The wonders of technology have revealed a new portrait by Goya. It’s underneath his Portrait of Don Ramón Satué (below), which is owned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

According to a press release, the new imaging technology is called scanning macro-Xray — flourescent spectrometry and it was developed by the University of Antwerp and the Delft University of Technology. It quotes Professor Joris Dik of the Delft University as saying “We can take the new mobile scanner to a museum and examine a painting layer by layer. This enables us to reconstruct the layers of paint and colours present underneath the visible painting without ever touching it.”

In this case, the scans reveal that Goya (1746-1828) painted over a more formal portrait of a man in a uniform, bearing honors and distinctions of someone in the highest ranks of an order of knights, which was established by the then-King of Spain and brother of Napoleon, Joseph Bonaparte. They date the portrait to 1809-1813.

Goya’s Satué portrait,on the other hand, was signed and dated in 1823.

No one know who the man in the uniform is, but the Rijksmuseum says that the picture “most likely depicts a French general who accompanied Joseph to Madrid. Another distinct possibility is that the portrait depicts Joseph Bonaparte.”

The museum also says that the painting was probably still with Goya “when the French army withdrew from Madrid in 1813.” By 1823, Goya was experiencing “trying” times:

Having supported the liberal Spanish Constitution of 1820, Goya was forced to hide out with a member of Satué’s family after the restoration of absolutist rule under Ferdinand VII. Given these circumstances, possessing a portrait of a Napoleonic officer would have been construed as highly suspect, which may be what motivated the decision to paint over the original portrait. 

The picture is on view at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam until the Rijksmuseum reopens its main building in 2013.  

What, ArtInfo said this morning, no visual artist geniuses? “For the first time in 15 years, there are no contemporary visual artists on the illustrious list of MacArthur Foundation fellows,” read one post on the site. 

Maybe the MacArthur judges were chastened by last year, when there was one: Elizabeth Turk. Turk makes very beautiful carvings that lie pretty much outside the mainstream of contemporary art, and critics (including some on my blog post) called them “boring.” A sample is at right.

I wondered what happened to Turk — what, in other words, happened in the wake of the award? Last month, she was in New York, to discuss her new work with Hirschl & Adler Modern, the gallery that had shown her work in 2006 and 2008. It has scheduled another solo exhibition for her next March. When I received that notice, I asked the publicist what else had occurred?

She spoke at TED Atlanta, for one. And she received a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution that lasts through this year. That’s pretty much it.

Whether or not you like Turk’s works or not, you have to admit that she really works hard on them. According to the description I received:

[She] works in marble and transforms a slab of one ton raw material into a seemingly weightless object. On average it takes Elizabeth one year to complete a piece. Elizabeth uses a variety of tools, including electric grinders, files and small dental tools, to transform one solid piece of marble into detailed patterns and complex shapes that range from the figurative to the abstract. The finished piece weighs between 50 and 120 pounds.

 

 

Let’s start with the premise that the works of Gustave Caillebotte are not as well known in the United States as they should be. They’re just not all that common in American museums.

So I was pleased to read that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at its annual meeting, announced that it was buying Caillebotte’s Man at his Bath, “regarded as one of the greatest works” of Caillebotte, MFA says in its press release.

It must be because, also according to the press release, the MFA has to sell eight works from its collection to pay for it (the amount was undisclosed). These works will be auctioned at Sotheby’s on Nov. 1 and 2:

• View from the Artist’s Window, Eragny, 1885, Camille Pissarro
• Overcast Day at Saint-Mammès, about 1880, Alfred Sisley
• Gust of Wind, 1899, Maxime Camille Louis Maufra
• Forest Interior (Sous-Bois), 1884, Paul Gauguin
• The Fort of Antibes, 1888, Claude Monet
• Bust Portrait of a Young Woman, about 1890, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• Saint-Mammès: Morning (Le Matin), 1881, Alfred Sisley
• Pearl Mosque, Delhi, late 1880s, Vasily Vereshchagin

All gifted to the museum, but none on view since 2003, they’re valued at between $16.6 million and $24.3 million, all told, according to the Boston Globe. The Globe also said that the “Caillebotte painting is from a private foundation and has been on loan to the National Gallery in London since the later 1990s.”

What’s more, to purchase the painting, the MFA is using “funds by exchange and from the Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Edward Jackson Holmes Fund, Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory of Alice Thevin, Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Parkman Oliver–Eliza R. Oliver Fund, Sophie F. Friedman Fund, Robert M. Rosenberg Family Fund, and the Mary L. Cornille and John F. Cogan, Jr. Fund for the Art of Europe.”

This all follows the deaccessioning rules of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and it also is in line with what I’ve advocated several times (one example here) — “deaccessioning in public.” We know in advance what is being sold, when, where and, when the auction is over, we’ll know what the museum received for the deaccessioned paintings and where the money is going.

Man at His Bath has been in the MFA’s galleries since April, and will be back on view in the coming exhibition Degas and the Nude.

As George Shackelford, the curator (who’s leaving shortly), told the Globe, “There’s not a dud painting in this group [that’s being deaccessioned]. That’s why we are very sad to see them go. It’s not secondary material, it’s great stuff. It has to be to get the required sum.”

As queasy as one may feel about the deacessions here, these are curatorial decisions. We can backseat drive, or Monday-morning quarterback all we want, but at the end of the day, there are (as I’ve also written) boundaries. The public can’t be polled everytime a museum wants to upgrade its collection.

 

Here’s a lesson in keeping good art records, with photographs. The Art Loss Register has just announced that it was able to identify and return two 17th Colonial paintings storen from a church in Bolivia in 1997 “thanks to the good quality archival photographs taken by the church prior to the theft.”

The story began on Christmas Eve in 1997, when more than a hundred religious artifacts were stolen from the Church of San Andres de Machaca in La Paz. A Bolivian National Monument since 1962, the church had been the targeted by thieves several years before as well. In 1997, it reported the new theft to the Bolivian Ministry of Culture and Interpol, which was later relayed and recorded on the Art Loss Register’s international database of stolen, missing and looted artwork, ALR says.

Last May, a U.S. art dealer asked the ALR to search its database of stolen art for two of the Bolivian colonial works. The dealer said he received the paintings on consignment from an elderly American collector. Art historians employed by the ALR conclusively identified the portraits of ‘Saint Rose of Viterbo’ (at left) and ‘Saint Augustin’ because they had suffered damage in several unique areas — documented by those archival photographs.

The paintings were returned to Bolivia at its embassy in London last week.

ALR says that many significant paintings from the Church of San Andres de Marchaca are still missing — including those depicting St. Rose of Lima, St. Francis Protecting the Laics, The Holy Family and an Armed Arcangel.

The dealer’s name and his source have not been disclosed, but investigations must be continuing.

 

 

Excerpt from a press release I recently received:

I’m aware of the nature of painting in our time, then and now, and in the 1970s, no one painted sunsets–or sunrises. Avant-garde art was conceptual, minimalist, multimedia. I wanted to paint– already suspect–and I wanted to tackle a dangerous subject, something risky that would shock my contemporaries. What could be more radical than the sun? I wanted to pry it out of cliché, to be seen as it is.

Any idea who said that? No one paints the sun, much, now either. If he or she did, it certainly wouldn’t be viewed as radical.

But is it? When so many artists are making their name by “shock and awe,” can a landscape painter become “hot”? 

There’ an interesting line in Holland Cotter’s review of the deKooning show at MoMA, published online today:

In 1953, when he exhibited his third “Woman” series, the paintings were so outrageous that the art world had to pay attention, and did.

But back to my question: I’d say the answer is no. The artist quoted above is Graham Nickson, and he said those words in a recent interview with Lilly Wei. His work is in an exhibition called Paths of the Sun that opened today at Knoedler. Look at his bio, and you will not find his work in many museums. Corporations are his mainstay, or possibly private collectors.

Leaving aside the merits of Nickson’s work, on which reasonable people can disagree, I think it’s admirable to take a subject and try to “pry it our of cliche.” I agree that, in today’s art world, it can be seen as radical.

More important, I agree with Nickson that there ought to be room for his kind of art, art that doesn’t try to offend, or shock, or make a political statement.

Here’s Donald Kuspit on Nickson’s 2009 exhibit, Italian Skies, at Jill Newhouse.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Knoedler Gallery