“The Mona Lisa and the rise of right-on iconoclasm”

“The botched attack this week on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris is a worrying sign of the times. On Sunday, a man disguised as a woman in a wheelchair attacked Leonardo da Vinci’s world famous painting with a cake. His stunt was filmed by dozens of museum visitors.

The 36-year-old breached the security barrier but failed to break the reinforced glass covering the painting. As the attacker was led away by security guards, he shouted: ‘There are people who are destroying the Earth… All artists think about the Earth. That’s why I did this. Think of the planet.’ The cake-wielding attacker has since been arrested and placed in psychiatric care.

Thankfully, this attack caused no damage to a painting that has been behind protective glass since a Bolivian man threw a rock at it in 1956. But we should and can expect more attacks like this. And next time, one of the world’s masterpieces might not be so lucky…”

Read the full article online free on Spiked Online here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/01/the-mona-lisa-and-the-rise-of-right-on-iconoclasm/

Hidden Masterpieces, John Soane Museum

“Architecture often seems something of a modern miracle: sheets and sheets of plans show buildings with every conceivable shadow mapped out by science and adjusted for time of day and season, and the existing environment is shown in high-tech images taken by drones. 

“So, when greeted by an impressively clear overhead view of Stonehenge — complete with shapes of shadows and measurements — one might be forgiven for assuming this is the work of some contemporary architectural firm. But, the large watercolour dates from 1817, and was drawn by architectural draughtsman Henry Parke for his employer Sir John Soane. 

“This drawing is on display in the exhibition Hidden Masterpieces at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was the most celebrated British architect of the Georgian period. He designed the Bank of England, Dulwich Picture Gallery and a number of other significant public buildings. He collected the archive material from his practice, and added drawings by other architects and artists, mainly of buildings, fittings and furnishings, which amounted to a lifetime collection of 30,000 drawings. This collection – held in the house designed by the architect himself in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – was bequeathed as a museum, which has remained virtually unchanged in almost two centuries…”

Read the full review at The Critic online here: https://thecritic.co.uk/crumbling-is-not-an-instants-act/

Conserving Concrete

For anyone doubting the appropriateness of concrete as a subject for conservation (perhaps wishing away over a century of architecture), the introduction to Concrete: Case Studies in Conversation Practice provides a rejoinder.

Concrete is one of the most ubiquitous materials of the twentieth century; therefore, anyone involved in conserving modern heritage needs some understanding of the material, its deterioration, and its effective repair. Some 150 years of development of reinforced concrete has produced an extraordinary legacy of structures and buildings.[i]

Concrete is an ancient building material, used since ancient times, refined by the Romans and revived for the development of Portland cement in the 1820s, since when it has been used almost continually.

Regardless of the building typology or construction date, the decay mechanism common to all the projects comes down to the basic issue of the steady progress of carbonation that leads to the eventual corrosion of the reinforcement. The rate of carbonation is affected by factors such as the depth of cover to reinforcement, poor workmanship, and low cement content, sometimes in combination, in each case influenced by the environmental conditions arising from the location.[ii]

The key difficulty for many béton brut buildings is that concrete is structurally integral and also the undecorated surface, thus serious deterioation of the concrete cannot be left untreated and any treatment cannot but alter the appearance of the building. It was only in the late 1980s that a programmatic, scientific approach to preservation of concrete structures was developed by the architecture profession – surprisingly late considering the considerable evidence of deterioration which had been documented before then.

Part of the Conserving Modern Heritage series from Getty Publications, Concrete: Case Studies in Conversation Practice brings together essays by conservators who have worked on projects to conserve and restore concrete buildings. Their experiences provide us with greater understanding of the problems and solutions for this issue which grows increasingly relevant and serious as some classic Modernist buildings are reaching a state of decrepitude. Strategies for corrosion protection and repair include patching, partial replacement and resurfacing. These have the obvious drawbacks of introducing ahistorical or incongruous surfaces. Corrosion inhibiting solutions and electrochemical realkalization are other approaches[iii].  

One ingenious solution which retards corrosion of rebar is remote sacrificial anode (RSA). The electro-chemical process of water corroding steel is delayed by the attachment of a section of grounded metal to the concrete. The electrical charge is thereby transferred to the RSA which corrodes instead of the steel in the concrete. However, electrical resistance of concrete means that it produces a localised effect rather than a solution for large areas. The RSA can be replaced when it is corroded, every 30 years or so. New techniques are being pioneered that involve the installation of meshes that are inside the concrete close to the rebar and connected to an RSA, effectively wiring the entire structure to stabilise corrosion but this seems to be construction application rather than a remedial system. Non-corroding anodes using direct current electricity are alternatives but require mains power or sustainable electrical generators, which are not always suitable or cost effective.

This volume provides 14 case studies of remedial action to restore and renovate concrete exposed to the elements. The first is structures from the 1920s and the last is a Donald Judd sculpture of 1988-91. The examples are free-standing objects, enclosed buildings and exposed open-air structures. They range from utilitarian structures, a church, market, warehouse, zoo, bathing station, school, university, theatre and residence.  Some of these are world-famous structures (the Marseille Unité d’Habitation of Le Corbusier), while others are lesser known. Architects include Oscar Niemeyer, Pier Luigi Nervi and Eugène Freyssinet. 

The structures featured are superb examples of their type, hence the efforts to conserve them. Some techniques could be used to extend the life of less important concrete structures. Halles du Boulingrin, the Reims covered market, features soaring thin-ribbed parabolic arches forming a curved roof – dramatic, aesthetically satisfying and practical. (Such a design had already been used by the architect for aircraft hangars at Orly, Paris.) It is a fine example of Art Deco architecture, built to replace a building destroyed during the Great War bombardment which practically erased the medieval town. It was fully restored and an acrylic-resin membrane applied to the outside to waterproof it. In this case the original building had been painted, so extensive restoration could be done, effectively resurfacing the entire roof and painting it. The installation of micro-processor controlled fans combatted the issue of condensation, which had dogged the original design.

A uniquely complex structure is Villa Girasole, Verona, which incorporated house which that revolved 360° on a circular base of concrete. Constructed between 1929 and 1935, the building was part residence, part art work, part proof of concept. The functioning of the building/machine/sculpture caused the damage to the platform. Regrettably, the essayists do not describe if the house is currently functional. In the case of Niemeyer’s Brazilian church, much of the water damage was caused by builders omitting to include the specified expansion joints. At the Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, Yale University, one problem was steel window frame anchorages corroding within concrete walls. The famous Unité d’Habitation in Marseille suffered due to some substandard concrete in places and the thinness of certain details (especially the balcony balustrades) led to cracking and spalling due to corrosion of internal steel. The pilotti were corroded and required resurfacing.

The essays by experts in the projects provide background, assessment of the problems, the potential solutions, conservation work undertaken and the general findings. Technical information is given (including plans, models, diagrams), though not at too great a length. Even the data is understandable to the non-specialist reader. Numerous photographs give us an idea of the original appearance of the buildings, their damage and their current state. There is a glossary included.

Evidence is that building conservators adhere to the principles of minimal intervention, maintenance rather than alteration, avoiding “improvement”, making changes noticeable but not jarring, attempting to keep interventions reversible and other standards that are shared with the best practice of art conservation. This publication shows that there is much that can be done to remedy unsightly, inconvenient and dangerous degradation of concrete structures – though the cost and difficulty may be in some cases prohibitive. Traditionalists, hoping demolition should be the only just destiny for Modernist structures, will be disappointed; for the rest of us, the documented solutions seem pragmatic and acceptable ways to extend the life spans of concrete structures. 

Catherine Croft, Susan Macdonald (eds.), Concrete: Case Studies in Conversation Practice, Getty Publications, 2019, paperback, 236pp, fully illus., $59.95/£45, ISBN 978 1 60606 576 1

(c) 2020 Alexander Adams

To view my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

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[i] Concrete, p. 11

[ii] Concrete, p. 17-8

[iii] Note François Botton’s caution: “[…] it appears the effectiveness of the realkanization procedure may depend on the level of corrosion before treatment, or it may simply not last longer than twelve to thirty months.” Concrete, p. 123

UbuWeb: Culture meets the Internet

“Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is illegal; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted.” So Kenneth Goldsmith describes the website he started in 1996. It has survived copyright claims because it is non-profit, so it does not extract financial gain from its appropriation.

The website was named after Alfred Jarry’s anarchic protagonist Ubu Roi. The website contains avant-garde artistic and cultural material such as verse, prose, audio, video and images. The site hosts little-known side-projects of major artists, such as Salvador Dalí’s film Haute Mongolie – hommage á Raymond Roussel (1976) and Richard Serra’s Television Delivers People (1973). Goldsmith is a poet and so there is a particular emphasis on poetry and spoken poetry, including concrete poetry and sound poems. UbuWeb is a resource replete with ephemeral material, side projects, creative dead-ends, aborted forays and one-off collaborations. It does not host mainstream music, video or texts. The material sometimes comes from official releases; other times it is recorded (with varying degrees of competence and fidelity) from radio or television by private individuals. Sometimes it is bootleg or clandestine. UbuWeb is the sort of place a person can spend a whole evening following a meandering trail through the cultural jetsam of the Twentieth Century.

Goldsmith explains that he uses basic coding and simple systems that have not changed in over 20 years. The relative crudity of such procedures makes the website robust, as well as charmingly old-fashioned. Without relying on cloud data storage or specialised database systems, Goldsmith has (so far) avoided the dangers of redundancy or dispute with programmers, which could have taken the site offline. “Don’t trust the cloud. Use it, enjoy it, but don’t believe in it.” He warns, “don’t bookmark. Download. Hard drives are cheap. Fill them up with everything you think you might need to consult, watch, read, listen to, or cite in the future.” We live in a time of encroaching censorship, when cloud/online access is at the mercy of increasingly censorious governments and overbearing social-media websites. Organisations make themselves vulnerable to pressure from activist lobby groups and Twitter mobs of a few hundred ill-informed virtue-signallers.

Pirating is a compliment, as Goldsmith views it. “If your work is well regarded enough to be pirated, that means you have achieved some level of success that most artists will never have. When we decide to pirate an artists’ work, it means that we think that work is worth knowing about and worth preserving.” The diffuse, unregulated distribution of material increases the chance of preservation and transmission. However, technological obsolescence has rendered some formats more inaccessible than some dead languages. Do you know anyone who has the technology to read a floppy disk or Betamax video cassette? The technology exists but it is rare, specialised and diminishing yearly. This will inevitably apply to digital files also.

Goldsmith calls the guerilla collaborative project of UbuWeb the product of “folk archiving”. “[…] we’re no fans of licenses of any kind. We’d prefer the materials be used without any restrictions whatsoever.” Fine in itself but beside the point because the material is not produced or owned by UbuWeb, as Goldsmith freely admits. He is applying his principles to the products of others but yields ground when challenged by rights holders. Sometimes artists submit material or make arrangements with their agents to permit material to remain on the website.

UbuWeb falls into an ethical grey area, even if the legal situation is fairly obvious. The UbuWeb modus operandi is to post first and wait for artists or representatives to react. Strictly speaking, the fact that UbuWeb is not monetised and is a non-profit body does not take precedence of copyright violation, which is a matter of intellectual property rather than income claiming. Copyright strikes come from those copyright holders important and financed sufficiently to pursue take-down notices. UbuWeb does accede to requests from copyright owners. (Search for the films of Francesca Woodman on UbuWeb and you will encounter the message “These films have been temporarily removed by request of the Marian Goodman Gallery.”) However, much of the work on the site is so gloriously shoddy, awful and poorly recorded – or simply obscure – that it is not material that could generate income worth claiming.

Goldsmith explains how automated notices triggered by file titles – often filed by bodies with no authorisation to do so – claim copyright and demand compensation. As UbuWeb gains no income from the material, there is no gain to be paid. (Legally, the issue is deprivation of benefit and unauthorised use of protected material.) These automatic copyright claims are now commonplace and even inhibit legitimate criticism and educational use permitted under law. Among ISPs, rights holders and pirates, there is recognition that digitisation of data and the advent of the internet has meant that copying and distribution are beyond complete control.

There are odd cases when works are caught in limbo: not financially viable enough to license and release and still restricted by copyright. This means that non-profit file-sharing is the only way to make (unofficially) available material of documentary, historical or cultural value. In the case of artist videos, the material is seen so rarely and in specific locations that – unless one happens to have access to a specialised university library – one can live a whole lifetime without seeing pieces. The stills reproduced in monographs or old magazines become the entirety of one’s understanding of the videos. Gallerists consider UbuWeb a competitor, which devalues the rarity if their commodity, although it is possible to view UbuWeb as a promotional channel, exciting and stimulating viewers and collectors, especially with regard to lesser known artists. The often poor quality of the videos on UbuWeb (compressed, pixellated, muffled, samizdat) means that ardent collectors or enthusiasts seek out high-quality versions they have pre-viewed on UbuWeb. Some creators offer material to Goldsmith and use it as a channel to reach an audience, although Goldsmith notes that UbuWeb is a repository for material already existing rather than a channel for new work.

The birth of digitisation and the internet has revived the readership of concrete poetry. Now original books and journal pages can be copied and shared accurately, allowing readers access to visual-verbal poetry that is not financially viable to publish conventionally. Kurt Schwitters is a favourite of Goldsmith’s. He discusses the importance of words to Shwitters the artist and how his writing overlaps with his celebrated reading of his Ursonate. All of this maps neatly on to UbuWeb’s capacity to store examples of visual, verbal and aural art. UbuWeb contains scans of every page of Aspen, RE/Search and Fuck You, famous channels for the counter culture. Likewise, the 27 Tellus audio cassettes of music, poetry and sound are available complete on UbuWeb.

The book ends with 101 of Goldsmiths favourite gems of UbuWeb: Céline singing his songs accompanied by accordion, Don Cherry and Terry Riley playing live in Cologne, a rare very early Steve Reich tape piece taken from secret recordings, Captain Beefheart reciting his verse, Alice B. Toklas reading Brion Gysin’s recipe for hashish fudge.

The author is generous in his appreciation for the countless donors who have sent files and physical material and he tells the stories of some pioneers – poets, collectors, fans, obsessives (or an admixture) – with whom he has interacted. Some wish to remain anonymous, concerned about stigmatisation as pirates or the threat of legal action. Their enthusiasm is infectious and we can well imagine the excitement of discovering troves of material – some of it considered permanently lost.

Goldsmith makes a common error of writing of material being “excluded from the canon”, which is an impossibility, as the canon is not exclusionary. No material can be excluded from a canon, only included or omitted and is a corporate effort; the canon cannot be imposed or enforced, hence exclusion is impossible.

Goldsmith has a lively and informal style and a lithe mind. He blends erudition and irreverence. Although the writing style is witty and readable, Goldsmith does include some footnotes. Duchamp is My Lawyer would prove a valuable book for law students and jurists as it explains how copyright works in practice not just law and how “folk law” tends to regulate copyright disputes through give-and-take personal interactions rather than court rulings. Interested parties reach informal, cost-effective, non-arbitrated understandings through negotiation in cases regarding material of little monetary worth.  

Duchamp is My Lawyer is an approachable and even-handed discussion of UbuWeb and issues regarding copyright in the digital age. It also provides an insight into the evolution of the counter culture in the internet age and the practical, legal and financial issues of producing and consuming art today. Well worth seeking out.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Duchamp is my Lawyer: Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, Columbia University Press, paperback, 2020, 318pp + x, $26/£20, ISBN 978 0 231 18695 7

© 2020 Alexander Adams

To see my books and art visit www.alexanderadams.art

“The Melancholy of Obsolete Futures”

“Brutalism has seen a surge in interest among young people keen on bold uncompromising Modernist design. Whole books of moody photographic studies of concrete buildings are snapped up by fans of urban life and retro design. A crop of new books explores the Brutalism of socialist states.

“While Constructivism and avant-gardism in fine art came to prominence during the October Revolution, it was suppressed in favour of Socialist Realism by the mid-1930s. In architecture more adventurous forms and materials persisted, although in the minority. Under Stalin there was a degree of stylistic conformity and austerity, yet adventurous architecture was not seen as “bourgeois formalism” as it was in art. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, historicism receded and a greater variety of art, design and architecture (including Modernist architecture) became possible. While supposedly for the masses, many of the showpiece constructions were moribund from the start: inverted ziggurat hotels that were barely occupied and shopping centres with few consumer goods to offer. Much of this architecture was completed less than a decade before the economic and political collapse of the Eastern Bloc….”

Read the full review online at The Critic here: https://thecritic.co.uk/melancholy-of-obsolete-futures/

Quote on “Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism”

“Look at the groups removing “politically objectionable” statues. Look at university-student mobs which shout down or assault public speakers. Look at student bodies which demand “safe spaces” and ban discussion as “hate speech”. This is Identarianism [identity politics] in its purest form, where it expresses the mentality and emotional tenor of even those who consider themselves moderates. Most activists do not fully understand the origins, tenets and implications of their ideology. No matter. Consider the Cultural Revolution, when commissars harnessed the anger of young idealists to instigate an orgy of righteous cultural destruction. Identarianism is not simply another way of viewing society, which can co-exist with other outlooks; it is an entity which has evolved to suppress opposition and destroy cultural expression.”

Published in The Jackdaw, 2017, reprinted in Alexander Adams Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism (Imprint Academic, 2019)

The war on America’s past continues

“In the wake of recent attempts – some successful – to have Confederate statues removed from the US south, what is the future of colonialist statues in the US west? In Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory, Cynthia Culver Prescott, a professor of history at the University of North Dakota, senses a reluctance to apply to pioneer monuments the ideological zeal that was turned on Confederate memorials. ‘We resist applying the insights of settler colonial studies to American pioneer narratives because to do so would call into question foundational myths of Jeffersonian agrarianism and American exceptionalism, and lay bare white conquest of native lands and peoples.’ She outlines the cases against statues of colonialists, and particularly against female settlers, who took part in the drive to colonise the American west in the 19th century.

“Statues depicting women have been criticised by academics and campaigners for being idealising, inaccurate, generalising and stereotypical. There is a sense that campaigners direct such ire at statues of women settlers not just because they embody sexism and colonialism but because they show women as complicit in the act of dispossessing native peoples. There is a residual resentment that – in intersectional terms – a political minority took part in a project to oppress another minority….”

Read my article on Spiked here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/07/29/the-war-on-americas-past-continues/

Looted Art & Monuments Men

 

Iris Lauterbach (a Munich-based professor, who specialises in art and architecture in the Nazi era) has written a study of the work of the Monuments Men, basing it on extensive archival research.

In 1944 the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) section was founded. The team became known as the Monuments Men; a term made famous by the 2014 feature film starring George Clooney. Initially, it was planned that the Allies would agree a common system but there were political differences between the powers. While the American and – to a lesser extent – the British authorities were led by principles of neutrality and fairness regarding looted items on German territory, the French and Soviets were less neutral. Indeed, the Soviets were unwilling to give up much of the loot they took custody of in Germany and restored only some of it to Germany and other nations. Many items are retained in former Soviet lands and considered compensation for the massive cultural losses the USSR suffered during the Axis Powers’ invasion. This matter is still a sensitive subject for Russian and German authorities.

Founded 1944, they followed the frontline Allied forces as they fought, attempting to do what they could rescue treasures from not only the German military but also plunderers among the Allied forces and local populations. Their efforts were restricted by the strategic and material demands of a still active war. The first priority of the Monuments Men was to locate and recover art from the haphazardly improvised caches (over 1,500 of them) scattered across Germany, many in old mines and basements. Herman Goering’s lordly spoils were found in army trucks. Göring had been the process of trying to remove them from the advancing Allied forces when the convoy had been left stranded. Much of the art was not packed adequately and had been damaged by damp and rough handling. Bundles of Old Master drawings were found rotting in forests. Caches had been predated by plunderers.

Bavaria was in the American sector of occupation (comprising Bavaria, Württemberg-Baden and Hesse) and Munich was the regional capital of Bavaria. It made a natural centre for American operations. In a severely damaged city, the US Army discovered that the Nazi party building and the Führerbau (Leader’s building) to be in good condition and used them as centres for collecting, assessing, storing and administering looted art. The use of the buildings proved to be both practical and symbolic, by turning the centres of Nazi control into places were restitution of culture was administered. The buildings were designated the Central Collecting Point (CCP).

The Monuments Men pledged to act not as conquerors set on doing their own plundering but as careful stewards and impartial arbiters. It was partly their objects that led to the curtailment of a touring exhibition of “appropriated” masterpieces from Germany being returned to Germany.

The staff was headed by qualified American art historians and curators, many of whom had studied under German art professors, some in exile from Nazi Germany. Senior officers and soldier guards were American; they were assisted by denazified German experts (including curators, conservators photographers and technicians), handymen and secretaries.

Every day precious objects (ranging from coins, books, jewellery, tapestries, furniture and historical objects to fine art of every description) were brought to the CCP. Much of it was in poor condition, damaged by theft, transportation and neglect. The art treasures that passed through the CCP were dazzling. They included the Van Eyck Brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece, Leonardo’s Woman with Ermine, Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, Rodin’s Burghers of Calais and masterpieces by Rembrandt, Rubens, Bruegel, Cranach the Elder, Titian, Tintoretto, the Impressionists and every major European painter. Historic books and scientific archives were included, along with the Hungarian monarchical regalia. A more melancholy group of artefacts were collections of Judaica confiscated from the liquidated Jewish populations of central and Eastern Europe.

The organisation classed items into three categories: A) art looted from public organisations in outside of Germany, B) art looted from private individuals, C) art removed from German institutions for purposes of safeguarding it. The art was photographed, described, numbered and given an index card. Some cards are reproduced in the book. The workload was huge. To assist curators a 9,600-book reference library was in existence at the CCP by November 1945. Assistants trawled the extensive NSDAP archives of art acquired for German museums, in particular Hitler’s planned museum in Linz, as well as paperwork for the personal art collections of Hitler, Göring and senior Nazis. Some of the art was stolen; some of it was acquired at extortionately low prices from owners who ranged from the eager to unwilling. (The MFA&A considered any items acquired during German occupation of a country to be illegal (i.e. stolen, coerced or unfairly acquired).) Germans who had assisted in these campaigns of acquisition were interrogated. Some were careerists, others were committed. A handful apparently retained loot and were involved in the black market for art. Among others, dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt escaped serious punishment because the MFA&A did not have access to sufficient documentation to determine the extent of his involvement in dealing looted and extorted art. As we know now, he retained a horde of stolen art which was left to his son and only recently discovered. The CCP also had to contend with theft from the depot. The widespread poverty, currency suspension and unemployment meant that theft and bartering were endemic in everyday life all over Germany.

Claims for restitution to non-German owners were made via their national representatives, with a few exceptions being Jews who fled East and inhabitants of the Soviet-occupied Baltic states if the claimants were resident in the West. Otherwise, national representatives would come to the CCP and collect works claimed by their nationals. Private claimants in Soviet-occupied nations generally had their returned property possessed by their state.

Returning work to former Axis powers Italy and Austria proved more difficult, with delegations engaged in protracted wrangling and diplomatic negotiation. The Bavarian Government considered these countries to be claiming too zealously and the CCP position wavered, dependent on the views of senior officers. The US government agreed to some of these dubious claims against the objections of the CCP. German claims were considered only after foreign claimants had petitioned.

The administrative and logistical difficulties of dealing with so many claims meant that mistakes were made. One error was not the result of a slip but a crime. When a Yugoslav art dealer called Ante Topić Mimara arrived to claim items for Yugoslavia, his claims were processed and the objects were taken before it was discovered that many of the items were not from Yugoslavia at all. It seems that a female German staff member at CCP assisted Topić and left with him, later to become his wife. She had apparently secretly provided Topić with a list of unclaimed works at CCP of unclear provenance for him to claim for Yugoslavia. The MFA&A had been duped in what was effectively a heist. The only major scandal in the MFA&A’s history was covered up by the US government, which failed to recover the items. Some of Topić’s private collection is now in a Zagreb museum but much of it has disappeared.

By August 1947 the MFA&A had restituted material appropriated by the Nazis in the following proportions: 65.4% to France, USSR 12.8%, The Netherlands 8.6%, Austria 4.5%, Hungary 3.3%, Poland 2.9%, and other countries 2.5%. Record keeping was difficult when huge quantities of materials arrived daily. Some of the items were mistaken believed to have been looted but turned out not to have been. Objects were sometimes lost (or stolen) and uncatalogued items surfaced randomly. This was in part due to the closure of other centres and the transferral of unclaimed work to the Munich CCP.

The CCP finally closed on 1 September 1951. 33,188 items were restored to claimants between August 1945 and September 1952. To put that into context one should know that the French authorities estimated that approximately 100,000 items had been stolen from French institutions and citizens, of which 61% were returned by 1950. Today Poland lists 60,000 stolen objects as still missing. (The CCP only handled objects in the American zone of occupation, with some foreign caches coming there. The figures naturally exclude looted items recovered by the other Allied powers and objects destroyed or undiscovered.) In 1952, custodianship of looted property at CCP was turned over to organisations under control of the Bavarian State. Some owners agreed to their objects being bought by the Bavarian State. Heirless items were divided up between various countries of origin, some retained in storage, some given to museums, others auctioned. Eventually, unclaimed works of little value were auctioned. The residue of unclaimed work of significance is now in the ownership of the FDR and the Bavarian State.

Chapters are short, each focusing on a different aspect of the CCP’s activity, arranged chronologically. Lauterbach includes information on the later use of the building as a venue for exhibitions of historic and contemporary art and design. This was done to promote new, non-Nazi art (most obviously abstract art, which absolutely contravened National Socialist aesthetic policy) and to foster American-German co-operation.

The book is liberally illustrated with fascinating photographs of the CCP at work. We see a Leonardo resting casually in a rack, a Titian Danaë stacked against a Claude Lorrain landscape and the Bruges Madonna being manhandled. Snapshots show smiling soldiers smoking cigarettes and posing next to Old Master portraits. Staff are shown working and relaxing and we get an idea of the conditions and attitudes towards the many aspects of the restitution of looted artefacts.

Lynn Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa (1994) is the standard account of the Nazi looting of art. The Central Collecting Point adds much detail to efforts to conserve and restitute that loot. This is a translation of the original German-language book, published in 2015. Lauterbach has extensively used the archives of various institutions – not least the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, her home institution – but has elected not to note precise sources for her information about the internal workings of the CCP contained in the MFA&A records. That is pragmatic but will disappoint scholars wishing to peruse the original documents. This title provides a balanced and informative overview of the subject. The prose style and numerous photographs bring the difficult and important work of the Monuments Men to life.

 

Iris Lauterbach, Fiona Elliott (trans.) The Central Collecting Point in Munich. A New Beginning for the Restitution and Protection of Art, Getty Research Institute, January 2019, 320pp, 238 mono illus., hardback, £55/$70, ISBN 978 1 60606 582 2

 

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my books and art here http://www.alexanderadams.art

Frans Hals: A Family Reunion

A current touring exhibition reunites fragments of a giant family portrait painted by one of the masters of the Golden Age of Dutch painting, Frans Hals (1582/3-1666) (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, 13 October 2018-6 January 2019; touring to Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 2 February-28 April 2019; Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, 8 June-25 August 2019). This exhibition comprises nine paintings and one drawing. The exhibition is reviewed from the catalogue.
Hals was born in Antwerp and was taken to Haarlem by his family, who fled the Eighty Year War in the South Netherlands. We know little of his artistic training and early career. He was principally a portrait painter. Four of his sons followed their father in the painting trade. Hals was innovatory as a portraitist, being known for the development of complex expanded multi-figure compositions, capturing informal and lifelike facial expressions and body language and for portraying the individual characters of sitters. He made his trademark the wet-on-wet finish for his paintings, although the paintings were built up in different sessions and it was only the final layer that was painted so vigorously.
Around 1623 Hals was commissioned by a Catholic wool merchant called Gijsbert Claesz of Leiden and his wife van Maria Jorisdr van Campen of Haarlem, who moved to Haarlem after their marriage. The prosperous merchant had a large family of thirteen children and could afford the grand painting that the size of his family necessitated. Only in 2013 was the family securely identified as the van Campens. The book contains a family tree of the van Campen family, documenting the individuals portrayed in the picture. The portrait was apparently commissioned after the birth of the couple’s thirteenth child. When a fourteenth (and final) child was born, it was added to the painting in 1628 but this infant was painted not by Hals but Salomon de Bray, who signed the addition. The choice of artist was a good one, as the figure is painted in a style congruent with the original.

[Image: Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666), The Van Campen Family in a Landscape (fragment) (ca. 1623–25), oil on canvas. 151 x 163.6 cm. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, inv. 2011.80]

The van Campen painting is the earliest surviving group portrait by Hals. It shows the couple Gijsbert Claesz and Maria Jorisdr van Campen and their children in an outdoor setting. One of the children is being pulled in a miniature cart by a goat. This caprice is seen in another painting of the era. The painting shows the children ranged across the painting, interacting with each other, playfully, attentively, considerately. Thus the family is seen as harmonious, achieving concert through interplay of the natural tendencies of members combining for the benefits of the group collectively. In some paintings of the time, nurses and servants were included but research shows that all of the figures here are related.
The painting shows Hals’s abilities at his best and clearest, also demonstrates the competence of the artist as a composer of complex multi-figure tableaux. The painting is full of observant touches and individuality without neglecting propriety. It is easy to see why Hals was so esteemed in his time and later. One wonders about the painter’s later poverty, whether this was down to changing fashion, financial incompetence or the effect of competition. This book does not discuss Hals career as a whole.
The principal reason the painting was dismembered was probably practicality. Originally, the canvas is estimated to have been 153.5 cm high and about 333 cm wide. Scrutiny reveals that there is also slight water damage. At some point before 1810, the canvas was cut into three or four pieces. The original group portrait was divided into at least three parts, namely The Van Campen Family in a Landscape (all c. 1623-5; Toledo Museum of Art), Children of the Van Campen Family with a Goat-Cart (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) and Portrait of a Boy of the Van Campen Family (private collection). There may have been a further fourth section with two children but that remains unidentified or has been lost. The exhibition reunites the three parts for the first time in two centuries. It also includes six other portraits by Hals, including the large group portrait from the National Gallery, London. The catalogue illustrates examples of Dutch painted portraits, including Rubens’s wonderful double portrait of the artist and his wife, which fleshes out the genre that Hals’s paintings occupied.

[Image: composite of full painting using 3 fragments and adapted additions]

The catalogue illustrates composites of the complete painting. A fascinating sequence of reconstructions shows how other experts have previously conjectured the original painting would have been, each limited by the circumstances. It includes forensic details that help to reconstruct the exact size of the original canvas. The authors present the current state of knowledge about the van Campen painting, discussing provenance, technical analysis, the extent of historic repainting and suggestions about the content of the lost section. This book studies Hals as a portrait painter and the practice of Seventeenth Century Dutch portraiture, with good examples reproduced. This succinct but informative title would make a good introduction to Dutch portraiture for students, as well as being an approachable addition to the corpus of Hals scholarship.

Lawrence W. Nichols, Liesbeth De Belie & Pieter Biesboer, Frans Hals Portraits: A Family Reunion, 2018, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium/Hirmer, hardback, 112pp, 70 col., £20, illus., ISBN 978 3 7774 3007 2

© 2018 Alexander Adams
View my art and books at http://www.alexanderadams.art

Degas: Themes and Finish

Jane Munro, Degas: A Passion for Perfection, Yale University Press, 2017, 272pp, 250 col./mono illus., hb, £40, ISBN 978 0 300 22823 6

Daphne Barbour & Suzanne Quillen Lomax (eds.), Facture: Conservation, Science, Art History, Volume 3: Degas, National Gallery of Art, distr. Yale University Press, 2017, 196pp, fully illus., pb, £50, ISBN 978 0 300 23011 6

 

To mark the centenary of the death of Degas, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge is holding an exhibition of his works (closes 14 January 2018), which will subsequently tour to Denver Art Museum (18 February to 20 May 2018). This is a review of the catalogue of that exhibition. Compared to the blockbuster shows of Degas in recent years, this is an intimate affair. It combines work from Cambridge and Denver with a few loans from other collections. Cambridge purchased a number of pieces from the posthumous auctions of Degas’s studio, work selected by John Maynard Keynes.

Items in the exhibition are divided into rough groups: Degas and England, copies of the masters, monotypes, landscapes, nudes, dancers and sculpture. There is a section of the catalogue and exhibition given over to Degas’s influence on following British artists. Degas made a handful of visits to England but unlike his youthful stay in Italy (admittedly a longer period) these made no discernible impression on his art. Degas rarely mentioned his English sojourns. Like his predecessor Gericault, Degas must have been impressed by the British passion for horse racing but whether it left much of an impression beyond that is an open question.

Although Degas did not win a scholarship to the French School in Rome, he had enough of an income to tour independently. He travelled with Moreau and they sometimes copied the same paintings and depicted each other. Degas spent time in Naples where he had family. Degas was the most academically gifted and inclined of the Impressionists and revered Ingres, himself a devotee of the Old Masters. The young Degas modelled himself on Ingres, using the same materials, spending hundreds of hours drawing, learning traditional techniques and acquiring the skills expected of an academic painter. This included long sessions copying paintings and sculpture in museums, including Greek and Roman sculpture, Donatello, Veronese and others. The exhibition includes copies by Ingres, showing parallels between the two painters.

Some of the most unfamiliar works are those actually typical to painters on a grand tour of Italy. The small landscape sketches in oils are acutely observed and sensitively painted views of Naples, Rome and other locales. As was common, these are painted on paper for convenience and later pasted on board for presentation. This was an easily portable medium though it is discouraged because of the technique’s unsuitability on both optical and conservation terms. However, the expediency was used for works that were not intended to be public and were only created as supporting studio material to be transcribed or adapted to more permanent works.

Degas never much cared for landscape. As for working en plein air, Degas derided painters who did so. Allegedly he had a good memory for landscape and produced his landscapes in monotype from memory in the studio. His adaptation of landscape as body suggests that forms rather than light or colour were a preoccupation and that he was willing to adapt in order to transform actual landscapes into more anthropomorphic images. One wonders whether those who claimed Degas had a good memory for landscape actually compared art to specific places. Most likely Degas did have a good visual memory but clearly the important thing was how the memory of the view seemed and how it might be adapted to suit the artist’s purpose, not the veracity of the art compared to the source.

(Image: Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Italian Landscape seen through an Arch, c.1856–9, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 36.7 x 32 cm, Howard and Nancy Marks)

So these landscape sketches, executed en situ, are anomalies in Degas’s practice as a whole but completely congruent with a young artist of the time. Degas used these views of legendary sites of history and culture as sources to be recorded the way he assiduously drew paintings of the Old Masters in the museums of Italy. Degas tended to use landscape as mere background for a subject wholly other and which was his real interest. In early paintings such as Scene from the Middle Ages it is obvious that Degas had no engagement with landscape and would have dispensed with it altogether if he had had the chance. (And he eventually would.) It was just a short step from Young Spartans Exercising (1860), with its perfunctory landscape, to Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the ballet “La Source” (c. 1867-8), with its artificial landscape in the form of a painted backdrop. The play of artifice and verisimilitude allowed Degas to turn his limitation into a feature. He no longer had to be concerned about “getting things right” when flatness and lack of integration became an absolutely truthful presentation of stage backdrops. He would have entirely dispensed with landscape painting if he had not had to use views as part of his paintings of horses and jockeys. One wonders if Degas’s deteriorating eyesight played any part in his rejection of landscape as a subject for his mature art. The artist, his long vision seriously impaired, simply could not see well enough to paint them. It seems likely that physical limitations accorded with his artistic preoccupations rather than the other way round.

On the evidence of these oil sketches Degas was a competent landscapist in the line of Corot and Ingres. Watercolour studies of rocks are also included.

Monotype printing, where a design is drawn in ink on a metal plate before being run through a press with paper which transfers ink to paper, was one of Degas’s principal means of artistic expression. His monotypes outnumber his prints of other types. Degas often reprinted from the same plate a second impression, which is always lighter than the first print. Degas would usually modify the second impression with pastel, gouache and body colour. These alterations sometimes became so involved and extensive that additions entirely cover the underlying print. The atmosphere, emphasis and appearance of print could be radically changed, as was apparent in the recent MoMA exhibition, New York which included comparative examples of first and second impression monotypes. (For my full review of that exhibition see “Degas monotypes”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CLVIII, no. 1360, pp. 589-90; July 2016.)

Subjects of monotypes on display include landscapes, horse-and-jockey and street scene. A comparative print by VLN Lepic is included to show how free and expressive the prints of the French C19^th monotype revival could be. French monotypes of this period share in common the approach of expressive inking of etchings, wherein plates were inked in highly individual and expressive ways which altered the appearance of the original design and introduced new elements. This made each impression as individual as a unique drawing, quite at variance with the usual practice of printers attempting to make an edition of an etching as uniform and neutral as possible.

Nudes, dancers and sculpture are related in Degas’s art. Dancers were often drawn nude – either from life or imagined – before being used in paintings and the nudes of women washing and drying often include difficult, peculiar and transient poses that echo those of dancers either in actions or resting and stretching. Degas figurines in wire, clay, Plastiline and coloured beeswax were often of dancers in motion. Some poses were so unstable that Degas had to introduce props to keep the figures upright. Other sculptures were of horses. Britain has few really good Degas pastels of nude figures, so the exhibition has usefully drawn upon American loans. One can see many poses reoccurring in different mediums and figures repeated in pictures. Degas used tracing paper to experiment with positioning, tracing and reversing. He also used tracing paper as the ground for large-scale finished pastels, an unconventional choice which has caused some conservation issues for collectors. Using a slick surface for a powdery medium is problematic; Degas relied on applying extensive layers of fixative throughout the drawing process to keep the pastel in position. Using water sometimes turned the pastel to a paste which he would manipulate with brushes, creating a fusion of wet and dry techniques.

The sculptures are discussed more extensively in Facture: Conservation, Science, Art History, Volume 3: Degas, published by the National Gallery of Art, featuring works from its unique holding of original Degas statuettes.

(Image: Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Arabesque over the Right Leg, Left Arm in Front, First Study, c.1882–95, coloured wax over a commercially prefabricated metal wire armature, attached to a wooden base, 23.5 x 13.7 x 27.5 cm, © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

The posthumous repairing, editioning and distribution of bronze casts of Degas is involved and covers a multitude of archival, legal and moral issues about the reproduction of sculpture. These questions are of great financial importance considering the value of the pieces and the proliferation of fakes (or at least “unauthorised copies”). Degas considered casting some of his figures but never did; he exhibited only one sculpture during his lifetime, the famous Little Dancer aged Fourteen (1878-81), at the 1881 Impressionist exhibition. It was Degas’s heirs who decided to edition the statues in bronze and sell them.

The generously sized illustrations in the Cambridge catalogue allow us to get a good feeling for the originals. Both Facture and the Cambridge catalogue include x-rays which display the armature and internal components of the originals. Degas’s gimcrack, improvisatory approach to sculpture is apparent in evidence of hasty repairs, scraps of cloth and cork used as bulk and numerous breakages. Degas was apparently serious about his sculptural practice but treated the objects themselves in a rather casual manner. Extensive repairs were needed to many of the figures before they could be cast and some figures were just a jumble of fragments. It is fascinating to see the nails and wire holding the figures to their wooden bases and all the other touches of the artist which are obscured in the bronze casts.

There is debate about how finished the statues and the paintings are. Degas’s art is a difficult to assess in terms of finish. He left some works unfinished, exhibited art that seemed incomplete, revised finished work and wanted to “re-touch” sold pictures in private collectors (often to disastrous results). For discussion on that point, the bronzes and possible restorer intervention in a pastel, see my discussion of Facture on ArtWatch UK’s website here: http://artwatch.org.uk/degas-and-the-problem-of-finish/

For the general reader A Passion for Perfection is a good overview of Degas’s output, with new observations on his themes and techniques. Facture is an essential publication for scholars and collectors of Degas’s art.

18 October 2017