Review: Is art history? Two L.A. museums offer answers, but only one is right

Is art history?

So asked UC Berkeley art historian Svetlana Alpers in a savvy 1977 essay, a question posed early in an exceptional 60-year career. Alpers, now 88, went on to become a leading historian of Dutch Golden Age painting. She aimed her essay, though, on a change she sensed was underway in the discipline of art history.

Analyzing the visual power of material objects — paintings, sculptures, textiles, manuscripts, ceramics, etc. — in the context of their creation had always been an art historian’s primary activity. “Seeing” is what an art historian did. Now, however, signs were emerging that seeing, an endeavor more complex than one might at first think, was starting to be overwhelmed by focusing analysis on the context itself.

Studying the beliefs and ideas of a past time and place bumped the object to one side, where it now was given equal weight to economics, literature, religion, scientific developments, politics and other varieties of social life. Art was merely one element of a much larger pursuit. Cultural history squeezed art history.

Catching up recently on three big exhibitions, I kept thinking of Alpers’ incisive essay. All three shows are part of “PST Art: Art & Science Collide,” the sprawling extravaganza at more than 70 Southern California independent art spaces, all funded by the Getty Foundation. While these three exhibitions include many marvelous objects, only one is satisfying; the other two left me cold. The chilly shows are doing it backward, using art to explain cultural history, rather than the other way around.

The remarkable show is the Getty Museum’s “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light.” The center of attention is light as a hinge between new science and old religion — Christian, Jewish and Muslim — as manifest in around 100 Medieval art objects made in Western Europe. The period under review is 800 to 1600 — the long Middle Ages, a stretch that roughly spans the death of Emperor Charlemagne and the end of the Renaissance.

As a wall label puts it, that was when an Earth-centered understanding of our place in the celestial order was replaced by a sun-centered one. The power of light doesn’t get more intense than that.

“Tapestry of the Astrolabes,” Flemish, circa 1400-1450, wool and silk.

(David Blázquez)

The show begins with an extensive selection of luxury astrolabes, a technical instrument of engraved and ornamented metal plates and dials used for timekeeping, astronomy and navigation. Whether steering a ship for commercial trade or finding the direction of Mecca for purposes of prayer, an astrolabe harnessed light to manage desires around science and myth.

How important were astrolabes to the transformative evolution of European thought? A spectacular, 26-foot-wide Flemish “Tapestry of the Astrolabes,” hanging for centuries in a cathedral in Toledo, Spain, gives an indication.

It shows an angel in a diaphanous robe cranking a giant machine that spatially organizes a host of courtiers, astrological symbols, enthroned representations of philosophy, arithmetic and geometry, the poet Virgil and the astronomer Hipparchus, all amid a shower of stars and fields of flowers. At the upper left, the gray-bearded figure of a wise and eternal God directs the action, hovering within a dazzling golden sunburst.

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The exhibition, organized by Getty curator Kristen Collins and paper conservator Nancy K. Turner, with Glenn Phillips of the Getty Research Institute, is presented in three thematic sections. The tapestry and astrolabes are with several great manuscripts in “Astral Light,” built around the study of astronomy. “Light and Vision” next explores illumination as knowledge. Finally, “Aura and Performance” considers divinity as aroused by the senses, especially sight.

There are many marvelous loans, not least the so-called Spitzer Cross from the Cleveland Museum of Art, a famous and exquisitely refined 12th century Limoges enamel. Two feet tall, its design of a crucified Christ positioned above the skull of Adam was dug out from a copper ground, filled with powdered glass mixed with metallic oxides and fired to achieve an extraordinary array of colors, both delicate and bright. Enamel and copper absorb and reflect light in different ways, animating the polished object.

Some familiar works are surprising, informed by the context. The nature of optics, or how the eye sees as light’s conduit, is the focus of an altarpiece fragment by Giotto from the San Diego Museum of Art. Six hovering angels shade their eyes with their hands, or else they shield their eyes behind transparent colored disks — think 14th century sunglasses. The heavenly host is dazzled by the blinding golden light emanating from God.

Following eye-grabbing rock crystal carvings, gilded paintings, elegant blown-glass mosque lamps, priestly robes woven with sparkly silver and gold threads, a huge Byzantine chandelier and more, a large embossed and engraved altar front nearly steals the show. The 12th century “Stavelot Retable,” loaned by Paris’ Cluny Museum, shows the Christian Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the 12 apostles, courtesy of beams of light radiating from above.

“Stavelot Retablo,” circa 1160-70; gilded copper, champlevé enamel and mixed media.

(© RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

The high-relief altar front of gilded copper figures with enameled halos, 7 feet wide and nearly 3 feet tall, powerfully articulates the apostles. They assume varied states of reaction to the event — astonishment, meditation and incredulity among them. Underscoring the scene’s spiritual liveliness, the museum created remarkable lighting for the piece.

Gradually it changes. Sometimes the light shifts slowly from one side of the altar to the other, recalling sunshine streaming through windows over the course of a day. Then the lights flicker, evoking candlelight at night. At other moments the light holds steady, as it would in a typical museum display, allowing for close examination of the light-reflective golden object.

The presentation is effective in clarifying light’s importance as a religious metaphor in the gold embossing, as well as being an actual material in the chapel where the altar was placed. Medieval artists crafting astute sculptural designs like this were doing pre-industrial animation, intended to bring static imagery to life.

The show’s one glitch is its occasional incorporation of contemporary art among the historical works. Unnecessary paintings, sculptures and installations by Vija Celmins, E.V. Day, Anish Kapoor and five others turn up here and there. (Related standalone installations by Charles Ross and Helen Pashgian are elsewhere in the museum, where five additional light-related PST Art shows of varying interest are installed.) The practice of including recent art in historical exhibitions, an increasingly common art museum schtick, means to make supposedly arcane subjects relevant and timely by suggesting that living artists still engage those themes.

Well, maybe. But so what?

Ali ibn Muhammad al-Barmaki, “Mosque Lamp of Amir Qawsun,” 1329-35; glass with gilding and enamel.

(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

What does Celmins’ beautiful 1992 painting of stars glinting in a dusky night sky, or Day’s 2018 gold-leaf cables and monofilament stretched on a diagonal between ceiling and floor, have to do with elucidating the art of the long Middle Ages, which “Lumen” achieves? The answer, of course, is nothing. Contemporary works just yank you out of the exciting sense of historical discovery that the best museum exhibitions offer.

That’s a small thing, though, fairly easily ignored. The same can’t be said of the two disappointing exhibitions, both at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures,” organized by seven LACMA curators, presents paintings and sculptures from different global societies and time periods that ponder the origin and development of the universe. “We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art,” organized by three curators, attempts something related, examining the cosmological significance of color.

“Carved Sphere,” Guatemala or Mexico, Maya, 200–450; limestone.

(Museum Associates / LACMA)

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In short, cultural history is not being harnessed to illuminate works of art, as “Lumen” does for medieval objects. Rather, it’s the other way around: Works of art are being asked to explain cultural histories of cosmology. Art is demoted to illustration.

In ancient Mesoamerica, for example, the color white represented the spark of a creative process, while black was the color of death. That marvelous white ceramic Olmec figure sitting cross-legged with his grinning head resting on one hand is formally attractive; but for the purpose of revealing cosmology, it is no different from the white Maya carved sphere displayed nearby. The pleasant sphere is much less visually interesting, but that’s oddly irrelevant to the art museum.

Vitrines holding wildly different white or black objects make no sense, because whatever might be the specific visual point of the art objects is extraneous. Six of one, half a dozen of another.

Likewise, in “Mapping the Infinite,” small but handsome Roman bronze figures of Venus, Mercury and Mars are lined up on a shelf, but each one could be replaced by any other Roman bronze figure of Venus, Mercury or Mars, since the goal is merely to stand as a cultural example of cosmological beliefs. Nearby, a striking 9th century Indonesian carving in volcanic stone of Brahma, the multi-headed god, represents the myriad complexities of creation — just like every other Hindu Brahma sculpture that is not on view.

Looking at it, one wonders: Is this sculpture distinctive because volcanoes in central Java are spiritual sites, so molten material thrown up from deep within the earth inflects the art’s intended meaning? We don’t know. A question like that is of no interest here. This specific art object is of secondary concern — which is discouraging for an art museum.

Wonderful art objects get demoted to the status of illustrations. Both exhibitions are a big jumble of things brought to bear on cultural history, a subject better handled through texts. That’s what illustrations are for — as adjuncts to writing.

“Brahma, the God of Creation,” Indonesia, Central Java, 9th century; volcanic stone.

(Museum Associates / LACMA)

And, yes, both shows tuck some contemporary works into their historical displays, downgrading them as well. The artists will survive, and who can blame them for taking the opportunity? But it’s a waste.

These two mediocre exhibitions are on view in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion — one until spring, the other for nearly a year. Just outside, the expensive new building under construction for the museum’s permanent collection is taking shape, designed for a misguided plan for theme show displays. I fear these are samples of what we can expect when the David Geffen Galleries opens in 2026.

At art museums like LACMA, cultural history now regularly swamps art history. Svetlana Alpers was prescient.

Alpers’ newly published book (her eighth) of essays collected from the last six decades, issued by Hunters Point Press, brings “Is Art History?” forward as its title, which seems pointed enough. Included is a later 1991 piece on art museum displays, which she introduces with a pithy remark: “A museum is a way of seeing, not a way of learning about culture.”

Check out the exhilarating “Lumen” and see what she means.