Previous Posts: June 2013

The Picture So Far...50 Years in Painting Conservation is a landmark retrospective of the painting conservation profession and practice. Such a comprehensive review has not been presented in this country before and the event has broad appeal, not only to conservators but to curators, art historians, dealers, and collectors. The conference will also address the present challenges facing painting conservation and will conclude with a chaired panel discussion on our future directions. We are very pleased to have attracted pre-eminent international speakers (Nicholas Penny, David Bomford, Richard Wolbers, Joyce Hill Stoner among others) who will offer an extremely valuable insight into this, one of the key professions within the ’fine art family’.

"The Treasury and the chancellor have listened very carefully to a case given with great vim and passion.

“5% is a real result within the DCMS overall cut. It's still of course going to require some tough decisions, but it is a good result for the arts council and the DCMS in the way that they have put the case."

The arts council was asked to model cuts of 5%, 10% and 15%. An ACE spokeswoman said that the model was “very crude, and not definite”, but a 5% cut might reduce the number of organisations in receipt of grant-in-aid from over 700 to around 400-450.

Mark Taylor, director of the Museums Association, said: “This cut, on top of the previous ones, pushes some national museums in England close to the tipping point where large areas of their work will have to be abandoned and facilities closed down.

“It will also impact on Renaissance funding and may reduce the number of Major Partner museums.”

The announcement follows cuts in 2010 to DCMS' core budget from £1.4bn to £1.1bn and cuts of 50% to its administration, then a further £34m in cuts to its core budget in December last year.

Recently, the Culture Secretary for the UK Government set out a different approach to culture and asked the culture sector to help her make the arguments about the economic impact of culture in the context of economic growth.

I don’t agree. That is not the future I choose.

The Scottish Government already accepts the case for the role of government in supporting the cultural sector. We actively support the case for public subsidy of the arts. We understand that culture and heritage have a value in and of themselves.

[...] the lightbulb in a single [connoisseur's] head is invisible to the rest of us, and indistinguishable from self-delusion (except by inference from that expert’s track record).

“The way in which an intuitive verdict is reached can, from the nature of things, only be described inadequately. A picture is shown to me. I glance at it, and declare it to be a work by Memling, without having proceeded to an examination of its full complexity of artistic form.”

The problem Friedlander had is the lack of documentation (at the time and since) regarding the Flemish 'primitives' - for example, the only documentation on Mostaert is van Mander (known to be suspect as mostly recorded via word of mouth) and a handful of references to works in collections - there are no signed works apart from a suspected signed work in Rome, so Mostaert's entire oeuvre is pretty much guessed from titles of works mentioned by van Mander and an Ecce Homo listed in Margaret of Austria's inventory. There's certainly no conclusive evidence that any works are actually by Mostaert. The same goes for most early Flemish - so essentially Friedlander had a ton of photographs that he had to arrange into some sense, and that for me is a good basis that early Flemish art historians can work from. I'm sure given databases, science etc that Friedlander would have been more than happy to revise many of his attributions. Putting a name to a group of iconographically/compositionally similar works was in a way better than leaving them all as anons. It was a fascinating period for art history and Friedlander was in the enviable/unenviable position of having the reputation of a connoisseur and having pretty much everyman and his dog that owned an old master sending him photographs on a daily basis after an opinion.

The small copper enclosed is by Johan König (1586-1642). It was knocked down for 120.000 euro an hour ago at a sale in Toulouse against an estimate of 700/1000 euro, catalogued as Flemish school.

German police say they have broken up a multimillion-pound international forgery ring that specialised in Russian avant-garde artists.

Federal police said in a statement that 100 officers raided businesses, homes and art galleries across the country including in Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Cologne on Wednesday and Thursday. Searches were also carried out in Israel and Switzerland.

Two suspects, aged 67 and 41, were taken into custody as alleged leaders of the group of six forgers.

Police said that since 2005 the ring has produced and sold more than 400 faked paintings as "previously unknown works" attributed to artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich for "four- to seven-figure euro sums" each.

It was billed as a 'curated exhibition', but was mostly just the most expensive upcoming lots from the major summer sales.

The [National] Trust is hosting two “perception-changing” events this month, featuring displays of the risqué and racy danceform, as part of an attempt to appear less “buttoned-up” and to attract new, younger visitors to its properties. It follows a dismal year for the Trust in 2012, when the wet weather was blamed for a four per cent drop in visitor numbers.

One of the events is being held at Killerton, an 18th century house set in a 6,400 acre estate near Exeter, which until now has been best known for its collection of historical costumes.

Burlesque shows, which have enjoyed a revival in recent years, involve titillating performances by women in ornate, tasselled garments. However, the Trust assures that the Devon event will feature “tasteful dancing” from the performers, who will be “showing off their corsets, feathers and pearls”.

The first world war is not an occasion to celebrate. [...] I have a different tale to tell, but it is relevant and true, about a young man who volunteered at the age of 15. He was full of optimism and a great patriot, and went to war believing that it was going to lead to dignity, glory and honour. It did not; it led to disease, degradation, bitterness and early death at the age of 43.

That young man was a machine gunner. The belief on both sides was that machine gunners were never taken prisoner, because they were responsible for killing hundreds and possibly thousands of people. He found himself in a machine gun nest—a foxhole—gravely injured, and the others were dead. That was in April 1918, when the Germans broke through on the Messines ridge. His life was saved. He heard a German patrol coming to him and took out his rosary beads to pray, waiting for the bullet to blow out his brains. He could not get out of the hole, where he was identified as a machine gunner because the machine gun was lying across his body. However, he was not shot. The German officer, and two others, carried him across no man’s land and his life was saved. He was ever grateful to the Germans for the rest of his life.

He went there to serve the cause of his country that he loved and to kill the Hun, who were slaughtering Belgian babies. Other small nations had a different army experience at the time. He returned to civilian life and found that he was on a pension. He could not do what he called a man’s job ever again. In the mid-1930s, his pitiful pension was reduced by an ungrateful Government, who changed the reason for his pension from saying that his ill health was attributed to his war wound to saying that it was aggravated by it, although he went in as a perfectly fit 15-year-old.

The man was my father.

Bendor has very kindly invited me, as the guy who discovered them, to say something about Mary Beale’s two sketches of the painter’s son Bartholomew c.1660, unveiled in Tate Britain’s BP Walk Through British Art. I am honoured, tho Tabitha Barber’s brilliant online catalogue entry could not be bettered.

They hang with Tate Britain’s other Beale, Young woman in profile, perhaps the studio assistant Keaty Trioche c.1681. These pieces that Beale painted for herself and her family have in Bendor’s words a ‘casual familiarity not often seen in seventeenth century English portraiture.’ Tate Britain visitors described them to me as ‘everyday,’ ‘real’ and ‘modern’. 

How influential were they though? They were largely unknown outside the Beales’ circle and dispersed after their deaths. In the next gallery William Hogarth’s Heads of Six of the Artist’s Servants c.1750 – 55 has the same unpretentious humanity. Hogarth would have seen a set of Beale’s private work. His friend and patron Bishop Benjamin Hoadly married Mary Beale’s star pupil, Hogarth’s friend, the portraitist Sarah Curtis. Sarah brought nine Beales with her including a self-portrait, a portrait of Charles Beale Sr and ‘Two Children in a Landscape’, perhaps Bartholomew and Charles Jr.

Did Beale make an impression on Hogarth? If more of his work c.1740 was like the Stuart-retro Portrait of the Actor James Quin 1739 (Tate Britain) you’d say yes, quite probably. It’s not that simple. But there is an affinity of mood. The ‘sobriety, energy, directness and sincerity’ that Mark Hallet sees in Hogarth’s mature portraits describes Mary Beale’s as well. Perhaps his visits to the Hoadlys nourished him when he was trying to create a distinctly ‘English’ portraiture. Their godly good cheer must have had a flavour of Charles and Mary Beale’s household, and Sarah Hoadly would have preserved Beale’s memory as well as her painting.

1. Patronage, Acquisition and Display: Contextualising the Art Collections of Longford Castle during the Long Eighteenth Century

Birkbeck College, University of London (School of Arts)/The National Gallery, London

2. Sir Philip Hendy (1900-1980) director and scholar in Leeds and London 1934-1967: the acquisition and display of art and curatorial practices in ages of austerity

University of Leeds/The National Gallery, London

While Hendy was responsible for some major acquisitions over his long tenure (1946-1967), what’s striking is how many mistakes he made.

Letting David’s Napoleon in his Study go in favour of purchasing this Tiepolo sketch: he seems to have had a particular interest in 18thc Italian works.

Acquiring the only wrong “Rembrandt” from Chatsworth.

And a Giorgione which is substantially not original (putting it politely), even if it could definitely be attributed to him.

Then there’s the Delacroix which never was, and, similarly, the Pontormo  and the Cavallino which turned out, quite quickly, not to be so.

Also a Batoni which, in near forty years of visiting the National Gallery, has never been exhibited in the main rooms.

And there was the controversies over the Renoir dancers at £163,000 in 1961 and the early version of Rubens’ Judgement – when, again, his great Daniel in the Lions’ Den went to Washington

On the plus side, there’s the Burlington Cartoon and getting extra money out of HM Treasury – at a time when was possible to do so – to help buy the Uccello St George*, Monet’s large Waterlilies and Cezanne’s Large Bathers.

11. e. Trustees were presented with the principles Information has been exempted under Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act 20003.

1.d. Trustees endorsed the principles of Tate’s long-term Vision document, and recommended developments following discussion at the Away Day. They discussed the importance of finding a clear and outward-facing expression of purpose, demonstrating relevance and the importance of Tate as an institution that takes risks on behalf of society.

9.c. They [the Trustees] were informed of the news from the DCMS that in the budget there was likely to be a further cut of 1% in 2012/13 and 2013/14 in addition to the previously announced cuts of 1% and 2% in those years.

British Art at Tate and the National Gallery – a draft Memorandum of Understanding.

6.11 Photographic Material 

a. Trustees were informed of changes to the credit of specific papers in Tate’s archive.

An interesting development which might well be as a result of the “secret” MoU between Tate and the National Gallery which was completely redacted in the Tate’s recent Trustee Minutes.

“The Hill Above Harlech” c 1917 by William Nicholson ( a wonderful artist in my opinion ) has just gone on show in Room 46 of the National Gallery ( the Degas Room ) as a Tate loan.  I’m not sure what this means in terms of the NG “date cut off” or as a modern British loan—but it is interesting!

According to Mr Ellis, art thieves are career criminals. While most crime is undertaken by opportunists, an art thief needs to know the market and be professional. “They find the Achilles heel in security,” he says. After all, you can’t “take a painting off the wall and flog it in the pub”.

The idea of masterpieces being stolen to order for a criminal mastermind, typified by James Bond villain Dr No displaying Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington, is entirely fictional, says Mr Ellis. In his 20 years as an art crime investigator he has never come across a “Mr Big”.

But is a Picasso stolen from a wealthy collector of any concern beyond the victim of the crime when most people have more pressing concerns? Mr Ellis believes it is. “Art is being used as a currency to fund criminality, arms, drugs and terrorism,” he says. “It’s far more important than just losing cultural property. If you stop art crime you are stopping the funding of arms and drugs”.