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12 June 2012

Could the Louvre’s “Virgin and St. Anne” provide the proof that the (London) National Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks” is not by Leonardo da Vinci? When the National Gallery’s restored “Virgin of the Rocks” was pronounced an entirely autograph Leonardo we were left reeling with incredulity. Picture restorers rarely decline opportunities to claim “discoveries” but could they really be claiming an ability to make a picture an autograph Leonardo simply by thinning its varnish? During the media frenzy of the National Gallery’s £1.5bn Leonardo blockbuster, its chief restorer, Larry Keith, was asked if a distinctive Leonardo brushstroke had emerged. “No”, he said, proof of authenticity lay in the picture’s internal relationships. Given that those relationships differ markedly from the ones present in the Louvre’s unquestionably autograph “Virgin of the Rocks”, what accounted for the discrepancies? The then Above, Fig. 1: St. Anne’s feet and pebbles – a detail from the Louvre’s recently restored “Virgin and Child with St. curator, Luke Syson, replied that Leonardo’s style Anne”. had, in the London copy, become abstracted, less naturalistic and more “metaphysical”. This seemed fanciful: had not all of Leonardo’s pictures carried a beguiling air of the metaphysical – and had this quality not derived from the artist’s preternaturally intense engagement with natural phenomena and the mysterious powers which operate through them? Had a new corroborating body of drawn studies emerged? The Gallery admits that not only is there no identifiable Leonardo brushwork but that the picture itself is “manifestly uneven in finish and execution” and that there has been “a good deal of agreement that Leonardo himself painted little or none of it”. When we asked if any securely autograph Leonardo paintings shared these newly claimed characteristics, Syson said that they were also found in the “Last Supper”, when only 20% of that large, fragmented, degraded, many-times restored, de-restored and re-restored mural survives – and when its recent restorers “discovered” that it had originally been choc-full of tiny naturalistic details (curtain hooks, slices of lemon, reflections on glassware, tablecloth patterns and so forth). Above all, the National

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 1 / 24 Gallery’s latest upgrade flew in the face of – and seemingly sought to circumnavigate – a landmark Above, Fig. 2: The treatment of rocks seen at the base of 1996 article by a geologist (and now art historian), the National Gallery’s the “Virgin of the Rocks” as seen Ann Pizzorusso, who has shown that while the before the recent restoration. rock configurations in the Louvre version were entirely consistent with precise formations found in nature and in Leonardo’s own studies, those seen in the London version were found in neither. (See Pizzorusso, “Leonardo’s Geology: The Authenticity of the Virgin of the Rocks”, The MIT Press, Vol. 29, No. 3, and “Leonardo’s Geology: The Authenticity of the Virgin of the Rocks”, in Leonardo Magazine, Vol. 29. No. 3, 1996, pp. 197- 200.) Here, Pizzorusso presents further elegant demonstrations of the London picture’s non- autograph status that are manifest in the (recently Above, Fig. 3: A detail of Leonardo’s “A rocky ravine”, a pen and ink drawing in the collection of Her Majesty the restored) late Leonardo masterpiece, “The Virgin Queen. In a note by Per Rumberg in the catalogue to the and Child with St Anne”. National Gallery’s 2011-12 “Leonardo da Vinci – Painter at the Court of Milan” exhibition (p. 184), attempt is made to accomodate the drawing within the new “metaphysical” Ann Pizzorusso writes: reading of the Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks”. The drawing itself, however, remains awkwardly elusive and “controversial” in terms of chronologies and its geological London’s National Gallery recently announced that testimony. It has variously been dated from the early its version of the “Virgin of the Rocks”, previously 1470s to the 1490s. The Gallery takes a “Goldilocks” attributed to various artists who worked in Milan, option and settles for “about 1480-83″. was now, after being cleaned, solely the work of It is acknowledged that the drawing bears a “particularly striking” relation to the Verocchio “Baptism of Christ” on Leonardo da Vinci. The National Gallery supports which Leonardo worked in the late 1470s. This relation is its claims by stating that the work represents a granted to demonstrate Leonardo’s “lifelong fascination change in style and that the geology in the picture with natural phenomena” (of which Ann Pizzorusso has frequently spoken). An ingenious – but ultimately vain – is rendered in a more abstract, monumental style attempt is made to fit the drawing to the National (see Appendix A). Gallery’s version of the “Virgin of the Rocks”: “Although the appearance of the precipice in this drawing While art historians have long discounted the is similar to geological formations that occur on the National Gallery’s version as one by Leonardo, the banks of the Arno near Florence, the overall composition Gallery has now discounted centuries of also relates to formulae seen in contemporary painting and prints”. With that linkage and one bound, as it were: scholarship with their new interpretation and “This coexistence of the real and the imagined is subsequent attribution of the painting to particularly interesting when considering the relevance of Leonardo. What is most ironic and troubling about this sheet to the [London] “Virgin of the Rocks”. Specifically, “The precipice, with its distinctive cluster of the National Gallery’s position is that there are vertical pinnacles leaning against a clif”, it is said, reams of contractual documents which still exist “anticipates the mystical landscape in the [London] today documenting a 25 years long lawsuit altarpiece”. But insofar as it might be thought to do so, it anticipated that of the earlier Louvre version rather concerning the two versions of the painting and sooner – unless one maintains that the unquestionably which show, unequivocally, that Leonardo did not autograph Louvre version was not yet sufficiently paint the version in the National Gallery. Prof. mystical. In any event, this “mystical/not-mystical” construct founders on hard geological fact when “another Charles Hope, a former director of the Warburg detail” of the drawing – “the curved strata on the bottom Institute, London, and an expert in notarial Latin of the river bed” is admitted to bear “a close resemblance states that there is no doubt that Leonardo to the stratified layers of rocks forming the ledge in the foreground of the Louvre version of the picture” while no painted the first version and not the second (New such configurations are present in the London picture. York Review, 9 February 2012). While we may be able to forgive the National Gallery for not being up on notarial Latin, there is no excuse for their proposal that Leonardo changed his style. In the decades in which I have studied Leonardo from all aspects (we must remember, Leonardo did not consider himself primarily a painter) one thing stands out in all his works—a fidelity to nature and a lifelong effort to depict natural objects as realistically as possible. The father of Leonardo studies, Carlo Pedretti, in his book analyzing Leonardo’s nature drawings,

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 2 / 24 “Leonardo da Vinci Nature Studies from the Royal Library at Windsor Castle” (with a forward written Above, Fig. 4: In the catalogue to the Louvre’s celebration of its restoration of Leonardo’s “Virgin and by Kenneth Clark, a former director of the National Child with St. Anne” (La Sainte Anne ~ l’ultime chef- Gallery in London), devotes the entire volume to d’oeuvre de Leonardo de Vinci), this astonishing drawing discussing Leonardo’s preoccupation with natural – also from the Royal Collection at Windsor – is reproduced. Dated to 1500-1510, it testifies to objects and his fanaticism in attempting to depict Leonardo’s enduring fascination with stratified them as realistically as possible. This passion was sedimentary rocks which, here, are shown subject to imparted to his students, Francesco Melzi, Cesare further “liquefying” geological forces. As Pizzorusso argues, it would indeed be hard to imagine a more da Sesto, Giovanni Boltraffio and Marco disabling lacuna in the London “Virgin of the Rocks” than d’Oggiono. So much so that a drawing of a Tree this lack of such rock strata. (RL 12417), long thought to be by Leonardo, was later attributed to Cesare da Sesto and a view of Amboise (RL 12727) to Francesco Melzi. In analyzing the works of Leonardo’s students one can see that they have followed Leonardo’s technique and depicted natural objects as realistically as possible. They had obviously heard quite a bit of ranting by Leonardo about “Botticelli’s bad landscapes” (see Appendix B). Another reason why Leonardo’s approach is reflected in his art is that he was born in the transitional era of the late Middle Ages, an age still filled with superstition and fear, especially about such things as mountains, natural catastrophes and death. He grew up leading the way into the Renaissance, faced all these fears, and debunked them. He travelled extensively in the Alps outside of Milan taking note of nature and geology. He noted landslides and torrential flooding with its associated damage (see Figs. 3 & 4), he dissected corpses to provide the most

accurate depiction of human anatomy we have ever had until relatively recent times. His work as Above, top, Fig. 5: the bottom of the Louvre “Virgin of engineer, geologist, botanist and astronomer the Rocks”; middle, Fig. 6, the bottom of the London cannot be disconnected from his work as an artist “Virgin of the Rocks”; bottom, Fig. 7, the base of the (see Figs. 8 & 9). To understand Leonardo, one Louvre’s “Virgin and St. Anne”. In this chronological sandwich, the central picture, sans must understand him completely. And to stratified rock formations, is the clear “odd man out”. If understand him completely is not difficult. He has the Syson/Keith hypothesized philosophical shift were written everything down. He was faithful to nature. accepted, it would be, as Pizzorusso points out, imperative to explain why Leonardo abandoned his rock If one applies just that one rule to Leonardo da preoccupations in the London picture only to resume and Vinci, looking at his work from a scientific carry them to the new and unprecedented technical standpoint, the answer is crystal clear: fidelity to heights achieved in the “Virgin and St Anne”. The “theological”/conceptual apologia for the London nature is a Leonardo trademark that can be used picture’s long questioned properties, simply does not to determine the authenticity of his work. withstand visual scrutiny. To attribute some elevated expression of the “supernatural” to the generalised, Now that we have seen that the National Gallery botanically-imprecise plants in the London picture (“the has preferred not to acknowledge the work of flowers appear to be ideal composites of of the leaves and petals of real plants”) is implicitly to slight Leonardo’s many esteemed Leonardo scholars, maybe looking corpus of plant studies, when no one – not even Durer – at the recently cleaned “Virgin and Child with St. has equalled the sense he bestowed of life itself upon the Anne” in the Louvre will change its mind (see Figs. humblest plant. 1, 7, 10, 11, 14, 17, & 21). The “Virgin and Child More damaging than the deficiencies of the component parts of the London picture, is the overall slovenliness of with St. Anne”, dated to about 1510, came later its dispositions, the absence of Leonardo’s miraculous, than the National Gallery version of the “Virgin of sure-footed placements evident above in both Louvre pictures. The London picture is full of clumsinesses. The the Rocks”. We do not know how much later, as bloated, formulaic depictions of plants are carelessly the National Gallery has now dated the initiation strung along the foreground without apparent thought, of its version of the “Virgin of the Rocks” as purpose or design. The infant is bloated; the drapery incoherent and chromatically at war with aerial 1491/2-9 and its completion to 1506-08. perspective; the rocks little more than a shorthand. Professor Hope, in his review of the notarial documents regarding the lawsuit states that the National Gallery version of the “Virgin of the http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 3 / 24 Rocks” could not have been painted before 1508. If we use the 17 year time period (1491-1508) which the National Gallery cites for its “Virgin of the Rocks”, it would mean Leonardo was painting the “Last Supper” (1492-7/8), completing the Burlington Cartoon (1499-1500 or 1506-08) and the “Virgin of the Rocks” at the same time. On page 96 of Kenneth Clark’s book entitled “Leonardo da Vinci” he indicates that Leonardo was exceptionally busy. Apart from the first

“Virgin of the Rocks” his time was taken up with Above, left, Fig. 8: A sheet of studies, that has been work for the court. He was the court limner and dated to “about 1487-90″, from the Bibliothèque de also painted two portraits of the Duke’s l’Institut de France (B fol. 14r), showing Leonardo’s study mistresses Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli. of violets and designs for a means of soldering lead roof coverings. With these portraits, we would be up to five major works in progress by Leonardo if we include the Above, right, Fig. 9: A detail of the sheet at Fig. 8. National Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks”. This being said, all of these works being done at nearly the same time gives us the perfect opportunity to appraise, determine and evaluate the stylistic traits of the artist at that period of his career. In looking at the Burlington Cartoon and the “Virgin and St. Anne”, both are rich with geologic detail and accuracy. Leonardo has risen to new heights in his portrayal of landscape elements. His talent and passion are vividly displayed in the Burlington Cartoon and he reaches a level of sophistication, subtlety and accuracy in rendering the geology in the “Virgin and St. Anne” which had never been seen before (see Appendix C). Above, left, Fig. 10: The “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”, The St. Anne is a geologic tour-de-force. In fact, as recorded in a postcard of 1900. Leonardo experimented extensively on developing Above, right, Fig. 11: The “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”, as recorded after its recent restoration at the paints and a technique for depicting the pebbles Louvre. of agate, chalcedony and marble at the feet of the What is striking in this photo-comparison is the greater Virgin and St. Anne (see in particular, Figs. 1 & 21). sense of spatial depth and plastic articulation in the earlier record. There is today, markedly less sense of the Leonardo writes in his notebooks about his efforts conflicting cruciform sweeps of diagonals, where we and how satisfied he was to have developed an formerly saw a more pronounced swing down from top approach to rendering the pebbles in such a right at the crown of the tree, through St. Anne’s (then more forcefully drawn and shaded) left arm and elbow, realistic fashion. In fact the entire painting is one through the successive arm/knee/arm/knee configuration geologic treat after another. He had spent years in of the Virgin, down to the placement of St Anne’s feet on the Alps so he knew the landscape and geology the then more brightly “spotlighted” left section of the rocky foreground. Against that progression, we better exactly. With his newly developed technique for saw in the earlier state how Leonardo had orchestrated a painting marbleized pebbles he was delighted (- countervailing upper left to bottom right sweep through see Appendix D). the principal heads and the arms of the Virgin and the Child, down to the rump and tail of the lamb – a Using a date of 1510 for the “Virgin and St. Anne” movement that was decisively echoed and enforced by the parallel diagonals of the Virgin’s right leg and St. and a date of 1483-86 for the “Virgin of the Anne’s left leg. Rocks”, both in the Louvre, we have proof that The postcard is reproduced in the catalogue to the Leonardo did not change his style, and that, if Louvre’s recent “La Sainte Anne ~ l’ultime chef-d’oeuvre anything, he became more fanatical in his quest de Leonardo de Vinci” exhibition. Needless to say, it is not shown next the post-restoration state of the painting for geologic accuracy, developing new paints and today. If restorers were recovering not shedding pictorial techniques for natural depiction and driving his values, would they not be as tempted as we to show such students to deliver the most accurate depiction of helpful historic photo-comparisons? nature in their own works. So we must ask the question “How and why could Leonardo have changed his style to produce a work so lacking in geological and botanical accuracy as the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ in the http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 4 / 24 National Gallery in London?” There is no evidence Leonardo changed his style and now, with the recently cleaned “Virgin and St. Anne”, we have that proof. We also know that his students were inculcated with his passion for accurate depiction of natural objects so we must also exclude his students as authors of the National Gallery work. It would be best for the National Gallery to reopen the case for the attribution of the work to Leonardo. Hundreds of years of scholarship by Leonardo critics as well as the words and the Above, left, Fig. 12: The Louvre’s “Virgin of the Rocks”, by Leonardo. works by Leonardo himself should not be Above, right, Fig. 13: The National Gallery’s “Virgin of the discounted. The National Gallery does a disservice Rocks”, by whomever. to those who have worked so hard to come up with incontrovertible evidence regarding the attribution of this work and most of all the National Gallery does a disservice to Leonardo himself.

Ann Pizzorusso

Appendix A The National Gallery’s claimed shift within Leonardo’s oeuvre “We know that Leonardo’s painting technique gave priority to the figures. The Virgin is designed first, as she is in so many of his drawings, and the landscape seems to flow from her. Since Leonardo saw the painter’s acts of creation as analogous to Above, left, Fig. 14: The recently restored “Virgin and God’s, his generation of the landscape in the Child with St. Anne”. Virgin of the Rocks and the absolute, unalterable Above, right, Fig. 15: a contemporary copy (1508-1513) of the “Virgin and Child with St. Anne” from the Armand perfection of the Madonna at the center could be Hammer Museum of Art, the University of California. understood as precisely connected with the It might be noted that in the copy, the central doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. But the background rocky outcrops flanking the head of St. Anne are darker than those seen in the Leonardo today – as appearance of the Virgin and her companions, and were those of the picture itself as seen in the 1900 of the plants and rocks, are different, in the two photograph at Fig. 10. More noteworthy perhaps, is the versions: the theological meaning of his stylistic treatment in the copy of the rocky foreground. At the left we see a fairly attentive attempted repetition of the choices has shifted slightly. In the Louvre picture detailed strata and pebbles of the original work, but Leonardo relies on entirely naturalistic tactics to curiously, as work proceded to the right, interest seem to give the picture its spiritual flavor: the sinless wane and the artist resorted to the lazy rounded rocky shorthand used throughout in the London “Virgin of the beauty of the Virgin becomes the same kind of Rocks” as seen here in close-up at Fig. 16. truth as the natural beauty of the irises nearby. But in the London Virgin of the Rocks, the Virgin and Christ are supernatural, the world around rendered notably less naturalistically, the rocks are straightened to become great columns; the flowers appear to be ideal composites of the leaves and petals of real plants. Tackling the theme for a second time, Leonardo chose to show the viewer not just a vision of the Virgin Mary, but Gods’ perfect ideas for everything around her. What we are shown here is an ideal world made before the physical creation of our own imperfect cosmos, before the need for humankind’s salvation.” The National Gallery catalogue, “Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan”, page 174.

Appendix B

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 5 / 24 Leonardo on Botticelli’s bad landscapes “He is not universal who does not love equally all the elements in painting, as when one who does not like landscapes holds them to be a subject for cursory and straightforward investigation-just as our Botticelli said such study was of no use because by merely throwing a sponge soaked in a variety of colours at a wall there would be left on the wall a stain in which could be seen a beautiful landscape.” Above, Fig. 16: A detail of the National Gallery “Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, from: “Treatise on Painting”, the Rocks”. the chapter on Criteria and Judgments, the subsection “How a painter is not worthy of praise unless he is universal”.

Appendix C Walter Pater “Saint Anne–that delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo’s strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief Above, Fig. 17: A detail of the Louvre’s recently restored interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”. deep water.” A comparison with the testimony of the postcard at Fig. 10 would suggest that (as with the dance floor seen in Walter Horatio Pater, “The Renaissance, Studies in Renoir’s “Dance in the City” in the previous post) the Art and Poetry”, The Echo Library 2006, page 54. ground plane has suffered considerable abrasion. The limbs and tail of the lamb would seem to have been weakened and particularly so in the case of the drawing Appendix D and the modelling of the right foreleg which crosses the Carlo Pedretti Virgin’s drapery. “The movement of the fifteenth century was twofold; partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the ‘modern spirit’, with its realism, its appeal to experience. It comprehended a return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raphael represents the return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this return to nature, he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So we find him often in intimate relations with men of science – with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes of manuscript; and those who can judge describe him as anticipating long before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. He explained the obscure light of the un-illuminated part of the moon, knew that the sea had once covered the mountains which contain shells, and of the gathering of the equatorial waters above the polar. “Notebooks and sheets of about 1508 contain a number of notes on ‘mistioni’ (mixtures), a plastic http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 6 / 24 material of his own invention with which he aimed at imitating the colour and design of semi- precious stones. He describes his production process and how, once the objects were thus produced, he spent much time finishing them with his own hand to a smooth and glossy surface…At the same time he was much taken by anatomical Above, Fig. 18: A detail of the National Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks”. studies, so that when he described the production It seems astonishing to us, on artistic grounds, that this process of his ‘mistioni’ he came to specify the passage of painting could be held to be the work of effect that was to be achieved: ‘…then you will Leonardo. In her 1996 “Leonardo’s Geology: The dress it with peels of various colours, which will Authenticity of the Virgin of the Rocks“, Pizzorusso says of this work: look like the mesentery of an animal’. “An observer with some knowledge of geology would “In 1502, Francesco Malatesta wrote Isabella d’Este find that the rock formations…do not correspond to that Leonardo had looked at many of the Medici nature; most of Leonardo’s drawings and paintings do. It seems unlikely that Leonardo would have violated his gems and objets d’art made of stone. Leonardo knowledge of geology in favour of abstract praised ‘the one of amythyst or jasper as Leonardo representation, considering that he executed an even baptized it, because of the admirable variety of its more geologically complex picture – the “Virgin and St. Anne” (1510) – after he had completed the National colours’”. Gallery painting.” Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo, A study in Chronology and Style, London, 1974, pages 132-137.

Ann Pizzorusso For an in-depth comparison of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks see: www.leonardosgeology.com

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Above, Fig. 19: Unfortunately, the attribution of slack and shoddy painting to a great master is not without precedent at the National Gallery. Here we see at the top, a fragment of a niche sculpture of Venus and Cupid shown in the background of a large panel painting of Samson and Delilah that was given to Rubens in 1930 in a certificate of authentification written by the Rubens scholar Ludwig Burchard. On the strength of that certificated attribution, the work was sold in 1980 to the National Gallery for a then world record Rubens price (and then second highest price for any painting) and has been upheld as an autograph Rubens ever since. By contrast, the image at the bottom is a passage of painting from the left wing of the securely documented and autograph Rubens panel “The Raising of the Cross”. As was discussed in a special issue of the ArtWatch UK Journal of Spring 2006, the “Samson and Delilah” has been dated at the National Gallery to 1609 and “around 1610″ – and therefore effectively to the same date as the “Raising of the Cross” of 1609-1610. The photographs, and the http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 7 / 24 different levels of handiwork that they record, speak for themselves. In 2005 a dedicated website was established in opposition to the attribution.

Above, Fig. 20: A much-injured fragment of tablecloth decoration on Leonardo’s “Last Supper”.

Above, Fig. 21: A detail of the Louvre’s recently restored “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”. In her 1996 MIT article, Pizzorusso noted that: “Leonardo’s observational knowledge of geology is far more accurate that of Renaissance theorists who hypothesized and discoursed rather than observed.” Moreover, she continued, Leonardo’s: “extraordinary knowledge provides us with an unbiased method of distinguishing his work from that of his many imitators and followers. Precise geology is, in this case, an index of authenticity. It serves as Leonardo’s inimitable trademark.”

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 8 / 24 Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.

I June 2012

Review: Renoir at the Frick – The Curatorial and Conservational Photographic Blind Spots The Frick Collection’s recent temporary exhibition “Renoir ~ Impressionism and Full-length Painting” contained ten pictures and took ten years to assemble. It was organised by the deputy director, Colin Bailey, to showcase the The Promenade, the museum’s sole and “somewhat overlooked” Renoir – “overlooked” because Henry Clay Frick’s entrenched prohibition against loans had prevented the picture from travelling to major Renoir shows such as the 1997-78 “Renoir Portraits” exhibition which Bailey had organised for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, The Art Institute of Chicago and The Kimbell Art Museum, Above, Fig.1: An exhibition of Renoir paintings at the Fort Worth. If the Promenade could not join the Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York, in February 1914 (as international party then the party might come to shown in Bailey, p.103). The Frick Collection’s Renoir of 1875-76, The Promenade, can be seen in the centre of the Frick. the wall on the left. There can be no doubt, vis-à-vis the adjacent Renoirs, that this picture was then, when less than forty years old, a relatively light “blond” painting For this celebration of a single work nine major within the oeuvre – much as contemporary written pictures were borrowed from seven museums and accounts testify. Bailey, a distinguished scholar of French art, produced a book/catalogue that contains much illuminating material on contemporary costume and fashionable mores. As delightful as the show itself ought to have been, the experience proved dispiriting and alarming. Partly, this was because such temporary compilations of dream combinations always come with downsides and a common glaring omission. In this case, for several months a gallery-full of important Frick pictures were bumped from view as important works from other, also temporarily depleted, museums were put at risk. The Musée d’Orsay, for example, sent both its Dance in the City, which had been transferred from its original canvas and relined (see Figs. 10-13 and below), and its Dance in the Country, across the Atlantic. The National Gallery Above, Fig. 2: Durand-Ruel’s Grand Salon at 35, rue de (London) sent its already travel-damaged The Rome, Paris (Bailey, p. 187), showing Renoir’s Dance in the City of 1883 on the left. We can see from the Umbrellas, and did so at a time when it had lent shadows cast by the furniture, that Renoir’s picture was at its brittle, fragile, shotgun-blasted, “never-to- that precise, now historically-telling moment, brightly lit from multiple light sources. The fact that it is captured travel” Leonardo Cartoon to the Louvre. The against a dark wall and adjacent to a very light painted Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, lent its fire- double door is of immense assistance is assessing the damaged Madame Henriot “en travesti” (The Page) work’s own (then) tonal values. …and so forth. The omission that is common to all borrowed compilations was the failure – perhaps for reasons of institutional politesse – to take the opportunity

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 9 / 24 to assess the relative physical conditions of the variously treated and restored cross-section of pictures from within an oeuvre or, in this case, from a specific moment within an oeuvre – “the decade of Impressionism”. This commonly encountered lacuna was the more apparent because Bailey himself discusses conservation matters rather more than most. He does so, however, as a seemingly grateful recipient/beneficiary of museum restoration departments’ technical largesse and their routinely delivered “discoveries”. With his prefatory expression of deep gratitude to an international slew of conservators for “their participation in undertaking technical examination on the paintings in their charge and for allowing Above, left, Fig. 3: Detail of Fig. 2. me to publish their findings in this catalogue” we Above, right, Fig. 4: A greyscale conversion of Renoir’s Dance in the City, as seen in Bailey’s book/catalogue. knew precisely what critical appraisals not to Note the apparent lightening of the woman’s hair, the expect. model for which was the dark haired artist, Susanne Valadon. Strictly speaking it would not be necessary to call for comparative assessments on such occasions if museums were all, as a matter of course, completely frank about the restoration-injured conditions of individual works. By way of an example of what might be discussed at a time when recollection of the show is still fresh and when armed with Bailey’s book/catalogue, which is as intensively researched and handsomely illustrated as might ever be expected, we consider here the technical history, in so far as it has been disclosed, of just one of the nine loaned pictures – Renoir’s beautiful invention of arrested intimacy- in-movement, his Dance in the City. The obvious starting point for any appraisal of a picture’s successive states should be the earliest photographic record of the work. With Renoir we enjoy an immense if not comprehensive photographic record. We even have film footage of him painting and sculpting. We have contemporary or near-contemporary photographs that show his paintings in the context of close proximity to other paintings and in a common light (Fig. 1). Above, left, Fig. 5: Klimt’s portrait of Serena Lederer, as When the testimony of early photographs differs recorded in 1930 in a photograph published in the New York Neue Galerie’s 2007 “Gustav Klimt ~ The Ronald S. markedly from presently photographed states (as Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections”. so often is the case with modern masters – see Above, right, Fig. 6: Klimt’s portrait of Serena Lederer, in Figs. 3-7), then, self-evidently, there is an issue an undated photograph taken after the picture was crying to be addressed. acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1980 and published in the New York Neue Galerie’s When, for example, we compare the very different 2007 “Gustav Klimt ~ The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections”. states of Renoir’s Dance in the City, as seen in Figs. 3 & 4, despite making allowances for photographic variations (such as the great discrepancies of size between the earlier and later images) and being mindful of Bailey’s own thanks to the photographer Michael Bodycomb for having “improved the quality of almost every image”), it is clear that the painting today is not the work that it once was; that its values and relationships have changed. Consider the floor on which the dancers perform: then, it was more varied in its tones; http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 10 / 24 today it is more equal. Then, the floor to the right of the ball gown was darker than the floor to the left of the couple. That darkness served to emphasize the sweeping profile at the back of the trailing gown. Reading downwards from the waist, the shape of two convex masses of material formerly made a leisurely elegant descent towards the train. Today, that “materially” expressive clarity of design in the lower of the two draped forms has been quite disrupted, if not lost, as the now lighter tone of the floor merges with the now diminished shaded tints of the gown (see Figs. 3, 4 & 11). For all of Bailey’s admirably close (and expertly advised) attentiveness to the dress-making “mechanics” of the gown – “…The skirt is draped in puffed folds (en bouillonée) with a tier of

drapery in the front and two pleated flounces at Above, Fig. 7: The cover of the ArtWatch UK Journal No the bottom. The long train is is draped and 23 in which it was pointed out that the restorers of pleated to form poufs in the back, and a petticoat Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (on which the figure in the cover can be glimpsed beneath it” – he misses the illustrations appears), had failed to provide directly comparable before and after restoration photographs. weakened and possibly redrawn profile. Bailey Museums that own Klimts, like the Neue Galerie in New well describes Renoir’s preoccupation with York, are as unforthcoming on their restoration histories costume. As the son of a tailor and a seamstress, as are museums that own Renoirs, like the Phillips Collection, in Washington. It would be a very good thing how could that artist have been unaware of or for art if every owner had to maintain an up to date indifferent to the expressive “cut” and sweep of a logbook that recorded all that was known about a picture’s provenance and the conservation treatments costume on a swirling, waltzing figure? Previously, and repairs that it had undergone. the costume of the male dancer was more various in its tones. Today it reads as a uniform black appendage to the female dancer. Previously there had been no hint of the present overly-assertive, sharpened and darkened treatment of the coat tails which pictorially are now as disruptively emphatic as the head of a claw hammer. For Bailey, the now lighter toned, more equal floor is “immaculate”. To a charlady that might well seem gratifyingly the case, but Renoir, as Bailey acknowledges, fretted greatly about establishing integrated relationships of figures and backgrounds. As Renoir himself put it: “I just struggle with my figures until they are a harmonious unity with their landscape background, and I want people to feel that neither the setting nor the figures are dull and lifeless.” (“Renoir by Renoir”, N.Y., 1990, p. 50). “Harmonious” sometimes seems to be an elusive Above, left, Fig. 8: Le Lever (Les Bas), a monotype print in concept to non-artists. It is not synonymous with black ink on white laid paper, by Edgar Degas, as published in Eugenia Parry Janis’s seminal 1968 “Degas “more-alike”. Rather, it describes the uniting Monotypes ~ Essay, Catalogue & Checklist” for an through an artistically forged equilibrium of exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. otherwise potentially disparate, disjunctive Above, right, Fig. 9: An oil sketch by Renoir for his painting Dance in the Country, published in Bailey, p. 176. elements. We constantly see in artists’ No such sketch exists for Dance in the City, but the preliminary, intimate sketches how their very first overall attack in this small study would seem perfectly in thoughts attempt to anticipate and resolve the keeping with Renoir’s own claim to have struggled with his figures until they achieved a harmonious unity with requirements of such pictorial equilibriums – see their landscape background. Figs. 8 & 9. Rendering Renoir’s dance floor more homogeneous has had a spatially flattening and pictorially deadening effect. Rendering it both

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 11 / 24 generally lighter and more equal has contributed to the unfortunate effect of detaching the couple from their swirling space and leaving them as isolated and self-contained as a pressed flower in a book. Indication of the painter’s pictorially melding preoccupation is unmissable in the small oil sketch at Fig. 9 that Renoir made for another of his dance paintings. Compared with the earlier state of Dance in the City, the present one resembles an artificially sharpened photograph. With apparent injuries we must always look for causes and look for them behind as much as within official accounts. As mentioned, and as Bailey euphemises, this picture has “had a complicated structural history”. That is, it has Above, left, Fig. 10: The back of Dance in the City after been both transferred and relined. Both operations the paint film had been detached from its canvas, as are highly dangerous. When the paint film was published by Bailey at p. 180. detached from (its presumably original) canvas, Bailey’s excitement at the opportunity to enjoy “a rare glimpse into Renoir’s initial preparations” is problematic. the restorers took the opportunity to photograph What little evidence is discernable of the first steps of the painting from the back of the paint, capturing painting the figures is what can be glimpsed through a the image in reverse. This image is excitedly double white fog. As Bailey describes, on an already preprimed canvas, Renoir blocked in a further section of presented as having afforded “a rare glimpse into white ground priming over the area which was to contain Renoir’s initial preparations…we can see the lines the two figures. It is claimed that through this double demarcating the back and the train of the womans barrier of white paint we can see how Renoir “laid out the contours of his dancing couple with a brush”. It is even dress” (but see comments and photograph at Fig. said that we can “see the lines demarcating the back and 10). In the same vein, an X-radiograph “shows the train of the womans dress”. It is unfortunate that the how enegetically Renoir laid out both his figures small size of the reproduction and its hazy image do not permit a safe reading of the information. It is not said and the background elements”. Bailey discusses whether or not those initial lines were adhered to in the an infrared reflectogram (Fig. 11) and subsequent painting. Do they conform to the shapes of acknowledges that these “technical” images were the back of the gown that were evident in the undated but presumably the earliest known photograph of the made by the Laboratoire du Louvre, C2RMF. Our painting that is seen here at Fig. 2? Were those shapes colleague in ARIPA, Michel Favre Felix, advises that that initially defined the forms of the white gown maintained and bolstered during the painting by the a certain number of paintings coming from the darket tones of the adjacent floor? “Information” gained Louvre or from “l’Orangerie”, were “more or less through “advanced”, technically expensive imaging restored” in 1986 on entering the Musée d’Orsay. systems is neither self-sufficient nor self-evident, it must always be read and interpreted. If conservators and Bailey confirms that the picture entered the Louvre curators opt not to address the testimony of the most in 1979 and was transferred to the the Musée accessible and least problematic technical records of d’Orsay in 1986 but offers no details on any condition (that is, the full range of successive ordinary photographs), they will not be well-placed to ask the restorations of the picture. The pronounced right questions and make the best readings. There is differences in the picture that are evident in Figs. every danger at the moment of the new technical 4 and 13 would however suggest that a imaging being deployed as a diversion from, not a resolution of, the most urgent questions of the physical restoration took place at some point after 1986. and aesthetic well-being of old paintings. Needless to say, Renoir painted from the bottom Above, right, Fig. 11: Dance in the City, an infra-red reflectogram, made by the Laboratoire du Louvre, up with overlaid patches of paint and his final, C2RMF. most considered statements therefore formed the upper visible surface of the original paint film. That original, considered and final surface (as was best seen and recorded in the earlier photograph at fig. 2), is no longer to be found in current photographs or in the flesh. Whatever interest penetrative imaging might have, it is secondary in importance to the actual appearance of pictures to the human eye. The current escalating vogue for “technical” imaging that probes beneath the surfaces of pictures serves to divert attention from destructive restoration actions on pictures’ critically important upper surfaces. If the present international museums merry-go-round of borrowings makes the need to address the http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 12 / 24 condition of paintings impolitic, then that is a further compelling reason for curtailing it. Michael Daley

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Above, Fig. 12: Renoir’s Dance in the City, detail, as shown in the 1985 catalogue to “Renoir”, an IBM sponsored travelling exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain in collaboration with the Réunion des musées nationaux and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Above, Fig. 13: Renoir’s Dance in the City, detail, as shown in the 2012 book/catalogue for the “Renoir ~ Impressionism and Full-Length Painting” exhibition which was financially supported by: The Florence Gould Foundation and Michel David-Weill; The Philip and Janice Levin Foundation; The Grand Marnier Foundation; the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation; the Fiduciary Trust Company International; and, the Federal Council on the http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 13 / 24 Arts and Humanities.

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15th May 2012

Review: Deadly Docents, Dirty Varnish and a Big Educational Push at the Frick The hardest thing to do in today’s internationalised world of museum administration is to stand still. A trip to New York always compels a visit to the delightful time-frozen art palace that is the Frick Collection but it would seem that, even there, maintaining the status quo there has proved unendurable. Madcap schemes to build new galleries for new exhibitions under the Frick’s garden have been drawn up. It is possible that the new director, Ian Wardropper (former chairman of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), has dampened ardour for the kind of curatorial and physical “bolt-ons” that have skewed similarly bequeathed jewels like the Wallace Collection in London and the Phillips Collection in Washington (where today the historic works and their period architectural setting have been swamped and diminished by curatorial and architectural expansionism; where today “Special exhibitions are a signature element …offering new perspectives on the work of contemporary and modern artists.”) The Frick’s director does however seem minded to expand the audio tours and “other educational programs” and a book prominently displayed in the Frick’s shop (see right) serves as explicit manifesto for Education’s bid to interpose itself noisily at the very centre of Above, Fig. 1: The cover of the 2011 book that has been museums between art and its visitors. As the published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. painter Gareth Hawker describes below, something vital and of the essence is threatened by the prospect. And, as the painter James Keul discovered on a recent visit, something similar is already up and running at the Getty: “The docent in the Rembrandt room of the East Pavilion upper level, which covers art from 1600- 1800, was speaking to a tour group of about 20 people, mostly middle-aged, and asking what observations people had made on the small painting of the Abduction of Europa. One member of the group asked why all of the paintings appear so dark. The docent answered that varnish and oils applied over the years had darkened, leaving many works darker than they were intended to be. Presumably, this was meant to plant a seed in

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peoples’ minds that all dark paintings are the Above, Fig. 2: The Frick Collection Giovanni Bellini “St result of a darkened varnish rather than an Francis in the Desert”, 1480. intended effect that was used, in this case by a Baroque artist, to provide contrast and thus bathe Art and its Appropriators ~ A Note on the Barnes a picture in a divine light…” Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania (Michael Daley) In “Teaching in the Art Museum” (p. 3), Rika Burnham Gareth Hawker writes: describes the concluding essay chapter on the Barnes Foundation as “a special case study in museum Visitors who plan a quiet hour or so contemplating education”. works of Art in an American museum risk being The Barnes, as a foundation whose primary purpose was educational, rather than being a museum in which accosted by guides called “Docents” who intend to teaching happens to take place, appealed greatly to the deepen their museum experience. Docents, author – even as its method was rejected. Invited in 2003 according to Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, the to teach as a guest lecturer (unusually, for one untrained in the Barnes method), Burnham came to appreciate how authors of “Teaching in the Art Museum: Albert Barnes had collected and assembled a collection to Interpretation as Experience” (2011, Getty be continually rearranged “by the teachers” so that they Publications – see Figs. 1 – 4), seek to enable the might make visible a “continually evolving universe of art and ideas”. If outdated as a pedagogical system, the visitor to “make meanings”. The book’s purpose central role of the educator in the Barnes foundation’s “is to explain making meanings – to open the mission was seen to offer “rich possibilities as a model for world by means of art”. Although many readers the future of our profession”. might be baffled by such sentences as: “metacognition is a byproduct of practice and it facilitates profound experience”, Burnham and Kai-Kee’s respective positions as Head of Education at the Frick Collection, New York, and Education Specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, requires that their campaign to help docents influence a whole culture by shaping the public’s attitude to works of Art be examined. Docents are amateur enthusiasts, who have been trained to a high level – though not to degree standard – in both teaching and art history. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, and are of all Above, fig. 3: Albert C. Barnes with Renoir’s “Bathers in ages. They probably think of themselves as more the Forest” (left). Photograph of 1932 from the Barnes Foundation Archives. or less ordinary people who enjoy appreciating art Barnes, like Henry Clay Frick, was a ruthless accumulator and wish to help others to do so. of wealth but where Frick amassed prime art specimens like some super-philatelist, Barnes was gripped both by The position of the Docent was created in 1907 in specific artistic passions and generous democratising response to a perceived need. Visitors to art impulses. Above all, he was in thrall to Renoir’s late and summary, non-impressionist, nude paintings. An intimate galleries wished for a guidance in appreciating of and close collaborator with John Dewey, Barnes works of art which was deeper than that being bequeathed his stupendous collection (a thousand provided by art-historical lectures. Docents were pictures with over one hundred and eighty Renoirs) as the tool of an educational method. Executed with his money, trained and appointed to meet this need by his works of art, and according to his and Dewey’s ideas, providing an education in aesthetic pleasure. this unique experiment affronted many in the artworld. Nearly a century later, there is no longer As the cash value and the esteem of the collection rocketed, covetous eyes grew impatient with the agreement about what might be meant by “an foundation’s high-minded purpose and began seeking education in aesthetic pleasure”. So this book ways to prise the art away from a distinctive teaching appears at an opportune moment, just when method that encouraged/demanded that the student make the great mental effort to acquire the specific museum educators are seeking to clarify their habits of perception of artists so as to see as the artist roles. sees. In order to help redefine their objectives, Burnham and Kai-Kee refer to the work of the educationalist John Dewey who wrote in his classic 1934, Art as Experience, that “The task is to restore confidence between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.” Dewey had identified an ideal response to a work of art. The visitor would begin by gaining an “experience” (that is, a sense of unity). A teacher http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 15 / 24 might help the visitor in this, by stimulating and guiding his thoughts, but without ever imposing any view or judgement. In this way, “guided interpretation” might help the visitor to “make meaning” – to recognise relationships in many aspects of life and art. At its highest this process can generate a sense of over-arching interconnectedness which Dewey called a “culmination”. In one exercise, students working in a group are encouraged to offer up any ideas and reflections which come to mind in reaction to a painting. These “thought showers” sound as if they could be open and productive, but, if a student asks an awkward question, the process seems to go into shut-down, as the following account (p. 71) may Above, Fig. 4: Two of the original (now shamefully illustrate: denuded) Barnes Foundation galleries, as published in “Teaching in the Art Museum”. “The picture (the Frick Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini) is beginning to cast its habitual spell. When Rika Burnham, the Frick’s present Head of Suddenly, without warning, in a slightly Education and a former Getty Museum Scholar, undertook her teaching at the Barnes, she did so with evident confrontational tone, one man in the group asks, trepidation. Her account (p. 134) opens like a Hammer ‘What’s the difference between a work of art and a horror film set in Translyvania: mere illustration? This might be just an “Darkness is falling in Merion, Pennsylvania, as I leave the illustration.’ [See Fig. 2] The question raises larger station and walk slowly up the hill and turn onto North Latch’s Lane. The year is 2003 but it could just as easily philosophical issues that are more difficult than be 1950. Unchanged, the Barnes Foundation stands silent, he probably realizes and than I can accommodate proud, only slightly faded by time and the endless in the context of a gallery program. I urge him to controversies that have swirled around it since Albert C. Barnes died in 1951. The night watchman at the front be patient. Perhaps the experience of the painting gate pokes his head out and says they are expecting me. may begin to resolve the question, at least for I walk up to the massive wooden doors and lift the large him.” knocker, pausing for a moment to imagine the treasures inside. My knock sounds heavy and hollow. Slowly the The docent hopes that the student’s experience of door opens…my heart is racing. Twenty years of teaching at the Metropolitan have not prepared me for teaching in the painting might begin to resolve his question – an installation like this.” ignoring that fact that it was his experience which Burnham’s dilemma was this: had prompted the question in the first place. “Is it possible to teach with these works of art, I wonder, Perhaps only certain types of experience are as my eyes adjust slowly to the complex arrangements, acceptable. (Dewey made a distinction between the soft but dim lighting? How could I teach in these “experience” and “an experience”). The docent also cacophanous arrangement of art objects? How could I help my students see and make sense of the art in what suggests that the student’s question might be appear to be overflowing, even hyperactive spaces?” resolved, “for him”, as if his question were It sometimes seems that the default response of every personal; as if he were troubled by a mental hang- museum employee and volunteer, when confronted by an up; and as if she were his counsellor. But his old painting, is to complain knowingly about its question was not personal. It was a general “condition”. Perhaps in a field heavy with “conservators” it would be held professionally tactless or even provocative question about how works of art may be to entertain the possibility that non-treatment might ever classified. An answer which was good only “for be preferable to “conservation”? Burnham was first required to talk about two early Netherlandish devotional him” would not have addressed the issue – if pictures given to the school of Gerard David, a “Virgin indeed such an answer could have any meaning at and Child” and the “Crucifixion with the Virgin, St John, all. and the Magdalene”. She immediately took against the two works and their setting: So, to summarise, the teacher has judged that her “However, questionable attribution is only one of my student has had the wrong kind of experience, but concerns. Both pictures are darkened by varnish and will not explain why; she judges that he is surrounded by many objects and other pictures. My heart sinks. It is hard to imagine that we will be able to see probably ignorant of issues which are connected much, let alone sustain study and dialogue.” with his question but she will not tell him what One senses on Burnham’s own account that the Barnes they are. This begins to look less like an students may have come to the rescue of a disoriented application of Dewey’s theories and more like a teacher: power-struggle in which the docent issues a put- “This is a second year class; the students have spent the

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 16 / 24 down and asserts her superiority. previous year learning the Barnes method of seeing. One is a psychologist, another a lawyer, and still others are As so often throughout the book, while the artists…We sit and begin in silence. We search for words, describing what we see, at first hesitatingly, then with theories seem perfectly innocuous, even more confidence. Through our shared dialogue we slowly illuminating, it is the way in which they are put begin to unfold the small ‘Virgin and Child’. The students into practice which gives cause for concern. The are patient and disciplined in their looking, persistent. The small work of art becomes large and radiant to our authors seem to share a general squeamishness eyes, its spiritual mystery paramount, while questions of about talking about artistic quality. This is a attribution and history, for the moment, recede.” mindset which is just as prevalent in Museum Such revelatory surprises were to come thick and fast. education in the UK as in the USA. While the Not only was the varnish-darkened picture possessed of authors appear to accept Dewey’s observation that radiance, but Burnham was surprised by its ability to command any attention at all “given that it is surrounded works of aesthetic merit may be found at all levels by many other works of art, some large and imposing.” of human endeavour, not solely in High Art, they The teacher, already a veteran Metropolitan Museum apparently interpret this to mean that one must Educator, came belatedly to the realization that “pictures can be part of their ensembles, yet still assert not point out the difference between good and themselves…” bad. Week after week and, seemingly, against all odds, pictures were to come alive for Burnham. El Greco was The authors do mention the importance of looking reached. and seeing, but by these terms they seem to mean finding and telling stories, rather than observing shapes and colours. Works are treated as objects to be read, like books, with stories to be discovered and assimilated. Looking at a painting for its artistic qualities is considered only as a small part of a student’s involvement, not of central importance. (Whistler’s Ten O’ Clock lecture, with its concentration on qualities such as colour, tone and shape, would form a stark contrast to the narrative approach outlined here.) For the authors, talking is an essential part of the process of experiencing a work of visual art. The authors would like to see the docent become increasingly prominent in museums. They wish to see teaching develop in such a way that, “galleries may be defined as places where dialogues take place around works of art” (p. 151). This means that galleries would no longer be defined as places where one goes to look at paintings. They would no longer be quiet. The authors envisage galleries “filled with the hum of conversation [… as] educators move from the periphery to the center.” But this move may have harmful consequences. If visitors learn to think of the appreciation of works of art as a series of “experiences”, with little regard to artistic quality, their eyes will be closed to many fundamental aspects of the art of painting. Such visitors are unlikely to observe that some pictures are better Above, Fig. 5: El Greco, “Vision of Saint Hyacinth”. For its than others. They will not notice when quality has display context at the Barnes, see Fig. 4 (top). been reduced over time: when paintings have For Burnham, the attributional quibble came first: “Perhaps painted by El Greco or by his son, Jorge Manuel, been degraded by insensitive restoration it is one of three versions of the subject.” Such doubts “treatments”. Their non-judgemental, non-critical notwithstanding, “We look intently, searching for meaning stance will make them easy prey for apologists and understanding, and again, the picture shines through its darkened coat of varnish.” A landscape by Claude who promote restorations with appeals to crude Lorrain is at first seemingly inaccessible hanging over a sensation such as, “now we can see what was glass case, but it too “triumphs over dim evening light underneath that dark paint!” or, “now look at how and yellowed, aging varnish”.

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 17 / 24 bright that blue has become!” Although her heart initially sank on entering the Barnes collection, Burnham now hopes that despite its enforced Works of art will be relegated to the status of tools move to downtown Philadelphia, the collection may yet which enable the visitor “to open the world by “inform our museum education visions…as we search for a pedagogy advancing our own questions, promoting means of art.” Defining the function of art in this freedom, and serving us as we seek ever-deeper way is simplistic. Art can have many meanings or understanding of the artworks we love”. One senses likely none at all, yet we can still recognise that it is obstacles to this ambitious prospectus: there is an institutionally insurrectionary, anti-curatorial, anti- “right” – if our minds are quiet. Yet the museum of scholarly bias that, paradoxically, requires building an the future which the authors envisage is hectic alliance in which curators must relinquish authority: “If and noisy. education truly is central to the mission of art museums, as most have claimed since their founding, I believe that “Responsible for the continuing translations of educators must collaborate with curators and conservators so that that objects can be free to engage meaning that occur in the new museum, the in dialogues with one another that are not limited only by educators who teach are the most accomplished curatorial imperatives.” It is hard to see how – outside of members of the education department, best the Barnes as it once was – it could be other than a daydream to call for a world in which throughout qualified to shape and animate museum “museums big and small, works of art can be moved into programs. They lead the department, define its surprising juxtapositions at the request of the teachers, philosophy and mission, and overturn the to create new dialogues and open new horizons.” historical definition of teaching as a peripheral, Moreover, the Barnes’ enforced migration has had disastrous consequences for what might once have volunteer, or entry-level activity.” served as an educational beacon. Wrested from its bequeathed purpose-built beautifully landscaped and If, by “translations of meaning” the authors mean architecturally handsome home (with distinguished carved anything like the “guided interpretation” we have sculptural decorations), the Barnes collection has been seen in the verbatim accounts of their teaching deposited within a mean-spirited conservationally sanitised replication of its old interiors. Moreover, these sessions, we know that it will involve subtly are set within an ugly, affronting, clichéd modernist pressurising the visitor to conform to their view of mausoleum that in repudiating history celebrates nothing art, “shaping and animating” his “experience”. more than its own materials and its tyrannical soul- destroying rectilinear aesthetic obsessions – an aesthetic A quiet hour contemplating beautiful paintings which nods derivatively and dutifully to the “signature” modernist roof-top glass box that has been defiantly looks likely to become ever more elusive if the bolted on to the top of Tate Modern’s own “modernised” authors get their way. historic building. Compounding the offences against art and generosity of spirit that this hi-jacked legacy Gareth Hawker constitutes, it transpires that the new building already serves (in flagrant breach of the terms of Barnes’ stipulations) as yet one more commercial “events venue” Printable PDF version of this article: with a “nice museum attached”. ArtWatch_UK_15_05_2012_Deadly_Docents_Dirty_Varnish_File That betrayal has not gone unchallenged. In yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, Nicholas Tinari, a patent attorney Comments may be left at: [email protected] who studied at the Barnes from 1989-91 and later co- founded Barnes Watch in attempt to stop the trustees of the Barnes Foundation from altering the terms of its indenture of trust, speaks of his anger and sadness at the opening of the gallery in Philadelphia: “anger at the gross betrayal of Albert Barnes’ remarkable gift and sadness “for something truly unique [that] is gone, not only an art collection in the perfect setting, but an original idea.” Tinari’s heart-felt sadness is realistic – a dream has died. The Barnes experiment is not universally replicable and its high aesthetic demands could certainly not be met in the envisaged relativist talking shops when “In the art museum of the future, we walk into a gallery in which the hum of conversation fills the space”. In François Truffaut’s film version of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ the “book people” are seen wandering around talking to themselves in order to keep alive the chosen book that they have committed to memory in a society where books are outlawed and destroyed as anti-social. In the transformed museum espoused by Burnham and Kai-Kee, the silent contemplation of a painting will give way to group inductions by educators who make themselves “responsible for these dialogues”; who ask to have a central place in the future museum. In practice, such a transformation threatens the greatest gift that a work of art offers: its implicit invitation to individual viewers to think their own thoughts, to have their own responses, to commune in tranquility directly with the artist. That is the great luxury and privilege that the museum makes possible to all comers regardless of wealth and ownership. Michelangelo once said that he was never less alone than when alone with his thoughts. Can art’s educators really not appreciate that guaranteeing to all the circumstances that permit vivid, living personal, one- http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 18 / 24 to-one engagement with art – to the value of which the authors of this book themselves eloquently testify – should be the primary objective of all museum administrators? It is the art itself that is educational. We do not get waylaid in theatres and concert halls by would-be explainers, nor should we in galleries. Art appreciation classes belong in the class-room.

LINKS:

National/Professional/Volunteer Organizations:

American Association of Museums www.aam-us.org National Docent Symposium Council www.docents.net Congress of Volunteer Administrator Associations www.COVAA.org Association of Volunteer Resources Management www.vrm-roundtable.org Points of Light Organization www.pointsoflight.org United States Federation of Friends of Museums (USFFM) www.usffm.org World Federation of Friends of Museums www.museumsfriends.net Regional Museum Organizations New England Museum Association (NEMA) www.nemanet.org Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM) www.midatlanticmuseums.org Association of Midwest Museums (AMM) www.midwestmuseum.org Mountain Plains Museum Association (MAPA) www.mpma.net Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) www.semcdirect.net Western Museums Association (WMA) www.westmuse.org

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28 April 2012

Rocking the Louvre: the Bergeon Langle Disclosures on a Leonardo da Vinci restoration ArtWatch has been haunted for two decades by a nearly-but-not-made restoration disclosure. In the 1993 Beck/Daley account of the Nippon TV sponsored Sistine Chapel restoration (Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business and the Scandal), we reported that in the late 1980s Leonetto Tintori, the restorer of Masaccio’s “Trinity” in the Santa Maria Novella, Florence, and a member of the international committee that investigated the controversial cleaning, had “urged the Sistine team privately to preserve what he termed ‘Michelangelo’s auxiliary techniques’ which in his view included oil painting as well as glue-based secco” (p. 111). What we had not been able to say was that Tintori (who died in 2000, aged 92) had prepared a dissenting minority report expressly opposing the radical and http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 19 / 24 experimental cleaning method. Above, Fig. 1: The Virgin (detail) from Leonardo’s “Virgin Shortly before the press conference called to and Child with St. Anne”, before restoration. announce the committee’s findings, Tintori was persuaded by a (now-deceased) member of the Vatican not to go public with his views. He was assured that his judgement had been accepted and that what remained on the Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo’s finishing auxiliary secco painting would be protected during the cleaning. With a catastrophically embarrassing professional schism averted, the restoration continued and the rest of what Tintori judged to be Michelangelo’s own auxiliary and finishing stages of painting was eliminated. Without knowledge of Tintori’s highly expert dissenting professional testimony, the public was assured that despite intense and widespread opposition the cleaning had received unanimous expert endorsement. Critics of the restoration were left prey to disparagement and

even vilification. Above, Fig. 2: The Virgin (detail) after restoration. On January 4th, we noted that in the widely reported schism that emerged at the Louvre with the resignations of Ségolène Bergeon Langle, the former director of conservation for the Louvre and France’s national museums, and, and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, the former director of paintings at the Louvre, from the Louvre’s international advisory committee on the restoration of Leonardo’s “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”, it had been recognised that the resulting crisis of confidence was of a magnitude not seen since the Sistine Chapel controversy. Restoration advisory committees are not imposed on museums and customarily they serve as political/professional fig leaves. In the wake of the Louvre committee resignations, Above, Fig. 3: Left, the short Louvre catalogue, published in 2012 after the restoration; right, a plate of the same embarrassed and perhaps panicky members of the heads published in 1992. museum’s staff offered self-contradictory and unfounded assurances (see below). In January, the Louvre’s head of painting, Vincent Pomarède reportedly claimed that “The recent cleaning was absolutely necessary for both conservation and aesthetical reasons.” This assurance proved unfounded on both grounds. Pomarède added that no member of the committee “has ever said that the cleaning was not prudent and had gone too far technically.” One has now done so – publicly – and left museum restorations under an unprecedented spotlight. During an earlier cleaning controversy at the Louvre, Edgar Degas threatened to produce an anti-restoration pamphlet that would be what he termed a “bomb” – but he never did so, so far as Above, left, Fig 4: Leonardo’s “The Musician” as published in 1945. Above, right, Fig. 5: an infra-red photograph of we know. Now, as Dalya Alberge reports in the the musician published in 2011. Guardian, the French Le Journal des Arts yesterday published an interview with Ségolène Bergeon Langle of truly momentous if not incendiary consequence (see below). We learn that her resignation came after no fewer than twelve letters requesting information on the restoration’s http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 20 / 24 course went unanswered; that it was made in specific and pointed protest against the use of retouching pigments whose safety had not been proven; and, that the Louvre’s public claims of some pressing conservation need to remove the varnish were false, having been made despite it being known within the museum that any potential threat to the paint came not from the varnish but

from a single faulty board in the picture’s panel which was reacting to the museum’s insufficiently Above, Fig. 6: The musician, as in 1945. Above, right, Fig. stable environmental conditions. Perhaps most 7: the musician, as published in 2011. By any optical disturbingly serious for art lovers are Bergeon appraisal, it can be seen that Leonardo’s painting Langle’s disclosures that along with old (but presently stands somewhere between its 1945 self and an infra-red photograph of itself. nonetheless still protective) varnishes, original material of Leonardo’s was removed – against her advice – from the painting; and, aesthetically, that it is confirmed that the modelling of the Virgin’s face was weakened (see Figs. 1 and 2; and, for weakening to the modelling of St. Anne’s face, Figs. 12 and 13). That the Louvre authorities would not inform even so distinguished a member of its own advisory committee might suggest either that the restorers had not known in advance what they would be doing to the painting; or, they feared that disclosure of their intentions would provoke opposition within the advisory committee. Either way, this was clearly an unacceptable (if not improper) way for a museum to execute irreversible alterations to one of Leonardo’s most advanced sophisticated, complex and problematic works. To Bergeon Langle’s now public “insider” criticisms, additional detailed material to highlight Above, Fig. 8: The musician, detail, as recorded in 1945. further Louvre procedural shortcomings and misrepresentations to the press and to the public will shortly be presented by Michel Favre-Felix, the president of the Association Internationale pour le Respect de l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique (ARIPA). Favre-Felix is also to call formally for the establishment of a national scientific ethics committee that would be independent of museums and their restoration teams and be charged with re-examining the conservation file on the challenged St. Anne restoration. A second member of Louvre’s advisory committee, Jacques Franck, the world authority on Leonardo’s painting technique, has said to the Guardian that a restoration likely to generate such disapproval from leading figures should never have been undertaken in the first place and, given that Ségolène Bergeon Langle is unquestionably Above, Fig. 9: The musician, detail, as found in 2011. France’s highest authority on restoration matters, her alarmed protest is therefore one that should mean a lot to both Leonardo scholars and art lovers the world over. Unfortunately, the restoration-induced changes on the St Anne are not unprecedented. It is Art’s

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 21 / 24 general tragedy that while scholars have quietly enlarged the oeuvre of Leonardo over the last century and a half, restorers have repeatedly swabbed and scritched away at the surviving fabric of those precious works – sometimes to an astounding degree, as with the “Last Supper” in Milan. With the National Gallery’s substitute version of the “Virgin of the Rocks” we have seen how the distinctive Leonardesque expression on the angel’s mouth was altered (without any acknowledgement) despite the fact that a distinguished scholar and former director of the Gallery, Kenneth Clark, had seen the angel’s face Above, Fig. 10: The musician, detail, as recorded in 1945. as being “the one part of our Virgin of the Rocks where the evidence of Leonardo’s hand seems undeniable, not only in the full, simple modelling, but in the drawing of the hair”. It is a matter of note that four of the most enthusiastically supportive members of the Louvre advisory committee were drawn from the curators and restorers who were directly responsible for the London and Milan Leonardo restorations. Of Leonardo’s accepted earlier paintings, in 1939 Kenneth Clark lavished especial praise on the treatment of modelling found on two portrait heads – and in his enthusiasm, he awarded the palm of best preservation to both of them. The “Ginevra Benci”, then in the Liechtenstein Collection but now in the National Gallery of Art,

Washington, was judged “the best preserved of all Leonardo’s early pictures”; one that “shows most Above, Fig. 11: The musician, as found in 2011. clearly his intentions at this period”; and, one where “within the light oval of the face there is very little shadow, and the modelling is suggested by delicate gradations of tone, especially in the reflected lights.” Clark thrilled to the great refinement of execution: “We see a similar treatment of form in Desiderio’s low reliefs, controlled by the same sensibility to minute variations of surface. There are passages, such as the modelling of the eyelids, which Leonardo Above, Fig. 12: The eyes of St. Anne, in Leonardo’s never surpassed in delicacy, and here for once he “Virgin and St. Anne”, before its cleaning at the Louvre. seems to have had none of that distaste for the medium which we can deduce from his later paintings, no less than from contemporary descriptions of his practice.” Ever aesthetically alert and deft, Clark saw all of these ultra-refined technical devices as being entirely “subordinate to the feeling of individual character with which

Leonardo had been able to charge his portrait, so that this pale young woman has become one of Above, Fig. 13: The eyes of St. Anne, as found after the the most memorable personalities of the picture’s cleaning at the Louvre. Renaissance.” (We are grateful to Carroll Janis for drawing attention to this passage.) Clark’s alertness to the physical/aesthetic characteristics of Leonardo’s hand was to the fore in his reflections on the “Portrait of a Musician” at the Ambrosiana in Milan. In the “subtle luminous modelling” of its head and its “delicate http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 22 / 24 observation of light as it passes across the convex forms”, this work could only be “by Leonardo’s own hand alone and unaided” and it was “very similar to that of the angel in the Virgin of the Rocks”. As it stood before 1939, this too was “perhaps the best preserved of Leonardo’s paintings”, and in it we were then able to “learn Above, Fig. 14: The eyes in Leonardo’s “Ginevra Benci”, as something of his actual use of pigment, elsewhere seen in Bode’s 1921 Studien über Leonardo da Vinci. obscured by dirty varnish, and we see that it was less smooth and ‘licked’ than that of his followers.” Ironically, Clark, with his pathological aversion to “dirty” varnish (which is to say, old varnish on an old painting on an old support), was more responsible than anyone for the subsequent museum restoration/stripping mania. Looking around today’s museums, it is hard not to conclude that Clark might have been more careful in his wishes. Bergeon Langle’s warning against the modern addiction to penetrative imaging systems is particularly apt and timely: the hyper- Above, Fig. 15: The eyes of “Ginevra Benci”, as found in active restoration changes (see right) made to the 2011. modelling and to the expression of those precious living Renaissance faces have cumulatively thinned and abraded pictures surfaces and material components and thereby remorselessly pushed great paintings into sad resemblances of their own infra-red under-states (see particularly, Figs. 4-11 and 19 & 20). Technical curiosity kills more than cats. In the case of Leonardo it has contrived to pull that artist back from his own increasingly lush highly-wrought subtly atmospheric shading towards the brilliant but thinner decorous linearity of Botticelli, when any comparison of the “Mona Lisa’s” hands with those of Leonardo’s “Annunciation” would have warned precisely against such perverse and regressive adulterations. Above, Fig. 16: Andrea del Verrocchio’s “Flora”. The interview given to Le Journal des Arts of 27 April, by Ségolène Bergeon Langle read as follows: Why resign from the Louvre’s scientific advisory committee for the St Anne? “In January 2011 the committee had agreed on a gentle cleaning of late varnishes and the removal of the stains on the Virgin’s cloak. Yet, between July and October 2011 a more pronounced cleaning was done and presented as ‘necessary’, which I objected to. I was then faced with people who would oppose my position, which is technical and not based on aesthetics. My 12 letters [to the Louvre] asking for precisions on some aspects of the cleaning process and on the materials to be used for retouching, remained unanswered. I had to resign (on December 20th, 2011) to be heard just on one specific point: the Gamblin retouching Above, Fig. 17: “Ginevra Benci”, detail, as seen in 1921. pigments were not to be used since their innocuousness is not proven. Right from the beginning, false ideas have been put forth, like calling ‘repaints’ original retouches by Leonardo http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/ Page 23 / 24 in the work’s early stages, or to attribute flaking in the paint layer to the ‘contracting varnish’, a [consequence that was] actually due to the sawing up of the wood [panel]…” What do you think of the work done? “In my opinion, the precautionary principle hasn’t been respected. We must face the fact that the Virgin’s face is less modelled now. The cleaning should never have gone so far. However, I was happy that the grove [of trees] be preserved and, also, the ground’s material constituents that some ‘felt’ not original (though between January and April 2011 a brown-greenish section of the ground, located Above, Fig. 18: “Ginevra Benci”, detail, as seen in 2011. below St Anne’s elbow had been removed already). Besides, another matter of much controversy, the whitened layer on Christ Child’s body, has mistakenly been understood as a late varnish [that has] gone mouldy. I’m inclined to believe it was an irreversibly altered [original] glaze and, therefore, I have recommended that it be preserved, but nobody would hear me.” The current Leonardo exhibition implies that his other paintings in the Louvre should be cleaned also. How do you feel about that? “Just not to do it, by all means! The original flesh paint in the St John-the-Baptist, being rich in oil, displays a significant network of drying cracks and might be fragile in the event of cleaning. For sure, scientific methods are essential but they need sound interpretation and wisdom dually… To date, there is too much boldness originating mistakes and an alarming fascination for infra-red investigation whereby are revealed under-layers that were never meant to be seen.” Michael Daley

Printable PDF version of this article: ArtWatch_UK_28_04_2012_Rocking_the_Louvre_File

Comments may be left at: [email protected] Above, Fig. 19: The musician, detail, as found in 2011.

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