Up and up and up
February 15 2012
Picture: Christie's
Christie's Postwar and Contemporary Evening sale yesterday made a total of £80.5m, the strongest since the previously over-heated days of 2008. One of the strongest sellers was Christopher Wool's 'Untitled' of 1990, above, which will forever tell the buyer he is a fool for paying just under £5m for it. The top price was, inevitably, for a Bacon, 'Portrait of Henrietta Moraes', which made £21.3m. More details of the sale here.
Meanwhile, the head of Bonhams contemporary sales has gone public with his frustration at how works are now seen simply for their investment potential:
"A lot of us were frustrated, it is always about the estimates and the deal, not the art. We wanted to talk about the works of art. It's whether the art works are important.
"When I started at Christie's many years ago clients would ask me about the work of art or the artist. In late 2007 they started asking: 'what's it going to cost me and how much will it be worth.' That's when you become a commodities broker."
On 'Freud Portraits' at the NPG
February 14 2012
Picture: National Portrait Gallery/Private Collection/Christie's
Last night, at the new 'Lucian Freud Portraits' exhibition at the NPG, I found myself repeating the mantra, ‘Freud was a great painter, Freud was a great painter...' I needed this reassurance because, after seeing about 30 of the show's 130 works, I began to think dangerously heretical thoughts. Such as, ‘I don’t like this portrait’.
Now you may, like me, be used to seeing Freud’s portraits in small groups, perhaps in commercial galleries or auctions. And, like me, you may long have been an admirer of his undoubted genius, his skill with the brush, and his unerringly dispassionate eye. In a Sotheby’s Contemporary and Modern sale, for example, his pictures destroy the competition. But I must warn you that en masse it can all become a bit too much. All that brown, all those empty, soulless faces, and all that realistic but lifeless, cadaverous flesh. It’s like being in a morgue.
Of course, Freud really was a great painter. And yet, this show is billed as an exhibition of portraits, so it is as a portraitist that we are asked to judge him. And as a portraitist, as a purveyor of both human likeness and spirit, he comes close at times to failing. His subjects’ repeatedly blank look can become overwhelming, even depressing. If you subscribe to the widely held admiration of Freud’s 'brutal honesty', then you’ll like what you see. But if you think portraits should show a greater range of human emotion than from bored to vaguely terrified, you won't. This, I know, is a subjective view, and a minority one.
So where does that leave Freud the portraitist? Most will enjoy the feasts of flesh and paint that are Freud's late nudes (the sort of pictures Rubens would have painted, had he dared), but it’s hard to tell whether the flesh is a means to the paint, or, as I suspect, vice-versa. In that sense the pictures are all, as Freud himself said, autobiographical. Now some say that all portraitists end up painting portraits of themselves, that it is impossible to meet a patron over only a series of sittings, and know them well enough to distill their character as well as portray a likeness. But the point with Freud is that he never seems even to try.
Perhaps the problem is our need to project Freud as a portraitist in the first place, rather than simply as an artist. We do this because we have few really good contemporary portraitists with which to compare him. Nobody paints people like Freud anymore, not least because, generally, we don't value painting people. We like our portraits, as the increasingly one-dimensional BP Portrait Award shows, to look like photographs. In other words, we applaud Freud the portraitist in the same way Samuel Johnson applauded a dog walking on its hind legs, because we are surprised to see it done at all.
Which is why I began to wonder last night if, by classing Freud as a portraitist, we're in danger of tarnishing the Freud brand, even of overdoing, if it is possible, the Freudian hype. For, if as a result of this exhibition we continue to project Freud as a portraitist, then in the greater narrative of art history it is unlikely he will be seen as a great one. In a hundred years’ time the allure of his celebrity will have vanished, and few will care that Kate Moss sat to him, or that his pictures broke records at the auction rooms. Instead, people will see his portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth (hung, as they inevitably will be, alongside previous Dukes and Duchesses by Van Dyck, Gainsborough and Lawrence) and wonder why he made them look so miserable, and drained of any soul.
I hope, therefore, that we remember Freud as a painter, pure and simple. A painter of people, yes, but primarily a painter of things. For it is in beholding the simple application of Freud’s paint onto canvas that one derives the most pleasure, the most how-the-hell-does-he-do-that. So if you go to this excellent exhibition, which you must, don’t view the pictures as portraits of this or that person you might vaguely recognise. Instead do this – look closely, sniff the paint, and breathe in Freud’s brilliance.
Exhibition closes 27th May.
Dictator Art - in Hungary??
February 14 2012
Picture: The Art Newspaper
There's an interesting piece in The Art Newspaper on the new right-wing government in Hungary taking control of the arts. The government has even commissioned patriotic paintings, one of which features Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister. Which is what they do in North Korea. Julia Michalska has the story:
Since coming to power with a two-thirds majority in 2010, Orban’s Fidesz party has passed more than 350 laws and rushed through a constitution which, the international community argues, endangers Hungarian democracy. Last month, to celebrate the official inauguration of the constitution, Orban opened a government-organised exhibition at the National Gallery. It chronicles 1,000 years of Hungarian history, focusing on sovereign statehood and Christianity (until 16 August). The show includes 15 large state-commissioned canvases depicting important historic events spanning 150 years, including an image of Orban. The event contributed to the decision by the National Gallery’s director, Ferenc Csak, to resign before the show opened. “The government shouldn’t have the power to order exhibitions with such a high political agenda. Museums shouldn’t be getting involved in politics,” says Csak.
The oldest paintings in the world?
February 13 2012
Picture: Nerja Cave Foundation
Paintings discovered in a cave in Spain are thought to be the oldest in the world. In case you're wondering how they know:
...charcoal remains found beside six of the paintings – preserved in Spain's Nerja caves – have been radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and 42,300 years old.
That suggests the paintings may be substantially older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in south-east France, thought to be the earliest example of Palaeolithic cave art.
The next step is to date the paint pigments. If they are confirmed as being of similar age, this raises the real possibility that the paintings were the handiwork of Neanderthals – an "academic bombshell", says Sanchidrián, because all other cave paintings are thought to have been produced by modern humans.
More in New Scientist here.
Curator vacancy at SNPG
February 13 2012
Picture: SNPG
How rare is this? There are three plum curatorships up for grabs at the moment. In addition to the two at Tate Britain, here's one at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. These are the requirements:
Educated to degree level, you will have experience of sharing specialist knowledge enthusiastically and effectively with a wide variety of audiences, as well as previous experience of working in a curatorial role. In addition, you will possess a strong interest in, and knowledge of, Scottish history and society. Specialist or post-graduate knowledge of Scottish and/or British history and of British portraiture would be highly advantageous.
Closing date is 5th March. Good luck!
Hockney at the RA - 5/5 for fun
February 13 2012
Picture: David Hockney, 'More Crooked Timber on Woldgate', 2008, charcoal on paper.
The critics may have disliked David Hockney's show of new landscapes at the Royal Academy, but I thought it was excellent. Not every work will be seen as a masterpiece, but then the exhibition was never intended to be one of the 'best of' shows we're used to. Instead, it is a display of mostly new works, in a new style, of a curiously new genre in contemporary art; a great British painter painting Britain. In that respect we can allow the artist some failures in return for his certain successes.
Above all, the exhibition is great fun. Giant canvasses combine colour, passion, quirky perspective and sharp natural observation with a flair rarely seen these days. You can't fail to leave without a smile. One thing I immediately noticed in the exhibition was the noise. Normally, contemporary art exhibitions are muted affairs as visitors mentally struggle to understand whatever blob, squiggle or lump it is they are supposed to admire, or admit to their bemusement and wander silently by. But at Hockney almost everyone has a ready comment about each picture (in my experience, overwhelmingly positive comments), and the emerging hubbub of pleasure is a delight to hear.
That said, my favourite works in the show were not the paintings, but the drawings, which on the whole are the best works. Some of them are mesmeric, and reveal just how good an artist Hockney can be when he really tries. I found myself reminded of Van Gogh's charcoal landscapes; both artists share a similarly idiosyncratic view of nature, and are possessed of a similarly fluent ease with which to capture it. Happily, I'm not the only one who likes Hockney's drawings, for in Brian Sewell's otherwise damning review of the exhibition, he let slip this rare nugget of praise:
There was a time in the 1970s when I thought him one of the best draughtsmen of the 20th century, wonderfully skilful, observant, subtle, sympathetic, spare, every touch of pencil, pen or crayon essential to the evocation of the subject, whether it be a portrait or light flooding a sparse room; nothing has made me change that view, but Hockney has tried very hard.
So, do go to the exhibition if you can. In the meantime, you can see other recent Hockney landscape drawings here.
Dating 'The Field of the Cloth of Gold'
February 13 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
One of the most iconic Tudor paintings in the Royal Collection is the The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which celebrates Henry VIII's meeting with Francis II outside Calais in 1520. But there has always been doubt as to when exactly it was painted. Now, new research has suggested an earlier dating for the picture, and answers to the mystery of why Henry VIII's head was cut out and replaced at a later date. More details here.
The need for catalogue raisonnes*
February 13 2012
Writing in The Art Newspaper, the art market commentator Marion Maneker says that catalogue raisonnes are the best way to protect against the growing problem of fake art:
The other key pillar of the self-regulating market is the scholarship that produces reliable catalogues raisonnés. But, the field appears increasingly under threat. The troubling retreat of scholars in the case of a group of Francis Bacon drawings (The Art Newspaper, December 2011, pp1, 8) indicated that experts, fearful of costly lawsuits, are shying away from taking a public stance on what is, or is not, a legitimate work. [...]
Ultimately, the best way to protect the art market—and address the issue of regulation—is to safeguard scholarship: this underpins an artists’ value, provides proof of provenance and lubricates an expanding market. As the art business continues to globalise, its growth depends upon making scholarship reliable and accessible. Because, in the end, the experts are the only candidates who can provide the adult supervision the market desperately craves.
Though she** is primarily concerned with modern and contemporary art, the same could probably be said for the whole art market, including Old Masters, where the issue is not one of fakes, but of correct attributions. But the problem is, not enough art historians these days are interested in publishing catalogue raisonnes. Devoting years of study to one artist is unpopular, and seen as too like the old-fashiond approach to art history of 'who painted what when'. This is sad, but a fact.
* A reader has suggested this should be 'catalogues raisonne'.
** Another reader writes:
As always, enjoyed logging on to Art History News but I think Marion Maneker, whose article I also read with much interest – valuation and attributions being such vexed subjects – is male not female. Maybe Marian/Marianne = female!
And to be completely pedantic, it should be catalogues raisonnés (old French grad here).
Whoops - Marion, Sorry!
Be a Tate Curator. But not if you specialise in the 1840s.
February 13 2012
Picture: Tate
A reader has alerted me to two current vacancies at Tate Britain, for curatorships covering British art from 1750 to 1915. But as she points out, and as you can see from the descriptions above, there seems to be a slight gap.
If you want to apply, you have until 1st March to do so.
Introducing Major Edward Borrow
February 12 2012
Picture: Durham.gov.uk
[Warning: this is a nothing-to-do-with-art-history post] Some years ago I bought two tin trunks full of letters written during the First World War. They are between Edward Borrow, an officer in the Durham Light Infantry, and his wife, Alys. The letters are rare in that they reveal two sides of the war; a soldier from the front to his wife at home, and vice-versa.
I can't think why I bought them - I was a student at the time and could hardly spare the cash. The correspondence is often moving, and at times intimate, but could not be called great literature. In a sense, that is why the letters are so interesting; their very ordinariness, even cheerfulness, shows a side of the war often forgotten amidst the War Horse-style emotive gloom of retrospective histories (or worse, historical fiction). And, after I came across the letters by chance at a country auction, unloved and randomly wedged into old cigar boxes, I thought that if nobody else was going to look after them, then I must. So I bid over six months rent, and began to organise and transcribe them.
Anyway, the point of this post is to say that today, in a moment of idle Google-ing, I found out for the first time what Edward Borrow looked like. Above is his photo from the museum of the Durham Light Infantry. Seeing it is oddly moving; here is a soldier to whom I have no connection whatsoever, and yet of whom, for at least a part of his life, I know the most private and banal details. Anyone who has written a biography or a thesis on a single subject will know the peculiar feeling of disjointed affection one can feel towards your subject. (I knew I'd spent too long researching for my PhD when I started dreaming about Disraeli.) So here, with a curious feeling of pride, I publish for the first time a few extract's from Major Borrow's letters to his wife, together with his portrait: [click Read on for more]
30th December 1915
You want to hear something of my life in the trenches:- at about 7 a.m. I begin to think about getting up, pull on my other pair of socks (I sleep in my fist pair because it dries them you know) pull on my “rubber boots thigh” look in the glass to see if it will do till its warmer, say “dammit” and wander forth. Then I strafe the night orderlies if they haven’t baled out the mess-dugout properly during the night and send off three reports and one indent. At 8 I go to breakfast, which used to be a lonely meal, only now the Colonel has taken to coming along about then. Then I ask Blatchford if he’s caught any rats during the night (the trenches are full of rats and mice and if we catch any we always have a soup) then to work. I usually start several parties on to pumping, baling, ditching and building dugouts; then to the office dugout and search through orders, General Routine orders, Corps Orders, Division Orders, Brigade Orders, Special War Office Letters and all the suggestions that every Staff Officer thinks he must make or bust each one of which is absolutely necessary to the proper conduct of the War!
23rd May 1916
My own little wife,
The guns have been roaring and crashing and thundering for two days and nights now. I wish I could tell you what it means, but I mustn’t : though perhaps you can guess if I say that one entire battalion was blotted out and, report has it, the best part of another; blotted out just as effectively as if you had kicked a stone out of your way and in almost the same time, comparatively. From where we are in trenches, darling we saw it in the distance about two miles away without knowing what was happening actually and ever since the guns have roared and attacks made to try and recover what we had lost; I don’t suppose you’ll read more than just a paragraph about it in the papers but those roarings and thunderings and anxious wonderings as to whether it will be your turn next will be going on round here for weeks I expect until one side or the other gives up and turns its attention elsewhere. I’m again absolutely safe dear and can walk out of my 30 foot deep dugout and watch a finer pyrotechnic display than ever you saw at the Crystal Palace. For as soon as the artillery fire becomes intensive on either side the other fellow puts up rockets and magnesium lights by the dozen; and the guns flash for miles round you; and in daylight you actually see them plastering the skyline with terrific bursts of earth and rock; black smoke, green smoke, pure white smoke, grey smoke and when an aeroplane hovers over the line tiny puff balls of white burst round it like cotton wool blown about by the wind. Then if the wind is right, as it was the day before yesterday, down comes a cloud of gas – thick greyish, tear producing smoke when every man has to watch as he never watched before, ready to mow down anybody coming up behind that cloud and fight as this war has taught us how to fight. And then perhaps at 3 or 4 in the morning you hear the larks begin their twittering and Teddibee goes off to blessed sleep such as I’m afraid Honeybee doesn’t often get; forgetting everything darling, even the nerve racking anxiety which takes a lot of forgetting!
11th July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme:
When the push began to happen of course – casualties to infantry almost entirely; every day the line tried to push ahead somewhere on the 20 mile front on which we are attacking and every thousands yards was won at a cost of a thousand casualties perhaps 2000, I don’t know, and infantry casualties too. You should get the Cherub to tell you about it; he is now with a field ambulance and not with us any more. I happened to walk into his Ambulance Station the other morning at about 4 a.m. and found him and four worried blear-eyed dog tired looking men they were too – and the Cherub told me that for 3 days and nights they had been doing nothing but bandage and cut and bind up wounds, and the pity of it all is that in spite of all the care and thought behind this push wounded men do not always get taken back to the dressing stations: casualties sometimes come so thick and fast to infantry that wounded have to wait until the battle has been over some time. And a battle ground a week old is not a nice place.
We’ve just come out of the front line and are in reserve now: I suppose we shall go in again shortly, the push isn’t over yet; and when we left, although we didn’t have much to do with it being in German territory than it ever has been; for four days or was it five, Teddibee had had just about 10 hours sleep, and could appreciate how you feel when you write that you haven’t slept for three nights; and he could appreciate too dear the truth of what you write in your letter…
In praise of...
February 10 2012
Picture: Credit Suisse
...Luke Syson [above], the National Gallery curator of the Leonardo exhibition. Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian, rightly lays on the acclaim:
Syson has proved that courage and passion are the true virtues of a great curator. His exhibition has gone but it will never be forgotten. He too is leaving the National Gallery to work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But he has left an amazing legacy in London: an exhibition that should change the way exhibitions are thought about from now on. I hope we see many more such intimate and soulful revelations of what knowledgeable curators love about their artists.
To see why we don't have a comments section here at AHN, check out some of the bitter bile beneath Jones' article. And those are the moderated ones...
John House 1945-2012
February 10 2012
Video: Courtauld
It is with great sadness that I report the news of Professor John House's sudden death. He was Emeritus Professor of The Courtauld Institute in London, and one of the most noted art historians of his generation. He specialised in 19th Century French art, and published on books on Monet, Manet, Degas and Renoir.
Not only was he a great scholar, he was also a thoroughly nice man; perpetually cheerful, always happy to help, and blessed with a communicative ease most academics can only dream of. Viewers of Fake or Fortune? will remember him from our programme on Monet, in which he had to return to London from Paris with news of the Wildenstein Institute's rejection of David Joel's painting. In the above clip he can be seen talking with characteristic fluency on Renoir's La Loge.
The Director of the Courtauld, Deborah Swallow, has made this statement:
One of the pre-eminent scholars of nineteenth-century French art of his generation, John served The Courtauld with great distinction from his appointment in 1980 up until his retirement as the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in 2010; I cannot think of anyone with a deeper attachment to all aspects of our community, with which his close and richly productive involvement has now been cruelly cut short.
John was a much loved and greatly respected teacher and colleague. His scholarship reached well beyond the world of academe through the many wonderful exhibitions he curated both here at The Courtauld, at the Royal Academy and throughout the world. It is almost impossible to imagine The Courtauld without his strong yet benign presence near at hand.
The Duchess and the photographers
February 9 2012
Video: Disney
Following my post below, on the Duchess of Cambridge's trip to the NPG, a reader writes:
Wonder if I'm the only one who found similarities between the press shouting 'Ma'am' at the Duchess of Cambridge last night and with the seagulls shouting 'mine' in Finding Nemo [above]. Take a listen (really is uncanny!)
The best art charity you've never heard of?
February 9 2012
Picture: Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust/Public Catalogue Foundation
A giant round of applause please for the Woodmansterne Art Conservation Awards, an independent fund that supports the restoration of oil paintings in British public collections. The award is operated by Woodmansterne greetings cards, which have long printed cards with fine art reproductions. Since 1995, 60 paintings have been conserved at a total cost of £357,000. Last year, Woodmansterne funded the restoration of the above portrait by Pickenoy at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
If you work in a museum which has a painting which needs restoring, then you have until 21st February to apply for this year's award.
Duchess of Cambridge at the NPG
February 9 2012
Video: Telegraph
Last night, the Duchess of Cambridge made her first solo royal engagement at the National Portrait Gallery, where she saw a private view of the Lucien Freud exhibition. That the Duchess should choose to support the NPG at this moment is excellent news not just for that gallery, but for the arts in Britain in general.
The above flash-filled video gives an idea of just how much press interest the Duchess has to deal with, even when she goes to a museum. I like the way the photographers first try to get her attention by shouting 'Catherine', then, not having much luck, with a politer 'Ma'am'.
Meanwhile, the exhibition has gone down well with the critics. Here is Brian Sewell's conclusion:
I am told that Freud loved to hate me. I did not hate him; nor do I hate his paintings - it is only that I share neither his lust for ugliness nor his taste for furfuraceous paint, and wish that he had found a different escape from the trap of beautiful Neo-Romanticism. I wish that he had always painted sheets and wiping rags in the white paint in which he clad his mother in 1982-4, when Sargent and Pontormo seem to have held his hand, and given us more such exquisite details as the rat in the hand of a naked man and the fringed blanket in Flora with Blue Toenails of 2000-1, the hand of the octogenarian not trembling. When all is said and done, for all his perversity, Freud was perhaps as great a figurative painter as is now possible, and he is well-served by this exhibition.
Christie's edge Sotheby's in Impressionist & Modern
February 9 2012
Picture: Sotheby's/Art Daily
In the Impressionist & Modern evening sales this week in London, Sotheby's sold £78.9m, but Christie's came out on top with £97.8m. Sotheby's top price was £8.2m for a snowy landscape by Monet of 1885, L'Entree de Giverny en Hiver [being sold by Henry Wyndham above]. Sotheby's 'forgotten' Klimt did not sell in the room when estimated at £6-8m, but sold soon afterwards for £5.6m. Over at Christie's, the top seller was the £19m Henry Moore mentioned below.
Early Titian comes to London
February 9 2012
Picture: Hermitage
The Hermitage Museum is lending one of Titian's earliest great works, The Flight into Egypt, to the National Gallery in London from 4th April to 2nd September. More details here, and on the Hermitage's website there is some interesting information about the picture's recent restoration.
More 'Liberate Tate' daftness
February 9 2012
Floe Piece - Liberate Tate from You and I Films on Vimeo.
Are Liberate Tate learning from their mistakes? Instead of chucking gallons of 'oil' on the floor at Tate Britain (and then running away, leaving someone else to clear up the mess), this time Liberate have left a block of ice from the Arctic to melt in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. They still ran away, but at least water is easier to mop up than molasses.
And Liberate have also figured out that arriving at a protest in a gas-guzzling taxi doesn't look good, for, as you can see above, the protesters piously carried the block of ice by foot from St Paul's Cathedral. But they don't mention the carbon cost of hauling a lump of sea ice all the way back from the Arctic, which is presumably quite high.
I have to say, though, that as a form of artistic protest, the illuminated ice looks rather clever. And yet, Liberate Tate just can't stop shooting themselves in the foot. Earlier this week, they put up a post on their site, called "Who has been a speaker at Tate on a BP sponsored platform?" This 'named and shamed' artists as eminent as Peter Doig, and Peter Blake. This silly post (not least because Liberate is an anonymous organisation, and its protestors wear veils) prompted much outrage on Twitter, and cries of McCarthyism. And so Liberate took the post down, leaving the page blank save for the ironic message: 'This is somewhat embarrassing, isn't it? It seems we can't find what you're looking for'. You can still see the original page on Google cache, here.
