Twelve Years an Artist II / II
Review: Juan de Pareja at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 3rd - July 16th, 2023
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/juan-de-pareja
Part II of II
Part I of II (Link)
Let’s not imagine that Juan de Pareja and his status as slave are a mere curiosity in the History of Art. He occupies the very center, the fulcrum of Art History, the dialectical underside of the narrative of Art as liberation from the slavery of Labor.
In my last sustained conversation with the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin I tried to clarify some intricate postmodernist methodology. Nochlin was in a struggle with her smartypants colleague Roz Krauss, and she was on the lookout for methodological creds. The relationship ended after I told Nochlin this particular approach was incompatible with art historical practice: to take it up she would have to abandon the foundational principles of her discipline. When you’re out of a narrative you’re out of a job.
Nochlin’s core assumption — the commonplace foundation for Art History, actually — was the assumption that the artist is an exception to the rule, outside or beyond or in advance of the social. Without this the artist’s just another working stiff, a specimen for sociologists or anthropologists, subject to the methodologies of anthropologists and sociologists. “Why have there been no great women artists” falls apart without the word “great.” (Krauss herself had no such problem. Newfangled theories were not a means to strengthen her methodology, just an excuse to show how clever she was.)
To be frank, there is nothing exceptional about Juan de Pareja’s paintings:
Nothing out of the ordinary, either, about his social circle; after his freedom had been recognized Pareja joined a coterie of artists now known (if you’re a specialist in Baroque Spanish painting) as the “Madrid School.” Pareja was just another working stiff who happened to be Black, and to have been a slave: a highly competent painter though somewhat cautious in his compositions. By contrast with Velázquez, for whom painterly space is expansive to the point of treachery, Pareja arranges his canvases into tightly overlapping and intersecting elements, similar to Poussin’s, only more fussy.
If a slave paints a masterpiece in the forest and there’s no art historian around to record it, is the slave an artist? It’s good to think there was nothing unusual for a Black man to be painting in seventeenth-century Spain; perhaps nothing out of the ordinary for a slave to be an artist, even, because Pareja’s paintings are startlingly competent for someone who is presumed to have started painting only after his manumission: supposedly, slaves were forbidden to paint. One portrait in the show that’s attributed to Pareja was painted the same year he received his papers, meaning four years before he was officially free. Indeed, the whole thrust of this challenging exhibition is to underline the matter-of-factness of Pareja’s position. Certain areas of Seventeenth-century Spain formed, we are told, “a highly multiracial society in which enslaved labor was widespread.”
Note that it wasn’t the human beings that were enslaved, but their labor. And that “slavery in early modern Spain was concentrated in urban centers and associated with artisanal and professional classes.” From that angle the line between the slave and the “free” seems as fluid as the color line, which in its turn suggests that the difference between “enslaved labor” and “creative” labor was not as unbridgeable as one might imagine. For instance, the painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo “owned” three slaves, one white, one Berber, and the third Black, though one can only conjecture what kind of work they were called on to perform around the workshop. Considering Murillo’s output, one may well wonder.
Donald Kuspit, that creepy critic, used to kick back his sneakers in front of his class and expatiate upon “Adolf Hitler, world’s greatest artist.” He was merely parroting the Nazis themselves, and Josef Goebbels in particular, who liked to describe themselves as artists, superior beings whose willpower enabled them to transcend historical constraint. Every blonde beast thinks it’s beautiful: “Culture becomes a new name for barbarism.”1
Much of Art History is founded on a similar argument: that evil must be accepted as the price of Art. I suggest it’s the reverse: that the purpose of the fantasy of Art as an autonomous presence, an “aura,” is to absolve of evil:
“‘Perish the world, that Art may be’, says, Fascism, and looks for satisfaction through Art.”
„ »Fiat ars – pereat mundus« sagt der Faschismus und erwartet die künstlerischen Befriedigung. “2
In concrete, that is, historical terms: the ideologies of the Early Modern Period drew strength from the Aristotelian distinction between the Slave and the Free Man, a dialectical distinction above all. Slaves were innately devoid of Free Will. Their inability to make decisions on their own was ontological, not socially determined. In contrast to them were the Free Men, the practitioners of the Liberal Arts, whose labor consisted, despite all appearances, in making decisions according to their own will and wishes. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the figure of the artist emerges as model for that distinction: the Free Soul, the antithesis of the Slave. Let’s not imagine that Juan de Pareja and his status as slave are a mere curiosity in the History of Art. He occupies the very center, the fulcrum of Art History, the dialectical underside of the narrative of Art as liberation from the slavery of labor.
WOID XXIII-16b. Part II of II.
Published June 11, 2023.
Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution : Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 209.
Walter Benjamin, „Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“ [“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“].