Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

Magnificent Gesu Exhibit: Ask and You Shall Receive

As great projects often do, the amazing exhibition on view at the Fairfield University Art Museum began with an impossible dream. Seeking ideas for a show to mark the university’s 75th anniversary this year, museum director Linda Wolk-Simon convened an exhibition committee, among show members was Xavier Salomon, chief curator at the Frick Collection. Salomon suggested that she ask to borrow Bernini’s great marble bust of Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino—which normally resides in the Gesu, the Jesuit’s mother church, in Rome.

The Fairfield museum is located in Bellarmine Hall, after all, and he is the university’s patron saint.

Wolk-Simon thought, they’ll say no—but why not? The bust, created in 1621-24, had never before left Rome. Bernini (1598-1680) was quite young when he carved it.

She was right. The church say no–the first time. She also asked to borrow other things, too, and eventually the church came around and granted four of her requests–and then the rector inquired why she had not requested his favorite item, the bejeweled silver-and-gilt-bronze Cartegloria of Saint Ignatius made by Johann Adolf Gaap in 1699 (detail, right).

And that’s how the museum came to host an international loan exhibition, Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age, of nearly 60 objects from museums including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Met, the Princeton University Art Museum, and many more. It opened on Feb. 2 and runs until May 19.

I’ll get back to the show in a minute. But perhaps even more important will be the catalogue for “The Holy Name–Art of the Gesu: Bernini and HIs Age.” It will be a 600-page monster with essays by many scholars and a foreward by Philippe de Montebello, the Director Emeritus of the Met who served as honorary chair of the exhibition committee. For the exhibit’s press release, he said, “If I were still Director of the Metropolitan, I would be jealous of Fairfield doing this show. It’s simply incredible–it brings to the Fairfield University Art Museum some of the greatest artists working in 17th century Rome.”

For me, it also fulfills another purpose. The Gesu, with its rather plain exterior (click on the link in my first paragraph to see both exterior and interior photographs), sits in a crowded part of Rome; it is easy to overlook. Yet inside, it’s stunning. The ceiling of the apse is a fresco–Glory of the Mystical Lamb–painted by Giovanni Battista Gaulli. And that’s just the start. The curious can find much more about it online.

From the church, Fairfield was able to borrow Gaulli’s final painted wooden model for the apse fresco, plus a gilt bronze statue of Saint Teresa of Avila by Ciro Ferri, the bust, the cartegloria and another true treasure–a silk chasuble embroidered with gold, silver and silk threads, c. 1575-1589 (detail, left), worn by the church’s great benefactor, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. .

The Bellarmine-Bernini bust, which normally hangs high in the church but here can be seen at eye level, is gathering most of the attention in the art world. On Instagram, Luke Syson, chairman of the Met’s European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department, wrote, in part:

Today I witnessed an object I’d previously categorized as a work of baroque art–a very great one but nonetheless the rather remote portrait of a long-dead individual with a history of religious learning and obduracy–spiritually recharged to become the animate patron saint of this Jesuit university. It’s partly that the sculpture is normally an ingredient of the minestrone of Counter-reformation glory that is the Gesù, placed high up, impressive but rather invisible, just one of Rome’s many treasures. At Fairfield, it’s not just that one can see him properly for the first time, though that’s absolutely marvelous. It’s also, and more importantly, that he could only have traveled there–the Jesuit authorities would never have supported a loan to somewhere else and requests to borrow the piece by larger, grander, older museums have always been turned down. They were right. Here he’s turned into the living Saint Robert Bellarmine rather than the long-dead seventeenth-century cleric known for having put a spoke in Galileo’s scientific wheel….

Bernini makes him embody a combination of deep thought and profound belief. His fingers scintillate in prayer. The fierce muscles above his eyebrows express his brain power. It’s an extraordinary piece of characterization. Bernini did something amazing but, fascinatingly and most unexpectedly, it’s only at Fairfield that the Saint has come truly alive for me.

I can’t end this without posting a painting–so here, below, is Gaulli’s The Vision of St. Ignatius at La Storta (c. 1685-90)–Ignatius being a founder of the Jesuits.

So–go if you can. Visit the Gesu next time you are in Rome. Meantime, enjoy the photos I took while there.

 

See It Now–Michel Sittow, Extraordinary Painter

Hats off to Estonia, which in celebrating the 100th anniversary of its proclamation as an independent republic in 1918, following the dissolution of the Russian Empire, decided to honor its genius painter–Michel Sittow (c. 1469-1525)–with his first monographic exhibition.

And we Americans are lucky for that, because the National Gallery of Art happens to own two of his best paintings–so it became the natural partner for an exhibition that opened yesterday. I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal, in a piece published today and headlined A Renaissance Artist Cloaked in Mystery.

Sittow’s works are few and far between–so you are forgiven if you do not know him or his works. Although he had many royal patrons, including Isabella of Castile, Margaret of Austria and Christian II of Denmark, many of his works have disappeared. As I wrote:

Sittow apparently never signed his paintings. In records, he is listed under various names and confused with others with the same given name. His works were copied. Over the years experts had attributed some of them to Jan Gossart, Hans Holbein the younger or others, and he was largely forgotten until the early 20th century. Despite attempts to catalog Sittow’s works, no one knows the extent of his surviving paintings: a 2011 catalogue raisonné lists 111 works as by Sittow but confirms him as the artist in only 13 cases.

In the U.S., aside from the two in Washington–one a gift of Paul Mellon and the other purchased with Mellon money–the only other accepted works are in the Detroit Institute of Arts (here and, here, on Pinterest–not on the DIA website). The Metropolitan Museum once listed a monk’s portrait as by him but now calls it “French, 1500.”  The Getty catalogue lists this work, Portrait of a Man with A Pink, as by Sittow, but it’s not on view, is in poor condition and, to my knowledge, is not accepted by at least some others as a Sittow.

So, the NGA/Estonia exhibit brings together a dozen of Sittow’s works, plus a few by his workshop and others (his probably teacher, Memling, and some contemporaries).

For me, the unquestionable star of the show is the NGA’s gift from Mellon–Portrait of Diego de Guevara (?) (c. 1515/1518) [above, right], which is part of a diptych whose other half is a Madonna and Child [at left]. I could not outdo, and therefore quoted, the catalogue description:

A Spanish courtier and ambassador (who once owned Van Eyck’s masterpiece, the “Arnolfini Portrait”), De Guevara looks adoringly at the infant Jesus in a way best described by the exhibition catalog—“with a pensiveness bordering on melancholy that in its humanity is without parallel in early Netherlandish art.”

I love that he owned the Van Eyck! At some point, he gave it away to Margaret of Austria, ruler of the Netherlands. And now it resides in the National Gallery, London.

Go and see this at the NGA if you can, because it’s unlikely to happen again in our lifetimes.

 

 

Ken Burns, Collector, Gets An Exhibition

There’s nothing like a celebrity, even a person behind the camera instead of in front of it, to attract attention–sometimes even deservedly so. I think that is the case for an exhibition opening Friday, Jan. 19, at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska.  “Uncovered: The Ken Burns Collection” will display 28 quilts to the public for the first time, drawn from his collection of about 75.

I interviewed Burns for the “Show Us Your Wall” feature that runs in the Weekend section of The New York Times on Fridays. In the resulting piece, headlined Don’t Tell Ken Burns Quilts Are Quaint and set to run in tomorrow’s paper, he explains how he collects and why, along with commenting on his favorite quilt and another very striking one (see them at the Times link).

For the Study Center, he also said this:

As a collector, I’m looking for something that reflects my country back at me. Quilts rearrange my molecules when I look at them. There’s an enormous satisfaction in having them close by. I’m not a materialist. There are too many things in the world, and we know that the best things in life aren’t things. Yet there are a few things that remind me of the bigger picture.

We live in a rational world. One and one always equals two. That’s okay, but we actually want—in our faith, in our families, in our friendships, in our love, in our art—for one and one to equal three.

And quilts do that for me.

That’s a pretty difficult task he has set for articles of vernacular art, but in some ways the second paragraph might apply more broadly to all art. We want art to move us in a new direction, provide missing perspective, help us see things differently. Don’t we?

The Quilt Study Center is well-known among Americana experts, quilt fans and people in its region. Burns brings it to the attention of a greater audience, and I was happy to help do that. There’s more art in the U.S. than just that on the coasts, a narrow stripe down the Midwest and a few places in Texas.

 

Is There Anything New In Costume Exhibits?

Yes, maybe. Vogue magazine recently wrote: “Couture Korea proves that in the often choked-up calendar of museum fashion exhibitions, there are still fascinating new subjects to explore that are fresh and full of feeling.”

Couture Korea, on view until Feb. 4 at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, is an exhibition of more than 120 works, of both historical Korean fashion and modern reinterpretations of them. In setting up the show, the museum notes that this is “a moment when young Seoul-based designers are making the leap to the global stage and international haute couture is finding inspiration in Korean art and culture.” (Certainly, Korean contemporary artists are doing that.)

I was in San Francisco recently, and stopped in. Some of the creations, which I’ve shown here, are truly beautiful. And it was well-installed.

There was something else that I liked about the show. All the costumes are, as usual, encased in vitrines. Yet they they practically begged to be touched. So the Asian Art Museum attached, near the labels, little swatches of the fabric that visitors could touch–see the one at right as well as some below.

Now museums have had a lot of problems lately with visitors who do not know they can’t touch most objects in a museum, so this may sound dicey. But I don’t think so. I think it worked beautifully. Where possible–and I realize it’s probably not for historical costume exhibits–this is an idea worth copying.

A New Leonardo?

Has the unprecedented sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi brought more paintings by the Renaissance master out of the closet? Over the courses of this fall and winter, some people were speculating that that would happen, and also that–of course–none of them would be “right.”

Now the Worcester Art Museum is entering the fray, but with a reasoned case–founded on research and connoisseurship over many years–for a painting it has owned since 1940: A Miracle of Saint Donatus of Arezzo (c. 1479-85), below. The painting is a predella panel of an altarpiece in the Duomo of Pistoia in Tuscany; a second panel, Annunciation, is in the collection of the Louvre. A third seems to be missing.

Saint Donatus, donated to the Worcester museum as a Leonardo but soon downgraded, has been attributed to Lorenzo di Credi since then–but that attribution has bothered Laurence Kanter, Chief Curator at the Yale University Art Gallery, for about 20 years. More recently, it also bothered Rita Alberrson, chief conservator at the Worcester museum, who has studied the painting for about 9-10 years, using 21st century technology. The two of them have been working away on the attribution, and in conjunction with Bruno Mottin, the senior curator of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, who has studied Annunciation, below. are prepared to argue that both works are largely by Leonardo.

I wrote all this up for an article for the January issue of The Art Newspaper, making their case more clear with examples. My piece is not online yet–just in the print and digital versions so far. (I have posted it on my website.)

Worcester on March 10 will open an exhibition, The Mystery of Worcester’s Leonardo, of those two works plus one by Lorenzo di Credi–it’s there to show his style, which is incongruous with the two other works. While Kanter is convinced that most, if not all, of Annunciation is by Leonardo, and perhaps 85% of Saint Donatus is by him, the two museums are hedging a bit with their new labels, which will read “Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi.”

Go and you’ll be able to see for yourselves.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum and the Louvre