Art History Today

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.

Walter Benjamin on El Greco

Interesting comment by Walter Benjamin. In his essay on Franz Kafka, he writes:

What Kafka could see least of all was the gestus. Each gesture is an event- one might even say, a drama- in itself, the stage on which this drama takes place is the world theatre which opens up towards heaven. On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco- who was the patron saint of the expressionists- the gesture remains the decisive thing, the centre of the event.

I'll return to this in a post I'm preparing on the baroque, along with a hundred other things.  

In the meantime, merry Christmas to AHT's readers.

Disappearing Act

It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that Turner Prize winner Richard Wright is a painter; three other painters have won before. What is significant is Wright's way of disposing of his art- he uses white emulsion to make his walls of gold disappear.

This could be categorised as the "the aesthetics of disappearance", an art that has destruction programmed into it. Why is this important today? For Wright, the world is full of "stuff", rather like the bursting cornucopia of digital TV- mostly stuff we can happily do without. The cultural sphere is filling up rapidly and Wright believes less is definitely more. From a strictly art history perspective, Wright's aesthetic can be tied into the current backlash against the 1980s YBA movement, especially Damien Hirst. Hirst, Emin et al are all about producing art objects, largely superfluous, for exhibition in the galleries of Joplin and other avatars of bad taste. Whilst some of this "stuff" is interesting, most of it, like the ephemera of the media industries, seems dispensable.

It's worth asking if Wright's condemnation of over-produced art places him in the camp of those previous modern art commentators like Matthew Collings and Robert Hughes who have become sceptical of postmodern, image-saturated art. Should Wright's effacing art be relocated within a classical tradition that these hitherto boosters of modern art have turned to: Raphael, Rubens, whose art depends upon planning and methodical execution rather than improvisation and novelty, the stock in trade of the YBA crowd. Some critics would happily re-claim Wright for an anti YBA tendency. They would say that Wright's painting marks a return to academic principles: use of the cartoon and preliminary drawings to provide the basic design for the artist to follow. Yes, Wright owes much to traditional fresco painting; but renaissance painters – in some cases- destroyed only their cartoons, not the paintings themselves. But Wright after meticulously planning and painting a wall invariably paints over it, removing it from the sight of his audience, and, let us not forget, himself; Raphael and others were aiming for immortality through their work. Wright's strategy resembles the process of forgetting; deliberately expunging selected parts of memory unlike renaissance art which relied on copying and the recall of ideas and motifs for the maintenance of a tradition.

There's another issue here. I wonder if it is right to say that in destroying his art, Wright removes it from history, let alone art history- not an easy question to answer as we seem to be at the end of history, even living in a post-historical condition. In his book, Art History after Modernism, Hans Belting analysed what he called the "continuity of painting", a space where painting is the site of memories or change rather than part of a movement in art history propelled by progress. Despite attempts to create new types of painting such as neo-expressionism in the 1980s- Schnabel, Basquiat- doubt about concepts such as history and time ensured that such movements were short-lived. It's interesting to consider Wright's painted-over painting in the context of Belting's discussion of post-history and post-modernism. Belting sees art at the end of history split between emancipation from the tradition or replaying "a lost game" in exhibitions and commentary. It strikes me that Wright's gold leaf walls despite their remembrances of art of earlier epochs escape the continuum of painting and the game of repetition and replay; hence it is a mistake to try to claim them as modern re-inventions of renaissance fresco painting, as one critic has. Wright is not the modern equivalent of Giotto or Raphael. Rather, Wright's art has to do with intervals in the artist's and the viewer's life- experiences not reliant on a model of continuous development of art over time, or worse, art that defines its modernity in the context of what has already existed.

That was a sentiment expressed by the cultural historian Walter Benjamin who equated the continually repeated with the condition of hell. Benjamin quoted Kafka from The Trial: the incident where the painter Titorelli produces canvas after canvas, all identical in every respect, from under his bed for the befuddled protagonist K to buy. By destroying his art, Wright ensures his art cannot be sold, or rendered into the status of the commodity. That is what makes Wright's disappearing act significant for the age of late-capitalism
.

Louise Bourgeois's Tangled Web

Excellent programme on Louise Bourgeoise on Sky Arts last night.

Neglected throughout the 60s and 70s, but her resurrection has been going on for the last 10 years. Her recognition has really come shamefully late given that she has been around for most of the twentieth century.

Born in France in 1911, she was the child of parents who ran a tapestry restoration business. Childhood is a salient theme in her art: some of her pieces could be called abreaction, or just reaction to childhood trauma and memories. Talking of memories, I'll always remember my first encounter with LB's art. It was a wintry day in Bilbao, early morning, as I walked up the river Nervion to the Guggenheim. Imagine my surprise when I see this giant spider on the other side of the river. Although, from a distance it resembled a prop from a sci-fi B movie, that giant arachnid in front of Frank Gehry's postmodern configuration was unforgettable- it also proved to be more interesting than the art inside the museum.  

Had I known more about LB then I might have thought how apt this spider's exterior location was. LB has never really been comfortable within the museum, the symbol of art history itself. Take her attitude towards surrealism. Although she knew all the great minds of the movement- Ernst, Duchamp etc- she said- as in this programme- that she's never really worked out her relationship with surrealism. A concrete illustration of this is her wheel hidden under the skirts of a female figure: the wheel references Duchamp through a discourse of maternity.  

Perhaps LB felt separate from European modernism in general; she left France for the U.S.A. in 1938, marrying Robert Goldwater, who she said was a kind of substitute for her own father. What is remarkable about LB is the way she's stuck around despite the many setbacks she's met in the States. Among these has been investigation by HUAC, but unlike other surrealists put through this humiliation, and who counter-attacked petulantly thus earning themselves extradition, LB maneuvered adroitly. Despite investigation for communist leanings, she eventually went on to gain citizenship in 1955. Despite a retreat into the solipsism of neo-Freudian explorations, LB retained her political antenna which was attuned to the post-war political explosions such as '1968'. As Paul Stuart says on the World Socialist Web Site, LB even sympathized with the poor of California, flooded out, unlike the rich who she said were safe in the mountains.

I'm not surprised to learn from this article that Goya was one of LB's influences. Her sculpture, 'Destruction of the Father' (1974) reminds me of some of the Spanish master's still-life paintings. These contain birds piled up like the corpses in his 'Disasters of War' series. I can easily believe- as Stuart says- that this fragmented structure, with its echoes of the butcher's slab, may conjure up the battlefields of Vietnam or Verdun.  

Now in her 97th year, LB shows no signs of quitting. As for the rest of us, we have an awful lot of catching up to do, both artistically and politically.  

Silent Corners and Shadow Prayers: The Sacred made Real.

My third visit to London this term, primarily to visit the 17^th century Spanish exhibition, The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700.

Well, for those people who were put off by the overtly religious nature of this exhibition and decided to stay at home worshipping a very different kind of God, Sky TV/free view, all I can say is that it's your loss. It's all the more your loss as this array of paintings and sculpture is never likely to be assembled again.

The title of this piece was suggested by Peter Hammill's song about baroque religion, The Lie: Bernini's Saint Theresa; "the silent corner haunts my shadow prayers" intones Peter. I don't think he would have liked this exhibition as at the end of his song he rejects all the trappings of Catholic religion, sweeping out of church in a swirl of organ and screams. "Shadow" and "prayers" seems appropriate here though since its curator, Xavier Bray, has set up the array of lights to create interesting shadows. One thing that strikes you straight away about the exhibition is the way it's lit. Bray has thought long and hard about how he could maximise the effect that this sacred art could have on both a believing and secular public. Only five or six rooms, but each one an installation in itself that communicates a theme or an experience guaranteed to make you contemplate, and more importantly, think about your own relationship with religion and sacred art. The NG exhibition environment plays a major role in this effect: it encourages introspection in the dark. This shadowplay comes about because with sculpture we're dealing with solid objects projected into space rather than the flatness of the painted surface. That was a bonus for Bray: it allowed him to emulate the atmosphere of a baroque church where images of Christ and his saints are glimpsed through the gloom rather than presented in the unforgiving clarity of bright exhibition lighting. This is one of the most tenebrous exhibitions I've ever visited. They tried to do a similar thing in the Late Caravaggio show in 2005, but it wasn't half as atmospheric- or indeed eerie- as this.

Room 1 gently introduces us to one of the prevailing themes in this exhibition: the interaction of painting and sculpture. Confronted by the very first painting- a portrait of Juan Martinez Montañés the sculptor- by Velasquez, we're shown in one single work the theme of the "sculptural painter." This idea will be revisited, with greater emphasis, as we progress through the show. The next important painting- in this section, IMHO, is the truly unique Crucifixion with a Figure at the foot of the Cross, by Zurbaran. I've written on this before, so no need to follow up on that. Suffice to say that despite what Bray says in the catalogue, I don't buy the idea that this is St Luke; it's more likely to be a self-portrait, as Zurbaran tended to place himself- in symbolic form- within the pictorial space. Here he made that symbolic transfer in human form.

Near the exit to this room is a large statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception- possibly by Montañés and an unknown polychrome sculptor- which possesses a sad grace all of its own. Graceful is the word I'd use to describe Velasquez's Immaculate Conception, on the wall next to it. It's only when you pay attention to the beautiful, girlish features that you understand how Velasquez's religious art is less rooted in the sacred and more the mores of everyday Spanish life. Within this society the nun's veil shimmers into the worldly mantilla; realism winks at religion who tries to avert her gaze. It also offers the chance to study the facture of the master up close and personal- it's hung lower down than usual- especially the impasto of the white clouds, the naturalistic equivalent of the children that lift the Virgin up into heaven in more rococo versions, like Murillo's. In passing, it should be mentioned that most of the Velasquez represented here isn't his best, especially The Flagellated Christ contemplated by the Christian soul in the next room. This work edges more towards the sentimentality of Murillo; I'm sure that this picture would have found favour with a Victorian audience in love with the child and guardian angel theme.

On entering the largest room in this show where a life-size sculpture of Christ by Montañés is complemented by Zurbaran's painted version, the effect is startling, Zurbaran's Christ on the Cross might be seen as the centrepiece of this religious assembly, but it really has serious competition in the form of Montañés's crucifix which looks down on its painted and human companions. It elicited the remark "It's beautiful" from a visitor, but I wonder if she was right. In early modern Europe, debates raged about the presentation of Christ: should his skin be shown as pure, sleek as marble; or should the violence of his harsh treatment be mapped out on the bloody geography of his body for all to see? Walk across the room and look at the back of Gregorio Fernández's statue, encased in glass, of Christ the Ecce Homo. His muscular back is streaked with bloody smears of paint; the paragone takes on a brutal and harrowing aspect. This visitor failed to register similar violent deposits on the Montañés- the blood lines there are not as numerous, but they're definitely visible. But equally important is the inclusion of a painting by Ribalta, a Spanish artist who worked in Naples. His Vision of St Bernard of Clairvaux is stunning in its appropriateness, a sober riposte to Alfonso Cano's heated Lactation of St Bernard hanging in the first room. Here, the Virgin squirts her milk from her teat into the open mouth of St Bernard, an image that the Counter-Reformation was uncomfortable with, as were my students when I showed them a slide of it a couple of weeks ago. It's tempting in a post-Freudian world, to muse on the psychosexual motivation underpinning this legend, but far better to return to Ribalta. I doubt if his Vision of St Bernard, for the rest of its gallery life, will ever find such a perfect home again. Its utility is that it not only demonstrates the debate about the "Spanish paragone"- the contrast between/unification of painting and sculpture- but also penetrates to the core of this exhibition: perfecting the illusion that wooden effigies and painted figures can approximate beings in the real world. What's depicted in Ribalta's painting is a statue of Christ on the cross coming to life and grasping the saint who swoons with ecstasy as his eyes shut tight, the better to intensify the vision he is experiencing.

I'd call Ribalta's picture a concrete metaphor for the principle of the actualisation of inanimate matter into living tissue. Is it a Pygmalion effect? I guess so, although that myth is not only pagan but a foundational metaphor for the love of art rather than transmission of theological ideas. Within the Pygmalion legend we cannot distinguish between truth and fantasy, such is the power of art to deceive and undercut the reality principle. But the art in this exhibition is not marking out a strict divide between reality and illusion; it is concerned with the interim; how these wooden, painted sculptures are suspended between the cold of the tomb and the breath of life. Looking at Montañés's two statues of St Ignatius Loyola and St Francis Borgia, guarding the exit like two sentinels, I fantasised about them moving their heads, coming down off their pedestals in order to convert we heretics to the inflexible edicts of the Counter-reformation. Instead they remain frozen like Pedro de Mena's statue of Mary Magdalene peering intently at a crucifix that she holds in her hand. Here is another interesting theme developing: the silent interaction between the religious figures and the objects they hold. Pedro de Mena's Mary Magdalene stares fixedly at the crucifix which could almost function as a mirror, an attribute of vanitas to remind the penitential saint of the life of sin she's left behind, an ambivalence here? On the other hand there is no ambiguity in Velasquez's painted grim Mother Superior, Jerónima de la Fuente gripping her crucifix whilst glaring at the viewer- you could imagine her using it to deal a hefty blow to a wayward sinner.

Not everything works in this exhibition, at least to my critical and over-trained eye. The room that thematises the Dead Christ relies on a cluster of unimpressive works whose amalgamation merely accentuates their defects rather than strengths. The half-length of the Virgin of Sorrows looks faintly absurd, embedded in a cabinet, she veers dangerously close to kitsch; the statue of a dead Christ relining on pillow and crumpled drapery brings to mind the image of someone lying on an airbed which is slowly losing air; the inclusion of another Neapolitan painter's- Ribera- Lamentation of Christ, while thematically consistent, seems stylistically at odds with the exhibition as a whole. I suspect that the Ribera – which is conveniently owned by the NG-, may have been a last minute substitute for other art that could/would not be loaned. Still, none of this matters. You could quite happily avoid this room and your visit to the exhibition would not be marred in the slightest.

The curators of this exhibition have set aside a darker room with benches, which given the atmosphere of church in this exhibition, could almost be mistaken for pews. Here *is* a silent corner; a place for reflecting not only on this exhibition but the place of art and religion in the world of today. I thought about an article I wrote a few years back, the lineaments of a projected book on postmodernism and religion which didn't evolve into a something more substantial. Exhibitions like this do speak to our own times, a point proved by a renaissance exhibition of 2001 which became a site of grieving after the paradigmatic calamities of 9/11. That catastrophe burned religion and violence far more into the cathode ray tubes of our brains than any reading of the horrors of torture and martyrdom in the history books, or indeed the weals on the afflicted body of Fermández's Ecco Homo. This scepticism born of a saturated media landscape goes some way towards explaining the patchy attendance of the Sacred Made Real. Also, don't forget this exhibition appears at a time when Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion is riding high in the bestseller lists. But Jean Francois-Lyotard, the master builder of postmodernism, conceded that with the disappearance of God advocated by theorists has paradoxically come a return to faith, or at least the application of certain theological ideas to philosophical issues. That rings true with this exhibition: Zurbaran's picture of St Francis seems to me to have the gravity of a philosophical statement; whilist his Christ on the Cross surely could be viewed in purely existentialist terms.

Xavier Bray deserves the highest commendation for this highly unique exhibition; he may very well be made St Xavier, or the equivalent of canonization in the art world. This is surely destined to become a flagship exhibition for the NG's policy of moving away from blockbusters toward events more narrowcast and difficult. Good! You only have to look back to the 1980s when Spanish shows were on such soft subjects as collecting Spanish art in Britain** to see how far Spanish art has come at the N.G.  

**Having escaped the London rain I found myself deep in the bowels of a bookshop on the Charring Cross road. I acquired a catalogue of a 1981 NG exhibition El Greco to Goya: The Taste for Spanish Paintings in Britain and Ireland. This was under the late Michael Levey's tenure. Though excellent on its own terms, hardly as specialized or challenging as the current show. How times change.

 

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.

I'm Talking about the Midnight Rambler: Damien Hirst

Just got in late from a round of exhibitions in London. Expect a long post on the Spanish exhibition at the NG in a few days, not forgetting the Old Master sale at Christie's tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you ever wondered where Damien the wonder kid gets his inspiration from, well now you know. Not Francis Bacon or Rembrandt, but London after dark. Here's a photo of DH taking a photo outside a London gallery in the wee small hours. The Evening Standard has the details.

Who Nose?

The 19th century physician and Italian critic, Giovanni Morelli pioneered a method of art analysis based on comparing the physiognomy of figures within renaissance paintings. To Morelli, attention directed to lips, eyebrows, fingernails, ears, even toe-nails, was fundamental to a theory of connoisseurship.

I don't know if Morelli went in for noses, but Culture Grrl at the Met in New York certainly does. it's interesting to note that she's used the nasal organ to solve a tricky problem of identification at their current Velasquez Rediscovered exhibition. Culture Grrl reports, the identity of the man in the portrait remains unresolved, but what could undermine the idea of this being Velasquez himself is that the proboscis of the gent in the re-attributed portrait doesn't match that of the nose of an authenticated self-portrait in Valencia- below-, therefore casting doubt on the man being our artist.




Still, I'm leaning towards Met curator Keith Christiansen who won't relinquish the possibility that it does show Velasquez's own features. Over the last month I've been showing these images of Velasquez to my students and have almost convinced myself that the elegant cavalier in the Prado's Surrender of Breda- below- who is a dead ringer for the man in the Met portrait- is Velasquez. And while I respect what Jonathan Brown is saying about it being inappropriate for an artist to appear in the painting of a historic event, I wonder… The Surrender of Breda shows Spinola, the Spanish general, in the centre of the composition. He was on very good terms with Velasquez and sailed with him to Genoa, on the artist's first visit to Italy in 1629. And isn't there a tradition of artists placing themselves at the side in paintings containing patrons and powerbrokers. Isn't this what Velasquez did in Las Meninas? Culture Grrl remains unconvinced of Christensen's identification, and she points out that he didn't put a small image of the Valencia S/P on the wall panels in the exhibition.

"When I asked Christiansen (who sees a resemblance to the Met man) why he didn't include an image of the Valencia painting on the wall text panels (which do include images from "Surrender of Breda"), he replied, "Jonathan has been fantastic, and I wanted to work with him. I thought, 'Jonathan knows this artist better than anybody. Who am I?'

Christensen's modesty is admirable, but presumably, a reproduction would have supported Brown's argument that the man in Valencia and the Man in the Met are two entirely different persons. Still, I can see why Christensen wants to hang on to his assertion. If this were a Velasquez self-portrait, it would draw more people to the Met. I'm still rooting for it as a portrait of the master.

BTW, Las Meninas is being disregarded in the battle of the noses. The features in it are too deeply enveloped in shadow for the purposes of physiognomic analysis.

Who could that mysterious man be? Who nose?  

 

Publishing and the Powergame

I received this from some UK colleagues….This happened to me and other scholars last year.

Click on this link to discover the perils of trying to get things published in this gatekeeper riddled profession.