Save Ashgate Publishing
I know many of you are already aware of the bad news regarding the planned closures of Ashgate’s Burlington and UK offices. The online petition now includes 3,700+ signatures (and counting). –CH
Save Ashgate Publishing
Petition to Rachel Lynch, Managing Director, Ashgate Publishing & Managing Director, Humanities & Social Science Books, Taylor & Francis Group Jeremy North
Ashgate Publishing Company was purchased by Informa (Taylor & Francis Publishing) in 2015. On November 24th, 2015, the North American office of the press in Burlington, Vermont will close and Ashgate’s US staff members, including Erika Gaffney, Ann Donahue, Margaret Michniewicz, Alyssa Berthiaume, Kathy Bond Borie, Seth Hibbert, Stephanie Peake, Martha McKenna, Lea Durfee, Suzanne Sprague, and Emilly Ferro will cease to be representatives of Ashgate.
According to an e-mail sent to series editors, plans are still being discussed for Ashgate’s publishing business in the UK. However, information has since emerged that the UK office is scheduled to close in December.
Independent academic presses like Ashgate have offered a safe haven for scholars working in certain subfields as University presses closed entire publishing specializations and fired editorial staff in response to campus austerity measures. Academic presses are more than profit margins, income from the backlist, utility bills, payroll, and marketing campaigns. Ashgate flourished through the bonds formed between editors and authors, the care and attention of copy editors, and above all, the good will of authors and readers. We the undersigned authors, readers, and reviewers of Ashgate books write to voice our appreciation for the accomplishments of Ashgate’s North American office. We urge Taylor & Francis to reverse course immediately and restore Ashgate’s US and UK offices.
Exhibition | Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected
Chiswick House by Lord Burlington, 1729
(London: RIBA Collections)
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Press release (23 July 2015) for the exhibition now on view at RIBA:
Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected
Royal Institute of British Architects, London, 9 September 2015 — 9 January 2016
The Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio is the only architect who has given his name to a style, one that is still in use around the world after nearly 500 years. From the US Capitol to a 21st-century Somerset cowshed, Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected introduces Palladio’s design principles and explores how they have been interpreted, copied and re-imagined across time and continents from his death in 1580 right up to the present day.
Focusing on his legacy, RIBA’s exhibition explores how architects such as Inigo Jones and Lord Burlington turned Palladianism into a national style. The style was adopted in the design of houses, churches, and public buildings around the world from New Delhi to Leningrad. Palladianism became so widespread that it seeped into people’s unconscious references and desires: elements were found popping-up in American Negro Churches and terraced housing and homes in the UK. The 20th century saw a revival of traditional Palladian mansions while the 21st century has seen his design principles being utilised in a more abstract way. The exhibition asks many questions about what makes a building ‘Palladian’. Does a building have to look classical to be Palladian? Is it the design principles or the social and political connotations of tradition, power, and establishment that have led to the enduring popularity of the style? The exhibition is structured chronologically around three themes: revolution, evolution, and the contemporary. It includes 50 original works, including drawings, models, and busts.
The first part of the exhibition introduces Palladio and outlines his unique system of architecture. It charts the development of Anglo-Palladianism from 17th-century England, through to the transformation of Palladianism into a national style by the mid-18th century. It also explores the role of books in spreading Palladio’s ideas—both his own Four Books of Architecture and later publications that spread Palladian style beyond Britain. Highlights include Palladio’s A Design for a Palace (1540s) and projects for low-cost housing in Venice (1550s), original drawings by Inigo Jones include a preliminary design for the Queen’s House at Greenwich (1616), Colen Campbell’s original pen and wash design for Mereworth Castle, Kent (1723), and an original drawing of Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House (1729).
The second part of the exhibition follows Palladio’s legacy worldwide in a series of themes that explore how others have either followed his guidelines to the letter or employed them more creatively. It looks at how Palladian design has been adopted for commercial viability and in the service of politics and religion—both in western countries and in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Away from the centres of power, people turned their hand to Palladian self-builds with anonymous builders using pattern books to fuse Palladian elements with local vernacular traditions. Highlights include the original 1721 model of St Martin-in-the-Fields church by James Gibbs, a perspective of Catherine the Great’s Pella Palace near St Petersburg by Ivan Starov (c.1786), a watercolour perspective of Stormont in Belfast by Sir Arnold Thornely (1927), and Palladio’s original designs for the Villa Valmarana (c.1560) and the Palazzo Antonini (c.1560).
The last section of the exhibition follows the story of 20th- and 21st-century Palladianism. Despite the rise of modernism, Palladianism survived in Britain and America as a domestic style both for landed families and the newly rich who commissioned grand classical homes to evoke a sense of history and confer status. Highlights include a linocut perspective of Kings Walden Bury, Essex by Raymond Erith and Quinlan Terry (1971) and photographs and models of houses built since the 1960s. The exhibition goes on to explore post-modern Palladianism, where the style has been referenced historically, playfully or ironically. Key exhibits include works by Swedish architect Erik Asplund and Belgian architect Charles Vandenhove alongside other new buildings on the continent and in Canada. The exhibition ends by examining contemporary abstract Palladianism—buildings that contain no visual references to classical architecture but follow Palladian design principles in terms of proportion or planning. It asks whether a building has to look like a Palladian building in order to be one? It will include a newly commissioned film comparing Palladio’s Villa Caldogno with Brick House (2005) by Caruso St John and looks at a selection of contemporary buildings, ranging from a model of an underground house in Mongolia by OFFICE Architects to offices in Switzerland by Peter Märkli.
The exhibition coincides with the 300th anniversary of the publication of two books key to the spread of Palladianism worldwide: Giacomo Leoni’s first full translation into English of Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura and Colen Campbell’s survey of English architecture Vitruvius Britannicus, both published in 1715. These books paved the way for a flood of cheaper pattern books that enabled anyone, from Russian royalty to a American carpenters, to create Palladian designs.
The RIBA Collections contain over 350 drawings and sketches by Andrea Palladio, the world’s largest assemblage of his drawings—85% of all those in existence. The exhibition is designed by Caruso St John Architects. The design takes its inspiration from the interior of Palladio’s villas and the way that his Four Books of Architecture have been used by generations of architects. The palette will reference Villa Caldogno’s frescos. Palladian Design is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, The Headley Trust, and the American Friends of the British Architectural Library.
The Burlington Magazine, November 2015
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 157 (November 2015)
Interior of the Church of Santiago de Surco, Lima, Peru, attributed by Gauvin Alexander Bailey to Johann Rehr and Santiago Rosales, before 1759–1773.
A R T I C L E S
• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “The Fantastical Rococo Altarpieces of Santiago de Surco, Peru,” pp. 769–75.
R E V I E W S
• Simon Swynfen Jervis, Review of Giuseppe Beretti and Alvar González-Palacios, Giuseppe Maggiolini: Catalogo ragionato dei disegni (In Limine, 2014) and Michael Sulzbacher, Peter Atzig, Sabine Schneider, and Karsten Hommel, Friedrich Gottlob Hoffmann (Grassi Museum, 2014), pp. 790–91.
• David Bindman, Review of William Pressly, James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art (Cork University Press, 2014), pp. 791–92.
• Richard Green, Review of Christopher Wright, The Schorr Collection of Old Master and Nineteenth-Century Paintings (The Schorr Collection, 2014), pp. 792–93.
• David Pullins, Review of Carolyn Weekley, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South (Yale University Press, 2013), p. 795.
Exhibition | Alessandro Magnasco (1667–1749)
Opening next week at Galerie Canesso:
Alessandro Magnasco (1667–1749), The Mature Years of a Nonconformist Painter
Galerie Canesso, Paris, 25 November 2015 — 31 January 2016
Palazzo Bianco, Genoa, 25 February — 5 June 2016
Alessandro Magnasco (1667–1749), les années de la maturité est une exposition centrée sur les plus belles œuvres de la production tardive de ce peintre anticonformiste. L’exposition a le privilège de bénéficier d’un partenariat exceptionnel avec les Musei de Strada Nuova de la ville de Gênes, lieu de naissance de l’artiste. Elle débute à la Galerie Canesso à Paris (du 25 novembre 2015 au 31 janvier 2016) pour faire ensuite étape au Palazzo Bianco de Gênes (du 25 février 2016 au 5 juin 2016).
Artiste à l’œuvre originale et extravagante, Magnasco a été découvert au début du XXe siècle et il est considéré, à certains égards, comme l’un des précurseurs de Goya (1746–1828), des Expressionnistes et l’un des pères du fantastique et du macabre. La fascination de l’artiste pour les atmosphères sombres, la dissolution des formes et un propos moral sévère met en évidence sa dissidence par rapport à la culture figurative contemporaine. Néanmoins, son œuvre riche et variée ne peut se définir par ces seuls caractères. Les réalisations de l’artiste impressionnent, tant du point de vue du langage pictural extrêmement personnel, que de celui des sujets qu’il est le seul à aborder en Europe entre les XVIIe et les XVIIIe siècles. Ses compositions parcourues de petites figures en mouvement nous portent vers l’art de Guardi (1712–1793) et des Vénitiens du Settecento. L’exposition présentera une vingtaine de tableaux, certains à découvrir pour la première fois en France.
Exhibition | Revolution under a King: French Prints, 1789–92
From UCL:
Revolution under a King: French Prints, 1789–92
UCL Art Museum, London, 11 January — 10 June 2016
Curated by David Bindman and Richard Taws
We are pleased to announce that in January 2016 we’ll be opening the exhibition Revolution under a King: French Prints, 1789–92, featuring a selection of prints from the early, highly volatile years of the French Revolution, curated by Professor David Bindman and Dr Richard Taws, in collaboration between UCL Art Museum and UCL History of Art. It is well known that a chain of key historical events characterised the French Revolution, making it effectively the biggest political media event of its time. These events were communicated extensively throughout Europe in print culture and the combination of image and text, employed extensively in newspapers and graphic works, made for powerful satire and caricature.
It is, however, not always realised that the pivotal moment, the Fall of the Bastille, was in fact followed by three years in which the king of France still nominally presided over the dissolution of the old feudal order. It is this period that is the focus of the exhibition, tracing the early years of the Revolution from the ‘June Days’ of 1789, through the Fall of the Bastille, to the eventual deposition of the Louis XVI in 1792. The exhibition will consist of vivid coloured prints of major events from the period, and a selection of medals, including one made from ‘chains of servitude’ supposedly found in the ruins of the Bastille.
New Book | Piranesi’s Lost Words
From Penn State UP:
Heather Hyde Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-0271065496, $80.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was one of the most important artists eighteenth-century Europe produced. But Piranesi was more than an artist; he was an engraver and printmaker, architect, antiquities dealer, archaeologist, draftsman, publisher, bookseller, and author. In Piranesi’s Lost Words, Heather Hyde Minor considers Piranesi the author and publisher, focusing on his major publications from 1756 to his death in 1778. Piranesi designed and manufactured twelve beautiful, large-format books combining visual and verbal content over the course of his lifetime. While the images from these books have been widely studied, they are usually considered in isolation from the texts in which they originally appeared. This study reunites Piranesi’s texts and images, interpreting them in conjunction as composite art. Minor shows how this composite art demonstrates Piranesi’s gift for interpreting the classical world and its remains—and how his books offer a critique of both the Enlightenment project of creating an epistemology of the classical past and how eighteenth-century scholars explicated this past. Piranesi’s books, Minor argues, were integral to the emergence of the modern discipline of art history. Using new, previously unpublished archival material, Piranesi’s Lost Words refines our understanding of Piranesi’s works and the eighteenth-century context in which they were created.
Conference | Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship
From ArtWatch UK; also see Brian Allen’s remarks in The Guardian (14 November 2015). . .
Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship
The Society of Antiquaries of London, 1 December 2015
Connoisseurship may be defined as expertise in art in the very narrowest of senses; surprisingly, however, it is also a definition in which many different disciplines intersect. In the public realms of law and the art world, a ‘connoisseur’ must be recognized as being an expert, as being capable of giving credible testimony regarding the subject, and as remaining actively engaged with the world in which attributions and authentications are made. This public recognition takes years of work and is hard-won. Yet, does this public recognition of expertise signify accuracy or truth in the claims that a connoisseur makes about art? This one-day conference investigates the always-interrelated and often mutually-troubled processes by which connoisseurship is constructed in the fields of art and law, and the ways in which these different fields come together in determining the scope and clarity of the connoisseur’s ‘eye’.
Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship is organized by ArtWatch UK, the Center for Art Law (USA) and the LSE Cultural Heritage Law (UK), to be held at The Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE. All inquiries to artwatch.uk@gmail.com. Admission is by ticket only. For ticket prices and to purchase tickets (exclusively through Eventbrite ), please click here.
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P R O G R A M M E
8.30 Registration
I | The Making of Art and the Power of Its Testimonies
9.00 Michael Daley — Like/Unlike, Interests/Disinterest
Michael Daley (UK), Director, ArtWatch UK, an artist who trained for twelve years (with post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools) and taught in art schools for fifteen years before practicing as an illustrator (principally with Financial Times, The Times Supplements, The Independent and, presently, Standpoint magazine), will suggest that the principles of sound connoisseurship in making attributions and appraising restorations are implicit in fine art training and practice, and will discuss the trial in Italy of Professor James Beck on a charge of aggravated criminal slander brought in Italy by a restorer against the scholar but not against the newspapers which had carried his reported comments.
9.25 Euphrosyne Doxiadis — Perception, Hype and the Rubens Police
Euphrosyne Doxiadis (Greece), a painter/scholar whose 1996 book The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt won the won the Prix Bordin, the Prix d’ ouvrage by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France, and, the 1997 ‘Prize of the Athens Academy’, will challenge the Rubens attribution given to the National Gallery’s oil on panel Samson and Delilah in the 28th year of her researches. Astonished at her first sighting of this painting in the National Gallery, the author will discuss both its manifest artistic disqualifications and the edifice of support that surrounds an attribution first made in 1930 by a leading Rubens scholar who today is notorious for his many excessively-generous certificates of authenticity.
9.40 Jacques Franck — Why the Mona Lisa Would Not Survive Modern Day Conservation Treatment
Jacques Franck (FR), an art historian and a painter trained in Old Master techniques, is the Permanent Consulting Expert to the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA, and an editorial consultant to Academia Leonardi Vinci. He was a curator/exhibitor in the Uffizi’s exhibition La mente di Leonardo (2006) and will draw on experiences as an adviser to the Louvre’s restorations of Leonardo’s St Anne and Belle Ferronnière, and his current PhD investigations on Leonardo’s sfumato technique at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, to demonstrate the threats presently facing the Mona Lisa in a museum conservation system that he considers inadequate to preserve the masterpiece in the event of it being cleaned at the Louvre.
9.55 Ann Pizzorusso — Leonardo’s Geology: The Authenticity of The Virgin of the Rocks
Ann Pizzorusso (US) is a professional geologist and a Renaissance scholar whose work focuses on Leonardo da Vinci as a geologist. She has written numerous scholarly articles on Leonardo and his students, and the artists who preceded and followed him, analyzing the use of geology in their works. Her landmark article, “Leonardo’s Geology: The Authenticity of The Virgin of the Rocks” compared the two versions of the paintings. Demonstrating geology as a diagnostic tool—which was in fact Leonardo’s trademark—she will attribute only one of the two versions to Leonardo. Her new, four gold medals-winning book, Tweeting Da Vinci, discusses how the geology of Italy has influenced its art, literature, religion, medicine.
10.10 Discussion
10.30 Coffee
11.00 Segolene Bergeon-Langle — Can Science Deliver Its Promises to Art?
Segolene Bergeon-Langle (FR), France’s Honorary General Curator of Heritage, is both a scientist and an art historian. A former Head of Painting Conservation in the Louvre and the French National Museums, and a former Chair of the ICCROM Council (Rome), she is presently a member of the Louvre’s preservation and conservation committee. She will discuss various restoration cases showing how scientific analysis can fail properly to understand painters’ techniques and the deterioration of paint layers when questions are inadequately framed or when the interpretation of scientific reports is inadequate. Such difficulties can be overcome when connoisseurs themselves ask for scientific analysis to clarify some problem they have encountered, or when they can examine technical reports together with their scientific partners so as to avoid otherwise possible misinterpretations.
11.15 Michel Favre-Felix — Overlooked Witnesses: The Testimony of Copies
Michel Favre-Felix (FR) is a painter, the president of ARIPA (association for the respect of the integrity of artistic heritage), the director of the review Nuances, and the 2009 recipient of the ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize, will present two restoration cases, studied from the French Museums’ scientific files, illustrating how restorations fail by not heeding the testimony of historical copies. He will stress the importance of disciplined arguments and of expert guidance from art historians, in a critical approach, rather than as the endorsement of ‘discoveries’ claimed during restorations by restorers. His cases will demonstrate how successive restorations can impose fresh and compounding misrepresentations on art when supposedly correcting previous errors.
11.30 Kasia Pisarek — How Reliable Are Today’s Attributions in Art? The Case of La Bella Principessa Examined
Kasia Pisarek (Poland/UK), an independent art historian and research specialist on attributions, took an MA at the Sorbonne and a PhD at the University of Warsaw. Her doctoral dissertation “Rubens and Connoisseurship: On the Problems of Attribution and Rediscovery,” identified many recently fallen Rubens attributions. She will set out a number of interlocking aesthetic, art historical and technical arguments against the recently claimed attribution to Leonardo of the drawing La Bella Principessa, which appeared anonymously and without provenance in New York in 1998. Her findings were published in the June 2015 Artibus et Historiae.
11.45 Discussion
12.15 Lunch
II | Righting the Record: Diverse Experts as Authority
1.15 Introduction by session moderator Tatiana Flessas
1.20 Brian Allen — Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater: The Demise of Connoisseurship since the 1980s
Brian Allen (UK) is a former Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and is now Chairman of the London Old Master dealers Hazlitt Ltd. He will speak about the gradual demise of connoisseurship in academic art history (especially in the UK) over the past three decades and will consider the effect of this on the study of art history and the art market. Up to the early 1980s few questioned the importance for young art historians of acquiring the skills to determine authorship but as the discipline of art history evolved from its amateur roots in Britain so too did a determination to adopt the theoretical principles of other areas of study. Only now are we witnessing the consequences of this change of emphasis.
1.35 Peter Cannon-Brookes — Reconciling Connoisseurship with Different Means of Production of Works of Art
Peter Cannon-Brookes (UK) turned from natural sciences to art history and has been active as a museum curator with strong interests in conservation and security. Connoisseurship has been undermined by the decay of museum-based pre-Modern Movement scholarship leading to the growing corruption of reference collections and of connoisseurship enhanced by the detailed study of them. Can the systems of stylistic analysis evolved from the 1940s and social anthropology be reconciled with the actual processes of production of works of art throughout the ages? The business models adopted by Raphael, El Greco and Rubens are by no means exceptional, and the evident disdain of Rodin for those prepared to pay high prices for indifferent drawing-room marble versions of his compositions, encourage re-evaluation of connoisseurship as an essential tool.
1.50 Charles Hope — Demotion and Promotion: The Asymmetrical Aspect of Connoisseurship
Charles Hope (UK) is a former Director of the Warburg Institute and will discuss the tension that exists between connoisseurship as a type of expertise acquired by long experience and as an activity based on the use of historical evidence and reasoned argument. Will claim that, in practice, these two aspects are often in contradiction to one another, and that many connoisseurs have been unable or unwilling to provide clear arguments about how they have reached their opinions. Too often, judgements about authorship are decided by appeals to authority, and almost by vote, rather than by evidence.
2.05 Martin Eidelberg — Fact vs. Interpretation: The Art Historian at Work
Martin Eidelberg (US), professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University, will discuss the reliability and fallibility of provenance and scientific analysis of pictures in determining the authenticity of paintings. Using case histories that he has gathered from his research in preparing a catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), he will consider whether such supposedly factual data is reliable, or whether it is subjective and open to the interpretation of scholars.
2.20 Discussion
2.40 Robin Simon — Owzat! The Great Cricket Fakes Operation
Robin Simon (UK) is Editor of The British Art Journal and Honorary Professor of English, UCL. Recent books include Hogarth, France and British Art and (with Martin Postle) Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting. He will report his discovery (in 1983) that many of the paintings depicting cricket in the MCC collection at Lord’s were fakes, most of them made by one person between 1918 and 1948 but purporting to date from the 16th century to the 20th. They had been presented to MCC by Sir Jeremiah Colman (of the mustard family) who acquired them from a variety of agents and dealers. It is quite a tale and turns, among other things, upon an ingenious manipulation of provenance.
2.55 Anne Laure Bandle — Sleepers at Auction: Boon or Bane?
Anne Laure Bandle (CH) is guest lecturer at the LSE, director of the Art Law Foundation, and a trainee lawyer at the law firm Froriep in Geneva. She wrote a PhD in law on the misattribution of art at auction and more specifically on the sale of sleepers. She will discuss the creation of sleepers at auction by means of different cases, and focus on the attribution process of auction houses and their liability when selling a sleeper.
3.10 Elizabeth Simpson — Connoisseurship: Its Use, Disuse, and Misuse in the Study of Ancient Art
Elizabeth Simpson (USA) is a professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New Yor, a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, and director of the project to study and conserve the collection of wooden objects excavated from the royal tumulus burials at Gordion, Turkey. She will address the use and misuse of connoisseurship in the study of ancient art, the scholarly and methodological divides between archaeology and art history, and the current trend away from connoisseurship in the study of ancient art and artifacts. She will also show how connoisseurship is used to fabricate narratives for looted objects in order to validate unprovenienced works in private and museum collections.
3.25 Round table discussion
3.45 Tea
III | Wishful Thinking, Scientific Evidence, and Legal Precedent
4.15 Introduction by session moderator, Charles Hope
4:20 Irina Tarsis — Reputation is no Substitute to Due Diligence: Lessons from the Closure of the Knoedler Gallery (1857–2011)
Irina Tarsis (USA), is an art historian and an attorney based in Brooklyn, NY. Founder and Director of Center for Art Law, Ms. Tarsis is an author of multiple articles on the subject of restitution, provenance research, book history and copyright issues. With degrees in International Business, Art History and Law, in her practice Ms. Tarsis focuses on ownership disputes surrounding tangible and intangible property. She will discuss the history of the Knoedler Gallery that closed after more than 160 years in business having sold a cache of misattributed forgeries. Short of a dozen lawsuits were brought against the principles and staff of the Gallery for selling works attributed to the blue chip artists. Ms. Tarsis will discuss the responsibilities of dealers, collectors and art advisors to their clients and the scholarship when handling art in business transactions.
4:35 Nicholas Eastaugh — The Challenge of Science: Does ‘Fine Art Forensics’ Really Exist?
Dr Nicholas Eastaugh (UK), Founder/Director, Art Analysis and Research Ltd., London, originally trained as a physicist before going on to study conservation and art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he completed a PhD in scientific analysis and documentary research of historical pigments in 1988. Since 1989 he has been a consultant in the scientific and art technological study of paint and paintings. A frequent lecturer, he is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. In 1999 he co-founded the Pigmentum Project, an interdisciplinary research group developing comprehensive high-quality documentary and analytical data on historical pigments and other artists’ materials. This led to the publication of The Pigment Compendium in 2004, which quickly became a standard reference text in the field. In 2008 he identified the first of the forgeries to be recognised as by Wolfgang Beltracchi, the now infamous Red Painting with Horses.
4.50 Megan Noh — Trends in Authentication Disputes
Megan E. Noh (USA) is the Associate General Counsel of Bonhams, one of the world’s largest international auction houses. Based in the New York office, Ms. Noh practices in a global hub for art transactions, and is uniquely poised to observe the numerous transactions conducted by Bonhams which require its specialists’ assistance with the authentication process, as well as the growing body of caselaw and legislative efforts emerging from this key jurisdiction. Ms. Noh’s presentation will cover trends in authentication disputes, including the cessation of artists’ foundations and authentication boards to issue opinions confirming attribution, as well as increased litigation and reliance of parties on scientific evidence and testimony. She will also elucidate the position of auction houses as a liaisons or ‘middlemen’ in this process, facilitating the flow of information as between collectors (sellers and buyers) and third party authenticators.
5.25 Final discussion moderated by Charles Hope
5.50 Closing remarks by Irina Tarsis
Exhibition | Rise and Fall: The Earl of Mar and the 1715 Jacobite Rising
Press release (9 November 2015) for exhibitions now on view in Edinburgh:
Rise and Fall: The Earl of Mar and the 1715 Jacobite Rising
Calum Colvin: Jacobites by Name
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 14 November 2015 — 27 March 2016
Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, with His Son Thomas, Lord Erskine (Collection of Earl of Mar & Kellie at Alloa Tower, National Trust for Scotland)
The 300th anniversary of the 1715 Jacobite Rising will be marked by two fascinating new displays at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this winter. A key player in the rising, John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, will be the focus of Rise and Fall, while Calum Colvin, one of Scotland’s leading contemporary artists, will explore the visual imagery and legacy of the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745 in Jacobites by Name.
Responsible for initiating and subsequently ending the Rising, the Earl of Mar (1675–1732) was an extraordinary individual, passionate about both politics and the arts. Born in Alloa, Clackmannanshire, he was a Member of Parliament and later Secretary of State for Scotland, before being deprived of office by the new Hanoverian king, George I, in 1714. Mar raised the standard of rebellion against the Hanoverians, and from September to December 1715 he was effectively ruling Scotland.
The 1715 Rising is a key date in the power struggle between the Protestant Hanoverians and of the exiled Stuarts. It was a major attempt by the Jacobites—the supporters of King James VII (of Scotland) and II (of England) and his heirs—to regain the throne for the Stuart claimant, James Francis Edward Stuart. However victory eluded Mar and he ultimately fled to France with James Stuart in 1716, where he remained until his death in 1732.
At the centre of Rise and Fall will be two large and impressive portraits of the Earl and his wife, Frances Pierrepont (of around 1714), by Sir Godfrey Kneller, the leading portrait painter in England of the time. These imposing paintings usually hang at the National Trust for Scotland property Alloa Tower—the ancestral home of the Earls of Mar and Kellie—and were commissioned by Mar himself. Although he is often defined by his political and military career, Mar was a man of fine taste and an enthusiastic patron of the arts, with a talent for amateur architecture and garden design.
Prints, drawings and miniatures also on show in Rise and Fall bring alive this cataclysmic episode of Scottish history and shed light on the life and interests of the Earl of Mar. Key loans have come from the collection of the current Earl and Mar of Kellie and the National Records of Scotland.
Calum Colvin, Lochaber no More, 2015
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s outstanding Jacobite collection has been used to inspire a contemporary intervention which complements Rise and Fall by the renowned Scottish artist Calum Colvin. His Jacobites by Name inventively combines photography with painting and installation. The result includes new works such as Lochaber no More (2015) which links two images of Charles Edward Stuart, commonly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, the second Jacobite pretender to the throne and instigator of the failed 1745 Jacobite Rising. The first of the images shows Charles as a young man and the other much older.
To make his photographic works, Colvin constructs a set in his studio, using furniture and ornaments, and then paints images on to these three-dimensional objects. When seen through the lens of his camera, a two-dimensional image is formed, a blend of reality and illusion. Lochaber no More is a powerful evocation of the passage of time and the melancholy of lost Jacobite hope, while fragments of burned tartan hint at the tragic outcome of the last rising. In his work, Colvin also alludes to the tradition of secret symbolism and optical illusionism in Jacobite-related art; because support for the exiled Stuarts was dangerous and could lead to accusations of disloyalty to the Crown, ‘secret’ portraits of the Pretenders were to be discovered on folded fans, sewn discreetly onto articles of clothing, or concealed inside the lid of a closed box.
Colvin was born in Glasgow and studied art in Dundee and London, before coming to prominence in the mid-1980s. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States and has worked on commissions for the National Galleries of Scotland.
Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery said: “The Jacobite struggle remains potent and romantic 300 years after the key events that defined it. These complementary displays connect powerful portraiture of the 18th century with contemporary responses, and remind us in an engaging and inspiring way of a turbulent period in Scottish history. We are especially grateful to the National Trust for Scotland, the Earl of Mar and Kellie and the artist Calum Colvin for their generosity and commitment to the project.”
Calum Colvin commented: “This new body of work investigates the traces of Jacobite material culture, portraiture and visual illusion to be found in Scottish museums up and down the country. I wanted to take a fresh look at this material with a view to re-interpret the matrix of symbols and allusions that they carry and, through a range of different types of contemporary making, bring them into the digital age. The works are contrasted with the existing collection in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and question the role of this familiar iconography in Scottish national culture.”
About the National Trust for Scotland
One of Scotland’s leading conservation charities, the National Trust for Scotland cares for some of the nation’s most important heritage sites, from grand castles to humble homes and wild coastline. With more than 100 properties packed with paintings, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and fine furniture, the Trust holds Scotland’s biggest collection of in-situ artworks. Amongst its gems include many fine pictures by artists including Raeburn, Batoni and Peploe to name a few. Some of Scotland’s finest contemporary works, including pieces by Ken Currie, Julia Douglas and Julie Roberts, are on currently on display at Drum Castle in Aberdeenshire while Aberdeen Art Gallery undergoes a major refurbishment.
About Alloa Tower
Alloa Tower is the ancestral home of the Erskine family, the Earls of Mar and Kellie. The tower is the largest, oldest keep in Scotland and was originally built to guard the nearby ferry crossing on the River Forth. The Erskines were aides to the Stuart monarchs and guardians to the royal children—Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI both spent part of their early lives at Alloa Tower. It was Mary who granted the earldom to the Erskines in 1565. Since its construction around 1368, Alloa Tower has been altered many times and provides a rich variety of architectural styles and historic collections. Once part of a much larger mansion, with extensive gardens modelled on those of Versailles, among the features within the tower are a sweeping, eighteenth-century Italianate staircase, a medieval oak beamed roof, a dungeon and a well. It also houses collections of important paintings, on loan from the Erskine family, including the two full length portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller on display here.
In 2015 the fourteenth-century Alloa Tower in Clackmannanshire was acquired by the National Trust for Scotland (NTS), having previously been managed by NTS working in partnership with the Clackmannanshire Heritage Trust, with financial support from Clackmannanshire Council. From 1988, Alloa Tower was restored from a semi-derelict state and first opened to the public in 1996. It is this partnership, and the philanthropic endeavours over many years of the current Earl of Mar and Kellie and his father, that have enabled NTS to secure the tower’s long-term future.
Historians of Netherlandish Art Fellowships, 2016–17
From HNA:
Historians of Netherlandish Art Fellowships, 2016–17
Applications due by 14 December 2015
We urge members of Historians of Netherlandish Art to apply for the 2016–17 Fellowship. Scholars of any nationality who have been HNA members in good standing for at least two years are eligible to apply. The topic of the research project must be within the field of Northern European art ca. 1400–1800. Up to $2,000 may be requested for purposes such as travel to collections or research facilities, purchase of photographs or reproduction rights, or subvention of a publication. Preference will be given to projects nearing completion (such as books under contract). Winners will be notified in February 2016, with funds to be distributed by April. The application should consist of: 1) a short description of project (1–2 pp), 2) budget, 3) list of further funds applied/received for the same project, and 4) current cv. A selection from a recent publication may be included but is not required. Pre-dissertation applicants must include a letter of recommendation from their advisor.
Applications should be sent, preferably via e-mail, by December 14, 2015, to Paul Crenshaw, Vice-President, Historians of Netherlandish Art. E-mail: paul.crenshaw@providence.edu; Postal address: Providence College, 1 Cummingham Square, Providence RI 02918-0001.
New Book | The Frick Collection: Decorative Arts Handbook
Press release (10 June 2015) from The Frick:
Charlotte Vignon, The Frick Collection: Decorative Arts Handbook (New York: The Frick Collection in association with Scala Arts Publishers, 2015), 172 pages, ISBN: 978-1857599398 $25.
The unique atmosphere of The Frick Collection has as much to do with the decorative arts as with the old master paintings that line the museum’s walls. Indeed the enamels, clocks and watches, furniture, gilt bronzes, porcelain, ceramics, silver, and textiles far exceed in number, and are the equal in quality, of the works on canvas and panel. The institution announces the publication of the first handbook devoted to the decorative arts in the collection. This long overdue book will help convey the balance among the various art forms represented in the house and provide a valuable introduction to this area. Comments Director Ian Wardropper, “Despite the manifest importance of decorative arts at the Frick, until recently our small staff did not include a specialist in the field. Thanks to an endowment campaign and the generosity of a number of supporters a permanent curatorial position was created in September 2009. With energy and imagination, the first incumbent of this curatorship, Charlotte Vignon, has initiated a series of exhibitions that highlight this aspect of the collection. The present handbook is another indication of her scholarly dedication to the decorative arts.”
The Frick Collection: Decorative Arts Handbook offers fresh insight on various works long in the museum’s holdings and also includes commentary on more recently acquired examples. Exquisitely illustrated with new photography, this paperback volume is available in English and French editions.
Henry Clay Frick: Developing a Decorative Arts Collection
Acquiring paintings preoccupied Henry Clay Frick when he moved to New York in the first years of the twentieth century. While renting William H. Vanderbilt’s mansion at Fifth Avenue and 51st Street, he devoted his attention to collecting masterpieces by Rembrandt, Velázquez, and other masters. As the sumptuous house he constructed at 70th Street took shape between 1912 and 1914, he recognized the need for furnishings of a caliber that matched his painting collection. Interestingly, most of his purchases in this area were made just before or after he began to occupy the house and in a very concentrated period of time.
A trip to London and Paris in the spring of 1914 inspired many of the choices Frick would make for his New York mansion. After meeting Victor Cavendish, the ninth Duke of Devonshire, at Landsdowne House in London and his country house at Chatsworth, Frick acquired from him a suite of tapestry furniture thought to be eighteenth-century Gobelins. Impressed by the Wallace Collection and wishing to emulate it, he set out to acquire high-quality decorative arts of different periods and materials, especially porcelain, oriental carpets, and French Renaissance enamels and furniture, such as pieces made by André-Charles Boulle, with their distinctive turtle-shell and brass veneers. In Paris, through the intermediary of the American decorator Elsie de Wolfe, he purchased French furniture from the collection of Sir John Murray Scott (inherited from Lady Wallace, the widow of the founder of the Wallace Collection). In a single month, he spent more than $400,000, more than he had ever spent on collecting in this field.
In some cases, furniture and decorative arts were assembled to complement specific rooms of the house. Elsie de Wolf, for example, counseled the acquisition of a desk by the great French eighteenth-century cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener together with Sèvres porcelain for Adelaide Frick’s second-floor dressing room, which was lined with wall panels painted by François Boucher’s workshop. The room and its furnishings were transferred to the first floor in 1935. Other great eighteenth-century French furnishings for Adelaide’s dressing room came through Joseph Duveen, then the head of Duveen Brothers. After Fragonard’s cycle of paintings was installed in the drawing room in 1915–16, Duveen sold Frick many more works to embellish its decor. French Renaissance furniture was bought to complement the collection of sixteenth-century enamels acquired in 1916; Henry’s office was transformed into a gallery for its display. The Italian Renaissance cassoni were always intended to be placed beneath masterpieces of painting in the West Gallery or elsewhere.
Carefully selected blocs of decorative arts, such as the forty-six pieces of Limoges enamel Frick acquired through Duveen from the estate of J. Pierpont Morgan, were one means by which the collection grew quickly. Morgan’s death in 1913 gave Frick the opportunity to choose from one of the finest and largest collections in the world just when he was seeking to expand in this area. Another example was the group of fifty Chinese porcelain jars and vases that Duveen had also acquired from Morgan’s estate. Apart from the windfall of the availability of the Morgan collection, Duveen’s own stock was so extensive and of such quality that Frick could buy from him French royal commissions, such as Gilles Joubert’s chest of drawers, which was among some twenty-five pieces of furniture that arrived at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street during the year 1915.
Later Acquisitions
Generous gifts from members of the Frick family and other donors have continued to enrich the decorative arts collection. The founder’s son, Childs, gave about two hundred pieces of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in 1965, considerably augmenting those works his father had purchased fifty years earlier. In 1999, Winthrop Kellogg Edey’s extraordinary collection of some forty clocks and watches arrived at the Frick. Henry Arnhold has recently given us the Great Bustard from his distinguished and comprehensive collection of Meissen porcelain, and another one hundred and thirty-five works are pledged to the Frick as a bequest. Individual objects of great merit are prized additions to our holdings. Diane Modestini gave us our first piece of Italian majolica in honor of her husband Mario Modestini in 2008. On occasion, acquisitions are also made, such as the unusual vase japon, purchased in 2011.
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