Previous Posts: entries 2023
John Wonnacott
August 11 2022
Picture: Charles Saumarez Smith
Charles Saumarez Smith has written a new book on the British artist John Wonnacott. It's coming out on 5th September, but you can pre-order it here. On ArtUK Charles has written an article about Wonnacott's work, with illustrations of those in public collections.
Horniman Museum to return Benin Bronzes
August 8 2022
Picture: The Sunday Times
The Horniman Museum in London has decided to formally transfer ownership of a collection of 72 items looted from Benin in 1897 to the Nigerian government. Here's the Horniman's statement. In The Sunday Times, Liam Kelly calls this a 'watershed moment', and I think that's right. This is a really significant decision, and the processes which have led to it must mean this is the first of many.
A few thoughts on why. First, the decision to transfer has been made following a request from Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM). In days past, one of the hand-wringing responses from UK museums was, 'well we'd love to give them back, but we've had no formal request'. That's now changed.
Second, the Horniman is a central government funded museum. So this decision has been - or will be - signed off by the Department for Culture, DCMS. There have been some instances of UK museums returning (or pledging to return, since only two items have actually gone back so far) some of their Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, but these have been regional museums, not sponsored directly by DCMS. In The Sunday Times, the arts minister, Lord Parkinson, is quoted as not necessarily approving the Horniman decision, but making it clear decisions like this are up to museums:
Lord Parkinson, the arts minister, said that it was not for government to “tell the museums what the right or wrong decision is” and that any restitution claims should be made “case by case, item by item
Parkinson added: “There are at least two sides to every argument. The job of historians and museums is to faithfully represent all of those sides and let people make their decisions. A lot of people are concerned that we rush to moral judgment about the past.
It's bad history if a nation sweeps things under the carpet and forgets them. It’s also bad history if you create new myths of wickedness and sins of the past. We have to confront the facts and learn lessons from them.
Third, this all builds pressure on the British Museum, which not only has the UK's largest collection of Benin Bronzes, but also of course many other high profile restitutable items, such as the Parthenon Marbles. For the British Museum, however (and some other major institutions such as the V&A) there are separate bars of statute preventing restitution. Recently, as mentioned on AHN, senior museum leaders like the V&A's Tristram Hunt have not only called for these laws to be reviewed, but have effectively taken the decision into their own hands with cleverly crafted 'long term loans'. While Lord Parkinson says 'the case has not yet been made' to change the law, it is hard to see how the now government-endorsed policy of 'this is up to individual museums' can be countered by 'well not that museum'.
In other words, it seems to me that the Horniman Museum and Lord Parkinson have made, or are about to make, a significant contribution to a change in UK government policy. Remember, this is a government which usually loses no time to strike a position of 'Britain first' in any culture war. So the fact that we are seeing these developments now probably does, however obliquely, herald a turning point.
One final technical point, I suspect the export licensing system, including the Waverley Criteria (by which the government judges whether cultural items can be permanently exported from the UK) will have to be amended in light of this new policy. Because all of these items will require export licences, and at the moment it's hard to see how items like the Benin Bronzes can be said not to satisfy the Waverley Criteria for blocking export. They are:
Is the item closely connected with our history and national life?
Is it of outstanding aesthetic importance?
Is it of outstanding significance for the study of some particular branch of art, learning or history?
If there is a change in the export licence system, we really will know that a nationwide restitution of these objects is finally going to happen.
"Diary of an Art Historian" (ctd.)
August 8 2022
Picture: BG
My latest Diary column for The Art Newspaper has gone online, here.
Van Gogh's pots
August 8 2022
Picture: Van Gogh Huis
A new exhibition at the Vincent Van Gogh Huis has assembled as many objects as possible from his pictures, and through them has made a number of interesting discoveries:
Never before have all the everyday objects depicted by Vincent been accurately identified. Recent research by art historian Alexandra van Dongen, curator of historical design at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, shows that a precise identification of Vincent's objects can sometimes shed new light on the possible place of manufacture and the dating of his work. For example, a very simple earthenware saucepan that appears on Still life with potatoes comes from the southern French pottery center Valuaties. It was previously assumed that Vincent painted this still life in Nuenen, but identification of the saucepan and technical research into the linen canvas indicate that Paris 1886 was the place and time of its manufacture.
More here.
"Reframing Picton"
August 5 2022
The National Museum of Wales has hit on a novel way to display its portrait of Thomas Picton, a major figure in Welsh history who was also a nasty b*stard. As Steven Morris in The Guardian reports:
After months of consultation and anguished debate, the portrait has been hung not in the museum’s grand Faces of Wales gallery but in a modest side room, and is contained in a specially built travel case made of softwood and scraps of plywood, with a strut covering the figure’s bulging groin area.
It is surrounded by vivid descriptions of Picton’s brutal treatment of the people of Trinidad when he was governor at the turn of the 19th century, including the torture of Luisa Calderón, a 14-year-old girl of mixed heritage.
{/box}
More here.
The Parthenon Marbles (ctd.)
August 4 2022
Picture: BG
There was an interesting story in The Sunday Times signalling a major shift in the British Museum's approach to the Parthenon Marbles. Jonathan Williams, the BM's Deputy Director, has offered "a positive Parthenon partnership” with the Acropolis Museum in Greece. They're not clear what the partnership would involve - whether long term loans, transferring ownership (unlikely), or some sort of fudge (more likely) - but the language is I think important. It not only comes after George Osborne (Chair of the BM) saying 'there's a deal to be done' (as I wrote earlier on AHN), but because Williams himself had recently ruled out any substantial change in policy. So now we have trustees and executives at the BM both signalling they're open to a change in policy. This comes on the back of the UK government also (although more gently) signalling a change in policy, in saying the issue of the Marbles is entirely up to the British Museum, not ministers. Which, in this age of Tories never losing a chance to intervene in the culture wars, is surprising, and I think in itself revealing.
Women artists worth 10% of men.
August 4 2022
In The Guardian, Mary Ann Sieghart reports that for every one pound a work by a male artist makes, a female artist makes just 10p. The figure comes from research by Helen Gorrill, for a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Recalculating Art. The Guardian story has this opinion - in my view completely correct - from the director of Tate Modern, Frances Morris:
“Women artists have fared very poorly because there’s been an unconscious collusion between the marketplace, art history and the institutions. Everybody lacks confidence, everybody’s looking for confirmation. So there’s been a sort of confirmational history, which you could call the canon. And, of course, convention and history were framed by patriarchy."
The Radio 4 documentary goes out on 11th August at 11.30. More here.
The NPGs 'Kit-Kats'
July 27 2022
Video: NPG
The National Portrait Gallery are restoring their 'Kit-Kat' portraits, the series of late 17th and early 18th century paintings by Sir Godfrey Kneller. There's a nice couple of videos about it, the first above, and the second here.
Hirst burns art
July 27 2022
News today that Damien Hirst will something something money burn spot paintings something something NFTs money something money money money. If you're still interested, more here.
Did Neanderthals paint too?
July 25 2022
Picture: New Scientist
In The New Scientist, Michael Marshall looks at the problems of trying to date cave art, and wonders - if we've got it wrong - whether earlier hominids might not have been artists too. It turns out that not only is something of the technical analysis of cave art questionable (carbon dating, and so on) but our cave art connoisseurship might have been out too:
If a lot of the given ages are spurious, our ideas about who made the art are also spurious.
A succession of hominins have lived in western Europe and might theoretically have made the region’s cave art. Modern humans are the most recent inhabitants, having permanently settled in the region around 45,000 years ago after emerging from Africa. Before that, Europe and western Asia were inhabited by Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years. And before that, other hominins like Homo antecessor were around.
If all the cave art in western Europe is less than 30,000 years old, it could only have been made by our species. But in the cases where researchers like Pike have managed to get reliable dates, that hasn’t always proved true.
Back in 2012, Pike’s team showed that a red dot on the wall of El Castillo cave in northern Spain was at least 40,800 years old. That was old enough to be borderline: Neanderthals were still around, so they could have made the dot.
The benefits of copying
July 25 2022
Picture: The Times
The Times' new chief art critic, Laura Freeman, has written about the benefits of not just looking at art, but copying it, even with a simple pencil drawing. She went to meet one of the National Gallery's art handlers, Tom Hemming, who sketches the Gallery's masterpieces in his lunch break:
Copying used to be the foundation stone of an artistic education. Pupils copied busts, plaster casts and the works of men who came before. The 20th century put a premium on creativity, self-expression and originality and the copy fell from favour. Derivative, slavish, stale? Not necessarily. The National Gallery’s exhibition Picasso Ingres: Face to Face shows just how inventive a copy can be. Picasso’s Woman with a Book is an outrageous reworking of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Madame Moitessier. (“Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal,” said the quip master Picasso.)
Hemming describes the teaching at Byam Shaw as “quite . . . conceptual”. Many graduates from art school in the last 50 years would say the same. What then does copying give an artist? “Basic drawing skills,” Hemming says, “but probably even more, looking. It’s quite hard to sit for long enough in front of a painting to look as intently as you’d want to look to gain everything you’d want to gain without working through it. Drawing allows you to do that.”
More here.
Art & Protest (ctd.)
July 25 2022
Video: news.co.au
Further to my post about activists gluing themselves to museum masterpieces, a Uffizi employee demonstrates a no nonsense approach, by just pulling them off.
Waldemar on the 'immersive experience'
July 25 2022
Picture: Timeout
For the Sunday Times, the Great Waldemar has been to visit some of these new 'immersive art experiences' popping up everywhere. He tried the Van Gogh one, and didn't like it:
Reader, I fled. It was all so ghastly. Having read some positive reactions to Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, which has been “wowing visitors” in a trendier corner of London, I hot-footed over to Shoreditch expecting an improvement. Foolish me. It was worse.
The reproductions of the paintings were even less in focus. The son et lumière was even more tremulously pointless. And the storylines peddled in the surrounding info-niches even less reliable, notably the sudden claim, announced in a film, that Van Gogh was colour blind! This ludicrous suggestion, presented as a recently discovered fact, will leave hundreds of bemused visitors believing yet more porkies about poor old Vincent.
A-Level art history at the Courtauld
July 22 2022
Picture: Courtauld
The Courtauld Institute has launched a new course to support the charity Art History Link Up, which runs Art History A-Level courses for state school children. Only 8 state schools currently teach an art history course. Now, AHLU participants will be able to study at the Courtauld, and all for free. There will also be an online access too. More here, and apply here.
Carabinieri seize Artemisia
July 21 2022
Picture: Carabinieri TP
The Italian Carabinieri's specialist art unit, the TPC, have seized a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which they say was exported illegally from Italy. The painting, Caritas Romana, or Cimon and Pero, was due to be sold at auction at Dorotheum in Vienna, and had been exported in 2019. It has now been returned to Italy, pending further investigation, after the intervention of Eurojust.
The Carabinieri allege the export process was illegal, through the owners 'concealing the painting's identity and value' on the export application. The owners, however, have issued a statement denying this.
The painting has long been known as a Gentileschi (in 2018 it was even on a poster for an exhibition in Italy, which gained media attention after it was censored by Facebook). So this cannot be a case of a newly discovered Artemisia (as so many are), where the attribution was only discovered after it had been exported. On the face of it, getting a well known painting by Artemisia exported by pretending it isn't by Artemisia, and then swiftly selling it publicly at auction as an Artemisia in neighbouring Austria sounds like a spectacularly dim thing to do. It appears from what I can glean in the Italian press that the information deemed incorrect on the export application was instead about its value, put at €200k, and provenance.
In The Art Newspaper, the Gentileschi scholar Ricardo Lattuada places blame on the export licensing office in Genoa, which issued the paperwork in 2019:
Lattuada argues that it is the state's fault for allowing the work to leave the country in the first place, arguing that the culture ministry's underfunding and inexpertise is partly responsible. “The Carabinieri TPC does fine work in recovering works like these,” Lattuada said. “But it would be better if such huge errors did not happen in the first place.”
Anyone who has ever tried to export a painting from Italy will know what a lengthy process it is; pictures have to be physically inspected by a qualified expert (I believe a local museum curator) before a licence is granted. Meanwhile, La Repubblica has a story wondering if another Artemisia sold at Dorotheum, Lucrezia, was also incorrectly exported from Italy.
Update - a reader writes:
The Artemisia thing is slightly strange.
Although it has been exhibited in Italy, it is by no means universally accepted [as by Gentileschi], and has not I think been exhibited anywhere else. It is clearly painted in Naples where you get this collaboration/copying going on, especially with Palumbo, Cavallino. To me it looks quite Cavallino like.
So given that I’m not sure the €200k figure is too far wrong, as a possible/maybe.
A £400k Picasso, or a worthless copy?
July 21 2022
Video: Euronews
Police in Ibiza have questioned a man on suspicion of smuggling in a Picasso sketch without paying import Vat. Spanish import Vat for artworks is 10%, and the sketch was being brought in from Switzerland, so outside the EU. Apparently, the man had two receipts in his luggage, one for the value as a Picasso, of about CHF450k, the other as a copy, for CHF1,500. Which suggests he hadn't really thought it through...
More here.
National Gallery - the Game
July 21 2022
Picture: NG
The National Gallery has launched a computer game, on Roblox, designed to appeal to younger children. There are various museum-y quests you have to accomplish, as you try and rise through the ranks 'from Apprentice to High Keeper'. Says the NG:
Developed through the pandemic, the project utilised Roblox as a platform for developing ideas with the children remotely. As children played and shared, the platform became an integral way for the project team to enable children to enjoy the National Gallery’s content off-site - taking the magic of immersive storytelling beyond the Gallery’s walls and into children’s homes.
Lawrence Chiles, Head of Digital at the National Gallery, London, says: ‘We are always looking to extend the opportunity to take the Gallery’s collection to audiences in new and innovative ways. The fact that they can learn about the paintings on a platform they find familiar, fun and engaging is great to see. It takes the Keeper of Paintings into a World of Keepers environment that has huge potential and it’s lovely to now have the characters in both a playful app in the Gallery and within Roblox. The way the project has evolved with the children through the design process is also really special.’
I tried to have a go, but my ancient computer can't cope with Roblox. (AHN readers who've noticed the website has looked the same since its inception, over a decade ago, will not be surprised.) But it looks like fun. Download it here.
Also, it will hopefully further demonstrate that to engage with audiences online, museums need to stop trying to control use of their images.
Art & protest (ctd.)
July 21 2022
Picture: VRT.be
The new vogue for activists to glue themselves to priceless artworks has spread from Britain. In Bruges, a man glued himself to Van Eyck's in the Groeninge Museum, or rather, to the safety glass in front of the painting. So happily no damage was done. However, it wasn't his first target; according to VRT, he'd tried to enter the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk in Bruges, home to Michelangelo's Madonna and Child. But fortunately the police were waiting for him; glue on the marble might have been quite serious. We've seen a number of these incidents so far, including at the National Gallery in London. Let's hope the craze passes before some serious damage is done.
New Gainsborough for Munich's Alte Pinakothek
July 19 2022
Picture: SDZ
The Alte Pinakothek in Munich has acquired a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough; Thomas Hibbert (1744-1819) was painted in 1785. It is a pair to the museum's portrait of Hibbert's wife, Sophia, which it has owned since the 1970s. The portrait of Thomas was until recently on loan to Gainsborough's House Museum in Suffolk. The purchase price was €1.8m.
The acquisition is notable given the sitter's association with the slave trade. Hibbert was an enthusiastic slave owner and slave trader, as was his much of his family: the Hibberts were one of the leading slave factorage businesses in Jamaica, selling slaves as they were disembarked from slave ships. They were also, not surprisingly, leading critics of the abolitionist movement. I can't imagine a UK institution wanting to acquire a likeness of a sitter so involved with slavery, not least spending €1.8m on one. More here in the Sud Deutsche Zeitung.
Modigliani x-ray discovery
July 18 2022
Video: AP
Hot on the heels of the National Gallery of Scotland's Van Gogh x-ray discovery, the Hecht Museum in Israel has found three Modigliani portraits beneath the surface of his painting Nude with a Hat. More here.
