Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
There’s a painting for everything, and while some people conjure up Norman Rockwell on Thanksgiving, I lead toward the Dutch masters, like Jan Davidsz de Heem. Below is his Still-Life with Flowers and Fruit from the 1660s. I hope you are enjoying family, friends and an even better feast today.
I’ll be away for the next couple of weeks, back online in mid-December. While I’m away, there should be–space permitting–a review by me  in The Wall Street Journal of an excellent exhibition.
During World War II, in London’s bleak days, Kenneth Clark acted, as the review of his biography by James Stourton in today’s New York Times reminds us.
Clark recognized that in dark times there is a yearning for serious art, music and literature.
Many people now feel that we as a nation are going through dark days as well–no matter where you stand politically, it’s hard to reconcile our national values with the increased incidents of hate that have been occurring around the country this year. It doesn’t compare with World War II, but I am wondering if–without getting political–our cultural institutions might be involved in a healing process.
It would be an opportunity to demonstrate that so-called elite culture is not elite at all. The BBC, the Stourton writes, had “not understood the mood of the nation, and believed that people wanted nothing but light music.â€
But Clark felt otherwise:
Bereft at how emergency orders had shut down so much of the cultural life in London, he began to open the now-empty and echoing National Gallery for a vastly popular series of noontime concerts.
The BBC took notice and began to broadcast them.
Furthermore, since the National Gallery’s artworks had been shipped out of town, to safety in Wales,
Clark elected to take one master painting at a time out of storage, and to show each selection in a series of exhibitions titled “Picture of the Month.†Nearly 40,000 people came to see Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus.â€
Can our museums today be part of the solution? Have they misread the situation, like the BBC, offering exhibitions that divide rather than unite? Can they think of ways to bring us together?
These questions are worth pondering–and, after some deep thought, perhaps some action.
I spent most of Friday afternoon and evening at Tefaf-New York, and I found it to be as full of interesting paintings and objects as I expected. Here are pictures of some interesting booths–there were so many. When I remember where I was, I’ve added a few details.
Richard L. Feigen’s booth–with a wonderful Courbet bust in the center and a fantastic Velazquez on the right.
Shapero Rare Books.
Wonderful glass on that wall, Lillian Nassau Gallery.
Otto Naumann’s booth: the Mengs, top left, which was in the Met’s Unfinished exhibition, sold on Friday to Anderson Cooper.
Agnews’ booth–full of pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Sam Fogg –a wonderful booth on the second floor of the Armory.
At the back of Sam Fogg.
Back on the first floor, Philips gallery.
Please don’t draw any conclusions from the scarce sight of people in these photos. I waited for quiet moments, so you could see what was in the booths.
Tefaf continues through Wednesday.
When I traveled to Berlin earlier this summer, I spent about four and half hours at the Gemaldegalerie (not enough time)–a full hour of which was spent looking at Portrait of a Young Girl (1470) by Petrus Christus. It’s the subject of the “Masterpiece” column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal, and was published on Saturday under the headline The Girl with the Sidelong Glance (at right). (If you are not a WSJ subscriber, you can read it here.)
It is a great picture, clearly, but I wouldn’t have noticed all the details without the help of Stephan Kemperdick, the museum’s curator of Early Netherlandish and German Painting. He spent most of that hour with me, and two things in particular come to mind that I might have missed without him: the very thin “tissue” draped around her shoulders (easy to see around her neck, but not across her bodice) and her unmatched eyelids. He also pointed out the geometry of the painting, the molding that aligns with her mouth and the vertical axis, neither of which I mentioned. (I read catalogue and book excerpts about her, too.)
As if to demonstrate the portrait’s drawing power, while we were talking, comparing it with three nearby van Eycks, a man came into the gallery with a folding stool. Taking no note of us, he plopped his stool right in front of the painting and sat there staring at it for at least five minutes. And then he got up and left, cursorily looking at other works.
Some people are bothered by that heavy strap around her neck holding the headdress in place. Christus used it as a pictorial device, as my article notes, but Kemperdick did not know of another like it in paintings for a female, though he did tell me that a picture of Philip the Good shows something similar. I found that manuscript page, painted by Rogier van der Weyden, which is the frontispiece to the Chroniques de Hainaut held in Royal Library of Belgium–it’s at left (for a larger image, click on it and click again on the next page).
Still, the girl is mysterious and neither Kemperdick nor any of the written materials I consulted knew anything about the loop in the bonnet. Imagine my surprise–and delight–when a read wrote to me this morning saying that long ago she had been told by “an expert” that the velvet forehead loop advertised that she had a dowry of some known quantify–perhaps “10..thousand? hundred? pounds? gold coins?”annually.
Can we solve that mystery? Does anyone reading this know about the loop?
Europe beckoned–that is where I have been. Not to the art sales in London, but rather to Berlin and then to Bulgaria for a week. I saw a lot of art–fantastic art in Berlin, of course, and some interesting things in Bulgaria. I’ll share some of that here in the future.
But while I was gone–on Saturday–The Wall Street Journal published a piece I’d written a few weeks ago in the weekly Masterpiece column. Headlined Dazzling Reminders of Mortality, my piece examined four 18th Century sculptures carved by Ecuadorian master Caspicara. Never heard of him? He was an indigenous artist of whom Spanish King Charles III once said, “I am not concerned that Italy has Michelangelo; in my colonies of America I have the master Caspicara.”
Well, that’s a little bravado. But the four little sculptures in question, just acquired by the Hispanic Society of American Museum and Library, are spectacular. I invite you to read my piece. Here’s a look at all four of them
Caspicara was known for his exquisite carving and attention to anatomical details. Â You can see both in the backs of these pieces as well as the fronts:
