Previous Posts: articles 2018

Hands are ­notoriously difficult to get right, even for the finest Old Masters (stand up, Peter Lely, I’m thinking of you), but Barocci emerges as something of a digital specialist.

Im sorry what planet are you on? The example of hands painted by Lely are awful, no knuckle structure, white and lacking tone, elongated and curved in all the places they should be straight and straight in all the places their should be curved. Resultantly they look like flat, fat sausages squeezed out of a casing machine by someone attempting to do so for the first time. 

I have several family members who are doctors who always berate my interest in art because they believe so much of it to be anatomically inaccurate and unbelieveable, I try to argue against this for all the reasons that I hope you would agree with with but im not going to go into it here.. However the example you give..just wont stand up and you dont need a medical degree to see that.

sorry first and last AHN rant over!

If I may Leave  aside the previous contributor's enquiry regarding the cosmological location of Mr Grosvenor for one moment, it is patent nonsense to say that the hands are badly executed according to shape and anatomical correctness - Doctor or no doctors..

Look a little harder and you might see the marvellous subtlety of his skill. He is painting the hands of a gentlewoman who never did manual work, and most probably cultivated a fashionably desirable skin tone of lucid paleness, hence the milky lightness. As with his predecessor Van Dyke, the slight suggestion of lucidity and purply vein under the skin is also beautifully hinted at if you look hard enough (not that difficult, surely?). Not being a cadaverous spinster of seventy, or a bruising farmer's wife used to a loamy prehensile grip year in year out, her hands therefore tend towards a slight plumpy sub-cutaneous sheath over the knuckles, surely a common physical trait the world over amongst folk still near enough to youth? The index finger of the top hand is the correct length in relation to the metacarpal area, and if you measure the whole length of the hand it is approximately the same as the distance from chin to brow, which is as it should be in anatomical study. I can see no 'straight lines'.. indeed, there are no straight lines in the human form.. every painter worth his salt in the academic tradition of the 17th C would have been taught this anyway. As for the curves... well they are Eve's blessing after all...

Your "contender for comment of the year" addendum inspired me to take a closer look at the hands, and I have to agree with him.

The index finger of the right (upper) hand has an unnatural curve to it and is spread an uncomfortable distance from the middle finger, the middle finger looks unnaturally stiff - as though it had been broken and badly set so that the middle joint can't be bent - and the third and fourth look deformed, as does the joint at the base of the little finger. And where is the thumb? There is nothing to indicate that the the sitter has one.

The left (lower) hand looks much more 'loosely' painted (studio assistant?), so its defects are in a way less glaring, but the angle of the wrist makes it look sprained and feels uncomfortable to even look at, the index finger is clumsy, the middle finger again looks deformed, and the poor sitter  is apparently missing both her third and fourth fingers as well as her other thumb.

Perhaps, since you run a hands-on* blog,  you could share some close-ups of some of Van Dyke's (and others') hands for comparison purposes.

*groan - so you won't have to :)

Increasingly museums want to be more explicit about improving people’s lives and strengthening communities. In the UK this has led to two different approaches emerging: social justice and wellbeing. [...]

Social justice museums and wellbeing museums aim to do pretty much the same things and achieve the same ends. They use their assets of collections, buildings, knowledge and networks to help create a fairer society, in which people live better lives. But there are some philosophical differences.

Social justice focuses on areas such as human rights, inequality and poverty. It believes the state should strongly intervene in communities. With origins on the left, it is perhaps red.

Wellbeing prioritises concepts such as self-help, local organisation and relationships. It stresses the role of civil society organisations, such as charities and community groups, to complement the work of the state, whose main role is to help local communities flourish so they can find their own solutions. It has its recent origins, at least in part, in the green movement.

Personally, I may be colour-blind, but I can’t see very much difference between these versions of red and green. Yet in my work on Museums 2020 I sense rumbling disagreements between the groups, with social justice people thinking wellbeing people are a bit wet and naïve about the realities of disadvantaged people’s lives. Conversely, wellbeing people think social justice people are a bit too top down and doctrinaire.

It’s worth being cautious about restoration when it comes to auction rooms. The leading auction rooms, particularly as they develop their rapidly growing private sales (dealing) business, go to considerable lengths to advise their clients that buying at auction is so easy that they shouldn’t feel the need to seek any independent advice before buying. They are wrong.

In the Daily Telegraph in October, Orlando Rock, deputy chairman of Christie’s, offered up a detailed guide on how to buy art at auction. It is all very reassuring to know that, despite any misgivings you may have had about the art world, it is in fact a nice cosy place and the leading auctions are a ‘transparent and fair platform’ that offer goods at fair prices with the ‘stamp of long-term quality and value’. And that buying art at auction is ‘accessible, affordable, personal and fun’. I would add ‘nerve-racking, opaque, confusing and often expensive’.

Rock does mention that condition is an issue and suggests that, if you feel the need, you can ask for a condition report from one of the in-house experts. However, these should not be relied on. A good restorer can make a painting that is in bad condition look fine to all but the trained eye. They can also be very good at disguising their work. The old expression that you do not find out what you have bought in the art world until you try to sell it is never truer than when it comes to condition.

If experienced dealers always feel the need to seek the advice of an independent third-party restorer before they buy, then that should tell private clients what they should be doing. Restorers are mainly generous with their time and often have to attend the major sales on behalf of clients. By seeking such advice, collectors will save themselves plenty of expensive mistakes, and it is sound practice to take the time to get to know a good restorer and make him part of your team.

[...] art-historical books and publications. Here, what is striking is not so much the cliché but the inventiveness of the language used, the reckless extensions and elaborations of words, the adverbial decor, the nifty transformation of noun into verb, the plain sentence got up in grotesque academic drag. We have recently witnessed ‘the narrativisation of subversion’ and ‘the spatiality of viewership’, among other portly neologisms. And the more the argument concerns art’s inclusiveness, the collective memory or the demotic gaze, the more the language seems to retract into hermetic exclusivity. Critical and historical writing must in some way be shaped by an intended audience. Style – whether it be complex or succinct, expository or descriptive – is a writer’s personal expression inflected by a sense of that audience. In a good deal of recent art history, felicitous style is rarely a consideration, but the imagined reader is there, drawn from a restricted circle of fellow academics (who will, incidentally, nod knowingly at the fashionable names quoted and cited that give the writer a spurious authority). Articles are couched in a careerist language to be peer read for renewal of tenure. An initial distrust of plain English turns into a positive fear of it, in case of reprisals.

How many of them are out there I wonder? Sitting on comfy stipends in faculties and institutions around the globe, writing impenetrably cryptic books, papers, monographs and theses that nobody but their identical  peers or hapless undergraduates will read?

Since Sotheby's said it must continue to eat into its commission to woo top sellers, the auction house said it plans recoup some losses by charging buyers more for winning artwork. For the first time in five years, Sotheby's said it would raise its buyer's premium from March 15; an artwork's winning bidder will be asked to pay a fee of 25% of the work's gavel price up to $100,000, plus an additional 20% of its price up to $2 million, plus 12% of anything above that.

Great "high flier" article in "Comment" (just saw it this morning). You raise a great point, which anyone who has taught at Sotheby's Institute (I have occasionally) will have noted. Most of the students come from wealthy backgrounds. If a master's in art business becomes the entry requirement in the art world, it is being restricted to a very narrow segment of society.

 I too would take the Spitfire.

This is a beautiful, thrilling and intelligent exhibition, its exegeses so self-evident that the turbid and turgid, over-explanatory and occasionally foolish catalogue is virtually superfluous. For a less formidable introduction library users should borrow Nicholas Turner’s Federico Barocci, 2000 (ISBN 2-84576-025-6) though the reproductions are appalling; I commend, too, David Ekserdjian’s Correggio, 1997 (ISBN 0-300-07299-6), for some recollection of his work is essential if one is to understand Barocci. Having seen the exhibition, the visitor might find it fruitful to look at early works by Rubens, and paintings by Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and other painters from Bologna.

All I can do is plead with you to go. This is the exhibition of the year, and the way things are going we won’t see anything like it for a long time to come.