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.
IN THE next few months the Trustees of the British Museum will recommend to the Prime Minister the appointment of a new Director - a decision which can hardly fail to affect the whole direction of museums in the next decade and beyond. The British Museum stands at the apex of the UK museum system, the oldest, largest, most respected and most expensive national museum. It is not an art museum. Its purposes are primarily historical, archaeological and ethnographic. It would not be sensible for the Trustees to appoint a Director whose interests were narrowly art historical. But it happens to have accumulated one of the world's greatest collections of art and artefacts, prints and drawings. No one can be indifferent to the future of these.
It is possible that if Dante Rossetti and Edouard Manet had been asked but a little time ago what would seem to them the most improbable event that the future could have in store for them, they would have answered, the exhibition of their respective pictures in Burlington House and the Palais des Beaux Arts. And yet within a few months - death having first removed both of them from that strife and noise of praise and blame, which during lifetime one had so earnestly shunned and the other so eagerly courted - this seeming marvel came to pass. Widely different in temperament, they nevertheless had this trait in com- mon - both were dissatisfied with the existing traditions of Art, and sought for themselves some other way.
LITTLE has been written about Max Ernst's Toilette de la mariée (Fig. 11) although it stands at a pivotal point in the artist's career. Painted in 1939/40, it was one of the last important canvases Ernst produced in Europe before his escape to America in 1941, which followed periods of internment as an enemy alien in France.
ONE OF the most counter-productive episodes in Poussin scholar- ship in recent years has been the debate over the group of early drawings at Windsor. The fifteen drawings, comprising a set of nine, apparently executed for the poet Giovanni Battista Marino in 1622-23, two related mythological scenes, and four battle scenes, were firmly denounced as mid-seventeenth century (and implicitly Roman) copies by Konrad Oberhuber in 1988, a stance which received support from Elizabeth Cropper and Hilliard T. Goldfarb, and criticism from Hugh Brigstocke and Ann Sutherland-Harris. It appeared that a confusing dichotomy of opinion would develop over these drawings, so vital to an understanding of Poussin's style before his arrival in Rome in 1624. Fortunately a simple but previously overlooked piece of evidence is available which may resolve the issue.
ONE of the more intriguing pictures in the recent Fragonard retrospective exhibition was one entitled Le jeu de la palette, lent by the museum in Chambéry (Fig.21). It shows a corner of a verdant garden in which young men and women lounge in the shadow of a stone staircase, watching a game in which a foppish boy raises a paddle to strike the hand of a young woman seated in the lap of a companion. From the staircase, other figures look on. The picture is a fairly new addition to Fragonard's œuvre, having been first identified in 1986 by Jean-Pierre Cuzin, who recognised the composition's similarity to the central area of a well-known drawing by Fragonard in Frankfurt (Fig.22).
ALTHOUGH it has long been conjectured that Edouard Manet's father Auguste might have been ill, perhaps paralysed, when the double portrait The artist's parents (Fig.26) was painted around 1859-60, the exact nature of his condition has never been clearly established. Documents from the Archives of the Ministry of Justice, where Manet pére was a career magistrate and judge, remedy this deficiency with precise information about his life, occupation and his illness at that time.
CHARLES STERLING died on 9th January 1991, deeply stricken by the recent loss of his wife. Only three days earlier he had had the pleasure of seeing, fresh from the press, the second, and last, volume of his monumental work Peinture médievaleà Paris. It marked the end of a long and creatively active career.
