Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration

By Mary D. Sheriff

Art historians have long been accustomed to thinking about art and artists in terms of national traditions. This volume takes a different approach, suggesting instead that a history of art based on national divisions often obscures the processes of cultural appropriation and global exchange that shaped the visual arts of Europe in fundamental ways between 1492 and the early twentieth century.

Essays here analyze distinct zones of contact--between various European states, between Asia and Europe, or between Europe and so-called primitive cultures in Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific--focusing mainly but not exclusively on painting, drawing, or the decorative arts. Each case foregrounds the centrality of international borrowings or colonial appropriations and counters conceptions of European art as a "pure" tradition uninfluenced by the artistic forms of other cultures. The contributors analyze the social, cultural, commercial, and political conditions of cultural contact--including tourism, colonialism, religious pilgrimage, trade missions, and scientific voyages--that enabled these exchanges well before the modern age of globalization.

Contributors:
Claire Farago, University of Colorado at Boulder
Elisabeth A. Fraser, University of South Florida
Julie Hochstrasser, University of Iowa
Christopher Johns, Vanderbilt University
Carol Mavor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Mary D. Sheriff, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lyneise E. Williams, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807898192

Book preview

1

Introduction

Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art, 1492–1930

MARY D. SHERIFF

Imagine entering a museum for the first time, anxious to learn about European art. You pay the entry fee, pick up a map, and hurry to the works you have come to see. Following the numbered floor plan, you traverse sequential rooms dedicated to different national schools at different historical moments: Italian art of the early Renaissance, 1400–1500, in one suite; Spanish Baroque Painting, 1600–1700, in another. When your circuit seems complete, you again consult the floor plan, just to make sure you have seen it all. And now you notice there is a department of Islamic art one floor up and that the arts of China and Latin America are located in an entirely different building.

The trajectory of this imagined visit implies the primacy of national traditions within Europe and the separation of the arts of Europe from those of other cultures. Walking through the museum, visitors often follow a path much like that traveled in thumbing through a history of world art. Museum and text together emphasize the distinctiveness of art forms, even if the odd label or caption points out that a French artist imitates an Italian precursor or that an English patron collected Chinese porcelain, and even if the occasional museum room or history subchapter focuses on an international moment. The divisions that structure both galleries and textbooks are surely heuristic necessities, but they nevertheless obscure processes of cultural appropriation and exchange fundamental to the making of European art.

The goal of this book is to elucidate and explore those processes as they shaped the visual arts between 1492, when Europeans first landed in the Americas, and the early twentieth century, when numbers of Americans gathered in Paris, exerting a profound influence on the cultural scene. These processes presuppose at least two recognizable entities (e.g., nations, cultures, regions, etc.) in contact with one another. We do not set out, then, to abolish notions of national schools or cultural difference, nor to discard the concept of European art. Rather, this collection aims to explore cultural contact as a set of dynamic, varied, and continuous processes that have been essential to forming the arts we call European.

By using the term European art I do not mean to suggest that we can identify a specific group of artworks to which the label naturally belongs. The idea of Europe has always been and continues to be unstable, and it is impossible to say incontestably what states and cultures count or counted as European where and when. Adding to the instability of the concept are the hostilities and the differences, the prejudices and the stereotypes that divided one European group from another. Religious strife pitted Protestant against Catholic Europe; theories of climate and its effects on the human animal led northern Europeans to view their southern neighbors as sensual, hotheaded, and even degenerate. And in the course of the eighteenth century, the continent was split in a second direction, with those living in the west posing themselves as different from — and superior to — the less civilized folk who hailed from a newly conceived eastern Europe. At the same time, ruling families throughout Europe married one into the other, creating a sort of pan-European aristocracy. Bloodlines, position, and wealth also defined a cosmopolitan class who could imagine themselves as both transcending national borders and distinct from persons of lower status with whom they shared a similar heritage, religion, or nationality. Contact made differences apparent, but it also allowed for the adaptation and hybridization of practices and customs, which moved back and forth across national, regional, and religious divides. In terms of art production, there have always been many different forms circulating on the continent, each shaped by contact between and among cultures without and within Europe's real or imagined boundaries.

Despite the hostility, prejudice, and separation that often marked the relation between different peoples, retaining the term European is both useful and appropriate. As historian Anthony Pagden has pointed out, when faced with cultures very alien, Europeans have persistently described themselves to be not merely French or Spanish but also European.¹ Retaining the term European thus acknowledges the common heritage claimed by those dwelling on the continent: the classical past of Greece and Rome that was never as pure or unified as it was imagined to be. We do aim, however, to loosen and redraw the boundaries of what has constituted European art, whether it be through adding hybrid works made in contact zones, considering forms of production not usually classified with the fine arts, attending to a wider range of art traditions within Europe, or including painters such as Pedro Figari, whom Lyneise Williams discusses in our final essay. Born in Uruguay of Italian parents, Figari built his reputation in Paris, where the style and subject of his paintings engaged the discourse of the primitive evident throughout Europe and the Americas in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The essays that follow focus on different contact zones, and in distinguishing different sorts of exchange, they pose a range of pertinent questions. How were artistic practices that we recognize as European shaped in contact with objects, artworks, and people in border zones, colonies, discovered lands, and sovereign states distant from Europe? How were they shaped by contact between cultures within Europe that were perceived as quite different from one another? What social, commercial, and political conditions enabled and shaped the European appropriation of objects and ideas made elsewhere? How did cultural contact affect not only the individual European artist but also larger artistic movements and the histories we make of them? How do we redraw the boundaries of artistic movements once we acknowledge the global circulation of artworks? And if cultural contact can tell us something about art, what can art tell us about cultural contact? While the essays are arranged chronologically, this introduction is organized around and focuses on significant issues raised explicitly and implicitly in the essays that follow.

The title of this collection, Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration, acknowledges the groundbreaking and inspirational work of historians Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley: Asia in the Making of Europe (1965–93). In this monumental multivolume series, Lach and Van Kley investigate the relations between East and West from 1500 to 1800, demonstrating the deep and widespread influence of Asian societies on developing European culture and illuminating the many ways that the revelation of Asia transformed and modified — in essence helped to make — Europe.² This project also draws inspiration from the work of literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, especially from her influential book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). Where Lach and Van Kley focus on Asia, Pratt attends to the contact zones, and especially South America, in which Europeans encountered denizens of the New World. She borrows the notion of transculturation, which ethnographers used to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.³ Expanding the definition of transculturation, Pratt asks not only how Europe shaped those places it colonized but also how Europe's constructions of subordinated others [were] shaped by those others. And through exploring European contact with South America and its textualized representations, she concludes that the entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.⁴

Although many art historians are now making inquiries similar to our own in relation to specific historical moments, this volume further posits that contact with other cultures has been an essential factor throughout the history of European art, and one that is in constant dialectical tension with adherence to national (or regional) traditions.⁵ Our volume, moreover, also explores the historiography of art, considering in particular the assumptions that in the past have worked to limit the role of cultural contact. Individual authors address current scholarship that moves beyond those assumptions and in their essays trace out paths for the future. Eurocentrism — the point of view that holds European culture as both the apex of civilization and the privileged focus of interest and inquiry — can all too easily be blamed for art history's shortcomings. There is no doubt that a sense of the continent's supremacy has played a substantial role in marginalizing the effects of contact with other areas of the globe. But Eurocentrism is too simple an explanation that neither touches on the disciplinary assumptions that ground art history nor illuminates the many types of exchanges — some between nations within Europe — that have contributed to the making of European art. In addition to analyzing different forms of cultural contact, the authors in our volume also address art historical practices and assumptions that have limited the scope of our histories and enlarged those blind spots that are their unavoidable by-product. What I mean by blind spots are those artists, practices, movements, or traditions occluded because they cannot be framed in established categories of analysis.

One blind spot has been the artist Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–89), who is the subject of Chapter 5. Despite a fame spread over all of eighteenth-century Europe and beyond, only recently has Liotard captured the attention of more than the most specialized specialists. What has sparked recent interest in this artist is precisely what first brought him notice in his own day: a five-year sojourn in the Ottoman Empire and a self-generated image as the Turkish Painter. Art history's concern with cultural contact accounts for Liotard's increasing prominence in publications and exhibitions, but why was Liotard — given his fame and talent — so long held offstage? Hailing from Geneva, Liotard came from what has been a no-man's-land for the history of art — at least as that history has been written outside Switzerland. Each temporal episode in the story of European art typically focuses on a small, select group of regional or national traditions while excluding many others. Swiss artists, like those working in Croatia, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, and many other sites in Europe, are largely absent from the master narrative, as are the artistic practices and traditions of those polities. Especially in the United States, art history's vision of European art has been narrowly focused indeed, and this historiographic tradition continues to limit considerations of cultural contact by restricting those areas of Europe that register in art's history.

Liotard, moreover, executed many of his works in media that have long ranked low in established hierarchies. Our general histories of art between the Italian Renaissance and the Jazz Age typically focus on fresco and oil painting and, to a lesser degree, sculpture and architecture. Liotard, however, was a master of the pastel portrait, a medium and genre long associated with cosmetics, women, and amateur artists. He was also known for his miniatures and enamels, small works set into jeweled mounts or used to decorate snuffboxes and the like. The sharp distinction between high art (e.g., painting and sculpture) and decorative art (porcelain, jewelry, furniture, etc.) or between art and luxury goods is a historical construction that gained force only at the very end of the eighteenth century. At the same time that buyers, sellers, and even many artists treated art as a luxury product, those concerned to raise the status of the fine arts — academicians, aestheticians, and the like — tried to separate art and commerce by imposing theoretical distinctions that elevated fine art above concerns of the marketplace. In the case of the decorative arts (or objects of material culture) other alleged differences from the fine arts supported the theoretical divorce between art and commercial enterprise. The decorative arts, for example, were often marked by a utilitarian function — holding a candle, containing food, telling time, covering a wall surface — that seemed to ally them with other trade or manufactured goods. In contrast, the fine arts — painting and sculpture, for example — were said to be of higher status because they had no such utilitarian purpose but, rather, appealed to the spirit and mind. Moreover, where the fine arts of painting and sculpture could and did claim intellectual or liberal art status, the decorative arts were, in contrast, confined to the merely artisanal — the manual and the mechanical.⁶

As a discipline, art history inherited these distinctions, and maintaining them has much diminished our awareness of how contact with different cultures affected the arts in Europe. It is precisely in the production of snuffboxes, fans, sofas, teapots, reliquaries, wallpapers, and fashion — to cite just a few examples — that we often find clear traces of contact with different forms of artistry. And just as often we find that the same men and women who made the works we vaunt as fine art also involved themselves in the design and production of luxury goods, as well as in creating theatrical sets, military uniforms, and commemorative medals. The objects from other parts of the globe that had a notable impact on the arts of Europe were not always forms of high art. Often they were objects of commercial exchange: porcelains or textiles, for example. Sometimes they were even consumables, like the coffee that came into Europe from the Ottoman Empire. Coffee generated an entire range of European arts, from actual coffeepots to images of coffeehouses and coffee drinkers. As Christopher M. S. Johns tells us in his contribution, even the pope had a coffeehouse specially built in Rome and outfitted with an expensive imported porcelain service.

Attending to a diverse array of artistic products demonstrates that the realms of commerce and art have never been distinct, and this point is argued strongly in our first three essays. In Johns's essay, for example, Rome emerges as an entrepôt, a gathering place for the rich and famous and the essential stop for English gentlemen on the Grand Tour. The city was a complex site of exchange in which wealthy tourists purchased and carted home pieces of the local patrimony: Renaissance bronzes, contemporary paintings, Roman antiquities, and all manner of curiosities. Such transactions increased the social prestige of buyers, but they also altered local artistic practices, as Johns's essay makes clear. Moreover, because of this visitor-driven art market, the Romans would later come to understand that art was essentially an export product, like leather handbags, elegant shoes and silk neckties. In her analysis of seventeenth-century Dutch art, Julie Hochstrasser shows how imported textiles, rugs, and porcelains changed the vocabulary of objects visible in Dutch still life painting. These changes, moreover, celebrated the success of Dutch commerce not only for bringing the objects represented back home but also for creating the wealth necessary for many more citizens to own luxury goods like Chinese porcelains and Dutch still life paintings. Hochstrasser, moreover, describes the process that transformed Chinese Ming porcelain into Delftware, the blue-and-white pots and vases that still signify as quintessentially Dutch. Yet from the point of view of Hochstrasser's essay, what makes Delftware Dutch is its origin in products brought to Holland through foreign commerce.

The importance of cultural contact in the making of European art has thus been diminished not only by Eurocentrism but also by long established historiographic practices: attending only to the art of a very few countries within Europe, separating the high arts from the decorative arts, and divorcing the arts from commerce. We can add to these factors several others that are equally important. The first is another binary distinction that has helped to frame art history as a discipline: that between ethnographic specimens (or what were earlier called curiosities or exotica) and fine art. Save for exploring the modern primitivist aesthetic created by artists like Gauguin and Picasso who discovered the art of indigenous peoples, European borrowings from curiosities and ethnographic specimens have remained relatively unexamined, and this is especially true for earlier centuries. The separation between art and ethnographic specimen — as well as the impossibility of actually maintaining such a separation — is evident in considering the phenomenon of the ethnographic museum, born in the nineteenth century. While the very existence of such a museum suggests that there is a separate category of objects that belong in such a setting, many of the objects displayed in ethnographic museums could easily be — and have been — integrated into art museums with collections of African or Oceanic or pre-Columbian art. In the realm of private (as opposed to institutional) collecting, which Claire Farago also discusses in her contribution, the cabinet of curiosity persisted well into the eighteenth century and beyond. These collections mixed natural history specimens, ethnographical objects, and European engravings, paintings, sculptures, and antiquities, suggesting that those who bought and owned these objects did not separate into distinct realms the fine arts, the decorative arts, and exotica. Nor did they draw a sharp line between the artful objects nature made (e.g., corals, crystals, and shells) and those wrought by human hand, all of which found their way into the same collections housed and displayed in the same spaces. Only later were curiosities, such as the Aztec featherwork fans Farago discusses, relegated to ethnographic museums and storerooms.⁷ Collecting curiosities, especially when taken from colonized peoples or peoples Europeans considered as savage or primitive, also raises a series of questions that do not press upon exchange between equal trading partners.

The Dutch appropriation of Ming porcelain grew from commercial trade in which each side exercised some control over the exchange. In the case of many Mexican featherworks, Spanish conquistadors looted these objects as they subjugated the Aztec kingdoms. Such featherwork made into ceremonial objects such as capes and fans had a visible impact on European art making, and featherwork was immediately adapted to European missionary needs and made to represent Christian iconography. Yet, as Farago points out in our opening essay, such works have never been recognized within the existing framework of Renaissance art. The forcible appropriation of Aztec materials, moreover, presents ethical problems that should also be acknowledged in our histories of art, especially since the repatriation of cultural property removed forcibly or illegally from its original setting remains an ethical issue in the world today. Many Aztec objects were collected from a culture forced by invading conquistadors and missionaries to convert to an alien religion and to renounce traditional ways of life. Where there was a definite gain for the Chinese merchants trading with Holland, there was a loss for the Nahuatl-speaking people of Mexico.

Another aspect of the prevailing art historiography that has contributed to the undervaluation of cultural contact is the assumed dichotomy between formal properties and subject matters. It is primarily in the area of formal innovation — and especially challenges to linear perspective and illusionism — that contact with other art forms has been accepted as having a substantive effect on European art. This chapter in the story of European art generally begins with the French Impressionist painters discovering Japanese prints and moves to artists like Gauguin and Picasso discovering Oceanic and African art. My point is not to suggest that stylistic appropriations are insignificant. Indeed, Lyneise Williams in her contribution takes up the issue of primitivism in early twentieth-century Europe and Latin America, analyzing it as a style that mimics art made by peoples Europeans considered in a lesser state of civilization (or put otherwise, closer to the state of nature). Her discussion tells us much about how Europe imagined for its own purposes these others, many of whom were colonial subjects. Yet Williams's analysis also shows that in the case of Pedro Figari, subject matter was just as significant. In Paris, he represented elements of the Afro-Uruguayan culture in ways that ran counter to some of the stereotypes primitivists embraced and that thwarted, if only inadvertently, the desire of Uruguayan authorities to efface traces of the rich traditions derived from African sources. Figari's paintings create a hybridized art that diverges from the prevailing primitivist mode precisely through a use of the naïf vocabulary of forms joined to a personal selection of subject matter. Throughout our volume, essays engage issues raised by both form and subject matter, considering, for example, Frans Post's depiction of the church at Olinda, Brazil; Pompeo Battoni's portraits of Scottish nobles in Rome; Eugène Delacroix's representations of Moroccan doors and thresholds; and Paul Gauguin's depictions of childhood.

Attending to subject matter also offers the opportunity to examine cultural attitudes and prejudices as they are embedded in works of art — attitudes and prejudices that inherently presume cultural contact, no matter how distant from the point of creation and no matter if the artist's contact with the other culture was entirely mediated. Many commentators today are indeed attending to subject matter in sophisticated ways that illuminate a history of attitudes toward the many others that Europeans encountered around the globe. Nevertheless, art historical writing sometimes adopts a hierarchy of