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

We are all condamnes . .: we are all beneath sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve . .: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. a certain number of spend this interval in listlessness, a certain number of in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and ballad 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 faculty of perception of life, ecstasy and sorrow of regard with affection the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which approach naturally to many of us. sole be sure it is passion - that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of similar wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the be fond of of art for its be in possession of sake, has most. For art advances to you proposing frankly to give nothing on the contrary the highest quality to your twinkling of an eyes as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. - Walter Pater, "Conclusion," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and verse 1868(1)

In visual art the aesthetic second is that flitting instant, for a like reason brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at single with the work of art he is looking at, or with actuality of any kind that the spectator himself dioceses 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 sum of two units become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is have a title toed by one awareness. When he reclaims workaday consciousness it is as if he had been initiated into illuminating, exalting, formative mysteries. In short, the aesthetic twinkling 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 organ of sight taking pleasure in the form and color of the aesthetic particular As the testimony of similar consummate nineteenth-century aesthetes as Bernard Berenson and Walter Pater put in mind ofs the ritual of contemplating art constituted a mystical jiffy of contact with a realm that transcended ordinary consciousness. notwithstanding that 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 upon both sides of the Atlantic. After the paradigm shift to a post-Darwinian universe in the 1860 Pater, like many other members of the English intelligentsia, cast asideed the Christian notion of the afterlife of the human soul(3) Pater's agnostic answer to the riddle of the great Unknown was that individual could expect nothing better from this existence than the small in number blissful moments when the completeded structures of art released the psyche into a timeless space rid of a loaded by the consciousness of death. As he contemplated different forms of art - from the institute of Giorgione to the classical in a state of natures celebrated by Winckelmann - Pater demonstrated by what means aesthetic experience ritualized into a quasi-religious practice could tender 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 on the outside a psychic reprieve for the agnostic conscience.

Berenson's testament to the mystical power of art may tend hitherward as a surprise to those scholars who keep to think of him as a disinterested, Morellian connoisseur responsible for the first important catalogue of Italian Renaissance painting. Berenson's late meditation upon the nature of aesthetic experience titled Aesthetics and History, however, yields a revealing glimpse of by what mode Pater's religion of art serv as a sacred body 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 etho of Harvard in the early 1880 and like his father, cast offed Jewish orthodoxy for the Enlightenment tillage of Western Europe. Following his teacher Charles Eliot Norton, he took up the quasi-religious attitude to art characteristic of agnostics at Harvard, admitting Berenson's embrace of Pater was too radical for Norton, who preferr 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 gymnast has observed that in "Reverencing art, individual revered the spirit in humankind. . . The acolytes of art, whether Christians or hebrews 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 things that served its values, Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919; [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED!), the prototype of the late nineteenth-century collector as connoisseur, erected a private world predicated upon the idea of art as a link to another, higher realm. admitting the agnostic elevation of formal beauty in the 1890 promot the experience of art as a religious instant it later validated the "pure" gaze of the connoisseur as a completely secularized cultural practice. The secularized len of the later twentieth hundred in fact has dehistoricized Freer's practice of connoisseurship for a like reason that this has been reframed in bourns of a different ideological agenda. Freer's fidelity to the art-for-art's-sake rhetoric - of the "pure gaze" and the "pure" art fact as ends in themselves(6) - has prov single of the stumbling blocks in establishing the meaning of his connoisseurship for the cultural history of late nineteenth-century America. This rhetoric has obscur the motives behind his accumulation of what is ofttimes perceived as an eclectic material substance of Asian and American artifacts: a collection of Asian ceramics; selected examples of Asian painting and sculpture; and the paintings and prints of Whistler and his American followers. in like manner far, this collection has elud the ability of scholars to discern any coherent structuring principle that would relate these three clumps other than Freer's "pure" pleasure in the formal qualities of the particulars he purchased.(7) One explanatory strategy favored by dint of some recent studies is to examine Freer's aesthetic disposition within the framework of the sociology of capitalism. like an approach would situate the essentialist rhetoric of purity as a distinguishing mark that identifies the collector/connoisseur as single who has achieved a desireed social space through the possession of cultural capital, which Pierre Bourdieu has defined as a self-legitimating plant of cultural signals manifested in metes of attitudes, tastes, knowledge, and credentials. As Bourdieu has observ "The unsullied gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world which, as like is a social break." This "charismatic ideology" separates society into" 'antagonistic casts' - those who understand and those who do not," conferring on the privileged few the aura of an aristocracy.(8)