Case professor examines modern development of connoisseurship in art
New book by Catherine Scallen looks at impact of leading connoisseurs on understanding of Rembrandt
August 10, 2004 | For more information: Jeff Bendix (216)-368-6070
Since the time of the Renaissance the study of art in the West has been tied to connoisseurship, the practice of attributing works of art to particular artists and assessing their aesthetic value. Connoisseurs, who are often also academics, dealers, and museum curators, exercise enormous influence over the reputation of individual artists. But little attention has been paid to the process of precisely how this select group of individuals goes about their work, and how their judgments shape the public’s view of individual artists.
Catherine B. Scallen, associate professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University, closely examines the process of connoisseurship as it has applied to the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn in her book Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship (Amsterdam University Press, 2004). Scallen examines the impact of German scholars Wilhelm von Bode and Wilhelm Valentiner, and Dutch scholars Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Abraham Bredius, on knowledge about and reputation of Rembrandt.
She also looks at the relationships the four men had with each other and with other influential individuals from the art world, such as journal editors, museum curators and art dealers in the latter part of the 19th century and first part of the 20th , as well as their impact on the then-emerging field of art history.
The book had its origins when Scallen was a graduate student working on her dissertation about Rembrandt, and heard of a scholar in the field named John Van Dyke whose work was frequently belittled. Later, as a fellow at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, she came across a copy of Van Dyke’s 1923 book Rembrandt and His School. “I found it wasn’t crazy at all. He had a lot of very cogent things back in the 1920s about issues of Rembrandt connoisseurship. And that was really startling to me,” Scallen recalls.
Her graduate and post-graduate work coincided with the publication of the findings of the Rembrandt Research Project, which had been intended as the definitive assessment of which works were genuine Rembrandts, but wound up raising as many questions as it answered. As a result, says Scallen, “it made me start thinking about who gets to be an expert and how? How does it work out that certain people are accepted as the authorities in a field, and others are marginalized or entirely dismissed?”
The questions, particularly as they pertained to Rembrandt, had larger implications for the field of art history. “The dramatic rise in popularity of Rembrandt’s art, first in Europe and then in North America during the later 19th century, meant that Rembrandt connoisseurship became one of the most influential and contested arenas for the development of modern practices of connoisseurship,” she writes in the book’s introduction.
Rembrandt in particular provided a rich field of study, not only the artist’s works themselves but the people who studied (and continue to study) his works. There is a great deal of disagreement among scholars as to which paintings are genuine Rembrandts, due in part to the lack of documentation for many of his paintings, the fact that many of his paintings were small and could be moved easily, and because of changing standards of authenticity.
“In the 17th century if a work was done in the master’s style, with his approval, it would go out under his signature, and the 17th century would accept that as a genuine Rembrandt,” Scallen explains. But then in the 19th and 20th centuries we increasingly became obsessed with the idea of the artist as genius, and therefore only the work of his own hand was acceptable.” In fact, says Scallen, there are only 10 paintings in existence which can be unquestionably documented to the artist’s own hand, although there are approximately 50 more which are widely accepted as genuine Rembrandts.
Scallen notes that despite their zealous study of Rembrandt, little of the work of Bode, Bredius, de Groot and Valentiner is studied today, although Bredius’s Rembrandt catalogue numbering system is still in use. Nevertheless, Scallen writes in the conclusion of her book, the quartet have had a lasting impact on the practice of connoisseurship in three areas: “their recasting of connoisseurship as a professional activity, their shaping of connoisseurship as an activity promoted through public debate, and the development of modern modes of art historical communication.”
As to the latter, Scallen points out that the four were responsible for many aspects of the art world taken for granted today, such as the chronologically organized, fully illustrated catalogue raisonne, technical articles in professional periodicals describing a new discovery, and museum and gallery exhibitions devoted to the work of a single artist who was no longer living. Says Scallen, “What they engaged in was groundbreaking scholarship, not just for Rembrandt, but for art history writ large.”
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