Looked at from a critical or scholarly perspective, a good many exhibitions seem hardly necessary. They are often makeweights in a museum’s schedule, a curator’s or art historian’s proposal taken on by an exhibition committee eager to fill its ‘forthcoming events’, to satisfy the conditions attached to funding or the demands of education departments. Often they can simply be crowd-pleasers without a context, but with a famous name or movement in the title to ensure increased visitor numbers. We might contrast here the brazen footfall-chasing of the Albertina in Vienna with the focused scholarly shows at the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art which can also delight the non-specialist. The Victoria and Albert Museum this past year had a spectacular hit with its David Bowie exhibition, but there was no major show rooted in or stemming from its core collections of applied and decorative arts. Perhaps the Museum has been treading water until its William Kent exhibition arrives from New York (where it is at the Bard Graduate Center to 9th February; in London from 22nd March to 13th July). Painting and drawing has fared better in displays and shows of British works on paper, Constable and Chinese scroll painting (all current). But before looking at a few highlights for 2014, here is a résumé of the last twelve months.
If the exhibition Facing the Modern. The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (to 12th January)1 had been shown in Vienna at one of the excellent museums devoted to the cultural history of the city – such as the Wien Museum or the Jüdisches Museum Wien – it would have seemed an interesting and appropriate project. Unfortunately, staging a show of this kind at the National Gallery, London, is an entirely different matter. In the context of this great international museum displaying masterpieces of European art through the ages, Facing the Moderncomes across as flawed and oddly parochial. Sadly, it represents a missed opportunity to introduce the British public to the splendours of fin-de-siècle Viennese art.
A rare architectural paper model (after 1570) by Federico Brandani for the Chapel of the Dukes of Urbino at Loreto.
A rediscovered text to a printed drawing book by Odoardo Fialetti, originally published in Venice in 1608, is discussed and reproduced in full.
An unpublished letter in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, from Guercino to Cardinal Mazarin of 1648, discussing commissions and payments.
An unpublished letter in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, from Francesco Albani to his pupil Girolamo Bonini, with references to Poussin and Annibale Carracci.
Two new letters documenting Canova in his hometown of Possagno and at a picnic in which he rearranged the local girls’ hairdos in a Neo-classical style.