'Rembrandt: Britain's discovery of the master' (ctd.)
July 19 2018
Picture: BG
There’s an excellent new exhibition on Rembrandt in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh; ‘Rembrandt: Britain’s discovery of the master'. It’s one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time. It explores the history of collecting and admiring Rembrandt in Britain, from within his lifetime right up to the present day (even here, the now ubiquitous contemporary tack-on works well, and leaves us Rembrandt lovers with a rather triumphant demonstration of how his work still influences great artists, like Auerbach, today).
The exhibition covers everything from Rembrandt’s paintings, to his drawings, to his prints. The assembly of paintings is first class, and they look tremendous hung in the rooms of the Royal Scottish Academy on the Mound. The choice of drawings is really fascinating, and includes works with intriguing attributional issues, such as four drawings of scenes in Britain which have long been connected to Rembrandt, even though he very likely never came here. And the section on prints is equally interesting; it not only includes some of Rembrandt’s own best prints (including the famous ‘100 guilders print’ showing Christ Preaching) but also those by other artists who either admired him, or in some cases made forgeries in imitation.
One such example was by Benjamin Wilson, who forged a Rembrandt landscape print in order to fool the artist Thomas Hudson. Hudson had outbid Wilson for a number of Rembrandt etchings in a London auction, and had also insulted him. So, to get his revenge, and to mock Hudson’s connoisseurship, Wilson made up a print and sold it to Hudson as a Rembrandt. He triumphantly inscribed a second state of the print; ‘A proof print from this plate, designed and etched by B Wilson, was sold as a very fine Rembrandt to one of the Greatest connoisseurs for Six Shillings, the 17 April 1751’.
What I liked most about the show was its unapologetic celebration of one person's artistic genius. In an age when many academic art historians tell us that 'value judgements' are the discipline's cardinal sin, to say nothing of the belief that attribution doesn't matter, this is refreshing. Because the focus was on why collectors in Britain admired Rembrandt, the exhibition consisted of excellent examples of Rembrandt’s work, told us why they were excellent, and how people acted on that excellence. Nor was there any hint of the pretentious art history guff we sometimes see in major Old Master exhibitions. AHN cannot praise the show's curator, Dr Tico Seifert, enough.
As an evangelist for both Old Masters and Scotland, I was of course keen to tell AHNers and others about the show, in the hope of enticing some of you to Edinburgh (the show runs until 14th October). So, as we so often do these days, I wanted to take some photos in the show, both as an aide-memoir, but also to post images on here, and also on Twitter. But alas. No sooner had I taken out my phone, to take a snap of The Holy Family at Night (’The Cradle’) attributed to the workshop of Rembrandt (more on this soon), than an energetic room warden marched over, saying photography was not allowed, and waving his arms in front of the camera (see above). He then said I had to delete the photos I’d just taken. I agreed to stop taking photos, but declined to delete anything. A lady with a radio then appeared and kept a watchful eye on me. Dr Bendor Grosvenor; famous threat to the safety of Old Masters.
Regular readers will know that I’m a champion of both photography in galleries, and the abolition of museum image reproduction fees. So I decided to tweet the photo of the guard’s hand in front of ‘The Cradle’. It seems to have caught on, and by the end of the day I was on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme (which you can listen to here, I'm on at 12 minutes in). The next morning, the photo appeared in The Telegraph, as part of a long story on the rights and wrongs of taking photographs in museums.
It seems hard to believe now that it was only in 2014 that the National Gallery in London allowed photography in its main galleries. But still the norm is for temporary exhibitions to ban photography. I think it’s time this changed. First, the problem is that most museum visitors now understand that photography is allowed, and we snap away avidly at things we want to share, or record. So it comes as something of a shock when we reach for our camera in a different part of the museum, but are immediately shouted at.
Why is there a photography ban in temporary exhibitions still? In the Telegraph, the Scottish National Gallery gave the following statement:
“Photography is usually not permitted in special exhibitions which include works that do not belong to NGS. This is primarily because many lenders (private and public) understandably require us to restrict or ban photography of the works that they have entrusted to our care.
Why ‘understandably’? If as a lender you take the decision to lend a work of art to an exhibition, you are clearly happy for it to be viewed by the public. I don’t really see why you should then want to ban people from taking a photo of it. In fact, the reason photography is banned is largely to do with the pernicious business of image reproduction fees. Museums who try to make money from selling images of their artworks need above all to restrict people’s ability to take their own photos of those artworks. And because an exhibition like the Rembrandt show in Edinburgh contains works from galleries with varying rules on photography and image reproductions, a lowest common denominator approach is enforced. If one lender wants to ban photography, then it’s banned in the whole exhibition. (The irony is that in my case, the painting I was trying to photograph belonged to the Rijksmuseum, who are entirely relaxed about photography and image use.)
The end result is unsettled visitors, room guards who spend much of their time shouting at visitors, and, most seriously of all, a dramatic limitation on museums’ ability to market their exhibitions. These days, because almost all exhibition visitors have a smartphone in their pocket, each of us has the potential to be a mini marketing machine on behalf the museum. Every time we share a photo of an exhibition, we can encourage people to visit that show. This is particularly important for engaging new audiences. A recent survey by Tate found that for young people, the top two drivers for getting them to visit an art exhibition was ‘word of mouth’ at 37% and social media at 25%. The more traditional ways of exhibition marketing, such as adverts, barely even registered with young people.
And it’s not as if museums aren’t beginning to accept this. Just before the Rembrandt exhibition, I was contacted by the Scottish National Gallery’s new ‘Digital Content and Social Coordinator’. They wanted 'to meet with people such as yourself who engage across a wide network on social media.’ I responded that I was glad to meet and to help do my bit to spread the word. But I literally cannot do that if photography is banned. Of course, if I’d gone to the press preview of the exhibition, or even the private view (though they don’t invite me to the those), I would have been allowed to snap away to my heart’s content. But for ordinary exhibition-going folk it’s a different story. Even though the likes of AHNers would be the best kind of word of mouth marketers for the exhibition.
I think it’s time for those organising exhibitions to be more muscular with potential lenders, especially when it comes to putting on shows in museums which already allow photography. They need to say, we’re a public gallery, putting on a public exhibition in the 21st Century, and if you don’t want to allow people to take photos, then we’ll borrow a work from elsewhere. Museums need to stop being paranoid that those taking photos of paintings are going to make a fortune by launching their own range of tea towels. I said on Radio 4 that there was a touch of the Gollum about too many museums these days; they view their artworks as ‘their precious’, even though they’re public institutions. This whole way of thinking needs to change if museums are going to be able to thrive with new audiences in the digital age.
But that’s enough about marketing. There are many other reasons we might want to take photos in an exhibition like the Rembrandt show. In the Telegraph article, Sir Simon Schama told us why he needs to take photos:
“They can be fantastic research tools if you want to see how the paint lies on the painting. I do that all the time. Then you have a photo archive to work with. You can see it in much more detail than on an online picture.”
I find it’s also useful to be able to make a record of things like frames, and picture hangs in exhibitions, none of which we find in exhibition catalogues. I also find it really useful to take photos of accompanying wall labels. In the Rembrandt exhibition, the wall labels are superb. In fact, because the exhibition catalogue in this case is (very sadly) not a traditional one with each artwork getting an entry, and is instead a series of essays, there is far more information available on the wall labels than in the catalogue. For example, the full story of the Benjamin Wilson forgery I mentioned at the top of this post is only very briefly mentioned in the catalogue. And then there is the quality of the reproductions in the catalogue, which are very poor. Finally, although some art historians might sniff at it, it is actually possible to trigger new debates and research leads through sharing images online. We don't have to do everything through peer reviewed articles that hardly anybody reads. Let's take our subject online, and make it accessible to all.
I’ll write more about some of the exhibits in the exhibition soon. But in the meantime, do go and see it if you can.
Update - a reader writes:
I briefly wanted to react to your post of July 19th on the taking of pictures in special exhibitions. I worked on a major exhibition that was on show earlier this year, and we had a discussion on this topic as well. Previously, in our museum taking pictures was forbidden in special exhibitions, precisely due to the external loans. Because we were not satisfied with this solution, we decided to ask our 40+ lenders whether they would be comfortable with allowing photography by visitors. We would make clear on the labels whether the work in question could be photographed (which is, admittedly, also not a perfect solution). The result was that, of the ca. 115 exhibitits, 47 received a "No Picture"-Pictogram. Notably, many of these were works on paper. We were rather surprised by how many lenders, of whom many were major, internationally renowned institutions, were perfectly fine with the idea - eventhough some of their loan contracts featured a "No photography"-clause.
All we had to do was ask.
