Previous Posts: June 2022
The disappearance of Gauguin's chair
June 20 2022
Picture: via TAN
In The Guardian, Donna Ferguson reports on research by a Dutch academic on why Van Gogh's painting Gauguin's Chair (above right) became much less well known than his painting, Van Gogh's Chair (left), even though the two were originally painted by Van Gogh as pendants. The answer lies with Johanna Bonger, the widow of Van Gogh's brother, Theo, who took a great dislike to Gauguin:
“Johanna never showed Gauguin’s Chair, while Van Gogh’s Chair was promoted as a really important piece of art,” said Louis van Tilborgh, senior researcher at the Van Gogh museum and professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam, who published his research in the Dutch art journal Simiolus.
He thinks that the reason Bonger did not want to exhibit the painting was that she disliked Gauguin after the French artist publicly belittled his former friend. “Gauguin, very early on, spread the word that Van Gogh was not only mad but also that he, Gauguin, had to teach Van Gogh how to paint. I think Bonger knew that and my conclusion is that, for that reason, she didn’t want to put those two pictures together.”
Back in 2020, Van Gogh scholar Martin Bailey also wrote about the history of the paintings, examining how Van Gogh's Chair came to be sold:
One of the mysteries, which does not appear to have been addressed in the Van Gogh literature, is why the two paintings were split up: Van Gogh’s Chair is now at the National Gallery in London and Gauguin’s Chair is at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
On Vincent’s death in 1890 both pictures were inherited by his brother Theo, and after he died the following year they passed to Theo’s wife Jo Bonger and her son. In 1923 they lent Van Gogh’s Chair to an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London. A few weeks later it was bought by the National Gallery for just under £800, with funds provided by Samuel Courtauld. In 1926, Courtauld suggested that Van Gogh’s Chair might be sold, in order to buy one of the artist’s landscapes, explaining that “we ought not to have too many Van Goghs”.
Fortunately, A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889) ended up being acquired without the sale of the chair painting. Considering that Theo’s wife Jo then owned around 200 paintings it is surprising that she chose to sell one which was quite so personal. It also meant splitting up what the artist very clearly regarded as a pair.
New Ricci discovery at Tefaf
June 20 2022
Picture: TAN
In The Art Newspaper, Osman Can Yerebakan has news of a fantastic Sebastiano Ricci discovery to be unveiled at Tefaf in Maastricht. The picture, Diana and Endymion, was spotted by dealer Christopher Bishop in a Florida auction house, where it was catalogued as a work from the 19th Century. According to TAN, when Bishop saw the painting online, he was particularly struck by Diana's... anatomy:
From the light’s focus on Diana’s breasts to her somber expression and the hint of arousal conveyed in Endymion’s horn, the codings of autonomy and desire reveal a painter eager to push his era’s boundaries. It was in fact this trait that encouraged dealer Christopher Bishop to bid $200,000 to fetch the painting in a Florida-based auction house’s online sale, which had listed the work as dating from the 19th century.
Bishop will also unveil a newly discovered Jan Lievens drawing, of Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp, which came up for sale in a Massachusetts auction estimated at $300, eventually making $514,800. The Ricci will be offered at €1.35m, and the drawing at €1.4m, both at Tefaf (25-30 June).
National Gallery of Scotland extension delayed
June 17 2022
Picture: SNG
And not just delayed, but delayed again. The new galleries (to replace the 1970s space for displaying Scottish art, which resembled a hastily decorated NCP car park) were due to open in 2018, then 2021, and now it's going to be late 2023. The budget has gone up too, from an initial £15.3m, then to £22m, and now they won't say what to (which means quite a lot more than £22m). What's gone wrong? From The Times:
The project has involved excavating beneath the building, which dates from 1859, but it has been held up by the discovery of “unexpected remnants” of previous developments, including “deeply buried layers of concrete”, as well as damp penetration and asbestos.
All of which is unimpressive, really. Who could have imagined that digging down from a 19th Century building towards a 19th Century railyway line would reveal 'deeply buried layers of concrete'? One wonders again at the ability of the management of the Scottish National Galleries to pull off this project (and to be honest, much else, as long suffering AHN readers may remember).
But those looking to be generous, the SNG aren't alone; there is a tendency for museum refurbishment projects to go horribly over time and budget. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp closed in 2010 for a restoration, due to open in 2017. It's still closed, and the latest date is the end of this year. We'll believe it when we see it.
Anyway, following the Edinburgh news, I thought I'd check in on the National Portrait Gallery in London, which closed in 2020 for an overhaul, and was due to reopen in Spring 2023. The good news is they're still due to open in 2023, but they won't confirm exactly when. Which suggests a possible delay. But given Covid, I think we can probably forgive them that. (Though I still wish they hadn't closed entirely!)
Boom time for female Old Masters
June 17 2022
Picture: FT/Weiss Gallery
Here's a good article by Breeze Barrington in the FT on the rise in values for works by female Old Masters. In part, this is due to a very belated realisation by institutions that they need to look again at the representation of female artists in their male-dominated collections. But it also represents a shift in taste among collectors. Within the article, there's news of an interesting discovery at the Weiss Gallery, of a sketch of Charles Beale by Mary Beale (above).
It's been bugging me for a while, incidentally, the awkwardness of the term 'female Old Master'. Can we do better? Old Mistress obviously doesn't work. But would de-gendering the collective noun for painters before 1800 give us a chance to come up with a more appealing name anyway, one without the perjorative 'old'? I am, at this moment, stumped. 'Classic art' hasn't really taken off. And 'female classical artists' conjures up violins. Can you think of something? Let me know.
Update - a reader writes:
It says a lot about the industry that it uses ‘old masters’ for any work produced before c.1800 in the first place, and ‘master/mastery’ of course implies maleness. I don’t really have an offering for an alternative term, but I can usually get away with ‘renaissance women artists’ (although I also usually only write about things pre-1700), but that has its own problems, especially given the different meanings of the word ‘renaissance’. But I do think that if we focused on eras or styles that might help. If you call Artemisia an ‘old master’ you need to specify her gender, but if you call her a baroque or 17th century painter you don’t.
It does make it easier if we are more period-specific, like Renaissance or Baroque. And these are more engaging terms too, than just 'old'. We probably do still need a catch all term though. Of course, the French just have 'tableaux anciens', and the Italians 'dipinti antici'. Which at least is non-gender specific.
Christie's Old Master evening sale
June 16 2022
Picture: Christie's
The catalogue for Christie's Old Master evening sale has gone online, and there are many nice pictures to see. I'll come back later for a more detailed look at the sale (and when Sotheby's put theirs up*). But my eye was immediately drawn to a Portrait of a Carmelite Monk, catalogued as a work by Van Dyck, estimated at £2.8m-£3.5m. This picture was largely unknown, until it was sold at Sotheby's in 2011, also by Van Dyck, for £713,250, against an estimate of £600,000-£800,000.
Back then, I thought it was probably not by Van Dyck (as I wrote on AHN here), but Rubens, which was its traditional attribution (the provenance was from a descendant of Rubens, and it was even traditionally identified as "Rubens' confessor"). Now, however, I think it is by Van Dyck, and I was wrong in 2011. I remember seeing it in the excellent Van Dyck: the Antomy of Portraiture exhibtion at the Frick in 2016, and realising, under the patient tutelage of curators Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker, that they were quite right, it was early Van Dyck.
Either way, I remember there was general agreement back in 2011 that whether it was by Rubens or Van Dyck, the price then was something of a bargain. Now, an astute collector has seen their taste vindicated, for not only is the estimate much higher, but the picture is guaranteed by Christie's. It represents how much the market for Old Master pictures can change, even in the space of a relatively short time.
* Less than three weeks till the sale, and still no catalogue - tut!
Digitally preparing for the worst, in Ukraine
June 16 2022
Video: CNN
In Ukraine, teams are taking digital scans of heritage sites and monuments for potential rebuilding, should they be destroyed by Russia. More above from CNN, and here in The Economist.
Rembrandt in Wales
June 16 2022
The latest iteration of the National Gallery's Masterpiece on Tour programme has seen their Rembrandt portrait of Saskia go to Powys in Wales. The scheme is very worthwhile, and I see from Andrew Dickson's Guardian story that it is set to be expanded:
“We wanted to try and take down some of the barriers,” says Susan Foister, the gallery’s deputy director when we speak. “People should have access to great art locally.”The scheme’s first iteration involved one painting spending around six weeks at three regional galleries each year. Now, the NG wants to build multi-year partnerships, working closely with spaces that haven’t borrowed works before to share expertise and select works that might resonate with their visitors. Last year, Oriel Davies and its collaborating galleries took temporary possession of Chardin’s tender 18th-century portrait of a boy, The House of Cards. Once Saskia has done her stint, she’ll be followed by a flamboyantly colourful Tobias and the Angel by the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (c.1470-5), which will tour in 2023.
NG's virtual Jubilee exhibition
June 16 2022
Picture: National Gallery
The National Gallery in London has started doing excellent virtual exhibitions. You can move around with ease and even zoom in on the pictures tolerably well. There's even an augmented reality option, on mobile devices. Their latest celebrated the Queen's platinum jubilee:
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the longest reigning monarch in British history. She has witnessed many changes of government and has advised no fewer than 14 successive Prime Ministers. This year, she became the first British monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee, commemorating 70 years of service.
To mark this unprecedented milestone, we have brought together 28 paintings from our collection that shed light on the notion of queenship, including portraits of female rulers from different times and countries as well as images that relate to some of the attributes most frequently associated with female monarchs past and present.
More here.
The Parthenon Marbles (ctd.)
June 16 2022
Picture: BG
I was interested to see that the Chair of the British Museum trustees, George Osborne, said 'there's a deal to be done' on the Parthenon Marbles. Speaking to Andrew Marr on LBC he said:
“They’re an amazing testament to human civilisation. In the British Museum, they tell a story about civilisation compared to all the other civilisations, China, India, other parts of the Mediterranean. In Greece, they tell the story, just of Greek civilisation. I think there’s a deal to be done but I think there’s a deal to be done where we can tell both stories in Athens and in London.”
You can listen to the full excerpt here. The reason I think this represents a movement by the British Museum (or at least, its trustees) is that the BM has had a longstanding policy of being happy to loan the Marbles (or some of them) back to Greece for display, but Greece won't accept a loan because it would mean surrendering all claims to title. So ostensibly Osborne is signalling he's prepared to go beyond this. Perhaps some form of joint title would be appropriate, recognising their historical status?
It's also interesting that the UK government has repeatedly said this is a matter for the BM's trustees, rather than just outright say, 'the Marbles will stay in the UK', which is what you might expect from our current culture war-ing government. So, if the Trustees do decided to do something different, it's hard to see how the UK government could block them.
How much do museums make from NFTs?
June 13 2022
Picture: TAN/Uffizi
Museums have so far been reluctant to declare how much they've been making from selling jpegs NFTs. In The Art Newspaper, Gareth Harris reports that the Uffizi has sold a single Michelangelo NFT (above) through its commercial partner, Cinello, for €240,000. The Uffizi's cut? Just €70,000. And of that, I suspect they spent a fair deal on legal fees setting up the scheme.
According to Gareth's piece, however, much of the controversy in Italy over the sale seems to be about who 'controls' the NFT, and thus the image:
The move has sparked concerns however about whether major works are up “for sale”. An article in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica last month asked: “Who owns Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo?.... who has the legal rights linked to the work? If the buyer ever decides to exhibit it, can he do it without the permission of the Uffizi? Basically: do we not risk losing control of our heritage in a time when we are increasingly moving towards the metaverse?” The newspaper adds that Italian government ministers have also raised concerns about the deal with Cinello.
In a lengthy statement, the Uffizi says: “Basically: do we not risk losing control of our heritage… In reality, [existing laws] give punctual and precise answers to those questions long before the invention of the technology in question, i.e., the Ronchey law of 1994, and again the Urbani code of 2004…. the rights [linked to the works] are in no way alienated, the contractor has no right to use the images granted for exhibitions or other unauthorised uses, and the assets remain firmly in the hands of the Italian Republic.”
For those of us who do our bit to help spread appreciation for Old Masters to new audiences, it's despairing to hear major museums like the Uffizi obsess about who has 'control' over images of publicly owned artworks. Nobody needs to control these images.
Artemisia and 150 other works by female artists
June 13 2022
Picture: Muskegon Museum of Art
In the US, the Muskegon Museum of Art has announced a donation of 150 works by female artists, including an Artemisia Gentileschi, as part of a gift to create a special wing of the museum dedicated to female artists. The gift is said to be worth $12m, and has been made by Steven Alan Bennett & Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt. More from Tessa Solomon at ARTNews here, and you can get better images of the artworks here.
Restitution win for 101 year old Resistance veteran
June 13 2022
Picture: Guardian
I love these restitution stories; Bischoff van Heemskerck, the daughter of a Dutch doctor who went into hiding rather than collaborate with the Nazis, and who was herself a member of the Resistance, has been reunited with a portrait by Caspar Netscher, more than 70 years after it was looted by the Germans from a Dutch bank. Dalya Alberge has more in The Guardian here. The picture has been consigned to Sotheby's in July.
'Young Falconer with Dogs'
June 13 2022
Picture: Millon
This adept piece of auction house photography caught my eye. Presumably the live dog is not included. If you'd like to find out, it's lot 118 at Millon in France.
Tate to deaccession '£20m Bacon archive'
June 8 2022
Picture: Copyright Barry Joule, via The Guardian
In The Art Newspaper, Martin Bailey reports on one of the most curious national museum stories of recent years; Tate is to deaccession a Francis Bacon archive given to it almost 20 years ago, at which time it was apparently valued at up to £20m. Now, however, Tate has cast doubt on many of the items said to have been connected to Bacon himself (this follows the Francis Bacon estate casting doubt of the material last year, as reported by Dalya Alberge in The Observer). And though Tate normally cannot deaccession works of art, there are different rules for its archive (as very long-standing AHN readers may remember, from back in 2012). The Bacon material is first to be offered back to its donor, Barry Joule, a friend of the late artist (above).
'Grinling Gibbons & his Contemporaries'
June 7 2022
Picture: Paul Mellon Centre
The art historian and curator at the Wallace Collection Ada de Wit has published a new book on Grinling Gibbons, which looks excellent. From publisher Brepols:
One of the greatest artists of the English Baroque, Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721) was born in Rotterdam to English parents. He moved to England at the age of nineteen and embarked on a spectacular career. His exuberant lifelike carvings in limewood can be admired at Hampton Court Palace and at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. But what was the Dutch tradition that shaped him? And what set him apart from the other carvers of his time? This book explains the importance of woodcarving and provides new insights into the work of woodcarvers in the Netherlands and Britain. Full of discoveries and new images, it discusses little-known interiors, objects, craftsmen and their patrons, and provides a rich introduction to the ornamental world of woodcarving.
You can order the book here.*
*(Although actually at the time of writing, you can't, since the link doesn't work. AHN says to Brepols, your website seems often to make it difficult to buy your books, please fix it!)
New Burlington Magazine
June 7 2022
Picture: Burlington Magazine
The June edition of the Burlington Magazine is out, with many good things as ever. The cover story places the newly discovered (and recently sold) Michelangelo drawing in context; another new discovery is a still life by Frans Snyders (above); and other articles include new documents on Jan van Belcamp in London in the 17th Century. The editorial wonders what future generations will come to assess as 'Elizabeth II style', in the same way we routinely say 'Georgian' or 'Regency' now. More here.
New sculpture gallery at the Prado
June 7 2022
Video: Prado
The Prado in Madrid has opened a new sculpture gallery, above is a timelapse of the installation. More here.
NFTs are safe investments (ctd.)
June 7 2022
Picture:NFTNewsPro
More news on the precarious nature of NFTs; the Twitter account of NFT king Beeple was hacked, leading to tens of thousands of dollars being lost by people who fell for the scammer's trick. In response, Beeple said, “Stay safe out there, anything too good to be true IS A F******G SCAM.” And well, he should know. More here.
Restitution and the V&A
June 7 2022
Video: V&A
The video above sets out the story of a gold ewer restituted to the Turkish government, apparently by the V&A museum; the video is on the V&A's website, and the V&A's director, Tristram Hunt, is at the handover ceremony. The ewer was acquired in 1989 from an antiquities dealer who, it has since been discovered, was up to no good, handling illegally excavated and exported items from Turkey. So far so commendable.
But, sharp-eyed restitution watchers among you will know that the V&A, much like the British Museum, has traditionally taken the line that it cannot deaccession such items (and especially not historicaly looted items), even if it wanted to; UK law prevents such it. Discussions with the Ethiopian government over items looted by British troops in the 19th Century, for example, have so far only discussed long term loans. For the V&A's own criteria on deaccessioning, see section 4.3 here.
So what's going on? Though the ewer appeared to be part of the V&A's collection, was shown in its galleries, and appeared on their website, it officially formed part of the Gilbert Collection, of works acquired by the late Sir Arthur Gilbert. The Collection originally had its own galleries in Somerset House, but struggled to make the finances work, and in 2009 the collection was 'incorporated' into the V&A. So technically the ewer could be returned.
Why is this interesting? Because I think it gives an insight into how some national museum directors, like Tristram Hunt, would handle restitution requests if the law was changed to allow them to do so. At the moment, the government's response in such cases is to say; 'it's up to museums', while museums say 'it's up to the government'. That at least is the British Museum's mantra. But I detect changes afoot, and hopefully directors like Tristram are working on more flexible procedures behind the scenes. We'll see.
