COV.DEC09.v.1:cover.june.pp.corr 18/11/2009 10:53 Page 1
D E CE M B E R R
2009 T H E B U RLINGTON MAG AZI NE
New information on Veronese’s Da Porto portraits | Early images of the tombs of Henry VII and Elizabeth I NO .
Mariette’s notes on the Jullienne sale of 1767 | Queen Victoria’s Audience Room at Windsor The reception of Morris Louis in Australia and New Zealand
1281
Turner and the masters | Boldini | Rodin’s legacy | Late Monet | Women Surrealists | Kapoor
VOL . C L I
USA
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December 2009
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dec09baroniB:AQ_31815_J_Baroni 11/11/2009 16:30 Page 1
Dealers and Agents in Master Paintings and Drawings
MARCO RICCI Belluno 1676 – 1730 Venice
A Winter Landscape Gouache on paper, mounted on panel: 318 x 460 mm
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Galerie Canesso Tableaux anciens
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Homage to Pluto Oil on canvas, 87 × 117 cm (34 ¹⁄₄ × 46 ¹⁵⁄₁₆ in) One of a pair (with A Jewish Funeral )
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dec09tomasso.qxp:Agnews 23/11/2009 09:11 Page 1
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dec09steinitz:Arturo Cuellar March 2003 16/11/2009 15:44 Page 1
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dec09longari:Nella Longari 17/11/2009 15:49 Page 1
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Fra’ Damiano Zambelli da Bergamo (? – 1549) The flagellation after 1542 Pyrography and marquetry in various woods with pewter, 76.5 by 51.5 cm. Bibliography: V. Alce: Il Coro Intarsiato di San Domenico in Bologna, Bologna 2002, pl.60; M. TRIONFI HONORATI: ‘Una tarsia di Fra Damiano da Bergamo con la flagellazione e la figura di Papa Paolo III Farnese’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 43 (1999), pp.639–44.
dec09pageVIII:Layout 1 18/11/2009 10:47 Page 1
MEDieval and renaissance art
SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY ART AND ART HISTORY DEPARTMENT Tenure-track position available Nov. 1, 2009 For more information or to apply: http://www.scu.edu/hr/careers/faculty.cfm SCU is an AA/EO employer committed to excellence through diversity Closing date Dec. 11, 2009
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CURATOR: DUTCH AND FLEMISH DRAWINGS AND PRINTS £26,294 PER ANNUM • LONDON The British Museum is looking to recruit an enthusiastic individual to curate the collection of works on paper by Dutch and Flemish artists from the beginnings until the end of the 19th Century. Responsibilities will include creating quality catalogue entries for all the works on the Museum’s database, Merlin, and publishing books and articles about the collection and matters that may arise as a result from its study. You will work to mount exhibitions in the Museum within the area of specialism and suggest acquisitions and help in fundraising to achieve them. Educated to degree or equivalent you will be fluent in both spoken and written English and possess a sound reading knowledge of foreign languages, including Dutch. Some experience in the field of Netherlandish drawings and prints is an essential requirement of this role. You will be able to demonstrate your ability to encourage and support junior staff as part of a wider team, and be able to achieve the goals of the team as well as individual goals. Some publication in the field of Dutch or Flemish art would be an advantage.
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CHARLES RATTON & GUY LADRIÈRE ANTIQUE - MOYEN AGE - ARTS PRIMITIFS TABLEAUX - SCULPTURES - OBJETS D’ART
Jean-Paul laurens (1838-1921) Joan of Ark in jail Signed lower right. Grey and black walsh, white bodycolour, 46.3 x 39.3 cm. Formerly in the collection of Mame, Tours. Inscribed on the mount: "composition pour une édition de Jeanne d'Arc".
14, rue de Marignan, 75008 Paris. Tél. (0) 1 43.59.58.21 11, quai Voltaire, 75007 Paris. Tél (0) 1 42.61.29.79 e-mail: galerie.ratton.ladriere@wanadoo.fr
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List of Boutiques available on www.chanel.com
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DEC.Contents:cont.nov.pp.corr 13/11/2009 16:14 Page 1
VOLUME CLI • NUMBER
1281
• DECEMBER
2009
849
EDITORIAL
815 Berlin’s Neues Museum
Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes, A. Gomme and A. Maguire by COLIN AMERY
849
ARTICLES
816 The children in Veronese’s portraits of Iseppo and
by STEPHEN DUFFY
Livia da Porto by XAVIER F . SALOMON
850
819 Three early seventeenth-century watercolours of the tombs of Henry VII and Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey by JUNE SCHLUETER
Richard Parkes Bonington. The Complete Paintings, P. Noon The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors – Goya to Picasso, D. Howarth, ed. by IAN ROBERTSON
p.829
851
821 The judgment of a connoisseur: P.-J. Mariette’s annotations to the 1767 Jullienne sale catalogue: Part I (paintings) by EDOUARD KOPP and JENNIFER TONKOVICH
The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art & The Icon Painting Tradition, A. Spira by CHRISTINA LODDER
824 ‘The gem of the Palace’: Queen Victoria’s Audience Room at Windsor Castle by HUGH ROBERTS
852
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
830 Morris Louis in Australia and New Zealand by
EXHIBITIONS
EDWARD HANFLING
ART HISTORY REVIEWED VI
p.823
853
by CHRISTOPHER BAKER
855
836 E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion: A Study in the
Turner and the Masters Anish Kapoor by MARINA VAIZEY
Psychology of Pictorial Representation’, 1960 by CHRISTOPHER S . WOOD
857
Women Surrealists by JAMES BOADEN
858
BOOKS
Oublier Rodin? by PATRICK ELLIOTT
840
Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, D. Summers
860
by SCOTT NETHERSOLE
Rogier van der Weyden and the Master of Flémalle by PAULA NUTTALL
840
Das Pariser Perikopenbuch und die Anfänge der romanischen Buchmalerei an Rhein und Weser, A. Worm
863
841
The Art of Medieval Urbanism. Parthenay in Romanesque Aquitaine, R.A. Maxwell
p.854
865
Watteau, Music and Theatre by HUMPHREY WINE
by STUART WHATLING
842
Boldini; Signorini by PHILIP RYLANDS
by C.M. KAUFFMANN
866
Monet by ELIZABETH W. EASTON
Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, F. Nevola by MACHTELT ISRAËLS
843
The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters, S.E. James
868
CALENDAR
872
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
by ELIZABETH GOLDRING
843
Nec spe nec metu. La Gonzaga: architettura e corte nella Milano di Carlo V, N. Soldini
p.856
by RICHARD SCHOFIELD
844
The Sistine Chapel. A New Vision, H. Pfeiffer by MALCOLM BULL
845
Next month’s issue:
Del piacere della virtù. Paolo Veronese, Alessandro Magno e il patriziato veneziano, C. Terribile
A tondo of St Matthew in S. Felicita, Florence, attributed to Pontormo
by XAVIER F. SALOMON
847
Le ‘Stanze’ di Guido Reni: Disegni del maestro e della sua scuola, B. Bohn
The statue of George III in Edinburgh by Anne Seymour Damer
by CATHERINE JOHNSTON
848
Dulwich Picture Gallery: British Catalogue, J. Ingamells by MARTIN POSTLE
p.859
Old-master sources for a Jackson Pollock sketchbook of the late 1930s
Cover illustration: The Queen’s Audience Room, by Joseph Nash. 1845. Watercolour, 29.6 by 35.4 cm. (Royal Collection, RCIN 919807). Illustrated in this issue on p.826.
DEC.Masthead:Masthead 11/11/2009 12:20 Page 1
VOLUME CLI • NUMBER
1281
• DECEMBER
2009
Editor: Richard Shone
Managing Director: Kate Trevelyan Kee
Deputy Editor: Bart Cornelis Associate Editor: Jane Martineau Production Editor: Alice Hopcraft Editorial Assistant: Anne Blood Contributing Editor: John-Paul Stonard Index Editor: Barbara Pezzini
Advertising & Development Director: Mark Scott Design & Production Manager : Chris Hall Circulation & Promotion Manager: Claire Sapsford Administrator: Bébhinn Cronin Administrative Assistant: Olivia Parker Accountant: Anita Duckenfield
Consultative Committee Dawn Ades OBE FBA David Anfam Colin B Bailey Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue GCVO FBA FSA David Bindman Claude Blair FSA Christopher Brown Richard Calvocoressi CBE Lorne Campbell Lynne Cooke Paul Crossley Caroline Elam David Franklin Julian Gardner FSA John Golding CBE FBA Sir Nicholas Goodison FBA FSA Christopher Green FBA Tanya Harrod Michael Hirst FBA John House Ian Jenkins FSA Simon Jervis FSA C M Kauffmann FBA Rose Kerr Alastair Laing Sir Denis Mahon CH CBE FBA Robin Middleton Jennifer Montagu LVO FBA Rosemarie Mulcahy Nicholas Penny Anthony Radcliffe FSA Dame Jessica Rawson CBE FBA J M Rogers FBA FSA Pierre Rosenberg Deborah Swallow Gary Tinterow Julian Treuherz Sir Christopher White CVO FBA Paul Williamson FSA Although the members of the Consultative Committee give invaluable assistance to the Editor on their respective subjects, they are not responsible for the general conduct of the magazine Attributions and descriptions relating to objects advertised in the magazine are the responsibility of the advertisers concerned
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Contributing Institutions The Art Institute of Chicago The Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute The Cleveland Museum of Art The Frick Collection The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Kimbell Art Museum The Metropolitan Museum of Art Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London
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The Burlington Magazine, 14-16 Duke’s Road, London WC1H 9SZ Tel: 020–7388 1228 | Fax: 020–7388 1229 | Email: burlington@burlington.org.uk Editorial: Tel: 020–7388 8157 | Fax: 020–7388 1230 | Email: editorial@burlington.org.uk
DEC.Editorial:Layout 1 13/11/2009 15:34 Page 739
Editorial Berlin’s Neues Museum TO AN UNINFORMED EYE, the course of the Berlin Wall, twenty years after its destruction in November 1989, is difficult to discern, so thorough has been its obliteration. But other remnants of the city’s tragic history, from the Third Reich, the Allied bombardment and the Cold War, are yet unavoidable in what, since 1999, has been the German capital. Until very recently no building stood as witness to this concentration of history more poignantly than the Neues Museum. After devastating bombing in 1943 and 1945 it remained in East Berlin as a romantic overgrown ruin, decaying and vandalised, a constant reminder of the past at a time when so much else was gradually being transformed. This October, however, it became the latest component of Berlin’s Museumsinsel (a World Heritage Site) to be opened once more to the public, following on from the successful renovation of its neighbouring Alte Nationalgalerie (2001) and the Bode-Museum (2006).1 At the outbreak of the Second World War the Neues Museum’s collections, universally known for their Egyptian holdings, were stored (not, however, preventing the destruction of some of them); more found their way to the Soviet Union and those works not returned to Berlin in 1958 are still the subject of restitution claims. But by a miracle the majority was saved. The urgent question was to what kind of home were the objects to return. Some patchy remedial work had been undertaken on the building in the years of partition (and parts of it demolished), but it was not until the late 1990s, when a master plan for the constellation of the five museums on the island had evolved, that a specific vision emerged as to how Friedrich August Stüler’s Neo-classical and technically innovative structure was to be reborn in the twenty-first century. Any attempt to revive the Museum had to take into consideration several factors. First among these concerned its historicising origins, as conceived by Stüler in the 1840s. He drew up a scheme of display in which the somewhat severe exterior of the building (Fig.I) belied the highly embellished rooms within, reflecting a mostly fanciful vision of the historical periods to which the objects belonged – for example Egypt, Rome, Pompeii, seen in especially commissioned murals and reliefs. Eventually these rooms began to speak more redolently of the mid-nineteenth century as a last fling of Prussian Enlightenment than of the ancient civilisations they were intended to evoke. Should these be faithfully recreated or be allowed to disappear – what was left of them – in a total interior renovation? Secondly, about forty per cent of the structure had gone, including the ‘shocking void’ where once had been the impressive main staircase, and the entire north-west wing; some rooms were virtually intact, others in disarray, without floors and ceilings. This led some extremists to believe that only a complete new interior was possible. Thirdly, would a ‘faked-up’ Museum cast a shadow over what was to be displayed inside, lending the exhibits themselves an inauthentic air contrary to the highly specialised nature of the collections? There was also the consideration of whether a strict restoration would carry the right kind of historico-political symbolism (as is evident in the rebuilt
I. The Neues Museum, Berlin. 2009.
Frauenkirche in Dresden). Lastly, a truce had to be forged between those who cared primarily for the preservation of a historic structure, particularly the vociferous Gesellschaft Historisches Berlin e.V. (the ‘Historical Berlin Society’) and the curators whose job it would be to display the outstanding collections, bearing in mind the needs of the huge numbers of expected visitors and their twenty-first century expectations. The problem of the Neues Museum was to be, perhaps, the sorest test of all these claims, not unprecedented in themselves, but here needing someone with reserves of tolerance and patience as well as a vision to make the past tantalisingly alive. An international competition for the renovation of the building in 1997 was won by David Chipperfield, the British architect known for his restrained classic-modernist style, whose current projects include the extension of the S. Michele cemetery in Venice and an addition to the Kunsthaus Zürich. The Neues Museum presented him with perhaps his greatest challenge. Given the general acclaim for his work following the October reopening, he has met this challenge with an ingenuity and a sensitivity that are at the service of a masterly intellectual framework. It is a superb synthesis of what at first seemed impossibly conflicting objectives. In a sense, Chipperfield has submerged his architectural identity; his hand is almost hidden. Yet the building has instantly become a highly original solution from which many a preservationist might learn. From room to room, the rhythm and tone change almost imperceptibly, from cool restraint to dramatic display. The chic, somewhat gaudy bust of Nefertiti, the most celebrated object in the Museum, queens it over the rotunda with its coloured walls and marble floor; in the Moderne Galerie, the flow is momentarily stopped by the great cast of Ghiberti’s Gates of Heaven for the Baptistery in Florence, a reminder of the famous cast collection that once occupied the first floor. Wisps of history – from architectural fragments to bullet holes – are in transparent harmony with the obviously new interventions. This lack of uniformity to the galleries – so different from the succession of numbingly similar rooms in many a new museum or extension – keeps the visitor both visually and taxonomically alert. Those who worried that the emphatic character of Stüler’s building, strengthened by its renovation, might overwhelm the interior displays need have had no fears. The resurrection of the Museum’s history (without recourse to portentous nostalgia) exists seamlessly with the demands of the future. 1
For the then recently reopened Bode-Museum and an interim report on the Neues Museum, see the Editorial ‘Berlin’s Museumsinsel’ in this Magazine, 148 (2006), pp.71–72. the burlington m a g a z i n e
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The children in Veronese’s portraits of Iseppo and Livia da Porto by XAVIER F. SALOMON
PAOLO VERONESE ’ S ‘Portrait of Count Joseph da Porta of Vicenza with his Son’ (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; Fig.2) is first mentioned in a 1913 catalogue of the Sedelmeyer Gallery at 6 rue de La Rochefoucauld in Paris, with a provenance from the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza.1 By 1924 it was in the collection of Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, and in 1927 baron Detlev von Hadeln published it in connection to the portrait of ‘a lady with her little daughter’ by Veronese, which Henry Walters had acquired from Paolo Paolini in Rome in the early 1900s (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; Fig.1).2 The portrait of Count Porto was displayed in the Veronese exhibition at Ca’ Giustinian in Venice in 1939 and, in the accompanying catalogue, Rodolfo Pallucchini recorded unpublished research by Giulio Fasolo, according to whom Giuseppe da Porto had married Lucia Thiene in 1545.3 Pallucchini and Fasolo claimed that Giuseppe and Lucia had seven children, the eldest ones being Adriano and Porzia, but did not provide any specific dates of birth. The identities of the four sitters in Veronese’s portraits in Florence and Baltimore were maintained in all later studies, until Erik Forssman’s 1973 book on Palladio’s Palazzo Porto in Vicenza.4 Forssman confirmed the identity of Count Porto in Veronese’s painting by illustrating an anonymous sixteenth-century portrait in the Castello di Thiene, which clearly derives from Veronese’s picture and is inscribed: ‘IOSEPHVS PORTVS. ANNO DOMINI MDLII. AETATIS VERO SVAE XXXII’.5 He also corrected the names of the adults in the portraits – and first owners of the palace – as Iseppo and Livia, but he still recognised the two children as Adriano and Porzia.6 All ensuing publications on Veronese, including recent ones, repeat the same identifications and variously date the portraits between 1551 and 1556.7 The most complete biography of Iseppo da Porto still records 1545 as his wedding date, and Adriano and Porzia as the eldest children from the marriage.8 However, a significant archival document, long known to Palladio scholars, proves that the usually accepted wedding date and the names of the children are wrong. Thanks to this text it is possible to give the children in the Porto portraits new names and to date the paintings more precisely. In 1990 Manuela Morresi discovered, in the Porto family archive in Thiene, a memoriale, probably written by Iseppo da
Porto himself, in which he recorded the births and baptisms of his children.9 The document was particularly useful because it confirmed the dating of Palladio’s Palazzo Porto in Vicenza. According to Tommaso Temanza, an inscription with Iseppo’s name and the date 1552 (now lost) was still visible in the palace in the eighteenth century, and this was used ever since to provide a terminus ante quem for its completion.10 Iseppo’s memoriale corroborated the date: while his daughter Vittorina was born on 27th August 1550 and was baptised in the ‘old room near the old sala’, the next daughter, Emilia, was born on 8th December 1552 and baptised in the ‘room at the back in the new house’ (see Appendix below). While this piece of evidence has often appeared in Palladio studies, the document has not been properly used with regard to Veronese’s portraits. The memoriale lists all of Iseppo and Livia’s ten children and records their exact dates and times of birth, when and where they were baptised and who acted as godparents. In three cases notes were added about the children’s untimely deaths. The document names the children in order of birth: Leonida (1543), Deidamia (1545), Dorotea (1546), Porzia (1548), Lavinia (1549), Vittorina (1550), Emilia (1552), Gerolamo (1554), Lelia (1556) and Adriano (1558). Only Clemente di Thiene, followed by Guido Beltramini, has linked the document to Veronese’s portraits.11 While they both correctly noticed that the Uffizi painting could not possibly portray Adriano (who was only born in 1558 and was the last of the children), but rather Leonida – the primogenito – they surprisingly continued to identify the girl as Porzia. The memoriale demonstrates that Iseppo and Livia did not marry in 1545, as is usually stated. Forssman had already noted that Giovanni Galeazzo Thiene had provided his daughter Livia, after her engagement to Iseppo da Porto, with a dowry of 4,000 ducats in February 1542, and suggested that the couple could have got married that year.12 The birth of Leonida on 24th February 1543 firmly places Iseppo’s and Livia’s wedding between February 1542 and February 1543 and, assuming that Iseppo and Livia were married before Livia became pregnant, as one would expect, most probably between February and May 1542. Both Thiene and Beltramini are surely right in identifying the boy in the Uffizi portrait as Leonida, the first-born son of the couple. Statues of Iseppo and Leonida, with their names
I would like to thank Beverly Brown, Martha Clawson, Stephen Campbell, Nicholas Cullinan, Vincent Delieuvin, Arturo Galansino, Jean Habert, Morten Steen Hansen, Lauren Jacobi, Frederick Ilchman, Antonio Mazzotta, Valentina Ravaglia, Joaneath Spicer, Luke Syson and Clemente di Thiene for the help they provided in my research on the Porto portraits. Mary Engel Frank, who has been researching this particular topic at the same time as I have, has been especially generous. 1 Illustrated Catalogue of the Twelfth Series of 100 Paintings by Old Masters of the Dutch, Flemish, Italian, French and English Schools, being a portion of the Sedelmeyer Gallery, containing also a General Index of the 1500 Pictures described in the 13 catalogues of the Sedelmeyer Gallery published to date, Paris 1913, pp.54–55, no.33.
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D. von Hadeln: ‘Two Portraits by Paolo Veronese’, The Burlington Magazine 45 (1924), pp.209–10; idem: ‘Some Portraits by Paolo Veronese’, Art in America 15 (1927), pp.239–52. 3 R. Pallucchini: exh. cat. Mostra di Paolo Veronese, Venice (Ca’ Giustinian) 1939, p.73, no.26. 4 E. Forssman: Il Palazzo Da Porto Festa di Vicenza, Vicenza 1973. 5 Ibid., p.18. 6 Ibid., pp.13 and 16–17. Before Forssman, only E. Arslan: ‘Nota su Veronese e Zelotti’, Belle Arti 1 (1948), p.232, had used the correct name Iseppo, instead of Giuseppe.
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1. Livia da Porto Thiene and her daughter Deidamia, by Paolo Veronese. 1552. Canvas, 208.4 by 121 cm. (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore).
2. Iseppo da Porto and his son Leonida, by Paolo Veronese. 1552. Canvas, 207 by 137 cm. (Galleria degli Uffizi, Collezione Contini Bonacossi, Florence).
inscribed below, also appear at the top of the palace in Vicenza and confirm the idea that Leonida was considered Iseppo’s heir when the palace was built. In fact, in 1552, when the palace was completed, the couple had no other male children – Gerolamo was only born in 1554 and died three years later, while Adriano was born in 1558. It is notoriously difficult to ascribe a precise age to sitters in portraits (and especially children), but Federico Zeri’s assess-
ment that the boy and girl in the Porto paintings are probably about nine and seven years old respectively is a sensible conclusion.13 The inscription recorded by Temanza in the Palazzo Porto and the memoriale demonstrate that the building was inhabited by 1552; the date on the anonymous portrait of Iseppo at Thiene reasonably indicates that Veronese’s portraits were probably painted in that same year. Leonida was exactly nine years old in 1552. The archival evidence, however, challenges
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palazzo di Lorenzo da Bologna’, Annali di Architettura 2 (1990), pp.112–13 and 118, doc.5. She, however, only transcribed a few sentences of the document. 10 T. Temanza: Vita di Andrea Palladio Vicentino, Venice 1762, p.VIII. 11 C. di Thiene: Il Castello Porto-Colleoni-Thiene, Trento 1995, p.40; G. Beltramini in idem and H. Burns: exh. cat. Palladio, London (Royal Academy) 2009, pp.77–79, nos.35–36. Both Beltramini and Morresi, op. cit. (note 9), mistakenly cite the location of the memoriale as Mazzo CXI, instead of CXL. 12 Forssman, op. cit. (note 4), p.20, note 5; Beltramini, op. cit. (note 11), p.72, probably following Forssman, is the only other source to give a 1542 date for the wedding. 13 F. Zeri: Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore 1976, p.406.
For recent examples, see T. Pignatti and F. Pedrocco: Veronese, Milan 1995, pp.57–59, nos.28–29; M. Ajmar-Wollheim and F. Dennis, eds.: exh. cat. At Home in Renaissance Italy, London (Victoria and Albert Museum) 2006, pp.137–39 and 352, nos.4–5; J. Garton: Grace & Grandeur. The Portraiture of Paolo Veronese, London and Turnhout 2008, pp.26–33 and 187–91, nos.5–6; and idem in F. Ilchman, ed.: exh. cat. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. Rivals in Renaissance Venice, Boston (Museum of Fine Arts) 2009, pp.216, 218–19, 221 and 296, nos.43–44. 8 M. Scremin: ‘Da Porto, Iseppo’, Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, XXXII, Rome 1986, pp.734–36. 9 M. Morresi: ‘Contra’ Porti a Vicenza – Una famiglia, un sistema urbano e un
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the traditional identification of the girl in the Baltimore painting with Porzia. Porzia was only four years old in 1552, and it seems unlikely that Veronese would have depicted her when two older sisters – Deidamia and Dorotea – were also alive. It is therefore probable that the two children portrayed were the eldest, and that the girl is Deidamia, born in 1545, as Iseppo records, when ‘we were in Venice, awaiting to be judged and had a house of messer Domenico Morosini, in the court of Ca’ Morosini’. She was suitably only two years younger than her brother Leonida. In the portraits the family line was therefore envisaged to continue, as one would expect, through the primogenito and the eldest daughter.14 A further noteworthy element confirms the dating of the portraits. In his 1927 article, Von Hadeln first noticed that in the Baltimore portrait, ‘the lady seems to be in an interesting condition – this much is betrayed by her slight expression of suffering, and even more by the spreading proportions of her figure’.15 Livia’s prominently positioned hand seems to validate this hypothesis, and the marten, with its elaborately decorated gilt head, has often been seen as a symbol of pregnancy and childbirth.16 The date 1552 would confirm this assumption: on 8th December of that year, Livia gave birth to a daughter, Emilia. The memoriale in the archive in Thiene thus demonstrates that the portraits of Iseppo da Porto and his son Leonida, and of Livia da Porto Thiene and her daughter Deidamia should be dated to 1552, and most probably between March and December of that year, when Livia was pregnant. Appendix Memoriale of Iseppo da Porto’s children (Thiene, Archivio Porto-ColleoniThiene, Mazzo CXL, no.1868). [fol.5r] 1543 adi 24 febraro in di di sabato venendo la domenicha a hore cinque di notte nascette el mio primo fiollo el qualle fu batizato de mexi quatro et giorni tri dal R[everen]do episcopo chierigato in quell tempo sufragano de vicenza del R[everen]do cardinale ridolfo su la sala vechia che era in detto tempo et fu meso alquanti nomi insieme et fu meso la mano del putino in ditti nomi et si tolse asorte leonida et cossi fu batizato et postoli ditto nome che fu tenuto a batessimo dali sotto scripti compadre prima el mag[nifi]co messer paulo tiepolo fiollo del cl[arissi]mo messer stephano il qual li fu lui impersona et poi el s[ign]or ant[oni]o renaldo el quall fu compadre et io tene con carta de procura per il mag[nifi]co messer zuane michiele fiollo del cl[arissi]mo messer fantin e comadre fu la mag[nifi]ca madona biancha priuli in quel tempo capitania de vicenza et m[adonn]a anna Capra. [fol.7r] 1545 adi 26 mazo in di de martij venendo al mercole a ore cinque di notte nasette il mio fiollo secondo il quall fu una puta che fu batizata a venecia de giorni 25 nella chiesia de san zuan grexostimo dal R[everen]do parochiano in quel tempo in detta chiesia perche in quel tempo eramo a venecia per esser apresentato in le pregione et avevemo una Cassa de messer domenicho morexini in corte de cha morexini ap[pres]so de la parochia dove parturise m[adonn]a livia mia consorte et li fu posto nome a detta mia fiolla deidamia li compadre furno li sopto scripti prima el mag[nifi]co messer nicol boldu el mag[nifi]co messer allovise capello et il mag[nifi]co messer marcho ant[oni]o cornaro del cl[arissi]mo messer zuane le comadre furno le sopto scripte la mag[nifi]ca m[adonn]a lugrecia da pesaro nora del cl[arissi]mo messer her[ola]mo procurator la mag[nifi]ca m[adonn]a cornelia dolphina molgie del mag[nifi]co messer her[ola]mo sta a santo agustin et la s[igno]ra
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The manuscript Istoria della famiglia Porto, e degli Uomini Illustri della medesima (1678) in Thiene, Archivio Porto-Colleoni-Thiene, Armaro I, Canto 9, n.1, records that Leonida married Attilia Thiene. Surprisingly, the eldest daughter, Deidamia, was the only one of the children not to marry, and became a nun in the convent of S. Pietro, Vicenza.
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lugrecia agnella mantovana molgie del s[ign]or benedetto in quell tempo anbasiator dela exc[ellenci]a del s[ign]or ducha di mantoa alla Ill[ustrissi]ma s[igno]ria di venecia. [fol.9r] 1546 adi 14 luio in di de mercholle a hore quatordese nasette il mio tercio fiollo il qual fu una puta che fu batezata in vicenza nella camara vechia apreso la salla vechia dal R[everen]do curator al batesmo alhora in domo la qual fu batizata de giorni 18 et li fu posto nome dorothea li compadre furno il sopto scripto messer bor[tola]mio canaro e non altri ne homini ne done. [fol.11r] 1548 adi primo marzo in di de zobia venendo al venere a hore due di note nasette il mio quarto fiollo el quall fu una puta la quall fu batezata in vicenza nela camara vechia ap[re]sso la salla vechia dal Rev[eren]do curator al bates[i]mo i[n] quel tempo in domo la qual fu batezata de giorni quaranta cinque et li fu posto nome porcia; li compadre furno li sopra scripti la ex[cellen]cia de messer franc[esc]o anzolelo et el s[ign]or franc[esc]o franceschini delle done non li fu alcuna. [fol.13r] 1549 adi 7 zugno in di de venere venendo al sabato a hore una di notte nasette el mio quinto fiollo il qual fu una puta la qual fu batezata in vicenza nella camara vechia apreso la salla vechia dal Rev[eren]do curator al batesmo in quell tempo in domo la qual fu batezata de giorni otto et li fu posto nome lavinia li compadre furno el s[ign]or ant[oni]o Capra et non altri ne homini ne done. 1549 adi 4 lugio morse la sop[r]a scripta lavinia a tal che non vise se non giorni vinti otto. [fol.14r] 1550 adi 27 avosto in di di mercole a hore dodese nasette il mio sesto fiollo el qual fu una puta la qual fu batizata in vicenza nela camara vechia apreso la salla vechia dal Rev[eren]do curator al batesmo in quel tempo in domo la qual fu batezata de giorni vinti et li fu posto nome vitorina et non fu tenuta da compadre ne comadre alcuna se non la comadre la ha arlevata. [fol.15r] 1552 adi 8 decenbrio in di de zobia venendo il venere di note a hore 13 nassette el mio setimo fiollo il qualle fu una puta la qual fu batezata in vicenza nella camara de dredo nella casa nova dal Rev[eren]do curato[r] al batesmo in quel tempo in domo la qual fu batezatta de giorni vinti uno et li fu posto nome emilia li compadre fu solo lo ex[cellentissim]o doctor messer ottavio dala tavolla medicho et non altri ne homini ne done. 1565 in di de venere venendo il sabato a hore cinque passate adi 30 marzo morite la detta emilia. [fol.16r] 1554 adi 29 aprille in di de domenica venendo al luni a hore due e meza di note nasette il mio ottavo fiollo el qualle fu uno puto maschio lo qual fu battezatto in vicentia nella camara de driedo nella caxa nova dal Rev[eren]do curator di domo al batesmo qual fu messer pre’ franc[esc]o cognominato da san marcho dredo vespero adi 16 mazo de dito anno lo qual fu batezato de iorni 17 e li fu posto nome Herol[a]mo li compadre fu el s[ign]or conte uliviero da seso et il s[ign]or conte bernardin capra e non li fu altri ne homini ne done. Il qual morite adj 25 avosto 1557. [fol.17r] ‘1556. Adi 10 settembrio In Vicenza in di de zobia a hore 21 pasatte nela camera di dietro de la casa nova nascette il mio nono fiolo qual fu una putta et fu battizatta dal Rev[eren]do messer pre franc[esc]o Curattor al hora in domo ditto da San Marco, la qual haveva giorni 37 ne l’anteditta camera, et li fu posto nome Lelia, fu compadre il S[igno]r Vicenzo Franceschini et no altri’. [fol.18r] 1558. adi xi 7mbrio in giorno de Dominica avanti le hore quattro di notte nascete un figliol maschio il qual fu battizato ali 21 9mbrio 1558 dal Rev[eren]do in quel tempo curato in domo il passato detto fu battizato in casa nella camara de dredo, fu compadre il Rev[eren]do mons[ign]or Thadio contarini canonico di Vicenza, et il m[agnifi]co s[igno]r c[on]te messer Ghelino de Ghelini dottor et non altri ne homeni ne donne il qual fiolo fu il suo decimo al qual fu posto nome manfredo isepo et adriano per il qual sempre e sta chiamato.
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Von Hadeln, op. cit. (note 2), p.245. Zeri, op. cit. (note 13), p.406, also believes that ‘Lucia’s spreading proportions and her mellow expression indicate that she was expecting another child’. 16 More recently, see J.M. Musacchio: ‘Weasels and Pregnancy in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies 15 (2001), pp.182–83.
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Three early seventeenth-century watercolours of the tombs of Henry VII and Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey by JUNE SCHLUETER
and seventeenth centuries, the album amicorum, or Stammbuch, was especially popular among educated Germans. Begun in the universities, where students obtained memorial signatures of their fellow students and professors, these small, pocket-sized books soon became part of a traveller’s paraphernalia, accompanying him abroad, where he not only obtained the autographs of foreign dignitaries but also commissioned picture-shop artists to make watercolour paintings on its pages. Among the most intriguing of the several thousand surviving albums is that once owned by Jakob Fetzer, now in the collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. The dates of the signatures in this album indicate that Fetzer, from Nuremberg, was in England between July 1618 and May 1620, making trips to Edinburgh in 1619 and Dublin in 1620. While in London, he apparently visited the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey, where he was sufficiently impressed by the grand burial tombs of the first Tudor king and the legendary Tudor queen to commission what may well be unique watercolour paintings of them, each remarkably detailed, and published here for the first time. One of the two paintings of Henry VII’s tomb (fol.24) shows the gilded bronze effigies of the King and his wife, Elizabeth of York (Fig.4). The recumbent figures lie side by side, hands raised, palms folded in prayer. Sumptuous pillows cushion the royal couple’s heads, which, unlike the effigies today, are crowned.1 The pair rest on a black marble tomb with a carved frieze; the side of the monument is decorated with three wreath medallions in copper gilt surrounding figures of Mary’s and Henry’s patron saints separated by four gilt classical columns and framed by Tudor roses. Two brass cherubs sit at the foot of the effigies holding banners with the King’s arms. The tomb is much like the one envisaged in Henry VII’s will, made a month before his death in 1509 and still extant. The King had wanted a tomb displaying not only his and Elizabeth’s recumbent effigies, ‘of copure and gilte’,2 but also, on an adjacent shrine of Edward the Confessor, his kneeling figure. Three years after his father’s death, Henry VIII commissioned the monument. He rejected the plan of the original sculptor, Guido Mazzoni, which would have placed both life-sized effigies of the
King on one monument, and entered into a contract with the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who completed the monument in 1517.3 The sculptor probably would have known that Edward VI, the royal couple’s young grandson, was buried at the head of their resting place. But he would not have known that the tomb he was designing was later to house the body of James I,
The author thanks Special Collections librarians at Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; the inter-library loan staff at Lafayette College; Tony Trowles, Westminster Abbey librarian; Arthur J. Rothkopf; Eric Luhrs; and Paul Schlueter for their assistance. 1 Elizabeth of York’s crown recalls the description of her funeral: ‘Her body was brought through the City in a gorgeous hearse, on which lay her waxen effigy in Royal robes, with “hair dishevelled” and with her crown and sceptre’; Mrs A. Murray Smith (E.T. Bradley) and Lady Birchenough (M.C. Bradley): Westminster
Abbey, 26th ed., London 1929, p.64. The crowns shown in the painting may have been placed on the effigies and later removed, or they may have been the product of artistic licence. 2 M. Condon: ‘The Last Will of Henry VII: Document and Text’, in T. Tatton-Brown and R. Mortimer, eds.: Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII, Woodbridge 2003, p.113. 3 See B.H. Meyer: ‘The First Tomb of Henry VII of England’, The Art Bulletin 58/3 (1976), pp.358–67.
IN THE SIXTEENTH
3. Tomb of Elizabeth I, in the album amicorum of Jakob Fetzer. 1618. Watercolour, 7.7 by 10.3 cm. (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; Cod. Guelf.235 Blank., fol.26).
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have begoune; whiche we wol be by our said executours fully accomplisshed and perfourmed’.5 John Britton describes the grate three hundred years after its completion: In its perfect state, it was certainly an object of splendour, costliness, and beauty. It was an immense brass inclosure, perforated with almost innumerable small arches, quaterfoils, and other figures; also decorated with numerous pinnacles, canopies, statues, cognizances, crowns, &c. some of which were richly gilt and enamelled.6
4. Tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, in the album amicorum of Jakob Fetzer. 1618. Watercolour, 8.4 by 10.3 cm. (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; Cod. Guelf.235 Blank., fol.24).
The album painting includes the upper part of the grate, which, over the years, has disappeared. It does not show the verses by John Skelton, poet laureate under Henry VIII, that were said to have hung upon the screen on parchment tables and that may have gone missing in the century before the Fetzer painting. Nonetheless, viewed from the south side of the north aisle of the Chapel, this perspective on the royal tomb may be unique in both orientation and age. Fetzer proved more than a casual observer at Westminster Abbey, for he commissioned an artist to make another tomb painting, that of Queen Elizabeth I (fol.26; Fig.3). Buried in the north aisle of the Henry VII Chapel above her half-sister, Mary, the Virgin Queen is sculpted in white marble. Beneath a decorated canopy, her recumbent effigy rests in a fine gown and sumptuous jewels; the Queen’s face is framed by an extravagant ruff, and she holds an orb in one hand and a sceptre in the other. Unlike the wholly white effigy that modern-day visitors to the Abbey see, this marble form of Elizabeth is draped in the crimson ermine-lined royal robe, and she wears the royal crown. She looks, in fact, like the effigy carried from Richmond to Westminster in 1603 that left the throngs who attended her funeral weeping: when they beheld her statue or picture lying upon the coffin set foorth in Royall robes, having a Crowne upon the head thereof, and a ball and scepter in either hand: there was such a generall sighing, groning, and weeping, as the like hath not beene seene or knowne in the memory of man . . .7
the whereabouts of his unmarked resting place remaining a mystery for nearly 250 years.4 A second watercolour painting of Henry VII’s tomb (fol.162) shows the bronze enclosing ‘grate’ decorated with roses and topped with the King’s badges – the Welsh dragon, the Richmond greyhound and the Tudor arms (Fig.5). Begun in his lifetime, the grille, worked by English artisans, seems to have been consonant with Henry’s will, which specifies that ‘there be made in lenght and brede aboute the said tombe, a grate, in maner of a closure, of coper and gilte, after the faction that we
Elizabeth had died fifteen years before Fetzer visited London, but the German would have understood why James erected so splendid a monument to his long-reigning predecessor and why the King, who styled himself the peacemaker buried the Protestant Queen with her Catholic half-sister, to repose in peace together. Even as he admired the handsome monument to Elizabeth, however, Fetzer would have noticed in the south aisle of the Chapel the recently completed, similarly styled but larger and more sumptuous tomb of Mary, Queen of Scots, James’s mother, whom Elizabeth had had executed, and understood why the Stuart king had had her remains transported from Peterborough Cathedral to be re-interred in Westminster Abbey, a crowned Scottish lion at her feet.8 Or, if Fetzer’s thoughts went beyond the narrative of commemoration, he may have sensed a more politically sinister story. For in order to bury Elizabeth in
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6
5. Grille enclosing tomb of Henry VII, in the album amicorum of Jakob Fetzer. 1618. Watercolour, 7.7 by 10.3 cm. (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; Cod. Guelf.235 Blank., fol.162).
For the fascinating account of the 1869 excavation that revealed James’s remains, see A.P. Stanley: Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, New York 1882, II, pp.367–403. At the time of Fetzer’s visit, the royal Tudors interred in the Henry VII Chapel were Henry VII; his wife, Elizabeth of York; his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort; and three children of Henry VIII: Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth. Of the royal Stuarts, only the remains of Mary, Queen of Scots, and three of James I’s children – Sophia (died in infancy), Mary (died aged two) and Henry, Prince of Wales – were in the Chapel in 1618. 5 Condon, op. cit. (note 2), p.114.
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J. Britton: The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain, Represented and Illustrated in a Series of Views, Elevations, Plans, Sections, and Details, of Various Ancient English Edifices: With Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Each, London 1809, II, pp.26–27. 7 J. Stowe and E. Howes: Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England. Begun by John Stow: Continued and Augmented with matters Forraigne and Domestique, Ancient and Moderne, unto the end of this present yeere, 1631, London 1631, p.815. The multitudes would have seen a waxwork effigy resting atop the coffin containing the Queen’s remains, a restored copy of which is preserved in the waxwork chamber of Westminster Abbey.
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the monumental tomb he erected for her, James had to have her body removed from its resting place beneath the Chapel altar. It now lay some distance from Henry VII, above the similarly childless Queen Mary I and adjacent to the corner sheltering the remains of two of James’s young children as well as the princes killed in the Tower. Moreover, the tomb of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, Henry VII’s mother, also made by Torrigiano, was in the south aisle, next to James’s mother. Although Fetzer would not have seen this story develop, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s nineteenth-century Abbey sleuths, who discovered the body of James I interred with Henry VII and his Queen, would surely have recalled James’s evocation of his descent from Henry VII in justifying his claim to the English
throne, and they may have wondered, fleetingly, whether his motives in erecting a monument to the Virgin Queen were pure.9 In 1618 James was still seven years away from his own death and the unmarked grave in the Henry VII Chapel. But Fetzer’s interest in the King of England, France, Ireland and Scotland found its expression in a royal signature (fol.4v), watercolour paintings of the Stuart king (fol.154) and his arms (fol.5), and the autographs of Queen Anne (fol.7) and Prince Charles (fol.9). The Stuart king signed, characteristically, with the motto ‘Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos’ (‘Spare the humble and subdue the proud’) from Virgil’s Æneid, a sentiment consistent with his unmarked but well-placed grave within the tomb of the first Tudor king.
8 As James explained in a letter of 28th September 1612 to the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough Cathedral (Peterborough Cathedral Archives, MS.11a), he was ordering that the remains of Mary, Queen of Scots, be brought to Westminster Abbey and that a memorial to her be erected there: ‘. . . it appertains to the duty we owe our dearest Mother, that like honour should be done to her Body, and like Monument be extant of Her, as to others, Hers, and our Progenitors have been used
to be done, and our selves have already performed to our dear Sister the late Queen Elizabeth’. S. Gunton: The History of the Church of Peterburgh: Wherein The most remarkable Things concerning that Place, from the First Foundation thereof: With other Passages of History, not unworthy Publick View, are represented, London 1686, p.81. 9 For a revisionist reading of James’s political burial agenda, see J.M. Walker: ‘Reading the Tombs of Elizabeth I’, English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996), pp.510–30.
The judgment of a connoisseur: P.-J. Mariette’s annotations to the 1767 Jullienne sale catalogue: Part I (paintings) by EDOUARD KOPP and JENNIFER TONKOVICH
1989 SIMON JERVIS heralded in this Magazine the discovery in the National Art Library, London, of the famed connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette’s extensively annotated copies of the catalogues accompanying the sales of two highly regarded eighteenth-century collections – that of the duc de Tallard in March–May 1756 and that of Jean de Jullienne (Fig.6) in March 1767.1 Jervis published a tantalising selection of Mariette’s annotations, which hinted at the significance of his marginalia. Upon closer reading, Mariette’s comments on the quality, attribution and authenticity of the artefacts, or asides about their price and provenance, often prove essential in understanding the true content of these collections which, however prestigious, often included copies masquerading as originals. No one at the time would have been a more able judge than Mariette, who knew both collections well and had accumulated decades of invaluable experience as a connoisseur, art historian, dealer and collector.2 Therefore his erudite critical remarks on individual works offer precious insights into the history of collecting, the art market and connoisseurship. The present article is accompanied by a full transcription of his annotations to the paintings
IN
With thanks to Mark Evans, Senior Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 1 S. Jervis: ‘Mariette’s annotated copies of the Tallard and Jullienne sale catalogues’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 131 (1989), pp.559–61. They are both part of the National Art Library’s Special Collections, RC.EE.39b and RC.EE.40, respectively.
6. Portrait of Jean de Jullienne, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour. c.1735. Pastel, 59.1 by 47.9 cm. (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge MA).
2 See Mariette’s biography in: exh. cat. Le Cabinet d’un Grand Amateur P.-J. Mariette 1694–1774, Paris (Musée du Louvre) 1967, pp.25–31. Coincidentally, Mariette’s expertise was to receive full official recognition not long after the Jullienne sale, in November 1767, when he was made Membre Honoraire Amateur of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.
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in the Jullienne sale (lots 1–320), which is available online on this Magazine’s website. A separate article and accompanying transcription concerning the drawings in the same sale (lots 321–1017) will follow. Jean de Jullienne (1686–1766) was slightly older than his close friend Mariette (1694–1774). He was a wealthy dye merchant and one of the foremost collectors of paintings (Fig.7), prints, drawings and decorative arts in eighteenth-century Paris and is perhaps best known for commissioning and publishing
the so-called Recueil Jullienne, a collection of prints reproducing paintings and drawings by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), which he undertook shortly after the artist’s death.3 During his lifetime Jullienne amassed over 2,300 drawings – including 425 by Watteau – in addition to his collection of more than four hundred paintings. Of the latter, a significant number are documented in the manuscript ‘Catalogue des Tableaux de M. de Jullienne’ (c.1756–58; Morgan Library & Museum, New York), which contains miniature illustrations of a portion of the works (Figs.8 and 9).4 From about 1715 Jullienne bought and sold paintings and drawings and continued to do so until his death in 1766. The following year the core of his collection was sold at auction.5 The accompanying catalogue, prepared by the well-established expert and dealer Pierre Remy,6 contained more than 320 paintings and seven hundred drawings, not to mention numerous prints grouped in over two hundred lots, plus one thousand decorative objects.7 During the sale, which took place in the Salon Carré at the Louvre, Parisian amateurs and foreign grandees acquired choice works to augment their burgeoning collections. The most ambitious buyer by far was Catherine the Great, whose agents obtained numerous canvases for the Hermitage. Frederick I of Prussia’s agent purchased paintings to hang in the picture gallery at Sans Souci, while distinguished local collectors such as the duc de Choiseul, or for that matter Mariette himself, secured paintings for their own collections.8 The Jullienne sale did not follow the order of the catalogue, but was organised by sessions (or vacations) whose number Mariette conscientiously inscribed in the margins of his copy of the catalogue. He also recorded prices 9 and buyers’ names whenever possible,10 followed by instructive and engaging comments.11 The annotated catalogue must have served him as a kind of aide-mémoire, to which he seems to have returned after the sale, adding further information.12 Nothing suggests, however, that his comments were ever intended to be read by others. His handwriting is miniscule and not easily legible. Moreover, the connoisseur was notoriously protective of his knowledge.13 The comments show, above all, Mariette’s thought process as he studied and assessed a work of art. Is the attribution correct? Is it an original or a copy? What is the condition? Is the work well composed and expertly executed? How does it fit within and compare to the rest of the artist’s œuvre? Is the price justified? Such are his main preoccupations.
3 See E. Dacier, A. Vuaflart and J. Hérold: Jean de Jullienne et les graveurs de Watteau au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1922–29. 4 Inv. no.1968.52. Another important visual record of the Jullienne collection is provided by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s illustrated copy of the sale catalogue, documented in photographs in the library of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 1767 Mar 30 PaReJ. 5 Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, desseins & estampes et autres effets curieux après le décès de M. de Jullienne, Ecuyer, Chevalier de Saint-Michel, Honoraire de l’Académie Royale de Peinture & de Sculpture, Paris, 30th March to 22nd May 1767 (Lugt 1603). 6 As the Jullienne sale was announced in the Correspondance littéraire (February 1767), Grimm referred to Remy as a ‘célèbre brocanteur de Paris’; M. Tourneux: Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., Paris 1877–82, VII, pp.238–39. In effect, Remy was responsible for cataloguing some of the most important sales of the century, including the collections of Jean-Louis Gaignat (1768), François Boucher (1771), Vassal de Saint Hubert (1773), the marquis de Gouvernet (1775) and Blondel de Gagny (1776). See also P. Michel: ‘Peintre et négociant en tableaux, et autres curiosités. Bon connoisseur. Esquisse d’un portrait’, Mélanges en hommage à Pierre Rosenberg: peintures et dessins en France et en Italie XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles, Paris 2001, pp.328–36; S. Darroussat: ‘Recherches autour de l’expert et marchand Pierre Remy (1715–1797)’, in Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de
l’Art français 2001, Paris 2002, pp.103–15; and F. Marandet, ‘Pierre Rémy (1715–97). The Parisian art market in the mid-eighteenth century’, Apollo 158 (August 2003), pp.32–42. 7 Sale catalogue cited at note 5 above. 8 Catherine the Great: lots 52, 78, 128, 143–44, 156–57, 162, 165, 172, 176–77, 191, 227, 252 and 268; Frederick of Prussia: lots 194, 199 and 220; the duc de Choiseul: lots 141 and 181, and subsequently lots 131, 153–54 and 170; Mariette bought lot 2 for himself and lot 15 for his friend Horace Walpole. 9 Comparison of the prices noted by Mariette with those found in two other copies of the Jullienne catalogue show that, apart from the occasional mistake or approximation, he recorded prices accurately. 10 The locations of many of Jullienne’s canvases are known today thanks to copies of the sale catalogue annotated by other hands. However, the difficulty in tracing a number of the works is rooted in occasionally unreliable attributions and the number of copies tagged with the name of the original artist. Jullienne’s sources other than auctions have been little explored, so Mariette’s record of private transactions provides an unrivalled source for documenting how and when Jullienne assembled his collection. 11 The lively nature of Mariette’s comments seems to echo his desire to make the reading of sale catalogues ‘moins sèche & moins ennuyeuse’; see his Description sommaire des dessins [. . .] du cabinet de feu M. Crozat . . ., Paris 1741, p.xi. Mariette
7. Venetian pleasures, by Jean-Antoine Watteau. c.1719. Canvas, 56 by 46 cm. (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). ‘Un des plus parfaits tableaux de Wateau qui n’a point changé & ne changera point. M. de Julienne a laissé pour restant le pendant à M de Montullé qui a très bien fait d’achetter celuici. Il vaut pour lui le double de ce qu’un autre en auroit payé’.
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8. Page with elevation of a wall in ‘Catalogue des Tableaux de Jean de Jullienne’. c.1756–58. Watercolour, 19.6 by 26 cm. (Morgan Library & Museum, New York; acc. no.1966.8, fol.50).
9. Suffer the children to come unto me, by Jacob Jordaens. c.1615–16. Panel, 104.1 by 169.9 cm. (St Louis Art Museum). ‘. . . tab. qui ne m’a jamais plu & je ne pu me refuser de le dire plus d’une fois à M. de Julienne qui l’avoit achetté pour être de Rubens et payé fort cher il est lourd de touche & encore plus mal composé’.
Remarkably clear and concise, Mariette’s judgments are distinctly frank and incisive. As he comments on a chinoiserie by the contemporary glass-painter Pierre Jouffroy (lot 302), his irony proves damning: ‘il y a de quoi rire de voir une pareille misère dans le Cabinet de M. de Julienne. J’imagine qu’il ne l’y avoit mise que par Charité’.14 However, Mariette reserves his most acerbic comments for Remy, whose knowledge and attributions he often questions or corrects. In a sense, this is typical of the way in which rival experts criticised each other in the second half of the eighteenth century.15 Yet in this instance the criticism may have assumed a special significance. For someone as humble and deeply knowledgeable as the author of the Abécédario,16 it must have been annoying to see Remy claim for himself the elevated status of connoisseur. Not only did the dealer pretend to be able to rely solely on his own opinion, but also to make attributions with a high degree of certainty.17 So when Remy mistakes a copy of a Tintoretto painting, the original of which was in situ in Venice, for an actual canvas by the master (lot 48), Mariette shows little mercy: ‘Tout [. . .] homme sçait [. . .] cela, M r Remy est le seul qui l’ignore’. In another instance (lot 211), where Remy pronounces an attribution to Poussin, Mariette hardly conceals
his irritation as he deems the painting to resemble the master’s manner ‘autant [. . .] qu’à un fagot’.18 Judgmental though it may be, Mariette’s wording is always sensitive, usually measured but sometimes outright passionate, and taken as a whole the comments reveal a lively personality.19 He has real coups de coeur, notably praising a landscape by Salvator Rosa, which he considers ‘Excellentissime’ (lot 78; Fig.10) or a Virgin and Child by Simon Vouet, which he describes as a ‘vrai bijou. le Guide voudroit l’avoir fait’ (lot 208). In another instance, he is upset to see a fine picture by Sébastien Bourdon leave France (lot 220). By contrast, certain works repel him, including a painting by François-Hubert Drouais: ‘Le froid qui regne dans ce tableau me glace et me tue’ (lot 299). While Mariette has full confidence in his own taste, he is careful and modest in discussing attributions, particularly of works from the Low Countries. Thus about lot 130 he confesses: ‘je l’ai vû avec plaisir mais est-il de Rembrandt. J’ai trouvé des gens qui en doutoient, cela ne m’auroit pas detourné d’en faire l’emplette’. Unlike many actors in the art market, he is more attuned to the quality of the works than the names attached to them.20 Mariette shows an acute understanding of market prices. Instead of following trends, they should, in his view, justly
annotated not only auction catalogues, but his books in general (‘dans presque tous il y a joint des notes savantes, quelquefois critiques, & toujours instructives’, wrote Basan in his ‘Abrégé de la vie de M. Mariette’, in Catalogue Raisonné des différens objets de curiosités dans les sciences et les arts qui composoient le Cabinet de feu Mr Mariette . . ., Paris 1775, p.vii). He was even asked by colleagues to annotate texts, such as Condivi’s Life of Michelangelo, which was published by Lamberto Gori in 1746 with Mariette’s comments. 12 The annotations for certain lots show that Mariette must have returned to the catalogue, because he added provenance information which post-dated the sale; see lots 123 and 154, for example. 13 ‘Fier à juste titre de ses trésors, il avait le tort d’en être jaloux, refusait aux autres la communication d’une science qu’il réservait pour lui seul, et éconduisait assez sèchement les malheureux confrères amenés par le besoin de s’instruire’; L. Clément de Ris: Les amateurs d’autrefois, Paris 1877, p.325. 14 See also lot 246, where he makes an unsparing remark about the painter of architectural views Michel Boyer (1668–1724). 15 See K. Pomian: ‘Dealers, Connoisseurs, Enthusiasts’, in Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, Cambridge 1990, pp.151–52. The expert Glomy’s attacks on Remy’s incompetence in making attributions were indeed widely reported at the time: ‘M. Rémy a un rival dans le sieur Glomy, autre brocanteur. Autrefois, ils faisaient les
catalogues et les ventes en société; mais deux soleils ne peuvent durer ensemble. Le soleil Rémy et le soleil Glomy se sont brouillés. Celui-ci, en rédigeant le catalogue des tableaux de feu M. Bailly, a dit malicieusement de M. Rémy qu’il n’a eu d’autre part à ce catalogue que d’avoir donné la mesure des tableaux. M. Rémy en appelle de cette calomnie à la justice du public éclairé; et, pour écraser son rival à force de générosité, il se fait un plaisir d’annoncer que M. Glomy est un des premiers pour coller les dessins et pour les ajuster avec des filets de papier d’or’; see Tourneux, op. cit. (note 6), VII, pp.238–39. 16 P. de Chennevières and A. de Montaiglon: ‘Abécédario de Pierre-Jean Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur l’art et les artistes’, Archives de l’Art Français (1851–62). 17 See Remy’s foreword to the Catalogue des tableaux [. . .] du Cabinet de feu M. Pasquier, Paris 1755, pp.5–6; and Pomian, op. cit. (note 15), pp.148–49. Dealers active earlier in the century tended to reiterate the opinions of connoisseurs. 18 In the same vein, see Mariette’s view on lots 95 and 122. 19 On Mariette’s character, see M.J. Dumesnil: Histoire des plus célèbres amateurs français et de leurs relations avec les artistes, Paris 1858, I, pp.231–32. 20 His comment on lot 30 is another meaningful example. See also letter from Mariette to Bottari, 26th October 1764, in G.G. Bottari: Raccolta di lettere sulla Pittura, Scultura ed Architettura . . ., Milan 1822–25, V, p.407.
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10. River landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl, by Salvator Rosa. 1650s. Canvas, 175 by 261 cm. (Wallace Collection, London). ‘Excellentissime tableau, mais qui auroit jamais pensé qu’on eut donné un tel prix pour un morceau où il ne se rencontre que des rochers & quelques arbres, presque point de figures & encore assez mal dessinés. Il est vrai que pour le couleur & la touche, on ne peut rien desirer davantage. M. de Julienne avoit eu ce tableau de M.de de Parabere & le paya autant que je puis m’en souvenir 3000 H. Il a eté poussé jusqu’à 12000 p.r la Czarine’. 21
See his opinion on lots 65 and 83, for example. In a letter to Padre Paciaudi, 9th August 1767, Mariette wrote: ‘A la vente de Julienne qui s’est faite depuis peu [. . .] tableaux, dessins, estampes, sculptures, porcelaines, etc., tout y a été porté à des prix excessifs. Il m’a fallu suivre le torrent, et quoique je ne regrette point l’argent que j’y ai versé, j’y ai mis beaucoup plus que je comptais, et que je n’aurais 22
reflect the intrinsic value of works of art.21 Therefore when a painting by Gerard de Lairesse fetches an impressive 9,610 livres, Mariette deplores ‘un prix si fou & si exhorbitant’ (lot 194), although he concedes elsewhere (lot 145) that certain works are of such high quality that they can be hardly overpriced.22 Conversely, he holds some prices to be unduly low. ‘Quel caprice il regne dans les ventes’, he writes about a Jordaens (lot 120), ‘ce tabl[eau]. qui est agréable et de toute beauté, a eu peine à trouver maître, & il a eté donné pour rien’. Nevertheless he gives credit to those who buy shrewdly. When a certain Donjeux acquires a Van Dyck original (lot 123) for the price of a copy, Mariette concludes that ‘le marchand qui s’en est chargé a fait un très bon coup’. While confirming his reputation as an indefatigable observer with a sharp and quick pen,23 Mariette’s annotations attest to his sustained practice of connoisseurship, whereby he articulated his empirical judgments on individual works of art and his keen understanding of the art market. The connoisseur’s marginalia on the pages of the Jullienne sale catalogue are therefore central to anyone interested in the art world in France before the Revolution. dépensé il y a quelques années. Du reste, ce que j’ai eu est bon, et le bon n’est jamais trop payé’; see C. Nisard: Correspondance inédite du comte de Caylus avec le père Paciaudi, théatin, suivie de celle de l’Abbé Barthélémy et de P. Mariette avec le même, Paris 1877, II, pp.349–50. 23 See Chennevières and Montaiglon, op. cit. (note 16), I, p.viii.
‘The gem of the Palace’: Queen Victoria’s Audience Room at Windsor Castle by HUGH ROBERTS QUEEN VICTORIA’S AUDIENCE ROOM at Windsor (Fig.11), lying on the south side of the Upper Ward of the Castle in the heart of the sovereign’s private apartments, provided the setting, at once formal and intimate, for the Queen to conduct official business with her government ministers, ambassadors and senior members of her Household when she was in residence in the Castle. Towards the end of her reign, it was noted that this was the room where the Queen ‘has received all the great men and women of the world, and the walls of which, if they have ears, have listened to many wise words and secrets more sacred than were ever uttered in the most closely tiled Masonic Lodge’.1 As such, it was the successor to the King’s and Queen’s Audience Chambers in the old State Apartments of the Castle, given up by George IV when he moved the royal apartments from the north to the east and south ranges of the Upper Ward of the Castle in the 1820s. It was also the last, the most elaborate and the most highly
finished of a series of projects undertaken by Prince Albert in collaboration with the sculptor, decorator and architect John Thomas (1813–62). Although now somewhat altered,2 it is perhaps the best surviving but least known example of the Prince’s mature taste in interior decoration. At the same time it stands as one of the most carefully thought out, elaborate and ingeniously constructed pieces of royal iconography in any British royal residence. This article provides an opportunity to reappraise a now largely forgotten interior.3 In August 1862, eight months after the Prince’s untimely death and less than a year after the Audience Room was completed, the Illustrated London News singled out the room for special comment in its obituary of Thomas (who had died the previous April), noting that on ‘the decorations of this room Thomas devoted his utmost strength; he executed the whole of it himself, under the personal direction of the late Prince
1
3 The research for this article was undertaken in preparation for the exhibition Victoria and Albert: Art and Love, to be held at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 19th March to 31st October 2010. 4 Illustrated London News 41 (30th August 1862), p.232. 5 Windsor, Royal Archives (hereafter cited as RA), Victorian (hereafter cited as VIC), Add C12/228. This manuscript account by Bell is annotated with
Anon.: The Private Life of the Queen, London 1897, p.6. The memoir, which was published without royal permission in 1897 and later suppressed, contains an inaccurate description of the Audience Room (pp.6–7). 2 The overdoors were removed and the paintings changed in 1946 and again in 1979 (see note 7 below). Curtains were added to the walls in 1979 and a false ceiling was fitted in 1983.
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Consort, and it has been pronounced by the best authorities to be one of the most perfect and beautiful things of the kind ever produced’.4 This positive view was reflected with even greater emphasis by the antiquary and Secretary to the Privy Purse, Doyne Courtenay Bell, five years later, when he provided for the Queen a description of the room to accompany the photographic record of the Castle commissioned from the celebrated French photographer A.-A.-E. Disdéri. In this commentary, Bell described the Audience Room as ‘certainly [. . .] the most elegantly and harmoniously ornamented of all the apartments in the Castle [. . .] a striking illustration of the refined tastes of HRH The Prince Consort, who always delighted to see the fine arts lend their assistance to every object of daily use & domestic comfort’.5 Three years later, in 1870, the Audience Room was described by the Royal Librarian, Benjamin Woodward, as ‘the gem of the Palace’.6 The room that called forth such praise is deceptively small, measuring slightly over fourteen feet in width and fifteen in depth, excluding the window embrasure (c.4.26 by 4.57 metres). As originally conceived and executed by Thomas and the Prince, it was lined to a height of eight-and-a-half feet (2.6 metres) with part-gilded panelling of satinwood and tulipwood marquetry. The upper section of the panelling was inset with twelve of the fifteen oval portraits of George III’s family by Gainsborough7 in delicate giltwood frames, the three remaining portraits being mounted in carved surrounds above the satinwood panelled doors on the north, east and west sides (Fig.12). Below the portraits and framed en suite with them were set seventeen glazed cases, mounted with enamel miniatures representing Queen Victoria’s Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian ancestry. The dado and door panels were inset with porcelain plaques, and on the east wall, below an elaborately framed arched overmantel, stood a carved white marble chimneypiece incorporating royal armorials. Above the panelling, the polished plaster walls were decorated with a stencilled blue and gold trellis design incorporating Garter emblems, surmounted by a deep coved cornice modelled in relief with the heads of every sovereign from William the Conqueror to Queen Victoria. Soaring above all this was a dome modelled in relief with the patron saints of the United Kingdom – St George, St Andrew, St David and St Patrick – from the centre of which was suspended an elaborate glass chandelier. Finally, the entablature above the entrance door was set with a porcelain profile medallion of Prince Albert and inlaid with an inscription recording that the room was altered and decorated ‘under the superintendence of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort in the 24th year of the reign of Queen Victoria’ (i.e. 1860, the date which also appears inlaid in the entablature of the chimney-glass). These inscriptions, together with the surviving bills (which were divided for payment between the Privy Purse and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and are discussed in more detail below), provide the principal documentation for this remarkable project: no references to the evolution and progress of the work have been found in the Queen’s journal or in Prince Albert’s surviving papers. Although surprising, this absence almost certainly
reflects the hands-on part the Prince took in the design and supervision of the work, and the probability that the majority of decisions were made face-to-face, on site at Windsor,8 the Prince relying on an efficient and trusted designer. As the obituarist in
corrections by Queen Victoria. 6 B.B. Woodward: Windsor Castle, Picturesque and Descriptive, London 1870, unpaginated. 7 O. Millar: The Later Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, London 1969, nos.778–92. The fifteen oval portraits of George III and his family by Gainsborough, including the three overdoors in carved surrounds, were removed in
1946 and replaced by nine circular portraits of Queen Victoria’s children by Winterhalter, supplemented with three portraits by Hayter (of the Duchess of Kent, Princess Victoria and Prince Albert), Queen Victoria by Landseer and George, Prince of Wales, by Corden after Sant. These in turn were all removed in 1979. 8 Although on one occasion (as detailed in Thomas’s bill), the design process evidently involved sending samples up to Balmoral for the Prince’s approval.
11. Realised design for the Queen’s Audience Room, Windsor Castle, by John Thomas. 1861. Watercolour, 39.7 by 29.3 cm. (Royal Collection, RCIN 919808).
12. The Queen’s Audience Room looking north, by A.-A.-E. Disdéri. 1867. Photograph, 22.6 by 28.1 cm. (Royal Collection, RCIN 2100100).
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13. The Queen’s Audience Room, by Joseph Nash. 1845. Watercolour, 29.6 by 35.4 cm. (Royal Collection, RCIN 919807).
the Illustrated London News observed, one of the reasons why Prince Albert chose Thomas was that ‘he [the Prince] saw that he could get his own wishes carried out and suggest without arousing professional pride or being dictated to when he wished to direct’.9 Despite this absence of personal comment, it is beyond doubt that the Audience Room occupied a unique place in the life of the Queen. She appears to have selected this room, in preference to those used by George IV and William IV on the east front, on the strength of its convenient location adjacent to her private Sitting Room. Here, on the walls of loosely draped blue silk installed by Morel and Seddon in the late 1820s for Lady Conyngham’s daughter,10 she hung the Gainsborough portraits of her grandparents, father, uncles and aunts (Fig.13), which she thought were ‘beautifully done’. Lord Melbourne, with whom the Queen discussed the new hang in October 1838, warmly approved of the display, and hearing of Princess Augusta’s pleasure in this arrangement, commented: ‘It’s a very good thing having those pictures; it makes a great impression upon old people, who always think they are forgotten, as they generally are’.11 Whether the presence of the Gainsborough portraits in the Sitting Room was intended to make a dynastic statement, it was certainly of very considerable significance to the future of the dynasty that Prince Albert was summoned to this same room on 15th October 1839 to listen to – and accept – the Queen’s proposal of marriage; and it was here, too, that she and Prince Albert spent the first evening of their married life.
9
See obituary cited at note 4 above. H.A. Roberts: For The King’s Pleasure, London 2001, pp.276–80. 11 Queen Victoria’s Journal (RA), 17th and 30th October 1838. Princess Augusta (1768–1840) was the second daughter of George III and Queen Charlotte. 12 G. Beard and C. Gilbert, eds.: Dictionary of English Furniture Makers 1660–1840, Leeds 1986, p.705. 13 RA, MRH/Supt WC/Bills, quarter to 31st December 1850. 14 Ibid., £97 16s. These tables, Royal Collection Inventory Number (hereafter cited as RCIN) 515.1–2, may be identified with the pair supplied by William Gates to George IV, when Prince of Wales, for his apartment at Buckingham House; Kew, The National Archives (hereafter cited as TNA), LC9/337, quarter to 5th January 1790. They were subsequently placed in the Old Throne Room at Carlton House; 10
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Eleven years later, in 1850, as part of a general programme of improvements at Windsor, the decision was taken to alter the Audience Room using the carver and decorator Thomas Ponsonby.12 This work included a new cove and cornice, papiermâché enrichments to the ceiling, arabesque decoration and gilding on doors and shutters,13 and the comprehensive restoration of a pair of late eighteenth-century gilded tables (visible in Fig.12), to which were added two ‘very neatly finished’ gilt-brass and plate-glass display cases.14 The latter, lined with deep crimson silk velvet, were intended to contain the Queen’s inherited collection of cameos and intaglios. Nothing remains of Ponsonby’s scheme beyond the tables, which continued in use in this room following the next and more radical transformation. Thomas began work on the Audience Room in 1860 at a time when he was already working for the Prince on a number of Windsor projects, including the Royal Dairy at Frogmore and the Print Room in the Castle. His first dated design (Fig.14) was submitted on 2nd August.15 Eleven further drawings in the Print Room at Windsor, which include elevations and details of the architectural enrichments of the room,16 and six in the Royal Institute of British Architects Library, London,17 show the development of the complex iconography of the room (Fig.16). From these it is clear that the intention from the start was to create a diminutive royal gallery of ancestors, or Ahnengalerie, replete with British and Saxe-Coburg heraldry and insignia. This concept, familiar from Continental royal and princely collections, was intended to encompass eventually not only the Queen’s immediate family, but as much as possible of her more distant ancestry, stretching back over the preceding three hundred years. The bill submitted by Thomas for his work on the Audience Room,18 taken in conjunction with his drawings, makes clear the extent of his responsibility and his involvement in the design of every part of the interior fittings (see Appendix below).19 Surprisingly, given that Thomas’s principal experience and skill was as a designer and sculptor, the cabinet-making – a substantial and complex undertaking – is included without comment in his bill, from which it must be assumed that he subcontracted this element to a third party. The most likely candidate would probably be J.G. Crace, with whom Thomas had previously worked at Leeds Town Hall.20 Crace’s firm had regularly supplied the Royal Household, notably during the refurnishing of the State Apartments for the Imperial visit to Windsor in 1855,21 for the new furnishings in the Private Secretary’s and Privy Purse offices at Windsor in 1856,22 and for the fitting-out of the Print Room in 1860–61, the latter to Thomas’s designs.23 Thomas’s bill remains silent on the procurement of the elaborate plasterwork for the cornice and domed ceiling, the designs for which he produced as part of the overall scheme.24 This is likely to have been provided by the well-known plasterers
see W.H. Pyne: The History of the Royal Residences, London 1819, III, illustration opposite p.28. 15 RCIN 740188.a. Inscribed: ‘Chimney Piece Design No 1. NB A piece of coloured Velvet for picture Frames will be submitted to the Approval of His Royal Highness’. 16 RCIN 740188.b–l. 17 J. Lever, ed.: Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (T–Z), London 1984, p.37, project 15, nos.1–6. 18 For a total of £1,123 17s. 19 For example, the drawing illustrated in Fig.16 gives precise details for the chimneypiece, grate, fender and candle-brackets attached to the mirror frame. The brackets have since been removed and the grate was changed in 1929.
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14. The Queen’s Audience Room, elevation of east wall (preliminary design), by John Thomas. Signed and dated 2nd August 1860. Pen and watercolour, 51.3 by 67.3 cm. (Royal Collection, RCIN 740188a).
Jackson & Sons of Rathbone Place, London, the firm that had supplied new ceiling ornaments for the Van Dyck Room (now the Queen’s Ballroom) in the State Apartments for the Imperial visit in 1855 and with which J.G. Crace’s firm had worked on numerous occasions.25 The most unusual and original feature of the decoration, the porcelain plaques for the dado and doors made by Herbert Minton & Co. to drawings supplied by Thomas, were separately invoiced.26 Each of the three doors is set with ten lilac-ground plaques decorated en grisaille with delicate grottesche, bordered in red and gilt with pole-and-ribbon ornament. The upper and lower panels are set with four rectangular plaques painted with British and Saxon royal crests. The central panels are each formed of two rectangles with concave ends framing a roundel. On the entrance door, beneath the profile of Prince Albert and inscription previously mentioned, the roundels display the Queen’s and the Prince’s arms (Fig.19). On the east and west doors, clearly marking the Prince’s unbounded admiration for the artist he regarded as sublime, are finely painted miniature copies of Raphael’s tondi from the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, representing Theology, Poetry, Philosophy and Jurisprudence (Fig.17).27 Inset into the dado are sixteen varioussized rectangular plaques painted with insignia of the principal British orders: Garter (Fig.18), Thistle, St Patrick, Bath, St Michael and St George, together with the Naval and Military Victoria Crosses (which the Queen had instituted in 1856) and the national emblems of the rose and thistle.
20
M. Aldrich, ed.: The Craces: Royal Decorators 1768–1899, Brighton 1990, p.128. TNA, LC11/136, quarter to June 1855. 22 Ibid., quarter to June 1856. 23 RA, MRH/Supt WC/Bills, quarter to December 1861. 24 RA, 740188.d, e, g and l. 25 Aldrich, op. cit. (note 20), pp.96–97 and passim. 26 ‘1 Set Slabs Painted & Gilt to Drawing £160’ (TNA, LC11/167, quarter to December 1861); and RA, PPTO/PP/QV/PP2, Box 57, Bill 2963. The bill in the Lord Chamberlain’s accounts is endorsed: ‘This Amount (£160) had already been paid by the Privy Purse’. Five drawings by Thomas for Minton’s use are now in the RIBA Library; see Lever, op. cit. (note 17), project 15, nos.2–6. 21
15.The Queen’s Audience Room, design for curtains and pelmet, by John Thomas. c.August 1860. Pencil, 54 by 72.7 cm. (Royal Collection, RCIN 740188f).
16. The Queen’s Audience Room, design for chimneypiece, grate, fender and candlebrackets, by John Thomas(?). August 1860? Pencil and wash, 42 by 38.5 cm. (Library Drawings and Archives Collections, Royal Institute of British Architects, London).
The remaining elements of the decoration overseen by Thomas consisted of an ‘Extra Superfine’ fitted and bordered Brussels carpet and Axminster rug, supplied by Watson, Bontor & Co. of 35–36 Old Bond Street, London, at a cost of £24 1s 8d,28 and the elaborately draped curtains of crimson Italian silk damask, ‘to order and pattern approved’, which came from Caley Brothers of Windsor at a cost of £187.29 In both
27 These finely executed copies after Raphael may have come from another source: it has not been possible to examine the reverse of the plaques, but Thomas’s inscription on the drawing for the left-hand central panel of the east door; see ibid., project 15, no.6: ‘These circles to be filled up by copies from Raphaels Frescos in the Vatican of which this is merely an indication’ hints at another hand. The copyist most favoured by the Queen and Prince, Carl Schmidt of Bamberg, submitted a bill of £30 for ‘4 Copies of Porcelain Pictures’ in 1861 (RA, PPTO/PP/QV/PP2, Bill 3040, quarter to Christmas 1861), which may relate to these plaques. 28 TNA, LC11/165, quarter to June 1861. This included a charge of £6 for ‘Expenses of designs for Body & Border’ (i.e. translating Thomas’s designs). 29 RA, MRH/Supt WC/Bills, quarter to June 1861.
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19. The Queen’s Audience Room, north door, inset with porcelain plaques painted with the armorials of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (Windsor Castle). 17. The Queen’s Audience Room, east door, detail of porcelain plaques painted with Poetry and Jurisprudence after Raphael (Windsor Castle).
18. The Queen’s Audience Room, porcelain plaque painted with the insignia of the Order of the Garter (Windsor Castle).
30
Windsor, Royal Library, 740188.i. RA, MRH/Supt WC/Bills, quarter to September 1861. 32 The history of the royal collection of miniatures during Queen Victoria’s reign is the subject of a detailed study in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné by Vanessa Remington: Victorian Miniatures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, London June 2010. 33 Queen Victoria’s Journal (RA), 19th May 1842. 34 This process may have been accelerated by the Duchess of Gloucester’s bequest to Queen Victoria in 1857 of six giltwood frames containing groups of miniatures (RA, VIC/AddV/93–4). I am grateful to Vanessa Remington for this suggestion. 35 During this period, the carver and gilder W. Thomas of 29 Berners Street, London, provided ‘Thirty oval frames for Enamels – mounted on seven Clamped 31
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instances, the designs were entirely Thomas’s. Of the two that were offered for the curtains and pelmet, one was closely followed (Fig.15), while the second was annotated ‘Not approved’.30 In the case of the lighting for the room, Perry & Co. provided a new cut-glass and ‘ormoulu color metal’ chandelier with four oil burners (visible in Fig.12), made ‘as pr estimate and drawing approved’ at a cost of £104.31 The most significant feature – in many ways the raison d’être of the room – was without question the large collection of enamel portrait miniatures ranged by dynasty around the walls. Under Prince Albert’s direction, and with the Queen’s cheerful collaboration over the previous two decades, the existing enamels in the royal collection had been sorted out and separated from the light-sensitive miniatures on ivory, vellum or card.32 The latter were henceforth to be protected in a specially designed cabinet in the Print Room. This project, first mentioned by the Queen in May 1842 (‘Looked at the old enamels & miniatures I have, which are being put into proper order. They are most
Mahogany boards – and covered with rich Genoa Velvet & Gilt leaves & Ribbands’ for Windsor at a cost of £29 10s (TNA, LC11/167, quarter to December 1861). While the description might fit the boards in the Audience Room cases, the oval frames for the enamels are undoubtedly all of gilt bronze and were supplied by Hatfield from 1851 onwards as part of an extensive programme to reframe uniformly the entire royal collection of miniatures (e.g. TNA, LC11/139; March 1851 to December 1854, in which period around 560 new frames were supplied). Other rooms in the private apartments at Windsor were hung with groups of more simply arranged enamels, identically framed by Hatfield; see Remington, op. cit. (note 32). 36 The original drawing can be seen underneath the figures in a number of places. The second artist may have been James Roberts, who was paid for retouching
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Thomas’s perspective drawing or realised design for the Audience Room (Fig.11) varies in certain relatively small areas from the original design submitted in 1860 (Fig.14), for example in the carving of the chimneypiece, the arrangement of the porcelain panels in the doors, the cresting of the overmantel and the colour of the curtains. The realised design, while exaggerating the sense of space, is very close to the appearance of the room as completed, although it omits the chandelier and treats the movable furniture of the room in summary fashion. The drawing has been given an additional degree of verisimilitude by the depiction of an audience in progress, although the figures may have been added (perhaps by another hand) at a slightly later date.36 Work on the Audience Room was just complete by the time of Prince Albert’s death on 14th December 1861, and it was here, appropriately and significantly, that his coffin rested on the night before his funeral in St George’s Chapel on 23rd December. Given its unparalleled association with the happiest and saddest events in the Queen’s life, the Audience Room belonged pre-eminently, as the Queen put it in a letter to her eldest daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, to ‘a precious past which will for ever and ever be engraven on my dreary heart’.37 After December 1861, in common with every part of Windsor that had been closely associated with the Prince, this unique room was treated as sacrosanct by the Queen, and so remained in all essentials unchanged for the forty years of her widowhood.38 20. The Queen’s Audience Room, glazed giltwood frame containing twenty-two enamel miniatures of the Stuart dynasty (Windsor Castle).
Appendix Bill submitted by John Thomas for his work on the Audience Room. (TNA, LC11/167, quarter to December 1861).
valuable’),33 became an absorbing preoccupation for the royal couple, and throughout the 1840s and into the 1850s they commissioned a substantial number of additions to complete the dynastic groupings, from which a selection was to be made in due course for the Audience Room.34 For these additions, they had used for the most part the three leading enamellists of the day, Henry Pierce Bone, William Essex and Joseph Lee. For Thomas’s scheme around two hundred miniatures were eventually to be arranged around the room, below the Gainsborough ovals, in twelve large and five small inset glazed giltwood cases designed by Thomas (Fig.20). The larger cases contained as many as twenty-four enamels, the smaller between three and five, with a large concentration on George III and his family and Queen Victoria and her family. Uniformly framed in gilt bronze by J.A. Hatfield, Bronze & Ormolu Manufacturer of 21 Cumberland Street, London, the individual portraits were named on scrolling gilt-metal ribbons and set on velvet-covered boards surrounded by flat gilt-metal leafy branches.35
drawings in August 1861; see D. Millar: The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, London 1995, II, pp.885–86. Although the male figures (which seem to be portraits) have not been satisfactorily identified, the figure in the centre bears a considerable resemblance to the Queen’s former Lord Chamberlain, the marquess of Breadalbane, who was sent in 1861 as Special Envoy to Berlin to invest William I, King of Prussia, with the Order of the Garter. If, as Delia Millar argues, the scene must predate March 1861, when Queen Victoria went into mourning for her mother, there would appear to be only one occasion at Windsor when the Queen received dignitaries of sufficient standing to warrant the use of the Audience Room. On 21st January 1861 General de Bonin arrived at the Castle on a special mission from the King of Prussia, to deliver a letter announcing
To providing the whole of the Material designing and executing Interior Fittings to Her Majesty’s Private Audience Closet with elaborately inlaid Satinwood Pilaster &c and also the whole of the picture frames gilding same &c with carved & gilded Window Cornice for Curtains and a richly inlaid Mirror Frame also a sculptured Statuary Marble Chimney piece with carved Frieze &c the whole executed as per Estimate sent in Aug 2 1860 £1070 To packing cases packing Loading the whole of the above fittings and Carriage of same to Windsor Castle £8 10s To providing material and making model of Curtains for Windows including Tassels Fringes Drapery &c £2 15s To providing Material Designing and carving Candle Brackets for Mirror Frame in Her Majesty’s Audience Closet packing Case &c and sending same to Balmoral for HRH The Prince Consorts approval £7 12s To making Designs for Carpet China panels Fire Grate &c &c as per Estimate £35
the new king’s accession, and count de Bernstorff, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary for the King of Prussia presented his credentials. A preparatory sketch by Thomas (Windsor, Royal Library; 740188.h), with a different arrangement of furniture, also shows an audience, with the Queen, Prince Albert and a child on the right, and two unidentifiable male figures on the left. 37 R. Fulford, ed.: Dearest Mama. Private Correspondence of Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia 1861–4, London 1968, p.23, letter dated 18th December 1861. 38 A small number of enamel miniatures of members of the Queen’s close family were inserted in 1874 and in the following year new curtains of crimson brocatelle were hung. The last additions to the miniature display were made in the next reign with a group of enamels of King Edward VII, Queen Alexandra and their family. the burlington m a g a z i n e
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Morris Louis in Australia and New Zealand by EDWARD HANFLING
BETWEEN RIVULETS OF COLOUR at each end of a long canvas there is a vast expanse of emptiness. This is Beta Nu (Fig.22), painted in 1960 by the American Morris Louis, one of the longest and certainly the emptiest of over 120 paintings known as Unfurleds.1 A common view is that the longest Unfurleds, which are over twenty feet in width, are less successful than those, like Gamma Upsilon (Fig.21), at around fourteen feet long. Diane Upright refers to a loss of ‘compositional tautness’ in the longer works.2 Kenworth Moffett writes that ‘they can seem too long and fall into two distinct but beautiful sides, which only occasionally come together’,3 and John Elderfield says that Louis ‘courted failure by pulling the areas of colour too far apart’.4 According to Elderfield, in the best Unfurleds, ‘Louis stretched out the edges not to some indeterminable point of visual concealment, but to the precise point of pictorial unity’.5 Is there such a precise point? A work of art that seems initially to be devoid of unity, unstable, often over time settles back and is accommodated as a picture, as art. Standards of unity are not static, and Louis saw a new form of unity in advance of his audience. As a result, Beta Nu has been overlooked, even by scholars, critics and artists generally sympathetic to Louis’s work.6 In 1972 Beta Nu was purchased for the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, by its far-sighted director, James Mollison. In the previous year it had been in a Morris Louis exhibition touring Honolulu, Melbourne (Figs.23 and 24), Auckland and Santa Barbara, arranged by the Auckland City Art Gallery in collaboration with the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York. The mixed response to the exhibition in Australia and New Zealand is indicative of the challenge posed by Louis’s Unfurleds – Beta Nu especially – for both critics and artists. Close examination of Beta Nu reveals the implications of its radical pictorial openness and apparent disunity.7 Louis challenged the preconception that a surface should be covered, a space filled, and that a unified composition depends on relating forms or pieces of a consistent size. The persistence of those conventions, in spite of Louis’s innovations, makes most contemporary art easy to grasp. Beta Nu, on the other hand, still resists comprehension and recognition. Louis’s process alone is baffling. He painted Beta Nu by pouring newly developed magna acrylics onto the ends of a nine by twenty-three foot length of unsized, unprimed cotton duck canvas. In his twelve by fourteen foot studio, this meant unrolling and painting each end separately, manhandling the massive weight of the canvas and expertly controlling the flow of paint, which was thinned with turpentine.
1
Louis titled two Unfurleds using letters of the Greek alphabet. After his death, the Louis Estate followed this precedent in titling all the other Unfurleds. 2 D. Upright: Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, New York 1985, p.26. 3 K. Moffett: exh. cat. Morris Louis, Boston (Museum of Fine Arts) 1979, p.36. 4 J. Elderfield: exh. cat. Morris Louis, London (Arts Council of Great Britain) 1974, p.57. 5 Ibid., p.56. 6 Jules Olitski’s practice of pushing pictorial incident (in the form of ‘edge drawing’) to merely a couple of edges of an expansive colour field, can be seen as a response to the ‘empty centre’ of Louis’s Unfurleds, though Olitski’s art is based on a principle of
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21. Installation of Morris Louis exhibition, Auckland City Art Gallery, October 1971, with Gamma Upsilon (1960. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 260.4 by 421.6 cm.; private collection, Fort Worth, Texas) hanging in background, and Beta Nu unstretched in foreground. (Courtesy of E.H. McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki).
This direct method produced captivating and even delicate results. In Beta Nu, an excess of medium thinner or turpentine caused feathering and halo effects at the edges of the maroon band (third from the top on the left of the painting), as well as the brown (fifth from the top on the right), and faintly around the tan immediately below the brown.8 On the right-hand side, bright colours (orange-red, yellow and green) are played off against a base of darker, more closely related hues. The colours on the left are relatively consistent in value and intensity as well as width. In short, the overall effect of the painting depends on the relative intensity of the orange-red and the yellow on the right. Beta Nu is not quite Louis’s largest painting. Beta Iota (1960) is fractionally longer and higher, but has a smaller sense of internal scale because the rivulets of colour are pulled in further towards the centre, ‘closing’ the intervening space.9 Theta Beta (1960) – an early Unfurled in which the rivulets run from points several feet in from the vertical edges towards the outer sections of the lower edge – has a proportionally larger area of raw canvas than Beta Nu, but it is twenty-one as against twenty-three feet long (the area not covered with paint is slightly smaller). While there irreducible surface coverage. The difficulty lies in finding an open system, and making emptiness meaningful, without merely imitating Louis or resorting to a milder solution. 7 Moffett refers to ‘the astonishing openness of the Unfurleds’; K. Moffett: ‘Morris Louis: Omegas and Unfurleds’, Artforum (May 1970), p.46. 8 For more detailed analysis of Louis’s techniques and materials, see M. Fried: Morris Louis, New York 1970; and Upright, op. cit. (note 2). 9 No doubt it was for this reason that E.A. Carmean identified Beta Iota as an exception to the general rule that the longer Unfurleds compromise pictorial coherence; E. Carmean: exh. cat. Morris Louis: Major Themes and Variations,
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22. Beta Nu, by Morris Louis. 1960. Synthetic polymer paint on unprimed canvas, 259.1 by 701 cm. (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; copyright 1960 Morris Louis).
are ten Unfurled paintings over eighteen feet long, the majority are around fourteen feet – precisely the length specified by Michael Fried as the limit to which a painting may be extended if it is to preserve its instantaneous unity.10 From the vantage point of the present, Beta Nu looks unified, not least because of its relative symmetry. At the time Louis was painting the Unfurleds, his inbuilt sense of what makes a ‘picture’ compelled him to impose colour on the canvas at both ends. However, Beta Nu now looks more important than any of the other Unfurleds, because by separating the two colour-zones so dramatically – reserving this seemingly disproportionate amount of bare canvas in the middle – Louis tested pictorial coherence, pulling apart the components that make up a painting, stretching the canvas to a point of utmost tension and tautness.11 As Elwyn Lynn wrote at the time of the 1971 Melbourne exhibition, ‘despite what might look like abstraction’s over-concern with balance, Louis wanted an imbalance to emerge from what resembled symmetry’.12 Beta Nu looks serene, but the internal forms exert considerable pressure. It is almost as if the painting has been wrought from a single, multicoloured cord made up of many strands – as if the artist has tugged at this from both sides, pulling it apart to form two banks of loose threads. There is the feeling of unravelling, and of a push towards disunity.13 Louis eliminated the idea of composition in the usual sense of relating parts to each other and to the edges through a series of distinct decisions and adjustments. This comes through in Walter Darby Bannard’s eloquent analysis of the Unfurleds: Louis suddenly, so it seems, discovered that pictorial coherence could be strongly established by reversing the assumption Cubism, and to some extent all painting before Cubism, had forced on painting: that visual integration of the picture is Washington DC (National Gallery of Art) 1976, n.p. 10 See K. Moffett: ‘Clement Greenberg’, http://kenworthmoffett.net/kenworthmoffett/Clement_Greenberg.htm, accessed 15th June 2009. 11 Paint and canvas, line, colour, shape, surface and space – these things are all pulled apart in Louis’s painting, dismantled, and simply shown for what they are. In the end, the original rectangle of canvas has been only minimally interfered with, remaining largely unaltered, despite the pressures exerted upon it, and meaningful as a result of those pressures. 12 E. Lynn: ‘Louis in Australia’, Art International 15/9 (1971), pp.32–33. 13 There are paintings preceding the Unfurleds that feature cords or columns of
achieved by putting the visible parts of the painting together. Instead of accommodating the edges of the picture, and fussing with the factors of design they imposed, the Unfurleds throw the parts of the painting against the edge, and make the edges do the job of holding the picture together. By doing this, Louis turned separation into a virtue instead of a liability, and the banked streams of pure hue were entirely free to run separate, and to give out the full character of their colour and the sensuous liquid quality of flowing paint.14 The edges of Beta Nu are crucial, and carry more weight, because there is so little internal form relative to the size of the surface. The vertical edges, for example, are propped up like buttresses as the colours press upwards and outwards. A peculiarity of the Unfurleds (and a factor in the pulling and stretching process) is that they record the flow of paint down the canvas, towards the centre, but there is an overall feeling of upward lift. This means that viewers may observe or sense aesthetic effects that are contradictory, and that contradict the physical facts of the paintings and knowledge of how they were produced. Like other Post-Painterly Abstractionists, including Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski, Louis determined the edges of his paintings after applying the paint – a technique known as ‘cropping’. However, the cropping of the Unfurleds is different; the image appears inevitable, and materialises when the canvas is wrapped round the edges of the stretcher, rather than through deliberation on which section or sections of a painted canvas will ‘work’ as pictures (as is the case with many of Noland’s and Olitski’s works of the 1960s). The top edge of Beta Nu looks free and open, not intersecting with painted form at all, but it is not errant or arbitrary; the uppermost rivulets reach for the top edge, marking it, like a drawn line, and holding it in place.15 The inevitability of the finished work means several colours, such as Twined columns II (1960), where two such columns are placed to each side of the canvas. 14 W.D. Bannard: ‘Morris Louis and the Re-Structured Picture’, Studio International 188/968 (1974), p.20; see also idem: ‘Quality, Style and Olitski’, Artforum (October 1972), p.66; and idem: ‘Art Quality and the Formalist Controversy’, Quadrille 9/1 (Autumn 1974), pp.4–7. 15 The uppermost rivulet on the left side is approximately 7 cm. from the top edge of the canvas, while the uppermost rivulet on the right is approximately 4 cm. from that edge.
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23. Installation photograph of Morris Louis exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1971. From the right: Turning (1958. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 239.4 by 452.8 cm.; Honolulu Academy of Arts), Number 82 (1961. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 203.2 by 254.0 cm.; Robert Elkon Gallery, New York) and Beta Nu. (Courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).
24. Andre Emmerich speaking at the opening of the Morris Louis exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1971, with, hanging from left to right, Umbria (1959–60. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 188 by 264.2 cm.; estate of the artist, Washington DC) and Tense recession (1961. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 204.5 by 134.6 cm.; estate of the artist, Washington DC). (Courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).
that it is hard for the viewer to picture the canvas in its original state, or as Louis himself saw it (for he saw not one Unfurled that had been cropped and stretched).16 It is only with the final cropping and stretching that the Unfurleds pop out beyond the mundane, cut free from their immediate context. The painting process itself was as far from artiness as it could possibly have been: no preparation of the surface, just raw canvas; no pre-mixing or adjustment of colours, just pre-formulated colours from Leonard Bocour; and the natural flow of the paint. Louis worked on Beta Nu in a suburban house in Washington DC, the nation’s capital, the seat of Congress. Interestingly, the painting now resides in Canberra, Australia’s capital city. Louis had the vision to see beyond his immediate environment, beyond the social and political concerns of the time. That open tract of untouched canvas is a free space, one that opens out to the world, so that it seems to interfere with reality as something new and unfamiliar. It reads as a desire for release from all inhibiting systems, artistic and social. The 1971 Morris Louis exhibition was the idea of David Armitage, who was then the Exhibitions Officer at the Auckland City Art Gallery and believed there was a need for an exhibition by a top-class international painter.17 He negotiated the loan of the paintings with Andre Emmerich, and a catalogue with an introduction by Rosalind Krauss was also compiled. There were eleven paintings, four from the Veils series, three Unfurleds and four Stripes.18 First the exhibition went to the Honolulu Academy of Arts (30th April to 30th May 1971), then to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (8th July to 31st August; Figs.23 and 24), and the Auckland City Art Gallery (12th October to
28th November) and finally to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (8th January to 6th February 1972). For the Auckland City Art Gallery, the transport costs proved excessive, and Armitage, who had initially budgeted on sea rather than air travel, felt compelled to resign from his position.19 He evidently found some consolation in the experience of seeing Louis’s paintings in the flesh, which he described as ‘deeply moving’.20 The impact of Beta Nu in Australia and New Zealand can be measured by the critical reception of the work, and by evidence of a response to Louis’s pictorial innovations on the part of artists from these countries. Most intriguing is how Beta Nu was, and is, received in Australia, given that it has been in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia since the year after the exhibition. It is worth noting that the galleries hosting the exhibition also had the opportunity to purchase paintings included in the show. While the Honolulu Academy of Arts purchased the Veil painting, Turning (Fig.23), the National Gallery of Victoria turned down the offer of an Unfurled, Gamma Upsilon (Fig.21), on the grounds that it was too expensive.21 Auckland City Art Gallery also declined a painting (a Veil, Umbria; 1959–60), despite the success of the Auckland dealer and critic Petar Vuletic in negotiating a very reasonable price with the artist’s widow, Marcella Brenner, and dealer Andre Emmerich.22 Clearly there was resistance to Louis’s work that went beyond its monetary value. Beta Nu did not impress all Australian reviewers of the Louis exhibition. It did strike Nigel Murray-Harvey as powerful and, understandably, ‘unnerving’.23 More difficult to understand is Alan Warren’s assessment: ‘The size is impressive but the emptiness is not’.24 ‘Difficulty’ is the basis of Elwyn Lynn’s in-depth account of
16
22
Louis arranged for two Unfurleds to be stretched and exhibited at Bennington in 1960, but even these he never saw in their final form, merely marking their edges on the canvases and sending them off. 17 David Armitage in conversation with the author, 27th May 2007. 18 The paintings were as follows: Veils: Turning (1958); Yad (1958); Umbria (1959–60); Beth Sin (1959). Unfurleds: Gamma Ro (1960); Beta Nu (1960); Gamma Upsilon (1960). Stripes: Number 82 (1961); Split spectrum (1961); Tense recession (1961); Horizontal VII (1962). 19 Conversation cited at note 17 above. 20 Ibid. 21 Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, Archives, ‘Submissions for Purchase’, NGV Minutes, meeting 20th July 1971, p.3.
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Auckland, Auckland Art Gallery, Archives, ‘General: Ephemera 1972 (Includes Correspondence)’. 23 N. Murray-Harvey: ‘Communicating in a very personal way’, The Times (Canberra, 30th July 1971). 24 A. Warren: ‘Louis collection exemplifies the end of an era’, The Sun (Melbourne, 21st July 1971). The comment was not directed specifically at Beta Nu, but this painting – the largest and most ‘empty’ – would presumably have been the worst offender for Warren in this respect. However, inverting Warren’s statement renders it more accurate: the emptiness of Beta Nu is more significant than its size alone. Numerous painters have worked on a similar scale, but the emptiness in Louis’s work makes the size impressive. 25 Lynn, op. cit. (note 12), pp.29–33 and 49.
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25. Meditation blue, by David Aspden. 1977. Acrylic on linen, 100 by 267 cm. (Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales).
the exhibition in Art International,25 where he explains the problems Louis’s paintings pose for the viewer. Lynn’s analysis of the role of the edge in the Unfurleds is most germane here. He argues persuasively that the edges do not form a boundary or a frame, and are not analogous to ‘the side of a billiard table from which trajectories ricochet’.26 This he attributes to the fact that Louis’s pours of colour do not divide the surface; the rivulets are not lines or distinct planes or areas, and neither do they define line, mass or volume. Their sense of ‘flow and direction’ precludes this and implies ‘boundlessness’.27 Lynn recognises that Louis’s achievement of ‘openness’ is more subtle than simply the implied continuation of forms beyond what is palpably there in the paintings, or the impression of colours merely passing over or through an empty space. It is easy, he says, to ‘misread the openness of the Unfurleds as an invasion of unpainted areas from outside’.28 Instead, the openness of the Unfurleds is inherent, bound up in the internal forms, irrespective of any virtual extension into surrounding space. Lynn’s belief that lessons could be learnt from Louis’s work was not shared by many other Australian critics.29 Indeed, his review provides evidence that Louis’s paintings were at odds with new tendencies in Australian art, notably conceptual practices. The exhibition occurred at an interesting juncture in Australian art history, when divisions emerged between those responsive to ‘conceptualism’ and those who remained committed to painting.30 Although neither of these groups was homogeneous or uniform in their opinions, the varying responses to the Louis exhibition reflect the opposing critical allegiances. A consistent theme in reviews of the exhibition is the rejection of Clement Greenberg’s approach to Post-Painterly Abstraction.31 Greenberg had visited Australia just three years previously, giving a lecture at the Power Institute in Sydney in which he was scathing of conceptual art and other ‘way out’ alternatives to modernist painting. However, nor does he seem to have responded enthusiastically to Australian manifestations of modernist abstraction.32 Perhaps such opinions were perceived by his Australian audience as high-handed and unsustainable. When Greenberg moved on to New Zealand to deliver further lectures, the New Zealand Herald noted that Greenberg’s visit to
Sydney had ‘thoroughly aroused the Australian art world and evoked a great deal of controversy’.33 Certainly an Australian reaction against Greenbergian formalism was well under way by the time of the Louis exhibition in 1971. For instance, although Daniel Thomas refers to the ‘pure opticality’ of Louis’s paintings in line with Greenbergian formalism, he opens up other avenues of interpretation, notably some evocative analogies for Louis’s painterly effects.34 Likewise, Terry Smith provides a nuanced analysis of the formal mechanics of the paintings, but is careful to distance himself from Greenberg.35 Smith contends that Louis’s work ‘precisely intersected with the needs of a certain kind of chauvinistic, historicist art criticism in America’.36 In particular,
26
31
Ibid., p.30. ‘Despite what looks like linearity, Louis keeps the painting open; despite the successively imposed stains, the surface is never sealed’; ibid. 28 Ibid., p.32. 29 Ann Galbally is an exception in this respect: ‘Undoubtedly “precious objects” in these “post-object” times, the Louis exhibition is a marvellous assertion of the longevity of painting and of the unbreakable bond between an artist and his medium’; A. Galbally: ‘Who says there’s no mainstream of art?’, The Age (Melbourne, 21st July 1971). 30 Among those hostile to conceptual art was Alan McCulloch, who, writing in Art International, noted that its supposedly destructive influence was first evident in Australian art in 1968; A. McCulloch: ‘Letter from Australia’, Art International 15/8 (1971), p.62. 27
26. Painting 1972, by Milan Mrkusich. 1972. Acrylic on canvas, 172.7 by 172.7 cm. (Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu).
The lecture was published as Avant-Garde Attitudes, Sydney 1969. See B. Smith, with T. Smith and C. Heathcote: Australian Painting 1788–2000, Melbourne 2001, p.443. 33 ‘Vigorous Critic of the Arts’, New Zealand Herald (25th June 1968). In New Zealand, Greenberg was also reported as saying: ‘Australia struck me as being 15 to 20 years behind the United States’; ‘Critic: NZ art can’t exist’, Auckland Star (27th June 1968). 34 Thomas describes the paintings as ‘refreshing’, musing that ‘To penetrate them with the eye is as good as diving into an ocean wave with the body’. He does not consider it far-fetched ‘to think of the bare canvas’ ancestry in ships’ sails billowing on the sea’; D. Thomas: ‘A look beneath a painted face’, The Telegraph (Sydney, 18th July 1971). 35 T. Smith: ‘Abbreviated cultural package’, Sunday Australian (25th July 1971). 36 Ibid. 32
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he believes, stained colour paintings corresponded with Greenberg’s call for flatness in modern painting. Smith’s review is representative of a backlash against Greenberg which tended to oversimplify the arguments. According to Smith, Greenberg believed that ‘implied space (illusion) had to be expelled from painting’. This leads him to the erroneous conclusion that satisfying Greenberg necessitates ‘staining an entire surface without differentiation’.37 In fact, Greenberg did not believe that painting an undifferentiated, monochrome surface would inevitably result in ‘quality’. On the contrary, he regarded such paintings as ‘arbitrary objects’, maintaining that great ‘pictorial’ art has at least some inflection of the surface to render it interesting or compelling.38 A ‘picture’, in this sense, entails illusion, created not through perspective or eye-fooling techniques but purely through colour relationships, such as those that characterise Louis’s paintings.39 In reviewing the Louis exhibition, Bernard Poles falls into the same trap as Smith, arguing that Louis’s paintings lack the ingredient of space necessary for great painting, and comparing Louis unfavourably with Mark Rothko on this basis.40 Where Smith is able to perceive spatial subtleties in the Unfurleds in the face of Greenberg’s supposed insistence on flatness,41 Poles observes ‘nothing but a null surface’.42 Poles sees the paintings themselves as complicit with the Greenbergian position, which, echoing Smith, he describes as ‘chauvinistic’.43 Greenberg (for his critical support) and Andre Emmerich (Fig.24; for his role in bringing the Louis exhibition to Australia) are both accused of running a form of marketing campaign, attempting to ‘brand’ and sell Louis’s paintings and iniquitously influencing Australian artists.44 Far from seeing any lessons for young artists in Louis’s work, Poles is more concerned with warning them off.45 He need not have worried. If many Australian artists saw the exhibition, few, it would seem, attempted to respond in their own work to Louis’s daring use of raw canvas as a dominant and positive pictorial element. Moreover, although Louis’s influence is evident in works by a small number of Australian painters, that influence seems to have taken place earlier, during the 1960s, when modernist abstraction was a more vital force in Australian art.46 Aspects of Post-Painterly Abstraction can be detected in the abstract paintings of the Australians David Aspden, Sydney Ball, Paul Partos, Ron Robertson-Swann and John Stockdale. In 1963–64 Ball responded to works by Louis that he saw while living in New York, producing a series of vertical-stripe paintings.47 In 1967 Aspden exhibited paintings reminiscent of Louis’s Veils, created by soaking paint into raw canvas,48 and then turned to stripes in 1968, horizontally disposed and owing more to Gene Davis than to Louis. Works by both these Washington DC artists were shown in Australia in 1967 as part of the touring exhibition
Two Decades of American Art. Aspden had initially been inspired by two examples of Post-Painterly Abstraction, one by Louis (a Stripe painting, Water-shot; 1961), the other by Kenneth Noland (Split spectrum; 1961), which he saw in The James A. Mitchener Travelling Collection in Australia in 1964.49 Perhaps the most sustained and significant Australian response to Post-Painterly Abstraction is to be found in the paintings for which Aspden is best known, featuring a thin application of paint, into as much as onto the surface of the canvas, and an all-over distribution of feathery-edged, leaf-like shapes. Some of these works, like the Meditation paintings of 1977 (Fig.25), are more open than others because the ‘torn’ shapes float within a pale ground rather than filling the surface. Also, as Terry Smith has pointed out, in works like Little bay (1969) narrow spaces of raw canvas are visible between the coloured shapes, in line with the American stain technique.50 However, because the painted shapes are distributed evenly, the areas of unpainted canvas do not challenge pictorial unity as they do in Louis’s Unfurleds.51 Australian art generally shows no notable response to this most significant achievement of Louis’s work. In New Zealand, the critical response to the Louis exhibition included a perceptive essay by Wystan Curnow in Arts & Community,52 and reviews by T.J. McNamara and Hamish Keith for
37
44
38
45
Ibid. For an accurate discussion of Greenberg and ‘flatness’, see T. Fenton: ‘Greenberg The Critic’, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/thecritic.html, accessed 15th June 2009. For an inaccurate but instructive account, see A. Danto: ‘Us and Clem’, Artforum (March 1998), pp.13–14. Danto believes wrongly that Greenberg saw flatness as the end point or goal of painting. 39 See C. Greenberg: ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), in J. O’Brian, ed.: Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Chicago and London 1993, p.90. 40 B. Poles: ‘Colour and its continuity’, Sunday Review (6th August 1971). 41 Smith reads the expanse of raw canvas in paintings like Beta Nu as a ‘great tugging of colour across the Gestaltian gap between the colour runs, which sometimes evokes colours in this untouched space’; Smith, op. cit. (note 35). 42 Poles, op. cit. (note 40). 43 Ibid.
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27. Port of Auckland, by Ian Scott. 1974. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 244 by 122 cm. (Collection of the artist, Auckland).
Ibid. Ibid. 46 Louis’s name almost invariably crops up in accounts of the American influence on Australian art of the 1960s; see E. Lynn: ‘The Travelling Exhibition of selected paintings from the James A. Mitchener Collection’, Art and Australia 2/3 (1964), p.208; P. McCaughey: ‘Surviving the Seventies’, Artscribe 23 (1980), p.23; and G. Catalano: The Years of Hope: Australian Art and Criticism 1959–1968, Melbourne 1981, p.162. 47 Smith, op. cit. (note 32), p.428. 48 N. Hutchison: ‘The Dynamiting of the Picture – David Aspden’s Paintings’, Art and Australia 9/3 (1971), p.228; see also Catalano, op. cit. (note 46), p.160; and E. Lynn: Bulletin (24th June 1967). 49 T. Smith: ‘The Painting of David Aspden’, Art International 14/8 (1970), p.50. 50 Ibid., p.79. 51 The effect is sometimes similar to Larry Poons’s dot paintings of the 1960s.
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28. Model series no.80 (The end of Louis), by Ian Scott. 2006. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 240 by 480 cm. (Collection of the artist, Auckland).
the major Auckland newspapers.53 Beta Nu was not singled out for detailed analysis, but it may have been what McNamara had in mind when he declared that Louis’s paintings represented ‘an extreme position’.54 Of the artists who attended the exhibition, most responded (just as Australian artists had) to Louis’s pouring and staining techniques, rather than his sense of openness. David Armitage, the instigator of the Louis exhibition, shows an awareness of Louis’s innovations in his paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While these works have figurative elements that owe something to Pop art, they exploit areas of raw canvas and the scenes sometimes tilt towards the picture plane to achieve a composition reminiscent of Louis’s Veils. Armitage has described Louis’s Unfurleds as ‘risk-taking at the highest level’, and, since moving to England after his resignation from the Auckland City Art Gallery, he has made abstract paintings using poured and stained acrylics.55 However, like most New Zealand artists, he has not tackled the openness of the Unfurleds. In the 1970s New Zealand abstract painters gravitated towards Auckland’s Petar/James Gallery. Petar Vuletic opened the gallery in 1972 and showed, almost exclusively, modernist abstraction, including the paintings of Milan Mrkusich, Phillip O’Sullivan and Ian Scott.56 Mrkusich had been developing his own form of colour-field painting during the 1960s, but in 1971–72 his paintings took on more atmospheric surfaces as a result of using diluted acrylics and unprimed canvas, evident in Painting 1972 (Fig.26).57 O’Sullivan produced extreme and eccentric monochrome colour-fields during the mid-1970s, and then responded to Louis’s Veils with a series of Truth Tables, featuring washy bands of intense colour. But only Scott, it seems, responded to Louis’s use of raw canvas. Scott was clearly impressed with Louis’s work before the 1971 exhibition, painting a playful Homage to Morris Louis in 1969.58 Between 1973 and 1975 he produced a series of paintings, the
Sprayed Stripes (Fig.27), in which colours applied directly with commercial spray cans were floated against an expanse of white or sometimes unprimed canvas. Then, thirty years later, in the midst of a series of paintings depicting female soft-porn models next to modernist masterpieces, he craved a far more extreme openness and spaciousness to cope with the challenge posed by Louis’s Beta Nu, which he recognised as ‘the freest space ever invented’.59 This led to Model series no.80 (The end of Louis) (Fig.28), in which a strapping stripper poses before a fragment of Beta Nu, a bulky and vulgar presence at one end of an airy strip of pure white. Scott is the first artist to build on Louis’s openness, erecting a grand scale white wall (complete with gallery wall label for Beta Nu) that seems to project out into the world, augmenting the pictorial space of Louis’s empty canvas.60 The extension of white in The end of Louis and Model series no.83 (The edge of Olitski) (2006), seems ungraspable and outlandish, beyond what a painting normally looks like. Apparent disunity and unimpeded openness offer the possibility of a new way of looking, a new standard. For John Elderfield, writing in 1974, Louis was ‘one of the very few artists of our century whose work has really changed the course of painting’.61 The Unfurleds altered the constitution of painting – the idea that a painting must be composed of easily compatible parts that cover the canvas. However, Elderfield noted that this was not yet widely understood.62 That same year, Darby Bannard predicted: ‘Future painting may spread its roots in the fertile soil of the Unfurleds. It doesn’t look like it now; the Unfurleds, at this point in the history of Western Art, still look isolated. But they are the mainstream’.63 Much has been made of Louis’s process, construed as a natural offshoot of Pollock’s drip technique and part of a wider reorientation of art towards impersonal and mechanical procedures.64 Yet, Ian Scott aside, artists have not acted on Louis’s most significant achievement, the extraordinary freedom invoked by the use of raw canvas in Beta Nu.
52
58
W. Curnow: ‘Morris Louis at the Auckland City Art Gallery’, Arts & Community 7/12 (1971). 53 T. McNamara: ‘Painting Display Offers Vast Fields of Colour’, New Zealand Herald (13th October 1971); and H. Keith: ‘New Way of Seeing’, Auckland Star (16th October 1971). 54 McNamara, op. cit. (note 53). 55 Armitage has also said of Louis: ‘He was on the limit [. . .] Louis just seemed to take it into another dimension. He created his own world [. . .] Pop never got me off the ground one bit’; conversation cited at note 17 above. 56 For an account of the Petar/James Gallery and the artists exhibiting there, see E. Hanfling and A. Wright: exh. cat. Vuletic and his Circle, Auckland (Gus Fisher Gallery) 2003. 57 See idem: Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation, Auckland 2009, pp.65–66.
For a discussion of Scott’s Homage to Morris Louis, see E. Hanfling: ‘Alan Wright and Ian Scott: The House-Painting Aesthetic in 1970s New Zealand Abstraction’, Journal of New Zealand Art History 23 (2002), p.38. Until recently, this painting was in a private collection in Sydney, but it has now returned to New Zealand. 59 Ian Scott in conversation with the author, 29th November 2006. 60 For a discussion of the Model Series paintings and Scott’s use of white, see E. Hanfling: exh. cat. The Model Series Paintings: 1996–2004, Auckland (Ferner Galleries) 2004; and idem: Ian Scott: Lattices, Auckland 2005. 61 Elderfield, op. cit. (note 4), p.7. 62 Ibid., p.8. 63 See Bannard, op. cit. (note 14), p.6. 64 See D. Carrier: ‘Reviews: Morris Louis: High Museum of Art’, Artforum (January 2007), p.256.
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Art History Reviewed VI: E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation’, 1960 by CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
‘MAKING PRECEDES MATCHING’ :
with this famous formula, the epitome of his Art and Illusion (1960),1 Ernst Gombrich proposed that artists, before they ever dream of copying what they see before them, make pictures by manipulating inherited ‘schemata’ that designate reality by force of convention. At some point an artist compares a pictorial schema to direct observation of the world, and on that basis presumes to correct the schema. This then enters the stock of available formulae until some later artist holds it up to the world and ventures a further adjustment. In this way art may come to have a history. Beholders, in turn, make their own sense of pictures by collating what they see on the canvas with what they know about the world and with what they remember of other pictures. Gombrich’s account of the making of art as an experimental and even improvisational process impressed many readers beyond the academic discipline of art history. However, for two decades or more, many art historians have considered his name a byword for a rationalist, Eurocentric and naively naturalist approach to art with which they no longer would wish to be associated. A forceful blow to Gombrich’s reputation was struck by Norman Bryson in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983), an intricately reasoned critique of the quest for an ‘Essential Copy’ that has supposedly driven Western art and art theory since Antiquity. Bryson argued that the picture, as a conventional sign, delivers not reality but only a coded message about reality and that verisimilitude is nothing more than ‘rhetoric’ that persuades the unwary viewer that he or she is seeing things as they really are. Within the discipline of art history, for at least a decade, Bryson’s polemic was highly influential. His anti-naturalism was embraced by art historians who wished to modernise their discipline, bringing it into step with the development of critical theory and poststructuralism that by the 1980s had already profoundly reshaped literary studies. The problem-solving model of the development of Western art that Art and Illusion proposed left Gombrich, in Bryson’s view, aligned with an unacceptable classical theory of representation: ‘so far from questioning the Whig optimism of that version, it in fact reinforces its evolutionary and teleological drive’.2 After Bryson, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that the phrase ‘Essential Copy’, implying an endpoint to the process of experimentation, was Gombrich’s, which it was not. Yet only a
decade later Keith Moxey presented Gombrich as ‘the most eloquent advocate’ of the ‘resemblance theory of representation’, according to which ‘representation has something to do with the imitation of nature’. Moxey then contrasted this view with that of the philosopher Nelson Goodman, numbering him among ‘Gombrich’s critics’, who ‘pointed out that [. . .] a picture never resembles anything so much as another picture’.3 A reader who turns to Goodman’s book Languages of Art for further elucidation, however, will be surprised to find that the author mentions Gombrich not as his intellectual antagonist, but rather as a principal witness in his own conventionalist cause: ‘Gombrich, in particular, has amassed overwhelming evidence to show how the way we see and depict depends on and varies with experience, practice, interests, and attitudes’.4 In Art and Illusion Gombrich makes a powerful case against what Ruskin called the ‘innocence of the eye’ (p.296). Perception, in Gombrich’s account, is not a given but a learned practice, involving an active construction of the world. Resemblance to reality is an effect generated by the interplay between the expected and the unexpected. Pictures are ‘relational models’ of reality (p.253). Pictorial realism was a historical and collective product, and hard-won. The artist is not free, but faces a limited array of choices (p.376). Cultures determine what is possible (p.86). Such propositions inverted the conventional wisdom about representation. Like his near-exact contemporary, Claude LéviStrauss, Gombrich was a ‘reverse thinker’. Lévi-Strauss argued that myths are made by combining bits and pieces of previous myths. Meaning does not precede, but rather follows, the myth-maker’s bricolage. ‘Mythical thought [. . .] is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning’.5 Gombrich too solved problems by turning them inside out. For example, he pointed out that astrological associations do not explain character traits but create them: human nature adjusts itself, as it were, to fit the signs.6 Gombrich’s paradoxical argument is also homologous with that of Thomas S. Kuhn, who in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) described the paradigmatic, essentially social basis of scientific knowledge. Just as Kuhn’s demonstration of the collective and conventional nature of scientific knowledge was a
We are grateful to the Azam Foundation for sponsoring this article. 1 E.H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York 1960. Originally delivered in 1956 as the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. 2 N. Bryson: Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, Cambridge 1983, p.21. 3 K. Moxey: The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, Ithaca 1994, pp.30–31. 4 N. Goodman: Languages of Art, Indianapolis and Cambridge 1976, p.10. Gombrich
played a similar role in Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington 1976, pp.204–05, a classic treatise that makes the most extreme case possible for the conventionality of signs. Even iconic signs, or pictures, which would seem to be related to what they signify in stronger than conventional ways, figure in Eco’s analysis as the products of cultural convention. In making his case, Eco enlisted none other than Gombrich, citing his analysis of Constable’s recoding of the light effects in the English landscape in Wivenhoe Park (National Gallery of Art, Washington; 1816).
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revelation for non-scientists, so too were non-art historians greatly impressed by Gombrich’s arguments. Kuhn stripped the scientific revolution of some of its aura by showing that scientists were driven by ambition and limited by force of habit. Gombrich, for his part, desanctified the contents of the great museums by showing how the painters, even as they were aiming at ideal form or expounding arguments, were also solving local, practical, technical problems. Yet art historians, already familiar with the conventions of pictorial representation, were not taken by surprise, for this is the basic premise of the modern discipline of art history, especially as it was formulated by the pioneering theorists and historians Konrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl. ‘People have at all times seen what they want to see’, said Wölfflin.7 Art and Illusion echoes and amplifies this dictum. Further, Gombrich stands accused of reducing art to mere technology. Art, to an art historian, is self-evidently something made. The art historian is interested in the ways artists select and recombine, contrive and construct, perhaps even add to reality. To speak of artists striving to match their fabricated worlds to a real world is to render the making of art less a poetic activity and more a technology. Poesis or artistic creation, in many modern theories of art, is compromised if it submits to practical imperatives. Art-making, an activity no doubt less free than it pretends to be, is nevertheless taken to symbolise the freedom of the imagination. Technology, by contrast, is a problem-solving process and does not claim autonomy. To a certain extent Gombrich invited this reading of his work by distancing himself, in repeated comments throughout the 1960s and 1970s, from the radical constructionist reading of Art and Illusion – from Umberto Eco and Nelson Goodman, in effect. Gombrich felt that their positions were unreasonable. He also courted the naturalist reading of his work by appearing to say that European painters got better and better at representing the ways things looked between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This raised the possibility that Gombrich might believe that European art was better than non-European art. Emerging in the early nineteenth century, at a moment when medieval art was recovered for scholarship and when academic prejudices in favour of ideal beauty and measured proportions were under attack, the discipline has deep roots in a relativist mindset. The eye of the modern academic art historian, whether in search of the underlying principles of form that reveal the shape of history itself, or in search of the concrete links that connect the artefact with historical life, is officially neutral. Riegl, whose pupil Julius von Schlosser was Gombrich’s teacher, is alleged to have said that ‘the best art historian is the one who has no personal taste’.8 Other art historians dismissed Gombrich as a reactionary who failed to grasp the power and significance of the dominant modes of the making of art in his own lifetime. Gombrich did not disguise his lack of sympathy for the twentieth-century avantgardes and appeared to pander to the ill-informed opinion of the man on the street when he described works of modern art as
‘bewildering’, as ‘conundrums’ or ‘experiments’, as art that had ‘lost its bearings’. Cubism in Art and Illusion is dismissed as a ‘last desperate revolt against illusionism’ (p.281). But Gombrich’s relation to modern art is more complicated than this. He was a contrarian by nature and could not abide the smug post-War consensus, among an educated elite, that abstraction had vanquished figuration once and for all. By the 1950s abstraction had lost its revolutionary edge and had become universally palatable. Critics across a wide ideological spectrum agreed that abstraction held out the promise of a new spiritualism, whether austere or romantic, in the face of the brutal literalisms and the delusionary mythologies that had together wrecked the century. The bourgeois amateur of art could congratulate him- or herself for apprehending a modern art which, according to André Malraux, writing in 1949, ‘has liberated painting which is now triumphantly a law unto itself’.9 Even the Thomist theologian Etienne Gilson, who delivered the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in 1955, one year before Gombrich, proclaimed that painters could never again indulge in ‘the easy pleasures of imitational or representational art’. Since Cézanne, Gilson affirmed with satisfaction, painting had been forced to submit to a ‘cure of abstractionism’.10 Gombrich did not like the complacent tone of this, any more than did Leo Steinberg, who in 1953 reminded readers that the ambitions of the major modern artists, including Manet, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Matisse, had been ‘adequately summarized in Constable’s dictum which defines the goal of painting as “the pure apprehension of natural fact’”.11 Unlike Steinberg, Gombrich in 1956 could not foresee the return to figuration, to iconography and to the plenitude of contemporary experience that was just on the horizon, the rejection of the dogma of abstraction. Gombrich’s reaction to the crisis of art in a modern culture – the loss of confidence in any transcendental reference point – was simply to set aside the concept of art, at least provisionally. He mistrusted all the modern philosophical guides, metaphysicians and anti-metaphysicians alike, who might have offered him a glimpse of a new concept of art, suited to modern experience: Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, but also his own near-contemporaries, Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Instead he envisioned a comprehensive ‘science of the image’. Here he went far beyond Steinberg. After the War, Gombrich actually submitted to a publisher the project of an ‘ambitious book of which actually Art and Illusion and the Sense of Order (1979) are only fragments: a general book on images and the different functions of images’, for example, illustration, symbolism, emblems and decoration, to be called The Realm and Range of the Image. In his mistrust both of idealism (the hope that images might guide us to a truth beyond experience) and of hermeneutics (the hope that the truth might be embedded somewhere deep inside the image), Gombrich is the ally of such disparate but influential figures as John Berger, Horst Bredekamp and Jonathan Crary. For Art and Illusion, with its many reproductions and analyses of posters, advertisements, popular
5
end up producing four quite different-looking works – that Wölfflin had retold on the first page of his Principles. 8 Cited by O. Pächt in idem: The Practice of Art History, London 1999, p.29. 9 Cited by L. Steinberg: ‘The Eye is a Part of the Mind’, in idem: Other Criteria, New York 1972, p.290. 10 E. Gilson: Painting and Reality, New York 1957, pp.259 and 265, note 25. 11 Steinberg, op. cit. (note 9), p.292.
C. Lévi-Strauss: The Savage Mind, Chicago 1966, p.22. R. Woodfield: ‘Warburg’s “Method’”, in idem, ed.: Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects, Amsterdam 2001, p.285, citing a little-read essay by Gombrich published in a Belgian journal in 1954. 7 H. Wölfflin: Principles of Art History (1915), New York 1950, p.17. Gombrich even began his second chapter with the very anecdote from Ludwig Richter – involving four draughtsmen who strive to render a natural motif with perfect objectivity and 6
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prints, optical illusions and scientific illustrations, indisputably prophesied the field of study that would later be called Bildwissenschaft in Germany, and in Britain and America ‘visual culture’. The student of visual culture, who may well harbour ambitions to liquidate the discipline of art history outright, believes that the study of images has been impeded by outmoded tastes for the fine arts, aesthetic experiences and the art of interpretation. By identifying a problem-solving dynamic embedded within the history of the fine arts, Gombrich drew fire from two constituencies: on the one hand, those who believe that art historians should never tell the story of art as a story of progress, and on the other hand, those convinced that modern art does represent an advance on earlier art – not because it better renders how things appear, but because it proposes a new social order, captures the invisible structure of the cosmos or reflects on the nature of art itself. To the latter charge, Gombrich pleaded guilty: he was sceptical of all avant-gardisms. He reveals the sources of this view in his book-length interview with Didier Eribon, where he describes a lengthy unpublished manuscript on the subject of caricature, which he wrote together with Ernst Kris. The two authors saw caricature, which first appeared in European art only in the late sixteenth century, as a successor to the magical image, which in pre-modern times had been credited with the power to defame or even injure its subject. Caricature was only possible once people stopped believing that the image could work real harm. When the interviewer asked Gombrich whether he still held this theory, the art historian answered: ‘No, certainly not’. For Kris, like so many other modern thinkers, including Freud as well as Riegl and Aby Warburg, was ‘under the spell of an evolutionist interpretation of human history, imagined as a slow advance from primitive irrationality to the triumph of reason’. After the Second World War Gombrich felt it was simply no longer possible to believe optimistically in the inevitable refinement of the human spirit.12 Art historians, in Gombrich’s view, were simply unable to resist telling the story of art as a progressive dominance of spirit over matter. He associated this model with Hegel, but it has much older Christian roots. Gombrich was right that the dematerialisation of art is the basic plot structure of virtually all ambitious art history written since the nineteenth century, whether formalist, humanist, Marxist or poststructuralist in flavour; from Riegl, Wölfflin and Meyer Schapiro to T.J. Clark, Hubert Damisch and Rosalind Krauss. In this narrative, art begins by restaging a primal tactile or bodily relation to the world. At a later point art puts its trust in the sense of sight, offering the world as a picture. In this way the beholder is stabilised and put face to face with the work of art, preparing him or her either to enter into a virtual relation with the work, or to reflect on the work’s reflections on the conditions of its own possibility, including the beholder’s perceptual and cognitive participation; and so on ad infinitum. The story is retold with many nuanced variations. In Wölfflin’s scheme, the linear or tactile mode is succeeded by the painterly or optical mode; but the sequence of linear to painterly can also be repeated, as a kind of sub-routine, inside an overall painterly regime. In the twentieth century of Krauss, the
optical mode is shadowed by the threat of a collapse back into the corporeal; the power of the drives and the senses to confound the reflective ambitions of art becomes the very theme of modern art. But in the end it is always the asymmetry between body and mind that gives the narrative its shape. This is the account of the discipline, more or less, offered by Michael Podro’s Critical Historians of Art (1982), a book that expressly excludes Gombrich. Gombrich lost faith in reason as the basis for this narrative, and so turned to technology. Problem solving, as explicated in Art and Illusion, is a kind of externalised reason. Technology makes measurable progress and yet does not depend on human virtue, only competence. Gombrich was not saying that art, in the end, turns out to be nothing other than a technology. He was only saying that if you are interested in telling the story of art as a story, with a plot, and if you are interested in showing that art registers the progressive domination of mind over matter, then you had better narrow your field of vision and focus only on those episodes in the history of art when artists were trying to render the look of things. Although he was averse to avant-garde art, Gombrich’s theories of the production and reception of art developed in Art and Illusion can easily be extended beyond representational art to abstract art and indeed any art. Podro, in his book Depiction (1998), saw no barrier to extending Gombrich’s account of the art of painting as a reflection on the conditions of perception – on the realisation of the subject through recognition, in Podro’s terms – beyond the horizon of illusionistic painting. ‘It would be hard to conceive of a practice of this kind [Mondrian’s abstractions] – this play of variations – without the cultivation of formal relations in earlier depiction, without familiarity with the consistencies of morphology that run through discrete objects and the re-vision of one feature through another’. The process is structured as a feedback loop: ‘recognition sustained and developed itself through recruitment of its own material and psychological conditions to make itself more replete’.13 The ‘depiction’ phase of art history, which has the merit of revealing clearly the structure of the game, now appears to have been a limited episode. Not only the ‘look of things’, but also the hidden essence of things, can be modelled, schematised, corrected. Some artists seem to do nothing but make and make, never bothering to match. In fact, they are comparing what they make to a conception of reality they find somewhere inside themselves. We are not dealing with ‘progress’ here, but rather with an emergent process that seems, from the inside, to have a structure even if it is not at first clear where it is headed. It is like learning – not mastery of a skill, but learning as the growth of a deep familiarity with a subject or a problem. Learning is a convergent process that nevertheless has no endpoint. We may feel that we are learning more and more and yet, paradoxically, have no idea what it might be like to have learned everything, to have nothing more to learn. And this, I believe, is the nature of the process that Gombrich was describing. European art has at times appeared – even and especially to the artists themselves – to be a convergent process and yet no one has ever imagined that art would one day achieve its ends and cease to change.
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Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, Baltimore and London 1993, pp.284–89. 14 E.H. Gombrich: ‘Raphael’s “Stanza della Segnatura’”, in idem: Symbolic Images, London 1972, p.101. See also the final words of ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’, in
Ibid., pp.51–53. M. Podro: Depiction, New Haven 1998, p.26. Bryson, op. cit. (note 2), p.30, allowed as much. W. Iser: How to Do Theory, Oxford 2006, pp.52–55, makes a similar argument. See the more extended discussion of Gombrich in W. Iser: The
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In the last chapter of Art and Illusion, Gombrich wonders how art, if it is just a technology for simulating optical impressions, manages to amount to anything at all. In fact, he never once lost his sense of what art is and why it is significant, even as he denied himself any facile satisfaction in art. Like his teacher, Schlosser, who held an ineffable Crocean conception of art, Gombrich, in his scholarship, tends to evade the question. He gives us glimpses of his view of art only in gnomic comments, typically in the closing pages of his essays, for instance at the end of ‘Raphael’s “Stanza della Segnatura’”, where the painter is credited with transforming humanistic commonplaces into a beautiful and complex composition that gives the impression of ‘an inexhaustible plenitude’. Gombrich adds, and one wishes he had said just a little more on the topic: ‘This plenitude is no illusion’.14 Such comments, which hint at a positive aesthetic, are rare. Gombrich understood that under the altered conditions of modernity, any theory of art has to be routed through a theory of the image, a Bildwissenschaft. Nevertheless his dramatic account of the dialectical honing of representational algorithms across time conjures up brief, mirage-like visions of an art that finally shows us what life is like. The possibility of such an art had been explained away by a century of art-historical scholarship – a secular science. Gombrich, true to his Viennese training, demonstrated once more the paradoxical dependence of the image on formulae and improvised solutions. Yet in the end Gombrich cannot disguise his excitement about the image that manages somehow to seize the real. That image shines through Art and Illusion’s screen of explanations. Non-art historians did not perceive this shining through of reality, for they were more interested in the argument about the conventionality of pictorial representation, which was new to them. But some art historians did, and that is why they held Gombrich’s book at arm’s length. Norman Bryson, when he called for a systematic semiotics of the image, was only telling art historians what they already wanted to hear: that the image of the true image is too threatening, that it must be exorcised, that it will drag us back to religion. In the third chapter of Art and Illusion, ‘Pygmalion’s Power’, Gombrich places his story within the long-term context of the myth of the image or artefact that comes to life. He assigned the dream of ‘rivalling creation itself’ (p.93) to an ‘archaic’ phase when images were thought by virtue of their lifelikeness to wield magical power. The impression of lifelikeness was created, not strictly by resemblance, but by efficacy within a ‘context of action’, a ritual or a game. But the threats to orthodox religion and to reason posed by magic and by ritual are worries that Gombrich inherited from ‘Christianity’ and the ‘Enlightenment’, respectively. In assigning the confusion of art and life to a primitive stage in human history, he accepted the very evolutionary model of human nature that he had reproached Freud and Warburg for holding. In fact, art’s possessive relationship to life has by no means diminished in ardour. In modernity it simply takes different forms. Techne, the Greek word for art, is what man adds to nature. The ultimate aim of techne – the challenge – is the generation of
life out of non-life. At that point, art would come to an end because man becomes nature. Art never quite lost sight of that self-annihilating goal.15 Sculpture and painting tried to capture and deliver life. When in the nineteenth century mechanical and electric technologies, immeasurably more powerful than the traditional media, took up the challenge of animation, the idea that one might still be able to fabricate living images by hand came to seem quaint. More lifelike than any oil painting were the images of photography and cinema. But not everyone believed that these marvels belonged to a history of art. When Gombrich delivered his Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 1956, many in his audience surely believed that the ambitions of serious art and the largely commercial motivations of cinema, including animated films, had parted company forever. The caprices of Disney Hollywood Studios, it seemed, were a puerile, trivialised extension of the dream of a ‘second life’ that had once sustained the great tradition of the making of art. Many artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, impatient with the pieties surrounding painterly abstraction, were emboldened to turn to the illusion-generating technologies. These were the years of video art, multimedia performances, Fluxus, Structural film; the years of the introduction of photography into conceptual practice; not to mention photorealism in painting. Like the old masters, whose obsessions with perspective or light effects Gombrich chronicled, these artists found no contradiction between control over representational technologies and the project of delivering the world a second time in order to make it strange; to make art, in other words. Art and Illusion is more easily contextualised within a history of modern art than within a history of modern art history. Today, half a century after the book’s publication, the moving image, the animated image, the interactive image, the moving body, the machine, the flow of information itself have all become basic components of artistic production. The stagings and restagings that have structured art since the late 1950s, from Fluxus to Happenings, from performance art and installation art to the art of relation and participation, might well be understood as reinsertions of creativity into ‘contexts of action’, rituals and games, with the aim of collapsing reflective distance and reinvesting the work of art with life. This project looms once again as the vanishing point of art. Illusion reaffirms the body as the central preoccupation of art. The body generates perceptions and memories which it then imitates by fabricating images beyond its own boundaries, such as paintings or films. The illusion is nothing other than an external image that has come to resemble very closely an internal image, thus seemingly abolishing the boundary of the body. The body merges with its environment and so postpones annihilation. The fusion of techne with life as envisaged by the artist is less sensational but no less real than the artificial life hypothesised today in the robotics or the biology laboratory. Gombrich seemed aware in 1956 that he was standing at the brink of a completely new era, in art as much as in science, but was unable to peer over the edge. In Art and Illusion he found nevertheless a way to remind us that art is most art-like when it imagines what it would be like not to be art.
the volume of the same name (London 1963); or Art and Illusion, p.396, the penul timate sentence of the book, on our habitual reluctance ‘to recognize ambiguity behind the veil of illusion’. 15 Compare the reference by Bryson to a ‘generally held, vague, common-sense
conception of the image as the resurrection of Life’; Bryson: op. cit. (note 2), p.3. I am not sure that common sense does conceive of the image in this way, but if it does, then this is the most interesting remark Bryson makes in Vision and Painting. the burlington m a g a z i n e
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Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting. By David Summers. 213 pp. incl. 12 col. + 79 b. & w. ills. (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2007), $39.95. ISBN 978–0–8078–3110–6. Reviewed by SCOTT NETHERSOLE O P T I C S , P E R S P E C T I V E , E V E N V I S U A L I T Y , have not been ignored by recent scholarship. The reassessment of them in David Summers’s latest book might, therefore, prompt sighs from some readers, especially given the evocation of all ‘Western Painting’ in the title. But the cover is deceptive, for within it are bound four short and tightly argued chapters, each essentially self-contained and period specific. The first is drawn from antiquity; the remainder seldom stray from the fifteenth century. Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Goya – all inexplicably promised on the dust jacket – are entirely absent, and excursions into other epochs are, at best, laconic. The broad title is not indicative of an all-embracing survey, as was the case with his previous work Real Spaces.1 It points, instead, to the basic tenet of Summers’s argument: Western painting is bound by certain fundamental characteristics, which he groups under the rubric ‘optical naturalism’. These include the description of light, dark, colour and their respective interaction with atmosphere, as well as the more typical tendency to foreshorten lines and shapes. At certain moments, these qualities have come together to produce, say, a system of perspective, when a temporary bridge linked ‘science’ and ‘art’. Such instances are the subject of this investigation. But Summers’s hypothesis – one is tempted to write, his ‘point of view’ – is far grander, for he speculates that these traits all derive from a single optical system that underlies all Western Painting. Further to which – as his afterword makes clear – perspective has assumed a philosophical importance in the West, from Nietzsche and perspectivism to Heidegger and the human subject, that in the author’s estimation has political significance. Summers’s story has a beginning, with the first attempts to imitate appearances in Greek painting. It also has a hero in Leon Battista Alberti, who, having read Pliny the Elder, maintained that it was Apollodorus of Athens – the ‘shadow painter’ – who first ‘held the eye’ (and thus the mind). The opening chapter seeks to explain such an achievement by arguing that the rise of illusionism in Greek painting of the fifth century BC closely paralleled the birth of the study of optics. Not that art was simply content to witness scientific development; instead, it interacted with it in important
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ways. Central to the ensuing argument is an elaboration of skenographia, or illusionistic scene painting, and skiagraphia, the internal modelling of forms in light, associated with Agatharcus of Samos and Apollodorus respectively. This chapter obviously has to negotiate intractable problems of survival, and the author might be criticised for not addressing more fully the degree to which Roman copies ‘reflect’ Greek originals. It does, nonetheless, establish the importance of light, and not just space, to the understanding of perspective. Naturally enough, then, the subsequent chapter – ‘Speculum Animatum’ – deals with Brunelleschi and the fifteenth-century Florentine development of single-point perspective. This socalled invention once again brought into alignment, at least notionally, pictorial and optical knowledge, after the great expansion of the latter, particularly through the efforts of Arab scholars, had caused them to part company. Their renewed commonality, however, was not expressed in a pure Euclidean science of notional points, but in a shared concern for reflection, whether mirrored in the ‘sensitive surface’ of the eye or the virtual spaces of Brunelleschi’s (lost) paintings. Summers’s next chapter introduces his other great protagonist, as the narrative takes a new direction by crossing the Alps. This chapter, entitled ‘Speculum Mundi’, reconstructs Jan van Eyck’s World map, unknown from any visual representation but thought to have existed from its mention by Fazio in De viris illustribus. It is not necessary to emphasise the dangers that such speculation introduces; the chapter’s strength lies, instead, in the relationship it posits between a nascent landscape tradition and cartog raphy. It also introduces an interesting question about the nexus of learning and visual (in this case, cartographic) forms and traditions: can they be fruitfully brought together to produce an actual image of a lost work (pl.9)? The final chapter unites the two central characters in a discussion of the religious symbolism of light, particularly the Marian ‘mirror without stain’, and Alberti’s attribution of the invention of painting to Narcissus. So it is perhaps fitting that these pages account for the word ‘desire’ in the title. All the same, the actual interaction of Alberti and Van Eyck is problematic: it remains undocumented, despite all the evidence that is marshalled to the contrary. It is here, in such prosaic detail, that the pedant will find cause for complaint. The analysis of lost paintings, from Greek antiquity to the Renaissance, mires any argument, however convincing, as does the need to build a case on insecure foundations: neither Van Eyck’s trip to the Holy Land, nor his passage through Florence, nor Alberti’s trip to see the Ghent altarpiece is corroborated by external documentation. The reader is occasionally forced into the unsympathetic role of Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, desirous only of ‘facts’.
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But such complaints are disingenuous, for Summers possesses the rare skill of being able to generalise successfully. His thesis of the co-independence of optics and painting is not only seductive, but convincing. It is best glanced in an, admittedly brief, discussion of optical devices: ‘I will argue that painters at crucial points learned (or were taught) to see not so much through passive reliance on mirrors or camere obscure but rather through taking part in the broadly emerging consensus that vision itself is comparable to what is to be seen on such surfaces and that it is therefore possible to learn about appearances through them’ (p.14). It is this ability to see through the superficial relationships that bind optics, perspective and Western painting to the threads that weave them together into meaningful structures that accounts for this book’s great contribution to scholarship. 1 D. Summers: Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London 2003, reviewed in this Magazine, 147 (2005), pp.762–64.
Das Pariser Perikopenbuch und die Anf änge der romanischen Buchmalerei an Rhein und Weser. By Andrea Worm. 272 pp. incl. 31 col. + 164 b. & w. ills. (Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin, 2008), £89. ISBN 978–3–87157–220–3. Reviewed by C.M. KAUFFMANN A BOOK OF PERICOPES – passages from the Gospels to be sung at Mass – is essentially a Gospel Lectionary, but this particular manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque national, lat.17325) has only thirty-five such passages, probably necessitating the ownership also of a fuller Gospel Lectionary for daily services. It is a sumptuously produced work with nineteen full-page Christological miniatures and numerous decorated pages and painted initials. Past attributions, based on style, have wavered between the Rhineland and Lower Saxony, but, as the author points out, there are very few extended picture cycles from either area in the first half of the twelfth century. About two thirds of this book is devoted to a very detailed study of the iconography of the miniatures. Every movement and gesture of every figure and each shade of every colour is described in detail. Sceptics of this degree of thoroughness will remain sceptical. In the Annunciation, the angel approaches the Virgin from the left, but then he nearly always does and, given the inclusion of excellent colour plates, is it worth mentioning? But often the sceptics will be proved wrong as the author demonstrates subtle distinctions in composition, dress or colour which provide clues as to the iconographical origins of the miniatures concerned. Most of the compositions are essentially Byzantine, others Byzantine with Western variants and
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only a few, most notably the Resurrection and the Burial of the Virgin – largely absent in Byzantine cycles – derive from a Western tradition. The presence of a veiled woman at the Virgin’s feet in the Death of the Virgin and of a group of nuns in the Burial of the Virgin leads to the conclusion that the manuscript was produced for a convent of nuns. The closest comparisons of the iconography are with manuscripts from Lower Saxony, most notably the mid-twelfth-century Gospels from Helmarshausen in Gnesen (Cathedral Archive, MS2). On the basis of these close links, a tentative attribution is made to one or other of the richest Ottonian foundations in Lower Saxony, most particularly to Quedlinburg, Gandersheim or Herford. In terms of style, there is a striking difference between the ornamental pages and the miniatures. The former, dominated by purple and gold, are closely related to their Ottonian predecessors of mid-eleventhcentury Echternach, whereas the miniatures are clearly Romanesque. Their calm and balance, and the subtle expression of emotion of the figures, are the artist’s hallmark, whereas the damp folds and the facial modelling are Byzantine in origin. Not for the first time, Byzantine influence is seen as coming via Italy, and considerable evidence is put forward to trace the reception of Italian models in the Rhineland. The earliest phase of this influence appears in the wall-painting fragment in S. Gereon, Cologne (c.1070–75), and the Koblenz Bible (c.1067–77) in Pommersfelden. This early influence of Italo-Byzantine style in the Rhineland is attributed to the activities of Archbishop Anno of Cologne (1056–75) who was inspired by the Papal revival to introduce monastic reform in his archdiocese. While admitting that there is no clear ‘Reform style’, the author argues that the sociocultural change brought about by the conflict between Papacy and Emperor led to the abandonment of the Ottonian tradition – closely identified with imperial patronage – and the development of a more Italianate style in the newly reformed monasteries. This phase comes to an end, it is argued, after about 1130 when Mosan floral initials finally replace the remains of the Ottonian decorative tradition, and hence this manuscript is here dated c.1120–30. The problem of tracing the closest iconographical comparisons to Helmarshausen and the nearest stylistic ones to Cologne is sen sibly settled by pointing out that a professional artist of such high calibre was likely to have been employed in different centres, and hence the ‘Rhine-Weser’ subtitle of the book. This is a thorough, scholarly and insightful examination of an outstanding manuscript of the early Romanesque period and it provides a wider cultural setting for north German illumination of the first half of the twelfth century, a field in which relatively little has survived. The book ends with an English summary, bibliography and index of manuscripts, but it is to be regretted that there is no general index.
The Art of Medieval Urbanism. Parthenay in Romanesque Aquitaine. By Robert A. Maxwell. 375 pp. incl. 155 col. + 131 b. & w. ills. (Penn State University Press, University Park, 2008), $90. ISBN 978–0–271–02956–6. Reviewed by STUART WHATLING
monographs there is a continuum of sorts between, at one extreme, the highly specific study dealing with a single, neatly self-contained artwork and at the other, the wide-ranging catalogue, in which the items described share some unity of authorship or geographical region but are otherwise treated as distinct and autonomous entities. By contrast, Robert Maxwell’s fascinating portrait of medieval Parthenay examines the town as a whole – not detailing the key monuments as isolated phenomena but presenting them as constituents of (or rather as participants in) the construction of a common urban identity. The choice of Parthenay as the subject for this study was fortuitous. The town is small and self-contained enough to be treated in toto as a microcosm of medieval urbanism, while its economic decline in the thirteenth century and later obscurity saved it from the cycle of renewal and renovation that became the lot of more successful settlements throughout Europe. As a result, enough of the town’s medieval architectural fabric survives (Fig.29) to speculate about its original form, particularly with the aid of documentary and archaeological sources. I described this book as a portrait of Parthenay, but perhaps ‘biography’ would be a more accurate description. For this is no mere snapshot but a veritable life-history of the medieval town. The first couple of chapters provide a useful sketch of the place (with some wry observations concerning the changes in use that some of the churches have suffered over the years), followed by an exemplary account of its early development. For students of medieval architecture, whose courses rarely include much on the actual processes of medieval ‘colonisation’ and urbanisation, this material is particularly helpful. As well as setting the scene for Parthenay’s own development, it provides an invaluable model for understanding the birth pangs, infancy and adolescence of a great many other European towns. Maxwell’s methodology, combining conventional documentary history with considerations of social anthropology, political theory and economics, is a great help in explaining the strategies employed by counts and clerics alike to encourage the development and exploitation of their increasingly valuable land. Such an analysis is particularly useful in understanding the remarkable intensity of church-building witnessed in the Poitevin lands throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a level of activity which mere demographics or growing religiosity cannot otherwise account for. Despite its enthusiastic engagement with the fashionable discourses of urbanism and
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29. Detail of the west portal of the church of S. Paul, Parthenay. Late eleventh century.
social anthropology, this is not a book that shies away from the hard work of traditional architectural scholarship. Those who prefer the world of base profiles, architectural genealogies and sculptural connoisseurship to the discourses of Henri Lefebvre and Michael De Certeau will not be disappointed. This is particularly true in the third and fourth chapters, which meticulously relate the architectural and sculptural styles of the early Parthenay chantiers to those of other Aquitainian locales, before plotting the emergence of a distinctive local style. The author then considers how the urban identity created through architectural style was subsequently reflected and amplified through the re-use of that style and through its appearance in other media or contexts ultimately generating what Maxwell characterises as an ‘iconography of urbanism’. In these chapters, as is the case throughout this impressively produced volume, the arguments are supported by well-chosen images, including a large number of the author’s own photographs of otherwise rarely seen monuments. It is easy to forget (and Maxwell draws on various twelfth-century writers to help remind us), that medieval towns such as Parthenay were often carved out of untamed forest – and were perceived in just such terms by contemporaries. To their inhabitants, and to merchants or pilgrims passing through, they were oases of order, where cut stone and rich skylines served as indices of development and (Christian) civilisation. In such settlements, architectural and sculptural style contributed to the identification of self, not just through the contrast between the urban and the rustic but also through the individuation of the urban; not just
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‘town’ but ‘this town’. While such communal expressions of architectural selfhood have long been recognised in relation to, for example, trecento Siena, it is likely that they played an equally important role in less exalted settlements too. If the late twentieth century was a fruitful time for discussions about ‘Artistic integration in Gothic buildings’, then the time may now be ripe for extending our horizons to encompass the idea of artistic integration across the medieval town. Maxwell’s splendid new volume may serve as a worthy opening chapter in that much needed discourse.
Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City. By Fabrizio Nevola. 303 pp. incl. 197 col. + 70 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2007), £40. ISBN 978–0–300–12678–5. Reviewed by MACHTELT ISRAËLS O N E O F T H E T R A V E L L E R ’s
most elusive tasks when getting to know a new city is grasping the local significance of neighbourhoods. For a fifteenth-century visitor, Fabrizio Nevola’s book would have been the perfect guide. It describes how in the course of that century Siena’s changing governments developed the urban fabric and it reads the cityscape as a civic manifesto. In Renaissance Siena key moments in the history of the city-state had repercussions on urbanistic, architectural and stylistic choices. The first chapter discusses the building campaigns of Siena’s government of the nove (1287–1355). These buildings – including the Palazzo Pubblico, the Spedale della Scala, the fountains and city gates – acquired the status of a canon for the subsequent architecture in the city. Nevola states that ‘the message and its format continued to be relevant to a society where government, citizens and urban form were bound together in an inextricable manner’ (p.8). However, the traditional and retardataire style of fifteenth-century Sienese architecture may well have been a deliberate choice, the result of historical awareness of the city’s past. The book’s wealth of novel ideas is contained in the following chapters, which discuss the artistic upheaval caused by foreign influences and their subsequent absorbtion into the city’s fabric. In 1432 Siena welcomed the Emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg and his court as honoured guests, going to great lengths both to show the city at its best and to pay tribute to the Emperor by embellishing the route of his entry and his living quarters. During Sigismund’s ten-months’ stay, courtly life was staged in the physical fabric of the city and this affected the urban experience. This development is evoked beautifully by Nevola through his reading of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus (1443–44), a love story of Eurialus, one of
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Sigismund’s courtiers, and the Sienese lady Lucretia, seen as a personification of the city. Civic identity as experienced by the foreigner and the native became associated with the city’s built form. There was no happy ending for Piccolomini’s lovers, but the imperial sojourn left a lasting mark on Siena by opening up public spaces for private display. Imperial coats of arms could now co-exist with those of the republic. Whereas previously, rich Sienese families had constructed traditional fortified palaces, or castellare, an expression of feudal and defensive aspirations, they now favoured a more open type of palace designed for the display of family pride and for dialogue with city life. Even after the Emperor left the city its thoroughfares were renovated under state supervision. The city, which wished to establish venerable Roman origins but was devoid of antique remains, started to invent its own ancient past. In the civic commission of 1441 to renovate the oratory of the local saint and Roman martyr Ansanus, the medieval tower was invested with Antique significance by the insertion of classicising windows. Both the Palazzo Bichi-Tegliacci (now the Pinacoteca Nazionale) and the imposing Castello delle Quattro Torri near Siena were built in the early 1450s for Giovanni di Guccio Bichi, a rich and powerful citizen who, for his city palace, copied the trifore windows of the Palazzo Pubblico to emphasise his own importance in the city, whereas some architectural details were added in a more up-to-date style. Nevola compares the palace with the Palazzo Medici in Florence, where a similar fusion of styles illustrated the ambitions of its patron. Palazzo BichiTegliacci was chosen as the temporary residence for the republic’s visitors, among them in 1459 and 1460 Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (later Pope Alexander VI). In fact, the public function of the palace was such that the plaster had hardly dried when Bichi sold it to the Tegliacci family, allies of the Medici, as a pawn in an attempt to ease relations with Florence. An important turning point in Renaissance Siena was the election to the papacy in 1458 of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. He had been born in exile, and one of his first diplomatic feats was to authorise the re-admission of his own and other noble exiled families to Republican Siena. The humanist Francesco Patrizi soon lauded the benefits of their enlightened patronage in his De institutione reipublicae of 1464, a text that Nevola identifies as written at the instigation of the Pope. Pius’s remodelling of Corsignano, his birthplace, as the ideal Renaissance city of Pienza is well known, but Nevola has studied the renovation of the Piccolomini palaces in Siena (Fig.30) as a further implementation of the Pope’s political aspirations. A second book could be filled with examples of the political manipulation of ecclesiastical space. Ten-year indulgences were granted by Pius to the church of S. Martino, for example, in the heart of the
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Piccolomini enclave, and its prior was permitted to wear pontifical insignia during the holy office, thus introducing a papal and religious focus that could compete with the civic domain of the cathedral in the secular heart of the city. For Nevola, as for Luke Syson,1 the ascendancy of Pandolfo Petrucci (1452–1512) as ruler of the city marks the culmination of the takeover of civic power by the private sector. Pandolfo built his palace close to the republican Palazzo Pubblico on the Campo so that the city hall’s venerable symbolism of power might rub off on him. He even intended the Campo to become the antechamber to his palace, with a project by Baldassare Peruzzi to enclose the piazza with a circular colonnade, a common feature of princely palaces. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, arguably the first notable Sienese architect known by name, emerges as part of Petrucci’s network of patronage, his artistic skills being treated as diplomatic commodities. He introduced into Siena a style of architecture developed at the court of Urbino, with frescoed palace façades rather than sombre stone fronts. Nevola tells a revealing tale of outside political influences. Yet the generative power of the city’s conservatism still has to be told and follows a different timeline. In the fifteenth century Siena had already started to rejuvenate its own past and in the process forged a new style and a historical awareness. The frenzy of private building that followed Sigismund’s entry in 1432 had been set in motion already in the 1420s, when private chapels were built in the cathedral (under the auspices of the republican, civic government) and the guilds had emerged as a new class of
30. View of the façade of Palazzo Piccolomini along the chiasso dei Pollaiuoli, Siena. 1469–1510. Photograph by Fabio Lensini.
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patrons. On the other hand, renewal and outside influences notwithstanding, the canon of the city’s fourteenth-century architecture never lost its relevance. In the seventeenth century the aesthetics of the Baroque interior of the Cappella del Voto, designed by Bernini as an addition to the cathedral, could go hand in hand with an exterior built to conform to the medieval pattern. The book’s illustrations are well chosen, and maps help to explain how social patterns and ritual were overlaid on the built fabric. The endpapers, with Arnold van Westerhout’s etching of Siena of 1685 of blacksmiths forging a Piccolomini coat of arms, perfectly illustrate the book’s title. Nevola fuses Anglo-Saxon and Italian scholarship and provides a sweeping vision of an iconography of Siena’s urban shape: this is a book that should grace the libraries of both inquisitive travellers and specialists in Renaissance art and architecture. 1 L. Syson: exh. cat. Renaissance Siena: Art for a City, London (National Gallery) 2007; reviewed by Richard Stemp in this Magazine, 150 (2008), pp.43–45.
The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters. By Susan E. James. 358 pp. incl. 53 b. & w. ills. (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vermont, 2009), £65. ISBN 978–0–7546–6381–2. Reviewed by ELIZABETH GOLDRING
author’s contention that ‘never before in English history, and arguably never again to such a degree, were women responsible for the shaping of English art as they were under the Tudors’ (p.1). ‘Art’ is here defined broadly and includes painting in all its many forms, as well as needlework, jewellery, funerary brasses and effigies and architecture – although most of the book is concerned with painted portraits either in large or in miniature. Documentary sources such as inventories, wills and household accounts form the basis for this study. Many are familiar from printed editions; others are available only in manuscript. However, Susan James somewhat overstates the originality of her approach by claiming that ‘the methodology used looks beyond traditional sources and an effort has been made to broaden the base of research by investigating material from primary documents more generally considered the province of English history’ (p.4), for virtually every scholar working in the field of Tudor art since Erna Auerbach in the 1950s has made regular use of documentary sources such as these, the methodologies employed in the study of Tudor art long having overlapped with those employed in the study of Tudor history.
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That said, many of the wills that James cites have never before been quoted in print and her inclusion of relevant snippets from these documents – demonstrating, among other things, the extent to which Tudor women from a wide range of backgrounds bequeathed paintings to one another – is a welcome contribution. So, too, is James’s attempt to connect artistic practices in England with those on the Continent – in particular, her (persuasive) argument that Flemish workshop models, which involved female participation, came to influence English workshop models over the course of the sixteenth century. There is, however, a surprising lack of engagement with other recent scholarship. Given that James presents evidence for the patronage of art by both elite and non-elite women, it is a shame that she does not set her work in dialogue with the research of Robert Tittler, Tarnya Cooper and others on artistic patronage among members of the middle classes. By the same token, it seems an opportunity missed when, in an extended discussion of portraits of women posing as daughters, wives and widows, James makes no mention of ‘the pregnancy portrait’ or of Karen Hearn’s ongoing work on this newly identified genre. The book has been poorly proof-read and copy-edited. In chapter one, for example, James asserts repeatedly and wrongly (pp.36–37, 46, 63 and 64) that the substantial picture collection of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, passed first to his brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, and then on to Ambrose’s widow, Anne, who in turn bequeathed it to her sister-in-law, Katherine, Countess of Huntingdon.1 It must also be said that the individual chapters do not always work together to advance the larger argument; at the end of chapter seven, for example, the book simply stops, without any conclusion. The role of women as consumers, patrons and artists in Tudor England is an important and interesting topic, which has never before been the subject of a book. Although James is to be applauded for having identified this lacuna in the existing scholarship and for having attempted to fill it, The Feminine Dynamic is an uneven work, which is unlikely to constitute the final word on this subject. 1 The dispersal of the picture collection that Leicester displayed at his three primary residences – Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire; Wanstead Manor, Essex; and Leicester House, London – was extremely complicated. Although Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, held a life interest in Kenilworth and its contents, this reverted on his death in 1590 to Leicester’s illegitimate son, Sir Robert Dudley. Warwick had no claims on the contents of Wanstead and Leicester House, which were part of the jointure of Leicester’s widow, Lettice Knollys; see E. Goldring: ‘Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester for Kenilworth Castle’, The Burlington Magazine 147 (2005), pp.654–60, esp. pp.659–60; and idem: ‘The Earl of Leicester and Portraits of the duc d’Alençon’, The Burlington Magazine 146 (2004), pp.108–11, esp. pp.110–11.
Nec spe nec metu. La Gonzaga: architettura e corte nella Milano di Carlo V. By Nicola Soldini. 514 pp. incl. 239 b. & w. ills. (Olschki, Florence, 2007), €65. ISBN 978–88–222–5268–7. Reviewed by RICHARD SCHOFIELD FOUR CHEERS FOR Nicola Soldini who has produced a magnificent study of a relatively neglected area of Italian cinquecento culture.1 His aim is to discuss all aspects of the activities of Ferrante Gonzaga and his court artist, Domenico Giunti, locating their ventures in Milan, Messina and Palermo against the prevailing cultural and political climates. At the heart of the book is the Villa Gonzaga (later Simonetta) in Milan: the old villa that Ferrante acquired in 1547 was restructured by Giunti to become the most spectacular suburban palace in Lombardy.2 It included a vast three-storey façade at the south (Fig.31) with long pergolas at left and right and an extraordinary U-shaped courtyard at the back with elaborate gardens, a fish pond like that at the Palazzo Te, a casino ornamented with fountains and a pergola of twenty-eight columns. The original villa was owned by Gualtieri Bascapé, an important official under Ludovico il Moro, and the new parts did not mesh well with the old because Ferrante and his family moved in immediately and building went on around them. The author discusses Bascapé’s involvement in Ludovico’s plans for a vast piazza in front of the Castello Sforzesco, a new Broletto and streets near the Porta Vercellina, and his involvement with Leonardo’s work in the Saletta negra and Sala delle Asse.3 Ludovico’s fall and the loss of houses and villas owned by his supporters are amply rehearsed, as well as Gualtieri’s attempt to get back his villa, which took him until 1507. Ferrante’s new villa went up very fast; the south façade was finished in 1551, the gardens and U-shaped courtyard in the following years; but everything stopped in 1555. The courtyard consisted of vast Doric arcades on the ground floor, with two narrower stories above.4 The configuration of the villa at the back famously generated a remarkable echo which fascinated Gaspar Schott, Athanasius Kirchner and others.5 Soldini is surely right to see strong parallels in terms of function and decoration between Ferrante’s villa and that of Andrea Doria at Fassolo, completed by 1531–32. The Genoese villa would have included, according to Perino’s amazing façade project, rectangular windows with crosses in them; and the villa has a huge one-storey U-shaped portico at the back (but so too the courtyard of the palace of Giacomo Medici at Melegnano of the late 1540s), and telling details such as balusters with two bulbs divided by a ring. Both Andrea Doria and Ferrante Gonzaga were initially great favourites of Charles V, both needed palaces in which to show themselves off and receive visitors of the highest rank. The book closes with a discussion of the various hypotheses advanced to account for the extreme hostility
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31. View of the south façade of Villa Gonzaga (later Simonetta), Milan. Restructured by Domenico Giunti, c.1547–51.
that Ferrante managed to arouse in Milan and elsewhere. Soldini deals with the funding of the construction. Ferrante married the wealthy Isabella da Capua and earned much as a mercenary in Rome and Naples, as well as his salary as Viceroy in Sicily and Governor of Milan. But his finances collapsed and he faced trial in Brussels, accused of financial mismanagement, particularly that he illegitimately appropriated material from churches, monasteries and the camera ducale for the construction of his villa; Ferrante admitted to acquiring columns from the Corte ducale and elsewhere. A leitmotif of Soldini’s book is the use of fictive architecture, deployed on the exterior of the villa in the form of painted windows with mullions forming half a cross, but in the interior only in the form of large friezes with space for tapestries or large pieces of furniture. A series of six tapestries called the Puttini, commissioned by Ferrante in 1552, had the subject-matter and dimensions appropriate to the villa. Culturally diverse, the team of decorators were all foreigners; a Florentine/Pratese architect, Giunti, plus painters evidently from Flanders; from Genoa, the sculptor Giacomo Carlone, who made the pedestals of the first storey of the main façade with crests in imitation of those on the portal of the palace of Agostino Salvago in Genoa. Otherwise relations between Ferrante and other distinguished artists, such as Leoni and Angelo Marini, remain difficult to nail down and Leone Leoni’s magnificent statue of Ferrante triumphing over Envy (Guastalla) was ordered after his death by his son, Cesare. All other cultural activities of Ferrante’s court are reconstructed here: relations with Giovio, who visited the villa in 1549 and was fascinated by imprese; for Soldini, the Titian Portrait of a man in red in Kassel is not a portrait of Ferrante, but the Titian-like portrait in a private collection in Genoa may be. In the 1540s the rise of Bernardino and Giulio Campi produced many portraits now mostly lost, but Ferrante duly appears in Giulio Campi’s Crucifixion (Cremona). Giunti’s early career is examined and the treatment of his master, Niccolò Soggi, by Vasari subjected to suitable scepticism. Giunti
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arrived in Rome in the early 1530s and worked for the Portuguese Dom Martinho Vimioso who lived in the Teatro di Marcello in 1525–35; there he started making engravings of ancient buildings (the Colosseum, Pantheon and the Porta Maggiore, clearly influenced in part by Peruzzi’s graphic techniques. Soldini also discusses the saga of Sebastiano del Piombo’s Ubeda Pietà (Museo del Prado, Madrid) of 1533–39, concluding that the replica of the picture mentioned in the documents was made by Giunti and that he also acquired a Raphael for Ferrante. There is no evidence that Giunti acted as a military architect for Ferrante in Sicily (Ferrante was himself an expert) but more as a draughtsman, and the story that he was the engineer of Messina from 1536 is not true. Rather, Giunti was a poor man’s Giulio Romano, a multitalented artistic impresario. He worked on the Castello a Mare at Palermo (demolished 1922) and the villa suburbana, now identified by Erik Neil as the Villa del Duca di Bivona. Here we find fascinating information about the use of slaves in Sicily in the building trade (so too at the Castle in Milan), domestic service and agriculture; Soldini reports that Francesco Repishti has discovered that Giunti himself had a Turkish slave in Milan. The focus returns to Milan, where Soldini again sees Giunti not as a builder of fortifications but rather as an urban designer. Working closely with Nicolò Secco, the Capitano di Giustizia, he devised projects to straighten streets, knock down projecting balconies etc., as well to change the piazza of the Duomo, which involved the destruction of the second version of S. Tecla in 1548 and the dispersal of various kinds of shops from the piazza, particularly smelly ones (an idea already present in Filarete). The immediate motive for much of this activity was the entry of Philip II of Spain. Giunti evidently oversaw all these celebrations along with the banquet in the courtyard with the Fructus belli tapestries on view, as well as the spectacular scenography for Nicolò Secco’s comedy L’interesse. Soldini also deals with nearly all Giunti’s other architectural activities, although S. Angelo deserved to be discussed at greater length. This is a very distinguished contribution to the study of artistic culture and history in Lombardy and will raise standards in the field.
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1 Rossanna Sacchi has made an equally important contribution in the same area; R. Sacchi: Il disegno incompiuto. La politica artistica di Francesco II Sforza e di Massimiliano Stampa, Milan 2005. 2 Incredibly it was not mentioned by Bartolomeo Taegio in his list of villas of 1559. 3 It is invariably forgotten that the decoration of the Sala delle Asse was similar to that in the cupola of the wooden tiburio built for the marriage of Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella d’Aragona in 1489; this included portraits of the dukes, flowers, fruit hanging from branches, grass with birds and ‘parva bruta’ sitting on it: Tristano Chalco said that ‘it could be believed to be’ a wood or natural arbour (‘ut vera iam silva et nativum arbustum credi posset’). 4 The order of the façade with echinuses with one annulet combined with attic bases must be Doric, although Soldini calls them Tuscan-Doric. But Soldati’s Stima (1567) says that the order of the ground floor of the courtyard was Doric; the capitals combined with attic bases of the temple in Raphael’s S. Paul preaching in Athens must be Doric following Vitruvius’ injunction about temples dedicated to Mars (S. Della Torre; R.V. Schofield: Pellegrino Tibaldi architetto e il S. Fedele de Milano, Como 1994, p.75; cf. J.S. Ackerman: ‘The Tuscan/Doric Order: A Study in the Metaphorical Language of Architecture’, Journal of the Society of Architecural Historians 42/1 (1983), pp.15–34, defines too many such examples as Tuscan). Niccolò Soggi used the variant in the temple at the right of his Madonna delle Nevi and in the Vision of Augustus, where the arcades are surely the obvious source for the ground floor of Giunti’s façade. 5 The saga concludes with the story of an unnamed, loony Englishman who tried to reproduce the echo in a building near London, but failed and shot himself, perhaps producing another marvellous echo.
The Sistine Chapel. A New Vision. By Heinrich Pfeiffer. 352 pp. incl. 186 col. ills. (Abbeville Publishing Group, New York, 2007), £125. ISBN 978–0–7892–0934–4. Reviewed by MALCOLM BULL THIS MAGNIFICENTLY illustrated study of the iconography of the Sistine chapel by a Jesuit scholar at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome is based on three convictions: first, that the artists were guided by papal theologians in their choice of subjects; secondly that every detail of the frescos can be explained from the library of these theologians; and thirdly that all the frescos, both those executed during the pontificate of Sixtus IV and those of Michelangelo, ‘correspond exactly to a unique iconographical plan’ elaborated at the outset. Of these beliefs the first is unquestionably true, for no commission of such importance and complexity could have been undertaken without some theological guidance, and the last demonstrably false, since there were significant changes in the plan for the ceiling, originally conceived as just a starry sky. Less clear is the extent to which Pfeiffer’s second conviction can be sustained. Some details seem to require a theological explanation, whereas others appear to be the artist’s invention. But where does one begin and the other end? Pfeiffer himself sometimes notes the transition, suggesting that ‘from the fresco of the
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Fall and Expulsion onward [. . .] Michelangelo freed himself of the Vatican theologians’. Elsewhere, he even claims that Botticelli insinuated a contemporary reference into the most obviously puzzling episode in the chapel – the prominent temple sacrifice in the Temptation of Christ. This would appear to be the sacrifice for the purification of a leper described in Leviticus, in which one bird is killed and the other escapes – a parallel, Pfeiffer ingeniously argues, to the fate of the two Medici brothers attacked in the cathedral of Florence by the Pazzi conspirators (identified as the three young men, one of whom has a dagger, on the far left of the painting). Pfeiffer otherwise draws on theological sources rather than contemporary history, principally the colour symbolism of PseudoHugh of St Victor and the Liber concordiae of Joachim of Fiore. On the basis of the former he argues that a single colour code operates throughout the painted decoration in which red signifies love, green hope, white faith, blue heavenly contemplation, silver eloquence, violet penitence, and so on. As the colourless drapery of the newly resurrected dead in the Last Judgment implies, colour and meaning go together, but the need for formal variety is often the stronger imperative. For example, on the side walls, Christ always wears red and blue, while Moses on the opposite wall always wears golden yellow and green, with the result that the other figures (including both God the Father and the Egyptian taskmaster) often appear in contrasting reds and blues as well. Christ wears traditional colours replete with theological significance, but when the Egyptian task master wears similar colours they do not have the same meaning, or, in all probability, any meaning at all. Pfeiffer’s reluctance to leaven his learning with even a hint of scepticism is equally evident in the case of Joachim. There are obvious generic similarities between the organisation of the ceiling and the Joachite way of conceiving history as a linear progression foreshadowed in the events of the Old Testament, foretold by the prophets, and calibrated by generations of the ancestors of Christ. Specific parallels are striking but few, and it is therefore difficult to know how far to push a Joachite interpretation of the iconography. Pfeiffer is very confident, using Joachim to explain the distribution and depiction of the ancestors across six bays of the chapel, specific gestures in the creation of Adam, and the arrangement of several figures in the Last Judgment. On the other hand, Pfeiffer makes little of Joachim’s central idea of the Trinitarian division of history. Yet this symbolism would not have been foreign to the artist himself, for as Marco Collareta has pointed out, the artist’s personal sign of three interlocking circles, which by the time of his death was interpreted as the unity of the three professions of painting, sculpture and architecture, was derived from Joachim’s figure of the three status of Father, Son and Holy Spirit which also influenced Dante.
Somewhere during Michelangelo’s long life, this Trinitarian symbol acquired a new, specifically artistic significance. It is tempting to see the ceiling, which divides the stories from Genesis into three groups and proceeds from God the Father’s painterly division of light from darkness, waters from firmament, through the sculptural climax of the formation of Adam and Eve (the types of Christ and the Church), to the building work of Noah (who sends forth the dove from the ark – the type of the procession of the Holy Spirit) and his family, who construct the altar, the ark and a shelter for the drunken patriarch, as an unconscious step towards the reinterpretation of this threefold pattern. Were this so, it would be a good example of the way in which theology fades imperceptibly into art.
Del piacere della virtù. Paolo Veronese, Alessandro Magno e il patriziato veneziano. By Claudia Terribile. 150 pp. incl. 66 b. & w. ills. (Marsilio, Venice, 2009), €24. ISBN 978–88–317–9800–6. Reviewed by XAVIER F. SALOMON
1978, to mark Cecil Gould’s retirement as Keeper, the National Gallery in London organised a display of Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander (Fig.32) – the painting Ruskin had described as ‘the most precious Paul Veronese in the world’. X-rays of the canvas were exhibited next to it and the small exhibition was accompanied by a booklet written by Gould.1 In it, he admitted that ‘for so marvellous – and so large – a picture we are, nevertheless, frustratingly ill informed of the circumstances of its origin’. Gould proposed that the Family of Darius had been painted for the Palazzo Pisani at Este during the autumn of 1573, when Veronese was recuperating after his interrogation by the Inquisition. The suggestion sparked a fierce exchange of opinions between Richard Cocke and Gould in the pages of this Magazine.2 This represented the first serious attempt to understand and discuss the historical events surrounding the creation of Veronese’s canvas. In Goethe’s account of his visit to Venice in the autumn of 1786, he mentioned only one painting, the Family of Darius. In his Italienische Reise, Goethe described his visit to Palazzo Pisani Moretta, where he admired the painting, and reported on the legend that Veronese had been a guest of the Pisani’s for some time, and in gratitude for their hospitality, had painted in secret the Family of Darius, rolled it up and left it under his bed as a gift. The story was a celebrated one and flourished with further embellishments. For Antoine Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville – the first to refer to the story – Veronese had taken refuge in the Palazzo Pisani at Este during a violent thunderstorm; for later writers the painter was recovering from a bad fall from a horse, or escaping the Inquisition. As unlikely as these events can IN
seem, Gould was still dependent on them and his account of the painting was reasonably queried by Cocke. As Nicholas Penny has recently written, ‘it is unlikely that Veronese could have found a suitable canvas waiting for him, unlikely that he would have been able to work on such a large painting in secret, unlikely that he would have rolled it up while still wet, and very unlikely that any bed would have been large enough to conceal it’. Ridolfi mentioned the painting – in the Palazzo Pisani in Venice – in 1648 and, before that, in 1632, Giovanni Antonio Massani had written about it in a letter to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, in which he listed paintings by Veronese that he thought could be on the market. The Family of Darius was for Massani ‘a most beautiful thing, and worthy of a Prince’.3 Following Gould’s and Cocke’s speculations regarding the canvas, Claudia Terribile’s impeccable research on the painting – already partly presented in an article – provides key pieces of evidence finally to understand for whom, when and why the Family of Darius was painted.4 Penny’s recent catalogue of the National Gallery’s Venetian paintings repeatedly cites Terribile’s arguments and pays homage to her archival discoveries.5 Both Penny and Terribile have produced exhaustive accounts of the painting, which will be of immense help for future studies on the picture and on Veronese. Terribile’s book expands on her previous article and looks at the Family of Darius comprehensively, and Penny’s catalogue entry is so detailed and thorough that it could be published as an independent booklet (much longer than Gould’s of 1978). Terribile’s book is divided into two parts. The first deals with the original commission, context and history of the painting, while the second focuses on its iconography and meaning. By navigating through the family trees of various branches of the Pisani family, the author identified the patron of the canvas, Francesco Pisani (1514–67), and the painting’s original location, in the Palazzo Pisani at Montagnana, designed by Palladio. This had been tentatively suggested in the 1930s, but Terribile provides further proof to confirm it.6 When Francesco died, without children, he left his property to his cousin Zan Mattio, and through him to his heirs, whom he wished would assume the first name Francesco in his honour. In 1568 a lawsuit was underway between Zan Mattio and Francesco’s widow, Marietta Molin, who had been effectively disinherited. Zan Mattio complained that Marietta, in an attempt to regain her husband’s property, tried ‘even to remove the canvases and iron [fixtures] of the most precious picture of the story of Alexander the Great’, providing a terminus ante quem for Veronese’s painting. The picture is reasonably dated by Terribile (and by Penny) to the mid-1560s. Francesco must have been an important patron of both Palladio and Veronese, and the contract for Veronese’s early Transfiguration for the high altar of the cathedral of Montagnana was signed in Pisani’s house in 1555.
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While Terribile and Penny agree that the Family of Darius was painted for the Palazzo Pisani at Montagnana, they do not attempt to identify the specific room in which the canvas was displayed. The building still retains its original Palladian plan, and a visit to the palace makes it clear that Veronese’s large canvas could have only been painted for one of the two side walls of the main sala on the piano nobile.7 The picture was probably on the left wall; the visitor would have entered the room and followed the direction of the narrative, proceeding, like Darius’ women, towards Alexander. The painting is lit from the right, which is fitting considering that the only source of light in the sala are the three large windows on the end wall, to the right of the picture. The presence of two small – original – doors in the middle of the walls indicates that the Family of Darius was displayed above them, at a certain height, and was intended to be seen di sotto in su. An analogous arrangement appears in Battista Zelotti’s, almost contemporary, frescos for the main sala of Villa Emo at Fanzolo, where scenes of the Continence of Scipio and the Sacrifice of Virginia were painted on the side walls, above doors. It seems unlikely that the wall opposite the Family of Darius would have been left empty, and Francesco Pisani’s death in 1567 might account for the lack of a pendant canvas, by Veronese or by another artist. Terribile rightly argues for the importance of terraferma commissions for Veronese in the 1550s and 1560s. Many of his Venetian patrons – Francesco Pisani but also, for example, Marcantonio and Daniele Barbaro – lived in the countryside (at Montagnana and at Maser) and only occasionally resided in Venice in rented apartments. The Family of Darius was probably only moved to Venice after 1629, when the Pisani bought their palace on the Grand Canal. It was eventually sold in 1857 to the National Gallery by Vettore Pisani. The events surrounding the acquisition – fully discussed by Penny in his catalogue – provoked Lord Elcho’s parliamentary attack on what he absurdly perceived as a ‘second-rate specimen [. . .] of a secondrate artist’ and resulted in Otto Mündler’s dismissal as the Gallery’s travelling agent. The painting represents the celebrated event following Alexander the Great’s defeat of Darius, King of Persia, at the Battle of Issus. Sisigambis, Darius’ mother, together with the queen, Stateira, and her two daughters, make obeisance to their victor, but in doing so mistake Hephaestion – Alexander’s closest friend – for Alexander. As a eunuch makes this mistake apparent to the queens of Persia, Alexander magnanimously forgives them. It is a rare subject in paintings before Veronese and the artist himself had tackled the theme once before in the, now destroyed, frescos for the Villa Soranza. In its composition, Veronese’s painting looks back to Sodoma’s fresco for Agostino Chigi’s bedroom at the Farnesina in Rome. This seems to confirm that the painter did indeed travel to Rome in 1560. The Renaissance taste for Alexander was directly related to the discovery and translation of texts
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32. Family of Darius before Alexander, by Paolo Veronese. c.1565. Canvas, 236.2 by 474.9 cm. (National Gallery, London).
by ancient authors, these sources stressing Alexander’s magnificence and liberality rather than only his military deeds, and presenting him as an avid reader of Homer and, most importantly, as Aristotle’s illustrious pupil. Alexander became an exemplum virtutis to be emulated by a modern public. The episode of Alexander and Darius’ women was the epitome and summa of his virtuous behaviour. Veronese, however, is not faithful to any of the ancient sources. While generally most closely following Valerius Maximus’ account of the episode, he adapts the events for his grandiose composition. Terribile is surely right in pointing out that the artist combined the wellknown episode with a subsequent one, when Alexander and Hephaestion take Darius’ daughters, Stateira and Dripeti, as wives. Veronese’s pictorial intelligence manifests itself in the painting, where the viewer is confronted with the same dilemma as Darius’ women. Which one is Alexander? Terribile and Penny settle for the general (probably correct) view that the young man in red is Alexander, pointing to Hephaestion to his left. But some scholars believe the man in crimson to be Hephaestion indicating the rightful ruler.8 Surely the fact that modern viewers still debate the issue is a proof of Veronese’s wit. In discussing the painting’s narrative, Terribile pays homage to David Rosand’s reading of the canvas. She coins the definition of ‘ethical hedonism’, agreeing with Jean Paul Richter that the subject of the picture ‘was evidently conceived to serve as an example to be emulated by the Venetian nobility, and especially by the Pisani family and by their descendants’.9 Gould had described the Family of Darius as a ‘paean to nobility: nobility of spirit, of race, of conduct, of setting’. The iconography of the painting reflects Pisani’s view of his family’s nobility and his wish to set an example for future generations. One of the most difficult issues regarding the painting is the supposed presence of portraits. William Hazlitt described it as a ‘family-picture’, and Richter, followed by subsequent scholars, believed that ‘the heads are portraits taken from life. They evidently represent Venetian patricians and, according to tradition, they are members of the distinguished Pisani family’. Penny, on the other hand, concluded that this is ‘more probably
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the ideal family of Veronese’s imagination’, and that none of the characters is meant to be recognisable. Terribile suggests that the man behind Alexander might be ‘a portrait of Veronese in disguise: bohemian look and manner, pride and dignity in displaying and inscribing his own excellence in the aura of Alexander’s glorious and immortal one’. It seems unlikely that the man in armour is Veronese, and he does not look like other (presumed) images of the painter. The only figure that seems to be a possible portrait is the old man in blue behind Darius’ family. Often confused with Darius (who was not present at the event), he also is an implausible eunuch. He is most likely the patron himself, Francesco Pisani, centrally placed as an external, yet vital, actor on the stage, like Tommaso Rangone in Tintoretto’s canvases for the Scuola di S. Marco. Following the iconographical tradition of the University of Venice, Terribile identifies the significance of every figure, animal and object in the painting. This is the weakest part of her argument. While the overall presentation of the meaning of the painting is well argued and convincing, she seems to give too much prominence to some of the features in it. The horses refer to animal instincts and their taming, the dwarf represents everything bad and evil, the monkey is a symbol of female lust, while even the siren on the shield to the right is ‘a special space’ for Veronese ‘to lay claim to the prerogatives of his profession, glorify his art, state his own intellectual autonomy’. It is more tempting, however, to believe that even though the painting was carefully and intelligently planned to provide an important message, many of its details were purely decorative. The youngest princess – who Goethe described as ‘a pretty little mouse with a defiant expression’ who ‘looks as if she was not at all pleased at coming last’ – seems to be more worried about her toy-dogs, which a court dwarf is shielding from the nearby monkey, than about her family’s tragic reversal of fortune. Surely this is a witty vignette that cannot be charged with a substantial meaning. The monkey is interesting in itself as an animal. As noticed before, the same exact creature appears in other paintings by Veronese, most notably in the Feast in the house of Simon in the Galleria Sabauda in
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Turin, in the Sala dell’Olimpo at Villa Barbaro at Maser, in Sebastian exhorting Marcellus and Marcellianus to go to their martyrdom in S. Sebastiano in Venice and in the Feast of Gregory the Great at Monte Berico in Vicenza. This is a very specific animal, faithfully represented, and it is worth considering that Veronese may have portrayed a precise monkey, owned maybe by one of his patrons – possibly a diplomatic gift from the East. Thanks to Terribile’s research – and to Penny’s exemplary catalogue entry – the Family of Darius has come out of the historical fog, which still shrouded it only thirty years ago. Such a fundamental and beautiful picture deserves so much attention and study. What Henry James wrote about the painting holds true to this day: ‘You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace’. 1 C. Gould: ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ by Paolo Veronese. A résumé, some new deductions and some new facts, London 1978. 2 R. Cocke: ‘Veronese’s “Family of Darius” at the National Gallery’, The Burlington Magazine 120 (1978), pp.325–29; and C. Gould: ‘Veronese and “The Family of Darius’”, ibid. 120 (1978), p.603. 3 W.L. Barcham and C.R. Puglisi: ‘Paolo Veronese e la Roma dei Barberini’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 25 (2001), pp.57–87. 4 C. Terribile: ‘La “Famiglia di Dario” di Paolo Veronese: la commitenza, il contesto, la storia’, Venezia Cinquecento 15 (2005), pp.63–107. 5 N. Penny: National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings. Volume II. Venice 1540–1600, London 2008. 6 B. Brunelli and A. Callegari: Ville del Brenta e degli Euganei, Milan 1931, p.337. 7 I would like to thank the owner of the palace for allowing me to visit the interior of the house in September this year. 8 For this reading, see J. Fletcher: ‘Review of “Painting in Renaissance Venice” by Peter Humfrey’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 138 (1996), p.135. 9 J.P. Richter: ‘“The Family of Darius” by Paolo Veronese’, ibid. 62 (1933), pp.181–83.
Le ‘Stanze’ di Guido Reni: Disegni del maestro e della sua scuola. By Babette Bohn, with a preface by Charles Dempsey. 235 pp. incl. 116 col. + 83 b. & w. ills. (Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 2008), €48. ISBN 978–88–222–5777–2. Reviewed by CATHERINE JOHNSTON
suggests, this catalogue of an exhibition of drawings from the Uffizi examines the graphic œuvre of Guido Reni and his pupils. In addition it includes a handful of
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drawings by his teachers, Denys Calvaert and the three Carracci, and others by his contemporaries trained at Palazzo Farnese, who in turn assisted Reni in the execution of frescos for the Borghese in Rome. The selection of material was entrusted to the able hands of Babette Bohn, author of the catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Lodovico Carracci. There were a number of loans from other Italian institutions and the accompanying catalogue boasts a new, enlarged format reproducing drawings for the most part in colour. It features fifty-two sheets traditionally, and occasionally newly, attributed to Reni. Curiously, there is also a questionable cartoon for Erigone (cat. no.52) from an American private collection, taking us into the realm of tempera and oil when the inclusion of a drawing from the nearby Marucelliana Library, identified by a former Director of the Uffizi print room as Reni’s proposal for the cupola of the Cappella Paolina in S. Maria Maggiore, would have better served the argument.1 A similar number of drawings are devoted to Reni’s assistants Gessi, Sementi and the faithful Sirani, as well as to other, lesserknown pupils who passed through his studio, however briefly. It is no secret that none of these artists attained the status of the master. When this reviewer prepared an earlier catalogue of Bolognese drawings at the Uffizi (1973), few of Reni’s students were yet studied. The exceptions were Simone Cantarini of Pesaro and Domenico Maria Canuti, the first a prolific draughtsman favouring red chalk with a surprisingly fertile imagination who died prematurely; the second a ceiling fresco painter of renown both in Rome and Bologna. They are still the only ones to have risen above provincial status, with the possible exception of Cagnacci who finished his days in Vienna, but who is ill-represented in this catalogue. Nevertheless, it is in the work of the pupils that the novelty of the selection lies, in that Reni’s drawings are already known through exhibitions in Vienna2 and Frankfurt3 and various articles published in this Magazine.4 In the intervening years much literature has appeared on these Bolognese followers, most of it local, but faithfully cited by Bohn in her entries. Not all the students were slavish imitators seeing things only through their master’s eyes as the name of the Italian optometrist, Guidoreni vision group, might suggest. Rather, drawings by Cervi, Savonanzi, Tamburini, Boulanger, Brunetti, Bolognini, Cittadini and Canuti display an independent spirit perhaps due to the fact that the artists moved on from the immediate sphere of Reni’s influence. An appendix comprises seventy-six drawings with summary entries, all of them illustrated. Given the nature of much of the Uffizi material emanating from Bologna over a relatively short period, and the current print room Director’s long experience in Bologna, it might have been helpful to address the question of the makers and suppliers of paper in that city, systematically recording paper marks where discernible.
Some comments on specific works follow: no.6: Study for St Catherine in the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’. No wheel is indicated for the saint, yet the arm and drapery beneath it seem to be supported by something as in the painting, where the wheel is evident, suggesting this may be a copy after it. No other redchalk drawing by Reni is known from so early a date. no.15: Study for a prophet in the Cappella dell’Annunziata, Palazzo del Quirinale. A copy. no.17: Nude half figure for the ‘Triumph of Narses’ fresco in the Cappella Paolina, S. Maria Maggiore. By comparison with no.18, the softer and looser handling of the chalk points to a later period in the artist’s career, perhaps at the time of the painting the Fall of the giants. no.53: Fall of the giants. A recently discovered drawing for the same subject in black chalk on blue paper5 is more typical of Reni’s hand and must date earlier in the creative process than this drier, more finished study in red chalk for the woodcut by Coriolanus. no.55: Study for Ariadne. It is regrettable that this splendid red-chalk study was not reproduced in colour. no.69: Four male nude figures suspended in air. Whether by Reni or Sementi, this group of intertwined figures is in direct relation to those in the upper right of Philippe Thomassin’s engraving of Rebel angels, but in reverse.6 no.72: Presentation study for the pediment fresco on the façade of S. Maria del Baraccano. Stylistically this finished design strongly resembles the hand of Francesco Brizio and compares well with a pen study of the same subject in Stockholm there given to him.7 Perhaps a clue to the confusion over authorship can be found in the inscription on the verso of another sheet from the same source ‘Disegno della faciata del portico del Barachano fatta rifare [. . .] l’anno 1621 / fatta dal Gessi’, suggesting that climate had damaged the original fresco which thus required repainting. no.104: Study for Nessus and Dejanira. A surprisingly vigorous study in wash for G.A. Sirani’s painting of the subject. nos.106 and 107: An elderly bearded man looking up to the left and An elderly bearded man looking downwards left: two fine head studies in black chalk also by Sirani. no.111: Draped female head study for the ‘Allegory of Earth’ fresco at S. Michele in Bosco. A rare occasion when Canuti exhibits an obvious debt to Reni through his delicate handling of red and black chalks. Appendix no.31: Seated youth seen from behind. Could this be the sheet Ranuzzi described as ‘Bella fig.a, in schiena.lapis rosso/di Guido’ (p.578v, no.55)? While Michael Jaffé published the drawing as Reni (and indicated a copy after it in Copenhagen), the present reviewer proposes instead it is by Cavalier d’Arpino (and not Boulanger as advanced in the catalogue). 1 A. Forlani Tempesti: ‘Guido Reni, Cerano, Giovanni di San Giovanni: tre schede seicenteschi . . .’, Antichita Vivà 33/5 (1994), p.43, fig.1. 2 V. Birke: exh. cat. Guido Reni: Zeichnungen, Vienna (Albertina) 1981; reviewed in this Magazine, 123 (1981), pp.573–77. 3 S. Ebert-Schifferer, A. Emiliani and E. Schleier, eds.: exh. cat. Guido Reni und Europa; Ruhm und Nachruhm, Frankfurt am Main (Schirn Kunsthalle) 1988; reviewed in this Magazine, 131 (1989), p.168. 4 Most recently, see A. Sutherland Harris: ‘Guido Reni’s Royal patrons: a drawing and a proposal’, the burlington magazine 151 (2009), pp.156–59. 5 M.T. Caracciolo in G. Bora: I disegni del Codice Bonola del Museo Nazionale di Belle Arti di Santiago di Cile, Rome 2008, no.32. 6 M. Bury: exh. cat. The Print in Italy 1550–1620, London (British Museum) 2001, no.101. 7 P. Bjurström et al.: Italian Drawings: Florence, Siena, Modena, Bologna, Stockholm 2002, no.1312.
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Dulwich Picture Gallery: British Catalogue. By John Ingamells. 287 pp. incl. 219 col. + 21 b. & w. ills. (Unicorn Press, London, 2008), £24.95. ISBN 978–1–906509–02–6. Reviewed by MARTIN POSTLE
John Ingamells polished off the catalogue of mid-Georgian portraits in London’s National Portrait Gallery, 1760–90 (National Portrait Gallery, 2004), than he ventured south of the capital to begin work on the present volume; the first of three catalogues of the collection at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Dulwich was Britain’s first public picture gallery, founded in 1811, some thirteen years before London’s National Gallery. At that time the collection comprised three bequests: that of Edward Alleyn (1566–1626), founder of the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich; William Cartwright (1607–86); and Sir Francis Bourgeois, who gave his own collection and that of his close associate, Noel Desenfans. From the outset, it contained a wealth of European works by artists such as Claude Lorrain, Cuyp, Poussin, Rembrandt, Guido Reni and Watteau. The British component, however, was not significant, with the exception of a few works by Van Dyck and a Gainsborough portrait. Indeed, as Ingamells notes, while the Bourgeois Bequest contained around 370 paintings, only forty-seven were British. Of these British works, nearly half were by Bourgeois, who, as the present catalogue reveals only too well, was an artist of limited ability. Over the past two hundred years, however, the British works at Dulwich have grown in quality and quantity, so that they now comprise around forty per cent of the entire collection, and include some of the Gallery’s finest objects. A catalogue devoted to British works in the collection is therefore fully justified. Although Ingamells’s catalogue is the first to concentrate exclusively upon Dulwich’s British art holdings, certain key works have been a constant focus of critical attention since the early nineteenth century. In 1824, in his Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England, William Hazlitt lighted upon Reynolds’s Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse (DPG318), a picture which ‘appears to us to resemble neither Mrs. Siddons, nor the Tragic Muse’. And while Hazlitt believed that Mrs Siddons, the actress, was ‘tragedy personified’, her portrait by Reynolds, he averred, was ‘in a bastard style of art’. More politely, and with greater enthusiasm, Ingamells regards Mrs Siddons as ‘perhaps Reynolds’s most successful attempt to reconcile his ambition as a history painter with the necessary business of portraiture’. When, in 1999, the Getty brought together the prime version of Mrs Siddons from the Huntington and its Dulwich cousin and subjected them to close technical analysis, it became clear that the latter was, at best, a pale imitation of the original.1 It is all the more fascinating, therefore, to recall that Noel Desenfans, in 1790, purchased Reynolds’s original portrait of Mrs Siddons on behalf of the French statesman Charles Alexan-
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33. A lady as a shepherdess, by John Greenhill. c.1665. Canvas, 94.3 by 73 cm. (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London).
dre de Calonne. As he did so – or just before the purchase – Desenfans appears to have commissioned the copy now at Dulwich, which (just to confuse matters) bears the inscription, ‘REYNOLDS PINXIT 1789’ – some five years after Reynolds signed and dated the original. In his entry, Ingamells describes the portrait of Mrs Siddons as ‘Studio of Reynolds’, indicating correctly that the picture is not by Reynolds but a copy made by an artist working in his studio. Hitherto, and notably in David Mannings’s catalogue raisonné of 2000,2 the picture has been ascribed to Reynolds (with its own catalogue entry), albeit with the proviso that it contains a good deal of studio assistance. In fact, Reynolds probably did not so much as point his paintbrush in the direction of the picture. Such attention to detail on the part of Ingamells, while downgrading effectively the status of Dulwich’s picture, is commendable. As Ingamells acknowledges, his catalogue owes a debt to research into the collection undertaken by previous authors. In recent years, he singles out particularly the invaluable contribution of Giles Waterfield, Director of the Gallery from 1979 to 1996, who not only put Dulwich back on the map as a museum of international repute but carried out and encouraged, among other things, new research into aspects of the British collection in such memorable exhibitions as A Nest of Nightingales (1988), which focused upon the Linley Bequest, and Death, Passion and Politics (1995), based on Van Dyck’s Venetia, Lady Digby. In addition, Ingamells flags up two previous catalogues of the collection, Peter Murray’s of 1980, and Richard Beresford’s more lavishly illustrated and funded version, published in 1998. In both Murray’s and Beresford’s catalogues the objects are organised alphabetically by artist, irrespective of school, although as a comparison reveals – and as Murray acknowledged – the former contained only those pictures which were actually on exhibition in the Gallery, or ‘which might be exhibited on
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occasion’. This meant, for example, that Sir Francis Bourgeois’s entire œuvre was omitted, as were most of Edward Alleyn’s pictures. In Ingamells’s catalogue, by contrast, no stone is left unturned, and while Alleyn’s bequest cannot be described in artistic terms as ‘God’s gift’, it is fully documented and illustrated here (in colour) for the first time. For the casual reader, an initial frustration presented by the current catalogue is that the works are not organised in alphabetical order by artist, but by bequest; beginning with the Alleyn Bequest of 1626, and moving through the successive bequests of Cartwright, Bourgeois, Linley and Fairfax-Murray, to individual historic and recent acquisitions, as well as the inevitable Dulwich College portraits, miniatures, (selected) drawings, sculptures and works either lost, destroyed or purloined. Yet, while the division into works by acquisition means that one cannot locate, for example, Gainsborough’s works together in one place, this is a small price to pay for the greater intellectual pleasure in being able to understand at a glance how the collection developed and the distinguishing features of its various components. The Alleyn Bequest, although it forms the bedrock of Dulwich Picture Gallery, remains the least well-known aspect of the collection, because the pictures are unattributed, in poor condition and, for the most part, still scattered throughout Dulwich College in private apartments. They are mostly undistinguished, not least the job lot of assorted English monarchs and Sibyls. The Cartwright Bequest, also dating from the seventeenth century, contains some forty-eight works described in the present catalogue as ‘British’. The quality of the works here is varied, although of a considerably higher calibre than Alleyn’s gift. Indeed, it contains a number of gems, notably A lady as a shepherdess (DPG399; Fig.33), by John Greenhill – an artist patronised extensively by Cartwright, whose own portrait, also attributable to Greenhill (DPG393), is in the Bequest. Cartwright who, like his friend Alleyn, was an actor, also bequeathed a number of theatrical portraits, the most distinguished, as Ingamells indicates, being Nathan Field (DPG385), a highly sensitive work by an unknown hand. The Bourgeois Bequest, which prompted the foundation of Dulwich Picture Gallery, is, as has been stated, bedevilled by the presence of Bourgeois’s own paintings, the ‘most accomplished’, as Ingamells notes kindly, being a Sea shore with rearing horse (DPG335). Of these works, the author has little to say, although this is more than can be said of the two landscapes in the Bourgeois Bequest by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (DPG297 and DPG339), which are not commented upon other than the possible appearance of one of them in the 1765 Paris Salon – that is before de Loutherbourg was even remotely ‘British’. Passing on quickly, one arrives at the Linley Bequest, a small collection of portraits by Gainsborough and Lawrence given to Dulwich by two of Thomas Linley’s sons in 1835, which, at a stroke, gave Dulwich credibility as a locus for Georgian portraiture. Finally, one arrives at possibly the most distinguished bequest to Dulwich, of
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forty-seven portraits, assembled by the artist, collector and dealer Charles Fairfax Murray between 1911 and 1917. As Murray noted at the time, he was less concerned with the identity of the sitters, or the reputation of the artists, than the intrinsic qualities of the works in question. Murray’s bequest included the arresting portrait of an unknown man, here attributed to Isaac Fuller (DPG569), which graces the cover of the catalogue, and Tilly Kettle’s portrait of Eliza and Mary Davidson (DPG582), which is as fine as anything painted by Romney. Murray’s greatest gift, however, was surely Lely’s Nymphs by a fountain (DPG555) which, despite Ingamells’s concerns over the manner in which ‘the five nymphs seem awkwardly combined’, has always appeared among the artist’s most satisfyingly erotic works, just as his Boy as a shepherd (DPG563) is a painting, as noted by one of its former owners, Horace Walpole, endowed with an ‘impassioned glow of sentiment’. This catalogue of British pictures at Dulwich serves as a reminder of how crucial these works are to the Gallery’s history, and its future. It also reveals once more the considerable cataloguing skills of its indefatigable author. 1 R. Asleson, ed.: exh. cat. A Passion for Performance. Sarah Siddons and her Portraitists, Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum) 1999. 2 D. Mannings: Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, London and New Haven 2000, I, p.415, no.1620.
Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes. By Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire. 338 pp. incl. 105 col. + 185 b. & w. ills. + 230 plans. (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2008), £50. ISBN 978–0–300–12645–7. Reviewed by COLIN AMERY
the country house in Britain continues to exercise scholars and this large volume, published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, is the fruit of the labours of two highly distinguished architectural historians, with the shadow of a third lurking in the wings. Andor Gomme died just after this masterwork was published but it will stand as a lasting memorial to his exceptional talent and unusual approach to architectural history. Alison Maguire wrote her Ph.D. thesis at the Courtauld Institute on the subject.1 In the wings is the presence of the late master of architectural history, Howard Colvin, who inspired the work and encouraged the authors’ thorough approach and who is the book’s dedicatee. The aim of the book is to explore the evolution of country house plans throughout Britain and Ireland from medieval times to the eight eenth century. By understanding and explaining the planning of the houses the authors successfully unveil the way of life of the ownTHE HISTORY OF
ers and their households. Working from drawn plans, it is possible to experience the third dimension of daily activities in the houses and how they shaped the buildings. Mark Girouard was the pioneer of the examination of the country house as more than architecture in his seminal work of 1978, Life in the English Country House, in which he brought social and architectural history together in an immensely readable form. Gomme’s academic background was very broad and culminated in his teaching both English literature and architectural history. At Cambridge he was as much inspired by F.R. Leavis as by Ruskin and he saw architecture as a storehouse of recorded values. For him and his collaborator, apparently opaque plans – there are 230 of them especially measured and drawn for this book – are as capable of meaning and translation as any ancient manuscript. The reader can tell, as the book progresses from fortified donjons and towers to ordered Palladian piles, that the key is the plan. Many of the photographs were taken by the authors over the last three decades, and it is clear that nothing is written about that has not been visited and, in many cases, measured on site. The seven main chapters move chronologically through the social and defensive mores that gradually transformed the medieval plan of hall, chamber and offices, reflecting ranks and cultures, into houses with wings and courtyards when people began to feel safer with their feet on the ground. The authors reveal how intrigued they were by the sudden arrival of formality and the astylar ‘double pile’ house, introduced and named by Sir Roger Pratt (1620–85), which made country houses not accretive but compact, tidy and symmetrical. This book reveals, through intense study of innumerable local examples, that the story of the transformation of the vernacular country house into a formal pile, which some historians have tended to simplify, is in fact very complex. The authors explore a long period of experiment by builders and by the families for whom they worked to create houses that were adaptable for a changing class and social system. The complexity of the story almost needs threedimensional models to help visualise the way houses have physically reflected social change. And at times the book’s detail on a huge range of examples in an admirable effort to be definitive, is almost overwhelming. The authors’ personal visits to measure the built evidence of social change give the book something of the character of a scholarly journey, and the reader is invited to join the authors as they wander up and down the back stairs, attics and ‘rustic’ lower floors. Service rooms are as intriguing to them as the formal rooms. Architectural style impinges only when it imposes formality on the plans of the houses from the mid-seventeenth century. The Tudor gentleman was happy to live in a house the style of which was merely an elaborate version of the common architectural language of Tudor England, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century as Vanbrugh and the Baroque went out of fashion and Palladianism
arrived, imposed architectural style became a new uniform for country houses that gradually also changed their internal planning. The reader will have to become familiar with the six types of plan – ‘the square pile; the simple spinal double pile; the triple pile; the axial hall; the state centre; and the state centre with pavilion’ that dominated the seventeenth century. By the end of the book there is a strong sense that the authors are longing for the decline of the formulaic plan and the stasis of the eighteenth century. A return to Romantic asymmetry in the nineteenth century is just hinted at in the last chapter, but this is such a complex subject that it would make a natural sequel to this exhaustive study. 1 A. Maguire: Country House Planning 1660–1700, London 1992.
Richard Parkes Bonington. The Complete Paintings. By Patrick Noon. 480 pp. incl. 403 col. + 133 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2008), £85. ISBN 978–0–300–13421–6. Reviewed by STEPHEN DUFFY SINCE THE MID- 1980S it has been increasingly recognised that Bonington painted some of the most breathtakingly beautiful pictures of his era, while there has also developed a deeper understanding of his crucial role in the crosscurrents between British and French culture after the Napoleonic wars. In this welcome reappraisal – or perhaps one should say rehabilitation, for many of his contemporaries, including Delacroix, knew it perfectly well – no one has played a role as significant as Patrick Noon. First he was responsible in 1991 for the revelatory exhibition at New Haven and Paris that transformed our perception of Bonington by showing a superb array of his oils, watercolours, prints and drawings next to a few carefully chosen complementary works by Isabey, Huet, Delacroix and others. Then he was the chief curator and instigator of the exhibition Constable to Delacroix. British Art and the French Romantics, held in London, Minneapolis and New York in 2003–04, in which Bonington was inevitably among the main attractions. Now he has produced a complete catalogue of Bonington’s oils and watercolours, the fruit of several decades’ conscientious labour spent resolving properly for the first time the extent and character of the artist’s œuvre. The task that Noon set himself was not easy. Bonington’s works are scattered far and wide; the few exhibited in his lifetime were often shown under the vaguest of titles; and, above all, as Noon himself acknowledges, he faced the ‘crucial challenge’ of discrediting countless misattributions. As early as 1824, four years before his death at the age of twenty-five, Bonington was said by the critic Auguste Jal to have ‘created a mania [. . .]; he has proselytes and imitators’, and for at least the next twenty years, a profusion of copies, fakes and innocent efforts
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in a disconcertingly similar style was turned out by a host of British and French artists. As Noon himself admits, ‘a catalogue raisonné is ever a work in progress’, but it is to his great credit that, thanks to the ‘very rigorous selection criteria’ which he has rightly applied here, we now at last have a convincingly defined body of work to attach to Bonington’s name. On a shelf this handsome new volume sits comfortably next to the 1991 catalogue of which it is evidently in part a revision. The work of the same designer (Derek Birdsall), it has the same height and width, and even shares the same typeface, although now white has replaced pale cream paper. Noon has taken the opportunity to amend and update his original introductory essay, sometimes changing only a word or a phrase, but also adding new passages, such as a paragraph on the Prix de Rome, for which, to Noon’s evident approval, Bonington decided not to compete. Most significantly, he has included documentary material which was previously unavailable to him. The most extensive of these new sources (only scraps of which have been published before in 1924) are the letters that Charles Rivet, Bonington’s companion on a tour of northern Italy in 1826, wrote home to his family during their journey. They tell us frustratingly little about Bonington’s artistic aims and practices, but they do help establish more accurately the route the two men took and give some idea of the diligent routine of study that Bonington in particular adopted in Venice. Although his refusal to learn the language and his insistence on tea and beefsteak make him seem the archetypal English tourist, he evidently adored Venice, where he wished to stay longer, but Rivet insisted that they move on. The importance of Bonington’s pioneering role in making the city one of the key inspirations of nineteenthcentury painting has still to be sufficiently recognised, but not the least of the services performed by Noon’s catalogue is to reproduce all the known oil-sketches that he painted there in the open air. As original as they are beautiful, it is sad and even shameful that none belongs to a British public collection. Noon catalogues his 415 entries in five sections: landscapes in watercolour; landscapes in oil; Italian subjects in both media; figure subjects in watercolour; and finally figure subjects in oil. Wash drawings, some of which have barely been touched by the brush, are included among the watercolours. Noon states that, apart from the Italian section, ‘individual works appear chronologically within these categories’, but in fact this is not always the case, and it is questionable that the division into sections is better than an overall chronological approach, which would have given a more coherent account of the artist’s development. Bonington’s career was so short that his watercolours can be dated over only ten years and his oils over just half this time. Inevitably, even within such narrow timescales, there are perils with an artist who only occasionally dated his works. It was with wry amusement as well as some dismay that the present reviewer read that his dating to c.1825 of the Wallace Collection’s On the Seine near Mantes (cat. no.167) in his
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own book on Bonington was too late, whereas in fact, rather against his better judgment, he took the dating from Noon’s 1991 catalogue (c.1823–24, as now suggested, is indeed preferable). The only landscape in oil to be dated specifically by Noon to the year 1824 is A fishmarket near Bologne (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; no.171), one of the artist’s finest coastal scenes. Perhaps this is a reflection of Noon’s earlier belief that it was probably shown at the 1824 Paris Salon as Marine. Fishermen unloading their catch, although he now plausibly proposes Tate’s Coast scene with fisherfolk (no.172; dated here c.1824) as this picture, because its dimensions accord better with those submitted to the selection jury and it has an over-painted label which seems to be for its Salon catalogue number. Noon catalogues the Yale painting before that at Tate, but it is surely a more complex, and more accomplished, reworking of the theme essayed in Tate’s picture (which has the better claim to be dated unambiguously to 1824). Noon adds that the Yale painting may have been exhibited excatalogue at the Salon, but does not provide evidence to support this suggestion. These comments, however, as well as a wish that on occasion the author had pushed his discussion of individual pictures a little further, are minor criticisms of a major work of scholarship. Henceforth, just as Turner scholars have their Butlin and Joll and their Wilton numbers, all those who work on Bonington will refer to the Noon numbers of this essential catalogue.
The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors – Goya to Picasso. Edited by David Howarth, with contributions from Nicholas Tromans, Claudia Heide, Hilary Macartney, Paul Stirton and Michael Jacobs. 160 pp. incl. 136 col. ills. (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2009), £14.95. ISBN 978–1–906270–18–6. Reviewed by IAN ROBERTSON
The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors – Goya to Picasso, held at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (18th July to 11th October), was accompanied by a visually attractive and well-designed catalogue, illustrating a good proportion of the paintings that were on display. Unfortunately, a deal of confusion is immediately caused by the inclusion of too many that were not, but which were merely referred to in one or other of the complementary essays. These articles endeavour to establish the validity of their speculations apropos the influence of Spanish painting on the British artists concerned, but in many cases are not convincing. In his introductory essay, ‘The Quest for Spain’, David Howarth has attempted to define the progress of British interest in Spanish art during the over-lengthy period covered by the exhibition. Regrettably, the
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activities of British collectors are unsatisfactorily documented, and the text is further impaired by the inclusion of numerous minor errors of fact. Henry Swinburne is referred to as ‘the first British writer to do well out of the country’ [sic], whatever that is intended to imply, for he was merely writing up his Peninsular perambulations, as did other late eighteenth-century travellers – those curiosos impertinentes – none of whose works is listed in the bibliography, nor is Memoirs of Painting (1824) by ‘the famously successful picture agent William Buchanan’, which one might have expected to find. Samuel Edward Cook (later Widdrington) had devoted many pages to Spanish artists in his Sketches of Spain (1834), and had actually ridden well off the beaten track to view the Zurbaráns at Guadalupe: but he is ignored. Richard Ford, who had acquired Zurbarán’s St Serapion (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford CT) among other canvases, later found such religious subjects distasteful, and sold several of them. Why, one wonders, were the theatrically costumed four ‘Sons of Jacob’ (in which Zurbarán’s assistants must have had by far the major hand) included in the exhibition: they have hardly been influential, and how they pale in comparison to his saints! Ford also condemned El Greco’s œuvre as being ‘very unequal’, which few would dispute: ‘what he did well was excellent, while what he did ill, was worse than any body else’; his figures ‘often more lengthy than Fuseli, and as leaden as cholera morbus’. No mention is made of Ford’s concise ‘Life of Velazquez’, contributed to The Penny Cyclopaedia in 1843, nor, of his reviews, such as ‘Head and Stirling on Spanish Art’, published in the Quarterly Review of 1848, to mention one only; nor any reference to the lithographs by Lake Price in his Tauromachia, or The Bull Fights of Spain of 1852, to which Ford contributed an explanatory text, and which presumably brought the subject to the notice of later artists in search of such typical themes. In 1851 Ford was tempted to buy five lots at the Meade sale, with the excuse that they were ‘positively thrown away, for the taste for Spanish art has not yet commenced’, an opinion he was to reiterate later in the Athenaeum, stressing that paintings of the Spanish School were still ‘far from being understood or appreciated’ in Great Britain, where we turned ‘with true Protestant abhorrence from bleeding monks and martyrs hairy to the sweet Italian portraits of the Virgin Mary’. William Stirling and Richard Ford are properly recognised as being immensely influential in promoting an interest in Spanish art to the ‘happy few’ – those who had the money and taste to appreciate and acquire it. Admittedly, some collections had fallen fortuitously into the hands of their owners, as had the canvases picked up by Wellington at Vitoria and later hung in Apsley House: to accumulate such paintings impressed and gave cultural cachet. Ford, when later describing that collection, intimated that the Duke, although ‘devoid of any high aesthetic perceptions, and no judge of fine art’, at least ‘never uttered one syllable of the cant of connoisseurship’.
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Howarth demeans himself by making the gratuitous statement (p.24) that Stirling and Ford ‘were only two of many celebrated British visitors to the country who had multiple casual sexual liaisons, something for which the country was famous’, without providing evidence to support such allegations. One turns with relief to Tromans on Goya’s Disasters of War, but with less enthusiasm for the shovel-hatted clerics of David Wilkie’s insipid art, however fashionable and in demand by the undiscriminating newly rich of the time: his melodramatic canvases now hang like wet blankets. Ford referred to Wilkie as the ‘canny Scot’, who achieved ‘fame and fortune by painting what his patrons desired to have’. Far better delineated were the picturesque romanticised scenes by John Frederick Lewis, on which Claudia Heide digresses, but surprisingly the equally fine draughtsmanship of George Vivian (1798–1873), who deserves recognition, is not referred to. In vain will one look, here or elsewhere, for any description of the numerous prints and caricatures produced during Peninsular-wartime Spain, any evaluation of their impact, or of portraits of British generals. Although Lewis copied several works by Velázquez in the Prado, any actual influence is hardly discernible. Too often, his paintings and lithographs – as well as in the many other albums published at that period, including the exaggerated views by David Roberts – are peopled by majos and contrabandistas, with perhaps a friar here, a beggar or gipsy there, treated like props to be rearranged to satisfy the market for the stereotype. These are avoided by John Phillip in his simple street scenes in Toledo and Segovia, which are preferable to the majority of his more ambitious works, often overcharged and contrived, however technically proficient he may have been. A small selection of historically valuable photographs taken in the late 1850s and early 1860s of Spain, as seen through the objective lense of Charles Clifford, provided a refreshing alternative to the fanciful and sentimental Victorian perception of the country as imagined and represented in many of the works that were shown. Heide also writes on Islamic architecture in Andalusia, concentrating on the Alhambra, and its decoration as interpreted by Owen Jones, a very questionable influence. Noteworthy, but too brief, and concerning works of art painted far earlier than the parameters set for the exhibition, is Hilary Macartney’s essay on the ‘Discovery’ of Spanish art of the Golden Age, although we are now surfeited by Murillo’s snotty urchins and simpering Virgins. Paul Stirton describes the ‘cult’ of Velázquez, whose works Whistler claimed had so much influence on him, and this is occasionally demonstrable, as in his portrait of Carlyle (illustrated but not exhibited), while Stirton claims that Velázquez also inspired Sargent and Lavery, among others. In the final essay, the same critic expatiates on British artists and the Spanish Civil War, in which we find examples of the anguished and tormented art of both Edward Burra and
Wyndham Lewis, together with a Surrealist work by John Armstrong. The penultimate essay, by Michael Jacobs, concentrates on Sargent (again), Melville, Brangwyn, Joseph Crawhall, Picasso’s Weeping woman, dating from 1937 (the same year as Guernica), and David Bomberg’s tawny views. Conspicuous among other artists referred to are Muirhead Bone, and also William Nicholson, whose Jennie as Infanta (1910) could well have been chosen to accompany Millais’s earlier Souvenir of Velasquez [sic]. Although space is wasted in the book by reproducing details of exhibits hardly requiring amplification, in general the works reproduced, both colourful and sombre, give a rough idea of the range of influences, however slight, which may have proceeded from Spain: all tastes and distastes are catered for. A scratch chronology (in which no artist is listed after John Phillip other than Picasso and Bomberg) is appended to the catalogue, followed by an exhibition checklist, in which no reference is made to the provenance of the paintings concerned. The bibliography is quite inadequate.
The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian AvantGarde Art & The Icon Painting Tradition. By Andrew Spira. 224 pp. incl. 90 col. + 40 b. & w. ills. (Lund Humphries, London, 2008), £48. ISBN 978–0–65331–975–7. Reviewed by CHRISTINA LODDER
is a tour de force, providing an invaluable study of a very important subject. The author argues convincingly that the icon was fundamental to the way in which Russian avant-garde artists sought new means of expression, and he pursues his argument with enthusiasm, intelligence and insight, reinforcing it with a range of compelling visual comparisons. His focus is not the icon as it had become by the beginning of the twentieth century – an aesthetically debased, mass-produced artefact – but the icon of old Russia, before it had begun to assimilate naturalism and conventions such as single-point perspective from Western art in the seventeenth century. In his first chapter, Spira summarises the philosophical, theological and aesthetic bases of icon painting and its history in Russian culture. With a praiseworthy concern for issues of continuity, his examination of the icon’s impact begins with the nineteenth century, highlighting the way in which it supplied the means of communicating with the masses, establishing art as part of the national tradition and emphasising the national basis of art. At the same time, the author also explores the spirituality and Christian themes in the work of artists like Nikolai Kramskoi and Nikolai Ge. The main body of the book is devoted to figures such as Marc Chagall, Naum Gabo,
ANDREW SPIRA’S BOOK
34. Design for the stage set for Liturgie, by Natalia Goncharova. Watercolour, pencil, cut and pasted paper and foil on cardboard, 55.2 by 74.6 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; copyright ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2007).
Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin, although the author also extends his discussion to Varvara Stepanova’s Constructivist fabric designs, Bela Uitz’s works on the Luddite hero ‘The Great Enoch’, and the paintings of the émigré artist Nikolai Obukhov. Spira’s principal focus is the creative assimilations of the icon tradition in terms of compositional features, techniques and spirituality. Some of his most eloquent and inspired text concerns Malevich and draws illuminating parallels between icon painting and the artist’s Suprematist canvases of coloured geometric forms on white grounds. Spira suggests that the eight-pointed, Orthodox cross is the key to many Suprematist compositions and is particularly eloquent on The black square, which Malevich called ‘the icon of my times’.1 The author compares the display of Suprematist canvases at the 1915 Zero-Ten exhibition to the arrangement of icons on the iconostasis – the screen that divides the laity from the clergy in an Orthodox Church, and was defined by the theologian Pavel Florensky as the membrane separating the visible from the invisible world. Spira goes on to compare Malevich’s underlying spiritual and contemplative approach in the ‘white on white’ paintings of 1918 to the monastic meditation undertaken by icon painters, using the artist’s text of 1922, God is not Cast Down, as well as Florensky’s writings to substantiate his observations. He argues that just as the icon is not important as a material representation in itself but is significant only for its relation to the divine world, so Malevich’s ‘white on white’ paintings became subsumed within the spiritual space of non-objectivity. Perhaps it is not surprising that Spira is less interested in the way that the avant-garde also subverted the icon tradition. While he writes perceptively about Goncharova’s designs in 1915 for the ballet Liturgie (pp.134–35; Fig.34), he tends to be less expansive about the more provocative and challenging aspects of her work, which led to her trial for blasphemy in 1914. Likewise, he minimises the sacrilegious aspects of Larionov’s self-portrait in the form of an icon (p.56) and Malevich’s The chiropodist at the baths of 1911–12 (p.68), which is based on Andrei Rublev’s icon The Old Testament
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Trinity of c.1411–20 (p.20). In the Rublev, three angels, representing the Godhead, visit Abraham and are offered a Eucharistic meal. Malevich outraged contemporary sensibilities by using the same compositional format to show three men sitting in a public bath-house, smoking and having their toenails cut, while one lumpy foot rests on the Eucharistic table. Inevitably, a work of this enormous scope involves a rigorous process of selection, and each reader will find subjects or artists that they would have liked to have seen explored in more depth. For instance, why did Jewish artists like Chagall, Gabo and others explicitly refer to icon painting in their works? The answer may be as much institutional as personal, as much a challenge to the establishment as an aesthetic experiment. Equally, it is disappointing that the author does not discuss Gustavs Klucis’s Dynamic city of c.1920 (Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki), a utopian image which is painted on a painstaking prepared icon board and was clearly intended to have a strong metaphysical resonance. Why did Klucis, a member of the Communist Party, paint what is in effect an icon? Such an idealistic statement of personal belief acts as an interesting footnote to Spira’s fascinating discussion of the role that icons played in Communist propaganda, including Klucis’s own highly effective posters of the late 1920s. Such observations are not criticisms, but merely indicate the scale of the subject and perhaps the impossibility of achieving the ambitious task that the author has set himself. In producing a highly stimulating and intelligent book, full of original ideas, new information and penetrating insights, Spira has made a significant contribution to a subject that is fundamental to the history of Russian art. 1 Letter from Kazimir Malevich to Alexandre Benois, May 1916; St Petersburg, State Russian Museum, Manuscript Department; English translation in K.S. Malevich: Essays On Art 1915–1933, ed. T. Andersen, transl. X. Glowacki-Prus and A. McMillin, Copenhagen 1968, p.45.
Publications Received The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-Century Beggar Imagery. By Tom Nichols. 266 pp. incl. 10 col. + 94 b. & w. ills. (Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2007), £60. ISBN 978–0–7190–7582–7. In this well-illustrated study, Nichols surveys the fortunes of the beggar in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century art. Nichols discerns two major trends in such imagery. In northern Europe, beggars are depicted as deceitful vagrants, often roaming the countryside from town to town. Such books as the Liber vagatorum: Der betler orden (first edition c.1510) and Der fielen. Rabauwen, oft der Schalcken Vocabulaer (Antwerp 1563) professed to expose the fraudulent practices of beggars; similar views were expressed, if less overtly, by Bosch and Bruegel and in the prints of Lucas van Leyden. This marks a radical change from the generally positive role assigned to beggars in the social and religious life of the Middle Ages, a change that Nichols attributes to ‘the increasingly work-oriented economies’ of northern Europe after 1500, the enclosure of common land that drove the disenfranchised peasantry into the towns, and the Protestant condemnation of begging, especially by pilgrims and mendicant monks. Public charity passed
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from religious to civic institutions, and private almsgiving was viewed by the reformers as a sinful attempt to purchase God’s favour. In contrast, the Catholic societies of southern Europe followed the traditional identification of beggars as God’s ‘deserving poor’, and almsgiving as an efficacious means of achieving salvation. In the paintings of almsdistributing saints by Veronese and Annibale Carracci, among others, beggars assume prominent compositional roles, their heroic, semi-nude figures often modelled on classical and Renaissance prototypes. Beggars also appear in the secular art of southern Europe after 1580, probably influenced by transalpine models, and the drawings of beggars by Carracci often betray a satirical intent. However, Caravaggio, Ribera and Georges de La Tour depict beggars more sympathetically, in the spirit of the Lazarillo de Tormes and other anti-heroes of picaresque literature. That Nichols’s account of beggar imagery in southern Europe contains some of his most penetrating analyses is not surprising, as his previous work on this subject has focused on Venetian painting. In treating northern images, however, he apparently treads on less familiar terrain. Specialists in Dutch and Flemish art may question his reading of certain images, and there are a few outright errors (‘Hugenberg’ should read ‘Hogenberg’, i.e. Frans Hogenberg, Antwerp printmaker and publisher; and ‘F. Kok and J. Piet’ is actually one person: Jan Piet Filedt Kok). But despite these occasional shortcomings, this is an informative book that should stimulate further research on this topic. WALTER S. GIBSON Architetti e ingegneri a confronto. L’immagine di Roma fra Clemente XIII e Pio VII. Edited by Elisa Debenedetti. 3 vols., each 480 pp. with numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Bonsignori Editore, Rome, vol.I, 2006, vol.II, 2007, vol.III, 2008), each €60. ISBN 978–88–7597–345–8 (2006); 978–88–7597–399–7 (2007); 978–88–7597–409–1 (2008). The publication of the third volume of this study of architects and engineers in Rome between 1750 and 1830 marks the end of some impressive research conducted by Elisa Debenedetti, which aimed to register and interpret the professional architectural milieu during that period. The research started in 1991 with the exhibition In Urbe Architectus (G. Curcio and B. Contardi, eds.: exh. cat. In Urbe Architectus, Rome (Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo) 1991), which took as its subject the built environment, including the maintenance of unexceptional buildings, the improvements to roads and network services and the conservation and repair of historic buildings. This marked a shift of interest from the so-called ‘high architecture’, which is chiefly concerned with buildings of historical importance. The three volumes contain a register of Roman architects operating in the chosen period, which fills a gap in our knowledge. These are divided into two parts, thus reflecting two disciplinary approaches. The first part, written mostly by art historians, is a register of the biographies of the architects and the engineers, based on archival and bibliographical research. The second part, written by architectural historians, interprets the work of the architects and engineers, focusing on specific technical and practical aspects of the building process. Even in this period, when there were no significant building projects, Rome was bursting with activity. Between 1750 and 1830, more than 260 architects are recorded, proposing and promoting new projects, sometimes pleading with institutions that were motivated by pragmatic rather than cultural considerations. Together with the exhibition catalogue Contro il Barocco. Apprendistato a Roma e pratica dell’architettura civile in Italia 1780–1820 (A Cipriani, G.P. Consoli and S. Pasquali, eds., Rome (Academia di San Luca) 2007), these volumes provide a comprehensive image of the architectural environment in Rome at that date and constitute an important step in the definition of European culture after the ancien régime.
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Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron. By Sylvester Bone. 136 pp. incl. 80 col. + b. & w. ills. (Bayham Publishing, 2 St Martin’s Almshouses, Bayham Street, London NW1, 2009), £20. ISBN 978–0–9562894–0–7. Sylvester Bone, himself the son of two artists, Stephen Bone and Mary Adshead, is the author of this attractively produced and written, but all-too-short biography of his grandfather, Sir Muirhead Bone (1876–1953). The volume, in an edition of five hundred copies, with a frontispiece by Francis Dodd entitled Bone at the press, contains reproductions of some seventy examples of Muirhead Bone’s work in a variety of techniques: pencil, charcoal, pen and ink, pastel, chalk, wash, watercolour, etching, drypoint and oil paint, or a mix of more than one. These give us a good idea of the wide range of his output, from sketches of his birthplace, Glasgow, in the late 1890s to his remarkable work as an Official War Artist in both the First and Second World Wars. It is only unfortunate – largely due to cost of production – that so many of the illustrations are printed in a somewhat reduced size, even if the precise dimensions of the originals are provided in the list of plates. Very many of them deserve to be published in larger format, without approaching the size of those reproduced in the two enormous volumes in which Old Spain was issued. The 154 drawings this contained were the result of six visits made to Spain between 1924 and 1928 by Muirhead and Gertrude Bone; but the work, priced at 100 guineas, which precluded any rapid sale, was published by Macmillan in 1936, with the Spanish Civil War in full swing. The 250 copies for sale were disposed of eventually, but not entirely until the late 1960s, when a cache of unsold sets was discovered in a warehouse and virtually remaindered, when they were snapped up by the discriminating bibliophile and collector. Among the many notable drypoints reproduced in this biography are those of The demolition of St James’s Hall and The great gantry, Charing Cross Station, both of the mid-1900s, and A Manhattan excavation and View of Stockholm, dating from the mid-1920s, all fine examples of his consummate artistry and draughtsmanship. Bone was once described by Kenneth Clark as the only British artist who stood comparison with Piranesi, but the quality of his work also brings both Callot and Bernardo Bellotto to mind. Bone not only believed in helping a younger generation of artists to build on the past as he had done, but encouraged and materially assisted several avant-garde artists and sculptors (among them Epstein), trying to get commissions for them and supporting their projects, whether or not he entirely understood their work. A revival of interest in Muirhead Bone is confirmed by the exhibition devoted to him recently at the Fleming Collection, London, which included several examples of the few oil paintings he executed, together with the work of other artists, among them Bomberg, Gertler and Stanley Spencer, who were helped by Bone in their early careers. IAN ROBERTSON
Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks. Edited by Daniel Esterman, with an essay by Hubert Damisch. 280 pp. incl. 83 col. + 4 b. & w. ills. (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2008), $39.95. ISBN 978–0–89236–893–8. Letters and musings from Meyer Schapiro’s European travels in 1926 and 1927, before his rise to fame, provide the material for this publication on the writer and art historian. Virtually illegible scribbles by the young scholar have been painstakingly transcribed by his nephew, Daniel Esterman. Highlights are the reproductions of pages from Schapiro’s travel notebooks, which include many careful drawings of buildings and architectural details, particularly in the Abbaye de Saint-Pierre in Moissac. A.H.
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Turner and the Masters London, Paris and Madrid by CHRISTOPHER BAKER
Turner paid deference to his heroes and competed with his rivals, engaging in artistic duels which often had spectacular results. He considered himself part of an illustrious European tradition and could with confidence draw on painting from seventeenth-century Rome or the Netherlands. Furthermore, Turner delighted in playing the games of one-upmanship that the arena of exhibitions positively encouraged. He also always had a keen eye on the pressing question of what would sell, and as many of his key patrons were enthusiasts for old masters as well as for painters of his own age, to make knowing references to them made sound commercial sense. These considerations underpin the ambitious exhibition Turner and the Masters, seen by this reviewer at Tate Britain, London (to 31st January; then at the Grand Palais, Paris, from 22nd February to 24th May, and the Museo del Prado, Madrid, from 22nd June to 19th September). Aspects of its theme have been explored before, for example in Turner et le Lorrain (2002),1 but this is the first time that the full spectrum of his critical approaches to the art he was stimulated by has been exhibited, with a startling range of loans of high quality. Turner and the Masters is arranged in six austerely installed thematic sections, and the first, ‘Education and Emulation’, establishes Turner’s soaring ambition at the outset of his career. The visitor is immediately confronted with Willem van de Velde the Younger’s A rising gale of c.1672 (cat. no.19) and Turner’s pendant for it, his Dutch Boats in a Gale . . . (the Bridgewater Sea-Piece) of 1801 (no.20). It is hard not to disagree with contemporary critics, who hailed the brilliance of the Bridgewater Sea-Piece, a dramatic statement from a twenty-six year old artist, keen to learn from tradition, but also to out-run it. This sets the tone for all that follows, as the exhibition offers numerous opportunities for relating Turner’s work to that of his mentors and competitors, and encourages visitors to determine when he fell short of or surpassed his models, and, in some cases, whether alternative loans would have illustrated the point being made more effectively. It is in essence an old-fashioned compare-and-contrast lecture boldly translated to the walls of the gallery, which retains all the pleasures and pitfalls of such an exercise. Few artists could THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER
35. Port Ruysdael, by J.M.W. Turner. 1827. Canvas, 92.1 by 122.6 cm. (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; exh. Tate Britain, London).
stand such scrutiny, but Turner emerges as fearless and largely undiminished, and the catalogue deftly contextualises his achievement. It features valuable essays which range from considerations of the opportunities he had to view old masters and contemporary painting in London, to his own role as collector, and his reaction to contemporary French art.2
The second room, ‘The Academy and the Grand Style’, shows him grappling with the masters of classical landscape. It is no surprise that his response to Claude was profound and beneficial, and it is especially effectively illustrated by the pairing of Turner’s Crossing the Brook of 1815 (no.34) with Claude’s Landscape with Moses saved from the waters of 1639 (no.33)
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37. The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (‘Whitehall Stairs, June 18th 1817’), by John Constable. 1832. Canvas, 130.8 by 218 cm. (Tate Britain, London).
– a work he would admittedly only have known through an engraving. What is far less compelling is his reaction to Poussin. In 1802 in Paris, Turner made extensive notes on The deluge of 1660–64 (no.29), but clearly struggled to create an adequate painted response, as his dark and chaotic interpretation (no.30), created three years later, demonstrates. Arguably, the only British artist ever to stand up to Poussin’s model of terror and awe with confidence was Francis Danby, whose vast interpretation of the subject of 1837–40 hangs a few galleries away in Tate Britain. Turner’s
engagement with the third landscape painter offered up here, Salvator Rosa, was subtle and more to do with evoking a frisson of danger and isolation in the wilderness than specific formal debts, and so is not sympathetically illustrated by the blunt comparison on show (nos.22 and 23). In the third section of the exhibition, ‘The North’, Turner’s A Country Blacksmith of 1807 (no.49) represents an engaging riposte to David Wilkie’s Village politicians (no.48) of the previous year. Turner was evidently keen to be judged against a new talent and shows
38. Helvoetsluys; – the City of Utrecht, 64, going to Sea, by J.M.W. Turner. 1832. Canvas, 91.4 by 122 cm. (Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo; exh. Tate Britain, London).
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himself adept at recording the minutiae of a humble rural interior, but his figures have none of the rumbustious vigour of Wilkie’s, who were clearly descendants of David Teniers’s countrymen (no.50). Figure painting also provides the most uncomfortable pairing in this room, that of Turner’s Jessica of 1830 from Petworth (no.44) with Rembrandt’s Girl at a window of 1645 from Dulwich (no.43). It is noted in the catalogue entry that the Rembrandtesque lineage of the Turner passed virtually unnoticed when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. There is a good reason for this as its sources should largely be sought elsewhere; it is perhaps more Rubensian in manner, and may represent a nod to works such as Thomas Lawrence’s Julia, Lady Peel of c.1826–27 (Frick Collection, New York), which was shown at the British Institution in 1830. Rembrandt and Turner fare better earlier in the show, notably through the very striking comparison made between Rembrandt’s Landscape with the rest on the flight into Egypt of 1647 (no.8), probably the first of his painted landscapes that Turner saw, and Turner’s Limekiln at Coalbrookdale of 1797 (no.9); here is a rich and rewarding dialogue, which involves appropriating sacred imagery to generate the sense of wonder created by an early industrial site. Turner is also shown to have produced thoughtful responses to the landscapes of Cuyp (nos.46 and 47) and Watteau (nos.52 and 53), so continually broadening his range of effect and incident. In the section entitled ‘Painters Painted; the Cult of the Artist’ famous examples of his interpretations of Raphael (no.63), Canaletto (no.67) and Watteau (no.64) at work are highlighted. Preposterous and splendid to varying degrees, they are all celebratory and provide a striking contrast with the portrait of Turner himself at the end of the exhibition. This small, robust study by Charles West Cope shows a squat, bluff man in an overcoat perched on a little trestle before an easel. In life Turner was physically an anti-hero, but he clearly sought to be elevated to the pantheon he gradually produced in paint. It included Ruisdael, for whom Turner felt he could not create a biographical image and instead produced a brilliant, oblique ‘portrait’ with his imaginary Port Ruysdael of 1827 (no.70; Fig.35). This picture is cleverly displayed with Ruisdael’s own magnificent Rough sea at a jetty of c.1652–55 (no.69; Fig.36). The terrifying steel-grey sky of the latter contrasts with Turner’s image of slightly greater optimism, its clouds tinged with gold, cream and pinks – thus creating a quieter and more lyrical response to a Dutch seascape than that he had earlier proffered to Van de Velde. ‘Competing with Contemporaries’ tackles the crucible of temporary exhibitions and shows Turner outshining with little difficulty Thomas Stothard (no.76), George Jones (no.79) and Clarkson Stanfield (no.84). However, some competition proved more testing, especially that provided by Constable.
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The 1832 Royal Academy exhibition included his The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (no.71; Fig.37), which was hung beside Turner’s Helvoetsluys (no.72; Fig.38). C.R. Leslie reported that Turner added at the last moment the red buoy in the foreground of his seascape in response to the scarlet accents in Constable’s picture. As the paintings are reunited here for the first time, it is possible to judge the significance of this famous example of brinkmanship. Now that we are far from the excitable atmosphere of a Varnishing Day, Turner’s action appears a rather feeble attempt to unsettle a rival, as Constable’s magisterial panorama fizzes with energy, while Turner’s work is highly competent but relatively tame, even with its splash of red. Turner also met a formidable challenge in the work of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, for whose The Glorious First of June, 1794 of 1795 (no.88) he was engaged to create a pendant. His The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 of 1823–24 (no.89) remains a curious and monumental anomaly in his career; it represents an immense but misplaced effort, resulting in an image that can be read as depicting defeat rather than triumph. It did not match the taste of the artist’s patron, George IV, who preferred to admire immaculate uniforms rather than the reality of the destruction of warfare, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that there were no further commissions from that source. Turner may not have received more Royal patronage or honours, but sought to craft a broader, impressive legacy for himself. In 1829, the year the King gave away his Trafalgar to Greenwich Naval Hospital, Turner drew up his first will, offering the then very young National Gallery two great Claudian pictures to hang beside the seventeenth-century master’s works; this bequest was later adjusted to reflect the dual Italianate and Dutch strands of his inspiration (nos.94 and 103) and dominates the last room of the exhibition. It is a formidable memorial but one that retains an in-built irony because his greatest legacy would prove to be far more radical. The academic tradition from which Turner emerged demanded deference to a canon of exemplars, which he paid in full, and which is amply illustrated by this stimulating show. However, his ego, matched by a meteoric talent, used this process to forge new, riveting forms of painting.
Anish Kapoor London by MARINA VAIZEY
of recent sculpture by Anish Kapoor (b.1954) at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (to 11th December),1 introduced by a room of the early work that initially brought widespread attention to his art, an attention and a success that is now global, is a puzzle. It is a maddening combination of bread and circuses – affecting works of art and expensive, if entertaining, fun-fair foolishness. Kapoor is certainly part of the new establishment, garlanded with honours and, as a Royal Academician himself, a symbol of the RA’s sometimes desperate reaching out to the contemporary. He is among that select handful of sculptors (now mostly all Academicians) who might be called the Lisson School. That London gallery, with careful and imaginative intelligence, has nurtured a generational group who have achieved in several instances not only critical acclaim but commercial and even popular success. And no contemporary British sculptor has contributed more successfully than Kapoor to public sculpture: perhaps he is the unexpectedly natural heir of Henry Moore. It is indeed unprecedented that the main galleries of the Royal Academy, the piano nobile of Burlington House, are wholly given over to a living British artist, and one of beguiling, even exotic heritage: Kapoor was born in Mumbai, his father Rear Admiral DC Kapoor, and came to London in the 1970s to study at Hornsey School of Art for three years and, subsequently, for a year at Chelsea THE MASSIVE SHOW
School of Art. (Incidentally, the first time a monographic exhibition of work by a British artist, alive or dead, occupied Burlington House’s piano nobile was that of Turner for the bicentenary of his birth in 1975. That show changed the perception both of British art and the Royal Academy.) The Kapoor exhibition is undoubtedly an enormous crowd pleaser, and any gallery director, in these days of those politicocultural buzz words, access and inclusion, would be delighted at the spectrum of visitors: this reviewer’s observations over several visits is of a wide demographic in terms of age and background, and the crowds are all very busy talking. And unusually, perhaps, for what seems such an overtly seductive show, with distinct amusement-park elements, everybody is also visibly mildly mystified, and busy reading the gallery guide as they go around. In part this is because, unlike most large exhibitions in public spaces, Kapoor has decreed the most discreet of captions: there are no introductory explanatory paragraphs on the walls of each gallery, but rather a very short list of titles, not easy to find: what is on view is supposed to speak directly. It is not unusual in most reviews of exhibitions to discuss the art on view, with perhaps only a cursory nod to display and presentation; but in the case of this show the spectacle almost overrides and indeed at times even obscures any attempts to critically evaluate discrete pieces. In part this is because of the performative element in the show, and the need to ask the guards just what is going on, or what is the timing for the piece called Shooting into the corner (Fig.39). A deliberately robotic person, dressed all in black, rumoured to be an actor, prepares the shoot every twenty minutes. Here a cartridge of brilliantly coloured red wax is inserted into a cannon-
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I. Warrell: exh. cat. Turner et le Lorrain, Nancy (Musée des Beaux-Arts) 2002. Many of the comparisons made in the exhibition were also explored in the fourth chapter (‘Interpreting the Old Masters’) of J. Gage: J.M.W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’, New Haven and London 1987. 2 Catalogue: Turner and The Masters. By David Solkin, with contributions by Guillaume Faroult, Sara Monks, Martin Myrone, Kathleen Nicholson, Philippa Simpson and Ian Warrell. 240 pp. incl. 170 col. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2009), £25 (PB). ISBN 978–1–85437–7982; £35 (HB). ISBN 978–1–85437–8651.
39. Shooting into the corner, by Anish Kapoor. 2008–09. Mixed media, dimensions variable. (MAK, Vienna, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art; exh. Royal Academy of Arts, London). the burlington m a g a z i n e
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40. As if to celebrate I discovered a mountain blooming with red flowers, by Anish Kapoor. 1981. Wood, cement, polystyrene and pigment, 97 by 76.2 by 160 cm. (Tate, London; exh. Royal Academy of Arts, London).
like device (an arrangement with compressed air cylinders). A big bang ensues and a splatter of red wax is propelled across two galleries. Sometimes the bullet, to put it frankly, just plops, particularly later in the day when the cylinders seem not to be working at full tilt: this can cause a certain amount of merriment. In any event a huge amount of stuff is building up in the Small Weston Room (where the small prints and drawings are usually shown at the RA’s Summer Exhibition) on the wall and the floor. We are told that at the end of the show some twenty tons of red wax will be deposited, the trajectory allowing for a great deal of residue. Part of the subversive pleasure of Shooting into the corner is seeing these very grand rooms messed up with piles of red muck (like a heap of brilliantly coloured mud) and the walls splattered. Visitors’ reactions at one end of the spectrum included domestic concerns over the clean up and, at the other, interpretations of the cannon shoot as a comment on destruction, the futility of war, symbolic blood and so on, expressed almost in semi-comic terms (Oh what a Lovely War!). Shooting into the corner teeters between the dignified and impressive, and the silly (does it represent an infant’s projectile vomiting, or society vomiting blood)? Its impression is curiously arbitrary. The overall anthology has a three-fold thrust: early work, late work and especially commissioned work. If we follow one of the routes available, we enter a room which contains a sampling of the early sculptures which first captured public attention, and which remain, in my view, just as enchanting today, although less surprising. These are forms of a kind of free-hand geometry, constructed out
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of wood, cement and polystyrene and covered with an unfixed coating of the most vividly coloured powder pigments. They are selected from a series called 1000 names. The pigments recall the marvellous market stalls in India, which sell pure powder colour. Radiant and blazing colour is integral to Indian culture, if not landscape, and several major Hindu festivals, Diwali, the Festival of Light, and Holi, in which people throw coloured water over each other, deploy not only light but also fireworks and vibrant colour. Kapoor confines himself to such primaries. Even now, nearly thirty years after the series began, the shock remains of seeing within the white-cube confines of a very grand gallery these coalesced clouds of colour, vaguely recalling animistic fragments. They are placed not just on the floor but also on walls, and very high up, encouraging us to be alert. The display is slightly vitiated by most of the sculptures, which should be directly floor-hugging, having been placed on neutral low-lying white platforms. All are beguilingly beautiful and aesthetically appealing, and subtly evoke an acute apprehension of the course of modern sculpture. Yes, the Victorians, not to mention the Greeks, enjoyed coloured sculpture; yes, the moderns took sculpture off the plinth; and yes, the avant-garde said anything could be sculpture. All this is acknowledged, yet the originality, and dare one say it, charm of the individual pieces of 1000 names beguiles: they are gorgeous, enigmatic, emphatic, vulnerable, fragile and assertive, all at once. And at times, presciently, Kapoor seems to have as much play with the naming game as Damien Hirst: one piece is called As if to celebrate I discovered a mountain blooming with red flowers (Fig.40). Then Kapoor began to take his audience into his sculptures in a far more direct way. One of the biggest galleries is dedicated to a succinct collection of polished metal curved walls, both concave and convex, reflecting the visitors and playing with perceptions of scale, even turning the viewer upside down. The artist calls each of these a Non-object, further identified by what the shape might suggest, e.g. Pole or Door. One is accurately called Vertigo; a wall piece has the literal title Gold mirror. As Kapoor said in an interview on the occasion of the installation of his Marysas, which occupied the whole of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2007, in such a way that no visitor could grasp it as an entity, he is ‘concerned with the way in which the language of engineering can be turned into a language of the body’.2 Indeed Kapoor’s Cloud gate (2004; Millennium Park, Chicago), also of polished steel, is perhaps the single most successful public sculpture of the twenty-first century, successful because it is aesthetically pleasing, wonderfully seductive, huge but unthreatening. Millennium Park has been conceived as a kind of instant South Bank, in the very centre of Chicago, bordered by Frank Gehry’s open-air pavilion for summer performance at one end
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and the rejuvenated and expanded Chicago Art Institute at the other. This bean-shaped, stainless-steel sculpture (nicknamed the Bean), under which people can walk and see themselves reflected, is at its heart. ‘I want to make body into sky’.3 Cloud gate’s scale is just right, as has been the scale of Kapoor’s variously sited Sky mirrors. The sequence of Non-objects at the Royal Academy is a domesticated version of Cloud gate, but the smaller scale diminishes the aesthetic effect, turning some of these pieces into decor. The same problem perhaps applies to the sculpture which greets visitors in the courtyard of Burlington House, Tall tree and the eye, thirteen metres tall. This collection of brightly polished, asymmetrically balanced steel baubles reflects viewers, Burlington House and its own sequences, but is perhaps too reminiscent in scale and sitting of the skilled presentation of public Christmas trees – especially the Victoria and Albert Museum’s and Tate Britain’s annual artist variations on the theme to which we are culturally accustomed. The ambiguity of the artist’s intentions is perhaps most evident in the deep red Svayambh (from, we are told, the Sanskrit, meaning self-generated), a forty-ton cylinder of wax, paint and Vaseline, that moves with excruciating slowness on a track of the same red waxy substance, taking an hour and a half to inch its way through the enfilade of five galleries at the north end of the piano nobile. Svayambh is shaped by the portals it moves through. There are only three galleries of the five in which the visitor can stand or sit to watch (rather like watching paint dry). At no point does health and safety allow us to stand
41. Hive, by Anish Kapoor. 2009. Corten steel, 5.6 by 10.07 by 7.55 m. (Courtesy of the artist, Lisson Gallery, London, and Gladstone Gallery, New York; exh. Royal Academy of Arts, London).
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in such a way that we can see the cylinder full on, approaching or departing; it is a frustrating experience. In much of the later work no potential orifice, or its contents, is left unexplored. Hive (Fig.41), of corten steel, is typically all-enveloping, and of course deliberately impossible to see all around. Untitled (2009), of fibreglass and resin, and inspired by the Laocoön, occupies another room, and suggests writhing intestines embracing a glowingly red hollow form which seemingly plumps for suggesting various orifices, back, front and facial, depending on your turn of mind. Red is of particular importance for, as Kapoor has said, he works ‘with red because it is the colour of the physical, of the earthly, of the body’.4 The recent group of neutrally coloured, grey cement Greyman cries, Shaman dies, billowing smoke, beauty evoked (2008–09), sets each constituent piece on a plywood platform demanding that we negotiate various narrow paths between them. They evoke everything from termite nests to worm casts, fish eggs, coiled intestines and their contents – mildly disgusting and mildly beautiful simultaneously. They invite touch, which is strictly forbidden. Here may be the paradox of the whole show: we are seduced but forbidden consummation. The sculptures almost beg to be stroked, teased and fondled; the spatterings of wax ask to be picked up. But the command is clear: look, don’t touch. Much of what is on view is enjoyable and surprising, but the whole adds up to less than its parts. Ultimately the several monumental sculptures are trivial, and exude a curious air of desperation, a search for something controversial and newsworthy for its own sake. Kapoor has been quoted as saying ‘artists do not make objects, they construct mythologies and it is through their mythologies that we read their objects’.5 But these myths are unexpectedly obvious and banal, and he excuses himself by saying of Svayambh that ‘it has no real subject. Nothing in particular’.6 An artist saying that his work has no meaning? In spite of the technical ingenuity, the imaginative use of unexpected materials, the inventive forms and ravishing colour, in sum, the entire show does Kapoor a disservice, representing a serious artist in ephemeral and fleeting guise. 1
Catalogue: Anish Kapoor. By Homi K. Bhabha, Jean de Loisy and Norman Rosenthal. 192 pp. incl. 100 col. ills. (Royal Academy Publishing, London, 2009), £40 (HB). ISBN 978–1–905711–50–5; £22.95 (PB). ISBN 978–1–905711–51–2; £70 (limited edition). ISBN 978–1–905711–65–9. 2 Anish Kapoor in conversation with Heidi Reitmaier, Tate (September–October 2002), pp.92–93. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Anish Kapoor quoted in N. Baume, ed.: exh. cat. Past, Present, Future, Boston (Institute of Contemporary Art) 2008, p.31. 6 Anish Kapoor in conversation with Giles Tieberghen in exh. cat. Svayambh, Nantes (Musée des Beaux Arts) 2007, p.21.
Women Surrealists Manchester by JAMES BOADEN SINCE THE APPEARANCE in 1985 of Whitney Chadwick’s book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, there has been an avalanche of publishing on the subject – ranging through edited scholarly volumes, essays in exhibition catalogues, collections of historical writings and monographic studies.1 These texts have had a major effect on the way in which the movement as a whole has been exhibited and understood in the last decade. Today it is almost unthinkable to present an exhibition devoted to Surrealist art that did not include work by women such as Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington or Claude Cahun. Women artists were vital to Jennifer Mundy’s 2001 exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound at Tate Modern, for example, where their work illustrated the dialogues of desire formed between figures such as Carrington and Max Ernst, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Patricia Allmer, the curator of Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, at the Manchester City Art Gallery (to 10th January), takes a very different approach, displaying the work of a huge array of women artists with very little reference to their male counterparts within the movement. The darkened exhibition space is divided according to a number of different themes – some of them representing traditional genre categories (‘portraiture’, ‘still life’, ‘landscape’) and others describing topics within the works (‘fantasy’ and ‘interiors’). Within each of these categories works of disparate media, date and geographical origin are mixed together freely. While women were crucial to the initial advent of the Surrealist movement in 1920s Paris – as often not-so-quiet muses for male writers and artists – it is only in the late 1930s that women became active producers within the group, and thus the work of many of the artists in the exhibition has been dismissed as belated and derivative. Barring the extraordinary output of the photographer Claude Cahun, the majority of the best works displayed in Manchester are from the period between 1939 and 1960, when the movement was often perceived as having lost its ideological intent. Rather than challenging these oft-repeated assumptions regarding the originality and political efficacy of these works, the exhibition eschews chronology to sidestep the discussion entirely. The complex question of building a canon of women Surrealists is immediately posed by the first selection of works, which deal broadly with portraiture: both Surrealist women’s representations of one another and their self-representation.2 Among these works are some stunning loans – Carrington’s exquisite Self-portrait (1936–37; cat. no.30) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
depicts the wild-eyed painter in the company of a lactating hyena and flying rocking horse; Eileen Agar’s assembled sculpture The angel of anarchy (1936–40; no.3) – from which the exhibition takes its name – sat to one side, a head shrouded in countless silk shawls, feathers and gee-gaws, watched over by a tiny painted hybrid of the faces of Kahlo and Rivera (Fig.42). The exhibition’s most successful section is devoted, in the main, to portraits of women Surrealists by other women. Dora Maar’s photographs of Leonor Fini; Lola Alvarez Bravo’s assured photographic portraits of Frida Kahlo and her studio; and Claude Cahun’s snapshots of Jacqueline Lamba, the second wife of André Breton, whose works of art were all destroyed by the Surrealist ringleader following their divorce, gave a glimpse into intra-feminine relationships which have been rarely discussed in the growing literature on the movement. The section on ‘Interiors’ explores the way in which Surrealist artists played with ideas of claustrophobia, the domestic uncanny and the family by depicting warped spaces. This idea had been central to Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art, the exhibition curated by David Lomas and Anna Dezeuze at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester earlier in the year. In Lomas’s and Dezeuze’s display several of the assumptions made about the gendered roles of homemaking were seen challenged by Surrealist artists, male as well as female. Angels of Anarchy seemed rather to repeat a number of clichéd positions regarding women in the home, suggesting frustration at being imprisoned and shackled to domestic chores. During the late 1930s and 1940s, when many of the works were completed, women had found new roles during the War – radically shifting the attitudes
42. Diego and Frida (I), by Frida Kahlo. 1929–44. Oil on wood with painted shell frame, 26 by 18.5 cm. (Private collection; exh. Manchester City Art Gallery).
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43. Portrait of space, by Lee Miller. 1937. Photograph, 30 by 27.8 cm. (Lee Miller Archives, Chiddingly, East Sussex; exh. Manchester City Art Gallery).
presented in the exhibition’s framing texts. The ‘Still Life’ works, which included some beautiful Frida Kahlo paintings and Mimi Parent’s Mistress (1996; no.95), a whip constructed from her severed plaited hair – also served as a reiteration of art-historical clichés regarding women’s relationship to the home. Still life, the exhibition texts argue, allowed women to reclaim their domestic sphere from the men who were the legal owners of that space. The presentation of ‘Landscape’ similarly falls back on simplistic ideas of gender roles, seeming to suggest that while men might own the land, women could faithfully embody nature itself. While recourse to such ideas may well suit works such as Ithell Colquhoun’s vaginal tree trunks, it seems illfitting for artists with a developed interest in disguise and artifice, such as Agar and Miller. Miller’s Portrait of space (1937; no.77; Fig.43), a photograph of a mirror suspended on a torn veil obscuring a desert scene, extends her investigation of artificiality and the camera’s mediation from fashion photography into nature itself. In all three of these segments of the show, claims are made for the social and political radicality of the artists and their work. The catalogue tells us that Manchester was the perfect venue for the exhibition because of the city’s connections with the suffrage movement. Yet in the exhibition’s rhetoric those women of a previous generation (including Dada artists such as Hannah Hoch, Emmy Hennings, Sophie Tauber-Arp or the Baroness Elsa) are implied to have left the gender divisions for bohemian women of the 1930s and 1940s firmly entrenched. Many of Surrealism’s women thoroughly questioned the radical claims of first-wave feminists, often advocating a woman’s right to bourgeois pleasures over more broadly social ideals. Other problems within the theoretical framework of the exhibition are best demonstrated by the treatment of Cahun’s ‘selfportraits’ – the startlingly fresh images of the
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artist dressed in a variety of guises ranging from manly drag to cutesy kewpie-doll taken in the late 1920s and 1930s in Paris and Jersey. Tirza Latimer has long argued that the term ‘self-portrait’ is a misnomer for Cahun’s work; research shows that the images were almost always a collaboration between the artist and her adoptive sister, Marcel Moore, who lived with Cahun as her lover.3 These images have been venerated as queer icons by lesbian artists of different generations, from the feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer to the younger performance artist Del LaGrace Volcano. In the exhibition space no mention is made of Moore, and Cahun is stripped of the sexuality that gave her photography, her writing and her little-studied theatrical work such radical force. The overtly lesbian themes in the work of Oppenheim and Toyen are also either played down or silenced throughout the show. The marginalisation of sexuality here, in favour of a conservative version of the politics of gender, is pervasive throughout the exhibition. The turn towards an essentialist model of feminism is surprising, as one of the reasons for the rediscovery of the work of women Surrealists over the last two decades lies in the prescient challenge to binary gender positions the work seemed to offer, and in particular the way in which the roles many of the women occupied in the 1930s chimed with postmodern ideas about the relation between gender and sexuality. There is much in the beautiful catalogue4 that belies the simplifications of the exhibition, and many of the texts add new insights into old problems and introduce new figures to the canon – Donna Roberts’s account of female Czech Surrealists is particularly welcome, while Patricia Allmer’s knowledge of the Belgian situation introduces some beautiful works by Jane Graverol and Rachel Baes. While welcoming the chance to see so much work of rare quality together, I was left feeling as if the movement had been failed twice over – first historically, as the nuance of the artists’ interventions in the 1930s and 1940s was translated into a clumsy battle of the sexes; and secondly, within its postmodern legacy, reduced from a complex questioning of the performance of gender to a simple opposition to patriarchal norms. 1 While published research on women Surrealists first appeared in French in ‘La Femme Surréaliste’, a special issue of the journal Obliques 14–15 (1977), Chadwick’s book has had a wide impact on English-language scholarship; W. Chadwick: Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, London 1985; M.A. Caws, R. Kuenzli and G.G. Raaberg: Surrealism and Women, Cambridge MA 1990; and P. Rosemont: Surrealist Women, London 1998. 2 A Surrealist fixation that provided the focus for Whitney Chadwick in idem, ed.: exh. cat. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self Representation, Cambridge MA 1998. 3 See T. Latimer: Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, New Brunswick 2005, pp.68–104. 4 Catalogue: Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism. Edited by Patricia Allmer. 256 pp. incl. 120 col. + 75 b. & w. ills. (Prestel, London, 2009), £35 (HB). ISBN 978–3–7913–4365–5.
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Oublier Rodin? Paris and Madrid by PATRICK ELLIOTT WAS RODIN THE LAST great nineteenth-century sculptor, or the first great sculptor of the twentieth century? The question is implicit in the title of the recent exhibition held at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris: Oublier Rodin? La Sculpture à Paris 1905–1914 (closed 31st May), which travelled to the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid (closed 4th October).1 The answer, of course, is both, but the question highlights Rodin’s status as an artist simultaneously anchored by tradition and escaping from it. Organised by Catherine Chevillot, chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay and a leading authority on late nineteenth-century sculpture, Oublier Rodin? brought together just over one hundred sculptures by twenty-nine sculptors. The focus was on Paris between 1905 and 1914, when, in just a decade, sculptural conventions were turned upside down and inside out. Rodin was still alive but his manner (the Impressionist touch, the torture, the fragmentary, the ambiguity) had developed into a new kind of orthodoxy; the exhibition sought to show the ways in which younger sculptors rejected his methods, yet also fed off them. This contradictory impulse was explored through judicious groupings, whereby works of similar type – for example heads, torsos, crouching figures and standing figures – were shown together. By adopting this approach, a torso by Rodin could be shown next to a torso by Archipenko, and a kneeling figure by Albert Bartholomé next to others by Brancusi and Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Mixing traditional and avant-garde sculpture of this period is reasonably straightforward (more so than with painting) since almost all the sculptors conformed to the same subject-matter (heads and figures), materials (bronze, stone, plaster and clay) and scale. The point was simple: the subjects were similar, but the treatment had changed, thus raising questions of style and its meaning. France was represented by sculptors such as Maillol, Bourdelle, Matisse, Renoir, Duchamp-Villon, Joseph Bernard and Lucien Schnegg; Germany by Lehmbruck and Bernard Hoetger; Italy by Medardo Rosso and Ernesto de Fiori. There was a substantial Spanish contingent, including Gargallo, González, Clarà, Casanovas and Picasso; and Brancusi, Elie Nadelman, Otto Gutfreund, Zadkine, Lipchitz and Archipenko counted among the East Europeans. A few other sculptors sneaked into the selection, although they were not really part of the Paris scene: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, George Minne and Arturo Martini. The exhibition occupied an awkward set of spaces on the first floor of the Musée d’Orsay (where this reviewer saw it), on the Terrasse Lille, which is basically a broad corridor connecting one end of the museum with the other, acting as a thoroughfare and seating
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44. Standing female figure, by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. 1910. Cement, 194 by 54 by 53 cm. (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
area. The Musée d’Orsay began life as the Gare d’Orsay, and unfortunately the Terrasse Lille retains the authentic feel of a railway platform. It benefits from natural lighting but is otherwise completely unsuited to an exhibition of sculpture since the works had to be presented in a queue of Perspex cases along one side and could not be seen in the round, or from a distance, or in quiet contemplation. The four rooms leading off the terrace were invariably the most successful. The six themes into which the exhibition was divided – ‘Rodinism’, ‘Reliefs’, ‘Mutation’, ‘Volume’, ‘Line’ and ‘War’ – were completely interchangeable, but the section on Rodinism made perfect sense. There were some impressive juxtapositions, notably three almost identical bronze torsos by Rodin, Hoetger and Duchamp-Villon (cat. nos.10–12) and very similar standing figures in plaster by Rodin, Bernard and Lehmbruck (nos.3–5). These scene-setters effectively established the problem faced by sculptors emerging in the early years of the century: to follow Rodin or not? And if not him, who? Maillol pointed the way forward by rejecting movement and fingered modelling in favour of compact, architectonic forms and smooth surfaces. Painters such as Derain, Picasso, Modigliani and Matisse began to make new kinds of art partly inspired by non-Western art; and an influx of émigré artists from Eastern Europe introduced new styles and working methods.
45. Bather with drapery, by Aristide Maillol. 1908/1921. Bronze, 174 by 70 by 45 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Calais; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
46. Young woman carrying a pitcher, by Joseph Bernard. 1905/1912. Bronze, 175 by 40 by 52 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
Although pairing Bourdelle’s Bust of Beethoven (no.7) with Picasso’s Cubist Head of Fernande (no.8) and Maillol’s relief Crouching woman (no.40) with Cubist reliefs by Gutfreund and Duchamp-Villon (nos.47–48) produced striking visual comparisons, the problem with typological displays is that they can give a false sense of homogeneity. Where the Centre Pompidou’s survey show of modern sculpture, Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne? (1986), sought to show the ineluctable drive towards multi-media abstraction and conceptual art, Oublier Rodin? steers the opposite path, emphasising conformity and continuity rather than radical change. The sculptural revolution that occurred in Paris before the First World War was engineered by Picasso, particularly in his assemblages, and by Duchamp. None of this work was on show. Another problem of a typological display is that it can force irrational choices. Thus Maillol’s Mediterranean (no.74), an absolutely crucial work which should have featured at the start of the show, appeared towards the end of it, in order to accompany other crouching figures. By the same token, Bourdelle’s best work, Heracles the Archer (usually on show on the Terrasse Lille) did not feature, presumably because there was no section on movement or athletes. The one sculptor who triumphantly escaped categorisation was Brancusi, whose polished bronze Sleeping muse (no.94) looked like an invader
from another planet and made the adjacent work by Duchamp-Villon and Nadelman look ordinary. If the selection procedure made some of the traditional sculpture look imaginative and some of the avant-garde work look crude (Clarà’s marble carving of a Goddess (no.76) attracted the eye primarily because it was next to a clumsy and damaged woodcarving of a figure in a similar pose by Manolo; no.82), the chief virtue of Oublier Rodin? was that it lingered in the middle ground, presenting figurative sculpture that was neither academic nor riotously avant-garde. Thus sculptors whose dates and styles suit neither the Centre Pompidou nor the Musée d’Orsay earned their place in the spotlight: Despiau, Casanovas, Hoetger, Minne and Gargallo all looked impressive in the company of more celebrated names. A large room devoted to ‘Volume’ looked stunning, with life-size standing figures by Renoir, Bourdelle, Lehmbruck (Standing female figure; no.57; Fig.44), Bernard (Young woman carrying a pitcher; no.56; Fig.46), Maillol (Bather with drapery; no.16; Fig.45) and Ernesto de Fiori (Young standing man; no.58; a revelation from the Kunsthalle Mannheim) parading imperiously down the middle, as if on a catwalk. This room gave an indication of how the show might have looked, had it been allotted grander rooms. If the space and the selection criteria both exerted a constricting effect, the exhibition’s
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Achilles heel was Lehmbruck. He is a giant of a sculptor, but his over-representation was suffocating and strange. Lehmbruck only lived in Paris for five years, from 1910 to 1914, and his influence there was negligible; moreover his greatest works were made after his return to Germany. Yet nearly one in five of the sculptures in the exhibition was by him, many of them were large and they occupied the best ‘sight-line’ spaces. He was also the only artist represented by paintings, drawings and etchings (sixteen works), and five of the seventeen catalogue essays are devoted to him. The impression given was that Rodin had handed the baton to Lehmbruck and that the other sculptors provided a sort of context (a doubly surprising conclusion given that the Musée d’Orsay is often criticised for only championing French art; triply surprising given that no French museum owns a sculpture by Lehmbruck). In fact, this peculiar bias had a more prosaic rationale: the exhibition was co-organised with the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, and was to have toured there. The German venue cancelled at a late moment, but with the loan agreements in place, the selection remained. The exhibition would have benefited enormously had this problem been addressed. 1 Catalogue: Oublier Rodin? La Sculpture à Paris 1905–1914. Edited by Catherine Chevillot. 332 pp. incl. 234 col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, and Hazan, Paris, 2009), €42. ISBN 978–2–7541–0397–8.
Rogier van der Weyden and the Master of Flémalle Frankfurt, Berlin and Leuven by PAULA NUTTALL
2009 H A S B E E N a memorable year for Rogier van der Weyden scholars. By serendipitous coincidence, two independently organised major exhibitions, each very different in intent and content, offered new insights into his formation, output and influence. The first of these, Der Meister von Flémalle und Rogier van der Weyden, shown first at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and subsequently at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (closed 21st June), drew on the exceptional holdings of these two collections, which individually boast some of the core works in the Flémalle/Van der Weyden corpus. Amplified by significant loans from Europe and Amer ica, it brought together nearly sixty paintings associated with these artists. Even though some key works – the Prado Descent from the Cross, the Braque triptych and the London Portraits of a man and a woman (attributed to Robert Campin) – were unable to travel, this was an unprecedented, and almost certainly unrepeatable, achievement, for which the curators, Jochen Sander and Stephan Kemperdick, are to be congratulated. With
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slightly different emphases in its two venues, respectively reflecting the strengths of the two collections (Flémalle at Frankfurt, Rogier at Berlin), this exhibition boldly addressed some of the thorniest issues in early Netherlandish painting, namely the identity of the artist known as the Master of Flémalle, his artistic relationship to Rogier van der Weyden and the authorship of works by Rogier himself – issues vexed by the poor survival rate and lack of documentation of early Netherlandish painting. The Master of Flémalle is a construct, named in 1898 by Hugo von Tschudi after three panels (cat. no.6), The Virgin and Child, St Veronica and The Trinity, allegedly from the (non-existent) Abbey of Flémalle, acquired by the Städel in the mid-nineteenth century.1 Recognised as important early examples of the Netherlandish ars nova, stylistically akin to Rogier van der Weyden, although not apparently by his hand, the Flémalle panels formed the nucleus of a corpus of related, anonymous works. In 1909 Georges Hulin de Loo proposed identifying the Master of Flémalle as Robert Campin, a painter with no known surviving works, but well documented in Tournai between 1406 and 1445, in whose workshop Rogier van der Weyden and Jacques Daret (the author of a surviving, documented altarpiece of 1433–35 for Arras, stylistically related to works in the Flémalle group and by Rogier) enrolled in 1427 as ‘apprentices’, becoming free masters in 1432.2 The identification of Campin with the Master of Flémalle found widespread acceptance, and despite attributional controversies within the œuvre, Campin has come to be regarded, with Jan van Eyck and Rogier, as one of the founding fathers of Netherlandish painting. Recently, however, a plethora of publications, many of them invoking new technical evidence, has thrown the debate wide open.3 Particularly pressing is the question of whether the historical figure Robert Campin was indeed the Master of Flémalle, and the question of Rogier’s activity before and during 1427–32, when he was in Campin’s workshop, and in the intervening years before his emergence in Brussels in 1435. One of the aims of the Frankfurt/Berlin exhibition was to enable a fresh look at the paintings, and to challenge the accepted view of Campin’s importance as an innovator and a formative influence on Rogier. The impressive first rooms in Frankfurt united most of the paintings in the Flémalle group, including the Mérode triptych (no.4), the Dijon Nativity (no.5), the Prado Annunciation and Marriage of the Virgin (no.9), the Frankfurt Bad thief on the cross (no.8) and the Flémalle panels themselves (no.6; some of these were seen at Frankfurt only). Diversity within this group has traditionally been attributed to workshop practice, but the extent of the diversity revealed here was arresting. Virtually no two paintings appeared to be by the same hand. Works depending on a common source, such as the Mérode, Brussels and Prado Annunciations (nos.3, 4 and 9)
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47. The Visitation, by the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. c.1435–40. Panel, 9.7 by 36.5 cm. (Galleria Sabauda, Turin; exh. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, and M, Leuven).
appeared so heterogeneous as to suggest that they were executed in different workshops, even perhaps in different centres. In the light of this it is surely no longer possible to speak of one single master, be he Campin or not, as the originator of all, or even most of, these works. It does not follow, however, that Campin was an insubstantial artist, nor that it was Rogier who played the part traditionally assigned to Campin in the development of Netherlandish painting, as Kemperdick and Sander suggest. The issue of Rogier’s relationship to the group remains unresolved. The three Flémalle panels are the lynchpins here, being closest in style to Rogier, and his involvement in them cannot be excluded. However, despite persuasive stylistic arguments in the catalogue suggesting that they are his first independent works,4 and the unparalleled opportunities for comparison that the exhibition afforded (which would have been enhanced had
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48. The Visitation, by the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. c.1435–40. Panel, 57.5 by 36.2 cm. (Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig; exh. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).
Rogier’s Miraflores triptych, no.29, been displayed in proximity to the Flémalle panels, no.6), the jury remains out. If Rogier’s hand is indeed present in the Flémalle panels, this could be explained by the role that such a gifted collaborator would have had in a busy workshop such as Campin’s. Workshop issues also dominated the second part of the exhibition, devoted to Rogier. At Berlin this section was slightly larger, and was presented in a single space, which offered a chronological sweep spanning the Flémalle group and Daret’s Arras panels to late fifteenth-century copies of Rogier, enabling instructive comparisons. Virtually all these paintings – including the Washington St George (no.21), the Louvre Annunciation (no.26), the Abegg Crucifixion (no.31) and the St John triptych (no.37) – have been given to Rogier, but only three, the Miraflores triptych, the Berlin Portrait of a woman (no.20) and the Bladelin triptych (Berlin; no.33), are universally accepted. The Miraflores triptych (no.29), an important commission on which Rogier lavished exceptional care, is the only surviving work by him mentioned in a contemporary source. Centrally displayed, it provided a crucial point
of reference for the surrounding works. Although by no means as heterogeneous as the Flémalle group, these too were manifestly not the work of a single artist, as was clear, for instance, from the juxtaposition of the Turin and Leipzig Visitations (nos.26 and 27; Figs.47 and 48). Both are workshop products that depend on the same model, yet the two artists’ personalities are evident in their different approaches: the one in Leipzig stresses decorative contour, while the one in Turin is more volumetric. Yet despite such differences, an underlying stylistic homogeneity was evident in the Rogierian paintings. Lorne Campbell has suggested that to meet the international demand for his work, Rogier had workshops in both Brussels and Tournai, and perhaps also in Bruges.5 This would account for the large number of extant paintings by a variety of assistants who utilised Rogier’s designs. To achieve consistency of style and execution – the painted surfaces are technically superb – Rogier must have exerted a rigorous standard of quality control that explains, and was essential to maintaining, his reputation as the foremost painter in Europe. His works were themselves copied outside the Netherlands, and it was instructive to see the copy of the
Miraflores Christ appearing to the Virgin (no.30), made for Isabella of Castile, perhaps by Juan de Flandes. Despite extreme care taken in reproducing faithfully not only the design, from a tracing, but also the paint surface, the copy is slightly less nuanced in the handling of surface detail; the fading of the red lakes and the apparent absence of ultramarine also suggest that inferior materials were available in Spain. A pair of works that seems difficult to accommodate within the Rogierian fold are the Werl wings from the Prado (no.22), traditionally part of the Flémalle group but here given to Rogier’s workshop, largely on account of similarities with the Louvre Annunciation (itself, however, a design that reflects the Flémallesque Mérode Annunciation, a reminder of how circular the artistic relationships in these groups can be). The Werl St Barbara (recently cleaned, displaying a dazzling array of virtuosic light effects) is posited, dubiously in my view, as the source for the London Magdalene (no.32), here demoted to Rogier’s workshop, with scant heed of the technical evidence presented by Campbell supporting its autograph status.6 The Magdalene is herself the poster girl for the Leuven exhibition, underscoring the impossibility of achieving attributional consensus. The exhibition Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464, De passie van de meester at M, Leuven (to 6th December), was in almost every respect unlike Frankfurt/Berlin. Staged to inaugurate Leuven’s new municipal museum, its touchstone was, theoretically, the Prado Descent from the Cross, painted for the Great Crossbowmen’s Guild in Leuven. However, neither the Descent nor other key works (notably the Escorial and Vienna Crucifixions and the Durán Madonna) were able to travel to Leuven any more than to Frankfurt or Berlin. Altogether there were few original paintings by Rogier in the exhibition, although a highlight was the gloriously restored Seven Sacraments (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; cat. no.81) in the final room. This was not, therefore, a monographic show featuring blockbuster paintings, nor did it seek to address questions of attribution, formation and development. Instead its curator, Jan van der Stock, together with Lorne Campbell, Head of the Scientific Committee, focused on Rogier’s reputation as the leading and most influential painter of his day, and presented him in rapport with some one hundred carefully selected works across a range of media to demonstrate the universality of his artistic language. The subtitle, ‘Master of Passions’, was misleading: ‘Rogier van der Weyden and visual culture in the fifteenthcentury Netherlands’ describes its remit more accurately. Yet this was not a didactic exhibition about influence, transmission or workshop practice, although these questions were necessarily raised; rather, it stimulated thought about more allusive artistic relations through the intelligent juxtaposition of thematically or formally related works. It opened with two contextual rooms, respectively evoking Rogier’s role as official
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painter to the city of Brussels through works for the Town Hall – the Bern Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald tapestry (no.3) after his lost murals, and the ‘Scupstoel’ drawing (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; no.7) and stone capital (Broodhuis-Maison du Roi; no.8) – and his association with the Burgundian court. This was illustrated with an array of works that included Rogier’s own superb dedicatory miniature from the Chroniques de Hainaut (Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels; no.9), portraits of the ducal family and their satellites, notably Rogier’s diptych of Philippe de Croy (Huntington Library, San Marino, and Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; no.19), and – a particular highlight – the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon (no.17), the newly restored bronze effigy from Antwerp Cathedral reunited after more than three centuries with the ten surviving pleurants from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, exemplifying Rogier’s legacy as a designer of earlier, lost Burgundian tombs. From this point the exhibition moved into thematic territory under broad rubrics such as ‘Mother and Child’ and ‘Golgotha’, which permitted some revealing visual dialogues between objects in diverse media. Particularly successful was the exploration of Rogier’s many inventions on the theme of the Virgin and Child, enabling, through a thoughtful series of juxtapositions, the impact of his designs to be traced. One example was the Williamstown Virgin and Child (no.40) attributed to the Master of the Embroidered Foliage seen in relation to three well-known Rogierian compositional types from each of which it derives elements: the Rotterdam drawing of the Virgin and Child (no.39), the Bruges version of the St Luke drawing the Virgin (no.41) and a Spanish copy (no.36) of the Durán Madonna; each of these, themselves early copies of Rogier originals, were in turn juxtaposed with yet other works. These cleverly arranged visual ramifications eloquently illustrated the extent to which Rogier’s inventions were reproduced, adapted and recycled in a variety of related visual contexts, in his workshop and beyond. Underscoring this point, a group of drawings (nos.48–54) from Rogier’s workshop, presented together for the first time, one of them alongside a sculpted St Ambrose (Bollert Collection, Germany; no.55) for which it served as the design, demonstrated the function and range of drawings as artistic tools. Rogier’s relationship with sculpture has long been noted: his paintings often evoke sculpture and he himself produced designs for it. Partly because of its poor survival rate, Netherlandish sculpture is all too often neglected, and the exhibition offered a revelatory opportunity to view works in bronze, stone, wood and alabaster, many of them specially restored and exhibited for the first time, and brought into eloquent dialogue with Rogier’s works. In the ‘Golgotha’ section, copies (nos.62 and 63) of the Vienna and Escorial Crucifixions were shown with the Mayer van
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49. The Virgin and Child with Sts Peter, John the Baptist, Cosmas and Damian (‘The Medici Madonna’), by the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. c.1450. Panel, 61.7 by 46.1 cm. (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; exh. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; and M, Leuven).
den Bergh angels from a triumphal cross (no.65) and a little-known monumental Calvary group from St Martin’s Church, Bierghes (on loan to the Musée de Rebecq; no.64). Here it was Rogier’s language that the unknown sculptors spoke; elsewhere, as in the monumental stone Entombment from the Collegiate Church of St Vincent, Soignies (no.80; Fig.50) or the Apostles from the Musée Communal, Nivelles (no.60), the relationship may depend on common ground rather than direct imitation. Rogier’s own debt to sculpture was implicit in the rapport between Jean Delemer’s Tournai Annunciation (no.26), polychromed by Campin while Rogier was in his workshop,
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and the Louvre and Antwerp Annunciations (nos.27a and 30). This raised rather different questions about his formation from the painterly ones asked at Frankfurt/Berlin, which might have been explored further in the exhibition (although they are addressed in the magnificent and weighty – in every sense of the word – catalogue).7 While sculpture and drawings were well represented, and to a lesser extent manuscripts and textiles – including the spectacular Tarquinius Priscus tapestry from Zamora Cathedral (no.6) and the Bern Seven Sacraments embroideries (no.83), displayed in conjunction with Rogier’s triptych – works in other media, 50. The Entombment. Hainaut (Mons?), c.1440–60. Stone with traces of polychromy, 120 by 200 cm. (Collegiate Church of St Vincent, Soignies; exh. M, Leuven).
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notably glass, metalwork and prints, might also have been included as further evidence of Rogier’s influence on every aspect of artistic production in the Netherlands. More might also have been made of Rogier’s influence further afield, although this is a vast topic that possibly was eschewed for practical reasons. With its very different stance, its emphasis on workshop and legacy and its multimedia approach, Leuven was the ideal counterpart to Frankfurt/Berlin, covering ground left untouched by the latter. Both exhibitions have contributed invaluably to our knowledge and understanding of Rogier, the one by presenting an unparalleled opportunity to focus on important paintings by or associated with him and the Master of Flémalle, the other by placing him within his broader artistic ambit. Both additionally presented newly restored works that permitted reappraisals. One of the stars of both shows was the Medici Madonna (nos.39/59; Fig.49), recently cleaned, and manifestly a work of much higher quality than previously thought – although in this reviewer’s opinion still not by Rogier himself. We should, however, beware of getting bogged down in the problems of attribution, important though they are. A more constructive way forward lies in the direction pointed by each exhibition, but most emphatically by Leuven, away from the traditional distinction between ‘great’ master and ‘lesser’ assistants, towards a deeper understanding of Rogier’s artistic practice, and the role within his workshop of skilful and talented artists who reinterpreted and disseminated his inventions. Moreover, by considering the wider context in which these works were produced, we may additionally gain an understanding of consumer expectations and choices, which will enable us better to evaluate the evidence of style. 1 H. von Tschudi: ‘Der Meister von Flémalle’, Jahrbuch der königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 19 (1898), pp.8–34 and 89–116. 2 G. Hulin de Loo: ‘An Authentic work by Jacques Daret’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 15 (1909), pp.202–08. 3 Summarised in S. Kemperdick: ‘The Flémalle–Campin–van der Weyden problem: still existing’, in L. Nys and D. Vanwijnsberghe, eds.: Campin in context. Peinture et société dans la vallée de l’Escaut à l’époque de Robert Campin, 1375–1445, Valenciennes, Brussels and Tournai 2007, pp.3–14. 4 Catalogue: The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden. By Stephan Kemperdick and Jochen Sander, with essays by Bastian Eclercy, Peter Klein and Antje-Fee Köllermann. 404 pp. incl. 203 col. ills. (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2008), €34.90. ISBN 978–3–7757–2259–9 (English); ISBN 978–3–7757–2258–2 (German). 5 L. Campbell: ‘Brussels and Tournai’, in Nys and Vanwijnsberghe, op. cit. (note 3), pp.113–23. 6 L. Campbell: National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools, London 1998, pp.392–406. 7 Catalogue: Rogier van der Weyden, 1400–1464. Master of Passions. By Lorne Campbell and Jan van der Stock. 592 pp. incl. 302 col. ills. (Davidsfonds, Leuven, 2009), €59.95. ISBN 978–90–8526–105–6 (English); ISBN 978–90–8526–105–6 (Dutch); ISBN 978–90–5826–667–5 (French).
Boldini; Signorini Ferrara; Padua by PHILIP RYLANDS EXHIBITION Giovanni Boldini nella Parigi degli Impressionisti at the Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara (to 10th January), focuses on that part of Boldini’s career sandwiched between his Macchiaiolo period in Florence in 1864–71 and his stardom from 1889 as portraitist of the Parisian Belle Epoque.1 The latter was an annus mirabilis for Boldini. Nominated to curate the Italian section of the Exposition Universelle, he exhibited twelve of his own paintings, nine of them portraits, including the so-called Pastello bianco, his full-length portrait of the teenage Emiliana Concha de Ossa (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), which won a gold medal. Soon after, Boldini was appointed a member of Légion d’honneur. The Ferrara show nevertheless counts as a retrospective, with works from 1864 to 1901. It is smaller than the Boldini exhibition at the Palazzo Zabarella, Padua, in 2005, where even the mid-career period under the spotlight in Ferrara was better represented.2 But the Ferrara show has nimbly avoided replicating the Padua checklist, and offers masterpieces missing from that exhibition, such as The washerwomen (Fig.51), and portraits of James McNeill Whistler from the Brooklyn Museum (1897; cat. no.6) and of Adolph Menzel from the Berlin Nationalgalerie (1895; no.80). In 1871 Boldini left Florence for London and then Paris, where he was to die in 1931 aged eighty-eight. According to the curator, Sarah Lees, the virtuosity and dazzle of Boldini’s later portraiture has overshadowed his heterogeneous production in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s. Boldini first visited Paris in June–July 1867, where he saw enough new art to make him dissatisfied with Florence. The THE
experience encouraged him in the pursuit of detailed realism in his portraits of haute bourgeois society in Tuscany in 1870–71. But even before his definitive departure for Paris he had painted at least three fancy pictures with eighteenth-century costumes in the manner of his older Parisian contemporary Jean-LouisErnest Meissonier. When he visited the First Annual Exhibition in London in May 1871 only Meissonier and Alfred Stevens drew his attention. By November he had settled in Montmartre. Civic calm had only recently been restored in the city in the wake of the Paris Commune. Berthe, whose surname we do not know, instantly became his model and mistress: all feminine charm, she appears in innumerable paintings of this decade in fancy dress (in Louis XV and Empire fashion). Her emphatically oval face and large eyes were features she shared with other beauties that Boldini loved – Alaide Banti (daughter of his friend the Macchiaiolo painter Cristiano Banti) and the duchesse Gabrielle de Rasty. Through the Parisian dealer Adolphe Goupil, Boldini tapped into an AngloAmerican clientele eager for paintings by Meisonnier, Mariano Fortuny the Elder and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Lees, in her highly informative catalogue essay, reveals that Boldini was not contracted exclusively to Goupil, as was previously supposed,3 but remained free to sell directly to collectors or to other galleries. Yet his paintings in the 1870s – in their technique, subjects and even scale (little paintings) – define the Goupil taste, together with those of Meissonier and Fortuny. Tiny brushes loaded with silvery and white pigments give sparkle and a brittle minuziosità to scenes of Louis XV fops and cocottes whiling away the afternoons in the gardens of Versailles (no.8), or a dusky Spanish torero and his girl idly watching a cockatoo and a macaw (no.10). The muted tones and larger brushes Boldini used in his earlier Macchiaiolo paintings have an earthier feel, the emanation of a
51. The washerwomen, by Giovanni Boldini. 1874. Canvas, 32.3 by 51.6 cm. (Private collection, courtesy of David Nisinson Fine Art, Bridgeport; exh. Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara). the burlington m a g a z i n e
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52. Portrait of Henri Rochefort, by Giovanni Boldini. c.1881–82. Canvas, 61 by 50 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; exh. Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara).
rustic, Tuscan sensibility. They might predictably have drawn him towards Impressionism, whereas ambition, and an innate appetite for detail rather than atmosphere, took him in the opposite direction. A panoramic view of Place Clichy (1874; no.16) – with its vast sky and Frith-like street anecdote – was criticised in its own time for the disconnection between the light in the sky above and in the place below.4 Lees recounts not only the chronology and fortunes of Boldini in Paris, but tracks his position vis-à-vis Impressionism, and this is where the interest of the show lies: what were the options available to artists in Paris that were not those of either the pompiers or the Impressionists? Boldini successfully painted landscape en plein air (equivalent for the Macchiaioli to the sentimento del vero, which he had learned from his days in the 1860s at Castiglioncello). He painted cityscapes in competition with his fellow Italian expatriate Giuseppe de Nittis (an exhibitor in the first Impressionist show in 1874) and with Jean-Jacques Tissot, and in advance of those of marginal Impressionists, such as Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-François Raffäelli. Both he and De Nittis were friends of Degas, and shared with him an interest in café, theatre and concert nightlife. A revealing episode concerned Henri Rochefort, the Republican journalist and politician who returned to Paris from exile in 1880. He was painted first by Manet (1881; Hamburger Kunsthalle) and then by Boldini (Fig.52). The two paintings are so similar in format and content (Rochefort wears the same clothes) that Lees speculates that Rochefort, unhappy with Manet’s version, asked Boldini to do it better, which, at least in Rochefort’s eyes, he did. Boldini more closely charted Rochefort’s features, and gave vitality to his facial expression, incidentally enlivened by the cocked right eyebrow (surely the consequence of the habit of wearing a monocle, the cause of Whistler’s arch expression in the Brooklyn portrait); in Manet’s likeness there is a relative passivity of facial expression. Hence Boldini’s
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quasi-narrative urge – the brush in the service of recounting a mood and a personality – differs from the brevity with which Manet conjures an image from liquid paint applied to the black background. If Manet’s priority is matière and technique, Boldini’s is (at least in this case) a veristic image of life. Boldini nevertheless sensed that, given his extreme technical proficiency, there were innovative things he could do with his brush. A more rapid movement of the hand would convey flickering light and swift movement – in the cause of an enhanced presentation of frenetic urban life. Several works of the early 1880s have an experimental character: night scenes, horses and carriages (inspired by Meissonier, not Degas), large works with sweeping strokes, sciabolate – as if Boldini were fencing with his canvas. The exhibition has the merit of reconstructing an important painting of this kind, almost two metres wide, from drawings and fragments that Boldini worked on between 1881 and 1886. It depicted a near accident, with a rush of oncoming horses and a child with a hoop swept from their path by a young woman, perhaps a sister. The fragment of horses’ heads, with thick, fluid paint and vigorous, almost gestural brushstrokes, is well known to visitors to Ferrara’s Museo Boldini. By connecting this with a series of studies for a work titled Le Pont des Saints-Pères in the same museum, Lees identified a second fragment in a private collection in Novara (no.29), depicting the child being wrenched aside.5 The focused central motif of the child, with its distressed and puffy face, is highly finished, while all around it, as in a vortex, is fuzzy and formless. This combination, which perhaps corresponded to some Bergsonian avant la lettre intuition of how the eye sees, became a technical habit, almost a hallmark, of Boldini’s painting for the rest of his life. The Florentine Telemaco Signorini (1835–1901) was one of three older artists who welcomed and encouraged Boldini when he first arrived in Florence in 1864 (the others were Cristiano Banti and Michele Gordigiani). He is the subject of an exhibition at the Palazzo Zabarella, Padua, Telemaco Signorini e la Pittura in Europa (to 31st January).6 His work is comparable to that of Giovanni Fattori, the greatest of the Macchiaioli, for like Fattori, he painted Risorgimento battles, white Tuscan oxen, crowded marketplaces, figures in landscapes and genre scenes, often with a virtuosity matching Boldini’s. Also like Fattori, he apparently suffered a crisis of confidence in his last decade, producing clumsy figure paintings of a pan-European naturalist kind. A small number of early works, however, make him remarkable, such as the then-shocking Room of the disturbed women in the Hospital of San Bonifacio (cat. no.46; Fig.53) and the prize-winning November (1870; no.60), both of them in Cà Pesaro, Venice. The exhibition is an enthralling survey of a provincial artist’s work, with a sprinkling of paintings by others, such as Corot, Troyon, Bazille, Daubigny, Tissot, Stevens and even Degas, that constitute the ‘European’ component of the exhibition’s title.
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53. Room of the disturbed women in the Hospital of San Bonifacio, by Telemaco Signorini. 1865. Canvas, 66 by 59 cm. (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro; exh. Palazzo Zabarella, Padua).
Signorini is best known for a strange, slightly mawkish painting called The tow-path – mawkish because of the evident social criticism implied by the struggle of the boatmen in contrast to the idleness of the top-hatted servant and the bourgeois child. This is the subject of a speculative but convincing catalogue essay on the Japanese sources for the painting and on the early availability of prints of the Edo period in Italy in the 1860s.7 The exhibition is elegantly installed and well served by its catalogue. 1 Catalogue: Giovanni Boldini nella Parigi degli Impressionisti. Edited by Sarah Lees, with essays by Sarah Lees and Richard Kendall and catalogue notes by Barbara Guidi. 232 pp. incl. 140 col. ills. (Ferrara Arte Editore, Ferrara, 2009), €47. ISBN 978–8–89793–02–03. The exhibition then travels to the Sterling and Francine Clarke Institute, Williamstown MA, which holds the largest collection of Boldinis in America (14th February to 25th April). The catalogue has an undated list of exhibitions, an index but no chrono-biography. For a detailed biography see F. Dini, ed.: exh. cat. Boldini, Padua (Palazzo Zabarella) 2005, pp.275–86. 2 Reviewed in The Burlington Magazine 147 (2005), pp.348–50. 3 Boldini sold only (or as many as) twenty-nine works through Goupil until the relationship ended in 1881. His first sale, exhibited in Ferrara, was Two women in eighteenth-century costume at the piano (1871; private collection; no.7). The catalogue publishes all the Boldini entries in Goupil’s registers (pp.215–18). The Goupil Archives are in the J. Paul Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. 4 Illustrated London News (17th April 1875), p.374, cited in Lees, op. cit. (note 1), p.38. 5 The catalogue includes an essay on Boldini’s drawings: R. Kendall: ‘Boldini e il disegno. I primi anni a Parigi’, in ibid., pp.69–83. 6 Catalogue: Telemaco Signorini e la Pittura in Europa. Edited by Giuliano Matteucci, Fernando Mazzocca, Carlo Sisi and Ettore Spalletti, with contributions by Ettore Spalletti, Fernando Mazzocca, Silvio Balloni, Paul Nicholls and Vincenzo Farinella. 256 pp. incl. 126 col. + 42 b. & w. ills. (Marsilio, Venice, 2009), €42. ISBN 978–88–317–9840–2. 7 V. Farinella: ‘Signorini e Hiroshige: un’ipotesi sulle fonti visive dell’Alzaia (e un apertura sul giapponismo dei macchiaioli’, in ibid., pp.44–57. The painting was reproduced in this Magazine, 150 (2008), p.492.
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Watteau, Music and Theatre New York by HUMPHREY WINE
Director’s foreword in the exhibition catalogue states,1 Watteau, Music, and Theater at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (closed 29th November), honoured Philippe de Montebello, who was Director from 1977 until the end of last year, and it is a fine tribute to him that the catalogue editor and exhibition curator, Katharine Baetjer, succeeded in bringing together fifteen paintings and eight drawings by Watteau, as well as forty other paintings, drawings, prints and objects related to the themes of music and theatre. These were shown in two rooms of the upper-floor galleries, the paintings in one room and the drawings and prints in the subdued light of the other. The paintings by Watteau included two not previously shown in a museum exhibition, L’Alliance de la musique et de la comédie (cat. no.4; private collection) and the recently rediscovered La Surprise (no.11; private collection), once in the collection of Watteau’s friend Nicolas Hénin (but unfortunately not Watteau’s L’Accord parfait from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also once in Hénin’s collection). Among other paintings by Watteau were the Metropolitan’s own two canvases Mezzetin (no.12) and Comédiens françois (no.14), Berlin’s L’Amour au théâtre françois (no.7), L’Amour au théâtre italien (no.10; Fig.55) and (something of a wreck) the Pots-
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54. Guitar, by Nicolas Alexandre Voboam II. 1680. Ebony, red cedar, spruce and ivory, 91.9 by 25 by 9.3 cm. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
dam Récréation italienne (no.15), Dulwich’s Les Plaisirs du bal (no.9) and the Museo ThyssenBornemisza’s Pierrot content (no.2). The eight drawings by Watteau were from north American public and private collections. There was great pleasure to be had, not only from seeing these items, but also from other pertinent loans to the exhibition. Here the highlights were two sketches by Lancret from Munich and Dallas (nos.16 and 17) depicting concerts in, respectively, the Paris and Montmorency homes of Watteau’s patron, Pierre Crozat, and three drawings by Claude Gillot from the Metropolitan’s own collection. These facts in themselves represent a considerable achievement since the purpose of the show, which would not have been served had it opened too long after de Montebello’s retirement, must have significantly reduced the gestation period usual for an exhibition focusing on a major artist and involving international loans. In addition, the Metropolitan Museum no doubt found itself pre-empted in respect of a number of important and relevant Watteau drawings by two contemporaneous major exhibitions of French drawings elsewhere in New York. For the most part the catalogue entries, supported by colour illustrations but unfortunately lacking comparative illustrations, concisely and stylishly summarise already published material, and are especially informative on items from the Metropolitan’s own collection. They were written by Baetjer and eight others, mainly specialist staff members at the Metropolitan. The catalogue includes two essays, one a short introduction by Pierre Rosenberg and the other by Georgia J. Cowart explaining the
differences between the various forms of theatrical entertainment available in Paris c.1700. To locate Watteau’s music- and theatrerelated production, which after all was most of it, adequately within its visual, historical and social contexts would require considerably more space than was allowed in this exhibition. Overall, however, the show’s principal defect was a lack of clear structure, in which respect the recent thematic exhibition in Valenciennes was more successful.2 There were insufficient text panels to explain the exhibition narrative, the labels for the individual exhibits contained only tombstone information and the selection of exhibits was insufficiently rigorous. Exhibition visitors were left to guess what might be the relevance to Watteau, for example, of two studies (nos.43 and 44) for stage sets made by Jacques de Lajoüe more than ten years after the former’s death, or why the well-known Cochin print (no.47) of the so-called bal des ifs held at Versailles in February 1745, fascinating as it was in itself, was included. Even further from the exhibition’s proclaimed theme was the Metropolitan’s Dance in the country by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo of c.1755 (no.24). True, it contains commedia dell’arte figures, but the catalogue entry by Baetjer (rightly) makes no claim to a Watteau or Paris connection for the picture, and one was left feeling that it was there for no better purpose than to fill a gap. Similarly irrelevant, but without the aesthetic appeal of the Tiepolo, was an oil-sketch of c.1748, A masked ball in Bohemia from the Metropolitan (no.23), attributed to the Austrian artist Andreas Altomonte, while the inclusion of two military subjects by Pater (nos.20 and
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21), also from the Metropolitan’s collection, was entirely puzzling. One was left with the sense that the exhibition had wandered off into a general history of European music, theatre and dance in the eighteenth century and then found that even this left space available on the wall. In addition, while it is admirable that the Metropolitan should have thought outside the box by also exhibiting objects other than paintings, drawings and prints, those in the room in which the paintings were exhibited were for the most part curiously chosen. They included several Meissen and other German commedia dell’arte figures made between the mid-1730s and c.1760 from the Metropolitan’s own collection. According to the catalogue, only one of these, a Nymphenburg figure of a Harlequine (no.56), has a possible claim to have been influenced by Watteau, namely his etching of Les habits sont Italiens, reworked with engraving by Simonneau the Elder. Visitors would have been helped to make the link without resort to the catalogue if the print, which is known in several states, or indeed Watteau’s(?) related drawing, had also been exhibited. The drawing is in the Kupferstichkabinett of the same Berlin institution lending paintings to the exhibition, so not to have included it was a missed opportunity. Also shown was an elaborate guitar made in Rome decorated with ivory and mother-of-pearl from the Metropolitan’s own collection (no.60). It is an admirable object but looks nothing like the guitars typically shown in Watteau’s paintings. These were most likely made in Paris by members of the Voboam dynasty,3 and, although their decoration varied, those in Watteau’s paintings were relatively simple with marquetry decoration in alternate coloured woods around the soundboard and the sound hole, and ebony ‘moustaches’ on either side of the bridge. One such, close in appearance to the guitars in two of the paintings in the exhibition, La Partie quarrée (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; no.3) and Berlin’s L’Amour au théâtre italien, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Fig.54). Since Boston was already a lender to the exhibition (Watteau’s La Perspective; no.8), not borrowing this guitar was another missed opportunity. More successful was the inclusion of a musette de cour from the Metropolitan, although it was shown in the drawings room rather than next to L’Amour au théâtre François, the painting in the exhibition most relevant to it. Although this show would have benefited from more focus, it had many individual exhibits to savour. It also whetted the appetite for a monographic exhibition that might emulate the one that took place in 1984 to coincide with the tercentenary of Watteau’s birth. The tercentenary of his death will be in 2021, but must we wait that long? A few comments on individual catalogue entries for paintings by Watteau follow: no.4: L’Alliance de la musique et de la comédie. The muse at the right holding a lyre is not Euterpe but Erato or Terpsichore, as Joseph Baillio suggested in his comprehensive catalogue entry in The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier, New York (Wildenstein) 2005–06, no.44. As she is holding a lyre, she is prob-
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ably the former. Certainly the association between Erato and the lyre was current in eighteenth-century France: see L. de Prezel: Dictionnaire Iconologique ou Introduction à la connoissance des peintures, sculptures, medailles, estampes, & c., Paris 1756, p.104. no.10: L’Amour au théâtre italien. Not dated in the catalogue or on the wall label. Rosenberg suggested 1718 when it was exhibited in 1984. This seems right. no.11: La Surprise. The ledgers, correspondence and receipts, 1797–1834, of the London picture restorers R. Brown and Co., now in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, record picture restorations carried out for numerous clients. One such was General Murray, one time owner of La Surprise, whose transactions with Brown are first recorded in an entry dated 23rd December 1808 and whose address is there given as 63 Wimpole Street. An entry under Murray’s name dated 2nd January 1810 (on a page headed 1809) reads: ‘[Cleaning & c.] two Picrs on Panel. Conversations by Watteaus [sic] 1 10’. This suggests that La Surprise was in the Murray collection by that date. no.12: Mezzetin. Not dated in the catalogue or on the wall label of the painting. The date c.1718–20 given to the Metropolitan’s related drawing (no.31 of the exhibition) by Perrin Stein (in one of a number of praiseworthy entries by her) is that generally accepted for the painting. 1 Catalogue: Watteau, Music, and Theater. Edited by Katharine Baetjer, with an introduction by Pierre Rosenberg and an essay by Georgia J. Cowart. 148 pp. incl. 67 col. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009), £35. ISBN 978–0–300–15507–5. 2 P. Ramade and M. Eidelberg: exh. cat. Watteau et la fête galante, Valenciennes (Musée des Beaux-Arts) 2004. 3 F. Gétreau: ‘Watteau et la musique: réalité et interprétations’, in F. Moureau and M.M. Grasselli, eds.: Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) le peintre, son temps et sa légende, Paris and Geneva 1987, pp.235–46, esp. pp.240–41.
Monet New York by ELIZABETH W. EASTON
of his life Claude Monet was so little regarded that only a handful of people came to the Orangerie in Paris in 1927 to celebrate the artist’s great gift of the Nymphéas to the French nation.1 His panels were ignored and neglected, if not derided, by artists, art historians and the public at large. Neither critics nor fellow artists showed interest in Monet’s late, large canvases until after the Second World War, when they spoke anew to a generation seeking solace from the heavy-handed ideological art of the War years, and resonated in a new way with the large canvases produced by the Abstract Expressionists on the other side of the Atlantic.2 The tide began to turn with a landmark essay of 1952, written by the artist André Masson, who had returned to France after spending the war in exile in New York: ‘One could dream of a Monet turning towards the use of large canvases, clear and iridescent, the preserve of Veronese, of Tiepolo. Do not dream any more; consider his supreme
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work, the Nymphéas [. . .] A deserted site in the heart of Paris, a consecration of the inaccessible. One of the peaks of French genius’.3 Paul Facchetti, who was the first to exhibit Jackson Pollock in Europe in 1952, reminisced: ‘The American painters, [. . .] those who came to Paris after the war with their famous G.I. Bills, they were impressed by European culture, and they all rushed like flies to one place: the Orangerie, to look at the Nymphéas by Monet, those colored rhythms with no beginning or end’.4 Indeed, Ellsworth Kelly had a life-transforming experience at Giverny, which he visited as a result of the G.I. Bill. The small panel he painted after this visit, Tableau vert (1952), recently given by the artist to the Art Institute of Chicago, pays homage to Monet’s paintings at Giverny. The panel, unlike the solid colour shapes for which he later became known, reveals seemingly infinite layers of blues and greens, all colours of the water-lily pond. In 1957 Clement Greenberg wrote of Monet’s later paintings that the artist ‘found what he was looking for [. . .] not in Nature, but in the essence of art itself, in its “abstractness’”. Others found in Monet a source of inspiration different from Greenberg’s formalism: William Seitz curated an important exhibition in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments, which focused on the emotional impact, ethereality and the ‘mood’ of these canvases. Among the particular fascinations of the exhibition Monet’s Water Lilies at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (to 12th April), is to see Monet against the backdrop of Modernism, and even postmodernism. The canvases of the great Impressionist, pushing the boundaries of painting at the end of his life, produce a very different effect when seen in one of MoMA’s stark galleries than they would within the context of nineteenthcentury painting at a traditional, encyclopaedic museum. For this exhibition, Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, has placed MoMA’s two large Nymphéas (one a triptych and one a large single panel) on opposite walls of a small-scale gallery, as Alfred H. Barr, Jr. had originally envisaged them, flanked by four smaller canvases on the side walls. The triptych appeared dwarfed in the 2004 inaugural installation of the large atrium of the new MoMA; in this small gallery, however, the viewer has the opportunity to feel enveloped by water – or rather, the largeness of Monet’s aqueous vision. While the experience does not equal the complete all-encompassing effect of the Monet panels in the Orangerie, the breadth of the triptych, at over twelve metres, is stunning. Flanked by just a few other pictures, all of the lily pond and its surroundings, the display achieves what every museum should try to do: highlight works from the permanent collection in a way that makes the public aware of the art anew. Temkin’s short accompanying catalogue, written with Nora Lawrence, reviews in gripping detail the history of the Museum’s acquisition of their ‘Water lily’ panels.5 Purchased in 1955–56, at the beginning of the curve of
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56. Installation view of Jeu de Paum, Paris, at its reopening in 1958. Photograph. (Archives, Musée du Louvre, Paris, folder U1, 1958).
appreciation for late Monet, these canvases were lost in the tragic fire of 1958. The essay vividly recreates the excitement of acquisition and display, and the subsequent shock of loss. Including material from the archives, the catalogue quotes a poignant passage in a letter from the young Dan Flavin, who, long before making his name as a Minimalist, wrote to Alfred Barr: ‘I will so miss the large picture but any portion of it which can be saved will be enough for me. My heart still aches over the loss’.6 Temkin provides details of the negotiation for the triptych and large panel now in the collection, including the prices paid, which had increased more than tenfold since the purchase of the first works a mere three years before. After having languished in Monet’s studio in Giverny for decades, the stretchers needed to be replaced. One of the most touching anecdotes in the essay reveals that Dorothy Miller, Barr’s colleague and head of Museum collections, did not want to see the stretchers destroyed, so gave them to three artists, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Fred Mitchell, who worked on a large scale and ‘could make good use of them’.7 Temkin decided to take the frames off all the canvases in this exhibition, replacing gilded mouldings and heavily carved surrounds with simple strip frames. The late large Nymphéas were never in anything but simple
mouldings; framing the triptych would defy the all-encompassing visual experience that Monet intended. But the curatorial decision to remove the frames of the other pictures in the exhibition was a bold and clever gesture; this reductive framing solution underscores the flatness of the canvases, the scumbling of the paint surface and the ‘abstractness’ that Greenberg had initially seen in them, and furthers their contextual coherence with the rest of MoMA’s collection. This is different from William Rubin’s unilateral replacement of all the frames in MoMA’s collection with uniform strip frames in 1984, which was not a success. In this installation, rather, the effort has been made to harmonise all the pictures into a unified presentation (the frames on the two canvases on loan, one from a private collection, the other from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would have fought with the stark presentation at MoMA) and to contextualise these panels as ‘Modern’. This is not the first time that the attempt to modernise Monet has involved removing the frames. Germain Bazin, the chief curator of the Louvre after the Second World War, prepared the Jeu de Paume as the first picture gallery the French public had seen since the War when it opened in 1947, dedicated to modern French painting (Fig.57). As a result of this milestone, Bazin wrote in detail about how, in terms of
57. Installation view of Jeu de Paume, Paris, during its opening in 1947. Photograph. (Archives, Musée du Louvre, Paris, folder U1, 1958).
the framing, he studied the entire collection and ‘introduced an innovation, by presenting unframed, but simply edged with paper, some of Monet’s later paintings, which by their very nature, are unsuitable for framing, and the innovation was well received’.8 By 1958, to celebrate the reopening of the Jeu de Paume (Fig.56), which had been closed for four years after an upgrade to accommodate its magnitude of visitors, Bazin furthered his experiments with the presentation of late Monet: ‘Lastly, we felt that we ought to rationalise the frameless method of displaying some of Monet’s later works, conceived as fragments cut out of space, which had pleased the public in 1947. We therefore collected all these pictures in one room and set them in the wall. The pictures were therefore so arranged as to form a coloured sequence [. . .] Moreover, Monet himself has proved, with his Waterlilies, that he was concerned, towards the end of his life, with achieving decorative effects. Imperceptibly, “dynamic arrangement” has come to be so widely accepted that it is adopted everywhere, and even in the Louvre itself ’.9 Whether or not Bazin was actually invoking the dynamism of American painting and display, it is nonetheless evident that even in post-War France at the highest levels of museum governance, Monet alone among the Impressionists was being presented in such a ‘dynamic’ way. The Museum of Modern Art continues that celebration today with this jewel of an exhibition. At a time when MoMA seeks to become a relevant venue for the exhibition of twenty-first century art, it is interesting that, as Bazin said over fifty years ago: ‘To those inclined to criticise us for taking liberties with masterpieces, we would reply that the latter, by their very content, are full of possibilities which make them adaptable to the taste of any given period’.10 1 Recollection from Paulémile Pissarro, youngest son of the painter and Monet’s godson, as recounted to his grandson, Joachim Pissarro, that Monet had been buried twice, once after his death, and again the following year with the opening of his Nymphéas at the Orangerie. 2 R. Golan: ‘Oceanic Sensations: Monet’s “Grandes Décorations” and Mural Painting in France from 1927 to 1952’; and M. Leja: ‘The Monet Revival and New York School Abstraction’, address this topic in detail in P. Hayes Tucker and M.A. Stevens, eds.: exh. cat. Monet in the 20th Century, Boston (Museum of Fine Arts) and London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1998, pp.86–108. 3 A. Masson: ‘Monet le fondateur’, Verve 7 (1952), p.68, cited by Golan in idem, op. cit. (note 2), p.96. 4 Ibid. 5 Catalogue: Claude Monet: Water Lilies. By Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence. 48 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009), $12.95. ISBN 978–0–87070–774–2. 6 Daniel N. Flavin to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 16th April 1958; New York, Museum of Modern Art Archives, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, I.303, cited in Temkin and Lawrence, op. cit. (note 5), p.31. 7 Ibid., p.37. 8 Germain Bazin, archives, Musée du Louvre, Paris, folder U1, 1958, 2 juin. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.
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Calendar London Alan Cristea. New editions and acquisitions are on view in both galleries to 26th January. Alison Jacques. Works by the German painter André Butzer can be seen to 9th January. Annely Juda. Experimental Workshop, Japan 1951–1957, and The Great Experiment, Russia. Homage to Camilla Gray, are both on view to 18th December. Barbican. The Curve has been transformed into a Second World War bunker by the Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski; to 10th January. Boundary Gallery. Bronzes and works on paper by Jacob Epstein on the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death are displayed to 23rd December. See also Royal Academy. British Museum. Completing its series of exhibitions exploring power and empire, the Museum examines the rule of Moctezuma II, the last elected Aztec Emperor; to 24th January. An exhibition examines the great age of printmaking in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century; to 5th April; to be reviewed. Camden Arts Centre. A solo exhibition of work by the German-born American artist Eva Hesse is on view here from 11th December to 7th March. Courtauld Gallery. Frank Auerbach’s paintings of post-War London building sites, including St Paul’s, Oxford Street and the Shell Building, are on view here to 17th January. Daniel Katz. A Collector’s Cabinet III: An Exhibition of European Sculpture and Works of Arts; to 23rd December. Dulwich Picture Gallery. Drawing Attention: Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso & more presents a selection of 100 drawings (Fig.58) from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; to 27th January. Faggionato Fine Art. Twenty paintings by Wayne Thiebaud are on view here to 18th December. Fleming Collection. Works from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; to 19th December. Haunch of Venison. Works by the British artist and designer Stuart Haygarth are on view to 31st January. Hauser & Wirth. At Southwood Garden, 197 Piccadilly, sculptures by Hans Josephsohn are on display to 22nd January. Hayward Gallery. A retrospective of works by Ed Ruscha is on view here to 10th January (then in Munich and Stockholm); to be reviewed. Helly Nahmad. An exhibition of works by Monet; to 26th February. Karsten Schubert. A retrospective of work by Bob Law is on view here to 16th January. Marlborough Fine Art. Silhouettes and filigree ceramics and papercuts by Charlotte Hodes are on display here to 7th January. Matthiesen Gallery. An exhibition of Spanish sculpture 1550–1750 (to 18th December) coincides with the National Gallery’s The Sacred Made Real; to be reviewed. National Gallery. The Sacred Made Real brings together 17th-century Spanish paintings and painted wooden sculptures and provides a reappraisal of the role of hyper-realist sculptures in the development of Spanish art; to 24th January (then in Washington; see also Matthiesen Gallery and Indianapolis); to be reviewed. To coincide with the exhibition, a special display examining the technical challenges of making a polychrome sculpture is on view in Room 1. Parasol Unit. A group show of work by Cecily Brown, Hans Josephsohn, Shaun McDowell, Katy Moran and Maaike Schoorel; to 7th February. Pilar Corrias. Works by Ulla von Brandenburg are on view to 30th January. Queen’s Gallery. The exhibition tracing the history of the ‘conversation piece’, seen previously in Edinburgh and reviewed in the October issue, is on view here to 14th February.
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Raven Row. An exhibition of film projections by the German artist Harun Farocki; to 7th February. Redfern Gallery. An eightieth-birthday retrospective of early paintings by Anne Dunn is on view here to 28th January. Royal Academy. A survey exhibition of works by Anish Kapoor is on view to 11th December; it is reviewed on p.855 above. An exhibition examining the radical transformation of British sculpture at the beginning of the twentieth century focuses on the work of Epstein, GaudierBrzeska and Gill; to 24th January; to be reviewed. Serpentine Gallery. The exhibition Design Real looks at industrial, scientific and domestic design; to 7th February. Simon Lee. Wall-mounted sculptures by Donald Judd from the 1960s and 1970s are on view to 29th January. Sir John Soane’s Museum. The use of classical orders in architecture since antiquity is the theme of an exhibition running here to 30th January. South London Gallery. Nostalgia, a new three-part video installation by Omer Fast is on view here to 6th December. Tate Britain. A show exploring Turner’s responses to the work both of European predecessors and British contemporaries runs to 31st January; it is reviewed on p.853 above. Lucy Skaer, Enrico David, Richard Wright and Roger Hiorns square up for this year’s Turner Prize; the display of their works runs to 3rd January.
58. Paris, by Sonia Delaunay. 1915. Coloured wax on laid paper, 32.6 by 44.3 cm. (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; exh. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London). Tate Modern. The exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World examines how artists since the 1980s have cultivated their public persona as a product; to 17th January. An exhibition of work by the pioneering conceptual artist John Baldessari is on display here to 10th January. The tenth Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall, by the Polish artist Mirosław Balka, is on display here to 5th April. Timothy Taylor. New works by Bridget Riley are on view here to 19th December. Victoria and Albert Museum. The Museum’s new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, as well as the new Ceramics Galleries, open on 2nd December; see last month’s Editorial. The exhibition Maharaja: the Splendour of India’s Royal Courts runs to 17th January. Wallace Collection. During refurbishment of the west gallery of the museum, a sizeable selection of nineteenth-century paintings is temporarily on view in the exhibition space in the basement. 25 new paintings by Damien Hirst, recycling motifs from Francis Bacon, are on view here to 24th January. Whitechapel. The first retrospective in Britain of works by the French artist Sophie Calle is on view here to 20th December. White Cube. Paintings by Damien Hirst, made by the artist’s own hand, are on display at Hoxton Square and Mason’s Yard to 30th January.
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Great Britain and Ireland Bath, Victoria Art Gallery. The Arts Council touring exhibition Unpopular Culture, selected by Grayson Perry, is on view here to 3rd January. Bedford, Bedford Castle. A large exhibition of works by Edward Bawden, from the archive of his works donated by the artist to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, is on show here for the first time; to 31st January. Belfast, Ulster Museum. The exhibition Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed: The Imagery of Sean Scully is on view here to 14th February. Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. 17thcentury Dutch paintings from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, are shown alongside Dutch paintings from the Barber; to 28th February. Birmingham, Ikon Gallery. The first exhibition in England of works by the Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken, whose audio-visual installation works borrow from underground and youth sub-cultures, is on view here to 24th January. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. An exhibition of recent acquisitions of drawings and prints runs to 24th January. The leading international authority on Renaissance medals in the post-War period, Graham Pollard (1929–2007) spent his entire career at the Fitzwilliam Museum, rising from a gallery attendant to become Deputy Director, and his contribution to the field is explored through the two collections that he built up during his life: the Museum’s collection and his own private collection; to 31st January. A collection-based exhibition explores the work of Sargent, Sickert and Spencer; 8th December to 5th April. Cardiff, National Museum. Rembrandt’s Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet from Penrhyn Castle, which the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, unsuccessfully attempted to acquire in 2008, is on loan here to 21st March. Compton Verney. An exhibition exploring the private world of the artist’s studio from the 17th century to the present day is on view here to 13th December; to be reviewed. Georgian Portraits: Seeing is Believing is an exhibition of works from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath; to 13th December. Dublin, Hugh Lane Gallery. On the centenary of the birth of Francis Bacon at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, the exhibition Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, curated by Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison, provides an overview of and new insights into Bacon’s work; to 7th March (then in Compton Verney); to be reviewed. Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art. An overview of work by the French artist Philippe Parreno, and the first solo exhibition in Europe of sculpture by the American artist Lynda Benglis; both to 24th January. 150 master photographs from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, depicting New York City are on view to 7th February. Edinburgh, Dean Gallery. Seen earlier in London, the BP Portrait Award 2009 is on view here while the Portrait Gallery is closed for refurbishment; from 12th December to 21st February. Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery. The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing features the work of eleven contemporary artists; to 10th January. Edinburgh, Inverleith House. An exhibition of sculptures by Karla Black is here to 14th February. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. The exhibition devoted to Paul Sandby, already seen in Nottingham and reviewed in the November issue, has its second showing here to 7th February (then in London). An exhibition exploring Peter Lely’s enormous collection of paintings, drawings and prints runs here to 14th February. Edinburgh, Queen’s Gallery. Photographs by Herbert George Ponting and Frank Hurley of Scott and Shackleton in the Antarctic mark the centenary of Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole; to 11th April.
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Gateshead, Baltic. Works by Martin Parr are on show here to 10th January. Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery. Paintings, drawings and prints by Andrzej Jackowski; to 12th December. Leeds, Henry Moore Institute. Sculpture in Painting brings together 30 paintings from the 1500s to the present, with works by Titian, Hogarth, Vuillard and de Chirico, and explores the dialogue between painting and sculpture; to 10th January; to be reviewed. Leeds, Temple Newsam House. Wonderwall: 300 Years of Wallpaper; 2nd December to April 2010. Liverpool, Tate. The artist Michael Landy curates an exhibition that juxtaposes his own works against those of Jean Tinguely, by whose concepts of autodestruction Landy has been inspired; to 10th January. Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. Flashback is an exhibition of works by Bridget Riley drawn from the Arts Council Collection; to 13th December. Manchester Art Gallery. Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism; to 10th January; it is reviewed on p.857 above. Fantasies, Follies and Disasters: The Prints of Francisco de Goya; to 31st January. Middlesbrough, Institute of Modern Art. An exhibition of drawings by Ellsworth Kelly; 11th December to 21st February. Newlyn, The Exchange. A solo exhibition of video works by Marcus Coates; to 30th January. Norwich, Sainsbury Centre. Subversive Spaces. Surrealism and Contemporary Art is here to 13th December. Nottingham Contemporary. A major retrospective of the early work of David Hockney, from 1960–68, inaugurates this new museum; to 24th January; to be reviewed. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. The Museum has reopened after a major redevelopment of its building. Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius is the curious title of a monographic loan exhibition devoted to the Plympton-born artist; to 20th February. St Ives, Tate. The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art explores the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on British art since the turn of the twentieth century; to 10th January. Salford, The Lowry. An exhibition of paintings by L.S. Lowry and by Maggi Hambling on the theme of the sea runs here to 31st January. Salisbury, Roche Court. Sculptures by Sarah Staton and by Nina Saunders are on view to 31st January. Windsor, Windsor Castle, Drawings Gallery. An exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne includes works by Holbein; to 18th April. Woking, The Lightbox. An exhibition of works by Jenny Holzer is on view here to 14th February.
Europe Amsterdam, Hermitage. The opening exhibition at this revamped and expanded outpost of the Hermitage explores life and art at the Russian court in the 19th century; to 31st January. Amsterdam, Museum Van Loon. An exhibition of paintings of Jurriaan Andriessen; to 4th January. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. A survey of winter landscapes by Hendrick Avercamp; to 15th February (then in Washington); to be reviewed. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. The exhibition Alfred Stevens, previously in Brussels and reviewed in the September issue, is here to 24th January. 15 years of research into Van Gogh’s correspondence culminates in the launch of a website detailing the results of this work, the publication of a six-volume book in three languages and the exhibition Van Gogh’s letters: The artist speaks; to 3rd January. Antwerp, Rubenshuis. Room for Art in 17th-century Antwerp explores art collecting in 17th-century Antwerp through three paintings by Willem van Haecht depicting the art collection of Cornelis van der Geest (1555–1638); to 28th February (then in The Hague).
Athens, Byzantine and Christian Museum. Warhol/Icon: The Creation of Image; to 10th January. Athens, Gagosian Gallery. Works by Cy Twombly comprise the inaugural exhibition of this new branch, located at 3 Merlin Street; to 19th December. Athens, National Gallery. The birth of Neoclassicism in France. Masterpieces from the Musée du Louvre; to 11th January. Bagno a Ripoli (Florence), Oratorio di S. Caterina all’Antella. The trecento frescos in this oratory are joined by 12 unfamiliar paintings by, among others, Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello Aretino; to 31st December. Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró. Works by Frantisek Kupka; to 24th January. Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani. A large survey of work by John Cage is on view here to 10th January (then in Høvikodden). Basel, Fondation Beyeler. A large survey exhibition of works by Jenny Holzer; to 24th January. Basel, Kunstmuseum. From Dürer to Gober: 101 Master Drawings from the Kupferstichkabinett; to 24th January. New research into works in the permanent collection are presented in Frans II. Francken, Die Anbetung der Könige, und andere Entdeckungen; to 28th February.
59. The rock of doom, by Edward Burne-Jones. 1885–88. Canvas, 155 by 130 cm. (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart). Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. The monographic exhibition devoted to Carl Gustav Carus, previously seen in Dresden, runs here to 10th January. Berlin, Berlinische Galerie. An exhibition of work made in Berlin since 1989 assesses the impact of that momentous year; to 31st January. Berlin, Brücke-Museum. An exhibition focusing on the work of Fritz Bleyl runs here to 25th April. Berlin, Charlottenburg. Cranach and Renaissance Art under the House of Hohenzollern; to 24th January. Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim. Paintings by Julie Mehretu are on view here to 10th January. Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum. Following showings in Los Angeles and Nuremberg, the exhibition Kunst und Kalter Krieg. Deutsche Positionen 1945–1989 (known by the more divisive title ‘Art of Two Germanys’ for the US display) can be seen here to 10th January; to be reviewed. Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof. Seen earlier in London, The Saints, by the American artist Paul Pfeiffer, is a multi-media installation recreating the 1966 World Cup final; to 28th March. Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie. A solo exhibition of work by Thomas Demand; to 17th January. Bern, Kunstmuseum. Paintings by Giovanni Giacometti; to 21st February; to be reviewed. Bielefeld, Kunsthalle. An exhibition of work by the German Impressionists; to 31st January.
Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum. Seen earlier in New York, the exhibition devoted to the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright, reviewed in the September issue, is on view here to 14th February. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes. An exhibition devoted to the early work of Murillo runs here to 17th January (then in Seville); to be reviewed. Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico. An exhibition here reconstructs Federico Zeri’s intellectual biography through the paintings for which he found sound attributions and through his collection of photographs of works of art and archaeological sites; to 10th January; to be reviewed. Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. A retrospective of work by Markus Lüpertz; to 17th January. Bordeaux, Capc-Musée d’Art Contemporain. An exhibition of works by Ilya Kabakov is on view here to 7th February. Bourg-en-Bresse, Musée de Brou. Paintings by Zoran Music (1909–2005) are here to 10th January. Bregenz, Kunsthaus. An exhibition of work by Tony Oursler can be seen here to 17th January. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts. From Botticelli to Titian: Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art includes some 80 loans from international collections; to 14th February. The Alchemy of Beauty: Parmigianino – Drawings and Prints runs to 15th March. Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. A loan exhibition devoted to Fragonard drawings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon; to 18th January. Castelfranco Veneto, Museo Casa Giorgione. On the 500th anniversary of his death, Giorgione is being celebrated in his home town with an exhibition of ‘about half his works’, together with a generous selection of those by his confrères including Bellini, Cima, Sebastiano and Titian; 12th December to 11th April; to be reviewed. Catania, Fondazione Puglisi Cosentino, Palazzo Valle. Burri e Fontana: Materia e Spazio confronts the work of these two artists; to 14th March. Catanzaro, Museo Marca. Antoni Tàpies Materia focuses on the artist’s large-scale work over the last three decades; 12th December to 14th March. Cologne, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst. Das Herz der Erleuchtung. Buddhistische Kunst aus China (550–600); to 10th January. Cologne, Museum Ludwig. An exhibition examining the work of Angelika Hoerle (1899–1923), whose work foreshadowed Surrealism; to 1st January. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst. Works by Christian Lemmerz are on view to 6th March. The monographic exhibition devoted to Nicolai Abildgaard, seen previously in Paris and Hamburg, has its final showing here; to 3rd January. An exhibition devoted to Haarlem Mannerist prints runs to 17th January. Dresden, Residenzschloss. ‘Crossing the Sea with Fortuna’: Saxony and Denmark – Marriages and Alliances Mirrored in Art (1548–1709) runs to 4th January. Dresden, Semperbau. An exhibition of works by Georg Baselitz reflects on the artist’s relationship with Dresden; to 28th February. Düsseldorf, K21. A survey of paintings by the Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal is on view here to 10th January. Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast. Seen earlier in London, a survey exhibition of work by Per Kirkeby, is on view here to 10th January. Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum. An ambitious, threepart exhibition examining the work of El Lissitzky; to 5th September 2010. Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twenthe. The exhibition of works by Nicolaas Verkolje; to 24th January. Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti. An exhibition focusing on Boldini in Paris between 1871 and 1886 and on his work before he became the portraitist of the beau monde runs here to 10th January (then in Williamstown); it is reviewed on p.860 above. Florence, Palazzo Strozzi. Trompe l’œil from Antiquity to the present day is the theme of an exhibition running here to 10th January.
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Frankfurt, Liebieghaus. An international loan exhibition here explores the work of Houdon and his contemporaries; to 28th February (then in Montpellier). Frankfurt, Museum für Angewandte Kunst. A monographic exhibition devoted to the cabinetmaker André Charles Boulle; to 31st January. Frankfurt, Museum für Moderne Kunst. A survey exhibition of works by Jack Goldstein, one of the ‘Pictures Generation’; to 10th January. Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle. A retrospective of works by László Moholy-Nagy, including the artist’s Raum der Gegenwart of 1930; to 7th February. Frankfurt, Städel Museum. A monographic show devoted to Botticelli runs here to 28th February; to be reviewed. Geneva, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. Art and its markets: Flemish and Dutch painting of the 17th and 18th century presents new research into this part of the Museum’s permanent collection; to 29th August 2010; to be reviewed. Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruisdael and Beyond: Dutch and Flemish Printmaking in the 17th Century; to 3rd January. Genoa, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce. Così vicina così lontana examines art in Albania before and after 1990 and the effect of regime change on art; to 7th February. Genoa, Palazzo Ducale. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of Russia taken in 1954 are on show here from 4th December to 14th February. Genoa, Wolfsoniana. An exhibition of Futurist ceramics and graphic work runs here from 5th December to 11th April. Gorizia, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Gorizia. Here and at the Castello di Gorizia, an exhibition focuses on the importance for Marinetti of the frontier area of Venezia Giulia; to 28th February. Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. In celebration of Judith Leyster’s 400th birthday, an exhibition here focuses on the artist’s Self-portrait from Washington, where this show was seen previously, and includes additional loans of works by the artist; 19th December to 9th May. Haarlem, Teylers Museum. Here, and at the Singer Museum, Laren, the first monographic show devoted to the work of Anton Mauve runs to 14th January. The Hague, Gemeentemuseum. An exhibition comparing works by Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian is on view here to 24th January. An exhibition on Delftware coincides with the launch of the website www.delftsaardewerk.nl; to 11th April. The Hague, Mauritshuis. The exhibition devoted to Philips Wouwerman, seen previously in Kassel, runs here to 28th February; to be reviewed. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. The third instalment of a tripartite exhibition of works by Sigmar Polke is on view to 17th January. Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. A major survey of contemporary art from around the world runs here to 10th January. Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts. A retrospective of works by Renée Green; to 3rd January. Leiden, Lakenhal. The exhibition Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde. Constructing a New World comprises some 300 works by 80 artists surveying Van Doesburg’s influence on the European avant-garde; to 3rd January (then in London). Leon, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon. Current exhibitions include works by Ugo Rondinone, Jorge Galindo and Kyong Park; all to 10th January. Lisbon, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian. An exhibition of Art Deco in France presents objects that were originally included in the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts; to 3rd January. Louvain, M. At this curiously renamed museum, an international loan exhibition explores the work of Rogier van der Weyden; to 6th December; it is reviewed on p.860 above in conjunction with the exhibition that took place in 2008–09 in Frankfurt and Berlin.
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60. Breton boy, by Paul Gauguin. 1889. Canvas, 93 by 72.4 cm. (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Fondation Corboud, Cologne; exh. Albertina, Vienna). Madrid, Fundación Juan March. An international loan exhibition explores Caspar David Friedrich’s drawings in relation to his paintings; to 10th January. Madrid, Museo del Prado. The exhibition devoted to Juan Bautista Maíno is on view here to 31st January; to be reviewed. Dutch Painters in the Prado brings together a sizeable group of the most important Dutch paintings from the permanent collection on the occasion of the publication of the first catalogue of this part of the Museum’s holdings, largely unknown to the wider public; to 15th April. The Rijksmuseum’s more than 4 metres long Company of Captain Reinier Reael, better known as the ‘Meagre Company’, by Frans Hals and Pieter Codde, is on loan here to 28th February. Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Videos, drawings, objects and installations by the Croatian artist David Maljkovic; to 18th January. Works by Francesco Lo Savio; to 11th January. The exhibition Rodchenko y Popova. Defining constructivism is on view here to 22nd February. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Here and at the Fundación Caja Madrid, Tears of Eros explores the relationship between sexual desire and the death instinct in the visual arts spanning Rubens to Rodin; to 31st January. The first retrospective in Spain of works by FantinLatour; to 10th January. A display focuses on the Museum’s famous grisailles by Jan van Eyck; to 31st January. Malaga, Museo Picasso. A retrospective of work by Sophie Taeuber-Arp; to 24th January. Marseilles, Musée Cantini. De la scène au tableau, shows the influence of the theatre and the theatrical on artists from David to Vuillard; to 3rd January. Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli. Some 50 exquisite textiles in the show Seta, Oro, Cremisi illustrate the technological innovations in silk production promoted in Milan by the Visconti and Sforza families; to 21st February; to be reviewed. Milan, Palazzo Reale. A major Edward Hopper exhibition runs to 24th January (then in Rome). Montpellier, Musée Fabre. A monographic exhibition devoted to Jean Raoux; to 14th April; to be reviewed. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. The completion of a complex and lengthy restoration of Andrea del Sarto’s Holy Family is celebrated in a display which also includes another version of the painting from the Louvre; to 6th January. Rubens challenges the Old Masters: Inspiration and Reinvention examines the copies Rubens made of the work of other painters; to 7th February.
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Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne. Prints by Daniel Hopfer are here to 31st January. Nijmegen, Museum Het Valkhof. The exhibition Catherine’s world presents the Hours of Catherine of Cleves from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, which will be disbound for the occasion so that more than 100 pages can be viewed separately; to 3rd January. Padua, Galleria Civica Cavour. Futurist sculpture 1909–1944: homage to Mino Rosso is another in the series of celebrations of Futurism’s centenary; to 31st January. Padua, Palazzo Zabarella. Telemaco Signorini’s works are shown alongside those by contemporaries such as Van Gogh, Degas, Caillebotte and others in a show running to 31st January; it is reviewed on p.863 above. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. A comprehensive survey of Surrealist photography made between 1920 and 1940 runs here to 11th January (then in Winterthur and Madrid). Paris, Galerie des Gobelins. Trésors des Habsbourgs d’Espagne, chefs-d’œuvre de la la tapisserie de la Renaissance; 15th December to 7th March. Paris, Grand Palais. An exhibition surveying works made by Renoir after 1900 runs here to 4th January (then in Los Angeles and Philadelphia). Paris, Institut Néerlandais. Dutch and Flemish paintings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen are on loan here to 24th January. Paris, Jeu de Paume. An exhibition examining the cinematic work of Fellini is accompanied by installations devised by Francesco Vezolli; to 17th January. Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay. An exhibition here focuses on Marguerite Gérard as a pupil and collaborator in Fragonard’s studio; to 6th December; to be reviewed. Paris, Musée d’art moderne. In Arc, a survey exhibition of paintings by the German artist Albert Oehlen is on view to 3rd January. Paris, Musée de la Vie Romantique. The exhibition Souvenirs d’italie (1600–1850): Chefs-d’œuvre du Petit Palais is here to 17th January. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, previously in Boston and reviewed in the November issue, runs to 4th January. An exhibition devoted to drawings by Battista Franco runs to 22nd February. La collection Georges Pébereau: Maîtres du dessin européen du XVIe au XXe siècle; to 22nd February. Paris, Musée du Luxembourg. A monographic exhibition devoted to the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany runs to 17th January. Paris, Musée Eugène Delacroix. Une passion pour Delacroix: la collection Karen B. Cohen; 16th December to 5th April. Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André. A loan exhibition of works by artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Memling and Van Eyck from the Muzeul National Brukenthal, Sibiu, Romania, runs to 11th January. Paris, Musée Rodin. The first exhibition exploring the relationship between Matisse and Rodin runs to 28th February; to be reviewed. Paris, Pinacothèque. De Rembrandt à Vermeer is a loan exhibition of paintings from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; to 7th February. Passariano, Villa Manin. The age of Courbet and Manet: the spread of realism and Impressionism through central and eastern Europe; to 7th March. Piacenza, Galleria d’arte moderna Ricci Oddi. An exhibition devoted to small-scale paintings by the Macchiaioli and post-Macchiaioli; to 2nd May. Pont-Aven, Musée. Paintings by Maurice Chabbas (1862–1947) can be seen here to 3rd January. Rancate (Mendrisio), Canton Ticino, Pinacoteca cantonale Giovanni Züst. The collection assembled by Riccardo Molo (1883–1934) of 19th-century Italian painters from Fattori to Segantini is on public view for the first time; to 10th January. Rimini, Castel Sismondo. Paintings spanning Rembrandt to Picasso from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are on loan here; to 14th March.
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Rome, Galleria Borghese. 20 paintings by Francis Bacon, including two triptychs, are placed side by side with Caravaggio’s work; to 24th January. Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori. Michelangelo’s drawings for his architectural projects in Rome; to 7th February; to be reviewed. Rome, Museo Mario Praz. An exhibition of the Roman drawings of Lancelot-Théodore Turpin de Crissé (1782–1859) from the collection of the Louvre is on show here to 13th February. Rome, Palazzo della Cancelleria. Another celebration of Galileo, this one ironically sponsored by the Pontificia Accademia delle Scienze, among others, is here to 31st January. Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni. A large exhibition of works by Alexander Calder; to 14th February. Rotterdam, Kunsthal. Modern Life. Edward Hopper and his Time places works by Hopper alongside a large selection of works by O’Keeffe, Feininger and Grant Wood among others, drawn from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; to 17th January. Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. A display compares the Museum’s St Jerome by Anthony van Dyck with a second version in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, now that both works have recently been restored; 5th December to 14th February. Roubaix, La Piscine. The focus exhibition in France to examine the influence of the Bloomsbury Group ranges works by Bell, Grant and Fry alongside French associates such as Simon Bussy, Henri Doucet and Jean Marchand; to 28th February. Rovereto, Museo d’Arte moderna e contemporanea. Masterpieces of modern art from the Winterthur collection are on show here to 10th January. Salzburg, Museum der Moderne. A survey exhibition of work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner runs here to 14th February. Siena, S. Maria della Scala. An exhibition devoted to Federico Barocci runs here to 10th January; to be reviewed. Stockholm, Moderna Museet. An exhibition juxtaposing works by Dalí and Francesco Vezolli runs here to 17th January. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. An exhibition of work by Caspar David Friedrich introduces the Swedish public to an artist who is not at all represented in Swedish public collections; to 10th January. Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie. The first monographic exhibition in Germany devoted to the work of Edward Burne-Jones; to 7th February (Fig.59). An exhibition devoted to the prints and drawings of Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (1609–1682/83) runs here to 7th March. Toulouse, Les Abattoirs. Early works by Miquel Barceló, 1973 to 1984, comprise an exhibition on view here to 28th February. Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition of work by Max Ernst runs to 18th January. Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’arte Contemporanea. An exhibition exploring the kinetic art of Gianni Colombo runs here to 10th January. Turin, GAM. An exhibition of works by Ian Kiaer are on view here to 31st January. Valenica, Museo de Bellas Artes. Valencia, The Splendour of the Renaissance in Aragon, previously in Bilbao, presents a selection of some 100 works on loan from the Museo de Zaragoza; to 17th January (then in Zaragoza); to be reviewed. Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Jean Baptiste Vanmour: a painter from Valenciennes in Constantinople is here to 7th February; to be reviewed. Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. An exhibition devoted to the work Maurice Prendergast while he was in Italy in 1899 and again in 1911–12, previously in Williamstown, runs here to 3rd January (then in Houston). Verona, Palazzo della Gran Guardia. The idea that Corot can be seen as the ‘father’ of modern art is explored here in an exhibition of 115 works spanning Poussin to Picasso; to 7th March.
Vienna, Albertina. The exhibition Impressionismus. Wie das licht auf die Leinwand kam, is on view here to 10th January (Fig.60). Vienna, Belvedere. An exhibition on the work of Franz Anton Maulbertsch; to 17th January. Vienna, Essl Collection. 25 recent paintings by the German artist Daniel Richter are here to 10th January. Vienna, Kunsthalle. 1989: The End of History or Beginning of the Future?; to 7th February. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Charles the Bold (1433–77): Art, War and Courtly Splendour, previously in Bern and Bruges and reviewed in the July issue, runs here to 10th January. Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. A loan exhibition here explores art at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, with a special focus on two recently acquired works by Hans von Aachen and Joseph Heintz the Elder; to 12th January. An exhibition exploring the picture frame from the late medieval period to the 19th century runs here to 12th January. Vienna, MUMOK. The exhibition Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in Eastern European Art is on view here to 14th February. Zürich, Kunsthaus. A loan exhibition of drawings and paintings, Georges Seurat: Figure in Space, runs to 17th January (then in Frankfurt).
New York Brooklyn Museum. An exhibition of 124 watercolours from a set of 350 by James Tissot, depicting detailed scenes from the New Testament, all in the Museum’s collection, are displayed for the first time in two decades; to 17th January. Frick Collection. The exhibition Exuberant Grotesques: Renaissance Maiolica from the Fontana Workshop shows the Frick’s recently acquired maiolica dish with the Judgment of Paris along with five related works on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; to 17th January. Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection; to 10th January (then in Paris; see also Morgan Library). Gagosian. At 522 W. 21st St., new sculptures by Richard Serra; to 23rd December. Hauser & Wirth. Works by Paul McCarthy from the Snow White series, based on the fairy tale, are on view to 24th December.
Jewish Museum. An exhibition examining how Man Ray’s work was shaped by his turn-of-the-century American-Jewish immigrant experience runs here to 14th March. Lehmann Maupin. Works by Tracey Emin are on view to 19th December. Luhring Augustine. An exhibition of European sculpture from the 1960s to the 1980s is on view here to 19th December. Marian Goodman. New works by Gerhard Richter, including paintings from the 2008 ‘Sindbad’ cycle, are on view to 9th January (Fig.61). Matthew Marks. New works by Fischli & Weiss are on view to 16th January. Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum has on loan the marble sculpture Young archer, first attributed to Michelangelo in 1997 in this Magazine. An exhibition exploring scenes of everyday life in American painting (1765–1915) runs to 24th January. Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156–1868; to 10th January. Morgan Library & Museum. William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun’ is drawn from the Morgan’s extensive holdings of works by Blake; to 3rd January. Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings includes more than eighty drawings from the Morgan’s renowned holdings; to 3rd January (see also Frick Collection). Museum of Modern Art. A display of six late paintings by Monet, made at Giverny, including four from the collection are on show for the first time since the Museum’s reopening in 2004; to 12th April; it is reviewed on p.866 above. Seen earlier in Berlin, the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, can be seen here to 25th January; to be reviewed. A retrospective exhibition of works by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco is on view here from 13th December to 1st March (then in Basel and Paris). Neue Galerie. From Klimt to Klee: Masterworks from the Serge Sabarsky Collection honours the life and work of the museum’s co-founder; to 15th February. New Museum of Contemporary Art. Works by Urs Fischer are on view to 24th January. Pace Wildenstein. Recent works by David Hockney are at 25th St. and 57th St.; to 24th December. Richard L. Feigen. The London dealer Sam Fogg and Richard Feigen join forces in the show Medieval Art and the Contemporary Spirit; to 5th February. Solomon Guggenheim Museum. Seen earlier in Munich and Paris, the extensive retrospective of works by Kandinsky is on view here to 13th January; it was reviewed in the July issue. A new commissioned work by Anish Kapoor, Memory, is on display to 28th March. Whitney Museum of American Art. Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is on view here to 17th January. An exhibition of works by Roni Horn is on view to 31st January.
North America
61. Abstract painting, by Gerhard Richter. 2009. Canvas, 195 by 140 cm. (Courtesy of the artist and Marion Goodman Gallery, New York).
Atlanta, High Museum of Art. Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius includes some 50 works, including more than 20 sketches and studies by Leonardo, some of which will be on view in the United States for the first time; to 21st February. Austin, Blanton Museum of Art. The display reconstructing Veronese’s Petrobelli altarpiece, seen earlier in London and Ottawa, is here to 31st December. Beverly Hills, Gagosian. New paintings by Jeff Koons are on view to 9th January. Birmingham Museum of Art. The touring exhibition Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery has its last showing here to 10th January. Chicago, Art Institute. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus from the National Gallery, London, is here (to 15th January) as a reciprocal loan for the Institute’s Crucifixion by Zurbarán, which is on show in the National Gallery’s The Sacred made Real exhibition. the burlington m a g a z i n e
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Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago runs to 31st January. Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum. Twenty-five paintings by Susan Rothenberg comprise an exhibition running here to 4th January (then in Santa Fe, Washington and Miami). Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum. An exhibition here focuses on two paintings acquired in the 1960s as by Rembrandt but now considered as ‘workshop of Rembrandt’ and puts them into context through works on loan from public and private collections in the United States and Canada; to 24th January. Houston, Menil Collection. Works by Joaquín Torres-Garcia; to 3rd January (then in San Diego). An exhibition exploring the fragmented human body in art spanning late medieval to the 20th century runs here to 28th February. Houston, Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition The Moon, previously in Cologne and reviewed in the September issue, runs here to 10th January. Indianapolis Museum of Art. Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World explores the exaggerated aesthetic and expressive means employed by 17thcentury Spanish artists to convey religious experience through works in various media, including polychrome sculpture (Fig.62) to 3rd January (see also London, National Gallery and Matthiessen Gallery). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The monographic show devoted to Luis Meléndez, previously in Washington, is here to 3rd January (then in Boston). Los Angeles, Getty Villa. Collector’s Choice: J. Paul Getty and His Antiquities; to 8th February. Los Angeles, Hammer Museum. An exhibition of watercolours by Charles Burchfield can be seen here to 3rd January (then in Buffalo and New York). Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference, a timehonoured exercise in connoisseurship, explores the differences between Rembrandt’s drawings and those of more than 14 pupils and followers; 8th December to 28th February. There is a concurrent display of Dutch drawings from the Getty collections. Minneapolis, Institute of Arts. An exhibition here explores how the definition of a ‘masterpiece’ has changed over time through works from the Louvre, including Vermeer’s Astronomer; to 10th January. Montclair, Art Museum. A loan exhibition on the reception of Cézanne in America and his influence on artists such as Hartley, Marin, Demuth, Gorky and several others, runs here to 3rd January (then in Baltimore and Phoenix). New Haven, Yale Center for British Art. An exhibition devoted to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill includes many objects that were in Walpole’s collection; to 3rd January (then in London). The exhibition A bouquet of botanical delights: the life and art of Mary Delany is on view here to 3rd January. Oklahoma City Art Museum. The touring exhibition The Dutch Italianates: Seventeenth-Century Masterpieces from Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, has its last showing here to 3rd January. Philadelphia, Museum of Art. A retrospective of work by Arshile Gorky is here to 10th January (then in London and Los Angeles); to be reviewed. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art. The Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries have reopened after renovation, with displays of American and European decorative arts from the mid-18th century to the present day. Sarasota, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Venice in the Age of Canaletto; to 10th January. Seattle Art Museum. Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti; to 11th April. Syracuse, Everson Museum of Art. Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales is on view to 3rd January (then in Washington and Albuquerque). Washington, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A retrospective of works by Anne Truitt, who died in 2004, honours this important minimalist artist; to 3rd January.
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62. St John the Evangelist on Patmos, by Pedro Roldán. c.1665. Poychromed wood and silver, 50 by 30 by 31 cm. (Monastery of S. Clara, Clarisas Franciscanas, Montilla, Córdoba; exh. Indianapolis Museum of Art). Washington, National Gallery of Art. Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800, is on view here to 31st January. The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900; to 18th January. 45 proofs for lithographs, etchings and screenprints by Jasper Johns; to 4th April.
December sales London, Bonhams (Bond St.). Impressionist and modern art (3rd); Irish art (8th); Old-master paintings (9th); European ceramics (9th); Prints (15th). London, Christie’s (King St.). Russian art (1st and 2nd); Old-master prints (8th); Old-master and 19thcentury paintings, drawings and watercolours (8th and 9th); Cabinet d’un Amateur Européen (9th); European decorative arts (10th); French furniture, savonnerie, Sèvres porcelain, silver and Chinese works of art (10th); Victorian and British Impressionist pictures, drawings and watercolours (16th). London, Christie’s (South Kensington). Russian pictures and works of art (3rd); Old-master and 19thcentury paintings, drawings and watercolours (11th); 20th-century British art (16th). London, Sotheby’s. Western manuscripts (8th); Oldmaster sculpture and works of art (8th); Continental furniture and clocks (8th); Old-master and British paintings (9th and 10th); Victorian and Edwardian art (17th). New York, Christie’s. American paintings, drawings and sculpture (2nd); Photographs (7th); 20th-century decorative art and design (8th); Antiquities (11th). New York, Sotheby’s. American paintings, drawings and sculpture (3rd); Egyptian, Classical, and Western Asiatic antiquities (10th); Books and manuscripts (11th); The collection of Robert Isabell (17th); 20thcentury design and Tiffany (17th).
Forthcoming Fairs Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair (BRAFA); 22nd to 31st January. London, 20/21 International Art Fair; 18th to 21st February. Madrid, ARCO; 17th to 21st February. New York, Master Drawings; 24th to 31st January. Palm Beach, American International Fine Art Fair (AIFAF); 3rd to 8th February.
the burlington magazine
Colin Amery is a freelance writer and critic. His most recent book, St Petersburg, co-authored with Brian Curran, was published in 2007. Christopher Baker is Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. James Boaden is a Lecturer in modern and contemporary art at the University of York. His research focuses on post-War American art and experimental film. Malcolm Bull is Head of Art History at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. Stephen Duffy is Curator of Nineteenth-Century Paintings and Exhibitions Curator at the Wallace Collection, London. He is currently writing a book on the miniatures in the Wallace Collection with his colleague Christoph Vogtherr. Elizabeth W. Easton is the co-founder and Director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Patrick Elliott is Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. He specialises in twentieth-century sculpture. Elizabeth Goldring is an Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick. Edward Hanfling is a freelance art historian, curator and critic. His monograph on the New Zealand abstract painter Milan Mrkusich, co-authored with Alan Wright, is forthcoming. Machtelt Israëls is Researcher in History of Art at the University of Amsterdam. She is writing a monograph on Sassetta and the catalogue of the Berenson Collection at Villa I Tatti, Florence. Catherine Johnston is a freelance art historian. She is currently preparing a catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Guido Reni. C.M. Kauffmann was formerly at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His most recent book, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England, 750–1550, was published in 2003. Edouard Kopp is Assistant Curator of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Christina Lodder is a Fellow of the University of Edinburgh. Her book on Kazimir Malevich is forthcoming. Scott Nethersole is the Harry M. Weinrebe Curatorial Assistant at the National Gallery, London. Paula Nuttall is an independent scholar, whose current research is on fifteenth-century secular imagery. Martin Postle is the Assistant Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. Hugh Roberts is Director of the Royal Collection and Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art. Ian Robertson is a freelance writer. His book, Atlas of the Peninsular War, is forthcoming. Philip Rylands is Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Xavier F. Salomon is Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. June Schlueter is Charles A. Dana Professor Emerita of English at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania. Richard Schofield is Professor of Architectural History at Venice University (IUAV). His most recent book is a translation of Vitruvius’ On Architecture. Jennifer Tonkovich is a Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Morgan Library and Museum, New York. Marina Vaizey is the former editor of Art Quarterly and The Review for the National Art Collections Fund. She is currently a Trustee of the Geffrye Museum and chairs the Friends of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Stuart Whatling is currently finishing his Ph.D. thesis on visual narratology and early Gothic art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Humphrey Wine is Curator of 17th- and 18th-Century French Paintings at the National Gallery, London. He is currently working on the catalogue of the Gallery’s 18th-century French paintings. Christopher S. Wood is Professor of Art History at Yale University, New Haven.
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