Martin Kemp had an unconventional start to his career as an art historian and is now rewriting the way the subject is approached. Helen Davies meets him
Martin Kemp's career as an art historian began with him "lurking" at the back of art history lectures in the early 1960s at Cambridge University. Lurking - because he was then an undergraduate studying natural sciences. He admits that he did look rather conspicuous, but he soon fell under the spell of Nikolaus Pevsner and Ernst Gombrich, then guest lecturers, and abandoned the laboratory for the gallery and a world that previously he had viewed only from behind red ropes. Today he is professor of the history of art at Oxford University and a fellow of Trinity College.
Kemp was appointed to a chair at Oxford in 1995 with a brief to develop art history as a full degree. He founded the Centre for Visual Studies in 1999, and the first students will graduate next summer. He says: "It was crazy that a university with one of the world's greatest collections of visual culture didn't have an undergraduate degree."
During Kemp's first academic appointment at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada - where he arrived with a suitcase full of slides and taught the entire history of art in a year - he attracted hate mail from local artists after he mercilessly criticised their work in the Halifax Mail-Star . "I was a really arrogant young prick," he admits.
It was with the publication of his Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man in 1981 that he made his reputation. The book aimed to be a full biography of the artist, his works and his life. It took almost 20 years to write and secured his position as a leading authority on Leonardo. Today, it is a standard reference.
"I felt that all the treatments of Leonardo, Leonardo as an artist, Leonardo as a botanist, Leonardo as a geologist, engineer and so on somehow or other were missing the point," Kemp says. "I was working through anatomical drawings when big pennies started to drop. It wasn't a eureka moment, but it seemed right. There was a consistent core that explained, albeit in a way that makes considerable demands on the reader, that these were not separate activities but were motivated by a common set of beliefs as to how the human mind can operate in the visual world. I got a very clear sense of what actually was quite a compact set of central principles at work in Leonardo. There was a core of simplicity that radiated out into any area of the natural or human world."
But despite rave reviews - Gombrich called it "masterly" - and its appearance on university reading lists in the UK and the US, the book was not in print for long. Kemp even bought up the remaining 80 copies in the publishers' warehouse and gave them to his students. The original edition is said to have been spotted recently on the internet selling for £300.
As of this year, students no longer need to scour libraries and second-hand booksellers for a copy. The book has been reprinted with a new introduction to celebrate its 25th anniversary, which also coincides with "Universal Leonardo", a European-wide series of exhibitions that Kemp has curated, and a forthcoming exhibition on Leonardo at the Victoria and Albert Museum this autumn, another Kemp project.
The process of re-editing "wasn't as gruesome as I thought it might be", says Kemp. "I thought it might be absolutely cringe-making. The book was much more orthodox art history than I would do now, with more of the standard moves. My style of writing has changed. I now work on a rather looser, more flexible structure of prose, I hope. I am more inventive with how I use sentences, their length, format, paragraph lengths and internal rhythm of the text, which I now treat in a more pacey way."
This more vigorous sense of style is what Kemp brought to Leonardo , a brief introduction commissioned as part of Oxford University Press's Very Short Introduction series, written in ten days sitting beside the swimming pool at the Villa Vignamaggio in Tuscany and published in 2004. For many students, this smaller, more free-ranging and thematic approach to Leonardo serves as a textbook. "Early on I gave a copy to the head porter at Trinity, before I gave a copy to the (college) president, I have to say, and he came in next day to say that he couldn't put it down." Right now it is whizzing off the shelves, boosted by the phenomenal success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and the film of that book.
But there is more to Kemp than Leonardo scholarship. The work he has produced with students in mind is The Oxford History of Western Art , an introductory volume under his editorship that was written with a backward glance at Gombrich's The Story of Art and Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages , two standard textbooks. It is now on all university reading lists.
"When Gombrich wrote his book, art history was a much more unified pursuit and there was a general agreement as to what art history was doing," says Kemp. "It seemed to me that there could be a different way of putting it together, a way that was more modular and not so much a seamless story. I felt strongly that we needed the so-called applied arts, photography and so on. The big figures - Michelangelo, Leonardo and Rembrandt - get a decent showing in the Oxford book but not the normal conspicuous dominance. It was intended to be read from any starting point and was consciously student oriented." The large number of illustrations in the book was founded on Kemp's conviction that the centre of the history of art "depends upon the analysis of what is irreducibly visual about artefacts".
Like so many grammar school boys of the postwar baby boom, Kemp's cultural horizons were transformed at university, where, he says, he "was given an education not so much by those who were trying to teach me, but by other students". He has continued to eschew the confines of academe and in Who's Who lists his hobbies as "hockey, running and avoiding academics". This he does by living in Woodstock, north of Oxford - close to the university but not "saturated by academics". His favourite galleries are the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Frick Collection in New York.
Kemp has also retained more than a keen interest in curating his own exhibitions. He set up ArtAkt, a joint venture with Marina Wallace of Central St Martins College of Art and Design. He and Wallace are working on a forthcoming exhibition at the Hayward Gallery titled Sex , a follow-up to Spectacular Bodies . He has been assured that curating an exhibition or reorganising a gallery, both serious intellectual pursuits with a public audience, will be counted as part of the research assessment exercise. "They have a public impact and influence, probably more than your average academic monograph."
Kemp still admits to a "certain intensity of working and a temperament that can be fairly explosive". But now, he thinks, his arrogance has gone and he is "just a slightly scary enthusiast".