Mapping the Web

Yes, I know it's been an inordinately long time since I last blogged. Apologies!

I haven't given up on the blog, but a combination of relentless daily work, laziness, lack of time and the feeling that there wasn't much to blog about at present have conspired to keep me away from the web log. I've decided that the way this blog will develop in future is as an arm of my teaching: I'll aim to post at least fortnightly on my current courses/topics; the fruits of my off-line research will appear between the pages of books and other terrestial publications. Remember those?

As to the mysterious image above? It's a detail of a map of the web made by Information Architects Japan, and modelled on the Greater Tokyo subway. I gather that Microsoft aren't happy with their location on the map. I guess IJA will lose serious sleep over that.

The full Web Trend Map can be found here and a massive PDF version here. On the former, click on the names to go to that site.

Konrad Oberhuber Controversial Curator: 1935-2007

I didn’t hear about the death of the connoisseur and curator Konrad Oberhuber from a brain tumour in September, until today.

For myself, Oberhuber will always be associated with Poussin because it was during my doctorate that I got to know his books and ideas. I never met the man, mores the pity, but my first inkling of his, shall we say, eccentric persona, was when my supervisor growled, “Everybody ignores Oberhuber.” I was sufficiently intrigued to seek out his catalogue of controversial exhibition of the artist that he curated at Fort Worth, Texas in 1988. This show was contentious because it contained a lot of drawings that were not by Poussin, but errors of attribution were not the only reason for the opprobrium that was showered on Oberhuber's head. Far more damning in the eyes of some scholars was the fact that Oberhuber had used the ideas of the Theosophist Rudolph Steiner as a way of working out Poussin’s development. I now understood the reason for my supervisor’s warning remark and why he had glared at me when he chanced upon me with my head in Poussin: The Early Years in Rome. One simply didn’t work out problems of stylistic development on the basis of a spiritualist philosophy forged in the crucible of German romanticism and idealism. It was non-rational; it was uncritical; it was downright bizarre.

As Oberhuber said in his catalogue, it was Steiner’s implication that we “rhythmically pass through various attitudes towards space in the course of our lives.” Although it’s too loose a concept to apply to artistic development, I did find the idea of a reaction towards space during a phase of the artist’s life thought provoking. In his preface to his volume Oberhuber identifies developmental phases in the life of an artist, so for Poussin, his work before 1622 was determined by outline, the period between 1622-29 (the Venetian period) an enlivenment of line and surface, and from 1629 by a preoccupation with structures in space. These ideas on spatial progression also influenced his work on Raphael, probably leading to some strange attributions and theories about that artist’s growth. The problem with Oberhuber’s connoisseurship is that it transcended the normal parameters of the practice. Where Poussin was concerned, he believed each work to show the artist’s personality at a specific moment in time; extreme stylistic differences could be explained by influences inspiring him at that particular moment. Yet just a casual trawl through the illustrations in the 1988 catalogue should alert the reader to the fact that no one single artist could be so stylistically diverse. However, a whole raft of drawings were attributed on the grounds that he assimilated various influences in his early years in Rome.

Although Oberhuber quietly left the field of Poussin studies after the Fort Worth exhibition in 1988, his presence can still be felt. Last month while attending the Poussin exhibition in Bilbao I was dismayed- though not entirely surprised- to find landscape drawings by other hands that had appeared in Fort Worth in 1988, re-appear as autograph in the Spanish show. The same problem persists in the connoisseurship of Raphael drawings, where as Matthias Wivel points out, many sheets that had been attributed to the master’s workshop were attributed to Raphael himself. The implications of that exaggerated oeuvre have since become apparent.

Until now the last I heard of Oberhuber was a few years ago at a conference where I was told he was doing the rounds of the print rooms in the U.S.A. after having retired from the Albertina in Vienna in 2000. Although I disagreed with many of his conclusions, especially concerning Poussin, I’m sorry to hear about his death. He was gifted with high intelligence, and whatever you thought about his ideas, you certainly couldn’t say they weren’t stimulating. Art history has lost yet another great spirit.

Bilbao Diary 2: Lost in the Funhouse

Visitors to Bilbao soon become aware of its greatest cultural asset: Frank Gehry’s architectural marvel, the Guggenheim Bilbao. Near the end of the long taxi ride from the airport, the car suddenly drops down into the town and this stupendous building dominates the cityscape. Opened in 1997, I’m visiting it in its ten-year anniversary, an event celebrated by a mammoth exhibition devoted to American art from the 18th century to the present. Alternatively, if you’re approaching the museum on foot along the river, you can’t help noticing another great cultural landmark, Louise Bourgeoise’s ‘Maman’, a large arachnid sculpture that seems to stand guard over the rear entrance to the museum. Less threatening, but larger is Jeff Koon’s Puppy near the main entrance to the museum, a wire sculpture covered with plants that I’m sure must have raised the eyebrows of many a Basque citizen when it was installed in the Guggenheim Bilbao’s inaugural year. Actually there were protests of a more concrete and vehement nature when the museum opened for business in 1997. Before I went to Bilbao I dipped into a volume of essays, Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim and discovered that a guard was blown up by ETA, the Basque separatist organization in 1997; this explains why there are a lot of armed security guards in evidence within the museum.

Fortified by Spanish cuisine and coffee I ventured into the bowels of this futuristic behemoth, expectant of seeing some breathtaking sights. There are impressive artifacts and installations within the building, but if you are not convinced by modern and conceptual art, you’re probably best walking round the building assimilating the whole experience of a different and exciting display space rather than getting to grips with the art inside. On the ground floor you’ll find a mixed bag of art works. One of the first things on view is Jenny Holzer’s ‘Installation for Bilbao’, a construct of LED sign columns streaming such messages as “I SCAN YOU”. My impression was of a cross between Wall Street and the Matrix, although these columns are red not green like the ticker tape effect in the film. Standing inside Holzer’s installation is more effective: it’s like taking a neon bath; you’re bathed in the warm glow of the descending columns. Next to this are rooms containing art by the likes of Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel. Schnabel likes to think of himself as an exponent of the neo-baroque, although there was little of that on display here, just his crockery paintings. I wonder how many plates have been smashed in the service of fuelling Schnabel’s aesthetic fantasies. As for Koons, he’s another artist suffering from the symptoms of neo-baroque folie de grandeur. On the same floor you are invited to make a fantastic voyage into the swirling sculpture of Richard Serra’s ‘The Matter of Time’ which is impressive, even more so from above. Walking through canyons of steel snaking through a room the size of an aircraft hanger is bound to bring on intimations of mortality. The monolithic is usually associated with the divine, not the manageable and small-scale piece of art residing in a corner of the gallery. Does Richard Serra worship the god of small things? I think not.

On the second floor, you are treated to a minimalist room, mainly Donald Judd- give me Brancusi any time- and a large overview of American painting from the days of elegance to our age of anxiety. I started with John Singleton Copley’s portraits –not his best- and then worked through the great sublime vistas of Albert Bierstadt towards excellent examples of New York abstract expressionism. It’s a long time since I saw Pollock’s ‘The Moon Woman’ in the Peggy Guggenheim collection Venice, so it was pleasing to see it here, along with Rothko, and various others. Their art still holds up well against the empty gestures of Franz Kline and the inchoate meanderings of Willem de Kooning, also in evidence here. The whole museum currently doubles as this gargantuan ‘Art and the USA’ show, thus another room on the same floor has Pop Art, represented here by a sampling of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist. I have to confess that I quite prefer Rosenquist over Warhol: I like the immediacy of such paintings as ‘Swimmer in the Econo-Mist’ which seems to be swept up in a vortex of scattered objects and vivid colour. I don’t dislike Warhol, but what was on display here didn’t really fill me with admiration: prints of electric chairs, flowers and celebrities whose iconography deluded faddish art historians claim is the history painting of the 20th century.

Upstairs was the least captivating of all: an exhibition of insipid photographs showing homunculi in various poses- not easily engaged with at all. I also found a video of a Basque artist looping his utterance of some Spanish word with ideological overtones quite banal. His shrieks ululated throughout the museum making one feel an acute sense of disquiet and mild resentment at being distracted from the art that merited one’s attention. I would rather put up with Matthew Barney’s impenetrable video cycle on the 2nd floor than this piece of irritating agit-prop at the top of the building.

There was a lot of good art on display in the Guggenheim Bilbao, though some of it left me cold. Still, individual taste aside, the problem that Guggenheim Bilbao face is how do they compete with the building itself; how can the permanent collection surpass the architectural vision of Frank Gehry that created the so-called “Bilbao effect.”. This specific concern appears in the preface to the BG’s guidebook where the phrase “no museum is defined by its architecture” is written Yet, I wouldn’t mind betting that for most visitors, both actual and virtual, it is precisely the structure that is identified with the museum and not the exhibits within it, with the notable exception of Bourgeoise’s spider sculpture.

Bilbao Diary 1: Poussin and Nature

I’ve taken a breather from the blog for the best part of a month, but I felt that I had to write about last week’s expedition to Bilbao in Spain to see the Poussin show: Poussin and Nature, curated by the Louvre’s Pierre Rosenberg.

Bilbao isn’t a very inspiring place to visit, especially in the wintertime: difficult to get a beverage or something stronger in the afternoon, and if you want to eat dinner in the early evening- forget it! You’d have to bribe or arm wrestle a waiter to get a table between 7.00 and 9.00 pm. Situated amongst the mountains in the Basque country, the industrial town enjoys an oceanic climate which roughly translated means that it isn’t as warm as most of Spain. Still, I didn’t come to Bilbao to grouse about the amenities or the climate; I came to see Poussin, so onwards and upwards.

The exhibition is currently being held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Bilbao, an institution that boasts impressive holdings, on which I’ll write another day. You enter Poussin and Nature through a door to the right of the main entrance on the ground floor. I have to say that what struck me immediately was the inclusion of two Poussin paintings that were unfamiliar to me, and I was tempted initially to dismiss them as copies after lost paintings. However, I’m now coming round to thinking that the ‘Apollo and Daphne’, of 1626 and the ‘Pan, Midas and Shepherd’ of slightly later may be autograph. I’m at an immense disadvantage here, as I didn’t take notes en route because I naturally assumed that I’d buy a catalogue on the way out. No dice! I refused to pay 135 Euros or nearly £95 for a paperback catalogue written mainly in Spanish. However, I digress.

Most of the landscape paintings hung in this exhibition were familiar to me through actual visits or illustrations in publications. It was wonderful to study such canvases as the ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’, or ‘Cupid Tugs Pan’s Beard’ (left) as the catalogue has it. You never really experience Poussin properly until you stand in front of his creations and drink in his genius. Apart from the early mythologies or subject-less paintings set in landscape there were good examples of his monumental landscape period when the poetic view of nature is replaced by a more rigid and geometrical organization. I can’t remember which one of the Phocion pictures was present here- probably the Liverpool ‘Burial of Phocion’ (1648) (right) in which the Athenian general’s remains are returned to a plot of earth in the shade of presiding trees. It was interesting to compare the clouds and vegetation in the Liverpool painting with a similar composition on the other side of the room whose title, date and location, time, tiredness and too much Spanish wine has wiped from my mind. However, I do recall that the quotations of sarcophagi and tombs in that painting were too detailed for Poussin: he likes to cover his tracks where sources are concerned. No, I would challenge Rosenberg’s claim that this painting is by Poussin alone- more a collaboration between him and his French compatriot Jean Le Maire. This is intriguing and exciting because it’s yet another canvas that I haven’t seen. Le Maire and Poussin certainly worked together in the early Roman period on such trail blazing paintings as the ‘Plague of Ashdod’, but does this prove that their partnership lasted well into the 1640s?

Halfway through the exhibition, the visitor encounters the graphic area of the show: the drawings after nature. My eyes lit up at my first physical encounter with the beautiful sheet owned by the Uffizi of the Aventine in Rome; it is almost soaked in light, an effect recalling Félibien’s comments supposedly inspired by standing behind Poussin as he sketched the antiquities of Rome in the sunlight. Equally impressive is the drawing of St Mary of Egypt and St Zosimus in nature (left), a sheet that I’ve held in my hands at Windsor, as I was inclined to tell the guard who rebuked me for getting too close to the art. Still, they’re only doing their job, bless them. I was more put out at the inclusion of a group of drawings which betrayed alien hands, not Poussin’s own at all. Some of these drawings were exhibited by Konrad Oberhuber in his controversial though excellent show at Fort Worth in 1988. I also recall that some of these drawings were shown in a loan exhibition hosted by the Ashmolean, Oxford between 1990-1; I was not convinced of their authenticity then and am still not persuaded that they are autograph. Such drawings as ‘A View with S. Giorgio in Velabro, Rome’ just don’t fit into the picture of Poussin’s development as far as I’m concerned. To be fair to Rosenberg, he has put a note on the wall saying that some of these drawings have been disputed, but why then not ‘attributed to Poussin’, rather than give the impression that they’re drawn by the master himself? For all that, the public, very small at Bilbao –about 5 people in the gallery beside me- and in New York – travels there next Feb- will have been given a rare chance to familiarize themselves with Poussin’s graphic technique.

Returning to the paintings, there is much to admire in the latter stages of the exhibition. It was fitting that a painting owned by the Prado, ‘Landscape with St Jerome’ (right) should be included in the Spanish leg of Poussin and Nature. Standing before it I was reminded of Poussin’s ability to render light on rock or the fleeciness of a tree against the sky. And if you want an excellent example of how Poussin can paint different trees, then check out Montreal’s ‘Landscape with a Man Chased by a Serpent’, a canvas much written on by me in my doctoral dissertation. There I argued that this painting might have been influenced by the neo-Augustinianism of the seventeenth- century, something that this show and perhaps Poussin scholarship in general doesn’t seem interested in. I got a brief look at the catalogue before leaving the building, but apart from a few references to the Flight into Egypt, there seemed to be hardly anything about the relationship between Christianity and nature. True, in the exhibition we do have ‘Hagar and the Angel’ and two splendid canvases from the Seasons (Spring and Autumn), but wouldn’t the show have benefited from some of those paintings Poussin did of those Holy Families in a natural setting. The closest we come to this- no small compensation- is the Louvre’s Finding of Moses (left) which caused Chantelou to be jealous of its owner, Pointel.

This can only be a summary of the Bilbao show based upon fragmented recollections hindered by the absence of a catalogue and the limitations of memory, but my overriding impression was very positive. For God’s sake, there hasn’t been a Poussin exhibition on this scale since the big shows of the 1990s. Walking around this exhibition made me very conscious of that and how this exhibition- especially when it transfers to New York- MUST mark a new phase of Poussin scholarship. Yes, there are minor omissions and problems of connoisseurship, but despite this Rosenberg is to be congratulated on an excellent and long overdue show. I can’t wait to see it again in New York next year when doubtless I’ll have even more to say!

Reviewing Siena

I've been surveying the reviews and responses to Renaissance Siena: Art of a City which opened at the NG London last week. I'm not going to review it myself; in all likelihood I won't get to the show until sometime next month. Still, it's interesting and salutary, I think, to gauge the mood of the art historical press about an exhibition that is causing debate.

Jonathan Jones, with his usual wit and panache, writes in the Guardian that the exhibition marks a certain mission drift on the part of the gallery; more specifically, Jones sees the gallery allowing shows that "chase their tales up scholarly blind alleys." Maybe it's down to the gap at the top- no replacement for Charles Saumarez Smith yet- that has allowed curators to use shows as vehicles for the idiosyncratic forcing of a point. Jones likes the exhibition- who wouldn't be charmed at some of the art on display?- but believes that it is ultimately silly. Wisely, Jones advises scrutiny of the previous generation of painters like Duccio and Sassetti outside the exhibition but in the gallery; only then can the visitor get a sense of Siena's historical and artistic development. Jones identifies Matteo di Giovanni's Ascanio altarpiece- top- as the best of a mediocre bunch, and although he finds much to admire and marvel at in the much touted Domenico Beccafumi, he fails to measure up to Florentine mannerists like Pontormo. I think that Jones is right on the money when he says that Beccafumi is a "connoisseur's artist", a painter whose curiously self-absorbed art appealed to a mildly deranged elite.

Brian Sewell known for his asperity in his reviews, turns in a balanced and illuminating overview of the show in the Evening Standard. Sewell ponders whether a century after the calamity of the Black Death in 1348, Sienese art was sufficiently resilient to offer a challenge to Florence, just 30 miles up the road. Naturally, Sewell concludes that Siena could not: it lacked the humanist powerhouse that produced such heavyweights as Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Giorgione. Far from being concerned with scientific matters such as proportion and perspective, Sienese quattrocento painting remained marginal to the main intellectual thrust of the Renaissance. Siena's fame has been recent, since it remained out of fashion until aesthetically inclined scholars like John Pope-Hennessy- name checked by Sewell here- pleaded for a moment of contemplation in which to absorb the beauty and charm of this archaic art. For Sewell, Matteo again stands at the top of the heap whilst an attributed work by Benvenuto di Giovanni is of "such miserable quality that it deserves to be neither in this exhibition nor in the permanent collection." Sewell is equally critical of Beccafumi whose only claim to contemporaneity is his colour, although that is filched from Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling. Really? I'd never have guessed!

Finally, last week on the BBC's Culture Show, T.V. pundit Andrew Graham Dixon was sent to Siena itself to be overawed by Beccafumi's ceiling in the Palazzo Pubblico-right-, although he also dropped in on Pinturicchio's frescoes- based on Raphael's designs- in the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral. Beccafumi's frescoes out in Siena do impress, but it may be significant that AGD muttered at the start of the broadcast "I've always preferred Florence to Siena."

I don't want to knock Sienese art; I'm sure that there will be works of charm and beauty in the show to make the journey down to London worthwhile. Still, I wonder about the premise of this exhibition andmore importantly its time span. I'm currently teaching a course on Sienese art, but my Sienese journey starts in the time of Duccio and ends in the period covered by the NG exhibition. I shall reserve judgment about the paintings in the show until I've seen them for myself, but I can't help thinking that the curators of this show have miscalculated greatly in choosing to use the exhibition as a vehicle for their questionable thesis.

Is It a Rembrandt?

I woke up to the news from the BBC's website that this painting, auctioned by Moore, Allen and Innocent, was thought to be a Rembrandt by some of the bidders at the auction. According to the firm's Philip Allwood:

""When I first saw it I said it looked very much like a Rembrandt and was assured by the client it had been checked out years ago and it wasn't..."

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam concurred, but that cuts no ice with the bidders who drove up the price: it shot past its reserve of pounds 1,500 to a cool 2 million.

Readers of this blog may recall that something like this happened earlier this year when bidders at Gildings, recognised a Titian despite that auction house not being convinced of its authenticity. Looking at this new painting, I don't immediately peg it as autograph, though you can hardly judge from a small digital image. It could be by one of his pupils, but they tended to show themselves dressed up as the master and this individual looks like Rembrandt himself. If it is by Rembrandt, it looks like it fits into the late 1620s when the artist is using gorgets. Flicking through the catalogue of Rembrandt Self- Portraits held in London in the 1990s, I see that the closest it comes to is the Self-Portrait with Gorget, known through two versions, one in Nuremberg and one at the Hague- right. The expression of the artist here is so different from the Moore, Allen and Innocent 'Rembrandt'- more composed and dignified rather than laughing out loud. I can see why the Rijksmuseum have their doubts, because although the costume gels with the kind of armorial portrait produced in 1629, the laughing out loud expression just doesn't fit the mood of those pictures. Here, it's like somebody has painted a blend of Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Still, I'm intrigued and eagerly await developments.

Renaissance Superhero

Is it a bird or is it a plane? No, it's the Blessed Agostino Novello performing his posthumous miracles in the Sienese painter, Simone Martini's altarpiece (left) dedicated to the churchman. Composed of one large central panel depicting a large Agostino as well as four surrounding narrative panels in which an airborne Agostino appears, it inspires comparisons with the likes of Superman, Spiderman et all.

My favourite panel is the one where Agostino swoops down from the sky to catch a child who has fallen off a balcony. At least I think that's what he's doing because it isn't clear; he looks like he's giving blessing to the child rather than saving it! And there's a panel of a child being ravaged by a ferocious wolf while Agostino appears from behind a rooftop. Still, like in Batman and Superman, you know all will turn out well in the end. Agostino has a hot line to the divine; why else would an angel be whispering into his ear in the central panel?! Although this is clearly a serious subject, the flying antics of this 13th century Augustinian theologian provoked gales of laughter when I showed it to my students last week.