THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE

‘Infinite riches in a little room’: 1903–2003

ONE HUNDRED CANDLES are lit this month in celebration of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE's continuous publication since the luxuriously produced first issue appeared in March 1903. Its course since then has been a sustained exploration of the presence of art in its innumerable manifestations in the life of humanity, from the Paleolithic bison in the cave at Altamira to the installations and videos of today. The cumulative wealth and diversity of content is remarkable enough but is made even more so by the eminence of those who have contributed, including almost every internationally noted scholar of the past century. Enjoying the best of times and surviving the worst, the Magazine soon sailed, in waters both smooth and rough, familiar and uncharted, towards the position it still holds as the foremost periodical devoted to the history of art.

From the start, it was something new in the English-speaking world. As Caroline Elam discusses in her article in this issue, there was the Connoisseur, founded two years earlier in 1901, whose content careered miscellaneously between contributions by Bernard Berenson and tips for collecting old lace and oak furniture; it was momentarily valuable but gradually lost its competitive scholarly bearings. In Europe there was a handful of publications devoted to the scholarship of art, notably the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (which lamentably came to the end of its life in December 2002), the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, published in Berlin and Leipzig respectively, and Rassegna d'Arte, published in Milan. Aspects of all these formed a blueprint for the Burlington's aims and scope. It rapidly assumed a profile that is still recognisable today in, for example, the order of its contents and its emphasis on attributions, discoveries and documentation. It was lavishly illustrated, even with the occasional ostentatiously tipped-in colour plate, and sold for 2s 6d per month, wrapped in its distinctive cover designed by Herbert Horne. Although Western European art was (and still is) its major focus, its contents branched out to include articles on Persian miniatures, prehistoric cave paintings, oriental carpets and Japanese art and ceramics; in its commentaries and campaigns it transcended its remit as a journal for 'Connoisseurs' (as announced in its title) and its monthly Editorials were a feature not shared with its continental counterparts. Recent and contemporary art was to be treated with the seriousness accorded to older art – so the first issue declared – but this was not always the case. Influential attention to recent art began to appear only after Roger Fry had complained in a letter published in 1908, addressed to the Editor, Charles Holmes, that it was not receiving considered and unprejudiced treatment.1 From about 1910 onwards, the situation changed and it is ironic that the issues of the Burlington that followed over the next fifteen to twenty years are now frequently mined as a repository (if a somewhat erratic one) of progressive English taste. Art magazines such as The Studio, although acutely aware of contemporary design and architecture, failed to address Post-Impressionism, let alone the work of its successors.2 As late as 1926, The Studio was bewailing the 'many grave deficiencies' of Seurat's Baignade, Asnières, then a new addition to the Tate Gallery's collection, whereas the Burlington in 1920 had published André Salmon's magnificent tribute to Seurat decked in a full-page reproduction of the Baignade.

Much of the early history of the Magazine is irrecoverable: the archive up to the 1940s is more or less contained in one fat drawer of a filing cabinet. Few glimpses survive of office life and some of the figures who were editorially prominent in the first decades remain as shadows (only this year, for example, have we managed to procure an image of Robert Tatlock, the Editor through the 1920s). We do now have, however, a fairly solid (written) portrait of the relationship of Sir Charles Holmes and Roger Fry, both crucial to the Burlington's well-being. Their activities and individual style are further illuminated by Flaminia Gennari Santori's article with its account of the Burlington's transatlantic fortunes and of its only too familiar editorial discords. In an earlier birthday issue (July 1986), Edith Hoffmann published a vivid memoir of her time at the Magazine, working first for Herbert Read and then for the increasingly ailing and absent Tancred Borenius. These difficult years came to an end with the appointment in 1947 of the Burlington's longest-serving Editor, Benedict Nicolson. Although he relied greatly on the advice of several members of the Consultative Committee, especially the conciliatory Herbert Read and the decisive Ellis Waterhouse, Nicolson quickly became identified with the Burlington throughout the curatorial and academic world. He bravely re-designed the Magazine, introduced new writers and editorial features and set it on its post-War course of renewed respect and prosperity. It became, as John Golding has commented, 'the most important and best journal of its kind in the world'.

It is worth examining a single issue, edited entirely by Nicolson. The brown cover of September 1960 announces the contents and the price of 7s 6d. Inside, the masthead names the twenty-five members of the Consultative Committee and is followed by twenty pages of advertisements, half of which are devoted to superb twentieth-century works in forthcoming Sotheby's sales, all illustrated in black and white. There is no Editorial page (Nicolson put down his pen in August) and we immediately plunge into the full text of Kenneth Clark's address on Bernard Berenson given at the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Mischievously incongruous, the adjoining frontispiece bears a Michelin-esque seated nude by Picasso of 1906, flagging an article by Phoebe Pool on the early rooms of the great Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Further articles on art nouveau and on Poussin are also exhibition-based and in the latter, Anthony Blunt, in a bare-knuckled attack, gloved in deferential prose, defends himself against Denis Mahon's suggested revisions to Poussin's chronology by urging 'caution and humility'. Alastair Smart presents the first part of his findings on the age-old 'Giotto – not Giotto' controversy on the attribution of the legend of St Francis cycle at Assisi; and Luke Herrmann publishes a bozzetto for Luca Giordano's Deposition in the Accademia. A letter from Michael Levey corrects a 'foolish omission' in an article by him on Tiepolo (published three months earlier). After a fling of book reviews, there is an unusually short-winded 'Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions' column, a reflection of the then almost general observance of the summer shut-down.

How much and how little has changed in the forty or so years since then? The skeleton is still recognisable but the Magazine is now plumper and perhaps even more diverse. It has a great deal of colour now (there was none in 1960); there are far more exhibition reviews, especially of recent art; notices of books are longer; there is a comprehensive sweep to the Calendar that reaches parts of the globe Nicolson barely acknowledged. The masthead is much less austere for it now bears the names of generous benefactors who, like our advertisers, make the publication possible. As to the quality of the contents it is difficult to judge, for each period has its particular style and interests. This becomes abundantly clear if we turn to perhaps the most notable contribution to the Magazine's centenary celebrations, Michael Levey's anthology, to be published later this month, of writings culled from the Burlington over its hundred years.3

Although Levey's task was daunting – relays of door-stopping volumes were delivered to him over many months – he had on his side a long familiarity with the Magazine as reader, contributor (his first article appeared fifty years ago) and chronicler of its early history.4 Turning this way and that, from the strade of leading articles to the calle of reviews and obituaries, he has succeeded brilliantly in conveying the Burlington's range and flair, while remaining ever-alert to its essential seriousness of purpose. It would have been too easy simply to bring together writings by the most celebrated contributors or to fill the book with many of the most remarkable discoveries published in the Magazine, such as Hofstede de Groot's publication of Vermeer's Woman weighing pearls or Enriqueta Harris's identification of Velázquez's portrait of Camillo Massimi. We find, of course, the great and expected names – from Berenson to Haskell, Clark to Gombrich, Wittkower to Panofsky – but not all are caught in their maturity: John Pope-Hennessy, for example, is snared very early in his career, writing on British art; Benedict Nicolson is represented more or less at the start of his life-long romance with the Caravaggisti. There are also some surprises – William Rossetti on his brother Dante and Augustus John on his sister Gwen; there is the fledgling A.D.B. Sylvester, as David Sylvester then signed his contributions; and the irascible Douglas Cooper under his early, much-needed nom de plume, Douglas Lord.

One of the incidental pleasures of browsing through the Magazine, as Michael Levey has demonstrated, is the discovery of unexpected contributors. Henry James is perhaps the most massive of figures to have applied themselves to a Burlington obituary (he wrote on Charles Eliot Norton in January 1909); among novelists and poets the names of George Moore, Arthur Waley, Osbert Sitwell and Nancy Cunard occur. But, outside the realm of the museum curator and the art historian, it is perhaps the contributing artists over a long period who make the biggest splash. Levey has included Henry Tonks, Augustus John and Maurice Denis. Elsewhere, the contributions from Oskar Kokoschka and Ludwig Meidner underline the welcome given in the Burlington's pages to political refugees in the 1930s and 40s. These included, of course, many eminent scholars such as Gombrich, Pevsner, Pächt, Buchtal and Kurz, all of whom immeasurably increased the Magazine's international scope and standing. Among other painter-writers, a frequent if sometimes incontinent reviewer was Walter Sickert whose contributions, such as his invaluable memoir of Degas (November 1917), he would himself deliver to the office as a large parcel marked: 'ENGLISH PROSE! THIS SIDE UP! WITH CARE!';5 and one of the last published writings of Lawrence Gowing was a review in the Burlington of the Edinburgh exhibition of Cézanne and Poussin (October 1990). More recently, lectures and memoirs by Georg Baselitz, Howard Hodgkin, Rodrigo Moynihan, Michael Craig-Martin and Bridget Riley have added lustre to these pages.

Although self-congratulation – even if only for the Magazine's uninterrupted longevity – is certainly in order, it would not be out of place to consider what might be perceived as its shortcomings. In recent years the Burlington has sometimes come under fire for not embracing the New Art History that emerged in the 1970s as part of a broader re-thinking of several related academic disciplines. While it is true that the Burlington has not embraced the methodologies and language of politicised art history at its most extreme, and has maintained, from the start, its fixation on the object, it has by no means neglected the swelling matrix of historical, social and aesthetic conditions that are responsible for each object's specific attributes. Much of the spadework needed for the theoretical and interpretative discourse of the New Art History has been carried out in these pages. Over the years they have included commentary on almost every aspect of patronage and collecting, commissioning and dealing. Artistic production within the framework of an era's politics has been examined side by side with the biographical minutiae of wayward individuals; we have published letters and memoirs, contracts, and inventories, wills and bills; we have looked at African hangings and documentary photographs of Hull; at varnishes, frames and artists' suppliers. We have seen collaborations and fallings-out; played our rôle in the rise of seicento studies, in the revival of the Pre-Raphaelites, in some of the first scholarly examinations of Cubism. We have discussed Henry VIII's shaving habits; found Mondrian in a London cinema; seen Winslow Homer dabbling in (pictorial) transvestism; witnessed Reni's testiness and Degas's recalcitrance; and we have floated along the Thames with William Morris in a boat named 'The Ark'. We have recorded Frans Hals's daughter-in-law reduced to selling old clothes; and Gainsborough planning a bathing holiday at Exmouth. We have listened to John Bacon in 1842 deploring the interfering 'good taste' of the government's Committee of Taste set up to monitor public sculpture; and found Ben Nicholson designing a coffee pot. We have compared the health of State-controlled Yugoslavian museums in the 1950s with the sagging structure and underfunding of their British counterparts; grieved for the losses caused by war, theft, fire and flood (as well as by over-zealous conservation). We may be sometimes narrow and aloof; we have made mistakes with outrageous attributions and the publication of fakes (Van Meegeren's 'Vermeer', Christ at Emmaus, being the most notorious); and sometimes we have not raised our voice loudly enough on issues of the day. But the overwhelming impression over a hundred years is one of wealth of content controlled by passionate probity. And for this we have only our contributors to thank.

This Centenary issue, as attentive readers will recognise, is the first to be carried out in a modification of the familiar design, making the Magazine, we believe, more elegant and spacious. In July and in February 2004, there will be two further Centenary issues; a display at the National Portrait Gallery, London (from 26th March for six months), will contain images of past Editors; a series of related lectures at the same venue will examine aspects of the careers of Roger Fry, Herbert Read and Benedict Nicolson; and The Burlington Centenary Lecture will be given by Nicholas Penny on 29th October at the National Gallery. On a wider scale, we are looking forward to the collaborative venture between the Magazine and the academic information service JSTOR to provide an electronic version of the whole run of the Burlington from 1903 onwards. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this project will make accessible every word and image we have published. Here indeed will be 'infinite riches in a little room'.

1 R. Fry: 'The Last Phase of Impressionism' (letter to the Editor), THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 12 (1908), pp.374-75.

2 See the excellent account of The Studio and contemporary magazines by C. Ashwin: '"The Studio" and Modernism. A periodical's progress', Studio International 192 (September/October 1976), pp.103-12.

3 The Burlington Magazine. A Centenary Anthology. Selected and introduced by Michael Levey. Preface by Caroline Elam. 224 pp. incl. 45 col. pls. + 150 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003), £29.95 / $65. ISBN 0–300–09911–8 (HB). Published on 20th March 2003.

4 M. Levey: 'The Earliest Years of The Burlington Magazine. A Brief Retrospect', THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 128 (1986), pp.474-77.

5 As recorded by Osbert Sitwell in the introduction to his selection of Sickert's writings, A Free House!, London 1947, p.XV.