grand narrative in art and its deconstruction
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An exquisite exhibition “Historical Tales. Fact and fiction in a historical picture”, demonstrating the battle between the pathos of the grand narrative and the pathos of its deconstruction.
All old academies are similar to each other, each academic museum is unhappy in its own way. Wide marble staircases, echoing corridors and – somewhere, like in Milan, a luxurious meeting and tourist crowds, so you can’t breathe, somewhere, like in St. Petersburg, the remnants of former luxury, students copying samples and rare visiting specialists. The art gallery of the Vienna Academy of Arts is unhappy in that crowds of tourists run headlong through the enfilade with beautiful Florentines and Venetians, French and Dutch, Rubens and Titians, Huberbers and Rembrandts, in order to stand reverently in the last hall before Bosch’s “Last Judgment.” Of course, academic science, the highest achievements of which in the form of copies and originals are precisely collected in academic museums, stood – humiliation rather than pride – on the principle “we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” But Bosch with his Gothic devilry was never among these giants. Over time, everything got mixed up in the academies, and almost every thing from the Viennese collection can be somehow correlated with academic grammar, even Cranach the Elder’s “Lucretia” before his death seemed to bequeath to future generations to pore over the doctrine of proportions and nude formulas. Every one, but not the Boschian cabinet of curiosities of the medieval imagination, which so fascinates the modern viewer. The Academy has been working for centuries on a vocabulary of visual language so that the artist can tell a story, competing with epic poetry and court chronicles, but, God forbid, not like Bosch, and what kind of story can there be after the Last Judgment.
Exhibition “Historical Tales. Fact and fiction in the historical picture,” by the new director of the Vienna Academy of Art Collections, Sabine Foley, explains how this archaic vocabulary works and how contemporary art is working to abolish or update it. “Fairy tales” are placed or, rather, embedded in the enfilade of the Picture Gallery: and works of old masters from other museums (for example, “The Self-Sacrifice of Marcus Curtius” was brought to the exhibition – a grandiose tondo by Veronese, hanging in the Kunsthistorisches right under the ceiling so that the horse of a brave Roman as if it were jumping not into a hole that appeared out of nowhere at the forum, but directly onto the heads of the spectators; you can see it up close, looking at the horse’s belly), and the works of contemporary artists are mixed in with what is always on permanent display. The poster for “Fairy Tales” is a collage of two things that form a comic allegory of power: a hybrid figure of an autocrat in Napoleonic boots and an office jacket with a trash can on a mop instead of a scepter, arranged in such a way that its lower part is taken from an engraving from a famous painting by the master of salon academicism Paul Delaroche’s “Napoleon after Abdication at the Palace of Fontainebleau”, and the top one is from post-conceptualist artist Ana Torfs’s diptych “Revolution”, which plays on the different images and meanings associated with the title word, from political radicalism to the Salon of the Rejected. Old art is full of the pathos of great history and enduring historical subjects – battles of civilization and barbarism, empires, heroes, disasters; new art is filled with the pathos of exposing outdated fairy tales. The exhibition is smart, ironic, sophisticated and requires a lot of reading – not of the labels, but of the exhibits themselves, which rhyme with each other in complex ways. By the last hall, the audience’s strength is drying up – there is almost no one in front of Bosch. Together, old and new pathos cope with the Last Judgment.
The preface to “Fairy Tales” is a huge reproduction of John Leech’s cartoon “Substance and Shadow,” published in Punch in the summer of 1843: a group of beggars, beggars, street children and cripples came to the exhibition and looked at pictures of a well-fed, prosperous life. The cartoon in Punch was accompanied by a lengthy mocking commentary: the government, they say, is not obliged to give money to the poor – the shadow of wealth shown at such an exhibition will be enough for them. Today, the “Pancevsky” commentary, full of references to specific persons and circumstances, requires an even more detailed historical commentary with many details: about pauperization, social stratification, waste of the state budget, corruption and similar matters. But even without this knowledge, the picture looks strikingly relevant, and it’s not even a matter of the author’s satirical strategy, which today would be called subversive affirmation: we can easily project this ancient English caricature onto modernity, not only in the sense that stratification, waste and corruption in – is still with us, but also in the fact that art, even if now it does not embellish life, but castigates ulcers and vices, continues to play the role of illusion, replacing direct action with critical discourse. The English cartoon, which goes back to the Italian cartone, “cardboard”, meaning caricature and which came into many languages from English in this meaning, was used for the first time in connection with “Substance and Shadow”. Leach was referring to a very specific exhibition that the Punch editors mocked: it was the Westminster Carton Exhibition of 1843 – exhibitors were invited to submit cartons (that is, large-format sketches for frescoes) of subjects from British history to the competition, the winners were promised cash prizes and orders for paintings in the post-fire parliament. In a clever curatorial touch, Leach’s cartoon is reproduced at such an enlargement, as if it were not a magazine picture, but cardboard for a parliamentary fresco – ideal history and critical modernity collide heads in this reproduction.
The 1843 Carton Exhibition was staged in Westminster not simply to show the designs for the building’s in situ design, but also to spite the Royal Academy, which was generally considered to be failing in its primary mission – to maintain the proper standard of history painting, the main genre in academic hierarchy. It was not only in London that they could not cope – the Viennese “Fairy Tales” show that the first crisis of the grand narrative, which in the field of fine arts was the historical picture in the broad sense, came not in the middle of the 20th century, but in the middle of the 19th century, when pictorial history met reportage modernity. It is not the ill-fated Mexican emperor that the Republicans are aiming at from the watercolors and lithographs of Edouard Manet, who paints as if he saw with his own eyes the execution of Maximilian, and not at Goya’s “Rebels”, it is modern art itself that has come to deal with the classical tradition. The roots of modernity are not in modernism and new “formulas of pathos”, the roots of modernity are in realism. Of course, photography made its contribution: it promised to tell the whole truth and present a complete picture, and then began to frame, keep silent and lie no worse than Rubens in court allegories. With the revolution of technical media, a divergence begins: the historical vocabulary of the academy – ruin, figure, heroic or sacrificial nudity, emperor, triumph, hero, horse, battle, after battle, disaster, landscape of ruins – continues to be addressed by artists working in photography, film and video. , Danica Dakic and Eleanor Antin, Harun Farocki and Alexander Kluge, Cyprien Gaillard and Omer Fast, John Murphy and Ana Torfs, but not in order to find the only correct interpretation there. There are many interpretations, a cloud of meanings, myriad subtexts, narrative lines do not intersect, stories are fragmentary. However, not a single contemporary artist manages to deconstruct the grand narrative of a historical genre the way the great Baroque master Salvator Rosa did in “The Roman Battle”: in a giant canvas, more like a fancy-patterned carpet, there are almost all the words from the dictionary – heroes, horses, ruins, a battlefield, a disaster – but they do not form into intelligible sentences, but stick together into a warlike and tragic mess. The image of history as a bloody meat grinder for centuries – Rose wins over both modernity and Bosch. I’ll clean it up.
“History Tales. Fakt und Fiktion im Historienbild.” Academy of Arts, Vienna, until May 26, 2024
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