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Connoisseurship
Vèlazquez, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), 1650
Connoisseurship is cultivated
appreciation of quality and merit.
At its root, it is an emotional response to art that
some people experience and others do not.
Some individuals go through emotional roller coasters as
they read poetry or listen to music, while others remain
indifferent or bored, and it is the same with looking at
a painting or sculpture.
Connoisseurs are individuals who react to art with great
sensitivity and see subtleties, qualities and
shortcomings that escape the rest of us. One could
compare the reaction of a connoisseur to the way crystal
rings with a beautiful and lasting note, as opposed to
the dull and short sound of glass.
Because of their great interest in art, connoisseurs are
always very knowledgeable about art history, collections
and the lives of artists.
Nevertheless, while everyone can go to college and
graduate in art history, factual knowledge of art does
not produce connoisseurs, it only forms scholars.
This is not so different from taking golf or tennis
lessons. Most everyone can become a decent club player,
but it takes this additional ingredient we call talent,
or a natural gift, to ever play like a pro.
For these reasons, connoisseurship is both the most
celebrated of qualities and the most decried.
The highest distinction in the art world is to be
referred to as someone who has "a great eye". Every
dealer, art critique, collector and auction specialist
would like to be known as someone who has "a great eye".
It means being a connoisseur. Having an ability which
does not come from a Ph.D. title and reading thousands
of art books, but instead from a deeper understanding of
art. The innate gift to distinguish what is great from
what is just good. The talent to recognize the hand of a
master as opposed to the work of his imitators.
In the days before there were books on everything,
x-rays, and millions of photographs, these connoisseurs
only had their eyes and their memories, to sort, compare
and rank the best paintings and to recognize who had
painted these thousands of unsigned old masters.
Likewise, it was always connoisseurs who saw the quality
and merit of works by pioneers such as the
impressionists, and who discovered countless talented
new artists everyone was rejecting in their early days.
Today we have armies of art history graduates, people
whose knowledge comes exclusively from books, and from
seeing all paintings in the postcard size of printed
reproductions. Most are utterly unable to distinguish
quality and merit, poor forgeries from genuine
originals.
How else does one explain that forgeries have invaded
the market like never before, and that 15 percent of all
paintings by famous artists sold by galleries and
auction houses are outright fakes?
Every couple of years we hear that a new forger has been
arrested after he sold hundreds of fake paintings by
important masters. Where did all these fakes go? They
were sold by art galleries and auction houses. Some went
to museum collections. How come nobody spots these new
series of forgeries when the first, second or third
enters the market? In part because of a paucity of
connoisseurs and because knowledge from books has
replaced cultivated appreciation of quality and merit.
Connoisseurship is decried because so many making a
career in the art world are unable to tell apart a
mediocre forgery from a genuine great painting.
Bernard Berenson, one of the greatest connoisseurs, has
been idiotically and posthumously attacked and
criticized for accepting commissions from the legendary
dealer Duveen. What his critics fail to mention is that
all the paintings Berenson recommended to American
millionaires were authentic masterpieces, which he
identified as such using his judgment, his
connoisseurship, and indeed these paintings stand among
the finest crown jewels of American collections.
Denying connoisseurship, which is that some people have
as a superior and cultivated ability to recognize
artistic merit, is one of the surprising blind spots of
our supposedly enlightened age.
We firmly believe in the ability some possess more than
others, to judge, appreciate and respond to art.
Along scholarly research, provenance, comparative
analysis, and scientific examinations, we consider the
opinion of connoisseurs to be invaluable in determining
authenticity. |
