Previous Posts: September 2017
Job Opportunity!
September 18 2017
Picture: V&A
The V&A Museum in London is looking for a new Director of Collections. Says the blurb:
We are seeking to appoint a Director of Collections, who will play a significant role in the delivery of the V&A strategy to ensure our collections and knowledge are at the very centre of our work. You will be leading all aspects of curatorial and research activities across the Museum, developing a clear vision for the division from day-to-day operations and decision-making, to helping to define and build on the key areas of strength and expertise that can contribute to extending access to the widest possible audience.
Over the next 5 years we are planning a major expansion of our physical and digital*, using the lens of design to make our collections increasingly accessible and relevant. We have significant plans to expand and deliver our education vision, building on our existing successful programmes to become a force in design education. We plan to extend the geographical reach of the V&A and play a leadership and opinion-forming role in the fields of formal education and museum and gallery interpretation.
Salary is £100k. Deadline 8th October. Good luck!
* 'physical and digital' what? Is this a typo? Or is it modern museum-speak? 'I'm going to expand my physical' sounds like a line from Carry On Matron.
Lost Lancret discovered by Sotheby's
September 14 2017
Video: Sotheby's
Sotheby's in New York will sell a re-discovered painting by Nicolas Lancret early next year. The painting, Winter, has been lost since 1889, and known only through an engraving. Says the Sotheby's press release:
The painting is part of a cycle of Four Seasons commissioned directly From Lancret by the French diplomat Jean-François Lériget de la Faye at a momentous point in the young artist’s career. While these works still exhibit the influence of his mentor, Antoine Watteau, their magnificent quality undoubtedly helped to establish Lancret’s name as an independent master. Voluminous, sweeping fabrics fall softly on his figures’ bodies and capture light in a way that exudes movement and gesture. With a transparency achieved through the application of refined glazes, Lancret conveys the nonchalant, voluptuous elegance of a winter’s afternoon where time stands still.
What an excellent video Sotheby's has made for this.
The painting will be sold in the Sotheby's winter Old Master sale in New York, which takes place on 1st February. So Sotheby's are so far sticking to their early date in the calendar, and not following Christie's New York's move to April.
Rembrandt in China! (ctd.)
September 14 2017
Picture: The Leiden Collection
The Leiden Collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings continues its well-received tour in China - having recently been shown at the National Museum of China, it will soon open in Shanghai, at the Long Museum. More here.
Isn't it amazing that it took the energies of a private collector to show a Vermeer in China, for the first time ever? Western museums have missed a trick here.
'Monochrome - Painting in Black and White'
September 14 2017
Video: National Gallery
On 30th October (till 18th February) a new exhibition in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in London will look at black and white paintings. Says the NG's site:
Painting using predominantly black-and-white pigments has long held a fascination for artists, yet there has never been a major exhibition on the subject.
‘Monochrome’ presents a series of case studies that investigate where and when grisaille painting was used and to what effect: from early religious works to paintings that emulate sculpture or respond to other media such as printmaking, photography, and film.
Comprising works on glass, vellum, ceramic, silk, wood, and canvas by artists such as Rembrandt, Picasso, and Gerhard Richter (1932–), ‘Monochrome’ encourages visitors to trace the fascinating but little-studied history of black-and-white painting.
'Reflections' at the National Gallery
September 14 2017
Video: National Gallery
Here's a trailer for the National Gallery's forthcoming exhibition, 'Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites': Says the gallery's blurb:
Acquired by the National Gallery in 1842, the Arnolfini Portrait informed the Pre-Raphaelites’ belief in empirical observation, their ideas about draughtsmanship, colour and technique, and the ways in which objects in a picture could carry symbolic meaning.
The exhibition will bring together for the first time the 'Arnolfini Portrait' with paintings from the Tate collection and loans from other museums, to explore the ways in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), Sir John Everett Millais (1829–1896) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), among others, were influenced by the painting in their work.
The show runs from 2nd October - 2nd April.
Is this by Rembrandt? (ctd.)
September 13 2017
Picture: National Gallery
Back in 2014 I reported that the leading Rembrandt scholar Ernst van der Wetering had upgraded a painting in the National Gallery to 'Rembrandt', long after it had been downgraded to 'Follower of Rembrandt'. 'Old Man in an Armchair' had been allocated to the National Gallery in 1957, as a Rembrandt, through the Acceptance in Lieu scheme. But it was downgraded in 1969 by the Rembrandt scholar Horst Gerson, a decision followed by the Rembrandt Research Project in its earlier incarnation.
Prof. van der Wetering is now chairman of the Project, and has decided that in his opinion the picture is indeed by Rembrandt. When he announced his decision, the National Gallery held fast to its description as 'Follower of Rembrandt'. Now, however, the Gallery will re-label the picture as 'Probably by Rembrandt', and it is currently on display in the newly re-hung Dutch and Flemish rooms.
For what it's worth, I think this is the right call. 'Probably by' is a much underused term in the attribution game, and we should see it deployed more often. The term began to be used at the National Gallery during the directorship of Sir Nick Penny, replacing the sometimes baffling 'attributed to'.
Incidentally, I learnt this information through Twitter, when the National Gallery's new Dutch and Flemish 1600-1800 curator was taking part in #AskaCurator. Excellent all round.
Waldemar on the NPG's 'Encounter'
September 13 2017
Picture: BG
If you haven't read it, the Great Waldemar's succinct review of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, The Encounter, spares no punches:
Not for the first time in my life, as I left the new show at the National Portrait Gallery, I was moved to mutter: “Thank heavens for the Queen.” Once again, Her Majesty had saved the day. Were it not for her loan of a wall full of commanding Holbein drawings from the Royal Collection to the exhibition entitled The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt, that exhibition would be a poor event. Short on quality. Short on direction.
It is the fate of the National Portrait Gallery to be searching continuously for angles. Portraiture is, after all, a straightforward affair. Over here you have the artist. Over there you have the sitter. One records the other. And that’s it. Finding inventive ways to present this exchange is, therefore, a museum challenge that encourages much smoking of mirrors.
The problem with the angle attempted by The Encounter is that it isn’t an angle. Every portrait ever produced is the result of an encounter — it’s all a portrait can be. Putting a definite article in front is not enough to give this effort any true purpose or meaning. As for the subtitle, Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt, it’s a tease. Neither Leonardo nor Rembrandt is represented here in a significant fashion. If you ignore these directional problems, you are left with a drawing show in which various Old Masters of various levels of talent have been arranged in a string of sections that are supposed to frame telling aspects of Old Master portraiture. But don’t.
Cleaning Gainsborough's 'Blue Boy'
September 13 2017
Video: Huntington.org
Thomas Gainsborough's celebrated 'Blue Boy' has been taken off display at the Huntington art gallery in California ahead of a two year restoration project. Emily Sharpe in The Art Newspaper reports:
Part of the conservation will take place in one of the museum’s public galleries in a special exhibition called Project Blue Boy, due to open in autumn 2018.
According to Christina O’Connell, the senior paintings conservator at the Huntington, recent treatments have focused on adding layers of varnish so the picture could remain on display. This has obscured some details and caused the colours to “appear hazy and dull”.
The Huntington will have a special site dedicated to the project here. THe Blue Boy is now thought by some scholars to show Gainsborough's nephew, Gainsborough Dupont. When the painting was sold to Henry Huntington in 1921 for $728,000 it was the world's most expensive painting. These days, 18th Century British portraiture is not nearly so valuable, relatively. But who knows how long that will last. Fashion and value in the art market are fickle things.
Incidentally, to give you an idea of just how expensive the painting was in real terms in 1921, the seller was the 2nd Duke of Westminster, a man who, as the richest man in Britain, hardly needed the money. But then that side of my family (to whom, incidentally, I am related only genetically, not financially) has always been very canny with money.
Update - a reader writes:
The Blue Boy was not the world’s most expensive painting at the time of its sale. That record was still held by Leonardo’s Benois Madonna, which Nicholas II acquired – in competition with Duveen and American magnates – for $1.5M (£310,000) in 1914. By comparison, The Blue Boy fetched a mere £148,000 in 1921.
The Westminsters must have been short of cash at the time as they also off-loaded – to Huntingdon as well – Gainsborough’s Cottage Door and Reynolds Sarah Siddons as The Tragic Muse, both for around £70,000.
I don't think it was a shortage of cash, rather a certain family Philistinism.
Flemish portraits 1400-1700
September 13 2017
Picture: via Mauritshuis
The Mauritshuis in The Hague has a new exhibition of Flemish portraits on loan from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the KMSKA. Says the Mauritshuis website:
The exhibition includes major works by Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Pieter Pourbus, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Remarkably, almost all the sitters can be identified. This is why the exhibition will not only highlight what makes Flemish portraits so special, but also who appears in the pictures and how they wanted to be viewed.
The KMSKA is currently closed for refurbishment, and is planned to reopen in 2019. It has been closed since 2011 - and is further proof that museums should never entirely close for refurbishment, as it's a recipe for delays and a loss of momentum. That said, the KMSKA has been quite good at putting works from its collection on loan elsewhere.
Van Dyck exhibition in Munich
September 13 2017
Picture: Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Exciting news - a major new Van Dyck exhibition is to be held at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich in late 2019. Says the museum's website:
The exhibition, which will also include loans from international museums, creates a multidimensional portrait of Van Dyck, who carved out his own style in his younger years precisely through his confrontation with the almost overpowering artistic persona of Peter Paul Rubens.
It will run from 1.10.19 to 1.2.20, and AHN has already booked tickets.
New museums in Bishop Auckland
September 11 2017
Picture: Guardian
In The Guardian, Maev Kennedy reports on a new museum in Bishop Auckland devoted to paintings of and by miners:
A unique collection of paintings by Durham miners, many made by men who spent their working lives underground and their nights painting on kitchen tables, in attics or garden sheds, will go on display in the first museum in the UK dedicated to such art.
The museum is being created in a former bank building on the marketplace in Bishop Auckland. It includes works by Norman Cornish, the most famous of the group, who left the pits at the urging of his wife to become a full-time artist and spent the rest of his life recording the small streets, shops and people of Spennymoor, where his studio is preserved in an exhibition at the town hall.
More here. This news comes on top of the exciting plans for another museum in Bishop Auckland backed by the financier Jonathan Ruffer.
Fire at the Hermitage!
September 11 2017
Video: Euronews
A fire broke out in the Hermitage last week. It was in the basement, and there were fears that some of the museum's famous cats had been killed. But according to The Art Newspaper, the cats only sustainted injuries. More here.
New Old Masters
September 11 2017
Picture: Freddy Fabris
I'm late to the appreciation of these photographic re-interpretations of Old Masters by US photographer Freddy Fabris. He posed a group of car mechanics as works by Rembrandt (as above), Leonardo, and Michelangelo. More here.
Airport art
September 11 2017
Video: Rijksmuseum
When it comes to pride in Old Masters, no country does it better than the Dutch. They're happy to celebrate their Golden age artistic heritage, and don't feel embarrassed about art that is 'old'. At Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, for example, you'll regularly see adverts using Rembrandt's face, or, as above, a baggage belt wtih a Vermeer on it.
And now there's a new Rijksmuseum gallery in the airport - open 24 hours a day! Says the Rijksmuseum:
Anyone flying in or out is welcome to stop off here to enjoy the artistic glories of the Dutch Golden Age. Ten paintings from the Rijksmuseum collection will be on show, with landscapes, seascapes, portraits and floral still lifes by Dutch masters such as Jan van Goyen, Willem van de Velde the Younger, Abraham Mignon and Michiel van Mierevelt. Travellers can view the paintings at any time, day or night, free of charge.
I cannot imagine a British gallery or airport ever doing this.
More here.
Update - I know the image in the screen grab is a Liotard, it's even written next to it! Watch the video and you'll see a Vermeer come around on the belt.
Eike Schmidt goes to the KHM in Vienna
September 11 2017
Picture: via Apollo
Surprising news that Eike Schmidt, who joined the Uffizi as director in late 2015 is to become the new director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He will take up his new post in 2019. Reports Apollo:
Schmidt will replace Sabine Haag, who has been at the helm of the Kunsthistorisches Museum since 2009. The news was announced this morning by the Austrian culture minister Thomas Drozda at a press conference in Vienna, at which Schmidt stressed the need for the KHM to embrace digital opportunities to appeal to a wider international audience.
Schmidt’s contract at the Viennese museum will initially be for five years. At the Uffizi, he has gained a reputation for bold modernisation: renovating and redisplaying major galleries (including those dedicated to Botticelli), reorganising the curatorial structure, introducing a new pricing system for museum tickets, and expanding the scope of the exhibition programme at both the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti.
I hope that in the next two years Schmidt can complete some of his reforms at the Uffizi. When I visited earlier this year, it was probably the worst experience of a major gallery I have had as a visitor. Getting in is of course the hard part, and while I appreciate that there is great demand for tickets, the way entry is managed does not exactly help. I was given two tickets, both of which had to be scanned and collected by different people, each time creating bottlenecks in the queue to get in. And then, just when you thought you had cleared all the hurdles, and have climbed the stairs to the main galleries, you then have to have your ticket checked again! Is it a massive job creation scheme?
The collection is of course worth the wait. But don't bet on seeing anything other than Italian art. I asked to see the Flemish galleries, and was told that these are only sometimes open on Tuesday. My advice is to go to the Palazzo Pitti instead.
Still, there was a curious and welcome contrast when we went to film in the Uffizi for Britain's Lost Masterpieces. The staff could not have been more helpful, welcoming and relaxed about us filming the paintings. Much of the time filming in galleries involves 'computer says no' over zealousness from staff, not to mention eye-watering fees. British galleries are some of the worst offenders.
Bowie's Tintoretto at the Rubenshuis (ctd.)
September 11 2017
Video: Rubenshuis Museum
I have reported before on the loan of David Bowie's Tintoretto to the Rubenshuis Museum in Antwerp, one of my favourite places. Above is an English version of a video made by the museum to publicise the loan. Excellent, don't you think?
Stolen de Kooning returns to US museum (ctd.)
September 11 2017
Picture: New York Times
I mentioned recently the case of a stolen de Kooning painting that had been returned to the University of Arizona. Now police are trying to figure out how it was stolen in the first place, and according to William K. Rashbaum in the New York Times they are trying to determine if:
[...] the heist was engineered by a retired New York City schoolteacher — something of a renaissance man — who donned women’s clothing and took his son along as his accomplice, and then hung the masterwork in the bedroom of his own rural New Mexico home, where it remained.
In other words, they are examining whether he stole a painting now valued at in excess of $100 million simply so he could enjoy it.
The teacher, Jerome Alter, and his wife, Rita, both died at 81, he in 2012 and she earlier this summer.
More here.
Antwerp's masterpieces free online!
September 11 2017
Picture: Rubenshuis Museum/City of Antwerp
I have just discovered that the city of Antwerp has not only put good high-resolution photos of their masterpieces online (inlduing the above Rubens self-portrait) but has made them all free to reproduce, in any context. Amazing! Bravo Antwerp - you can explore the databse for yourself here.
Fakes, fakes everywhere? (ctd.)
September 11 2017
Picture: via TAN
The long-running Knoedler scandal has drawn to a close for Anne Freedman, who was director of the New York gallery when it sold $70m worth of fakes. Freedman has settled the last case against her, and continues to deny suspecting any of the pictures were fake. She has said:
“I was a perfect mark, so I’m told, and my research helped them figure out their own scheme,” describing those who conned her as “exquisitely conspiratorial wizards”.
That's as may be. But the fakers were not wizard enough to fool a fairly basic scientific analysis of the paintings.
Apologies (ctd.)
September 11 2017
Many apologies about the lack of news. It took us a few days to see off the unwanted attentions of a hacker, who had somehow been able to control that part of the site which points our browsers hither thither. So while AHN itself never disappeared, everyone was diverted to a random advertising site.
At the end of last week I was in London filming some final sequences for Britain's Lost Masterpieces. More on that soon.
And finally I will be able to get back to AHN later today. There's lots of news to catch up on, so standby! And thanks for your patience.
