For a figure so ubiquitous in museums, Kunsthallen, and biennials, the curator is maddeningly difficult to define. There are, it would seem, as many ways to be a curator as there are kinds of institutions at which to be one, and no single history that can account for them all. Attempts to answer the question of what it means to be a curator inevitably read like taxonomies of species of birds. The encyclopedic museum is the habitat of one kind of curator: studious and bookish, an “academically capable researcher who spends the majority of their time in libraries.”1 The biennial is that of another entirely: hyper-mobile, charismatic, a “transient, independent curator visiting the studios of a global array of artists.”2 If there is no history of the curator, Daniel Birnbaum suggests, “maybe it has to do with the fact that the curator wasn’t, and maybe shouldn’t be, such a well-defined figure.”3 So many of the assumptions that we might make about this profession can be readily contradicted by one of its practitioners. What is easiest to assume about the profession is that it is new.
Irrespective of genus, the figure of the curator as we know it now is perhaps largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century invention, but much of the work of the curator is not as modern as we think. In his Curator’s Handbook, Adrian George locates the origins of the term “curator” in the fourteenth century, its Latin root “curare” indicating that at its heart is some concept of “care.”4 Looking through the history of art, it seems that as long as there have been collections, there has been what is still described in museum circles as “collections care.” Scattered throughout the literature on the great ages of collecting in Europe is anecdata referencing inventories taken, acquisitions made, and restorations undertaken, largely by collectors and connoisseurs, if not also by artists and architects.
This was certainly the case in early modern Spain. The art collection of King Philip IV was one of the largest in early modern European history, accumulated over the course of a century.5 His paintings alone numbered in the thousands, an overwhelming number of which were commissioned by, purchased on behalf of, or simply given to King Philip IV himself.6 The publications of Zahira Véliz and Ángel Aterido Fernández hint at the work that artists and other craftsmen did at the Spanish court to restore, catalogue, and clean them. Painters were expected to be skilled in restoration; period treatises like those of Francisco Pacheco and Antonio Palomino even include instructions on how to clean paintings without removing their paint and recipes for fresh varnish that might replace old layers of varnish darkened by smoke and time. As they aged, paintings could be in-painted, relined, structurally stabilized.7 Frames were made in-house by teams of cabinetmakers and gilders; if a painting arrived at the palace rolled up, a carpenter would make a stretcher to go with it.8 Alongside secretaries and notaries, artists helped both to inventory works of art, recording such data as their authors, subjects, and dimensions, and to appraise them.9 As Aterido Fernández and Véliz point out, many of the methods to which these documents allude are already outdated, but it is hard not to hear in this work the echoes of the conservation laboratories, frame workshops, and collections’ management databases that are so integral to the operations of the modern museum.
At least one period treatise gives a sense of the ends toward which this work was the means. As early as 1560, when the collection was only beginning to take shape, Felipe de Guevara made a curious remark in a treatise titled Comentario de la pintura y pintores antiguos. “Paintings [that are] covered and hidden,” he writes, “are deprived of their value, which consists in the foreign eyes [that look at them] and the judgments that men of good understanding and good imagination make of them, which cannot be done unless they are in places where they may occasionally be seen by many [people].”10 Guevara’s text is no curator’s handbook; more fittingly for his age, it was written as counsel on the ways in which art could support the moral, governmental, and economic stability of Spain. In the process, however, it voices the view that one of the essential functions of artworks is to be displayed.
This conviction that the Habsburg art collection should be displayed was extraordinarily consequential for the Habsburgs’ most celebrated painter, Diego Velázquez, who over the course of his career came to be its curator. To be sure, while in the service of King Philip IV of Spain, Velázquez made paintings, including those that earned him his stellar reputation in the history of Western art. However, he also made acquisitions of paintings and sculptures for the art collection of which he was the steward; made attributions, sometimes erroneously; selected works of art for installation in spaces with public audiences; and commissioned frames of varying designs to adorn them. No curator in recent memory has executed a canvas to rival Las Meninas, but the average working curator can be expected to have done the rest of it.
Perhaps not entirely unlike those of the present day, the early modern museum that was the Alcázar palace cannot be extricated from the systems of power that created it, and those that it in turn created. In his book on the portrait of the king, Louis Marin concluded that “the king is only truly king in images,” a precept that bears itself out in different ways in Velázquez’s royal portraits.11 It might be said that the king was also king in his objects; the Habsburg art collection was an imperial project, as was the Alcázar that housed it. The Alcázar palace was, in Jesús Escobar’s succinct phrasing, “the preeminent built symbol of power in seventeenth-century Madrid.”12 Within the limits of what the surviving documentation permits, Escobar describes an interior littered with imperial iconographies: busts of Roman emperors, maps of the globe and architectural plans for royal projects, grand staircases. Because of the high vantage point of the palace overlooking the surrounding forests, even the views through windows to the building’s immediate surroundings would have given a sense of dominion over a sweeping landscape. Like this palace, the Habsburg art collection, which consisted not only of paintings and sculptures but also of rugs, tapestries, furniture, frescoes, and all manner of objets d’art, was the product of the aggregation of labor, materials, and talent to the very center of the Habsburg world, sometimes by diplomatic but more often by exploitative—if not murderous—tactics. Not for nothing does Adrian George remind us that “the nascent development of the role of curator in its current form is inexorably linked to the development of collecting as a pastime of the rich.”13 At least one disc of gold bullion of the kind that would have been shipped from the Americas to Spain during this period still survives to the present day (fig. 0.1). This object epitomizes the literal transfer of wealth across geographies and toward the Spanish capital in the centuries leading up to Velázquez’s tenure there. It also serves as a reminder that the goods and services listed above, whether labor, materials, or talent, are simply capital by any other name. As Byron Hamann importantly argues, Las Meninas is not only a paean to artistic virtuosity; it is an index of empire.14
Spanish Colonial, Gold Bullion, 1622, gold, 11.9 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, AGOID.29439
Image © AGO
By the time Velázquez was finished with them, the exhibition spaces under his purview in the Alcázar palace and the royal monastery at El Escorial would sit somewhere between the Gallerie degli Uffizi of Renaissance Italy, with its linear telling of a history of art, and the Château de Versailles of Louis XIV’s France, a monument to absolutism. His was a conjoined set of motives, both political and artistic; as it happens, exhibition is an apparatus well suited to both kinds of objectives. In an essay simply titled “What Is an Exhibition?,” Elena Filipovic offers the following answer: “Of course it can be many things, but perhaps first and foremost it is not a neutral thing. In its many lives, it has been understood as a scrim on which ideology is projected, a machine for the manufacture of meaning, a theater of bourgeois culture, a site for the disciplining of citizen-subjects, or a mise-en-scène of unquestioned values (linear time, teleological history, master narratives).”15 With each of these propositions, Filipovic reminds us that historically, exhibitions have always been to one degree or another about power as much as they have been about art. If this is so, it is likely because art has always been about power as much as it has been about art (figs. 0.2–0.4). Either way, as the official portraitist to King Philip IV of Spain, Velázquez was tasked with representing the Spanish monarchy. There was, it turned out, more than one way to do this at the Habsburg court. Like royal portraits, the Alcázar palace and the monastery at El Escorial were sites of negotiation of the political and aesthetic legacy of the Habsburg art collection, where art itself was made and remade for Velázquez, the painter, and for the king, his patron.
Giorgio Vasari, Portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, 1534, oil on panel, 157 × 114 cm, Gallerie degli Uffizi, inv. 1890, no. 1563
Image © Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi
John Singer Sargent, The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant, 1899, oil on canvas, 292.1 × 213.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 27.67
Image © BPK | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama, 2018, oil on canvas, 213.7 × 147 cm, National Portrait Gallery, NPG.2018.16
Image © Kehinde Wiley, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
The central premise of this book is that curatorial interventions of any kind are meaningful, if not meaning-making, gestures and that this has been true in advance of the existence of the figure of the curator as we currently understand it. The work of art history is so often to determine what paintings meant to the people who made them, or to the people for whom they were made. But to investigate the history of the exhibition of artworks is to ask how the meaning of an object could be configured or eventually reconfigured by the space that housed it. Likely thanks to an increasingly self-aware museum culture, it has recently become possible for curators Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne to write that “exhibitions are the primary site of exchange in the political economy of art, where signification is constructed, maintained, and occasionally deconstructed. Part spectacle, part socio-historical event, part structuring device, exhibitions—especially exhibitions of contemporary art—establish and administer the cultural meanings of art.”16 Although written with modern curatorial practices in mind, this thought raises useful questions for those who work on the collections that formed the foundation of modern museums and especially the gallery spaces that were their precursor. How did the changing display of collected works shape the way they were understood by their audiences? How might it have determined what responses those works inspired, or what responses they could inspire?
These questions take on further urgency when one considers that artists themselves have often—and in all periods since the Renaissance—gotten in on the curatorial game. If exhibition is the site at which the meaning of a work of art is staged, then it should hardly come as a surprise that artists might see its installation as the final artistic act, the modern-day equivalent to the traditional vernissage, the double entendre that equates the work’s last coat of varnish with its first view to a public. For Filipovic, that artists might furthermore see curatorial work as an extension of artistic practice is obvious. “Many artist-curated exhibitions,” she writes, “are the result of artists treating the exhibition as an artistic medium in its own right, an articulation of form.”17 Again, this is a formulation that depends on a seemingly modern kind of figure, the “artist-curator,” defined everywhere in relation to a specifically modern conception of “the exhibition.” Nevertheless, it poses a useful challenge to what we understand to be the limits of an artistic practice like that of Velázquez. To once again invoke Adrian George: “Whatever [artist-curators] do could be defined as a work of art, an installation for instance, even if that installation is made up of work by other artists.”18
Giorgio Vasari, Bernardo Buontalenti, and Alfonso Parigi the Elder, Gallerie degli Uffizi, 1560–81. Piazzale degli Uffizi, 6; Florence, Italy
Image © Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi
The modern “artist-curator” depends on an art-industrial complex that did not exist in the early modern period in the form that it does now; however, the “artist-curator,” too, is a figure with a rich history.19 Velázquez was not the only painter of the long early modern period to perform the kinds of work approximating that which we would now assign to museum curators—that is, the work of mediating works of art for a public, usually within the context of a dedicated display. Beginning in 1560, Giorgio Vasari designed and built what are now still the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, whose linear floor plan recalls the teleological history of art in Florence found in his own treatises (fig. 0.5).20 Peter Paul Rubens rebuilt his Antwerp home in the 1610s and 1620s to accommodate the presentation of his personal collection of gems, coins, sculptures, and paintings, likely in anticipation of the visits to the collection eventually made by foreign dignitaries to Flanders (fig. 0.6).21 In 1660 the painter David Teniers the Younger produced an illustrated catalogue of the art collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, titled the Theatrum Pictorium, alongside oil paintings that assembled its contents in fictive gallery hangs (fig. 0.7).22 Beginning in the 1780s, sculptor Antonio Canova mounted exhibitions of his own works in Rome and then in Naples, Milan, and Venice, presenting his contemporary sculptures alongside the works from antiquity that had inspired them as a strategy for staging their “neoclassicism” (figs. 0.8 and 0.9).23
Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Sight, 1617, oil on panel, 64.7 × 109.5 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P001394
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
David Teniers the Younger, The Archduke Leopold William in His Picture Gallery in Brussels, 1647–51, oil on copperplate, 104.8 × 103.4 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, P001813
Image © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado
Antonio Canova, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1804–6, marble, 242.6 × 191.8 × 102.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1967, 67.110.1
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Belvedere Apollo, Hadrianic age–Antoninian age, marble, 224 × 118 × 77 cm, Musei Vaticani, MV.1015.0.0
Image © Governatorato SCV—Direzione dei Musei
Gustave Courbet, Exhibition et vente de 40 tableaux et 4 dessins de l’oeuvre de Gustave Courbet, June 1855. Pavillon du Réalisme; 7 Avenue Montaigne; Paris, France
Image © Institut Gustave Courbet
Edgar Degas, Self-Portrait with Albert Bartholomé (1895–1900), ca. 1895–97, photograph, 9.6 × 13.3 cm, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, EO-53-PET FOL
Image © Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Installation view, First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, April 10–May 6, 1917. Grand Central Palace; Lexington Avenue and 46th Street; New York City, NY. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives, Arensberg Archives, WLA, Box 63, Folder 9, No. 001
Image © Philadelphia Museum of Art
Yves Klein, Le Vide, April 28–May 12, 1958. Galerie Iris Clert; 3 Rue des Beaux-Arts; Paris, France
Image © Succession Yves Klein
Into modernity comparable case studies readily come into view: In 1855 Gustave Courbet organized a solo presentation of his rejected submissions to the state-sponsored Salon, mounting a pavilion within sight of it and distributing his “Realist Manifesto” as an accompanying catalogue (fig. 0.10).24 Beginning in 1897, Edgar Degas fashioned his private home and studio into a maison-musée, arranging his paintings, textiles, books, and furnishings in a deliberately disheveled tableau (fig. 0.11).25 Marcel Duchamp anonymously submitted his notorious Fountain (lost) to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists Exhibition, on whose “hanging committee” he himself was also serving as president; when it was rejected, he resigned from the post in protest (fig. 0.12).26 In 1958 Yves Klein produced Le Vide, a performance piece consisting of painting the walls of a commercial art gallery white, by which he presented the “white cube” as its own autonomous work (fig. 0.13).27 No history of the artist-curator has ever been written.28 The examples just enumerated suggest, however, that such a history is possible. Because the “artist-curator” was never—and continues not to be—a clearly demarcated or substantially codified professional category, this history could be no linear tale.29 Rather, it would take the form of an anthology of what would appear to be isolated episodes, united by the direct engagement of their diverse protagonists with the particular institutional frameworks of their time and place that determined what art meant, to whom, and how.
This book is not a history of the artist-curator, nor does it seek to answer the many questions such a figure conceivably provokes. The aim of this book is simply to reevaluate Velázquez’s relationship to the exhibition apparatuses of his immediate age, reconsidering the various ways in which Velázquez’s activities as a painter and his activities as curator of the Habsburg art collection informed each other.30 Velázquez’s paintings express ambitions and attitudes toward his art historical predecessors that would motivate Velázquez’s reorganization of parts of the royal collection that included their works. In turn, the collection and display of paintings in royal exhibition sites would cultivate in Velázquez a knowledge of art and its history that would inform the paintings he produced at court. Velázquez’s simultaneous roles as painter to King Philip IV of Spain and the curator of his art collection were the twinned expressions of a single creative imagination, his paintings and his gallery hangs the products of a unified set of artistic and professional imperatives. The figure of the “artist-curator,” however seemingly contemporary or nebulously defined, calls into question what a monographic view of the career of a painter like Velázquez might look like: what it can and should include if its author means to provide the most complete picture of the output of an artist like Velázquez, whose painting production was one aspect of a larger field of artistic productivity while in the service of the Habsburgs.
A sizeable tome could likely be written on the secondary art market, the emergence of the picture gallery, the history of restoration across early modern Europe, among other factors that converged across the European continent to facilitate the roles that painters came to play in the acquisition, cataloguing, and display of the substantial art collections that had been amassed by the start of the seventeenth century. This is to say nothing of the ink that could be productively spilled on the ways that collecting practices—both on the part of painters and on the part of patrons—shaped trends in artistic output in this period. This book has a comparatively modest ambition. Irrespective of methodological affiliation, scholars have for decades been calling Velázquez the “curator” of the Habsburg art collection.31 This book endeavors to define precisely what that means.
Morgan 2013, p. 29.
Morgan 2013, p. 29.
Daniel Birnbaum, cited in George 2015, p. 3.
George 2015, p. 2. Although the parameters of the figure of the curator remain obscure, the curator is currently exploding as a subject of art historical interest. Subgenres of literature on the topic include at least one handbook to curatorial practice (George 2015); compiled interviews with curators (Thea 2001; Obrist 2008; Micchelli and Thea 2009; Obrist 2011; Szeemann 2012; Micchelli and Thea 2016); biographies of particularly high-profile contemporary curators (Beasley 1998; Laclotte 2004; Müller 2006; Bonami 2014; Obrist and Raza 2014); and journals devoted to the subject (the recently minted Journal of Curatorial Studies and Manifesta Journal, to name two examples). This is only a selection of the growing literature examining curatorial practices of different kinds, somehow already too extensive to list here in its entirety.
An introduction to the Habsburg art collection can be found in Brown 1995, pp. 95–145. Specialized literature on this collection will be cited in the chapters to follow.
For a useful breakdown of the artworks in the royal art collection at the time of Philip IV by reign under which they were acquired, provenance, category of object, and so on, see the tables in Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 19–20.
Aterido Fernández and Véliz 2016.
Aterido Fernández et al. 2004, pp. 370–74.
Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015.
Guevara 1560, unpaginated: “las pinturas encubiertas y occultadas se priuan de su valor, el qual consiste en los ojos agenos y juizios que dellas hazen los hôbres de buen entendimiento, y buena ymaginacion, lo ql no se puede hazer sino es estando en lugares donde algunas vezes puedan ser vistas de muchos.” Republished in Guevara 1788, pp. 4–5. On this text in particular, see Vázquez Dueñas 2010; Galende Díaz et al. 2013; Giménez-Berger 2014; in addition to the existing literature on Felipe de Guevara, broadly considered.
Marin 1988, p. 8.
Escobar 2022, p. 47. On the topic of the Alcázar, see also Checa Cremades 1994a and Martínez Leiva and Rodríguez Rebollo 2015, pp. 23–148, both referenced in Escobar’s text.
George 2015, p. 2.
Hamann 2010.
Filipovic 2013, pp. 74–75.
Greenberg et al. 1996, p. 2.
Filipovic 2017, p. 8.
George 2015, p. 8.
On the artist-curator, see Smith 2012; Jeffery 2015; Johnstone 2015; Filipovic 2017 along with the succeeding essays in the same volume; and Green 2018, all of which assume the artist-curator a modern—if not totally contemporary—figure.
On Vasari and the Gallerie degli Uffizi, see especially Gahtan 2014.
On Rubens’s art collection, see Müller 1989 and Belkin and Healy 2004.
On the Theatrum Pictorium, see Vegelin van Claerbergen 2006.
On Canova’s exhibition strategies, see Ferando 2011, part of which was previously published as Ferando 2010.
For the exhibition catalogue, see Courbet 1855. On the exhibition, more broadly considered, and its context, see Font-Réaulx et al. 2008, pp. 165–225.
On Degas’s maison-musée, see Crisci-Richardson 2012.
On Duchamp’s curatorial, archival, and art-administrative interventions, see Filipovic 2016.
On Klein’s Le Vide, see Klein 1982.
Bonaspetti and Cernuschi 2017, p. 5: “In the context of long-sustained and venerable art historical scholarship, the history of the exhibition is still nascent (if recently beginning to expand), and the story of the artist as curator, a key aspect of that fascinating narrative, largely remains to be written.”
Then again, neither is the history of the modern museum (Paul 2012, p. viii).
Of the many monographs on the life and career of Velázquez, none are more attentive to his role at the court of Philip IV—and especially the way his relationship to Philip IV structured the trajectory of his career—than Brown 1986b and Marías 1999. On the professional titles that Velázquez held in addition to court painter, see especially Barrios Pintado 1999; Muñoz González 1999; Portús Pérez 1999; Cordero and Hernández 2000; Cotillo Torrejón 2003; Barrios Pintado 2003; and Cruz Valdovinos 2008. A brief summary of Velázquez’s work on the changing decoration of the Alcázar palace was recently written up in Hermoso Cuesta 2021.
For just three examples, see Brown 1986b, p. 241; Portús Pérez 1999; and Alpers 2005, pp. 183–89.