The Art Bulletin

The monumental Self-Portrait with Two Students that French academician Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) exhibited at the 1785 Salon manipulated the contradictions and controversies that defined the era‘s professional female artists and, through its calculated transgressions, won the approbation of critics, Salon-goers, and elite patrons. Influenced by diverse sources, ranging from old master traditions to contemporary fashion plates, the work presented Labille-Guiard as a protean figure--both an ambitious portraitist and a stand-in for fashionable sitters. This calibrated ambivalence propelled Labille-Guiard to new heights of social and professional success.

The Paris Salon of 1824 has been widely considered one of the most important of the nineteenth century. It has long been characterized as a highly polemical exhibition, divided between the waning tradition of Jacques-Louis David and the painting of Eugène Delacroix and his peers, more recent arrivals in the Salon arena. Delacroix‘s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios would seem to be the candidate least likely to garner approval from Étienne-Jean Delécluze, the Salon‘s staunchest critical defender of the Davidian tradition. His unexpected praise for the Chios‘s central figure reveals the relation between David‘s history painting and the Chios.

Peter Cornelius‘s monumental 1840 fresco cycle in Munich‘s church of St. Ludwig summed up the German Nazarenes‘ endeavor to construct a modern religious painting: while rooted in emulation, its aesthetic strategies engaged Romantic theory, post-Kantian philosophy, and theology. This engagement produced a highly conceptual attitude to art, which found expression in Cornelius‘s notion of "historical symbolism." The symbolic impulse fostered a style characterized by fragmentation, idealized abstraction, and suspension of narrative, whereas the desire to revive sacred history led to a type of visual piety in which the act of seeing brought about belief through philosophical reflection, not immediate experience.

During the height of the Qing Empire (1644-1912), Manchu emperors embraced Tibetan Buddhism at Wutaishan with unprecedented vision and fervor. Wutaishan‘s consequent transformation is both revealed in and continually rearticulated by a widely disseminated map of the mountain, engraved on-site by a Mongolian lama in 1846. The map is so situated at the intersection of several different image-making traditions, each revealing its own criteria for truthful representations. Examining the particular rhetoric of history and revelations within these traditions illuminates how a sacred landscape is formed and inspires a new understanding about the relation between holy maps and territories.

Peter Henry Emerson, arguably the father of modernist photography, struggled throughout his career to articulate a theory of art for photography. A consideration of key themes in this struggle--including technical decisions about depth of field, choices about how to stage representations of labor, and his use of figures for the frame that sets the photograph apart from the world--reveals that Emerson‘s theory and practice contends with issues that return to play a central role in debates about the break separating modernist and postmodernist photography.

David Smith: A Centennial. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 3-May 14, 2006

Robert Rauschenberg: Combines. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 20, 2005-April 2, 2006; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, May 21-September 11, 2006