Art History Today

Connoisseurship on Trail. Book Review: John Brewer, The American Leonardo; a Twentieth-Century Tale of Obsession, Art and Money, 2009.

Here’s a review of an important book I’ve not had time to put up; it’s especially relevant in these times of Leonardo mania.

When the legendary dealer and confidante of connoisseurs, Joseph Duveen (fig. 2), declared a painting of the woman known as La Belle Ferronnière a copy (fig. 1), after seeing a photograph, he found himself sued by Mrs Andrée Lardoux Hahn, the owner of the picture. The case was eventually settled with Duveen paying $60,000, something like $650, 000 today. The trail in 1929 fielded a formidable team of connoisseurs, including the most famous of  all, Bernard Berenson (fig.3). Yet, to no avail as the presiding magistrate, Judge William Harman Black, dismissed all the expertise of the connoisseurs as inadmissible; and Black demanded much more rigorous methods to prove the ability to determine the authorship of paintings. Enter science, particularly x-rays to make connoisseurship transparent to a lay public. Brewer’s account of the famous trial of Hahn v Duveen and its consequences demands to be read by anybody- within or without the profession- interested in the machinations of the Old Master market. Not only does the author place the trial within the context of art history, but also within the culture of modern American capitalism. As he reminds us at the start of the book, this was the age of conspicuous consumption: a tine during which wealthy Americans chased valuable works of art, the sort of milieu described in the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James. In the scramble for worldly goods, modern wealth became linked to high culture; the renaissance, which was seen as the epitome of this, was co-opted by dealers and financiers; while with the growth of the public sphere and modern communications powered by capital, the American public shared in the debates about art covered by the modern press.

1.La Belle Ferronnière, Private Collection, USA,

In one of the most important parts of the book, Brewer dissects the “culture of connoisseurship.” Identifying two types of “scientific connoisseurship”: firstly, the type  that depends upon a barrage of technology such as X-rays, infra-red, microscopy etc which is common to us today; secondly, the connoisseurship of the nineteenth-century organised around systems and hierarchies, sub-divisions of schools following a taxonomy borrowed from the life sciences. It was this latter type of connoisseurship that found itself unwittingly on trial since its Morellian methodology was seen as kind of “magic” by Judge Black. Berenson’s “magic”, which to use Brewer’s words was “a subjective technique dependant on the eye”,  could not be verified objectively; a way of scientizing attributions was therefore demanded. As Brewer amusingly puts it, Berenson and the connoisseurs were eye rather X-ray. It was ok to detect the ghost in the machine by technological devices, but not by what was perceived as the mysticism of the experts. Introducing technology into the trial, as well as the forensic skills of the Hahn’s lawyers, helped to undermine the consensus of connoisseurs. Not that you need a lawyer to break a consensus; James Beck showed how fragile such groups are  in his discussion of the Madonna of the Pinks, incidentally  mentioned by Brewer in his introduction.

2. Joseph Duveen visits the races..

There have been many consequences arising from the Hahn v Duveen trial. For one thing, here we have the uninformed owner of art going head to head with the experts, usually with the objective of financially benefitting from it. This may have been an intention of the Hahns, although they were almost certainly goaded by Duveen’s arrogance and contempt for the non-expert. He pronounced their picture a copy, though he shot himself in the foot by saying that the Louvre version was not by Leonardo, but somebody “close to his hand-possibly it was painted by Boltraffio.” The pressing of science on the trail came out of this; it  was a way of democratising the culture of connoisseurship. However, Duveen didn’t completely renounce technology; after being sued, he called for more photographs of the Hahn La Belle, since he had little faith in his pre-trail experts; Valentiner was too young; de Ricci knew more about manuscripts than painting, Duveen sent large photographs of the painting to more established experts in Europe  like Sir Charles Holmes (former editor of The Burlington Magazine), Roger Fry, part of the Bloomsbury set and former curator at the Met in New York, Sir Claude Philips, retired keeper of the Wallace Collection. Photographs would prove problematic however to Duveen since they would be challenged as evidence in court.- technology can be a double-edged sword. Eventually the Hahn picture and its more famous Louvre variant would be examined side by side behind closed doors by an assembly of curators, connoisseurs and lawyers in 1923, which presages another trend in the modern art world- the appearance of disputed art works in litigation.

3.Bernhardt Berenson inspects a painting.

One of the main threads running through this account is the relationship between science and art. The rift between scientific connoisseurship and traditional connoisseurship is wide, and really shows no signs of narrowing at the present time, with good reason. Despite the hoped for Holy Grail of objective scientific testing, such procedures cannot validate attributions on their own. In a thoughtful afterword, Brewer calls on a method that incorporates both objective scientific testing and the subjective techniques of the eye, a harmonised methodology suggested by someone who was a conservator, and the “father of cleaning pictures” in the U.K., Helmut Ruhemann. I recall that in an essay on Berenson, Sydney J. Freedberg called the intuition of the connoisseur “computerlike in its swiftness” since the connoisseur enters data into his memory bank, retrieves, process and analyses this visual information as he looks at the work of art; but all of these computer-like operations demand an aesthetic sense and eye for characteristics in a painting, such as colour, form, gradation of light etc. Ideally, a connoisseur “machine”, calibrated halfway between objective examination and aesthetic subjectivism confronting the work of art. Is it possible to have such a model for connoisseurship in our own time? Retaining the computer analogy, I’m not sure that you could programme one to take account of all the historical, visual, art historical data, complete with stylistic and local variations. “Scientific connoisseurship” is such a slippery concept anyway; Berenson thought what he did was “scientific”, “the isolation of the characteristics of the known and their confrontation with the unknown” as he said in “The Rudiments of Connoisseurship.” That didn’t cut any ice with the formidable Judge Black, who must have believed Berenson’s authenticating method was difficult, if not impossible to substantiate with concrete evidence. Black saw it as smoke and mirrors. Maybe someone should have explained to him that the trick is to strike a balance between analysis based on accumulated knowledge and an empirical means of testing art in the present. There are signs of this in our own time, but as Brewer says, we still have a very long way to go.

The kind of modified Morellian connoisseurship that Berenson practiced can have its disadvantages, since it can encourage a “checklist” mentality, something that aristocratic connoisseurs and museum directors like the formidable Wilhelm von Bode, condemned. Von Bode also hated Morellian connoisseurship because it threatened to make connoisseurship available to all; the last thing he wanted was his Berlin museums to be filled with crowds pronouncing on Botticellis and Raphaels, aided by manuals of “mechanical connoisseurship.” All one had to do was draw up a catalogue of physiognomic details, hands, eyes, ears, memorably called by Charles Eliot Norton, Berenson’s teacher at Harvard, “the ear and toe-nail school.” One of the worst examples of this DIY connoisseurship was the “fakebuster” and friend of Ruhemann, Maurits van Dantzig, who helped to detect the master forger Van Meegeren. Van Dantzig found art history unaccommodating when he introduced his method of “pictology,” a technique derived from graphology and psychological testing. Interestingly, Van Dantzig’s methodology developed out of his use of psychologically profiling employees in his company. Just like F.B.I. profiling, the data was used to build up a picture of an individual; the same principle was applied to hunt down the artist within the work. Pictology might be termed a blend of science and aesthetics that announced it could identify the painter through a worksheet of “characteristics”- van Dantzig claimed over 70 in a Leonardo painting! Inevitably, as Brewer recounts in his chapter on Ruhemann and van Dantzig, the latter ran foul of art historians, not just for his mechanistic connoisseurship, but because of his contentious personality. Van Dantzig significance to the Hahn La Belle was that he tried to use it in his war against art historians, while the more placid Ruhemann tried to get on with them; he could boast Philip Hendy, a director of the National Gallery who actually saw the Hahn La Belle in London, amongst his friends.

4.Guardian photo showing crowds outside the current Leonardo exhibition.

Perhaps the most admirable thing about John Brewer’s book is the way it deftly interweaves these debates about connoisseurship with the expansion of the public sphere in modern times. No one can doubt that connoisseurship now occurs in a mass society underpinned by high speed communications and mediatized experience, available to all. Today even leading curators make decisions in the blink of an eye influenced by this electronic matrix; just seeing a sent photograph via e.mail or the web can trigger an acquisition. The internet has exploded art out into cyberspace where most developments in the art world can be discovered, if you know where to look.

The Hahn trial was sensationalized by the New York newspapers and thus involved the public vicariously.  At the time of the Hahn trial, scientific connoisseurship stood for a common-sense allied against the collective snobbery of the experts; this seems to have continued into our time with such cases as the Jackson Pollock woman who battled the Manhattan elite and much more recently, David Joel, who went up against the mighty Wildenstein Foundation in an episode of the BBC’s Fake or Fortune?

I wrote this post on connoisseurship and the public after visiting an exhibition of renaissance drawings last year, not heavily crowded, though more people in attendance than usual. I’m not sure what I would have written if I’d done it after visiting the Leonardo blockbuster (fig.4), which is breaking all the records for public museum-going- truly a phenomenon of our times. Art in major museums has become big business; exhibitions have turned into commodities and the painter a brand to be sold and consumed, for better or worse. The public has become more aware of all the debates through high gloss catalogues, TV and the internet, and in cases is even engaging via the web, or letters to newspapers.

Where does this leave the connoisseur practicing his or her method in this age of mass consumerism? Wilhelm von Bode must be turning in his grave. Connoisseurship has become popularized by the net, newspapers and television programmes, a development whose seeds may have been planted in the Hahn era where the clouds of mystique were dispersed by democratic scientific connoisseurship demanded by a couple who felt that the the old style of art evaluation was an elitist scam.

5.Hahn La Belle (left); Louvre La Belle, as they appeared in Harry Hahn’s The Rape of La Belle (1946).

The public may never get the chance to see the Hahn La Belle as it resides in a private collection- it was sold at Sotheby’s last year for $1.3 miillion, three times above its pre-sale reserve. Before that the lady resided in splendid isolation at an address in Omaha that Brewer was not allowed legally to disclose. Despite attempts by the Hahns and their supporters to gain the approval of such august personages as Kenneth Clark, it has remained hidden from the public. In 1993 the U.K.’s leading Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp studied it in Omaha, pronounced it a 17th century copy but interestingly said it was more “seductive” than the one deemed authentic, now in the Leonardo show. Looking at the colour reproduction of her (fig 1), as well as this b/w image (fig. 5)- obtained from this site which has good material on the case- which was reproduced in Harry Hahn’s 1946 book about the painting, The Rape of La Belle, I can see what Kemp means. The Hahn lady looks more alluring… Even if this is a copy, I much prefer to it to its more well-known, colder and lifeless twin, not just my opinion, but other art historians. Another important point made by Brewer is that although no one has proved the Hahn La Belle is a Leonardo “at least to the satisfaction of most experts”, nobody has proved it is not. It seems to function as a symbol of the ambiguity of connoisseurship and art history, indeterminate, midway between an original and a copy.

This book is a fine addition to the literature on the history of connoisseurship, especially as it extends that topic out into the era of modern capitalism and the culture industry. Imagine Leonardo in Hollywood, and I don’t mean Leonardo DiCaprio!  John Brewer has made a timely and valuable contribution; he deserves to read by anybody interested in the relationship of art and modern society.  The chapter on the “cult of connoisseurship” is one of the best summaries of the subject that I've ever read. Highly recommended.

I’ll return to this subject of the two La Belles in another post eventually.

Other Sources

James Beck, From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis, Florence, 2006).

Bernard Berenson, “The Rudiments of Connoisseurship” in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art Vol. 2, (London,1903), 111-148.

Sydney J. Freedberg, “Some Thoughts on Berenson, Connoisseurship, and the History of Art”, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, Vol. 3 (1989), pp. 11-26.

 

The Missing Picture

Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, “Giampetrino”, Christ Carrying the Cross,  c. 1510-30, National Gallery, London, oil on poplar, 60 x 47 cms.

Here’s a hard-hitting article from the Michael Daley, the head of the art history watchdog, Art Watch, on restoration issues behind the blockbuster Leonardo show. I share their disappointment that Giampetrino’s Christ Carrying the Cross was not included,  This painting is important, as it throws light not only on the technique that Leonardo imparted to his Milanese followers, but also the pictorial effects that the workshop learnt from the maestro. It seems that for discovering the impact of Leonardo’s technique on his companions, Giampetrinio is the painter to study, rather than Boltraffio whose work was also restored in readiness for the Leonardo exhibition.

Just a thought of my own, which has been bothering me all this term as I’ve been teaching a course on Leonardo da Vinci. Presumably the reason Giampetrino wasn’t included is that somewhere along the line the decision was made to confine the exhibition to Leonardo’s first Milanese period, hence eliminating Giampetrino’s involvement, although Leonardo may have jotted his name down – “gian petro”- on a list dating from about 1497, in the Codex Atlanticus. True, Giampetrino’s copy of the master’s Last Supper is included; but if the parameters of the exhibition had been extended, we could have had more Giampetrino  and painters like Solario and even Luini, who are all represented in the holdings of the National Gallery, their Portrait of a Venetian Senator and Christ Amongst the Doctors, respectively. There wouldn’t have been any negotiations or politicking needed about these works as the museum owns them.It could also be argued that the second Milanese generation’s art provides more of an insight into the master’s influence than the likes of Marco d’Oggiono and Boltraffio- certainly the former, who is one of the most mediocre painters Italy ever produced! Surely Giampetrino’s Christ could have been accommodated; after all, the Leonardo cartoon- which has been traditionally dated to 1506-8, was chronologically re-located to the end of the first Milanese period- 1499-1500, presumably to justify its inclusion within the show.

As for the Giampetrino’s Christ Carrying the Cross, Michael Daley says, “Not only is it as closely related to Leonardo’s imagery and methods as has been acknowledged, it is arguably the best preserved Renaissance picture in the National Gallery.” It seems strange that it wasn’t included then. Still, it’s now out of the reserve collection, and available to view in a – one hopes!- quieter part of the gallery.

Three La Tours in the U.K.

 

Georges de la Tour, St Jerome Reading, The Royal Collection, Hampton Court, c. 1621-3, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 62 x 55 cm. Given to La Tour in 1972.

 

A bit more on Georges La Tour. As a correspondent to Art History News points out:, if you want to see La Tour in this country, you have go to Hampton Court (St Jerome Reading), Leicester Art Gallery (The Choirboy, A Young Singer), or Preston Hall Museum, Stockton on Tees, (The Dice Players). Remember there are none of his works in the National Gallery.

I had the privilege of seeing all three, along with loans from Fort Worth and Dublin in a small exhibition, Georges de La Tour: Master of Candlelight, held at Compton Verney in 2007.

The curator of the exhibition, and the U.K.’s leading expert on La Tour, Christopher Wright, pulled no punches when commenting on La Tour’s omission from the canons of taste.

“At no point in his long career did [Kenneth] Clark  see fit to bring La Tour into the structure of his criticism and art history. Had La Tour been included in his Civilisation, the artist would, at a stroke, have been brought to the attention of a much wider public”.

As I said in the previous La Tour post, Anthony Blunt was very keen for the NG to acquire a La Tour. This, as Wright indicates, was that despite having a solid preference for Nicolas Poussin, Blunt was not blind to the rest of the 17th century French school; Clark, however, had absolutely no interest in French 17th century painting at all.

A large blind spot for the director of one of the world’s leading museums!

Source

Christopher Wright, “The Genius of La Tour: a lesson in the history of taste” in exhibition cat, Georges de La Tour: Master of Candlelight, Compton Verney, 2007, 33-38.

 

National Gallery Notes

With the opening of the Leonardo exhibition just days away. the National Gallery are marking the event with the publication of their latest Technical Bulletin, no. 32,.all on Leonardo da Vinci. As Art History News says- thanks for the link- this is “art history nirvana.” Better still, it’s free. While you’re here, also download another free edition of the Bulletin, no. 31, which looks at a Verrocchio work, and the wider question of the relationship between Verrocchio and his students, including Leonardo. The essays on Leonardo in Verrocchio’s studio, in no. 32, and this essay should ideally be read back to back.

I took time out from my busy teaching schedule to visit the NG last Monday. I  wanted to look at the exhibition on Sir Charles Locke Eastlake before it closed, at the end of this month. I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t a bigger installation, just five pictures acquired by the first director of the NG, and one of the instigators of “scientific connoisseurship.” However, it was worth visiting, especially for the opportunity to peek at some pages of Eastlake’s travel journals, see his passport, and some letters. A nice little ensemble celebrating the man’s achievements. In addition to a copy by Eastlake of Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr, there are works by well known artists like Pisanello, Giovanni Bellini;, G. Catena; there’s also pictures by obscure artists like Bona da Ferrara and Ambrogio Bergogne. Hurry, if you want to see it as it’s due to close very soon.

 

Pisanello, Apparition of the Virgin to Sts George and Anthony Abbot, 1445, egg tempera on poplar,  46.5 x 29 cm. Presented by Lady Eastlake to the NG, in memory of her husband, in 1867.

Though there wasn't any literature to accompany the exhibition, I did visit the bookshop and pick up a copy of Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon’s Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World, which I daresay I’ll read and review on the blog, when time permits. I also bought a copy of John Brewer’s The American Leonardo, a tale of connoisseurship, greed and deceit. Can’t wait to read that! I still have more Leonardo lectures to put up and one connoisseurship- oriented post on the Raphael Judgement of Paris. So much to do, so little time- the common complaint!

A Few Things

Just a few things: interesting stuff that might interest some people.

The organiser of a forthcoming conference in Amsterdam has asked me to publicise their event, which I’m very happy to do. It’s a conference on the Nabis, or Symbolist painters, to be held on 27th-28th October. 

The conference has been booked for the Thursday 27th and Friday 28th of October 2011 and will take place in Amsterdam, ABN AMRO Bank HQ. The conference will open with a plenary lecture on Thursday and a chance to visit the exhibition with a full day of 8 speakers on Friday. There are no registration charges but please contact Craig Landt ([email protected]) to confirm your place.

Please find the conference programme here Nabis programme

 

 

Lily Ann Pop is an artist who lives in Turin; she has a sacred art project underway called “The Man of the Shroud.” this is always a fascinating subject, and Lily Ann covers it using photography.

From the Artist’s biography:

In March 2009 graduates in painting with the thesis: A mirror of the psyche: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene. An analysis of the scenographic aspects. Along with that presents the following four paintings: Square in Holstenwall, The Hallucination, Caesar the Somnambulist.The Awakening from the Grave, Caesar's death.
In May 2011 participates at the Sacred Art exhibition organized by the New Artemisia Gallery, located in Bergamo, Italy, with two photographs titled The Man of the Shroud (#1 and #2).
In October 2011 participates at the collective exhibition Art Italy in London at SW1 Gallery.
The artist is currently represented by Agora Gallery from New York.

The artist is keen to promote this project in the U.K., so if any museum people are reading this. Lily Ann’s full biography and portfolio van be found here.

 

Since I participated in a conference on Rubens last year I’ve kept an eye on all things Rubensian. This is the latest issue of the Rubens periodical, the Rubenianum Quarterly; topics include “ A Rubens University” and “Palazzo Rubens: The Master as Architect.”  You can download it here.

Poussin’s Revenge

The above is what  a colleague of mine is calling the wave of  impending strikes at the National Gallery. In response to concerns about security, the foot soldiers of the museum are threatening a series of strikes next month that could seriously disrupt the high-profile Leonardo exhibition due to start on the 9th November.  The cause of these projected walkouts are the new security arrangements. From the Guardian:

“Under pressure from government cuts, the gallery has instructed its warders – now called "gallery assistants" – to each watch over two rooms rather than one, as previously. Warders claim the new arrangement allowed the Poussin vandal time to attack two paintings because the warder was in the adjoining room.

About 200 members of staff – including curators – have signed a protest petition to the gallery's director, Nicholas Penny.”

Security has been a burning issue since the attack on Poussin’s Golden Calf perpetuated in the summer. I can only assume that the great French master would have approved of the action the warders, or “gallery assistants” as they are now forced to call themselves, might take on behalf of his art, Leonardo’s and all the other old masters in the gallery.

The article doesn’t mention it, but it remains to be seen how other major museums like Cracow and the Louvre are going to react to this growing storm, since their valuable masterpieces will be vulnerable too.

I haven’t yet booked a ticket for the show, and that might prove a blessing in the long run.

The Butcher’s Shop: Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon in New York

I was recently invited to the preview of an upcoming exhibition in New York, but much as I’d love to go, NYC is a long way away! I have the next best thing as the Helly Nahmad Gallery have sent me a catalogue. From that, I’ll try to give a virtual review of the show, before it begins!

 

My first thought is that this pairing of two modern masters (18 works by Soutine, 14 by Bacon) is inspired, especially as the parallels are explored along the themes of meat, flesh and paint. There have been attempts to force similar parallels between Bacon and others, like the Bacon and Caravaggio show put on in Rome in 2009. The convergence at that show was forced, but in this case there’s no need to collapse the two painters into each other, as if they were thematically indivisible. The correlations emerge naturally here: both Soutine and Bacon were inspired by Rembrandt’s 1655 Dead or Flayed Ox, an exemplum in flesh and bone, as well as a piece of pathos off the butcher’s slab. Both artists acknowledged the importance of Rembrandt’s work; both were fascinated by the analogies between paint and flesh; both lived in the same period; both stayed in Paris and were intimate with the old master tradition. So the exhibition stands on a solid bedrock, unlike a lot of parallel lives expositions. Rembrandt and Caravaggio anyone? These parallels are competently outlined in the introductory essay, “Flesh and Paint” by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, the curators of the show.

The exhibition catalogue also stresses this equivalency with a timeline that places Soutine and Bacon side by side. This allows the reader to cross-reference year by year, learning what works are being produced, what articles written, what books read, as we journey through time. So  we read that between 1927-29 Bacon is in Paris improving his French, studying Poussin’s Massacre of he Innocents at Chantilly, and reading surrealist writers like Georges Bataille.  In the same period, Soutine is enjoying success with shows and attention whilst painting meat hung in butcher’s shops. Onwards to 1933 when Bacon essays his first Crucifixion, a motif in which flesh becomes almost metaphysical, descending from the bones, a visual theme which the French critic Gilles Deleuze, in his Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, read as a deformation holding consequences  not only for modern art, but the Christian figurative tradition overall. Bacon certainly didn’t see his art as “spiritual”; Cimabue’s Crucifixion, and the whole gallery of carnal and holy suffering that followed it was nothing more than “ a worm crawling down the cross”, in Bacon’s memorable phrase. Meanwhile across the page, we’re learning that a few years earlier (1924-5) Soutine produced six “almost life-size” canvases of beef paintings, all developed from what is looking like a paint/flesh blueprint, or even ur-carcass, Rembrandt’s Dead Ox. They’re reproduced on the page like a Warholian series, but rendered with sympathy, not detachment. You’d have paid a high price for seeing them painted though: by all accounts, Soutine’s studio stunk to high heaven, and the decomposing meat attracted the flies thus causing consternation to Soutine’s visitors. This was long before Damien Hirst!

  Away from thematic parallels, the exhibition catalogue surveys, with the aid of wonderful magnifications of works, the overlap of artistic technique. Although such terms are purely arbitrary, Soutine seems the most “painterly” of the artists. You can see why the American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning adored him. Looking at the hands of Soutine’s 1920 Praying Man (in the show), for example, can be a vertiginous experience:  greens, reds, oranges and yellows pulsate, kind of like hallucinatory fruit. Colours are “pulled” over each other, and the spectator has the sense of losing their centre of gravity. Paint is solid and substantial, yet it seems to dance in a euphoric way before the eyes.  Sorry, don’t have an image of Praying Man, but there’s a similar, nervous, decomposing look to some of Soutine’s other art. Take his 1918 Self-Portrait (in the show) where the effect is of paint stripping the flesh away to reveal the bones, and that yellow-brownish background reminds me of animal flesh. Soutine’s studio had indeed become a butcher's shop.

Though they have similarities where paint as flesh is concerned, Bacon’s technique is different because he applies the paint more sparingly. This has led to detractors accusing him of clumsy, or unfinished compositions. Issues of finish aside, Bacon sought a kind of armature or skeleton for the painting- and sometimes it’s difficult to see where this motor begins and ends in his art. With Bacon’s painting we don’t encounter the viscous blobs and bubbles approximating to fleshy fluids or pus, like we do in Soutine; it’s more like laying the body bare, resulting in a kind of  shock “realism”.  Of course we don’t have to relate technique to meat in Bacon:’s art.  It’s also implicit in the painter’s name, his cultural origins in Dublin where he was surrounded by animal flesh, dogs and horses, motifs which persist into the 1970s with works like Untitled: Study for a Dog, (in the show). For Bacon, meat and violence may have been inextricable since he must have known the horrifying story of the Dublin rebel leader Robert Emmet, hanged, drawn and quartered in 1803. The story goes that the executioner sliced off the criminal’s head with a butcher’s knife, whereupon all the dogs came running to lick the blood off the pavements. It’s like Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas come to life in the streets of Dublin.  

Bacon is much admired now, but Soutine has had his devotees too. I’m not that familiar with his work, so Martin Hammer’s closing essay on “Soutine Mania in Post-War British Art” is helpful. Hammer re-visits that potent ensemble of Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon; but we also learn about the impact of Soutine on the likes of Lucien Freud, and the generation inspired by him- Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Studying Soutine- Auerbach especially- led to a new feel for the practice of painting. Like acolytes eager for the mysteries of art, they sought out the elder Soutine, and found the hidden secrets of the painted surface. Post-war British art was all the better for it.

If you’re in New York, the exhibition opens on May 1st.

Here Comes the Deaccessioning Flood?

Back to museum politics and, inevitably, money.

A few days ago Bendor Grosvenor reported the dismal story of Bolton Council deciding to sell off 36 works of art. Though they bowed to pressure from arts groups about stopping the deaccessioning of a picture by a local painter, all the other 36 are going under the hammer at Bonham’s. Due to some famous artists on this list, I can’t help thinking Bendor might be on to something about this opening the floodgates for other council sell-offs, especially with the current evisceration of local government funds. The Dughet classical landscape (above) is top-notch, the Millais (below) is good and the Romney is a fine work. What a sorry state of affairs.

Some of the works doomed to deaccessioning and auction:

Gaspard Dughet Classical Landscape (pictured)
Richard Ansdell Buzzard and Ptarmigan
William Powell Frith A Dream of the Future
18th Century French School The Finding of Oedipus
Arthur Ambrose McEvoy Madame Errasuriz
Walter Richard Sickert Pauline de Talleyrand-Perigord
Philip Wilson Steer The Falls at Aysgarth
John Everett Millais The Somnambulis (pictured)
George Romney King Lear
Edward Burne-Jones Danae and the Brazen Tower
Charles Ginner English Landscape

 

  The real tragedy is that people who have grown up with these works will now be deprived of them. We tend to forget about what could be called the “history of viewing”, in local museums. Each painting has welcomed many visitors over and over in its time, like a reassuring friend; now that bond will be broken.  Reading this article I can’t help contrasting it with another experience: attending the 1998 Art Treasures of England: The Regional Collections exhibition, masterminded by Richard Verdi and Richard Foster. I can visualise the R.A. packed with wonderful pictures, from every provincial museum in the country, (Bolton included), and me marvelling at the richness of holdings in our local museums, set up with philanthropic drive and civic virtue. How different things seem today with our cultural lifeblood being drained away by a philistine government completely out of control, forcing local councils to take these measures. I fear BG’s thought about floodgates opening might prove prophetic.

George Frederick Watts: An English Symbolist.

This post was looking like it was heading for the bowels of my computer, but now the V&A have announced a new exhibition on aestheticism, I think it’s fairly relevant to that. It’s adapted from one of my lectures on the renaissance and 19th century English art.

Watts was known as the “English Michelangelo," probably because of his prowess as a sculptor. Today his fame rests largely on his painting; he could paint across the spectrum, from society portraits to symbolic and allegorical works of the most beguiling complexity. When his art, especially ‘Love and Death’, were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, he immediately became incorporated into the International Symbolist movement. His Cupid here could be based on the antique, but it’s pose also reminds me of a putto in one of Raphael’s tapestry cartoons.

A measure of his status can be seen in the fact that Watt’s works are mentioned in the so-called “bible of decadence”, J.K. Huysman’s A Rebours of 1884. Here’s a suitably dandified portrait of Huysmans. This novel was avidly read by Oscar Wilde and the English Aesthetic movement who regarded it as a manifesto for a life of decadence. In A Rebours, Watts is summed up in these terms: “..the weirdly coloured pictures by Watts…a dreamy scholarly Englishman afflicted with a predilection for hideous hues.” This assessment hits the mark; Watts did specialise in paintings that though laden with classical and renaissance references, nevertheless had a more abstract and “dreamy” feel to them. His treatment of the classical nude should be seen as part of a trend seeking to expunge all classical and humanistic associations from it in favour of something more symbolic and diffuse.  A source of this mistiness in technique and subject matter can be found in Spiritualism. Watts was heavily involved in this through friends and patrons, and his language as the following extract shows echoes the metaphors of spiritualism, such as rending the veil:

“the one thing which is more than ever clearly perceived is the density of the veil that covers the mystery of our being, at all times impenetrable, and to be impenetrable, in spite of which conviction we ever passionately yearn to pierce it. This yearning finds its natural expression in poetry, in art, and in music.”

“Yet as long as humanity is humanity, man will yearn to ascend the heights human footsteps may not tread, and long to lift the veil that shrouds the enigma of being, and he will most prize the echo of this longing in even the incoherent expression of literature, music, and art.”

Watts was, arguably, the most symboliste of all the post-Pre-Raphaelite movement. His art was a confluence of several genres: the figural nude, the poeticised archetypical woman, and an uncompromising symbolism in which the subject seems to dissolve into dream and reverie, the distillation of the painted thoughts of a dreamy, scholarly English scholar pursuing the unattainable.

We observe the dandy hero of Huysman’s novel, Des Esseintes, poring over British illustrated travel guides in the Rue de Rivoli.

“He became interested in the laconic and exact details of the guide books, but his attention wandered away from the old English paintings to the moderns which attracted him much more. He recalled certain works he had seen at international expositions, and imagined that he might possibly behold them once more at London: pictures by Millais- the Eve of Saint Agnes with its lunar clear green; pictures by Watts, strange in colour, gamboge and indigo, pictures sketched by a sick Gustave Moreau, painted by an anaemic Michel Angelo and re-touched by a Raphael submerged in blue. Among other canvases, he recalled a Denunciation of Cain, an Ida, some Eves (like this “She Shall Be Called Woman”) where in the strange and mysterious mixtures of these three masters, rose the personality, at once refined and crude, of a learned and dreamy Englishman tormented by the bewitchment of cruel tones.” I’ll do another post on Huysmans soon, his knowledge of renaissance art via  Gustave Moreau.

N.B. Gamboge is “a partially transparent dark mustard yellow pigment.” Thanks Wikipedia. What a brilliant name for a colour!

Syd Barrett’s History of Art

 

Well, not really. One of the revelations in Rob Chapman’s new biography of the legendary painter, piper, mystic Syd Barrett, founder member of rock mastodon Pink Floyd, is that Syd wasn’t planning to write a story of art, sad to say.

I first heard about Syd Barrett's “History of Art” several years ago, and was really hoping it would turn out to be true. Imagine, not Gombrich’s Story of Art or Janson’s History of Art, but Syd Barrett’s History of Art,. I was looking forward to seeing the expression on the faces of the librarians when I ordered it for the university. Tragically, Syd’s “History of Art”  turns out to be some notes he made on major painters, copied from catalogues and art books, subsequently auctioned off as  Lot 725 after Syd’s death in 2006.

As Chapman says, “the art folder contained nine pages of notes, arranged chronologically from the Byzantine period- a favourite period of Syd’s, I think- through Florentine and Gothic Art, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, the Dutch School, Rembrandt and Vermeer, through to the mid- twentieth century.”

By reading this book I thought I was taking a holiday from arty matters. Little did I know. There’s quite a lot on Barrett’s music in relation to his painting aesthetic, the cultural explosion of the 60s and the art school dance. Before Barrett became a rock legend with Pink Floyd, he was a painter, but he made the decision to pursue music and forsake art, at least as a professional career. Syd was a student at Camberwell Art College, a very promising one by all accounts; but Syd seems to have been more skilled at painting himself out of the picture. One of the most poignant episodes is a friend telling of Syd simply stopping painting, and consequently abandoning a vital part of himself, never re-captured again.

There’s much to enjoy in this book: I particularly liked the description of  halcyon days at Cambridge in the 60s, as well finding out that the inspiration for the Alice-like Emily in Syd’s first great song, See Emily Play, may have been the sculptress Emily Young, who’s highly regarded in Britain today. Click here for a clip of the song performed by Syd and his mates in their heyday.

Syd destroyed most of his paintings, although interestingly he took photos of them. The book coincides with an exhibition, Syd Barrett: Art and Letters, currently on in London.