Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
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Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
IN THE next few months the Trustees of the British Museum will recommend to the Prime Minister the appointment of a new Director - a decision which can hardly fail to affect the whole direction of museums in the next decade and beyond. The British Museum stands at the apex of the UK museum system, the oldest, largest, most respected and most expensive national museum. It is not an art museum. Its purposes are primarily historical, archaeological and ethnographic. It would not be sensible for the Trustees to appoint a Director whose interests were narrowly art historical. But it happens to have accumulated one of the world's greatest collections of art and artefacts, prints and drawings. No one can be indifferent to the future of these.
It is possible that if Dante Rossetti and Edouard Manet had been asked but a little time ago what would seem to them the most improbable event that the future could have in store for them, they would have answered, the exhibition of their respective pictures in Burlington House and the Palais des Beaux Arts. And yet within a few months - death having first removed both of them from that strife and noise of praise and blame, which during lifetime one had so earnestly shunned and the other so eagerly courted - this seeming marvel came to pass. Widely different in temperament, they nevertheless had this trait in com- mon - both were dissatisfied with the existing traditions of Art, and sought for themselves some other way.
LITTLE has been written about Max Ernst's Toilette de la mariée (Fig. 11) although it stands at a pivotal point in the artist's career. Painted in 1939/40, it was one of the last important canvases Ernst produced in Europe before his escape to America in 1941, which followed periods of internment as an enemy alien in France.
CHARLES STERLING died on 9th January 1991, deeply stricken by the recent loss of his wife. Only three days earlier he had had the pleasure of seeing, fresh from the press, the second, and last, volume of his monumental work Peinture médievaleà Paris. It marked the end of a long and creatively active career.
