Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863–1959 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863–1959 Kathryn M. Floyd Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863–1959. Phaidon Editors and Bruce Altshuler. London: Phaidon Press, 2008. Pp. 410. $90.00 (cloth). When Kenneth W. Luckhurst concluded his 1951 volume The Story of Exhibitions with the optimistic line "of exhibitions, as of books, there will be no end" he could not have known that works such as his own, that is, books about exhibitions, would be rare despite the postwar cultural boom his statement predicted.1 Temporary displays of objects have arguably endured as the most important form for communication and commodification in "the art world" since the birth of their modern incarnation in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, exhibitions, whose ephemeral natures make them difficult to historicize, receive far less theoretical and historical attention than their more permanent cousins, museums. This dearth of study is especially true in the sphere where they matter most—art history. Important historical considerations of specific exhibitions first appeared in the late 1960s. By the early 1990s histories of biennials, avant-garde events, salons, expositions, and Old Master shows by authors like Lawrence Alloway, Ian Dunlop, Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, Patricia Mainardi, and Francis Haskell were emerging from nineteenth-century studies, institutional critique, and a postmodern attention to the issue of art and commodity. In 1996 the important anthology Thinking about Exhibitions appeared, providing an initial body of literature and a solid theoretical framework for a new area of discussion.2 The book's articles outlined a constellation of issues surrounding exhibitions, including concepts of space, time, history, design, curatorship, cross-cultural translation, spectacle, and spectatorship. Despite these groundbreaking studies, a fundamental integration of the topic into standard art historical discourse was never fully established. Scholars often understand exhibitions to be the purview of curators and other practitioners. A more significant factor in their marginalization may be the fact that exhibitions exist not as static arrangements of objects within bounded spaces—as "objects" made of other objects, so to speak. Instead they consist of complicated, immaterial, and often dispersed elements such as personal and professional networks, financial limitations, political realities, institutional policies, social and sociological responses, and other elements that often escape the archive of [End Page 262] history. Behind the organized displays of artworks in any exhibition lies an untidy, and often unrecorded, web of forces that challenge art history's traditional focus on discrete objects created intentionally by individuals working alone. With his new book Salon to Biennial-Exhibitions That Made Art History, Bruce Altshuler intends to stimulate the rapidly growing interest in this complex practice. The first in a two-part set, Volume I covers the years 1863 to 1959 and provides basic information and primary materials associated with landmark exhibitions of contemporary art from Paris's "Salon des Refusés" to New York's "The New American Painting." The forthcoming Volume II will examine exhibitions from 1959 to the present. While creating a canon of significant shows, the editors have limited interpretative commentary in favor of offering a sourcebook of statistical data, images, and primary texts. Basic information including names of venues, organizers, and artists, numbers of works and attendees, as well as a rich assortment of excerpts from reviews, artist statements, and catalogues make up twenty-four chapters on twenty-four individual exhibitions. Most interesting are the hundreds of images the book provides, including not only photographs of the exhibitions, but reproductions of catalogue pages, posters, diagrams, newspaper clippings, and artworks. This wealth of information will no doubt evoke new considerations of these events and the artworks found within. There are some old favorites as well as new surprises among the archival materials contained in each chapter. Among the photographs that stand out are a handful of rarely seen photographs of the exteriors of important exhibitions venues such as Herwarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, site of a 1912 exhibition of Italian Futurism, or the Galerie Beaux-Arts, the Paris venue of the 1938 International Exposition of Surrealism. These images remind us of the world outside, but also inherently connected to, the spaces and arrangements within. A telling...