Category: Exhibitions
Tate promises a better hang
May 18 2012
Tate Britain has responded to recent critics of their current displays by promising a better hang of the historic collection in 2013. FromThe Guardian:
Central to that is a rehang of the collection, which the gallery's director Penelope Curtis said would be displayed chronologically – from 1550 to the present day – rather themed or by artist group.
That will please vocal critics – among them the Guardian's Jonathan Jones and the respected Burlington Magazine – who have been aghast at the paucity of pre-1900 works being displayed over recent years.
That is down to the Millbank Project, explained Curtis. "What we didn't do well enough was communicate that we were in the middle of a building project. We were perhaps too successful in hiding it."
Nicholas Serota, overall director of Tate, admitted: "Obviously when you have something like a fifth of the galleries out of service you have to sympathise with the visitors.
"They are expecting to see a full panorama of art from 1550 to the present day and we haven't been able to show many of the great works in the collection."
That's a masteful piece of spin, and slightly missing the point. But never mind. As I said a while ago, the new Turner galleries are a triumph, which bodes well for all the rest.
New Turner hang at Tate
May 14 2012
Picture: BG
I went recently to the Turner extension at Tate Britain to admire their new hang. If you haven't already been, go too. It's a triumph. For the first time in many years, the galleries have a cohesive narrative, and highlight not only the best of Turner's work in an engaging and fresh manner, but also reveal a number of new discoveries. An example is the above reclining nude, cleaned for the first time, and, wonderfully, hung unframed in all its unfinished glory (you can see a photo of it before cleaning here - if Francis Bacon had painted that, it would sell for £50m). Gone, thankfully, are the curious 19th C 'Romantic' works by lesser painters that the Tate had shoved into the Turner galleries during their renovations. And gone too is the mawkish shade of green that dominated the rooms, now replaced by cool blues and greys. It's reassuring to see Tate doing something so well. Now we just need to hope that the cohesiveness of the hang is not disturbed in future years, as happens too often.
Waldemar on Leonardo the Anatomist
May 10 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
The Royal Collection's new show get's the thumbs up from Waldemar:
So accomplished is the presentation here of our inner biology, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Leonardo isn’t just progressing anatomical understanding. He is also inventing biological drawing. Today, we live in a world of plentiful biological illustration, and all these methods of explaining the inner body are familiar to us: the section, the inner close-up, the view across the cut, the map of the arteries, the exploded joint. In Leonardo’s time, they all needed to be invented. Here he is, turning abstract knowledge into a tangible and understandable visual coding.
The final room is dizzyingly impressive. It records his most sustained effort to turn his anatomical knowledge into a published treatise. Somehow, he gets to know the professor of anatomy at the university in Pavia, and the two of them embark on a thorough investigation of the skeleton and its muscles. A few of the sheets of intense, insightful drawings that result — a set of views of the inner workings of the human hand; a series of cross sections of the human shoulder in motion; the first accurate drawing of the human spine — are downright miraculous.
These sensitively shadowed drawings of body parts achieve so much more than is demanded of them. There’s a sense of movement, a thoroughly convincing corporeality and, above all, that uniquely Leonardoesque sense that you are somehow able to look through the human skin to a precisely observed inner reality: not an abstracted diagram of the stuff of life, but the stuff itself.
The unobservable is being observed here. And this utterly convincing sense of reality is Leonardo the artist’s greatest gift to Leonardo the scientist.
Durer exhibition - the real discovery
May 2 2012
Picture: Playmobil
A reader writes:
I enjoyed reading your story on Durer, but for once your journalistic instincts have deserted you. Somehow you've missed the big story about the Nuremburg show - which is that, in his honour, Playmobil have produced a special-edition mini Durer figure, painting his self-portrait.
I got one at the Prado a couple of months ago - you can pick them up from the Nuremburg tourist office, here:
http://tourismus.nuernberg.de/shop/
I mean, how cool is that?
This goes way beyond cool. The only thing wrong with it is the suggested age range, '4-10'. Every art historically minded adult must surely want one. I want several. In fact, I want a whole edition of artists painting their self-portraits (starting with Van Dyck).
Longstanding readers may remember another art historical toy featured here on AHN, the unique Ken-as-David Michelangelo homage. If you know of any others, send them in!
Analysing Durer
May 1 2012
Picture: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg
To coincide with an exciting new exhibition on Albrecht Durer, in Nuremberg from 24th May to 2nd September, new research has revealed previously unknown aspects of Durer's technique. In his 1493 Self-portrait (x-rayed above), researchers discovered that on occasions he painted with his thumb and the ball of his hand. Full details in Der Speigel here.
Leonardo as anatomist
May 1 2012
Excitement is building ahead of the Royal Collection exhibition of Leonardo's anatomical drawings (opens 4th May at Buckingham Palace). Will we see queues like those outside the National Gallery? Probably not, but it will be crowded.
Above is a fine video featuring the Royal Collection senior curator Martin Clayton on the drawings. You can buy the exhibition app here. And here is a piece by Channel 4 News, which is a little simplistic but features a contribution from National Gallery director Nicholas Penny.
The NPG's 'most popular show ever'
April 30 2012
Picture: NPG/Freud Estate
The Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is so popular, they're now opening it till midnight. From the NPG's press release:
Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery will open until midnight from 24-26 May, in the lead up to the last day of the most popular paid-for exhibition in the gallery’s history, it was announced today (30 April).
Gallery figures released today reveal that since it opened on 9 February 2012, Lucian Freud Portraits has attracted over 175, 000 visitors so far, overtaking its previous record-breaking paying exhibitions Mario Testino Portraits (2002), David Hockney Portraits (2006) and Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life (2008).
The extra tickets for the midnight openings on Thursday 24, Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May will go on sale today only (via Ticketmaster) at www.npg.org.uk/freud or by phone (0844 248 5033). The Gallery’s Portrait Restaurant will be taking bookings for dinner until 9.30pm and the exhibition shop will also be open.
Sewell on Hampton Court 'Mistresses' exhibition
April 20 2012
Picture: Christie's
The Great Man doesn't like it. Which is perhaps to be expected, given the original way the exhibition is laid out (which I liked). But he makes a connoisseurial blooper in relation to the full-length of Nell Gwyn, above:
Always attributed to Peter Lely, it seems a wretched nude when compared with his convincingly erotic tumble of more substantial nymphs snoozing by a fountain in the Vale of Lethe (a masterpiece in Dulwich), painted perhaps a decade before Charles II came to the throne and perhaps evidence of a licentious tendency in English culture well before the Restoration. That these two paintings are by the same hand and same imagination is quite improbable; a prime original of the Gwynn portrait has yet to be discovered.
Sewell's mistake no.1 - comparing Lely's later works with his earlier pictures. Lely is a rare artist, in that he seems to get worse as he gets older. The picture Sewell refers to in Dulwich is perhaps his best early painting, from the early 1650s. The Nell Gwyn is a later work, from the 1670s.
What explains the difference? I don't know - but I suspect - that Lely's decline was partly due to idleness. Note, for example, his extensive reliance on the studio system. But perhaps most of all we must blame ourselves - for we English in the 17th Century just weren't that interested in painting itself, from an artistic point of view. We were the philistines of Europe. Portraits of ourselves we loved, but, generally, we weren't cultured enough to tell the difference between an exquisite piece of brushwork by a master hand, or a plodding piece of drapery by a studio assistant. (After all, these portraits were meant to hang in dark, candlelit dining rooms, so it didn't particularly matter.) This partly explains why there are so few really talented native English artists, and why those foreign artists that did come here tended to decline in their powers as they churned out portrait after portrait, and realised that they could get away with less and less effort. Compare for example Van Dyck's later English portraits with his earlier Antwerp works. Compare also Kneller's portraits; his earier English pictures are far better than the later ones, in which he relies increasingly on studio assistants. Happily, by the eighteenth Century we Brits had become a little more cultured (thanks in part to things like the Grand Tour), and we were at last able to contribute meaningfully to art history with the likes of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth and Lawrence.
And Sewell's mistake no.2: condition. As I was muttering earlier this week, not enough critics take into account condition issues when looking at paintings. The Lely in Dulwich Sewell takes as his reference point is in excellent condition. The Lely of Nell Gwyn is not, and has been both flattened during a relining, and abraded through over-cleaning - which partly explains why it failed to sell twice at auction recently. Personally, I'm in no doubt about Nell's attribution to Lely, and nor that it was the portrait Charles II had in his private rooms.
New Raphael exhibition the Prado
April 18 2012
Picture: Louvre, Raphael's Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione
This sounds like a must-see:
This will be one of the most important exhibitions ever to be devoted to the work of Raphael (1483-1520) and his studio and the first to focus on the final phase in the artist’s career when he became the most influential painter in Western art.
Organised in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre (where the exhibition will take place following its showing at the Museo del Prado), the 40 paintings and 30 drawings that comprise this exhibition will be displayed chronologically. As such they will cover the last seven years of Raphael’s life, from the start of the pontificate of Leo X (1513) up to the artist’s death in 1520. This period includes famous works such as the Saint Cecilia Altarpiece (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) and the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, from the Louvre. Space will also be given to the work of Raphael’s principal pupils and followers, Giulio Romano (c. 1449-1546) and Giovanni Francesco Penni (1488-1528), who worked under the master’s close supervision on the late commissions he received.
12th June - 16th September.
The condition of Titian
April 17 2012
Picture: Hermitage
In The Telegraph, Mark Hudson wonders if Titian's Flight into Egypt really deserves to be billed as 'Titian's First Masterpiece', as the National Gallery is billing it in their new exhibition:
The background is extremely accomplished, with its line of autumnal trees, receding towards craggy mountains reminiscent of Titian’s native Dolomites, surrounded by sunlit clouds. The group of shepherds, conversing in the shadows in the middle distance, are pure Giorgione in their tenebrous moodiness.
The figures in the foreground, however — Mary on her donkey led by a tousle-headed youth, with a rather stiff-looking Joseph bringing up the rear — progress in a flat frieze-like fashion, the figures rendered in laboured imitation of Bellini. While they have a certain naive charm, the faces are generic, the drapery cumbersome. The magisterial assurance of that extraordinary early portrait The Man with a Blue Sleeve (here called Portrait of Girolamo Barbarigo) is utterly absent. Indeed, it is impossible to believe the two works are separated by only two years, as the exhibition claims.
Background and foreground fail to marry to the degree you wonder if more than one artist was involved, or if the two parts were painted in different periods. Vasari suggests that Titian may have been assisted by a group of German artists — experts in landscape — to whom he gave “hospitality”. But if Titian was still a teenage assistant to Bellini, as the exhibition implies, it’s difficult to imagine him putting anyone up, and the treatment isn’t in any case particularly Germanic.
The answer to this disparity in the quality of the painting is of course its condition. The picture has been substantially abraded in the past in many areas. The figures in the foreground are in parts liberally covered in over-paint to cover-up these losses. So of course it appears at first glance as if some parts are better painted than others. In fact, some parts are simply better preserved than others.
Sadly, so few critics, and increasingly academics, understand condition issues these days. (We saw this most recently in the reviews of the Leonardo exhibition.) And Titian, perhaps more than any other painter , suffers from condition issues. There are two reasons for this. First, he was such a sophisticated artist, and used new techniques and delicate glazes that are particularly sensitive to over-cleaning. And secondly, he has been one of the most sought-after and collected artists of all time, and consequently collectors, dealers and museums have 'cleaned' Titians at a higher rate than works by other artists. This is especially evident in the National Gallery's new exhibition, where two putative Titians on loan from the Hermitage are in the most ruinous state, thanks largely to the Hermitage's old and hopelessly misguided policy of transferring all their panel paintings onto canvas.
I hesitate to say this, but probably The Flight Into Egypt worked more harmoniously (as a whole image) before it was cleaned, when the uniform effect of layers of old varnish knocked back the underlying imperfections caused by loss and abrasion. For example, look at the bottom of the cleaned painting above, and the way the figures seem to float rather uneasily. But in the painting before conservation, there was a subtler degree of shadowing at the lower edge of the canvas, which rooted the figures more effectively in the foreground.
The best John Michael Wright?
April 11 2012
Picture: SNPG
A reader writes:
Thank you for the Hampton Court notice, but isn't Wright's best portrait the wonderfully subtle image of the architect fellow [Sir William Bruce, above] in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery? Hope I don't sound obsessive, but I am a bit about Wright who is undeservedly obscure and sometimes mis-catalogued as 'follower of Lely'.
As a fellow John Michael Wright obsessive, I'm delighted to hear of other Wright fans. And yes, Wrights are very often catalogued as 'follower of Lely', or 'follower of Kneller'. I've been lucky enough to find quite a few over the years. The SNPG portrait is indeed very fine. But personally I don't think many English portraits of the 17th Century can beat Wright's depiction of Charles II for drama and sheer majesty. If you have a favourite Wright, let me know.
Update - a reader writes:
JM Wright is wonderful but don't you feel the foreshortening of the sitter's left arm in that SNPG picture is rather feeble? And the head all out of proportion with the body? [...] My favourite painting, for what it's worth: http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/402803
New exhibition at Hampton Court
April 10 2012
Picture: BG (taken surreptitiously, so apologies for the poor quality)
Most visitors to Hampton Court will have heard about Henry VIII and his six wives. Few, however, will know about Charles II and his more numerous mistresses. This is a shame, for the stories of the Stuart court can be just as interesting as those of the Tudor world, and even come close to being as politically important. For had Charles II had spent less time chasing actresses, and concentrated instead on producing a legitimate heir, we might not have had the calamitous reign of James II, and thus the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights, and the consitutional monarchy we live under today.
So all praise to Historic Royal Palaces for shifting their focus onto the Stuarts at Hampton Court. Their new exhibition, The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned, looks at the love life Britain's most priapic king, Charles II. I can highly recommend it. Brett Dolman, the curator, has put together a show which is both pleasingly entertaining and informative - rare these days - and has selected some of the finest examples of British portraiture from the seventeenth Century. These include: probably the finest miniature of the period, Samuel Cooper's unfinished portrait of the Dule of Monmouth; a selection of Lely's best 'Windsor Beauties', including Pepys' 'prettiest girl in the world', Frances Stuart; my favourite Van Dyck, Cupid and Pysche (though sadly hung too high, and poorly lit); and John Michael Wright's best painting, his portrait of Charles II (glimpsed above).
I was also pleased to see that Lely's full-length of a naked Nell Gwynn has been displayed properly identified as her, and without the late Sir Oliver Millar's curious suggestion that the sitter is Barbara Villiers. The Lely (above) is hung next to a contemporary copy of the same subject, which, while of inferior quality, confirms to me in its more detailed background that Lely's original, which is strangely muted in that area, has suffered a degree of loss over the years.
A number of pictures have been cleaned for the exhibition, including Lely's fine portrait of Lady Byron, which has languished in the Royal Collection's store for many years. And in a way, what this exhibition really revealed to me was that the previously rather empty and sparsely hung Wren rooms at Hampton Court come to life when full of pictures. Kneller's 'Hampton Court Beauties', for example, are usually crammed into a small and dimly lit ground floor room used by William III at Hampton Court, where it is impossible to stand back from them, or even see some them in the gloaming. This may well be a historically relevant place to hang the pictures, but as Kneller once said when he found someone looking too closely at his portraits; 'my pictures are not made for smelling of'. They need space to be appreciated. So hopefully, the exhibition will usher in a rehang of the later Stuart rooms at Hampton Court. But in the meantime, do go along to this excellent new show - and let me know what you think.
Yes - it's a porn warning at Hampton Court
April 10 2012
Picture: BG
Seems a touch Puritanical to me...
That early Titian
April 5 2012
Picture: Hermitage
A reader writes:
It's a pity you (and The Guardian) displayed the photo of the painting before cleaning.
Above is the cleaned picture, via ArtDaily.
Rembrandt goes to New York
April 4 2012
Picture: English Heritage
How kind of us - English Heritage has leant Rembrandt's epic Kenwood House Self Portrait to the Met. It's the first time the picture has left Europe. On display till May 20th. Enjoy!
Until further notice...
April 4 2012
Picture: Newsweek
...this site is a Hirst-free zone.
Update: Brian Sewell's review is well worth a click. His conclusion:
I can sum it up as shiny shit.
Video of cleaned Leonardo 'St Anne'
March 30 2012
Video: AFP
PS - Don't confuse the cleaned Leonardo with the copy...
Waldemar on 'Turner & Claude'
March 27 2012
Picture: BG
He likes it:
The show ahead consists of ever clearer evidence that Turner was a great and tremendous artist, Claude a charming one. At the heart of the display is the famous face-off between their two views of ancient Carthage; a face-off Turner engineered when he left his work to the nation, on the condition that these two works always hang together. Which they usually do, in the National’s octagonal gallery.
In Claude’s Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, the weak beam from a low sun on the horizon seems barely to reach the shore, and even the figures humping stuff onto boats in the foreground appear utterly exhausted. But when Turner adopts more or less the same viewpoint, he flicks a switch and the electricity surges on. The sun is rebooted to its nuclear setting. A volcano erupts in the bay and the waters boil.
The usual interpretation of Turner’s insistence that his work hangs next to Claude’s is that it was intended as a homage: a pupil’s thanks to his master. But I no longer believe that. On this evidence, Turner’s great burst of atomic sunshine constitutes an effort to flatten Claude in battle. This wasn’t an homage. This was a beating-up.
An exhibition on miniatures at Philip Mould
March 23 2012
Picture: Philip Mould
Portrait miniatures were the closest you could get to photos before photography was invented. So it wasn't surprising that the genre died out quite quickly after photography became popular. An exhibition here at Philip Mould looks at how miniature painters gamely fought on into the 20th Century, some with more success than others. More details here.
