Art History Today

Matthew Collings and 10 Years of Tate Modern

Good programme on BBC4 last night.

Maybe it's not unusual to see Matthew Collings presenting a programme on 10 years of Tate Modern, but I did get the impression that he was slightly bemused by the whole topic; he seemed to have a certain ambivalence about his relationship to those times too. Back in the heady 80s, Collings personified the new enthusiasm of the era that saw Tate Modern opened amidst a helazapoppin atmosphere of champagne orgies and acid house music. Last night's programme saw Tracey Emin reminiscing on multiple bottles of fizz consumed in lift parties, followed by drunken contemplation of the art inaugurating the event. With such abandon, the new avant-garde was launched.

Never off late night arts programmes, especially BBC2's epochal Late Show, Collings extolled the virtues of Hirst, Emin and the enfant terribles of Brit Art. Engaging and effusive, Collings drew the confidence of the art brat pack and the brickbats of those who believed modern art and modern life was rubbish. Undaunted, Collings brought the message via accessible art TV on C4 and books designed to be understood by those unfamiliar with the arcane musings of the contemporary art cognoscenti. Riding the wave of Tate Modern, now liberated from the physical constraints of Tate Millbank, Collings caught the vibe of the time and began to speak directly to the public with the aid of an estuary English that omitted 'ing' from words and pronounced superlatives like wonderful 'wunnerful'.

Then it all went sour. In the noughties, Matthew, or Matt as he preferred to call himself, declared his dissatisfaction with contemporary art and the media circus of the Turner Prize. Instead he turned back to the renaissance and the baroque to sing the praises of Titian, Rubens and Velasquez. In this decade I was looking at more modern art, and thinking about its link to the old masters, so I was fascinated not only with the series, but Matt's turnaround: Matt's Old Masters aired on Channel 4 in 2003 followed by a book of the same name. MOM saw Collings take a Kenneth Clark travelogue approach: now emoting in front of Rubens's paintings in Antwerp; next, cruising on the Grand Canal whilst making connections between Titian's painterly style and the splashes of artists like Pollock and De Kooning. He still pronounced wonderful 'wunnerful though, but it didn't bother me- I was intrigued by this mix of blokey classlessness and Clarkean erudition.

Colling's reservations about the art he had previously praised to the skies was echoed by a number of modern art dissenters, most notably Robert Hughes who produced a memorable T.V. revisionist essay, New Shock of the New in which Hughes- recovering from a dreadful car accident- manoeuvred himself with walking stick around Damien Hirst's art whilst almost prodding it with the disdain of a man encountering dog shit on his mid-day stroll. Hughes's deep discontent with modern art was emphasised by the production of an original biography of Goya; again, a modern art pundit had turned back to the old masters in disgust. Something of that same mood came through in last night's programme when Collings, far from the dressed-up Tate image of the noughties, strolled round galleries with shirt out, collar wide open, and an air of having just come out of the pub. Gone was the breathless enthusiasm of old; in its place was a quiet resignation brought on by years of looking at this stuff. Walking around what looked like a pile of bright sherbet on the floor of a corporate gallery occupied by faceless robots in suits, Collins seemed ill at ease and not wholly sold on what he saw in front of him.

Perhaps my favourite part of the programme was Colling's interchange with Tate Modern director Sir Nicholas Serota. Sir Nic – another Collings demotic touch- spoke of the inconvenience of storing modern art at Tate Millbank - now Tate Britain. In the bad old days, the public got to see only a fraction of modern art, said Sir Nic in aggrieved tones. It still rankles with him that modern art took decades to be accepted in this country due to snobbery and museum politics. One of the paintings in this tip of the iceberg category would have been Matisse's Snail which Collings described as "charmingly quaint". Still, you had the feeling that Collings was even less happy with the art that had sidelined Matisse and his "quaint" contemporaries at Tate Modern.  

I know a few experts in modern art, and to them the attitude of Hughes and Collings is incomprehensible. One told me that he saw Hughes's rant as completely unjustified- the curmudgeonly complaining of a grumpy old art critic. They are more forgiving of Collings, perhaps because his disquiet with modern art has taken a less fractious tone than Hughes. I'm not an expert on modern art; I teach courses on art of all periods, but I'm still a tourist there. I think I can understand why Collings and Hughes got fed up with the plethora of art produced in this decade though. Walking round Tate Modern last autumn, I had the feeling that the excellent and canonical art of Matisse, Picasso, Pollock et al was being swallowed up in the maw of frankly unimaginative crap purchased by those in thrall to the ideology of the new.

After 10 years, Tate Modern's significance and importance has diminished, a point wittily underscored by Collings who started this programme from inside a model of the Tate which was itself inside a museum in Berlin. Could there be a more telling metaphor of where Tate Modern stands after 10 years?  

It's become a work of conceptual art in itself, and the art inside merely incidental.  

   

In Memoriam: Avigdor Arikha (1929-2010)

Avigdor Arikha, who died last week, was that rare person- both art historian and painter. Here's another obit, which tells you more about his painted output, which I'm not familiar with. I knew him chiefly as art historian, mainly through my interest in Poussin.

Arikha and Poussin coalesced for me in 1995 when I saw him on a legendary arts strand programme- the Late Show- a special made on Poussin and Blunt to accompany the exhibition on the artist mounted in London that year.

My abiding memory is of a quiet-spoken man, knowledgeable but un-didactic, speaking in front of Poussin's late masterpiece the Deluge. Though I wasn't yet a serious Poussin scholar, just a member of the informed public, my interest was engaged enough to record the show, a video that I still have. Later when I embarked on a PhD on Poussin, and amongst other things, researched the relationship between Poussin's landscape paintings and religion in his France, I recalled Arikha using both voice and hand to unravel the complex strands of meaning in the Deluge. Unlike most Poussin scholars who concentrated on the iconography and symbolism of the painting, Arikha delved deep into the painted material itself, downwards into the monochromatic pigment because he discerned there the real meaning of the picture. As a painter, he recognized that it is also necessary to track the passage of Poussin's brush –something that Tony Green has been saying for decades- as well as the thoughts crossing the painter's mind as he worked. Here's Arikha commenting on Poussin's Rape of the Sabines:

"Poussin came back to a rapid touch with a small bristle brush, generally round, which left its marks, as if the strokes had dried under his hand."

When I visited the 1995 exhibition (twice!) I spent a lot of time peering into the murky depths of the Deluge with Arikha's ideas fresh in my mind. Later during my doctorate I read a lot on the Deluge. Most of this material seemed to focus on iconography, which was fine but hardly groundbreaking. Looking for fresh thinking on the painting, I returned to Arihka's ideas that seemed to me to make more sense in terms of understanding (a) Poussin's intentions as a religious painter; (b) how religious themes informed nature painting in the mid-17^th century; (c) how the monochromatic treatment of the picture related to the theological themes within.

Fast forward to November 2009 and I'm in the Turner and the Masters exhibition contemplating Poussin's Deluge again. Arikha's interpretation still holds good for me, even now. Here's an extract from his long essay on Poussin where- for me- he nails the picture's hidden structure in a way no one else has.

"The scene represents the last season of the year (winter), the last season of life (old age), the last hours of day (nearly night), and the end: the deluge. Noah's Ark is in the background. All sinks, all drifts downward to its end.

 

Two men (as in the Jewish minyan), one woman, one child and one horse are desperately clinging on. With them, a horse and a baby. All goes downwards, except for the ascending prayer suggested by the little twisted figure placed on the horizon line, lifting his wringing hands towards the dark sky, by the waterfall. The baby lifted upwards from the sinking canoe on the right will not be saved: placed on the same horizon-line, the outstretched hand will never reach the baby. In contrast, the only living being not to sink, is the snake creeping upwards. The snake illustrates not evil only, but eternity.

The snake alone prevails in Poussin's composition. The lightning striking down is its echo. The snake is painted dark on light, and the lightning, light on dark. They are parallel, like voice and echo. Their form constitutes the key to the painting. The variations of the twisted line continue, throughout the composition: dark on light angular lines (rocks), light on dark spiral lines(trees). Hanging on the upper-right tree is another small snake. This one is the echo of the snake creeping upwards.  

The ascending snake and lightning striking down uphold the praying figure, with another one clinging onto him, in a diagonal syncopation. Poussin painted the biblical deluge as seen from the side of the doomed."  

For me, the strange, disturbing monochromatic pattern suggests both sin and salvation in the world, which helps to retain a degree of ambiguity in interpretation, not a bad thing.

Arikha called Poussin's Deluge the artist's testament. Perhaps Arikha's careful unraveling of his 17^th century predecessor's masterpiece should be seen in terms of inheritance too- Arikha's legacy to Poussin's studies, that still hasn't been properly understood.

Here we go again…

Oh dear! Almost immediately after my cri de coeur concerning the sexed up art market and attribution driven agendas, we get what looks like another example of the phenomenon. News is breaking about the sighting of a painting in storage in Modena, which is being touted as a recovered Raphael. Mario Scalini, state superintendant for art in Modena, says he discovered the above painting after conducting an inventory of 20,000 works hidden away. The painting, which has an ornate 17^th century frame, was languishing in a storeroom in the palace of Sassuolo.

Scalini says that the painting of a woman, which seems to be modeled on the head of the Virgin in the Madonna della Perla painted by Giulio Romano, now in the Prado, will need to be inspected and validated by Raphael scholars. Maurizio de Luca, who worked on Raphael's frescoes at the Vatican, is equally guarded. "They can't say it's Raphael's. That will come only after study by art critics and historians who will decide if it was painted by the artist or perhaps one of his pupils."  

Now the U.K. papers have got hold of it because experts are saying that it might have a £25m price tag. Preliminary examination has detected three layers under the painting which seemingly betray Raphael's hand. Despite this, Scalini, who hopes to persuade the Prado to show the new work alongside the Madonna della Perla, is waiting for a task force of art historians and scholars to engage with the painting directly.

That means the magnifici, who doubtless as I write, are jetting off to Italy, salivating at the thought of a work that they can exhibit as autograph Raphael. There's a T.V. show on Living at the moment, Criminal Minds, about a crack FBI team of profilers. At the start of every episode the team boards a luxurious jet and speeds off to awe organizations lower down the food chain with their expertise. The magnifici are the art historical version of them, summoned by curators and museums outside the bubble to lend their know-how to problems of attribution and connoisseurship. What a pity that unlike Criminal Minds they have a low success rate.  

Scalini says that the ornate frame around the picture implies something more special than a pupil's copy. I suppose he is angling for the idea of the portrait as a gift for an individual patron, developed from the Romano Madonna. That's feasible, certainly more than another view stating that this work is an earlier study for the Madonna della Perla. Why wouldn't Raphael's "first draft" consist of a drawing rather than a work in oils though? This mysterious lady might have a Raphael underdrawing, but it does not follow that she's all by Raphael. That's worth remembering before we go crazy and announce we've got another Raphael on our hands. It's difficult to put a monetary value on an underdrawing.

I don't have the privilege of seeing the work at first hand. These are just a few observations on seeing this reproduction.

1. As well as the Pearl Madonna, the type recalls the Garvagh Madonna in the National Gallery, London (c. 1510), although in that picture the head looks to the viewer's right.
2. The cangiante effect on the clothes seems consistent with Raphael's portraits from a few years later though; the palette in the Garvagh is less saturated.
3. I have real problems with the face. To my eye, it seems crudely drawn and the modeling not up to the master's high standards. The oval of the face isn't accentuated very well.
4. I don't get a sense of a well-drawn composition- we really need to compare that underdrawing with one in an authenticated painting, the London Garvagh Madonna for instance. If they match, then we may have a pupil's version painted over the master's design, as I said above.   

Now we wait for the magnifici to proclaim autograph status or not. For myself, I wouldn't be in a hurry to add this demure beauty to Raphael's painted oeuvre.  

Agendas for Art

Last week, a colleague, Ben Sweeney, told me of a dispute between an art journalist, Richard Dorment and a connoisseur, Peter Silverman.

It concerns the recently discovered Leonardo da Vinci drawing, 'La Bella Principessa'. Talk about art pundits having agendas! According to Silverman, Richard Dorment, the art critic of the Telegraph, has a vested interest in making the public believe that the drawing is not autograph since Dorment was previously married to Kate Ganz, the Manhattan dealer who paid a derisory amount for the work at Christie's in 1998. Top Leonardo experts like Martin Kemp are now calling it the most significant discovery in renaissance art for decades; if he is right, the drawing is worth millions. No wonder Dorment is sore. If he'd known the truth, he could have retired and we would have been spared his exhibition reviews in the Telegraph. It's hard not to feel sorry for poor Kate Ganz though, in the unhappy position of having the drawing in her gallery for 10 years, and then selling it as a 19^th c German portrait, whilst tragically unaware of its possible real provenance and value. It's the Pete Best effect- you miss out on a ticket to fame and fortune and are left to reflect bitterly for the rest of your life on what might have been. Another reason for feeling sympathetic towards Ganz is that she was advised by curators and experts in New York, amusingly called by Kemp the "New York gang", who now look to be without any credibility at all. In his indispensable From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis, an attack on the lamentable state of connoisseurship today, the late James Beck called the group of scholars who influenced the acquisition of the "Raphael" Madonna of the Pinks by the National Gallery, the magnifici. I wouldn't mind betting that a number of this curatorial elite were responsible for advising Ganz,, so now they're not looking magnificent at all- just ridiculous.

I don't mean to rubbish all connoisseurs, just those whose scholarship is motivated by other issues than getting at the truth, of having agendas in mind instead of the art itself. Silverman casts himself in the role of crusading connoisseur, intent on exposing the omissions and inconsistencies in Dorment's piece. Silverman published a point by point reply to Dorment's article of 12^th April, which is reproduced below. All the arguments are set out in Martin Kemp's new book on the painting, which I'm informed goes into everything, including the practice of "not exhibiting works in private hands unless they are proposed gifts." What?

Silverman's points.

1. The work was initially identified as a Leonardo by Professori Mina Gregori, the 84 year old doyenne of Italian art.

2. It was first published in September 2008 by Allessandro Vezzosi, Director of the Museo Ideale Da Vinci in a major monograph, prefaced by Carlo Pedretti, the world's senior Da Vinci expert.

3. Francesco Buranelli, former head of the Vatican Museums, and Claudio Strinati former Head of the Museums of Rome, and now in the Italian Ministry of Culture, have endorsed the attribution. Timothy Clifford, former Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, as well as Simon Dickinson, one of the world's leading art dealers and formerly a Sotheby's senior expert also have endorsed the attribution.

4. Of those whom Mr. Dorment cites as rejecting the attribution not one actually has been to the premises of the research laboratory or even seen the picture-including Dr. Penny, who refuses to do so. Why I know not.

5. Those who have reported on the discovery such as journalists from DER Spiegel or The London Times (Jean Follain) as well as those who ultimately endorsed the attribution, have made the effort to visit the premises of Lumiere Technology in Paris-something Mr. Dorment has not done.

6. British and American museums have refused to show La Bella because of a misguided policy of not exhibiting works in private hands unless they are proposed gifts!! This is duly noted in Martin Kemp's book.

7. Leonardo's palm and thumbprint are indeed on the parchment. This was discovered by the Lumiere Lab and confirmed by the forensic specialist, Peter Paul Biro, assisted by a former director of the Canadian equivalent of Scotland Yard. Mr.Biro has won a legal case over the Jackson Pollock issue, another egregious omission by Mr. Dorment. Interested readers can confirm this easily on the internet.

8. In denigrating by implication the 'Exhibition Hall' where the Bella Principessa is now on view, Mr. Dorment fails to mention that she is in the excellent company of Raphael, Michelangelo, Filippino Lippi and others, in a comprehensive survey of the Renaissance, with loans from many major Italian institutions, including the Ufizzi. The exhibition is entitled 'And There Was Light' and is under the sponsorship of the city of Goteborg, the patronage of the Vatican, and the President of Italy. It is curated by Francesco Buranelli and Allessando Vezzosi. I would recommend that if Richard Dorment is really interested in seeking the TRUTH he should attend the lecture by Martin Kemp and Pascale Cotte at the Courtauld institute on THE BELLA PRINCIPESSA on May 7th, 20010.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this case –and I'll have to read Kemp's book to help me make up my mind- I do feel that we've lost an awful lot if art books and exhibitions, not to mention art criticism is driven by agendas rather than scholarly ambition. It's impossible not to feel overwhelmed at the way the Leonardo drawing has become sucked into a vortex of claim and counter-claim; art connoisseurship has grown more adversarial in the last few years. Worse, everybody must have an agenda in these individuated and egotistical times. It has implications beyond the intrigues of Mr Dorment, Professor Kemp and Mr Silverman, not to mention the magnifici sitting aloof on their curatorial thrones whilist dreaming up new ways of turning "Duccio into Matisse." Does this story and many like it, including the farrago of the Madonna of the Pinks, the non Raphael portrait sold as a Raphael a few years back, and now the NY branch of the magnifici attempting to morph Granacci into Michelangelo, illustrate how abject and plausible the art world has become? The world of art connoisseurship and exhibition scholarship seems to be driven by politics and the main chance. I'll rejoice if 'La Bella Principessa' turns out to be the real thing, but will nonetheless feel sad at the world she has been thrust into.