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Ghosts in the Lecture Room: Connoisseurship and the Making, Appraising, Replicating and Undoing of Art’s Images

18 May 2014

On the 3rd of May, the Mellon Centre hosted a lively conference on the divisive subject of art connoisseurship – “The Educated Eye?”, now available on Webinar (http://new.livestream.com/accounts/7709097/connoisseurshipnow). Yesterday, a three-day congress opened at the Hague on “Authentication in Art” (7-9 May) carrying the subtitle “What happens when the painting you are buying, selling, investigating, exhibiting, insuring – Turns Out to be a Fake or a (Re)Discovery…” A small ground-breaking exhibition with bearing on the two conferences (“Diverse Maniere: Piranesi, Fantasy and Excess” – see below and Figs. 1 and 2) is running at the Soane Museum until May 31st.

Curating the Future

The question mark in the Mellon Centre’s conference title, reflects persisting antipathies to connoisseurship, which practice/discipline/pose nonetheless shows signs of rehabilitation. The conference proved admirably even-handed “ideologically” but somewhat constricted in its composition and terms of engagement.

The first speaker, Dr Stephen Deuchar, a former director of Tate Britain who has followed a former chairman of the Tate’s board (David Verey) into the Art Fund’s management, might be taken to represent the official modernist/progressivist museum world establishment. In his paper, “Connoisseurship Now: Some Thoughts”, Dr Deuchar disclosed that the Art Fund no longer confines itself to helping museums buy great works of art that might otherwise be lost to the nation, and now, for example, has contributed “generously” towards something involving the conceptualist Martin Creed (who turns lights on and off), even though no object will be acquired. Gifting this munificence to the Tate required Deuchar (and, perhaps, his chairman?) to step aside from the trustees’ deliberations.

There were two problems with Deuchar’s position. First, in espousing a Connoisseurship of The New-and-the-Forthcoming, the curator effectively operates blind in bandit territory. As the National Gallery’s director, Nicholas Penny, has pointed out, it takes time to evaluate new art, we cannot yet know how it will compare with other art that will shortly follow, or with other yet-to-be-seen contemporary art. Second, his position is old hat and inadvisable: in the 1960s and the 1970s critics championed contemporary art not on quality but on the degree to which it “challenged” existing art practices. So-called “New Activities” were heavily promoted by such critics and curators as Richard Cork and Sir Nicholas Serota of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, the Whitechapel Gallery and, for the last twenty-six years, the Tate. With the dismantling of quality as the principal criterion of judgement, and with the aid of the state-funded, respectability-conferring Arts Council, new activities soon became official activities, leaving most fine art practices and practitioners marginalised. Few noticed that “fine art” had cut itself off from related design and craft activities, and from its own history, to become a cosseted licensed playground where rules were the property of “artists” who played by no rules.

Culturally determinist Marxist art historians (like John Berger and, for a while, Peter Fuller), had gone further; had become more mystical and taken to praising art that they judged to have “anticipated the future”. Insofar as art might ever be said to do such a thing, it could only be seen to have done so in retrospect. When asked to comment on the significance of the French Revolution, the connoisseur of history, Mao Tse Tung, replied, “It’s too soon to say”.

The New Art History

The Mellon conference pitted (trade) chalk against (museum) cheese with Dr Bendor Grosvenor of the Philip Mould gallery and Dr Martin Myrone, a Tate curator and champion of the New Art History which pursues the socially signifcant in favour of the aesthetically desirable (“The Limit of Connoisseurship”). In the course of his conceptually suave paper, “Why Connoisseurship Matters”, Dr Grosvenor made two startling disclosures. First, having just seen Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, he now appreciates that the critics he had held to be “myopic” – were right all along: Michelangelo’s work has indeed been ruined. Second, that he stands behind restorers to prevent them from destroying glazes on Van Dyck paintings. (See Figs. 12a to 15.)

Dr Myrone declared allegiance to the New Art History where the social has routed the aesthetic. The resulting knock-about reminded this observer of days on the New Left in the late 1960s when Kim Howells, a rebellious Hornsey College of Art student (but later a New Labour government junior minister), wanted all potentially saleable object-based art to be outlawed – unlike the “democratising” mass medium of TV in which he was dabbling. When we asked Howells how he regarded Goya’s Horrors of War etchings, he replied that, although in sympathy with the works’ politics, the fact that they were printed on paper, “which is a capitalist commodity”, meant that they, too, would have to go. Dr Howells later grew up artistically and, as a visiting minister to the Tate, left a rude comment on a Turner Prize exhibition. Soon after, he lost his place in government.

Parts and Wholes

The afternoon session paired Spike Bucklow, the Hamilton Kerr Institute’s Senior Research Scientist (“Connoisseurship, technical knowledge and conservation”), and the British Museum’s head of prints and drawings, Hugo Chapman (“Dodging the label connoisseur from Christie’s to the British Museum”). Mr Chapman told how, when working in trade (Christie’s), he had been advised to describe himself as “an expert” rather than a connoisseur. It seems that the public can more easily forgive mistakes made by the former. Chapman told a story about a librarian who once hid a key drawing from an artist’s box when showing it to a scholar, and then, when duly reviewing the scholar’s book, professed himself astonished that no mention had been made of the said drawing.

The Hamilton Kerr conservator opted to address small things because “fragments are easier than wholes”, while the embarrassed-connoisseur attempted (more sensibly) to make artistic sense of the whole effects of drawings, and to understand, thereby, how they were executed. Dr Bucklow first showed how eloquently cracks on paintings can testify to a picture’s age, medium, underlying support, country of origin and so on. Having thus demonstrated an evidently usefully diagnostic tool (a kind of Connoisseurship of Cracks), he dismantled his own edifice by demonstrating how the vagaries of individual works’ histories and compositions so complicate the system as to render it effectively useless.

Mr Chapman, while conceding the very great difficulties of making sensible identifications of authorship in drawings, described how he tried to establish Michelangelo’s authorship of a drawing by considering its overall relationships and effects. In a nod towards Myrone’s position, he conceded that because many works in collections are ephemera, it would be futile to attempt to establish authorship of every piece of paper, even though such works often have great social significance and interest.

Salvage Operation

In the final paper (“New Connoisseurship, Old Europe, and the Future of Art history”), Professor Liz Prettejohn, head of York University’s Department of Art History, made a spirited attempt to retain a still-vital discipline that might be free of the more toxic ingredients of past connoisseurship practices. Prof. Prettejohn’s credentials in this respect were well established by a demonstration of her undergraduate response to a formal analysis test set by an old-style connoisseur professor. Prettejohn showed a Rembrandt etching about which students who had been reared exclusively on the study of modern art had been able to volunteer only that it was “old” and “probably Victorian”.

A Missing Link

This constructive, even illuminating, conference had two constricting deficiencies. First, connoisseurship’s purpose was largely confined to determining authorship, with, Dr Grosvenor’s startling asides apart, no consideration given to the urgent need to appraise restorers’ often radically transforming changes – an unforgivable lapse given that unsound attributions can always be corrected, while bad restorations are forever. Second, no artists contributed to this conference. While all speakers addressed the problem of producing an Educated Eye, none seemed aware that nothing educates the eye faster than producing or copying art. With artists, critical faculties were developed in academies and art schools by doing rather than by reading about or simply looking at. Listening to conscientious people grappling with the difficulties of connoisseurship while seemingly indifferent to or ignorant of art practices and blasé about restoration injuries, left an impression of a profession viewing fundamental problems through the wrong end of a telescope.

It is no accident that artists have initiated most of the great picture-cleaning controversies. Those who create art best identify injuries to it. The present state might easily be corrected: it would take small resources to have student scholars make brief drawn copies of the works they study, thereby appreciating art’s vital mind/eye/hand connections. Appreciation and discrimination may be of the theoretical essence in connoisseurship, but taken alone, without knowledge of and engagement with art’s practices, they leave practitioners susceptible to the traditional charge of being pretentious poseurs.

Drawn to Distinguish

Hugo Chapman’s sound quest to grasp the logic of the whole triggered theoretical and practical thoughts. Drawing provides the best route into questions of connoisseurship, being the most private, direct and likely entirely autograph form of image-making. If trainee art historians were required to make different types of drawing, even for brief periods, it would be incalculably helpful in establishing connections between historical artefacts and their original purpose.

Students might, for example, practice drawing as Rodin did with his famous late quick figure studies – never taking their eyes off the model while enclosing a complete figure with a swift continuous contour. Rodin did so, he explained, to fix in his memory the unique total effect of the body – its gestalt – and to test his own grasp of the miracles he had observed. The means required for drawing are miniscule: an American newspaper illustrator who illustrated first night performances of plays concealed a small pad and a very short pencil in a jacket pocket so that he could make discretely drawn notes of the actors to use later to prepare his finished illustrations.

By helping to fix images in the mind, drawing is the very opposite of taking photographs, which practice can evade thought and appraisal. Rodin once reproached himself for having failed to appreciate that the most important part of a head lay not in any of its individual features but in the manner in which they were all fused into a whole. In perverse contrast, the decision to restore the entire cycle of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes was made not on any analysis of the whole and its internal relationships but on the basis of brief chemical tests made on a single lunette (the sections of wall above the arched windows in the Chapel) that happened to be within the reach of restorers who were working on minor frescoes. Misplaced faith in the validity of those “scientific” tests (of an insufficiently tested cleaning agent – it was later discovered to have etched the surfaces of stone, producing corrugations that scattered light, rather than to have cleaned them) permitted the Vatican’s curators and restorers to launch a cleaning programme on the entire fresco scheme with uniform and pre-determined applications of a single, ferocious stone-cleaning material (a soda, ammonia and detergent cocktail) even though, to those with eyes to see, the lunettes had played a subdued and subordinate role to the ceiling proper in Michelangelo’s grand scheme. (See Figs. 4 to 9.)

There is a another way

By all accounts, the finest, least controversial, most sensitive picture restorer working in Britain in the 20th century was the German émigré, Dr. Johannes Hell. His method was utterly respectful of the whole and overall effects of pictures. Dr Hell had trained first as a fine artist and then taken a doctorate on Rembrandt’s drawings. He deplored restorers’ practice of cutting “windows” through (assumed) dirt and varnish until bright colours and light tones are exposed (as at Fig. 7). He worked overall on the entire surface of a picture with the mildest solvents so that no optically and conceptually deranging relationships could emerge. His slow method was made slower by frequently “resting” a picture to give it time to air out, so that no corrosive solvents might accumulate within the paint layers. With Hell’s method in mind, it can be painful to consider the haste in which today’s restorers procede with their swabs, acetone, scalpels and “windows” when in pursuit of more authentic and original paint underneath a picture’s surface.

Connoisseurship in action

We take a degree of pride in the fact that the (proper) exercising of connoisseurship has been alive and flourishing within this organisation for over two decades. From its inception in 1992, Artwatch has deployed aesthetic discrimination and visual analysis in demonstrations of injuries made during “conservation treatments”. Specifically and in terms of methodology, we have done so by the correlation of photographic records of the pre and post-restoration states of works. (This website was custom-made to carry directly corresponding images side by side or in continuous vertical sequences so as to facilitate the most directly revealing visual comparisons.) In the Witt Library, we see photographic records that do not just assist the making of attributions but that also record the progressive debilitation of paintings over successive restorations. We notice that the difference between an authentic work and a close copy can be far smaller than that between an authentic work seen before and after a bad restoration. Dr Grosvenor really did not need to wait until he could join the scrum in the Sistine Chapel to appreciate that Michelangelo’s work has been ruined – he needed only to study the countless pre and post-restoration photographic records that we have carried on this site and had described earlier at length in the 1993 (James Beck and Michael Daley) book “Art Restoration ~ The Culture, the Business and the Scandal”.

The nature of evidence

Defenders of restorations often say that they cannot be judged on photographic evidence. In other regards, art dealers have great faith in the veracity of photographs – they will bid online on the strength of a single photograph. Bernard Berenson preferred to examine Michelangelo’s ceiling by looking at large photographs in books rather than by eye when craning his neck in the chapel. We should be clear on two points: there are no good grounds for disregarding photographic proofs of restoration injuries; the kind of evaluative test that Prof. Prettejohn’s old style connoisseur teacher devised for undergraduates might just as profitably be applied to analysing the differences between pre and post-restoration conditions. (See “An Old Style Connoisseur Test for Undergraduate Art Historians:” opposite.)

For all the social alertness of the New Art Historians, little comment has been made on the major organisational and “ideological” changes within the museum world over the last half century or so. In our view, the failure of scholars and curators to heed artists’ complaints stems from the fact that they have allowed themselves to become dependent on the technical expertise of the very many restorers who have become institutionally embedded throughout the museum world. It is now restorers not painters who pontificate on the making of paintings. It is they who insist that photographic records of their own “treatments” may not be held up and used in evidence against their actions.

Speaking generally, as an organisation, we are bemused by a profession that uses photographs for all manner of curatorial, scholarly and critical ends except for the indentification of restoration injuries. Scholars now routinely revise their own professional scholarly accounts in order to bring them into line with restorers’ latest, often radical, transformations. In the published accounts of restorers and curators alike, nothing ever counts as an injury – every change is presented with drum rolls as a “discovery”. Whole steamships, Vermeer necklaces and sheep can go missing without an art historical murmur or any ruffling of connoisseurs’ feathers. Even in terms of attributions, Artwatch has been pro-active on the connoisseurship front.

The misappliance of science and early calls for the the return of connoisseurship

While protesting since the early 1990s against the cult of “scientific” conservation and its disparagement of “subjective” aesthetic judgements, we have throughout commended a return to proper and rigorous applications of connoisseurship. In the October 1994 Art Review article “How to Make a Michelangelo”, we suggested that “The fact that our scholars and technical experts flit quite so promiscuously through time and space might suggest uncertainty of connoisseurship and ability to ‘read’ paintings”. Three years later, in connection with another National Gallery attribution, we wrote: “In recent years the art of connoisseurship has become entangled with the scientific analysis of paintings. Problems of attribution, once resolved by the educated ‘eyes’ of individuals, are increasingly seen as the property of interdisciplinary teams of curators, restorers and scientists who enjoy the technical, financial and professional support afforded by large museums. But how sound are the new proceedures – and how reliable are the published accounts given of them?” (Art Review, July/August 1997, “Is this really a Rubens?”).

In truth, it might fairly be said that the campaigning essence of Artwatch has been a constant assertion of the primary value of visual connoisseurship – see also, “Is Michelangelo’s Entombment in the National Gallery by Michelangelo?” by James Beck in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, CXXXVIII, 1996. We have devoted two entire ArtWatch UK journals to critiques, successively formulated and advanced by the painter/scholars Euphrosyne Doxiadis and Dr Kasia Pisarek, of the National Gallery’s Rubens “Samson and Delilah” attribution. The title of the last book (2006) by ArtWatch’s founder, the late Prof. James Beck, was “From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis”. It received few reviews – and no mention at the Mellon Centre conference.

A connoisseur of Ephemera

No mention was made, either, of a remarkable new work of scholarship published last year by the British Library and the Oak Knoll Press in the USA – Michael Twyman’s “A history of chromolithography ~ printed colour for all” – which we first encountered in the Institute of Conservation’s Chantry Library, Oxford. The ingenious lengths to which printers went in the pre-photographic era to replicate any image, and all things in the world, in reliable colour on multiple, co-ordinated slabs of stone is truly astonishing to behold (see Fig. 3). It is impossible to exaggerate either the illuminating usefulness of this major, beautifully produced book, or the sheer delightfulness of its immense pictorial riches. For those who might feel that a major tome on a history of a printing method might make for dull or excessively technical reading, we would urge, “think again”: here are to be found ephemera (printed bills, advertising cards and the likes) alongside early pioneering hand-drawn attempts faithfully to produce such elusive epically heroic fine art subjects as paintings by Turner and Michelangelo. The faithfulfulness of the attempts to replicate the values of the most hallowed artists summoned applications of great sensibility and powers of aesthetic discrimination. Here, the connoisseur, the scholar, the social historian, the technical historian and the lover of fine drawing and colouring might all feast together, in awe at the dedication, the talent, the artistic insight found in an unsung publishing trade.

We were delighted, for example, to find so full an account of the production of Robert Carrick’s 30 x 44 inches 1852 chromolithographic copy of Turner’s “ Rockets and Blue Lights…” made in no fewer than fourteen colour separations (see Fig. 9). That faithfully made, expensive and then state of the art record (“the only perfect reproduction of a picture ever issued” – as it was claimed to have been in 1900) testifies indisputably to the destruction of the principal boat in the painting on which we have commented a number of times, most recently on the obtuse (or brazen) presentation of this wrecked picture as a jewel in Turner’s crown – see “From Veronese to Turner, Celebrating Restoration-Wrecked Pictures”.

Even more importantly, there is also reproduced, in its entirety, a massive 1,027 x 470 mm (40 by 27 inches) faithful cartography-like, on-the-flat, full colour image of 1852-53, that simultaneously depicts the entire curving geometries of Michelangelo’s combined ceiling and upper walls decorations (see Figs. 4 to 8). We had never before seen this work in its entirety. It reproduces every single figure (there are over three hundred) and architectural motif Michelangelo depicted. Most preciously of all, this encyclopaedic record testifies to the hierarchy of values within which Michelangelo situated his images.

By capturing the tonal and chromatic logic of the whole, not the fragment, of Michelangelo’s murals, this hand-drawn lithograph corroborates precisely the written testimony of the painter Charles Heath Wilson who examined the ceiling on a special scaffold in the 19th century. All parts of this great pictorial ensemble were not equal in their treatment. The “outer” section (as here seen at Figs. 4 and 5) was the semi-circular sections of painting made around the windows on the upper walls (the lunettes). They were the darkest passages of painting. They contained in their illusionistic recesses (see Fig. 7) depictions of the ancestors of Christ. This dark band of human figures set Michelangelo’s work apart from the wall paintings below – as did his great escalation of scale in his figures. Far from being an arbitrary but precisely situated zone of dirt, as the Vatican authorities preposterously and against all scholarly records claimed, this dark zone served aesthetically and symbolically as a kind of visual plinth for the even more monumental figures and the Divine Events depicted above on the ceiling. The next row comprised an architectural screen against which Michelangelo’s stupendous giant prophets and sibyls were set and relieved in the brilliant cinematic, shadows-casting light we have previously described. Above them, set in the sky glimpsed through illusionistic apertures in ceiling’s architectural scheme are the biblical scenes and the depictions of God Himself – Whose restoration injuries we have also chronicled. Today, by the miracles of our technology, we can see and move around the entire, now restoration-ruined surfaces of the Sistine Chapel, but the Vatican will not release a TV film made in the 1960s of the pre-restored state. Recent technical advances have carried us into a world where it is possible to produce perfect facsimiles not only of images but of three-dimensional objects and, even architectural spaces and forms.

CODA

The small exhibition currently showing at the Soane Museum shows three-dimensional realisations of graphic inventions of Piranesi by the foundation Factum Arte. A full size replica made by the foundation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt was unveiled this week. It was reported by Peter Aspden in the Financial Times “Fit for a king: Tutankhamun’s replica burial chamber”(see Fig.). Such technical capacities for replication raise issues that we will explore in coming posts. This fertile new territory is one for which scholars and connoisseurs will be ill-prepared to assess for as long as they ignore the mistreatment of unique and historic art objects by technicians who transform them into synthetic, polished replications of their (assumed) original autograph states. This website launched in 2010 with a discussion on authenticity in art and music (“The New Relativisms and the Death of ‘Authenticity'”). It did so in response to a restorer’s imposition (in new but deceivingly aged and cracked paint) of a piece of computer-generated “virtual reality” onto Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Connoisseurship is more urgently needed today than ever.

Michael Daley

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Above, Figs. 1 and 2: Top, a page of a review by Daisy Dunn (April issue of Standpoint magazine) of the Factum Arte “Diverse Maniere: Piranesi, Fantasy and Excess” exhibition at the Soane Museum, London, showing the gilt seashell-based chair that has been realised from an engraved design by Piranesi. At Fig. 2, above, we see a preliminary computer generated realisation of another Piranesi design – for a coffee pot – that was subsequently replicated in three dimensions and is now on show at the Soane Museum.
Above, Fig. 3: An illustration from Michael Twyman’s “A history of Chromolithography” (p. 452), showing a 1904 photograph (Modern Lithographer, vol 1, no. 4, April 1904) of printers at Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son’s chromolithographic establishment, London, moving a lithographic stone weighing about half a ton.
Above, figs. 4 and 5: Top, a detail, and, above, the whole of a lithograph printed, probably, in twenty-one colours on two sheets of paper, showing the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling and adjoining sections of the chapel’s upper walls and windows. The lithograph measures 1,027 x 470mm and was made from an 1853 drawing by Pratesi by C. Köpper under the art direction of L. Gruner and supervision of J. Storch at Winckelmann and Sons, Berlin.
The lithograph is reproduced in Michael Twyman’s “A history of Chromolithography”, with the image running across the book’s centrefold as seen here at Fig. 5.
Above, Figs. 6a and 6b: Left, the section of wall and ceiling in the Sistine Chapel that adjoins the wall of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (here seen the thin dark strip on the right of the photograph). In this photograph, taken before the last restoration, we still see the dark zone of the lunettes which set Michelangelo’s frescoes apart from those on the walls below, much as had been reproduced in C. Köpper’s 1852-53 lithograph shown above at Figs. 4 and 5. Fig. 6b: The photograph on the right was taken after the cleaning of the lunettes and the ceiling, but before the cleaning of the Last Judgement. We see here how the former clear pictorial articulation between Michelangelo’s wall painting and that by others below it has been erased. At this stage, the not-yet-cleaned Last Judgement, seen in the bottom right-hand corner, is glaringly out of tone with the rest of Michelangelo’s work.
Above, Fig. 7: A test cleaning strip made on a lunette, to show the effects of the AB57 cleaning gel when left in place for varying lengths of time.
Above, Fig. 8: One of the ancestors of Christ depicted by Michelangelo on the lunettes (the sections of wall that surround the tops of the Sistine Chapel’s arched windows), as recorded before cleaning (left) and after cleaning (right).
This photo-comparison was one of a number of such published in a December 1989 article, “SALVIAMO ALMENO il Giudizio Universale”, in the art magazine Oggi e Domani by the sculptor Venanzo Crocetti. As a young man Crocetti had worked on a restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the 1930s and was one of the earliest critics of the last restoration. His photo-comparison shows the inversions of relative pictorial value that occurred; where what was once darker-than, becomes lighter-than, and vice versa; when, if the work had simply been cleaned, the lights would have become lighter and the darks would have become darker. Such inversions of pictorial value only arise when paint is lost. And, yet, in defence of this cleaning, one of the co-directors of the restoration, the Vatican Museums’ curator, Fabrizio Mancinelli, claimed that his cleaning had led to the “surprising conclusion that the kind of suggestive painting by shadows for which Michelangelo was admired until a few years ago was essentially the product of candle-smoke and still more of glue varnishes”.
Above, Fig. 9: Turner’s painting Rockets and Blue Lights as reproduced in Michael Twyman’s “A history of Chromolithography” (p. 592). This image shows the final stage of proofs (the strip to the left contains one of a pair of registration marks showing fourteen intersections that co-ordinated the printing of the fourteen colour stages) of a copy of the painting made by Robert Carrick and printed by Day and Son in London, 1852. The image is 760 x 565mm.
It was unusual for important, original works of art to be brought to the chromolithographers’ studios because of the obvious dangers. Michael Twyman reveals in his chapter “Visuals and the Visualiser” that in the case of Turner’s Rockets and Blue Lights, this was done by William Day of the firm Day & Son because the printing and publishing house wished to make a reproduction that would serve as a demonstration of the firm’s capabilities in chromolithography.
Above, Figs. 10 and 11: Top, the illustration by Jenny Nyström for the cover of “Snövit: Barnens Julkalender”, as on the book’s 15th edition in 1914. Above, left column: top, the “Snövit: Barnens Julkalender” cover, in its 1914, 15th edition, when chromolithographed in five colours with mechanical tints; above, detail. Above, right column, top, the “Snövit: Barnens Julkalender” cover, in its 1917, 18th edition, when printed photo-mechanically, in relief and in three colours; above, detail
Both illustrations as reproduced in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography.
An Old Style Connoisseur test for undergraduate art historians:
Compare the two sets of details of Van Dyck’s portrait Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle, (shown left before cleaning, and, right, after cleaning) in terms of: a) their relative vivacity as image and as a portrayal of the subject; b) their tonal gradations; and, c) their colouring.
Above, Figs. 12a and 12b, top, and 13a and 13b, above: Van Dyck’s portrait Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle. The details on the left are as reproduced in the Tate Gallery’s 1992 catalogue to the 1992-1993 exhibition organised by Andrew Wilton, “The Swagger Portrait”. The details on the right are from the catalogue to the Tate Gallery’s 2009 exhibition, “Van Dyck in Britain”.
Above, Figs. 14 and 15: Van Dyck’s portrait Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle, top, detail as in the Tate Gallery’s catalogue to the 1992 “The Swagger Portrait” exhibition; above, the same detail from the Tate Gallery’s 2009 exhibition, “Van Dyck in Britain”.
The Continuing Questions for Undergraduates here are: e) Are the drawing and the modelling in the flesh areas clearer and stronger on the top detail or that immediately above? f) Could the removal of discoloured varnish alone account for the dramatic chromatic change in the fabric of the dress? g) Was any other colour than blue discernable in the dress as seen before restoration? h) Has any loss of velatura occured in the course of the cleaning? i) Are all the changes that have occured in this painting attributable to a straightforward removal of surface dirt and discoloured varnish? j) Can we expect the painting to return to its previous subtlety and richness of colouring – and strength of modelling – when its present varnish discolours?
A brilliant tour de force:
Above, Fig. 16: “Brilliant flambé vase”, plate 46 of S. W. Bushell’s Oriental ceramic art (New York, 1897), lithographed by C. Thurwanger, August 1891, and printed in twenty-eight colours by L. Prang & Co., Boston. 330 x 212mm. (As published in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography, p. 547, and by courtesy of The Winthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.)
Above, Fig. 17: A plate from A history of chromolithography (p. 609), showing two proof stages of the lithograph shown at Fig. 16. The upper image here shows part of the key-line drawing made to guarantee the perfect registration of all twenty-eight coloured stages of the printing. The key-line drawing contains two rows of spaces to record the individual colours used to make the image. The lower image shows the final proof when all twenty-eight colours have been printed. It also contains the record of every individual colour and tint used in the row of colour tablets, and below that is seen the successive build-up of colouring as each stage is completed.
Above, Fig. 18: The Lithographic artists’ room of the Dangerfield Company’s works, St Albans. From L. Gray Gower, “How a chromolithograph is printed”, Strand Magazine, February-July1904 (as published in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography, p. 417).
Above, Fig. 19: Emilio L. Tafani, oil painting of a lithographic studio. Probably the painting exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, 1944 as “The mystery of the craft”. 785 x 1,140mm. (Courtesy Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading). As published in Michael Twyman’s A history of Chromolithography, p. 557.
An Original Drawing Redrawn – and how!
Above, Fig. 20: An original drawing for “Tokyo white figure”, plate 96 of S. W. Bushell’s Oriental ceramic art (New York, 1897), signed “Jas & C Callowhill” and marked up with trim marks and outline colour tablets. (Courtesy Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). As published in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography, p. 548.
Above, Fig. 21: “Tokyo white figure”, plate 96 of S. W. Bushell’s Oriental ceramic art (New York, 1897), printed in about nineteen colours by L. Prang, Boston. Image 363 x 182mm. As published in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography, p. 548.
Above, Figs. 22 and 23: Details of a printed key-line drawing and the finished chromolithograph for a Christmas Card, designed by Rebecca Coleman and printed in sixteen colours by Raphael Tuck & Sons,1881. Both 45 x 68mm. As published in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography, p. 565.
Death to world imperialism:
Above, Fig. 24: Dimitrii Moor, “Death to world imperialism”, published by the Vyacheslav Polonsky’s Litzidat (Literature and Publishing department of the revolutionary Military Administration of the Soviet Republic), c. 1919. Printed in five colours from ink-drawn stones, with stippling. Sheet 1,100 x 748mm. (Courtesy David King Collection, London). As published in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography, p. 279.
Above, Figs. 25 and 26: Histoire des quatre fils Aymon (Paris: H. Launette, 1883), illustrated by Eugène Grasset. The plates made and printed by Charles Gillot using the “gillotage” process patented by his father, Firmin Gillot. Second title-page printed in four colours. Page 280 x 227. As published in Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography, p. 321.
Above, Figs. 27a and 27b: The cover wrapper of Michael Twyman’s A history of chromolithography
Below, Fig. 28: The FT Weekend Magazine (Supplement of the year), April 19/20 2014, carrying Peter Aspden’s report “Fit for a King”.
Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.


The Controversial Treatments of the Wallace Collection Watteaus

8 September 2011

Restorers who blunder often present their dramatically altered works as miraculous “recoveries” or “discoveries”. Sometimes they (or their curators) park their handiwork in dark corners pending re-restorations (see the Phillips Collection restoration of Renoir’s “The Luncheon of the Boating Party” and the Louvre’s multi-restoration of Veronese’s “The Pilgrims of Emmaüs”). Here, Dr Selby Whittingham, the Secretary-General of the Watteau Society (and the 2011 winner of ArtWatch International’s Frank Mason Prize – see below), discusses the controversial restorations of Watteau paintings at the Wallace Collection and calls for greater transparency and accountability in the treatment of old masters.

Selby Whittingham writes:

The Watteau exhibitions held in London 12 March – 5 June 2011 prompted much comment, but little about the condition of the oils at the Wallace Collection [- see endnote 1]. Exceptionally Brian Sewell mentioned their poor state: “both overcleaned and undercleaned, victims of cleaners with Brillo pads and restorers with a taste for gravy.” [2] This was a bit sweeping, but had some justification.

In the Watteau Society Bulletin 1985 Sarah Walden contrasted the recent restorations at the Wallace Collection with those at the Louvre and the different philosophies behind them [3]. The report on the cleaning of “Les Charmes de la vie” at the Wallace by Herbert Lank in 1980, she wrote, did not discuss “whether to touch the varnish at all…and if so how far it should be lightened and removed.” By contrast the Louvre report on cleaning “L’Embarquement pour l’isle de Cythère” centred “on the ethical and perceptual problems of thinning the varnish.

If the results were far more satisfying at the Louvre, a defence might be that its picture was in better condition to start with than the Wallace one. In his 1989 catalogue of the Watteau pictures John Ingamells said that “Les Charmes de la vie” was described as “much injured” in 1895, and that in 1980 several areas of retouching were uncovered [4]. That might explain the loss of paint suffered on the face of the girl in the centre, but this glaring defect was only made all the more obvious by cleaning, to disguise which the picture was at first hung in a dark corner and then was retouched by Lank again in 1987. [For Ingamells’ and Lank’s discussions of the restoration in the Burlington Magazine, December 1983, see below, right.] However the scrubbed appearance of the picture overall with subtle transitions in the landscape lost (- see Figs. 1 – 7.) cannot be explained by partial losses of paint earlier.

In 1984 Lee cleaned “Pour nous prouver que cette belle” at the Wallace (- see Figs. 10 & 11). It had already been cleaned by Lord Hertford’s factotum Mawson in 1856, when Hertford acquired it and its pendant, “Arlequin, Pierrot et Scapin”, at the sale of Samuel Rogers, before which they had belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1989 Ingamells de-attributed the picture, whereas now Dr Christoph Vogtherr re-attributes it (surely rightly) to the master. This is ironical, as an excuse for cleaning is that sometimes it leads to the uncovering of an original, whereas the opposite happened in this case. Though the painting now has the same scraped appearance as “Les Charmes de la vie”, this has not altogether obliterated Watteau’s touch and the quality of the faces and other details. It was a pity that Waddesdon had not lent for comparison the pendant (the attribution of which to Watteau was also once questioned – by Ellis Waterhouse – probably unjustifiably) [5].

In 1975 the two large oils at the Wallace, “Divertissements champêtres” and “Rendez-vous de chasse” were cleaned by Vallance. The result was generally considered disappointing. Part of the blame for this was laid at the door of Watteau, who was charged with painting mechanically, the first being an enlarged version of the much more pleasing “Les Champs Elisées”, also at the Wallace. The two big pictures were not painted as pendants, but made into such at an early date, thus necessitating, to make them the same size, the addition of strips at the left and bottom of “Rendez-vous de chasse”, thereby seriously slackening the tautness of its composition. This provides another irony. A merit of restoration is said to be that it returns works to their original state as near as maybe, but here deliberately that has not been done. Paint by a later hand and extensions are retained to the detriment of the overall effect contrary to what the artist intended.

Two loans were added to the main display upstairs. They were “Le Défillé”, an early battle scene from York, and another early work, “L’Accordée de village”, from the Soane Museum. These may be interesting to the specialist, but for most merely diminished the display, considerably helping justify Sewell’s sweeping castigation. The second in particular has long been recognised to be a wreck. Was it when Soane acquired it in 1802? We are not told. Admittedly Dr Vogtherr has not set out to produce another catalogue raisonné and exhibition labels never say anything about condition, but surely they should?

Downstairs in the exhibition devoted to Watteau’s great promoter, Jean de Jullienne, hung “Fêtes vénitiennes” from Edinburgh, which is generally acknowledged to be in good condition. Critics often blame the condition of Watteau’s oils on his poor and hasty technique. Why, then, are some of his pictures in a so much better state than others? Is this a case of curators and restorers trying to shift the blame?

Watteau provides an excellent subject for the consideration of such questions. As he often evolved compositions as he painted, x-rays are frequently informative. Jean de Jullienne by having most of his paintings engraved provides a valuable check on their original appearance, supplemented by the numerous painted copies made in 18th century. (The pair of “Arlequin, Pierrot et Scapin” and “Pour nous prouver que cette belle” were in fact engraved by L. Surugue in Watteau’s lifetime almost immediately after they were painted, showing that the extensions in that case were Watteau’s own). In 1986 there was such an exhibition at Brussels, to which the Louvre and Wallace (in the person of John Ingamells) contributed. [6] But no British curator (including Dr Nicholas Penny) was interested in transferring it to Britain. This short changed the British public, as does the continuing failure to make conservation history a routine element in any exhibition of old masters.

ENDNOTES

1 Watteau at the Wallace Collection, by Christoph Martin Vogtherr, 2011; Jean de Jullienne: Collector & Connoisseur, by Christoph Martin Vogtherr and Jennifer Tonkovich, 2011.

2 “Top Drawer,” Evening Standard, 24 March 2011.

3 “A Tale of Two Watteaus,” pp, 9-11. She has since restored the strange and almost unknown “Le Rêve de l’artiste”, the attribution to Watteau doubted by Donald Posner in 1984, a doubt apparently removed for some after cleaning.

4 The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures, III, French before 1815, 1989. These catalogues were inexplicably remaindered off by the museum a few years ago.

5 Selby Whittingham, “Watteaus and ‘Watteaus’ in Britain c.1780-1851,” in Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) le peintre, son temps et sa légende, ed.François Moureau and Margaret Morgan Grasselli, 1987, pp.271-2.

6 Watteau, technique picturale et problèmes de restauration, ed. Catherine Périer-D’Ieteren, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1986. Dr Martin Eidelberg pointed out the catastrophe of cleaning when the restorer failed to realise that a painting might be a collaboration between Watteau and another artist (Lecture at the 1999 ArtWatch UK Annual Meeting).

Selby Whittingham

The 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize

The 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize was awarded to Dr Selby Whittingham on June 8th, on the occasion of the annual Professor James Beck Memorial Lecture given at the Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, by Professor Charles Hope on the subject of cleaning controversies at the National Gallery. Artwatch UK director Michael Daley paid the following tribute:

“In Britain, one of the doughtiest, longest-standing opponents of a sometimes self-regarding fine art establishment has been the art historian Selby Whittingham. Dr Whittingham, a student of medieval art and a devotee of both Watteau and Turner – two of the most restoration-vulnerable painters – started a campaign in 1975 for the creation of a proper and fitting Turner Gallery to house Turner’s great bequest. Some here may remember what a very fashionable cause this had been – enjoying the support of Henry Moore, Hugh Casson, Kenneth Clark, and John Betjeman among many others. But art establishments can look after themselves and sometimes prove accomplished practitioners of the principle Divide and Misrule.

“A case in point might be seen in the curator T. J. Honeyman who, in the 1940s, supported critics of the National Gallery’s cleaning policies in a letter to the Times. Merely for observing that the then failure of the gallery’s trustees’ to respond to their critics might suggest a certain “cynical aloofness”, he was, he later disclosed, “severely ticked off” by the trustees’ Chairman, Lord Crawford. It was only many years later that he was, as he put it, “restored to favour in high places” when he made it clear in an article in the Studio that he was now entirely convinced that “our National treasures were in the keeping of qualified responsible people”.

“Far from recanting, Dr Whittingham has never flinched and, over the last 35 years, has mastered the art of writing the letter you might hope never to receive – and would only deserve to receive if you were, say, the head an Academy that had mislaid both Turner’s death mask and the substantial funds that he had provided for a generous award and medal in his name to practicing landscape painters – or, if you were the head of a gallery that had lost two Turner paintings to what a government minister described as “a particularly nasty gang of Serbs”, after announcing that the pictures would not be accompanied by a courier when loaned to a foreign museum.

“It gives me very great pleasure therefore to award the 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize to Selby Whittingham and to invite Dr Whittingham to say a few words about the current state of his campaigning – and I should add that we do so with a great sense of organisational indebtedness to this most widely-read recipient who, over the years, has generously supplied us with countless citations of restoration practices and abuses – Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary-General of the Watteau Society, the Secretary of The Real Turner Society, and the Secretary-General of Donor-Watch, Dr Selby Whittingham.

Selby Whittingham’s acceptance:

I would like to pay tribute to Art Watch, which, by challenging the restoration and attribution of works of art, additionally makes people scrutinise them more carefully. Sir David Piper, whom I knew at the National Portrait Gallery, welcomed the National Gallery controversy over picture cleaning ‘as furthering a continual extension of knowledge and of alertness’.

Piper realised that for the enjoyment of art many things are requisite, and that one needs also to consider the psychology and the conditions of viewing art. I once asked Sir Trenchard Cox what the attitude of the National Gallery was when he was a curator there in the early 1930s. He said that display was regarded as a very ‘deuxième’ matter.

Today museum curators regard everything as secondary to getting as many visitors as possible and their own researches published. Hence the vogue for museum blockbusters with their ponderous catalogues and the concomitant damage to exhibits and frustration for viewers.

Of course such shows go back at least to the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. But now museums hold them, resulting in the devaluation of their permanent collections and sometimes, through their eagerness to lend in order to borrow, the breaking faith with donors, something increasingly prevalent more generally, as seen in the attempt to overturn the founding aims of the Warburg Institute. Granting powers to lend were fought against by the grandfather of the present Lord Crawford, when a trustee of the National Gallery, as he knew just where that would end.

Sir Maurice Bowra, when charged with betraying his principles by accepting honours, said in justification that ‘they gave pain to academic enemies whose influence he had fought all his life; and, secondly, they recognised his campaigns …’ Through this prize I am very happy to be associated with Art Watch, whose leaders have, while many in the art world merely mutter their discontents in private, been bold enough to put their heads repeatedly above the parapet.

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Above, Fig. 1: “Les charmes de la vie”, (reversed) engraving by Pierre Aveline, after Antoine Watteau, the British Museum, London.
Above, Fig. 2: Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the Wallace Collection’s 1960 volume of illustrations of pictures and drawings to accompany the Catalogue of Pictures and Drawings.
Above, Fig. 3: Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the catalogue to the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.
Above, Fig. 4: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the 1947 Lund Humphries “The Gallery Books No. 14, Antoine Watteau, Les charmes de la Vie”.
Above, Fig. 5: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the catalogue to 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.
Above, Fig. 6: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the 1960 Wallace Collection catalogue
Above, Fig. 7: a detail of Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie” as reproduced in the catalogue to the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.
Above, Fig. 8: Watteau’s “Fete galante with a lute player and a bust of Bacchus” at Sansosouci, Potsdam, as reproduced in the 1947 Lund Humphries “The Gallery Books No. 14, Antoine Watteau, Les charmes de la Vie”.
Above, Fig. 9: Watteau’s “Fete galante with a lute player and a bust of Bacchus” at sanssouci, Potsdam and as reproduced in the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.
Above, Fig. 10: Watteau’s “Pour nous prouver que cette belle”, as shown in the Wallace’s 1960 catalogue volume of illustrations.
Above, Fig. 11: Watteau’s “Pour nous prouver que cette belle”, as shown in the catalogue to the 2011 “Watteau at the Wallace Collection” exhibition.
Above, Fig. 12: Dr Selby Whittingham’s acceptance of the 2011 ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize on June 8th at the Society of the Antiquaries of london, Burlington House.
Dr WHITTINGHAM’S LONG STRUGGLE to protect the surving integrity of Watteau’s work, makes him a most fitting recipient of a prize in honour of Frank Mason who (in ArtWatch UK Journal 14) deftly explicated the intrinsic vulnerability of paintings:
As artists, we know that a fine oil painting does not possess a hard, impermeable surface, but that it is comprised of layers of fine ground pigments suspended in elastic films of various oils and varnishes, which are superimposed, interwoven,and melting into each other in a way which not even the artist can accurately map. In spite of what conservators would have us believe, science cannot objectively scrutinise a painting and accurately enumerate all of its components in in any meaningful way; a plain chemical analysis is too crude a tool to measure the ineffable.”
Given the great vulnerability of paintings to restorers’ interventions, it is essential that proper means of evaluation and criticism be in place. Remedying this methodological lacuna is a core objective of ArtWatch’s campaigning. There is no mystery about how it might be achieved. Those who alter paintings should be required make comprehensive visual records of their interventions. Photographic records provide an indispensable working basis for making comparisons and, therefore, informed appraisals. In an age of digital photography this would neither difficult nor expensive.
Restorations expunge paintings’ previous conditions and create new ones. To evaluate change, like must be compared with like. In the absence of earlier states, photographic records provide the only means of making comparisons and comparisons are of the essence in appraisal. Because earlier, pre-restorations records are in black and white, we here publish greyscale versions of more recent colour photographs to facilitate direct comparisons. With Watteau’s “Les charmes de la vie”, after its 1980 restoration, we see a net loss of pictorial vivacity. Had varnishes and disfiguring repaints alone been removed, we would expect the opposite with the darks being darker and the lights lighter. The landscape behind the figures has been rendered flatter, shallower, less effective as a foil for the foreground action. The two sets of foliage that abut the composition’s flanking columns were darker where closest to the architecture (thereby throwing the building and its figures into relief) and lighter when advancing into the landscape and towards the sky. Such artistically distinct and purposive relationships are never accidental by-products discoloured varnishes.
In the above-mentioned Burlington Magazine accounts, photographs are used not to disclose the treatment but to illustrate difficulties encountered. A photograph of the cleaned but not-yet repainted picture sits above an x-ray photograph of the painting and no fewer than three details of the post-cleaning, pre-restoration state are shown in support of claims that the picture was badly constructed by the artist and much damaged by previous restorers. The curator, Ingamells, speaking of Watteau’s numerous changes notes that “all seem primarily concerned with the problem of relating the foreground figures to the architectural setting and to the landscape beyond.” As if in exculpation of his own debilitation of that crucial relationship, Lank, the restorer, begins his account with the observation “Watteau’s approach to the composition and execution of a painting presents the restorer with many problems.” But such problems only present themselves on physical/chemical/abrasive interventions. If an artist really is notoriously careless in his working method, we might expect a restorer’s conscientious reluctance to intervene at all. Lank, even as he evokes initial problems for restorers that would have been generated by Watteau’s working method, states that “as soon as the natural resin varnish originally applied has yellowed, cleaning becomes desirable”. But, of course, it does not. It only becomes desirable to those who cannot endure the signs of age in a painting; to those who would seek (vainly – and repeatedly) to return a painting to its fullest original chromatic luminosity every thirty years or so, no matter how vulnerable the work might be to interventions. Lank himself concedes that “unless this work is done with care, the paint lying on the top will be easily abraded over areas of impasto in the previous painting”. That being so, how urgent was it in 1980 for Lank to remove (and then redo) “discoloured varnishes, extensive repaint and toning”? Lank characterises his own actions as minimal when they consisted of such interventions as repainting (in “easily removable tempera washes”) a group of Watteau’s figures on the authority of an enlarged photograph of the reversed engraving by Aveline here shown in Fig. 1. On Lank’s own recognition, his actions were such as to “invite criticism when the painting is viewed in a harsh light.” It was vainly hoped that the subdued light of “the present hang in Hertford House” might prevent negative appraisals of the newly “restored” picture.
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