Category: Exhibitions

I went round the Rijksmuseum today.  First things first, it's excellent.  The rich collection is shown off well; not too cluttered and fully (read also, sensibly) labelled in English and Dutch. As other commentators have written, the placing of paintings with furniture and decorative arts makes great sense.

The queue was manageable at around 45 minutes - around half that if you book online - but unsurprisingly it was very busy inside.  It's perhaps not quite as bad as the attached photos suggest, but there were certainly a lot of people when I went.

I'm not totally convinced the grey blue wall colour works with the paintings, but that may just be personal preference.  The layout of the floors is also slightly confusing.  I appreciate that this was dictated by the constraints of the building but it is a little annoying that the chronology of the floors jumps around: ground floor 1100-1600, first floor: 1700-1900, second floor: 1600-1700, third floor: 1900-to date.  But these are minor quibbles in what is a superb museum.

Go, go go!

One other thing I forgot to mention was that the main sponsors of the Rijksmuseum have had their company names and logos boldly commemorated in new stained glass windows at the end of the main gallery.  Although it is a little incongruous, I rather liked it and if they've helped financially in what is such an obvious, not to mention expensive success then why not.

Did you miss the British Folk Art show that Tate are planning? I think it was in the Guardian report - and I know that they have already enquired about two pieces at Bangor: a tavern sign, The Four Alls (Seen, I think on the BBC Your Paintings sites, and one of our carved slates - so that show might be something out of the ordinary, for Tate at least.

The blue silk garter ribbon worn by Charles I in his famous van Dyck portrait may have been discovered - attached to a book.

Researchers believe four pieces of cloth could be the sash owned by the monarch after one was radiocarbon dated to the mid 17th century - the period when the King ruled.

The discovery was made after [Sir] Anthony van Dyck's portrait, which features three images of Charles, was selected for a new exhibition and Royal Collection Trust curators decided to examine the silk pieces which were attached to a book about the King.

It may interest readers of AHN to know that another reliquary of King Charles I is at large, but this one is somewhat more latently gruesome than the blue sash. It may be seen (sitting silently in a small glass display-case) by any member of the public visiting the small and somewhat obscure mueum of 'Fort Paull', which lies on the noth Bank of the River Humber some miles east of Kingston-Upon-Hull.. It was on the site of this museum that the King  made camp in order to lay seige to the town at the commencement of the English Civil-War, This singular object is no less than a small section of neck vertebrae, reputedly removed at the time of the tragic King's execution, and then, after passing from hand to hand, latterly finding new employment as.. guess what..?  A salt-cellar.

The two artists shortlisted for the 2013 BP Portrait Award 2013 are John Devane for The Uncertain Time and Susanne du Toit for Pieter.

John Devane (17.08.1954) for The Uncertain Time (1720 x 2490mm, oil on canvas). 

A painter who also teaches at Coventry University, John Devane, has an MA from the Royal College of Art. He has been shortlisted for his large group portrait of his three children: Lucy, 25, Laura, 20, and Louis, 15. Painted over three years, the picture sets out to show how children emerge from childhood and begin to assert their independence revealing something of their adult selves. He says: ‘The composition suggests an almost stage-like shallow space constructed in two zones with the three figures presented as if they are awaiting some kind of event’. The artist’s key points of reference are the works of Courbet, Chardin, Degas, Balthus and Samuel Beckett. This will be the second time John Devane’s work has been exhibited at the BP Portrait Award, his In the House of The Cellist was seen in the 1995 exhibition. 

Susanne du Toit (05.03.1955) for Pieter (1080 x 830mm, oil on canvas). 

Educated at the University of Pretoria and the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Susanne du Toit is an artist now based in Crowthorne, Berkshire. She has been shortlisted for her portrait of her eldest son Pieter, aged 35. The sitting took place in the artist’s studio, as part of a series of portraits of her family. Susanne du Toit says she allowed Pieter to find his own pose, with the condition that his hands would appear prominently in the composition – she says she has always found hands essential to communicating personality. ‘I look to the body to provide as much expression as the face’, she says. ‘Having said that, the averted gaze of this portrait, which was his choice, struck me as characteristic of his reflective character, and became intensely engaging’. 

This year the competition received 1,969 entries from 77 different countries. 55 portraits have been selected for the exhibition (National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 June - 15 September 2013). 

In 1948, William Goetz, the famed Hollywood producer, head of Universal Pictures, and legendary art collector, purchased a painting attributed to Vincent Van Gogh for $50,000. Although it was acquired from a reputable art dealer and deemed genuine by a prominent Van Gogh expert at the time, debate about the painting’s authenticity ignited an art world controversy that impacted U.S. foreign affairs.

For decades, only a handful of people knew the whereabouts of the painting, known as Study by Candlelight. Today, the Goetz family heirs hope to learn more about the provenance of the painting by drawing upon recent scientific developments in the study of artist materials and working methods.

In presenting this exhibition, the Nevada Museum of Art makes no attempt to determine the authenticity of the legendary painting. Rather, the exhibition re-visits its extraordinary story through archival documents, correspondence, photographs, and press materials that have never before been brought together in one place. The exhibition will look closely at the Goetz family’s Hollywood lifestyle and legendary art collection, assess what is known about the provenance of Study by Candlelight, consider the painting within the stylistic and historical context of Van Gogh’s body of work, and report on the art world controversies and international politics that have surrounded the painting.

[...] the first exhibition to focus in depth on Elizabethan society. As well as gathering together important portraits of Elizabeth herself, and building on fascinating new research, the exhibition will explore the lives of men and women who lived and worked during her reign from courtiers to country gentry, explorers, bankers, physicians and lawyers, artists and writers.

The exhibition will consist of rarely or previously unseen loans from private collections as well as iconic portraits from historic houses and museum collections.

I find this extraordinary.  Yes, dismissed by many as 'cute kitch', it is, in fact, one of P's most iconic paintings.  Having just seen it in the (brilliant!) early Picasso show at the Courtauld, it simply is a phantastic image and the paint is beautiful.  I suppose the response was negative due to over-exposure?  A bit like Ravel's 'Bolero' we are all so sick and tired of?

Museums can take greater risks in the way they use and share collections. Handling and lending rarely cause significant harm.

[...] the physical risks run by works of art every time they are moved; as recently as 2008, at the National Gallery in London, a panel painting was dropped and broken as workers took down the great “Renaissance Siena” show. We also have to worry about the wear and tear that will diminish every well-travelled picture or sculpture. (Conservators wouldn’t fill in condition reports on every loan if there had never been a thing to note on their forms.)

Letter worker, graphic designer, type designer and action calligrapher Timothy Donaldson created a new piece of calligraphy at Bilston Craft Gallery. The piece was commissioned by The Harley Gallery as part of Signs for Sounds. This touring exhibition curated by Jeremy Theophilus explores the contemporary practice of letter-forming from traditional calligraphy to the use of digital technologies and performance. It considers the impact of letter form, an art that we are surrounded by everyday – from traditional calligraphy to hi-tech type design. The event was beautifully captured on video by Anthony Davies for Last Phoenix Films. We witness the creation of a calligraphic work of art, as gesture becomes calligraphic movement becomes word, whose meaning is gradually obfuscated until it becomes meta-text. Timothy eloquently comments.

From the scratch of the quill curling across the page, to letters painstakingly chipped and carved from stone, Signs for Sounds looks at the ways that artists use the age-old shapes of letters to amplify the effect of words. This exhibition examines the traditional skills of letter-forming, along with how we use lettering in the modern world – with artists’ films of graffiti and virtual typography where visitors can experiment with Jason Edward Lewis’ virtual typography to re-shape poetry on touchscreen monitors. Featuring examples of outstanding skill in letter-forming by leading practitioners, the exhibition shows how writing communicates meaning and how this is changing with the use of new media in the digital age. Exhibitors include letter-engraver Tom Perkins, calligrapher Ewan Clayton and performance artist Julien Breton, who dances letter forms using light. There is also a family-friendly activity area, and a display of creative writing by local writers’ groups Bilston Writers and Bilston Scribblers on the theme Sights and Sounds of Bilston.

If you read the blurb on the website the so called exhibition in Puerto Rico is not an exhibition at all but it is the permanent collection of British Art. However they are calling it an exhibition as they are doing a scholarly catalogue of their Victorian paintings, which is good news. Perhaps you might alert your readers to this. (Try turning on the English language button on the website and all will be revealed) It is a collaboration with the Tate - encouraging to hear of some good things the Tate is doing even if they are thousands of miles from London.

You ask: who knew? Well, anyone seriously in to the Pre-Raphaelites knew of this collection and I am surprised a seventeenth century enthusiast such as yourself doesn't know the museum. Julius Held was one of the advisers to Luis Ferrer in forming the collection and it has fantastic European baroque holdings.

When I went there I was shown round by Ferrer himself, alas now no longer with us, but then in a wheelchair. He had lots of anecdotes about his bargain hunting, for example his advisers told him not to buy Leighton’s Flaming June, but he did so anyway, for £2000 (1963). Victorian painting and baroque painting were both cheap then and he got some great things. 

Next time you are in the USA go there, it is not that difficult, you fly to San Juan and then change to a small plane to Ponce a rather charming but sleepy town, with one really good restaurant that Ferrer took me to. The waiters all bowed when we arrived.

The Ponce Museum of Art is unforgettable.  I was there 30 years ago, and aside from Flaming June by Frederic, Lord Leighton, and other British Masters, it has an extremely large and important collection of Russian 19th century artists.

Don Luis Ferre was a former Governor of Puerto Rico, and he told me that he had an engineering degree from M.I.T., before going into the family business of concrete and cement construction.

He was, of course, a dedicated art collector, advised by Oscar and Jan Klein, of The Central Picture Gallery in NYC, and by Professor Julius Held ( Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck) of Columbia University.  When I was there there were galleries dedicated to Oscar and Jan Klein, and to Julius Held ( all gone, as is Don Luis ).

Don Luis told me that every year he would get higher and higher offers from British Dealers to buy Flaming June. 

He and Julius Held both told me that when he started to collect, he went to Professor Held for advice, and ever after, he would pick out paintings, and vet them by Professor Held, to see if they were museum quality.  Don Ferre showed me around his home and personal collection - I remember that he had several impressive paintings, and an important Antonio Gaudi window grill.  But the best things went to the museum.  ( see Wikipedia ).

Aside from this, Ponce is fun.  It houses one of the most charming Victorian buildings in the whole world - the Ponce Fire House.

If you are genuinely interested in art and emerge from this show thinking that you have seen scores of outstanding paintings, you should spend more time studying other examples. For comparison the galleries adjacent to this exhibition contain two outstanding works by the Pre-Raphaelites’ French contemporaries, Eduard Manet’s “Dead Toreador” (probably 1864) and Paul Cézanne’s portrait of his father reading a newspaper (1866). Consider the simplicity, directness and mysteries of these paintings against the moralizing and endless intricacies of the Pre-Raphaelites. It is a contrast between the complex and the merely complicated.

Pre-Raphaelite art is a volatile, highly complicated mixture of questionable intentions, literary erudition, ironclad nostalgia, meticulous realism, lavish costumes and a prescient technicolor palette. The brotherhood was formed in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, three disgruntled students at the Royal Academy of Art. Barely 20, they were repelled by the decadence of art and society, much of which they ascribed to the Industrial Revolution. 

It's been decided that labels like this are the best way of widening access to what is now called our 'old stuff'. The removal of any useful information from the labels for our recent 'Looking at the View' exhibition [as covered earlier on AHN here] was considered a success, so we've been told to use descriptive terms that are 'more relevant to a younger audience'. The new policy is, in portraits, to describe sitters as 'a bit dull', 'quite cool', and 'really fit'. The access team are still working on new terms to describe landscapes, but I've heard that 'totes amazeballs' was only narrowly rejected by the Future Label Forum.

Really enjoyed your April Fool - not really all that far from the truth!

It is very unkind of you to pretend that the Tate is following the Historic Royal Palaces in its moronic labelling, and that the example from Kensington Palace is real! Some of the more cynical among us might easily have believed you - so thank goodness it is 1 April!

Your photo of the caption just shows how un-informative these are: visitors may wonder how Copley came to paint someone who died before he was born.  As you probably are aware, unlike anyone less informed looking at the work in this context, the painting a copy by Copley of a work by an earlier artist, Morier.

"George II was punctual...."  Perhaps that explains why they called him 'King George the second'.

The labels that ended up in the final display had apparently been written, revised and dumbed down innumerable times thanks in large part to the efforts of the outside experts who even forbade the use of the word ‘century’; ‘too confusing for the general public’ was the message (there was, I gather, a rich moment when a curator asked at one of their regular public meetings ‘How then do I describe the 17th century?’; ‘the seventeen hundreds’ came the reply’).

I visited England last September and spent more than a week in London - had a ball, however the one disappointment was Kensington Palace. We visited after hearing that the whole place had been done up. We didn't enjoy the display theme - it was vaguely ridiculous and very distracting from the actual paintings and other pieces. As a comparison, Apsley House was fabulous.

My wife and I visited the palace last month, together with some of her German relatives, I couldn't believe the inept displays, and the even more inept descriptions & potted histories that accompanied them. It left our visitors much bemused, who couldn't understand why, with all our history, and the objects to accompany the story of it, we would choose to dress it in a manner more in keeping with the windows of a department store.

What has been done with the museum is less a restoration with some fancy contemporary design than the inauguration of a curatorial revolution. When you see those early Rembrandts or the great mannerist “Massacre of the Innocents” of Cornelis van Haarlem with its ballet of twisting rumps, you will also encounter, as would those who would first have seen them, the silver, weapons and cabinets that were the furniture of the culture that made those pictures possible. You will enter the historical world of the Netherlands at a particular moment. And, because the objects are housed in frameless, edgeless displays in which the glass is of a stunning invisibility, nothing in one’s field of vision separates images from artefacts.

History and art have their natural companionship restored, for – although historians condescendingly suppose images to be “soft” evidence of the past, and art historians suspect historians of obtuse philistinism – the truth is, as Huizinga knew, they need each other to reconstruct the reality of lost worlds. History without the eloquence of images is blind; art without the testimony of texts is deaf.