Gayford M. & Wright K. (eds.) The Grove Book of Art Writing: Brilliant Words on Art from Pliny the Elder to Damien Hirst

Grove Press, 2000. — 644 p.
The Grove Book of Art Writing: Brilliant Words on Art from Pliny the Elder to Damien Hirst edited by Martin Gayford and Karen Wright is a seminal compilation about art history. It is an anthology of art that should not be overlooked by any art lover. Discussing the visual arts successfully in words is often held to be an impossible task. In fact it is merely difficult. And since the days of the ancient Greeks, many writers of all kinds have taken up the challenge -- not only art critics but novelists, poets, gossips, artists, and essayists. In The Grove Book of Art Writing, Martin Gayford and Karen Wright have collected the best and most lively attempts to pin it down, in a single-volume cornucopia of writing on art. From Vasari and Freud on why Mona Lisa smiles, to Adolf Hitler on the degeneracy of modernism, to Picasso on how to measure the depiction of the female body, art historians, art critics, artists, as well as the aforementioned weigh in on what makes art so wonderful, frustrating, what makes it art. From the deadly serious to the deeply witty, from the sublime to the ridiculous, The Grove Book of Art Writing is an eloquent compendium of insight into the diverse ways the visual arts can be seen and thought about.Gayford (art critic, Spectator magazine) and Wright (editor, Modern Painters) have scoured the centuries to provide a delightful romp through the world of art writing. The material includes both short stories and long quotes, arranged thematically by chapters that cover the artist at work, models, psychology, and revolution to truth and beauty, how to do it, and bad reviews. Writers ranging from Seneca to Henry James to David Bowie provide pointed, lively entertainment; cumbersome and uninspiring prose is not found here. Readers learn such tidbits as Pierre Bonnard's refusal to have his face photographed after the death of his wife, Brian Eno's attempt to relieve himself in Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," and John Wells's comparison of abstraction and alchemy. So, ultimately, what is art? Read the Grove Book of Art Writing to find out.ContentsPreface xi
Introduction xiii
In the Studio: The Artist at Work i
Brassai — Hawksworth Fawkes — Henry Syer Trimmer — Rene Gimpel —
Robert Hughes - Alice Michel - Stefan Zweig - Bruce Chatwin -
Benjamin Robert Haydon - William Rothenstein - Hilton Kramer -
Charles Baudelaire - William Copley - M. Boschini - Winifred Nicholson
- Herbert Read - David Lewis - Seneca
Nature, Lyric and Sublime 33
Paul Nash - Robert Smithson - Pietro Aretino -John Wells - C. R. Leslie
- David Sylvester -James McNeill Whistier - Andre Gide - Manuel II
Palaeologus - Shen Tsung-ch'ien -John Ruskin -Jackson Pollock -
Herman Melville - John Constable - Charlotte Bronte - William Hazlitt -
Leonardo da Vinci — Emile Zola — Georges Braque
Artists and Models jy
Ovid — Isadora Duncan — Giorgio Vasari — Annette Vaillant - Jacopo
Tebaldi — Eugene Fromentin — Edouard Manet — Giorgio Vasari — Paul de
Freart - Leigh Bowery - Helene Parmelin - David Sylvester - Henrietta
Moraes - Lawrence Gowing - Quentin Bell - Ambroise Vollard - Vincent
Van Gogh - Denis Diderot - David Sylvester
The Human Clay: Humanity in Art 83
Oskar Kokoschka - Henry Fielding - Lucian Freud - Kenneth Clark -
Svedana Alpers - Rainer Maria Rilke - Robert Louis Stevenson -John
Berger - Giovanni della Casa - Titian - Walter Sickert -Julian Barnes -
Joanna Frueh - Henry Moore - Edmund Waller - Henry James -Jahangir
The Artist Interrogated: Interviews and Other Inquisitions ioy
John Ruskin -James McNeill Whistler - Damien Hirst - Andy Warhol -
Leo Steinberg - David Bowie -Jackson Pollock and William Wright -
Trial of Veronese
On the Couch: Art and Psycholog}' 129
William Blake - Richard Wollheim - Anita Brookner - Antonin Artaud -
Sigmund Freud -John Richardson - Germaine Greer
JLa Vie de Boheme iji
William Blake - Giorgio Vasari - Giovanni Baglioni - Germaine Greer -
Julian Maclaren-Ross - Filippo Baldinucci - Andre Salmon - Germain
Bazin - Fernande Olivier - Fielding Dawson - B. H. Friedman
- Roger Hilton
Revolution Now! 179
Helene Parmelin — Yuan Hung-tao — Beatrice Wood — Blind Man — Brian
Eno - George Grosz - Tristan Tzara - George Melly - Richard Dorment
- Rene Magritte - Kasimir Malevich - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti -Jean
Auguste Dominique Ingres - Guy Deghy and Keith Waterhouse -
Guerrilla Girls - Yves Klein - Gilbert & George
— Georges Braque
Artistic Encounters: Greek Meets Greek 207
Albrecht Durer - Benvenuto Cellini - B. H. Friedman - Edouard Manet -
Ambroise Vollard - Michael Ayrton - Eugene Delacroix -John Constable
- C. R. Leslie - W. P. Frith - Samuel Palmer - William Rothenstein -
James Lord - Marjorie Lilley - Giorgio Vasari - Daniel Farson
Every Picture Tells a Story 22
Julian Barnes -John Ruskin -James McNeill Whistler - Evelyn Waugh -
Charles Lamb - Virginia Woolf - Walter Sickert - Leonardo da Vinci -
Calvin Tomkins
Truth and Beauty: In Search ofReality and the Ideal 2ji
D. H. Lawrence - C. R. Leslie - Benjamin Robert Haydon - Johann
Joachim Winckelmann - Eugene Delacroix -John Richardson - Antonio
Palomino - Helene Parmelin - Honore de Balzac - Georges Braque -
Johann Eckermann -John Keats - Marcel Proust -Jose Ortega y Gasset
— Willem de Kooning
Gallery-going The Experience ofLooking at Art 277
Iris Murdoch - Edward Burne-Jones - Lucian - Rembrandt van Rijn -
Jean-Paul Sartre - David Sylvester - Henry James -Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe - Rosalind Krauss - Rainer Maria Rilke - Leo Steinberg - Henri
Matisse - Mark Twain - Robert Hughes - John Updike
Mysterious Beauties: Art and Revelation 309
Marcel Proust - Georges Braque - Michael Levey - Samuel Palmer -
Barnett Newman - Iris Murdoch
How to Do It: The PracticalAspects ofArt 319
Edouard Manet - Maurice Denis - William Hazlitt - Audrey Flack -
Cennino Cennini - Paul Gauguin - Marcel Duchamp - Benvenuto Cellini
-Jackson Pollock - Paul de Freart - Georgina Burne-Jones - Pliny the
Elder - B. H. Friedman - Pablo Picasso - Pierre Auguste Renoir - Terry
Frost - Keith Vaughan - Damien Hirst - Katsushika Hokusai
Significant Form: Shape, Weight, Mass and Volume in Art 343
Joyce Cary - Henry Moore - Henri Gaudier-Brzeska - Wassily Kandinsky
- Maurice Denis - Roger Fry - Quentin Bell - David Sylvester - Bernard
Berenson — Georges Braque —John Ruskin — David Sylvester — Pliny the
Elder -Joyce Cary - Paul Cezanne
A Sense ofPlace: Art and Travel 363
Howard Jacobson - Ambroise Vollard - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
Mary McCarthy - Vincent Van Gogh - Patrick Heron - Nicolas Poussin -
John Berger — Albrecht Diirer —John Elderfield — David Hockney —
Michael Jacobs - Robert Hughes - William Feaver -John Constable
The Probity ofArt: Drawing 40/
Su Tung-p'o - Shen Tsung-ch'ien -Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres -
Charles Baudelaire - Henri Matisse - Michael Craig-Martin - Giorgio
Vasari - Robert Hughes - Leon KossorT and John Berger
A Difficult Relationship: Artists and Patrons 42
Benjamin Robert Haydon -Joyce Cary - Thomas Gainsborough -
Giorgio Vasari - Rembrandt van Rijn - Walter Sickert - Matthew Collings -
St Bernard of Clairvaux
Imagination 439
Bryan Robertson - Giorgio Vasari - Leonardo da Vinci - Max Ernst -
Rene Magritte -Joan Miro - Pliny the Elder - David Sylvester - Laurent
Matheron - Paul de Freart - Charles Baudelaire - Gustave Courbet
Emotion 4J9
J.-K. Huysmans - Bernard Berenson - Anita Brookner - Stendhal –
Eugene Fromentin - W. H. Auden - Denis Diderot - Aldous Huxley -
Damien Hirst - Leon Battista Alberti - Andrew Graham-Dixon - Henry
James — John Ruskin
Paint and Stone, etc.: The Materials ofArt 483
Willem de Kooning - Lawrence Gowing - Walter Sickert - Patrick Heron
- Helen Lessore - Arnold Houbraken - Karel van Mander - Georgina
Burne-Jones — Siri Hustvedt — Jed Perl — Clement Greenberg — C. R.
Leslie — Maurice Denis — Gilbert & George — Tim Hilton — Adrian Stokes
— Barbara Hepworth
Bad Reviews and Stinging Replies: Artists and Critics joy
Robert Hughes - Brian Sewell -James McNeill Whistler - Pablo Picasso -
Georgina Burne-Jones — Auguste Rodin —John Ruskin — William Blake —
Ambroise Vollard - Jacopo Tintoretto - Henry James -Jean Baptiste
Simeon - Charles Baudelaire - John Constable - Adolph Gottlieb and
Mark Rothko - Paul Klee - Daniel Farson
Light, Colour, Space jjj
David Sylvester - Henri Matisse - Sylvia Plath - Richard Dorment - Adolf
Hitler — Yves Klein — Berton Roueche — Vincent Van Gogh — Umberto
Eco - Pablo Picasso - Charles Baudelaire - Henri Matisse - Bernard
Berenson - Alfred Wallis - Patrick Heron - Oskar Kokoschka - John
Elderfield — Francisco Pacheco — Leonardo da Vinci
What is Art? jjy
Harold Rosenberg - Andy Warhol - Barnett Newman - Arthur C. Danto
- David Sylvester - William Boyd - B. H. Friedman - Paul Cezanne -
Hilton Kramer - Georges Seurat - Vincent Van Gogh - Joyce Cary -
Tristan Tzara - Barnett Newman - Georges Braque - J. M. W. Turner -
Marcel DuchampWhat are anthologies for? The answer, we believe, is, for reading - if possible right through, from beginning to end. At any rate, taking in a chapter at a time. It is with that end in view that we have compiled this collection.
Walter Benjamin had a similar ambition: to put together a whole, coherent book entirely out of quotations. He never got around to doing so, perhaps because the project is impossible. Certainly we would not claim to have succeeded where Benjamin has failed. For one thing, we intrude into the text with regular editorial comments of our own. For another, not all the passages we have selected connect, logically or even illogically, with the others.
None the less, we have tried to assemble pieces of writing that fit together - from widely separated times and places - in terms of harmony or contrast of meaning, style, length, or tone. We certainly don't agree with them all — we are, after all, art writers ourselves, and one characteristic of the genre is that it is a rare event for two exponents to concur absolutely. In fact, a propensity for disagreeing is virtually a job qualification for a critic; while artists themselves are, if anything, even more opinionated.
What we have tried to do is allow the various pieces of writing to set each other off, like complementary colours, or different depths of tone. In this case, rather than red against green, light or shade, we have myriad points of view, a spectrum of attitudes: short snatches, long meditations, solemn thoughts, snide remarks. The main criterion by which we chose our snippets of writing was that they should be vivid, interesting, and belong in one of the sections of the book. That seemed the best way to deal with a subject - art - to which approaches, and about which opinions, are so diverse, not to say cacophonously discordant.
This is not intended to be a Domesday resume of all that is wise and deep that has ever been written about art. Such a book would probably be impossible to assemble - or at any rate, would require as many volumes as an encyclopaedia — and even if it were completed would probably be impossible to read. For that reason there are many celebrated writers on art whose names are not to be found in the index to this book.
Often the reason for leaving them out is that their words defied our efforts to fit them in. In particular, treatises on art history and art theory conceived and written on the grand scale do not respond well to being anthologized. A short excerpt, more frequently than not, turns out merely to be a meaningless fragment, a travesty of the whole. On the other hand, there are quite a few surprising contributors to our selection — an Emperor of Byzantium, Mrs Thatcher — who found their way in because, in a relatively short span, what they had to say was pointed, lively, vivid, entertaining — the qualities we wanted for this book. That leads us on to another question. What is art writing? One possible answer might be that it is equivalent to art criticism, but that seemed to us too narrow a definition. Art criticism is a type of writing which has existed, at least in a fully developed form, for only a little over two centuries (the earliest clearly distinguishable examples are perhaps the commentaries that Denis Diderot wrote on the Paris Salons of the 1760s). Essentially, art criticism is an informed and provocative discussion of an artist or a current exhibition - a type of reporting that flourished in the newspapers and periodicals of the nineteenth century, and continues to flourish today. It is, however, by no means the whole of art writing. That is a far wider field, which has been around for very much longer - there are small detachable nuggets of it in some of Plato's works from the fourth century bc . Since that small beginning art writing has increased in volume until, these days, it has become a flood, a Niagara - of histories, theories, anecdotes, epigrams, how-to-do-it manuals, recorded conversations, fictions and poems, to name only the more common manifestations. All of these need to be included in order to get the whole picture; all of them are pointers arranged around the central mystery: what is art?
The informed verdict of a professional observer - that is, art criticism - is one element of this flood of writing. But so too is the response of those amateurs for whom art criticism is not even a part-time profession. Charles Baudelaire, who himself moonlighted prolifically as a critic, made some wise remarks on this subject. 'I sincerely believe,' he wrote in 'The Salon of 1846', 'that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling, but, since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is that painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy.' That is plainly true. Marvellous writing about art — some of the very best - can be found embedded in literature, in the novels of Proust, Henry James, and Joyce Cary, for example, or the poems of Auden and Keats. Conversely, more conventional art writing can on occasion also be good, even great, literature. It is quite possible to read Ruskin simply as an artist in prose, irrespective of what he has to say about art - and, given that a good deal of what he says about art, as in his notorious attack on Whistler, or in the passage on Canaletto to be found in 'Bad Reviews and Stinging Replies', is so crashingly wrong-headed, that is no bad thing. Here we come to one of the paradoxes of the subject. Painting, sculpture and so forth are of course arts. But art writing its elf can be an art; moreover, the merits of a piece of good prose do not disappear simply because the author happens to be wrong. This is plainly the case with Ruskin, and as a matter of fact with all critics. Robert Hughes, an outstanding contemporary writer on art, has remarked that from time to time every critic misses by a 'country mile'; he admits to having done so over Philip Guston's later work. We have all missed on occasion, and some of us do so incessantly. That does not necessarily matter, however. As Walter Sickert, a painter who also wrote with wit and dash, observed: 'The bulk of Ruskin's writing is not invalidated by his attack on Whistler. A certain girlish petulance of style that distinguished Ruskin is not altogether a defect. It served to irritate and fix attention, where a more evenly judicial writer might have remained unread. The pretension of a great critic is not like the pretension of the ridiculous modern being called an expert. A great critic does not stand or fall by immunity from error.'
Nor, on the other hand, is getting it right necessarily enough. Guillaume Apollinaire, generally speaking, got it right, if backing the artists valued by posterity is what counts. He supported the Cubists and many others in their early, struggling days. Most of those he tipped for fame did indeed become famous (he could do this because, unlike Ruskin, he associated with artists, the best way to find out what's going on). But his writings suggest that he supported Picasso and Braque without really understanding what they were doing; furthermore, and worse, despite being a distinguished poet, novelist and dramatist (and supposedly the coiner of the term 'surrealism') he wrote rather dully on art. So, although he was right, we have left him out.