The Jackdaw

Category: Comment

  • Alexander Adams: Women in Art Today

    Alexander Adams

    We are told that in many fields women face systematic disadvantage and are under-represented. It has become a core belief of many and goes almost unchallenged. When politicians came under pressure regarding supposed gender discrimination in the workplace, the British government conducted a survey of arts organisations. The 2018 report found that women comprise 56% of the British arts-sector workforce. The Arts Council of England has a National Council comprising 53% women and an overall workforce of 65% women. This evidence seems to contradict the narrative that British organisations reflect male power. At the very least, female administrators and human-resources staff must be implementing a form of patriarchy which is proving strangely ineffective. 

    I wondered why the female-disempowerment story had such currency when reality appeared to contradict that. So, starting in July 2018 for 12 months, I collected data on the press releases that I encountered as a critic in the forms of emails, publisher catalogues, magazine advertisements and notices on specialist websites regarding the international art world. I neither screened nor sought out data. I wanted to test the narrative that women in the arts face obstacles that their male colleagues do not – in other words, women are subject to widespread sexism due to the actions of individuals, organisations and systems. I daily checked every public statement relating to living individuals of ascertainable gender, classing each entry under appointment, prize/award or event. I tallied data monthly and derived from it percentages. I discounted any announcements relating to dead artists, non-fine-art events, events without an identifiable artist and previously announced events. Announcements relate to events in Europe, North America, Australia and a few from other regions. 

    The event data are numbers of opportunities not individuals because it was impossible to count individuals in events such as art fairs. Thus an event of 2 male artists is listed as “1 male opportunity”; an exhibition of 8 men and 3 women is listed as “1 mixed opportunity”. Each entry of unknown gender or mixed gender is counted as 0.5 male and 0.5 female opportunities.

    Although the system was neither comprehensive nor watertight, it produced remarkably clear consistent data.

    1.  Women outnumber men in recent appointments.

    Data shows that, in the cases documented, women are appointed to a greater number of permanent positions than men in public and private venues, arts organisation and to more temporary positions as organisers, directors and curators of events. This strongly suggests that there is no bias against women in hiring and promotion of individuals for permanent and temporary positions. It is fair to conclude there is no systematic bias against women being appointed to jobs within the fine arts. If, as it seems, a) women are entering existing positions at a greater rate than men and b) they are entering at a greater rate than that of the increase of positions in the field overall, then the field is becoming increasingly female populated.  

    2.  Female artists outperform male artists in recent fine-art prizes and awards.

    Considering the multiple estimates of the population of artists dividing 40-45% female and 55-60% male, female artists win more prizes than men proportionate to the percentage of the artist population that they comprise. All other things being equal, a female artist is two to three times more likely than a male artist to receive an award or prize. It is fair to conclude there is no systematic bias against female artists receiving prizes and awards.

    3.  There is over-performance of women artists in recent fine-art prizes and awards.

    Working on the basis that women form 40-45% of all professional active fine artists, we can see a measurable consistent over-performance by female artists. Different women were receiving prizes, awards, honours, scholarships and so forth, so it was not a case of a few skilled individuals winning multiple prizes due to personal merit and thereby distorting data. Male artists are under-represented in terms of fine-art prizes and awards. It is fair to conclude that female artists statistically over-perform and male artists under-perform in the area of receiving prizes and awards. 

    4. Female artists are represented in recent arts events at a level commensurate with that which they form in the artist population.

    Working on the basis that women form 40-45% of all professional and active fine artists, we can see that they have opportunities commensurate with their proportion of the artist population. The figure is remarkably consistent month-on-month. It is the largest dataset in the survey and the most consistent in terms of percentages. It is fair to conclude there is no systematic bias against women artists participating in fine-art events.

    5.  Recent female-only events outnumber male-only events.

    The total number of specifically male-only events was very small compared to specifically female-only events. For whatever reasons, fewer events around single-gender bases were devoted to male artists than female ones. It is fair to conclude that specifically single-gender events significantly favour female artists by providing more opportunities for female artists than for male artists. 

    6.  The dataset is of adequate size.

    The larger is the dataset the greater the consistency. Appointments and Prizes/Awards – the groups with the least amount of data – fluctuated most; Events had most entries and was most consistent. Inevitably, a study with a larger dataset would be more accurate.

    7.  The data is internally consistent.

    Data did not fluctuate dramatically over period and did not seem to be seasonally affected. Even in months with relatively little data, percentages for these months remained consistent with high-data months. This suggests that the data is relatively reliable and consistent. It also suggests that as trends were stable that the data shows a persistent state rather than a temporary situation.

    8.  The data seems a reasonable reflection of reality. 

    There is no indication – factually, logically or anecdotally – that this data is not a workable approximation of reality. The data reflects the experiences of most artists, art critics, art collectors and other art professionals rather than any political narrative.    

    9. These conclusions are in need of future correlation and correction. Further statistical models and datasets are needed to confirm or disprove the conclusions above. 

    Overall, these figures – while being a limited dataset – are an indication of what is likely the true state of affairs. To my knowledge, this is the first time such data has been compiled and for that reason alone it is of value. A more comprehensive survey is needed. However, there is nothing in this data or the conclusions that seems not broadly representative of the current situation.

  • Alexander Adams: What is Critical Theory and Why Should I Care?

    Alexander Adams

    “Was Lt Columbo’s name really Frank? We’ve all seen the freeze-frame close-ups of Columbo’s ID badge which states that his first name is ‘Frank”. But should we consider this canonical?”

    I’m becoming more and more confused by this ‘canonical’ business. The above is from Columbophile website. I love his joke about the Jewish lady who was walking down the street when she met a flasher. He whipped open his raincoat and she bent down to have a closer look. ‘Huh!’, she said. ‘Call that a lining?’

    At Browse and Darby on Cork Street for a small show of paintings called Off the Radar selected by William Packer. Some of these artists I remember from the Royal College. Leonard Rosoman was supposed to be my personal tutor. He is represented here by a rather good portrait of Jamie Scott. During his time as my tutor he never spoke a word to me. I asked Cyril Reason, another tutor, about this and he explained that Leonard was frightened of me. Jean Cooke I also remember. She was a nice woman but suffered from John Bratby. The only thing I remember her saying is “Ooh mi cystitis is really killing me this morning”. Her picture Up the road and pigeon die is worth a look.

    Deep in the bowels of the Sainsbury wing at the NG is an exhibition of the work of Mantegna and Bellini. The Venetian Bellini was one of the earliest artists to use landscape as an important ingredient of a picture and he did it in a less ‘wooden’ style than heretofore. The Paduan Mantegna was married to Bellini’s sister so they were kind of rivals. Mantegna was rather more formally and classically inclined, best known for his Triumph of Caesar. It’s good to see this series again, and illuminated much better than they were recently at the Royal Academy.

    The Feast of the Gods by Bellini is a good example of the way artists used to collaborate. It was touched up later by Titian, and then Dosso Dossi. The Assassination of St Peter Martyr, which is in the National Gallery, demonstrates the importance landscape held for him, about two thirds of it being taken up by a forest. The Drunkenness of Noah, also by Bellini, shows a near naked Noah sprawled out with three attendant figures. The central one behind him has a facial expression of slavering lechery, similar to that of the chief skinner in Ribera’s St Bartholemew, but more of that later.

    Bellini made a copy of Mantegna’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple. He did it from a tracing. What they did to babies in those days was extraordinary. The baby here being proffered to the priests is wrapped up tightly in white bandages and apart from the head would have been unable to move. It’s a wonder they didn’t gag it for good measure. Is this what’s meant by swaddling? Minerva expelling the vices from the Temple of Virtue by Mantegna is interesting mainly for his depiction of the vices. There’s a wonderful fat one in the bottom right corner.

    The drawings are very interesting, especially Mantegna’s Virtus Combusta. The description of it in the catalogue is delicious: ‘Pen and brown ink and point of the brush on a brown ground, heightened with white, the black background over red on paper.” Poetry. Blindfolded Virtue is being led to a pitfall by sundry malefactors. There are many other beautiful drawings. The Virgin and Child with Angel by Mantegna – tonally exquisite.

    There’s a priest in these parts who wanders around in a floor-length cassock, with a squarish hat and a pimple on top. He’s very furtive looking with a purplish complexion, and terribly thin. An obvious self-flagellant and wearer of the barbed wire garter. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got hairy palms. The other day he was bending down to talk to a small boy and I felt like Alfred Hitchcock who, upon witnessing a similar scene, wound down the window of his limo and shouted “Run! Run little boy! Run for your life!”

    “We have seen in our times men sent to the flames or the hangman’s hands on the grounds of their rejecting the holy word of god as the prelates interpret it. These prelates have lifted up their eyes as they were swooning with joy at the salvation of the sinner, though deeply regretting the agony inflicted. They love the pain of others for in it their own power is made manifest. It’s the one thing that man wants. Not knowledge, not virtue, but power.” So wrote Machiavelli. Some of the horrors of the life religious are on display at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in a show of paintings by José Ribera.

    One of the chief horrors (still common in the Middle East) is the strappado. The miscreant has his hands pinioned behind his back and is hoisted by the wrists, sometimes to a great height. Occasionally they would be suddenly jerked down a bit, just for jolly. The arms would steadily assume a vertical position as shoulder dislocation advanced. At what point death would ensue is uncertain. Perhaps they did them a favour and let them drop. Still it was for their own good, to protect them from eternal damnation in the fiery pits.

    Ribera was also preoccupied by the gruesome fate of St Bartholemew, who was flayed alive. There are several versions of this theme but the best is in the first room. Unfortunately it has been covered fairly recently in high-gloss varnish, which renders close scrutiny impossible. You have to stand well back to avoid the glare. There are many ways to varnish a picture and many different varnishes – you can even get a matt one. The one they’ve used here is most unfortunate. But it is a great picture.

    The chief skinner is shown sharpening his tool with a look of enormous relish, almost lechery, and this motif recurs in all the other versions. Most of the pictures in this show are to do with inflicting pain. St Peter was crucified upside down and Ribera went to great lengths to figure out how this was achieved. Not easy. The base of the cross is notched and morticed to allow the passage of the ropes attached to the ankles of the unworthy saint before he was hauled up and planted head down. It looks like his head would have been fairly close to the ground so bystanders must have been tempted to give him a good kicking, or maybe not as this would have shortened the agony.

    Writing about pictures with such enormously powerful subject matter is a difficult business. I suppose you can consider Caravaggio in aesthetic or compositional terms, but not these. And for a religious person they must be something else altogether; they are after all devotional items. Perhaps to get inside Ribera you have to go to the drawings, many of which are on display here. It seems clear that the sadistic tendency was there all along, it was inherent in Ribera’s make-up and he managed to harness it to religiosity.

    Regular readers will be aware of my friend Mistress Trish, who runs a dungeon down in Warren Street. It might be a good idea to take her along to Dulwich to give her a few new ideas. She’s got a houseboat and one of her clients has been enquiring about keelhauling. I advised her against it, for that way madness lies … and quite a bit of trouble. I recommended she stick with walking the plank.

    Like the universe the cosmic conceit of the art trade is expanding forever. Some of us thought that the gravity of logic or aesthetic sensibility would somehow cause it to slow down and contract, but no such luck. There must be some weird dark matter involved. The joke persists, as can be seen at Tate Bankside.

    “I’ve suffered for my art, and now it’s your turn!” could well be the motto of the artist responsible for the new display in the Boiler Room. There’s absolutely nothing in it until you get to the bottom of the ramp. There, gangs of schoolchildren are cavorting on the floor, which has been laid with some sort of heat sensitive tiles reacting to foot or body pressure, leaving a mark behind. Off to one side is a smallish room to which you are admitted after having your hand stamped with a long number. Inside it’s like a Turkish bath but the steam is something akin to a mixture of menthol eucalyptus vapour which promotes the tears you should shed for the plight of refugees. I felt like erecting a large sign reading “Art is not Elastoplast”.

    Oh, just one more thing. I popped into the National Portrait Gallery to see the BP prize. A little man told me it had finished the previous week. “You’ll have to go to Wolverhampton,” he quipped.

  • Michael Daley: Selling a Leonardo with Oomph

    Michael Daley: Selling a Leonardo with Oomph

    Michael Daley

    Questions proliferate on the disappeared $450 million Leonardo Salvator Mundi. Where is it? Who owns it? Who still believes it a Leonardo? Will it be exhibited this year at the Paris Louvre’s big Leonardo exhibition, as promised? Can it be true, as an artnet blogger now claims (on the claimed say-so of “two principals involved in” Christie’s 2017 sale) that the painting was removed on the night of the sale to be installed on the yacht of Saudi Arabia’s supreme ruler, Mohammad Bin Salman? Does Christie’s know more about this imbroglio than it has disclosed? Will the Salvator Mundi ever be seen again?

    In The Last Leonardo, Ben Lewis contributes hugely to knowledge of the picture’s shadowy emergence and subsequent near-mythic elevation. We now know the picture was bought not for “around $10,000”, as claimed, but for $1,175 – for less than the low estimate of $1,200-1,800 on a work described as being “after Leonardo da Vinci” at the St Charles Gallery, New Orleans. We now know that gallery closed down after the Salvator Mundi’s sale and reappeared under the same name but without previous records. We now know Christie’s turned the picture down in 2005. We know the “consortium” of buyers initially comprised Robert Simon, a New York dealer and Alex Parish (a freelance dealer and online picture scout for the Richard Green dealership). We know that before, during and after being exhibited at the National Gallery in 2011-12 as an undisputed autograph Leonardo, the picture was on the market and numerous attempts to sell it privately to museums for between $80 million and $250 million failed.

    Lewis discloses that it was variously rejected by: the Qatari royal family; the Hermitage; the Getty Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Vatican; Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie; and a German auction house whose Leonardo advisor, Professor Hans Ost, was and remains “very sceptical about the attribution”. The initial consortium was running out of money and afraid to offer the picture for auction. As Parish put it to Lewis, “there’s not a deader-in-the-water [work?] than a picture which you put up to auction and then bombs… where do you go from there? Absolutely dead.” Somehow, despite all failures, unimaginable success was to follow. 

    Deliverance began with a third consortium member: “An offer of help came in 2010 from a reputedly well-connected New York old master dealer, Warren Adelson, who has a gallery in a magnificent uptown townhouse. ‘I made a proposal to Robert and Alex to buy a share of the picture,’ Adelson says, ‘because I wanted to run with the ball and help them sell it.’ He negotiated a 33 per cent stake in the painting in return for a $10 million advance payment. It was accepted. As Robert Simon put it ‘there were a lot of expenses. The photography and the storage were expensive. When we insured at its value the insurers wouldn’t allow me to keep it in the gallery. It had to be kept in a vault at an art storage facility. There were my research costs, going to Europe five times, and Milan five times, and London and New York, and going and checking the libraries. Dianne [Modestini, the restorer] was helpful in not requiring us to pay everything in advance.’”

    Lewis wryly observes “nothing in the known universe, no item, no object or quantity of material, has ever appreciated as fast as the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci” but, even with a war chest, and Adelson on board, the going remained rough. The picture was offered to the Dallas Museum (for a rumoured $125 – $200 million). The museum’s new director, Max Anderson, was enthusiastic about the chance to “‘acquire a destination painting’ that would draw crowds to the museum.” Parish told Lewis: “We were strung along by him for some time … at the eleventh hour they offered just $40 million and $25 million of that was meant to be a swap with another painting. Apparently some of those Bible Belt people had little or nothing good to say about the picture. One guy – I won’t tell you who – said, ‘Boy, that is one faggy-looking picture of Jesus’ or something to that effect. I was really like, ‘O-o-oh, great. This is going so well.”

    Despite the astronomical leg-up inclusion in the National Gallery’s major Leonardo exhibition as a rediscovered lost autograph Leonardo prototype painting, this Salvator Mundi remained unwanted by museums and could not be risked at auction. Partial success – in the consortium’s inflated terms – was only achieved in 2013 with a controversial lawsuits-generating private sale through Sotheby’s to a Freeport owner who bought at $80 million and immediately sold on to a Russian oligarch for $127 million.

    What then would carry the picture over the line so spectacularly in 2017? When Christie’s got its second chance, it launched a global promotional blitz that rested on two planks: the authority of a claimed unusually broad consensus of endorsement among art historians; and, an absurdly inflated and unfounded provenance taken from the National Gallery’s own unfounded claims that rested on the then – and still – unpublished researches of Robert Simon. ArtWatch UK exposed the unsoundness of Christie’s provenance the day before the sale. 

    Lewis gives an especially attentive account of the precisely focussed means by which this seeming sufficiency of art experts was enlisted. With the single exception of Professor Martin Kemp (who spouted statements galore and made a promotional video for Christie’s immediately ahead of the sale to counter our criticisms) almost none of the listed scholars and curators had then – or has since – gone on record giving reasons for holding the painting to be an authentic autograph Leonardo prototype for all other Salvator Mundi versions. When Lewis asked the consensual scholars he “was not able to verify the verdicts of all the art historians listed in Christie’s catalogue.” His account of how the tongue-tied dozen scholars were assembled is molten:

    “Robert Simon was well aware that he needed to be strategic and accumulate the right allies if his painting was to be authenticated as a fully-fledged Leonardo. ‘Part of the reason for the secrecy was the mechanics, if you will, that Bob had to employ in order to get the utterly fantastic consensus that he compiled,’ says Alex Parish … After the initial period of restoration [there being quite a number – see Figs. 2 to 8], Simon and Parish began showing the picture to close contacts. The first to see it was Mina Gregori, not a Leonardo expert but a close friend of Simon’s who had made some hotly contested attributions to Caravaggio in the past. She came to see the picture in New York in November 2007, and said nothing at all while she was standing in front of it, but as Simon walked back to the lift she turned to him and said, with an Italian sense for melodrama, ‘È lui’ – It’s him.”

    Gregori was a good first choice. The owner of the Martin Kemp-supported La Bella Principessa drawing, Peter Silverman, gave this account of Gregori’s endorsement of that other would-be Leonardo in his 2012 memoir Leonardo’s Lost Princess: One Man’s quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci:

    “We had become close friends with Mina over the years, and she frequently stayed with us when she visited Paris … I asked her to look at the portrait again, telling her, ‘Mina, people are saying it could be Leonardo. Please sit and study it carefully and give me your honest opinion’ … Mina remained bent over the portrait for a very long time. Finally she called me to her side. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is Leonardo. Allow me to be the first to say so formally.’ I handed her a black-and-white photo, and she wrote the attribution on the back. I still have it.”

    Lewis frequently encountered un-clarity and contradictions: “Several curators and restorers from the Metropolitan Museum saw the partially restored Salvator Mundi in early 2008, but it is not clear what exactly was said about the painting. According to Robert Simon and Christie’s, a majority of the Met experts agreed they were looking at a Leonardo. One of its Italian renaissance specialists, Keith Christiansen, certainly did, and still does. Another senior staff member, Andrea Bayer, deputy director for collections, told me she would not comment on the painting. One senior academic source close to the Met told me, on condition of anonymity, that ‘The Met curators don’t believe that it is by Leonardo. One curator told Simon that the Met would be glad to accept the painting as a gift for study purposes. That means they thought it was a wreck and not by Leonardo.’ Another highly placed museum source informed that one of the Met’s curators ‘judged the painting a Leonardo but didn’t want it in his collection because of its condition’. If the museum’s specialists did consider the possibility that it was a Leonardo, it’s unusual that they made no attempt to make Simon an offer for it at the time – or since.”

    Next stop for Simon was Nicholas Penny, then head of sculpture at the Washington National Gallery who had recently bought a sculpture for the museum from Simon. “‘Robert’s had quite a lot of dealings with me, and I think he probably knew that I was not frightened to stick my neck out,’ Penny told me. Simon showed Penny the painting, and he responded, ‘You have a really interesting problem.’ By that, he did not mean the attribution was an issue. He was referring to the difficulty of establishing widespread agreement in the art historical community for new attributions.” Penny passed the baton to Luke Syson who was organising the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition. Syson shared his newly appointed boss’s judgement, telling Lewis in Kempian language: “It had that sense of how the natural is assembled to make the supernatural. The picture seemed to hover somewhere between our realm and the supernatural.”

    Syson and Penny saw an opportunity for a dramatic pictorial debut and an accompanying risk: “They knew that exhibiting a painting such as the Salvator – newly discovered, with uncertain attribution and on the market – would break a universally accepted convention of public collections not to legitimise or promote entrants to the field. To overcome this hurdle, Syson came up with a high-stakes solution. He organised a seminar, a gathering of the world’s top art historians to examine the Salvator in London ‘with an open mind’.” So, a disinterested scholarly perusal was in prospect? Here’s how Lewis saw it:

    “Five great Leonardo experts attended this meeting. From Milan came Professor Pietro Marani, who had supervised arguably the most challenging restoration in art history, that of the Last Supper …  Also from Milan was Maria Teresa Fiorio, who had run two of that city’s major museums and was an unrivalled specialist in Leonardo’s assistants and pupils. Carmen Bambach, the curator of drawings at the Met, had already seen the Salvator in New York on several occasions. [And was one of a quartet of distinguished scholars who rejected the attribution in reviews of the National Gallery exhibition.] From Washington, DC … came David Alan Brown, the revered curator of Italian paintings at the National Gallery of Art, who had long ago in his PhD thesis expressed his belief in the existence of a ‘lost Salvator Mundi’ by Leonardo, depicting ‘a mature bearded Christ … frontally posed and strongly lit from the left against a dark background with his right hand raised in blessing and his left hand holding a globe’.”

    In so contending, the student was then putting down a challenge to the great Leonardo scholar, Ludwig Heydenreich who, in a major study on the Salvator Mundi problem had concluded there was no indication that Leonardo had painted a prototype Salvator Mundi from which all other versions derived. In 1978 another American student, Joanne Snow-Smith, proposed that one version – the de Ganay – was the missing autograph Leonardo prototype painting. In 1982 she produced a book of advocacy (The Salvator Mundi of Leonardo da Vinci), which also failed to gain acceptance. However and astonishingly, much of her unsupported confection of a French royal provenance for the de Ganay version was lifted and applied by Syson in his catalogue entry. (Lewis believes the National Gallery had mistakenly switched versions and that Christie’s simply followed suit: “Luke Syson has since told me that he was mistaken to include this in his catalogue entry”. Lewis reports that research he commissioned shows that, contrary to Snow-Smith’s claim after Heydenreich’s death, the great scholar had not endorsed her thesis and, in truth, had rejected it in scholarly code.

    The last scholar to arrive at the Syson seminar (Penny did not attend) was Martin Kemp. Conspicuously absent, Lewis notes, was (our colleague) Jacques Franck, “a Leonardo expert who was a trained painter rather than an academic, and who had advised Syson on the restoration of the Rocks.” Another omission “the most surprising, was Frank Zöllner. A professor of art history at Leipzig, Zöllner was the author of the best-selling, multi-edition catalogue raisonné of Leonardo’s paintings.” Lewis suggests a possible reason for Zöllner’s absence. He had recently written: “mention must be made of the increasing attempts, above all in recent years, to attribute second and third-class paintings to Leonardo’s hand. In this context it should be noted that the catalogue of paintings presented here is definitive. While there may be works circulating in the fine art trade that stem from Leonardo’s pupils, the likelihood of an original by the master himself is extremely small.’ Syson says that leaving Zöllner off the guest list in London was, in retrospect, ‘a mistake’.”

    A mistake of a not uncommon kind at the National Gallery, it would seem, when attributions are afoot. On 8/9 November 2002 a symposium was held at the Gallery at which 25 art scholars and experts examined another small painting in the conservation department to determine whether a version of the very many Raphaelesque Madonna of the Pinks was the autograph Raphael original, as was being proposed by the Gallery’s Italian Paintings curator, Nicholas Penny. The Gallery later claimed that all present shared Penny’s judgement that the Northumberland version, which had been on display at the Gallery for ten years, was the original autograph Raphael. One Raphael expert excluded from the occasion was our late colleague in ArtWatch, Professor James Beck of Columbia University. As Beck wrote in his 2006 book, From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis, “Since the picture … was essentially on the market, a consensus among experts was highly desirable. An undocumented object that lacks the appearance of a consensus will not bring top prices and will rarely be treated seriously. In the past such an accord might have taken years to accomplish, but in today’s globalized world it can occur quickly, especially with the prodding of the public relations apparatus, amply available in world-class museums like New York’s Metropolitan and London’s National Gallery.”

    At the National Gallery’s Salvator Mundi seminar, Lewis notes, “No minutes were taken … No declaration of any kind was signed … No official announcement was issued after it ended. There was no formal process by which the attribution of the painting was conducted. The National Gallery did not ask to have the painting left with it to be examined … as the Albertina Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna had done with the Bella Principessa, before reaching a negative conclusion … After the meeting, Syson informed Nicholas Penny that the experts had agreed that the painting was indeed by Leonardo himself … Two weeks after the meeting, Penny contacted Simon and told him that the art historians had judged his painting to be a Leonardo … Penny formally asked if the National Gallery could borrow the painting for its exhibition three years hence, and also asked him to keep it a secret until then.”

    The members of the National Gallery Salvator Mundi seminar had also been sworn to secrecy – as Kemp puts it in his memoir, Living with Leonardo, “All of the witnesses in the gallery’s conservation studio were sworn to confidentiality, and the painting travelled back to New York with Robert. It was becoming a ‘Leonardo’.” Beck had observed with the National Gallery’s Raphael symposium, “No polling of the invitees’ views concerning the putative author of the Northumberland Madonna was conducted … at least as far as I have been able determine. The National Gallery director reasoned that since none of the people who attended … expressed doubts at that time about Raphael’s authorship, they all favoured it, interpreting silence as agreement.” Lewis continues, “However the art historians who attended the National Gallery meeting did not in fact reach an official attribution or an informal consensus about the Salvator Mundi. Nor were they asked to. ‘I have never issued an official opinion on the Salvator Mundi, and in any case, I have never been asked to do so,’ Maria Teresa Fiorio told me. ‘I discussed the painting informally with colleagues, and I do not know by what means my opinion was made known. If the Salvator Mundi was exhibited as an autograph work at the National Gallery, then that was an autonomous decision by my London colleagues.’”

    On the Penny Raphael symposium, Beck reported: “Although an overwhelming majority of the participants were persuaded, and hence a credible consensus was achieved, the claim of unanimity is unwarranted. I learned that at least three of the original 25 do not agree that picture is an autograph painting by Raphael. Indeed, one participant told me with indignation that he had spoken out against the attribution at the symposium itself* [*It is indicative of the climate of such encounters this dissenter insisted that I not identify him]. For the connoisseur the lesson of the Northumberland Madonna must be: beware of the consensus. Factors outside the specific issue can be determining factors, including personal friendships, national and institutional loyalties, and the distinction and power of the museums represented. Arguably in the case of the Northumberland Madonna the entire Anglo-American Art Establishment was co-opted, including Christie’s auction house by the presence of one of its staff, while Sotheby’s was directly involved and did take credit for the sale to the National Gallery, according to its own advertisements. What makes this consensus attribution so intriguing is that until 1991 an equally solid consensus among Raphael scholars held that the picture was nothing more than a good copy **[**The observation was made to me by Michael Daley.]”

    Lewis noted “The final score from the National Gallery meeting seems to have been two Yeses, one No, and two No comments.” He adds “For three years nothing was heard of the National Gallery meeting. Then in the summer of 2011, a few months before the blockbuster Leonardo exhibition opened, the curtain was finally drawn back. Simon issued a press release on 7 July. ‘A lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci has been identified in an American collection,’ it began. He then carefully listed the names of the illustrious art historians to whom he had shown the painting … Simon claimed that there had been ‘an unequivocal consensus that the Salvator Mundi was painted by Leonardo, and that it is the single original painting from which the many copies and versions depend … The Salvator Mundi is now privately owned and not for sale.’” Penny was to be hoist with his own petard: “Penny and Syson knew that this was not factually correct, although it is highly unusual for a public institution to show a painting that it knows is for sale. ‘I did know, of course, that the picture was potentially on the market when we borrowed it,’ says Penny. ‘Some people have professed to be astonished by this, but I’m pretty sure I would have discussed this with the relevant trustees and the chairman’ … Luke Syson told me, ‘I catalogued it more firmly in the exhibition as a Leonardo because my feeling was that I was making a proposal and I could make it cautiously or with some degree of scholarly oomph.’” David Ekserdjian, a Gallery trustee at the time, confirmed to Lewis that he supported the attribution. The Board Chairman was Mark Getty.

    Lewis’s conclusion startles: “Where the institutions of art have rules they are often the wrong ones – out of date, no longer fit for purpose. Museums, for example, are not by convention, allowed to exhibit a work of art that is on the market or to show a newly discovered one with a doubtful attribution – the source of much of the controversy over the Salvator Mundi. But as exhibitions and museums multiply, while the stock of old paintings remains much the same, it is unreasonable to expect curators not to look for pictures with surprises and controversial backstories to put into their shows. Such disputes are part of the reality show of art …”

    Best to treat art as its own reality. Cutting corners on connoisseurship would do the art world no favours.

  • Michael Daley: A Life Drawing

    Michael Daley

    Fans of Tacita Dean will be delighted to learn that she is having yet another exhibition, this time at the Royal Academy… And it’s well up to her usual standard. This time she is “exploring the genre of landscape in the broadest sense.” Well, broad is the word. She’s blown up a number of black and white photos so as to fill the enormous wall space available and touched them up here and there with some white paint. That’s about it. 

    The person from Preston, the one who recently won that silly art prize, but who is not yet wearing her new OBE medal, was sitting in a corner by some large glass cabinets containing four-leaf clovers, collected over the years by Tacita Dean herself. I pretended not to notice. She’s also become a professor you know, at something called Preston University. Like Tacita Dean’s her work is feeble. It’s the sort of stuff most artists would chuck away before starting again.

    What can such a creative possibly feel when confronted by examples of true greatness, or even just competence, as can be found in the new wing of the Royal Academy, such as the wonderful drawing of Leda and the Swan by Michelangelo (below, now thought to be a copy by Rosso Fiorentino)? It doesn’t matter who did it, it’s just as good, quite exquisite. Two Victorian academics apparently tried to have it no-walled on moral grounds. 

    Would Dean or Himid feel shame before work as accomplished as this? I don’t think so. Identity politics and arrogance combine into an impenetrable carapace of self-regard and entitlement. (And how’s that for hyperbole, or hyperbowl as Mr Major, that master of litotes, used to say?) Separating the Dean Department from one of the newly developed wings is a vestibule in which hangs an extraordinary painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence of Satan Summoning his Legions (opposite). More Fuseli than Lawrence at first glance, until you notice the superb handling of paint. Lawrence considered it to be his greatest work but it’s hardly ever been seen as it’s fifteen feet tall and there was nowhere to show it. I wonder if at any time it was anatomically complete, but the groin is featureless. He must have waited around for one of those floating pieces of gauze to come drifting by and captured it at the exact moment it landed. (Thank you. E L Wisty) A great Satanic purple bell end would have made an interesting feature.

    Constable’s small skies and landscapes of Hampstead Heath are very impressive (and very small) and there’s his view of the side of Somerset House which seems to have had a number of small watergates. I’ve been mistaken for some time in thinking that there was only one which is now that great arch of the riverside entrance.

    Thor Battling the Serpent of Milgard by Fuseli is worth a look and you will also find here a cast of the Laocoon which on its own is worth a visit.

    The Annual Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy has just opened. Hamish Kipper has dumped something large and expensive in the courtyard, which shouldn’t detain anyone for very long. Inside, that lanky old bim, The Widow Twankey, was sporting a bright purple wig surmounted by a tiny orange sombrero. A clown’s onesie and pale green clogs with enormous platforms completed the ensemble.

    In her gloriously exuberant manner she was ranting at a bunch of hacks which left most of the galleries free and enabled me to have a good look round to see what was on offer. Dear Reader, I  don’t know how much they charge at the door if you go along as a civilian, about a score I imagine [A mere eighteen actually. Ed], but in the age of the five pound pint, four of those will make you happier.

    There was one thing that I liked; a glazed box relief of toy unicorns galloping through a forest. It’s by Cathy de Monchaux, someone I’ve never rated before, but it shows imagination, an ingredient absent from almost all current art. Two enormities from David Hockney are on show, back to back. Poor fellow … it must be all that bogey weed.

    It was almost a relief to come across The Brick Woman, who has got herself up to the tenth floor of a block of flats and painted almost every brick in Islington.

    There is an ingenious bear which emerged in 3D from the middle of an oriental carpet and MacFisheries has been hammering tacks into things yet again. What tedium. Entropy always increases. Close down the art schools. 

    The Widow has also produced a range of gyfterie which you can purchase from the RA shop. This ranges from a paper luncheon napkin at £2.50 (although being a dedicated vulgarian she probably calls it a serviette) to handkerchiefs at twenty quid, T shirts at £28 and Teddy Bears at £24. All very reasonable I’m sure.

    It wasn’t until I was strolling away down Piccadilly that it occurred that there had been no sign of the Creative Bachelors. I checked the catalogue, no paper and glue to be found. The Widow was in overall charge this year and there’s a whisper round the paddock that she doesn’t hold with living sculptures.I don’t suppose they are too bothered because they are opening their own gallery soon, as they are cross with Mr Serota for not showing them sufficient respect.

    Readers may be interested to know that The Jackdaw has been banished from the Mall Galleries following an article suggesting judicial skulduggery at the Threadneedle Prize. It matters not as they never anyway got around to  paying for issues they sold.

    To the National Gallery to see the exhibition of Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the English-born American landscape painter. He was from Bolton and sailed to the USA with his parents at the age of 17. By the time he was 28 he’d acquired a patron who paid for him to travel to London where he met Turner and Constable. He was rather daunted by Turner who he considered rather uncouth, having “the appearance and manner of the master of a coasting vessel”. Many of the paintings that inspired him are included in this exhibition, notably Turner’s Hannibal Crossing the Alps and Constable’s Hadleigh Castle. Indeed, the arrangement of the Castle tower over towards the left side of the rectangle was to become a recurrent motif later on in his series The Course of Empire. He pinched, or as they say nowadays appropriated, the sky in Hannibal for one of his later painting. In a way you could say that he tidied up Turner and Constable but that is not to detract from The Course of Empire, a series of seven intriguing paintings (1835/36). You get the feeling that he really enjoyed doing these, especially the Consummation and Destruction with their casts of thousands, and then the perfect melancholy of Desolation, Constable’s castle replaced by a lone standing column with stork’s nest. Earlier parts of the exhibition deal with industrial England. A small hand-coloured etching of The Leader of the Luddites reminded me very much of The Widow Twankey. John Martin also features with his Belshazzar’s Feast and The Deluge.

    Upstairs in Room 1 you can see a selection of works by Ed Rooshay which are supposed to have some connection with Cole. I can’t see it myself. Masking tape and spray gun skies … if you like that sort of thing.

  • Dick French: On The Town – November 2020

    Dick French
    November/December 2020

    Rebecca Cains has died. She was only 50. “Death lies on her like an untimely frost.” Also known as “Becky the Scrapyard Queen” on account of the subject matter of her paintings – mostly wrecked cars and vans on roads or in scrapyards. She showed occasionally at the Royal Academy and frequently at Mall Galleries, where, at the time of her death, she was becoming something of a big cheese who sat on committees, etc.. She will be missed by all the hep cats in Bradley’s Spanish Bar where we always ended up jiving to the juke box.

    For many years, while living in Italy, she had been a professional dancer, so she always knew how to get the best out of opponents. The last time I saw her was just before the lockdown when we went to the opening of the Leon Spilliaert show at the RA with Dirty Harry and Mrs Cravat. She looked well and was in good spirits, even though she had been diagnosed with cancer five years before and it had now come back to haunt her.

    She was impressed by Spilliaert’s picture of an absinthe drinker and said that as soon as she got back to darkest Somerset she would attempt a portrait of a cider drinker. I don’t know how far she got with that. She could have had him or her sprawled out over a rusting bonnet nursing a two-litre bottle. The colour and sparkle of the cider would have gone nicely with the rust.

    She was very fond of motoring, up to a point if a little vague. I once asked her what sort of car she was driving. She paused a bit before replying: “It’s a brown car”.

    Throughout her illness she bravely carried on conducting dancing classes; jazz dancing it was, and something else called zumba.

    She leaves two grown-up children, ace guitarist Gianluca and the glamorous Gaia, who is about to start at Camberwell. She can’t fail.

    Spiv, teddy boy, conman, “prize wanker with a pocketful of red herrings”… All these terms have been used to describe Lucian Freud at various times in his career. William Feaver has written a most amusing two-volume biography of Freud. It’s full of great stories but like the Warhol biography I reviewed a few issues back I feel the author is overly enamoured of his subject. This is a little off-putting.

    Rather in the manner of many French intellectuals, Freud was fascinated by the criminal underworld. He had many dodgy friends. Round about the time of the Festival of Britain he was producing some remarkable work. There is a rapt obsessiveness about them that reminds me of Richard Dadd. Think of The Child’s Dilemma, a watercolour in which a child is moving a chess piece with a look of insane concentration. His portrait of Viscountess Rothermere, Mrs Ian Fleming, has something of this, although Evelyn Waugh hated it and said he’d put the tiara on crooked. It looks more like a hat to me. Ian Fleming hated Freud and Freud hated his stay at Goldeneye and, of course, Fleming.

    He came strongly under the influence of Francis Bacon and started to use hog’s hair brushes and thicker paint. His portrait of John Deakin (illustrated) is excellent, but a lot of the others were just dreadful; such as the joint portrait Michael Andrews and his wife. It’s hard to believe that this was the same artist who had painted Interior in Paddington with Harry Diamond standing in his raincoat by the window, fag in hand, beside a potted palm. He wore that raincoat forever. Many years ago I was stuck in the French pub with Harry Diamond. Like many of these celebrated Soho characters he was a colossal bore.

    An American writer noted that Freud was good but not that good. I think this was true. With thin paint he was unique. But his handling of thicker paint, with few exceptions, was indifferent and sometimes downright unpleasant, dry and knotted. From time to time he could do it, as in the portrait of Deakin. The ears and the complexion are great, as is the fluid treatment of the forehead, a human beetroot.

    And what are we to make of his portrait of the Queen? Zorba must have had a good chuckle over that one. 

  • Laura Gascoigne: Institutional Rationalism – November 2020

    Laura Gascoigne: Institutional Rationalism – November 2020

    Laura Gascoigne
    November/December 2020

    In the introduction to his 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, the classicist E R Dodds recalled a chance meeting in front of the Parthenon marbles with a young man who confessed: “This Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit”. When Dodds asked him why, he replied: “Well, it’s all so terribly rational, if you know what I mean.” Dodds thought he did. “The young man was only saying what had been said more articulately by Roger Fry and others. To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art… the art of the Greeks… is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience.”

    The conversation inspired Dodds to write his influential collection of lectures demonstrating that the Greeks were not really rational at all but as prone to magical thinking as any other culture. What Dodds didn’t say – or didn’t notice – was that the brand of modernism practised by Roger Fry and others was hardly an example of penetrating to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience. There was nothing irrational about the British interpretation of the modernist concept of significant form, but then British art – with the rule-proving exception of William Blake – has always tended towards the ploddingly rational.

    I haven’t read Dodds’ book since I was a student, but its title came back to me when I visited the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Not Without My Ghosts at the Drawing Room. The show (which tours in different editions to Blackpool, Sheffield and Swansea) is a small survey of art inspired by spiritualism or allegedly made under direction from spirit guides, starting with a loopy watercolour drawing by the Victorian medium Georgiana Houghton, who counted Titian and Correggio among her celestial controllers. Believe that if you will. But setting its makers’ claims aside, the work itself – apart from a couple of stylised surrealist drawings by Tanguy and Masson – has a rare quality: freshness. Every artist’s approach is utterly different. To judge by their paintings the Pas-de-Calais coalminer Augustin Lesage and the Walthamstow housewife Madge Gill inhabited different planets, even though they were roughly contemporary and only separated by the same English Channel that European modernism so easily crossed.

    Lesage and Gill are both accredited ‘outsider artists’ represented in Dubuffet’s collection of Art Brut, but not all the contributors to this show were untrained. The historical section includes a visionary portrait of The Spirit of Voltaire by Blake and an astonishingly accomplished evocation of the stuff of nightmares by Austin Osman Spare, a working class prodigy who won a scholarship to the Royal College, caught the occultist bug from Aleister Crowley and languished on the margins ever after. Neither Blake nor Spare were technically outsiders, they were simply too irrational to fit in.

    The show’s second half features contemporary artists inspired by the idea of spiritualism rather than the experience, aside from Susan Hiller whose Sisters of Menon series records an attack of automatic writing. Lea Porsager has repainted illustrations from a 1901 investigation into clairvoyance; Ann Lislegaard has made drawings under hypnosis; Olivia Plender has recast a seminal spiritualist text of the 1860s as a graphic novel. The records of a séance held last January by Suzanne Treister to contact an imaginary Museum of Black Hole Spacetime Collective in outer space are more entertaining, but none of the imagery is visually arresting. The only exceptions are two paintings by Ann Churchill, a self-taught artist inspired by Spare whose vibrant, tapestry-like works are packed with esoteric meanings.

    The Hayward could be onto a winner here. While the South Bank gallery lays off all its front-of-house staff and shuts for the winter after the closure of its exhibition Among the Trees (emptier on a weekday than any London park) I’ve got a feeling people will flock to this touring show. The public loves mad artists, especially when they’re safely six feet under. The Guggenheim scored a succès fou two years ago with its retrospective of Swedish spirit artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), which broke all attendance records at the New York gallery and spawned a follow-up film released this October. Like Blake and Spare, af Klint was a trained artist who went off piste after becoming involved in spiritualism and is now being hailed as a female pioneer of abstraction. Rational male abstractionists can expect recognition in their lifetimes; irrational women must wait until they’re dead.

    I wonder how visitor figures for Not Without My Ghosts will compare with footfall in our reopened national galleries, running at 12% of normal levels according to DCMS summer stats. An investigation by The Art Newspaper in September found that 70% of the National Gallery’s booking slots still had vacancies the day before and 100% of Tate Britain’s. It’s hardly surprising if people won’t risk infection to visit galleries. Applying the Covid-test to exhibition visits only proves, if proof were needed, that for most people the consumption of art is not a priority, let alone a matter of life and death. Even Bendor Grosvenor admitted in September’s Art Newspaper that his enjoyment of pictures at the Covid-proofed National Gallery was spoiled by fear. “I recoiled at every cough echoing through the galleries… I felt I was in an alien place – more well-appointed hospital than museum”. His fears were justified; he contracted Covid and made his admission from isolation.

    I know how he felt. I’m picking and choosing my exhibitions; while prepared to risk my life for Artemisia Gentileschi, I missed the press view of the Royal Academy’s delayed Summer Exhibition. I couldn’t face the prospect of wading through room after room of routine works rendered obsolete by Covid. Ben Luke in the Evening Standard confessed to finding the usual submissions “oddly comforting”; I feared I would find them more than usually depressing. Jackdaw readers will probably throw up their hands in horror when I confess to having preferred Grayson Perry’s 2018 selection of nutters, but the public agreed and went in record-breaking numbers. With a deficit of £8m and the Taddei Tondo under threat of the hammer, it was a success the RA may want to repeat.

    As Dodds argues in support of the irrational, human beings don’t just think, we also feel. Galleries would be far more popular with the public if they dropped the institutional rationalism: what most people want from exhibitions is to be surprised, amused, moved, intrigued, shocked, even disgusted – anything that provokes an emotional response. They don’t want an endless diet of representational painting, but neither do they want the sort of socio-political commentary dressed as art that won this year’s Turner Prize finalists bursaries of £10,000 each. Art made to any formula is formulaic: it needs a dose of irrationalism to liven it up.

    We’re living in an arsy-versy world in which rationalism has taken over art and abandoned politics. But here’s a suggestion: why not let the Turner Prize winners run the country and give Dominic Cummings a pot of paint and a brush? He has the classic profile of the mad artist – angry, rude and monomaniac – and his track tops would look much cooler spattered with paint. Then Dom could channel fellow slaphead Jackson Pollock while Boris made outsider-arty buses out of wine crates and filled them with little passengers wearing face masks. Sorted.

  • Dick French: On The Town – September 2020

    Dick French
    September/October 2020

    It’s not true that King Juan Carlos is hiding out in Bradley’s Spanish Bar. He only used that cupboard under the stairs while waiting for one of those posh penthouses over the road to be readied for him. Although it is true that he was reluctant to leave after falling for the abundant charms of barmaid Mimi, who at the moment is playing hard to get. I don’t know what his mistress, La Wittgenstein, is going to make of it. Poor old Juan Carlos de Borbón, him with the gammy leg he got shooting African wildlife – elephants are thin on the ground in the West End.

    The Sage writes from The Grotto: a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of deserting the city for country life with all its joys. Excessive rain caused his septic tank to overflow and back up into the house. He had to spend £200 hiring something called a “gulley sucker”. He also tells of a local pub landlord, an ex-farmer, who has erected an electric fence in front of his bar counter.

    I’ve been reading Philip Ziegler’s book about the 14th century Black Death and its social consequences. There was an upsurge of class hatred and after a while a feeling of acceptance, followed by a compulsion to go out and have a good time. There was “a spirited battle between monks and townsmen in Hull, but such affrays in Hull were practically a local sport.” There aren’t so many monks around these days but the compulsion to go out and have a good time survives. When you take statins you don’t need a plague to be haunted by dream images of pestilence and death.

    Nobody will ever know what really happened to Vincent van Gogh. He is supposed to have shot himself in the Champ de Blés after painting the cornfield with crows. But that picture was made ten days before his death. It’s true that he was very worried about his brother Theo, his main source of income and materials, who was also beginning to show the familial traits of mental instability and had quarrelled with his gallery Boussod et Valadon. He was also syphilitic. He became increasingly berserk and died only a few months after Vincent. On the other hand, following his arrival in Auvers, Vincent was on a roll. He was producing a painting a day and he was mentally at peace and under the care of Dr Gachet, a queer fish and homeopath described by Vincent as “even crazier than I am”. But I think generally he was probably a good sort.

    A book by Stephen Naifeh and Gregory White Smith which I’ve just read suggests that Vincent was shot accidentally by two teenage brothers who had been persecuting him for weeks. Many reviewers have pooh-poohed the idea but it strikes me as very interesting. They were both obsessed by Buffalo Bill whose Wild West Show had captivated Paris the previous year. One of them had a pistol thought to be a .38 revolver. The boys also had stage connections and knew some of the girls from the Moulin Rouge who would sometimes arrive in Auvers for a break. They would get these girls to flirt with Vincent, whom they regarded as just a smelly old clochard. One of them put it about that they had caught him tossing off in the woods.

    If he had intended suicide why shoot himself in the stomach, a most disagreeable way to go? And if he shot himself in the Champ de Blés what happened to his easel and equipment, not to mention the painting? Emile Bernard said he dumped all his stuff in a haystack. But it’s possible that the shooting took place in a courtyard close to where he was staying. A woman claims she saw a courtyard full of smoke. It’s certain that the boys were tormenting him, not least because Vincent was unable for some reason to pronounce Buffalo Bill, which always came out as Puffalo Pill. They found this hilarious. One of them slipped a grass snake into his paint box and mucked about with his cadmium red, expensive stuff.

    Lots of people saw him staggering back to the Café de la Mairie where he was lodging. When Theo arrived he found Vincent calmly sitting up in bed puffing on his pipe. The bullet hole was small and there wasn’t much blood. The bullet itself was never extracted, none of the doctors in attendance being qualified to attempt this. I hope they fed him painkillers. The bullet had been fired from some distance and at an odd angle. I’m sure that a 38 calibre bullet fired into the stomach would come out the other side. It may have been something smaller, like a .22 more suited to a teenager’s gun. There is a strong possibility that he was shot accidentally during horse play.

    “N’accuse personne, c’est moi qui a voulu me suicider.” Why did Vincent say this? Gaston and René Secrétan, the brothers, went on to have successful careers, one in banking the other in film music. One wonders about the secrets of the confessional…

    During Vincent’s stay, Auvers-sur-Oise was popular with amateur painters on account of the Barbizon ‘plein air’ style of painting. Other artists did not regard Vincent very highly. “Quel est le cochon qui a fait cela?” said one visitor about Vincent’s work.

  • Dick French: On The Town – July 2020

    Dick French
    July/August 2020

    Reading Pepys again about the plague of 1666. Not one for self-isolating, he was still enthusiastically putting it about: “Thence to Betty Martin and there did tout ce que je voudrais avec her and drank and away by water, home and to dinner. Down to Deptford, loaded half my goods and sent them away into safekeeping.” (He buried his parmesan in the garden.) “So back home and then I found occasion to return in the dark and to Mrs Bagwell, and there nudo in lecto con ella did all that I desired. But though I did intend para demorado con ella la noche, yet when I had done ce que je voudrais I did hate both ella and la cosa, and taking occasion from the uncertainty of sa marido’s return esta noche, did me levar and so away home”.

    These are difficult times if you are trying to write about the antics of the ‘art world’. One can almost hear Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling drawling… “Well I think the word difficult is awfully well chosen.” It’s like trying to extract a ping-pong ball from a nun.

    I’ve been reading one of Huysman’s most unreadable novels. Called Là-Bas, the hero is trying to write a biography of Gilles de Rais, the notorious medieval mass murderer of children all over France. In the end he repented his sins and went to the stake rejoicing. The writer becomes obsessed with the wicked Madame Chantelouve, but when they get around to performing the deed of darkness he is repelled by her enthusiasm and lewdness. One of Madame Chantelouve’s chums is “a most puissant priest” who claimed to have saved nuns who had been incubus-ridden for two, three or four days” – lucky old nuns. There’s a great deal of diabolism and Madame Chantelouve is intimate with many perverted priests. Sounds like it should be interesting, but for some reason it isn’t. It must be the creeping religiosity. Huysmans became devout in the end as did many writers of the period.

    Beardsley is thought to have died a convert. I’m not so sure. Some have suggested that his swing to the church was more to keep André Raffalovich sweet as he sent him regular cheques. Raffalovich was a Russian Jew converted to Catholicism and a keen saver of souls. It was he and Smithers who kept the poor chap going in the end.

    Brian Reade wrote of “the friendly talons closing in around him.” I think this is close to the truth. Beardsley’s driving force was mischief.

    More on local characters … She seems to glide along the market as her gown trails the ground. All in white layers, even a white headdress and veil she must spend a lot of time at the washing machine. Years ago when I lived on Parkway in Camden Town there was a similar all-white woman. But she was more off the shoulder, sexier, but that was more than 20 years ago – maybe it’s the same woman. She was a great friend of Tullio De’Nardis, the Parkway crimper. Marvellous chap; he used to do Brazilians in the back. In the end he had to banish her from the salon as she insisted on smoking. I’ve got a feeling that when she gets home she has a great white table prepared for a feast with a crumbling wedding cake covered in cobwebs.

    I’ve just discovered the Spanish word for gusset. It’s entretella, so instead of saying I’m as dry as a nun’s knickers (to my Spanish friends in Bradleys) I can now get it right: “Ay caramba, estoy tan seco como la entretela de una monja!” None of them had ever heard of a gusset. I had to draw one for them … not easy.

    Don’t worry it gets better. Did you know that Burne-Jones was Kipling’s uncle? “You may talk o’ gin and beer/when you’re quartered safe out ‘ere, an’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it, but when it comes to slaughter/you will do your work on water, an’ lick the bloomin’ boots of’im that’s got it.”

    A wonderful euphemism for being gay I’ve just discovered: “He’s light on the loafers.” And this brings us to … I’ve just added to the list of Lockdown’s Heroic Deeds by reading the new biography of Andy Warhol. Over 900 pages.

    “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty and you’re a killer of laughter.” So said Willem de Kooning to Warhol at a party. “Oh gee, I’ve always liked your paintings,” came the reply. There was no way of getting to him, he absorbed everything like a sponge. Someone said it was like being with a handful of fog. Before he slipped crab-wise into the fine art world he made a good living as an illustrator, mainly of shoes and boots. He did them in a blotted style transferring the wet drawing to the other side of the page by folding. They were much in demand. He was still churning them out while becoming famous as a pop artist, or rather one of his assistants was.

    Paul Morrissey, his right hand man for longer than most, described him as “autistic, dyslexic, frightened, timid, and with no artistic instincts.” So why do people take him so seriously? Why were so many sucked into his orbit? After all, he was smelly and had crabs. A lifelong addiction to valium caused chronic constipation and he required a daily enema, which I imagine was no great inconvenience. His earnings from the world of commercial art enabled him to take a lease on a large mid-town industrial space which came to be known as The Factory. He had it decked out in silver foil by his friend Billy Name. It was very groovy and became his web. Drugs of all kinds were available, speed being the favourite at first. They didn’t get going on coke until the ’70s, even though it’s much better for you than speed. After all, it is organic, even if it does blow a hole in your nose.

    I feel that the author Blake Gopnik is overly enamoured of his subject and his acolytes. How about this – “Billy Name and his gorgeous and sometimes naked friends from the dance world”… There is a “gorgeous and patrician curator called Sam Wagstaff.”

    Perhaps the greatest hoot of all … one of the Campbell’s soup prints he describes as “the single greatest image in art painting as we know it.” As he knows it perhaps. The fact that the soups came in 32 different flavours is somehow linked to Bach’s 32 Goldberg Variations. 

    A one-time favourite, Freddie Herko, danced out of a fifth-floor window leaving our Svengali to moan “Oh why didn’t he tell us he was going to do it. We could have been there and filmed it.” He expressed similar sentiments about Edie Sedgwick, one time superstar and favoured bit of art candy. He knew that she was going to destroy herself and just wanted to be in on the occasion. He missed out on her overdose of downers a year or so later.

    Maybe his disarming sense of idiocy went some way to alleviate the effect of his passive sadism.

    There was enormous rivalry between Warhol’s downtown crowd and Bob Dylan’s upstate lot. Downtown it was all speed, heroin and poppers. For Dylan it was bogey weed and acid. Both sides were totally drug-addled. Edie Sedgwick went backwards and forwards between the two camps. “Napoleon in rags” was Dylan’s phrase for Warhol and he wrote Like a Rolling Stone about Edie Sedgwick. “How does it feel? How does it feel?” Well I suppose it was pretty numb most of the time.

    I enjoyed this book. It’s full of fascinating details and the author evokes the period very well. Warhol had dreadful rectal problems, anal warts and a fissure.

    When he was bleeding to death in the back of the ambulance after being shot by Valerie Solanas, the driver turned round and said “For an extra 15 dollars I can turn the siren on.” Solanas only got three years and was bailed after one. The first thing she did on release was to phone the studio and ask to come around. Morrissey dissuaded her. She wanted to bring round her manifesto for The Society for Cutting up Men, or SCUM.

    Warhol was said to have become religious towards the end. I think it was more the camp religious iconography that appealed to him.


  • Laura Gascoigne: Uncomfortable Truths – September 2020

    Laura Gascoigne
    September/October 2020

    Six weeks ago, a Hampstead neighbour left a book on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of kindness from strangers; at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My husband read it, and it did. But this book was different, as was its intention. It was a copy of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s bestseller Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, with an unsigned post-it note attached. “I’m sure you are good people,” was the gist of its message, “but every time I go up and down the street the lamps in your window make me uncomfortable”. I can’t quote it word for word as it was thrown away. The book wasn’t thrown away; my husband read it. To me it smacked too much of re-education, and I disliked the passive-aggressive anonymity of the note.

    The lamps have been in my family as long as I remember. They travelled with us from Cairo, where my father had opened the first English language bookshop after the war, to Belgium where he managed the Brussels branch of W H Smith and on to Cambridge, where he ran a university bookshop. The black figures supporting the lampshades – both dressed in Persian trousers, the man wearing a plumed turban and the woman a tasselled tarboosh – are not a legacy of the transatlantic slave trade: they represent Nubians in the service of an Egyptian Pasha.

    The lamps, in other words, are Orientalist, part of that fantasy of the exotic East that swept through Europe in the 19th century, catching the imaginations not only of the sorts of sleazy Salon painters of slave markets and harems that now make us uncomfortable, but of Delacroix and later Picasso – a fantasy that made Arabian Nights a far bigger best-seller than Eddo-Lodge’s extended charge sheet of facts and figures will ever be. Imagination is a shadowy thing that fades in the full beam of facts and figures, yet it is the stuff of which culture is made. Still, nobody wants to make their neighbours uncomfortable or invite anonymous bricks unaccompanied by post-its through the windows, so the offending lamps are now upstairs lighting the desk on which I am writing this.

    For good or ill, these lamps are part of my heritage; I won’t disown them, nor will I disown the rest of it. So here, for the record, is a full confession. My first word was ‘Abdul’, the name of our Egyptian servant; hearing my mother call him around our Cairo apartment I obviously thought I’d try it myself. If that makes me a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist, how about this: my father’s ancestor Sir Thomas Warner, a soldier in the service of Elizabeth I, founded the first British Caribbean colony on St Kitts where his tomb still stands. My grandfather Plum Warner was born in Port of Spain and moved to England to pursue his passion for cricket, eventually captaining the England team; his brother Aucher captained the first combined West Indies side. There was no money in non-professional cricket, so despite being knighted for services to the ‘gentleman’s game’ Plum left my father £50 on his death.

    Does all of this make me feel uncomfortable? It’s my past and there’s nothing I can do to change it. History, personal and national, is a complex business which – forgive the cliché – is never black and white. But public statues are different from personal property. The people of Bristol were perfectly within their rights to object to public space being occupied by a monument to a slave trader who salved his conscience through philanthropy – an objection doubly justified by the fact that the statue was put up 80 years after the Abolition Act. In the same way, many of the confederate statues defaced or torn down during the Black Lives Matter protests in America were erected in the 20th century in reaction to desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement; in historical terms, they’re as fake as a Disneyland fairy castle. As the ancient historian Matthew Sears wisely remarked two years ago: “Let’s not forget that monuments tell us much more about those who set them up than those they represent.” New statues of Stalin are even now going up in Russia so that Putin can bask in the reflected glory of an earlier strong man who defeated the Germans.

    What does Marc Quinn’s statue, Surge of Power: Jen Reid, tell us about the man who set it up? That he’s a shameless opportunist ready to piggyback on a black woman’s spontaneous political gesture for his own self-promotion. I punched the air myself when I heard that within 24 hours Bristol’s mixed-race mayor Marvin Rees had had the 3-D scanned and printed resin effigy hauled away in a skip lorry and was billing the artist for removal. Better still, the black British sculptor Thomas J Price, winner of a new commission for a Windrush monument in Hackney, denounced Quinn’s stunt as “yet another example of white privilege in action” and accused him of having a “saviour complex”. Ouch.

    The trouble with empty plinths, of course, is the temptation to fill them. As Hew Locke – who registered his own protest against Colston in 2006 by encrusting a photograph of his statue with gewgaws – observed when the dominoes started falling: “The newly empty plinths are all potential Fourth Plinths”. God forbid. But can we fill them with replacement heroes? Is any public figure squeaky clean enough? And how will they be apportioned between ethnicities? Sadiq Khan’s newly formed Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm has got its work cut out. 

    History will not be erased by removing statues, as the Democratic Football Lads Alliance – keen historians that they are – would have us believe. Ninety-nine percent of the population have no idea who the statues they pass everyday represent anyway, and would only miss them as figures in the composition of the urban landscape. For most people they’re just a shape on the periphery of vision, breaking up the harsh geometry of the city with a human form, a function that when made by actual sculptors – not Gillian Wearing – they fulfil very well. As such, we will miss them. Where they cause offence they can always be removed to museums or designated sculpture parks, like those on the outskirts of New Delhi and Budapest, to be ‘contextualised’ away from their original context. 

    But we can’t remove all reminders of our imperial past. After all the offending statues have been taken away, what are we going to do about all the grand civic buildings built with imperial money? Dismantle them stone by stone and ship them overseas to the former colonies that paid for them with their blood, sweat and tears? Nothing in the historic environment of our major cities is guilt-free, but full reparation will never be possible. “Guilt is never of real use. Except for the guilty,” writes Bonnie Greer in July’s Art Newspaper. “Neither is historical ignorance”. Removing things that make us uncomfortable from our field of vision is pure hypocrisy. Everyone enjoying the relative wealth of this country today is benefiting from, if not complicit in, the history that made us rich. Don’t hide away the evidence. Deal with it.


  • Laura Gascoigne: Desperately Loose Ends – July 2020

    Laura Gascoigne
    July/August 2020

    You’re a curator working at the V&A, and the place shuts down. What do you do? You’re at a loose end. April comes around and you’re stuck at home with your furloughed partner watching your gerbils spin around on the rolly wheel of life when an idea strikes you. Why should your pets enjoy normality as if nothing has happened? Why not disrupt it with some challenging art?

    Maybe I’m being unfair to Filippo Lorenzin. Maybe his experience of government-imposed confinement woke him up to the monotony of his pets’ lives and made him want to relieve it. Whatever the motive, he constructed a miniature white cube gallery, hung it with rodent versions of famous paintings such as Il Gerbilio con L’Orecchino di Perla and added an official notice cautioning DO NOT CHEW. “It was fun to play around with the white cube aesthetics and the raw energy of our gerbils,” he told The Art Newspaper – energy directed by Pandoro and Tiramisu, as by most young gallery-goers, into posting selfies of themselves admiring the art on Instagram.

    With the arrival of Covid-19 this year’s silly season started early. In May it was the turn of art documentary maker Jared Schiller to adorn his chicken run in Kent with a Hyde Park railings-style hang of works by his friends. Unlike the gerbils, who took an active interest, Schiller’s hens looked unimpressed by the works of George Shaw, Goshka Macuga, Richard Wentworth et al., though they showed more appreciation for Girl’s Night Out in Peck-ham, an assemblage of bird seed with which they interacted to the point of destruction. Meanwhile across the pond in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum, director Julián Zugazagoitia invited a family of Peruvian penguins from the locked-down local zoo to explore his museum’s equally deserted galleries, where he noted their preference for Caravaggio over Monet. 

    Silly, yes, but more watchable than most online attempts by panicked museum directors to keep audiences on board. And they’re right to panic, because what if the months of lockdown show us that – like cheap flights, fast fashion and priapic office buildings – we can live without museums? So the show must go on and venerable institutions must compete with freelance Instagrammers for the public’s attention. In May the Met invited owners of the latest AR software to project a gurning zemí ancestor figure from its closed Caribbean Arte del Mar exhibition into their cars, backyards or shower stalls. “I like to see the energy redistributed in digital form so it can reach people in their lives today,” said the show’s curator James Doyle. A prize bit of blarney if ever I heard one. Share my shower with a zemí? Totally psycho.

    Out of sight, out of mind is the worry for museums, but shifting audiences online could make matters worse. The Rijksmuseum’s bumper lockdown menu of “10 ways to visit… without leaving home” features a new online platform Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close that “aims to recreate the experience of casually browsing a museum with a multimedia guide”. But why leave home ever if you can enjoy a similar, even enhanced experience from your sofa? That is, after all, the experience most gallery visitors today want. Let’s not pretend, however, that there’s anything casual about ‘browsing’ a museum with special software. It’s a mediated experience. What’s missing is the essential element of aimlessness and, with it, the possibility of an accidental discovery that you alone have made.

    Smaller galleries without the digital resources of the Met or the Rijksmuseum have had to find other ways of keeping their heads above the waters of oblivion. The ICA moved fast and on day one of the lockdown launched ICA Daily, a selection of links recommended by director Stefan Kalmár to “cheer you up while self-isolating, social-distancing, working from home or working to keep essential services going.” Nice thought, Stefan, but can you really imagine an ICU nurse coming off a 12-hour shift and stripping off her PPA and surgical gloves to sample his inaugural programme of 11 years of ICA talks, Ojerime’s latest mix-tape B4/Breakdown – “a mix of dark, melancholic R&B with emotion-filled vocals” – or Dennis Cooper’s 10th novel Zac’s Haunted House, a “graphic tale of abject horror in a tightly wound work beyond words”? I thought not. (See page 43)

    True, she wouldn’t have got much solace either from White Cube’s lockdown series of artists’ diaries featuring a confession on 3 April from Tracy Emin that she got out on the wrong side of her bed that morning and shouted at a complete stranger: “Get between the lines you fucking idiot!” What our essential worker might have welcomed on return to self-isolation with a leaky faucet was Newlyn Art Gallery’s Idle Women: Power Tools, a series of household DIY videos made by women for women. That’s more like it. ‘How to fix a dripping tap?’ Yes!  ‘Reseal a sink?’ Yes! ‘Drill into a brick wall?’ Yes, yes, yes! Smash a double-glazed window? Err possibly… Why? Not to steal a Cornish second-homeowner’s telly when yours has broken, as I wrongly assumed, but to get out when there’s a fire. Good sensible advice.

    Given that ‘Hello, I’m still here’ is the basic message behind all this electronic signalling for attention, Kettle’s Yard went for the most basic option: a webcam (illustration). Trained on “a part of the house both shadowy and light-filled” featuring a window, a suspended 1960s Perspex disc by Gregorio Vardanegas and a shelf of straggly houseplants, it was designed to allow “virtual visitors to trace the light changes through the day” from 5.30am to 8.30pm. I tried it for a couple of minutes (I haven’t got all day) during which the only change was the occasional spasmodic jerk as the lagging webcam caught up with the reflection of a different bit of straggly houseplant in the Perspex disc. Only mind-expanding drugs would have made it watchable.

    Still, Kettle’s Yard gets points for simplicity. The best online offerings give you a page of thumbnails to click on and let you get on with it. The BP Portrait Award, which has adopted this format, works perfectly well online since most of the paintings are photorealist and gain nothing from being seen in the flesh. And the online shopping model is a perfect fit for selling exhibitions: while the economy tanks, online art sales have been going up.

    You know where you are with a selling exhibition; there’s no need to fanny about with digital innovation if you’re not pretending to perform a public service. The past weeks of lockdown have made me appreciate the honest directness of the old exhibition model where art is displayed for sale. I felt nostalgic recently listening to John Kasmin on the British Library Sounds website reminiscing about how David Hockney’s early exhibitions in his New Bond Street gallery were full of students chomping sandwiches on his Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs. That was a public service that paid for itself. Meanwhile the billionaire owner of the Evening Standard, Evgeny Lebedev, has been lamenting in his paper that “the arts risk a return to the hobby of the elites rather than a democratic pursuit”. In the visual arts, at least, that would mean reverting to a model that produced all the masterpieces in the Rijksmuseum, and still appears to function best in a crisis.