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INDEX | PINBOARD | MICROSTORIES | FEATURES | SPECIAL EDITIONS | HISTORY AND THEORY OF ATTRIBUTION | ETHNOGRAPHY OF CONNOISSEURSHIP

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(Picture above: metmuseum.org)

ONE) Tests and Test Cases in the History of Connoisseurship

A connoisseur, testing his visitors upon some forgeries: As nicely being described by Meryl Secrest in Being Bernard Berenson. But the ›joke‹, as she also tells us, did backfire even more nicely: Someone dropped by, someone competent, someone with expertise, who, however, said nothing, but still showed to be able. Resulting with the word getting around that the connoisseur, BB, had some forgeries hanging on his wall. Resulting with the connoisseur stopping to joke around.

A Russian collector at around 1900, and wanting to test the ability of connoisseurs: By having an unnamed old Italian picture named by one, by a second, and by a third expert, independantly.
Testing the ability of connoisseurs? Maybe rather a testing of a whole group. Of a whole culture of connoisseurship (and their ability as to consensus). It did not come to that (and probably none of the connoisseurs would have agreed to the terms of that experiment).

These examples of tests and testing in the history of connoisseurship might be purely anecdotal. But there are also test cases that bear on more. And these are test cases in the 19th history of connoisseurship that have become, in retrospect, more revealing. Because some test cases involved the whole culture of connoisseurship (or at least a whole subculture), and by involving almost everyone, these test cases now show as most revealing of how a culture of connoisseurship did work at a certain moment in time. Experts speak on pictures. But test cases, one may say, are telling as to experts and expert cultures.
Without entering into too much specifics one might name the two major controversies of the 19th century: about the ›Perugino or Raphael?‹ test case Apollo and Marsyas (the well-known Louvre picture, shown below); and about the two version of Holbein’s Madonna of Bürgermeister Meyer, a controversy also known under the name of ›Holbein-Streit‹.

This latter controversy, very in particular, is interesting as to the historical sociology of connoisseurship. Because, as art historical tradition has it, this controversy did end in triumph of art historical connoisseurship (especially able showed connoisseur and curator Adoph Bayersdorfer), but art historical tradition mostly fails to explain why actually, after the Holbein convention of 1871, the discipline of art history, being in reorganization at the time, showed unable or not being interested at all to institutionalize a culture of connoisseurship within the academia.

Connoisseurship, in brief, has become a self-organizing practice, being practiced in, outside and inbetween the institutions of academic art history, the world of the museums and the art market. And although scientific standards might work as a obliging reference to all of these participants, not all the actors comply to scientific standards, as the members of a scientific community are expected to comply to the standards within their discipline.

So far, so good. This introductory remarks may serve as a point of departure for more sociological and ethnological observing in the field. For example as to two bronzes, attributed these days to Michelangelo, upon which a symposium is upcoming in July. But more generally also for example as to blogs having turned into important (smaller) institutions within the field, or as to controversies being settled (or not settled) in court rooms, not to mention of controversies that continue (or are being documented) on Youtube.
This is what I meant with self-organization of connoisseurship: while the academia seems to be only interested occasionally to become the court of opinion as to attributional questions and to establish firm methodological standards and grounds, other players in the field go on to practice as they please (or is there a common ground, and if yes, which one?), and the view of the whole culture might be called charmingly chaotic (but from the standpoint of scientific standards one might also call it a mess; a mess that could and should, if one wanted to explain it historically or sociologically, traced back to the age of the Holbeinstreit, and especially to the years that followed it).
Connoisseurship, at present, is being regarded as being part of art historical tradition, but academic art history does know little of and shows rarely interested in the history of connoisseurship that certainly is not going to write itself, in sum: an accumulation of knowledge and progress of methodological conscience, due to a lack of historical conscience, cannot be observed, and all the same, art historians tend to regard themselves, if necessary (and although the discipline does only occasionally practice connoisseurship at all and mostly ad hoc), as the declared experts in all questions of attribution and authentication. Because: who else, acknowledged, would there be?

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TWO) The 20th Century’s Last Word on Connoisseurship or: The Riverbank symposium of 1999

Riverbank is the name given to a hanging scroll that the New York financier Oscar Tang bought for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1997. From artist/collector C.C. Wang who, on his part, had bought the work from Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian). The latter is, while the scroll is also attributed to 10th century painter Dong Yuan, according to the late James Cahill, the author of this work (see below the picture of the work with its supposed author). And we may add that the late James Cahill did not only know Chang (of which Cahill himself owned at least one work), but C.C. Wang is also to be regarded as one of Cahill’s mentors. In a word: recalling these brief facts means also to become aware that the Riverbank test case was/is not only about a work of art, not only about some isolated questions, but also, and not least, about a culture. About the culture of connoisseurship, one might say, and if the work was ›on trial‹ at the end of 1999, when a symposium was held at the Met (see here, also ›the art of connoisseurship‹ was on trial. But ›culture‹ means here, in a more narrow sense, also the culture of Chinese Art History, but not only the culture of Chinese Art History, since the culture of connoisseurship is not exactly identical with the academic culture of Chinese Art History.

Why should, we may ask now, a complete outsider, as far as Chinese Art History is concerned, become interested in this particular case? I would say: beside the fact that it is never wrong to attempt to learn something new, for two particular reasons. For one: the outsider who does not know anything about Chinese art history can nevertheless attempt to observe, on a mere methodological level, how the experts deal with the questions raised. And this seems to be not the worst exercise: to describe/to analyze various methodolocial approaches.
The other reason is, I would say: Just because the Riverbank case has turned into a test case (revealing much of the culture that did produce this case), it is interesting to take this case as an example of how connoisseurship organizes today: Who is involved? And if self-organizing processes make connoisseurship (and not an isolated culture of specialists, nor the academia): Of what nature are these processes of self-organization, here, in this particular case, or in general, today?

According to James Cahill’s view – Riverbank and its maker: Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian) (source: James Cahill, Riverbank: A Closer Look (final update))

The late James Cahill was, of course, the one particular individual who did help much to turn the Riverbank case into a test case. Because for James Cahill it was obviously about much more than just about a single work of art and its supposed author. Indeed Cahill was the one who did not only choose the role of the one questioning a seemingly established attribution; he also did choose the role of the one explaining to the world the culture of Chinese Art History. And indeed Cahill, who did feel that the 1999 symposium had been anything but balanced (but more of a ›clubbing Cahill‹ event), did also feel that the controversy was not over.

If we gather some informations here as to the nature of a test case, we don’t want to go too much into detail, and it is not the question at all, if we would be inclined to accept Cahill’s narrative, his way of seeing things, and the academic culture in particular. What interests us here is for example the mere fact that Cahill did choose Youtube as his media and, in very particular, inserted two lectures, dedicated exclusively to the Riverbank case, into his series of lectures on Early Chinese Landscape Painting that one may watch on Youtube, with the one particular lecture dedicated to the Riverbank symposium and to Cahill’s critique thereof, and the other dedicated to Cahill’s attempt, as he himself did put it, to hit the last nail into coffin of Riverbank itself.
And particularly interesting also, and not necessarily a mere marginal fact, that Cahill, while attempting to assemble materials, quotes, statements in support of his view, he does also mention a Chinese blogger who did speak out in support of Cahill (and whose statements were made known to Cahill by one of his supporters). This is, we might say, the extended court of opinion (which is the reality today), with a Chinese blogger who might also be an expert, but as a matter of fact: this we do not know at all, nor are we in the position to find out.

All in all we do observe, with Cahill, an individual turning the mere Riverbank case also into a lesson about positions of power within the world of academic Art History, and at the same time, using channels of communications and networks that are not limited to the more traditional ways of dealing with scientific questions (the symposium being for example one classical form).
Connoisseurship does not organize (and never did) within the academia alone, nor does connoisseurship organize according to mere scientific principles: Cahill does speak about friendships, about fears, as a teacher, that his pupils might suffer in case of of supporting Cahill positions, and again, it is not the question if this is a narrative that stands testing (we are not in the position at all to test it), but we take it as one description of how the culture of connoisseurship (that involves the academia, but is not at all ruled by the academia) does work today. And we do interpret the role of the late James Cahill as the role of one individual being, for several and also personal reasons, being particularly involved and active (in revealing things that others remain rather silent of), but also being one individual being particularly active within self-organizing processes that strike us as being fascinatingly unorganized, if not to say chaotic: as the extended court of opinion is today, consisting of the most diverse platforms with the most diverse narratives and truths.

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THREE) Some More Specific Remarks on the Riverbank Test Case

Assuming that the Cahill lectures on Youtube are not to be considered as the last word on Riverbank, assuming in other words that the discussion, in various circles, went on and still goes on, I still would like to finish with a few rather specific remarks on the case, as if the Cahill lectures had been the last word on Riverbank, and be it only for the again more marginal observation that Cahill says at one point in his lectures that he does not dispose of really good slides as to the work in question, which, again, I find rather striking, if not to say rather weird, if it is about the supposedly last nail to a coffin (or the explanation to a wider audience of why to hit such a nail).
Nevertheless I can follow Cahill’s arguments, although I am getting the slight feeling while listening to him that he tends to interpret his own interpretation of visual evidence as the only possible way of interpreting this visual evidence. In other words: it seems to me that Cahill has not been particularly interested, and probably has never been, to deal with and to answer the most fundamental question of why various people see (and seeing means also interpreting here) differently. I don’t know whether an academic symposium is meant to have various opinions simply clash, or if it is meant to join forces to answer questions that bear on general issues in a collective effort, but it does not seem to me that connoisseurship of Chinese painting as reflected by the Riverbank case, is particularly interested in finding common ground.
Because to find or to define such ground would rather be easy: Two main hypotheses have been put forward (and several others, but they do not concern us here, and for the moment), and it might be considered as a suggestion that in such a case the scientific community would agree to test both hypotheses, both suggested attributions, and organize according to a opposing view point principle.
But truth is that the one argument, the last nail in the coffin argument was put forward by Cahill long after the symposium, and it is rather in passing by that he mentions, in his filmed lectures, that this was the one distictive property that he has found, allowing him with some certainty to attribute the work in question to Chang Dai-chien, and this property is not a stylistic property at all, but a mere materialistic property: it is what Cahill calls the brickwork pattern, the revealing property, as he seems to think, only to be found in works by Chang Dai-chien, a brickwork pattern in the silk, due to an effort, as Cahill supposes, of having silk artifically ageing.
And the one fundamental question that is raised by this argument is simply if this can be regarded as being true: is the brickwork pattern only to be found in works by Chang Dai-chien, or can the hypothesis of having found a distinctive property be refuted, by showing that the brickwork pattern can also be found in other artist’s works?
It may seem that Cahill is right in assuming that connoisseurship of Chinese painting is in difficulty as to attribute 10th century works of art, since individual properties, and the knowledge thereof may be lacking, but the Chang Dai-chien hypothesis can still be tested, and one would have to assemble much more examples of ascertained works; and also, as the Cahill argument implies, one would have to check Chinese paintings in general for the brickwork pattern in question (and I am not under the impression that Cahill had ever done this, because it seems to me that he deals with the problem all too briefly; and since he did discover this brickwork pattern property only long after the symposium of 1999, one might also assume that, in earlier times, when not knowing of such patterns, he therefore did not see them, not being prepared to see them, not being prepared to look after them). And if there is some truth in the latter observation as to just ad-hoc findings and ad-hoc dealing with distinctive properties, one could be inclined to mention again the complete lack of tradition in art historical connoisseurship as to questions of method. Because, if there had been an accumulation of knowledge as to method, an accumulation of methodolocial conscience, one would have dealt with fundamental questions of procedure first and made Riverbank a real test case, applying all historical experiences with and gained in such cases.
But this was not at all the case. In truth the symposium paper by Wen C. Fong, Cahill’s friend but also opponent in this case, is most revealing as to this respect: In containing for example a review as to how art historians like Wölfflin did conceptualize style, and in not mentioning at all that it had been Wöllflin’s aim, after being very much interested in the Morellian approach to connoisseurship in his earlier years, to conceptualize the over-individual features of style, and to subordinate, if not to say: dismiss the question of individual authorship). And if this is defined as the common ground as to solve a common problem, the question of individual authorship is excluded from the beginning, which is, in other words, only the own (10th century hypothesis) will be allowed and tested, since, as to this respect, it is (only) about the question if the work in question does fit in into a stylistic paradigm or not, and less about the question of determining individual authorship. And the tradition that Wen C. Fong does review in his paper and implicitly defines as being relevant, has much to do with the history of art history as an academical disclipline (being especially dismissive of connoisseurship since the 1960s, only to realize, some decades later, that attributional expertise is indispensable), and little to to with the actual history of connoisseurship, wherin the actual experiences of dealing with attributional questions were actually being accumulated (mostly by individuals, in- or outside, or inbetween the institutions, and not necessarily passed on to a general tradition and to the next generation).
Yet, if this all does sound way too pessimistic: one of the best papers on conceptual and epistemological fundamentals of connoisseurship we indirectly owe to these issues, and probably in particular to the Riverbank controversy. It is a paper by the philosopher (another outsider to the field) John H. Brown, and was published within a volume on perspectives on connoisseurship of Chinese painting (see here).

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