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September 2013

Vol. 155 | No. 1326

Editorial

Confronting the present: museums in Los Angeles

More than fifteen years have passed since the Getty Center’s spectacular campus in Brentwood, Los Angeles, was opened to the public (Fig.I). An Editorial published in this Magazine to mark the occasion asked in passing whether it was ‘wise for a hyper-rich institution such as this to climb a hill, turn its back on the city, and devote itself to the study and accumulation of western high art’. In Britain and elsewhere, we are now five years into a period of austerity measures that have attempted, with dubious effect, to expiate the fiscal and regulatory sins of the recent past. Museums remain vulnerable to cuts in public funding and occasional attempts by public officials to plunder their collections.

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Free review

German art at the Louvre. Paris

THE EXHIBITION De l’Allemagne, 1800–1939. De Friedrich à Beckmann at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (closed 24th June), commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty for economic co-operation between France and Germany, caused a huge controversy, involving bitter denunciations from German newspapers, aggrieved responses from the Louvre, an intervention (in defence of the Louvre) by the German ambassador to France, and reports of dissent among the team responsible for the exhibition. But of course any exhibition that explores the Germanness of German art is bound to arouse strong feelings. The main accusation, provoked by the end date of 1939 in most versions of the title, was that the French bias of the exhibition confines German art to the Sonderweg, or special way, which implies that Germany has had a different historical trajectory from other nations, and that German Romanticism is tainted by Nazism, which it is presumed to have foreshadowed.

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  • MA.SEPT.COWLING.Fig

    What the wallpapers say: Picasso’s papiers collés of 1912–14

    By Elizabeth Cowling

    The sources for some of Pablo Picasso’s wallpaper collages in the late Cubist period, 1912–14.

  • MA.SEPT.WHITFIELD.Fig

    Unpublished letters from René Magritte to Pierre Flouquet: 1920–21

    By Sarah Whitfield

    Three unpublished, early letters (1920) from René Magritte and three unpublished works on paper by the artist.

  • Ma.SEPT.ROSE.Fig

    The visual arts in the BBC’s ‘The Listener’, 1929–39

    By Sam Rose

    The BBC magazine The Listener and its coverage of the arts in the 1930s, with special reference to contributors such as Kenneth Clark, Herbert Read, Ernst Gombrich and others.

  • MA.SEPT.DANIELS.Fig

    Henri Matisse’s stained-glass window ‘La Rosace’ (1954)

    By Rebecca Daniels

    A discussion of Matisse’s last commissioned work, a stained-glass window in memory of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in the Union Church, Pocantico Hills, New York.

  • MA.SEPT.BOND.Fig

    A reconsideration of Roger Hilton’s ‘September 1963 (Figure and bird)’

    By Timothy Bond

    The imagery and evolution of Roger Hilton’s late large painting September 1963 (Figure and bird).