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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

“Inductive Optimism” Or A Real Discovery? — UPDATED

Could there possibly be a trove of 100 unknown Caravaggio drawings and maybe a painting or two? Some Italian researchers say so. That caused an immediate storm of incredulity.

Here’s the story: Last week, art historians Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz,  artistic director of the Brescia Museum Foundation, and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli, his colleagure, announced their find and said they were publishing their work in a two-volume, 477-page e-book entitled Young Caravaggio – One hundred rediscovered works, supposedly available on Amazon, but I couldn’t find it either here or on the UK site. (True, one story I read said “will publish,” so maybe it’s forthcoming.)

They said they discovered the sketches in a collection of paintings and drawings from the workshop of Simone Peterzano which has been held in a castle in Milan, Castello Sforzesco, since 1924, after they were transferred there from a nearby church. Caravaggio was an apprentice to Peterzano in his youth, as were other Italian painters. The Peterzano archive contains 1,378 paintings and drawings by the master and his students, and Curuz and Fedrigolli say it’s unlikely than some are not by Caravaggio. So they set to work to find them.

However, doubt was cast when other art historians said the pair had not studied the sketches in person, but rather used photographs to make identifications. It surely didn’t help that someone in the early articles had already placed a value on them — some 700 million euros.  

But while, according to the Daily Telegraph, “Their research was praised as “intelligent” by Claudio Strinati, a prominent expert in 16th-century art and an authority on Caravaggio,” others disagreed. For example:

Dr John T. Spike, a Caravaggio expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, said the quality of the sketches was better than Caravaggio’s earliest known work, Boy Peeling Fruit, painted in 1592.

“The sketches from the collection show robust, competent drawing, yet in Caravaggio’s earliest painting he was struggling to draw competently,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “How could he have gone backwards in terms of his artistic skill?”

The American press hasn’t given much coverage to the claims, but I’d venture that’s partly because they show so little interest in art (as opposed to the art market). Reuters picked it up and published something yesterday, dousing the claim with cold water. The AP, too, showed restraint and disbelief, writing:

Among the prominent skeptics was Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums and one of Italy’s most esteemed art historians and restoration experts, who pointed out that many experts have seen the drawing and “not one of those experts had come up with the name of Caravaggio.”

Paolucci described the claim as “pure inductive optimism” in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano on Friday, though he acknowledged it was always possible that “researchers with lesser credentials but with an especially gifted eye, sensitivity and also luck” had pinpointed something new.

Sounds right to me.

UPDATE, 7/11: No wonder I couldn’t find the book mentioned above on Amazon’s website: The Telegraph is now reporting that the book has been withdrawn. It said:

…Stefano Boeri, a cultural official with Milan city council, announced the launching of an investigation to ascertain “the correctness of the procedures regarding the publication” of the e-book.

A panel of heritage experts from Castello Sforzesco, the castle where the archive of sketches and drawings is kept, would scrutinise “with rigour the ideas advanced by the authors of the e-book,” he said….

Uh-oh.

Photo: Supper at Emmaus, from the National Gallery collection in London

Catching Up With The Berlin Gemaeldegalerie Situation

The Association of German Art Historians has written an even stronger petition against the planned “irresponsible” move of Berlin’s Old Master painting collections out of the Gemaeldegalerie and into the Bode Museum, partly, plus much more into storage than the one I’ve written about before. Here’s one paragraph from it:

To put it bluntly: Bode’s vision of showing painting and sculpture together cannot be used to gloss over the disappearance into storage of large parts of the Gemäldegalerie collection of Old Master paintings. We also consider the token solution proposed in official statements, namely to stage rotating presentations of the works that the Bode Museum is far too small to house, as irresponsible on conservation grounds. Would such a solution be conceivable in the newly redesigned Louvre? What would Bode have said about it?!

So far, 4,154 German art historians have signed on. The link above includes an English translation. Meanwhile, the petition launched here in the U.S. has 6,363 signatures. But Jeffrey Hamburger, the Harvard art historian who created it, today wrotes to supporters:

At the rate of ca. 850/day, we have done quite well. We need, however, to do more. Just think: if each of you recruited one additional person to sign, we’d have close to 12,000. Two more, close to 20,000. With a little effort, we can greatly magnify the impact of our common cause. Now is not the time to sit back, but rather to redouble our efforts.

Authorities in Berlin have taken notice of the petitions, but apparently claim that no one goes to see the Old Master paintings. Nonetheless, they are being forced to respond and, as someone put it recently, their thoughts are “evolving.”

Sign here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Gemaeldegalerie

Josiah McElheny, On Not Being The Easy Artist You Think – UPDATED

Josiah McElheny has been around in the art world for a while, but I confess that the first time he really registered with me was last year, when I saw Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (detail, below right), followed quickly by a look at Czech Modernism (below left) at the Institute For Contemporary Art nearby. That was for the article I wrote last fall for The New York Times about contemporary art in Boston.

I was intrigued, and that got me interested in writing about him, which led to my article about him in yesterday’s New York Times. I confess that I was one of the people Helen Molesworth, chief curator at ICA and a long-time backer of McElheny, was talking about in this passage, drawn from a catalogue essay:

If part of Josiah’s agenda is to try and think through the relations between the social contract and abstraction, then I’d like to talk about the kinds of experiences I find people have of Czech Modernism….The piece is comprised of mirrored vases housed in a mirrored vitrine that allows you to see an endlessly reflected image of the vases––a truly spectacular mise en abyme––and yet you do not see yourself. …for the most part, what people experience in response to this object are feelings of profound pleasure, amazement, and wonder. Yet when I talk about Czech Modernism publicly and discuss my sense of dread and horror, which is what the object engenders in me, when I describe a world of infinitely reproducible objects that are unfailingly the same, in which no human agent exists …

I find that I have to be gentle, I have to lead people to the idea slowly, because if I begin there, the crash, the affective letdown, is so hard.

…it’s not hard to get people to realize the dark implications of the piece. If this is a model of the social, then it is not a place where you want to live. That being said, I’ve watched a lot of people dispense with the darkness of the work almost immediately on assimilating it, and move back into the much more comforting place of wonder. So, for all of the sculpture’s explorations of the roads of modernism not taken, for all of its querying of utopianism, there’s a deep strain of foreboding in it. The work can be quite dark, as it intimates that the thing that you want is also the thing that is unsustainable….helplessness.

When I discussed these modernity pieces with McElheny, he said: “To me those pieces are a failure. I misread how they would be perceived.” He called them his “most successful failures,” and added “I was disappointed that most people didn’t think what I thought they would.”

But here’s the thing: McElheny knows that he is trying to embed sophisticated ideas into simple objects, and he volunteered to me that  “There could be a big gap between what I’m talking about and what I’m doing. I accept that absolutely.” In other words, the viewer may not be entirely at fault.

A little later in our discussions, he added this: “I am an artist, so I get to be irresponsible in the way I am responsible to my own desires. That’s the gift and the terror of it. I don’t think artists should run the world. We should represent quixotic, imaginative thinking.”

I like that.

UPDATE: Cleaning out some of my reporting notes, I found a few other comments from some who knows McElheny’s work well but didn’t want to be quoted by name. They are revealing, though, so I wanted to share them:

  • He wants the work to be seductive, beautiful and compelling purely as an object, but an object imbued with content has a much deeper life. It has a life of its own.  
  • He is interested in our obsession that histories are true, with singular meanings. There are layers, and his work makes us responsible for finding out the cracks in history.
  • You’re trapped by the physical seduction, but then you have to realize that there are all these layers and you say, “now I have to know that.”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (top); ICA (bottom)

Josiah McElheny’s Own Big Bang

In today’s Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, I have an article about Josiah McElheny, the glass artist who’s certainly having a moment right now — museum exhibits, gallery shows, commissions. He’s a very thoughtful and articulate artist, a conundrum of sorts, because he’s a cerebral artist working primarily in a medium known for its decorative nature.

A little excerpt:

… a few hours spent with him there recently — during which he expounded on influences like Czech modernism, the 19th-century German writer Paul Scheerbart and various obscure historical incidents — demonstrated why this room, where he researches and draws, is more important to his work than his small glass foundry, also in Brooklyn. In a medium known for work many regard as lightweight and decorative, Mr. McElheny’s creations strive to convey sophisticated, often dark ideas.

…Over the next year Mr. McElheny will have his own big bang, a constellation of exhibitions that will reveal his work —in glass and other mediums — in more depth than ever. It started last month in New York, with a show of new work addressing fashion, abstraction and identity at Andrea Rosen Gallery, up through the end of June. In Boston on Friday, the Institute for Contemporary Art will open “Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite,” a midcareer survey that will unveil a major piece about the cosmos, “The Center Is Everywhere.” In London seven large sculptures, all involving mirrors that reflect abstract films, are on view at the Whitechapel Gallery through July 20.

Other events will follow, including a gallery show in Chicago in September relating to the Swiss literary modernist Robert Walser, and the premiere in December, at the Vizcaya Museum in Miami, of a film reimagining Scheerbart’s story “The Light Club of Batavia.” And next year the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio will present a survey of his work, “Towards a Light Club,” focused on modernism.

Oddly, given all this interest, Mr. McElheny said he is “still trying to figure out how art works.”

Here was an artist eager to talk about his work, unlike some others who prefer to let it speak for themselves.

I spent many hours with Josiah, and I’ll be back with some further thoughts later.

 

Chinese Painting Soars To $46 Million, But That’s Not The Story

Last week, an auction in China brought to the fore an artist whose name we probably ought to know: Li Keran.

His Thousands of Hills in A Crimsoned View, which was inspired by a poem written by Mao Zedong and was painted in 1964, fetched $46 million at Beijing Poly.

As Jing Daily, which reported the sale, noted, Li is not a household name even in China, and the work was purchased by “a domestic entrepreneur who began buying art two years ago.” It came, however, from “overseas.”

I know some people say, with apparently good reason, that figures coming out of China are not all that they’re cracked up to be. I also know that we should not judge art by a value determined by the marketplace.

But, I think we ought to know about Li because I tend to agree with something I read recently to The New York Times.  In an article published on Apr. 23, headlined “China Extends Reach Into International Art,” Fan Di’an, director of the National Art Museum of China, was quoted saying: “For the Western point of view, the 20th century is Western art, and the art of Modernism. I don’t think that is fair. These days, when Western scholars discuss modernity, they should also discuss Chinese modernity.”

Some people do know Li. In the ArtPrice report on the 2011 art market, which I reported on here (read the comments — some people dispute numbers coming from China), Li Keran was No. 10 on the “Top Ten Artists,” defined as a global ranking of artists by auction revenue during 2011. Here is that list:

  • Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) – $550m
  • Qi Baishi (1864-1957) – $510m
  • Andy Warhol (1928-1987) – $325m
  • Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – $315m
  • Xu Beihong (1895-1953) – $220m
  • Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010) – $212m
  • Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) – $198m
  • Gerhard Richter (1932) – $175m
  • Francis Bacon (1909-1992) – $129m
  • Li Keran (1907-1989) – $115m

How many of the non-Western artists can you call up an image for?

Regarding Li, here’s what ArtPrice wrote:

Just outside the top 10 last year, Li Keran took tenth place in the 2011 ranking. The sixth Chinese artist and perhaps, so far, the least well-known in the West, with only 5 of his works selling outside Asia in 2011. Although there was no new record for Li Keran last year, he generated his fourth and fifth best results (Landscape in 1979 sold for $5.1 million and Maple woods on Mt. Danxia 1963 fetched $5 million) and his works attract a not particularly selective type of demand: only 13% of his lots failed to sell in 2011. One of the Chinese Moderns, Li Keran mixed traditional ink and accumulations of colours, creating a sense of depth and perspective. His technique reflected his apprenticeship and his mastery of Chinese landscape painting, but also Western influences. The artist’s market is primarily in mainland China where 90% of his revenue is generated. Paintings by the artist seldom travel, and should become increasingly rare on the market, especially after the artist’s widow donated over a hundred paintings to the Chinese government. His progress this year is well deserved considering that in 2001, only 12 years after his death, when the National Museum of Hong Kong organised a major retrospective of his work, Li Keran was already in Artprice’s Top 500… at the 345th place. China’s power on the art market has in effect swept Keran all the way to the Top 10.

Now he does have a record price. It’ll be interesting to see next year’s Top Ten from ArtPrice.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Jing Daily