Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction 1606065343, 9781606065341

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Issues & Debates

PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCULPTURE

Conceétion Hunraine

1938 (pierre)

Hivriehs K

The Getty Research Institute Los Angeles

Issues & Debates

PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCULPTURE igen

OBJECT IN REPRODUCTION

EDITED BY SARAH HAMILL AND MEGAN R. LUKE

THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS PROGRAM Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Director, Getty Research Institute Gail Feigenbaum, Associate Director © 2017 J. Paul Getty Trust

Published by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Getty Publications 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 500 Los Angeles, California

90049-1682

www.getty.edu/publications Mary Christian, Manuscript Editor Ashley Newton, Assistant Editor Hespenheide Design, Designer Catherine Lorenz, Cover Designer

Victoria Gallina, Production Coordinator Stuart Smith, Series Designer

Distributed in the United States and Canada by the University of Chicago Press Distributed outside the United States and Canada by Yale University Press, London Printed in China Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hamill, Sarah, editor. |Luke, Megan R., 1977- editor. |Getty Research Institute, issuing body. Title: Photography and sculpture : the art object in reproduction / edited by Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke. Other titles: Issues & debates, Description: Los Angeles : Getty Research Institute, [2017] |Series: Issues & debates |Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017012011 |ISBN 9781606065341

Subjects: LCSH: Photography of sculpture. Classification: LCC TR658.3 .P49 2017 |DDC 779.092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012011 Front cover: Erwin Blumenfeld (American, 1897-1969). The Three Graces in the Studio ofAristide Maillol,

Marly-le-Roi (detail). Heliogravure. See Johnson, fig. 2. Back cover: Dan Flavin (American, 1933-96). untitled (to Henri Matisse), 1964. See pl. 17.

Frontispiece: “Plastische Schneebildungen. Snow Formation,’ and “H. Arp, Concrétion Humaine, 1933 (pierre), Zurich, Kunsthaus,” 1937. See “Introduction, fig. 3.

Every effort has been made to contact the owners and photographers of objects reproduced here whose names do not appear in the captions or in the illustration credits listed at the back of this book. Anyone having further information concerning copyright holders is asked to contact Getty Publications so this information can be included in future printings.

CONTENTS

Vil

Acknowledgments

Introduction Reproductive Vision: Photography as a History of Sculpture SARAH HAMILL AND MEGAN R. LUKE

33

Plates

REIMAGINING THE CLASSICAL PAST 50

“Pictorial Silhouettes” and Their Surroundings: Antique Sculpture and Archaeological Photography STEFANIE KLAMM

67

Sculpture from Behind JEREMY MELIUS

81

Photography as Carving: The Folios of Clarence Kennedy SARAH HAMILL

29

Burckhardt’s Eyes: The Photography of Renaissance Architecture between Pedagogy and the Museum ALINA PAYNE

PERCEIVING SCULPTURE THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 120

The Long Arm of the Lens: Photography, Colonialism, and African Sculpture SUZANNE PRESTON BLIER

138

Artificial Blindness: Objecthood and the Photography of Sculpture MEGAN R. LUKE

13S

Sleight of Eye: Man Ray, Duchamp, and the Photography of New Sculptural Forms ANNE McCAULEY

GAS

The Sight of Sculpture STEPHEN MELVILLE

TECHNOLOGIZING EXPERIENCE 1o2

Solid Sight: Sculpture in Stereo BRITT SALVESEN

210

A Virtual Presence in Space D. N. RODOWICK

222

For an Ethnosociology of Sculpture and Photography in India CHRISTOPHER

235

PINNEY

Evidence of Sculpture JEFFREY WEISS

REFLECTIONS 202

Pronk Photography GEOFFREY BATCHEN

261

Sculpture in Photography ALEX POTTS

270

Sculpture’s Present, Photography’s Past ANNE M. WAGNER

276

Epilogue Photographing Sculpture, Sculpting Photography GERALDINE A. JOHNSON

291

Biographical Notes on Contributors

292

Illustration Credits

295

Index

VII

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of a collaboration between two scholars over several years. We owe our thanks, above all, to Katja Zelljadt, who introduced us at the College Art Association conference in 2010. Although we could not know

it then, she set in motion a rich and fruitful collaborative exchange that has resulted in countless stimulating conversations, public symposia, and object-

based workshops that tackle the question of photography’s mediation of sculpture and its shaping of art historical knowledge.

The essays compiled in this volume emerged from a series of events that we co-organized, held at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) and the Clark Art Institute in 2014. We owe our tremendous thanks to the many people involved in conceiving, planning, and participating in those events. At the GRI, we thank

Gail Feigenbaum, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, and Joanne Pillsbury for their staunch support of our projects. With Anne

Blecksmith and Tracey Schuster, we coordinated a workshop “Photo Study Collections: Primary Evidence of Art History’s Legacy in Photographs” in January 2014, and we could not imagine better partners for launching those first conversations about this topic. We are especially grateful to Tracey for sharing her immense knowledge of the GRI’s Photo Archive and pointing us toward new avenues of inquiry. Mahsa Hatam, Sally McKay, Janae Royston, and the Special Collections staff went above and beyond to execute the logistics of the workshop. We would also like to thank the workshop’s participants and respondents: Andrea Bacchi, Suzanne Preston Blier, Jens Daehner, Stefanie Klamm, Chris Lakey, Jeremy Melius, Alex Potts, Joan Schwartz, and Colin Westerbeck.

We are also grateful to Costanza Carafta, for her support of our project from afar, and Timothy Grundy, for providing translations of Heinrich Wolfflin’s essays on the photography of sculpture. In September 2014 we convened the first part of a two-part symposium,

“Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction,” at the Clark Art Institute. We thank Michael Ann Holly for supporting our initial proposal;

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Darby English and David Breslin for their elaborate and patient help with its many details; and the entire Research and Academic Programs staff, especially

Melissa Horn, Deborah Fehr, and Elizabeth McCormick. The second part of this symposium took place in October 2014 at the GRI, and it received the same

amount of meticulous attention from many members of its staff as our earlier workshop. We would like to thank all those above, in addition to Peter Bonfitto,

Nathaniel Deines, Sue Kang, Rani Singh, and John Tain. We are profoundly grateful to all the speakers at both venues: at the Clark, Suzanne Preston Blier, Peter Geimer, Sarah Hamill, Geraldine A. Johnson, Megan R. Luke, Anne

McCauley, Stephen Melville, Alina Payne, and David Rodowick; at the Getty, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Jeremy Melius, Christopher Pinney, Alex Potts, Britt

Salveson, Irene V. Small, Joel Snyder, Anne M. Wagner, and Jeffrey Weiss. We especially thank Vanessa Schwartz, who offered an illuminating response that concluded the event at the GRI and who gave us opportunities to present related objects and ideas to students in the Visual Studies Research Institute at

the University of Southern California. We would also like to thank the many attendees for their pointed questions and comments, including Sara Bodinson, Louise Hornby, Susan Laxton, Ralph Lieberman, Sarah Miller, and Sally Stein. Our collaborative research and intellectual exchange would not have been possible without support from a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the

American Council of Learned Societies. This fellowship allowed us to conduct archival research together in the Carola Giedion-Welcker archives in Zurich and the Clarence Kennedy archives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was essential for our coauthored introduction. We also thank Alex Potts and Vanessa Schwartz for their long-term support of our joint work for these

research initiatives. We are grateful to Gail Feigenbaum, Michele Ciaccio, Karen Ehrmann, and

Janelle Gatchalian at the GRI for championing this book project and for their detailed assistance in preparing the manuscript, to the anonymous reader for feedback on our proposal, and to all the authors, who generated an exciting body of new scholarship that will be an essential resource for students working

in many fields for years to come. Finally, we owe Timothy Grundy and Chris Lakey our colossal thanks for their tireless support of our work and ideas and

take pride in the joy they share with us in seeing this book realized. Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke

INTRODUCTION

REPRODUCTIVE VISION Photography as a History of Sculpture Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke

How does photography shape our relationship to a given object, showing us where to stand and what to see? How does it allow us to tell a particular story about that object, mediating how we are lured to it, gain access to it, and perceive it? This book explores how photographs are tools that direct the ways we experience sculpture and narrate its history. The essays presented here adopt diverse

perspectives—historical, philosophical, and anthropological—to show how reproductive images condition our perception and have structured the disci-

pline of art history. We focus on the medium of sculpture, rather than painting or other objects in the world, because of the unique ways that sculptures impinge on our physical space and enact a temporal, haptic, visual, and aesthetic encounter.’ As

an elusive, spatial medium, sculpture is opposed to photography, which fixes time in an instant and compresses space to two dimensions. But the medium of sculpture has also been changed by the technological advancement of photography. In a photograph, a sculpture’s materiality and scale are made por-

table and flexible—all the better to classify, compare, and study the object from afar. Sculpture is thereby transformed into an imaginative picture, an animated

vision of its form, surface, or site. The medium of sculpture has long been defined by techniques of reproduction, such as casting, stamping, or copying. It was a popular subject for the first photographers. William Henry Fox Talbot, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre,

and Hippolyte Bayard, among others, frequently depicted plaster casts or staged tableaux of statuettes and miniatures produced for a booming market in objets

dart.? These evocative images, for all their novelty, were therefore already shadowed by discourses of reproducibility inherited from the history of sculpture, and photography functioned as one mechanism of reproduction among others. Yet, by drawing an analogy between the sculptural copy and the photograph, these early images also uniquely altered our perception of sculpture through vantage point, setting, lighting, and proximity.

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In the late nineteenth century, commercial firms produced vast collections of photographs, which assisted art historians and connoisseurs in ordering and classifying objects.’ Based on conventions of early modern reproductive prints, these firms standardized a uniform style for documenting sculpture that is still in use today.’ Take, for example, a photograph of the restored Apollo Belvedere

in Denkméler griechischer und rémischer Skulptur, a large-format compendium of collotypes initiated in 1888, marketed for pedagogical purposes and issued serially by the firm of Friedrich Bruckmann in partnership with the art his-

torian Heinrich Brunn in Munich (pl. 1).° The frontal and distanced vantage point presents an overall image of the sculpture as a contained composition, a pale silhouette whose contours are clearly defined against a black backdrop that masks out anything extraneous to a figure conceived as a harmonious whole. The photograph divorces the sculptural object from any temporal or spatial

context, including its display in the Vatican Museums and its identity as a historical or archaeological artifact—a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze made in the fourth century BCE. This rich context is distilled into a caption that gives us

the sculpture’s title and location in German, French, and English—which, along with the sanitized and timeless space of the photograph, invites the sculpture’s formal classification and comparison with others. This image can serve as a record of dispassionate, objective observation in part through the monochrome

background and the surrounding taxonomy. As Joel Snyder has argued, the

homogeneity of such images established a rhetoric of believability, so that the documentary photograph became a certificate, a stand-in for the object itself.° This plate was one in an expansive series that surveyed Greek and Roman sculpture in a uniform style and format. The print illustrated here comes from

an edition of 785 plates, and although later sets consisted of still more images,

the visual presentation remained constant.’ This consistency subordinated the individual photographer to the corporate body of the publishing firm and it quickly became universalized (pl. 2). Plates from different publishing houses could seem indistinguishable, readily exchangeable when put to use for substitution and comparison. Writing in 1897, in the second of a series of three articles dedicated to the

problem of how sculptures should be photographed, Heinrich Wolfflin singled out this specific photograph of the Apollo Belvedere for critique.® Its defects, he argued, were the same that plagued the installation of the sculpture in the Vatican Museums, where the discriminating beholder “must press oneself hard

up against the wall” in order to grasp a perfect, calm, and this “original view,’ in which the sculpture’s form would be lessly resolved, that the photograph could never deliver.? vantage had Apollo’ cloak running parallel to the picture

clear image. It was entirely and effort-

For Wolfflin, this plane, serving as a

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relief ground against which the body of the god would appear to emerge. The head would be in “pure profile, while the feet visibly unite? a posture of serene, yet tensile contrapposto.’® The Brunn-Bruckmann photograph, which shows Apollo tentatively stepping out toward us, radically departs from this image of composure. Wolfflin complained that it rendered the contours of the figure “limp,” creating an overall impression that was “insecure, brittle, unsettling”! Here he enlisted his method of comparative looking that he famously pioneered in his dual slide presentations and in his influential account of stylistic binaries in Principles of Art History (1915).’* In order to distinguish between “good” and

“bad” photographic reproductions, Wélfflin compared the Brunn-Bruckmann collotype to an idealized image he believed was latent in the sculpture, a “nor-

mal view” that the beholder was charged to seek out and, through educated discrimination, recognize.’* This view remained an immaterial ideal until it was realized in perception, and it is clear from Wolfflin’s essays that the camera's eye could never be a cognate for human vision—indeed, the causes for the spreading corruption of poor reproductions were photographers who operated the

apparatus without the guiding expertise of the art historian, and the unchecked proclivities of “the feral eye of people today.’ In his publication Wolfflin compared the “incorrect reproduction” from Brunn-Bruckmann not to a photo-

graph that meets with his approval—for none existed—but to an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi completed “in Raphael’s time” that depicts the sculp-

ture as he felt it wished to be seen.”® It is tempting to overemphasize Wolfflin’s bias toward the frontal view—the aspect that runs parallel to the picture plane, allowing the viewer to appreciate

the figure’s silhouette as a totality. He repeatedly castigates the lateral, “painterly” view that positions the figure obliquely to this plane, breaking up the “linear” inscription of contour.’® However, there is more at work in his assessment of these reproductions. Central to Wolfflin’s theory of sculptural perception— which he credits to Adolf von Hildebrand’s 1893 treatise The Problem of Form—

is a dialectic between stasis and movement.’”? Whose time and whose space governs our encounter with art objects—the sculpture’s or ours? Does sculpture occupy our space or does it create one anew? Do the “kinesthetic ideas,” to use

Hildebrand’s terminology, generated by our eyes and bodies dominate those represented or enlivened by the object itself?’* For Wolfflin, the pleasure of

looking at a sculpture lies precisely in this play between its body and our own:

There must be just one exhaustive main view if we are not to be endlessly driven restlessly around the figure. ... Once the eye has been sensitized to the differences between clear and unclear vision, leafing through modern

illustrated books and catalogues becomes a torment. . . . But in front of the

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originals we will find that there is a particular pleasure in turning from these mediocre views to the perfect one. And, repeating the experiment, we will not tire of allowing the purified image to emerge from inadequate appearances. This image stands there calm and clear and is felt to be a liberation, in the true sense of the word. This is a pleasure that painting cannot give us.”

Photographs could not possibly restage this pas de deux between beholder and sculpture—and they should not even try. Writing at a moment when artists and historians were just beginning to contend with photographic reproducibility on a mass scale, Wolfflin expressed no small anxiety about the substitutional rheto-

ric increasingly codified through publications like Brunn-Bruckmann’s, which risked fixing what he understood to be a disturbed and temporary phase of sculptural perception and sanctioning its educative value. Seen in three dimensions, a sculpture could elicit a true experience of liberation as a beholder strove

to attain a perceptually coherent view of the work, moving from unclear to clear vantages to release the object from a state of agitation and deliver it into one of repose. For Wolfflin, sculpture is a training ground for perception, and the

way it teaches us to see objects in the world could only be validated by a “good photograph,’ but never delivered by photography as such.

We return to the questions Wolfflin raised in his essays on the photography of sculpture to consider anew how photographs shape sculptural knowledge

and visualize changing methods for seeing, conceptualizing, and disseminating the objects they record. Wolfflin’s anxieties take on renewed urgency as we contend with a new phase in the history of mass reproduction, a moment when

technologies for capturing, aggregating, and exchanging images have constitutively shifted our experience of reproductive photographs. The specter of obsolescence that haunts, even motivates, technological “progress” has taken on a new Cast: photographs and the material platforms through which they are consumed seem ever more dematerialized while digital technologies are reviving the popularity of the facsimile. As a consequence of the increasing economic viability of 3-D printing and virtual rendering, we face a renaissance in the creation of objects akin to the plaster casts and electrotypes that had ceded to the

dominance of photographic reproduction in the previous century.”° The reproductive photograph is now everywhere and nowhere: it is only a keyword search

away yet unobtainable, an endlessly malleable digital file, whose size, material, and surface is perceptually indistinguishable from the uniform, pixelated plane. How art historians use and circulate reproductive photographs has shifted radically, as well. Slide libraries and photo archives are collective spaces of the past,

their haptic repositories of images that were held in the hand now replaced by

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VISION

the taxonomic grids of files seen on a computer screen. In the classroom, the click and hum of the slide projector has been made obsolete by the buzz and glow of digital projection.

As we make sense of these real social and material shifts and their effect on our understanding of sculpture and photography, the historical intersections of these media constitute a more pressing and varied topic for study than ever

before. In the digital age, the reproductive photograph is reframed as a historical artifact of modernity—a recent past shared unevenly around the globe. In what follows, we examine two exceptional cases in some depth, focusing on the art historians Clarence Kennedy and Carola Giedion-Welcker, who took

up the challenges that Wolfflin recognized in order to enliven and give form to narratives about sculpture. In the 1930s both attempted to write history through photography and approach photography as a vehicle of sculptural perception. Their efforts are a response to the contemporaneous ideas of Walter Benjamin, who also explored the ways reproductive images shift our experiences of art. In

the second version of his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” published in 1936, he singled out sculpture as the medium most at risk in the rise of mass reproduction: “In the age of the assembled [montierbar| artwork, the decline of sculpture is inevitable?** This claim, which he did not elaborate elsewhere, portends the demise of sculpture through an unrelenting, ever-increasing accumulation of photographs. In his diagnosis, photography, which initially gave form to the mediation and display of artworks, will ultimately supplant existing technologies for their very creation. Sculpture is the

repressed term in his general reflections on the authenticity of art and “aura.” Indispensable for aura is our unrepeatable, and therefore temporally specific, perception of objects in a shared space. “In even the most perfect reproduction,’ he wrote, “one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.” With the onslaught of mass reproducibility, we

read of the decay of aura, which he reiterated once more as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.’** Benjamin set up a dichotomy between ancient, presumably carved, Greek

sculpture and a film by Charlie Chaplin, an example of the montaged work of

art. Film was “the first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility.” It was endlessly flexible and adaptable, since it could be “assembled from a very large number of images and image sequences that . . . can be improved in any desired way.’”? While he acknowledged archaic methods for reproducing sculptural form, such as casting and stamping, he nevertheless insisted that Greek sculpture resisted technological reproducibility in its imperative to transmute “eternal values.” He argued that the endless recon-

figurations made possible by editing made film the antithesis of the “form least

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capable of improvement—namely sculpture, whose products are literally all of a piece.’** This definition of sculpture favors the single monolith made from a completely unified material base. For Benjamin, it is a medium that stands at the origin of art history and its objects are fabricated to endure for all time.

Sculpture remains, in other words, an art of the integrated, closed figure and not a modernist art of space or surface.

Benjamin grounded his dichotomy between film and sculpture by contrasting their technologies of production. Yet he overlooked the ways that sculpture and photography intersected in modernism to elicit complex perceptual encounters. For modern sculptors such as Medardo Rosso and Constantin Brancusi, for instance, the versatile medium of photography was as constitutive of sculptural perception as it was a means to disseminate representations of

their sculpture through reproductive images. Both sculptors used the camera to dematerialize the solid object as mere surface—for Rosso, through cropping and vantage point, for Brancusi, through double exposures and erratic lighting. Their photographs also frequently staged the singular monolith in dialogue

with other sculptures, bodies, and spaces, envisioning a range of fantastical situations and sites in which the modernist object could be encountered beyond the private home, the public square, or the museum.” For Rosso, Brancusi, and other modern sculptors who photographed their works, the sculptural object

was both a physical form, “all of a piece,’ and its imaginative projection in a reproducible and transitory image.

Just as photography could give form to a new kind of sculptural perception in modernist artistic praxis, so too could the reproducible formats of the photo

book and the pedagogical slideshow function as montaged artworks that invite

a specifically sculptural mode of viewing. As Benjamin was grappling with the impact of mass reproduction on sculpture, Kennedy and Giedion-Welcker separately sought to define alternative models for how reproductions could enact sculptural space and time. In their efforts to advance new ways of seeing sculp-

ture and to tell visual histories that could not be accommodated by normative models of photographic documentation, they felt compelled to experiment with the materials, formats, and platforms of photographic reproduction in a manner that Benjamin had championed in the montaged work of art. Clarence Kennedy, a self-described scholar-photographer active in the United States, was deep into his work creating photographic volumes of ancient Greek and Renaissance Italian sculpture and publishing them as Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture when he partnered with Polaroid to develop a new kind of 3-D imaging technology. The vectograph, Kennedy hoped, would profoundly enhance how photography could represent and reenliven spatial experience for students. At the same time, working in Switzerland, Carola Giedion-Welcker

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was assembling the first book to survey modern sculpture. She enlisted and elaborated on the newly popular format of the photo book to write a history of objects that seemed to evade or repudiate historical analysis altogether. Kennedy and Giedion-Welcker were each preoccupied with techniques of photographic imaging when cameras were cheaper, faster, and more portable than ever before. New materials and methods permitted photographs to be printed at an unprecedented scale, while the labor of photography could be divided among the manipulation of the camera apparatus, the chemistry of development, and the machinery of the press. As photographic technology became ever more complex, opaque, and specialized in its internal operations,

it became easier to use, and the distance separating professional from amateur

diminished.*® For Kennedy and Giedion-Welcker, these revolutions in photographic reproduction did not portend the end of sculpture but could, in fact,

simulate an experience of its objects, whether by creating an illusion of embodied space through effectively harnessing binocular vision or by reactivating its

temporality through the composition of page layouts and image sequences.

Countering the model of documentation set by nineteenth-century commercial firms, which froze the sculptural object in a non-space outside of time, they enlisted photographic reproductions to conjure a tangible space and enliven historical and perceptual time. Their distinct approaches prompt further reflec-

tion on a key question that, in turn, structures this book as a whole: how can a photograph teach us to see the sculptural object anew and open onto new interpretations of sculptural space, surface, and time?” Picturing Spatial Experience: Kennedy’s Vectographs

In 1939 the scholar-photographer and Smith College professor Clarence Kennedy was hard at work with engineers at the Polaroid Corporation to develop a 3-D technology of imaging for the reproduction of sculpture, to make images that could simulate a felt experience of roundness he thought missing from two-dimensional photography. The previous year Joseph Mahler had pioneered the vectograph under the guidance of Polaroid’s founder, Edwin H. Land. Mahler’s invention was to superpose the orthogonals of two polarizing filters at right angles to one another on a single plane, resulting in a threedimensional representation when viewed through polarizing lenses.** For Kennedy, the development of the vectograph solved a problem that had occupied him since 1933, which was how to create three-dimensional images for

teaching sculpture. The vectograph offered easy collective viewing—a group wearing polarizing glasses could look at the same image together and see the illusion of depth—and its replication of binocular vision in a single photograph

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made it an ideal medium for the classroom. The vectograph simulated a form of viewing sculpture, as it required a viewer to move in and out of vantage points to attain a stable view of the illusion. It not only mirrored the experience of

kinaesthetic looking described by Hildebrand and Wolfflin, it also heightened a tactile experience of objects and spaces, inviting viewers to imagine touching a sculpture’s surface or inhabiting its spatial environment. Through the 1930s Kennedy immersed himself in the study of stereoscopic imaging techniques, consulting with engineers at Polaroid, Eastman Research

Laboratories, and Bausch and Lomb to develop films, projectors, and cameras that would depict objects three dimensionally and project them on a screen without distortion. His aim was to produce a set of high-quality stereographic slides and prints for dissemination by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, an organization that beginning in the late 1920s was distributing art repro-

ductions to preparatory schools and colleges in the United States and Canada as a photographic microcosm of the museum.” In 1933 Kennedy pitched his

new project as a “collection of stereoscopic views of sculpture,’ which would comprise both distanced and up-close views. He proposed to “fit out an auto-

mobile as a traveling laboratory” for making images, allowing him a broad reach: the European “tour” might also “proceed as far as desired into Egypt and Asia.”*° The project was quickly scaled back to include “masterpieces” in American collections, but Kennedy’s desire for portability remained, and by 1936 he had constructed a sturdy stereoscopic camera and lightweight extendable tripod that would fit in the trunk of his car.*’ He also began a book on “stereo theory and practice,’ never published, which detailed classical treatises

as well as his own research on stereo vision, aimed at inciting future commercial production.** Stereographs would, he thought, replace other two-dimensional photographs, and, judging by the Carnegie Corporation's substantial investment in the project—by 1938, it had awarded Kennedy just over $600,000 in today’s dollars—the organization shared his optimism: as one internal memo declared, “this appears to become one of the most important developments in visual aids to art education of recent years.”*? Why would Kennedy and his industrial partners go to such lengths to develop a virtual image of sculpture? At stake was nothing less than the medium itself, whose three-dimensionality guaranteed its marginalization in art history. Sculpture “never had a fair chance, being taught for the most part without originals and through the medium of flat photographs,’ one Carnegie memo reasoned.** Circulating original objects for pedagogy was “too expensive,’ and other reproductive techniques had failed to accurately convey the object's surface, texture, and space. Plaster casts, for instance, “particularly after they [got] dirty, misrepresent(ed] the artist.** Two-dimensional photographs

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could not properly simulate the “sense of roundness,” or the contingent, binocular experience of viewing an object in its surroundings.** Kennedy aimed to fill these gaps by developing a 3-D reproduction. Although stereographs

were first popularized in the 1850s, as he pointed out, their views of sculpture were “completely inadequate” for teaching, and professional photographers had

not developed the technology required for making high-quality study images of sculpture.*” But perhaps the most difficult challenge to overcome was the

“unsocial character of . . . stereo viewing to date,” as Kennedy observed in a 1936 article, or the fact that only one person at a time could see a given view, “cut[ting himself] off from the outside world while he holds his eyes station-

ary before a piece of unfamiliar apparatus.”** This is what made the vectograph

such a ground-breaking innovation, for it revolutionized the conditions of 3-D viewing. Rather than using polarizing filters placed on top of the image, a vectograph was itself the polarizer. By presenting binocular vision in a single image,

vectographs required no “special lanterns or bulky viewing devices,’ Kennedy noted, since the “slides can be used in any ordinary lantern and the prints held in the hand,” although they required polarizing glasses for the image to be seen

in 3-D.*° The vectograph could be a social medium, replicating the collective experience of seeing sculpture in the round and making the photograph suitable for the spaces of the classroom and the book.

Kennedy experimented with how the nascent technology could point up different aesthetic possibilities for sculpture. In four large-scale vectographs printed on transparencies, for instance, he pictured Donatello’s bronze Bust of a Young Boy (ca. 1450-55), in the collection of the Bargello, in Florence. These

images intensify and invigorate the tactility of the bronze surface (pls. 3, 4).

They frame the sculpture tightly, cropping the boy’s shoulders from view, which has the effect of animating the sculpture as a human portrait sitter. Details pop into high relief: the textures of hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows catch

the light and emerge outward from the surface. The collarbone, its sensuousness heightened through reflection and shadow, juts toward us. In the vecto-

graph, Donatello’s worked-over surface—the gouges, incisions, and modeled additions all cast in bronze—become hyperrealized, so that the sculpted boy appears as if encased in amber, evoking André Bazin’s analogy for photography as suspending and preserving objects in a clarifying, viscous medium.*° In two detailed views, Kennedy homes in on the low-relief medallion at the boy’s breastbone, where illuminations and shadows sculpt the horses and charioteer. The vectographs map the voluminous surface of sculpture, using an optical medium to conjure an aerial and possessive experience of touch in the topographic vision of the peaks and valleys, protruding textures and recessed depths of the bronze surface.

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In another mode, Kennedy heightened a contingent and shifting experience of the situational space of sculpture, using the vectograph to reenact how a beholder encounters sculpture in the round (pl. 5). Portraying a late classical Greek torso of a youth in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he aligned his camera with the corner of the pedestal, meeting the youth's gaze. Two marble heads, one in a vitrine, are displayed in niches in the background. The vectograph sharpens the installation through its focus on edges: the shad-

ows cast from the glass vitrine and niches and the darkened void of pedestal and base demarcate the limits and boundaries between sculpture and its surrounding, creating a “bold drama out of the gaps between things,’ as Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has described the spatial dislocation of stereographs.*’ In the vectograph, space is warped as much as it is crisply defined. Like a hologram, the room dissolves or skews with the shift of the viewer’s gaze. Moving up or down

distorts the tiled floor and niched wall, by turns elongating and shortening the room while the central figure of the sculpted torso remains secure. Kennedy's vectograph allows us to imagine what it would be like to encounter this sculpture in situ as we shift our gaze in relationship to the image. We move in and out of the clear and unclear vantages that Wolfflin ascribes to sculptural perception,

here in relation to the plane of the reproductive image. The vectograph uses an ultra-modern technology to enact a bodily encounter with a plane, and it also enlivens a sculptural aesthetic of perceptual contingency, inviting viewers to

shift between an experience of sculpture as solid and anchored, and rootless and unmoored. The vectograph instills an elusive encounter with image and object.

In 1938 Kennedy produced a draft of Sculptures in American Collections Illustrating the History of Art Reproduced in Three-Dimensional Photography, a comprehensive survey of art objects from Mesopotamia,

Persia, Egypt,

and ancient Greece that would include vectographs for dissemination by the Carnegie Corporation.** The book’s vectographs have not survived, but we can imagine that the heterogeneous approaches Kennedy demonstrates in his test images would have structured his introduction to this cutting-edge technology. His project was cut short by World War II. Shortly after Mahler’s invention, with Kennedy serving as a “consultant,” Polaroid began mass-producing vec-

tographs and kits for making them, and training members of the military to use the technology for aerial reconnaissance.** In a wartime brochure, Polaroid echoed Kennedy’s own reasoning when it expounded the vectograph’s portability and applications for collective viewing, lending itself to the battlefield. But its simulation of space mattered most: “In vectographs every ridge and valley,

every clump of trees, every rock stands out, solid and real. The soldier instantly gets the lay of the land. He can plan where to take cover, where to attack, as

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confidently as if he were in his own back yard.”** The topographic surface of a sculpture like Donatello’s portrait bust now became the enemy territory to be aerially surveyed and bombed. What 3-D imaging promised was an illusionistic representation of a topographic plane, replicating a tactile, possessive encounter to instill a firsthand visual knowledge. Like so many subsequent virtual technologies of imaging— such as the Google Art Project or the New York Times’s VR app, launched in

collaboration with Google**—the vectograph underscored the limitations of photography to simulate an immediate and tactile encounter with spatial bodies and matter. It aimed to bridge the gap between a representational image and a material form by mimicking binocular vision. Sculpture was the medium on

which these innovations were tested out: sculptural viewing stood as the model for a whole other range of possible visual encounters subsequently applied to this imaging technology, from aerial warfare to mass entertainment. But sculptural perception was also latent in the experience of seeing the vectograph itself,

which mandated a bodily engagement with a shifting, amorphous plane. Narrating History Visually: Giedion-Welcker’s Moderne Plastik

If for Kennedy replicating an experience of kinesthetic looking was at stake in his experiments with the vectograph, for Carola Giedion-Welcker what mattered was photography’s ability to give form to an essential, even ideal sculptural body in her layouts and sequences of images. In 1937 she published the first book dedicated to the history of modern sculpture in both German and

English, Moderne Plastik. Elemente der Wirklichkeit. Masse und Auflockerung (Modern Plastic Art: Elements of Reality; Volume and Disintegration).*° It was

an inauspicious moment for a serious theorization of modern art in Europe:

released in the same year the defamatory Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition opened in Munich, the book was swiftly banned in Germany. As a result, Giedion-Welcker’s account of modern sculpture and the canon of artists she identified fared better among Anglophone audiences. Herbert Read credited its importance for his own survey, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History (1964), and forty years after its publication, Rosalind Krauss still had to contend with

its ideas before offering her own counternarrative in her landmark Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977).*” These writers were responding as much—if not

more—to a revised, redesigned, and expanded edition of Giedion-Welcker’s book, published in 1955, under the vastly different circumstances of the postwar era.*® Nevertheless, it is important to recall how in the years during which she

prepared the first edition, Giedion-Welcker confronted the same cultural and political pressures that had motivated Benjamin’ reflection on aesthetics in the

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age of technological reproducibility, and how she attempted to make the case for the vitality of sculpture by enlisting the very technologies he had claimed would destroy it. Giedion-Welcker set out to write the recent history of sculpture as a photo book, an approach she had first adopted for her doctoral thesis on Rococo sculpture in Bavaria, which was copiously illustrated with photographs that, with rare exception, she had taken herself.*” She pursued her work on Moderne Plastik with an eye toward the powerful example of Heinrich Wolfflin, with whom she had studied in Munich in 1915 and remained in regular contact for

decades after World War I. Wolfflin’s articulation of the “double root of style” in both contemporary life and the autonomous “development of [human] vision” over time was as crucial for her book as were his reflections on the utility of the photographic reproduction of sculpture.°® For over three years Giedion-

Welcker collaborated remotely from Zurich with the typographer Herbert Bayer, who was running a successful design studio in Berlin after the dissolu-

tion of the Bauhaus by the Nazi government in 1933. Photography would not only be the means through which she would narrate the development of modern sculpture, it would also give form to the perception that such sculpture demanded. In the process, modern sculpture would appear to be an art that was photographically conditioned, and photography, in turn, could be seen as

a kind of sculptural technique. At the same time, the format of the book asks

us to consider what it might mean to see Benjamin's “assembled artwork”—in this case, the photo-sequence itself—according to the terms Giedion-Welcker set out to characterize modern sculpture, namely as “Masse und Auflockerung,” volume and disintegration. By prompting us to reflect on how we see sculpture

through photography, Moderne Plastik also challenges us to view photography as a mass medium through the specific perceptual training we obtain with a new kind of sculptural object.

As Giedion-Welcker and Bayer conceived it, the argument and layout of Moderne Plastik would follow the model offered by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s second Bauhaus book, Von Material zu Architektur (1929).°' Prefaced by a short,

thirteen-page textual introduction and followed by fourteen pages dedicated to

artists’ biographies, a bibliography, and a catalogue of the illustrations, the heart of Moderne Plastik consists of 131 pages that structure a rhythmic composition of photographic reproductions, expanses of white space, and brief captions with condensed descriptions and quotations from the artists. Giedion-Welcker and Bayer debated at length about the relative scale of the images on each page, which follow no predictable pattern.*? Some float on the page; others are full-

bleed illustrations; some require that we draw the book near for intimate inspection; others push the objects represented dramatically into our field of vision.

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102

Through this dynamic design, Moderne Plastik readily distinguished itself from the wealth of contemporary photo books focused on sculpture. Popular series such as Die Blauen Biicher (The blue books), dedicated primarily to German

sculpture and architecture, or Kulturen der Erde (Cultures of the world), edited

by Ernst Fuhrmann for the Folkwang Press, for instance, typically isolated photographs to one or two per page, regularized their printed size, and adhered to the formal conventions for photographing sculpture established by large firms

like the Bruckmann Verlag.** For Moderne Plastik, by contrast, Giedion-Welcker collaborated directly with sculptors themselves to obtain photographs of their

work, and Bayer greatly exaggerated the variable size of the illustrations on each page, frustrating any impulse to deduce conclusions about the relative scale of the sculptures by comparing them against a uniform standard. In a characteristic example, Giedion-Welcker contrasted the monumental prehistoric Dolmen des Marchands in Locmariaquer, Brittany, to Brancusi’s

marble sculpture The Fish, as it was installed in his Paris studio (fig. 1). The photograph of the megalithic tomb structure is cropped to measure the length of the depicted capstone, and this measurement appears, in turn, to be the standard used to enlarge the photograph supplied by Brancusi, such that the form of his

Fig. 1. “Dolmen des Marchands Locmariaquer (Bretagne)” and “C. Brancusi, Le poisson, 1918-1928 (marbre), Paris.” From Carola Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik: Elemente der Wirklichkeit; Masse und Auflockerung (Zurich:

Girsberger, 1937), 102-3.

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veined marble slab is reproduced at the exact same size on the facing page. In this way, Giedion-Welcker could visualize her claim that this form “was not cre-

ated for the constriction of an atelier, but for the expanse of a landscape.’** The ambition was not to enlist varying formats of photographic images to reproduce actual relationships of scale but to produce the experience of new ones through the activity of paging through the book. Rather than use photography to simu-

late an experience of walking around a fixed sculptural figure, we are meant to witness how sculpture itself fragments and dissolves into a series of discrete images that explode across the space of the book. The measure of sculpture is no longer the human body but rather this fluid and fungible space, presented here as a function ofthe aperture of the camera and the format of the page.

Throughout Moderne Plastik we are asked to see individual views of modern sculptures, not just in relation to one another but also to works of art from the African continent, archaic Greece, or prehistoric Stonehenge and Carnac. Giedion-Welcker first developed an interest in the origins of artistic creativity

through her encounters with another of Wolfflin’s students, Wilhelm Worringer, whose lectures she attended regularly during her student days in Bonn and with whom she and her husband, architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, remained close friends until his death in 1965.°° She repeatedly credited Worringer’s 1907

touchstone thesis, Abstraktion und Einfiihlung (Abstraction and Empathy), for enlarging the historical context for contemporary art: in his account of how humans have enlisted art to mediate their confrontation with primal forces beyond their control, he argued that their relationship to space could be char-

acterized by either empathetic projection or existential dread (Raumscheu).°°

By means of photographic comparison, Moderne Plastik asserts that the sculptural medium is fundamentally atavistic, essential for our most basic rituals in

navigating how we perceive the world. Giedion-Welcker wanted to establish a visual resonance between two different kinds of form that in her estimation

exist outside of history, between contemporary art and what she called “a decisive ur-form.””’ In a text on the stones of Carnac she was quick to insist that “no reproduction can communicate a true impression, an impression of the spatial

dimension, of the great gasp of those lithic alleys” and when we look at these prehistoric monoliths, “we automatically think of contemporary sculptural form-creation.’** Although photographs fail to transmit the auratic “here and

now” of the stones, she used these images in Moderne Plastik to assert that they can nevertheless facilitate a productive perceptual immediacy of another sort. The photographs are diagnostic tools that make present a universal urge to form that finds a cyclical, even uncanny, expression across extremes of space and time. Through these photographs, what we see in prehistoric art is not a distant relic, but “above all and with a poetic directness, the unencumbered power of

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vision and [the impulse to] form.”*? To see the distant past in the present is not, she argued, the same as the banal appropriation of an eclectic repertoire

of forms borrowed here and there in the service of a fashionable primitivism. Instead, she envisioned a strictly formal kinship between the modern and the

archaic that would be linked to the dream state and a renewed interest in “prelogical, irrational phenomena.” By narrating a history of sculpture through photographs, Giedion-Welcker attempted to make visible an unconscious wellspring of form that operates across millennia. Contemporary sculpture could thereby appear to be a reproduction of a primal, original vocabulary of form,

one that asserts the proximity of human creativity to that of nature. We see this thesis culminate in a striking pair of photographic spreads at the center of the book, both dedicated to the work of Hans Arp (figs. 2, 3).°* Here modern sculpture is not compared to works hewn by human hands but to forms discovered and recorded in nature. In the first spread, a photograph of the

Lucerne Gletschergarten, a natural monument of glacial potholes and polished boulders that opened to the public in 1874, shortly after its discovery in the heart of the city, faces one of Arp’s Configurations, a series of sculptures that consist of

Fig. 2. “Gletschergarten Luzern” and “H. Arp, Configurations

1932 (pierre), Meudon.”

smaller parts arranged but not affixed on a larger form, which the beholder was

From Carola Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik: Elemente der Wirklichkeit; Masse

invited to rearrange at will. The photograph of the glacial landscape is smaller

Girsberger, 1937), 88-89.

und Auflockerung (Zurich:

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IL Aey Conceétion Humane

1933. (pierce), Ziieiek, Ruwsthane

than that of the sculpture, and the relative scale of each set of objects represented

is inverted from what we would expect. The Arp looms larger than an entire field of sandstone; its photograph spans the width of the page, bringing it close so that, by comparison, the boulders in Lucerne appear as if we were seeing them through

the wrong end of a telescope. A similar distortion of scale effected through photography governs the dynamic between the images in the following spread, where clumps of melting snow in a river are set against the marble Human Concretion (1933). Yet, unlike the image of the Gletschergarten, we do not even have a hori-

zon to help anchor our perception of these “plastic snow formations.” Using a square rather than a rectangular format, the photograph gives the impression

that the field of snow extends indefinitely beyond the frame of the image in all directions. It abstracts natural phenomena into patterns of tonal contrast and lends a different sensation of vastness to the photograph of the neighboring Arp. Rises: “Plastische Schneebildungen. Snow Formation,” and “H. Arp,

Concrétion Humaine, 1933 (pierre), Zurich, Kunsthaus.” From Carola Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik: Elemente der Wirklichkeit; Masse und Auflockerung (Zurich: Girsberger, 1937), 90-91.

Here the biomorphic white forms are set against a black ground in an image that

is also square but enlarged to bleed off the page, making the sculpture appear like a magnified detail of the abstract-natural world it mimics. Stone carved slowly by ice in the first spread gives way to liquid flux in the second. From one pair to the next, we are made to feel how nature changes at different rates, variously animat-

ing and inflecting how we perceive each sculpture in turn.

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Like Wolfflin in his essays on the photography of sculpture and Benjamin in his various meditations on aura, Giedion-Welcker was concerned with the inscription of perceptual images that repeatedly irrupt into visibility every time we mediate the world with our bodies.** As a photo book, Moderne Plastik argues that the history of recent sculpture is not the product of a linear evo-

lution of style but a cyclical return to the “fundamental phenomena of the sculptural,” chief among them the simple fact that “the human body is a plastic reality, just like the world of things that surround it”®* The photographs in this book are not intended to reproduce their objects according to the logic of

substitution but rather to index our immersion in the world and our shared existence in space with the other bodies that we perceive. We see this approach in the reproductions Brancusi and Naum Gabo sup-

plied to Giedion-Welcker, for example. Brancusi’s Endless Column is captured from a worm’s-eye view, vertiginously silhouetted against the sky, while other sculptures are caught in a play of light within his studio. Works in plastic and celluloid by Gabo and the open scaffolding of the sculptures by his brother, Antoine Pevsner, allow light to pass through like photographic negatives:

they are shown as bodies that are no longer defined by a closed material mass, but which instead delineate “volumes in air” (Luftvolumen), casting shadows

onto the monochrome surfaces that surround them.®° Gabo’s vibrating Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1920), for instance, is made visible by fixing its

disturbance oflight against a darkened plane (fig. 4). Consisting of awire rod

attached to an electric motor, it is an object that traces the limits of our corporeal vision when it comes to parsing time: its movement is too rapid for us

to distinguish in discrete phases, and so our eyes can only see a blur, a ghostly apparition fleshing out a virtual volume. Here the photographic document

completely identifies the sculptural body with the photogram, a technique that held particular fascination for Moholy-Nagy and other New Vision photog-

raphers for the way that it could spatialize the dynamism of light.°° In turn, Giedion-Welcker pointedly compares this image to Brancusi’s own photograph of his marble Bird (1925): “The impression of movement, which the constructiv-

ists produce via technology, Brancusi achieves by retaining real mass, through proportion, tension, and the luster of the polished marble or metal (light). The dematerialized swing up into space happens here and there with works that

were made completely independently from one another.’®” Photographic comparison with the art of prehistory or the forms of nature had allowed Moderne Plastik to narrate a specific history for recent sculpture, but it could also describe a different kind of sculptural temporality, one already conditioned by the spatialization of the movement of light through photographic inscription. The photographs in the Gabo/Brancusi comparison

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130

obscure, even eradicate qualities that we may have once felt were indispensable for the perception of sculpture, such as a specific and legible material integrity

or a single fixed and bounded form that affirms our confidence in our own bodily command over space. As such, they are documents not of an objective image of the objects they register, but of their modernity—of sculpture made in the photographic age.°* Rather than obscure sculpture’s claim on time, the manipulation of photographs in Moderne Plastik to tell its recent history mul-

tiplies that claim instead—from one object to the next, from object to photograph, from objects installed in space to photographs arranged in book-space,

from the distant past to our present moment.” Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction

Fig. 4.

The experiments with photography that Kennedy and Giedion-Welcker under-

“N. Gabo’s ‘Kinetische Plastik’ (1922)” and “C. Brancusi, Loiseau, 1925 (marbre), Paris.” From Carola GiedionWelcker, Moderne Plastik: Elemente der Wirklichkeit;

took in the 1930s animate two questions that lie at the core of this volume: How

Masse und Auflockerung

odological problems that are unavoidable for any scholar who relies on images

(Zurich: Girsberger, 1937), 130-31.

in the age of mechanical and digital reproducibility. The sixteen essays in this

do reproductive photographs picture spatial experience, and how do they serve as a form of historical writing in their own right? These questions raise meth-

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volume explore how photographs give a specific form to sculptural objects and to the modernist, ethnographic, or archaeological contexts that surround them. Like the institutional framework of a museum display, a reproductive photograph can make an object available for aesthetic contemplation, releasing it from other identities it may once have also held, whether as a ritual artifact, a quotidian tool, an architectural ornament, or a historical document. The essays here return representational density to the photograph, unmasking its own for-

mal qualities and conventions in order to account for its power to define the identity and significance of the sculptural object it records. From here, ques-

tions about the intersections between these two media begin to multiply: What new ways of understanding sculptural surface, body, and space have emerged? How do we relate the different temporalities of perceiving sculpture, whether seen in an instantaneous photographic exposure or experienced in situ? How

do we account for photography’s role in defining the aesthetic, formal, and social histories of the medium of sculpture? In the essays that follow, these questions intersect with others that examine

how photographs of sculpture underpin our institutional and disciplinary histories. The photographic tool—as a paratext to the writing of art history—is a social agent. It is indispensable for provenance research, canon formation, institutional record-keeping, the transformation of art into commodified property, and copyright law. What happens to these systems when the imagined transparency of the photographic reproduction is denied through an analysis of the photograph’s form? What stories about the preservation or destruction of cultural patrimony become possible? Often the writing of art history in its photographs and texts valorizes certain kinds of labor at the expense of others. Which repro-

ductive photographs are authored and which are anonymous? Whose intention is more worthy of legal protection, the sculptor’s or the photographer's? Since the 1980s, the role of photography in the emergence of art history,

archaeology, and anthropology as “scientific” disciplines in the nineteenth century has been a central topic of scholarly investigation.’® This scholarship has shed light on the methods of foundational art historians, in particular Aby Warburg, who innovatively arranged and displayed photographs to narrate the past.”! Through the study of Warburg and others, scholars have

drawn our attention to the visual as well as textual articulation of the historiography of art and to the visual technics of art historical knowledge. In the early 1990s, studies by Mary Bergstein, Michel Frizot and Dominique Paini, and Geraldine A. Johnson turned to the photographic mediation of sculpture, inspiring an emerging field of inquiry.’* One aim of this field has been to tell the story of how photography became the prime vehicle for the global

circulation of art and artifacts. As this research has shown, the documentary

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strategies that Western photographers used at the beginning of the twentieth century for presenting non-Western objects cannot be understood apart from imperialist discourse and ambition.”* By adopting conventions of photographic documentation that firms like Bruckmann and Fratelli Alinari had developed for the art of Greco-Roman antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, photographs of African or Oceanic objects bracketed out their original social, performative, or ritual identities, delivering objects with complex histories to Western audiences to be consumed and appropriated as pure form. Within

the institutional frameworks of the university, the museum, the art market, and the publishing house, the camera could legitimize any object as “art”—a concept that Brassai famously underscored in his “sculptures involontaires,” published in Minotaure in 1933.’”* Printed alongside captions written by

Salvador Dali, Brassai’s close-up photographs of small pieces of detritus read as a mocking critique of the power of a photograph to frame, authorize, and validate the Western institution of art. Published just two issues after his first photographs of Pablo Picasso's sculptures appeared in the magazine, Brassai’s “sculptures involontaires” were executed when he was attempting to harness

photography to record a new kind of modernist sculpture within that tradition. This approach reached its apex in André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire, in

which photography entirely supplanted the art object, absorbing the world’s

heritage into the broad scope of the book.” Our volume also builds on research into the material turn of art history. In studies of sculpture across subfields, scholars have explored how a sculpture’s siting in an architectural or performative situation determines its meaning.’”° Photography emerges as one mechanism of display among others, such

as pedestals, niches, and vitrines. As photographic archives are digitized and disseminated online, a number of scholars, in turn, have refocused our attention to photographs as material objects.’’ Just as the interdisciplinary field of

book studies has renewed attention to the histories of its objects, research into the texture, surface, format, and size of photographs has sensitized us to how they are vehicles for method, reception, and meaning.”* Scholars such as Carol Armstrong, Patrizia Di Bello, Costanza Carafta, and Joan Schwartz have shown us how photographs, like sculptures, are affected by their physical siting—in an archive, a folio, a book, or a projection.”? Our comprehension is based as much upon their haptic data as on their optical presentation of objects.

In the past thirty years, the questions taken up by this volume have been mined by contemporary artists whose work takes place at the intersections between photography and sculpture. Thomas Demand, Peter Fischli and

David Weiss, Rachel Harrison, Barbara Kasten, and Gabriel Orozco, to name only a few, use the camera to present everyday objects or assemblages that

INTRODUCTION:

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are disbanded as soon as the photograph is taken, resulting in a picture of an ephemeral or transitory sculpture.*° Building from the legacies of conceptual and site-specific art, these works suggest a definition of sculpture as simply whatever can be photographed. Sculptural materiality and space have disappeared into the mediating plane of the reproductive image, seeming to fulfill Benjamins prognosis for sculpture’s obsolescence in the age of mass reproduction. Two recent exhibitions, The Original Copy at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010) and Lens-Based Sculpture at the Akademie der Kiinste in

Berlin (2014), stand out for their attempts to survey, respectively, the recent history of the photography of sculpture and artistic practices that engage photography as a sculptural technique.*' Given such work, what are the consequences

for the objecthood of both media? Is it possible to dispense with the “object” entirely and with sculpture as a category of representation, to signal both virtu-

ally instead—as a memory, concept, or trace? At the same time that these photographic projects appear to reject sculptural materiality altogether, recent theoretical approaches to new media have

proposed to do away with photography as art history’s principal reproductive

technology. New media theorist Lev Manovich, for instance, has envisioned a supersized version of Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire, updated for the twenty-first century, in which reproductions are translated into code, making possible the

comparison of hundreds of thousands of images simultaneously through massive sets of metadata.*’ This raises the question of whether photographs are

even necessary in this age of colossal abstraction in the name of big data, and it suggests a way of leaving behind the reproductive image—and its imbrication in Western histories of art and aesthetics—altogether. How do we begin to decouple the practice of writing of art history from its dependence on photography? What new methodological approaches and modes of seeing would alternative technologies of reproduction and visualization make possible? For this volume, we invited scholars of sculpture, photography, architecture, and film, working in anthropology, art history, and archaeology to draw upon

these diverse fields of research and tackle the historiographic, archival, and theoretical questions that have emerged. The essays in the book's first section, “Reimagining the Classical Past,’ collectively examine how photographers have used the camera to reframe or enliven the sculptural past and make claims about cultural patrimony. Stefanie Klamm looks closely at how photography emerged alongside drawing as an illustrative tool for archaeologists in the late nineteenth century, and her essay tracks a range of divergent approaches for depicting classical sculptures, from the inclusion of a sculpture’s surroundings to close-up views to sequences of antique figures mapped in 360 degrees.

Jeremy Melius deepens our understanding of discourses of sculptural frontality

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by examining a series of photographs taken from sculpture’s dorsal view. Melius attends to the complex fears and desires that accompany looking from behind, juxtaposing the slides that the painter Ad Reinhardt made of the backs of sculpture in the 1950s and 1960s with the photographs Adolf von Hildebrand took of his daughters around 1888. Taking up the 1920s folios of scholar-photographer

Clarence Kennedy, Sarah Hamill explores how the camera became a tool of inscription to illuminate the carved surface of sculpture. Kennedy's photographs elicit a haptic mode of beholding in ways that evoke ideas explored by the British critic Adrian Stokes in his contemporaneous writings on the aesthet-

ics of carving. Focusing on the collaborations between the art historian Jacob

Burckhardt and a circle of architects indebted to his ideas about Renaissance cultural history, Alina Payne, in turn, considers how our perception of archi-

tecture as a sculptural monument has been conditioned by the specific form of the photographic atlas.

The second section, “Perceiving Sculpture through Photography,’ asks how these various visual arguments about a shared classical past came to be chal-

lenged or revised through modernism. Suzanne Preston Blier considers how photography has governed the field of African art, shaping how these objects

and images were collected, displayed, and circulated. Photography has also played a vital role in the market of forgeries of African objects by setting a standard image for African art. Megan R. Luke examines the way space is fig-

ured through the labor of the photographic apparatus, using the example of Walker Evans's portfolios of African sculpture and ordinary hand tools to show

how photography can function simultaneously as a technique for sculptural production and as a technology for facsimile reproduction. Anne McCauley

explores how Man Ray, often collaborating with Marcel Duchamp, transformed traditional photographic reproductions of sculptural objects into original creations. These evocative images called into question the fixity of the sculptural viewer and the primacy of the three-dimensional object over the photograph that recorded it. Stephen Melville takes a broad view of the topic by asking, how far and under what conditions can photography discover a work as a sculpture?

In a discussion that ranges from Titian’s Madonna di Ca’Pesaro to the Trajan’s Column iPad app, Melville proposes a speculative history of sculpture through its engagement with photography, one that unfolds in the absence of any actual camera. Melville's line of inquiry opens onto the essays in the third section, “Technologizing Experience,’ which each contend with the fact that our experience of any artifact from the past always occurs within parameters set by

photographic technologies. Surveying three-dimensional lens-based media from the Victorian era to the 1960s, Britt Salvesen highlights how stereoscopy

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was understood to be a sculptural medium. D. N. Rodowick, in turn, addresses various theories of virtuality to show how Victor Burgin and other contemporary artists enlist photography as a medium to create spatial situations broadly conceived. Their historical and theoretical reflections on the sculptural potential of virtual images prompt us to examine how we interact with such images and to reassess the necessity of a material object as a photographic referent. Adopting an ethnosociological approach, Christopher Pinney takes up these

concerns in his study of the vernacular practices that accompany digital montages, lenticular prints, and cellphone shots of devotional objects produced within the contexts of domestic veneration and seasonal rituals in India. Jeffrey

Weiss, by contrast, concentrates on various art contexts for the exhibition of Minimalist objects, demonstrating how photographs not only document works that are physically unstable and iterative but also evince the extended temporality of these objects and their potential for refabrication across various material platforms. The book concludes with shorter reflections by scholars who have each made significant contributions to study of the photography of sculpture. Their contributions take up broader, intersecting topics that are crucial for all the essays

in this volume. Geoffrey Batchen examines the role of early photography in the paragone, or the competition among the arts; Alex Potts surveys the imbricated

histories of documentary and modernist styles for the photography of sculpture; and Anne M. Wagner offers a meditation on the consequences for sculpture’s perceptual contingency in the wake of the invention of photography. Finally, as a chief scholar of the photography of sculpture, Geraldine A. Johnson, in her epilogue, reflects on how our understanding of this exchange has broadened since the publication of her own pioneering anthology, Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third-Dimension (1998). Through its constellation of objects,

images, and vantage points, we envision this volume as a resource not only for the study of art history but also for those contending with the history, theory, and aesthetics of visual culture and the humanities more broadly.

Notes 1. Our understanding of sculpture is informed by modernist debates about the medium. For a helpful survey of the ideas that contribute to our brief formulation here, see Jon Wood, David Hulks, and Alex Potts, eds., Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007); and Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (London: Yale University Press, 2001).

2. See, for example, Julia Ballerini, “Recasting Ancestry: Statuettes as Imaged by Three Inventors of Photography,’ in The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life, ed. Anne W. Lowenthal (Princeton: Princeton

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University Press, 1996), 41-58; Geoffrey Batchen, “An Almost Unlimited Variety:

Photography and Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century,’ in The Original Copy: Photography ofSculpture, 1839 to Today, ed. Roxana Marcoci, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 20-26; and Susan L. Taylor, “Fox Talbot as an Artist: The ‘Patroclus’ Series,” Bulletin: Museums of Art and Archaeology, The University of Michigan 8 (1986): 39-55.

. See, for instance, Frederick N. Bohrer, “Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of Art History, in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 246-59; Costanza Carafta, “From ‘Photo Libraries’ to ‘Photo Archives’: On the

Epistemological Potential of Art-Historical Photo Collections,” in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory ofArt History, ed. Costanza Caraffa (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 11-44; and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, “Fawning

over Marbles: Robert and Geraldine MacPherson’s Vatican Sculptures and the Role of Photographs in the Reception of the Antique,” in Art and the Early Photographic Album, ed. Stephen Bann (Washington: National Gallery of Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 94-122.

. On early modern reproductive prints of sculpture, see, for example, Sarah Cree,

“Translating Stone into Paper: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Prints after Antique Sculpture,’ in Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 15001800, ed. Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 75-101.

. Stefanie Klamm, “Bruckmann Verlag,’ Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008), 1:225-27.

. Joel Snyder, “Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29.

. Brunn-Bruckmann, Denkmadler griechischer und rémischer Skulptur, in Study Photographs of European Paintings and Ancient Sculpture from Verlag F. Bruckmann (1880-ca. 1929), photo archive, Getty Research Institute. Brunn-

Bruckmann’s Denkmdler was expanded to include as many as 800 images and reissued in various editions until 1947, long after the men’s deaths in 1894 and

1898, respectively. Separate registers with commentaries about the sculptures recorded in the plates were eventually published by some of Brunn’s most promi-

nent students, including Paul Arndt and Adolf Furtwangler; see Paul Arndt, ed., Denkmaler griechischer und rémischer Skulptur. Register (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1897, 1902, 1906, 1912, 1926, 1932, 1947); and A. Furtwangler and H. L. Ulrichs, eds., Denkmadler griechischer und romischer Skulptur. Handausgabe (1898; rev. ed. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1911).

. These essays were originally published by Heinrich Wolfflin as: “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll” [part 1], Zeitschrift fiirbildende Kunst, n.s. 7, no. 10 (July 1896): 224-28; “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll” [part 2], n.s. 8, no. 12 (September 1897): 294-97; “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll? (Probleme der italienischen Renaissance),” n.s. 26, nos. 10/11 (1915): 237-44. We refer to

the published English translation, and note when we modify it with reference to the original: Heinrich Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,”

INTRODUCTION:

REPRODUCTIVE VISION

trans. Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 52-71. See also

Megan R. Luke, “The Photographic Reproduction of Space: Wélfflin, Panofsky, Kracauer,’ RES 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010): 339-43: 341-342; and Geraldine

A. Johnson, “‘(Un)richtige Aufnahme’: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History,’ » Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 12-51, 17-20. . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,’ 59. . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,” 59 (translation modified). . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,” 59 (translation modified).

. On Wolfflin’s method of comparative looking, see, for instance, Evonne Levy, “Wolfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915-2015), a Prolegomenon for Its

Second Century,” in Heinrich Wélfflin, Principles ofArt History: The Problem of the Development ofStyle in Early Modern Art, ed. Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen, trans. Jonathan Blower (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015), 1-46; and Zeynep Celik Alexander, “Looking: Wolfflin’s Comparative Vision,” in Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2017). . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,’ 57; Wolfflin also refers to the “normal viewpoint” (54) and the “normal frontal view” (58). . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,’ 53 (translation modified). . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,” 59.

. Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,’ 53, 58. . Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, in Empathy, Form, and Space:

Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1994). 18.

Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 229. For Wolfflin’s references to Hildebrand,

see “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,” 54, 58. 19. Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph a Sculpture,” 58-59 (translation

modified). 20.

For an insightful review of the uses of virtual technologies of imaging for art history, see: Elizabeth Mansfield, “Review of Google Art Project and Digital Scholarship in the Visual Arts, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 30, no. 1 (2014): 110-17. 3-D printing technologies have gained

currency in art history, conservation, and archaeology. When it was installed at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, for instance, the exhibition Power and Pathos:

Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World (2015), curated by Kenneth Lapatin and Jens Daehner, displayed 3-D printed casts in miniature of sculptures in the exhibition as a pedagogical tool for conveying issues of surface, materiality, process, and completion. See also the changing role of photographs in recent digital mapping projects, such as Stephen Murray and Andrew Tallon’s Mapping Gothic 21.

France: http://mappinggothic.org/about. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed.

Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 109. 22.

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ 103, 104-5.

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23. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ 109. 24. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 109. 25. See, for instance, Friedrich Teja Bach, “Brancusi and Photography,’ in Constantin

Brancusi: 1876-1957, ed. Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, exh. cat. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 312-19; Elizabeth Brown, Brancusi Photographs Brancusi (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995); Paul Paret, “Sculpture

and Its Negative: The Photographs of Constantin Brancusi,’ in Johnson, Sculpture and Photography, 101-15; Jon Wood, Close Encounters: The Sculptors Studio in the Age of the Camera (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2001); Sharon Hecker, “Reflection and Repetition in Rosso’s Art,’ in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions,

ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 23-69; Paola Mola, Rosso: The Transient Form (Milan: Skira, 2007);

and Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions: Photography and the Matter of Sculpture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 26.

In a comparison ofthe technology ofprehistoric art and that of the remote-controlled aircraft, Benjamin addresses this automatization and division oflabor in Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 107, where his discussion ofthe ability of new technologies to replace labor with play is foundational for the idea of the camera as an inscrutable black box, elaborated by Vilém Flusser in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000): 28-32. For a helpful survey of this technological history, see Sabine T. Kriebel, “Theories of Photography: A Short History,’ in Photographic Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 8.

AT This essay has been jointly written with the exception of the case studies

that follow. Hamill is the author of “Picturing Spatial Experience: Kennedy’s Vectographs” and Luke is the author of “Narrating History Visually: GiedionWelcker’s Moderne Plastik.” Research for both studies was conducted collaboratively. 28.

Brenda Bernier, “Polaroid Vectographs,’ Topics in Photographic Preservation 13 (2009): 89. See also Edwin H. Land, “Vectographs: Images in Terms ofVectorial

Inequality and Their Application in Three-Dimensional Representation,” Journal of the Optical Society ofAmerica 30, no. 6 (June 1940): 230-38.

29. The corporation had funded Kennedy's seven-volume series of lavish, large-scale

folios, Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture, published between 1929 and 1932, and purchased Kennedy's photographs for inclusion in the art sets. 30. Clarence Kennedy, “General Considerations for Shaping a Plan for the Use

of Stereo Photos ofSculpture,” 27 March 1933, Carnegie Corporation of New York Records 1872-2000, grant files (hereafter CC grant files), box 326, folder

20, “Preparation of Material for Art Study in Sculpture (Kennedy Clarence), 1925-1941.”

31. Clarence Kennedy to William A. Neilson (president of Smith College), 14

December 1936. Kennedy’s letter served as a report of his Carnegie Corporation Grant, since Smith College administered the funds. ey). Kennedy mentions this book in his report of 14 December 1936. A draft of his

publication is in the Edwin Land Collection of Clarence Kennedy Papers, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, box FV 9EEV S.

INTRODUCTION:

REPRODUCTIVE VISION

33. In 1938, the Carnegie Corporation’s grants to Clarence Kennedy for the project amounted to $36,850. See memo on appropriation made ca. 18 April 1938,

Carnegie Corporation of New York Records, 1872-2000, CC grant files, box 326, folder 20. Memo on appropriation made ca. 5 March 1936, CC grant files, box 326,

folder 20. 34. Memo on Appropriation Made, 13 November 1933, CC grant files, box 326,

folder 20. 35. Memo on Appropriation Made, 13 November 1933. 36.

Memo on Appropriation Made, 13 November 1933.

37. Kennedy, Report on grant, 29 January 1935, CC grant files, box 329, folder 20. 38.

Kennedy, “The Development and Use of Stereo Photography for Educational Purposes,” Journal of the Society ofMotion Picture Engineers 26 (January 1936): 4.

39. Clarence Kennedy to Frederick Keppel, 21 October 1940, CC grant files, box 326,

folder 20. 40. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 14. 4l. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Panama’s Cut: Stereoview/Painting,’ in Colossal:

Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal (Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2012), 136. 42. Kennedy’s archives contain only two pages of the table of contents, along with

the title page. See Clarence Kennedy Papers and Photographs, 1921-58, Fine Arts

Library, Harvard University, oversized box.

43.

Clarence Kennedy, Letter to Frederick Keppel, 21 November 1940, CC grant files,

box 326, folder 20. Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1998), 118. Vectographs supplied intelligence for the Normandy invasion. After the war, the technology was adapted for commercial purposes, for example, the first 3-D movie premiered in 1952.

44.

Polaroid Corporation Handbook (Cambridge, MA: Polaroid Corporation, 1943), 10.

Clarence Kennedy Papers and Photographs, 1921-58, CK addition box FV 6030.

45. See Elizabeth Mansfield, “Review of Google Art Project,” and Ravi Somaiya, “The Times Partners with Google on Virtual Reality Project,” New York Times, 20 October 2015. 46.

Carola Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik. Elemente der Wirklichkeit. Masse und Auflockerung (Zurich: Girsberger, 1937); and Modern Plastic Art: Elements of Reality; Volume and Disintegration, trans. P. Morton Shand (Zurich: Girsberger, 1937). The introduction and descriptive captions that accompany the illustrations

are so different between the two editions that they constitute entirely distinct

texts. Translations from German from all of Giedion-Welcker’s texts cited here are by Megan Luke.

47. Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964); Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press,

1977). 48. The second edition was simultaneously published as Plastik des XX. Jahrhunderts.

Volumen- und Raumegestaltung (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1955) and as Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space (New York: Wittenborn, 1955). Read

referred to this edition in Modern Sculpture and to the first edition in The Art of

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Sculpture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956). Krauss cites the title of

the first edition and her commentary on the book focuses on it as an artifact of thinking about sculpture in the 1930s, but her footnotes make clear she consulted the later edition; see Passages in Modern Sculpture, 3-4 and 289.

49. Carola Giedion-Welcker, Bayerische Rokokoplastik. J. B. Straub und seine Stellung in Landschaft und Zeit (Munich: Recht, 1922).

50. Letters from W6lfflin in Giedion-Welcker’s archive date from 1915 to 1945; gta

Archiv, ETH Ziirich. For a detailed examination of Wélfflin’s importance for

Giedion-Welcker, see Iris Bruderer-Oswald, Das neue Sehen: Carola GiedionWelcker und die Sprache der Moderne (Bern: Benteli, 2007), 131-37. Sigfried

Giedion, Hans and Lita Finsler, Hans Curjel, and Franz Roh were also students in his circle at this time. 51. Giedion-Welcker fully embraced the evolutionary trajectory that Moholy-Nagy

had traced in this book, from the dissolution of closed material mass into the virtual spatiality of light and movement; she credited it as “an utterly foundational book on sculptural [plastische] development.” Giedion-Welcker, Moderne

Plastik, 18 note 8. On Moholy-Nagy’s importance for this project, as well as his own assistance for its realization, see Bruderer-Oswald, Das neue Sehen, 120-21; and Iris Bruderer-Oswald, “Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Entdeckung der Moderne, in Das Bauhaus und Frankreich / Le Bauhaus et la France 1919-1940, ed. Isabelle Ewig, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, and Matthias Noell (Berlin: Akademie

Verlag, 2002), 422. 52. When Giedion-Welcker received the final pages of the layout from Bayer, she

enthused: “You've brought such liveliness to the layout and executed it with such sensitivity, that I cannot thank you enough. Everything was truly much more difficult with the distance than under normal circumstances. It had to remain a presentation about sculpture, though without seeming like a dry summary. It’s marvelous how you yanked my schoolmasterish finger from my nose and still the whole thing makes a serious impression.” For citations from this and other exchanges between the collaborators, see Bruderer-Oswald, “Carola GiedionWelcker,” 423-25. 53- For a comparison of Moderne Plastik with Die Blauen Biicher, see Christian

Bracht, “Die Logik des Kommentars. Carola Giedion-Welckers ‘Moderne Plastik’ (1937),” in Avantgarden im Fokus der Kunstkritik: eine Hommage an Carola Giedion-Welcker, ed. Regula Krahenbihl (Zurich: SIK-ISEA, 2011), 57-59. For an

invaluable survey of the complexities of mass-produced photo books at this time, see Pepper Stetler, “Bound Vision: Reading the Photographic Book in the Weimar Republic,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2009, esp. 185-201 (on Fuhrmann). 54. Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik, 103. 55. On Worringer’s importance for Giedion-Welcker’s intellectual formation and

Moderne Plastik in particular, see Bruderer-Oswald, Das neue Sehen, 35-37, 127-

30. Spyros Papapetros has analyzed the importance of prehistoric art for Sigfried Giedion’s later architectural history, The Eternal Present (1962-64), and the role

that his own photographs and collaboration with Bayer on the layout played in his development of a “haptic form of historiography”; he notes Giedion-Welcker’s 1938 essay, “Prehistoric Stones,’ published in Transition, but does not discuss the

INTRODUCTION:

56.

REPRODUCTIVE VISION

debt that The Eternal Present has to the example of Moderne Plastik: “Modern Architecture and Prehistory: Retracting The Eternal Present (Sigfried Giedion and André Leroi-Gourhan),” RES 63/64 (Spring/Autumn 2013): 173-89. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfiihlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (1908; Amsterdam: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), 15-16 and 46-48; translated by

Michael Bullock as Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). 57: Carola Giedion-Welcker, “Neue Wege der heutigen Plastik” (1934), reprinted in

Schriften 1926-1971. Stationen zu einem Zeitbild, ed. Reinhold Hohl (Cologne:

DuMont, 1973), 388. Together with a portfolio of many photographs later included in Moderne Plastik, this text was published as “New Roads in Modern Sculpture,” trans. Eugene Jolas, Transition 23 (July 1935): 198-201. 58. Carola Giedion-Welcker, “Besuch in Carnac” (1934), reprinted in Schriften, 11, 12.

59. Carola Giedion-Welcker, “Prahistorie, Vico und die Moderne Kunst” (1938),

reprinted in Schriften, 13. 60.

Giedion-Welcker, “Prahistorie, Vico und die Moderne Kunst,” 14.

61.

Arp was instrumental in the production and distribution of the book; according to Bruderer-Oswald, he ignited Giedion-Welcker’s interest in modern sculpture after they were first introduced in Paris in 1924 and was the “initiator” of the project (Bruderer-Oswald, “Carola Giedion-Welcker,’ 420, 422).

62.

See Stefanie Poley, Hans Arp: Die Formensprache im plastischen Werk (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1978). For the Gletschergarten, see https://www.gletschergarten.ch/ natur-und-poesie-mitten-in-der-stadt.

63.

See especially Benjamin's description of his experience of aura as an experience of space, which traces and inscribes the natural world into temporally specific images: Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ 105; and “Little History of Photography,” Selected Writings:

64.

Giedion-Welcker, “Neue Wege der heutigen Plastik,” 386.

Volume 2, 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 518-19. 65. Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik, 134.

66. See, for example, Herbert Molderings, “Laszlo Moholy-Nagy und die

Neuerfindung des Fotogramms,” in Die moderne der Fotografie (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2008), 45-70. 67. Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik, 130.

68.

See Geraldine A. Johnson, “An Almost Immaterial Substance: Photography and Dematerialization of Sculpture; in Immaterial: Brancusi, Gabo, MoholyNagy, exh. cat. (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard Publications, 2004), 70-88; and Paret,

69.

“Sculpture and Its Negative.” This reading considerably complicates Krauss’s claims about Giedion-Welcker in Passages in Modern Sculpture; see also Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “Carola Giedion-Welcker: Misrepresented Collaborator of Modernists,” in Womens Contributions to Visual Culture, 1918-1939, ed. Karen E. Brown (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 89-100.

70. The literature on this topic is extensive. See, in particular: Wolfgang Kemp,

Foto-Essays zur Geschichte und Theorie der Fotografie (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1978); Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution. Studien zur Geschichte

29

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einer Disziplin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979); Wolfgang M. Freitag, “Early Uses of Photography in the History of Art,” Art Journal 39, no. 2 (Winter 1979/1980):

117-23; Donald Preziosi, “The Panoptic Gaze and the Anamorphic Archive,” in Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 54-79; Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Helene E. Roberts, ed.,

Art History through the Camera’ Lens (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1995);

Anthony Hamber, “A Higher Branch of the Art”: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839-1880 (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1996); Matthias Bruhn,

ed., Darstellung und Deutung. Abbilder der Kunstgeschichte (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank fiir Geisteswissenschaften, 2000); Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide

Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’

Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 414-34; Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as ‘Bildwissenschaft;” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 418-28; Frederick N. Bohrer, “Photography and Archaeology: The Image as Object, in Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image, ed. Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 180-91. 71. For a survey in English with key references for the scholarly revival of Warburg,

see Michael Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History,’ New German Critique, no. 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): 59-73; also Matthew

Rampley, “Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas,’ in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. Alex Coles, (London: Black Dog, 1999), 94-117; and Thomas Hensel, Wie aus Kunstgeschichte

eine Bildwissenschaft wurde: Aby Warburgs Graphien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011). 72. Mary Bergstein, “Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography

of Sculpture,” The Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (1992): 475-98; Michel Frizot and

Dominique Paini, eds., Sculpter-Photographier, Photographie-Sculpture: Actes du colloque organisé au Musée du Louvre par le Service Culturel (Paris: Marval, 1993);

and Johnson, Sculpture and Photography (see note 6). See also Helene Pinet,

ed. Pygmalion Photographe: La sculpture devant la caméra (Geneva: Tricorne, 1985); Eugenia Parry Janis, The Kiss ofApollo: Photography and Sculpture, 1845 to the Present, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 1991); and Erika Billeter

and Chiistoph Brockhaus, Skulptur im Licht der Fotographie: von Bayard bis Mapplethorpe (Bern: Benteli, 1998). Since the 1990s, numerous scholars have broached this topic. For three

extensive recent bibliographies, see Denise Raine, “Bibliography: Sculpture and Photography,’ Sculpture Journal 15, no. 2 (2006): 296-98; Roxana Marcoci,

“Selected Bibliography,’ in Marcoci, The Original Copy, 242-47; and Patrizia di Bello, “Editorial: Special Issue, The Sculptural Photograph in the Nineteenth Century,’ History of Photography 37, no. 4 (2013): 385-88. For recent essays

not included in those bibliographies, see Michael Cole, “Sculpture before Photography,” in Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alina Payne (University Park: Penn State Press, 2015); Jacqueline Jung, “The Kinetics of Gothic Sculpture: Movement and

Apprehension in the South Transept of Strasbourg Cathedral and the Chartreuse

INTRODUCTION:

REPRODUCTIVE VISION

de Champmol in Dijon,’ in Mobile Eyes: Peripatetisches Sehen in den Bildkulturen der Vormoderne, ed. David Ganz and Stefan Neuner (Munich: Fink, 2013), 132-63;

and Christopher R. Lakey, “Contingencies of Display: Benjamin, Photography, and Imagining the Medieval Past,’ in Imagined Encounters: Historiographies for a New World, ed. Roland Betancourt, special issue, Postmedieval: A Journal of

Medieval Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2016): 81-95. 73- For literature that has been especially helpful for our thinking, see Virginia Lee Webb, “Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935,” in Perfect

Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935 (New York: Metropolitan

Museum of Art, 2000), 13-52; Sebastian Zeidler, “Totality against a Subject: Carl Einstein's ‘Negerplastik;” October 107 (Winter 2004): 14-46; Wendy A.

Grossman, “From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image,” Visual Resources 23, no. 4 (December 2007): 291-336; Wendy A. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009);

Joanne Pillsbury, ed., Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2012); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby,

“Two or Three Dimensions? Scale, Photography, and Egypt's Pyramids,” in Photography's Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 115-28.

74. See Katharine Conley, “Modernist Primitivism in 1933: Brassai’s ‘Involuntary Sculptures’ in Minotaure,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 1 (January 2003): 128;

and Steven Harris, “Voluntary and Involuntary Sculpture,’ in Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art, ed. Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 13-28. Photographs taken by Brassai in Picasso Boisgeloup studio in December 1932 were published to accompany André Breton, “Picasso dans son élément,’ Minotaure, no. 1 (1933): 8-29; his sculptures involontaires appeared in Minotaure, nos. 3-4 (1933): 68. See Jon Wood,

“Magie Blanche. Boisgeloup et la présentation des sculptures de Picasso vers 1930-1935, Revue de l’Art 154 (2006): 49-56. 75- See Rosalind Krauss, “1959, 9 January; The Ministry of Fate,’ in A New History

of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1000-1006; Rosalind Krauss, “Postmodernism’s Museum without Walls,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg (London: Routledge, 1996),

341-48; Henri Zerner, “Malraux and the Power of Photography,’ in Johnson,

Sculpture and Photography, 116-31; Georges Didi- Huberman, LAlbum de lart a lépoque du “Musée imaginaire” (Paris: Louvre / Editions Hazan, 2013); Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Album of Images According to André Malraux,” trans. Elise Woodard and Robert Harvey, Journal of Visual Culture 14 (April 2015): 3-203

Hannah Feldman, “Fragments: Or, the Ends of Photography,” in From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 19-40. 76.

See, for instance, Potts, The Sculptural Imagination; Malcolm Baker, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (London: V&A and Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001); Anne M. Wagner, Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University

ail

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Press, 2005); Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Jacqueline Jung, The Gothic Screen: Sculpture, Space and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 77: See, for instance, Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library (Cambridge: MIT Press,

1998), Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), Robin

Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and Peter Geimer, Bilder aus

Versehen: Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2010). 78. For a helpful introduction to book studies, see Leslie Howsam, ed., The

Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 79.

See Angela Matyssek, Kunstgeschichte als fotografische Praxis. Richard Hamann und Foto Marburg (Berlin: Mann, 2008); Patrizia Di Bello, “Sculpture, Photograph, Book: The Sculptures of Picasso (1949)” in The Photobook from

Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, ed. Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson, and Shamoon Zamir (London: Tauris, 2012), 91-109; Costanza Caraffa, ed., Fotografie als

Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009); Costanza Caraffa, ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011); Joan Schwartz, “The

Archival Garden: Photographic Plantings, Interpretive Choices, and Alternative Narratives,” in Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions: Essays

in Honor of Helen Willa Samuels, ed. Terry Cook (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2011), 69-110; Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena, eds., Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015). 80.

See, for instance, Tamara Trodd, “Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall, and Sherrie Levine,” Art History 32, no. 5 (December 2009): 954-76; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,

“Cosmic Reification: Gabriel Orozco’s Photographs” in Gabriel Orozco, ed. YveAlain Bois (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 139-57; Claire Barliant, “Photography and the Objet Manqué; Art in America 100 (March 2012), 108-17; Dezeuze and

Kelly, Found Sculpture and Photography; and Sarah Hamill, “Surface Matters: Erin Shirreff’s Videos and the Photography of Sculpture,’ Art Journal (forthcoming Winter 2017). 81.

Marcoci, ed., The Original Copy; Bogomir Ecker, Lens-Based Sculpture. Die

82.

Lev Manovich, “Museum without Walls; Art History without Names:

Verdnderung des Skulpturbegriffs durch Photographie (Cologne: Konig, 2014).

Visualization Methods for Humanities and Media Studies,’ in Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 253-78. The questions raised

by Whitney Davis in “How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age,” October 117

(Summer 2006): 71-98, also inform the ideas introduced in this paragraph.

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PLATES

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Plate 1. (opposite) Apollo Belvedere (Roman copy, 130-40 CE, of Greek original, ca. 330 BCE;

Vatican City, Musei Vaticani), photograph ca. 1895. From Friedrich Bruckmann and Heinrich

Brunn,

Denkmdler

griechischer und rémischer Skulptur (Munich: Bruckmann, 1892-1905), plate 419.

Plate 2. (top) Group of study photographs from the Getty Research Institute’s photo archives illustrating the Apollo Belvedere (Roman copy, 130-40 CE, of Greek original, ca. 330 BCE). Published by the Anderson, Alinari,

Brogi, and Bruckmann firms,

ca. 1890-1910.

PLATES

37

Plate 3. (opposite) Clarence Kennedy (American,

1892-1972), with assistance from Joseph Mahler (Czech). Vectograph transparency of Donatello (Italian, ca. 1386-1466), Bust of a Young Boy (ca. 1450-55, bronze; Florence, Museo Nazionale di Bargello). Boston, Harvard

Business School, Baker Library, Polaroid Corporation Vectographs. Plate 4. (top) Clarence Kennedy (American, 1892-1972), with assistance from Joseph Mahler (Czech). Vectograph transparency of Donatello (Italian, ca. 1386-

1466), Bust of aYoung Boy (detail, ca. 1450-55, bronze; Florence, Museo Nazionale di Bargello). Boston, Harvard Business School, Baker Library, Polaroid Corporation Vectographs.

38

PLATES

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PLATES

Plate 5. (opposite) Clarence Kennedy (American, 1892-1972), with assistance

from Joseph Mahler (Czech). Vectograph transparency of sculpture installation at the Museum

of Fine Arts,

Boston, with Greek Youth

(ca. 375-325 BCE, marble). Boston, Harvard Business School, Baker Library, Polaroid Corporation Vectographs.

Plate 6. (top left) Ad Reinhardt (American,

1913-1967). Photographic slide, ca. 1950-65. New York, The Ad Reinhardt Foundation.

Plate 7. (top right) Ad Reinhardt (American,

1913-67). Photographic slide, ca. 1950-65. New York, The Ad Reinhardt Foundation.

PLATES

William Fagg/ Herbert List

emer

Plate 8. Cover of William Fagg, Nigerian Images: The Splendor of African Sculpture (New York: Praeger, [1963]) featuring a

photograph by Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) of a fourteenth- to fifteeth-century copper alloy pendant mask from the Benin kingdom (Nigeria).

Plate 9. (opposite) Titian (Italian, ca. 1488-

1576). Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, 1519-26, oil on canvas, 4.88 x 2.69 m. Venice, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

42

PLATES

‘The Seven Ancient WONDERS of the WORLD

Plate 10. (top) Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954). Audience 04, Florence, 2004, chromogenic print, 179.5 x 335.8 cm.

Plate 11. (bottom) View-Master (American, act.

1939-2008). The Seven Wonders of the World, 1962, paper slipcase and cardboard reel. Los Angeles, collection of Britt Salvesen.

Plate 12. (opposite top) Robert Morris (American, b. 1931). Untitled (Mirrored Cubes), exterior view, Green Gallery, New York, 1965, mirrors on wood, 5313 5S ox Doo ems

Plate 13. (opposite bottom)

Victor Burgin (English, | b. 1941). A Place to Read, installation view, Campagne

Premiére, Berlin, 2010.

PLATES

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43

PLATES

45

Plate 14. (opposite top) Victor Burgin (English, b. 1941). A Place to Read,

2010. Plate 15. (opposite bottom) Painted wooden manorath device, Saraswati Digital Studio, Nathdwara, Rajasthan, 2015.

Plate 16. (top) Manorath device with Photoshopped image of Shrinathji. Saraswati Digital Studio, Nathdwara,

Rajasthan, 2015. Collection of Christopher Pinney.

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Plate 17. (opposite) Dan Flavin (American, 1933-96). untitled (to Henri Matisse), edition of 3, 1964, pink, yellow, blue, and green fluorescent light, (h) 244 cm.

Plate 18. Dan Flavin (American, 1933-96). untitled (to Henri Matisse), 1964. From Arts Magazine 44, no. 4 (1970), cover.

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50

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES” AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS Antique Sculpture and Archaeological Photography Stefanie Klamm

Translated by Fiona Elliott

“The black background in the plate is deplorable not least because it seems

to eat into the shaded sections ofthe figure. In order to prevent this, the contours are usually outlined, with the result that the figure then looks like a twodimensional silhouette glued onto a black or a white background.” With these words, written for a review of a volume of the catalogue of the Munich Glyptothek in 1929, the archaeologist Ernst Langlotz took a clear stand against

the way that sculptures had been typically photographed since the second half of the nineteenth century. Langlotz’s criticism was more than a simple objection on aesthetic grounds. In his view, this approach to the transformation of

a three-dimensional object into a photograph rendered the object no longer fully visible. The physical volume of the figure was diminished and the resulting images were, as he later put it, no more than “pictorial silhouettes.” His argument was thus also a critique of scientific illustrations and a reflection on their purpose, which in turn encourages us to consider the significance of image

manipulation in the discipline of archaeology, in this case, concerning GraecoRoman sculpture in particular (see pl. 1).

A dark background was deemed necessary if, for instance, a statue had to be photographed in situ in a museum where the surroundings had to be excluded. Accordingly, the external contours of the statue would be outlined in ink coyering the negative and all the unwanted areas would be expunged. However, masking images in this way tended to give sculptures the appearance of cut-outs

placed against a black background.’ This process was the norm for professional

photographic publishers, as it is in compendiums of archaeological illustrations, such as the atlas of Greek and Roman sculptures edited from 1888 onward by archaeologist Heinrich Brunn in collaboration with the publisher Friedrich

Bruckmann.* In this reference work, the dark masking of the images contrasted starkly with the whiteness of the sculptures, in effect emphasizing the contours and all but eliminating the three-dimensionality of these objects. The introduction of a black background recalled the emphasis on contours in early

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES”

AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS

engraved reproductions, which also isolated sculpture from its surroundings. This approach, roundly criticized by Langlotz, gave the artifacts an awkward

placelessness, as they seemingly floated in blackness. In effect, this technique aestheticized sculptural objects—which were often incomplete or fragmented— turning them into auratic art objects.° According to Joel Snyder, showing figures frontally or in profile against dark backgrounds became the dominant convention in the photographic representation of sculpture in the second half of the nineteenth century. This convention

provided little scope for variation, and had to do with the growing commercialization of photography from the mid-1850s onward. Snyder points out that the leading publishing houses that produced books of photographic plates were run by entrepreneurs who were not chiefly interested in artistic or scholarly

pictorial traditions. They established a limited set of rules that were generally accepted by photographers of sculptures: the figures were to be photographed in

their entirety, at a right angle to the camera, and in diffuse daylight. Such compositional uniformity, Snyder suggests, contributed to photographs of sculp-

tures being seen as rhetorical substitutes for the original artifact—although the photograph had in fact been subjected to a whole series of interventions.° With the adoption of this procedure as standard practice, objects in albums of archaeological plates were typically only illustrated with a single image, or at most, two or three. These standard full-frontal and profile views had an affinity with the photographs taken of criminals and suspects (soon known as mug

shots) that started to be used in criminal investigations at around the same time.’ Indeed, these images of sculptural artifacts conveyed little of the spatial dimensions or aesthetic qualities of the originals, but they did facilitate rapid recognition and classification of individual works. Such homogenization laid the foundations for a comparative methodology. In the same way that scientific publications tended to work with typical but distinctly individual illustrations of plants and animals, these photographs served as references to artifacts rather than conveying a real sense oftheir properties.* Langlotz, seeking to distance himself from these conventions, expressed his preference for early modern prints of antique sculptures since these, in his view, communicated a deeper understanding of the sculpture and its threedimensionality than was generally found in photographs of sculptural works. Moreover, in his view, the artists who made the original drawings of these

statues were able to depict them as “spatial bodies in real space” since they grasped the modes of perception and presentation that prevailed in antiquity.” Langlotz’s notion of appropriate reproduction techniques for illustrations of statues from antiquity was thus very much at odds with standard practices in

the late nineteenth century.

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KLAMM

Langlotz was not the first person to prefer drawing to photography for the illustration of Greek and Roman sculpture. In an 1876 essay on an archaic bronze head, Heinrich Brunn specifically considered the advantages and dis-

advantages of different pictorial techniques."° He came to the conclusion that drawing was most suited to conveying its formal aspects, its contours and structures, and the interrelationships between different parts of the head. In his opinion, drawing could retain the “spiritual expression” of the bronze head because of its ability to communicate the artistic impact of the sculpture authentically.’ For Brunn, drawings “vouched for the accuracy of the main interrelationships and outlines” and he credited them with providing “a more faithful picture” than photography, which he regarded as leaving the viewer

with a “false impression” of the sculpture.’” He felt that photography introduced a number of optical and perspectival distortions that falsified the characteristics of the head and did not fully communicate its three-dimensionality. Photography, he concluded, was therefore not suited to certain archaeological

purposes.’° Line drawing had, in fact, been the preferred form of illustration for archaeological artifacts since the eighteenth century. A mainly linear style of drawing with very little internal texturization is also reflected in engravings of ancient sculptures published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. All the illustrations in the Comte de Clarac’s Musée de sculpture antique et moderne

(1826-53), for instance, are engravings done from line drawings (fig. 1).'* The argument in favor of this style was that it both illustrated the object and medi-

ated its form, and at the same time it also concentrated on the formal and figurative nature of the work rather than on its materiality, color, or surface textures.

This reduction to a purely linear image that conveyed all the main information about a particular object allowed scholars to develop an analytic approach to

artifacts from antiquity.'° Brunn, for one, was disturbed by the distortions he detected in photographs and by the actual irregularities of objects that were captured by the camera. Photographs, in other words, did not have the clearly drawn lines he wanted. Subsequent archaeological illustrations in the “new” medium of photography continued to fuel this preference for clear lines. Many archaeologists and scholars of antiquity felt that photography should conform to the pictorial conventions that had already been established in engravings, and should adopt their focus on the linear structures of single sculptures. The colors and textures in these photographic prints were all intended to recall the look ofprints and lithographs. It was not by chance that the “inventor” of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, described his new pictorial technique as “photogenic drawing.”'®

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES”

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Conventional documentary photographs, with their high contrasts, also reinforced the notion that antique sculptures were white. There had been an ongoing debate since the late eighteenth century as to whether ancient sculp-

tures and architecture had originally been polychromatic or monochromatic. The art critics of the day regarded colorless sculpture as the ideal, since it relied

solely on its sculptural form for its beauty, rather than on surface textures or colors.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for instance, believed that the true

expression of beauty was found in form alone.** A dazzlingly white or paleyellow tinted plaster cast of a sculpture was better suited than the original for

conveying beauty—and the truth within beauty—in a clearly delineated body as an expression of true and perfect form.” This then explains why archaeologists often worked with photographs of casts of sculptures since the whiteness of

the cast provided a sharper outline, as opposed to photographs of the originals which also showed the oxidation or patination of the surface and other contingent aspects of the sculpture’s history.”°

Rigel. Apollo Belvedere. From Frédéric comte de Clarac, Musée de sculpture antique et moderne; ou, Description historique du Louvre et de

toutes ses parties de statues, bustes, bas-reliefs, et inscription du Musée royal des antiques, et des Tuileries et de

plus de 2500 statues antiques, vol. 3 (Paris: L'Imprimerie Royale, 1832-34), pl. 475, no. 906.

54

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At the same time, a photographic illustration—which differed from earlier engravings or lithographs—was seen by some critics to be the “mechanical product of a mechanical process.” Photography encouraged a different concentration on the object itself, on its surface textures and irregularities. For Paul Arndt, who edited and contributed to several compendiums of classical sculptures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing was no longer a viable form of illustration for works from antiquity. In his view, photography was the only means of producing a “mechanical likeness” of the object “in its true appearance.” The disadvantage of drawing, as he saw it, was that the end result was a picture of the sculpture “as seen through the filter of the artist's eye?”? Arndt argued that the line drawings in compendiums of illustrations of sculptures, such as that of the comte de Clarac, only gave an impression of the

work as a whole or of a pictorial motif but did not communicate the individual shapes and details that were increasingly essential to those engaging in the criti-

cal analysis of style and form.”* Adolf Michaelis took a similar approach in a 1906 review of archaeological research. He even declared that photography had taught archaeologists “to see with new eyes.’** Michaelis regarded the use of photography as crucial to the future development of archaeological methods. In his opinion, photography not only made it possible to display a large number of objects, it also facilitated their “lively contemplation.” In spite of the preferences of certain archaeologists like Brunn for drawing as a means of representation for scholarly purposes, pho-

tography was the vehicle through which archaeological analysis and the critical study of copies began to receive much wider interest. During the course of the

nineteenth century, form and style had come to be recognized as the fundamen-

tal criteria in the evaluation and classification of archaeological objects.”° The notion of style, which was first used in literary theory to define the characteris-

tic traits of individual authors, had also been used since the eighteenth century to describe formal properties that were shared by works of art from a particular

era, nation, school, or artist.”” Stylistic analysis was refined by Kopienkritik, the critical study of copies. This method included the analysis and attribution of Graeco-Roman works— above all statues and vases—by a comparative analysis of the “handwriting” of different artists.** Recurrent, seemingly unimportant details in the handling of drapery, ears, eyes, or hands were unmistakable stylistic indexes: the unintentional marks left by the individual maker. Kopienkritik focused on the comparison of a range of copies of an even older, original work. The origins of this research lay in the widespread assumption, in place by the mid-nineteenth century, that the majority of sculptures that had survived from antiquity were

Roman copies of famous Greek works believed to have been lost and which

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES”

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AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS

featured in contemporary literature on art, such as Nobilia opera in toto orbe by the sculptor Pasiteles. These literary sources provided accounts of Greek artists and their styles. Together with comparative analyses of sculptural traditions, they provided the basis for the identification of Roman sculptures. Scholars compared iconographic and formal characteristics to establish as comprehen-

sively as possible a series of sculptures which were stylistically connected and interdependent. Pictorial reproductions were essential for comparative studies of this kind.”” Different media techniques were thus used to create a sequence of

interrelated copies. The focus shifted from the work as a whole to its individual components. Fragments that had been joined together since antiquity were now taken apart again and depicted as fragments. Scholars expected the process of

analytical comparison to lead them to an object that no longer existed—the lost

Greek original. They proceeded as ifthe removal ofdifferent layers of reproduction would cast light on an imagined original, which they thought preceded the

copies but which in fact arose from them (fig. 2).*° In his Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik (1893), Adolf Furtwangler took

this minute scrutiny of ancient artifacts to new heights. He turned to photographs of sculptures in an effort to construct a normative history of Greek sculpture and to add to the canon of masterpieces from antiquity.” One advantage

Fig. 2. Head from Statue of a Boy, Dresden.

From Adolf

Furtwangler, Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik: Kunstgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Giesecke & Devrient, 1893),

pl. 27.

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KLAMM

of photography in this respect was its capacity to simplify complex, threedimensional artifacts by concentrating on surface structures and, specifically, by making details unusually visible. The dissection of a sculpture into its component parts took place through a series of close-ups. This photographic prepara-

tion and fragmentation of objects helped scholars in stylistic analyses, since the individual characteristics of eyes, ears, cheekbones, veins, and other anatomical details were of particular importance to any such investigation.** The plates in Furtwangler’s compendium exemplify the methodological fragmentation and recomposition of objects. The illustrations of heads are largely standardized to

depict the face either frontally or in profile.** Depicting sculptures in isolation against a black background also supported the aims of comparability and uniformity, which, in turn, would facilitate scholars’ efforts to reassess individual artifacts. Furtwangler worked with plaster casts ofsculptures to homogenize the photographs for his publication. Given the location and state of preservation of many of the sculptures in which he was interested, this was the only way he could focus, for instance, solely on a given head and present it in better light-

ing as an aid to comparison. He also separated fragments that he felt did not belong together or reunited others in order to reconstruct the original form of an object.** Homogenous illustrations assisted in the canonization of certain artifacts that matched Furtwangler’s Neoclassical ideal of sculpture from antiquity.

Along with firsthand analysis and the use of plaster casts, photography was one of Furtwangler’s preferred means of accurately investigating and compar-

ing sculptures.*” He himself explained that his methods had greatly benefited from photography, since the photographic close-up made it possible to make precise comparisons between a number of copies in different locations.*° This

new methodological approach to sculpture made older archaeological illustra-

tions ofline drawings and engravings appear inadequate, and they remained of interest in the themes they illustrated, but not as a source of information on the style of the original. Many came to feel that they too obviously bore the “stylistic stamp” of their time and of the draftsmen and engravers who made them.” Artistic input in drawings and reproductive prints was viewed nega-

tively, whereas photography—despite its deficiencies—was “more faithful” to stylistic nuances, technical singularities, and artistic impact. Even an archaeologist who had not seen the original work could use photography “to confidently determine its stylistic nature and its relationship to other known works” and directly compare it to other objects from far-flung locations. As photography took hold in the 1870s and 1880s, benchmark publications in the field, such as the journal Archdologische Zeitung, increasingly started to

use photographs for their illustrations of sculptures, aided by the development of reliable print processes such as photogravure and halftone printing. By this

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES”

AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS

point, archaeologists broadly agreed that the superior reproduction of surface textures in photographs was essential to stylistic analysis.** The notion of the lucidity of the photographic image, which had currency since the 1850s, now came to imply that it afforded the viewer direct access to the object depicted. On this basis, a photographic image came to be seen as a non-manipulable equivalent to the photographed sculpture that allowed the viewer to gaze directly at that object.*” To look at a photograph of a statue was to look at that same statue itself, and photographic illustrations came to be seen as “physical impressions of the objects they represented.”*°

While archaeologists active around the turn of the century regarded photography in terms of an epistemic ideal of “mechanical objectivity,” as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have put it, a different approach to academic illus-

trations of works of art soon emerged.** For Ernst Langlotz it was essential that any image should convey “the visual impression intended by the artist” as closely as possible. In his view, the angle and position from which a work was photographed were crucial to the mediation of the artist’s intention.*” However,

any approach to a three-dimensional work of art is by definition subjective and aesthetically individual, which is why Langlotz rejected the notion of the objective representation of sculpture by means of photography. He also understood that so many different photographic images of one and the same object eliminated any suggestion that photography was objective, even apart from the

fact that a camera lens does not capture the same image as a human eye.** For Langlotz, the standard frontal and profile views were only pseudo-objective and intrinsically inadequate, because “photographing Greek sculptures . . . is

an art in itself”** A similar line had been taken in 1896 by art historian Heinrich Wolfflin, who first opened up the debate in art history and archaeology regarding the best ways to photograph sculpture.*” Wolfflin proposed that photography should replicate what a viewer would see from the ideal standpoint, from a position the sculptor had had in mind, which also allowed the sculpture to

explain itself to the viewer. In his view it was particularly difficult to determine the main vantage point for Graeco-Roman statues, since, more often than not, the original pedestal was missing and these pieces were often wrongly presented in museum displays. Taking the Apollo Belvedere as his example, Wolfflin set out his thinking on how sculptures should be viewed. He suggested that this figure is notable for its planarity and that its outstretched arm had to be depicted parallel to the picture plane, so that the head could be seen in profile.*° Wélfflin felt that no modern photographs of this statue achieved this view—even the image in Bruckmann and Brunn’s Denkmdler griechischer und romischer Skulptur (pl. 1). Wélfflin was similarly critical of the photographs

oy)

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KLAMM

used by specialist photographic publishing houses, such as Giacomo Brogi and Fratelli Alinari in Florence.*” Above all, he felt it was crucial to photograph a sculpture from its principal vantage point.** He also implied that it was up to the art historian to ensure that a photograph would be usable for scholarly purposes and to instruct his photographer accordingly. Collaborations between scholars and photographers were far from unusual. In the 1920s and 1930s, archaeologist Gerhart Rodenwaldt worked with pho-

tographer Walter Hege to produce popular books on the Acropolis in Athens and on Olympia. In preparation for their travel to Greece in 1935 to take photographs for their Olympia book, published in connection with the Olympic

Games organized by the Nazi regime in Berlin in 1936, Hege and Rodenwaldt experimented with different ways of photographing sculptures in the Berlin

collection of plaster casts.*? Rodenwaldt, too, rejected the notion that photographic images could be objective: “A good photograph . . . is far from being an objective likeness. It reflects either an artistic stance or a scholarly interpreta-

tion.”*° He recognized that lighting, the photographer's standpoint, and camera angle all had a major influence on the interpretation of sculptures from antiq-

uity, added to which, no sculpture can be captured in a single photograph.” Like Langlotz and Woélfflin before him, he required the photographer to engage

with the artistic qualities of the sculpture, and Hege did this with outstanding success by frequently taking a systematic approach that could produce up to

fifty shots showing a single object from different angles.°” An ongoing dialogue between the photographer and the scholar was thus vital. Brunn had already concluded that the shot deemed to be correct by the archaeologist was not necessarily a given. For Rodenwaldt, a photographic reproduction of a sculpture had to convey “the nature of the work of art” as

the archaeologist saw it, which could, in turn, become the basis for “a deeper

understanding of Greek sculpture.”’* He was not satisfied with a photograph that merely provided a faithful likeness of a sculpture; it also had to underpin his interpretation of the artifact and reinforce his aesthetic judgment. His pre-

ferred shot of the head of Apollo from the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, for instance, conveyed the organic appearance of the work and the affinity to Greek classicism that, in keeping with the normative aesthetic ideal of Greek art from the classical era, he regarded to be characteristic of these pediment figures.°* Hege’s photographs thus allowed Rodenwaldt to identify what he argued were the aesthetically significant aspects of these sculptures (fig. 3). The decisive role of the photographer is clearly reflected in the fact that Hege’s name appears alongside Rodenwaldt’s as coeditor of their books on the Acropolis and Olympia. In the 1920s and 1930s Hege provided numerous pho-

tographs of art and architecture for German art historians and archaeologists.

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES”

ee)

AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS

He specialized in photographs of medieval architectural sculptures and sculp-

tures from ancient Greece. While it is difficult to determine the actual nature of his relationship to the National Socialist regime, his illustrated books, which were as popular in the Weimar Republic as in the Third Reich, promoted a nor-

mative concept of German identity.°’ Hege’s photographs concentrated on the

fragmentation of an object and on gazes and facial expression, which heightened the impact of the sculpture. He often created a powerfully theatrical atmosphere in his images, enlivening objects by lighting them with portable lamps. Some sculptural fragments were dramatized by means of a strong light coming from one side; others were photographed from unusual angles. Hege later used the same techniques for photographs of religious monuments, cathedrals, and temples. Such photographs invited a strong emotional identification on the part of the viewer. However, his most dramatically expressive images with strong highlights and shadows are not generally found in the publications produced in collaboration with archaeologists (fig. 4).°°

For his part, Langlotz advanced the dictum “photograph Greek statues as the Greeks saw them” and demanded that ancient sculptures be presented in the open air in their original setting.*’ In 1936, together with the archaeolo-

gist Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt and the photographer Hermann Wagner, he displayed archaic sculptures from the Acropolis Museum outside on pedestals and had them photographed in direct sunlight, in a bid to show them in their original context under correct lighting conditions and to give a sense of how

Fig. 3. Walter Hege (German,

1893-1955). Photograph of plaster cast of the head of Apollo, west pediment, Temple of Zeus at Olympia. From Gerhart Rodenwaldt,

“Sitzungsprotokoll der Archaologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, 04.06.1935,” Archaologischer Anzeiger, LOSS aticese

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KLAMM

they had once interacted with the surrounding architecture and landscape. He thereby explicitly took a stand against the dark backgrounds of early museum photography (fig. 5). °§ “Greek sculptors always took into account a high posi-

tion of the sun as they worked,’ he argued, which meant that present-day displays should be lit from above.*’ He rejected the practice of photographers

shining a light on every detail in order to achieve an “abstractly registered | objectivity, which had been important in Kopienkritik. He believed that ancient

sculptors had already made allowance for light and shadow, which should come across in any photographs of their works.°° Some archaeologists raised concerns in response to Langlotz’s notion that archaic sculptures be displayed in direct sunlight. In a review of Die archaischen Marmorbildwerke der Akropolis (1939), for instance, Rodenwaldt wrote that the shadows “break up the organic

coherence of the form” and created patches of “pitch blackness.” Accordingly, he suggested that shots of this kind should only be taken in indirect lighting.® Such efforts notwithstanding, photographs had certain limitations as opposed to plaster casts.°* Most obviously, they could not convey a sculp-

ture’s intrinsic three-dimensionality. Ludger Alscher, who lectured on classical archaeology at the

Humboldt- Universitat in Berlin from 1951 to 1985, experi-

mented with a different approach in order to realize the three-dimensionality

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available to the plaster cast in the context of the book.® In Alscher’s opinion, one of the most important features of any sculpture was its spatial position, which the viewer could only fully understand by moving around it. He therefore developed a form of 360-degree panoramic photography, which he also hoped would help to identify how the main vantage of sculptures changed from

one epoch to the next.** Starting with a frontal view, he progressively rotated plaster casts of sculptures on their vertical axis in order to give as complete an impression as possible of their spatial properties.°* He then attempted to use

these all-around views to discern the gaze unique to each era of Greek art and to identify a distinctive, epochal connection between sculpture and the space

around it. For Alscher, “plasticity and monumentality” were the “overriding factors in the Greek approach to artistic design.”°° Like Wolfflin before him, he thus sought to discover what the sculptor had intended as the principal vantage point of an artifact, which he argued was the only angle that revealed an innate “organic” wholeness.°” However, this vantage cannot exhaust the sculpture completely, since the work also “represents a physically tangible whole, such that the figure may assert its independence in space—a space that can be tra-

versed and which radiates around the sculpture’s being.” All the different views of a sculpture were, in fact, important to Alscher, because it was only in combination that they conveyed a true picture of the whole sculpture, even if the principal vantage point provided the key to the work’s interpretation (fig. 6).°* Stereoscopic photography proved to be one of the most popular means of

creating what looks like a three-dimensional image and, as such, could provide a way of showing sculpture in space. Yet, to my knowledge, it has never

been exploited for archaeological illustration. Treasured as souvenirs of tourist attractions, often replete with world-renowned ancient sculptures, these photographs create an illusion of spatiality and depth in an image that could almost be described as haptic. However, sculptures depicted in such images can only be seen from one angle, and their three-dimensionality is most dramatic

when they have been photographed in real space and not against a dark, neutral

Fig. 4. Walter Hege (German, 1893-1955). Photograph of fragments of Hercules and the Vanquished Nemean Lion, metope from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, photograph ca. 1935. Berlin, HumboldtUniversitat zu Berlin, Winckelmann-Institut, Institut fiir Klassische Archaologie,

Fotothek. Fig. 5. Peplos Kore. From Ernst Langlotz and Walter-H. Schuchhardt, Archaische

Plastik auf der Akropolis (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1941), no. 10. Fig. 6. Kouros of Tenea and the Kritios Boy. From Ludger Alscher, Griechische Plastik, vol. 2.1, Archaik und die Wandlung zur Klassik (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1961), pl. 1, A, B.

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background. Only with a differentiated foreground, middle ground, and background does the stereoscopic effect come fully into its own.®” Alscher’s panoramic sequences demonstrated the multisidedness of sculptural figures with unprecedented rigor, yet the high contrasts of the white plaster and the black background in his images continued to flatten individual views of sculptures and reduce them to the same “pictorial silhouettes” once lamented by Langlotz. From Langlotz to Rodenwaldt to Alscher, modern archaeologists responded in heterogeneous ways to the challenges of illustrating sculpture in three dimensions. Their solutions, which crossed multiple reproductive media, illuminated the dominant notions about Greek and Roman sculpture and its most salient

features. The space around the sculpture, the context of its discovery, and its possible use in antiquity have all variously contributed to the reproductive formats of the images created.

Notes This text is based on “Linie—Form—Raum. Uber wissenschaftliche Bilder antiker Skulpturen,’ in Reproduktion. Techniken und Ideen von der Antike bis heute, ed. Jorg Probst (Berlin: Reimer, 2011), 138-55.

1. Ernst Langlotz, review of Johannes Sieveking and Carl Weickert, eds., Fiinfzig Meisterwerke der Glyptothek Konig Ludwigs I. Paul Wolters zum 70. Geburtstag dargebracht (Munich: Obernetter, 1928), in Gnomon 5, no. 9 (1929): 481-85, here

483f.

2. Ernst Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen,” in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts 94 (1979): 1-17.

3. See, for example, Joel Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the

Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21-50.

4. Heinrich Brunn, Friedrich Bruckmann, and Paul Arndt, eds., Denkmédler

griechischer und romischer Sculptur (Munich: Bruckmann, 1888-1900), vol. 1. See also the introduction by Hamill and Luke to this volume. 5. See Stefanie Klamm, Bilder des Vergangenen: Visualisierung in der Archdologie im 19. Jahrhundert: Fotografie—Zeichnung—Abguss (Humboldt-Schriften zur Kunstund Bildgeschichte, vol. 20) (Berlin: Mann, 2017), 265-72, 295-310. 6. Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography,’ 28-29. 7. On this point, I am grateful to Alex Potts for his comments at the January 2014

workshop “Photography's Mediation of Sculpture,” at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. On early criminal photography, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Context ofMeaning. Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 352-53, 357-64. 8. See Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory; Critical Inquiry 31, NO. 1 (2004): 153-82.

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES”

AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS

. Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen? 1-2. For an example of this kind of representation, see the engraving of the Apollo Belvedere after Marcantonio Raimondi (printed in 1552) in Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth

Rodini, eds., Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800 (Chicago: Smart Museum, 2005), 140.

Heinrich Brunn, “Archaischer Bronzekopf im Berliner Museum? in

10.

Archdologische Zeitung 34 (1876): 20-28. See also Stefanie Klamm, “Vom langen

Leben der Bilder. Wahrnehmung der Skulptur und ihrer Reproduktionsverfahren

in der Klassischen Archaologie des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Pegasus—Berliner Beitrdge zum Nachleben der Antike 9 (2007): 209-28.

. Brunn, “Archaischer Bronzekopf? 24.

12. Brunn, “Archaischer Bronzekopf,” 21, 23. 13. Brunn, “Archaischer Bronzekopf; 21-24. . Frédéric de Clarac, Musée de sculpture antique et moderne ou description historique du Louvre et de toutes ses parties de statues, bustes, bas-reliefs et inscription du Musée royal des antiques et des Tuileries et de plus de 2500 statues antiques, 6 vols. (Paris: LImprimerie Royale; Texier, 1826-53). 15. See Werner Busch, “Die Akademie zwischen autonomer Zeichnung und

Handwerksdesign—zur Auffassung der Linie und der Zeichen im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Ideal und Wirklichkeit der bildenden Kunst im spaten 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck, Peter C. Bol, and Eva Maek Gérard (Berlin: Mann, 1984), 177-92; and Klamm, “Vom langen Leben der Bilder,” 211-13. 16.

Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography,’ 22-26. On the imperative that photography emulate extant print media, see Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

iz See, for example, Karina Tiirr, Farbe und Naturalismus in der Skulptur des 19. und

20. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1994), esp. 13-124, 130-37; Andreas Bliihm, ed., The Colour of Sculpture: 1840-1910 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1996), 11-60;

and Ingeborg Kader, “Zur Rolle der Farbe in der mentalen Reprasentation: Gipsabgiisse und die Farbe ‘weif’; ” in Henri Lavagne and Frangois Queyrel, eds., Les moulages de sculpture antiques et histoire de larchéologie; Actes du colloque international, Paris 24 octobre 1997 (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 121-56. . Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 1. Aufl. Dresden 1764, 2. Aufl. Wien 1776 (Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Schriften und

Nachlafs, 4.1), (Mainz: von Zabern, 2002), 147-48.

19. See Hans-Ulrich Cain, “Interpretierende Linien und das Ethos eines ehrli-

chen Gipses,” in Faszination Linie, 33-36; Stefanie Klamm, “Neue Originale— Medienpluralitat in der Klassischen Archaologie des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Das Originale der Kopie. Kopien als Produkte und Medien der Transformation von Antike, ed. Horst Bredekamp et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 47-67. 20.

Hans-Ulrich Cain, “Gipsabgiisse. Zur Geschichte ihrer Wertschatzung,” in Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums und Berichte aus dem Forschungsinstitut fiir Realienkunde (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1995), 207.

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21.

Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography,’ 27.

22.

Paul Arndt and Walter Amelung, eds., Photographische Einzelaufnahmen antiker Skulpturen (Munich: Bruckmann, 1893), 3.

My. See also Paul Arndt, Griechische und Rémische Portrdats (Munich: Bruckmann, 1891-1929).

24. Adolf Michaelis, Ein Jahrhundert kunstarchdologischer Entdeckungen, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1908), 296. 25. Photographs were also used as teaching aids to train archaeologists’ powers of observation. Michaelis, Ein Jahrhundert kunstarchdologischer Entdeckungen, 295-97. 26.

Adolf H. Borbein, “Zur Entwicklung der archaologischen Forschung im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Archdologie, ed. Ruprecht Kurzrock (Berlin: Colloquium, 1977), 36-39 and “Formanalyse,” in Klassische Archdologie—eine Einfiihrung, ed. Adolf H. Borbein, Tonio Hélscher, and Paul Zanker (Berlin: Reimer, 2000), esp. 109 and 112.

27. Stephanie-Gerrit Bruer, Die Wirkung Winckelmanns in der deutschen Klassischen Archdologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1994), 7-25; Undine Stabrey,

“Stil. Archaologische Deutungszustande,” Kritische Berichte 42, no. 1 (2014): 151-62. 28.

Lang, Klassische Archdologie, 194-97. See Klamm, “Neue Originale,” 47-67.

29.

See Wilfred Geominy, “Zwischen Kennerschaft und Cliché. Romische Kopien und die Geschichte ihrer Bewertung,’ in Rezeption und Identitat. Die kulturelle Auseinandersetzung Roms mit Griechenland als europdisches Paradigma, ed. Gregor Vogt-Spira and Bettina Rommel (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 38-59 and

Miranda Marvin, The Language of the Muses: The Dialogue between Roman and Greek Sculpture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008). 30. See Ulfert Tschirner, “Harte Kontraste. Kopienkritische Betrachtung fotografi-

scher Kunstreproduktionen,’ in Vergleichendes Sehen, ed. Lena Bader, Martin Gaier, and Falk Wolf (Munich: Fink, 2010), 445-66.

31. Adolf Furtwangler, Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik. Kunstgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Giesecke & Devrient, 1893). See also Michaelis,

Ein Jahrhundert kunstarchdologischer Entdeckungen, 300-301; Bruer, Die Wirkung Winckelmanns, 182-85; Suzanne Marchand, “From Antiquarian to Archaeologist? Adolf Furtwangler and the Problem of ‘Modern Classical Archaeology,’ in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 248-85. 30), For example, Furtwangler, Meisterwerke, 7, 18-20, and 138f. 33.

For example, Furtwangler, Meisterwerke, pls. 6,11. This volume also contains full-

length views, e.g. pls. 12, 23, 26, and 29. In the case of sculptures, however, the focus is on illustrating surviving heads. 34.

See Furtwangler, Meisterwerke, 475 n. 3; see 291 pls. 11, 27; 6 pl. 2.

35. Furtwangler, Meisterwerke, x. 36.

Furtwangler, Meisterwerke, vii-viii; Adoif Furtwangler, “Die klassische Archaologie und ihre Stellung zu den nachstbenachbarten Wissenschaftsgebieten,” Deutsche Revue, January 1905, 73-86.

“PICTORIAL SILHOUETTES”

AND THEIR SURROUNDINGS

37- Michaelis, Ein Jahrhundert kunstarchdiologischer Entdeckungen, 296; Furtwangler,

Meisterwerke, x. Erik Straub, Ein Bild der Zerstérung. Archdologische Ausgrabungen im Spiegel ihrer Bildmedien (Berlin: Lukas, 2008), 46, 57-59. 39. See Kelley Wilder, “Looking through Photographs: Art, Archiving and Photography in the Photothek,” in Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Costanza Caraffa (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), esp. 38.

118-23.

40. Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography,’ 33. 41. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 115-90.

42. Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen,” u1.

43. Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen,” 4, 13, 15-17. 44. Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen, 17. fiir bil45. Heinrich Wolfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” Zeitschrift dende Kunst 7 (1896): 224-28; 8 (1897): 294-97; 26 (1915): 237-44, reprinted in Erika Billeter, ed., Skulptur im Licht der Fotografie (Bern: Benteli, 1997), 409-17, translated in Heinrich Wélfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,’ trans.

Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History B6, no. 1 (February 2013): 52-71. 46.

Wolfflin in Billeter, Skulptur im Licht der Fotografie, 413; Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,’ 58-59.

47. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and Monica Mafholi, eds., Fratelli Alinari: fotografi in Firenze, 150 anni che illustrarono il mondo 1852-2002 (Florence: Alinari, 2003). 48. Wolfflin in Billeter, ed., Skulptur im Licht der Fotografie, 413-14, Wolfflin, “How

One Should Photograph Sculpture,’ 58-59. 49.

Gerhart Rodenwaldt and Walter Hege, Die Akropolis (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1930) and Olympia (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1936). On his collaboration with Hege, see Gerhart Rodenwaldt, “Sitzungsprotokoll der Archaologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, 04.06.1935,” in Archdologischer Anzeiger,

1935, 354-64. See also Matthias Harder, Walter Hege und Herbert List. Griechische

Tempelarchitektur in photographischer Inszenierung (Berlin: Reimer, 2003), esp. 108-16. 50. Rodenwaldt, “Sitzungsprotokoll,” 356. 51. Rodenwaldt, “Sitzungsprotokoll,” 356, 358. 52. Harder, Walter Hege und Herbert List, 78-79, 111-12. 53- Rodenwaldt, “Sitzungsprotokoll? 357 and Harder, Walter Hege und Herbert List, 53. 54. Rodenwaldt, “Sitzungsprotokoll,” 358-60. 55. Harder, Walter Hege und Herbert List, 78, 88. 56. Harder, Walter Hege und Herbert List, 84-88, 97-100, u11f.

57: Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen,” 4. 58.

Hans Schrader, Ernst Langlotz, and Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt, Die archaischen Marmorbildwerke der Akropolis (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1939),

viii, 4; Ernst Langlotz and Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt, Archaische Plastik auf der Akropolis (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1941), cat. nos. 10, 11, 13. The

sculptures had already been taken outside the museum for Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia film. Wilfred Geominy and Doris Pinkwart, eds., Ernst Langlotz

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(1895-1978). Archdologie als Leidenschaft (Bonn: Akademisches Kunstmuseum,

59.

1995). Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen,” 6.

60.

Langlotz, “Uber das Photographieren griechischer Skulpturen,’ 8-9, 13.

61.

Gerhart Rodenwaldt, review of Hans Schrader, Ernst Langlotz, and Carl

Schuchhardt, Die archaischen Marmorbildwerke der Akropolis (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1939), Gnomon 16, no. 4 (1940): 155-68. 62.

See, for example, Maike Berchtold, Gipsabguf$ und Original. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte von Werturteilen, dargelegt am Beispiel des Bayerischen Nationalmuseums Miinchen und anderen Sammlungen des 19. Jahrhunderts

(Stuttgart: Universitat, 1987); Frank Matthias Kammel, “Der Gipsabgufs. Vom Medium der asthetischen Norm zur toten Konserve der Kunstgeschichte, in

Asthetische Probleme der Plastik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Andrea M.

Kluxen (Nuremberg: Aleph, 2001), 47-72; Charlotte Schreiter, ed., Gipsabgiisse und antike Skulpturen. Prdsentation und Kontext (Berlin: Reimer, 2012); and Klamm, Bilder des Vergangenen, 295-310. 63. Ludger Alscher, Griechische Plastik, 5 vols. (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der

Wissenschaften, 1954-82). 64.

Alscher, Griechische Plastik, vol. 2.1, Archaik und die Wandlung zur Klassik (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1961), 170.

65. Alscher, Griechische Plastik, vol. 3, Nachklassik und Vorhellenismus (Berlin:

Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1956), 11 n. 13. 66. Alscher, Griechische Plastik, vol. 1, Monumentale Plastik und ihre Vorstufen in der

griechischen Friihzeit (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1954), 7. 67. Alscher, Griechische Plastik, vol. 2.1, 89-90 and 93-94.

68. Alscher, Griechische Plastik, vol. 2.1, 94. 69.

See Patrizia Di Bello, “‘Multipying Statues by Machinery’: Stereoscopic Photographs of Sculptures at the 1862 International Exhibition,” History of Photography 37, no. 4 (2013): 412-20; Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos,

eds., Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), viii, 24.

67

SCULPTURE FROM BEHIND Jeremy Melius

Discussion of the relation between photography and sculpture has often turned on photography’s perceived deficiencies in staging the older medium. Photography, the account goes, fails to do sculpture justice: in its incomplete registration of sculpture’s rich phenomenological and material specificities;

its decontextualization of sculptural objects from their real-spatial coordinates; its ceaseless disciplining of sculpture’s mobile beholders, imposing upon them a fixed and falsely abstracting point of view. Given so many limitations,

it has been less common for scholars to focus on what might be gained— aesthetically, historically—from the relation of these mediums. Yet the gains are potentially multiform, opening our eyes to unperceived and misunderstood aesthetic dimensions of both mediums and to the ways in which their interaction may encode historically specific modes of feeling and thinking. Out of the

conjunction might come new ways of writing both mediums’ histories. In a two-part essay of 1896, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” Heinrich Wolfflin takes both the positive and negative stances I have described."

On the one hand, he complains. Flying in the face of his insistence on a normative frontal vantage for the appreciation of Renaissance sculpture and, by extension, all work of the “good . . . tradition,” the sheer proliferation of poorly conceived photographs has come to suggest that works of sculpture could be captured, willy-nilly, “from any side.”* “False images” have begot “false impressions.”® “[C]orruption” abounds.* What makes this so frustrating for Wolfflin is that it need not be so. For on the other hand, if oriented properly, the photog-

rapher’s art might serve as a crucial aid in “guid[ing] the viewer back to seeking out the view that corresponds with the artist's conception”’—even, Wolfflin’s text implicitly suggests, enhancing one’s experience of that view.’ For in drawing

his theoretical justification from the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand’s powerful treatise The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1893),° Wolfflin puts forward a

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program for the reproduction of artworks in which photographing sculpture head-on could serve not merely to clarify its forms for study. Rather, capturing that “one comprehensive main view” might confirm and extend the aesthetic capabilities of figurative sculpture itself, embodying and even amplifying that essential viewpoint from which the artwork, as it were, most wished to be seen.’ Form itself would be prescriptive. Sculpture of the kind that most interested the young Wolfflin asked to be looked at in this way. And it was the principal job of the photographer to oblige, repeating in two dimensions that small miracle of seeing afforded by study of the original: “from inadequate appearances the purified image [might be allowed] to emerge, which stands calm and clear and

in the true sense is felt to be a liberation.”* Like most disciplinary structures, Wolfflin’s injunctions work largely to enable various possibilities for deviance. They thus offer an especially useful frame for discussing what I take to be the truly interesting effects of spatial disjunction within the confrontations between photography and sculpture. In

what follows, I focus on a remarkable pair of photographs taken by Hildebrand in 1887 or 1888 that show his eldest daughters arranged in quasisculptural form.

But first, I offer a mid-twentieth-century preamble: a discussion of the photographic slides taken by the painter Ad Reinhardt during the 1950s and ’6os. Both are moments in which frontality opens onto its discontents, and the photography of sculpture works to figure the psychic and spatial intensities of the figure’s dorsal view.”

Reinhardt’s photographs remain underappreciated and, for the most part,

unknown. Nothing could have prepared me for the jolt of delight when I first encountered them at a gallery in New York in 2013.'° There, projected on the wall, was a brief sequence drawn from the thousands of photographic slides

that Reinhardt took in the last twenty years of his life, during travels around the world as well as at home in New York. They displayed a wide assortment

of objects, artworks, and architectural forms, many of the slides beautiful in their rigid, often symmetrical compositions, as well as in their witty formal sequences. Thanks to the pioneering scholarship of Prudence Pfeiffer, we now know a good deal about Reinhardt’s procedures.'' They were related to his teaching at Hunter College. Robert Morris, for instance, recalled a seminar on Asian art: “Reinhardt showed about 500 slides a night, each one of which he had taken himself. He had been to every major site in the Orient. All he ever said was, “That’s Classical} or “That’s early Classical} or ‘That’s Archaic? or ‘That’s Baroque.”'* But he also drew from them in the quirky pseudo-art historical

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slide lectures he would present at his apartment, as well as at that gathering place for the New York avant-garde, The Club. His term for them was Nonhappenings, with such titles as “Art Fallout Report” and “Annual April-First Communion and Fireside Chat / Beating a Dead Horse / ‘Pop-Expressionism’

& ‘Momisny (Mus. Mod. Art) /... Let’s get the Flux out of Here?" More could be said about the general ambitions of Reinhardt’s photography. What struck at first was the extent to which the painter found himself drawn to photographing works of sculpture and the way he departed from the strict frontality he used for architecture, relishing instead photographing sculptures

from the rear (pl. 6). If any reader of Wélfflin has longed to restore to vision and imagination the delights of sculpture’s posterior realm in photography, Reinhardt may be your man. ‘The slides present a veritable parade of sculpted behinds: brightly lit, cast in shadow, human, animal, male, female, supplely

ornamented, chastely austere. In the face of such fixation, across such a variety of forms, a focus on the erotic is perhaps inevitable. Another group of slides, this time concerned with anal themes in quasi-pornographic magazine illustra-

tions, might suggest a voyeuristic drive. Yet, more was at stake in Reinhardt’s photographs than merely some desub-

limation of sculptural form. The slides ask to be examined in relation to one of Reinhardt’s most notorious remarks: his “definition of sculpture” as “something

you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.”"* The joke has always been understood to reinforce a hierarchy among the mediums, with painting's refined claims to our attention raised over the coarser object-world of sculptural matter, more like misplaced furniture than a truly fine art. Should the photograph be taken to represent the painter’s further denigration of a putatively

inferior medium—the ass a site of sadistic regard, crudely figuring sculpture’s gross material base? I am not so sure. For like all good jokes, this one turns not only on aggression but also, primordially, on a complex of anxieties and fears it

barely masks. These concern the bodily occupation of three-dimensional space. In Reinhardt’s quip, it is sculpture that effectively sneaks up on us from behind. It imagines the encounter as a jarring physical event—an eruption of the body's

awkward presence in which blind, threatening touch interrupts the knowing self-possession of sight. Considered as artworks, after all, paintings have only front sides. They do not harbor their vulnerability in three dimensions the way that statues and human bodies do. Sculpture, that is, opens its viewers to the bodily apprehension of spatial contingency. It seeks to order that experience,

perhaps. But disorder always lurks around the bend. Ultimately, Reinhardt’s photographs of sculpture seek to memorialize and restage just such possibilities. The photographs reveal their figures as fully subject to such contingency—

to the erratic play of light and shadow across their variegated surfaces, to the

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unstable environmental conditions of the sites they occupy, and to the awkward involuntary disclosures they make when approached askew. Under this camera’ eye, statues come to seem more like unmotivated objects than fully vivid works of art. But more than this, in the peculiar situation these photographs picture, such subjection rebounds upon the viewer: we, too, become entangled in spatial relations. Whether or not presented literally (at least one of

the photographs shows Reinhardt’s own reflection in a window), the photographer’s dependent position finds itself inscribed into the picture, his peculiar behavior almost an expression of the obdurate materiality under regard—and by extension, so too with the viewer, adrift in this world of mute things. Planted four-square behind pharaoh by the camera, what meaning can I glean from the statue’s reluctant facade (pl. 7)? Yet, noticing the statue’s misalignment within architectural space—its slight deviance from full symmetry within the arch it faces—what else can I depend on for orientation? What can be made ofwhere I stand? Spatial disorientation reveals itself to be reciprocal, implicating sculpture and viewer alike in the mere givenness of space.

“A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs,’ Siegfried Kracauer wrote in his great essay on photography from 1927, “for they make visible not

the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment.””” Interpretive emphasis usually falls on the play of temporality signaled by this

passage—on the oldness of the photographs. It ought equally to fall on issues of space,’° on the fact that it is the sheer indifferent particularity of the spatial configuration that interrupts knowledge, diverting both perception and memory from their familiar routes, and in the process unseats the viewer’s dazed body from affective self-control. Sculpture turns its back on us in Reinhardt’s photographs. We are left to shudder, or stand blank.

Such anxieties have a long and complex history. Among other things, it was

against the possibility of such reciprocal unsettling that Hildebrand had sought to defend. As is well known, The Problem of Form laid out a normative vision for sculptural composition that seemed to prize clarity, stability, and absolute frontality above all—an ideal of representation only achievable through the artists sensitive engagement with the poetics of relief. So often has The Problem of Form been brandished as an epitome of conservative thinking—as the arttheoretical expression of classicism’s last, dying gasp—that it can be difficult to keep hold of the sheer force of the text’s impact on thinking about art. Indeed, obvious exceptions such as William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) or

Joshua Reynolds's Discourses on Art (1769-90) aside,” it is hard to think of an

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artist's published writings that have had more direct an effect upon the very procedures of art historical writing than Hildebrand’s brief text. Careers as diverse as those of W6lfflin and Bernard Berenson, Alois Riegl and Vernon Lee divide themselves neatly into periods before and after they read Hildebrand." And within the development of modernist criticism, impatience and hatred

for Hildebrand has been nothing short of a structuring principle. From Carl Einstein and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois,

the sculptor has served as a favorite touchstone of wrong thinking.'? Such hostility makes sense: modernist sculpture itself had so often engaged in the interrogation of Hildebrand’s beloved frontal vantage. From the disintegration of surficial coherence in Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell (1880-1917) to the shattered, anti-Hildebrandian frontality of Pablo Picasso’s sheet-metal Guitar (1914),?° or the conflation of sculpture’s back and front in Henri Matisse’s Backs (1908-

1931), and on to Bruce Nauman’s endlessly disturbing Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970): throughout this history, the tense commerce between frontality and its

others was simultaneously preserved and undone. The special disorientation and bodily constriction enforced by Nauman seems of particular relevance

here. At the end of a long, narrow corridor stand two stacked monitors: one always shows the corridor as empty, the other, fed by a closed-circuit camera at the passage’s front, surveys the occupant from behind. As you walk down the corridor, you watch your own estranged image grow smaller and smaller. You

sense, impossibly, the back of your body peeling away.” In the face of such developments, however, the full relevance of Hildebrand’s vision has not always been well understood. Again, the problem has seemed to be the artist’s prescriptive tone. For him, all sculpture ought to behave, in certain key respects, the way that classical relief supposedly did: receding, that is, clearly from a virtual frontal plane, along a vector that enlivened depicted incident at the same time as it secured coherent spatial knowledge, totalizing

the viewer’s grasp of form. “All spatial relations,’ Hildebrand wrote, “and all

distinction of form are read off from a single vantage, so to speak, from front to back.” Or as he put it even more emphatically: “There will always be one view that presents and unites the whole plastic nature of the figure as a coher-

ent surface impression, analogous to painting or relief”’** That single vantage should be subsumed under the governing “distant image” (Fernbild) for which

he tirelessly advocated. For that vantage “signifies,” the text goes on, “the actual visual notion that underlies the sculptural representation.”’* As Michael Podro cogently notes, “Its function was not simply, or perhaps not even primarily, illusion—it was order.?> The Problem of Form, then, seems to offer a primly representationalist conception of sculpture over a materialist one, a trait that has elicited savage criticism ever since. Hildebrand’s enemies (as well as some of

pak

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his friends) have sometimes asserted that such an irredeemably pictorial vision of sculpture indexes an underdeveloped feeling for its full three-dimensional force—a perverse blindness, on Hildebrand’s part, to sculpture’s rich phenomenological specificities, as encountered by a mobile, fully embodied viewer.”° But nothing could be further from the truth. and discipline not because of some lack of feeling cisely because he feels such space too much. The The Problem of Form is everywhere vulnerable to

Hildebrand craves distance for sculptural space but prealways embodied subject of spatial entanglement.” “We

live and weave a spatial consciousness into the nature that surrounds us,’ he suggests in an especially beautiful turn of phrase.** And as a consequence, we always remain open, beyond the body’s fragile boundaries, to full involvement in three-dimensional space. For him, the word sculpture does not point to some

discrete, separable object in the world. Rather, sculpture names the totality of an enfolding spatial complex, one that encompasses statue and beholder alike, taking place only in and as the charged field of empathetic co-presence that

comes alive between them. It names the spatial distribution of bodily vulnerability that haunts imagistic form. In this regard, Nauman’s might be the most Hildebrandian sculpture of all.

Hildebrand’s own formulation of these desires and fears for sculpture proves especially telling on this count: “It is not the task of sculpture to leave the viewer

in an unfinished or uncomfortable frame of mind with regard to the threedimensional or cubic nature of the impression—striving to form a clear visual image. Its task, rather, is to provide the visual image and thus to remove what is agonizing from the cubic form [dem Kubischen das Qualende zu nehmen].””?

Such naked admission of disturbance certainly sets Wélfflin’s own prescriptive

formulas in a new light. Indeed, in his review of The Problem ofForm, Wolfflin

incorporated this passage almost verbatim into his text.°? But what precisely might this “anxiety of the cubic” entail for Hildebrand’s own sculptural practice?*' And where might photography fit in? In a fuller treatment of his work, it could be demonstrated that Hildebrand’s entire sculptural enterprise, from beginning to end, unfolded as a career-long endeavor to manage cubic anxiety —an endeavor that everywhere depended upon shuttling between two- and three-dimensional modes of representation. Drawing, painting, and even photography came to provide “other scenes” for sculptural exploration.>? Here I

wish to focus on two small and especially telling tokens of such inter-medial exchange. A photograph of 1887 or 1888, taken by Hildebrand in the villa of San Francesco di Paolo in Florence, the former monastery in which the sculptor and

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ie)

his family had lived and worked since 1873, presents a potent document of his artistic concerns (fig. 1). In it, Elizabeth, Eva, and Irene Hildebrand, nude except

for the improvised loincloths covering their waists, stand arrayed in a subtle, interconnected pose in front of and partially within a doorway ornamented

with figures and foliage—one of Hildebrand’s decorative projects within the villa. Perched on their improvised pedestal, itself standing atop what looks to be a table, the three girls have effectively composed themselves into a sculptural relief.** Dependent on the architecture that surrounds them, like the small figures within that doorway’s own low relief, they also gather together, touching and almost touching, providing each other with support. And yet, to compare the photograph to a work of a year or two later, they are not so closely fused together as Hildebrand’s two youngest daughters in the beautiful portrait bust he executed in 1889 (fig. 2). The quiet affection that Silvia and Bethel

Hildebrand so tenderly express for each other in this work is also a sculptural necessity. With no architectural frame to define their bodily integrity, they have

nothing but each other to hold onto, and they huddle close. And one need not break the work’s tender spell by drawing attention to the sculpture’s hollow back in order to see how all of the bust’s emotional charge depends on its delicate negotiation of the frontal plane.** In the photograph, Hildebrand’s three older daughters find a balance between standing close and standing apart. Though at first glance it may seem domestic

Fig. 1. Adolf von Hildebrand (German, 1847-1921). Hildebrand’s Daughters Modeling, 1887-88. From Sigrid Esche-Breaunfels, Ado/f von Hildebrand (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag flir Kunstwissenschaft, 1993), 208.

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in circumstance, the picture thus offers its own sort of theory of relief.*° First and foremost, I want to say, framing as it does real bodies in quasi-sculptural space, the photograph instantiates a very specific imaginative possibility. It realizes a fantasy of what it would be like to inhabit and even, somehow, to be the calm plenitude of sculptural relief. It is as if relief’s sheltering spatial clarity has become an extension of bodily existence itself. This proves to be the logical correlate of Hildebrand’s commitment to an empathetic psychology of art. For to truly participate in the calm recession of sculptural depiction would be also to

feel oneself becoming sculptural, confirming one’s own embodiment as a coher-_ ence by imaginatively—corporeally—taking place within aesthetic form. If the photograph enables the imagination of such shelter, however, it also enforces an awareness of how precarious the body’s new situation might be. Shadows gather darkly around Hildebrand’s daughters, suggesting some unknowable space behind them. Here the picture seems to positively cultivate cubic anxiety. A second photograph, this time of Eva Hildebrand standing alone, drives the point home (fig. 3). Her pose, all the more arresting in its isolation, recalls to us the tenderness of the body’s exposed surfaces, as Eva twists slightly outward into our space, casting a lonely shadow against the adjacent jamb. Without her sisters to join hands behind her back, her hold on space becomes less secure. A new vulnerability takes hold. Photographic space

requires that Eva be somewhere specific—here, now, in this precise form: the price of her three-dimensional incarnation. Hildebrand had explored relief’s

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| eB | %

Bb

‘

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4

potential for evading such precise spatial markers in a small and fascinating sculpture executed in 1877, the year in which Eva was born (fig. 4). I cannot help

but feel that Hildebrand’s photograph was in some sense meant to recall this remarkable depiction of the infant Eve slowly taking shape out of the mother

stone.*° There is something both primal and reserved about that emergence. For even as she stretches her new limbs out from what remains of the block—it is in some ways a wildly direct metaphor for the act of birth—she also folds

them over each other and pulls them back in, as if trying not to reach too far out. The minimal depiction of a seat secures her at least provisionally upright

orientation; without it we would certainly see her as lying on her back, and per-

Fig. 2. Adolf von Hildebrand (German,

1847-1921). Double Portrait of the Artist's Daughters, 1889, polychrome terracotta, 50 cm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 86.SC.729.

Rigus:

haps still partly do. It adds to the sense we have at the figure’s edges of a barely

Adolf von Hildebrand (German,

perceptible set of planar modulations that afford her space at the same time as

Modeling,

they qualify her only partial emergence. Indeed, the sculpture seems almost a demonstration piece, embodying what would become, in The Problem of Form,

Hildebrand’s explicit doctrine of carving backward from a frontal plane in order to achieve the figure. In a remarkably open way, sculptural composition just is the development of bodily composure here. And behind her, the stony matrix keeps the body fused, safe. Eva at age eleven has none of this proto-spatial secu-

rity. Instead, her form hovers at the edge of an abyss—a zone of blind, unbridled three-dimensionality, toward which her back is turned.

1847-1921). Eva Hildebrand 1887-88.

From

Sigrid Esche-Breaunfels, Ado/f von Hildebrand (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag fiir Kunstwissenschaft, 1993), 580.

Fig. 4. Adolf von Hildebrand (German, 1847-1921). Eva Hildebrand, 1877, marble, 57.5 cm. From

Sigrid Esche-Breaunfels, Ado/f von Hildebrand (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag flr Kunstwissenschaft,

1993) 133:

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As a token of such vulnerability, we might attend more closely to that shadow she casts. It offers a sign of the body’s exposure as well as its solitude. It indexes the contingency of her occupation of this space. But note also that it is the side of the body to which the shadow particularly draws attention—the side that her absent sisters can no longer protect. An inalienable marker of her presence here before us, a feeble ghostly double, it also serves as an emissary of the lightless void behind her, the shadow’s intimation of lateral exposure also suggesting the dorsal view we precisely cannot see. In such complex effects,

the anxiety of the cubic is localized within a structure of care. The anxiety is

for Hildebrand’s daughters—for these particular fragile bodies, which he loves. The more one considers what exactly the sculptor’s theoretical commitments to frontality sought to protect the viewing subject against, the more one begins to think about—to feel—the terrible vulnerability of the back of the human body brought into play. The photographs call to mind the consequences of a primal fear of exposure to what lies unseen—unseeable—behind.

And what of Reinhardt’s vantage—the view from behind? Just occasionally, Hildebrand explored the occupation of this taboo position, always with bewil-

dering results. Significantly, his preferred mediums for doing so were two-

dimensional. Such views, whether studied or casual, deserve further study.’ Here I would draw attention to a small suite of drawings, most likely dating to

the early 1880s, that depict a fantastic scene of young boys bathing.** They were produced in the long wake of Hildebrand’s artistic apprenticeship to the painter Hans von Marées, ten years his senior, when he first arrived in Italy. As far as scholars can reconstruct it, their charged collaboration hovered somewhere between homosocial camaraderie and homoerotic intensity. It would have significant impact on the direction of Hildebrand’s art.*” And as always with that

artist, and even in these belated missives to the painter, sculpture was not far from view. The drawings, in their groupings as well as in their individual figures, all depend on the composition of Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina, a project long associated with the Renaissance artist’s sculptural ambitions. Michelangelo served as a kind of god for Hildebrand throughout his career. The Problem of Form concludes in a famous discussion of the Medici Madonna (1521-34), cel-

ebrating the way Michelangelo “subjugated his corporeal imagination to [his artistic] need with passionate consistency and thus created a new corporeal world.*® The new world looks more anxious in modern hands. In his aquatic idyll, Hildebrand pictured his bathers all together as well as in isolation, imagi-

natively, one almost wants to say obsessively, rotating the figures to encompass

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multiple aspects. And among these sketches, one finds the most disturbing drawing of Hildebrand’s career (fig. 5). In it, a naked boy clambers out of the water, legs spread wide, his anus exposed to view. Fantasies of surveillance and

exposure, of the body’s multisidedness, receive embarrassingly little in the way of masking or displacement here. The excessive marking of that anus—anatomically improbable; distended, one feels, as a function of a now explicitly sodomit-

ical gaze—produces its own kind of shudder. Much more could be said here about the graphic intensity of these works, about Hildebrand’s figuration of the sheet’s—the body’s—surfaces as a site of shadowy puncture. For my purposes here, however, the psychic dynamics at play need little in the way of further

elaboration, except to say that in coming to rest on this drawing we should not feel that we have somehow “solved” the case of Hildebrand’s cubic anxiety, as if it could be some merely personal psychic disposition, nor think we have uncovered some traumatic kernel around which his hypersensitive theories of space

had finally congealed. That unprecedented sensitivity, I have been suggesting, speaks beyond itself to address the spatial and affective disturbances opened up and time and again repressed by the photography of sculpture at large. Fantasy is expansive in nature, and we need not fetishize any single scenario of vulner-

ability or disclosure in order to begin to see both fear and desire running deep within the pictorial staging of sculpture’s spatial relations. In their accretion through history as well as their singular intensity, such scenarios allow us to

Figs5: Adolf von Hildebrand

(German, 1847-1921). Bather, early 1880s, black pen and pencil, 35.7 x 23 cm. From Sigrid EscheBreaunfels, Ado/f von Hildebrand (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag ftir Kunstwissenschaft,

1993), 563.

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grasp something ofthe vast, ambivalent complex of dorsal feeling condensed in sculpture’s frontal view, as it finds form in Hildebrand’s arresting photographs, and as it returns, unappeased, in Reinhardt’ staging of sculpture itself being taken—taking us—from behind.

Notes 1. Translated together with a third from 1915 as Heinrich Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” trans. Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History 36, no. 1

(February 2013): 52-71.

2. Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 53. . Wélfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,’ 53. . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,’ 53. . Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,’ 53. . Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem ofForm in the Fine Arts (1893), in Empathy

W Nw

Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1994).

7. Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 58. 8. Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 59. 9. Too few scholars have dealt seriously with the implications of the dorsal for the visual arts. Several exceptions have informed my own thinking: Patricia Rubin, “Art History from the Bottom Up,” Art History 36, no. 2 (April 2013): 280-309;

within media studies, David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and within

queer studies and film theory, Lee Edelman, “Rear Window’s Glasshole,’ in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 72-96. Although I encountered it too late to make full

use of it here, I have also found suggestive Wayne Koestenbaum, “Facing Taylor Meads Ass,” Little Joe 2 (2011): 68-77. 10. “Ad Reinhardt,” David Zwirner Gallery, New York, 7 November-18 December 2013.

1. Prudence Pfeiffer, “Projected Non-Happenings,’ in “Routine Extremism: Ad Reinhardt and Modern Art,’ PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010, 251-314. My

understanding of the Reinhardt’s photography in general draws heavily on Pfeiffer’s excellent treatment. 12. Robert Morris, A Continuous Project Altered Daily (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 265, quoted in Pfeiffer, 262-63.

13. Pfeiffer, 269. These “non-happenings” were delivered on 6 April 1962 and 29 March 1963.

14. Quoted in Lucy Lippard, “As Painting Is to Sculpture: A Changing Ratio? in American Sculpture of the Sixties, ed. Maurice Tuchman, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967), 31. 15. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 57.

16. For discussion of Kracauer’s sense of photographic space, see Megan R. Luke, “The Photographic Reproduction of Space: Wolfflin, Panofsky, Kracauer” RES 57/58 (Autumn 2010): 339-43.

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7. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1767-90), ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 18.

See, for instance, Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture”; Heinrich Wolfflin, Classic Art (1899), trans. Peter and Linda Murray (London: Phaidon Press, 1964); Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance

(London and New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1896); Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry (1901), trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985);

Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness,” Contemporary Review, part 1 (October 1897): 544-69, part 2 (November 1897):

669-88. For a fine account of Wélfflin’s conception of relief and its relation to Hildebrand, see Alina Payne, “On Sculptural Relief: Malerisch, the Autonomy of Artistic Media and the Beginnings of Baroque Studies,” in Rethinking the Baroque, ed. Helen Hills (London: Ashgate, 2011), 39-64.

19. Carl Einstein, “Negro Sculpture” (1915), trans Charles W. Hauxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, October 107 (Winter 2004): 122-38; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “The Essence of Sculpture” (1920), trans. Deborah Shannon, in Modern Sculpture

Reader, ed. Jon Wood, David Hulks, and Alex Potts (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 71-79; Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977); Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,’ in Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 65-97. 20. 21.

As Bois describes it; see Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson.” See also Nauman’s remarks to Joan Simon in 1986: “In a lot of the early work I was concerned with ideas about inside and outside and front and back—how to turn them around and confuse them,’ in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman Words, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 323.

Dae

Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, 243.

235 Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, 258. 24. aS

Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, esp. 230. Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 85.

26.

The four modernist critical texts cited earlier largely avoid such caricature. In this

they are exceptional. My For a different account of Hildebrand’s treatment of the body, suggesting that “both the sculptural body and the viewer's bodily engagement were suppressed in Hildebrand’s system,’ see David Getsy, “Encountering the Male Nude at the

Origins of Modern Sculpture: Rodin, Leighton, Hildebrand, and the Negotiation of Physicality and Temporality,’ in The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts, ed. Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan (Berlin: Mann, 2003), 308. 28.

29.

Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, 239.

Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, 258, translation modified: Gessamelte Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Henning Bock (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966), 242.

30. Heinrich Wolfflin, “Ein Kiinstler tiber Kunst,” Allgemeine Zeitung 157 (11 July 1893), in Kleine Schriften, ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Brenno Schwabe, 1946), 88.

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_ I borrow this phrase from Sebastian Zeidler, “Totality against a Subject: Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 18. 32. See for instance, Hildebrand’s life studies related to his making of The Water Bearer (1874-78), or his own emphatic drawing over the surface of aphotograph

ofa model for the Wilttelsbach Fountain (1890-95) in Munich, as if he were

seeking to clarify and enliven its silhouetted forms. Reproduced in Sigrid EscheBraunfels, Adolf von Hildebrand (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag fiir Kunstwissenschaft,

1993), 51, fig. 43; 213, fig. 277. 33: The photograph relates in some way to a never completed sculptural program

intended for the garden ofthe villa, for which Hildebrand made a plaster sketch and to which the poses of his daughters in the photograph more or less correspond: see Esche-Braunfels, 208, fig. 267. As will be clear from my discussion, however, the photograph has significance far beyond its relation to this modest project.

34. A photograph ofthe sculpture’s back is available at http://www.getty.edu/art/ collection/objects/1146/adolf-von-hildebrand-double-portrait-of-the-artist'sdaughters-german-1889/?artview=dor4285. 35. It does so at the very moment Hildebrand undertook crucial revisions to his draft BO:

for Das Problem der Form. I borrow the phrase from Anne Wagner, whose powerful account of the maternal metaphor in modernist sculpture informs my discussion: see Wagner, Mother Stone: The Vitality ofModern British Sculpture (London: Yale University Press, 2005).

37. In addition to the studies for The Water Bearer, see, for instance, the strange

photograph ofan unidentified life-size statue of amale nude seen from behind—

whether a study for an early work or a copy after the antique is not clear—found among Hildebrand’s papers. And what are we to make of the dismal, bow-legged perversity of his caricature of the archaeologist Adolf Furtwangler propelling himself away from us on ice skates? See Esche-Braunfels, 587, fig. 1022; 571, fig. 988. 38. Reproduced in Esche-Braunfels, 562-63, figs. 964-70.

39. For an essential account of Marées’s practice, see André Dombrowski, “The

Untimely Classicism of Hans von Marées,’ in Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean, ed. Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski and Anne Dymond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 84-115. During the same period, both Hildebrand and Marées developed strong friendships with the aesthetic theoretician Konrad Fiedler, whose influence and direct interventions loomed large in the composition of The Problem of Form: see Elisabeth Decker, Zur kiinstlerischen Beziehung zwischen Hans von Marées, Konrad Fiedler und Adolf Hildebrand: Eine Untersuchung tiber die Zusammenhdnge von Kunsttheorie und Kunstwerk (University of Basel, 1966; Dudweiler: Klein, 1967); Hubert Faesen, Die bild-

nerische Form: Die Kunstauffassungen Konrad Fiedlers, Adolf von Hildebrands und Hans von Marées (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1965); and Max Imdahl, “Marées, Fiedler, Hildebrand, Rieg]l, Cézanne. Bilder und Zitate” (1963), in Reflexion, Theorie, Methode: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 42-111.

4O. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 276.

81

PHOTOGRAPHY AS CARVING The Folios of Clarence Kennedy Sarah Hamill

The sense that you can touch the sculpture—that you can feel its bulk and see the chisel-stroke—is strongest in a “close-up.” —CLARENCE

KENNEDY,

CA. 1932"

In Stones ofRimini, published in 1934, British art critic Adrian Stokes famously

identified carving and modeling as opposing terms used for Renaissance sculpture. He would later generalize this vocabulary, making carving stand in for an aesthetic of truth to materials in painting. But in Stones of Rimini, carving and

modeling signal conceptions of sculptural values. The terms did not so much indicate literal practices; instead they distinguish between ideas of sculptural surface, on the one hand, and sculptural shape, on the other. The sculptor that

Stokes sees as epitomizing carving is Agostino di Duccio, and the book offers an appraisal of Agostino’ reliefs in Rimini’s Tempio Malatestiano, which he calls

“the apotheosis of carving.” All sculpture, Stokes points out, exhibits traces of both modes, whether carved or modeled. But carving is the privileged term in his aesthetic because it expresses the materiality of stone—the “very rockiness of the reliefs and the stoniness of the stones,” as Michael Ann Holly puts it.* The practice of “cutting away” vivifies the stone’s luminous tactility, or the sculpture’s physi-

cal matrix.* Carving—which he likens to activities of washing, polishing, or sweeping—brings to light an object’s material self-sufficiency, its individualized substance,’ whereas modeling is a “building up” or “manufacture” of things.® Unlike carving, modeling maps onto stone a “pre-conceived” notion of shape, imposing an artistic will. By “whittling away” the stone block, “carv-

ing is an articulation of something that already exists,” that can never be

“freed from the stone matrix.”” Bound up in Stokes’s argument about carving is a theory of the photography of sculpture. He complains that German and Italian critics are incapable of really “seeing” Agostino’ reliefs—he gripes against what he calls the “horrid

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noun, Plastik,” which defines the medium of sculpture as a molding of shape.” But he notes that this oversight in part depends on the quality of art reproductions. “Photographs,” he argues, “transmit plastic values exceedingly well, carving values hardly at all”? Stokes warns the reader about the book's illustrations—with two exceptions, they were commercial stock prints from the Alinari and Brogi firms—images that he calls a “hindrance” for their inability to convey the carved surface.!? Readers may even wonder, he writes, “why I should make

so prolonged a fuss about these reliefs,’'t because seen in a photograph, the carved values of an Agostino relief—“the gradual rounded cutting, the closely

related equal tones and half tones, the luminosity”—are lost." Many, though not all, of the plates Stokes included in Stones of Rimini present Agostino’ reliefs divorced from their spatial setting in the church, a fact for which the author apologized.’* Captured from a frontal vantage point, the reliefs are framed individually—an ordering that emphasizes their overall composition. The backgrounds are typically blackened or cropped to isolate their formal contours. In most cases, the reliefs are pictured as total planes encapsu-

lated by a frame, and in only a few instances are details presented. In one, the photograph zooms in on a dolphin-riding putto on the tympanum.”

These stock photographs carry a rhetoric of imaging tied to art history's formation as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century."* By consistently framing objects through frontal vantage points, and by presenting them from a distance against a neutral backdrop, or by cropping the background from the print entirely, photographic firms standardized the documentary process,

establishing, in Joel Snyder’s words, a “rhetoric of believability” (pl. 2).’° As Snyder has argued, a “language of equivalence between a picture and its model”

emerged through such regularization.” There was little variation from frame to

frame, from firm to firm, all the better to make possible an art history of formal comparison. Once visually decontextualized, objects from different historical periods and geographies could be brought together on the printed page in a

shared visual rhetoric, studied and compared on the basis of style, a process epitomized in André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire. Nineteenth-century stock photographs published by a range of commercial firms of the Apollo Belvedere, for instance, similarly emphasize the sculpture’s contours and its linear silhouette, to facilitate a reading ofits form."®

As Stokes knew, this established rhetoric of imaging carried a built-in preference for an object's shape over its surface and for the optic over the haptic. Lost in a photography of modeling were the contingencies of embodied viewing, the sort of tactile qualities that Stokes aligned with carving.’ If the reproductions on which art history has relied privilege the concept of Plastik,

to emphasize modeling, what would a photography that puts stock in carving

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look like? How have photographers stepped away from the taxonomy of form central to the tradition of art history to make surface or tactile qualities visible instead, or to make the contingent detail essential to the connoisseur’s process

of close looking and attribution? These questions guide my approach to the photography of Clarence

Kennedy, a scholar-photographer and contemporary of Stokes whose published folios activate the tactile and sensuous surfaces of sculpture over its composition or shape, making a visual argument for photography as carving. Kennedy, who taught art history at Smith College from 1917 to 1960, published few scholarly articles or books during his lifetime.*® He was, however, a prodigious photographer and producer of folios of sculpture, works that carry a scholarly argument about photography’s role in sculptural perception. Between 1928 and 1932 Kennedy published seven volumes as the series Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture in collaboration with his wife, Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy,

who aided in the printing and design of the books.*! Two of the volumes were devoted to Greek monuments and bronzes; three to sculptures by Desiderio da

Settignano; one to Andrea del Verrocchio’s unfinished Forteguerri monument; and one to quattrocento portrait busts.*” An eighth volume, whose production was halted in part due to World War I, was devoted to Antonio Rossellino’s tomb for the Cardinal of Portugal.”* ee With the exception of the Verrocchio study, the only one published as a book, the series included no explanatory texts. Each

unbound folio comprised photographs mounted on variously colored papers— some suspended in embossed or penciled frames, others matted in juxtaposing colors—that were numbered on their versos. Each included a separate title page and list of captions, printed in letterpress.

The project was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which in

the late 1920s and early 1930s distributed pedagogical materials for the study of art—slides, books, and mounted photographs—to high schools and colleges in

the United States and Canada. Advised by a committee of New York curators, an art dealer, and a Princeton professor, the corporation disseminated a canon that at the outset favored antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.”* In 1925 Frederick

Keppel, the corporation’s president, purchased Kennedy's photographs—which departed from the project’s consistently commercial style—to include in the art sets. But Kennedy also appealed for funding—to the tune of one thousand dol-

lars per year—for his more lavish folios, which addressed a specialized audience of scholars, collectors, and curators, and were produced in editions of between

sixteen and one hundred.” Kennedy was persuasive. Writing to Keppel on 28 May 1925, he pointed out

the “inadequacy of existing commercial photographs,’ and argued that the folio format “may be, in itself, a contribution to scholarship, since its purpose is to

So

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find, through the manipulation of the light, and the choice of the point of view, the significant qualities of the work in question.””* This is to say that the visual rhetoric Kennedy envisioned brought new attention to the object, grasping it on its own terms. Manipulating lighting and vantage point could make visible qualities of surface and tactility that had long been occluded by stock photographs. All of this required skill: a photographer undertaking this sort of work, he argued, must be knowledgeable and would be able “as a result of his own study .. . [to] appreciate the intention of the artist, and [could] discover it with

the help of favorable conditions of light such as he may create.””” Using the best materials available, the photographer would accentuate “subtleties that are easily lost.” Kennedy had explored the contingencies of sculptural display in his

Harvard dissertation of 1924, “Light and Shade and the Point of View in the Study of Greek Sculpture,’ illustrated with his own photographs.” The dissertation is a remarkable study in how display impacts a sculpture’s meaning, since it explored how the installation, lighting, and photographic dissemination of

ancient sculpture could teach the public to see. Kennedy noted how different sculptural materials behave under a range of lighting conditions and stressed

that shifting reflections can change a sculpture’s look, “afford[ing] a sensitive means of perceiving even delicate gradations of form.”*® Changes in lighting could also yield new attributions, as he describes how a head brought out to a

window from the glare of an artificially lit storage room could be newly identified as a missing fragment of aParthenon metope.*” Kennedy also emphasized the role of vantage point—he marveled at the

many “effects which merely a change in the point of view will disclose’*??— thereby entering into a dialogue in modern sculptural aesthetics about the

beholder’s stance in the perception ofsculpture. In his 1893 The Problem of Form

in the Fine Arts, Adolf von Hildebrand argued that sculptural space should be organized around a principal or frontal point of view in order to properly con-

tain and alleviate the contingencies of embodied viewing.** But it was Emanuel Loewy’s concept of the “memory picture,” an idealist definition of sculptural

form influenced by Hildebrand—or, in Loewy’s words, “the Platonic Idea of the object, namely, a typical picture, clear of everything individual or accidental”*“—that Kennedy took up throughout his chapter on vantage point. He acknowledged the importance of the frontal view for grasping an object’s pictorial image, but Kennedy also argued for the consideration of additional and

“intermediate” views, claiming that sculptors designed their works to be seen from “an infinite number of positions.”*> He wrote that a “form cannot be comprehended from a restricted number of points of view, since even early sculptors tend to compose their figures from every angle as they work around them;

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consequently a scholar can understand a work of Greek sculpture only by studying it from many angles. . . . Each new light and each new viewpoint emphasizes a new succession of planes and accents which give some new and subtle differences to the expression of the inner emotion of the sculpture.”>* Here Kennedy highlights a spatial process of viewing that could not be limited to a singular and frontal vantage point or condensed into an idealist image, as Hildebrand and Loewy would have it. Grasping an object’s surface meant absorbing its process of carving through multiple and possibly conflicting vantages, unsettling

the idea of a totalizing and frontal plane, or “memory picture.”*” Details, too, served a vital role in perceiving sculptural surface. Kennedy cri-

tiqued the distanced views favored by stock photographers—what Stokes called

the photography of modeling—writing that seeing a photograph in which “the whole figure is reduced until it lies entirely within our field of vision, we are neither encouraged or even enabled to realize the significance of details.”** Close-up, fragmentary views allowed for an understanding of the labored sculptural process. The “varied and elusive qualities” of a work such as the Parthenon frieze would be “gradually reveal{ed]” through “study of its smallest details.”*” Here Kennedy links a process of connoisseurship that enlarges morphological clues, the method that Giovanni Morelli had advocated in his study

of Grundformen, or significant details that reveal the artist’s hand.*° Kennedy implemented his dissertation’s conclusions in the photographs he made for the Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture series. Rejecting

the concept of frontality and the structured images of wholeness used by photographic firms, he made oblique or unusual vantage points and the detail the basis of his photography. Take, for a start, his photographs of Desiderios relief of the Madonna and Child in the Bargello in Florence. The photographs appear in volume 6 of the Studies, on Desiderio’s reliefs and his Santa Trinita

Magdalen. The sequence begins with a clarifying image of the relief that is dis-

rupted through six details that each telescope us closer (figs. 1, 2). Moving from right to left and back again across the surface of the relief, the sequence organizes and highlights a string of sculptural moments, homing in on Desiderio’s appeal to the sense of touch. The six details do not add up to the cohesive whole; instead they sample the surface, guiding us unpredictably from view to view in

images that are just over life size.** In the fourth and fifth details Kennedy highlights the interplay of hands at center right. One image frames the Madonna’ hand pressing into, as if molding, the child’s fleshy shoulder. A finger curves into his supple body; another is pressed awkwardly against the child’s arm. In another, the child’s small hand folds in around itself to clutch at a piece of veil—a movement that continues in the following detail, which centers on fingers that grasp the wrinkled surface

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of fabric (see fig. 1). These photographs direct attention to—even lay claim to— how the sculpture thematizes touch. As Alison Wright has argued, Desiderio’s reliefs “acknowledge the operation of haptic impulses triggered by sight” and she describes how his works stage touch within a pictorial realm of the sacred that is kept just out of reach.*” Kennedy amplifies this iconology of touch in his visual argument for tactility, asking us to look closely at gestures that indicate volume in a shallow field.** The photographs also point up the sculptural values of carving—for

Fig. 1. Clarence Kennedy (American, 1892-1972). “Detail of Desiderio, Madonna and Child (The Panciatichi Madonna),

instance, consider the detail that organizes the Madonna’s left hand as it

1460.” Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture:

curves firmly yet delicately around the child’s malleable flesh (see fig. 2). From

Volume VI, 1929, plate 22. Oberlin College, Clarence Ward Art Library.

edge to edge, the photograph pictures a full range of carving techniques, from the shallow incisions to the deep undercutting of the fingers. The plain marble border is visible as well—a strategy Kennedy also used when photographing

Fig. 2. Clarence Kennedy (American, 1892-1972). “Detail of

the Turin Virgin and Child, in a detail that pictures a sliver of space beyond

Desiderio, Madonna and Child (The Panciatichi Madonna),

the marble’s edge. These photographs evidence the carving process by fram-

1460.” Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture: Volume VI, 1929, plate 19. Oberlin College, Clarence Ward Art Library.

ing material and medium, stone matrix and carved surface. In this sequence, his strategy hinges on the camera as a device of incision or etching. Like

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cutting away to articulate what already exists—Stokes’s terms for an aesthetic of carving—Kennedy’s photographs anatomize the relief to make visible its carved surface. Sculpture is enlarged, dissociated, incised, and dissected by his mechanical tool. This understanding of photography as a tool of analysis was tied to modernist discourses of photographic abstraction, and it anticipates Walter Benjamin's “Little History of Photography” (1931).** “Photography,” Benjamin writes, “with

its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”*° Here the critic describes a medium with the keys to a microcosmic world beyond vision

or cognition. The camera is a form of inscription, a device of perceptive analy-

sis and critique. Although Kennedy would not go so far as to adopt Benjamin's Surrealism, he, too, suggests that the active camera*® can penetrate the object and make elusive surfaces visible.*” Kennedy manipulated lighting, cropped objects unexpectedly, and made palpable flesh of flat stone reliefs, all in analytical ways: “each plate may be said to incorporate the results of my research and to be in a way a critical estimate of the subject.’** And his analysis addressed issues ignored by scholars. Kennedy was first

drawn to Desiderio because of a history of misattributions.*® His book on Verrocchio’s unfinished Forteguerri monument was similarly motivated: he aimed to identify the artist’s authorship in the monument’s complex making.*° Kennedy summed up his approach to the monument this way: “Since [a commercially produced] photograph was for years the only one existing of this

tomb of the Cardinal Forteguerri in a dark aisle of the Cathedral in Pistoia, it was supposed that Verrocchio—to whom it was attributed—had no real part in its execution. This doubt was disproved by the beauty which was revealed . . .

when details were taken in good light.”*' Close-up details offered evidence for connoisseurship, as Morelli had argued decades earlier.

Yet close-to images were hard to obtain. Reporting on his photographs of Desiderio’s Marsuppini Tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence, for the Carnegie Corporation, Kennedy noted that adequate photographs existed of the

tomb’ larger parts as well as of the whole—he had used hundreds of these commercial images for structuring his vast archive of Italian Renaissance art.*” But even the details sold by firms, such as an Alinari detail of Desiderio’s Tabernacle of the Sacrament in San Lorenzo, Florence, were taken from a frontal, distanced vantage point and thus were inadequate to attribution (fig. 3).°°

Achieving such views was laborious and required specialized technologies and homemade contraptions. The sculptures had to be cleaned of the dirt and dust that filled the carving.** There was also the issue of lighting—erratic and

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unpredictable in a church’s darkened interior. Kennedy improvised a portable

car battery attached to a small searchlight that he or an assistant held from the height ofaladder, moving the lamp constantly during the exposure.** The process simulated diffused daylight, aided by reflectors. He manipulated mirrors to make inaccessible surfaces visible. Kennedy also built a tripod with a ladder as

one leg that allowed him to photograph from any height or angle.*° Scaffolding and large-format cameras revealed surfaces in extreme close-up.” Notably, in exploiting the camera as a mobile, prosthetic vision, Kennedy

did not replicate the experience of viewing the sculpture on the ground. For instance, volume 5, dedicated to the Tabernacle of the Sacrament, opens with

an overall view of the monument, and the subsequent sixty-five images probe its different parts, parceling it into details. The first sequence depicts the lowest relief of Christ, Saint John, and the Virgin—Kennedy notes on the caption that a mirror was required, since in 1929 it was positioned behind an altar.** As

in his photograph of the Virgin and Child, Kennedy framed an iconology of tactility, isolating an interplay of hands. Once again, the reliefisnot charted in totality but rather analyzed as a series of disconnected parts.

Fig. 3. Desiderio da Settignano (Italian, 1429/32-1464.) Tabernacle of the Sacrament, detail. Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence. Photographed by Edizioni Alinari.

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Kennedy disaggregated the sculpture in still other ways. Picturing the candle-bearing angels that flank the central panels, he mapped the leftmost head from three vantages, cataloguing it in three dimensions as the camera shifted to the left (figs. 4, 5). We then jump to a shot framing the figure’s

torso, then its legs, in a dramatizing image of the luminous marble cloak seen

against a dark ground. Between torso and legs, the vantage point has shifted,

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destabilizing our orientation to this sculpture and to the monument as a whole. This sequence emphasizes an active pursuit of viewing rather than presenting static, timeless image. By grappling with such disjointed views, we are forced to reconcile our changing positions in front of the sculpture. Higher up, Kennedy also disrupts the inaugural, principal point of view with

oblique shots of the putti and the infant Christ. In photographs that are wholly dependent on a ladder to reach the top of a sculpture, he takes us around and behind the figures. The stabilizing symmetry of the lunette is ruptured with

views of the putti’s backs as well as shots that fragment the figures. The infant Christ child, for instance, is dissected as a series of body parts, set against a strip of board, which Kennedy used as a background.” In these close-to views ofthe

upper reaches, we encounter objects materially and three-dimensionally—we

see where the sculptures meet and emerge from the wall, and the masonry used to attach them (fig. 6). Equally as disorienting are Kennedy’s shots of the mantle supporting the lunette. In one, we look up at the rows of intricately carved ornamentation,

Fig. 4. Clarence Kennedy (American,

1892-1972). “Detail of Desiderio, Tabernacle of the Sacrament, San Lorenzo, Florence 1461.” Studies in

the History and Criticism of Sculpture: Volume V, 1929, plate 13. Oberlin College, Clarence Ward Art Library.

Fig. 5. Clarence Kennedy (American, 1892-1972). “Detail of Desiderio, Tabernacle of the Sacrament, San Lorenzo, Florence 1461.” Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture: Volume V, 1929,

plate 14. Oberlin College, Clarence Ward Art Library.

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each row different from the next; beyond the edge looms a black void (fig. 7). Several photographs away, however, we are plunged into the angel-studded

relief underneath, with its elaborately carved flowers. The result is a dizzying suite of photographs that each abstract the sculpture’s ornament. We move from the bottom of the mantle to the flattened surface below, and the sequence of Fig. 6. Clarence Kennedy (American, 1892-1972). “Detail of Desiderio, Tabernacle of the Sacrament, San Lorenzo, Florence, 1461.” Studies in

the History and Criticism of Sculpture: Volume V, 1929, plate 55. Oberlin College, Clarence Ward Art Library.

Fig. 7. Clarence Kennedy (American, 1892-1972). “Detail of Desiderio, Tabernacle of the Sacrament, San Lorenzo, Florence, 1461.” Studies in

the History and Criticism of Sculpture: Volume V, 1929, plate 51. Oberlin College, Clarence Ward Art Library.

close-to views presents a series of dissonant snippets of carving. Kennedy cre-

ates a progression of parts whose order is difficult to resolve.

In his folio, Kennedy imagines an individualized, non-uniform encounter with sculpture, asking us to follow him through a temporal and spatial analysis of its heterogeneous surfaces and parts. We see the backs of sculptures and the

worn floor of the church, the moment where carving fades into stone. So, too, are we invited to scrutinize the sculpture’s surface, to zoom into the carved flowers and leaves, abstracted from the whole. This range of photographs departs

from the regularized style of fixed frontality adopted by commercial firms. By staging a panoply of contingent, almost spontaneous views, the folio elicits a process of seeing evocative of Carl Ludwig Fernow’s description of Antonio Canovas Cupid and Psyche in 1806: “One can never arrive at a satisfying view of

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the work,”** he writes in complaint of the sculpture’s lack of frontality. “One has to leap around it, looking at it now from above, now from below, getting lost in the individual partial views, without ever getting an impression of the whole”! This type of contingency also defines the physical experience of looking at the folio, which unfolds in a constellation of unrelated views, made haptic and material as a beholder lifts up and turns over the plates, perhaps taking them out of sequence to create new juxtapositions.* Even as Kennedy embraced the

abstracting possibilities of the camera's frame, akin to early twentieth-century formalist photography, he was drawn to a Pictorialist presentation. The heavy colored papers and letterpress design situate a modern technology in an Arts

and Crafts tradition of printing that might seem to be at odds with the genre of the mass-produced stock photograph.

Kennedy's unconventional photographic method of dissection—his cutting

into and activation of the tactile, sensuous surfaces of stone—unsettles the idealism of the principal point of view and unyokes photography from its history as a device for the taxonomy of form, a device for understanding modeling. Orienting viewers to the fragmentary detail, the scholar-photographer used his camera as instructive of a temporal and contingent process of looking. As a tool for connoisseurship, Kennedy’s camera teaches us how to see the sculptural

surface. This much Ulrich Middeldorf—who had modernized the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in the early 1930s—registered when

he described the photographs as introducing “a totally new vision of sculpture. Those photographs taught what to look for: structure design, modelling and textures. They were not ‘more beautiful than the originals’ as has been said, they made their qualities better understood than any verbal analysis could do.’** For Kennedy, photography could aid the connoisseur’s eye and make an argument

for the haptic, contingent elements of a sculpture’s carved surface. Qualities of tactility are visualized in his photographs, paradoxically through the optical

device of the camera, which is here used as a medium of analysis in its own right.°* Sculpture is seen through its sensuous incisions and cavernous depths, through the particularly spatial indeterminacy of its manifold parts. Here again the comparison to Stokes is useful. In the critic's later writing on carving, he would rely on a Kleinian theory of object relations to equate

carving with how the infant relates to the whole object as separate from herself, acknowledging her limits. Richard Wollheim described how Stokes’s stone carver “respect[s] the integrity and the separateness of the stone, celebrates the whole object with which he characteristically enters into relation and also the integrated ego that he projects.”®* Like the sculptor’s chisel, the camera was a mechanical lens for encountering sculpture as an independent, vital surface. In Kennedy’s folios, photography distances the object—it cannot be possessed in

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a single view or understood as a stable, plastic form, but requires a process of fragmentation, of perception through the data of details.°° Even as the sculptural surface is probed and inscribed, analyzed and carved by the camera, the textured surfaces of stone are splintered into an infinitude of parts in photographs that acknowledge the limits of perception.

Notes I wish to thank Chris Lakey, Ralph Lieberman, Megan Luke, Anne McCauley,

Jeremy Melius, and Alex Potts for their feedback on this paper when it was presented at the Clark Art Institute and, in an earlier version, at the Getty Research Institute. I am also indebted to Joanne Bloom and Amanda Bowen, Fine Arts Library, Harvard

University, for their keen assistance with Clarence Kennedy’s archives, John Michael Morein for research assistance, and Joseph Romano, Oberlin College, for the illustrations. Research support was generously provided by an American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship and an H. H. Powers Travel Grant, Oberlin College. 1. Clarence Kennedy, “General Considerations for Shaping a Plan for the Use of

Stereo Photos of Sculpture,” ca. 1932, Carnegie Corporation of New York grant files, box 326, folder 20. 2. Adrian Stokes, Stones of Rimini (University Park: Penn State Press, 2002), 117. See

also Stephen Kite, introduction, Stones of Rimini, 8. 3. Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2013), 57. 4. Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 108.

5. See Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 148.

Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 108-9. . Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 114. Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 107-8. DS. Ss eo oS

Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 108.

10. Stokes includes two illustrations of reliefs in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, one by Donatello, which conveys qualities of modeling, and one by Agostino, which expresses carving, to illustrate how photography emphasizes qualities of modeling. See Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 135-36. 11. Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 108. 12. Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 136; “The greater the modeling conception in sculpture, the less are the values lost in photograph” (135).

13. Stokes wrote in a footnote, “The architectural arrangement of the reliefs determines the greater part of their attraction. I must apologize for my failure to obtain photographs that might show them to better advantage.” Stokes, Stones of Rimini, 108. 14. Plate 35 is offered as a detail for plate 34.

15. Frederick Bohrer has linked modern discourses of photographic objectivity and the emergence of art history as a scientific discipline. Frederick N. Bohrer,

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“Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of Art History,’ in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 250. The literature on photography’s role in the formation of the discipline is vast. For two recent approaches, see Costanza Caraffa, “From ‘Photo Libraries’ to ‘Photo Archives’: On the Epistemological Potential of Art-Historical Photo Collections, in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory ofArt History, ed. Costanza Caraffa (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 11-44; and Geraldine A. Johnson, ““(Un)richtige

Aufnahme’: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History, Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 12-51.

. Joel Snyder, “Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution,” in Sculpture and

Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29. . Snyder, “Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution,’ 33. 18.

For a discussion of how these conventions are aesthetically charged, for instance to convey ideals of timelessness, see Alex Potts, “Sculpture in Photography,’ in this volume.

19. As Etienne Jollet has noted, photographs served a double role in Stokes’s writing:

while on the one hand, they could make a sculpture present to an audience, on the other, they could guide the reading of the object too much, possibly closing off other descriptive possibilities. Etienne Jollet, “To Bring the Distant Things Near: Distance in Relation to the Work of Art in Stokes’s Thought,’ in The Coral Mind: Adrian Stokes’s Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis, ed. Stephen Bann (University Park: Penn State Press, 2007), 189-

20.

98, 194-96. For an excellent overview of Kennedy’s work and archives, see Melissa Lemke,

“A Connoisseur’s Canvas: The Photographic Collection of Clarence Kennedy,’ in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, ed. Costanza Carafta (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 323-33. 21.

The contributions of Kennedy’s wife, Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, an author and

professor, remain uncredited in the publications. In 1921 and 1922, the pair photographed the Parthenon frieze; sculptures in Paris, Bologna, and Athens; as well as the facades of North Italian Romanesque churches for Arthur Kingsley

Porter’s publications. Ruth was deeply involved in the letterpress design chosen

for the folios, and founded the Cantina Press, through which she published her own study on the concept of originality. See Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy to her mother, 4 August 1921, Kennedy Collection, College Archives, Smith College, Northampton, MA, box 47 “Scrap Album”; and Lemke, “A Connoisseur’s Canvas,” 326. 22.

The Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture series comprises vol. 1, part 1, Three Greek Bronzes, part 2, The Erechteion (1928); vol. 2, The Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini by Desiderio da Settignano and Assistants (1928); vol. 3, Certain Portrait Sculptures of the Quattrocento (1928); vol. 4, The Treasure of the Siphnians at Delphi (1929); vol. 5, The Tabernacle of the Sacrament by Desiderio

da Settignano and Assistants (1929); vol. 6, The Magdalen and Sculptures in Relief (1929); and vol. 7, The Unfinished Monument by Andrea del Verrocchio to the

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Cardinal Niccolo Forteguerri at Pistoia (1932), with essay by Elizabeth Wilder and a8

edited primary sources by Peleo Bacci (Northampton, MA: Smith College) See Lemke, “A Connoisseur’s Canvas,” 324. Kennedy’s photographs were included ina later publication: Frederick Hartt, Gino Corti, and Clarence Kennedy, The Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal 1434-1459 at San Miniato in Florence

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 24. For an overview of the art sets, see Abigail Deutsch, “Investing in America’s

Cultural Education: The Carnegie Art and Music Sets,” Carnegie Reporter 6, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 16-25, https://www.carnegie.org/media/filer_public/90/85/908591c2— 2065-4334-9f69-30be2e689503-ccny_creporter_2010_vol6no1.pdf

25. Clarence Kennedy to Frederick Keppel, 28 May 1925, Carnegie Corporation of New York Records, 1872-2000, grant files: box 326, folder 20. Volumes 1 and 2

were each printed in editions of 25; volume 3 in an edition of 16; volumes 4, 5, and 6 in editions of 57; and volume 7 in an edition of 100 with 32 plates and ten addi-

tional copies with 58 plates. 26.

Kennedy to Keppel, 28 May 1925.

27. Kennedy to Keppel, 28 May 1925. 28. Kennedy to Keppel, 28 May 1925.

29. For a discussion of Kennedy’s dissertation, see Dimitrios Zikos, “Clarence

Kennedy’s Photographs of Desiderio,’ in Desiderio da Settignano (Venice: Marsilio, 2011), 331-61, 332. 30. Clarence Kennedy, “Light and Shade and the Point of View in the Study of Greek

Sculpture,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1924, 48.

31. Kennedy, “Light and Shade,’ 33. 3), Kennedy, “Light and Shade,’ 27. 33.

Kennedy lists Hildebrand’s essay in his dissertation bibliography; see Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1893), in Empathy Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis

Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1994). He does

not cite Heinrich Wolfflin’s engagement with the photographic point of view in his 1896 and 1897 essays, “Wie Man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” Zeitschrift fiir

Bildende Kunst, republished as Heinrich Wélfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” trans. Geraldine Johnson, Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013): 52-71.

. Emanuel Loewy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art (1900), trans. J. Fothergill (London: Duckworth, 1907), 10. . Kennedy, “Light and Shade,” 22. . Kennedy, “Light and Shade;’86-87.

. Fora discussion of Emanuel Loewy’s law of frontality, see Whitney Davis, “Schema and Form: Lowy, Fry, Schafer,’ in Visuality and Virtuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). . Davis, “Schema and Form, 32. 39.

Davis, “Schema and Form,” 31.

40. On Giovanni Morelli’s Grundformen, see, for instance, Richard Wollheim,

“Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship? in On Art and the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 177-201; and Jeremy

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Melius, “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood, Art History 34, no. 2 (April 2011): 288-309. 41. The marble relief measures 68 x 53 cm. 42. Alison Wright, ““Touch the Truth’? Desiderio da Settignano, Renaissance Relief

and the Body of Christ,’ Sculpture Journal 21, no. 1 (2012): 7-25, 19.

43. For a discussion of the iconography of touch in low relief, see Francois Quiviger, “Relief Is in the Mind: Observations on Renaissance Low Relief Sculpture,” in

Field: Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy, ed. Donal Cooper and Marika Depth of Leino (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 169-89.

44. Later in his life, Kennedy had friendships with several modernist photographers, among them Paul Strand and Ansel Adams, and published an essay on portfolios by Ansel Adams and Brett Weston, “Photographs in Portfolio,” Magazine of Art, February 1950, 68-69.

45.

Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 2: 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 510-12.

46.

Beaumont Newhall recognized this energy in 1942: “Compared with the dreary, uninspired stock prints which are so often used for art courses, the Kennedy photographs are vital and alive.” Beaumont Newhall, “Photography as a Branch of Art History,” College Art Journal, no. 4 (May 1942): 87.

47. Alison Wright writes, “As Nicholas Penny has noted, the special lighting conditions required to appreciate Desiderio’s low reliefs were, under normal circumstances, something of ahandicap.” Wright, “Touch the Truth” 23. 48.

Clarence Kennedy to Keppel, 21 August 1930, Carnegie Corporation of New York Records, 1872-2000, grant files: box 326, folder 20.

49. Kennedy, “Report of the Progress of the Photographs of Sculpture during the Summer of 1925,” Carnegie Corporation of New York Records, 1872-2000, grant

files: box 195, folder 12.

50. See also Lemke, “A Connoisseur’s Canvas, 331. John Pope-Hennessey described the monument’s complex authorship and cited Kennedy and Wilder's volume as a key source. See John Pope-Hennessey, Italian Renaissance Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1958), 297.

51. Clarence Kennedy, “Sculpture Photography,’ in The Complete Photographer: Volume 9 (New York: National Education Alliance, 1943), 3190-99, 3197.

Sp Kennedy wrote in his 1925 report that existing photographs “showed the detail

only at a small scale, where it was impossible to identify its nature for comparisons with questioned works, or to see its actual character or its beauty.’ Kennedy, “Report of the Progress.” 53. As Geraldine A. Johnson notes, by the late 1880s detailed views were increasingly available from the Alinari firm. Johnson, “(Un)richtige Aufnahme,” 22.

54. Kennedy, “Report of the Progress.” 55. Kennedy described his technique for

controlling shadows to Keppel in 1925: “An automobile storage battery, and a search light with a fifty candlepower lamp provided the necessary illumination. It would last about five hours, after which it had to be taken out and recharged. The real problem was to overcome the artificiality

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of the effect ofadirect lighting of such power, high in the air where it was impossible to arrange any system of diffusers and reflectors. This was accomplished

by moving the light constantly during the entire exposure—sometimes a matter of forty five minutes. Thus any desired reflections could be introduced and the edges of the shadow softened until the effect was exactly that of diffused daylight.” Kennedy, “Report of the Progress.” 56.

Kennedy, “Report of the Progress.”

57: He made both 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 prints. 58.

The entire monument was moved across the church after World War II. See Tommaso Mozzati, “Tabernacle of San Lorenzo,” in Desiderio da Settignano: Sculpture of Renaissance Florence, ed. Marc Bormand and Nicholas Penny (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 228.

59. See Kennedy, “Sculpture Photography,’ 3197. 60. Carl Ludwig Fernow, as quoted and translated in Potts, The Sculptural

Imagination, 50. 61. 62.

Fernow, as in Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 50. Alex Potts writes, “Stokes saw collage as a modern equivalent to traditional carving by virtue ofits retrieving the given actuality and integrity of materi-

als and things as they occurred in the modern world.’ Potts, “Stokes and the Architectural Basis of Sculpture,’ in The Coral Mind, 13-36, 24. 63. Ulrich Middeldorf, “Clarence Kennedy 1892-1972, Art Journal 32 no. 3 (Spring

1973): 372, as cited in Lemke, “A Connoisseur’s Canvas,, 324. 64.

The photographs make possible “other modes of experience and forms of attention” to use Geraldine Johnson's description of such an alternate history that hinges on touch. Geraldine A. Johnson, “Touch, Tactility, and the Reception of Sculpture in Early Modern Italy,” in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 61-74.

65.

As cited in Anne M. Wagner, “‘Miss Hepworth’s Stone is a Mother,” in Sculpture

and Psychoanalysis, ed. Brandon Taylor (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 75. 66. For a related discussion of the role details played in a paradigm shift from knowl-

edge to information in the nineteenth century, see Jennifer Raab, “Introduction: Seeing in Detail,” Frederic Church: The Art and Science of the Detail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 1-19.

OS)

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The Photography of Renaissance Architecture between Pedagogy and the Museum Alina Payne

The photography of sculpture has been long acknowledged as a topic of importance in the field of art history and the reflection on its function goes back to

the fathers of the field and the early days of the new medium. For example, in the late 1890s, that is, at a time when many photographic albums of art-

works were being produced, Heinrich Wolfflin famously looked to Adolf von Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form (1893) to argue how photography should

be used for reproducing sculpture in a flat medium.’ And the two essays he wrote in 1896 inaugurated a sustained attention to this problem that continues

into our day.” The photography of architecture, on the other hand, has been

somewhat less intensely attended to, though the variety and innovation in this area have been even more remarkable if one thinks of dioramas and panoramas

and their exhibition, of topographical photography, or of the documentary use of architectural photography starting with the Commission des Monuments Historiques in France and their Mission Héliographique of 1851, which docu-

mented systematically 120 sites and employed noted figures like Edouard Baldus and Henri Le Secq.’ In particular, the early photography (hence reproduction)

of monuments of artistic and historical significance, that is, of architecture qua artwork, has garnered comparatively little attention. Yet, the selection of sites, the presentation, the materiality of the medium and its manipulation, the stylistic qualities of the images obtained all have interesting stories to tell. Much has been credited to the technical limitations of early photography, which, so

the argument goes, caused the abstracted quality of the photographs produced at the time. Thus, for example, the absence of details or atmospheric effects,

such as clouds, that were essential for picturesque views, and from which architectural photography is said to have evolved, is seen as the result of the long exposure times necessary. And it has been argued that these limitations led to

a reconfiguring of the subject, such that architecture became its own landscape and the camera explored it as such.*

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view, yet even so, not all absent effects were inevitable This is a valid point of or inescapable in early architectural photography. For example, the wet plate collodion photographs of the 1850s to 1880s permitted a very high quality in the details, which was absent in later techniques.° And as I will try to show in this essay, much was still left to the photographer's latitude, and a broad range

of decisions—aesthetic and otherwise—were not mechanically determined. What is particularly interesting here, given the development of photography on the eve of the establishment of art history as an academic discipline, is that the representation of architecture in the photographic medium, with all the intended and unintended effects, created a lens through which it was received and taught, analyzed and disseminated. Indeed, the phenomenon may be productively compared with the arrival of the printed and illustrated architectural

book in the sixteenth century, which has been acknowledged as a watershed event for architecture culture. Bound collections of prints like the Speculum Romae Magnificientiae (Rome, after 1550s) or illustrated books like Sebastiano Serlio’s Book III on Antiquities (Venice, 1540) traveled far and wide, dissemi-

nating classical architecture to the far corners of the earth—to Peru, Brazil,

Goa, Holland, Portugal, and beyond. Yet this was a heavily mediated dissemination of an architecture that the recipients would never actually see, for these book illustrations were surrogates which replaced direct viewing and sketching

from real life. Equally revolutionizing, I would argue, was the photograph— especially the photographic atlas—as it affected architecture and art historical

pedagogy and the reception of historical architecture three centuries later. The promise of the photograph is complete and unadulterated veracity, or as Roland

Barthes famously phrased it, “a specific photograph, in effect, is never distin-

guished from its referent (from what it represents)... . The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape.”® The photograph, as intermediary layer between architectural object and viewer, is therefore surreptitious, and thereby all the more powerful. But did photography, despite this apparent “contract” to be one with (or laminated to) reality, slip something into the commonplace of viewing such that we do not notice it anymore? Can we un-think or un-see the architectural monument from the photograph? 1. Burckhardt and Photographers of Renaissance Architecture

To begin to answer this question I will focus on one interesting convergence: of an art historian, of three architects, and of their photographic atlases, that is, on Jacob Burckhardt and a little-known nexus of architects that revolved around him more or less closely. Burckhardt wrote Der Cicerone in 1855 asa

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guidebook intended for both the connoisseur and the scholar “for the enjoyment of the works of Italy,” as he claimed modestly.’ The book was not illustrated, so copious and dense were the descriptions of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Twelve years later (and after the publication of the great Kultur der Renaissance in 1860) appeared his Die Geschichte der neueren Baukunst (1867),

as part of Franz Kugler’s series of volumes on historical architecture. The book was republished in 1868 with the title Die Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien

(a title that Burckhardt preferred); the images (drawings in this case) were added by Wilhelm Liibke, Burckhardt’s erstwhile colleague in Berlin and close

friend.* The work was a fragment as it was part of a much larger and unfinished project of Burckhardt’s, intended to include painting and sculpture as well, but as published it only covered architecture and decoration. Yet this focus

on architecture, even if somewhat unintended, had a significant consequence

in architectural circles: as we know, and as Christiane Tauber has discussed at greater length, architects responded enthusiastically, some even hailing him as

“the oracle of Basel.” However, these two books had also a less well-known sequel. In the wake of their publication, three architects began to gravitate around Burckhardt, with two of whom he started a close correspondence and friendship. They were Heinrich von Geymiiller, architect and historian (and the coauthor, with Carl Stegmann, of the multivolume Die Architektur der Renaissance in Toscana, pub-

lished in Munich starting in 1888), and Max Alioth, his cousin, a painter and

architect. To Geymiiller and Alioth, Burckhardt extended the accolade of being his eyes for looking at architecture by proxy: both traveled extensively across Europe, and with both he enjoyed a nearly twenty-year sustained correspondence greedily drawing on all they experienced and saw in their travels.’® The

third and perhaps most important missing link until now was one Alexander Schiitz, a Berlin architect and professor at the academy who visited Burckhardt in Basel, wrote to him in the ensuing years, and created one of the first, if not the first, photographic atlas of Italian Renaissance architecture in four volumes between 1878 and 1882 (published in Hamburg) based on the Cicerone

and Geschichte der Renaissance (fig. 1).'' In addition and contemporary with the Stegmann/Geymiiller project was one by Robert Reinhardt, who published an equally monumental set of volumes, the Palastarchitektur von Oberitalien und Toscana (1886-1911), with its Toscana volume among the first ones to come

out (in 1888).!? If not directly related to Burckhardt (though clearly related to the enthusiasm for Tuscany and the Renaissance his work had generated), this publication from Berlin was in synergy if not in outright competition with the other two atlas projects—one from Munich, the other from Hamburg—and thus inevitably entered a world of Burckhardtian photographic representation

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of Italian Renaissance architecture set up by them, further amplifying its spread and reach. Here, then, is Burckhardt, a prodigious user of photographs (his Nachlass of photographs now at the University of Basel runs into the thousands) and a major authority who set up the Renaissance as the lost golden age of a modern world now sadly threatened by its own modernity—and emerging out of the sphere of his influence, a way of seeing that architecture, of presenting it in photographs, and therefore of establishing how it would be looked at thereafter,

understood and used by architects and scholars.’* Indeed, available in large, elegant folios and ostensibly independent of Burckhardt’s texts, the photographs in these atlases seemed objective testimonies and gave rise to an economy of images that disseminated a particular vision of architecture. Yet the connection to Burckhardt was there, powerful and determining. Schiitz, producing the earFig.1. Palazzo Giugni Canigiani, Florence. From Alexander Schiitz, Die Renaissance in Italien: Eine Sammlung (Hamburg: Strumper, 1878-— 82), vol 1, Heft 1, n.p. Copy owned by Jacob Burckhardt.

liest of these atlases, was perhaps the most outspoken with respect to his work’s relationship to Burckhardt’s. The volumes are dedicated to Burckhardt and in

his dedication he describes how he sought to follow the Cicerone and accompany its clear and evocative descriptions with his photographs.’* But Geymiiller was just as in thrall to Burckhardt, and to some degree, in their wake, so too was

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the author of Palastarchitektur. What begins to emerge here then is a confluence of power: the power of Burckhardt to affect photography without him ever holding a camera in his hands, that is, the power of the word to call forth the image and to enliven it; and, subsequently, the power of the image to translate the word and to replace it. The first atlas of Renaissance architecture to be published was that of Alexander Schiitz and as such, it allows us to follow the thread of the Burckhardt-based economy of the image to its inception. This atlas is addi-

tionally important because not only were the images made with Burckhardt’s text alongside, and hence following Burckhardt’s eyes, but especially because

we know from Schiitz that he personally directed all the shoots and that the photographer was a sort of amanuensis: he himself was the mastermind behind the camera lens."* The work is proudly and extensively dedicated to Burckhardt (Schiitz describes how he came to do so in one of his letters) and is made up of four volumes of Hefte, or folders."® The individual sheets are quite large—about 36 by 45 centimeters—and the quality of printing and paper very high (the process is collotype, a version of photolithography). There is no text, except a

lengthy catalogue of cross-references between the photographs and the multiple locations in Burckhardt’s two publications where these buildings are discussed. Although Burckhardt is not the only reference, he is overwhelmingly the most frequent one. We know from the letters preserved between them that Schiitz presented Burckhardt with the volumes when they were first published, and that Burckhardt received them gratefully. Indeed, the copy of this atlas that Burckhardt owned, and that has been recently recovered, shows clearly his

attentive use of the images: he used them for teaching (he numbers them in the sequence in which he presumably passed them around the classroom, accord-

ing to his established teaching method) and occasionally corrects attributions.”” To be sure, these were not the only images Burckhardt had, but they seem

to have been his favorite teaching tool. Why would he number them otherwise, if not for a course that he will repeat, as he did his Renaissance Vorlesungen?

Indeed, the fact that Burckhardt liked the images and that they fully met his requirements is stated clearly in his thank-you letter to Schiitz: “The images as such are exceptional as regards the viewing angle and the perspective that was possible for the photographer, and they place almost everything that is available

on the market decidedly in shadow.’”* A comparison between Schiitz’s images and those Burckhardt bought on the market (now in the Burckhardt Nachlass), and to which he presumably refers in these lines, reveals subtle but significant differences. First and foremost they have to do with point of view (something Burckhardt was clearly very attentive to) and with inclusion and exclusion of extraneous material (Schiitz’s images

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Z

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(S, Croc

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leave out all contaminating stuff, concentrating exclusively on single, depopulated monuments) (figs. 2, 3). His choices are also particular with respect to

focus, to the use of lighting and perspective, and most importantly, to the presentation of a complete monument rather than partial views. Compared to the

other images Burckhardt bought, his are portraits of buildings, not buildings

in a city. Indeed, unlike most photographers of vedute, or city views, Schiitz was an architect, not an engraver or painter, and as such his views are not pic-

turesque (or malerisch): he is not seeking effects of light and shadow, and he eliminates carriages or passersby (a typical scale-producing element ever since

Piranesi included exaggeratedly small staffage figures in his prints). Instead, the palace facades in his photographs fill the screens, most often taken as if

in orthographic projection. This is not to say that he does not see the importance of perspective and of raking views. Occasionally he uses them as in the facade of the Palazzo Medici (fig. 4). But it is especially in such instances that

one can sense the sensibility of a Burckhardt reader at work: this is not simply a palace that forms a corner and that at its other end merges into the neighboring walls (as Alinari shoots it in the same period). Rather, as taken in this

photograph, the corner dramatizes the great overhang—much criticized upon

Fig. 2. View of Pazzi Chapel, Florence. From Alexander Schitz, Die Renaissance in Italien:

Eine Sammlung (Hamburg: Strumper,

1878-82), vol. 1,

Heft 1, n.p. Copy owned by Jacob Burckhardt.

Fig.3: View of Pazzi Chapel, Florence. From Burckhardt Nachlass,

University of Basel. Fig. 4. FLORENZ. PALAZZO:

RICCARDS.. PAGADE

Wuxace

(MICAELOZZ0)

MEDICT.

Corner view, Palazzo Medici, Florence. From Alexander Schiitz, Die Renaissance

in Italien: Eine Sammlung (Hamburg: Strumper, 187882), vol. 1, Heft 1, n.p.

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its building for being presumptuous and proud of the Medici to claim so much sky by covering it with their deeply projecting cornice, an intended and well-

understood symbol of their covert claims to leadership inside a republic. Thus photographed, this assertive corner is of one piece with Burckhardt’s prose, with his definition of the Gewaltmensch (the man of power), who characterizes the

Renaissance, be he a condottiere, a prince, or a great artist."” The proud shoulder of the great condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni is the equivalent of the Medici palace corner translated from body and sculpture into architectural photography, the architectural sign of the “birth ofthe individual” (fig. 5).*°

In the trade photographs that Burckhardt owned (and to which he refers when he praises with particular emphasis the viewing angles in Schiitz’s images), such nuances are absent. Derived from the veduta tradition, these photographs aimed more at capturing the picturesqueness of the siting than

at singling out specific monuments in close-ups. The origin of early Italian architectural photography in the engraving tradition of vedute is evident in the careers of many shops such as that of Giovanni Battista Maggi in Turin, who after 1858 shifted his activity from engraving and maps to selling the pho-

tographs of Italian cities by Giacomo Brogi from Florence.”’ The same path was followed by Tommaso Cuccioni, active in Rome (until 1864 and his heirs thereafter), who becomes a major photographer of Roman monuments for the

Fig. 5. Andrea del Verrocchio (Italian, 1435-88). Bartolomeo Colleoni, 1480-88, bronze. Venice, Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Unknown

photographer, before 1907.

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tourist trade, and by foreign photographers in Italy, especially Germans such as Giorgio Sommer (whose shop operated in Naples, and from whom Burckhardt bought photographs now in the Nachlass).”* This activity pattern was strongly related to travel photography, on the one hand, and responded to the limitations of the medium, on the other: photographers focused on buildings-as-views because they could withstand the long exposure times.”* As a business, they were made with a broad market and increased tourism in mind, essentially on speculation, blending travel photography and photography of artistic monuments into one. As such, they represented and created at the same time a kind

of consensus of what was important and how it might be seen, or as in the case of the Alinari, who developed a “portrait of the city” approach, they also offered

visual documentation on the territory in the age of Italian unification.”* These then were a far cry from the images by Schiitz, who intended to replicate a

particular critical reading, that is, Burckhardt’ eyes looking at the monuments. Nor were Schiitz’s photographs similar to the ones produced by Baldus and others for the Mission Héliographique of the Commission des Monuments Historiques, an inaugural architectural photography campaign in France two

decades earlier. Although Baldus retouched his photographs so as to monumentalize the buildings (in keeping with the ambition and even the name of the Commission) and sought to remove extraneous material, Schiitz’s approach was

even more instrumentalizing.** Conceived as a visual parallel to Burckhardt’s books, his photographs were intended as a reification of his words, descriptions,

and choices, and sought to make the image resonate with the text and the aesthetic it promoted, however subliminally. Stegmann and Geymiiller’s approach was also somewhat different, though

equally Burckhardtian in recording the historian’s canon of Florentine artists, with an emphasis on the fifteenth century. Unlike Schiitz’s volumes, the Toscanawerk aims to replicate a traditional architectural treatise—with scale

drawings, colored details, sections, and full-size ornament profiles, with text and commentary—as it befits an architect/historian such as Geymiiller. Yet instead of the traditional architecturally rendered views, the enormous folios include photographs, which add a level of immediacy that drawings could not attain. Something of a hybrid between an architectural treatise and a photographic album, it was clearly more professionally aimed, targeting the practicing (historicist) architect, in addition to the museum library, the academic, and (somewhat less) the tourist/connoisseur. But this is also why the Toscanawerk’s

photographs are very similar to those of Schiitz—very large, thus lending an almost physical presence to the buildings photographed, expensively printed images, on high-quality stock paper (some volumes on rag paper, hence sug-

gesting an ambition for near-luxury status), put together in folders like albums.

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There are differences between them, of course. For example, the Palazzo

Medici, though equally focused on the corner, seems far less aggressive in a near-orthogonal view (fig. 6). The frontal plane of the palace facade is parallel

to the picture, not like a ship cutting through the waves as in Schiitz’s case, and suggests more the architect’s elevation drawing rather than the perspective view. The interior of the church of Santo Spirito, on the other hand, is more dramatic, unlike the perfectly balanced view in Schitz’s take. The Pazzi Chapel is almost

identical, flat against and close to the picture plane with the cupola cut off

(unlike the images available in the trade, which are more concerned with showing the whole site). Yet, for all the subtle differences, Stegmann and Geymiiller, like Schiitz, shine a spotlight on specific monuments, detaching them as much as possible from their larger urban contexts to better document their forms.

Fig. 6. Corner view, Palazzo Medici, Florence. From Car! von Stegmann and Heinrich von Geymiller, Die Architektur der Renaissance in Toscana (Munich: Bruckmann, 18901908), vol. 2.

2. Architecture, Reproductive Photography, and Museum Objects

But beyond detaching historical buildings from their contexts to better present them as monuments, what Schiitz had proposed—as did Stegmann/Geymiiller in his wake—was, in effect, reproductive photography of architecture. The term

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has been used with reference to the reproduction of paintings, drawings, and prints into photographic albums, yet the strategy evident in Schiitz’s use of the

camera as it follows Burckhardt step by step and narrates the Renaissance in pictures, amounts to a version of reproductive photography applied to archi-

tecture.*° In Italy the decades between 1860 and 1880 marked the period of flowering for reproductive photography (of corpuses of drawings such as Raphael’s commissioned by Prince Albert, or of architectural drawings undertaken by Geymiiller himself, for instance) alongside that of photographic vedute

intended for the growing middle-class tourist market.” But with Schiitz and Stegmann/Geymiiller, these two prevailing modes hybridize to create an equiv-

alent for the reproductive photography of artworks that had architecture as its main object.** Rather than offer views of the city-with-monuments, these pho-

tographs produce a distancing effect akin to that of the object in the museum: architecture is presented through reproductive photography as a work of art, untouched and isolated as if in a glass case.

The fact that both photographic campaigns—Schiitz’s, like Stegmann/ Geymiiller’s—were conducted by architects is significant, and shows not only

an interest in useful models for design, but also a growing desire to lift architecture into the domain of art within the profession. Schiitz was the brain behind the camera for his volumes, though he used local photographers as technicians (such as G. Mattucci in Florence who had taken over Alphonse Bernoud’s oper-

ation there). The Studio Stegmann was responsible for the photographs of the Toscanawerk, which it had taken over from the Societa San Giorgio (a German

group of photographers in Florence). Which one of the two—Stegmann or Geymiiller—was responsible for guiding the camera work (and when, in the

long history of the project) is unclear. Yet Geymiiller was also an architect, and was a photographer himself and the initiator of a corpus of photographed

architectural drawings (a subject on which he corresponded at length with Burckhardt) and could not but have been involved.” Finally, Reinhardt too was an architect and his Palastarchitektur was also photographed by architects (all listed on the title page), thus signaling the development of a trend away from the painter/engraver photographer to the specialist of a three-dimensional art. In this process, and in these works, architectural photography looked to sculpture—another three-dimensional art form—around which had evolved a technique and style of photography all its own. The slippage may also have been

facilitated by another striking resemblance between Schiitz’s and Stegmann/ Geymiiller’s corpuses: the inclusion of sculpture in works devoted to architecture. Schiitz’s volumes are chronological and material-based—with two volumes of early and high Renaissance and two volumes on stone, terracotta, and wood decoration (ostensibly following Burckhardt’s category Decoration in his

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Baukunst book)—thus devoting a significant amount of space to sculpture. In fact, Schiitz’s focus is on sculpture inasmuch as it modifies architecture, and he

includes altars and ciboria, baptismal fonts and basins, wooden sacristy furniture, and carved choir stalls (fig. 7).

As he acknowledges, Schiitz is also and equally indebted to the architect Gottfried Semper (Burckhardt’s colleague at the ETH in Zurich from 1855 to 1857) for this approach that privileges materiality and making in a treatment of

architecture.*° Yet this interest in architectural furniture, or Kleinarchitektur— sculpture/objects made of the materials of architecture (marble, stone, mosa-

ics) or embedded in it—that subliminally connects sculpture and architecture may also be found in Burckhardt. The same is true of Stegmann/Geymiiller. Although their strategy is monographic—moving from one artist to another

(unlike Burckhardt), in a Vasarian manner, quasi-biographical, documenting the oeuvre rather than taking a historical cut across sites, yet, like Schiitz, they

too include sculptors active on the borderline between sculpture and architecture: the Pollaiuolos, the Rossellinos, Desiderio da Settignano, Donatello,

Benedetto da Maiano, and others. Indeed, they follow the exact angles and views of Kleinarchitektur that are illustrated in Burckhardt’s architecture book (inserted by Liibke but with Burckhardt’s approval). The synergy with

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ity

Burckhardt’s work is arresting and not coincidental. Although Geymiiller does not refer to Burckhardt on every page as Schiitz does, his relationship to his

written work was just as strong and deferential. Not only were they close friends and not only did he seek Burckhardt’s advice in all his ventures, but he also personally helped edit and update Der Cicerone (the architecture parts of the fifth and sixth editions), precisely at the time of production of the Toscanawerk.”" Regardless of differences, in both atlases the Kleinarchitekturen included are cut off from their contexts and are presented as individual works of art,

brightly lit objects sharply cut out against dark (or completely neutral) backgrounds. In short, the mode used is that of reproductive photography of sculp-

ture such as the Anderson shot of the Colleoni monument or, almost half a century later, the 1930s Brogi photograph of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, where a curtain was installed to shield the public sculpture from the Palazzo Vecchio wall against which it is placed for the sake of obtaining a “clean” pho-

tograph without visual noise in the background (fig. 8).** The presence that the Kleinarchitekturen claim—close to the picture plane, far closer than the viewer could ever get to in real life (for Donatello’s pulpit at the cathedral of Prato the photographer must have been up on a platform)—gives them a physicality that

counters the dematerialization effected through photography. In addition, the

Fig. 7. Chancel, Certosa in Florence. From Alexander Schutz, Die Renaissance in Italien:

Eine Sammlung (Hamburg: Strumper, 1878-82), vol. 3, Heft 6, n.p.

Fig. 8. Donatello (Italian, ca. 13861466). Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1460, bronze. Florence, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio.

Photo by Giacomo Brogi Photographers, 1930.

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grainy image, the textured, thick paper that enhances tactility, the richness of the shadows that are completely saturated deeply enhance materiality and presence. Indeed, the isolation of the object and its monumentalization in these

picture atlases exaggerates their real scale. For example, Benedetto da Maianos pulpit in Santa Croce is relatively small, and it is located in the nave, that is, not distanced from people, framed in its own context like wall tombs or chapel sculpture. Instead, in these photographs, site-specific objects such as this one

are displayed in isolation, as if in a museum, surrounded by the museum hush, by its artificial lighting and airtight atmosphere. Schiitz treats the architecture he photographs similarly, as an artwork and

oversized sculpture that he detaches from its background. In his view of the oratory of San Bernardino in Perugia, for example, the building is flattened, the surroundings are cut out, and architecture becomes an object on display just like Benedetto da Maianos pulpit or the chancel in the Certosa in Florence (see fig. 7, fig. 9). The same museum effect is visible later in the Stegmann/Geymiiller

volume, in the images of architecture such as Alberti’s main portal to Santa Maria Novella, where the wall takes up the whole picture and no space seems to exist outside its own materiality. Perhaps the museum effect is even stronger

DIE

Fig. 9. Facade, Oratory of San Bernardino, Perugia. From Alexander Schutz, Die Renaissance in Italien: Eine Sammlung (Hamburg: Strumper, 1878-82), vol. 1, Heft 2.

RENAISSANCE

IN

ITALIEN.

PERUGIA, CONFRATERNITA FACADE.

DLS. BERNARDINO

(AGOSTINO DI GUCCIO,

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in Schiitz. The dignity and significance that Burckhardt’s prose had conferred upon Renaissance buildings and objects emanates powerfully from these photos. Burckhardt had made them into universal models, given them a stature equal to ancient and medieval monuments, and the images support that prose by various devices—scale, cutouts, elimination of daily incident, the implication of the museum spectatorship. When one looks at a Schiitz object and palace, one can see similar strategies bleeding across media: the sculpture is architec-

turized, lifted to the level of monument, while the architecture is elevated into sacrality, to the level of sculpture as museum object, an aesthetic fulcrum. Both

are treated as three-dimensional, cubic objects that rest on their plinths as if in a museum display case. These photographs invited and permitted the kind of intense contemplation that Burckhardt’s detailed, fulsome, almost excessive notes on viewing sculpture close-up record (such as his closely recorded exami-

nation of the Pergamon altar)—a translation of words into image, the potential

of words embedded in the image.** Such an approach was not the result of mechanical limitations, but rather a deliberate strategy. Schiitz’s images, like Geymiiller’s, fill the page: no air is available, no sky, no wind, no nature, and almost no shadows. These are not impressionistic images exploiting terrain and lighting effects, but dispassionate ones, of objects in a vitrine, exhibited—an exterior treated as if in an inte-

rior. Nor did photographic images of buildings have to be devoid of people. Many photographers, such as the Alinari, Brogi, and others, included them no

matter how long an exposure time this entailed. Indeed, there was demand for “peopled” scenes and alongside panoramas (the vedute of old), the “angoli della

citta” (picturesque corners of the city), scene di costume (genre scenes—washerwomen, artisans at work, and so on), and art objects from museums, the Alinari

also produced “vedute animate,’ where passers-by enliven the city scene (it was all completely posed and artificial). Instead, what Schiitz and the Toscanawerk developed is the architectural photograph on equal footing with the photograph of art objects from museums. In short, what these photographs bring to their subjects is an aura—in a

reversal of Benjamin’s assessment of mechanical reproduction.** Here the mechanical reproduction transforms the object and conveys upon it a form of

sanctity, heightens it above daily experience, extracts it from the city and the picturesque and makes it into a monument, where otherwise it might be just another building on the street (such as any Alinari image from Burckhardt'’s Nachlass). The material aspects of these atlases also added to the aura of these objects, and raised them to the level of sacrality of museum exhibits. Both Schiitz and Stegmann/Geymiiller use the collotype process and chose publishers who were specialists in this technique. This was a very high-end printing

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objects process that proclaims the luxury item, just as the museum dignifies the it displays. In fact, the photographs—staged and printed—confirmed visually the verbal elevation of the Renaissance to a golden age. Photography creates the monument, and it does so by its subtle implications of a neighboring art

form—sculpture—which belongs in the museum, and which, by association, lifts architecture into its pure, contemplative world. In his now-famous essay “Der moderne Denkmalkultus” of 1903 Alois Riegl

conjured up a vision of the city as a backdrop for selected buildings that contained the aura of age, history, or art—all at once or only one of the three—as if under spotlights, detached from what surrounded them.*° The photographic albums achieved the same effect and may well have fueled this vision. The atlas format also helped: infinitely re-organizable, it invited movement around discrete objects, like multiple paths through many exhibits. It was Burckhardt’s Musée Imaginaire.

The casualty of the transition from picturesque views to architecture as objects of art is memory, and the site of this loss is the museum. As Dominique Poulot has argued, in the wake of the 1789 Revolution, Alexandre Lenoir could

save the French dynastic monuments because once placed in the museum they became art and were vacated of memory and hence socially acceptable.*° The same phenomenon is at work in the architecture atlases. Unlike the national-

ist project of a country in the throes of unification, which guided the Alinari’s efforts to create a symbolism of the Italian city and patrimony and which

requires memory as underpinning, the museological impulse evident in the photographs of both Schiitz and Stegmann/Geymiiller responds instead to the rise of art history as an academic discipline and the teaching of historical archi-

tecture to the architects of eclecticism.*”? Memory means events, people, costume, and the particular moment. Once eliminated from architecture through the agency cf photography, like the gritty backdrops of public sculptures behind curtains, what is left is the universalizing quality of the museum. Notes [am particularly grateful to Maurizio Ghelardi for generously sharing with me his discovery of the Alexander Schiitz volumes owned by Burckhardt in the library of the University of Basel, and to Daniela del Pesco and Neil Levine for suggestions and

stimulating conversations about architectural photography. i am also greatly indebted to Amanda Bowen from the Special Collection of the Harvard Fine Art Library for helping me with the photographic material for this essay.

1. Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1893). For an English translation, see The Problem

of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German

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Aesthetics, 1873-1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios

Ikonomou (Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1994).

. Heinrich Wélfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll I} Zeitschrift fiir bildende Kunst, N.F., 1896, 224-28; and Heinrich Wélfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen

aufnehmen soll II,” Zeitschrift fiirbildende Kunst, N.E., 1897, 294-97. For an

English translation, see Heinrich Wolfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” trans. Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History 36, no. 1 (February 2013):

52-71. In addition to bibliography on sculpture and photography contained in this volume see also Michael Cole, “Sculpture before Photography,” in Vision and Its Instruments, ed. Alina Payne (University Park: Penn State Press, 2015), 241-58.

. See Philippe Néagu et al., La Mission héliographique: Photographies de 1851, exh. cat. (Paris: Direction des Musées de France, 1980); Photographier larchitecture 1851-1920, ed. Anne de Mondenard exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994), and Anne de Mondenard, La mission héliographique. Cinque

photographes parcourent la France en 1851 (Paris: Monume, 2002). . Eve Blau, “Patterns of Fact: Photography and the Transformation of the Early Industrial City,’ in Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation from the Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, ed. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian

Centre for Architecture, 1989), 36-57.

. Pascal Griener, “La résistance a la photographie en France au XIXeme siecle: Les publications (histoire de l'art,’ in Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Costanza Carafta (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 60. . Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 5-6.

. Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italien, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 2 vols., ed. Bernd Roeck, Christine Tauber and Martin Warnke (1855, 2nd ed. 1869; Munich and Basel: Beck & Schwabe, 2001). . Jacob Burckhardt, Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Italien, Kritische

Gesamtausgabe 5, ed. Maurizio Ghelardi (1868 [as Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien]; Munich and Basel: Beck & Schwabe, 2000).

. Christiane Tauber, Jacob Burckhardts “Cicerone” (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000), 253-59. 10.

Carl von Stegmann and Heinrich von Geymiiller, Die Architektur der Renaissance in Toscana, 11 vols. (Munich: FE. Bruckmann, 1885-1908); Jacob Burckhardt,

Briefwechsel mit Heinrich von Geymiiller (Munich: Georg Miiller and Eugen Rentsch, 1914); Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an einen Architekten 1870-1889 (Munich: Georg Miiller and Eugen Rentsch, 1913). 11.

Alexander Schiitz, Die Renaissance in Italien. Eine Sammlung (Hamburg: Strumper, 1878-82), 4 vols. Schiitz traveled to Basel in May of 1878 ahead of

the publication of his work to visit Burckhardt. Alexander Schiitz to Jacob Burckhardt, 14 September 1878. 12.

Robert Reinhardt, Palastarchitektur von Oberitalien und Toscana (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1886-1911).

13. On Burckhardt as passionate collector of photographs and believer in the value of

the medium see Nikolaus Meier, “Der Mann mit der Mappe. Jacob Burckhardt und

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die Reproduktionsphotographie,’ in Jacob Burckhardt. Storia della cultura, storia 259-97. delliarte, ed. Maurizio Ghelardi and Max Seidel (Venice: Marsilio, 2002),

ig vor, 14. “Dieser Sammlung einen erlauternden Text beizugeben, kam mir iiberfliiss da Herr Professor Jakob Burckhardt das Wesen jener gewaltigen Epoche . . . bereits in so uniibertrefflicher Weise gezeichnet . . . Ich durfte mich also beschranken,

in der Auswahl und Anordnung des Stoffes Burckhardts Cicerone méglichst zu folgen, und versuchte mit seinen anschaulichen Schilderungen, sowie seiner klaren und fachgemassen Kritik das Bild zu gesellen.” Schiitz, Die Renaissance, vol. 1, n.p. 15. On photography as tied to mass media and the rising tourism in Italy following

unification, see Daniela del Pesco. “Fotografia e scena urbana fra artigianato e industria culturale” in Immagine e citta. Napoli nelle collezioni Alinari e nei fotografi napoletani fra ottocento e novecento (Naples: Gaetano Macchiaroli, 1981), 65-107. 16.

“Ich kann Ihnen versichern hochverehrtester Herr Professor, daJs wohl kaum in

uneigenniitzigerer Absicht, nur als Aus-flu/s der tiefsten Verehrung und warmsten Dankbarkeit eine Widmung erfolgte. Ich bin ein Schiiler Hase’s in Hannover, also von Haus aus Gothiker, ein unwissender Alltagsmensch, nur durchdrungen von der innigsten Liebe zur Kunst. Ihren Werken war es vorbehalten mich einzufiihren in die ital. Renaissance, und Sie werden daher verstehen, daJs die

Art wie solches dort geschehen, mich zu Ihrem dankbaren Schiiler machen muJste, dem es Bediirfnifs war, seinen Dank auch zu bethatigen.” Alexander Schiitz to Jacob Burckhardt, Berlin, 10 December 1878. Staatsarchiv Basel, Signatur PA 207, 52 S. Schiitz was a student of Haase’s in Hanover and started as

a Gothicist, as he acknowledges in his letter to Burckhardt. Burckhardt’s books converted him to the Renaissance, and he has all the zeal of the convert. He visited Burckhardt in Basel in 1878. 173 The atlas was known to have been bought by the university library in Basel and

was described by Max Burckhardt in Burckhardt’s letters, but it was lost and only recovered a few months ago. 18.

“Die Aufnahmen als solche sind, zumal was den Augpunct und die dem Photographen mogliche Perspektive betrifft, ganz vorziiglich zu nennen und stellen das Weitmeiste was sonst im Handel vorkommen mag, entschieden in Schatten.” Burckhardt, Letters, vol. VI, 188, Letter 794. Max Burckhardt, editor of

19.

the letters, proposed that Burckhardt used the plates to illustrate his lectures. Burckhardt characterizes with this term both the powerful overlords (the Este, Sforza, Borgia, etc.) and the greatest artists, Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo among them. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860: Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner, 1988), 104-6.

20.

Burckhardt assigns the Palazzo Medici the epithet “gewaltig,” thereby suggesting a symmetry between a Gewaltmensch (Cosimo Medici) and his abode. He also describes the cornice as “prachtvoll schwer” and mentions frequently Cosimo’s

concern with igniting the envy of hiscontemporaries. Burckhardt, Die Baukunst, 51. Likewise in Der Cicerone he addresses the problem of the colossal cornice as signature feature of the Florentine palace. Burckhardt, Cicerone, 159.

BURCKHARDT’S

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EYES

On photography and the veduta tradition, see Maria Antonella Fusco, “Il ‘luogo commune’ paesaggistico nelle immagini di massa; in Storia d'Italia. Annali s. II paesaggio, ed. Cesare Seta (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1982), 753-801. For an example

of the subjects of early photography in Rome, see La fotografia a Roma nel secolo XIX. La veduta, il ritratto, larchaeologia. Atti del convegno Palazzo Braschi December 1989 (Rome: Artemide Edizioni, 1991). 22.

Lafotografia a Roma, 163, 150. On Sommer, see Un viaggio fra mito e realta. Giorgio Sommer fotografo in Italia 1857-1891, ed. Marina Miraglia and Ulrich Pohlmann, exh. cat. (Rome: Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1992).

23. See for example the Nile pictures of 1859-60, 1877, 1875. Susanne Miiller, Die Welt des Baedeker. Eine Medienkulturgeschichte des Reisefiihrers 1830-1945 (Frankfurt:

Campusverlag, 2012), 155-70. 24. For the Alinari who developed the “figure di citta” as a genre, see Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Gli Alinari (Florence: Alinari, 2003), 19, chapter 6. For a broader syn-

thetic reading, see Marina Miraglia, “Note per una storia della fotografia italiana

(1839-1911)

» >

in Storia dellarte italiana, II (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1981), 462-65.

25. On Baldus and his retouching of photographs and isolating his architectural sub-

jects the better to monumentalize them (“dégagement”) see Barry Bergdoll, “A Matter of Time: Architects and Photographers in Second Empire France,’ in The

Photography of Edouard Baldus, ed. M. Daniel, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994). 26.

Stephen Bann, “The Photographic Album as a Cultural Accumulator,’ in Art and

the Early Photographic Album, ed. Stephen Bann (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2011), 7-29; Anthony Hamber, “Facsimile, Scholarship, and Commerce:

Aspects of the Photographically Illustrated Art Book (1839-1880),” in Bann, Art and the Early Photographic Album, 124-47.

O77 Fotografia italiana dellottocento, exh. cat. Florence-Venice, 1979-80 (Milan:

Electa and Florence: Fratelli Alinari). On the Raphael project, see Dorothea

Peters, “From Prince Albert’s Raphael Collection to Giovanni Morelli: Photography and the Scientific Debates on Raphael in the Nineteenth Century,” in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, ed. Costanza Caraffa (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 129-44. 28.

Photographs were cheaper than prints as a seller lamented: “commercio della fotografia é felicissimo perche il loro prezzo ¢ la sesta o settima parte di quello delle stampe, la consevazione di esse e il loro trasporto piu commodo e presentano qualche cosa di piu elegante per la loro piccolo dimensione.’ Marina

Miraglia, “Leta del collodio,’ in Fotografia italiana, 45. See also del Pesco, “Fotografia e scena urbana fra artigianato e industria culturale,” on prices. Other areas of development were scientific photography of documentation, and that of reconstructing (and restaging) battle scenes, important in post-unification Italy. See La fotografia a Roma and Fotografia italiana, 130. 29. The announcement of the Toscanawerk appears in the 29 November 1882 issue

of Deutsche Bauzeitung (the leading German architectural periodical) as the work of the Societa San Giorgio, but Stegmann took over the same year and Geymiiller was invited to write the text and in this period he traveled almost

every year to Tuscany. Not coincidentally, 1882 was the same year the last Schiitz

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volume appeared and it signals the incentive he gave to the nascent photography of monuments. There were noteworthy disagreements among Geymiiller, Carl Stegmann, and his art historian son, Hans Stegmann, such that the former was asked to leave the project in 1890. He returned to it in 1897 upon Stegmann’s death. The role of the Societa San Giorgio is stated clearly on the volume’ title page: “nach den Aufnahmen der Gesellschaft San Giorgio in Florenz herausgegeben, weitergefiihrt und vollendet von Carl von Stegmann und Heinrich von Geymiiller.” On Geymiiller’s career, see Heinrich von Geymiiller (1839-1909).

Architekturforscher und Architekturzeichner, ed. Josef Ploder and Georg Germann (Basel: F. Reinhardt, 2009).

30. As architect Schiitz was clearly aware of the main theoretical positions in his field at the time, and no architect had greater visibility in Germany, especially as theorist and author, than Gottfried Semper. His major opus was and remains Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten oder Praktische Aesthetik (Frankfurt

am Main: Verlag fiir Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860-63). When Burckhardt starts teaching in Basel in the fall of 1858 he laments in his opening lecture how difficult it is to teach without images: “Schwierigkeit, von einer Formenwelt ohne Abbildungen zu reden’; see Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kunst der Renaissance, vol. 2 (Munich and Basel: C. H. Beck and Schwabe, 2014), 1. Bil, Tauber, Jacob Burckhardts “Der Cicerone.” 32. For examples of the removal of backgrounds in sculpture photography (e.g.

Donatello'’s sculpture by Alinari of 1903), see Geraldine A. Johnson, “Using the

Photographic Archive: On the Life and Death of Images,’ in Caraffa, Photo Archives, 154. For earlier examples of the practice which included the photography of wall paintings in churches, cut out and pasted on white backgrounds, see Alessandro Conti, “Storia di una documentazione, in Gli Alinari Fotografi a Firenze, 1852-1920 (Florence: Alinari, 1977), 162. 33. For example see his notes on the Pergamon altar guidebook recording his impres-

sions: “Die Gottin gewaltig reich gelockte, mit iippigem Antlitz und Queerfalten am Halse.—Der Schlangenfissler will sich wirkl nur noch retten. Seine Musculatur erinnerte mich an die des vatican. Torso.” Burckhardt autograph annotations on Beschreibung der Pergamenischen Bildwerke (Berlin: Weidmann 1882), 16. Nachlass Stehelin, P-A 208, 125 Basel University Library. 34. Walter Benjamin, “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?’ in Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed, Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-52. 35. Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung,” in Gesammelte Aufsatze, ed. A. Rosenauer (1903; Vienna: WUV-Universitatsverlag,

1996), 139-84. 36.

Dominique Poulot, “Alexandre Lenoir et les musées des monuments francais,” in Les lieux de memoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 1515-44.

37.

On photography as a builder of national identity in the age of unification, inevitably focused on the city and a recognizable territory as well as on memory/memorializing, see Quintavalle, Gli Alinari, 116, 141.

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THE LONG ARM OF THE LENS Photography, Colonialism, and African Sculpture Suzanne Preston Blier

In 1963 William Buller Fagg published his now-classic Nigerian Images: The Splendor of African Sculpture, richly illustrated with photographs by the German photographer Herbert List (1903-1975) (see pl. 8).’ The volume appeared three

years after Nigerian independence from British colonial rule. In different ways, both events reflect on the tangible outcome of the 1897 British sacking of Benin City, the theft ofits rich art treasury (ivories and bronzes, most notably), and

the exile of the Edo king, Oba Ovonramwen. Today it is hard to engage Benin

art in many circles without addressing the punitive expedition. Like the Elgin marbles, the return of stolen property to rightful owners often figures promi-

nently in related discussions. The role that photography has played in African and other colonial engagements is a subject of rich scholarly interest. There is

now a significant corpus of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial photography addressing questions such as stereotypes and the photographic archive

as related to African art more specifically.” The striking differences between various scholarly vantages and the larger issues of how photographic practices shape the very practice of art historical study are particularly noteworthy. In

short, what I am doing here is in part shifting away from questions of modernist appropriation and fascination with these objects through photography and emphasizing instead how this same medium has played a seminal role in shaping and mediating the field of African art history itself.

Nigerian Images is considered in some ways William Fagg’s most seminal contribution to the field of African art history. The 144 black-and-white pho-

tographs, comprising the bulk of this 174-page volume, speak to the deep and often difficult relationship among photography, colonial history, African art scholarship, and related art circulation. William Fagg and Herbert List featured prominently in this colonial legacy. The initial lines of the volume’s blurb read: “When British colonial pioneers first drew the frontiers of what was to become

modern Nigeria, they unwittingly defined an area in which were found nearly

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all the materials on which our understanding of African art history is based” Notable here is not only the removal of the Nile Valley and the Islamic north from African art history but also the relative dearth of information on historical aspects of sub-Saharan African art in this era. The closing lines of the publishers blurb for this book address Fagg’s “uniquely authoritative textual analysis” and Herbert List’s role in bringing “the intense poetic feeling and acute sense of

form that made him an artist of international renown”? The emotional power List brings to these works in some ways reengages

enduring Western biases concerning African cultural practices more generally, emphasizing their purported emotional content and expressive power (fear, pleasure), rather than intellectual content, history, economic significance, or political ends. This kind ofprivileging of the emotional within African art studio photography complements the historic Western biases at play in addressing

Africa and people of African descent more generally, as well as a legacy of certain strands of scholarship in the field that has privileged use (function) or local aesthetic terms and expressions over the historical sociopolitical issues at play. The Photographic Double System

William Fagg (1914-92) is generally seen as one of the good guys of the colonial

era. The legacy of early African art connoisseurs like Fagg is in many respects similar to the history and legacy of photography more generally. Allan Sekula observes of photography that “the simultaneous threat and promise of the new medium .. . was recognized at a very early date. ... We are confronting, then, a double system: a system of representation capable of functioning both honor-

ifically and repressively.”* While for Sekula “this double operation is most evident in the workings of photographic portraiture,”® it is equally and in some

ways even more strongly at play in the development of the African art archive in colonial and in post-independence contexts. The visual archive, which had

emerged with the physical sciences as a means of documenting and analyzing core differences between species of flora and fauna, also played a key role in the burgeoning “science” of police work and racial typologies. The photographic archive found new footing as well in art collecting practices in the colonial era, which reached an apex in the same 1880s and 1890s period that the new “sciences” of criminology and race were finding broad societal support. In similar ways the photograph archive “as an encyclopedic repository of exchangeable images” also played an important role in the circulation and sale of artworks coming from the wars for colonial control of regions around the world, including much of Africa.

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Whereas Sekula focuses on the archive’s effect on the objects and/or people represented, Susan Sontag has addressed the archive’s power-laden elements and qualities of violence, pointing to the ways that “photographs are a way of imprisoning reality,” evoking the “camera is a sublimation of the gun,”* and the fact that “photographs really are experience captured.” William Fagg’s photographs reflect vital elements of both the Sekula and Sontag premises. Among other things, his photographic archive defines and in a sense comes to stand for Fagg’s own investment as a scholar, for the particular context of the photographic documentation is also the moment when he was able to document and access the core local research insights about these works for which he has become so well known. If the glossy large-format Herbert List photographic plates in Nigerian Images speak to the primacy of Nigerian art as “art” (seen today in problematic Western terms as works without function or use), then

the wide array of photographs of in situ shrines and related images that distinguish the Fagg archive address issues of discovery and documentation that are a central part of many African art historical research projects. The cover photograph of Nigerian Images depicts a striking Benin cire per-

due copper alloy mask with serpents emerging from facial orifices. It also offers evidence of Nigeria’s colonial collection history, although the issue as such was given little play in the era in which this book was published. This important

work, dramatically lit from below and cropped closely for greater effect, gives the impression of a fire-lit ceremonial ritual, in which we see a masked priest peering down at his potential victim. In European cultures, serpents evoked

biblical tropes of original sin in the distant Garden of Eden. Similarly, in Africa the motif carried associations with original sin and the assumed benefits that fresh troops of missionaries would assure by way ofconversion. The aura of fear

in this cover is enhanced by the blood-red lettering that emblazons the title, Nigerian Images.

It matters little that locally such masks were considered to be highly prestigious castings that were worn as pectorals (not face masks), and that this undulating serpent motif is identified today with the Benin Osun cult linked

to traditions of healing as well as with a powerful nearby circa 1300 CE Yoruba king of Ife, Obalufon II, and his great powers of healing and renewal.'° Fagg himself photographed a number of copper alloy pectorals with similar serpent motifs in shrines in the southern Nigerian area. The greater aim of this cover photograph was to bring an image to the buying public that conformed to what they “knew” African art to be. Similarly dramatic photographic engagements still are found in many books and articles on African art.!! This photograph and the cover it dominates speak to the ways that African art often continues to be

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framed in the Western imaginary, as well as how malleable sculpture and other three-dimensional works are to photographic variables such as lighting, shading, point of view, lens angle, backgrounds. The potential of photography, particularly of three-dimensional subjects, to convey emotion and sentiment is one of the key reasons why Alphonse Bertillon insisted in his classic treatise La photographie judiciare, on the development of “an aesthetically neutral standard of representation . . . liberated from these considerations.””” In this sense photographic portraits carry similar considerations to works of sculpture. The potential impact of artistic engagement in a photographer's approach to sculptural form in fine art photography is what makes this genre so different from the reproduction of two-dimensional

works, where capturing the surface of an image as accurately as possible is the standard. In large measure this is why copyright law today often necessitates not only permission from a sculpture’s owner, but also from the photographer. To photograph a sculpture is necessarily to add another layer of aesthetic engage-

ment and technical acumen to the aesthetic mix. The complexities of and individual investment in the photography of sculpture is in large measure why List was hired for the Nigerian Images book project. List was a well-known fashion and portrait photographer who also explored ancient temples, ruins, and landscapes in his work. Sculpture was, in effect, little different from other subjects of his photographic practice. Interestingly,

List’s photographs of the stunning Nigerian sculptures from the earliest Nok era (fig. 1) to the early to mid-twentieth century showcased in Fagg’s volume have become key models for art forgers working in places such as the Cameroon grasslands center of Foumban, where in 2004 | encountered art forgers creating modern-day versions of early Nigerian works in terracotta and copper

alloy modeled after early Nigerian works featured in Nigerian Images. Seeing this well-worn volume in one of the artist’s compounds while undertaking

research there gave unique meaning to the issue of art circulation and the role of photographic archives within the very fabric of the art market. While the false assumption perpetuated in the West today that most African art found

in Western collections was absconded during colonial raids such as the Benin punitive expedition, the very success of these prolific forgers reflects a very

different situation, namely that most African artworks that have entered in museum and private collections in the twentieth century have arrived in the West through private dealers, African as well as Western. These individuals often acquire their works in local settings through contexts that range from a family’s religious conversion, to financial need (for health care, education etc.),

to contexts of local or other theft. Since so many important artworks still are

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coming out of African settings, and there are so few local museums on the con-

tinent with funds for acquisitions, it makes the possibility of new finds viable. Books such as Fagg’s establish a set of desired canonical works that collectors readily recognize and seek out.

Fagg’s own history is interesting in this light. The son ofa book antiquarian, he studied classics at Cambridge. Two years later, after earning a supplementary BA in archaeology and anthropology, he was named assistant keeper

at the British Museum's department of ethnography (Museum of Mankind), interrupted by his service in the Second World War. Africa was his accorded subject of responsibility, although at the time he had limited knowledge ofit. He formed relationships with key dealers on the continent as well as various artists Fig. 1. Sonogram showing exterior and interior of fake Nok-style sculpture (Nigeria), probably made after 1980 to pass for a work of ca. 500 BCE-200 CE.

who had, following Picasso, begun to appreciate African works. In time, Fagg became one of the field’s important African art connoisseurs. He undertook several trips to Nigeria beginning in 1949 and 1950. When his brother, Bernard

Fagg, became a colonial officer there, they helped to found the colony’s first

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museum. From his post he began to collect Benin and other arts for what would become the national museum." He also began a larger photographic project there, traveling around southwestern Nigeria to document historic artworks in local shrines and other collections. In this process he created an important visual archive, housed in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, on which scholars of Nigerian art continue to rely. In time, Fagg rose to the posi-

tion of keeper of African art at the Museum of Mankind. Following his retirement in 1974 he became a consultant for Christie's auction house, where he

both authenticated and offered documentation on an array of African artworks, including those he had come to know in Nigeria."* Fagg’s own photographs and those of others published in his various vol-

umes on African art have featured prominently in the African art collection and valuation processes. African sculptures that appear in his various books

and Christie’s catalogues have thereby been accorded an additional patina of legacy and legitimacy. There are good reasons for this, since Fagg was one of the first to recognize and document key artists and historic traditions in sub-

Saharan Africa; he was also one of the first to ascribe dates to such works. For Fagg, African art was little different from Western art, and the care with which he attended to issues of photography, documentation, and history figured in this. His writings and photographs have become part of Sekula’s double system

of representation functioning in ways that bring both insight (honor) and detriment to the works engaged. Of Fragmentation and Assemblage

In the years following the British punitive expedition of 1897 that brought the now-famous Benin bronzes and ivories to Europe, an array of books highlighting the broad array of this extraordinary war booty began to be published. British compilers of these works were among the earliest. Each volume was larger than the last: Read and Dalton (1899) showed 32 leaves of images; Pitt

Rivers’s volume featured 50 plates (1900); Roth (1903) included a remarkable

275 plates.'* As a number of the absconded Benin sculptures were being sold at auction to help defray museum costs, German museums entered into the

acquisition fray and soon more volumes featuring these works began to appear, most notably that of Felix von Luschan. As director of the Kénigliches Museum fiir Vélkerkunde in Berlin, von Luschan’s book Die Altertiimer von Benin (‘The antiquities of Benin, 1919) with its inclusion of 889 illustrations was by far the

most massive.'® The renewed colonial competition in the quest to own Benin trophy arts in the years following the British punitive expedition is examined in

WA)

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