by Jon Lackman | 2 November 2010 | Books
In recent decades, scholarship across the humanities has challenged the notion that history is the story of great men and women, of queens, kings, kaisers, caliphs, sultans, shahs, tyrants, tycoons, tzars, emperors, celebrities, and CEOs. Postcolonial theory, among other things, has helped to popularize the notion of and focus attention on the “subaltern.” Enacting this “turn” in art history proves to be a bit more difficult, of course. Much of the art that’s ever been made, and most of what survives, has been made for, about, and according to the rules of the powerful and the rich. Hence we see a continuing stream of publications on royal portraits, patronage, and academies. For example, in caa.reviews, Kishwar Rizvi considers Sussan Babaie’s Isfahan and its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi’ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (“a significant contribution”), and Elizabeth C. Mansfield evaluates Reed Benhamou’s Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in “ancien régime” France (“a crisp account”). Mansfield neatly sums up the inescapability of the royal:
Few institutions have influenced the course of European art or the writing of art history as decisively as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Its pulse animated the visual extravagance of Versailles, the popularity of public art exhibitions, the emergence of art criticism, and the codification of an approach to arts instruction that persists to this day.
It doesn’t help that art books are expensive to produce and thus beholden to the wealthy institutions and individuals who can afford to subsidize them. Britain’s Royal Collection Publishing, founded in the 1990s “with the aim of building a definitive list of publications about the royal residences and works of art,” continues to issue well-illustrated and amply documented books such as the hefty Victoria & Albert, Art & Love, the midsized The Royal Portrait: Image and Impact, and the slim Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron: Early British Photographs from the Royal Collection. Although these all have their merits, The Royal Portrait points up the difficulties inherent in this enterprise. Its survey goes right up to the present day with a final chapter on Queen Elizabeth II and her family. While author Jennifer Scott acknowledges in the abstract that royal portraits sometimes reveal “political self-fashioning, vanity [and] insecurity,” the chapter itself is gratingly hagiographic. For example, concerning three snapshots (of dubious artistic merit) of the smiling queen taken by her son Andrew, Scott writes, “These photographs give a very human insight into the private life of the monarch, and they succeed in this far more than any paparazzo photograph because the sitter evidently had complete trust in her photographer.”
http://albertis-window.blogspot.com/2010/11/art-history-bloggers-as-les.html
Perhaps of interest to those who seek alternate ways of writing about art.