Catalogue Raisonné Scholarship Today: “If by yes you mean no, then yes."
College Art Association Annual Conference
Friday, February 16, 2024
9.00am-10.30am CST
In-person session
Chairs: Eileen Costello, The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Parker Field, Director, The Arshile Gorky Foundation
A catalogue raisonné should serve as the most reliable source of information on a given artist. Within it, one should be able to confidently confirm, learn, or simply familiarize oneself with a particular artist’s work. Catalogue raisonné research has become increasingly more sophisticated over the past two decades, yet with this plethora of research comes a plethora of dilemmas: What if an author discovers a work by an artist that might not actually be included in the catalogue raisonné, for any number of reasons?: the artist themselves has disavowed a work that, in fact, originated with their hands; inept draftsmanship that an author feels would not further the scholarship; newly discovered double-sided paintings that leave the author wondering about the artist’s intentions; overpaintings that may either cover-up or invalidate a work of art; “inconsequential” marginalia, and more. These issues raise questions as to how the artist wanted their work to be publicly shown and whether they wanted the whole of their work shown, and at what point is a work by an artist no longer a work by that artist? These sets of problems dovetail with conservation issues, and raise further questions. A diverse panel of catalogue raisonné authors and painting/and or drawing conservators will present papers on their experiences dealing with these prickly issues, touching upon the many variegated methodologies used by catalogue raisonné scholars and conservationists in determining that will include modes of attribution, connoisseurship, authentication, and conservation.
Papers
“Modigliani's Legacy: Beyond the Catalogue Raisonné,” Leslie Koot and Julia May Boddewyn, The Modigliani Initiative
“The Case of Slovenian Caricaturist Hinko Smrekar's Catalogue Raisonné,” Ciril Horjak, Univerza V Ljubljani
“Giovanni da Udine’s Drawings: Revisiting Attribution and Function in Catalogue Raisonné Scholarship,” Larissa Mohr, Universität Wien