To Show One’s Hand: Effort in Practice and Reception
When Raphael sent him some nude studies in 1515, Dürer noted the significance of these drawings. John Ruskin, in his lecture ‘The Relation of Art to Morals’ (1870), invokes and translates Dürer’s comments, adding his own emphasis: ‘These figures, [Dürer] says, “Raphael drew and sent to Albert Dürer in Nürnberg, to show him”—What? Not his invention, nor his beauty of expression, but “sein Hand zu weissen”, “To show him his hand.”’ Ruskin’s emphasis on the effort discernible in a work exemplifies the historically persistent notion of the artist’s hand as the imprimatur of their humanity. This metonym takes on a new significance in the context of digital nonhuman compositions, as AI image generation programmes often render figures with their hands hidden – in pockets, behind backs, or cropped out of frame – or else betray themselves by rendering hands unfaithfully, with extra digits, displaced finger joints, and misshapen palm configurations.
This session seeks to critically examine the role of human effort in art since 1800, by exploring how the idea of artwork as indicative of the artist’s hand – their labour, humanity or autography – has fared in the face of various forms of creative delegation, collaboration, mechanical reproduction, and the advent of nonhuman design. To that end, we invite papers from across disciplines that consider issues around the ethics of artistic effort, broadly conceived, such as overwork and/or ease, readymade art, work that ‘could have been done by a child’, the use of AI technologies in art and design, and technical evidence of artistic labour in conservation science.
The session will be marked by a letterpress handbill for attendees, produced in collaboration with Bristol Common Press, set in metal type by hand.
Session Convenors:
Deborah Lam, University of Bristol
James Harrison, University of Bristol
Speakers:
Benjamin Harvey, Mississippi State University
Illustrating Effort: Norman Rockwell Shows His Workings
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), the American illustrator and artist, exercised a kind of calculated anti-sprezzatura over the course of his long career. Rather than making his art seem effortless or easy, he took the opposite course and relished drawing attention to the difficult, time-consuming, and labour-intensive aspects of his practice. He did so not only through the characteristics of the works themselves—their subject matters and their manifest displays of craft—but also by carefully controlling what his audience knew about his artistic process.
Accordingly, Rockwell set about showing his workings in publications he either authored or authorized. In, for example, My Adventures as an Illustrator (1960), his autobiography, Rockwell devotes entire chapters to his painstaking methodology. “Flops”, for example, describes wasted effort, works that failed for one reason or another; while “I paint another Post cover” takes the form of a journal, charting the troublesome progress of one work over a fourteen-week period, from initial idea to the delivery of the completed work. Such accounts were targeted at Rockwell’s many admirers, amassed largely through his job as the foremost illustrator at The Saturday Evening Post, a magazine with a peak circulation of over 6½ million. Seldom had such a large audience cared about arcane questions of artistic decision-making and technique.
My paper explores the performative displays of effort found in Rockwell’s art and writings, and at how he ultimately challenged his viewers to make interpretative efforts of their own.
Alice M. Chambers, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
“The Public Will Judge:” Issues of Medium and Mimicry in Two Copies of Watson and the Shark
John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) revolutionized history painting, its popularity leading Copley to produce multiple versions of the work. In addition to the MFA Boston’s full-scale copy (1778) of the original, the Detroit Institute of Arts holds a third copy of this image painted by Copley in 1782. However, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has a version of the painting produced c. 1780-1790 not by Copley, but by a London company called the Polygraphic Society. Its founder, Joseph Booth, developed a “mechanical and chymical process” of reproducing oil paintings. Though Booth remained secretive about his methods, conservators have suggested that he stenciled, block printed, or screen-printed oil color onto specially-prepared canvases before hand-finishing details. Booth (falsely) advertised that his polygraphic paintings came into being without the interference of a human hand, yet were miraculously indistinguishable from ‘real’ oil paintings.
This paper will explore the Houston and Detroit paintings in dialogue with one another, examining to what degree we might consider them to be of a different medium. Though visually similar with the same dimensions and compositional orientation, each was produced via fundamentally different processes. I ask how eighteenth-century consumers would have read the difference between these two methods of copying and how this compares to the perceptions of museum goers today. Using the Detroit and Houston paintings as a case study, I ask how issues of authenticity, replication, mechanization, and media affect the perceived value of artworks the further one strays from the artist’s hand.
Clara Shaw, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Authenticity and Autography in Paul Nash’s World War One Lithographs
In 1918, the Ladies Pictorial reviewed Paul Nash’s six lithographs displayed in his exhibition The Void of War: ‘Unforgettably eloquent in their stark reality… so intense in their expression of desolation and chaos that you instinctively shudder and swallow hard as you realise that this is an actual record of what is happening over there.’ This emotional response typifies the reactions Nash’s war prints elicited from viewers. In a time when the realities of the First World War were obfuscated by censorship and danger was considered inherent in modernity and the mechanization of warfare, authenticity gained artistic value. However, contrary to appearances, Nash’s lithographs were in fact not produced ‘over there.’ Rather, they were drawn in the safety of the English countryside. Nevertheless, Nash imbued his images with the rhetoric of an eye-witness account by virtue of their expressive, hand-drawn quality.
This paper proposes that Nash expressly turned to lithography to exploit its technical ability to preserve the artist’s direct hand, evincing both his artistic effort and his experience with the ongoing war effort. The resulting prints became duplicatable surrogates of his popular front-line drawings. The paper first contextualizes Nash’s choice of medium within the contemporary revival of artistic lithography as a unique, autographic method of multiplying drawings. Additionally, it considers how Nash’s production coincided with the rationale behind the British War Propaganda Bureau’s deliberate mobilization of lithography to disseminate testimonials of war experience.
Sarah Rapoport, Yale University
The Efforts of Industry: James Tissot’s Cloisonné Enamels
In the 1880s, the London-based French artist James Tissot began to produce cloisonné enamels, idiosyncratically transposing fleeting subjects – fashionable ladies, imagery drawn from Punch cartoons, and Impressionist-style landscapes – to the painstakingly laborious medium. Their polarized reception revolved around the apparently disproportionate effort expended on cheap, transient things. French aesthete Robert de Montesquiou observed a “disproportion…between the assured duration of the work and the transience of fashion.” Others found Tissot’s subjects unsuitable for cloisonné but nonetheless noted them as “an extraordinary memorial of his…skill of hand.” The artist’s exhibition strategies likewise amplified and expanded this articulation of effort through the inclusion of “test pieces” demonstrating the experimentation, failure, and process by which he had learned to successfully work in the medium. “All these works,” he proclaimed in the catalogue, “have been designed, modelled and executed by the Artist’s own hand.”
This paper positions the production, exhibition, and reception of Tissot’s cloisonné alongside Victorian discourses of artistic labour. In an age of mechanization and mass production, thinkers like John Ruskin romanticized pre-modern models of labour while denouncing the degradation and rapidity of mechanical (re)production. I suggest that Tissot’s engagement with cloisonné disrupts this binary logic by placing the hand and its efforts in unexpected proximity to the transient and mass-produced. Drawing on craft scholarship by theorists such as Ezra Shales and Glenn Adamson, I argue that Tissot’s enamels embody an alternate attitude towards modern labour and its products, making visible the slow work inherent in mass-produced commodities by fixing them in cloisonné.