This is Not Just a Painting by Bernard Lahire

Author:Bernard Lahire
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509528714
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

That speaks volumes about the lack of importance accorded to experts at this time and, with little risk of error, it may be assumed that a great many copies of original works were admired.

At the end of the eighteenth century, connoisseurship53 and collecting gained popularity amongst the elite in Europe (especially in France, Italy and England).54 In order to be familiar with European art, it was necessary to travel throughout Europe and to occasionally buy works, both of which implied a significant economic capital. Through these repeated visits to museums, churches, cathedrals and private collections, a body of visual empirical knowledge was built up, a capacity to recognize works, link them to other works and sometimes to series of works, a knowledge or capacity sometimes summed up in the notion of possessing an eye. The connoisseur is therefore, in the British tradition, this aristocratic gentleman who travels extensively and visits all possible art locations, buying, collecting and attributing anonymous works to their creators, thanks to his eye. In the history of art, he will also play the role of someone who discovers artists who are somewhat forgotten or neglected.55

The specialist’s eye is clearly not just a natural phenomenon, an innate talent. Connoisseurs and art historians themselves condense into this word the accumulation of visual experiences in the art field. What was at stake was not so much distinguishing yourself from the profane who would not have the natural gift of seeing and recognizing,56 but in distinguishing between those who have a direct and practical knowledge of works of art, as a result of the amount of time spent amongst them, and those whose knowledge was academic, scholarly, acquired from books. As the art historian Jacques Thuillier writes: ‘As a last resort, whatever the claims and the silences of catalogues and inventories (after death), the eye is the only judge.’57 The specialists could therefore appropriate the popular saying: ‘Seeing is believing.’

It was of course the development of the art market and of large private collections in the late eighteenth century, alongside the advent of public museums which took on responsibility for the values of rarity, originality and singularity, which reinforced the need for attribution.58 Any commercial exchange assumes a knowledge of the exact nature of what is being bought, particularly in the field of art where prices have no direct link with the time dedicated to producing the object. Since it is indeed a question of the sacred and of a belief in the inestimable value of works by certain clearly designated artists, the cult of the authentic is inevitable. The work must have been integrally produced by the hand of the artist for the magic to work completely. And when experts are forced by the imperatives of institutions to seek tangible proofs of the presence of that exceptional individual, they commit themselves with passion to the study of the details: ‘Thus, the brush stroke and the detail in painting became privileged sites where new ideas about the uniqueness of the creator were constructed.

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