I can’t cry over Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” a painting that held me in thrall as a teenager and brought me closest to tears, or for that matter any other painting. I have joined the ranks of the tearless. Like other art historians, I am fascinated by the pictures I study, but I don’t let them upset my mental balance. It’s all right for a picture to be challenging, but I don’t think of pictures as dangerous: When I look at an image, it doesn’t occur to me that it might ruin my composure, or alter the way I think, or change my mind about myself. There is no risk, no harm in looking.
The damping-down of my reactions has been a slow process. In part I grew up and away from the paintings I loved when I was younger. I suppose everyone gets sober as they get older; and I’ve also grown toward books and away from fresh encounters with paintings. These days I tend to prepare myself before I travel to see an important painting: Like a diplomat getting ready for a summit meeting, I do some background reading and take some notes. That way I come at the painting well armed with thoughts and problems. Often, it works, and I have a richer experience than I would have had without doing research in advance: But there is a small, painful price to be paid every time. Each idea from a book is like a little tranquilizer, making the picture easier to see by taking the rough edges off of experience. Once, it seemed there was nothing between me and the “St. Francis in the Desert” but a foot or two of empty air. Now it’s like peering between the shelves in a library: Somewhere back there, beyond the wall of books, is the painting I am still trying to see.
Studying in advance is an ingrained habit for academics, and because I am an art historian, I may have an especially virulent strain of the disease. Yet the same goes for anyone who learns anything about an image: Each fact is a shield against firsthand experience. Anyone who has even glanced at a museum label or opened an art book is incrementally less able to be really affected by seeing the artworks. I don’t deny that historical knowledge paves new roads to the work, deepens and enriches the work, and helps make sense of unfamiliar paintings. But it also alters the relation between the person and the painting, turning seeing into a struggle. You see what’s on the museum label or what the guidebook says, and you are lucky if you see much else. Once your head is filled with all kinds of fascinating bits of information, it gets harder to see anything beyond the labels, the audio tours, and the exhibition catalogs.
In university classes, art historians usually caution their students to try to keep seeing for themselves, and not to be dependent on books. That’s a real enough danger, and I think it conceals a more insidious problem: The piles of information smother our capacity to really feel. By imperceptible steps, art history gently drains away a painting’s sheer wordless visceral force, turning it into an occasion for intellectual debate. What was once an astonishing object, thick with the capacity to mesmerize, becomes a topic for a quiz show, or a one-liner at a party, or the object of a scholar’s myopic expertise. I am still very much interested in Bellini’s painting. But the picture no longer visits me in my sleep, or haunts my thoughts, or intrudes on my walks in the countryside. It no longer matters to my life, only to my work.
Most people who study pictures are content to read, and let their reading help them see. For them, learning only deepens the experience of pictures. The more you know, they’ll say, the more you get out of a visit to the museum. Without knowledge, you’re just guessing, and your guesses are probably both wrong and much simpler than what the artist really had in mind. Any number of historians, sociologists, and philosophers have argued the point. Other people -- a smaller number -- have some things to say in favor of naked, ignorant experience. The position I’m taking is closer to two philosophers, John Dewey and R.G. Collingwood, who have said that no one appreciates any work in full: Every response is partial, and any emotion is mixed with its companion thoughts, so why say that one person’s experience is off-limits and another’s is legitimate?
The division between people who know nothing about pictures and those who know a great deal isn’t the same as the division between people who respond emotionally -- say, by crying -- and those who don’t. There are overlaps, to be sure, and virtually all academics are in the tearless camp. Learning did kill emotion for me, but I also have heard from people who know a great deal about paintings and still cry.
Could the two sides talk to one another? Can a person who has just cried in front of the “Mona Lisa” possibly have anything to say to a historian who has studied the painting her whole life? Perhaps it only works the other way around: The person who cries might go to hear the historian lecture, and eventually the weepy person might learn something from the sober one. At least that is the way it would happen if the two people could even understand one another. In my experience people with intense emotional reactions to paintings don’t care for the way historians talk, and the feeling is mutual.
As part of my research on people who have been moved to tears by paintings, I called and wrote to a number of nationally and internationally known art historians. I wanted to augment the letters I had solicited in newspapers and on the Internet with the opinions of some of the people who are most knowledgeable about paintings. I asked the historians if they had cried in response to an artwork, and also if they thought there might be a link between the “knowledge” gained by crying and the knowledge -- not in quotation marks -- acquired by studying. The majority of replies were unambiguous and to the point: Crying is not part of the discipline, and has nothing to contribute. The more famous the art historian, the less likely he or she had ever cried. Based on my somewhat random survey, I would have to say tearlessness is a criterion of good scholarship.
Most of the art historians ruled the question of crying out of court. I was told, for example, that crying is old-fashioned, romantic, and unfitted to modernist art. I was told that serious viewers are right not to cry, and that in any case crying is not what most artists want from the public. I was told that a book on crying has no place in the discipline. “It will close the gates of Harvard to you forever,” one historian said. But then he added, “of course, that doesn’t mean much anyway.” The art historians I spoke to raised most of the points I’ve been mulling over: They said that crying is private, irrelevant, incommunicable, misguided, and ignorant. (In so many words, that is: Most of my correspondents were very polite.) Some even gave me reasons why I shouldn’t be writing about this topic to begin with: Crying, they said, has nothing to contribute to our understanding of pictures. Several people pointed out that if crying were somehow relevant, then I shouldn’t write about it unless I had cried over a painting.
The historians who helpfully advised me not to continue with my project were certainly annoying, but they’re the ones who gave me the impetus to keep going. I decided, perversely I suppose, that I must have hit on the perfect subject for a book: Almost no one wanted to talk about it; it was not well defined or widely documented; I may not be qualified to write it; it is unprofessional, embarrassing, “feminine,” unreliable, incoherent, private, and largely inexplicable; and it is philosophically dubious and historically outdated. Nothing could have attracted my attention more! Something, I thought, is clearly amiss in what we expect of pictures.
Of all the objections, the one I have the least idea how to answer is the charge that I haven’t cried myself. (Or at least, that I can’t remember if I’ve cried.) Perhaps in the end, this project is like a book of seafaring adventures written by a person who has never been in a boat: accurate but dry. Still, my lack of tears was what kept me curious. It also helped me to be more sympathetic to my weepy correspondents. I have come close enough to crying to know what paintings are capable of, and it bothered me that my everyday reactions were so weak. It also struck me that if I had cried, or if I were the kind of person who cries often, then my project would probably have become too much of a memoir. My confused, decade-long encounter with Bellini’s painting helped me stand somewhere between the mooniest letters and the most curt and icy skeptics.
There are many species of tearlessness. Among art historians, it tends to be assumed that a lack of emotion is no big loss. One scholar whose work I have long admired wrote me a polite letter, declining to share his experiences. “Dear Mr. Elkins,” he says, “Your next project on the Niobe syndrome (art historians moved to tears by what they are seeing) sounds most engaging; and I am intrigued to learn that the response to your questionnaire has been ‘overwhelming.’ For myself, I would rather not participate, even at the risk of confessing to a stony, unfeeling nature.” And he signs it, a bit coolly, “with warm regards.”
This is typical of several letters, conversations, and phone calls in response to my inquiry. This one is especially circumspect (notice he doesn’t quite say he has never cried), but it fits the mold: The historians distance themselves from the subject, and express a brief regret. Indeed, this historian’s apology is so perfunctory that it almost looks like he is proud of his “stony, unfeeling nature.” Another historian, just as well known, answered me in parentheses, like this: "(the answer is no).” Yet another said she had never thought about the subject before, though she imagined some art historians must have cried. She could almost remember the name of one of them. As we talked, it became apparent that she had ruled herself out without even thinking. She thought I must have been asking about other people.
Some of these conversations and letters gave me the creeps. People answered me so confidently, and with such emotional distance, that I felt as if I had asked them for the time of day, or tomorrow’s weather. It would be one thing if people wondered why they had not cried; but it is quite another when the very notion that they might have cried seemed so alien, so inadmissible, that they automatically assumed I was asking about other people. It’s the complacency that worries me. If you don’t feel strongly, how can you know what’s out there, beyond the pale of thought?
The most famous art historian of the second half of the 20th century, Sir Ernst Gombrich, wrote me a long letter all about how other people have cried. He himself hasn’t. “I see that you are going to disprove the passage in Leonardo’s Paragone,” he writes, citing a passage where Leonardo proposes, “The painter will move to laughter, but not to tears, for tears are a greater disturbance of the emotions than laughter.” Gombrich adds that he has never wept in front of a painting, or even laughed.
When I got Gombrich’s letter, I nearly gave up writing: The world’s best-known art historian says he’s never wept, and he quotes Leonardo, the world’s best-known painter, saying that it is impossible to make people weep over paintings. What more is there to say after that? How could anyone cry unless they were a bit off in the head?
Luckily the rest of Gombrich’s letter shows how. The example of Leonardo is particularly telling. Crying wasn’t something Leonardo valued, and he shared that perspective with many artists of his time and place. It is not accidental, I think, that Gombrich was trained as a specialist in Italian Renaissance art (as I was). Historians of any stripe pick up the values of the period they study, and many are attracted to certain periods by affinities they feel. In relation to what came before and after, the Italian Renaissance is a locus of dry intellection. Relatively speaking -- these are treacherous generalizations, but they have their truth -- in other times and places, crying was both valued and expected. So even though Leonardo is the West’s pre-eminent painter, he doesn’t stand for the centuries that followed him; and even though Gombrich is the best-known living art historian, his education is not irrelevant to his judgment.
Needless to say, my profession is not entirely unemotional, even if it is nearly tearless. Some art historians habitually form strong attachments to the pictures they study. Given the emotional climate of the times, strong dry-eyed reactions are easier to admit than weepy ones, and a number of people have told me they have been moved virtually to tears by pictures. Yet it is also clear that there are many kinds of extremely forceful, personal encounters that do not result in tears: the lightning bolt, for example. The philosopher Richard Wollheim told me he has shuddered at artworks, but never cried. Over the years I have seen several historians and critics get worked up over artworks, stomping around, gesticulating, overcome with happiness or fascination. One of my teachers, Barbara Stafford, has a wonderful, infectious enthusiasm for whatever she sees. Historians like her -- a happy minority -- are clearly transported by works of art: Something in the pictures takes hold of them, and (as Plato would have said) they catch fire. I know a number of very passionate, engaged, enthusiastic art historians, who are deeply attached to paintings, and I am not begrudging that kind of half-wild response -- but I would still want to know what it means to say you’re very attached, or very enthusiastic, even though you have never cried.
In all, I talked to or wrote almost 30 art historians. When the letters were all in, I had seven people who said they’d cried at paintings, and only two who were willing to go on the record. Eleven of the 30 said they habitually feel very strongly about art, even though they don’t cry. (They were all very shy. One historian wrote saying he hadn’t cried, he didn’t think emotional reactions were a good idea, and I could not use his name.) At a rough guess, I would bet that 1 percent of my profession have been moved to tears by an artwork, and another 10 percent let themselves get emotional. The remainder are professionals, in the pejorative sense of that word.
I’ve been talking about art historians and other academics, but what I’m saying goes as well for anyone whose attachment to pictures is mainly intellectual. I’ll hazard another guess, based on my unscientific survey of people in all walks of life, that the majority of such people are content not to feel very much, and that many actually distrust strong emotions. They try not to let themselves be manipulated, and they look askance at people who get carried away. For them the eyes are intellectual organs, made for scrutinizing the world, and the mind’s business is to keep control of the passions. Nietzsche wrote some brilliant pages on those kinds of people, whom he called “ascetics.” For them, the object of appreciating art is indeed to feel something, but feelings have to be managed so they do not get out of hand. Asceticism has its good points: It fosters critical distance and provides the coolness that is essential to any considered evaluation. But ascetics forget that in addition to seeing, the eye is an organ that cries; and in addition to thinking, the mind is an organ that slumps into a miasma of confusion, or burns up in a storm of incomprehensible passions.
Ascetics are fundamentalists of the passions: They don’t want to feel, and they have rigid reasons why feeling would be bad for them. They are related to a more interesting group, whom I’ll call wistful ascetics: people who have not cried, but who are taken by the idea of crying and maybe even want to cry.
Robert Rosenblum, an art historian, wrote me a very straightforward catalog of his reactions to paintings. After “some soul-searching,” he says, “I must end up confessing that, unlike Diderot’s, my own lachrymal ducts have never responded to a work of art.” (My letter to him had mentioned the 18th-century critic Denis Diderot, whose passionate art criticism was a tonic for the age.) “On the other hand,” he adds, “if you’re interested in physiology, I have truly gasped (jaw dropped, breath caught, etc.) from the sensation of what I guess we might still call Beauty, or some other kind of magic in art.” He lists a few works of art that took him aback, and then he notes -- a little sadly, but only a little -- that he never felt that way the second or the third time. “In each case, it was a response to my first view of the work. By the time of the second, I was already invulnerable. I suspect we art historians, in particular, wear too much armor; but thank you for suggesting that we might shed some of it.”
Rosenblum isn’t afraid of crying, and he doesn’t disdain it. From there it’s one step to becoming a wistful ascetic. A few art historians who wrote me did express unhappiness about the fact that they had never cried. One was openly envious of people who can react openly to pictures. Another wrote to say that crying in front of a painting might be “one of the best things a person can do,” because it could “save you from having to see a doctor or psychiatrist.” That correspondent also said people should “open their souls or their minds when they see a picture,” and stop holding back. “If you listen to the words people say when they look at paintings, it’s mostly things like ... ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ ... or else they are just discussing the details of the picture, or trying to find out what the symbols mean, or other technical stuff. But if you can see the picture just for what it is, without restraining yourself, you might be overwhelmed by its beauty, which breaks all the resistance, and tears down all the walls between the object and the observer -- even ‘inner walls.’ In that case ... the painter and the observer grow into one another. They are united, like Siamese twins.”
Sadly, she can’t bring herself to cry. “One thing I hope for myself,” she concludes, “is that I will cry, just once, seeing some special painting. I just cannot. When I visit galleries and museums, I feel bothered by the crowds around me. I hate to have to share all the beautiful paintings with other people. It’s hard to feel close and intimate with the paintings when there are so many people around.” Once she had “dry tears” looking at Vermeer’s “Milkmaid.” That is a funny phrase, “dry tears,” and I am not sure what it means. It sounds different from what I felt in front of Bellini’s painting, or from the gasps that Rosenblum recalls. My intense and confused reaction to Bellini, Rosenblum’s gasps, and this woman’s dry tears all share a common trait: They are responses that could lead to tears, like resting places on the way to full crying.
The woman who had dry tears is still hopeful, but most of the people I have talked to are not. Instead the problem for them -- as it is for me -- is to figure out what it means to be so far from tears. I exchanged letters for a while with another historian who feels, as I do, that it would be a lucky thing indeed if she were ever to actually cry at a painting. “Art historians are embarrassed to admit that they have cried before paintings,” she says. “My dissertation adviser eons ago confided to me that he had cried when first seeing the Brueghel collection in Vienna, because he saw them in the still bombed-out museum. The entire scene really overpowered him. He told me this as we were discussing why it was art historians never ‘went public’ about the preference for quality. Now, why don’t we? Is it because art historians were mostly men operating in a suspiciously ‘feminine’ field, and they had to look tough? Art history, as a very ‘soft’ area of study, was trying to look more objective and therefore more scientific; could it be that saying, ‘I like this work to the point of tears’ made us sound too much like critics? Are we just prigs?”
Especially in American culture, people don’t like to admit crying, and academics are only that much more reserved, and less likely to confess anything personal. Art history is definitely “feminine” in all sorts of ways: It is not a hard science, and it attracts a high proportion of female students. Certainly male art historians have occasionally been at pains to lend it a masculine legitimacy. Even more important, though, art historians do not want to be confused with critics. (That would make them even softer, even more undisciplined.) Weeping sounds too subjective, too unreliable, and therefore too much like art criticism.
In the United States, art history has traditionally been a “soft discipline,” supposedly one of the easiest academic fields -- and that alone would be enough to account for what my correspondent was describing. There are other factors as well, which are even harder to admit. I suspect, for instance, that not all art historians have very deep feelings in general, in life. They are often interested mostly in texts and languages, and the trappings of the trade -- going to conferences, teaching, getting better jobs. Needless to say, it is not easy to say such things diplomatically. But the evidence is there, in the field itself: Art historians are trained to be dispassionate and to avoid judgments of quality. That being so, the field may also attract people who already feel relatively little.
Seven out of the 30 historians I talked to admitted to crying in front of paintings, but several thousand saw my questionnaire and didn’t answer at all. The response rate among academics, as a sociologist would say, was unusually low. The overwhelming majority don’t cry, never have, and don’t wish they could. How can I explain that fact, unless I say that many people who become academics fail to feel anything very strongly? Academe is well stocked with philosophers who know about such things as empathetic reactions, theories of crying and catharsis, and “lacrymogenic experiences” (as one especially serious correspondent put it). There is no lack of people content with their “stony, unfeeling natures.” Absence of strong emotion becomes the norm, and I think many academics end up living their lives pretty much without it.
Inevitably art historians produce students who think crying is more or less out of the question, an embarrassment, an irrelevancy, something for neophytes, a breach of decorum, a sign of immaturity. In that respect, art historians are ascetics in Nietzsche’s sense. They don’t feel much, and that makes them suspicious of people who do: That’s my cynical theory of the discipline.
I don’t mean to say that all historical learning is poison. In some circumstances, even a tiny drop of historical fact is dangerous, even if it is dissolved in an ocean of tears. In other cases, reading and looking can go hand in hand. There is no formula. I lost myself in Bellini’s painting, and history ruined it for me afterward. Other times I have read about pictures in advance, and then managed to forget some of that learning when I saw the actual painting. History can be a panacea, a poison, or a placebo. Most often it turns out to be a fatal poison. In all cases, it helps to not be afraid of feeling something personal, something no one else could understand. That’s the bottom line in any encounter between a viewer and an image.
Even after many years, I am still drawn to pictures of places that seem isolated or rarely visited, to objects that would be overlooked, and to shapes and colors that would normally go unnoticed. The saint in Bellini’s painting still catches my eye, standing alone at the foot of his cliff, looking out over the nearly deserted landscape. I know that the actual cliffs still exist in Italy, and I know that the cliffs around Ithaca, N.Y., are still there. I know the differences between them, and so I also know their similarities. That knowledge is what helps lead me from my most immediate reactions back to history.
I know all about the dubious pedigree of my ideas, and I can name a whole collection of old-fashioned notions that formed my imagination as a child. The key is to know. As long as I can see what makes up my imagination, I can keep an eye on how it mingles with historical ideas, insinuating itself into the facts of history, posing as part of the picture, camouflaging itself as historical truth. Each of us has an intellectual genealogy like this, waiting to be discovered, and it leads each of us to love certain images and avoid others.
The moral is: Trust what attracts you. You do not have to doubt your gut feeling and turn immediately to the guidebook or the label on the wall. Academics read so many texts they have nearly lost the ability to make contact with pictures, and they are taught that their untutored reactions are unreliable and irrelevant. But they aren’t. On the contrary: Unchecked responses are the only way to experience pictures as something more than wall ornaments.
In most cases, history kills. Luckily it kills slowly, over many years. During the long interval between the first poison pill and the death of all feeling, history can give a great deal of pleasure. Just as smokers love their cigarettes, I love the facts and findings of history. Art history continues to deepen my experience of images, and I keep buying, reading, and writing books of art history, even though I know I am slowly corroding my ability to address paintings with full emotions and an open heart.
Like a drug, history takes me out of myself, saves me from myself. It shelters me from the raw, unpredictable encounter with artworks: It’s safe, it’s calm, and it’s entertaining. It’s very pleasureful. It has all the traits of a deadly drug.
History is an addiction, and there is no cure.
James Elkins is a professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This essay is excerpted from Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, recently published by Routledge. Copyright ©2001 by James Elkins.
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