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(It is interesting to discover that Lord Clark’s hands began to tremble after writing that passage and he had to go for a walk on the sea front to calm down).
Clark is ticked off for a complete blindness to sexual politics. Stonard thinks that
descriptions such as that of ‘the small, full, manageable body which has always appealed to the average sensualist’, however true, are irredeemable.
But Stonard makes a strong case for The Nude (1956) as a work that can still be read ‘simply for the pleasure of its sentences’.
Roger Fry’s Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927) is certainly another book that deserves praise as literature. Even so, Fry was at his most eloquent when explaining how hard it is to put into words what he finds so spellbindingly wonderful about his subject’s work. ‘I find myself, like a medieval mystic before the divine reality, reduced to negative terms. I have first to say what it is not.’ That, it almost goes without saying, is the true difficulty and interest of writing about art. It involves trying to explain in words something that is inherently non-verbal: a visual experience.
Henri Matisse remarked that he who would be a painter should first cut out his tongue. This was advice he did not take himself, even metaphorically, but he does seem to have been grudging and evasive when bombarded with questionnaires by Alfred H. Barr during the preparation of the latter’s huge and groundbreaking monograph, Matisse: His Art and His Public (1951).
This, evaluated sagely and sensitively by John Elderfield, was the first of a type: the massive, would-be definitive study of a contemporary artist, making use, as Elderfield puts it, of ‘the big guns of American institutional scholarship — with its special access to artists, archives galleries collectors and teams of researchers’.
Despite all that, however, Barr was subject to a serpentine reproof by the review of the Burlington Magazine: ‘Reading Mr Barr makes us more indulgent towards the incompleteness and unreliability of Vasari.’ Elderfield points out that the reviewer, Anthony Blunt, had recent experience of evading interrogation; Barr had failed to get the full facts out of Matisse, but neither had MI5 succeeded in 1952 with Blunt.
If it can be tricky studying an artist still living in the south of France, pity the scholar of Jan van Eyck. The pitfall of Erwin Panofsky in his Early Netherlandish Painting (1953), though, was not so much the almost complete lack of written statements by any of the artists he was discussing, as the fact that he was on the wrong side of the Atlantic from most of their pictures and hence obliged to rely on photographs. The result was some unfortunate mistakes about such matters as his interpretation of Melchior Broederlam’s ‘Annunciation’. The Virgin is actually holding not a piece of purple wool, but a brown taper — and an elaborate theory fell flat.
There are two morals there. One is: always look at the original. But the other, drawn by Panofsky himself and underlined by Susie Nash in her chapter on him, is more general. ‘I am too old’, Panofsky wrote in 1957 (he was then 65), ‘not to know that error is just as important a factor in history — and scholarship — as truth.’
That’s spot on, and applies to art as well as history. The Renaissance, for example, was based on a creative misunderstanding of classical antiquity. A great deal of 19th-century art derived from an incorrect assessment of the Middle Ages (and the Renaissance). Picasso didn’t comprehend the first thing about the meaning of the African sculptures he used as source material for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’. And so on.
It is unlikely that the interpretations of art in terms of social and political history or structuralism discussed in the later chapters will prove more than provisional — though some, such as Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972) are masterpieces of scholarship and literature in their own right. The point is more to be interesting than to be correct (though it is nice to be that too).
As for artists, they like to be mysterious. When Vasari tried to get a closer look at a sculpture Michelangelo was working on, the great man dropped the lamp he was holding, leaving the historian and critic in total darkness. It’s often like that.
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