The logic of our age

The entire Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was closed yesterday, so that rich people could have a party. In the UK museums were traditionally reticent about renting themselves out for private functions, but some now market themselves aggressively. It starts with out-of-hours rental, but once the principle is established and the tills start ringing the plutocrats encroach on normal opening times. It's like the old joke where a man asks a woman if she'd sleep with him for a million pounds. On careful reflection the impecunious lady agrees. "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?" he then asks. "What kind of woman do you think I am?" she replies angrily. "We've already established that; we're just haggling over the price". It might be more expensive to hire an entire museum during opening hours, excluding the public, but it's just a matter of haggling. 

The Victoria and Albert Museum is already notorious for its vicarious closing hours so they can set up for parties. A number of other museums often have random room closures for private events. I've also heard anecdotal reports of damage to art during a wedding piss-up at the Wallace Collection. Weddings are appropriately a time for drunken revelry. Museums are not an appropriate place.

It saddens me that people can travel from all over the world to see the Met, but then be denied access because only the super-rich can go today. It would be bad enough if the Met were making a difficult compromise to raise needed funds. But they actually seem proud of themselves. Its Twitter feed is stuffed with pictures of celebrities, as if the museum's purpose is to provide a backdrop for celebrity photos, 'drooling over wealthy people' as Tyler Green put it on Twitter.

This is the apotheosis of the modern museum. The real experience is reserved for the wealthy. But the rest of us can look admiringly at how cool museums are, because celebrities hang out there. Maybe drooling over celebrity photos on the Met's Twitter feed is the museum experience today.

Muckraking

Picture: Google

Art criticism is too often too uncritical, but writing about museums and galleries is an especially hagiographic genre.  I enjoyed Jonathon Conlin's well-received history of the National Gallery, The Nation's Mantelpiece, but it's very much an establishment history.  Stewards of the Nation's Art by Andrea Geddes Poole dishes some dirt.  It's a fascinating account of institutional politics on the boards of the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate and Wallace Collection between 1890 and 1939, full of great anecdotes that are unreported in the more sanitised official accounts. 

Geddes Poole remorselessly documents the failings of  the Trustees, which were astutely noted by the Treasury.  Treasury official R.S. Meiklejohn is quoted, "I have been told on good authority that one of the Trustees had never heard of Mantegna, another was ignorant of Masaccio, two of them seeing a photographic reproduction of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne were surprised to learn that the original was in the National Gallery" (p.166, quoting from National Archives T1/11995, Meiklejohn to T.L. Heath 27 June 1916).  A number of trustees are revealed as ignorant, bullying philistines.

The future King Edward VIII was briefly a trustee of the National Gallery, and I'd heard that he was somewhat disengaged.  But I had no idea that the NG acceded to his request to borrow a few pictures for his own house - which he proceeded to re-frame!  It seems only by good fortune that the original frames were found in a bedroom.  It's a great story that she tells well, highlighting the dereliction of duty by the board.  

The research is compelling, but the narrative is spoiled by Geddes-Poole's heavy-handed use of Pierre Bordieu's ideas about cultural capital to tell a version of the well-worn story about declining aristos versus the ascendant middle class. It's hard to justify such a broad claim on a tiny sample of connected individuals who served on museum boards.  The evidence is anecdotal, and there isn't enough to convince that we're seeing anything more than the usual frictions of office politics.  Moreover her unconcealed preference for commoners against aristocrats causes her to judge the self-serving dealer Joseph Duveen too generously, and to glide over many exceptions to the 'rule'.  It's implied that Kenneth Clark was an especially effective Director of the NG because he managed the board so well, but on the other side was ongoing strife with the staff, which is discussed in Conlin's book.

Geddes Poole writes that, "Noting the disparities between the two varieties of cultural capital (inherited and educationally acquired) helps to illuminate the divide between the amateur and the professional.  As professional expertise rose in value at the Treasury and in the director's chair, aristocrats on the board found their cultural capital devalued and their authority threatened." (p. 219)  That's a rather highfalutin way of saying that some people got onto the board because of who they were, others for what they knew - but it's not really such a clear-cut distinction.  Some aristos knew a lot about art, and some commoners had inherited a lot of money and social cachet.  The comment about threatened authority is question-begging.  The more interesting question is how professional expertise in art emerged and became valued, but that is assumed rather than explained.

She claims that "the value of amateur connoisseurship was about much more than knowledge or taste.  The issues concerned power and authority and were fraught with implications for an aristocracy in the process of being eclipsed by an emerging professional class" (p. 219)  This is lazy writing.  What does "fraught with implications" mean?  What implications?  It's just left hanging, and we're expected to nod obligingly at the impossibly vague claim that important things are happening in the background.

The book is also marred by a profusion of errors.  In one sentence she misspells three artists ('Wouvermand', 'Tenier', 'Van Dyke' p.143).  It's Fra Filippo Lippi not Fra Lippo Lippi (p.196), unless she means the poem by Browning rather than the artist.  Ingres painted Madame Moitessier not Madame de Moitessier.  She mentions "a rare Cima da Conegliano head of St Jerome" purchased for the NG by Clark (p.183).  There is a Cima St Jerome at the NG, but it's not just a head and it wasn't bought by Clark.  I simply don't know what she could be referring to.  She describes Titian's Diana and Calisto (sic) as the less  (sic) good of three Titians, when the Venus Anadyomene is clearly the least good (wrong on grammar, spelling and art, p.142).  She weirdly judges Sir Philip Sassoon's collection insignificant because "it was too diverse and did not concentrate on period, artist or country" (p. 25, a judgment repeated on p.200) - so I guess collections like Thyssen's and Frick's must be trivial too.   

The thesis doesn't convince, the social theory is a distraction and the carelessness rankles.  But I truly recommend the book.  There's a wealth of fascinating information, if you can tolerate its failings.  

Murillo Day

Picture: Guardian

Yesterday I went to the Murillo exhibitions at Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Wallace Collection.  Brian Sewell has written a great review; the comments below can be read as footnotes to Sewell.

 

The most disappointing aspect for me was the lighting.  Soane's magnificent daylit galleries have been blacked out, presumably to evoke the crepuscular light of a church.  Exhibition curator Xavier Bray also organised the outstanding exhibition of Spanish sculpture at the National Gallery, The Sacred Made Real, which was similarly spotlit.  That could be forgiven given the absence of natural light in the Sainsbury Wing exhibition space, and it worked well with the sculptures.  But the constant harsh glare of bright spotlights does not replicate the dim, variable light of a church.  On some paintings the spotlighting was distorting, such as the Penitent St. Peter where white highlights around the eye in particular stood out too strongly.

 

I was especially taken by The Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome: The Dream of the Patrician and his Wife, pictured above.  The colour is fantastic.  However, the reds in particular seem to have suffered from harsh cleaning; even from a distance you can see a dramatic difference between the uniform colour of the tablecloth, and the shimmering impasto of the white cloth on top of it.  As a result, the tonal balance in the picture is upset; large areas of relatively undifferentiated red demand attention, whereas the lively subtlety of the colours in better preserved areas like the yellow seem to recede.  This picture also suffers from the harsh lighting at Dulwich; you have to stand to the right to view it.  From the left all you can see is reflected light.  The large lunettes are shown out of their grand gilt frames, and hung high.  This at least is effective; you can really appreciate how well these paintings function hung at a height.

 

Sewell criticised the catalogue for being too obscure - written for Burlington Magazine readers rather than the general public.  Even as an occasional Burlington Magazine reader, I was rather disappointed; it's a collection of academic essays rather than a catalogue.  It doesn't even include the exhibits drawn from the Dulwich collection's B-list of Murillo-ish paintings, which I thought instructive at least in the history of taste.

 

Dulwich Picture Gallery is a bit of a trek into the suburbs, but it always repays a visit. It's probably the best museum building in the UK, and the collection is fabulous.  At the moment part is off display to make way for Murillo, but there is still plenty to see.  A studio version of Titian's Venus and Adonis is on display following restoration - the first time I've seen it, and it's good in parts.  Poussin's remaining Sacrements are on loan from Belvoir Castle, and there are fine still lifes by Boschaert and Huysum on loan from an anonymous collection.  There are two damaged predella Saints by Raphael in the collection, and I noticed for the first time that the inscriptions on the frames give the wrong dates for Raphael (1483-1521 rather than 1520).  But failing to correct that historic error seems somehow more forgivable than the dreadful lighting in the Murillo show. 

 

The Wallace Collection has simultaneously mounted a small exhibition of Murillo based on its own collection.  The Wallace does these small exhibitions well, and the catalogue is superb.  Today's catalogues seem sometimes to be vehicles to boost the publications list on curators' CVs.  The Wallace's is designed for visitors - small, cheap, relevant (although calling the Bibliography 'further reading' seems inappropriate when seven of the ten publications are eighteenth or nineteenth century and two of the others are in Spanish!).