Art History Today

In Defence of Orazio

If I needed any proof that journalists don't know much about art, all I have to do is to look at Jonathan Jones's article on women painters, which rubbishes Orazio Gentileschi, the father of Artemisia, the celebrated female artist. This writer shows his ignorance of Orazio by stating that Orazio's art is the antithesis of Caravaggio. It's not as simple as that. For one thing it's known that Orazio knew Caravaggio well; he even lent him props, a detail he had to mention in a law trail against Caravaggio. Orazio may even have seen Caravaggio paint, which may have motivated Orazio to paint alla prima, or straight onto the canvas without the aid of preliminary sketches. It is true that Orazio was to evolve a studied elegance in his art- the pirouetting pose of a monk or saint- but Orazio owed much to Caravaggio despite dispensing with the blood and guts realism that was to attract Artemisia.

I first came across Orazio's art in a local museum where one of versions of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt often intrigued me. Why did he make his Joseph so comically supine; what induced him to have the ass's head peeping out from behind the wall? And there were the colours: cool purples and browns accentuating forms set out in clear planes. Since then I've seen many Orazio works in the U.K., Europe and the States, so I have more of an idea of his traits and influences. I've never regarded him as clinical, a label that Jones gives him. It's true that there's a slightly abstract quality to Orazio's art, but that's because he was diligent in his design, working the composition over and over until it had achieved the degree of perfection which he wanted. Take a look at his Vision of St Francesca Romana (above); look at the careful treatment of the draperies and the creamy impasto of the saint's scarf. I also like his palette; there's the vermilion of the virgin's dress which harmonises with the slate grey of the saint's dress and the previously mentioned snowy white of the scarf. Yet there's even a hint of Caravaggio here with the realistic handling of the angel waiting at the right.

Jones also takes a swipe at what he calls Orazio's "creamy realism" which he sees as anticipating Victorian art. Not being an expert on Victorian art, I don't know if his art influenced that era. I can imagine that Orazio's Raphael- like art may have appealed to artists seeking some kind of classical model. But I can't see Orazio Gentileschi leading to artists like Lord Leighton or others of that ilk. Think again Mr Jones.

Fake Is Real!

The Independent reports on the revelation that a hitherto regarded fake at the Courtauld Institute, has turned out to be a genuine masterpiece. The painting, The Procuress- above- is now thought to be a work from the 17^thcentury. It entered the Courtauld just after the war as a registered fake, a copy thought to have been produced by one of the most infamous of forgers- Hans van Meegeren. The Dutch forger went in for imitations of Vermeer with a dash of Caravaggio, most notably the forger's Supper at Emmaus of 1937. The fusion of different styles was one of the factors that led to van Meegeren's downfall. You just couldn't have blatant Caravaggesque effects in Vermeer's art. Another reason may have been HVM's figures looked nothing like HVM, the master. The fact that they shared the same initials may inspired van Meegeren to become a Vermeer forger. 

The Courtauld now believe that this "fake" Procuress may even have hung in Vermeer's own house. A similar painting by Dirk van Barburen of the School of Utrecht, can be seen in our National Gallery's- A Woman Seated at the Virginal, of 1671. That may be so, but it's ridiculous to say this once fake work was actually painted by the Master of Delft himself as one journalist has reported. The expert opinion is that it is an anonymous artist of the 17^thcentury, although wether it's actually by van Barburen himself remains a matter of speculation.

The Independent has this on the history of the painting:

The painting was presented to the Courtauld by Professor Geoffrey Webb, a specialist on historic architecture. He had been a senior arts officer in Germany just after the Second World War, and apparently received it in the Netherlands as a gift for helping with the restitution of works of art. He believed it was a Van Meegeren fake which had been recovered by the Dutch authorities in 1945 from the forger's villa in Nice. When Anthony Blunt, the then-director of the Courtauld, accepted The Procuress, few questions were asked. A few suspicious queries raised in the 1970s by the Dutch scholar Marijke van den Brandhofwere not followed up, as all appeared convinced it was a product of the forger. It was later lent to three exhibitions on fakes as a fine example of a forgery. Two other versions of The Procuress were thought to be the original until now. The first was owned by the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, but in 1949 another emerged from an English private collection. It was auctioned at Christie's before being bought by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

I'm vastly amused by the fact that a real masterpiece was lent to exhibitions as an example of a fake; but what makes me smile much more is the mention of Blunt. What I find funny is that the Procuress hung on the Courtauld's walls during Blunt's directorship- a real artwork which was deemed fake. But in Blunt's flat above the Courtauld, a painting by Poussin- now known to be fake- hung over Blunt's mantelpiece regarded by the director, who was convinced it was real.

   

   

  

Good News from Southern California

M.O.C.A. stands for the Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s located in downtown Los Angeles, and I visited it in April last year when I was attending a conference at U.C.L.A. I liked it as a compact gallery with some interesting modern art installations, so I was pleased to hear that MOCA has evaded the ignominious fate of being merged with the huge Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, LACMA for short. LACAMA is more like an adventure playground of art- MOCA’s collection and identity would have been swallowed up by that great cultural behemoth.

What I didn’t know- but I do now from Richard Lacayo of Time- is that when I visited it, MOCA was in the throes of a financial crisis. This has been going on since 2007, and it looked as if an amalgamation with LACMA was unavoidable- until now. Thanks to a challenge loan of $30 million from Eli Broad-an LA billionaire who owns one of the largest modern art collections- MOCA has raised $60 million this year. Broad is famous for his good works in downtown L.A., so I guess his help isn’t a great surprise.

I’m often accused of not liking modern art- but it’s simply not true. I’m not fond of conceptual art, or artless art, but I do like modern art of the early 20^th century, especially that links back with the early modern. I do try to see modern art from time to time, and I do try to visit museums of modern art.  If I had to single out my favourite modern art museum, I’d have to say Guggenheim Bilbao. But MOCA is definitely worth a visit.

J.G. Ballard and Leonardo

Jonathan Jones’s thoughtful, but late meditation on the late, great J.G. Ballard celebrates his painterly style. Known for his surrealistic descriptions of this world, he had intellectual ancestors in such artists as Dali, Ernst and Magritte. But it is not a well-known fact that Ballard was interested in renaissance artists too, especially Leonardo da Vinci.

One of his finest Leonardo- inspired stories is his Giaconda of the Twilight Noon. Beat that for a title. This is a more like a literary tone poem evoking a state of disturbed mind; in this case that of the protagonist Maitland. Temporarily blinded and in a wheelchair, Maitland has visions of marine terrain reminiscent of the cliffs and rocks in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks.   On regaining his external sight, Maitland finds that he has lost the inner sight with the Leonardo-like vision. So Maitland makes the dreadful decision to blind himself permanently. This oedipal act returns Maitland to the vision of the womb of Leonardo’s painting forever.

Ballard also wrote a story called The Lost Leonardo, which as its title suggests is about the theft of a masterpiece, in this case a fictional representation of the crucifixion by Leonardo. But this is a very different art crime, perpetrated by no less a figure than Ahasuerus, sometimes known as the Wandering Jew, who taunted Christ on the Cross and was condemned to roam the earth until Judgment Day. Determined to put a better spin on himself, Ahasuerus has journeyed through time re-painting and re-touching images of himself that appear in scenes of the crucifixion, including ones by Poussin, Rembrandt and Veronese, to mention a few. Out of 439 on the web gallery of art, I’ve chosen Mantegna’s in the Louvre- 1457-9. When the curators in the story catch up with Ahasuerus, he has his eyes on a Dali crucifixion. But he flees leaving the lost Leonardo behind, and the last thing heard of him is that he has been made director of a museum that is building up a collection of paintings of the cross.

The two stories can be found in Ballard’s collection- The Terminal Beach.

Dirty Pictures

I recently learned that a former Louvre  restorer, Regina Pinto Moreira, got more than she bargained for when she decided to clean the grime off Poussin's Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus, dating from about 1635. Beneath the layers of dirt she disclosed a phallus painted on Priapus. The offending article had been painted out by nervous, and censorious Spaniards in the 18th  century. Our curator told a Sao Paulo newspaper- the town where the museum that owns the picture is located- that “post-production modesty” came into play when the Poussin was in the collection of the Spanish royal family. And the cost of re- exposing this offending member? The removal of the over-painting and dirt cost 150,000 Euros or $213, 000.

Reading this, I’m reminded of how much Poussin’s body is played down in the literature on the artist- the art historical equivalent of painting over the true, earthy, corporeal Poussin, I guess.  Take the Nymph and Satyr of 1627, in the National Gallery, London. Many might see it as a purely mythological scene devoid of any lasciviousness or lust, but it’s quite obvious what the voyeuristic satyr is doing behind the tree. Interestingly Humphrey Wine says in the NG catalogue of 17^th French Painting that the eroticism in the picture didn’t stop an attribution to Poussin, though the painting’s exposure to the public was delayed on matters of decency.  Apparently, some Georgian bigwig made a fuss about obscenity and morals, hence the picture’s delay in being showed to the public. It can’t have bothered the original owner of the painting though, Holwell Carr, who was actually a clergyman!

 

All this reminds me that the great Poussin expert Anthony Blunt could never really reconcile Poussin’s painting brain with the vulgar functions of his body. All Poussin scholars know the story of Blunt's reluctance to quote a, literally, scatological piece of prose in Poussin’s letters attacking a patron, during his lectures at the Courtauld. Still, Poussin was all flesh and bone, not an isolated brain floating free of his body. And as for sex in Poussin. Well, Poussin caught syphilis, the dreaded French disease with the result that his motor functions were severely impaired and his drawing hand became shaky.

I’m tempted to say that despite attempts to de-sexualize Poussin, this subject sticks out a mile.

A Deluge of Great Art

It looks like Tate Britain might be the place to be at present since it’s hosting the Turner and the Masters exhibition- details here. When I heard about this show, I was slightly sceptical, not out of disrespect to Turner, but to the kind of exhibition that pits the moderns against the old masters. Earlier this year I was disappointed by the Picasso: Challenging the Past exhibition at the London National Gallery, which proved to be an arid sprawl of Picasso’s art and photos of old masters- most of the Goyas, Velasquez's etc could not be shown due to cultural politics. I thought it was more a case of Old Masters 2, Picasso 0. By contrast, the current Turner show has all the makings of a draw since the redoubtable romanticist will meet his match in the likes of Claude, Poussin, Rubens, and Ruisdael.

The title of this post is inspired by the fact that Poussin’s Winter- Deluge of 1660-4 is being shown in the same space as Turner’s own version of this apocalyptic canvas. Poussin’s Deluge is one of the most unforgettable of his oeuvre; it evokes with its monochromatic treatment darkness visible- the end of the day, and perhaps the end of the world. I’ve written substantially on this elsewhere, but it gets my juices going to know that it will be possible to view it in the same installation as Turner’s Deluge. For him and other painters of the era of romanticism, Poussin’s canvas proved talismanic for those wishing to convey a pervasive despair at the state of the world. Artists on both sides of the channel took their cue from Poussin who would not have understood his painting used as a vehicle for the transmission of deep pessimism. The black/white pattern was, I think, meant to convey the complex theological ideas of clerics Poussin knew in Rome in his final years, not the embittered and bleak personality of a man close to death. Turner’s Deluge of 1805 is closer to the despair usually associated with Poussin’s original, though Turner's version is very much of its time, conceived with the idea of the romantic sublime in mind; humanity huddles in the foreground while figures in the middle ground seem powerless against the unrelenting forces of nature.

Much has been made about the idea of Turner’s competitiveness and rivalry with the Old Masters. I’m not so sure this is right angle on Turner and tradition. Sure Turner was ambitious and strove to excel in his art, but his interaction seems more complex than a battle with the old masters. I suspect Turner’s rivalry was reserved for his contemporaries and he just displaced that competitive streak onto tradition. He was hardly a Picasso locking himself away to do battle with Velasquez. The competitive angle seems to me a theme used by the curators for marketing purposes. Still, whatever Turner’s motivation in creating emulative masterpieces, there’s no doubt that the public will be overwhelmed by the deluge of art on show at Tate Britain. It should be one of the exhibitions of the year. Not to be missed.

Mirror Mirror

Yesterday I had one of those art imitating life experiences. I was scheduled to give a talk in front of Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (above) in the London National Gallery. To while away the train time, as I sped towards my destination, I read Noah Charney’s The Art Thief in which there is a scene in which a professor- you’ve guessed it- delivers a lecture to his students in front of Van Eyck’s masterpiece.  Of course, I couldn’t resist holding up the book and telling the students about it when I arrived- they were amused at this strange juxtaposition of fact and fiction.

In this way, the Charney book became a kind of distorting mirror because there were certain discrepancies between my talk and the fictional art historian.  For instance, he calls the painting the Marriage Contract, but I’ve never called it that, although I know that Erwin Panofsky was the first to suggest that the presence of the two witnesses in the convex mirror at the back of the painting implied such a ceremony. According to the Bible, you cannot put someone to death on the word of one witness- ditto for proof in marriage ceremonies. Also, I don’t think the dog on the floor symbolises loyalty, it’s more likely to convey lust given Arnolfini’s adulterous proclivities.

So I and the literary professor occupied our own parallel universes, never quite colliding otherwise we’d both cease to exist. And what better place to reflect on the relationship of art and life than in front of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait which boasts one of the most illusionist devices ever conceived- the mirror in which the world of the painting is simultaneously caught and elided. The Charney book functioned in the same way; it reflected aspects of my own art history professional existence whilst demonstrating they weren’t exactly true, just part of a fictional framework.

Van Eyck’s mirror within a painting continued to pursue me as I journeyed homewards. Animated advertisements on the underground, operating rather like screen-savers, competed for my attention. First, the convex mirror looming larger than life, than the zooming out to reveal the room, which, remember, was in a painting regarded by students and their art professor who held up a book in which a similar scene was being enacted.   

Domenichino Too

It’s going to be fever pitch excitement in that auction room at Christies on December 8^th. Not only- as mentioned a few posts ago- a splendid Rembrandt rescued from oblivion, but a fine masterpiece by Domenico Zampieri, better known to art historians as Domenichino- little Domenic. Though expected to fetch far less than the Rembrandt, Domenichino’s St John the Evangelist (1627-9) could go for £10 million.

This painting is a good example of how Domenichino assimilated high renaissance idioms: the motif of the hand within the page of the book, seems to derive from the prophets on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, as indeed does the ensemble of figures. It isn’t a direct transfer from a specific source since St Johnand the little children or putti could be distilled from a number of Michelangelo's prophets and sibyls. Yet, despite the monumental high renaissance style, Domenichino softened the forms, imparting an almost feminine grace to the Evangelist who looks up in inspiration towards the heavens.  Perhaps the most strangest feature is that abruptly raised right leg of the saint. I don't know the source of that, but my guess is that it's a modification of an aerial figure, such as in Raphael's Vision of Ezekiel or maybe the Jupiter in the Villa Farnesina in Rome.

This work was owned by one of the most famous of baroque collectors- the Marchese Giustiniani, who had a taste for the academic classicism of such artists as Domenichino and Poussin. Not that they were his favourite painters- that accolade fell to Caravaggio whose works numbered 12 in the Marchese’s collection.

It’s not often you get a baroque painting of this calibre come up at open auction. Coupled with the Rembrandt, it should electrify the atmosphere at Christies in December.  

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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.