Pourbus in Vienna
July 9 2018
Picture: KHM
I do like the portraiture of Frans Pourbus the Younger. At the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, there's a new exhibition reuniting a pair of his early works, a husband and wife. More here.
New Michaelina Wautier painting discovered
July 9 2018
Picture: via Codart
It's all go for the 17th Century artist Michaelina Wautiers at the moment; there's the first exhibition ever staged on her work in Antwerp (till 2nd September), and now the curator of the show, Katlijne Van der Stighelen, has identified a new work by her (above). More here.
'British Old Masters are booming'
July 9 2018
Video: Sotheby's
Here's a punch video from Sotheby's, urging you to consign your British Old Masters for sale. The category is 'booming', they say, and you wouldn't be surprised to hear that I agree. Though as ever with the Old Master market there are pockets that remain resolutely unfashionable.
In The Art Newspaper, Anna Brady has good analysis of the recent London Old Master sales, with Sotheby's edging Christie's in both overall totals as well as selling rate (Sotheby's sale covered here, and Christie's here). It was interesting to see a number of pictures make serious price rises on even recent sales, such as a portrait by Caracci, which made £4.3m, after selling in New York in 2005 for £1.8m.
But there was disappointment at Christie's in not being able to sell Ruben's portrait of his daughter Clara Serena, despite doing an excellent job marketing it. I thought the picture would fly. So treat all my market views with great caution. But then regular readers know to treat everything I say with great caution...
I'll write more about the Clara Serena soon.
Victoria Beckham does Old Masters
July 9 2018
Video: Sotheby's
I've been meaning to mention this excellent Sotheby's video, about an exhibition of Old Masters in Victoria Beckham's shop in London. Bravo Posh, and bravo Sotheby's.
Artemesia heads for the National Gallery
July 9 2018
Video: Drouot
Remember the newly discovered Artemesia Gentileschi self-portrait that surfaced at auction in Paris last year? It has been acquired by the National Gallery in London (as first reported by one French art historian back in April). It's an excellent purchase by the National Gallery, and a coup to get such an important painting out of France, given their rather draconian export laws.
But I'm puzzled by the reported price. The picture was sold at auction for €2.3m (including fees) in December. But the National Gallery announced last week that they have paid £3.6m. That's quite a steep mark up.
Normally, the argument in such circumstances goes like this; museums don't have access to the sort of ready cash needed to buy something at short notice at auction. But is that the case with the National Gallery? The French auctioneers did a good job in publicising the picture, so the National Gallery would certainly have been aware of it at the time of the sale.
As I reported first in my diary piece in The Art Newspaper, the National Gallery has reserves of well over £200m. They could quite easily have bid for the painting at auction themselves, should they have wished to. The main donor towards the £3.6m cost in this case is the American Friends of the National Gallery (for whom the latest accounts showed a balance of $180m), which contributed $3.7m - more than the cost of the painting at auction. Therefore, a quick phone call to the US could have amassed the necessary funds to bid for the picture at auction.
So what justification is there for the £1.6m mark up? Very often, dealers buy a dirty looking picture like this, and then re-present it post-restoration. They take the risk that beneath all the dirt and old varnish, there's a picture in fine condition. But in this case that doesn't apply, as the National Gallery have bought the picture un-cleaned. The only other justification I can think of is the strict French export laws I referred to earlier. Perhaps the National Gallery didn't want to be faced with buying a painting which might then never be allowed to leave France, and so was happy to leave bidding on the painting to someone else who was prepared to carry the risk of being left with it in France.
But £1.6m might be seen by some as rather a lot to pay a dealer for taking that risk. I think the National Gallery needs to explain their reasoning here. On the one hand they tell us that they need to raise every penny then can via things like image fees. But on the other, they're prepared to spray the cash about when securing acquisitions in this less than efficient way.
Update - I asked the National Gallery for a statement, and they have sent me the below:
“The National Gallery was not given notice of the painting's appearance at auction in Paris, so we were only able to consider its acquisition once it had been purchased there by dealers. Though the price paid by the Gallery is considerably higher than that for which it sold in Paris, we sought independent views on what a fair market price would be prior to making its purchase (as is normal practice).
“The painting did not feature in a major London or New York sale with one of the main auction houses, where the National Gallery might have been made aware of the painting prior to the sale. Unlike these auction houses, who publish catalogues weeks if not months in advance of their major sales, auctions through Drouot in Paris are made up of lots of different dealers/consignors, and it is typical to only have a few days’ notice of what is going into a sale (the commissaire priseur’s video on the painting was only put online on 7th December 2017 – just a fortnight before the actual sale). Therefore the National Gallery only became aware of the painting just 2-3 days before the auction, but did not see it at first hand. After the sale we discovered the identity of the buyer and arranged to see the painting as soon as possible thereafter, shortly after the picture's arrival in London.”
I'm afraid this statement is rather unsatisfactory. The National Gallery, as a centre of international scholarship on Old Master paintings, should not take the view that it is up to auction houses to 'give them notice' of major pictures coming up for sale. The National Gallery should make it their business to become aware of major re-discoveries like an Artemisia Gentileschi self-portrait, especially when she is an artist who is high up on their acquisition wish-list.
Furthermore, this was a picture whose emergence was in fact widely publicised. As the National Gallery statement says, the video above may have been put online two weeks before the sale on 7th December. But a catalogue entry was online on 23rd November, and a press release was sent out on 22nd November, long before the sale on 19th December. That's a month's notice, which is entirely standard practive for an Old Master sale. The French art historian Didier Rykner wrote about the painting on La Tribune de l'Art on 6th December.
Furthermore, I'm also told that at the time of the sale in Paris, the picture already had an export licence. So there was no danger in the painting not being able to leave France, as I had suggested above.
Now, why does this matter? The National Gallery has acquired an excellent painting. It means that two previously unknown Artemisia self-portraits are now on public display, one at the Wadsworth Atheneum in the US, and the other in London. (The painting at the Wadsworth Atheneum was acquired after it failed to sell at Christie's in New York at an estimate of $3m-$5m in 2014.) Of course, there's no guarantee that had the National Gallery bid directly for the picture in Paris that they would have been successful. I'm also not for one moment criticising the dealers involved. They did what dealers do - and they ultimately helped the UK acquire this important work.
But I think it's important that the National Gallery is able to demonstrate that it is a proper steward of public - and donor's - money. Justifying paying £1.6m more for a painting just because they didn't see it in time is not impressive. The National Gallery may say that it don't have the staff or resources to monitor every auction around the world. But even a fraction of that £1.6m would pay for a member of staff to properly scan auction catalogues, and make sure the Gallery is aware of what's coming up for sale. Cheaper still would be an auction email alert service for the words 'Artemisia Gentileschi'. Or ask me to be their auction searcher; I'd be delighted do it gratis.
The National Gallery is probably the only major gallery in the UK which has the means to go out and buy major pictures these days. But they need to be much better at it. Because if they get better at it, they'll be able to buy more pictures.
Update II - for an example of a British museum able to buy works at auction at short notice, see here for Derby Museum's bold buy of two Wright of Derby's in New York, at only ten days notice, for $293,000.
Update III - the estimate at the time of the Drouot sale was €300,000-€400,000. Potential bargain territory.
Update IV - a reader writes:
I think that you are absolutely right about the necessity of the National Gallery's keeping tabs on the movement of important paintings on the art market, and I would also think that it is imperative that the respective curators keep up, via social media (often where knowledge of these things first surfaces), with what is happening.
In respect of this, I am continually aghast that the IT dept of the NG is in charge of Twitter; it seems to me that each curator should have a shift doing the official tweets from the Gallery. The Getty, for instance, and the Liverpool Museums, to mention two at random, will engage in conversations with one on Twitter, go away and look things up if asked, and generally have an interesting and fruitful dialogue. The NG, on the other hand, has a Twitter account (and Facebook) which is run by people who know nothing about art; so they just tweet/ post what they're given, and don't engage.
The point about social media is a good one, not least because it makes it so easy to find out about things like the impending Gentileschi sale. The news of the upcoming Gentileschi auction in Paris was widely shared on social media, including a post by the account @RembrandtsRoom (7,700 followers) on 13th November, which in turn was re-Tweeted by me. The original post was 'liked' by National Gallery staff members. So although the NG statement says the Gallery only became aware of the sale 2-3 days prior to the auction, some Gallery staff members knew of it long before.
Update V - another reader writes:
Indeed, the NG goofed. How much was the goof is uncertain, but the amount was material. Given that another bidder paid 2.3 million Euros for the picture, the NG would have had to bid up somewhat to get it, perhaps another 200 K or so. That still leaves a large hole for the NG to explain. Their error isn't the price that they paid, which is a respectable price for a rare picture by AG who is now increasingly important, it is that they overlooked the sale.
But on Twitter, the former National Gallery director Charles Saumarez Smith says:
I think this is a bit unfair: it's not always possible to know what is going through a French saleroom, see and study the painting, and get approval for a high bid at short notice. It's a great acquisition using private funds, not public.
I don't necessarily disagree with Charles; all I'm suggesting here is that the National Gallery should aspire to be more alert to what is coming up at auction, so that it can acquire good pictures at good prices. It's just good practice to monitor what's coming up for sale, not least because it's in sale catalogues that so many new discoveries and evidence is unearthed.
Street art in the Louvre
July 9 2018
Video: Louvre
The Louvre has made a series of most curious videos, called 'Dialoguer avec le Street Art'. Which is surprisingly Franglais for such a seriously French institution. More here.
Fakes, fakes everywhere (ctd.)
July 9 2018
Picture: via TAN
The painting of St Jerome exhibited at the Met as a work by Parmigianino (for the backstory see here) has again been declared a fake, this time by the Italian analyst Maurizio Seracini. The journalist who has been at the heart of this story, Vincent Noce, writes in The Art Newspaper:
[...] he found a “synthetic resin”, manufactured after 1930, in the varnish and used “as binding media, throughout the layers of the painting”, according to the report. “Infiltration of the surface varnish in the layers underneath should be totally ruled out,” he insists, “since no other binding media was found in the paint layers”. Seracini also detected modern pigments such as zinc sulphide and titanium dioxide in the ground layer, suggesting the forgery might have been made “around the first half of the 20th century”.
Seracini’s theory is that Saint Jerome was painted over another composition covered by an old varnish, which was “either scraped off or cleaned up”. He also notes “long-lasting woodworm activity” and “significant damages” consistent with age on the panel, but not on the painting. The same contradiction was noticed in the painting sold as a Cranach to the Prince of Liechtenstein. Both works, among others, are now sequestered in Paris by order of the judge in charge of a criminal investigation that opened in 2015.
The suggested date of the forgery is interesting, pointing to the earlier half of the 20th Century. Though personally I think we're dealing with someone making these paintings much more recently.
Pastels at the Louvre
July 9 2018
Picture: Louvre
There's a new exhibition on pastels at the Louvre. On his blog, the king of all things pastel, Neil Jeffares, gives it the ultimate review.
'Diary of an Art Historian' (ctd.)
July 9 2018
Picture: via Christie's
My latest diary piece for The Art Newspaper is online, here. Among other things, I struggle to see the justification of Picasso's Young Girl with a Flower Basket making $115m at auction.
Augustus John discovery
July 9 2018
Picture: via BBC News
A previously unknown painting by Augustus John has been bought at auction by quick-thinking staff at Poole Museum. From the BBC:
"Edwin on the Beach" was bought by Poole Museum for £1,850 after manager Michael Spender saw the piece at an auction.
The artist's granddaughter Rebecca John who is a leading expert on his work, has confirmed the piece is genuine, meaning its value has soared. [...]
He found the piece in an auction catalogue after a house clearance in Moreton-in-Marsh, in the Cotswolds.
Excellent work, Mr Spender; AHN salutes you!
There's currently an exhibition of John's works on at Poole Museum, more here.
Apologies...
June 27 2018
Sorry for the lack of news lately. I've been preparing for my course on connoisseurship at the Royal Academy. It's sold out, but we'll be running it again in December in case you're interested. Details here.
Van Eyck's lost lamb
June 19 2018
Picture: via Codart
Restorers working on Jan Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece have removed a layer of 16th Century overpaint which was covering the artist's original lamb (now seen above right). More here on Codart.
Meanwhile, the author of a new book claims that the missing panel, stolen in 1934, is buried somewhere in the city, but he's not saying exactly where. He's based his claim on a letter allegedly written by someone involved in the theft, which contains riddles and mysterious words. According to The Guardian, authorities in Ghent are taking the claim seriously. Although if there was any truth in the claim, why publish the book now? Why not wait until after the panel has been dug it up, and gloriously claim to have solved the mystery?
Italian Museums (ctd.)
June 19 2018
There's an interesting editorial in The Burlington Magazine on the future of Italian museums, now that the reforming culture minister, Dario Franceschini, has lost his post, after the recent Italian elections. The Burlington rightly approves of his decision to end the tradition of having exclusively Italian-born museum directors, but also hopes that his most significant reform - on museum financing - will survive:
The most fundamental reform, however, has not been controversial – giving museums and galleries control over their own finances. Previously, all income received by a national museum, whether from entrance fees or revenue from merchandise, for example, was passed back to the state, which then redistributed it at the discretion of the ministry. Although this provided a welcome source of income for small or little-visited museums, it was a major disincentive for large institutions to attempt to build revenue by improving their attractiveness to visitors with facilities such as shops and cafés. More seriously, the system made it virtually impossible for them to raise funds from outside sources, since benefactors could usually not specify where or how their donations would be spent.
The Burlington highlights how the new possibility of raising funds from supporters is helping the Bargello Museum in Florence (above), which has long suffered from an inability to go out and compete for funds and attention. A new Friends of the Bargello organisation is helping change all that. Of course, AHN joins The Burlington in praising Dario Franceschini's achievements, and hopes that his changes continue to bring positive benefits to Italy's wonderful museums!
Young Curators at the Wallace Collection
June 19 2018
Video: The Wallace Collection
Here are some broadcasting and curatorial stars of the future, guiding us around the Wallace Collection. Let's see more museums doing this kind of thing.
'Sir Richard Wallace - The Collector'
June 19 2018
Video: The Wallace Collection
Here's an exhibition you really ought to see - a show dedicated to one of the most energetic collectors in art history, Sir Richard Wallace, creator of the eponymous Wallace Collection in London's Manchester Square. The show opens on Wednesday, 20th June, and runs until 6th January 2019. It doesn't just focus on what you might normally expect from the Wallace Collection - say, French 18th Century art - but objects like a gold trophy head from Ghana. More here.
I'm interested in what the Director of the Wallace Collection, Xavier Bray, says in the above video about the generosity of Sir Richard Wallace's collecting ethos. While he was alive he lent his entire collection to an exhibition at Bethnal Green Museum for two years, which was visited by 5 million people. Of course, because of the restrictions put on the Wallace Bequest by Sir Richard's wife, Lady Wallace, no works have ever left Manchester Square on loan. Personally, I think it's time to look again at that apparent restriction (which is not in fact as emphatic as is usually suggested), so that the treasures of the Wallace Collection can be shared around the country - and even the world - just as Sir Richard himself undoubtedly intended.
Update - the show gets five stars in The Guardian.
Beyoncé does the Old Masters
June 18 2018
Video: via You Tube
Beyoncé has made a video in the Louvre. Just the sort of thing to get new audiences interested in Old Masters. Well done the Louvre.
Art world gender pay gap
June 18 2018
Picture: Tate
There are some fairly eyebrow raising statistics in this Art Newspaper report on gender pay gaps in the art world in Britain. The focus was on auction houses:
Bonhams is the worst offender with a 36.7% pay gap, Christie’s pays women 25% less than male colleagues and the difference at Sotheby’s stands at 22.2%. These figures are based on median hourly earnings and include part-time workers (of which more are female). The median pay gap among the more than 10,000 companies that submitted figures is 9.7%.
But there were some discrepancies in the museum world too:
The Victoria and Albert Museum pays women 7.2% less, while the Royal Academy of Arts has a pay gap of just 1%. Meanwhile, at the British Museum, women out earn men by 4% and at Tate Gallery women are paid 2.4% more than their male counterparts, with 70% of its highest earners being women.
Bravo Tate!
Image Licences on ArtUK
June 18 2018
Video: ArtUK
The ArtUK website has made a short video about the various types of image licenses you can find on the site. There are a bewildering array, but burrow deeply enough and you can find some institutions that have signed up for fairly liberal types of Creative Commons licenses, which allow you to use images for free in many circumstances. ArtUK has a search facility which allows you to find works by the type of licence on offer. Remember, something having a 'Creative Commons' license may sound as if it belongs to 'the commons' (ie, all of us) but usually it doesn't. Tate, for example, make much of their Creative Commons licenses, but actually they're highly restrictive, and have been re-written by Tate to make them even more so (against the rules of Creative Commons itself).
Anyway, while I'm glad that ArtUK have made this filtering system available, it is nonetheless a rather depressing reflection of the unnecessary limitations these licenses place on us (to say nothing of the possibility of copyfraud, given the legal uncertainty about copyright in artworks which are themselves out of copyright). In the video, ArtUK invites users to search for the right licenses for 'presentations' and 'academic papers'. But the mere fact that we even need a 'license' for such images is a sad reflection on how image licensing acts as a brake on art history. Remember, these are (almost always) publicly owned artworks.
Still, I think ArtUK is our best chance of making images of the UK's art collection more widely available to scholars and educators. For that reason, I and my campaigning colleagues are working on persuading institutions to makr their images as 'Public Domain', or the most generous Creative Commons licences on ArtUK. Watch this space.
The next step is to persuade ArtUK itself to make high resolution images available for institutions that have agreed to make their images available for free re-use. At the moment, ArtUK only allows you to download high-res images if you buy a license through their shop. The low-res images available on the main site are not usually good enough for publication, even online. But there is no option to download high-res images from institutions that have gone 'open'. I have done my best to persuade ArtUK to rethink this, and have even offered financial support if necessary (as a longstanding supporter of theirs).
That said, many of us are very concerned that ArtUK - whose founding raison d'etre as Fred Hohler's Public Catalogue Foundation was to make images of public art available to the public - has now joined the image selling business. The ArtUK licensing shop is, unfortunately, helping museums perpetuate the practice of monetising their artworks by offering a more 'efficient' way of making money from images. My campaigning colleagues are finding it is actually one of our greatest competitors, when we discuss open access with institutions. When we're making the case for institutions to stop selling images, it's always helpful to our cause when we point out that it's actually a very inefficient way of raising revenue, because you need to employ people to answer all the different enquiries that come in, and help determine who deserves a discount and so on. But selling licenses through ArtUK is attractive to some institutions, because ArtUK is a charity, and a much more palatable partner than, say, Bridgeman, which is a commercial company.
Let there be no doubt, if more and more British institutions sign up to ArtUK's image licensing system, then academic and education art historical publishing will become even more difficult and more expensive. Gone will be the flexibility of academics being able to make their case to museums directly for a free image, because instead you'll just be dealing with an algorithm. I just looked up what an image fee would be through ArtUK for an academic publication, of just 500 copies, and for an inside image; £78. That's expensive. It's the same for whichever institution you select.
Sleeper alert
June 18 2018
Picture: Drouot
A pastel at auction in Paris estimated at €800-€1200 and described as 'French School' has made €239,400. It turns out to be a self-portrait by Charles-Antoine Coypel. More here on La Tribune de l'Art.
Glasgow School of Art
June 18 2018
Video: ITV
Terrible news here in Scotland that the Glasgow School of Art has been destroyed by fire. Charles Rennie Mackintosh's famous building was ravaged by fire four years ago, with about half the building then lost. A renovation was nearly complete. Now, however, the whole building has been burnt, and it's unlikely that much original fabric has survived. Quite how such a disaster could have been allowed to happen, given the recent history, is quite schocking, to say nothing of the millions that had been spent restoring the site (and, one presumes, fitting adequate fire prevention measures). The fire was reported at 11.15pm but by the time fire crews were on site at 11.20pm half the building was ablaze.
