Strikes at the National Gallery?
October 12 2011
I learn from Art History Today that security staff at the National Gallery are threatening to go on strike, perhaps even during the Leonardo exhibition. Budget cuts have forced the National to put one warder in charge of two rooms, instead of a warder to a room as before.
Obviously, the recent attack on the Poussin, above, means this is an unusually sensitive issue. But it would be a shame if strike action disrupted the gallery. The National suffers more than other galleries from strikes because it is overly unionised. Now is probably not a good time to say that I occasionaly see warders not doing their job very well (for example, playing Sudoku).
The Madoff Curse
October 12 2011
Picture: Christie's
That Wootton once owned by Bernie Madoff failed to sell again today at $70-100k. An after-sale offer of $30k would probably do it. A better investment than any fund of Madoff's...
Guffwatch - Oxford edition
October 12 2011
Picture: Modern Art Oxford - 'Abraham Cruzvillegas, La Familia, 2009. Coconuts, artificial hair, steel wire and glue. Image courtesy of kurimanzutto'.
A reader has sent me this, from Modern Art Oxford:
Abraham Cruzvillegas - Autoconstrucción: The Optimistic Failure of a Simultaneous Promise
Cruzvillegas has created a series of new works for Modern Art Oxford that respond to the diverse contexts of the city of Oxford and the artist’s own personal background: The Optimistic Failure, a large-scale suspended sculpture in the form of a ‘mobile’, adorned with representations of Amazonian tsantsas (shrunken heads) made from animal dung, grass and soil collected from Port Meadow, Oxford; and The Simultaneous Promise, a mobile sculpture constructed from a tricycle and sound system that plays recordings of the artist’s interpretations of songs from his childhood and new songs by Oxford bands. These commissions are presented alongside two other new works: Blind Self Portrait as a Post-Thatcherite Deaf Lemon Head. For 'K.M.', in which found paper items are layered in thick monochrome paint and pinned to the gallery walls in a geometric pattern; and Untitled Scratching Relief with Builders Groove 3, a drawing incised directly onto the walls of the Upper Gallery and inspired by the route explored by Cruzvillegas’ during his visits to Oxford.
Update - a reader writes:
Guffwatch amused me today. Poor MoMA. Still the Deaf Lemon Heads would make a good name for a band. It reminded me of a guy called Victor Wynd, vendor of oddities, who owns a unique shrunken head of a European, priced (cheaply I would think) at £35,000.
Sounds like a bargain. Wonder who he (the head) is.
How do you find a Leonardo?
October 12 2011
Picture: Artinfo/Science Television Workshop. Martin Kemp examines 'La Bella Principessa'.
With good old fashioned connoisseurship (partly). Martin Kemp, Leonardo scholar and proponent of the putative Leonardo discovery La Bella Principessa, explains, in an interview for ArtInfo:
Connoisseurship still plays a role. It's much denigrated and criticized, but ultimately, without connoisseurship, we really wouldn't know Leonardo's work at all. It's still a fundamental tool in establishing what was done by him and when it was done, since none of it is signed, none of it is dated, and, apart from "The Last Supper," nothing has a continuous provenance. So you still have a lot of that rather old-fashioned judgment by eye to do.
So, in the flesh, you look at it. It's on vellum, and you can see the extent to which the surface is deteriorated, which you can't see, really, in a digital file, which smooths out the surface. You can begin to see where it's been restored — as you look at it in different light and from different angles, the physicality of it becomes apparent. But that's only your starting point. Then, all the heavy-duty research comes in, and we now have, of course, an enormous body of extra things we can look at. So the initial connoisseur's reaction merely tells you that something is worth looking at, but at any point one wrong thing can throw that all away — a later pigment, a bit of something that might come up about its history to indicate it was forged at some point, and so on. I was trained as a scientist, and if you have a scientific theory, you only need have one bit of the experiment that says, "this is not right," and the whole thing collapses. You always have to be looking for that one thing that is going to demolish the whole expectation that's being set up.
Kemp also backs away from the ludicrous 'Leonardo finger print' evidence that was much touted in his recent book on the Principessa. Even an amateur sleuth could see that the 'finger print' discovered by the controversial art investigator Peter Paul Biro was entirely unconvincing. Kemp now says:
I would not now probably say much about it at all, because on reflection I think we don't have an adequate reference bank of Leonardo fingerprints. I've talked to fingerprint specialists, and they typically require a full set of reference prints. We don't have that for Leonardo. My sense is — and this is Pascal's sense, too — that it's probably premature, given what we know about Leonardo's fingerprints, to come up with matches at all.
For a more thorough analysis of the whole Principessa case, toodle over to Three Pipe Problem.
The British in India - the artist's view
October 12 2011
Picture: YCBA, Thomas Daniell, 'The Indian Rhinoceros', c.1790
An exhibition on the artistic legacy of the British in India has opened at the Yale Center for British Art. Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India 1770-1830:
...explores the complex and multifaceted networks of British and Indian professional and amateur artists, patrons, and scholars in British India in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their drive to create and organize knowledge for both aesthetic and political purposes. Selected from the Center’s rich holdings, the exhibition includes a diverse range of objects from both high art and popular culture, including albums, scrapbooks, prints, paintings, miniatures, and sculpture, demonstrating how collecting practices and artistic patronage in India during that period constituted a complex intersection of culture and power.
Rajtastic. Runs until December 31st.
Being an auctioneer
October 11 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
Here's an enlightening video from Sotheby's about being an auctioneer. It's a touch laudatory, but includes interesting snippets from Henry Wyndham (above), who's the best in the business.
The price of bad provenance
October 11 2011
Picture: Christie's
A picture from Bernie Madoff's collection will be sold at Christie's in New York tomorrow. Brocklesby Betty, 1718, by John Wootton has an estimate of $70,000-100,000. In the first Madoff sale in June this year it had an estimate of $140,000-169,000. Strangely, this time it is being offered in a 19th Century European Paintings sale, which is hardly the right auction.
Leonardo's Self-Portrait to go on display in Turin
October 11 2011
Picture: La Venaria Reale
A new Leonardo exhibition will open at La Venaria Reale near Turin on November 18th, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. The highlight will be Leonardo's Self-Portrait drawing. According to the exhibition website, the drawing will be on display 'for the first time ever' (which I find hard to believe). The show runs until 29th January 2012.
Two stolen Picasso's recovered
October 11 2011
Picture: Das Bild
After the sad news of yesterday, some better news now from Germany: two Picassos stolen in February 2008 have been recovered.
Tete de Cheval, 1962 (above), and Verre et Pichet, 1944, belong to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, but were stolen while on loan in Switzerland. The pictures were found in Serbia, which now seems to be the art theft capital of Europe. Das Bild believes that Dick Ellis, formerly of Scotland Yard, was involved in tracking the pictures down.
As ever, it is thought that the pictures were stolen in the hope that a ransom would be paid. The director of the Sprengel Museum, Ulrich Krempel, said:
Often, criminals try to extort a ransom to the insurance or use images as collateral in drug deals.
The sad truth is that as long as museums carry on paying ransoms (or 'fees for information' as the Tate calls them), these thefts will continue.
A tale of two galleries...
October 10 2011
Picture: BG
Rant Alert...
This weekend I went to both the Ahsmolean and the National Gallery. At the former, you can take pictures (e.g., above - I love their low, busy hangs), and the room attendants are cheery.
At the latter, I saw a hapless elderly tourist get bellowed at by a room attendant for seeming to lift his camera. It was such a loud and rude shout that everyone in the room was visibly startled. More and more galleries are allowing photos for personal use - the National should too. And it should stop shouting at its visitors. (I don't like to criticise the National - but as I have my name on their wall, I hope they'll forgive me...)
For your shelves - my publishing picks
October 10 2011
Some art history books just out:
- Human Connections in the Age of Vermeer, by Arthur K. Wheelock, Danielle Lokin
- Lost and Found: Wright of Derby's View of Gibraltar, by John Bonehill
- Pamphilj and the Arts: Patronage and Consumption in Baroque Rome, by Stephanie C. Leone
- Rubens and Britain, by Karen Hearn [pedantic point, Rubens would have come to England. Britain didn't exist.]
- Velazquez, by Norbert Wolf
- Gainsborough Landscapes: Themes and Variations, by Susan Sloman
Restitution - a case study
October 10 2011
Picture: Philip Mould Ltd
This is worth going to: Dr Clarence Epstein of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project will be in London on 20th October to give a talk on tracking down Nazi-looted art. Max Stern was a Jewish art dealer forced to dissolve his business, with his pictures sold at knock-down prices. The lecture is at 8pm at Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square London (near Russell Sq.). Call 020 7520 1535 for seats.
We recently gave the above Flemish picture back to the Stern collection. It had originally been sold from Stern's collection at Lempertz auction house in Germany. And guess where we bought it, unknowingly, some 70 years later? Lempertz. And would they give us a refund? Nein...
Money for old rope (with a dead child on it)
October 10 2011
Picture: BG
Viewing the London contemporary art auctions is one of the highlights of my art market year, as the auction houses transform their sale rooms with dramatic lighting and enormous estimates. Where an old master sale is crammed with pictures, people and conversation, contemporary sales are hushed, reverential affairs where no expense is spared. Every piece of art is treated as if it were a priceless masterpiece, its virtues extolled to gullible collectors by trendy specialists in look-at-me glasses. Even the labels are larger than usual, to cope with all those extra zeros. It's worth going just to marvel at the sheer decadence of it all.
The above caught my eye at Christie's. Maurizio Cattelan's Untitled consists of three flagpoles. At the top of one hangs a life-like dummy of a child on a rope. It is the centrepiece of this week's Contemporary Art evening auction on 14th October. At the entrance to the room in which Untitled is displayed is a sign saying:
Please note an artwork in this room is of a challenging nature. Please ask a member of staff if you require any further guidance.
Powerful, or revolting? You decide. But at £900,000-£1,200,000 it provides a telling narrative of the time we live in.
Crushed - $134m's worth of Picasso, Matisse, Braque etc.
October 10 2011
Picture: Paris Museum of Modern Art, Matisse's 'Pastoral'.
Bad news - the criminals behind the daring theft of five pictures from the Paris Museum of Modern Art last year have claimed the works are now destoyed. From the LA Times:
Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Matisse and Leger paintings stolen in May 2010, and worth about $134 million, may have been dumped in a garbage bin on a Paris street and destroyed with the rest of that day's trash, according to testimony by one of three suspects connected to the theft. The suspect, a 34-year-old watch repairman, was identified only as Jonathan B. by the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.
Of course, if I was one of the small time crooks who stole the pictures on the orders of a Mr Big, then I too would say the pictures were destroyed, to make the trail go cold. I suspect Mr Big (or Mr Bigovich, as these characters usually are) is looking at the pictures now, and dreaming of the day in a few years time when he can extract a ransom for the pictures' safe return.
It also turns out that the thief who got into the museum, a Serb known as 'Spiderman', only intended to take one painting, Fernand Leger's Still Life with Candlestick. But security at the museum was so hopeless he helped himself to four more:
...the museum's alarm didn't sound when the art was removed from the wall, so he wandered around the national museum for more than an hour, helping himself to four more masterpieces, before driving away in a car parked nearby. Despite several security cameras, three night watchmen didn't notice the masked intruder.
I find it hard to believe this wasn't an inside job...
The story behind the discovery of Leonardo's 'Salvator Mundi'
October 9 2011
Picture: BG/Sunday Times
Dash out and get a copy of the Sunday Times if you haven't already got one. The magazine has the story behind the discovery and attribution of Leonardo's Salvator Mundi. There's even a quote from moi. (I would link to it, but Murdoch's paywall is in the way.)
The most convincing evidence, for me, is the photo of the exquisite pentimento on Christ's thumb (above). See my earlier pentimenti story for why these little changes can be such useful evidence.
Friday Amusement
October 7 2011
Picture: Cartoonstock
Arthistorynews 2.0 begins...
October 7 2011
Just to say that I'll be joining Twitter as of Monday. You can follow the latest from AHN @arthistorynews.
Brian Sewell on Grayson Perry
October 7 2011
Would you be surprised if I told you Brian Sewell does not like Grayson Perry's new show at the British Museum? Not only does he dislike Perry's pots, but he also wonders why the BM invited him to exhibit in the first place:
I quite see why the director of the BM accepted Perry's proposal for this wretched little show.
Boyishly provocative, aesthetically levelling, too clever by half and ultimately shallow, the reasoning was that with Perry's name, face and persona attached to it, thousands of loyal Perry fans will become fans too of the British Museum.
How naive - exhibitions of Hirst and Freud made no new friends for the Wallace Collection, and they were not held in such derision. Perry is not a man of scholarship, nor of credibility, and neither informs this puerile, silly and self-aggrandising show. Everything is subordinate to Perry's work; the largest exhibit is his, the exhibition's feeble climax is his, and his pots will rise substantially in price now that they have been exhibited in the British Museum. If the director was too unworldly, the trustees should have recognised the commercial implications of Perry's impertinent proposal - dealers in his pots are certainly rubbing their hands with glee, while the rest of us must pay £10 to see these pointless juxtapositions of Perry's current stock in trade with BM property. Was he paid a fee for his curatorial services and for writing the embarrassing nonsense of the catalogue?
"Do not," he writes in it, "look too hard for meaning here." Do not look at all.
The exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, runs until 19th February.
Look at this painting - did you notice the missing piece?
October 6 2011
Picture: Tate
As I mentioned earlier, the Tate has restored the missing section of John Martin's Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The decision to restore it was undertaken with the help of a vision scientist, Tim Smith, who tracked the eye movements of 20 people to see how they reacted to the damage in the painting. Not surprisingly, they noticed the missing section. He has written an article about the process:
The decisions made by conservators when restoring important works of art have a direct influence on how the final painting will be perceived and there is a lot of psychological insight that can inform this process. For example, computational models of visual attention can tell a conservator whether a crack or the loss of a segment is likely to capture the viewer's attention and how this will change depending on the context in which the painting is viewed.
For the damaged John Martin we decided to compare how viewers attended to and made sense of different digital reconstructions of the painting by recording viewer eye movements. An eyetracker uses high-speed infrared cameras to record where a person looks on a screen. This allowed the TATE to foresee how viewers might attend to the final product before embarking on costly and time-consuming work on the painting itself.
[...]
In the neutral version of the painting the mouth of the volcano and part of the city is lost and instead the viewer dwells on the edges of the loss, spending significantly less time on the foreground figures. The consequence of the different gaze pattern is that when asked to describe the content of the painting, viewers of the unreconstructed version did not realise it was a painting of an erupting volcano. The painting had lost its meaning and viewers could not view it as originally intended by Martin.
The difference in gaze behaviour between the completely restored and unrestored (neutrally filled) versions confirmed our intuitions about how destructive the loss was. [...]
Isn't this an explanation of the bleedin' obvious? I'd love to know if this exercise cost the Tate anything.
