Biography

Dr. Paul Galvez is a historian of modern art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Prior to coming to I Tatti, he was research fellow and visiting lecturer at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas, Dallas, where he also was acting director of the MA Program in Art History. His 2002 book Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale University Press, London) looks at the artist’s landscapes through the lens of painterly technique, materiality, and contemporary science and literature. His current research interests include the history of impasto or physical relief in painting, the intersection of modern art and art historiography, and the problem of hybridity in the sculpture of Paul Gauguin.

Project Summary

In his 1897 book Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Bernard Berenson praised the “exquisite modelling of Cézanne, who gives the sky its tactile values as perfectly as Michelangelo has given them to the human figure.” More than simply the earliest commentary published in English on the then relatively unknown modern artist, Berenson’s words anticipated by several years an argument that would become a critical commonplace by the beginning of the twentieth century: that Cézanne’s art possessed an almost sculptural heft that distinguished his painting from that of his Impressionist peers. My research at I Tatti entails a historically specific unpacking of the key term of Berenson’s analysis, “tactility,” and especially its applicability to the art of painting (as opposed to architecture, sculpture, or decorative objects). Despite the prominent role played by the optic-haptic opposition in the history of art history, the nineteenth-century German-speaking thinkers who most rigorously analyzed paintings in terms of vision vs. touch mostly limited their examples to older art or to contemporary art unmarked by recent debates about color and optical theory. Thus, the opportunity to test concepts of opticality and tactility developed for the study of Renaissance art against the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painting of the day was lost. As for the modernist critics, despite the importance of the individualized gesture or artist’s “touch” in the development of modern painting, they had been long conditioned to turn away from the art of the past, especially that revered by the academy, and to look instead to the city, science, or non-European and folk art for inspiration. The example of Berenson and others, however, shows that points of contact between Renaissance art history and modern art do exist in which the tactile dimension of painting is raised as a fundamental issue.