generation – among them Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume – The big during his time as a teacher at Goldsmiths College. Despite this success he remains an elusive reveal personality; his CV and his art may be familiar, but beyond the inner circle In his memoir-meets- the man is something of a mystery. So this book comes as a welcome musings on art, Michael opportunity to learn more about the Craig-Martin invites man behind the work. Although originally intended as a volume of readers into his creative collected writings, it gradually expanded into more of a memoir as and private worlds, the artist filled in the gaps to give writes Marcus Field biographical context to his ideas. The result is an illuminating hybrid, with each entry given a title: ‘On getting On Being An Artist married’, for example, or ‘On colour’. Many of these ‘chapters’ are less than Michael Craig-Martin a page long; some are just a few Art/Books, £22.50 sentences. There are also pictures, ranging from vintage photos from Michael Craig-Martin first became the family album to handsome interested in art as a teenager living in reproductions of Craig-Martin’s work. Washington DC in the 1950s. He had Early in the book we learn of several moved to the US with his parents from formative experiences that shaped Ireland, where he was born in 1941, the artist. First, he writes, his growing and was studying at a Catholic boys’ awareness at school of his homosexuality school when he began looking at drew him to because it reproductions of paintings in books. ‘seemed to hold the promise of It was his discovery of modern art acceptance, of another way of being in that had the biggest impact. ‘I was the world’. Then, at 15, he spent a year seduced by art’s promise of new and living in Bogotá, where his father, an dangerous ideas, mysterious objects economist with the World Bank, had and meanings, exotic and sophisticated been posted. Here he attended people, sensual freedoms and taboos,’ life-drawing classes given by a teacher he writes. ‘From then on, I never he admired. The way he was taught to considered any role in art or in life draw there, with bold outlines and no except that of the artist.’ shading, remains his style to this day. Sixty years later, Craig-Martin, But the experience that had the now 73 and living in London, is one biggest impact on the budding artist of the most respected figures in the was his time as a student at Yale School British art scene. His work appears of Art in the early 1960s. Craig-Martin in many distinguished private and gives a vivid description of this public collections, including the Tate legendary place, where he was among and National Portrait Gallery, he is the last students to study under the a Royal Academician and has just system devised by the Bauhaus master retired as a trustee of the Art Fund. He Josef Albers. This method of learning is also widely credited with having by regular drawing and design exercises nurtured several key artists of the YBA led to his life-long fascination with the

Left: Michael Craig-Martin in London in 1969, shortly after he moved to the capital, photographer unknown; right: Michael Craig-Martin, Eye of the Storm, 2002; from On Being An Artist

32 Summer 2015 Art Quarterly know him alittle better. reading this,it’s nice tofeel you me.’ This may betrue,butafter my work, Ibelieve you already know Craig-Martin writes ‘If you know ‘Aren’t they fabulous?’ out hislatestsuperstar, Jane Forth. Warhol asked Craig-Martin, pointing ‘Have you seenJane’s breasts yet?’ Warhol ataparty inLondon1971. well ashistale aboutmeeting Andy Keeler duringtheProfumo affair, as paid by Newsweek totrail Christine of hisfirstjobinEngland when he was the way. Iparticularly enjoyed thestory Craig-Martin hasencountered along anecdotes aboutplaces andpeople serious texts are many, oftenamusing own voice’.their make it,butsimply ‘tohelpthemfind students what tomake, orhow to concludes, hasnever beentotellhis So hisjobasateacher, helogically believe totally inthedemocracy ofart.’ a voice inartnow do,’ he writes. ‘I those who didnotpreviously have be saidandis worthy ofconsideration; of contenthasmeantthatanything can wants tohave ago. ‘Theliberation art openedupthefieldtoanybody who changes thatgave risetoconceptual Martin ispassionate. As heseesit,the writes, ‘rarely rationally so.’ is always emotionally intelligent,’ he from paintingstoThe literal readings ofany creative work, powerful chapter. Here herails against he assertsin what isperhapshismost ‘Art ismetaphor–poetry, notprose,’ they are oftenboth wise andinspiring. society are themeatofbook and meaning ofartandtherole ofartistsin it even hasitsown Wikipedia page. tree. The work isnow soinfluentialthat what you seeisactually afully grown accompanied by atext arguing why in which aglassof water onashelfis celebrated piece,AnOak Tree (1973), of thisshift was Craig-Martin’s most made inany medium.Oneproduct this gave for new ideasand work tobe of conceptualartandthefreedom the revolution thatled totheemergence a teacher and artist. He writes well about Britain in1966andbeginshiscareer as with hishomosexuality), moves to describes how hefinally cametoterms child (a laterchapter, ‘Oncomingout’, course ofhislife ashemarriesandhasa become hissignature pieces. pin, abucket, achair– which have everyday objects–anoversized safety Craig-Martin’s playful paintingsof concerns are stillclearly visible in seen inunexpected ways. These vehicles for profound revelation when and with how ordinary thingscanbe psychological properties ofpictures, In hisintroduction tothisbook, Sandwiched between themore On his work asateacherCraig- Craig-Martin’s musings onthe After Yale, Craig-Martin plots the Summer 2015 33 Quarterly Art Bible. ‘Great art

Picture credits in here portrait: courtesy the artist. eye of the storm: Courtesy Gagosian Tom Keating was a forger whose forgeries have been successfully sold – as forgeries – at Christie’s. An early example of acknowledged forgery was the 16th-century Venetian Marcantonio Raimondi’s clever imitations of internationally famous artists, for profit; however, he put in visual signifiers to show they were not authentic. The enraged Albrecht Dürer took to law, and as the first internationally marketed artist, made an elegantly furious denunciation of imitators and forgers. But it is also Raimondi who made prints after famous paintings, a way of reproducing great art in more accessible form. Indeed, as we are not told by the author, it is paradoxically again to Raimondi that we have some notion – say – of ’s now lost compositions: Raimondi’s Judgement of Paris, after Raphael, became even more famous in the history of art when Manet borrowed some of its elements for Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Dealers and connoisseurs may have different aims, of course, and there is early on a succinct description of own right. It is a field replete with Above: Han van Meegeren Duveen, that buccaneer art dealer, painting Christ Among the False promises ironic contradictions. Doctors, after Johannes falling out with Bernard Berenson – Artists as various as Leonardo, Vermeer, during his trial the great connoisseur who made his The Art of Forgery: and Warhol, not to in Amsterdam; Shaun living by authentications and The Minds, Motives and Methods mention Van Gogh and Dalí, are under Greenhalgh, Amarna attributions yet who also so expanded of Master Forgers discussion, as Charney examines Princess, from The Art our appreciation and understanding of Forgery Noah Charney the methods of connoisseurs, scholars, of Italian art – over whether authentication boards, artists or Giorgione painted what is now Phaidon, £19.95 themselves complicit in others doing known as the Allendale Nativity. Reviewed by Marina Vaizey their work, forgers for gain and Giorgione was the more valuable also impudently to challenge the art attribution, but Berenson thought it Here is a very serious subject described world, and the relatively new and was by Titian. Ironically, modern in vastly enjoyable fashion with crucially important scientific armoury techniques show that Duveen was implications both subtle and obvious, now used to authenticate. Almost right, if for the wrong reasons. about serious issues. Forgers and all the scores of cases that proceed Charney shows us with myriad forgeries of works of art question our through the book are in one sense examples how and why the creation assumptions about why and how we failures as forgers, because they have and trade in false Old and Modern assign values, aesthetic and monetary, been publicly exposed. Paradoxically, Masters has been a devastating yet and define originality and authenticity, they may also be triumphs, understandable part of the art world M useum and why and how these things matter. posthumously or even in someone’s for centuries. To be successful, art It is also a romp of a read. lifetime, acknowledging the success was said by Aristotle to have to possess The very title implies, of course, of the forger, even if temporary, in three components: good, in the sense that there is an art to forgery. Picasso’s fooling academics, curators, collectors of skill; beauty; and interest. Forgery : © Bolton Bolton © PRINCESS : oft-quoted aphorism that bad artists and the market. Although physical ultimately betrays and fails on all these copy, good artists steal, helps to set harm may not ensue, forgery is not a counts. Fakery is not confined to the AMARNA the tone. Charney’s enthusiastic style victimless crime. Forgeries accepted visual art, as Charney reminds us. ain. ain. C well conveys his own fascination with E into the canon distort and deform History is also falsified, from the the subject, providing a vivid account historic understanding. ridiculous to the sublime: from, say, of why the skilled and not so skilled Charney’s compelling narrative of the 18th-century creation of a Celtic rs Joseph M rs imitate the work of others, with the the master forger of Old Master epic told by the mythical Ossian, to the intention to deceive. The German drawings, Eric Hebborn (1934–1996), is Hitler Diaries of the 1980s. r and M r jeweller Reinhold Vasters (1827-1909), a study of an artist who felt undervalued There is a helpful glossary of who produced magnificent objects for his own work, devised a way of scientific methods for ascertaining in the greatest of renaissance styles making ‘original’ Old Master drawings, historic periods and attributions; rt, Gift of Gift A rt, and is in major public collections, was and eventually became famous in extensive footnotes and bibliography only outed a century after his death his own right, not for his own art but tell us how many sensational cases useum of M useum and seems to have been motivated for his forgeries. It can obviously be have been reported and often well simply to exercise his skill as he was dangerous: Hebborn was murdered in reported in newspapers; and we are also a well-respected jeweller in his own Rome. The case remains unsolved. The reminded of several major museum

I ndianapolis right: he led a happy and profitable life. infamous Han van Meegeren, another exhibitions that look at fakes and The Italian Icilio Joni (1866-1946) forged artist undervalued in his own eyes, was forgeries in their collections and others’. gold-ground Italian primitives, became accused of treason for selling a Vermeer

: © MEE G EREN : friends with Bernard Berenson, and to Göring, and saved his life at his trial Marina Vaizey is an art critic, curator van van his forgeries are now valued in their in 1947 by showing it was a forgery. and former editor of ‘Art Quarterly’.

Art Quarterly Summer 2015 35 by the National Art Collections Fund, the forerunner of the Art Fund, Anatomy of which – in a move that would never be sanctioned today, on all sorts of an obsessive grounds – divided them in strikingly uneven portions between the Tate Frank Auerbach: Gallery (which got all the best ones), Speaking and Painting the British Museum, the Ashmolean Catherine Lampert in Oxford, the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the Royal Cornwall Thames & Hudson, £19.95 Museum in Truro, the Reviewed by Frances Spalding of Victoria in Melbourne, and – amazingly – the Fogg Art Museum ‘Here at last,’ wrote David Sylvester in Cambridge, Massachusetts. in 1956, of an exhibition at the Beaux They are gloriously reunited here, Arts Gallery in London, ‘is a young and what Hollywood might call the painter who has extended the power production values of this massive of paint to re-make reality.’ These and gorgeous volume could scarcely words, coming from such a powerful be improved upon. Moreover, the critic, first drew the public’s attention introductory essays and commentaries to Frank Auerbach. This solo exhibition are excellent, so it is a shame that took place only a year after he had all the translations were not overseen left the . Sylvester Infernal pursuits by an appropriately meticulous copy explained: ‘These paintings reveal editor. Dante was an absolute master the qualities that make for greatness William Blake: The Drawings of invective, and would presumably in a painter – fearlessness, a profound for Dante’s Divine Comedy have been incandescent with rage at originality; a total absorption in finding his beloved Henry VII of what obsesses him; and, above all, Sebastian Schütze and Luxembourg here weirdly re-christened a certain authority and originality Maria Antonietta Terzoli ‘Harry VII’ (page 7)! I would love to in his forms and colours.’ Taschen, £99.99 know to which circle of Hell he would Today Auerbach’s greatness is Reviewed by David Ekserdjian have consigned the person responsible widely recognised. His seven-days-a- for that particular horror. week obsessive method of working, Dante’s Divine Comedy is the first great with only one day off for his annual work of vernacular literature that David Ekserdjian is professor of art and holiday, is also becoming well known. people in considerable numbers still film history at the University of Leicester And, if anything, he has become even read for pleasure. (Although it is true and an authority on Italian Renaissance more fearless in his pursuit of what most of them probably run out of steam painting, notably the artists Correggio he calls ‘the recalcitrant, inescapable at some point in the last of the three and Parmigianino, the subjects of his two thereness... of everyday things’. canticas, Paradiso, and then skip to the monographs for Yale. Whereas his early oils were painted final canto.) It is also the single work of fiction that has inspired the most and Left: William Blake, Plate the best works of art. Many of these are 66, Antaeus setting down representations of its great set pieces Dante and Virgil in the Last Circle of Hell, from William ondon L – Paolo and Francesca, Ugolino – which Blake: The Drawings for

rt, A rt, tend to be flashbacks related to Dante Dante’s Divine Comedy;

F ine by their protagonists. However, there right: Frank Auerbach, is also a continuous tradition of Chimney in Mornington illustration of the whole poem which Crescent–Winter Morning, stretches all the way back to the 14th 1991, from Frank Auerbach:

M arl b orou g h Speaking and Painting century and is not dead yet. Blake’s engagement with The Divine ourtesy ourtesy C Comedy falls squarely into this category (his Ugolino is the solitary flashback), and is unquestionably one of its high points. Towards the end of his life, and ach: b ach: auer g es.

I ma at the instigation of his friend and disciple, John Linnell, he produced 72 illustrations of the Inferno, 20 of the Purgatorio, and 10 of the Paradiso. They range in character from exquisitely g eman ustralia/Brid resolved watercolours, a select few of A which are signed, seemingly to confirm that they are indeed fully finished, to

ourne, M el b ourne, hauntingly embryonic efforts, often with copious pencil annotations. To

ictoria, V ictoria, a devout Dantist, their mood may at times feel altogether more like Blake than Dante, but they almost never display anything short of a touching fidelity to the text, which Blake learnt

ational Gallery of Gallery N ational Italian to illustrate. They remained together until 1918, lake: © b lake: and were then purchased at Christie’s

Art Quarterly Summer 2015 37 in near monochrome, and, in some instances, so thickly that the paint sagged and wrinkled as it dried, his mature works have speed and fluidity. This is partly due to his admiration for Giacometti’s ability to model figures in such a way that they seem to be still in flux. Auerbach only discovered his purpose as a painter when he recognised his need to record ‘something that was intimate enough to me to be worthwhile’. But if his subject matter is circumscribed, it is ambitiously treated: whether painting a loyal model or a familiar urban haunt, he searches out a ‘secret internal geometry’ and a formal grandeur. It is sometimes hard to relate Auerbach’s abstract marks to literal facts or objects. But as , a friend and collector of Auerbach’s work, once astutely remarked, it is ‘the architecture that gives his paintings such authority’.  Catherine Lampert began sitting for Auerbach in 1978. Their unremitting weekly sessions not only proved helpful to her during a period of Above: Théodore Géricault, the three exceptions), originally personal crisis, but have also given The Raft of the Medusa, The big picture commissioned by publications such as her compelling insights into this 1819, from Keeping an Eye and the Open; left: Frank Modern Painters London Review artist’s personal and professional life, Auerbach, Head of Keeping an Eye Open of Books, are similarly free-ranging in his philosophy and habits. Their the scope of their enquiry. A revelatory Catherine Lampert, 1986, Julian Barnes conversations have taught her much from Frank Auerbach: chapter on the Swiss Impressionist about his past and the formative Speaking and Painting Jonathan Cape, £16.99 Félix Vallotton (subtitled ‘The Foreign influences on his work. She gifts her Reviewed by Claire Wrathall Nabi’) begins with the dilemma posed readers with mongrel prose, in which by the will of a notable collector, art history, biography and memoir, As a teenager in Paris in 1964, the Dr Claribel Cone, who bequeathed for the most part, blend happily. summer before he went to Oxford, a remarkable collection of works by I would have enjoyed it even more Julian Barnes happened on the Picasso, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, had an editor given some sentences, Musée Gustave Moreau. The Wallace Gauguin, as well as a small, mysterious and the book itself, a better shape. Collection, the National Gallery, the canvas by Vallotton called The Lie, to Auerbach himself is frequently Louvre had hitherto left him unmoved. the Baltimore Museum of Art on the quoted, his glittering percipience Here in Moreau’s ‘huge, high barn condition that it ‘improved’. Otherwise illuminating the narrative, while also of a studio’, he had a sort of epiphany it would go to the Metropolitan in New weakening the possibility of critical and remembers ‘for the first time York, which unsurprisingly wanted it. distance. Yet this book is a necessity consciously looking at pictures rather (Baltimore won the contest; the Cone for all Auerbach’s admirers, for it than being obediently in their presence’. Collection remains adjacent to the contains much fresh and vivid detail During the intervening half- campus of Johns Hopkins University.) about his life and work. century, Barnes has looked intently Another contrasts the work of the at a lot of paintings, thought deeply French doctor-sculptor Paul Richer, Frances Spalding is professor of art and, since his novel A History of the notably his cast of the corpse of a history at Newcastle University. Her World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989), written woman, known as La Vénus ataxique recent books include ‘John Piper, about them too. (1895), her emaciated body tortured Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art’ (Oxford That novel contains a chapter, by tertiary syphilis, with that of the University Press) and ‘Prunella Clough: reprinted here, in which he relates in Australian hyperrealist sculptor Ron Regions Unmapped’ (Lund Humphries) searing detail the story of the shipwreck Mueck (specificallyDead Dad, 1996-7). of the frigate Medusa and its survivors, ‘Can we, should we, must we now call captured for posterity by Géricault in her art?’ he asks, even if the work was his monumental painting The Raft of not intended as such. the Medusa (1819), who went so far Manet also suffered ‘an atrocious as to have a scale model of the life raft end’ brought about by tertiary constructed in order to be sure to paint syphilis and ataxia, during which he ondon L it correctly, but apparently overlooks repeatedly painted the ‘ephemeral rt, A rt, the fact that the survivors clinging beauty of flowers’, the subject of two

F ine to it had been adrift for 13 days, so still lifes, which Barnes discusses, dehydrated and starved that they had along with Music in the Tuileries resorted to cannibalism. ‘Catastrophe Gardens, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and,

M arl b orou g h has become art,’ he writes; ‘that is, in particular, The Execution of after all, what it is for.’ Maximilian, in the essay on his work,

ourtesy ourtesy The other 16 essays in this book, another instance of the way Barnes C mostly on French or at least weaves biography, history, philosophy francophone artists (Howard Hodgkin, in this fascinating, richly illuminating ach: b ach: auer Lucian Freud and Claes Oldenburg are and beautifully written book.

Art Quarterly Summer 2015 39