God it’s boring. I love the National Gallery and I was squirming in my seat. Why doesn’t Wiseman let the paintings speak for themselves? Again and again, he films audiences listening to curators or guides give lectures about the National Gallery’s works of art. One such talk would make sense in a portrait of the museum. But why repeat the exercise, again and again – and again?

 'Action is needed to tackle the grotesque waste in national collections. In the Louvre alone, some 250,000 works are currently hidden away in overflow rooms.

'Museums should also be given the option of selling works that have been in public collections for at least 50 years.'

On the retirement of Richard Shone, Editor, The Burlington Magazine is looking for an Editor to lead the publication forwards in both print and digital formats. The successful candidate will be responsible for maintaining the integrity and academic standards of the editorial content, including selecting, commissioning and editing articles with the assistance of an experienced editorial team. The successful candidate must have a bachelor’s degree, but an advanced degree in art history, literature, or a related field is desirable. A high professional standing in a scholarly press, museum, university or equivalent environment is required. The ideal candidate will have a broad knowledge of art and publishing, a tested understanding of the editorial process, and be able to work to tight deadlines. The successful candidate must also have proven leadership skills and the ability to create a positive and productive team environment. The candidate should be able to collaborate effectively with a wide range of colleagues and contacts, both external and internal, and must possess excellent communication skills. This is a board-level position that reports to the Chairman and so requires a candidate who is organized, able to set priorities and juggle competing demands. Some travel is required.

Indeed the estimable The Burlington Magazine  has a midlife identity crisis. Is it a professional magazine or an academic journal? 

If it is the former then it must serve the entire profession and if the latter then adapt to the current standards for such principally online publications and join a JSTOR type group.

In either case the current generation is web rather than print oriented and its beautiful production standards are expensive like the product of a Savile Row tailor and eventually will have as limited a market.

I'm sure their attitude will change. They're the last bastion. Remember when everywhere was like that - having to pretend in the Heinz you weren't working for a dealer!

I wonder if the new editor will Trojan-horse the Trade in by introducing more contemporary art, where the Trade/museum lines are even more blurred.

The very energy of Rubens has something brittle about it. He cannot stop for fear of looking into the dark. He seems terrified of Caravaggio’s shadows, Rembrandt’s eyes, Velazquez’s mirror. His art endlessly moves on, through a bewildering range of genres. It also assimilates a staggering variety of influences.

Keith Christiansen, who has closely studied the present painting, considers it to be among the finest of surviving versions, but notes that it is difficult to go beyond this judgment, given the picture’s condition. He notes that at this early date, when Caravaggio was working for the market, the artist may well have painted more than one version. For Christiansen, that in the Queen’s collection (Hampton Court) is the best preserved and the most convincing of the versions that he knows.

Interestingly, the contours of the Queen’s Boy peeling a fruit line up precisely with our painting, suggesting that the two were made from a common design.

The x-radiograph of the present work (fig. 4) does not reveal any tracing, and primarily shows that Caravaggio built up the folds of the boy’s shirt with lead white.

While its autograph status has been questioned by some over the past several decades, many scholars support the attribution to Caravaggio, including Sir Denis Mahon, Barry Nicolson, John Gash, Luigi Salerno, Mina Gregori, and Beverly Louise Brown.

The reverberation of this golden age of portraiture [by the likes of Bronzino] haunts us even today in ways as varied as the original function of the older paintings. A celebrated artist who adapted the conventions and superficial appearance of Renaissance portraiture for her own ends is Cindy Sherman, whose History Portraits (1988-1990) ransack sources as readily identifiable as Raphael’s La Fornarina (Untitled 205) or as generic as Untitled 209, a portrait of a lady in an elaborate 16th-century costume who confronts the viewer with all the haughtiness of a Bronzino aristocrat. Naturally art using photography, or Sherman’s performance art version of it, lends itself to the appropriation of historical images, and with no post-war artist was this accomplished to greater effect than with Joseph Cornell, whose Medici Slot Machines were executed in the 1940s and 50s using printed reproductions of such paintings as the Portrait of Bia de Medici by Bronzino (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) (fig. 1), which gaze poignantly out at us from behind the glass, part devotional object, part arcade entertainment.

When respectable art critics and auction houses attribute a ghastly painting, like this so-called Caravaggio to the man himself, I ask myself, 'did Caravaggio- for whatever reason, drugs, drink, or disease, go through a phase in his career, where he was no longer capable of imitating himself?'

Are great painters in fact capable of producing work without a single piece of correct anatomy or redeeming brush stroke? 

Personally, I think not.

Perhaps they think it will 'clean up nicely...'

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and co-curator of last year’s hugely successful Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition at Tate Modern, has been appointed Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, it was announced today, Tuesday 6 January 2015.

The appointment by the Gallery’s Board of Trustees, which has been approved by the Prime Minister, was made following the resignation of current Director Sandy Nairne in June 2014. Nicholas Cullinan will take up his new post in spring 2015. 

Since joining The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in early 2013, Dr Cullinan has taken an important role in developing a number of projects including the programme for the museum’s occupancy of the Whitney Museum of Art’s Marcel Breuer building in 2016 (following the Whitney’s move to another location), expanding and redisplaying the permanent collection and increasing the Modern and Contemporary Department’s base of supporters. At the Met, he organised the exhibitions Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932-47 (2013); Amie Siegel: Provenance (2014); and devised and led, together with co-curator Andrea Bayer, one of the Met’s opening exhibitions at the Breuer building for March 2016. He has been responsible for a number of major works being acquired by the Met. Significant gifts he worked on include the donation to the Museum of forty-four pieces by Carlo Scarpa and fifty-seven works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, dedicated to African American artists.

Previously Curator of International Modern Art at Tate Modern (2007-2013), he worked on exhibitions such as Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (2014), Malevich (2014), Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye (2012), Tacita Dean: FILM (2011), Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia (2008) and Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons (2008). While at Tate, Dr Cullinan also worked on acquisitions and collection displays, founded a committee for Russian and Eastern Europe art and was involved with many aspects of the second phase of the Tate Modern project, for which the new building, designed by Herzog & De Meuron, is scheduled to open in 2016.

Prior to joining Tate, he was the 2006-7 Hilla Rebay International Fellow between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Previous experience includes in 2006 a Helena Rubinstein Internship at the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff from 2003-2004. 

Dr Cullinan was educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he was awarded First Class Honours for his B.A. in History of Art, a distinction for his M.A. and where he also gained his PhD. In 2003 Dr Cullinan was visiting teacher for the M.A. Course at the Courtauld Institute. While studying there he was a part-time Visitor Services Assistant at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 2001-2003. He also served as board member of the Courtauld Association from 2011-2013. Dr Cullinan is British and grew up in Yorkshire although he was born in Connecticut, USA in 1977.

“What I find frustrating sometimes, is people seem to brush right by the needs of the museum.”

[Page] is an extremely well known English garden designer along with Gertrude Jekell. And if you say you don't know who she is...

Per your recent post about the proposed Frick expansion, let me direct you to two articles in the Huffington Post written by Charles A. Birnbaum, founder and president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation -  Here's What's Missing in the Debate Over the Frick Collection's Proposed Expansion and That 'Temporary' Frick Garden - It Was Created to Be Permanent.  Together, they provide some context for why the Russell Page-designed garden is a central issue in this debate.

As for the physical addition, along with opening space on the museum's second floor, we know there will be a net increase of some 42,000 square feet, but be have yet to get an accounting of how all this space is being allocated. The most recent architectural rendering (attached) does not discuss the disposition of more than 35,000 square feet – how much of this addition is going for office space?  And, do all of the museum's components have to be contiguous? 

The Cooper-Hewitt, also sited in an historic Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue,  just managed to increase their exhibition space by 60% without a massive addition or the destruction of their garden – and they moved some offices offsite to other properties they own on East 90th Street. 

The Guggenheim Museum has curatorial offices down in SoHo.

In addition, the Russell Page-designed garden is a site specific work of art, which Frick officials have deemed an interim land use. This is a particularly disconcerting aspect of the entire debate.  Cultural custodians are making a judgement about the worth of a specific work of art, and an entire genre – what are the criteria? On what basis is this unique work of art, a commissioned site specific work that is part of their permanent collection, being deemed of less value than other parts of their permanent collection?

[The Frick's director, Ian Wardropper, has said that the Frick currently has three gardens, and will continue to after the expansion because the Page garden will be replaced by a rooftop garden.  Ergo, gardens are all the same and interchangeable.  That's a devastating indictment of the entirety of landscape architecture and design – and because it's being rendered by otherwise esteemed cultural custodians, it will be taken at face value and not challenged.  Substitute building for garden and see if that response is still valid.  What if Wardropper said of their three Vermeers: because of space considerations we're replacing one of the three Vermeers with a newly acquired black velvet painting – don't worry, we started with three paintings and we end up with three paintings. That, in essence, is what is being proffered].

 [...] let’s ruin it! Let’s make it big and noisy and crowded! 

A big part of the [expansion] pitch is education. But last I checked the Frick doesn’t allow children under 10 and hopefully that won’t change.

The Frick garden is charming but is an ornament which is viewed but unused. The museum has genuine needs which the addition will serve and will benefit the public. As you mention Central Park is just across Fifth Avenue.

Keep your mouth shut.

The debate revolves around several points. Is the 1970s garden, given its recent vintage, important enough to be protected? Would the loss of the garden harm the townhouse character of the street — which historically had no such gardens? A really correct restoration would replace the three townhouses — why isn’t that on the table? Will the new wing overpower the original Frick, even though the original Frick long ago disappeared?

The lightning rod is the garden itself, a simple, innocent thing. With foresight the Frick has never made the garden public, and it’s “don’t touch” aspect is part of its considerable charm. But is it “charm preservation” we’re after?

I think the question is whether or not this garden (and by extension, landscape architecture) is considered a work of art – and not compared to works by Vermeer, Watteau, Franceso di Vannuccio, etc.  Is this art?  In deciding to demolish the garden, Frick officials have tacitly endorsed the idea that it's not.  Shouldn't it be incumbent on them, as cultural custodians to whom we look to for guidance, education and understanding and who we believe have a broader context, to outline their criteria and explain why they believe so?  The garden's fate is in their hands. Thus far, this has been absent from the debate.

[...] is the man graffiti artists love to hate. His relentless and increasingly hi-tech pursuit of graffiti writers for almost 30 years has earned him the reputation as the graffiti bogeyman.

His name is frequently spray-painted on walls as a taunt to the authorities. Abusive comments about him have even been spotted on goods wagons in Germany. Saysell has helped convict at least 300 graffiti offenders in his time, first in Bristol and more recently in London for British Transport police. As the only detective registered as an expert witness on graffiti, Saysell regularly helps police forces across the UK and Europe.

Saysell says the police are winning the war on graffiti. But his tactics and hardline approach are being questioned. He is seen by many as out of step with a society that celebrates rather than prosecutes graffiti artists. Even some officials tout the idea of decriminalisation.

The Ford House, which is on solid financial footing and carries no debt, is using proceeds from the sale to create a special endowment for preservation, conservation and restoration of the collection — defined as the 1929 English Cotswold-style mansion designed by architect Albert Kahn, the landscape and gardens created by Jens Jensen and furnishings and objects inside the house.

The Ford House, which draws about 60,000 visitors a year for tours and events, has a separate operating endowment of $86 million.

Mullins said that the Ford House trustees received an unsolicited offer for the Cézanne painting in the middle of 2013 but at first turned it down. The buyer came back with a second offer that also was refused. Mullins said that when the buyer came back a third time, the seven-member board — comprised of six Ford family members and the family's lawyer — decided to discuss with a wider circle of family members the possibility of selling.

"This was really a once-in-a-lifetime offer," said Mullins. "The family thought it was a way to guarantee the estate would be taken care of the way Eleanor would have wanted."

“It is important for us to remember that French art of the second half of the nineteenth century is not only Impressionism, Naturalism and Symbolism, but that there were also figures who were mainly driven by their imagination. This is the ‘other French nineteenth century,’ and it is equally influential.”

In the December issue of popular science magazine New Scientist, Icke, a professor of Theoretical Astronomy at the University of Leiden, states that the pearl on the ear of the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, could not have been a real pearl. The way in which a pearl would reflect the light does not match the reflection of the light in the painting, says Icke.

The article by Vincent Icke confirms what we at the Mauritshuis have been thinking and writing about Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring for some time now. In fact, it's one of the most fun facts about this painting. Just like the fact that it was purchased in 1881 by the previous owner at an auction for 2.30 guilders. At the museum, the caption for the painting also mentions the unrealistic size of the pearl. Vincent Icke reaches the same conclusion, but through a very different understanding and research. The Mauritshuis has taken note of his findings with great interest. This illustrates what makes seventeenth-century paintings so interesting to look at: nothing is what it seems.

The Mauritshuis has written previously about the jewel in the ear of Vermeer's girl, saying it was not a true pearl. Indeed, just like the turban, the "pearl" was no daily outfit for Dutch girls in the seventeenth century. Quentin Buvelot (Mauritshuis chief curator) described the painting together with fellow curator Ariane van Suchtelen in the catalogue for an exhibition on highlights of the Mauritshuis in Bologna earlier this year. They then wrote: "Some of the most salient features of Vermeer's painting include the girl's headpiece and the pearl in her ear. The headpiece consists of yellow fabric, with blue fabric on top of it, knotted around her forehead. The yellow-green jacket is painted in such a loose style that it isn't clear which material it's made from. It is probably wool fabric. This garment is often seen as part of the girl's exotic costume, but it is indeed a contemporary jacket. The low-set sleeve and small pleats are typical of the fashion in the 1660s, when this painting was made. The pearl on the girl's ear is remarkably large. Whereas most pearls nowadays come from farms, in the seventeenth century, they were natural ones. Pearls were formed in oyster-like sea mussels. Large pearls were rare and ended up in the hands of the richest people on the planet. In the seventeenth century, cheaper glass pearls, usually from Venice, were also quite common. They were made from glass, which was lacquered to give it a matt finish. Maybe the girl is wearing such a handcrafted 'pearl'."

One of the richest and most comprehensive digital art and archival resources in Europe and the world’s largest archive of British Art - Tate Archive - is being made available online for a worldwide audience.

Sketchbooks, drawings, family photographs, personal letters and intimate diaries from artists including Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson will be available on the free archive, which has been supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund with a grant of £2 million.

Highlights of the project, which will be released in stages, include Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture records compiled by the artist throughout her life. They featuring original photographs, handwritten notes and details of exhibitions, giving a comprehensive record of her sculptures from 1925-1975.

Diary entries include tender love letters with intimate sketches sent by Paul Nash to his wife detailing their early life together as well as his service as a soldier and war artist during the First World War. 

My wife and I would like to add a very loud ''hear hear'' to Martin Filler's article.  We used go out of our way to stop-over in Chartres whilst driving to and from our house in the south-west in France. Even for a confirmed atheist such as myself, the cathedral interior was the most spiritual and awe-inspiring building that I have ever experienced and it truly became an inspirational place of pilgrimage for us. We were shocked and heart-broken, indeed out-raged, when we visited last year to find that the French had wilfully embarked on this catastrophic campaign of so-called restoration. The result is that now we sadly have no wish to return, as we prefer to retain the memories of this Gothic masterpiece when it still retained the accretions of centuries which were responsible for so much of its mystical character.

Perhaps we can now expect the French state to countenance the cleaning of the Mona Lisa?