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.

Scrooge is mighty busy at England's three most important museums; a postscript

Apologies to the National Gallery or rather Nicholas Penny, its outgoing director, and its Trustees for singling them out in my earlier post. It seems that the Victoria and Albert Museum AND the British Museum, too, are shut on the 24, 25 and 26th of December. The three most important art museums in the city--in the country-- are in the hands of philistines who appear to believe that no one would want to be in a museum when they could go shopping or watching Downton Abbey.
   Oh to be in Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum is OPEN EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR. Yup Christmas Day included. Paris or New York wouldn't be bad:  The Louvre is closed for three days IN THE ENTIRE YEAR. (December 25, January 1 and May 1.) The Metropolitan closes for four: January 1, May 1, Thanksgiving Day and  December 25.
   All the hot air about London being a culture capital and the town can't even keep open its great museums when people have the most time to visit them.  As for the people in charge of tourism; they spend millions luring tourists to the city and then shut the door to one of its biggest attractions.

Not so ho ho: London's National Gallery is a holiday NO GO .

On this chilly, sunny Christmas Eve, I reckoned that what with last minute shopping and the exodus of locals this would be a great moment to spend more time with that grandest old man, Rembrandt. 

 I checked that the underground and buses would still be running when I left the museum to come home.  I reckoned that the NG would probably close early--say 4 or 5 pm. It was only fair to give staff time to get wherever they were going to spend the night before Christmas. All looked good and off I went.
  I got out of the Underground, crossed Trafalgar Square, climbed the steps and headed for the Sainsbury Wing. And then I saw it:  All gates shut. The place looked like a fortress not a house of revelations, never mind a refuge.
   Back at my desk (each to her own Christmas treats or tortures), I Googled.  The National Gallery chose to close all day, every day, from Christmas Eve until December 27. Take that all of you who would rather spend time with Rembrandt or Piero or Holbein or.... than do last minute shopping or join the stampede at the sales.
   Nick Penny has marked his last Christmas as Director of the National Gallery with a big Bah Humbug, shutting its doors for a preposterous three days straight. He and those other Scrooges, the Trustees should be ashamed. My Christmas wish to one and all of them is coal filled stockings on the morning of the 25th.