Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X

Home

Home archive

Issue 15. Battles around Images: Iconoclasm and Beyond

Arts as Existence. The Artist's Monograph and Its Project

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: November 2006

Gabriele Guercio, Arts as Existence. The Artist's Monograph and Its Project
Cambridge, Mass., and London : MIT, 2006, ISBN: 0-262-07268-8

Great books have often a very simple starting point, which enables them to have a fresh look on an issue that had ceased to be an issue at all. Gabriele Guercio's Art as Existence is a wonderful example of such a mix of a minimal trigger and maximal results. The books is a rereading of a specific genre, the artists's monograph, which Guercio defines as a single book on a single artist that follows the "life-and-works" model. The monograph is so ubiquitous a genre that its very existence is almost no longer noticed, and this de-naturalization of a full-blown formulaic structure is the first of many surprises that are waiting for the reader.

Guercio tackles the genre of the monograph from a double point of view, historical as well as cultural. On the one hand, the author wants to know where the genre comes from, how it has been transformed since its beginning and why it is no longer intellectually challenging - despite of course the economic relevance of a still increasing output. On the other hand, Guercio also scrutinizes the ways in which the monograph both shapes our thinking on art and is being shaped by it, emphasizing thus the pertinence of a truly interdisciplinary stance in the field of art history (a field whose methodological and theoretical narrow-mindedness is often accused of permitting the continuing role of an old-fashioned genre and the "life-and-works" paradigm that is supporting it).

The overall structure of the book is chronological and brings the reader from a very precise "alpha" - the Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Vasari, who really invented the monograph - to a somewhat diffuse "omega" - the exhaustion and fossilization of the genre since the first decades of the XXth century and the growing doubts on the very possibility to restore its inventiveness. This very clear historical survey is one of the major merits of Art as Existence. Such an achievement is due to Guercio's refusal of the monograph genre as a transhistorical essence and to the foregrounding of "life-and-work" book as an open and historically shifting question that addresses our ideas on artists and art. This viewpoint helps Guercio to establish a chronological line in which continuity and discontinuity keep each other in a dialectical balance. Instead of describing the evolution of the monograph, Guercio highlights a certain number of key publications, which each perform not just a new step in one unified history, but a paradigm shift within the global framework of the "life-and-work" model. Art as Existence, which contains a close reading of some thirty important monographs, insists on three landmark publications (there are certainly others, and it may be dangerous to propose such a synthesis, yet I think that the following triad is really the bone of Guercio's argument):

• Vasari's Lives (1568), which for the very first time in Western history consider artists a worthy subject of biographical description, of equal value of other Great Men (Guercio will come back on the gender issue), and which also create the figure of the individual artist, in "the dual consideration of the biographical and the artistic realism" (26); this model will only become a dominant paradigm around of the turn of the 19 th Century (after the French Revolution, which frees the artist from his patron while introducing also the modern museum), when one observes a real 'explosion' of monographs;

• Johan David Passavent's Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni (1839), which revolutionizes the genre in different ways: Passavent introduces "the idea of the artist's oeuvre as a multidimensional whole" (94), which he sees as a continuum, often with very 'vitalistic' overtones that bear echoes from Goethe's thinking on the organic growth of the work of art; all these shifts make room for the monograph as catalogue raisonné and increase of course the role of connoisseurship, while determining also the basic tension between "life" and "work", between biography and oeuvre that will be the major characteristic of all the 19 th century monographs that really matter;

• Bernard Berenson's Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criciticsm (1895) dramatically reorients the genre toward the biographical, but a biographical approached via the artistic, the author defining the main goal of a monograph "to extract an 'artistic personality' from the works" (194), advancing the notion "that the works of arts in themselves bear all the necessary evidence of their maker, both as an artist and as a human being" (id.); strongly influenced by Morelli's empirical vision on connoisseurship as well as by the psychological theories of William James, Berenson's monograph represents the subjective interpretive mode characteristic of the last creative phase of the genre.

For many readers, Guercio's discussion of the XXth century monograph will come as a great surprise, for even the greatest achievements of this period (the author discusses for instance monographs by Panofsky, Fried or Clark) and its most audacious innovations (the major examples here are John Berger and Roger Lebel) do not convince him that the "life-and-work" paradigm is really still alive. Guercio is able to keep such a critical distance towards these modern giants thanks to his interdisciplinary approach, and this theoretical and methodological openness is another major merit of Art as Existence. The monograph is not analyzed as a genre in itself, either sub specie aernitatis or in its historical metamorphoses, but as a symptom of a different, more complex field, that of art itself. From this point of view, one understands why Guercio can argue that the finest XXth century monographs are just continuations of 19 th century models. Our own vision of what art is and on the relationships between artists and art (and maybe on the world in general) have changed to such a point that it is no longer possible today to believe in the "life-and-work" model as a valuable key for the understanding of the meaning of art.

Yet this healthy disbelief toward the use-value of the genre does not imply for the Guercio any suspicion toward the very utility of studying it, and I think that the way Guercio established this distinction is perhaps another great quality of his book. For many good reasons, the author argues, we must go beyond the "life-and-works" model in our thinking and writing on art, yet only the careful study of a no longer viable genre can help us to overcome it. For this reason, Guercio does not limit himself to explain why the monograph paradigm is so at odds with modern and postmodern interrogations, for example on issues like identity, post-colonialism, and gender. He also stresses the reasons why it is urgent to take up the analysis of the genre, ranging from the illusion that we know what a monograph is to, for instance, "the alleged association of the monographic tradition with ill-founded views of the human subject" (8). Art as Existence will prove in length that we are wrong in thinking that we "knew it all", and such a lesson in modesty is always profitable.

After reading Art as Existence, one can only start dreaming of a further broadening of Guercio's interdisciplinary approach. A comparison with the "life-and-works" model in literary historiography and theory for instance may prove extremely promising. Guercio's rereading of the artist's biography cannot but provoke new questions on the dialogue between words and images, first at historical level (how did painters' and writers' monographs interact?), second at methodological level (what will happen when we start reading visual monographs as texts?), and third at theoretical level (how to rethink the paradigm in a field like literary theory that is not obsessed by connoisseurship or attribution problems and that considers intentional fallacy as one if its dogmas?). Only great books can raise great questions, and Art as Existence is certainly one of this kind. It is now the task of its readers to continue what the author has started.

This site is optimized for Netscape 6 and higher

site design: Sara Roegiers @ Maerlantcentrum