On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes

Author(s): YVE-ALAIN BOIS

Source: October , Fall 2015, Vol. 154 (Fall 2015), pp. 127-149
Published by: The MIT Press

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 On the- Uses and
Abuses of Look-alikes*

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

It is in his 1964 Tomb Sculpture, his most formalist book, that Erwin Panofsky
offered this definition of pseudomorphosis: "The emergence of a form A, mor
phologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated
to it from a genetic point of view." The example he gave was the uncanny similari
ty between third-century bc Punic sarcophagi and tombs of the High Gothic peri
od, some 1,500 years later: In both types, a human figure, apparently perfectly
alive, eyes wide open, is placed horizontally on the ridge of a small, slanted, roof
shaped lid, this position being sometimes connoted as uncomfortable by the pres
ence of a pillow beneath its head. The morphology is similar in both kinds of
tombs, but the historical processes that led to these two occurrences of the same
shape could not be more different: In the case of the Punic sarcophagi, "an effigy
originally three-dimensional and recumbent had come to be precariously placed
on the roof of a house-shaped sarcophagus"; in the medieval tombs, "an originally
two-dimensional figure, depicted on a slab in the pavement but represented as
standing, had subsequently acquired three-dimensional volume, the figure
expanding into a statue, the slab raised upon supporting members or growing into

* This is the slightly updated text of a lecture I gave in April 2005 at a symposium marking the
twenty-fifth anniversary of CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts) in Washington, D.C.,
and then again at Princeton University a few months later, soon after my arrival at the Institute for
Advanced Study. I resisted the urgings of CASVA'S dean (Liz Copper) to publish it in this institution's
bulletin, finding it too tentative. I felt (and still do) that in order to do full justice to the issues
addressed here, I would have to reimmerse myself in various fields with which I used to be familiar
decades ago (notably, anthropology and linguistics). My intention was that, as soon as I had been freed
of other commitments, I would conduct a graduate seminar (the best means, in my experience, to
obtain the kind of reimmersion I had in mind) and, in turn, write a small book on the topic. It so hap
pens that "other commitments" never left me with a moment of respite. A few years ago, I was
approached to submit an essay for a Festschrift volume celebrating my friend Bruno Reichlin, whose
writings on architecture I greatly admire, and, as the request was said to be extremely urgent, I chose to
submit a French translation of this text (there was some degree of affectionate teasing in this submis
sion since, as we had discussed at several occasions, Bruno had sometimes succumbed to the lure of
look-alikes). Of course, as is usual with Festschrift volumes, the book took years to appear. The text was
published as "De l'intérêt des faux-amis (pour mon vrai ami Bruno Reichlin)" in L'opéra sovrana: Studi
sull'architettura del XX secolo dedicati a Bruno Reichlin (Mendrisio Academy Press/Silvana Editoriale) in
2014. Meanwhile, I was informed that a video of my giving this lecture (in English) was available online
and so decided that, no matter its imperfection, it was probably better to let it appear in print, thus in a
format less prone to misprision.

OCTOBER 154, Fall 2015, pp. 127-149. © 2015 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Full-page illustration in Erwin Panofsky's
book Tomb Sculpture. 1964.
Panofsky's captions: left, sarcophagus of a
Punic priestess, Musée de Lavigerie, Carthage;
top right, sarcophagus of a Punic priest;
bottom right, tomb of St. Erminold, 1283,
abbey church, Prüfening.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 129

what is known as a tumba."1 Unfortunately, Panofsky did not expand on the phe
nomenon of pseudomorphosis—but it is clear that he considered it a major booby
trap for the art historian: Already, in his previous book, Renaissance and
Renascences, he had spent most of his energy discarding look-alikes (in order to
assert the specificity of the Italian Renaissance at a time when its very existence as
a historical rupture was contested in favor of the idea of an incremental series of
small renascences of which it would only represent the cumulative climax—a sce
nario he found abhorrent).
As a modernist, I instinctively share Panofsky's wariness. Nothing irritates me
more than being presented a Tan trie image as a Malevich simile (with the implica
tion that since the works are morphologically similar, their meaning must be identi
cal as well—ergo, that Malevich was purely and simply a mystic). Nothing irritates
me more than being told that an empty white Bristol board, exhibited in 1883 under
the title First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather, by the French

1. Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964), pp. 26-27. Panofsky had in
fact used the term "pseudomorphosis" much earlier, in the lectures about Piero di Cosimo that consti
tute the 2nd and 3rd chapters of his Studies in Iconology, published in 1939. But there it had a very dif
ferent meaning. He used it to characterize the survival of medieval features in a work of art produced
by the humanist, classicizing Renaissance:

While medieval art had appropriated classical motifs without much reflection, the
Renaissance tried to justify this practice on theoretical grounds: "The pagan people
attributed the utmost beauty to their heathen God Abblo," Dürer says, "thus we shall use
him for Christ the Lord who is the most beautiful man, and just as they represented
Venus as the most beautiful woman we shall chastely display the same features in the
image of the Holy Virgin, mother of God." While classical images were thus deliberately
reinterpreted, there are many other cases in which the revived classical traditions merged
quite naturally, or even automatically, with surviving medieval traditions. When a classical
character had emerged from the Middle Ages in utterly non-classical disguise . . . and had
been restored to its original appearance in the Renaissance, the final result often showed
traces of this process. Some of the medieval garments or attributes would cling to the
remodeled form, and thereby carry over a medieval element into the concept of the new
image. This resulted in what I would call a "pseudomorphosis." ("Father Time," Studies in
Iconology [New York: Icon Editions, 1972], p. 70.)

As Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood noted, this concept of pseudomorphosis, which is
not very similar to the later version of the concept (even if it too partakes of a structural conception of
history and artistic production), was directly borrowed from Oswald Spengler, who himself borrowed it
from the field of crystallography (Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance [New York: Zone Books,
2010], p. 48). Here is the definition provided by Spengler:

In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water fil
ters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow
mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten
masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in
their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there
arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape,
stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralo
gists call this phenomenon Pseudomorphosis. ( The Decline of the West, vol. 2 [New York:
Viking, 1927], p. 189.)

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130 OCTOBER

humorist Alphonse Allais, prefigures the white monochromes or rather achr

a Robert Rauschenberg, a Piero Manzoni, or a Robert Ryman dating from
than half a century later (here the implication is that these artists merely r
something invented years before them, as if whiteness in itself were a character
strong enough for us to ignore all other criteria of differentiation, and particul
the distinct context of apparition of these various works) .2 I call this kind of hi
cal telescoping, which keeps fueling curatorial enterprises to great acclaim,
morphism. I should also add that even within a single historical era o
encounter cases of pseudomorphosis: The artist Sol LeWitt points to the al
resemblance between the works of Manzoni and Ryman as such à case:

There are many works of artists that superficially resemble the works of
other artists. This has been true throughout art history. Single works
can always be shown to be similar to other single works. Unless one
compares the total work of each artist, one cannot say the work is the
same. Comparisons have been made between Manzoni and Ryman
because they both made white paintings; between Beuys and Morris
because they both used felt; between Ulrich and Bochner because they
both used measurements, and many others. Those that make such com
parisons do not know the work of these artists and operate on the level
of petty gossips. They are not to be taken seriously.3

Like LeWitt, I loathe pseudomorphism—and I find in its failure to provide

explanation for the phenomenon of pseudomorphosis on which it feeds on
the clearest proofs that a purely morphological formalism, as opposed to a
tural one, cannot lead anywhere.
But still, it is impossible to ignore the phenomenon itself, if only becau
Walter Benjamin recognized long ago, the capacity of perceiving resemblan
analogies, similarities is at the heart—at the aesthetic heart, one could even
of human knowledge: We simply cannot avoid the titillating flashes of look
that take us by surprise, and it does us no good to repress them.4 Indeed, I
ence such a flash almost every time I visit a museum collection if I am not
larly acquainted with the area or period to which the works I am beholding

2. For the Allais episode and the publication of this as well as other monochromes in hi
Primo-Avrilesque of 1897, see Denys Riout, La peinture monochrome: Histoire et archéologie d'un genre
Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 2003), pp. 169 ff. As Riout reports, Allais was by no means alon
ducing "joke monochromes."
3. Sol LeWitt, "Comments on an Advertisement Published in Flash Art, April 1973," original
lished in Flash Art, June 1973, reprinted in the exhibition catalogue Sol LeWitt (New York: M
Modern Art, 1978), p. 174. The artist LeWitt pairs with Bochner is probably Timm Ulrichs. Hi
lio of sixteen silkscreens, Vorsicht, Kunst!, published in 1969/1970 by the Kestner-Gesells
Hannover, contains several measurement pieces, one of which looks indeed very similar to th
by Bochner around the same time. (My thanks to Alistair Rider for putting me on the track of U
4. On this fundamental aspect of Benjamin's thought, see Blair Ogden, "Benjamin, Wittge
and Philosophical Anthropology: A Réévaluation of the Mimetic Faculty," Grey Room 39 (Sprin
pp. 56-73.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 131

(ignorance is key: The less one knows the context, the genesis, the more easily one
falls prey to the jolt of pseudomorphosis—which is another way of saying that the
less one approaches an object with the skepticism afforded by rational thought,
the more one can let one's imagination run its course).
Here are two examples:
Stumbling upon Young Woman on Her Death Bed in the Musée des beaux-arts
de Rouen, I could not understand what this painting was doing next to works by
Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, until I read the label assuring me that it dated
from 1621, as specified by the inscription in the top right corner. Upon reflection,

Dutch or German School. Young Woman on Her Death

Bed, or The Dead Woman. 1621.
© Musées de la Ville de Rouen / C. Landen, C. Loisel.

that inscription, which, according to the label, states that the woman died at age
twenty-two and that her portrait was painted two hours after her death, should
have given me pause, for it is perhaps the only element of the painting that would
be foreign to a work dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, where
I had immediately placed it. (I had thought of an artist like Jules Bastien-Lepage,
one of those French so-called naturalist painters who had managed, not without
talent, to borrow certain stylistic traits from Manet, taming them so that they

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132 OCTOBER

would suit the bourgeois taste of the time.)5 I had overlooked the inscriptio
had focused solely on the figure—but I don't think I could easily be blame
this, given the arrestingly realist representation of death that this picture prov
As always on such occasions, this was a lesson in modesty: I would have fa
connoisseurship exam on that one.
I was somewhat comforted to find out, however, when doing my home
afterward, that many of my peers would probably have failed the test as w
even in the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch deathbed portraits, well
to the specialists, this work stands apart, flouting the age-old and nearly un
convention of the closed eyes as a means of literally making up death into s
And even if one switches to the main pictorial tradition of the representa
death in the West—that is, Christian scenes—one is just as hard put to find
of the dead Christ with his eyes wide open (in the myriad representations o
Passion), or of a bright-eyed dead saint in the countless figurai narratives o
tyrdom. And when one encounters such rare images, it is more often than n
closing of the eyes that is pictured (as in Rubens's Lamentation of Christ fr
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna). The only true exception I know of is t
Holbein's Dead Christ in the Kunstmuseum Basel, but this work is such a fluk
the corpus of Western art that scholars are still wondering how it came abo
for what purpose it was made.7 Even Caravaggio, who did everything he cou
secularize his Virgin Mary when he represented her on her deathbed, show
her, as was said at the time, as a "filthy whore," even Caravaggio could not
himself to show her vitreous gaze. Not that he feared censorship (his painti
rejected anyway by the congregation for which it had been commissioned, a
hard to believe that he had not expected this turn of events), but it does no
to have been then in the order of the possible. The only way a dead face cou
shown with its eyes open was if it was decapitated, thus inherently transformed
an object of horror and abjection—as in Caravaggio's David with the Head of
or in any version of Judith and Holofernes by Cranach the Elder. And in tha
corpus of monstrosity, the severed Head of Medusa represented the ab
paragon, as both Caravaggio and Rubens knew so well.
I must admit that I was rather surprised to find out, when looking into
practice of the death portrait in the nineteenth century, that, with very rar

5. Another late-nineteenth-century artist one could think of, especially with regard to the
decorum, is Gustave Caillebotte (see, for example, his Nude on a Couch of 1881-82, at the Min
Institute of Art). Alex Potts also pointed out to me that many non-French artists would be a bett
didate than Bastien-Lepage, for example the Norwegian painter and writer Christian Krohg.
6. On the tradition of the "last portrait" in European painting from the Renaissance on
Pigler, "Portraying the Dead," Acta Historiae Artium Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae (Bud
(1956), pp. 1-75. On the Dutch tradition in particular, see the exhibition catalogue Naar het l
Nederlandse doodsportret 1500-heden, ed. B. C. Sliggers (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1998).
7. As Michael Cole reminded me, the Man of Sorrows is mostly represented with eyes wide o
ing the beholder—but he could hardly be said to be "dead" (though he bears all the wounds of
cifixion) since he is resurrected: He is dead as man, alive as God.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 133

tions, the taboo of the open eyes prevailed in painting.8 The persistence of the
closed eyes also largely predominated in photography, undermining my vague
hope that such a solid continuity was just medium specific, pertaining to the long
pictorial (and also sculptural) tradition in the West. However, I was somewhat
relieved to learn of the now largely forgotten production of photographs repre
senting deceased persons as if they were still awake, sitting up, eyes wide open.
This was not a marginal production, given the place that an eminent photograph
er such as André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, the main author of calling cards in
mid-nineteenth-century Paris, gives it in his 1855 photographic manual (he specifi
cally mentions that each time he was called upon to make a death portrait, he
asked the family not to close the eyes of their beloved).9 Not a marginal produc
tion—and, actually, it was paralleled in America at the same time—but one that
has been almost entirely repressed, perhaps understandably so when one looks at
the disturbing images, especially those of children, which seem to make up the
bulk of the relatively few surviving examples. (Both the practice and its subsequent
repression correspond to the progressive erasure of death as a visible phenome
non, which began at the end of the nineteenth century and accelerated after
World War I—a phenomenon coined by Ariès as "reversed death.")10 But let me
leave this macabre domain and go bucolic instead.
I would have flunked yet another connoisseurship test with a second exam
ple of pseudomorphosis—this time stemming from a canvas hung on a wall of the
American wing of the Art Institute in Chicago. There too, I was dumbfounded
upon approaching it: Why was this work, which I took to be an early Mark Tobey,
next to paintings by George Inness and John Singer Sargent? Of course, Tobey is
an American artist, but given the standard division in our field between pre- and
post-1945 American art, by which the latter is deemed part of the modernist canon
at large (from Matisse and Picasso to Pollock and Pop, etc.) while the former

8. There are countless examples, from Ary Scheffer or Henri Regnault to Claude Monet, attesting
to this persistence. As for the exceptions, there is nothing, I think, between Géricault's morbid series of
decapitated heads from 1820 and Adolf Menzel's drawing reportage on the front of the seven-week
Austro-Prussian war in 1866—nothing much in between, and nothing much after.
9. On Disdéri and his postmortem photography, see Joëlle Bolloch, "Photographie après décès:
pratique, usages et fonction," in Le dernier portrait (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2002), p. 126.
Disdéri's manual was called Renseignements photographiques indispensables à tous.
10. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf, 1881), 5th part. Disdéri's death por
traits partake of a relatively brief period of "spectacularization" of death following the trauma of the
French Revolution: The Parisian morgue built by Haussmann in 1868, for example, was at first a very
popular attraction (the word morgue comes from the verb morguer, which means "to look from above,"
as did the spectators viewing the corpses from a mezzanine keeping them at a distance from possibly
infectious diseases).
To the exception constituted by the open eyes of decapitated heads in the Renaissance
(Medusa, Holofernes) correspond the photographs of men presented as abject or monstrous by those
responsible for their death: Both the bare-chested cadaver of Che Guevara (surrounded by high-rank
ing soldiers of the Bolivian junta, proud of their hunt) and that, emaciated and naked, of Holger
Meins, a member of the Baader-Meinhof group who died in jail at the end of a long hunger strike, have
open eyes.

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134 OCTOBER

John Singer Sargent. Thistles. 1885-89.

Gift of Brooks McCormick. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

keeps being chauvinistically localized, I was wondering if this anomalou

tion was intended, on the part of the curator, as some kind of demotion
Tobey was not thought modernist enough, not forceful enough, to be a
join the great de Koonings in the modern-art galleries a floor or two abo
not have the slightest clue that Thistles, for such is the title of this paint
1885-89, was in fact the work of Sargent, an artist for whom I do not h
sympathy. Had I rushed to read the label, contrary to my habit, my ant
prejudice might have prevented me from looking at this puzzling work
enough (and would have perhaps killed the pseudomorphic frisson in th
In this case too I was happy to find out, in reading the entry devoted to
ing in the catalogue of American collections at the Art Institute of Chicag
was indeed considered most uncharacteristic of Sargent.12

11. That visit took place long before the construction of the Art Institute's new win
Piano, and the new installation of the collection that followed.
12. See Judith A. Barker, Kimberly Rhodes, and Seth A. Thayer, American Arts at the Art
Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Chicago: the Art Institute, 1998), pp. 322-25.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 135

But besides the exceptional nature of the two works I mentioned, it should
be noted that what led me to misdate or misattribute them were highly specific
features—the crude light, the lack of decorum, the oblique point of view, the flab
by posture, the frank unattractiveness of the figure, the color range, in the seven
teenth-century painting; and, in the Sargent: the quasi-alloverness of the composi
tion, the plaster-like matteness, and above all the superimposition of whitish marks
on a variegated background of gray, camel, and maroon hues. The reason why I
underscore this highly specific level of differentiation is that, by contrast, in most
cases of blatant pseudomorphism, the similarities that are summoned are of a
much more generic kind.
As an example of this abusive practice of pseudomorphism, I would mention
the exhibition, curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe in 1984 at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, entitled "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art:
Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. I shall spare you the details of the polemics gen
erated by that show—for the most part the critics of Rubin and Varnedoe were
prompt to assail their notion of "affinity" as epistemologically unsound and politi
cally dubious in its contribution to the myth of an a- or transhistorical "human
nature." But one of the reasons why these critics could be so persuasive in their
somewhat self-righteous dismantling of what was, as they all admitted, a very rich
and challenging exhibition, was the very low level of differentiation that operated
throughout the show, in particular in its section called, precisely, "Affinities": The
lowest point in this regard was, for me, the pairing of a ceremonial shield from
Papua New Guinea and a 1961 "target" painting by Kenneth Noland, which did lit
tle justice to either work.
If I am bringing back this chestnut to the fore, however, it is not in order to
restart an old debate but to refer to the argument made by the anthropologist
William Sturtevant at a symposium held by MoMA in conjunction with the exhibi

Spread
Spread in
in William
WilliamRubin's
Rubin's
introduction to the cata

logue of the exhibition

"Primitivism" in 20th
Century Art. 1984.
■o

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136 OCTOBER

tion. I quote here James Clifford, who summarized Sturtevant's argument

review of the show:

Anthropologists, long familiar with the issue of cultural diffusion versus

independent invention, are not likely to find anything special in the simi
larities between selected tribal and modern objects. An established princi
ple of anthropological comparative method asserts that the greater the
range of cultures, the more likely one is to find similar traits. MoMA's sam
ple is very large, embracing African, Oceanian, North American, and
Arctic "tribal" groups. A second principle, that of the "limitation of possi
bilities," recognizes that invention, while highly diverse, is not infinite. The
human body, for example, with its two eyes, four limbs, bilateral arrange
ment of features, front and back, and so on, will be represented and styl
ized in a limited number of ways. There is thus a priori no reason to claim
evidence for affinity (rather than mere resemblance or coincidence)
because an exhibition of tribal works that seem impressively "modern" in
style can be gathered. An equally striking collection could be made
demonstrating sharp dissimilarities between tribal and modern objects.13

The second principle articulated by Sturtevant, that of the "limitations of possi

bilities," might seem scandalously reductive—for we like to think of the world as infi
nite—but it is nevertheless one that can be very helpful in the analysis of pseudomor
phosis. In fact, the writer who spent most of his career discussing occurrences of this
phenomenon in the natural world—the French sociologist and literary critic Roger
Caillois—constantly referred to Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, the brilliant nine
teenth-century Russian chemist who produced the first periodic table of the ele
ments, as his intellectual hero. Why is that? It is not so much that Mendeleyev classi
fied the chemical elements but that his groundbreaking classification was based on
the hypothesis that these elements are limited in number, a hypothesis that led him
to determine how some squares that he could not yet fill in his finite chessboard of
possibilities—because these predicted elements had not yet been found in nature—
would be filled (and indeed were: Three such elements were discovered during his
lifetime, confirming his scientific discovery, just as the 1919 British solar-eclipse expe
ditions confirmed Einstein's prediction on light-deflection, or, closer to my preoccu
pations, just as the deciphering of the Hittite language, after the death of Ferdinand
de Saussure, confirmed the stunning hypothesis he had made (at the age of 21) of
the existence of a hitherto unknown phoneme in ancient Indo-European languages).
I quote Caillois:

[Mendeleyev] 's feat is more astounding that than of the astronomer who
calculated the orbit and the mass of an invisible planet in the vast sky. He
drew the absolute checkerboard where all discovered elements necessarily
take place, where all elements to be discovered would take place, those
that terrible laboratories would eventually fabricate, those included in
samples sent to us through space by other worlds as meteorites.

13. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern" (1985), in The Predicament of Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 191-92.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 137

For Caillois, Mendeleyev was a structuralist avant la lettre, whose primary goal had
been to delimit the extent of a combinatory corpus by studying the conditions of pos
sibility of the variables it elicited:

The periodic table presents itself as the manifesto of discontinuity and

finitude. It proclaims at the same time the existence of an ordered uni
verse, whose fundamental structures are countable. They are even in
minute number. Despite appearances and the infinite variability of the
universe, it is only an effect of illusion if everything seems possible.
Nothing could be more wrong. There is neither caprice nor fancy, nor
compliant or elastic fringe to welcome some unforeseen novelty: only a
tight web without any cracks, rows mercilessly aligned, if ever staggered.14

This methodological link between Mendeleyev and structuralism was actually

proposed more than fifty years ago by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who mentioned the
Russian chemist when suggesting that something like periodic tables of phonologic
structures in linguistics (predicting all possible languages, past or future) could be
established with the help of mathematics and statistics.15 He did not follow up on his
suggestion—a rather naive dream belonging to the early years of structuralism—but
before offering a summary of his own work on the elementary structures of kinship,
he referred to another example that is perhaps closer to our preoccupations (given
that it deals with objects rather than abstract relations): the research of Jane
Richardson and A. L. Kroeber on female fashion. In their 1940 work entitled Three

Centuries of Women's Dress Fashions: A Quantitative Analysis, Richardson and Kroeber

studied the rhythmic regularities of fashion in the West from the mid-seventeenth
century on.16 What they found is, first, that recurrences are predictable—their peri
odicity is centennial (to use Barthes's paraphrase: "If, at a given moment, dresses are
at their longest, they'll be at their shortest fifty years later and will again be at their
longest another fifty years later"17) ; second, that the periodicity of fashion seems to be
almost entirely unrelated to historical events, contrary to what one might imagine: At
best, the great dramas of history (wars, revolutions) engender a greater stress on the
extremes of the pattern (very, very short/veiy, very long); third, that the distinctive
traits of the dress, its structural elements in the course of three centuries and up to
what was the present of Richardson and Kroeber, remained very limited in number
(skirt length and width, waist length and width, décolletage length and width) ; and,
fourth, that the regular alterations are systematic, affecting all elements at once in a
preordained fashion (for example, the skirt width and the waist width are always in
inverse proportion: When one is thin, the other is wide, and vice versa).

14. Roger Caillois, "Reconnaissance à Mendeleïev," in Cases d'un échiquier (Paris: Gallimard, 1970),
p. 79.
15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Langage et parenté," first published in English in 1951, revised for its
French publication in Anthropologie structurale I (Paris: Plön 1958), p. 66.
16. This work is mimeographed in the Anthropological Records (1940, vol. 5, no. 2) published by the
University of California Press.
17. Roland Barthes, "La mode et les sciences humaines" (1966), reprinted in Oeuvres complètes (Paris:
Seuil, 1994), p. 122.

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138 OCTOBER

This regularity, so surprising at first in a domain that we tend to consider o

of absolute arbitrariness and to value for its freedom and imaginativeness, is
amazing if one considers that the support of the dress, the female body, re
constant (it does not come in that many shapes), and that there are a limite
ber of ways, themselves predictable, to cover it: In other words, for Kroeb
Richardson, Sturtevant's principle of the "limitation of possibilities" is cle
work in the field of fashion. Of course, just as much as Lévi-Strauss's dre
something like the periodic table of language, Kroeber and Richardson's re
is clearly a product of its time, its positivist faith lending it an almost co
effect.18 That fashion—at least that of his own age—was abiding by certain
had already struck Saussure at an early point in his career as a general lingu
1894), as he was pondering the conventionalist conception of the arbitrari
language by the American Sanskrit specialist William D. Whitney. Unlike Ba
Lévi-Strauss, and Richardson/Kroeber, though, the prestructuralist Sa
thought that the principle of the "limitation of possibilities" was one of the
teristics that most distinguished fashion from a system like language: "Ev
fashion that regulates our clothes is not entirely arbitrary: one can't stray b
certain point away from the conditions that are imposed by the human bo
Nothing limits language, on the contrary, in the choice of its means, as n
forbids the association of such and such an idea with such and such a sound."19

18. It is also somewhat flawed, historically, as was pointed out to me by Andrew J. Hamilton, from the
Society of Fellows at Princeton University, whom I thank for allowing me to reproduce his remarks. 1 thank
him as well for discreetly signaling that my holding on to the cliché of fashion as the land of "absolute arbi
trariness" is a product of my own time, and of my own ignorance of the history of fashion:

Readers familiar with garment history might take issue with Richardson and Kroeber's study
and conclusions. Using data up to the 1930s, these scholars were examining what (they per
haps did not fully grasp) was already the end of one of Western fashion's most controlled
periods. The European monarchies of the early-modem and modern periods and their con
tingent social customs, not least among them their treatment of women, maintained certain
garment types, shapes, and comportments. The periodicity Richardson and Kroeber
observed and its seeming independence from historical events were already in sharp decline
by the article's publication in 1940, and all but vanished after the world wars with the emer
gence of the United States as a new superpower and arbiter of style. Since the fin de siècle,
the debut of celebrity designers championed for their imaginativeness, ready-to-wear,
knitwear, synthetic fibers, and mass production changed "fashion" so drastically over the
course of the twentieth century that Richardson and Kroeber's conclusions now seem inac
curate. However, the larger principle of "limitation of possibilities" that their findings may
have evidenced can indeed be widely observed in garment and textile history and, along with
the issue of pseudomorphism, is absolutely essential to its study. For instance, the grid con
structed by warps and wefts creates a "finite chessboard of possibilities" that limits the choices
weavers can make when constructing motifs. For this reason, many highland Andean textile
motifs can be strikingly similar to those found in Turkish kilim textiles, even though there is
no "genetic" relationship between them.

19. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1972),p. 110.
This passage is an obvious interpolation by the editors of the course—in other words, it does not figure in
any of Saussure 's three sets of lectures (1907, 1908-9, 1910-11) as transcribed by his students. As Tullio de
Mauro noted, the passage in question is, rather, based on Saussure 's early notes for an article on Whitney;
see Ferdinand de Saussure, Écrits de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 211.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 139

Much later, after he had developed a concept of the arbitrariness of the sign that
far surpassed in complexity that of Whitney (constituting in fact a critique of it)
and opposed this fundamental arbitrariness to the proclivity of any sign system
(including language) towards motivation (notably through "analogic creation"),
Saussure would refer again to fashion. It was to discuss the assimilation of phonetic
changes in the history of a given language to those in fashion, proposed by certain
linguists by way of an explanation: The similarity does not explain much, wrote
Saussure, because no one has ever explained the changes in fashion: "One only
knows that they depend on the laws of imitation, which concern philosophers a
great deal. This 'explanation' thus does not solve the question, but it has the
advantage over the others of placing it in the context of a larger question. The
principle of phonetic changes would thus be purely psychological. There is imita
tion, but where does the process start? There lies the mystery, on which we shall
throw no more light in phonetics than in fashion."20
But let's come back to Lévi-Strauss. His essay "Split Representation in the Art
of Asia and America," written in New York during World War II, is one of the most
interesting investigations of the phenomenon of pseudomorphosis ever attempt
ed. After having scoffed at the abusive search for analogies in different cultures
that led so many scholars to imagine improbable cultural contacts, Lévi-Strauss
exclaims: "And yet, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies presented by
Northwest Coast and ancient Chinese art."21 While he lists all the traits that are

similar in these various art forms, Lévi-Strauss categorically rejects the hypothesis
of human migrations advanced by the "diffusionist" school of anthropology, whose

20. Ferdinand de Saussure, Premier cours de linguistique générale (1907) d'après les cahiers d'Alber
Riedlinger, ed. and trans. Eisuke Komatsu and George Wolf (Oxford: Pergamon, 1996), p. 41a (transla
tion slightly modified). The passage appears almost as such in the 1916 edition of the course (th
major change is the substitution of "psychologists" for "philosophers"). See Tullio de Mauro's edition
p. 208.
21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 246.

Images from a full-page

illustration in the original
edition of Claude Lévi
Strauss 's Anthropologie
structurale (1958).

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140 OCTOBER

demonstrations were indeed ridiculously weak at the time. Even though he do

not use the term, Lévi-Strauss defines this phenomenon exactly in the same m
ner as Panofsky's pseudomorphosis: "The emergence of a form A, morphologica
analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it fro
genetic point of view." He condemns the diffusionist anthropologists because t
stretch historical facts in order to create the illusion of a genetic relatio
Furthermore, he remarks, even if their wildest hypotheses were confirmed, t
would not explain why a cultural trait, borrowed and diffused over a very lo
period of time, would have remained the same—stability is no less mysterious t
change. "External connections can explain transmission," he writes, "but o
internal connections can account for persistence."22
The elegant hypothesis proposed by Lévi-Strauss, after several long detou
and a complex analysis that I cannot even attempt to reconstruct here, is that
the cultures in which he finds similar "split representations" were what he c
"mask cultures," for which the human body was the original support of image-
ing (thus the importance of tattoo in several of them) and whose social hiera
chies were regimented by masquerade. He even does what I would call a Panof
number—by which I refer to the extraordinary series of "refutations of the pr
to the contrary" that lend so much flavor to the long footnotes of Renaissance
Renascences—he explains why the "split representation" does not occur in certa
"mask cultures" by showing that in such cultures, the mask does not have the s
constitutive function (no longer referring to ancestry and encoding a hierarchy
genealogies, it belongs to a pantheon of gods whose image is only the occasion
garment of an actor participating in a specific ritual).
I do not know if Lévi-Strauss's argument has been disproved—my guess i
that it has not, not because it is foolproof, of course, but simply because it does
seem to have interested the specialists in the field.23 I would also add that, later
life, responding to new data gathered by specialists of prehistory, he would be
hostile to certain aspects of diffusionist theory—but still without accepting
idea that prehistoric contacts could provide a stronger explanation of the
nomenon he is tackling. It is perhaps surprising, given Lévi-Strauss's great kno
edge of Saussure's work, that at this point he did not think of consulting anew
early scholarship of the great Swiss linguist—which forms the basis of all the
sages concerning etymology in his Course of General Linguistics, passages that
too often ignored by Saussure's admirers—for it would have helped him, if not
reconcile the genetic and structural points of view, at least to accept the idea t
the examination of structural analogies can, under certain circumstances, lead
the discovery of genetic filiations and continuities. But that is another story, which
I do not want to dwell on here: As a modernist, I do not feel particularly at e
with discussing issues pertaining to the long duration.

22. Ibid., p. 258.

23. My friend Marcel Hénaff, who teaches anthropology at UC San Diego, asked Lévi-Strauss on
behalf if his essay had ever been commented on (discussed, approved, rebutted) by his peers.
laconic answer was: no.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 141

So I'll jump to an example of recent pseudomorphosis—one that I have

already used elsewhere, but to which I cannot find a more telling substitute.24
In February 1973, the slick, international, Milan-based art magazine Flash
Art carried an advertisement, placed by Galerie m Bochum, in which three works
of art were reproduced. Each of them was by a different artist, but the illustra
tions had something in common: They were all doubly captioned; that is, each
work was given its original date and attribution (Jan Schoonhoven, 1962;
François Morellet, ca. 1958; and Oskar Holweck, ca. 1958) but was also ascribed
to the American artist Sol LeWitt, this time with a different date (1969, 1972,
and 1972, respectively). In case one would not have grasped the content of the
double attributions and dates, the ad copy read: "Which work of what European
artist of the sphere of the Neue Konkrete Kunst will be taken next by Sol LeWitt
for a copy of his newest works—which will be propagated with as much publicity
as his own innovation?"
The subtext of the ad is well known. It is a situation that began after World
War II and whose origin has been traced by Serge Guilbaut in his book How New
York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, as well as by other social art historians, a situation
that one could characterize as the cultural imperialism of the United States, a
symptom of which was the growing takeover of the international art market by
American dealers. Furthermore, the situation intensified during the '60s in post
war Germany, where the American omnipresence (notably at Documenta) func
tioned as a buffer against the memory of the recent national (Nazi) past. By the
early '70s, even if it was soon to be affected by the 1973 oil crisis, the American
art market clearly dominated its European counterpart, the German sector
being certainly the most directly affected by this preeminence.
Let us look at the corpus delicti. One cannot but agree that the similarity
to which the ad points is quite puzzling. For very little indeed seems to differen
tiate François Morellet's 4 Double Grids (0°, 22.5°, 45°, 67.5°) of 1958 and Sol
LeWitt's Circles, grids and arcs from four corners and four sides of 1972. Let me state
at the outset that I do not subscribe at all to the thesis set forth in the ad—basi

cally, that we are presented with a case of plagiarism. Even if LeWitt had not
been known as one of the least competitive artists in the New York art scene, a
very quick glance at his career provides evidence enough that he would not have
needed to rely upon a European model to arrive at his startling overlapping of
grids. But once the hysterical tone of the attack is removed, the comparison is by
no means to be discarded.

Let's read first the response of the accused, Sol LeWitt, published in Flash
Art in June 1973 and deemed important enough by the artist to be reprinted it
the catalogue of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in

24. For a more elaborate discussion of this episode, see my article "François Morellet/Sol LeWitt:
A Case Study," in Künstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII Internationalen Kongresses
für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 15-20 Juli 1992, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1993), pp. 305-18.

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142 OCTOBER

TV
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Le Witt
Witt for
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propagated with much publicity as
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Kunst wird Sol Le Witt als Vorlage
für
fur seine neuesten — mit viel Publi
city als eigenständige
eigenstandige Innovation
propagierten — Werke auswahlen?
auswählen?

Full-page advertisement placed by Galerie m Bochum,

in the February 1973 issue q/Tlash Art, Milan.

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 143

1978: "Before last summer," writes Le Witt, "I never saw a work by Morellet; the
drawing described, 'Arcs, Circles & Grids,' is the 195th and last variation of all
the combinations of these forms and cannot be fully understood as an isolated
work. In the Morellet illustration there are only grids. In my drawings there are
arcs from sides and corners, and circles as well as grids." The last point seems at
first sight trivial, for in those two "similar" but different weavings of superim
posed meshes, the viewer is much more likely to notice the similarity of the total
effect rather than the differences of the means: Be it grids only in the case of
Morellet, or grids, arcs, and circles in the case of LeWitt, the result of their
superimposition is that of an allover surface saturated by a constellation of opti
cal flickers, a bombardment of vibrating circles competing for our shifting atten
tion much like the ripples produced on the surface of a lake by the droplets of a
light spring rain. But LeWitt is right in pointing to the difference, for his image,
unlike Morellet's, is the product of a cumulation—it is, as he states very clearly,
the "last variation of all the combinations" exposed in the book he published in
1972 entitled Arcs, from corners & sides, circles, & grids and all their combinations.
The book in question, divided in four parts, is based on an additive process. A
caption for each independent page is given at the beginning of each of the four
"chapters." The first part deals with arcs "from corners and sides": Its first page
shows concentric arcs from one corner; the second, a superimposition of con
centric arcs from two adjacent corners; the third, of arcs from two opposite cor
ners, then from three, then from four; then come the arcs from the sides; then
all the possible combinations of these two classes of arcs (the forty-eighth and
last page of this "chapter" showing, of course, "arcs from four corners and four
sides"). The second part begins with a set of concentric circles to which is super
imposed, in exactly the same order (and number of pages), the series previously
described. In the third part, the constant unit is changed—it is not the set of cir
cles anymore but an orthogonal grid—but the progressive superimposition is
otherwise repeated. The last chapter, as expected, adds both the set of circles
and the grid as constant units to the same progressive series—the last image
being, as mentioned above, Circles, grids and arcs from four corners and four sides.
What is striking in Le Witt's series of 195 images (and my very brief descrip
tion can only give a vague sense of it) is the tedious exhaustiveness of the cumu
lative operation and the extreme de-dramatization of the serial approach, some
thing that governs all his work from 1966 on but which was entirely ignored in
the comparison made in the Galerie M ad. There is no surprise in LeWitt's sys
tem and no economy: His world is obsessional—he has to entirely unfold the ele
mentary systems he uses, up to their entropie end. As Rosalind Krauss has beauti
fully shown, his art never does what I just did in describing his book: It never says
et cetera.25

25. See Rosalind E. Krauss, "LeWitt in Progress" (1977), reprinted in The Originality of the Avant
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 245-58.

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144 OCTOBER

François Morellet. 4 double grids 0°, 22°5, 45°, 67°5. 1958.

© AD AGP François Morellet.

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 145
On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes

' . ,V . i" v., * .;■

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195. Circles, grids and arcs from four corners and four sides.

Sol LeWitt. Circles, grids and arcs

from four corners and four sides.
195 th page of the book entitled Arcs,
from corners & sides, circles & grids
and all their combinations. 1972.
© 2015 The LeWitt Estate / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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146 OCTOBER

This is not at all the case in Morellet's

_

work. To be sure, both artists use systems.

But Morellet's art is riddled with surprises. In
front of Interference of 2 Different Networks of
Lines 0°, 1° of 1955, one has a hard time
reading the image as what it is, a simple
superimposition of two sets of equidistant
parallel lines, the first of which being hori
zontal and the other, with a wider spacing
between the lines, placed at a very slight
angle. Or that the odd disorder of 2 Grids of
Dashes 0°, 14° is the result of the superimposi
tion of perfectly regular grids (I would never
have been able to figure this out without the
help of the diagram provided by the artist,
who makes no mystery of his systems). Or
again, in Red over Light Red, over Red, over Dark
Red, over Black and over White from 1953, it is
only thanks to the much more famous
demonstrations done by Joseph Albers in his
Homage to the Square series (begun in 1950)
that we accept without too much incredulity
the empirical fact that the central red square
remains rigorously identical in the five differ
ent panels. We could find endless examples
of such "surprises" in Morellet's art, especial
ly in his superimpositions, and, of course,
this aesthetics of variety has very little to do
with the idea of exhaustiveness. It is as

though LeWitt and Morellet were, through

almost similar means and with almost similar

end products, conveying entirely opposite

messages: One has to do with control, order,
Top:
Top:
Morellet. Interference
Morellet.
of 2 dif Inter
ferent
ferent
networks of lines 0°, 1°.
andnetworks
in some sense boredom (our first reac of
1955. tion while leafing through Le Witt's book is to
Middle: Morellet. 2 grids of dashes 0°, say: "Enough, I've got it, I've got the idea"),
14°. 1956. the other has to do with the loss of control,
Bottom: Morellet. Explanatory diagram,
with the disorder emerging from an accumu
c. 1977.
lation of order, and with astonishment.
All © AD AGP François Morellet.
There is one last point to which I
would like to return in LeWitt's declaration,
for it will lead me back to the issue of "diffu

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 147

sion versus independent invention" discussed by anthropologists. Answering Flash

Art's ad, LeWitt wrote: "Before last summer [the summer of 1972] I never saw a
work by Morellet." Yet in the same Museum of Modern Art catalogue that reprint
ed this statement, one can read an entirely different declaration by the artist with
regard to the same issue. In a caption for Circles, grids and arcs from four corners and
four sides, and after having explained that it was part of a book, LeWitt writes:

The French artist François Morellet had previously done drawing using
grids with a similar spacing. Although at the time I was unfamiliar with
his work, it was possible that I had seen one reproduced or on view at
The Museum of Modern Art's 'The Responsive Eye' exhibition. When I
became aware of the similarities of our work, I abandoned mine. I am
sorry if I caused him discomfort, since I regard him as an able artist.

(Let's ignore the rather patronizing qualifier "able" used by LeWitt: After all,
he was still rather annoyed at the ad and had apparently been led to believe that
the various artists it invoked had instigated it.) Now, how can we account for this
contradiction? Was LeWitt lying by omission in the first statement and in the sec
ond statement finally admitting his debt in
the face of the evidence? I do not think so.
I would rather say that LeWitt was right
both times: He had both seen and not seen

some of Morellet's works prior to the sum

mer of 1972. That is, he had seen the par
ticular Morellet grid illustrated in the Flash
Art ad at the Responsive Eye exhibition held
in 1965, but in the context of that show,
entirely devoted to Op art (and derided by
all American critics as the pinnacle of
kitsch), he could not but have missed the
systematicity of the work in question. In
the context of the show, it could not help
but appear as another example of the Bridget Riley.
Riley. Current.
Current. 1964.
1964.
moiré effect so favored by Op artists such
as Bridget Riley, whose Current of 1964 was reproduced opposite it in the cata
logue. Ergo: The diffusionist explanation (and the notion of "influence" that goes
with it) is of no help with regard to understanding the phenomenon of pseudo
morphosis; in order for a form to be received in a context different from that of its
origin, it must first of all be receivable. Not everything is possible at all times and
in all places, to paraphrase Wölfflin.26

26. "Not everything is possible at all times." Wölfflin, "Pro domo" (1920); French translation in
Réflexion sur l'histoire de l'art (Paris: Klincksieck, 1982), p. 45.

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148 OCTOBER

I would even say that had LeWitt known about the fact that Morelle
was system-based rather than yet another Op-art trick, he would have b
"see" it, to relate to it, rather than rush by, indifferent—and maybe even to
the tenuous level at which there is indeed some affinity between Morellet
and the 195 pages of his own book. What I mean by this is that, despite t
ble differences in the formation of the two artists—one steeped in the t
European geometric abstraction, the other a member of the Minimalist g
which never hid its profound contempt for this tradition—they used a simila
gy within a similar set number of possibilities and for a similar purpose, eve
purpose did not have the same exact meaning for both of them. I will call th
egy, at least in the two works alluded to in Rash Art, the modular grid; I
the general purpose one of non-compositionality.

Morellet. From Yellow

to Purple. 1956.
© AD AGP François
Morellet.

In passing, it should be noted that the pseudomorphic relationship between

LeWitt and Morellet is not in any way exceptional. One could mention many pair
ings of this kind, for example between a work by Morellet (From Yellow to Violet, 1956)
and one by Frank Stella {Jasper's Dilemma, 1963), or—with a bigger temporal gap—
between a painting by Olga Rozanova (Green Stripe, 1917-18) and one by Barnett
Newman (End of Silence, 1949); or between Karl Ioganson's sculptures of 1921 and
Kenneth Snelson's in the '60s. In all these cases we know that the author of B had
never seen A, had not even heard of the author of A. There are countless cases of
such striking similarities in twentieth-century art, particularly within the corpus of
abstraction, simply because a vast cohort of artists got what I call the non-composi
tion bug. And if you want not to compose, the possibilities are not infinite.
What lesson do I draw from this? Essentially, that pseudomorphosis is not
necessarily entirely pseudo, but that one has to watch out in order to avoid falling
into the Noland/Papua trap. If two objects look the same, it does not mean that
they have much in common—much less that they have the same meaning. But if

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On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes 149

they have something in common, this might reside in their strategy, or at least in
their conditions of possibility. Soviet Constructivists like Rodchenko or Ioganson
and Minimalist sculptors like Le Witt or Snelson were all in search of a non-compo
sitional mode. For the former group, it was a matter of finding a non-subjective,
"scientific" method that would no longer belong to bourgeois aesthetics but would
take part in the collective elaboration of a new ethos for the emerging socialist
society. For the latter, it was a matter of discovering a non-subjective method, a
logical yet antirational and even anti-scientific one, which would take part in a rad
ical denunciation of Cartesian rationalism, the scourge that had brought the
Holocaust and Hiroshima to mankind. The ideology of these two groups diverged
on most issues. If they used the same strategy toward the same purpose (non-com
position, non-subjectivity), the meaning of this strategy and of this purpose was for
them utterly different.
Following my visit to the museum in Rouen, I was itching to find out about
what made Young Woman in Her Death Bed possible, and whether there was some
thing in the society of seventeenth-century Flanders in common with that of mid
nineteenth-century France or America that had produced such disturbing pho
tographs of dead children with eyes wide open. But something in common, as
well, in the cultures of these two societies soon after the occurrences of such
works, something that would have motivated their repression and thus destruction
and would explain why they seem so exceptional today. I should also note again
that the open eyes are by no means the only thing that triggered in me this imme
diate conviction, when looking at the seventeenth-century painting in Rouen, that
I was in front of a nineteenth-century painting (I would have felt just the same if
the young woman's eyes were closed)—they were just the tip of the iceberg. I am
still itching to, of course, and probably forever will be, being a specialist of neither
period. The pseudomorphosis in that case might indeed be pseudo, a total fluke,
but if it is not, the flash that floored me could be the occasion of a redistribution
of the art-historical cards—which is, as far as I am concerned, the only really inter
esting part of the game in which we are all so passionately participating.

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