This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
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, 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 by Luis de Morales, known as “El Divino” and a contemporary of El Greco. Described as “sublimely expressive”, it was 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.
