Category: Exhibitions
Mr & Mrs Beckham
October 26 2012
A reader sends in this photo from street artist 'Mr Brainwash's' exhibition in Oxford St, London. I suppose we must glad that a street artist even knows who Gainsborough is.
Rehabilitating Velasquez
October 24 2012
Picture: Prado/Met
The Prado has borrowed the Met's recently re-discovered Velasquez. This video about the restoration of the picture is worth a click.
Both the Prado and the Met call it an unknown sitter. To me, it feels like a self-portrait, both compositionally and in its unfinished state. It looks very like him too, don't you think? The picture bears a close resemblance to a head on the far right in Velasquze's Surrender of Breda, which was once thought to be a self-portrait, though the Prado's website says that this idea 'is no longer accepted'. Personally, the head in question in The Surrender also feels to me like a cheeky self-portrait, in the way it beckons you towards it at the edge of the canvas. Such a conceit is of course not uncommon.
Small but perfectly formed
October 22 2012
Picture: Dulwich Picture Gallery
The Courtauld's new show Peter Lely - a Lyrical Vision, which looks at Lely's early works, is one of the best small exhibitions I've ever seen. If you haven't yet been, go. If you live abroad, book a flight. Happily, I didn't see much sign of the nonsense put out in the Courtauld's press release for the exhibition (tho' I haven't yet read the whole catalogue).
So congratulations to the Courtauld, and to curator Caroline Campbell, for staging it. (Congratulations also, by the way, to James Stunt, who is described on the wall as the exhibition's 'Lead Sponsor'. Readers who are up on their celebrity news will know that businessman James is married to Petra Ecclestone. Those of you who don't read Heat or the Daily Mail should marvel at a young man who not only likes Old Masters, but also supports academic research into them. How rare is that? He also has a fine collection of 17th Century British portraits, including works by Van Dyck, and lends many of them to museums, including the Huntington museum in California.)
I should really write a review of the exhibition, but Brian Sewell has beaten me to it, and I can't hope to improve on his piece in the Standard. He likes the exhibition (which of course means it's really excellent), but quibbles with the chronology of the works on display:
This is a bonne bouche of an exhibition, a delicious morsel (perhaps titbit is the better translation in this context) thrown in with the admission charge to the rest of the Courtauld Gallery. It is the sort of thing sometimes done so well there to fill a gap in our knowledge of art history, throwing new light on familiar paintings and revealing others unfamiliar. I lament only that the curator neither asked nor answered the question: “Who dared buy such sexually provocative paintings during Cromwell’s Courtless and puritanical Interregnum?” And the proposed chronology is suspect.
None of the works on display are securely dated, and the chronology is indeed hard to pin down. In part this is because Lely was so variable in his output. When he could be bothered to do justice to the full range of his talents, he was unmatched. But at other times one suspects he was an idle genius. But then, which geniuses aren't? His brilliant Nymphs by a Fountain (above), on loan from Dulwich, is so infinitely better than the works hanging either side of it that one begins to wonder if they're by the same hand. We must also note that one of the major works on display, The Concert, is quite clearly unfinished (a fact not always appreciated), which makes comparison with other early works tricky.
Regular readers will remember me banging on about Lely being a rare case of an artist getting worse as he got older. Largely, this is to do with the dread hand of the studio assistant creeping into his output. This is mainly confined to Lely's portraiture, and so doesn't wholly impact on the subject pictures on show at the Courtauld. It's a question which, coincidentally, Sewell touches on in his review:
There may well be thousands of these portraits, ranging from rare prime originals of often quite astonishing quality, to crass workshop replicas by assistants drilled to imitate Lely’s way with the fashionable face and repeat the stock patterns of the dress, landscapes, flowers, musical instruments and other essential embellishments of portraiture. On Lely’s death in 1680 his executors employed a dozen such slaves to complete for sale the many unfinished canvases stacked about his studio. It is these half-and-half and hardly-at-all Lelys that line the corridors of the indigent aristocracy whose houses are now administered by the National Trust, and no sight is more aesthetically and intellectually numbing, unless it is a corridor of Knellers.
Poor Sir Godfrey. Personally, I love a good corridor of portraits - even Knellers.
Update - a reader writes:
Brian Sewell's query about Lely's market for nuddy pics is interesting. There's an 'Art in the Interregnum' doctorate in there but the image of the regime booting the door in if you weren't living like something out of The Crucible is misleading. Once he was firmly in control I think His Highness the Lord Protector - with his fine tapestries and music evenings at Hampton Court - I think England was much the same. No theatres, true, but the late Protectorate was religiously tolerant, and by extension I suspect that there wasn't a moral embargo on what paintings you could own.
The Protectorate didn't fail because it was too strict - I think early modern Englishmen quite liked strongarm government, like Henry VIII - but because it couldn't establish a convincing 'narrative' to replace the old monarchy in people's minds, and without a strong successor it was natural - thank God - to want the old ways back.
And even if it was all starched collars and sermons, Lely's paintings would be a private expression of what people no longer saw in public. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, Kabul's most popular bootleg film was Titanic, and barbers would style men's hair a la Caprio, to be hidden under turbans.
Wise words from HM
October 17 2012
Picture: BG
Saw this on the wall at the National Portrait Gallery this evening.
It's all going modern at the National Gallery
October 17 2012
Picture: National Gallery/Estate of Richard Hamilton
I had a quick look at the new Richard Hamilton exhibition at the National Gallery yesterday. Boy, could he not paint.
Regular readers, who know what a reactionary stick-in-the-mud I am, won't be surprised to hear that I'm a little puzzled by the National's direction of travel at the moment. They seem to be on a quest to contemporise everything. We recently had the Titian Metamorphosis show, in which Titian's Diana masterpieces were shown next to robotic antlers, naked bathers, and stage designs. Now we have Richard Hamilton's park-railing pastiches of Poussin and Titian. And later this month we'll have Seduced by Art, in which we can "View Old Master painting through a new lens with the National Gallery's first major exhibition of photography", where contemporary photographs will be hung alongside "historical painting".
It's all most curious.
A Holbein sitter identified?
October 15 2012
Picture: Royal Collection/Telegraph
Conservation of a Holbein in the Royal Collection has revealed more clues about the identity of the sitter. I'll try and get more images, like x-rays, from the Royal Collection. But I'm a bit pushed for time today, so for now, find the basic story here.
Update - see more images and the x-ray here.
Update II - find further details here at the NPG, and watch a talk by Royal Collection curator Clare Chorley here.
That Raphael competition
October 10 2012
Picture: Teylers Museum
I recently mentioned a novel approach to making attributions by the Teylers Museum in Holland. The museum's curators weren't sure about the attribution of the above drawing, and so decided to ask members of the public what they thought.
A reader has taken up the challenge. He identifies the lower head in this drawing, below, in the Louvre, and writes:
I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but the red chalk study of three heads (Teyler’s) can no way be Raphael. It’s a spiritless, meticulously drawn facsimile of a ‘lost’ drawing. I know the bottom study from a drawing in the Louvre (inv. 3862). The style of this bottom head study reminds me of Raphael’s long-standing competitor, Sebastian del Piombo, but the top two rule out such an attribution.
Appreciating Wright of Derby
October 10 2012
Picture: Derby Museum
Read this tragic little editorial in the Derby Telegraph, and weep:
Today we pose a controversial question in the hope of provoking a serious debate.
Do we invest time and money in trying to maximise the potential of the city's impressive multi-million pound Joseph Wright Collection or, at a time of deep recession when the city council is being forced to cut millions from its budget, do we sell off the works of art to fund other projects?
Why are we asking such a question? Because, in a year when the Joseph Wright Gallery reopened in Derby after a £150,000 refurbishment, paid for by council tax payers, 40% of those people we asked had never heard of him, while 13% had heard his name but did not know he was an internationally-acclaimed painter.
We even tried to make the survey a little easier by posing our question outside some of the key places in Derby associated with the artist. And all of the 100 people quizzed lived locally and came from all age groups.
We have nothing against our heritage – indeed we are rightly proud of it – but we feel it is vital that the people of Derby engage in a debate about such an important issue.
Clearly some of the lack of knowledge could be tackled with improved education. We wonder just how many of our children are taught about Joseph Wright in our primary and secondary schools?
We could also follow the example of other city's like Wakefield, which built a gallery bearing the name of the world-famous sculptor, Barbara Hepworth, who was born in the Yorkshire city.
But, to pursue this option, will cost money and it needs to be supported by all sections of our community. We wonder whether there is an appetite for this sort of thing when so many people are losing their jobs or struggling to cope with cuts to services.
Is now the time to cash in this valuable asset and plough the money into something which will give real and significant benefit to the people of our city?
It is a difficult question but it needs to be asked.
No it doesn't. The question that really needs to be asked is why, in an editorial in which it complains about bad education, the Derby Telegraph cannot spell 'cities' correctly.
Still, it's at least heartening to read that Derby Museum, in a bid to 'increase awareness' of Derby is planning to mount a touring exhibition of 35 paintings by Wright.
Vermeer in Rome
October 1 2012
Picture: Rijksmuseum
A major new exhibition on Vermeer and his age has opened in Rome, at the Scuderie del Quirinale. The show includes eight Vermeers, and fifty works by his contemporaries. More details and images here.
X-ray reveals Velasquez original
September 17 2012
Picture: Meadows Museum, Dallas
Intriguing story in The Washington Post about Velazquez's portraits of Philip IV, which are known in a number of autograph versions. An x-ray of a version in Dallas has apparently proved that it is the first. It will be exhibited alongside a version from the Prado in a new show, which runs until January 13th. Regular readers will remember the Met's restoration of their version, which saw them upgrade the attribution to Velazquez in full.
How to publicise an exhibition in the 21st Century...
September 10 2012
Picture: Walker Art Gallery
...find a Penis in a painting! There's all sorts of excitement in the press at the news that a willy has been 'found' in Millais' Isabella, ahead of the new Tate Pre-Raphaelites show. In case you can't find it, it's the erect-looking shadow of the man in the left foreground. From The Independent:
One of the works on show at the exhibition, which opens tomorrow, is the first painting by John Everett Millais as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he helped found, called Isabella. One Tate curator has uncovered a hidden image in the painting which shows a character in the foreground with what appears to be an erection.
Isabella, painted in 1848 when Millais was just 19 years old, will force people to “shove aside their preconceptions” and “dramatically changes the way we see the work,” Carol Jacobi said. “It gives us a different view of the Victorians.”
The painting shows the character in the foreground on the left angrily leaning forward, with his leg outstretched and using a nutcracker. The sexual suggestion is produced by a shadow on the table.
Dr Jacobi said: “The shadow is clearly phallic, and it also references the sex act, with the salt tipped into the shadow,” before adding: “We can assume it’s deliberate, so then that raises the question: what’s it there for?”
But wait, what's this? I have just this minute 'discovered' two similar 'shadow willies' in Millais' The Carpenter's Shop (Tate, below), a work previously thought to be all about religion. But, Stop the Press - Millais must have been willy mad! And the picture's all about 'wood' - OMG! Can readers find any more examples?
Update - a reader writes:
Pretty sure there's something ropey going on in 'The Ornithologist' too...
... and what's Grace Hoare trying to hide behind that hat? I think we should be told!
Update II - meanwhile, a reader more at home in the 17th Century wonders, justly, what the hell is going on with this Velasquez. Ooph.
I feel a book coming on: 'Da Penis Code', anyone?
Durer & Holbein on show at the Royal Collection
July 25 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
Further details of forthcoming Royal Collection exhibitions have been announced - a highlight will be 'The Northern Renaissance' at the Queen's Gallery in London, from 2nd November - 14th April 2013. Says the Collection:
This exhibition celebrates the Renaissance in northern Europe, the counterpart to the revolution in art and scholarship that took place in Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries. The period was marked by dramatic change – monarchs vied for territorial power, reformers questioned the central tenets of Christian faith and scholars sought greater understanding of their world. Against this backdrop, artists produced works of ingenuity, beauty and superb technical skill. More than 100 works are brought together including paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, miniatures, sculpture, tapestries and armour. Among the highlights are prints and drawings by Albrecht Dürer, mythological paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and preparatory drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger displayed alongside the finished oil portraits.
'Young Van Dyck' exhibition at the Prado
July 23 2012
Picture: Museo Prado
Here's a fascinating glimpse of all the effort that goes into a museum exhibition - the Prado have put online the hanging plans for their new 'Young Van Dyck' exhibition. On page four (which you can zoom into) you can see all the exhibits. The show opens in November - and I am counting down the days.
A Caillebotte at the National Gallery
July 18 2012
Picture: National Gallery
A reader has alerted me to an exciting new loan at the National Gallery in London - Gustave Caillebotte's Bridge at Argenteuil and the Seine. It was bought at auction last year for $18m, having sold previously in 2008 for just $8m. The picture fills a gap in the national collection, after the last Caillebotte on loan to the NG was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I at Compton Verney
July 12 2012
Video: Compton Verney
A reader has kindly alerted me to this video from Compton Verney by its director Steven Parissien. (The sound quality is poor, and you have to turn the volume right up.) It discusses Van Dyck's Portrait of Charles I in Three Positions, which is on loan from the Royal Collection until September, and hangs alongside a later copy of Bernini's famous bust of the King, for which the painting acted as a guide.
I'm afraid I can't resist pointing out some innacuracies in the video. The supposition is made that it was fortunate for Van Dyck that he died in 1641 - a year before the Civil War broke out - for after 1642 'the patronage... people like Van Dyck had enjoyed completely disappeared'. This is not quite true, as the portraits by William Dobson of the court in Oxford show only too clearly. And in any case, Van Dyck knew what was coming and seems to have been making plans to leave England.
It is then said that after Charles I's death Cromwell 'tried to get away' from the 'iconic portraiture' of the Caroline regime, and commissioned paintings that were a little 'less kingly'. The famous line 'paint me warts and all' is mentioned. But again, not entirely true. The distinguishing feature of Parliamentary portraiture after the Civil War is that it seeks completely to emulate the Royalist portraiture formulated by Van Dyck in the 1630s. Robert Walker's portraits of Cromwell simply take an existing Van Dyck prototype, and place the Protector's head on top. In 1655 the engraver Pierre Lombart was paid £20 bythe council for an engraving of Cromwell (by then called 'His Highness') in exactly the same pose as Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I on a horse. After Cromwell's death, his head was rubbed out from Lombart's plate, and that of Charles I put back in.
The point is that Van Dyck's portraits were not seen just as images of royalty, but as images of power. That was Van Dyck's genius. The head on the body was interchangeable. In fact, any head would do.
Rarely seen Picasso on display at National Gallery
July 12 2012
Picture: National Gallery
This delightful 1901 portrait by Picasso is going on loan to the National Gallery. Bibi la Puree was a famous reprobate in Paris at the turn of the century. From the NG press release:
Bibi la Purée was a picturesque figure in the bohemian circles of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter. A former actor turned vagabond, he was affable and eccentric and survived by shining shoes, stealing umbrellas and drinking absinthe. He occasionally acted as private secretary to the poet Paul Verlaine, who dedicated a sonnet to his friend. Picasso probably met the ragged dandy in the brasseries and seedy bars they both haunted, and would have been fascinated by his elderly, grimacing features. The portrait is brushed in broad, gestural strokes vigorously applied, which capture Bibi’s grin with uncompromising energy. This expressionistic treatment, combined with Picasso’s use of harsh colours, enhances the tramp’s grotesque energy.
The painting has rarely been seen in public. It entered a private French collection in 1939 and has not been lent to any of the major Picasso exhibitions. It has been known in the Picasso literature only by a small black-and-white photograph and the vast majority of Picasso’s admirers will never have seen it ‘in the flesh’. It is on loan to the National Gallery from a private collection.
Poets & Titian
July 11 2012
Picture: BG
The National Gallery has a series of films of poets reading their take on Titian's Diana myth paintings. Some of them are wrist-slittingly dull, but Seamus Heaney's Actaeon is splendid. See it here.
Titian Metamorphosis - what the critics say
July 10 2012
Picture: BG
Most of the news stories highlights on Mark Wallinger's real live naked Dianas; the Daily Mail, for example, focuses on the 'peeping Tom' angle. The show gets four stars from Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times (paywall), and also from Mark Hudson in The Telegraph. In The Guardian Jonathan Jones takes broadly the same view as I did yesterday:
I am in two minds. Titian does not actually need to be compared with or spruced up by any living artist to be made "relevant" because in any sense that matters he is a living artist, right now. His colours, brushstrokes, stories, characters – for he is a dramatist in paint – blaze with urgency and excitement.
Who can be bored by Titian? The first time I visited the National Gallery, when I was 19, his painting The Death of Actaeon leapt out at something sensual and real I could relate to. In all honesty, I would rather see a big exhibition about him than a clever modern take.
But this is London 2012. It's a flash place, and the National Gallery cannot always be putting on exhibitions of Paul Delaroche. This exhibition is free and fun. Go and enjoy what Ofili (especially) has done. Then look at the Titians at the heart of the show and fall in love.
No word yet from Brian Sewell...
Titian studio piece restored at Dulwich
July 10 2012
Picture: Dulwich Picture Gallery
A new display opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery today, showcasing the conservation of a Titian workshop piece, Venus and Adonis. The exhibition will:
...celebrate the conservation of Venus and Adonis, a painting produced by Titian’s workshop after the celebrated prototype painted by Titian for Philip II, King of Spain in 1554. The painting has been in storage since the early twentieth century and was in desperate need of restoration, as can be seen from the photograph. The removal of discoloured varnishes and retouchings has revealed the work to be an evocative rendition of an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, centring upon the last meeting of the ill-fated lovers Venus and Adonis. This was the most famous of Titian’s poesies, his series of mythological paintings that he envisaged as visual equivalents to poetry. The Dulwich version stands as an example of early artistic massproduction, providing striking comparison to the Andy Warhol Portfolios exhibition.
Titian 'Metamorphosis' at the National - review
July 9 2012
Picture: BG
I'm not sure what to make of this new exhibition at the National Gallery, but here goes. The show begins with the Gallery’s two newly acquired Titians, Diana & Actaeon, and Diana & Callisto, together with the Gallery’s Death of Actaeon, also by Titian. This is the first time all three paintings have been hung together since the 18th Century. The pictures are beautifully lit, and look every penny’s worth of their £95m price. The specially constructed room is a triumph – one feels like a Spanish grandee at the court of Philip II, seeing the paintings for the first time.
To help us understand what the rest of the exhibition is all about, here’s what the Gallery's blurb says:
‘Metamorphosis: Titian 2012’ – featuring new work by contemporary artists Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger in a unique collaboration with The Royal Ballet.
This multi-arts project, part of the Cultural Olympiad's London 2012 Festival, will draw on the powerful stories of change found in Titian’s masterpieces, revealing how these spectacular paintings continue to inspire living artists.
A multi-faceted experience celebrating British creativity across the arts, ‘Metamorphosis: Titian 2012’ brings together a group of specially commissioned works responding to three of Titian’s paintings – Diana and Actaeon, The Death of Actaeon and the recently acquired Diana and Callisto – which depict stories from Ovid’s epic poem ‘Metamorphoses’.
If you think this reads as if someone wrote the exhibition proposal by cramming in as many creative buzzwords they could think of, and then tried to make it relevant to the Olympics, you’d probably be right. The exhibition feels like that too. I bet it sounded great on paper, all those years ago when people were wondering what the hell a ‘Cultural Olympiad’ actually was.
But in practice the exhibition doesn’t entirely work; like Churchill’s famous pudding, it has no theme. For a start it’s in the wrong place. It just isn’t possible to achieve a ‘multi-faceted arts experience’ in the Sainsbury Wing exhibition space, which is designed to show paintings, and that’s all. Much of the exhibition is supposed to be about the relationship between the Titians and the new performances. But since the performances are mainly over in Covent Garden we’re reduced instead to mere snippets. You get a few costumes from the shows, some curious footage from the dance rehearsals (such that you can’t see any of the dancing, only close-ups of as many ballerina buttocks and breasts the director thought he could get away with), three very small models of the stage designs, and three equally small screens that repeat the Covent Garden performances. Really, the exhibition should have been put on at Covent Garden itself, and the Titians left upstairs in the National's main galleries.
Broken down into its constituent parts, the exhibition is entertaining enough. Its saving grace is that it is free; nobody will emerge feeling underwhelmed by what has been billed as the National Gallery’s major event of the year. I’m sure the Titian-inspired performances at the Royal Ballet will be a great success, and it is to be applauded that the National Gallery (and their sponsor Credit Suisse) has commissioned them. But these could still have happened without this slightly laborious exhibition. After all, if the National Gallery had really wanted to do its bit for London during the Olympics, it should simply have put on one of its regular first-class exhibitions.
Closes 23rd September. See images from the exhibition here.
* I'm told this is called a 'kinetic sculpture'.
