Art World All-A-Twitter about Turner Landscape

The art world is all-a-twitter, so to speak, about Wednesday's Sotheby's London auction of J. M. W. Turner’s magnificent 1839 landscape, Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino. It was expected to sell for £12 – 18 million ($18 - 27mm), but the auctioneers hammer fell at just shy of £30mm ($45mm). As a point of comparison, a Turner view of Venice fetched £20.5mm at auction in 2006. Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

But the excitement was about more than just the price.

According to Sotheby's David Moore-Gwyn, Senior Specialist in Early British Paintings, "This is Turner at his absolute best. One of the most evocative pictures of Rome ever painted, this picture has everything: a colourful, relaxed beauty, exquisite detail, flawless condition and superlative provenance and exhibition history. One of the last great Turner masterpieces to have remained in private hands, its sale at auction represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for collectors and one of the landmark moments of my 35-year career at Sotheby's."

That’s something worth twittering about!

By “superlative provenance,” he means that the painting has only appeared on the open market once in the 171 years since it was painted. It was originally bought by Hugh Munro, a friend and patron of Turner. Almost 40 years later, while honeymooning in Italy in 1878, the 5th Earl of Rosebery and his new wife, Hannah Rothschild, acquired it. For the next 100 years, it hung in the family's country home or in their London residences, until, in 1978, it was loaned to the National Gallery of Scotland.

The painting is further distinguished by its immaculate condition.

Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino ("Cow Pasture") is a view of the un-excavated Roman Forum, bathed in hazy light. It is the last of Turner's 20-year series of views of the city. Turner painted it at the peak of his career, from studies and sketches he made on two visits to the city. The sun-washed panorama shows features of classical, renaissance and baroque Rome, but in the foreground we see livestock and herders, the activity of modern life. The painting shows the artist at the height of his technical powers and represents the culmination of Turner's fascination with Rome. Some consider Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino to be the finest among his many depictions of Italian cities.

The Getty now must apply for an export license, as the picture is considered part of Britain’s cultural heritage. It appears that this is a mere formality, although if someone in Britain were able to raise £30MM in the next three months, the decision might well go against export.

The headline of yesterday's Scotsman newspaper lamented, "£30m Scots Turner Painting Lost to Nation". The article points out that the "three-month 'export stop' would allow a potential UK buyer to match the price, but that 'no-one will have enough money to pay for it'". However a Sotheby's spokesman said the UK already has a large collection of Turners and that it is "important for the artist's international reputation that his works were able to be viewed around the world." He added that this case is "not in the same league as when a very great but very rare work of art is sold and by its loss we're impoverished."

I'm thrilled to think that Turner's Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino may be hanging at the Getty when I'm there in January!

Some Summer Exhibits in the US

Some enticing exhibits in the US this summer. Here are but a few:

PITTSBURGH, PA
Frick Art & Historical Center
May 14 - September 5

Small but Sublime: Intimate 19th Century American Landscapes at the Frick Art & Historical Center. 22 small-scale paintings and drawings by 18 American artists, ranging from the realistic style of Hudson River School to the American Impressionists. Admission is free.



NEW YORK, NY
The Morgan Library & Museum
May 18 - September 12
Eight extraordinary drawings by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) demonstrate the variety and dynamism of his draftsmanship. Dürer, master of the German Renaissance, transformed drawing in Northern Europe. Using his unrivaled talent as a draftsman and the force of his powerful artistic personality, Dürer tirelessly promoted drawing as a medium, creating works of exceptional beauty and remarkable technical skill.


Exhibitions focused on Dürer’s drawings are rare, and this marks the first time in more than twenty years that the Morgan’s outstanding Dürer holdings will be displayed together. Also included are prints and treatises by the artist.In his pursuit of beauty, Dürer devoted careful attention to every aspect of artistic production. On view in the exhibition are a woodcut, its associated woodblock, and a letter to the patron for whom it was made. In the letter Dürer wrote, “Please let it be as it is. No one could improve it because it was done artistically and with care. Those who see it and who understand such matters will tell you so.”

The Morgan Library & Museum
May 21 - August 29
Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design gives us scenic vistas, winding paths, bucolic meadows, rustic retreats suitable for solitary contemplation and other alluring naturalistic features of gardens created in the Romantic spirit.

The Romantics looked to nature as a liberating force, a source of sensual pleasure, moral instruction, religious insight, and artistic inspiration. Eloquent exponents of these ideals, they extolled the mystical powers of nature and argued for more sympathetic styles of garden design in books, manuscripts, and drawings, now regarded as core documents of the Romantic Movement. Their cult of inner beauty and their view of the outside world dominated European thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The exhibition features approximately ninety influential texts and outstanding works of art, providing a compelling overview of ideas championed by the Romantics and also implemented by them in private estates and public parks in Europe and the United States, notably New York’s Central Park.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
12 May-15 August
An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo presents 72 extraordinary works of the 16th-18th centuries, from a preeminent private collections of Italian Old Master drawings. Masterpieces by historically important draftsmen—principally Italian masters but also artists whose careers brought them south of the Alps—among them Correggio, Parmigianino, Bernini, Poussin, Guercino, Canaletto, and Tiepolo.

CALIFORNIA
J. Paul Getty Museum, LA
May 18 - October 17
Printing the Grand Manner: Charles Le Brun and Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV features eleven large prints intended to evoke the grandeur of Le Brun’s large-scale paintings and tapestry designs that illustrate events from the exemplary lives of ancient rulers such as Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great. Examines the prints' rich vocabulary and illuminates the context in which they were made between the mid-1660s and the mid-1680s.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
May 22 - September 6
The de Young Museum hosts the Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, which includes approximately 100 paintings from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection. Highlights the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, among others.

The Musée d’Orsay is lending their most beloved paintings while it undergoes a partial closure for refurbishment and reinstallation in anticipation of the museum’s 25th anniversary in 2011.
Birth of Impressionism will be followed in the fall of 2010 by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Beyond: Post–Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. The de Young will be the only museum in the world to host both exhibitions.

Would That I Could Get to the Getty

LOS ANGELES - To celebrate Italian Language Week, the J. Paul Getty Museum is offering a special one-hour overview -- in italiano -- of the current exhibition: Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) is considered the greatest Baroque sculptor, and his unparalleled talent as a portrait sculptor transformed the practice and earned him the patronage of the Catholic Church and nobility in 17th- century Rome. Co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa , Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture is the first major exhibition of Bernini's work in North America and the first ever comprehensive exhibition of the artist's portrait busts.

On view at the Getty Center through October 26, 2008 , the special exhibition also includes Bernini's portrait drawings, as well as portrait busts by other important sculptors in 17th-century Rome such as Francesco Mochi, François Duquesnoy, Giuliano Finelli, and Alessandro Algardi. If you’ve been to Rome, you know Bernini. If you’ve listened to the Jane’s Smart Art audio guide to St. Peter’s Basilica, you’re also familiar with the work of Mochi, Duquesnoy, and Algardi.

As a complement to the Baroque portraiture exhibit, the Getty Center has mounted another temporary exhibit at , Faces of Power and Piety: Medieval Portraiture -- also through October 26, 2008.

The goal of medieval portraiture was to present a subject not at a particular moment in time, but as the person wished to be remembered through the ages. “While modern portraiture strives to capture the accurate likeness of a specific person, medieval portraiture was primarily valued for its ability to express an individual’s social status, religious convictions, or political position,” says Elizabeth Morrison, curator of manuscripts, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Art Daily provides a schedule of related lectures, gallery talks, & concerts in Sept and Oct.

New operating hours and parking fees

Henceforth, the Getty Center will close at 5:30 pm (a half hour earlier than previously) on Sundays and Tuesday through Friday. Saturdays it will remain open until 9pm. The Getty Center is closed on Mondays. Ticketed events and performances will still be presented on Friday evenings, but the galleries will not be open to the general public. Getty Villa hours will remain unchanged.

Admission to both Museums remains free.

In addition, beginning on Sept. 9, parking fees at both the Getty Center and the GettyVilla increased from $8 to $10.