What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear (Montreal, McGill Queen’s University Press, 2019) 320 pp. $135.00 cloth $44.95 paper

Abstract

Phillips and Bear’s volume about history painting, past and present, opens with an epigraphical quotation from the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: “History is only present to us in light of our future” (3). The choice is apt. With Gadamer in tow, Phillips and Bear, too, collapse time through their rhetorical framing and commitment to uniting a remarkably wide range of visual material. In their view, the concepts of narrative and history have dictated and delimited understandings of the genre. By revisiting these frameworks, they suggest that history painting in fact escapes definition—and that this elusive quality has long enhanced its appeal to artists and audiences alike.What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? is not only unprecedented in its timespan, beginning in the fifteenth century and ending in the twenty-first. Few macro-studies and even fewer transnational works about history painting as a genre exist.1 Its position atop the Western hierarchy of genres has so long been accepted as historically entrenched that most meta-analyses are devoted to its inevitable twentieth-century fall—a tale of decline that the volume’s authors explicitly challenge, proposing instead a narrative of change. They do so, in part, through the concept of “distance” as a “dimension of representation” (11). In the introduction, Phillips proposes “four fundamental distances that shape our experiences of history and time” in works of narrative art—“form, affect, summoning, and intelligibility” (11). Over the centuries, he argues, artists’ evolving engagement with these facets of distancing helped to shape the genre in unpredictable ways.Arranged chronologically and thematically, the book is divided into three parts, each introduced by Bear. Part I, “Human Figures and Human Viewers,” begins in 1435 with the concept’s birth—Leon Battista Alberti’s use of the Latin word historia (“story”) to describe “a narrative image with many figures” (27). This fundamental ambiguity between history and story interweaves the section’s chapters, from Stuart Lingo’s examination of Agnolo Bronzino’s Martyrdom (“such distinctions were contested from their inception”), to Susanna Caviglia’s study of premodern France and Phillips’ account of secular “re-distancing” in nineteenth-century Britain.Part II, “History Painting in the Marketplace,” details how history painters increasingly produced subject matter for public audiences and art markets. Cynthia Roman’s analysis of the satirical printmaker James Gillray’s academic background and enduring narrative aspirations provides an incisive model of an artist’s “re-distancing” from elevated to “more immediate national and secular concerns” (90–91). Additional essays by Bear and Tim Barringer illustrate the genre’s evolving fluidity.Part III, “History Painting after Modernism,” dispels the notion that history painting ended with modernism. Instead, it shows “how many of history painting’s constitutive features endured in unexpected, often mutated, forms” (154). One forceful example is Michael Godby’s assessment of William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments (2016), a work of reverse graffiti on the Tiber riverfront in Rome; another is Elizabeth Harney’s discussion of Julie Mehretu’s Mural (2009), created for the Goldman Sachs lobby after the 2008 economic crash. The mutability of the genre is encapsulated in Dexter Dalwood’s treatment of Rita Donagh’s Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970 (1971), an abstract painting that references both Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and the 1970 Kent State shootings and is intended to document her performance with her students as part of the narrative that she presents.The question arises whether works such as William Kentridge’s ephemeral frieze or the Icelandic artist Rúri Fannberg’s interactive, sonic Archive: Endangered Waters (discussed in Chapter 13, by Mark A. Cheetham) overextend the mandate of history “painting” and might be better described as narrative art. But part of the volume’s power is its insistence on placing these works in the Albertian tradition. Less successful, however, is its attention to gender. No women artists appear until discussions of the twentieth century, when they emerge as creators of some of the volume’s most abstract works. Aware of this male focus, the editors have gendered all viewers female. Yet such rhetoric implies, problematically, a story of male artists creating for female audiences, whereas the chapter structure suggests that only as history painting unmoored itself from traditional structures could women, and non-white men, enter the profession. This absence is not for lack of potential material. Earlier instances abound, including Angelica Kauffman’s classical narrative canvases and Marie (Mme.) Tussaud’s wax displays. Such examples would have buttressed the volume’s overarching argument for the perpetual accessibility and commerciality of historical art—the themes that otherwise anchor the chapters so effectively, by reconstituting “history painting” as a protean genre that artists continue to mold to their own means, patrons, politics, and times.