Art Historian Pushes Against His Profession’s Tendency Toward Interpretive Overreach
Peter Hecht is an advocate for facts on the ground or, rather, on the canvas. He’s intent on returning the artwork’s agency to the subject under discussion.
Few things make a book reviewer’s eyes glaze over as quickly as the arrival of a compilation of writing about art. Rarefied byways of contemporary culture tend to encourage the intellectual manques within their parameters to indulge in grudgery, theory, and jargon. While every literary genre has its thornier precincts, art history and art criticism are particularly notorious for their hermeticism.
It was with a cautious sense of optimism, then, that I read the preface to “Listening to what you see; Selected contributions on Dutch art,” a new book by a historian and former professor at Utrecht University, Peter Hecht. “I have always tried to write clearly … taking the risk that ‘if I show my cards openly, certain readers will probably think that they cannot be of much interest.'” This quote from Goethe prompts Mr. Hecht to “wish that every academic were made to learn it by heart.”
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