Mind the Gaps at the Louvre

Picture: MS

Drost's Bathsheba is lonely. She used to be flanked by two of the Louvre's great Rembrandts: his version of Bathsheba on the right, and St Matthew and the Angel on the left. The St Matthew has gone to the Louvre's new branch in Lens, the Bathsheba is 'being examined'. Lots of pictures are being 'examined' at the moment; my guess is that they're being prepared for transport to Lens. Instead of an opportunity to see rarely exhibited pictures from the basement, there are great big gaps in the displays. And what can compensate for the loss of Bathsheba and St Matthew from the Rembrandt room? The Louvre has some fine Rembrandts, but it's an area of relative weakness and these are two of the three highlights; only the late Self Portrait at the Easel remains.

Other pictures have recently returned, but the captions haven't been updated. There's a sign in the Ingres room advising that Monsieur Bertin is in Lens. But previously it didn't hang in the Ingres room; it was in the large format French paintings room, to which it has now returned. Unless you know the picture you wouldn't realise, though, because the captions haven't been updated. Here he is, with his 'caption':

And here is Raphael's Baldassare Castiglione, which was removed early from the Late Raphael exhibition for its rendezvous in Lens, with a detail of its caption:

and here is Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People:

Unbelievable that the Louvre would fail to give Liberty Leading the People its caption!

The Louvre used to be the greatest encyclopaedic museum in the world. Now it's a brand, selling merchandise and shipping art between its branches. Coherent groups of objects are being broken up to satisfy political and economic imperatives. The Louvre has acquired most of Fragonard's series of Fantasy Portraits, which look fantastic as a group. But now the most famous of them all, the portrait of the Enlightenment encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, has been separated from its companions and sent to Lens. 

The main reason for my visit was to see Raphael drawings, and I'm pleased to say that the print room remains an oasis of culture and civility. I look forward to some more upbeat posts about the drawings by Raphael and his school that I saw.

More bad wall text

Picture: Melbourne Art Network

Melbourne Art Network tweeted this absolute gem from Kelvingrove in Glasgow, a museum that takes dumbing down to new heights.

 

It was in response to another strident and brilliant editorial in the Burlington Magazine on the state of art writing.  It's frustrating that the Burlington is so expensive to access on-line - I got dirty looks from the staff at the National Gallery shop yesterday when I started to read a third article, propping myself up by the cash register - but the freely available editorials are always brilliant and always right. 

Great wall text

Picture: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The latest Tate Britain show is dispensing with long labels so that we can find our own meaning, reports AHN.  Phooey, I say.  We can dispense with art history entirely if it's just about finding our own meaning.  The point of wall text is to help us to look out rather than in, to expand our understanding rather than narrow our vision to our internal thoughts.  One museum that does it really well is the Met.  It's quirky, variable and often brilliant.  Here's the text for the picture above:

De Witte's earliest architectural views, like this one, borrow compositional ideas from his fellow Delft artist Gerard Houckgeest (ca. 1600–1661) but treat the Gothic church interior less in terms of solid forms than of space, light, and mood. In stressing these intangible qualities De Witte suggests a spiritual environment and also anticipates the optical approach of Johannes Vermeer.

This breaks a lot of rules.  That first sentence is long and complicated.  It's heavy with art history - how many casual visitors will even have heard of Houckgeest?  But it's packed with useful, interesting information that helps us understand the painting as an aesthetic object and place it in an art historical context.  It resists the temptation to describe the painting.  The most obvious thing to do would be to draw attention to the urinating dog, and talk about the activities taking place in the church.  But anyone can see that; it's not necessary to state the obvious in wall text.  I can imagine one of the trendier British museums writing something like this:

This church is painted white inside because the Dutch protestants have painted over religious images.  The artist, Emanuel De Witte, specialised in painting churches.  These paintings were bought by the middle classes to hang in their houses.  Churches were social places in the 1700s - we can see lots of people hanging out.  Can you see what the dog is doing?

I'm caricaturing a bit, but you can recognise the simplistic anecdotal style.  Of course this has its place, and one of the nice things about the Met is that it seems capable of speaking to different audiences.  They run great docent tours and the wall text speaks with different voices.  It's a refreshing change from the uniform infantilism in some British galleries. 

 

The text for the Bronzino Drawings exhibition a few years ago was especially memorable; I noted down some of the text:

This study is among a group of drawings dating about 1545-60 that may be attributed with some confidence to Bronzino but are particularly reminiscent of Pontormo's mature figural style at the time he was working on the frescoes (now destroyed) in San Lornezo, Florence; Bronzino, who assisted Pontormo on the project, completed it upon the master's death in 1557.  Unique to Bronzino are the soft yet palpably defined sculptural quality [...], evident in the rubbed, relieflike interior modeling; polished degree of finish; nervous fineness of outline; stylized roundedness of individual muscles; and greater overall naturalism of anatomical structure and detail.  The technique of regular parallel hatching, not usual for Pontromo, was used throughout. [Agnolo Bronzino Standing Male Nude in Three-Quarter-Length Seen from the Rear c. 1545-60, Uffizi 6589F]

The anatomical modeling recalls that of cat. no. 47 [above], but the rendering is more diffused and impressionistic, with the strokes of the chalk more smoothly rubbed in while the contours are not as hard and fine. Bronzino's tendency was to contain forms within marked outlines and to define sculptural forms while rubbing the chalk strokes of the interior modeling into soft, nearly sfumato effects [...] [Agnolo Bronzino Standing Male Nude in Three-Quarter-Length Seen from the Rear c. 1550-60, Uffizi 6606F]

I think this is just brilliant.   It's well-written, and it flatters the viewer by explaining what is at issue in attributing these drawings.  This kind of text isn't a barrier to looking, it encourages us to look more closely and more carefully.  I can't imagine any major British museum daring to write wall text like that. 

Admirable and abysmal presentation at the Ashmolean

The Shoemaker Pot (Picture: Ashmolean)

I don't know much about Greek vases, but I like them.  They are outside my main artistic interests, but I've enjoyed hours perusing collections from Malibu to Moscow.  I've recently read excellent popular books based on the collections in the Met, the Getty and the Berlin Antikensammlung, which have given me a bit more knowledge and helped develop my appreciation.  But whereas in galleries of European paintings I read the wall text so that I can heckle the attributions, I'm still reliant on the curators to help me make sense of Greek vases.  In the Ashmolean they've let me down. 

The Ashmolean has one of the best collections of Greek vases in the world - certainly the best in the UK after the British Museum.  The presentation is thematic rather than chronological, which is quite common in displays of ancient art.  That makes it harder to show the development of Greek art, but it can still be an effective heuristic - the Getty Villa does a great job of combining a predominantly thematic display with enough chronological exhibits to make sense of historical development.  But at the Ashmolean the presentation is crushingly banal.  Here is the text of the 'Women and Children' section:

Women in most city-states of ancient Greece had very few rights.  They were under the control and protection of their husband or a male relative for their entire lives and had no role in politics.  Most women spent their waking hours in the preparation of cloth: whether carding, spinning or weaving wool.  To be considered respectable, women would remain at home, only going out for festivals or to fetch water from a public well.  The only important public role for a woman was to be a priestess.  Marriages were arranged by parents and dowries were paid to the groom's family.  Marriage was usually for purposes of family alliance rather than love (although Eros, the god of love, figures large in wedding imagery).

The only point where this touches on art is a parenthetic reference to the god of love featuring in wedding imagery (who'd have guessed?).   The Ashmolean is a museum of archaeology as well as art, and I think it's completely legitimate to tell the wider story of ancient society.  But even as social history this is pretty thin and unnuanced.  In any case, it shouldn't have to be a choice between either social history or art; Greek vases are valuable both as records of ancient Greek society and as great works of art that have resonated through history.  Other museums manage successfully to convey both aspects. 

 

Some Greek vases are signed, occasionally by both potter and painter.  Others have been grouped together under conventional names.  Generations of scholarship have brought us closer to the individual creative minds of ancient Greece.  The Ashmolean has examples by some of the greatest vase painters, but you wouldn't know it from the captions because they don't name any artist on the exhibit labels.  That's right.  Pause and read that again.  They really don't even name the artists. 

There is lively debate about the role of the individual artist in ancient Greece, and some are sceptical of applying methods of connoisseurship developed in the context of renaissance European art to the study of ancient Greece.  I certainly agree that assigning authorship shouldn't be the sole purpose of scholarship; that would be arid indeed.  But individual styles are readily apparent, and the presence of signatures (rare even in early renaissance art) must indicate some contemporary recognition of artistic personality.  I simply cannot comprehend any rationale for expunging all reference to authorship. 

 

Objects are subsumed in thematic stories, with only minimal information about individual vases.  The caption next to one piece is "Man and boy making love.  The nature of Greek homosexual love is the subject of current academic debate."  That is possibly the worst caption I've ever read.  We can see that it's a man and boy making love.  And to be told that there is an academic debate without giving us any information whatsoever about that debate is tantamount to saying 'move along people, academics are talking about this - we'll get back to you when we've concluded the debate, and in the meantime there's a gift shop just downstairs...'. 

 

The contrast in the renaissance bronzes display is refreshing and reassuring.  Some are shown in the paintings galleries, with others grouped together in their own room.  The accompanying text is short and relevant.  If you  want to learn more, there are folders of information provided in the room.  These samizdat binders have none of the glossiness of the wall text for Greek vases, but the content is really useful.  Timothy Wilson, the Keeper responsible for these galleries, will be displaying the Michael Wellby gift of renaissance silver.  I can see why Wellby entrusted it to the Ashmolean, and I share his confidence that they'll do justice to his collection. 

 

I felt that I was being invited in to join a conversation about the renaissance bronzes.  The curators were sharing their knowledge and interest, giving anyone the chance to follow at least part of the way towards their expertise.  If they were dealing with a scene of Greek gay sex I suspect they'd hand out copies of Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality and give you a quick update of the debate since then. 

I was actually angry when I first saw what they'd done with the display of Greek vases.  On sober reflection, I feel belittled.  It felt like the they were trying to flatter our preconceptions and then send us on our way.  They should have higher regard for their patrons, and we should be more critical and more demanding of our museums.  I'm not writing this from a position of any authority.  I'm just a museum visitor who'd like some help, and who appreciates curators sharing their expertise rather than fobbing me off with assurance that the important academics are debating stuff.  I'm sorry to be so grumpy about a museum I love so much, but this really won't do.