Category: Exhibitions
Awake in New York
January 22 2012
Picture: BG
Greetings from a snowy New York, where I 've come to view the Old Master sales at Sotheby's and Christie's. I flew in yesterday afternoon, and will leave later this evening (Sunday). My flight on Delta was suddenly cancelled with only a few hours warning on Friday evening, and, having spent over two fruitless hours on the phone trying to rebook, I eventually managed to get a flight via Paris by contacting the airline on Twitter. It's amazing what a rant in under 140 characters can achieve these days. The schedule is a little tight, but it gives me enough time view the sales, say a few hellos, and get back to the office for Monday morning.
It also means I can stay roughly on UK time, so here I am, awake and waiting for breakfast to begin. I've tried the telly, but it's only 'infomercials' at this time (my favourite so far, 'The Brazil Butt Lift - For the Butt of Your Dreams', $49.99), and replays of Newt Gingrich's victory speech after his win in the South Carolina primary last night. It seems he may now have the momentum to go on and win the nomination. Yikes.
Regular readers will know that when it comes to New York, I tend to take the view of Kenneth Clark - wonderful from afar, 'but up close it's another matter'. I know some readers in the city won't like that - but don't worry, I've always liked New Yorkers. My mother is American, and I've spent a lot of time here over the years, mainly in Washington, which is more my kind of city. I like a bit of space every now and then. Still, New York is one of the best cities in the world when it comes to the arts. The new Renaissance Portraits exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is worth the trip alone at the moment (closes March 18th).
As a former arts policy wonk, I always like to see the differences between the way museums are run in London and New York. Here, since there is very little state support, museums tend to be more responsive to their visitor's needs. So if you want to go the Metropolitan late on a Saturday night, fine, it's open till 9pm, with restaurants and live music. As you can see above, it was busy when I went at about 7.30pm.
Wouldn't it be nice if all museums in major cities were open late in the evenings - not least so that the people who actually live and work there could spend more time in them. Otherwise museums tend to become the preserve of tourists. There was a nice atmosphere at the Met last night, a sense that people were really using the art as a means to unwind, as well as learn. A strangely high number of dating couples too. We should do more of this in London.
Now - I'm off to find bacon...
Everybody out! (for 2 hours)
January 20 2012
35 rooms were temporarily closed at the National Gallery yesterday as room warders went on strike. The stoppage lasted two hours, but the Gallery managed to keep the Leonardo exhibition open. Between 30 and 40 warders took part, according to The Guardian. Two anonymous warders were quoted in the paper:
"Although we've been assured that CCTV equipment and the glazing of the pictures will prevent any kind of a situation and offer security and deal with any security issues, I think there's still a feeling that a human presence is more effective than a camera," he said.
Another said the gallery was focusing on rare incidents of major vandalism and ignoring the "minor but continuous" damage done to paintings by visitors touching them or falling against them. "It's happening daily," he said, adding that, if he was in the other room under his responsibility, "I wouldn't see it".
It's a tricky one this. Nobody wants to risk paintings being attacked, as happened recently with a Poussin. Glazing pictures is most tedious (thankfully, very few paintings at the Gallery are glazed). And it is sad to see any staff at galleries threatened with redundancy.
But as a frequent visitor to the Gallery it seems to me that the practice of having one warder per room is inefficient and expensive, not least because many rooms are quite small. I suspect that boredom amongst warders, not a lack of them, is a greater risk when it comes to guarding the gallery. No painting can be safe when a warder is playing sudoku. Would it be better to have fewer but more alert warders, which would be the practical result of a single warder occasionally having to cover two rooms?
How many people does it take to hang a spot?
January 18 2012
Video: Gagosian/via ArtInfo
I make it 14 in all.
Hockney at the RA: 'what happened?'
January 17 2012
Picture: Royal Academy/David Hockney, 'Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006', oil on 6 canvases.
Alastair Sooke in the The Telegraph is not convinced by the new blockbuster, and gives the show three stars out of five:
Whether or not we accept this argument, the simple truth is that the show is far too big. Like a sprawling oak in need of a tree surgeon, it required a stronger curator prepared to lop off the deadwood. I could happily have done without the watercolours recording midsummer in east Yorkshire in 2004, or the suite of smallish oil paintings from the following year.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t understand paintings like these. Fresh, bright and perfectly delightful, they are much too polite and unthinkingly happy for my taste: if they offer a vision of arcadia, it is a mindless one. Moreover, they resemble the sorts of landscapes that we expect from amateur Sunday painters. Hockney is anything but that – yet whatever game he is playing here eludes me.
The iPad drawings from 2011 are similarly irksome. Some people get excited because they were made using a piece of fashionable technology (a tablet computer with a touch screen). Yet the technique is surely immaterial – as Hockney says, an iPad is just another tool for an artist, like a brush.
I love the bracketed explanation of what an iPad is, presumably for the Telegraph's more disconnected readers. Over at The Guardian Adrian Searle is similarly unimpressed. It all seems a little unkind to me. Here, at last, is a great British painter painting Britain. Isn't that, on rarity value alone, worth praise?
The worst 'Leonardo' review you'll read
January 17 2012
Picture: EADT
From the East Anglian Daily Times' columnist Lynne Mortimer (above, amusingly portrayed in the paper as The Mona Lisa):
The Leonardo exhibition was extraordinary. You could get close enough to his sketches to see his left-handed pen strokes and backwards writing.
He had a bit of the same trouble doing hands as Walt Disney, it seems. Fortunately Leonardo did not resolve this by giving his figures three fingers on each hand and white gloves. It would have spoiled the look of Woman with Ermine (stoat in its winter coat).
The cartoon was there... and, to trot out the old joke, it still didn’t make me laugh.
The two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks, one from the National Galley the other from the Louvre, in Paris, were brought together in one room. Leonardo’s Last Supper wasn’t there. It was painted on to a wall in a convent in Milan and has badly deteriorated over the centuries. But a painting of the original is on show and you can see the very long toes of the apostles.
As we left the exhibition my husband turned to me and shook his head. “It was very good... but...”
“But what?”
“There was nothing about Titanic, was there? And we didn’t see that painting he did of Kate Winslet in the cabin.”
Boom. Boom.
Hockney at the RA
January 17 2012
Video: Royal Academy
Here's a nice interview with the great man on his new show at the Royal Academy.
Leonardo as comedian
January 17 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
Following on from the rather lame jokes in the East Anglian Times' review of 'Leonardo' (see below), here's a genuine Leonardo joke from one of his notebooks:
It was asked of a painter why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.
Isn't that pretty funny? I bet it was during the Renaissance. In fact, you only have to look at Leonardo's drawings to see that he had a good sense of humour. One of my favourites is the above finely executed head of a man in profile [Royal Collection]. I like to think that Leonardo thought his subject needed livening up, and so hurriedly added the impish face to the left. Another favourite is the drawing of a Rocky Cavern, complete with cheery-looking duck [also Royal Collection].
If you haven't yet been...
January 13 2012
Picture: National Gallery of Scotland
...to the excellent Gainsborough landscape exhibition at the Holborne Museum in Bath, then go soon, for it closes on 22nd January. But if you miss it, fret not, for it will be at Compton Verney from 11th February till 10th June. So you have no excuse not to see it.
Spotmania - there's no end to it
January 13 2012
The Spots are producing some great candidates for guffwatch. Or perhaps we should have a new competition, Spotballs. Please send me good examples if you see them. If nothing else the exhibition is useful for flushing out the true believers, those Hirst disciples who, at this defining moment of revelation, still cannot see that it is all just meaningless.
Here's the normally sound Adrian Searle squeezing out 900 Spot words for The Guardian, largely by explaining the bleeding obvious:
So here come the spots: a quarter century of two, three, four and five-inch circles, with some as big as 40in across, and others just a couple of millimetres. Never mind the shifts from imperial measurements to metric: they're all just spots. Clean and flatly painted circles of household gloss on white or off-white backgrounds, they cover canvases large and small in unremitting grids. No two spots touch, and no colour is repeated on the same canvas, although some are close as dammit to being the same hue.
And so it goes on.
More worryingly, here's the Director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, whom Christina Ruiz spotted:
...leaving the show when I finally manage to corner him. He is beaming. “I’m a really, really happy person having seen that,” he says. “It proves that these spot paintings are not a gimmick at all. They are part of an incredible system and they are a very serious exploration of what colour can do.”
You may get the impression that I don't like Damien Hirst. On the contrary, I am a great admirer. Not of his art, which is mostly no good, but of his brazenness, his financial success, his knack for publicity, and above all his ability to exploit the madder parts of the contemporary art world, and to reveal them for what they are, which is empty. I feel sure that one day he will turn around and say 'ha! fooled you!'. That's why he deserves his place in history (and his money). He will probably be remembered not as an artist, but as a comedian, one of the greatest of his age. And the joke was on us.
Spotmania - 300 suckers sign up for 'The Challenge'
January 13 2012
Christina Ruiz, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, has bravely taken up the 'Complete Spot Challenge', which is to see all 11 Hirst Spot exhibitions in return for a free Spot print. Apparently 300 people have already signed up to do the same. Ruiz has written an excellent blogpost about her impending quest, which is well worth a read. Of her first Spot experience, in Gagosian's Britannia St. gallery in London, she writes:
There are 60 canvases here with spots ranging in size from 60 inches in diameter to just 3mm. One example from 1994, entitled Arginine Decarboxylase, sold at Christie’s in London for £881,250 last February, making it one of the more expensive spot paintings to sell at auction. To me it looks no different to the paintings on either side of it.
By the second room, the spot fatigue, and panic, start to set in.
I know how she feels - Christina, I wish you good luck. Still, a word of warning if you're one of those hoping to travel round the world pointlessly looking at the same thing: the 'Spot Challenge' rules state that;
Acceptance and use of the Spot Print constitutes permission (except where prohibited by law) to use your name, image, likeness, and photograph (all at the discretion of the Sponsor) for future advertising and publicity in any and all media now or hereafter devised throughout the world in perpetuity, without additional compensation, notification, or permission.
In other words, you have to trade a lifetime of shame for your poxy print.
Spotmania
January 12 2012
Yesterday saw the opening of Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011. The exhibition features some 300 paintings in eleven galleries across the world, from LA to Hong Kong. There are big spots, and there are small spots, there are coloured ones and there are monochrome ones. Five of the paintings are by Hirst himself, the rest were made by anonymous assistants. To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, Hirst posed for photographs with his fingers up his nose (above). A Complete Spot Challenge has been organised by the Gagosian galleries, hosts of the exhibition; anyone who visits all eleven locations will get a signed spot print by Hirst ‘dedicated personally to you’.
I have a hope that somewhere, in a parallel universe, none of this is happening.
This post has been sponsored by Lemsip.
Waldemar in 'Leonardo'
January 11 2012
Geschlossen
January 10 2012
Picture: wien.gv.at
The Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna, which houses one of the greatest art collections in the world, is to close. From this year entrance is only possible if part of a pre-booked group.
Sadly, I've never been. Many years ago I was skiing in Switzerland, and, thinking that the Liechtenstein Museum was in, well, Liechtenstein, drove all the way to the tiny capital, Vaduz, only to be told I was in the wrong country. This prompted my boss to suggest that if I wanted to see the Mellon Collection, I should go to Tesco.
Need a Leonardo fix, but can't face the queues?
January 10 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
Then head to Birmingham. Ten Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection will go on display soon at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition will be part of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Dates 13th January - 25th March.
"All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally."
January 3 2012
In a riposte to those artists who rely on others to make their work for them (Koons, Hirst et al), David Hockney has ensured that his forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy is preceded by the above statement. He also said, in The Guardian;
"I used to point out, at art school you can teach the craft; it's the poetry you can't teach. But now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft."
Sounds like a pretty accurate summary of what's wrong with art schools these days.
The Leonardo queue...
December 22 2011
Picture: BG
...gets longer and longer. This morning it started in Trafalgar Square, then snaked up behind the Sainsbury Wing, before coming back on itself and then continuing inside. If you're having to queue to for tickets, follow my earlier advice and buy the catalogue first; by the time you get to front you'll be fully prepared for the exhibition. It's either that or at least two chapters of War & Peace...
The Vermeer effect
December 22 2011
Picture: Louvre
In case you haven't seen it yet, Vermeer's Women at the Fitzwilliam Museum closes on 15th January. The exhibition has drawn record crowds, with 130,000 people filing past the Louvre's Lacemaker since October. It has been so popular that the opening times have been extended for the last two weeks of the show.
Coming soon at Dulwich - Van Dyck in Sicily
December 19 2011
Video: Dulwich Picture Gallery
An exhibition bringing together all the works by Van Dyck from his time in Palermo. I literally cannot wait. Here's Xavier Solomon giving a sneak preview. Opens 15th February 2012.
Winter exhibition in Zurich
December 14 2011
Picture: Musee d'Orsay (C) RMN
Here's an enjoyable idea for an exhibition, 'Winter Tales', which will look at winter landscapes in art. The exhibition will take place at the Kunsthaus Zurich from 10th February to 29th April 2012. Monet's The Magpie (1868/9) will be one of the loans. To see others, there's an excellent preview website here.
Monet's water lilies go to Liverpool
December 14 2011
Picture: Fondation Beyeler
A new exhibition next year at Tate Liverpool will bring together five Monet water lily paintings for the first time in the UK. The show will open 22nd June till 28th October. From the Tate's press release:
The Water-Lily Pond c1917-19 lent by the Albertina, Vienna, and Water Lilies 1916-19, lent by Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel are the works which will go on show for the first time in the UK. They will join three other Monet water-lily paintings in the exhibition: Water Lilies 1916 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Water Lilies 1907 from Göteborgs Konstmuseum; and Water Lilies after 1916, on loan from the National Gallery to the Tate Collection. This will be the first time that five of Monet’s water lilies have been brought together in the UK for over a decade.
Tate Liverpool has gone for a blockbuster here, for the exhibition will be called Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings. The justification for assembling three fairly randomly connected big names runs thus:
Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings will examine the art historical links and affinities between three artists who were all considered radical painters in their time, suggesting common characteristics and motivations underlying their late style. The exhibition will explore their shared fascination with light, landscape, the sublime and mythology as well as the painterly qualities of their work, whether as makers of figurative or abstract images. Displaying over sixty works, the exhibition will treat each artist in considerable depth, with rooms juxtaposing the works of two, or all three, of the artists. Works by Monet and Twombly will be drawn from museums and private collections across the world, while works from Tate’s Turner Bequest will be supplemented by loans from American museums.
