The Burlington Magazine, June 2021
Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Traou en Dalmathia, 1757
(Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France)
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The eighteenth century in this month’s issue of The Burlington . . .
The Burlington Magazine 163 (June 2021) — Works of Art on Paper
A R T I C L E S
• Ana Šverko, “Clérisseau’s Journey to Dalmatia: A Newly Attributed Collection of Drawings,” pp. 492–502.
A collection of 136 hitherto anonymous drawings of Italy, Istria and Dalmatia in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, is here attributed to Charles-Louis Clérisseau. The drawings, which include a group made during his journey from Venice to Diocletian’s Palace in Split with Robert Adam in 1757, further expand our understanding of Clérisseau as the forerunner of a new generation of traveller-painters.
• Tony Barnard, “Trading in Art: Antonio Cesare di Poggi (1744–1836),” pp. 492–502.
With the help of his English wife, Hester, the Italian artist A.C. Poggi forged a career in London as a portrait painter, a retailer of fans, a dealer principally in drawings and publisher of prints. Poggi’s successes and failures reflect changing fashions and fortunes in the capital’s competitive art world between his arrival in England c.1770 and departure for the Continent in 1801.
• Christopher White, “Reminiscences of the British Museum Print Room, 1954–65,” pp. 492–502.
The author’s first job, as Assistant Keeper with responsibility for the Northern schools in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, London, introduced him to a distinguished group of curators and an occasionally eccentric band of visitors. The department’s focus was emphatically on drawings, where major acquisitions could be made by sharp-eyed scholars in the salesrooms.
Fan portraying George III and his family at the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in 1788, made by A.C. Poggi incorporating a print by Pietro Antonio Martini after J. H. Ramberg, ca. 1790, engraved and hand-coloured paper with carved and pierced ivory sticks and guards, width when open 38.4 cm (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, T.56-1933).
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R E V I E W S
• Elizabeth Pergam, “The Frick Reframed,” pp. 536–39. On the plain, grey walls of the Modernist Breuer building, New York, some of the most famous works from the Frick Collection shine in a new light.
• Yuriko Jackall, Review of the exhibition catalogue Une des Provinces du Rococo: La Chine Rêvée de François Boucher, ed. by Yohan Rimaud and Alastair Laing (In Fine éditions d’art and Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie de Besançon, 2019), pp. 539–41.
• Jonathan Yarker, Review of the exhibition Turner’s Modern World (Tate Britain, 2020–21), pp. 541–44.
• Amanda Dotseth, Review of the exhibition publication Museo del Prado 1819–2019: Un lugar de memoria, ed. by Javier Portús et al (Prado, 2018), pp. 546–49.
• Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Review of Les dessins de la collection Mariette: Écoles italienne et espagnole, by Pierre Rosenberg et al, 4 vols., (Somogy, 2019), pp. 550–51.
• Oliver Tostmann, Review of Die Zeichnungen des Giovan Battista Beinaschi aus der Sammlung der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf am Kunstpalast, ed. by Sonja Brink and Francesco Grisolia (Imhof Verlag, 2020), pp. 556–57. [Beinaschi lived between 1636 and 1688, but Tostmann notes in passing points of his eighteenth-century reception.]
• Christoph Martin Vogtherr, Review of L’ Art et la manière: Dessins français du XVIIIesiècle des musées de Marseille, ed. by Luc Georget and Gérard Fabre (Silvana Editoriale, 2019), pp. 557–58.
Exhibition | Turner’s Modern World
Now on view at Tate Britain (with versions of the exhibition soon coming to Fort Worth and Boston). . .
Turner’s Modern World
Tate Britain, London, 28 October 2020 — 12 September 2021
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 17 October 2021 — 6 February 2022
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2022
One of Britain’s greatest artists, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), lived and worked at the peak of the industrial revolution. Steam replaced sail; machine-power replaced manpower; political and social reforms transformed society. Many artists ignored these changes, but Turner faced up to these new challenges. This exhibition will show how he transformed the way he painted to better capture this new world.
Beginning in the 1790s, when Turner first observed the effects of modern life, the exhibition follows his fascination with the impact of industrialisation. It shows how he became involved in the big political questions of the time: campaigning against slavery and making paintings that expressed the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars.
This landmark exhibition will bring together major works by Turner from Tate and other collections, including The Fighting Temeraire (1839) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844). It will explore what it meant to be a modern artist in his lifetime and present an exciting new perspective on his work and life.
David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon, and Sam Smiles, eds., Turner’s Modern World (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2021), 240 pages, 978-1849767132 (hardcover), £40, $55 / ISBN: 978-1849767125 (paperback) £25.
This monograph is tied to the first exhibition to highlight Turner’s contemporary imagery—the most exceptional and distinctive aspect of his work. Rather than making claims for Turner as a proto-modernist, it explores what constituted modernity during his lifetime and what it meant to be a modern artist. Turner’s career spanned the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of the British Empire, the birth of finance capitalism and modern industrialization, as well as political, scientific, and cultural advances that transformed society and shaped the modern world. While historians have long recognized that the industrial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century inaugurated far-reaching change and modernization, these were often ignored by artists as they did not fit into established categories of pictorial representation. This publication shows Turner updating the language of art and transforming his style and practice to produce revelatory, definitive interpretations of modern subjects.
David Blayney Brown is Senior Curator, Tate Britain. Amy Concannon is Curator, Tate Britain. Sam Smiles is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Plymouth, and Programme Director, Art History and Visual Culture, University of Exeter.
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