On the Hilltop

Letters

Vol. 29 No. 3 · 8 February 2007

From Thomas Crow

Nicholas Penny’s assertion that the ‘elite academics’ invited by the Getty Research Institute ‘rarely have any interest in the museum’ (LRB, 4 January) represents the fundamental premise of his general polemic against them: that these pampered academic art historians are indifferent to contact with actual works of art. Can he offer the slightest empirical foundation for his claim? Without that – and he could not produce it if he tried – that stale curator’s canard counts as nothing but unsupported defamation.

He writes as one for whom appearances are salient, down to the ‘well-chosen fabric’ that society decorator Thierry Despont imposed on the interior of Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Museum. The damask wall coverings delight him, but the surface appearances of the scholars’ existence, gleaned from second-hand accounts, attract only his resentful sneers and unearned condescension. Count his references to the (small) swimming-pool at their residence – while reminding yourself what a common domestic amenity this is all over Los Angeles – and it becomes clear that he aims to accomplish by petty innuendo what he cannot achieve through honest argument.

It is true that the Research Institute makes every effort to remove any unnecessary impediment to Getty scholars getting on with their work from the moment they arrive. And it has the advantage of an unparalleled staff and physical infrastructure in its pursuit of this aim. Scholars are in residence for a limited time, many for three months and the rest for no more than nine (and none for the ‘whole year’ at which Penny marvels). Before and after they face the same constraints and obligations that affect every working lecturer, curator, practising artist or independent scholar (the Institute has them all).

In Penny’s imagination, ‘guests of the Provenance Index’, experts in Dutch inventories but ‘unlikely to be well versed in Benjamin and Barthes’, look on with ‘bemusement’ at the pretentious post-seminar conversations (poolside of course) carried on by the Research Institute scholars. It should be noted for the record that the Getty Provenance Index is firmly a part of the Research Institute and thus entertains no separate guests. Numerous specialists in the history of collecting and the art trade have been in residence under its aegis (one nine-month cycle was devoted to these topics), but none in my memory disdained acquaintance with Barthes or Benjamin – knowledge of whose thought being no more than the mark of an adequately advanced education. In that Walter Benjamin provides some of the most profound philosophical meditations on the cognitive power of objects displaced in space and time, that choice of example is singularly inept. When Penny wheels on his plain-spoken man, the warder posing ‘uncomfortable questions’ as the curator makes his rounds of the galleries, we know we have entered the realm of a drearily familiar philistinism. (And how does he know that Alex Potts or T.J. Clark could not respond to this warder’s queries just as well as he could, if not considerably better?)

On the topic of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, the object of some years of work by the staff of the Research Institute, I searched in vain for the one judgment any serious reader would most want: that is, an assessment of the quality of the translation and the rigour of its philological underpinnings. If Penny did not feel equipped to offer one, perhaps he should have passed on the assignment.

Thomas Crow
Director, Getty Research Institute

Nicholas Penny writes: I have no objection to the Getty scholars’ having the use of a swimming-pool, and my account of the life around it and in the library on the hill is not ‘second-hand’. I was, for a while, privileged to be one of those scholars – invited by the founder of the Provenance Index before that institution was ‘firmly’ subordinated to the director of the Research Institute. I never claimed that anyone ‘disdained acquaintance’ with Benjamin, but merely noted the mild discomfort of the minority which may not have read him (or Barthes). The idea that the Institute has given little attention to the museum receives unexpected support from Thomas Crow’s letter, which shows him to be unaware that the damask (on which the curator of decorative arts insisted) is not employed on the walls of the upstairs painting galleries – the rooms I specifically commended.

I am unaware of having made any allegation that either Alex Potts or T.J. Clark is incompetent to converse with warders. My observations on the dangers of privileged isolation for scholars – whether academics or curators – were not part of a ‘general polemic’ against academic art historians. But there certainly are some academics who have little interest in contact with real works of art, just as there are many curators who are indifferent to ideas, and I suppose that the former must constitute Crow’s ‘serious’ readers: those who will, he is sure, find it to be of no interest that a book about sculpture says nothing about where the sculpture can be found.

Vol. 29 No. 4 · 22 February 2007

From Michael Williams

Nicholas Penny writes of T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death that ‘if only he had been content with art criticism instead of art writing he could have given us a concise essay’ (LRB, 4 January). What follows is an ad hominem attack, highlighting an anecdote in which Clark attends a demonstration on the steps of the National Gallery that leads, in Penny’s mind, to an ‘after-dinner speech to old comrades’. (The recollection hardly takes up a page of the book.) He finishes by suggesting that the book is an elitist rumination for ‘the benefit of other professors on the [Getty] hilltop’. This seemed to me to be a travesty.

The subtitle of Clark’s book is ‘An Experiment in Art Writing’. He kept a diary of his prolonged exposure to, and examination of, two Poussin paintings – Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake – recording daily variations in light, both natural and artificial, and viewing the paintings from a full range of distances. Later, he revised the diary and added to it, but the feeling of its being written in front of these pictures is maintained. Clark’s confrontation with the authentic work of art – rather than all the surrogates that are now available – over a period of three months is the nub of this experiment. It is not just a formal or perceptual confrontation: Clark allows ethical, political and even (reluctantly) personal considerations, as well as the more usual historical and theoretical dimensions, to come into play. These non-formal dimensions are never allowed to be merely the starting point for a discourse on, say, ‘the politics of the image’ (Penny’s suggestion). Clark returns to the paintings and their material actuality again and again.

Penny does not seriously evaluate the experiment; and he doesn’t have much time for ‘art writing’. But this is art writing quite unlike Pater, or Stokes (for instance), trading in refined sensibility and effulgent phrase. Clark includes poems in his spectrum of responses but he is always anxious, wondering whether the phrase he has chosen fits the perception or idea that he is unravelling. There is a persistent intensity, that he might understand more, probe further. On the other hand he writes: ‘something in me flinches from the glamour of always probing deeper as a looker, piercing the veil, staking emotional ownership of the image.’ This self-awareness runs through the book. Clark has a restless, dialectical approach, and he does probe deeper.

Michael Williams
Thrupp, Stroud

Vol. 29 No. 5 · 8 March 2007

From Marcia Pointon

I hesitate to prolong the aftermath of Nicholas Penny’s entertaining but essentially trivialising review of The Sight of Death (LRB, 4 January). However, Michael Williams’s passionate defence of T.J. Clark perhaps merits an observation (Letters, 22 February). Clark is by no means the first person to record and evaluate changes in the appearance of paintings determined by varying qualities of light and different viewing positions. The most distinguished example of scholarship grounded in this kind of discipline that I know is Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall’s Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994). Of The Institution of the Rosary in the Gesuati, Venice, for example, they write: ‘The picture in a sense is a number of different pictures and would be hard to exhaust, but it is noticeable that it looks better in the morning, when the lighting from both sides is at its more complex and paradoxical, not in the afternoon, when the simpler and fully licensed west light source gives its plain reading.’ The authors’ memorable account of Tiepolo’s great ceiling in the Treppenhaus of the Prince-Bishop’s Palace at Wurzburg is a historical analysis predicated on looking over time:

Take, for instance, light near absolute zero – a grey December late afternoon with the very minimum light intensity for the paintings to be made out at all. These are not bad viewing conditions in the Treppenhaus, just special conditions. Indeed, Tiepolo kept for such a moment a special effect, not normally available. What happens is that heaven comes into its own.

Marcia Pointon
University of Manchester

Vol. 29 No. 6 · 22 March 2007

From Jonathan Harris

T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death is proving something of a hot potato. Nicholas Penny didn’t really want to handle it in his review (LRB, 4 January); Thomas Crow (Letters, 8 February) didn’t mention it at all in his riposte to Penny’s attacks on the Getty Research Institute (a bit odd given that Crow was Clark’s star PhD student and that he takes a socio-historical approach to art in his books on late 18th/early 19th-century French painting); Michael Williams’s defence (Letters, 22 February) makes no attempt to relate the book to Clark’s work as a whole (which is surely necessary in trying to make sense not just of Clark’s descriptions of the Poussin paintings but of the political references, both tacit and direct, that so irked Penny); and Marcia Pointon – hesitating to ‘prolong the aftermath’ of the original review – merely seeks to indicate that Clark’s visual analyses have some precedent in the Alpers and Baxandall book on Tiepolo (Letters, 8 March).

A really worthwhile review of The Sight of Death should engage with its relationship to Clark’s earlier books and the trajectory these have followed away from a direct and teachable historical-materialist method. Not that Clark has stopped being a kind of Marxist, but The Sight of Death is difficult because it isn’t recognisable as disciplinary art history. That is its strength and its challenge. Its complex, interwoven subjective and historical elements, which don’t add up to any comfortable ‘method’ or ‘theory’ of looking or of art, remain intelligible as part of Clark’s long meditation on how to bring contemporary socio-political perspectives together with hard looking at artworks from the past.

Jonathan Harris
University of Liverpool