by Jon Lackman | 28 May 2010 | Teaching
The March-April 2010 issue of Le Débat prints a talk that Pierre Rosenberg gave at a September 2009 colloquium (pdf):
My career has been in museums, at the Louvre mostly, where I’ve spent almost 40 years. I love museums, all museums. Alas I didn’t discover them in school, but rather from my parents … Many don’t get that opportunity, that privilege … [Our educational] system, I say with regret, is antidemocratic, profoundly unjust, profoundly antiegalitarian, and perfectly elitist in the worst sense of the term.
Isn’t it to remedy this grave injustice that art historians have long fought for art history to be a required course in high school and college? … School teaches us to read and to write, but it doesn’t teach us to see … Art history is nothing other than learning to see. Art is not transparent …
Art history has had its great figures, from Aby Warburg to Erwin Panofsky, from Bernard Berenson to Roberto Longhi, from Anthony Blunt to John Pope-Hennessy, from Robert Rosenblum to Michael Baxandall, not to mention our compatriots who made 19th-century France one of the two great countries for art history alongside Germany and our more recent Henri Focillon, Émile Mâle, Élie Faure, Louis Grodecki, Antoine Schnapper, Daniel Arasse. My list is not exhaustive …
[Yet it is] a misunderstood discipline. The sentence that has enraged art historians, here it is. You can read it in the 2008 Bulletin Officiel of the national education ministry: “A teacher of French literature [can also] teach the arts … To do so, he has no need for specialized education.”
“He has no need for specialized education.” The jaw drops.
I confess I knew next to nothing about Antoine Schnapper and Daniel Arasse until Rosenberg inspired me to look them up. And I study French art! As of this writing, Arasse doesn’t even have a Dictionary of Art Historians page.