Tripping Over Art History with Tacita Dean
The artist’s new book, Monet Hates Me, finds inspiration in the Getty Research Institute’s archives
Installation view of Monet Hates Me, Tacita Dean, 2021
Body Content
In the vaults of the Getty Research Institute is a lock of Auguste Rodin’s hair: a thin brown snippet, tied with a white string.
It was one of the first things artist Tacita Dean stumbled upon in the Institute’s special collections, prompting a journey that led to her recent artist’s edition and related book, Monet Hates Me.
As an artist in residence at the Research Institute from 2014–15, Dean combed through the vast collections of one of the largest art libraries in the world, containing everything from medieval alchemy books to optical devices to artist’s letters and sketchbooks. Letting chance be her guide, she unearthed black-edged mourning envelopes and wax seals, the signatures of French painters, postcards from the Mexican Revolution, and yellowed posters by the Surrealistes-Revolutionnaires group, among other finds.
Dean was part of a scholar’s cohort who arrive at Getty each year to conduct specialized research. Yet unlike the scholars, who come with pre-defined areas of study, Dean approached the material with an artist’s perspective. “I found behaving as a scholar strangely difficult,” Dean writes in the book. “I skid across knowledge and research by tripping over things.” Her way of working, she says, is best described by the surrealist Andre Breton’s idea of “objective chance,” which “relies on chance, contingency and a certain blindness to reach an outcome.”
Dean eventually amassed her own idiosyncratic collection of images, photographed from the archives—with a particular attention to the odd or overlooked detail. She was interested in the marginal, the lost, the accidental, or the forged—those historical objects that elude any tidy narrative.
In one story, Dean recounts the tale of a 16th-century painting called Madonna Under the Fir Tree—as it changed hands throughout history. “Only in 1961, when the painting underwent restoration ahead of being photographed for a Paris photo agency, was it discovered to be a fake: the Madonna had developed a slight squint that had gone unnoticed since the war,” she writes. The real painting was officially declared missing in 1981. “I am not sure we know everything there is to know about the story of the squinting Madonna under the Fir Tree.”
It wasn’t until the start of the pandemic—what she calls in the book, “a block of uniquely purposeless time”—that Dean found herself returning to the images she had collected at the Research Institute years before. From her home in Berlin, she began the laborious work of reproducing aspects of several of the images by hand—copying, for instance, a letter written by Danny Ewing Greenberg to his father, the famed art critic Clement Greenberg, 100 times with the same fountain pen.
With her longtime collaborator Martyn Ridgewell, Dean designed the custom-made “exhibition in a box,” an artist’s edition containing 50 objects inspired by materials she found in the special collections. (The title, Monet Hates Me, is based on a line in one of Monet’s letters that seemed to read “hate tacita.”) In some cases, the objects appear in an altered form. In one, details from numerous sources—a 16th century Flemish painting, for instance—appear as tiny ovals floating in space against a sky taken from a damaged 19th-century glass negative.
The accompanying artist’s book, also titled Monet Hates Me, includes reproductions of the 50 artworks from the edition, original source material, and texts by Dean which provide insight into her distinctive selection process. “The book threads together Tacita’s connections and disconnections to the archival materials, weaving her personal resonances and the subsequent research ‘rabbit holes’ she went down,” said Anne Rana, who worked with Dean as a researcher on the project. “The book is also very much a record of the pandemic period in which it was made. It’s been fascinating to see an artist come in and bring the Research Institute’s archives out to the public in a different, intuitive, and intimate way.” The result illuminates Dean’s eccentric path through the annals of art history.