The Big Pictures

ArtForum, Oct, 1999 by Yve-Alain Bois

I've always fetishized the "complete works" editions of my favorite writers and daydreamed about the prospect of reading any one of them from A to Z (which of course I've never done). I loathe anthologies and the arrogance of the editor who chooses for the reader what is worthy of interest. Nothing fuels my fantasy more than the illusion of having in front of me a lifework whole, with all its moments of grace and oddity there to be unearthed (even if the exhaustiveness can only be temporary, as the appearance of countless "revised and expanded" editions of books warns us, and with the criteria for completeness ever expanding). If the museum postcard rack never seems to offer the same experience, what I enjoy most while perusing the writer's complete works is that I'm the one who makes the selection of the keepsake.

This sense of empowerment and substitutive possessiveness is accentuated in the case of the catalogue raisonne (perhaps paradoxically, for the reason that what is presented for our perusal is not the works per se, as in literature, but reproductions of them: a catalogue raisonne is a kind of surrogate collection). In any event, with the catalogue raisonne the recording of a "complete corpus" dramatically underscores a dialectical effect: It is only when confronted with the "whole" oeuvre that one is able to realize in which singular way a particular oeuvre is not whole, in the sense that things don't "hang together" - and it is precisely the anomalies, the false starts, the strange offshoots that one immediately notices when leafing through a book that consists in the main of hundreds of images in sequence. (The order is what's of the essence here - that's the "raisonne" aspect, so called perhaps as a paean to Descartes: The clearer the order, the more conspicuous the perturbations.) This paradox is not always acknowledged by the authors of catalogues raisonnes. Because they become de facto experts who are responsible for attribution - and because their research has immediate consequences in the marketplace - they are often trapped, sometimes unknowingly, into consolidating the myth of the artist's consistency once he or she has attained a mature style. But the joy of the reader has much to do with the sense of being put in the loop, of suddenly becoming aware of the hitherto unknown divisions that fracture a subject, the cleavages that are indeed what make this subject particular.

Catalogues raisonnes are at most only infrequently reviewed (David Sylvester, who produced the Magritte catalogue raisonne, told me recently that not a word concerning his mammoth achievement appeared in print). This has a lot to do with the genre's dryness and its just-the-facts-ma'am posturing. But for all their common denominators, particularly what I call the ID card - entries on individual works providing title, date, medium, size, provenance, present location, exhibition history, bibliographic references - catalogues raisonnes come in all shapes and sizes (though they are always bulky). Sometimes the cataloger asserts his or her authorship as a critic, which is not without risks (think of poor Arturo Schwartz, lambasted in these very pages just over a year ago, rightly or not, for having empurpled his entire Duchamp effort with the soap opera of incest theory). Other times he or she hides behind the ethos of positivism and, rather than deciding which facts are significant, opts for guidelines that permit only the strict minimum of interpretation. My ideal is somewhere in between: Having rummaged through the archives and seen all the works included in the corpus, the cataloger arguably knows more about the topic than anyone else, and when he or she has interesting things to say, we should be all ears.

Four recent publications provide a good cross-section of the genre.

In some cases the gatherer, to my chagrin, was excessively modest. Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonne of the Sculptures (Schirmer/Mosel, $199) is a splendid, luxurious book in which almost every one of the 147 works covered is given a full-page color reproduction, and in some instances another, smaller view (a handful of black-and-white photographs document the sculptures that are no longer extant). It was assembled by Twombly's assistant, Nicola del Roscio, who provides a flawless JD card for each work. But del Roscio, who refers to himself here as an editor, a rarity in such publications, refrains from telling us anything about the process, formation, context, and so forth of these sculptures. The book's only commentary is Arthur C. Danto's elegant preface, in which he distinguishes Twombly's archaizing effigies from Duchamp's readymades and ponders over the relation between Twombly's sculpture and painting. We are left more or less alone in wondering, for example, about the different versions of a given work, or about the huge lag in time between the elaboration of an assemblage in "wood, wire, twine, nails, house paint and wax on fabric" (no. 10, 1953) and its casting in bronze (painted white, as is often the case with Twombly's work, and thus looking as if it had been executed in plaster) for an edition of eight (no. 11, 1989). This catalogue is indeed a gem, not only because of the quality of its printing but also because it facilitates comparison between "original" and cast, and allows one to think about the uncanny timeliness of Twombly's sculptural output (there have been no stylistic changes whatsoever from 1948 on), but we might have wished for a more authorial presence from the cataloger, whose intimacy with the work is topped only by that of the artist.