Art History Today

The Artist’s Studio & the Academic Tradition.

Last week the artist’s studio was presented as an introspective space; an area where the painter contemplated himself either through the self-portrait in the studio, or the studio itself, which could be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s mind. This probably gave the impression of a solitary space, a place into which no other soul intruded. However, the artist’s studio was not only a space for reflection, but a realm where information was conveyed betweenn painter and others through the process of teaching.  This could take many forms: the rational, disciplined space of the academy (Carracci, above); the artist’s own private studio in which he taught paying pupils (Rembrandt, right ); an indeterminate space where pupils learnt through the division of labour (Raphael’s bottega); family concern where relatives, as well as external members, cooperated in the enterprise of the workshop (Tintoretto).

Learning could take many different forms. A pupil could be given the task of copying the artist’s work, trying to reproduce their style, and the master would subsequently evaluate it, correcting it where necessary, as in this fascinating example from Rembrandt’s private school in Amsterdam. Notice how the master has imposed his terribilita on the pupil’s (Constantin van Renesse) tentative Annunciation; Rembrandt’s angel has a grandeur that the puny original couldn’t hope to match. And note that in the drawing in the previous section, Rembrandt is shown amongst his pupils- this is a hands-on situation. However, there could be a much more systematic, hierarchically organised programme of study; the pupil would be allocated certain tasks depending on their place in the pecking order.

It is instructive to examine an image of a workshop by the Flemish engraver Cornelius Cort, after Jan van der Straet, and so perhaps a reflection of his own studio. Equally, as the title of Cort’s print suggests, it is meant to show the mechanics of painting, its operations broken down into parts within the studio. The objects that we see symbolise learning in the studio. The statues of Venus stand for female beauty; the books refer to humanist knowledge; the skulls and animal skeletons the importance of anatomy. In this image we get a striking sense of how important learnedness was in the artist’s studio. The young apprentices in van der Straet’s studio not only draw the limbs of the body, the effects of light and shadow on classical sculpture but also pore over texts, some of which are likely to be anatomical manuals. The elderly man who dissects the arm of the skeleton may be the master but he is more likely to be an older artist delegated to supervise the work of the pupils. It is likely that the master is the artist working on a large history painting at the back of the studio, which is labelled “Pictura”. What this print hints at is a division of labour within the Flemish studio; it also promotes the idea of an advertisement for the painter’s studio, a site of artistic skill and humanist virtue, qualities that the master hopes his pupils will learn from his teaching. (See Giles Waterfield’s discussion in The Artist’s Studio, 18.).  In another image of the workshop, this time from 17^th century Rome, perhaps illustrating the working practices of the Academy of St Luke (above), we see even sharper sub-divisions of painting. Amongst the studio activities we see a dissection of a cadaver, study of a statuette, lessons in geometry, the mapping out of a cartoon observed by a teacher, the sketching of a lower limb, and the inspection of a set of eyes drawn by a pupil. The latter would part of the curriculum in the Bolognese academy of Annibale Carracci, his relatives and external pupils. Here’s a sample of a set of drawn eyes showing you the progression from sketchy lines to a fully realized organ.  

 

As Carl Goldstein states in his survey of the academy in western art (Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art, (30-6), the organisation should be distinguished from other entities like workshops, clubs and schools, although there was inevitably a certain amount of overlap. Clubs existed in the early modern to bind artists, intellectuals and men of virtue together; the workshop would be an additional presence but not the same as a workshop in itself. There were differences too: a workshop would not encourage the study of literature and poetry, or music. For example, this painting by Eustache Le Sueur of members of the French Academy, set up in 1642, shows a fairly relaxed gathering of fellows, some of whom paint, play music and even stroke dogs!  This low key attitude would eventually be swept away by the reforms of Louis XIV. Painters would be made to think for the King, paint for the King! Nicolas Loir’s grand  Allegory on the Founding of the Academy of Painting and Sculptor of 1666 leaves you in no doubt who is calling the shots here. Female personifications of Painting and Sculpture are unravelled by Old Father Time, while a portrait of Le roi, accompanied by Fame and Wisdom, presides over all. The artist’s studio has turned into something that is the equivalent of the French Civil Service!

 

  The central tenet of the workshop would be learning from the masters, and this would entail lots of copying, both paintings, drawings and classical sculpture. The latter was especially important because of its figurative nature; the representation of the body was a key humanist idea that pupils were expected to adhere to. The emphasis on copying the works of the past would bring the working space closer to the idea of a school. Michelangelo’s famous ‘Battle of Cascina’ cartoon, destroyed through the enthusiasm of other artists, was called a “school” of art, according to his biographer Giorgio Vasari. Vasari seems to have been making a direct connection between the practice of copying and the notion of a “school.”  In an important representation of the renaissance artist Bandinelli’s workshop, drawing is obviously highly important, but another theme is suggested allusively by the sad, “melancholic” pose of a pupil who immediately conjures up the introspection and self-reflexivity we saw in the artist’s studio last week.  This note of sadness chimes in with the light shown in the image, which conveys the idea of inner illumination. Goldstein links this use of light to the concept of disegno, which on the one hand can signify drawing, but also a kind of inner, hidden design located in the artist’s mind. What Bandinelli was seeking to bring to his art was intellectual respectability- a body of theory to underscore the manual craft of drawing. This is taking the studio further away from a space in which manual functions are carried out and nearer to a philosophical view of art, which is essential to the intellectual theory behind the academy.

 

The idea of the academy brings us back to teaching, because the name refers to the grove of trees where Plato taught his pupils philosophy. Yet an academy in Plato’s sense would be about talking and discussion, usually about morals and ethics- not about art. Plato and art do come into contact in the renaissance in Raphael’s seminal fresco, the School of Athens where the young master shows himself in the company of Plato, Aristotle and other wise men. This image would serve other artists who wanted to make connections between philosophy and painting, most conspicuously in the art and writings of the seventeenth-century painter Pietro Testa, who in his Liceo or Lyceum- another philosophical teaching space- incorporates Plato and Aristotle as well as allegorical figures referring to the three arts: painting, sculpture and architecture. I’m not even going to attempt to unravel Testa’s abstruse allegory, and anyway the use of philosophers in 17^th century representations of the academy is a complex issue which deserves detailed consideration. Essentially it seems to boil down to the idea of discourse in the workshop and studio: it wasn’t “academic” enough to just practice the art of painting; it had to be discussed, analysed and presented as a set of theoretical precepts set  within in a teaching programme.

 

As should be obvious by now, the academy was exclusively a male space, though the female form was drawn, mainly from classical statues. Until the late 19^th century, women were excluded from academic life, although there were plenty of situations where they did paint, earn honours and distinction. Yet, it must be stressed that success stories like Sophonisba Auguisolla, Angelica Kaufmann and Artemisia Gentileschi were rare. Generally, women were barred from practicing the highest form of painting, so they fell back on the so-called lesser genres. They were definitely not history painters, but had to settle for painting still-life, portraits and types of art at the lower end of the academic hierarchy. However, with women gaining more economic independence, and with a thaw in the academy’s attitudes towards them, opportunities became more available. Private academies appeared such as Heatherley’s School in Newman St, London, and most significantly of all the Slade School of Art, which from its opening in 1871 admitted women to its classes. Women were also granted the right to draw and paint from male and female models. Reproduced in Waterfield is Elizabeth Brown’s Female Figure Lying on a Bed, which won first prize (equal) in the Slade Figure Painting Prize in 1931. More well-known than Brown is Gwen John who turned out to be one of the Slade’s greatest pupils. John was a pupil at the Slade between 1895-98. At the end of that stint John went to Paris and studied under Whistler at the Académie Carmen. A painting of John’s room in the rue du Cherche Midi, Paris, nicely encapsulates the privacy and intimacy of her painting space. The room’s pared down minimalism suggests a retreat to the interior away from the crowded and competitive Slade School of Art. As Greer has said of Gwen John, she “painted her paintings less and less, leaving the ground showing through, never touching the canvas twice, in the same place, risking failure with every move. While her brother (Augustus John) spread himself very thinly, she withdrew into a single drop, forever compressing and concentrating her art and her feelings to an inner end, the intense, energetic, but utterly circumscribed life of a mystic.” See Greer, The Obstacle Race, 110).Something of that retreating nature is present in this painting which does suggest the hermeticism of a saint crossed with the atmosphere of a bohemian studio.

 

Of course women had entered the studio as wives, lovers and models, and in some cases both. Gwen John had been model and lover to the sculptor Rodin, for example. Models are obviously vital to the practice of the artist, and the nude model comes to symbolise a variety of different artist’s studios encountered in the history of art. William Orpen’s ironically titled The English Nude of 1900  –Orpen was born in Dublin- is wonderfully realistic.This portrait of his mistress references a number of famous nudes: Emily Scobel’s unflinching gaze owes something to Manet’s success de scandale Olympia of 1865;  and the pose of Orphen’s nude is taken from Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, modelled by his own mistress Hendricje Stoffels. In this clever and knowing representation of the artist’s model, Orpen locates the type in the history of the studio whilst conveying the overlap of academy, gender and family within the artist’s habitat.

Inside the Artist’s Studio

As I’m busy for the next few months and don’t really have time to write anything new, I’m going to do what I did last term- do posts adapted from lectures on the term’s theme. This term it’s the topic of the Artist’s Studio, a course I developed after attending an exhibition in 2009. I’ve used Giles Waterfield’s book on the subject to create a framework for the lectures- I’ll be interweaving my own thoughts and ideas within this.

Some key ideas that Waterfield says should be kept in mind are the following. “How have artists’ studios been seen by the artists who occupy them, and by other artists, and by their publics, over the past four hundred years? What are the myths that have developed around this type of space? Do certain ideas, or motifs, characterise depictions of the artist’s studio? And can types of studios be arranged into valid categories? These are some of the issues that this book, and the exhibition that inspired it, attempt to illuminate, using examples primarily taken from the British tradition.” (The Artist’s Studio, 1).

If we start in the renaissance period we can immediately see a variety of contexts for the idea of the studio. Studio comes from studiolo, meaning a room for contemplation, like a study. This differs from the renaissance workshop or bottega. Although these two rooms would have different functions, they could be in the same building. Waterfield gives the example of Tintoretto who would have worked and supervised painting operations in his bottega, but he would have had a studiolo in which he could quietly ponder ideas for his paintings, or even attend to business matters there.  Already we see here a division emerging that might be characterised as a split based on the mind/body dichotomy. The private room could be likened to the mind; by contrast, the busy workshop would be analogous to the outward body, visible and busily functioning. We can also see division occurring between the idea of contemplation and that of acting, although that is to simplify. An artist like Raphael could be working in his own industrious bottega, but that would not stop him from contemplating the art he was working on amidst the din and distractions. His studiolo was in his head.

The image of the artist in their studio constitutes a genre in itself, but where did it originate? There are not many examples of the painter at work in their studio in the renaissance period; artists would not have felt the need to represent themselves at work in their studio, especially as there wouldn’t have been a market for it. The “studio” appears in the very composition itself with its draperies and figures suggesting drawing and modelling respectively. The odd representations of the artist in their studio don’t throw much light on it as an idea in the renaissance. In this engraving of young Raphael in a corner of his studio, we have a portrait of the man, not an image of how he worked, even though he is placed next to artistic tools.  It is only in later periods that Raphael, Michelangelo and other renaissance artists are shown in a studio situation, as in Delacroix’s painting of the latter, made about 1849-50.

After the renaissance, images of the artist in their studio become more common, especially in the Netherlands. Here, where matter-of-fact realism conditioned life, we see the space of the artist’s studio becoming more recognisable as a real space. Rembrandt is, of course, the main exponent. In this early painting (about 1628) in Boston, we see him staring intently at a canvas he has either painted, or is contemplating putting brush to. Behind the young painter are jars containing pigment and oil for binding; on the wall hangs a palette that he may eventually use, assuming that he has not started painting. This painting is also a self-portrait, and it was via this genre that the artist’s studio became more visible, both explicitly and by implication. In a later self-portrait at Kenwood House Rembrandt shows himself before an easel which we assume was in his own studio. This may be true, but the studio is also “present” as an abstraction: the circles on the easel probably refer to the theory behind the practical side of painting.  This theoretical representation of the studio can be contrasted with a magnificent painting (c.1660) by C. N. Gijsbrechts who shows us items in a studio such as a skull, the peeled stretcher of a canvas, a little miniature- possibly the artist’s wife- and other details such as his oozing palette and brushes stacked up against a ledge. These and the back of the painting obviously confirm it as a representation of the artist’s studio, but the skull, which must be a prop too, places it in the tradition of the vanitas- a meditation on the transience of life, and in the case of this image, the mutability of art too.

Sometimes we do not even see the artist at all, or the artist does not make it obvious he is the craftsman making pictures in his studio. An image of the 18th century academic painter Henry Fuseli’s studio is captured by an anonymous artist of the British school. He does not show Fuseli at work, but the watercolour shows the paraphernalia of painting: cheval glass (for self-portraits), palette, pigments and a large figurative painting on an easel. We could consider this image as a snapshot of a studio observed by an almost detached eye; we could equally see it as the artist viewing his own workspace from a distant point. Commenting on this watercolour, Wakefield says that the work plays with themes of presence and absence. We see a similar idea in an etching made in 1825 to illustrate a Guide for Young Artists, by the 19th century watercolourist David Cox. Cox shows us a very large palette with brushes- he is said to have used a large Swan’s Quill brush-sketches in various media, such as graphite, pen and wash, in the manner of Claude Lorrain. This corner of the artist's studio is “populated” by examples of the art that Cox studied and produced: Claude like classical scene, marines and seascapes in the Dutch style, watercolours that the artist executed on his many painting tours in England, Wales and abroad. Cox himself is not present. Instead, we get the impression that he has stepped out to have a quiet smoke, a habit of his while sketching. Notice also how in his instance the studio overlaps with the exhibition space, a theme I’ll return to in a later lecture.

The Butcher’s Shop: Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon in New York

I was recently invited to the preview of an upcoming exhibition in New York, but much as I’d love to go, NYC is a long way away! I have the next best thing as the Helly Nahmad Gallery have sent me a catalogue. From that, I’ll try to give a virtual review of the show, before it begins!

 

My first thought is that this pairing of two modern masters (18 works by Soutine, 14 by Bacon) is inspired, especially as the parallels are explored along the themes of meat, flesh and paint. There have been attempts to force similar parallels between Bacon and others, like the Bacon and Caravaggio show put on in Rome in 2009. The convergence at that show was forced, but in this case there’s no need to collapse the two painters into each other, as if they were thematically indivisible. The correlations emerge naturally here: both Soutine and Bacon were inspired by Rembrandt’s 1655 Dead or Flayed Ox, an exemplum in flesh and bone, as well as a piece of pathos off the butcher’s slab. Both artists acknowledged the importance of Rembrandt’s work; both were fascinated by the analogies between paint and flesh; both lived in the same period; both stayed in Paris and were intimate with the old master tradition. So the exhibition stands on a solid bedrock, unlike a lot of parallel lives expositions. Rembrandt and Caravaggio anyone? These parallels are competently outlined in the introductory essay, “Flesh and Paint” by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, the curators of the show.

The exhibition catalogue also stresses this equivalency with a timeline that places Soutine and Bacon side by side. This allows the reader to cross-reference year by year, learning what works are being produced, what articles written, what books read, as we journey through time. So  we read that between 1927-29 Bacon is in Paris improving his French, studying Poussin’s Massacre of he Innocents at Chantilly, and reading surrealist writers like Georges Bataille.  In the same period, Soutine is enjoying success with shows and attention whilst painting meat hung in butcher’s shops. Onwards to 1933 when Bacon essays his first Crucifixion, a motif in which flesh becomes almost metaphysical, descending from the bones, a visual theme which the French critic Gilles Deleuze, in his Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, read as a deformation holding consequences  not only for modern art, but the Christian figurative tradition overall. Bacon certainly didn’t see his art as “spiritual”; Cimabue’s Crucifixion, and the whole gallery of carnal and holy suffering that followed it was nothing more than “ a worm crawling down the cross”, in Bacon’s memorable phrase. Meanwhile across the page, we’re learning that a few years earlier (1924-5) Soutine produced six “almost life-size” canvases of beef paintings, all developed from what is looking like a paint/flesh blueprint, or even ur-carcass, Rembrandt’s Dead Ox. They’re reproduced on the page like a Warholian series, but rendered with sympathy, not detachment. You’d have paid a high price for seeing them painted though: by all accounts, Soutine’s studio stunk to high heaven, and the decomposing meat attracted the flies thus causing consternation to Soutine’s visitors. This was long before Damien Hirst!

  Away from thematic parallels, the exhibition catalogue surveys, with the aid of wonderful magnifications of works, the overlap of artistic technique. Although such terms are purely arbitrary, Soutine seems the most “painterly” of the artists. You can see why the American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning adored him. Looking at the hands of Soutine’s 1920 Praying Man (in the show), for example, can be a vertiginous experience:  greens, reds, oranges and yellows pulsate, kind of like hallucinatory fruit. Colours are “pulled” over each other, and the spectator has the sense of losing their centre of gravity. Paint is solid and substantial, yet it seems to dance in a euphoric way before the eyes.  Sorry, don’t have an image of Praying Man, but there’s a similar, nervous, decomposing look to some of Soutine’s other art. Take his 1918 Self-Portrait (in the show) where the effect is of paint stripping the flesh away to reveal the bones, and that yellow-brownish background reminds me of animal flesh. Soutine’s studio had indeed become a butcher's shop.

Though they have similarities where paint as flesh is concerned, Bacon’s technique is different because he applies the paint more sparingly. This has led to detractors accusing him of clumsy, or unfinished compositions. Issues of finish aside, Bacon sought a kind of armature or skeleton for the painting- and sometimes it’s difficult to see where this motor begins and ends in his art. With Bacon’s painting we don’t encounter the viscous blobs and bubbles approximating to fleshy fluids or pus, like we do in Soutine; it’s more like laying the body bare, resulting in a kind of  shock “realism”.  Of course we don’t have to relate technique to meat in Bacon:’s art.  It’s also implicit in the painter’s name, his cultural origins in Dublin where he was surrounded by animal flesh, dogs and horses, motifs which persist into the 1970s with works like Untitled: Study for a Dog, (in the show). For Bacon, meat and violence may have been inextricable since he must have known the horrifying story of the Dublin rebel leader Robert Emmet, hanged, drawn and quartered in 1803. The story goes that the executioner sliced off the criminal’s head with a butcher’s knife, whereupon all the dogs came running to lick the blood off the pavements. It’s like Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas come to life in the streets of Dublin.  

Bacon is much admired now, but Soutine has had his devotees too. I’m not that familiar with his work, so Martin Hammer’s closing essay on “Soutine Mania in Post-War British Art” is helpful. Hammer re-visits that potent ensemble of Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon; but we also learn about the impact of Soutine on the likes of Lucien Freud, and the generation inspired by him- Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Studying Soutine- Auerbach especially- led to a new feel for the practice of painting. Like acolytes eager for the mysteries of art, they sought out the elder Soutine, and found the hidden secrets of the painted surface. Post-war British art was all the better for it.

If you’re in New York, the exhibition opens on May 1st.

Enterprising Research

  If you think that the present government's ambitions to change education in the U.K. stops at rising tuition fees, then think again. I’ve been hearing about their plans to hi-jack the Haldane Principle- essentially a rule that academics decide the direction of research, not politicians. The implications of this are very grave and far reaching because it would mean that intellectual production would be strictly controlled by the spreadsheet, not academic ambition. More seriously, it might mean that decisions about humanities research might rest on their relevance to enterprise culture and the so-called “Big Society.”

The art historian Iain Pears writes about how this ideological measure is manifesting itself in the government’s attempt to “direct” Funding for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) into intellectual areas, some of which have no relation to the humanities at all.

“The Arts and Humanities Research Council, for example, has been instructed to direct a ‘significant’ part of its funding into six strategic research areas which have been defined for it. Some of these areas have little to do with either the arts or the humanities – ‘civic values and active citizenship’, for example. Other proposals have a political slant: of particular concern is the unelaborated instruction, in a document issued by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, that ‘AHRC will systematically address issues relating to … cultural renewal contributing to the “Big Society” initiative.’”

Pears goes on to comment on something I’d never heard of, although given the present state of things in the U.K., not entirely surprised to learn about. How about a “Humanities for Business Programme” consisting of modules like “Machiavelli and entrepreneurial success”, “Rousseau and Marketing”, and Shakespeare has to be in  it of course. What about a module on “Henry V and Inspirational Leadership.” These were proposed in a British Academy pamphlet last year. I glanced at this but the enterprise culture section of it must have escaped my attention. But why stop there? Why not a course on Raphael and advertising in the renaissance, or Giotto and banking, Titian and shopping in Venice anybody? Don’t laugh; there have been books on renaissance shopping published.

There have been some excellent studies of art and the market. The economist John Michael Montias created an important survey of the 17th century art market in the Netherlands, and others have been inspired by him. It’s important to point out though that Montias, and others working in that vein, were not in thrall to the rhetoric of marketing and were certainly not thinking of economic life in the same way the Coalition are- every aspect of social existence controlled by the balance sheet.

  I myself have dipped a foot in early modern art and the subject of economics, in articles on Rembrandt and Poussin; but always with some ambivalence, especially in the present ideological climate. I think the study of economics and painting is a very worthwhile subject to pursue, but I interpret economics in a much broader sense: painting, psychology, and the reception of the artwork. I’m not interested in turning the early modern or renaissance into some model of consumer society, or projecting our own neoliberal marketised nightmare onto earlier periods because of some prevailing ideological fad. I’m not interested in projects that are nothing more than itemizations of the financial value of furniture, fittings and props in renaissance paintings either. I recall a conversation in front of Holbein’s Ambassadors in which my interlocutor proceeded to tell me how much the carpet and other items in the picture cost.  I stood there speechless as I’d never heard anybody turn a renaissance painting into a commodity in such blatant terms. I much prefer books like Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy where he introduced the concept of the “period eye”, an idea that literally took account of how merchants and businessmen in renaissance Florence viewed the works they commissioned. This was a different kind of calculation and depended on knowledge of the artist’s skill in determining value in the painting, not simply the price of the objects in the picture. Baxandall has always been required reading on my renaissance courses, but in the last decade there’s been a drift away from him towards what is called the material renaissance. I can’t help thinking that the material renaissance approach unwittingly plays into the hands of the architects of Thatcherism and its inheritors? I increasingly wonder if such books and research projects monetize the field, and that academics are not taking this into account or choosing to ignore it. Is writing about the economic side of painting turning research into a kind of commodity?

There may be more opportunity to ponder that question in the future. Judging by the way things are going with funding bodies who may not control the Haldane Principle anymore, more marketing and money projects are going to appear in humanities research, but determined by the “impact” they have on society, or should we say the “Big Society” to use that ridiculous moniker; not generated because the subject of economics and the arts is academically stimulating and can throw light on how artists such as Rembrandt and Vermeer painted and interacted with their society, which is what Montias’s work achieved.

Subjecting research generation to an “enterprise culture” model can’t bode well for the humanities, especially art history, if that becomes the main criterion by which research projects are judged.

Art Themes and Memes of 2010

Connoisseurship and Science.

  The topic of how science can help us identify painters, styles, authorship etc, has figured highly on this blog over the past year. In a July post, I said that Martin Kemp’s and Pascal Cotte’s book on the troublesome La Bella Principessa drawing showed how the two approaches could function for the artistic good, without feeling the need to outdo each other. I’ve received e.mails and comments from top Leonardo scholars/connoisseurs who believe that this compromise augurs well for an age of increasing complexity in museum politics and practice. Yet, despite this attitude of rapprochement, why do some still harbour doubts and clamour for a “return to traditional connoisseurship.” Perhaps that’s valid; one word that didn’t feature much in the National Gallery’s Close Examination exhibition was connoisseurship.

Rediscoveries, Rediscoveries, Rediscoveries!

We ended last year with the rediscovery of a Velasquez at the Met in New York, and guess what? We’re concluding 2010 with another Velasquez (pictured) dredged from the vaults of the Met. I found last year’s attribution completely convincing, but have to agree with Culture Grrl about the lamentable quality of this year’s find, despite the attribution’s support by one of the leading experts on the painter. This seems to be a cumulative trend: curators making claims about the dusty old masters in their basements; claims subsequently endorsed by a leading authority. Some attributions hold water, but I can’t help feeling a little jaded and cynical at the rediscovery phenomenon, particularly with such headline attracting names like Rembrandt and Velasquez. And for every authenticated old master, there is one that simply doesn’t pass the test. I’m looking at that so-called “Caravaggio” St John in Amsterdam, which doesn’t convince me in the least.

Refurbishment, Refurbishment, Refurbishment!.

  If there was one word that caused my blood to boil it was the dreaded word refurbishment. It reminded me of Baudelaire’s complaint about Paris being full of road works and construction; or Ruskin’s rants about restoration and dropping cement on classical figures in Venice, all in the name of progress. In much the same curmudgeonly mode, I cry “Excuse me, but do we have to close whole museums, or deprive the public of their permanent collections for such as long time, purely so we can have a 21^st museum experience”? Particularly reprehensible is Tate Britain (pictured) which is about to embark on a 45m makeover, necessitating the storing of most of the pre 1900 collection. After writing this post, I got comments and messages from lots of readers who have seen this modern construction imposed on their own museums. And there’s another dimension to refurbishment:, it seems to have replaced loan exhibitions as a way of unintentionally hiding the permanent collection from the people.

Art History and Cyberspace.

What have Facebook, Twitter et al have to do with art history? On the face of it nothing, but look again and you might change your mind. I’ve used Facebook to discuss the iconography, style etc of old master paintings; the messaging system seems to be ideal for that. I’m not exactly a Twitterholic, but the software obviously has its attraction for art enthusiasts who have found my blog through it, and as a communication device, it’s awesome.  It’s not yet clear what social networking and the rise of cyberspace can do for art history, but we’d be fools to ignore its potential, especially as education is likely to become more open-source and accessible in the future. As I said here, I think it’s inevitable that web technology will be absorbed into our discipline, especially as the paradigms of publishing change, as they must, due to the mass amateurization of publishing caused by the rise in weblogs, wikis and other on-line resources. That can only mean that we’ll learn more about the benefits of sharing information and ideas on line.   

Art and the Age of Austerity.

If there is one word that needs to be re-defined to make it reflect a specific historical moment, it’s austerity and the programme of momentous and callous measures associated with it. From now on we won’t be able to hear that word without thinking of effigies of Nick Clegg burned by furious students, or David Cameron reassuring pensioners their winter fuel allowance was safe, whilst planning to take it away from them, as we learned over the festive season. The austerity programme glanced off the major museums- no admission charge, only a 15% cut, and financial reserves to be accessed, up to 50% in the NG’s case- but the axe hacked mercilessly away at the Arts Council and other arts organisations. Timber! Down they went, the funding for a broad swath of arts ventures, not to mention provincial museums, libraries, and other targets which are deemed too much of a luxury for the incoming Age of Austerity. If we took austerity to its logical conclusion, I would be sitting on the floor of my study with my net book powered by my own battery; and when that packed up, I’d be reading books by the light of the candle, desperately trying to block out the noise of the anti-culture police bulldozing the libraries and universities outside. Still, I guess we should give thanks to the ConDems for not imposing admission charges on the major museum, but can we really believe it’s going to last? Can you really trust a government on culture that is so mean that it gleefully deprives young children of the delight of discovering reading? And what chance has culture and the arts got in this country when it’s represented by people like this?

Art and Protest

Situationist fun or serious engagement with an administration that seems to have abandoned the young to their economic fate? I don’t know, but the outbreak of sit-ins, art school occupations and tactics (as reported on here) that fused the aesthetic and the political certainly caught the attention and imagination of those who had been, hitherto, politically quiescent, myself included. Who can forget the book block as a spirited response to kettling, a word that has huge resonance for the protest movement. I think it’s copyrighted, otherwise I would have shown you an image of a kettle cop laying into Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. Away from the physical fray, the most symbolic expression of young artist rage appeared at the Turner Prize, shaming the glitterati inside who should have opened the door for free education, but settled for business as usual instead. Forget about Susan Phillipsz, the students should have won, since 2010 protest could be the new modern art! Pictured are the Arts Against Cuts movement who briefly occupied the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, whilst enroute to a demonstration.

AHT wishes all its readers a happy new year! I’ll be back in Jan with an overview of exhibitions to look out for in 2011.

Art Treasures from Budapest

Last week I took time off from the daily grind to refresh myself with another exhibition- and what an event. We're talking 12 rooms of paintings and drawings from all periods, but with the emphasis on baroque; a cornucopia of art treasures presented to an audience that hasn't seen most of them. That includes me. I've never been to Budapest, but if this is a taste of the art in that city, then it's on my visit list.

The show is so large and wide ranging in its genres and styles that it would be pointless to try to overview it in a review. Instead, I've listed a number of paintings that caught my eye, or that I found of surpassing interest. When you go in the first painting you'll see is a strange Woman of the Apocalypse by a Hungarian master whose many headed beast of Revelations is obviously based on Durer's print of the same subject. Most people will have come for Raphael's Esterhazy Madonna though –top of the post- but in all honesty it's a disappointment because the multileveled frame around it kills its charm stone dead. What idiot decided to surround Raphael's paintings with over-elaborate and ornamented frames? It's a deplorable trend. Best to view it in a reproduction sans frame.

You're spoilt for choice in the 17^th century rooms. There's a Poussin- which I'll save for another post- or you could have an El Greco or Annibale Carracci, or how about a dynamic Flight into Egypt from Luca Giordano? I've opted for a well painted canvas by Caravaggio's arch rival, Il Cavaliere d' Arpino, whose Diana and Actaeon has an interesting twist: the goddess seems to be pleading with the hunter rather than intimidating him. Stylistically, it's a nice re-working of Titian into a picture of courtly elegance. More in tune with the orotund and majestic feel of the baroque is Ribera's Martyrdom of St Andrew, which has a gravitas to it that makes it seem like a painted lecture. If Ribera is too realistic then you could always turn to the classicism of Artemesia Gentileschi's Jael and Sistera, which has a restraint despite its violent subject of a woman bashing a tent peg into a man's head!

Old master drawings are set out in two large rooms and there are some hits and misses here. Apart from the Leonardo sheets, I was drawn to a Durer drawing of a rider which must connect with the engraving of Death, Knight and the Devil. I'm not so convinced about the Raphael drawing though- it looks well below his usual standard. My favourite drawing in the entire show would have to be Rembrandt's spirited pen and wash sketch of his wife Saskia sitting at a window. I love the bold line of Rembrandt's pen which seems even more emphatic than usual here. There are some impressive portraits here: Goya, Sebastiano dell Piombo, Moroni. But, completely outside my customary frame of reference, I've chosen an 18^th century one. Greuze's portrait of the collector Paul Randon de Boisset. We're used to Greuze's swooning, sentimental young beauties in the Wallace Collection- but this has a piercing naturalism and seriousness that really does impress.

Some nice contributions from still-lifers like van der Heyden and others. Tally ho past the hunting scenes which bore me to death…but this is more like it-exotic birds and fruit from the 18^th century Hungarian painter Jacob Bogdany. He was quite successful in London and I can see why. His paintings of birds are stunning; this could be re-titled "The Parrot Lecture". The intimidating bird on the left reminds me of a professor I once knew! The landscapes are really of very high quality. My particular favourite was one of Claude- a gentle scene of a rustic driving his livestock across a brook. Then there's two Salvator Rosa's which are very fine. John Wooton's Classical Landscape doesn't do a bad job of bringing Poussin's philosophers' grove into the 18^th century.

That leaves the modern art which I didn't really get a chance to appreciate as I was dead on my feet by the time I got there! Mention must be made, however, of a Picasso Mother and Child, done right at the end of his Blue Period and start of the Rose period. This painting marks a period of transition: moon to sun, grey to gold, austerity for prosperity. And don't we all need that!

Finally, the catalogue, which was really a bargain at its special discount price of £9.95. The art is set out chronologically in the catalogue, century by century and the drawings are not separated from the paintings. The catalogue entries aren't very detailed, but then all the art is reproduced.

Faking It

I've just finished reading a book that cleverly interweaves fiction and art history within an 18th century setting. I'm talking about Barbara Ewing's novel The Fraud.  

Without spoiling the plot too much, the story revolves around a Bristol painter who goes to Italy and assumes the persona of a Florentine artist: Filipo di Vecellio, an in-joke. Returning to Bristol, he rescues his sister Grace from poverty, and sets her up as a housekeeper in his fashionable town house in Pall Mall. Here's the catch. Grace must renounce her former life and identity and pretend to be his sister Francesca. The main thread running through the novel is that Grace/Francesca is actually the better painter, a fact that her brother cannot come to terms with. So fact is coated over with layers of deception. Filipo paints portraits for illustrious clients by day; Francesca paints at night in her room.  

Ewing is excellent at evoking the sink or swim world of Hogarth's London; the painter makes a cameo appearance earlier in the story. Also present are Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, the former presiding over the 'on the line' RA exhibitions; the latter offering sympathy and advice to the embroiled Grace/Francesca. Our heroine also learns about chiaroscuro from Mr. Joseph Wright of Derby; this provides Ewing with a excellent metaphor- the woman paints from a darkness within her.

The novel also falls into the art crime genre too: at an advanced stage of the narrative, we're given an object lesson in faking a Rembrandt and aging it to fool the academicians.

Ultimately, fakery on the artistic and social level is difficult to sustain. Exposure becomes the only solution for Grace; but Filipo, despite the unraveling of his life's story, decides to go on living a lie.

Most art history in novel format doesn't succeed, but I think this does. Ewing's research is thorough and she blends art fact with art fiction adroitly. Add a dash of art crime and you've got all the ingredients for a great book. Recommended. 

Why can’t Art History TV be more like Greenaway?

I'm not organized enough to do a roundup of the year, so my final post of 2009 is this homily on TV art history. Best wishes for 2010- let the festivities begin!

I've got Sky Arts on trail and I'm tempted to keep it because of all the great art programmes. One of these was broadcast last night: Peter Greenaway's docu-essay, Rembrandt: J'accuse made in 2008.

For starters, RJA is stylistically varied. In terms of presentation, Greenaway is simply dazzling. The documentary includes a whole bag of pyrotechnics: montage, dramatization, numerical countdown, words scrolling across the screen, Greenaway as the main structural unit, digitally inserted into the narrative, taking the part of cinematic expert, art historian, prosecuting council, and judge.

It's interesting to re-construct Rembrandt's Nightwatch as a crime scene or a site of accusation where some heinous crime has supposedly been committed by Frans Banning Cocq and his cronies. I won't comment on Greenaway's whodunit theories- I'll leave that to the Rembrandt experts to accept or reject- but I found the idea of an arraignment a good metaphor for thinking about the state of art history on TV. Compared to the art fare served up on BBC 4 this Christmas, Greenaway's visual essay was stunningly innovative, and unwittingly or not, damning of traditional art presentation strategies Choosing to present himself within the scene while announcing a countdown- or more accurately count up- of 31 mysteries secreted in the painting, Greenaway turned the Nightwatch into one of his movies, like The Draughtsman's Contract.

It's pity that there wasn't the same level of invention in art history programmes on BBC 4 this Christmas. Their Private LIfe of a Christmas Masterpiece was predictably close shots of paintings, then cut to talking heads stating the bloody obvious. It reminded me of one art historian who told me that the BBC was always calling her to appear on art history programmes, but she always said no. I used to put that down to snobbery, but on reflection I can see she was right: art history TV doesn't need art historians who inevitably seem more redundant as the camera lets the paintings "speak" for themselves.

Another moan of mine is the use of music in art history TV. In Christmas Masterpiece, all the visuals were drowned in the predictable audio wash of Allegri or some other religious composer. Again, Greenaway was more inventive. His minimalist soundtrack was used as a punctum: it announced the mysteries like audio bullet points. It's like we're ticking off clues or observations on a CSI crime report.

It's a great pity that BBC4 can't hire more filmmakers to create art history films, especially as there is an unwritten history of cinema and painting that only directors like Greenaway are qualified to unravel. His comment that cinema was born with Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens and Velasquez would launch such an enquiry. But in 2010 I guess we'll just have to resign ourselves to more unimaginative BBC art history shows presented in the usual banal way. Thank god for Sky Arts.

Record Raphael

What a week!

Not only the Spanish show- review soon come-, Hirst after dark and a painter winning the Turner Prize- congratulations to R Wright for that- we've now heard that a beautiful Raphael drawing has broken records at Christies. This beautiful drawing of a muse has fetched £ 29.2 million, a historic landmark for the market.

As for the Rembrandt Portrait of a Man, previously invisible for 40 years...that has gone for £20.2 million, just over the figure I thought it would fetch.  

My only regret with events such as these is that the art disappears from public view, but not for ever. We'll just have to hope that they are loaned to special exhibitions in the not too distant future.

Above- Raphael's muse meets the art market full on.

Rembrandt After 40 Years

Artdaily reports on a Rembrandt portrait that is coming up for auction at Christies in December. The painting, Portrait of a Man, Half-Length with Arms Akimbo, dates from about 1658. More intriguingly, this painting has not been seen in public for nearly 40 years. The sitter, who seems assured and comfortable in his pose, has not been identified. The portrait found its way to Columbia University, where it survived a student sit-in in 1968 before being sold in 1974 to raise money for the university. It was last seen in public in the exhibition, Rembrandt After 300 Years, held in Detroit in 1970.

I’ve only seen a photo of the work- unfortunately accompanied by a Christie’s employee- but my first thought is that there’s something of the self-portrait formula about it. The man wears a beret- a typical Rembrandt accoutrement- and the white shirt visible between the areas of the over garment recalls such treatments as the canonical self-portrait in London. The sprightly rendered white impasto really is a fine passage of painting; that’s worth the price of admission alone. And that impassive but steady gaze recalls the self-portraits too. I can’t find anything about it in my Rembrandt catalogues and books, but I’m hoping that I can find out more eventually.

This elusive Rembrandt is expected to sell for 18-25 million pounds- but I hope it doesn’t disappear into the bowels of a private collection.

I shall keep tabs on this auction as it will also feature a good Domenichino, of which more another time.