Guffwatch - Biennale 2013
June 10 2013
Video: Biennale Channel
Here's a video about the US pavilion at the Biennale, which I found to be one of the more pointless ones. Note how all the usual Guff genericisms trip off the tongue, especially the use of opposites, which are useful because they allow you to say pretty much anything:
...this experiance of intimacy in a very public space
...it seems like it's an accumulation of found objects and random, but in fact it's carefully studied, it's almost like a poem on many levels...
...it's about the organic growth of things, and also their detrioration...
...there's this mesmeric beauty that is inevitable with a pendulum, but there's this constant anxiety of the potential for something to go wrong...
Regular readers may be surprised to hear that there were a number of pavilions I liked very much, such as those of Belgium, Spain and Germany. More on my trip to Venice soon...
Update - a reader says the above approach is not dissimilar to the fashionista inteviewed by Sacha Baron Cohen here.
Honthorst's 'Duet' sold in New York
June 10 2013
Picture: Christie's
Christie's did well with the above Honthorst in their New York Old Master sale last week, selling 'The Duet' for $3.37m (inc. premium). The estimate was $2-3m. The picture had an interesting provenance; having once been in the collection a Russian aristocratic family, the Stroganovs, it was seized by the Soviets and displayed in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. It was then sold by the Soviets in Berlin in 1931, where it was bought by Bruno and Ellen Spiro. Their possessions were seized by the Nazis in 1938, and it was re-sold, again in Berlin, only to end up in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1969. Happily, the picture was restituted to the Spiro heirs earlier this year.
Update - a reader Tweets:
Happy for the Spiros, but will they be dividing the proceeds with the Stroganovs?
Interesting point - how far back should we take restitution cases?
Cuts ahoy!
June 10 2013
Picture: Evening Standard
It's interesting to see the briefing going on here in the UK press about cuts to the arts. Details of the Government's spending review are due to be announced in late June, and departments are now engaged in last minute negotiations with the Treasury. On Saturday, the FT reported that Culture Secretary Maria Miller (of whom AHN recently disapproved) is 'resisting' cuts to her department's £1.2bn budget, a briefing which comes hot on the heels of suggestions that she might be sacked and her department axed altogether. On Sunday, the Sunday Times quoted a 'Whitehall Source' as saying that the Opera-loving George Osborne was in favour of shielding the arts from hefty cuts, but that his 'Philistine' deputy, Liberal Democrat Tresury Secretary Danny Alexander, was insisting that the arts take a hit. This last story is most curious, as Osborne is Chancellor after all, and has the final word. Either way, it all points to the fact that the arts world is being softened up for a significant cut, and that axe-wielding Tories are looking for someone to blame.
It's curious to note that there has been relative silence about cuts from the art world, aside from a recent plea by Sir Nicholas Serota. Are the grand fromages of the arts resigned to the inevitable, or are they concerned that, in these austere times, public pleas for special treatment might only damage their case?
A Turner for Bristol
June 10 2013
Picture: Bristol Art Gallery
Congratulations to Bristol Art Gallery, who have acquired a Turner watercolour of Avon Gorge. More details here in the Bristol Post, which delights in the fact that the city of Bristol has acquired the picture 'without paying a penny' (all the funding came from charitable sources).
LACMA buying and selling
June 10 2013
Picture: LACMA
Didier Rykner at Tribune de L'Art reports on two new acquisitions by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a Daniele Crespi Mocking of Christ, above, and a Pieta by Francesco Trevisani. All most encouraging, though I have heard lately of an imminent LACMA disposal of a work more important than this. I can't reveal the picture, but its instances like this which make me glad we don't have deaccessioning here in the UK.
Sewell on the Royal Academy Summer Show
June 9 2013
Picture: artnews.org
He doesn't like it:
In the past I have occasionally discussed the 10 best exhibits and ignored the other 1,200 or so; this year, as there are no best, I thought to choose the 10 worst, but in so universally dismal a gathering, even that has proved impossible and I have only three to offer, all in their own ways so ghastly that I must award them Equal First. They are Lorry Art, by Rose Wylie [above], a daub worthy of a child of four; Sudden Rain in Mombasa, by Mohammed Abdullah Ariba Khan, who has the impertinence to ask £1,400 for a seascape (in an ornate sham gold frame) of the kind to be expected in a Margate B&B; and The Vanity of Small Differences, Perry’s six tapestries in hideous homage to Hogarth, visually raucous and machine-made offences to all for whom the word tapestry conjures the glories of Mortlake and Brussels.
A copy of a Raphael - yours for £1m
June 7 2013
Picture: The De Brecy Trust
Some years ago I was taken to a bank vault in London to look at the above picture, which was claimed to be a contemporary copy or version of Raphael's Sistine Madonna.
The picture is now being sold by the De Brecy Trust, which owns it, in an online auction with an opening bid of £1m. Various claims, some backed by 'science', are made for the picture.
I can say only one thing - caveat emptor.
A rare National Gallery deaccession
June 7 2013
Picture: Christie's
A fascinating enamel by Henry Bone RA is being offered for sale at Christie's later this month (est. £80k-£120k), of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London). The provenance reveals that Bone's copy after Titian was in fact once owned by the National Gallery, having been bought by them in 1971 for $8,000 but then sold just two years later, though the catalogue doesn't state why.
Update - a reader has been sleuthing around in the National Gallery's online archive pages, and has found the story. The enamel was loaned to the National Gallery during the restoration of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne in 1969. But the enamel was somehow damaged, and the Gallery was obliged to buy it. They then sold it on soon afterwards. From the NG archive:
Enamel after Titian by Henry Bone. Damage sustained on return from loan at the National Gallery, photographs and x-rays, correspondence with conservators and owners re cost of repair to be met by the National Gallery. Agreement made for work to be ceded to the National Gallery upon payment to owners. Correspondence with Christie’s re sale of enamel upon Department of Education and Science’s advice.
Curiously, this aspect of the Bone's history is not mentioned in the latest catalogue entry.
Update II - another reader writes, from Truro:
Henry Bone, that great Truronian, himself precipitated a catastrophic crash of a different nature with his masterpiece in 1811.
This was at the time the largest enamel ever painted and was viewed by 4000 people before the buyer, Mr Bowles, took it away. He paid 2,200 guineas for it.
Bone was paid a big fat cheque which he promptly cashed at Fauntleroys Bank so that he could impress his wife with a huge pile of money. The next day the bank collapsed.
Always so nice when extra information like this is sent in by readers - thanks!
'Non!' - attributing works the French way
June 7 2013
Picture: TAN
Melanie Girlis in The Art Newspaper reports that a possible Utrillo consigned to Sotheby's has been turned down by the Association Utrillo, which is run by the man who has inherited the right to attribute Utrillos all over the world, Jean Fabris.
Inherited? Indeed, for in France you can only authenticate modern art if you have inherited the droit de moral of an artist. As TAN reports:
The weight of Fabris’s decision is entirely in accordance with French law, under which artists have moral rights that protect the integrity of a work, including when and how it is shown and treated, regardless of its owner. When an artist dies, this right is bequeathed either to an heir or to another designated person, or people. In theory, the right does not extend to authentication, but in practice, the owners of the droit moral also, by default, become artists’ external validators, often compiling their catalogues raisonnés.
Incroyable. Mind you, there's a hefty reward for any geneologists out there who can find a link between me and Van Dyck.
Update - a reader alerts me to M. Fabris' previous form on hunting down what he thinks are fake Utrillos. This comes from an AP news story back in 1989:
Jean Fabris, 58, is waging war against the alleged fakes, accusing art dealers, auctioneers and experts of putting profit before art. Critics of his efforts claim he's the one who is after money.
He disrupted auction sales in April at both Christies and Sotheby's in London, crying ''Fake, fake.'' He was removed from the auction houses, and the sales of the 17 contested Utrillos went ahead. His campaign scored a tentative victory in Paris when he persuaded a criminal court judge to confiscate seven alleged Utrillo paintings valued at more than $1 million from well-known Paris auctioneer Guy Loudmer.
Verification of the disputed paintings will be handled by a court-appointed panel of experts. A final decision is not expected until early summer.
Fabris has also challenged the New York market. He has written to Sotheby's and Christie's threatening court action if they do not withdraw nine Utrillos to be sold by Sotheby's on May 10 and six more by Christie's on May 11.
''We're not surprised to learn that he is once again attempting to promote unfounded allegations in the press,'' said Diana Levitt, a vice president and director of corporate affairs for Sotheby's in New York.
''As we previously stated, and as the courts in France have also found, Mr. Fabris is not a recognized expert in Utrillo's works. We have notified him that we stand by our authentication of the works in our sale and that we intend to offer them for sale on the date scheduled and that if he interferes in our sale, we will take whatever action we think approbriate to protect Sotheby's and our consignors' rights.''
The seven Utrillos in the April 4 London sale fetched over 1 million pounds ($1.68 million).
Update II - an auctioneer with direct experience of this kind of thing writes:
These self-acclaimed experts are quite a nuisance, since they can't just be ignored, how preposterous their claims might be. Insecure potential clients seek their advice or request their approval, and as an auctioneer to say 'Don't listen to him, he's a nutter" doesn't really come through as a nuanced advise…
Ciao Venezia
June 7 2013
Picture: BG
I'm back - apologies for the lack of service this week. I'll return soon with a bountiful haul of stories and the usual nonsense.
Is the Future Online?
June 4 2013
Auctions to Axe Buyer's Premium?
June 4 2013
By Lawrence Hendra
We wish...
However, in response to declining attendance numbers, this New Jersey auction house decided to do just that, completely axing buyer’s premium in a recent sale for anyone who bought in the room and not remotely via the internet from elsewhere. It's amazing how much bidding is down via the internet now; I recently went to an auction in central London and could count on one hand the number of people sitting in front of the rostrum.
I'm off...
May 31 2013
Picture: Airpano.com
...to Venice, where I'll be making a short programme for BBC2's The Culture Show with Alastair Sooke. Alastair is going to wow me with some of the contemporary art on display at Biennale, and I'll wow him some of the glories of the Venetian Renaissance. That's the idea, anyway.
I'll be back on Thursday. If you're lucky, my colleague Lawrence Hendra will post the odd bit of art historical news in the meantime. Ciao.
Britain at the Venice Biennale
May 30 2013
Video: Telegraph
Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph gives Jeremy Deller's exhibition in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, called English Magic, four stars out of five:
Does English Magic work as “art”? In a sense, that’s almost beside the point. Here is a sequence of tough and uncompromising statements skewering the forces that Deller feels are blighting Britain. You could interpret the exhibition as an indictment of our entertainment-obsessed media culture, which, in the artist’s book, does not sufficiently hold Britain’s rich and powerful to account.
Whether or not that’s the case, English Magic contains some uncomfortable home truths that need to be expressed. You don’t come to Deller looking for life-changing aesthetic experiences. But it's hard to resist the strength of his ideas, or the persuasive nature of his democratic politics.
Museums and image reproduction fees
May 30 2013
Picture: BG/National Gallery
Regular readers will know that AHN takes a dim view of UK museums charging reproduction fees for scholarly and informative publications: if an object belongs to the public, then so should its image. In a timely article for the Times Higher Education, Jane Masseglia highlights the inconsistent approach taken by museums:
Many museums and collections either do not charge at all, or charge a small administrative fee and request a copy of the finished publication. God bless the British Museum, for instance: the file is attached free of charge, and with permission to reproduce it. The Wriston Art Center Galleries in Wisconsin give their permission, waive the fees and would like to know which format would be most convenient. The staff of the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke München are happy to provide the image free of charge but are, they say, very fond of chocolate. You feel the warm glow of being a member of an international community working together to bring ancient objects to a wider audience.
But then you read the other replies, and your heart sinks. One museum’s image service demands €78 (£66) for each image and permission to reproduce it - and the same amount to reuse a photo you’ve bought from them before. Another asks for £120 per image and then unexpectedly begins to haggle when you express your horror. And, most bafflingly, a museum in the US charges $50 (£33) per digital image sent by email but only $25 for a posted, picture-quality A4 printout. Clearly the cost and the administrative labour involved are unrelated. There can be only one conclusion: the image services of such institutions are primarily a commercial enterprise.
The National Portrait Gallery is, many tell me, an offender when it comes to high image fees. Here's a letter to The Author from the historian and broadcaster Dr Ian Mortimer on his attempt to use the NPG's images, here published with his permission:
Recently I set about arranging for pictures to illustrate my forthcoming book, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England. With a budget of £3,500, I deliberately selected images in public institutions, so the money would benefit the public as much as possible. Sadly, many of them demanded too much money. In the end, twenty-four of the thirty-seven pictures used came from commercial image libraries. The British Library was the only publicly funded institution that proved competitive.
I find this lack of competitveness alarming and disappointing - not so much as the writer of this particular book (because there are many alternative images available in galleries) but from the point of view of a supporter of the institutions in question. My book should have resulted in several thousand pounds going to help public bodies curate their collections, not to fatten shareholders’ wallets. But the point to which I especially want to draw members’ attention is the lack of regard to authors’ businesses implicit in this. Subsequent correspondence has revealed that the galleries assess their competitiveness by measuring their fees aginst those of similar institutions. I would contend that this is the wrong approach; instead they ought to consider their customers (especially authors) who ultimately decide whether or not to use their images.
To prove my point, consider the National Portrait Gallery images (the most expensive in my sample). I originally intended to use five quarter-page images from the NPG, and to obtain world, all-language rights in case my agent found a foreign-language publisher. For each ¼-page image the NPG quoted £20 plus VAT for delivery of the digital file, plus £175.00 for the rights for up to 25,000 copies sold, plus 50% of that fee for simultaneous ebook publication. This totals £282.50 + VAT for each ¼-page image.
If the NPG thinks this sum is reasonable then it follows that it considers a fee totalling £18,080 for a sixteen-plate non-fiction book exclusively using its images is reasonable. It is not. It equates to a charge of 72.3p per copy just for the images. Looking at my statements for my earlier Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, the first 25,000 paperback sales in 2009 realised a total royalty of £17,530.50 (average 70.1p per copy). Were I to use just ¼-page NPG images in my forthcoming book, every sale would lose me money. And that is just home sales: each export copy realises a much lower royalty (26.3p per copy in the case of a TTGME paperback). If I used sixteen whole-page images from the NPG (total cost per image £400.62p plus VAT, a charge of 25.6p per copy) I would earn less than a penny on every export copy sold. Does the NPG really think that reasonable: 25.6p for the images, 0.7p for the author?
While there may be some limited benefit in pricing images at high levels – to extract the maximum revenue from specialist books, which have to include specific images – I cannot help but think the current pricing strategy of most institutions is shortsighted and in need of complete review. They should be undercutting commercial galleries if they want more UK non-fiction authors to use their images. And I applaud the British Library for leading the way and making its manuscript images available at reasonable prices in these austere times, which are difficult for all of us, not just the public sector.
I should perhaps add that here at Philip Mould & Co. we licence our archive of images (searchable here) to the Bridgeman Art Library, and get a regular, if small, income from it. We are of course a private operation, and I have no qualms charging, for example, Innocent Smoothies a handsome fee for reproducing one of our portraits of Henry VIII on the back of their cartons, as happened last year. We usually provide reproductions for academic books gratis, if authors ask nicely...
Ian Mortimer's new series, A Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England, starts on BBC2 tomorrow, at 9pm.
Update - a reader alerts me to an article in the New York Times on this very topic, in which Taco Dibbits, director of collections at the Rijksmuseum says:
“We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have are, in a way, everyone’s property,”
Quite!
Update II - I should of course have mentioned the NPG's new policy of allowing free image use for qualifying academic books with a print run limited to under 3,000 copies, which I covered here on AHN last year. My apologies to the NPG for not remembering to mention it again on this occasion.
New Curatorial Head at National Gallery
May 30 2013
Many congratulations to Letizia Treves, who is the new Curator of Italian Painting 1600-1800, and indeed Head of the Curatorial Department. Letizia was previously a Senior Director of the Old Master Department at Sotheby's in London. Such high profile moves from the art trade to the museum world are rare, but greatly to be encouraged. It's a pleasing recognition, perhaps, that some of the best Old Master expertise is to be found in the art trade.
How not to hang a painting
May 29 2013
Picture: NY Times
Reader Adam Busiakiewicz from Warwick Castle sends this clipping from The New York Times in 1890. Happily, the picture, which is a studio piece, is now hung much more securely, and in a frame.
2 years for Picasso vandal
May 29 2013
Video: ITN
The plonker who did this has been jailed for two years. More here in The Art Newspaper.
PCF goes commercial
May 29 2013
Picture: PCF
Very interesting to see that the Public Catalogue Foundation is building on its expertise and offering a commercial digitisation service. If you run an institutional collection and want to have, say an online catalogue of your collection, then why not hire the people who've put a whole nation's art collection online? More details here.
How not to respond to art criticism
May 29 2013
Video: via The Daily Dish
An art student who says 'like' a lot is goaded to an extreme reaction by critics who also say 'like' a lot.
