Michelangelo Meets Buffalo Meat (original) (raw)
August 24, 1997
Michelangelo Meets Buffalo Meat
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Grove's new 34-volume Dictionary of Art reflects big changes in the politics, the history and the biases of our age
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THE DICTIONARY OF ART Edited by Jane Shoaf Turner. Illustrated. 32,600 pp. New York: Grove's Dictionaries. 34 Volumes. $8,800.
have been living with Grove's Dictionary of Art for a while now and it takes up almost as much space as a roommate: combined, the 34 heavy, dark-green volumes containing 32,600 pages of double-column small print weigh 168 pounds, and if they were to be stacked would reach five feet, which I gather happens to equal the height of the dictionary's chief editor, Jane Shoaf Turner. Neater, better organized than I am and the perfect citizen with a virtuous global purview, it sometimes seems to glower at me from the shelves, and so, periodically, I have peevishly hunted for its flaws, gloating over venial errors and oversights (no entries, for instance, on the art historians John Rewald or T. J. Clark) and complaining to myself about its sometimes unlovable prose.
Then, inevitably, I am made grateful for its help and for the elevating surprises that come from browsing through it, a routine that neatly proves the continuing value of books as opposed to computers. It is not true that electronic data storage has rendered a work like this obsolete. Search engines aren't good enough yet to make the dictionary practicable on the Internet, and the longer, book-length entries would, in any case, be effectively unreadable. The dictionary's size is, moreover, beyond the present storage capacity of a single CD-ROM, while putting it on several of them would significantly defeat the prime benefit of a CD: cross-referencing. Cross-referencing in Grove is as easy as pulling a book from the shelf and faster than the Internet is most of the time.
Then there's the serendipity of reading about, say, Buddhism, turning the pages and coming upon an entry on Buffalo Meat, a 19th-century Cheyenne Indian artist -- the sort of random connection that hypertext links simply aren't designed for.
If the Grove dictionary is a throwback, in other words, we should be grateful for it. The most ambitious art-publishing venture of the late 20th century, it is an awesome single source on world art. Of course, you almost have to be as rich as the collector Paul Mellon (who, by the way, merits a nice full column of text in Grove) to buy this $8,800 leviathan. But it is an invaluable acquisition for any serious art lover, indispensable for libraries or schools.
The dictionary was 15 years in the making, actually not long considering that the only comparable project was begun in 1907 by two German scholars, Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, as a biographical compendium only; it was completed, in 37 volumes, in 1950, long after they both had died, by which time much of their work was obsolete. At the glacial and episodic pace revisions on it apparently have been going, we'll all be dead when the proposed revised German edition of Thieme-Becker is complete. Grove's entry on Thieme-Becker, incidentally, is a respectful but concise three paragraphs.
Journalists love numbers, big awe-inspiring ones best, which has made the dictionary, much hyped for many years, a journalist's dream: it includes 26 million words in all, 41,000 articles by 6,700 contributors from 120 countries. In hunting for an apt metaphor for something enormous and spectacular conjured up from scratch, I thought of St. Petersburg, then looked it up in Grove, which offers 10 dense pages on the city's history.
Michelangelo, the longest biographical entry among 20,800 of them, is 30 pages and 16,000 words. Among such astronomical numbers the 15,000 illustrations, mostly black and white, seem skimpy, but the point of the dictionary is to purvey information through words, and, after all, what number of illustrations would ever have been adequate to document the entire history of art? One per article (41,000) or 10 (410,000) or 100 (4.1 million)?
The longest entry, on China, totals 469 pages and 755,400 words. A thorny issue for the dictionary's English editors was achieving an ecumenical balance between Western and non-Western subjects. Western art takes up more than half of Grove in the event, but not much more than that. The entry on Japan is 431 pages, the one on Africa 227. Even Afghanistan gets 27 pages.
In this respect, the dictionary is a product of our age: since Thieme-Becker, and particularly since the idea for Grove was hatched, art history has exploded in scope, especially in methodology, which means, among other things, that gender and politics are now issues -- along with iconography, biography, patronage, style and conservation science. During the last 15 years the world has also changed, and the dictionary has had to change with it, the history of Russian art, for instance, taking into account the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, the old divisions between high and low art have eroded, as has the overwhelming academic bias toward the study of European art. The dictionary recognizes all these changes, but to its credit without capitulating to them on the whole: that is, in contested and unsettled affairs it remains mostly neutral, though sometimes to a fault. I found the entry on the English historian, connoisseur and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, for instance, comically terse, as if the editors thought it would have been in poor taste to talk about him at greater length. Reading entries like the ones on de Kooning or Tiepolo, I also wondered whether many people would be able to envision the paintings from the descriptions, not because the prose is jargony but because it is so flat.
On the other hand, entries on Degas, on portraiture and on Michelangelo show Grove at its best: thorough, lively, clear. What else would you expect with 6,700 different contributors except mixed results? Writing on art is generally so awful these days that it is remarkable there are so many authorities whose prose could be made accessible. And if the dictionary doesn't tell you something, at least it tells you where to find it, in 300,000 bibliographical citations. This is crucial because encyclopedias are initial sources of information but they're never definitive, even at 26 million words. The accomplishment of Grove is to have provided a library of reference material with many points of entry into various subjects: sections like Decadence and Decline, or Music and Art, or even Building Regulations, open up the study of art to paths of inquiry that standard biographical or geographical entries don't, and I found those sections among the most memorable precisely because they're unconventional, hence thought-provoking.
Tastes change, and who knows what people will make of this mix of entries 20 years from now? The Grove dictionary is a sister publication to the authoritative New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the sixth and most recent 20-volume edition of which came out in 1980. Earlier editions of the music dictionary, first published in 1878, are relics, and they are tendentious in ways that, presumably, their editors did not realize. Undertaking a vast project like the Dictionary of Art is akin to changing light bulbs in the Empire State Building: by the time you're done it's necessary to begin again. I was amused by the entry on computer art, which ended, ''it is clear that in the culture that computers help to create, many things will become commonplace that were previously assumed to be impossible.'' This is called hedging bets, an acknowledgment that the entry will be outdated by the time you read it.
In every sense this is a historic publication, a throwback in conception to the 18th century and Diderot as a catalogue of knowledge, and who knows whether anyone will try to supersede it in the future -- or whether anyone could?
Michael Kimmelman is the chief art critic of The New York Times.
