Save it for the nation

Save it for the nation my story in the current (November) artnewspaper in print and on line.



https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/long-lost-tudor-tapestry-could-be-saved-for-the-nation

Where there's smoke: Did Henry VIII's--and the nation's-- treasure leave England illegally?

The magnificent St Paul tapestry commissioned by Henry VIII for Hampton Court Palace in 1536 is a  national treasure. It was taken from London to Barcelona in the late 1960s and has remained in Spain ever since. Why was such an exceptional treasure given a license to leave this country?  The answer, it appears, is that it did not have one; that was exported illegally.  Splendid, historically important and technically innovative, the panel is currently back in London.  Spain granted its private owner a temporary license so that conservation work could be carried out by specialist dealers S Franses. They have put in on public view for the next two weeks. The final stage of conservation will then begin. The Spanish temporary license expires in February. By every relevant measures of importance, the St Paul tapestry belongs here. It should in England where it could join the National Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum or, better still,  hang once again at Hampton Court.

Some 20-feet long, woven during the Renaissance in Brussels at the height of weavers’ skills, richly embellished with gold-wrapped thread, it is a fabulous piece that only a king could afford.  This surely was obvious to the Vigo-Sternberg-Galleries, top dealers in tapestries, where the work was seen shortly before it arrived in Spain. Its money value in 1970 was least $8,000, an additional reason an export license would have been required. (Today, on the open international market, it would be £10million or more.)  Indeed, its evident splendour and value is one reason that more recently, Spain has twice refused its owner’s application for a full export license. This far no  record that a license was requested or issued has turned up. According to the S Franses Gallery,  Wendy Hefford, tapestry specialist at the V& A when it left England and the expert most likely to be asked to judge its suitability for export, says she never saw it.    

This St Paul panel  is the  “It is the Holy Grail of Tudor Tapestries,” says Thomas P. Campbell, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and leading authority on Renaissance tapestries;  author of the brilliantly researched “Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court.” Originally there were nine tapestries in the St Paul set. This rare survival, all on its own, gives a vivid pictorial expression of the king’s thinking and state of mind at a tumultuous period in his reign and the country’s history--the dissolution of the monasteries.

Campbell explains that Henry VIII wished to  “present himself as head of the British church,  a religious man. He wanted to show that he was in direct succession to Abraham, Joshua, David, Moses and St. Paul.”  In this work St Paul is shown directing the burning of irreligious texts; an act  Henry VIII was then overseeing in England.  The smoke that billows up in the centre of the tapestry—wonderful and terrible-- is evidence of destruction in the service of religion and power. It is also an aesthetic and technical triumph. Go see it at the gallery. With any luck it will remain at home in England for all to see in years to come.

Tomorrow (Saturday) Campbell will be giving a lecture on Henry VIII's tapestry collection at the Royal Academy of Art. (Tickets, which are free, are available through the Franses gallery..)   

Priceless Freedom: The photographs of Pentti Sammallahti

https://www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/pentti-sammallahti


Please click on the link above to my this story abotu Pentti Sammallahti a great photographer.

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/07/28/pentti-sammallahti-finlands-top-photographer

This my most recent story is readable by going to Economist.com and then if you are not a subscriber, registering. There is no obligation to subscribe and you get three free stories a month.
MAKE THIS ONE OF THEM! Pentti Sammallahti is a photographer whose work you might like--a lot.

Heavenly Bodies: fun but no soul

Rocking frocks

“Heavenly Bodies” mixes metaphors at the Met

Its curators hope that the blend of high-fashion and RomanCatholic artefacts is “simply divine”. But divinity is not so simple

Prospero

May 24th 2018by P.W. | NEW YORK

TWO diverging meanings of “divine” underpin “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”, at the Metropolitan Museum ofArt. This, the largest show in the history of the Met’s Costume Institute, and one of the biggest at the Met overall, is in large part “just divine, dahling,”—an exuberant and luscious treat. In contrast, the rare loan of some 40 ecclesiastical garments and objects from the Sistine Chapel Sacristy at the Vatican—all “dedicated to worship”—are divine in the traditional sense. To unite these two meanings is the goal of Andrew Bolton, the exhibition’s curator.

The hint that this was an over-reaching ambition was there from the start, with the organiser’s repeated references to taking a tour of the show as going on a “pilgrimage”. Of course the two meanings of divine can merge, and often do, when High Mass in performed in a magnificent cathedral, for example. Other denominations can achieve this, too, as was evident in Windsor at the royal wedding. “Heavenly Bodies” is drawing crowds for good reasons. The show’s production values alone are sensational, with columns of mannequins in golden dresses hanging suspended from the museum’s high ceilings and a very great deal more. But it never does quite marry the two divines. The Vatican loans include the silk- and gold-embroidered mantle of Pope BenedictXV; the embroidered and gem-embellished mitre of Pope Leo XIII; papal rings and pectoral crosses; and most extravagant of all, the tiara first worn by PopePius IX for Christmas mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome in 1854. It is set with 19,000 precious stones, most believed to be diamonds. More down to earth, literally, but for some perhaps also more touching, are the traditional red, slip-on shoes worn by Pope John Paul II only 20 years ago.

The Vatican was astute in insisting that its loan be displayed apart from the fashion show. It may be ironic that the underground Costume Institute became the setting for its copes, chasubles and dalmatics—all liturgical vestments. In fact this works in their favour. The otherwise bare rooms allow contemplation for those who seek it.

The vastly larger parade of high-fashion outfits spreads across the main floor’s Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance art galleries. It carries on in the chapels, galleries and gardens at the Cloisters branch of the Met some eight miles north. Upstairs and uptown, razzle-dazzle and glamour with forays into exhibitionism prevail. There are frocks and gowns that incorporate imagery of the Roman Catholic religion including crosses by the score, as well as densely sequinned frocks by Versace and Dolce & Gabbana which portray the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus. There are riffs on the clothes of parish priests, cardinals and bishops; high-fashion angels look down on the crowds of visitors from the top of arched doorways.

Clothes for men make an appearance too. At the Cloisters, for example, a mannequin becomes a designer monk when robed in a hooded brown wool ensemble by Rick Owens, an American fashion designer. It incorporates a protruding open tube (of the same fabric) at crotch level. Lest the viewer’s thoughts dart to the Church’s paedophilia scandals, the caption directs attention to the bawdy characters in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”—written in the safely distant 14th century.

A particularly disconcerting display, also at the Cloisters, goes one metaphor too far. A mannequin outfitted in a lavish white-silk couture bridal gown stands alone before a chapel altar. “Ave Maria” plays on a loop. There is no groom visible; it would be a a fashion show’s culminating coup de theâtre; here it is a fashion exhibition’s coup de grâce. This pretty image, instead of uniting the meanings of divine, mixes up two often life-changing sacred rites and appears to diminish both. Poverty and chastity are among the vows taken by nuns, decidedly not those sworn by couture-clad brides in church marriage ceremonies.

In one of the catalogue essays that provide the intellectual underpinning for this exhibition, David Morgan, a professor of religious studies at Duke University, writes that the “robes, mantles and tunics in which saints appear...make the body the material manifestation of spiritual virtue.” While there is plenty of Catholic iconography in the clothes on view at the Met, the spiritual is absent, almost but not quite entirely: A Jean-PaulGaultier evening dress has a red beaded heart on the left breast, pierced with a sword. From this a rivulet of red silk falls to the floor. Unlike so many other pieces with crosses and such looking merely ornamental, it is exceedingly moving—a work of art. So too is the opulent, pale silk gown by Balenciaga constructed with only a single seam. Both have something divine about them in both senses of the word—as indeed does that bling tiara worn by Pius IX.

Alas, for the aims of Mr Bolton, these are rare exceptions. Overall, the attempt to merge the two meanings of divine flops—sometimes painfully. For those who simply want to enjoy a fabulous theatrical display, the show is downright infallible.

Big Man; Big Heart Gunter Blobel

Big Mind; Big Heart    Gunter Blobel  May 21, 1936—February 18, 2018

A brilliant scientist who won the  Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1999, he gave the million dollar award to the restoration of Dresden. He was not born in the city;  it was never his home yet from the age of eight he lived there in his heart.

 

I first met Gunter Blobel in October, 2003. Everything about him seemed over-sized. He was exuberant, expansive. He was also tall, his white hair thick and wavy.  There was something lyrical about the way he talked; his hands swooped around as if in accompaniment to his song.  He managed to look elegant with it being overly casual or studied. On this day he was wearing a white linen shirt, black trousers and a black cardigan. A beige, heavy knit cashmere scarf was wrapped around his neck. He seemed fit but was no body braggart. (Later, I learned from another early bird around the Central Park Reservoir,  that he was an early morning runner.)

Dr Blobel sat down behind a desk was stacked with papers. I was warned me that he was very busy; that our meeting would have be short.  I did not doubt it. I felt sure his daily commitments exceeded the number of hours in a day.  One reason for this may be that he is a charismatic and prodigious talker. It was two hours later that I stood up to say goodbye. I apologized for having kept him from his work.

“When the subject is Dresden,” he said, “I can go on talking for ever.” 

   

  Dresden was the reason I was there.  I was dug into trying to find out more about a famous collection of 18^th century porcelain that had been born and two centuries later had met its death in Dresden. It was commissioned by Augustus the Strong, the Elector of Saxony, who made the city his capital. In his race to be the first in Europe with the recipe for hard paste porcelain he had set up a factory at nearby Meissen. The early Meissen collection I was learning about was later sold but it had stayed in Dresden until it was hidden in the mountains outside for safekeeping during the Second World War. Against orders, a truck loaded with it,  was parked overnight in the courtyard of the city’s residence palace. That was the first night of the firebombing. 

Surprisingly (some might say miraculously) a decade later a few porcelain survivors of the great collection were dug out of the still unsifted mounds of rubble.  These patched together small figures had become my guides to the collection; to its owners and to the city with which its fate had been intertwined from the first.  Martin Roth, Director of Saxony’s State Museums in Dresden, told me that I must talk with Gunter Blobel. No doubt it was his introduction that made the encounter possible. For all his warmth and generosity of spirit, I suspected that Gunter Blobel would not have patience for people with whom he shared no interests.

   Minutes after we met, we were in the small village in Silesia where he grew up. It was towards the end of the Second World War.  This region, then in Nazi Germany was later in Communist East Germany and now is in Poland. Gunter was one of eight children. The youngest was two; the eldest a teenager and he was eight when his father, a veterinarian, decided that they must leave home where life was “a rural idyll.” The Russians were advancing from the East.

   “People believed the Russian and American armies would meet at the Elbe,” Gunter Blobel told me.  And they were terrified. Russian troops were infamous for rape and robbery.  The family was going to head for the American side of the river and the farm of relatives in western Saxony. The car was packed; off they went.

   Dresden straddles the Elbe.  It was the young boy’s first sight of a big city.  This one packed a particularly potent punch. Since the 18^th century, Dresden had been one of Europe’s culture centers: Bach played the inaugural concert on the organ in the Frauenkirche; Wagner conducted the premiere of his Flying Dutchman at the Semperoper.  The Old Masters, porcelain, arms and armour museums were world famous. For centuries, writers had remarked on the beauty of its Renaissance and baroque architecture.  

“It was a child’s fantasy,” Gunter Blobel recalled, still  bewitched. “Everywhere there were putti, statues, cupids with arrows pointing down at me. I asked my parents couldn’t we stay longer? They said no.”  The family reached their new if temporary home in early February, 1945.  Within days they heard reports on the radio that Dresden was being bombed.  They already knew. “You could see for a hundred miles, the wine-red sky.”

 The war in Europe was over by May. The family headed east again. “There was rubble instead of road,” he said. “We ate what we could scavenge in the fields.”  Sometimes they found apples; sometimes things that they had to boil before they were edible. “Everywhere there were burnt out farms, dead animals—cows, horses.” Whole villages were destroyed.

  Once again they came to the Elbe.   

   “It took us a whole day to cross Dresden,” he remembered. “It smelled of corpses. Broken statues were on the ground.  It was horrendous, horrendous.”

  This ebullient man I had been listening to had tears in his eyes.  He had not buried his “horrible horrible, unimaginably horrible” memories. He allowed them to lay him low and surely this was not the first time. Yet he had new and marvellous images of the city to soothe him; not least of all because of his own heroic efforts.

   The eight year old who saw Dresden in ruins made a promise: If ever in his life he had money, he would  use it to help rebuild what had been a magical city. In 1991 Dr. Gunter Blobel founded the Friends of Dresden.  In 1999, most of his million dollar Nobel award went for the rebuilding of the city’s glorious Frauenkirche and the replacement of a synagogue to replace one that had been destroyed by the Nazis.

”I cannot tell you how hard I worked to raise the money,” he said.  “I couldn’t do it again.” Because of his passion and all that very hard work, that was not and will not be necessary.

Cash Cows. What art is worth and why..

Relative Values at the Met   

 Just as you'd expect,  Relative Values at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its splendid 16^th century tapestries, jewels, sculpture and works  of art is a beautiful show, even illuminating. The surprise is that its also fun—with no dumbing down along the way it tells the bracing story of the shifting fates of price and value. See it if you can. There’s lots of time—it doesn’t close until June next year.  Congratulations to curator Elizabeth Cleland . With seeming effortlessness—and wit—she has produced a terrific show ; one with a timely and important story to tell.  The success of the exhibition is in part the result of the choice of these  magnificent 62 works most from the Met's collection.  But it is also due to Ms Celeland’s intelligent, cunning and amusing choice of assistants. Bring on the cows. Or if we are talking about the Celestial Globe above, bring on a herd of them.

But before introducing the cast of cows:

They pieces are grouped by theme: Raw Material, Natural World, Virtuosity, Technological Advances, Utility, Recreation and Fame. I try to ignore themes but these at least serve a purpose:. They spotlight the value of different materials in the 16^th century, the admiration for some skills and indifference to others, the time needed to create a piece and the tastes of increasingly competitive rich collectors. This was the recipe for how a work was valued--and its price set. 

The labels are a treat. Instead of the usual record of dimensions and dates plus a description of what you have just seen with your own eyes, these quickly teach the lesson that is the reason for this show: There works were of dramatically different values==absolute and relative-when they were made than they are today. )And that they were along the way--and may well be tomorrow.  The ease with which we are taught this lesson and its staying power is the result of the curator's choice of instructors. Welcome to cows.

In the 16^th century the north of Europe was a crazy quilt of political entities and—crucially here—currencies.  It transpires that such factors as the pay of skilled or unskilled workers and the cost of a loaf of bread,  the price of a milking cow was the fairly consistent equivalent of 175 grams of silver across these many borders. For that reason the original purchase price of each of the treasures on view is  calculated in cows. They do their job well. 

The black silhouette of a cow, facing left, appears on every label. She is followed by the multiplication symbol and a number.  The oil painting on wood panel of “The Rest of the Flight into Egypt” by a follower of Quentin Metsys, for instance,  originally cost COW x 5. The “Celestial Globe” at the start of this blog, is Cow x 59.  “Charity,” a gilded alabaster sculpture: Cow x 40.  The fantastical, enamelled and gem embellished pendants on display cost from Cow x 35 to Cow x 60.

    The first owner of the gilded silver tankard fashioned in Augsburg could have bought 5 cows for the same money. As for the elegant rock crystal bird with silver legs and ruby eyes made in Nuremberg (my favorite in the show), a mighty shake of the money tree was needed. It cost Cow x 275.   

 

This is mooing with a message alright: Neither price nor value are immutable.

When is an artist going to print that on tee shirts and hand them out—or sell them—at Frieze?  (Replacing "immutable" with "fixed" won't make the answer yes any sooner.) How many dealers are going to remind their clients that art is a solid investment only if you happen to be in the right place when the music stops. Go to this show. Enjoy the art and take home the message it tells with such charm and ease. In the face of temptation, it is a good one to remember.