Since Aby Warburg, twentieth-century art historians have made generative connections between medieval and contemporary art. In 1930, Meyer Schapiro took Férnand Léger to see the Morgan Beatus (New York, Pierpont Morgan, M. 664), inspiring Léger’s future palettes and forms (25). The cover of Herbert Kessler’s Seeing Medieval Art (2019) looks like a color-field painting, though it’s actually a thousand-year-old manuscript painting (Darmstadt Hessisches Landesmuseum AE 679, f. 126v). In his 2012 Medieval Modern, Alexander Nagel notes that “the ‘medieval strain’ in modern art is becoming clearly visible, making it possible, in turn, to think through the history of modern art in new ways” (14). Elina Gertsman has published a series of books highlighting this strain, from her edited volume Abstraction in Medieval Art (2020) to her brilliant The Absent Image (2021); so too have Amy Knight Powell, Glenn Peers, and Charlotte Denoël and Erik Verhagen. [1]
These instances of comparison, L’art médiéval est-il contemporain? Is Medieval Art Contemporary? claims, are richest when the medieval and the contemporary are put in dialogue. Nancy Thebaut, in her strong opening historiographical essay (“Au-delà des périodisations. Parcours passés et futurs potentiels”), asserts that “la radicalité de chacune est mise en valeur et peut susciter de nouvelles considérations” (32). To Thebaut, it is less important whether or not (let’s say) Judy Chicago intimately knew Hildegard’s work before she made The Dinner Party. Instead, Thebaut argues, the comparison between the two periods should allow us to further open up each individual period, allowing us to see subtle things in medieval art or modern art that “jusqu’à present, nous ont échappé” (33).
Many of the splendid essays in this volume do just what Thebaut recommends. Medievalists use modern art and writings to refresh their understanding of the medieval. Aden Kumler’s piece (“‘All form is a process of notation’: Hrabanus Maurus’ ‘exemplativist’ art”), the strongest in the volume, uses Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins’s conception of “exemplative” art to better understand In honorem sanctae crucis. “Exemplative” art is both an “instantiation of [a] conceptual model and its implied range of possibility...the potential (future) instantiations of the model” (100). Kumler uses this twentieth-century theorization to better expose how Hrabanus’s medieval readers might have navigated In honorem, not just reading it once to understand it once, but also taking advantage of its abstraction to actively, perpetually re-read and re-translate it, finding In honorem’s unstable, eternally multiplying meanings, “rigorously exploring, without transgressing, the sacred mysteries at the center of their religious beliefs” (108). Isabelle Marchesin’s “Les nombres de la forme et les formes du nombre: Essai sur les carolingiens et l'abstraction” also exemplarily reconfigures how we understand ninth-century art through the lens of the modernist obsession with mathematical aesthetics, arguing that Carolingian art is much more than ornamentum and that, like twentieth-century art, its geometry is a semiotic system. Bissera V. Pentcheva’s “Abstraction in Medieval Art: The Chiasm in Hagia Sophia” uses Rosalind Kraus and Alan Karpow’s writings to show how Byzantine icons were not representative paintings imitating life, but rather “action paintings” that captured performances of ritual, a gestural residue that channeled the spiritual energy of God.
Scholars in L’art médiéval est-il contemporain? also pursue the inverse investigation, using the medieval to see modern subjects anew. Larisa Dryansky’s “Hollis Frampton, ‘médiéval’” enumerates the ways in which Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century De Luce (and other medieval sources like the Lindisfarne Gospels) undergird Frampton’s film Zorns Lemma (1970). Exploring medieval mysticism and medieval devotion to Christ’s wounds allows Janig Bégoc to recast a French performance artist’s use of blood as more than just sexual liberation (in “La conversion du précieux sang: Gina Pane et la mystique médiévale”). In “Automata, Kineticism, and Automation: An Oblique History of Animacy in the Art of the Long 1960s,” Roland Betancourt insists that the animacy of 1960s art was inspired not just by industrial automation and kinetic sculpture, but also by the animacy of the viewer that was required by Disneyland’s rides, immersive art environments, and 1970s performance art; he comes to this conclusion by comparing 1960s viewer experiences with medieval documents recording Byzantine viewers’ ekphrases of “animate paintings.”
Some essays are less successful at using one period to open up the other. In Elliot Adam’s “Qui était Jean Fouquet pour François Robertet?”, Adam’s comparisons with contemporary art feel too quick and simple, tacked onto an otherwise robust article on authorship and fifteenth-century French court painting. Benjamin Riado’s article, “Art conceptuel et scolastique: Le Chêne de Michael Craig-Martin est-il Thomiste?”, does a lovely job of reminding us that even art work made in 1974 can be grounded in older, less “scientific” modes of perception, including “belief in the possibility of a miracle resulting only from our desire for it” (75); but his insistence that this contemporary “perméabilité au sacré” (88) connects with Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of transubstantiation specifically (and not, let’s say, Augustine or Anselm’s ideas about belief vs. understanding) longs for more justification. Valérie Mavridorakis’s essay, “L’artiste conceptuel à son pupitre,” argues that conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt saw themselves as “serial clerks” and thus functioned similarly to medieval monastic scribes (60). Mavridorakis emphasizes that conceptual artists’ insistence on meticulous copying yielded a kind of reification of the product and diminishment of the hand of the “genius” artist, which, in her mind, was a humble act akin to medieval monastic scribal practice; she is inspired by the fact that LeWitt calls his process “mystical” and desired “silence” in his art (62). Mavridorakis’s provocation is intriguing, and her attempt to “inscrire l’art conceptuel dans une longue durée” (73) is appreciated, but in the end her depiction of medieval monks as mere transcribers “mieux préparés à l’écriture qu’à la lecture” (68) is under-researched, with little scholarship on the experiences of monastic scriptoria cited and no concrete medieval examples furnished. Perhaps more light could have been shed on conceptual art if the understanding of medieval monastic transcription had been better understood. Moreover, one cannot ignore that, no matter how much conceptual artists saw themselves as a part of a Barthesian “death of the author” movement, LeWitt’s work was sold as a named brand on the art market--not exactly an exercise in monastic humility.
But nuances such as these might not be the point of L’art médiéval est-il contemporain? The volume concludes with a coda (“Zoe Leonard’s Suitcases”) written by Amy Knight Powell. In the essay, Powell uses Leonard’s installation 1961 as a metaphor, a lesson for scholars in how to build analogies between seemingly disparate time periods. She quotes Deleuze: “‘we live empirically as a succession of different presents...ever-increasing coexistence of levels of the past’” (229). She describes how Leonard double-dates her photographs with both the date they were taken and the date they were printed, “captur[ing] a moment and send[ing] it into the future, bracketing the stretch of time between” (232). She quotes Michael Serres: “‘analogies...are dangerous and even forbidden--but we know no other route to invention’” (239). More than the merits or successes of any one essay, the generative potential of comparative work is this volume’s main provocation. In eleven essays, it models a promising way forward for medievalists, modernists, and scholars in the twenty-first century academy.
--------
Note:
1. Amy Knight Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books, 2012); Glenn Peers, Byzantine Things in the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); and Charlotte Denoël and Erik Verhagen, Make it New: Conversations avec l’art medieval. Carte blanche à Jan Dibbets (Paris: BnF, 2018).