James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

27.Some Things I Learned From Alpers And Baxandall

27. Some Things I Learned from Alpers and Baxandall (Written in answer to a query from Jason Kuo, 1/28/07)

I learned from Svetlana Alpers partly from reading her writings (e.g. "Is Art History?" in which she was continually raising questions about the direction of our discipline) and partly from being constantly bugged by her to read certain things (e.g. Foucault) and broaden my methodological concerns. Soon after I began teaching there I gave a lecture in a departmental series, supposed to be about what one was up to then, and used it to demonstrate a visual solution to a problem (why the Kôtôin pair of landscapes can't possibly be by Li Tang: in other words, style history.) She found it interesting, but asked afterwards: "What would you do if the dating and attribution of all your paintings were suddenly solved, and secure?" I didn't have an easy answer, and was started on thinking about that matter: where do we go after style history and authenticity? I have a thick file of correspondence with her—long, single-spaced memos arguing problems, sometimes departmental but also theoretical and disciplinary. She was a powerful voice in departmental meetings, and I inevitably absorbed new ideas about how art history should be done just from listening to her arguments, and doing reading that she recommended. I think I started with semiotics at her urging, and used it in seminars and writings quite early. (Slow for art historians generally, relatively early for Chinese art specialists.) Svetlana would come to talks I gave, and criticize them afterwards. I used to compare her willingness to go against established doctrines in Dutch art history, e.g. that the paintings always have symbolic, literary meanings that can be found by pursuing old pattern books etc.--as in China, an insistence on finding written sources and backing for one's observations--with my own situation vis a vis Chinese art historians; she was similarly looked on by the Dutch specialists as a renegade.

Michael Baxandall was teaching at Berkeley only during the later years I was there, and only half the year, but before that we had him as a lecturer—the "Limewood Sculptures" series while he was working on the book, the lectures that became Patterns of Intention, which were affecting me strongly before the book appeared. I still cite the "Firth of Forth Bridge" one when I write about how to construct a set of circumstances around the work, circumstances surrounding and somehow affecting its making, without seeing any circumstance or factor simply as cause of any aspect of the work. And so forth. I would consult Michael, and often Svetlana with him, when I had a question about whether some phenomenon I was working on had a parallel in European art studies, and got enlightening answers. And he was always cautionary: I remember Ginger Hsu coming out of a session with him, in which she had presented a strategem she'd worked out for linking aspects of Yangzhou painting with the city's cultural and economic history in some way; she emerged looking crestfallen, having been told no, that wasn't legitimate. But she also told me, some time later when she had rethought the problem, that she was the stronger for it.

I'm sure I will think of other ways Svetlana and Michael contributed to my opening-up as an art historian, but these will do for now.

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