27 August, 2002
BOOKS: Modernity through dry eyes
James Elkins’s Pictures & Tears
Have you ever cried in front of a painting? This deceptively simple question is the point of embarkation for a strange little book by James Elkins called Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings. Elkins is an American art historian who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Several years ago, his curiosity was piqued by an argument between two students in one of his classes. They were discussing their responses to an exhibition of work by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. On one side was Michael, who observed that the curators had attempted, through their use of lighting and music, to make viewers ‘love’ the work. He claimed that this was a ridiculous thing to do. ‘You couldn’t love a painting,’ Michael argued. ‘Paintings are intellectual things. It’s not a normal love. It would be ridiculous to fall in love with a painting.’ At this point, another student, Tamara, piped up ‘I did.’ She went on to recount her experience in front of Friedrich’s Memories of the Riesengebirge (1835). Not only had she found the painting ‘very quiet and very beautiful’ but as she looked at it, she had felt sudden tears streaming down her face. ‘It was wonderful,’ she said. At which point everyone looked very embarrassed, and the discussion soon turned to other topics. It is not the done thing, apparently, for graduate students to cry over paintings.
Elkins was less struck by this exchange than by his colleagues’ reaction to it when he described it to them afterwards. Those who were not art historians all thought, apparently, that Tamara’s experience was a positive and even an enviable one. Art historians, on the other hand, thought that Tamara was a naive throw-back to a species of highly-strung romanticism that should have died more than a century before – she was, after all, an art historian in training, and thus should have responded to the painting in an intellectual, detached, critical manner. And this, in turn, set Elkins thinking about the nature of his profession, of modernism per se and – ultimately – of the relationship between the visual arts and religious experience. These are the basic questions at the heart of Pictures & Tears – paradoxical, provocative and revealing questions one and all, which ought, even if imperfectly answered, to have produced a compelling book.
Yet Pictures & Tears is, as I wrote earlier, a strange little book, alternatively annoying and persuasive, purblind and lucid, toe-curlingly twee and enviably honest. Its major, monumental defect is one of style. Elkins, clearly, sides with the Tamaras over the Michaels of this world. Although he claims not to have cried in front of a picture, one senses he would very much like to. What’s been holding him back? Again and again (there is a lot of repetition in this book) he places the blame on art historians and in particular on the deadening effect that acquired knowledge can have on direct personal experience. Elkins, in other words, harbours a lot of resentment towards his chosen profession, even as he continues to practice it and to follow, up to a point, its conventions. And this, I suspect, lies behind his decision to write this book not in the icily professional, rational, linear language of American academic art history, but rather in another voice altogether – one that is personal, subjective, anecdotal, rambling and somewhat inconclusive. Alas, while the rhetorical conventions against which he is reacting are not exactly attractive, neither is their mirror-image. Elkins makes the mistake of acting as if worrying at great length over some simple vignette will inevitably yield profound discoveries – something which, as this book makes clear, is not invariably the case. His attempts to marry considerable art-historical knowledge with an ‘aw, shucks, I’m just an ordinary guy’ simplicity can grate horribly. And this short book is too long by half. For all these reasons, I found it virtually impossible to read it for more than fifteen minutes or so at a time. It does not help that other writers – T. J. Clark at the clever end, Matthew Collings at the demotic one – have confronted the horror that is academic ArtSpeak and vanquished it far, far more effectively. There comes a point where style can distract from everything else without generating any pleasure or excitement in its own right. That point is reached very quickly in Pictures & Tears.
And yet, and yet ... it would be a mistake to dismiss this book. For one thing, that woefully geeky prose-style notwithstanding, it is hard not to like Elkins. On some level, the book really does enact its subject-matter – one warms to his passion and his evident sincerity even as one loses patience with his dogged re-hashings of the same tired revelation. He also makes a number of very striking points. This is why Pictures & Tears is worth reviewing – and quite possibly, why it is worth reading, too.
His main point, I think, is that here in the long trailing wake of modernism, we have lost something in the way in which we respond to art. I remain slightly unclear about the nature of that ‘something’, but I think Elkins feels – and here he may be right – that art-lovers in the contemporary West are both nostalgic for the certainties of religious faith, and are particularly likely to come face-to-face with that nostalgia in front of art, and hence that crying in front of art is a deep, honest and important form of engagement not only with art, but with something far greater than that.
There are, I think, problems here as well as much truth, but I’ll deal with that later. For the moment, it is worth quoting Elkins’s account of how attitudes towards the affective power of art have changed over time:
The shift from the fifteenth-century Andachtsbilder [devotional images] like [Dieric] Bouts’s to the sixteenth-century showpieces of skill is the first large-scale alteration in Western thoughts about painting and emotion. [...] The second is the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century return of emotions, as in [Jean-Baptiste] Greuze’s painting. The third [...] is nineteenth-century Romanticism. And the fourth, the one we are living in now, is the twentieth-century retreat into stoic intellectualism. In the broadest possible terms, that is the vacillating history of pictures and tears in the West.It is also the story of our current disillusion. A huge cultural change, like a tidal wave, has brought us to this affectively neutral place and marooned us here. From our dry desert island we look out at the ocean with suspicion.
All of which is fair enough.
Elsewhere in the book, Elkins examines responses to specific works – the Rothko Chapel at St Thomas University in Houston, Texas; Giovanni Bellini’s Ecstacy of St Francis in the Frick Collection, New York City; Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Young Woman Who Weeps over Her Dead Bird in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; Dieric Bouts’s Mater Dolorosa at the Art Institute of Chicago – in order to chart these developments, both historically and in terms of his personal and subjective response. He is right to place Michelangelo on the painful cusp of a choice between skill and devotion; he is right about the dodgy eroticism of Greuze’s painting, even if he mistakes Catullus’s sparrow for a canary and seems unaware of the far more explicit if less cloying sexual innuendo of the poem itself; even though he does not use the phrase ‘devotio moderna’ he writes thoughtfully and lucidly about the shifts in devotional practice which underpinned Bouts’s meticulously observed paintings. He is right that the language in which modern art is discussed generally excludes references to religion while at the same time employing the language of theology everywhere. He is also right to confront the weaknesses in his own argument. It is true, for instance, that viewers may weep in front of paintings for reasons that have nothing to do with anything intrinsic to the paintings themselves. But it is also stunningly true that in the fifteenth century, weeping in front of a devotional image was a recognised sign of piety, that in the late eighteenth century, weeping was a sign of admirable sensibility, and that in our own times weeping – in front of a picture in an art gallery, anyway – is a sign of precarious mental health, to put it no more strongly than that.
Elkins makes a point of excluding discussion of tears in other contexts because he wants to focus on what it is that we do and do not see in paintings per se. This is, I think, a pity. Crying is potentially a deep response, but it is also a mediated response, albeit one mediated in ways that few of us have consciously considered. Elkins notes more than once that crying at films is considered more acceptable than crying in galleries, but says less than he might about why this is the case. (What he does say, however – that cinemas are dark, play on several senses, exclude distractions and can take time to build up cumulative effects – is very much to the point.) But like all mediated responses, crying underscores social and personal distinctions. Not everyone who cried over television coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales found it difficult to listen dry-eyed to the pipes that played the cortege of Elizabeth the Queen Mother out of Westminster Hall, and vice versa; there are people who cry over football results who cry over virtually nothing else; tears can mean anger or frustration or relief as easily as they can mean sorrow or despair. During the course of research for his book, Elkins received many letters (some of which are reprinted as an appendix to Pictures & Tears) on the subject of crying in front of paintings, and although many of these (especially those from art historians such as E. H. Gombrich and Robert Rosenblum) discuss not crying, there are plenty of letters that show that people still are moved to tears by art. What makes them different? Oddly, given his central thesis, Elkins does not explore their respective spiritual states, or indeed much else about them – age, sex, educational or geographical background, social class – other than the information they choose to provide. So the result is thought-provoking, rather than persuasive or conclusive. The question turns out to be at least as interesting as the answer.
At its best, Pictures & Tears is, like more or less every other worthwhile book ever written, a work of autobiography pretending to be something else. This is the quality that gives the book, in places, its distinctive appeal. For instance, soon after discussing a Bellini painting he particularly loved in his youth, Elkins notes that in pre-revolutionary China, artists might travel for months in order to gaze, perhaps for as little as a few minutes, on a particular painting. He reflects
Today everything has changed. We can fly quickly from city to city comparing pictures, or wait for large travelling exhibitions to bring together all of Pollock, or Cézanne, or Picasso [...]Most of us are happy enough with the new arrangements: within limits, we can see what we want when we want. Yet I wonder if the Chinese customs might not be better than ours. If I had known I would only see Bellini’s painting once, I would have looked hard, and tried to memorize it. I might even have made a sketch of it, and labelled all the colors. Later I could have tried to nourish my memory by reading over my notes and trying to call it to mind.
Memories are lovely things because they are unstable. Each time you recall something it changes a little, like a whispered secret that goes around a room and gradually changes into nonsense. If I hadn’t seen the Ecstacy of St Francis again, my memories of it would have slowly altered to fit the changing shape of my life.
Elkins is, by his own account, not a Christian. The preceding paragraphs recall, among other things, St Augustine’s Confessions and his gradual realisation that the only alternative to mutability, deterioration and ultimate loss is to be found in the unchanging presence of God. Yet Elkins’s attitude towards religion remains strangely opaque. Elkins, it seems, seeks all the intensity of revelation, feels nostalgic for its big answers and stable verities, and yet does not seem to question the good sense of looking for these in galleries, rather than in liturgy or scripture or prayer. And here is another strange weakness in Pictures & Tears – its failure to address, in any very direct way, the relationship between art and religion. He sees that Bouts, for instance, created his paintings less as ‘art’ than as devotional appliances; he sees that for Michelangelo and his contemporaries, ‘art’ was beginning to break away and become an end in itself, rather than simply a set of functional objects; I think he sees that for an artist like Friedrich, landscape could operate as an ambiguous imagery, allowing itself to represent religion but at the same time subtly undermining religion’s assumed centrality in European culture. But Elkins should have said a little more about the role of individual artists, and patrons, and the context in which art can be found. After all, if someone weeps in front of a Bouts diptych while at the same time kneeling, reciting prayers and having a genuine religious experience, that is a rather different business than standing in front of an isolated Bouts panel amid the clinical whiteness of a gallery, thinking one’s own thoughts and for some reason starting to cry. Elkins can, I think, see that religion is missing, but he cannot quite bring himself to want it to come back – at least not to the extent of opening himself to faith. And so we are stuck with the strange halfway house of expecting art to act as a sort of non-embarrassing surrogate for religion, and then wondering why it fails to deliver the goods.
I hope I am not being unfair to Elkins in my account of Pictures & Tears. Infelicities of style notwithstanding, Elkins is getting at something important, and if he doesn’t quite reach his destination, he at least sets his readers off on a worthwhile journey. Pictures & Tears is, meanwhile, well-produced and virtually typo-free, which is more than one can say for many books these days. And the letters at the end are simply fascinating in their diversity and sheer oddity.
For what it’s worth, I’m happy to admit that I have more than once cried in front of paintings. Three examples come to mind. I once cried tears of sheer frustration in front of Giotto’s Death and Ascension of St Francis in the Bardi Chapel of Florence’s Santa Croce both because I found the different sorts of sadnesses on the faces of the friars very moving and because I could not convince my companion that these frescoes were in any way interesting; I once cried in front of a Van Dyck portrait of Charles I in the Louvre because as I gazed into the king’s eyes I felt sad both that he had been murdered, and that his portrait was doomed to protracted exile in a land of regicidal republicans; I have cried several times in front of Titian’s Pieta in the Accademia in Venice because I am always convinced, looking at Mary Magdalene, that Titian has come as close as anyone could to capturing how any normal, flawed human would look if she had known and loved God incarnate, seen Him die and did not entirely feel confident – for how could she be? – that she would soon see Him risen and alive once more. Of all of these experiences, I think only the last is in any way religious – and even then, ‘religious’ only through the accidental coincidence of a gallery-going Christian with a picture which had always been meant as, among other things, an incitement to Christian devotion. Or to put it another way, I think it has virtually nothing to do with ‘art’.
Which leads me back to my basic disagreement with Elkins. He believes, as far as I can tell, that the disparate objects gathered together in a place like the Louvre have some sort of objective shared identity as ‘art’ – possibly even an identity which has remained valid over time. For me, however, the category of ‘art’ has never made much sense. A dyptich by Bouts was commissioned and created to do one sort of thing, an erotic-sentimental concoction by Greuze was made to do another sort of thing, and a Rothko instalation a third sort of thing, and hence what is interesting in all of this is not only honesty and curiosity about our own subjective reactions (an interest which Elkins shares) but also knowledge of the context from which these objects were ripped in order to consign them, carefully labelled and standardised and rebranded, to the awful tyranny of the gallery space. The whole question of context – the purposes for which these works were created, their intended audiences and surroundings – goes a long way, in particular cases, towards explaining why people used to cry over ‘art’ more in the past than they apparently do now. But explaining why art has come to act as a surrogate, however ineffectual, for religion requires an explanation of why religion apparently now needs a surrogate, and here Elkins’ dislike of his own discipline – of art history, even of ‘knowledge’ per se – ultimately proves his undoing. Or to put it another way, the Michaels of this world are correct in recognising that there are norms regarding the way in which Chicago graduate students are supposed to act around paintings, and the Tamaras of this world generally realise exactly what they are doing when they push against the boundaries of these norms. She and Michael are both using art to make statements about the sort of people they are, because that it one of the chief functions that responses to art serve these days. The fact that Elkins's art historian colleagues and his non-art historian friends responded differently to Tamara's experience simply shows how well those norms are working.
Elkins, I am sure, knows that he is pressing against the boundaries of academic seriousness by writing a book like Pictures & Tears. He was apparently warned by a colleague that this book would ‘close the gates of Harvard to you forever.’ If so, Harvard’s loss is Chicago’s gain. For all its grating eccentricities and occasional blind spots, this is a much more interesting book than most of what emerges from academic presses, and Elkins’ is a voice which, despite its occasionally annoying timbre, deserves to be heard.
James Elkins, Picture & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, Routledge, 2001, £14.99 (hb).
Bunny Smedley is ERO's Arts Editor.