Previous Posts: articles 2018

Commendably, the Prado has now released a significant deal of technical information, free to access online. Previously such details would be reserved for gallery technical bulletins or journal publications. It is a wonderful step forward for transparent reporting of findings that this information was made available relatively quickly after the public announcement a few weeks ago. Those particularly interested in the technical details are directed towards the video presentation by Ana González Mozo, researcher in the Museum’s Technical Documentation Section and Almudena Sánchez Martín, a restorer at the Prado.

An 11th-hour injunction has brought a dramatic halt to an auction by Christie's in London of a treasure trove of hundreds of artefacts relating to Waterloo, Wellington and the Crimea.

Heirs of the 1st Lord Raglan, who commanded troops at the Charge of the Light Brigade, are embroiled in a bitter battle over the ownership of military memorabilia. Legal action by one member of the family has cancelled plans by another to sell more than 300 objects, including arms and armour, furniture and works of art, tomorrow.

The treasures, which had been estimated to fetch £750,000, were to have been sold on behalf of the executors of Fitzroy John Somerset, 5th Lord Raglan, great-great-grandson of the 1st Baron (1788-1855), whose military career was at the right hand of Britain's greatest soldier, the first Duke of Wellington, for almost 40 years, during the Peninsular War, at Waterloo, and as private secretary, through to his command of British forces in the Crimean War.

There was a line in the Home section of The Sunday Times yesterday that Van Gogh’s house had been bought unseen by a Chinese buyer.

For more than 20 years pretty much everything Damien Hirst he has made, done or said has received media attention. But attention is different from respect, and if you ask the man in the street he’ll tell you that Hirst became a billionaire by cynically exploiting our collective greed and stupidity.

For reasons that I don’t understand, he insists on presenting himself as a fraud who is somehow pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. And that’s a pity, because in Tate Modern’s full-scale retrospective he comes across as a serious - if wildly uneven - artist.

We emerge from this strange, flawed, but hugely ambitious show with a sense of Hirst as complex and troubled personality. As an artist his work is indeed difficult to take - not because it is dumb, but because no one in his right mind wants to think about the painful subjects it deals with.

Over the last nine years the PCF’s team of researchers has had unparalleled access to the nation’s oil painting collection. This has provided valuable insights into the state of painting catalogue records and the guardianship of these paintings. Unsurprisingly, it has found that the state of records varies greatly between collections and that there are significant gaps in knowledge about paintings’ artists, subjects and execution dates.

There are a few reasons for this. Only a fraction of the participating collections have staff with fine art expertise or other relevant knowledge. This is because many of the institutions involved in the project are small museums with limited resources or non-art specialisms and others are not museums at all. Furthermore, many of the museums – both large and small – have lost fine art expertise due to financial cutbacks.

The PCF has also found that those collections without expertise often do not know where to turn for help. 

Re: the new Bonhams website, they seem to have got rid of their facility to search through past lots, although, weirdly, you can still search past auction titles. For example, I am interested in the landscape artist Francis Towne, so a search for "Towne" in past auctions brings up one result: a 2005 'Collections from Town & Country Houses' sale in Edinburgh that has, er, nothing to do with Towne.

There has been a posting about the new website at Art History News.

http://www.arthistorynews.com/articles/1214_Bonhams_new_website.

Can I suggest that you correct the comment on the site by emailing something on the lines of 

"The reader of your posting about Bonhams' new website clearly didn't try very hard.

http://www.bonhams.com/search/?q=%22Francis%20Town%22&indexes=lot

You can search for any lot sold by Bonhams since 2003 and yes, you can still see the images of these lots.

http://www.bonhams.com/search/?q=%22Sinbad%20the%20salilor%22&indexes=lot

The “discovery” is in fact nothing of the kind. The painting in Woburn Abbey is included in every single catalogue I know of the paintings of Rembrandt, from John Smith in 1836 to Leonard Slatkes in 1992. Only one colleague, Christian Tümpel, ever assigned it to a pupil of Rembrandt’s rather than the master. When the painting was exhibited in 1950 in Edinburgh, Jan van Gelder, one of the greatest art historians and connoisseurs of the 20th century, wrote this about it: “... always wrongly placed within the chronology of Rembrandt’s work is the portrait of an Old Jew. After cleaning we find it signed and dated 1643, not 1633 (see Bredius 185). There can be no doubt about its authenticity.” (J.G. van Gelder, “The Rembrandt exhibition at Edinburgh,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 92, nr. 572, November 1950, p. 328.) Although this may be phrased a bit defensively, I know of no printed record of doubt concerning the authenticity of the painting.

I think you should name and shame!

I do tho sometimes feel sorry for auctioneers and think I could well do the same in their place.

Painting spots was very dull. There's not a lot you can say about them. The canvases would arrive; they'd be stretched and pinned. Damien would specify spot size and we would mark them up and draw them. Then we'd have a massive delivery of household paints, which we'd mix into smaller pots of whatever colours we needed. We'd have hundreds of colours: no two were ever the same. A six-foot square canvas with spots four inches apart would take about a week. Every painting was sold.

It was quite simple really. With the spot paintings: it was, just a formula. Damian didn't need to have much input. Most of the time, there were two of us, although it would depend on how quickly he wanted them churned out. We were just the small fry. I came out of Goldsmiths [University] thinking I can't do anything, so I did these. Although they were all hand-painted, meaning each one is imperfect, there is no individual quality to the painting.

It remains the largest art heist in history, a brazen robbery in which two thieves disguised as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, disabled two guards and stole masterworks worth more than half a billion dollars.

The 1990 robbery and the recovery of the paintings have puzzled investigators for more than two decades.

Now federal authorities appear to be pinning some hope of solving the mystery on Robert Gentile, a 75-year-old reputed mobster who is jailed in a drug case.

The FBI believes Gentile “had some involvement in connection with stolen property” related to the art heist, said assistant U.S. attorney John Durham in Hartford federal court. Durham said FBI agents have had unproductive discussions with Gentile about the theft, but didn’t elaborate on his allegations.

Gentile’s attorney, A. Ryan McGuigan, called the notion preposterous. He said Gentile has lived with his wife in the same small house in a Hartford suburb for 50 years and has no idea what prosecutors are talking about.

“He doesn’t know anything about art, he’s never been to an art gallery in his life,” McGuigan said in an interview. He “couldn’t tell a Rembrandt from an Elvis painting.”

The Tate should revert to its original nomenclature: The National Gallery of British Art (used in the press at its inception, if not officially). As Sir Henry Tate merely endowed the building and not the foundation (indeed for most of its life the acquisition budget came from the Chantrey bequest), the Millbank site should be called the Tate building, whilst the institution could be 'The National Gallery of British Art', a name which would underline the institutions supposed central purpose.

Incidentally, have you seen the heart-breaking plans for ruining the central rotunda, by inserting a staircase? Whilst the general idea of reopening the first floor galleries is an excellent one, the destruction of Sidney Smith's wonderful Guarini-esque  dome seems extremely short-sighted. The plan will spoil the flow of the 1890s building into the wonderful Duveen galleries (which I agree with your excellent suggestion, should be hung with paintings). The space under the dome is actually quite small and its destruction will, in more enlightened times when the visitor numbers recover, lead to serious congestion.

I thought "what?", then "Ahhh, it's an April Fool thingy" and then almost as quickly the corrosive doubt...

I tried to book a telephone bid [...] too, and they didnt reply to me either. They sometimes do reply, and sometimes sell things reasonably. But isnt it a copy after a print in the National Gallery of Scotland, so maybe not a bargain?

Doubt I'll be the first but I reckon the view is Paris from Montmartre, 1886...by a former resident of Stockwell.

And at www.zazzle.com you can order a T-shirt and a Bumper sticker of this.

For nearly six decades a Cézanne watercolor depicting Paulin Paulet, a gardener on the artist’s family estate near Aix-en-Provence, was familiar to scholars only as a black-and-white photograph. No one knew if the actual work, a study for Cézanne’s celebrated “Card Players” paintings, still existed and, if it did, who owned it.

But the watercolor recently surfaced in the home of a Dallas collector and is now heading to auction at Christie’s in New York on May 1, officials at the company said on Monday. It is estimated to sell for $15 million to $20 million.

Cézanne’s images of workers on his family farm — pipe-smoking men sitting around a table, their expressions dour, their dress drab, absorbed in a game of cards — are among his most recognizable works. Some are pictured alone; others are shown in groups of two or more. Paulet is the only one of the figures to appear in all five paintings in the “Card Players” series.