One of the minor annoyances of art museum-going in recent years has been the tendency of curators to hector the visitors who enter their galleries for the purpose of looking at art. This trend takes various unwelcome forms, but one of the most obnoxious involves the routine labeling of individual paintings and pieces of sculpture.
Most visitors to art galleries are interested in two, maybe three, essential things when looking at a picture: who painted it, and when, and its title. Sometimes visitors will want to know when the artist lived and, perhaps, some relevant information about his or her life and career. Sometimes, if the subject is obscure or the painting is allegorical, art historians will furnish a brief, useful guide to understanding the scenery and interpreting action or objects.
In recent decades, unfortunately, the study of art has not been immune to the colonization of American scholarship by the political left. Art historians and, in particular, museum curators have moved steadily away from the understanding and appreciation of art on aesthetic grounds and, instead, applied their Marxian sledgehammers to works on display, to the lives of artists, and, especially, to the patrons of art and the subjects of portraits.
It is not enough to explain that something was depicted by somebody at the request of somebody else; we must now be taught that that somebody else wanted the picture painted in order to proclaim his or her own power and wealth. Or that the scenes depicted in paintings—a Flemish interior, a French garden scene—reflect the petit-bourgeois status, or racist beliefs, or rapacious business practices, of subjects and patrons. These curatorial practices are both intrusive and insulting—to the pictures and sculptures, to the people who created them, and, not least, to the people who enter museums on a quest to see, and to be nourished by, great works of art.
Consider the latest instance of this philistine practice. The Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts has an abundant collection of American portraits, most of them from around New England and most from the colonial and early republican period in America. Most visitors to the Worcester Museum understand that people who had their portraits painted in the 18th century by such famous artists as Gilbert Stuart or John Singleton Copley were people of means. Moreover, as a new label in the Museum’s Early American gallery explains, “these paintings depict the sitters as they wish to be seen—their best selves—rather than simply recording appearances.” Which is to say that wealthy New Englanders, like middle-class denizens or even the poor, then and now, much prefer to be flattered in portraits rather than shown (in Oliver Cromwell’s famous phrase) warts and all.
But that’s not all. The Worcester Museum wields its own special sledgehammer to drive home the point that the subjects of these portraits, despite their “best selves,” are (by contemporary standards) despicable people since the portraits don’t indicate “the sitters’ reliance on chattel slavery . . . . Many of the people represented here derived wealth and social status from this system of violence and oppression.” And on and on.
No one disputes the horror of slavery. And it’s entirely possible—perhaps even probable—that some of the portraits depict individuals who “derived wealth and social status” from slavery. But is anyone unaware of this? And would anyone feel that, by exhibiting these paintings, the Worcester Museum were signaling its admiration for slavery? Even if we accept the need to “contextualize” these works of art, why only mention slavery—as though these sitters’ lives and contributions were limited to their connection to this institution? It is entirely likely that some of them, along with the titans of commerce and civic grandees, were secret diarists, or religious skeptics, or homosexuals, or social dissenters, or scholarly women whose lives were blighted or thwarted, somehow, in early America.
People visiting the Worcester Museum of Art can discern all this on their own—and can do so without the condescending assistance of curators out of their depth.
