» ARCHIVE Artwatch

Artwatch UK

ARCHIVE

Articles Go to News & notices

[03/12/2024] Why Greece Does Not Need the Elgin Marbles

[16/10/2024] Joshua Charow unveils the remaining spaces that helped foster New York City’s epicentral art world reputation

[20/08/2024] “The Fate of the Parthenon Sculptures before and after Elgin”

[31/05/2024] Holbein’s Anne Boleyns and the “Discovery” Trope

[18/04/2024] Sex, Trigonometry and Anne Boleyn’s Recovered Likeness

[15/04/2023] ArtWatch at Thirty, Part II: The Artful Promotion of the World’s Worst Restorations

[08/12/2022] ArtWatch at Thirty, Part I: The Unstoppable, “Rapidly Filed Away” Sistine Chapel Restoration

[05/11/2021] The Demise of the National Gallery’s “made just like Rubens” Samson and Delilah with inexplicably cropped toes

[29/04/2021] With the Sistine Chapel ceiling we know, but who wrecked Gustav Klimt’s Helene and Sonja portraits?

[27/01/2021] Art-Trading, Connoisseurship and the Van Dyck Bonanza

[09/10/2020] A National Gallery restoration that repudiates earlier National Gallery restorations

[12/08/2020] The Disappeared Salvator Mundi’s endgame: Part I: Altered States and a Disappeared Book

[18/01/2020] Situating “La Bella Principessa’s” Eye

[26/11/2019] From Guido to Boccioni – The Liberation and Repudiation of Classicism

[28/10/2019] The non-appearing, disappeared, $450million, now officially not-Leonardo, Salvator Mundi

[30/06/2019] Notre-Dame: A Tale of Two Pathologies

[23/04/2019] Notre-Dame Cathedral: Another restoration, another fire – and more unanswered questions

[06/02/2019] The Leonardo Salvator Mundi Part I: Not “Pear-shaped” – Dead in the water

[12/11/2018] The pear-shaped Salvator Mundi

[30/10/2018] Whiter than right

[11/10/2018] Two developments in the no-show Louvre Abu Dhabi Leonardo Salvator Mundi saga

[18/09/2018] How the Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi became a Leonardo-from-nowhere

[10/04/2018] The Leonardo Salvator Mundi Saga: Three Developments

[01/01/2018] The $450m New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi Part II: It Restores, It Sells, therefore It Is

[14/11/2017] Problems with the New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi Part I: Provenance and Presentation

[26/05/2017] Fakes, Falsifications and Failures of Connoisseurship

[23/11/2016] Connoisseurship: Examinations, Debates and Snap Visual Responses

[16/02/2016] Chartres’ Flying Windows

[29/03/2015] The Conservation Laundering of Illicit Antiquities

[07/01/2015] Art’s Toxic Assets and a Crisis of Connoisseurship ~ Part II: Paper (sometimes photographic) Fakes and the Demise of the Educated Eye

[03/10/2014] Art’s Toxic Assets and a Crisis of Connoisseurship

[20/09/2014] “Art’s Toxic Assets” ~ Announcing a new ArtWatch UK website

[15/09/2014] The Samson and Delilah ink sketch – cutting Rubens to the quick

[06/06/2014] Sistina Progress and Tate Transgressions

[08/05/2014] Ghosts in the Lecture Room: Connoisseurship and the Making, Appraising, Replicating and Undoing of Art’s Images

[13/04/2014] How the Metropolitan Museum of Art gets hold of the world’s most precious and vulnerable treasures

[07/04/2014] How ‘good taste’ destroyed art

[24/03/2014] From Veronese to Turner, Celebrating Restoration-Wrecked Pictures

[13/03/2014] Mantegna’s Dead Christ : They Know Not What They Do

[24/02/2014] Good Science; Over-Reaching Science; Over-Promoted Science.

[07/02/2014] From the Horse’s Mouth: Seventy years of worthless “science” and reassurances on the safety of picture cleaning solvents

[04/02/2014] The Futurist Louvre and Leonardo’s Fate: nothing ventured, nothing lost

[20/01/2014] THE FATE OF SCULPTURES AT: 1) The Metropolitan Museum of Art; 2) The British Museum; 3) The National Museum of Kolkata; 4) The Academy of Art in Perugia; And, the Burrell Collection next?

[06/01/2014] NEW YEAR REPORT

[11/12/2013] The Twilight of a God: Virtual Reality in the Vatican

[25/11/2013] Bubbles burst.

[11/11/2013] A Poor Day of Remembrance for Burrell

[30/10/2013] Art and Photography

[14/10/2013] Barnes, Burrell and a Beck Memorial Lecture: “Philippe Mercier Watteau’s English Follower” ~ by Martin Eidelberg

[24/09/2013] Betraying Burrell – Shame on Glasgow

[06/09/2013] Protecting the Burrell Collection ~ A Blast against Risk-Deniers

[26/08/2013] Destroying archives

[30/07/2013] Farewell, then, Fine Old Sindie Arts Coverage

[11/07/2013] Review: Who Cleaned the Queen’s Windows and the Lady’s Pearls?

[01/07/2013] Review: Ways of Showing – or not

[21/06/2013] Review: The Unobservant Eye

[01/04/2013] The Sistine Chapel Restorations, Part III: Cutting Michelangelo Down to Size

[28/03/2013] The Sistine Chapel Restorations, Part II – CODA: The Remarkable Responses to Our Evidence of Injuries; and Thomas Hoving’s Rant of Denial

[01/02/2013] The Sistine Chapel Restorations, Part II: How to Take a Michelangelo Sibyl Apart, from Top to Toes

[21/01/2013] The Sistine Chapel Restorations: Part I ~ Setting the Scene, Packing Them In

[10/01/2013] ArtWatch Stock-taking and the Sistine Chapel Conservation Debacle

[17/12/2012] “Pick Up A Pencil”

[01/10/2012] Coming to Life: Frankenweenie – A Black and White Michelangelo for Our Times

[01/09/2012] The Battle of Borja: Cecilia Giménez, Restoration Monkeys, Paediatricians, Titian and Great Women Conservators

[30/08/2012] The “World’s worst restoration” and the Death of Authenticity

[02/08/2012] Reviews: Taking Renoir, Sterling and Francine Clark to the Cleaners

[18/07/2012] L. O. L. It’s Peeping Tom Time at the National Gallery!

[11/07/2012] Review: Stone-washed Renoirs and the Shock of the Undone

[12/06/2012] Could the Louvre’s “Virgin and St. Anne” provide the proof that the (London) National Gallery’s “Virgin of the Rocks” is not by Leonardo da Vinci?

[01/06/2012] Review: Renoir at the Frick – The Curatorial and Conservational Photographic Blind Spots

[15/05/2012] Review: Deadly Docents, Dirty Varnish and a Big Educational Push at the Frick

[28/04/2012] Rocking the Louvre: the Bergeon Langle Disclosures on a Leonardo da Vinci restoration

[08/04/2012] Another Restored Leonardo, Another Sponsored Celebration – Ferragamo at the Louvre…

[23/03/2012] Black is a Colour

[14/03/2012] The Perpetual Restoration of Leonardo’s Last Supper, Part 2: A traumatic production of “a different Leonardo”

[28/02/2012] Shedding archival records at the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum

[07/02/2012] The Perpetual Restoration of Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ – Part 1: The Law of Diminishing Returns

[19/01/2012] What Price a Smile? The Louvre Leonardo Mouths that are Now at Risk

[04/01/2012] The Louvre Leonardo Restoration Committee Resignations

[24/12/2011] Something Not Quite Right About Leonardo’s Mouth ~ The Rise and Rise of Cosmetically Altered Art

[06/12/2011] Two “As Good as New”, Colour Contrasting Velazquezs ~ Thanks to the Fundación Iberdrola

[24/11/2011] The National Gallery’s £1.5 billion Leonardo Restoration

[29/10/2011] Makeovers, Sleepovers and Martyrs ~ Is St Paul’s Cathedral fit for purpose?

[12/10/2011] Applying recreated authenticity to historic buildings in the name of their conservation

[05/10/2011] Sir’s not always right

[21/09/2011] A conservation appeal too far: Sophie Dahl’s public relations disaster

[07/09/2011] The Controversial Treatments of the Wallace Collection Watteaus

[17/08/2011] From Annigoni to Banksy: restorers’ crimes against art and graffitist’s crimes against architecture

[11/08/2011] Dicing with Art and Earning Approval

[24/07/2011] Lucian Freud’s blast against picture restorers, and a fellow painter’s note of appreciation

[20/07/2011] Attacked Poussins at the National Gallery

[17/07/2011] Leonardo, Poussin, Turner: Three Developments in London and Krakow

[09/07/2011] Questions and Grey Answers on the Tate Gallery’s recovered Turners

[03/07/2011] Brighter than Right, Part 2: Technical Problems of Protection, Health and Safety at St Paul’s Cathedral

[31/05/2011] Brighter than Right, Part 1: A Modernist Makeover at St Paul’s Cathedral

[20/04/2011] John Singer Sargent and how something ‘really filthy’ comes off in the conservation studio, time and time again

[11/04/2011] Vandalism and restoration ethics: The case of the Dutch “Thinker”

[06/04/2011] Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic – A suitable Case for Treatment?

[01/04/2011] Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 2: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling

[26/03/2011] Misreading Visual Evidence ~ No 1: David Hockney, an art historian and an x-ray photograph

[17/03/2011] “With our Art Laser you can clean any work of art without damaging it” ~ Why professional art conservation is not always a good thing for works of art

[09/03/2011] Why is the Metropolitan Museum of Art afraid of public disclosures on its picture restorers’ cleaning materials?

[25/02/2011] Discovered Predictions: Secrecy and Unaccountability at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

[18/02/2011] An ominous silence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

[08/02/2011] The European Commission’s way of moving works of art around

[02/02/2011] Why is the European Commission instructing museums to incur more risks by lending more art?

[27/01/2011] How the National Gallery belatedly vindicated the restoration criticisms of Sir Ernst Gombrich

[23/01/2011] In Memoriam: Thomas Molnar (1921-2010)

[20/01/2011] Shifting contours – and other faults with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photographs

[16/01/2011] The museum world’s increasing acceptance of virtual-reality “resurrections”

[10/01/2011] The National Gallery, London:The World-Leader in museums’ online provision of photographic reproductions of paintings

[08/01/2011] An Unreported Tragedy, Picasso’s Warning, a Dog That Didn’t Bark, Fried Peaches and Coloured Cleaning Swabs: The Sheldon Kecks’ Unexamined Restoration of ‘The Luncheon of the Boating Party’ – The Phillips Collection’s Fabled Renoir

[29/12/2010] Response to Attack

[29/12/2010] A spectacular restoration own-goal: undoing, re-doing and (on the quiet) re-re-doing a Veronese masterpiece at the Louvre Museum

[20/12/2010] Romanian Heritage: the Struggle to Protect the “Protected”

[18/12/2010] Waste Much, Want Not: the feather-bedded public-sector avant gardists

[13/12/2010] An Appeal from Poland

[26/11/2010] The New Relativisms and the Death of “Authenticity”

News & Notices Go to Articles

[16/12/2021] Further Thoughts II: The less and less Leonardo ex-Cook collection Salvator Mundi

[25/11/2021] PROLOGUE TO FURTHER THOUGHTS II

[28/09/2021] Review: Peter Freeth RA – 40 Years of Aquatints

[12/05/2021] An Appliance of Science in Art Historical Studies

[03/08/2020] Further thoughts about the ex-Cook Collection Salvator Mundi*

[05/02/2020] The Saviour and a Stealth-Attribution

[09/12/2019] Hollow Gods and Dangerous Beauty

[15/11/2019] Books on No-Hope Art Attributions

[20/09/2019] Forthcoming events: The Ben Lewis Salvator Mundi Lecture and the new ArtWatch UK Journal

[04/07/2019] SALVATOR GRUMPI – UPDATED

[26/04/2019] HMS Caroline: The Ship’s the thing

[07/03/2019] Exhibition: Sargy Mann, Late Paintings

[22/02/2019] The Louvre Museum’s bizarre charge of “fake information” on the $450 million Salvator Mundi

[17/11/2018] Two troubled Leonardos

[06/11/2018] Lest we forget

[31/10/2018] Hyping museum-restoration wrecks

[14/10/2018] Christie’s recent sale of a stolen painting

[09/08/2018] “Leonardo scholar challenges attribution of $450m painting”

[16/05/2018] In Memoriam: Tom Wolfe (1930 – 2018)

[25/04/2018] Rodin and ancient Greek art – a personal view of a magnificent show

[02/04/2018] In Celebration: Paul Anthony Harford, Draughtsman

[29/03/2018] Startling disclosures on the re-re-restored Leonardo Salvator Mundi

[11/03/2018] IN THEIR OWN WORDS: No. 3 [11 March 2018] – The Reception of the First Version of the Leonardo Salvator Mundi

[06/03/2018] IN THEIR OWN WORDS: No. 2 – The Curse of (revenue-generating, thought-precluding) Audio-guides

[05/03/2018] IN THEIR OWN WORDS: No. 1 – Civilisations and Burrell Loans

[27/02/2018] Nouveau riche? Welcome to the Club!

[20/02/2018] A day in the life of the new Louvre Abu Dhabi Annexe’s pricey new Leonardo Salvator Mundi

[03/11/2017] Degas and the Problem of Finish

[23/10/2017] Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, and an “unusual lapse”

[17/10/2017] A memorial lecture, two journals and an assault on scholarship

[03/10/2017] The (not so-new) latest New Leonardo Discovery

[20/09/2017] Mondrian, Schmondrian – another lapse of museum expertise

[25/06/2017] BOOK REVIEW – “For Our Freedom and Yours”

[06/06/2017] BOOK REVIEW – A Restoration Palindrome

[15/12/2016] Leonardo and the Growing Sleeper Crisis

[29/11/2016] The Louvre’s Leonardo Restorations: The Tide Turns

[06/11/2016] Bendor Grosvenor’s Eye, a new Raphael, and further barbarism at the Louvre

[23/10/2016] Barbarism at the Louvre

[20/10/2016] The Art World’s Toxic Assets – Part III: Failures of Scrutiny

[31/08/2016] The 2016 James Beck Memorial Lecture

[30/08/2016] SAVE THE HITCHCOCK ODEON!

[28/07/2016] Trouble at Yale University Press London

[21/07/2016] Fake or Fortune: Hypotheses, Claims and Immutable Facts

[01/07/2016] A restorer’s aim – The fine line between retouching and forgery

[24/05/2016] Problems with “La Bella Principessa” – Part III: Dr. Pisarek responds to Prof. Kemp

[03/05/2016] Problems with “La Bella Principessa” – Part II: Authentication Crisis

[05/04/2016] Restoration criticism should be banned: official

[02/04/2016] Bring on the Clowns (- or, “Italy Loses It”)

[30/03/2016] ArtWatch and the Death of the Independent

[18/03/2016] Opera, Authenticity and Madness

[09/03/2016] How Illissos (and Mr MacGregor) flew close to the Sun

[02/03/2016] Iconoclasts, Replicators and Nostalgists

[25/02/2016] Problems with “La Bella Principessa”~ Part I: The Look

[16/02/2016] Sandle at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road

[10/01/2016] Connoisseurship in Action and in Peril

[27/10/2015] The Sixth James Beck Memorial Lecture

[23/10/2015] Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship

[06/10/2015] Brian Sewell – Still Stinging in Death

[16/09/2015] Heritage Industry Abuses

[09/08/2015] Fake or Fortune II

[25/07/2015] THE ELEPHANT IN KLIMT’S ROOM

[02/07/2015] A Broadside at Bankside

[08/06/2015] Does the art trade turn a blind eye to church thefts?

[05/06/2015] Now let’s murder Klimt

[31/05/2015] Whatever happened to “Do not touch”?

[08/05/2015] And the World’s Worst Restoration is…

[13/04/2015] Bags and Abuses of National Trust – Florence Hallett reports:

[01/03/2015] The Spring 2015 ArtWatch UK Journal

[18/02/2015] Heritage at Risk – from the Heritage Lottery Fund

[24/01/2015] A bodge too far: “Conservation’s” catalogue of blunders

[22/01/2015] The Consequences of “Cleaning” Pictures

[12/01/2015] Je suis CHARLIE

[15/12/2014] Chartres Cathedral Make-Work Scheme

[20/11/2014] A New Threat to the Warburg Institute

[11/11/2014] Michelangelo’s disintegrating frescoes

[24/10/2014] Jonathan Jones over-heats, again

[10/08/2014] The 2014 James Beck Memorial Lecture