Previous Posts: June 2012

Looks like Richard Gere with a wig.

I'm not sure that unreporting vandalism is possible, ethically or practically, but nothing the youtube generation has done to art has so far matched the hammer attack on Michelangelo's Pieta or the shotgunning of The Madonna of the Rocks.

Maybe a return to the pillory is the answer?

Surprised to see YOU make a mistake in your blog today.  

The Sotheby's/publisher bumph may be claiming the biography of Lord Clark is the first, but actually Meryle Secrest published 'Kenneth Clark: A Biography' in September 1983 in hardback.

An example of how Clark remains under appreciated: last week I attended the Warburg Institute's very important conference on Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, which was a great success, but where Clark's name was not mentioned once in spite of the fact that he was one of the first English art historians to popularize Warburg's methods in this country (notably in the book on the nude).

Federico Barocci (1535–1612) is celebrated as one of the most talented artists of late 16th-century Italy. Fascinated by the human form, he fused charm and compositional harmony with an unparalleled sensitivity to colour.

Thanks to the cooperation of the Soprintendenze delle Marche, the exhibition will showcase Barocci’s most spectacular Marchigian altarpieces, including his famous Entombment from Senigallia and Last Supper from Urbino Cathedral – never before seen outside Italy. In total, 16 of his most important altarpieces and devotional paintings and five of his finest portraits will be on display alongside their preparatory drawings and oil sketches.

Barocci was an incessant and even obsessive draughtsman, preparing every composition with prolific studies in every conceivable medium. Drawing from life and inspired by the people and animals that surrounded him, his works are characterised by a warmth and humanity that transform his religious subjects into themes with which all can identify.

This exhibition explores the concept of music as a pastime of the elite in the northern Netherlands during the 17th century. Vermeer and Music: Love and Leisure in the Dutch Golden Age will bring together for the first time the National Gallery’s two paintings by Vermeer, Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, and Vermeer’s Guitar Player, on exceptional loan from the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House. The exhibition aims to enhance viewers’ appreciation of these beautiful and evocative paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries by juxtaposing them with musical instruments and songbooks of the period. Visitors will be able to compare 17th-century virginals, guitars, lutes and other instruments with their painted representations to judge the accuracy of representation and what liberties the painter might have taken to enhance the visual or symbolic appeal of his work. In 17th century Dutch paintings, music often figured as a metaphor for harmony, a symbol of transience or, depending on the type of music being performed, an indicator of one’s education and position in society. Musical instruments and songbooks were also included as attributes in elegant portraits to suggest that the sitter was accomplished in this area.

The Portrait in Vienna 1867–1918 is the first exhibition to explore Viennese portraiture during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, showing both the continuity and the rupture between the Biedermeier and imperial traditions of the 19th century and the innovations of avantgarde artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka in the years around 1900. The period is widely regarded as the time when the avant-garde overthrew the academy.

The exhibition explores how portraiture came to be closely identified with the distinctive flourishing of modern art in Vienna during its famed fin-de-siècle years. It is divided into six sections: Biedermeier-Modern (the rediscovery around 1900 of early 19thcentury portraits of the Alt-Wien bourgeoisie); Modern Family/Modern Child; The Artist; Modern Men/Modern Women; Love and Loss (the use of the portrait to declare love and commemorate the dead); and Finish and Failure (unfinished works abandoned by frustrated artists, or rejected by outraged sitters).

In 1992 my wife and I saw Caravaggio's (un-restored) 'Raising of Lazarus' in the Messina museum.  We were entirely alone, as far as we could see in the whole place, except for very welcoming guardians.  The 'Raising of Lazarus' made a tremendous impact: my reaction then that this was the single greatest oil painting I had ever seen, and I am not sure I would think differently today.  Thanks for flagging the restoration -- I can only heartily recommend anyone see it in Rome or back home in Messina.

After a few months on the job, I was assigned a new duty—writing the essays that are printed beneath and between the reproduced images in the sale catalogue. [...] The essay copy is mostly a formality, but it plays a role in the auction house’s overall marketing strategy. The more text given to an individual piece, the more the house seems to value it. I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (“fey,” “gestural,” “restrained”) amid a small repertory of active verbs (“explore,” “trace,” “question” ). I inserted the phrases “negative space,” “balanced composition,” and “challenges the viewer” every so often. X’s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary—which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light—ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades. I described impasto—paint thickly applied to a canvas, often with a palette knife—almost pornographically and joked with friends on Gchat that I was being paid to write pulp. Pulp was exactly what I was writing. It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise. In most ways, the auction house is unshackled from intellectual pretense by its pure attention to the marketplace. Through its catalogue copy (and for a time, through me), it makes one small concession to the art world’s native tongue.

 "It stands to reason that an auction house which sells art worth billions of dollars per year and relies on its reputation to secure consignments and purchasers would not put its business at risk by knowingly selling forged works."

The so called “Mini Rotary Psycho Opticon” by Rodney Graham is a kind of readymade—a replica of a freestanding kinetic op-art sculpture used as a mechanized back-drop for an early 1970’s Belgian television show on which the band Black Sabbath appeared performing their song ‘Paranoid”. The work comprises a large spinning disc behind a wall with five holes cut in it. The disc contains five discs (each containing a black and white op-art pattern) which are visible through these holes while the disc spins, creating a crude ‘psychedelic’ optical effect. The apparatus was designed to be pedal-powered by a bicyclist. Therefore the work has a high finish and is interactive. In an exhibition context viewers will be able to operate the machine. The Mini Rotary Psycho Opticon is designed by a master bicycle designer.

The findings reveal disagreements in the art history community about the value of digital research, teaching, and scholarship. Those who believe in the potential of digital art history feel it will open up new avenues of inquiry and scholarship, allow greater access to art historical information, provide broader dissemination of scholarly research, and enhance undergraduate and graduate teaching. Those who are skeptical doubt that new forms of art historical scholarship will emerge from the digital environment.  They remain unconvinced that digital art history will offer new research opportunities or that it will allow them to conduct their research in new and different ways.

Now is the time for the coalition government to act boldly and herald in an equally exciting new chapter for the visual arts online: to scrap licensing fees for public-domain works of art. These quasi-copyright assertions and licences are the digital equivalent of museum entry fees, and they prevent us from using, learning from and simply enjoying these art resources.

A digital renaissance in the visual arts is under way. Improvements in screen resolution coupled with faster broadband and more sophisticated digitisation technologies will create compelling ways to access and experience art online. New initiatives such as Your Paintings, a joint effort by the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC to catalogue the UK's collection of 200,000 oil paintings, or the Google Art Project, which has now attracted over 150 museums across 40 countries, allow online visitors unprecedented access to artworks and provide new levels of brushwork detail.

Last year Yale University became the first art institution to announce it would provide licence- and royalty-free access to digital images of public-domain materials in all Yale collections. Far from having a price calculator, it makes no charge for downloading the 20MB, 300dpi TIFF file of any of Yale's public-domain works.

I spoke to Kenneth Hamma, consulting information architect at the Yale Center for British Art, who described the two-step process in adopting this open-access policy. The directors of the museums and libraries first convinced themselves this was the right thing to do partly because the licensing revenues were small, but more importantly because they didn't feel it was their responsibility to determine how these images could be used. After this idea was presented to the officers of the university, they took five minutes to make a decision. It was a no-brainer.