Portrait of a collector as an agnostic: Charles Lang Freer and connoisseurship

We are all condamnes . . .: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve . . .: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion - that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. - Walter Pater, "Conclusion," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1868(1)

In visual art the aesthetic moment is that flitting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at, or with actuality of any kind that the spectator himself sees in terms of art, as form and colour. He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the picture or building, statue, landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness. When he recovers workaday consciousness it is as if he had been initiated into illuminating, exalting, formative mysteries. In short, the aesthetic moment is a moment of mystic vision. - Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History, 1948(2)

Connoisseurship in late nineteenth-century America and England was not simply a matter of the educated eye taking pleasure in the form and color of the aesthetic object. As the testimony of such consummate nineteenth-century aesthetes as Bernard Berenson and Walter Pater suggests, the ritual of contemplating art constituted a mystical moment of contact with a realm that transcended ordinary consciousness. Though the "Conclusion" to Pater's bible of aestheticism, The Renaissance, scandalized his English contemporaries for its seeming embrace of a hedonistic philosophy of life bereft of social responsibility, it was instrumental in promoting the religion of art as a surrogate for orthodox religious beliefs among the upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic. After the paradigm shift to a post-Darwinian universe in the 1860s, Pater, like many other members of the English intelligentsia, rejected the Christian notion of the afterlife of the human soul.(3) Pater's agnostic answer to the riddle of the great Unknown was that one could expect nothing better from this existence than the few blissful moments when the perfected structures of art released the psyche into a timeless space unburdened by the consciousness of death. As he contemplated different forms of art - from the school of Giorgione to the classical nudes celebrated by Winckelmann - Pater demonstrated how aesthetic experience ritualized into a quasi-religious practice could offer the refined sensibility the sensation of stopping time - of expanding the painfully short "interval" of earthly existence. This heady, intoxicated state, in Pater's thinking, thus held out a psychic reprieve for the agnostic conscience.

Berenson's testament to the mystical power of art may come as a surprise to those scholars who tend to think of him as a disinterested, Morellian connoisseur responsible for the first important catalogue of Italian Renaissance painting. Berenson's late meditation on the nature of aesthetic experience titled Aesthetics and History, however, yields a revealing glimpse of how Pater's religion of art served as a sacred text for an elite group of late nineteenth-century, American agnostics - with Berenson standing first and foremost among them. Born in Lithuania to a reformed Jewish family, Berenson assimilated himself into the Protestant ethos of Harvard in the early 1880s, and like his father, rejected Jewish orthodoxy for the Enlightenment culture of Western Europe. Following his teacher Charles Eliot Norton, he took up the quasi-religious attitude to art characteristic of agnostics at Harvard, though Berenson's embrace of Pater was too radical for Norton, who preferred John Ruskin's and Matthew Arnold's more socially responsible worship of culture.(4) Of the late nineteenth-century American agnostics who celebrated the religion of art, James Turner has observed that in "Reverencing art, one revered the spirit in humankind. . . . The acolytes of art, whether Christians or Jews, theists or agnostics, revered art as spirit enfleshed."(5)

While Pater the aesthetician definitively articulated the aesthetic credo of agnosticism, and Berenson the scholar identified a category of objects that served its values, Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919; [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED!), the model of the late nineteenth-century collector as connoisseur, constructed a private world predicated on the idea of art as a link to another, higher realm. Though the agnostic elevation of formal beauty in the 1890s promoted the experience of art as a religious moment, it later validated the "pure" gaze of the connoisseur as a completely secularized cultural practice. The secularized lens of the later twentieth century in fact has dehistoricized Freer's practice of connoisseurship so that this has been reframed in terms of a different ideological agenda. Freer's fidelity to the art-for-art's-sake rhetoric - of the "pure gaze" and the "pure" art object as ends in themselves(6) - has proved one of the stumbling blocks in establishing the meaning of his connoisseurship for the cultural history of late nineteenth-century America. This rhetoric has obscured the motives behind his accumulation of what is often perceived as an eclectic body of Asian and American artifacts: a group of Asian ceramics; selected examples of Asian painting and sculpture; and the paintings and prints of Whistler and his American followers. So far, this collection has eluded the ability of scholars to discern any coherent structuring principle that would relate these three groups, other than Freer's "pure" pleasure in the formal qualities of the objects he purchased.(7) One explanatory strategy favored by some recent studies is to examine Freer's aesthetic disposition within the framework of the sociology of capitalism. Such an approach would situate the essentialist rhetoric of purity as a distinguishing mark that identifies the collector/connoisseur as one who has achieved a coveted social space through the possession of cultural capital, which Pierre Bourdieu has defined as a self-legitimating set of cultural signals manifested in terms of attitudes, tastes, knowledge, and credentials. As Bourdieu has observed, "The pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world which, as such, is a social break." This "charismatic ideology" separates society into" 'antagonistic casts' - those who understand and those who do not," conferring upon the privileged few the aura of an aristocracy.(8)