The New York Review of Books was fretting recently about the rise of "garbology" in art criticism. No, this is not a reference to the use of obscure or pretentious language by critics trying to appear more profound than they are. It describes instead a sort of sub-field of archaeology, named (with ironic intent) after the practice of going through celebrities' refuse in search of evidence that casts new light on their public personae.
The NYR raised the obsession with "object-based information" in the context of a book about the studio of the painter Francis Bacon. As you probably know, the studio used to be in London. As you may also know, it was a mess, packed with thousands of objects ranging from dried-up paint-brushes to old magazines, most of them thrown higgledy-piggledy around the floor.
But a few years ago, everything in the room (including the walls) was photographed, catalogued, packed in crates, and shipped to Ireland. Then it was lovingly reassembled, in every detail. And now it resides permanently in Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery, where it is a prize exhibit.
The relocation has in turn led to a book by the gallery's curator, from which the NYR focuses on one of the studio's thousands of objects: half a page torn from an 1894 French translation of a medical textbook - Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche - and featuring a photographic close-up of a patient with diseased gums.
That this inspired an important series of Bacon paintings is apparently beyond dispute. The NYR's concern is that it might still represent an unwarranted intrusion into the artist's work. Introducing the case for the prosecution, the reviewer asks: "Is it really our business to be snooping around here, in another man's trash?" Fortunately, it emerges in evidence that Bacon was probably complicit in any crime, having deliberately cultivated an image of the studio as the "compost" from which his art grew. The apparently casual mess was instead arguably "Bacon's lone work of sculpture", suggests the reviewer. And far from intruding, observers are being manipulated by a painter who lets them see only what he wants them to.
Thus, after a trial lasting about 2,000 words - short by the NYR's standards - the Hugh Lane Gallery is acquitted of all charges.
FOR THOSE OF us who like to preserve the mystery in art, however, the news is not all good. Until recently, the last word on the French Impressionist Claude Monet had belonged to his fellow painter Cézanne, who famously remarked: "He's only an eye. But what an eye." The fact that many of us had no idea what Cézanne meant by this did not diminish its authority.
In fact, it has long been suspected that an eye condition - cataracts - may have influenced Monet's style. Now, scientists who could not leave well enough alone claim to have proved it, using computers to recreate the artist's famous lily pond as it would have appeared to him, with separate colours blurring into a muddy mixture. The scientists - from California's Stanford University - suggest that the gradual changes in Monet's painting technique mirrored the deterioration in his sight.
I visited Monet's garden at Giverney a couple of years ago and it was an unforgettable experience. Indeed there is a school of thought - mostly among philistine horticulturalists, admittedly - that it is his true masterpiece. And even if we don't go this far, we can accept that, like Bacon's studio, the garden was Monet's foray into sculpture.
At any rate, and with absolutely no risk of exaggeration, we can split the difference and agree that it was the "compost" from which his art grew. But the implication of the Californian study - that his trademark blurry painting style was partly an accident, and that he might have reproduced the pond more photographically if only he could have seen it - is disturbing.
I'm reminded of another article in the NYR from years ago, about the French abstract painter Fernand Léger. This speculated that Léger may have
been partially colour-blind, able to recognise shades of red, but not green, a colour he used badly and tended to avoid. "When, after the war, he adds secondary colours to his primaries, the oranges and purples hold their own against the reds, yellows and blues, but the greens often don't," wrote
the reviewer.
No doubt scientists will catch up with Léger too eventually, and deliver a clinical diagnosis. But I prefer art criticism that does not completely strip the subject of its mystique. And the NYR article on Léger was such a model in this regard that I cut it out and kept it.
Particularly admirable was its description of the painter's formative visit to a cubism exhibition in Paris.
Here, it says, he saw "canvases of Picasso's and Braque's fully developed analytic cubist manner, works organised in linear grids that supported complexes of transparent interacting planes, out of which the subject could be reconstructed, only to be reabsorbed into an overall abstract pictorial scintillation".
The beauty of a sentence like that is that it can be appreciated for its visual impact alone. It may well have a deeper significance. But so long as we steer clear of garbologists, it remains entirely up to the observer to decide what, if anything, the words mean.