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In Memoriam Walter Liedtke, 1945–2015

2015; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 50; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/685670

2169-3072

Keith Christiansen,

Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland

Next article FreeIn Memoriam Walter Liedtke, 1945–2015Keith ChristiansenKeith ChristiansenJohn Pope-Hennessy Chairman, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThat Walter’s first love was seventeenth-century Dutch painting is well known. Not only was it his chosen field of study, but he felt a genuine affinity for the people and culture of the Netherlands and he wrote about the works of art of its golden age with extraordinary eloquence and passion. What distinguishes his 2007 catalogue Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the 1984 collection catalogue devoted to Flemish painting is not so much the twenty-five years he devoted to its writing, but the quality of familiarity and personal engagement he brought to the individual works of art. Walter knew the topography of the Low Countries as well as he knew his native northeastern United States, and his writing about the land- and seascapes of Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael is informed by personal memories. As he worked on the catalogue, the individual entries began to assume the form of mini-monographs that take the reader into the mind of the artist and the nature of his achievement. The catalogue is a landmark of its kind, its literary ambition taking it far beyond what one normally finds in a collection catalogue.Walter’s work on El Greco—the partial results of which are published here—is of a different character. Who would have thought that Walter harbored a fascination for Spain and its art, let alone that of the most visionary of the artists who worked there? The defining event in the history of the Dutch Republic was the Peace of Münster in 1648, whereby Philip IV acknowledged the independence of the seven northwestern provinces. From that point on, the two cultures—one a Catholic monarchy with a vast colonial empire, the other a small but enormously prosperous Protestant mercantile republic—diverged in every way. Dutch art was not collected by the Spanish: to this day the weakest part of the collections at the Prado is Dutch art. So how did Walter become fascinated with seventeenth-century Spanish art, which in so many ways is the antithesis of Dutch art? He had, of course, been assigned responsibility at the Metropolitan for the exhibition of Francisco de Zurbarán, held in New York, Paris, and Madrid in 1987–88, and he had followed up this involvement with an article reconstructing the enormous multitiered altarpiece for the Carthusian monastery of Nuestra Señora de la Defensión, outside the city of Jerez de la Frontera. The main canvas from the altarpiece belongs to the Metropolitan, so in a way, that article marks his first incursion into the project he was working on at the time of his death. In any case, after completing the Dutch catalogue, it was suggested to him by Everett Fahy, then chairman of the Department of European Paintings, who knew of Walter’s interest in Spanish art, that he consider working on a catalogue of the Spanish paintings. Walter launched himself into the project with his accustomed enthusiasm and zeal and set about learning Spanish, reading about Spanish history, and establishing contacts with the leading scholars. He never did anything by half measure.When I succeeded Everett Fahy as chairman of the department, Walter and I discussed the project and how it might best be pursued, given the complexity of issues relating to some of the paintings in the collection and the command of the material that would be necessary. He agreed that it would, for example, be foolhardy to undertake the cataloguing of the Museum’s holdings of Goya, as Goya scholarship has raised questions that will require years of study and reflection and discussion before consensus is reached. One might have thought that he would have wanted to focus on Velázquez, since he had already written about the equestrian portrait of Don Gaspar de Guzmán (1587–1645), count-duke of Olivares, in an article he coauthored in 1981 and in his book The Royal Horse and Rider: Painting, Sculpture, and Horsemanship 1500–1800, published in 1990. To my surprise, he wished to begin with El Greco. As it happens, I had written entries for the Metropolitan’s paintings on the occasion of the El Greco exhibition that was held in New York and London in 2003–4, and I mistakenly thought there was little left to be done. What I did not grasp was that Walter’s detailed interpretation of contracts (in the case of the The Vision of Saint John), his reading of topography (in the case of the View of Toledo), and his persistent pursuit of issues of ownership and his analysis of a key inventory (in the case of Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara) would result in fundamentally new insights.During the years Walter worked on his El Greco entries, emphasis in the department (and, indeed, the Museum) shifted from published to online cataloguing. Scholarship is a constantly evolving enterprise. The discovery of a new document, the appearance of a new piece of information or work of art, or the asking of a question no one had bothered with earlier—all these things can fundamentally change our analysis and understanding of a work of art. Online cataloguing—rather than an online publication—allows entries to be updated and thus to evolve with scholarship and reflect new information and ideas. By contrast, a published catalogue represents the view of the author at the point of time when the catalogue goes to press, taking its fixed place in the historiography of scholarship until the appearance of a revised edition.Walter was a book person, and he very much saw his own work as situated in a specific moment of time. Moreover, he loved the form of the scholarly catalogue, with the opportunity it provided to argue at length his point of view or refute the position of another scholar without worrying about the interests of the reader, the assumption of the scholarly catalogue being that it is for fellow scholars rather than the potentially broader audience of an online catalogue. He was, moreover, a master of the extended footnote, which gave him the possibility to digress on matters he thought germane to his subject. So while he was content that the efforts of his research should be incorporated into the online cataloguing effort of the Department of European Paintings, he always hoped his work would be published as he had initially intended. We do so here, arti et amicitiae.The manuscripts were edited by Katharine Baetjer, Curator, Department of European Paintings, with research assistance by Jennifer Meagher. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Metropolitan Museum Journal Volume 502015 Sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/685670 Views: 257Total views on this site © 2015 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.