Muraclay » Museums

Nights at the museum: the bands that have gigged in galleries

Nosheen Iqbal — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:18:50 +0000

Animal Collective's forthcoming installation at the Guggenheim comes from a proud tradition of pop mash-ups with the art world

It's better than copying Jackson Pollock and more ambitious than pretending to be full-time robots. The only surprising thing about Animal Collective taking over New York's Guggenheim museum is that nobody thought of it sooner. But the Brooklyn experimental pop crew are collaborating with video artist Danny Perez on a site-specific installation for the museum's 50th anniversary.

The idea is to "transform the rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment". From the sounds of it, the piece – Transverse Temporal Gyrus – could beef up the band's future live shows considerably. Ticket-holders are promised video projections and visual abstractions; I'd count on at least a couple of ethereal black-and-white film shorts and Cy Twombly-ish swiggles projected on the walls. The band won't be performing in the space, but the three-hour show will include recorded music composed for the event.

The Guggenheim's curators have pulled off a neat trick. Of all the Brooklyn-based bands experimenting with art rock, this lot are the best choice to fill the space. Just imagine their bass bouncing through Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic space, their blissed-out rave-pop sliding down the spiral walls.

Animal Collective are not the first to try the art-pop mash-up, though. Plenty of bands have played live shows in galleries or museums. Blur's comeback started with a gig at the railway museum in Colchester. Pet Shop Boys have also played in several modern art institutions. And seeing the Strokes perform among 50ft dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in 2006 is probably one of the most surreal gigs I've been to.

However, artistic intervention in a public institution, mixing musicianship with modern art, is a little less common. There's the Velvet Underground getting it on with Andy Warhol, and Kevin Shields curating and soundtracking an exhibition of Patti Smith's polaroids. Similarly, Massive Attack's 3D and UnitedVisualArtists worked on Volume at the V&A, another site-specific piece. The former built the sounds, synchronised to fit a luminous installation of columns in the foyer of the building in 2005. The audio-visual sculpture could only be triggered by visitors moving inside and around the piece, like a Dan Flavin show crossed with Kraftwerk.

Last year, David Byrne of Talking Heads brought his museum piece, Playing the Building, to London's Roundhouse. Originally staged in Stockholm's Färgfabriken gallery, Byrne's interactive installation was a sublime bit of mechanical doodling. Visitors were invited to the show to play an organ connected by trailing tubes and wiring to the walls, girders and beams of the building. Bizarre, but properly seductive. As I'm sure Animal Collective will be.

Nosheen Iqbal

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Michelangelo’s drawings at the Courtauld gallery are intimate encounter with an artist in love

Jonathan Jones — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:31:30 +0000

In one room, this sensational exhibition shows the greatest drawings that survive from Michelangelo's hand

The Courtauld gallery, that sombre, academic institution, dares to go where Irving Stone never went in his bestselling novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. It refutes, with all the authority at its command, centuries of bowdlerisation that have left the nude saints in Michelangelo's painting The Last Judgment still – in 2010 – emasculated by prudish drapes. It gives us the unmade movie Michelangelo in Love, pouring out his soul in art and verse to a handsome youth whose beauty crystallised all the longings inherent in Michelangelo's art ever since he carved his teenage masterpiece The Battle of the Centaurs, with its vision of life as a tumult of wrestling male bodies.

This is a sensational exhibition in more ways than one. It is the most intimate encounter with Michelangelo yet staged by a British gallery but, if you come for the story, you will stay for the art, for here in one room are the greatest drawings that survive from his hand. Most of Michelangelo's surviving sketches are just that, sketches for the sculptures, paintings and buildings that awe visitors to Italy: only a handful of his drawings were intended to be enjoyed as works of art in their own right, and he made most of these as love gifts for Tommaso de' Cavalieri. They are brought together here to release you soaring among winged, ascending and falling beings in the strange and wonderful atmosphere of Michelangelo's "chaste desire", as he described his passion for Tommaso.

Michelangelo's devotion is right there to see, in an amazingly slavish note he scribbled on a drawing of the hubristic Phaeton falling from the sky after he tried to drive the sun god's chariot: "Master Tommaso, if this sketch does not please you, say so …" It must truly have been an overpowering love to reduce Michelangelo, who refused to take orders from popes, to such servility. And what a drawing it is: horses sculpted in delicate black chalk fall in a nightmarish vortex towards twisting mourners whose grief is literally rooting them to the spot. Beside it his finished drawing of the same tragedy, presumably completed after listening to Tommaso's comments, portrays Jupiter high in the heavens hurling a thunderbolt from the back of an eagle. Images of eagles keep recurring, as if in a sex dream scripted by Freud. Michelangelo's most explicit present for Tommaso portrays the classical myth of Ganymede, the beautiful boy carried away by lustful Jupiter who has taken the form of an eagle to achieve his rapture; imagine being young Cavalieri and getting this gift from your famous, older admirer.

Love was in the air in Renaissance Italy, and Michelangelo's drawings compete with the heterosexual hedonism of Titian's paintings: his wonderful red chalk Bacchanal responds to Titian's Children's Bacchanal. But Michelangelo's drawings for Cavalieri are more personal and confessional than any other Renaissance renderings of saucy Roman myth, and what you are left with, as you contemplate the Courtauld's magnificent possession The Dream, which sums up all existence as a striving of bodies and a yearning of souls, is an immense love for this most courageous and human of artists.

Jonathan Jones's book about Michelangelo is published by Simon and Schuster in April.

Jonathan Jones

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Michelangelo’s dreams of male muse go on show at Courtauld

Mark Brown — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:26:15 +0000

London gallery displays finest of Renaissance artist's drawings for his friends, with loans from the Vatican and the Queen

Some of the most magnificent drawings ever executed – physical manifestations of Michelangelo's love and infatuation for a handsome and intelligent teenage boy – will on Thursday go on display as a group for the first time.

The groundbreaking show at the Courtauld gallery in London, with loans from the Vatican and the Queen, is essentially a joyously gay love story.

The drawings were done by Michelangelo when he was about 57. In the winter of 1532 the artist met Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a Roman nobleman celebrated for his dreamboat good looks, his superior intellect and his gracious manners, and fell head over heels in love with him.

Stephanie Buck, the show's curator, said it was, at heart, an extraordinary romance. "These drawings were meant to be looked at and studied, people looked at them with magnifying glasses and mirrors for hours and hours. With these drawings you can't reach higher."

The exhibition is built around The Dream of Human Life (Il Sogno, or The Dream) which was bequeathed to the Courtauld in 1978 by one of the century's most important collectors, Count Antoine Seilern. It is considered one of the finest of all Renaissance drawings. In it Michelangelo focuses on the beauty of the body, depicting a nude young man being roused from sleep, and human vices, by a winged spirit.

Buck is in no doubt The Dream is one of Michelangelo's "presentation drawings" made for Cavalieri in 1533. Others on display include The Punishment of Tityus, The Fall of Phaeton, The Bacchanal of Children, and The Rape of Ganymede. They would have been seen by the pope and the Medicis and on one level were teaching Cavalieri how to draw, and perhaps offering moral guidance. But they were also expressions of the artist's consuming love for the boy.

Michelangelo as an artist was at the height of his powers and fame, and almost deified. The quality is indisputable. In 1568 his biographer, Giorgio Vasari, called the works "drawings the like of which have never been seen".

Buck said it was unclear how old Cavalieri was when Michelangelo fell for him. The Courtauld research put him at between 16 and 17, she said.

The exhibition also shows that it was more than just physical infatuation. Michelangelo clearly held Cavalieri's intellect in high regard. Alongside The Fall of Phaeton is an earlier and different version on which the artist writes, saying that if the sketch does not please Cavalieri he should say so.

"The point is," said Buck, "that Cavalieri, although he was so young, must have played quite a role in the making of it because he was able to criticise it and send it back."

The Vatican has also lent for the exhibition Michelangelo's original poems, which he composed in the early stages of the friendship. Again there is little doubt as to how he felt. One reads:

"You know that I know, my lord, that you know that

I come here to enjoy you nearer at hand, and you

know that I know that you know who I really am: why

then this hesitation to greet each other, even now?

If the hope that you give me is true, if the great desire

that has been granted me is true, let the wall raised

up between these two be broken down …"

The Courtauld show is already attracting considerable academic interest, and it represents the first time that The Dream has been exhibited alongside the other presentation drawings. The last time they were together (without The Dream) was in 1988 for exhibitions in Paris and Washington.

The debate about Michelangelo and his sexuality continues. He never made any secret of his love of male beauty – just look at David – but he always maintained it was a celibate love, a platonic love. That goes, too, with Cavalieri.

Buck said: "The whole idea, which he repeats in his letters and poems, is that he doesn't want to chase Cavalieri off. He speaks of his physical desire but it is a chaste love and he is not approaching him in a manner that would make it difficult for Cavalieri."

Having said that, Buck believes Michelangelo was certainly gay and that he would have slept with men. But Cavalieri was from such a high-ranking family in papal Rome that the two of them going to bed was never going to happen. Yet Cavalieri, who later married and had children, was clearly honoured to be held so highly in the affections of Michelangelo; they stayed close friends. He was with Michelangelo at his deathbed and was later instrumental in ensuring unfinished projects were completed.

Of course the one question that wants to be answered is what did the boy look like, how handsome was he? "We know there was a portrait of Cavalieri but it is lost," said Buck. "Unfortunately."

Mark Brown

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National Portrait Gallery reveals all in online archive

Mark Brown — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:47:04 +0000

From cleaver-wielding suffragettes to a gun-toting delusional Edwardian, the National Portrait Gallery has played host to more than portraiture in its 150-year history

They are some of the forgotten stories from the last 150 years of the National Portrait Gallery: an Edwardian murder and suicide, a cleaver-wielding suffragette and a big rat problem.

The gallery announced today the posting online of an archive catalogue along with reports, letters and photographs which give a fascinating insight into some of the less well-known chapters in its history.

It comes after two years of cataloguing previously unseen material, a project that the gallery's archivist and records manager, Charlotte Brunskill, said they were about a third of the way through: "When I first started there was a 150-year backlog of stuff that hadn't been looked at."

One of the most dramatic stories in the gallery's history was a murder and suicide in the east wing in 1909. The newspapers were full of it, the Daily Express reporting on the well-dressed man, a 70-year-old from Hove "wearing a silk hat and a fur coat", who visited the gallery with his 58-year-old wife.

When they got to Room 27 the man pulled out a revolver and shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. Two young women on a day out fled in terror. It later turned out the man was "delusional with a persecution complex" believing he was being pursued by someone not identified.

An internal report on the incident includes the detail: "Three attendants remained after the gallery was closed to clear up in Room XXVII. Men were sent from HM Office of Works to remove by scraping such stains as remained in the floors after they had been washed over by the Gallery charwomen."

Many documents relate to an incident involving a suffragette in 1914. A woman who later gave her name as Anne Hunt, a "well-known militant" as it turned out, visited the gallery with a meat cleaver hidden in the folds of her dress. When she got to a Millais portrait of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle – "I think they particularly didn't like him," said Brunskill – she smashed through the glass and ripped his face, shouting that it was "a protest against the re-arrest of Mrs Pankhurst."

A report said an attendant had seen the woman a few days earlier and taken her to be American "from the closeness with which she then examined the pictures". When she turned up again on the Friday he thought he must be wrong as "no American would have paid the 6d entrance fee twice over". She looked suspicious enough for him to follow and grapple with her when she attacked the Millais, possibly preventing further damage.

The gallery had no paintings during the second world war – they went secretly to Mentmore, a mansion in Buckinghamshire – but did have rats. They were everywhere, it seems, and their extermination was formalised in rat reports saying where they were killed and trapped, along with "killers' remarks". A typical entry might have read: "1 Trapped in library" - "drowned by Pitkin." Or another in the library that was "speared by Pittock with poker after it had escaped, with great excitement."

The gallery also said it had received a grant to catalogue the papers of the first director, Sir George Scharf, covering years when the gallery had no permanent home. It was originally in a private house in Great George Street, then South Kensington and briefly in Bethnal Green before moving in to its present home in 1896.

Some of the most interesting material are Scharf's pocket books packed full of drawings, including some from his visit to Blenheim palace and one of an infant Winston Churchill.

Brunskill said a lot of Scharf's diaries covered his obsessions with the weather and his health but he was also a committed campaigner against the "national disgrace" of the gallery not having a permanent home. Sadly he died shortly before the gallery moved to its home in St Martin's Place, near Trafalgar Square.

The archive also touches on the 1960s and the groundbreaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968 which the gallery clearly wanted as a happening, swinging event. It was more like a concept album and there was music and incense and it was all a bit too much for a Mr Steer from Barnes who wrote a letter of complaint.

The gallery's then new young director, Roy Strong, wrote back defending the show, but adding: "You may like to know that both the next two exhibitions will have no music or smell."

Mark Brown

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Penises and caustic soda: the case of the Cambridge antiquities

Charlotte Higgins — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:47:02 +0000

The antiquities gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge reopens to the public on Saturday – with some fascinating stories

In the Greek and Roman gallery in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge –
one of the most important collections of antiquities in the country,
which reopens to the public on Saturday after a £950,000 makeover –
there is one Greek pot the eye might easily flit past.

Unless, that is, you happen to take more than a cursory view at the
central figure's genital area. In the bowl of this 5th-century Attic
kylix (drinking cup), is the figure of a man, naked but for a cloak,
and holding a lyre and a staff. But something rather peculiar seems to
have happened: there's a noticeably smudged, discoloured patch around
the groin area.

According to conservator Christina Rozeik, who has been working with
the objects in the refurbished gallery, that penis will be "the
subject of much detective work over the next year".

The pot was once owned by the collectors Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, whose lives spanned the 1860s to 1930s. The pair met at art
school in London in the 1880s, and they later became friends and
supporters of Oscar Wilde.

They amassed a fine collection of antiquities that was later
bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam. According to the museum's keeper of
antiquities, Lucilla Burn, the two "were a pair of aesthetes; and they
collected on aesthetic grounds".

The flesh-coloured blotch is actually the trace of a rescue attempt on
the pot by one of the couple. "Genitals restored by Ricketts," states
the original Fitzwilliam catalogue entry baldly. A century on, the
restored patch has discoloured and faded, while the original surface
of the pot, dating from about 480BC, has survived impeccably.
According to Rozeik, who counts the restoration as "quite skilful",
the problem is that "we don't know what's underneath". Ricketts – a
fine painter as well as a set designer and typographer of note – had
motives for drawing in the figure's genitals that can only be
inferred.

Nor is it a question of simply removing Ricketts' work and having a
look at what lies beneath. "Part of the dilemma is that Ricketts is a
significant artist," she said. "We would have to think very hard
before removing his work."

The question of the blotchy genitals is a very modern conservation
dilemma. Should Rickett's restoration be regarded as a valid part of
the history of the object and left, or should it be removed? As Rozeik
asks, "Is there any such thing as authenticity? What's the 'real'
object?"

The Ricketts-Shannon collection in the Fitzwilliam includes about 100
objects. They are mostly Attic vases, though the couple did also own a
very sultry head of Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.
He is instantly recognisable, according to Mary Beard, professor of
classics at Cambridge University, "because he's got that lovely
pouting lip". Burn added: "And then there's the downwards gaze and
tilted head – very Princess Diana."

Not all the pieces are as controversial as the smudged-penis kalyx;
but in this new display of the Fitzwilliam's antiquities the curators
are coming clean about past gaffes made by the institution. It is what
Beard calls "the new transparency".

For instance, a miniature bronze statuette of a Roman priest (known as
the "Marlay Genius") isn't much to look at now. But in the mid-20th
century it was one of the favourite objects of the then keeper of
antiquities, Winifred Lamb.

The statuette was packed away with other precious items during the war
and hidden in Shropshire. But when it came out of storage in 1947, it
was found to be suffering from "bronze disease" – a condition arising
from damp that caused green pustules to burst out on the sculpture's
surface.

The condition could have completely destroyed the object, so advice
was sought from Cambridge's chemistry department. Various solutions
were proposed, and Lamb wrote to the director of the museum: "I'd
rather see him yellow, purple, any colour, like a Woolworth ornament
than have him in a galloping consumption."

The up-to-the-minute cure for the condition – which would be regarded
as rather extreme these days – was to dunk the figure into fearsome
solution including caustic soda for 50 hours. The little priest came
out cured – but also minus much of the exquisite surface detail that
had made him such a favourite of Lamb's.

According to Beard: "The story of the object goes right up to now. It
didn't just miraculously finish at the end of the Roman empire. In the
case of the Marlay Genius, it was like treating a cancer patient. Now,
he's lucky to be alive – if pockmarked."

Charlotte Higgins

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Titian takes you to a realm beyond carnality. Stanley Spencer doesn’t

Germaine Greer — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:51:16 +0000

The boast of the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge that it houses "collections of international importance, including work of European, American and Asian schools, ranging from the 13th century to the present day" is no more than the truth. Its Constables, Titians, Monets, Poussins are as good as the best in any museum anywhere in the world. I can still remember seeing for the first time there a landscape by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whom I knew only as a painter of bloated, sentimental female figures. Le Grand Vent depicts nothing more remarkable than a piece of grassy wasteground, but Renoir's swift, allusive brushstrokes convey the density and texture of every hummock, as well as the glittering energy of the passing gust of wind.

I was astonished that Renoir had used black to render the boisterousness of the white clouds. If he could so capture a landscape and a moment, why did he ever do anything else? After more than 40 years I still can't get over that picture. The unique character of the Fitzwilliam means you can quickly compare Renoir's handling of the sky with Constable's, and come just that bit closer to understanding what all truly great paintings have in common.

The museum has just hung a show of paintings by John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer from its collection, and I find myself wishing they hadn't. For the first time, the museum seems to me provincial rather than perfect. Many of the works are unapologetically minor; but even the ones that are not are less significant than they should be, if they are to dwell on the same plane as the rest of the collection. Sargent was grotesquely successful in his own time, as portrait painters tend to be once they have established a popular formula – but he is not a painter we need to see much of now. He may have fancied himself as a great landscape painter seduced from his true bent by filthy lucre. If he did, the examples shown here prove he was wrong.

When you look at a reclining nude painted by Titian – the Fitzwilliam's Venus and Cupid with a Lute-Player, say – you are being admitted to a realm beyond carnality. The luminous figure is alive but poised and contained, not simply dumped amid dirty linen. Titian's model, if there was one, was probably a courtesan, probably under age, and no better than she should be, but all such concerns are irrelevant.

Sickert's nudes are very different. The exhibition catalogue asks whether the figure in Mornington Crescent Nude 1907 is model, prostitute or corpse. She might well be all three. Her body appears saponified, her breasts and belly engorged as if with the gases of decomposition. We look down on her from a cool distance, as if we were undertakers come to remove her to the morgue. A succession of four Sickert exhibitions in London should have been enough to convince us that Sickert is simply not good enough for the Fitzwilliam.

Alhough painted nearly 30 years later, and very different in execution, Stanley Spencer's self-portrait with his second wife Patricia Preece could be a companion piece to the Mornington Crescent Nude. Preece's flesh has undergone slippage, and her face is set in a staring death mask; only the painter is alive. By the time these pictures were painted, Preece had returned to her lover, the painter Dorothy Hepworth, whose pictures she used to sign; she was then in the process of stripping Spencer of everything he owned.

By way of justifying the yoking together of these three artists, rather too much is made of the slender connections between them – which boils down to little more than that they occasionally treated similar themes. Sargent had no more acrimonious critic than Sickert, and Spencer learned nothing from either of them.

Of the women who were Sickert's faithful allies, only Thérèse Lessore makes the grade. The portrait of Sickert in coloured chalks and watercolour that Lessore made in 1919, eight years before she became the painter's third wife, is included as a curiosity. Sylvia Gosse was the most important of the dozen or so women who worked on Sickert's prints, copying on to his canvases the details of the photographs he used later in his career. Gosse also lent him money, bought his pictures, nursed his first wife in her terminal illness and raised a fund for him in old age. The Fitzwilliam was left a still life by Gosse in 1991 (the museum has 13 of her prints, but she was allowed no space in this exhibition).

It takes a sharp eye to detect Spencer's faithful wife Hilda Carline as the diminutive grey statue in his repulsive pseudo-allegory, Love on the Moor, completed after her death. Carline was a serious artist, who worked as steadily as she could, alongside raising two daughters, the misery and turmoil of being married to Spencer, a mental breakdown and failed treatment for breast cancer. The Fitzwilliam exhibition offers a pretty good object lesson in how women's contribution is winnowed out of art history.

Germaine Greer

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Folkwang museum unveils Chipperfield redesign

Kate Connolly — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:18:22 +0000

German museum once dubbed the most beautiful in the world set to welcome back artworks banished by the Nazis

On a visit in 1932, Paul J Sachs, the co-founder of New York's Museum of Modern Art, referred to it as "the most beautiful museum in the world", whose influence stretched way beyond German borders. But then one of Europe's first and finest public collections of contemporary art was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis, the Folkwang was brutally broken up and 1,400 of its works – including Chagalls, Picassos, Matisses, Kirchners and Gauguins – were strewn around the world.

This weekend the museum, in the western German city of Essen, will be returned to its former glory as a temple to modern art with the opening of the British architect David Chipperfield's much-vaunted new glass and concrete space.

The building, say critics, exudes calm. One described it as "resembling a meditation centre", another likened it to "snowflakes in a glass skirt", so weightless does it appear from inside and out compared with much of the Ruhr valley's heavy industrial architecture.

Summing up what he thought important about his design, Chipperfield – who beat other celebrated architects including Zaha Hadid and David Adaye to win the commission – said: "You want to lose yourself in it, as well as being able to orientate yourself."

The Folkwang building, a series of cubes whose windows are made out of recycled glass, reinforces London-born Chipperfield's status in Germany as a darling of modern architecture. It comes hot on the heels of his highly ambitious transformation of Berlin's war-torn Neues Museum.

The Folkwang redesign, which to the Germans' delight was completed on schedule and within budget, will come into its own in March with the opening of the exhibition The Most Beautiful Museum in the World. The show will bring together for the first time in more than 70 years the artworks that were stripped from the gallery's walls by the Nazis in 1936.

Among the returning treasures will be works by Oskar Kokoscha, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Marc Chagall's vibrant Purimfest, a dusky self-portrait by Giorgio di Chirico, Paul Gauguin's Contes Barbares, as well as Grazing Horses by Franz Marc, currently in the Harvard Art Museum, will hang once again in Essen.

The Folkwang collection – the name derives from Hall of Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and beauty – was first established in 1902 by the cultural philanthropist Karl-Ernst Osthaus, whose vision was to anchor modern art in the centre of urban life. The Folkwang model subsequently inspired many art museums around the world.

The €55m reconstruction was made possible by Berthold Beitz, a philanthropist and former steel baron whose name is inextricably linked with the fortunes of industrial Germany and who initiated his Krupp Foundation to finance the project.

The 96-year old, who greatly plays down his little-known role in saving 800 Jews from the Holocaust by convincing the Nazis they were vital to the war effort, said returning the museum to its former status was his gift to the citizens of Essen. "My only wish had been that I'd be alive to see it, and now my dream has been fulfilled," he said.

Kate Connolly

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Ripped Picasso ‘will be repaired for exhibition’ in New York

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:33:28 +0000

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art says a Picasso painting damaged by a visitor will be repaired in time for its exhibition of his work in April.

The Actor, from Picasso's rose period, now has a 15cm (6in) tear in the canvas's lower right-hand corner after a woman lost her balance and fell on the painting on Friday during an art class.

The restored painting will be displayed as planned in the exhibition of 250 Picasso works drawn from the museum's collection, which will run from 27 April to 1 August. The museum has owned the painting since 1952.

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