What is art?
A 19th-century question with 21st-century impact
Archived article from Feb 9, 2001
By Diane Cornell
When Jonah Siegel visits a museum, he looks at the big picture. While the rest of us are adjusting our audio tour or scanning a guidebook for the locations of famous works of art, Siegel is grappling with much larger issues.
Siegel, an assistant professor of English on the New Brunswick campus, is not merely seeking the great impressionists or the Greek sculptures; he is seeking out answers to such questions as: What defines an artist? How do museums shape our view of art?
In his book, "Desire & Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art" (Princeton University Press), Siegel explains how 19th-century ideas shape our modern view of artists, their works and the institutions that showcase them.
"I became very interested in the modern idea of the artist -- what it is and how this idea became part of our popular culture," Siegel says of his research, which began some 10 years ago as his doctoral dissertation. "Our idea today of an artist really didn't exist in the 18th century, and we only got glimmers of it in the 19th century."
The notion of an artist as someone who is very admired, but somewhat disconnected from everyday life; who produces art that pleases him/herself regardless of whether it pleases others; who challenges the conventions of the day, is a relatively recent construct, says Siegel.
In earlier centuries, artists were seen as extremely skilled craftspeople who belonged to a guild, much like carpenters. Their works were commissioned by wealthy patrons or by the religious elite and were primarily displayed in country homes or in churches. Such art was rarely seen by the common man.
Siegel began to wonder how and when the role of the artist began to change, and what role museums played in this transformation. His book brings together literature, cultural documents and art to offer, what he terms, "a dynamic account of the place of institutions and the imagination of institutions in culture."
"As I began researching the book, I learned more about fine arts and came to realize that there is a lot to be said about the relationship between the visual arts and literature," Siegel says. "I found that there was a real engagement with fine arts in the 19th century." He notes that many writers in this period, such as Keats, Reynolds and Wilde, were motivated by their interest in the visual arts.
The turn of the 19th century was also the time when artists themselves became objects of fascination, says Siegel. A new genre, the literary biography, gained popularity with the publication of Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" in 1779 and Walter Scott's "Lives of the Novelists" in 1825.
This enthusiasm for art and artists at times manifested itself in rather odd ways, Siegel points out. For instance, reproductions of famous sculptures proliferated to the extent that such pieces as the "Winged Victory" or the "Venus de Milo" could be "seen" in several museums at once. Archival photographs of the Chicago Museum of Art show halls crowded with statues, many of them copies: the "Apollo Belvedere," the "Medici Venus," the "Elgin Marbles." The hunger to see these works led museums to display copies proudly alongside originals, Siegel observes.
Antiquities, particularly, were considered the epitome of art and held up as a model for 19th-century artists. Siegel says that copying was the primary method of instruction in the art academies at the time, and artists felt pulled between their own ambitions and the past. "The challenge for the artist in neoclassicism is immense: instructed to base himself on ancient art, which is the justification and foundation of everything he hopes to accomplish, he must, nevertheless, to some degree, break out of the cycle of repetition in which he has been trained."
Siegel points to the turn-of-the-19th-century French painter Jacques-Louis David, who used his classical training in his famous piece commemorating the "Tennis Court Oath." The painting shows the members of the French Chamber of Deputies, but while their heads are historically accurate renditions, their bodies are copied from Greek and Roman statues.
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