{"id":6587,"date":"2024-04-16T13:53:52","date_gmt":"2024-04-16T17:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/?p=6587"},"modified":"2024-05-20T13:57:12","modified_gmt":"2024-05-20T17:57:12","slug":"editors-introduction-10-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/2024\/04\/16\/editors-introduction-10-2\/","title":{"rendered":"editor\u2019s introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Toni Armstrong<\/span><\/h4>\n

If secrets are a form of social currency, then the history of art has a wealth of treasure to be discovered. Secrets have long been a form of community building, as those \u201cin\u201d a given circle are allowed to know and those \u201coutside\u201d are kept in the dark. The word secret<\/em> comes from the Latin meaning \u201cto separate,\u201d and secrets often do exactly that: separating truth from fiction, separating trustworthy confidants from suspects, and separating conspicuousness from mystery. There are many secrets in the archives and hidden within the works of art we study. Some of these secrets were made through acts of censorship or neglect, while others were made by artists choosing to protect themselves. Yet other secrets were created inadvertently when a gap in knowledge left something unspoken between two generations or when records of a creator\u2019s own interpretations ceased to exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

From x-ray technologies that reveal the \u201csecrets\u201d hidden in art to public writing on the \u201csecrets\u201d of art-making, concealment and its revelations play an unavoidable role in our work as scholars, artists, and art historians. We act as detectives when we research: combing through archival and curatorial records, looking at art objects, and theorizing about the world and our histories. When we publish our findings, we allow these secrets\u2014whether intentionally or accidentally hidden\u2014to have a scholarly voice and be rediscovered by new audiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a series of secrets embedded in Rogi Andr\u00e9\u2019s 1940 portrait of Peggy Guggenheim (fig. 1).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 1. Rogi Andr\u00e9 (1900-1970). [Peggy Guggenheim]<\/em> (ca. 1940). Photograph. 11.5 x 9.1 in. (29.3 x 23.2 cm). Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>Andr\u00e9, born Rosza Klein in Hungary, studied painting at the Fine Art School in Budapest before moving to Paris in the late 1920s.1<\/sup> Andr\u00e9 learned photography through her husband, Andr\u00e9 Kert\u00e9sz, and began making portraits around 1928. Marguerite \u201cPeggy\u201d Guggenheim (1898-1979), perhaps better known for her collecting and patronage in the United States, spent much of her time in the 1920s and 1930s in Paris amid the vibrant modernist arts community.2<\/sup>\u00a0Much of the scholarship on Guggenheim opens her story with her arrival in New York in 1941, when she\u2014like many other expatriates\u2014abandoned occupied Paris amid the onset of World War II. Once in New York, Guggenheim quickly rekindled her relationships with exiled artists, opening the \u201cArt of this Century\u201d Gallery in Manhattan in 1942 to feature work by Leonora Carrington, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Georges Braque, and others. This photograph demonstrates an important moment in Guggenheim\u2019s story: she stands among art objects in her collection moments before leaving behind the social world she had spent two decades building.<\/span><\/p>\n

When scholars open Guggenheim\u2019s story in New York, they neglect the fact that she spent years living in Paris among these artists, building the social network that would allow her to become so successful so quickly back in New York. In Andr\u00e9\u2019s photograph, Guggenheim poses in the artist Kay Sage\u2019s apartment, where she stayed after Sage fled Paris for the United States a few months prior. Guggenheim has intentionally surrounded herself with works she has recently collected: Constantin Brancusi\u2019s polished bronze sculpture, Maiastra<\/em> (c. 1912) and Robert Delaunay\u2019s Fen\u00eatres ouvertes simultan\u00e9ment <\/em>(1912). In other photographs in this series, Guggenheim and Andr\u00e9 posed Brancusi\u2019s sculpture with her, indicating that Guggenheim felt it was an important indicator of her taste, perhaps specifically her interest in high abstraction. Yet more details are embedded in this image that demonstrate Guggenheim\u2019s self-fashioning as an art patron: there are two 1934 issues of the surrealist magazine Minotaure<\/em> beside her, while Guggenheim holds a third featuring Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Rotorelief no. 7<\/em> (1935).3<\/sup>\u00a0Choosing to place herself among these objects for this photograph demonstrates to the viewer\u2014and the historian\u2014that Guggenheim was already imagining herself as an important modernist patron well before she left Paris. When she arrived in New York shortly after this photograph was taken, she brought both the objects around her and the connections they represented.<\/span><\/p>\n

As stories move through history, they pick up new details. Once finally given voice, their meaning has changed. The two feature essays included in this issue deal with this question of how visual art becomes layered as it is reprised through time. To analyze the contemporary prints of Amalia Mesa-Bains, Gilda Posada<\/strong> unravels multiple layers of history; she analyzes the sixteenth-century Codex de la Cruz-Badiano,<\/em> an important pictorial manuscript on Mexican and Indigenous botany and medicine and distills the violent history of the twentieth-century Bracero<\/em> Exchange Program. Thus, when Posada turns to her reading of Mesa-Bains\u2019 prints, she shows how this fraught history is embedded in each contemporary image, too. In our second feature essay, Iakoiehwahtha Patton<\/strong> examines how a series of controversial erotic images, I modi,<\/em> were equally disseminated and censored in the years following their publication in early modern Italy. Reactions to the titillating novelty of I modi,<\/em> increasing efforts to control the image of the nude, and anxieties about viewers\u2019 reactions to the images led to a papal censorship campaign against the prints.<\/span><\/p>\n

In parallel with the work undertaken in our feature essays, two exhibition reviews demonstrate how artists and curators alike grapple with storied historical legacies. Corey Loftus<\/strong> explores how artist Jessica Campbell reprises the history of a 1920s women\u2019s activist society, the secretive Heterodoxy Club, through rich textile art in an exhibition at the Fabric Museum in Philadelphia. Loftus makes visible the connections between the Heterodites\u2019 activist work and publishing and Campbell\u2019s engagement with the archive. Although a less direct challenge to the archive, Miray Eroglu<\/strong>\u2019s essay on Partisans of the Nude, <\/em>an exhibition at Columbia University, shows how this exhibition offers an important addition to the narrative of both modernism and twentieth-century Arab art. Eroglu demonstrates the multiple meanings of the nude\u2014as a site of personal reflection, a political act, a space of collectivity\u2014for both the artists and their audiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

As we produce new scholarship, we are all finding new methods for \u201ctelling\u201d these complicated and layered secrets. Shawn Simmons<\/strong> reviews Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art<\/em> to show how Lex Morgan Lancaster\u2019s notion of \u201cqueer abstraction\u201d offers an analysis of abstract art production without concrete boundaries or inflexible interpretations. Instead of crafting a singular definition of abstraction, Simmons lauds Lancaster\u2019s capacity to uncover layers of meaning and multiple modes of visibility in abstract art.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our two research spotlights demonstrate new methods for writing about aspects of history that are too often under-discussed in scholarship today. Liz Neill<\/strong> describes \u201cThe Provenance Reliability Index,\u201d a digital humanities project that tracks the movement of archaic pottery vessels in both the ancient and modern worlds. Through a digital database, Neill demonstrates a model for collecting and sharing data about the displacement of ancient Mediterranean objects from their original findspots that reveals avenues of further contextualization for their mobile lives. With a different method, but a similarly radical approach to how we might create new scholarship, Danielle Wirsansky<\/strong> describes her new musical entitled The Secrets We Keep<\/em>, which explores Jewish-Polish history during the Holocaust and its aftermath through Slavic folklore. Through this mode of storytelling, Wirsansky offers a new way of engaging the public to expand and share the often painful conversations held in the fields of memory studies and Holocaust studies.<\/span><\/p>\n

In All About Love,<\/em> Black feminist scholar bell hooks urges her readers to consider the telling of secrets as a way to reclaim power, to build community, and to protect one another.4<\/sup>\u00a0As our authors have shown in this issue, secrets have a way of connecting us inextricably with our pasts. The work of uncovering these secrets requires that we first notice an absence, a mask, or an erasure. The act of telling<\/em> these secrets\u2014through the production of new scholarship\u2014requires new ways of looking at, thinking about, and writing history.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Toni Armstrong<\/strong> is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Toni works on 19th- and 20th-century art in the United States, with a particular focus on women art collectors, queer and women\u2019s history, and alternative museum practices.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

1. Catherine Gonnard, tr. Katia Porro, \u201cRogi Andr\u00e9,\u201d Dictionnaire universel des cr\u00e9atrices <\/em>(Paris: Archives of Women Artists, 2019), via AWARE, <\/em>https:\/\/awarewomenartists.com\/en\/artiste\/rogi-andre\/<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. See Mary Dearborn, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim <\/em>(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and Emma Acker, \u201cThe Maverick Collector: The Method in the Madness of Peggy Guggenheim.\u201d Collections<\/em> 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2004): 81\u2013100.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. The Minotaure <\/em>issues featured are Minotaure<\/em> no. 6 (December 5, 1934) with a cover by Marcel Duchamp, and Minotaure<\/em> no. 5 (May 12, 1934) with a cover by Francisco Bor\u00e8s. The open issue may be Minotaure <\/em>no. 10 (December 1937).<\/span><\/p>\n

4. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions<\/em> (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Toni Armstrong If secrets are a form of social currency, then the history of art has a wealth of treasure to be discovered. Secrets have long been a form of community building, as those \u201cin\u201d a given circle are allowed to know and those \u201coutside\u201d are kept in the dark. The word secret comes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[623],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6587"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6796,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6587\/revisions\/6796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}