Previous Posts: articles 2018
'Achtung, Spitfeuer!'
September 15 2011
Picture: Imperial War Museum
Did you know that today is 'Battle of Britain Day'? It marks the end of Hitler's attempt to destroy the Royal Air Force in 1940, as a precursor to invasion.
Above is Paul Nash's Battle of Britain, one of the more important works of art from the Second World War. The picture is one of favourite war pictures, and fits perfectly the description given by Kenneth Clarke, when describing the purpose of keeping an artistic record between 1939-45:
What did it look like? they will ask in 1981, and no amount of description or documentation will answer them. Nor will big, formal compositions like the battle pictures which hang in palaces; and even photographs, which tell us so much, will leave out the colour and peculiar feeling of events in these extraordinary years. Only the artist with his heightened powers of perception can recognise which elements in a scene can be pickled for posterity in the magical essence of style.
The single picture exhibition
September 15 2011
In these straitened times, museums are increasingly mounting single picture exhibitions. And why not? If you're a charging museum, borrowing one blockbuster masterpiece is a good way of drawing in the crowds - and extra revenue. Judith H. Dobrzynski examines the phenomenon in The Art Newspaper:
Creative use of smaller budgets for exhibitions is one driving force behind this trend. The directors we spoke to said that loan fees, design, insurance and transport costs for a single work are minuscule compared to a big thematic or an in-depth show for a single artist. Marketing tends to be the main expense, leaving museums in control of spending as much or as little as their budget allows.
Directors cite other virtues of single-work shows: they encourage people to really look, rather than move on after a few seconds to the next thing on the gallery walls. “We use them to teach how to experience a great work of art and see why it is a masterpiece,” said Brian Ferriso, the director of the Portland Art Museum. In 2009, when Ferriso arranged to bring Raphael’s La Velata, 1514-15, to Oregon from the Palatine Gallery, “people sat for ten to 20 minutes looking, and often they’d come back after going through our Renaissance galleries,” he said. Last year Portland borrowed Thomas Moran’s vast canvas Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1990, from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
How well do you know your Degas?
September 15 2011
Picture: RMN (Musee d'Orsay)
Take the Degas quiz here.
Prince Albert on display
September 15 2011
No, not that, the man, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Queen Victoria's husband. A new exhibition dedicated to the life of the Prince Consort has opened in Germany.
Dictator Art - General Franco edition
September 14 2011
Did you know that Franco could paint? I didn't. Mark Hudson in The Telegraph gives an over-view of his pictures, and tries, for the sake of an alluring headline, to compare his art with Hitler's.
Hitler was a competent, if mediocre semi-professional who had hoped for a career in art, Franco a naive amateur, who took to painting as therapy.
But both choose subjects associated with well-established genres exemplifying an order, with which they identify, but which remains comfortingly outside their own experience.
Hitler’s pallid watercolours favoured grandiose buildings, pictured in an ultra-conservative style in which their massive forms remain constrained and distant. Franco’s art is at its most distinctive in hunting scenes, a genre associated with philistine masculinity – art for grandees of the past who didn’t like art.
Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition comes to London
September 14 2011
Picture: Ferens Art Gallery, 'Princes Dock, Hull', 1887.
John Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight opens at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London on 19th September, and closes on 15th January. See a slideshow of selected works here.
Museums & Economic Impact
September 14 2011
UK museums take note - the Met Museum in New York has issued a zippy press release detailing how much revenue they help generate for the City.
For example, their four most recent exhibitions, including the Alexander McQueen show:
'...generated $908 million in spending by regional, national, and international tourists to New York, according to a visitor survey the Museum released today. Using the industry standard for calculating tax revenue impact, the study found that the direct tax benefit to the City and State from out-of-town visitors to the Museum totaled some $90.8 million.'
A similar set of figures after the National Gallery's forthcoming Leonardo exhibition would help make the case for arts funding in the UK.
de Kooning retrospective in New York
September 14 2011
A major new exhibition on the career of Willem de Kooning opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 18th Sept. The New York Times has interviewed the curator of the show, John Elderfield (above), who has made wide use of photographs of de Kooning at work. Discussing his later career, when de Kooning was suffering from the onset of dementia, he says:
“People later talked about how de Kooning was not in control of what he was doing, but it was clear from these photographs that he was,” Mr. Elderfield said. “The kind of continuous revision that happened to these pictures has very much de Kooning’s signature to it.”
These late, often haunting canvases — sparer than the sensual and colorfully theatrical work he created when he was at the height of his powers — have often been debated, because it is hard to know how much he painted himself and how much was done by studio assistants.
“When you think of artists today like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, who have armies of assistants virtually creating their work, does it really matter?” Mr. Elderfield said. “I don’t think it does. In de Kooning’s case, we know his hand is in all his work.”
New Gainsborough landscape exhibition in Bath
September 14 2011
Picture: National Gallery of Scotland, Thomas Gainsborough, 'Landscape with a Distant Village'.
Here's something to look forward to - an exhibition of Gainsborough's landscapes. The exhibition opens at the Holborne Museum in Bath on 24th September and closes on 22nd January. It will be, says the Holburne, 'the first exhibition in fifty years devoted solely to his landscape paintings and drawings'.
The exhibition will then move to Compton Verney from 11th February to 10th June 2012. It has been sponsored by the British art dealer Lowell Libson.
'Degas and the Ballet'
September 13 2011
Picture: Royal Academy
The Royal Academy's new Degas exhibition, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, opens on 17th September. You can see an audio slideshow preview here (it's well worth a click).
Ahead of the exhibition, The Telegraph has a nice selection of Degas' quotes on dance, including:
"They call me the painter of dancers.They don't understand that the dancer has been for me a pretext for painting pretty fabrics and for rendering movement."
"My women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations ... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole."
New Rembrandt exhibition in US
September 13 2011
Picture: Rembrandt and workshop (?), 'Portrait of a Man reading', oil on canvas, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
An exhibition of Rembrandts in American public and private collections will open on 30th October at the North Carolina Museum of Art (closes 22nd Jan). The show will then move to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
Rembrandt in America will be the largest collection of Rembrandt paintings ever presented in a US exhibition. Full details here.
The art market and the double-dip
September 13 2011
Image: Google Finance. Graph: Sotheby's share price over the last 6 months.
The Art Newspaper has an interesting piece on how the art market might fare if the impending 'double-dip' recession is a bad 'un. TAN also relates that Sotheby's has cut back investment in Europe in favour of expansion in... you guessed it - China.
Fears are growing about the potential impact of this summer’s renewed global economic turmoil on the art market. The 2008 financial crisis sharply hit art sales across all sectors, but the market bounced back quicker than many others, particularly for blue-chip works. At issue now are two diverging premises: that art is a luxury brand, as sensitive to stock markets as high-end fashion and first-class flights (this is the view of those looking at the art market from the outside); or that it represents a safe investment, sought after in troubled times much like gold and the Swiss franc (the view of those with more vested interests).
The evidence from my little piece of the art market is that a double-dip won't severely disrupt things. If most people have survived the last three years reasonably well, then you'd presume they are good enough at their business to see out another downturn. It's the triple-dip I'm worried about...
'One of the best American painters ever, period.'
September 13 2011
Picture: jsonline
The Milwaukee Art Museum has acquired the above portrait, Alice Hooper, c.1763, by John Singleton Copley for $3.5m. Full details here.
Art & Politics: Churchill's bust back in Oval Office?
September 13 2011
Mitt Romney, the sanest of the Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential elections, has declared that if he won, he would put Winston Churchill's bust back in the Oval Office. The bust, by Jacob Epstein, was lent to the Bush administration by the UK Government after 9/11 - but returned by Barack Obama in 2008. Romney said:
You know, one of -- one of my heroes was a man who had an extraordinary turn of phrase. He once said about us, he said, you know, you can count on the Americans to get things right after they've exhausted all the alternatives. And now and then we've made a couple of mistakes. We're quite a nation. And this man, Winston Churchill, used to have his bust in the Oval Office. And if I'm president of the United States, it'll be there again.
Epstein's Churchill is not a nice image - in fact, it's positively ghoulish. I wasn't that surprised that Obama, a man of taste, sent it back. If the UK had sent one of Oscar Nemon's infinitely superior busts of Churchill, might it not have been thrown out?
New portrait commissioned by the NPG
September 12 2011
Can you guess who it is? Click 'Read on' to see the caption...
The Berlin Jewish Museum
September 12 2011
Picture: Centrum Judaicum
Here's one of history's cruel ironies: Berlin's first Jewish Museum opened in January 1933, one week before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The museum's founder, Karl Schwarz, fled to Israel just months later, and though the museum staggered on until 1938, all its contents were seized by the Nazis.
Now, a new exhibition in Berlin's Centrum Judaicum, charts the reassembling of the museum's collection (open until December 30th). Catherine Hickley has the full details in Bloomberg here.
Wanted £64 million
September 12 2011
Picture: BBC
If you were building a house, wouldn't you make sure you had enough money to finish it, before you started? Building for the new extension at Tate Modern (above) is to be put on hold, because only 70% of the £215m necessary has been raised. From the BBC:
"We will raise this money," said Lord Browne, Chairman of the Tate Trustees.
He said that that work on the 11-storey structure was continuing "in bits and pieces... to make sure that we are sufficiently prudent".
"If we do not raise another penny, we can stop and wait," Lord Browne explained.
Friday amusement - Double-dip edition
September 9 2011
Picture: Cartoon Stock
Have you seen this roundel?
September 9 2011
Picture: Watts Gallery
The Watts Gallery is trying to track down this 15th Century della Robbia roundel of the Virgin and Child. It used to belong to George Frederic Watts, seated - but vanished after 1938, after Watts' wife died.
Poussin goes to the Kimbell
September 9 2011
Picture: Christie's
Nicolas Poussin's Sacrament of the Ordination, which was offered by the Duke of Rutland at Christie's last year, will now go on display at the Kimbell Museum in Texas. Carol Vogel in the New York Times has the story of what happened after it failed to sell:
What few people realized was that the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth was quietly keeping tabs on the painting. “We were watching it closely,” said Eric M. Lee, the Kimbell’s director. “But December was not the right time for us to buy it.”
When it didn’t sell, he added, he “felt it was too important a painting to pass up.” So Mr. Lee approached the museum’s trustees “to see if we could afford it.”
This summer the institution finally made a deal, paying $24.3 million — Christie’s low estimate — without the auction house’s steep buyer’s premium. Robert Holden, a fine-art agent based in London, and George Wachter, head of Sotheby’s old master painting department worldwide, represented the Kimbell.
I wonder how long it will take for the Duke's four remaining Sacrament paintings to end up at the Kimbell...
