Carol Mancusi-Ungaro is one of the leading experts in the field of art conservation. Mancusi-Ungaro has pioneered techniques for restoring work by modern and contemporary artists and has worked on several paintings by Barnett Newman.
She says that there are a set of rules that conservators must follow when restoring a painting, the first being that you should make every effort to not use any material that cannot be removed or reversed in the future. If conservators add paint to a canvas, they want to make sure that paint can be dissolved and removed later. They do this in case the artwork needs to be retouched again in the future. Conservators also try to preserve as much of the original material as possible, touching only the areas that need treatment.
They should also really study the artist and look at their past work in order to get a sense of what the artist was trying to achieve.
With these rules in mind, the Stedelijk phoned up practically every conservator in Europe. The biggest challenge was the very simplicity of the painting. Goldreyer promised that when he was done, the slashes would be virtually invisible.
Finally, four and a half years later, Goldreyer unveiled the painting, and when the museum director, Wim Beeren, came to inspect his work, there was no sign of the slashes.
But when the painting went back up, people immediately noticed that the red paint looked different. It was the same hue as before, but previously there had been a shimmering quality to the red that gave it a sense of depth.
The city council of Amsterdam sent it to a forensic lab to try to figure out what Goldreyer had done, and they concluded Goldreyer had used a paint roller to lay down layers of dull acrylic paint similar to house paint over the original.
If the analysis was correct, Goldreyer had rolled over the entire canvas of a twentieth-century masterpiece with house paint. The whole affair cost over a million dollars and now the museum was still stuck with a damaged painting. Van Bladeren found another piece by Newman, a large blue painting with a white zip down the middle titled Cathedra and attacked this piece with a box cutter.
When he was done, he threw a packet of pamphlets on the floor that contained rambling, incoherent writing. At his second trial, van Bladeren was declared mentally unfit and sent to a psychiatric institution. A Newman sculpture at a museum in Houston was spray-painted with swastikas in and just last year, someone poured white paint into the reflecting pool surrounding this same sculpture and left behind white supremacist leaflets.
After Cathedra was attacked, both Ysbrand Hummelen and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro advised on its restoration, and the museum spared no expense. The canvas was stitched together with surgical sutures and orthodontic wire on a specially built table. Four painstaking years later, it was unveiled. Cathedra is currently on display at the Stedelijk.
The painting is in a storage facility at the edge of town. It waits there, hoping for a day when future conservators might be able to undo what was done to it. To remove the layers of paint, and get to the original experience, the one the artist created, still sleeping underneath. I just finished listening to The Many Deaths of a Painting while on my run. Another great episode.
However, I was saddened by a moment in the show when Barbara asks John how he would feel if someone attacked a painting after they heard this podcast… John responds that he would feel terrible and that the episode would have failed. While I empathized with John in that moment and his reaction is genuine, I really feel the query was unfair.
Possibly the whole of the past, since there is nothing in memory, certainly nothing it has repressed, that cannot be reactivated. But it is above all modernity, this Modern ist past which we are told we no longer belong to, that will or will not legitimize the painting of tomorrow.
It is for it to say whether, yes or no, what we have called painting during modernity, which includes ancient painting, will have ceased to exist and whether, yes or no, the practices that may replace it will have maintained the link with their pictorial prehistory.
Thus the future of painting addresses its demand for legitimization to the Modernist past. Such a statement is highly problematical, since it bears an uncanny resemblance to the various neotraditionalist and historicist positions currently dominating the art scene, if it does not appear as a simple reiteration of the formalist position.
Yet it is radically opposed to them, the whole question being to know, in the long term, how modernity is to be defined and, in the short term, how this demand for legitimization is to be formulated.
But he made several mistakes, of which not the least consisted in holding an a priori concept of what painting is, a concept which came to him from too narrow a reading of history and which served him as a yardstick for prejudging the future. Here was criticism undertaking to prophesy a tradition to be legitimized in advance by a middle-class, watered-down version of Modernism. Kitaj or Jim Dine, have been able to integrate by refusing.
None of these people—and other names should be mentioned—has the excuse of ignorance or irresponsibility. At most one can grant them the mitigating circumstances of fear. But if one grants them that, one must on the other hand incriminate them for their pursuit of power.
Whether influential critic, manipulator of the market, or curator or director of a museum, the people mentioned here have sought or are seeking the power to intervene in the history of art. And this not only oppresses the most vital art of today, not only directs and deforms judgment, but risks further mortgaging the chances of a reinterpretation of the history of Modernism.
It is in this sense that the future of painting—or of art—addresses its demand for legitimization to the Modernist past. It is to a Modernism that is still waiting to be reinterpreted. But a lot remains to be done, that can be done only if one starts by sorting out as far as possible, on a theoretical level, what pertains to judgment and what to interpretation. It ought to be an established fact that the judgments that have made history in the period from Manet to Pollock and beyond are without remission.
Concerning artists as undisputed as these or Mondrian or Newman, or Marcel Duchamp, for that matter, any revisionism would be absurd or monstrous. The consequences indeed would be serious and immediate. And this is not because, as one might be inclined to think, there is an unbroken and irreversible chain of progress in which artists are linked to one another throughout the course of a one-way history, but because no work of art exists alone, being always the interpretation of at least one other work.
On the one hand there is the relevance of the interpretations the works propose of one another by order of historical succession; on the other, the resonance that ranks these interpretations around a limited number of focal points echoing each other in all directions, forward and backward, mainstream and fringe, specific and trans-specific.
It is one thing to interpret the history of art as an artist, another to interpret it as a critic or historian. Nevertheless both parties have this in common—that everything begins and ends in esthetic judgment.
The difference is that his judgment is not by the same token an interpretation, or at least not an explicit interpretation, and explicitness is required of the historian, whereas it is absolutely not required of the artist.
The historian and the critic are obliged to give reasons for their judgments, to explain them and build an interpretation of the works that places them in a context which is, more often than not, their historicity. Furthermore, their discourse constantly refers to that of other historians and critics, either refuting them or taking them over, either amplifying them or cutting them down.
None of this is required of artists. Although their culture, ideology, and taste are formed by what they have read and learned about art as much as by their firsthand acquaintance with works, and indeed by many other things, no one should expect them to make explicit in their work the interpretation which that work embodies.
The esthetic judgments out of which a work arises—and in the making of art the only judgments that count are esthetic ones 8 —do not require any explicit motivation, justification, or explanation whatsoever. In a way, of course, this is also true of the historian and the critic.
Inasmuch as their work begins and ends in esthetic judgment, they have as much right as anyone to the most arbitrary subjectivity. But it is their job to produce a rationale for their verdicts, with the imminence of another verdict to be rendered in their own case, of which they must know they run the risk.
What they submit to the judgment of others is not simply their esthetic judgment but rather the interpretation explaining, justifying, or amplifying it. And this, needless to say, is not to be judged esthetically.
It is to be judged interpretively. The discursive history of art—which must be distinguished de jure even if de facto this is not such an easy task from the operative history of art, entirely immanent in the opera , the works—is thus made up of interpretations that expose themselves to the verdict of other interpretations.
Although this may look like a truism, it is not. For every precaution must be taken to avoid the misconception that what is here intended is a revival of the old ideology of the autonomy of art, according to which artworks can perfectly well dispense with theories and interpretations: that being sufficient unto themselves, they enjoy complete immunity and impunity with regard to what critics and art historians may have to say about them.
This is not true. Artworks have everything to do with theories and interpretations, and not only with those which the artists supply on their own account in texts and manifestoes. They have everything to do with them because they themselves are theoretical and interpretive, owing their status as works of art not to the skill or technique of artists, nor to their ideas or intentions, but rather to their esthetic judgments.
And these are unquestionably interpretations, but—and this is the point—interpretations that cannot interpret themselves. If they could that would mean either that the work in question was not the resultant of esthetic judgments but the illustration of a pre-existing theory and there are of course many cases of this, which adds to the confusion , or that what is called its self-reference amounted to a tautology offering no hold to criticism and this does not exist, whatever some may think.
In the first case works of art would be merely ideological and without any specificity; in the second case they would exist as absolutely autonomous and hermetic monads not accountable to ideology, history or the outside world. As neither case is admissible, it must be concluded that works of art worthy of the name are concretions of esthetic judgments which interpret other, earlier or at the most contemporary ones, but which as interpretations remain suspended, awaiting other, later interpretations which will make the former explicit.
Depending on whether those subsequent interpretations are themselves works of art, i. The operative history of art jumps from esthetic judgment to esthetic judgment and, although interpretations are embodied in them, these may well remain implicit all along the historical chain—or network. The discursive history of art moves along from interpretation to interpretation and, although esthetic judgments preside over them, the work of justifying these is never completed.
The two histories, needless to say, are closely intertwined, constantly crisscrossing and sometimes going part of the way together. That they are very often inextricable de facto makes it all the more urgent to sort them out de jure. The intellectual—i. There have also been examples of a symmetrical danger when art takes the form of criticism. It may happen that an artist seeks to reduce all art, not only his own, but that of others as well, to a critical discourse, regurgitating this discourse as a work of art.
Kosuth has presented successively a variety of theoretical interpretations of art which, while inaccurate, are not at all without interest, but he has presented them as art and as if they were self-interpreting, which removes them from interpretive judgments and moreover greatly confuses the issue of the nature of esthetic judgment. These two examples show that we have all the more to gain by distinguishing decisively between the operative and the discursive histories of art, that it neither can nor may be ignored that they are constantly interfering with each other, influencing each other, stimulating or inhibiting each other.
It is imperative to emphasize what distinguishes them from each other and to repeat that, in the operative history, the interpretations which are embodied in the concretions of esthetic judgments constituted by the works might well but this would be an extreme case remain implicit throughout the entire historical network, whereas, in the discursive history, the esthetic judgments presiding over the interpretations and taken up or challenged by succeeding criticism and reinterpretations never achieve ultimate justification and foundation.
Thus it is not in the name of the discursive history of art that revisionism is rejected here. The judgments consecrating even such artists as Mondrian or Newman will never be finally justified in such a way as to be rendered absolute and objective.
It must be so postulated, and a postulate requires no justification. It is a wager, it is in itself a judgment, not caused by a motivation but regulated by a maxim and sensed to be true thanks to a feeling. In these disenchanted days, the feeling is fear, and the maxim close to what Ernst Bloch called Das Prinzip Hoffnung The principle hope. The work that should proceed from all this belongs to the discursive history of Modernism, but addresses itself to it only very indirectly.
Tackling it head-on would involve endless ideological refutations and counter-interpretations of the accepted readings of the history of Modern art. The operative history resists the discursive history as it has been written by orthodox schools of Modernism down to the present time; above all it resists the various reactionary reappraisals that today are attempting to reappropriate it the better to silence it. It is to that operative history that the pictorial and artistic practices of tomorrow are already addressing their demand for legitimization.
Visits If you are planning to see an artwork, please keep in mind that while the art we cover is held in permanent collections, pieces are sometimes removed from display for renovation or traveling exhibitions.
Barnett Newman. Catalog Number. Books What are you Looking at? Samantha Hull. Red, yellow, and blue, oh my! Accessed February 22, Barry James. November 02, Bowen, Monica.
June 23, Accessed March 06, Imdahl, Max.
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