Art History Today

National Gallery occupied 9/12/10

 

 

 

Nearly every museum and art school seems to be in occupation these days.  

This time it's the National Gallery's turn.  

 

2013 is a Long Way Off. The Rijksmuseum Effect.

 When I visited the Rijksmuseum May last year, it looked like this. 

 

 

 

When I visited the Accademia in Venice this April, it looked like this. Note the developing theme: refurbishment indicated by cranes, trucks, scaffolding etc. 

 Now refurbishment is fine in itself. After all, museums need more space so that they can show more of their collection that is subterranean, hidden in store rooms or languishing far from the public gaze. I'm sure that once the cranes and lorries have rolled away, and we have entered the new spacious Rijksmuseum, all will deem, public and curators alike, that the long wait was worth it. However, the massive downside to refurbishments is that most of the permanent collection disappears for years. This is what has happened with the Rijksmuseum; this is what will happen to Tate Britain, which from next year undergoes a wholesale makeover of £45 million. Not only that, but as its new director and overseer of the project, Penelope Curtis says, there will be fewer exhibitions over the next few years. This will be a shame since the last few years under the stewardship of Stephen Deuchar saw some excellent shows like the Turner and the Masters which I visited last autumn.

I don't really care about the re-hang- you get used to them- but putting most of the collection's holdings into storage for 3 years- or more if the project doesn't finish on schedule- seems deplorable to me. At a time when the arts are threatened, we need to be reassured they're still there by seeing them and engaging with them face to canvas. To be fair to Penelope Curtis, there will be art on show during the refurbishment, but from what I can glean on the web, it's mainly going to be more modern art and less historical art. This is the re-surfacing of a problem that has bedeviled the Tate Empire for decades: is it a gallery of modern art or a gallery of English art? Tate Modern seemed to have solved the problem, but modern English art still has a claim on Tate Britain.

Perhaps the post- refurbishment re-hang will solve this problem of integrating English modernism and the traditional stuff- but you're going to have to wait a long time to see. But you see, these days you have to wait for things; you have to endure deprivation and suffer austerity because it will be worth it in the end, when the pictures are released from their dark captivity and emerge into the sunlight like the prisoners in Beethoven's Fidelio.  Well, I don't buy that wait and see argument, and anyway, as one commentator says on Jonathan Jones thread about this topic, why not tour the traditional paintings round the regions? Or as Jones says himself, give the traditional art to other galleries the like the National Gallery, the V&A and Dulwich that would welcome historic art more. The Pre-Raphaelites, 18^th century history painting et al would make sense in the display culture of the NG, V&A, and Dulwich.

I wonder if Tate Britain will put one of these renovation timelines on its website? It seems to stretch and stretch and stretch into the distance. 2013 seems a long way off, but it'll be worth the wait in the end. You'll see…in three years or more.

Dealing with Canaletto

 

 

In a review of the current Canaletto and His Rivals exhibition at the National Gallery, Brian Sewell spills the beans that the curator of the show, Charles Beddington, is a dealer and that "the provenance of one painting includes the line "with Charles Beddington Ltd, from whom purchased by the present owner 2006". Here's the whole section:

There is perhaps some general point in an exhibition of works by Canaletto and his overlapping rivals, but to demonstrate it thoroughly requires more than the paltry 55 on view in Trafalgar Square. With primacy given to Canaletto and Guardi, less familiar painters are given short shrift, yet it is these who need greater exposure and discussion, and the vexed question of the varying degrees of authenticity in paintings by these popular and expensive painters (particularly Canaletto) is not touched on at all. As some very grand paintings from public or impeccable collections are included, some very beautiful, some scintillating in atmosphere and detail, it seems odd to have borrowed a number that are dry, dull and open to question; it is odder still that any scholar-curator should have selected paintings recently on the market and only briefly in their present private ownership. Long used to the wiles of the art trade as I am, I sense the scratching of art dealers' backs, for Charles Beddington, the curator in question, is himself such a dealer and quite open about it — the provenance of one painting includes the line "with Charles Beddington Ltd, from whom purchased by the present owner 2006".

Should we be concerned? Sewell certainly thinks so.

Should the National Gallery allow a working dealer to select and catalogue an exhibition of paintings by artists whose work is his stock in trade? As for his unenlightening scholarship — surely that is easily matched by any jobbing art historian, even the permanent curators of the National Gallery? Is it churlish of me to wonder what fee and expenses he has been paid? Dealers should, of course, be encouraged to mount exhibitions in their own premises (for then we all know where we stand), and they should be consulted when thought to have particular knowledge, but for the National Gallery to surrender its exhibition rooms for a dealer to use as he wills, seems a wretched and dangerous precedent.

Intrigued, I googled Charles Beddington and found out that he joined Christie's old master division from the Courtauld, now owns a private gallery, Charles Beddington Ltd, and is a member of the Fine Art Fund Group. The objectives of the funds are: to capitalise on its art market expertise; build long-term capital growth for Investors; provide diversification to a client's investment portfolio. Hardly the language that curators speak, is it?

I agree with Sewell that it would be a pity if this exhibition set a "wretched and dangerous precedent." Mind you, the public exhibition has always brushed up against the free market. Back in the 18^th century, some complained that the public salon at the Louvre was a "picture shop." Nearer our own time, do you really think Poussin's Sacraments (one of which is to be auctioned at Christie's in December) has not been ogled by some prospective buyer during their tenure at the N.G.? Though in that case it's more likely to be a museum than a private individual. My money's on the Washington N.G.

 

The NG doesn't seem too concerned about Beddington's link with the art market, which should give cause for concern in itself. I dare say Mr Sewell will have more to say about this in due course, namely on the theme of how the public museum is not a sales room, like in this illustration- Christie's in the 19^th century.

Connoisseurship and the Public Eye

This is the second in a series of posts that considers different aspects of connoisseurship. Previously, the relationship between connoisseurship and science was looked at; this time I want to think about connoisseurship in the context of public museology- that branch of museum studies that examines the role of the public in the construction of display spaces. The question of connoisseurship and the public wasn't far from my mind on my recent visits to the stunning British Museum Italian Renaissance Drawings exhibition, and the so-so Close Examinations show at the NG. During moments of looking at the drawings and paintings, not to mention dodging the leakage of information from audio-guides, my mind turned to the origins of the public in the museum: how certain cultural and factors brought about changes in the way the public saw art; the appearance of the public eye.

There's no doubt looking at the crowds delighting in close study of old Master drawings at the British Museum, V& A and those closely inspecting the art works in the NG that connoisseurship is becoming a public experience. Where did this phenomenon originate? According to Jonathan Conlin in his comprehensive history of the NG, a bid to wrest control from connoisseurs on behalf of the public can be traced back to 1749 when the architect John Gwynn urged a creation of "a public art academy". Later in the 19^th century, the transition from art in private galleries to art in a building purpose built to admit the public begins in earnest. Specifically, in this period we're looking at a struggle between connoisseurs, principally members of the British Institution, who wanted to keep art in private galleries and who believed that the public did not have the expertise to make value judgments about art. They were right, but certain connoisseurs like the future director of the NG, Charles Lock Eastlake, considered it their duty to acquire art from private galleries in order to educate the public in art history, so that they could gain the skills needed to judge and value works of art. Eastlake, the subject of a forthcoming 2011 show at the NG, acquired 139 paintings for the gallery, most of them Italian renaissance paintings. Despite his intellectual vision and his unwavering conviction in the NG, he did drop horrendous clangers. For example, in 1845, he allowed the "bad Holbein" to be purchased for £630. This painting- in the Close Examinations show- has now been re-attributed to Michael Coxcie.

To give Eastlake his due though, when he became embroiled in disputes about so- called Raphaels, he made the correct decision- to reject. Had he not, there would have been even more "Raphaels" to accompany the dubious Madonna of the Pinks in the Sainsbury Wing. There were other misses by Eastlake, but one of the reasons why Eastlake is such an important figure is that he recognized the role of connoisseurship in the building up of a gallery for the public. With his trusty lieutenant Otto Mündler, the NG's travel-agent, Eastlake hunted pictures on the continent, assessing their artistic merit, while keeping a sharp eye on the budget that dogged his footsteps. Despite financial constraints, Eastlake and Mündler, combined with the formidable connoisseurial fire power of German art connoisseur Gustav Friedrich Waagen, broadened out the renaissance holdings of the NG. To this curatorial team, we owe the purchase of gems like Giovanni Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow, Veronese's mammoth The Family of Darius and Alexander and Uccello's 'Battle of San Romano', not to mention a brace of neglected paintings from the school of Brescia.

Eventually, Parliament would cancel Mündler's salary- and hence his job- shades of conflicts between NG personnel and the government that continue to this day. Another dispute between politicians and curators concerned the proposed merging of the collections of the British Museum with that of the N.G. which held implications for educating the public in the arcane ways of connoisseurship. One of the participants to this debate was the Pre-Raphaelite supporter John Ruskin who believed that the "sister arts" should be shown under one roof, all the better to instruct the public. Ruskin had a good point. Painting is merely part of the artistic process and in order to appreciate and understand an artist, you need to be familiar with his or her drawings. There is another angle on this. If the drawings of artists are in one location and their paintings in another, it requires great visual memory to recall the drawings in the journey from one location to another. This point about connoisseurship, the public and memory was made by C.T. Newton, an officer of the B.M:

"..the comparison of objects in contiguous compartments or galleries is a very different thing from the strain on the mind which takes place when we attempt to transport, in our memories, through the thoroughfares of a crowded city, those fine shades of distinction on which classification mainly depends. The trained student of art can with difficulty do this, even with the help of elaborate drawings and notes; the general public would doubtless, in passing from one museum to another, endeavour to institute comparisons ; but these comparisons, appealing to recollections half obliterated, would be partial and inexact; the public would cease to observe resemblances no longer forced upon their attention; their minds would no longer be in a state to receive those ennobling impressions which are suggested, even to the most careful observer, when, by the felicitous combination of the monuments of many races, a vast scheme of historical relations is suddenly disclosed and demonstrated."

The final part of Newton's statement is interesting. When moving from one museum to another, members of the public become fatigued which affects their memories, which in turn impairs their ability to make comparative judgements between works of art in different locations, when they are only in one museum. The publics' memory of what they saw in the museum becomes crowded out by the sights and sounds of the city; so, in order for the public to function as efficient connoisseurs in a modern urban setting, they must develop strong powers of mental concentration, or have the image before them so that they are less liable to make mistakes unlike the trained connoisseur who can work from memory despite the many distractions around them.  

Newton was mainly concerned with antiquities and he says nothing about the drawings in the British Museum, which if reformers like Ruskin had had their way would have been in the NG, alongside the paintings. In retrospect, the decision not to house the BM drawings- and the Raphael cartoons in the V& A for that matter- in the N.G. or to at least to have had a building containing the drawings/prints next to the paintings in the NG was misguided. Why? Because exposure to paintings in the vicinity of drawings would have sharpened the public's powers of visual analysis and probably accelerated the science of public museology. These days, the public don't need a visual memory; they can buy catalogues of exhibitions – when they are not too expensive- or guide books containing images of paintings in galleries, but in the mid 19^th century, catalogues were in their infancy and highly specialized at that. Like today, some visitors could not afford them. This led William Ewart to suggest to Parliament "that there should be affixed or appended to the paintings, statues and other works of art, to specimens or illustrations of science, antiquities, public monuments, and historical memorials in our public institutions, explanatory inscriptions, giving a brief account of the subject, date, history and author of the work so as to afford some general instruction to the public, and to spare them the expense of purchasing a catalogue." This meant that where the public were concerned, connoisseurship disappeared. As Christopher Whitehead points out, labels were a declaration that the individual did not need to know the work on sight when visiting the gallery- they were aimed at non-connoisseurs, in other words. Labels evolved parallel to catalogues, both building on scientific connoisseurship, and by introducing labeling, the museum was turned into a monumental catalogue; its paintings were its "book" illustrations and its corridors and halls were its "pages."

How comfortable do connoisseurs and art history professionals feel in these living catalogues? The answer would seem to be not very, due to the number of visitors who attend and break the concentration of the connoisseur.  

Is that a viable view these days? I used to believe that the only place you can really practice true connoisseurship was in the secluded print rooms of museums, or in provincial galleries undisturbed by the tread of the madding crowd, or in the study in your own home with the world at bay. With loupe or magnifying glass in hand, or you'd pour over the lines and shadings of renaissance drawings, oblivious of the teeming hordes outside. Now, I don't feel the need to rise above the crowd like the contortionist connoisseurs in the Punch cartoon. Instead, I rejoice in the numbers of people coming to scrutinize Raphael, Parmigianino, Michelangelo, Verrocchio et al and practice my art history rituals in the midst of the crowd. In these days of mass marketing, the insatiable thirst for exhibitions and art and the explosion of the image across cyberspace, the loupe of the connoisseur has turned into a large public eye.

Leading on from that last sentence, I'll probably do a third installment- on connoisseurship and technology, in the not too distant future. It's a popular topic on the blog.  

Images

Richard Wiatrek, The Connoisseur, date unknown.

Attributed to Michael Coxcie, Portrait of a Man with a Skull, about 1560 or later. ("The Bad Holbein")

Photograph of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake.

Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, 1500, bt 1858.

The British Museum

'The Advantages of the Practice of 'Athletic Exercises' by Young Painters, as recommended by a Great Critic', Punch cartoon, 25^th May, 1861.

Sources consulted

Jonathan Conlin, The Nation's Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery, London, 2006.

David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World, Princeton, 1978.

Christopher Whitehead, The Public Art Museum in 19^th Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery, London, 2005.

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.

 

Disliking Delaroche

A painting of Charles I by Paul Delaroche, the 19th century French artist, is being restored in readiness for a forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery, London.

So what?

I must admit to having a problem with Delaroche's art: it is lifeless, contrived and, well, boring. Perhaps it's because he specialized in English history and that was rammed down my throat at school. The title of a monograph on the artist is called Paul Delaroche: History Painted, which is exactly what he does. His oeuvre is comprised of a historical pageant of emperors, kings, queens, dukes, princes, favourites- all the trappings of history with a capital H. If Sellar and Yeatman had taken up careers as painters, this might well have been the result. But there's wit in those authors, something conspicuously lacking here. This is nothing more than a dull composition stiffly based on a Mocking of Christ, probably by Titian or Rubens.

The rescuers of Delaroche's picture say that it going to be shown next to their Execution of Lady Jane Grey. Now this is a Delaroche picture I really loathe. Even members of the NG don't think much of it. Here's Erica Langmuir in the Companion to the NG.  

"I myself don't like this picture very much. I find the surface slick, the detail over-finicky for the large scale. Mainly, I dislike its sentiment: the apotheosis of female fragility pitied by a genteel executioner in russet tights. Delaroche, who based the painting on a sixteenth-century Protestant martyrology, has falsified the historical account the better to appeal to his contemporaries."

To be fair, Langmuir wrote this in 1994, but I doubt if this work has edged up the popularity stakes since then. Even the Charles I is preferable to this painted waxwork show. Speaking of the Stuart monarch, there's another representation of a historical event that must, I assume, go with the renovated picture since they're both similar in style and subject. This is the scene of Oliver Cromwell opening the lid of Charles I's coffin, an event that probably didn't happen,

Delacroix's- a much better history painter- words on this fabrication of the civil war come to mind here. "He [Cromwell] looks as he lifting the lid of a snuff box." That nails Delaroche perfectly. A precious, fussy painter obsessed with imparting an air of forced gentility to the canvas of English history. Give me paintings by Delacroix anytime.

A Disgraced Pope

It doesn't surprise me to read in the Art Newspaper about how the art historian John Pope- Hennessy, better known to renaissance scholars as "the Pope", was allowed to export an important old master out of the country instead of delaying its export license. It's sickening to read that a former director of a British gallery, and an inspiration to lots of British art historians, sought to sell a Carracci abroad instead of seeking to secure it for a U.K. museum. This seems to have been a tendency with museum directors in the days before accountability. I recall that Blunt sought to find international buyers for old masters that appeared in this country.

The Art Newspaper pulls no punches. The declassification of these secret papers show that It was clearly negligent of the then director of the London National Gallery- Michael Levey- to recommend that the export licence for the Carracci's Vision of St Francis – above- should be not be held up. Levey's words are unnerving coming from the director of a British museum:

"Given that it was the private property of a major national museum director," it would be "difficult" to recommend that its export licence should be delayed, to allow a UK public collection to match the price."

Our loss was eventually the National Gallery of Canada's gain. But perhaps the most tragic part of this saga is the Pope's statement that he wanted his paintings to go to the Ashmolean in Oxford. Although Pope-Hennessy had reassured Michael Levey that his paintings would go to Oxford, it seems that his enmity with Levey and the N.G may have played some part in the decision to sell the Carracci to the London dealer Colnaghi, who did much to promote the painting for sale. In a few months its price had rocketed from £25,000 to near £100, 000. Unfortunately, this wasn't the end of the story. Pope-Hennessy sold his Domenichino to the Getty Museum for an undisclosed price, later revealed by the man himself to have been $750, 000. The Domenichino had also passed through the export licensing system with the same result.

A very sad coda to this disreputable episode- none of the Pope's paintings were willed to the Ashmolean. They would surely have boosted the artistic stock of that provincial gallery. What a waste!

I'm sorry but this is a Pope who should be inverted, as in Dante's Inferno!

 

 

Fake Is Real!

The Independent reports on the revelation that a hitherto regarded fake at the Courtauld Institute, has turned out to be a genuine masterpiece. The painting, The Procuress- above- is now thought to be a work from the 17^thcentury. It entered the Courtauld just after the war as a registered fake, a copy thought to have been produced by one of the most infamous of forgers- Hans van Meegeren. The Dutch forger went in for imitations of Vermeer with a dash of Caravaggio, most notably the forger's Supper at Emmaus of 1937. The fusion of different styles was one of the factors that led to van Meegeren's downfall. You just couldn't have blatant Caravaggesque effects in Vermeer's art. Another reason may have been HVM's figures looked nothing like HVM, the master. The fact that they shared the same initials may inspired van Meegeren to become a Vermeer forger. 

The Courtauld now believe that this "fake" Procuress may even have hung in Vermeer's own house. A similar painting by Dirk van Barburen of the School of Utrecht, can be seen in our National Gallery's- A Woman Seated at the Virginal, of 1671. That may be so, but it's ridiculous to say this once fake work was actually painted by the Master of Delft himself as one journalist has reported. The expert opinion is that it is an anonymous artist of the 17^thcentury, although wether it's actually by van Barburen himself remains a matter of speculation.

The Independent has this on the history of the painting:

The painting was presented to the Courtauld by Professor Geoffrey Webb, a specialist on historic architecture. He had been a senior arts officer in Germany just after the Second World War, and apparently received it in the Netherlands as a gift for helping with the restitution of works of art. He believed it was a Van Meegeren fake which had been recovered by the Dutch authorities in 1945 from the forger's villa in Nice. When Anthony Blunt, the then-director of the Courtauld, accepted The Procuress, few questions were asked. A few suspicious queries raised in the 1970s by the Dutch scholar Marijke van den Brandhofwere not followed up, as all appeared convinced it was a product of the forger. It was later lent to three exhibitions on fakes as a fine example of a forgery. Two other versions of The Procuress were thought to be the original until now. The first was owned by the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, but in 1949 another emerged from an English private collection. It was auctioned at Christie's before being bought by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

I'm vastly amused by the fact that a real masterpiece was lent to exhibitions as an example of a fake; but what makes me smile much more is the mention of Blunt. What I find funny is that the Procuress hung on the Courtauld's walls during Blunt's directorship- a real artwork which was deemed fake. But in Blunt's flat above the Courtauld, a painting by Poussin- now known to be fake- hung over Blunt's mantelpiece regarded by the director, who was convinced it was real.

   

   

  

Dirty Pictures

I recently learned that a former Louvre  restorer, Regina Pinto Moreira, got more than she bargained for when she decided to clean the grime off Poussin's Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus, dating from about 1635. Beneath the layers of dirt she disclosed a phallus painted on Priapus. The offending article had been painted out by nervous, and censorious Spaniards in the 18th  century. Our curator told a Sao Paulo newspaper- the town where the museum that owns the picture is located- that “post-production modesty” came into play when the Poussin was in the collection of the Spanish royal family. And the cost of re- exposing this offending member? The removal of the over-painting and dirt cost 150,000 Euros or $213, 000.

Reading this, I’m reminded of how much Poussin’s body is played down in the literature on the artist- the art historical equivalent of painting over the true, earthy, corporeal Poussin, I guess.  Take the Nymph and Satyr of 1627, in the National Gallery, London. Many might see it as a purely mythological scene devoid of any lasciviousness or lust, but it’s quite obvious what the voyeuristic satyr is doing behind the tree. Interestingly Humphrey Wine says in the NG catalogue of 17^th French Painting that the eroticism in the picture didn’t stop an attribution to Poussin, though the painting’s exposure to the public was delayed on matters of decency.  Apparently, some Georgian bigwig made a fuss about obscenity and morals, hence the picture’s delay in being showed to the public. It can’t have bothered the original owner of the painting though, Holwell Carr, who was actually a clergyman!

 

All this reminds me that the great Poussin expert Anthony Blunt could never really reconcile Poussin’s painting brain with the vulgar functions of his body. All Poussin scholars know the story of Blunt's reluctance to quote a, literally, scatological piece of prose in Poussin’s letters attacking a patron, during his lectures at the Courtauld. Still, Poussin was all flesh and bone, not an isolated brain floating free of his body. And as for sex in Poussin. Well, Poussin caught syphilis, the dreaded French disease with the result that his motor functions were severely impaired and his drawing hand became shaky.

I’m tempted to say that despite attempts to de-sexualize Poussin, this subject sticks out a mile.

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.