Current NewsLetter

June 1998

15 June 1998

Dear Fogg print fans,

Quote of the day! "I think that Durer was so successful because he was a great distributor. If he were alive today, he'd have a website." This from a young woodcut artist from named Tom Huck -- a great name for an artist from Missouri, no? His prints combine Durer and R. Crumb.

You must be tired of my on-going association of prints and pixels, especially those of you who are not tied to a computer. But I am afraid that this year my print history class had to produce the final assignment -- always an exhibition -- on the web rather than in a gallery, and I do want to alert those of you with internet access to their exhibition. Its address:

http://icg.fas.harvard.edu/~finart106x/

The experiment was not a total success in that I did not maintain the control that I should have: one of my students enthusiastically offered to mount the individual presentations into an integrated website, and, given my own ineptitude, I accepted the offer and turned my students' disks over to him. He did a marvelous job with the visuals, even creating animations to explain technical processes. However, it now would be a difficult project for me to gain access to these files to edit them, and so the world is treated to the grammatical infelicities and typos of undergraduates. I blush for them.

Yet perhaps it is interesting, as a cross-section of what I was able to communicate about looking at prints to students who were not art history concentrators. Their response ran from genuinely naive delight to sophisticated analysis. Perhaps it was a function of their concentrations (chemistry, economics, literature, studio art), but not one seemed to have a historical bone in his or her body. All of the non-art historical facts that I might report in association with a print were news to them, were duly noted, and even were remembered; but, for example, the fellow (from MIT) who worked on the relationship of book illustration to text never responded to my hint that, of the four books he selected, the Nuremburg Chronicle was authentically late medieval and the other three were conscious recoveries, in one way or another, of things medieval. I say this by way of comment, not criticism: historical analysis was not required by the assignment, and his book illustration mini-exhibit is, I think, extremely effective.

Which leaves one wondering why no art history students took the course. Does the idea of a historical survey not appeal in an era of ahistorical education? The catalogue description of my course starts out: "A history of Western printmaking..." but among the other Fine Arts courses open to undergraduates, the only ones that use the word "history" in their titles or descriptions are Prof. Eugene Wang's two courses on Chinese art and calligraphy. Another professor, Alice Jarrard, slips "historical" into the descriptions of her two undergraduate courses, and her title for one of them, "Painting and Sculpting in Italy, 1575-1700" certainly suggests history.

Two dates separated by a dash is an explicit indication of passing time, and so also, curiously, is her substitution of the gerund "Sculpting" for the anticipated "Scupture". It brings you up short, forcing a reconsideration of Professor Jarrard's "Painting" as well. Thoughts about the process of making art, including the time it takes, follow. But let me quote her course description: "Examines notions of invention, genre, patronage, function, and audience in 17th-century Italian art. The settings for these historical investigations include Bologna, Rome and Naples..." So you see, in this context "historical" merely indicates the past, and a fairly static one at that. Perhaps the gerunds were adopted in order to free the student from concentrating on the art object itself. From a consideration of its making, rather than it as already made, can one pass more readily to its patron and its audience? And "notions"? That sounds much more spritely than a heavy-duty sequential historical concept; perhaps it is simply a lure to catch the eye of the undergraduate catalogue browser.

I don't mean to imply for a moment that Professor Jarrard is indifferent to objects. In fact, among the faculty in the Fine Arts Department, she is the print and drawing collections' most avid user. She schedules classes in the Jakob Rosenberg Seminar Room and gives assignments that bring the students back. And I couldn't be happier about her attitude, because for her, prints are objects of pleasure as well as utility. But as you can see from her course description, notions of history have changed, and other fine arts course descriptions are yet more ahistorical. I gather from secondary reading that even the concept of factual history is in disrepute in some quarters. No wonder my students are devoid of history.

I often show prints in relation to each other because, as multiples that were intended for wide dissemination, they were often the vehicles of influence and reaction. I try to let the prints themselves explain the development of a tradition -- landscape in the 17th-century, for example. The students "get it" but only on a case by case basis, I feel. How can I make them appreciate the whole, as a process, as well as they understand the parts, as results?

Speaking of self-explanatory prints, we have just been given the single most exceptional old master print that has entered the collection since I became curator: Martin Schongauer's Death of the Virgin, in a fantastic early impression, on paper bearing the earliest watemark according to Lehrs, and in excellent condition. It is a donation from a Harvard/Radcliffe couple in their sixties who are "down-sizing". I had never seen them before in my life.

We already owned an impression, gray and mutilated, and yet of necessity I had used it for comparative purposes with our Durer and Rembrandt Death of the Virgin impressions. But both of those are of excellent quality, and they put the wretched Schongauer to shame. It was impossible to convey to students the sheer fecundity of the the model, alive with incident and yet harmonized into a pulsing entity. Our new impression, aside from its independent value as one of the greatest prints of the 15th century, can now make the point that the two greatest printmakers of the 16th and 17th century drew explicit inspiration from their artistic forebear, and that such an appropriation was not done ironically; it was not evidence of a lack of creative power. Our new Schongauer makes it easy for me to demonstrate that things were different then -- which is what history is all about.

Very best,

Marjorie B. Cohn
Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints

TEL: (617) 495-2393
FAX: (617) 496-3800
E-M: cohn@fas.harvard.edu

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