Artwatch UK
NEWS & NOTICES [ News Desk: news.artwatchuk@gmail.com ]
  • An examination of certain pre-emptive scholarly/art market establishment strikes against a pending book that rejects the Rubens ascription of the National Gallery’s contested Samson and Delilah. [read more]
  • class="AWPtag1g1" style="margin-bottom:10px;">In Part I* of III, Michael Daley introduces the [$45-50m.] purchase of a panel attributed to the father of the Siennese school of painting (*As published in the November/December 2008 issue of the Jackdaw). [read more]
  • Jacques Franck here concludes his three-part demolition of the once attributed but now deposed, $450m New York/Russian/Saudi Leonardo da Vinci Salvator Mundi picture’s supposed stylistic, artistic and technical credentials. [read more]
  • Jacques Franck, painter/draughtsman and art historian specialist in Leonardo da Vinci’s evolved painting techniques, explores the conceptual limitations and the resulting adverse consequences (i. e. damaging restorations and mis-attributed works) of art historical studies and scientific essays that are today being made without duly informed consideration of actual historical artistic practices. [read more]
  • A remarkable show of haunting monochromatic prints is running at the Art Space Gallery (until 8 October). As can be seen in a short film made by the gallery’s director, Michael Richardson, Peter Freeth, who works without technical assistance or commercial collaboration, has devised a novel form of printing in which all parts of the plate are bitten simultaneously in the acid bath. [read more]
  • A slim but eloquent and persuasive study of the assorted depictions of rock in Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne examines the pictorial means of the most perplexing figural invention in the artist’s oeuvre. [read more]
  • The Leonardo Salvator Mundi controversy turns on which artist’s hand is – or which artists’ hands are - present on the painting. Many scholars agree that more than one hand is present. Here, it is demonstrated that while two hands are present, neither belongs to Leonardo. [M.D.] [read more]
  • artin Kemp and a dozen (largely mute) art historians bet the professional farm on a “from-nowhere” Salvator Mundi being an autograph Leonardo painting. On fetching $450m in 2017 it disappeared. No-one will say where it is. We now hear from a previously reliable source that it never left New York. [read more]
  • With museum and gallery visits becoming ever-more crowded noisy expensive and denuded of works loaned, in needless restorations, or stored as directors play developers as well as impresarios, the appeal of small venues grows. Bury Street in St James’s is buzzing with two (free) exhibitions, one light on drawings, one rich. [read more]
  • The latest addition to the fast-growing but least-estimable art book publishing genre – The Book of Art Attribution Advocacy - has finally arrived. It comes eight years late and on the second anniversary of Christie’s, New York, 15 November 2017 sale of the formerly attributed-Leonardo, Salvator Mundi picture - which disappeared the following day. [read more]
  • ArtWatch UK Notices: On October 1st, AWUK holds the tenth Annual James Beck Lecture (Speaker: Ben Lewis, author of The Last Leonardo) in London and publishes its thirty-second members’ Journal “From Sistina to Salvator” [read more]
  • The July/August issue of the Art Newspaper carries three fascinating items on the standing of the disappeared Salvator Mundi painting which may or may not be included in the forthcoming Leonardo exhibition at the Louvre. [read more]
  • After the Cutty Sark debacle, some good cheer. Another ship in another place has been turned into museum without being burnt to a frazzle, hoist out of water and travestied by being unceremoniously dropped into a modish glass and steel architectural hooped skirt (see below). [read more]
  • A most remarkable exhibition is running until March 10th at the Royal Drawing School (19–22 Charlotte Road, London EC2A 3SG). [read more]
  • The Louvre Museum in Paris has attacked one of its own named Leonardo restoration consultants - Jacques Franck - with professional disparagement and an allegation of having conveyed “fake information”. [read more]
  • Two supposed Leonardos are now in difficulties. The Salvator Mundi, sold for half a billion dollars just over a year ago, hasn’t been seen since. In France, the Saint Sebastian drawing saved for the nation was not bought and has now been put back on the international market. [read more]
  • Frances Moreton, Director of the War Memorials Trust, writes: "Our war memorials remind us not just of those who lost their lives but the consequences of conflict and the importance of preserving these memorials to ensure that future generations learn from the experiences and sacrifices of those we remember." [read more]
  • Today museums seem as likely as not to be closed for “re-development”. Even small "time-capsule" artists or collectors home/museums, like Leighton’s, are fair game. Closures present loan opportunities and the National Gallery has snaffled some Courtauld Gallery Impressionist plums. [read more]
  • In our 11 October post (“Two developments in the no-show Louvre Abu Dhabi Leonardo Salvator Mundi saga”) we suggested that new-style confidential legal conflict-resolution procedures might favour the big guys over the little guys – who “necessarily will forfeit their strongest card: the capacity to raise institutionally embarrassing press coverage”. [read more]
  • Dalya Alberge reports in the Guardian that a Leonardo scholar, Matthew Landrus, believes most of the upgraded Salvator Mundi was painted by a Leonardo assistant, Bernardino Luini. [read more]
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Buyer Beware

In Part II* of III, Michael Daley introduces the $45-50mn purchase of a panel attributed to the Father of the Sienese school of painting (*As published in the January/February 2009 issue of the The Jackdaw.)

Buy in haste, repent at leisure? The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s purchase in 2004 of the so-called Stoclet Duccio met near-universal acclaim in New York and was hyperbolically hailed by the museum itself as “a single supreme masterpiece of Western painting” and no less than “a turning point in art history”. The work is currently on show at the National Gallery in the “Siena – The Rise of Painting 1300-1350” exhibition. There, it is described as “the exquisite, small half-length Virgin and Child often referred to as the Stoclet Madonna now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.”

Coming next in Part III: “TOXIC ATTRIBUTIONS?”

March 25, 2025 | Categories: blog | Leave A Comment »

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