How not to buy a Rembrandt

Picture: Wales Online

Two big Rembrandt deals have been announced recently. Both reveal wastefulness and foolishness in public art acquisitions.

The UK government has placed a temporary export block on Catrina Hooghsaet (above), which is being sold from Penrhyn Castle. The Telegraph reports that a private buyer has agreed to pay £35m plus sales tax of £660k. The painting is exempt from sales tax, so presumably £660k is due on agent's fees of £3.3m. UK buyers have until 15 February to register interest in buying the picture. 

I hope no one does. The picture has been openly marketed for years; the Rijksmuseum came close to buying it. There was ample opportunity to negotiate a friendly deal without the need to pay millions to Sotheby's. I don't begrudge dealers' mark-ups or agents' fees, which are fairly earned in a competitive market. But British institutions have a woeful history of waiting until the last minute and then declaring a national emergency, when a bit of foresight would save millions. If anyone wanted it, the should have said so earlier. They will seem incompetent if they only raise their hands now. 

The other element I find objectionable is the smoke-and-mirrors approach to funding acquisitions. An element of tax that's been deferred could potentially be removed from the sale price, making it cheaper for a British public collection to buy the picture. But the real cost to the UK taxpayer doesn't actually change. It makes no financial difference if the tax is collected and then spent on a painting, or if the tax isn't collected in the first place. But it does give an artificial incentive to buy pictures subject to tax deferral, which is an arbitrary way of choosing acquisitions. I've written more about it here, and discussed on the BBC's One Show here.

Finally I don't think it's the best way to spend £35m. It's a fine picture, and I'm a great Rembrandt fan. But it's not one of his best, and we've got quite a lot in the UK already. Spend the money on other things, and please try to buy wholesale not retail. Lots of great pictures are sold for surprisingly modest prices, and £35m could fill some serious gaps in British public collections.

Picture: Dutch News

The French and Dutch governments have jointly bought this pair of full-length portraits by Rembrandt from the Rothschilds for €160m. The Dutch came up with €80m shortly after buying a Adriaen de Vries bronze for almost $28m, yet they are so short of funds for operating costs that they have to close at 5pm each day to cater for private events. When you consider the value of the Rijksmuseum's entire collection, there is no way that they money they're getting from plutocrats and celebrities can cover the cost of capital for the public asset they are exclusively enjoying. But every day the oiks are kicked out in the late afternoon so the privileged few can party away in evening. 

It's a chronic problem in the art world that money can be raised from public funds and private donors for big acquisitions and flashy extensions, but no one wants to pay for more modest acquisitions or for the running costs of all the new wings. The Dutch government should have spent the €80m on opening later so the public can enjoy what's already there. 

My other concern with this dumb deal is that the pictures will be shared in perpetuity, meaning that these large and fragile pictures will be moved between Paris and Amsterdam every few years. There will always be minor damage when big pictures like this are shipped hundreds of miles. But what happens if they become too fragile to move? And what happens if the museums disagree on restoration? Or if one museum wants to lend them elsewhere, to the Louvre Lens for example? What will happen if the Louvre wants to rent them out to a foreign museum? Or if the two countries fall out. It is inconceivable in the medium term, but forever is a long time and who knows what will happen in 300 or 500 years. Shared ownership of art is an absolutely terrible idea. When a crisis happens, it will seem obvious in retrospect. But right now the deal is being naively praised as 'saving' the Rembrandts, as if any other buyer would destroy them. I'd certainly be sorry to see them disappear to a private collection, but I'd be much happier if they'd both been bought by the Getty or the Kimbell. 

Rijksmuseum to public: "If you don't like it, buy your own Rembrandt"

Picture: MS

It's a cliché that blockbusters are overcrowded, but Late Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum was the worst I can recall. It's more spaced out than the London leg of the show, but that extra space isn't to give the pictures room to breathe. It's to cram in the maximum number of people. There were far, far more people per picture than in London (which was also badly crowded). The room above has just three pictures in it. There were rarely fewer than a dozen people in front of each of them. 

There have been many complaints. A Dutch newspaper headed its report of the show with a visitor quote, "I could have punched someone". Director Wim Pijbes responded to criticism by saying that if you want a contemplative experience you should buy your own Rembrandt. That must be the most disgusting thing I've heard from a museum. When Anatole France said, "The law, in its majestic majesty, forbids rich and poor  equally from sleeping under bridges" it was satire, criticising the economic inequality that mocks formal equality. Pijbes offers a grotesque perversion of this, offered not as criticism but as fact. He implies that the democratic experience must be raucous and crowded, describing the 'great buzz' at the show.

But of course Pijbes, art historian and museum curator, recognises the pleasure of looking at pictures rather than jostling with 'buzzy' crowds, and another comment he made last week is revealing. He explained that the reason the Rijksmuseum closes so early (5pm) is to give them time to set up for the 500 or so private evening functions they host each year. The contemplative experience is so valuable and so desirable that they can charge a fortune for it, reserving it only for the rich.

Meanwhile those of us stuck in the third class carriage get an experience that is deliberately degraded. Not only must we contend with crowds. Flash photography is permitted at the Rijksmuseum, including at their special exhibitions. The official regulations still say no flash, but there are no signs up and people were freely using flash in front of guards. There are also red focus dots on many modern cameras that linger on the surface of the pictures you're struggling to see. Between the red spots and the bright flashes, pictures were arbitrarily illuminated several times a minute. Here's a two minute clip of the Washington Self Portrait. People are more willing to move aside to let people take pictures than to allow people to look at pictures, so it's easier to snap pictures than to look at them. It helps move people through more quickly and more predictably, but trying to focus on looking at anything is impossible. 

Museum overcrowding is a problem with no easy solution. Some want to build more extensions, but even if there's more room to show Troost people will still crowd around Vermeer. It's the same handful of famous masterpieces that draws the crowds; as the Rembrandt show illustrates, the extra space in the Amsterdam leg just meant even greater overcrowding. But the answer can't be to reject a contemplative experience (actually never mind a contemplative experience; I'll settle for just being able to see the pictures). Treating people like cattle and encouraging a more superficial engagement for the masses and charging through the nose actually to see things is an absolute perversion of what museums ought to be, and a degrading way to show great art. Pijbes' vile elitism adds insult to the injury of the Late Rembrandt experience.

Dresden Closed

Picture: Wikipedia

The Dresden Gemaldegalerie is closed for construction until March 26.  Very annoying when an entire museum is closed, but at least it's only a few months.  The Cleveland Museum of Art closed for almost three years, and the Rijksmusuem has been largely closed for a decade.  The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and The Mauritshuis in The Hague are both currently closed for long-term building projects.  It's hard to imagine what kind of improved visitor services could justify depriving the world of these collections for such a long time; cramped and crowded 'highlights' displays just don't compensate.  The Rijksmuseum building has now been closed for nearly a tenth of its life.  Sometimes those in charge seem to forget that people come to their institutions see paintings by great artists rather than building projects by Very Important Museum Directors.