While purchasing old copies of Baedeker’s guides for Duke Libraries, I ran across this book dealer vignette on Baedeker’s Guides:

Literary references to Baedeker’s abound, from E. M. Forester’s A Room with a View to Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad. T.E. Lawrence is reputed to have used Baedeker’s guide to Palestine during his Doctoral work in the Levant and prompted his Allied superiors to make facsimile copies during WWI. During the Luftwaffe’s Vergeltungsangriffe the guides were important enough to be reportedly cited by Gustav Braun von Stumm, that “We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.” In the so-called “Baedeker Blitz” of 1942 the English cities of Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York, and Canterbury were bombed. Bookseller Inventory # 1203300030

One of the perennial one-ups-manships games in academics is to intimidate your friends with all the great books in your discipline that you’ve read.  Luckily, there never was much consensus in art history.  Or rather there were too many censensae (that’s the nice thing about standards, there’s so many to choose from).  Most graduate students in art history are given reading lists supplied by their departments or advisers, but these varied from school to school. It was hard to play this game–and win definitively–in art history.

Until 2010, when Paul von Naredi-Rainer together with Johann Konrad Eberlein and Goetz Pochat picked 169 books that were ‘Hauptwerke’–the major texts–of art history and published them in a guide.  More amazing than the fact that any academic would write this is that they found a publisher of “pocket guides” (Taschenausgaben) to issue it.  I love art history but somehow the 169 greats of the discipline is not pocket literature to me.

But never mind.  Just test yourself, like one of those are-you-a-real-man questionnaires in Guns ‘N Ammo magazine.  Are yrou a REAL art historian?  How many of these books have you read . . .

James Ackerman:  The Architecture of Michelangelo
Jean Adhemar:  Influences Antique dans l’art du Moyen Age francais
Svetlana Alpers:  Rembrandt’s Enterprise:  The Studio and the Market.
Carlo Argan: Storia dell’arte italiana
Carlo Argan:  L’Arte moderna
Marcel Aubert: L’architecture cistercienne en France
Kurt Badt:  Eine Wissenschaftslehre der Kunstgeschichte

[more soon!]

Hauptwerke der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung.  Stuttgart: Kroener, 2010.  Lilly Library NX 175.H387 2010 (checked out!)

The rebirthed Barnes Foundation, now in Philadelphia, has issued a catalog on its holdings on Renoir, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation (2012).  Barnes owned 181 Renoirs by the time of his death in 1951, mostly from the artist’s later years.  This is problematic for curators because the last twenty years of Renoir’s life he settled into painting almost exclusively fantasy naked women. Renoir, bent over, in a wheelchair, hands crippled with arthritis, devoted his final years to producing thinly veiled porn.  If you dig your women on the plumper side, Renoir’s output from 1909-1919 is the acme.  Art history, for the last sixty years, has taken a really dim view of this production and understandably so.  Want to create an awkward silence at soiree of art types?  Just say you find Renoir’s late work important.  Even praising Normal Rockwell wouldn’t get you the horrified stares that a statement like that would.   The curators of the Barnes catalog were at a loss to explain why the collector–not generally disposed to modern art that was titillating–bought nearly exclusively from this period. The feminist view that this output is women-as-object (something Renoir himself unfortunately admitted); the Progressivist approach is that art historians bemoaning that there’s no “finish line” in Renoir’s late work–it doesn’t lead to anything in art history;  the New Art History types (rather older now) observe that these works don’t deconstruct very well. Like, not at all.

But there was some hope, it turns out we may not have to hate Renoir after all.  At one point, the Barnes’ curator, Martha Lucy, makes a startling observation:  all the criticism agreed with, couldn’t Renoir’s late work be viewed as making the woman the canvas?  Those large nudes taking up most of the picture plane and doing inane things, maybe Renoir’s fantasy isn’t so much an old man leering but a reversal of art and life.  The model in the studio becomes the art–not on the canvas, but of the canvas.

Post script:  the catalog describes one of Renoir’s favorite models as having been found by Matisse on a streetcar.  The Fauve master spied a zaftig redhead on the tram and told her she would be perfect as a model for Renoir.  Now, if I hadn’t read this in an art history book, I’d have thought this bogus!  Of all the lame come-on lines. But it worked (“I’m not the artist, but I’m a friend of his and I think you’d look great naked . . . ).  The woman, Claire Heusling, did become Renoir’s model and, after doing the nude stint, ended up marrying the artist’s son, the famous director Jean Renoir.

Only in art history.

Ray Bradbury’s obit int he NYT was illuminating.  I’m not a sci-fi type (many would argue neither was Bradbury), but what caught my eye was his pronouncement that he didn’t graduate from college–instead he graduated from libraries.  Bradbury isn’t the first person to miss a college education only to educate himself through personal reading, Patti Smith (who handily worked at Brentano’s in New York) was another who immediately springs to mind.  In most of these cases, these self-educated personalities disparage formal education for the growth of personal reading.  The famous 19th-century connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/morellig.htm, was fond of going out of his way to dis academics who studied the history of objects at the cost of actually looking at them.  But all this backlash at the academy is really misplaced.

One of the goals of education–formal education–is to encourage a pattern of personal education as well.  The criticisms against college–usually voiced by those far from the  university–that they are ‘ivory towers’ and you don’t know anything until you get in the real world perpetrates this odd dichotomy of school education vs experiential. Reading is the great leveler–something that doesn’t seem to be as emphasized as much in college as it used to [turn on old fogy filter now].  In twenty years as a librarian I’ve been amazed to see how reading lists–both electronic and hard copy–have shrunk.  And you can forget assigning a foreign-language text to an undergraduate, even though all Duke students are required to pass three semesters of a foreign language.

The problem with reading going out of vogue is that I think self-education is going out as well.  Where or how the next gen of Bradburys will educate themselves is not clear.  Only that they’ll likely have to graduate from somewhere other than libraries.