Above right Circle picture, by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. 1931. (p

3. Circle picture, by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. 1933. Oil on canvas, 74.3 by 119.8 cm. (Kunstmuseum Bern; exh. Museum of Modern Art, New York). cross-stitch woollen thread used in the alternating squares from a vertical to a horizontal direction, Taeuber-Arp produced the requisite pattern; each axial shift imbues the surface plane with a darker or lighter sheen and corresponding visual weight. First coming to the fore in her fibre works, Taeuber-Arp’s refined colour sense was grounded in ‘harmonic gradations’ (p.33), as the co-curator Walburga Krupp writes in her catalogue essay, as opposed to contrasts of complementary colours.1

In October 1910 Taeuber-Arp enrolled at the Debschitz School, Munich, which was noted for an innovative pedagogy that encompassed the fine and applied arts. By the following autumn she had opted to specialise in textile design and turned-wood sculpture. In November 1914 Taeuber-Arp returned to her hometown of Zurich, where, the following summer, she began studying dance at Rudolf von Laban’s School of the Art of Movement. In May 1916 she accepted a teaching position in the Applied Arts Department at the city’s Trade School, where she would remain on the faculty until 1929. Presenting her work in national museums and exhibiting societies, Taeuber-Arp quickly established herself as a crafts professional whose preferred technique of needlework was deployed in the making of functional artefacts and works of art alike. Yet, even as she gained recognition for her textile works, Taeuber-Arp was drawn into the orbit of the iconoclastic Dadaists, who congregated at Cabaret Voltaire. At the opening of Galerie Dada in March 1917 she performed an abstract dance set to an onomatopoeic sound poem by Hugo Ball (1886–1927), who was one of the group’s principal protagonists. In 1918 she designed stage sets and turnedwood polychromed string puppets (Fig.1) for an eighteenth-century play performed at Zurich’s Marionette Theatre; they, too, were well received. By the mid-1920s, however, her focus had pivoted toward interior design, a shift that was consolidated in 1926 with the renovation of the Aubette, a historic building on Strasbourg’s main square, into a multipurpose entertainment complex (Fig.4). For this commission, she invited Jean (Hans) Arp (1886–1966), her husband and long-term artistic collaborator, and the Dutch founder of De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), to join her. By the late 1930s, now showing internationally in a range of avant-garde contexts, she was counted a peer by coteries of Concrete and Constructivist artists of divergent persuasions. A rare female painter in otherwise heavily male dominated spheres, her spare meticulous geometries continued to reveal unexpected nuance and vitality.

Although widely recognised in European artistic and design circles, Taeuber-Arp never had a solo show during her lifetime. Following her untimely death in 1943, critical and art-historical attention prioritised her work as an abstract painter – a myopic focus that has severely limited not only the reception of her multidisciplinary practice but also the recognition of her pioneering role in Modernism’s history.

The narrowing and ‘normalising’ of her multifarious endeavours – a bid for mainstream status – was encouraged, if not initiated, by the posthumous catalogue raisonné published in 1948 and overseen by her bereaved partner.2 It accorded her applied art works and design nominal significance at best.

In 1981 the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), hosted the first retrospective in the United States devoted to Taeuber-Arp. Comprising approximately forty works in total, it underscored that bias, discerning a steadiness of focus and purpose in the artist’s later years that signalled the maturation of her vision. Four decades later, the present survey, assembled from some three hundred objects, puts on full display the dynamic spirit and formal inventiveness with which Taeuber-Arp engaged – what she called ‘living abstraction’ (p.20). Here, the exhibition’s compelling visual rhetoric – the subtle attunement of works of art to institutional container – that characterises the installation as a whole, comes into its own. Designed to house the late work, the monumental last gallery is divided by short free-standing walls into a series of interlocking smaller spaces, which afford each of the various subsets of works from this period a suitably scaled enclave while, at the same time, permitting transverse sightlines across the gallery. These tunnelling vistas create dialogues between works with different formal lexicons, often with unanticipated and playful results. In short, the design reinforces the visitor’s parting impression that Taeuber-Arp’s future production would branch out in multiple fertile directions.

Standout essays by Briony Fer and Jodi Hauptman in the excellent catalogue further illuminate the work of the artist’s last years. Attentive to the enduring role of dance and the performative in Taeuber-Arp’s vision, Fer argues that such choreographies of movement – through lines – in her œuvre did not culminate in the pure, essential and absolute identified with a Constructivist aesthetic; rather, their trajectory traces an alternative journey towards the ambiguous, contingent and playful, exemplified, for example, in the series ‘Schematic Compositions’ begun in 1930 (Fig.3). By contrast, Hauptman homes in on a group of works from 1941, small in dimension but monumental in feel, which she reads in relation to contemporary sociopolitical events and the psychic toll they exacted on the homeless artist in flight from the Nazi regime. Consider, for example, the drawing Crossing of lines, bars and figure-planes (1941; Kunstmuseum Basel) or the linocut Crossing of straight lines, planes from the portfolio 10 Origin (1942; Museum of Modern Art, New York; not exhibited). Executed in easily portable materials, such as pencil and coloured pencil on paper, these charged works feature dense overlapping of angular forms with few precedents, as Hauptman astutely points out, in what to date had been a very consistent visual vocabulary. That said, it is the works from TaeuberArp’s first decade – c.1915–25 – that currently excite. At a time when cross-disciplinary modes are ascendant in the contemporary art arena, with textile-related practices foremost among them, it is the fibre works of art with seemingly little pedigree, such as Vertical-horizontal composition, or the woven wool tablecloth, complete

4. Aubette 127 (axonometric drawing of the ‘Five O’Clock’ tearoom in the Aubette, Strasbourg). 1927. Gouache, metallic paint, ink and pencil on diazotype, 123 by 99 cm. (Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg; exh. Museum of Modern Art, New York; photograph M. Bertola).

with fringes, Cross on red ground (1924; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau) that require an accounting. Though formal and material parallels may be adduced in concurrent explorations by Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) and, shortly after, Anni Albers (1899–1994), the granular scholarship that would ramify their shared values and impulses remains in potentia. Beautifully calibrated and even-handed, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction may be the match needed to fuel a blaze.

1 Catalogue: Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction. Edited by Anne Umland, Walburga Krupp and Charlotte Healy. 352 pp. incl. 435 col. ills. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021), £69.99. ISBN 978–1–63345–107–0. 2 See G. Schmidt, ed.: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Basel 1948.

Émailler le verre à la Renaissance: Sur les traces des artistes verriers entre Venise et France

Musée national de la Renaissance – Château d’Écouen 13th October 2021– 14th February 2022

by sylvie lhermite-king

The Château d’Écouen, commissioned by the Constable Anne de Montmorency (1493–1567), and now a museum dedicated to the decorative arts of the Renaissance, is the perfect setting for an exhibition that focuses on enamelled and gilded glass from Venice and France in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and that seeks to distinguish it from recreations in the nineteenth century. The curators, Aurélie Gerber, Françoise Barbe and Isabelle Biron, have brought together 120 objects from a large number of national and international collections. The exhibition is the culmination of more than ten years of research conducted under the project name Cristallo. One of the central objectives of the project has been to identify the composition of the glass and enamels by means of chemical analysis, with the aim of determining whether the objects are of Renaissance and Venetian origin or produced elsewhere in the style of Venice or, indeed, were made in the nineteenth century. The results presented in the exhibition and catalogue are impressive, even though they raise new questions.1

Glassware held an important place in the Kunst- and Wunderkammern of the Renaissance courts of Europe. Venetian glassmakers had acquired their expertise from the tenth century onwards thanks to commercial and cultural exchanges with the East. From 1279, when the expansion of the industry and the ever-present risk of fire necessitated its transfer to the island of Murano, glassmaking provided the Venetian economy with an important source of income. The city had a virtual monopoly on the manufacture of fine glass, which was exported to Europe and the Orient. In the mid-fifteenth century, the master glassmaker Angelo Barovier not only rediscovered lost techniques of colouring, gilding and enamelling glass but also developed a formula for obtaining a glass of supreme quality, called ‘cristallo’.

In Venice the market for luxury glassware was modest and demand was mainly limited to utility glass. Although decorated luxury glass is rarely mentioned in the inventories of aristocratic or wealthy Venetian families, pieces enamelled with the arms of such families as the Tiepolo, Barberigo, Marcello, Moncenigo, Loredan and Grimani nonetheless attest to the prestige in which Venetian glass was held. Most of the production of enamelled glass was reserved for export. For example, in the second half of the fifteenth century, Florentine families, including the Medici, Pucci, Salviato and Strozzi were avid buyers. Around 1500, Venetian glass production was at its apogee, but glass manufactories were soon to develop in other Italian cities on the initiative of their sovereigns, such as the Medici in Florence and the Gonzaga in Altare. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, glassmakers – first from Altare and then from Venice – travelled to all the courts of Europe, and their production, either replicating Venetian glass or adapting it to the tastes of their patrons, acquired the sobriquet à la façon de Venise.

The exhibition is installed in two rooms on the ground floor of the château, the former apartments of Catherine de’ Medici. The display cases are positioned so that the pieces can be viewed from all sides, and the soft lighting reproduces the effect of candlelight reflecting on the glass. The first and largest room contains a number of masterpieces of Venetian enamelled glass from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as footed bowls, goblets and pilgrims’ flasks made of coloured glass and enamelled with figures or arabesque scroll work. These pieces are often decorated with patterns of gilded scales and enamel dots. The colours of the enamels are bright and varied and

5. Covered bowl showing the Triumph of Chastity. Venice, c.1500. Blue glass, polychrome enamels and gold, height 27.8 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh. Musée national de la Renaissance – Château d’Écouen; © RMN-Grand Palais; photograph Franck Raux).

those of the glass bodies are turquoise, deep emerald green and cobalt blue. The last was used for a magnificent covered bowl representing the Triumph of Chastity (cat. no.9; Fig.5), from the collection of Salomon Mayer von Rothschild (1774–1855). With its shape inspired by goldsmiths work and the decoration reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, this prestigious piece was probably intended to be displayed at banquets. The attribution of the bowl to Venice has now been confirmed by scientific analysis. Several enamelled goblets made from colourless glass on display can now be assigned to Venice, including one decorated with putti riding dolphins (Musée du Louvre, Paris; no.11), also from Rothschild’s collection, which was chosen for the cover of the catalogue.

In the past, some of the pieces have been identified as being products of workshops outside Venice, on the basis of such criteria as shape and decoration. For instance, the soft colours of the enamel and the motif of foliage and birds on a cylindrical

Below 6. Footed goblet known as the ‘Halberdiers’, French, mid16th century. Uncoloured glass and polychrome enamels, height 71.2 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh. Musée national de la Renaissance – Château d’Écouen; © RMNGrand Palais; photograph Hervé Lewandowski). 7. Cylindrical covered pot on a foot, Venetian style. Second half of the 16th century. Uncoloured glass, polychrome enamels and gold, height 25 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh. Musée national de la Renaissance – Château d’Écouen; © RMN-Grand Palais; photograph Martine BeckCoppola). covered pot on a foot (no.47; Fig.7) have been thought to point to a Catalan origin. According to the curators, analysis has confirmed that the composition of the glass support ‘is not compatible with the formulas used by Venetian glassmakers’ (p.131). However, two related objects from the Musée du Louvre, Paris, a ewer (no.46) and a cup with two handles (no.45), the decoration of which is stylistically similar, are compatible with Venetian formulas, thus raising questions about workshop practices.

The second room presents a selection of the most important French enamelled glass from the sixteenth century, including a sumptuous goblet from the Wallace Collection, London (no.89), which is among the first loans by this institution. Decorated on its foot with a crucifixion in enamel, the goblet has provoked a long-standing and continuing discussion about its possible liturgical use as a chalice. Another important example of French production is a footed goblet known as the ‘Halberdiers’ (no.90; Fig.6). Once suspected to date from the nineteenth century on account of its refinement and the clarity of the glass, its origin in the Renaissance has now been established. The costume of the halberdiers suggests a date in the 1560s or shortly after, although a later sixteenth-century date cannot be ruled out. One display case is devoted to pilgrim flasks, some of which are made of opaque turquoise and blue glass and decorated with pewter or gilded copper mounts and Limoges enamel medallions. Other display cases present a selection of enamelled glass pieces of doubtful dates. Two pieces with the arms of Catherine de’ Medici (Musée national de la Renaissance – Château d’Écouen; nos.106 and 107) are thought to consist of Renaissance glass but to have ‘certainly been re-enamelled in the second half of the nineteenth century’ (p.207); for others, the composition demonstrates a complete nineteenth-century origin, but often it remains open to question whether they were fakes or copies. Throughout the exhibition, information is provided as to whether the pieces have been analysed for their chemical composition and, if so, whether the tests produce results ‘compatible or incompatible with the Venetian Renaissance formulas’. This scientific approach to the glass, which largely excludes such considerations as object design, iconography, gilding and enamelling techniques and manufacturing processes, may confuse non-expert visitors, especially as no dates are proposed for any of the objects.

The well-illustrated catalogue contains a number of informative essays, mostly by the curators, and an appendix with tables that presents the results of the technical analyses.

1 Catalogue: Émailler le verre à la Renaissance: Sur les traces des artistes verriers entre Venise et France. Edited by Aurélie Gerber, Françoise Barbe and Isabelle Biron. 272 pp. incl. 200 col. + b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais, Paris, 2021), €39. ISBN 978–2–7118–7858–1.

Venetia 1600: Births and Rebirths

Palazzo Ducale, Venice 4th September 2021– 25th March 2022

by camilla pietrabissa

Celebrating the 1600th anniversary of the legendary foundation of Venice, this exhibition was originally due to open in the spring of 2021 but was postponed for six months because of the covid-19 pandemic. It will now close on the day of the city’s annual anniversary celebrations, the 25th of March, which is also the Feast of the Annunciation. Venice has remained attached to its traditions, particularly as it faces the threats of demographic decline, the erosion of its remarkable buildings and the devastation of the lagoon’s fragile ecosystem. Against this background, the exhibition shows the role of art in shaping and mediating the urban imaginary of its inhabitants and its tourists – both the Grand Tourists and their contemporary version, the global tourists.

Planning for the present exhibition began after the curators, Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, collaborated on a Tintoretto exhibition at Palazzo Ducale, Venice, in 2018–19.1 For this exhibition they have been joined by Gabriele Matino, an independent scholar, and Andrea Bellieni, the curator of the Museo Correr, Venice, the museum from which the majority of works have been borrowed. The subtitle alludes to one of the city’s most enduring symbols, the phoenix. Jacopo Sanguinacci, a Paduan scholar writing at the eve of the millenary jubilee of 1421, addressed Venice as ‘a living phoenix that renews itself and never changes form’ (p.36).2 Significantly, the theme of reappearance also plays an important role in the cult of the city’s patron saint, St Mark, whose lost relics are said to have been discovered in a column during the renovation and expansion of the basilica in 1094. The twelve loosely chronological sections of the exhibition pivot around the subject of such fresh starts, which, according to the curators, ‘define the history of Venice and the Venetian character’ (p.23). Although almost 190 out of the more than 270 works on display date from roughly between 1400 and 1800, the selection also includes a sixth-century Byzantine marble stoup (Museo Archeologico di Torcello; cat. no.2b.11) and a 2021 video installation by Studio Azzurro, Mose and Beyond (nos.12.1 and 12.2), documenting the lagoon’s flood-control system.

On entering the introductory room, visitors are faced with Vittore Carpaccio’s Lion of St Mark (no.1.1; Fig.8), restored for the occasion by the organisation Save Venice. In the same room, Jacopo de’ Barbari’s woodcut of 1500 (Museo Correr, Venice; no.1.2) and a wooden model of the city by Marco Acerbi (c.1961; IUAV University of Venice; no.1.3), establish the metropolitan city (called the dominante) as the exhibition’s sole focus, thus excluding the islands in the lagoon, the territories on the mainland and the city’s Mediterranean colonies. Since Venice’s foundation could not be traced back to Classical Antiquity, Venetians relied on legends and myths to help establish an account of the city’s origin. According to the Chronica extensa (1352) by the doge Andrea Dandolo, St Mark received a prophetic dream, which announced the birth of Venice on the day of the Annunciation in 421. On display in the second room are objects connected with this legend: a selection of illuminated manuscripts, chalices and other artefacts from the treasury of St Mark and a large chromolithograph by Alberto Prosdocimi (1881; Museo Correr; no.2b.8), depicting the basilica’s famous façade. The Annunciation became a preferred subject for many of the city’s patrons and artists and the exhibition brings together paintings made for private devotion and works created for churches, such as a refined mosaic by Giovanni Novello (1516; Scuola Grande Arciconfraternita di San Rocco, Venice; no.2a.3), commissioned for a sumptuous altar in the church of S. Rocco. A group of objects relating to the personification of Venice as Justice concludes this section.

The third room opens a sequence of galleries more firmly rooted in material culture. Rooms three and four examine maritime trade and conflicts, using nautical atlases, an astrolabe (14th century; Museo Storico Navale, Venice; no.3.11), paintings and vases

8. Lion of St Mark, by Vittore Carpaccio. 1516. Oil and tempera on canvas, 130 by 368 cm. (Palazzo Ducale, Venice).

brought from China, coins from the Venetian mint and a display relating to the establishment of Aldus Manutius’s Aldine Press in 1494. The two following rooms focus on urban renewal in the decades after the disastrous battles of the League of Cambrai (1509–16) with painted portraits of the doges and city views. Architectural models and books by Andrea Palladio, together with a marble capital from Jacopo Sansovino’s Loggetta (1537–49; Palazzo Ducale; no.5.11), illustrate the role of architects in this enterprise. Although outbursts of the plague in 1576 and 1630 and a fire that destroyed the two largest rooms of Palazzo Ducale in 1577 were moments of crisis, they were succeeded by periods in which artists received significant public and private commissions, as paintings by Alessandro Varotari, called Padovanino (no.7.22; Fig.10), Domenico Tintoretto and Bernardo Strozzi in the seventh room demonstrate.

From the late seventeenth century until the fall of the Republic in 1797, the city’s policy of neutrality in conflicts between foreign powers led to a burst of creativity. Thus, the room dedicated to the eighteenth century provides the most spectacular display, with a central group of mannequins dressed in original costumes from the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, arranged around a model of the bucintoro, the magnificent state barge (Fig.9). The theatre was thriving at this time and opera singers were highly popular figures, as for example Faustina Bordoni Hasse, a favourite of audiences and composers, who was portrayed by Rosalba Carriera (1731; Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Venice; no.8.5). The room dedicated to the nineteenth century, a tumultuous time of revolution and modernisation, is particularly convincing: Luigi Querena’s views of the Austrian bombardments of the city (1849; Museo Correr; no.9b.3) and the large-scale allegory Venice united with Italy by Giacomo Casa (1861; Museo del Risorgimento; Udine; no.9b.8) are important examples of the revival of traditional Venetian genres – the veduta and Renaissance history painting. By contrast, the rooms dedicated to the twentieth and twenty-first century are less persuasive.

9. Installation view of Venetia 1600: Births and Rebirths at Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 2021. The selection of paintings by artists patronised by Venice’s resident Peggy Guggenheim, such as Jackson Pollock, Tancredi Parmeggiani and Giuseppe Santomaso, exhibited alongside models for buildings designed by foreign architects for Venice, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Steven Hall, hint at an ambiguity in Venice’s attitude to international initiatives. At least since the inauguration of the first Biennale in 1895, the temporary presence of foreign patrons and artists in the city was greeted with ambivalence. Guido Zucconi’s excellent essay in the catalogue demonstrates that most recent architectural projects remain largely unfinished. Urban renovation appears to have become utopian.

Preservation is perhaps a more suitable term to define the exhibition’s agenda: as the visitors move towards the last rooms in which videos address current ecological concerns, they can see photographs of the disastrous floods in 1966 and 2019 lined up in a corridor. In Bill Viola’s video sound installation, The raft (2004; no.11.1), a storm of water turns a group of strangers into a

10. Virgin and Child with a votive model of S. Maria della Salute, by Alessandro Varotari, called Padovanino. 1631. Oil on canvas, 266 by 168 cm. (Diocesi Patriarcato di Venezia, Venice; exh. Palazzo Ducale, Venice). 11. Judith and her maidservant with the head of Holofernes, by Orazio Gentileschi. c.1621–24. Oil on canvas, 136 by 159 cm. (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT; exh. Palazzo Barberini, Rome). community. In Studio Azzurro’s Mose and Beyond, the protection of Venice and its lagoon are posited as major challenges for the future. Overall, this exhibition presents recurring themes of symbolic and political value across a variety of artefacts of differing qualities and provenances, while signalling the vulnerable condition of urban heritage. Enthusiastic visitors have suggested on social media that this display should be made permanent as a Museum of Venice. It is open to question whether a permanent display would represent an appeal for a better urban survival plan, or whether it would constitute another step in the process of turning the city into a museum.

1 R. Echols and F. Ilchman, eds: exh. cat. Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Venice (Palazzo Ducale) and Washington (National Gallery of Art) 2018–19; see the review by T. Nichols: ‘Coming of age: Jacopo

Tintoretto’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 160 (2018), pp.1024–29. 2 Catalogue: Venetia 1600: Births and Rebirths. Edited by R. Echols, F. Ilchman, G. Matino and A. Bellieni. 366 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Consorzio Museum Musei, Milan, 2021), €52. ISBN 978–88–320–2614–6.

Caravaggio e Artemisia: la sfida di Giuditta. Violenza e seduzione nella pittura tra Cinquecento e Seicento

Palazzo Barberini, Rome 26th November 2021– 27th March 2022

by keith christiansen

The catalyst for this engaging exhibition is one of the masterpieces of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini: Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes (cat. no.II.5). It is easy to forget that this now-famous work was virtually unknown prior to 1951, when the Roman-based restorer Pico Cellini brought it to the attention of Roberto Longhi – just in time to be inserted, hors catalogue, into the groundbreaking exhibition on Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti at Palazzo Reale, Milan (to make this possible the exhibition was extended by the then Minister of Education, Guido Gonella).1 The circumstances of the painting’s creation c.1600 and its convulsive impact on a younger generation of artists – most famously, at least for modern viewers, Artemisia Gentileschi – are the subject of this exhibition and a richly informative catalogue essay by Maria Cristina Terzaghi.2

Thanks in no small part to the studies of Terzaghi, we now know that the Genoese banker Ottavio Costa gave the painting pride of place in his notable collection, which included two other works by the artist, keeping it behind a silk curtain and prohibiting its sale by his heirs. Terzaghi believes he restricted access to the work (although it is mentioned by Giovanni Baglione in his Life of Caravaggio) and guarded against copies being made – as we have learned from the correspondence between the collector Giulio Mancini and his brother, Deifebo, copies were thought to lower the prestige of the original.3 Be that as it may, the impact of the picture on a generation of younger artists was enormous, for no one prior to Caravaggio had given such sensationally visual form to the account of Judith’s heroic and transgressive act as recounted in the Clementine Vulgate Bible of 1592. Earlier artists had most often depicted her holding the head of the Assyrian general – as an emblem of Humility overcoming Pride. Alternatively, she was shown putting the head into a meat bag held by her servant and accomplice, Abra, or the two making their way back to Bethulia with their grisly trophy (pictures of both themes are included in the exhibition).

At issue was the matter of decorum as well as a societal reluctance to show a woman killing a man.4 Yet the biblical account of the murder, which reads remarkably like a blow-by-blow police report, could not help but inspire artistic invention. Veronese, for one, did not shy from depicting the immediate aftermath of the decapitation, with Holofernes’s headless body exposed on the bloodied sheets of his bed and a richly attired Judith gathering her trophy while her African servant opens the bag into which it will be put. Dating from c.1580, the painting, in Palazzo Rosso, Genoa, is illustrated in Lara Scanu’s fascinating catalogue essay tracing representations of Judith before Caravaggio. On a canvas of c.1552–55 in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Tintoretto illustrated the moment before the decapitation, when Judith, armed with the Assyrian general’s sword, draws back the bed curtain to view her victim, while in another canvas, also in the Prado (1577–78; no.I.2), he represented the moment after the beheading, when Judith, in a ritual act reminiscent of Tosca, drapes the bedcover over the headless body. Unusually, Pierfrancesco Foschi artfully depicted Judith delivering the second blow to Holofernes’s neck (c.1540–45; Spier Collection; no.I.1). But it is a composition by Giulio Romano, known from an engraving, that provides a real precedent for the violence in Costa’s prized picture.

Caravaggio added a further element by substituting for Judith’s young female servant an old crone such as was generally associated with depictions of procurers, thereby introducing an erotic subtext to the story that could be justified by the fact that Judith’s ploy involved seduction. He went still further in the painting of Judith’s revealing blouse. This subversively shocking aspect of his depiction was pointedly not taken up by Artemisia, the other protagonist of the exhibition. The theme of the exhibition’s subtitle is taken up in Filippo Maria Ferro’s catalogue essay that takes a psychoanalytical approach to women and violence in western art. It has often been assumed that in the art of Caravaggio and Artemisia life experience and art intersect in a novel fashion, and Terzaghi reviews the possible importance for them of the trial and public execution in September 1599 of the young and beautiful Beatrice Cenci for the murder of her father, who had abused her, while in a fascinating catalogue essay Elizabeth Cohen addresses questions relating to women in contemporary society.

The twenty-nine paintings in the exhibition range from famous works to others that only recently have garnered attention or been newly identified. They are distributed among five galleries, each of which is organised around a dominant image or different thematic moments in the story. The paintings by Foschi and Tintoretto set the prelude – ‘Judith at the Intersection of Mannerism and Naturalism’ – while Caravaggio’s celebrated picture for Costa holds the end wall of the second, key gallery: ‘Caravaggio and his First Interpreters’. There, displayed on angled panels (Fig.13), six paintings suggest various responses, ranging from

12. Judith beheading Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi. c.1612. Oil on canvas, 159 by 126 cm. (Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples; exh. Palazzo Barberini, Rome).

Giuseppe Vermiglio’s banalisation of Caravaggio’s composition (1610–15; private collection; no.II.7) to Valentin de Boulogne’s psychologically acute depiction (1627–29; MUŻA, Valletta; no.II.8), in which a disconcertingly unflappable young Judith – she can hardly be more than sixteen – locks eyes with her screaming victim, whose raised arm reaches desperately into the dark void. A stilled, candlelit scene ascribed to Trophime Bigot (c.1630; Galleria Nazionale di Parma; no.II.10) and a vigorously painted, brutal rendition by an artist now identified as Bartolomeo Mendozzi (c.1625; private collection; no.II.9) mark two further responses. In the latter, Judith turns her head to engage the viewer – a notably theatrical idea employed by the German painter Johann Liss to even greater, dynamic effect in a canvas displayed in a later gallery (1624–27; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; no.III.18). The literary and theatrical treatment of the story of Judith is the subject of a catalogue essay by Paola Cosentino.

This theatrical strategy, which extends the drama into the viewer’s space, distinguishes a canvas sometimes ascribed to Louis Finson (c.1607; Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Naples; no.II.6) that had been thought by many to copy a second version of the Judith story painted by Caravaggio in Naples in 1607 and subsequently owned by Finson. The original of that composition was discovered in an attic in Toulouse in 2014 and, following heated debates, alternatively ascribed to Caravaggio (alone or assisted) or to Finson.5 The copy was a necessary stand-in for the ex-Toulouse picture, which could not be lent but is discussed both in Terzaghi’s essay and in Tania De Nile’s entry. In it, Judith, a mature and beautiful woman of fierce dignity and resolute determination, is austerely dressed in black, as the heroic Biblical widow, thereby eliminating the element of deception that to many contemporaries was suggestive of the wiles women employ to entrap men. Terzaghi feels that the absence of ‘any hint of seduction’ is ‘unthinkable’ for a genius such as Caravaggio (p.66). But this verdict surely underestimates the originality of this singular and, to this reviewer’s mind, powerfully affective departure from the norm, which reimagines Judith as a defiantly heroic woman who does not require the youthful charms of seduction to perform her grisly mission. It also overlooks the stylistic advance made over the brilliant but planar composition of Costa’s picture, which – remarkable as it is – adheres to sixteenth-century ideas, with its clear bilateral organisation emphasising contrasts of emotion, figure types and gender. The space in the ex-Toulouse picture is at once tighter and more clearly defined (the red cloth sweeps back and is hung over the branch of tree); the triad of figures is brought together, with the hands and heads of the two women united to a common purpose; and Abra’s fixed gaze on Judith and Judith’s challenging glance at the viewer introduce a completely new dynamic. This reviewer believes that the last word on this remarkable picture, the quality of which has little to do with the bland copy attributed to Finson, has yet to be said.

In the third gallery, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi and the Theatre of Judith’, it was a treat to see juxtaposed Orazio’s canvas from the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (1608–09; no.III.15) with Artemisia’s related picture from Palazzo Pitti, Florence (c.1615; no.III.16). In both, the two women, their deed accomplished, are shown as though leaving the Assyrian camp, with Holofernes’s head in a basket from which drips the Assyrian general’s coagulating blood. Artemisia clearly recalled her father’s painting (doubtless she had a drawing or tracing of it), but she exchanges the mood of quiet reflection for one of sharp alertness to danger. The reassuring hand that Orazio shows Judith placing on Abra’s shoulder is altered in Artemisia’s picture so as to suggest Judith’s anxiousness to depart. And there could be no greater contrast than that between Artemisia’s painting from Naples (no.III.13; Fig.12), in which the two women, their sleeves rolled up for their bloody task, struggle to pin down their victim, and Orazio’s elegant canvas from Hartford (no. III.17; Fig.11). Orazio freezes the action of their escape, showing the two women huddled together, cradling the basket with Holofernes’ blood-

13. Installation view of Caravaggio e Artemisia: la sfida di Giuditta. Violenza e seduzione nella pittura tra Cinquecento e Seicento at Palazzo Barberini, Rome, 2021–22. (Photograph Alberto Novelli).

drained head, and describes contrasts in dress, social status and character, Judith’s inspired calm providing a counterpoint to Abra’s alert anxiety (interestingly, Orazio never depicted the beheading). Thought-provoking comparisons such as these make this an engrossing exhibition.

This section spilled into a fourth gallery, where to very different effect both Guido Cagnacci (c.1645; Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna; no.III.21) and Mattia Preti (c.1650–53; Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte; no.III.24) show Judith, still within the tent, gazing heavenwards in prayerful gratitude after completing the deed. The fifth and final gallery addresses the overlap – emblematic as well as dramatic – between depictions of Judith, David with the head of Goliath, and Salome with the head of John the Baptist. Here again Valentin takes a lead role, with his powerfully confrontational painting of David (c.1615–16; Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid; no.V.28) and his eloquently triumphant Judith from the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (c.1626–27; no.IV.27).

The exhibition does not aspire to completeness. Rather it focuses on a moment and addresses a phenomenon of seventeenth-century culture worthy of further investigation: the fascination with socially subversive, violent subjects, often drawn from the Old Testament. That said, it is unfortunate that two crucial works are absent. One is Adam Elsheimer’s oil on copper in the Wellington Collection at Apsley House, London. Elsheimer’s candlelit scene, in which Holofernes looks desperately out at the viewer, had an impact out of all proportion to its diminutive size and was admired – indeed owned – by Rubens, who in turn painted one of the most erotically charged, over-the-top depictions of the story (known through copies and an engraving). The second is Artemisia’s masterful painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts (c.1623–25), in which the two women are shown full length, by candlelight, gathering up Holofernes’s head while anxiously gazing ‘off stage’ at some unseen but possibly heard disturbance. Often considered her greatest masterpiece, it is a work that marvellously explores the poetics of Baroque painting. But such are the limitations imposed on exhibitions. The excellent essays in the catalogue cover a range of topics that extend the discussion well beyond the purely art historical.

1 See Editorial: ‘The first modern painter’,

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 93 (1951), p.211. 2 Catalogue: Caravaggio e Artemisia: la sfida di Giudetta. Edited by Maria Cristina Terzaghi. 184 pp. incl. 95 col. ills. (Officina Libraria, Rome, 2021), €29.50. ISBN 978–88–336–7162–8. 3 M. Maccherini: ‘Caravaggio nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini’, Prospettiva 86 (1997), pp.71–92, at p.80. 4 In 1504, during the discussions about moving Donatello’s bronze Judith and Holofernes to make room for Michelangelo’s David in front of Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Francesco di Lorenzo Filarete, the herald of the Signoria, noted that it was not a good thing to have a work showing a woman killing a man. See G. Gaye: Carteggio inediti d’artisti, II, Florence 1840, p.456: ‘la giuditta è segno mortifero [. . .] non sta bene che la donna uccida Ihomo, et maxime essendo stata posta chon chattiva chonstellatione, perchè da poi in qua siate iti de male in peggio’. 5 The attribution to Caravaggio was defended in J. Gash: ‘Caravaggio’s other “Judith and

Holofernes”’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 161 (2019), pp.716–31. The case for Finson’s involvement is made, most recently, in G. Papi: ‘Caravaggio e Finson: un’amicizia’, in M.C. Terzaghi, ed.: Caravaggio a Napoli e l’Ecce Homo di Madrid: Nuovi dati e nuove idee, Naples 2021, pp.68–83; and R. Vodret: ‘La “Giuditta che taglia la testa a Oloferne” di Tolosa, considerazioni sulle analisi techniche e confronti con la prassi executiva di Caravaggio’, in ibid., pp.85–99.

New galleries of Dutch and Flemish art

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 20th November 2021

by ivan gaskell

2021 saw the opening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), of two related initiatives: the Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA), the first resource of its kind in the United States, and a suite of newly installed corridors and galleries for Dutch and Flemish art. Both were made possible through the generosity of two collector couples, Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie. They have given or promised 114 Dutch and Flemish paintings, the library of the late art-historian Egbert HaverkampBegemann and initial endowment funds for the CNA.

The Boston area has enjoyed a long engagement with seventeenthcentury Dutch and Flemish art through generations of collectors and the attention of scholars in universities and museums. In recent years the MFA has had distinguished curators in this field, among whom are Clifford J. Ackley, now emeritus; Ronni Baer, who moved to the Princeton University Art Museum in 2019; and Antien Knaap. Christopher Atkins, formerly a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, joined the MFA as the inaugural Van Otterloo-Weatherbie Director of the CNA in August 2019 and has been working in pandemic conditions to prepare the centre for its opening. It has now elegantly appointed premises for its staff, library and pre- and postdoctoral fellows. Yet can a research institute dedicated to the art of one small area of western Europe command more than specialist attention, especially at a time when many seriously question the cultural pre-eminence of Europe and its diaspora?

14. Kalis Boud, by Adriaen van de Venne. c.1635. Oil on canvas, 39.4 by 26 cm. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Atkins and his colleagues are well aware of the challenges of promoting Dutch and Flemish art in a worldwide context. The idea of a ‘Golden Age’ is dead. The Dutch are facing a reckoning for their colonial past. There is now little room for the celebration of values that appealed to many in earlier generations and that still prompt the interest of collectors: Dutch religious tolerance, which has proved to be a historical myth, and middle-class virtues expressed in secular subject-matter. The seven provinces that rebelled against Spanish rule and established a republic were a model, in part, for later republican movements. In The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856), John Lothrop Motley evoked parallels between the emergence of the United Provinces and that of the United States. The commercial oligarchs who ruled the former could readily serve as models for the ambitions of the plutocrats who have long dominated the latter.

The United Provinces continues to be of historical interest not least because modern capitalism, with its distinctive banking and joint stock companies, took shape there earlier and more virulently than elsewhere. The idea that the merchants and investors who dominated the Dutch republic were beneficent has long since gone the way of other romantic fictions. Class conflict was a big issue in the United Provinces as the majority of the population laboured under crippling indirect taxation to pay for the emerging country’s wars. Baer explored this topic in her MFA exhibition Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer in 2015–16,1 yet in the displays of the new gallery questions of class, the emergence of a nascent proletariat and the role of het grauw (the vulgar masses) receive short shrift. The titles given to paintings by Adriaen Brouwer and Cornelis Bega still include the discredited term ‘peasants’. The fact that wealth was far less widely distributed than popularly believed surfaces only occasionally in label commentaries, as when a description of a portrait by Nicolaes Maes of Helena van Heuvel (c.1680–83) states that she and her husband bought a house in Amsterdam in 1664 for 42,000 guilders, ‘140 times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman’. A grisaille painting by Adriaen van de Venne of a fictional member of het grauw, named Kalis Boud, is tucked away in a dark corner (Fig.14). He is a character from Van de Venne’s book Picture of the Laughable World (1635), which explores the underclass of Dutch society, such as the unemployed, beggars and war refugees; a copy of it is on display beneath the painting.2

A good part of the wildly unevenly distributed wealth in the new republic derived from overseas trade shading into rapacious colonialism that fed a nascent industrial capitalism. The historian Sven Beckert has dubbed this ‘war capitalism’.3 The Dutch were among its harshest exponents, notably through their overseas joint stock trading companies, the East India Company (VOC), and the West India Company (GWC). In 1619 the VOC destroyed the Javanese town of Jayakarta to build Batavia (presentday Jakarta), and two years later slaughtered thousands on the Banda Islands in pursuit of nutmeg and mace. The GWC transported thousands of captives from West Africa to the Caribbean and Dutch Brazil. The GWC continued its trade in enslaved Africans for most of the eighteenth century. A large model of the VOC ship Valkenisse (Fig.15) is a commanding presence in the largest gallery, yet rather than point to the exploitation inherent in colonial resource extraction that such intimidating vessels enabled, the text panel focuses on luxury consumption and wealth creation in the metropolis.

Admittedly, it would be no small task for the CNA project to decentre its field of study and to acknowledge the material pluralism of the parts of the world affected by the spread of the Dutch and the attendant movement of

15. Model of the Dutch East India Company ship Valkenisse. 1717. Wood with hemp and cotton rigging, 48.3 by 35.6 by 172.7 cm. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

peoples and goods in the seventeenth century, in particular in an institution that strictly separates cultures from different geographical areas and where many expect the CNA to address Dutch and Flemish art in a narrow sense. Atkins and his colleagues have made a good-faith start by drawing attention to the role of African slavery in the production of Dutch wealth. Among the many works of decorative art on display is furniture. Some items include ebony – also used for picture frames – which, as a label states, was felled and processed by enslaved workers. Most ebony came from the Dutch Indian Ocean colony of Mauritius, where enslaved captives from Madagascar laboured. In a gallery section on ‘Global Commerce’, the curators relate paintings of a table laden with sugared sweetmeats by Osias Beert (Fig.16), a young woman eating sugar from a silver canister by Godfried Schalcken and a fantasy landscape of a Brazilian sugar plantation by Frans Post to the role of enslaved Africans in the production of this tropical commodity. The installation includes an informative video featuring Knaap and Mary Hicks, a historian from the University of Chicago, which follows on from a speaker programme that the CNA organised in November 2019, titled ‘Sugar in the Early Modern Atlantic World’.

Atkins and his colleagues not only face the legacy of capitalism and colonialism as well as the inevitable constraints of what is at their disposal in the museum, they also have to negotiate what one might term ‘collector values’. Many collectors have different assumptions and values from those of scholars. Collector values tend towards celebration and nostalgic attitudes that have been typical of heritage, in contradistinction to critical history. Art museums have to perform the tricky task of balancing heritage with history, and the MFA is no exception. Although in some galleries attention is paid to slavery, one corridor presents without qualification an installation called ‘Collecting Dutch and Flemish Painting: A Boston Story’. Some labels go so far as to uncritically include the donors’ own observations on the works shown. The subsections adhere to a standard set of tired tropes in the study of Dutch and Flemish art, including ‘Sumptuous Still Lifes’, ‘Copper as Canvas’ and ‘The Lure of Italy’. These topics are all compatible with collector values. They perpetuate received opinion rather than represent adventurous scholarship.

A research institute, including one in a museum, has a responsibility to challenge received opinion. If it is held captive to collector values this is unlikely to happen, whatever the wishes of its director might be. To their credit, Atkins and his colleagues have put down admirable markers of

16. Still life with various vessels on a table, by Osias Beert. c.1610. Oil on canvas, 72.4 by 108.6 cm. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

intention. These include a collaboration with Harvard University on a fourpart online symposium in April 2021, ‘Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures’, and a collaborative project on the Dutch art market with Northeastern University. These are early days, and Atkins and his colleagues deserve the encouragement and support of scholars in museums and academia to overcome the difficulties and limitations they face. It will take great fortitude and determination on their part not to fall into the trap of rearticulating received opinion or of contributing no more than incremental gains in knowledge rather than initiating big ideas. This reviewer feels optimistic that they can achieve a great deal.

1 Reviewed by Dennis P. Weller in this Magazine, 158 (2016), pp.159–61. 2 A. van de Venne: Tafereel van de belacchende werelt, en des selfs geluckige eeuw, goed rondt, met by-gevoegde raedsel-spreucken, aen-gevvesen in de boer-agtiche eenvoudigheyt, op de Haegsche kermis, The Hague 1635. 3 S. Beckert: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York 2014.

Hogarth and Europe

Tate Britain, London 3rd November 2021– 20th March 2022

by richard stemp

In their preface to the book that accompanies this exhibition, the curators, Alice Insley and Martin Myrone, state that, following early discussions, ‘it became clear that there were several exhibition projects, rather than just one, that could be developed’ (p.9).1 Unfortunately, at no stage do they seem to have decided on which of the projects they should focus. The exhibition as it stands could represent three or more different takes on the subject, none of which is coherently argued or followed through and some of which are never fully acknowledged. This confusion is explicit from the outset.

The first work displayed is Hogarth’s The march of the guards to Finchley (1749–50; Foundling Museum, London), a painting that does not, at first glance, have any connection to Europe. Nor does it on any subsequent glances. Set on the outskirts of London, it may conceivably illustrate the exhibition’s subtitle, ‘Uncovering City Life’, given in the exhibition and the accompanying guide but to which there is no further reference in the book or on Tate’s website. Even in the exhibition the interpretation of the painting is confused. Whereas the label interprets the soldier in the foreground as a reference to the Classical trope of Hercules at the crossroads – the choice between duty and pleasure – the book suggests that he ‘shows dignity in parting from his pregnant wife’ (p.75), with no reference to the woman who grasps his other arm. To this reviewer’s eye, the former interpretation seems more likely, but the unacknowledged contradictions give little confidence about what follows.

Clearly, the second work exhibited, O the roast beef of old England (‘The gate of Calais’) (1748; Tate), would have been a far better introduction to the exhibition as named, showing, as it does, Hogarth’s direct experience of Europe (his arrest, as a spy, when sketching the Englishbuilt gates), packed full of ‘xenophobic stereotypes’ and yet nuanced by his clear appreciation of European art – the curators suggest both Chardin and Canaletto. Despite his apparent suspicion of Europeans, Hogarth had deep love and profound knowledge of European art, but sadly this is never explored with the depth that might have been expected or hoped for.

The section ‘Modern Painters’ considers the developing possibilities for artists in the eighteenth century and introduces portraits of Hogarth and some of his European contemporaries. In several European states painters could no longer rely on court patronage, leaving them more free but also more likely to suffer financial hardship. The suggestion that the tendency to romanticise the notion of the struggling artist started earlier than the Romantic movement is convincing. This section is followed by a closer look at the exhibition’s nominal secondary theme, ‘Artists and Cities’. Although the large maps of the locations considered – London, Paris, Venice and Amsterdam – are impressive objects, a single map tells us little about the development of the city in question, nor about the functioning of its artistic community. Admittedly, the book does include four

17. Captain Lord George Graham, 1715–47, in his cabin, by William Hogarth. 1742–44. Oil on canvas, 68.5 by 88.9 cm. (National Maritime Museum, London; exh. Tate Britain, London).

short essays that cover some of these ideas in different ways, but the sheer size of these maps leaves little room for the paintings themselves and so each city’s art is poorly represented. The works displayed here also underline one of the essential problems of the exhibition. Despite some similarity in theme and approach, often inspired by the readily available prints of Hogarth’s work, none of the artists who can be said to represent the ‘Hogarthian’ strand in European art, such as Cornelis Troost and Pietro Longhi, is as graphically skilled – either in naturalistic representation or caricatural dexterity – nor are they as incisive in terms of identifying social mores or deploying excoriating wit. Or, to put it in other terms, unpopular with some art historians no doubt, they are simply not as good. The same holds true in the following section, ‘Modern Moral Narratives’, which is carried by Hogarth’s work – how could it be otherwise? Even vague references in the exhibition and book to narrative scenes by other artists (notably Giuseppe Crespi) do little to suggest it was ever different.

‘In the Company of Men’ gets closer to one of the main aims of the exhibition, explicitly stated in a subsection to this theme, that of ‘Questioning Hogarth’. Such questioning is already present earlier in the exhibition in the labels and wall texts, by a rich variety of voices including the artist Lubaina Himid and the Museum Detox network. The celebration here (in the art at least) of white male privilege cannot be avoided. Several of the paintings seem to represent reasonable situations, in which nothing untoward is going on. Hogarth’s Captain Lord George Graham, 1715–47, in his cabin (Fig.17) is one such example. Elsewhere, it is frequently hard to gauge the level of satirical intent. In neither Sir Francis Dashwood at his devotions (c.1733–39; private collection) nor Francis Matthew Schutz in bed (c.1755–60; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery) is it clear to what extent Hogarth disapproves of the subjects’ behaviour – the hypocrisy and sexual depravity of the former or the over-indulgence of the latter. But that is always the case: he enjoys pointing out people’s foibles, delights in criticising anyone and everyone to the extent that no one escapes his razor-sharp wit. To what extent he was complicit with the behaviours depicted is precisely what the curators suggest should be questioned, although such questions are never – and perhaps can never be – answered. The focus here is on Hogarth’s lost painting A midnight modern conversation, a depiction of an all-male gathering, whose participants are in advanced – and degrading – states of drunkenness. It is represented in the exhibition by painted copies, prints and images on punchbowls, both European and Chinese.2 Hogarth’s print of the composition (1733; Royal Collection) is inscribed ‘We lash the vices but the persons spare’, but was this just a way of excusing his enjoyment of the debilitating excess he depicts? Was there any criticism of a ruling class who applied one rule for themselves and another for those they governed? The curators do not draw any contemporary parallels – but then, they do not need to.

Another painting here asks yet more questions. John Greenwood’s Sea captains carousing in Surinam (c.1752–58; Saint Louis Art Museum) is undoubtedly derived from A midnight modern conversation. However,

18. The times of day: morning, by William Hogarth. 1738. Etching and engraving on paper, 48.7 by 39.2 cm. (Private collection; exh. Tate Britain, London).

Greenwood was American, the subjects of the painting are white Americans and Black slaves in Suriname, which, although a Dutch colony, is not European, nor is the place depicted a city. Does this painting really belong in this exhibition? It is certainly fundamental to the curators’ initial ideas; this is the very first work they mention in their first essay in the book, ‘Painting modern life, making the modern world’. It is clear that race and colonialism are two of the unacknowledged themes of this exhibition, themes which deserve serious, focused attention. Not only would it have been more honest to have entitled the exhibition Hogarth and Colonialism, but this painting would also have more reason to be here. Hogarth and Race would be another, equally appropriate, title. Were this the primary subject of the exhibition, however, it would deserve better powers of observation than it is given, complex and fraught with difficulties as it is.

Often the visual evidence is not given its full weight, and the following are just some examples of the loaded and potentially inaccurate observations that occur. Although the exhibition label is right in saying that in Hogarth’s print The times of day: morning (Fig.18) the pious, church-going woman ‘ignores the Black beggar woman’ (a comment not repeated in the book), it is also true that she ignores everyone else around the beggar. Of this group, four are warming themselves by the fire and are intent on nefarious ends, whereas the remaining three could well be what in contemporary terminology (which the exhibition insists, anachronistically, on using) would be ‘rough sleepers’. Of these three, one is Black. Surely it is more damning of society and indicative of its racism that, of this admittedly small sample, thirty-three per cent of rough sleepers are Black. This number is disproportionately high given the statistic, quoted in the book and more than once on the wall panels, that between one and three per cent of people living in London at the time had African heritage.

Another example of oversimplified interpretation is Captain Lord George Graham, of which we are told that there is ‘music played by a Black servant boy, positioned in the margins of the picture frame’ (p.115). However, he is arguably slightly more central than the white servant boy on the other side of the painting. He is also dressed better and with greater dignity than his white counterpart. Admittedly this one of few images in Hogarth’s œuvre of a person of colour who is painted with dignity. There are many stereotypical and arguably racist images in his work – but then, no one escaped his savagery and few, if any, are depicted with dignity in his satirical works. But does this mean that Hogarth himself was racist? Or was he pointing out the racism of society as a whole, as another way of digging into the hypocrisy of Britain’s white majority? This is another question the exhibition does not – and perhaps cannot – answer.

One last example of this sadly imprecise approach is in the section ‘High Life’, which includes the painting A game of quadrille, by Hubert François Gravelot (Fig.19). As well as the (white) players, there is a white servant about to serve tea, accompanied by her Black assistant. The exhibition label states that he is in the shadows, as if he has been kept out of sight. The implication is the same as for Graham’s Black musician – that Black members of the community were, as a whole, marginalised. This is of course true. But for Black servants the situation was different and arguably worse. The servant in question is dressed in a bright green coat over a brighter red waistcoat. The intention was never to keep him in the shadows – he just happens to be there in this painting. He was dressed to be showcased, to stand out, an ‘exotic’ addition to the household, an owned object, a pet even. This is certainly the situation in Hogarth’s truly grotesque Taste in high life (1742; private collection). It should come as no surprise to anyone that European society in the eighteenth century was profoundly racist. Any society that permits slavery – let alone flourishes as a result – cannot be otherwise. The ways in which this is evidenced in the art of the period is something that deserves to be treated thoroughly, and with honesty, rather than with the broadbrushstroke generalisations we have here, hidden behind the tenuous title Hogarth and Europe.

19. A game of quadrille, by Hubert François Gravelot. c.1740. Oil on canvas, 63.5 by 76.2 cm. (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; exh. Tate Britain, London).

1 Accompanying publication: Hogarth and Europe. Edited by Alice Insley and Martin Myrone. 208 pp. incl. 200 col. + b. & w. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2021), £35. ISBN 978–1–84976–768–2. The exhibits are not numbered. 2 The book includes a superb essay on these ceramics, L. Tharp: ‘Pots in Hogarth’, in ibid., pp.102–07.

Late Constable

Royal Academy of Arts, London 30th October 2021– 13th February 2022

by mark evans

After Constable’s death in 1837 his friends resolved to give a painting in his memory to the National Gallery, London. His ‘six-footer’ Salisbury Cathedral from the meadows (1831–37; Tate, London) was proposed, on account of its ‘magnitude, subject and grandeur of treatment’.1 Because ‘the boldness of its execution rendered it less likely to address itself to the general taste’, they decided instead to present The cornfield (1826; National Gallery, London; cat. no.11). However, the very qualities of ‘magnitude’, ‘grandeur of treatment’, ‘boldness of execution’ and disregard for ‘general taste’ seem to characterise Constable’s late style.

This exhibition of fifty-four exhibits has been deftly curated by Anne Lyles, formerly responsible for the Constable collection at Tate, and Per Rumberg, curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. It occupies an enfilade of three rooms; the first and last are painted sage green, a colour deemed especially suitable for picture galleries by the artist and curator Richard Redgrave, whom Constable had taught at the Academy Schools. The central gallery, which is reserved for light-sensitive works, is a very dark green.

The show opens with A boat passing a lock (1826; Royal Academy of Arts, London; no.21), which the artist presented as his diploma work when he was elected an academician in 1829. Nearby are several of the vibrant outdoor oil sketches he painted between 1810 and 1828, which Constable’s daughter Isabel later gave to the Academy. On the end wall, fixed to a maroon-coloured screen for added emphasis, are the full-size sketch and final version of The leaping horse (nos.8 and 9; Fig.20). In front of them, a sloping lectern supports three preparatory drawings. According to his friend and biographer C.R. Leslie,

20. The leaping horse, by John Constable. 1825. Oil on canvas, 142 by 187.3 cm. (Royal Academy of Arts, London).

Constable worked simultaneously on both canvases, deciding only late in the day which one to finish and submit for exhibition at the Academy. Redgrave perceptively described the full-size sketch: ‘The subjects are laid in with the [palette] knife, with great breadth and in a grand and large manner [. . .] enhancing points of colour added, and brightness and daylight obtained by further draggings and knife touches [. . .] Viewed at a distance, the scheme of the picture is complete, the local truth of colour beautifully felt, and the freshness and daylight are startling’.2

After the excitement of The leaping horse, the high finish of The cornfield seems ingratiating, and Constable himself wryly remarked ‘it has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give’.3 At the centre of the long wall facing the entrance is the magisterial Dedham Vale (1828; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; no.12). Its vertical composition derives from Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the angel (1646; National Gallery), a picture of which Constable had made an exact copy. Lyles’s informative catalogue essay identifies Dedham Vale as a tribute to the artist’s late mentor Sir George Beaumont, who had given the Claude to the National Gallery.4 The elegant ash at the right of the scene was probably based on a favourite tree, which Constable personified as a ‘young lady’ in a lecture at Hampstead in 1836.5 A similar one appears later in The valley farm (1835; Tate; no.29). A more overt memorial, to Constable’s recently deceased wife, Maria, is Hadleigh Castle, also exhibited here alongside its full-size sketch (1829; Tate and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; nos.14 and 15). Its subject of a frowning fortress may have been suggested by J.M.W. Turner’s diploma work, Dolbadarn Castle, North Wales (1800; Royal Academy). However, Constable’s shattered tower silhouetted against a seemingly infinite cloudy sky and sunlit sea is redolent of loss and departure, like the medieval ruins and seascapes painted by his German contemporary Caspar David Friedrich.

The next room has subdued lighting to show watercolours on the left wall and sepia drawings on the right. On the centre line, Constable’s eerie watercolour of Stonehenge (no.48; Fig.21) is isolated on a maroon screen. To its left is Old Sarum (1834; Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A); no.47). Both incorporate the rainbow from an earlier study (1827; Yale Center for British Art; no.42), a recurrent symbol of hope in the artist’s late works. When Stonehenge was exhibited in 1836 an anonymous reviewer remarked: ‘The effect [. . .] is as marvellous and mysterious as the subject itself’.6

In his thoughtful catalogue essay, Matthew Hargreaves emphasises the priority of chiaroscuro over colour in Constable’s late style. This is strikingly apparent in two

21. Stonehenge, by John Constable. 1835. Watercolour, 38.7 by 59.7 cm. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; exh. Royal Academy of Arts, London).

abstracted sepia studies (c.1836; V&A; nos.52 and 53) that recall the powerful wash drawings by Claude he had seen in the collection of Richard Payne Knight. Hundreds of surviving progress proofs demonstrate the immense care Constable took between 1829 and 1837 to correct the mezzotints that David Lucas made after the designs for the sets of prints known as English landscape scenery. Given their importance, it is unfortunate the exhibition included only one of these prints (1829; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; no.54), a proof entirely overpainted in chalk and wash.

The final room comes as something of a disappointment. At the centre of its left wall is The valley farm. Despite earning Constable his highest ever fee of £300 when it was first shown in 1835 this painting caused a critic to complain: ‘He ought to be whipped for thus maiming a real genius for Landscape’.7 It seems especially dour alongside the furious brushwork of A farmhouse near the water’s edge (c.1830–36; Phillips Collection, Washington; no.31). Even experts were troubled by the immense stylistic difference between such works. In 1893 C.R. Leslie’s son George denounced A cottage at East Bergholt (c.1833; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight; no.32) as ‘mere palette scrapings’ and thought it a forgery. He was corrected by Charles Holmes, who praised ‘the purity of its colour, and the transparency of its shadows’ as well as the ‘amazing power of [its] drawing with the palette-knife’.8 On the end wall, a final maroon screen supports one of Constable’s most idiosyncratic works, Cenotaph to the memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (no.37; Fig.22). It depicts the monuments to Reynolds, Michelangelo and Raphael in the grounds of Beaumont’s country estate. Related landscape drawings (1823; V&A; nos.34–36) occupy a lectern in front of the painting. Comparable to a Baroque allegory in the late style of Titian, The Cenotaph has a deep significance, commemorating a pantheon of the artist’s heroes. At the far end of the right wall is Constable’s last picture, Arundel mill and castle (1837; Toledo Museum of Art; no.39). Nearby, two oil sketches for the Opening of Waterloo Bridge (c.1819 and 1829–31; V&A and Yale Center for British Art; nos.23 and 24) stand in for the opulent riverscape painting of the same title, indebted to Canaletto (1832; Tate), which is not in the show. However, the absent work that casts the longest shadow over the exhibition is undoubtedly Salisbury Cathedral from the meadows, the painting Constable told Leslie ‘would probably in future be considered his greatest’.9

Late Constable provides a timely and engaging survey of the artist’s final decade. He was then preoccupied with memorial projects and his personal contribution to the history of painting, especially what he called in 1833 ‘the chiar’Oscuro of Nature’ (p.133, note 70). The exhibition does not seek to place Constable’s work in the broader context of late artistic style. It could, for example, be likened to ‘Beethoven’s final compositional mode’, which Edward Said characterised as ‘a peculiar amalgam of subjectivity and convention’

22. Cenotaph to the memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire by the late Sir George Beaumont, Bt, by John Constable. 1833–36. Oil on canvas, 132 by 108.5 cm. (National Gallery, London; exh. Royal Academy of Arts, London).

overshadowed by ‘a sense of his impending death.10 Moreover, the absence of individual entries in the catalogue limits its space for consideration of specific works. The full admission price of £19–21 for a show in which almost four-fifths of the exhibits are drawn from public collections in London may also appear high. There remains scope for an ampler and more nuanced treatment of this fascinating subject.

1 C.R. Leslie: Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, ed. J. Mayne, Oxford 1980, pp.267–68. 2 R. Redgrave and S. Redgrave: A Century of Painters of the English School, London 1866, II, pp.394–95. 3 R.B. Beckett, ed.: John Constable’s Correspondence VI: The Fishers, Ipswich 1968, p.217. 4 Catalogue: Late Constable. With contributions by Anne Lyles, Matthew Hargreaves, Annette Wickham and Mark Pomeroy. 144 pp. incl. 87 col. ills. (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2021), £21.95. ISBN 978–1–912520–72–5. 5 R.B. Beckett, ed.: John Constable’s Discourses, Ipswich 1970, p.71. 6 J. Crosby Ivy: Constable and the Critics 1802–1837, Woodbridge 1991, p.217. 7 Ibid., p.202. 8 C.J. Holmes: Constable and his Influence on Landscape Painting, London 1902, p.236. 9 Leslie, op. cit. (note 1), p.237. 10 E.W. Said: On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, New York 2006, p.9 (with reference to the writings of the philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno).

The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris 22nd September 2021– 22nd February 2022

by rosalind p. blakesley

The story of the spectacular collections of the Russian brothers Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, long hushed after Stalin decried their pernicious formalist aesthetic, has riveted growing audiences in recent years. Natalya Semenova’s lifetime of research has fuelled Russian-language publications and reached Anglophone readers in her book Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection (2020). Visitors to the vast exhibition in 2016–17 that the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, dedicated to Ivan’s great peer, the collector Sergei Shchukin, would also have gleaned from the commentary that the Morozov collection would yield an equally eye-watering array.1

Yet little can prepare one for the sheer scope and quality of works that the Fondation Louis Vuitton has amassed for this, the first exhibition outside Russia in which the Morozov brothers do not share the stage with Shchukin but rightly headline the event on their own. Organised in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and State Tretyakov Gallery, both in Moscow, it brings to Paris some two hundred works by many of the world’s pre-eminent modernists. These are interspersed with superb Russian paintings (many, although not all, of which were acquired by the Morozovs), highlighting the influence that the Morozov collection had in Russia while reiterating that Moscow was no cultural backwater but a roiling artistic melting pot in its own right. The visual banquet is complemented by expert essays and previously unpublished documents in a hefty catalogue, which is less an exhibition guide than a monolithic endeavour to enjoy at home.2

Thanks to the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s slick publicity, expectations are high as visitors enter Frank Gehry’s curvilinear, glass-clad edifice that rears improbably in the verdant expanse of the Bois de Boulogne. With the lure of iconic paintings displayed in Gehry’s towering, lightfilled space, it is something of an anti climax to descend into the bowels of the building to start the exhibition. The first room nonetheless dispels any subterranean unease with arresting portraits of the Morozovs and their relatives alongside those of pioneering Russian patrons and artists of the day. We meet Mikhail, paunchy, flushed and balding in a portrait by Valentin Serov (1902; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), his vast fists evoked in a few broad brushstrokes. ‘You cannot tell where his head ends and his neck begins’, the artist Vasily Perepletchikov disobligingly recalled.3 Mikhail died of a heart attack the following year at the age of thirty-three, by which time he had become the first Russian to acquire a Van Gogh as well as buying paintings by vanguardists from Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis

23. Ivan Abramovitch Morozov, Moscow, 1910, by Valentin Serov. 1910. Tempera on cardboard, 63.5 by 77 cm. (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; exh. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris).

to Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Edvard Munch, all of whom feature here. Ivan, Mikhail’s junior by a year and the better-known Maecenas of the two, is introduced by a decent enough portrait by Konstantin Korovin painted the same year that Mikhail died (1903; Tretyakov Gallery). But it is Serov’s portrait of 1910 (Fig.23) that came to define the man, depicting him in front of Matisse’s Fruit and bronze (1910; Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow) that he had acquired that same year. These two pictures hang side by side towards the end of the exhibition, providing a golden opportunity to consider how Matisse’s painterly bravura inspired a boldness of contour and form in one of Russia’s greatest portraitists.

Such are the Russian cultural luminaries portrayed in the exhibition’s first hall that visitors can temporarily lose their bearings, as the connection between this illustrious pantheon of sitters and the Morozov collection is not always clear. Focus is restored in the neighbouring room, in which photographs of the interior of Ivan Morozov’s mansion dating from 1909 to 1941 (the earliest taken by Maurice Denis) create an unassailable record of the artistic jewels that it contained. These photographs document with foreboding the evolution of the collection from private passion to state asset, as Ivan’s collection was nationalised in 1918. A decade later it was amalgamated with Shchukin’s collection in Morozov’s mansion, where together they formed the State Museum of Modern Western Art. (After the Revolution, Ivan, termed ‘deputy director’, lived with his family in just three rooms of his home before fleeing abroad, dying in Karlsbad in 1921.) In one photograph, Red Army soldiers are given a tour of Denis’s monumental panels The story of Psyche (1908; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) in Morozov’s music salon – an installation that is reassembled in the exhibition’s final hall. In another, a portrait of Stalin hangs in what had been Morozov’s dining room. The photographs reveal the precise placement of the likes of Renoir’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Jeanne Samary (1878; Hermitage), Manet’s The cork or Country inn (La Guinguette)

24. The cork or Country inn (La Guinguette), by Édouard Manet. c.1878. Oil in canvas, 72.4 by 92 cm. (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; exh. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris).

(Fig.24) and the first Picasso to come to Russia, Harlequin and his companion (The Saltimbanque) (1901; Pushkin Museum). Along with the Morozovs’ other western European works these paintings were removed from view after Stalin closed the museum in 1948 to protect the honest Soviet mind from bourgeois aberration. They are here reunited in a single, poignant room.

The thrill of seeing much of the Morozov collection reassembled cannot be overstated, with its Impressionist landscapes, Cubist landmarks and entire rooms devoted to Gauguin and Cézanne, by whom Ivan owned a full eighteen works. Yet for all the parade of masterpieces, it is the provocative juxtaposition of western and Russian trailblazers that lingers in the mind. On one wall, Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910; Pushkin Museum) rubs shoulders with Natalia Goncharova’s The smoker (1911; Tretyakov Gallery; ex-catalogue) and Kazimir Malevich’s Portrait of Mikhail Matyushin (1913–14; Tretyakov Gallery), illuminating the starkly different ways in which these artists challenged the orthodoxies of figurative art. On another, Cézanne’s quietly contemplative Self-portrait in a casquette (c.1873; Hermitage) is buttressed by the fabulously peremptory self-portraits of Pyotr Konchalovsky, lent by the Ekaterina and Vladimir Semenikhin Foundation and Petr Aven’s private collection in Moscow, and rarely on public display. Although one must read the labels carefully to appreciate which of these paintings were part of the Morozov collection and which have been included by way of comparison (Ivan found Malevich, for one, a step too far), the point about the cut and thrust of transcultural artistic exchange is well made.

Whether this show succeeds in capturing the true impact of the Morozov collection is nonetheless a moot point. Ivan arranged his paintings salon style in sumptuous interiors, where they jostled for attention in a dazzling, kaleidoscopic display. Here, by contrast, they plod along in single file on walls of a relentless pale beige, and are at times so widely spaced that they seem lost. Gauguin’s Café at Arles (1888; Pushkin Museum) is entirely friendless on its own wall. Cézanne’s small but exquisitely muscular Bathers (Fig.25), despite punching above its weight at just 26 by 40 centimetres in size, is all but marooned.

Most curious of all is the decision to hang Van Gogh’s The prison courtyard (1890; Pushkin Museum) like some religious relic in a room of its own. This has the predictable if ironic outcome that visitors – by now fatigued as they reach the third of the exhibition’s four floors – are compelled to shuffle along in a queue to pay homage to a painting that by its very nature challenged the adulation of ‘high’ art. Only the recreation of Ivan’s music salon corresponds to the collector’s vision (one that Maurice Denis did not share, writing in 1909 that ‘my large decoration is a little isolated in a big cold room’; p.24). Meanwhile, important aspects of less well-known paintings go unremarked, such as the colonialist attitudes that are evident in the two paintings by Georges Manzana-Pissarro (c.1906; Hermitage; and 1907; Pushkin Museum). Inspired by Gauguin’s work in Tahiti, these images depict naked people of seemingly Polynesian heritage reduced to patterns and shapes as decorative as those of the zebras and peacocks behind them. The Fondation Louis Vuitton may have felt obliged to place these and other paintings in spacious splendour to enable the crowds they correctly anticipated to view them properly: but collectors as ingenious as the Morozovs arguably deserved a more probing and creative display.

25. Bathers, by Paul Cézanne. 1892–94. Oil on canvas, 26 by 40 cm. (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; exh. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris).

1 Reviewed by Markus Lähteenmaki in this Magazine, 159 (2017), pp.62–63. 2 Catalogue: La collection Morozov: Icônes de l’Art modern. Edited by Anne Baldassari. 524 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Gallimard and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2021), €49. ISBN 978–2–07–290458–5. English edition: The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art. ISBN 978–2–07–290459–2. 3 N. Semenova: Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection, transl. A. Tait, New Haven and London 2020, p.66.

Laura Knight: A Panoramic View

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes 9th October 2021– 20th February 2022

by sally beazley-long

In 1965 Laura Knight (1877–1970) was the first female Academician to be honoured with a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, with 260 works displayed. In the introduction to the catalogue, William Russell Flint commented on Knight’s

‘sheer variety of achievement’,1 but although the exhibition was received enthusiastically in the national press, it was subject to a scathing review in this Magazine, which described her art as ‘facile and sentimental’.2 This view compounded the dwindling interest in her work in the wake of avant-garde Modernism but since feminist initiatives emerged half a century ago to challenge dominant art-historical narratives, the growing focus on women artists has gradually led to renewed recognition of Knight’s significant contribution to twentiethcentury visual culture. Her works are still sought-after by collectors today; however, there remains a tension between Knight’s phenomenal popularity during her lifetime and the relative lack of enduring critical acclaim, which means she is still largely unknown to contemporary audiences.

Laura Knight, A Panoramic View is the most extensive display of the artist’s work since the Royal Academy retrospective and aims to reintroduce Knight to the wider public. Organised as part of a trilogy of exhibitions, each with a slightly different focus, this show complements Laura Knight: A Celebration, which was held at the Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, in 2021, and Laura Knight, which is due to open at Nottingham Castle Museum in March.3 An ambitious presentation of over 160 works from public and private collections, the exhibition under review is dominated by the large colourful oil paintings for which Knight is best known, but it also includes numerous other items that reveal the exceptional scope of her creativity – from watercolours, prints and drawings, to designs for jewellery, costume, chocolate boxes and ceramics. Although a number of these works have rarely been on public display, there are also notable omissions: for example, her posters for the London Underground, the book jackets she designed for a series of novels in the 1920s and her remarkable self-portrait with a nude model, Laura Knight with model, Ella Louise Naper (Self-portrait) (1913; National Portrait Gallery, London).4 As the photographer Hannah Starkey (b.1971) comments in her catalogue essay, ‘Pictures within pictures’, this painting is sometimes more familiar than the artist’s name.5

Knight’s prolific œuvre, estimated to comprise over three thousand works spanning more than seventy years, is significant for its versatility and engagement with disparate subjects; however, as a result, it is difficult to track the evolution of an identifiable style. Such diversity thus presents challenges in the curation of a solo exhibition, which usually seeks to give a coherent view of an artist’s achievements. Instead of trying to create cohesion where it does not exist, the curators of this exhibition, Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira, have arranged the works thematically by subject-matter and highlighted the divergent nature of Knight’s projects through the use of contrasting colours on the gallery walls, giving the impression of a series of smaller discrete exhibitions.

Displayed against a cream background, Knight’s early works include arresting figurative drawings she made in charcoal as a teenager, which demonstrate her precocious talent for handling the details of facial features and hair (Fig.26). Nearby

26. Study of a girl aka Sarah, by Laura Knight. c.1893. Charcoal, 49.5 by 39.4 cm. (© Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2021; private collection; courtesy John Mitchell Fine Paintings, London; exh. MK Gallery, Milton Keynes).

27. Installation view of Laura Knight, A Panoramic View at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2021. (Photograph Robert Harris). oil paintings, including Dressing the children (1906; Ferens Art Gallery Hull Museums), her first work accepted for display at the Royal Academy, are striking for their confident proportions and accomplished use of light effects in muted tones. Knight’s palette brightened after she moved to the Cornish coast in 1907 but it was a relocation to London in 1919 that precipitated the most dramatic change in her work. In the exhibition space, this is marked by an abrupt transition to crimson walls in the third and largest room in the gallery (Fig.27), where her vibrant ballet and circus images are displayed to theatrical effect.

This room includes some of Knight’s most engaging works, which date primarily from the inter-war years, when she was at the height of her celebrity. Many of her subjects are depicted behind the scenes, sometimes in dressing rooms, a space that fascinated Knight for its transformative potential. This subject-matter was equally compelling for contemporary audiences as the roles of artifice and glamour in the construction of femininities assumed new significance in the Hollywood era (Fig.28). Knight capitalised on the allure of such concepts and the ‘print collection boom’ by making a series of small prints that show women attending to their hair and make-up, of which two are exhibited here: Make-up (1925; private collection) and Gilding the lily (1926; private collection).6 Often overlooked, these images form part of her print œuvre of eighty, mainly monochrome, works, which were for sale in editions of up fifty-five and were aimed at the new market of young fashionable female consumers.7

There is another sharp shift in tone in the fourth room, where some of Knight’s imposing commissions as a Second World War artist are displayed. These are juxtaposed with portraits of racially segregated patients in an American hospital and a series of paintings of gypsies. These much smaller works demonstrate Knight’s ability to engage sensitively with marginalised groups without succumbing to stereotypes of representation but, hung against cream walls, they are overshadowed by the war paintings, dramatically displayed on a navy background. The momentum created in the central display of theatrical works fades further in the final room. This space is decorated an incongruous pale pink and presents backstage scenes from the 1920s to the 1940s, several commissioned portraits and a series of landscapes of the Malvern area in Worcestershire, where Knight settled in later life. It is an incoherent selection that will either fascinate or bemuse the viewer but is also an apt summary of Knight’s resistance to categorisation by style, subject or medium. To further understand this eclectic artist from a twenty-firstcentury perspective, the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition provides valuable additional material. It includes incisive essays and contributions from contemporary

artists who provide personal responses to Knight’s work and demonstrate her enduring relevance, particularly in relation to the representation of women. In the catalogue Barbara Walker (b.1964) describes Knight as ‘a complicated artist’ who is ‘a fiendishly difficult figure to pin down’ (pp.146–47) and in this context the show offers an insightful introduction to Knight and the rich legacy of her production.

1 Pamphlet for Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Dame Laura Knight, DBE, RA, London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1965. 2 K. Roberts: ‘Current and forthcoming exhibitions’ THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 107 (1965), p.483. 3 See E. Knowles, ed.: exh. cat. Laura Knight: A Celebration, Penzance (Penlee House Gallery and Museum) 2021. Laura Knight is scheduled to be held at Nottingham Castle Museum from 12th March to 12th June 2022. 4 See S. Beazley-Long: ‘Laura Knight on display: book jackets and self-promotion in the 1920s’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 163 (2021), pp.594–603. 5 Catalogue: Laura Knight, A Panoramic View. Edited by Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira. 216 pp. incl. 119 col. + 45 b. & w. ills. (Bloomsbury, London, 2021), £25. ISBN 978–1–7813–0111–1. 6 A. Stephenson: ‘From conscription to the Depression: the market for modern British art in London, c.1914–1930’ in C. Gould and S. Mesplède, eds: Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present: A Cultural History, Farnham 2012, p.62. 7 A. Stephenson: ‘Strategies of display and modes of consumption in London art galleries in the inter-war years’ in P. Fletcher and A. Helmreich, eds: The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London: 1850–1939, Manchester 2011, pp.57–68. 28. The dressing room at Drury Lane, by Laura Knight. 1922. Oil on canvas, 76.2 by 63.5 cm. (© Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2021; private collection; exh. MK Gallery, Milton Keynes).

Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times

Museum of Arts and Design, New York 22nd May 2021–6th February 2022

by anne swartz

This two-person exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, speaks to the idea of home as a space that during our pandemicrelated confinement has transcended notions of security to ascend to the realm of the sacred.1 First shown at the Portland Museum of Art in 2020, it presents the individual and collaborative practices of Carrie Moyer (b.1960) and Sheila Pepe (b.1959). This iteration in New York is one of the first exhibitions shown in the city to reflect on past and ongoing experiences of isolation caused by the pandemic.2 At the same time, it signifies the continuity of the ways that feminist makers have resisted the confines and constraints of the patriarchal art world. At the Museum of Art and Design the exhibition is shown in a large U-shaped gallery; the works are ordered according to visual and aesthetic complements, rather than in a chronological or thematic arrangement, and solo works are displayed alongside collaborative ones. This space allows for more intimate contact with the work than the Portland showing, where the exhibition took up the majority of the museum, and several replacements from the artists’ collections for works that could not travel make this show distinctive. Incorporating a wide range of media, it presents decoration, domesticity, craft and patterning as emancipatory tools and positions art as a method of engagement for possibility and freedom.

Moyer and Pepe have been an artist couple for more than twentyfive years and their work addresses feminist form and abstraction; the potential for historical material to speak through the present; queer activism; and queer collaboration. It is imbued with a simultaneous sense of anguish and psychic protection. In this exhibition, the artists indirectly address life in an era of multiple global

crises – from the climate emergency to refugee displacement and persistent gender discrimination, as well as pernicious sexual violence and the exploitation of children. These issues provide a stronger mooring to the lure of the home and studio, and the desire for increasing opportunities for communal connectivity. Both artists rely on craft techniques and materials alongside more conventional approaches to drawing and painting; their work combines the oft-lauded cultural material of painting alongside less acknowledged ‘minor’ or decorative crafts. Maine is a key part of the origin story for this couple. Moyer and Pepe first met in 1995 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, which is a renowned nine-week summer residency programme. Nevertheless, the art on view promotes a dialogue that reaches beyond this specificity of place. A number of the works on show were made during collaborative residencies, including ones at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, in 2011, the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans, in 2016, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbria, in 2019. Both artists teach in higher education and highlight their ideas about art actively and in various forums. Although the appearance and forms of their respective works have little in common, they consult each other regularly and work in adjacent studios. One such benefit of this arrangement is that Pepe aids Moyer in the naming of her paintings.

Naming too is a crucial aspect of this exhibition, as demonstrated by the title. A tabernacle usually refers to a sacred object, an idea that is recalled in their collaborative work Opera buffa (Fig.29), an altar-like installation composed of twenty-six drawings based on Italian churches and castles. The work was made during their two-month residency in Umbria as a form of call-and-response: a drawing completed by one artist prompted reciprocal action by the other. The title refers to a genre of Italian comic opera and highlights the frivolous, double-edged, yet profound play that underpins the artists’ work. The individual components are arranged in order to evoke an altarpiece – an element that defines a space for veneration – and which, perhaps, can also be read as a tongue-in-cheek

For more writing on recent art, visit Burlington Contemporary, our online platform for the latest research and reviews on contemporary art: contemporary.burlington.org.uk

29. Opera buffa, by Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe. 2019. 26 looseleaf drawings of ink, gouache and acrylic on paper, each 38.1 by 55.9 cm. (Private collection; photograph Jenna Bascom; exh. Museum of Arts and Design, New York).

suggestion that viewers will esteem the work itself. In the conventionally masculine space of the architectonic, rigid frame, the artists insert feminist symbols and puns. At the top of the ‘altar’ installation, a headdresslike adornment resembles a vulva; multiple prehistoric Venus figurines flank the sloping ‘roof’; and on the left-hand side the inclusion of the letters ‘SPQR’ signals the ancient Roman Republic all-male government, which on the right has been altered to the artists’ initials, ‘SPCM’. Several of these images look up to the bright blue sky via portals or surroundings, giving a hopeful air, and even perhaps recalling the unifying colour of Giotto’s frescos.

As part of the radical operations of this show, a cluster of humorous works, hung together on a wall, offer variations on the idea of breaking out of the box – or the constraints of the canvas. Moyer and Pepe have labelled the action of producing these collaborative works as ‘play time’ (p.46), the largest of which is Carries a soft stick (Fig.31), a multimedia work made of oil paint, wood, a cut plastic bag and glitter on canvas. The work resembles a polygonal painting with an adjacent fabricwrapped peg leg. Some of the painted imagery transitions into tangible form, for example, a painted white circle extends into white fabric at the left-hand edge of the canvas. The artists passed such works back and forth in the manner of the Surrealist exquisite corpse. The adjacent five, smaller-scale works, Yvette (2021), Dandy’s drogress (2021), Lardy-dardy (2011), Our hump (2011), and Freeze pops on the couch (2011), were made during their Saratoga Springs residency, and they share a common formal feature: they all break out of the box. These pieces demystify the artistic process; and complicate the ideal notion that the art object can contain everything. When boundaries became constraints, feminist makers figured ways around them: augmentation, accretion, obsession and embellishment all became ways for such artists to move beyond formally rigid limitations.

The idea of the tabernacle also refers to a private, intimate and shared space, such as the home. The focal point of the exhibition is the installation work Parlor for the people (Fig.30). This ‘communal space’, described by the artists as a ‘big tent’ (p.52), comprises custom-made stools, pillows and fabrics, rugs and chairs together with a series of collaborative webbed sculptures and cloud-like forms, which hang from the ceiling. The particular shape of folding chair the artists have used here – known as X-chairs or Savonarola chairs – originate in medieval Italy and are of particular interest to Pepe because of her Italian heritage and interest in Italian art history. Intended as a gathering space, this work speaks to resistance in the museum to testing the rules or categories of different media. Furthermore, presenting a functional seating area that can be used by visitors as an art installation redefines what occurs in the museum space; it activates the viewing experience, allowing it to include conversation between visitors, who are able to gaze upon, and exist within, the work while engaging in dialogue. Although Moyer and Pepe maintain regular practices as individual artists, this exhibition reveals the potent possibilities when they ally themselves creatively. With the range of captivating prospects set forth here, anticipation builds for their future cooperative efforts.

30. Parlor for the people, by Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe. 2020. Fabric, batting, rubber, hardware, plexiglass, paracord, poplar, paint, hardware and leather, overall dimensions variable. (Private collection; photograph Jenna Bascom; exh. Museum of Arts and Design, New York). 31. Carries a soft stick, by Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe. 2016. Oil paint, wood, cut plastic bag and glitter on canvas, 119.4 by 111.7 by 7.6 cm. (Private collection; exh. Museum of Arts and Design, New York).

1 Catalogue: Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pape: Tabernacles for Trying Times. By Jamie DeSimone et al. 89 pp. incl. 50 col. ills. (Portland Museum of Art, Portland, 2020), $29.99. ISBN 978–0–916857–64–6. 2 The exhibition in Portland was scheduled for 7th February–7th June 2020 but closed early because of the pandemic.

Books

A reconsideration of Rembrandt’s landscape drawings rejects the recent radical reduction of works attributed to him by Otto Benesch

Rembrandt: Landschaftszeichnungen / Landscape Drawings

By Achim Gnann. 368 pp. incl. 311 col. ills. (Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg, 2021), €79. ISBN 978–3–7319–0962–0.

by christopher white

When Otto Benesch’s six volumes cataloguing all Rembrandt’s drawings were published between 1954 and 1957, they were received with a mixture of praise for the successful execution of a Herculean task and criticism that he had been too generous in what he accepted as being by the master.1 At the time, works in dispute may have amounted to as much as ten per cent, but this was nothing compared to the wholesale reduction of Benesch’s list carried out by Peter Schatborn in his book on the drawings, which has reduced the supposed œuvre by almost exactly one half, from approximately 1,390 sheets to no more than 700.2 A number of other scholars, such as Martin Royalton-Kisch and Holm Bevers, have also been actively diminishing Benesch’s list.3 Perhaps the time has come to ask whether some or indeed much of the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

Achim Gnann, a curator at the Albertina, Vienna, and a scholar more generally associated with Italian art than with Rembrandt, clearly thinks it has. In his beautifully illustrated book, with German and English text printed side by side, he argues his case. It must be said that with so many drawings and so many varying opinions under discussion, the absence of both an index and a concordance is regrettable, making it difficult for factually minded scholars to tot up the score. Gnann’s position is that Benesch’s list of just over 250 landscapes, reduced by nearly a half by Schatborn, should be augmented to around 260 accepted drawings; that is to say he virtually accepts all of Benesch’s attributions and adds some new ones, such as the obviously genuine Kostverloren House (Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden). It is good to learn from the book that the lively debate that apparently took place between Schatborn and Gnann was entirely amicable.

Gnann’s disagreements with Schatborn become apparent early in the volume, and it is unfortunate that Schatborn was given no opportunity to explain why he rejects the attribution of particular drawings. Among the examples are the four English views copied from some unknown source. Schatborn accepts Windsor Castle (Fig.1) and St Alban’s Cathedral (both Albertina, Vienna), which are signed and dated 1640, but not the two views of London with St Paul’s Cathedral (Albertina and Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin). Gnann convincingly argues that stylistically they hang together and are therefore by one hand, which he believes is that of Rembrandt. Other examples of drawings omitted by Schatborn but accepted by Gnann include Willow tree stump (Biblioteca Reale, Turin), which is thematically close to the etching of St Jerome writing in a landscape, dated 1648; River landscape with a man bathing (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin), sometimes argued to be by Constantijn van Renesse on account of its relationship with a drawing by the latter; and the late impressionistic Pesthuis, Amsterdam (whereabouts unknown). This reviewer finds Gnann’s arguments for restoring these works to Rembrandt convincing.

Gnann’s revision of Rembrandt’s œuvre as presented by Schatborn is not all one way, since A landscape with a bear (Fondation Custodia, Paris), a drawing after Titian, which has been accepted – even by Schatborn – as by Rembrandt from the time it was first published by this reviewer,4 is here rejected. In this instance, I do not accept Gnann’s arguments, but he might well retort, ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’. In his act of revisionism, Gnann has also turned his attention to the question of dating, offering some new solutions to this old problem as presented by Benesch and other scholars. For example, he argues that the dating to 1648–50 by Benesch of three stylistically cohesive drawings, all executed in an unusually free manner, namely Landscape with a drawbridge (Albertina), Tree-lined road leading to a farmhouse (Fondation Custodia) and Landscape with farmhouse with trees (Kupferstichkabinett), is too late and they should be placed at the beginning of the decade.

But Gnann’s book is much more than an exercise in connoisseurship, since he is offering an in-depth study of Rembrandt’s practice of landscape, largely based on the drawings but also, where relevant, including related etchings and the occasional painting. In his discussion of his approach to the subject he commends Rudolf Steiner’s theory of the seven-year cycles that occur

1. Windsor Castle, by Rembrandt van Rijn. 1640. Pen and brown ink with wash on blue paper, 18.3 by 29.7 cm. (Albertina, Vienna).

in human development as expounded by the late Konrad Oberhuber, who applied it to the work of Raphael. Gnann’s study takes off from the work of previous scholars, notably Cynthia Schneider’s exhibition of Rembrandt’s landscapes in Washington in 1990 and, more specifically, the revision proposed in the volume edited by Boudewijn Bakker of Frits Lugt’s seminal study of Rembrandt’s walks in and around Amsterdam.5

The book is divided into twenty short chapters covering a wide range of topics, including drawings of identifiable localities, such as the English views, Rembrandt’s two supposed journeys to Utrecht and Gelderland and views of Amsterdam and Diemen, which must have been the artist’s favourite village. Some of the chapters examine individual works, such as Cottage near the entrance to a wood (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Boathouse (Lubomirski Princes Museum, Wroclaw) and the drawings connected with the drypoint The clump of trees. Finally, there are discussions of more general themes, such as ‘A new approach to landscape in drawings and etchings’, ‘Light and air’ and ‘Painterly abstractions’. Each drawing discussed is meticulously subjected to a concentrated analysis according to subject, style, date and technique, requiring the reader’s full attention, particularly when, as is often the case, the illustration is on another page. The main text is supplemented by nearly five hundred often discursive footnotes. By the end of the book, one has the sense that one knows exactly what engaged the artist in each instance and how he achieved his result. The author’s tone is didactic and his analysis precise; there is nothing vague about his conclusions. Some Rembrandt scholars may be tempted to accuse Gnann of trying to turn the clock back, but to this reviewer he has presented a convincing image of an artistic personality with an œuvre that coheres.

1 O. Benesch: The Drawings of Rembrandt, London and New York, 1954–57. 2 P. Schatborn and E. Hinterding: Rembrandt: The Complete Drawings and Etchings, Cologne 2019, reviewed by Christopher Brown in this Magazine, 162 (2020), pp.630–31. 3 See, for example, M. Royalton-Kisch: The Drawings of Rembrandt: A Revision of Otto Benesch’s Catalogue Raisonné, available at https://rembrandtcatalogue.net/, accessed 4th January 2022; and H. Bevers: Rembrandt: Die Zeichnungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett: Kritischer Katalog, Berlin 2006. 4 C. White: ‘A Rembrandt copy after a Titian landscape’, Master Drawings 13 (1975), pp.375–79. 5 See C.P. Schneider: exh. cat. Rembrandt’s Landscapes: Drawings and Prints, Washington (National Gallery of Art) 1990; and B. Bakker, ed.: Landscapes of Rembrandt: His Favourite Walks, Bussum 1998.

Treasury, Memory, Nature: Church Objects in the Middle Ages

By Philippe Cordez. 284 pp. incl. 75 col. ills. (Harvey Miller, London and Turnhout, 2020), £76.50. ISBN 978–1–912554–61–4.

by tom nickson

In the fifteenth century visitors to Bayeux Cathedral could marvel not only at the famous embroidery, displayed in the nave on the Feast of the Holy Relics, but also at an extraordinary number of other precious textiles, relics and metalwork items such as were once found in church treasuries across Latin Christendom. An inventory of 1476, based partly on one made in the 1330s, records these items together with over thirty books chained to different parts of the cathedral interior and an unusually wide-ranging collection of wonders. These included a rock crystal reliquary in the form of a column, topped with coral; two narwhal tusks, believed to be unicorn horns; and an inscribed ivory casket, still in the cathedral today, which was possibly made in Muslim Toledo. Displayed around the high altar were five oliphants, carved from elephant ivory; three other horns, said to be griffins’ claws; an ostrich egg; and what the inventory calls a ‘whale’s tooth’, perhaps a walrus tusk carved to resemble a fish. These and other treasures have long fascinated antiquaries and art historians, but their significance is for the first time fully explored in this book by Philippe Cordez, the English version of the author’s PhD thesis, completed in 2010 at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (EHESS), and already published in German and French in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

A brisk introduction to the etymology and historiography of church ‘objects’ is followed in chapter 1 by a detailed consideration of ideas of ‘treasure’ from late Antiquity onwards. Cordez shows how St Ambrose and St Augustine expanded the notion of spiritual treasure found in St Matthew’s Gospel, and how under Charlemagne the modern sense of church treasures was first fully established. From the early twelfth century, relics and treasures found a new use, dispatched on tours to raise funds for building campaigns. Ironically, however, the near-contemporaneous establishment of the opus – the financially independent institution responsible for construction and the provision and maintenance of many church goods – to some extent sidelined the custodes responsible for church treasures. A final section demonstrates how the ‘treasury of merit’ was developed by scholastics in the 1230s and underpinned the indulgence inflation of the later Middle Ages.

Donors were commonly recorded in inventories, and in his second chapter Cordez explores connections between objects and memory. He discusses the earliest relic lists, demonstrating their relationship to prayers and litanies that itemised different categories of saints and their dependence on the small labels identifying the saints that were commonly attached to relics. Relics could also be enumerated in the liturgy, as in the sequences assembled for the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, in the 1250s, or made more publicly visible, as with the names of saints inscribed on the back of the Hildesheim portable altar (now in the British Museum, London), or the large painted inscriptions on the apsidal piers of the abbey church of Veruela, eighty kilometres west of Zaragoza. Cordez offers three detailed case studies of the intertwined relationships

2. Ostrich egg reliquary. Probably second half of the 13th century. Gilt silver, precious stones, enamel and ostrich egg, height 33.5 cm. (Domschatz Halberstadt; © Landesamt für Demkmalpflege und Archäologie SachsenAnhalt; photograph Juraj Lipták).

Books

between objects, memory and politics: St Peter’s staff, supposedly taken to Cologne cathedral in the tenth century but also claimed by Metz, Trier and elsewhere; Christ’s foreskin, preserved at the abbey of Charroux in western France, which prompted an extended debate on Christological relics from the late eleventh century onwards; and chess pieces, notably the rock crystal pieces set into the pulpit at Aachen in the early eleventh century and the ivory examples kept at the abbey of Saint-Denis and Reims Cathedral.

Perhaps the most groundbreaking chapter is the last, which underlines the global nature of medieval treasuries. They included coconuts (first recorded in Angers in 1255 as a ‘nut of India’) repurposed as chalices and reliquaries, nautilus shells from south-east Asia, ostrich eggs (possibly from the Arabian ostrich, extinct by the 1940s) (Fig.2) and twisting nautilus teeth, which from the 1380s onwards gained a reputation in Latin Christendom for counteracting poison. The purported remains of giants, dragons, griffins and crocodiles were proudly shown to visitors as mirabilia, but from the sixteenth century onwards were increasingly recognised as rare specimens of naturalia and can sometimes be identified as whale bones, the fossilised bills of swordfish or the horns of European bison or Alpine ibex. Many such examples are represented in the book’s sumptuous illustrations.

Many readers will appreciate Cordez’s deep mining of French and German sources and scholarship but may be frustrated by the book’s claims to speak for all of Latin Christendom and the lack of engagement with recent work by such authors as Erik Inglis, Joseph Ackley and Mary Carruthers.1 Notwithstanding these quibbles, the book provides an innovative, wide-ranging and important account of the content and conception of medieval church treasuries. It opens new opportunities to reassess, for example, early inventories from Spanish churches published in Manuel GómezMoreno’s Iglesias mozárabes (1919); the detailed records of church goods from medieval Iceland printed in the Diplomatarium Islandicum series; the cosmopolitan collecting habits of Charles IV of Bohemia or the canons of San Isidoro, León; or, indeed, scholarly interest in treasury objects evident in publications by the Society of Antiquaries, London, in the eighteenth century or by A.W.N. Pugin in the nineteenth. That enquiry might even be carried further to consider early collecting practices in Jewish contexts (one thinks of the proud record of Samuel HaLevi’s donations to the Tránsito synagogue in Toledo, inspired by biblical descriptions of Solomon’s Temple) or the collections of objects in the Kabaa, Mecca, or the Fatimid royal treasury. Cordez’s book reminds readers of the scale of what has been lost, but also causes us to look again and wonder anew. That is an achievement by any standards.

ORDER A BOOK

To order a book reviewed in The Burlington Magazine, please visit www.burlington.org.uk, where a link will take you to John Sandoe Books. By ordering your book through our website, John Sandoe Books will generously donate a percentage of the sale back to the Magazine, supporting our mission to publish new research on art and its history.

1 See E. Inglis: ‘Expertise, artifacts, and time in the 1534 inventory of the St-Denis Treasury’, Art Bulletin 98 (2016), pp.14–42; J.S. Ackley: ‘Reapproaching the Western medieval church treasury inventory, c.800–1250’, Journal of Art Historiography 11 (2014), available at https://arthistoriography. files.wordpress.com/2014/11/ackley.pdf, accessed 13th January 2022; and M. Carruthers: The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge 2008, esp.pp.37–55.

Die Bronze, der Tod und die Erinnerung. Das Grabmal des Wolfhard von Roth im Augsburger Dom

Edited by Gerhard Lutz and Rebecca Müller. 256 pp. incl. 113 col. + b. & w. ills. (Dietmar Klinger Verlag, Passau, 2020), €29.90. ISBN 978–3–86328–174–8.

by paul williamson

The bronze tomb slab of Bishop Wolfhard von Roth (reg.1288–1302) in Augsburg Cathedral (Fig.3) is remarkable on several counts. Thought to have been made shortly after his death in 1302, the tomb shows the bishop lying on a fringed pall with full episcopal vestments and crozier, his gloved hands resting on his stomach, with a long inscription running along the four sides of the slab, giving the date of the bishop’s demise. Unusually for a gisant of this date, the figure is shown naturalistically, as if laid out in death, his head resting on a pillow, with the draperies of his robes falling to the sides, rather than represented more conventionally for the time, as a standing figure placed in the horizontal. Furthermore, the markedly gaunt and sunken face of the bishop – more cadaverous and elongated than normal – is shown with closed eyes. These features alone would make the slab worthy of study, but there is much more to it than that, as the book under review makes clear.

Alongside its striking stylistic and formal characteristics, the tomb slab is of outstanding significance as a signed work, not just by one artist but by two. At the foot of the effigy, on the return of the bishop’s suppedaneum, is an extraordinary if short leonine hexameter inscription ‘otto me cera fecit cunratque per era’ (‘Otto made me of wax and Conrad of bronze’). Otto and Conrad may therefore be viewed as Swabian counterparts to their English contemporaries, the sculptor Alexander of Abingdon and the goldsmith and founder William Torel, who supplied wax models and cast large-scale bronze effigies respectively. For the English craftsmen we have the royal accounts to flesh out their contributions; the enigmatic Otto and Conrad, however, appear to emerge from obscurity – this is frustrating, because because palpably unlikely – and little else is left by which they may be judged. Although the contributors to this book have not been able to identify any additional works by Otto and Conrad – even the bronze bell of 1299 of St Moritz, also in Augsburg and signed by a ‘Magister Cunr(adus)’ does not appear to be the work of the same Conrad – they have provided us with a rich and valuable handbook covering every aspect of the tomb slab, its making and context.

Twelve chapters have been devoted to the various strands. Following a block of fifteen good colour illustrations of the slab, the volume begins with an essay by Florian Dorn and Thomas Krüger that provides a short biography of Wolfhard, seen through the lens of his documents and seals while Bishop of Augsburg. There follow three essays on the tomb and the liturgy by Jürgen Bärsch, Jens Brückner and Dorothea Diemer, the last two discussing the original location (but with no consensus) and later positions of Wolfhard’s tomb in the cathedral before it was moved to its present resting place in the chapel of St Konrad in the eastern choir. Two technical essays on the composition of the alloy and the casting technique by Björn Seewald and Martin Mach, both of the laboratory of the Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Munich, complement a detailed study of the majuscule inscriptions by Franz-Albrecht Bornschlegel.

The second half of the volume is given over to art-historical issues, starting with two stimulating essays on the background

and wider context of Wolfhard’s tomb slab by Diemer and Gerhard Lutz, the latter introducing some compelling comparisons with Italian effigies, most tellingly that of Pope Clement IV (d.1268) in Viterbo. Dominic Olariu concentrates on Wolfhard’s face and notions of recumbency, and succeeds in demolishing the suggestion put forward by Erwin Panofsky in his influential Tomb Sculpture (1964) and by other earlier authorities that it was modelled with the aid of a death mask. The book concludes with two essays: a characteristically thorough and enlightening one by Joanna Olchawa, who is rapidly inheriting the mantle of doyenne of medieval bronze studies from Ursula Mende, with concise observations on the material and techniques of the German and French bronze tomb slabs that pre-date that in Augsburg; and another by Rebecca Müller on artists’ signatures elsewhere and their relevance to the names on the Wolfhard slab.

With the publication of this volume, which is both focused and wide-ranging, the tomb slab of Wolfhard von Roth has been transformed from a neglected ‘Sleeping Beauty’ of medieval art history (to borrow the words of Olariu) into a celebrity. The reviving kiss bestowed upon this strange and unique sculpture by the editors and authors is emphatically deserved. The publishers could have been forgiven for assuming that a relatively arcane subject would appeal only to a small audience and justified a high price; they are to be commended, therefore, for producing a handsome, clearly laid-out paperback at a reasonable price in the hope that it will attract a wider readership, as it surely warrants.

3. The tomb slab of Bishop Wolfhard von Roth (d.1302), signed by Otto and Conrad. Early 14th century. Bronze, 227 by 88 cm. (Augsburg Cathedral).

Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature

By Leslie A. Geddes. 256 pp. incl. 124 col. + 14 b. & w. ills. (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ and Oxford, 2020), £48. ISBN 978–0–691–19269–7.

by francis ames-lewis

A well-known drawing by Leonardo da Vinci in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (Fig.4) shows an old man seated in profile, his head supported on his left hand, contemplatively looking across at a series of studies of water flowing past rectangular obstacles placed in the stream’s path. The sheet comes from a disassembled notebook, so Leonardo would not have drawn, or ever have seen or made any connection between, the two halves of the sheet together. Nevertheless, serendipity has provided us with a bipartite image that is vividly suggestive of Leonardo’s lifelong preoccupation with water and the dynamics of water flow. It is moreover a celebrated example of Leonardo’s habit of analysing a natural phenomenon through complementary drawings and text as well as of his use of analogy. In his accompanying explication, he compares the movements of the water with those of hair ‘which has two motions, of which one depends on the weight of the hair, the other on the direction of the curls’.

Although she makes no comment on the pensive, Leonardo-like figure, Leslie Geddes reproduces this sheet as an example of the difficulties of visually analysing and describing flowing water because of ‘its speed, transparency, and lack of differentiation or fixity’ (p.101). This is an ambitious book – some might say over-ambitious – partly because of these perceptual problems, but also because Geddes seeks to examine Leonardo’s explorations of water within the much broader context of the ‘growing scholarly interest in the environmental humanities [. . .] the complex interconnection of man and the natural world’ (p.3): it is a truism that, as she says, ‘water is a requirement for life’ (p.197). The danger inherent in her praiseworthy ambition is that her argument may seem to run out of control, just as the unconstrained forces of water itself, in the form of storms, hurricanes and floods, can only too easily break through human systems designed to regulate and harness it.

The book is divided into two parts, ‘Water Tamed’, and ‘Water Unleashed’. In the first part, Geddes ‘analyzes the role of engineering – and drawing as the primary mechanism for design – in controlling water’ (p.11). She discusses in close, revealing detail a series of studies in which Leonardo considered the designs of mechanisms for harnessing waterpower. These include Archimedean screws to raise water from rivers or streams, to be used for irrigation or for driving machines like watermills; dredging equipment, vital for keeping channels of navigation clear and easily negotiable; and pumps and other similar machines. Geddes observes and carefully records how Leonardo repetitively drew variants of these mechanisms, each design stimulating the next; and she analyses how he progressed from right to left across his sheets of paper, filling in spaces between his diagrams with complementary textual descriptions and explanations. She contrasts this process with the more formal design techniques of the Sienese artist-engineer Francesco di Giorgio Martini, whose book of civil engineering designs Leonardo owned, emphasising the fertility of Leonardo’s inventive mind and of the graphic conventions that he developed.

The second part, ‘Water Unleashed’, opens with an examination of Leonardo’s studies of the dynamics of waterflow. Geddes rightly observes that ‘[w]ater’s fleeting whirls and eddies are difficult to perceive, and hydrological patterns of movement challenged the artist’s powers of graphic abstraction’ (p.97). In another impressively inventive Royal Library sheet (c.1510–12; RL12660v), Leonardo had earlier

encountered the representational problem of how graphically to describe the flow of water around obstacles, finding increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking the curling movements of the stream. Below this is an exceptionally complex study of water falling through a culvert into a pool below. Here Leonardo developed new ways of describing the foamy bubbles generated by the stream’s plunging movement and created new graphic conventions of helical swirls and twists by which his pen lines explored ripples fanning out across the water surface. This subtle and elaborate study of patterns of water flow that Leonardo both perceived and intuited perhaps deserves lengthier consideration than Geddes gives it, if only because it foreshadows his extraordinarily imaginative and inventive series of ‘Deluge’ drawings. These show Leonardo’s poetic imagination at its most fully developed towards the very end of his life and well deserve the rich and appreciative discussion they provoke in this book.

The notion of ‘water unleashed’ neatly reflects the sense that Leonardo’s later thought and imagination were untrammelled, no longer controlled by pictorial or graphic orthodoxies. As in part one, Geddes’s selection of material for consideration echoes the breadth and fertility of Leonardo’s thinking. But responding to the artist’s difficulty in guiding the flow of his creative inventiveness along pathways that develop logically encourages her to develop lines of enquiry that sometimes lose touch with her principal areas of exploration and generate some structural looseness in her text. As noted above, part 1 is relatively compact and taut in organisation, justifiably opening up into relevant fields of analysis of Leonardo’s wide-ranging activity, such as his canal engineering and thence also his map-making. But already Geddes digresses, for example in considering Leonardo’s preoccupation with the patterns of knots, which culminated in his decoration of the Sala delle Asse, in Castello Sforzesco, Milan, for which water does not appear to have much relevance.

In part 2 the discussion becomes more markedly discursive, responding as it does to Geddes’s wish to expand the context of Leonardo’s thinking about water by integrating it within the ‘environmental humanities’. She explores the role of the elemental force of dynamically flowing water in the evolution of landscape and in geological change through close analysis of Leonardo’s studies of rock formations. Diverting yet further beyond water, she considers Leonardo’s textual and graphic investigations of fire and smoke, and his experiments on hearing and the sense of sound. Covering such increasingly broad fields of exploration results in relatively thinly spread analysis; but one cannot help admiring how, through her own fertile processes of thought and analogy, Geddes mirrors the astonishing liveliness of Leonardo’s creative imagination.

4. Studies of water, and a seated old man, by Leonardo da Vinci. c.1512–13. Pen and ink on paper, 15.2 by 21.3 cm. (Royal Library, Windsor Castle, RL 12579r).

Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

By Fabio Barry. 448 pp. incl. 215 col. + 117 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2020), £30. ISBN 978–0–300–24817–3.

by maryl b. gensheimer

This book narrates a history of stone; it is ‘a biography of a material’ (p.1) in examples spanning the fourth millennium BC through to the eighteenth century. Previous studies have stressed marbles’ historical role as expressions of conspicuous consumption, social prestige or political power.1 Barry, however, interprets marble as an artistic medium rather than a luxury commodity, the material qualities of which communicated a spectrum of associations to, and elicited a range of responses from, patrons and viewers.

The first chapter sets the stage, tracing the development of the use – or simulated appearance – of coloured stones in the art and architecture of the ancient Near East, from Egyptian faience to Mesopotamian glazed brick. This brief history introduces a key theme: coloured stones (or their likeness) were desired for their radiance, which in both religious and secular contexts denoted symbolically and metonymically the divine aura of gods or monarchs.

Chapter 2 examines marble architecture and sculpture in the Greek and Roman worlds, in which ‘white’ signified light and radiance. Thus, for marble temples, such as the Parthenon in Athens (447–432 BC), and sculpture, such as the Via Labicana Augustus (early 1st century; Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome), Barry argues that their materials were important because luminous white marbles seemed to absorb a divine essence. It was the stones’ shimmering qualities that made white marble so desired in early periods and, later, essential for premier buildings and sculpture.

In the third chapter Barry explores the enduring premodern view that all materials are a compound of the four elements (earth, fire, air and water). The continuing belief that marbles are water-based and, in a way, images of their own elements – the generative earth and its watery arteries supposedly creating marbles’ veined composition – guides Barry’s discussion of sculpture and architecture from Hellenistic Alexandria to imperial Rome. The idea that marbles were prized for the natural artistry of their markings also underlies the discussion of fresco in chapter 4. Barry

stresses that the fresco technique was first invented and later used widely in Minoan, Greek and Roman contexts to recall – and sometimes elaborate upon – the veining of genuine coloured stone.

The discussion of domestic decoration in chapter 4 is expanded on in the following chapter, in which Barry reviews the use of, and rationale for, marble and other stones in palaces and palatial homes. Barry suggests that the palace in Ptolemaic Alexandria (330–323 BC) set a standard for polychrome marble architecture against which Augustus may have measured himself following his annexation of Egypt in 31 BC, and which many Romans emulated in the centuries following. Through chronologically later examples, such as the reception hall in a house at Ostia (c.AD 394), Barry argues for a direct link between Alexandrine court culture and later Roman architecture, where luminous marbles created artful interiors that shone with their own light.

To build on the idea of incandescent spaces, the following three chapters examine early church interiors. Barry explicates the theological significance of churches created with a seemingly innate radiance – of marbles and their counterfeits in paint, plaster and glass used because of their miraculous, divine veining. Such themes climax with an analysis of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (532–37), which probes Byzantine constructs of divine light as manifested through the gold mosaic and the book-matched marble revetment. Hagia Sophia’s Proconnesian flagstone flooring, which resembles a rippling sea, reprises the idea – as set out in chapter 3 – that marbles were of watery origin and is interpreted therefore in terms of its metaphysical significance as cosmic waters.

Barry then leaps to quattrocento painting to discuss marbles’ veining as abstracted materialisations of, for example, the Passion or Annunciation. He then departs from painting to investigate coloured marbles in Renaissance chapels and church façades, where they appear with the greatest concentration in Venice, and explores marble (real and imitation) in palatial homes in Renaissance Italy. Again, Barry notes that a large part of marbles’ appeal lay in their veining, which was understood to translate astral rays into gemlike displays of colour and celestial pattern.

The final chapter highlights Gianlorenzo Bernini’s work in Rome, particularly the Cornaro Chapel in S. Maria delle Vittoria (1647–52) and S. Andrea al Quirinale (1658–71). Barry elucidates once more coloured stones’ potential to draw connections to divine light as it is sublimated into marbles and their veining, and as Bernini’s tableaux created sfumato progressions from earth to ether.

This is an ambitious book. Barry’s multidisciplinary approach and geographical and chronological scope draws insightful connections between, for example, the Judaeo-Christian vision of a gemlike Heavenly Jerusalem and the multicoloured ziggurats of the neo-Babylonian period (626–539 BC). Barry’s wide lens, however, does introduce some tangents, such as the analysis in chapter 3 of works constructed from a single stone – ex uno lapide – which, although interesting, deviates from the chapter’s overall focus on beliefs about the generation of stones. Yet given its rich discussion, artful prose and abundant illustrations, Painting in Stone makes a distinctive contribution to art and architectural history. This is a book in which readers will find food for thought as they consider coloured stones as an artistic medium in their own right, one with the potential to express myriad cultural, social and religious meanings.

1 See, for example, M. de Nuccio and L. Ungaro, eds.: I marmi colorati della Roma imperiale, Venice 2002.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768): Ein Europäisches Rezeptionsphänomen / Fenomeno Europeo della Ricezione

Edited by Ortwin Dally, Maria Gazzetti and Arnold Nesselrath. 200 pp. incl. 39 col. + 2 b. & w. ills. (Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg, 2021), €42. ISBN 978–3–7319–1115–9.

by clare hornsby

The response to the work of the groundbreaking historian of art Johann Joachim Winckelmann began across Europe during his lifetime (1717–68) but was crystallised and heightened by his murder; for example, shortly after that tragic event, Goethe, with poetic certainty, wrote that Winckelmann ‘was marked by destiny’. The untangling of the meaning and importance of the work from the almost mythical status his writings rapidly achieved – and have to a large extent maintained – in German literature is assisted by the publication of this volume. The introduction points out that as Rome was the centre of Winckelmann’s life and studies, it was therefore the ideal place for conferences and exhibitions to mark his double anniversary in 2017 and 2018. This volume on the European reception of his writings is the result of those initiatives.

The essays, primarily in German with some in Italian and two in English, are all by well-known Winckelmann scholars. Surveys of his reception in the German-speaking countries, in Italy, France, Bohemia, the Habsburg Empire, Spain, Poland, Russia, the Netherlands and Great Britain are preceded by an introduction by the editors and a fundamental contribution on Winckelmann’s scholarly and intellectual formation by Marcello Barbanera. The book concludes with an illuminating theoretical essay by the French scholar Elisabeth Décultot and a summary of the varied receptions of Winckelmann and his importance in the present day by Eric Moormann, written in Italian; Moormann has also contributed a short survey in English on the response in the Netherlands.

By asking what was new about Winckelmann’s approach, Barbanera’s essay acts as a thought experiment enabling him to identify both the origins of the writer’s intellectual formation in earlier historiography, philosophy and aesthetics and the way he exploited a variety of European scholarly traditions, including German philology, the French Encyclopédie and English aesthetics. Barbanera notes the importance of Winckelmann’s first book, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture; 1755), written before he arrived in Rome, in which the clarity of his thought regarding the absolute pre-eminence of Greece was established, deriving from his deep immersion in Classical texts and his historiographical formation in Dresden.

It is inevitable that many of the contributions discuss the translations of Winckelmann’s works, which, other than in France, where unauthorised versions appeared as soon as 1766, came surprisingly late. Of particular interest is the contribution by Dorota Folga Januszewska on the Polish reception of Winckelmann, which focuses on the fascinating reworking, translation and publication by Count Stanisław Potocki of Winckelmann’s most important book, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity; 1764). Potocki’s The Polish Winckelmann, the fruit of many years’ work, appeared in 1815 and the museum he created in Wilanów, based on Winckelmann’s

writings and a collection of antiquities, turned his adoration of the master’s work into a national educational project.

In an excellent contribution, Maria Fancelli, co-editor of the complete edition of Winckelmann’s letters in Italian – a huge enterprise – thoroughly analyses the history of the response to him and his writings in Italy, from the translations by the antiquary and museum director Carlo Fea (1753–1836) up to the present day. Fascinating early piecemeal translations – the descriptions of the Belvedere Torso and other canonical statues (taken from Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom of 1759 and from Geschichte der Kunst) – were published in London by the artist Henry Fuseli in 1765 and 1768 in the journal Universal Museum, as recounted in the essay on Winckelmann’s reception in Britain by Katherine Harloe. Somewhat misleading in this contribution is the emphasis given to a connection between Winckelmann’s thought and the study of buildings in Greece by the British architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett during their travels there in 1751–53. Although this was commented on by Winckelmann in his writings on architecture, their empirical approach is not connected in spirit to his aesthetic concerns. Additionally, there is a digression relating to the Society of Dilettanti – needlessly emphasised by an illustration of William Hogarth’s portrait of one of its founding members, Francis Dashwood as a monk blasphemously ‘at his devotions’ before an image of a sprawled Venus (c.1733–39; private collection) – that is quite unconnected to the impact of Winckelmann’s work on the educated elites and scholarly societies of England.

Décultot’s contribution is the climax of the volume. It has been translated into Italian, surely unnecessarily, given that the purpose of this book is to highlight the pan-European nature of Winckelmann’s intellectual heritage and scholarly ambitions. It is a shame that French is not one of the languages of the volume; the only occasions on which it appears are in quotations. Décultot answers the question posed by Barbanera in the first essay by arguing that Winckelmann’s principal innovation was the identification of the primacy of style-asevolution as the moving force of the narrative of art history. As she says, Winckelmann, although he never travelled there, lived in Greece in his mind; his writings were the outward manifestation of his continual meditation on the role Greek art played in artistic developments within every other society. This excellent volume, which is particularly strong on the responses during the lifetime of Winckelmann and up to the end of the eighteenth century, will be an essential part of the library of anyone interested in the reception of ancient art.

Gemalte Kunstgeschichte: Bildgenealogien in der Malerei um 1800

By Léa Kuhn. 333 pp. incl. 24 col. + 54 b. & w. ills. (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Paderborn, 2020), €69. ISBN 978–3–7705–6453–8.

by robert skwirblies

It is generally agreed that around 1800 the foundations of the modern discipline of art history were laid in written debates and commentaries. In this book, based on her PhD thesis submitted to Munich University in 2018, Léa Kuhn asks whether and, if so, how art history was also ‘made’ with images and investigates the existence of conceptual tools and art-historical methods that were adapted to painting or developed in competition with it. Thus, Kuhn examines pictorial genealogies, that is to say a history of artistic forms that has its own laws and can be distinguished from the historical or iconographical approach of art-historical writing. As a key example she presents an engraving after Jean-Baptiste Descamps (1715–91), which provided the frontispiece to his Lives of Flemish, German and Netherlandish painters, first published in 1753. It depicts a seated personification of Pictura, who is writing and painting at the same time. For Kuhn, this illustrates her core argument: the effort of painters to ‘steer the reception of their own work – in the long term’ (p.xvii) not (only) in the form of written but also pictorial statements. Following Caroline van Eck’s and Alfred Gell’s theory of the agency of works of art, the author considers that the works themselves stimulated art-historical debates. The book is organised into three main chapters, which consist of case studies intended to demonstrate the author’s thesis, followed by a short conclusion.

The first chapter is devoted to a fulllength double portrait (Fig.5), which shows the artist Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751–1829) and his brother, Heinrich Jacob (1760–1803). Once considered a collaborative work of the two brothers, the painting is now recognised as a work by Wilhelm from 1782, painted when the brothers were in Zurich together, after Wilhelm had been to Rome for about a year. It depicts them in conversation in their studio; Wilhelm points to his brother and to the easel beyond, on which an unfinished painting is propped up, showing the well-known story of the philosopher Diogenes carrying his lamp looking for a man; behind on the wall are three portrait drawings of scholars and poets of the Enlightenment in Zurich, representing the artist’s ‘intellectual fathers’ (p.39). According to Kuhn, the painting serves to assert Wilhelm’s conception of himself as an artist and to underline his independence not only of his artist family in Kassel but also of history painting in the tradition of Carracci and Mengs, which he achieved by varying iconographic motifs such as Diogenes or Hercules at the crossroads and bringing new naturalism and veracity to the forms and representations. In its immediacy more effective than any text could be, the painting’s impact was carefully orchestrated through exhibiting and circulating the work.

The second case study concerns a family portrait (1788; New-York Historical Society, New York) by William Dunlap (1766–1839), whose artistic activity extended to working as a dramatist, theatre entrepreneur and critic. Painted shortly after his return from a study visit to England, it shows Dunlap with his parents, to whom he presents a large canvas that is shaded and partly concealed in the background of the composition but can be identified as a scene from Hamlet. Kuhn interprets the work as a response to the ‘emerging exclusion mechanism of the subject of history of art’ (p.xxix). The obscure but dominating presence of Shakespeare in Dunlap’s work underlines the difficulty of gaining access to art in more peripheral locations, as New York was at this time, and the impossibility of creating art that is free from historical influences. As in Tischbein’s painting, the history of the painting’s creation is depicted in the painting itself, which can thus be understood as ‘painted (micro) art history’ (p.156).

A work by Marie-Gabrielle Capet (1761–1818) is the focus of the third and most detailed chapter. Like Tischbein and Dunlap, the artist depicts herself; she is in the company of her teacher, the painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and a number of pupils in Labille-Guiard’s Paris studio (1808; Alte Pinakothek, Munich). The latter is shown painting her own master, Joseph-Marie Vien, and his family, assisted by her husband and teacher, François-André Vincent, who stands behind her, pointing to some detail in

the painting. Kuhn convincingly argues that the work demonstrates Capet’s opposition to the increasing gender divide in artistic practice after the French Revolution, which took place physically in the studios as well in relation to subjects and modes of painting, with women expected to paint in small format or miniatures, depict children and still lifes and use soft brush strokes, whereas paintings in large format, portrait and history painting and vigorous brushstrokes were reserved for male painters. Capet’s painting, by contrast, highlights the cooperation between men and women in the practice and teaching of art.

The fundamental question raised by Kuhn’s study is whether she succeeds in demonstrating the validity of the concept of ‘painted art history’ or whether, ultimately, her in-depth interpretations of a small number of specific works remain within the framework of an iconographical approach, with a particular focus on the socio-historical aspects of art production and reception. The author herself admits that the effect paintings had on art-historical discourse is rarely verifiable. Yet, although it may remain difficult to ascertain whether the works possessed an agency of their own, they are certainly singular expressions of the artistic personalities who created them. What all the paintings discussed by Kuhn have in common is the artists’ interest in their own origin and background, be it the family or the circle of teachers and colleagues. Indeed, the central theme of a genealogy of artists, based on descent, as in the case of artist families, on education, as in a master-student relationship, or on the stimulus of ideas, as in a thinker-artist relationship, provides a necessary and effective framework for the study. Moreover, Kuhn’s largely conclusive pictorial analyses are intellectual bravura pieces. A large body of literature is referenced and the author indicates where she develops on other scholar’s ideas. Despite the complexity of the subject, the language and structure are clear. The deliberately focused choice of illustrations adds to the impression of precision and clarity. It is a pleasure to read this book and to follow the author’s train of thought.

5. The brothers Heinrich Jacob and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. 1782. Oil on canvas, 81 by 65.3 cm. (© Freies Deutsches Hochstift and Frankfurter Goethe-Museum; photograph David Hall).

Horace Pippin, American Modern

By Anne Monahan. 264 pp. incl. 96 col. + 25 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2020), £40. ISBN 978–0–300–24330–7.

by colin rhodes

Horace Pippin’s short public career as an artist spanned just a decade before his untimely death in 1946. Born in 1888, he spent most of his adult life in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He is mostly known for his paintings relating to his service in the First World War, during which he received a life-changing wound that severely restricted movement in his dominant right arm, but which ironically helped him to become an artist because of the disability pension he received as a result. Pippin also created images of poor Black American life, which are conventionally understood as belonging to the contemporary folk art category of ‘memory paintings’ of Southern subjects, although Pippin actually grew up in Goshen, New York. During his lifetime his work was lauded by such influential American art world figures as Alfred H. Barr Jr, Dorothy Miller and Albert C. Barnes. He enjoyed the patronage of the prominent New York dealer Edith Gregor Halpert and such champions of Black American as Alain Locke. Seldon Rodman’s monograph on Pippin, published in 1947, was the first on an African American artist.1 Despite this, after his death Pippin’s star quickly faded, as a new wave of internationalist American Modernism, exemplified by Abstract Expressionism, gained dominance.

Pippin was later claimed as part of the specialist fields of self-taught and contemporary folk art, owing largely to a selective reading of his biography and art that produced erroneous narratives of spontaneous creativity and separation from the art mainstream. In fact, of the nearly one hundred exhibitions in which Pippin was included between 1937 and his death, only three were devoted to ‘self-taught’ or ‘Modern primitive’ art.2 The rest were a mixture of interracial group exhibitions of Modern American art, surveys of contemporary African American art and solo exhibitions.3 His Modern credentials were determined at the time by a peculiarly American construction of homegrown Modernism, which was figurative and conceptually based on Whitmanesque notions of existential ‘freedom’, the idea of being ‘self-made’ and truth to one’s geographical roots. Pippin’s Modern identity was also bound up with notions of ‘primitive art’ that were understood rather differently in 1930s America than in the second half of the twentieth century, when it acquired a marginalising meaning distanced from the modernist project proper. In its earlier usage the term had long referred admiringly to periods and types of art that appeared to eschew mimetic representation, from ancient Egyptian, European medieval and Italian quattrocento art to traditional Chinese and Japanese forms of painting and printmaking admired for their apparent approach to pictorial form, but with little attention paid to historical or cultural specificity. The notion of the ‘Modern primitive’, exemplified by such French artists as Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), was related to this narrative.

In Horace Pippin, American Modern, Anne Monahan seeks not only to recuperate Pippin to the Modern context in which he operated, but also to firmly establish his credentials as a professional artist centrally engaged in the development of his career. While acknowledging the important roles played by dealers, curators and collectors, Monahan also convincingly describes Pippin’s own agency. In other words, Pippin emerges as an artist operating much like any other, and more successful than many in his time, albeit as a one facing additional impediments in his struggle for visibility, as a Black man who was subject to systemic racist attitudes and assumptions. Monahan demonstrates the ways in which Pippin interacted with and influenced both Black

6. The domino game, by Horace Pippin. 1943. Oil on composition board, 32.4 by 55.9 cm. (Phillips Collection, Washington).

and white audiences, including his skilful manipulation of the ‘artist statement’: ‘Pippin understood the value of his story. As his career escalated, he increasingly instrumentalized autobiography via statements and interviews, and watched his prices rise over 1,000 per cent’ (p.7).

To resist a purely biographical reading, Monahan’s book replaces historical teleology with a thematic structure arranged in chapters on ‘Autobiography’, ‘Labor’, ‘Process’ and ‘Gifts’. Nothing is taken for granted, and Pippin cyclically emerges and re-emerges out of a narrative driven by forensic readings of specific works, both iconographically and as visual reference to contemporary lived experience. The painter’s historical personhood is continually refreshed, as it were, by facts thereby revealed through his paintings, which are rightly treated as planned and studied constructions, rather than as expressions of some quasi-visionary inner outpouring of individual and community memory. For example, Pippin’s war paintings, made primarily in two phases, at the beginning of his career and at the outbreak of the Second World War, were long understood as straightforwardly autobiographical. However, through examination of Pippin’s military service, his written autobiographical remarks and potential pictorial sources for iconographical elements, Monahan reveals not only their sophistication, but also the ways in which the artist modulated his practice to appeal to audiences as he came to understand them. This is also true of the series of cotton farm pictures that followed the first wave of war subjects, such as Cabin in the cotton (c.1931–37; Art Institute of Chicago), which Monahan describes as a ‘redirecting [of] his quasi-autobiographical energies’ (p.51). In other words, Pippin’s figurative impulse led quickly to subjects he believed would likely interest collectors, from local sights, portraits and still life, to history and genre pictures, some of which, Monahan tells us, have been often viewed as southern scenes, but which more likely relate to Pippin’s own childhood in Goshen, as in the case of The domino game (Fig.6).

Monahan also demonstrates Pippin’s active participation in local art world conversations. It is a moot point whether he would have been able to achieve what he did had he lived in the South, but despite a high degree of segregation in his life, in Chester County the possibility of interracial community activities and interpersonal relations was real. Pippin was also aware of significant art collections, notably the Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion, Philadelphia. There he was able not only to see the breadth of modernist subjectmatter, but also to study work by Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Rousseau, who at that time in America were regarded more for the similarities in their work and seen as fellow travellers in modernist innovation and formal simplification, as opposed to the segregated exemplars of mainstream Modernism and naive art respectively, which emerged in later discourse. Pippin’s posthumous reputation suffered a similar

fate when the facture of his work came to be considered condescendingly as an aspect of his general education and ethnicity.

Monahan’s concluding remarks are interesting because even as they seek to reinscribe Pippin’s centrality in discourses of American Modernism, as opposed to folk or self-taught art, they are by inference reminders of the marginal position America occupied at that time in respect of dominant (European) modernist discourse. It is what the likes of Clement Greenberg railed against in his polemics, and when American Modern art reinvented itself in the decade after the Second World War, Pippin was just one among many prominent American artists of the preceding period whose work became deeply unfashionable. It is fitting therefore that Monahan brings Pippin back to life for us as a professional artist and a modern in his time.

1 See S. Rodman: Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in America, New York 1947. 2 See, for example, H. Cahill: exh. cat. Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America, New York (Museum of Modern Art) 1938. The exhibition toured nationwide throughout 1939. 3 See, for example, J.D. Hatch: exh. cat. The Negro Artist Comes of Age: A National Survey of Contemporary American Artists, Albany (Institute of History and Art) 1945; and W.R. Valentiner: exh. cat. Advance Trends in Contemporary American Art, Detroit (Institute of the Arts) 1944.

Art and the Nation State: The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland

By Róisín Kennedy. 304 pp. incl. 24 b. & w. ills. (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2021), £90. ISBN 978–1–78962–235–5.

by philip mcevansoneya

Mainie Jellett’s work was ‘artistic malaria’ (p.154); Auguste Rodin’s was ‘revolting’ (p.54) and Henry Moore’s was a ‘foretaste of hell’ (p.151). These were some of the epithets applied to examples of modern art in twentieth-century Ireland. Such views were not those of philistines but of people who on other occasions had pretensions to artistic discernment, such as the painter and poet George (‘AE’) Russell, the nationalist politician and writer J.J. O’Kelly and Lady Dunalley (who said she was misquoted), the respective authors of the judgments quoted above. This is evidence of the anxiety, confusion and suspicion that created obstacles to the critical evaluation of Modernism in Ireland in the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, as Róisín Kennedy shows in her informative and closely argued book.

In the 1920s and 1930s Ireland was finding its feet as an independent state and appeared introspective despite the existence of a global diaspora.1 Art in the public realm was a low priority for the new state and the promoters of Modernism were viewed as a suspect elite that was swayed by cosmopolitan rather than national values. However, change was initiated with the establishment under the Department of External Affairs of the Cultural Relations Committee in 1948 and An Chomhairle Ealaíon (The Arts Council) in 1951.

The book starts with the bold assertion that there was substantial public interest in modern art in post-independence Ireland, at least so far as a series of controversies is concerned. For example, Harry Clarke’s Geneva window (1929–30; Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami) was bought back by the artist’s widow from the Irish government, since it had never been installed due to doubts over the androgyny and eroticism of its imagery. Kennedy uses these controversies to highlight ‘the ongoing tensions between the demands of the international art world, which required art both to reflect national characteristics and to express universal modernist values, and the needs and requirements of local factions in Ireland’ (p.12). Those tensions were never resolved and Kennedy concludes that it was only with the advent of postmodernism in the 1970s that Irish art came into its own both domestically and internationally.

The disputes – of various magnitudes – are discussed chronologically in chapters dealing with such topics as the censorship or, more precisely, marginalisation of controversial art; the surprisingly fertile period during the isolation of the Second World War, which saw the establishment of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943 as a liberal antidote to the Royal Hibernian Academy; the attempts at building international connections in the 1950s through participation in events such as the Venice Biennale and in the 1960s with the first of the Rosc exhibitions, held every few years in Dublin between 1967 and 1988, which brought American and continental Modernism to Ireland. Given Kennedy’s foregrounding of women artists, some analysis might have been expected of the role of women critics and writers in these developments, such as Máirín Allen (Máirín Nic Ailín), Elizabeth Curran and Gertrude Gaffney, although they are mentioned.

The success of the book relies on its capacity to breathe new life into several well-known events and to integrate them with some less familiar episodes. For example, the much-debated and drawn-out confrontation over Georges Rouault’s Christ and the soldier (1930; Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane), which was first offered to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 1942 but rejected until 1956, is discussed in as much detail as the design, production and installation of Andrew O’Connor’s sculpture Triple Cross, Christ the King (c.1931–33). The latter was erected in Dún Laoghaire in 2014, albeit not as originally intended on the principal passenger quay in the harbour, having been spurned by the Church authorities even though it was paid for by public subscription. Its setting is said by Kennedy to affirm ‘its position as central to the official image of Dún Laoghaire as a place of culture and free thinking’ (p.69), which, no doubt, explains why it adorns the entrance to an underground car park.

These controversies may be seen as evidence of the struggle for authority as much as clashes of opinion over artistic merit. Controversy was caused not only by difficulties in accepting modern styles but also by a variety of social, religious and political factors. Gender also played a role because women artists and their work came in for particular criticism. It was difficult to reconcile the desire for conformity and stability in the newly independent state with the radical and questioning nature of Modernism. The result was, at least until well into the 1960s, the production of works of art in variations on modernist styles but from which any political content had been voided. For example, an artist as stylistically radical as Jellett (1897–1944), who in the early 1920s went to Paris, where she was taught by André Lhote and Albert Gleizes, chose to reconcile her modernity with her conservative milieu by introducing religious and national iconography into her work.

Given its price, the book is parsimoniously illustrated with a meagre ration of grainy black-and-white illustrations. There are some minor quibbles: T.G. (Tom) Rosenthal is confused with Norman Rosenthal (p.121); some footnotes are incorrect (for example, note 41 on p.92 refers to the Sunday Independent not the Irish Independent); and Louis le Brocquy was not the first artist to be represented in the National Gallery of Ireland while still living (p.4 and p.149); so too were George Sharp and

Books

Stephen Catterson Smith when the gallery opened in 1864. More seriously, like so much commentary on Ireland, the book is Dublincentric. The efforts made in, for example, Cork, Galway and Waterford to establish and sustain public collections and civic art-life are relegated to a footnote. Nevertheless, this is a highly valuable study that ably complements and expands on S.B. Kennedy’s Irish Art and Modernism 1880–1950 (1991).

1 The artistic dimensions of the diaspora have begun to be tackled, see, for example, E. O’Connor: Art, Ireland, and the Irish Diaspora: Chicago, Dublin, New York, 1893–1939: Culture, Connections and Controversies, Newbridge 2020.

Iconoclasm and the Museum

By Stacey Boldrick. 212 pp. incl. 60 b. & w. ills. (Routledge, London and New York, 2020), £34.99. ISBN 978–1–138–36968–9.

by thomas stammers

On 9th July 1776, rebellious colonists read out the Declaration of Independence in front of Joseph Wilton’s equestrian monument to George III in Bowling Green, New York. That evening they proceeded to drag the statue from its plinth, remove its laurel wreath, chip off its nose and dismember it into several parts. The decapitated head was initially intended to be exhibited above Fort Washington, in a manner recalling the fate of convicts, although it was rescued by Loyalists and returned to England. The remaining lead parts were dispatched to Litchfield, where they were melted down and cast into bullets for use against British troops. The plinth itself came to serve as a tombstone for Major John Smith in 1783, before it was debased in a different way, becoming the flagstone for the front step of the Mayor of Jersey City’s mansion, on which the statue’s hoof marks are still visible today.

This incident is one of several episodes of iconoclasm explored by Stacey Boldrick over the past five hundred years, ranging from the Reformation assault on the Gothic statuary of Winchester Cathedral in 1538 and the Puritan levelling of the Cheapside Cross, London, in 1643, to the 2017 campaign to bring down Confederate statues in Memphis. The chapters interweave incidents of image-breaking with reflections on how effectively these acts have been commemorated, curated or transformed into contemporary art. In each case study, Boldrick explores the physical and symbolic violence inflicted upon the figurative and often highly anthropomorphised works of art: one seventeenth-century tract, The Downe-fall of Dagon, imagined the Cheapside Cross narrating its agonies in the first person. In the wake of iconoclasm, Boldrick traces how surviving fragments were recuperated, relocated, recontextualised and even reanimated over successive generations. For example, the toppling of the statue of George III was commemorated in a painting by Johannes Oertel, Pulling down the statue of King George III, New York City (1852–53; New-York Historical Society), and was also re-enacted for a film that plays on a continuous loop in the Philadelphia Museum of the American Revolution.

The study of iconoclasm has proliferated in recent years, and Boldrick acknowledges her debt to the landmark work of Dario Gamboni, as well as such specialists as Margaret Aston and Wendy Bellion. Although her case studies may not offer much new empirical research, they do have a different target, in seeking to question the hesitance of museums to address these histories within their interpretation of collections. At times, she alleges, this reticence is tantamount to new forms of erasure. Here Boldrick seeks to vindicate her contribution to Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, the muddled 2013 exhibition at Tate Britain, and return to its thesis that iconoclasm should be regarded as not simply destructive but generative. Approaching Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘iconoclash’, in which the visual sign is not so much negated as transformed, Boldrick asks us to consider what new meanings might emerge out of acts of vandalism – such as the cleaver marks hacked into the Rokeby Venus by Mary Richardson in 1914. Boldrick also reflects on the practice of Kate Davis (b.1977), notably her Reversibility series (2011–ongoing), in which the artist juxtaposes the attack on the Rokeby Venus with a suffragette pamphlet found in Glasgow Museums, which has also been defaced. Boldrick sees in iconoclasm a way of testing fundamental assumptions about value, and even wonders whether Richardson herself merits relabelling as a proto-performance artist.

In its chronological range the book offers a provocative introduction to some key conceptual issues, although a tension exists between a more archaeological approach, evident in chapters about the fate of medieval sculpture, and the later case studies, where materiality plays second fiddle to questions of context, power and identity. The elasticity in her use of the term ‘iconoclasm’ is problematic: for example, can it really be applied to the removal of artefacts from display or the act of cataloguing them incorrectly? In addition, Boldrick’s unwillingness to countenance the role of bigotry, mental illness, greed and self-promotion in driving attacks on works of art – think of the senseless doodling on Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1958) at Tate Modern in 2012 – is frustrating and misleading. While Iconoclasm and the Museum calls for more empirical research into the degradation suffered by objects in the past (to which few curators would object), Boldrick also insinuates a more controversial set of claims about the interpretative, creative and even reparatory potential lurking in forms of imagebreaking, past and present. The two strands do not sit easily together.

That said, the questions posed by the book are enormously topical. The author’s sophisticated treatment of contemporary art practice in chapter 5 speaks eloquently to current debates raging around public memorials. Michael Rakowitz (b.1973), Titus Kaphar (b.1976) and Hew Locke (b.1959) encourage us to think beyond the dichotomy of either defending or dismantling statues of contentious historical personalities. Boldrick reveals how each of these artists foregrounds experiences of loss (what Rakowitz calls ‘unbuilding’), transforming material substances and surfaces, or embracing forms of adaptation and amendment, thereby blurring the line between homage and critique. In such works as Kaphar’s ghostly Monumental Inversions: George Washington (2016), the painful contradictions inherent in the personality of the subject, and his legacy, are captured in a composition of burnt wood and hollow glass, in which Washington, on horseback, appears as a ghostly and incomplete silhouette. It neatly illuminates one of Boldrick’s favoured metaphors, that iconoclastic acts ‘sit in the shadows of artworks [. . .] stories waiting to be remembered by the institutions entrusted with their care’ (p.19).

1 See T. Barber and S. Boldrick, eds: exh. cat. Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, London (Tate Britain) 2013. 2 See B. Latour: ‘What is iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars?’, in idem and P. Weibel, eds: exh. cat. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Karlsruhe (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) 2002.

Obituary Christian Theuerkauff (1936–2021)

For many years Deputy Director of the sculpture collection at the Bode Museum, Berlin, and honorary professor at the city’s Free University, Christian Theuerkauff was a leading scholar of Baroque ivories, whose expert connoisseurship and archival research definitively shaped our understanding of many of the outstanding sculptors in the medium.

by marjorie trusted

Christian theuerkauff, who died in Berlin on 7th October 2021 at the age of eighty-five, was the doyen of Baroque ivory studies. Renowned for his pre-eminence in his field and for his hugely impressive publication record, he was also unstintingly generous and hospitable to friends and colleagues. His long and productive scholarly life, as well as his kindness and humanity, can be no more than outlined here. But those who knew him will remember how his meticulous intellectual endeavours were inextricably combined with his creative, thoughtful and deeply humane personality.

Theuerkauff was born in Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia) on 19th July 1936. The eldest child of Johannes Theuerkauff, a member of the local consistory church council, and his wife, Erna née Laubrinus, he grew up during the Second World War and lived through the era when Germany was divided. He attended school in Königsberg until 1943, when he was evacuated to Borna near Leipzig in Saxony, where he lived until 1947. Later his family moved north to Wilhelmshaven and he attended the high school in Bremen until 1956, specialising in the arts and humanities. He matriculated at the University of Kiel, where he continued to concentrate on the arts, initially the study of German and English, before specialising in the history of art. From the summer term of 1957 Christian was a student at the Albert-Ludwig University at Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden, where he read history of art, archaeology and prehistoric studies. He was awarded a scholarship to read for his doctorate in Vienna in the winter term of 1960–61.

In 1963 Christian was employed as a trainee at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. This was his first full-time post in a museum, although he had already published a catalogue of the ivories in the museum at Klosterneuburg in 1962, while he was still a doctoral student. He was then awarded a grant to catalogue the sculpture in the Hamburg museum from 1963 to 1965. This catalogue was published in 1977, co-written with Lise Lotte Möller. Chrisian’s first permanent curatorial job was as a research assistant at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf, where he was based from 1965 to 1969. In October 1969 he was appointed Curator of the Sculpture Collections in West Berlin at Dahlem. The Berlin sculpture collections were at that time split between East and West, most of the large-scale sculpture being housed in the Bode Museum on Museum Island, beyond the Berlin Wall, whereas the small-scale sculptures were kept at Dahlem. When the sculpture holdings in Berlin were reunited in 1990, Christian was promoted to Chief Curator of what was now a much larger collection. He subsequently became Deputy Director of the sculpture collection at the Bode Museum (with which the Dahlem collections had been merged) and the Museum of Byzantine Art. In 1991 he was made an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin and regularly taught students at the Bode Museum. He retired in 2001, but his enthusiasm for his subject and his unrivalled experience in handling ivories meant that he generously continued to give his expertise freely. He was always happy to discuss questions of attribution and wider issues of art historical interest.

One of Christian’s first articles appeared in The Burlington Magazine in 1962: a characteristically erudite contribution on a signed ivory tankard by Ignaz Elhafen (1658–before 1715),1 the Austrian sculptor who was the subject of his monographic doctoral thesis. As is true of Christian’s later publications, this article, and indeed his thesis, has remained a vitally important work of reference for all those working on baroque ivories. Christian wrote and published prolifically, his articles often exploring the work of individual artists, teasing out their styles and sources of inspiration, and at the same time examining the patronage they enjoyed and their cultural contexts. He used the tools of connoisseurship sensitively and perceptively: constantly handling, closely observing and comparing works of art. Many of his articles are weighty discussions, more like short books, the non-fiction equivalent of novellas. One such seminal early publication is an extended piece dating from 1973, effectively a catalogue raisonné, of the œuvre of a major ivory sculptor known then only as the Master B.G. Years later this sculptor was identified as Balthasar Griessmann (c.1620–1706). Christian’s hypotheses about the artist and his work, as set out in his article, including his thoughts about Griessmann’s origins and the likely dates of specific pieces, were validated by this much later archival discovery.

Individual sculptors whom Christian likewise studied attentively and whose work he published include Adam Lenckhardt, Francis van Bossuit, David Heschler and Johann Christoph Ludwig Lücke, as well as countless others. None of these artists had been given such patient and intelligent

Christian Theuerkauff, photographed in 2010 by Hiltrud Jehle.

Obituary

attention before Christian focused on them, piecing together primary archival research with acute observations and appreciation. Such articles opened up new avenues of research for others; Christian always welcomed new scholars in the field, generously sharing information with them, whether by correspondence or in person. He particularly encouraged and nurtured younger scholars and those embarking in the field.

Christian’s articles appeared in a wide range of periodicals in Germany, Austria, Britain and the United States from the early 1960s up to the first decade of the twenty-first century, meaning they reached innumerable students and scholars in the world of baroque sculpture over several generations. Additionally he contributed to exhibition catalogues, coedited a Festschrift for Peter Bloch in 1990 and perhaps most importantly published and contributed to key catalogues of museum collections, such as that of the baroque ivories in Berlin (1986).2 In 1980 the collector and benefactor Reiner Winkler (1925–2020) commissioned Christian to compile the catalogue of his baroque ivories, the first volume of which appeared in 1984, the second one ten years later, by which time the Winkler collection had expanded. This later volume with its many new catalogue entries also enabled Christian to include addenda to the first volume with his own later discoveries. It was a typical sign of his conscientiousness that he wished to correct and edit his own research when necessary, although such addenda did not in any way detract from the superb scholarship of the first volume.

A bibliography of Christian’s publications compiled by Regine Marth, assisted by Daniela Hoffmann, can be found in the Festschrift published in his honour in 2011, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday.3 The bibliography is a telling indication of his abundant productivity, totalling just under two hundred entries. The Festschrift itself, with almost thirty essays by an impressive array of expert international contributors, and a tabula gratulatoria of nearly one hundred names, testifies to the number of scholars and sculpture enthusiasts who wanted to express their admiration for Christian. The Festschrift originated in the International Ivories Group founded by Jutta Kappel and the present author in 2009, a group that both Winkler and Christian supported.

Those who knew Christian were grateful recipients of his handwritten letters (he did not favour emails), which, penned in his tiny writing, were often embellished with beautiful spidery coloured drawings, sometimes of flowers or landscapes, sometimes of Venetian scenes. Christian and his family adored Venice, which they visited frequently. Christian had married Anna-Elisabeth Liederwald, an expert on glass, notably Venetian glass, in 1963. Those who had the good fortune to visit them at home in their large apartment in Argentinische Allee in Berlin were warmly received, with smiles, good food and delightful conversation that was both intellectual and empathetic, like Christian himself. In his later years Christian became sadly unwell and could no longer entertain his friends as he might have wished. But he was affectionately supported by his family, and his vast scholarship is a fitting monument to the profound knowledge and understanding he had of his subject. The lines chosen for the card announcing his death were from the Book of Genesis: ‘Haltet mich nicht auf, denn Gott hat Gnade zu meiner Reise gegeben’ – ‘Do not detain me, now that God has granted success to my journey’.

The author is grateful to Charles Avery, Friederike Börsch-Supan, Hiltrud Jehle, Hans-Ulrich Kessler and Regine Marth for their kind assistance. 1 C. Theuerkauff: ‘A signed ivory tankard by Ignaz Elhafen’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 104 (1962), pp.288–91. 2 The catalogue was reviewed by Richard H. Randall, Jr in this Magazine, 129 (1987), pp.33–34. 3 R. Marth and M. Trusted, eds: Festschrift für Christian Theuerkauff. Sculpture Studies in Honour of Christian Theuerkauff, Munich 2011.

among this month’s contributors

Francis Ames-Lewis is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London.

Sara Ayres is currently working on a critical edition of the 1669 diary of Prince George of Denmark’s visit to England and the Restoration court.

Sally Beazley-Long is an independent art historian.

Martin Biddle excavated Nonsuch Palace in the summer of 1959 in his first year reading archaeology as an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Rosalind P. Blakesley is Professor of Russian and European Art and a Fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge.

Keith Christiansen is Curator Emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Lars Hendrikman is former curator of old masters, Bonnefanten, Maastricht.

Ella Hendriks is Professor of Conservation and Restoration of Moveable Cultural Heritage at the University of Amsterdam.

Clare Hornsby is an art historian and research fellow at the British School at Rome.

Susan Frances Jones is a specialist in Northern European art of the late medieval and Renaissance periods. She is currently teaching at the New College of the Humanities, London. Ward Leloup is a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (HOST Research Group) and Ghent University (Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies).

Sylvie Lhermite-King is a Paris-based antique dealer specialising in works of art of the Renaissance and baroque periods and an expert for Venetian and façon de Venise glass at Drouot auction house.

Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Anne Delvingt is an independent researcher of European Caravaggism. She is currently writing the catalogue raisonné of the Antwerp painter Gerard Seghers.

Jan Dumolyn is a senior lecturer in medieval history at Ghent University (the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies).

Mark Evans is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at Bard Graduate Center, New York.

Maryl B. Gensheimer is Associate Professor of Roman Art and Archaeology and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Maryland. Philip McEvansoneya is a lecturer in the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin.

Toon de Meester is a local historian who specialises in the history of medieval Bruges and its houses.

Tom Nickson is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Camilla Pietrabissa is a postdoctoral research fellow at IUAV University, Venice.

Colin Rhodes is Distinguished Professor and Xiaoxiang Scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hunan Normal University.

Robert Skwirblies is research assistant at Technische Universität, Berlin. Mathijs Speecke is a PhD student and research assistant at Ghent University (the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies).

Thomas Stammers is Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History at Durham University.

Richard Stemp is an independent art historian.

Anne Swartz is a Professor of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah GA.

Marjorie Trusted (aka Holly Trusted) is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her publications include Baroque and Later Ivories (2013).

Richard West is an independent scholar.

Christopher White’s last book on the artist, The Intimate Rembrandt, will be published in the spring.

Paul Williamson is Keeper Emeritus and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.