B1216-479-498

Exhibition Reviews Raoul De Keyser London and Rocherchouart

by MERLIN JAMES TH E T OU R IN G EX H I B I T I O N of paintings by the Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser (b.1930) brings into better view an important figure not among the usual postmodern suspects.

Now on view at the Musée de Rocherchouart (to 29th August), its first showing, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London,1 provided a welcome alternative to a string of recent exhibitions in the city reprising more familiar names from the late twentieth century, including Polke, Lichtenstein, Judd, Guston, Richter and Twombly.

De Keyser’s early games with minimalist conventions open the show. Baron in an Al Held field (Fig.44) lets a mischievous dog stray into a pristine colour field. Slice III (1969) is one of the artist’s plank-like vertical panels leaning against the wall, abstract at a glance, but betraying fragments of schematised, black-outlined cloud and wave. Camping IV (1970–72) is an Ellsworth Kelly-like abstract of flat blue and yellow, but readable as dune and sky. A few works in the show introduce De Keyser’s extensive referencing of the lines on sports pitches, evoking notions of rule, play, ground and field in painting. Also evident from early on is the artist’s habit of painting the sides of the canvas, even over baton frames. Vagrant (1978) seems to have been remounted over a too-large stretcher, pulling the painted sides onto the front surface and even leaving a corner of the stretcher showing. Frequently, stretcher bars are allowed to impress through scraped areas, flouting a very basic taboo in easel painting. Often the margins of the canvas are subtly painted to create the ghost of the stretcher behind. At the same time there is a sense of compositions being fragments of possibly larger fields, and there is also much layering and cancellation. Paintings are evidently made over other, older images, or generated from their semi-obliteration.

From the late 1970s onwards, the work (and this is crucial to its project) at once has consistency yet is resistant to formulae. It is largely, yet not always and not of its nature, abstract.

Imagery – trees, windows, interior walls, stairs, Venetian blinds, grilles – is implicit, or explicit. There are virtual monochromes, animated uneasily by rag smears, knife scrapings or shrapnel-like pockmarks. The question of what is significant, and what incidental, is continually begged. Another charged uncertainty is whether individual paintings here need to be read in the context of the larger, more complex œuvre for their character (at times indeed their very sufficiency) to be recognised as works of art.

43. Untitled, by Raoul De Keyser.

1985. 120 by 110 cm.

(Private collection; exh. Musée de Rocherchouart).

De Keyser’s spare, sceptical consciousness of convention and construction, and of the essential meagreness of painting’s means, is part of what makes him a tougher customer than, say, many British abstractionists of the 1970s and beyond. His paintings are deliberately uningratiating. Their formalism is one that accepts contingency rather than aspires to inevitability or ‘rightness’. Nor does he indulge in romantic reverie. Poetic, associative titles are more arbitrary than those one is used to from the post-Abstract Expressionist

44. Baron in an Al Held field, by Raoul De Keyser.

1964–66. 105 by 80 cm. (Private collection; exh. Musée de Rocherchouart).

tradition. Several pictures are called Tornado; but this is at odds with their (diverse) atmospheres. It is in fact the name of De Keyser’s rowing boat, from which perhaps he glimpsed some inspiration for the works; but importantly he is simply borrowing here another kind of ‘name’ for another kind of artefact, the barque (which is – like a painting? – a vehicle, and an arena for experience). The very inaccessibility of the significance to the viewer is somehow taken as read.

Commentary on De Keyser often emphasises his tactics vis-à-vis painting’s purported endgame, with Richter’s name often evoked.

It is largely on such grounds, no doubt, that we are treated to the current retrospective.

Granted, Beckett’s sentiment, ‘I can’t go on; I’ll go on’, inflects De Keyser’s practice, and Come on, play it again is the title of one group of paintings. But his disabused attitude to painting’s potential for signification and expression does not lead to routine strategies such as those offered by many artists, from Arte Povera onwards, who have parodied the effect of the brushstroke, exhibited canvases wrenched from the stretcher, or ones artfully cut to expose the stretcher and wall behind.

Nor are his Venetian blinds, grilles and windows like the jokes of Neo-Geo painting, turning Minimalism’s grids into prison bars or circuit boards. Least of all does he think of himself abjectly or poignantly playing house amid painting’s ruins, as so many current figurative painters seem to do.

If the main point of the work were the ingenuity of its escaping act from a late modernist straitjacket (or indeed its ability to function within it), this would be a limited the burl ington m agazin e

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45. November, by Raoul De Keyser. 1989.

70 by 50 cm. (Private collection; exh. Musée de Rocherchouart).

achievement. Rather, like certain other artists who played at times between abstraction and figuration (names come to mind as various as Francis Picabia, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Hélion, Roger Hilton and Prunella Clough), we finally care about De Keyser’s paintings as individual, characterful works of art with a rich, allusive relationship to broader experience. Close as the squiggles and dabs of his Untitled (Fig.43) may be to Polke’s famous spoof Modern art, De Keyser is genuinely proposing that these bones can live. The longer we look, the more we see; light, shadow, depth, movement, a prevailing direction, layering, the beginnings of illusionism, of composition, the inflection of colour, something of a tattered flag, a windsock, a ribbon on a stick. Even the programmatic Baron in an Al Held field sustains interest beyond its originating conceit; the dog is lying down and seen from above but, encroaching from the lower edge, can be read as humorously erect and humanoid, like a perky glove-puppet parading across the picture’s window. The abstract line it crosses becomes a stick carried over its shoulder like a wand, a flag, or the staff carried by some fairy-tale figure running away from home. Scraped and sullied images such as November (Fig.45) can certainly carry emotive charge (pace commentators’ usual denials of ‘expressionism’ in De Keyser); and the frustration is not only that of the painter tired of well-mannered abstraction. It is also frustration at the failure of ideals, the loss of illusions, the struggle to express. De Keyser’s art is highly metaphoric and indeed potentially symbolic. Horizons, portals, cloudy memories/ portents of previous/potential realities – all these are given a credibility in the viewer’s imagination, in a way they may fail to have in more obviously ‘metaphysical’ painting from Rothko, Still or Newman. De Keyser

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manages to shed the institutional flavour that clings to art for which the museum has replaced the church as a locus of religious experience.

It might be argued that one needs the grand mainstream of late modernist abstraction in order to appreciate De Keyser’s more quirky practice. But that again is to see him too much as reactive to and dependent on the concerns of late modern and postmodern art.

He relates to a wider and deeper pool of tradition, tracking back from Arp, Matisse (the grey of the Piano lesson is ubiquitous), Spilliaert, Daumier and Courbet to, say, the silvery light of Teniers or the scatterings of Avercamp’s ice skaters.

The modernist mistake was not a belief in painting’s progress, but in imagining that this implied a destination, an endpoint. Painting had been evolving for centuries before Impressionism, continually assimilating and superseding previous developments. De Keyser points to a resumption of this urgent but open-ended advance, certainly ingesting abstraction, with all its quasi-millenarian delusions and solipsistic dogmas, but as simply one further chapter in a continuing story.

1

From Rocherchouart the exhibition travels to the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art, Tilburg (11th September to 9th January 2005), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (January to April 2005; exact dates to be announced) and Kunstmuseum St Gallen (May to August 1905). Catalogue: Raoul De Keyser. Texts (quinti-lingual) by Anthony Spira, Adrian Searle, Ulrich Loock and Konrad Bitterli.

176 pp. incl. 88 col. pls. + 5 b. & w. ills. (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2004), £24.95. ISBN 085–488– 136–0. The colour reproduction, at least in the initial printing, is often wildly inaccurate, and the illustration of Untitled, 1964–66, on p.37 is reversed.

Watteau and the fête galante Valenciennes

by ALAN WINTERMUTE

appropriate that the city of Valenciennes, as part of the regional festivities accompanying the celebration of Lille as this year’s European Cultural Capital, should have chosen to pay tribute to Jean Antoine Watteau, its most famous son. Watteau et la fête galante at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes (closed 14th June), was a thematic exhibition in which Watteau played the starring role, but a principal supporting one was given to his most faithful pupil, JeanBaptiste Pater. If the genre of painting that they popularised throughout the courts and salons of Europe took root in the gardens and promenades of Paris and the Ile de France, this exhibition sought to demonstrate that many of its seeds were planted in the soil of their Flemish homeland.

Watteau et la fête galante was organised by Patrick Ramade and Martin Eidelberg, a doyen of Watteau studies, who is the principal author of the accompanying catalogue.1 In I T I S ALTO GE THE R

its nine handsomely installed galleries, the exhibition sought not so much to define the fête galante as to identify the various social and art-historical currents that attended its creation.

The first and most captivating room was the only one devoted exclusively to Watteau: the commedia dell’arte-inspired L’Aventurière from Troyes (cat. no.1); the overlooked musical pastorale, La Déclaration attendue from Angers (no.3); the ambitious and rarely exhibited L’Ile enchantée from the Ortiz collection (no.7) which, with its large cast of paired lovers and mountainous, Leonardesque landscape, evokes Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère in miniature; and the wistful Deux cousines from the Louvre (no.9; Fig.46). Together they demonstrated the broad range of Watteau’s approach to the genre of the fête galante, while a superb group of seven related drawings indicated the artist’s unorthodox methods of composing his pictures. After the earliest years of his career he almost never made compositional studies (a rare sheet from the Art Institute of Chicago for a fully worked out fête galante was a welcome inclusion; no.12), producing instead closely observed figure studies of individual models in casual poses.

During the eighteenth century, the term fête galante was used comparatively rarely to categorise the paintings of Watteau and his immediate followers, as Eidelberg observes in his slightly pedantic etymological essay that serves as the introduction to the catalogue; ‘sujets galants’, ‘sujets champêtres’, ‘sujets modernes’ or ‘bambochades’ were the more commonly employed phrases until well into the nineteenth century. And yet the term has proved unshakeable in discussions of the genre that was perfected, if not invented, by Watteau. Eidelberg accords great significance to Christian Michel’s fascinating recent discovery, yet to be published, that in August 1717 Watteau was formally received into the Académie royale as a painter ‘en qualité d’académicien’: this was the standard wording used when an artist was admitted as a history painter, and Eidelberg cites this as proof that Watteau was regarded as such and not as a painter of genre, as is commonly assumed.

Nevertheless, his masterpiece, Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, was immediately rebaptised ‘une feste galante’ by the Académie, and at the time of their reception Watteau’s pupil Pater and his followers Nicolas Lancret and Bonaventure de Bar were each described by the Académie as painters with a ‘talent particulier des fêtes galantes’. Watteau’s own contemporaries were soon to claim, as Dézallier d’Argenville did in 1745, that ‘on le reçut Académicien sous le titre de peintre de fêtes galantes’ – mistakenly, perhaps, but itself a clear indication that any official distinction between Watteau the history painter (who made fêtes galantes) and Watteau the painter of the fête galante was soon lost.

The second gallery of the exhibition, ‘Le royaume de Vénus’, should, in principal, have made the case for Watteau as a history painter sui generis. Its focus was Le Pèlerinage à l’île de

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46. Les Deux cousines, by Jean Antoine Watteau. c.1717–18. 30.4 by 35.6 cm.

(Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes).

Cythère, the only fête galante that abandoned earthly reality (however romanticised) for a more elevated, allegorical realm where cavorting Cupids and winged putti guide Love’s pilgrims to (or from) their mythic island destination. Unfortunately, the exhibition had to make do with Tardieu’s engraving of Watteau’s celebrated reception piece (no.13), as the Louvre (perhaps understandably) would not lend it. Likewise, the joyous and Rubensian reworking of the composition in Charlottenburg, probably made a year or two later for Jean de Jullienne, and the modest early foray into the subject (perhaps based on a play) from the Städel in Frankfurt were not included. In contrast to these grandes absences, there were several earlier works that offered in one way or another precedents for Watteau’s masterpiece: an anonymous Flemish panel representing the medieval tradition of the Garden of Love (no.14); courtesans and their clients paying homage to a very lively statue of Venus in Louis de Caulery’s amusing modern interpretation of a text by Philostratus (no.15); sensual pagan youths dancing and drinking in Padovanino’s fine early seventeenth-century copy of Titian’s Andrians (no.16); and, best of all, two spectacular, large pen-and-ink drawings by Rubens based on his painting of the Garden of Love (nos.17 and 18; Fig.47), drawings that Watteau would certainly have seen in the collection of Pierre Crozat. A charming but badly preserved version of the Pèlerinage à Cythère by one of Watteau’s most appealing followers, PierreAntoine Quillard (no.20), could not, how-

ever, compensate for the absence of works

by Watteau himself, making all the more inexplicable the curatorial decision to exclude from the exhibition L’Enjôleur – with its Cytherean pair of pilgrim lovers – and Le Faune, two early decorative panels by Watteau that were acquired with great fanfare by the Valenciennes museum in 1999. (Perversely, they hung outside with other eighteenth-century works, as a preamble to the exhibition.)

The remaining galleries illustrated themes that either informed the iconography of the fête galante or whose own imagery was in turn influenced by this new genre. As is often the case in thematic exhibitions, some works

seemed to have been chosen somewhat arbitrarily to represent their assigned categories: Sebastiaen Vrancx’s Feast in a royal garden (no.72) was included in the gallery devoted to ‘La collation’ because its revellers are picnicking; however, they are also walking and would have found as appropriate a home in the room dedicated to ‘Promenades’, or in ‘Accords’, since they are making music as well. Especially vexing was the separation of pendants: Watteau’s gentle guitar-tuning Enchanteur from Troyes (no.55) was included in the section ‘Accords’, while its companion, L’Aventurière, was hung seven galleries earlier, despite the fact that she is being serenaded by an actor playing a guitar.

Each section of the exhibition was developed around one or more works by Watteau and works by younger masters of the fête galante who built on Watteau’s example.

Among the chief pleasures of the exhibition was the rare occasion to see paintings by some of the more obscure members of Watteau’s circle. In addition to the half-dozen paintings each by Lancret and Pater – a few of them first-rate – there were drawings by Claude Gillot and Antoine Dieu, paintings by Joseph Parrocel and the (blessedly) forgotten JeanBaptiste Lebel, as well as the impressive reception pieces of both François Octavien and Bonaventure de Bar (nos.25 and 26; both borrowed from the Louvre, where they are never on public display). Particularly welcome were four paintings by the mysterious and gifted Antoine Quillard, who died in Lisbon at the age of twenty-nine; the two from the Louvre were cleaned for this occasion (nos.41 and 63; Fig.49).

Less satisfactory was the exploration of the impact of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century northern and Italian paintings, drawings and prints on the development of Watteau’s imagery. Here, the difficulties that the organisers had in securing loans were most evident; mediocre copies and workshop replicas substituted for village feasts by David Vinckboons (no.22) and Pieter Brueghel the Younger (no.29), while sadly worn originals by Michiel van Musscher (no.61), Dirk Maas (no.73) and 47. Garden of Love, by Peter Paul Rubens. c.1632–35. Pen in brown ink with grey wash and white heightening, 48 by 71 cm.

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; exh.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes).

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48. Le Contrat de mariage,

by Jean Antoine Watteau. c.1712–14.

47 by 55 cm. (Museo del Prado, Madrid; exh.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes).

50. Dancing couple, by Jean Antoine Watteau. c.1716–18. Panel, 22.9 by 17.2 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes).

Frans Wouter (no.60) had to do duty for the beautiful canvases by De Hooch, Ter Borch, Teniers, Wouwermans and Titian that Watteau would have studied. The exhibition made several effective juxtapositions between works by Watteau and earlier masters: a pen drawing of shepherds in a landscape, now attributed to the circle of Domenico Campagnola but given to Titian when it was in Crozat’s collection (no.58), hung beside Watteau’s beautiful copy of it in red chalk (no.57); and a shrewd demonstration was made that Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Wedding dance (no.29) provided nearly every compositional motif that Watteau was to employ in his Le Contrat de mariage (no.28; Fig.48). Nevertheless, the overall poor quality of the earlier masters in the exhibition had the effect of reducing them to little more than textbook illustrations. More troubling still, the absence of authentic works by Titian and Veronese and the severe under-representation of Rubens robbed the exhibition of the three painters who most influenced Watteau’s artistic development, as nearly all of Watteau’s contemporaries commented and as every

49. Planting of the maypole, by Antoine Quillard. c.1720–25. 37.5 by 45 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes).

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scholar has since observed. To place Watteau in the context of those three artists would have demonstrated not only the major sources of inspiration for the themes, ideas and motifs of the fête galante, but also the sources for the ‘spirit’ of the genre, for it was from Titian, Veronese and Rubens that Watteau learned to construct his compositions, to choreograph groups of figures, to integrate them with nature, and to create drama through subtle means. It was from these masters that he learned how to use colour: in a word, how to paint.

In truth, Watteau et la fête galante suffered from its grand ambition. Probably no museum in the world, with the exception of the Louvre, could have done justice to such an undertaking. An exhibition equal to its subject would have required not only many of the greatest paintings by Watteau and his circle, but also the masterpieces that Watteau and the French genre painters of his era were able to see and study. Watteau et la fête galante was, in effect, two exhibitions interleaved: Watteau and his sources, and Watteau and his followers. This second aspect of the exhibition was largely achieved; the first was disappointingly incomplete. The underlying thesis of this part of the exhibition is not new and the catalogue, which is stylishly produced and readable, effectively surveys previous scholarship without breaking much new ground. It would seem to have been the opportunity to compare the tiny masterworks by Watteau with his well-known sources of inspiration that justified embarking on this exhibition but such juxtapositions were few.

The organisers of the exhibition were also victims of unfortunate circumstances. On display concurrently with Watteau et la fête galante were several shows devoted to Rubens, as well as The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Genre Painting, which included a half-dozen of Watteau’s most perfect fêtes galantes. Not surpris-

ingly, the catalogues of the latter exhibition and of that under review often consider the same issues, notably in Barbara Anderman’s thoughtful essay ‘La notion de peinture de genre à l’époque de Watteau’ in the Valenciennes publication, which turns to many of the eighteenth-century sources on the evolving meaning, definition and reception of ‘painting of everyday life’ that Colin B. Bailey mines in ‘Surveying Genre in EighteenthCentury French Painting’, a comprehensive examination of the subject in the catalogue to the show in Ottawa, Washington and Berlin.2 The origins, development and dissemination of the fête galante remain subjects worthy of scholarly attention – after all, this curious, hybrid genre was arguably the most original, influential and fashionable genre of painting in Europe for the better part of thirty years, between c.1715 and 1745 – and the present exhibition provided a welcome opportunity to see major works by Watteau alongside fine examples by his principal followers, even if the sources of the genre were only imperfectly illuminated.

Some remarks on individual works follow: no.4: Sheet with studies of a man sitting and a man reclining,

by Jean Antoine Watteau (Musée du Petit Palais, Paris). This sheet includes studies for recumbent male figures in both La Déclaration attendue (no.3; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers) and L’Ile enchantée (no.7; private collection, Switzerland) but, curiously, both the wall text and the entry on the drawing discuss it only in relation to the former even though the latter hung only a few feet away from it. no.9. Les Deux cousines, by Jean Antoine Watteau (Fig.46). The painting, which dates from late in Watteau’s career, is first recorded in London, c.1729–31, when it was owned by Bernard Baron, a French print-maker who moved to England around 1717 and engraved the painting for the Recueil Jullienne.

Watteau’s study (no.11; British Museum) for the seated woman is identical in handling and executed in the same, somewhat unusual, pencil and red-chalk technique as a study in a private collection (P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat: Antoine Watteau: catalogue rai-

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sonné des dessins, Milan 1996, p.527) for a figure that appears in L’Amour paisible, a lost painting made in c.1719 for his patron Dr Richard Mead, during Watteau’s stay in London. Like Les Deux cousines, L’Amour paisible and the Comediéns italiens (also painted in London for Mead) were engraved in London by Baron. We should reconsider the obvious possibility, first raised by Jacques Mathey in 1959 (Antoine Watteau. Peintures réapparues, Paris 1959, p.69) and never (to my knowledge) pursued elsewhere, that Les Deux cousines was painted by Watteau during his London sojourn. no.24. Foire de village, by Claude Gillot (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt). Eidelberg seems correct in rejecting the recent identification of this drawing as a depiction of the Ile de Cythère, and he may be correct in believing that it represents a village fair (although the presence of a boat carrying horsedrawn carriages would be anomalous in this iconography), but I would be reluctant to conclude, as he does, that it cannot represent a scene from the theatre. no.28. Le Contrat de mariage, by Jean Antoine Watteau (Fig.48). Dating this painting, which Eidelberg puts at c.1712–14, has always been a problem. Most of the figures on the left side seem to conform to the artist’s early style of c.1710–12, as related drawings confirm, while several figures in the right foreground appear to be considerably later, c.1716, as does a drawing for the seated violinist in the British Museum (PR 510).

Like most authors, Rosenberg and Prat have opted for an early dating for the painting, and subsequently have dismissed associating it with any later drawings, arguing, as Marianne Roland-Michel has (Watteau, An Artist of the Eighteenth Century, New York 1984, p.223), that such drawings simply depict models in poses similar to figures in the painting. A fresh examination of the painting may suggest a simpler solution; it appears to have been executed in at least two campaigns, with the dancing and music-making group in the right foreground added around 1716 to a painting that had been started in c.1711–12. The heavy cracking throughout this area is consistent with subsequent overpainting. Eidelberg once again asserts, as he has done for many years, that he recognises the hand of Quillard in several of the figures, a view which has garnered very little support but with which I wholly concur. Placed in the context of the present exhibition, it is very clear that Quillard is responsible for the group of four or five highly characteristic figures in the far left background. no.54. Dancing couple, by Jean Antoine Watteau (Fig.50). The attribution to Watteau of this small panel has long been controversial, but Eidelberg makes a convincing case for it by recognising that it is not a very early work by the artist, as was always presumed because of its subject-matter, but a painting of his full maturity, datable to as late as 1718.

However, his assertion in the same entry (note 2) that the painting of La Contradanse from the Sterling Post collection is an ‘excellente copie’ is unsupportable.

Although considerably damaged, it is certainly Watteau’s original, and it has recently been given to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it will shortly undergo conservation treatment (see A. Wintermute: Watteau and His World: French Drawing from 1700 to 1750, New York and London 1999, pp.178–79, fig.93).

1 Catalogue: Watteau et la fête galante. By Martin Eidelberg, with contributions by Barbara Anderman, Guillaume Glorieux, Michel Hochmann and François Moureau. 296 pp. incl. 84 col. pls. + 164 b. & w. ills.

(Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2004), 39.

ISBN 2–7118– 4677–6.

2 Reviewed by Richard Rand in this Magazine, 145 (October 2003), pp.744–46.

French primitives; Paris  Paris

by SUSIE NASH Courtauld Institute of Art, London

of major exhibitions of late medieval French art are being held in France. The first to open was Les Primitifs Français. Découvertes et redécouvertes (closed 17th May) which was followed by Paris 1400. Les arts sous Charles VI (to 12th July), both at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Les Primitifs Français was essentially an exhibition about scholarship with the aim of presenting some of the advances made in the study of fifteenthcentury French painting since the great show of 1904 held at the Bibliothèque nationale.

The present exhibition focused primarily on panel painting and manuscripts, with some other media mostly used to illustrate attributional arguments that have accrued to a number of panels. It began with a documentary survey of the 1904 exhibition and displayed a small group of works representative of the numerous objects then claimed as French but since recognised as originating in other regions, such as Spain, Italy and the southern Netherlands. The re-classifications in 2004, as in 1904, are mostly made on the basis of style, and while the majority of these are uncontroversial, others remain hard to re-assign with conviction, such as the large and impressive drawing of the Death and

52. Jeremiah, by Barthélemy d’Eyck. c.1442–45.

Panel, 152 by 86 cm. (Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels; exh. Musée du Louvre, Paris).

51. Death and Assumption of the Virgin. ?Italian artist.

Early fifteenth century. Pen and ink on parchment with yellow wash, 65 by 32.7 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

Assumption of the Virgin (cat. no.8; Fig.51), as is suggested by its attribution to an ‘Artiste italien?’ in the catalogue. This work demonstrates how porous and difficult the idea of ‘French’ still is at this period, in a country which absorbed such strong influences from neighbouring regions, and where so many foreign artists were drawn to work. Defining a national identity, and national and regional styles, are as fundamental to this show as they were in 1904.

Following the opening section, three ‘dossiers’ traced in more detail the way in which the study of fifteenth-century French painting has advanced since 1904, in terms of the discovery of new works or documents, and through conclusions drawn from stylistic analysis. These case studies were focused on two regions, Paris and Provence, and one artist, Jean Poyer. In terms of the significance, number and range of works displayed, Provence dominated the exhibition, with its subdivision into smaller studies of four artists: Barthélemy d’Eyck, Enguerrand Quarton, Joseph Lieferinxe and Nicolas Dipre. In each, the visitor was taken through the steps of how the works on display came to be identified with these four names. Some of the exhibits, such as the Aix Annunciation (no.36) now given to Barthélemy d’Eyck, and the Villeneuve-lès-Avignon Pieta (no.34) given to Enguerrand Quarton, were in the 1904 exhibition, then given respectively to Burgundian School and School of Nicholas Froment.

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Others represent works discovered since, such as the panels of the life of St Sebastian from an altarpiece now attributed to Josse Lieferinxe (no.44).

Throughout the exhibition juxtapositions of objects proved enlightening: in the section on Paris two works given to the Master of the Dunois Hours, the Last Judgment (no.14; Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris), painted on cloth, and a little-known Trinity with the canons of Notre-Dame de Paris (no.13; Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris), painted directly on panel without a ground, amplified our knowledge of painting in Paris in the years 1430–50 and begged questions concerning technique, media and function.1 In each section, the comparisons made possible between panels and manuscripts were particularly welcome, although one was mindful of the difference in scale and medium. In the Provence section, the display of the Villeneuve-lès-Avignon Pietà at a lower level and with stronger lighting than usual made the terrible state of its surface more apparent, and raised many questions about the artist, his media and methods and how they related to other works apparently by him. It was also instructive to see the Aix Annunciation (église de la Magdalene, Aix-en Provence) reunited with its wings (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Fig.52), which are all in very different states of preservation, as has recently been detailed by Dominique Verloo and Nicole Goetghebeur.2 Their reunion emphasised both their different physical condition and the oddity of the altarpiece’s format, with the fictive sculpture on the interior rather than the exterior of the wings. The frames of these panels and the restrictions of the display unfortunately did not allow them to be shown with the backs visible and the wings at an angle, which would have made their reunion even more instructive.

Throughout the exhibition there were large and extensive text panels, detailing how certain ‘découvertes’ had been made. These were as much part of the show as were the works themselves, and they included a number of small black-and-white photographs of related objects which were often the crucial link in the chain of the argument; but of course small black-and-white photographs do not allow the visitor to judge these primarily stylistic issues for themselves, and consequently the show came across at times as didactic and somewhat frustrating. Moreover, the fundamental premise of the exhibition meant that it naturally felt retrospective rather than forward looking, and tended to close off avenues rather than offer new ones to explore.

How much does the change from anonymous works to ones now attributed to named artists further our understanding? And in some cases, if the identification is wrong (and sometimes, as with Jean Poyer, where the evidence for matching the works to the artist is slim), how much is it hindered? In addition, the conclusion the visitor might draw is that, as presented here, the scholarship on French painting of

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53. The flight into Egypt at sunrise, from Heures du maréchal Boucicaut (fol.90v). Paris, c.1408. Parchment, 27.5 by 19 cm. (Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris; exh. Musée du Louvre, Paris).

this period has been exclusively devoted to questions of personal and regional style and identities, and is undertaken primarily in France.

The catalogue,3 a useful summary of the current position, with several articles on the historiography of this field since 1904, underlines the need both for a more widespread and systematic technical investigation – strikingly absent in the exhibition – and a fuller integration into the literature of what has been achieved in studies of this period.

54. Goldenes Rössl. Paris, before 1405. Enamelled gold and silver with sapphires, rubies and pearls, 62 by 45 by 27 cm. (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich; exh. Musée du Louvre, Paris).

The second of the Paris exhibitions, Paris 1400. Les arts sous Charles VI, is a much more ambitious project which considers the period 1380–1420 under Charles VI’s reign.4 It is an absolutely astounding visual feast, which brings together a wide range of media: goldsmiths’ work, stained glass, tapestries, embroideries and other textiles, manuscripts, panel paintings, cameos, ivories, sculpture, armour and architecture (well represented by models, antiquarian drawings and photographs), documents and seals, including some of the inventories of the royal collections, which form such an important documentary basis for our knowledge of many of the objects on view. The range of immensely famous, canonical works is truly exhilarating: the Belles Heures (no.188; unbound with several leaves displayed on the wall at various points throughout the display); the Grandes Heures (no.43b); the Heures du maréchal Boucicaut (no.172; Fig.53); the Grandes Heures de Rohan (no.232); the Bible moralisée of Philip the Bold (no.184); the Très Belles Heures de Notre-Dame de Jean de Berry (no.186); the Bréviaire de Jean sans Peur (no.166); the Heures de Charles le Noble (no.169a); and Le Livre de la chasse of Gaston Phébus (no.139).

Of all the media in this show the goldsmiths’ work is perhaps the most revelatory, and the star is without doubt the Goldenes Rössl (Fig.54), a monumental joyau made as a New Year’s gift in 1405 (n.s.) for Charles VI from his wife Isabeau of Bavaria. It is joined by a range of other pieces in the same technique of email en ronde bosse, which was developed c.1350 in Paris and by 1400 had become a hallmark of the city’s luxury goods. This is evident from the popularity in Europe of these pieces, and a number come from treasuries in Spain and Italy where they have been since the early fifteenth century, such as the Siena pax (no.91; Museo Diocesano, Arezzo) from the collection of Pope Pius II Piccolomini. The Rössl is exceptional in its technical brilliance and artistic conception, the richness of its iconography, intensely observed portraiture and complex interplay of figures and architecture. In every respect this work should be the canonical object of European art c.1400; its media and location have meant it has remained relatively unknown and undervalued outside the study of metalwork of this period, despite a magnificent restoration and publication of 1995.5 The organisation of the objects in Paris 1400 combines a wide variety of modes: some sections are centred on patronage, beginning with the preparations of Charles V for the coronation of his son; elsewhere the groupings are by media, or concern issues of style and attribution such as the juxtaposition of various de Limbourg miniatures with the Large round Pietà (no.183), displayed for the first time with its back visible, attributed to the Limbourgs’ presumed uncle Jean Malouel.

Other sections explore iconography, such as the Man of Sorrows, which is rightly shown to have been an intensely popular subject across all media at this period, perhaps in part

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

55. Chartres triptych. Paris, c.1380–1400. Silk, gold and silver thread on linen on hinged board, 48 by 84 cm.

(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres; exh. Musée du Louvre, Paris).

owing to the presence of several Italo-Byzantine images of this theme in the royal and ducal collections. Here we find it on cameos as well as a fascinating embroidered triptych (no.148; Fig.55), which is in a remarkable state of preservation and still has its original hinges, clasps and stamped and tooled leather decoration on the back and exterior wings.

Elsewhere the grouping of objects reconstructs settings and spaces, as in a section on the royal palace whose interiors are evoked through miniatures from manuscripts such as the Dialogues de Pierre Salmon (nos.51–52), and the stained glass from Evreux showing Charles VI in prayer (no.48).

These different ways of presenting material work well as a series of individual displays, but are perhaps less successful in terms of the show’s overall coherence. However, while the exhibition may not lead the visitor effortlessly by chronology or theme, choosing this more complex mode of presentation brings about some enlightening juxtapositions: by placing, for example, the astounding, monumental marble Virgin and Child (no.216) from Marcoussis, attributed to Jean de Cambrai and given to that church by Jean de Berry, surrounded by eight other statues of the same subject, the remarkable originality of this work was emphasised. Another felicitous display was that of the two surviving gilded bronze figures which formed the supports of the now lost châsse of Saint-Germain-desPrés (no.190a–d), which were shown with the contract for this piece and the eighteenthcentury engraving which recorded its appearance before its destruction: with this the visitor was able to reconstruct the original appearance of the object with the actual sources to hand.

However, perhaps the most amazing grouping and the most rewarding was the case which housed several of the most famous manuscripts made for Jean de Berry. Here the semi-grisaille diptych pages from the Heures

de Bruxelles (no.45), often attributed to André Beauneveu, could be compared with the semi-grisaille pages of the psalter documented as by Beauneveu in Jean de Berry’s inventory of 1402 (no.42), which showed that they were clearly painted by different artists. In the same case the Grandes Heures (no.43a) was displayed with the painting on parchment of the Carrying of the Cross (no.43b), usually thought to be the one surviving example of the seventeen full-page miniatures included in this manuscript and which in the 1413 inventory were specified as painted by ‘Jacquemart de Hesdin et autres ouvriers de monsiegneur’. Seeing the book next to the painting on parchment made it questionable as to whether they do in fact belong together, and if not, this would necessitate a reassessment of the œuvre of Jacquemart and also allow a different context and purpose to be put forward for the parchment painting: the inventories of the royal and ducal collections indicate that independent paintings on parchment were not uncommon, and one could imagine this work having once been part of a work such as the ‘petits tableaux de parchemin paints, c’est assavoir d’un crucifix et de plusieurs ymages’ listed at Saint Pol in Charles V’s inventory of 1380.6 Such examples go some way to illustrate the richness of this show and the way in which it will open doors to further research, allowing many questions of function, attribution and technique to be re-examined. It displays famous works in new ways and brings to notice relatively obscure works deserving of further study. It is an extraordinary exhibition giving Paris its rightful place as the greatest European centre for the production of luxury products at this period.

1 Another work, also French, close in date, similar in format and also painted directly on wood without a ground, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Johnson collection) and depicts donors around a Crucifixion; see C. Sterling: ‘La peinture sur panneau picarde et son rayonnement dans le nord de la France au XVe siècle’,

Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français (1981), pp.3–18, fig.2. Both these paintings may be epitaphs rather than altarpieces, which might explain in part their odd technique.

2 D. Verloo and N. Goetghebeur: ‘Maître de l’Annonciation d’Aix (Barthélemy d’Eyck?) “Le prophète Jérémy”, volet droit du Triptyque de l’Annonciation d’Aix, Provence, vers 1442–1445’, Bulletin de l’Institut royal du patrimoine artistique 29 (2001–02), pp.241–52.

3 Catalogue: Primitifs français. Découvertes et redécouvertes.

By Dominique Thiébaut, Philippe Lorentz and François-René Martin. 182 pp. incl. 82 col. pls. + 77 b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2004), 42. ISBN 2–7118–4771–3.

4 Catalogue: Paris 1400. Les arts sous Charles VI. Edited

by Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye. 413 pp. incl. 232 col. pls. + numerous figs. in col. and b. & w. (Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2004), 45. ISBN 2–213– 62022–9.

5 R. Baumstark and R. Eikelmann, eds.: exh. cat. Das Goldene Rössl. Ein Meisterwerk der Pariser Hofkunst um 1400, Munich (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum) 1995.

6 J. Labarte: Inventaire du mobilier de Charles V, roi de France, Paris 1879, p.242, no.2218.

Picasso/Ingres Paris and Montauban

by CHRISTOPHER GREEN Courtauld Institute of Art, London

the Musée Picasso, Paris (closed 21st June), and opening this month at the Musée Ingres, Montauban (8th July to 31st October), Picasso/Ingres was granted the accolade of piano nobile treatment when installed in the Hôtel Salé. It occupied the suite of nobly proportioned rooms reached from the grand processional staircase, rather than the low, cramped attic quarters usually set aside for temporary exhibitions at the Musée Picasso. It opened with Ingres’s Le Bain turque shown in its own white space, a picture that had hung in the Musée Picasso once before: it featured in the attic room that served as antechamber to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon in the great exhibition of 1988 dedicated to that painting. As just one artist among a heteroclite company brought together as formative for the Picasso of the Demoiselles, Ingres appeared alongside Derain, Cézanne, and the sculptors of Oceania, Africa and prehistoric Spain. In the present exhibition, Ingres meets Picasso alone.

Picasso/Ingres has been conceived and installed by Laurence Madeline with the kind of imaginative yet scholarly drive that has come to be associated with exhibitions at the Musée Picasso. The catalogue is carefully tailored to fit the show, with especially important new research in contributions from Jean-Roch Bouiller, on Ingres and the ‘rappel à l’ordre’, and from Madeline herself, on the dialogue between Picasso and Ingres throughout the former’s career.1 This is a dialogue exhibition, of course, but not in the line of the huge Matisse/Picasso show of 2002–03.

Here we are invited to look not at Ingres with and against Picasso, but to see Ingres with and through Picasso.

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56. Olga sewing, by Pablo Picasso. 21st March 1921.

Pencil on paper, 34.2 by 24 cm. (Musée Picasso, Paris; exh. Musée Ingres, Montauban).

The works that follow the Bain turque immediately set the agenda of the exhibition.

A carefully selected group of drawings for the Ingres painting accompany a single pen-andink sketch for the unavoidably absent Demoiselles, three large Picassos of 1906 and 1921 (including The harem), the modestly scaled yet grand Bathers drawing of 1918 from the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge MA, and the Musée Picasso’s tiny seaside Bathers, also of 1918 and painted for the Jazz Age. This selection of work made when Picasso was in his twenties and thirties is confronted by a closely hung group of prints of brothel subjects which were etched at the very end of his life, each one, like the earlier works, a response to his initial experience of the Bain turque in 1905. The exhibition covers most of Picasso’s lifetime, and its character is all-inclusive from minuscule works on paper to ambitious oils.

Two observations follow from this. First, where Picasso’s relationship with Ingres has tended to be discussed almost exclusively in relation to his classicising work of the First World War and after, the exhibition in fact explores a life-long obsession. Secondly, Ingres as model here is the Ingres who works from drawing into painting. The Picasso of this exhibition seeks heuristically to know Ingres at the level of process. The bringing together of such a wide range of works in different media and on different scales gives them an almost collaged look, appropriate to Picasso’s brusque, staccato ways of responding to everything that attracted his gaze, including Ingres.

In the catalogue Georges Vigne reminds us that Ingres himself refused to show his drawings with his paintings: for him, the immaculacy of the finished work erased the earlier process. However, the Ingres exhibitions of

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1905 and, especially, of 1911 in Paris showed drawings and paintings together, and Picasso could see them together also at Montauban when (as Madeline demonstrates for the first time) he took the train there in 1904 and 1913.

It was this twentieth-century Ingres that allowed Picasso, as amply confirmed by this exhibition, not merely to produce ‘Ingresque’ images but to act out his own ways of ‘doing’ Ingres.

Those commentaries on Picasso/Ingres that have concentrated on the period of the ‘rappel à l’ordre’ have stressed, above all, Picasso as

classical stylist and pasticheur. This exhibition invites an exploration of Picasso’s relationship with Ingres that goes beyond style and pastiche.

Picasso’s obsession with Ingres had two registers, one erotic – the register in which he revisited his memories of the Bain turque and of, for instance, the Odalisque with a slave (a wonderful version of which in pencil and coloured wash is in the exhibition) – the other, the register in which, from 1915 into the 1920s, he became a portraitist overtly invoking Ingres. It is in the latter register that Picasso is most obviously a pasticheur, and this is the dominant mode of his ‘rappel à l’ordre’ relationship with Ingres. In the Paris installation, Madeline brought together on one wall, in close proximity to the word ‘pastiche’, a group of Ingres drawings with a group by Picasso, the two groups abutting one another.

The drawings were so arranged that an Ingres was almost always paired (at a distance) with a Picasso: Mme Picasso sewing with Mme Ingres sewing, for instance (Figs.56 and 57).

Alongside, Madeline paired the first of Picasso’s ‘Ingresque’ portrait drawings, his spring 1915 Portrait of Max Jacob, with Ingres’s pencil drawing of Louis-François Bertin (Figs.58 and 59).

There is no doubt that Picasso the portraitist of the late 1910s and early 1920s is often a pasticheur, sometimes respectfully, as in the Portrait of Max Jacob, sometimes humorously at the expense of Ingres to the point of grotesque parody, as in the Portrait of Igor Stravinsky. And when he uses the firm, incisive line of the Stravinsky drawing, he can seem to take Ingres’s graphic sureness to an almost mechanistic extreme. It is the repetitive, mechanistic aspect of Picasso the pasticheur of Ingres that Rosalind Krauss has emphasised.2 What, however, emerges much more insistently in the present exhibition is a compulsive engagement not so much with what can be learned

58. Portrait of Max Jacob, by Pablo Picasso.

1915. Pencil on paper, 33 by 24.8 cm.

(Musée Picasso, Paris; exh. Musée Ingres, Montauban).

59. Portrait of Louis-François Bertin, by Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres. 1832. Pencil on paper, 32.2 by 34.1 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh. Musée Ingres, Montauban).

57. Madame Ingres sewing, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. c.1824. Graphite on paper, 15.6 by 12.5 cm.

(Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris; exh. Musée Ingres, Montauban).

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

60. Madame de Senonnes, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. 1814–16. 160 by 84 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes; exh. Musée Ingres, Montauban).

and repeated about Ingres’s use of line and his selection of pose, but rather with the processes of seeing and mark-making by which Ingres converts the presence of a very particular individual into a drawn image. What matters most crucially is the palpable realisation on paper of physical and psychological presence. Looking at Picasso’s subtler portrait drawings (to which the word ‘mechanistic’ simply does not apply) alongside Ingres could not spell this out more clearly: Max Jacob alongside Bertin, for instance. These are images (Picasso’s as much as Ingres’s) that have been arrested in the process of coming into being, not in any sense a mechanistic process comparable (as Krauss would have it) to photographic development, but an active, willed process of looking, responding and drawing.

Picasso’s Cubist experiments, especially of 1909–12, were always concerned with the pictorial recreation of the phenomenological experience of presence. Drawing portraits as if he were Ingres allowed him another way of exploring how and with what intensity that could be achieved, and this was so even when he artificially restricted himself to the unvaried, unbroken pen-and-ink line of the Stravinsky portrait.

Ultimately, therefore, what Picasso learned from Ingres the portraitist is not unrelated to what he learned from Ingres the hot/cold painter of fleshly pleasures. Picasso the eroticist, obsessed with the Bain turque, is always concerned, as the exhibition shows from start to finish, with making palpable on paper or

61. Nude woman in a red chair, by Pablo Picasso. 1932. 129.9 by 97.2 cm.

(Tate, London; exh. Musée Ingres, Montauban).

canvas the corporeally sensual. This comes across especially strongly with the juxtaposition of Picasso’s Portrait of Olga in an armchair (1918) – the pasticheur at his most respectful and stylish – with Ingres’s Portrait of Madame Rivière, a challenge to which Picasso rises with aplomb. Opposite them, however, Madeline hung a small Ingres replica in oil of the head of his Grande odalisque alongside a small Picasso of a monstrously transformed head: a confrontation much more of unlikes than of likes.

This announces the arrival of a new eroticist Picasso, a Picasso emergent at the end of the 1920s violently at odds with pastiche who uses Ingres as the starting point for erotic deformations of the female figure. Here Madeline achieved perhaps the most disturbing confrontation of the whole show, Ingres’s coolly sensual Madame de Senonnes (1814–16) alongside Picasso’s raw meat and bone Nude woman in a red chair of 1932 (Figs.60 and 61). Process here is not made much of even by Picasso, however rapidly he has brushed his canvas, but this collection of tumescent body parts has presence just as palpably as does Mme de Senonnes. Subversively, the sheer physicality of Picasso’s erotic invention encourages a fresh, less respectful look at Ingres’s unsuspecting sitter.

It is Picasso the eroticist who closes the exhibition, an artist still obsessed with the Bain turque but now using Ingres at his most provocatively hot and cold as a starting point for new erotic fantasies featuring Raphael and ‘La Fornarina’ in the etchings Suite 347. The

last section is presided over by Ingres’s enormous Jupiter and Thetis (1811; Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence). It is accompanied by a small 1966 drawing after the painting by Picasso, the wry humour of which cannot begin to challenge the chilling severity of Ingres’s monumental couple. Yet, in the detail of Thetis’s flung back head and stretched neck, Picasso found, as the exhibition demonstrates, something very hot: a stimulus for his eroticisation of the female figure as intense as any he had so far found in Ingres. This is, indeed, one of the leitmotifs of the show, repeatedly present from the abandoned dancer of the 1918 Bathers at the beginning. The upturned nose-like feature and the arched form at the top of Nude woman in a red chair can, for instance, easily be seen as one more recurrence of this motif.

At the Musée Picasso, Ingres’s Jupiter and Thetis only just fitted its wall, and the exhibition altogether only just fitted the allocated spaces. Despite this, it is a show that succeeds on the wall with a force hardly suggested by the catalogue. To encounter Ingres and Picasso together makes it possible to see much more in Picasso than pastiche.

1

Catalogue: Picasso Ingres. By Laurence Madeline, with contributions by Georges Vigne, Jean-Roch Bouiller, Robert Rosenblum and Stephane Guégan.

191 pp. incl. 132 col. pls. + 50 b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2004), 39. ISBN 2–213– 62023–7.

2 R.E. Krauss: ‘Picasso/Pastiche’, in The Picasso Papers, London 1998, pp.87–210. the burl ington m agazin e

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Schwitters and Arp Basel

by CATHERINE CRAFT AT T H E H EA R T of the exhibition Kurt Schwitters: Merz – A Total Vision of the World at the Museum Tinguely, Basel (to 22nd August), lies a cramped white space that recreates the artist’s Hanover Merzbau, the environment Schwitters began to build in his studio in the early 1920s as he delved into the implications of Merz, a nonsense word that in 1919 he took from a fragment in one of his collages to christen a new group of works (Fig.63).

Initially conceived as a one-man response to Dada, whose Berlin members had rebuffed his attempts to join them, Merz quickly came to encompass all Schwitters’s activities, from painting, sculpture and collage to typography, poetry and architecture. Abandoned when he went into exile in 1937 and destroyed in a 1943 air raid, the Merzbau survives only in photographs. When compared with them the reconstruction appears accurate but is inert as only a replica can be, lacking the mild chaos of daily life that was the optimistically transformative focus of Merz.

The exhibition’s organisers seem to have appreciated the irony of this situation and have responded to it with strategies inspired

by Schwitters himself. There is a touch of the absurd in the monstrously oversized felt house slippers in which visitors must shuffle about while inside the reconstruction, an obligation at once sensibly protective and comically appropriate to the private nature of the original space. More significantly, the installation spirals out centrifugally from the Merzbau into clusters of thematically grouped smaller galleries in much the same way that the elements of Schwitters’s own Merzbilder frequently radiate out from a central point (Fig.62). The resulting arrangement presents Schwitters’s concerns clearly but in an intimate manner

62. Merzbild K 6 Das Huthbild, by Kurt Schwitters.

1919. Collage and oil on pasteboard on wood, 87 by 74 cm. (Private collection; exh. Museum Tinguely, Basel).

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63. Reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters’s destroyed Merzbau, by Peter Bissegger at the request of Harald Szeemann, assisted by Ernst Schwitters. 1981–83. Painted wood, plaster and plastic, 393 by 580 by 460 cm. (Sprengel Museum, Hanover; exh. Museum Tinguely, Basel).

that encourages visitors to circle and wander between rooms devoted to such topics as the use of discarded materials in collage, the relationship of Merz to Dada and Constructivism, and the role of chance in Schwitters’s work.

In addition to providing Switzerland with its first Schwitters exhibition in more than two decades, the current project – a veritable retrospective of his Merz activities in all media – also provides a new context for his work. The sensitivity, intelligence and good humour that characterise the exhibition and the contributions to its substantial catalogue take their cue from the late Jean Tinguely, an unabashed admirer of Schwitters.1 Tinguely was inexplicably left out of an exhibition organised in 2000 by the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, devoted to Schwitters’s impact on art after the Second World War, an omission that is subtly corrected here by the strategic insertion of a few sculptures by Tinguely at various points in the installation (Fig.64). As one reaches the outer limits of the exhibition, the slightly muffled sounds of Tinguely’s mechanised assemblages can be heard from an adjacent series of galleries devoted to his own efforts to create environments from found objects, and the presence of these large-scale, wheezing and clunking works lends enthusiastic support to Schwitters’s vision of a world redeemed by and given meaning through Merz.

Merz may have initially come into being when Berlin’s Dadaists rejected him, but Schwitters’s introduction in 1918 to Hans Arp, one of Dada’s original participants in Zürich, marked the beginning of a friendship lasting until Schwitters’s death in 1948. In tandem with the Museum Tinguely’s project, the Kunstmuseum Basel has launched a simultaneous examination of their friendship and its mutual effects, Schwitters Arp (to 22nd August), and the accompanying catalogue makes a fine counterpart to the Museum Tinguely’s publication.2 Arp and Schwitters collaborated on occasion and frequently dedicated or gave works to one another; according to Schwitters, Arp was one of the only people who really understood his Merzbau, while Arp admired Schwitters as a ‘conjuror’ in his ability to transform waste into art.3 A quiet and classically balanced installation gathers together their paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and graphics and, as at the Museum Tinguely, a listening station allows visitors to hear recordings of their poetry.

The Kunstmuseum’s show appears to present Arp at an advantage. It includes far more of his work than Schwitters’s, reflecting the former’s longer life as well as the Kunstmuseum’s ownership of a substantial representation of his œuvre; furthermore, the overall selection of work by Schwitters cannot be said to match the quality of the Museum Tinguely’s show.

This imbalance strengthens the impression of Arp as catalyst and source for Schwitters, with his earlier work providing precedents for Schwitters’s involvement with collage, poetry and sculpture.

Schwitters had not even begun to make collages when he met Arp, but once this became his primary method of working, he incorporated references to his friend just as exuberantly and subversively as he did railway tickets and chocolate wrappers. In Merzbild 21, das Haar-Nabelbild (1920; cat. no.94) he labelled a small circular element – one of several in the picture and a typical form in his Merzbilder – ‘nabel’ (navel), a clear reference to Arp, who favoured this motif in his own work. Is this to mean then that all such forms

64. Tricycle, by Jean Tinguely. 1960. Welded bicycle pedals on stone pedestal, 150 by 35 cm. (Private collection; exh. Museum Tinguely, Basel).

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

Painters of reality Cremona and New York

by BRAM DE KLERCK Open University of the Netherlands, and Leiden University

65. Tanzerin, by Hans Arp. 1925.

Painted wood, 146.5 by 109 cm.

(Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; exh. Kunstmuseum Basel).

in Schwitters’s work are or could be navels?

As with other such elements in his collages, the significance of such inclusions is richly indeterminable, and references to Arp in Schwitters’s œuvre seem to operate less as overt indicators of influence than as signs of friendship or sly artistic commentary. This appears to be the case even in Schwitters’s late sculptures, several of which closely echo works by Arp but replace their graceful ease with an almost parodic awkwardness.

The elegantly accomplished, seemingly inevitable forms of much of Arp’s sculpture can make Schwitters’s assembled work appear tatty and heavy-handed by comparison, but the sheer materiality of Merz also highlights unexpected aspects of Arp’s work. The basic respect Schwitters had for the integrity of the picture plane as the foundation of his work’s collaged accretions points up the frequency with which Arp delighted in puncturing it.

His reliefs feature gaps and holes that subvert their compositional integrity (Fig.65), and even when the picture plane is not actually violated, it is rendered arbitrary by repeated patterning or ignored altogether, as in Dada relief (1916; no.7). Similarly, Schwitters’s collages provide an interesting context for Arp’s papiers déchirés, collages made from rippedup pieces of his own collages and drawings, as well as paintings from the early 1940s made on crumpled paper (nos.46, 47, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65 and 67). Given their active surfaces and the rough contours of the collages’ torn edges, one cannot help wondering whether Arp might here have taken inspiration from Schwitters’s creative use of discarded materials.

If the Kunstmuseum’s project benefits Arp somewhat more than Schwitters, it is not only by its presentation of him as the senior partner in their friendship. Strangely, much of Arp’s œuvre has never been subjected to the same degree of critical enquiry as his peers. In contrast to a continuing flurry of activity around Schwitters – the production of a multi-volume catalogue raisonné as well as numerous exhibitions and scholarly publications – a relative quiet has settled around Arp, as if there were nothing more to say about him. The catalogue’s contributors aptly prove otherwise, but the strongest proof lies in the Kunstmuseum’s presentation of Arp’s works themselves, engaged as it were in a lively series of conversations with a good friend.

1

Catalogue: Kurt Schwitters: Merz – a Total Vision of the World. Edited by Annja Müller-Alsbach and Heinz Stahlhut, with contributions by Guido Magnaguagno, Iris Bruderer-Oswald, Karin Orchard, Peter Bissegger, Eric Hattan, Beat Wyss, Jakob Kolding, Daniel Spoerri, Christoph Bignens, Kurt Schwitters, Konrad Klapheck, Ralf Burmeister, Klaus Staeck, Thomas Hirshhorn, Christian Janecke, Jean Tinguely, Juri Steiner and Karl Gerstner. 264 pp. incl. 157 col. pls. + 77 b. & w. ills. (Museum Tinguely, Basel, and Benteli Publishers, Bern, 2004), Sw.F.59. ISBN 3–7165–1350–4.

2 Catalogue: Schwitters Arp. Edited by Hartwig Fischer and Sandra Gianfreda, with contributions by Gottfried Boehm, Hubert Damisch, Götz-Lothar Darsow, Isabelle Ewig, Hartwig Fischer, Sandra Gianfreda, Bruno Haas, Isabel Schulz, and Gwendolyn Webster. 265 pp. incl.

168 col. pls. + 13 b. & w. ills. (Kunstmuseum Basel, and Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004), Sw.F.60.

ISBN 3–7204–0152–9. Available in German only.

3 H. Fischer: ‘Gegenliebe. Schwitters und Arp’, in ibid., p.51.

A SMALL ALTARP I ECE , painted by Lorenzo Lotto around 1523 for the church of SS. Trinità in Bergamo, depicts the Holy Trinity in an unusual way (cat. p.134). Above a landscape, Christ stands on a double rainbow, the dove of the Holy Spirit over his head, while God the Father is represented by a vague cloudy outline against a brilliant yellow background. Lotto clearly took the Old Testament prohibition on making images of God to heart. Oddly enough, this painting, supremely supernatural in effect, is included in the exhibition Painters of Reality, seen by this reviewer at the Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Cremona, and currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (to 15th August).1 However, the detailed depiction of the nude figure of Christ and of the landscape, with its trees, small buildings and mountainous view, is the result of Lotto’s meticulous study of visible reality and his particularly direct manner of transferring it to canvas. It is precisely this kind of keen observation and depiction of the world that was already recognised in Lombard painting, even if it was not always highly appreciated, by sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury theorists such as Vasari, Ridolfi and Agucchi.

The exhibition in Cremona and the slightly different version in New York present about 110 paintings and drawings by masters active in the leading artistic centres of Milan, Brescia, Bergamo and Cremona from the early years of the sixteenth century until the first half of the eighteenth. Starting with Vincenzo Foppa’s altarpiece of the Adoration of Christ (S. Maria Assunta in Chiesanuova, Brescia; p.70), chosen for its ‘domestic intimacy’ and ‘sense of everyday life’, the exhibition moves on to cinquecento portraiture by such brilliant practitioners as Giovanni Battista Moroni and Moretto (Fig.66), includes religious works by sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury artists such as Lotto and Tanzio da Varallo, and brings together drawings by, among others, Leonardo da Vinci and Sofonisba Anguissola. Fede Galizia and Panfilo Nuvolone’s still lifes of fruit lead on to Evaristo Baschenis’s beautiful paintings of musical instruments. Genre painting is represented by Annibale Carracci’s Two children teasing a cat (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; p.240),2 two or three works by Caravaggio (the Cardsharps from Fort Worth being shown only in New York), a handful of paintings of social outcasts by Giacomo Ceruti, as well as his lovely Girls’ school (Fig.67). Ceruti’s works, together with a series of portraits from the 1730s by Vittore Ghislandi, called Fra’ Galgario, take the exhibition well into the eighteenth century.

The peculiar interest in naturalistic effects and in scenes taken from everyday life so characteristic of Lombard painting has attracted

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66. Portrait of a man (?Count Fortunato Martinengo Cesaresco), by Moretto da Brescia. c.1542. 114 by 94.4 cm. (National Gallery, London; exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

much interest in the past few years, as this show and its accompanying catalogue demonstrate,3 but the theme is much older. The exhibition I pittori della realtà in Lombardia, held in Milan in 1953, had Roberto Longhi as its chief instigator and the author of the catalogue essay.4 As the exhibition under review uses almost exactly the same title, we should ask ourselves to what extent this homage to Longhi follows his lead, and how much it takes into account recent developments in scholarship in the field of north Italian painting.

In the 1920s and 1930s Longhi published a series of articles on artists he dubbed ‘precaravaggisti’ in the belief that their work, produced in and around the painter’s native Milan, helped develop Caravaggio’s realism and striking use of chiaroscuro. In Brescia and Bergamo in particular, western outposts of the Venetian Republic, he found these characteristics in such artists as Foppa, Moretto and Lotto; but equally important were the brothers Antonio and Vincenzo Campi of Cremona, when Caravaggio, active in Milan in the years after 1584, worked in the studio of Simone Peterzano. Following Longhi, such works as Giovan Paolo Lomazzo’s Self-portrait as abbot of the Accademia della Val di Blenio (Brera, Milan; p.212), and in particular Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo’s magnificent St Matthew and the angel (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; p.157), have been presented time and again as no more than the fertile humus from which Caravaggio’s art grew.5 In the present exhibition this view is still closely followed, although new directions can also be discerned. One important development is the focus on the cinquecento, and the inclusion of many religious works, whereas in 1953 Longhi almost exclusively selected portraits, still lifes and genre paintings mostly dating from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Another new trend is the emphasis on the contribution Leonardo da Vinci made to Lombard realism during his years in Milan. Martin Kemp applies the term ‘hyper-naturalism’ to Leonardo’s meticulously observed, almost botanical drawings of plants (Fig.68), made in preparation for his

67. Women making lace (‘The girls’ school’), by Giacomo Ceruti. 1720s. 150 by 200 cm.

(Private collection, Brescia; exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

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68. Spray of blackberries, by Leonardo da Vinci. c.1506–08. Red chalk on paper, 18.8 by 16.5 cm.

(Royal Collection, Windsor; exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

painting of Leda and the swan, now lost. And Mina Gregori regards Leonardo’s manner of studying facial expressions and creating luminous effects, taken up by his Lombard followers, as his further contributions to north Italian naturalism, ultimately leading to Caravaggio’s innovations. Whereas Longhi stressed the importance of those artists whom he considered to be typically Lombard, by which he meant painters who had freed themselves from Venetian influences, this exhibition includes works by painters Longhi had rejected from this category such as Gerolamo Romanino from Brescia and Andrea Previtali from Bergamo.

The fact that Longhi remains a crucial point of reference for many contributions to the catalogue, whether his arguments are accepted or rejected, illustrates the profound impact his views still have on the study of Lombard painting. In general, it is his philological, stylistic approach that has been taken over without much debate. Attempts to reveal something of the purpose and significance of Lombard naturalism are sometimes alluded to, but disappointingly almost never seriously discussed. What, for example, are the devotional implications of the brutal verism in the exposed body of Christ being crucified in paintings by Callisto Piazza (c.1535–38; S. Maria Incoronata, Lodi; p.169) or Vincenzo Campi (1577; Certosa, Pavia; p.208)? And how are we to interpret the obvious parallels with northern European art in Savoldo’s Crucifixion (c.1515; Maison d’Art, Monte Carlo; p.148), with its Flemish-inspired landscape and borrowings from prints by Dürer and Cranach? A systematic approach to questions of this kind, which has been attempted in several monographic studies in the past few

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decades,6 would have added an extra dimension to the interpretation of naturalistic tendencies in north Italian painting, and to this admirably selected exhibition.

1 Catalogue: Pittori della realtà. Le ragioni di una rivoluzione. Da Foppa e Leonardo a Caravaggio e Ceruti.

Edited by Mina Gregori and Andrea Bayer, with essays

by Andrea Bayer, Mina Gregori, Linda Wolk-Simon, Martin Kemp, Giulio Bora and Enrico De Pascale. 342 pp. incl. 133 col. pls. + 79 b. & w. ills. (Electa, Milan, 2004), 45. ISBN 8–8370–2743–5. English edition: Painters of reality: the legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004), £40. ISBN 0–300–10275–5.

2 It is curious that, with regard to Carracci, no mention is made of A.W.A. Boschloo: Annibale Carracci in Bologna; visible reality after the council of Trent, The Hague 1974.

3 See D.A. Brown, ed.: exh. cat. Lorenzo Lotto, rediscovered master of the renaissance, Washington (National Gallery of Art) 1997; F. Porzio, ed.: exh. cat. Da Caravaggio a Ceruti; la scena di genere e l’immagine dei pitocchi nella pittura italiana, Brescia (Museo di S. Giulia) 1998; F. Caroli, ed.: exh. cat. Il Cinquecento lombardo; da Leonardo a Caravaggio, Milan (Palazzo Reale) 2000; F. Paliaga, ed.: exh. cat. Vincenzo Campi; scene del quotidiano, Cremona (Museo Civico) 2000; M. Bona Castellotti, ed.: exh. cat. Tanzio da Varallo; realismo, fervore e contemplazione in un pittore del Seicento, Milan (Palazzo Reale) 2000.

4 R. Longhi et al., eds.: exh. cat. I pittori della realtà in Lombardia, Milan (Palazzo Reale) 1953.

5 See, for example, J.P. O’Neill, ed.: exh. cat. The Age of Caravaggio, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1985, nos.5 and 13; C. Strinati and R. Vodret, eds.: exh. cat. Caravaggio; la luce nella pittura lombarda, Bergamo (Accademia Carrara) 2000, no.7.

6 See, for example, V. Guazzoni: Moretto, il tema sacro, Brescia 1981; idem: ‘Pittori della realtà ed esperienza del sacro’, in La Lombardia spagnola, Milan 1984, pp.153–96; A. Gentili: I giardini di contemplazione; Lorenzo Lotto 1503–1512, Rome 1985; B. Aikema: ‘Savoldo, la città di Dio e il pellegrinaggio della vita’, Venezia Cinquecento 3 (1993), pp.191–203; and B. de Klerck: The brothers Campi; immagini e devozione; religious painting in sixteenthcentury Lombardy, Amsterdam 1999.

Perugino Perugia

by MICHAEL BURY University of Edinburgh

Perugino: il divin pittore at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia (to 18th July), is a very welcome event. Apart from the principal show, there are interesting subsidiary exhibitions at the Rocca Paolina devoted to aspects of the Nachleben, and in the monastery of S. Pietro on miniature painting.1 Although the main exhibition has some wonderful things in it, unfortunately it is flawed. It is evident from the essays in the catalogue,2 and even from some of the individual entries, that many more items were expected than actually arrived. In particular, many of the drawings are missing and photographs are shown instead, which is not at all satisfactory.

It seems that political pressures within the Umbrian region may have played a destructive role in what was intended to have been a much more ambitious project.

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69. Birth of the Virgin (or the Baptist?), by Pietro Perugino. Panel, 17.7 by 41 cm.

(The Walker, Liverpool, exh. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia).

In recent years there has been a gradual revival of interest in this important painter from Città della Pieve: Pietro Scarpellini’s monograph of 1984, the exhibition curated by J. Antenucci Becherer in 1997, and Vittorio Garibaldi’s monograph of the same year, have added to our knowledge, but much remains to be clarified.3 The problems are immense.

We do not know when he was born; although he was said to have been of the same age as Leonardo, this need not mean anything very precise. In 1472 he was inscribed in the Florentine Compagnia di S. Luca as a dipintore, but this date simply means that by that year he was paying dues to the Compagnia and it is thus a terminus ante quem for his having finished his apprenticeship and for his arrival in Florence, both of which could have occurred considerably earlier (or not). According to Vasari, he first trained with a minor Perugian painter and then moved to Florence where he entered the workshop of Verrocchio; but neither proposition can be supported by any contemporary documentary evidence. In his mature work, pressed for time as a consequence of his own success, he made very considerable use of assistants and collaborators.

A problem that has especially exercised the curators of this exhibition is how to understand the artist’s emergence and very early career. Unfortunately, few of the paintings that are candidates for early works by the master, scattered through the museums of the world, are actually shown. However, the juxtaposition of the predella of the Birth of the Virgin (or the Baptist?; Fig.69) from the Walker, Liverpool, with the S. Bernardino panels of 1473 (cat. no.I.9) convincingly demonstrates that the figures in one of them – the Miracle of the young girl (Fig.70) – were by the same hand. The fine quality and the transparency of light give strong support to the idea that both were conceived and painted

by Perugino. The eight S. Bernardino panels were a collaborative venture and many were painted by people of much lesser skill. However, there was clearly a guiding intelligence behind the whole scheme, and the likelihood that this was Perugino’s is suggested by the way that the architectural structure of the Healing of the child born dead (no.I.9f) was

re-used in his later Ranieri Annunciation (no.I.33). Perugino often redeployed his own inventions, but not, as far as we know, those of others.

Was Vasari correct in supposing that Perugino was for a time in Verrocchio’s workshop? The S. Bernardino panels do, to a limited extent, reveal Verrocchio’s influence, especially in the angular structures of the draperies, but the impact of Pollaiuolo’s ideas is far more prominent. The panels take up the narrative methods employed in the embroideries for the Baptistery vestments (Il Paramento di S. Giovanni) designed by Pollaiuolo from about 1466: using figures seen from the back to frame a space within which the scene takes place; giving figures rather large hands whose open-fingered gestures elaborate their emotional response to the events; the wearing of exotic head gear. The decorative vocabulary, such as the jewels that define the borders of all the S. Bernardino panels, relates to that seen in the Pollaiuolos’ St James altarpiece for

70. Miracle of the young girl, by Pietro Perugino.

1473. Tempera on panel, 78.5 by 56.5 cm.

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S. Miniato and in the Charity for the Mercanzia (both Uffizi, Florence).

The Madonna and Child from Berlin (no.I.2) was, it is claimed, a product of Perugino’s hand during his putative stay in Verrocchio’s studio, and in fact it seems possible that the young Perugino, working on the basis of a cartoon by Verrocchio, might have painted it. The points of comparison are not only the small-scale, almost miniaturist works already discussed, but also the group of larger paintings that can plausibly be dated to the 1470s. The first work that can be securely attributed to Perugino is a fresco with St Sebastian at Cerqueto: seventeenth-century records mention an inscription with the artist’s name and the date 1478. From this it is possible, without any special pleading, confidently to attribute to him two pictures shown in the exhibition: the fresco from Deruta with Sts Romano and Roch (no.I.16; the damaged date is probably to be reconstructed as 1476) and the Adoration of the Magi in the Galleria Nazionale in Perugia (no.I.12). In this context, the attribution to Perugino of the Berlin Madonna looks credible.

In the exhibition’s first section, paintings attributed to Perugino are interspersed with works by other painters active in Perugia in the 1470s. The questions this raised are, first, whether Perugino owed anything to a local tradition of painting and, secondly, whether he was the only channel for the reception of Florentine pictorial methods and ideas in Perugia in the 1470s. Unfortunately there are so many uncertainties of date and attribution that we are faced by a bewildering variety of possible solutions to those questions. Several essays in the catalogue bearing on these problems give quite different answers. Even some apparent certainties prove to be unfounded. For example, it cannot be deduced from the archives of the Confraternità di S. Francesco that Pietro di Galleotto painted the banner with the Flagellation (no.I.17) in 1480. This interpretation depends upon a misreading of a document which describes a banner, now lost, by this painter with the figure of St Francis: the patron saint of the confraternity, not a Flagellation.4 One of the great revelations of the exhibition is the presence of the Villa Albani altarpiece (Fig.71). The quality of this painting, with its landscape connecting the three panels before the intense glow of a luminous sky, links it to the Galitzin Crucifixion in Washington and points to Perugino’s search for a world of heavenly beauty as presented by the great Netherlandish painters such as Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling. In Florence, Lorenzo di Credi tried for similar effects. Visually, the Albani picture is fascinating. The asymmetry of the architecture means that the eye, as it scans across from the open distances on the left, is brought to an abrupt stop by the closure of the buildings on the right. And there are remarkable changes in the scale of the figures: the saints at the sides are much smaller than Joseph and Mary in the centre. The date 1491 on the picture is a problem, for everything suggests that it should be a work of the 1480s.

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71. The Albani triptych, by Pietro Perugino. 1491. Tempera on panel, 140 by 160 cm.

(Albani Torlonia collection, Rome; exh. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia).

One or two pictures appear in the exhibition with attributions to Perugino that do not seem justified. The Head of a boy from the Sarti collection in Paris (no.I.38) was unlike anything else in terms of the way it is painted,

72. St Augustine, by Pietro Perugino. Tempera on panel, 94 by 64 cm. (Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; exh. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia).

while the Portrait of a youth from the Uffizi (no.I.43) stood out as anomalous in terms of the sitter’s characterisation. Even within the limited dimensions of this show, one is struck by Perugino’s refined sensibility. When repeating a composition, he made tiny adjustments to improve it or adapt it to the new circumstances: analyses of Perugino’s use of cartoons by Rudolf Hiller von Gaetringen, who contributed an essay to the catalogue, help us to understand that. But the execution of the pictures that utilised those cartoons might be entrusted to others. For instance, the relationship between the Madonna of the Confraternity of S. Maria Novella (no.I.45) and the Pala Tezi (no.I.47) could be examined closely in the exhibition. Seeing them together reveals their differences very clearly: the paint surface of the Pala Tezi has an absolute smoothness of finish, with none of the depth of transparent shadow that characterises the other picture. Perugino’s interest in and ability to elicit miraculous effects of subtle shadow was shown again and again in masterpieces that have been gathered here, as for example the St Augustine from Pittsburgh (Fig.72). The Pala Tezi must have been painted by an assistant or collaborator.

The attempt to reconstruct the S. Agostino polyptych in the exhibition is very valuable; most of its panels are in the Galleria Nazionale, but the documentary and material evidence is very difficult to interpret and there is no consensus. Although I cannot follow Christa Gardner von Teuffel’s proposal for an

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alternative reconstruction, it is a great pity that the essay she contributed to the catalogue was so violently truncated: evidence of the haste with which that publication must have been produced, and it is another indication that this great artist has not been well served by the present exhibition. He will never seem a very satisfactory painter to those in search of displays of invention and endless originality, but the devout introspection of his figures satisfied one of the most significant requirements of religious art of the period, and this, to the present reviewer’s mind, justifies the immense reputation that, for a time, he enjoyed.

1

La fortuna e il mito, curated by Alessandro Marabottini and Caterina Zappia, Perugia (Centro Espositive della Rocca Paolina) 2004; Perugino e la miniatura umbra del Rinascimento, curated by M.G. Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto, Perugia (S. Pietro) 2004.

2 Catalogue: Perugino. Il divin pittore. Edited by Vittoria Garibaldi and Francesco Federico Mancini, with essays

by Antonio Paolucci, Gianni Carlo Sciolla, Pietro Scarpellini, Laura Teza, Tom Henry, Antonio Natali, Nicoletta Baldini, Tommaso Mozzati, Arnold Nesselrath, Francesco Federico Mancini, Christa Gardner von Teuffel and Rudolf Hiller von Gaertringen. 656 pp. incl. 400 col. pls. + 185 b. & w. ills. (Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, 2004), 50. ISBN 88–8215– 683–4.

3 Pietro Perugino. Master of Italian Renaissance, curated by J. Antenucci Becherer, Grand Rapids (Art Museum) 1997.

4 F.F. Mancini: ‘Identificazione di Pietro di Galeotto’, Esercizi 2 (1979), p.45, note 12. Mancini read the inventory of the confraternity of S. Francesco as saying ‘confalone da portare inanzi alla Croce et la figura de Santo Francesco’, thus allowing him to connect the gonfalone, documented as painted by Pietro di Galeotto for the confraternity in 1480, with the surviving canvas of the Flagellation. In fact the document reads, ‘confalone da portare inanzi alla Croce con la figura de Santo Francesco’.

Matteo da Gualdo Gualdo Tadino

by VICTOR M. SCHMIDT Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Matteo da Gualdo et il Rinascimento eccentrico tra Umbria e Marche recently held in the Museo Civico Rocca Flea, Gualdo Tadino (closed 27th June), was an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with the work of this lesser known painter from the Umbrian quattrocento. Matteo di Pietro di ser Bernardo (c.1430/35–1507) was represented by thirteen paintings, and his many other works in the area, particularly frescos, are surveyed in the accompanying catalogue, which also includes a register of relevant documents, the most interesting of which are given in full.1 The six paintings from the museum’s own collection were supplemented by works from nearby churches, as well as loans, including a Virgin and Child on canvas (cat. no.7; Fig.74 ), and an interesting Christ on the Cross from a private collection in London, also on canvas, perhaps a fragment of a hanging used during Holy Week T H E EX H IB IT ION

73. Virgin and Child enthroned with saints, by Matteo da Gualdo. 1462.

Tempera on panel, 120 by 132 cm.

(Museo Civico, Gualdo Tadino).

(no.11). Appended were some works by Matteo’s son and grandson, Girolamo and Bernardo di Girolamo, who also painted, although they were chiefly active as notaries.

Matteo’s earliest dated work, the small altarpiece of 1462 from the local Clarissan convent of S. Margherita (no.1; Fig.73), betrays the strong influence of the painters of Camerino, particularly the artist whose œuvre used to be given to Girolamo di Giovanni but who has recently been shown to be the Master of the Sperimento Annunciation (alias Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio).2 Although Matteo’s figure style essentially remained the same, it sometimes became mannered, as in the Assumption between Sts Thomas and Sebastian in the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia (no.13), in which he also tried to follow the drapery patterns of the grander style of a Luca Signorelli or a Perugino. This figure style is really a mannerism, as is shown by the altarpiece from the parish church of Coldellanoce, in which Matteo introduced the portrait of the patron, whose liveliness contrasts strangely with the patternbook-like quality of the saints (no.6; Fig.75). In the meantime, Matteo also absorbed a wide range of influences from contemporary painters, adding to the charm of his work. The upper register of the altarpiece from the local church of S. Maria dei Raccomandati (no.5) reflects Piero della Francesca’s St Anthony polyptych in Perugia. The bizarre Tree of Jesse in the museum’s collection (no.12) shows, next to the figure of Adam depicted as St Honofrius, a wonderful still life of Crivellian gourds. The introduction of painted reliefs and other figures all’antica seems to have been inspired by Signorelli (Fig.74).

The second part of the exhibition, concerning the ‘Rinascimento eccentrico’ of Umbria and the Marches, consisted mostly of loans, including a fragmentary altarpiece by Bar-

tolommeo di Tommaso from the museum in Foligno, a Resurrection of Christ by Nicola di Ulisse from the museum in Norcia, a Man of sorrows by Nicola di Maestro Antonio da Ancona from the museum in Jesi, some works

by Ludovico Urbani, the Crivelli brothers and others; Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio, on the other hand, was not represented. Some of these painters were certainly active in northeastern Umbria or the neighbouring Marches, but others were not, such as Andrea Delitio, represented with a delightful diptych from the Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo in L’Aquila, or the modest painter from Spoleto, Bartolommeo da Miranda. Something in the concept of ‘eccentrico’ did not work: the paintings in this section were heterogeneous, not only in style,

74. Virgin and Child, by Matteo da Gualdo. c.1485–90.

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Francesco da Gualdo, procurator of Filippo Calandrini, bishop of Bologna.3 In 1471 Alunno signed his large polyptych (almost four metres high) for the Franciscans. Even in a small town like Gualdo there were discerning patrons with clear notions of regional developments who were not content with what was available locally. It is within this framework that Matteo da Gualdo needs to be considered. For art historians who wish to explore developments in style in combination with socio-economic factors, Matteo da Gualdo is an interesting ‘case’ which, thanks to a sympathetic exhibition and its substantial catalogue, can be studied with profit.

75. Virgin and Child enthroned with saints and a donor,

by Matteo da Gualdo. 1485–90. Tempera on panel, 190 by 182 cm. (S. Lorenzo, Coldellanoce; exh.

Museo Civico, Gualdo Tadino).

but also in quality. This became all too evident when one entered the room housing the museum’s masterpiece: the monumental polyptych from the local Franciscan church

by Niccolò Alunno of Foligno.

In the introductory essay to the catalogue, Eleonora Bairati charts the many-sided aspects of the Umbro–Marchigian so-called ‘eccentrics’, touching upon such concepts as the ‘shadowy Renaissance’ (Longhi), the ‘Pseudo-Renaissance’ (Zeri), contrasting ‘centre’ with ‘periphery’, pointing to various types of altarpieces, surveying painters who travelled against those who worked mainly locally, and tracing stylistic influences. While many of the observations are interesting and valid, they lack depth, because the attempts to define the painters’ stylistic profiles are not squared with considerations of demography, patronage and quality. Let us be frank: Matteo da Gualdo is not a great painter, but rather one of the many industrious artists, like Neri di Bicci, of the quattrocento. If I see it correctly, we have here a painter from a town of some importance in north-east Umbria who, during his lifetime, was probably the only painter active there. As such he catered for a clientele from an area defined by the mountains to the north, Nocera Umbra farther south, and, more to the west, the river Chiascio, even as far as Assisi, where he executed some interesting works such as an altarpiece from S. Pietro which was in the exhibition (no.2). His work mostly consisted of frescos, relatively small altarpieces and works on canvas. His altarpiece for the cathedral of Nocera Umbra (not in the exhibition) is probably his largest extant commission. Significantly, when it came to really important commissions, outsiders were called in. The Collegiata, Gualdo’s main church, ordered a polyptych from Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio (the upper register is now in the Brera), who supplied another in 1465 for the parish church of S. Pellegrino di Gualdo Tadino, still in situ, at the behest of Angelo di

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1 Catalogue: Matteo da Gualdo. Rinascimento eccentrico tra Umbria e Marche. Edited by Eleonora Bairati and Patrizia Dragoni. 276 pp. incl. 79 col. pls. + num. b. & w. ills. (Electa Editori Umbri Associati, Perugia, 2004), 50. ISBN 88–370–2847–4.

2 At the exhibition Pittori a Camerino nel Quattrocento in Camerino, 2002, reviewed by Francis Russell in this Magazine, 144 (2002), pp.779–80.

3 For these works, see now A. De Marchi, ed.: Pittori a Camerino nel Quattrocento, Milan 2002, pp.337–39, no.14, and pp.342–44, no.19.

Whitney Biennial New York

by JAMES LAWRENCE The University of Texas at Austin

contemporary art are seldom as polished as was this year’s Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (closed 30th May), ensuring that its curators Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin and Debra Singer generated lively debate around a show that was coherent and fluid. If the installation was oppressive in places, even on a busy day the works remained visible both in isolation and as part of the curatorial proposition. This sure footing extended beyond the Whitney, with a pleasing set of sculptural and sitespecific works in Central Park (curated by Tom Eccles, director of the Public Art Fund) and a well-organised programme of perform-

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77. Live to ride (E.P.), by Elizabeth Peyton. 2003.

Board, 38.1 by 30.5 cm. (Private collection, courtesy of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; exh.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

ances throughout New York. The optimism surrounding these projects was almost defiant, given the backdrop of national trauma against which this Biennial was selected and staged.

Even the most explicitly political work avoided crass, short-lived polemic, and the most telling evidence of crisis emerged from a conversation between present and past.

The nostalgic urge among younger artists was in plain view. Mark Handforth and Taylor Davis played with the formal language of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture.

Handforth’s Rising sun (2003), an arrangement of orange fluorescent tubes emulating solar rays, invoked Dan Flavin, while DiamondBrite (2004) presented a replica of an interstate highway sign in the manner of a Richard Serra Cor-ten piece. Davis’s Pallet (Fig.76) exploited the protocols of late 1960s installation with a punning sensibility that proved counterproductive. Set on the floor without a plinth, Pallet had been stepped on and damaged three times before the end of April.

Handforth and Davis are very impressive 76. Pallet, by Taylor Davis.

2002. Wood and mirror, 12.7 by 114.3 by 132.1 cm. (The artist; exh. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

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artists and witty interpreters of style and manner, but their sense of parody lacks the confidence to extend beyond form into content. Their work is arresting but not entirely convincing.

There were also several works by artists who had absorbed the stylistic lessons of psychedelia, and the end result was skilful but sterile. Their preferred techniques, including computer-aided printing on vinyl, were far too industrial and distant from the artist’s hand. An installation environment by Brazil’s pseudonymous Assume Vivid Astro Focus drew on psychedelia and Latino culture to emulate a cutting-edge dance club, but that illusion fails in a museum with uniformed guards. Perhaps psychedelia does not translate successfully into the twenty-first century, or perhaps these artists were exploiting the same aspects of psychedelia that attracted commercial interests in the 1970s. Psychedelia provides an appealing blend of saturated colour, decisive line and utopian content, but its countercultural origins carry specific connotations that have mostly fallen out of favour.

This problem can be considered in relation to sincerity and authenticity. These artists are not treating the past ironically, mocking the styles of the clothes they steal. They have come by their tastes and choices honestly, and make strenuous efforts to find aspects of past practice that are relevant to their concerns.

But they are nonetheless speaking the 1960s as a second language. This seems to be a consequence of timing, since many of the references to the past are creative misunderstandings connected with questions of power, dissent and failing systems. Revisiting the 1960s and 1970s was, in part, a matter of curatorial preference – even the catalogue, which includes multiples from some of the Biennial’s participants, was inspired by the boxed magazine Aspen.1 In Circa 1968 (2004), Mary Kelly took a photograph from the May 1968 protests in Paris and copied it in compressed tumble-dryer lint. This conflation of the political and the personal is in keeping with Kelly’s approach throughout her career, but Circa 1968 also addresses a first-hand memory.

For many of the artists in this Biennial, the 1960s are history rather than memory.

Sam Durant, for example, takes the iconography of the protest movements of the 1960s and restates it, so that grainy documentary photographs from news magazines become carefully executed pencil-on-paper copies, and handwritten signs from marches become light-box advertising. Durant’s work goes to the heart of the era’s political successes and failures, but it stops short of any contemporary insight that rises above the level of cautious analogy.

In most surveys, such moments of uncertainty and failure of nerve might prove crippling. This Biennial, though, occurred at an extraordinary time, and reticence is a valid response to the state of American culture. It would be a mistake to conclude that a compelling interest in the 1960s is merely a symptom of disengagement or lack of direction,

78. Still from 89 seconds at Alcazar, by Eve Sussman. 2003. Video projection, high-definition video colour, sound (12 mins). (The artist; exh. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

for these artists are passing judgment from the studio on art that will soon be the subject of history rather than criticism. This might be a moment to celebrate the past before moving on to a new set of artistic problems, but the show feels more contemplative than purposeful.

In fairness to some of the younger artists, their contemplative streak was accentuated by the presence of an earlier generation well advanced in their careers. This is not to say that they overshadowed the younger contributors. Robert Mangold’s stately Column paintings (2002–03) showed the advantages of years invested in taking painting back to its barest components, whereas Kim Fisher employs the hard-won lessons of monochrome painting to explore a material and symbolic language of luxury. David Hockney’s watercolours shared a room with Elizabeth Peyton’s intimate portraits, an intelligent and generous pairing that emphasised Peyton’s supple touch and skill with loose strokes (Fig.77). Hockney’s work seemed as youthful as Peyton’s, and together they provided a place for the show to catch its breath. Robert Longo, Richard Prince and Mel Bochner all provided striking work that demanded attention, and Longo’s 2001 seascape in charcoal, Untitled (Hell’s Gate), was one of the most stunning single pieces on display.

A couple of curatorial failings deserve mention. First, the wall texts frequently exceeded their interpretative remit and prescribed the meaning of the work, a surprising error that imposed an inappropriate passivity

on the audience. Secondly, there was one truly horrendous sonic overspill. Cory Arcangel and BEIGE collaborated on a project involving a reprogrammed 1980s video game, with amplified 1980s-video-game sound. This noise carried through several adjacent galleries in which were installed a number of works that gained no benefit from this accidental soundtrack.

Those complaints are minor, especially considering the excellent selection and treatment of film and video pieces. Eve Sussman’s 89 seconds at Alcazar (Fig.78) explores painting’s temporal contingency, with a choreographed drama in which Velázquez’s Las meninas falls into place and then breaks apart.

89 seconds at Alcazar shows the critical artistic moment to be as tenuous as any hold on power, and this was the most concise expression of the exhibition’s underlying theme.

The 2004 Biennial was timely rather than timeless, and this is perhaps the mark of its success. There is no dominant direction in contemporary art, and any attempt to suggest one would have been misleading. On the basis of this survey, American artists seem to be testing the limits of what they already know, and this is cause for confidence in their ability to create something new.

1

Catalogue: 2004 Biennial Exhibition. With essays by Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin and Debra Singer.

272 pp. incl. 136 col. pls. + 18 b. & w. ills. (Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2004), $45. ISBN 0–87427–139–8. the burl ington m agazin e

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Byzantium New York

by ANTHONY CUTLER Pennsylvania State University

Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (to 4th July), is the third in a series of huge shows on Byzantine art held at the Museum. Larger than the Age of Spirituality (1977) and The Glory of Byzantium (1997), it encompasses the three centuries from the day when ‘in 1261, the citizens of Constantinople, New Rome, welcomed the restoration of political and religious power to those who were of their own culture’, as Helen Evans puts it in the catalogue’s introductory essay,1 to 1557, the year in which Hieronymus Wolf coined the term Byzantium to denote an historical unit, one distinct from both the empire that its inhabitants had, for a millennium, called Roman and that Wolf’s contemporaries, such as Vasari, called Greek. Robert Nelson, in his essay, points out that Byzantium thereby entered the realm of scholarship, an accession that marked its demise as surely as the Ottoman conquest of the capital in 1453. Renamed by the erudite, it could consequently be remade by later generations.2 Displayed in the Tisch galleries, the exhibition installation eschews gimmicks of presentation all too common in museum shows today. In place of simulation and electronics, panels hover luminously in vitrines, while books, fragments of architectural sculpture, coins and other small objects line the walls, mercifully (and all too rarely in exhibitions of Byzantine art) at eye level. Except for one room intended to suggest the nave of St Catherine’s at Mount Sinai, no ‘virtuality’ imposes itself and, with a minimum of distracting, didactic signage, the objects are left to speak for themselves.

Works of art speak only when they can be seen, and one of the triumphs of the show is the visibility of great things that are not easily accessible in their usual settings – the Man of Sorrows ‘micromosaic’3 in its huge, relicencrusted case (cat. no.131), too rarely opened at S. Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome; or the ‘Holy Face’ of Laon (no.95; denied to an exhibition at the Vatican a few years ago) from the cathedral’s treasury. But beyond the warhorses (studied all too often in photographs) are objects unknown save to a few specialists. Among these must be counted the large woodblock illustrating the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, its reverse later used for a fairly workaday icon of the Pentecost (no.247); and the three-dimensional marble Virgin and Child (no.41; Fig.79) originally from the mausoleum of the Serbian king Milutin which has spent most of its life, draped with ex-votos, in the apse of the church at the Sokolica monastery in Kosovo.

It is an object that could change our view of Byzantine sculpture, or at least of the impact of the West on the Balkans.

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79. Virgin and Child. Byzantine (Serbia), 1312–16.

Marble, 106 by 67.5 cm. (Sokolica monastery, Kosovo; exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Almost as much as novelty, the quantity of things exhibited together can alter our perceptions. Thus, for the first time anywhere, nearly half the total number of surviving late Byzantine mosaic icons are on display (nos.126–39), an aggregation that allows one to appreciate the diversity of materials and techniques employed in their creation.4 Such

a haul has been condemned as ‘museological imperialism’ on the part of the Metropolitan.5 The fact remains that without it not only would scholars lack the opportunity for direct comparative study but large crowds of visitors would have little idea of the aesthetic and economic splendour of the Orthodox church in the early modern era, or of its appropriation and appreciation in Italy, France and the Netherlands.

The gap between today’s audiences – lay people and professional art historians – emerges most clearly in the different narratives attached to the objects, temporarily in the exhibition’s labels and permanently in the catalogue. To the first group belongs a gloss on the epithet of the Virgin Aristerakratousa (no.230), nonsensically explicating it as a reference to the stars on Mary’s mantle (it simply means that she holds the Child on her left arm). Fortunately such wrong information does not carry over into the catalogue where, nonetheless, the illusions of a number of authors are left unexcised. Belief in ‘imperial’ workshops, for instance, is evidently still dear to some eastern European contributors (nos.188 and 195), a notion so unfounded that it should lead to the conclusion that the curator in charge of an object is not necessarily the best person to write its catalogue entry.

This is especially so in the case of church textiles. Significantly, in his fine essay on them, Warren Woodfin has no truck with the idea. Even here, however, an opportunity is missed: two of the great silk sakkoi (silk liturgical vestments interwoven with preciousmetal thread; nos.177 and 178; Fig.80) bear the Transfiguration on the back of the shoulders, the area of the garments most visible

80. ‘Minor Sakkos’ of the Metropolitan Photios (front at left, back at right). Byzantine (Constantinople), fourteenth century, with later additions. Silk satin with silver, silver-gilt and coloured threads with pearls, 142 by 150 cm. (Kremlin State Historical and Cultural Museum, Moscow; exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

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81. Two-sided icon with the Virgin Pafsolype with feast scenes (recto) and the Crucifixion and prophets (verso).

Byzantine (?Constantinople), second half of fourteenth century. Tempera on gessoed wood, c.116.8 by 86.4 by 2.5 cm. (Collection of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Istanbul; exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

when in use. This implies that Hesychasm (the doctrine according to which human beings might see the uncreated light of Mount Tabor) achieved greater resonance in performance than in book illustration (no.171; cf. no.281) or other media where its impact has been suggested. Illustrations in the catalogue, where these objects are shown from both sides, offer better purchase on their function and iconography than is available in the exhibition, where they can be seen only from the front, hanging like fruitbats in a natural history museum.

The catalogue eschews the technical analyses nowadays customary in the discussion of textiles. Given that such data are arcane and of concern only to specialists, this may be a wise editorial decision. Still, at least one reader laments the general lack of concern with the way things were made. This inattention is especially regrettable in the case of the tiny ivory box from Dumbarton Oaks (no.5), turned on a lathe and thus quite different from any Early or Middle Byzantine example of the genre. So, too, the complex history of the double-sided Pafsolype icon (no.90; Fig.81) inserted into a later setting – a standard fourteenth-century practice (cf. no.82) – gets rather short shrift. The entry speaks politely of ‘recent restoration’ when, standing before the object, one can see that it has been (repeatedly?) butchered. Errors as well as omissions will doubtless be noted. Yet all such observations are a backhanded compliment to Evans and her team without whose global trawl we would never have had an exhibition of this scope and a catalogue that will remain, long and inevitably, the standard reference work on the art of a later, enlarged Byzantium – a Byzantium of the mind – that, paradoxically, issued from ‘the state on the straits’.

1 Catalogue: Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557).

Edited by Helen C. Evans. 658 pp. incl. 470 col. pls. + 105 b. & w. ills. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004), £50. ISBN 0–300–10278–X. 2 R.S. Nelson: ‘Byzantium and the Rebirth of Art and Learning in Italy and France’, in ibid., p.523. For more on this transformation, see A. Cutler: ‘From Loot to Scholarship: Changing Modes in the Italian Response to Byzantine Artifacts’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995), pp.237–67.

3 This follows the term used in the catalogue, but by no means are all such pieces ‘micro’: the Hodegetria icon from Sofia (no.126) measures 98 by 80 cm. without its frame. Here the tesserae are large enough to see how, in common with monumental mosaics, shadowed margins of flesh are dovetailed into more brilliantly lit passages.

4 Even if one, a Virgin Eleousa (no.128) assigned here to the early fourteenth century, should have an early twenty-first century date added to it. In a private collection in New York, it was almost totally reconstructed by Pete Dandridge, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who furnishes two invaluable pages on its manufacture.

5 See the review of the exhibition by J. Perls: ‘Good as Gold’, New Republic (17th May 2004), p.29.

fresh, breathtakingly assured, and inscribed with the sheer delight of their creation.

Today, they rival his exhibition ‘six-footers’ for public attention.

The first American exhibition of such works, Constable’s Skies, at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York (closed 25th June), assembled twenty-nine oil-sketches: fifteen from (primarily North American) private collections and eight from (mostly British) public institutions. While the absence of certain specific examples – and of any works in watercolour – was to be regretted, there was nevertheless much to savour. Several of the studies had not recently been exhibited, and three were lent unglazed. The spacious installation grouped the works by size and type (pure skies versus sea- and landscapes) against burgundy walls. The overall effect was energetic and decisive, allowing viewers to follow Constable’s brush across the surface of the sheets as it rapidly and astutely captured essential forms.

The marks range from short precise strokes (some resembling fish-scales, others latticework) to broad curves and squiggles and to long sweeping lines (Fig.83). In a remarkable study from the Frick Collection (Fig.82), Constable coaxed the wet black paint at the edge of a steel-grey cloud downwards in a series of fine streaks, capturing a sudden drizzle in an otherwise brilliant sky. His restricted palette (reduced for fieldwork) soon becomes familiar: most of the studies employ only white, black and blue against a pink ground. Unusually, the large sky study from Oxford (Fig.84) – luminous after its recent cleaning – reveals a light ground (originally white, now a warm beige) beneath thinly applied layers of paint. Intriguingly, passages of graphite glimmer at the lower right and left of the sheet, suggesting that Constable may have started this sketch using a pencil. In the exhibition catalogue,2 Sarah Cove notes only two other oil-sketches by Constable with graphite underdrawings, both executed with a palette knife, a slower technique which required the initial pencil work to secure the design.3 In the sky studies, however, Constable typically brushed the entire scene rapidly in oil, working wet-in-wet with little later retouching. Why, then, did he begin the Ashmolean’s sheet in graphite? Did the light ground colour prompt an experiment? And how, exactly, did Constable make his large

Constable New York

by ELIZABETH E. BARKER Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

of John Constable – never exhibited during his lifetime, absent from his 1838 studio sale, and unsold at his son’s 1871 auction – finally reached a wide audience following his daughter’s bequest of 1888 to the South Kensington Museum, London.1 Then, as now, these private, informal sketches seemed a revelation – exquisitely T HE C LO UD STUDI E S

82. Study of clouds 28 July 1822, by John Constable.

Oil on paper, 29.2 by 48.2 cm. (The Frick Collection, New York; exh. Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York). the burl ington m agazin e

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sky sketches, which could not have fitted onto the paintbox lids that supported his smaller studies? Do fewer large sheets survive because they proved cumbersome to prepare? The Constable Research Project, which has done so much to further our understanding of the artist’s work, will surely provide the answers.

Already, more is known about Constable’s methods of work, meteorological exactitude, and his relationship to other cloud-sketchers than ever before.4 (Another sky painter of the 1820s who, like Constable, noted the date, time and wind conditions on his studies can be added to the list; his work was recently included in Joseph Gandy: Visionary Views of England, at Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York.) The substantial catalogue of the present exhibition makes a real contribution to the literature. The fine reproductions – generally true in colour, and mostly uncropped – are only the most obvious virtue of this attractive book, which contains brief reflections by Freda Constable and Leon Wieseltier, and poems by David Shapiro and Floyd Skoot.

Readers of this Magazine will be most concerned with its three art-historical and two conservation essays.

Graham Reynolds considers the function of the cloud studies within Constable’s practice, and questions whether they can be linked to any discernible improvement in the exhibition pieces painted after his period of intense ‘skying’ from about 1820 to 1824. In ‘This Glorious Pageantry of Heaven’ Anne Lyles reassesses the state of research, reminding us that Constable began to sketch skies in Salisbury (rather than Hampstead), and that he composed his famous letter of October 1821 (his ‘aesthetic manifesto’ on skies) in response to a dismissive remark made privately to his friend, the Reverend John Fisher (rather than to published criticism, which did not particularly fault him).5 She argues that Constable’s convincing representations of changing weather conditions enhanced the narrative aspect of his large landscapes, thereby claiming for them something of the status of history painting. Lyles concludes by cor83. Hampstead Heath, sun setting over Harrow, 12 September 1821, by John Constable. Oil on paper, 24.1 by 29.2 cm. (Private collection; exh. SalanderO’Reilly Galleries, New York).

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84. Cloud study 31 [sic] September 1822, by John Constable. Oil on paper laid on canvas, 48 by 59 cm. (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; exh. Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York).

recting the over-emphasis on Luke Howard (whose system of cloud classification Constable may not have known in the early 1820s) with a reassertion of his admiration for William Paley, who found evidence of God in the wonders of creation. Conal Shields in ‘Why Skies?’ furthers the examination of Constable’s engagement with theology and with natural history, and presents a thoughtful reading of the cloud studies as barometers of the artist’s feelings.

Cove examines the materials and techniques of Constable’s sky sketches in oils, analysing the paint components that render

his unvarnished oils variously glossy or matt, and explaining the ‘turbid-medium effect’ (chiaroscuro created by pale scumbles on a dark ground). In ‘Catching the Sky’, Peter Bower assesses Constable’s paper supports at length, and provides detailed information about George Steart of Montalt Paper-Mills, manufacturer of a blue wove drawing paper used by Constable for a group of chalk studies not represented in the exhibition.

Long after the sketches in Constable’s Skies have been dispersed to their respective collections, the catalogue will attest to the artist’s profound engagement with the sky – for Constable, the chief ‘Organ of Sentiment’ in landscape painting.

1

I. Fleming-Williams and L. Parris: The Discovery of Constable, London 1984, pp.19, 72 and 87.

2 Catalogue: Constable’s Skies. Edited by F. Bancroft.

188 pp. incl. 104 col. pls. + 14 b. & w. ills. (SalanderO’Reilly Galleries, New York, 2004), $75. ISBN 1– 58821–126–6.

3 S. Cove: ‘Very Great Difficulty in Composition and Execution’, in ibid., p.145, and p.152, note 131.

4 K. Badt: John Constable’s Clouds, London 1950; L. Hawes: ‘Constable’s Sky Sketches’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969), pp.344–65; J.E. Thornes: John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science, Birmingham 1999; E. Morris et al., eds.: exh. cat.

Constable’s Clouds: Paintings and Cloud Studies by John Constable, Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland) and Liverpool (National Museum and Galleries on Merseyside) 2000.

5 For Salisbury, see T. Wilcox in Morris, op. cit. (note 4), p.52; for ‘aesthetic manifesto’, see J. Gage in J. Gage et al.: exh. cat. Constable: Le choix de Lucian Freud, Paris (Grand Palais) 2002, p.231.

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