Previous Posts: August 2012

Much enjoyed your post on the Olympics - and we Brits have achieved great things.  But don't think that we have not been through a similar period of achievement but subsequent disappointment in relatively recent history.  I so well remember the atmosphere of achievement and optimism at the time of the Coronation in 1953...

On Coronation Day the newspapers were bought by us excited teenagers camping overnight on the Mall.  The Daily Mirror was printed in gold, with a huge headline: “The Crowning Glory – Everest is Climbed”… the first we knew of Hilary and Tensing’s momentous achievement.  There were other expressions of triumph lauding the ‘New Elizabethan Age’, the popular sentiment of the day.  Advertisements for Air France proudly proclaimed “The only airline flying the de Havilland Comet and jet-prop Vickers Viscount” – British-built and the first and only jet-powered aircraft in airline service... the envy of the Americans.  Britain ‘Led the World’ in so many ways:  Jaguar and Aston Martin were winning the Le Mans 24-hour races; the ‘Glorious Glosters’ had won fame and a VC in Korea; our motorcar, aircraft and shipbuilding industries were supreme… The Jodrell Bank radio-telescope and Calder Hall, Europe’s first nuclear power station, were further proof of our scientific achievement.  A year before, the Festival of Britain had launched a new era in domestic and industrial art, architecture and design. The Royal Ballet was the envy of the western theatre; Britten, Walton and Vaughan-Williams were our greatest living composers.  Cunard’s ‘Queen’ liners were unloading thousands of Americans at Southampton to attend the coronation of our beautiful young Queen.  Churchill was our Prime Minister, the most famous of all living international leaders, presiding over a Commonwealth of Nations that spanned the globe, as did the Royal Navy's Fleets and dockyards.  The whole world looked on in admiration, envying our outstanding achievements in trade, technology, industry, the arts and engineering - and our huge contribution to winning the second world war.

Yet, what is the ‘legacy’ of all that heady optimism today?  Whatever the undoubted success of London 2012, we should beware of  complacency bred from success in sport alone.  There is far more urgent work to be done if we are to regain, in other fields, the international respect accorded to our athletes in the past two weeks.

You are right; the London games were a triumph for Britain. Hopefully the resulting positive triumphalism will sustain people in the face of quotidian reality. However, your comments reminded me of Canadian’s collective joy during the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, when heavy investment in a multi-year support program for athletes, rather embarrassingly called “Own the Podium,” translated into a pleasing medal haul (the most gold won by a country at a single winter games). 

It was a great party and probably most of us got fan fever to some degree for sixteen days. Indeed, there was absolute delirium when the Canadian team beat the Americans for gold in hockey (our self-proclaimed national sport). Lasting impact? The hockey final is mentioned occasionally. Also, periodically there is a news item about the difficulties encountered selling units in the Olympic Village (designed as a condominium complex). Otherwise, not much.

Perhaps such successes – the efforts of a few enjoyed by many – are not sufficient to remain with us as a touch point of lasting national pride. Nonetheless, you Brits have much to celebrate, everything that happened between the Queen’s dramatic arrival at the opening to the Spice Girls dancing on top of black cabs during the closing ceremony. We enjoyed it all!

The hypnotizing argot of the art world is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to decipher a gallery press release or encountered a nebulous artist statement. It’s a vocabulary of modified adjectives and abstract nouns, of concepts that get deconstructed and ideas that get interrogated, distributed practices and embraced ambiguity. In a recent article for the innovative web publication Triple Canopy, Alix Rule and David Levine coin the term “International Art English” (shorthanded “IAE,” roughly equivalent to the popular nickname “artspeak”) to describe this language, tracing its history and divining its murky rules. IAE “always recommends using more rather than fewer words,” the authors write; it “sounds like inexpertly translated French;” is marked by an “uncanny stillness;” and has a heavy “dependence on lists” (guilty as charged).

Rule and Levine have arrived at their findings by sorting through the past 13 years of press releases from e-flux, an online art project and distribution platform founded by artists Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Adriana Arenas, Josh Welber, and Terence Gower in 1999 that sends out paid-for announcements to its 90,000-plus-member email list. Rule and Levine loaded the collected press releases into Sketch Engine, a piece of software that analyzes linguistic behavior and trends from bodies of text. The tendencies that they discovered are obvious in retrospect — an overreliance on adverbs, repetition of adjectives, and a preponderance of subordinate clauses — but more striking is their outlining of the past and possible future of IAE. 

Rule and Levine peg the origin of IAE to the critical journal October, founded in 1976 by art historians Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. October introduced French post-structuralist philosophers to American audiences, translating the writing for the new publication. So begins IAE’s departure from standard English. The approximations, vagaries, and quirks of those French-to-English translations, as Rule and Levine describe, took on the status of art-writing tropes and were widely emulated by less scholarly magazines, then galleries, institutions, and artists, in a process of semantic entropy. A language originally invented by and for the elite of the art world that “allowed some writers to sound more authoritative than others” trickled down and became destabilized in the process, eventually morphing into the pidgin we know (and don’t love) today.

The halting of the painting's export caused some ruckus in the art world, with some people questioning why Britain should have a cultural claim to a work created by a French Impressionist painter.

Conservators in Germany have joined the protest over plans to relocate the world-famous collection of Old Masters in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie. Under the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz's (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) plan, the estimated 3,000 works will move into the much smaller Bode Museum to make way for modern art including the collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch. Any Old Master that cannot be displayed in the smaller space will go into storage for an estimated six years until a new space is found for the collection on the capital's Museum Island.

The move, which was announced at the beginning of July, poses a “significant conservation risk”, said a statement released by the Bonn-based Verband der Restauratoren (Association of Restorers) on 19 July. The association, which has around 2,500 members, argues that the Pietzsch collection should move into the Gemäldegalerie only when a suitable location has been found to accommodate the Old Masters. “Only then can transport be reduced and the possibility that large parts of the collection will disappear into stores for years be avoided,” the statement said. “Any handling, packaging and transportation—even within the building—means mechanical stress and climatic changes to the works, which weakens their substance.”

In a bid to settle one of the mysteries of the art world, the three inch long, red hair was lifted from "Still Life with Peonies" and DNA samples taken from it will be compared with those from Van Gogh's living relatives.

If confirmed a Van Gogh, the painting could fetch a value of £39 million and make Cologne art collector Markus Roubrocks, its owner, a multi millionaire.

The bright painting of a vase of multicoloured peonies resting on a wooden floor was discovered in a Belgian attic in 1977, and since then debate has raged in the art world whether it is the work of the Dutch master.

Mr Roubrocks, who inherited the painting from his father, has always argued it is an original Van Gogh dating from the spring of 1889 just a year before the artist took his own life. Two independent art experts who examined the picture independently backed his claim, but the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam contests this, saying the brush strokes are inconsistent with Van Gogh's style, and therefore the painting is nothing more than an expert piece of forgery.

According to Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the painting was taken from the cathedral in Wroclaw, then known as Breslau and part of German territory, to protect it from Allied air raids. Cranach was known to be one of Hitler’s favourite artists and it is possible that it was ear marked for inclusion in the planned Führermuseum, Linz. 

After the war, the picture was returned to the Diocesan Museum, Wroclaw rather than the war-damaged cathedral. It had been broken in two and officials decided to have it restored. Siegfried Zimmer, a German priest and amateur art collector and painter, was commissioned to take care of the restoration work, but he instead had a copied made between 1946 to 1947 and stole away to Berlin with the actual Cranach. The hoax was not uncovered until 1961, when a Polish conservator examined the picture and found it to be a modern copy. The original passed through private hands until it made its way to an unnamed Swiss collector who held it until his recent death, when it was left to the Diocese of St Gallen.

Surely the photo is of the forgery, or much overpainted if it's the original. The Madonna's face looks very 'South Pacific' and the whole thing is like those murals in Greek hotels when I was young.

Museum director Christopher Brown said: "The public's response to the campaign for the Manet has been overwhelming.

"The museum is enormously grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, other foundations and many individuals who contributed so generously and helped us save Manet for the public.

"To have succeeded in acquiring the portrait this year, when the UK is in the international spotlight, is something of which the museum and the entire country can be proud.

"This is one of the most important pictures of the 19th century, which has been in Britain since its sale following the artist's death in 1884. Its acquisition has transformed the Ashmolean's collection and has at a stroke made Oxford into a leading centre for the study of Impressionist painting."

18th Century Collections Curatorial Department Internship Opportunity

The National Portrait Gallery is seeking to appoint an intern for six months [one day a week] with a proven interest in portraiture to gain experience in general curatorial work and research across a number of projects.  The main focus of the internship will be on the 18th-Century Collections but an interest in the portraiture of other periods is desirable.  Tasks may include answering public enquiries, scoping out ideas for the annual redisplay of Regency miniatures, research towards a forthcoming display on World War Two and the RAF at Beningbrough Hall, Yorkshire and research support towards an academic study of portrait print collecting and extra-illustration in eighteenth-century Britain. As a large part of the internship will involve research in libraries and archives in London, it would be an advantage to have completed an MA or be engaged in a programme of PhD study.