Clemente's Kalighat "crimes," part II

To the Editors:

I'm an untrained artist who has long used A.i.A. as a means of self-education. Sometimes I'll even copy paintings in the magazine to see how they're made; but these copies are exercises that I destroy or tuck away for reference. To present them as my own work would be to cheat the original artist and to betray my own reasons for painting. Or so I thought.

Brooks Adams's matter-of-fact reply to Vinod Dave's revelations has me puzzled about questions of influence and origin [see Letters, Sept. '06]. Isn't it stealing when Francesco Clemente makes unattributed direct copies from the works of vernacular Kalighat painters? Yes, he inserts his face into the designs, but this is different from pasting his face onto Dr. Gachet or Woman I. In such cases we'd recognize the source and the irony. But Clemente's borrowings from late 19th-century Indian sources aren't even ironic. He copies anonymous, little-known works and passes them off as his own. Does the speed and whimsy of these self-portraits excuse them from being deceitful?

I don't want to be coy or self-righteous here; I'd really like to understand. Is Brooks Adams's "direct appropriation" a euphemism for "theft," or is this accepted practice in the world of art? In the world of letters this is not accepted practice. It's called plagiarism, and it can destroy careers.

William Flintoff

Somerset, N.J.

To the Editors:

Brooks Adams's response to Vinod Dave was clever but it somehow felt like a cover-up. Echoing Clemente, he cites the fact that the Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie "never mentions the connection in his Gagosian Gallery catalogue essay." But any artist can see that Clemente was looking at the catalogue of Indian art that he has owned up to having or at images by the young, unnamed Indian artist whose work he admits to being aware of. So, he copied or "appropriated'--that's allowed. But not admitting to the obvious--that he was looking directly at the work while he created his own--is dishonest.

Sara Stites

Miami Beach

To the Editors:

I am at a loss to understand why Francesco Clemente did not simply disclose his Kalighat "appropriations" to Brooks Adams. For the feature article [A.i.A., May '06], he told Adams about his working procedures in great detail, but chose to omit his Indian borrowings. Consequently, Adams's claim that Clemente's Self-Portrait as a Bengali Woman shows the artist "at the top of his game" is amusing at best.

Once the Kalighat sources were pointed out by Vinod Dave, Clemente still avoided the subject--electing to tell us, instead, that even Salman Rushdie didn't make the link. What does this comment really mean? That Rushdie should have done research to ascertain if Clemente's work was original? Or that Clemente expects viewers to suspend the use of their reason? When confronted with Kalighat images that are clearly very well known to him, Clemente seemed to experience memory failure--a form of denial that proves to be irritating for the reader.

Adams, Rushdie and the Gagosian Gallery all failed part of their critical mission. We can categorize them as simply ignorant of the existence of these images from the Kalighat school. But the artist, who admittedly knew the material, has committed a failure of acknowledgement that is totally unacceptable.

Marco Sassone

Toronto, Canada

Brooks Adams replies:

First of all let's be clear: there is no question of a "cover-up," as Ms. Stites claims, because I honestly did not know about the Kalighat sources for Clemente's paintings at the time I wrote the article. I cannot speak for the artist, but my impression is that the Kalighat works feature conventional, oft-repeated imagery that cannot be ascribed to a single author, and that perhaps the whole notion of authorship, in the Western sense, may not apply to such works. My feeling is that these works are indeed fair game for aporopdation or "theft" (Mr. Flintoff's term). It's a bit like Roy Lichtenstein lifting imagery directly from the Yellow Pages.

We also should not underestimate the effect of the change in scale. Kalighat watercolors are small handheld objects, while Clemente's figure paintings are monumental. (I suspect his Self-Portrait in an Imperial Age may be based on a small ancient bronze or print source, but I'm not losing any sleep over it. That kind of imagery has been out in the world for a long time.) In any case, all this attention is good for Kalighat painting (which many of us never knew about previously), good for Clemente's work and good for my thinking about how to write art criticism. In going into this project--which, by the way, started as a catalogue essay about the "Tandoori Satori'" series for a Roman museum show--I stated very clearly to Clemente that I didn't feel comfortable talking about the Indian content in his work (I still don't) and so wouldn't address it. Now that refusal has reared up in my face. Nevertheless, I'm glad that other people are talking about these issues, and I must say it's been a learning experience.