Awards
2008 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Robert L. Herbert
Robert L. Herbert
Methodological innovation, scholarly impeccability, disciplinary impact, and durability of contribution characterize the published works of Robert L. Herbert, recipient of this year’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art. From his earliest essay on Georges Seurat in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1959 to last September’s Art Bulletin article on Jean-François Millet’s reading material, Herbert’s writing on art spans forty-eight years. In that sweep of time, he has produced a major work of scholarship—a book, exhibition catalogue, substantial article, or edited publication—approximately every year and a half. That almost half-century of sustained writing on art encompasses not only nineteenth-century French topics, his primary area of research, but also studies of eighteenth- and twentieth-century art.
Noted for his original iconographic reading of Impressionist painting, the deep social contextualization of art production, and a series of monographic studies of Millet, Seurat, Claude Monet, and Pierre-August Renoir, Herbert embraces the full spectrum of art history in his methodologies, from the cultural to the highly technical, from art criticism to the connoisseurship of drawings, from the broad to the focused, from decorative arts to masterpieces like La Grande Jatte.
The jury especially recognizes Herbert’s faultless scholarship as manifested in his writing, which securely bridges the space between cultural phenomena and the materiality of artworks, including the processes by which they are made. We learn from him not only about peasant and landscape, about ballet dancers and class exploitation, but also about the painter’s touch and the application of pigment to surface, its consequences and meanings.
Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (1998)
Through his publications, two generations of art historians across North America and Europe have felt the impact of his fresh thinking about important artists and their canonical works. The 1975 catalogue on Millet for the exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris resurrected that artist from neglect and misunderstanding, reestablishing his reputation and forming the basis for much subsequent scholarship by others. The books and catalogue on Seurat, his paintings, and his drawings—from 1962, 1991, and 2001—have also provided the foundation for major studies by successive researchers.
Testimonials from major scholars and persistent citations in new publications confirm the continuing validity of Herbert’s published contributions, which have laid the groundwork for decades of accumulating new scholarship. This is an achievement founded on the meticulousness of his art-historical practice and the fact that his publications arise from the strength of his thinking and his recovery of primary sources from overlooked deposits and archival collections.
The jury also observes that Herbert’s writings seek a wide, culturally engaged readership, as indicated by more than twenty years of his reviews published in the New York Review of Books. Most of these are megareviews of multiple catalogues and books, such as that on Monet appearing in the August 2007 issue. Art historians and other interested readers alike have benefited from both his scholarship and his accessible writing style. Most of all, the jury wishes to acknowledge that Herbert’s lifetime of writing on art has helped shape the contours of today’s discipline of art history.
Jury: John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa, chair; S. Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University; and Janet A. Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design.
