Awards
2009 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Georges Didi-Huberman
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (2008)
One of the most distinctive and influential voices in the field of art history, Georges Didi-Huberman has written a cascade of publications that address works of art created in a variety of geographical locations and widely differing historical moments.
His pioneering 1982 work, translated into English in 2003 as The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpætriere, shaped the thinking of a whole generation of Anglophone historians of photography by helping to cement connections among medicine, incarceration, and photographic visualizations that formed a mainstream of art-historical discourse in the 1980s and 1990s.
In Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art of 2005 (a translation of Devant l’image of 1990), he poses a direct challenge to art history’s aspirations to objectivity based on iconography and the social history of art. He argues that an insistence on historical distance keeps the aesthetic power of art at bay, and that historicism tames the timeless appeal of works themselves. A brilliant illustration of this conviction is found in Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1995; French ed., 1990), where he conceives the act of painting as an allegory of the Incarnation: the spiritual made material. Paint itself becomes the means by which transcendental truths are vouchsafed to human beings.
It comes as no surprise to learn that the renegade art historian Aby Warburg is Didi-Huberman’s historiographic hero. In his book L’Image survivante of 2002, one of the consequences of the unique importance he ascribes to the presence of the image is that this presence calls into question art history’s received notions of historical development. If the object “breaks” time, then the history of art is necessarily an “anachronistic” enterprise. The intensity of the rapport between work and viewer does not allow us to subordinate art to some preestablished historical trajectory.
Images Malgre Tout (2003), translated as Images in Spite of All (2008), his imaginative and penetrating study of four rare photos of Auschwitz taken by a Jewish prisoner, may be his most daring work of all.
Didi-Huberman’s writing constitutes a call for the recognition of the poetry of images and their continuing appeal to interpretation, while nevertheless perpetually escaping its grasp. Far from denying the importance of history, his formidable body of scholarship insists that art historians forever rethink the significance of the concept, as present and past continually collide in our encounter with the work of art.
Jury: Janet Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design, chair; S. Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University; and Keith Moxey, Barnard College, Columbia University.
