Yippee: London's National Gallery will remain free to all

The annual press conference presenting the National Gallery's upcoming year in exhibitions took place this week. It was also a formal introduction to the NG's new Director, Gabriele Finaldi and to Hannah Rothschild the new (and first female) Chair of its trustees.  They both stressed that in spite of the government's repeated cuts, admission will remain free to all.   This is great news not least of all because there has been plenty of gossip about that other museums--all victims of government cuts-- are considering reintroducing admission charges-- in spite of the clear and strong evidence that the numbers visiting soars when people do not have to pay.
  Starting in November--may it only be earlier--its galleries will no longer be shut because of strike action.  That is when the contract with an external security providing company goes into force. The mismanagement that led to a prolonged strike of the gallery's security employees has been outrageous. Tens of thousands of British and foreign visitors have been unable to see many of the paintings for which the NG is justifiably world famous.  Whatever his achievements, Sir Nicholas Penny did not end his stint as Director on a high note.
    Next move: Get the UK government to change the tax laws to encourage philanthropy. Take the lead from the United States where museums and museum goers are enormously enriched because of gifts from private sources. Even the NG is benefiting from that: On view during the the press conference was a beauty of a small painting by Giovanni da Rimini. New York art lover and billionaire Ronald Lauder gave the National Gallery the money to buy the 15th century painting at Sotheby's in London last year. During Mr Lauder's lifetime it will be on public view every three years for three months and otherwise wherever he chooses to display it. Everybody wins.

London's Museums: Let them eat praise

The politicians and the great and good or equivalent were patting themselves on the back. Under the enormous twisting glass Medusa tendrils of Dale Chihuly's chandelier the crowd at the Victoria&Albert Museum hoovered up tasty canapes and drank nicely chilled white wine. London & Partners "the official promotion company for the capital" bash to encourage the press to get the message out:  London's museums are more Googled than those of any place in the world.  A video message from our blond bombshell mayor Boris Johnson Visitor numbers are way up. Americans are coming in droves. I like a good party but my response to this one was outrage.                                     .
  .The budgets for London's museums are being cut way back ==again. Much of the National Gallery is closed to visitors because its security staff has been on strike for months. Tough luck for all those millions who want to see Leonardo or Veronese.  One or another of the British Museum's galleries are often shut because of staff shortages. The V&A, whose deputy director spoke at the party and which is launching an expansion into East London, has cut curatorial staff so severely that some departments feel they are bleeding to death.
    Hey but why spoil the party? Well because the situation is terrible. Either the government must support the art institutions that are the pride of the country and bring millions of visitors and pounds sterling to the capital every year or it must alter the tax structure to encourage private individuals and corporations to take over their running costs. It is that simple.


 

Making a Splash: Sickert in Dieppe

Under valued, under appreciated but coming up fast, at last.




The photograph of a handsome man in his sixties, hair slicked back, hands on hips, wearing a thigh length, horizontally stripped bathing costume faces the title page "Sickert in Dieppe," a rewarding exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Cirencester.  He looks straight into the camera while knee high in the foaming waves of the English Channel off the Normandy coast. The year was 1920. In fact he might have been staring inland at the Royal Hotel on the front yet nothing about him connects him with the painting of that hotel he completed in 1894, more than a quarter of a century before. It is charming, delightful even and safe. Yet only 8 years later, still in Dieppe he painted "The Fair at Night" seen on the right. And "Le Grand Duquesnne, Dieppe" (left) one of four powerful paintings commissioned for a restaurant which the timid owner rejected. This rewarding, revelatory show gives plenty of support to those who argue that if Sickert remained in Dieppe instead of returning to England he would be far more famous than he is today. He is a much better painter than some French contemporaries who are better known (Sisley comes swiftly to mind), more highly praised and whose work sells for more money.

Rubies, the fourth "r"

A long time ago, it was reading, writing and rithmatic. Now I've added rubies with a minor in emeralds and sapphires or I have tried to. This time my studies took place at l'Ecole off the rue de la Paix in Paris which looks absolutely nothing like P.S. 79 on Morris Avenue where I used to win spelling bees.

Van Cleef & Arpels, a global star in high jewellery, created this school. It occupies a handsome building around the corner from its flagship store near Place Vendome. When I was invited to take one of its courses I was pleased to be asked but not keen to accept. With subject titles like "Stories and Inspirations," or one session offering advice from a stylist  I reckoned the courses were intended to be a luxe and chatty interval between lunch and cocktails. But then people I know who had been said I should give it a chance. I did.

The course I elected was:  "Gemstone Identification: Recognize the Stones."  I doubt that I'd be crazy about rocks even if I could afford them. But looking at beautiful stones even small ones when set in jewels is appealing and it would be good to know if what I am ogling is the real thing or glass.  I know that rubies are red, emeralds green and sapphires blue and even that this is not necessarily so. But how to tell a ruby from a spinel? Or a ruby that was made by a devious man not amoral Mother Earth?  So off I went to Paris to my class, student numbers limited to 16.

Orientation was civilized. Coffee, tea, varieties of water and juices plus thinly veiled social awkwardness. Then it was into class.The large, light classroom looked like a lab with one long table edged with high stools. Tweezers, magnifying loops provided. .Scientific equipment (who know what kind or for what?) on a table along the back. We were told to divide into three groups of four each. But on the day we were only 11. Ours was the odd group out. The three of us would be examining rubies--real and otherwise. Another group got sapphires and the last emeralds.  I will not go into all the paperwork we had to do as we weighed and measured and looked for imperfections (inclusions)-- which it transpired are a good thing if not overdone at least in colored stones like these. The other members of my team were two French women. Very fast my team turned out to be their team with me an undesirable burden. Team Sapphire included a good- humored daughter and mother from Mexico; the former giving the entire two week series of courses to the latter for her birthday-- plus two men in suits who work in high end watches..the kind that feature gems. Team Emerald I never worked out.
  The instructor was a gem expert with long years at Van Cleef&Arpels. He was kind, patient, spoke clearly but very soon I was in way over my head. It was fairly easy to work out which ruby was glass (too perfect) and I was quick to learn the correct way to wrap each example in the special squares of  paper so the stone wouldn't fall out by mistake. Alas it wasn't enough. The biggest lesson I learned was that French women can be ferociously competitive--one of my team mates was desperate to "win" which meant to correctly identify the real ruby in our batch. Her country woman (on her own entirely agreeable) joined the race as she did not want to appear slack.  I was the odd woman out. I just wanted to learn what I could. I did not perceive that this was a contest. Well being the odd woman out is a department in which  I qualify as an expert for all the good it did me.
    Yet it was far from a waste of time. I came home with an appreciation of the skills that go into mastering the identification of gem stones and the determination of their quality. The pros have to be able to do this in seconds in the market place in India or Sri Lanka. We simply have to be dazzled by what they take home.  And being able to tell glass from a gem stone is not a bad lesson for one afternoon's hard work.

London Photo: mostly but not only the same big names

Is there anything left for photographers? Obviously I don't mean the millions taking selfies; I mean for men and women with cameras who want other people--strangers--to look at their work. It is real easy to get the feeling that it has all been done before.

   Make it bigger, very bigger, was one solution. Thomas Struth and Candida Hofer certainly have done well with it. But not me. I look at one of their images and it is as if I've seen them all. The subject matter changes but the result is always the same: Slick and empty.Not empty intriguing;  empty tedious.  Still when I heard about Photo London at Somerset House, the city's new photography fair, I wanted to go. And did.

   Too much. That was my first reaction. So many images..Wall after wall covered with them. Black and White; Color. Landscapes, still lives, portraits. Animals. Visual jokes. Sex and leather. Hundreds, then thousands. 

 It isn't fair to photographers.nor to the rest of us.

 Seeing so much or rather being confronted by so much by so many, living and dead means that I was stopped as I shuffled along by what grabbed my attention; which doesn't necessarily mean what was best. My head and eyes never got clear enough, focused enough, to work out what if anything I think is exceptional as in wonderful at this fair. But I did enjoy some surprises: the first of them a series of three images by Iwajla Klinke, a young Berlin photographer who was being exhibited by Paris- based Galerie Polaris. 

 Klinke likes rituals that include young persons dressing up. When she finds out about such a ritual that appeals to her she goes to it. She does not then ask her subjects to visit her studio in Berlin and recreate their characters. She photographs them on the ritual spot. For all that, the images are not photographers in situ.

A black cloth is hung up; the boy or girl stands before it and all sense of context is removed.  The result is a captivating mixture of the authentic and the artificial. Or that is the way it works out in this this series taken in south Germany in 2014 at the festival known there as Fastnacht Reliquiar. Fat Tuesday, we call it in America. The day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. .

   Amusing, engaging, attractive and not expensive: The set of three framed images is priced at euros 3,300. 

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Rembrandt Late and better than ever

The Jewish Bride   Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

I've loved it since I first saw it a long time ago when I lived in Amsterdam. But it always made me squirm a little. I don't like thinking that I am a prude but prudish is what I felt when looking at it. It is so beautiful and intimate, the cloths worn by the bride and groom are so lusciously glamorous. Rembrandt's "The Jewish Bride," is moving, touching, of course, but touching was just the trouble-- for me. Standing opposite it, I felt like a voyeur, as if I were eavesdropping on a sexually charged intimate moment. Or was there a feminist angle to this: Did I squirm because the  groom was acting like an exhibitionist?  And the bride, alas, a creature trapped in marriage with no escape? So on it went; for years I loved it and felt funny about this painting. Then three days ago when I went to Amsterdam to see the magnificent Late Rembrandt exhibition for what was surely the last time since it closed today. It is a show I first saw here in London at the National Gallery where it ended in January.

At the Rijksmuseum, on a wall to the right of "The Jewish Bride," hangs a small drawing, not easy to make out.. (See below) Only when I'd read the caption and looked again, hard, did I see the head of a man in its upper right hand corner. "The Jewish Bride" was painted between 1665 and Rembrandt's death four years later. The drawing was done in 1662. Whether it was a sketch for the later painting or an example of Rembrandt thinking out loud isn't known. With the help of the caption and Googling, I now know the drawing, and very likely the painting, too, connect to the Old Testament story of Isaac and Rebecca. The couple (I suspect he more than she) were keen to keep their marriage secret because beautiful Rebecca might be a prize worth stealing. They therefore pretended to be brother and sister. But the king, Abimelech, up in the top right hand corner of the drawing, got a look at them when they thought they were alone and saw what we see in both drawing and painting. No wonder I felt like an eaves dropper; a voyeur. In the drawing the king is looking on from behind the couple. In the painting, we--standing in for Abimelech--are face to face with them and at the same time invisible.Their story had a happy ending: The king protected them both. It was happily ever after for them and through Rembrandt, for us. It is one of the most memorable of the many memorable pictures in the show.

Rembrandt, Isaac and Rebeccah spied upon by Abimelech, ca. 1662

And this was not all that was gained by seeing the show in Amsterdam. Not only was the drawing there to "explain" and engage, there was placed next to "The Jewish Bride," a painting not seen in London. "Family Group," Rembrandt's only such portrait, although painted about the same time is the image of the bride five or six years after that secret, stolen moment. She, the same model, is seen together with her husband (a different guy) and their three small children. Here they pose with the desire to be seen for the proud parents they are--or wish.  It is lovely to see the paintings together. The group is neither as charged an image nor as beautiful a painting as the bride but it is made memorable by being shown side by side; a less intense, less intimate later chapter in the story.

Family Group Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig

In London where it ran from October until January, the show was a knock out even if the special exhibition space in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery is too cramped to do justice to almost anything shown there. Maybe my determination to try to get to Amsterdam to see it at the Rijksmusum was the product of some sort of cock-eyed geographical mysticism; as if because Rembrandt spent most of his life there; did most of his work there, it had to be the best place to see it. And I'd heard it was going to be displayed in natural light. (Only partly true as it turned out.) In fact the timing was terrible. I was in New York then back in London with work to do. If felt a little nuts and was expensive in money, too, to rush to Amsterdam to get one more look at the pictures Rembrandt made in the last few years of his life.  Then I just up and did it. 
 Was it worth it? YES YES. I hope anyone reading this managed it too.

One last image; a painting that captured me near the end of the show. You can Google the Bible story. In it, Simeon the old man was near death; Rembrandt was, too.

The Presentation at the Temple or Simeon with the Infant Christ in the Temple,Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.  

Shaking Quakers dwindle while their artistry soars

The 247 international dealers who exhibited at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in March brought many and varied treasures to sell yet one stood apart from all the rest:  Instead their usual chic twenties and thirties French design pieces, Galerie Downtown turned its stand into an evocation of a nineteenth century American Shaker dwelling--part meeting house, part living quarters.  In the middle of the fair's hoopla and hubbub, a glance at the purity, beauty and the feeling of quiet peacefulness it promised lassoed me in. It was even better inside. 

  I saw many objects I coveted at the fair and loved every exhausting day I spent there but the Shakers alone would have made the trek to Maastricht rewarding enough. I wasn't alone. It was very popular with visitors and everything sold fast.

  The Shakers, devout Christians, capitalist communists, were a celibate sect that began in England in the eighteenth century, flourished in America during the century that followed and that still, if just barely, survives today. The last community, in Maine, has three members. A Quaker breakaway, they got their name from the dancing and trembling that was a feature of their meetings. They believed in and practiced racial and sexual equality but in practice it was on the separate but equal side: the women cleaned and cooked and the men crafted some of  most powerfully simple yet magnificent furniture made in America. Those fellows could not have had more steady hands or more perceptive eyes when they set to work creating the objects with the Shakers lived--whether it was a large chest of drawers, a twenty foot long dining table, a straight back chair, a straw hat or a box for storing needles and thread.   




  A book about the galleries collection which was curated by Francois Laffanour and Phillipe Segalot was launched at the fair. “Shaker: Function, purity, perfection,” is a fine introduction to the Shakers and their way of life; the Museums devoted to it (former no longer populated communities), the extraordinary furniture they made and its continuing influence n contemporary designers. That endures; the same cannot be said about the allure of celibate communes.

\\\\A Shaker retiring room   Metropolitan Museum of  Art

Walter Liedtke; art-loving scholar, in memoriam

Walter Liedtke , a specialist in Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he worked for 35 years, was killed on February 3, in the fireball the followed a commuter train crash outside New York. He was on his way home from work. He had a passion for the art that was his subject, the artists who created it and the scholarship that can illuminate our understanding of it. See and listen to him demonstrate that in this video (part of the Met series 82nd and Fifth), in which he talks about Rembrandt's painting Aristotle with a bust of Homer.


What follows is a interview with Walter that I wrote which appeared in the 25th anniversary of TEFAF the biggest and best art and antiques fair that takes place every March in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He was a regular visitor. A deservedly confident professional, he was not arrogant. For him, the fair offered the change to learn as well as to a good time and, occasionally, to buy.
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“Things come out of the woodwork.” This is what draws Dr Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to TEFAF every year. Liedtke. who specializes in North European architectural paintings, says his few days at the Fair may be his only chance to see Old Masters that have come from one private collection and will disappear into another. He sees more Old Masters at the Fair than he can expect to come across  at an auction, private dealers or other museums in a year. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, has a large collection of 99 Dutch paintings of which about half are hanging at any one time.  Now in his late sixties, he continues to be a student of his subject. “At Maastricht I can see maybe 500 different Dutch painters,” he says. “I come back with pages of notes. The experience is great.”

   Although Liedtke goes to TEFAF expecting to learn rather than to buy--“the Met already has a rich collection and the things we lack are quite expensive--” he explains, he occasionally finds paintings that would enhance its holdings. He still vividly recalls one that got away in n 1999. It was a Gerard van Honthorst at the stand of the Milan-based Dutch dealer Rob Smeets. Liedtke thought the $2 million asking price was extremely cheap and reserved it but Smeets would hold it only for one week.  “Everyone at the museum agreed that it was the great Caravaggesque painting we lacked,” he recalls. But at that time there was no one willing to donate the money needed to buy it and the picture went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

            Liedtke himself collects Oriental art but nevertheless twice in the 25 years he has attended the Fair he has ended up buying European paintings to take home. Most recently he could not resist a work by Rotterdam painter Anthony de Lorme at the stand of Raphael Valls.

            Along with many museum professionals who are regular visitors to Maastricht, Liedtke also enjoys the social side of the Fair.  “I have favourite dealers because of their personalities and practical, hands-on knowledge of the field,” he says. He admires their ability to place their bets on decisions sometimes made in hurry. “Otto Naumann will walk into some old lady’s attic, look at a thing and say ‘Yes, I’ll have it for half a million dollars,’” Liedtke says. “It could be by a fairly minor artist but, under a ton of dust, a great example of his work.” He has the candour and uncommon humility to add that at the Metropolitan Museum he is able to study a painting for as long as a decade before coming to a comparable conclusion. 

Catch 22 at the British Museum

The European decorative arts galleries at the British Museum are closed because of staff shortages--not enough guards. The disappointed visitors confronting a broad, tall, closed wood door, is advised to phone ahead in future. And that is just what I've done before setting forth. .
   "Thank you," says the recorded message after quite a few rings and clicks. "All of the information staff are busy at present." There follows a menu that among other options allows me to reserve a wheel chair but offers no info about which galleries are shut for the day. When the menu finishes, the voice begins again:  "I did not get your response." The menu repeats....

The BM is one of the world's greatest museums in a city that bills itself as a culture capital because it is one. It is also one of the most visited institutions in England; a country that runs its museum as if it has not yet managed to make its way into the developed world.

Can this inability to be fully open and to inform the public about what is closed, along with the London- wide shut down of all its museum for three straight days over Christmas, be a problem of such magnitude that it defies solution by museum directors and even more worrying by the people elected to run the country?  Just think of the implications if the answer is yes. Or perhaps it is not necessary to think about that, one only needs to be pained by the all too obvious answers.