Pictures and Tears

James Elkins opens with a strange puzzle: centuries of written accounts describe viewers sobbing, fainting, or trembling before paintings, yet almost no one today cries in a museum, and those who do often feel embarrassed about it. His central argument is that this isn't because paintings got worse or viewers got colder, but because the entire apparatus of modern art appreciation — the hushed galleries, the wall labels, the art-historical vocabulary of style and technique — actively trains people toward detached, analytical looking and away from the kind of emotional surrender that produces tears.

Why this matters, in Elkins's telling, is that it exposes a hidden cost of art education and connoisseurship: the more fluently we learn to talk about composition, provenance, and influence, the less available we may become to being simply overwhelmed by an image. He treats crying not as sentimental weakness but as a data point about a mode of engagement — direct, bodily, undefended — that professionalized art culture has quietly pushed to the margins, and he goes looking for it in historical letters, personal testimonies, and his own solicited stories from readers.

Who should read it

Museum-goers, art students, and anyone who has ever felt oddly unmoved standing in front of a celebrated masterpiece will find this a candid, self-questioning look at what gallery-going trains us to feel and not feel. It's less useful as art history proper than as a meditation on emotional literacy around images.

About the author

James Elkins is an American art historian and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, known for writing about vision, images, and the psychology of looking rather than conventional art-historical scholarship.