SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 2010
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CASVA: Where art scholars color outside the lines
Art critic Blake Gopnik asked three of CASVA’s scholars to head to the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and talk us through a work of art their research has touched on. The results:
DAVID J. GETSY
David Getsy is a 37-year-old professor at the School of the Art In- stitute of Chicago. During his fellowhip at CASVA, he is studying Scott Burton, an American artist who died of AIDS complications in 1989. Burton made his name with pared-down modern sculptures that dou- ble as furniture. The National Gallery has two of Burton’s “settees” — oblong granite boulders with a seat and back sliced out of them — in the atrium of its East Building, and Getsy is sitting on one as he gives his take on its maker. “Why would an artist create work that you’d use, or walk past — or maybe not even notice?” Getsy asks. The answer is that Burton hoped to undermine the power tradition- ally vested in the artist. By adding functionality, Burton insisted that his art isn’t complete until it is used by someone, Getsy says, turning anyone who sits on one of his benches into a collaborator. Burton, as a gay artist and a fan of feminism, wanted to “deny his
own presence, and step back from his own authority.” This is the opposite of one of the most famous moves in modern
art, whereby someone like Marcel Duchamp could take the everyday and turn it into sculpture, just by saying that’s what it is. Burton’s chairs, Getsy says, are quite happy to avoid declaring themselves as art at all. “They’re meant to be a bit humble, and they’re submitted to the viewer, and [Burton] allows himself to be overlooked as an artist.” As if on cue, four young teens sit down on a nearby Burton. “Look,” one says, with obvious relish, “it’s art we can touch!”
ELIZABETH CROPPER
Elizabeth Cropper, the 65-year-old Englishwoman who heads CAS-
VA, made a huge splash in 1976 with a classic article about Renais- sance notions of beauty. Asked to talk about a work in the National Gallery’s collection, Cropper heads to a portrait of a gorgeous Floren- tine noblewoman and her young son. It is by Agnolo Bronzino, court painter to the Medici dukes of Tuscany in the 1540s and 1550s. The mother, dressed in a ransom’s worth of red brocade and gold, is “shown according to the most fashionable ideals of the 1540s,” Cropper says. “She has just the right philtrum” — the channel down her upper lip — “and perfectly arched eyebrows and a high clear fore- head,” all as prescribed in texts on beauty at this time. Those texts also insist that “the hand should not be too thin, and the flesh should spring back if you touch it,” fine descriptions of the hands in the por- trait. “We notice very much her long neck and head placed on her shoul-
ders like a vase,” says Cropper — and in Florence at this time, the vas- es of antiquity were held up as the perfect model for feminine el- egance. Bronzino, remarkable for the “hidden games” he liked to play with art, even gives his sitter tiny vase-shaped earrings, driving the point home. The whole picture, Cropper says, is about things hidden and re- vealed: “There’s always a sense that there’s something more be- neath the surface.” This isn’t just a pretty picture of an ideally pretty woman with her child. It’s about politics as well, painted at a moment when the city’s days as a republic were no more than a memory: “As aristocratic government becomes the rule in Florence, the sense of genealogy and dynasty becomes important.”
casva from E1
overseas. They work in the shadows to find new insights into art — so the rest of us don’t have to. One CASVA scholar has shown that Renaissance patrons had such flexible ideas of time that they could know a bronze of Jesus was brand-new, yet still count it as dating to the time of Christ. A CASVA lecturer made the convincing case that a tame seascape by Edward Hopper —nothing more than a boat, Sunday sail- ors, water and sky — was in fact all about World War II and radio newscasts.
Glorying in the difficult
These CASVAnauts are led by their own version of Judi Dench’s “M.” Elizabeth Cropper, a British scholar who has lived in the States for decades, is entering her 10th year as CASVA’s dean. She is a petite 65-year-old and a power dresser — crisp brown pantsuit, brown silk scarf, chunky beads. Her genteel manner is known to hide ambition and a will of iron. “We do look for the most outstanding scholars to do the most demanding, in- tense work they can,” Cropper says mat- ter-of-factly. She is sitting in her corner office on the fourth floor of the gallery’s East Building, with views onto the bloom- ing trees of the Mall and the Capitol a couple of blocks off. Cropper rattles off an impressive list of people and projects hosted by her center. She names a posse of brand-name art his- torians, here for six months or a year or two of distraction-free research and writ- ing. They in turn mentor a band of young- er scholars finishing their doctorates, or just moving beyond them. (CASVA doesn’t do its own teaching, but it accepts and funds PhD students registered else- where.) And then there’s the supply of vis- iting scholars, old and young, who show up for CASVA seminars and lectures. Some of what gets worked on at CASVA
may seem a touch obscure. Cropper touts the center’s ongoing digitization of the records of the Accademia di San Luca, founded in Rome in 1593 as one of Eu- rope’s first art academies. Senior scholar Suzanne Preston Blier, a Harvard profes- sor on research leave at CASVA, has been working on a project titled “Imaging Amazons: Dahomey Women Warriors In and Out of Africa.” One of the doctoral students is bashing away at a thesis titled “Mediating the Third Culture at Tlatelol- co, Mexico City.” This is CASVA as a center for pure research and esoterica, on the model of an astrophysics lab. But Cropper also insists that there is “a constant sense that it would be important to have these ideas reach a larger public.” The chief vehicle for this is the Mellon Lectures, a series of Sunday talks deliv- ered each spring, then published in book form. Some of the world’s most influ- ential volumes on art — Lord Kenneth Clark’s “The Nude,” with its famous dis- tinction between nakedness and nudity, or Sir Ernst Gombrich’s “Art and Illusion,”
DAVID BINDMAN
David Bindman, a visiting scholar at CASVA for the last two months, is
a 69-year-old English art historian who built a distinguished career working on art from 18th-century Britain. Lately, however, he has been looking at blackness and whiteness in art from all over, and what they tell us about racial attitudes. (Bindman is co-editing a series of impor- tant volumes called “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” alongside the great African American scholar Skip Gates.) Bindman points to the Shaw Memorial, finished in 1900 by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to honor one of the first black units of the Civil War, led by abolitionist Col. Robert Gould Shaw. Bindman calls it “the greatest work of 19th-century American sculpture,” yet even though done from an abolitionist viewpoint, it buys into old ideas on race. “You can be an abolitionist and still continue to work with stereo- types you’ve inherited,” Bindman says. He points to the plaster studies for the heads of Saint-Gaudens’s soldiers, on display across the room from the finished memorial, and shows how they are highly individu- alized. In the finished monument, the blacks have been given “the prominent lips and fuzzy hair” that 19th-century racial theorists insist- ed on as typical, Bindman says, and “all the individuality in the image is tied up in the one white figure.” Shaw is “someone who’s in control of his own condition and of his horse,” but the sculptor takes care to depict the feet of his marching vol- unteers as well out of step. Shaw is erect as could be; the soldiers he commands, despite their fame and prowess, are “relatively untidy. In some ways that emphasizes their humanity, but it also establishes their lower social position.”
Join the Conversation
The 59th annual Mellon Lectures begin Sunday, April 18, at the National Gallery. The Mellons this year are presented by pioneering Yale scholar Mary Miller, who will speak on “Art and Representation in the Ancient New World.” Miller will look at our attitudes toward pre-Columbian art and how much they’ve changed over 40 years. “I hope people will be able to understand that you don’t have to be a specialist to engage this art,” she said by telephone last week. (If she’s as much fun in a lecture as she is over the phone, we have a treat in store.) Each lecture begins at 2 and is in the East Building auditorium. They are free. The schedule: April 18: The Shifting Now of the Pre-Columbian Past April 25: Seeing Time, Hearing Time, Placing Time May 2: The Body of Perfection, the Perfection of the Body May 9: Representation and Imitation May 16: Envisioning a New World For information: 202-737-4215 or nga.gov/
programs/lectures.
He talks about the “real consequences” of such issues for the day-to-day fate of pictures like Botticelli’s: “It’s possible that it remains in private hands rather than in a museum because it was difficult to ac- cept the painting.”
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
STAR CHAMBER:Members of the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
which pinned down how realism works — started life as Mellons. “We are looking for the very best in scholarship to present to the American people,” Cropper says.
This year, pre-Columbian
This year’s five lectures, which launch April 18 as the first Mellons to tackle pre- Columbian art, have been entrusted to Mary Miller, one of the great scholars of Mayan culture. In a field long dominated by ethnography and archaeology, Miller is known for her unusually visual, art- historical approach to pre-Columbian ar- tifacts — for her insistence that looking closely at an object gives you as much in- sight as reading its culture’s words. Interviewed over the phone from her
office at Yale, where she is dean of under- graduates, Miller says she felt “shock and awe” when she got the invitation for the Mellons: “We should be doing this on Skype, so you can see my facial anxiety.” Her subject fits with Cropper’s efforts to turn CASVA, which for a long time had a reputation for being stodgy and Euro- centric, into a place that wants to look at “all of art and visual culture, for all of time, for all the globe.” In 2004, Cropper welcomed a young
University of Chicago doctoral student named Karl Debreczeny, who was work- ing on Tibetan paintings and their rela-
tionship to Chinese art. Now that he has moved up to a job as curator at the Rubin Museum in New York, one of the great centers for the study of Himalayan cul- ture, Debreczeny’s pure research is trick- ling down to the public. This spring, the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery invited him to launch a show partly built around his doctoral studies. Laymen looking at the work, Debreczenyn says, will witness fertile contacts between Tibet and China that belie the “two-dimensional story” of conflict and submission that we get from the nightly news, and that has drifted into Tibetology. These were ideas Debrec- zeny developed as a grad student at CAS- VA. “We pride ourselves on recognizing tal- ent early,” Cropper says. She mentions Alexander Nagel, who became the Mellon Professor at CASVA in
“We are looking for the very best in scholarship to present to the
American people.”
— Elizabeth Cropper, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA)
2004, when he was still an up-and-com- ing Renaissance scholar at the University of Toronto. (Disclosure: He and I became friends when we were both living in Can- ada.) During his two years in Washington, Nagel published a controversial paper in the field’s most prestigious journal. He also worked on two books that are just now appearing; they promise to shake up everyone’s ideas about Renaissance cul- ture. His CASVA work helped win him the position of professor of Renaissance art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, possibly the top job in his field. Nagel says one of the Renaissance works he studied closely in Washington was a peculiar Botticelli portrait, on loan to the National Gallery from a private col- lector, that has a crude medieval image set into it. That marriage of old and new had been incomprehensible to scholars, who thought the strange pairing must have been cobbled together in the 19th century. But Nagel realized that it illus- trated one of the more radical claims he was working on at CASVA: that the “real- ist” artists of the Italian Renaissance were deeply influenced by the apparent simplicity and purity of much earlier art, which they would have read as reflecting the great culture of the Greeks and Ro- mans. Recognize that, Nagel says, and “the conjunction in that painting stops looking weird.”
An effect on exhibitions
Leah Dickerman, a doctoral fellow at
CASVA who went on to become a Nation- al Gallery curator and is now at the Mu- seum of Modern Art in New York, says CASVA’s research has a clear effect on what viewers get to see in special exhibi- tions. Even before the National Gallery gave her the go-ahead on her landmark 2006 survey of Dada, the absurdist art movement that flourished in Europe and America between the two world wars, CASVA backed her for a series of semi- nars where scholars could hash out what that movement meant. The globalism of Dada, the importance of the movement’s female members, Dada’s interest in ex- ploring gender — those CASVoid ideas be- came messages even a casual visitor might have taken home from Dicker- man’s show. Dickerman says she hopes to re-create
the “seminar” model for major shows she might do in the future, but acknowledges this will be harder to do without CASVA on site to support her pure-research agenda. “No one questions that physicists need
to operate in a very rarefied and esoteric environment, where they can entertain wild ideas, many of them unprovable,” Nagel says. “But it’s not obvious to every- one that art history needs to get done at that level — so it’s good that a place exists that insists it does.”
gopnikb@washpost.com
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