Destroyed – Disappeared – Lost – Never Were (2024)

Beate

Fricke

Aden

Kumler

Objects play a prominent role in art history. Historians reflect on exemplary works and what they reveal. They may disagree as to which objects best exemplify a period or style, and about which represent stylistic innovations and turning points, but objects are central to these discussions. Artworks are a source of information about historical eras and about individual artists and their practices. Considering the reception of individual works can tell us about the values and social practices of a particular time and place. Even though there may be no consensus about what single works—exemplary or not—can reveal, the ‘object-centred’ approach characterizes art history textbooks, university courses, TV shows, and popular blogsalike.

But the history of art is not just the history of objects, nor even the history of the artists who made them and of how those objects were received. The history of art is also the history of loss. Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler, the editors of Destroyed – Disappeared – Lost – Never Were, remind us that the destruction of art has a history as long as the making of art. Therefore, limiting our consideration to works that still exist may give a distorted understanding. To understand the history of art, one might argue, it is necessary to look beyond those objects that have survived until the present day. In addition to thinking about the objects that have endured, we must take seriously those works that have been lost and reconfigure art history with them inmind.

The aim of Destroyed – Disappeared – Lost – Never Were is to invite art historians to reflect on the ways that dynamics of loss, destruction, and non-existence ‘haunt and animate’ their understanding of their work (pp. 14–15). Contributors were invited to think through how their own practices and understanding are shaped by the ‘negative spaces of historical retrospection’ (p.15). What are the implications of taking loss seriously, and of making it central rather than peripheral? The authors whose work is presented in the volume are specialists in periods from late antiquity to the present, and in a range of geographicareas.

The editors and several of the contributors alike remind us that Johann Winckelmann—author of History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), the foundational text of art history—was already aware of what might be called the structuring absence of lost works. Contributor Peter Geimer—in his response to the essays in the volume (‘Mourning the Loss of Works/Praising Their Absence: AResponse’, Chapter 10)—notes that Winckelmann identified a ‘basic structure’ of art-historical works: namely, mourning the absence of lost works while (secretly) praising the productive effects of that absence (p. 143). In a similar vein, Geimer quotes the poet Johann Gottfried Herder who claimed that it was sad but ‘perhaps good’ that the barbarians destroyed much of the art of antiquity. If they had not, ‘the quantity could drive us mad and oppress us’ (p.146).

The challenges to the project of taking loss seriously are obvious. For one, as Claudia Brittenham notes in her essay ‘John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Lintel of Kabah’ (Chapter 2), a ‘lost’ object must have been noticed before it disappears for the loss to be registered. In addition, lost works test our capacity for imagination, as they can be understood only through language (when written descriptions remain) or through renderings in another medium, such as drawings or photographs.

The title of this volume recounts some of the ways in which art objects cease to be. Destroyed: The lintel of Kabah was incinerated in a fire in 1842. Ablack-and-white line drawing is all that remains. Michele Bacci, in ‘Jerusalem’s Loca Sancta and their Perishable Frames’ (Chapter 1), recounts the history of the destruction of architecture on Jerusalem’s holy sites. While the physical structures have been destroyed, site-bound holiness, Bacci argues, is ‘indestructible, when supported by memory’ (p.33).

Disappeared: Danielle B.Joyner, in ‘Finding Delight in Gardens Lost’ (Chapter 5),reflects on the beauty and impermanence of lost medieval gardens, and what can be conjectured from the writings and diagrams that remain. Pages from illustrated manuscripts, being removable and saleable, are liable to disappear. Sonja Drimmer, in ‘The Sanguine Art: Four Fragments’ (Chapter 3), imagines four ‘moments’ in history of such a manuscript as it is cut apart and later reassembled. Her essay highlights another way that objects can be lost: they can disappear to scholars and to public view by vanishing into the private artmarket.

Lost: Arguably, the lintel of Kabah was lost before it was destroyed. Its removal from its original placement in the abandoned city of Kabah in the Yucatan peninsula, and transfer to an exhibition hall in New York City, meant that it was effectively lost to the community of Mesoamericans whose ancestors had created it. Similarly, the artefacts and manuscripts removed from the ‘Library Cave’ of Dunhuang, China, are not literally lost. Their presence is recorded in museums in at least twelve different countries. But the collection is ‘lost’ in the sense of no longer existing as a single resource reflecting the multicultural and varied religious heritage of the area where it was assembled (see Michelle McCoy, ‘Cave and Camera: Shades of Loss in the Library Cave of Dunhuang’, Chapter 9).

Sometimes traces that remain give us a tantalizing indication of what has been lost. The drawing of the intricate brass doors that once stood in a palace in present-day Diyarbakir hint at the experience of the people said to have journeyed from far away to view the actual doors (see Meekyung MacMurdie, ‘The Manuscript Machine: Assemblages and Divisions in Jazarī’s Compendium’, Chapter 8). Saints’ relics, such as a skull or other bone fragments, are material testimony to reliquaries that have been lost (see Lena Liepe, ‘Lonely Bones: Relics sans Reliquaries’ Chapter 7). Jaś Elsner, in ‘The Dreamwork of Positivism: Archeological Art History and the Imaginative Restoration of the Lost’ (Chapter 4), examines the epistemological problem of making sense of a lost whole from fragments. He cautions against ‘reparation through fantasy’ (p.69).

Never Were: In some ways, this category is the most problematic. It denotes those works only ever fabricated in human imagination and language, or in plans, models, drawings, and textual instructions. None of the essays take this category as afocus.

These essays do not start from philosophical problems as such. Rather, they are philosophical through engagement with actual works and the problems they raise. The exception is Kristopher W.Kersey’s essay, ‘Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan’ (Chapter 6), which engages directly with the concept of loss in Japanese aesthetics. While his focus is on medieval works, the implications of the paper extend beyond that period and should be of interest to anyone interested in Asian philosophy.

There is much for philosophers of art in this volume. The essays are all interesting, well-written, and thought provoking. The quality of the reproductions varies. An index would have been welcome.

The editors and contributors write with the understanding that we are losing artworks every day—through accidents, environmental damage, de-accession, and intentional destruction (both malicious and by communal consent). This knowledge must feel overwhelming at times to those who are in the best position to understand the importance of what is at risk of being destroyed, disappeared, or lost. So, Iwas struck by Drimmer’s account of handling a manuscript in poor condition: ‘Gaps in the pages, unfortunate repair jobs, they are all tangible traces of the people who came here before me to hold this object just as Iam doing now. This damage is reassuring. It promises me that not everything is destined to expire behind glass’ (p.56). While all loss should be recognized, it does not all have to be mourned.

Reference

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