Exhibition | Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect
From the press release (18 July 2019) for the exhibition:
Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect, Drawings from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Petit Palais, Paris, 11 December 2018 — 31 March 2019
Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, 4 October 2019 — 5 January 2020
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 31 January — 10 May 2020
Curated by Edouard Kopp and Kelly Montana
Jean-Jacques Lequeu, The Tomb of Isocrates, Athenian Orator (Tombeau d’Isocrate, orateur athénien), 1789; ink on paper, 47 × 41 cm (Paris: Collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France).
The Menil Collection is pleased to present Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect, Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an exhibition of fifty drawings by the draftsman and architect who is now considered to be one of the most inventive artists of post-revolutionary France. On display at the Menil Drawing Institute from October 4, 2019 to January 5, 2020, the exhibition explores Lequeu’s wildly imaginative and spectacularly detailed architectural drawings and anatomical studies.
Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) was born in Rouen, France, and studied architecture in Paris. Over the course of his career, which was drastically impacted by the French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermarth, he worked as a draftsman, a surveyor, and a cartographer. His posthumous acclaim would come from the discovery of the hundreds of carefully preserved drawings he bequeathed to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1825, the year before his death.
Ranging from government proposals to fantastic and speculative structures that were never intended to be constructed, Lequeu’s architectural drawings depict civic infrastructure along with curious oddities such as a towering stable in the shape of a cow. His designs were never realized in part because of the political turmoil caused by the Revolution, and also because some of his architectural ideas, though minutely executed on paper, were simply impossible to build.
Said Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel Jr. Foundation Chief Curator, Menil Drawing Institute, “Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect presents rarely-seen drawings of great refinement by a singular artist, who was in essence an ‘architect on paper’. Together, the drawings attest to Lequeu’s prolific imagination, erudite knowledge and eclectic tastes. They also demonstrate how brilliantly he managed to bring his ideas to life on paper. More broadly, they remind us of the tremendous power and versatility of the drawing medium to conceive and to visualize architecture.”
Lequeu’s work was included in an exhibition of 18th-century French architectural drawings titled Visionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu organized by Jean Adhémar for the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1964. Dominique de Menil, co-founder of the Menil Foundation, brought that exhibition to the United States in 1967 and arranged its American tour. Visionary Architects was shown at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, before travelling to the St. Louis City Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum of San Francisco; The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; and the French Embassy in Mexico. Along the way it influenced a number of young artists. Sol LeWitt and Claes Oldenburg, for example, are known to have closely studied the fanciful and obsessive peculiarities of Lequeu’s work. In 1968 the notable architecture critic of The New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable, described Lequeu’s drawings as “délices [that] hover between dream and nightmare…. His is a world much closer to Disneyland, but infinitely more elegant and erotic….” Sixteen of Lequeu’s drawings that were included in Visionary Architects will be shown at the Menil as part of the forthcoming presentation.
Said Menil Director Rebecca Rabinow, “John and Dominique de Menil took great satisfaction in introducing the public to art of all kinds. Mrs. de Menil believed that Lequeu was someone who ‘belong[ed] to another world, a world pervaded by dreams and eccentricities’. Now, in the context of our new Menil Drawing Institute building, we can return to this quietly influential exhibition from more than fifty years ago and provide an in-depth look at an artist who is now being rediscovered by scholars.”
Co-organized by the Petit Palais, Paris, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the exhibition in Houston is curated by Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel Jr. Foundation Chief Curator, and Kelly Montana, Assistant Curator, both of the Menil Drawing Institute. Following the Menil’s presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Major funding for this exhibition in Houston is provided by Cecily E. Horton and The Vaughn Foundation. Additional support comes from Curtis & Windham Architects; Caroline Huber; Janie C. Lee; Adelaide de Menil; Susanne and William E. Pritchard III; Bill Stewart; and The City of Houston.
Barry Bergdoll, Jean-Jacques Lequeu: The Architectural Imagination in the Age of Reason
Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, Thursday, 14 November, 7pm
Barry Bergdoll will present a lecture on the occasion of the exhibition. Professor Bergdoll is a specialist in late 18th- and 19th-century French and German architecture, and the author of numerous works on the period, including the textbook European Architecture 1750–1890 in the Oxford History of Art series. He is Professor of Art History at Columbia University and former Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.
Exhibition | Slavery
View of the Plantation Cornelis Friendship in Suriname (‘Plantagie Cornelis Vriendschap’), eighteenth century, watercolor, 43 × 64 cm
(Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1959-120)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The exhibition opens this time next year at the Rijksmuseum:
Slavery, An Exhibition
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 25 September 2020 — 17 January 2021; dates extended to summer 2021
This exhibition testifies to the fact that slavery is an integral part of our history, not a dark page that can be simply turned and forgotten about. And that history is more recent than many people realize: going back just four or five generations you will find enslaved people and their enslavers. For the very first time, in 2020 the Rijksmuseum will hold an exhibition devoted entirely to this subject. Slavery is found in many cultures, places and times, but this exhibition focuses on slavery in the Dutch colonial period, spanning from the 17th to the 19th century.
Why the Rijksmuseum is holding this exhibition
The Rijksmuseum is the Dutch national museum for art and history. Slavery is an integral part of that history, and one that affects us all. Delving into the history of slavery will lead to a better understanding of contemporary Dutch society. The plans for this exhibition are part of a museum-wide effort to increase the attention given to colonial history, from diverse perspectives. Academic research, recent acquisitions, and a critical reappraisal of the existing collection are all aspects of this policy. Others include the multimedia guided tour entitled ‘Colonial Past’ and the Country Series of eight books that each focus on a nation with which the Netherlands had a relationship during the colonial period.
What the exhibition is about
In the days of Dutch colonial slavery, millions of people were reduced to the status of personal ‘property’. It has proven to be difficult to trace the stories of these people. The exhibition at the Rijksmuseum will center on ten individuals, some of them well-known, others less so. This emphasis on the personal will enable the museum to give a ‘face’ to slavery and make the universal and perpetual relevance of this history tangible. This exhibition does not attempt to offer a complete overview of the history of Dutch slavery. By taking a biographical approach, the museum wants to encourage museum visitors to reflect and to ask questions: How did enslaved people cope with their situation? Were there any voices of dissent? What did people in the Netherlands know about slavery? The exhibition will shed light on the trading triangle linking Europe, Africa and the Americas; on the Indian Ocean region; on southern Africa; and on enslaved people who were brought to the Netherlands.
The people involved in building this exhibition
The Rijksmuseum has assembled a team of specialist curators with wide-ranging academic networks, including Eveline Sint Nicolaas, Valika Smeulders, Maria Holtrop, Stephanie Archangel, and Saida Si Amer. The team will receive support from a think-tank that will convene on four occasions, as well as an international advisory council.
In the run-up to the exhibition, the Rijksmuseum will hold a number of meetings and events focusing on contributions and discourse from society at large. On 18 May 2018, for example, a discussion took place that focused on the part that Wikipedia can play in increasing the accessibility of our collection. And did you know that if you go to our online Rijksstudio, you can already start putting together your own collection of Rijksmuseum objects relating to slavery?
Exhibition | Cut and Paste
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Now on view at Edinburgh’s Modern Two; for the earlier period, see the catalogue essay by Freya Gowrley:
Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage
Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, 29 June — 27 October 2019
A huge range of approaches is on show, from sixteenth-century anatomical ‘flap prints’, to computer-based images; work by amateur, professional and unknown artists; collages by children and revolutionary cubist masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris; from nineteenth-century do-it-yourself collage kits to collage films of the 1960s. Highlights include a three-metre-long folding collage screen, purportedly made in part by Charles Dickens; a major group of Dada and Surrealist collages, by artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Joan Miró, Hannah Höch, and Max Ernst; and major postwar works by Henri Matisse, Robert Rauschenberg, and Peter Blake, including the only surviving original source photographs for Blake’s and Jann Haworth’s iconic, collaged cover for the Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The importance of collage as a form of protest in the 1960s and 70s will be shown in the work of feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Linder, and Hannah Wilke; Punk artists, such as Jamie Reid, whose original collages for the Sex Pistols’ album and posters will feature; and the famously subversive collages of Monty Python founder Terry Gilliam. The exhibition also features the legendary library book covers which the playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell doctored with collages, and put back on Islington Library’s shelves—a move which landed them in prison for six months. In addition, the exhibition also demonstrates how collage remains important for the practice of many artists working today. Owing to the fragility of much of the work, the exhibition will not tour: it can only be seen at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
Patrick Elliott, ed., with essays by Freya Gowrley and Yuval Etgar, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2019), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-1911054313, £25.
Exhibition | America’s First Veterans
From The American Revolution Institute:
America’s First Veterans
The American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., 8 November 2019 — 5 April 2020
John Neagle, A Pensioner of the Revolution, 1830 (Washington, DC: The American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, museum purchase, 2017).
The tens of thousands of men who fought for American independence suffered extraordinary privations in the war and risked their lives and livelihoods to help establish the United States. They had gone unpaid for much of the war, and many of them returned home with little more than the honor of having served the nation and the satisfaction that comes from duty faithfully performed. The new republic, which struggled to pay its wartime debts, thanked them for their service but offered them scant compensation or reward.
America’s First Veterans brings together paintings, artifacts, prints and documents to address the post-war experiences of the men who won the Revolutionary War—not the famous generals and leading officers whose names appear in histories of the war, but rather the junior officers and enlisted men whose stories are less often told. The exhibition focuses on their return to civilian life, their reception by a country torn and bankrupted by eight years of war, and the nation’s gradual realization of its vast debt to the men who won our independence. A centerpiece of the show is John Neagle’s arresting portrait of a pensioner of the Revolution, painted in 1830 in the midst of the fight for comprehensive federal pensions for the remaining Revolutionary War veterans.
Conference | The American Revolution
From the Museum of the American Revolution:
2019 International Conference on the American Revolution
Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia, 3–5 October 2019
The Museum of the American Revolution, the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, and the Richard C. von Hess Foundation are pleased to present the 2019 International Conference on the American Revolution. This event will bring noted historians, writers, and curators from Ireland, Scotland, England, and the United States together to explore military, political, social, and artistic themes from the Age of Revolutions.
The conference will coincide with the opening of Cost of Revolution: The Life and Death of an Irish Soldier, the Museum’s first international loan exhibition. With more than one hundred works of art, historical objects, manuscripts, and maps from lenders across the globe, Cost of Revolution will explore the Age of Revolutions in America and Ireland through the life story of an Irish-born artist and officer in the British Army, Richard Mansergh St. George (1750s–1798).
Program highlights include an opening keynote by Dr. Eliga Gould, speaking on “Making Peace in Britain, Ireland, and America: 1778 to 1783,” and a closing keynote by Martin Mansergh, noted historian and former Irish diplomat and Fianna Fáil politician who played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace process. In addition to two days of engaging talks, panel discussions, and tours of Cost of Revolution, conference guests may register for an optional one-day guided bus trip to follow the footsteps of Richard St. George through the Philadelphia Campaign of 1777.
The full conference packet is available here»
Note (added 29 September 2019) — The posting has been updated to reflect the change in keynote speakers; originally Linda Colley was scheduled to speak but was forced to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances. The museum hopes to host her in the future.
The Burlington Magazine, August 2019
The August issue of The Burlington was especially rich for the eighteenth century; apologies for not posting it much sooner, but it’s worth noting. –CH
The Burlington Magazine 161 (August 2019)
E D I T O R I A L
• “At the Yale Center for British Art,” p. 619. At the end of June Amy Meyers stepped down as Director of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, after seventeen years.
A R T I C L E S
• Sam Rose, “Peer Review in Art History,” pp. 621–25. A more recent development than is often realized, and historically imposed in a variety of ways, peer review is a fundamental but rarely discussed aspect of academic life. What impact does it have on publishing in art history?
• Alexander Echlin, “Was Lord Burlington a Jacobite?,” pp. 626–37. A thesis first put forward thirty years ago that Lord Burlington was a Jacobite, who used buildings and gardens to express his clandestine views, has won a measure of support. However, the biographical evidence is circumstantial and the architectural evidence is so ambiguous that it cannot sustain the argument.
• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Buenos Aires Cathedral in the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 638–47. Greatly altered in the early eighteenth century, the original appearance of the interior of Buenos Aires Cathedral, designed by Antonio Masella and completed by Manuel Álvarez de Rocha in 1771, is here reconstructed from newly identified visual sources, a watercolour of c.1830 and nineteenth-century photographs.
• Alexandra Gajewski and Michael Hall, “The Fate of Notre-Dame, Paris,” pp. 648–52. The first at Notre-Dame in April destroyed its largely medieval roof and the flèche designed by Violeet-le-Duc as well as badly damaging the vaults. Plans for repairs depend on an assessment of the long-term structural damage to the cathedral, despite which a five-year timetable for the restoration has been imposed by President Macron and a competition for a replacement flèche initiated.
• Giovan Battista Fidanza, “New Evidence for the ‘Barberini Apostles’ by Andrea Sacchi and Carlo Maratti,” pp. 653–59. Unpublished documents in the Barberini Archives in the Vatican Library clarify the patronage, authorship, and dating of a celebrated series of nine paintings of the Apostles commissioned from Andrea Sacchi and Carlo Maratti by Cardinals Antonio Barberini the Younger and Carlo Barberini.
R E V I E W S
• Simon Lee, Review of the exhibitions The Majesties’ Retiring Room and A Painting for a Nation: The Execution of Torrijos (Prado, 2019), pp. 673–76.
• John Bold, Review of Matthew Walker, Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 688–89.
• Anthony Colantuono, Review of Claire Farago, Janis Bell and Carlo Vecce, The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Trattato della pittura’ (Brill, 2018), pp. 693–95.
• Sandra Miller, Review of Valerie Steele, ed., Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Colour (Thames & Hudson, 2018), pp. 701–02.
Exhibition | George Stubbs: ‘All Done from Nature’
Skeleton of Eclipse (Collection of the Royal Veterinary College, University College London). Eclipse died in 1789 at the age of 25. The Veterinary College was built in 1791, with its first students enrolling in January of 1792.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Opening next month at MK Gallery:
George Stubbs: ‘All Done from Nature’
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 12 October 2019 — 26 January 2020
Mauritshuis, The Hague, 20 February — 1 June 2020
George Stubbs: ‘All done from Nature’ presents the first significant overview of Stubbs’s work in Britain for more than 30 years and brings together 100 paintings, drawings, and publications—from the National Gallery’s Whistlejacket to pieces that have never been seen in public.
Born in Liverpool in 1724, Stubbs was a quintessential product of the Enlightenment and embodied all of its core principles, questioning traditional authority and embracing the notion that humanity could be improved through the application of reason. Rather than trust to history and the untested example of his artistic and scientific precursors, Stubbs championed doing as a way of thinking and deployed pictorial representation as a form of knowledge and understanding. Today, he is recognised as one of the most original artists of the eighteenth century. His wide-ranging subjects included portraits, conversation pieces, and pictures of exotic and domestic animals—horses included—and his obsession with scientific exactitude has drawn comparison with the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
A major theme of the exhibition is anatomy. The show includes Stubbs’s contributions to a pioneering treatise on midwifery and his preliminary work on A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl. It also includes the detailed studies and drawings that led to The Anatomy of the Horse—the greatest coming together of art and science in British art—alongside the actual skeleton of the legendary racehorse Eclipse, which Stubbs depicted on several occasions.
A version of the show will tour to the Mauritshuis in The Hague where it will be the first-ever exhibition on the artist in the Netherlands. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with major contributions from Alison Wright, Jenny Uglow, Martin Myrone, Martin Postle, and Nicholas Clee as well as new and existing poetry by Roger Robinson.
Anthony Spira, Martin Postle, and Paul Bonaventura, George Stubbs: ‘all done from Nature’ (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1911300687, £35.
More information on the skeleton of Eclipse is available from this article by Mark Brown for The Guardian (6 July 2019).
Exhibition | Rescuing Horace Walpole
This fall at the Lewis Walpole Library:
Rescuing Horace Walpole: The Achievement of W.S. Lewis
Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 20 September 2019 — 24 January 2020
Curated by Stephen Clarke
Wilmarth S. ‘Lefty’ Lewis (Yale Class of 1918) devoted the better part of his life to building the world’s greatest collection relating to Horace Walpole (1717–1797), the British writer, collector, and historian. He also championed Walpole’s importance as a figure in English eighteenth-century life, doing so most effectively as general editor and guiding spirit of the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (Yale University Press, 1937–83), whose 48 volumes are widely acknowledged to this day as a model of scholarship in historical editing.
This fall’s exhibition, Rescuing Horace Walpole: The Achievement of W.S. Lewis, pays tribute to Lewis’s life and legacy as a scholar-collector, on the 40th anniversary of his bequest of the Lewis Walpole Library to his alma mater, Yale University. Drawing heavily on the recently cataloged Lewis archives, the exhibition shows how the total dedication of the collector resulted in a collection of extraordinary range and depth, and expressed itself in some surprising ways. It also evolved into a monumental achievement of scholarship in the Yale-Walpole edition and, in the process, transformed perceptions of Walpole and his age.
A related symposium, Scholarly Editing of Literary Texts from the Long Eighteenth Century, on September 21st, in New Haven, will explore the past, present, and future of scholarly editions of the collected works and correspondences of early modern British writers, ranging from the Yale Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) editions, via the Burney and Boswell papers to new editions now being planned for Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Aphra Behn (1640?–1689).
Curator Stephen Clarke will give a talk on the exhibition at the Lewis Walpole Library on October 28 beginning at 7pm.
Exhibition | Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair
From the Lewis Walpole Library:
Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair
The Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, New Haven, 9 September — 19 December 2019
Curated by Cynthia Roman and Mike Widener
Attributed to Theodore Lane, The Q-n’s ass in a band-box, 22 January 1821; hand-colored etching with stipple (Lewis Walpole Library).
Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair exhibition marks the bicentennial of the Queen Caroline divorce proceedings and focuses on the prolific media coverage around the 1820 trial. The trial is famous among cultural historians as a media event; in law it is remembered for Lord Brougham’s argument that a lawyer’s only duty is “to save that client by all means and expedients.”
There will be an online component following the physical exhibition. For the online exhibition, Cynthia Roman and Mike Widener have invited several scholars from diverse disciplines, at Yale and beyond, including many former research fellows, to contribute a short note focused on an object or group of objects of their choice from the Queen Caroline-related collections.
Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair will enable visitors to explore the rich resources at Yale on the topic of Queen Caroline (1768–1821) and many scholarly perspectives from cultural and legal historians on this fascinating story. A mini-conference, in connection with exhibition, will be held on the afternoon of October 4.
The exhibition is curated by Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library; and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, Lillian Goldman Law Library.
Carlo Dolci’s Saint Agatha Returns to Osterley
From the press release (15 August 2019) . . .
Carlo Dolci, Saint Agatha, oil on canvas, ca. 1665–70 (Osterley, National Trust 2900293).
The return of Saint Agatha to Osterley has provided the opportunity to stage a special winter exhibition for visitors, beginning in November, which will explore the rise to fame and fortune of the Child family who acquired the painting and showcase the art and design that they commissioned and collected from around the globe.
The Child family were goldsmiths and bankers who patronised the fine and decorative arts. The wealth they acquired was used to create the luxurious Robert Adam interiors still seen at Osterley today, and which were filled with Old Master paintings, lacquer furniture, Indian fabrics, and East Asian ceramics. The painting of Saint Agatha, purchased by art lover Sir Robert Child (1674–1721) at the beginning of the 18th century, became one of the works in a great picture collection at Osterley and was recorded in a 1782 inventory. However, it was later sold along with other family heirlooms in the 1930s.
Saint Agatha is a dramatic depiction of Agatha of Sicily, a Christian martyr, who suffered dreadful torture at the hands of the Romans. It is an example of the work of the Baroque master Carlo Dolci (1616–1687), a leading figure of 17th-century Florentine art, whose passionate depictions of holy figures aimed to inspire reverence and empathy for the divine. It captures the miraculous moment when Saint Peter the Apostle appeared to Saint Agatha in a vision and healed her wounds.
John Chu, National Trust Assistant Curator of Pictures and Sculpture explains: “Although an extraordinary number of original furnishings remain at Osterley, its once-famous picture collection has been almost completely dispersed or destroyed. We are lucky to have a number of paintings on loan from the Jersey family, but it is fantastic when a rare opportunity arises to purchase one for the property, especially one as moving and profound as this. The homecoming of Saint Agatha provides the chance to look more closely at the importance of pictures to the story of the house. She will be the highlight of our exhibition exploring the Child family’s meteoric rise and what these precious objects meant to them at a remarkable moment in British history. Saint Agatha will be displayed alongside other European and Asian works of art and design, including furniture and ceramics, bought by the family. We also want to give our visitors a sense of the special meaning that each object held for the people and cultures that created them. Dolci’s Saint Agatha, for instance, held powerful spiritual resonances for its Roman Catholic maker and his first Florentine patrons, but it was seen in a much more secular light when it entered the collection at Osterley and was displayed alongside family portraits. We are very grateful to Art Fund and our other generous donors and supporters for enabling us to acquire Saint Agatha and hope the exhibition will inspire all those who enjoy discovering examples of the highest quality art and design.”
Saint Agatha was purchased for £248,750 at the Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale [Lot 39] in London on 5 July 2018 thanks to a grant of £85,000 from Art Fund, support from private donors, Trust members, and visitors to Osterley Park, along with support from a fund set up by the late Simon Sainsbury to support acquisitions for the historic houses of the National Trust.
Since the acquisition, the painting has undergone two phases of conservation treatment.
Eleanor McGrath, Head of Grants at Art Fund, said: “It is wonderful to see this striking work return to its home at Osterley Park and House where it will be the highlight of the exhibition, helping visitors imagine the wider historic collections and life of the Child family.”
Treasures of Osterley: Rise of a Banking Family runs from 4 November 2019 until 23 February 2020.
Enfilade 
leave a comment