Previous Posts: May 2014

A note of caution regarding the fate of Poussin’s The Infant Moses trampling upon Pharaoh’s Crown. The lack of public campaign to save the painting (despite its undoubted quality and exceptional provenance) as compared to the highly effective appeal run by the Art Fund and The Fitzwilliam Museum for the same artist’s Extreme Unction 18 months ago suggests all does not bode well despite the painting’s continued deferral from export.  

Indeed, 2013/14 is turning out to be an annus horribilis for at risk paintings. Of the eleven paintings export stopped so far only the van Dyck self portrait has been secured for the nation. One other case remains outstanding (a Lusieri watercolour) but nine important paintings have gone abroad. The most recent loss is Le Brun’s Portrait of Everhard Jabach and his family which the Art Tribune describes as ‘exceptional for its quality’ and notes ‘the National Gallery in London…should have done everything in its power to keep it in England where it resided since the 18th century.’ Unfortunately, the National Gallery (or indeed other galleries across the UK) did not appear to share this view.

Her Majesty The Queen once commented in an interview regarding art that The Royal Collection was lacking a Poisson painting and appeared genuinely disturbed by the fact.  This one would be an excellent addition to Her collection.

It wasn’t the Queen as such, rather Prunella Scales as HM – I remember the comment from Alan Bennett’s Question of Attribution.

It looks terrible. How can they survive? But the boats were designed for this; the crew have practised. This is a homage to planning and experience. We should feel proud of humanity's competence and skill in the face of dreadful but awe-inspiring challenges. We're better able to cope than we might think.

The critics have been unrelenting. In the Dutch press, Bianca Stigter put it best when she said the Rijksmuseum was presenting art as cod liver oil: the nastier it tasted the more good it did you. Her colleague Wieteke van Zeil made the essential argument that the job of a gallery was to give people the space to think, not to tell them what to think.

The British press has been no less condemnatory. I am not disagreeing. The moral exhortations and cautionary tales the Rijksmuseum offers are historically ignorant, visually illiterate and brazenly propagandistic.

[...] after reading the book and seeing the show, I now know that the art world hates “Art as Therapy” because it’s just plain awful. I remain comfortable with its intention; its tone and execution, however, are all wrong.

At the AGO, de Botton appears in videos activated by the push of a button. The first is embedded in a science fair–like stand after the gallery’s entrance wickets. A quote by de Botton and Armstrong tells us that “an art gallery should not only be a place to learn about art [but also] should be a place where we can learn about ourselves.” Five themed sections, placed throughout the AGO on multiple floors, are then identified with a map. In these sections, permanent-collection works are curated by de Botton and Armstrong alongside instructive and interpretive panels.

In every video, one for each section, de Botton urges us to express our feelings via doodling or writing on iPads, the results of which are displayed on screens. In addition, throughout the building, we see aphorisms with the #artastherapy hashtag and symbol, an apothecary’s cross. One garbage can reads, “Art is advertising, for what is good.”

This encouragement to engage immediately appears suspect and ironic. In the videos, de Botton is remote and supercilious. He uses British diction such as “trolley” (instead of “shopping cart”) and jokey-cute, sugar-coated phrasing such as “the whole ticklish subject” (to speak of sex). (In the book, he even uses the term “the gentle sex.”) The tone, consonant with previous de Botton books but obnoxiously amplified in speech, is best described as dumbed-down-patrician. Despite de Botton’s sentiments of aesthetic-humanist magnanimity, he looks wan, uncomfortable, even hateful in the videos, hunching forward and speaking through a wince, his eyes squinting, his voice echoing through a generic gallery setting. One imagines him bound to a chair off-frame.

From lapis lazuli to cobalt blue, to dazzling gold and silver – travel through the story of colour with the National Gallery.

‘Making Colour’, the first exhibition of its kind in the UK, invites you on an artistic and scientific voyage of discovery. From sparkling gemstones to crushed insects, learn about the surprising materials used to create pigments and the incredible journeys made by artists in their pursuit of new hues.

Span hundreds of years from the early Renaissance to the Impressionist movement as you take in displays of paintings, mineral specimens, textiles, ceramics and glass.

Journey from lapis lazuli to cobalt blue, ancient vermilion to bright cadmium red, through yellow, orange, purple and verdigris to deep green viridian – in a series of colour-themed rooms. Finally, enter a dazzling central room devoted to gold and silver.

‘Making Colour’ is complemented by an interactive display that introduces a new world of contemporary scientific thought on colour. Designed to demonstrate how we perceive and register colour, the experiment will reveal how the eye and brain respond to colour in unexpected ways.

Patrick Vialaneix, 42, has become an improbable celebrity for beating the system—twice.

He first saw the Rembrandt, L’enfant à la bulle de savon (Child with soap bubble), at age 13 on a visit with his mother to the municipal museum in Draguignan, France. It reminded him of himself so much that viewing it was “like looking in a mirror,” he said. He became obsessed with the painting, returning over and over to behold its charms.

His fixation escalated until finally, at the age of 28, he decided he had to steal it.

As luck would have it, he was employed as an alarm technician, so he began with a painstaking study of the museum’s security system. He planned the heist for July 13, 1999, during the noisy celebrations on the eve of the French holiday Bastille Day. Just before the museum closed, he discreetly crawled into a large cabinet and waited. Later that night, as helicopters thundered overhead, he jimmied open the painting’s bulletproof-glass case, slipped out the work in a few seconds, and escaped just as the alarm sounded. By the time the police arrived, he was gone.

 “Take two calves’ feet, two quarts of spring water, two ounces of sugar candy, one ounce of hart’s horn shavings, and one quart of milk; put them into an earthen pan, and send them to the oven to be baked after the bread is taken out, and to remain all night in the oven.”

Professor Van de Wetering was the long-serving director of the Rembrandt Research Project, set up in the Netherlands to organise and catagorise research on the artist, and is in the process of writing the sixth and final volume overview of the painter which has meant travelling the world viewing works which have had the biggest question marks placed over them.

That includes London's Old Man in an Armchair which was purchased as a Rembrandt in 1957, but demoted in 1969 based on the views of then leading expert Horst Gerson.

Van de Wetering saw the work three years ago and will next week have his arguments published in the June edition of the Burlington Magazine. "I was amazed that the painting was rejected," he said. "Then I saw how it was and why it was rejected."

Van de Wetering said the demotion of the 1652 painting had been based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The judgment was based on connoisseurship – that if a painting did not look like Rembrandt it could not be Rembrandt. "That was a vast mistake and Gerson got many wrong."

Instead Old Man in an Armchair needs to be seen in terms of Rembrandt's experimentation, said van de Wetering. In 1651 the artist decided to start all over again, to reinvent how he painted – to both paint and draw with his brush, in what has become known as his late "rough manner".

The subject in the National Gallery painting is not a portrait, van de Wetering said. "This is a man posing to be studied ... it is a painting about painting."

Van de Wetering said it was one of a number of "paintings about painting" that Rembrandt made, but the National Gallery work was of huge importance because it was one of the earliest.

To me the colours, the light, the proportions and the handling of the paint seem spot on for Rembrandt.  I don't know of a forger who is that perfect and comes that close to him.

I had a quick look at the Met's picture The Auctioneer and I agree with you that the main painter is Rembrandt but it looks, from the photographs, as if another hand has touched-up parts of the hair, the shape of the hair on the shoulder looks mis-balanced, possibly causing the shape of the hat to change - the left-hand shadow on the face also seems too hard.  I can understand why it was downgraded.

An oil painting bought for a mere €150 (£120) from a dusty antiques shop in northeastern Spain 26 years ago has been discovered to be the earliest surrealist work by Salvador Dali, art experts confirmed on Thursday.

[Art historian] Tomeu L'Amo suspected it may have been an early work by Catalan artist Salvador Dali but the shopkeeper insisted that was impossible as it bore an inscription with the date 1896, eight years before Dali was born.

Nevertheless, Mr L'Amo purchased the artwork for 25,000 pesetas - around £120 in today's money - and spent the next quarter of a century trying to confirm his hunch. [...]

A team of experts used a series of technological methods to help determine the painting's authenticity. Infrared photography of the canvas revealed lines made by the artist that were consistent with a style he used in later works.

Analysis of the paint used on the canvas proved it could not have been created before 1909 and comparison of the lettering of the inscription with hundreds of other known Dali works by a well-respected handwriting expert showed it was consistent with Dali's own hand.

José Pedro Venzal, the handwriting expert who regularly carries out analysis for Interpol, revealed that the inscription contained a corrected spelling mistake, one that Dali oft repeated in later life.

The ten word dedication in the lower righthand corner of the painting written in Catalan translates as "To My Dear Teacher on the day of his birth", with the date 27-IX-96.

Mr L'Amo believes Dali, who had a reputation for making outrageous claims and carrying out media stunts, used a numerology code to come up with date.

"Dali must be laughing in his grave at the thought that he managed to fool everyone for so many years," he said.

The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, which runs a museum in the artist's birthplace of Figueres, has yet to recognise the work as a Dali original.

Nicholas Descharnes is standing next to the painting in the photograph - Robert & Nicholas are two of the most respected Dali experts, so as crazy as it might seem, it would suggest it has strong connoisseurial backing.

You are dead right to be wary of so-called forensic experts. Some years ago when I was a trainee solicitor in England I was in court when a defendant pleaded guilty to charges of fraud involving forgery of cheques. However this was only after another completely innocent person some months before  had been convicted of these offences based on finger print and handwriting evidence which in the event was wrong. The judge's passing remark in the later case "It makes you think, doesn't it" was to me the understatement of the century.

Available for the first time on the National Gallery of Art website, NGA Online Editions (œ) presents the most current, in-depth information on the Gallery’s collections by the world’s leading art historians along with rich capabilities for exploring that information. A customized reading environment and toolkit for managing text and images are intended both to provide scholars with a useful workspace for research and to encourage the study and appreciation of art.

NGA Online Editions launches with Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century by Gallery curator Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and will ultimately document more than 5,000 paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts in the nation's collection. Editions include an introduction by the curator, illustrated scholarly entries (each preceded by a short overview), artists' biographies, technical summaries, and a complement of rich media, educational materials, and appendices related to the featured collection. Formerly known as The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (a printed series of authoritative volumes on the Gallery’s permanent collections), NGA Online Editions puts this same detailed information—and more—at the fingertips of students, scholars, and anyone eager to learn more about the treasures of the National Gallery of Art.

This online feature makes almost five hundred images from the Morgan's exceptional collection of Rembrandt etchings available for the first time. The images presented here celebrate his unsurpassed skill and inventiveness as a master storyteller. 

Pierpont Morgan laid the foundation for this collection—the finest in North America—when he acquired his first Rembrandt etchings in 1900, with another major purchase in 1906. The Morgan holds impressions of most of the three hundred or so known etchings by Rembrandt, as well as multiple, often exceedingly rare impressions of various states. 

Renowned in the history of printmaking, Rembrandt's etchings are famous for their dramatic intensity, penetrating psychology, and touching humanity. Through these images you can explore some of the central and often recurring themes of the master's work, including portraiture, the Bible, scenes from everyday life, the nude, and landscape.

In the 17th & 18th century Britain there were plenty of women in the art trade, just not always as painters. Jacob Simon wrote a blog entry about female frame makers and gilders, which is here:

And you could make much the same points about picture dealing. In the early modern period it was not at all uncommon to find widows carrying on their late husbands' trade as picture sellers - their families still needed money to eat, after all. Working was hardly ever a matter of personal fulfilment like it is so often nowadays. Indeed, so far as the evidence allows for such a generalisation, I'd say it was even normal for women to sell pictures after theri husbands died and doubtless they played their part in the business while their husbands were still living. Some women dealers whose names spring to mind are Elizabeth Turner (d.1732/3), wife of Captain Henry Turner who was based at the Palace of Westminster in the early 18th century; Elizabeth Davis (died 1714), wife of engraver and dealer Edward Davis; Margaret Hay, wife of painter/dealer Andrew Hay; and the widow of copyist and picture seller Henry Peart (died 1700), who ended up selling her stock to the 1st Earl of Bristol in return for an annual pension. The Pearts were neighbours of the Beales in Pall Mall as you know.

In the records of the Painter Stainers company at this time one finds women-only workshops too, although it's never clear what trade they were carrying on.

[...] improve access to and raise awareness of Joseph Wright and his work, locally, nationally and internationally. It will offer research opportunities, produce exhibitions and publications as well as a programme of activities catering for all audiences including schools and families, university academics and casual visitors.

Comprising of the Joseph Wright Gallery containing the largest collection of Wright oil paintings in the world; The Study Centre with drawings, prints, letters and other supporting information relating to Wrights life and work; Exhibition space that will host temporary exhibitions of Wright’s work and placing Wright in context two exhibitions open in May as part of this launch “Wright Inspired”, looking at copies, fakes and work inspired by Wright and “Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond” an exhibition jointly developed with The Holbourne in Bath.

Damien Hirst's paintings are talentless and phoney as hell. Hirst is the fake. His efforts to do "proper" paintings have revealed his total lack of artistic accomplishment. This exposure of his fundamental inability means that it is impossible to take him seriously any more, especially as a painter. While the best of his early animal vitrines have some kind of place in art history, his paintings – spin, spot or realist – are cynical stunts by a man who cannot actually paint. So how on earth can they be of value and why should it be a big deal to fake them?

I cannot follow the reasoning of Jonathan Jones; he thinks Hirst's work is without merit, and therefore no crime worthy of punishment is committed in passing off a fake.  Even if that is so (and no doubt there are other opinions) it is hardly the point; anyone laying down their hard earned for a Hirst, is entitled to receive a Hirst (whatever it's artistic merits) and not a fake, and they have been deceived if they don't.  With the greatest respect to Jones, the sin lies in the deception, and not in any necessarily personal and subjective assessment of quality of the item copied, or indeed in the item used to deceive.