Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
THE end of 1985 saw the publication of two very different studies on the nature and functions of museums, one taking an academic look at their beginnings, the other raising disquieting questions about their future. The origins of museums, edited by Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, published the proceedings of a symposium held at Oxford to mark the tercentenary of the Ashmolean. Museums: Two Contributions to the Debate reprints two articles by Sir Roy Strong, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Given the full schedule of sitters Reynolds maintained from the late 1750s onwards, he rarely took on multiple commissions or major decorative ensembles. One well-known exception to this, however, was the series of portraits painted during the 1770s for the Thrales' library at Streatham Park, which includes some of Reynolds's most intimate and perceptive characterisations. Although the Streatham project was a paid commission, Reynolds's commitment to it was bolstered by his personal devotion to the Thrale family and their circle of friends. From 1766, when Reynolds and the Thrales first met, the painter was a welcome visitor to the Streatham household, which from that year included among its members Samuel Johnson. Johnson's influence was evident throughout this library, not only in the selection of books included on the shelves, but also in the choice of people pictured in Reynolds's portraits.
The literary sources of Bonington's small-scale history paintings are well documented; much less accessible are the discourses which the artist constructs, drawing on those sources. This article seeks to identify these discourses, to discuss the practice of their production and to analyse the ideology inscribed within them. By looking at a particular group of paintings we can see how within a particular society - in this case Restoration France - the past (both in the sense of its events as understood and its paintings and documents) is recuperated, re-presented and re-produced. The result is a complicated web of signification. The scale, the subject matter and the decorative nature of these works should not, it is suggested, distract us from the important insights they offer into the intersection of art and politics in France in the late 1820s.
Seven of the original costume designs by Burne-Jones for Henry Irving's production of J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur (1895) have recently been discovered in a private collection; the play was the only one for which Burne-Jones designed costumes and scenery, and little else has survived to show the extent of his contribution. All the scenery and apparently all the props, except for the Excalibur sword now in the Theatre Museum, were destroyed in a fire at the Lyceum storage, Southwark in February 1898. Of Burne-Jones's designs for scenery only one rough preliminary sketch (reproduced by Georgiana Burne-Jones in Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones) is known to exist. No costume designs, except for the seven reproduced here, appear to have survived.
The Lion on a rock (Fig.31) and the Portrait of Mrs French's lapdog (Fig.30) each reappeared at the end of 1984, unfortunately too late for inclusion in the George Stubbs exhibition at the Tate and the Yale Center for British Art, 1984-85. Each is painted in enamel colours; each is signed and dated, like all Stubbs's known work in enamels (but unlike all his oils). Their reappearance reduces the number of Stubbs enamels still 'lost' to approximately fifteen.
Francis Douce (1757-1834) has been preserved to posterity mainly as a judicious but eccentric antiquary and collector, who assembled remarkable holdings of books, manuscripts, coins, ivories, old master prints and drawings. A major benefactor of the Bodleian Library, he has now been honoured there by a sesquicentennial exhibition drawn from his collections and be-quest. He is less familiar as a friend and patron of contemporary artists, and ironically enough his usual claim to notice in this respect - his having supposedly acquired most of his numerous Rowlandson drawings direct from the artist - has been found in some cases to be without foundation. Nevertheless he probably knew Rowlandson, as he did Richard Cosway, who in 1817 gave him a drawing of a Crouching Venus (Ashmolean Museum), Thomas Lawrence, and Thomas Stothard, among others of their generation.
In 1910 the Victoria and Albert Museum bought a large group of drawings for furniture, metalwork, ornament and decorative sculpture by Sir William Chambers's pupil and assistant John Yenn (1750-1821 ). Many of these are highly finished, with pen and wash borders and pale water-colour backgrounds. Among the ten drawings for metalwork is a design for an ormolu candle-stick, and there are two further designs that can be related to existing works in this medium, but the remainder are for articles of table silver. There is good reason to believe that these date from the late 1760s and early 1770s, and it is probable that the original designs were not the work of Yenn, but of Sir William Chambers himself.
WYNDHAM Lewis had a liking for well-ordered hairstyles. This was a prejudice to which he more than once confessed. Indeed, we may assume that to watch the hairdresser '... trim aimless and retrograde growths into clean arched shapes and angular plots ...' was one of his favourite games.
Superficially this book is merely the second edition of the guidebook to the mural decorations of Cyprus published in 1964by this husband and wife team. In reality not only has the political organisation of Cyprus changed since then - so that authors have not visited the Turkish sector in the north and east of the island since 1974 and judiciously refrain from comment on the condition of monuments since the war (though there have been some repots of serious damage) - but the book itself int this edition has changed out of recognition. Owners of the first edition will need instantly replace it with this one, and the new extended format of the book with a vastly increased photographic coverage will make it valuable for a much wider audience concerned with Byzantine, Crusader and early renaissance wallpainting. Particularly successful is the method of reproduction of the colour photographs. The number of churches covered has been increased from 25 to 62.
This is a remarkable book. Not only is it scientific in approach, but it everywhere reveals a clear understanding of scientific method and its limitations in the field with which it is concerned. It nowhere uses 'science' as a cover for essentially nonscientific ends. It is practical. It is readable. As a means of bringing together a vast range of scattered documentary, historical and technical information, it is hard to see that it could have been done better. The sooner it becomes required reading for any art historian concerned with with wall paintings from prehistoric times onwards, for any trainee conservationist, and as a reference work for anyone involved in the commissioning or control of conservation work on murals of any kind, the better it will be for all concerned, and the greater will be the chances of survival for a significant and irreplaceable proportion of the world's artistic heritage. For any trained, professional conservationist, both its range and its precision, and its consistent level-headedness, will undoubtedly ensure that it rapidly becomes and long remains a valuable resource.
Fifty-six years have passed since Richard Offner published the first volumes of what he hoped would be a thirty-vloume Corpus of Florentine Painting. His plan was to a fully illustrated and scrupulously documented catalogue of all extant thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florentine pictorial art. He organised this vast material into the following divisions: Section I – the thirteenth century, Section II – Giotto and his direct followers, Section III – the miniaturist tendency, and Section IV – Orcagsnesque painters. By the time of Offner's death in 1965, only eleven volumes had appeared, eight of them being part of Section III. Since then Klara Steinweg completed three volumes and Hayden B.J. Maginnis edited a selection of Offner's unpublished attributions. All of these books were published under auspices of New York University. As Mina Gregori relates in the foreward to the present volume, the Instituto di Storia dell'Arte of the University of Florence has assumed responsibilty for the Corpus. The formidable of continuing Offner's work was entrusted to Miklós Boskovits, and it is gratifying to report that he has succeeded brilliantly.
I would not be surprised if in the forthcoming sale of the Chatsworth prints, an engraving by Giorgio Ghisi were to be sold for more than an etching by Parmigianino. If you are not a print collector, you may well ask: an engraving by whom? For Giorgio Ghisi (1520-1582) was not a major artist, if artist he was at all: he was, though, one of the most proficient engravers of the Italian renaissance, a craftsman whose skills were probably unparalleled South of the Alps during the second half of the sixteenth century. Born in Mantua in 1520, and taught engraving by Giovanni Battista Scultori, Ghisi soon moved to Rome, where no-one had been able to emulate successfully the extraordinary ability that Marcantonio Raimondi had shown in reproducing in black and white the drawings, paintings and frescoes of Raphael and his contemporaries.
This book is the complete Cordier companion. it has a catalogue, transcripts of documents and sources, and a book-length account of Cordier's life and work set in the context of Roman sculpture at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The catalogue has no additions to the generally accepted auvre but some incontrovertible rejections, the important ones reattributed by documents or good sense: The St Peter and St Paul on the pediment and the three heads of St Paul inside the church of S. Paolo alle Tre Fontane are documented works of Ippolito Buzio (II, pp.438-40) and the lower tier of reliefs of Pius V's tomb in S. Maria Maggiore are convincingly given here to Nicolas Pippe of Aras (II, pp.436-38). A range of peripheral possibilities is discussed and rejected, leaving only twenty-two fully documented accepted works. This means for example that no extant portrait bust of Cordier is endorsed, though many lost ones are documented.
The urge to collect has always existed, but its motivation and manifestation has changed in accordance with prevailing concepts and taste. In this fascinating book Miguel Morán and Fernando Checa study these changes, from the late Middle ages until the latter part of the seventeenth century. The bulk of their research is concentrated on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is based on an abundance of unpublished material painstakingly gleaned form archives of Simancas, the Historico Nacional, Palacio Real, Protocolos de Madrid and the Biblioteca Nacional. By examining large numbers of inventories they have been able throw new light on the changes in taste which took place during the period.
The American scholar Eleanor Tufts has been since 1972 the principal contributor to Meléndez studies, so the publication of her book on this remarkable painter is a welcome addition to the literature on Spanish eighteenth-century art, otherwise scantily dealt with.
It is perhaps a consequence of the increasing rôle of exhibitions in the study of sculpture that the process through which the finished work is arrived at are coming under more intensive scrutiny. The end result is often immovable, yet the designs and models that prepared it can easily be brought together for a limited period. Thus it has been in Belgium with Sculpture in Age of Rubens in 1977, in Czechoslovakia with Ignác Platzer in 1980, in England with Rysbrack in 1982, and now in Germany with Peter Volk's long-awaited exhibition Bayerische Rokokoplatik:Vom Entwurf zur Ausführung last summer.
last summer.The editor of this book defines an outsider as one who has been inadequately studied. He has made a book out of biographical essays on eleven such figures: Nigel Silcox-crowe on Roger Pratt, Richard Hewlings on James Leoni, Andor Gomme on William and David Hiorn, Roger White on John Vardy, Tim Mowl on Henry Keene, Thomas Cocke on James Essex, Neil Burton on Thomas Hopper, Matthew Saunders on Samuel Teulon, Ian Gow on David Rhind, and Richard Morrice in Ernest Newton.
This is a book which demands respect by reason of its author's erudition; it represents a great deal of work and it makes a real substantial contribution to our knowledge of its subject, which is not Pre-Raphaelite art as the personal and social background to that art. The subject is approached form a feminist point of view and the book consists very largely of a study of six women who, in one way or another, were involved in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, particularly in its second phase.
It was as recently as 1970 that Jean C. Harris published a monograph entitled Edouard Manet: Graphic Works: A Definitive catalogue raisonné. Rarely has such a rash assertion been so swiftly and comprehensively falsified. The most significant new discoveries were published in the catalogue of an exhibition at Ingelhheim in 1977, and more followed in 1978 with an exhibition at the Huguette Berés gallery in Paris.
Robert Motherwell's reputation has suffered from his being a survivor. Unlike Pollock, Rothko and Newman who died at the height of their creativity, or Guston who changed tracks to receive substantial acclaim in his last years, Motherwell has maintained the abstract expressionist tradition throughout a long career. It is always hard to judge such art objectively, since it relies so much for impact upon the receptivity of the viewer and receptivity is capricious.
