A Is for Art and Z is for Zygouries

How do you write a history of the world’s art when national borders are crumbling, fledgling experts are challenging conventional wisdom, long-ignored women’s and ethnic groups are demanding a place in the picture and almost no one can define art to anyone else’s satisfaction?

The answer: not easily.

“It almost killed us,” said Ian Jacobs, publisher of the new Dictionary of Art, a 34-volume tome promoted as the most comprehensive art historical reference ever. It is the work of 6,700 authors from 120 countries who wrote 27 million words in 41,000 articles--not counting all the discredited material thrown out after the fall of communism uncorked a flood of formerly suppressed information in Russia and Eastern Europe.

It wasn’t done quickly, either. Nearly 16 years have passed since the project was conceived at Grove Dictionaries Inc., a London firm best known for its Dictionary of Music and Musicians, first published in 1877 and now in its sixth edition.

But, finally, the Dictionary of Art is finished. It will be released Wednesday at the staggering price of $8,800, an event the scholarly art world will celebrate with cocktails, music and speeches at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The dictionary, which occupies five feet of shelf space, is bound in dark green cloth with relatively few color pictures bobbing in a sea of small print and black-and-white illustrations. It is an old-fashioned encyclopedia aimed at libraries, universities and museums. It was completed in the age of computers, but was begun too long ago to have been designed as a digital resource, Jacobs said. Grove, which invested $50 million in the project, has no plans to produce an electronic version, largely because rights to the reproductions would have to be renegotiated.

The first volume begins with Aachen--a center for medieval manuscript production in Germany and a Roman archeological site--and the last ends with Zygouries--the site of a Bronze Age town in southern Greece. Between those alphabetical extremes are artists as famous as Michelangelo and as obscure as Mithinari, an Australian Aboriginal painter and sculptor.

Encompassing all the visual arts except film--which would require an entire dictionary of its own--it covers architecture, photography and decorative arts as well as painting and sculpture. Topics from upholstery to picture frames get serious treatment. So do Asian and African arts omitted from Eurocentric reference books.

The mere thought of compiling all this information is enough to stupefy the most assiduous scholars, some of whom deemed the task impossible. “When we talked to advisors, they all said, ‘It’s a great idea, but you’ll never be able to do it,’ ” Jacobs said. “It’s just too damned big and too damned difficult.

“They were right. The first difficulty was the sheer scale of the thing. We had estimated we would use about 3,000 authors, based on our experience with the music dictionary. We ended up with 6,700 authors because we didn’t understand how specialized art history had become. In the music dictionary, articles about Mozart and Beethoven are written by one person. In art, it takes two people to write about Michelangelo. In decorative arts, an authority on Bohemian glass may know nothing about Bohemian furniture.”

Finding experts on everything from Chinese bronzes to African body painting to performance art was difficult enough. Getting them to turn their work in was sometimes even more exasperating.

Academics are notorious for extending deadlines, often simply to track down that one last, elusive detail. Four years ago, when Jacobs realized that 3,500 of the authors’ articles were overdue, he feared the project would never be finished. In desperation he dispatched a team to phone, fax, flatter and bully the delinquents.

Jacobs went after the hardest cases and the most important contributors, oozing charm and issuing polite threats. But he sometimes met his match. One male director of a London institution hid in the women’s room to avoid Jacobs when he stopped by to pick up the manuscript.

The enormous undertaking began casually Nov. 21, 1980, in a discussion of possible future projects. Grove Chairman Nicholas Byam Shaw and Harold Macmillan, then company president, came up with the idea of publishing an art reference, similar to the 20-volume music dictionary, which is considered the authoritative reference in its field.

They passed the idea on to Jacobs, who launched an informal investigation. The only competition was the Encyclopedia of World Art, a 17-volume reference published from 1959to 1968 by McGraw-Hill. Jacobs’ talks with librarians and scholars indicated that there would be a market for a new, more comprehensive resource, so a committee at Grove mapped out the project and came up with a goal: a 25-million-word, illustrated reference that covered the entire history of visual arts worldwide.

The next step was to determine exactly what and whom to cover, and how to organize the information. Grove established a 12-member editorial advisory board, then commissioned almost 200 specialists to provide lists of topics, their relative length and potential authors. Hugh Brigstocke, the dictionary’s first editor, coordinated the effort, laying out the intellectual framework and balancing areas of coverage. Soon he and his colleagues were sifting through the specialists’ lists and beginning to commission writers.

The dictionary not only covers the traditional subjects in the history of art, but also reflects revisionist scholarship and art trends of recent years. Women--from Italian 17th century painter Artemesia Gentileschi to contemporary American artists such as photographer Cindy Sherman and feminist sculptor Judy Chicago--rate biographies, as does Dat So La Lee, a Native American Washoe basket-weaver who lived from 1850 to 1925 and supported herself as a laundress in Carson City, Nev.

Essays on superstars offer fresh interpretations of their work--and then get up close and personal in sections on “character and personality.” Well, OK, you knew Picasso reportedly classified women as either goddesses or doormats. But did you know he saved all his nail clippings and locks of hair?

As for the dictionary’s geographical sweep, a global tour visits artistic meccas--Paris, Babylon, the Buddhist art-filled caves of Dunhuang, China--and tracks national cultural developments. These are not quick trips--the article on Japan is 430 pages, written by 76 authors. (Southern California museums and many area artists and collectors also are included.)

“My first job was to take the report for Early Netherlandish painting and make sense of it,” said Jane Shoaf Turner, an American scholar who joined the project in 1985 as an in-house editor. “I remember staring at it the first day and thinking, ‘What am I meant to do?’ Then I suddenly discovered a really important artist, Joachim Patenier, had been left off the Netherlandish list. And I thought, ‘Right, I have earned my first day’s salary.’ ”

She became a deputy editor in 1986 and became the dictionary’s editor in 1987 when Brigstocke moved on to become consulting editor.

One of her first responsibilities was to oversee the search for writers. “In the early days we were running after all the big names,” she said. “Then there was a kind of trickle-down effect, where somebody who has already written on Rembrandt doesn’t want to do it again, but recommends another scholar. That took care of 80% of the commissioning. To find writers for lesser-known artists, whom no one has claimed as their special property, we went to College Art Assn. meetings, where young professors and graduate students were very keen to sign up.”

Authors were paid $60 per thousand words. “That doesn’t put steak on the table of any art historian, but it is fairly standard for large reference books and it was never an issue,” Turner said. “The wonderful thing about academics is that they take scholarship very seriously. It is in their interest to have the topic done well and properly.”

In a field where interpretations can vary widely and careers are built on published words, being well paid is less important than having a voice in the right places. “Since this was the first time in history a complete history of art was being written, I wanted to participate,” said Constance W. Glenn, a historian of contemporary art who directs the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach. “If your area of specialty is represented, you want it to be your viewpoint.”

Her subjects included painters Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Stella and Tom Wesselmann and photographers Robert Frank and Walker Evans.

But if some viewpoints are left out, so many are included that it is difficult to find an art historian who isn’t involved with the book--much less anyone in the field who can offer an objective opinion of it.

“It has a cast of thousands,” said Albert Boime, a historian of 19th century art who teaches at UCLA and wrote about French painter Thomas Couture. Like most dictionary contributors, he hasn’t seen the book yet. But he characterizes it as “a landmark project” and “a monument to the field” that signifies the rise of art history as an important academic discipline.

The dictionary also represents “a new generational wave of scholars,” said Robert Rosenblum, a member of the dictionary’s editorial advisory board, who teaches art history at New York University. An early copy arrived at the school, where “everyone is oohing and aahing about the freshness and up-to-dateness and attractiveness of it,” he said.

Although students probably will constitute the dictionary’s largest audience, specialists will use it too, he said. “I’ll be cribbing from it for the rest of my life. It’s an incredible boon to the field.”

Once the writers did their jobs, Turner’s toughest intellectual challenge was making 41,000 articles in a dozen categories fit together logically. That entailed shuffling 20,800 biographies plus essays on ancient cultures and civilizations, cities and countries, archeological sites, art forms, artistic styles and movements, materials and techniques, patronage and religions.

“You had to decide things like, where are you going to treat Japanese lacquer, under L for lacquer or under J for Japan?” she said. “You can tell the story once, under L, explaining where the material comes from, how it’s made, what its properties are, what the conservation issues are, all the common characteristics. But if you want the detailed history of the stylistic development of Japanese lacquer, you turn to J because you can’t have a complete survey of the arts of Japan without lacquer.”

With the project shaping up over a long period, a certain amount of backtracking and revising was inevitable, Turner said. But the fall of communism and subsequent dismantling of the Soviet Union caused a major upset.

“A dictionary by Grove had to cover the world, but the world when we started was quite a different place from the world when we finished,” she said. “Once things began to change, the writing had to be completely overhauled and revised. The whole plan for the art of Yugoslavia and the list of Yugoslavian biographies changed. For the USSR, suddenly it was anathema to have Soviet scholars writing the story of Latvian or Lithuanian art. You had to scrap all the texts and start over with a Latvian writing about Latvia and a Lithuanian writing about Lithuania.”

Illustrations of artworks in countries where the flow of information is tightly restricted also presented a challenge. Photographs of monuments in Albania weren’t available, so an Albanian author, who moved to Berlin after writing his piece, asked friends to photograph the monuments. Their film was confiscated, so he arranged for a truck driver to smuggle film into Albania and smuggle it back into Germany after an Albanian scholar had taken a second set of photographs.

In another case, picture editors bumped into diverging views about what constitutes art. Many of the most important Japanese Buddhist paintings are in monasteries, where they are viewed as objects of devotion, not art. Requests were ignored, but persistent editors eventually found friends inside the monasteries to argue their case. “We had to pull every conceivable string to get those reproductions,” Turner said.

The project survived crisis after crisis. Even so, pressure escalated during the final year. Turner hit her boiling point late last fall when proofs were arriving in London at the rate of 1,000 pages a day--and had to be proofread and processed at the same speed. A staff of 22 worked with her, but she and her associate, Diane Fortenberry, read and approved all 32,600 pages.

The first 64 pages rolled off the press shortly after midnight May 1 at R.R. Donnelley & Sons in Willard, Ohio. Now the first run of 6,000 copies has been printed and about half have been sold.

In a few weeks, the new dictionary will start appearing on library shelves.

The Huntington Art Reference Library in San Marino will have one. Libraries that placed early orders were able to purchase the dictionary at reduced rates, in the range of $6,500, and take advantage of time payment plans. It’s still a lot of money, Huntington librarian Linda Zoeckler said. But Huntington curators’ contributions to the dictionary and the library’s focus on current scholarship made the purchase necessary. It is also likely to be a big help in answering telephone inquiries, she said.

Meanwhile, the art world is waiting--and those who didn’t contribute to the project are suspending judgment.

“I’m dying to see it,” Zoeckler said. “I want to know what artists are included. It will be interesting to see how they deal with Deconstruction and Marxism, and how they treat the Western discovery of non-Western cultures. Books like this become historic documents themselves because they reflect the period when they were written.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

16 Years in the Making

From conception to completion, the Dictionary of Art was a 16-year project. The entry on Michelangelo, for example, took 14 years. Here’s a countdown:

* Late 1980: Grove chiefs discuss publishing all-encompassing art dictionary.

* Mid-1981: Feasibility study begins.

* Late 1982: Michelangelo goes on sample list of artists’ names starting with M in market research brochure.

* Late 1985: Artists are ranked according to their importance to determine the length of entries. Michelangelo goes on the A list (16,000 words) because of his stature and the diversity of his work.

* Late 1986: London-based architectural historian and dictionary consultant Caroline Elam agrees to write about Michelangelo’s architecture. She recommends Anthony Hughes, a professor at Leeds University, as an additional contributor.

* Early 1993: Hughes submits his first draft, after revisiting all major monuments by Michelangelo in Europe.

* Mid-1993: Editors restructure Hughes’ article and add section on drawings.

* Late 1993: Grove’s picture department requests photographs of Michelangelo’s works from sources worldwide.

* Mid-1994: Hughes submits the final manuscript and Elam reads it to coordinate their work.

* Late 1994: Elam submits her manuscript. The combined article is edited, vetted, indexed and sent to typesetter. First proofs are sent to authors and proofreaders.

* Early 1996: First page proofs for the letter M arrive.

* Mid-1996: Volume 21, including Michelangelo, is printed in Willard, Ohio.

* Oct. 16, 1996: Dictionary is officially launched at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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THE NUMBERS:

Volumes: 34

Authors: 6,700

Articles: 41,000

Words: 27 million

Pages: 32,600

Illustrations: 15,000

Index entries: 720,000

Bibliography citations: 300,000

List price: $8,800