Category: Exhibitions

I quite see why the director of the BM accepted Perry's proposal for this wretched little show.

Boyishly provocative, aesthetically levelling, too clever by half and ultimately shallow, the reasoning was that with Perry's name, face and persona attached to it, thousands of loyal Perry fans will become fans too of the British Museum.

How naive - exhibitions of Hirst and Freud made no new friends for the Wallace Collection, and they were not held in such derision. Perry is not a man of scholarship, nor of credibility, and neither informs this puerile, silly and self-aggrandising show. Everything is subordinate to Perry's work; the largest exhibit is his, the exhibition's feeble climax is his, and his pots will rise substantially in price now that they have been exhibited in the British Museum. If the director was too unworldly, the trustees should have recognised the commercial implications of Perry's impertinent proposal - dealers in his pots are certainly rubbing their hands with glee, while the rest of us must pay £10 to see these pointless juxtapositions of Perry's current stock in trade with BM property. Was he paid a fee for his curatorial services and for writing the embarrassing nonsense of the catalogue?

"Do not," he writes in it, "look too hard for meaning here." Do not look at all.

The decisions made by conservators when restoring important works of art have a direct influence on how the final painting will be perceived and there is a lot of psychological insight that can inform this process. For example, computational models of visual attention can tell a conservator whether a crack or the loss of a segment is likely to capture the viewer's attention and how this will change depending on the context in which the painting is viewed.

For the damaged John Martin we decided to compare how viewers attended to and made sense of different digital reconstructions of the painting by recording viewer eye movements. An eyetracker uses high-speed infrared cameras to record where a person looks on a screen. This allowed the TATE to foresee how viewers might attend to the final product before embarking on costly and time-consuming work on the painting itself.

[...]

In the neutral version of the painting the mouth of the volcano and part of the city is lost and instead the viewer dwells on the edges of the loss, spending significantly less time on the foreground figures. The consequence of the different gaze pattern is that when asked to describe the content of the painting, viewers of the unreconstructed version did not realise it was a painting of an erupting volcano. The painting had lost its meaning and viewers could not view it as originally intended by Martin.

The difference in gaze behaviour between the completely restored and unrestored (neutrally filled) versions confirmed our intuitions about how destructive the loss was. [...]

Since 2008 the Musée d'Orsay has been gradually abandoning the concept, popularised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, of hanging paintings on white walls. "Outside 20th-century and contemporary art, white kills all paintings," said Cogéval. "When you place an academic or impressionist painting on a white background, the light from the white creates an indeterminate halo around the work, preventing the sometimes subtle contrasts and details being revealed."

The Peredvizhniki were a group of artists who came together in 1870 in protest at the conservative attitudes of Russia’s Imperial Academy of Art. The group aimed to portray contemporary Russian society, and to use art to highlight social and political issues. They organized travelling exhibitions to take art to the people and beyond the cities of St Petersburg and Moscow. Works by the Peredvizhniki have enjoyed huge popularity in Russia since the late 19th century but are little known in the rest of the world.

The Louvre very rarely lend this painting because it's almost as important in their collection as the Mona Lisa. It is a painting that people make a trip especially to the Louvre to see.

Did the 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer use a camera obscura – an early photographic instrument in which light is concentrated through a tiny aperture to cast a bright image on a surface in a darkened room – to help him create his mesmerising paintings of life in the tranquil city of Delft?

Undoubtedly. You can see microscopic highlights, lifelike perspectives and shadows in his paintings that strikingly resemble camera images and have no other reason to be there. It's more likely that he used a camera obscura than that he somehow "thought like a camera". Does this precocious photographic technique explain the power of Vermeer's paintings? Not really.

Italy's deputy minister of culture, Ricardo Villardi, said the show was Rome's way of relating to Cuba during a time of change.

"I asked myself how as a government we could accompany the changes, these transformations, that are under way, with respect for (Cuba's) autonomy... and the answer is this exhibition," he said.

His Cuban counterpart, Fernando Rojas, said it was "very appropriate" to show in Cuba the work of "a rebel, an innovator" who reflected the common people in his work "as we Cubans can appreciate that."

Call me a philistine, but somehow this just doesn’t strike me as an astute trade. Why not? Well, let me count the ways.

This painting, “Man at His Bath,” is not an eye-catching celebration of the human form, a la Michelangelo’s "David." Rather, it’s an everyday view of… well, mostly of an everyday butt. Which is basically what George Shackelford, chairman of the museum’s Art of Europe Department, said in Monday’s Globe.

“This guy is no Arcadian bather,” he noted. “It’s perfectly mundane — and expressly so.” One would think that self-evidently accurate appraisal would lead to this equally obvious notion: It’s probably not worth selling scenes by Monet, Gauguin, Sisley, Pissarro, and Renoir to acquire that perfectly mundane scene. Look, I’m not saying I wouldn’t trade one of those Jean Baptiste Camille Corot’s more-milky-March-sky-over-the-river scenes, but that’s about as far this guy would go. And I expect most museum-goers would agree with me.

Re photographic portraits - I have not seen the portrait in question, but on the principle I heartily concur. It does, however, give rise to an interesting question which does not go away when we look at distortions in paintings from other eras. It can be difficult to determine where masterly virtuosity, taking advantage of available technology, gives way to a technical dependence on technological competence. There’s a fascinatingly fine line somewhere down the road to The Arnolfini Wedding.

Creative use of smaller budgets for exhibitions is one driving force behind this trend. The directors we spoke to said that loan fees, design, insurance and transport costs for a single work are minuscule compared to a big thematic or an in-depth show for a single artist. Marketing tends to be the main expense, leaving museums in control of spending as much or as little as their budget allows.

Directors cite other virtues of single-work shows: they encourage people to really look, rather than move on after a few seconds to the next thing on the gallery walls. “We use them to teach how to experience a great work of art and see why it is a masterpiece,” said Brian Ferriso, the director of the Portland Art Museum. In 2009, when Ferriso arranged to bring Raphael’s La Velata, 1514-15, to Oregon from the Palatine Gallery, “people sat for ten to 20 minutes looking, and often they’d come back after going through our Renaissance galleries,” he said. Last year Portland borrowed Thomas Moran’s vast canvas Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1990, from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“People later talked about how de Kooning was not in control of what he was doing, but it was clear from these photographs that he was,” Mr. Elderfield said. “The kind of continuous revision that happened to these pictures has very much de Kooning’s signature to it.”

These late, often haunting canvases — sparer than the sensual and colorfully theatrical work he created when he was at the height of his powers — have often been debated, because it is hard to know how much he painted himself and how much was done by studio assistants.

“When you think of artists today like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, who have armies of assistants virtually creating their work, does it really matter?” Mr. Elderfield said. “I don’t think it does. In de Kooning’s case, we know his hand is in all his work.”

'...generated $908 million in spending by regional, national, and international tourists to New York, according to a visitor survey the Museum released today. Using the industry standard for calculating tax revenue impact, the study found that the direct tax benefit to the City and State from out-of-town visitors to the Museum totaled some $90.8 million.'