Ask a Silly Question at the British Museum

“What were people thinking about when they went to the GlobeTheatre to see the latest Shakespeare plays?” 

 This question posed by a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company gave NeilMacGregor, director of the British Museum, the idea for  “Shakespeare: Staging the World,” which just opened. It is widely agreed that MacGregor is an intelligent, erudite fellow but whatever made him think such a dopey question could serve as the armature for a major exhibition. A bookish show of diaries or essays by articulate, self-aware playgoers might have had a shot. Without them, the result was likely to be a lot of hot air.  And that is what this vaunted collaboration between the BM and the RSC turns out to be.  

    Actors have a well documented adoration for their own words but, usually, they aren’t altogether rewarding to listen in on. But terrific actors reciting Shakespeare now that is a very different thing.  In what the BM calls “a series of new digital interventions,”—video clips to you and me—provide... HarrietWalter speaks as Cleopatra, Sir Antony Sher as Shylock, Sir Ian McKellan as Prospero and Paterson Joseph as Brutus. I fear it sounds ungrateful but the result was irritating rather than inspiring. These performers and their declaiming kept popping up out of the dark as I crept around  trying to figure out what the 200 or so paintings and objects were going to tell me about Shakespeare. (I wasn’t expecting illumination about the preposterous conceit of reading theatre goers minds.) Very soon I felt all the theatrics were so much noise. What a waste.  

   As for the objects themselves…  Jacopo de’Barbari’s vast woodcut map of Venice (1.3 x 2.8) is always terrific to look at with its steeple top view of every house, convent, church and garden in the city. It was published in 1500; Shakespeare was born more than 60 years later. Okay, call this a quibble. How about this one: Shakespeare set plays in beautiful Venice but he never actually went there. So why this map? Even if he had been there what would this map tell us about his reaction to it? Most London playgoers would not have been to Venice, either. I enjoyed studying the map and I think most anyone who’s been lost in the city’s maze of alleys will, too. It is fun to see what has changed and how much has not. I always play the ridiculous came of trying to find the palace where I was lucky enough to live even though I know that I won’t find it. It is on the Fondamenta Nuove which was made from landfill after de’Barberi drew his map.

   Neil MacGregor is an historian with strong religious commitment. His best exhibitions reflect this. The First Emperor and Hadrian were terrific. So was the beautiful show about reliquaries or holy jewels as I think of them. (Here are links to my Economist review of both: FirstEmperor; Treasures of Heaven.)  Shah ‘Abbaswas a nightmare for me. The relatively few objects on view were treasures that were meant to introduce a neophyte like me to the Persian ruler’s importance. The carpets were fabulous but all I learned was that a rich, powerful, ambitious Muslim gave expensive gifts to important religious sites; a practice well known among similarly powerful Christians and Jews. I got a headache trying to find something to say in the Economist story I was committed to write. Thankfully I eventually had a brain wave; I ignored the exhibition and instead compared the portrait of Robert Shirley in it with another large portrait of the Englishman on view in the Van Dyke then at Tate Britain. (At BM below with his wife.)  If I learned almost nothing from the Shah ‘Abbas exhibition, I learned less from “Shakespeare: Staging the World.”        

I don't write about contemporary art but exceptions are the rule here as every place else.                  
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El Anatsui makes beautiful and covetable works of art out of used, metal whiskey bottle caps. Below is a profile I wrote about him which appeared in Intelligent Life magazine in Winter 2009. I've made a few cuts to remove mention of information that is now out of date. Next week, May 21, Bonham's on Bond Street in London is holding an African Art auction and one of El's metal tapestries leads the sale with an estimate of $500---£800,000.  If you catch new Schiaperelli/Prada show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute have a look at the Prada dress with a big skirt made out of "African bottle caps" --clearly inspired by El's work although not credited to him. (Better yet, visit the Met's African art gallery nearby and see the real thing.)
 
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The art world is waking up to the brilliance of El Anatsui, who weaves beauty out of bottle tops. paula weideger meets him

He’s the tops

El Anatsui, grey-haired and softly spoken, sat across from me on a black leather sofa in the lobby of a New York hotel. We had met to talk about his large and shimmering hangings. “I see myself as a person and an African,” he began. And indeed he was born in Ghana and since 1975 has taught and sculpted at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka until his retirement last year. He was quick to grasp what I was after when I asked a question but slow, sometimes very slow, to respond. The pauses between his words, between one sentence and the next, could be very long. It wasn’t that he was worried about saying the wrong thing. Although he is a modest man, he appears solidly self-confident. His pauses seemed to exist to create spaces in which he could think. “Professionally,” he finally added, “I see myself more as an artist in the world community of art.” So he is. But the world community of art took rather a long time to confirm his view. Fortunately, he wasn’t languishing.
Anatsui has “a huge reputation”, according to Chika Okeke-Agulu, a former student of his, now an art historian at Princeton. “He is one of the best-known names in (and I mean in the inside world of) contemporary Nigerian art. He is one of the leading figures associated with Nsukka School…arguably the most influential art school in Nigeria.” Lagos, an hour’s flight from Nsukka, has long had its own flourishing gallery scene and with that, active collectors. The novelist Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka are among those who own Anatsui’s work. The October Gallery in London has been showing his work since the mid-1990s. In 2006 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired one of his pieces for its African gallery. But it was only in 2007, aged 63, that Anatsui leapt into the heart of the wider art world. His springboard was the Venice Biennale, where he had exhibited in 1990, without making much impact.
Robert Storr, dean of the Yale Art School and director of the biennale, invited Anatsui to show two pieces in the Arsenale. Like all his current work, they were large hangings made of thousands of pieces of shimmering metal, stitched together with copper wire. They are astonishingly beautiful and not like anything done before. Some think of them as tapestries; Anatsui calls them sheets. It is common to hear them compared to Byzantine mosaics, but the differences are greater than the similarities.
Anatsui’s art is abstract. Colour, shape and light tell his story. In some pieces there are hundreds of dancing colours, while others are dominated by broad swathes of silver or gold or red. Unlike mosaics, these works are flexible; hanging free, they ripple as if they were cloth.
  Anatsui was the hit of that biennale. Of the pieces in the Arsenale, one was bought by Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum, the other for the Contemporary Collection of the Met. But his most talked-about work was a commission from the Belgian collector Axel Vervoordt for the Artempo installation at Palazzo Fortuny. “Fresh and Fading Memories, Part I-IV” was draped across the façade of this moody Gothic palace (picture above). Wire fastenings were undone to let light into the upper floors — adding to the loveliness of the piece, making the sumptuous fabric look ripped. Interest in Anatsui has been building ever since.


In October 2008 at Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in London, an Anatsui tapestry sold for $610,000, a world auction record for his work. (According to art-world gossip, one of his works has sold in the Middle East for over a million dollars. Vervoordt sold the Artempo piece, but will not disclose its price.) “Three Continents”, a dazzling 2.4 metres by 4.5 hanging, the outline of which resembles a Mercator projection, is priced at $700,000 at New York’s Jack Shainman gallery.  Commissions keep coming, including

“Fading Cloth” (2005), a typically shimmering piece by El Anatsuione for a 12 metres by 3.6 piece to hang in the atrium of the Bill and Melinda Gates campus in Seattle.
    “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa”, his first major retrospective, will open at the Royal Ontario Museum in October 2010. In January 2013 after a two year dealy it will finally reach New York as the inaugural exhibition at the Museum for African Art. As well as organising the retrospective, the mfaa has co-produced a 53-minute documentary, “Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui” by Susan Vogel director of Columbia University Global Centres: Africa. It’s an engaging, informative and sensitive look at his way of life andof working.

In the film we see Anatsui at his local internet shop, doing his e-mail. We watch the rusty red earth kick up behind him as he heads for the shed of a seamstress who will sew packaging for him. And he takes us to the spot where he first came upon a bag of the bottle tops that are now central to his work.
Many African artists prefer to work with materials found near to hand. But just why were there thousands of bottle tops on Anatsui’s doorstep? The answer has to do with recycling. Drinkers return empty gin and whisky bottles to their local distiller, where they are refilled and given new caps. There is a keen market for the cast-offs. Melted down, they are transformed into cooking pots. Thirst being what it is, Anatsui has no trouble buying what he needs.

Some 20 men work on the hangings. They sit on the floor or hunch over tables in a large, open-plan studio. The round tops are cut out, the remaining aluminium is made into strips. Each element is pounded flat and pierced. Round ones are threaded together with round ones, strips with strips. Anatsui tells his crew what colour combinations he wants. These are then put together in sections, or units as he calls them. A unit might be two feet square or smaller.
“Working with the rings that hold the caps – that is very, very slow,” Anatsui says. “A few inches in a day. But when you work with the shaft of the cap that is very fast, because the basic unit is big.” Although he used to make preparatory drawings for his wood sculpture, he does no drawings for these pieces. “Now, I place things on the floor and move them around,” he says. “When I like where it is, it gets linked up. There are a lot of permutations all along the route.”
As the tapestry takes shape it begins to look like a giant jigsaw. But there is no pre-existing image. Even the artist may not know exactly what he’s looking for
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“I am a nomad” El tells me. Since his retirement he has been making art and travelling the world inspecting sites and later installing his tapestries. Oh, and he's begun to commute regularly between Nsukka where he built a house overlooking the university and his homeland, Ghana.

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Improve or destroy? Will Laurence Graff, aka The King of Diamonds, yet again buy a famed historic diamond only to recut it to make it more saleable?


That is what he did to the big blue Wittelsbach (see above photo © Ernst A. Heiniger ) after he bought the historic stone at Christies. I wrote about that unhappy saga in the Financial Times. The importance of such a stone is not only its carat weight and color but the less commercially measurable associations it has with the people who have worn it, owned it, given it, treasured it, hidden it, used it for power and glory. Once recut it is just a big fat diamond. And, in the case of the king of diamonds, a brand nam.  He promptly renamed his  recut blue stone, the Wittelsbach-Graff.



 Now the Beau Sancy (right) is coming up for auction at Sotheby's and there is reason for lovers of extraordinary historic gems to worry.  This pale yellow diamond was probably found at Golconda, and certainly found in India, more than 400 years.It weighs a smidgen under 35 carats. It has many royal associations not least of them this: The Sancy was worn by the Florentine Maria de' Medici at her 1610 coronation as Queen Consort to the French king Henri IV. (See below.) It will be auction in Geneva on May 14-15 with an estimate of from $2-$4 million.

Cima da Conegliano in Venice, Paris and at a click away on Google Books.





Art lovers or just the art curious can raise a glass in a toast to Google books. It isn't likely that anyone will depend on the site the way we all depend on googling. But what a world it opens up; it's like having an amazing art library a couple of clicks away. The time it saves; the money and space. Yesterday, I was reading the notes I made a couple of days ago in Paris at the Musee du Luxembourg's just opened exhibition devoted to the Italian Renaissance painter Cima da Conegliano. (Above is my favorite of his paintings. It is not in the show but hangs above the altar in the hard to find-- even for Venice--church of St. Giovanni Bragora.) Even I have trouble making out my handwriting and it's at its worst when I am looking and writing at the same time. I could not figure out the words I'd copied from the wall text which quoted the art scholar Bernard Berenson.  I certainly know the source from which they were taken. Literally seconds later I'd found both, thanks to Google books. His book, Venetian Painting in America was right there. As its cover image is now right here. With a few more clicks taking me to the pages where Cima is mentioned, I found the very words:  “No other master of that time paints so well the pearly light that models the Italian landscape with a peculiar lightness and breadth.” To my mischievous delight the museum's wall text (as well as my scribbles) had got it wrong. "Silver" is not pearly, "models" is not the same as envelops. I did not point this out in my ==very favorable--Economist review of the show which will appear at the end of the coming week.  

                      DAZZLED

The most glittering of the events keyed to the Queen's Jubilee must be the redisplay of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London which opens to the public today. Just have a look above at the top of the seventeenth century sceptre held by the monarch during the coronation. It holds the 563 carat Star of Africa diamond. Oh and its practical too. The diamond pops out to be worn separately as a pendant on other occasions.Fuzzy image though it is its knock out grandeur still comes across. The Star of Africa is also called the Cullinan I diamond. It is the second largest diamond in the world and was one of nine gems cut from the more than 3000 carat original Cullinan stone. The Cullinan II is also on display. It sits smack in front of the Imperial State Crown of Great Britain.















  Yesterday morning the Princess Royal opened this exceedingly popular tourist attraction. Last night DeBeers, its lead sponsor, hosted a party and private view chiefly for specialists especially those employed at the various Royal Palaces. I couldn't go to the 8 a.m. press preview but DeBeers p.r. kindly invited me to the evening view. It was a privilege and a treat. One of the seldom mentioned but widely enjoyed perks of journalism is going to private views where it is possible to see and enjoy works of art in the absence of crowds. In this case the first of the privileges was the twilight into night visit to the Tower of London itself.



                                         




Guests were entertained at a reception in the former armoury which is now a restaurant. What with the champagne (and canapés) all was convivial with chatter and laughter to match. But outside all was silent and the Tower was magnificent.Presumably the famous ravens are early to bed. Candles lit the way across the long cobbled approach between the outer walls of the fortress and its buildings. The White Tower, scene of so much misery, now stands elegant and somehow pristine in the moonlight.





 What could be a better preparation for the sight of the Coronation Regalia when it was time to make our way across the courtyard, through a door like an enormous entrance to a bank vault and see the often eye popping gems. An airport like people mover will take tourists to this most popular of attractions slowly but surely alongside the display cabinets but last night they were still and we could stand and study or ogle as long as we liked. 


  It is perfectly pointless to say that the Cullinan diamonds are vulgar. Rocks of this size are intended to signify
status and power and that is the job they most certainly did. There is much music and images of pageantry including film of the last coronation, that of Queen Elizabeth II almost sixty years ago, well before most of the visitors were born. The gems sparkle as if the event had been sprinkled with star dust.And here in the Tower of the principal sources of that light. It was meant to enchant and impress and to remind those present and all those to whom they spoke and wrote of majesty and might. In a constitutional monarchy the message is diluted and that is all to the good; but the messengers are still magnificent-- and for those with a weakness for such things at least--a pleasure to see.


AND ALSO:   For those who want to own a symbol of power and status all of their own, on May 14 in Geneva



 Christie's will be auctioning 70 lots of jewels--contemporary and antique and just plain big time rocks-- belonging to philanthropist Lily Safra. Among them are 18 pieces--the largest every single offering--made by JAR, the Bronx born --like your blogger--Paris based Joel Arthur Rosenthal, creator of extraordinary and very expensive gem- set objects of art to wear. The sale is estimated to make a minimum of $20 million all of which will go to 20 of Mrs. Safra's charities. 

The law of unintended consequences or Why I don't write about cutting edge art--mind you maybe Gillian Wearing isn't cutting edge at all but is considered a modern master.




Tuesday March 27 went to the Whtiechapel Gallery in London. I hadn't been for ages. I went because my husband wanted to go to the opening of a small exhibition of loans from the Government Art Collection Fund. These are works from its collection which Prime Minister's have chosen to hang in their residence at 10 Downing Street. (Above an image of one of the state rooms in wartime.) At the Whitechapel the choice of what to show was made by the staff at number 10.  It was not easy to find this show. But the main exhibition was impossible to miss. Entering the Whitechapel's usually handsome, airy space, the place looked like an art storage warehouse. It was filled with tall, wide crates in a cockeyed zig-zag arrangement. These turned out to be the backs of roomlets created as viewing spaces for videos in the Gillian Wearing   retrospective. Presumably the artist wished to create this brutalist welcome to her show. Surely an imaginative museum designer if not the artist herself could have created a series of rooms the outside of which were part of the art. Then again, as the art itself turned out to be dead ordinary it was all of a piece after all.



 Upstairs there were large photographs--oversized has become the new normal.  Many of the images were of the artist wearing a clearly visible mask of her own face or the face of others including her family. This is a homely, less engaging version of Cindy Sherman==at that is Wearing at her best. Many were photographs of "the man in the street" holding hand written signs which were--or were not--a commentary on their feelings or the state of the world. (see above.)The over all impression was of banality and lack of vision. When it comes to art, with two strikes of this kind, you are out.
   VIP the invitation read. The crowd, mainly in their twenties and early thirties, were mostly drinking beer from bottles (the new champagne although it has been the vogue for half a dozen years). Dress was either military uniforms, nurses outfits or school children's garb and even those in Prada, nerd division, carried school bags. Fortunately for us, white wine was also available and fortunately for others pastel colored small bottles of possibly health boosting stuff.
   Eventually we found the small gallery upstairs with the Art Collection pictures. The most interesting was a portrait of Ada Lovelace, Byron's daughter. Augusta Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace was a hugely gifted and

 accomplished mathematician. She worked with Charles Babbage, on  the development of  
on the first mechanical computer, The Difference Engine. (see above.). She wrote its program and is widely credited as having been the first computer programmer.

We were prevented from leaving the Whitechapel the way we had entered so found our way to a corridor through which we were expected to exit. My husband went off to the W.C. and I drifted into a cozy, modernist room off the corridor. Red wine was quickly offered and it was good (that made a welcome change). There were snacks on a table. This appeared to be a gathering place for those who didn't fit the profile of Whitechapel VIP's. We didn't either but these folks looked faintly related or anyway like people belonging to yet another world as it turned out they were. They came in all ages from gray heads to kids. At the front of the room with windows looking out onto the street was a table piled with books, copies of one book: "A Man in a Hurry: the World's Greatest Walker. The Extraordinary Life & Times of Edward Payson Weston"  I'd stumbled into a book launch. And what a dandy subject: A Victorian, called "the father of
   

   pedestrianism, who was a hugely popular figure if also, perhaps, a part time charlatan. As I was taking this in my husband reappeared and James Corbett, the publisher of deCoubertin Books approached. They describe themselves as a "small family run enterprise."  They want to bring out two or three non-fiction books a year mainly about sport. Their aim is to publish readable works but not guff or fluff. The list will be kept small maybe for money reasons but also==and listen to this fellow writers--because they want to give full attention and support to each book on their list.
   What started out as a disappointing even irritating evening ended up sending us out into the streets of East London with smiles on our faces, books under our arms and the feeling that contemporary literature (and art) can still be an adventure and even a source of joy.

All sorts of treasures--Not jaded after this my eleventh annual visit to TEFAF

Just back from three days at TEFAF (The European Fine Art Fair), in Maastricht the Netherlands.  My first impressions--and opinions--can be found in Prospero, The Economist's art blog,  with the title "Silver threads among the gold."  But with 260 dealers exhibiting there is so much to see that it was only in my last few hours at the fair that I saw some of the art I most coveted. Two are sculptures from very different periods; the third is a display of chairs, yes chairs, that is a knockout.

This marble sculpture is displayed at the front of the stand of Milan dealer, Altomani &Sons. It is an engaging Roman marble of the forever young and mischievous golds of love Eros and his baby brother Anteros. The carvings date to the 1st Century A.D.
The thirty inch high sculpture as now seen is an ensemble put together in the Renaissance. It is the stance of Eros and the gentle yet attentive expression in his eyes that makes this work especially moving. According to some versions of the myth, Eros was lonely and Anteros was created as his companion. Here the artist appears to be showing Eros at the very moment he discovers this marvelous gift. Altomani is asking about euros 1.3 million. It is a honey.

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Florence is the home base of the Moretti gallery which also has brances in New York and London. They are well known as dealers in fine Italian gold ground paintings. With the arrival of Andrew Butterfield, people have come to expect outstanding sculpture, too. So it is at this year's TEFAF. The work above was front and center at their stand. No one could miss this lion who is both ferocious and lusciously modelled. The piece was made about 1715 by Giovan Battista Foggini. Although the sculpture looks like a bronze it is in fact made of terracotta.

There is strong evidence that the lion is a model for a monument to Queen Anne of England. Parliament put forward extravagent schemes to celebrate her reign, almost of none of them, including this monument, were carried out. Moretti asjed about euros 400,000 and has sold this king of beasts to a European private collector..

In both of the above cases, the price of these exceptional works seems a steal when compared with, for example, the small Picasso terracotta of a centaur for which the Galerie Krugier is asking euros 9 million. Picasso was a great sculptor than painter and it is a delightful little sculpture but 9 million? When you could buy both of these wonders and have change from 2 million.


Modernist furniture dealer, Brussels based Yves Macaux can be relied on to have outstanding objects. This year at TEFAF he has produced a particularly imaginative and illuminating selling show exclusively of chairs. Among them are elegant examples by Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Luce and Henry van de Velde. The pair that grabbed my immediate attention were chairs designed in 1902/03 by Koloman Moser, an artist new to me.
These striking pieces are sleek and a showy beauties. They are made of burr elm with Egyptian inspired decoration inlaid in veneered snakewood, black maple and mother-of-pearl.  I fancied every chair on the stand, in fact. But what makes the display so outstanding is that it brings out the special, sculptural qualities--and presence--of each chair. These are pieces of furniture to sit on, of course, but they have another life as works of art, too.