Previous Posts: February 2013

If any attempt is made by the host museum to charge for admission; or any item from their collection is put up for sale, the Art Fund, the charity that is donating them, can take them back.

With regard to the “strings attached” to Sir Denis Mahon's bequest, it seems to me that he is perfectly entitled to attach whatever conditions he likes. As you point out yourself, if any museum or gallery finds the conditions too onerous, they can decline the gift. In general, if someone wants works of art to be available to everyone they can reasonably require that no fee is charged to view them. In addition if they are bequeathed to the nation, selling them sometime later frustrates the donor’s intention, so this condition seems reasonable to me. Whilst it is unlikely that major institutions would come under control of an unscrupulous asset stripper, there is no harm in putting in some defence.

The popularity of his television [series] and book, Civilization, made him a target for much of the New Art History historians who saw his work as traditionalist and ignoring social factors of art production.

On a personal note, I think anyone whose heroes include John Maynard Keynes and Kenneth Clark must be a good art historian and connoisseur -- o.k., that is probably a non sequitur, but as I gather the twitterati say WTH !

Shame the DAH misspelt "Civilisation".

I am compelled by the British Museum’s latest exhibition to confess that I have no business to review it. It is common for the jobbing art critic to criticise artists and exhibitions of whom and which he knows nothing, to précis and paraphrase the catalogues and press releases, and to enthusiastically adopt established aesthetic positions because he thinks them safe (many reviews of the current Manet exhibition at the Royal Academy demonstrate the point).

Others, more arrogant — Roger Fry an outstanding historical example — have only to see a work of art or craft for the first time, be it from Polynesia or the pueblos of central America, to become an instant expert in the field; even worse, writing on art, we have hosts of blethering philosophers who believe philosophy to be the key to understanding everything, and plagues of novelists and creative writers confident of their ability to interpret and judge the visual arts — the day is upon us when Martina Cole appears on BBC2’s Friday night Review Show “…talking of Michelangelo”.

I thought I'd ask you about what you think art criticism is good for, and what makes it well done.

A new national organisation has been set up to allow museums and galleries to share their experiences of criminal behaviour with the police and each other, as they look to beef up security in the wake of ongoing threats to their collections.

A spate of high-profile thefts and vandalised work has left cultural institutions across the UK “on edge”, according to Vernon Rapley, the driving force behind the National Museum Security Group (NMSG), which has a reach of 800 institutions.

The group met for the first time on Tuesday in London. Representatives from about 70 institutions based around the country discussed threats facing galleries, museums, libraries and archaeological sites – and what they could do to protect themselves.

Mr Rapley, the head of security and services at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, described the group as a “self-circulating co-operative”, adding: “If the police authorities wanted to contact everyone in the museum security business in the UK they could do it at the touch of a button.”

Previously, four tests undertaken by Prof. John Asmus, nuclear physicist, who digitised the brushtrokes of both paintings, established scientifically that both the 'Earlier Version' [ie, the Isleworth picture] and the 'Mona Lisa' in the Louvre would have been executed by the same artist. This brushstroke analysis identifies conclusively an artist in the same way that DNA or fingerprints identify criminals'.

Let's update the Waverley criteria, distinguishing information from objects, [and] making online publication a condition.

You may know that the Getty already has microfilm copies of part of Agnew's archive, comprising stock books for the years 1852-1938.

Personally I think it would be a pity if the Getty got it - after all, how many people are going to traipse all the way over there to consult them? The Agnew's archive is the kind of essential reference resource you will want to dip into repeatedly, but briefly, year in year out. Who did they get that picture from? They exhibited such and such a drawing in 1932, but did they sell others from the same source at the same time? That kind of thing.

But you make an excellent point: nowadays if you want to acquire an important art historical archive, it really isn't good enough to expect people to plod along to your premises to examine it between the hours of 10 and 5 with an hour for lunch, under arcane study room conditions. What if you are based in Canada, and the archive is in London? At least the Getty understands that if it wants to be a leader of its kind, it has to address an audience well beyond those that can visit its reading rooms.

The claimant is Lancelot William Thwaytes, who consigned the work to auction in 2006; it was catalogued as The Cardsharps, “a 17th-century copy after Caravaggio’s original now in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth”. The painting had been in the Thwaytes family since 1962. According to the claim that was filed at the end of January, Thwaytes seeks unspecified damages, interest and costs relating to the price difference between the £42,000 the painting sold for in 2006 and “what its true open market value was in 2006”, had it been attributed to Caravaggio and to be determined by expert evidence. The filing includes the claim that Sotheby’s did not undertake the necessary research and analysis prior to the work’s sale.

In a statement, Sotheby’s says that its “view that the painting is a copy and not an autograph work by Caravaggio is supported by the eminent Caravaggio scholar Professor Richard Spear, as well as by several other leading experts in the field”. Other experts who have gone on the record in support of Sotheby’s view include Helen Langdon, the Italian Baroque scholar and the writer of Caravaggio’s 1998 biography, and Sebastian Schütze, a professor of art history at the University of Vienna. In reference to Mahon’s The Cardsharps, Schütze writes in his 2009 catalogue of Caravaggio’s paintings that “the quality of the execution… rather suggests the painting to be a copy”.

Sotheby’s adds: “Our view is also supported by the market, which gave its verdict on this painting when it set the price at £50,400 [the hammer price plus the buyer’s premium] at Sotheby’s sale in December of 2006. The catalogue in which the painting was included was distributed among the world’s leading curators, art historians, collectors and dealers—had they deemed the attribution different to that given in the catalogue, the price realised would doubtless have reflected that.”

[...] Caravaggio scholars Mina Gregori and Maurizio Marini; Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums; the curator and Bolognese art expert Daniele Benati; Thomas Scheider, a writer and restorer; and Ulrich Birkmaier, the chief conservator of the Wadsworth Atheneum.

A very interesting article on the Mahon 'Caravaggio' - do we know where it currently is, does it form part of the Mahon estate, which I understood was willed to the Art Fund, and on a slightly different matter, what is the news on Mahon's will, which I believe still hasn't been published?

Interestingly the article actually says Mahon “obtained an export licence for it that gave an estimated selling price of £10m”. 

I assume this was a temporary one for the exhibition in Trapani as I don’t recollect any case before the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art.  Unless of course there was no objection to a permanent export licence by the Committee’s expert adviser, the National Gallery, which, given the rarity of authentic Caravaggios in the UK, one would expect there to be.  

And what has happened to it since?  I notice that the Mahon pictures in the National Gallery have not yet been accessioned, they remain “On loan from the Personal Representatives of Sir Denis Mahon”.

[...] Thomas Herron, an author and English professor at East Carolina University, noted that the reason for the portrait’s obscurity may lie in Elizabeth’s efforts to control her image.

And according to Anna Riehl, author of The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Queen Elizabeth I the [...] portrait is a "rare exception in not covering up the queen's flaws”.

A 1563 draft of Royal Proclamation attempted to regulate the production and circulation of the Queen's portraits, and a 1596 order to the Privy Council commanded public officers "to aid the Queen's Sergeant Painter in seeking out unseemly portraits which were to her 'great offence' and therefore to be defaced and no more portraits to be produced except as approved by [the] Sergeant Painter."

While Herron points out that “the decrees don't specify ‘ageing’ portraits or even comment on the queen's own looks in any way”, many paintings of the time presented an eternally youthful Elizabeth. Herron also notes that visitors at her court commented upon the queen’s advanced age by the 1580s and 90s - as well as her dignified and benevolent disposition. He further observed that visitors offered less flattering descriptions.

In the new, unvarnished portrait of Elizabeth I, wrinkles-and-all, the artist has stepped over a fine line. All the accoutrements of her glamour are there, but the painter has gone just that bit nearer to the reality behind the myth than was required to give a portrait plausibility. The result is a cruel unmasking of power. Could this have been a deliberately subversive image, hidden away in the house of some rebellious lord? Here is the fairy queen, her spell broken.

Yes I thought that too about the Wrinkly Elizabeth. The 'rebellious Lord' bit was like something you'd hear from a well-meaning country house guide.

That type is curious - a highly individual Ditchley variant. I've seen a few examples - probably more than any other late type, but still fewer than you ever see of Henry VIII. Strange how rare relatively Queen Elizabeth's portrait is. Where did all these corridor pictures go?

Too bad you pooh-pooh this wrinkly Elizabeth as a "not particularly good workshop painting" -- I confess with head lowered that I find it deeply poignant and oddly impressive.  Ah well, that is the advantage of not having any connoisseurship expertise, perhaps!

New tests on a painting billed as the original version of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's 15th century portrait, have produced fresh proof that it is the work of the Italian master, a Swiss-based art foundation claims.

The tests, one by a specialist in "sacred geometry" and the other by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, were carried out in the wake of the Geneva unveiling of the painting, the Isleworth Mona Lisa, last September.

"When we add these new findings to the wealth of scientific and physical studies we already had, I believe anyone will find the evidence of a Leonardo attribution overwhelming," said David Feldman vice-president of the foundation said.

Surprised that @britishlibrary Leonardo manuscript viewer did not embed "horizontal flip" functionality to make text more accessible.

• The Proof Is in the Print: Avant-Garde Approaches to the Historical Materials of Photography’s Avant-Garde 
• Transmaterialities: Materials, Process, History (which includes a paper entitled, 'The Generative Possibilities of Base Materiality in Postwar Conceptions of Art and Architecture')
• The Empathetic Body: Performance and the Blurring of Private Self in Contemporary Art 
• Beyond Good or Bad: Practice-Derived Epistemologies of Studio Critique

If you took, more or less at random, some of the words in all the papers you cite, you could still come up with a paper that wouldn't look out of place on a CAA programme. How about:

Transmaterial empathies: Conceptions of practice-derived critiques of the self in Avant Garde postwar epistemiology.

I went to one of the supposedly unfathomable panels. It was perfectly fathomable. I hope Bendor comes to AAH!

French Art, 1715–1789 

West Ballroom, 3rd Floor 

Chair: Colin B. Bailey, The Frick Collection

Highlight for me was the "Critiquing Criticality" session, with the unintentionally ironic paper "Mediocrity doesn't happen overnight ... it takes a lot of hard work".  I do hate 'critique' as verb.  I know it has historic precedent, but 'criticising' is always better.  'Critiquing' gives the wrong focus, implying that it's all about the construction of a critique rather than the criticism of an external object.  But maybe that's the right connotation in this context.  

The 'New Connoisseurship' panel looks interesting though - I hope an AHN reader is attending and will provide a report.

The New Connoisseurship: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators 

West Ballroom, 3rd Floor 

Chairs: Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; H. Perry Chapman, University of Delaware

I say go for the voyeurism and snacks, stay for the panels and symposium. I often attend super obscure ones about how wood was beveled in 15th century Italian marquetry; or the presence extra-terrestrials in pre-Christian art. Mostly, however, when I get the CAA program (available on line or at the Hilton) I'm utterly baffled by the titles. Much of academia speaks a foreign tongue, using insular jargon and language I'm either unfamiliar with, can't understand, or isn't in dictionaries. I love made-up words. But when they don't make any new sense I get antsy. And feel dumb.

I am an avid reader of AHN and was amused by your comments about the CAA meeting in NY. I gave up attending several years ago -- too crowded, too frantic, too expensive, too many presentations I don't understand or care about.

I've been following your delightful blog for a few months now and I want to thank your for the work you put into it. It is balm for an art soul tattered by the likes of Artfagcity and Hyperallergic here in the NYC area. I was playing catch up and came across your Guff post on the annual CAA conference. I had to laugh because I fell behind while attending for the first time this year. There was the nonsense I knew to expect from more seasoned veterans, and that I didn't feel to badly trying to avoid, and some wonderful panels that left me inspired to go back to grad school and do good art history, not bad contemporary art-history-theory nonsense.  For all the panels on art criticism this year, and despite my interest and concern for the field I only sat through one lecture (which was great, but I was too exhausted to go on, and it might have continued horribly).

"It is about putting the old and new together so that the whole collection looks like it is one collection rather than two collections," said Tate Britain's director, Penelope Curtis, explaining why art from across 300 years, including painting, video and photography, had been put together for the display, Looking at the View.

"There has been a tradition here, I think, that people either came for the historic collection or they came for the modern and contemporary and people were not very good at thinking that actually, it was all one collection. I'm interested in trying to make it cohere more," she said.

There are no long descriptive labels and no route for visitors to follow, the display is all about looking, says the Tate. "Hopefully people will find different kinds of rapport and different meanings for themselves," said Curtis.

[...] opposition from three key trustees: the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, the painter Andrew Forge and the critic Herbert Read. Writing to Hepworth, Read described Whaam! as “just nonsense”. However, other trustees were keener, and after negotiations, Sonnabend offered to reduce its price to £3,940.