Exhibitions in London

Picture: Guardian

The only current exhibition that I'm inspired to review at length is the NG's Botticini's Palmieri Altarpiece, to follow. In the meantime, some thoughts on 'the rest'.

Goya: The Portraits National Gallery to January 16

Another rather formulaic idea for a guaranteed 'blockbuster': assemble pictures by the same famous artist around a particular theme and wait for the crowds. I haven’t even bought the catalogue, because recent offerings have been so feeble and yet again there’s no actual catalogue. You have to be really dedicated to see an NG blockbuster, because it’s just never quiet. Even at opening time the galleries are mobbed by people who’ve been at private views. The picture above is cruelly tempting: imagine twenty people between the bench and the pictures and you'll get a better idea. It’s interesting how much difference it makes. I recall the Family of the Infanta Don Luis when it was on extended loan at the NG some years ago, and it made a terrific impression on me. Seeing it behind thirty people deadened it. No point.

I was interested in the critical response. Fawning adulation from all the right-on critics in the main newspapers, but some intelligent criticism from Neil Jeffares. But must one be a great painter to be a great artist? I'm not so sure. Goya certainly had his weaknesses; just look at all those superficial hands. And some of the pictures in this show are absolute dogs. But others are, to me, quite wonderful. In the last room there are some especially feeble late works, but you can compare them to the superb Don Tiburcio (and look how cunningly he hides the hands!). I actually like many of the pictures a good deal, but we should take his critics seriously, and acknowledge his flaws. Indeed, a show focused on what's good and what's bad in Goya would have been much more interesting.

Ai Weiwei Royal Academy to 13 December

Wow, this is bad. This splendid Spectator article put it better than I could. But even people who recognise the art as execrable fawn over his politics. Actually Weiwei’s politics are as limp as his art. Banal, obvious and (from a western perspective) utterly safe. 

Jean-Etienne Liotard Royal Academy to 31 January

The Royal Academy puts on some of the best shows in London in its tiny little top floor galleries, whereas its grand blockbusters in the big rooms on the main floor are usually duds. The catalogue for Liotard is excellent, and I'd love to have written about the exhibition. I needed to see it a second time, and took a day off work to get there first thing and enjoy it quietly for a good block of time, but I was turned away at the door because my Friends card had expired and they haven't yet sent me a new one. I don't have many days off work, and to have wasted one of them because of such a stupidly bureaucratic response is utterly infuriating. It looks wonderful, so I hope you have more luck than me.

 

Picture: MS

Thirty Years an Obsession: A Private Collection Uncovered Daniel Katz Gallery to 18 December

Best thing I’ve seen in London. Really excellent and rarely-seen things, including a stunning Lelio Orsi and a Bernard van Orley (above) that I’ve coveted since seeing it in an auction catalogue about two decades ago. I didn’t know it would be in the show, and it was a wonderful surprise to see it.  A couple of superior Cranachs and a Spranger that I’d seen in New York were the other highlights for me, but there was a strong group of nineteenth century pictures too. I enjoyed this more than most of the big exhibitions. Really worth a look if you get the chance.

Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns British Museum to 6 December 

Bringing together drawings from wildly different traditions simply because they use the same medium seemed a weak theme for an exhibition, but this show is convincing. Rather than attempt a comprehensive narrative, it is separated into four relatively self-contained and coherent sections: the Italian Renaissance, Northern Renaissance, Dutch mannerism (stretching to other northern seventeenth century sheets), and the twentieth century. There are some sublime masterpieces here, and the connections and distinctions are revealing. The twentieth century section lacks the peaks of the other sections of the show, but there are still some fine drawings by artists that deserve to be better known. 

The show is well organised and the wall text is excellent, but unfortunately the display in London had some serious drawbacks. The early Italian drawings were wrecked by the reflection from a video loop, imposing moving images among the Raphaels. There's really no excuse these days for having an Open University style film showing in the gallery, when it could be put on YouTube for people to consult at home. And some of the northern mannerists were invisible, because they were so far back in vitrines. It didn’t matter as much with the rest of the exhibition, but some of the mannerist sheets are minutely detailed and demand close study. 

Even if you can't see the exhibition, I really commend the excellent catalogue. I especially hope it's read at the National Gallery. The Liotard and Metalpoint catalogues are both models they should follow.

Changes for the worse at the British Museum

Picture: British Museum

A couple of months ago I had a few days off work, so I popped along to the Print Room at the British Museum. I'd hoped to see their northern mannerist drawings, but as they weren't easily accessible I had a look at some early German drawings instead. They seem less intensively studied than the Italian drawings; there was quite a range of quality in groups of drawings attributed to the same artists. I don't know these draughtsmen well, and I've been missing out. The outstanding discovery for me was Hans Baldung Grien. I've long admired his paintings, and I knew of him as a revered draughtsmen, but nothing equals seeing the originals. The chalk study below is outstanding, but I'm cheating you by reproducing it. You really have to see the original to appreciate its artistry. My morning in the print room set me off with a renewed enthusiasm for early German art. I've been reading all I can find on the subject, and I'm hoping to make another trip to Germany to see more in the autumn. All from a chance encounter in the BM. 

Picture: British Museum

The British Museum's print room has been, I think, the most open in the world. You can just turn up with ID and ask to see just about anything. The only restricted items are the Jacopo Bellini album and the Dürer watercolours. Unlike many museums, I suspect they'd be open to considering requests to see those items too; in some places they won't even let you through the door without a letter of introduction signed by Leonardo himself. It really is a wonderful privilege to be able to turn up to the BM on spec and root around in the greatest collection of old master drawings in the world. For me it's one of the greatest pleasures of living in London. 

But no more. New rules restrict opening times, impose closure for the entire month of January and on every Monday and require an appointment to be made two weeks in advance specifying what you want to see. We all understand cost constraints and we know that difficult decisions must be made. But this is such a wrong decision. 

Every museum bleats the same tired rhetoric about access and inclusion. In practice it usually means 'experts' in museum studies dumbing down the wall text. In its quiet way, the BM print room actually exemplified inclusion. When I've been there there have often been tourists wandering in because they want to see Dürer's Rhinoceros or some other well-known highlight. Others come in with no clear idea of what they want to see. The staff have always been patient and always found them something to look at. People with little knowledge who can't even articulate clearly what they're looking for are treated equally with scholars and curators. These visitors won't book a fortnight in advance, and it's tragic that they will now be excluded. 'Access' is usually taken to mean reaching out to people who don't usually visit museums at all, but it ought also to be about provision for people along a spectrum of knowledge and interest, helping any visitor to see more and learn more. 

It's not just casual visitors who will suffer. What of people who might require more urgent access? Dealers and collectors, for example, who might want to consult something to compare with a drawing coming up for sale, or journalists researching for a tight deadline. Or just people who find themselves with an unexpected free morning in London. But some people will, I am sure, be able to get in at short notice. I can't imagine them refusing access to prominent dealers, visiting curators from other institutions, well-known journalists, or trustees and their friends (and friends of friends). Inevitably there will now be two-tiered access, reproducing a common bifurcation between provision for the masses and the elites. Established dealers will be able to turn up on spec; insurgents will have to wait until after the auction. Tenured academics who know the staff will get in; their students won't. 

You can't exaggerate the importance of the BM's collection of prints and drawings. There are fewer great comprehensive collections of drawings than of paintings; only the Louvre and the Albertina are really in the BM's league. The groups of drawings by the greatest renaissance masters is just phenomenal. And now that entire collection will be open for just four days a week, eleven months of the year, for a few hours a day from 10.30 to 4pm with an hour's break for lunch. Some of the greatest art in the world is now available for just eighteen hours a week, and that for only eleven months of the year. 

I don't doubt the sincerity of the curators who assure us that they want to preserve accessibility. I'm not sure how much the decision was driven by cost cutting and how much by bureaucratic diktat. But access is what has been lost. And that should be protested vehemently. 

Art as Diplomatic Token

Picture: British Museum

The British Museum is lending a statue from the Parthenon to the Hermitage. It's not for an exhibition that will show it in a different context or add to our understanding. It's simply a tokenistic gesture, a single stand-alone loan for the Hermitage's birthday. Neil MacGregor writes about grand universal values, but he trivialises them by sending arbitrary loans on foreign holidays. 

But it's not quite arbitrary. There is an obvious reason for MacGregor to mention a loan of an ancient tablet to Tehran alongside a loan a work from the classic age of Greek democracy to Russia. It's a profoundly patronising gesture about civilizing 'bad' regimes. MacGregor pretentiously and wrongly describes the statue as a "stone ambassador of the Greek golden age and European ideals". Respectfully Neil, that's bollocks. It's a chance for the apparatchiks at the Hermitage to crow about their cleverness in getting the BM to hand over one of its masterpieces, but it's not going to change the course of Russian politics. The statue is a towering work of art, but it doesn't carry a message, however much you seek to impose one upon it. Describing the Cyrus Cylinder as a document "setting out the humane ideals of the ancient Persian empire" is even more willfully inaccurate and anachronistic, as if it were The Guardian avant la lettre. 

There seem to be more and more loans of the most priceless objects that are most important to museums' permanent collections, often at the expense of smaller and smarter shows of less well know works that deserve more attention. Museums have learned that one of the best ways to generate publicity is to talk about objects that have 'never before been lent', even to the point of dishonesty in the case of the National Gallery's much-vaunted loan of Rembrandt's Claudius Civilis, which has been lent more often than stated in their press release. It's especially crazy to loan one part from what should be a single work of art. The worst possible resolution of the debate about ownership of the Elgin Marbles would be to see them circulating perpetually, different bits flown off to different countries where MacGregor feels they'd benefit from the messages he'd like to send.

And more of these loans are made without meaning or context - simply 'highlight' displays that take works away from places that people expect to be able to see them without any compensating benefit of seeing them in new light. Shows of 'treasures from x collection' are now commonplace, simply taking the best pieces from museums like the National Gallery of Scotland or the Rijksmuseum and sending them on tour. The Louvre no longer exists as a single encyclopaedic museums; it's a central repository that moves masterpieces between Paris, Lens and Abu Dhabi (so far...). The point about these loans is that they have no meaning or purpose. Exhibitions should enlarge our understanding, but simply throwing together the best things that happen to have ended up in a particular place is actually impoverishing. It impoverishes the lending institution by taking its best things, and it gives a one-sided view of the collection by showing only the 'greatest hits', encouraging a mentality that values only supreme masterpieces. 

This announcement encapsulates all that's worst about our culture of exhibitions today, lending a fragile object without good justification, shorn of context, on a diplomatic rather than artistic mission that will glorify the curators rather than the creators of the work of art. 

New Raphael!

Picture: MS

Very excited to see this new Raphael drawing Ajax and Cassandra at the British Museum recently, just accepted by the government in lieu of tax. The drawing shows Ajax abducting Cassandra from the Temple of Athena, where she grasps at the statue of Athena.

If you're called a Cassandra today it's usually because someone thinks you're making a false prophecy of doom, which is ironic because Cassandra's prophecies were true, but doomed to be disbelieved. In this drawing she is being abducted by Ajax (Ajax the lesser - not the famous one!) after the Athenians have taken Troy. No one had believed Cassandra's warning about the big wooden horse. Ajax swore that he didn't rape her, though no one believes him. Anyway, abducting Cassandra from Athena's temple was itself a heinous crime and he was later drowned after Athena hit his ship with a thunderbolt and Poseidon then sank it with his trident. 

It was probably made soon after his arrival in Rome in 1508, and he's responding to a classical source, perhaps an ancient cameo.* Raphael shows his skill in drawing the male nude, and shows the tense moment when Cassandra, looking to the statue of Athena for protection, is torn away by Ajax. There's a great contrast between the figures of Athena and Ajax, each with outstretched arms. Cassandra is just being peeled away from her tight embrace of Athena, a space opening up between her head and Athena's bosom. But still she is turned away from Ajax, with a huge literal and symbolic space between them.

It's a metalpoint drawing, which is made by using a metal stylus (often, though not always, silver) to mark paper that's prepared with a ground layer. The groundlayer gives the pinkish tinge to the eponymous 'Pink Sketchbook', although it was probably never bound as a sketchbook. Metalpoint was rather archaic by the early sixteenth century, but Raphael - that most versatile draughtsman - continued to use it to great effect. The new sheet is rather worn and battered, with large repaired losses at the margins. The British Museum owns two better preserved sheets from the same sketchbook. Facial Studies of the Virgin and Child in particular still shows the fine texture of the ground layer, and demonstrates a remarkably varied use of metalpoint, which is a medium noted for its limited expressive range.

The drawing has been on loan to the BM for many years, although it's not in their catalogue. It's now been accepted in lieu of tax, and is on loan to the BM pending formal allocation (which should be a formality). The acceptance in lieu scheme is economically irrational but politically savvy. There is no economic difference between taking £750k in tax and giving it to the BM to buy a Raphael or forgiving £750k in tax in return for a Raphael for the BM. But one of those options is politically more acceptable; acceptance in lieu looks like a free gift, even if it's no such thing. The net effect is to save some transaction costs, but it distorts museum acquisitions towards the random selection of objects offered up by people with big tax bills rather than the kinds of objects museums would choose for themselves. Still, I'm glad we've got this Raphael.  

Other objects accepted in lieu of tax can be seen here.

* Ruth Rubinstein 'Ajax and Cassandra: An Antique Cameo and a Drawing by Raphael' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol 50 (1987) pp. 204-205

Overheard in the print room

Picture: BM

The British Museum must be the most open print room in the world.  Anyone with ID can just turn up and request anything, except for just a single restricted item (the Jacopo Bellini album).  I've recently spent three days there looking at Raphael drawings, but this was the first time that I saw more 'casual' visitors.  I was really impressed by the helpfulness of the staff, but I couldn't help be amused by some of what I overheard.  One visitor seemed to have wandered in by accident, and didn't have any idea what she wanted to see.  She was offered some 'greatest hits' ... maybe you'd like to see some Michelangelo?  She demurred!  Without batting an eyelid, the assistant offered some Pre-Raphaelites.  That turned out to be just the ticket.   

 

Although I'm grateful for unimpeded access, I confess to a frisson of fear when I see piles of Leonardo and Michelangelo freely handed out to any neophyte. 

Raphael Drawings at the British Museum

Photo: BM

I've been inspired by the Raphael drawing exhibitions in Haarlem and Frankfurt (and seeing the outstanding drawing sold at Sotheby's), so I took a couple of days off work to look at the British Museum's amazing collection of Raphael drawings.  It was my first really sustained and focused study of drawings, and I'd prepared by reading as much of the vast literature on Raphael as draftsman that I could find.  But reading and looking at reproductions is truly no substitute for the real thing, and it was striking how quickly I learnt to discern differences in quality and to appreciate Raphael's artistic development.  I deliberately selected drawings by Raphael's students as well as attested originals so that I could make comparisons.  As I'd already seen in the Frankfurt exhibition, the students' work looks relatively better in reproduction.

The drawing above is from the Pink Sketchbook, in silverpoint on prepared paper.  No reproduction captures the astonishing subtlety of the original. 

Now I'm on a mission to see as much of Raphael's graphic work as I can.  Tomorrow I head to the Ashmolean, and I've got an appointment at the Louvre in January.