'Scream' buyer named
July 12 2012
Picture: Reuters
In the Wall Street Journal, Kelly Crow has the art world scoop of the year:
New York financier Leon Black paid Sotheby's nearly $120 million for "The Scream," Edvard Munch's 1895 pastel of a terrified man holding his head, according to several people close to the collector.
The identity of the buyer—who set a record for a work of art sold at auction—had been one of the art world's most closely guarded secrets since the dramatic, 12-minute sale in May. Now a new parlor game will begin: guessing where the iconic artwork ends up.
Mr. Black sits on the boards of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, setting up a potential tug of war between two of the country's most powerful art institutions. Neither owns a "Scream," aside from lithograph-print versions of it.
Caravaggio discovery - too good to be true?
July 12 2012
Picture: Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence
There's an excellent article by Michael Day in The Independent on the Caravaggio 'discovery'. Either the wheels are falling off the discovery story, or there's an academic bitch-fight of epic proportions going on:
Unfortunately, an email dated 11 May last year has now surfaced in which the pair [of art historians who made the discovery] appear to be requesting electronic copies of the works. Neither are there any official records of them having viewed the works in person, according to Francesca Rossi, the official in charge of access to the castle's art and antiquities. She told Corriere della Sera newspaper: "I've never seen them here. They've never had access to the collection, they studied the images exclusively from the computer disc."
Reports yesterday suggest the disc sent from Milan to Brescia contained over 1,700 jpeg images – at low resolution. And in a very Italian twist, authorities in Milan have also announced an internal inquiry to establish if unwarranted collusion and even corruption was involved.
Mr Bernardelli disputed the claims of the Milan officials. "We saw the collection various times, even if these were outside normal hours, accompanied by different people," he said.
Other art experts have taken issue with the pair's conclusions. One critic, Professor Philippe Daverio, said that identification of a Caravaggio's organic and ever-evolving work could not be made by looking for the presence of key "designs". "Design doesn't exist in the character of Caravaggio," he said. "And design wasn't needed in his painting. These sketches can't really be compared to anything."
Another critic, Francesca Cappelletti, who helped to establish that The Taking of Christ was painted by Caravaggio, was blunter: "To me, these pictures still seem like typical works of Peterzano." Another critic, Tomaso Montanari, said sarcastically the claim was akin to taking 100 drawings by Verrocchio (Leonardo da Vinci's master) and attributing them to the creator of the Mona Lisa.
British Art Journal
July 11 2012
I've been meaning to mention the new issue of the British Art Journal. Treats include:
- Peter Beauchamp on Zoffany's executor, Charles Dumergue
- Pat Hardy on Ford Madox Brown's Last of England
- Stephen Leach & Simon Manby on Joseph Wright of Derby's Philosopher by Lamplight
- Peter Jones on the 'Collage paintings' of Gyther Irwin
- David Hill on Ruskin's guide to Switzerland
- Wirginia Walker on the Newlyn School
- Sandra Boselli on Lucian Freud's 'Welsh interlude'
- Terry Jenkins on a newly found portrait of John Rich, a founder of the Royal Opera House.
Poets & Titian
July 11 2012
Picture: BG
The National Gallery has a series of films of poets reading their take on Titian's Diana myth paintings. Some of them are wrist-slittingly dull, but Seamus Heaney's Actaeon is splendid. See it here.
Titian studio piece restored at Dulwich
July 10 2012
Picture: Dulwich Picture Gallery
A new display opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery today, showcasing the conservation of a Titian workshop piece, Venus and Adonis. The exhibition will:
...celebrate the conservation of Venus and Adonis, a painting produced by Titian’s workshop after the celebrated prototype painted by Titian for Philip II, King of Spain in 1554. The painting has been in storage since the early twentieth century and was in desperate need of restoration, as can be seen from the photograph. The removal of discoloured varnishes and retouchings has revealed the work to be an evocative rendition of an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, centring upon the last meeting of the ill-fated lovers Venus and Adonis. This was the most famous of Titian’s poesies, his series of mythological paintings that he envisaged as visual equivalents to poetry. The Dulwich version stands as an example of early artistic massproduction, providing striking comparison to the Andy Warhol Portfolios exhibition.
Titian Metamorphosis - what the critics say
July 10 2012
Picture: BG
Most of the news stories highlights on Mark Wallinger's real live naked Dianas; the Daily Mail, for example, focuses on the 'peeping Tom' angle. The show gets four stars from Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times (paywall), and also from Mark Hudson in The Telegraph. In The Guardian Jonathan Jones takes broadly the same view as I did yesterday:
I am in two minds. Titian does not actually need to be compared with or spruced up by any living artist to be made "relevant" because in any sense that matters he is a living artist, right now. His colours, brushstrokes, stories, characters – for he is a dramatist in paint – blaze with urgency and excitement.
Who can be bored by Titian? The first time I visited the National Gallery, when I was 19, his painting The Death of Actaeon leapt out at something sensual and real I could relate to. In all honesty, I would rather see a big exhibition about him than a clever modern take.
But this is London 2012. It's a flash place, and the National Gallery cannot always be putting on exhibitions of Paul Delaroche. This exhibition is free and fun. Go and enjoy what Ofili (especially) has done. Then look at the Titians at the heart of the show and fall in love.
No word yet from Brian Sewell...
Titian 'Metamorphosis' at the National - review
July 9 2012
Picture: BG
I'm not sure what to make of this new exhibition at the National Gallery, but here goes. The show begins with the Gallery’s two newly acquired Titians, Diana & Actaeon, and Diana & Callisto, together with the Gallery’s Death of Actaeon, also by Titian. This is the first time all three paintings have been hung together since the 18th Century. The pictures are beautifully lit, and look every penny’s worth of their £95m price. The specially constructed room is a triumph – one feels like a Spanish grandee at the court of Philip II, seeing the paintings for the first time.
To help us understand what the rest of the exhibition is all about, here’s what the Gallery's blurb says:
‘Metamorphosis: Titian 2012’ – featuring new work by contemporary artists Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger in a unique collaboration with The Royal Ballet.
This multi-arts project, part of the Cultural Olympiad's London 2012 Festival, will draw on the powerful stories of change found in Titian’s masterpieces, revealing how these spectacular paintings continue to inspire living artists.
A multi-faceted experience celebrating British creativity across the arts, ‘Metamorphosis: Titian 2012’ brings together a group of specially commissioned works responding to three of Titian’s paintings – Diana and Actaeon, The Death of Actaeon and the recently acquired Diana and Callisto – which depict stories from Ovid’s epic poem ‘Metamorphoses’.
If you think this reads as if someone wrote the exhibition proposal by cramming in as many creative buzzwords they could think of, and then tried to make it relevant to the Olympics, you’d probably be right. The exhibition feels like that too. I bet it sounded great on paper, all those years ago when people were wondering what the hell a ‘Cultural Olympiad’ actually was.
But in practice the exhibition doesn’t entirely work; like Churchill’s famous pudding, it has no theme. For a start it’s in the wrong place. It just isn’t possible to achieve a ‘multi-faceted arts experience’ in the Sainsbury Wing exhibition space, which is designed to show paintings, and that’s all. Much of the exhibition is supposed to be about the relationship between the Titians and the new performances. But since the performances are mainly over in Covent Garden we’re reduced instead to mere snippets. You get a few costumes from the shows, some curious footage from the dance rehearsals (such that you can’t see any of the dancing, only close-ups of as many ballerina buttocks and breasts the director thought he could get away with), three very small models of the stage designs, and three equally small screens that repeat the Covent Garden performances. Really, the exhibition should have been put on at Covent Garden itself, and the Titians left upstairs in the National's main galleries.
Broken down into its constituent parts, the exhibition is entertaining enough. Its saving grace is that it is free; nobody will emerge feeling underwhelmed by what has been billed as the National Gallery’s major event of the year. I’m sure the Titian-inspired performances at the Royal Ballet will be a great success, and it is to be applauded that the National Gallery (and their sponsor Credit Suisse) has commissioned them. But these could still have happened without this slightly laborious exhibition. After all, if the National Gallery had really wanted to do its bit for London during the Olympics, it should simply have put on one of its regular first-class exhibitions.
Closes 23rd September. See images from the exhibition here.
* I'm told this is called a 'kinetic sculpture'.
Liberate Tate strike again
July 9 2012
Video: Linkup Films
My favourite daft arts protesters are learning: Liberate Tate's latest escapade - constructing a wind turbine blade in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern - is actually rather cool. And unlike last time there's no mess to clean up.
An art dealing week in numbers
July 9 2012
Last week was the busiest of the art dealing year, with our fair at Masterpiece, an exhibition at the gallery for Master Paintings Week, and all the Old Master auctions on in London. Here's how it went:
- No. of paintings viewed at auction: 677
- No. of bids placed: 12
- No. of paintings bought: 6
- No. of paintings transported at some point during the week: 36
- No. of visitors to the gallery during Master Paintings Week: 284
- No. of visitors to this site: 4,466 (thanks!)
- No. of paintings sold: 13
- No. of miniatures sold (by my colleague Emma Rutherford): 10
- No. of paintings actually sold by me: 1 (hopeless)
Titian 'Metamorphosis' at the National
July 9 2012
Video: National Gallery
I went to see the new Titian exhibition earlier today at the National Gallery. Most curious. I'll post a review when I've figured out what it was all about. Maybe lunch will help. Until then, here's a video about Diana being beastly to Actaeon.
Caravaggio 'discovery' 'row'
July 9 2012
Picture: La Stampa Photo removed after an angry email from a copyright agency in Italy.
It was inevitable, wasn't it? An improbable discovery story is announced by two art historians about 100 'new' works by Caravaggio worth hundreds of millions of euros. Immediately, the press send the tale around the world. The art historian's e-book gets a nice number of sales.
Then, doubts begin to emerge among other Caravaggio scholars. And it turns out the people who made the discovery never actually saw the works in the flesh, relying only on photos. The press, of course, delight in writing up the story all over again, this time with headlines about 'a row' over the discovery.
Is this the future of art history, where accuracy and scholarship suffer a slow death by press release?
Chasing Leonardo
July 9 2012
Picture: Christie's
There was an astonishing price at Christie's last week for the above painting, catalogued as 'Follower of Leonardo'. Estimated at £50-£70,000, it made £937,250 (inc. premium). I thought the picture was rather ordinary, and not half as good as the version in the Hermitage, which is thought to be by one of Leonardo's pupils, Francesco Melzo. But the Christie's catalogue entry was temptingly written, and evidently more than one person thought the picture was better than many believed. Would this price have been achieved before the recent Leonardo show? Possibly not.
Burlington vs Tate, round 2
July 9 2012
Picture: BG
The May issue of the Burlington magazine took a well-aimed shot at Tate Britain, and its lamentable hang. In the latest edition, Tate Britain's Director, Penelope Curtis, has written a response. Not wishing to waste time (I presume) the magazine has written an instant rejoinder, in the form of a new editorial. You can read it here.
A sleeper's long journey
July 9 2012
Picture: Christie's
A picture that did well last week was a portrait at Christie's of Henry Jermyn, an important courtier before and after the Civil War. It was being offered as Studio of 'Van Dyck', with an estimate of £60,000-£80,000. The picture was quite substantially damaged, especially in the hair and areas of the face. But overall it was a nice picture, of an important sitter. I thought that the head was almost certainly by Van Dyck, with perhaps some studio assistance in the drapery. It seemed that there might be some later oil over-paint in the hair. It is probable that the painting is a second portrait by Van Dyck of Jermyn, for there seems to have once been a full-length.
The picture has been sold at auction three times in the last two years. It first surfaced at a regional auctioneer in England in 2010, making £16,000 hammer when called 'Studio (or Follower) of Van Dyck'. Then it was sold at the Dorotheum in Vienna as 'Van Dyck' in full, making EUR 76,230. And last week it made £163,250 (inc. premium).
Fakes everywhere?
July 8 2012
Picture: Mail/St Petersburg Times
There were two fake stories over the weekend, one relating to a fake Picasso offered for sale in Spain, the other the memoirs of a claimed 'master forger' in the US called Ken Perenyi. The latter is the most interesting story, and in The Observer today, Dalya Alberge revealed some of Perenyi's techniques:
Perenyi's specialities included British sporting and marine paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries. He concentrated on the work of well-known but second-rank artists, believing that the output of the greatest masters is too fully documented. Dealers were often told he had found a picture in a relative's attic or spotted it in a car boot sale.
Perhaps Perenyi's proudest moment came when a forgery of Ruby Throats with Apple Blossoms, by the American 19th-century artist Martin Johnson Heade, made the front page of a national newspaper and was heralded as a major "discovery". It later fetched nearly $100,000 at auction in New York.
The New York auction house is not mentioned by name, but I think it must have been Christie's. A picture of the same title was sold in New York in March 1993, and was described as a new discovery. The cataloguing ran thus:
This painting is one of a group of paintings of ruby-throated hummingbirds that Heade painted shortly after his trip to Brazil in 1863-64. According to a letter dated January 27, 1993 from Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., it relates most closely to Ruby Throat of North America of 1865 (Stebbins, p. 230, no. 93), and appears to be a variant of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird in the Gems of Brazil series, now in the Manoogian Collection.
The painting was recently found in Devon, England, suggesting that it may have been painted circa 1865, while Heade was still in London pursuing the Gems of Brazil project. Otherwise, according to Stebbins, it would have been painted in the following year or two after Heade had returned to New York.
This painting will be included in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr.'s forthcoming revised catalogue raisonne of the artist's work.
Mr Perenyi has a book to sell, so the forgery revelations must come in handy. But it's interesting to note that in an interview in 2004 he claimed to be as clean as a whistle, saying:
Although he makes his living by painting, he says the money isn't what drives him. [...]
Perenyi says that although his paintings are meant to be persuasive copies, he doesn't intend to pass them off as the real thing. "Everything is sold as a modern work of art. That's what it says on my receipt," said Perenyi, who signs his own name to the back of each work.
In 2004, Perenyi claimed to have painted between 2-3,000 pictures. So Presumably there must be quite a few fakes still out there. But I like to think he wouldn't have fooled me with that dodgy Lely, above.
Update - a reader writes:
I was once shown a painting after the Phillips of Wellington. It was under old glass and looked like a so-so copy. The medals were garbled, but the old frame and general attic dirtiness were convincing.
I was asked my opinion about it, and started 'knowledgeably' explaining that the Golden Fleece was misunderstood, but it looked C19th, the labels on the back... before the grinning local hands told me it had come from China last week.
Bargain of the Week?
July 6 2012
Picture: Sotheby's
I know my fascination with Van Dyck means I'm a little biased, but I thought one of the steals of the auctions this week was the above full-scale replica of Van Dyck's portrait of the Stuart Brothers [National Gallery, London]. Catalogued as 'After Van Dyck', it is by Charles Jervas, one of Van Dyck's successors as Court artist. Like me, Jervas was slightly obsessed with Van Dyck, and regularly made copies of his works. This one appears in Jervas' posthumous sale. It sold at Sotheby's for just £11,250.
The Saenredam seesaw
July 6 2012
Picture: BG
I was pleased, but not surprised, to see that the Saenredam View of Assendelft made a huge £3.7m at Christie's on Tuesday. This was the same picture that had nearly sold as a sleeper at Christie's South Kensington, with an estimate of £3-5,000. To their credit, Christie's mentioned the South Kensington near-miss in their catalogue, but couched it by adding that they weren't the first people to misattribute the painting. Alas, there was no mention of Art History News' role in the picture's re-attribution.
Meanwhile, a Saenredam of a church interior which sold at Sotheby's New York in 2004 for $1.85m made just £713,250 this time round.
More on the Caravaggio discovery
July 6 2012
Picture: La Stampa No photo after a cross email from ANSA.
As you might expect, the Caravaggio 'discovery' story has gone round the world in a flash. Briefly, a team of Italian art historians claim to have found the works in the (publicly held) archive in Milan of Simone Peterzano, who employed Caravaggio as an apprentice between 1584-1588. From The Guardian;
"We always felt it was impossible that Caravaggio left no record, no studies in the workshop of a painter as famous as his mentor," Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz Guerrieri, artistic director for the Brescia Museum Foundation, told Italian news agency Ansa.
There is very little evidence to go on so far. It seems most of the works are drawings; of the 100 sketches newly attributed to Caravaggio, 83 are apparently repetitions of faces or poses from his known paintings. So the possibility is there that this is a cache of optimistically attributed studies done after the paintings. It's perhaps curious that some of the drawings published so far relate to works painted by Caravaggio long after he left Peterzano's employ, like the 1601 above drawing for the Supper at Emmaus [National Gallery].
The discoverer's e-book is already available to buy, so there's no doubt about the value of the publicity. Over at La Stampa there are some photos, which aren't clear enough to begin to make an opinion. In The Mail is a report with the sceptical view of other researchers.
More as I get it.
Update: more images here.
Update II - an email comes in:
Dear Sir, we verify on your website the publication of 2 images under ANSA copyright mistakenly attributed to La Stampa.
Please remove immediately and get in touch with our commercial department to clear the rights and pay the usage on your website.
'100' new Caravaggios discovered'
July 5 2012
This one sounds hard to believe, and apparently there will be more information tomorrow (Friday). But the Telegraph is reporting a newly discovered cache of up to 100 works by Caravaggio in Italy. More details here.
Hopeless blogging...
July 5 2012
Woeful service lately - apologies. I was filming all day today, plus we had the end of the Masterpiece Fair, and the Old Master sales are still ongoing. A full roundup of the week's events soon...
