawing and the imposition of Neoclassicism to combat the penchant for an unrestrained Baroque among the local artisanal guilds and patrons such as the clergy and wealthy Creole (Spanish, but colony-born) elites. While the academy admitted Mestizos (people with mixed “racial” heritage) and Indigenous students, mainly as non-regular artisans being trained for the technical guilds, its regular students were generally well-born Creoles undertaking a professional career. Despite a hierarchy that privileged foreign-born teachers, Spanish lineage, and a pedagogy grounded in the authority of the European academic tradition, history painting emerged very early on as a privileged genre that could give voice to the proto-nationalism of colonial elites. During the War for Independence (1810–21), the academy suffered, but survived. It was reconsolidated after 1821 as a mechanism for fashioning a national identity for the newly independent Mexico. The early post-Independence period was plagued with infighting between two political factions, conventionally identified as “liberal” and “conservative” to designate the pro-republican, secular, and federalist stance of the former and the monarchist, pro-Catholic, centrist orientation of the latter. During this period history painting reflected the competing ideologies of the two factions with scenes drawn from Rome’s Republican history and episodes inspired by the Bible. As early as 1850 Juan Cordero executed what is viewed as the first secular painting drawn from national history, a scene of Columbus presenting bounty from the Americas to the Catholic monarchs. However, it wasn’t until the 1860s – once the Liberal Republic was firmly established under the leadership of Benito Juárez (1861–72), and after the loss of over half of its territory to the US (1846–48), a civil war for the Liberal Reform of Constitution (1858–61), and the Intervention of the French (1862–67) – that Mexican history began to predominate.

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During the tumultuous post-Independence period, paintings exploring episodes from the conquest, the war for independence, and the French Intervention were pressed into the service of reconciliation and national unity through the creation of a shared sense of identity. As Liberals prevailed this identity was increasingly rooted in the pre-Hispanic past, with grand machines extolling Indigenous myths and heroes or demonizing the Spanish for the horrors of the conquest. By the late nineteenth century, national history paintings reflected a thoroughly consolidated Creole nationalism that extolled the strength of the Aztecs in order to promote the modernizing agenda of the authoritarian dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1879–10, known as the Porfiriato). Paintings like Leandro Izaguirre’s The Torture of Cuahtémoc (1893) (Fig. 8.2) were exhibited in Mexico’s pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It presents the last Aztec leader stoically refusing to reveal the location of the treasury to Hernán Cortés while being burnt alive. Situated within a fantasized pre-Columbian interior and arrayed as though along a theatrical proscenium, the scene demonstrates all of the hallmarks of academic history painting: Cuauhtémoc’s heroic nude body showcases Izaguirre’s mastery of life drawing; Cortés’s clothing and erect bearing, his understanding of gesture and drapery; the heroic and edifying narrative, drawn from Mexico’s “antiquity,” espouses the nation’s resistance to foreign invasion. This message would have been particularly salient at an international celebration of Columbus’s “Discovery of America,” for even as the Díaz regime was aggressively courting international financial investment, it still felt the need to proclaim its sovereignty lest the “colossus to the North” harbour any further designs on its much-reduced territory.7 As this capsule treatment of the development of academic history painting suggests, this genre of painting has been intimately connected to the post-conflict consolidation of political power and national identity since the late colonial period. Moreover, heroic history painting, and the Neoclassical style in particular, were used to assert first the colony’s and then the nation’s rationality and modernity in the face of foreign doubts about both. With the triumph of liberal republicanism, we see the shift from Greco-Roman to Mesoamerican antiquity as part of the consolidation of Mestizo identity – an idealized mixture of Indian and European cultural traits – for the independent nation-state. This classicizing Indigenism, while often extolling the virtues and inviolate spirit of ancient Indigenous culture, was placed in the service of an essentially Creole project for maintaining political power over Mexico’s vast, racially mixed underclass. So even as Díaz was putting up monuments to Cuauhtémoc, he was violently suppressing Indigenous communities, one of the many abuses that lead to the outbreak of the Revolution in 1910.8

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8.2 Leandro Izaguirre. The Torture of Cuauhtémoc. 1893. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacionale de Arte, Mexico City. De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images.

Political turmoil was accompanied by calls for cultural revolution within the academy. Students objected to the hierarchical and outmoded pedagogy, called for the appointment of local teaching masters, and staged an alternative exhibition of national painting to protest the state’s penchant for foreign taste.9 They rejected the state and academic preoccupation with order, tradition, and rationality by exploring exotic subjects.10 At the same time, they began experimenting formally with European modernisms such as Impressionism, post-Impressionism, and Symbolism applied to the national landscape or folk themes such as the ritual migration of Mexicans to ancestral gravesites during the Day of the Dead festivities.11 Thus even before the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution (1921), academic art was undergoing a radical transformation. Students, like Orozco, who remained in Mexico during the civil conflict were trained in methods that emphasized personal style over slavish adherence to masters.12 Orozco’s “Statement” regarding the Epic reflects the fin de siècle incursions of modernism into the academic genre of history painting. In it he writes: “In every painting, as in any other work of art there is always an idea, never a story.”13 With

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this he indicates his antipathy to the long tradition of morally edifying and ambitious narrative painting established by Alberti in his treatise on painting and perpetuated by the academy throughout the nineteenth century.14 He continues, “The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus … There are as many literary associations as spectators … Consequently, to write a story and say that it is actually told by a painting is wrong and untrue.” Here, we pick up resonances with what Robin Veder calls “kineasthetic modernism” in Orozco’s references to an economy of energy unconstrained by the laws of decorum or the demands of moral edification.15 Orozco names this alternative “idea.” It is “idea” that generates the vitality of form, which in turn unleashes the energies enervating not only the artist but also his viewer. In negating the expectation and even importance of “story” in his mural cycle, Orozco rejects the academic tradition of narrative painting, one that entailed not only expectations about proper subject matter (istoria) but also a proper orientation to history (historia). As in Italian, the words “story” and “history” are interchangeable in Spanish, where the word historia can be used for both. And yet even as he pronounces negatively upon the weight of the humanist tradition in painting, his invocation of these terms reveals the genealogy of his public painting practice within the forays of modern methods into his academic training, such as the Pillet system of drawing and Chevreul’s colour theory as well as the esoteric spiritualism of the intellectual milieu in both post-revolutionary Mexico and the cosmopolitan Delphic Circle with which he was associated in the US. Acknowledging the tension in his work as one between an individualized conception of style and the demands of “public, admonitory mural painting,” art historian Renato González-Mello asserts that with every project Orozco renegotiated the line between public and private through “his way of conceiving the composition of history painting” in relation to architecture.16

Muralism, the Post-Revolutionary State, and the “Historicist” Turn As with the Bourbon Monarchs and the post-Independence state, post-revolutionary state actors turned to public art as a mechanism for national consolidation. While the academy survived, public art patronage shifted to the Ministry of Public Education. Under the leadership of José Vasconcelos, an ambitious public art initiative was begun, thus inadvertently launching what would become Mexico’s most signifi-

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cant contribution to modern art, the so-called “Mexican Mural Renaissance.”17 While the Revolution is popularly understood as a radical break with the Porfiriato, revisionist historians have demonstrated that the post-revolutionary state was continuous, in many respects, with its nineteenth-century predecessor.18 Culturally, this is also the case. Even as artists associated with the radical wing of muralism proclaimed their antipathy to easel painting and bourgeois taste, they nonetheless endeavoured to work for the state and to cultivate a sense of national identity that is not that different from the themes of nineteenth-century history painting.19 And while post-revolutionary Indigenismo reflects the artists’ support for the struggles of Mexico’s oppressed “popular classes,” a category that includes the largely rural and Indigenous peasantry as well as the urban proletariat, artists continued to mine the Mesoamerican – primarily Aztec – past for salient myths, heroes, and historic episodes. This emphasis on Indian and peasant subjects is often referred to as “official Indigenismo” for its paternalism and statist orientation.20 Early post-revolutionary murals were eclectic in terms of both style and subject matter. Nineteen twenty-four marked a key moment for political reorientation when the artists proclaimed their allegiance to both the Communist Party and the state in the wake of an attempted coup.21 Despite their support for the state, federal patronage was inconsistent throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, especially after the artists’ leftward turn resulted in images that promoted further rebellion in the name of worldwide proletarian revolution. During this period Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros travelled to the US to seek opportunities for public art outside of Mexico’s political class. Only Diego Rivera successfully navigated the whims of public and private patronage in Mexico during this period, as is evidenced by one of his masterpieces, the so-called History of Mexico, an enormous historical fresco painted in the monumental staircase of the National Palace between 1929 and 1935 (Fig. 8.3). This mural bears the hallmarks of all that is impressive and problematic about post-revolutionary muralism. Organized across three walls, it lays out a progressive, dialectical vision of Mexican history rooted in an idealized Toltecan-Aztec past and moving inexorably toward a Marxist, industrialized future. On the north wall, Rivera situates scenes of Quetzalcoatl’s reign and departure within a hieratic composition that mimics the spatial logics of Mesoamerican pictorial organization, emphasizing order and creativity, while also hinting at Aztec Imperialism just before the fall of Tenochtitlan. On the facing south wall, he paints Marx amidst the turmoil of 1930s Mexico pointing prophetically toward a utopian factory-scape along a distant horizon. The large west wall narrates a compositionally complex history of Mexico from the Conquest to the Revolution with episodes from the former arrayed horizontally along the

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8.3 Diego Rivera. History of Mexico. 1929–35. Fresco. National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

base of the wall, scenes from the Viceregal period across the midline, and episodes from Mexico’s armed conflicts (the War for Independence, the US-Mexican War, the Reform War, the French Intervention, and the Mexican Revolution) situated in the arches across the top. This dense field of images is organized via axial symmetry into a series of theses, antitheses, and syntheses along both the horizontal and vertical axes.22 For example, those conflicts associated with foreign invasion are situated in the outermost arches, while Mexico’s civil wars are depicted in the two arches flanking the centremost dedicated to its independence struggle. The west wall is centred on a virtual column with the epic battle between Cortés and Cuahtémoc at its base (Fig. 8.4). Moving up, we see a rendering of the Aztec toponym of an eagle with a serpent in its beak standing on a prickly pear cactus, signalling the foundation of both Mexico-Tenochtitlan and the modern Mexican Republic (this image is on the Mexican flag) and, as such, one of many images of Mestizaje throughout. Just above, we see Miguel Hidalgo, the insurgent priest and leader of Mexican Independence, flanked on one side by the monarchist Augustín Iturbide and on the other by figures associated with the cause of racial justice and republicanism,

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such as José María Morelos y Pavón. These opposing forces are synthesized by the establishment of the post-revolutionary state, represented here by portraits of presidents Álvaro Obregón (1920–24) and Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28). Finally, at the top of the arch we see a factory worker joining forces with Emiliano Zapata and pointing the viewer towards the south wall where the horizontal brotherhood of the proletariat and peasantry will culminate in an appropriately modern, but Indigenized, “Mexico of Tomorrow.” As Leonard Folgarait has argued, Rivera’s mural stages a ritual experience that interpolates the viewer as she walks up the stairs from the first floor to a landing that permits a more distanced view.23 The scenes along the lower registers are roughly life-size and active, ensconcing her within episodes of armed combat, while those along the top are more static and flattened out – a sea of faces, written laws, and decrees that require careful reading rather than the more embodied experience of the scenes below. In this sense, the viewer ascends from the affective chaos of war into the sober clarity of legal citizenship, in a sense preparing her for the subject position offered by the newly formed National Revolutionary Party (the npr would become the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party, or pri, the official ruling party until 2000). Folgarait argues that this shift from what he calls the “figurative” to the “discursive” register is enacted by Rivera’s sophisticated manipulation of avant-garde formal devices, in particular the semiotic complexity of Cubist composition. Thus, while the mural clearly harkens back to the wellhoned subjects of academic history painting, it also betrays the infiltration of modernist formal experimentation, estrangement, and temporal play, features that certainly complicate any simplistic understanding of its didactic narrative. Rivera worked on this mural off and on for nearly six years. During that time its iconographic program shifted with the ideological stances of his federal patrons. Begun under the strong-arm leadership of Calles’s Maximato (the period from 1926–33 when Calles, the jefe maximo, ruled by proxy through presidents Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, and Abelardo L. Rodríguez), the cycle was completed after the more radical Lázaro Cárdenas took power (1934–40). This ideological shift is most visible on the south wall (painted in 1935) where Rivera not only critiques the corrupted power of the Maximato (his former patron), but also openly endorses a Marxist interpretation of history as “the history of class struggle.” In the final version he converts what had once been an airplane and serpent – a technocratic apotheosis of Quetzalcoatl – into a monumental portrait of Karl Marx.24 Set before a blazing sunrise and pointing toward a distant factory, this messianic figure represents both the return of Quetzalcoatl (seen departing on the north wall along with the setting sun) and a Communist prophet, thereby converting Mexico’s

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8.4 Detail of History of Mexico from the west wall (showing Cortes battling Cuauhtémoc, the Aztec toponym, Padre Hidalgo, flanked by liberal and conservative figures, presidents Obregon and Calles, a proletarian worker, and Emiliano Zapata). Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

Indigenous past into a pre-figuration of its Socialist future. This “back to the future” messianism is typical of Rivera’s modernizing Indigenism, and in this mural it is anchored by a temporally and compositionally complex, but nonetheless historicist logic that embeds pre-Hispanic concepts of cyclical time (signalled by the rising and setting sun) and prophetic history within an essentially Judeo-Christian conception of linear time and eschatological history.25

Orozco’s Epic, Figural Dialectics, and the Decolonial Critique of History Rivera’s National Palace mural is both exceptional (in terms of its historical sweep, scale, and central location) and emblematic of mural art’s historicist tendencies. For our purposes, its notable features are: its adherence to Marx’s philosophy of history as a material dialectic akin to G.W.F. Hegel’s model; its use of the Quetzalcoatl myth of departure and return to naturalize a triumphant and progressive vision of Mexican history; its Marxist messianism, whereby the Communist theorist becomes a deus ex machina of history, taking Mexico “back to the future” and essentially authorizing, in secular form, the eschatological claims of the conquest via the Quetzalcoatl mythologem. Conversely, Orozco’s Epic takes a decidedly antihistoricist approach to the question of history and painted dialectics. Orozco’s mural engages the pre-Conquest past melancholically, acknowledging the barbarism of civilization and the catastrophe of history conceived of as progress. Their differences hinge upon the politics of messianism. Orozco’s melancholy throws the messianic claims of eschatological history into question and reveals them to be implicated in the exercise of colonial power. This difference is mobilized through Orozco’s “figural dialectics,” a term I take from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which he characterizes the dialectic between past and present as “figural,” forgoing narrativity and flowing metaphors for that of the constructivist “image,” configured as an irruptive “flash” of recognition.26 In the N volute to his Arcades Project, he elaborates: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past, rather, an image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical.”27 Orozco’s cycle as a

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whole is a “dialectical image” in which he has constellated the Conquest of the Americas with Modern America – what “has been” with the “now” – in order to critically interrogate the tendency in Mexico to incorporate the Aztec past into both indigenizing history painting and leftist mural art. With respect to the latter, the Epic would seem to be very similar to Rivera’s National Palace cycle. Both artists invoke the Quetzalcoatl myth and implicate his prophetic return in post-conquest history. However, Rivera’s mural draws from the Eurocentric historiography whereby Quetzalcoatl’s return serves the messianic historical structure and claims of modern nationalism. Orozco’s deployment of the myth, on the other hand, acknowledges what David Carrasco calls the “ironic critique” that inheres within the Quetzalcoatl mythologem.28 Recalling that the Aztecs appropriated the myth of a returning god from the Toltecs to legitimate their imperialism in Central Mexico, he argues that it represents an imminent acknowledgment of the fragility of their own claim to power. Thus, the Spanish integration of stories about Quetzalcoatl into their own providential designs on the Americas was yet another ironic attempt to justify colonization via a borrowed Toltecan lineage. Rivera repeats this gesture without signalling its irony when he crafts Marx as Quetzalcoatl’s return. Orozco’s ironic critique is enacted in two interrelated ways: through the irruption of the reserve desk within the sequencing of the north wall and as a consequence of the differential iconographic and compositional strategies Orozco uses to depict the conquest within the temporal logics of the “Ancient” and “Modern” halves of the mural. Rather than reconcile cyclical conceptions of time with an essentially linear narrative of history’s dialectic, Orozco emphasizes their epistemological distinction. In so doing, however, he does not reify this distinction in favour of the veracity of history and the progress of historical time, or conversely in favour of a prelapsarian mythical time conceived of as an idealized repository that assuages the discontents of capitalist modernity. Orozco marks this distinction by representing the conquest twice, once as “Prophecy” and then again through “Cortez and the Cross.” These two scenes are adjacent to one another but separated by the reserve desk, which marks the trauma and loss the Conquest occasioned. “Prophecy” is the last panel along the western wing of the north wall (Fig. 8.5). Its figures face away from the reserve desk and look instead toward the “Aztec Warriors” depicted in the first panel of the north wall. The visual relation between these two panels suggests the action of a circle, drawing the eye back and forth across the wall, but containing its movement within a self-referential system in which the Aztec appropriation of Quetzalcoatl foretells the return of a conquering

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god, and the arrival of the conquistadors seems to confirm the divinatory nature of the past. As the viewer moves across the breach of time and history, however, the conquistadors arrive again. And this repetition makes all the difference. If the conquistadors are an anonymous, mythic force in “Prophecy,” they are all too identifiable in “Cortez and the Cross.” The tall, ironclad figure of Cortés stands astride a pile of dead bodies. A solemn friar accompanies him and plants a monumental cross into the rubble of Mesoamerican civilization signalling the advent of both the spiritual conquest and the march of theological time. Cortés’s conquest inaugurates a linear unfolding of events across the “Modern” half of the mural that culminates not in the arrival of a new messiah, but rather in another moment of unredeemed destruction: Christ chopping down his cross before a sky-high mountain of civilization’s rubble (Fig. 8.6). In the Epic Orozco shows that the Aztecs, like the Spanish, appropriated the Toltecan myth. The figures in “Aztec Warriors” don the Serpent and Jaguar costumes central to the ritualized re-enactment of Quetzalcoatl’s epic battle with his rival Tetzcatlipoca. Moreover, a profile view of one of the feathered serpents that protrude from the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan spans the base of the image. Teotihuacan was an abandoned Toltecan city that the Aztecs appropriated as the birthplace of their gods. It had recently undergone extensive excavations under the direction of Manuel Gamio, the cultural anthropologist who penned Forging a Fatherland (1916), one of the key texts of post-revolutionary nationalism and a case study of official Indigenismo.29 Orozco’s critical attitude toward the Aztecs is clear in the panel that precedes “Aztec Warriors” depicting “Ancient Human Sacrifice.” In this gruesome scene priests restrain a sacrificial victim before a monolith with iconographic features associated with the Aztec’s patron deity Huitzilopochtli. Thus, in Orozco’s mural the Quetzalcoatl sequence seems to hover between two aggressive imperial powers serving as a “cultural resource” for their competing, but complementary, claims to dominion. By calling attention to the differential temporalities of myth and history Orozco paradoxically acknowledges that the prophetic history of the Aztecs is not antithetical to the eschatological history of the Spanish. Writing against both positivist and constructivist historians who assert that the Aztecs mistook Cortés for a returned Quetzalcoatl despite the lack of any evidence to support this claim, Mackenthun has argued that the “longevity” of the myth of Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy may in fact be due to the “structural similarity” between “two ‘nomadic’ societies and their respective cultural narratives for legitimating imperialist action.”30 Rather than naturalizing the dialogical process that construed Cortés as Quetzalcoaltl’s return as historical truth, Orozco reveals its implication in successive colonial projects reminding

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8.5 José Clemente Orozco. The Epic of American Civilization. Detail of “Ancient” half of the mural showing (above) the West wall sequence, “Migration,” “Snakes and Spears,” and “Ancient Human Sacrifice,” and (below) the Western half of the North wall sequence detailing the Myth of Quetzalcoatl from left to right, “Aztec Warriors,” “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl,” “The Pre-Columbian Golden Age,” “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl,” and “The Prophecy.” 1932–34. Fresco. Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth College. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College.

the viewer that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”31 Barbarism, as Benjamin insists, is not only a feature of the “cultural treasures” that any civilization amasses as heritage, such as the stone effigy appropriated by the Aztecs. It also taints “the manner in which [that heritage is] transmitted from one owner to another.”32 By calling our attention to the distinct semantic levels of the Quetzalcoatl myth and its role as bedrock for the heritage of two imperial civilizations, Orozco allegorizes it. That is, his treatment of the myth calls attention as much to the ways its meaning has been produced as it does to what that meaning may be. Whereas Rivera routinely turned to post-conquest codices to anchor his Marxist Indigenism within the truth claims of Mesoamerican ethnography, Orozco seems to have intuited the heteroglossic nature of these texts. Rather than a Mesoamerican figure, Orozco’s Quetzacoatl is unmistakably “white” or European, following Dominican friar Diego Durán’s construction of Quetzalcoatl-Toplitzin as a New World St Thomas. Gonzalez-Mello has traced Orozco’s imagery to an eclectic mix of sources from William Blake’s Book of Job (1827) to bastardized images from the Florentine Codex in John Hubert Cornyn’s The Song of Quetzalcoatl (1931) and line drawings of a Moses-like Quetzalcoatl in Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Lives of Celebrated American Indians (1849). The diverse aetiology of Orozco’s iconography reminds us that in 1932 (as well as today) there were no authoritative Mesoamerican sources to consult for the myth of Quetzalcoatl. The spotty and eclectic nature of the prototypes Orozco did consult reveal not only his penchant for esotericism,

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8.6 José Clemente Orozco. The Epic of American Civilization. Detail of “Modern” half of the mural showing (above) the Eastern half of the North wall sequence from left to right, “Cortez and the Cross,” “The Machine,” “Anglo-America,” “Hispano-America,” “Gods of the Modern World,” and (below) the East wall sequence, “Symbols of Nationalism,” “Modern Human Sacrifice,” “Modern Migration of the Spirit,” and “Chains of the Spirit.” 1932–34. Fresco. Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth College. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College.

but also that the Quetzalcoatl story exists only as a series of fragments within postconquest documents that all served to bolster the claims to Indigenous heritage of the Spanish as well as the modern nation state. Orozco’s melancholic grappling with the allegoresis of cultural Indigenism is less an intentional decolonial stance, and more a symptom of the encryption of colonial violence at the heart of the post-colonial nation state. As Ranjana Khanna argues: “In the context of new formerly colonized nation-states, the critical response to nation-statehood arises from the secret embedded in nation-state formation: that the concept of nation-statehood was constituted through the colonial

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relation, and needs to be radically reshaped if it is to survive without colonies, or without a concealed (colonial) other. The specter of colonialism (and indeed its counter – the specter of justice) thus hangs over the postcolonial independent nation-state.”33 Following Khanna, I read Orozco’s melancholic dialectic as a form of critical agency wherein the return of a post-conquest Quetzalcoatl persists as an inassimilable remainder within the national myth, making demands for justice upon the future. This is why we see Orozco claiming the prophetic possibilities that inhere in the Quetzalcoatl myth, while simultaneously mobilizing its critical irony.

Conclusions: “Modern Industrial Man” and the Redemptive Possibilities of Anti-Historicist History Painting Orozco’s Epic presents us with the epistemological and ontological crisis of settler nation-states in the Americas. He draws our attention to the relationship the present has forged with the past. His procedure is figural rather than temporal. His juxtaposition of the prophetic history and cyclical time of the Aztecs with the linear eschatological time of the Spanish conquistadors illuminates the crisis of the jetzeit or “now time.” This is why the mural shifts so abruptly from “The Arrival of Cortez” to “The Machine” and a sequence of panels that speaks directly to the political crisis of the 1930s in the Modern wing. By telescoping the pre-Cortesian past through the mechanized present, Orozco juxtaposes American modernity with American antiquity, radically undermining the progressive claims of popular nationalism as well as those of the Marxist Left. Like Benjamin’s critic he destroys the mythical image of progress by revealing history to be a catastrophe. In so doing, he brings about “a revolutionary chance in the fight for an oppressed past.”34 “Redemption,” states Benjamin, “depends upon the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe.”35 His recourse to the language of theological redemption does not signal a destruction of allegory and the completion of history, however. Rather, as Uwe Steiner insists, it evokes “the need to grasp history the way it would have to be imagined at any of its moments in accordance with the idea of redemption.”36 Orozco’s Epic figures an incendiary vision of American civilization as a catastrophe rather than a gleaming achievement, its culture a ruinous monument to barbarism rather than progressive enlightenment. Orozco’s Epic is not structured as a seamless movement through homogeneous time in which Quetzalcoatl’s sacrifice prefigures Cortés’s conquest and ultimately America’s redemption through

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Christ’s messianic return. Rather he exploits the architectural structure of the reserve room to underscore the fragmentation of montage emphasizing rupture over synthesis or reconciliation. Orozco’s mural is, therefore, like a Benjaminian constellation that brings the dialectic between what has been and the now to a standstill, by situating the viewer within the crisis of the “now time.” Benjamin characterizes the “now time” of the dialectical image as a “messianic cessation of happening” insofar as it carries within it the possibility of bringing the historicist flow of time to a standstill.37 Benjamin’s conception of time is differential. He insists that there is an ontological distinction between the temporalities of past, present, and future, and that our grasp of historical – human – time proceeds existentially through differential modes of “memory, expectation, and action.”38 Thus his conception of a material dialectics of history transposes the existential experience of time onto the practice of history but reverses its directionality. Rather than recollecting the past in order to anticipate the future, in the static temporality of the dialectical image “the category of anticipatory hope is cast upon the past … [and] the category of recollection is imposed upon the future.”39 Orozco foregrounds the present’s experience of the past, producing the historical intelligibility necessary for revolutionary action without prescribing the form that action will take or conjuring a messianic hero to enact it. Orozco situates “Modern Industrial Man” within the standstill of the “now time” demanding that the contemporary US viewer see the oppressed past of Conquest and colonization as a concern of her own. The racialized figure who mirrors the modern viewer is, however, surprisingly ambiguous. Many are tempted to read him as a Mestizo because of Orozco’s status as a Mexican and the Indigenous/ European binary – or Mestizaje – that the mural seems to perpetuate. However, most US viewers read this figure as African American. In a speculative gesture, I suggest that the figure’s racial ambiguity serves to interrupt the redemptive claims of Mestizo nationalism or Rivera’s indigenized Marxist proletarianism. His racial ambiguity cannot be fully represented within the terms of Mestizo nationalism, but his presence alerts us, nonetheless, to a different form of disenfranchisement, to another subaltern call for justice: that of enslaved Africans.40 “Modern Industrial Man” follows the final scenes of the mural in which a highly unorthodox rendering of Christ attacks modern idolatry in the form of pagan, Christian, and even Buddhist objects heaped upon a mountain of technology and weapons. This scene resonates with Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence,” which James Martel characterizes as the clearing away of “mythical certainties” that comprise our “sense of reality” so as to “make space for non-idolatrous forms of representation.”41 In situating “Modern Industrial Man” in this way, I

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am insisting that we not see him as a representative figure of the working class. That is, despite his status as a worker, he is not an icon, or rather, an idol, of that kind of redemptive politics. Rather, he is a figure of non-representation and therefore an expression of the “weak messianism” each generation possesses. “Modern Industrial Man” images a collective “future” wherein the colonial violence upon which the sovereignty of the settler state is established is recollected. In this respect, this is emphatically not a return of Quetzalcoatl, not a transcendent or divine redeemer. Rather this is a figure of the kind of small, local justice that we can have only if the phantasmagorias of transcendent justice or divine redemption are displaced. Instead of culminating his dialectical history with a redemptive Marx, as Rivera does, Orozco leaves us with the figure of a subaltern man, situated as a spectre of a different – and repressed – call for justice within the colonial melancholy of modern America.

Notes 1 Statement penned by Orozco for a press release issued on 25 May 1932. Gonzalez Mello and Meliotes, eds. José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–1934, 158. 2 Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 73. 3 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 71. 4 I take the term “decolonial” from Walter Mignolo to emphasize the extent to which modernity is a colonial project and that despite independence movements in settler states, we have not achieved the status of being “post” colonial. See Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. 5 See Ramírez, The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement. 6 For the history of the academy of San Carlos see: Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos (1785–1915); Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting; and Oles, Art and Architecture in Mexico, 96–198. 7 Vazquez, “Translating 1492,” 21–9. 8 Johns, The City of Mexico in the Age of Díaz. 9 1910: El Arte en un Ano Decisivo. La Exposicion de Artistas Mexicanos. 10 Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition. 11 Lozano, Mexican Modern Art, 28–43. 12 Renato González Mello discusses Orozco’s training during the period in the academy in “Public Painting and Private Painting” in González Mello and Meliotes, José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–1934, 62–97. 13 Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth,” n.p.

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14 Grafton, “Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context,” 37–68. 15 Veder, The Living Line. 16 González Mello and Meliotes, José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–1934, 97. 17 The scholarship on Mexican muralism is vast; the basic sources are: Anreus, Greeley, and Folgarait, eds., Mexican Muralism; Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance; Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States; and Rochfort, Mexican Muralists. 18 See Joseph and Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution. 19 See La Arqueología del Régimen, 1910–1955. 20 See Brading, “Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico,” 75–90. 21 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero, Fermín Revueltas, José Clemente Orozco, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Germán Cueto, Carlos Mérida, Manifesto del sindicato de obreros teécnicos, pintores, y escultores de México, flier published by El Machete 2, no. 7 (15–30 June 1924, Mexico City), translated and reprinted in Ramírez and Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias, 461. 22 Rodríguez-Prampolini, Diego Rivera, 131–7. 23 Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual,” 18–33. 24 For reproductions of the studies Rivera did for the north wall, see Diego Rivera Catálogo General de Obra Mural y Fotografía Personal. 25 This is Georgio Agamben’s term from his essay, “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” in Potentialities, 160. 26 Benjamin, Illuminations, 253–64. 27 Benjamin, Arcades Project, N 3, 1, 463. 28 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire. 29 Gamio, Forjando patria and La población del Valle de Teotihuacán. 30 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 134. 31 Benjamin, Illuminations, 216. 32 Ibid. 33 Khanna, Dark Continents, 25. 34 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Thesis XVII, Illuminations, 262. 35 Benjamin, “Central Park [35],” in Jennings, ed., The Writer of Modern Life, 161. 36 Steiner, Walter Benjamin, 172–3. 37 Benjamin, Illuminations, 262. 38 Benjamin and Osborne, eds., Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, 1–31. 39 Ibid. 40 Khanna, Dark Continents, 21. 41 Martel, Divine Violence, 59, 53.

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9 History Painting after Conceptual Art james nisbet Is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started again? Roland Barthes1

Since the late 1970s, the American artist David Ligare has created what he describes as “neo-traditional” paintings that include not only landscapes and still lifes, but also history paintings – narrative scenes drawn from classical literature that he sets in the hills of Monterey, California, where he resides (Fig. 9.1).2 To the contemporary spectator, Ligare’s body of work might appear anachronistic and perhaps even willfully ill-informed regarding major artistic developments of the past two centuries. But in fact his incorporation of classical subject matter and adoption of history painting as a genre arose out of a considered response to postwar conceptualism, and more specifically, to the circulation of contemporary art through Artforum magazine during the 1970s. Ligare has recounted, for instance, that he first learned of the conceptualist compositional strategies of John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner while reading the magazine. In 1973, Baldessari fashioned the celebrated photographic series Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, purportedly taking thirty-six photographs of such attempts and selecting what the artist deemed the “best” ones for exhibition. As Baldessari’s series reduces photographic composition to operations of a priori linguistic formulation and chance, Weiner had likewise pioneered an even more daring stance for which he stated that his art “need not be built” in order to fully exist. Following from this declaration, most of his mature works consist in either multiple, ephemeral states or the form of text alone.3 In response to these moves to privilege non-compositional strategies over careful deliberation in making art, Ligare initiated his own “thrown” pieces.4

9.1 David Ligare. Achilles and the Body of Patroclus (The Spoils of War). 1986. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

His Thrown Drapery series of paintings begun in 1978 each comprise a single bed sheet pictured aloft above a seascape (Fig. 9.2). While ostensibly assuming a similar stance to the conceptualist procedures of Baldessari, Ligare’s thrown drapery paintings present nothing actually thrown or left up to chance at all. As he explains: “The series of paintings showing a piece of drapery thrown into the air above the sea introduced me to the fundamentals of classicism. The white drapery reminded me of marble sculptures that I had seen in Greece in 1963 from which the heads and arms had been knocked off and all that remained was the draped torso. These paintings were meant to appear as casual as snap-shots, but were, in fact, carefully composed onto a structure of lines relating proportionally to the rectangle of the canvas … After doing an exhibition of this series in 1978 I decided

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to begin using classicism directly rather than alluding to it … Because classicism had been essentially banished from the art world, it seemed tantalizingly ‘wrong’ to pursue.”5 In this fascinating statement, Ligare convincingly speaks to both the complexity and timeliness of his thrown drapery series, which embody not merely a rejection of non-composition in the twentieth century, but more pointedly, a recalibration of the tradition of classicism in the guise of the aleatory. Each named after a Greek island, these paintings are indeed less in keeping with the practices of conceptualism than they are a positive affirmation of the role played by the visual arts in distilling and conveying cultural memory. In making such a move in the art world of the 1970s, which certainly read as misguided or “wrong” in the eyes of most critics and commentators, Ligare has remained adamant that his embrace of Greco-Roman precedents was not a matter of turning his back upon the world in which he lived. To clarify this position, I again quote the artist at length: My own personal perspective is not one of conservatism. I despise the socalled Classic-Realists. Theirs is a kind of formulaic mushiness of light, subjects and technique. Indeed, realism itself, the representation of present day life has become a near total cliché. The insistence that art must be a reflection of the life around us whether by way of Realism or Readymades has become narrow and narcissistic. It is a form of chronological chauvinism. History painting as a new radicalism would merely be another form of gratuitous stylistic shifts if it wasn’t something that was hugely needed to redirect the culture. As I have said for many years, we are in need of a renewed desire for knowledge. Just as Modernism – particularly Surrealism – made us more aware of the irrational world inside and out, we must now be made desirous of the rational. Conservatism and fundamentalism now own the irrational. Liberal politics and aesthetics need to redirect their cultural energies away from a whole litany of easy clichés … The student is not looking for a mere “impression” of something but the fundamental truth to its existence.6 As Ligare had begun to formulate this position in the late 1970s, his earliest endeavours into classicism were bolstered significantly by another timely encounter with Artforum, in this instance with Sidney Tillim’s essay “Notes on Narrative and History Painting.”7 A key contributor to both Arts Magazine and Artforum during the 1950s and 1960s, Tillim cultivated a decidedly eclectic outlook as a critic, supporting geometrical abstraction in the face of painterly abstraction in the ’50s, pop art before other commentators in the early ’60s, figuration during the height

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9.2 David Ligare. Naxos (Thrown Drapery). 1978. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

of minimalism later that same decade, and then history painting in the ’70s. While Tillim may now be remembered mainly as an apologist for figurative painting during a time when it seemed anathema to do so, his position on post-war art should not be defined by championing a particular kind of art so much as fiercely opposing the assumed, ideological posture of criticism that congeals around any predominating taste of a given period.8 The impact of Tillim’s “Notes on Narrative and History Painting” for Ligare arose from the former’s insistence that history painting is neither reducible to narrative representation nor realism as such. While any number of “episodes of figurative art … have cropped up during the history of modernism only to end up serving an appetite for change rather than generating change itself,” Tillim polemically maintained, “history painting is nothing more or less than a dogmatic approach to the problem of originality.” “By originality,” he explains further, “I mean nothing like a ‘breakthrough’ in the

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modernist sense, but a feeling for the figurative tradition so strong that it seems radical.”9 Ligare has on several occasions expressed a similar understanding of the “originality” of his coastal California history paintings. Whether declaring that “I’m not seeking the kind of originality Picasso sought,” or offering the distinction that “another kind of originality” is “to make paintings that return to origins,” his basic point has remained consistent that the post-avant-garde expectation that each successive artist develop their own inimitable technique(s) for creating works of art “is no longer original” and is furthermore muddying the impact that contemporary art might offer to the culture at large.10 It is worth noting briefly that Ligare’s position on the “originality” of history painting was formulated at approximately the same time as the founding of the journal October in 1976 by Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson (critics who both left Artforum’s staff to do so).11 Through a number of influential essays that framed an emerging postmodernism deeply affected by the experimental use of mechanically reproducible media and post-structuralist theory, the vision of contemporary art promoted in the pages of October might seem a far cry from Ligare’s practice. But, in fact, Krauss’s own widely discussed account of artistic originality in “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths: A Postmodern Repetition,” first published in 1981, is shaped by a related critique of originality to that of Tillim.12 Krauss argues that the modernist avant-garde movements both “repress[ed] and discredit[ed]” the necessary interconnection between copying from the past and generating novel solutions in the creation of art.13 In response to the avant-garde’s various fantasies of regenerating art from a zero degree, Krauss defines a postmodern kind of repetition, for which her prime example is Sherrie Levine’s photographic reproductions of canonical modernist photographs, which “establishes a historical divide” from such avant-garde repression by embracing copying as a crucial aspect of artistic production.14 While this embrace of what Krauss calls the “complementary” discourses of originality and copying in postmodernism suggests the possibility of opening channels of continuity between contemporary art and traditions of the more historical past, she instead characterizes the temporal structure of postmodernism as a “splintering into endless replication.”15 This is to say that at a pivotal moment in the reception of conceptualism in the late 1970s, we encounter two related rejections of the avant-garde myth of originality. For Ligare, by way of Tillim, the necessity of repetition suggested the importance of maintaining ties with the conventions of historical artistic expression; for Krauss, such repetition amounted to fragmentation in the relationship of contemporary art to the past.

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Apropos of Ligare’s choice to paint thrown drapery in response to this condition of late modern originality, Tillim also specifically addressed painted drapery as subject matter in his Artforum essay, noting that “In the absence of a figure capable of movement, drapery can be employed as a surrogate … ‘abstractly’ and realistically at the same time.”16 With his Thrown Drapery series, Ligare similarly takes up this tension between abstraction and realism, but with a clear sense that “abstract,” conceptual schema – whether of proportion, linear perspective, or performative operations – would be pushed beneath the surface of his paintings to undergird more recognizably classical subject matter. In Ligare’s work, meaning derives from the act of shaping rather than reproducing, his “neo-traditional” approach eschewing the many attempts throughout the twentieth century by artists to distance composition from subjectivity. Whether rejecting conceptualist chance operations or the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, Ligare has produced paintings and drawings throughout his career that place intentionality, learning, and personal responsibility first and foremost. In taking up both Ligare’s practice of history painting and his critical stance regarding contemporary art, the following essay will not proceed from the position of claiming that history painting is alive and well simply because one intelligent but largely unheralded artist adopted the genre in the late 1970s. Ligare will instead provide a lens for examining the notion that history painting instead permeated into other mediums during the twentieth century and exists most prominently today within large-format colour photography. The Vancouver-based photographer Jeff Wall has argued, for instance, that the emergence of “photography as art” – by which he means photography that had “revolutionized our concept of the picture and created the conditions for the restoration of that concept as the central category of contemporary art” – happened coevally in the 1970s with Ligare’s own turn to history painting and was similarly a response to and rejection of “pure, or linguistic, Conceptualism.”17 With Wall’s assertion in mind, we will examine whether contemporary photography has in fact absorbed the ambitions of pictorial representation inherited from history painting, taking Wall as primary subject, but turning in due course to others of his generation including Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe. Admittedly, this is a broader topic than a single essay might adequately address. But in keeping with Roland Barthes’s statement above that certain artistic practices cannot simply be revived from the dead – and to be “modern” is to be cognizant of this condition – we will neither seek to characterize an entire field of practice nor, for that matter, to reanimate one. Our interest will instead concern the degree to which a cluster of key individual practices

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might begin to inform the relative continuity of history painting from the European tableaux tradition to post-conceptual photography. Before beginning this discussion of photography, however, it is necessary to first briefly think through the condition of writing history from the perspective of a minor artist.

On Minor History Rather than attempt to argue that Ligare’s late twentieth-century history paintings occupy an as-yet-unrecognized position of mastery within the field of contemporary art, I propose to approach these works from their very position of marginality in the art world, which is to say as a “minor practice.” By this term, I refer quite specifically to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of a minor history as opposed to the way that Charles Baudelaire once described “Monsieur G.” as a minor artist “less skilful” than the others of his generation.18 Contrary to this latter position, Ligare’s work quite consistently demonstrates technical excellence, as likewise the conception of his paintings and drawings are founded on careful analysis of his culture and place in history. Thus, while not lesser qualitatively, the minor artist is one who displaces the monolithic authority and security of those who assume the position of the “major.” As Deleuze and Guattari assert, “only the minor is great and revolutionary,” and indeed their prime example of such an author in literature is no less “minor” a figure than Franz Kafka.19 Explaining this position further, they write: “A minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language. But the primary characteristic of a minor literature involves all the ways in which the language is effected by a strong co-efficient of deterritorialization.”20 “Deterritorialization” is one of the crucial but more amorphous concepts elaborated in Deleuze and Guattari’s opus A Thousand Plateaus. In the most general sense, deterritorialization “is the movement by which ‘one’ leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight.”21 Such “lines of flight” for Deleuze and Guattari might be either actual or ideational in nature, suggesting that a “territory” need not be a geophysical place, but is a far more elastic notion describing any (“major”) position that seems ontologically stable. Branden Joseph has recently employed this understanding of the minor to interpret Tony Conrad’s body of artwork across film, sculpture, and music. Such use of moving images and sound, Joseph argues, shifts the reception of the minimalism, especially with respect to its existing emphasis on predominately on static, visual media. In elucidating the relation of the “major” to the “minor,” Joseph

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explains that “The major is rather what can be made to serve as an idea, category, or constant against which, whether explicitly or implicitly, other phenomena are measured … Deleuze and Guattari’s examples are major languages and major sciences, standardized and homogenized in the interests of regulation by a king, a state, or an institution – allied, in other words, with sovereignty, instituted in every case in the interests of erecting and maintaining a hierarchical order.”22 Such a claim does a great deal to explain the relatively minor position of moving images, sound, and performance in relation to the major arts of painting and sculpture in the twentieth century. It is also suggestive of the ways in which Ligare’s “return” to history painting complicates such categories. One complication arises from the fact that history painting came into being during the latter half of the second millennium in Europe in the position of not only a major artform but the major artform. From Nicolas Poussin to JacquesLouis David, history painting was precisely that which was “allied … with sovereignty” and with “erecting and maintaining a hierarchical order,” even if that order briefly became a revolutionary one for David. Ligare himself has found continuity with this lineage’s investment in classical order, form, and narrative – or in his preferred terms, “structure, surface, and content” – and especially so with the work of Poussin (a point to which I’ll return below).23 But in the 1970s, history painting no longer held this position of a major or dominant art form, having been systematically stripped of its sovereignty and hierarchical supremacy by wave upon wave of avant-garde invention. Ironically, then, to turn to history painting in the wake of conceptualism in the 1970s is to adopt an obsolete, unpopular, seemingly untimely, and therefore “minor” art form. As such, Ligare’s history painting is not a sovereign practice so much as one that operates in the shadows of sovereignty. I consider this a “tactical” approach to genre in Michel de Certeau’s sense of this term as “a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper,’ nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality.”24 In keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking about the deterritorializing flight of minor artistic expression, a tactic does not reinforce a territorial encampment, for that is left to the order of “strategy.” Such strategy is for de Certeau “the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an ‘environment.’” Strategy can be brought to bear in any place and at any time. “Tactics,” on the other hand, rely on denying the possibility of separating from an “environment” and thereby from a given discursive and temporal order. With this distinction in mind, we can now more fully appreciate Ligare’s tactical adaptation of history painting in the aftermath of conceptual art. Given the rise of

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other media – namely photography, video, installation, and performance – as vehicles for major artistic expression in the late twentieth century, Ligare’s history painting uncoupled from the sovereignty of this genre’s original place in the hierarchy of artistic media and genre. Once divested of such “visible totality,” it could no longer be thought of as removed from the other tactical moves being made across the field of contemporary art. Accordingly, a key difference between Ligare’s approach and that of Tony Conrad arises from the fact that Ligare has never appeared at the fringes of a major movement – like minimalism – but instead has worked adjacently to the rise of photo-based picture-making as a major artistic field.25 Ligare’s adoption of history painting as post-conceptualist tactic likewise places these other more recognized turns to classical principles in large-scale colour photography within sharper perspective. Why, for instance, did Ligare’s embrace of history painting contribute to the marginalization of his practice from the most prominent museums and galleries of the art world, while Wall’s seeming translation of the same genre into photography facilitate his recognition in these very same institutions? It is to this question that we now turn.

Wall’s Photographic “History Paintings” Few, if any, artists to emerge in the last half century have been as divisive as Jeff Wall. For many critics and historians, Wall’s work exemplifies the aesthetic incorporation of the European painting tradition into the medium of photography. This is approximately the controversial thesis of Michael Fried’s 2008 book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, which is not exclusively about Wall but features him more than it does any other artist.26 Yet this position does not originate with Fried’s text. As early as 1995, the prominent French photo historian JeanFrancois Chevrier summarized Wall’s photography as follows: “The corpus of photographic tableaux produced by Jeff Wall since The Destroyed Room in 1978 can be situated (defined by the historian) as a post-conceptual attempt at the reconstruction of a pictorial tradition in the age of the media.”27 The specific work to which Chevrier refers, The Destroyed Room (1978), is the first photograph in Wall’s mature oeuvre, a carefully orchestrated scene of wild domestic abandon that he displayed on a massive scale of 1.59 x 2.34 meters in his now characteristic format of backlit photographic transparency, in this case in the street-front window of Vancouver’s Nova Gallery. Wall has been clear that the apparent chaos of The Destroyed Room was based quite specifically on the formal composition of Death of Sardanapalus (1827), Eugène Delacroix’s romanticist history painting of murder and mayhem

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in the personal chamber of the Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus before his suicide. Following this first effort at bridging photographic production with the European pictorial tradition, Wall created a number of subsequent photographs based on paintings by Manet: Picture for Women (1979), Stereo (1980), and The Storyteller (1986), after A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Olympia, and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, respectively. While these three Manet pictures are not “history paintings” per se, Wall has nonetheless paid particular attention to the hierarchy of genres in both his photographic production and a number of scholarly essays written on his own work and that of his contemporaries.28 Wall has also vociferously opposed what he calls “photo-ghetto thinking” throughout his career, the idea that photography is a separate, technical pursuit that lies outside of the “major” art forms of painting and sculpture. Indeed, his mindfulness to the history of European painting, in particular, has attracted a number of scholars with an expertise in this area, including, in addition to Fried, T.J. Clark, Norman Bryson, and Thomas Crow.29 But for all the historical heft that this group has found in Wall’s photography, there are other authors, most notably Rosalind Krauss, who categorically dismiss Wall’s historical citations as producing the appearance of “history paintings” while not “engag[ing] that medium’s specificity.”30 For Krauss, this amounts to little more than “the kind of revanchiste restoration of the traditional media that was so characteristic of the art of the 1980s.”31 Recalling Krauss’s position on originality discussed above, her rejection of Wall’s historicism further suggests that part of what is amiss in his practice amounts to blurring the lines between one kind of repetition committed to continuities with art that precedes modernism and another that engages the contemporary circulation of photo-based media. While the established pictorial compositions and subjects that Wall culls for his projected photographs might lie at the heart of the deep division between his supporters and detractors, it also sets up a telling point of comparison to the paintings of Ligare. For Wall, unlike Ligare, the history of tableaux serves less as a set of relationships to carry forward than as a cultural form that was indeed to be found in the past rather than the present. Wall’s vocabulary of citation, for instance, is not necessarily quoted directly from the source. It is often filtered through layers of cultural memory embedded in visual art, cinema, advertising, and elsewhere.32 This understanding of Wall’s citational strategy suggests that at a structural level, his work shares as much with a contemporary such as Cindy Sherman as it does with Manet or Delacroix. We might recall that Sherman’s iconic series of Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) do not reproduce any specific cinematic character or scene. They instead draw upon their audience’s memories of the ways that women look and behave in particular social environments in a wide range of familiar films.

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Sherman also briefly engaged in her own series of photographs after “History Paintings” during the years 1988–90, and of these, only one – Untitled #199, which stages the composition of Caravaggio’s Self Portrait as Bacchus (Sick Bacchus) (1593) – has a direct referent. The rest compile specific gestures and narrative details as tropes that allude to known paintings of the past within staged photographs of the present. The fact that Wall approaches citation comparably to Sherman reveals that, unlike Ligare, Wall’s work does not enact history painting in the present so much as holds it in suspension – neither rejecting its precedence nor directly adopting its strategies. Against this assertion, critics such as Julian Stallabrass might counter that Wall’s use of digital montage to assemble the elements of his photographs and the large scale of his works mimic the viewing experience of “academic history or mythological painting” and its piecemeal approach to production.33 For Stallabrass, such methods also operate in lockstep with the consumption of contemporary art by wealthy collectors and museums. Unlike other critics who claim Wall as heir to the tradition of modernist art, Stallabrass doesn’t maintain that Wall restarts or returns to nineteenth-century modernism so much as he has pioneered a transitive approach to imbue his photographs with its financial and symbolic value.34 But while there is little debate that Wall does construct many of his pictures from a bank of source materials and studies and that the scale and execution of his works invite “viewers [to] shuttle between standing back to take in the whole scene and moving forward to inspect detail,” both akin to history paintings, I want to insist upon the distinction between the operation of these features within Wall’s photographs and the actual paintings to which they refer. Such a distinction, of course, doesn’t contradict Stallabrass’s point regarding the market, but it does significantly affect how we understand the legacy of history painting in Wall’s photography. To further unpack this distinction, we might consider Wall’s An Eviction (1988/2004) (Fig. 9.3). It is a work that has become something of a touchstone for his harshest critics, in part because it spent the first part of its life, before 2004, as a moving image, and the second part as a single, backlit photographic transparency. When first exhibited in 1988 as Eviction Struggle, the work also consisted of a series of video screens detailing the actions of the individual figures cast around the suburban landscape it depicts. In stilling the multiple inputs and simplifying the multimedia of this original version as a single image, Wall packages his work, Stallabrass maintains, for more ready saleability as a would-be tableau. Rather than history painting, though, An Eviction instead recalls the late landscape paintings of Nicolas Poussin, which is a significant reference because Poussin’s

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works also absorbed the ambition of history painting within a genre that was considered of lesser financial and symbolic value in his day. This connection begins with scale. Measuring 229 x 414 centimetres, Wall’s photograph is larger than even the largest of Poussin’s landscape paintings and more panoramic in its wide horizontal orientation, but this size is less remarkable than the small figures that dot the landscape and whose attention all turns on the dramatic action of the titular eviction transpiring on a front lawn in the left-centre of the image. This relation of these figures to the landscape strikingly recalls the figuration throughout Poussin’s late landscapes, many of which also focus upon a single event, such as the notable Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648) in the National Gallery in London, the city where Wall spent three years as a graduate student of art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. While Wall has never mentioned Poussin in connection with An Eviction, he did comment specifically on his interest in Poussin’s landscapes with regard to an earlier work from 1985.35 What seals this as a Poussinist landscape, though, is the striding legs and manneredly outstretched arms of the woman intervening amidst the core action of the eviction. It is a gesture whose drama and unnaturalness once again invokes the small figure

9.3 Jeff Wall. An Eviction. 1988/2004. Transparency in lightbox.

9.4 Nicolas Poussin. Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe. 1651. Oil on canvas. Städelsches Kunstinstitut.

astride in Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, as well as contemporaneous works by Poussin such as Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) (Fig. 9.4). Pausing upon this latter painting, we see Thisbe, a Babylonian princess, rushing in dismay towards the expiring body of her lover Pyramus. The circumstances of this charged moment, adopted by Poussin from Ovid, unfold as we proceed back into the picture, where a band of herders and their flock are attempting to ward off a lion. Following the curve of the road that lies just beyond this group takes the viewer’s eye around a placid pond that separates the mayhem from a calm herd in the centre of the picture, flanked by the equally tranquil stasis of architectural encampments to either side. A rider cloaked in red carries the news of the attack back into this populated world, a visibly fierce wind at his back, instilling a sense of foreboding that is also being played out by the weather in the sky above where a storm builds over the city located on the right side of the canvas. It would take far more descriptive investment to fully articulate the finer points of tension in this picture, of what Poussin makes visible and what he leaves invisible to insin-

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uation and the imagination. It is a challenge that has inspired generations of exegesis. My point in juxtaposing Poussin’s painting with An Eviction is to emphasize that Wall’s apparent debt in compositional scale and execution to historical landscapes such as Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe – which even includes the fact that Poussin also added his figures after finishing the underlying landscape – does not extend to the inner workings of each picture. Despite the deep space of An Eviction, its logic of recession is controlled by Vancouver’s urban grid of electrical lines, light posts, and roadways, in contrast to what Wall himself describes as Poussin’s careful overlapping of planes.36 More significantly, the array of figures and objects that litter Wall’s photograph do not develop the drama of the eviction taking place. The other figures scattered up and down the street simply look at what is happening, drawing our attention back to this struggle but not adding anything in particular to how we view it. Likewise, the other elements of Wall’s landscape simply exist – whether fences, buildings, or even the weather itself – and would appear precisely the same with or without the titular eviction. Thus, while it may call to mind Poussin’s work in multiple and even distinctive ways, An Eviction lacks the more complete pictorial order of Poussin’s classical landscapes. By way of contrast, we might look now to Ligare’s Landscape with Diogenes Throwing Away His Bowl (1984) (Fig. 9.5). Like Wall’s photograph, there is much that immediately links this painting to Poussin’s historical landscapes: the classical narrative drawn from the Greek philosopher Diogenes Laertius’s Lives, the greater spatial emphasis on landscape over figuration, and, of course, the fact that Poussin painted the same subject, Landscape with Diogenes (1657). Yet other than the main action of Ligare’s painting transpiring in the foreground – Diogenes tossing aside his drinking bowl as a superfluous possession after seeing a young man use his hands for the same purpose – this work might not appear to draw significantly from Poussin’s precedent. For instance, rather than the intricately detailed landscape that unfolds in the latter’s work – characterized here, as in Pyramus and Thisbe, by a road that joins two settlements across a body of water – Ligare’s setting features a more simplified recession of river, trees, and rocky hills.37 To grasp the more significant ties of Ligare’s painting to Poussin’s, one needs to look beyond the surface details. This is because Ligare, like his seventeenth-century predecessor, is a classicist who doesn’t copy landscapes so much as shape their features to exemplify principles of pictorial unity. I’ve noted already that Ligare composed his Thrown Drapery paintings according to the proportions of each canvas. In his Landscape with Diogenes, this same sensibility applies, as we might note in the strong diagonal line from the lower left corner to the upper right or that from the middle of the foreground to the upper left. While this scene may lack the more dramatic weather

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9.5 David Ligare. Landscape with Diogenes Throwing Away His Bowl. 1984. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

of Pyramus and Thisbe or even billowing clouds of Poussin’s Landscape with Diogenes, weather and atmosphere are by no means arbitrary elements in this scene. Note, for example, how the gradient of blue in the sky plays against that on Diogenes’s tunic, as, likewise, the shadow bisecting the curvature of his discarded bowl mimes that of his own chest. Both effects of colour and tone are the product of the day’s fading light, forging a metaphorical connection between Diogenes’s moment of realization and the climatological qualities of the landscape in which it occurs. In Ligare’s terms, “everything is related to everything else in some manner [as] a metaphor for the interrelatedness of nature and human activity.”38 This triangulation of Wall, Ligare, and Poussin, however, should not be read as driving a wedge between the two contemporary artists with respect to which is the true Poussinist. Rather, in noting the difference between Wall borrowing Poussin’s surface elements and Ligare adapting his approach to composition, we gain a sharper view of Wall’s own relationship to the history of painting. When placed alongside only the other artists of his generation who use photography as their primary format – whether Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, or James Welling – Wall can indeed appear to be carrying forward the torch of history painting. But when brought beside Ligare’s contemporaneous turn to that genre, it becomes clear that the inner mechanisms of Wall’s pictures are more in keeping with his contemporaries of the so-called Pictures Generation

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than they are with the European painters signified by his photographs. For all the historical citation in Wall’s practice, his work remains firmly in Ligare’s category of “realism,” as pictures that hold up a mirror to the appearances and expectations of their social world rather than attempting to re-shape it. By invoking Poussin, Manet, and Delacroix among the many visual inputs circulating in the late-modern imaginary, Wall doesn’t carry forward the project of history painting so much as he places the lingering imaginary of that tradition in dialogue with the visual experiences of his own environs of Vancouver.

Mapplethorpe’s Classicisms This is not ultimately an argument, however, about Jeff Wall’s work in and of itself. Wall instead stands in as the figure most closely associated with the adoption of history painting’s legacy within the kind of large-scale colour photography that has exploded in galleries and museums since the late 1970s. While it is not a wholesale embrace of history painting, as has often been suggested if not stated directly in his reception, I’ve argued that Wall’s work instead reveals a more convoluted set of aesthetic ties to that original tradition. As a brief conclusion, I’d like to look beyond Wall to another of his contemporaries, who, like Sherman and the rest of her Pictures compatriots, is rarely considered directly alongside his work. Albeit in different registers than that of Wall, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography has also consistently split opinions. As opposed to a debate between inheriting modernist art versus playing to the market, the fiercest public clash around Mapplethorpe’s work – sparked by the posthumous cancellation of his retrospective exhibition The Perfect Moment at the Corcoran Gallery in 1989 – arose between apologists for the range of personal expression and sexual desire depicted in his photographs versus a radically conservative agenda of censorship. We might begin to parse this divide with respect to an abiding inconsistency in the reception of Mapplethorpe’s body of art between form and content. This position is summarized well by Arthur Danto: “There is a tension at the heart of Robert Mapplethorpe’s art, verging on paradox, between its most distinctive content and its mode of presentation. The content of the work is often sufficiently erotic to be considered pornographic, even by the artist, while the aesthetic of its presentation is chastely classic.” Danto goes on to claim that while Mapplethorpe’s approach to content is “peculiar to America in the 1970s … content apart, the photographs seem scarcely to belong to his own time at all.”39

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In keeping with Danto, there is perhaps no more incisive topic that reveals this friction in Mapplethorpe’s work more than the various registers of “classicism” with which his photography has been identified. In the exhibition catalogue for The Perfect Moment, for instance, one writer avers that “[Mapplethorpe] has done something that no one else quite expected him to do: He has proven that classicism and eroticism are not contradictory, that they are two poles of the same experience.”40 Consistent with most commentators who make mention of Mapplethorpe’s classical impulses, this writer does not define classicism, per se, but aligns the classical as lacking everything that characterizes the erotic: sensuousness, playfulness, desire, individuality, even freedom. In this reading, the classical imbues order and regularity to that which is otherwise too chaotic and diffuse to grasp, which is to say, the author finds a notion of the classical in Mapplethorpe that exceeds the latter’s occasional use of marble sculpture as subject matter (as in Female Torso of 1978) or occasional citation of classical motifs (such as that of the three graces in Ken and Lydia and Tyler of 1985) (Fig. 9.6). These latter examples characterize Mapplethorpe’s literalist classicism, for which additional authors have found “much of his visual inspiration in antiquity and neoclassical art,” and, in related fashion, frame the moniker “classicist” as but one among Mapplethorpe’s many typologies that also include “bad boy, social climber, pornographer, cultural documentarian, sexual outlaw … [and] genius.”41 The more structural approach to classicism in Mapplethorpe finds instead that his affinity for “cocks, assholes, fellatio,” as Jonathan Katz maintains, employs eroticism as means to “infiltrat[e] and overtak[e]” the classical regimes of composition in photography and of the nude in sculpture.42 Indeed, Katz picks up on a notion that has long been latent in the Mapplethorpe literature – from Kobena Mercer’s meditation on the intertextuality of Greek sculpture and racist stereotype to Richard Meyer’s reflection upon Jesse Helms fictionalizing a “marble-top table” as classical plinth for male erotic encounters – that the most affecting pull of the classical in this body of work lies beneath the surface.43 This sense of classicism as an operation is distinct from that of classicism as a citational system of ancient forms and events. As such, the former notion of a structural or buried classicism beneath the pictorial surface creates something of an unexpected alignment between Ligare’s history paintings and Mapplethorpe’s “classical” photographs. Mapplethorpe states, for instance, that “I went into photography because it seemed like a perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence … to pick up on that madness and give it some order,” which he did by way of “classical” photographic technique and a cache of established poses from the history of sculpture. Treating art as a means of expression and ultimately of commu-

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9.6 Robert Mapplethorpe. Ken and Lydia and Tyler. 1985. Gelatin silver print. J. Paul Getty Museum.

nication, Mapplethorpe’s photographs eschew the avant-garde fantasy of merging art and life to assert instead that it is shared cultural traditions that are best suited to open up or liberate social constraints around how we each queerly desire and love. But for all of its insight into the different forms and expectations of human belonging, Mapplethorpe’s art could never be confused as didactic in the mode of Ligare’s. In their own respective media, Mapplethorpe’s classicizing photographs, like Ken and Lydia and Tyler, and Ligare’s classicizing history paintings, such as Achilles and the Body of Patroclus, were both ways to address gay rights in the midst of the aids crisis in America during the 1980s, but with different sensibilities regarding how a work of art might affect positive change.

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Consequently, Ligare’s turn to history painting in the wake of conceptualism differs in notable measures from both the citational strategies of Wall and compositional control of Mapplethorpe, while nonetheless shedding light upon these and other major practices of photography to arise within the art world of the 1970s. Reexamining this field around the question of history painting after conceptualism does not so much “territorialize” an expanded field of photography and history painting in the late twentieth century as it reveals the temporal complexities that differentiate and define the phenomenon of contemporary photography. Ligare had responded to conceptualism’s radical treatment of composition and media by attempting to unify the traditional methods of the visual art as a response to and means of resisting the ever-accelerating media sphere around him. But pace Barthes, Ligare’s work makes clear that if history painting was to be “started again” in the late twentieth century, it could no longer function as a major art form. Instead, from the position of the minor, Ligare’s turn to this genre in its complete form tellingly inflects the more incomplete and partial shards of history painting to disseminate across the photographic practices of Wall, Sherman, Mapplethorpe, and others. Within this reconfiguration of photography as a field, history painting does not persist under its previous sovereignty so much as through assorted aspects of the once total genre reworked in step with the demands of our fast-moving, atomized, and media-saturated world.

Notes 1 Barthes, Image – Music – Text, 163–4. 2 Ligare quoted in Lisa Crawford Watson, “A Classic Correspondence,” 218. 3 Weiner’s statement reads in full: “The artist may construct the piece / 2. The piece may be fabricated / 3. The piece need not be built / Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.” January 5–31, n.p. 4 The idea of non-composition as employing operations such as chance, the grid, deductive structures, the monochrome, and the readymade to minimize the personal choice of the artist in generating artistic form has been discussed most influentially and extensively by Yve-Alain Bois. See, for instance, Bois, “Strzeminski and Kobro”; Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France”; Bois, “The Limit of Almost”; and Bois, “The Iconoclast.” 5 Ligare quoted in Paul Chadbourne Mills, “David Ligare: An Appreciation,” n.p. 6 Ligare, “Letter to Peter Schjeldahl.”

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7 Tillim, “Notes on Narrative and History Painting.” Notably, Ligare recalls encountering Tillim’s work as a painter “at the Whitney Annual in 1972,” years before first reading his criticism. Ligare, On Using History, n.p. 8 On the criticism of Sidney Tillim, see Siegel, “Critical Realist.” 9 Tillim, “Notes on Narrative and History Painting,” 43. 10 Ligare in Watson, “A Classic Correspondence,” 218; Ligare, “On Originalities”; Ligare, “Realism and the New Ideal.” 11 For a concise account of the institutional history of Artforum and October, see Smith, “Art or Ad or What?” 12 Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde.” 13 Ibid., 64. 14 Ibid., 66. 15 Ibid. 16 Tillim, “Notes on Narrative and History Painting,” 42. 17 Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference,’” 44. 18 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 40. 19 Deleuze and Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?,” 26. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 508. 22 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 48. 23 Ligare’s full statement reads: “When I began analyzing paintings like those by Poussin, I concluded that there was a fullness about them that could be broken down into three basic elements; structure, surface and content.” Ligare, David Ligare, 3. 24 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix. 25 Notably, photography is also fundamental to Ligare’s painting process. But rather than deriving his compositions directly from photographs of his subject matter, Ligare wears a loupe around his neck containing a small photographic transparency. By referring briefly to this image while he paints, Ligare admits ambient light into his experience of this photographic image and retains its details in memory rather than copied transcription as he moves back and forth from loupe to canvas. Author in conversation with the artist, 21 November 2015. 26 Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. 27 Chevrier, “Play, Drama, Enigma,” 11. 28 See, for instance, Wall, “Unity and Fragmentation in Manet” and especially “Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings.” 29 As Thomas Crow has compellingly claimed, it is not simply the case that Wall appropriated recognizable nineteenth-century painterly motifs, but that his photography

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appealed especially to scholars of nineteenth-century painting precisely because it internalized the “new art historical” approach such scholars employed in their own scholarship. See Crow, “Profane Illuminations.” 30 Krauss, “‘… And Then Turn Away?,’” 29. George Baker adopts Krauss’s position on Wall in “Photography’s Expanded Field.” 31 Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” 297. 32 See, for instance, Thierry de Duve’s argument regarding the mediating role of Paul Cézanne in Wall’s interpretation of Nicolas Poussin in “The Mainstream and the Crooked Path.” In this essay, de Duve reiterates the claim that “[Wall’s] pictures are composed like classical paintings, in a unitary, seamless space” (27). 33 Stallabrass, “Museum Photography and Museum Prose,” 95. 34 The term “symbolic value” is borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. 35 Speaking about his photograph Diatribe (1985), Wall describes wandering Vancouver like a “flâneur” scouting locations, as if for a movie: “When I recognized this space, this lane, I recognized a whole lot of other things that I wanted in the picture which I wasn’t aware of before. I realized that this road set up a spatial situation that strongly recalled the classical landscapes of Poussin. He rarely, if ever, uses sharp perspectival recession because it’s too dramatic, too irrational. Poussin know that the vanishing point of the perspective system is the irrational point which permits [98] you to call the whole rational structure into question, and so he usually hides it, as all classicists do. He always likes to have quite flat planes overlapping to produce a gently receding space, a sober, measured kind of poetry typical of classical composition.” Wall and Barents, “Typology, Luminescence, Freedom,” 97. 36 Ibid. 37 With respect to his depiction of Diogenes and the importance of Poussin’s work as model, Ligare has noted: “One of the things I did when I started my project in 1979 was to deconstruct Poussin’s paintings. I made photocopies of them and then tried to work out his structures. What I discovered in really using strict structuring is that it doesn’t always work because the ‘eye’ has other ideas. In other words, it doesn’t look right. If my painting was a Poussin composition, he would have Diogenes staff going to the upper right corner but I didn’t do that for some reason. The landscape that I have placed the figures in is a pretty literal depiction of the Salinas River.” David Ligare in email correspondence with the author, 15 November 2016. 38 Ibid. 39 Danto, “Playing with the Edge,” 311. 40 Larson, “Robert Mapplethorpe,” 15. 41 Wolf, “An Authentic Artlessness,” 47; Flood, “Introduction: New York City, 15 October 2010,” 5.

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42 Katz, “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Queer Classicism,” 261. 43 See Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing”; Richard Meyer, “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art.” Also notable is the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition, staged as a collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and State Hermitage Museum. Featuring a series of Mapplethorpe photographs in the collection of the Guggenheim paired with Mannerist prints from the Hermitage, the organization of the show unfortunately appears in retrospect to be a rather arbitrary means for two institutions to display objects from their respective permanent collections, as there is little that expressly engages sixteenth-century Mannerism in Mapplethorpe’s photography. Celant and Ippolitov, with Vail, Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition.

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10 What Is the History in Contemporary History Painting? dexter dalwood

It is a remarkable fact that the Slade School of Art awarded a history painting prize as late as the 1950s. New ways of working and thinking about art in the decades to follow were a challenge not only to the traditional genres of painting but to painting itself, and it is not surprising that in the era of conceptualism, land, body and performance art, and minimalism the prize was discontinued. But neither painting nor the will to address historical events in the medium of oil paint were completely dead. In fact, a range of serious and innovative artists continued to ask the question of history painting in the context of an expanded field of art practice. My focus in this chapter is on three artists, Rita Donagh, Jörg Immendorff, and Richard Hamilton, each of whom forged their own distinct paths, consciously and unconsciously negotiating the construction of images, and seeking a visual economy of historical events in the age of a proliferation of images. Their urge was to make paintings that could be in dialogue with the contemporary concerns of painting, yet address image-making subjectively. They were also concerned to explore their position in relation to global and political events, for this was to be the driving force in their work. It is in this way, I think, that these three artists moved the genre of history painting forward in the late twentieth century. What links these three artists, it seems to me, is the idea of embedded references: references that allude to subtle and inventive meanings that go beyond the image being presented. That is, references that accumulate to give a wider perspective of an event, beyond simply describing it from a singular viewpoint. These references are the most important feature of a history painting, from Benjamin

West’s 1770 painting, The Death of General Woolf, to Richard Hamilton’s 1981–83 painting, The Citizen (Fig. 10.1). Where Hamilton embeds references to contextualize the contemporary struggle of the hunger strikers within Irish history, West embeds references to make an apparently contemporary event both have a nationalist agenda and provoke the heightened emotion of a Lamentation of Christ. This is the substrate of all history painting: its continuing relation to classical history and literature, vernacular history, actuality. It is customary to evoke classical mythology or Christian iconography to embellish or overlay an image with a significance beyond that which is actually depicted.

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10.1 Richard Hamilton. The Citizen. 1981–83. Oil on canvas. Tate.

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The flourishing of history painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries crystallized its pure form: a high minded narrative painting with a political slant of some kind that dealt with significant secular, rather than religious, or noble moments. History painting always carried some degree of irony – not of the trivial kind but of the profound. Contemporary history painting is not a literal extension of this traditional project, but relates rather through shared concerns: how is it possible to make paintings that originate as a response to a contemporary event which are not mere reportage (for example a photorealist depiction) in terms of how the image is understood by the viewer. How to make an image that can evoke the “tableau” of a history painting – often a space with a “threshold” that the viewer is required to enter? Such a depiction of a perceptual pictorial space, and the conceptual realization of images brought together as a variety of embedded references, reworks the connection to history painting. This kind of painting has to be eminently readable for the viewer but must also provoke them to think about something that isn’t necessarily depicted. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, contemporary artists working in media such as photography and the moving image certainly did make work that engaged with the tropes and “look” of history painting. But I suggest that what they did not explore was the link to the singular set of events that formulates a history painting – the embedded reference that acknowledges painterly language in constructing meaning. The German post-war artist Joseph Beuys embodied a new ideal of an artist for his generation: this ideal demanded total commitment and seriousness from artists. His experience as a German fighter pilot in the Second World War, shot down and rescued by Tartars who wrapped him in fur and fat to survive – whether embellished and mythologized by the artist or not – came to underpin his whole material aesthetic. In the early 1970s he very publicly denounced painting as a “useless act” and also coined the term “social sculpture.” The term had a wide scope for Beuys – the role of the artist encompassing ideas about political, economical, and educational systems that also included the environment. Beuys advocated this pressing need for change – a new cross-disciplinary position for the artist “all around us,” he said, “the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped, or created.” This had a profound effect on a generation of artists emerging in the early 1970s who continued to make paintings, whilst considering painting’s potential anachronism as an artistic practice.1 In his lectures, Beuys was also advocating that artists should no longer work alone. Both positions can be seen as deliberately testing and provocative. Jörg Immendorff was a student of Beuys’s at the academy in Dusseldorf in Germany. He absorbed Beuys’s teaching but began to critique it. For a period in the

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1960s Immendorff made a series of work, paintings, models, and performative action under the title of “Lidl,” a nonsense word chosen for its Dadaistic connotation. Immendorff went on to make a series of paintings that explored his adoption of Maoism as a guiding ideology, making propaganda-style paintings that were cartoonish in their drawing and execution. Immendorff’s work “Where do you stand with your art, comrade?” openly questioned his own dilemmas: “can painting be justified if it has no political function or role?,” “what does socially relevant artistic action look like?,” and “what role has painting played in the course of most history?” Alongside other contemporary German artists (Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke particularly), Immendorff had come to the painted image through both performance and political direct action. His paintings of this period both harangued his fellow artists and posed questions – what is the role of painting? How can it situate itself in relation to politics and the history of art? In 1977 Immendorff embarked on a series of paintings titled Café Deutschland that were to occupy him for nearly a decade. These paintings took their lead from a 1976 painting by Renato Guttuso, Caffe Greco:2 an imaginary gathering of artists and writers in the interior of one of Rome’s oldest cafés. In Café Deutschland I (Fig. 10.2), the first in the series, Immendorff depicts his contemporary and friend, the East German dissident artist A.R. Penck, extending his hand of friendship through a wall. Their gallerist Michael Werner thought they might have mutual interests and had introduced them. They shared a desire to construct a visual critique of the (1961–89) division of the city of Berlin. Immendorff’s first meeting with Penck was a significant factor in the development of Cafe Deutschland. Penck at that time lived in Dresden in Communist East Germany and was barred by the authorities from publicly exhibiting his paintings, whereas Immendorff, residing in the West, enjoyed near total artistic freedom. Despite the great differences in their respective situations, the two artists formed a bond based in common political causes and a shared feeling of artistic isolation. Immendorff described his condition as an artist as firstly a “discussion in myself – then a discussion in my classroom with Joseph Beuys that then extends out to the wider world.” As a committed and engaged Maoist, his paintings of the early seventies had been his attempt to depict his struggle to find an answer to the questions this presented him with. Café Deutschland I was a historic and breakthrough painting that opened the door to the future for Immendorff. The agitprop-style paintings he had previously been making were transfigured into a tableau that became a conceptual space – part theatre set, part club – where Immendorff presented different protagonists acting out roles in an ideological struggle that

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10.2 Jörg Immendorff. Café Deutschland I. 1977–78. Oil on canvas. Galerie Michael Werner.

represented a whirligig of politics, identity, and culture. Immendorff was depicting a divided Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s evoking the pre-war cabaret counterculture of Berlin and Paris, and the interiors depicted by German expressionists such as Otto Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The Café Deutschland series are an example of contemporary history painting, unique in their grand scale and Immendorff’s ambitious aim of reconciling his country’s evolving identity and the complexities of the East/West divide. No other artist of the post-war period had this ability to forensically question the situation in Germany and the impact that a divided Berlin had on the rest of Europe. They remain unique as an artistic and political statement of this period of German history.

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It is possible to see Immendorff’s Café Deutschland series as a depiction of protest that became a picturing of a fantasized historical situation and, within time, both a projected fantasy of history and a documentation of a particular historical time frame (the period of the Berlin Wall that divided Germany). In an interview in 2005, Immendorff reflected on this period of his work from the late seventies: “advanced, excellent art always has something to do with describing the current state of things. But to a large extent it also describes a condition that lies in the distant future. Or it describes a condition far in the past that I pull forward, a condition that has been overlooked and is worthwhile to have one more look at because it conveys a lot of energy. It is worthwhile to work against forgetting the past.” Contemporary interpretations of history painting need not always depict such elaborate figurative scenarios as Immendorff’s Cafe Deutschland paintings. Rita Donagh is a British artist with Irish ancestry – the majority of her work has been about her family connection to Northern Ireland and particularly the “troubles” between 1968 and 1998. In 1970, she was teaching in Reading University where her students had become increasingly politically active and frustrated with conventional approaches to making art. Donagh made very conscious choices continuing to produce a multi-linguistic form of painting that aspired to a more active role in how painting was to be negotiated by the viewer. Rita Donagh describes her painting: Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970 (Fig. 10.3) documents a three-week period of studio activity in the Fine Art department at Reading University. “On the first day a room was painted white throughout, including the floor. A student devised a grid as a means of regulating movement within the space. Crosses were put on the grid to mark squares where movement was prohibited. The studio became a stage – action/performance being a natural expression of group creativity.” The central rectangle within the painting defines this grid of squares, 10 x 14, indicating the plan of the studio. Superimposed on the plan view are two perspective projections and an enlarged detail from the plan that crosses the entire picture area, so that markings appear more than once on different planes. Events in the studio could be recalled and located, and events outside recorded (such as the Kent State shootings which occurred during the first week on 5 May). To the left and right of the studio area are other external references. On the left is a sinuous line that defined a contour of a figure (man) in a previous painting. On the right are outlined shapes derived from American writer Henry Thoreau’s own drawing of cross sections through Walden pond (landscape) featured in another painting.

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10.3 Rita Donagh. Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970. 1971. Oil and graphite on canvas. Tate.

This is a work that on first viewing doesn’t seem to fit any obvious criteria of a history painting – it has no figures, there is no apparent threshold of entry into the painting. The painting acts as a space in flux rather than place, as there is no sense of threshold to enter and thus the characteristic history painting element of a “real” place is missing. Donagh borrows the rhetorical devices of history painting in a deliberately haphazard way, and as a result, the fluidity of various different positions and thoughts can co-exist without being pinned down. The painting is primarily an abstract image of a plotted graph with reference points that are direct transpositions of the students’ actions. But the image also references the artist’s obsession with Thoreau, author of Walden (1854), who had taught himself surveying and made the first accurate depiction of Walden Pond in

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1846.3 The painting also makes a direct reference to a “real event” in history. The students’ confrontation with the National Guard, at Kent State University in Ohio, had made Rita Donagh keenly aware of her own and her students’ privileged position – protected and cocooned in comparison with their American and European counterparts. The shooting of the Kent State students is represented as a clear pink bloodstain in the middle left of the painting. This reference to the outline of a body was in fact derived from a Richard Hamilton screen-print Kent State – an image the artist had made after seeing a tv broadcast in the aftermath of the shootings. Donagh’s painting, then, is not only a record of a performative action by her students in Reading University in 1970 – itself a muse on an actual historical event, the Kent State shooting – but it also creates a premise for the negotiation of an image. She acknowledges the viewer’s subjectivity – in terms of figuring out embedded references and their relationship with the depicted image – to their experience of looking at painting. But at the same time, she relates the viewer’s experience of being alive at a particular historical moment to the negotiation of both recent and mediated history: communicating a point of view with the understanding that it co-exists with countless others. The artist concluded her 1972 statement: “I hoped by using abstract signs and conventions of perspective, to find equivalents for experience and feeling, while at the same time conveying precise information about a particular time and place. I also wanted to investigate the extent to which a painting could encompass those multidimensional events and relationships – add a new element – contribute another part to the whole.” Like Jörg Immendorff, Rita Donagh had been impressed by Joseph Beuys’s statement that it was no longer possible to work alone; it seemed to fit in with her own point of view. Indeed she found it enormously exciting to participate with others on a creative level (the project that inspired the work with her students) and in doing so came to see that painting could be part of a much larger whole. In context then, these two works from the 1970s grappled with the prevailing debates in contemporary art, particularly the rejection of painting as a relevant activity. Yet both, in hindsight, reveal an ambition to connect with the task of history painting: an apparent depiction of something enacted in real time – the literal depiction of particular events – counterbalanced by the mediated version of such an event through the subjectivity of the painter. In the early 1980s, the British artist Richard Hamilton began work on a painting based on an image that he had seen in a documentary on television. The documentary was about the notorious H block, a wing of a prison in Long Kesh, Northern

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Ireland, that had been used to house Republican prisoners during the “troubles.” Since 1976, a new law called “Criminalisation” had been introduced as part of a more brutal counter-insurgency strategy adopted by British Intelligence, military, and political leaders. This meant that all new Republican prisoners were no longer regarded as political prisoners but criminals, and would have to wear prison uniforms and do prison work. The prisoners protested against this change in their status by staging hunger strikes and blanket protests (rejecting prison clothing), which developed into a “no wash” strategy notoriously known as the “dirty protest.” The prisoners refused to wash and smeared their own excrement on the walls of their cells. Although these facts had been reported in the media, the Granada television broadcast “The H Block Fuse” was the first opportunity for the general public to see footage from inside the cells at Long Kesh. In his own words Hamilton describes the impact it had on him: “By chance in 1980, I was struck by a scene in a tv documentary about republican prisoners in the H blocks. To the surprise of the British public, a film was shown of men ‘on the blanket,’ a term used to describe action taken by detainees in defiance of prison regulations. It was a strange image of human dignity in the midst of self-created squalor and it was endowed with a mythic power most often associated with art. It manifested the noble spirit of Irish patriotism having retreated (or was it pushed?) into its own excreta.” Hamilton had no desire to make a direct moral or political message. He initially responded simply to what the images suggested visually, both historically and art historically, beginning by taking still photographs from the documentary and collaging together pieces from several different photographs. On the right hand panel of the diptych he painted the figure of a bearded, shaggy-haired man – who suggested to him the image of Finn MacCool, the Irish folk hero (Fig. 10.4). Hamilton had previously made a series of prints derived from James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the hero, Leopold Bloom, has an altercation with a bar fly nicknamed “Citizen.” The left-hand panel of the diptych consists of swirling marks, which, in the way they are painted, acknowledges their source: a photograph that Hamilton had blown up from documentary footage of the surface of the walls of the hunger striker’s cells smeared in excrement. These swirling marks of shit somehow reminded Hamilton of the Irish Book of Kells.4 In evoking this idea of a link to ancient Irish culture, Hamilton sought to bring attention to the historical precedent for hunger striking in Ireland. Historically, the hunger strike in Ireland was long used as a way to obtain justice: evident in the ancient civil code, the Senchus Mor mentions “Troscad” (fasting on or against a person) and “ir Caelachan” (achieving justice by starvation).

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10.4 Richard Hamilton. Finn MacCool. 1983. Photo-etching, aquatint and engraving on paper. Tate.

This code clearly explains how hunger striking could be used to recover a debt or to correct a perceived injustice, by the complainant fasting on the doorstep of the defendant. If the hunger striker was allowed to die, the person at whose door he starved himself was held responsible for his death and had to pay compensation to his family. By including these references in the context of the painting The Citizen, the painted image’s construction then becomes a rich and complex amalgam of embedded references.5 Hamilton’s restaging of the image of the hunger striker (the Nationalist detainee Hugh Rooney) in a contemporary context included enough reference to the events underpinning the image historically to maintain the painting as a talisman of a collaged new reality. This was a new reality that did not operate only as reportage in the immediacy of the event but also gained an iconic aura – long after the heat of the moment had evaporated.

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I don’t think Hamilton consciously took on the role of history painter when he began The Citizen but the painting does signal a deliberate idea about how images of current events could have a significant role to play within painting. This new territory for the genre of history painting was the subjective, mediated use of found imagery through a process of both associative connections with history, literature, or photography. Hamilton’s was a complex construction of a collaged image from a mixture of reference material – including observational sources (such as images from the tv documentary of the H-Blocks), literary allusion (such as the link from Homer’s Odyssey to Finn MacCool), and collage using the modernist innovation of “cut and paste” that is also found in both Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s poetry. Traditionally, history painting had been primarily a depiction of power. Artists and their audience relied upon a collective knowledge in terms of earlier precedents and their related narratives. By the late twentieth century, however, I think artists whose work could be thought of as reworking history painting shifted their emphasis to employ a predominantly subjective way of making images about historic events. This approach encompassed thinking about painting’s own history of depiction, but most importantly, coalesced it to a more responsive and personal way of bringing disparate images together. This allowed for a range of references and interrelations that activated the viewer’s memory to bring the viewer’s experience of looking into a conscious moment of recognition.

Notes 1 Hamilton was also engaged with Beuys’s dialogue with the responsibility of the artist to society. He can be seen in the 1972 video of Beuys’s performance Information Action at the Tate Gallery, London, asking Beuys direct questions. 2 Immendorff had first seen Guttuso’s Café Greco (1976) at the Venice Biennale. (Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, repr. Guttuso: Opere dal 1931–1981, exh. cat., Centrodi Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Venice 1982, 87 in col.) 3 See Henry David Thoreau’s journal entries, such as “Before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line,” 1846. 4 The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript created in an Irish monastery circa 800 ad; it is the best example of a Gospel book of that period in its complex illustrations. 5 The Fenians were devoted to the liberation of Ireland.

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11 Unwritten History William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments, Piazza Tevere, Rome, 2016 michael godby

Veni, Vidi … (Plutarch, Life of Caesar, 50) In 2016, on 21 April, the legendary foundation day of Rome in 753 bc, William Kentridge inaugurated his monumental frieze, Triumphs and Laments, in Piazza Tevere on the banks of the Tiber (Fig. 11.1). The mural measures about 500 metres in length and fills the entire nineteenth-century embankment on the Trastevere side of the river between the Ponte Sisto and the Ponte Mazzini. The wall is over ten metres high and many of the figures effectively fill this extensive space. Triumphs and Laments is a magnificent achievement, comparable in scale to the Sistine Ceiling and amongst the largest drawings ever made. In a city of giganti, from Castor and Pollux on the Piazza del Campidoglio, to Michelangelo’s sybils and prophets, the mural relates to the colossal architecture on its skyline: the Colosseum itself and the dome of St Peter’s. Dwarfing passers-by, joggers, cyclists, and perambulators, Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments both fits into the extraordinary Roman landscape and engages with the idea of megaloprepeia that created this unique urban space in the first place. Classical patrons and their Renaissance successors used Aristotle’s theory to justify the magnificence of their constructions as a form of giving back to the state in proportion to the benefits they had derived from it.1 Unlike historical commissions in Rome, Triumphs and Laments does not have a single mecenato, or patron – no cardinal, pope, or prince who would have employed the artist to broadcast his message – and status – to the world.2 Instead, the project

11.1 William Kentridge. Triumphs and Laments. Viewed from the Ponte Sisto with St Peter’s in the background. 2016. Piazza Tevere, Rome.

was driven by Kristin Jones, the artistic director of Tevereterno, who ten years ago asked Kentridge to take on the commission and has spent much of the intervening period collecting funds and negotiating permissions with the city’s municipal authorities. Tevereterno, a “multidisciplinary cultural project for the revival of Rome’s Tiber River,” as the name suggests, uses art as a catalyst for urban transformation, a vehicle to upgrade a sadly neglected part of the city.3 The origin of the project in this progressive cultural initiative suggests a very different program for the frieze than what would have been created for any historical Maecenas. As part of his project Kentridge created the video William Kentridge: Triumphs and Laments; it was shown originally at the 2015 Venice Biennale and, between April and October 2016, at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (macro), together with a selection of drawings, stencils, and related material. The video comprises several discrete episodes, most of which feature two images of the artist, as if representing his left- and right-brain identities, engaged in conversation

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with himself. This video is the principal source of Kentridge’s comments on his work and will be referred at various points in this essay. In the video, Kentridge compares his Triumphs and Laments frieze to an unrolled Trajan’s Column, thereby confirming the classical precedent for the structure of his work.4 Kentridge also cites this monument in his very first image of a Winged Victory and draws several others from it amongst the approximately ninety figures that comprise the fortyseven images of the frieze (Fig. 11.2).5 As in any classical Triumph, at first glance the figures seem all to move in the same direction on the embankment; but the general right-to-left movement towards the Ponte Sisto from the Ponte Mazzini is actually reversed halfway with a second version of the Winged Victory that herself is turned around and now faces to the right. In the second part of the frieze,

11.2 William Kentridge. Triumphs and Laments. Detail of the Winged Victory, from Trajan’s Column. 2016. Piazza Tevere, Rome.

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directional movement is varied but, for the most part, it appears to progress back towards the steps of the Ponte Mazzini. We will see that Kentridge interrogates the classical model for the frieze at every turn. By placing Trajan’s Winged Victory both at the start of his frieze and at the pivotal halfway point, Kentridge seems to signal his intention to engage with the very idea of history because, in a detail that he reproduces from the column, this figure is represented inscribing the emperor’s victories over the Dacians on her shield (Fig. 11.2). On the column, history is shown as a passive vehicle recording the deeds of great men, but we shall see that in his work Kentridge both questions which events are selected for historical narration and uses the openness of his visual medium to interrogate the authority of the narrator. His intention is clear in the second manifestation of the Winged Victory because in a sequence of three images she is made gradually to disintegrate and fall to the ground: no history, evidently, is universally true and the larger history of Rome tells that Trajan’s Empire was eventually overrun by Barbarians, including descendants of the same Dacians whose conquest was celebrated on the column. Throughout the mural Kentridge pits his visual history against the conventional received history of Rome, both in the manner of its telling and in the incidents he has chosen to illustrate. One of the principles of classical art, and history painting generally, especially when intended for monumental purposes, was permanence: the precepts extrapolated in sculpture, painting, and architecture were believed to be universally true and so appropriate materials and forms were employed to ensure that they would pass unchanged through the generations. In Triumphs and Laments, Kentridge, while observing – or appearing to observe – the norms and forms of classical art, has deliberately subverted them in his choice of materials. No doubt issues such as cost and speed of execution contributed to the decision, but his idea to create his monument using only the organic accretions of centuries on the walls of the Lungotevere is, in this context, entirely subversive: using a procedure that is known in street art circles as “reverse graffiti,” Kentridge defined his images by applying high-pressure hoses to the walls removing the organic matter except where it was covered by his stencilled designs. This assault on the classical tradition is not simply in the radical choice of grime as a medium for art but also in the fact that inevitably over time the dirt will return and eventually obliterate Kentridge’s own work. Paradoxically, Kentridge’s choice to use only the organic materials of the embankment for his frieze, his refusal to introduce extraneous materials – of stone or pigment – make it seem, as Beatrice Zamponi remarks in her review of the work, as if the frieze has always been there.6 Kentridge’s simple

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modifications of the colour and texture of the dirt against the background of travertine marble on the embankment and walkways makes the project fit with extraordinary sympathy – and beauty – into its urban landscape. In his comments on the frieze, Kentridge states that he is not “interested in telling a chronological history of Rome” but rather presenting fragments from which people can reconstruct a possible history. He explains the significance of his title in noting that what is a cause of triumph to one will be a cause for lament to another; and, continuing the ambiguity, that every state has both heroic and shameful episodes in its history: in this regard, Kentridge notes the proximity of the Jewish ghetto to St Peter’s itself and the survival of this segregation in Rome until 1870 when the city was forcibly incorporated into the new Italian state. These remarks indicate that for Kentridge history is a complex and incomplete project that depends more on the writer and reader than on any supposedly objective collection of facts. In his work, Kentridge has always been concerned as much with the method of recording information as with the ostensible content. For example, talking about his anamorphic works, in which apparently distorted drawings are corrected when a viewer looks at them in a convex mirror, he wrote: “I’m interested in machines that make you aware of the process of seeing and aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking. This is interesting in itself, but more as a broad-based metaphor for how we understand the world.”7 In fact, all Kentridge’s work – from his stop-frame “Drawings for Projection,” in which charcoal drawings are composed for filming, adjusted and erased, and filmed again – is provisional in the sense of being both open and incomplete. His work is about how we make sense of the world, rather than what the world means. As MariaChristina Villasenor put it in relation to Black Box (2005): “In creating a work that reveals the motor of representation, Kentridge renders these processes transparent, removing the veil of opacity behind which selective, subjective memories are crafted into the grand narratives of history.”8 In looking at the Tevereterno frieze in this light, one can see, no matter the superficial similarity, that the mural is not simply a reproduction of a classical Triumph, nor is it actually a translation of such a model into a modern equivalent. Kentridge has absorbed the language of the Triumph into his own idiom and, in the process, completely subverted the authority of the original. Those familiar with Kentridge’s work will recognize that he has intruded several of his own idiosyncratic forms into the symbolic vocabulary of the Roman Triumph: one of the porters derived from Mantegna’s Hampton Court panels of The Triumph of Caesar is made incongruously to carry a sewing machine on his head;

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the Papal Ass is made to offer coffee from an espresso maker to the kneeling Widow of Rome (Fig. 11.5); one of the figures taken from the Arch of Titus somehow supports himself on a single wooden leg; and several of the images are arranged on floats, as if in a carnival, rather than making their own way in the procession. All these motifs are regular features in Kentridge’s work, which, while eluding specific interpretation, tend to convert the classical form of the Triumph into a sort of Dadaist charivari. The motif of the procession has long been an important part of Kentridge’s work. An early example is the animated film Monument (1990) in which a procession of the dispossessed marches into – and becomes part of – the monument to their capitalist oppressor Soho Eckstein. A similar procession marches through the streets of Johannesburg in Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), seeming to represent the urban underclass laying new claim to the city, while Felix Teitelbaum, Soho, and Mrs Eckstein act out their perennial love triangle. In graphic art, Kentridge initially composed his processions in the distinctive arc form of the Roman Triumphal arch to give historical stature to the frieze even while he questioned its authority. This model allowed him to introduce variety in the dramatis personae of his procession in a static medium with both realistic and emblematic accessories. The large Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass drawing of 1990, now in the Tate Modern, for example, includes figures with miners’ helmets, crutches, megaphones, and hyenas, together with the pathetic exhortation by Haile Selassie to his countrymen – shortly before he was deposed – to compete with European economies.9 Over the years, Kentridge’s processions have accrued an extraordinary assortment of appendages; many, like the megaphone, around the theme of communication; others, like the walking tripod, relate to filming and recording; and some, borrowing from his wife’s profession, feature instruments of medical diagnosis. Others again, like the espresso pot and the scissors, have wandered into his iconography from the flotsam of his studio furnishings. Moreover, these processions have multiplied in different media: in charcoal drawings, paper cut-outs – or, occasionally, tearings – bronze sculptures, and, beginning with the animated film Shadow Procession (1999), as moving silhouettes designed to cast shadows: this is the form that was used on the two inaugural nights of Triumphs and Laments in April 2016. Kentridge insists that these processions have no origin and no destination: “I think what is important to me is that uncertain ending.”10 For Kentridge, the significance of the procession motif ranges from the march of the dispossessed in his early videos, to the idea of the flow of history, to the movement of diasporas, migrations, and the current refugee crisis – or a combination of some

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or all of these incidents at the same time: his most recent procession, If We Ever Get to Heaven, features several of these eruptions and assembles a visual history, in art and photography, documenting such events in the appendix of the book on the project.11 On the two nights of the inauguration of the Roman mural, Kentridge overlaid the mocking in his frieze of the absurd claims to fame and memorialization of the Classical Triumphs with the frenzy of Philip Miller’s and Thuthuka Sibisi’s music, the dancing lights, and the moving processions, which, like the earlier marches of the dispossessed, seemed to express some demotic urge symbolically to reclaim and re-possess urban space.12

Cinis iamiam futurus es, aut ossa nuda (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations V. 33) As well as subverting the classical Triumph through the intrusion of his own idiosyncratic symbolic vocabulary, Kentridge has interrogated important aspects of the original visual imagery. The classical Triumph was a procession into ancient Rome organized by the city to welcome triumphant generals and emperors. It comprised the victorious armies themselves; standard-bearers carrying the insignia of Rome and regiments involved in the campaign; captives from the defeated enemies who later would be shown off in imperial games; trophies of war carried by porters; and the victor himself standing in a chariot, occasionally with a laurel wreath of victory held over his head. Impressive as they were, such processions, of course, were ephemeral affairs and certain emperors sought to immortalize their triumphs – and include descriptions of their victorious campaigns – by translating them into stone. In Triumphs and Laments Kentridge references directly two of the most important remaining monuments illustrating the ancient Roman Triumph, Trajan’s Column and the Arch of Titus, as well as Andrea Mantegna’s fifteenthcentury recreation of such monuments. But, in the very first image of the frieze, the Winged Victory from Trajan’s Column, Kentridge effectively questions both the authority of the state and the history that it employs to broadcast it (Fig. 11.2). Kentridge appears to continue this interrogation in the second image of his mural, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius from the centre of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio (Fig. 11.3). Although it owes its survival through the Middle Ages to being mistaken for the first Christian emperor, Constantine, this statue is probably the most influential representation of the idea of Imperial Rome. But as well as being a celebrated general and emperor (ad 161–80), Marcus Aurelius was one of Rome’s greatest Stoics. Kentridge has derived the title for his project Smoke, Ashes,

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Fable in St John’s Hospital, Bruges, in 2017, from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations: “Next I ask myself the question. Where is it all now? Smoke, ashes, fable? Or perhaps it is no longer even a fable,” which he has in fact used in earlier work. The sentiment is similar to the Meditation reproduced above as a caption that reads in translation and continues, “Soon you will be ashes or bones. A mere name at most – and even that is just a sound, an echo.”13 More telling, perhaps, given the riverside setting for Kentridge’s mural, is Marcus Aurelius’s comparison of the journey of life to the flow of a river: “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept away and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away” (Meditations IV, 43). As if in illustration of this text, Kentridge actually includes in his frieze both an illustration of the decorative plaque commemorating the disastrous flood level of 1557 and an image of the Tiber in flood with people trying to escape with their belongings. Seemingly inspired by the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, amongst others, Kentridge has translated the classical Roman Triumph from an account of some historical procession into a rhetorical vehicle for discourse on the passing of time and the vanity of earthly achievements. In the third image of the mural, he signals the hollowness of victory by representing a triumphal chariot empty, the horse drawing it a skeleton, and the laurel wreath held over no figure’s head (Fig. 11.4): other horses drawn from Trajan’s Column are also rendered in skeletal form as if disintegrating before one’s eyes like Trajan’s empire. And he treats that other familiar symbol of ancient Rome, the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, in a similar way: twice it is represented in skeletal form and, in the image that follows the empty triumphal chariot, its authority is subverted by the clear reference to a contemporary local advertisement in which the lactating wolf is presented as an espresso machine and the infant brothers substituted by receptacles for coffee. Returning to the theme of the equestrian monument elsewhere in the mural, Kentridge caricatures Giuseppe Sacconi’s grandiose statue of Vittorio Emanuele II (1885) that dominates the Roman skyline as a child’s toy, suggesting the hollowness of political authority and the fraudulence of monuments that promote it;

11.3 Opposite top William Kentridge. Triumphs and Laments. Detail of Marcus Aurelius from the Campidoglio, with a skeletal horse. 2016. Piazza Tevere, Rome.

11.4 Opposite bottom William Kentridge. Triumphs and Laments. Detail of a skeletal horse, triumphal chariot, and the laurel wreath of victory. 2016. Piazza Tevere, Rome.

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and, next to this, he represents Mario Rutelli’s monument to Anita Garibaldi (1932) on the Janiculum Hill that shows the rider brandishing a pistol while clutching an infant under her arm, rather than her more famous husband’s larger statue nearby. In their different ways, these images reveal the “Lament” within the “Triumph” of the project’s title. The two words represent not simply the undulations of fortune – acknowledged as a favourite theme by the artist in several videos – but also two ways of addressing the same phenomenon. But, having used one of Monteverdi’s Madrigals as the sound track of History of the Main Complaint (1996), and created his opera Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (1998) on the basis of Monteverdi’s seventeenth-century original, Kentridge is familiar with the distinct genre of Italian Baroque Lamenti in which a hero or heroine laments the cruelty of a lover or their mistreatment by the gods. Monteverdi himself used the lament form to address the city of Rome in Octavia’s “Addio Roma, addio patria,” in L’Incoronazione di Poppea; and both Girolamo Conversi and Stefano Landi put Baldassare Castiglione’s lines on the ancient city to haunting music in their Lamenti. Castiglione’s Superbe colli, e voi, sacre ruini is worth reproducing in full because it anticipates nicely the elegiac tone of Kentridge’s mural: “Proud hills and sacred ruins / That still bear the great name of Rome, / Alas, what pitiable remains you show / Of so many sublime and wonderful works. / Huge statues, arches and theatres, divine artifices, / Memorials to glorious and happy triumphs,/ Into handfuls of dust even you are now transformed / And made a cheap subject of gossip to the world. / Though for a while great works wage war / On time, yet with slow, inexorable tread / Time demolishes both works and names. / And so I live at ease with my great cares, / For if time brings an end to earthly things / It may also bring an end to my distress.”14 As well as complementing the celebratory purpose of the Triumphs with the reminder that where there is victory there is also defeat and loss, the lament contrasts the apparently objective, factual account of history with the subjective realities of sentiment and emotion. The provisional nature of Kentridge’s work has been noted – the stop-frame technique of drawing and erasure, for example, to which can be added his and Doris Bloom’s drawing with fire in the Johannesburg iteration of Memory and Geography (1994) and, in the 1995 adaptation, the temporary projection of drawings in light on historical buildings in Rome.15 The fact that Triumphs and Laments will slowly disappear in time adds to the poignancy of the work, as does the manifest beauty of its integration with the tones and textures of the travertine marble of its embankment setting. But Triumphs and Laments is beautiful – that is to say deeply affecting as well as aesthetically satisfying – in the way Kentridge has manipulated his unlikely media as forms of graphic expression. Using stencils to define form, Kentridge has approximated

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11.5 William Kentridge. Triumphs and Laments. Detail of Pope Celestine V, the Papal Ass, and the Widow of Rome. 2016. Piazza Tevere, Rome.

the grime of the walls to his favoured charcoal medium, pen and wash drawing, and the engraving technique of etching and aquatint. The drawing of his monumental figures is extraordinarily subtle in the capturing in their outlines bodily expression and gesture, and deeply poignant in the play between definition and obscurity in tonal rendering. Kentridge has long admired the graphic work of Goya and several of his figures in this mural put one in mind of the pathos and humanity of Los Caprichos and the Disasters of War series (Fig. 11.5). In a much quoted early statement on his purpose in his work, Kentridge has written: “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.”16 This approach surely also governs Kentridge’s understanding of history, and it certainly informs his representation of the human figure: there are no heroes or villains in Kentridge’s work, neither in the present nor in the past, just human beings struggling with the weight of history and their own internal contradictions. In this light, Kentridge composed his history of Rome after the fall of the Empire in Triumphs and Laments by selecting episodes from

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the hundreds of images that had been researched in the city by the medieval scholar Lila Yawn.17 Lila Yawn noted that the city’s history was obviously mixed, with as many disasters as triumphs; but it was Kentridge who complicated this reading by questioning the authority of received images and seeing “ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings” at work as much in the past as in the present and future. Kentridge represents the medieval period of Rome in a number of images scattered through the mural. There is the group of Henry IV, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor (1056–1106), in conflict with Pope Gregory VII over the socalled Investiture Controversy, as to which of the two world powers had the right to appoint bishops. In an image drawn from an illustration in the twelfth-century Chronicle of Otto of Freising, Kentridge shows Henry and his anti-Pope Clement III expelling Gregory from Rome in 1084, and the death of the pope in the following year.18 The material ambitions of the Pope caused not only conflict between Rome and the emperor, and divided Europe for centuries, but also created schisms within the church itself. In 1294, Celestine V, after only five months as pontiff, abdicated to return to the simple life of a hermit (Fig. 11.5). But there was no escape from political intrigue in Rome at that time: Celestine was imprisoned – and some said murdered – by his successor Boniface VIII, the most venal pope in history, at least according to Dante. For this image, Kentridge drew on a fifteenthcentury miniature of the pope kneeling in prayer.19 Perhaps another reason that Kentridge included this extreme short-term pontiff is that his only claim to fame is to have introduced the right of the pope to abdicate, a right of course exercised recently by Benedict XVI. Kentridge has depicted little-known incidents from Rome’s history to show the depths of depravity to which the city fell in the Middle Ages. In a double image of the Papal Ass appearing to offer coffee to the Widow of Rome (Fig. 11.5), Kentridge follows an illustration of Fazio degli Uberti’s fifteenth-century lament on the city that represents Rome’s proud heritage reduced to the figure of a widow begging in front of a landscape of its monuments.20 The Papal Ass, meanwhile, was a hybrid monster with a woman’s breast and stomach and two heads on its tail, amongst other deformities; it was reportedly found drowned in the Tiber in 1496 and interpreted during the Reformation by Martin Luther and others as a certain sign of the corruption of the papacy and the end of days:21 in 1523, Lucas Cranach the Elder made a woodcut of this creature that was circulated as a broadsheet by the Protestant reformers. It is the pathos of the widow kneeling at the foot of this monster especially that puts one in mind of Goya’s Caprichos. Kentridge draws on a number of modern statues to represent other reformers of various kinds, who

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flourished for a moment only to be betrayed by the city. Arnold of Brescia (1090– 1155) preached church poverty and was eventually hanged by Pope Adrian V, with the support of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa: his body was burnt and ashes cast into the Tiber to prevent his grave from becoming a martyr’s shrine; Cola di Rienzo (1313–54), a self-appointed tribune who, with Petrarch’s blessing (Canzoniere LIII), aimed to restore Rome’s ancient glory was also betrayed by successive popes and emperors and was eventually murdered by the mob;22 and the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) who, extending the Copernican model of the universe, challenged key Catholic doctrines and was burned at the stake as a heretic in the Campo dei Fiori: in the Triumphs and Laments video, Kentridge movingly – perhaps provocatively – cites Bruno’s response to his sentence “Perhaps your fear of passing judgement on me is greater than mine in receiving it.” The statues to each of these counter-heroes in the history of Rome, which Kentridge references in his drawings, were all erected, some under protest from the church, after the fall of Rome on 20 September 1870 and the subsequent dismantling of the papal territorial state.23 The invasion of Rome, and its forcible incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy, are indicated by Kentridge in his inclusion of Publio Morbiducci’s 1932 monument to the Bersaglieri, the elite regiment that breached the city walls in that campaign.

O tempora! O mores! (Marcus Tullius Cicero, In Catilinam I) These judicial and extra-judicial murders are part of a long sequence of violent deaths in the city that constitute the real basis of the laments in Kentridge’s frieze. Kentridge intersperses these episodes in the mural but, in chronological order, they start at the very foundation of Rome with the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus: the anniversary of the foundation of Rome that was celebrated in the inauguration of the mural was also the anniversary of this fratricide. The image of the dead Remus is taken from a French seventeenth-century engraving that resembles, and likely depends on, the central figure in Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, which is notoriously supposed to have been drawn from the body of a prostitute who had drowned in the Tiber. Next in the history of Rome, Kentridge marks the change from monarchy to republic in the image of the Rape of Lucretia, drawn after Titian’s late painting, which, followed by Lucretia’s suicide, prompted the expulsion of the Tarquin kings. The end of the republic, in turn, is represented not in any heroic image of Julius Caesar or Augustus, the first emperor, but in two images of Cicero’s head, the one complete and seemingly dragged behind the carriage transporting a

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11.6 William Kentridge. Triumphs and Laments. Detail of the Triumph of Death with bullet holes, a raised hand, and the fractured bust of Cicero. 2016. Piazza Tevere, Rome.

version of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, and the other apparently broken, as if to illustrate his murder on the orders of Mark Antony, his decapitation and the display of his head and severed hands in the Roman Forum (Fig. 11.6).24 Extreme violence also marks the beginning of the Christian history of Rome in the image, drawn from Filippino Lippi’s fresco in the Brancacci Chapel, of the execution of St Peter – who asked to be crucified upside down to distinguish himself from Jesus. The early modern history of the city is represented by the violent deaths of Arnold of Brescia, Cola di Rienzo, and Giordano Bruno, which are interspersed with apocalyptic images of the plague and Death itself (Fig. 11.6).

Roma o Morte (Giuseppe Garibaldi) Murder continues as the principal theme in Kentridge’s representation of modern Roman history. In the context of the mural, the figure of Haile Selassie stands for the Italian occupation of Ethiopia between 1935 and 1941 and the widespread use of poison gas against the civilian population. Mussolini’s decision to join the Axis

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with Germany in 1940 divided the population, leading to civil war in some parts of the country and – with German assistance – the ruthless suppression of resistance fighters. Kentridge provides both a literal illustration of these events in the public execution of partisans, and a film still from Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, Citta Aperta (1945) of the scene where Pina, played by Anna Magnani, is shot by the ss while trying to reach her fiancé, Francesco, who has just been arrested: she dies in the arms of Don Pietro Pellegrini who was due to marry them the next day. Kentridge suspends a laurel wreath, no longer the Roman sign of victory but now a martyr’s crown, over this fictitious scene. Another famous death from the world of cinema was the murder in 1975 of the great director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Explained at the time as a sordid sex crime, it has long been thought that Pasolini was assassinated because of his relentless attacks on corruption in the Roman political establishment. Kentridge’s use of the forensic photographs of the crime scene would certainly have reminded him of his own experience when making Felix in Exile (1994) in which he imaginatively converted a friend’s description of police photographs of murder victims in confined spaces to representations of corpses in open landscapes.25 In a curious composition that includes Bernini’s figure of St Theresa in Ecstasy and a group of Romans killing barbarians from Trajan’s Column, Kentridge represents another modern Roman political murder in the scene of the discovery of the body of Aldo Moro, the five-time former prime minister, in the trunk of a red Renault on 4 May 1978: Moro had been kidnapped in March by the Brigate Rosse, seemingly to disrupt the historic compromise that would have seen the Italian Communist Party entering a coalition with the majority Christian Democratic Party for the first time. In the Tiber mural, Kentridge has defied convention to create a veritable catalogue of Rome’s inglorious history, from the day of its foundation until modern times: as a matter of fact, although Kentridge chooses not to draw attention to it in his interviews, there are many more of these shameful episodes than there are “triumphs” – and these “triumphs,” as we have seen, are represented for the most part as hollow victories and shams. Kentridge gives voice to these silent laments of the mural in the figure of Jeremiah that he draws from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Possibly a self-portrait, Michelangelo’s prophet appears to bemoan both intrinsic human sinfulness, in the Book of Jeremiah, and, in the Lamentations, its inevitable consequences in the Destruction of Jerusalem and the first diaspora of the Babylonian Captivity. There is of course no direct Roman reference in this history but Kentridge uses Jeremiah’s stature, made concrete in Michelangelo’s image, seemingly to extend his prophecy to connect with the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the diaspora, and the persecution of the Jews in the Roman world:

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in successive images, Kentridge depicts, first, the procession of spoils from the Temple of Jerusalem carried in triumph on the Arch of Titus; then one instance based on a drawing by A.J.B. Thomas, The Donkey (1817), of the regular parading of the Jews in the annual Roman Carnival that was instituted by Pope Paul II in 1467;26 and finally an illustration of the deportation of Italian Jews, with the connivance of civil and ecclesiastical authorities, from Rome in 1943. There were many instances of deportation throughout the war years but in October 1943, 1035 Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where most of them were murdered. Perhaps not coincidentally, the website that chronicles these and other persecutions of the Jews also has the title “Triumphs and Laments.” In three more images seeming to process towards the figure of Michelangelo’s Jeremiah, Kentridge appears to link the prophet of the Lamentations also to the tragic diaspora of our own times, the ongoing refugee crisis from Africa and the Middle East. An overcrowded refugee ship, which is simultaneously a Roman galley – perhaps suggesting the Roman origin of the colonial disruption of the Mediterranean world – is followed by a crowd of figures marching with bundles on their head, before a group of three women, identified as widows of Lampedusa, the Italian island that acts as a holding cell at the gates of fortress Europe, approaches the enthroned figure of Jeremiah – in this context, simultaneously the grieving Biblical prophet and, visually at least, an impotent judge. With this theme, Kentridge brings his tortured history of Rome to a close although, of course, except in very short sequences like these, the narrative is as little resolved as it is chronological.

Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre (Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis)27

The multivalence of Kentridge’s figure of Jeremiah – its indication of the Roman Destruction of Jerusalem while foretelling the Babylonian; the Roman diaspora while prophesying the Babylonian Captivity; adding the current refugee crisis to those tragic migrations; and seeming to double as prophet and tribune, even while representing Michelangelo and, undoubtedly on one level, Kentridge himself – is central to the artist’s understanding of visual images, and their difference from verbal description. Visual images are suggestive and provisional, rather than definitive. They invite pluralities of meaning, in sequence or in layers, unlike the

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will to definition that is associated with words. Moreover, they work in unpredictable, even unintended, relationships with each other, rather than the necessary linear sequence of verbal accounts. In other images from the mural, Kentridge seems to point up the multivalence of images as a way to question the authority of history. For example, his reference to the murder of Aldo Moro, as we have seen, is accompanied by sketches of the Ecstasy of St Theresa and the execution of Barbarians from Trajan’s Column. It is difficult to make sense of this conjunction. It might suggest that Roman history and art is grounded in the violent capture of slaves in the Empire; or it might derive from the random collection of images in some tourist brochure. In the Triumphs and Laments video, the artist is shown shuffling model stencils of the Winged Victory that eventually turn into the disintegrated form of the image and, turning to the camera, he responds to the intellectual challenges of his alter ego with the simple assertion “I make.” Similarly complex is the image of the Triumph of Death that is drawn from a fourteenthcentury fresco, whose surface pockmarked by bullet holes is painstakingly reproduced in Kentridge’s mural as if to ask whether one can kill a painting, even one representing Death itself (Fig. 11.6). This image, which is followed by the second, fractured head of Cicero, includes the detail of a hand: is this one of Cicero’s severed hands from the Roman forum that has strayed into the previous scene? Or is it, as Kentridge has represented previously, and as any Johannesburg viewer would immediately comprehend, a hand gesture used to tell taxi drivers one’s desired destination? Or is it simply the universal gesture to stop? In Kentridge’s visual universe, images may float free but they may also be tied to specific cultures or histories. Thus Kentridge moves the famous scene from Federico Fellini’s Dolce Vita of Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Eckberg in the Trevi Fountain to a bathtub, in part perhaps to negate any tourist interest in the splendours of Rome but also to suggest how a child in Johannesburg such as himself in 1960 would translate the scene into his own world. Kentridge also delights in contradictions between words and images and probes the tensions between them to create or locate new meaning. A late addition to the mural is the image of the Black Box with the inscription “Quello che non ricordo” (What I don’t remember). These words suggest that the Black Box is a black box flight recorder – an idea Kentridge had treated in his 2005 video – notwithstanding that an actual black box looks nothing like this. Beyond this, the image is a verbal/visual pun that, in the context of the mural that is consistently anti-heroic and anti-monumental, draws attention both to the relevance of memory – and the fallibility of memory – in any act of memorialization, and the multivalent role of image-making in that process.

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Dulce et Utile (Horace, Ars Poetica) As well as being a most beautiful adornment of a neglected part of Rome, simultaneously seductive and impressive, Triumphs and Laments is instructive in offering three distinct versions of unwritten history. Like other history paintings, it is unwritten in the sense that it is a visual rather than verbal account of Rome’s past; but unlike most earlier examples of the genre that aspire to clarity and certainty in their telling of moral truths and principles, Triumphs and Laments embraces all the openness and ambiguities of visual communication. Triumphs and Laments is also “unwritten” in the sense that it chooses as subject matter episodes from the city’s history that, for the most part, have been neglected in official accounts of Rome’s past, or which present official history in strikingly new ways. Moreover, Kentridge’s history is “unwritten” in the sense that the major thrust of this great mural is precisely to “un-write” the official history of Rome, to deconstruct both the grammar and the vocabulary that have rendered, and continue to render, a particular version of the past with authority and certainty. Even as it begins its own journey of degradation and disappearance, already apparent in the photographs six months after its inauguration, Triumphs and Laments should profoundly affect the way that one sees not only the history of the Eternal City but also at this time of continuing crisis – in the Mediterranean, South Africa, and throughout the world – of one’s own position in history.

Notes I am grateful to the University of Cape Town Research Committee for funds to permit travel to Rome to view Triumphs and Laments in situ and to visit the Kentridge exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma; also to Claire Godby for her help in preparing my photographs for publication; and, as always, my thanks to Sandra Klopper for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 Fraser Jenkins, “Cosimo de’Medici’s Patronage.” 2 Lauf, “Locating William Kentridge.” 3 Kentridge, “Triumphs and Laments,” www.triumphsandlaments.com. 4 See Ketcham, “Writing on the Wall.” 5 I am grateful to Tony East of the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, for sharing Kentridge’s preliminary list of subjects in the mural. However, viewing the work in Rome revealed that several changes were made, seemingly quite late in the project. Research on the history and significance of Kentridge’s subjects is my own.

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6 Kentridge, “William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments,” www.triumphsandlaments.com. 7 Kentridge, What Will Come (Has Already Come), 77. 8 Kentridge, William Kentridge: Black Box/Chambre Noire, 33. 9 Manchester, William Kentridge: Arc/Procession. 10 Tone, Fortuna, 256. 11 William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance. 12 The opening events were documented by Giovanni Angela on YouTube, 22 April 2016. 13 Aurelius, Meditations. My thanks to Alex D’Angelo, of the University of Cape Town Libraries, for help in obtaining a Latin translation of this text that was originally written in Greek; and to David Wardle, of the university’s classics department, for help with this translation. 14 Translation by Avril Bardoni in Lamenti (directed by Emmanuelle Haim, London: Virgin Classics, 2008): efforts to contact both the publisher and the translator of this poem have been unsuccessful. 15 Kentridge, Doris Bloom, William Kentridge. 16 Kentridge, William Kentridge, n.p. 17 Lauf, “Locating William Kentridge.” 18 See “Henry IV,” www.granger.history.picture.archive. 19 See “Celestine V,” www.granger.history.picture.archive. 20 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Ms.ital.81. 21 Dykema, “The Ass in the Seat of St Peter.” 22 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere LIII: “Others helped [Rome] when she was young and strong / This one saved her from death in her old age.” 23 The Arnold of Brescia monument was erected in Brescia by Odoardo Tabacchi in 1882; the Cola di Rienzo statue was made by Girolamo Masini for the Capitoline Hill in 1877; and the Giordano Bruno monument was erected in the Campo dei Fiori by Ettore Ferrari in 1889. 24 Ovid’s explanation of Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree as the origin of the laurel wreath used in Roman triumphs, and that stood guard outside Augustus’s palace, is the likely reason for Kentridge to have included Bernini’s sculpture in this place: Metamorphoses, Book I, 553–67. 25 Kentridge, “Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory,” 93. 26 Kentridge made a drawing of a Jew being tumbled in a barrel that also derived from an illustration of the papal carnival. This drawing was included in the macro exhibition but was not used in the mural. 27 Pliny’s phrase on Africa as a source of hybrid animals is usually translated as “Always something new out of Africa” and taken to indicate that the continent is always full of surprises.

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12 Reimagining Global Modernity in the Age of Neo-Liberal Patronage The History Paintings of Julie Mehretu elizabeth harney

Julie Mehretu’s immensely complex paintings epitomize the material and spiritual tumult of the last decade, unleashed by widening economic inequalities, mass migrations, and the rise of xenophobic and populist politics. Not simply commentaries on our present condition, they are also “chronopolitical” acts, shaped by a concerted “practice of counter-memory”1 and a staunch scrutiny of the multifarious experiences of colonialism. These acts stem from “an ethical commitment to history, the dead, and the forgotten.”2 In translucent vellum, ink, and acrylics, Mehretu meticulously layers tracings of archival architectural drawings, ghostly photographs of bombed buildings or pulsating public squares with draughts of colonial-modern city plans and grand maps of empire. Her highly detailed, gestural abstracts can be disorienting in their compression of time, space, and place, overwhelming in their juxtaposition of sweeping form and exhaustive precision. Indeed, there is a purposeful opacity to them, born of their allusions to depth, mass, and oscillating structure. Most writings on the works of this mid-career painter commend the astonishing means through which she captures our zeitgeist (its overload of information culture, simultaneity, and mobility) – promising, perhaps, to make sense of “the growing social inequalities created by a predatory economic globalization.”3 For example, in an early review in the Art Journal, critic Peter Eleey asks: “Is it worth thinking about Julie Mehretu’s paintings and drawings as perfect contemporary pictures? Not because they necessarily are ‘perfect’ (whatever ‘perfect’ might mean), nor because Mehretu seeks such a quality (I suspect she does not), but

because her achievement is predominantly celebrated on the basis of the virtuosity and thoroughness with which her pictures purportedly reflect the complexities of globalised existence.”4 There is little doubt that in her works of the last decade Mehretu has produced a deeply personal and moving commentary on our current social-political, economic, and cultural struggles. Whether addressing the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, the ardent activism of the Occupy Movement in Zuccotti Park, or the annihilation of Damascus and the scattering or resilience of its citizens, Mehretu uses her abstract works to usher her audience through the drama of contemporary resistance movements (Fig. 12.1, 12.2). Like many abstract painters before her, Mehretu uses evocative titles to indicate subject matter. While these responses to her works capture our shared desire to find in them both explication and respite from the chaotic dissonance that characterizes our interconnected, transnational world, they do not address the deep historicism embodied in her practice. What would happen were we to view these works as evocative and affective forms of contemporary history painting? And, if we do, would they best be considered a continuation of an abiding but neglected tradition, as a revival that held a renewed call for public address and collective action, or an ambiguous, open-ended proposition that supersedes the genre? If indeed they can be usefully viewed as contemporary “takes” on the genre then what would it mean to produce history paintings in a global contemporary art world defined as simultaneously post-historical and archivally obsessed? This lens suggests a productive line of inquiry. As a matter of fact, Mehretu has admitted, “I am hoping that the paintings operate in a Baroque, over-the-top epic narrative … I look at them as current historical narrative paintings, pulling from the likes of Delacroix.”5

Addressing an Engaged Public As the premiere genre of the European painting canon from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, history painting is associated with classicism and romanticism, with courts and salons. Through highly conventional figurative scenes these paintings offered allegorical distance from sordid or mundane details of history, while advancing lofty ideals, moral codes, and universal truths. In later periods, the distance between allegory and chronicle narrowed, enabling artists to address more squarely the contemporary political or social realities of their time. These painting practices also demanded that close attention be paid to anatomical drawing, arrested action, and the precision of line and colour.6 The

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12.1 Julie Mehretu. Conjured Parts (eye): Ferguson. 2016. Ink and acrylic on canvas. Marian Goodman Gallery.

12.2 Opposite Julie Mehretu. Epigraph, Damascus. 2016. Photogravure, sugar lift aquatint, spit bite aquatint, open bite, Hahnemühle Bütten 350 gr., ink and acrylic on canvas. Marian Goodman Gallery.

didacticism inherent in history painting traditions seems far removed from the pop culture dynamism of the Japanese manga explosions or the tracings of dystopic urban blight that characterize Mehretu’s intense abstracts. However, as I argue below, viewing these enormously complex, moving, and popular works through the lens of history painting may reveal a surprising number of striking parallels: a commitment to and belief in the importance of public address; a keen appreciation or expectation of engaged spectatorship (demanding an ethical-political stance); a complex, compositional structure that is cinematic or performative in nature; a reliance upon and mixing of dual mechanisms to narrate the past (allegory and reportage); an allure of monumentalism, multifiguration, and multi-layering; a close attention to the power of the line and the ability of colour to make form; and a charged, perhaps challenging, relationship to patronage and public. To be sure, this viewing lens also reveals a powerful set of paradoxes. The artist has recently referred to these ironies as useful “contradictions.” In a practice deeply informed – even haunted – by narratives of ruination and entropy and animated by a postcolonial political compulsion to reimagine and reengage past utopian futures, her work is vulnerable to co-optation by the very global capitalist

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structures it seeks to critique.7 Mehretu’s oeuvre is almost universally read in postcolonial terms, aligning her ethical and aesthetic profile with her transnational roots and diasporic experiences. Mehretu and her family fled Ethiopia soon after the socialist Derg regime assumed power in the 1970s, first for Senegal and then for the safety of suburban Michigan. Her parents had been deeply involved in the flowering of modernity in 1960s Ethiopia and Mehretu poignantly addresses the sense of personal loss connected to its failures or unfulfilled promises. She notes: “I was born to an Africanist, an Ethiopian, and an American who’s a Montessorian, both modernists, both in certain ways utopianists … Two thirds of the world being decolonized, this shift to being your own individual nation – that’s the history that I am coming from. We were the children of the people who were making this new world, who believed in this new possible world. That informs not only who I am but also those socialist and Utopian ideas and theories – they almost haunt me. Not necessarily as things that I can believe in, but you can believe in parts of them. But they’re there – they are always there – it is the desire – it haunts my thinking.”8 This compelling profile is used to read an easily digestible “difference” into her approach and her subject matter. Yet one should not forget that she is also a product of traditional American art school training and steeped in Western art historical knowledge. She is a painter’s painter – devoted to studying, honouring, and finding her place within the long trajectory of painting’s histories and actively linking the utopian visions of vanguardist art with those informing struggles for emancipation and equity. She argues, “The paintings are a way of navigating, not just a painting, and all the historical weight of pictures, but a narrative filled with urgency and optimism like a strange dream.”9 Like other accepted practices of history painting, Mehretu’s works are structured to encourage collective acts of remembrance and to recall past orders and narratives, but they also speak assertively of our material present. With the refugee crisis unfolding across the Mediterranean and the surge of reactionary populist movements within the belly of Western democracies, the prescience of these works is indeed alarming. Critic Peter Eleey grants the artist and her works an extraordinary role, suggesting: “She takes the position of Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history, looking at this world as an accumulating wreckage of events, its strata piled up yet transparent, a chain of events both painterly and referential that are collapsed into a single catastrophe. In our despair, she is our angel offering a view that, while utterly decontextualised, feels sympathetic. Her provision of the appearance of an overwhelming amount of data from a safe distance keeps the chaos from being threatening, even at the enormous scale at which she sometimes works.”10 For her part, the artist thinks of her abstract “paintings” as narrative pieces that encourage deep, lengthy contemplation of his-

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tories big and small, global and localized, chronicled, silenced, or forgotten. The works speak to the grand points of history – wars, mass migrations and displacements, and the perilous and fractious spread of global capital. It would be many years before she returned to Ethiopia and yet her artistic sensibilities have long gravitated towards the archaeological – unearthing the shards of unfulfilled historical narratives, investing in the remarkable archive of modernist plans that shaped public spaces and, by extension, the human condition. Her meta-narratives are always tempered by the resolute presence of hatchmarks in pencil and ink, said to represent hidden, half-remembered, but no less consequential micro-histories and populist action. Her study of Chinese calligraphic traditions and Ethiopian manuscript production, coupled with her deep commitment to drawing practices, is evident in her approach to this mark-making. She envisions these marks as historical characters, engaged in acts of dissent and resistance that signal “moments of uprising” and “intense empowerment.”11 Through these characters, she restores a sense of agency to the individual, imagines the possibilities of utopian action in the midst of our deeply regulated neo-liberal moment, and provides a reminder of the power of the one to contribute to the welfare of the common. At times, they seem to mass with all the potential force and power of an angry mob, at others, they traverse the breadth and depths of her canvases with the impulses of roaming migrants, their fists raised in revolution, defiance, or victory. She explains: “I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place.”12 Mehretu’s painting of history oscillates between meta-narratives of human struggle and references to specific actions, all the while maintaining an opacity afforded by abstraction. Treating historical “truth” not as eternal and universal but as dynamic and contingent, she has no desire to leave a legible evidentiary or clinical record of events. Mehretu populates her canvases with any number of individual stories, desperate acts of survival, and leaps of faith, enacted by exiles and refugees. Within these hetero-temporal canvases, past narratives collide, compete, or co-exist in often, glorious contradictory fashion – their presence made palpable through the artist’s vigorous rubbings and deliberate erasures of paint and ink. Recorded or

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rumoured histories make their presence felt as spectral palimpsests, haunting the certitudes we embrace in our post-historical, contemporary world. It is clear that Mehretu thinks deeply about the temporal, if not historical, demands expected of her viewers; they are no longer simply passive spectators of history or of art but are instead encouraged to be active participants. The diaphanous surfaces of these canvases allow her viewers, in equal measure, to believe that they recognize pasts, presents, and futures. She argues: “These are complex, time-based paintings that you have to interact with. You move through them geographically in a way that goes beyond the cerebral. It is a felt experience.”13 In their reassessment of history painting and its relationship to contemporary art, David Green and Peter Seddon remind us that traditional history painting “self-consciously addressed itself to a public.”14 Does Mehretu’s commitment to abstraction make it impossible to achieve the kind of public address typical of the traditional genre? Do the layerings, erasures, and disorientation of her narratives overstimulate her public to the point of “spectatorial passivity?”15 Fellow artist Siemon Allen describes the experience of “viewing” one of Mehretu’s canvases: “Standing at some distance from the canvas we take in the expanse of the entire landscape with the advantage of a bird’s-eye-view … from this perspective, the landscape can also seem a vertiginous panorama that threatens to swallow us up. As we move closer, we lose our vertigo, but at the same time we also relinquish our omnipotent gaze … we have fallen into the painting’s space.”16 We draw close to examine precise details of architectural drawings that are so clearly the product of painstakingly “slow” work. We then pull away to grasp the charged movement that animates the whole with gestural, sweeping strokes of colour. This timebased, immersive engagement with her works has both cinematic and sonic effects on the viewer who is repeatedly made aware of her body in relation to the larger canvas and surrounding environment. The artist describes this desired process as a type of time travel through the soundscapes of history through which one attunes to the din of history’s rhymes. The temporal and spatial elisions enacted in her practice leave us unsure as to whether we are simply looking back at the ruins of imperial exploits and failed utopias or at the mirrored compulsions and imaginings still evident in our present predicament. We are drawn to her chronicling of the reactionary populism and proto-fascist structures that mark our contemporary moment while wishing we could look away or beyond their achingly familiar forms. Indeed, in the presence of these works one asks whether humanity is “on the edge of a richer and more profound indictment of the catastrophic modernity inaugurated by Europe’s colonial and imperial power than the makeshift, prelim-

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inary diagnosis that served the very different political interests of national liberation movements during the Cold War.”17 Mehretu’s practice is, in fact, highly invested in the power of public address, determined to imagine a “transnational public sphere dedicated to promoting democratic values, human rights … and a potential ‘dialogue of cultures.’”18 This self-conscious stance towards the function that painting should play in society echoes the remit of traditional history paintings, in their assumed role as moral compass by the example of myths, gods, or the nobility. An ethics permeates the work, confronting the entropic and dystopic forces that threaten to overwhelm our contemporary condition with a dialogical position that demands we take sides, as though “contracted” into an experience of responsible viewing and, by extension, recognition of the social activist agenda that motivates her practice. Mehretu’s focus on historical places that have been the site of affecting, mass protests illustrates her allegiance to Situationist tactics of marking and inhabiting public spaces, through movements of bodies, acts of mappings, and plays of language. Her masterful series entitled Mogamma: A Painting in 4 Parts, which was first shown at Documenta 13 (2012), is a case in point. The Mogamma (which means “collective” or “complex” in Arabic) is the name given the government building that anchors activity in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the site, of course, of Arab Spring uprisings against Hosni Mubarak’s reign in 2011. In a remarkable moment, protest actually toppled a sitting dictator. Mehretu was most interested in that in-between moment, the interchronic pause or threshold, when utopian dreams of democracy formed – as she calls it “an idealistic possibility” – and then the quick loss of it – revolution co-opted. Eighteen days after victory in Tahrir Square, the Muslim Brotherhood seized upon the gains of the revolution and silenced opponents. Like in many of her other pieces, there is much archival layering in these works. Shapes and structures from Red Square, Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, Assahabah Square in Darnah, Libya, Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square (where the Organization of African States was formed), and Zuccotti Park, the site of the “Occupy” protests in New York, 2012, all make their presence felt within this series. She says of Mogamma that she was interested “in the social and mythological and political projections we put on those kinds of spaces … the desires we have for those kinds of spaces – about what public spaces can be,” adding “there is a kind of desire and symbolism that can happen in those spaces versus what really does get achieved, what real social change does happen.”19 This is a large cycle of paintings, reaching 4.5 metres tall and stretching 3.5 metres wide. The artist recreates the tumultuous action of these sites by layering black and white

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stencilled building plans, applying coloured touches of paint that billow out like explosions of energy or smoke, and outlining geometric shapes that call to mind the flags or banners of the protestors. The scale and scope of the works endow them with a capacious and generative character, gently prodding us to focus upon the aspirations of squandered moments. It is evident that these ruminations move her critical eye back and forth through time, to the French, Russian, and American revolutions for sure but also to the great anti-colonial movements – in Haiti, Algeria, and Ethiopia (which had its own short-lived renaissance, known as Addis Spring). And it is not difficult to see why the Tate Modern has called this series “a complex memorial to sites of state oppression and communal resistance.”20 With its interest in “movement of the masses and the movements that make history move,”21 Mehretu’s overall project is notably aligned with that of key anti-colonialist thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, or C.L.R. James, whose revolutionary aspirations and agitations in the age of decolonization not only shaped a generation’s approach to collective action and the necessities of cultural and political liberation but stressed the inter-connectedness and interdependence of the modern world. As Arif Dirlik reminds us, “the Third World may have been essentialized in terms of poverty, race, religion, whatever; but it also served for a while as a source of utopian longings for the unity of the oppressed, and for the creation of alternative futures.”22 One can see their influence reflected in Mehretu’s observations of the worker, the protestor, the migrant, and the roles they must play to navigate the indelible forces of history. She seems to regard History with a capital H, as an overwhelming force much the same way Fanon would write consciously and clearly about its “staged,” powerful nature. In his classic Black Skin, White Masks he concludes that the only solution to the ravages of racial inequality and colonial dependency is to “rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me” and “reach out for the universal,”23 for the “creation of a human world … of reciprocal recognitions,”24 rather than refuge in some “materialised Tower of the Past … I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world.”25 For Fanon, and by extension Mehretu, history would demand action of the dispossessed: “Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight History. It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanism. Decolonization is truly a creation of new men.”26 Especially in her early works, one can almost imagine this transformation process playing out where the compositional centre begins to implode or explode. Architectural drawings,

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12.3 Julie Mehretu. Looking Back to a Bright New Future. 2003. Ink and acrylic on canvas. PinchukArtCentre.

which appear at first to provide a structure, seem to fragment before one’s eyes. Structures from vastly different historical, cultural, or geographical pasts are juxtaposed, layered, fractured. Mehretu attempts “to redraw the geography of struggles for emancipation, or, put another way, to decolonize revolution as a concept and an object of historical inquiry.”27 Such canvases as Looking Back to a Bright New Future (2003) (Fig. 12.3) or Transcending: The New International (2003) (Fig. 12.4) evoke Cold War and nonaligned movement models for socio-political structures and aspirations for more equitable global interactions. In the latter, she researched the architecture and street plans of postcolonial African economic capitals, using them to organize the composition and to recall dreams of the proto-nationalist movements of the

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12.4 Julie Mehretu. Transcending: The New International. 2003. Ink and acrylic on canvas. Walker Art Center.

decolonization era and the later developmentalist agendas of Cold War politics. But it would be naive to view these allusions to past struggle and mass action as simple forms of nostalgia or searches for redemption (although both of those feelings may indeed be at play). Rather, it seems more apt to approach them as evidence of a longing, which “is not always for the ancien regime or fallen empire but also for the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete.”28 During the era of postmodern critique, Linda Hutcheon offered a helpful understanding of nostalgia as “a structural doubling-up of two different times, an inadequate present, and an idealized past.”29 But Jennifer Wenzel’s work on antiimperialist nostalgia seems most appropriate for understanding Mehretu’s practice. Wenzel has described current “nostalgia for the Cold War and the weight of the Third World within it [as a] … nostalgia for a time when the Third World mattered.”30 She notes: “If imperialist nostalgia is regret for change of which one has been an agent, anti-imperialist nostalgia holds in mind hope for changes that have yet to be realized, changes that were always yet to be realized. Anti-imperialist nostalgia acknowledges the past’s vision of the future, while recognizing the

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distance and the difference between that vision and the realities of the present.”31 Can the notion of the “Third World” be redeemed or recuperated? Can nostalgia be a pro-spective rather than simply retro-spective force?32 For many, the bankruptcy of progressive ideologies (Marxism, Indigenous forms of socialism, Fanon’s liberationist ideals, pan-Africanism) has led to a deep and disconcerting sense of living in “tragic times.”33 In his masterful text, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of the Colonial Enlightenment (2004), David Scott attempts to remap “the problematic in which the relation between colonial pasts and the postcolonial present is conceived,”34 asking, “what happens when the horizon of possible futures becomes our ‘futures past?’”35 In many ways these canvases address the collapse of social and political hopes and the thwarted anticolonial imagining at the heart of plans for postcolonial nation building. They emit a very palpable feeling of loss and hope, suggesting that if we could just reach back into a graspable history, tweak it a bit, and try again we might be able to fulfil a still unfinished emancipatory project at the heart of modernist anti-colonial and cosmopolitan struggle. “That is the point of departure in all the work, trying to make sense of the version (my emphasis) of history and reality that my whole family in Ethiopia is living in, and another one that exists here with my parents and my grandmother, and yet another one that I experience.”36 One might be tempted to see these utopian dreams as both fragile and futile – but the works themselves, with their commitment to complexity and vibrancy, ultimately feel generative in nature. Her interest in emergent utopias that double back upon or “devour” themselves encourages her to think through history’s recursive structure in a textured, even playful manner. In various public talks, Mehretu uses the phrase “repeat action” to describe the recognizable cycle of revolution and devolution at work in modernist history.37 She asks: “how can you invent something else when this kind of entropic/dystopic collapse is taking place, an insidious kind of other force so cannibalizing and devouring of these kinds of ideals … how can the image question this, speak to this or provide something else.”38 To date, critics have focused primarily on the spatial dynamics of Mehretu’s works, citing her fascination with and reliance upon blueprints, references to migrations of the twenty-first century, and repeated articulations of globalization’s rhizomatic reach. To be sure, for much of her early career Mehretu anchored her compositions around the structured outlines of architectural or urban plans and the logics of cartographic images. In these works, compositional and conceptual space is never empty but always temporal and political, treated as a palimpsest of local histories unfolding against imagined, realized, or abandoned imperial visions. Her stencilled plans are exceedingly accurate, her freehand treatment of

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line and scale utterly meticulous. These elements serve not only to anchor the compositions but also act as narrative players. She highlights for us the many ways in which colonial-modern buildings and urban design played an intimate role in both imperialist visions of empire and later postcolonial and nationalist development schemes. The remnants of colonial hubris can be found in the built structures of colonial regimes. These narrative fragments address both the “physic and material space in which people live and what compounded layers of imperial debris do to them.”39 Their physical fate, often reduced to a crumbling state in the present day, serves as a powerful symbol of wasted opportunities or failure of vision. The early infrastructure building of postcolonial cityscapes was inherently hybrid, often ephemeral and incomplete (either started and abandoned or altered and added to in slipshod manners), revealing the compromised, ephemeral nature of the colonial project. Indeed, the “incompleteness is the first and most conspicuous legacy of colonial urban design.”40 This state of “incompleteness” and “bricolage” was intimately linked to recurring failure. Even as colonialists amply approached colonial spaces as laboratories of modernism where they could first “test out” their vanguardist ideas, assiduously drawing up maps of exclusion to distinguish European from “native” quarters, their “elaborate visual representations – first cartography, then charts, diagrams, architectural drawings, and buildings, too – promised a level of analysis and control they could not deliver.”41 In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon noted: “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters and European quarters … Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized.”42 Fanon’s lines seem achingly apparent in Mehretu’s canvases.

Figuration and Abstraction Can history painting be given a postcolonial agenda in abstract form or must figuration exist to advance a politics of agency and articulation? Does Mehretu’s abstraction negate or deter from the power and persuasion of her history painting? Certainly, her dedication to abstraction aligns with her ongoing search for a renewed vanguard and the possibilities of radical action. The imbrication of utopian vision and abstraction has, of course, a long history in the making of non-objective art, from Constructivism to Futurism. In her recent MoMA exhibition on The

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Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, curator Laura Hoptman argued: “Abstraction is a language primed for becoming a representation of itself, because as much as it resists the attribution of specific meanings, the abstract mark cannot help but carry with it an entire utopian history of modern painting … It would be difficult to identify a contemporary abstract painter who is not selfconsciously referring to that history.”43 In many ways, Mehretu’s practice is highly invested in the classic tools and promises of abstraction: the void or the unseen, the processes of editing, erasure, fragmentation, connection, and disconnection (the additive subtractions of Rauschenberg come to mind). At some points in her work, activity seems to simply cease. Her voids suggest ultimate “untranslatability” of form and narrative. But in Mehretu’s case, these aesthetic choices are checked by an insistent re-take on the histories and fates of collective action and by the belief that abstraction will protect her from the fate of didacticism and reductionism. “I have insisted on abstraction. There’s an opacity to my paintings that I hold on tight to.”44 But her commitment to abstraction affords her much more. Abstraction suits the ways in which the reigning regimes of Western representation have situated Africa (or the former third world by extension) – a place and an idea overlain with tropes of disorder, disease, and despair.45 She tutors us not only in forgotten, local, or interconnected and interdependent global histories, but also in the very nature of history itself. Mehretu’s radical project rests on “a sense of reversibility of time that has accompanied the widespread rejection of the teleology of modernity, and the many reversals of history that have accompanied it.”46 These aesthetic choices register with the viewer on a number of levels. Her processes of erasure or ghosting (what she calls disintegrations) suggest derelict or neglected structures, perhaps victims of the ravages of history or the violence inherent to the deliberate silencing of human stories (Fig. 12.5). The evocative power of the “not yet,” “the never to be,” “the almost,” or even the “can-be” suggests missed opportunities, broken promises, or future possibilities.47 Evidence of a vigorous hand engaged in the rubbing off of mark or form summons a cleansed or sanitized space; arguably “erasure would be as ripe a place for [that type of] political potential as the subversive marks themselves.”48 Mehretu’s works challenge our perceptions and assumptions of pastness, effectively encouraging the viewer to consider temporality on both phenomenological and discursive grounds. It is difficult to state definitively how the differing time-scales informing her works map onto one another. Time may fold, double back, or be loosely braided within the compositions and their viewing has its own durations and rhythms. This abstruseness suits a contemporary art viewer, accustomed to the disorientation and peculiar blindness produced by spectacle culture.49 Whatever ultimate shape her

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12.5 Julie Mehretu. Ethiopia Fragment. 2009. Ink and acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

measures of history might take (either as distanced, documented events to be read or deliberately misread in a layered narrative form, or as somatic responses to visual cues and viewing practices), their presence illuminates the epistemological limits of our contemporary condition.50 While figures are reduced to hash-marks (with no mass, no pathos, no emotion), they seem, nonetheless, to retain much of the agency in her narratives, often animating her compositions in intriguing ways despite their marginalized status in written histories. She has called her hash-mark, abstracted figures her “private utopian fighters.”51 And it would come as little surprise that Mehretu cites the Russian Constructivists, Ben Shahn, and other Social Realists, whose unerring commitment to a socially conscious art practice provide clear models for abstraction and history painting alike.

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Patronage, Politics, and Publics The best-known and most controversial of Mehretu’s massive works is her Mural, commissioned for the lobby of Goldman Sachs bank in 2009, a project that involved the use of some 215 different colours, multiple layers of drafted plans, and tedious application of inks and sprayed acrylics (Fig. 12.6). It took two years to complete and relied upon the labour of many studio and on-site assistants. The completed work, which extends over an eighty-foot-long expanse of the lobby and reaches twenty-three feet in height, can be seen, at least in parts, from ten blocks down the road in either direction. This is a statement piece and not surprisingly, has proven to be controversial. It engages multiple publics from its embedded site in one of the institutions implicated in and maligned for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. It sits directly across the street from the memorial to the World Trade Center. The site is also haunted by the largely silenced voices of the “Occupy Wall Street Movement,” which had gathered in Zuccoti Park nearby. Her viewers range from the thousands of Goldman Sachs employees – cogs in the wheels of capitalism – traders and bankers, custodial staff, and bike messengers – who file past and wait in lines beneath it as they pass through security checkpoints every day, to the tourists who gravitate towards the 9/11 commemorative garden and are afforded only fractured glimpses of it from the street. Although tensions between patron and artist are certainly common to this historical genre, as a privately commissioned painting that provides differing levels of access to viewers and simultaneously commemorates and implicates its patron in the long histories of capitalist activity, Mural may not fall easily within established patronage frameworks for history painting. Its incomplete or partial viewing, coupled with its fragmented, even antagonistic set of publics, poses intriguing interpretive challenges. Has the artist intentionally challenged the didactic character and monolithic address of the genre – foregrounding its limitations – or has she embraced its “failures” in an attempt to elasticize its possibilities for our contemporary moment? For Mural Mehretu consulted Fernand Braudel’s masterpiece, The History of Civilization and Capitalism (1985) to cast her gaze back to the entangled relations between slave economies, the rise of industrialization, merchant banks, and the development of political and cultural modernity. She built up her layers, spraying each with a mix of silicon and acrylic, sanding and erasing, and then starting on the next, paying careful attention to the detailed materialist and built histories of finance capitalism. Within these rich and overlapping layers of paint, ink, and pencil Mehretu takes us on a journey along ancient trade routes, documents the rise of mercantile cities and ports, monitors the shifts in population as labour

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12.6 Julie Mehretu. Mural. 2009. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 200 West St (Goldman Sachs building, viewable to the public through windows on the corner of Vesey St and West St), New York.

follows capital, and documents the birth of financial institutions, some of which are at the centre of the neo-liberal networks of today. With assiduous detail, we are shown the outlines of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, an early New England bank profiting off burgeoning global trade networks and exploitation of natural resources and slave labour, the gates of ancient Greek marketplaces that act as hubs of activity, and the ghostly image of the New York Stock Exchange. The narrative reminds us that each historical juncture is imbued with old and new configurations of capitalism, social formations, and affect. Mehretu’s often restrictive black and white palette is here enlivened by a vibrant palette of greens, oranges, reds, and yellows – perhaps to reflect the promises and abandon of capital. It is here where her abstract, safe distance from the messy realities of our current condition is most tested, as she is forced to deal not only with the overly charged and compromised nature of her site but also with the ironies of her commission. The political activism so evident in all of her works seems in danger of

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being tempered, even severely misread, with the work’s association to the very institutions she questions and the threat of “decorative” or corporate viewing. Critics have made some attempt to deal with these uncomfortable ironies but have contributed little to a deeper questioning around their place in history painting. For instance, Calvin Tomkins, writing a generally positive review, quipped: “If art were judged by the company it keeps, much of the High Renaissance would go down the drain.”52 Mehretu’s Mural is constructed in anticipation of a heterogeneous public and a complicated, maybe even compromised reception. She admits feeling torn by the choice to accept the commission, but in the end the chance to address and school a large and varying public in the histories of capitalism and its ravages may have been too great to concede. Indeed, her decision has surely resulted in her most thought-provoking history painting yet.

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Notes 1 Eshun, “Further Considerations,” 289. 2 Ibid., 288. 3 Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries,” 3. 4 Eleey, “Julie Mehretu’s ‘Perfect’ Pictures,” 99. 5 Mehretu as quoted in Sirmans, “Mapping a New, and Urgent,” 2001. 6 Green and Seddon, History Painting Reassessed, 7. 7 Njami, A Useful Dream, 5. 8 Erikson, “The Black Atlantic,” 67. 9 Mehretu as quoted in Sirmans, “Mapping a New, and Urgent,” 2001. 10 Eleey, “Julie Mehretu’s ‘Perfect’ Pictures,” 99–100. 11 Mehretu, Manifestation, 2004. 12 Ibid. 13 Mehretu as quoted in Simmons, “Insisting on Opacity,” 2016. 14 Green and Seddon, History Painting Reassessed, 7. 15 Eleey, “Julie Mehretu’s ‘Perfect’ Pictures,” 103. 16 Allen, “Destruction/Construction,” 53. 17 Gilroy, “Toward a Critique,” 591. 18 Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries,” 3. 19 Mehretu, “TateTalks.” 20 Tate Modern, “Mogamma,” 2012. 21 Renault, “Decolonizing Revolution,” 35. 22 Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 152. 23 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, xiv. 24 Ibid., 70. 25 Ibid., 176. 26 Ibid., 2. 27 Renault, “Decolonizing Revolution,” 35. 28 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvii. 29 Hutcheon, “The Irony.” 30 Wenzel, “Remembering the Past’s Future,” 12. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” 8. 33 34 35 36

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37 Mehretu, “usc Roski Talk.” 38 Mehretu, “TateTalks.” 39 Stoler, “Introduction: The Rot Remains,” 2. 40 Wright, “The Ambiguous Modernisms of African Cities,” 226. 41 Ibid., 226. 42 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 38. 43 Hoptman, The Forever Now, 21. 44 Simmons, “Insisting on Opacity.” 45 Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference,” 462. 46 Dirlik, “Whither History?,” 83. 47 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 235. 48 Erikson, “The Black Atlantic,” 67. 49 Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?, 281. 50 Nagel and Wood, Anachronistic Renaissance, 9. 51 Mehretu as quoted in Jacobson, “The Sanctity of Action,” 2004. 52 Tomkins, “Big Art, Big Money.”

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13 “Earth Death Pictures” as Contemporary History Painting mark a. cheetham

The essays in this volume encourage us to think beyond the literal confines of any one genre or medium as we articulate what history “painting” was and is. My arguments about connections between contemporary eco art and the long history of landscape depictions of the earth aim to contribute to this expanded sense of the category. Contemporary eco art does not have a conventional bond with history painting, which traditionally focused on political, religious, and mythological events and on human actors. Until the nineteenth century, landscape too was also largely excluded from history painting and seen usually only as a stage or setting for events. I will argue that these exclusions are too restrictive, both in our assessments of past practices and especially if we are to imagine history painting in the present. My claim is that landscape can be productively understood as a commitment to presenting the history of the earth in the visual arts, both in the nineteenth century and in its legacies in eco art today. When contemporary artists and art historians do think about landscape painting, there is a tendency to see its accomplishments as problematic and to relegate the genre safely to the past.1 Eco art is typically thought to have reacted more to land art of the 1960s than to earlier engagements with the earth in the visual arts, in large measure because painting was eclipsed as a dominant medium in the 1960s. Land art of the 1960s and 1970s characteristically saw itself as replacing rather than extending what it construed as the outworn genre of landscape painting. From the vantage point of contemporary eco art, however, with its emphasis

on our human engagements with the planet, the landscape genre can be seen as aspiring to the elite position of history painting in the nineteenth century in Europe and in the colonies of North and South America. Its renderings of the earth’s history competed with history painting’s default to mythological, political, and religious themes. In Europe, depictions of the earth’s physiognomy by Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, and John Ruskin, for example; of the sea by J.M.W. Turner; and of the atmosphere by Constable all demonstrated understandings of the earth’s dynamic history in its interactions with human religious and political machinations. Parallel connections between landscapists, scientific understanding, and the conception of the earth were found in nineteenth-century American painting.2 If this retrospective view is plausible, I would go further to claim that – in direct parallel and contact with nineteenth-century landscape models – eco art today can also productively be thought of as a revived history painting, whose subject is the planet in crisis. In this work, the earth is the protagonist and our human relationship with it is the focus of attention.

Rúrí’s Eco Art The Icelandic artist Rúrí shows in Archive: Endangered Waters (2003; Fig. 13.1) that human behaviour is the root of the rapid changes to the planet to which we are witnesses. Rúrí represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2003 with this interactive photo and sound installation. It’s not a work one simply sees, not a landscape of the traditionally framed sort to be viewed from a familiar distance. Sound is at least as important as Archive’s visual and textual dimensions. One soon learns to pull out the sliding mounts for the fifty-two images of Icelandic waterfalls that Rúrí presents on transparent film for two-way viewing. Doing so triggers the signature roar of a specific waterfall, a natural phenomenon closely identified with Iceland as a pure and natural place.3 Archive addresses the history of waterfalls on several temporal planes: the fifty-two images no doubt allude to the sequential cycles that we humans live by, which are too fast for the planet to adapt to. Other temporalities are suggested: some of the waterfalls no longer exist; many remain endangered, likely to become the past of an inevitable future, all because of huge reservoirs created by a controversial Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam and power generating plant built in Iceland’s interior highlands primarily to supply power for an aluminum smelter.4 That visitors can in effect turn these waterfalls on and off on a whim by sliding their mounts in and out is one poignant dimension of the

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artist’s lamentation. Another is the quasi-scientific archiving of the earth’s phenomena in art institutions. As Rúrí says in a related context, “it may come to pass that all that will remain as a reminder of the waterfalls will be the works of artists.”5 Rúrí’s attention to our actions in the face of threatened nature leads to areas of concern that together establish this work as a powerful contemporary history picture. She addresses a momentous historical issue: anthropogenic climate change and the viability of naming our epoch the Anthropocene. She explores the affective aspects of the work as it articulates the earth’s history, eliciting what I call “the emotional life of water.” Finally, the work may be seen in relation to the tradition

13.1 Rúrí. Archive: Endangered Waters. Exhibition view of the interactive installation. 2003. Icelandic Pavilion at the 50th Annual Venice Biennale.

of history painting that arguably embraced elements of the landscape genre in the early nineteenth century. As eco art, the installation is a witness to and an “actant” in the Anthropocene6 – a work about the interactions of the human, material nature, and the planet’s ecosystems (a term coined only in 1935) that traces back to the beginnings of the industrialization of the globe. By inviting us to manipulate the sounds and images of waterfalls, Rúrí mimics in microcosm the power humans now have to change landscapes and nature. She makes this overarching effect one of individual responsibility. While Archive records the vitality of waterfalls and nature generally, it is more about their demise than their life.

“Earth Life Pictures” versus “Earth Death Pictures” My coinage “Earth Death Pictures” is intended as a contemporary, discordant echo of Carl Gustav Carus’s pleas in the early nineteenth century for “Earth Life Pictures,” those that are carefully observed based on scientific data and rendered in sufficient detail and clarity to become landscape paintings “of a new and higher kind, which will uplift the viewer into a higher contemplation of nature.”7 A fuller sense of Carus’s Erdlebenbildkunst allows us to gauge what this innovation can reveal about contemporary practices and what eco art might in turn let us see in Carus’s work. Carus’s Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (1815–24) was a largely conventional account of landscape painting. Carus was proud to be an accomplished amateur in this field. As court physician to the king of Saxony and noted natural scientist, he came in contact with many of the most important scientists and artists of his day. The book is dedicated to Goethe. Caspar David Friedrich, who became a close friend, is Carus’s model artist; Alexander von Humboldt, who also supported Carus’s ideas, was his exemplary natural scientist. Because I am setting this text into a comparison with the fate of landscape in the twentieth century and today, it’s important to emphasize that Carus, Friedrich, and many others at this time also saw the need to improve, indeed to rescue, landscape painting. The Letters contribute to a century-long discussion across Europe about the academic status of landscape, an intense period of material and intellectual history that may be compared with the controversies around the demise of landscape in the 1960s and after. The condemnations of landscape in the 1960s seem like a familiar echo when we read in Letter VIII that “it is time to consider the future study of landscape painting, a topic that affords much room for melancholic reflection, since we can hardly speak of its future without reflecting on its dismal present” (123).

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Carus is original in two ways important to the comparisons I want to make: he called for collaboration between scientific and artistic approaches to understanding the earth, and he developed the potent notion of the earth-life picture as the key to this cooperation.8 Where Carus was positive about renovating the genre, the terms of the debate over landscape were inverted in the 1960s and afterwards. Carus laid the blame on art academies, which encouraged the copying of other landscape paintings rather than an educated attention to nature. He believed that artists needed scientific training “to see the necessary connection between the outward forms of mountain ranges and the inner structure of their masses, and the necessity with which that inner structure follows from the history of those mountains … Instruct him in the specific laws of atmospheric phenomena the variations in the nature of clouds, their formation and dissolution, and also their motion” (126). With such knowledge, they could perceive the inner, forming essence and unity of all forms in nature – the “earth life.” The earth life picture is “a true geognostic landscape,”9 he elaborates in the next letter, that is, a study of the mineral deposits of the earth’s crust. Art and science collaborate in Carus’s work: “art prepares and promotes the cognitive awareness of nature, which is natural science,” he wrote in Letter III (98). Promoting the earth-life picture as the future of landscape depiction, Carus drew an explicit contrast with the training of history painters, who at this time were better prepared because they “at least study anatomy” (138). He followed his own advice in producing visually detailed, naturalistic depictions of specific mountain ranges and the basalt columns at Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa in the Scottish Hebrides, for example. But his purpose was not simply to convey the surface particularities of a landscape but also to record their interconnectedness with other natural systems. Had Carus’s Nine Letters appeared recently, we would likely call him an environmentalist thanks to his emphasis not only on educating artists to see and render the earth’s life, but also on the museum-going and art-buying public to receive enlightenment through landscape paintings that are truly new. Given the ability to see and show landscape anew, Carus enthusiastically writes: “there will infallibly be earth-life paintings, of a new and higher kind, which will uplift the viewer into a higher contemplation of nature” (131). Carus explicitly stated that the earth-life picture was the new history painting and did so in a periodical to gain circulation for his views. Publishing Letter VIII in Ludwig Schorn’s Kunst-Blatt in 1826, he appended a note regarding the genesis of his reflections on landscape: “Over the past decade, numerous reflections on this art, which has as its true task the great object of representing individual scenes … of the universal life of nature – and which I would therefore prefer to call nature’s

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history painting, or earth-life painting – have given rise to a series of nine letters (emphasis in original).”10 Carus sought to raise the status of landscape in art academies and among the public because, he held, only this form could convey the all-important divinity and unity of nature. It was frustrating to Carus that his call for earth-life painting as the new history painting received rather few and largely negative reviews in his lifetime. As Oskar Bätschmann has written: “the program of ‘earth-life painting’ – to express the structure and history of mountains through their form, and to render the other elements in such a way as to reveal the universal rule of law and demonstrate the harmony between the particular and the universal – was far beyond the capacity of landscape painting” (43). I want to suggest, however, that his ideas have new resonance when encountered from the perspective of eco art. The time for Carus’s ideas is now. His work is of the Anthropocene in the sense that, not unlike his contemporaries Turner and Ruskin, and not unlike Rúrí, Carus construed human history and the history of the earth as fundamentally intertwined. It is in this sense that the earth’s history is the most important subject of history painting, one that he prophetically dedicated to the future of the genre. Examples of eco art such as Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters engage the planet’s history in terms of the crises of anthropogenic climate disruption. Working at the other end of the Anthropocene, however, Rúrí and others have converted the earth-life picture to earth-death art. John Ruskin wrote in his Lectures on Landscape, delivered in Oxford in 1871: “Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation of the physical conditions appointed for human existence.” Never one to make a point without emphasis, he added, “Turner did not paint [his] sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous arrangements; neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of physical science, to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire coast; nor the Indiaman to show you the force of impact in a liquid mass of sea-water of given momentum. He painted this to show you the daily course of quiet human work and happiness, and that, to enable you to conceive something of uttermost human misery – both ordered by the power of the great deep.”11 Ruskin was appalled by the ravages of industrialization on both the landscape and humanity. If not perhaps “The First Ecologist,”12 Ruskin certainly was an early one – and one who, like Carus and many others, saw the interactions of the human and telluric as history. In this approach he too was inspired by Alexander von Humboldt. Analogous with Carus’s emphases in his earth-life pictures and Ruskin’s priorities, Turner depicted the interactions of the human and nature. To the bafflement and outright hostility of most of its early viewers, for example, his renowned Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth … (1842) places us in the roiling sea, from which we precariously

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view a struggling steam boat firing a distress flare as it fights to make safe harbour during a storm. Whether or not Turner was lashed to the mast of such a boat to experience and record the elements, as he claimed, is ultimately immaterial. He fully conveys the chaos of the storm in this painting: the horizon is dangerously off level and we cannot distinguish water from sky from spray. Turner’s famed indistinctness of form ensures that there is much we cannot see here. Our senses are overwhelmed and inadequate, suggesting his interest in Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and offering an opening for a more contemporary argument about elementals exceeding our grasp and intimating the presence of the earth’s forces.13 We can be historically specific on this point. James Hamilton claims that Turner was conveying the powerful forces of magnetism harboured by the earth in the design of the painting, those discovered by Michael Faraday and widely disseminated by the scientist – and Turner’s friend – Mary Somerville.14 We can see the effects of this energy in the vortex but we cannot see this elemental force itself. While this picture is framed, everything about it breaks free of the landscape genre’s conventions. A person of his time rather than ours – which is to say, a person of the Industrial Revolution – in this and many other works, Turner celebrated and sought to convey the affective impact of our technological innovations while simultaneously witnessing the power of nature. For him these forces co-exist and are too closely interwoven to be conveniently opposed in a narrative of struggle between nature and humanity. Because we are implicated as participants, not mere observers, in this drama and in Turner’s other historical landscapes, the earth or nature is not presented as an independent force but instead always with its human interlocutors. It is only with the post-human interests of some contemporary eco art that this default emphasis is challenged. Understanding Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters as a negative correlate of Carus’s earth-life pictures allows historical landscape practices to expand in a more capacious and contemporary frame, one that addresses the paradox articulated by Rebecca Solnit that “landscape is visible; too often history is not.”15 Archive’s intricate technology makes the earth’s history (and its potentially silent future) visible in ways that the earth-life picture could not 200 years ago. Where Carus envisioned an unapologetically anthropocentric “physiognomy” of natural phenomena, Rúrí’s waterfalls are displayed in a way that both invites our human response to them and, I believe, suggests their independent material existence. We are manoeuvered to lament the loss of these and other phenomena and to attend to the materiality of things before we acculturate them as objects and artefacts. Could water have an “emotional life” beyond our understanding? Sound

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is the trigger for thinking outside anthropocentrism here. Because up to five soundtracks of waterfalls can play simultaneously, the installation is inevitably cacophonous, beyond our grasp. Archive enacts what Teresa Brennan has called “the transmission of affect” in the porous and fluid situations wherein eco art – its human and non-human, organic and non-organic elements – mix, coalesce, and dissipate. That Rúrí did not overtly intend to revisit the earth-life picture and that Carus could not foresee today’s eco art is ultimately immaterial to the practice of eco art history today. Traditions – in this case of landscape depiction – are often articulated in retrospect, as Mark Salber Phillips has argued in a detailed study. As he also contends, “any lasting tradition must be in a process of continual reinvention.”16 In re-establishing a connection between landscape and eco art in this way, my hope is to add to the scholarship of eco art history by – to cite the pioneering collection edited by Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History – placing “canonical works and figures in a new light by revealing their previously unnoticed complexity, ambivalence, or even antipathy regarding environmental concerns.”17 To this end, I turn to the work of a contemporary eco artist whose work explicitly engages German Romantic landscape conventions.

Contemporary Visions of the Earth’s Life and Death Mariele Neudecker brings together explorations of the landscape genre, of the temporal duration of natural forms, and especially of human interactions with what we call nature. To lay out this articulation of landscape as a genre, her acclaimed earlier works – especially the so-called “tanks” (the description connotes containers), such as Over and Over, Again and Again (2004; Fig. 13.2), which magically and instructively revisit Romantic landscape conventions in a three-dimensional format, as if we could see a painting by Friedrich or Dahl as an environment into which we could wander – afford the viewer much more visual and conceptual access to landscape as a process than do the paintings that they quote. We can walk around and peer into this tradition because in these works, landscape’s overt artificiality and its seductive atmospherics are on display. Her quest is to see nature beyond landscape, to reveal a widely held suspicion in our Western culture that these viewing norms mask too much, that they block real experience. More importantly for our understanding of what she deems a purposeful movement “towards the contemporary sublime” in recent work undertaken in Greenland, for

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13.2 Mariele Neudecker. Over and Over, Again and Again (Detail). 2004. Glass, water, acrylic medium, salt, fibre glass, plastic. Commissioned by the Met Office for Elemental Insight.

example, however, she interrogates and captures her own motivations for coming to this remote place and the nuances of her emotional responses. “I wanted to come this far to find and see a ‘nature,’ beyond landscape,” she confides. “I wanted to see human relationships to the ‘landscape’ and nature … No reception, no grid, no charge … was it really just nature?” Yet with a quick honesty that underscores her understanding of the complexities of this desire, she wonders: “Do I? Did I?”18 Much of Neudecker’s work is based on her belief that our relationships are usually not with nature so much as with images of nature, especially landscape depictions. Her recent projects insist that our human practices of perception, of questioning, and of emotional reaction are integral to what we call landscape and what we hope to discover in some more fundamental form: nature. She constantly seeks effective ways to lay these habits out for us to see. Neudecker’s artistic propositions are not religious or mystical as Carus’s ultimately were; she does not

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imagine a final, cosmic answer to the question “what is Nature?” On the contrary, she is drawn to explore the partiality of our seeing, an inescapable situation that she calls “cropping.” With her we see how we look at landscape. We can register the selections and emphases that always accompany our looking. The foundational editing of what we see is not so much a shortcoming as it is profoundly human, whether it involves the physiology of our binocular vision or a technological prosthesis. “Somehow the sockets of my eyes suddenly seem to be too small, close, too tight and deep,” she reports from the Arctic in “Lamentations.” I want to have 360-degree vision. Needless to say: my camera lens frames and crops everything way too small and too tightly.” As it was for Carus, Ruskin, and Turner, it seems that we can only apprehend nature through human nature. 400 Thousand Generations, Neudecker’s much praised and often reproduced installation in the London Royal Academy’s exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World in 2009, draws its provocative title from the evolutionary time scientists believe it took to develop the photosensitive tissue crucial to the human eye. We see two large, glass, eye-like orbs on a table, but these are not models. They are liquidfilled tanks whose shape and doubling inevitably remind us of our own eyes. In addition to reflecting a beholder’s inverted image as she looks at the installation – just as our retinas do with the external world – the wax caps on the top of each sphere allude, in their relative softness, to the tissue behind the eye. These fragile caps seem to hold up the forms of blue mountains in the two containers, forms that connect visually and by analogy to the icebergs in her most recent work, such as a room-filling, sculptural cross section of an iceberg titled There Is Always Something More Important (2012). Compellingly out of place though it certainly is, and unnaturally static, the fictive iceberg is nonetheless also familiar. Neudecker does what we can’t readily do “in nature”: she anatomizes the form, cutting it in cross section and installing two eye-like video monitors on the wall behind it, like a human face. We don’t see inside the structure through these portals but move again back to the landscape. In this case we see ice flowing from one “eye” to the other across a one-metre gap. Our eyes and thoughts move but the iceberg remains uncannily still. We see much less than what we know is there. Sound is especially important to eco art, as witnessed in Archive: Endangered Waters. This is the case in another earth-death picture, Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007–08). Her installation can be thought of as an amplified and submerged version of Joseph Beuys’s Erdtelephon (“Earth Telephone,” 1968), in which the receiver is plugged into a clod of turf to complete a nature-human cycle of exchanging energy and information. Her effective gambit was to have people in an art gallery listen to climate change simply by phoning Europe’s largest glacier.

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Paterson provided only a phone number in the gallery; when called, listeners would hear the dripping sounds of the glacier thanks to microphones placed in its depths. In the artist’s words, “An underwater microphone led into Jökulsárlón lagoon – an outlet glacial lagoon of Vatnajökull, filled with icebergs – connected to an amplifier, and a mobile-phone, which created a live phone line to the glacier … A white neon sign of the phone number hung in the gallery space.”19 The spectacular landscape of this site is heard but not seen, felt emotionally but not fully experienced, a cipher, perhaps, for the imponderability of the Anthropocene. Paterson is not reticent about her meaning: “This lagoon is a graveyard of glaciers … In a way there is something heartbreaking about this, knowing that you are listening to something magnificent being destroyed – but it is also very beautiful, a celebration of nature.”20 Isabelle Hayeur’s photographs and videos bring together explorations of water, borderlines, and affect. She emphasizes her exploration of landscape and land use, especially the exploitation of arable land for suburban expansion in her Model Homes series of 2004–07. “It seems clear that our visions and lifestyles have a much greater impact on the world we occupy than in the past. It thus becomes particularly important that we assume responsibility for the landscapes we create and the worlds we imagine.”21 The seventy images in her Underworlds series (2008– 15) are especially powerful in their ability to show the global implications of ecosuicidal habits of the Anthropocene while also dwelling on its material intimacies. While this series of underwater photographs was taken in navigation canals and ship graveyards in the usa, Underworlds explores threatened individual ecosystems that stand in for the mistreatment of waterways globally. Seductive visually in their rich colouration, Hayeur’s images are also disorienting. Though many of the images were taken in southern Florida, this isn’t the vacation spot we are used to seeing and her images are anything but celebratory. Her technique is also unusual in that she positions her camera in a partly submerged position so that we see both the water line close to us and the one in the distance, producing two horizon lines. “The aquatic landscapes I probe have been considerably altered,” she states. “They are sometimes actual deserts where nothing is left to see. The images I capture bear witness to this absence.”22 As we see in the upper quarter of Substances (2012), for example, the day is bright and the water calm. Houses can be seen along the shoreline at the right. Commanding most of the image, however, is a close up view of an underwater plant. Placed front and centre as a “portrait” despite its smallness, it is a sickly specimen. What’s more, this plant is the only one that manages to stand and grow towards the light, however feebly. Others recline on the bottom

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amidst the silt – the “substances” of her title – that makes the water through which Hayeur photographs brown and opaque. The water is an unstable horizon line23 that we nonetheless measure with and against as we see reminders of human domination here, a distant apartment building or ship, as well as the dying aqueous ecosystem in which she immerses us. Patterned by the typical pictorial celebration of natural beauty in this area and to the normalizing conventions of landscape, we might be confused by Hayeur’s unusual perspective. It doesn’t take long to notice that the human landscape above the water line, which she always includes, is the source of the destruction in what she calls the “aquatic landscapes” below. Such knowledge colludes with our perplexity to register a strong emotional effect. Hayeur multiplies affective responses in still photographs from 2011 of what she deems a “marine cemetery,” the submerged world of Witte’s Marine Salvage, a ship “burial ground” on Staten Island, New York. The collective title of these photographs is Death in Absentia. Again composed from under the limen of the water’s surface so that we see both the sea floor and the looming shapes of rusting hulls, the images are quiet superficially but strange and disconcerting. In Castaway (2012), a video, we are taken on a tour of what amount to underwater ruins. Sound is again crucial to our absorption of this work. Sound artist Nicolas Bernier’s mix of electronic overtones with the echoes and clunks that we hear in Castaway even before the visuals come into focus, is otherworldly, alien. While they seem to emanate from discarded human technologies, from the ships we begin to make out, they are no longer fully human. While some of the sounds seem like the reverberations of working ships in the area, to call them groans comes to seem anthropocentric; we might think of them rather as registrations of non-human materials returning to the earth. Bernier describes his soundscape’s inception and goals in detail: “I had quite specific sounds in mind even though the idea was a bit entangled: I wanted to suggest the material in the images, but also suggest something that isn’t there, or something hidden, or something that was there before, or all those options. In the meantime,” he elaborates, “I wanted the sound to be abstract enough to leave some space to the viewer so s/he could read the sound and image relationship his own way.”24 Hayeur makes this progression clear in her video, which explores the ships from the surface for roughly its first half. A transitional sequence finds us looking at the refineries along the shore of New Jersey’s Chemical Coast, then at the landscape and up into the sky; we hear birds and other familiar sounds for a few moments. By visually linking the clouds in the sky with underwater clouds of sediment thrown up by Hayeur as she films, we imagine, she then seamlessly conveys herself

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under water to picture the hulls themselves. As in Substances, the ocean floor that we traverse is almost lifeless. The light has trouble penetrating even the shallow water. The final minutes of Castaway are quiet, inviting us to contemplate what we have seen. Where can Hayeur’s camera go now? She films reflections of a wan sun and clouds on the surface of the water, looking down, before fading to black.25

Isabelle Hayeur and J.M.W. Turner: A Brief Case Study of Crabs Hayeur is the Robert Smithson of water. Where the pioneering American land artist famously recorded the post-industrial monuments near his home town of Passaic, New Jersey, she reveals what was hidden even to the inquisitive Smithson, the underwater underside of the landscape so close to his birthplace. Its ruins suggest not only the past of specific industries but also the physical and ideological decay of modernity presided over by the Anthropocene. Her video looks back to the heyday of generations of ships, but without nostalgia. Instead, Hayeur’s focus is the baleful present in this area and the even less hopeful future

13.3 Isabelle Hayeur. Limulus. 2014. Inkjet on photo paper.

of heavily polluted oceans. Her underwater works are contemporary history pictures that can be contrasted productively with nineteenth-century precedents, even with the shipping news central to J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes. Limulus (2014; Fig. 13.3), for example, is a large, extended, horizontal “aquatic landscape.” The photograph was taken on Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, site of Smithson’s second uprooted tree sculpture (1969). Close up and under water, we see the shell of a dead horseshoe crab whose genus lends its Latin name to the title. There are a few plants on the seabed; the contrast with the verdant shoreline above the water is striking. But this isn’t the Chemical Coast: we see no signs of habitation nearby, though in the distance and out of focus, we have hints of what appear to be large smokestacks. The crab shell is clearly the focus of this large image because it is seen in full detail and close up. It is a still life, natur mort, embedded in a split landscape. Limulus – more than a single photograph – is an image of the planet’s contemporary history, another “earth death picture.” It stands in sharp contrast to perhaps the only well-known image of a crab of this sort in Western art, J.M.W. Turner’s enduringly controversial painting War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited in 1842 (Fig. 13.4).

13.4 Joseph Mallord William Turner. War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 1842. Oil on canvas. Tate.

Where Hayeur’s crab is commanding, Turner’s is so small as to be missed were it not for the poem he appended to the work when it was exhibited, a stanza in his ongoing composition The Fallacies of Hope: “Ah! thy tent-formed shell is like / A soldier’s nightly bivouac, alone / Amidst a sea of blood / but you can join your comrades.” John Ruskin quotes these lines in his approving discussion of a painting that was otherwise much lampooned and misunderstood in its time.26 With characteristic ambition, Turner is addressing several historical moments in this work. War was paired with Peace: Burial at Sea, his homage to his friend the painter David Wilkie, who was buried at sea off Gibraltar in 1841. War depicts a disconsolate Napoleon Bonaparte in full uniform, even though he is pictured as a British captive on the island of St Helena, where he died in 1821. One occasion for this painting was the return of his remains to Paris in 1840, but Turner had already painted famous episodes from the Napoleonic wars and the death of Nelson and saw no reason to venerate the military leader. Peace not only memorializes Wilkie’s gentle disposition and laments his loss with its dramatically dark colouration but is also contrasted with the belligerent behaviour of another contemporary painter, the volatile Benjamin Robert Haydon, as well as that of Napoleon the ruthless military leader. Standing at a watery shoreline and backed by a guard and an extraordinarily sanguine sunset and its reflection, which was much criticized for its vividness, Napoleon clearly contemplates the minuscule animal, which – in position if not scale – is comparable to Hayeur’s crab. As we have seen in his references to magnetism in Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth … (1842), Turner frequently incorporated his knowledge of natural history in his landscapes. In this case, his interest in the lower reaches of the great chain of being came from an expert on these creatures, his sometimesphysician Sir Anthony Carlisle, who was also professor of anatomy at the London Royal Academy, where Turner was professor of perspective. Turner’s poetic commentary on War revolves around his reference to the limpet. His poem could be understood to attribute these thoughts to the pensive Bonaparte, who is reminded of his soldiering days and of his captivity by the “tent-formed shell.” For Turner, the crab serves to underline the human element characteristic of most nineteenthcentury history painting. The “you” of the final line, italicized by Ruskin, has a double meaning. If it refers to the mollusc that is joining its fellows, it is a lament for Napoleon’s lost freedom. If it refers to Napoleon, it suggests that he was never again free and could only join his comrades in death. Where Turner paints Napoleon’s sublime fall to the status of a prisoner interacting with a crustacean, Hayeur tellingly inverts this hierarchy. She delivers what Alexander Pope called

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bathos, the opposite of the sublime or an example of its failure, but nonetheless a profound and by definition earthly status. Though we could call her aqueous landscape anti-sublime and anti-picturesque, it is more importantly an image that inverts the human/non-human hierarchy. Limulus explores the ecosystem we see: it is literally a picture of the earth’s death. If her photograph were to be retitled “War: Limulus,” the conflict would be that defined by philosopher of science Michel Serres, who claimed in 1990 that there is a new “world war” that takes the material earth and all its inhabitants as the target of multiple hostilities.27 He is not alone in this view or in expressing it in terms of violent conflict. A more recent expression of the idea comes from the scholar and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who wrote in 2010: “When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits – limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.”28 Hayeur’s bathetic reversal in Limulus implores us to respond.

Notes Research funding for this essay was gratefully received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also wish to thank my student researchers at the University of Toronto – Jackson Davidow, Alyssa Kuhnert, Katie Lawson, and Devon Smither – as well as artists Isabelle Hayeur, Rúrí, and Mariele Neudecker for their help with this project. Special thanks to Jordan Bear, Mark Phillips, fellow participants, and our hosts at the Clark Art Institute symposium on history painting in 2015. 1 Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, offers a sophisticated survey of the genre. Recent reconsiderations of landscape in art history and adjacent areas include DeLue, Elkins, eds, Landscape Theory and Malpas, ed., The Place of Landscape, Dorrian, Rose, eds, Landscapes and Politics and most recently, Scott, Swenson, eds, Critical Landscapes. 2 See De Lue, George Inness and Rebecca Bedell, Anatomy of Nature. 3 Gremaud, “Power and Purity.” 4 For other artistic responses to this project, see Gremaud, “Power and Purity.” 5 Rúrí in Árnason, “Time,” 38. 6 “actor, actant: Actant is a term from semiotics covering both human and nonhumans; an actor is any entity that modifies another entity” (Latour, Politics of Nature, 237). 7 Carus, Nine Letters, 131. 8 A detailed account of this book is given by Bätschmann, who also supplies a detailed understanding of the debates around the landscape genre from the late seventeenth century to

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Carus’s time. On natural history and landscape depiction in Germany at this time, see Timothy Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 1770–1840. Nina Amstutz gives a compelling new reading of Carus’s significance to Friedrich’s painting. 9 The term was coined by the geologist Christian Keferstein, see Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus,” 40. 10 Ibid., 29–30. 11 John Ruskin, “Lectures on Landscape/Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871.” 12 The title of a lecture by Paul L. Sawyer at Cornell University, September 2012, was “The First Ecologist: John Ruskin and the Futures of Landscape.” http://www.cornell.edu/video/ the-first-ecologist-john-ruskin-and-the-futures-of-landscape. 13 My allusion is to the work of several contemporary scholars who argue that what eco art can best reveal is the earth’s ultimate unavailability to human perception, how the earth exceeds what we can perceive and retracts itself from us in its ineluctable difference. In The Ethics of Earth Art, Amanda Boetzkes develops this counter-intuitive move away from anthropomorphic intervention – away from the practical intercessions of land restoration in eco art, for example – via the recessionary aesthetic of philosophers John Sallis, Luce Irigaray, and Martin Heidegger. Her work also accords with the “object oriented ontology” of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton. 14 Hamilton, Turner, 355. 15 Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent, 103. 16 Phillips, “What is Tradition?,” 5. 17 Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, eds, A Keener Perception, 3. 18 Neudecker’s text is titled “Lamentations … or: the escape from the ‘grid,’” and functions as a commentary to the work There Is Always Something More Important, 2012, seen in the exhibition IM SCHEIN DES UNENDLICHEN : Romantik und Gegenwart/In the Limelight of the Infinite – Romanticism and the Present. Altana Kulturstiftung, 16 December 2012–24 February 2013. “Towards the Contemporary Sublime” is the title of a presentation she gave at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London 9 October 2012. 19 See http://katiepaterson.org/vatnajokull/. Accessed 18 April 2016. While the phone link is no longer active (leading to the thought that the glacier has disappeared), Paterson has placed a sound clip of her work on her website. 20 Maev Kennedy, “Callers Take Part in Art,” Guardian, 8 June 2007. Accessed 18 April 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jun/08/artnews.art. 21 Hayeur, “Artist Statement,” Green Museum. http://greenmuseum.org/content/artist_ content/ct_id-166__artist_id-101.html. 22 Quotations are from Hayeur’s website: http://isabelle hayeur.com/photos/underworld/ index_en.html. 23 Caroline Jones has explored the complex nature and import of horizons in the work of

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Olafur Eliasson. See Jones, http://arts.mit.edu/excerpt-from-event-horizon-olafureliassons-raumexperimente-by-caroline-a-jones/ for reference. 24 Communication with the author, 24 May 2016. My sincere thanks to Nicolas Bernier. 25 Smithson, Robert Smithson, 149. 26 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. XIII, 160. 27 Serres, The Natural Contract, 32. 28 Shiva, “Time to End War against the Earth,” http://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/ 11/07/time-end-war-against-earth. See also Rebecca Solnit, “Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence.” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/climate-changeviolence-occupy-earth.

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293

Contributors

tim barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He specializes in British and American art, and art and empire. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). Edited collections include Colonialism and the Object (1998), Frederic Leighton (1999), Art and the British Empire (2007), Writing the PreRaphaelites (2009), and Victorian Jamaica (2018). He was co-curator of American Sublime (2002), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica (2007), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (2012), Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (2018), and Picturesque and Sublime (2018). j o r da n b e a r is associate professor of the history of art at the University of Toronto. His scholarship has focused on the historical intersection of visual representation, knowledge, and belief. His recent book, Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer (Penn State University Press 2015), received the Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800. He is now at work on a study of exhibitions and visual communication in early nineteenth-century London. susanna caviglia is assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her research and publications focus on early modern European art and culture, with an emphasis on France and

Italy. Her current interests include an investigation into the genesis of rococo history painting, the theory and practice of drawing in early modern period, the body in art, and the cross-cultural relationships within the Mediterranean world. She is the author of Charles-Joseph Natoire (1700–1777) (2012), and her articles have appeared in Art History, Revue de l’art, and Gazette des Beaux-Arts, among others. m a r k a . c h e e t h a m is a professor of art history at the University of Toronto. Author of eight books and numerous articles on topics ranging from Immanuel Kant and art history to abstract art to postmodernism, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Cheetham’s current research focuses on ecological art and on the uses of analogy in art history. His book Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ’60s appeared in 2018. He recently curated an exhibition titled Struck by Likening: The Power and Pleasure of Artworld Analogies at the McMaster University Museum of Art. m ary k. c off ey is associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College. She publishes on Mexican muralism, the history of museum practice, exhibition politics, and the production, consumption, and circulation of Mexican folk art. Her book, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Duke 2012), won the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey prize for a distinguished book in art history. She is currently completing a book on José Clemente Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization.  de xte r da lwood is a British artist. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010 for his mid-career retrospective at Tate St Ives. He is currently a research professor of fine art at Bath Spa University. He is the artist trustee for the National Gallery and serves as the liaison trustee on Tate’s board. He is also a contributor to The Burlington Magazine. m ich ael g odby is emeritus professor of history of art at the University of Cape Town. He received his ba from Trinity College, Dublin, his ma from the University of Birmingham, and his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. He has published and lectured on early Renaissance art, English eighteenth-century art, nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African art, and the history of South African photography. In recent years, he has curated major exhibitions on aspects of South African art. He is currently preparing a collection of papers for a book on the history of photography in South Africa.

296

Contributors

elizabeth harney is associate professor teaching African arts at the University of Toronto. She is also a curator, and was the first curator of contemporary arts at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian. Harney is author of In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Duke 2004) and Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora (Philip Wilson/Smithsonian 2003), and co-editor of Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (5 Continents Press 2007) and Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Duke University Press 2018). Her current book, The RetroModern: Africa and the Time of the Contemporary, is forthcoming. s tuart lin go is associate professor and chair of the Division of Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle. His first book, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (Yale, 2008), explores late sixteenth-century negotiations between retrospection and innovative pictorial practice and reexamines period art criticism and theory to enable new readings of the cultural significance of stylistic choices. His current project, Bronzino’s Bodies and the Ends of Mannerism, investigates how we might reassess Mannerism and its unprecedented investment in the body and the nude. Lingo’s work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, by Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and by the Kress Foundation. james nisbe t is associate professor in the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He works on modern and contemporary art, with special interests in environmental history and the history of photography. Nisbet’s book, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, was published by mit Press in 2014. mark salber phillips is an intellectual historian who engages with questions of historical representation. He is the author of On Historical Distance (2013), which won the Canadian Historical Association’s Ferguson Prize, as well as Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (2000), The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Renaissance Florence (1987), and Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft (1974). He is currently writing a study of history painting in Britain. He teaches history at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Contributors

297

cy nthia ellen roman is curator of prints, drawings, and paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. She specializes in British art of the long eighteenth century. She co-curated the exhibition Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (2009–10, with Michael Snodin) and she shares with Snodin the Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award for the related publication, to which she also contributed the essay “The Art of Lady Diana Beauclerk: Horace Walpole and Female Genius.” Her more recent projects focus on graphic satire. She edited Hogarth’s Legacy (2016), writing an introduction titled “The Complexities of Hogarth’s Legacy” and the essay “Copying ‘The Sleeping Congregation’: Hogarthian Innovations and the Rise of Graphic Satire.”

298

Contributors

Index

Page numbers followed by “f” and “n” refer to illustrations and chapter endnotes, respectively. Abstract Expressionism, 155 abstraction: distance and, 11; Hoptman on, 247; Ligare, realism, and, 187; Mehretu and, 239–40, 246–7; Tillim and, 184–5 Academy, The (Monkman), 22 Academy of San Carlos, 163 Achilles and the Body of Patroclus (The Spoils of War) (Ligare), 183f, 199 Adoration of the Magi (Leonardo da Vinci), 39 affect: as distance, 10–11; transmission of, 261 Aglionby, William: definition of “history painting,” 7, 9, 20, 67–8 Alberti, Leon Battista: on historia, 27–8, 30–1, 37, 46; the human figure and, 31, 46n6; on invention, 71, 72–3, 80 Alfaro Siqueiros, David, 167 Alfred in the Neat Herd’s Cottage (Wilkie), 75–6, 84n20 allegory: eighteenth-century shift away from, 9, 12; Alberti’s historia and, 30; Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo and, 35, 39–40; dynastic, 69, 70, 82; Louis XIV and, 52;

narrowing distance between chronicle and, 235; Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization and, 174, 177; West’s discomfort with, 72 Allegory of Waterloo (Ward), 87–8 Allen, Siemon, 240 Allston, Washington: Belshazzar’s Feast, 135; Elijah in the Desert, 137 Anthropocene. See eco art, contemporary anti-colonial critique and decolonization, 21–4, 171–8, 242–6 Apollo and Daphne (Bernini), 228 Apotheosis of Hoche, The (Gillray), 106, 107f Archive: Endangered Waters (Rúrí), 255–7, 256f, 259, 260–1 Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up (Kentridge), 220 Aristotle, 215 Armenini, Giovanni Battista, 43 Artforum magazine, 182, 184 art of reference, Mannerist, 41–3 authenticity and authentication, 116–17, 120, 123–5 avant-gardes: history painting and, 153, 156, 189; Krauss on, 186; legibility and, 154; Mapplethorpe and, 199; Mexican muralism and, 169

Baldessari, John, 182–3; Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, 182 Bambach, Carmen, 48n33 Bandinelli, Baccio: Hercules and Cacus, 36 Bann, Stephen, 153 Barante, Prosper de, 125 Bar at the Folies-Bergère, A (Manet), 191 Baroque, 163 Barque of Dante, The (Delacroix), 14 Barrell, John, 91, 104 Barry, James: Burnet on, 78; Death of General Wolfe, 10, 71–2, 73f; King Lear, 144; Progress of Human Civilization cycle, 105; Progress of Human Culture and Knowledge cycle, 149 Barthes, Roland, 182, 187, 200 Bastide, Jean-François de: La Petite Maison, 55–61 Bätschmann, Oskar, 259, 270n8 Battle of Cascina cartoon (Michelangelo), 41 Baudelaire, Charles, 188 Bay of Pigs (Dalwood), 20, 21f Beckmann, Max, 16 beholding, 50–1 Belshazzar’s Feast (Allston), 135 Belshazzar’s Feast (Cole), 135 Belshazzar’s Feast (Martin), 135–6 Benjamin, Walter, 55, 56, 171, 174, 178–9, 238 Berkeley, George, 143–4 Bernier, Nicolas, 265 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo: Apollo and Daphne, 228; Ecstasy of St Theresa, 229, 231 Berthelemy, Jean-Simon, 57 Betty Ford Clinic (Dalwood), 20 Beuys, Joseph, 206–7, 211, 214n1; Erdtelephon (“Earth Telephone”), 263 Black Box (Kentridge), 219, 231 Blake, William: Book of Job, 174; Jerusalem, 144–5 Bloom, Doris, 224 Boase, T.S.R., 116 Boetzkes, Amanda, 271n13 Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards (Masquerier), 116–20 Book of Job (Blake), 174 Borghese gladiator, 133, 144, 147

300

Index

Borghini, Raffaello, 37–40 Boucher, François: in Bastide’s La Petite Maison, 56; Jupiter and Callisto, 54f; Pygmalion and Galatea, 62; Sleep of Venus theme and, 64n5; The Toilet of Venus, 59–60, 60f; Venus at Her Bath, 66n29 Bowyer, Robert, 102, 103 Boydell, John, 94, 102–6 Boyne, John: General Blackbeard Wounded at the Battle of Leadenhall, 98, 99f Braddock, Alan C., 261 Braudel, Fernand, 249 Brennan, Teresa, 261 Brighton Bomb, The (Dalwood), 20 Brontë, Patrick, 136 Bronzino, Agnolo: “Il pennello,” 43; The Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, 35–46, 36f, 38f; The Martyrdom of San Lorenzo figure study, 45f Brown, Ford Madox: The Last of England, 23f, 24–5 Bruno, Giordano, 227 Bryson, Norman, 191 Bullock, William, 87, 123–5 Bunbury, William Henry, 101 Burke, Edmund, 260 Burnet, John, 76, 77–9, 84n23 Byron, Lord, 15, 143 Café Deutschland I (Immendorff), 207–8, 208f Café Deutschland series (Immendorff), 207–9 Caffe Greco (Guttuso), 207, 214n2 Campbell, Stephen, 48n25 Campidoglio (Michelangelo), 221 Caprichos, Los (Goya), 225, 226 Caravaggio: Death of the Virgin, 3, 4f, 227; Self Portrait as Bacchus (Sick Bacchus), 192 Carlisle, Anthony, 269 Carracci, Annibale, 101 Carus, Carl Gustav, 255, 257–61 Castaway (Hayeur), 265–6 Castiglione, Baldassare, 224 Celan, Paul, 17 Certeau, Michel de, 189 Césaire, Aimé, 242 Challe, Charles-Michel-Ange, 57, 62

Charles IV, 163 Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, The (Wilkie), 13–14, 13f, 76–7, 78–82 Chevrier, Jean-Francois, 190 Chicago, Judy: The Dinner Party, 6, 19–20, 19f Chipp, Herschel, 25n1 Christopher Columbus (Wilkie), 79 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 31, 227–8, 231 Citizen, The (Hamilton), 205, 205f, 211–14 Clark, T.J., 154, 191 classicism, 183–4, 197–8, 235. See also neoclassicism Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 52 Cole, Michael, 49n37 Cole, Thomas: background, 133; Belshazzar’s Feast, 135; The Course of Empire cycle, 142–9; The Course of Empire: The Arcadian, or Pastoral State, 144–5; The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 145–7, 145f; The Course of Empire: Desolation, 148f; The Course of Empire: Destruction, 147f; The Course of Empire: The Savage State, 144; European tour, 138–41; The Garden of Eden, 137–8; historical landscape and, 136–7, 149; history painting and, 131–2; industrialization and, 133, 141–2; Ruth and Boaz, 135 collectors of satire prints, 103–4 commercial markets. See marketplace conceptualism: avant-garde and, 186; Baldessari, 182–3; Ligare, 182–90; Mapplethorpe, 197–200; October journal and, 186; Tillim’s “Notes on Narrative and History Painting,” 184–7; Wall, 190–7 Conjured Parts (eye): Ferguson (Mehretu), 236f Connoisseurs Examining a Collection of George Morland’s (Gillray), 102–3 Conrad, Tony, 188–90 Consequences of a Successful French Invasion (Gillray), 106 Constable, John: Cole and, 139–41; eco art and, 255; Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames – Morning after a Stormy Night, 139, 140f, 148; landscape genre and, 132 Constructivism, Russian, 248 contemporary history painting: Doagh, 209–11;

embedded references and, 204–6; Hamilton, 205, 211–14; Immendorff, 206–9; shift from power depiction to subjective approach, 214; traditional history painting vs, 206. See also eco art, contemporary Copley, John Singleton: The Death of Major Peirson, 70, 97; The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 97; Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, 70 Cordero, Juan, 163 Cornaro, Luigi, 34 Cornyn, John Hubert: The Song of Quetzalcoatl, 174 Cortés, Hernán, 162, 164, 173 Cotter’s Saturday Night, The (Wilkie), 14 Course of Empire: The Arcadian, or Pastoral State (Cole), 144–5 Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire (Cole), 145–7, 145f Course of Empire: Desolation (Cole), 148, 148f Course of Empire: Destruction (Cole), 147–8, 147f Course of Empire: The Savage State (Cole), 144 Creation of Adam (Michelangelo), 40–1 Crimp, Douglas, 155 Crow, Thomas, 115, 191, 201n29 Cruikshank, George: Escape of Buonaparte from Elba, 113, 113f Cunningham, Allan, 76, 77, 79–82 Daddies, The (Monkman), 22 Dahl, Johan Christian, 261 Dalrymple, John, 106 Dalwood, Dexter, 20–1; Bay of Pigs, 20, 21f; Betty Ford Clinic, 20; The Brighton Bomb, 20; Nixon’s Departure, 20; The Poll Tax Riots, 20 Dandré-Bardon, Michel-François, 65n6 Danto, Arthur, 197–8 David (Michelangelo), 36–7 David, Jacques-Louis, 116, 189 da Vinci, Leonardo. See Leonardo da Vinci Day (Michelangelo), 43 Death in Absentia (Hayeur), 265 Death of General Wolfe (Barry), 10, 71–2, 73f Death of General Wolfe, The (West), 9f; Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People

Index

301

compared to, 16; distance and distances in, 71–4; embedded references and, 205; Gillray’s parody and, 91, 96–8, 100–3; impact of, 9–10; Monkman’s The Academy and, 22; Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners compared to, 14; Woollett’s engraving of, 93, 94f, 97. See also Death of the Great Wolf (Gillray) Death of Germanicus, The (Poussin), 8f Death of Major Peirson, The (Copley), 70, 97 Death of Sardanapulus (Delacroix), 15, 190–1 Death of the Earl of Chatham, The (Copley), 97 Death of the Great Wolf (Gillray), 88, 91, 93f, 95, 98, 100–3, 108 Death of the Virgin (Caravaggio), 3, 4f, 227 Death of the Virgin (after Caravaggio) (Monkman), 3, 5f, 23 Death of Wolfe, The (Woollett), 93, 94f, 97 Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, The (Turner), 139 decolonization and anti-colonial critique, 21– 4, 171–8, 242–6 Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar (Copley), 70 déjeuner sur l’herbe, Le (Manet), 191 Delacroix, Eugène: The Barque of Dante, 14; Death of Sardanapulus, 15, 190–1; The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero, 15; history painting and, 14–16; Liberty Leading the People, 3, 15–16, 15f; The Massacre at Chios, 14; Mehretu and, 235; Third of May, 14 Deleuze, Gilles, 188–9 Destroyed Room, The (Wall), 190 deterritorialization, 188 dialectics, figural, 171–2 Diana and Endymion (Lagrenée), 54f, 55 Dias, Rosie, 105 Diatribe (Wall), 202n34 Díaz, Porfirio, 164 Diderot, Denis, 55 Dido Building Carthage (Turner), 139, 146 Dinner Party, The (Chicago), 6, 19–20, 19f Dirlik, Arif, 242 Disasters of War series (Goya), 225 discours vs histoire, 125

302

Index

distance and redistancing: allegorical, 235; change in history and distance, 68, 82; form, affect, summoning, and intelligibility as distances, 10–11; historical knowledge and, 115– 16; mediated visual experience of history and, 88; proximity and, 115–16, 118–20; redistancing, 7, 10, 12, 90–1; relational, 10–11, 83n3; Richter’s “blurring” as, 18; technological innovation and, 126–8; West and distance of country, 71. See also Napoleon, exile, and distance Dix, Otto, 208 Doig, Peter, 20 Dolce Vita, La (Fellini), 231 Donagh, Rita: about, 209; Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970, 209–11, 210f Donald, Diana, 108 Doni, Anton Francesco, 48n26 Donkey, The (Thomas), 230 “Drawings for Projection” (Kentridge), 219 dreams and temporality, 53–5 Du Bos, abbé, 61 Duchamp, Marcel, 187 Dughet, Gaspard, 150n24 Duncanson, Robert Scott, 138 Durán, Diego, 174 Duve, Thierry de, 202n32 “earth death pictures.” See eco art, contemporary “earth life pictures,” 257–61 eco art, contemporary: Carus’s “earth life pictures” and, 257–61; Hayeur, 264–70; history painting, landscape genre, and, 254–5; Neudecker, 261–3; Paterson, 263–4; Rúrí, 255–7 Ecstasy of St Theresa (Bernini), 229, 231 Egyptian Hall, 87, 123–5 Eleey, Peter, 234–5, 238 elevation: nineteenth century and, 12; assumption of, 29–30; Chicago’s The Dinner Party and, 19–20; as deep understanding, 25; the popular, balance with, 89; position of privilege, 6–7; West vs Wilkie and historical faith-

fulness vs, 74; Wilkie’s Alfred in the Neat Herd’s Cottage and, 76 Elijah in the Desert (Allston), 137 Eliot, T.S., 214 embedded references, 204–6 Endymion (Wieland), 55 Epic of American Civilization (Orozco), 160–2, 161f, 171–9, 174–7f Epigraph, Damascus (Mehretu), 237f Epochs of the Arts (Hoare), 12 Erdtelephon (“Earth Telephone”) (Beuys), 263 Escape of Buonaparte from Elba (Cruikshank), 113, 113f Ethiopia Fragment (Mehretu), 248f Eviction, An (Wall), 192–6, 193f Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero, The (Delacroix), 15 Execution of Torrijos and His Companions, The (Gisbert), 22f, 23–4 exile. See Napoleon, exile, and distance Expressionism, Abstract, 155 Expressionism, German, 208 eyewitnessing, Whately’s response to Hume on, 120–2 Fallacies of Hope, The (Turner), 269 Fanon, Frantz, 242, 245, 246 fantasia, 39 Félibien, André, 7–8 Felix in Exile (Kentridge), 229 Fellini, Federico, 231 Female Torso (Mapplethorpe), 198 Ferrari, Ettore, 233n23 figural dialectics, 171–2 figures, human: as God’s supreme creation, 31–2; Michelangelo and, 34; narrative vs, 27–8, 31–4, 41. See also Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, The (Bronzino) Finn MacCool (Hamilton), 213f Folgarait, Leonard, 169 Fordham, Douglas, 91, 96, 98–100 400 Thousand Generations (Neudecker), 263 Freid, Michael, 190 French Rococo. See Rococo history painting

Fried, Michael, 155, 191 Friedrich, Caspar David, 255, 257, 261 Frith, William Powell: Railway Station, 76; Ramsgate Sands, 76 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 3 Gainsborough, Thomas, 132 Gamio, Manuel, 173 Garden of Eden, The (Cole), 137–8 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 228 General Blackbeard Wounded at the Battle of Leadenhall (Boyne), 98, 99f Genlis, Madame de, 63–4 genres, hierarchy of, 8, 156 George III, 103, 105 German Expressionism, 208 ghosting, 247 Gibbon, Edward, 139, 143 Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, 34, 35, 38, 44–6, 47n19 Gillray, James: The Apotheosis of Hoche, 106, 107f; Connoisseurs Examining a Collection of George Morland’s, 102–3; Consequences of a Successful French Invasion, 106; The Death of the Great Wolf, 88, 91, 93f, 95, 98, 100–3, 108; failure to achieve engraving commissions, 94–5; genres elided by, 108; marketplace and, 88; Royal Academy and turn to satire, 92–5; Sin, Death and the Devil, 108; Le Triomphe de la Liberté en l’élargissement de la Bastille, 106; Very Slippy Weather, 102–3 Giorgione: The Three Philosophers, 39, 40f Giotto, 29 Girodet, Anne-Louis, 65n6 Gisbert Pérez, Antonio: The Execution of Torrijos and His Companions, 22f, 23–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 64 González-Mello, Renato, 166, 174, 180n11 Goodrich, Samuel Griswold: Lives of Celebrated American Indians, 174 Goya, Francisco: Los Caprichos, 225, 226; Disasters of War series, 225 Grafton, Anthony, 30–1 Green, David, 240 Greenberg, Clement, 156

Index

303

Greenough, Horatio, 141 Guattari, Félix, 188–9 Guernica (Picasso), 3, 25n1 Guerrier philosophe, Le (Jourdan), 51, 52–3 Guttuso, Renato: Caffe Greco, 207, 214n2 Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames – Morning after a Stormy Night (Constable), 139, 140f, 148 Hamilton, Emma, Lady, 64 Hamilton, James, 260 Hamilton, Richard: The Citizen, 205, 205f, 211–14; Finn MacCool, 212, 213f Harris, Jonathan, 154 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 84n21, 85n36, 269; Napoleon Musing at St Helena, 112–13, 112f; Wellington Musing on the Field of Waterloo, 128 Hayeur, Isabelle: Castaway, 265–6; Death in Absentia, 265; Limulus, 266–7f, 267–70; Model Homes series, 264; Substances, 264–5; Underworld series, 264 Haywood, Ian, 108 Hazlitt, William, 132 Hegel, G.W.F., 171 Hellman, Mimi, 58–9 Henri IV Surprised by the Spanish Ambassador While Playing with His Children (Ingres), 118 Hercules and Cacus (Bandinelli), 36 heroic figures: Borghese gladiator, 133, 144, 147; Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo and, 41, 43; canonization of origins, 7; French political ideology and, 50; Gillray and, 95, 100– 1; Hamilton and, 212; Izaguirre and, 164; in Lamenti, 224; Myrone on, 91; Vivant Denon’s Point de lendemain, 57–8; West and, 70–2, 95– 7; Wind on, 70 Hill Draper, 92, 94 histoire vs discours, 125 historia/istoria: Aglionby and, 67–8; Alberti on, 27–8, 30–1, 37; Reynolds on “Great Style” and, 69–70 historical landscape genre, 137 Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (Whately), 120–2

304

Index

historicism: Benjamin’s “now time” and, 179; Delacroix and, 16; distance and, 88; embrace of, 12; Mehretu and, 235; Mexican, 162, 171; Wall, Krauss, and, 191 History of Mexico (Rivera), 162, 167–71, 168f, 170f History of the Main Complaint (Kentridge), 224 history painting: nineteenth-century revisions of, 12–16; twentieth-century modernism and, 16; Aglionby’s definition of, 7, 9, 20, 67– 8; contemporary revival in Keifer, Richter, Chicago, Dalwood, and Monkman, 16–23; dialectic between satire and, 92–3, 108; as genre, 6–10; modernism accounts and, 153– 4; modernist period and, 154; narrative vs human figure in, 27–8; persistence of, 3–6; relational distance and, 10–11; Renaissance and assumptions of, 29–30; Reynolds’s “Great Style” and, 69–70; secular nationalism, historicism, and, 12; Wind on revolution of, 95–6. See also specific artists and themes Hoare, Prince, 12 Hockney, David, 20 Hogarth, William, 74, 92; Pool of Bethesda, 14 Hollanda, Francisco de, 31 Homer, 214 Hoock, Holger, 91 Horace, 232 Hornn, Jean, 123–5 Hughes, Robert, 25n1 Hugo, Victor, 128–9 Humboldt, Alexander von, 257, 259 Hume, David, 82, 115, 120–1 Humphrey, Hannah, 102, 103, 106 Hutcheon, Linda, 244 If We Ever Get to Heaven (Kentridge), 221 Immendorff, Jörg: about, 206–7; Café Deutschland I, 207–8, 208f; Café Deutschland series, 207–9; “Lidl,” 207; “Where do you stand with your art, comrade?,” 207 Impressionism, 17, 165 indeterminacy, 39–40 industrialization, 133, 141–2, 259 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique: Henri IV

Surprised by the Spanish Ambassador While Playing with His Children, 118 invention: Alberti on, 71, 72–3, 80; West’s Death of General Wolfe and, 71 Irmscher, Christoph, 261 ironization, 44, 48n35 Iron Path (Kiefer), 17, 17f Isaiah (Michelangelo), 32 Izaguirre, Leandro: The Torture of Cuauhtémoc, 164, 165f Jackson, Andrew, 142 James, C.L.R., 242 Jeremiah (Michelangelo), 229–30 Jerusalem (Blake), 144–5 Jones, Caroline, 271n23 Jones, Kristin, 216 Joseph, Branden, 188–9 Jourdan, Jean-Baptiste: Le Guerrier philosophe, 50, 52–3 Joyce, James, 212 Jupiter and Callisto (Boucher), 54f Kafka, Franz, 188 Katz, Jonathan, 198 Ken and Lydia and Tyler (Mapplethorpe), 198, 199, 199f Kentridge, William: anti-colonial critique and, 21; Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, 220; Black Box, 219, 231; “Drawings for Projection,” 219; Felix in Exile, 229; history as “unwritten,” 232; History of the Main Complaint, 224; If We Ever Get to Heaven, 221; Memory and Geography (with Bloom), 224; Monument, 220; Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, 224; Shadow Procession, 220; Smoke, Ashes, Fable, 221–3; Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, 220; visual images, understanding of, 230–1; William Kentridge: Triumphs and Laments (video), 216–17. See also Triumphs and Laments (Kentridge) Key to Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards (Turner), 119f Khanna, Ranjana, 177–8 Kiefer, Anselm, 17–18; Iron Path, 17, 17f

kineasthetic modernism, 166 King Lear (Barry), 144 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 208 Krauss, Rosalind, 186, 191 Kruger, Barbara, 196 Labbie, Erin Felicia, 50 Lagrenée, Louis-Jean-François: Diana and Endymion, 54f, 55; Pygmalion theme and, 66n38 Lam, Wilfredo, 21 Lamenti, Baroque, 224 landscape genre. See Cole, Thomas; eco art, contemporary Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (Poussin), 193–4 Landscape with Diogenes (Poussin), 194–5 Landscape with Diogenes Throwing Away His Bowl (Ligare), 195–6, 196f Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (Poussin), 194–5, 194f Laocoön (Monkman), 22 Last Judgment, The (Michelangelo), 32–5, 33f, 41, 45, 106 Last of England, The (Brown), 23f, 24–5 Lawler, Louise, 196 Lawrence, Jacob, 21 Leader of the Luddites, The (“An Officer”), 133, 134f Le Brun, Charles, 52 Lemoyne, François, 62 Leonardo da Vinci: Adoration of the Magi, 39 Letter of Introduction, The (Wilkie), 14 Levine, Sherrie, 186 Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix), 3, 15–16, 15f “Lidl” (Immendorff), 207 Ligare, David: Achilles and the Body of Patroclus (The Spoils of War), 183f, 199; classicism and, 183–4; history painting, conceptualism, and, 182–7, 190, 196–7, 200; Landscape with Diogenes Throwing Away His Bowl, 195–6, 196f; Mapplethorpe compared to, 199–200; as “minor artist” and tactical approach of,

Index

305

188–90; Naxos (Thrown Drapery), 185f; photography in process of, 201n25; Poussin compared to, 195–6, 202n37; Thrown Drapery series, 183–4, 187; Wall compared to, 191–2 Limulus (Hayeur), 266–7f, 267–70 Lingo, Stuart, 27 linguistic turn, 157 Lippi, Filippino, 228 Liverpool, Robert Jenkinson, Lord, 112–13 Lives of Celebrated American Indians (Goodrich), 174 Looking Back to a Bright New Future (Mehretu), 243, 243f Lorrain, Claude: Cole and, 138–9; historical landscape genre and, 137; Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 138, 146 Louis XIV, 50, 52 Louis XV, 50, 52 Lucas Cranach the Elder, 226 Ludd, Ned, 133, 147 Luddism, 133, 147–8 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 36–7 Mackenthun, Gesa, 162, 173 Madame Tussaud’s, 126–8 Manet, Edouard, 154, 197; A Bar at the FoliesBergère, 191; Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 191; Olympia, 191 Mannerism: art of reference, 41–3; human figure vs narrative in, 27, 34; liberty of the body, 35; Mapplethorpe and, 203n43 Mantegna, Andrea, 221 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 187, 197–200; Female Torso, 198; Ken and Lydia and Tyler, 198, 199, 199f; The Perfect Moment exhibition, 197–8; Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition exhibition, 203n43 Marcus Aurelius, 221–3 marketplace: commercial entertainments, 87; history painting–satire dialectic and, 92–3, 108; national identity and, 104–6; print shops and collectors, 101–4; shift toward, 87–8 Martel, James, 179 Martin, John: Belshazzar’s Feast, 135–6

306

Index

Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, The (Bronzino), 36f, 38f; active body, power of art, and, 39–46; critiques of, 35, 37–40, 44–6; Mannerist “art of reference” and, 41–3; nudity and political subversions in, 35–8; Tiber river-god figure study, 43–4, 45f Marx, Karl, 169, 171, 172, 180 Masini, Girolamo, 233n23 Masquerier, John James: Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards, 116–20 Massacre at Chios, The (Delacroix), 14 Mehretu, Julie: about, 234–5, 238–9; “chronopolitical acts,” 234; Conjured Parts (eye): Ferguson, 236f; decolonization and postcolonialism, 238, 242–6; drawing practices and mark-making of, 239–40, 248; Epigraph, Damascus, 237f; Ethiopia Fragment, 248f; figuration and abstraction, 246–8; Looking Back to a Bright New Future, 243, 243f; Mogamma: A Painting in 4 Parts, 241–2; Mural, 249–51, 250–1f; patronage, politics, and publics, 249–51; public address and, 240–1; spatial dynamics, 245–6; Transcending: The New International, 243–4, 244f Memory and Geography (Kentridge and Bloom), 224 Mercer, Kobena, 198 Mexican muralism: the academy, history painting, nation-formation, and, 163–6; figural dialectics and decolonial critique of history, 171–8; history painting and, 154–5; “Mexican Mural Renaissance,” 167; Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization, 160–2, 161f, 171–9, 174–7f; Orozco’s Modern Industrial Man, 160, 179–80; post-revolutionary state and the historicist turn, 166–71; Rivera’s History of Mexico, 162, 167–71, 168f, 170f Meyer, Richard, 198 Michelangelo: Armenini on, 43; Battle of Cascina cartoon, 41; Bronzino and, 35–7, 39; Campidoglio, 221; circle of, 30; Creation of Adam, 40–1; David, 36–7; Day, 43; ironization and, 48n35; Isaiah, 32; Jeremiah, 229– 30; The Last Judgment, 32–5, 33f, 41, 45, 106

Michelet, Jules, 125 Michelson, Annette, 186 Mignolo, Walter, 180n4 “minor artists,” 188–90 Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (Monkman), 22 Mitchell, W.J.T., 56 Model Homes series (Hayeur), 264 Modern Industrial Man (Orozco), 160, 179–80 modernism: kineasthetic, 166; legibility vs opacity and, 154; Ligare on, 184; Orozco on history painting and, 165–6; zero-sum position with history painting, 153–4. See also conceptualism; Mexican muralism Mogamma: A Painting in 4 Parts (Mehretu), 241–2 Mola, Francesco, 138 Monkman, Kent, 21–4; The Academy, 22; The Daddies, 22; Death of the Virgin (after Caravaggio), 3, 5f, 23; Laocoön, 22; Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, 22; The Scream, 22 Monteverdi, Claudio, 224 Monument (Kentridge), 220 Moore, Henry, 16 Morbiducci, Publio, 227 Mural (Mehretu), 250–1f muralism. See Mexican muralism; Triumphs and Laments (Kentridge) Myrone, Martin, 91, 96 Nagel, Alexander, 39 Napoleon, exile, and distance: counterfeits texts, 121; Cruikshank’s Escape of Buonaparte from Elba, 113, 113f; exile and absence, 111–13; Haydon’s Napoleon Musing at St Helena, 112– 13, 112f; Haydon’s Wellington Musing on the Field of Waterloo, 128; historical knowledge and proximity, 115–16; Masquerier’s Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards and corporeal engagement, 116–20; memoirs of Napoleon, 117–18; photography, wax, and Sugimoto’s Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, 125–8, 127f; Protean Views, 113, 114f; Turner’s War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 1842, 267–9, 268f; visual inaccessi-

bility, skepticism, and Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, 120–2; witness authentication and Napoleon’s carriage in London, 122–5 Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington (Sugimoto), 126–8, 127f Napoleon Musing at St Helena (Haydon), 112–13, 112f Napoleon on Elba (Protean Views), 114f narrative: figure vs, 27–8, 31–4, 41; Mannerism and subordination of, 27, 34; nudity, indeterminacy, fantasia, art, and poetics over, 44–5 Nash, John, 146 Nash, Paul, 16 Natale, Simone, 126 national identity: British, 104–6, 108; Mexican, 164, 167, 177–8; secular nationalism, 12 Natoire, Charles-Joseph, 59 Naxos (Thrown Drapery) (Ligare), 185f neoclassicism: Burnet on Wilkie and, 77, 78, 82; as continuity with history painting, 16; New Spain and Baroque vs, 163; West’s modification of, 70. See also classicism Neudecker, Mariele: 400 Thousand Generations, 263; Over and Over, Again and Again, 261–2, 262f; There Is Always Something More Important, 263 Newsmongers (Wilkie), 81 Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (Carus), 257–61 Nixon’s Departure (Dalwood), 20 No Mercy to Captives Before Quebec (Townshend), 97, 99f non-composition, 182, 200n4 Northcote, James, 106 nostalgia, 244–5 “Notes on Narrative and History Painting” (Tillim), 184–7 nudity in Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, critique of, 35–7 October journal, 186 Olympia (Manet), 191 Orozco, José Clemente: Epic of American

Index

307

Civilization, 160–2, 161f, 171–9, 174–7f; Modern Industrial Man, 160, 179–80; on modernism and history painting, 165–6; patronage and, 167 Over and Over, Again and Again (Neudecker), 261–2, 262f Ovid, 194, 233n24 Parker, Deborah, 48n32 Pascoe, Judith, 123 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 229 Paterson, Katie: Vatnajökull (the sound of), 263–4 patronage, 87, 105, 167, 249–51 Peace: Burial at Sea (Turner), 269 Penck, A.R., 207 Penny Wedding, The (Wilkie), 81 Pericolo, Lorenzo, 46n6 Phillips, Mark Salber, 90–1, 115, 261 photography: distance and, 126–8; Hayeur, 264–70; Ligare and, 201n25; Mapplethorpe, 197–200; migration of history painting into, 156; Wall, 190–7 Picasso, Pablo, 16; Guernica, 3, 25n1 Pichot, Joseph Jean, 136 Picture for Women (Wall), 191 “Pictures,” 155 Pictures Generation, 196–7 Pierre, Jean-Baptiste-Marie, 56 pièta form, 9, 72, 96, 98, 100 Pitlessie Fair (Wilkie), 80 Pliny the Elder, 230, 233n27 Plutarch, 215 Point de lendemain (Vivant Denon), 57–8 Polke, Sigmar, 207 Poll Tax Riots, The (Dalwood), 20 Pomata, Gianna, 125 Pompadour, Madame de, 59–60 Pontormo, Jacopo: Venus and Cupid, 40–1, 42f, 44 Pool of Bethesda (Hogarth), 14 Pope, Alexander, 269–70 post-Impressionism, 165 postmodernism, 155, 156, 186, 244

308

Index

Pound, Ezra, 214 Poussin, Nicholas: Cole and, 138; The Death of Germanicus, 8f; history painting, sovereignty, and, 189; Jupiter and Antiope, 57; Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 193–4; Landscape with Diogenes, 194–5; Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, 194–5, 194f; perfections of, 7; Wall, Ligare, and, 192–7, 202n34, 202n37 Preaching of John Knox Before the Lords of the Congregation (Wilkie), 14, 79–82 Prince, Richard, 196 print market: commercial shops and collectors, 101–4; historical narrative, British national identity, and, 104–6; history painting– satire dialectic and, 92–3, 108. See also satire and caricature Progress of Human Civilization cycle (Barry), 105 Progress of Human Culture and Knowledge cycle (Barry), 149 Protean Views, 113, 114f Puttfarken, Thomas, 46n6, 47n8 Pygmalion and Galatea (Boucher), 62 Pygmalion and Galatea (Regnault), 62, 62f Pygmalion myth, 61–3 Quetzalcoatl myth: Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization and, 160–2, 171–8; Rivera’s History of Mexico and, 169–71 Railway Station (Frith), 76 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 162 Ramsgate Sands (Frith), 76 Raoux, Jean, 61–2 Raphael, 29, 32; Stanza della Segnatura, 45–6 Rauschenberg, Robert, 247 Readymades, 184 realism: Brown’s Last of England and, 24; Ligare on, 184, 187, 197; Social Realism, 248; Sugimoto’s Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and, 126; Wilkie and, 82 Recruiting Serjeant or Britain’s Happy Prospect, The (Townshend), 98 Reed, Luman, 144

references, embedded, 204–6 Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970 (Donagh), 209–11, 210f Regnault, Jean-Baptiste: Pygmalion and Galatea, 62, 62f religious iconography: canonization of origins, 7; critiques of Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo and, 38–40; embedded references and, 205; Gillray’s satire and, 100; Hamilton and, 205; Judeo-Christian time and understanding of history, 162; national identity vs, 12; Orozco and, 173, 178–9; pièta form, 9, 72, 96, 98, 100; Puritan Britain vs Catholic Europe and, 74; West’s Death of General Wolfe and, 9, 71–2 repetition, generic, 155 reportage: allegory and, 237; contemporary history painting and, 206; engravings and, 97; Gillray and, 93, 98; grand style vs, 95–6; painting as medium beyond, 156–7; West and, 100, 103, 108 Reynolds, Joshua: Allston and, 135; Boydell and, 105; Discourses, 135; Gillray and, 92; on Hogarth, 92; on invention, 73; national concerns and, 104; Royal Academy and, 132; West, neoclassical history painting, and, 69– 70; West’s Death of General Wolfe and, 74 Richter, Gerhard, 17–19, 207; Uncle Rudi, 17, 18f Riposo, Il (Borghini), 37–40 Ritorno d’Ulisse, Il (Kentridge), 224 Rivera, Diego: anti-colonial critique and, 21; History of Mexico, 162, 167–71, 168f, 170f; history painting and, 16; patronage and, 167 Rococo history painting: “beholding” and, 51– 2; illusion and intersubjectivity, 58–63; inactivity, seduction, and ecstasy, 56–8; progression from Louis IV to Regency to Louis XV, 50–2; shift from passive viewer to active beholder, 52–6; tableaux vivants and, 63–4 Roma, Citta Aperta (Rossellini), 229 Romanticism: Cole and Romantic pessimism, 143; Cole’s Course of Empire and, 144–5; collecting and, 123; Cunningham on Wilkie and, 77, 80, 82; Delacroix and, 14, 190–1; German

landscape traditions, 261; historiography and, 125, 132 Roman Triumphs. See Triumphs and Laments (Kentridge) Rosa, Salvator, 137, 138 Rosenberg, Harold, 155 Rossellini, Roberto: Roma, Citta Aperta, 229 Rowlandson, Thomas, 101 Royal Academy of Arts: Boydell and, 105; Burnet and, 78; Carlisle and, 269; Cole and, 139; engravers excluded from, 90; Gillray and, 92–3, 95, 101–3, 108; Neudecker and, 263; Reynolds and, 69, 78, 132; Turner and, 137; West and, 69, 73, 74 Rúrí: Archive: Endangered Waters, 255–7, 256f, 259, 260–1 Ruskin, John, 25, 255, 259, 269 Russian Constructivism, 248 Rutelli, Mario, 224 Ruth and Boaz (Cole), 135 Sacconi, Giuseppe, 223 satire and caricature: context, 90–1; dialectic between history painting and, 92–3, 108; Gillray’s Apotheosis of Hoche, 106, 107f; Gillray’s Death of the Great Wolf, 88, 91, 93f, 95, 98, 100–3, 108; Gillray’s turn to, 92–5; historical narrative, British national identity, and, 104–6; Machiavelli and, 36–7; print shops and collectors, 101–4; revolution of history painting and reform of, 95–100 Savonarola, Girolamo, 48n23 Scott, David, 245 Scottish Enlightenment, 82–3 Scream, The (Monkman), 22 Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (Lorrain), 138, 146 Seddon, Peter, 240 Self Portrait as Bacchus (Sick Bacchus) (Caravaggio), 192 Sernini, Nino, 32–4 Serres, Michel, 270 Shadow Procession (Kentridge), 220 Shahn, Ben, 248

Index

309

Shearman, John, 47n12 Sherman, Cindy, 191–2, 196, 197, 200; Untitled #199, 192; Untitled Film Stills, 191 Shonibara, Yinka, 21 Sin, Death and the Devil (Gillray), 108 Situationist tactics, 241 Slade School of Art history painting prize, 204 Smillie, James, 138 Smith, John Thomas, 88 Smithson, Robert, 266–7 Smoke, Ashes, Fable (Kentridge), 221–3 Sneyd, John, 102–3, 106 Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (Turner), 139, 140f, 146, 259–60, 269 Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (Kentridge), 220 Social Realism, 248 Solkin, David, 91 Solnit, Rebecca, 260 Somerville, Mary, 260 Song of Quetzalcoatl, The (Cornyn), 174 sound in eco art, 255, 263–4, 265 Stallabrass, Julian, 192 Stanza della Segnatura (Raphael), 45–6 Steiner, Uwe, 178 Stereo (Wall), 191 Stoichita, Victor, 61, 62 Storyteller, The (Wall), 191 Strange, Robert, 94 Stuart, James, 146 Substances (Hayeur), 264–5 Sugimoto, Hiroshi: Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, 126–8, 127f Surrealism, 184 Symbolism, 165 Tabacchi, Odoardo, 233n23 tableaux vivants, 63–4 Taylor, David Francis, 103 Taylor, Tom, 85n36 Terry-Fritsch, Allie, 50 Tevereterno, 216 There Is Always Something More Important (Neudecker), 263

310

Index

Third of May (Delacroix), 14 Thomas, A.J.B.: The Donkey, 230 Thoreau, Henry, 209–11 Three Philosophers, The (Giorgione), 39, 40f Thrown Drapery series (Ligare), 183–4, 185f, 187 Tillim, Sidney, 184–7 Titian, 227 Toilet of Venus, The (Boucher), 59–60, 60f Tomkins, Calvin, 251 Torture of Cuauhtémoc, The (Izaguirre), 164, 165f Townshend, George: No Mercy to Captives Before Quebec, 97, 99f; The Recruiting Serjeant or Britain’s Happy Prospect, 98; satire and, 97–8 Transcending: The New International (Mehretu), 243–4, 244f Triomphe de la Liberté en l’élargissement de la Bastille, Le (Gillray), 106 Triumphs and Laments (Kentridge), 216f; commission, 215–16; directional movement in, 217–18; drawing style, 224–5; equestrian monument caricatures, 223–4; history as “unwritten,” 232; inauguration of, 215; Jeremiah and Jewish persecution theme, 229–30; Lament theme, 224–30; Marcus Aurelius, 221–3; medieval-period images and reformers, 226–7; openness and ambiguities, 219, 232; Papal Ass, 225f, 226; procession motif, 220–1; Roman classical precedent and, 217– 18; skeletal horses, 222f, 223; Triumph of Death, 228f, 231; violent death sequence, 227–9; visual images, understanding of, 230– 1; William Kentridge: Triumphs and Laments (video), 216–17; Winged Victory, 217–18, 217f Truettner, William, 131 Tuckerman, Henry H., 131 Turner, Charles: Key to Bonaparte Reviewing the Consular Guards, 119f, 120 Turner, Joseph Mallord William: Carus and, 259; Cole and, 143; The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, 139; Dido Building Carthage, 139, 146; eco art and, 255; The Fallacies of Hope, 269; Hayeur and, 266–70; historical landscape and, 137; landscape genre and, 132; Peace: Burial at Sea, 269; Snow

Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, 139, 140f, 146, 259–60, 269; War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 1842, 267–9, 268f Tussaud, Joseph, 127–8 Uberti, Fazio degli, 226 Uncle Rudi (Richter), 17, 18f Underworld series (Hayeur), 264 Untitled #199 (Sherman), 192 Untitled Film Stills (Sherman), 191 Van Dyck, Anthony: Jupiter and Antiope, 57 Van Loo, Carle, 57, 59 Van Loo, Jean-Baptiste, 65n6 Varchi, Benedetto, 44 Vasari, Giorgio, 32, 34, 35 Vatnajökull (the sound of) (Paterson), 263–4 Veder, Robin, 166 Venus and Cupid (Pontormo), 40–1, 42f, 44 Venus at Her Bath (Boucher), 66n29 Versailles Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors), 52–3, 53f Very Slippy Weather (Gillray), 102–3 Vigée Lebrun, Elizabeth, 63 Village Politicians, The (Wilkie), 75–7, 75f, 78, 80 Villasenor, Maria-Christina, 219 Vivant Denon, Dominique: Point de lendemain, 57–8 Walker, Kara, 21 Wall, Jeff, 187, 190–7; The Destroyed Room, 190; Diatribe, 202n34; An Eviction, 192–6, 193f; Picture for Women, 191; Stereo, 191; The Storyteller, 191 Wallach, Alan, 131 Ward, James: Allegory of Waterloo, 87–8 War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 1842 (Turner), 267–9, 268f Weiner, Lawrence, 182, 200n3 Welling, James, 196 Wellington Musing on the Field of Waterloo (Haydon), 128 Wenzel, Jennifer, 244–5 Werner, Michael, 207

West, Benjamin: cult of immensity and, 116; The Death of General Wolfe, 9–10, 9f, 14, 16, 22, 71–4, 91, 93, 96–8, 101; embedded references and, 204–5; as historical painter to George III, 105; neoclassical principles, modification of, 70; on pen of historian and pencil of artist, 83; revolution of history painting and, 96, 98–100, 108; Reynolds, response to, 69–70; Royal Academy address, 73 Whately, Richard: Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, 120–2 “Where do you stand with your art, comrade?” (Immendorff), 207 Whisky Still (Wilkie), 81 Wieland, Christoph Martin: Endymion, 55 Wilkie, David: Alfred in the Neat Herd’s Cottage, 75–6, 84n20; The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, 13–14, 13f, 76–7, 78– 82; Christopher Columbus, 79; The Cotter’s Saturday Night, 14; history vs elevation and, 74; The Letter of Introduction, 14; Newsmongers, 81; The Penny Wedding, 81; Pitlessie Fair, 80; Preaching of John Knox Before the Lords of the Congregation, 14, 79–82; reception by Burnet and Cunningham, 77–82; success and popularity of, 74; Turner and, 269; The Village Politicians, 75–7, 75f, 78, 80; Whisky Still, 81 Wilkinson, Robert, 106 Wilson, Richard, 137 Wind, Edgar, 68, 70, 71, 95–6 Woollett, William: The Death of Wolfe, 93, 94f, 97 Yawn, Lila, 226

Index

311