John Elderfield

by David Carrier

John Elderfield. Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 1996 The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

What made giving up my academic position irresistible, an eminent curator once told me, was
the chance to have everyday hands-on experience of great art. Her observation fascinated me,
for then I started wondering how curators and historians might see painting differently, and so
write about it in diverse ways. There is a great tradition of such curator-historians, the tradition
defined, in part, by Roger Fry, and, at The Museum of Modern Art, by John Elderfields
precursor, Alfred H. Barr, and his colleague William Rubin. One interesting quality shared by
these diverse figures is their refusal to make the conventional distinction between purely
historical and journalistic art critical concerns. When Fry turned from old master connoisseurship
to his championship of Czanne and the post-Impressionists, he wanted to bridge the gap
between art history and analysis of contemporary art, to the benefit of both disciplines. Writing
as a critic, Fry gave art of his own time as much serious attention as Renaissance Italian works.
Barr, Rubin, and Elderfield, similarly, bring to modernism the kind of scholarly seriousness
which traditional art historians devote to museum art of earlier eras. Until contemporary art
attracts this sort of writing, its place in history, remains, as yet uncertain.
Since I began writing art criticism in 1980, I thought about Johns work frequently, wrestling
off and on, on many occasions; usually with ambivalent fascinationwith his accounts of Morris
Louis. But it was not until I read his catalogue essay for the Moderns Matisse retrospective in
1992 that I came to see how central were his particular concerns to theorizing about modernism.
Almost no one doubts Matisses greatness, but nowadays very nearly everyone finds his ways of
thinking, andcertainlyhis way of life, highly problematic. In his review of that exhibition,
Peter Schjeldhal nicely expressed this consensus: I dislike him, stillbut it is not so easy to be
critical while joyfully quivering. Johns great achievement, in that catalogue and also in
forthcoming publications which include Pleasuring Painting, was to show how revisionist
interpretation was needed if we were to adequately understand the value of Matisses art and
understand his relationship with abstract painting. Johns other forthcoming publications are The
Language of the Body: Drawing by Pierre-Paul Prudhon and a reissue of Hugo Balls Flight
out of Time. What I admire in this writing, evenor especiallywhen I disagree with its claims,
is Johns marvelous capacity to take up new points of view, and rethink fundamental issues.
And so, I thought it would be great fun for us to talk at length. No one with the position, Chief
Curator-at-Large and Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Museum of Modern Art could
be called little known, but, oddly enough, there has as yet been little critical analysis of
Elderfields work; and so, too little understanding of his achievement even though Elderfield has
directed major exhibitions, including the recent Piet Mondrian, the Henri Matisse retrospective,
Morris Louis, Kurt Schwitters, and the Masterworks of Edvard Munch. In part, I suspect, this is
because curators stand a little outside the academic world. Exhibition catalogues, John writes in
the Matisse catalogue, are prepared under conditions much closer to those of a newspaper office
than of a university library. Judging by my experience, he overestimates the tranquility of
university life. But when we got together last December, we had a full afternoon and evening of
uninterrupted conversation. I wanted to learn more about his conception of the role of his
museum; and about his perspective on these issues.
David Carrier The question of how the exhibition space works is something Ive thought about a
lot. People dont write about this, they dont talk about it. And yet, dealing with it is a big part of
your job. The Mondrian show felt different in Washington than it did at your museum.

John Elderfield The differences in installations from one venue to the next are, for me, among
the pleasures of looking at exhibitions. At The Hague, the Mondrian exhibition was seen under
natural light and with a lot of space between the paintings, and looked wonderful for that reason.
In Washington, the works were hung in a far more strictly chronological sequence than at The
Hague, and one learned enormously from that installation. At The Museum of Modern Art, I and
my colleague Beatrice Kernan had less space than either The Hague or Washington, but did have
the luxury of being able to design the galleries to fit the paintings rather than having to rely on
fixed, pre-built walls. This meant that we could pace the exhibition as virtually a sequence of
individual exhibitions of particular periods of Mondrians work, within which, therefore, it was
possible to depart from precise chronology in order to attempt to convey visually a sequence of
pictorial thinking.
How this works is, I like to think, somewhat like a conductor interpreting a musical score. And it
depends upon intuition as well as planning. For example, the octagonal gallery with the four
black-and-white diamond paintings seemed good for those four works and good as a kind of
semi-public space in the whole sequence. But I didnt realize until after the exhibition had
opened that at the back of my mind was the octagonal gallery with the four Allegory of Love
paintings by Veronese at the National Gallery in Londonwhich may be an interpretation, on
my part, of these four Mondrians.
DC Does hanging a show involve a kind of lore that isnt verbalized? Is it craft?
JE I fear that many people dont fully realize the extent to which hanging paintings is
interpretive, a form of rhetoric. Working on the installation for the Matisse retrospective in 1992,
there were rooms with, say, eight paintings that took three days to get right. Putting a work next
to another is as much a statement as putting words to a painting. Both narrate the pictures. I saw
the wonderful Matisse exhibition that Lawrence Gowing did in London in 1969 and the huge,
extraordinary Matisse show that Pierre Schneider did in Paris in 1970. Matisse was a revelation,
and remains a mystery to me. Back then, he led me to aspects of American painting. He also led
me to Clement Greenberg. And, whatever ones reservations about Greenbergs approach (now, I
have very considerable reservations indeed), he was clearly the entry point for engagement with
serious criticism.

Henri Matisse, Dance I, 1909, oil on canvas, 8' 6 x 12' 9 inches. Courtesy The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Gift of Nelson Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. 1992
Succession H. Matisse (ARS).
DC When in London in 1974, I saw the Morris Louis show and I was knocked out. I was caught
up in the writing about him. Now I find his art harder to evaluate. Today people speak of
rediscovering him as if he had quite vanished. It is very strange. I dont claim to understand that
change in taste.
JE I certainly dont. I had a marginal involvement in that 1974 exhibition and, through that,
found that Louis was one of the artists I cared about. When I came to do the show for MoMA in
1986, I was delighted. And I will immodestly say that it is the best Louis exhibition that has been
done. But, Im not sure I was quite at a point fully to articulate why we should continue to be
interested in him.
DC There is a generation gap. The American painters after the color-field painters dont feel any
connection back to Louis. The mid-career abstract painters my age dont look back, they dont
look at that painting at all; they dont have any connection with painters like Poons.
JE Thats true. I think that group of artists associated with Greenberg, both the important and he
unimportant among them, have been neglected, mainly, because their work became so identified
with modernism in the narrowest sense. One still reads characterizations of modernism as a
whole as if it were Greenbergian modernism, which has become back-projected onto everything
since the 1880s, even. This is ridiculous, of course, but the idea of modernism as mediumistic
self-sufficiency continues to be trotted out, as you know.

DC I picked up this phrase from your discussion of Diebenkorn. You say: The past is challenged
by truly original art . . . because challenging it allows the artist to speak frankly and
unconstrained. I dont know that artists would talk that way right now, because it is a notion of
the past that I dont think they would recognize.
JE I agree that many artists (and critics) are disconnected from that way of talking. I had a
painting teacher whose own teacher was taught by Sickert who was taught by Degas who was
taught by Ingres, and so it went on. Despite everything, I confess to clinging to the idea that it is
all one art school. And I do believe that, as we come to the end of the 20th century, we will
increasingly become aware not only of the difference between modern art (as it still is called)
and the past, but also of the continuities between 20th-century art and what preceded it. Hence,
for example, my recent project on Pierre-Paul Prudhon, which we might come to later.
DC Every time I walk through The Museum of Modern Art, its obvious that at a certain point
the narrative of the museum hasnt been formed. When you get to Warhol and Rauschenberg, at
this point you have to decide how to place this work; your story isnt evident from what can be
seen.
JE Part of this, clearly, is a problem of space, which we are trying to solve. But your point is
taken. At the same time, I think that the earlier parts of the story of modern art need
reexamination, and I know that my colleagues at the museum think the same. For me, though,
part of the problem is the absence of narrative in modern pictures demanding a museum
narrative; one that seems less than adequate.
DC Im very interested in how you want to present that sort of narrative. One of the things thats
going on in our culture that affects the way such museum narratives are understood is the short
term memory. I have the sense that nowadays five years feels like an enormous period.
JE This is one reason why MoMA, dealing with older modern and contemporary art, has such a
crucial role to play. We, possibly uniquely, are in a position to look for other ways to tell the
story.
DC Consider this other quote from your Artforum writing in the 1970s: Modern artunlike
earlier art . . . cannot afford the duality of visible image and invisible text characteristic of earlier
art. In the 1980s and post-modernism, this was an idea that came from Craig Owens and all of
the other people reading Walter Benjamin; what they wanted was precisely this kind of duality.
JE I was arguing, I suppose, for a modern (or modernist) symbolism as opposed to allegory, and I
have come to realize that this does imply a somewhat nostalgic sense of identity rather than
distance in relation to origins. Yet, since we do construct texts about modern pictures, we have to
acknowledge the possibility that they do embody invisible texts. In this respect, too, Czanne is
an heir of Poussin.
DC But arent Poussin and modernists very different in this way? The text of Poussin is very
specific. To me thats whats so interesting about your writing on Matisse, that you have to tease

out the text. Theres no way even of pretending that his pictures around 1910 had any particular
narrative, and so therefore in your commentary you have to construct it.
JE For a Matisse, the text being teased out has never previously been written. Conversation is a
great example (and Ive been puttering away on a book on this picture for a number of years)
precisely because it forces one to acknowledge that these great works do combine multiple
patterns of possible reading, multiple texts, in effect. Its density is what is impressive.
DC Isnt part of the paradox there that this very private man shows this private scene, his
domestic quarrel, in a big picture that he must have envisaged ultimately being visible to the
public?
Your radical capacity to innovate has been in terms of new methodologies, to engage with YveAlain Bois, Norman Bryson, and other people who have added to the culture. In terms of your
writing, maybe there are more conceptual additions than changes of taste. Is this a fair way to
characterize 20 years of your work?
JE I think so. I feel continually dissatisfied with how I explain things, and want to keep finding
new ways. With Yve-Alain, the dialogue began when his Matisse essay (for the catalogue of the
version of my show in Paris) responded to my essay for the New York exhibition. My new
Pleasuring Painting book from Thames and Hudson is, in part, a response to him. But it is also,
in larger part, a result of my interests (beginning with my 1992 Matisse catalogue) in feminist
and psychoanalytic issues, the latter affecting my Prudhon project even more.
Typically, these changes attach to new projects. For example, when I began running MoMAs
Drawings Department in 1980 (which I ran for a decade), I determined to do a book about 100
works in its collection (The Modern Drawing). It was a very wearing exercise. But I found, to
my surprise, that I had changed in the process. Doing it, dealing with such diverse works (not all
central to my taste), I found that their diversity required that I deal with conceptual issues
pertinent to each individual work.
DC I can see that problem, when you put Georgia OKeeffe in, and Lovis Corinth. Did the
variety of artists drive your narrative?
JE I know it did. Part of the result was a broadening not only (or not so much) of my taste, but of
the seriousness with which I had to address such diverse things. (This is one of the results of
working in a museum.) Similarly, the seriousness with which I have taken topics that would have
surprised a younger me has often been project-driven. Of course, I know I must choose projects
precisely for this purpose, as with the Prudhon book, which I have just completed after some
three years work.
DC It is interesting here how your concerns have converged with those of various academics,
Whitney Davis and others, who are interested in that historical moment, French art in the era of
Jacques-Louis David.

JE Quite frankly, when I took on the project (out of sheer, uninformed admiration for Prudhons
work), I simply had no idea of the amount of recent scholarly material on this period. I was
fascinated with him, in part, because he qualifies as possibly the first modern artist to create a
substantial oeuvre comprising images of the female nude, which intersected with my Matisse
interests.
DC If you go way back in your career, this analysis starts to revise the Greenbergian clich of
Manet being the starting point of modernism. Now youre saying that if we focus more on
Matisse, then we naturally go back to the 18th century. If you pursue your questions about the
relationship between text and picture, seeking pictures that arent controlled by texts, then you
might go back to the 18th century, to Watteau . . . for what text do you have with his pictures?
Its very interesting how this origin of modernism gets pushed back.
JE In dealing with Prudhon, one thing became apparent, the 18th-century interest in unfinish
is not purely a matter of formal enjoyment. It involves asking the beholder to complete the
picture in a textual way. A study drawing (for a painting) asks the beholder to complete the story
it only adumbrates. But an acadmie (a drawing released totally storyless from the studio) asks
the beholder to provide the storyor, rather, to remember a story suggested by the pose held by
the model.
DC As a viewer, youre not simply free to project when viewing a Prudhon drawing?
JE The beauty of these works aside, one fascinating thing about them is how texts might be
attached to the bodily postures they show.
DC Here you raise another issue. In Leo Steinbergs work, bringing the spectator in opens up
space for critical disagreements, in ways that maybe he originally wasnt totally prepared to
expect. Its clear that this spectator cant be neutral, that he or she must have an identity. And
then there will be a battle between interpreters who identify that spectator in different ways.
JE The other day, I was talking to Peter Galassi about the group of Cindy Sherman photographs
the museum has just acquired. They are what we call postmodernist works. Yet, the idea of a
single figure assuming different roles is one that is crucial to Matisses Plumed Hat drawings,
quintessentially modernist works. And photography, I would even want to argue, effectively
takes over from acadmies like Prudhons, what drawing, painting, and sculpture increasingly
have muted in their own mediumistic emphases, namely, thematization of the act of looking as
voyeurism. And voyeurism thematizes in the posed figure its own converse, which is
exhibitionism, and which it attributes as intention to the posed figure. Looking at past art like
Prudhons can help us to an understanding of things such as this.
DC The conceptual worry that I have about bringing the spectator in is that we are on this
terribly slippery slope. If each person looking at the picture sees it differently, then can there be
any objective art writing? One way to deal with the problem is to talk about gender, but another
way is to talk about what kind of visual culture the person brings to the paintings; seeing a
Matisse through eyes formed by Louis and Frankenthaler, that work looks different than it did in
1910. I even think, paintings look different to me now than they did ten years ago. Once you

bring the spectator in, Im not sure how youre going to control this persons role. Endless
proliferation starts . . .
JE You worry that the whole thing just degenerates into solipsism?
DC I do. I worry about how much overlap there is between the experience of different spectators.
JE But however much we properly acknowledge that all our experience is mediated, it is
constantly possible to surprise oneself. (Working in a museum, seeing great works every day,
convinces me of this.) This is, perhaps, to come back to your question: whether there are
qualities integral to pictures? I am convinced, at least, that experiencing works of art alters, if we
allow it to, what we know from other works of art and from the history of ideas.
DC There is something called actual seeing. In art history, the idea that there is this one-to-one
unmediated relationship called connoisseurship is what is most under attack, most
beleaguered. And yet there is a certain mood which for me is irresistible, of being in front of the
picture and saying I see this, I know it; nothing I might read at home could change my mind.
JE Perhaps there is a middle path. In front of a picture, one preserves the fiction of a one-to-one
relationship with the work, and then goes home and reads about it and is willing to be persuaded
to go back to it and look at it differently. The difficulty (and danger, I think) is of being unable to
shed the mediation while looking. I know it is impossible to do so (entirely), yet I cling to the
idea that truly giving oneself to a picture can allow the mediated interpretations to slide, one by
one, not out of view but to the side. And the great pictures seem to be those that force this on the
informed viewer, evoking new interpretations. This is to suggest that works are brought into the
canon to the extent that they allow this to happen. Think of the way that Monet now seems.
DC All of the change in the conceptual apparatus hasnt produced too much change in his
evaluation. No one is saying Monet is not a great painter.
JE But I think Monet has been diminished.
DC Why? Do people want a tougher, more resistant picture?
JE Part of it, certainly, is that they find him utterly unironical. But it is not just that. Matisse
survives because he keeps opening inexhaustibly. I think that Louis (though not as great, of
course) will continue to intrude himself because we havent exhausted him. Im not saying that
there is nothing left to say about Monet; only that his fit is tighter.
DC What Ive often thought is spectacular about LouisI dont know if this has been written
is that after plodding and plodding, then he makes the great breakthrough. He had this
stubbornness to keep going. This is very admirable. Looking back, the early things Ive seen in
reproduction dont look so promising. Theyre interesting because theyre by him.

JE Michael Frieds book lays this out as a demonstration that modernism needs a long
apprenticeship. Leaving aside the irony that it is Fried, a friend of Stellas, who makes this claim,
it is one that would find justification in the work of a Mondrian or a Matisse.
DC With Picasso, only Cubism marks a real jump; with Matisse, the early works are certainly
interesting. But with Louis, there was nothing and then suddenly everything.
JE Like being reborn.
DC With Frankenthaler, the development was fast from the start. So its hard to know how to
generalize.
JE Helens is a special case, but I do think that it becomes very difficult, under post-modernism
as well as modernism, for those artists who do find themselves quickly. I think that, clearly, the
business of being widely exhibited, of having mid-career retrospectives, and so on, can be a
problem. But many interesting modern and post-modern artists have only a few years of truly
vital work. I think of it as the Derain syndrome. But Derains example suggests that the few-year
artists are, perhaps, not so vital after all in their few years.
DC You didnt write anything about Mondrian for the show. Its hard from what I know of your
writing to imagine how you would grapple with him. Again, going back to your drawing
catalogue, heres the quote: "Mondrian saw . . . a cosmic dualism between the masculine and
spiritual (vertical) and the feminine and material (horizontal) . . . " Those are obviously the sorts
of statements that people worry about. Matisse at least didnt say anything like that. Were lucky.
JE Matisse did make some problematical statements in this regard, but nothing quite like that. In
any event, we need to separate the kind of anachronistically censorious worrying about such
statements, and the art itself. As for Mondrian, I am beginning to write about him after having
spent a long time with the paintings. Hanging the exhibition (to come back to where we started)
helped a lot, and provoked a lot of questions that I am now trying to answer to my satisfaction.
For example, it is clear to me that his stress on evolution is by no means some Darwinian
survival of the fittest (things surviving because they are the fittest; things seeming the fittest
because they survive). I dont yet know where my Mondrian text will go, but I do know that
questions of erotics are infiltrating it already.
DC Having this show in the same space as the Matisse show is revealing. You couldnt have the
same big show for Mondrian as you had for Matisse. They obviously led such different lives, in
practical terms. But in both shows we start with Northern light, and then quickly everything
brightens. In the second room of the Mondrian show, the jump in color is very dramatic.
JE One can argue that they ended at the same place in terms of their alliance of color and
drawing, and that they both began in a similar place, in a kind of Northern naturalism. Also,
Matisse does have a sudden jump into color at the turn-of-the-century.

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 194243, oil on canvas, 127 127 inches. Courtesy of
The Museum of Modern Art, NY.
DC I picture Matisse drawing endlessly, working night and day; theres nothing like that
obsessive activity of making in the life of Mondrian.
JE I do think that for Mondrian there is, at least, the same obsession in the acts of fabrication.
Victory Boogie Woogie was remade and remade. Look at its present state. Could it ever have
been completed?
DC Thinking about styles of self-description, I am struck by the ways in which modernism, the
modernism of Matisse as much as that of Mondrian, is described in terms not associated with
Poussin. Maybe thats one way of defining the continuity of recent art. We desire that Mondrian
and Matisse, and thinking of them as our contemporaries, be self-critical; but we dont expect
that of a 17th-century artist.

JE Do you think that we are at a point where the fact that Matisse, the man, or Mondrian, the
man, makes statements that we find objectionable means that we should criticize Matisse, the
artist, or Mondrian, the artist?
DC Youre thinking of the implied artist, that figure Richard Wollheim describes? For him the
implied artist, the figure we construct to explain the pictures as we interpret them, is only
contingently connected with the actual man whose life biographers present. I find this a tricky
claim; this way of thinking makes me deeply uneasy; when people want the artist to be the model
of all things. I worry about anyone having that kind of role.
JE Clearly, Mondrian the theoretical writer is connected to Mondrian the painter to Mondrian the
dancer, and so on. But they are also unconnected. I certainly would not want to argue that the
consequence of recognizing that Mondrians writings are products of their own literary
conventions is utter separation of these writings from his paintings, the product of other
conventions, and from his life, the product of yet others. If one does want to take a biographical
view of his art, there is plenty of evidence to support it.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Oval with Planes 1, oil on canvas, 42 31 inches. Courtesy
of The Museum of Modern Art, NY.
DC You recently wrote that even if we cannot agree how to identify with Matisses depicted
women, at least we can agree that "his paintings seem increasingly to afford the greatest of
intellectual pleasure, as we continue to argue about what other kinds of pleasure they provide . . .
" At that point, we reach agreement. His art produces a kind of dialogue that lesser modernist
works dont.

JE This comes back to the idea that great works combine multiple patterns of significance to an
extent that lesser works do not. They are denser.
DC Perhaps at some point discussion will close off. I have an article in a book coming out this
year from Princeton University Press on Manets A Bar at the Folies-Bergre, a volume with 13
essays about that one painting. When it appears someone somewhere writing her thesis may say,
Enough, I need to find another topic.
JE The picture has now become too saturated with commentary?
DC Am I ancient? I remember seeing the Manet in the Courtauld Institute in the early 1970s. I
sat before it because there was a sofa there, and drew diagrams of the perspective. But the
situation has changed completely. Now after so much has been written about it, adding anything
seems hopeless.
JE I agree that certain works may get so much attention that they seem exhausted by it. Whether
this is temporary or permanent exhaustion is the question. On the one hand, we can can argue
that important works get saturated by interpretation; on the other, that particular interpretive
strategies exhaust themselves.
DC Thats certainly a dramatic worry for someone like Tim Clark, where his 1960s world of the
Situationist International is almost unrecoverable now. In French politics, its not 1968 anymore.
At some level, treating interpretation in terms of fashion is self-refuting because the culture runs
through things so quickly.
The difference between a curators looking and an academics looking interests me a lot. My
fantasycorrect me if I am wrongis that, on the one hand, you have the privilege of being
close to the objects; on the other hand, your disadvantage is that you have so much
administrative work to do.
JE The difficulty for curators is keeping up with the art historical and critical literature on a
broad front, and also simply finding the time to write. Access to objects is the pleasure. And I
believe very strongly in object-based study. Whatever my other interests, I want the object
foregrounded, and I believe very strongly that to do so keeps one specifically testing
generalization. Looking at works of art is not an innate facility but has to be learned. (For
example, what comprises a Mondrian painting requires knowing how to recognize repainting,
relining, subsequently added varnishes, and so on.) I know that curators do have a way of going
on about this; also that, in some cases, it brings with it disinterest in theory. It does bother me
that some curators have taken this embattled stance because it cuts them off from a broader
debate, just as some broader debates are cut off from the objects they ostensibly address.
DC For you, the interpretive theory is really something empirical; its the product of looking to
be tested against looking. If the theorists dont have enough access to the objects, their theory is
going to exist in a kind of vacuum. In lots of art history there isnt much theory testing.

JE There is a wonderful statement by Panofsky to the effect that if you want to make a point
dont illustrate it. Museums force illustration. Hanging is just one way that alternative histories,
or questions about history, are being proposed. At the museum, we are currently thinking very
deeply about different potential ways of showing the collections and, at the turn-of-the-century,
will be devoting a year to doing something very different in order to experiment for the future.
This comprises, I suppose, what you would call empirical interpretive theory.
DC I can imagine odd sorts of relationships you might present if, say, you put the Russian
Revolutionary works next to Warhol, constructing narratives showing different ways of using
popular media.
JE As we discussed earlier, hanging paintings is a form of rhetoric. We are interested in testing a
variety of narratives.
DC All talk about post-modernism or the post-historical, insofar as it is empirical, is talk you can
test. My intuition is you will find continuity and continuity.
JE I think that we will always find continuity, owing to our capacity for remembering. And I
know that we will find that some narratives seem stronger than others.
DC Gombrich says somewhere that he doesnt like to see a picture moved in a museum. Thats a
different attitude.
JE The attitude of a pilgrim. There is certainly a part of me that feels that.
DC But once you open up these narratives, is that possible?
JE Have you seen Charlie Stuckeys modern installation at the Art Institute of Chicago? It is not
historical but chronological, really a sort of annal (in a particular year, these things happened).
Histories are different. The third category is the chronicle, a story that breaks off in the
chroniclers own present. Perhaps that is what, in a modern museum, we are fated to provide.
DC In an ideal world, if there were no restrictions on loans and no budget limits, if you could
borrow anything from anywhere (even works that dont exist anymore), what would be your
ideal show, your dream exhibition?
JE When I was dismantling the Matisse retrospective, it proved possible to show together some
of Matisses greatest works with Picassos. Since then, I have wanted to do a carefully selected
exhibition of works by these two greatest of modern artists. As it turned out, John Golding came
to the same conclusion, so we, together with Elizabeth Cowling and Kirk Varnedoe, are planning
such an exhibition. But I dont have an ideal exhibition, only an intimation of certain artists and
intellectual projects I want to examine.
DC How much attention do you devote to contemporary art?

JE I think that, apart from some exceptional people, the kind of contemporary art one is truly
interested in is a generational thing. I do follow new contemporary art, but I find that there is a
lot in modern, and pre-modern, art that continues to puzzle me more and more as I gain more and
more familiarity with it.
DC For a critic, the question is how supple you can be, and how many changes you can go
through.
JE For me, it is also that, looking at earlier art, new entry points are opened up into more recent
art.
DC Comparing Picasso and Matisse, I think that part of the power of Picassos images of women
is that theyre unaesthetic, and so very un-Matissean. In her Picasso: Art as Autobiography,
Mary Matthews Gedo writes of how Picassos paintings of Olga show his powers of empathy . .
. they constitute vivid visual records of the sufferings and delusions which psychotics often
experience. Thats not anywhere in the world of Matisse at all.
JE No. But whether that is a particularly useful way to describe Picasso is something I doubt
very much. I am becoming very interested in psychoanalytic approaches, but not in ones that
reduce art to autobiography. In any event, whatever the approach, a principal question (at least,
for a curator) is: What continues to so absorb your attention that you want to see it hanging on
the wall?
DC Its simply a brute empirical question, what remains of value. Thats fascinating because it
gives the museum a kind of role to provide in effect the laboratory for that kind of testing.
JE Testing what remains of value is one of the fascinations of being in a museum. I remember
when Pavel Tchelitchews Hide and Seek was one of The Moderns most sought-after pictures.
DC Its hard to imagine opinion being so far revised that this painting would come back.
JE But Christinas World is still very popular. Yet, I agree: Is it possible that this picture would
shift its place from popular admiration to be admired within the art world?
DC Thats the point where I just draw the limit.
JE And where we might end.