A Thousand Pictures

Emerson ignored too much when he wrote, "There is properly no history; only biography." Nonetheless, it is true that there is no history without biography. We construct theories of historical movements and trends that too often have a dangerous neatness about them. These reconstructions, though they pretend to an archeological authenticity, reveal at least as much about the time in which they are written as about the culture or events they are attempting to explain.

What saves our constructions from becoming neat but meaningless syllogisms is the messy but incontrovertible evidence of individual lives that survives in diaries, biographies, works of art and living memory. The men and women who were alive a hundred or fifty or five years ago were the characters and the audience for the dramas we are trying to breathe life back into today. The testimony of these men and women is both invaluable and unique--a mountain of statistics and doctoral theses has no more legitimacy and is often far less enlightening than a single Dorothea Lange photograph of an Appalachian mother or a waitress musing into Studs Terkel's tape recorder about the joys of serving tables.

If we can see history through the eyes of the people who experienced it--narrow and distorted as their vision may be--then we will have made a window in time. If we can recreate the context in which these person's decisions, beliefs and feelings were meaningful then we will have made that window a doorway through which we can enter the past and write histories that are faithful to their subjects.

As historians and students of the past and as trustees of the present that will become the past, women are beginning to feel a special obligation to acknowledge and preserve the biographies of other women. This sense of obligation is, in part, a result of a growing awareness that too many histories are based primarily or exclusively on the lives of literate white males.

The feeling of duty toward other women is also partly the result of a second, more personal, and perhaps even more compelling motive--one which lies behind such diverse efforts as the Berkshire Conference on the history of women, Judy Collins's and Jill Godmilow's film portrait of Antonia Brico, and the Thode Island Feminist Theatre. It is a feeling that many women, myself included, have that we will be truly free to establish our own identities only if we first rescue our counterparts in the past and the present from anonymity. If our goal is to redress an imbalance in the histories that are being written now and in those that will be written 50 years from now we must insure that our voices are heard and preserved.

Because the Radcliffe Collector's Discerning Eye exhibit could have accomplished so much toward this goal and it didn't, it is a source not of pride but of frustration and disappointment. The exhibit was created by and about Radcliffe women and yet it lacks a sense of its own identity or reason for being. It is surprising that a committee of 18 dedicated women working for nearly three years with a budget of $20,000 could finally produce a show in which the women whose interest in art is being celebrated remain so anonymous.

Even so trivial a matter as the way in which lenders to the exhibit wished to be acknowledged begins to take on a symbolic importance after one has walked through the show three or four times. Thirty-one of the 79 contributors wished to remain anonymous. Another 19 listed themselves as Mr. and Mrs. or Mrs. and used the husband's name with the woman's maiden name underneath in parentheses, as if the two names belonged to different people. This is admittedly a small point and doubtless caution overcame pride for many of the collectors but nevertheless how we identify ourselves can be important in determining how we and others perceive us.

The many beautiful objects selected for the Radcliffe show attest amply to the "discerning eyes" of the collectors represented. But one searches in vain for evidence of the discerning mind behind the educated eye. Who are these women? What does art mean to them? Why do they collect--as an investment, out of love of art, because of avarice or noblesse oblige? All of these questions are raised by the exhibit and nowhere are they answered. The lavish and no doubt expensive catalogue merely reproduces in photographs the objects displayed in the Fogg's galleries. Why? For posterity's sake? Posterity would have been far better served if some record had been made of the attitudes and motives that prompted these women to collect works of art. We might learn much about how cultural values and standards are made if we knew more about how education, money and personality combine to create collectors. Most glaring of all, the Radcliffe committee made no attempt to explore the nature of a Radcliffe education or it and how it shapes the choices of those who experience it.

The Discerning Eye exhibit is one of those rare instances in which a few words would have been worth a thousand pictures.