Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
THE GRANT OF £1 million by the Art Fund – the premier charity in Britain for the public acquisition of works of art – towards the appeal to buy Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and the grant of another £1 million towards the purchase of Anthony d’Offay’s collection of late twentieth-century art, jointly acquired by Tate and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, have drawn renewed attention in spectacular ways to this most venerable and generous institution. The first is an example of the Fund’s purpose at its most traditional – the securing of works of art for the nation against possible sale abroad (hence the title of the National Art-Collections Fund by which it was known for most of its existence). The second – helping to acquire and promote recent art – will surprise only those who have not followed the Fund’s policies in the last decade and more. A further point de départ for an assessment of the Fund’s current standing is the announcement last month of the resignation of David Barrie after seventeen years as the Fund’s director. Apart from these specific events, however, there is a growing perception of the Fund as a split personality – the familiar Lady Bountiful, unassuming yet firm, generous but not profligate, and an aggressively dictatorial organisation obsessed with stamping its image on the recipients of its charity.
SOME YEARS AGO nine of Alfred Stevens’s long-lost paintings based on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene were found in a shop in Marylebone, London. Once the focal points of a decorative scheme for the drawing room of 11 Kensington Palace Gardens, they had not been seen for almost a century. Painted in 1854–55, their importance lies in the pivotal position they hold within the artist’s œuvre. In 1853 Stevens had been commissioned to copy Raphael’s paintings on the vault of the Stanza della Segnatura for the Italian Court of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. In 1856, immediately after he had finished the Faerie Queene series, he embarked on his two greatest works, the Wellington Memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral and the decoration of Dorchester House, London (destroyed).
IN MARCH OF the year 1625/26 Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644) of Surrenden Dering, Pluckly, Kent, paid a painter whom he referred to as ‘Mr. Cuddington’ for ‘work done at Surrenden this Lent’ as follows:
For my first wife’s picture att length, £ 11–0–0
for my owne picture £ 6
for my wifes picture £ 6
for my brother H.D. picture £ 2
for frames for ye other pictures £ 1 15s 0d
given to his man 5s
In addition, Dering noted that ‘my father pd for Anthony’s picture and ye frame £5–10–0 and for my grandfather £1–15–0’, the implication being that ‘Cuddington’ did these as well.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI benefited from two types of patronage: on the one hand there was a set of constant patrons who assembled large groups of his works, and on the other a number of more casually interested buyers who made only one or two purchases. Two Liverpool-based collectors may be cited as representatives of these two types: the banker George Rae (1817–1902) for the former, and the lawyer Andrew Tucker Squarey (1821–1900) for the latter. If Rae’s long connection with Rossetti is well documented, Squarey’s revolves around a single commission, given in about 1865, for a watercolour of Hamlet and Ophelia (Fig.20), regarding which two previously unpublished business letters have now come to light.
‘I'VE MET TWO geniuses’, Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, told Daniel Farson, ‘Walter Sickert and Francis Bacon’. Although separated by a generation, both artists were devoted to figurative art and recognised the need to modernise the genre. One of the ways in which they did this was by openly publicising the sources of their figuration, albeit in a highly selective manner. Before being photographed for the Sketch in 1938, Sickert refused to clear up his studio, preferring to be captured in the real environment of his creative space. The photograph (Fig.27) anticipates the standard images of Bacon in his studio (Fig.28), where the painter posed repeatedly for press and art photographers. Both artists appear in front of mirrors among the seeming chaos of newspapers and magazines strewn across the floor. In fact a close examination of both studios reveals that these controversial sources were not randomly amassed but key aids in the genesis of their work.
ON 3RD JANUARY 1939 William Scott, then living in France, wrote to his old friend and fellow art student Harry Hicken (1911–2000). The letter (see Appendix 1 below), which appears to have been prompted by the news that Hicken was going through a divorce, is headed ‘chez Madame Achille, 6 rue St Sebastien, Cagnes-s.-mer’. As Scott explains, he was writing from St Tropez and the address he gives is where he and his wife, Mary, would be moving on the following day: ‘St Tropez is a lovely place but its [sic] exposed too much to the Mistral, the country is more sheltered near Nice’. This previously unknown letter is important for several reasons. First, Scott was never an enthusiastic correspondent so letters from him are rare. Secondly, even rarer are letters from this period of his life. None of the few known to us is as full of information as this one in which Scott takes the opportunity to bring his friend up to date with the events of the past twelve months.
THE TOURING EXHIBITION in 2007–08 of the work of Kenneth and Mary Martin focused attention on the differences between their abstract art, which is concrete, geometric and systematically constructed, and the art of the ‘School of St Ives’ which is abstracted from the appearance of things, often the local Cornish landscape. When the exhibition was shown at Tate St Ives, work by the Martins’ London-based colleagues – Victor Pasmore, Adrian Heath and Anthony Hill – was also on display alongside a representative selection of works by artists from St Ives. The London-based artists came together in 1951, with the sculptor Robert Adams, and presented their constructed abstract art throughout the next decade in important exhibitions and publications for which they themselves were responsible.
