A weekend in Vienna Part II: The Academy of Fine Arts

Picture: Platzpirsch.at

The Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna is just around the corner from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but few make the trip.  The gallery is on the top floor, above the Academy of Fine Arts, through grand but dilapidated corridors and past grotty student noticeboards.  The approach reminds me of the Brera in Milan.  The picture gallery itself is narrow and the lighting isn't great, with hanging space carved out with partitions.  But what treasures within!  Famous things include the great Bosch triptych of the Last Judgment, a celebrated Rembrandt Portrait of a Lady, Van Dyck's Self Portrait Aged 16 (on loan to the Prado Young Van Dyck exhibition at the moment) and some excellent Rubens. 

Picture: wga.hu

The Rembrandt (above) is disappointing because it's so damaged.  Even in reproductions you can see that the hands are worn, but the ruff is also largely illegible and the inimitable details around the eyes are blunted.  It still creates a great impression by virtue of the dynamic pose, and the face still dazzles at a distance.  Up close, it lacks the finesse of better preserved works like the wonderful Aeltje Uylenburgh of the same period (in the Otterloo collection; I saw it on loan to the Rembrandt's Women exhibition in Edinburgh, and again at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts).  The Vienna painting is probably the best Rembrandt that I haven't seen before - on my only previous visit to the Academy Gallery the Dutch pictures were in store because they were refurbishing the building.

The Dutch still lifes were really excellent, and appeared to have escaped the ravages of the restorers who wrecked the Rembrandt.  Jan van der Heyden is celebrated for his meticulous townscapes, but he is represented here by a rare still life.  I've seen other still lifes of his in the Thyssen in Madrid and the Norton Simon in Pasadena, and I recall both as being in poor condition.  This one is very well preserved, and gave me a completely different view of van der Heyden's considerable talents as a still life painter.  There are two fine still lifes by Rachel Ruysch, the larger of which is one of the best flower pieces I've ever seen - she could paint even better than George Baselitz.  There is also a very large and luxurious still life by Heem and a good Aelst.

The rich collection of Rubens is strong in oil sketches including the justly famous Judgment of Paris.  Among the finished works, The Three Graces (above) is listed as Rubens, but it's obvious that only the figures are his, the landscape and still life elements probably by Jan Brueghel.  It's a felicitous collaboration where the different styles give a sense of separation between the figures and the background that adds something to the composition, creating a sense of artifice that suits the subject.

 

A special treat for me was the profusion of Ruisdael, one of my very favourite Dutch artists.  A number of these were on loan from a private collection (together with a large Allaert van Everdingen), including a splendid small seascape in especially good condition.  The sky has suffered, as usual with Dutch landscapes, but the choppy sea is strikingly fresh. 

The Botticelli tondo of the Madonna and Child with Two Angels didn't impress me.  It is hung high up, and glazed with poor-quality glass with distracting reflections.  There is more of a continuum of quality in Botticelli's studio than in many other renaissance collaborators, from the consistently sublime quality of, say, the Mystic Nativity, down to some frankly dreadful daubs that still have good evidence of originating in his studio.  This one seemed more studio than Botticelli, from what I could make out - an effective and surely autograph composition derived from the Magnificat, but prosaic execution with heavy-handed outlines and a poor sense of volume, particularly in the recession of the faces.

Dieric Bouts Coronation of the Virgin is an interesting picture.  My first thought was that it was closer to Gerard David - certainly it's much 'sweeter' than one usually finds in Bouts.  But on closer inspection, those toothy angels are too robust for David, and there are plenty of Boutsian touches in the detail.  It's an early work, but impressive and beautiful.

 

I have a soft spot for Giovanni di Paolo, a relatively minor Sienese artist whose workshop eschewed grand fresco cycles, but painted polyptychs prolifically. His predellas are scattered far and wide, with many in American museums. The greatest concentrations are probably in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, and the Met in New York, particularly from the Lehman bequest. There are some in English museums, and I've just discovered from the marvellous Public Catalogue Foundation that there's one that I haven't seen, which is in Rochdale. I don't think there have been any recent studies of his work, although John Pope-Hennessy wrote about him. A catalogue raisonné would be much appreciated if anyone can spare a decade or so. 

Giovanni di Paolo's The Miracle of St Nicholas of Tolentino in the Academy Gallery shows a laughable failure to understand perspective.  He's clearly tried - you can see the incised perspective lines - but multiple vanishing points make you feel seasick looking at it.  It's one of his less successful pictures, but still charming.

 

I've resisted adding comment on the Bosch because it is so famous and so widely written about, but its fame is deserved.  It was the second time I'd seen it, and it still overwhelms; seeing the original is always a fresh experience that makes you forget how often you've seen it reproduced.  It's a brilliant, fascinating, compelling picture that is worth a trip to Vienna on its own.

 

This was one of my most enjoyable museum visits.  I spent about four hours, which was enough to get a good look at the highlights but still hanker to return.  There is a handful of great masterpieces that would grace the walls of even the greatest museums, but there are also plenty of lesser pictures that are still full of interest and all the more sparkling for their unfamiliarity. 

Vandalism at the Wallace

Picture: Suite101.com

I returned to the Murillo exhibition at the Wallace Collection this weekend, and found it in a worse state than last time.  A chunk has been snapped off a scroll on the frame of The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (painting above, frame below), on loan from Wrotham Park.  It looked like a new break, and I didn't recall it from my previous visit.  I asked the guard, who told me it had just happened recently, but they weren't sure when.  Other staff I asked said the same thing: "very unfortunate sir, no idea how it happened."  Eventually one guard let the cat out of the bag, and told me that it happened when the director was showing around a group of dignitaries, and 'Lady something or other' broke a piece off the frame.  There is now a flimsy barrier in front of the picture - but only in front of that one picture.

Picture: MS

The Wallace is usually very defensive about damage to its collection, which I suspect is commonplace.  On another visit I heard two guards discussing an incident that happened during a wedding that they hosted, but they clammed up when I enquired further. 

Picture: Grazia

 

The Wallace is one of the most fragile of museums, with a profusion of paintings and decorative arts displayed without barriers.  But they take few pains to protect it.  I've seen guards leave the room when large groups of raucous schoolchildren arrive, to avoid the hassle of intervening as they play with the fragile French furniture.  And you often see pushchairs rammed into exhibits, fingers poked against paintings, and sculptures caressed by visitors.  If you cross their palm with silver, you can even host a piss-up in its hallowed halls.  The latest incident speaks again to the privileges accorded to mammon by the Wallace - noble ladies getting special tours where they can poke and prod and smash the exhibits with abandon.  Just compare the 'touching side' with the other side of this gilt bronze to see the tragic consequences:

 

 

To be fair, I had noticed some improvement recently; visitors have been asked to check large bags in the cloakroom, and guards seem more alert (though my perception is based on a small sample of visits).  Some of the guards at the Wallace are outstanding - not only alert and careful, but helpful and knowledgeable when talking to visitors about the collection.  The Murillo show is lovely, perfect in scale and mood for the Wallace, and far removed from the previous director's scandalous Hirst exhibition, which I decried in a review on Culture Wars.  But this latest incident may cause prospective lenders to pause and consider if the Wallace is fit to be entrusted with loans given its failure to protect the Murillo. 

Restitution after World War I



 

Picture: Getty

I just read a book on the collection of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna that makes a cryptic reference to the return of 80 Venetian paintings to Italy in 1919. It clearly still rankles - "Italy's juristically controversial claim to the paintings led to their being returned" writes Renate Trnek in The Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna: An overview of the collection (Vienna: Bohlau n.d.) p. 10. 

I was already aware that panels from Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece (above) were returned from Berlin under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, so I did some more digging in the original peace treaties. The Reparations articles contain specific requirements for transfer of works of art, and in the case of Austria the open-ended requirement to submit to future demands to be determined by expert committee. 

It's remarkable that in 1919 the victors demanded that an African skull be repatriated ... to Britain! Also notable that the great Rubens St Ildefonso altar had to be returned to Belgium. It's still at the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, so I assume it was never returned. 

There was no equivalent treaty after World War II; the allies simply arrogated jurisdiction over the Third Reich's territory. However, the paintings from the Berlin museum that weren't destroyed by fire or in the Soviet zone were transported to Washington D.C. where they were shown in the brand-new (and largely empty) National Gallery of Art. I understand that there was some debate at the time about keeping them, but they were swiftly repatriated to Germany. I suspect that World War I was the last major war where the peace treaties contained significant provision for the movement of cultural property as part of war damages. 

The Versailles Treaty required:

• Return to France of objects looted in the Franco-Prussian War.

• Return to the King of Hedjaz of a Koran taken from Medina by the Turks and given to Kaiser Wilhelm.

• Return to Britain of the skull of Sultan Mkwawa removed from German East Africa.

• Provision of books and manuscripts to Louvain to compensate for the burning of the library.

• Transfer of panels by Van Eyck from the Ghent Altarpiece.

• Transfer of panels by Bouts from the Last Supper Triptych in Louvain, from the Alte Pinakothek and the Berlin Museum.

The Treaty of San-Germain-en-Laye with Austria was even more demanding. In particular, Article 195 bound Austria to accept the determinations of a Committee of three jurists to be appointed by the Reparation Commission to investigate the conditions under which objects were removed from the Italian provinces to Austria. It also permitted submission of claims from Belgium, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, and bound all parties to accept decisions taken by the Committee. A number of specific objects and collections were identified for return, including:

• Medici crown jewels to be returned to Tuscany.

• An Andrea del Sarto and four Correggio drawings, paintings by Rosa and Dosso Dossi and various bronzes to Modena.

• Twelfth century objects made in Palermo for the Norman kings to be returned to Palermo.

• Manuscripts and documents removed in 1718 to be returned to Naples.

• Rubens Triptych of St Ildephonse and other objects to Belgium (this is still in the Kunsthistorisches).
 
• The gold cup of King Ladislas IV to be returned to Poland.

• Various documents and manuscripts to be returned to Czecho-Slovakia.

I'm now interested to learn more about details of what was actually moved after the War - what did Germany send to Louvain, and what did the Committee require Austria to relinquish?   More information and references gratefully received.

Mahon Bequest - terms broken already?

Picture: The Art Newspaper

Denis Mahon's bequest of 57 baroque pictures to British collections has just been completed.  He also made bequests to the National Gallery of Ireland, and to the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna.  The National gallery produced a fine catalogue of his collection when it was exhibited in its entirety (Discovering the Italian Baroque by Gabriele Finaldi and Michael Kitson), including the non-UK bequests, and also a few paintings that he sold in the 1970s.  Much has been made of his condition that free entry must be maintained at the galleries benefiting from his bequests, but Temple Newsam received a painting, and it charges for admission - as does the Pinacoteca Nazionale.  So the terms are broken on the day it's announced! 

A weekend in Vienna I: The Belvedere

Picture: Colourbox.com

I'm just back from a long weekend in Vienna, inspired to return for the first time in a decade by David Packwood's fine account of his recent visit.

Vienna is a fascinating city, a great imperial capital from the fifteenth century and an intellectual and cultural powerhouse without equal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  After World War I Vienna went suddenly from being the cosmopolitan capital of a great empire to being just a big city in a small country.  It inherited a great imperial bureaucracy with a city hall exchequer.  The arts are an easy target in hard times, and there were serious discussions about selling off some of the Habsburg treasures, which had only just been nationalised; until after World War I the art collections were the private property of the Emperor.  The Albertina came close to being sold en bloc to Boston, split between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Fogg Museum at Harvard.  Lucky for Vienna, the sale was aborted. 

 

Vienna's fascinating history has inspired a vast literature. I recommend Alan Janic and Stephen Toulmin's Wittgenstein in Vienna and Carl Schorske's Fin de Siecle Vienna, both focused on the period of intellectual ferment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  I'm not aware of any monumental history of Vienna comparable to Alexandra Richie's Faust's Metropolis on Berlin, but I hope someone is writing one - I'd love to read it.



On this visit I went to the Belvedere for the first time, and it was a pleasant surprise.  Mitteleuropa-palace-baroque isn't generally my thing, but it's a fine building with good proportions and excellent light.  It has made the transition to picture gallery more successfully than some of its peers, perhaps partly because little of its exuberant original decoration survives.  The Belvedere has an odd selection of collections - medieval Austrian art (highlights in the Upper Belvedere, leftovers in the old stables at the end of the garden), eighteenth and nineteenth century Austrian art, odds and ends of European art (version of David's Napoleon on the St Bernard Pass, some impressionists), and of course the Vienna Secession.

Picture: Kunstpresse.at

It's worth visiting just for the room of Messerschmidt character busts.  A dozen are arranged in a circle in a small circular room with seven windows providing fabulous lighting.  It was a better experience than seeing the whole of the Louvre's Messerschmidt exhibition a couple of years ago, where the lighting was worse and the rooms too crowded. 

 

Picture: Wikipaintings

I enjoyed the Biedermeier and Baroque paintings, but my limited knowledge of these little masters made me impatient.  The masterpieces of the Vienna Secession are familiar to everyone, and easily appreciated.  I particularly liked the Kokoschka portraits in these rooms, with their wonderfully expressive hands.  His Portrait of the Painter Carl Moll is pictured above, but the reproduction is unjust to the feverish dynamism of the original.

 

Picture: Belvedere

Medieval Austrian art was moved to the Belvedere from the Kunsthistorisches in the 1950s.  Most of it is unfamiliar to me, but I thought some of it really rather good.  I liked the Michael Pacher - Dürer's master.  The fragments of an altar from the Franciscan Church in Salzburg are damaged but very impressive, and show awareness of trends in Italian art.  The figure binding Christ in the Flagellation (above) looks to be straight out of Mantegna.  It's a shame that some of these paintings can't be shown at the Kunsthistorisches, to allow better appreciation of Austrian art in the context of the more familiar 'greatest hits' of European painting. 

 

Conrad Laib's Crucifixion altarpiece was also impressive, but I wondered how much of its stunningly bright appearance is down to restoration.  It's a nice example of International Gothic that would provide a precursor to the Kunsthistorisches collection, which only properly gets going in the sixteenth century (give or take a Tura and a Mantegna or two...).  But that's a story for a future post.

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. 

The Computer Says "No"...

Picture: Tumblr

I got an astonishingly bureaucratic response to a query to the V&A - a museum that prides itself on being accessible and visitor-friendly.  I don't mind waiting to see the painting in question, but if I were engaged in time-sensitive research, or were visiting London only for a short time, I'd really want to know more about why it can't be seen for such a long and indeterminate period.  A direct response from a person would have been helpful in those cases.  Here's the email they sent me, with only the name of the sender redacted.  I bet they spent real money on all those forms and automated replies.

 

The painting in question looks interesting.  It's a full-size copy of Raphael's School of Athens that was commissioned for the Long Gallery at Northumberland House.  Roll on 2014 (at the earliest...)!

Subject: RT10086 Response to your Research Enquiries question

Victoria and Albert Museum
RefTracker
Response to your Research Enquiries Question #: RT10086 
Regarding
Please describe how we can help you: 
Would it be possible to view the Mengs copy of Raphael's School of Athens, which is listed as in store?

Many thanks
Michael Savage 

Our response is: Dear Michael Savage, Thank you for your enquiry. Unfortunately the Mengs' copy of Raphael's School of Athens will not be available before the end of 2014 at the earliest. It will be then on display in the Cast Courts. I am very sorry about this inconvenience but its avalibility depends on the progress of refurbishments work currently carried out in the Cast Courts. Yours sincerely, [name redacted - MS]

The status of your question is now closed.

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