Recognition and Renown: The Survival of Artistic Reputation

Abstract

This inquiry into one aspect of collective memory-the differential survival of reputation-distinguishes between two components of reputation: recognition by peers and more universal renown. Before their style of working went out of fashion in the 1930s, all the artists studied had been recognized as painter-etchers, but few had achieved a level of renown that guaranteed the preservation of their original oeuvres, a condition that, in the instance of visual artists, is a sine qua non for being remembered. Where such preservation was not assured, the posthumous durability of reputation depended on the artist's own lifetime efforts to protect or project that reputation, survivors with a stake in preserving or enhancing the artist's reputation, linkages to networks facilitating entry into the cultural archives, and retrospective interest leading to the rediscovery of the artist as the symbolic representative of emerging cultural or political identities. Similar conditions for remembering exist in other areas of culture production; these are affected by the rate at which "old" work loses relevance, the nature of the creative achievement, and the medium in which it is preserved.