Leonardo didn't paint 'Lady With an Ermine'!
November 22 2011
Picture: Princess Czartoryski Foundation
I'm indebted to a reader for alerting me to another piece of incisive art history in the letters pages of our national press. This is from Pauline Wood, of Ibstone, Buckinghamshire, in today's Daily Telegraph:
Sir,
In the painting Lady with an Ermine, currently on display at the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition, the lady’s right hand is out of proportion with the rest of her body (detail, below). If you measure from her wrist to the tip of her longest finger and transfer that measurement to her face, it reaches from her chin almost to the top of her head. My hand only reaches from my chin to the middle of my forehead.
Given Leonardo’s knowledge of anatomy, I find it difficult to believe that he would have made this error. I am not an expert or even an artist, but dare I suggest that this painting may be by one of his students?
In case you too are doubting the picture, go see the Leonardo exhibition, where you will not only understand all about foreshortening, but also see countless preparatory drawings. In fact, Leonardo liked the hand so much he used it twice; it appears in The Last Supper. And before you try putting your hand on your face to see if the Telegraph writer's theory is correct, and that a human hand cannot be larger than a human head, remember that her measurement has been taken from the back of Leonardo's sitter's hand, at the base of the bent wrist. This gives a measurement of at least an inch longer than if you measure from the base of your palm to your fingertip.
Anyway, I feel an Art History News prize coming on - for the most bonkers art historical theory of the year. Any suggestions for the title, or indeed the prize?
Complaint of the day
November 22 2011
A reader has tipped me off about a letter in yesterday's Daily Mail. A Mr Powell, of Frimley, Surrey, was complaining about the cost of entry to the Uffizi gallery, and the queues. He then added:
"We thought the Uffizi gallery overrated. More than half the paintings were of the Crucifixion or the Adoration of the Magi. It was like reading the same story in several different newspapers. We won't be returning."
I think this must be the best art historical whinge I've ever read. And exactly what you might expect to find in the Wail...
Test your connoisseurship - answer
November 22 2011
Picture: Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Well done to those of you who got the answer to this one; Thomas Lawrence's Portrait of William Lock of Norbury, 1790, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although unfinished, the legend is that Lawrence painted the portrait in a single sitting, pleasing Lock so much that he paid the artist a special bonus. Lawrence was then only 21 - it's no wonder Joshua Reynolds called him a genius...
'Sold for $43m!' Or perhaps not...?
November 21 2011
Picture: Christie's
There's an excellent article in The Economist* on the practice of guaranteeing pictures at auction. This is the process whereby an auction house finds a third party, perhaps a wealthy collector, to give a guarantee on a picture, thus helping secure its consignment by the vendor. If the picture does not sell on the big night, the guarantor gets to keep the picture (usually at a price below the lower estimate) and the vendor gets the moolah.
So far so clear. Things get murky, though, when the guarantor then starts bidding on the picture - if he buys it, he will almost certainly then get a discount (or a 'financing fee') in return for having guaranteed it. The question then is - if a guaranteed picture 'sells' at auction for, say, $10 million, and the buyer actually pays just $9 million (the remainder being his discount in the form of a financing fee), then has the picture really 'sold' for $10m? Most people would say not. And in a business where everything revolves around percieved value, then isn't that a distortion of the market?
The recent sale at Christie's of Roy Lichtenstein's 'I can see the whole room... and there's nobody in it!', above, may be, according The Economist, a case in point:
It is strongly believed, for example, that Guy Bennett, an art advisor acting on behalf of the Qataris, negotiated third-party guarantees on the top lots at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s recent contemporary auctions in New York. During the prestigious evening sale at Christie’s on November 8th, Mr Bennett was seen to make the winning bid of $38.5m for Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting, “I can see the whole room!... and There’s Nobody in it!”. Christie’s normal buyer’s premium (or commission) on this would bring the final price up to $43.2m, which was the price reported by Christie’s. However, high-powered guarantors often negotiate a 50-50 split with the auction house of as much as 30% of the overage (the amount generated above the guaranteed price) and an additional 50% of the buyer’s premium. The market believes the Lichtenstein was guaranteed at $35m. If Mr Bennett, who bought the picture, had negotiated such a deal, the real price he paid would have been $40.3m.
So if the above scenario actually happened, then the Christie's press release saying that 'I can see the whole room...' 'sold' for $43.2m is flat out wrong. Things get even murkier when the only bidder on the night is the guarantor. Because then you can't really be sure that the picture has sold for any value at all. It could be an exercise in setting 'value', perhaps to keep prices up for a certain artist. The Economist concludes that the guarantee system is too murky for its own good:
Good auctions are theatrical spectacles that create the illusion of deep markets. Historically a successful sale needs at least two bidders. But sometimes a guarantee leads to a “private sale in public” in which the guarantor is the only bidder. When the top prices for a particular artist are only reached via these kinds of behind-the-scenes, one-to-one transactions, it is reasonable to ask whether it is indicative of a market at all.
No one wants to ruin the entertainment value of a night out at the auctions, but contemporary art has enough credibility problems without unnecessary murkiness. “Industry practices need to catch up with the value of art today”, argue Michael Plummer and Jeff Rabin of Artvest Partners, a firm of art-investment advisors. “We need to require a higher standard of transparency and ethical behaviour because so much money is at stake.” Regardless of the money involved, the market would be considerably fairer and more open if the auction houses reported real prices, disclosed the reserve prices—and named the third-party guarantors as well.
*Thanks to Neil Bird for bringing it to my attention.
Test your connoisseurship
November 21 2011
Picture: BG
Can you tell who painted this? Hint, it's unfinished.
'Salvator Mundi' - it's all balls
November 21 2011
Picture: Salvator Mundi LLC
There's an interesting interview with Leonardo Scholar Martin Kemp over on Artinfo, in which he discusses his role in attributing the Salvator Mundi. He reveals that one of the things which convinced him about the picture is the orb in Christ's hand. After he first saw the painting he went down to the Ashmolean Museum to look at one of their rock crystal orbs:
What was striking for me was the orb, and I've subsequently researched it quite heavily. The "Salvator Mundi" obviously holds the mundus, the world which he's saving, and it was absolutely unlike anything I've seen before. The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they're of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they're terrestrial globes, sometimes they're translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they're like bubbles, but they're not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that's pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d'Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials.
So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, "Let's have a look at some rock crystal." And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the "Salvator Mundi"; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they're not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you've got in the "Salvator Mundi" is really a "a savior of the cosmos", and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.
$23.6 million Chinese contemporary work
November 21 2011
Picture: cultural-china.com
A work by Wu Guanzhong, Ten Thousand Kilometres of the Yangtze River (detail above), has sold at auction in Beijing for $23.6m. I think (but will have to check) that this is a new record for an individual work by a Chinese contemporary artist. More on Wu Guanzhong here.
Leonardo mania
November 19 2011
Picture: Ebay
Bidding for two tickets for the Leonardo exhibition on 30th November has now reached £330 on Ebay, after 34 bids. The cover price is £16. Wish you'd bought a whole lot when they first came out?
Advanced tickets have now sold out. The only way to get legit tickets is to turn up on the day and hope you get some of the daily allowance. Queues are beginning at 6.30am, with the gallery opening at 10am...
In WW2, the Brits looted too...
November 19 2011
Picture: Indiana University
Here's an unusual one: a painting is to be restituted to the German government. The late 15th Century Cologne School Flagellation of Christ (detail above) was looted by (ahem) a British soldier from the Jagdschloss Grunewald in 1945, before ending up in the Art Museum of Indianapolis University. It had previously been in the German royal collection. Perhaps Kaiser Wilhelm's descendants will now claim it back... More here.
Getty denies interest in 'Salvator Mundi'
November 19 2011
That, at least, is the headline in the LA Times. But if you actually read the story, it seems the Getty is not ruling it out:
David Bomford, acting director of the Getty Museum, said only that "other acquisitions" being considered by the Brentwood institution precluded the effort. Bomford, who was speaking to The Times' editorial board, is a former paintings conservator and head registrar at the London museum where the Leonardo exhibition is taking place.
It's unlikely they'll get another chance to buy a Leonardo; start jangling the tin!
Friday Amusement
November 18 2011
Picture: Cartoonstock
Continuing the Leonardo theme this week...
'A little bit of justice'
November 18 2011
Picture: Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Two paintings by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff are one step closer to being restituted to the heirs of a Jewish businessman killed at Auschwitz, after a ruling by a German government panel. The pictures are Self-Portrait (above) and Farm in Dangast, both of which are now in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Robert Graetz, a German Jew who worked in the textiles industry, was forced to sell the works to pay the punitive taxes levied by the Nazis. Graetz's grandson, Argentinian Roberto Graetz, said:
"You can’t undo the past, but it is possible to achieve a little bit of justice ... Many times over the years I have had tears in my eyes, remembering this family history while working on the claim. There is a sense of deep satisfaction at this conclusion, but the feelings are contradictory, because those who suffered are no longer here.” [...]
“My grandfather lost everything he worked for, and then died in a camp [...] My family first started trying to get these paintings back in 1946, after the war. The decision is good for us, for my children and my children’s children.”
Catherine Hickley in Bloomberg has the full story here.
A fake Modigliani at the Pushkin museum?
November 18 2011
Picture: The Art Newspaper
The Art Newspaper has an intriguing story about Modigliani's Portrait of Marevna (Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska, above right). An anonymous Russian collector has told TAN that he had the chance to buy it, but after subjecting it to scientific tests found out that it was a fake. The Modigliani Institute in Rome, on the other hand, and the Pushkin Museum, maintain it is legit.
First, 'the Russian collector':
“After 40 days, I got the evaluation back from the institute, which indicated that some of the pigments used in this painting were synthetic, produced after 1940,” he says. Modigliani died in 1920. The collector now says he is “revolted” to see the work hanging in the Pushkin as a genuine Modigliani.
Now, the Modigliani Institute:
Christian Parisot, the president of the Modigliani Institute in Rome who has the legal right to authenticate Modigliani’s work, insists that it is a genuine portrait. He denies all of the allegations questioning the authenticity of Portrait of Marevna and offers various documents, including a declaration by Marevna saying that she posed for Modigliani, and cites the results of scientific tests as proof.
“Current chemical and spectrographic tests demonstrate that the support, the canvas and all the colours used in this painting are of the period of the artist, and are comparable to those of the other paintings,” he says. He adds that there is no scientific research from any laboratory claiming otherwise.
The painting is listed in Parisot’s catalogue raisonné of Modigliani (Catalogue Raisonné A. Modigliani, Volume II, 1991) and has been exhibited elsewhere. It was shown at an extensive Modigliani exhibition “Amedeo Modigliani”, that opened in 2010 and ran until February this year at the Municipal House in Prague. The Modigliani Institute also points out that the painting was attributed to the artist when it was shown in 1983 at the Musée Bourdelle in Paris, when Marevna was still alive.
There seems to be a compelling case in the painting's favour. You read the full story here.
But a couple of things puzzle me. The picture is apparently for sale for EUR9m. I haven't seen the painting, but one wonders why the mystery 'Russian collector' is publicising this story. One also wonders why The Art Newspaper has not published or even seen for itself (as far as one can tell from the story) the collector's technical analysis. Certainly, I would be mightily annoyed if TAN published an anonymous collector's questioning of one of my paintings, with no evidence. Wouldn't you? Perhaps there is some murky behind-the-scenes negotiation going on - questioning a picture's validity is a great way to lower the price!
The risks of selling your art at auction in Paris...
November 18 2011
Picture: Avis de recherche de la Police Nationale
Thousands of works that 'went missing' over many years from the main Paris auction centre, L'Hotel des Ventes de Drouot, have been listed online by French police in a bid to identify their owners. The site is a nightmare to navigate, but contains some intriguing pictures. A number of arrests have been made, mainly amongst the porters at Drouot, the so-called cols-rouges. For more background on the case, see Simon Hewitt's reports in the Antiques Trade Gazette.
Van Gogh in Canada
November 18 2011
A major retrospective of Van Gogh's view of nature will open next year at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (25th May - 3rd September). 'Van Gogh; Up Close' will include 45 of his works. More details here.
Yesterday...
November 18 2011
...I was in the countryside looking for possible stories for series 2 of 'Fake or Fortune?'. This involved a long train ride, a fine lunch in a fifteenth century hall, and a disappointing 'Gauguin'. We have potential leads for a couple of programmes, but are still keen to hear of more, so keep your ideas coming...
Waldemar on 'Leonardo'
November 16 2011
Picture: Waldemar Januszczak
As expected, a good review from Waldemar on the Leonardo exhibition. And I was glad to see that, unlike many critics, he liked the Salvator Mundi:
Having expected to doubt the surprise new authorship, I found myself fully convinced by it. The rock crystal orb, Christ’s blessing fingers and his curly hair are super-sensitively painted by a hand we now recognise: a hand seeking always to extend the limits of depiction. The sheer strangeness of the image makes it feel Leonardo-esque. No normal painter would have attempted this.
Of course, this is completely the opposite to Andrew Graham-Dixon's response to the picture.
On the subject of why many critics have disagreed with the National Gallery's attribution of Salvator Mundi to Leonardo, a reader writes:
The Press has it in for the Salvator Mundi - I should guess - because the painting's had it too easy, from (re)discovery to attribution and exhibition in six years - no conspiracy, no mystery and not a scratch from sinister vested interests, just a perfectly respectable guest showing up 500 years late for a party.
In case you thought the Museums Journal was an impartial publication...
November 16 2011
I don't like to be political on this site. But instances of 'all Tories are philistines' annoy me. Here's an excerpt from the current editorial by Sharon Heal on free entry to museums:
There is no room for complacency, however; the Conservatives have long been rumoured to be in favour of charging and, despite all their protest to the contrary, would probably love the London nationals to be able to levy high admission charges on their millions of visitors.
And here's an extract from a speech by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt before the last election:
...let me state clearly that we will maintain free museums, which Chris Smith fought so hard to achieve... it has been a huge success, and under the next Conservative government it will remain so. No ifs, no buts.
New Powell Frith discovered
November 16 2011
Picture: BBC News
Found in an American beach house - a first version of William Powell Frith's epic painting, Derby Day. The finished picture, one of the most famous 19th Century narrative paintings, is in the Tate. This earlier version by Frith will be sold at Christie's in December, with an estimate of up to £500,000. Annoyingly, the catalogue entry is not online yet, so for now more details on BBC News here
Queueing for Leonardo
November 16 2011
Picture: BG
Advanced tickets for Leonardo have now sold out. If you want to go, you'll have to queue!
