James Beck; controversial art historian (Great)
Hyfler/Rosner
May 29, 2007
Professor James Beck
Art historian who caused controversy with his criticisms of
ill-advised restorations and attributions of Old Masters
James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University,
New York, was, to use one of his own favourite technical
phrases, an unicum, a "one-off" - a scholar who married an
impeccable professional method with respect for artists,
their views and their historical legacies.
To the discomfiture of some art historical colleagues, he
saw artists as allies. His declared solidarity with
artist-critics of restorations was to carry him beyond the
boundaries of academia into increasingly bruising
art-political engagements.
Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1930, Beck graduated in
history and political science in 1952 at Oberlin College,
where he had also studied painting. Aspiring to become a
professional painter, he took a master's degree in studio
art at New York University in 1954 before moving to Florence
for further painting studies at the Accademia delle Belle
Arti.
In Florence he met his future wife and lifelong partner,
Darma, and fell under the sway of Italian Renaissance art.
After teaching art and art history at the universities of
Alabama and Arizona State, he took a PhD in art history at
Columbia University in 1963 under the tutelage of the great
German scholar Rudolf Wittkower and the influence of Charles
de Tolnay, the legendary specialist in Michelangelo.
For nearly two and a half untroubled decades Beck alternated
between New York and his beloved adoptive Italy. He produced
many books and scholarly articles on sculptors such as
Donatello, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, Pietro
Lombardo, Antonio Rossellino, Niccolò dell'Arca and, above
all, Jacopo della Quercia and Michelangelo. His dedication
to these last two was to cost him dear.
In 1986, joining forces with artist-critics of the cleaning
of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, he
incurred the wrath of the art-historical establishment, some
of whose leading members had been, Beck felt, lazily
complacent about an experimental restoration project that
was proving as radically controversial aesthetically as it
was methodologically untested.
Beck's opposition to the restoration, which was funded by
Nippon Television Corporation to the tune of $3 million,
caused him to suffer vicious professional abuse and even
social ostracism within liberal New York's art-world high
society - notwithstanding the acclaimed and exemplary
scholarship in his book Doors of the Florentine Baptistery
and the perennial appeal of his classic, comprehensive
survey Italian Renaissance Painting.
The "battle of the Sistina" was followed almost immediately
by a second, more personally threatening furore, concerning
Beck's "own" Renaissance sculptor, the subject of his
doctorate, Jacopo della Quercia.
Beck's publications on the artist began in 1962 with his
earliest article ("An Important New Document for Jacopo
della Quercia in Bologna"), included a beautifully
illustrated book in 1988-89 on the marble tomb of Ilaria del
Carretto, and ended in 1991 with a magisterial two-volume,
standard monograph on Della Quercia, which assembled 506
documents pertaining to the artist.
As these lifelong studies were reaching final formulation,
the Ilaria tomb (regarded by Ruskin and Beck alike as the
most beautiful effigy of a woman in Italy) underwent a
disastrous restoration, during which it was stripped of its
ancient mellow patina (by chemical poultices and abrasion
with air-borne particulates) and then "reglossed" with a
penetrating, oil-based coating. Beck's condemnation of the
restoration, in the presence of the tomb in Lucca Cathedral
in July 1990, was reported in four Italian newspapers.
Those reports triggered four separate actions for criminal
libel by the restorer against Beck. The charges carried a
possible prison sentence of three years (and ruinous civil
damages).
Against the advice of his closest colleagues and one of his
own lawyers, Beck resolved on a point of principle to defend
his right, as the world's leading authority on Quercia, to
speak for the preservation of the artist's work. Not a
single scholar defended Beck in public in the run-up to the
trial because it was widely believed that he would lose.
That was also the view of the trial judge in Florence who
was overheard (by an intern-lawyer and former policeman
working for Beck's lawyers) confiding to the prosecuting
lawyer as they left the court together at the end of the
first session: ". . . eh, but I shall convict him". In the
event, after an unsuccessful attempt to have the judge
replaced, Beck was acquitted.
The terrifying ordeal of the trial had a chain of
consequences. First, it caused Beck to recognise the need
for an organisation dedicated to defending both the
interests and the integrity of art objects and the right of
scholars freely to discuss treatments imposed upon them at
the hands of technicians abetted by corporate sponsors. As a
result, he founded the monitoring and campaigning
organisation, ArtWatch International, in 1992.
Beck collaborated with his long-term ally, the British
artist (and present director of ArtWatch UK) Michael Daley,
to produce Art Restoration - The Culture, the Business, the
Scandal (1993), a book which anatomised controversial
restorations in Italy and at the National Gallery in London.
In November 1993, in a review for The New York Review of
Books, Charles Hope, the Renaissance scholar (and the
present director of the Warburg Institute), wrote that
having been, like many other art historians, initially
enthusiastic about the Sistine Chapel restoration, he now
recognised that "my earlier enthusiasm had been misplaced"
and that Beck had "in the face of hostility from his
professional colleagues and even a threat to his liberty,
done a valuable service to everyone who cares about the art
of the past".
Beck's impassioned pursuit of scholarly researches and
public campaigning continued unabated until his recent
illness. His newly published book, From Duccio to Raphael -
Connoisseurship in Crisis, a critique of the processes by
which secondary paintings get upgraded on questionable
methodological practices to Old Master status, may prove to
be his most explosive yet, if his final call for a more
effective legal oversight of the art market be heeded.
Certainly, the detailed, scrupulously painstaking case he
establishes for such supervision constitutes, for the
established art scholarly/market nexus, a call to account.
It begins: "Two paintings, a mini aspiring Raphael da Urbino
Madonna and an equally tiny aspiring Duccio di Buoninsegna
Madonna were sold for record prices in 2004. The first was
bought by London's National Gallery and the second by New
York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. These objects and the
mode in which the attributions to their famous presumed
authors were achieved, document a breakdown in modern
connoisseurship . . . In addition to what is regarded as a
monumental failure on the part of experts, the use and
misuse of public funds is an issue that lies just beneath
the surface."
Beck's scholarship and probity earned many honours and
awards throughout his long career - his favourite being the
title Commendatore di Merito della Repubblica Italiana
bestowed in 1992.
These honours notwithstanding, he remained a most affably
approachable teacher and colleague. In the introduction to
Watching Art: Writings in Honor of James Beck (published in
2006 on his 76th birthday), two former students, Mark Zucker
and Lynn Catterson, in testifying to his being "a great
teacher", conjure the delightful and productive bustle of
his office: "He is there everyday, usually in the company of
two or three students discussing their projects and, it
seems, almost threatening to crowd him out of his own
workspace. . . students may not even be aware of the
exquisite attention he pays to the details of their
conversations."
One source of Beck's strengths was a remarkable dynamic
physical energy - until late in life he played basketball
every weekend with students and colleagues, some less than
half his age.
James Beck is survived by his wife, Darma, his daughter and
son.
Professor James Beck, art historian, was born on May 14,
1930. He died of lung cancer on May 26, 2007, aged 77