In the Kitchen of Art (3)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi.

Ugolino di Nerio (Ugolino da Siena), The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John and Angels, ca. 1330 - 1335, tempera and gold on panel, 135 x 89 cm, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (source)

I’m sufficiently attuned to art for individual works to take on character in the literary sense, as they do in criticism. But the third and final part of Marco Grassi’s In the Kitchen of Art turns to the greats of connoisseurship and collection—that is, people,—and the drama bumps up accordingly.

Grassi studied the lives of Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi in depth. He knew Norton Simon. He worked for Baron Hans Heinrich “Heini” Thyssen-Bornemisza. He gathered possibly all that could be gathered about Eugene V. Thaw. Grassi exercised meta-connoisseurship of these men regarding their astuteness and expertise. On Berenson (p. 142):

What sets [Berenson’s books] apart from every other prior endeavor in the field of art criticism was that Berenson, perhaps in an echo of his youthful Talmudic studies, directed attention to the myriad visible details of the images he was describing. These he methodically, almost obsessively, classified, compared, and memorized. It was akin to building the precursor of a visual database, with the aid of which he would then patiently sift through the work of a given artist, slowly dissecting and refining. The distillate of this analytic process would then constitute the core of that artist’s essential qualities—his style.

On Longhi’s inventive use of Italian, which Grassi can appreciate as a native speaker (pp. 159-60):

A small example is the invented word lunato, derived from the word luna (moon) and twice used as an adjective to describe certain shimmering reflections depicted in the Arezzo frescoes: odd, but wonderfully appropriate. Another, more memorable neologism coined for Piero della Francesca is formacolore, a combination of two distinct words: “form” and “color.” It served the author admirably in identifying another core proposition of the book: that Piero’s great merit was to create form and substance in a spatial context (yet on a two-dimensional picture plane) by subsuming drawing and outline in a structure defined principally by color. In Longhi’s far more evocative words: “understanding that it was necessary to contain the snaky meanderings of functional line within the inexorable pipelines of perspective so that, properly irrigated, the vast fields of color might all burst into flower together.” No one would disagree that, while speaking of Piero della Francesca, Longhi might just as easily have been referring to Cézanne or Morandi.

Elsewhere Grassi recalls Norton Simon showing up personally to let him into his eponymous California museum on an otherwise-closed Monday. Thyssen-Bornemisza gave Grassi his first big break as a conservator and worked on his holdings for three decades as a visiting restorer. Page 176:

Several times, I was given the opportunity, by lesser-known private sources, of presenting the Baron interesting properties that might complement the collection’s existing holdings. In one such event, an incredibly rare and sublime example of early Sienese art found its permanent home with Thyssen. It is the great and almost miraculously preserved Crucifixion with the Virgin and St. John by Ugolino da Siena (ca. 1330–35). The painting had not surfaced since the 1890s when it was published in the Toscanelli Collection catalogue. Another privilege afforded me was the pleasure of strolling at will, often entirely alone and undisturbed, through Thyssen’s incomparable anthology of European art. After a year or two, I was on intimate terms with virtually every centimeter of those painted surfaces.

Drama reaches a peak in the coda. Here Grassi recalls his voluntary enlistment to save Florentine treasures from the devastation of the flood of the Arno in 1966. To control the dehumidification of sodden panels that would have split disastrously if allowed to dry at a normal rate, conservators were obliged to store paintings, for a time, in greenhouses. The number of victims in need of saving was immense (pp. 193-4):

The only reasonable course of action left for the harried Gabinetto staff was to determine for each painting a “rating” according to historical significance, state of conservation, age, and size. In effect, it became a kind of artistic triage whereby certain works, such as the Cimabue, went to the head of the line while many others languished in the dangerous limbo of the Boboli greenhouses. These were finally emptied when it became obvious that the numerous remaining panels would be at risk of ever greater deterioration if humidification continued. The [Vasari] Last Supper was put aside, semi-forgotten, and at the very end of the line. It was not retrieved from storage until eleven years ago when a full evaluation of its state was at last performed. By then, most of the pictorial layers were adhering to the facing papers rather than to the panel; much of the color had detached from both and was irretrievably lost. The wisdom of those early decisions, so hastily taken, was seriously open to question.

You would predict that an author so versed in historical European art would be unimpressed by current goings-on. Indeed (p. 137):

A stroll through the cavernous exhibition hall during Miami-Basel, not to mention the score of satellite marketplaces that spring up around it, cannot exactly be described as a life-enhancing experience. This has little to do with the material on view—the artistic validity of which may or may not be confirmed in decades to come. What reverberates through the myriad stands and tumultuous crowds is the urgency of the speculative imperative: a refrain endlessly repeated—now is the moment to cash in, now is the moment to buy or to sell. And this drumbeat of blatant venality—as obsessive as the disco rhythm that seems to permeate the entire town—becomes, itself, the main event.

Nevertheless, he had too fine an eye and sense of history to dismiss the whole present.

The small but remarkably comprehensive collection of American pop art, a promised gift from John Wilmerding to the Princeton Art Museum, is that rare and reassuring point of light in the darkening sky. A distinguished scholar of American nineteenth-century painting, Professor Wilmerding has, over many years, exercised his unerring eye and thorough understanding of the period in choosing not the largest, not the most obvious, not the flashiest, nor, assuredly, the most expensive examples of all the major pop artists—but they are the right examples. And seen together, as they recently were at Princeton, the effect was nothing short of illuminating and delightful, even for one not charitably disposed toward the genre.

“An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open,” says one of Darby’s Aphorisms. Having so faithfully, intelligently, and perceptively served in the kitchen of that tower, Grassi has graciously thrown upon the doors, laid down a welcome mat, and set out espresso and biscotti for us. This reader is grateful and delighted.

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Our next title for the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style by Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraktion und Einfühlung was first published in 1907 and made an early argument that artistic styles did not advance so much as change with the needs of the time. This claim bolstered German Expressionism and had an enormous influence on subsequent criticism. The book was recommended to me by Ophir Agassi, and reading it will be an opportunity for me to commune with his spirit.

It is divided into two parts. The first is around fifty pages; the second, including an appendix, is about eighty. There’s no convenient way to break up the second part, so we shall call upon Ophir for strength and plow through it.

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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style by Wilhelm Worringer. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” is an online exhibition representing the physical one in New York in June 2024.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.