The fading clout of the scholarly connoisseur
Does quality matter today when considering art?
The art world is largely a liberal sort of environment, but certain words and concepts have become almost taboo.
One word which has always fascinated me is connoisseurship, a term capable of conjuring an entire world. For perhaps more than a century, it was the most valued commodity in the art world. Collectors sought out connoisseurs — usually dealers — to help them form collections of note, filled with great and beautiful works of art.
Subject knowledge, judgement of quality and originality or authenticity, perhaps even significance, were essential to “connoisseurship”.
It was with the benefit of this judgement, a sort of human filter of art, that most of the collections to be found in the great museums in the great cities of the world, certainly of Western art, were formed.
The most famous connoisseur was Bernard Berenson, who advised Isabella Stewart Gardner buying Italian paintings but got into hot water when he became a weapon in the great dealer Duveen’s armoury, convincing American plutocrats to buy his Old Masters.
Possibly the greatest connoisseur of all time was Kenneth Clark. Rich, intelligent, well-connected, at 31, he was the youngest ever director of the National Gallery in London when he took up the post in January 1934.
Charles Saumarez Smith in his excellent history of the National Gallery wrote, “Clark had complete confidence … according to the judgement of his eye, an ability which he felt he had been born with and was conferred by his aesthetic judgement, which he always regarded as at least as important to the understanding and appreciation of works of art as knowledge of their history.”
Clark’s appointment led to a flowering of connoisseurship and scholarship, as he encouraged the careers of John Pope-Hennessy, Philip Pouncey and Denis Mahon, all of whom worked with him. This aesthetic, formal approach to art was the natural evolution of how one looked and appreciated it: there was good art and bad art, and clever people like Clark were there to say what was what.
Fast forward to today, and museums and the art market have evolved into discrete spaces. Perhaps the avant-garde, peppered with living artists and sprinkled with a sense of the new and the possible, has always seen itself as separate from older, established and static collections.
Over the past three decades and more, approaches to art collecting and art history have evolved into a healthy and stimulating pluralistic world.
Some museums have taken a creative, even radical, approach to their collections, thinking hard about how to appeal to visitors. Rather than the linear, aesthetic approach favoured by Clark et al., curators have tended to favour thematic displays, and today none is more important to museum administrators than seeking to redress a perceived imbalance in art history, namely the exclusion of women artists.
A recent example was Tate’s excellent survey of British women artists ‘Now You See Us’, where the exhibition’s premise superseded a qualitative judgement of art. Nonetheless, the standard was very high, and this important exhibition was commendable in its breadth and interest.
Does quality matter today when considering art? As objective standards have been eroded, the art market has fragmented into smaller pools, sometimes connecting but usually insular.
Connoisseurship used to be the ne plus ultra for all categories of art collecting, a broadly agreed aesthetic standard of quality, from which a sort of snobbery emerged if objects did not meet that standard. Fortunately, this has now evaporated, but where does that leave us in trying to understand and appreciate great works of art?
Happily, two recent museum purchases have given me reassurance that connoisseurship is still valued. First, the Getty announced in April that it had bought for an undisclosed price a painting on panel, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1565, by Luis de Morales, known as “El Divino” and a contemporary of El Greco. Described as “sublimely expressive”, it had sold at Nagel auction house in 2021 for €1.1m.
Weeks later, the National Gallery, London announced that it had acquired a mysterious painting from about 1500, titled The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret and Two Angels by an unknown artist for £16.4m: without doubt an important work from the Low Countries, which will join equally important works by unnamed artists such as the “Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece”.
Both purchases rely on deep knowledge of art history and thankfully steer clear of identity politics or thematic approaches to art — trends which have largely dethroned connoisseurship.
This article was published in The Critic, June 2025 issue available here
Hello Rufus
You are almost totally right in what you say, but one thing you could have mentioned is that the new art history that started training art historians in the 1980s has created a generation of scholars unable to see art as art, only from the societal, political, gendered, military, culturally relevant points of view. For these art historians connoisseurs and connoisseurship are suspect. Over the last year I have been endeavouring to get published a painting in a Danish collection in London and the peer reviewer at the Burlington did not address my arguments nor the associated drawing in Germany whose subject was unidentified by scholars from 1974 onwards. Apparently the peer reviewer dismissed the picture as they “didn’t believe in it.” I am of the belief this is a young curator at the National Gallery who hasn’t 45 years studying the artist or having read 30 feet of literature on the artist. The publication of a scholar’s work should not be considered improper if properly argued, and an attribution should published to allow discussion of that attribution. But then I offered the article to the Revue de l’Art and after three months was informed that the article was refused as there was no documentation for the picture! This flies in the face of all connoisseurship and the fact that pictures do sometimes appear without any documentation currently, which later comes to light to confirm the attribution as the scholarly community advances research. So my footnoted article sat for over a year without being seen more widely than peer reviewers. I have now found a publication willing to publish the article, and the editor has said that he thinks personally I am right; the only snag is that it will only appear in print in June 2026!
Connoisseurship deeply out of fashion, sadly, though yes we can all do without the snobbery. For museums, it is important to have exhibits and holdings that appeal to a broader audience (says the marketer in me) but too often I see blockbuster exhibitions (hello Met Costume Institute, I'm talking about you) not integrated enough with the rest of the museum's holdings and exhibits, such that cross-pollination becomes even less likely. And the dire lack of arts education (at least in the US) means that multiple generations have now grown up with little sense of how to experience and think about art, its quality, or lack thereof. Thanks for this piece, Rufus.