Words about pictures are often commentaries which justify categories. They give reasons for inclusions, exclusions and orderings. Connoisseurs distinguish genuine works from misattributions, and historians establish chronologies which support claims about why and how things have changed. What they write can be challenged by facts. A new X-ray or a contemporary inventory may destroy the argument a group of paintings was chosen to illustrate. Critics, by contrast, invent categories which facts cannot invalidate. For example, Kenneth Clark's distinction between the naked and the nude stands as long as we agree that pictures of unclothed people can be assigned to either the nakedness pile or the nudity pile. A comparison or anecdote may suggest why pictures in a critical category look similar, or may be the catalyst which leads the reader to react as the writer wishes, but no revelation about a painter's intentions, no change in attribution, no proof of forgery, can force the removal or inclusion of a particular image.

LRB 7 November 1991 | PDF Download