Previous Posts: February 2017
Bruce Munro on Impressionism
February 22 2017
Video: Sotheby's
To publicise their next Impressionist sale, Sotheby's has made the above film with the British artist Bruce Munro. I know I've said it before, but these short auction house short films are often so good.
Gurlitt horde (ctd.)
February 22 2017
Picture: Bild
The Art Newspaper reports that four more works from the Gurlitt collection have been restituted:
A drawing of the interior of a Gothic church by Adolph Menzel and a painting by Camille Pissarro, hidden for decades in Cornelius Gurlitt’s collection, have returned to the heirs of the original Jewish owners, the Kunstmuseum in Bern and German government announced.
German Culture Minister Monika Grütters returned the Menzel drawing on 20 February to the heirs of Elsa Helen Cohen, who sold it in 1938 to the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius’s father, to fund her escape to the US. Pissarro’s View of the Seine from the Pont-Neuf was returned to the heirs of the French-Jewish businessman Max Heilbronn a few days earlier, according to the Kunstmuseum.
Crowd-sourcing connoisseurship
February 20 2017
Picture: Universiteit Leiden
Pyschology researchers at Leiden University did an interesting experiment on connoisseurship, to see how quickly people could begin to discern attribution:
We used an experimental procedure we normally use to study grammar learning and applied it to evaluating art work. In the lab, participants looked at 50 paintings of landscapes by Van Goyen, a 17th century master. Next, we showed them 50 other landscape paintings. Half were Van Goyen’s and half were from his ‘environment’. Our participants indicated for each new painting whether they thought it was made by the same artist who made the first set of paintings or not. We tried ourselves. Overviewing all 100 paintings we presented in the lab, we could really not tell the difference between the Van Goyens and the environment (Cuyp or the Ruysdael). But we found that our participants could! Not perfectly, but definitely ‘above chance’.
What will happen when computers can do this?
The Louvre has a cat!
February 20 2017
Picture: Gareth Harris
On Twitter, journalist Gareth Harris has tweeted this photo of 'Richelieu', who is apparently the Louvre's cat.
Johnny van Haeften on the internet and art dealing
February 20 2017
Video: TEFAF
The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) has made a series of video interviews with Johnny van Haeften, to celebrate his 45 years in the art business. In the above film he discusses how the internet, and the accessibility of both auctions and auction prices, have impacted on the traditional art dealing model.
You can see the first video and others here.
Dog drawing re-attributed to Rembrandt
February 20 2017
Picture: Independent
A drawing of a dog in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, Germany, has been re-attributed to Rembrandt, after having been displayed for many years as the work of Johann Melchior Roos. More here.
Artemisia Gentileschi in Rome
February 20 2017
Pictures: BG
We went to see the Artemsia Gentileschi exhibition in Rome last week. The Deputy Editor, as you can see above, found it very exciting.
I highly recommend a visit. The show is on until 7th May. The show is genuinely revealing; it's only when you see a large number of her works together - and here cleverly interspersed with those of her contemporaries - that you reallise just how good she was, and how original. To be honest, she consistently knocks most of her rivals out of the park.
I particularly liked her .c1620-5 Portrait of a Lady with a Fan, below. What attitude. You wouldn't get a male artist painting a female sitter like that in the 17th Century.
'Vermeer and the Masters'
February 20 2017
Video: Louvre
The Louvre's new exhibition on Vermeer and his contemporaries looks to be worth a trip to Paris. It opens February 22nd, till May 22nd. I like the animated video above. The Gerrit Dous work especially well. Incidentally, what an underrated artist Dou is these days.
Update - the show gets five stars in The Guardian.
Old Master portrait drawings at the NPG
February 20 2017
Picture: Royal Collection Trust/Her Majesty the Queen, drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger.
This looks like fun; an exhibition of Old Master portrait drawings at the National Portrait Gallery in London. 'The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt' opens 13th July till 22nd October. More here.
New Michael Dahl self-portrait
February 20 2017
Picture: James Mulraine
My friend and fellow blogger has discovered a new self-portrait by Michael Dahl, who was one of the leading portraitists at work in England in the early 18th Century. More here.
The rise of the selfie
February 20 2017
Picture: Juno Calypso, the Honeymoon Suite, via Saatchi Gallery
In a review of a new exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London on the rise of 'the self' in culture (From Selfie to Self-Expression), the Great Waldemar looks at the selfie's evolution in art, and wonders why the selfies of the past are generally so glum:
Artists were the first selfie-takers because they were the only creatives in the past who could actually do them. What is now easy used to be difficult. Before the advent of smartphones and mirror functions, only those who could paint and draw to a high standard were capable of preserving a convincing likeness. Not only did you need to stare into a mirror for hours, wrestling with your own reality, but you needed also to say something meaningful. Looking like you was never enough.
No wonder the great self-portraitists are such a miserable bunch. The greatest of them all, Rembrandt, is one of art’s glummest presences. Rembrandt painted about 50 self-portraits in all — Kardashian numbers! But in none of them does he appear to enjoy what he sees. Even in his earliest selfies, the young Rembrandt looks as if he is counting the days. By the time he gets to old age, his face is as lined with pits and wrinkles as a pensioner’s scrotum. Yet this, too, is role playing. Those funny hats he wears, the gold chains, the fur coats, are studio costumes put on for the picture. This was not the clobber he wore in the street. Rembrandt’s selfies are fantasies about the passage of time, the shortness of life. [...]
Among art’s keenest self-portraitists, not one of them, not Gauguin, not Van Gogh, not Frida Kahlo, can be described as an optimistic presence. Something about looking into a mirror, staring deep into yourself, turned the self-portraiture of the Old Masters into a dark and profound pursuit. [...]
That is no longer true. Today, taking selfies is simples. Just point and click. Anyone can do it. Famous politicians gathered at important summits can do it. People falling out of aeroplanes can do it. Women in the bath can do it. Astronauts orbiting the moon can do it. We can all do it. The disappeared have disappeared. A Niagara Falls of selfies is cascading down on us from the heavens as every nobody on the planet is handed the tool with which to turn themselves into a somebody.
The show runs till May 30th.
It's time to nationalise UK local art collections
February 20 2017
Picture: DCMS
I've written a piece for The Art Newspaper on why nationalisation is the only way to safeguard the UK's regional art collections from being either run into the ground, or sold off altogether. More here.
Warhol down, Richter up
February 20 2017
Picture: Christie's
So says Marion Maneker at Art Market Monitor:
The 74% fall in sales volume is both dramatic and unsettling, especially when no serious participant in the art market will say that demand for Warhol has diminished. The dislocation of supply, caused by the rapid rise of art values from 2010-2015, is probably the reason for Warhol's market absence. Still, without significant works by Warhol on the block, there is a question of market leadership.
Fakes, fakes everywhere (ctd.)
February 20 2017
Picture: via Facebook
In Michigan, a 32 year old art dealer called Eric Spoutz (above) has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for selling forgeries for over ten years. Artists he claimed to be selling included Willem de Kooning. There's some interesting info here on the US Justice department's website - it seems Sproutz wasn't especially diligent:
Despite his efforts to create false histories for the artwork, investigators identified multiple inconsistencies and errors in SPOUTZ’s forged provenance documents. Many of the purported transactions took place before SPOUTZ was born, and the forged letters included non-existent addresses both for the purported sender and various parties referenced as sources of the artworks. SPOUTZ also consistently used a single distinctive typesetting when forging documents purportedly authored by entirely different art galleries in different decades regarding unrelated transactions.
This case is another demonstration of both the ease and problems of faking modern art. The ease is because, let's face it, some of this stuff is easy to replicate or mimic, especially when you're dealing with the proliferation of series and prints. The problems come because buyers assume there must be some quite specific paperwork attached to the artwork, since they were so recently created. It's here that modern forgers usually fall short. Of course, an attraction to forging Old Masters - if you can do it - is that the market is tempted to accept works without any meaningful paper trail.
Katie Zavadski has more background on Spoutz's activities in this piece from the Daily Beast in 2016.
Scotland almost there on Monarch of the Glen
February 20 2017
Picture: National Galleries of Scotland
The National Galleries of Scotland has nearly completed its fundraising to secure Landseer's famous Monarch of the Glen. The target, to buy the picture from Diageo, is £4m, and the Galleries are at £3.25m, with £2.75m from the HLF and £350k from the Art Fund. A public campaign has been launched.
Stolen Guercino recovered
February 20 2017
Picture: TAN
A large altarpiece by Guercino which was stolen from a church in Italy in 2014 has been located in Morocco. Someone was trying to sell it for £800k. Attempts are being made to get it back. More here.
Who'll buy £30m Pontormo portrait? (ctd.)
February 20 2017
Picture: ACE
In The Art Newspaper, Martin Bailey has some extra snippets on the Pontormo saga, including the fact that the National Gallery offered the US owner an amount above the £30.6m they were required to raise to make a 'matching offer'. We don't know what the amount was, but the offer was still rejected. Consequently, the export licence has been formally rejected, and the painting will now stay in the UK for at least the next decade.
Apologies...
February 13 2017
Picture: BG
Greetings from Rome! The bells are ringing as I type, and the sun is out. This is quite a contrast from Edinburgh in February. Yesterday we went to the Pantheon (what a ceiling), where we paid homage to Raphael, who is there buried (below, bad photo).
Then we went round the corner and by chance, in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, found the tomb of Poussin. Adam Elsheimer is buried their too.
I'm afraid blogging may be light for a couple of days. In the meantime, randomness from the Deputy Editor and I can be found on Twitter.
The art of sitting for your portrait
February 10 2017
Picture: via About Face
I've always wanted, as a sometime purveyor of portraits, to sit for my own portrait. Yes, it's vanity. But also I'd like to know what sitters go through. I can't decide whether I'd be a complete pain in the arse to paint - 'this is my best side; I want this pose; ever heard of Van Dyck?' - or would simply submit entirely to an artist, in order to best experience what it is like to be painted. (Be a pain in the arse, you say.)
Anyway, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery Sandy Nairne has written a fascinating essay on both commissioning portraits (which he had to do many times) and being portrayed. After he left the NPG he was invited to sit to Chuck Close. Here he describes the initial moment of portrayal:
I perched on the aluminium stool, with the large lens alarmingly close, banks of bright lights on each side, and associate Myrna nearby, ready to offer a paper towel to lessen the moistening on my face. She was operating the front part of the camera, including the shutter; the bellows framed with rods and stays, with wheels and cogs for positioning. The moment of exposure combines a blast of light from each side of the camera. Not really a shock, but startling even when you know it is coming. I was over-self-conscious about my appearance, and aware that if I became a Chuck Close Polaroid then every hair and pockmark might end up showing. And I was equally conscious of my expression. Should I be smiling? With my mouth open or closed? How could I not look stiff and get some degree of warmth into my expression?
Getty seeks to buy major Parmigianino (ctd.)
February 10 2017
Picture: ACE
When I mentioned last year the Getty's intended purchase of a wonderful Madonna by Parmigianino (above) there was no value given. 'In the tens of millions' I speculated, and today the case notes for the export licence hearing have been published, giving the value at £24.5m. The notes seem to confirm that (unlike the case of the recent Pontormo) the Getty has not paid for the painting already, and that the sale is therefore dependent on an export licence. The painting comes from Sudeley Castle, where it used to hang over a door (as below).
Will a UK institution be interested in buying the picture? One would imagine that there are certain tax incentives here, with perhaps a 'discount' of 40% on the £24.5m if the painting has been conditionally exempt from inheritance tax.
The case notes also reveal that the painting is on paper, something not previously known.
