Francis M. Naumann

My commutes this year have been enhanced by lectures on concert music (The Great Courses lecture series by Dr. Robert Greenberg, ten Great Masters, Their Lives and Music), and when this came across in an email, I was happy to expand my arts education again. I received a review copy of this from Edelweiss, Above the Treeline. I had read Maxwell Anderson's rel="nofollow" target="_top">The Quality Instinct: Seeing Art Through a Museum Director's Eye six years ago (must reread it soon!) and wondered if this might be a bit of seeing art through a historian's eye. Not really, but engaging nonetheless. Naumann is forthcoming with his naiveties, candid with his relationships (be forewarned, he is open with some...adult...interactions), and while I didn't get the full sense of his subtitle until the end, I did feel a privilege of his sharing of his mentors. Those mentors were Leo Steinberg, John Rewald, Beatrice Wood, and William Rubin, Robert Rosenblum and Robert Pincus-Witten. I'll not pick much from his memories here...best to read about them yourself.

Talking about his childhood, he said "Today we would have been classified as poor. Thankfully, my brother and I were unaware of it at the time, for my parents always seemed to have enough money to buy groceries and pay the bills." That reminded me of my childhood, though I was more than a little somewhat aware that we teetered on the edge. His mother was a "Sunday painter (literally)", and he and his brothers, not knowing yet that they were adopted, "assumed we had inherited her 'talent'..." While he addresses nurture and nature at the end of his book, my question at this part in the beginning was "Can you not 'inherit" memetic knowledge?"

Nice observation after he learned that with financial aid, work study, and loans he was paying for his own college and resolved to never skip a class again and to actually pay attention:

Being alert and attentive, however, did little to change my attitude about art history. I continued to believe that it was unnecessary for the practice of making art, which, after all, was supposed to concern itself with the present (or possibly the future), but the way I reasoned at the time, not the past.

We can be so smart, yet so stupid when we're young. My arts appreciation came so late.

In one class, he challenged a statement by his teacher and got an A.

It was the first time I realized that an idea - even if it contradicted the thoughts of your teacher - could be valid, but I was still not convinced that art history was worthwhile.

Sometimes our youth obscures our future. And his realization is lost on many an arrogant teacher. Now, he says that a class in philosophy and one in science had more influence on him than his art history classes. As top his philosophy professor

I admittedly liked his lifestyle [tied to a sports car], but no more than I could accept the value of art history, I could not fully comprehend why the study of ideas had any relevance.

Cue the philosophy lovers, at almost 58 years old, I agree with his youth and I still don't. Anyway, he said in the science class, a project had groups trying to find the focal point of a lens using a match, candle, a ruler and calipers, and various lenses.

Although it may not seem like much now, it was this exercise that made me realize that you needed to utilize everything at your disposal if your quest was to get the right answer toi a question

Two important lessons here: 1) Using all at your disposal..., and 2) To get the right answer. How many times have you seen teachers trapped by limited grasp mark something wrong because "that's not the way it was taught in class"?

His transition from artist wannabe studying at the Art Institute to his life's career came to a juncture with his final thesis. I'll leave that for the reader, but he says he was rightly judged by his advisor for being intelligent but not able to make better art. Naumann realized everything he "made was derivative" and that "the explanations I was providing for my work were more interesting than the work itself,..." And so he became an art historian.

I earned some interesting things when Naumann described the feedback from multiple editors at Holt when he tried to help Beatrice Wood get her autobiography published.

All of them agreed the text appealed to too many divergent interests, and they listed no fewer than five: [...] An autobiography, they contended, was only worth publishing when the person writing it was already famous, or if the writer focused in so tightly on one aspect of his or her accomplishments that it was more about the subject than about the person writing the book, Only the, they said, could the book be properly marketed and sold.

Huh. She did get it published - first self published, then picked up by a major publisher and reprinted a couple of times.

Now, an observation Naumann recalled from a Steinberg class on Cubism and the first assignment being to find the best definition of Cubism in the extant literature on the subject.

Steinberg knew that few art historians - even those who wrote books on the subject - actually looked at the pictures, so most any definition we found would probably be flawed, and therefore easily challenged.

I found that interesting and telling. I know engineers that never put eyes on what they design (and are surprised when we tell them an access panel is partially blocked by a parapet wall...) Naumann found a good answer to the question that Steinberg did not tear apart like those of his classmates.

This experience taught me two things about Robert Rosenblum: firstly, he was a person who really looked at art, and secondly, when describing it, he chose his words very carefully. That was exactly the kind of art historian I wanted to be.

A great life lesson is to choose your words carefully. (Even in a book review!)

Naumann says he once asked Rosenblum (what only realized at the writing of the book was an unfair and too limiting question) "what type of art historian he would prefer to be remebered as: like Leo Steinberg or John Rewald?" Rosenblum defered (they were at a party), saying he'd answer later and did so on the way out, "Rewald." When asked why by Naumann, he said,

It's more important to get your facts straight than presenting ideas, which will probably be forgotten over time.

Probably unintentionally, Naumann circled back to the philosophy question.

A good, easy read. Naumann writes well and tells good stories. Now...the jumping off lead? Seems I should look into Marcel Duchamp. And apparently, Joyce's Ulysses, something I've never been able to get far enough into to abandon, is best "read" while listening.… (mehr)

For about ten years, beginning with the Armory Show in 1913, New York City was host to the odd-sounding accents and queerer-looking paintings and constructions of a mixed bag of European and American avant-gardists. Besides the inscrutable figure of artist Marcel Duchamp, the European contingent included such iconoclastic visitors as the playboy painter Francis Picabia, the composer Edgard Varese, the diplomat Henri-Pierre Roche (author of Jules et Jim and adviser to the extraordinary collector John Quinn), and painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Crotti. Among the Americans were the photographer/painter/constructor Man Ray, the Precisionist painter and Fortune photographer Charles Sheeler, the Futurist Joseph Stella, and the Pennsylvania artists Charles Demuth and Morton Schamberg.
New York Dada is the first comprehensive study devoted exclusively to the accomplishments of these vanguard artists in America in the period 1915-23 - among the most underappraised, though most influential periods in the history of American art. Within months after the word "Dada" was discovered by a group of refugee artists and writers living in Switzerland, news of the movement reached artists in New York, who, by then, had already made works of art and engaged in activities that were similar in spirit to those produced by their European counterparts.
For this groundbreaking book, Francis M. Naumann has interviewed virtually all the survivors and has amassed a wealth of rare photographs and newspaper clippings, including pictures of early installations of modern art in homes and exhibitions, to capture the spirit of New York Dada in a work that is both informative and captivating. In view of the current trend to investigate the potential of a conceptually oriented approach to art and to the art-making process, it is perhaps no coincidence that New York Dada is now finally recognized for the important role it played in the formative phases of a modernist aesthetic.… (mehr)