Summer 2009 issue
Tsarist treasures - Behind the scnenes of the Hermitage Amsterdam by Ruud van der Neut p. 10-20
Exquisite jewels, ball gowns, furniture, tableware and gold snuffboxes are a few of the cultural riches illustrating the flamboyant lifestyle of the Tsarist rulers in the exhibition ‘At the Russian Court’ at the Hermitage Amsterdam this summer.
This inaugural exhibition of the newly expanded museum has been years in the making and features over 2,000 objects from the unparalleled collections of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
The Netherlands has had close ties historically with the Russian court. Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna (1795-1865), a daughter of Tsar Paul I, was also the wife of the Dutch king William I. Earlier on, Tsar Peter the Great based the grid of the city of St Petersburg, later home to the Romanoff Tsars, on the Amsterdam example. The State Hermitage Museum, comprising the Winter Palace, built by Peter’s daughter, Empress Elizabeth between 1754 and 1762, and the New Hermitage, where the art collections of the Romanoffs were first shown to the public, houses some three million Tsarist treasures. It is the largest art collection in the world.
In December 2008, Tableau contributor Ruud van der Neut, accompanied by a photographer, had exclusive access to this collection in his role as stylist for the Hermitage Amsterdam’s exhibition catalogue. Given unique access to dazzling jewels, snuff boxes and other artefacts usually behind security glass, at one point both men held a seal ring from Tsar Paul I in their – gloved – hands.
Many of the exhibition exhibits are stored permanently in depots in St Petersburg under controlled conditions, but nevertheless several fragile gowns had to be restored for the show before they could travel to Amsterdam. Moving the art objects to Holland was a military operation, requiring three shipments, with a Russian-Dutch team of 42 specialists and assistants poised to check and install the treasures at the other end. Among these is the famous Romanoff throne of Tsar Paul I and many family jewels and objects from the renowned goldsmith Carl Fabergé.
It was in 1996 that the idea was first mooted to have a Hermitage museum in Amsterdam and this opened its doors in 2003 in Amstelhof, a building complex dating from 1681 and formerly used as alms houses for the elderly. The greatly expanded building, ten times the size of the original, will have two permanent exhibitions and is the largest branch of the State Hermitage Museum outside Russia.
‘At the Russian Court’ covers the period of the last six Tsars from the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1917, a time of obscene wealth, decadence, absolute power, murder and political unrest. The Romanoff dynasty ended during the revolution in February 1917 when Nicolas II was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. He and his family were later executed in July 1918. A fitting footnote to this, is that gowns can be seen in the exhibition, like the one worn by Empress Alexandra, that were worn at the last themed ball she and her husband gave before the revolution.
Aan het Russische Hof, Paleis en protocol in de 19de eeuw
20 juni 2009 t/m 31 januari 2010, Hermitage Amsterdam, Amstel 51, 1017 AB Amsterdam, tel. 020–5308751, www.hermitage.nl
Glass art by Chris Reinewald p. 76-81
At the colourful exhibition in the Hague’s Gemeentemuseum to mark the fortieth anniversary of glass art at the Rietveld Academy, the influences of the teachers who ran the department can be traced in their students’ work. Caroline Prisse, the show’s curator, has put objects by forty of the department’s eighty graduates in the show. She, herself, has designed a spectacular ‘greenhouse’ filled with glass models of botanical species for the occasion, inspired by similar ones made by the Austrians Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in 1850.
In 2003 the international renowned department faced closure due to cutbacks. It was saved through reorganisation and the appointment of Prisse as the new department head. She, like her predecessors, continues the Rietveld’s non-conformist, non-commercial approach to glass art. All the exhibits are ‘objects’: there is no applied glass in the show.
Sybren Valkema (1916-1996) first bought working freely with glass to the Netherlands from America in 1965. At the time, the industry, i.e. the Leerdam Glass factory, did not have the time or money to support experimentation, while designers, without the facilities, depended on craftsmen to execute their designs.
Valkema had a portable gas oven copied he had seen in America, which made direct experimentation possible and, as the Rietveld’s assistant director, persuaded the board to open a department of free glass in 1969. Among his early pupils were Bert Frijns, maker of ethereal, monumental bowls, Mieke Groot and, the first foreign student, Richard Meitner from California, now all internationally well-known.
After Valkema retired, Groot and Meitner ran the experimental department for eight years (until 2000). Groot’s designs are often based on pots or bowls which she covers with an opaque enamel skin. These African looking objects form a striking installation in the show. Meitner is the quintessential and challenging post-modern artist who happens to express himself best in glass, often using religious symbols or West Coast Pop Art influences in his work. Other participants include Jens Pfeifer, who makes bodily parts, guns and toy animals in glass and Lisa Gherardi, Richard Pryce and Susan Hammond, who make pottery type objects.
Around 1995, galleries and other observers turned away from free glass art, feeling the extreme use of the material and the ‘way out’ techniques had led to contrived forms. Meitner himself does not believe the discipline of glass art has a future anymore, but professionally trained artists working with it do.
When Prisse succeeded Elisabeth Swinburne in 2003, she steered the glass department in the direction of conceptual art. One such example of this course, is a seemingly glassless work on display by a recent graduate Maria Lammersen, comprising a toy crane on a pile of blankets hoisting felt flower silhouettes. At their ends are large glass droplets, more there as a metaphor than to display any technical skill. Japanese artist Simsa Cho uses glass for its Shintoist value, incorporating it into his performances, while Mia Lerssi incorporates it into thought-provoking wall installations like ‘Cinderella is a Slut’ made from letters of dripped glass.
Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam 1969-2009
t/m 1 november Haags Gemeentemuseum, Stadhouderslaan 41, 2517 HV Den Haag, www.gemeentemuseum.nl
April 2009 issue
Zuiderzee with a Twist by Chris Reinewald p. 56-62
Not everyone was happy with the about-face of the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen: out with the folklore, in with the cutting edge art and design. This radical trend, introduced by the museum’s new director in 2006, continues in the current exhibition ‘Gone with the Wind’, which features Dutch fashion and accessories inspired by traditional dress.
Visitors first catch a glimpse of the museum’s new direction while approaching the harbour of the open-air part of the museum by boat. On a spit of land is ‘Huize Organus’, a yellow ‘house’ in the form of a giant intestine by artist Joep van Lieshout. Meanwhile, the surrounding settlement of traditional Zuiderzee houses are now furnished in contemporary Dutch design. Studio Job, for instance, has filled one interior with bronze and rosewood objects that combine Zuiderzee plainness with Shaker minimalism. Artist Hugo Kaagman has airbrushed the walls of a traditional fishvendor’s house with stencils of Delft blue tiles, while Carole Scholten and Stefan Baijings have produced innovative products like table glass and willow baskets inspired by craftsmanship and tradition.
Leading Dutch fashion designers Alexander van Slobbe and Francisco van Benthum have curated ‘Gone with the Wind’, in which contemporary designs are shown alongside national dress and objects from the museum’s collection. Visitors can also see how fashion designers have interpreted typical Dutch themes like the ‘Orange’ celebrations on the Queen’s official birthday, or the vibrant floral motifs in traditional dress.
In the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company introduced colourfully decorated chintz cotton from Indonesia from which jackets – to be worn indoors – were made, giving an exotic touch to nineteenth century Dutch dress. For the theme ‘The Cabin Boys of Bontekoe’, male fashion designers Van Benthum, Lucas Ossendrijver and Ivo Mittelmeijer have given their own take on traditional male dress of the period. Designers and twin sisters Truus and Riet Spijkers do not refer explicitly to Dutch traditional dress in their designs, but draw on its shapes, characteristic colours and use of natural materials.
In the exhibition’s so-called Pleating Room designer Mark Lentelink has drawn together items of clothing involving the art of folding. This was traditionally done in order to save expensive material- it was not stitched but pinned – so that it could be reused. In the museum’s Ships Hall, designs by Saskia van Drimmelen can be seen that draw on knotting techniques such as macramé and bobbin lace.
Traditionally, fashion and national costume make uneasy bedfellows. One changes every season while the other represents universal values or the status of a particular village or region. Traditional dress can also represent local codes. A woman mourning, for instance, wears a black ‘kraplap’ – the stiff, starched item of clothing worn on the upper part of the body – instead of a white one. Jewellery designers like to play with these kind of codes. For the exhibition, Ted Noten made a contemporary version of a traditional earring with which fishermen were able to pay for the cost of their funeral should they ‘remain’ at sea.
Gejaagd door de wind, until November 22, 2009, Zuiderzeemuseum, Wierdijk 12-22, Enkhuizen, tel: 0228-351111. www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl
Artist Couples by Chris Reinewald p. 20-25
Wonderful intimate stories about artists only add to the importance of their work, especially when they concern artist couples. The exhibition ‘Love! Art! Passion! At The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum features seventeen such pairings.
When a couple share the same job, especially a creative one, tensions can arise and lead to an unhappy ending, as in the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin or Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter to mention a few. Sometimes the separated pair continue their artistic partnership – their love of art being stronger than their love for each other.
While there are now successful female artists like Marlene Dumas or Cindy Sherman, there was a time when women artists put their love for their partners before their work. The American Jo Hopper-Nivison, for instance, never drew attention to her own paintings, in order to promote her husband Edward Hopper.
For art history, an artistic relationship counts when this is reflected in the work of both artists. Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock might have had frank discussions about each other’s work, but went their separate ways concerning style. On the other hand, style similarities are obvious in the work of Rodin and his talented pupil/lover Camille Claudel, especially at the peak of their affair. Eventually, he worked in a more abstract manner, while she spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum and destroyed much of her work.
The woman can sometimes eclipse her male partner artistically. Paula Moderssohn-Becker, among the first artists to paint ‘female’ themes like motherhood, met and married the painter Otto Moderssohn in Worpswede, a rural artists’ colony in northern Germany. She moved to Paris for a time to be on her own and inspired by Paul Gaugin’s work, explored different artistic avenues. Her oeuvre shows more daring and innovation than Otto’s, who stands in her shadow from an art historical perspective.
There are artist couples who literally worked together like Hans Arp and his wife Sophie, who made Dadaist-inspired collages, and the Russian painters Natalia Gontscharowa and Michel Larionov, who made Cubist versions of folk art. Their artistic ties survived their relationship, as in the case of French-born Niki de Saint-Phalle and the Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who collaborated on the Stravinsky fountain beside the Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Certain relationships arise because opposites attract. He, Diego Rivera, was fat and made crude, Marxist wall paintings; she, Frida Kahlo, was a slim girl who poured her emotions into tranquil, semi-primitive paintings. After two turbulent marriages – to each other – they still remained close. Painter Georgia O’Keeffe was living in remote Abiquiu, New Mexico, when she fell for the 23-year older, New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Despite their different lifestyles, love conquered all and they had a lasting relationship.
The innovative furniture of American designers Ray Kaiser and Charles Eames best illustrates the exhibition’s exploration of the mutual influencing of artist couples. From their designs it is impossible to tell who did what. And unlike the other artist couplings, both their personal and professional relationship endured.
Liefde! Kunst! Passie! - Kunstenaarsechtparen
21 februari tot 2 juni, Haags Gemeentemuseum, Stadhouderslaan 41, Den Haag, tel. 070-3381111, www.gemeentemuseum.nl
February 2009 issue
Jasper Krabbé: Memory of archives by Jonathan Turner p. 56-63
In his large-scale solo exhibition of 200 works in Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle, Amsterdam artist Jasper Krabbé continues his thematic exploration of the the passage of time and the fragmentary nature of memory. The atmosphere in his paintings, watercolours, drawings and collages from the past four years is dream-like, fragile and intimate. The colours, motifs and moods, though, have changed in Krabbé's recent portraits and landscapes. Accompanied by a 300-page book revisiting a decade of Krabbé's work, his current show provides an unusual vision of how one artist studies the many facets of recollection, reflection and fading memory. It is not about nostalgia, but his personalized contemplation of a poetic reality.
"I have always been interested in how one memory interrupts another, or how one thought jarringly intrudes on the previous," says Jasper Krabbé in his vast studio in a former factory in the west of Amsterdam. "Memory is never flawless. You have all these incomplete images in your head. This sense of being temporary, and my awareness of the ephemeral, is part of what I see as the tragedy of loss. As memories slip away, I try to hold on to experiences by painting them." In Krabbé 's recent work, we see certain motifs reappearing time and again - the simple silhouette of a blackbird, a detached hand, a house or temple in a forest, and such easily recognized objects as a key, an umbrella, a nail. The passing of time is symbolized by his sketches of a clock-face, a burning candle or an hourglass. Krabbé often depicts a solitary, isolated tree, with blossoms emerging from its branches in the manner of a Japanese woodblock print. Occasionally texts or words blossom from the tree in the place of flowers, like buds proclaiming the human emotions of "desire", "hope" and "fear". It is as if he has tacked his own drawings on to the branches, and then painted the result.
Scenes of daily life
Jasper Krabbé takes few photographic snapshots of his family. Instead he manually records casual scenes from his daily life, often quickly sketched on brown packing paper, pages torn from books and strips of cardboard, or hurriedly painted on textured sail-cloth. His constant muses are his wife Floor and their two boisterous daughters, Lotus and Lisa. "Daily life seeps into my work. Portraiture is a pillar. I think that I can say a lot through portraiture, especially when I work on the surfaces of damaged paper, old linoleum, or canvases roughly stitched together, so that the distortions become integral to the work, as the painted objects pass over the hems and folds." His own studio and art materials are also recurring subjects. A jar of paint-brushes becomes a dislocated still-life. In some ways, the various techniques Krabbé uses to produce his paintings become subjects in themselves, with printed logos and patterns peeking through thinly washed layers of paint, or the masking tape of earlier collages painted in as short strips of colour on new canvases. The absorption of the paint and bleeding of pigments become important factors in composition. By using an old striped blanket instead of a canvas, the horizontal pattern woven in the fabric suddenly mimics the lines of the kerb of a street, or a flat skyline.
While some works are closely related to a particular place, including his series of drawings from Majorca, or his tropical, night-time paintings inspired by an antique wooden statue of a horse in Malaysia, not all his motifs are so specific. "Not everything is literal, definite or obvious," he says, referring to paintings with such titles as Possible Narrative and The Floating World. "The cone-shaped form rising in the distance could be the representation of any mountain, from Fuji to Vesuvius." Similarly, Two Brothers (2005) could be alternatively interpreted as strictly auto-biographical or as an expressive painting capturing an idealized scene of fraternal affection, pride and uncertainty. In the background, behind the two standing male figures, the overlapping sheets of paper have been highlighted with white linear paintwork. Krabbé has cleverly transformed the geometry of the edges of the paper into the shape of a bed. The vague profile of a sleeping head on a pillow further accentuates the dream-like calm of this scene. The brother on the left looks down, his emotions hidden. This downward glance is common to many of Krabbé's portraits, though we are never sure whether the figure depicted in this pose is asleep, at rest, waiting, lost in thought or merely reading.
The shifting gaze
Krabbé's paintings play with the notion of the shifting gaze, offering us the different perspectives of the artist and his model. The borderlines between the concepts of the observer and the observed are repeatedly blurred. His portraits hint at a tantalizing sense of disclosure and honesty. The silhouettes are shown without artifice, tentative yet composed. In many of his iconic self-portraits, the figure is shown with his back to the viewer, looking out to sea or toward a distant horizon. In this way, we look at the protagonist looking at the landscape. Since there is little obvious detail in the landscape, and since there is no "eye contact" between the viewer and the model, the observer too can gaze at the empty landscape without being disturbed. This establishes a strange sense of complicity between the viewer and the artist.
In order to emphasize this sense of contemplation, Krabbé obliquely combines close-ups together with broad horizons, going beyond the normal restrictions that a single point of view can impose. Sometimes an interior is suggested by a few diagonal lines denoting a wall and a ceiling. One painting shows the back of the artist, standing still, arms by his side, looking at a bleak landscape. His "memories" are painted in the far distance. Another image from the same series shows the artist in the same pose, but this time facing towards us. The background has become the foreground, viewed from the opposite direction. These visions of stillness create a fascinating duality, where the figure of the artist maintains an aspect of invisibility, despite the fact that he appears in the dead centre of the canvas. The transparency of the paint adds to the impression of something spectral.
Krabbé's Ghosts series from 2007 shows the silhouette of a female figure standing in a doorway, reclining or posed on a chair. The rustic interiors are loosely based on photographs from old magazines and books about decor, but the artist has shifted the furniture, stylized the patterns in the rugs and wallpaper, and altered the perspective in a colourful manner reminiscent of Matisse and the Fauves.
"The figures of my ghosts are flat and empty, so that the interiors themselves make a bigger, brighter impact. It has to do with memory and how we perceive mental space. The figure is somehow dissolving. My ghosts are empty versions of the universal female outline," he says, although the resemblance to Floor is clear. "It literally could be the fading memory of someone. It says something about the fragility and frailty of existence."
The floating world
In any case, the figures and objects in Krabbé's painting rarely appear heavy. They float and hover like balloons. They are airborne objects, seldom anchored to the ground by shadows. His birds are not painted in flight, but are shown as if perched in midair. In some self-portraits, the artist appears to have a thought-bubble suspended above his head. Meanwhile The Crossing represents a swimmer midstream in a river, concentrated on his efforts to reach the opposite side, depicted as a buoyant figure between a pair of pale meandering lines, representing the river banks.
"My work has changed in that it's growing more sparse. I'm now concentrating more closely on a single image. I've intensified the focus to present reality as a whole, but giving less information, using less of a collage effect."
In earlier works Krabbé assembled small pages from his various sketchbooks to create larger grids of Collected Drawings which functioned as visual diaries, Nowadays he groups up to 50 drawings in a cluster, and exhibits them as a single installation. Series of framed drawings in different formats and styles are gathered together as informal visions of associated memories. A sentence of poetry and a small figure working in a field simultaneously present different points of view within the same installation. An image of an insect in the artist's studio, next to a memory of someone in Mumbai, next to a philosophical rendering of an infinity of stars come together to create a vital patchwork of ideas. In this context, the close-up of a table-cloth can also be seen as an abstract pattern painting.
"Different experiences from different periods can be adrift, and roll through each other like waves - a lamp from Chinatown, a curtain from the south of France, a shard from an advertisement, a man walking on the street, a drawing from London. Sometimes all this merges in a single image"
Memories from his numerous travels around the globe become a vast encyclopedia of different images which migrate across his canvases. Hence the title of his current show and book Memory Archive, based on the name of Krabbé's second solo in New York at the Brenda Taylor Gallery, nine years ago. Since then, following numerous solo exhibitions in cities as diverse as Antwerp, Auckland, Rome and Sao Paulo, this exhibition in Zwolle is his first solo in a Dutch museum. Given that the idea of family is so important to the artist, in an affectionate parallel, Jasper's father, Jeroen Krabbé, held a solo show of his own paintings in the same institution in 2008.
According to Ralph Keuning, director of Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle: "Jasper Krabbé's work seems worn by the ravages of time, worn down to its blurry essence, like a tempera painting by Mantegna. Krabbé's theme: the things that are transitory and the things that remain, are vanitas in the aesthetic sense. Here, melancholia does not consist of skulls and blown-out candles, but beautiful people at rest, his surroundings, life as it was." Keuning further places Krabbé's work in the tradition of the German Expressionists and such contemporary Italian artists as Clemente, Cucchi and Paladino, thematically linked in their "search of Arcadia, the lost paradise and, perhaps, immortality. With the sureness of a young father, who has learned at first hand that new life contains within it the departure of old life, Krabbé is searching for a solution to this dilemma. He preserves his memories in a Memory Archive. Materially speaking, his work appears (to have already) convincingly withstood the effects of time."
As Krabbé himself writes in his new book: "Painting is a way to understand, re-experience and record those objects of our perception – perhaps for all time."
Memory Archive - Jasper Krabbé, Solo exhibition at Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle, February 1 - May 10, 2009, Paleis a/d Blijmarkt, Blijmarkt 20, 8011 NE Zwolle, tel: 0572-388188. Tuesday-Sunday, 11.00-17.00, www.museumdefundatie.nl
Memory Archive - Jasper Krabbé - A new 300 page full colour publication with works from 1998 - 2008, published February 2009, Uitgeverij d' jonge Hond, www.dejongehond.nl
Fitting finishes by Ruud van der Neut p. 48-55
Furniture fittings have changed radically down the centuries, as shown by the many examples at this year’s TEFAF Art and Antique Fair in Maastricht.
The earliest fittings, layers of metal with nail decoration applied to tables and chairs, originated from ancient Egypt, a technique which arrived in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Then, furniture was heavy – held together by wrought iron bands and dragged by metal rings – but the invention of the block plane meant lighter wood panels. By Gothic times metal fittings were largely decorative and as furniture became more lavishly carved, these were even relegated to the inside of a piece. The Renaissance saw the use of bronze fittings, with engraved or etched motifs, used for the ostentatious furniture and curiosity cabinets of the day.
The French King Louis IV set the seventeenth century trend for monumental, lavishly decorated furniture trimmed with heavy gilt bronze fittings. Both bronze foundries and fire gilding flourished, while the vogue for baroque furniture fittings – acanthus leaf, masks and the heads of women and lions were popular motifs – spread from the French court to the rest of Europe. Then followed the small yet exquisitely proportioned and highly ornamented furniture of the rococo style, like the commode with its rocaille, fire gilt bronze fittings.
In the second half of the eighteen century, such was the demand for French furniture that other European countries produced their own versions, including the Netherlands’ less whimsical and excessive form. In about 1760 French furniture changed radically. During Louis VI’s reign, the interest for Classical Antiquity, invoked by recent excavation finds, led to neoclassicism: plain, angular forms with classical motifs like urns, garlands and portrait medallions on fittings. The Dutch embraced this more restrained trend. Using detailed engravings of furniture, ornamentation and fittings, Dutch furniture makers kept up with the new fashion, but replaced bronze fittings for the cheaper brass or copper sort, most of which were mass-produced and imported from Birmingham, England.
In the Dutch antique trade, Louis XV furniture with fittings from the later Louis XVI period can often be found. Because Dutch artisans were slow to respond to new styles, they simply added the fashionable XVI fittings to their Louis V furniture, but the pieces are still authentic.
Around 1800 the Empire style, with furniture decorated with motifs inspired from the Roman Empire, became popular. The Netherlands had its own restrained version of this, with fittings more sparingly applied. Following the end of French supremacy in Europe, people turned to more simple furniture with brass or bronze handles and keyholes forming the only decoration. Industrialisation produced inferior versions of early furniture fittings (patina was artificially applied for instance), while cheaper materials like leather were used as well as ivory, bone or mother-of-pearl.
In the late nineteenth centre, the Arts and Crafts movement rebelled against industrialised methods, producing crafted furniture fittings, while Art Deco handles were simply cut out of drawers, dispensing of fittings altogether. Nowadays we can choose our own fittings, usually from plastic, although nothing surpasses antique, handcrafted ones.
Passion in Pietrasante by Karoline Legel p. 102-106
Five years ago painter Kim Kroes visited the Tuscan town of Carrara, known for its marble quarries, and Pietrasanta, an historic centre for sculpture. ‘I was struck by the beauty of the marble and the amazing feeling you have when you start working with it’, Kroes explains. Thus, after his visit, Kroes (1960), who trained at The Hague’s Academy of Fine Arts, felt an immense urge to express his ideas in marble. In 2005 he spent several months in Pietrasanta devoting himself to his new passion and every year since has returned to work and study there.
Pietrasanta has been a centre for marble working since the fifteenth century and here the finest white marble from Carrara is made into products and sculptures (enlarged and reproduced from artists’ designs) by the town’s marble workers. Although Kroes feels that the sculptures, albeit accomplished, sometimes miss the original artist’s ‘soul’.
When in Pietrasanta he works at the well-known Sem studio. Sem Ghelardini was a gifted marble worker who, up until his death in 1997, worked for masters like Henry Moore and Joan Mirò. Leading sculptors from all over the world come to work at the studio and inspire Kroes enormously. `We learn a great deal from each other. We’re a tight group, supporting each other and often eating together’.
Kroes often searches for stone among remnants found at local firms making marble products. He first wets the marble checking for cracks, how the veins run and quality of the structure before haggling over a price. He once found what he thought was a splendid stone with great veinwork, but a local artisan advised him to chuck it as it was full of cracks. Not heeding his advise, Kroes later had his car window smashed. He vented his anger by attacking his piece of marble with a hammer. One large piece of stone remained over and from this he made one of his finest sculptures Innocenza.
For Kroes, the crucial difference between working in paint or stone is that painting requires endlessly adding to, while sculpture involves constantly taking away until an image appears out of the stone. The similarity with both is that you begin with a rough form and continually refine it until there are nuances and detail. What about the process of sculpture itself? ‘I first make a wax model of what I have in mind, taking direction, angle and which parts of the torso I want to show into account. For this I use real models, photos, imagination or drawings I already have. I then sketch this onto the stone and then saw huge chunks off this before the actual sculpting begins.’
The female torso is Kroes’s favourite subject matter and much more interesting than the entire figure. ‘In my sculpture I try and have abstraction going over into organic forms, thereby invoking passion and eroticism. In this way you bring tension to a sculpture.’
Kim Kroes’s work is on show at the Ivo Bouwman stand during TEFAF Art and Antique Fair (13-22 March).
Michael Triegel: Illusionary Realism by Greet Schuit-Hamming p. 114-119
Michael Triegel’s extraordinary paintings are currently on show at the Collectie Harms Rolde gallery and the Drents Museum, Assen. But what makes Triegel’s work so fascinating? His consummate skill? The occurrence of aesthetic pleasure in painting again?
Triegel (Erfurt, 1969) was twenty-five when he had his first museum exhibitions in Leipzig and Neurenberg, directly after graduating from the Hochschüle für Grafik und Buchdruckkunst. In his work his academic training at this Leipzig institute is clearly evident. Belonging to the third generation of Leipzig School artists, the so-called Neue Leipziger Malerschule, Triegel’s central theme in his work is the human form, although he makes landscapes and hyper-realist still lifes.
It is in his large figurative works that his style and expressive power is most obvious. At first glance they seem completely recognisable but on closer inspection the depictions are enigmatic, surreal even. As Triegel explains: ‘My realism doesn’t depict reality, but is a timeless and non-situational depiction which ultimately arises entirely from my imagination. I conjure up an unexpected and new realism so to speak’.
His work features saints, martyrs and mythological figures and he sometimes uses his own likeness to depict a St Sebastian, Hermes or Jupiter. He draws inspiration from Renaissance and Mannerist painters with their illusionary depiction of natural observation, spatial depth and perspective proportion. ‘You could say I reinterpret their work. That I return these old masters to the present, and want to discover their mysteries again. I use motifs and elements from their time and maintain their painting style and materials, but I don’t conform to their artist conventions but make something completely different.’
A recent painting with Renaissance elements is Der Bote Hermes, a fine example of the way Triegel packs his figurative art with content. Architecture and perspective, spatiality, light and extraordinary fragments of form like the floating foetus in the top, left-hand corner of the work create an enigmatic composition. Inspired by both the Christian theme of the annunciation as well as the Greek mythological figure of Hermes, Triegel has depicted Mary as a wooden dummy, however, while angel Gabriel is in the guise of Hermes but with the artist’s own face. Thus Triegel is the central motif, pointing a raised arm in the direction of the foetus and conveying the message of birth.
Many of the figures in Triegel’s paintings have his own face or body. The way he depicts himself and his choice of sources reveal something of his personality yet at the same time he hides behind these images. His wife too features in his work, as in his recent semi-nude portrait Christine as Halbakt, in which she appears to be making a vague gesture of blessing with her fingers, lending a Christian interpretation to this classic portrait. A Christian theme is again evident in Heimsuchung (2007) showing Mary visiting her niece Elizabeth. In the centre of the picture plane is a mandorla containing the two veined foetuses of Jesus and John. A reference to the anatomical foetus drawings by Da Vinci, perhaps?
Letter from Brussels by Peter Wouters p. 108-113
The royal palace of Turin is being drastically remodelled so that by 2011 it can accommodate the city’s national museum and the exquisite art collection of the House of Savoy, former owners of the palace. A major part of this collection is travelling and is currently on show at BOZAR, Brussels Centre for Fine Arts. The exhibition ‘Da Van Dyck a Bellotto’ features some 120 art works from Flemish and Italian masters, including Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Anthony van Dyck and Bernardo Bellotto. Among the highlights are four paintings by Rubens, never previously shown in Belgium, and illuminated manuscripts from the Royal Library.
Art exhibitions from the Czech Republic are very much in evidence in Belgium in relation to the country being the current holders of the EU presidency. The most important of these is ‘Decadence: Bohemian Lands 1880-1914’ on show at Brussels Town Hall and the Félicien Ropsmuseum, Namen. Hailed as the most comprehensive exhibition of Czech art for ten years, the exhibition explores the influence of decadence on late 19th century Czech artists. Meanwhile Design Flanders is showing contemporary Czech glass and porcelain, Prague House illustrations by famous illustrator Joseph Lada and the Czech Centre a retrospective by the acclaimed photographer Frantisek Drtikol.
Work by the legendary photographer Robert Capa is on show at Brussels Jewish Museum. Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in 1913, his first professional photographs date from 1931. He moved to Paris in 1933 and fell in love and married Gera Pohorylles, also a photographer. To survive financially, they changed their names to the more English sounding Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. She even informed the press that Capa was actually American. It worked. His photographs sold and Capa went on to become an acclaimed war photographer: his picture Death of a Republic Soldier became an iconic image of the Spanish civil war and made him world famous. A friend of people like Picasso and Hemingway, after his wife’s death in Spain he eventually settled in New York in 1939 and was one of the founding photographers of the Magnum photo agency. In 1954 he was killed by a landmine in Indochina.
One of Antwerp’s less familiar museums is the Maagdenhuis, a former orphanage for young girls. Housed in a typical seventeenth century house, its highlights include paintings by Rubens and Van Dyck as well as a collection of rare sixteenth century porridge bowls. The current exhibition ‘From the Linen Cupboard’ traces how girls in an orphanage learnt to make samplers embroidered with letters, numbers and motifs.
Over in Ghent, the Museum of Fine Arts has an exhibition by the Impressionist Emile Clausen (1849-1924). The museum was the first to buy a painting of his, The Kingfishers in 1892: thereafter other Belgian museums and the rest of Europe followed suit. Since then the museum’s Clausen collection has steadily grown and this themed exhibition is devoted to the painter’s various depictions of rural life. His work is also placed in the context of similar themes painted by his contemporaries.
Letter from Paris by Waldemar Kamer p. 92-97
The world’s press has described it as ‘the sale of the century’: the seven hundred art treasures from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent, who died last summer, and his partner Pierre Bergé.
The collection has been shown at the Grand Palais before the three-day auction begins at Christie’s in Paris, on 23 February. The auction house anticipates huge interest: response to star pieces displayed in New York, London and Brussels was such that the collection is estimated to fetch 500 million euros.
Saint Laurent and Bergé’s huge apartment was a mix of art deco and twentieth-century masterpieces, with medieval, antique and Oriental art objects. Highlights in the sale from the salon include an Eileen Gray dragon sofa from 1925 (estimate 3.5 million), a pair of Gustave Miklos chairs from 1920 (3 million) and paintings of the period by Di Chirico, Léger, Juan Gris and Matisse. Saint Laurent’s personal favourite painting by Matisse is estimated at 20 million euros. From the apartment library two Mondrians from1915 and 1920 are expected to fetch 10 million and 8 million euros respectively. Proceeds from the sale will be divided between the couple’s foundation and a new foundation for fighting aids.
At Palais Galliera, Paris’s fashion museum, the age of Napoleon III has been revived with an exhibition of ladies crinolines. The crinoline was a metal cage worn under women’s skirts and was designed by the American W.S. Thomson. By 1860 five million crinolines had been sold in France. The form changed according to fashion: round in 1861, oval in 1863, flat and square in 1867. Since the latest fashion was usually launched by the Empress and her ladies at court, the exhibition begins with a court ball theme featuring ball gowns and all the accessories, from tiaras and jewels to gloves and muffs (to prevent ladies catching pneumonia when walking from carriage to palace).
Musée d’Orsay is showing the work of the little known sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck in ‘Leaving Rodin Behind?’, an exhibition which explores whether it is possible to forget the master when looking at sculpture made in Paris between 1905 and 1914. Nearly all the sculptors featured, including Antoine Bourdelle, Aristide Maillo and Constantin Brancusi, were either Rodin’s pupils or worked in his studio and wanted to free themselves from his influence. Lehmbruck, who arrived in Montparnasse in 1908, made sculptors of kneeling girls, which similar to Brancusi’s figures were without arms, feet and head. After the outbreak of World War One, Lehmbruck fell into a deep depression, but created some of his most moving works. He committed suicide at the age of thirty-eight.
The Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine moved to Paris in 1908 and from 1928 until his death in 1961 lived in a small house close to the Luxembourg gardens. His wife later donated the house to the city of Paris and it is now the Musée Zadkine. The current exhibition there ‘Destruction’ traces the process of decay through the work of various artists, including rotting fragments of a wooden sculpture by Zadkine.
Letter from London by Huon Mallalieu p. 64-69
TALK OF THE TOWN
Close to my home in London, on a small round-about at the unfashionable end of Hoxton Market stands one of the most unpleasant pieces of public ‘art’ one might ever hope not to see. It is a cartoon-like sculpture of a manic, hippyish, woman dragging a line of children towards the delights supposedly to be found on the stalls and discount shops along the road. This piece of whimsy is surrounded by council estates, run-down pubs and a swimming pool and leisure centre where brave efforts are made to maintain standards. It is a profoundly patronising, council-commissioned, assumption that people who live in such an area must be incapable of appreciating anything of aesthetic merit. Poor people, it seems to say, should be given nothing more challenging than the sculptural equivalent of graffiti. Of course, that is true of many people at all levels of society, and it is also true that the British have a very hit-or-miss record in public sculpture. In 1937 as part of his series ‘The British Character’ the great cartoonist Pont did a drawing of a crowd of statues illustrating the ‘Passion for not forgetting the moderately great’, to which he might have added, ‘by mediocre sculptors’. But we have also had good sculptors, and a few great ones from time to time. Some of their works have been lucky in their siting – Thornycroft’s Boadicea by Westminster Bridge beneath Big Ben, Gilbert’s Shaftesbury Memorial (popularly known as Eros) in Piccadilly Circus, Paolozzi’s Newton in the British Library forecourt. Others are hardly noticed because of where they are – Sullivan by Goscombe John in the Embankment Gardens, and a second Paolozzi on the north side of New Oxford Street. When first erected this last, a typical robotic figure, commanded attention by spraying unwary passers-by from a battery of water jets every hour or so. Since that was stopped by some health and safety kill-joy, people hurry past without noticing it. On the other hand, the hideousness of Paul Day’s grotesquely out of scale Meeting Point in St Pancras Station is pointed up by its superb situation. However, there are some very good public sculptors at work today. Opinions differ violently as to Anthony Gormley’s merit; while he is undoubtedly the darling of the Establishment, and his Angel of the North considers its landscape setting, but there are beyond the Tate and Arts Council many who loathe him. Emily Young, who I have mentioned here before, notably in April 2003, is a particularly fine sculptor for public places, as can be seen in her powerful Angels’ Heads around St Paul’s Churchyard. At the same time the market seems to indicate a renewed interest among private collectors in sculpture, ancient, old and new. With any luck the changed conditions of recession will nudge both private collectors and public patrons to go for work of real quality, rather than waste money on vulgar baubles by Jeff Koons – or such horrors as the thing on the Hoxton round-about.
DRESSING THE TSARS
Although during the 1920s when they needed foreign exchange the Soviets sold off a significant proportion of the vast art collections formed by the Tsars, they carefully preserved other symbols of Imperial power. No doubt it was felt that the magnificence of the ceremonial dress used at coronations and the like would symbolise tyranny to the new Russia, just as it had stood for power in the old. The Armoury Chamber at the Kremlin had the right to keep costumes made for the ceremonies, so they might well have been worn just the once, and thereafter preserved immaculately. The concept of power dressing is almost as old as fig leaves, and the Tsars understood it perfectly. They, their courtiers and their servants were shown to be immeasurably apart from and above their subjects by the splendour of their dress, and like the priests in their gold, took station between the human and the divine. What might be unexpected in this comparatively small, but suitably powerful, show at the V & A, is that the majority of these costumes, from the time of Peter the Great to the overthrow of the monarchy, are not magnificent in a specifically Russian way, but particularly lavish examples of styles and fashions that could be seen at any European court. This was a direct result of Peter’s campaign of modernisation. During the grand tour of the West which he undertook from 1697, he was naturally most impressed by the court of the Sun King at Versailles, and France remained the centre of European fashion for much of the 18th century. The early costumes here were made in France, and later, even when cut and made up in Russia, the fabrics still came from French mills. Surprisingly, humanity breaks through. We see where the young Peter II’s waistcoats were let out at the seams as he grew, and we see the wedding coat that he would have worn had he not died of smallpox on the morning of the ceremony. The wondrous uniforms of coachmen and retainers often have labels in them with the names and positions of the wearers.
Magnificence of the Tsars, to March 29, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London SW7, tel: +(0) 20 7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk
SWAGGER ITSELF
“Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599 – 1641) was the greatest painter in 17th century Britain”, is the forthright opinion of the organisers of this Tate show, reasonably discounting the comparatively brief visits of Rubens, van Dyck’s early master, and placing van Dyck well above later fellow immigrants such as Kneller and Lely. The show is visually splendid, including many of the most magnificent works produced during his decade in Britain, from 1632 to his death at his house in Blackfriars. In them, it is argued, he re-invented portrait painting, not only recording the main protagonists in the disturbed decade which led up to the Civil wars and the execution of his principal patron King Charles I, but continuing to influence succeeding generations of artists until well into the 20th century, if not beyond. His is our view of the aristocrats at zenith of the Stuart monarchy – but his too, mediated by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Winterhalter, Sargent, de Laszlo and many others, is our idea of later social leaders.For a century before van Dyck’s arrival the strongest influence on British – essentially English - portraiture had been Holbein, whose provincial successors had sometimes added a strain of their own surrealism, and van Dyck provided a new injection of international sophistication. However, he was not above learning from what he found, and adapting it to his own ends. His innovative approach is examined here, and explained as a creative synthesis of his Antwerp baroque training and his deep study of Italian, and primarily Venetian, painting. His mastery of fabric painting is paid especial attention.Lenders include the Royal Collection, including royal portraits such as The Great Piece – Charles I and Henrietta Maria and their two eldest children, and the National Trust, which is co-presenter of the exhibition. A section traces van Dyck’s influence on later generations. The show is curated by Karen Hearn, Curator of 16th and 17th century British art at the Tate.
Van Dyck and Britain, 18 February to 17 May, Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1, www.tate.org.uk
MASTER KUNIYOSHI
Kuniyoshi is regarded as one of the last of the great masters of ukiyo-e, the ‘art of the floating world’ in paintings and above all woodblock prints. The floating world is not, as might be assumed, a sort of Oriental version of Monet’s Giverny, referring rather to the rising and comparatively unregulated – thus floating – merchant class from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It was originally an urban art, dealing with city life, courtesans, wrestlers and the like, later turning to landscape to re-connect city dwellers to their roots. Woodblock printing, whether hand coloured as at first, or colour-printed, was comparatively cheap, and so available to the many. Kuniyoshi of the Utagawa School (1798 – 1861) ranks with Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hirosige among the 19th century print makers, and he was a considerable innovator. He began with single-figure series of heroes and geishas, through imaginative re-workings keeping the traditional myths and legends alive, and when figures were banned in 1842 he found ingenious ways of evading censorship. Cats, which he loved, often took the place of human protagonists. He also increasingly introduced landscape, and pioneered a ‘wide-lens’ approach and the use of the triptych. He began to introduce such Western conventions as cast shadows and perspective, and it is doubly ironic that he died just before the Meiji opening of Japan to Western influence – which had as a consequence the eclipse of ukiyo-e as irredeemably old-fashioned. That in turn led to the use of prints as packing for exports to the West, where they were retrieved to help spark the vogue for japonisme.The show features more than 150 works, comical, serious and beautiful.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 21 March to 7 June, Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1, Tel.: +44 (0)207300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk
LOST SHEPHERD
The word ‘shepherdess’ conjures up a pretty, flower-bedecked Meissen or Chelsea figurine, or perhaps poor Marie-Antoinette at play. In reality, however, the life of a shepherd, whether male or female, could be harsh and very far from romantic. One of the few, and probably the last, full-time female shepherds in Britain was Jenny Armstrong, who died in 1970 aged 82, having spent all her life tending her sheep in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh, as generations of her family had before. In 1970 Victoria Crowe, a Surrey-born painter, settled nearby, and for 15 years she dre3w and painted the fiercely independent Scotswoman as she fed the flock, hefted bales of hay, trained the dogs and collected fuel, year in and year out, in snow and long summer evenings. Her cottage had neither telephone nor mains water until shortly before her death. The cycle of paintings which makes up ‘A Shepherd’s Life’ was first shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as part of a Millennium series of exhibitions; now it has come south to the Fleming with an added component. This is a tapestry of Two Views, one of Crowe’s paintings, commissioned from the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh by the Duke of Buccleuch, a longstanding collector of her work, who has a seat in the Borders just south of the Pentlands. It will hang, however, in the Duke’s English home, Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Victoria Crowe has lived in Scotland since she took a post teaching drawing and painting at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1968, and has established a high reputation for her portraits as well as landscapes.
A Shepherd’s Life, To 21 March, Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, Tel +44 (0)20 7409 5730, www.flemingcollection.co.uk
CASSONI COME INTO THEIR OWN
I remember my first visit to the Courtauld Gallery after its move to Somerset House, not for any of the great panels and canvases on the walls, but for the painted cassoni that stood beneath them. I had seen such things before, in Italy and when I had worked for Christie’s years before, but this must have been the first time that I had really looked at them, thus the persistence of memory. The show that has just opened, with the subtitle ‘The Courtauld Wedding Chests’ is the first ever to be devoted to the subject in the United Kingdom. It concentrates principally on just one pair – but what a splendid pair – which was commissioned in 1472 to commemorate the wedding in the previous year of Lorenzo di Matteo Morelli, a Florentine patrician, and Vaggia di Tanai Nerli, a member of another prominent family in Florence. A comparatively unusual feature is that they are complete with their spalliere, or painted backboards. They are among the most important pieces of Renaissance furniture to survive. Marriage involved great expenditure on clothes and textiles, as well as jewels, and these chests were intended to store the clothes afterwards. Not only are the Morelli cassoni particularly fine examples, but Lorenzo left a record of his wedding expenses, showing that nearly two-thirds went on the cassoni. They were constructed by Zanobi de Domenico, and the panels were gilded and painted by Biagio di Antonio and Jacopo di Sellaio.
The painted stories and subjects are – or would have been – familiar. Many are Biblical, such as the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, others make equally moral points taken from Boccaccio’s Decameron or from Roman history. The show ends with a section on the later history of cassoni, which were often altered to suit contemporary taste by collectors in the 19th century.
Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence, To 17 May, The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, WC2, Tel.: +(0)7848 2526, www.courtauld.ac.uk
POETRY AND NOODLES
If one may judge by some of the shows of contemporary Tibetan art put on by Rossi & Rossi of Clifford Street over the last few years, then it would be a great pity if it were to be lumped together with Chinese export produce as that market is winnowed by the recession. Where the ‘art’ cynically manufactured in Beijing and Shanghai to appeal to Western ‘collectors’ is often of little merit, Tibetan work produced both internally and in exile seems both honest and intelligent. The dealers have been offering Tibetan and other Himalayan traditional art for over 20 years, and know the field and culture very well indeed. Their view of what continues and grows from those traditions is to be respected, and their approval gives confidence to those of us with less knowledge. This is particularly valuable in cases, such as their current show, where the artist is blending ideas and imagery from East and West. Tenzing Rigdol was born in 1982 in Kathmandu. He studied in the United States, and in 2002 he and his family were granted political asylum there. Thus it is unsurprising that his work should have strong political undertones. What is, perhaps, less expected is that there is also a strong element of humour. The show consisits of 20 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and a video installation. This last, Scripture Noodle, a seven-minute video encapsulates Rigdol’s cultural miscegenation. It is inspired by a Buddhist saying: ‘Don’t be the bowl that carries the soup, be the mouth that gulps it’. He applies it to religion itself, by cutting a Buddhist test into strips, and cooking them in a wok with herbs and vegetables and eating the resultant stir-fry from a polystyrene take-away box. Other pieces mix West and East. A chair painted with Buddhist scriptures has the Magrittesque title This is not a chair; ‘Perhaps it is a chair which one cannot sit on, or maybe someone can sit on it while others cannot, depending on their own mental disposition,’ he says. Elsewhere he paints and draws making macaronic visual and linguistic puns, such as Mic-key, Nya-key and Mickey Mandala, using Mickey Mouse and the Tibetan words for ‘people are happy’, and ‘I am happy’. This artist should make others happy too.
Experiment with Forms, To 27 March, Rossi & Rossi, 16 Clifford Street, W1, Tel.: +(0)7734 6487, www.rossirossi.com
SHORTS
At the Wallace Collection ‘Treasures of the Black Death’, 19 February – 10 May 2009 shows for the first time in London hoards of medieval gold and silver jewellery found at Colmar in the nineteenth century, and at Erfurt in the 1990s. Both were buried at the time of the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century, almost certainly by Jewish families who were expelled or murdered because the Jews were blamed for spreading the plague. Among them are three of the earliest known Jewish wedding rings. More than just a cold display of treasures, this exhibition has a touching, very human dimension. Talks in the exhibition galleries every Thursday and first Saturday of the month at 1pm. An historic event at Dulwich Picture Gallery, to May 10, where four pieces of the Veronese Petrobelli Altarpiece are reunited for the first time since the 1780s. Painted around 1565, it was one of the largest altarpieces produced in Italy during the 16th century. It commanded a family chapel at Lendinara, north-east Italy until 1785 when the church was destroyed. The painting was cut up and ‘sold in quarters, as one does with butcher’s meat’. One piece was bought by Noel Desenfans (a Dulwich Picture Gallery founder) in London in 1795 and the other three known fragments are in the National Galleries of Scotland and Canada and the Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas. The display is also the first exhibition uniquely devoted to Veronese in the United Kingdom. ‘Forced Journeys’ at the Ben Uri, the London Jewish Museum of Art, www.benuri.org.uk , until 19 April, is a collaboration with the Courtauld Institute Research Forum. The exhibition is of work by mainly German and Austrian exiles in Britain between 1933 and 1945.
Letter from New York by Amy Page p. 122-126
TALK OF THE TOWN
Not surprisingly, the New York art world is talking about the decline in prices in a market that only a few months ago seemed to have nowhere to go but up. The downturn is most noticeable in contemporary art, the field that soared the highest. At auction, the catalogues carried pre-sale estimates that were made months before the downturn, so in many cases the biding had little to do with them. The consignors who lowered their reserve price - the price at which a piece could be sold - sometimes did well, if they lowered the price enough. Others did not. The auction houses took a beating, losing many millions of dollars in lots that had guaranteed prices to the consignor, prices that the owner would realize regardless of whether the piece was sold or not. This practice, which we are unlikely to see again for some time, was standard operating procedure for top works of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art. The collapse of investment banks and the sharp layoffs on Wall Street have hit New York very hard. They have been the big buyers in recent years and their absence from the market leaves a large hole. Dealers speak of stasis, how nothing is moving and no one seems interested in buying.. Art fairs suffer as dealers drop out and attendance and sales decline. Over the past few years, one heard complaints that there are too many art fairs. It is safe to say that there will be fewer in 2009 than there were in 2008. Despite the economic gloom and doom, New Yorkers do not seem depressed. What has been keeping people’s spirits up is the election of Barack Obama and a feeling that the new administration will make great changes and that the worldwide perception of America will rise. After eight years of George W. Bush, we have nowhere to go but up.
BEYOND BABYLON
A monumental exhibition on the ancient Near East four thousand years ago is drawing crowds to the Met. The exhibition ranges from Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in the south to Thrace, Anatolia, and the Caucasus in the north and from regions s far west as mainland Greece all the way east to Iran. Its focus is on the art created as a result of a network fo interaction that developed among rulers, diplomats, and merchants in the Near East during the second millennium B.C. The exhibition contains more than 300 objects that came from royal palaces, temples, tombs, and even a shipwreck. . Unfortunately, 55 objects that were to be lent by Syria did not come because of recent United States legislation allowing individuals claiming to be victims of state-operated terrorism to file liens against property belonging to that state while such property—which includes loans to museums—is in the United States. The Syrian objects are, however, included in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.
Even without the Syrian objects, there is plenty to marvel at. Many of the objects are small and exquisite, meant to be worn, carried for trade. Among the many highlights are pieces from the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000-1600 B.C.), including an Old Babylonian Kneeling Worshipper rendered in bronze, gold and silver, and two objects from Byblos, Temple of the Obelisks: a group of standing figures made of copper, alloy and gold, and a gold vulture. Also from this period is a small ivory female figure from Anatolia. Items recovered from a shipwreck found near Uluburun off the southern coast of Turkey is the focus of half of the exhibition. The ship, which sank in the second millennium B.C., is a time capsule of the period. The cargo included hippopotamus ivory canines and incisors, copper and glass ingots, golden jewelry elements and seals from Mesopotamia, Mycenaean Greece and Egypt, including a rare golden scarab of Nefertiti. Among the shipwrecked pieces on view are a gold pendant with a nude female and a falcon pendant, both from the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Turkey.
Beyond Babylon: Art Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C., until 15 March 2009, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York 10028
NORTON SIMON MUSEUM WORKS AT FRICK
An unprecedented collaboration is taking place starting this winter between the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California and The Frick Collection. when they inaugurate an ongoing reciprocal loan arrangement with the Frick presentation of five sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masterpieces, none of which has left its Southern California home in almost three decades. Norton Simon (1907–1993) was a pioneering entrepreneur whose enormous wealth derived from numerous business ventures. Simon’s focus turned to art in the 1950s, and in the same intelligent and strategic manner employed to forge his business empire, he amassed an art collection of great renown. Like Henry Clay Frick, he was a self-made entrepreneur who collected art with a passion. Also like Frick, Simon’s hard-earned fortune enabled him to buy the best works of art available on the market. Simon’s first acquisitions were Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by such recognized masters as Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Cézanne. In the 1960s he began acquiring Old Masters and modern works, choosing to sell many of his acclaimed French Impressionist paintings at the decade’s close; in the 1970s Simon’s appreciation for Indian and Southeast Asian art emerged and was reflected in his burgeoning collection. He was a man of extraordinary taste and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that there is not a bad painting in his collection. Colin B. Bailey, Associate director and Chief Curator of the Frick, says, “It was a great privilege to be able to select five unquestioned masterpieces from the collection of European paintings at the Norton Simon Museum, each one of which ranks among the artist’s finest works in any museum. More by accident than design the artists selected are not represented in the Frick’s permanent collection―yet the level of quality is absolutely consistent with the Frick’s greatest works.” The Frick will reciprocate in the fall of 2010 with a loan of Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville and two related drawings from its collection. The featured paintings are Jacopo Bassano’s (Jacopo da Ponte, 1510–1592) Flight into Egypt, c. 1544–45; Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577–1640) Holy Women at the Sepulchre, c. 1611–14; Guercino’s (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591–1666) Aldrovandi Dog, c. 1625; Francisco de Zurbarán’s (1598–1664) Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, 1633; and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s (1617–1682) Birth of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1660.
Masterpieces of European Painting from the Norton Simon Museum, 10 February -10 May 2009, The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York 10021
BOOKBINDINGS FROM THE MORGAN’S COLLECTION
One of the Morgan’s greatest strengths is its collection of historically and artistically significant bookbinding. Started by Pierpont Morgan, the collection now includes more than 1,0000 volumes, spanning the ages and many regions of the globe. Protecting the Word: Bookbindings of the Morgan presents a selection of outstanding works from the collection. Highlights include a jeweled eighth-century binding used on the famous Lindau Gospels; a magnificent seventh-to-eighth–century Coptic work; and a seventeenth-century English Bible and prayer book in stump-work embroidery. Together, these and approximately 50 additional works in the exhibition, demonstrate the skill and artistry of bookbinding at its finest. The Lindau Gospels, purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1901, was the Morgan's first truly significant acquisition in the field of medieval manuscripts. The value of the manuscript itself, however, is rivaled if not surpassed by its jeweled covers. The lower cover is one of the most important of all medieval bindings. It is one of three contemporary pieces of Carolingian goldsmithing ascribed to the so-called court school of Emperor Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne. The upper cover is dominated by a large gold repoussé figure of Christ crucified within a jeweled cross. Surrounding Christ are ten repoussé figures in lower relief, all in mourning poses. Another work in the show, the Coptic cover of the Gospels, is one of sixty Coptic bindings that Pierpont Morgan purchased in 1911, the year after they were found near the Monastery of St. Michael in Egypt. The Coptic Tracery Binding is regarded as the finest surviving Coptic binding. At its center is a cross surrounded by interlaced designs composed of two intertwined squares within a circle. All of these elements were cut from a single piece of red leather and sewn over gilt parchment. Also on view is a Roger Bartlett mosaic binding (1678). The Restoration, the period following the return of the English monarchy to the throne in 1660, was a grand era of English bookbinding. Perhaps the best documented binder of that age was Roger Bartlett. One of his finest works is this Bible, which is bound in red goatskin with colored leather inlays in black, white, and brown. The exhibition also includes nineteenth- and twentieth-century works as well as contemporary bindings.
Protecting the Word: Bookbindings of the Morgan, until 29 March 2009, The Morgan Museum & Library, 225 Madison Avenue, New York 10016
AMERICAN ARTISTS VIEW ASIA AT THE GUGGENHEIM
The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, is an exhibition that considers the dynamic and complex impact of Asian art, literature, music, and philosophical concepts on American art. The exhibition features some 270 works by more than 100 artists across a broad range of media, including painting, sculpture, video art, installations, works on paper, film, live performance, books and ephemera.
The exhibition was conceived and organized by Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and a leading authority of Asian art. “The Third Mind promises to be revelatory exhibition,” Munroe commented. “Visitors will see 130 years of American creative culture through an entirely new lens and should appreciate the transformative influences of Asian art and ideas on the formal and conceptual achievements of American modern and avant-garde art.” The exhibition title refers to a “cut-ups” work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind Untitled (“Rub Out the World”), ca. 1965, in which unrelated texts are combined and re-arranged to create a new narrative, evocative of the eclectic method by which American artists appropriated from Asia to create new forms, structures and meanings for their own art. The exhibition ventures beyond standard accounts of the history of American modernism in which Asian influence is reduced to stylistic appropriations of Japanese forms among Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and artists involved in the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements. The project’s scope will include the impact of the classical arts of India, China, and Japan, and the systems of Hinduism, Taoism, Tantric Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism. The artists whose works are shown were selected for their demonstrable engagement with Asian art, thought, or forms of spiritual practice. The Third Mind will feature major works from over 110 museums and private collections across Europe, North America, and Japan. Highlights include John La Farge, Peonies Blowing in the Wind (1889, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art); James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (ca. 1872-75, Tate, London); and a complete suite of Mary Cassatt’s drypoint etchings (1890-91, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and other collections); Georgia O’Keeffe, Abstraction, 1917 (Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Peters, Santa Fe, NM); Ezra Pound, Cathay (1913, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations); Jackson Pollock, Seven Red Paintings (circa 1950, private collection, Berlin); Franz Kline, Mahoning (1956, Whitney Museum of American Art ); Bill Viola, Room for St. John of the Cross (1983, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Three site-specific installations are featured in the Guggenheim Museum show. The James Lee Byars’ chamber that once hosted the performance The Death of James Lee Byars (1982-1994), overlaid entirely with sheets of gold leaf, will be constructed in the High Gallery, and a new commission by Ann Hamilton will be unveiled on the Museum’s ramps. In addition, Young and Zazeela’s Dream House will be created in an adjacent Tower gallery.
TWO ASIA WEEK EXHIBITIONS
MD Flacks Inaugurates New York Gallery
A group of sixteen Chinese stools, priced from $15,000 to $350,000, will inaugurate the new gallery that MD Flacks Ltd has opened in New York. The exhibition will offer an overview of the varied types and forms of stools in classical Chinese furniture made in a variety of materials including precious imported wood such as huanghuali and zitan, other wood such as nanmu, oak and boxwood, as well as marble and more humble materials such as bamboo. The stool was the earliest form of furniture to enter Chinese culture. Stools were used by every level of Chinese society and were not solely the seat of the wealthy.
One highlight is a magnificent huanghuali upward folding stool dating from the 16th/early 17th century that is one of the rarest pieces of Chinese furniture in existence. Not only is folding furniture made of such a precious wood very rare, but the design of this stool, with its upward folding, slatted top, in place of a soft woven seat, is particularly unusual with only four other known examples. In addition, this stool has iron mounts and fine silver decoration, which is also rare. Another rare piece from the same period is an imposing corner-leg stool, an early and fascinating example of huanghuali furniture. The design of basic corner-leg form appears to be a precursor of the mature Ming style. The generous proportions and unusual use of straight stretchers, together with the general aging of the timber and patinated surfaces, also indicate an early date. This is the only example of this type that MD Flacks has been able to find.
Chinese Stools, 10-27 March 2009, MD Flacks Ltd, 32 East 57th Street, New York 10022
Rossi & Rossi Show Himalayan Masks
One of the dealers exhibitions participating in New York’s Asia Week is a show of magnificent masks from the Himalayas presented by London dealer Rossi & Rossi. “Facing the Music” comprises thirty 19th and early 20th century masks made from wood or papier maché that were used in Buddhist ritual dances. This collection of masks was formed by a European private collector and the majority comes from Bhutan, the only remaining Buddhist Himalayan kingdom. The masks in the exhibition have been used in Buddhist dances which celebrate the activities of historic people as well as local deities and the gods and goddesses of the Vajrayana pantheon. Vajrayana Buddhism is so called because of the ritual use of the vajra, a ritual tool or spiritual implement symbolizing both the diamond and the thunderbolt. Many of the masks on view have animal faces, including a raven mask that may represent the raven-headed form of Mahakala, one of the principal guardian deities of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon, who has more than 70 different aspects and is characteristically portrayed with a human head and a crow’s beak. Raven masks are worn in Vajrakila dances where the dancer acts as one of the guardians of the four gates to the mandala. Other masks represent the citipati dancers, the lords of the cemetery who assist the god of death Yama, whose grinning skeletons mirthfully remind us of the impermanence of human existence and the importance of accumulating good karma to ensure a favorable rebirth. A wood skeleton mask in the exhibition, although macabre and dark, has a gaily grinning face and sports a simple crown above the empty eye sockets. Similarly mocking are the Atsara, represented by a human mask with a large hooked nose, who tease and provoke the crowd and the deities, bringing life and laughter to the ritual dances. Their ludicrous behavior reminds the faithful of how they should behave and thus reinforces the ideals of Vajrayana Buddhism. A stunning red papier maché Atsara mask in the exhibition has high cheekbones and a shaven head. The masks will be on sale in New York for prices ranging from $15,000 to $40,000. The display of masks will be complemented by a selection of tantric paintings and furniture, as well as Himalayan sculpture and ritual objects dating from the 11th to the 18th centuries.
Facing the Music: Masks from the Himalayas, 7-17 March 2009, Rossi & Rossi at the Neuhoff Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, New York 10022
Top Picks:
Pierre Bonnard: Still Life and the Late Interiors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through 26 April) presents paintings, drawings, and watercolors dating from 1923-1947, most of which were created in Bonnard’s house in Le Cannet, in the south of France, overlooking the Mediterranean. On view are dazzling works of color and light.
Audubon’s Aviary: Something Old, Something Borrowed, but Most Things New at the New York Historical Society (170 Central Park West, 13 February-5 April 2009), presents a selection of watercolors from The Birds of America revolving around various themes. The Society has the largest collection of Auduboniana in the world.
The AIPAD Photography Show New York, presented by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, is the foremost exhibition of fine art photography. More than 75 of the world’s leading photography galleries will present a wide range of high quality work by contemporary, modern and 19th century masters. (The Park Avenue Armory , Park Avenue at 67th Street, 26-29 March).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has expanded and reopened its galleries for Byzantine Art and the Art of Medieval Europe. One highlight is the newly-acquired “Jaharis Byzantine Lectionary,” a liturgical manuscript dating from around 1100, which is shown in an apse-like space.
Those who need an escape from economic woes - which is just about everybody - should hasten to The Morgan Library and Museum, where an exhibition, On the Money, presents 85 cartoons from the New Yorker magazine - all on the theme of money and all from a single-owner collection (23 January-24 May 2009).
November 2008 issue
History of Chairs by Ruud van der Neut p. 26-38
In the distant past furniture designers were anonymous: now they are not only known by name but have acquired the status of ‘artist’. Twentieth-century design classics are increasingly seen at major antique fairs and often sell for their eighteenth-century equivalents. Maarten Baas, Marcel Wanders, Miriam van der Lubbe and Piet Hein Eek are among the leading exponents of cutting-edge furniture design – a world of rapidly changing trends, heavily promoted by lifestyle media, glamorous trade fairs, museums and galleries.
The chair is the only furniture design that conforms to the contour of the human body. The shape possibly originated in Egypt some four thousand years ago and since then basic variations have remained largely unchanged. The earliest chairs had wooden seats, then from about 1600 often had a webbed seat covered with leather. Later carved decoration was added to the arm rests and legs. Chairs of the Baroque period had a shield-shaped back, often with velour or gold leather upholstery affixed to the frame with brass studs. Chairs had straight lines in the early eighteenth century, with slim, curved and splayed legs. French seating like the armchair and chaise-longue was also popular, with the Netherlands producing its own plainer versions, inspired by the decorative style of the English furniture maker Thomas Chippendale.
Gradually, an international interplay of style influences took place, making it harder to tell, for instance, whether an English-looking chair had been made in the Netherlands or vice versa. There were two types of chair: the ‘siège’, ostentatious and placed against the wall of a specific room, and the ‘siège’ courant, used anywhere in the house.
During the Louis XVI period, chair designers were inspired by the symmetry and straight lines of architecture and classical antiquity. These chairs made from strong elm have endured and still conform to today’s standards of comfort. Then came the sober and simpler Empire style of the Napoleonic age: mahogany chairs with ormolu detailing and Antiquity-inspired motifs.
Around 1815, lightweight and elegance were replaced by the Biedermeier style from Germany, reflecting the utilitarianism, good workmanship and comfort required by the new middle classes. Upholstered armchairs appeared in 1850 in which only the feet of the woodwork were visible. Meanwhile there was increasing interest for antique furniture, once the preserve of the rich, and to meet the demand reproduction designs appeared. By the late eighteenth century, however, designers, tired of this copying of earlier styles, began experimenting with new production methods and materials, like the steam bent beechwood chair by Michael Thonet.
The twentieth century appeared to give chair designers carte blanche to use any shape, material or colour. Everything was possible. Tubular steel chairs by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Mark Stam and other designers are now museum icons, as is Gerrit Rietveld’s red and blue chair and those designed by Charles and Ray Eames to mention only a few. More recent chair designers like Pierre Paulin, Philippe Stark and Ron Arad now have their creations made by international manufacturers like Minotti, Cassina and Knoll.
Oudhout’s Old Wood by Annelette Hamming p. 76-81
At first you do not know what you are seeing: a bright red car, a pair of All Stars, a Cola bottle – they are there yet somehow different. Closer inspection shows these photorealist sculptures are made from painted scrap wood. Diederick Kraaijeveld, better known as ‘Oudhout’ (Old Wood), is their maker.
Kraaijeveld knows the provenance – often exotic – of every piece of scrap wood he finds: one from a fishing boat in Turkey, one from a Kenyan beach, another from Ilha da Cardozo, Brazil. Closer to home he salvages wood from skips, demolished buildings and the like. Not for ecological reasons – he is a hoarder and has been since he was a child.
After studying history in Leiden, Kraaijveld (1963) went into journalism, earning a reputation in press and television as an award-winning investigative reporter. In his spare time he would still scavenge, and from what he collected made things – from collages of empty cigarette packs to wooden totems.
In 2005 he made his first Mustang car from reclaimed wood on the family kitchen table. His wife being suitably impressed, he decided to devote more time to this and stopped completely with television work in 2007. And now? ‘My aim is to hang all over the world: from New York to Dubai’, he says.
Oudhout is well on his way. Within a month of giving up his job he had his first show in Carmel, California. He has a New York dealer now: the Americans love his in-your-face art. Last June his portrait of footballer Ruud van Nistelrooy was chosen for Nike’s ‘Art of Football’ at Art Basel. And his work was enthusiastically received at Art London (next year he has a solo show in the capital).
Oudhout’s use of banal objects in his work makes a comparison with Andy Warhol inevitable. Instantly recognisable and without any message, this type of work has a wide appeal. However, while Warhol made icons of Campbell soup cans, Oudhout gives a new twist to British ones like his outsize Heinz baked beans.
To make a sculpture, he first photographs the subject and then divides it into pieces on the floor. Every piece of his assemblage is original coloured salvaged wood from a supply stored in two self-built sheds near his Hilversum studio. Black wood is a difficult to find. For the shiny black Afro of one of his favourite sculptures Black Venus he used timber that had been covered with bitumen and stuck down with tar. When a work is ready this is affixed to an underplate in order for the contours to be sawn out. The edges are then finished with strips of old zinc (from gutters).
The highly respected 17th century art dealer Willem-Jan Hoogsteder, not usually a modern-art fan, was so enthusiastic about Oudhout’s work that he drove with his thirteen-year old son in his Aston Martin to the artist’s studio to have his car immortalised – in scrap wood. The commissioned work now hangs above the bed of proud Hoogsteder Jnr.
Armand Bouten: Art Makes Itself by Susan van den Berg p. 58-63
For the first time a major retrospective of Armand Bouten’s work is being shown at the Groninger Museum. It represents a revival in the fortunes of this idiosyncratic expressionist, who achieved little recognition in his lifetime and who completely went his own way. He found a kindred spirit in his artist wife Hanny Korevaar. They travelled widely, lived in Paris and Brussels, and made work that was often indistinguishable, one from the other. A confusion heightened by the fact that from the early nineteen twenties Bouten no longer dated or titled his work in the belief that art ‘should speak for itself’.
This has made it difficult to arrange his work chronologically, but thanks to painstaking research by art historian and curator Doede Hardeman, the artist’s oeuvre has been reordered and forms the basis for this current show ‘Armand Bouten (1893-1965): Art Makes Itself’.
Born in Venlo, Bouten, the son of a postal worker and midwife, moved to Amsterdam in 1912 and supported himself as a freelance illustrator, before attending the Rijksnormaalschool voor Tekenonderwijs, an art teacher training school, where he met Hanny. Their first exhibition together in 1922 was not well received, one critic claiming that the artists could think only in terms of ‘masks’. This was a reference to the typical stylised expressions Bouten often gave his human faces, like those in his large work Interior, depicting a brother, one of his recurring themes.
After the couple married in 1922, they went first to Italy and then to Eastern Europe. Due to travelling, they now made smaller works and their subject matter changed dramatically with depictions of gypsies, fairs and cafés. A year later they returned to Amsterdam and exhibited jointly at the city’s Heystee Building in 1924. Apart from a group exhibition that same year, Bouten would not exhibit again until 1945.
In the nineteen twenties Bouten reached the pinnacle of his work, inspired by themes from his ebullient social life, which led to a series of powerful paintings of prostitutes. In 1924 the couple moved to Paris, where they made contact with Herwarth Walden, the German modern art dealer. He promised them an exhibition but this, for whatever reason, never materialised
While Bouten and his wife led a somewhat isolated existence, their passion for travel never waned. The pair moved to Brussels in the nineteen thirties, where they remained for the next twenty years before returning to Amsterdam. In this period Bouten made primitive wood sculptors recalling African art, and had a retrospective in 1945 at Galerie Apollo in Brussels – his final exhibition and the last official recognition of his work. The last twenty years of his life were marked by poverty for him and his wife. After Bouten’s death, his wife took care of his estate until she was hospitalised and, through some misunderstanding, her home was emptied by the local council and the contents sold. Thus their work wound up on the art market and through commercial exhibitions appreciation for Bouten’s oeuvre steadily grew.
Vodou collectibles by Chris Reinewald p. 102-106
The voodoo of Hollywood horror films is far removed from vodou, the ancient, indigenous religion of Haiti. Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum is showing spectacular artefacts from Haiti of this folk religion – an intriguing mix of African animism, Catholicism and Freemasonry – from the seminal Lehmann collection of voodoo art.
Whether it be taking Catholic mass in the mornings and practising rituals in the afternoon to keep ancestral spirits happy, the Haitians have a supple and non-dogmatic approach towards their gods. Often richly decorated objects are used to invoke the lwas (their gods and spirits) to influence both good and evil outcomes. Moreover, through the lwas, Bondye, the supreme deity, is reached.
Vodou’s wonderful mix stems from Haiti’s colourful history. Discovered by Columbus in 1492, the island was colonised first by the Spanish and then the French, who bought West African slaves with them. The latter’s descendents drove out Napoleon’s soldiers in 1804 and Haiti became the world’s first black (and Indian) republic.
The Swiss-born Marianne Lehmann has lived on Haiti for half a century and has amassed a huge collection of vodou art. Part of the collection, including ceremonial flags, giant mirrors, complete altars and statues from Bizango secret societies, is now on a world tour and afterwards Lehmann’s objects will be housed in a planned new museum on Haiti.
Vodou is an example of what is known in cultural sociology as a process of creolisation. In vodou folk art this is most evident from vévés, the abstract symbols on ritual flags (originally from Benin and Ghana) and wall paintings. Lwas are also symbolically depicted by vévés, the use of which are derived from 18th century, European Freemasonry.
Figures and symbols of various origin are often used in vodou culture. Lwas are often represented as Catholic saints with whom they can identify like Petrus, St Patrick or St Jacques of Santiago. Oddly enough Jesus is rarely depicted, although the Virgin Mary is. From Africa came Papa Legba, the intermediary between the lwas and humanity and gives (or denies) permission to contact the spirits. Then there is Kalfour, derived from the French carrefour (crossroads), the controller of the evil forces of the spiritual world. And then Bawon Samedi (Baron Saturday), master of the graveyard and guardian of ancestral knowledge. While it would not enter a Christian’s mind to dress up as a saint, Haitians have no problem identifying themselves with their favourite deity, like being Bawon by donning sunglass, a tall hat and sparkly suit.
The exhibition also features decorated bottles and small packets all stuck to each other and intended to bundle and bottle powers for various purposes. There is the congo pakêt that helps if spirits on ‘the other side’ are bothering you. Filled with herbs, leafs and seven handfuls of soil, the packet must remain unrecognisable, so is wrapped in colourful fabric.
The needs of Haitians who live in towns or have emigrated to places like Miami are met by halouba botanicas – special shops selling herbs and ritual, with sometimes a temple at the back.
Letter from Brussels by Peter Wouters p. 52-57
In Brussels the ING Culture Centre’s ‘Oceania. Ritual Signs, Authority Symbols’ is a unique survey of the cultures of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. Conceived as an imagery journey, the exhibition acquaints visitors with the wealth of sculpture, artefacts, weapons and jewellery of Oceania. For centuries artists from the region created ritual objects and authority symbols which gave each of their cultures a specific identity, like Melanesia’s panels and masks commemorating the dead, Polynesia’s refined sculpture and Micronesia’s jewellery.
The first Brussels biennial, which runs until 6 January, features eight exhibitions by experimental art institutes, including Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum, with contributions by sixty international artists. Housed in two deserted buildings along the city’s North-South railway link, these shows, along with the Biennial itself, tie in with Brussels’s growing reputation as a magnet for artists, curators and collectors.
In 2002 the Museum of Photography, Charleroi, acquired the photo archives of Paul De Heug (1896-1958), including those he took of the 1914-1918 war. These, along with grim images taken by anonymous photographers, including soldiers, of the Great War are the theme of the museum’s ‘La Grand Guerre’ exhibition. Den Heug’s images of trenches and soldiers’ daily lives are a far cry from the official propaganda photos of the time.
Over in Antwerp, the Middelheimmuseum’s exhibition ‘Rodin: Balzac, Story of a Masterwork’ offers a unique look into the artist’s work process while making his life-sized sculpture of the French writer. The portrait of Balzac was not well received by the French at the time, but now it is considered a key work in modern sculpture and lauded for its power and technique.
The exhibition ‘Flemish Tapestries’ at St Peter’s Abbey, Ghent, draws together fifteenth and sixteenth-century examples of the genre from Madrid’s Patrimonio Nacional, Spanish cathedrals and leading European museums for the occasion. The style and artistic value of such exquisite tapestries were often determined by their designers – famous painters like Rubens, Jordaens or Raphael. The tapestries, which have a common theme of war running through them, clearly reflect the changes in visual idiom that occurred in the Renaissance, like the use of perspective to create a less two-dimensional image. Highlights of the show are two tapestries from the series ‘The Conquest of Tunis’, designed by Jan Cornelisz.
The city is again having its annual art fair ‘Lineart’ at Flander’s Expo Hall I (from 5-9 December). A newcomer this year is the Nordin gallery, which will be showing work by the Belgian artist Guy Peelaert, internationally famous for his record-sleeve covers for the Stones and David Bowie among others.
Fourteen life-size statues from the world-famous Chinese Terracotta Army are on display at the Minderbroeders Church, Maaseik (Limburg). The Army, one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century, was discovered by a peasant digging a well in 1974. The first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang had the army buried with him on his death to guard his mausoleum. Of the estimated seven-thousand terracotta warriors buried, some one thousand have so far been unearthed.
Letter from Paris by Waldemar Kamer p. 68-75
Picasso is very much in evidence on Paris’s museum agenda this autumn. Three leading museums have devoted exhibitions to the influence of other great artists on Picasso’s work. The largest of these, ‘Picasso and His Masters’ at the Grand Palais, draws together two hundred works by Rembrandt, Poussin, El Greco, Goya, Delacroix and many other painters the artist admired and copied. These hang alongside Picasso’s own versions, enabling you trace how their compositions were at first faithfully rendered, to then be embellished, distorted and sometimes even destroyed.
Between 1950 and 1963 Picasso painted some two-hundred-and-fifty versions of seminal works. Just like Dali and other artists, Picasso fell under the spell of Velasquez’s Las Meninas and painted forty-four versions of this, six of which are juxtaposed alongside two preparatory studies of the original Spanish painting.
Over at the Louvre, Picasso’s variations on Women of Algiers in Their Apartment hang in the same room where works by Delacroix, the artist who made the original painting, are displayed. Of the three largest series of variations, Picasso probably had the greatest affinity with Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. He made some twenty-six variations of this, fourteen of which are now on view at Musée d’Orsay, including one where he takes Manet’s place in the group depiction.
The Pomidou Centre is marking the centenary of Futurism – and its later offshoot Cubo-Futurism – with an exhibition about the Futurists in Paris. The first exhibition of this Italian movement, held in 1912, has been specially recreated with the original paintings by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Sverini on show.
Seventy paintings from the Berardo Collection are on view at the Musée du Luxembourg. On loan from the best collection of modern art in Portugal, which was sold to the state last year by former owner José Berardo, they include works by Mondrian, Dali, Andy Warhol and Frank Stella.
Meanwhile the Pinacothèque gallery, on Place de Madeleine, is hosting two major shows: seventy paintings by George Rouault (1871-1958) and works by Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), inspired by rituals of the American Indians. More twentieth century art at the Musée d’Art Moderne, owner of one of the largest paintings in modern times – the epic mural Raoul Dufy made for the pavilion of electricity at the 1937 World Trade Fair. Based around this, the museum has a Dufy retrospective. The artist began his career as a Fauvist, influenced by Matisse, but later turned to his more recognisable joie de vivre style of painting. He was also a textile designer and worked for fashion designer Paul Poiret and Bianchini-Férier, a world-famous silk manufacturer.
Paris is also hosting its biennial ‘photo month’, which after twenty-eight years lasts much longer than its allotted time span. This year European photography is the broad theme, with over a hundred exhibitions to see, one of the highlight of which is a retrospective of American photographer Lee Miller’s work, former model, war photographer and muse of Man Ray, at the Jeu de Paume (until 4 January).
September 2008 issue
Paul Citroen: Portrait of a modernist by Ruud van der Neut p. 68-75
Artist, teacher, essayist, collector and art dealer – Paul Citroen (1896-1983) was all of these but is best known as a portraitist. He made some 7,000 portraits and Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle is showing 250 of his paintings, photographs and drawings. Having first had works on loan from Citroen in 1973, thanks to the mediation of his personal friend A.A.C. Maaskant, the museum eventually acquired ownership of the artist’s entire collection and personal archive in 1995.
Citroen was born in Berlin, the son of a Dutch fur dealer. By the age of 14 he already knew he wanted to be an artist and trained at a private academy. From painter Max Liebermann he learned how to sketch quickly, without taking his pencil off the paper until the drawing was done. Via fellow student, Georg Muche, he came into contact with experimental artists, and through Berlin’s Galerie Der Sturm with leading artists and avant-garde movements of the day. This exposure, coupled with a period of practical training at the Bauhaus, formed the basis for his first foray into buying paintings, with his father’s financial support. In 1920 he began dispatching some of these paintings to an Haarlem art dealer to sell, some of which are now top works of international museums like the MoMa in New York. During the making of this current exhibition, the museum came across personal papers showing Citroen’s keen sense of what was happening in the arts, although he was not a driven practising artist himself. As a painter he is impossible to pigeonhole, having worked in all kinds of styles – he was a pioneer of the photomontage, for instance. Citroen settled permanently in the Netherlands in 1928 and married Lien Bendien a year later. Given a camera by his in-laws, he became an enthusiastic photographer, exhibiting and publishing his portraits – the museum holds some of the original prints. In his painted portraits he was inspired by New Objectivity, the thirties realist movement. In 1933, along with artist Charles Roelofz, he founded the Bauhaus-inspired New Art School and in 1935 began teaching at the Academy in The Hague. The post-war years were difficult for Citroen however. Unable to find buyers for his work, he was forced to sell major works from his collection, most of which wound up in America. The tide eventually turned: Citroen was asked to design sets for the Netherlands Opera, received portrait commissions and began buying art again, mainly by Dutch artists, including Appel and Jan Cremer. Citroen excelled at portraiture and over the years painted thousands of portraits of people in the arts. In 1961 he made a series of lifesize paintings of fellow artists and friends, including Ondine Buytendorp, a student at the Hague Academy. She regularly posed for him and recalls him having a weakness for female beauty, as his inscriptions on his earlier portraits of women also testify. In the latter period of his life he gave many interviews, once stating ‘it was better to even make bad paintings than to have to write about them’.
Chinese parade by Adrie van Griensven p. 46-49
The immense changes in China are reflected in its fascinating and diverse contemporary art, for which there is an unprecedented interest, also in the Netherlands.
Art dealer Mark Peet Visser has new premises in Den Bos and is bringing upcoming, original Chinese talent. China’s new prosperity has created positive and negative effects, which is often commented on in its artists’ works, which also combine both East and West artistic traditions. In 2007 Visser successfully showed paintings by Ji Xiaofeng of young vacant-looking women preening themselves. Among the current work on show are Zhang Jianjun’s ‘fatties’, obese people seemingly only interested in consumption. In China itself, where hundreds of art museums are being built and the West’s leading galleries have opened shop, the Nineties generation of Chinese artists, having conquered the West, are now taking their own country by storm. In May Mask Series No. 6 by Zeng Fanzhi sold for 9.7 million dollars at Christie’s, Hong Kong. One of the few who saw China’s artistic potential twenty years ago was Uli Sigg, the Swiss ambassador to Beijing. He began buying Chinese art directly from artists in the late eighties ( galleries did not then exist) and has amassed 1,200 work. He is currently negotiating with the Chinese government to house his collection in a museum in Shenzen. Dutchman Hans van Dijk, artist and gallery owner in Beijing, was also one of the first to see what was happening in China. Beijing, once a centre of heroic socialist art had become a hotbed of a new personal realism. He was responsible for making the ‘China Avant-Garde’ show happen at the Rotterdam Kunsthal in 1993. There, Rob Malasch, who runs the Serieuze Zaken gallery, struck by Fang Lijun’s paintings, travelled to his village outside Beijing and returned with Lijun’s and other artists’ canvases, which he exhibited in 1995. In 1998 he and another early representative of Chinese contemporary art, Martijn Kielstra (Canvas International Art) showed works by a young generation of Chinese painters at the KunstRAI art fair.
Another Dutchman Fu Ruide, also fell under the spell of Lijun’s art, who meanwhile had exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum. This was to be the beginning of his modern Chinese art collection comprising ten artists, also including Yue Minjun, Yang Shaobin and Zhao Nengzhi. Fu Ruide says he can sense the loneliness most of this new generation of artists feel, as he felt the same in his youth. His collection is currently travelling in Europe, reaching America and the Netherlands in 2010.
The now astronomical prices for Chinese art has lead to coldblooded trading and speculation. One example is the Sinopia East Asia Fine Arts fund, launched by Jeanette ten Kate, in which participants invest a minimum of 50,000 euros and hope to at least double their money. Last year Sinopia sold two Feng Zheng Jie paintings for more than five times the original price. The artist, now world-famous, is also represented in the Netherlands by the Willem Kerseboom Gallery, which also deals in new Chinese art.
German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich in Rügen by Chris Reinewald p. 34-40
On the island of Rügen in northern Germany, the 19th century painter Caspar David Friedrich discovered how human mood appears to be reflected in nature. This Autumn (until 18 January 2009), Amsterdam’s Hermitage Museum is showing all the works of this romantic painter from the collection in St Petersburg, along with those by kindred contemporaries. Typical of Friedrich’s work is that his figures, often exaggerated in size, stand with their backs to the viewer. Was this because he was poor at human anatomy? Fascinating, however, is that you look over their shoulder with them into infinity, be automatically drawn into the scene.
Was it the technical ineptitude, straightforward symbolism or kitschy religion which led for a long time to Friedrich (1774-1840) being only appreciated in Germany, while being a postscript in art history elsewhere? Unlike Turner, Géricault or Delacroix, Friedrich’s romanticism never leaps off the page. Even his most abstract composition the Sea of Ice (1823) is properly painted when a few expressionist strokes would not have gone amiss. But the artist trained at the Academy in Copenhagen, where Dutch landscape art of the Golden Age was highly regarded. Friedrich’s best known painting Chalk Cliffs at Rügen (1818) depicts the artist and his new wife Caroline standing either side of a man kneeling – picking flowers perhaps? – on the edge of a gaping abyss. The French Surrealists were later to recognise a kindred spirit in Friedrich and saw this particular painting as an example of a Romantic Fear of Death. Notwithstanding, Friedrich usually places his figures higher than nature’s sheer force, so that they appear in control rather than overwhelmed by it. Another recurring element comprises two people standing on a hill together contemplating the moon or setting sun, the light of which reflecting their mood. While many artists chose to travel to exotic locations to widen their horizons, Friedrich was inspired closer to home. Born in Greifswald, then in Swedish Pomerania, the son of a candle and soap maker, Friedrich made three trips to Rügen in the Baltic Sea. The sketches he made, including those of the island’s inhospitable coastline and chalk cliffs, inspired his landscape paintings with figures.
Many of Greifswald’s locations which Friedrich captured remain to this day. Outside the town, a road named after the painter dissects a largely unchanged landscape of lush green meadows with Greifswald’s silhouetted spires as backdrop. In the nearby fishing village of Wieck is still the ruined abbey of Eldena, which represented mortality to the artist, one of his recurring themes. He, himself, was the quintessential Wanderer of German lieders and poems, with his woolly hat and water bottle around his neck for diluting his ink so that he could work outdoors. His early life was marred by tragedy, including the death of his mother and two sisters. When he was eleven he also fell through the ice and his younger brother died trying to rescue him. He eventually settled in Dresden but nevertheless yearned for his native soil.
Letter from Brussels by Peter Wouters p. 50-55
As a concluding exhibition to Belgium celebrating the 50th anniversary of Expo ’58 (Brussels World’s Fair), the Archives of the City of Brussels are showcasing all aspects of life in the nineteen fifties this autumn. Using a wealth of archive material, the exhibition ‘Within the Intimacy of 58’ illustrates the daily lives of Brussels’ inhabitants on the eve of urban expansion and the advent of television. Furniture and household goods of the time are also on display. As part of the Korean Festival, the city’s BOZAR (Centre for Fine Arts) is showing top Buddhist art works, many from Seoul’s National Museum. Alongside this historic exhibition is an installation by the 1960s Fluxus artist Nam June Paik, known for pre-empting video art, as well as one by Kimsooja, an emerging talent on Korea’s current art scene. Just outside Brussels is Gaasbeek Castle, which along with its usual attractions is now organising exhibitions. The current one ‘Marchioness Looking for Art’ ( a reference to the castle’s previous feisty, art-collecting owner Marie Peyrat, who bequeathed the building to the Flemish community) reveals the eclectic approach and subjective vision of both established artists and young emerging talent like Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin, Wangu Wang Du and Anouk de Clercq. One of the last major exhibitions at Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts before it closes for remodelling is “Heads on Shoulders: Portrait Busts in the Low Countries 1600-1800”. This is the first overview of monumental Baroque sculpture – the makers of which were renowned throughout Europe – since the Year of Rubens (1977). Their undisputed master was Artus I Quellinus, responsible for the famed sculptural decoration of Amsterdam’s town hall. Equally important was Franḉois Duquesnoy, known for his Manneken Pis statue, who worked in Italy, and whose success was second only to Bernini’s. Also in Antwerp, the Sterckshof Silver Museum is presenting the first overview of modern Belgian silver from 1950-1970. Civic and ecclesiastical silver can be admired along with jewellery and objects produced by prominent firms like Delheid, Wiskemann and Wolfers as well as by architects and designers. The top item in the selection of fifties silver is a centrepiece especially commissioned for the table of honour at Expo ’58. The current exhibition at the small but beautiful Félicien Ropsmuseum, Namen is devoted to all aspects of trees. Arranged into three themes, the exhibition looks at the tree as religious, symbol, as metaphor for the human condition and the link between trees and women. Linking up with this, Namen’s Maison de la Culture is showing artists who explore the symbolism of the tree in their work like Charley Case and Rodney Graham. Grand-Hornu (at Hornu) is presenting two daring installations especially designed for the Cartier Foundation in Paris plus silversmithy and household objects, all by the Italian Andrea Branzi, leading architect and designer. His innovative ideas have influenced Italian design since the late sixties, while his radical architectural theories inspired an entire generation of architects, including Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind.
Letter from Paris by Waldemar Kamer p. 62-67
This autumn sees a retrospective at the Grand Palais of work by Emil Nolde (1867-1956), who like other German Expressionists remains largely unknown in France. Born Emil Hansen in the village of Nolde (from which he later took his surname), he was originally a furniture maker’s apprentice before turning to painting. Having married a Danish actress, he moved to Denmark, becoming a member of Germany’s avant-garde groups, like the ‘Neue Sezession’ in Berlin. Recognition came late at the age of 50, when he returned from a trip to New Guinea with a series of colourful paintings. The exhibition includes watercolours he painted secretly, after the Nazi’s declared him a ‘degenerate’ and his best known and controversial work, the triptych The Life of Christ (1911). Also in the same venue is the ‘Biennale des Antiquaires’ (11-21 September), with a breathtaking array of antiques mainly from the 17th to 19th century period, two thirds of which are French. Then there is FIAC, the modern and contemporary art fair (23-26 October). More international than the Biennale, since the late 1990s the Fair has fanned out from the Grand Palais across town with, this year, 75 stands in tents at the Louvre’s Cour Carré and 20 installations at the Tuileries. More cutting edge perhaps, are the small alternative fairs to FIAC: ‘Show-Off’, which aims to bring work only a few months old, and ‘Slick’ housed in the basement of a building on rue d’Aubervilliers. Over at Musée d’Orsay, newly appointed director Guy Cogeval begins his tenure with an exhibition of pastels from the museum collection. Big names like Manet and Degas each have their own rooms in the exhibition, while five spaces are devoted to Symbolists who had an affinity with the medium. The retrospective of one of France’s leading sculptors, César (1921-1998) at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art is curated by the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel. The show features the artist’s well-known compressions (crushed items), human imprints (like his thumb on a woman’s breast) and expansions made from liquid polyurethane – the latter pieces fitting in well with the venue’s fluid architecture. In the garden are three huge piles of crushed newspaper, each four metres high and seven metres long. César had 720 tons of newsprint originating from a waste depot in Basel compressed and deposited the resulting three piles in front of the city’s Art Fair building as a ‘statement’ in 1996. At the Musée d’artet d’histoire du Judaïsme the intriguing exhibition ‘Looking for Owners’ comprises 53 top paintings by masters like Velasquez, Ingres, Manet and Monet, which were among the 60,000 art works returned to France by Germany after the war, but which still remain unclaimed. They form part of a core group of 2,000 top works which were in the temporary custody of French museums who, according to a 1997 study, did little to trace their owners. The resulting outcry, including an article in Tableau on the subject, led to a further 71 paintings being reunited with their original owners’ heirs.
Letter from London by Huon Mallalieu p. 76-80
It may not yet be true, but ever more insistently the whisper around the art market is that the contemporary boom has almost run its course. Certainly a re-evaluation is long overdue. In the nature of things, what is contemporary to one decade is old hat to the next, and generation after artistic generation have been lionised and then seen their initial price levels collapse. Eventually the best among them are rediscovered, reappraised and take their places in the continuum of art. The boom now ending – if it is - is different only in the frenetic levels it has reached, and the dubious premise behind much of it, that what is essentially manufactured ‘product’ should be treated as if it were individually created art. This attracted the sort of ‘collector’ who wanted his walls to wear images that were instantly recognisable as being very, very, expensive, and Warhol multiples and the like were perfect. However, many people who enter the market because being seen as a ‘player’ – please excuse the cliché - confers status, become genuinely interested and mature into proper collectors. Roman Abramovich’s recent acquisition of important works by Bacon and Freud, is an excellent indication of deepening taste, and although some commentators have suggested that his wife wishes to open a gallery in Moscow, that does not quite convince. It is worth looking back a little. Remarkably few of the artists who were the stars of important contemporary auctions in the 1960s and ’70s have featured in more than subsidiary sessions in recent years, but the process works on, and now a number of them are being taken seriously once more. Now the stars of the stars of later decades must go through a similar purgation. Just as in the 1970s we are experiencing a time of great financial uncertainty, and this, according to traditional wisdom, can only be good for the market in older art. In such periods people seek berths for their money where it will hold its value and may well show a decent profit later. Thus any contemporary collapse will be offset elsewhere, and the only sufferers will be people who gambled that prices would always continue to go up, and are left with unsaleable second rank pieces. This will particularly affect areas such as Chinese contemporary, where ‘tulip mania’ has been most evident. Salerooms will abandon them and offer whatever actually sells, and contemporary dealers will seek out an up-coming artistic generation to replace previous sensations. On the whole such periodic reassessments are healthy and necessary.
The National Gallery trumpets its major autumn show as ‘a landmark exhibition’ which will explore the dramatic rise in portraiture during the Renaissance. As is the academic fashion, the ‘Renaissance’ is not confined to 14th and 15th century Italy, but embraces Northern and other Southern European artists and schools as well. In some academic circles this revisionism is being taken so far that the very concept of a Renaissance is being stretched to meaninglessness. However, here we are promised exceptional depth too, with over 70 paintings, by some of the greatest masters,including Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Van Eyck, Holbein, Dürer, Lotto, Pontormo and Bellini. Furthermore, proper attention will be paid to portraits in non-painted forms, such as medals. It is extraordinary how little they have been prized by art historians in the past, even when from the hand of a Dürer. There will also be drawings and important sculptures. Through the portraits the exhibition, which is organised in partnership with the Prado, hopes to touch upon almost all aspects of life from birth, through courtship, friendship, politics and old age to death. Shakespeare, that Renaissance man, should be quoted as its motto. It also intends to shed new light on several levels of society, and to engage with ‘fundamental issues of likeness, memory and identity’.
The Imperial War Museum is obviously the place to go if you wish for tanks, howitzers, scud missiles and mock-ups of the trenches of the Western Front and the London Blitz. It also houses one of the most important collections of 20th century British art. Until quite recently this was generally overlooked even by specialists, since comparatively little was on view,and it was not always easy to visit the stacks. However, there have been a number of good exhibitions over the last few years, and now there has been a major re-hang, presented as ‘Breakthrough’.The basis and core of the museum collection is the work resulting from the Official Artists’ Scheme in both World Wars. This was the brainchild of the novelist John Buchan and was instituted by the Ministry of Information in 1916, both as comparatively civilised propaganda and to form a record. It was relaunched in 1939, and covered the Home Front as well as the various campaigns, and Official Artists have been appointed to record a number of recent conflicts including the Falklands, Kosovo and the Gulf Wars. Some very remarkable art has resulted. Among the items on display will be work by officially commissioned artists such as Paul Nash, CRW Nevinson, John Piper and Eric Ravilious, as well as some recently acquired paintings by William Scott and Robert Colquhoun. The exhibition will also showcase some contemporary pieces from the collection, including Two Blue Car Doors by Bill Woodrow and Theatre, an installation by Graham Fagen which resulted from his 1999 Artistic Records Committee commission in Kosovo. At the same time to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of the MV Empire Windrush in Britain in 1948, a special show ‘From War to Windrush’ tells the personal stories of the involvement of Black men and women from the West Indies and Britain in the First and Second World Wars.
Saint-Paul-de-Vence is one of the joys of the South of France, and one of its own greatest pleasures is the Fondation Maeght, established by the great post-war Parisian dealer Aimé Maeght and his wife Marguerite. They opened the gallery in 1945, immediately after the Liberation of Paris, with a show of Matisse drawings, and two years later they hosted the Surréalisme show organised by Breton and Duchamp. Among the great names they fostered thereafter were Miró, Calder, Giacometti and Braque. In 1964 their Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation was opened in Saint-Paul by the then Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, in a building by the Catalan architect Lluis Sert, designed with the sole intention of presenting modern and contemporary art in all its forms. This show in the Royal Acadmey of Arts, sponsored by BNP Paribas, has been selected from works held by the Fondation, and concentrates on the artists who were most closely linked to the gallery and the family. Thus it opens with Matisse and Bonnard, including the former’s portrait of Marguerite and the latter’s sketches of the Maeght children. Miró and Calder share a gallery, with mobiles, stabiles, pictures and ceramics, and another gallery is given over to Giacometti and Braque. Giacometti’s sculptures range from the Surrealist Spoon Woman of 1926 to Standing Woman and Walking Man, works made in 1960. Around them are some of Braque’s moving late paintings. The final room would be close to Maeght’s heart. He was a trained lithographer and encouraged his artists not only to make prints, but also to collaborate with poets in artists’ books.
After visits to her palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, and the Royal Museums of Belgium in Brussels, 51 of the Queen’s Flemish masterpieces come home to Buckingham Palace. This is the first time that the paintings, from the 15th to the 17th centuries, have been exhibited together, and they make a spectacular show. The sequence in fact begins not with Brueghel, but earlier with van der Weyden and Memling in the Burgundian period, when Christendom was still intact. It then passes on through the Reformation to the years of Spanish rule, especially under the Archdukes, Albert and Isabella, when Rubens and van Dyck were international figures. In the mid 16th century Flemish artists were considered to be the greatest landscape painters, but this show is also rich in remarkable portraits, including the famous 1517 image of the humanist Erasmus by Quiten Massys. Less well-known, but powerful indeed, is the illusionistic panel of a boy at a window, painted by an unidentified hand in the 1550s. Then there are the story-tellings of the Bruegels, Vredeman de Vries and Teniers, in which biblical stories and popular proverbs are re-enacted in Flemish villages.
More war, this time in three linked photographic exhibitions at the Barbican. Robert Capa (1913 – 1954) is one of the leading photographers of the twentieth century. His most striking images of the Spanish Civil War; the Sino-Japanese conflict; and World War II all appeared in the pages of the leading picture magazines of the day. Re-examining Capa’s innovations as a photojournalist in the 1930s and 1940s, the exhibition brings together rarely seen photographs and newly discovered documents that illuminate six of his most important war stories. The exhibition ‘This Is War! Robert Capa at Work’ will also be the first opportunity in the UK for the public to view a few selected works from the recently discovered ‘Mexican Suitcase’ – which contained thousands of Capa’s negatives from the Spanish Civil War and was inevitably hailed in the press as the ‘Holy Grail of Photography’. Gerda Taro (1910 – 1937) is a pioneering photojournalist who spent her brief but dramatic career photographing on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. This is the first major exhibition of her work to be held in the UK. Working collaboratively with her lover Capa, this talented German Jewish photographer was one of the first women to photograph war. She died in action at the age of 27. The exhibition includes over 80 photographs drawn form the International Center of Photography’s collection in New York, as well as examples of the many European and American magazines and books that reproduced Taro’s dynamic and impassioned war coverage. ‘On the Subject of War’, presents four contemporary artistic responses to current events in Iraq and Afghanistan: Omer Fast’s The Casting, Geert van Kesteren’s Baghad Calling, Paul Chan’s Tin Drum Trilogy, and An-My Lê’s 29 Palms and Events Ashore series. Each artist, in very different ways, explores how photography articulates the experience of conflict, whether the subjects of that experience are victims, combatants, perpetrators or observers.
Asian Art in London, now in its 11th year, is the largest Asian art event in the world. Unlike the spring week of fairs and dealers’ shows in New York, it has a central organisation, which publishes a handy guide to all the shows, sales and ancillary events (www.asianartinlondon.com). This year it runs from October 30 to November 8, and the gala party, normally a spectacular event, is at the Victoria & Albert Museum on November 4, with private tours of the Chinese galleries. There is also a symposium on Buddhist art on November 8, held in association with Asia House with experts from major museums. A series of specialist tours of the shows is also being launched. Museums, auctions houses, institutes in London and beyond, not to mention embassies, are all involved nowadays, but still the core and the real point is provided by the selling shows in the dealers’ galleries – it was after all a group of like-minded dealers that founded the event. The majority are clustered around Bond Street, St. James’s and Kensington Church Street – in each of which there will be an open evening, but there are also outlying participants in areas such as Islington, Marylebone and Swiss Cottage. Not surprisingly, dealers in Chinese ceramics and works of art predominate, but Japanese specialists run them close, and there are significant numbers of Islamic and Middle Eastern, Indian, Himalayan and South East Asian and Korean dealers among nearly 50 to visit.
A major loan exhibition of early works by Lucian Freud (born 1922), one of the leading figures in 20th century art, is not only of great interest in itself, but also important because in many instances, where the loans are from private collections, they will not have been seen in public since first exhibited or sold. With the support of the artist, the exhibition will be curated by the artist’s assistant and model for the past fifteen years, the painter David Dawson, and Catherine Lampert, who most recently selected the Freud retrospective which opened in Dublin in June 2007. This will be the first exhibition devoted entirely to the artist’s early work since 1997 with all works on loan from private or public collections, including oil portraits such as Woman with Tulip (1945), Girl in a Blanket (1953), A Woman Painter (1954) and the self portrait Man at Night (1947) and still lifes Scotch Thistle (1944), Dead Heron (1945), and Still Life with Aloe (1949). The aim of the exhibition will be to follow the evolution of Freud’s vision in the early years from the period of, in the artist’s words, “maximum observation”, when he proceeded solely “by staring at my subject matter and examining it closely”, to the period from 1954 when he deliberately wanted to “free himself from this way of working”. The selection will focus on comparisons between certain works, both stylistically and through subject matter.
Letter from New York by Amy Page p. 94-98
For art lovers, the first sign of autumn in New York is not the turning of the leaves or the sight of children carrying schoolbags, but the re-emergence of art and antiques fairs, a certain signal that the summer is really over and that the art world is back in business. The cycle of major fairs held in the city throughout the year begins two major shows occurring in October, both produced by Anna and Brian Haughton of London. The first, The International Art + Design Fair (3-8 October) is something of a new-comer, having been established only in 1999 while the second, The International Art & Antique Dealers Show—now celebrating its 20th year-- has become a New York institution. The Art + Design fair has morphed from its inception from being the International Twentieth-Century Arts Fair, showing modern and contemporary art and design, to a much more inclusive show of the work of 20th and 21st artists who practice every medium. The fair brings together international specialists showing 20th century and contemporary furniture, sculpture, jewelry, photography, painting, carpets and textiles, ceramics, glass, Far Eastern art and objects and other areas of design made from 1900-2008. The International Show is one of the most prestigious fairs in the United States. A showcase for dealers from Europe and the United States, the show was the first art fair in the United States to introduce vetting . The fair has many glamorous and showy pieces, brought by a variety of world-class art dealers who specialize a variety of fields. The works on view have an equally diverse price range, with pieces priced from a few hundred dollars rising into the millions. It was at this fair a decade ago that an Old master painting by Bernardo Bellotto sold for $14 million, then a record price paid for a work of art at an art fair. By the end May, when the art fair season ends in the United States and the art world’s focus shift to Europe, many New Yorkers think that the end has not come a moment too soon. Week-ends will now be spent in the country or at the beach, rather than trawling through the Park Avenue Armory. But by the time October comes around again, we are more than willing to start the cycle once again.
The Frick has three paintings by Vermeer—“Officer and Laughing Girl,” “Mistress and Maid,” and “Girl Interrupted at Her Music”--that are among the most beloved works in its collection. Purchased by Henry Clay Frick before his death in 1919, these works have hung in the Fifth Avenue mansion ever since. Now, for the first time in close to ten years, visitors have the opportunity to examine the paintings together on one wall. Their presentation is accompanied by a panel that traces Frick’s interest in Vermeer and places him in context with other early American collectors of the artist’s work. “We are delighted to place special focus on the institution’s works by Vermeer and enlighten visitors on the taste for this artist in America,” says Colin Bailey, Associate Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick. “Frick could claim responsibility for bringing to America its fourth authentic Vermeer, and his interest in the artist ultimately resulted in the acquisition of three fine canvases, a remarkable number with regard to his total accepted production of fewer than forty paintings.” American got its first Vermeer in 1887, when the New York financier Henry Marquand bought “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher,” formerly in a private collection in Ireland for $800. He gave the painting to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1889, the year he became that institutions second president. The picture is generally considered to be the best of the five Vemeers in the Metropolitan’s collection. Another Vermeer, “The Concert<” came to America a few years later in 1892, after Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston bought it for 29,000 francs (about $5,800) at a sale in Paris. (This painting was stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990.) A third Vermeer, “Woman with a Lute” was bought to America shortly before the end of the 19th century by the New York financier Collis Huntington, who later told The New York Times that he had known “nothing” about the artist when he was offered it, but simply “took a fancy” to it, buying it for a mere 2,000 francs (about $4,000). Henry Clay Frick bought his first Vermeer, “Girl Interrupted at Her Music,” in the summer of 1901, He paid $26,000 for it, which was a high price compared to what his cotemporaries had spent for their Vermeers. Over the next decade prices boomed for works by the artist. Frick bought his second Vermeer, “Officer and Laughing Girl” in 1911 for around $225,000, a record price for a Vermeer. The third, “Mistress and Maid” was acquired in 1914—the year of Frick’s death--for more than $290,000.
The first retrospective of the works of 20th-century Italian artist Giorgio Morandi is at the Met this fall. Known primarily for his still lifes, Morandi also occasionally painted landscapes and portraits, nearly all of which are included in this exhibition of some 110 works that span the artist’s career. Many of the works on view come from private Italian collections. Morandi’s style was developed by the early 1920s, when he began to focus on subtle gradations of color and tone among a small group of objects that he arranged and re-arranged in compositions that vary only slightly from one to the next. Through his signature repetition of a small number of simple motifs and economy of color, Morandi is said to have been a forerunner of Minimalism. Organized thematically as well as chronologically, the exhibition includes some of Morandi’s earliest pictorial experiments, his metaphysical paintings of the post-World War I years, the classical still lifes and landscapes that he produced as a mature artist, and the nearly monochromatic, dissolved images of his last years. Among the highlights is a still life from 1942 that appears to show only the bottom half of a group of objects. When the art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti complained that the upper half of Morandi’s original work was weak, the artist cut away the top, framed the lower half, and gave it as a gift to Ragghianti. After leaving the Met, the exhibition will be shown at MAMbo—Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna—the co-organizer of the exhibition.
A mid-career survey of photographer Catherine Opie is opening this month at the Guggenheim Museum. Born in 1961, Opie came to prominence in the early 1990s with a complex body of work in such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography. She documents images that characterize America. Her “Portraits” series (1993-97) celebrated the gay community in San Francisco and Los Angeles, including practitioners of drag, transgender people and performance artists. Her photographs portray figures who confront the viewer with intense gazes, set against brilliant backgrounds. At the same time, Opie began to photograph urban landscapes throughout Los Angeles. Her first city series, “Freeways” (1994-95), shows the city’s highways devoid of human presence. They are nearly abstract and printed on an intimate scale. The “Houses” series (1995) continued Opie’s urban exploration through views of Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions that, like the “Freeways,” seem to be lacking human presence. Opie’s interest in portraiture and domestic architecture continued to develop and began to merge in her series “Domestic” (1995-98), produced during a three-month trip across the country. These large-scale color photographs document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities, in settings varying from city apartments to country houses/ ore recently, Opie has turned to her own domestic life in the series “In and Around Home (2004-05), in which she photographs her own family and friends in her Los Angeles neighborhood.
Seven major paintings from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s famous Berlin Street Scenes of 1913-15 are being brought together in an exhibition at The Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA). Paintings from this series are considered the high point of Kirchner’s career and a milestone in German Expressionist art. Painted on the eve of World War I—just a few years after the Kirchner moved from Dresden to Berlin-- he uses the unusual motif of the prostitute and acidic color, jagged strokes and angular forms to captures the highly-charged, glamorous, and decadent atmosphere of his newly-adopted city. This is the first time that the paintings have ever been shown together. To put these paintings in context, MoMA is showing them together with contrasting examples of his works on paper exploring the same theme. On view are other city views and female nudes and cabaret dancers. Included are sketchbook studies, larger scale works in pen and ink, pastel and charcoal, as well as etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs. The exhibition is curated by Deborah Wye, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated books at MoMA. She says of the exhibition, “Through a range of effects, these paintings present a complex view of the modern city. Created in a period of rapid change and development, they mark a distinct time not only in Kirchner’s life, but also in the history of Berlin and in Germany as a whole.” The exhibition includes “Berlin Street Scene,” 1913, depicting two streetwalkers about to be approached by two men who are viewed from behind. The painting was restituted to the heirs of the original owners and sold at Christie’s in November, 2006, to the Neue Galerie for $38 million, an auction record price for a work by Kirchner.
An exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum showcases Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw’s collection of nineteenth-century watercolor drawings, a gift to the Cooper-Hewitt that meticulously detail the era’s interior furnishings and document the social, cultural, and aesthetic development of European domestic life. The collection includes 71 examples of English, German, Russian, French, Italian, and Austrian domestic spaces. Selected objects from the Museum’s permanent collection will complement the drawings. “House Proud” explores the concept of the house and its interior spaces as a source of pride, convenience, and personal status, which originated in the 19th century as a result of the rising bourgeoisie, the development of a consumer economy, the industrial revolution, and the emergence of the woman as guardian of the house. With the glorification of the home came the commissioning of watercolors to document newly-constructed or renovated interiors developed among European royalty, nobility, and the upper-middle class. These drawings—executed by both amateur and professional artists—were collected in albums as heirlooms, presented as gifts, or displayed in drawing rooms. Among the artists whose works are represented are James Roberts )”The Queen’s Sitting Room at Buckingham Palace”; Eduard Gaertner )”The Chinese Room in the Royal Palace, Berlin”); Franz Xaver Nachtman (“The Dressing Room of King Ludwig I at the Munich Residenz”); and Rudolph von Alt (“The Japanese Salon, Villa Hűgel, Heitzing, Vienna”).. The Thaw collection spans the entire 19th century and includes examples of English, German, Russian, French, Italian and Austrian domestic spaces. The watercolors are “the most important gift to the museum’s Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design Department in 30 years and will provide an invaluable reference for all of the museums collecting departments,” said Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt. “The drawings will allow a fuller reading of the 19th-century objects in the museum’s collection, heighten interdepartmental connections and inform and stimulate new acquisitions across the museums.
Summer 2008 issue
Black is beautiful p. 30-33
This summer Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk is drawing attention to the depiction of black people in Dutch art. The exhibition ‘Black is Beautiful’(26 July to 26 October) – the title borrowed from the emancipatory slogan of African Americans in the nineteen sixties – includes paintings, drawings and manuscripts from domestic and foreign collections, with works ranging from Reubens to Marlene Dumas. After visiting the city’s Rijksmuseum with a friend from Suriname, the exhibition’s curator Esther Schreuder and her companion were struck by the beautiful way black people were portrayed in the pcitures. ‘I discovered how many of the Great Masters had depicted them, not only as slaves and servants, but predominantly as powerful and confident people.’ One of the discoveries of her subsequent research into black people in Dutch art, was that black people were not always depicted as victims or as being oppressed, and it is this other side she is aiming to show. The exhibited works give a fascinating image of the changing role and importance of black people in Dutch art and culture. This began in 1330, in the miniatures of writer Jacob van Maerlant’s famous work ‘The Mirror of History’, in which black Andalusian Moors are depicted fighting the Christians. Then the exhibition has splendid examples of the Medieval biblical theme of the black king, one of the three wise men, portrayed by artists like Rubens, Jordaens and later Rembrandt. In the sixteenth century, when the Netherlands and the rest of Europe discovered the world, black people were depicted in an allegorical context. A century later, an African man or woman was used to personify Africa, or in still lifes, genre works and portraits, young blacks were portrayed as servants to the rich whites. Around 1800 international art began to see black people as victims of the slave trade, while in the nineteen century, thanks to the World Exhibitions, ‘exotic people’ from Africa and the East inspired European artists, including Dutch painters like Breitner and Isaac Israels. In the early twentieth century, the jazz age swept through Europe and everything black was ‘hot’, with African art inspiring western artists to trace the source of what they were doing. After the Second World War, Dutch Cobra artists especially were inspired by ‘primitive’ black art. Nowadays, black culture is part of European culture and the exhibition includes works by contemporary black artists who have appropriated white icons, like Gillion Grantsaan’s version of Queen Beatrix with an Afro hairstyle.
Classic Bakelite by Ruud van der Neut p. 68-73
Bakelite, once popular and mass-produced, is being rediscovered by collectors and museums alike. Dutch collector Frits Becht, who died in 2006, amassed two thousand products made from this mouldable plastic, ranging from jewellery to loudspeakers – the latter includes the Philips ‘Master Singer’, a design classic now in museum collections. Becht began to collect Bakelite out of a love for design and for its characteristic dark brown colour. The typical rounded angles of most Bakelite objects had a practical origin – they slipped out of the moulds more easily than the angular ones. Countless products were made from this revolutionary material between the nineteen twenties and fifties, including the casing for the first televisions. In the Netherlands Philips was among the first to use Bakelite on a large scale for its sound equipment and electrical products. In 1923 Philips even opened its own Bakelite factory ‘Philite’, but eventually the material was superseded by plastics that were new, inexpensive and easier-to-produce. From the mid-nineteenth century on, chemists had begun developing synthetics that would imitate natural materials, especially when the latter were becoming more rare. The American Charles Goodyear, for instance, developed a process for vulcanising rubber in 1839, and the Englishman Alexander Parkes developed Parkesine, an ivory and horn substitute in 1855. Hundreds of kinds of synthetics were later to be developed under the collective name ‘Plastics’. The oldest group of these are thermoplastics, which become soft when heated and can be re-formed, again, and include celluloid, used initially in the film industry. In 1907 the Belgian-born, American chemist Leo Baekeland registered his heat and pressure patent describing how to prepare resin, and ‘Bakelite’ the first entirely synthetic plastic made from phenol and formaldehyde was born. This was cheap, durable, heat resistant and quick to produce, although it tended to break easily. Bakelite objects were machine produced and made in factories that sprung up in Europe, Canada and Japan. Baekeland himself became a multimillionaire.
Bakelite was initially used as a substitute for costly materials like woods and ivory and designs were at first created spontaneously on the production floor by unknown designers inspired by styles like Art Nouveau, Cubism and, in particular, Art Deco. Then established artists saw its possibilities, especially in awakening ‘an aesthetic awareness’ among the wider public. Many Bakelite objects of the period have the characteristic curves, zigzags, chevrons and sunbursts of Art Deco, introduced in 1925 at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Around this time the radio appeared and along with loudspeakers was also made from Bakelite. In the Netherlands at Philips, engineer L C Kalff designed one of the largest (45 cm diam.) and innovative loudspeakers from Bakelite that was technically possible at the time. It was a huge export success and remained in use until the nineteen fifties. Bakelite continues to inspire contemporary designers like Philippe Starck and Terence Conran. The latter, owner of the similar named, British home furnishing chain, has commissioned designs in Art Deco Bakelite that are often more expensive than the 1930s originals.
In the footsteps of Piero della Francesca by Chris Reinewald p. 60-63
Those wishing to avoid Italy’s overcrowded cultural centres, should head for Arezzo and follow in the footsteps of the Italian painter Piero dell Francesca (1416?-1492) to Urbino and beyond. The winding roads and sleepy wine villages of Tuscany and Umbria en route are an added bonus. Until recently it was chiefly British and American art lovers who were familiar with Piero and his Madonna’s tucked away in simple Tuscan churches. Even the contemporary British artist, David Hockney, borrowed his somewhat naïvely rendered figures and three dominant colours: red, blue and yellow. Pero’s paintings, no more than twenty, can be seen in about ten days. The undulating countryside on the way, which Piero criss-crossed between commissions, is recognisable as the background in his altarpieces. Following a reassessment of this ‘unspectacular’ master, local government has splendidly restored his frescos and is hoping to draw visitors to the region’s museums in Arezzo, Sansepolcro, Perugia and Urbino, where his work is always on show. Piero made restrained, devout works, which even if they depict a battlefield like his impressive altarpiece Legend of the True Cross, a series of fresh frescos about the wood used for Christ’s cross, in the Basilica of San Francesco (Arezzo), have a stillness to them. He gave each episode of the legend his own personal twist. In a scene depicting a group of men struggling with the cross, for instance, one of them has a testicle peeping out from his wide undergarment. Among Piero’s patrons was the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Piero’s famous small diptych of them from 1474 hangs in the Uffizi gallery. One panel depicts the angelic wife, Battista Sforza, who died aged twenty six, while the second is a portrait of them both, the artist having realistically captured the battered features of her widow, the military leader Federico de Montefeltro. Their palace in Urbino is now the National Gallery of the Marches and has two small works by Piero, one representing the flagellation of Christ, the other ‘La Città Ideale’ depicting the artist’s exaggerated architectural perspective. The frescoes that Piero painted quickly and skilfully into the wet chalk of the Arezzo region are still nearly all in situ. From Arezzo, following the hilly route along the Tiber, you reach the walled town of Sansepolero, Pero’s birthplace, from where he eventually wound up by the Pope in Rome. Later he returned here, unable to work due to becoming blind and died in 1492. The town’s Museo Civico houses his altarpiece The Cloak of Madonna with Madonna surrounded by scenes of the life, death and resurrection of Her Son. Her cloak is open, protecting the much smaller depicted worshippers, their stiff looking appearance said to be attributed to the clay figures Piero used as models. Nearby is the medieval village of Monterchi, the birthplace of Piero’s mother. It is said that she gave birth to Piero after his father’s death and this could have inspired his unusual and introspective fresco Madonna del Parto. This bleached work on display here depicts Our Lady about to give birth.
Summer Highlights Great-Britain by Huon Mallalieu p. 54-56
LIVERPOOL
The Turner, Whistler, Monet show at Tate Britain a couple of years ago provided a fascinating demonstration of how important pollution was to 19th century art. The major exhibition of Liverpool’s reign as European Capital of Culture pursues a rather similar idea, in studying the artistic impact of the steam train. The steam engine revolutionised 19th century land and sea transport in a manner perhaps only paralleled by the impact of the internet and e-mail on late 20th century communications. This show deals specifically with railways, from the boom years of the 1830s and ’40s to the end of steam in the 1960s, and it captures the excitement with which artists responded to the extraordinary impact that steam trains had not only on the landscape, but also on society. Turner and Cox are just two of the many painters who sought to put this man-harnessed power into a context of natural forces. Around 100 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs have been brought together from collections across Britain and the world. They include Manet’s The Railway from the NGA, Washington; Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare from the NG, London together with three other works; Pissarro’s Lordship Lane Station from the Courtauld; and two van Goghs: The Blue Train from the Musée Rodin, Paris, and La Crau from Montmajour (BM). For the 20th century there are Hopper’s Railroad Train (Phillips Academy, Mass.) and de Chirico’s The Anxious Journey from MOMA, New York. There are photographs by Brandt, Stieglitz and Link. The social impact is best demonstrated by two well-known Victorian genre paintings. Augustus Egg’s The Travelling Companions, from Birmingham, hints at the freedom that ease of travel will bring, while William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station (from the Royal Holloway College, Surrey) shows the fascination that progress and technology had for the Victorians. As the co-curator, Julian Treuherz puts it: “Aboard these great machines, passengers travelled at faster speeds than ever before and notions of time and space were forever changed. Nothing has been done on this scale before – visitors are transported on an exhilarating journey in the company of some of the world’s great artists.” The exhibition is a collaboration with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and will be staged at the Nelson-Atkins from 13 September 2008 to 18 January 2009.
To 10 August, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, William Brown Street, Liverpool, +44 (0)151 207 0001
EDINBURGH
Even before the Festival takes Edinburgh over in August, the Scottish National Gallery has two well-worthwhile shows to tempt visitors, both of which run until 22 June. The first is ‘Images of Motherhood’, drawn from the galleries’ own collections, and ranging over some five centuries of painting. It includes works by Sandro Botticelli, George Romney, Pablo Picasso and Christine Borland. The exhibition was first shown this winter at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in partnership with Highland 2007 and the Highland Council.
‘Sickert to Gertler’ is more a celebration of midwiffery. Boxted House in Essex, a house drawn (if not painted) by Constable was the home of Bobby and Natalie Bevan from 1946 until 1974, and after the Second World War became a gathering place for artists. Bobby (1901-1974) was the son of the artists Robert Bevan (1865-1925) and Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876-1952) and was chairman of a leading advertising agency. Natalie Denny (1909-2007), a renowned beauty and hostess, modelled for many artists, most famously Mark Gertler. The exhibition contains both important, and unusual and private, works, and archival material from the period 1894-1970.
Paintings by Bobby's parents and their friends, including Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner, hung beside works by the couple's own friends, such as Christopher Nevinson, John Armstrong and Frederick Gore. The house became a social centre for artists, particularly those associated with East Anglia, like John Nash, Cedric Morris and Lett Haines. This year’s festival exhibition at the National Gallery Complex will be ‘Impressionism & Scotland’ from 19 July to 12 October. It hangs works by the great Impressionists with the art of the Scots they inspired.
The exhibition of about 100 paintings, and a few works on paper, will explore the enthusiasm for Impressionism of Scottish collectors as well as artists at the turn of the 20th century and the impact of European modernism on Scottish artists. Represented will be Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Whistler, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Matisse, as well as the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists. This exhibition will emphasise the many parallels between the work of Dutch, French and Scottish artists, whose work will be hung side by side: Corot and Walton; Bastien-Lepage and Guthrie; Whistler and Lavery; Degas and Crawhall; Manet and Fergusson; Cézanne and Peploe; Matisse and Hunter. It will demonstrate that, despite these influences, both at home and abroad, Scottish artists developed their own instinctive brand of Impressionism, quite unlike the more analytical approach of the French Impressionists.
At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery there is a collaboration with the National Library of Scotland. Central to the show is Samuel Smiles' 1859 hugely influential work, Self-Help. The display presents the people who were promoted by Smiles as contemporary role models and critically re-examines what we mean by 'Victorian values'. Featuring portraits from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition also contains a selection of some of the very best of the national art, library and archive collections, including material from the National Library of Scotland's recently acquired John Murray Archive. Much of the material will be on public display for the first time.
NG Scotland, The Mound, Edinburgh, +44 (0)131 624 6200, www.natgalscot.ac.uk
SNPG, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, +44 (0)131624 6200, www.natgalscot.ac.uk
DUBLIN
There are Impressionists to be seen in Dublin as well as Edinburgh and Liverpool this summer, but here it is neither landscapes nor machines that make up the National Gallery show, but interiors. The National Gallery’s major show includes many well-known paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Degas, Cassatt and Morisot, and through them purports to explore how these artists created a forward-looking vision of the world around them. It argues that in creating these deliberately informal interior scenes, the Impressionists were rejecting the narrative conventions of academic art. Friends and family were shown engaged in such everyday activities as slouching on sofas, daydreaming in bed, bathing, reading and dining. Beyond the home, the interiors of cafés and theatres were celebrated as arenas where social boundaries might be crossed; where men, women, working classes and bourgeoisie could see and be seen. As well as showing typical Impressionist works from the 1870s and 1880s, this exhibition will demonstrate how artists such as Vuillard and Bonnard propagated the Impressionist legacy of Intimisme with vigour and vibrancy into the 20th century. Impressionist Interiors will feature up to 40 paintings and works on paper from the Gallery's collection together with loans from European and US collections.
National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square West, Dublin, +353 1 661 5133, www.nationalgallery.ie
PROPHET HONOURED AT HOME, COOKHAM
One of his wives thought Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) mad, many people considered him eccentric, but he has always been honoured in his own country, the stretch of the River Thames between Maidenhead and Marlow. He was born, and spent most of his life, in Cookham, and there the old Methodist Chapel (where he worshipped) is now the Stanley Spencer Gallery. In 1912, he was chosen by Roger Fry for inclusion in the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, and after war service he produced powerful memorial works. He was also an official war artist during the Second World War. However, for most of his life his subjects were on the borders of the everyday and eternity, in a Cookham setting. His themes were Love, Work and Redemption, and he stands in the visionary tradition of William Blake, seeing ‘God and wonder in everything’. For all the ‘naivety’ of his style, though, he was technically much more proficient than Blake, and was also unlike him in that he was accepted by the Establishment, becoming, for a while, an RA and receiving a knighthood. The summer show ‘Prophet of Love and Work’, which runs until 2 November, is a chance to experience a number of rarely-seen works from private collections (such as The Garage lent by Lord Lloyd-Webber) as well as key paintings from the Gallery’s collection. Another of the stars is The Dustman (or The Lovers) painted in 1934, a riot of limbs, hands, dresses and almost hidden but always meaningful detail – including both his wives and a mistress. Among these paintings are the drawings for the only book illustrated by Spencer, the Chatto & Windus Almanack for 1927. This was reissued in 1983, and the organisers say that it is high time for another edition.
Stanley Spencer Gallery, High Street, Cookham, Berkshire, +44(0)1628 523484, www.stanleyspencer.org.uk
PRIZEWINNING GALLERY, CHICHESTER
The Gulbenkian Prize for museums and galleries, now in its sixth year, is the largest single arts prize in the United Kingdom. Last year it was won by Pallant House in Chichester, Sussex, for its remarkable achievement in blending a modern art gallery to a distinguished Queen Anne house in a conservation area. Suitably, summer’s major show commemorates the architect, Colin St John 'Sandy' Wilson (1922–2007). This retrospective celebrates Wilson's legacy through his architectural achievements and the outstanding collection of twentieth century British art he amassed over a lifetime, which was given to the gallery through the Art Fund in 2004. It brings together many drawings, models and writings from some of his greatest architectural projects, including the British Library and Pallant House itself, for the first time. The exhibition coincides with a major rehang of the Wilson Gift, with works by Wilson's contemporaries Michael Andrews, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, R.B. Kitaj, Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, as well as major figures including David Bomberg, William Coldstream and Walter Sickert all on show. Photographs and ephemera documenting the studios designed by Wilson's wife and partner MJ Long for several of the artists represented in the Wilson Gift, will also be on display. Following on from this, from 21 June to 12 October, will be a show devoted to Colin Self (b.1941), who was a leading figure in the 1960's British Pop Art movement and one of the first British artists to explore Cold War politics and the nuclear threat. Described by Richard Hamilton as 'the best draughtsman in England since William Blake', this exhibition, the first retrospective of his work, includes his powerful prints, paintings, collages and sculptures from 1960 to the present day.
Pallant House Gallery, North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex, (+44(0)1243 774557, www.pallant.org.uk
LONDON
The Roman Emperor Hadrian (117 to 138AD) is best known for his passion for Greek culture and the Greek youth Antinous, for his interest in architecture, and of course for the eponymous wall he so sensibly built between Britannia and Caledonia. He also built the pantheon in Rome, and the nearest thing to that in London is the old circular Reading Room of the British Museum. There, between 24 July and 26 October, a lavish exhibition, supported by BP, will look beyond this established image and offer new perspectives on his life and legacy, exploring the sharp contradictions of his personality and his role as a ruthless military commander. Incorporating recent scholarship and the latest spectacular archaeological discoveries, the exhibition will feature over 180 objects from 31 lenders from Italy to Georgia, from Israel to Newcastle. Loans of dramatic sculpture, exquisite bronzes and architectural fragments will be brought together and displayed for the first time in the UK, alongside famous objects from the Museum’s own collection such as the iconic bronze head of Hadrian and the Vindolanda tablets.
British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1, Tel +44 20 7323 8000, www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
Between 4 June and 31 August ‘British Orientalist Painting’ will explore the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of the Near and Middle East between 1780 and 1930, offering vital historical and cultural perspectives on the challenging questions of the ‘Orient’ and its representation in Occidental art. It will bring together over 120 paintings, prints and drawings of harems, bazaars, public baths, domestic interiors and religious sites, and all the major genres, themes and preoccupations of Orientalism in British art will be considered. Several exceptional and rarely seen paintings by John Frederick Lewis, Edward Lear, David Wilkie, Richard Dadd, Lord Leighton, and William Holman Hunt will be shown, as well as significant works by many less familiar names.
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1, tel.: +44-20-7887 8000, www.tate.org.uk
April 2008 issue
Painter Twins: the Oyens Brothers p. 28-35
Identical twins are rarely found in art, but David and Pieter Oyens are among the few exceptions. The inseparable Amsterdam brothers, born in 1842, were both painters, shared most of their life together in Brussels, chose the same subject matter and even modelled for each other. Their oils and watercolours on show at The Hague Gemeentemuseum emanate a nostalgia for an era long since past.
The brothers were sons of a prominent Amsterdam banker, but their own talent lay elsewhere. Aged eight, they began having drawings lessons from Johannes Veldhuyzen (1831-1910) and remained in lifelong contact with their mentor. After David married and settled in Brussels with his wife, Betsy, Pieter eventually joined him. They both shared a studio on rue Traversière and became part of the vibrant art scene. Their paintings of studio interiors – in which each twin painted the other – and café scenes reflect their Burgundian and flamboyant lifestyle. A confusingly similar painting style, however, makes it difficult to distinguish one work signed ‘Oyens’ from another. Notwithstanding, when painting the same subject David tended towards farcical poses while Pieter portrayed people in greater detail. Because they acted and looked alike, it was even difficult to tell the twins themselves apart. It is said that David’s wife once asked Pieter, assuming it was her husband, to ask his brother to visit them less often.
By 1875 they were already established artists. They exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium and France as well as receiving prizes for their work. At one point Pieter returned to Amsterdam, but unable to settle returned to Brussels two years later. David had greatly missed him as model and had consequently come unstuck with his depictions of studios and café life. A year after their first major Oyens exhibition in the Cercle, Brussels, in 1892, Pieter, aged 51, also married. Tragedy struck, however, when he had a stroke and died in February 1894, a month before his daughter was born. A major blow to David, his health deteriorated and for this reason he and Betsy moved to Arnhem. Missing Brussels, however, the couple returned to the capital but David died soon after in 1902. He was buried next to Pieter at Ixelles Protestant cemetery.
The twins were rediscovered in 1995-1996 when two exhibitions at the Royal Museum, Brussels, and the Rotterdam Kunsthal featured their work. But anyone purchasing an Oyens painting as a means of investment would be better finding an alternative. Like most Dutch nineteenth-century paintings, their work is not expected to increase in price in real terms.
The exhibition ‘The Oyens Brothers: Twin Painters’ also provides information on their studio, their models and the artistic circles in which they moved. It is curated by Fred Hendriks, who has built up a major archive on the Oyens brothers, and by Saskia de Bodt. In the accompanying lavish catalogue (which includes the complete correspondence between the brothers and Johannes Veldhuyzen), Bodt places their work within the context of the Brussels art world of the late nineteenth century.
Painting in Wood by Ruud van der Neut p. 74-81
At most art and antique fairs exquisite inlaid furniture can be found. But how and by whom was it made? They were sometimes known as ‘masters of perspective’ – the craftsmen who ‘painted in wood’ by covering furniture with veneer or tortoiseshell and embellishing it with inlaid compositions. These intarsia and marquetry techniques represent highpoints in furniture art.
The technique of intarsia (from the Latin word intersere meaning insert) involves chiselling out a pattern, a few millimetres thick, from the basic wood and filling in the remaining parts with thinly sawn veneer, brass or ivory. This is then polished and oiled so that the contrasting colour and texture of the inlay is shown to maximum advantage. The skill dates back to Greek and Roman times, while excavations show the Egyptians also used inlay to decorate furniture.
Intarsia reached its peak during the renaissance in Italy when methods were discovered to dye wood with plant extracts, and new exotic woods and imports like tortoiseshell provided innovative inlay materials. The fifteenth century also saw the introduction of a new form of ornamentation – marquetry. This technique again uses veneer but covers the entire surface of an item of furniture, creating the impression that the piece is made of an expensive material. In a more complicated form the marquetry is made into geometric patters by temporarily gluing various layers of veneer together and sawing out the pattern. The layers are then detached and stuck in symmetric patterns onto the furniture.
Curiosity cabinets, with their many drawers and compartments, came to epitomise the finest examples of marquetry. Patterns for cabinet marquetry were taken from international design books by ‘inlayers’, those that designed the ornamentation. The costliest cabinets had silver or gilt bronze decoration, plaques and fittings and were inlaid with precious or semi-precious stones. Large cabinets were rarely made entirely from one solid, expensive wood type: master cabinetmakers (ebonistes) would glue the outside with a thin veneer of exotic wood or coloured tortoiseshell and add decorative inlay work.
André Charles Boulle (1642-1732) is among the most famous cabinetmakers. He gave his name to a type of marquetry of patterned inlays that combined materials like tortoiseshell and brass or ebony with pewter. Nowadays, original Boulle pieces can fetch a few million euros at auction. During Louis XV’s reign, intarsia and marquetry reached its zenith and famous cabinetmakers included Abraham and David Roentgen, who made furniture for every European court. New, lighter, coloured woods like mahogany were also introduced in combination with darker hues like rosewood.
Not only expensive materials were suitable for marquetry. In France it filtered into folk art in the form of different shades of painted straw (‘paille’) being painstakingly arranged into pictures and stuck onto domestic items like needlework boxes.
Thereafter intarsia and marquetry gradually fell into the decorative background until it was revived again by Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Intarsia from aluminium, plastic or glass and marquetry from parchment or sharkskin combined with exotic woods heralded a new era for this type of ornamentation.
Sunday Silver p. 49-52
Carefully preserved in a linen sleeve, a church book with detailed ornamental silver binding dating from 1765 is unique of its kind. It is part of Bernard van Noordwijk’s rare collection of decorative church books, a selection of which, including this one, will be on display at the Art and Antique Fair, Den Bos (11-20 April at the Brabanthallen).
The collection comprises some 400 church books with silver and gold clasps dating from 1650-1900 and is thus the largest of its kind in the Netherlands. Van Noordwijk and his wife have been collecting for over 30 years and the church books reflect their taste for diversity and unity of style, history and background. Their interest for the genre was triggered when Van Noordwijk’s wife was given a bracelet fashioned from a church book clasp. Fascinated by its fine detailing, they began their search for decorative holy books. Over the years their collection has been amassed from antique dealers, private owners and trade fairs, both at home and abroad.
Church books cover printed bibles, prayer books or collections of hymns used by the faithful for personal devotion. These handy-sized books – easy to carry to church – were often personalised, incorporating a family coat of arms or the owner’s initials in the silverwork, or contain handwritten family data or personal inscriptions. The latter making it relatively simple for dealers to trace their provenance.
Around 200 examples from the Van Noordwijk collection also form part of an exhibition entitled ‘Sunday Silver’ at the Silver Museum Sterckshof, Antwerp (until 15 June). This showcases all aspects of decorative church books, like the exquisite craftsmanship of the silversmiths and bookbinders, the biblical and symbolic depictions on the book clasps and fittings and their use in everyday life. Some of the examples from the Van Noordwijk collection were tracked down in various countries: a Dutch bible with Friesian silver (1829) was found in Hay-on-Wye (Wales), for instance, a French missal with silver clasps (1850) in Copenhagen and a Dutch silver binding (1880) in Berlin.
The fine specimen from 1765, printed in Leiden, with a chased silver binding, probably made in Greece, is unique in that the cover has an extremely rare image of the Holy Trinity depicted with the Descent from the Cross. Van Noordwijk explained to Tableau the strangeness of having this image from Good Friday on the front, while the resurrection, representing Easter, and the most important family feast in Greece, is relegated to the back. He surmises that at some point the images must have been switched. The silver bound book is an edition of the New Testament in Greek and was compiled by Johannes Leusden (1624-1699), a publisher and scholar of eastern languages. As was the custom at the time, many of the names of cities and people in the book have been Latinised including the printer’s mark, ‘Luchtmanniana’ from Luchtmans, also publishers and booksellers.
The similar titled, accompanying book to the exhibition, published by Jongbloed, has the size and appearance of a church book and is lavishly illustrated.
Graphic Novels & Jewish history by Chris Reinewald p. 87-90
In the exhibition ‘Superman and Schlemiels’ at the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum forty prominent American, European and Israeli comic strip artists give their vision on Jewish history. Both comic strips and by extension storyboards, the latter comprising a sequence of illustrations giving the storyline of a film, date from the late nineteenth century. Early short comic films were often constructed like a comic strip with a pay-off joke at the end. In the same way these ‘shorts’ evolved into feature films, strips have developed over time into book-length stories and graphic novels.
Through both strip and film this exhibition tells of the experiences of the first Jewish immigrants to the US in the early twentieth century. Although from different generations, the work of Will Eisner and Harvey Pekar has widely covered this theme. The comic book artist and writer Eisner (1927-2005) was also the first strip artist to turn the genre into literature in his ‘A Contract with God’, a graphic novel about a New York immigrant community.
One of comic book writer Pekar’s most famous strips ‘Pa-ayper-Reggs’ (1981) tells of the city’s early Jewish rag peddlers. It is illustrated by former underground comic strip artist Robert Crumb, famous among others for his detailed satirical images of overweight women and oversexed men. In contrast, Ben Katchor’s figures are more sketchily drawn as is evident in his ‘The Jew of New York’ (1992), a collection of serialised strips about the lives of misfit characters in 19th century New York. Then there are the splendidly melancholy youthful memories that slowly unfold in the work of comic strip artist Chris Ware (1967).
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, sons of Jewish immigrants, were in high school when they created Superman in 1938. The first comic book of this super hero, who could fly and throw amazing punches, earned them 130 dollars, the next 500 dollars and finally became a multimillion dollar business. An illustration in a Look magazine of 1940 shows Superman holding a squirming Adolph Hitler in the air. A generation later American comic artists were to reflect more seriously on the aftermath of the Holocaust, which had cost the lives of their Jewish family members.
In 1987 Art Spiegelman decided to put a semi-autobiographical story about his parents during the Jewish persecution in strip form as Maus. The award-winning series, in which animals play the leading roles, finally shook off the ‘lowbrow’ image of the comic strip and inspired the Holocaust recollections of later cartoonists like Mirian Katzin and Bernice Eisenstein.
The strip has now definitely lost its innocence and not only in the context of the history of wars of grandparents. The 1996 award-winning book Palestine, drawn by comic artist Joe Sacco, for instance, is about the intifada as he experienced it on the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1990. In Persepolis political refugee Marjane Satrapi’s black and white comic strip images give an account of how she supported the Iranian Revolution as a teenager, thereby splitting her family in two.
Letter from Brussels by Peter Wouters p. 36-42
Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) drew much inspiration for his work from his passion for the theatre in all its many guises. He saw a link between theatre and everyday life – people around him were his ‘actors’; daily events formed the ‘plays’.
This influence is clearly traced at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, which is showing 220 of his works, plus theatre memorabilia, related works by modern-day artists and sixty Klees specially selected by conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.
Now that it has taken over the EU presidency, it is Slovenia’s turn to spotlight its country’s art in the European capital. Brussels Town Hall is showing fifty paintings from the major collection of post-war Slovenian art of the Nova Ljubljanska Banka. Meanwhile, for five days in April (18 – 21), the capital becomes the centre of international contemporary art when some 180 galleries from 24 countries take part in the annual art fair at Brussels Expo. The Fair features established names, young talent and galleries participating for the first time.
Chinese artists continue to invade the international art scene and Wang Du at BPS 22, in Charleroi, is no exception. Born in a mining community in 1956, he taught himself to draw and later participated in anti-Mao activities. After the Cultural Revolution he continued to rebel against officialdom and official art, and following imprisonment escaped to Paris in 1990 to develop a successful career in the West.
The Museum of Photography, Charleroi, is tracing American photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s quest during the 1970s to express time and space in his images, an approach which later became known as field photography. Born in 1938, this internationally acclaimed photographer was one of the first to experiment with colour in the early 1960s.
Colour, along with carefully arranged compositions, classic themes and a surreal influence, is what gives Belgian painter Jan Cox’s work a special place in post-war art history. A founding member of the group Jeune Peinture Belge, he had leanings towards the Cobra group and taught and exhibited in America. Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Art examines his career through an exhibition of key works including, crucially, Death of Socrates in 1980, which preempts Cox’s own suicide that same year.
Antwerp is still a leading centre for the diamond trade. A prestigious exhibition ‘Diamond Divas’ at the town’s Diamond Museum features the jewels worn by Hollywood actresses and other celebrities. Exhibition highlights are surely the 24-carat diamond Marilyn Monroe wore to promote ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ and singer Madonna’s Edwardian tiara, comprising 765 polished diamonds. Made by Asprey & Garrard of London, she wore this for her wedding to British film director Guy Ritchie.
SMAK in Ghent is featuring installations by the much feted Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl (b. 1946). Bijl takes reality from its everyday context and places this in a neutral setting, thereby forcing the observer to look at it differently. Banal, often trivial, elements form a starting point for his work. Among the show’s installations are a fictitious stock market and museum.
Letter from Paris by Waldemar Kamer p. 56-62
Few artists have taken colour as a means of expression to such extremes as the Fauve artist Maurice Vlaminck. ‘I transport all my feelings into an orchestra of pure colours’, he once said. In 1905 he exhibited at the Autumn Salon in Paris, where his work, along with that of André Derain, Matisse and certain others, was described by a critic as looking as if made by les fauves (wild beasts). In conjunction with an extensive catalogue of his oeuvre (600 pages), the Musée du Luxembourg now has a retrospective of Vlaminck’s work, including ceramics and sculptures.
‘Between Impressionism and Expressionism’ at Musée d’Orsay is a retrospective of the work by German artist Lovis Corinth (1858-1925). After a lengthy academic training, Corinth became a revered artist and founding member of the Munich Secession, a group which rallied against the prevailing historicism in art at the time. Later he became the most well-known painter of the Berlin Secession and opened his own art school for women. The painter’s landscapes were regarded as ‘impressionist’; his portraits ‘expressionist’, hence the title for the retrospective, the first to be organized outside Germany.
As the name implies, Musée Marmottan-Monet owns a famous collection of work by the Impressionist artist Claude Monet. It also administers the house and gardens at Giverny, the painter’s country house, and visited in Monet’s day – and even to this day – by young aspiring artists. The museum’s current exhibition ‘Travels to Giverny’ explores the influences the gardens have had on the many American artist visitors, among whom are John Leslie Breck, Theodore Earl Butler and Ellsworth Kelly.
Musée Rodin is showing virtually all the work it could trace of Camille Claudel (1864-1943), the pupil and mistress of world-famous sculptor Auguste Rodin. When she was admitted to a psychiatric institute, her lover organized an exhibition of her work, but it drew few visitors. Her name was more or less forgotten until Anne Delbée’s acclaimed biography about her in 1980. Thereafter, this little known sculptress – whose professional career was severely limited during her life by her gender – finally gained the recognition she deserved.
The Jardin des Tuileries is again the venue for the twelve Pavillon des Arts et du Design (PAD), a contemporary art and design fair which this year is expected to draw some ninety galleries (2-6 April). Meanwhile the Salon des Indépendant, where Vlaminck exhibited and sold work for the first time in 1905, is hosting its 119th salon in the vast spaces of Espace Champerret. Some seven hundred artists have been invited (11-16 April). Among other spring treats, the Netherlands Institute is showing a fine collection of contemporary art amassed by the Dutch businessman Jan H. de Pont (1915-1987). Jeff Wall, Bill Viola and Marlene Dumas are among those represented in the collection. Meanwhile, in conjunction with the Salon du Dessin (9-13 April), the Fondation Custodia, in its palace located behind the Netherlands Institute, is showing drawings from its own collection and those from the major Swiss collector Jean Bonna.
Letter from New York by Amy Page p. 70-73
TALK OF THE TOWN
As far as the major auction houses in New York are concerned, there is only one game in town for Japanese art and that is Christie’s. Sotheby’s discontinued holding auctions of Japanese art last year, a decision that many Japanese art aficionados deplored . The reason was that Sotheby’s new directive not to accept works for auction that are valued at $5,000 or less., which includes most of the hundreds of lots in its Japanese sales. Japanese art is not being neglected, however. This spring brings a trio of complementary exhibitions focusing on Japanese woodblock prints. All three focus on Ukiyo-e, Edo’s (modern Tokyo’s) “floating world” of beautiful women, landscapes, erotica, warriors and actors. Beginning at the end of February and running until the beginning of May, an exhibition entitled “Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1600-1860” at the Asia Society, showcases 140 world of Japanese ukiyo-e, ranging from commercially released prints of iconic images by artists such as Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige, to privately commissioned works made for the luxury market.
Joan Mirviss, a private dealer, is presenting 'Daring Visions—Prints of the Utagawa School..' The exhibition explores many of the 19th century artist’s who worked under the Utagawe name. The exhibition runs concurrently with “Utagawe: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900 at the Brooklyn Museum,. The Utagawa School, founded by Utagawa Toyoharu dominated the print market in the nineteenth-century and is responsible for more than half of all surviving ukiyo-e prints. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition focuses on the development of the Utagawa School, showing exceptional prints from a private collection, the core of which once belonged to architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Joan Mirviss’s show has a small selection of works by members of the school. Thus, by attending all thee exhibitions, one can learn a great deal about a fascinating field.
Are three exhibitions of Japanese art at one time too much of a good thing? No way.
MoMA AND P.S.1 PRESENT SURVEY OF WORK BY OLAFUR ELIASSON
'Take your time': Olafur Eliasson' is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by the artist, whose large-scale environments installations, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere. The show originated at the San Francisco Museum of Art, where it was on view until late February. Eliasson, who was born in Copenhagen and divides his time between that city and Berlin, is Denmark’s best known contemporary artist.. The exhibition draws from public and private collections worldwide, and includes 34 works that explore the artist’s diverse range of artistic production from 1991 to the present. Included are six new works created specifically for The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a subsidiary of MoMA. Eliasson uses such elements as light, water, ice, fog, stone, and moss to create unique situations that shift the viewer’s perception of place and self. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.
'Take your time' will include many of the works shown at SFMOMA as well as twenty additional works. The new works for the MoMA and P.S.1 exhibition
are 'Take your time,:' The natural light setup', 'Mirror door (observer', 'Mirror door (user)', 'Mirror door (spectator)', and Mirror door (visitor). 'Take your time' (2008), which will be on view at P.S.1, comprises a large, circular mirror that is affixed to the ceiling and rotates slowly on its axis, destabilizing viewers’ perception of space as they pass underneath it. Also at P.S.1 is 'The natural light setup (2008)', which is a light box emitting a bright, white glow from the combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum. 'Mirror door (observer)', 'Mirror door (user)', 'Mirror door (spectator)', and 'Mirror door (visitor)', visitor - all from 2008, are presented in slightly different versions at both venues .These works comprise several spotlights projecting onto rectangular mirror doors to create pools of light on the gallery floor. Other major works in the exhibition include” Moss wall”(1994), an installation of live reindeer moss that will naturally change color throughout its time on view in MoMA’s third-floor Special Exhibitions Gallery, and 'Ventilator' (1997), in which an electric fan suspended from the ceiling of MoMA’s atrium, which is 110 feet above street level. The fan will swing above the heads of visitors in ever-changing arcs - a striking representation of unpredictable movement through space. (20 April-30 June) www.moma.org, www.ps1.org
FOLK ART AT CHINA INSTITUTE
The history of Chinese shadow figures is explored in a Chinese folk art exhibition 'Enchanted Stories: Chinese Shadow Theater in Shaanxi' at the China Institute. For more than a thousand years in China, brilliantly colored rawhide figures have represented the great heroes and immortal deities of China’s legendary past in miniature. On view in the exhibition are 90 unique figures and screens on loan from the Shaanxi Provincial Art Gallery, which are on view in the U.S. for the first time. Animated by puppeteers from behind a transparent cloth screen, these figures showcase the style and technical finesse of the late Qing Dynasty. Shaanxi, located in Northeastern China, was chosen as its capital by thirteen historical dynasties. At the beginning of the13th century, shadow theater spread to Central and Western Asia and in the 14th century to Persia. By the 17th century, Chinese shadow theater was being performed in Paris. 'As one of the oldest of the Chinese arts', says Willow Hai Chang, director of the China Institute Gallery, 'shadow theater reflects multiple facets of Chinese culture and has entertained a broad audience from the emperors to rural peasants for more than a thousand years.' (until 11 May 2008) www.chinainstitute.org
ROCOCO AT THE COOPER-HEWITT
The exhibition examines the forms of this free-spirited 18th-century style, tracks reappearances in Art Nouveau and continues its exploration through the 20th and 21st centuries. This show is the first museum survey of the Rococo style and that traces how the design movement was born, re-born and
transformed across centuries and continents. 'This exhibition perfectly articulates the mission of the museum to explore the continuum of design as it surveys the Rococo style across centuries, continents and media,' says Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt. Rococo design-exuberant, opulent, theatrical and sensuous—emerged in Paris during the Regency of Philippe d’Orléans (1715–1723) in reaction to the imposing Baroque style of Louis XIV’s Versailles court. The term 'Rococo', first coined in the early 19th century, is derived from the French 'rocaille' (the shell-laden rockwork often found in grottoes) and the Italian 'barocco' or Baroque; it came to signify an aesthetic, as well as a lifestyle, spirit and attitude, which preferred wit and pleasure to pomp and circumstance.
The exhibition begins with the work of the prodigious designer and silversmith Juste Aurèle Meissonnier, whose creative genius, production and publications were a wealth of ideas for candlesticks, tobacco boxes, sword hilts, watch cases, wall paneling and furniture, through prints made after his designs. The epitome of Rococo design is an extraordinary silver tureen designed by Meissonnier for the Duke of Kingston, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which features a body and cover comprised of shells, crayfish and vegetable forms. The show also presents other expressions of high-style Rococo design in 18th-century France, with opulent silver, gold and other precious objects, exquisite furniture, ceramics, design is a large selection of Sevres porcelain, drawings and prints of François Boucher, the most famous painter of the Rococo period. who was also intimately involved with the creation of Rococo decorative arts objects.
The second half of the exhibition outlines how Rococo design emerged as a revival of the original style. Rococo design first enjoyed a revival in early 19thcentury England, due in part to the enthusiasm of the Prince of Wales for the style. (later Prince Regent and The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has a groundbreaking exhibition exploring the Rococo style and its continuing revivals up to the present day in multiple fields, including furniture, decorative arts, prints, drawings and textiles. On view in the first- and second-floor galleries from March 7. The exhibition charts the progress of the Rococo style as it radiates from Paris, travels to the French provinces, migrates to other European countries and later crosses the Atlantic to the United States. In mid-19th-century America, new technologies facilitated an outpouring of furniture and decorative arts objects with lavish curves, which were ideally suited to the Victorian parlor. Curvilinear parlor pieces such as a ‘causeuse’ love seat and the undulating floral furniture works of John Henry Belter, which were particularly popular in America’s southern states. Some of the most expressive re-interpretations of Rococo occurred during the late 19th- and early 20th-century Art Nouveau movement in France, Belgium, Germany and the United States. The single most important influence in the development of Art Nouveau graphics and decorative arts was Japanese prints with their asymmetrical compositions and their glorification of the natural world. Superb examples of Art Nouveau design on view, include Louis Comfort Tiffany vases, lamps and gourds by Emil Gallé; and jewelry by René Lalique.
In the 20th century, Rococo inspiration appears in the work of individual designers, including Alvar Aalto, André Dubreil, Carlo Mollino, Gerald Summers and Verner Panton. In reaction to modernism’s classical symmetry, contemporary designers often use natural materials, asymmetrical forms and sensuous curves. The rise of new materials, such as plastic, as seen in the mass production of Panton’s stacking side chair. In the first years of the 21st century, the Rococo style has appeared wholly, in part or remixed with characteristics from other movements in the work of many young designers, particularly those from the Netherlands and the United States. Highlights in this section include designs by Marcel Wanders, Tord Boontje and Ted Muehling, all of whom incorporate Rococo’s nature-based asymmetrical forms, theatricality and sensuous curves in their work. (Until 6 July). www.cooperhewitt.org
JASPER JOHNS AT THE MET
From the mid-1950s to the present, gray has been a consistent presence in Jasper Johns’ work. An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—organized jointly by the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago-- explores the uses of the color in Johns’s; work. Featured are more than 120 paintings, reliefs, drawing, prints and sculptures. “At the Museum,” says Gary Tinterow, Curator in Charge of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary art. “We are especially pleased to be able to present the extraordinarily beautiful and enigmatic work of Jasper Johns, an artist who anticipated many of the dominant concerns of contemporary art, and who continues to astonish and disturb. The exhibition includes such master works as 'Canvas', 'Gray Target', 'Jubilee', 'through 0', 'No, Diver', and 'The Dutch Wives'. Also included are works from the artist’s recent Catenary series - paintings that were received badly by art critics when they showed at Matthew Marks Gallery in June 2004 - as well as new works never before exhibited. The first exhibition to focus on Johns’ varied use of gray, it traces the progression of this color throughout his works and highlights its appearance in diverse media, including encaustic, oil paint, metal, aluminum, lead, graphite, charcoal and ink. When asked if gray draws attention away from figuration, Johns relied, 'The clues a range of color gives are lost, of course. Gray puts perception on a more tactile level, perhaps'. (Until 4 May) www.metmuseum.org
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM PRESENTS SELECTIONS FROM THE NIERENDORF COLLECTION
'From Berlin to New York: Karl Nierendorf and the Guggenheim' is an exhibition of approximately 70 works, from the collection of the German-born art dealer Karl Nierendorf (1889–1947). Nierendorf, who started his career as a banker, began his career as Formerly a banker, Karl Nierendorf began his career in the art trade in 1920 in Cologne, specializing in works on paper by German and Austrian Expressionist artists. In 1936 Nierendorf emigrated to the U.S. and established the Nierendorf Gallery in New York, where he encountered Hilla Rebay (1890–1967) and the newly established Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Nierendorf promoted artists represented in the Guggenheim collection, including Lyonel Feininger, Perle Fine, and Franz Marc, which led the Foundation to purchase a number of important works for its collection from the gallery. This exhibition of selections from the Guggenheim Foundation Collection features works by Josef Albers, Adolph Gottlieb, George Grosz, Vasily Kandinsky, Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Oskar Kokoschka, among others.
After Nierendorf’s death in 1947, the Guggenheim Foundation bought his entire estate, thereby gaining not only works acquired for the Guggenheim during his travels abroad from 1946 to 1947, but also the gallery inventory and objects from the dealer’s personal collection. This major acquisition enriched the breadth of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection with a concentration of Expressionist works, such as Kokoschka’s: 'Errant Knight', Surrealist paintings; and significant holdings of Klee. Also in this major purchase were early paintings by Adolph Gottlieb, which are among the first compositions by a member of the nascent school of Abstract Expressionism to enter the Guggenheim’s collection.
The current installation features both acquisitions from Karl Nierendorf’s galleries in Berlin and New York and from the dealer’s estate. In addition to historical exhibition brochures and gallery announcements, the exhibition will feature an interactive touch screen where the visitor can view archival catalogues, page by page. (Until 4 May) www.guggenheim.org
TOP PICKS
• From now to 1 May, passersby the East 60th entrance to Central Park will see an installation by British artist Sarah Lucas, sponsored by Public Art Fund. 'Perceval', as the work is called, is a life-sized bronze sculpture of a Shire horse pulling two oversized marrows, or squash, as the vegetable is called in America.
• Seventy-nine masterpieces of Renaissance drawing, including a number of rarely seen works, are on view at The Morgan Library & Museum in an exhibition entitled: 'Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi'. The show focuses on artists who worked on the frescoes, paintings, tapestries, and other decorative work that embellished the magnificent Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, best known as the home of the Medici dukes.
• A spectacular exhibition at The Frick Collection will exhibit Meissen porcelain from the collection of Henry Arnhold (1 East 79th Street, until 29 June). One of the greatest private holdings of early Meissen assembled in the twentieth century, the collection is well known to specialists, bur has never before been the subject of a major public exhibition.
• At the Rubin Museum of Art, an interesting exhibition entitled 'Bon: The Magic Word' surveys art from the 12th to the 19th centuries made by members of the Bonpo culture, a religious group in the Himalayas and Central Asia that was the dominant culture of Tibet before the northern advance of Buddhism,
• AIPAD (The Association of International Photography Art Dealers) is holding a fair at the Park Avenue Armory (Park Avenue at 67th Street) from 10-13 April. The fair is the longest running and foremost exhibition of fine art photography. More than 75 of the world’s leading fine art photography galleries will present a wide range of museum quality work by contemporary, modern and 19th century masters.
Letter from London by Huon Mallalieu p. 82-86
BREAKFAST & ART
Recently I had lunch with one of my editors. He is not an arty type, and so while it seemed sensible to get him onto my territory, it had to be an unthreatening area of it. The answer was fairly obvious: the Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain. The ‘Whistler’, of course, is not James Abbot McNeill, however much he may be celebrated elsewhere in the building, but Rex, the decorator and illustrator, who was killed commanding a tank in Normandy in 1944, and whose murals decorate the room. They are an airy neo-rococo fantasy that is wholly appropriate to the place. Somewhere on my chaotic shelves is one of the now rare pamphlets in which Whistler explained the story of the ‘Pursuit of Rare Meats’ which runs round the room. The room was not quite completed at the outbreak of war, and has been left unfinished, but at least it survived. I have a feeling that there was a proposal at one time to paint it all over. However, back in the ‘70s or early ‘80s when what had sunk to being an undistinguished café was relaunched as a high-class restaurant, the murals were valued again. At that time the Tate was said to have one of the best and most reasonably priced wine lists in town. It is still excellent, if not quite as distinguished as at first, and the cooking is having a very good patch at present. The menu is reassuringly compact, and all the boxes of sustainability, locality and organics can be ticked. I can’t say much about price, since my expenses were not in play on this occasion, but I believe that it is still reasonable for the quality. Soon after the Whistler Room was revamped, the V & A got in on the act, with advertisements for ‘A Rather Good Caff – with a Museum Attached.’ These were generally sniffed at for their vulgarity, but the café was indeed rather good. It is some time since I have used it, so I do not know how it scores at the moment, but I can recommend one or two other eateries attached to London institutions. Recently the Royal Academy has taken to inviting a favoured few to breakfast viewings of their exhibitions. For the Mellon show it was obvious that only a sophisticated English cooked breakfast was appropriate, and that they provided, including scrambled egg and smoked salmon. I look forward to a forthcoming breakfast for the Russian show, but I doubt whether they will run to caviar and vodka…Continental and croissants were also on offer at the RA, as they are at the Wallace Collection. Their lunch is also good; the only problem is that the acoustics in the roofed-over central garden, where the restaurant now is, are very difficult. Another great addition to London lunching is the restaurant on top of the National Portrait Gallery. Food and drink are fine and good value, and the roofscape, over the National Gallery towards the Palace of Westminster, is magnificent.
I think I should eat my way around some more culture for a future letter.
NEARLY ANTIQUE
The definition of an antique, used by Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise, is an object over 100 years old. This is no longer particularly relevant to a speeded-up world in which the artists of the 1970s are now ranked with the Old Masters, and a ‘90s revival must be imminent. However, it is rather comforting to think that in the bureaucratic mind there is a stately and ordered progression of objects, year by year transforming from second-hand caterpillars to antique butterflies.
The British Antique Dealers’ Association insists on no such arbitrary division, which is fitting, since although venerable, it is itself not quite antique in bureaucratic eyes. This year, in fact, sees the 90th anniversary of its founding, in the offices of the old Connoisseur magazine, on 7 May, 1918. Initially called The Art Traders’ Society, its immediate purpose was to fight a proposed luxury tax. In celebration, many of the 400 members are putting on special exhibitions, in London and across the country. A full catalogue, with an introduction by the historian Dr. David Starkie, can be obtained free of charge from members or from BADA, with and other necessary information: tel.: +44 (0)20 7581 4128, e-mail: badaexhibitions@btinternet.com.
CRANACH FULL LENGTH
Last summer there was a most stimulating small show at the Courtauld devoted to the elder Lucas Cranach, which whetted the appetite for more. Luckily it does indeed prove to have been a taster for the major exhibition which recently opened at the Royal Academy. It is a collaboration between the Academy and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, and with 70 works should allow us to form a measured judgement on an artist about whom, I suspect, many will be ambivalent. That Cranach was a fine painter there can be no doubt, and his superb draughtsmanship elicits unstinting admiration, but there is so often an element in his work – disturbing verging on distasteful – that makes him very hard to like. The sitters for his portraits are often rather ugly, or are presented as being so, and his Venuses and Eves so oddly misshapen. There is a clumsiness in many of the figures in the religious works. On the other hand, those ugly sitters are very real, and we can see that they are struggling with their thoughts; the gazes of Martin Luther or John the Steadfast of Saxony are turned inwards, to search their own souls. Duke John’s six-year old son looks half-witted at first, but surely he is living for the moment when he can escape from the pose and fling off the elaborate costume. Cranach was among the first, if not the first, to paint full-length portraits, he was a notable landscape painter, and there are stories and morals beyond the obvious to be teased out in many of his religious and mythological works. His stylised, seductive yet off-putting, nudes still have a strong influence on artists. (Until 8 June) www.royalacademy.org.uk
BOXED BEAUTIES
I have probably mentioned before that Renoir is far from one of my favourite painters, but I am very happy to admit that on occasions, when he exerted himself, he could produce a really great picture. One such is 'La Loge' in the Courtauld Gallery’s collection, and it is the subject of their latest in depth study. 'La Loge' dates from 1874, and was Renoir’s principal contribution to the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris. The theme of the theatre box was very popular in Paris at that time, and Renoir painted a number of variations, and the Courtauld picture is joined by la Petite Loge from Baden, Au Théatre from the National Gallery and Au Concert from the Clark Institute, Williamstown, as well as others by Mary Cassatt, Daumier, Degas and Forain. There is also a group of caricatures and illustrations from contemporary French fashion journals. ‘Watching and watched’ is a fascinating exercise for an artist, subject to many interpretations. In La Loge itself, she is there to be seen, he for what he may see. In Au Théatre, she is hoping to see, her chaperone, perhaps, hoping not to see, and a young man in the crush glad to have seen and hoping to be seen. In Mary Cassatt’s Au Français, she is observing intently, unaware that she is herself observed. It is a form of genre painting, with stories to be told and morals to be drawn. The catalogue is valuable in setting the scene, informative both on the Parisian theatre – the principal entertainment of the day – and on the history of fashion. The focus of the show is tight; like the focus of the paintings it brings together a great deal in a small space. It is rightly billed as a highlight of the celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Courtauld Institute of Art. At the same time the Courtauld is showing a selection from its holdings of 19th century French drawings.
Renoir at the Theatre, to 25 May, Courtauld Institute, www.courtauld.ac.uk
AMAZING RARE THINGS
This show comes from Edinburgh, where it has had a great welcome, and deals with ‘the art of natural history in the age of discovery.’ In the accompanying book, of which he is co-author, Sir David Attenborough writes ‘Leonardo da Vinci, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby. There is a common denominator that links these artists. It is the profound joy that all feel who observe the natural world with a sustained and devoted intensity.’ For the purpose of the show, drawn from the unrivalled holdings of the Royal Library, the ‘Age of Discovery’ runs from Leonardo’s anatomical drawings, plant and geological studies in the later 15th century, to Catesby’s drawings for his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1729 – 1747). The discoveries themselves were often new species, some of which now seem commonplace to us, while others are extinct. These were the first records. Cassiano (1588 – 1657) was an antiquary rather than an artist, but he commissioned others to record his museum of plants, birds and animals. Marshal (c.1620 – 1682) was a very fine botanical artist, and he compiled a florilegium that is unique in 17th century English art. Merian (1647 – 1717) was fascinated by flies, spiders and caterpillars, and in 1699 she travelled to Surinam to chronicle the life cycles of moths and butterflies. Her watercolours are splendidly vivacious. Catesby was remarkable as a self-taught artist, and he was as good with fish as he was with plants.
Amazing Rare Things, to 28 September, The Queen’s Gallery, www.royalcollection.org.uk
HOPE FOR THE BOOK
There are two very different shows to be enjoyed at the Victoria and Albert Museum between now and June. The first, devoted to Thomas Hope and already on, is a natural sequel to last year’s homage to James ‘Athenian’ Stuart. Hope was a member of a family of Scottish merchants and bankers settled in Amsterdam, and he moved to England in 1796 on the French invasion. He was a collector, designer and patron of the arts, and his influence was a major force in the creation of the Regency style in furniture and furnishing. He had travelled in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean, and was well aware of artistic developments in Paris and Rome. His collection of classical and neo-classical statuary was much studied, and his own designs for neo-classical and Egyptian furniture were archaeologically much purer than those of Percier and Fontaine, whom he knew. His Household Furniture and Decoration, published in 1807, became the style Bible of his generation. The exhibition includes recreations of interiors from his London townhouse, and also studies the influence of Deepdene his country house in Surrey. Thomas Hope: Regency Designer, to 22 June, Victoria & Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk
‘Blood on Paper’, the second show, which opens on April 15, is a reaction to often heard fears that the Book is virtually dead. The livre d’artiste has been less celebrated in Britain than on the Continent, although since the Second World War there have always been practitioners, and now there is even a specialist London fair devoted to books created by artists. This show not only brings together examples by many of the great names of the 20th century, but sets them among works in other media, including sculpture and installations, which have been inspired by books.
Blood on Paper: the Art of the Book, 15 April to 29 June, Victoria & Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk
AN AMERICAN CENTURY
It is the argument of this show that between the 1850s and the 1950s American art, like the United States themselves, matured and came of age. As to whether it has progressed or regressed in the subsequent half century is a debate that would certainly end in tears, if not blood. ‘Coming of Age’, which is a selection of works from the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Andover, Massachusetts, naturally follows a chronological path, from the mid-19th century landscapes that celebrated the opening up of the continent, to modernism and abstraction. Along the way are portraits by Thomas Eakins, genre paintings by Eastman Johnson, marine subjects by Winslow Homer, landscapes by Whistler and Sargent, Impressionists from Chile Hassam and Maurice Prendergast, Ashcan works by Robert Henri and John Sloan. Then on to Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hoffmann, Franz Kline, László Moholy-Nagy and Jackson Pollock. All in all, a remarkable tour d’horizon or panorama that might well have appealed to the Hudson River painters.
The exhibition is organised by the Addison Gallery together with the American Federation of Arts, a non-profit organisation that promotes exhibitions around the world, publishes catalogues and develops educational programmes (www.afaweb.org)
Coming of Age, to 8 June, Dulwich Picture Gallery, www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
CATFIGHTS
The Louvres, British Museums, Rijksmuseums, Metropolitans and National Galleries of the world’s great centres are all very well in their splendid ways, but for many travellers it is the smaller, specialist, idiosyncratic museums which provide the fondest memories of a city. No one can claim to have ‘done’ London until they have experienced the Soane. Artists’ houses are always a magnet for me, and obviously museums that were once home to people we admire should (but do not always) have the most powerful atmospheres. One of the more recent to be established in London is the Handel House Museum, just off Bond Street in Mayfair. It adds to the frisson that Jimi Hendrix stayed in the house for a while. At the end of the month an exhibition considering the composer and the divas for whom he wrote will open there, running on into November. Given the high histrionics – on and off stage – of the London operatic world in the first half of the 18th century, the show should be great fun. Handel’s star performers – the word ‘diva’ is actually a 19th century coinage – included ‘the Rival Queens’, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, Margherita Durastanti, Susannah Cibber and Kitty Clive. There will be a beautiful Mercier graphite sketch of Durastanti from the British Museum, portraits of Cibber and Clive from the Garrick Club, and the House’s own Bordoni by Nazari, among other paintings, together with objects, works of art and scores. Throughout the run there will be live musical events, exploring the repertoire created by the composer and his divas, and performed in the rooms where he wrote and worked with them.
Handel and the Divas, 30 April to 16 November, Handel House Museum, www.handelhouse.org
SHORTS
• An out of town show for anyone interested in contemporary furniture or rugs who is travelling to Dorset, is ‘Syzygy’, a selling exhibition of new work by leading craftsmen. It is curated by the cabinetmaker John Makepeace and is at the Alpha House Gallery, in Sherborne from 12 April to 10 May. The other exhibitors are Robert Kilvington (furniture) and Jenny Wilkinson (textiles); Paul Gower (furniture); Kay + Stemmer (furniture); Wales & Wales (furniture) and Jennie Moncur (tapestry); Guy Mallinson (furiture); Tracy Oldfield (rugs); and Christopher Farr (rugs). Tel.: +44 (0)1935 814 944 www.alpha-house.co.uk
• The multimedia artists Langlands & Bell are fascinated by acronyms, and they have turned their attention to museums – MOMA, ICA, SMAK, LACMA, MADRE have inspired a body of work including photographs, neon wall sculptures and prints. ‘Mathematically ordered, the codes and photos are superimposed until they begin to dissolve into each other in an endless cycle of familiarity and obscurity, constantly supplanting each other, much as the new acronym language supplants the original.’ To find out what this may mean, visit the Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 & 34 Cork St, W1 (Tel.: +44(0)7439 1866 www.alancristea.com) between 9 April and 10 May.
Februari 2008 issue
Piranesi's dream. Eternal modern design by Ruud van der Neut p. 38-43
The pioneering designs of Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) are still relevant to this day, as the exhibition ‘Piranesi’s Dream. Eternal Modern Design’ at Haarlem’s Teylers Museum reveals. Alongside examples of Piranesi’s own rich oeuvre the show includes contemporary designs by internationally acclaimed architects and designers clearly influenced by his work.
While Piranesi considered himself primarily an architect, few of his designs were actually realised. Apart from the renovation of a church, his only other design was in 1765 for the interior of the Caffè degli Inglesi in Rome, which drew both admiration and derision. The British painter Thomas Jones described the sphinxes, obelisks and pyramids decorating its walls as more suitable for an Egyptian tomb. Yet both projects contributed to Piranesi’s posthumous fame.
As an architect and designer Piranesi sought an innovative style in which he blended elements from antiquity into contemporary designs, as can be seen in a handful of his sketches owned by New York’s Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum. Among the highlights of his oeuvre is the Carceri d’Invenzione series, his etchings of imaginary, labyrinthine dungeons from which there is no escape. A metaphor perhaps for eighteenth-century Italian society? A link has been made between this series and Cubism in that both Piranesi and Cubist painters experimented with new forms to express themselves. Piranesi’s mission was to change the prevailing style of his time and he greatly admired the Romans for their unorthodoxy and inventiveness.
As an interior designer he seamlessly incorporated elements from antiquity into newly carved decorative objects and sold these to wealthy Grand Tour travellers. Among his masterworks are a marble mantelpiece made for the banker John Hope of Amsterdam, and a gilded console table for Cardinal Rezzonico, both objects now in the Rijksmuseum collection. A marble pedestal he designed with original Roman fragments and neoclassical decoration on show in the current exhibition is on loan from the Vatican.
Piranesi’s versatile designs ranged from vases, clocks and furniture to a papal altar and carriages for Grand Tour travellers. Only a few of his realised designs have survived however, including a man-sized candelabrum for his own headstone in the only church executed according to his own design – the Santa Maria del Priorato in Rome. The candelabrum was taken to France by his children a year after his death, where in a church they placed a life-sized marble sculpture of Piranesi made by the sculptor G. Angelini.
By featuring work by contemporary leading architects and designers like Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Michael Graves or Denise Scott Brown, the Teylers Museum exhibition illustrates Piranesi’s impact on modern style. Graves’s photographs and ink drawings of Italian antiquity and landscapes done on his own Grand Tour have a touch of Piranesi about them. Nowadays he is an acclaimed architect and designer – among others for Alessi and Target – with his own recognisable style. Even in new media Piranesi’s artistic legacy is evident: set designers for films like the Harry Potter series have clearly looked at his work.
Millais' Model by Susan van den Berg p. 49-53
Tate Britain’s remarkable exhibition about the life and work of John Everett Millais, (1829-1896) staged last year, can now be seen at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. The model for his painting ‘Ophelia’, depicting Hamlet’s lover drowning, was Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862), whose life was every bit as tragic as the character she depicts. Before she came into contact with the Pre-Raphaelites, Siddal worked as a seamstress in a milliner’s shop, where her exceptional beauty – she had striking copper hair – was noticed by the artist Walter Howell Deverell, who asked her to pose for him. Deverell introduced her to his friends – Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti – who had just founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In their quest for purity, the angelic looking Siddal personified their ideals. Within a short time she had posed for Rossetti’s ‘Rossovestita’ and Holman Hunt’s ‘Valentine’ and ‘A Converted British Family’. In 1851 she posed for ‘Ophelia’ in Millais’ studio. She wore a silver thread, embroidered dress the artist had specially bought and floated in this in a filled bathtub, where she lay for several hours in increasingly cold water. As a result Siddal developed tuberculosis that proved almost fatal and Millais was obliged to pay the doctor’s bills.
Afterwards she only posed for Rossetti and began writing poetry and painting herself. As his muse, Rossetti nurtured her artistic development while always being concerned about her poor health. Rossetti, a notorious womaniser, saw women as either virgins or whores (Siddal fell into the first category). Their relationship was platonic for many years, much to Siddal’s disappointment, and she resignedly watched him in the company of other women, including models, before they eventually married.
Siddal, a working class girl, was never accepted by Rossetti’s family, and the couple’s happiness was short lived. Humiliated by Rossetti’s infidelities and with unfulfilled ambitions, she numbed herself by taking laudanum – an addictive combination of opium and alcohol. She was overjoyed when she became pregnant but the baby was still born. In 1862 she died of an overdose. It is unsure whether this was an accident or suicide but an autopsy revealed she was pregnant again.
Siddal was buried in the Rossetti family grave at Highgate Cemetery. Her husband placed his manuscript of unpublished poems in her hair. Shortly after he painted ‘Beata Beatrix’, one of his best works, in memory of his wife, but thereafter his life fell apart. He too became addicted and mentally unstable. His notorious agent urged him to recover his manuscript but partly out of love for Siddal and the fact that grave desecration was illegal he initially declined. However, ambition got the better of him and in 1869 the poems were exhumed at the dead of night – Rossetti was not present.
These were published but not well received. In deep crisis, he spent the last ten years of his life, alone, in poor health at Birchington-on-Sea, where he died suddenly. At his request he was buried in the local church, not wanting to be in the family grave and look Siddal in the eyes.
Script: fashion & interiors by Chris Reinewald p. 60-63
In the new fashion and interior displays at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, which are drawn together under the name ‘Script, sets from famous costumes films are used to depict the fashions and attitudes of various style epochs. Most people have squirmed with embarrassment when looking at pictures of themselves from the eighties – could not someone have mentioned the idiocy of outsized clothes and shoulder pads? But that is the point: belonging to a certain style group, be it power dressing, disco, New Wave or punk, means everyone looks roughly the same. But behind fashion’s apparent modishness lurk systematic social trends, which are picked up and dropped in ever shorter time spans. Modishness in itself is nothing new: Michael de Montaigne complains about blindly following trends in his essay of 1580. “The new manner of dressing means that the old is promptly censured and with such determination and general consensus that you would think they are gripped by a kind of mania, which turns their thinking on its head”.
‘Script’ (until 8 August 2009) places fashion styles within a social and cultural context. It is the concept of Central’s director Pauline Terreehorst, as is her informative guided tour that visitors can download on their iPod before arriving. Due to the fragility of certain clothing items these will change every three months until August, but the film set displays and clips from films that have inspired fashion trends and reflect major social and cultural upheavals of the time will remain. These range from ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ and ‘Madam Bovary’ to ‘Basic Instinct’ and ‘Blade Runner’. In films like ‘The Age of Innocence’ and ‘Gosford Park’ the English class system is glimpsed – the social divide in the great houses between those ‘below stairs’ (the servants) and those ‘above’ (the ruling class). The film set display reflecting this includes a sofa with leisure clothing and a smoking jacket next to a splendid painting of moonlight by Jongkind, the precursor of Impressionism, on an easel. Opposite this a sombre film set depicting honest unpainted wood and a black gentlemen’s suit, representing physical and spiritual hygiene, is inspired by director John Ford’s ‘Young Mr Lincoln’, a film about the assassinated American president Abraham Lincoln.
Into the near present and a disco floor has been recreated to display a varied collection of retro clothing including a classic biker’s jacket with graffiti, quirky punk dress by designer Vivienne West wood, zoot suits and miscellaneous classic and hedonistic dressing. Falling outside the film set context is a display around the first fairytale computer game ‘Myst’ (1993). In this virtual world the player gets to have control in a kind of adventure film. The display includes antique Utrecht cupboards, the doors of which reflect those in ‘Myst’, behind which treasures and monsters are hidden. Finally, the modern interior, c.1920, with its Rietveld furniture from the museum collection, is not to be missed. Here filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s classic film about a man with a movie camera in a large city is also being screened.
Letter from Brussels by Peter Wouters p. 66-72
The former mining complex Grand-Hornu Images in Mons/Bergen is featuring the coloured vases of Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, who recently died at the age of 90. Made from delicate majolica, they were commissioned by the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, makers of the famous sèvres pottery, and created between 1993 and 2006 at Sottsass’s Italian studio in Montelupo.
The retrospective of the Antwerp painter Pol Mara (1920-1998) at the city’s Provinciehuis includes his paintings, designs, prints and personal archive. The artist is chiefly known for his large figurative works of young women made from the late 1960s on. After training, he worked in a neo-expressionist style, followed by a period of exclusively abstract work and was also co-founder of the avant-garde G58 Hessenhuis group.
In ‘The Imaginary Museum of Maurice Materlink’ the award-winning Musée Provincial Félicien Rops in Namen is showing artworks that have inspired the writer as well as the work of artists that illustrated his books. Also a playwright and essayist, Materlink (1862-1949), who settled in Paris, was the only Belgian author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What is Wallonian art? At Bozar, the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, the retrospective ‘Treasures Old and New from Wallonia’ has attempted an answer. . Choosing art works and decorative arts for their narrative character, Lauren Busine, the exhibition’s curator, presents a freely drawn portrait of Wallonia between the twelve and sixteenth centuries, long before the region was known by the name.
Also in Brussels the specially built new wing for Islamic art has finally opened at the Royal Museum of Art and History. The collection includes decorative arts from the sixth century and is one of the most important in the Benelux. Carpets are now displayed in specially designed vitrines of natural stone and ceramics and metalwork in temperature controlled inbuilt cupboards.
The Groeningemuseum in Bruges is presenting sixty ‘bozzetti’ or Italian sketches from Austria’s Baroque period. The highly animated sketches were made in different media and techniques and depict various stages of precision. They were also intended for various purposes. It is known that the Austrians Kremser Schmidt and Franz Anton Maulbertsch had assistants who executed altar pieces and frescos based on their masters’designs. Invariably the results of such team effort often lacked the exceptional colourfulness and freedom of the original sketches.
Craftsmanship and originality typify the work of Belgian silversmith and metalworker Nedda El-Asmar (1968) which is showcased at the Design Museum in Ghent. Her list of prestigious clients and award winning designs is impressive. For the French company Puiforcat she produced ‘Wave’, a set of stainless steel cutlery, and ‘Central Park’, a silver tea and coffee service presented to Prince Filip and Princess Mathilde for their wedding.
Finally, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brussels World Exhibition, or ‘Expo 58’ as it is commonly known, various cultural institutes are staging events and exhibitions. These include the former venue itself, the monumental Atomium – still standing even though originally only built for the duration of the exhibition.
Letter from Paris by Waldemar Kamer p. 80-86
Heroes and heroines is the theme running through several early spring shows. A major exhibition of Marie-Antoinette at the Grand Palais (15 March – 16 June) promises to be a blockbuster in terms of visitors, media hype and spin-off merchandising. Some 350 art works have been drawn together to illustrate the life of this beautiful but tragic queen. Divided into three sections, the exhibition opens with Bernardo Bellotto's ‘View of Schönbrunn’, the castle in Austria where she was born. The eleventh daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, she grew up in opulence but with attention paid to her artistic development. Her arranged marriage with Louis, the year younger French Dauphin, took place when she was fifteen at Versailles, amid untold pomp and splendour. The second section of the exhibition traces Marie-Antoinettes reign as Queen of France, including the role of Petit Trianon in her life, the small castle given to her by her husband, where she staged theatricals with her friends. Wild rumours about what really took place behind the closed doors of her ‘boudoir’ there, coupled with a perceived extravagant lifestyle led to her increasing unpopularity. The final section describes her downfall and the ultimate price she paid – her imprisonment in the Temple and her execution in 1793.
Two exhibitions are marking the 300th birthday of Marie-Antoinette’s contemporary Benjamin Franklin, inventor and co-signatory of the American Declaration of Independence. The one at the Musée des Arts et Métiers focuses on his inventions – the most famous being a lightening rod conductor – while the Musée Carnavalet on the American’s stay in Paris between 1776 and 1785. After America declared independence in 1776, Franklin was sent to Paris on a diplomatic mission to gain French support against the British. Regarded as a ‘modern man’ he was hugely popular in France, even if his appearance in the capital without a wig and in simple garb caused a furore at the royal court.
When Franklin died in 1790 there was three days of state mourning in France – this we learn from an exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale which looks at heroes down the centuries. People have always created mythic figures and initially these were drawn from among the aristocracy, the ones who travelled and fought valiant battles like Alexander the Great. In medieval times heroes were Christians, chaste like the knight Lancelot fighting for his Queen Genevieve. Wars and revolutions continued to create heroes, but it was not until the Second World War that people began to identify with victims, like Anne Frank or resistance fighters like Che Guevara.
The Decorative Arts department of the Fashion Museum has found an original way to display its extensive collection. A designer – the first is Christian Lacroix – is invited to select four hundred clothing items from 1633 on and hang one hundred of his or her own alongside those from the collection. Over at the National Natural History Museum its exhibition on pearls includes twenty-five black ones once belonging to the French Queen, Catherina de Medici.
Letter from London by Huon Mallalieu p. 92-97
How much, one wonders, did the branding of ‘FuturePlan’ cost the Victoria and Albert Museum? Not perhaps quite as much as the change to ‘SouthBank Centre’ for the management organisation of the ‘Arts Quarter’ (as nobody calls it), formerly known as The South Bank Centre. We are now apparently supposed to attach that ugly and amorphous concept to such familiar specifics as the Royal Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery, National Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall and, for all I know, Tate Modern. Such silly run-together names do not come cheap, since obviously they cannot be evolved without committees and sub-committees full of creative talent and backed by teams of researchers, pollsters, psychologists, market analysts health-and-safety and equality advisers and God-knows-what-all. Over a ten year period the V&A’s FuturePlan will: ‘Bring clarity to the physical space of the museum; Re-emphasise the quality of the original building; Ensure that the collections are beautifully displayed and easy to understand’ – all admirable aims to which no one could object. It would be interesting to know, however, how the cost of the name relates proportionally to the museum’s purchase budget. On a much larger scale the £50m grant for the new extension at Tate Modern represents a huge slice of the total expenditure for all British museums and galleries, and it is not surprising that the priorities of arts administrators are so widely questioned. The new wing will allow more of the Tate Modern collection to be brought out of storage, but presumably much of the best has already been on display, and a frequent criticism is that the contents fail to live up to the building that we have already. I would happily take a small bet that when the wing is opened there will be an expensive marketing campaign rebranding the place as ‘TateModern’. To return to the V&A, where the current phase of development includes work on a new suite of galleries for the display of the Medieval and Renaissance collections. These galleries will open in November 2009 and in the meantime highlights from the collection can be seen in Room 117. There until 27 April a small display highlights the growing market in 16th century Europe for decorative goods. Works by some of the greatest sculptors of the period, such as Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini and Giambologna, are included. As well as unique objects created for wealthy patrons, there are also examples of decorative items made in larger quantities for more diverse markets. The manufacture of German stoneware vessels, Spanish lustreware ceramics, Limoges enamels and Venetian metalwork are all highlighted in focused displays.
NATIONAL GALLERY: SWAGGER AND FABRIC
For nearly half a century in the mid 18th century no prince or milord visiting Rome on his Grand Tour could omit the rite of being painted by Pompeo Batoni (1708 – 1787). Benjamin West, the American President of the Royal Academy, said, ‘When I went to Rome, the Italian artists of that day thought of nothing, looked at nothing, but the work of Pompeo Batoni’. The placing of sitters before the Colosseum or other monuments was his conception, and he also influenced portrait painters across the continent. While his swaggering Grand Tour portraits are among the most memorable artistic accomplishments of the period, he was also a gifted history painter, and his religious and mythological works were eagerly acquired by the greatest patrons and collectors in Britain and mainland Europe. This exhibition (20 February – 18 May), which marks the tercentenary of Batoni’s birth, will be the first comprehensive presentation of his paintings in forty years. It will provide a vivid appreciation of the artistic achievement of ‘Italy’s Last Old Master,’ through the finest examples available in the public and private collections of Europe and America. His status as Rome’s most sought-after painter for both portraits and history paintings will be demonstrated by works never previously publicly exhibited, as well as newly discovered and recently restored works.
Alison Watt, the seventh Associate Artist at the National Gallery, and the youngest in the scheme’s history, may not do swagger herself, but she understands the attraction. Born in Greenock in 1965, she studied at the Glasgow School of Art and in 2000 she became the youngest artist to be offered a solo show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. A childhood trip to London to visit the National Gallery resulted in a lifelong admiration for Ingres’s 1856 portrait of Mme. Moitessier, which has been a constant source of inspiration for her, especially as to the suggestive power of fabric.The Rootstein Hopkins Foundation Associate Artist is appointed for a period of two years, working in the National Gallery studio with the brief of creating new work that relates to the Gallery’s permanent collection. The aim of the scheme is to demonstrate the continuing inspiration of the Old Master tradition on today's artists. (13 March – 15 June). www.nationalgallery.org.uk
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY: TRUE BLUES
‘Brilliant Women’ explores the image and identity of the independent creative woman in 18th century Britain by investigating the impact of the original 'Bluestocking' Circle - a group of women writers, artists and thinkers, first brought together as a ‘salon’ by Elizabeth Vesey in the 1750s, and later centred on the poets Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More. Male intellectual lions also attended their meetings, and indeed the mocking term ‘Bluestocking’ came from the characteristic garb of Benjamin Stillingfleet. They were celebrated for forging new links between gender, learning and virtue in eighteenth-century Britain, and were not just brilliant but were exceptional, both for their individual accomplishments and for collectively breaking the boundaries of what might be expected of women. The writers Hester Thrale, Fanny Burney, Anna Seward and Maria Edgeworth continued and expanded their work. The exhibition (13 March – 15 June) includes famous paintings and rarely seen portraits, graphic satires and personal artefacts to illustrate the world of the Bluestocking Circle. It also considers the way a wider circles of blues, such as the artist Angelica Kauffmann, historian Catharine Macaulay and early 'feminist' Mary Wollstonecraft, used portraiture to advance their work and their reputations in a period framed by the new possibilities introduced by the Enlightenment and the restrictions re-imposed as a reaction to the age of revolution.
There is also a show (to 26 May) of portrait photographs from Vanity Fair, both from the magazine’s first period, 1913 – 1936, and from its reincarnation, 1983 - , that is to say from Monet to Madonna, or from Steichen to Leibovitz.
www.npg.org.uk
HAYWARD GALLERY: LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU
Video artists seem to be among the most humourless people on the planet, so it will be very interesting to see how they perform in ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’ which aims to explore the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art. In a time of increasing globalisation, this international exhibition asks whether humour can only be appreciated by people with similar cultural, political or historical backgrounds and memories, or on the other hand laughter can act as a means, or indeed catalyst, to understanding. ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’ makes the large claim to ‘investigate the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire’. It will be very interesting to see if the case for universal humour can be made. Two of my favourite galleries to visit are the Musée de la Bande Dessinée in Brussels and the Cartoon Museum in Basle, both of which provide evidence that certain jokes appeal throughout the ‘Western’ world at least, while others work only locally. This exhibition (to 13 April) brings together more than 70 videos, photographs and interactive installation works by more than 30 artists from all around the world, some of them professional humorists, others, one might think, funny only unintentionally. They include: Makoto Aida, Kutlug Ataman, Azorro, Guy Ben-Ner, John Bock, Candice Breitz, Olaf Breuning, Cao Fei, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marcus Coates, Harry Dodge and Stanya Khan, Doug Fishbone, Ghazel, Gimhongsok, Matthew Griffin, Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund, Taiyo Kimura, Peter Land, Janne Lehtinen, Kalup Linzy, Yoshua Okon, Ugo Rondinone, Julian Rosefeldt, Shimabuku, David Shrigley, Nedko Solakov, Barthélémy Toguo, Roi Vaara, Martin Walde and Jun Yang.
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was one of the great figures of early 20th century avant-garde art, and also one of its most versatile practitioners. After winning an international reputation as a painter, sculptor and graphic artist, in the 1920s he turned to photography as the medium of the future. Here are about 120 original prints and photomontages, tracing his photographic progress through two decades during which he produced many of the classic images of Russian and indeed world photography. He gave it a new language of unusual camera positions, severe foreshortening of perspective and close-ups of unexpected details. In this he is said to have balanced the technical compositional concerns of an artist with his interest in the social and political life of the new Bolshevik state. Individual portraits, studies of modern architecture and industry, pictures of mass demonstrations and public entertainments become powerful images which had a marked influence on the aesthetics of European photography into the 1930s. The show (to 27 April) comes from and is curated by The Museum Moscow House of Photography, with the support of Roman Abramovich, and it is part of Russian ACT 2008, a celebration of Russian culture including film, music, contemporary art and photography which continues across London until April. Further information on this is on www.russianact.co.uk
www.hayward.org.uk
BARBICAN ART GALLERY: AS OTHERS SEE US
It is not really the place of a mere Earthling to pass comment on ‘Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art’ a show (6 March –18 May) which will present a large collection of contemporary art objects in the guise of a museum conceived by and intended for extra-terrestrials. Assuming that the actual organisers have really managed to free themselves from conventional lines of thought, a Martian perspective should open up contemporary art to fresh readings. Works will be classified in an eccentric taxonomic structure to produce surprising juxtapositions and humorous interpretations. The four broad categories are; ‘Kinship and Descent’, ‘Magic and Belief’, ‘Ritual’, and ‘Communication’. The show brings together over 150 works, including sculptures, mixed media, photographs, works on paper and videos by about 60 artists, among them Joseph Beuys, Jimmie Durham, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Brian Jungen, Louise Lawler, Piero Manzoni, Mike Nelson, Cornelia Parker, Haim Steinbach, Jeffrey Vallance, Gillian Wearing, Andy Warhol and Rebecca Warren.
www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery
ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART: POTS OF MONEY
Ceramic Art London is one of three significant design fairs that take place in London each spring, alongside last month’s ‘Collect’ at the V&A and ‘FORM London’ at Olympia from 28 February to 2 March. The selling point, so to speak, of Ceramic Art is that it is the only one that allows makers, rather than galleries, to sell work directly to the public. This year, eighty leading potters will be showing at what is now becoming a major international showcase for contemporary ceramics. A mix of well-known hands and newcomers from the UK, France, Germany, South Africa, Israel and Japan display their individually designed work to an international audience drawn from the public, collectors, gallery owners, investors and fellow potters. There will be a wide variety of styles, colour, and forms, and an equally wide price range, from £15 to £10,000. Notable this year will be exquisite sculptural works by Peter Hayes, Peter Beard and Claire Loder; work by recent graduates such as RCA student Louisa Taylor, who has already been commissioned to create a range of casual tableware for Wedgwood; quirky limited editions by Carole Windham, who draws inspiration from Pop Art and nineteenth century Staffordshire Pottery; and work by Jon Lawrence, a young ceramist who casts antique forms and covers the surfaces with graffiti-like scrawls and transfers. Set up by the Craft Potter’s Association – the ceramic equivalent of the Royal Academy - in 2005, Ceramic Art London was founded to be a platform for contemporary work in a medium that has sometimes been considered a poor relation to the fine arts. The main fair is supplemented by a display of new work by Royal College of Art students, to show current trends in studio ceramics. There is a programme of free talks and events including a talk by the influential British potters Edmund De Waal and Elizabeth Fritsch, and a ‘Desert Island Pots’ interview with Emmanuel Cooper, editor of Ceramic Review.
www.ceramics.org.uk
TATE BRITAIN: GRACES AND OTHER FIGURES
There is much to consider and to enjoy at Tate Britain this spring in three shows which might seem unrelated at first glance, but are in fact linked by their concern with representing the figure. The monumental Duveen Galleries are the perfect setting for the first exhibition to offer the full range of British neo-classical sculpture. These extraordinary marble pieces were designed to astonish and captivate, as artists were given hitherto unknown license to create highly charged nudes with vitality and sensuality. From the exquisite poise of Canova’s The Three Graces to the dramatic vigour of Thomas Banks’s The Falling Titan, the human figure, transformed and idealised in white marble, was the essence of this sculpture. Study of the body, and the contradiction of simulating soft and evanescent flesh in permanent, solid, stone, inspired by and transcending classical models, produced some outstanding masterpieces of figurative sculpture. The show (to 4 June) is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.
Even if London trailed behind Paris and Milan, the decade after 1905 was a time of extraordinary innovation. It has rightly been said that almost everything worthwhile in 20th century art was one or prefigured then. Among the London artists were the Camden Town Group, who introduced Post-Impressionism to Britain. ‘Modern Painters’ focuses on the key themes in their work: the city, people, style, sex, and the Camden Town murder. Fascinated by the changing ways of life in the capital, the Group captured the essence of this transitional period. Images of London buses, audiences enjoying light entertainment and gritty urban interiors evoke the atmosphere of a city and a country moving into the modern era, whilst nudes painted in dingy North London homes explore the changing sexual mores described in the contemporary writing of HG Wells, DH Lawrence, and Rebecca West. The exhibition (to 4 May) concentrates on the core of the Group - Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner – with Walter Sickert as a key player. This is the first exhibition of the Camden Town Group for over twenty years, although it follows the Courtauld’s show of Sickert’s nudes.
Peter Doig is an internationally admired British painter who made his name with his distinctive approach to figurative painting, but he also has art critical detractors. Like Sickert in taking newspaper images or snapshots as a starting point, Doig recasts such everyday imagery to present imaginary, evocative landscapes and figure scenes. All are imbued with a strong sense of atmosphere – his figures often seem out of time, and his landscapes possessed of a strange, haunting presence. Spanning the last two decades, this major survey brings together (to 27 April) over 50 paintings and a substantial group of works on paper. It includes a significant body of work made since his move to Trinidad in 2002 – including many pieces that have never been shown in the UK.
www.tate.org.uk
TATE MODERN: SHOCK OF THE OLD
Although Tate Modern describes this as a ‘provocative’ exhibition, it is hard to see how it could be so, since the ideas of the three artists - Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptualism and creator of the “readymade”, Man Ray, photographer and painter, and Francis Picabia, painter and poet – have been accepted and served up reheated (or rather, lukewarm) for the best part of a century. Their meeting led to the export of Dadaism to New York during the First World War, and the three pioneers remained friends, with periods of varying intensity, throughout their live, sharing a special artistic dialogue. At the heart of their friendship lay a common outlook on life, which emerged in jokes, a sense of irony, and a pronounced interest in eroticism. ‘Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia’ explores the affinities and parallels between the work of these three, showing how they responded to each others’ ideas and innovations.
The exhibition (21 February to 26 May) features over 400 works with key pieces such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912 which created a furore when displayed in the Armory Show of 1913, the iconic Fountain, 1917 and the Mona Lisa parody L.H.O.O.Q, 1919, with Man Ray’s distinctive rayographs, and Picabia’s later paintings. There has been no major exhibition of this kind at the Tate since the Duchamp show of 1966.
www.tate.org.uk
SHORTS
Two exhibitions that have recently opened will receive full treatment in our next issue. They are ‘Amazing Rare Things’ at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until September, which has come south from Her other Gallery at Holyroodhouse, and ‘Masterpieces from the Louvre’, paintings from the La Caze bequest, at the Wallace Collection, until 18 May.
The theme of the opera box provoked some of that patchy artist Renoir’s best work. The latest in the Courtauld series of small exhibitions tightly focused on one of the masterworks in the collection examines La Loge of 1874. It is compared and contrasted with similar compositions by Mary Cassatt and other contemporaries.
Nazif Topçuoglu: Ain't Ms. Behaving by Jonathan Turner p. 114-117
The well-to-do young women and girls in the recent photographs by Turkish artist Nazif Topçuoglu are captured in dramatic poses that recall Baroque painting. They are bathed in a theatrical light that purposely refers back to such masters as Caravaggio, Titian and Ingres. Now with his second solo exhibition at Flatland Gallery in Utrecht, Topçuo€lu reveals how he also reinterprets such literary references as Proust, Mann and Nabokov to produce a subtle political commentary on such themes as life in the Middle East, the supposed innocence of youth and the role that women now play in the contemporary world. "I need to produce images which are provocative, but not exploitative," Topçuoglu explains in this exclusive interview.
Girls on the verge of womanhood gaze off into the distance, or look back at the viewer with candid expressions. Given such potent titles as Stigma and Suicide, the recent photographs by Istanbul-based artist Nazif Topçuoglu from his New World (2007) series, present moments of high drama in a disquieting way. The colours, lighting and cropping are reminiscent of classical paintings on mythological and religious subjects. The late 19th Century settings provide backdrops for girls involved in games, symbolic activities and scenes of learning. Although his models are draped in highly expressive poses, lost in thought or frozen in mid-sentence, their faces are devoid of such strong emotions as horror, fear or pain. Instead, they seem poised on the brink of discovery. Literally, Topçuoglu 's models are ladies in waiting.
"In my new works, all photographed in Istanbul, I used only Turkish girls, none of them professional models. This is a political statement in itself, in an Islamic country where the big issues include the way women are dressed, and what they put over their heads and faces. Of course, it can be difficult to find models, but mine tend to be well-educated girls and university students."
Topçuoglu explains further in his writings: "When people look at my photographs of these young girls, sometimes vague allusions to sexuality and Lolita come up, even though the internationally renowned Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk claims that, for Nabokov, the main issue is not sexuality but the yearning for childhood. Readers who are old enough might also be reminded of Maurice Chevalier in his amusing French accent singing "Thank Heaven For Little Girls", in the movie Gigi with Leslie Caron. Or, those who have a darker disposition, will think of Death in Venice, via Thomas Mann or Visconti; in both cases as extreme examples of the culmination of one almost fetishistic desire for youth and innocence. These photographs tend towards a confrontation with time, memory and loss. One might say that, in order to cope with the transience of life, I am trying to recreate the unclear images of a past which I idealize."
In his large-scaled photograph Suicide, there are three points of focus - the dead girl in a night-dress splayed on the marbles tiles, a girl looking down from the balcony above and a group of girls in school uniforms turning the pages of a magazine. "It's the sad fate of secular girls in Turkey," says Topçuoglu, about this image with its plunging perspective. "There is the dead girl fallen like Icarus, a sad lover gazing down at her, and a circle of rich, upper-class, high society girls ignoring the scene altogether, looking at the photos in a fashion magazine. Rather than an allegorical picture, I see this as part of a broader social context, but still slightly tongue-in-cheek, of course. Regarding women and their lifestyle under an Islamic government, we can see that the secular experiment has failed. Their only idea of what is secular is really simple: international fashion."
Similarly, in Stigma, we see the twin acts of accusation and isolation, naivety and blame. The artist displays conscious irony when he enlarges such intimate, "hidden" moments into such grand photography. Both scenes were shot in the stairwell of the same ornate 19th Century building. Nothing is co-incidental in Topçuo€lu's work, there are many layers of metaphor. "The building is a turn-of-the-century bank, built by the Western powers who invested in the Ottoman Empire. It was their place of security, their way to remove funds and to control the financial market. It's the story of Turkey," he adds with a laugh.
The fingers pointed in blame in Stigma are not the sole reference to classical art. There is also the cold, directional lighting we recognize from Rembrandt. With their short hair and the occasional tattoo, although the models are obviously modern, "The light is old Dutch," says the artist. "When you use strong photographic lighting, it suddenly becomes painterly. It's does not have the warmth of normal mediterranean light, but it's more moody and gloomy like Caravaggio and his Doubting Thomas."
Meanwhile, Lamentations depicts three girls hiding their faces as they mourn their friends, laying on top of each other like a sea on an oriental rug. Topçuoglu mentions The Raft of Medusa (1819) by Théodore Géricault as a clear influence, as well journalistic pictures from Iraq, showing the wailing gestures of widows in war zones. Despite more serious undercurrents, the Turkish girls are decidedly healthy, and the scene is reminiscent of a teenage slumber party. The arched shape of Lamentations might be similar to the form of an altar painting in a church, but these girls enact a variety of poses ranging from submissiveness to wantonness, in a Byzantine game of Twister.
The triangular compositions of such recent works as The Bridge, Reconstruction and The Hunt, lend these photographs a tone of uplifting strength and physical aggression. The expressions of the models are perceptibly haughty, the figures appear assertive. Such works are also used by Topçuoglu to challenge the stereotype that women are not violent, and to question his own previously held belief that the world would be a safer place if it was run by matriarchal figures (as disproved by Condoleeza Rice condoning the war in Iraq, or the assassination of Pakistan's former president Benazir Bhutto). In an earlier work, Cain and Abel (2003), Topçuo€lu even shows two girls restaging the primeval struggle between two brothers, but this time using books as their weapons.
Books, the literature of Proust and library shelves have appeared regularly in Topçuo€lu's work, even before his Early Reader series in 2001. Books, and by inference knowledge, are powerful weapons against the idea that, in a male-orientated society, the education of women is fraught with danger. So Topçuo€lu shows his models posed with novels and scientific instruments. Others impersonate feminine versions of such characters as Tadzio, the young boy from Death in Venice.
Given his fascination for literature, it is may not be so surprising that Topçuoglu has published three books on photography criticism and history. He has a master's degree in Photography from Chicago's Institute of Design, and another in Architecture completed at METU in Ankara. "I also lived in Canada for a while." Many of his earlier works were dedicated to compositions combining the bloody innards of animals with young models dressed to look like well-behaved English schoolgirls. Two series entitled Offal With Girls, were created in Topçuoglu 's studios in Istanbul (2000), then New York (2001), in which he contrasted the clear skin of pristine maidens with the repulsive forms of entrails, and all the accompanying symbolism. Although he has been producing photographs since about 1990, Topçuoglu emerged on the international art scene in the Turkish pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, before participating in the Biennale of Photography in Moscow (2006) and the Noorderlicht Festival in Groningen (2007), as well as being shown in exhibitions in galleries in Istanbul, Barcelona, Paris and in Germany. This is his second solo show at Flatland Gallery.
According to critic Katerina Gregos: "Despite the old-fashioned mise-en-scene, however, the subtexts in Topçuoglu's photographs remain purely contemporary: from the issue of gender politics, to questions of voyeurism and desire associated with the male gaze, and above all, the problems of representing women." His photography is like a scrapbook of the curiosity and blind determination of feminine youth, incorporating teenage angst, adolescent dreaminess and the death of innocence. Naughtiness and mischief are never far behind. The sense of religious expectancy, like the solitude of those church paintings of the Virgin at the Annunciation, is all the more powerful given that Topçuo€lu works in a Muslim country, with a history of strictly enforced codes for the representation of human figures. This is also why his work is now catching so much attention. "Partly, it's my comment on the absence of women in art and Middle-Eastern literature," says Nazif Topçuoglu. "Youth has the potential for purity and hope. In any case, I like to give aesthetic pleasure. I'm not against beauty."
Nazif Topçuoglu - March 8 - April 18, 2008 - Flatland Gallery - www.flatlandgallery.com
Letter from Newy York by Amy Page p. 118-122
TALK OF THE TOWN
A museum installation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a new art fair, and publicity surrounding the discovery of a million dollar painting by Rufino Tamayo that was lying on the street on the street on the Upper West Side of New York, have all sparked considerable interest in Latin American art in New York this past November. The MoMA show , which runs through 25 February features some 200 works by Latin American artists that have been acquired by the museum in the past decade. By concentrating on works produced between 1930 and 1960 and on artists who were overlooked in the past, the show provides a more accurate view of the scope of Latin American art than usually is found in this type of show. Especially interesting is the museum’s showing of movements and artistic mediums associated with early Constructivist trends in Latin America. The emphasis on abstract works--by artists such as Joachin Torres-Garcia (Uruguay), Alejandro Otero (Venezuela) and Jesus Raphael Soto (Venezuela)—is interesting in that it reflects where much interest lies today. Soto, for example, was the star of the new contemporary Latin American art fair PINTA, and other abstract works were much in evidence.
The new art fair, which as scheduled at the same time as the Latin American auctions, promises to be an annual event. When I went there, the mood was buoyant and the fair well-attended. This year’s event had 35 dealers, from several Latin American countries as well as New York, who showed works ranging from 20th century masters (think Botero, Matta, Lam) to 21st century rising stars.
The second highest price at Sotheby’s sale of Latin American art , was Tamayo’s “Tres Personages,” 1970, a work that had been stolen twenty years ago from a warehouse in Houston, Texas. It was found abandoned the sidewalk on West 72nd by a woman who was passing by. The woman contacted someone at Sotheby’s, who had talked about the stolen painting on the television shoe, The Antiques Roadshow. He contacted the owner, who then asked Sotheby’s to sell the painting, which sold to an American collector for $1,049.000. That is just the sort of story that people love to hear about and you may be certain that New York garbage is now being scrutinized very carefully.
New Oceanic Galleries Opens at Met
Following a three year renovation, the New Galleries for Oceanic Art reopened in late November, revealing a completely redesigned and reinstalled exhibition space for the showing of one of the world’s best collections of art from Oceania—an area that includes Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, Australia, and, what the museum calls “Island Southeast Asia,” a region that encompasses Indonesia, the Philippines and adjoining regions. The inaugural exhibition of more than 425 works includes Melanesian highlights from the Museum’s collection that were collected by Michael C. Rockefeller in the 1970s, including two from the Asmat people of New Guinea, a group of nine ancestor poles and the Museum’s well-known canoe, which is more than 48 feet long and is capable of carrying up to 20 people. At the center of the Melanesian gallery is a soaring, brightly colored ceiling from a ceremonial house of the Kwoma people of New Guinea. More than 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, the ceiling is composed of more than 270 paintings, which were commissioned from a group of Kwoma master artists in the 1970s. Other highlights of the installation include one of the only sculptures that survived from the island of Mangareva, southwest of Tahiti, a group of wood sculptures from Easter Island, works from the Maori people of New Zealand puppets from Sumatra, and weather charm figures from the Caroline Islands, stylized human figures with kegs made from the sharp spines of stingrays.
Tara Donovan at the Met
“Tara Donovan at the Met” (until 27 April) is the fourth in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s series of solo exhibitions of mid-career contemporary artists, which has featured Tony Oursler (2005), Kara Walker (2006), and Neo Rauch (2007). Like the others, Donovan was free to create whatever she wanted. The result is a new, large-scale work conceived specifically for display in Museum’s galleries by New York-based artist. Donovan (born 1969) used silver Mylar tape to create Untitled (Mylar), 2007, a wall-mounted installation that encompasses the entire 1,600-square-foot Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery on the mezzanine level of the Museum’s Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Through a massive accumulation of metallic loops that both reflect and refract light, Donovan transforms the space into a unique phenomenological experience for the viewer.
In the construction of her installations, Tara Donovan uses single, common manufactured materials — such as tape, Styrofoam cups, toothpicks, clear plastic buttons, or drinking straws — and amasses up to millions of units into a structure that may resemble a topographical landscape, geological formation, or atmospheric condition. With roots in Earth Art, Process Art, Minimalism, and Post-Minimalism, Donovan’s work explores the inherent physical characteristics of the medium at hand while transcending the utilitarian nature of the materials.
Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim
The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum will present the most comprehensive survey to date of the work of Cai Guo-Qiang The exhibition, “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe” represents the museum’s first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist. Designed as a spectacular site specific installation within the museum’s galleries, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rotunda, he exhibition will present a chronological and thematic survey that charts the artist’s creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: gunpowder drawings; site specific explosion events; large-scale installations; and social projects. Featured are over 80 works created by the artist from the 1980s to the present that were selected from major public and private collections in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
“Cai Guo-Qiang is a transnational artist of extraordinary creative vision,” says Thomas Krens., c-organizer—with Alexandra Munroe—of the exhibition. “The Guggenheim is pleased to present Cai’s retrospective, which examines the full scale and complexity of his art and science of transformation.” Cai Guo-Qiang is internationally recognized as an artist, curator, and creator of large-scale explosion events, who has been active in exhibitions, biennales, and public celebrations around the world for the last twenty years. Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, and a resident of New York since1995, Cai is acclaimed as a bold originator of new forms of art that use gunpowder to create large-scale “gunpowder drawings” and site-specific “explosion events.” Since the mid-1990s, Cai’s practice has expanded to include interactive installations that often recuperate [change word]signs and symbols of Chinese culture and expose the dialectics of artifice and nature, barbarism and culture, localization and globalization. Cai’s work requires collaboration with tens or even hundreds of workers, including his project team, art-world volunteers and local employees.
The retrospective is designed as a site-specific installation, whose progression of works and compressed aspect will “fill the museum with the power of an explosion.” in Cai’s words. The exhibition focuses on the development and expression of Cai Guo-Qiang’s signature innovation—harnessing gunpowder to create powerful explosions, both as gunpowder drawings on canvas and paper and as explosion events. Three levels of the Guggenheim Rotunda’s ramp will be dedicated to illustrating how the gunpowder drawings cohere with the indoor and outdoor explosion events that Cai has produced in over twenty cities around the world.
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Penn Portraits at The Morgan Library
For the first time in its history, The Morgan Library & Museum will present an exhibition (until 13 April) devoted solely to modern photography, showcasing the institution’s first major set of acquisitions in this field. 'Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers' features sixty-seven portraits of some of the twentieth-century’s most influential artists, authors, and performers by legendary photographer Irving Penn (b. 1917). This rare collection of gelatin silver prints was acquired by the Morgan in 2007 and constitutes an extraordinary visual record of some of the greatest creative minds of the period, including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, Salvador Dalí, T. S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Featuring portraits from every decade of Penn’s sixty-year career to date—beginning with a 1944 photograph of Giorgio de Chirico and ending with a 2006 portrait of Jasper Johns—Close Encounters celebrates Penn as one of the great portrait photographers of our time and captures the feel of New York as a cultural capital during the postwar years. “Irving Penn’s incisive portraits illustrate a rich and defining period in this city’s cultural history,” said Charles E. Pierce, Jr., director of The Morgan Library & Museum. “Many of Penn’s subjects are artistic and literary icons whose own drawings, musical scores, manuscripts, and books are represented in the Morgan’s growing twentieth-century collections. For all these reasons, we could not imagine a more fitting home for these magnificent portraits than the Morgan.”
Irving Penn began his career as a photographer in the 1940s working for Vogue in New York. More than one third of the Morgan’s exhibition focuses on this period, documenting the evolution and maturation of his style. In 1947 he began photographing subjects seated on or in front of a draped rug, including Salvador Dalí, who usually dominated photographers and the portraits they made of him. On Penn’s rug, however, Dalí looks caught, though stylish and defiant. In 1948 Penn constructed a temporary corner out of movable walls within his studio and directed sitters to inhabit the restricted space. Among the 1948 corner photographs on view at the Morgan, Truman Capote is shown armed with an overcoat and a chair, playing to his childlike persona; Marcel Duchamp is elegantly posed and dressed, a svelte, tall line echoing that of the corner itself.
Penn’s portraits from the 1950s, ten of which are featured in the exhibition, begin to capture many of his subjects up close, sometimes cropping their forms to accentuate the two-dimensional design of a composition or filling the large picture frame with a bust or just a head. Penn’s iconic 1957 image of Picasso cloaks the artist’s face in the shadows of a wide-brimmed hat and the folds of a dark overcoat, leaving only the piercing stare of a single illuminated eye to radiate from the center of the photograph. Since the 1960s, Penn has often reduced his portraits to the busts or even just the heads of his sitters. Sometimes subjects close their eyes—for instance, the portraits of Ingmar Bergman (1964), Arthur Miller (1983), and Louise Bourgeois (1992). Only rarely does a subject gaze back at Penn with apparent total acquiescence, as in a powerful 2006 portrait of Jasper Johns.
Antea at the Frick
The Frick Collection is showing (until 27 April ) Parmigianino’s famous portrait of a beautiful young woman known as Antea (c.1531–1534). It is the first time that the portrait has been on view in the United States for the first time in over twenty years. Lent by the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, this painting is one of the most important portraits of the Italian Renaissance. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, identity of Antea is not known for sure. The sitter’s penetrating gaze and naturalistic presentation suggest that she is a real person. One of the earliest mentions of the painting, dating from the late seventeenth century, claims the sitter is Antea, a famous Roman courtesan, and Parmigianino’s mistress. Other theories suggest she is the daughter or servant of Parmigianino, a noble bride, or a member of an aristocratic northern Italian family. Her distinctive face is identical to that of an angel in another famous painting by Parmigianino, his Madonna of the Long Neck (c. 1534–39) that is in the Uffizi in Florence. That portrait is known to have been commissioned by a Parmese noblewoman, Elena Baiardi, which has led some scholars to believe that the subject of Antea was a member of the Baiardi family.
Others have suggested, more plausibly, that the painting is an example of “ideal beauty,” a popular genre of Renaissance female portraiture in which the beauty and virtue of the sitter were of paramount importance, rather than her identity. This single-painting presentation will offer an opportunity to explore the many proposals put forward regarding the sitter’s identity based on a close analysis of her costume and jewelry and a study of the painting’s provenance, as well as the chance to consider the work within its original social and cultural context. In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition Christina Nelson, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, offers a thorough assessment of these diverse identifications, concluding that whoever the sitter was, in his Antea Parmigianino succeeded in revolutionizing the genre of female portraiture by creating a woman with whom the viewer could fall in love.
Top Picks
• The Art Show, presented by members of the Art Dealers Association of America (AADA) is celebrating its 20th year at its annual show in the Park Avenue Armory (21-25 February 2008). This year’s show features some of the associations newest members together with those who have been established for a long time. As always, expect very high quality at this showplace fair.
• The Morgan Library & Museum has a survey of Italian Renaissance drawings from Florence’s Uffizi Gallery through 20 April 2008). Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries focuses on works by major artists who took part in a campaign to decorate the Palazzo Vecchio as the residence of Cosimo I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519-74).
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Silversmith’s to the Nation focuses on two makers, Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, who started in Boston in 1808 and moved to Philadelphia three years later. What is most extraordinary about this show are the monumental vessels celebrating heroes. The grand scale and patriotic imagery are typical of the period (20 November 2007-4 May 2008)..
• The Romantic Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, arguably America’s greatest landscape painters, is on at Adelson Galleries (19 East 82nd Street, through 18 March 2008). Thirty paintings, from all stages of Church’s career, are in the show, most of which come from private collections and have rarely, if ever, been on public display.
• The Gallery of the New York School of Interior Design (170 East 70th Street) is exhibiting Watercolors from the Highgrove Florilegium (through 12 April 2008). The 75 watercolors on view are of plants, fruits and vegetables that grow in the 15 acres of gardens at Highgrove, the residence of the Prince of Wales.