Art History Today

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.

Forging a Reputation: The Man Who Made Vermeers.

Reading Jonathan Lopez's book about the master forger Han van Meegeren, The Man who made Vermeers, I was reminded of the opening sequence of the 70s T.V. series Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy; this featured a doll that contained other versions of itself with slightly different expressions, until we get to the last one which has a blank face. Van Meegeren seems to have been like that. I bet that you could never pin down the real McCoy; he seems to have been skilful at manufacturing different versions of himself just as much as imitations of his favourite, Jan Vermeer. "Made" in this sense was not solely about faking paintings, but also creating bogus identities, mythologizing one's achievements, leaving a trail of false clues. So many roles: embittered forger producing fake Vermeers to spite the critics; millionaire decadent organizing parties for prostitutes in Amsterdam; Dutch folk hero playing to his fans at his trail in 1947, while surrounded by his own art; Nazi sympathizer writing inscriptions to Adolf Hitler in books embellished by fascist hieroglyphs.

It's the focus on the Nazi dimension that makes Lopez's book so distinctive and compelling. He's really sharp- and persuasive- on van Meegeren's association with the Nazi aesthetic. In a probing analysis, the author shows how the forger's most infamous work, the Supper at Emmaus, an expressionist re-imagining of early Vermeer with spectral forms with ghoulish faces, approaches the Volkgeist, or the spirit of the people tied to Germanic customs. A comparison between a later painting, Mealtime at the Farm of 1942- a kind of Louis Le Nain peasant meal meets the spirit of Mein Kampf- and the Supper at Emmaus, makes that Nazi connection very convincing.

In his time van Meegeren fooled not only leading players like Hermann Goering who owned one of his Vermeer forgeries, The Woman taken in Adultery, but also eminent art historians. None were more elevated and acclaimed than Abraham Bredius, one of the architects of Rembrandt scholarship- his paintings have Bredius numbers- and a man responsible for helping to purchase an uncontested Vermeer, the Allegory of Faith. Bredius has suffered the eternal humiliation of declaring the Supper at Emmaus a true Vermeer; he wrote an article in the bible of connoisseurship, The Burlington Magazine, in 1937, proclaiming its autograph status. As Lopez says, history and art history has been very rough on Bredius because he was conned by a clever psychologist who knew how to exploit the great Dutch art historian's weakness. Van Meegeren knew that Bredius expected religious pictures to emerge from Vermeer's early career, the one period of his career where pictures were scarce. And there was a lot riding on that "Vermeer"; not only an end-of-career coup for Bredius, but the making of the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and its new Director Dirk Hannema, who eventually bought the painting on Bredius's advice for what would be the equivalent of $4 million today. When everything unraveled, Bredius saw his world crumble to dust around him; I suspect that his major gaffe was partly why the Rembrandt Research project was set up, because some of his attributions must have been doubted in the light of his mistake in 1937. To be fair to Bredius though, he was responsible in the 1930s for cutting Rembrandt's hyper inflated oeuvre, a sad irony.

There's something about art history set against World War II that makes books like this read like thrillers at times. This is a world not only of curators and dealers but murderers, thieves and the military police. There are hairbreath scrapes like the time van Meegeren arouses Goering's suspicions about the provenance of the Adulteress. Who doesn't feel the same chill as van Meegeren when he is ordered by the Reichsmarschall to write a letter detailing the picture's history of ownership? How does one invent a provenance of a picture one has forged recently? Characteristically, van Meegeren hits on a brilliant solution: he writes Goering a letter saying that he will reveal the name of the owner within two year's time from the date of purchase. This is a masterstroke because it will confirm Goering's suspicions about the criminal origins of the Adulteress, while giving him an out with the letter; but it will draw attention away from the picture as a fake. This is a typical van Meegeren ploy betraying his attitude to life- an inveterate optimist sure of his ability to escape from the worst of all possible predicaments by guile and sense of the moment opportunism. 

The forger's luck ran out when the Allies apprehended Goering's picture dealer Alois Miedl, whose confession allowed the Adulteress to be traced back to van Meegeren. Miedl, quite a character himself, lived out the rest of life in sunny Spain bolstered by the proceeds accumulated through his dodgy wartime dealing. Others who had done the same were not so fortunate. Hannema was punished for collaborating with the Nazis and for sending art directly to them from Holland, his part was a revelation to me. Soon everybody was running for cover, collaborators, morally bankrupt dealers, women who had literally slept with the enemy, against a Holland of vengeful cruelty gradually ceding to leniency, a mood brilliantly evoked by Lopez with his sympathetic summary of the situation and use of harrowing photos of traitors suffering at the hands of the wrathful Dutch. This is one of the best descriptions of the war time Dutch art scene since parts of Lynne Nicholas's indispensable The Rape of Europa.

I've read a few books on van Meegeren, mainly for a current course I'm teaching on art crime, but I still can't really fathom how he succeeded beyond the dreams of most forgers. His Supper at Emmaus looks nothing like a Vermeer, but the forger managed to fool Bredius into believing it was. You'll find some possible reasons by another van Meegeren scholar, Errol Morris here, and lots more besides, including more from Jonathan Lopez. There's also a humorous and insightful film by the Boyman's Museum here.

Van Meegeren's fabrications now inhabit a curious world of tainted celebrity. Pictures like the Lacemaker, one of his earliest forgeries from 1926, are immensely appealing; and in such pictures perhaps we can detect an honest desire to emulate Vermeer to the best of the forger's abilities. It is a tragedy that van Meegeren could only discover his artistic ability through forgeries- his paintings under his own name hardly quicken the pulse. Lopez pulls no punches here, but he is impartial and objective. Yet, at the end of his book, we seem to encounter the blank face of the final TTSS doll, not somebody with a face or real identity. Van Meegeren's most successful forgery was the portrait of himself he presented to the world.  

Don’t Stop the Carnival!

We're on the eve of a massive protest against the cuts. The students' resistance is taking the form of a carnival in London, as this colourful poster proclaims.

I will be in London this week, but not until Friday when I'm visiting the Treasures from Budapest exhibition at the Royal Academy. I'm bound to lose myself in the renaissance and baroque sections of this show.

Still, I'll send the carnival my best wishes and support. There's a "dark new philistinism" looming over the country, and the high spirits of this event will hopefully go some way towards dispelling it.

Meanwhile, to give you some idea of the anger brewing in U.K. universities, here's a letter pledging support to the students- it was sent to the Guardian yesterday and is signed by no less than 295 academics.

 

Here's my pictorial tribute to the COR: Pieter Bruegel the Younger's Battle between Carnival and Lent. Plenty v Austerity, I guess.

 

There'll be a longer, more conventional post up before the end of the week.  

The Art of Bad Government

I wrote this post last week before disappearing under an avalanche of teaching assignments!

It was a strange thing to happen, but while watching the ConDems posing awkwardly in front of a backdrop with the Great Wall of China, on T.V. last week, I suddenly saw another backdrop superimposed over this one- a fresco in renaissance Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338-40). There is a slight Asian connection, since I do remember that the beautiful meadows in Lorenzetti's mural have been compared to Chinese book illustration; and I have thought myself that the large strip of forest behind the hawking party disappearing into the distance slightly echoes the Great Wall of China.

That's not the main reason I thought of Lorenzetti. He came to mind because his landscape appears in a fresco called An Allegory of Good and Bad Government.

As the title suggests, the three frescoes show what happens when good government, elected to protect the citizens, administer justice, and keep the peace, suddenly turns horribly bad. Around a personification of Good Government are allegorical figures representing Courage, Justice, Magnanimity, Peace, Prudence, and Temperance.

Under Good Government, everyone thrives, be they the most humble labourer or the most exalted prince; order is maintained and security established. So that we get the message, Lorenzetti paints a winged figure, Securitas, which hovers over the countryside.

Bad Government faces Good Government on the opposite wall as if to emphasize how one administration can just as easily turn into the other. The head of Bad Government is a demonic figure of Tyranny around which cluster a coalition of allegorical henchmen like Avarice, Cruelty and Pride.
Meanwhile poor old Justice is wrapped up in a shroud and tormented by menacing military types. Under the regime of Bad Government we have an occupying army, and countryside completely blasted and barren unlike the picturesque one of Good Government. Securitas is nowhere to be seen.

I came across a great blog by Dale S. Westervelt, Centering The Eagle: Concerning the Role of the Federal Government in the Life of Its Citizens which has a wonderful description of Lorenzetti's three-walled Allegory. You can read that here. Mr Westervelt quotes from a primer by David Millar on political philosophy that used Lorenzetti's painting.

"There is no better way to understand what political philosophy is and why we need it than by looking at Lorenzetti's magnificent mural."

I couldn't agree more. I don't need to read newspapers, watch TV, or look at books on politics to understand what's happening in the U.K. now. All I need is to contemplate Ambrogio's elegant and well composed allegory to comprehend what happens to the polity when the elected ones- or, in this case ones with no clear mandate- start to destroy the foundations upon which a well-governed society is built. I fear unless the tide turns we'll be living in something resembling Lorenzetti's occupied city, presided over by a bunch of ideologues blinded by their own dogma.

Mr Westervelt with the help of David Millar offers the following thoughts.

Good and Bad Government Profoundly Effect the Quality of Human Lives: Lorenzetti's frescos show how the rule of justice and other civic virtues allow "ordinary people to work, trade, hunt, dance, and generally do all of those things that enrich human existence…[and, alternatively] tyranny breeds poverty and death…[therefore] it really makes a difference in our lives whether we are governed well or badly." (ibid.)

Our Government's Form is Not Predetermined: The primer asks rhetorically why the mural was painted in the first place. The Sala dei Nove (Room of the Nine), in the Siena public square, was the meeting room of the rotating group of wealthy merchant governors. The mural served to remind these men—and many travelers and art historians over the centuries—of their civic responsibility to govern the people responsibly to preserve their lives, their liberty, and their happiness. The vivid portrayal of evil government was to be a sober reminder of the outcome of all manner of vice and the consequence of dereliction of their duties

We Can Know What Distinguishes Between Good Government and Bad: Unlike academic disciplines of math and science, which rely on methods and formulas to arrive at facts, we commonly think about politics as residing in the realm of opinions and preferences. Oxford's guide refers in this section to 'political knowledge.' "The frescos are meant to be instructive: they are meant to teach both rulers and their citizens how to achieve the kind of life they wanted."

Politics aside, I hope you enjoy Lorenzetti's beautiful murals. You can see the whole lot here.

The Rise of Digital Deviants

In the THES Paula Humfrey, a lecturer in on-line learning writes…

"Teaching online fosters the discipline of writing fluently in a way that is not available in any other academic environment. Online lecturers have the essential luxury of work that is as portable as a laptop computer. This makes it affordable to undertake independent research without relying on department travel grants and sabbaticals. A contract affiliation with a university provides an academic email address for correspondence. This is the only credential, beyond their doctorate, that lecturers need in order to pass through the virtual as well as the wrought-iron gates of the academy and recommend themselves to prospective colleagues, conference organisers and publishers."

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the spirit of 68 provides the critical paradigm..

"Bourdieu argued that the most interesting French minds at the crux of May 1968 were the "deviant" contract lecturers who were "more or less totally deprived of, or liberated from, the powers and privileges but also the tasks and the responsibilities of the ordinary professor". Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and others were critically relevant to the political and cultural moment even though they were disenfranchised within the academy. Bourdieu wrote: "I need only mention the astonishment of a certain young American visitor, at the beginning of the Seventies, to whom I had to explain that all his intellectual heroes, like Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, not to mention the minor prophets of the moment, held marginal positions in the university system which often disqualified them from officially directing research."

And the function of on-line lecturers in a digital world…

"Surprisingly, lecturers teaching online courses also offer the means for the academy to revivify itself, but not in the way that the academy presently imagines (that is, because online lecturers come cheap). Online lecturers with good minds offer a quality of scholarly independence that the university needs if it is to keep its degree programmes relevant in a digitally connected world."

All of which I'd agree with being a supporter of greater use of the web in education. But reading the cynical comments on the discussion thread, it's obvious that the on-line professoriate isn't desired by everybody.

Scroll down the page and Rebecca Attwood has interesting things to say about the U.K. government and a vision for on-line learning. I don't doubt her sincerity, but how does this play out against the ConDem's wish to curb the freedom of the internet? It strikes me that not content with wrecking U.K. society, the ConDems want to ruin the web for everybody.

Petition: Humanities and Social Sciences Matter.

"We urge the UK government to recognise the humanities and social sciences as a public good and to invest fully in their future rather than leaving them to the vagaries of the market."

Sign the petition here.

Image: Joshua Reynolds, Theory, R.A.

Christie’s on Poussin’s Ordination.

Richard Knight and Paul Raison of Christie's Old Masters and 19th Century Art department talk in this video about Poussin's Ordination, soon to be sold by the auction house. They're obviously very much in awe of the painting; Knight calls it the most important painting he's dealt with in his career. Nice to hear the speakers on the allusion to the philosophers' grove in the background- the figures reclining on the grass.

I wonder, and I stress this is just me thinking aloud, not Christie's, whether Knight's comment about Rome being Poussin's adopted home hints at a possible buyer in Italy. On second thoughts, this is just me being paranoid about the painting leaving the UK.  

All will be revealed in a few weeks.Cross our fingers. 

Defend the Arts and Humanities Site

I'd like to flag up this site I found dedicated to protecting the arts against the austerity regime.

 On the site you'll audio files of papers given at the Why Humanities? conference held at Birkbeck on the 4^th-5^th Nov. Musings on the two cultures, the Browne Report amongst other things. One art historian there- Iain Pears.

Finally, maintaining the anti-coalition mood, JJ at the Guardian pits the odious Nick Clegg against Hogarth on the work and idleness issue.

Image: Guercino's Allegory of Painting and Sculpture of 1637.

Matthew Collings on Art History Today

Just winding down after a really busy week.

What really made my week was T.V. critic Matthew Collings virtually stopping by to comment on my piece about his Piero della Francesca programme. His interesting comments are below. I agree with all he says, especially his point about the continuity between pre-modern and modern art. Thanks to MC for stopping by. Who says that blogs don't get read by influential art history figures!

 

"The series is not academically naive, it's just not coming from an academic place (or not only). I've never been disillusioned with modern art, and in fact have always thought of modern and pre-modern as profoundly continuous. The discontinuity is between modern and a certain type of post-modern, namely populist institution post-modern The aim of the series is to criticise that kind of thing."

 

A couple of other things. Glennis McGregor has told me about her great site Renaissance for Real. It looks at the renaissance and the virtual amongst other things. Definitely worth bookmarking and exploring.

I was also contacted by Accredited Online Colleges who have an article on 50 Amazing Museum Exhibits You Can Enjoy Online.

Right, I'm off to get a beer, listen to some music and relax.

The Day We Turned French?

I think there's only one image from art history that seems appropriate after today's scenes in London.