30 Years Ago

 

 

On 23 October 1996 Jan and her parents joined me at the Banqueting House in Whitehall. Beneath the ceiling painted by Rubens stood a platform of enormous volumes of The Dictionary of Art (TDA). This was a big day for me and my colleagues, especially Jane Turner, the Editor who around 1985 had joined the small embryonic staff of TDA as a specialist editor for Netherlandish art, and had masterminded the project with great skill and determination since her appointment as the Editor of TDA in 1987.

 

My own involvement in the project had begun at a dinner in New York in November 1980. Now and then I had been asked for advice, notably market research (carried out in the USA by my friend and former reference publisher of St. Martin’s Press, Roland Turner). In 1985, Nicky Byam Shaw, the Chairman of Macmillan, had asked me if I would be the Publisher of TDA, responsible for all aspects of the project, including spending a great deal of money. He told me that the job might not fully occupy my time but that TDA was such an important project that, if I was not busy, I could play golf. As it turned out I never had the time for golf.

 

Some of those giant volumes travelled to launch events in Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, but not to the US launch in the American galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nor to the International House in Roppongi, Tokyo (followed by a late-night party in a jazz club), or to the British Ambassador’s residence in Seoul.

 

Thirty years later, Jane and I have written an article for Oxford University Press, current owners of TDA, which with permission I have copied below. But first some photos.

 

Checking page proofs at R. R. Donnelly & Son, Willard, Ohio, Spring 1996: left to right a more youthful Ian Jacobs, Jane Turner, John Peacock, Production Director, Steve Benaim, Production Manager.

 

Julian Bell, The Dictionary of Art, oil on paper, 67x39 inches, 1992. Based on photos of colleagues at work, Julian's painting depicts the offices of TDA at 112 Strand, London. In the full size work (not visible alas in this scan) I can be seen "With his hands in his pockets as usual," as my boss said.

 

 

The Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, 23 October 1996

International House, Tokyo, November 1996. Left to right, front row, Professor Terukazu Akiyama, Japanese adviser to TDA, Naoko Matsumoto, marketing manager, Dr. Larissa Haskell and Professor Francis Haskell, Oxford University, Ian Jacobs, and Joan Mondale, wife of Ambassador Walter Mondale. Mrs. Mondale had a special interest in Japanese art.  

Dr. Youngsook Pak (second left) of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Londonn, British ambassador Thomas Harris, and mIan Jacobsat the launch of TDA, the ambassador's residence in Seoul, 19 November 1996.

The following is the article that Jane and I authored jointly.

 

 

Contributors: Ian Jacobs and Jane Turner

 

Grove Dictionary of Art, The

 

1.   Initial planning.

 

When Harold Macmillan’s family publishing company launched The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in New York in 1980, he asked the firm’s then chairman, Nicholas Byam Shaw, grandson of the painter John Byam Shaw, to consider a dictionary of art. Richard Garnett, editorial director of The New Grove, also heir to an artistic pedigree (his father was a member of the Bloomsbury Group), was asked to produce an outline plan.

 

Garnett studied the three existing substantial art reference works, the Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler (see Thieme–Becker), the Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs (commonly known as Bénézit), and the Encyclopedia of World Art. The first two consisted only of artist biographies, and the third, liberally illustrated survey articles. Garnett’s plan for The Dictionary of Art envisaged a work of worldwide coverage roughly half as large again as The New Grove that would combine biographies with articles on topics such as forms, styles, and movements, as well as civilizations and cultures omitted from, or insufficiently treated in, standard reference works. Like The New Grove, this dictionary would feature scholarship of the highest caliber while being readable and allowing for opinions and interpretations, not only dry facts.

 

This plan gradually changed. Architecture and the decorative arts, initially allocated only cursory treatment, were ultimately well represented, covered in entries on every UN-recognized country as well as under specific cities and centers of production. The recognition of cultures outside the West was unprecedented, from Africa to Aboriginal Australia and from the Pacific Arts to the Caribbean. This endeavor would take many years, a large investment (eventually £34 million), and would require a team of specialists in many areas.

 

On its publication in 1996, the dictionary consisted of 34 volumes (the 34th being an index), with 45,000 entries in alphabetical order, comprising some 26 million words of text written by 6802 scholars from more than 120 countries, accompanied by 15,000 black-and-white illustrations and 300 color plates. Nearly a quarter of the articles were translated from thirty different languages. The tasks of commissioning and processing such vast content were therefore substantial and complex, especially considering that most of the editorial and production work was carried out before the internet and email became generally available. Communication was conducted by fax, letter, and telephone or by hand when authors visited Britain.

Fig. oao-9781884446054-e-8000025119-graphic-1.jpg The stage for the launch of The Grove Dictionary of Art in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, October 23, 1996; image credit: Macmillan Publishers International Ltd.

 

2.   Editorial appointments and detailed planning.

 

By 1983 Macmillan Publishers had approved the plan, and Garnett had appointed as editor Hugh Brigstocke, who was succeeded in 1987 by Jane Turner; in 1985 Ian Jacobs was appointed as publisher of the project. Brigstocke assembled an international advisory board of twelve senior scholars, along with a growing number of outside area advisers whose role was to suggest topics for inclusion, their relative word lengths, and potential authors. By this time an initial team of scholars was appointed as in-house area editors, responsible for all aspects of the planning of their area of expertise, such as Classical Greece and Rome, medieval European architecture, Italian Renaissance art, Africa, the Pre-Columbian Americas, or Islamic art. Given the subject range, writers were commissioned from many disciplines: art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, curators, specialists who worked for art dealers and auction houses, and independent scholars. Eventually, the in-house editorial team consisted of some 100 editors who prepared articles for publication, relying on a 450-page editorial manual known as the “bible” to ensure consistency.

 

For general articles on materials and techniques, art forms, building types, patronage, collecting, and dealing, editors worked together to coordinate coverage globally and across time. For example, the article “Door” included discussions of this form from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, Early Christian and medieval Europe, Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, Rococo, and the Western world after 1750, as well as in the Islamic world, the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Pre-Columbian Americas. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s famous Baptistery doors in Florence were discussed here, their planning in detail in the biography of Ghiberti, their creation in the broader context of the history of the building and of its patronage, and the remarkable feat of their casting was addressed from a technical perspective in an article on “Bronze.” Such interrelated coverage was facilitated by the index and extensive cross-references.

In a period of rapid changes in their disciplines, editors embraced evolving scholarly approaches. For example, some scholars of South Asian art adopted traditional dynastic labels, while others divided art into religious categories: Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and so on. The editor for South Asian art worked with advisers to devise a system of geographical and temporal categories that could be applied flexibly. Similarly, Islamic art was defined not as the art of a religion but art produced in places where Islam was the principal or most important religion, and again was structured by geographical and chronological categories. The territorial size of Islamic art involved terminology in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish (distinct from modern Turkish), Russian, Spanish, French, and “Orientalist” transcription systems. A simplified system based on Arabic script was adopted. Similarly, editors did not shrink from controversies. As critic Robert Hughes noted in his 1996 review in Time magazine: “It will not … make Greek nationalists happy to find … the view that the ancient Helladic culture was not created by Greek indigenous peoples but by a people who emigrated from what is now Turkey.”

 

Editors had to keep abreast of news and geopolitical events. Work on the dictionary began when the Soviet Union and European Communist states were essentially closed to the West. Communication with scholars in those areas was controlled by the state, which posed challenges. The publisher, for instance, resisted Russian requests to “correct” articles on Russian art written by non-Soviet scholars. Access to scholars became easier in 1985 (thanks to Glasnost) and even more relaxed as Communist regimes collapsed in 1989. This led to additional work and the incorporation of new topics and discoveries, especially from Central Asia where Soviet scholars had made significant finds. Entries distorted by loyalty to the former regimes were replaced, and many references to East Germany, East Berlin, and Yugoslavia were amended. Scholars facing social and political unrest in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan resorted to faxes and diplomatic pouches to send information documenting endangered or destroyed national monuments.

 

Picture research and indexing proceeded alongside editing. When commissioned, contributors were asked to suggest illustrations. Editors checked their proposals to avoid duplication, and a team of picture researchers acquired the images. Besides commercial images, maps, archaeological site plans, and specially drawn diagrams were commissioned. The Index ultimately consisted of some 750,000 references.

 

3.   Other functions and technology.

 

By the 1990s some 120 people worked in the offices of the dictionary at 112 Strand in central London. Supplementing the editorial team were indexers, picture editors, translators, administrators, and production staff.

 

Bespoke computer systems were commissioned for indexing and administration (the latter from the London Business School). Such was the scale and complexity of the typesetting, indexing, and digital coding that only five suppliers worldwide were capable of supporting the production of the dictionary; Pindar Ltd. in Scarborough, Yorkshire, was selected. Although initial publication as a multi-volume book set was planned, by c. 1986 it was decided to use a form of SGML (standard generalized markup language) to simplify the management of typography and other elements and to facilitate future digital publication. The makeup and correction of many thousands of pages in a few months was managed by William Clowes Ltd. of Beccles, Suffolk; the volumes were printed in Willard, OH, by R.R. Donnelley & Sons.

 

4.   Reception and reviews.

 

In1996 The Grove Dictionary of Art was named Apollo Book of the Year and also received the 1996 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award (“demonstrating excellence in art publishing”) from ARLIS, NA. In 1997 the American Library Association awarded the dictionary the Dartmouth Medal, which recognizes a reference work of outstanding quality and significance. The same year the H. W. Wilson Award of the American Society for Indexing was given to the dictionary’s indexers, Ruth Levitt and Gillian Northcott, who the previous year had been awarded the 1996 Wheatley Medal of the Society of Indexers in the UK. In 1998 Jane Turner received a special Charles Rufus Morey Award from the American College Art Association.

 

Reviews were unanimously positive, recognizing the unrivaled range and the colossal amount of labor and organization that went into the ambitious enterprise. Richard Brilliant of Columbia University, for example, highlighted the inclusion of “African art, world architecture, Asian art, the decorative arts, Islamic art, Buddhist art, 20th-century art, photography, and many other … topics only recently recognized as worthy of attention.” Admittedly, however, not all general topics, such as “Portraiture,” were covered as globally as editors would have liked.

The Burlington Magazine observed that the dictionary had taken patronage seriously but lacked an overarching entry on the practice of patronage. A review in Art Documentation welcomed the heightened prominence of the decorative arts, especially those beyond the Western traditions, but felt that biographies of makers were too few compared to painters, sculptors, and architects. The coverage of American art was, the review judged, far superior to that in existing surveys and reference works, and the inclusion of art from many traditions enabled readers to explore comparative art history globally.

 

Thearticles were commended for incorporating up-to-date research, including new archaeological discoveries. Concerning architecture, its inclusion within broader art history

was especially valuable. Also praised was the jargon-free, “clear and readable” prose of the entries, which as Robert Hughes remarked, were “sometimes even dryly witty.” The sense of humor was perhaps best exemplified by the spine of vol. 19, covering “Leather to Macho.”

 

5. Grove Art Online.

 

The absence of a CD-ROM edition, regretted by some reviewers upon publication, was addressed in 1998 when the publisher opted to convert the dictionary into an online resource under the supervision of deputy editor Diane Fortenberry. Taking advantage of the SGML mark-up introduced during typesetting, Semantico, based in Brighton, Sussex, and founded by the programmer who maintained the dictionary’s index system, originally created by Roger Charlesworth, converted the typesetting files to an online, searchable database. The index was repurposed as a “related article” function to direct users quickly to relevant material elsewhere in the database.                                                                   

 

Thelack of online permissions for all illustrations except for maps and line drawings was solved in two ways. Links to images available on museum websites were embedded in articles, but this was limited by availability. A more comprehensive solution was provided by an arrangement with the Bridgeman Art Library to search its image database. The online publication has since enabled editors to update content rather than adding new material by way of spinoff books or new editions every ten or twenty years. In 2003 The Dictionary of Art and Grove Art Online were acquired by Oxford University Press, which five years later relaunched the online portal as Oxford Art Online.

 

Bibliography.

 

Gardner, Wendy. “The Dictionary of Art: The Concept, the Challenges, and the Achievements.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 15, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 29–32.

Stahl, Joan. “The Grove Dictionary of Art Online.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 18, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 51–52.

“The Alphabetical Ordering of World Art.” The Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1123 (Oct 1996): 643.

Hughes, Robert. “Towering Venture: Grove’s New 34-volume Dictionary of Art is an Epic Publishing Event.” Time 148, no. 21 (Nov 4, 1996): 93–94.

Brilliant, Richard. “A Vast Compendium of Knowledge.” Art Journal 56, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 82–85.

Cole, Herbert M. “Africa in The Dictionary of Art.” African Arts 30, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 58–65, 85–88.

Doumato, Lamia and others. “Dictionary of Art 34 vol. by Jane Turner.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 16, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 23-27.