[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 96 (Tuesday, July 16, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6862-S6863]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ARTTABLE LUNCHEON

 Mrs. CLINTON. Mr. President, on April 26, 2002, I had the 
opportunity to attend the 10th annual ArtTable Luncheon. ArtTable is a 
national organization for professional women in leadership positions in 
the visual arts. Founded in 1981, it provides a forum for its members 
to exchange ideas, experience and information through various programs. 
ArtTable is dedicated to promoting and advancing greater knowledge, 
understanding, and appreciation of the visual arts. At each year's 
luncheon, a different woman who has given her distinguished service is 
honored. The keynote speaker on this occasion was Dr. Kirk Varnedoe, 
Chief Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum 
of Modern Art and Professor in Historical Studies at the Institute for 
Advanced Study, Princeton University.
  Dr. Varnedoe has more than a dozen major exhibitions to his credit, 
both for the Museum of Modern Art and for other institutions. His work 
has often been at the forefront of the history of modern art and his 
extensive publications on European and North American art of the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have helped reshape and open up a 
variety of fields in art history. His contributions began in 1972, at 
the age of 25, with his doctoral dissertation on the drawings of Rodin 
and the epidemic problem of forgeries of the later drawings. This work 
was so significant that its results were published in collaboration 
with Albert Elsen before the dissertation had even been submitted. His 
scholarship since that time has been instrumental in opening entire 
fields of inquiry, for example, Impressionism, Scandinavian modernism, 
and the influence of photography on painting, as well as bringing 
little known artists into the center of debate.
  In his remarks at the luncheon, which I will ask be printed in the 
Record, Dr. Varnedoe spoke eloquently about his ``personal odyssey with 
the art of Auguste Rodin'' and the greater issues that journey brought 
to life. He discussed the ever-changing world of modern art and what it 
can teach us, especially during this incredibly challenging period of 
history through which we are living.
  I am grateful to Dr. Varnedoe for his continued scholarship efforts 
in the area of art history and for sharing this history with us in a 
way that we can apply it to our experiences in the world today.
  I ask that the remarks be printed in the Record.

                            ArtTable Keynote

                             April 26, 2002

                           (By Kirk Varnedoe)

       I have had a personal odyssey with the art of Auguste 
     Rodin. It's a love that I share--along with a great regard 
     for her late husband Bernie--with Iris Cantor. Rodin was once 
     for me an intense and special passion, a singular entry point 
     into the history of art. And now, that body of work seems 
     somehow seen at a distance, more coolly, and that artist one 
     among many with whom I've worked, and from whom I've taken 
     inspiration. Today, I would like to take that small and 
     really trivial personal trajectory into and through Rodin and 
     ruminate on it in relationship to a larger pattern: to use it 
     to think about the way that the modern tradition metes out 
     its gains and losses, the way it gives and takes; and then 
     also to use my little journey to suggest much larger issues 
     about learning and growth--about what we want from art as we 
     change and learn.
       Modern art, as is notorious, kills, and it kills 
     mercilessly. In the late 19th Century as it was just being 
     born it laid waste to the Salon world of Gerome and 
     Bougureau. And then as it built up steam in the early 20th 
     Century it decided to start slaying some of its own parents 
     and godparents. After World War II modern art killed Rodin 
     like a bright young barbarian gladiator taking down an aging, 
     opulently garlanded emperor--in sheer exhaustion at the 
     achievement of Rodin's weight and complexity, people found 
     themselves gagged to surfeit by the ancienne cuisine richness 
     of this enormous oeuvre, and yearned for a leaner, cleaner 
     psychic and physical life in art. That is perhaps exemplified 
     most pointedly by the beautiful polished surfaces of 
     Brancusi's sculpture. Where once Rodin's flesh roiled 
     volcanically, now you had a still-waters-run-deep beautiful 
     gleam, more like armor than palping flesh; compression/
     density replaced extension/elasticity;

[[Page S6863]]

     wit and elegance took over for brooding and suffering; and 
     abbreviated, pithy economic certainties were set up against 
     the older anguished overflowing desire and doubt; fulfillment 
     replaced yearning, and the sticky sweet humidity of Rodin's 
     world was replaced by slick machine cool. And then in the 
     20's and 30's, the curse of the word ``Victorian'' descended 
     on The Kiss on The Thinker and on so much else of Rodin's 
     work. A curse that I might say is still enacted at the 
     Metropolitan Museum of Art, if you go look at the 
     installation of the former Andre Meyer Galleries where there 
     is a special kind of purgatory off to the right of Cezanne 
     Degas, and Manet, where The Age of Bronze strides in pride 
     next to Rosa Bonheur and Bastien-Lepage.
       But just as certainly as the modern movement took away, it 
     so eventually gave back. Modern art is a sure killer but it 
     is also a fantastic resuscitator. And it works its growth 
     through pulses of recovery. One of those main pulses came in 
     the 1960's with scholarship by men like my mentor Albert 
     Elsen at Stanford, and by Leo Steinberg, who wrote a key 
     essay at the time of Elsen's Retrospective of Rodin at the 
     Modern in the late 60's. Elsen re-found a new Rodin, via his 
     training under Meyer Schapiro, and by his engagement as a 
     young man in the 50's with Abstract Expressionism. And his 
     show in the late 60's was the culmination of new interest, in 
     everything about Rodin's bronzes that was spontaneous, 
     painterly, seemed to depend on accident, and broadcast a kind 
     of heroic drama of angst that seemed in tune with Pollock, 
     with Rothko etc.. While Steinberg, on the other hand, via his 
     experience of Jasper Johns and Judd, pointed us to a new 
     awareness of the formal strategies of Rodin: his techniques 
     of repeating single molds to form new compositions; his 
     processes of fragmenting and hybridizing the body's anatomy, 
     against nature, towards new expressive devices. In these 
     radical, small gestures of handling material, he found a new 
     and more relevant Rodin for the late 60's, the age of 
     minimalism.
       Moving on, recuperating, resuscitating, the way that Modern 
     art does it, involves, not simply leaving behind, but finding 
     new ways to carry forward. We know that for example that 
     Cezanne said that his goal was to redo Poussin after nature. 
     Modern art has always had a steady urge to reinvent the past 
     and to recapture it in terms that translate its values into 
     ours, to reinvent, to make new, and this means not only old 
     masters like Poussin, but its immediate forbearers. So in the 
     1960s, you not only have the reinvention of Rodin, but the 
     re-invention of Russian Constructivism through minimalism, 
     Marcel Duchamp reborn in the work of Richard Hamilton, Jasper 
     Johns and Bruce Nauman, and Futurism in Pop Art, especially 
     British. A whole new parentage was reinvented, often outside 
     the traditional ``school of Paris'' lineage, for Modernism. 
     And the ``recovery'' of Rodin was a part of this 
     revivification.
       But at what a cost? Steinberg's essay for example, was 
     explicit in saying we have to begin by disregarding so much. 
     We have to begin by eliminating all of the public Rodin, all 
     of the finished works, indeed virtually all of the most 
     ambitious parts of his work, which are seen in a scornful 
     way, as part of the desire to please too large a public. 
     Steinberg wants to favor instead the intransigent truculence 
     of a private experimenter, showing no compromise at all with 
     the tastes or demands or emotions of the public of his time. 
     In Steinberg's case it is particularly modern irony that 
     imposes the great divide between our cooler, sophistication, 
     and a rejected messier world of sentiment pathos, and earnest 
     heroism in Rodins.
       ``Our'' Rodin, then, relevant, sanitized and censored--not 
     the Rodin of The Kiss, the Thinker, or the marble works, and 
     surely not the Rodin before whom Cezanne fell embarrassingly 
     to his knees, and to whom Ranier Maria Rilke dedicated his 
     pen and his time. Is that the inevitable price of progress in 
     knowing art? To narrow-hew, in order to make newly vivid/
     relevant? To diminish and deform as we try to reform, pick 
     and choose?
       This audience in this room is a kind of aristocracy, or 
     meritocracy, of special knowledge about art. We work at it. 
     We are typical of those the self-elected and self-organized 
     elites and cenacles and Salons that have made Modern art get 
     up and go from the beginning and all along. And this group 
     too is typical of the kind of voluntary assemblages--shooting 
     associations, stamp guilds, glee clubs, softball leagues and 
     debating societies--that, far from being anti-democratic in 
     nature, have been seen by observers since Tocqueville as 
     being central to the health of our plural society, and indeed 
     the unscripted backbone of democracy's difference from mere 
     mob rule. Now it's an article of faith in this room that 
     knowing more about art, being more sophisticated, is 
     certainly a good way of forming a club, of defining one's 
     self, gathering together with fellow feelers. But is it a 
     legitimate corollary that more sophistication and knowledge 
     is necessarily greater moral intelligence about the larger 
     world, or indeed about all art? The dirty truth is that there 
     is always a price to be paid, in the deadening of our 
     capacity to respond to joys that once moved us, sealing us 
     off from others in our iced and ironic superiority.
       We have been living for years now in a time of great 
     surprises, unpredictable events and changes that have deeply 
     affected us--the coming of AIDS, and with it a new sense of 
     fatality and mortality; the fall of the wall and what did not 
     come in the wake of its euphoria; the haunted resurgence of 
     Holocaust memory--and then, finally the massive rent in the 
     historical fabric that took place just over six months ago. 
     It is not just that the art of Louise Bourgeois, of Ghormley 
     and Munoz, of Kiki Smith and Charlie Ray have for years now 
     been asking us to rethink Rodin's heritage of the vulnerable 
     body. Nor certainly am I dealing with only the question of 
     suddenly now considering the specific memorial, monumental 
     and public ambitions of the best sense of memory and tragedy 
     in this one artist, Rodin--though both of these reinventions 
     and rethinking seem overdue. But what seems subliminally an 
     issue now is the broader confrontation with what our 
     sophistications may cost us more generally--in a lack of 
     access to the heroic, or to tragic, when these terms seem 
     suddenly, newly apposite and relevant. Is it we slick pros 
     who are irrelevant, and bound in? Inadequate to our time, as 
     it has to our great surprise changed faster than we seem to 
     be able to? This is a question I know many artists have been 
     asking themselves, and it is one worth our asking ourselves 
     too.
       We need to rethink the balance of continuity, and relevance 
     in art, the two things I think, that we go to art for. On the 
     one hand for a vivid sense of our own life, of being alive, 
     but also for a sense of things outside ourselves, other 
     minds, other ways of feeling. And that other shifts as we 
     change, and grow, and can include the parts of ourselves, the 
     passions that got us here but that we have abandoned and 
     closed up to some ostensible hipper and better good. What 
     does it mean to grow up? (Baudelaire felt that true genius 
     was only childhood recovered at will, now equipped with adult 
     means of communication) What does it mean in the art world 
     that we all inhabit, to be a pro? Is it a dead ideal that it 
     could entail for ourselves, and those we advise and instruct 
     an effort always towards a broadening, increasing sympathy 
     for a wider range of life experience, more encompassing, more 
     fully human? It might--if we could be less hidebound, a 
     little more sure of ourselves--it might be a goal to be more 
     alive to the possibilities of our peculiar moment in history, 
     if we truly work at it.

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