Art history and attribution

The thirty-ninth entry is l’historique des expositions, and the noun that opens it is one English has never had on its own. French keeps two words where we keep one. L’histoire is history as a subject and a story as a thing told: l’histoire de l’art, raconter une histoire. L’historique, masculine and made out of the adjective, is narrower and colder — the ordered record of everything that has happened to one particular thing. L’historique d’un dossier, l’historique de navigation, l’historique des versions, and on this page l’historique des expositions, the list of every show a picture has been lent to. Promoting an adjective to a masculine noun is an ordinary move in French — le quotidien, l’essentiel, le comique — and English cannot follow it here, so it changes noun instead: « the log », « the record », « the track record », « the exhibition history ». One warning comes with all this. Never reach for « historic », which in English says that a thing mattered. L’historique claims nothing of the kind. It only lists.