Previous Posts: articles 2018
Breaking the silence over fakes
April 18 2012
Picture: TAN
There's a very interesting piece in The Art Newspaper by Jack Flam, the author of the Robert Motherwell catalogue raisonne, on the subject of fakes and expertise. There have been a number of fake Motherwells on the market lately, and he has direct experience of the difficulties experts face when threatened by lawsuits. It creates, he says, a dangerous atmosphere of silence. His solution?
Two somewhat different ways of remedying this situation should be considered. The first would be to establish a properly constituted authority—similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority—with limited immunity from lawsuits, which would oversee the authentication of works by modern US artists. Doing so would rectify the topsy-turvy relationship between scholars, dealers and collectors, and would keep the authors of catalogues raisonnés and the foundations that often support them from being cowed into silence. Information would circulate more freely and experts would be able to pass judgments on works without getting entangled in complicated legal messes.
Another approach would be to pass legislation in the US that would give experts and scholars the kind of legal protection they now generally receive in the UK, where statements about authenticity may be protected as “opinions” and thereby be generally exempt from lawsuits.
Option 2 sounds most sensible to me. Or, better still, move to London! I find it strange that in the freedom of speech-loving US, where libel laws are more relaxed than in the UK, scholars are restricted from giving their view at all.
'Portrait of a Man'
April 17 2012
Picture: PCF/Your Paintings/Nottingham University
Last week I mentioned the forthcoming conference (25th April) at the National Gallery on the proposed new Oil Painting Expert Network (OPEN). OPEN will help under-resourced museums and galleries identify any mystery paintings in their collections, and provide advice on cataloguing and conservation. Thanks to those of who have signed up to come along - we now have over a hundred people attending. If you want to come you can still do so, and it's free. Here's the day's agenda.
I'll be giving a short talk at the conference, and will reveal a few hidden sleepers in our public collections. Here's a very simple example of how wider access to images can help with attributions. This portrait, in the collection of Nottingham University, is called 'English School', and described as 'A Portrait of a Gentleman with a Black Sash'. Most of you (I hope!) will know straight away who he is, and recognise the significance of the blue sash. Find the answer below, by clicking 'read on'.
Update - a reader writes:
Glad to hear of the OPEN initiative - it seems eminently sensible - but hasn't something along these lines been going on for the last few years. The National Inventory Research Project has published its results on the NICE website: sadly some (any?) of their conclusions are not reflected in the PCF data on Our Paintings. Lack of joined-up thinking?
There are more fundamental problems of course; aside from attributions [...] the searches in the online databases of the Royal Collection, the National Trust and Your Paintings simply do not work as they should and make interrogation a frustrating exercise.
As far as I can see, there are major probems with data-field definitions, resulting in inconsistencies.
None of this would have happened if the major collections in this country, and the PCF, had taken a joint approach to database development and cataloguing. The databases at the BM and the V&A are excellent - despite the sheer range of types of object they have to deal with: in the case of the former one can even search on previous owners, which is great for provenance research of course.
If these organisations have been able to come up with something workable, why haven't the others? It appears there was nothing to stop the development of a national database covering everything, not just paintings.
I agree that the BM and V&A sites are excellent, and models for everyone to follow. I know that the PCF and the Royal Collection have developments ongoing to improve searchability. Hopefully, it won't be too long before all these sites work well together. And if a body like OPEN gets up and running, we can nail as many incorrect and dubious attributions as possible.
When the PCF began, it was interested in merely photographing and recording the paintings in the national collection, taking the view that to try and do that alongside any attributional exercise would be impossibly time consuming. I think this was the right approach.
New National Gallery channel
April 17 2012
Picture: National Gallery
Feast your eyes on this excellent new addition to the National Gallery's website. Perfect for lunchbreaks (after you've read AHN...).
The condition of Titian
April 17 2012
Picture: Hermitage
In The Telegraph, Mark Hudson wonders if Titian's Flight into Egypt really deserves to be billed as 'Titian's First Masterpiece', as the National Gallery is billing it in their new exhibition:
The background is extremely accomplished, with its line of autumnal trees, receding towards craggy mountains reminiscent of Titian’s native Dolomites, surrounded by sunlit clouds. The group of shepherds, conversing in the shadows in the middle distance, are pure Giorgione in their tenebrous moodiness.
The figures in the foreground, however — Mary on her donkey led by a tousle-headed youth, with a rather stiff-looking Joseph bringing up the rear — progress in a flat frieze-like fashion, the figures rendered in laboured imitation of Bellini. While they have a certain naive charm, the faces are generic, the drapery cumbersome. The magisterial assurance of that extraordinary early portrait The Man with a Blue Sleeve (here called Portrait of Girolamo Barbarigo) is utterly absent. Indeed, it is impossible to believe the two works are separated by only two years, as the exhibition claims.
Background and foreground fail to marry to the degree you wonder if more than one artist was involved, or if the two parts were painted in different periods. Vasari suggests that Titian may have been assisted by a group of German artists — experts in landscape — to whom he gave “hospitality”. But if Titian was still a teenage assistant to Bellini, as the exhibition implies, it’s difficult to imagine him putting anyone up, and the treatment isn’t in any case particularly Germanic.
The answer to this disparity in the quality of the painting is of course its condition. The picture has been substantially abraded in the past in many areas. The figures in the foreground are in parts liberally covered in over-paint to cover-up these losses. So of course it appears at first glance as if some parts are better painted than others. In fact, some parts are simply better preserved than others.
Sadly, so few critics, and increasingly academics, understand condition issues these days. (We saw this most recently in the reviews of the Leonardo exhibition.) And Titian, perhaps more than any other painter , suffers from condition issues. There are two reasons for this. First, he was such a sophisticated artist, and used new techniques and delicate glazes that are particularly sensitive to over-cleaning. And secondly, he has been one of the most sought-after and collected artists of all time, and consequently collectors, dealers and museums have 'cleaned' Titians at a higher rate than works by other artists. This is especially evident in the National Gallery's new exhibition, where two putative Titians on loan from the Hermitage are in the most ruinous state, thanks largely to the Hermitage's old and hopelessly misguided policy of transferring all their panel paintings onto canvas.
I hesitate to say this, but probably The Flight Into Egypt worked more harmoniously (as a whole image) before it was cleaned, when the uniform effect of layers of old varnish knocked back the underlying imperfections caused by loss and abrasion. For example, look at the bottom of the cleaned painting above, and the way the figures seem to float rather uneasily. But in the painting before conservation, there was a subtler degree of shadowing at the lower edge of the canvas, which rooted the figures more effectively in the foreground.
Guarding "The Scream"
April 16 2012
Picture: Guardian
In The Guardian, Zoe Williams describes going to see Munch's The Scream, on view at Sotheby's before its sale in New York on May 2nd:
Approaching the work has the kind of ceremony you'd imagine they'd put on for the pope, or a dictator. You go through the security, the queue control, past the Miró, and there you are, in a totally dark room, this iconic creation glowing from the darkness as if possessed by a mystical force. [...]
Simon Shaw, Sotheby's head of impressionist and modern art, remarks, "It's so well known, so familiar; everybody's seen the pastiches, the parodies, the toys, the cartoons. You might think it would lose its power, but it doesn't. When you look at the Mona Lisa, it looks exactly as you'd expect it to look. This is quite different."
This is not Katherine Parr
April 16 2012
Picture: PCF/Lambeth Palace
I was pelased to see on a trawl through the Public Catalogue Foundation's website, Your Paintings, that the above portrait has been properly re-identified as Katherine of Aragon. For decades, the picture has wrongly been called Katherine Parr, and continues to crop up in the literature as her.
'Some like it Hot', c.1792
April 16 2012
Picture: Philip Mould
As featured in The Sunday Times yesterday, here's a homegrown discovery for you: the only oil portrait of the Chevalier D'Eon, one of the most famous transvestites in history. He was also a spy, diplomat, soldier and author. This portrait was sold in a minor auction in the USA, where it was catalogued as 'Portrait of a Woman with a Feather in Her Hat'. The giveaway is the medal of the Order of St Louis, which was awarded to D'Eon by Louis XV for his services as a spy in the Secret de Roi. the picture was long thought to be by Gilbert Stuart, but is in fact by the English artist Thomas Stewart.
You can read more about the picture and its history by clicking 'Read on'.
Update: story covered by The Daily Telegraph here.
Our Van Dyck discovery at the Ashmolean
April 16 2012
Picture: BG
Yesterday, I went to the Ashmolean Museum to see the Portrait of a Young Girl by Van Dyck we recently discovered. Forgive me if I tell you I felt burstingly proud standing in front of her - from auction house sleeper to museum wall in 18 months. It is there on loan from a private collector. Curiously, she looked far better at the Ashmolean than she ever did at our gallery. It may have been the red walls, or the lighting. Or the good company!
Me on Top Gear!
April 16 2012
Picture: BBC
Or at least, the same website as Top Gear - doubtless the closest I'll ever get. For any readers in Asia, you can see the first series of Fake or Fortune on BBC Asia Knowledge starting May 4th.
Google Art Project and Connoisseurship
April 13 2012
Picture: Capitoline Museum
Over at Art History Today, David Packwood has a must-read post on some of the art historical issues thrown up by the laudable Google Art Project. Money quote:
Maybe all this highlights the need for professional art historians and specialists to consult with the GAP on issues of attribution and connoisseurship, though overall it’s thumbs up for a very useful resource.
As a Poussin scholar, David (rightly) rejects the above picture (Camillus and the Schoolmaster of Falerii), which is attributed to Poussin in full by the Capitoline Museum in Rome. David says:
I’ve never seen this version before- and now unfortunately I have. I have no idea why the Capitoline have labelled this picture - here seen in situ - a Poussin. Like many of his paintings of the late 1630s, Poussin creates a firm, relief-like picture that usually unfolds from left to right. The colours, the poses, especially the foppish gait of Camillus have absolutely nothing to do with Poussin, or indeed the 1630s. Instead of thrashing the disgraced schoolmaster out of the village, the children seem to be leading him out to a picnic. Compare this with one of Poussin’s stern versions shown here.
I should advise the Capitoline to look for their painter in early 18th century France, a rococo painter with classical pretensions - but no means of putting them into practice. Let us not look but pass on.
I find the possibilities opened up by projects such as GAP and the Public Catalogue Foundation incredibly exciting. Are we not far off the day when the world's art historians (amateur and professional alike) can collectively have access to, and make judgements on, the planet's entire publicly-owned collection of art? Imagine; A Catalogue Raisonne of the World! (And in this world, there is no such thing as copyright.)
Update - a reader writes:
Having spent an incredibly frustrating day searching in vain for the location of Italian paintings (Roman galleries are so far topping my list of appalling/non existent online catalogues) the following sounds ideal:
"Are we not far off the day when the world's art historians (amateur and professional alike) can collectively have access to, and make judgements on, the planet's entire publicly-owned collection of art? Imagine; A Catalogue Raisonne of the World!"
Possibly the worst thing for art historians is knowing an image is in a collection and yet not being able to find it - or any information about it! Next step - make it compulsory for all works in private collections to be photographed and catalogued online so that scholars can learn from them? Definitely dreaming...
Hear hear to that. While of course nobody can compel private owners to put their paintings online, it is quite likely that images exist of most of them somewhere. For example, more and more auction catalogues are going online, and then there are image libraries such as the Witt, which may one day be online. The equivalent in Holland, the RKD, is increasingly being put online. And of course, almost all the pictures that we have handled here at Philip Mould are online for anyone to see over at our archive site, Historical Portraits.
Another reader writes:
Over at 3PP (which I discovered many thanks to your blog) there is a piece on the Google project (GAP) and Canal Educatif a la Demand (CED) that further endorses the Google / decent image access revolution taking place (three cheers). On checking just one favourite site and artist, Yale Center / Girtin) I must warn you that what is on the Google site might not be exactly what appears on the collection's own site: a work labelled 'Thomas Girtin' on the site Google is, when checking the collections own site details (link on GAP details page fortunately), given as 'imitator of...' and another (also 'Thomas Girtin' on Google) as 'follower of...' So it would be just as well to double-check information, however good the image.
Where they found that Cezanne
April 13 2012
Pictures: Art Daily
Sealed in the roof of a car. Art Daily has more fascinating images here.
Update: The picture's authenticity has been confirmed.
Update II - a reader writes:
A propos finding that Cézanne – that is exactly where the central character in “Headhunters” – the gripping and enjoyable new Swedish film, hid the art he stole. A case of Life imitating Art?
Test your connoisseurship
April 13 2012
Here's a little glimpse of a painting sent in by a reader. Can you guess the artist and title? No prizes alas, but global adulation from me and fellow AHN-ers.
Update: And the winner is... tweeter Claudia Dias; who very quickly got the correct answer, which you can find by clicking 'Read on'.
<<enormous round of applause>>
....
<</enormous round of applause.>
Art history futures - Thomas Kinkade's legend begins?
April 13 2012
Picture: Telegraph/Alamay
Perhaps inevitably, the death of the phenomenally successful US artist Thomas Kinkade has prompted some tales about his private life. Here's the most curious, from The Telegraph:
He had also been seen urinating in public — in the lift of a Las Vegas hotel and on a model of Winnie the Pooh in Disneyland. “This one’s for you, Walt,” Kinkade was reported to have said.
Curiously, while Kinkade denied accusations of financial impropriety, he did not deny the allegations about his personal conduct. Alluding to his practice of urinating out of doors, he explained that he had grown up “in the country” where it was commonplace. When asked about the Las Vegas lift incident, he admitted that “there may have been some ritual territory marking going on”.
Now I don't much rate Kinkade's paintings, and I suspect many of you don't either. But he was probably the most collected artist, on a numerical basis, in the world. In 500 years time, will art historians look upon his personal quirks in much the same way as we do with, say Caravaggio? Who knows?
The stories of Kinkade relieving himself in odd places reminds me of the time I was working at Buckingham Palace, during a summer opening. One day a visitor started urinating in the marble corridor, down the back of a Canova sculpture. He was entirely unfazed by the commotion he caused, saying something along the lines of 'when you've got to go...' I was detailed to escort him from the Palace, and to make sure he didn't try anything else in the gardens. As far as I know, he wasn't an artist.
That person who takes ages in the airplane toilet
April 13 2012
Picture: Laughing Squid
Here she is, artist Nina Katchadourian. And while she was in there, she used up all the loo roll to make Flemish and Dutch-style portrait poses.
Update: a reader has sent me this, with more photos. She really must have been in there for hours.
The price of reproductions
April 12 2012
Picture: British Museum
Here at Philip Mould, we're putting together our new catalogue. One of the pictures we'll include is a late Titian portrait of an admiral, which was admired by Van Dyck in Italy. He did a little drawing of it, above (bottom right hand corner), which is now in the British Museum. To reproduce this image at no more than a 1/4 page, the BM will charge us £330 plus vat. Now I know we're in the trade, and that we should certainly pay for reproductions. But in a world where many museums are liberalising their copyright policies, and even allowing free reproductions, isn't £330 plus vat a bit steep?
Update - a lively debate on this. A reader writes:
Re: The cost of reproductions, I can't help but think that it's a case of 'the biter bit' - it seems a lot of money to me, not being 'in the business', but no doubt this cost will be added in to the unimaginable asking price of your Titian - which your gallery website is far too coy to reveal, as far as I can see. This is usual 'market practice' I suppose but you are often concerned about knowing costs and if a public gallery were to purchase the picture no doubt you would insist on us knowing how much it (we) paid (?).
As you admit commercial dealers cannot complain being charged market rates, ie. what the market will pay. However, for museums to charge other museums or students and similar, such fees is nigh well criminal.
Our insurers don't like us putting prices on our website, or in our window, for fairly obvious reasons. Obviously, if the picture was sold to a public institution, one would expect that institution to state what they paid for it.
Another reader writes:
You wrote on 12th April about the BM charging for the reproduction of an image of a work in their collection which was out of copyright. It is understandable that institutions should try to raise more money at a time when public grants are under pressure. However, the BM and similar institutions are publically funded and have been supported by donations and bequests from people who expected their gifts to be freely available to everyone.
You and your readers may recall the case of Derrick Coetzee, a Wikipedia contributor, who was threatened with legal action by the National Portrait Gallery for uploading images to Wikipedia.
Personally, I think that if a picture is in a public collection, then its image right is too. Non-commercial use should therefore be free. There should be a charge for commercial use; the question is, how high should it be?
Update II - a reader writes:
It seems to me you and your readers are being unfair to the British Museum in this matter, not perhaps in questioning the sum of 330 pounds plus VAT, but in implying that the BM charges scholars and students. It does not. For reproduction in a scholarly publication, of an image that already exists (i.e. no new photography is required) the British Museum provides images within 48 hours, by email, free of charge. As a publicly funded institution they do indeed make their gifts freely available to those furthering research and knowledge, as one of your readers demands.
Those making money from the use of their images - whether publishers of art books or dealers - should of course pay a fair rate. It is not for me to say what that fair rate is. But I do feel that those of us, like myself, who have benefited in the past and who continue to benefit from the British Museum's extremely benign permissions to reproduce in a scholarly context should make clear that they are a model to be imitated. Attacking the innocent is not the way to improve the situation. Rather we should support them and praise them.
For the record, I certainly wasn't attacking the BM, nor suggesting they shouldn't charge dealers like me, merely discussing the specific cost of a reproduction. Regular readers will know that I am bursting with praise for any institution that offers free images for scholarly use. I should also add that for scholarly publications, we here at Philip Mould are happy to provide images free of use from our own image archive.
There is obviously some confusion about the BM's pricing policy, for when we reproduced the same Van Dyck drawing for a loan exhibition catalogue, we were charged, albeit a reduced rate. And another reader writes:
I have a book chapter... coming out soon which cost me about £400 for three images, only half-size. I refused to get one image from the BM as they obviously were charging way over the top. By contrast I have another essay with two NG pics in press- but they considerately waived the fee.
Here is the BM's image use policy.
Stolen Cezanne recovered?
April 12 2012
Picture: Buhrle Collection
Cezanne's Boy with Long Arms Boy in a Red Waistcoat, stolen in 2008 from the Buhrle Collection in Zurich, has apparently been recovered in Serbia, that hotbed of art crime. The picture was stolen with a Van Gogh, a Monet and a Degas. The Van Gogh and the Monet were found soon afterwards, but the Degas Ludovic Lepic and his Daughters (below) is still missing.
Apologies...
April 12 2012
...for the technical glitches earlier today.
Selling 'The Painter of Light'
April 12 2012
Picture: Thomas Kinkade
The death of US artist Thomas Kinkade has shed an interesting light on the industry that can spring up around a successful artist these days. Lovers of fine art might not like Kinkade's work, best described as John Atkinson Grimshaw on acid, but there's no denying his phenomenal popularity in the US. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kathleen Pender looks at the impact Kinkade's death has had on sales:
Works by Thomas Kinkade have been flying off gallery walls since the artist and marketer extraordinaire died unexpectedly at age 54 in his Los Gatos home Friday.
Nathan Ross, part-owner of the Original Thomas Kinkade Gallery in Kinkade's hometown of Placerville (El Dorado County), has not had time to count how many canvas reproductions have sold since Friday, but "I don't think I am exaggerating if I said 200," he says. On a normal weekend, he sells two or three. [...]
The spike in sales marks a sharp turnaround for the Kinkade brand, which has been in decline since its heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Gallery owners attribute the falloff to the economy, a decline in the collectibles market and oversaturation - the Kinkade name has been on everything from calendars and figurines to La-Z-Boy furniture and a housing development in Vallejo.
Allen Michaan, president of Michaan's Auctions in Alameda, says it's not unusual to see collectors snapping up works after an artist dies. "That is a typical reaction. People think when an artist dies, his work goes up in value."
Michaan would not be surprised to see Kinkade's originals, which are rarely on the market, appreciate but says, "I don't think there is any lasting value" in his reproductions. "A rule of thumb: Anything that is manufactured and marketed as a collectible really isn't."
Kinkades start at $750 for a 12-by-18, standard-edition, signed (by auto-pen) and numbered canvas reproduction and go up from there, with a bewildering array of options.
Each image has several editions - such as standard, artist proof, gallery proof, publisher proof, Renaissance, studio proof and master. Each edition has a successively smaller number of prints and a higher price tag. Higher-end versions also have a hand signature instead of a machine-generated one and additional highlighting (applied by trained artists) that add texture and depth.
In the Bay Area, the most popular Kinkades include Disney themes and scenes of San Francisco, Napa Valley, Carmel and the coast, Perata says. "The ones that are more religion-based sell amazing in the Bible Belt."
The state of art history today
April 11 2012
A learned reader hits the nail on the head:
Although the 1980s literary studies revolution in the history of art has unlocked lots of excellent new approaches to the study of British painting, I often think also about the detrimental effects. So much core archival research has been left undone in the decades since then, as it was unfashionable and unlikely to attract funding. So many generations of students have grown up not caring much about sources. I think it is interesting to contrast British art studies with, say, the history of the early modern state, where scholars are deeply rooted in their materials. Even fashionable ones, such as Steve Pincus. We art historians don't have even the most basic of research tools, such as biographical dictionaries and catalogue raisonnes, to work with. I think it is quite embarrassing, actually, that the field of study takes itself so seriously, yet much of it is essentially floundering around in the dark.
Titanic-mania
April 11 2012
Picture: Leeds Museum & Galleries
Here, courtesy of the Public Catalogue Foundation, is Frederick Cayley Robinson's The Outward Bound. Painted in 1912, it shows the Titanic leaving Southampton, and was commissioned after the sinking to commemorate the loss of Wallace Hartley, the violinist who was leader of the band that sank with the ship.
