The art exhibition between cult and market

Previous articleNext article FreeThe art exhibition between cult and market: The case of Dürer’s Heller AltarpieceRobert BrennanRobert Brennan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAt Documenta we note once more that the main function of “cultural institutions” resides in the process that renders art sacred, and consequentially in its mystification and its purpose, the marketing of cultural product.—Julio Le Parc and Enzo Mari, statement of withdrawal from Documenta IV, June 25, 19681Documenta, one of the most prestigious exhibitions of contemporary art worldwide, does not sell works of art: its aims are decidedly intellectual and historical. In the view of artists Le Parc and Mari, such seemingly disinterested exhibitions are in fact principal agents of art’s commodification. Their argument, in short, is that the exhibition sacralizes art in a way that both veils and enhances its performance on the market—a notion that remains a powerful fixture in discussions of contemporary art to this day.2 The following essay does not attempt to test this argument as an empirically verifiable hypothesis regarding the actual socioeconomic structure of the contemporary art world, but rather to understand the roots of its power as an assertion.There is good reason to believe that these roots run deep. For example, when the sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari describes crowds of people assembled for the sole purpose of seeing and appreciating a work of art—events we might properly call early “art exhibitions”—he characterizes them explicitly in terms of the processions held to celebrate the feast days of saints, traditionally anchored by a sacred relic or cult image.3 Similar comparisons were made in the case of Albrecht Dürer, as in the following passage from Matthias Quad von Kinckelbach’s 1609 work, Teutscher Nation Herligkeitt: “[Dürer’s] manuscripts and other plainly designed drawings on paper and parchment are regarded by artists and other admirers as holy things [Heiligthumb]; his panels and paintings are displayed and preserved as the highest and noblest relics [Kleinoder], so that, for several, one must pay money simply to see and scrutinize [abspiculiren] them.”4 Quad does not name specific examples, but, as Joseph Koerner has pointed out, his invocation of such “panels and paintings” must have been informed by a case from Karel van Mander’s Dutch and Flemish Painters of 1604, a text Quad drew on throughout his own writings.5 The relevant passage occurs at the end of van Mander’s description of Dürer’s Heller Altarpiece in the Dominican church of Frankfurt am Main (figs. 1–2): “It is almost unbelievable how much money this painting yields yearly to the monks of the monastery, through the tips given and the drinks bought by gentlemen, merchants, travelers, and others, interested in art and to whom this painting is disclosed.”6Figure 1. The Heller Altarpiece, interior. Historisches Museum, Frankfurt. (a) Jobst Harrich (copy of Dürer’s original of ca. 1507–9), Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, 1613–14. (b) Albrecht Dürer and/or workshop, Martyrdom of St. James (i.e., Jacob) and donor portrait of Jacob Heller, ca. 1507–9. (c) Albrecht Dürer and/or workshop, Martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria and donor portrait of Catherine Melem (Heller’s wife), ca. 1507–9. Photos: Courtesy of the Historisches Museum, Frankfurt.Figure 2. Dürer workshop, The Heller Altarpiece, ca. 1507–9, exterior of mobile wings. Frankfurt, Historisches Museum. (a) Adoration of the Magi (only one of the two panels has survived). (b) St. Peter and St. Paul. (c) St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Christopher. Photos: Courtesy of the Historisches Museum, Frankfurt.In liturgical, ritual usage, winged altarpieces like the Heller panels would only have been opened for masses and feast day celebrations.7 If visitors to the church wanted to see them opened otherwise, they would have had to make a special request, just as Dürer himself had paid to have a winged altarpiece by Stefan Lochner in Cologne’s Ratskapelle opened for him.8 The situation described by van Mander surely had many such precedents, for artists had observed and sketched paintings in churches throughout the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the wide spectrum of guests van Mander describes—“gentlemen, merchants, travelers, and others”—attendant for no particular religious occasion or professional purpose but simply because they were “interested in art,” suggests something different. From a modern perspective it evokes a permanent art exhibition, complete with an admission charge, within the walls of a church. To Quad, however, it resembled the age-old display of relics.Quad’s statement was written in an age when Reformation leaders often criticized Catholic displays of cult objects for being motivated purely by monetary gain. Quad himself was a Protestant who lived in the Catholic city of Cologne until 1604, when he seems to have been forced out on account of his religious beliefs.9 During that time Cologne held one of the most famous annual processions of relics in the entire empire, even as Protestant cities continued to seize and desacralize the relics within their walls.10 Do Quad’s words betray an awareness of this circumstance? Could they be considered an unwitting precursor of the modern critique of art’s commodification, enabled, discursively, by the Reformation critique of Catholic cult display?The present essay will not pursue an answer to these questions, which would depend on a more thorough contextual analysis of Quad’s writings. It will attend, rather, to the historical basis of his claim. Was the Heller Altarpiece indeed capitalized on like a relic? If so, what does its display suggest about the role of cults and markets in the modern formation of the art exhibition?The latter question is indebted to the work of a number of scholars who have studied the emergence of the art exhibition as a phenomenon of the early modern period.11 Paintings were of course displayed publicly throughout the Middle Ages in much the same way as other products of manual labor.12 They were not, however—and, indeed, could not have been—exhibited as “art” in anything like the modern sense until the existence of a public that had not only accepted the humanists’ ennoblement of painting beyond the ranks of the “mechanical arts” at the level of theory, but had also come to act upon it collectively as a matter of course in public life. Understood in this sense, as a vehicle for the public display of art “as art,” the art exhibition represents one important means by which post-Renaissance distinctions between art and other forms of intellectual and productive activity were effectively institutionalized.No single essay could hope to exhaust the causes and conditions of this development, whose scale alone suggests a concurrence of widely dispersed, mutually reinforcing factors over a long period of time. The most common approach to the study of such macro-historical processes would be a survey that draws together and compares diverse cases on the basis of their similarity to the historical outcome that one aims to account for. This article opts for a different approach, examining just one locus of the broader development (the display of religious art) as manifested by one specific case (the display of the Heller Altarpiece) in order to understand how a macro-historical phenomenon appeared from a specific vantage point within history. As such, it will refrain at the outset from any more precise definition of terms like “art exhibition” or even “art” itself. Such definitions are to serve here as products of historical investigation—as conclusions, not premises.Production and initial displayDürer painted the central panel of the Heller Altarpiece in 1508 and 1509 for an altar dedicated to Saint Thomas Aquinas in Frankfurt’s Dominican church. The mobile wings were likely painted by his workshop (fig. 1b–c and fig. 2), whereas fixed wings were added shortly thereafter for the same patron by Matthias Grünewald.13 The paintings remained in the church until the central panel was acquired by Archduke Maximilian I of Bavaria in 1614. Subsequently destroyed by fire in 1729, this central panel is known to us only through preparatory drawings (e.g. fig. 3),14 prints,15 and a copy by Jobst Harrich that Maximilian commissioned in 1613 to sit in place of Dürer’s original (fig. 1a).Figure 3. Albrecht Dürer, feet of an apostle (study for the Heller Altarpiece). Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen (MB 1958/T24). Photo: Studio Buitenhof, The Hague. Courtesy of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.Dürer’s patron, Jacob Heller, was one of the most prominent merchants in Frankfurt and commissioned other important works in the city, such as a Crucifixion scene executed by sculptor Hans Backoffen in 1509 (fig. 4).16 The Dürer altarpiece was of utmost personal significance to Heller because it was designed to adorn the chapel in which he and his wife would be buried, accompanied by an endowment whose interest would fund a schedule of masses to be said before the altar for the salvation of their souls.17 His testament of 1519 refers to the shrine as “my altar.”18Figure 4. Hans Backoffen, Crucifixion group, commissioned 1509. Frankfurt, Cathedral of Saint Bartholomew. Photo: Uwe Dettmar. Courtesy of Frankfurt Cathedral.Heller’s deep personal investment in his funerary chapel may help to explain the tension that arose between him and Dürer during the artist’s work on the project, known today through a famous series of letters. In August 1507, having accepted the Heller commission,19 Dürer was still busy with another major painting, the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, and was not able to begin work for Heller until the following year. Upon doing so, he soon realized that his ambitions for the painting required a degree of labor whose value far exceeded the formerly agreed-upon price of 130 Gulden, and requested that the price be raised to 200 Gulden. When Heller expressed frustration over the delays and the request for a higher price, Dürer offered him the option of raising the price to 200 Gulden for a painting of outstanding quality, or retaining the price of 130 Gulden for something painted faster.20 Apparently neither option satisfied Heller. Dürer’s response in the following letter addresses this, and in doing so suggests a more general tension between the format of the altarpiece and the kind of painting he had in mind:You further reproach me with having promised you that I would paint your picture with the greatest possible care [allerhöchsten fleiß] that ever I could. That I certainly never said or if I did I was out of my senses, for in my whole life-time I should scarcely finish it. With such extraordinary care I can hardly finish a face in half a year; now your picture contains fully 100 faces, not reckoning the drapery and landscape and other things in it. Besides, who ever heard of making such a work for an altar-piece? No one could see it. [Es wäre auch nie erhört worden, auf einen altar solch ding zu machen. Wer wolt es sehen?]21The final point is ambiguous. Read more literally, Dürer appears to ask who would want to see such a work if it were displayed as an altarpiece.22 Though some might dismiss the statement as offhand hyperbole, it may be taken to suggest that a high level of artistic labor would be extraneous to the altarpiece as a functional religious device: the audience that would use the altar is not one that would appreciate the picture as a “work,” as art.23 In subsequent letters with Heller, Dürer writes that such labor would be exerted more appropriately in other media: “No one shall ever compel me to paint a picture again with so much labour. ... So henceforth I shall stick to my engraving, and had I done so before I should to-day have been a richer man by 1000 florins.”24Why, then, did Dürer carry the project through to the end at all? Why did he insist on expending such labor on it, and not simply execute a picture scaled down to the original price, as he himself had suggested? His letters cite numerous reasons, some of which involve keeping his promise and preserving his friendship with Heller. Most important for our purposes, however, is his repeated claim that “I should prefer [the painting] to find a place at Frankfurt rather than anywhere else.”25As William Conway has pointed out, Frankfurt was important to Dürer because of its fairs.26 Fairs of this kind took place in major cities throughout Europe, having served as cornerstones of international trade since the economic expansion of the twelfth century. They usually convened annually on or near a Christian holiday, for which the authorities lifted normal tariffs and provided much-needed military protection for merchants and their caravans of goods.27 Since the late fourteenth century, Frankfurt’s two major annual fairs (one during Lent and another in autumn between the feasts of the Assumption and the Birth of the Virgin) ranked among the most important on the continent, making the city a central hub for trade in finance, textiles, luxury goods, and—most importantly for the subject at hand—books.28Dürer was far from the first artist to sell work at such fairs. Lucas Cranach often visited the fair in Leipzig, and a humanist poem of 1504 describes paintings and marble sculptures “that you could believe were by Phidias” on view there.29 Many scholars have hypothesized that prints lent themselves particularly well to distribution on such markets.30 Having acquired his own printing press in 1497,31 Dürer seems to have sold prints frequently thereafter on the fairgrounds of Frankfurt, Augsburg, Ingolstadt, and the Imperial Relic Festival in Nuremberg.32Particularly important in the present case is not simply the fact that images were sold on these markets, but rather the specific type of market that assembled at Frankfurt each Lent and autumn: the famous book fair, which attracted a vast contingent of humanists from all over the continent to the city’s “Book Lane.”33 In contrast to a market like Nuremberg’s Imperial Relic Festival, for example, which tended to offer staple goods for the common pilgrim or merchant,34 the Frankfurt book fair overflowed with volumes by the most illustrious authors in the Western canon. Contemporary writers like Erasmus strove to meet the Frankfurt market’s demand and have their work sold and discussed in such august company as well.35Dürer would have been keenly aware of the Frankfurt book fair and its audience through his godfather, the prominent Nuremberg publisher Anton Koberger, who had been selling books at the Frankfurt fairs since 1495 and often advised the artist in matters of business.36 Koberger opened a permanent shop in Frankfurt to supplement his sales from booths on the fairground in 1506.37 Dürer’s wife, Agnes, already appears to have been in Frankfurt for the autumn fair of 1505, where she “received 13 Gulden,“ apparently from the sale of prints.38 Initiated sometime before August 1507, the commission for the Heller Altarpiece presented Dürer with an opportunity to follow in Koberger’s footsteps by supplementing the ephemeral fairground booth with a more permanent presence in the city. Crucially, however, he did so not by opening a shop, like Koberger, but by painting an altarpiece.It is likely that Dürer wanted to execute the Heller Altarpiece at the highest possible degree of quality not only because it might boost sales of his prints on the Frankfurt market, but even more so because it would help secure his reputation in a highly educated, international community of humanists—an audience capable of evaluating his painting in terms of art, and indeed, rewarding superlative artists with spots in the annals of history. Dürer himself explicitly mentions “fame” (rumb) as a motive for his completion of the Heller commission, and took special measures to ensure that the painting would last five hundred years.39As completed, the work’s appeal to this particular audience would have been manifold. The execution of the lost central panel was so fine that a later sixteenth-century collector is said to have offered to buy just a of one of the feet fig. Dürer painted himself on a in the with his a whose text in the work’s execution by that same (fig. this level of and remains to to the of the original central the historical and of the work’s its of the of so by still fully from of the Heller Altarpiece, copy of the central panel (fig. Dürer’s fig. many have pointed out, the Heller Altarpiece and of two the Assumption of the in the and the Coronation of the In doing so, it Altarpiece, a work that Dürer may have of during his in (fig. has how of these two a by it with an an text on Assumption to Joseph of and his the known but highly account of the Assumption in a that even himself regarded as to than to Altarpiece, ca. Photo: Courtesy of the describes how the convened from throughout the to the only to be by a as took to a again them to the the of the was not present at but the from a through a As of this he the in which the had When Thomas with the Peter him for his it as another of of Thomas by the of the Peter even when the to find that the was indeed Thomas the of his and at last the all has the Altarpiece the final of this Thomas before the in The Coronation appears as a subsequent to the Assumption and as to the In the and Jacob to the and so and by the of the that they themselves to the that Thomas has just contrast to the of his and draws his book and his His upon renders a Heller Altarpiece a between the main of the two in on the Peter to the Having to this however, Dürer from him by the in the company of the to and by the of for the Thomas of the Altarpiece, Dürer’s Thomas still down the at having to the As a the not only the vantage point of the but also a of by at this first in which a will one like or like and The of is that the does not question and the so much as Dürer’s of this way the painting any that might be it, as to it to than to it in much the same way that will be within the For the of the at this particular in the is to that of the who the as an in of the to be before it. as will way later to the of the so will any that Dürer’s work be by its function as a for the of this kind would only have been to the of who Frankfurt’s aware of and by the of for the would have at the painting by Heller and his wife in that not only their but also that of the apostle at in the central the altarpiece appears to their in the face of any such The testament that accompanied the endowment of the altar suggests that this not only to the but also to the of the images Most in this are for a pilgrim to carry out two in the one to and another to and The who would one Gulden was to own on his of certainly to as more than regarding the specific that Heller to but one must be considered here since it was common as a motive for of of is likely to have been in to by as to be a of would ever to the in to that remained throughout the and could only by before their If possible these were to be made to the but in they were usually made to the church in forms such as altar a Heller also a more general for the of the whose economic and religious had long in the of August the Heller himself the of the fair in order that the religious be of the and in that same Heller the of his altar In such it may have to him that the subject of Dürer’s altarpiece to the city’s autumn fair, which traditionally on the of the His commission of a Crucifixion scene from Backoffen in 1509 had with the of the city’s other major fair as which traditionally took place during (fig. Though we out the that from the outset Heller these to the Frankfurt fairs by the he had from them in works of art that would and their sacred many altarpieces of this the Heller Altarpiece can be regarded as an of what Hans has an with a an that in two both as a work of art and as a It as a particularly in because both of these religious and a to the same the markets of the Frankfurt was the audience of the Frankfurt book market that the high level of artistic labor that Dürer on his The market however, no for such a a sale from a market would it and even if Dürer could find a place for it on no one could his of 200 Gulden in labor and The altarpiece format remained his The painting to be as a of for an audience assembled by the market, but in a in the of that of the painting the Heller in over his altar to the That almost to the of the Reformation in the city. In one of the first major was an of the Dominican church in a in of the for a on all religious and over the of the city’s for power the following in which the city to between the and the The was by a over in by the to the was that the and the to their images from but also the monks to in the most measures were only the city had and military from the by the in this point the the of the as well as a on and other The to and claim over the but the monks on the city. forced them to with the in the now to the city, but the monks could and on the until the last of them had so long as no were the of the in the never again lost the to the and for Reformation causes and the throughout the of the Most was the The of from the the market for funerary and the general withdrawal of the in a of a to the Heller Altarpiece appears in the of this an in the of the written in was a from Nuremberg who not only Dürer but also the and for the first of the artist’s most the on in His was of a intellectual of the and a personal of Dürer’s as could like and a to a Catholic church for the purpose of paintings in the that Frankfurt still was at this they would have been with the that images were in themselves that the of only in of what would as of an like the Heller they simply the religious the painting can be from an essay by that held between and Dürer When by Dürer in an argument, would often fire by that things be Dürer’s would these which you can neither be said even by the on the same in his own the to his own art that Dürer but also the broader outcome of such and to art ... in a way that

Altarpiece · Art · Art history · Cult · Exhibition · Painting · Political science · Art History and Market Analysis · Law

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