The Travels Of A Traveller's Triptych

How's this for provenance ...

A tiny 14th century enamel-on-gold traveller's devotional triptych :

• Mary Queen of Scots had it during her imprisonment in the Tower of London; she gave it to
• Elizabeth Vaux, wife of 4th Lord Vaux of Harrowden (gr-gr granddaugher of St Thomas More).
• Claudio Acquaviva, General of the Jesuits 1581-1616, who gave it as a coronation gift to:
• Pope Leo XI dei Medici (1605); it was returned upon the Pope's death to:
• Family of Fr Aquaviva, Dukes of Atri
• Maximilian I , Duke of Bavaria Wittelsbach (c.1616); Wittelsbach family owned it for more than three centuries, until they
• Sold it to a Munich art dealer (1933), who sold it to
• Fritz Mannheimer (died during WWII, wife Jane remarried Charles Wm Engelhard)
• During war, the triptych was stored in a London bank vault; Although the bank was bombed to smitthereens, the triptych remained intact;
• Looted from rubble by an English sailor who traded it it for drinks at an Irish pub
• Pubkeeper gave it to a convent, whence it passed to
• An unnamed local collector who traded it to a dealer for some chairs.
• The dealer showed it to Fr Martin D'Arcy, (Jesuit priest, Oxford) who knew it belonged to Mannheimer (he had bid against Mannheimer for it at auction when Mannheimer acquired it.)
• Returned to Jane Engelhard (c 1948); She gave it to D'Arcy, who was a noted collector.
• Put on public view to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1953)
• Evidently now on permanent loan to Victoria and Albert Museum, London

I'd love to see the tryptych, but I've been unable to find a picture of it, not even on the V&A website or the D'Arcy Museum website. Any leads?

Baroque: The First International Style

If you’ll be in London between now and July 19th, try to get to the V&A to see their special exhibit, 1620-1800 Baroque – Style in the Age of Magnificence.

Baroque was the first artistic style to have a significant global impact. It spread from Italy and France to the rest of Europe, and then was carried to Africa, Asia, and Latin America by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other European colonists, missionaries and traders. As European communities were established, craftsmen, artists and architects traveled and settled around the world. Trade in luxury goods and the distribution of art prints furthered the global dissemination of Baroque style.

Art Daily Newsletter reports today that “The magnificence and splendour of Baroque, one of the most opulent styles of the 17th and 18th centuries, is the subject of the V&A’s spring exhibition. The exhibition will reflect the complexity and grandeur of the Baroque style, from the Rome of Borromini and Bernini to the magnificence of Louis XIV's Versailles and the lavishness of Baroque theatre and performance."

Displays cover architecture, furniture, silver, ceramics, painting, sculpture, and textiles. Abnd will explore Baroque in performance and the theatre; the public city square; religious spaces including St Peter’s Basilica in Rome; and secular spaces including Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles.

Among the roughly 200 objects on display will be religious paintings by Rubens and Tiepolo. Of particular interest to anyone who has been to Our Lady Cathedral in Antwerp is an oil sketch of the center panel of Descent from the Cross, the huge altarpiece Rubens painted for the Arquebusier Guild, which is still magnificently on view in that remarkable gothic edifice.

Mark Jones, Director of the V&A said: “Baroque is one of the most exuberant and dazzling design styles there has even been, an expression of European power and magnificence in the 17th and 18th centuries. Our exhibition will be the first to examine all the elements of Baroque including architecture, art and design and will look at how it established itself through Europe and then internationally as European power grew overseas.”

If It Has Function, Can It Be Art?

Some art theorists insist that art is made to be seen, not used. Essayist Siri Hustvedt is one of these. In her Mysteries of the Rectangle, she says that art "has not practical function beyond visual communication between the product the artist created and the viewer.”

I don't know what Hustvedt thinks about Fountain, but even if she agrees with me that Duchamp's urinal is not art, I suspect our reasoning might not be the same ... I disagree that functional things can't qualify as art.

Take Clark Sorensen’s urinals, for example.

Titled Nature Calls, his series of one-of-a-kind, hand-made porcelain fixtures was inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe’s large-scale flower paintings.

Like Duchamp’s Dadaist Fountain, Sorensen’s Nature Calls urinals are also intended to be humorous and ironic. But unlike Duchamp, Soensen has created something original and unique, elevating the mundane into the realm of artistic expression.

Marcel Duchamp’s urinal ... er, "Fountain"

I don’t always succeed in appreciating a (so-called) work of art.

For example, I’ve never been able to appreciate Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain … which isn’t a fountain at all. It’s a urinal. And I’m not ashamed to say that I don’t “get” it, despite the fact that a poll of 500 art experts named it as the most influential work of modern art … ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse!

Duchamp's idea was that it’s the creative process that is the most important thing - that the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form.

Conceptually, I agree with that … but I can’t see that Duchamp actually created anything. What he did was purchase a factory-made product and hang it on a wall. And, indeed, when Duchamp shocked the art establishment in 1917, offering it for the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, Fountain was rejected for being neither original nor art.

Duchamp’s urinal is an example of Dadaism. According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti art", bent on rejecting traditional culture, and embracing chaos and irrationality. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with long-established aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. If art is a gift of the Universe, then Dada rejected the spirit of reciprocal generosity.

To my mind, even if American Dadism was driven by a sense of irony and humor, its negative purpose moves it out of the realm of art. Dadists themselves called it “anti-art”. How can something anti-art be art?

700 Year-Old Gift Still Elicits Gratitude

Following yesterday's posting, I remembered feeling that sense of gratitude to the Universe while looking at this sculpture in Our Lady Cathedral, in Antwerp, Belgium.

This sweet Madonna and Child was carved sometime before 1350, a gift from a long-dead, nameless artist – known to us today only as the Master of the Mosan Marble Madonnas. It's a gift that has kept on giving for almost 700 years!

The first time I saw it I knew very little about late medieval sculpture. But I was drawn instinctively to the expression of tenderness between this universal rendering of Mother and Child.

I was amazed that such grace and suppleness could be evoked in stone. The surface of the marble is so smooth and soft-looking, I wanted to reach out and stroke it.

It was only later that I learned that this sort of fluidity of pose and drapery, and the expressiveness in the baby’s playful gesture and the young Madonna’s affectionate gaze -- were extraordinary in a 14th century sculpture.

As a footnote: One might well wonder how this sculpture has remained almost completely undamaged for so long -- given that the cathedral stood central to Antwerp's tumultuous history (ie: religious iconoclasm, French revolution, world war). In fact, the statue is hollow, making it light-weight enough to be easily moved out of harm's way ... as oftern as might have been necessary!

Art as a Gift of the Universe

I haven’t posted for a rather long time because I’ve been busy pondering the meaning of life.

Actually, among the things I’ve been juggling is a treatise on the Art of Looking. As I’ve considered the subject, I’ve realized something quite fundamental about my approach to art:

I believe that a work of art is a gift of the Universe.

Here’s the spiritual logic: anything created by someone is an offering of a part of that person’s Being … an expression of the uniqueness of who that person is. We talk about a person as “gifted”. We refer to a person’s particular talent as “a gift from God”. We talk about gifts “coming from the heart”.

When a child gives us an off-kilter clay something-or-other, we are delighted … we recognize the care and concentration and the effort that went into it, and we receive it as a gift of that child’s Being … even while wondering what it is!

The extent to which you at least try to appreciate the work is an expression of your gratitude for the gift. It’s a reciprocal relationship. Taht may sound a little flaky … but so often when looking at an amazing work I feel a profound gratitude to the Universe that human beings are able to create such things.

Dali's Dalliance With Mass Production

Salvador Dali apparently labored less for art than for his purse.

In May 1973, a witness affirmed that, at the Hotel Meurice in Paris, Dali had signed 4000 sheets of paper, weighing in at about 750 pounds! The following year, French customs agents waylaid a small truck heading to Andorra loaded with 40,000 blank pieces of paper signed by Dali.

Apparently, “on a good day”, the Surrealist was capable of signing 1800 sheets in an hour, with the assistance of three helpers who whisked the papers under and out from under his pen. Now that’s a surreal image! He joked about what easy, profitable work it was.

Needless to say, questionable Dali lithographs have been surfacing in Europe, the US and Canada in recent years.

Is Culture Just Politics By A Different Name?

The frieze, the metopes and the wondrous pediments that constitute the Parthenon Marbles represent the acme of classical Greek art, and Athens' fantasitc new Acropolis Museum now provides a proper display for the parts of the Marbles which remain in Greece.

The remainder famously, or infamously, are owned by London’s British Museum, having been "rescued" in the early 19th century by the Scottish aristocrat Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin, from the neglect of the Ottoman regime that then occupied Greece.

Peter Aspden's article, A manifesto for the Parthenon Marbles, (Financial Times Nov 29th) navigates through the controversy-laden history of the Marbles with clarity and thoughtfulness.

As he unfolds the history of the separation of the marbles, Aspden wonders if the positions of Athens and London ever be reconciled. A self-described "interested observer and of Anglo-Greek parentage", he has spent years following the arguments on both sides of the issue, and here proposes a five-point reconciliation plan to help break the deadlock.

Aspden points out, “We owe it to the remarkable humanistic legacy of ancient Greece to move forward on this vexed issue; for culture is politics by a different name, and if we cannot decide on the future of a few marble stones, what chance do we have to do the right thing for all the world’s dislocated peoples?”

Quelle Surprise! C'est un Tiepolo!

I do love stories about extraordinary artworks that have been lost -- sometimes not even known to be lost -- turning up in attics or behind bedroom doors (see my Nov 14 , 2006 post, and Dec 17, 2007).

Imagine the shock: rummaging around in Grandmamma's attic and finding a Tiepolo! Of course the rummaging was taking place in the attic of a French château, so the discovery would perhaps have been less of a surprise than if the family home were a farmhouse in Kansas. Nonetheless ... how exciting!

The rediscovered masterpiece, Portrait of a lady as Flora, by the great Italian artist Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), had been hidden two or three generations ago because of the semi-naked subject. It is thought to have originated as part of a series of pictures commissioned by Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709-1762), probably intended for the Winter Palace.

This is one for Antiques Roadshow ... the painting was just sold at auction for $4,227,780!

125 Reasons to go to Amsterdam

125 years ago, the Rembrandt Association was founded by a group of individuals who were bent on keeping and returning significant works of Dutch art to the country. In the late 19th Century there was little governmental support for retaining important works of art, and the museums didn't have the financial resources to compete for acquisitions with foreign collectors. The Rembrandt Association began bringing works by artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Davidsz de Heem and Hendrick TerBrugghen back to the Netherlands. In its 125 year history, the Association has participated in the purchase of more than 2500 works for public ownership.

2008 marks the 125th anniversary of the Rembrandt Association. To celebrate the occasion a major exhibition is being mounted at Amsterdam's fabulous Van Gogh Museum. It will run 3 October 2008 - 18 January 2009.

More than thirty Dutch museums have collaborated to stage this one-time exhibition showcasing a selection of the best works of art the Rembrandt Society has helped them to acquire over the years.

It was due to the Association’s efforts that paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer were purchased for public collections. In later years the Association also turned its attention to foreign and modern works of art, which enabled museums to become more than simply temples of the Dutch artistic heritage. In this exciting exhibition some 125 of the most important and striking acquisitions will be shown together for the first and only time.

The Van Gogn Museum website provides details of the five sections of the exhibit: 1) key purchases of the last 125 years; 2) works of Dutch art that returned to the Netherlands and works that were retained in the country; 3) old masters by non-Dutch artists; 4) modern and contemporary art; and 5) a selection of acquisitions of the last ten years.

The Van Gohn Museum is also home to the world's largest Van Gogh collection.