The Art Market and the Museum Speaker Bios And
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The Art Market and The Museum Ethics and Aesthetics of Institutional Collecting, Display and Patronage from c.1800 to the Present TIAMSA / University of Edinburgh / National Galleries Scotland ONLINE PROGRAMME WORKSHOP 1 Thursday 6 May 2021, 14:00–17:30 BST Sessions 1 & 2 ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKER/CHAIR BIOGRAPHIES 14:00 – Welcome and Introductions Frances Fowle (University of Edinburgh / National Galleries of Scotland) Johannes Nathan (TIAMSA / Technische Universität Berlin) Juan Cruz (Principal, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh) Christopher Baker (Director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture, National Galleries of Scotland) Session 1 – Museums and Art Dealers (Part I) Chair: Frances Fowle (University of Edinburgh and National Galleries Scotland) Professor Frances Fowle is Chair of Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Curator of French Art at the National Galleries of Scotland. She is also Chair of the Association for Art History, a Senior Trustee of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, and sits on the TIAMSA Board. Frances is a specialist in late nineteenth-century art with an emphasis on artistic networks, collecting and the art market in Britain. She has curated numerous international exhibitions on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, in collaboration with institutions such as the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, the Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, and the British Museum. Her books, eXhibitions and edited volumes include Van Gogh and Britain: Pioneer Collectors (2006), Monet and French Landscape (2006), Impressionism and Scotland (2008), Van Gogh's Twin: the Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid 1854-1928 (2010), Van Gogh to KandinsKy: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 (2012), American Impressionism: A New Vision 1880-1900 (2014), Daubigny, Monet Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape (2016), Nordic Artists Colonies 1870-1914 (2017) and Globalising Impressionism: Reception, Translation and Transnationalism (2020). Page 2 of 12 14:20 – Diana Davis (Independent, UK): ‘The New Race of Connoisseurs’: Nineteenth- Century Dealers and the Museum In 1880 Henry Cole, first director of the South Kensington Museum, wrote an obituary for the dealer John Webb, describing him as ‘a connoisseur and collector of works of fine art…in whose critical judgement the State and many private individuals placed the highest confidence.’ The shop and the auction room had long served as a locus for implicit learning. However, as Cole’s tribute underlined, from the 1850s dealers became important players in the public sphere, as organizers of and lenders to public exhibitions, and as advisors, sellers, and donors to the museum. This paper analyses the seminal contribution of nineteenth-century British dealers such as Webb, Murray Marks, Isaac Falcke, and Thomas Miller Whitehead, in establishing the decorative art collections at the British and South Kensington Museums. Despite the overlapping competencies of dealer and curator and the dealer’s unrivalled understanding of the market, the trope of the dealer as a rapacious and duplicitous tradesman persisted. J. C. Robinson, first superintendent of the art collections at South Kensington, regarded dealers as competitors in the scramble for art objects, the ‘new race of connoisseurs’ who used their public role to promote themselves and increase the value of objects in the marketplace. Wherever the truth lay, the enduring legacy of these early dealers in the development of Britain’s national art collections is irrefutable. Dr Diana Davis specializes in the interface between collectors, dealers, and the art market in the nineteenth century. Her book, The TastemaKers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785-1865 was published by the Getty Research Institute in 2020. She has lectured for the National Trust, Christie’s Education, GRHAM, the Wallace Collection, the Furniture History Society, the ICAA, at Masterpiece and on the Jewish country house. She co-edits the French Porcelain Society Journal, a leading peer-reviewed publication on European ceramics. Her current research focuses on British dealers from the 1870s until 1930, the ‘modern antiquaire’. 14:40 – Tsukasa Kodera (Osaka University): ‘Siegfried Bing as a Global Art Dealer and Promoter of Japonisme and Art Nouveau: His Activities in Japan’ S.Bing, art dealer and entrepreneur of Japonisme and Art Nouveau, played a prominent role in the globalization of art market in the late 19th century. Although S.Bings archives seem to be lost during the WWII, publications by G.Weisberg among others and recent discovery of August Bing family archives have promoted new researches. In this paper I would like to shed new light on S.Bing’s activities in and with Japan, based on my ongoing research and on my collaboration with the August Bing archives in New Zealand. First I will briefly mention Bing’s tactics of trading Japanese art until his sale of Japanese art to the Louvre and other museums, and his shift of business to Art Nouveau in the 1890s. Secondly, I will focus on a publication Kwan-Ko-Dzu-Setsu by Ninagawa, richly illustrated standard work on Japanese pottery, published in Japanese and French in Yokohama. From this publication and from Ninagawa himself, early foreign collectors like W.A.Franks, E.S.Morse and S.Bing, learned about Japanese pottery, and they all tried to buy Ninagawa’s own pottery collection. I will show provenances of the Ninagawa potteries until they entered the MFA Boston and the British Museum. Thirdly, I will show some new findings from my ongoing research on Bing’s stay in Japan in 1880-81 and S.Bing & Co. in Yokohama and Kobe. For a comprehensive survey of Bing’s entire career in Europe, America and Asia, a global collaboration of scholars and museums is indispensable. I hope this paper could be the beginning of such collaboration. Tsukasa KŌDERA is professor of art history at Osaka University, and head of Research Project “Globalization of Art Market. Western and Asian countries” (2019-23). He studied at Amsterdam Page 3 of 12 University in 1981-88, and was a visiting scholar at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in 2004-05. His present concern is global art market in late 19th and early 20th century. He is currently making a research on Siegfried Bing. Publications: Vincent van Gogh. Christianity versus Nature, Amsterdam / Philadelphia 1990 (Ph.D. Amsterdam University, awarded Erasmus Study Prize); Exh. cat. Van Gogh and Japan, Tokyo, Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum) etc. 2017-18 (co-editor & author) ; Tsukasa Kodera et al., Exposition de la gravure japonaise à l’École des BeauX-Arts à Paris, 1890, organized by S.Bing, Special issue of Journal of Japonisme, vol.2, issue 1 (2017); https://brill.com/view/journals/joj/2/1/joj.2.issue-1.xml; “S.Bing documentation, 1880s”, PhiloKalia, 2021. Publications on Van Gogh, ‘Chagall and Yiddish culture’ etc. 15:00 – Christian Huemer (Belvedere Research Center, Vienna): ‘Vienna 1900 – Building a Museum of Modern Art’ Created in the spirit of the Enlightenment, public museums were meant to be places of learning, and yet they were caught between art and money. In order to stage exhibitions of modern art, curators depended on a tight network of agents in the international art market. Increasingly large sums of money had to be raised to purchase French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, for instance. By physically separating art from the hustle and bustle of modern life, museums created an apparently independent universe as a prerequisite for the historicization of the avant-garde. Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art, initially called Moderne Galerie, and housed in the Belvedere palace opened to the public in May 1903. The Baroque sequence of rooms provided by the emperor was considered a provisionary frame for a fairly small and heterogeneous collection. The anonymous author of the catalog preface pointed out that to this date Vienna had “no real collecting point for the works of art of the last hundred years, as Munich, Berlin, Paris and other cities have had for a long time.” Yet, who wanted this museum and for what purpose? Which cultural policy goals were pursued? Who made the first acquisitions and with which collecting strategy in mind? This paper will investigate the Viennese art market around 1900 and compare the early acquisition policy of the Moderne Galerie to museums devoted to modern art in other European countries (Germany, France, etc.). I hope to shed light on the political, economic, and aesthetic interests of the diverse groups advocating the project of a Moderne Galerie. Christian Huemer is Director of the Belvedere Research Center. He studied art history at the University of Vienna, the Paris Sorbonne, and the City University of New York where he submitted a dissertation on Paris-Vienna: Modern Art MarKets and the Transmission of Culture, 1873-1937. He was Deputy Director of the International Centre for Culture and Management in Salzburg and has taught at Hunter College in New York, the American University of Paris, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in Los Angeles. 2008-2017 Huemer was responsible for the development of the Getty Provenance IndeX® databases. In this conteXt, he organized international research projects such as MarKt und Macht: Der Kunsthandel im ‘Dritten Reich’ (DeGruyter, 2017) or London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780-1820 (Getty Publications, 2019). He is founding and board member of TIAMSA and editor-in-chief of the book series Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets (Brill). 15:20 – Discussion 15:40 – Break Page 4 of 12 Session 2 – Museums and Art Dealers (Part II) Chair: Johannes Nathan (TIAMSA / Technische Universität Berlin) ([email protected]) With a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, Johannes Nathan taught art history at the University of Berne until 2001, when he became director of Galerie Nathan in Zurich (est. in Munich in 1913).