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January 2009

Vol. 151 | No. 1270

Editorial

Not all gloom: exhibitions in 2009

THE DETERIORATING ECONOMIC climate has already had a sharp effect on auction houses and commercial galleries and dealers. It remains to be seen, however, what impact it will have on exhibitions in public museums. Plans for 2009 are almost certainly too far advanced to allow for cancellation or postponement, although this cannot be ruled out. The financial squeeze will certainly be painful for those who have wallowed in the comfort zone of business sponsorship. From 2006 to 2007 British corporate investment in the arts rose by ten per cent to over £170 million but the last few months of 2008 already showed a decline. In the visual arts this will affect not only exhibitions in well-known museums and galleries but the activities of small-scale institutions. The balloon of optimism set wildly afloat by arts leaders and inflated by reports such as Sir Brian McMaster’s Supporting Excellence in the Arts (January 2008) will have to be tethered more securely to the ground of everyday reality. Some good may come from this – quality over footfall, judgment over measurement, good over the simply new. Although cuts in funding are obviously a matter for regret, the resulting deprivations may lead to a rethinking of priorities, even to a renewed concentration on resources to hand such as permanent collections and to the abandonment of unnecessary museum extensions. Recent press releases from American museums already indicate a focus on their own holdings rather than on the origination or import of loan exhibitions. While large spectacular shows at major museums will probably secure backing, the less flamboyant ones will find it extremely difficult to attract business support. At the time of writing, it has been reported that Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy, the admit­tedly flawed exhibition now in Vicenza and opening this month at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, has had to be saved by private intervention when no business sponsor could be found. But even private funding is sure to be curtailed. Other areas likely to be affected are museum acquisitions, publishing (particularly of catalogues), advertising and the philanthropy of charitable foundations with dwindling investments. There is bound to be a slump in attendance figures and the associated activities of gallery-going. What is more difficult to calculate is the psychological effect on people drawing in the horns of personal expenditure.

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Free review

Michael Baxandall (1933–2008)

By Alex Potts

MICHAEL BAXANDALL, who died aged seventy-four on 12th August, is best known for his radically new approach to analysing the social and cultural significance of works of visual art. He sought out interconnections between specialised ways of looking and visual discriminations operating in artistic culture and more widely shared habits of viewing and visual expertises which were part of everyday experience and ritual practice within a society. He was attentive to nuances of meaning in the language used in artistic theory and criticism, and this, combined with his creative insight into cultural practices shaping the making and viewing works of art, gave real substance to the term the ‘period eye’ that he coined.

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  • Reconstructing Veronese’s Petrobelli altarpiece

    By Xavier F. Salomon

    ONE OF VERONESE'S grandest altarpieces, painted around 1563 for Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli’s family chapel in the now destroyed church of S. Francesco in Lendinara, suffered the fate of so many other similar paintings. Between 1788 and 1789, it was cut into pieces which were separately sold. This article, a contribution to a larger project on the Petrobelli altarpiece, considers how it has been possible to devise a new reconstruction of the altarpiece and to identify a fourth, long-lost fragment. Immediately after the altarpiece’s break-up any knowledge of the painting’s original location and appearance was lost; the story of its reconstruction, therefore, starts with the arrival of three fragments in London in the late eighteenth century.

  • Trials and tribulations: new documentary evidence for Bernardo Strozzi in Genoa

    By Andaleeb Badiee Banta

    FOR THIRTY YEARS the painter Bernardo Strozzi (1581/82– 1644) worked profitably for prominent ecclesiastical and private patrons in the rich international port of Genoa. After spending the first decade of his artistic career in a Capuchin monastery (c.1598–1608/09), Strozzi obtained permission to temporarily leave the Order in order to support his mother and unmarried sister and, during the first decades of the seventeenth century, he established himself as a leading painter in the city. In addition to lucrative commissions for cabinet paintings, altarpieces and frescos, Strozzi ran a large workshop that allowed him to produce multiple versions of his works to be sold on the international art market. At the height of his success, however, his personal life increasingly came into conflict with his professional enterprises, culminating in a summons to the archbishop’s tribunal in 1625–26 to face charges of practising art in a manner unsuitable for a friar. Unfortunately, the outcome of his trial is unknown since some of its documentation is missing. Nevertheless, this event proved to be pivotal for Strozzi, it being the first of a series of dramas that resulted in his flight in 1633 to Venice.

  • Duccio’s adjustment to ‘The temptation of Christ on the mountain’ from his ‘Maestà’

    By Dillian Gordon

    THE MANY AND complex narrative scenes of Duccio’s double-sided altarpiece for the high altar of Siena Cathedral, completed in 1311, evidently required careful planning. With over sixty narrative scenes, it was inevitable that some adjustments would have been made. Changes have been detected with the aid of infra-red photography in the Entry into Jerusalem (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena and the Raising of Lazarus (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth). Because the qualities of egg tempera painting make it difficult to conceal pentimenti, major changes made after completion of the painting process are rarely to be found in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian panel painting. However, close observation of The temptation of Christ on the mountain (Fig.16) reveals a significant addition to the compo­sition, visible to the naked eye, which discloses something of Duccio’s working methods and of the nature of the person responsible for overseeing the execution of the commission.

  • Hendrick Andriessen’s ‘portrait’ of King Charles I

    By Nadia Sera Baadj

    THE PUBLIC BEHEADING in London of King Charles I on 30th January 1649 incited tremendous fascination with his life and death in England and the Low Countries. Yet some contemporary accounts of his death on the scaffold at Whitehall sympathetically portrayed him as a martyr.

  • A puzzle solved: furniture at Newby Hall, Yorkshire

    By Judith Goodison

    TWO PUZZLES HAVE long remained unsolved about the handsome suite of dining room furniture at Newby Hall, near Ripon in Yorkshire: who was it made for and who supplied it? The suite consists of a sideboard table, two pedestals with vases and a wine cooler. They now stand at the north end of the Regency dining room which was built on to the north-west side of Newby Hall in 1808 (Figs.32 and 33). One of the pedestal vases was exhibited in 2000 with a caption firmly stating that it was made by the younger Thomas Chippendale. Others have not been so sure. John Cornforth, in an article in Country Life on Newby Hall in 1980 admitted his frustration at being unable to find any documentation. Whereas some features in the design and workmanship of the suite are similar to Chippendale’s known work, others are not.

  • Britain’s first Jackson Pollock

    By Peter Jones

    IT IS GENERALLY accepted that the first showing of a work by Jackson Pollock in a British public gallery was in early 1953 at the exhibition Opposing Forces at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Pollock’s painting, as is well recorded, had a galvanising effect on many British artists. The significance of Opposing Forces is not in question here. Yet accounts need to be revised as to when Pollock’s work first appeared in Britain, in the light of the discovery that a painting by him was shown in Hampshire some six years earlier than at the ICA. How an example of Abstract Expressionism came to be in Britain in the late 1940s is an intriguing story and is due to Southampton City Art Gallery’s maverick first curator G.L. Conran (1910–86) and the flamboyant Amer­ican art collector Arthur Tilden Jeffress (1905–61; Fig.37).

  • Michael Baxandall (1933–2008)

    By Alex Potts