To the Editors:
I am astonished that a publication as devoted to quality and excellence as The New Criterion could offer in the guise of serious criticism so transparently personal and vicious a diatribe as Creighton Gilbert’s “Sienese Storytellers” (April 1989). I am personally offended that Professor Gilbert’s long wait for an opportunity to vent his spleen with John Pope-Hennessy should end with the pretense of reviewing “Painting in Renaissance Siena,” an exhibition and catalogue with which John had no direct involvement, notwithstanding Professor Gilbert’s aberrant contention that “the very many citations to him in the catalogue substitute, in effect, for those by the curators.” (I am here guessing at Professor Gilbert’s very unclear meaning.)
It would appear that Professor Gilbert is equally content with the opportunity to disparage Keith Christiansen, the curator of the exhibition, who is contemptuously not once referred to by name in his “review.” Neither Carl Strehlke nor myself were “curators” of this exhibition; we collaborated on its catalogue. Furthermore, as a matter of correcting factual error, my doctoral dissertation was completed at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York under the direct supervision of John Pope-Hennessy (a role, I trust, he does not find the slightest bit “undignified”) and does not even peripherally concern “the visit by the outside painter Signorelli to Siena near the end of the time span of the exhibition.” It may now be customary to forgive errors of fact on Professor Gilbert’s part when he refers to works of art, but as the bulk of his “review” is based on pedantic criticism of what he considers insufficiently academic terminology and method and on what he clearly perceives to be inadequate academic credentials on the part of the exhibition’s three cataloguers, he might at least be expected to check facts regarding important purely academic concerns.
I am also astonished by Professor Gilbert’s ingenious rationalization for refusing Keith Christiansen’s invitation to study the Griselda Master’s Faith at the Metropolitan Museum. Because he could not study it “independently and repeatedly” he chose not to study it at all. This seems to me highly irresponsible behavior on the part of a scholar who proposes to publish on the artist. The same scholar is also preparing a study of Luca Signorelli’s frescoes at Orvieto. How much more remarkable, then, that he should decline an opportunity to study the remains of a drawing “unmistakably related” in style to that artist’s work (not, I hasten to add, unmistakably by him, as Professor Gilbert seems to think “related” infers), or that he should feel Signorelli’s influence in Siena amounted to nothing more than a digression when in fact it was more widespread and long-lasting than had been that of two other “outside” artists a generation earlier: Liberale da Verona and Girolamo da Cremona, whose presence in the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition surprisingly elicited no objections from Professor Gilbert. I am left to wonder whether graduate students at Yale University are now being encouraged by Professor Gilbert’s unorthodox example in the pursuit of scholarship, or whether his influence there is simply a “digression.”
Laurence B. Kanter
Curator, Robert Lehman Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY
To the Editors:
A recent Hilton Kramer editorial advocated the ban of movies from university classrooms (The New Criterion, February 1989), noting that students go to the movies in any case. Now, in “Sienese Storytellers,” Creighton Gilbert throws another stone at popular culture by deriding museum exhibitions of Christmas-candy art, implying, I suppose, that most museum visitors send Christmas cards anyway. When Old Master art becomes popular, is this sufficient reason to suspect its merits?
Gilbert’s review of the “Painting in Renaissance Siena” exhibition in the April issue hardly contains a single example of level-headed criticism, and his dislike for Sienese quattrocento painting is so pronounced that one wonders why he bothered to waste eleven pages on the exhibition at all. The greater part of the “review” is a biased and incorrect accounting of the career on the scholar to whom the exhibition was dedicated, John Pope-Hennessy. Several years ago Gilbert indulged in the same sort of tangent in an article about the same critic’s Luca della Robbia monograph, but that was at least about a book Pope-Hennessy wrote. Gilbert’s reasons for this sort of behavior are only known and best kept to himself. Although Gilbert seems to think that the show does no one any honor, he questions Pope-Hennessy’s achievements in the field in which it at least tries to honor him. John Pope-Hennessy is in fact an internationally acclaimed scholar of Sienese fifteenth-century painting and his work on the subject dates over a fifty-year period.
Only a few of Gilbert’s observations on the exhibition, catalogue, and curators that merit correction can be mentioned here. First, he insinuates that the authors of the catalogue, myself included, have not previously published enough on the subject to undertake such a project, when in fact we have all published more than Professor Gilbert, who has only marginally touched upon the Sienese quattrocento in his own publications. Secondly, he fantasizes that the description in the book’s acknowledgments of Laurence Kanter and myself as “pupils” of Pope-Hennessy leaves our “official thesis supervisors and other teachers there in a slightly undignified role.” This observation envisions a narrow definition of the teacher/student relationship, but it also implies a pettiness on the part of my dissertation advisers, Professors Beck and Davis at Columbia, of which they cannot by any means be accused and to which I hope Gilbert’s own students at Yale are not subject in their personal transactions with him. As for Laurence Kanter, he conducted his dissertation research under Pope-Hennessy’s direction.
During the exhibition we learned that the reconstruction of the Giovanni di Paolo predella for the Lehman Coronation was different than proposed. Gilbert sees our lack of foresight on this point as a fault of the exhibition and our scholarship, whereas this is exactly the sort of information that can be learned only in the context of an exhibition in which works of art are brought together and examined closely. Many new things were learned about other works of art in the exhibition and only because of the exhibition. It is a hands-on approach to art history and one of the most rewarding.
Gilbert voices his dislike for the artist Domenico di Bartolo, but it is incorrect to state that the reconstructed detached fresco of the Virgin of Mercy was displayed at “the margin of the show.” It was the first object to be viewed once the visitor started making his way around the gallery, and is an important example of Sienese religious imagery and devotion to the Virgin. In Siena it was so popular that when, in the seventeenth century, renovation necessitated destruction of the wall it was painted on, the fresco was detached and carefully preserved.
Toward the end of his article, Professor Gilbert questions the “humanistic contextual knowledge” of the curators’ educational background because he found a misuse of the word “cherub/ cherubim,” which in any case is used correctly in many other cases throughout the catalogue. He reminds us that cherub is put in the plural form like kibbutz is made into kibbutzim. This shows that Gilbert has plenty of chutzpah, but I doubt his charge can be used as a serious enough indictment of our education. He too is known to let a slip go by: for example, in “Sienese Storytellers” he makes mistakes about the sex of Langton Douglas’s progeny, Federico Zeri’s first name, and F. Mason Perkins’s birthplace.
Carl Brandon Strehlke
Adjunct Curator, John G. Johnson Collection
The Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia, PA