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.
JUST HOW MUCH the study of nineteenth-century French art has changed almost beyond recognition may be judged by a comparison between the present issue and this Magazine’s first special issue on the subject, published in June 1938. The latter carries a self-congratulatory Editorial on the affirmative role played by the Burlington in the acceptance in England of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, well ahead of ‘official and academic opinion’. The two main articles are extraordinarily broad-brushed: Douglas Cooper surveys French portraiture from Neo-classicism to Cézanne; and a young John Rewald writes on ‘Camille Pissarro: His Work and Influence’. A more focused note is struck by D.S. MacColl defending Jacques-Louis David against English indifference; there is a useful summary of works by Degas in American collections; and a flamboyant article by Michel Florisoone on the rise of the individual temperament versus the claims of ‘collectivism’ and universal taste.
SIR, Although very grateful for Christopher Brown’s genial review of the Vereniging Rembrandt celebrations in your February issue (pp.125–26), I am afraid one point in his text ought to be rectified because the Vereniging would otherwise receive rather more praise than it deserves. The 1931 Lozenge composition with two lines by Mondrian was not bought for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in the year it was painted, nor did the Vereniging have anything to do with its being given to the city of Hilversum at the time. It was a group of friends of contemporary art who bought it for 500 guilders to be placed in the new Hilversum Town Hall, from where the as yet unloved object was then lent to the Stedelijk Museum in 1951. In the course of a conflict with the Dutch government, Hilversum decided to sell the Mondrian in 1987, and it was only in the aftermath of the ensuing row that the city of Amsterdam, the Vereniging Rembrandt, the Algemene Loterij and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds provided the Stedelijk Museum with the 2.5 million guilders needed to retain it. Although the Vereniging supported the third Van Gogh to enter a Dutch public art collection in 1918, it only opened up to further modern and contemporary art in the 1950s, and its board would certainly have had no sympathy with a Mondrian in 1931.
by Mondrian was not bought for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in the year it was painted, nor did the Vereniging have anything to do with its being given to the city of Hilversum at the time. It was a group of friends of contemporary art who bought it for 500 guilders to be placed in the new Hilversum Town Hall, from where the as yet unloved object was then lent to the Stedelijk Museum in 1951. In the course of a conflict with the Dutch government, Hilversum decided to sell the Mondrian in 1987, and it was only in the aftermath of the ensuing row that the city of Amsterdam, the Vereniging Rembrandt, the Algemene Loterij and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds provided the Stedelijk Museum with the 2.5 million guilders needed to retain it. Although the Vereniging supported the third Van Gogh to enter a Dutch public art collection in 1918, it only opened up to further modern and contemporary art in the 1950s, and its board would certainly have had no sympathy with a Mondrian in 1931.
SIR, I read with interest the article ‘Picasso’s “Acadmic study of a cast of a classical sculpture” (1893–94) and the sight-size technique’ by Joan Uraneck in your issue of December 2008 (pp.826–28). I would like to point out that copying to scale in the flat does not constitute sight-size; if it did then all such copies would be sight-size, which is patently not the case. Sight-size is primarily a portrait practice, the fundamental principle being that the artist stands back not only to see the sitter and image together but to judge the ‘big effect’ of the work as a whole. There is no evidence (and none is cited in the article) that Picasso ever used or was aware of sight-size as a technique.
SIR, In Alastair Laing’s review in the February 2009 issue (pp.128–29) of the Jakob Philipp Hackert exhibition recently shown in Weimar and Hamburg, he illustrated as Fig.62 a large and much-published watercolour of a View of Rome from the Baths of Caracalla (Fig.46), lent from the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, noting that its magical evocation of evening light effects is exceptional in the artist’s œuvre. The reason for this is that it is almost certainly not by Hackert, but by Giovanni Battista Lusieri (c.1751–1821). The case for his authorship was convincingly made in the monograph on Lusieri by Fabrizia Spirito (2003), in which she pointed out the existence of a preparatory pencil drawing for the seated figure at the lower left corner of the Berlin watercolour among the Lusieri material in the Elgin collection at Broomhall (although she too cautiously allowed the possibility that it might be a collaborative work between the two artists). It is in fact entirely characteristic of Lusieri’s Roman views of c.1780, several of which were unknown to Spirito and remain to be published. The authors of the Hackert catalogue appear to have been unaware of the proposed reattribution to Lusieri, for Spirito’s book is not mentioned in the entry on the watercolour, nor in the general bibliography.
. The reason for this is that it is almost certainly not by Hackert, but by Giovanni Battista Lusieri (c.1751–1821). The case for his authorship was convincingly made in the monograph on Lusieri by Fabrizia Spirito (2003), in which she pointed out the existence of a preparatory pencil drawing for the seated figure at the lower left corner of the Berlin watercolour among the Lusieri material in the Elgin collection at Broomhall (although she too cautiously allowed the possibility that it might be a collaborative work between the two artists). It is in fact entirely characteristic of Lusieri’s Roman views of c.1780, several of which were unknown to Spirito and remain to be published. The authors of the Hackert catalogue appear to have been unaware of the proposed reattribution to Lusieri, for Spirito’s book is not mentioned in the entry on the watercolour, nor in the general bibliography.
MICHAEL LEVEY, who died aged eighty-one on 28th December last year, was first and foremost a writer. Of course, he was well known for his long association with the National Gallery where, in 1951, he became an Assistant Keeper at the age of twenty-four; in 1986 he retired as its Director after thirteen years of great achievements. Martin Wyld, who worked with him at Trafalgar Square, details below Levey’s legacy, which includes many notable acquisitions, the development of an education department, the establishing of an artist-in-residence programme and the touring of the Gallery’s pictures in museums outside London. All through this period Levey published many wide-ranging books, to much acclaim. But some of his first published writings were for this Magazine, as well as his last review, which appeared posthumously in the January issue this year. While most of Levey’s obituarists gave full accounts of his books and his work at the National Gallery, almost none mentioned his long connection with the Burlington which, as he mentioned in a letter to the present writer last year, had lasted fifty-five years. What follows is an impression of this long connection drawn from personal experience and from the extensive file of correspondence with a succession of five Editors.
which, as he mentioned in a letter to the present writer last year, had lasted fifty-five years. What follows is an impression of this long connection drawn from personal experience and from the extensive file of correspondence with a succession of five Editors.
IN 2003 THE Wallace Collection’s library received an unexpected but very welcome gift from Daphne Lucas, a great admirer of Richard Parkes Bonington who had formed an archive of material relating to the painter’s life. This gift was the visitors’ book for the armoury of Dr Samuel Rush Meyrick covering the period 1820 to 1830. As Mrs Lucas was well aware, she could not have found a more appropriate home for the book than the Wallace Collection. Not only does it own an outstanding group of paintings and watercolours by Bonington, but it also has much of the collection of arms and armour that Meyrick once proudly displayed at his houses in London and Herefordshire. It has long been known that Bonington and Delacroix visited Meyrick’s armoury in July 1825 from the sketches they drew there and from a letter written much later by Delacroix to the critic Théophile Thoré. It is therefore no surprise that both men appear in the visitors’ book. But, as will be seen, this slim volume with sixty-five pages of names and addresses contains much more of interest to scholars of French and British art in the early nineteenth century.
IN HIS REVIEW of the Salon of 1846, Charles Baudelaire singled out Eugène Delacroix as the embodiment of Romanticism. In the 1820s and early 1830s, however, critics and the public viewed the painter Charles-Emile Champmartin (1798–1882) as a leader in the Romantic movement alongside his friend Delacroix, both fellow students of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Critics writing about the Salon in 1828 consistently excoriated Delacroix and Champmartin in the same breath, casting them as radical artists or, as Etienne Delécluze explained, ‘the extreme left-wing in painting’. In the only sympathetic review of the artists’ major works from that year, the Figaro observed: ‘Champmartin is the scapegoat of the unconverted Romantic school. Delacroix’s Sardanapalus is also set in the pillory’. And in 1831, the hostile Journal des artistes claimed that ‘it is a curious thing to see that this time the Romantic coterie (because it still exists) praises Champmartin to the skies’. A recently rediscovered oil-sketch by Champmartin, Portrait of Eugène Delacroix and Alphonse Vée (Fig.11), sheds new light on the early days of Romanticism, when Champmartin, Delacroix and Vée (1796–1872) were apprentices in Guérin’s studio. The double-portrait documents the camaraderie of Guérin’s pupils, elucidates their apprenticeship and underscores Champmartin’s significance for the genesis of Romanticism.
AT THE PRESTIGIOUS New York sale in 1891 of works owned by the American collector George Seney, Jean-François Millet’s Waiting (Fig.16) sold for the substantial sum of $40,500, the highest price of this sale and nearly seventy times its original price. A rare example of an explicitly religious subject in Millet’s œuvre, the picture was described in the sale catalogue as ‘in the loftiest vein of feeling which the artist expressed in his works’ and viewed as a pendant to the artist’s scene of praying peasants, the Angelus (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), the most famous and expensive modern painting of its day. Waiting retained its fame into the early twentieth century when it was praised by Walter Sickert in 1923 as ‘a great classic of universal and eternal interest’. The painting’s commercial and critical success indeed symbolised the enormous posthumous appeal of Millet’s work, particularly for wealthy American collectors. Yet, this later appeal has meant that the original radicalism of many of Millet’s pictures, including Waiting, has often been overlooked. Exhibited at the 1861 Paris Salon, Waiting helped to establish Millet’s reputation as one of the most controversial painters of his age. This article aims to rediscover the picture’s original avant-garde and ‘realist’ qualities by examining both its genesis and the largely unknown critical discourse around it.
EDGAR DEGAS’S PAINTING Dans un café (Fig.30), also known as L’Absinthe, is one of his least satisfactorily documented major achievements. Often seen as a definitive statement of the artist’s urban realism in the 1870s, it is widely associated with the series of Impressionist exhibitions that began in that decade. As such, Dans un café has acquired a role in the emerging iconography of the age, in the imagery of his immediate followers such as Jean-Louis Forain and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in the fin-de-siècle repertory of Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Pablo Picasso and others. Yet the recorded history of the picture lacks conclusive evidence that it was shown in any of the Impressionist displays or at other venues in France before the early twentieth century. Scholars have confirmed its presence elsewhere, however, notably in the near-seclusion of an English provincial collection, where it arrived soon after Degas completed it. Remaining there for almost sixteen years, the painting was then bought by a major collector in Paris, comte Isaac de Camondo, who kept it until 1908. The implicit absence of Dans un café from public sight in Degas’s milieu during much of his life offers a fundamental challenge: if the painting was not seen by his contemporaries, either in the original or in some reproduced form, can it still be regarded as a seminal contribution to Impressionism and to the development of early modernism as a whole?
A DIVERGENCE HAS ARISEN between the interpretation of Gustave Moreau recently developed by Moreau specialists and the more traditional view maintained by histories of art, dictionaries of art and books and exhibition catalogues devoted to fin-de-siècle culture. According to the latter, Moreau was either a precursor of or a fully fledged participant in the nebulous movement known as Symbolism. The matter is further complicated by Moreau’s long-standing association with Decadence. For Moreau specialists, on the other hand, the painter of Œdipus and the sphinx and Salome was, above all, an innovative history painter. The purpose of this article is to clarify Moreau’s relationship with both Symbolism and Decadence. First, however, it will be helpful to summarise the current views of Moreau specialists.
