Art History Today

Faking It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.