A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

14. What Art Historians Can Learn from Harry

c h a p t e r 1 4 What Art Historians Can Learn from Harry Bradford R. Collins The point [of the interpretive act] is neither to reveal the hidden secret [of the plot] nor to add one more interpretation to the goodenough pile, but to invite one to see something right there in the text. jonathan lear, Open Minded (1998) Twenty years ago the editor of the Art Bulletin asked Egbert HaverkampBegemann , a senior faculty member at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, to review the state of research in Northern Baroque art. The assignment was part of the journal’s survey of the field as a whole, which it was conducting in response to the sometimes seismic battles then being fought, largely along generational lines, between the representatives of the so-called ‘‘old art history’’ and the ‘‘new.’’1 The growing dissatisfaction with the narrow methods and limited aims of what the old art historians preferred to call ‘‘standard practice’’ had led many younger art historians, in particular, to look to practitioners elsewhere in the humanities— particularly cultural anthropologists, Freudian psychologists, Continental literary theorists, and Marxist historians—for ways to reinvigorate our methods. Predictably, rather than engage the so-called New Art Historians and their concerns, the Standard Practitioners, on the whole, simply dismissed their methodological imports as unnecessary. That was certainly Haverkamp-Begemann’s response. In the conclusion of his 1987 Art Bulletin article he insists that: The methods of the art historian, developed over at least a century and a half, are all still valid. . . . It would be wrong to surrender them in the false expectation that other disciplines would be preferable. The work of art 197 198 What Art Historians Can Learn from Harry remains central to the [art] historian’s task, and it demands a specific approach that other disciplines can nurture, not supplant. Conversely, other disciplines can learn from the art historian and his methods.2 Although Haverkamp-Begemann does not specify what those in other disciplines might learn from art historians, his remarks on the centrality of the work of art would suggest that he is referring to the way we deal with the work of art—the care we take in considering it. During the past two decades I have often been reminded of Haverkamp -Begemann’s defensive response while considering some useful piece of methodological inspiration from a sister discipline but never as pointedly as I was by the lecture Harry Berger delivered at the University of South Carolina in 2005 on Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642; Figure 14.1) and the subsequent thoughts it has engendered. What most impressed me about Berger’s lecture was his attention to detail, to the specifics of the image itself, in short, his devotion to a kind of unhurried, careful looking that I find all too rare in my field at the present time. As Berger said in Figure 14.1. Rembrandt van Rijn. The Night Watch, 1642. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 199 Bradford R. Collins the Introduction of his book on Rembrandt’s portraits, Fictions of the Pose, he did not learn this perceptual mode from art history: ‘‘I’ve approached the Rembrandt/Renaissance relation not as an art historian but as an interpreter trained in literary studies, taunted by the challenge of extending the practice of ‘close reading’ from verbal to visual media.’’3 Having decided to develop a paper on the theme of what art historians might learn from Harry about close reading, I asked him for a copy of his lecture. What he sent me was a version thereof, the one he had delivered, ironically enough, to an audience that included Haverkamp-Begemann, to whom, in fact, he dedicated the lecture. Begemann had written the standard monograph on The Night Watch that Berger acknowledged ‘‘has been my bible since its appearance in 1982, and though it will be clear to him that here and there I’ve been guilty of small gestures toward apostasy, his is the book I always return to and still rely on most heavily.’’4 These gracious remarks were meant, I suspect, not simply to acknowledge a very real debt but also to soften what was to follow: a lesson to Professor Begemann in ‘‘close reading.’’ The best example of this is Berger’s corrective of Begemann’s reading of the three musketeers shown in the center of the painting...