Tag Archives: art history

May 13, 2013 · 9:35 am

Is Tate Britain Rediscovering Its Purpose?

“Gloriously, satisfyingly reactionary,” is the assessment of the Torygraph’s art critic, Richard Dorment, on the renovations to Tate Britain, the London museum dedicated to British art from the 16th-21st centuries.  The museum’s Director, Penelope Curtis, has presided not only over the renovation of the galleries themselves, but in re-hanging the paintings contained within it in chronological order.  In so doing she is bucking an unfortunate trend which hit public museums like the Tate, and the Hirshhorn here in Washington among others, in which their sense of purpose was forgotten in the fight to re-brand themselves as beacons of hipster nonsense.

Beginning around a decade ago a number of public art institutions, inspired by the example of Sir Nicholas Serota at the Tate conglomerate began to rearrange the collections of painting and sculpture in their care.  The exercise lead to the works being displayed, not chronologically or in “schools”, as one would study them in art history, but in whatever bizarre arrangement the management felt would draw in the curiosity-seeking public, and get them more press.  Curators would decide that a group of completely unrelated works evoked thoughts – for them, anyway – about sex, the environment, a cause du jour, and so on, and group them together, often in a highly discordant fashion.

At the time, the art press went into raptures over the idea that this idea was something bold, new, and fresh – which of course it wasn’t.  If you have ever been to a private museum, such as The Wallace Collection in London, you know that oftentimes private collectors and their families hung pictures of different centuries and styles together in their homes.  They did so because they liked the way the pieces looked together, as well as matching the colors of the drapes, furniture, or carpets.  Some pieces then occupied the space they did because they were thematically suited to the purpose of a room, or conversely were banned from a particular room because they were ill-suited to it.  One would not like to see a painting of the beheading of St. John the Baptist hanging over the sideboard in the dining room, for example, even if it was by Sassetta.

However when more public institutions began to make similar idiosyncratic arrangements of their collections copying Serota’s lead, there was quite correctly a vociferously negative reaction from those of us who love good art, but who thought that museums  were losing their way.  There is a time and a place for creating what are popularly called “mash-ups” of seemingly conflicting elements in exhibition spaces:  it has always been the purview of the temporary exhibition to juxtapose works which might not otherwise be displayed nearby each other, so as to encourage the visitor see the connections between them.  Artists always influence each other, sometimes centuries apart, and so for these traveling shows the mixture of styles and centuries can work rather well.  The highly-regarded Manet/Velázquez show at The Metropolitan in 2003 was a good example of this.

The point of the public museum is not to indulge the personal whims, bad taste, and general ignorance of its leadership.  Serota for example once argued that the great High Renaissance master Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” should be allowed to be sold and leave the country, since British public institutions needed to collect more “foreign” art – apparently forgetting the fact that Raphael was from Urbino in present-dy Italy, and never set foot in Britain in his lifetime.  Unfortunately this is the sort of person leading most major public art collections these days, and we all suffer as a result.

Rather museums are meant to be institutions which both preserve art for future generations, and educate us as to its history and meaning.  Having been established for the public good, they are provided with certain legal protections and exemptions, as well as taxpayer funding.  As a result, they are not meant to be a rich man’s plaything, nor a venue for proving to others in your field that you are a bigger hipster than they are.  Thus it is a very good thing indeed to see that Director Curtis has taken the time to examine the role of the art museum in public life, and to try to recapture a sense of purpose from which all may benefit.

TateInterior Loggia at Tate Britain, London

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April 30, 2013 · 10:49 am

Rags, Riches, and the Contemporary Art Trade

Why is it that when one sees articles like this, describing how the halls and salons of The Louvre are being filled with contemporary art, that the sensation is one of anger arising from a deep sense of injustice? We all know instinctively that much of the headline-making contemporary art we see is garbage, and sometimes quite literally so as shown in the photograph which accompanies this post.  Unfortunately, few people have the courage to actually stand up and say so, and there are several possible reasons as to why.

One reason might be that many in contemporary Western society are brought up to believe that anyone can make good art, which is simply not true.  It is one thing to encourage little Tracy to make a nice picture for Aunt Hilda with her fingerpaints. It is another to convince adult Tracy that she is a great artist, and can in fact teach other people how to be artists, when she cannot even draw properly.

I cannot speak to the European experience, but the rather poor state of art education in this country is something I suspect most of my American readers know first-hand.  One learns very little beyond a smattering of Attic sculpture, the Italian Renaissance, a bit of Dutch genre painting, and the French Impressionists,  followed by an over-concentration on Modern Art.  Then one spends the rest of the course making bad pots, or poor sketches of one of the girls in the class seated on a wobbly stool.  In fact, far more time is spent in the American education system teaching students how to boil an egg, parallel park, or avoid getting Suzy pregnant, than is on educating them about the great artistic legacies of Western civilization.

Increasingly it is the persona of the artist, feigned or otherwise, and not the art itself, which is valued and praised.  The art becomes secondary to the story, i.e. the mythos created around the artist: this one is a political dissident, or that one is a public drunk, or that one sleeps with anything he can get his hands on, and aren’t they fascinating people?  In the end, seeing someone put thousands of porcelain sunflower seeds in a room may be amusing, but no one dares to ask whether it is actually good art. [N.B.: It isn't.]  

The contemporary art world does not genuinely want to ask itself this question, nor does it want you to question their judgment on this point, because in reality much of that segment of the art market is nefarious, at best.  When you read about someone paying astronomical prices for what looks like – and in fact, is – a pile of poo with a title placard, the story is not really the art.  Rather, it is about the amount of money changing hands, based on how well the art dealers and press have managed to create a marketable brand value for the artist whose work is being sold.

What most people do not realize is that the majority of this art which makes you scratch your head or roll your eyes is not actually being brought home for people to display.  Instead, it is going into places like bank vaults or gigantic tax-free storage facilities, where it is kept as an investment  readily convertible to cash by financiers, spendthrift entertainers, and arms/narcotics merchants.  This story which broke yesterday, about private AND institutional collectors pulling out of Christie’s art storage warehouses in Brooklyn, should give you some idea of the vast amount of art created and sold over the past 30-40 years which is sitting crated up somewhere, unseen.

If it were all released onto the market at once, the value of such art would collapse, since frankly no one would actually want it.  There is already so much of it available that it has lost that one quality which collecting objects like Old Master paintings or fine porcelain has always had, which is scarcity.  We all know from economics that once the market becomes aware that something is not actually rare or difficult to obtain, it begins to lose value, and sometimes precipitously.  The contemporary art market keeps pushing along, making new art stars out of delusional half-wits to keep the flow of goods coming, but looking less like an intelligentsia and more like the purveyors of tulip bulbs.

As someone who has collected in some very niche areas of art for the last couple of decades, I regularly encourage my readers to go out and collect what you love.  Owning art is not only an ongoing means of self-education, it is simply a joy.  I would based on the forgoing advise you to avoid the temptation of buying art which requires you to install a dedicated video monitor, or put down a layer of plastic on the living room floor, in order for you to be able to display it.

Instead, look for those contemporary artists who know how to do things like actually paint – like this guy – and have made a career of careful and attentive craftmanship.  These people develop their natural talents into something striking and accomplished, whatever style they happen to work in, because they know that great art takes time and patience to create.  These artists are the men and women who inspire and encourage us to feel that link of continuity with the history of our culture, and not that we are simply cattle to be manipulated by the contemporary art world for the purposes of commerce.  And when the contemporary art market finally does burst, these will be the artists left standing.

Louvre

“The Venus of Rags” by Michelangelo Pistoletto (2013)
from an temporary installation at The Louvre, Paris

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April 22, 2013 · 10:27 am

Raising the Art Alarm in Turkey

Recent legal news from Turkey has provoked concern among a number of commentators in both the art world and the Christian world.  As reported in several news outlets, such as in this article which appeared in The Art Newspaper, Turkish courts have decided that a historic former church in the city of Trabzon can now be turned into a mosque.  It is part of a slowly increasing seepage of more strictly Islamic thought and practice into secular Turkish law and politics, which has been underway for some time now.

The beautifully decorated Byzantine building dates from the 12th century; it was turned into a mosque in the 15th century, subsequently abandoned and used for various secular purposes, then restored and turned into a museum in the early 20th century.  Many art historians and legal watchers believe that this is simply a legal test case, and a prelude to the great Hagia Sophia church in Istanbul, which itself is currently operated as a museum rather than a house of worship, being turned back into a mosque.  Yet we should keep in mind of course this sort of thing has happened throughout human history, as a result of some very basic human tendencies and motivations.

One of the key points to realize in the study of history is that the victors get to write the story in a very visible way, i.e. in the form of art and architecture.  They build monuments to themselves, naturally enough, since that is what men do, whether on a grand scale like a public memorial, or in a small way when the founder of a business has a portrait of himself commissioned for the board room.  Yet we should also remember that the victors try to remove those things which call to mind those whom they have replaced.

In Ancient Egypt for example, when a pharaoh died and was succeeded by another from a different family, the carved or painted name of the deceased monarch would often be eradicated from any structures built during his reign.  In Tudor England, Catholic churches such as Canterbury Cathedral were confiscated and made over to the use of the Anglican Church, as a result of which many works of art were destroyed in the frenzy of early Protestantism.  These sorts of things are done, as Yuri Zhivago observes in “Doctor Zhivago” when the family learns of the death of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, in order to show the populace that there is no going back.  Even if occasionally there are attempts to bring back what was lost, such as the Bourbon Restorations in France, they are usually short-lived.

What is particularly interesting about the article linked to above is that it brings together two very different groups of people.  This building has not been used as a church for a very long time, of course, so the question of whether it would return to its intended use is not even on the table.  On one hand we have art lovers, who do not want to see the beautiful and historic decoration of this building lost.  And on the other we have Christians, who do not want to see images of Christ, His Apostles, and Our Lady destroyed as a result of Islamic aniconism.

These two groups are so often completely at odds with one another at present, that their having a common interest will make it interesting to see whether they can act in concert on what will no doubt be a growing number of cases such as this, not just in Turkey but in Europe itself.  For of course with the demographic shift toward Islam taking place throughout much of Europe as a result of immigration, falling Christian birth rates, etc., more and more European churches with dwindling numbers of congregants will almost certainly be converted into mosques over time.  If indeed politics makes strange bedfellows, as Charles Dudley Warner once noted, we will see how the art world establishment and the various Christian churches concerned about what will happen in Trabzon and elsewhere, will do in trying to get along with one another.

Trabzon

Dome fresco in the  former Church of Hagia Sophia (12th-13th centuries)
Trabzon, Turkey

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January 24, 2013 · 11:17 am

17th Century Masterpiece Discovered at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

There has always been something very special indeed about the Hotel Ritz in Paris.  Whether it was Hemingway and Fitzgerald getting plastered and arguing in the bar, or Count Esterházy bringing in a troupe of Hungarian gypsy musicians to serenade him and his dinner guests – a moment lovingly referenced in the woefully under-appreciated Audrey Hepburn/Gary Cooper classic “Love in the Afternoon” – this grandest of grand hotels has played host to numerous famous people and important events.  The Nazis took over the Ritz as the headquarters for the Luftwaffe in World War II, while Princess Diana dined at the hotel just before the car crash which took her life.

The Ritz closed in August for a two-year complete renovation, and as part of this many of the historic rooms were temporarily emptied of their fine French furnishings.  One of these was the suite where the legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel lived for over three decades.  In the process of cleaning out her former living space, thanks to the keen eye of a French art historian who had been viewing the rooms before their closure, the hotel has managed to bring about the re-discovery of a major work of Baroque painting.

Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) was the preferred court painter of Louis XIV; in fact the Sun King referred to Le Brun as “the greatest French artist of all time.”  His first royal commission so pleased the king that he raised Le Brun to the nobility, and put him in charge of all decoration in the royal residences.  The famous “Hall of Mirrors” at the Palace of Versailles for example, is covered in his work.  Le Brun was appointed the director of the newly-established royal academy of painting and sculpture, which later became known as the “Academie des Beaux-Arts”, and laid the foundation for the academic tradition in French art for nearly three centuries.

The work which hung unnoticed at the Ritz appears to be Le Brun’s depiction of the Trojan princess Polyxena, who was executed by the Greeks for complicity in the death of the hero Achilles.  If you remember your histories of the Trojan Wars, one retelling of the story is that Achilles made the mistake of letting Polyxena, whom he had fallen in love with, learn the secret of his vulnerable heel.  Her brother Paris later used this knowledge to kill the Greek hero with a poisoned arrow.

The painting is signed with Le Brun’s initials and dated 1647, which places it prior to his coming into the service of Louis XIV.  As such it is an important example of the younger Le Brun absorbing the lessons of the painters whom he studied in Italy during a three-year-long stay there, including the High Renaissance master Raphael, and his own countryman Poussin.  Taking what he had learned from these, Le Brun adding greater exuberance and theatricality to his own, highly fluid style, which perfectly exemplified the more emotional and dramatic style of the Baroque.

Le Brun’s re-discovered masterpiece is set to be auctioned at Christie’s with what to me sounds like a rather low pre-sale estimate of half a million euros.  While it is a large work, it is not nearly the size of the absolutely gigantic canvases which Le Brun was able to execute on behalf of the Sun King later in his career.  So should you have a spare million or two sitting around, gentle reader, owning a painting of this quality, formerly the property of the most famous hotel in the world, and which Chanel herself probably looked at every day, would not be a bad investment.

U

“The Sacrifice of Polyxena” by Charles Le Brun (1647)
Hotel Ritz, Paris

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January 7, 2013 · 10:27 am

What Lies Beneath: Hidden Paintings and Tudor Portraits

If you will be in London between now and June 2nd, make sure you take time to drop by the National Portrait Gallery for a small but fascinating new exhibition, entitled Hidden: Unseen Paintings Beneath Tudor Portraits.  In preparation for a separate exhibition, experts at the National Portrait Gallery have identified that at least two paintings from the  16th-17th centuries in their collection were painted on top of Catholic devotional works.  The underlying, original images were revealed using modern investigative methods including x-rays and infrared reflectography.

It is not entirely unusual to have a new work of art created from an old one, for various reasons, and examples are known from the ancient world through to today.  Thus,  if a pharaoh fell out of favor in Ancient Egypt after his death, sculptures or paintings of him might be recarved or repainted to reflect a subsequent ruler.  In other cases, the artist may not have had access to all of the materials he needed, and so had to re-use what he had available; we know that Van Gogh often had to do this, for example.

While there is no consensus in this exhibition as to why these particular works were used as a base for new paintings, I would venture it is a reasonable certainty that this was partially brought about as a result of the iconoclasm that took hold under Henry VIII and his illegitimate progeny.  Beginning with the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry instigated a period of systematic destruction of the cultural and artistic patrimony of England that continued under his successors.  Anyone interested in learning more should read Cambridge professor Eamon Duffy’s authoritative The Stripping of the Altars, to try to grasp at least to some extent what was lost.

One of the works in this show is a portrait of the 1st Earl of Dorset, which was painted over a copy of Sebastiano del Piombo’s “Flagellation of Christ” – which itself was based on designs by Michelangelo. Another portrait, that of Sir Francis Walsingham, who was employed by Elizabeth I to capture, torture, and execute Catholics, is in a terrible irony of history painted over an image of the  Madonna and Child.  It should be pointed out that neither of these paintings are recoverable, at least with the technology presently available to us, because they were partially destroyed in order to create an even ground for the new painting to be painted on top.

Given that these portraits were painted about twenty years apart, it begs the very fascinating question: what else is out there to be discovered?  For surely now there is going to be a great interest among museums and collections which hold portraits dating from the Tudor period to have them analyzed in order to discover whether a devotional work lies beneath.  Perhaps there might even be a great artistic discovery in the making, of a work long thought to be lost.  It may be that, in reality, it has been hanging in plain sight all this time, in some castle or public gallery, under a thin veil of paint and varnish.

dorset

Portrait of Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset by Unknown Artist (1601)
Current state (l) and x-ray showing “The Flagellation of Christ” (r)
National Portrait Gallery, London

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