Category: Exhibitions
New exhibition at Hampton Court
April 10 2012
Picture: BG (taken surreptitiously, so apologies for the poor quality)
Most visitors to Hampton Court will have heard about Henry VIII and his six wives. Few, however, will know about Charles II and his more numerous mistresses. This is a shame, for the stories of the Stuart court can be just as interesting as those of the Tudor world, and even come close to being as politically important. For had Charles II had spent less time chasing actresses, and concentrated instead on producing a legitimate heir, we might not have had the calamitous reign of James II, and thus the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights, and the consitutional monarchy we live under today.
So all praise to Historic Royal Palaces for shifting their focus onto the Stuarts at Hampton Court. Their new exhibition, The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned, looks at the love life Britain's most priapic king, Charles II. I can highly recommend it. Brett Dolman, the curator, has put together a show which is both pleasingly entertaining and informative - rare these days - and has selected some of the finest examples of British portraiture from the seventeenth Century. These include: probably the finest miniature of the period, Samuel Cooper's unfinished portrait of the Dule of Monmouth; a selection of Lely's best 'Windsor Beauties', including Pepys' 'prettiest girl in the world', Frances Stuart; my favourite Van Dyck, Cupid and Pysche (though sadly hung too high, and poorly lit); and John Michael Wright's best painting, his portrait of Charles II (glimpsed above).
I was also pleased to see that Lely's full-length of a naked Nell Gwynn has been displayed properly identified as her, and without the late Sir Oliver Millar's curious suggestion that the sitter is Barbara Villiers. The Lely (above) is hung next to a contemporary copy of the same subject, which, while of inferior quality, confirms to me in its more detailed background that Lely's original, which is strangely muted in that area, has suffered a degree of loss over the years.
A number of pictures have been cleaned for the exhibition, including Lely's fine portrait of Lady Byron, which has languished in the Royal Collection's store for many years. And in a way, what this exhibition really revealed to me was that the previously rather empty and sparsely hung Wren rooms at Hampton Court come to life when full of pictures. Kneller's 'Hampton Court Beauties', for example, are usually crammed into a small and dimly lit ground floor room used by William III at Hampton Court, where it is impossible to stand back from them, or even see some them in the gloaming. This may well be a historically relevant place to hang the pictures, but as Kneller once said when he found someone looking too closely at his portraits; 'my pictures are not made for smelling of'. They need space to be appreciated. So hopefully, the exhibition will usher in a rehang of the later Stuart rooms at Hampton Court. But in the meantime, do go along to this excellent new show - and let me know what you think.
Yes - it's a porn warning at Hampton Court
April 10 2012
Picture: BG
Seems a touch Puritanical to me...
That early Titian
April 5 2012
Picture: Hermitage
A reader writes:
It's a pity you (and The Guardian) displayed the photo of the painting before cleaning.
Above is the cleaned picture, via ArtDaily.
Until further notice...
April 4 2012
Picture: Newsweek
...this site is a Hirst-free zone.
Update: Brian Sewell's review is well worth a click. His conclusion:
I can sum it up as shiny shit.
Rembrandt goes to New York
April 4 2012
Picture: English Heritage
How kind of us - English Heritage has leant Rembrandt's epic Kenwood House Self Portrait to the Met. It's the first time the picture has left Europe. On display till May 20th. Enjoy!
Video of cleaned Leonardo 'St Anne'
March 30 2012
Video: AFP
PS - Don't confuse the cleaned Leonardo with the copy...
Waldemar on 'Turner & Claude'
March 27 2012
Picture: BG
He likes it:
The show ahead consists of ever clearer evidence that Turner was a great and tremendous artist, Claude a charming one. At the heart of the display is the famous face-off between their two views of ancient Carthage; a face-off Turner engineered when he left his work to the nation, on the condition that these two works always hang together. Which they usually do, in the National’s octagonal gallery.
In Claude’s Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, the weak beam from a low sun on the horizon seems barely to reach the shore, and even the figures humping stuff onto boats in the foreground appear utterly exhausted. But when Turner adopts more or less the same viewpoint, he flicks a switch and the electricity surges on. The sun is rebooted to its nuclear setting. A volcano erupts in the bay and the waters boil.
The usual interpretation of Turner’s insistence that his work hangs next to Claude’s is that it was intended as a homage: a pupil’s thanks to his master. But I no longer believe that. On this evidence, Turner’s great burst of atomic sunshine constitutes an effort to flatten Claude in battle. This wasn’t an homage. This was a beating-up.
An exhibition on miniatures at Philip Mould
March 23 2012
Picture: Philip Mould
Portrait miniatures were the closest you could get to photos before photography was invented. So it wasn't surprising that the genre died out quite quickly after photography became popular. An exhibition here at Philip Mould looks at how miniature painters gamely fought on into the 20th Century, some with more success than others. More details here.
Turner's not-Claude Claude
March 14 2012
Picture: BG
I was intrigued by this little picture at the new National Gallery 'Turner & Claude' exhibition. It used to belong to Turner, and he thought it was by Claude - his hero. But modern scholars now say it has nothing to do with Claude. Which is all rather sad, don't you think?
I've no idea if it is by Claude or not - but my only thought would be that it's hard to make an attribution either way, given that it is a) dirty b) somewhat over-painted and c) under a thick yellow varnish. It would be fun to clean the picture, and see what it really looks like. You can read more about the work here.
"Critics turn on 'Turner & Claude' at the National Gallery"
March 13 2012
Picture: BG
That's not my headline, but Reuters'. Adrian Searle in The Guardian and Richard Dorment in The Telegraph dislike the National Gallery's new 'Turner & Claude' exhibition so much, it seems, that their response is the basis for a news story itself.
First, here's Searle:
Quite why the National Gallery is bringing together the British landscape painter with the 17th-century French classical landscapist, I can only wonder. It is only three years since Tate Britain mounted Turner and the Masters, a fascinating overview of his rivalries and influences – including Claude Lorrain.
Most of the works here are in British collections, the majority from Tate Britain and the National Gallery itself. There are only three major foreign loans, all from the US. So it will cost you £12 to see lots of paintings we already own. Perhaps the exhibition is intended to give respite to all the guards who had to shepherd the fainting, weeping and often hysterical crowds around its recent Leonardo show. Turner apparently burst into tears when he first saw Claude's 1648 Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. As well as being moved, he probably realised how far he would have to go to beat Claude as a painter. There is nothing new in this observation; nor does this exhibition have anything new to say about the relationship between the two artists.
And here's Richard Dorment, in a petulant mood:
For the life of me, I can’t understand why the National Gallery has gone to so much trouble to tell us something that most people with an interest in British art already know. [...]
The show is a muddle from start to finish. The best I can say about it is that the curators have borrowed some wonderful pictures to hang alongside much-loved warhorses from the National Gallery and Tate. But in the catalogue essays, art historians are given carte blanche to waffle on for page after page explaining ideas that could be written on the back of a postcard.
Don’t get me started on the labels: surely there are limits to the number of synonyms curators may use for “soft”, “glow” and “light”. And you only have to tell us once that Turner left Sunlight Rising through Vapour to the National Gallery in his will.
After seeing the exhibition, I found myself writing a single word in my notebook, but that word happens to be the kiss of death for any exhibition: “Why?”
To which the only response is, well why not? Both Dorment and Searle make the common mistake of thinking exhibitions always have to teach us something 'new'. Personally, I see nothing wrong in putting on shows that just have good pictures, well displayed. One of the nice things about the exhibition is that it isn't constantly trying to impress the visitor with a new theory, or a different idea in each room. Instead, it is a pleasant and gentle extended essay on two of landscape art's greatest proponents. I liked it very much. The rooms are well presented (really, we must stop whingeing about the Sainsbury Wing exhibition space - it's fine), and the pictures are given plenty of space, which is essential for Turner's larger works.
Searle's moan about there being only three major foreign loans is pretty daft, for a key point of the exhibition is that English collectors were so obsessed with Claude that fully half his works were in England by the 1820s. Those that Turner drew particular inspiration from (in the collections of Angerstein, Beaumont and Beckford) went on to become some of the central pictures in our permanent collections. And of course it was Turner's explicit desire that many of his best works remained in public ownership in the UK. So we should be glad that we don't have to look overseas to fill an exhibition like this.
Incidentally, I don't know which catalogue Dorment was reading, but it can't have been the one which accompanies this exhibition. The lavishly illustrated catalogue for this show is shorter than usual NG exhibition catalogues, and the essays, which I thought were excellent, even shorter. There is no waffle.
For better or worse, critics in the national press have the power, collectively, to make or break a show like this, and by extension have an impact on the National Gallery's reputation. In my view they therefore have a responsibility not to write off major exhibitions so glibly. For in the space of just over a month, the National Gallery has finished hosting a stellar success in Leonardo, bought a £45m Titian, and now presents us with 'Turner & Claude'. And I think that's pretty damn good.
Zoffany's condoms
March 12 2012
Picture: Times
In the TLS, Professor Mary Beard talks about her visit to the new Zoffany exhibition at the RA, and Zoffany's most risque self-portrait, above:
...we then explored some of the paintings we didn't know. One (from the Gallery at Parma) was a curious self-portrait of Zoffany apparently putting on a friar's outfit, actually getting ready to go out to party in fancy dress. And he's looking forward to a good time, for on the wall were hanging up, the label said, two condoms.
"But" asked the husband, "why do they say "two"? There's three of them hanging up -- a pair, and one a bit further to the right."
And that's certainly what it looked like. In fact it looked as if the condom on the right was neatly hanging over yet another version of the Venus of Urbino...just to rub in what the painting was all about. We didn't linger long, but decided to check it out when we got home.
That's where the story took a curious turn. Every single image I could get of this painting, including the one in the catalogue (above), crops off a good few centimetres on the right hand side, so you can't actually see what's going on there, and whether there's a third condom or not. In fact, in a major article on Zoffany self portraits (in the Art Bulletin 1987), William Pressly explains that even he hasn't seen the original painting and has only had access to a photo slightly cropped on the right. On the basis of that, he concludes that Zoffany had painted a strange tear in his image of the Venus of Urbino -- a significantly condom-shape tear (and that's the line repeated in the new catalogue).
Stuart beauties at Hampton Court
March 8 2012
Picture: Guardian/Royal Collection/National Portrait Gallery
Exciting news in The Guardian today about a forthcoming exhibition at Hampton Court, and not just because I live round the corner. The Wild, the Beautiful, and the Damned, which opens on 5th April, will look at the women of Charles II's famously salacious court. And happily, this means many fine portraits by Sir Peter Lely will be included, such as Frances Stuart (above left, Royal Collection) and Barbara Villiers (right, NPG). The latter's portrayal as the Virgin Mary holding one of the King's illegitimate children is still quite shocking, if you think about it.
From The Guardian:
The exhibition, the first at Hampton Court on the Stuart period after a decade spent on the Tudors and Henry VIII, is in the Queen's state apartments, which were created in the late 17th century by Sir Christopher Wren for Mary II.
"Beauty was a very thin line," the show's curator, Brett Dolman, said. "On one side, beauty is taken as a symbol of virtue and perfection, beauty could allow you to rise far beyond your original station in life. On the other, beauty is viewed with suspicion as a snare and one wrong step and your reputation is destroyed forever."
Also in the show will be Lely's full-length portrait of a naked Nell Gwyn, whose recent somewhat tragic auction history I have covered here before. From the Guardian article it sounds as if the picture will be exhibited unequivocally as Nell Gwyn - and this is further good news, for the sitter is undoubtedly Charles' most famous mistress. It was only the late Sir Oliver Millar's rather curious suggestion that the sitter might be Barbara Villiers that introduced any doubt on the identification.
Freud mania
March 8 2012
Picture: NPG/Freud estate
The NPG have release 7,000 extra tickets for the Freud Portraits exhibition. The show will now be open till 9pm on Saturdays.
Let's hope the opening on Saturday evenings is so succesful it becomes permanent. I've never quite understood why visual art is seen as a daytime activity, and performance art an evening one. I like going to galleries in the evening - it's usually the only time I can go.
New discovery heralds 'Zoffany' at the RA
March 7 2012
Picture: BG
Well, where to begin? The classy layout? The excellent catalogue? The varied and invigorating selection of works? The virtuoso display of the dying art of curation? For me, there aren't superlatives enough to describe the new Zoffany exhibition at the RA. Yes, Zoffany may never be in the top rank of artists from his ultra-talented generation. But there are few artists who tell us more about painting and painters in the 18th Century.
Born in Germany, studied in Italy, celebrated in England, and, at the end, almost abandoned in India, this perpetually peripatetic artist and his unprecedentedly varied network of patrons from German kings to Indian maharajahs gives us an unparalleled view into how art was valued and commissioned in the 18th Century. We can see in Zoffany the desire for large formal portraits, for conversation pieces, for subject pictures, for landscapes, for still lifes, for historical pictures, and even religious ones. He could paint the lot. True, the studied control of his paintings may bely a lack of fluency, and even genius in handling oil paint. But he was still capable of producing great paintings, such as the Tribuna [Royal Collection]. What he may have lacked in talent, he made up for in labour.
And in this exhibition, excellently curated by Martin Postle, we can see the whole range of Zoffany's work. Proof of how varied he could be in his approach comes in an exciting new discovery of the above landscape The South Gate of Lal Bagh, Dhaka, dated 1787. This picture was at auction in Sotheby's only last December, where it was catalogued as by Robert Home. I remember standing in front of it and being sure it wasn't by Home (on whom I'm something of an anorak), but I never made the connection to Zoffany. The figures are so unlike his usual figures, more sketch-like and elegant. But there, hanging next this landscape at the RA is another very similar scene by Zoffany which confirms the attribution beyond doubt. The picture was estimated at £60-80,000 at Sotheby's, and seemingly didn't sell (I'd value it at about £250,000 now). It's a great coup for the exhibition, and an important discovery, being one of only three surviving landscapes from Zoffany's time in India.
But perhaps the most pleasing thing about the show is that it is happening at all. This kind of single artist, scholarly exhibition is seen, at least amongst those who now control many of our exhibition spaces in the UK, as unfashionable. Now, funders and marketing people want 'thematic displays', onto which you can tag on topics of (dread phrase) 'contemporary resonance'. It should forever be to Tate's shame that they cancelled this exhibition ('too idiosyncratic' apparently), not least when we see the piss-poor effort - 'Migrations' - they have put on in its place. And it should be to the Royal Academy's perpetual credit that they have stepped in and rescued it. I suspect that most of all, however, we have to thank the Yale Center for British Art, who first sponsored the exhibition. Ultimately, of course, we must be grateful to the late Paul Mellon, whose largesse is now almost single-handedly keeping good old-fashioned art historical research in the UK going, not least through the Paul Mellon Centre in London. If it wasn't for his money, these kind of exhibitions, with their spin-offs of new research and discoveries, would most likely not take place any more. So please support the exhibition by going to see it. I promise you won't be disappointed.
'Zoffany' - press reaction
March 7 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
So far, the critics seem to like the Zoffany show at the RA. Here's Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph giving it 4/5, and here is Amanda Vickery in The Guardian. However, Philip Hensher has an engaging piece on the artist in The Telegraph, and makes this bold claim:
He must be the greatest painter of English royalty between Van Dyck and Winterhalter. In his royal paintings, such as the wonderful Queen Charlotte With Her Two Eldest Sons, royalty appears with the necessary spectacle, and even with a whimsical appearance, but also off-duty, relaxed. Other painters of the period, like Gainsborough, rendered royalty as private individuals; Zoffany’s royals have a curious quality, suggesting that they have wandered off from stiffer, stately duties and have flung themselves down without changing their clothes to be alone with each other and the painter. They have, unexpectedly, a connection with Zoffany’s large and innovative series of portraits of actors in their best and most memorable roles.
Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, Jonathan Jones gets into a terrible muddle sneering at Zoffany's Tribuna:
Zoffany's eye for the manners of the English was ironic and true. His strange and wonderful Tribuna portrays the reality of the Grand Tour – a social, not a cultural pilgrimage. It also reveals a trait in British society that remains constant to this day: the studied shallowness of the elite. In Zoffany's grand anthropology of the English ruling class, great art is just a prop for fashion and the rituals of the privileged.
A few quick points (someone has to defend the English elites):
- First, despite those prostitute-frequenting posh Grand Tourists that historians like to highlight, it is undeniably the case that the lure of Italy was primarily cultural. If it wasn't, most Tourists would have stopped in Paris, and England's country houses wouldn't be full of antiquities, and so heavily inspired by classicism.
- Second, our best source of information about the painting comes from the correspondence of two high members of the elite whom Jones derides as 'shallow'; they are Sir Horace Mann (who is in the painting, and was an art dealer on the side), and Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, and one of England's greatest art historians.
- Third, if the art in the Tribuna was just a prop for the privileged, why did Zoffany take such care to portray the figures as admirers of art, rather than each other? All the conversations in the picture are clearly being held around the objects themselves. Indeed the groupings are really no different to Teniers' depictions of the Habsburg elites admiring Archduke Leopold's art collection.
- Finally, the Tribuna was commissioned by the elite of all English elites, King George III and Queen Charlotte. And they were browned off that Zoffany had put any people in it. In other words, all they wanted to do was look at the art. They couldn't give two hoots about the social rituals or the fashion.
How to make Old Master drawings cool
February 29 2012
Picture: Salon du Dessin
This is a very smart advert for the Salon du Dessin (Old Master drawings fair), which opens in Paris on 28th March. Here is last year's advert on a similar theme. We need to do something like this for Old Master paintings in London. If you were responsible for this idea - get in touch!
Spotmania: another challenge completed
February 20 2012
Picture: The Art Newspaper
Top marks to The Art Newspaper's Cristina Ruiz for completing 'The Complete Hirst Spot Challenge', and all in economy class. The final stop was Beverly Hills, where she flew for a few hours, just to see the spots.
Then my card receives its final stamp and the challenge is complete. I am asked to fill in a form where I can choose the personalised inscription Damien Hirst will write on my very own limited-edition spot print. What can I write? I want to choose something Hirst might actually want to say to me. So after careful consideration I come up with something short and to the point: “Dear Cristina, Fuck off.”
Let me know what you would have Damien write on your personal print. A reader suggests:
Yes, it really is a load of old b******s.
David Hockney - man of the moment
February 20 2012
Picture: BG
David Hockney is not only the star of his own exhibition at the Royal Academy, but also takes leading roles in two other shows of the moment: in the NPG's Lucian Freud Portraits you can see Freud's portrait of Hockney (above), while at Tate's Picasso & Modern British Art you can see Hockney's imaginary self-portrait with Picasso. Is this unprecedented for a living British artist?
Queueing for Hockney
February 16 2012
Picture: BG
How many living artists can do this?
