Truth-telling in Art-History Reviewing Kemp, Martin (2018) Living with Leonardo
Sunday, 1 Jul 2018, 17:16
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Truth-telling in Art-History
Reviewing Kemp, Martin (2018) Living with Leonardo: Fifty years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond London, Thames & Hudson.
I can’t get over the feeling that this is an ‘old-fashioned’ book. After a year on a MA in Art History however I believe that to be a great compliment. It is a great tonic not least in Kemp’s sincere wish to stand, at least sometimes, on the ‘outside’ of art-history and to query the claims and arguments that this discipline standing alone feels able to support. It has an autobiographical aspect but that very much feels to me like a means of showing how and why success within scholarly disciplines should not be mistaken as badges of identity and 'expertise'. There is something truly refreshing in the ‘truth-telling’ this includes. I first became aware of this trait in Kemp as a result of the warm appreciation of Kemp by David Hockney and Martin Gayford in their last book on 'pictures'. Both (one an art-journalist the other even though he be a celebrated artist) are often treated as outsiders by the art-history elites. Kemp alone, they report, was prepared to take seriously their evidence about the early use of the camera obscura as a drawing tool and the consequences of that theory.
For Kemp, coming from an early educational background in the natural sciences, a background outside the charmed circle of the upper middle-classes, and taking on art-history for the first time as a post-graduate student allows him to show, totally without false embarrasment, how he caught up on the limited knowledge of languages, especially Italian, and the iconic texts of a Western culture background, not offered to him by his ‘background’. Moreover, he makes it clear that his meteoric rise had much to do with the role played by Anthony Blunt in mediating with the establishment. Telling the truth about one’s education and social background allows Kemp to indicate how and why he sometimes felt like an outsider in the rarefied and sometimes frankly nepotistic social atmosphere of the fine arts of the late twentieth century.
Forget the fact that the book hints at having something to say about mental ill-health though (I hope these hints are more traceable to an agent or publisher’s sense of what will sell a book than to the author). However, Kemp clearly is prepared to see the Leonardo industry (‘inflated art-world egos … Major scholars and authors, collectors, and curators…) as being well stocked with ‘Leonardo loonies’. I personally see this name-calling (whatever the provocation) as a deficit in the thinking in the book and an (unintended) insult to those with living with mental-health problems.
However, what really matters in Kemp’s great book is a rigorous sense that telling the truth is not a matter of merely imposing one’s social and cultural or ‘establishment’ authority, in the manner of Blunt say, but of testing the evidence which supports truth claims or counter-claims. That this feels old-fashioned may tell us more about the state of art-publishing – Kemp utilises direct critical examination of a range of evidence using well-established tools such as ‘falsifiability’ of hypotheses and ‘the law of parsimony’ in scientific explanation (228).
The narrowness of the class and educational access routes to art-history in the past formed a strong ‘established’ identity, equated with the kind of ‘establishment’ expertise that even Wittgenstein was prepared to champion as something beyond language, that they named ‘connoisseurship’. Kemp tries to preserve what is good about that the judgements of trained observers of art by championing its renaming as ‘judgement by eye’ (226). He goes as far as blaming scientist-wanderers into art-history as not being aware that such trained judgements of ocular evidence are demanded by even the ‘hardest’ of evidence used by scientific commentators on art – in judging, for instance, what exactly we are seeing in a an IR-reflectogram. All of this is examined in the crucial (as I see it) chapter 8 on ‘Science and Seeing’.
Yet the importance of Kemp’s insistence on evidence is in fact as well shown by his wonderful chapter on the cultural meanings about art used cavalierly in Dan Brown’s novels of ‘symbology’. The myth perpetrated by such novels (and their versions as movies) is easy to uncover – that true knowledge is having appropriate and trained awareness of the ‘hidden’ meanings lying behind coded images. That knowledge is presented as a matter of mastery of ‘codes’ is named by Kemp ‘secretology’: roughly a belief that all true knowledge is secreted behind codes, the key to which is known only to the few. Yet he makes it clear that this is a version of an assumption based on the validation that experts on images and imagery may ‘read-in’ the true, if secreted meaning of works. This critique is applied not only to the Dan Brown mythology but also to Freud (296) or to those obsessed by the meanings hidden under Neo-Platonic-idealist or magical mathematics that lurks in ideas like the ‘golden section or Fibonacci sequence (300).
I’m not sure Kemp says so explicitly but I believe that the very structure of his book tells us that such ‘codswallop’ was often the result of art-history divorced from rigorous use of multiple types of evidence and even more rigorous critical scrutiny of that evidence. Indeed art-history based on inadequate evidence-base and evidence analytics is no better than is the fictional ‘symbology’ of Dan Brown or inadequate rigour in reading reflectograms. The problem with art is that we may see what we want or what we expect to see because we have an ‘interest’ in seeing it thus. That interest can be monetary or reputational. It could be an interest in keeping alive a mystique about the value and values of professions – such as those in both art-dealing and sometimes (note Blunt) art-scholarship and which can be seen clearly in the case of ‘mistaken identity’ posed by the challenge to the Louvre’s version of the painting by the Isleworth Mona Lisa (92). But note that Kemp’s attack on self-interest as a key biasing factor in the perception of links the kind of refusal of evidence also common to other fictional ‘secretologies’ (92). Art-history, says Kemp, right at the offset can sometimes be:
A messy and sometimes turbulent tangle of wishful thinking, prejudice, vested interests, national characteristics, and rigged arguments. Tottering piles of hypotheses can be constructed to prop up cherished theories. An emphasis on connoisseurship can prevent sufficient attention being paid to ‘difficult’ scientific evidence (11).
. Out of all of the people who flit through these pages, Ernst Gombrich comes out of examination very well. In my view that is because he was prepared not just to ‘be’ the pontiff of art-history but to get down and dirty with the evidence (40f.).
I loved this book. It can stay by my side whilst I read more art-history
Truth-telling in Art-History Reviewing Kemp, Martin (2018) Living with Leonardo
Truth-telling in Art-History
Reviewing Kemp, Martin (2018) Living with Leonardo: Fifty years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond London, Thames & Hudson.
I can’t get over the feeling that this is an ‘old-fashioned’ book. After a year on a MA in Art History however I believe that to be a great compliment. It is a great tonic not least in Kemp’s sincere wish to stand, at least sometimes, on the ‘outside’ of art-history and to query the claims and arguments that this discipline standing alone feels able to support. It has an autobiographical aspect but that very much feels to me like a means of showing how and why success within scholarly disciplines should not be mistaken as badges of identity and 'expertise'. There is something truly refreshing in the ‘truth-telling’ this includes. I first became aware of this trait in Kemp as a result of the warm appreciation of Kemp by David Hockney and Martin Gayford in their last book on 'pictures'. Both (one an art-journalist the other even though he be a celebrated artist) are often treated as outsiders by the art-history elites. Kemp alone, they report, was prepared to take seriously their evidence about the early use of the camera obscura as a drawing tool and the consequences of that theory.
For Kemp, coming from an early educational background in the natural sciences, a background outside the charmed circle of the upper middle-classes, and taking on art-history for the first time as a post-graduate student allows him to show, totally without false embarrasment, how he caught up on the limited knowledge of languages, especially Italian, and the iconic texts of a Western culture background, not offered to him by his ‘background’. Moreover, he makes it clear that his meteoric rise had much to do with the role played by Anthony Blunt in mediating with the establishment. Telling the truth about one’s education and social background allows Kemp to indicate how and why he sometimes felt like an outsider in the rarefied and sometimes frankly nepotistic social atmosphere of the fine arts of the late twentieth century.
Forget the fact that the book hints at having something to say about mental ill-health though (I hope these hints are more traceable to an agent or publisher’s sense of what will sell a book than to the author). However, Kemp clearly is prepared to see the Leonardo industry (‘inflated art-world egos … Major scholars and authors, collectors, and curators…) as being well stocked with ‘Leonardo loonies’. I personally see this name-calling (whatever the provocation) as a deficit in the thinking in the book and an (unintended) insult to those with living with mental-health problems.
However, what really matters in Kemp’s great book is a rigorous sense that telling the truth is not a matter of merely imposing one’s social and cultural or ‘establishment’ authority, in the manner of Blunt say, but of testing the evidence which supports truth claims or counter-claims. That this feels old-fashioned may tell us more about the state of art-publishing – Kemp utilises direct critical examination of a range of evidence using well-established tools such as ‘falsifiability’ of hypotheses and ‘the law of parsimony’ in scientific explanation (228).
The narrowness of the class and educational access routes to art-history in the past formed a strong ‘established’ identity, equated with the kind of ‘establishment’ expertise that even Wittgenstein was prepared to champion as something beyond language, that they named ‘connoisseurship’. Kemp tries to preserve what is good about that the judgements of trained observers of art by championing its renaming as ‘judgement by eye’ (226). He goes as far as blaming scientist-wanderers into art-history as not being aware that such trained judgements of ocular evidence are demanded by even the ‘hardest’ of evidence used by scientific commentators on art – in judging, for instance, what exactly we are seeing in a an IR-reflectogram. All of this is examined in the crucial (as I see it) chapter 8 on ‘Science and Seeing’.
Yet the importance of Kemp’s insistence on evidence is in fact as well shown by his wonderful chapter on the cultural meanings about art used cavalierly in Dan Brown’s novels of ‘symbology’. The myth perpetrated by such novels (and their versions as movies) is easy to uncover – that true knowledge is having appropriate and trained awareness of the ‘hidden’ meanings lying behind coded images. That knowledge is presented as a matter of mastery of ‘codes’ is named by Kemp ‘secretology’: roughly a belief that all true knowledge is secreted behind codes, the key to which is known only to the few. Yet he makes it clear that this is a version of an assumption based on the validation that experts on images and imagery may ‘read-in’ the true, if secreted meaning of works. This critique is applied not only to the Dan Brown mythology but also to Freud (296) or to those obsessed by the meanings hidden under Neo-Platonic-idealist or magical mathematics that lurks in ideas like the ‘golden section or Fibonacci sequence (300).
I’m not sure Kemp says so explicitly but I believe that the very structure of his book tells us that such ‘codswallop’ was often the result of art-history divorced from rigorous use of multiple types of evidence and even more rigorous critical scrutiny of that evidence. Indeed art-history based on inadequate evidence-base and evidence analytics is no better than is the fictional ‘symbology’ of Dan Brown or inadequate rigour in reading reflectograms. The problem with art is that we may see what we want or what we expect to see because we have an ‘interest’ in seeing it thus. That interest can be monetary or reputational. It could be an interest in keeping alive a mystique about the value and values of professions – such as those in both art-dealing and sometimes (note Blunt) art-scholarship and which can be seen clearly in the case of ‘mistaken identity’ posed by the challenge to the Louvre’s version of the painting by the Isleworth Mona Lisa (92). But note that Kemp’s attack on self-interest as a key biasing factor in the perception of links the kind of refusal of evidence also common to other fictional ‘secretologies’ (92). Art-history, says Kemp, right at the offset can sometimes be:
A messy and sometimes turbulent tangle of wishful thinking, prejudice, vested interests, national characteristics, and rigged arguments. Tottering piles of hypotheses can be constructed to prop up cherished theories. An emphasis on connoisseurship can prevent sufficient attention being paid to ‘difficult’ scientific evidence (11).
. Out of all of the people who flit through these pages, Ernst Gombrich comes out of examination very well. In my view that is because he was prepared not just to ‘be’ the pontiff of art-history but to get down and dirty with the evidence (40f.).
I loved this book. It can stay by my side whilst I read more art-history