World's Most Visited Art Galleries

According to the The Art Newspaper 's annual international survey published in April 2009, The Louvre in Paris took the top spot as the world's most attended mus­eum, as you might expect. Centre Pompidou in Paris was second, then the Tate Modern in London, British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria was the most visited art gallery in Australia. With 1.48 million visitors in 2007-08, it also ranked among the publication’s top 25 most popular art museums in the world. Since Melbourne (3.85 million) doesn’t have the population of Cairo-Tokyo-New York-London-Paris-Mexico City, nor the history of Vienna-Berlin-Paris-Rome-Jerusalem-London, this is an impressive feat.

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National Gallery of Victoria, front entrance

When it came to individual exhibitions, Nara National Museum (850 ks west of Tokyo) won the 13th annual survey with a display of items from Shoso-in, the imperial treasure house of the Todai-ji Temple. It had an average daily attendance of 12,700 people. The Tokyo National Museum ranked second with a display of national treas­ures from the Yakushi-ji Temple. In third place was the Grand Palais Nave in Paris, a large exhibition hall which reopened in 2005 after long renovations. The Nave saw an average of 10,350 people per day for a display of digital art including film, videos and instal­lations. Madrid's Reina Sofia (which exhibition?) came next and a large-scale exhibition of Van Gogh's works made the Albertina in Vienna the next most popular gallery programme.

"Addled Art": dishonest art dealers

Regarding “Addled Art”, John Hopper wrote: I once read that one of the Nazi links of Modern Art with Jews was that artists who were trying to paint classically, would throw away their failures, which would then be salvaged by Jewish art dealers to be sold to the gullible public as Modern Art. To believe that convoluted story would be a gullible act in itself.

Agreed! My feeling is that anti-Semitic, anti-modernist art critics felt they could not blame the artists themselves for horrible paintings. Nor could they find fault with the stout art professionals who were directors of the important art galleries. So they had to find someone else who might have sneakily pushed second-rate, miserable, modern art on an unsuspecting Christian public – the Jewish art dealers! I will present some European and American examples of racism before coming back to the Australian book, Addled Art.

In Stills and Narration from 'Der ewige Jude' (The Eternal Jew) 1940, the narrator said “These days we find it hard to believe such pieces (of art) were once purchased by almost every state and city gallery; they had to be, because Jewish art deal­ers and Jewish artists extolled them as the only true modern works of art”.

The Visual Arts in Germany 1890-1937 by Shearer West quoted from the Degenerate Art Exhibition catalogue of 1937. Abstract art was lab­elled “sheer insanity” and the excess of all the isms was at­tributed to the machinations of Jewish art dealers like Flechtheim.

Stephanie Barron editor of Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany was a great source. She wrote that in 1933 the earliest exhibitions of degenerate art were organised to show the German people the products of the “cultural collapse” of Germany that would be purged from the Third Reich. Confiscated works were assembled into Chambers of Art Horror whose organisers decried the huge public moneys that had been wasted on these modern horrors. It implied that many of the works had been foisted on the museums by a cabal of Jewish art dealers.

Degenerate Art Exhibition (Barron book). Prices were displayed next to the paintings, to show how corrupt art dealers had secretively spent huge amounts of public moneys on so-called modernist rubbish.

In Modern Art, Peter Watson reported Jews have been particularly pre-eminent in the ec­on­omic exploitation of art and the formation of its commercial value since the rise of "modern art" in the 1880s. In that era, the centre of the art world was Paris. "There were two groups of impor­tant art dealers in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century; one was made up of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Paul Guillaume, Felix Feneon, and Leonce and Paul Rosenberg, dealers in contemporary works. The other was an equally tight-knit but smaller group of dealers who formed the elite secondary markets dealing with Old Masters and increasingly in the Impressionists. At the centre of this group were Nathan Wildenstein, Rene Gimpel and Jacques Seligmann. Loosely attached to them were three other dealers in London and New York, Samson Wertheimer and Roland Knoedler, later run by Charles Henschel until after World War II." "Paul Rosenberg's strait-forward approach and steep prices shocked Parisian art circles and made him the subject of savage criticism." He even once said, "As for me, a painting is beautiful when it sells." Among those in Rosenberg's art stable was Picasso, formerly signed to David-Henry Kahnweiler & Rosenberg's brother Leon. All these people were Jewish. (p219-20)

Peter Watson had even more viciousness to say about art dealers. “Many Jewish art dealers grew to be extraordinarily successful. In 1909 Jacques Seligman "astounded Paris by acquir­ing the Palais de Sagan, an even more luxurious house. Seligman was the main art supplier for the French Rothschilds as well as JD Morgan; he was also known for his contacts in Russia". "Possibly the most successful, and certainly the most secretive art dealer was Nathan Wildenstein." "Another reas­on for Wildenstein's success was his close association with Duveen and Gimpel, which made each others businesses truly international." [p220-4]. "Notoriously dishonest, Joseph Duveen was another prominent Jewish art dealer in the early decades of the 1900s. Upon his move from Europe to New York City, Duveen was charged in a legal "case that attracted enormous publicity" with evading customs duties of $102 million at today's values. Connections with several United States Senators and other men of influence helped Duveen evade the law. [p166]

Lionel Lindsay didn't quite have all those details, but he did allude many times to the illegal or immoral way that dealers got their modern art. Re the decline of France, Lindsay said "the writing was on the wall when the Jew Stavisky was discovered to have bribed more than half the members of the Chamber of Deputies" [page ix].

And "how proverbially shrewd was the confraternity of Jewish dealers, who added the pleasure of “taking down the Goysher” for immensely over priced works of ultimate questionable value to forcing the painters of their race on the credulous Christian" [p19].

“The public was completely bewildered. Artists raged, protested, watched the spread of the epidemic sponsored by the Jew. Some abandoned their able practice to enter the arena of novelty and compete with the impostors” [p25].

“I saw at the 1926 Venice International the largest pavilion devoted to Italian Futurism. It was literally the most gigantic joke ever ex­ecuted in paint. When 4 years later I returned to Venice, Fut­ur­ism, unchanged and exhibition nothing fresh, was confined to a small room and soon afterwards disappeared. It was not so lucky as the Ecole de Paris. It had no Jew dealers to ensure its continuance” [p26].

“Except in Australia, the most intellectually back-ward country of European origin in the world, modern art is already moribund. The Jew dealers are dispersed and the novelty makers have no new dishes to tickle the palates of fin de siecle decadents” [p34].

“Already, in spite of strong protests by the best French artists, a large infantile canvas by the douanier Rousseau has been forced by the Jewish Blum government on the authorities of the Louvre” [p41].

Does it matter that Lionel Lindsay held these racist views or that he published them? I suppose not, but Lindsay was a trustee in Australia’s second most important state gallery (NSW). Trustees had enormous power over the Gallery’s acquisitions, de-accessions, permanent displays, special exhibitions and publications. Lindsay successfully prevented the 1939 Modern Art Ex­hib­it­ion from being shown in his state gallery; cut off normal adv­ertising rev­enues and blocked almost all the paintings from being sold to Australian collections.

"Addled Art" by Lionel Lindsay

Lindsay etchings (bottom) Hyde Park, 1913 (top) Little Farm House, 1919

Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961) was one of three Lindsay brothers, part of one of Aus­tralia’s best known and most talented art dynasties. His etchings became very pop­ular in Sydney, to the extent that he became very involved with the Soc­iety of Artists. In 1921, when the Australian Painter-Etchers' Soc­iety emerged, Lindsay became its first president. He moved to Lon­don and began to exhibit in 1923. Of all the countries he visited, I sup­pose Spain was the one that intrigued him most.

When was the first time Lionel Lindsay publicly expressed his anti-modernism, anti-Semitic views? Michael Duffy found a letter to the editor of the very influential Sydney Morning Herald, 16/10/1940. It was inspired by a visit Lindsay made to an exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society. Lindsay was a very unhappy art critic, rav­ing in the letter that "The Australian public is perhaps yet unaware that mod­ern­ism was organ­ised in Paris by the Jew dealers, whose first care was to corrupt critic­ism, originate propaganda and undermine accepted standards so that there should be ample merchandise to hand­le. It was Uhde, the Jew art critic, who proudly boasted that three quart­ers of the art dealers, critics and collectors were Jews." Lindsay claimed that one-third of the artists in the exhibition had foreign names, due to the "influx of refugees", and observed that "true art grows like a tree from its native soil, and not from the sludge of decadent civilisations".

Please note that the date of his Sydney Morning Herald diatribe, 1940, was the same time that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were being herded onto cattle trucks to be taken to extermination camps.

Leger, La Bicyclette, 1930. With this image, Lindsay showed that flat-pattern Cubism was disreputable, harsh, repellent and unworkable.

But it was his book Addled Art where Lindsay actively mourned the loss of art­istic tal­ent. He believed that drawing was the basis of fine art. The loss of craftsmanship in art was directly due to the downgrading of draw­ing, some­thing that demanded dis­cip­line, pat­ience, hand-eye skill. So modern art was a flight from reas­on. Mod­ern­ism HAD to attack the found­ations of artistic tradit­ion, he said, but it had to be in­sidious.

Matisse couldn’t draw, so he was reduced to playing with surfaces. Chagall’s madness of vision, Lindsay said, inspired morbid pass­ions. “A perfume of Oriental bazaars emanates from their over-col­oured canvases which are crowded, sinister in expr­ession, disorderly and plastered with paint”. Questioning whether Klee was mad because he had had men­ing­itis, Lindsay saw him as an escapist who wished to get back into a child’s mind and clothes. Miro and Dali were dist­ing­uish­ed only by sexual obsession and sadism. Rouault was an embit­t­er­ed mis­ogyn­ist. Modigliani’s portraits had a Negroid element about them & his art tried to lure the guttersnipes down into Modig­lian­i’s own alcoholic misery. Picasso’s paintings were meaning­less, brown­ish enigmas, imitation art which could be framed up in any direction. Picasso had no personal­ity seeking expression; no vision that de­manded utterance. Only Cezanne and Degas escaped Lindsay’s vitriol.

Dali, Memory of the Child-Woman, 1932.

Lindsay included this image in the book to display Dali’s account of sadism and sex implications. The painting was viewed by curious visitors in its Australian exhibition only because “things in decay attract the flies”.

The concept of modern art being seen as “putrid meat” was probably borrowed from Nazi art critics. But Personal Reflections blog in Death of Australian painter and writer James Gleeson found an Aust­ralian use of the term. JS MacDonald, soon-to-be director of the important National Gallery of Victoria, was disgusted at the Murdoch Herald display of cont­emp­orary French and English art, 1939. “They are exceedingly wretched paintings … putrid meat … the product of degenerates and perverts … filth”, he wrote.

In Addled Art, Lindsay stated that nature was never ugly; only in degen­er­ation and decay could the spirit of ugliness dwell. So how did all this modern ugliness get foisted on an unsuspecting public? Lindsay’s answer was crisp. Three quarters of the European art dealers, critics & col­l­ect­ors were Jews. Jews excelled in the discovery of great val­ues, well ahead of the Aryans. It was due to Jewish influence and Jewish money that naus­eating paintings were sneakily slipped into galleries and priv­ate collections. “They have become the all-powerful masters of a rich and beautiful domain. They have their press, for making and destroying reputations, and in every country their agents are but hucksters”.

We cannot understand the timing of Lindsay’s vicious anti-Semitism, but we CAN understand the timing of his anti-modernism. Four important events had just happened. a] Pro-modern art views were strongly expressed during the disputes generated by attorney-general Robert Menzies in 1937. His proposal was to establish a conservative Australian Academy of Art. b] The huge support of Keith Murdoch of the newspaper empire, along with intense work by art critic Basil Burdett, resulted in the 1939 Exhibition of French and British Cont­emporary Art. It might have been controversial, but it was enormously successful in bringing international modern artists to Australia for the first time. c] The Angry Penguins modernist journal started up in Adelaide in 1940. d] The Contemporary Art Society held a very interesting exhibition in Melbourne in 1941. As a result of these four events, the full vengeance of the powerful anti-modernist tradition in Australia came pouring forth.

Sadly Lindsay became a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and was knighted for his services to Australian art in 1941. Addled Art, this vituperative attack on modernism in art, wasn’t pub­lished until 1942, AFTER Lindsay’s knighthood and gallery trust­eeship had been confirmed. In case the book’s message was too subtle for the reader, the book's cover showed a monkey, drawn as a caric­ature of a Jew and dressed as an artist, throwing rotten fruit at the Venus de Milo. Lionel Lindsay died in Melbourne in 1961.

cover of Addled Art, by Lindsay

A good read is folklore wikifood's post called FUTURE OF THE WORLD: Australian Art 1930-1960

Edwardian Dining: William Strang

Although I am very interested in later Victorian, Edwardian and post WW1 art, I was not familiar with Scottish artist William Strang (1859–1921) until 2004. That was the year The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, an amazing exhibition, visited the National Gallery of Australia.

There were several very popular themes in the exhibition, but the social customs assoc­iated with Afternoon Tea were fasc­in­at­ing. This is a theme I have looked at before, in A History of Tea Rooms and the Suffragettes and Emanuel Phillips Fox - an Australian Impressionist. The exhibition essay suggested that the joy of easy outdoors eating was such that many artists were drawn to this subject, from the French Impressionists to E Phillips Fox in Alfresco 1904 and Déjeuner c1910.


Strang, Bank Holiday, 1912, Tate, 153 x 123 cm

I think indoor eating was less free, more telling.  As can be seen in Blog of an Art Admirer and a History Lover. 

Just before WW1, Strang painted group portraits of young moderns wearing fash­ionable outfits, playing out their courting rituals. In Bank Hol­id­ay 1912 (Tate), Strang suggested the young couple were just starting their courting, still uncertain of what to expect. The flowers, unwrapped, lie awkwardly on the chair. Ap­p­arently Strang created a deliberately understated image, leaving it all ambiguous enough so that the individual viewer could weave his own story. My own guess was that the young lady was a little too keen on making eye contact with her partner; the young man was a little too focused on ordering the scones.

It is appropriate that Donald Read’s book, Edwardian England, selected this very painting for the front cover.

My Dream Home I : green, airy, full of treasures

I have lived in many homes since graduating university (Dec 1970), in Australia, Israel and Britain. The concept of a personal dream home flitted in and out of my consciousness, but it never had any fixed form. Are other people as vague? Tonight I saw a picture in a mag­az­ine advertisement that might fill in some of the specifics, but I thought I better check other peoples’ ideal homes first.

Desire to Inspire blog wrote an interesting post called My dream home. She wrote that she adored absolutely everything about the home she photographed, including the incredible blue-black exterior, used to downplay the Victorian embellishments. Every lovely photo she displayed was going in her Inspiration Folder.

Alchemy Fine Living in Dream Home Blog Party (25/5/2009) was even more interesting since she was descriptive about the elements of the dream: “It is my dream to live in a home with Spanish architect­ure. I would love a courtyard with a huge fountain and tall palm tress scattered about the property. White stucco walls that look like adobe are my favourite, especially when topped off with a red tile roof. I adore terracotta tiles with a few hand painted tiles mixed in here and there. To me, there is nothing quite like entering into a home through a large, ornate carved wood door.”

Things That Inspire blog, with the posted photos, was the most useful of all. In French Inspired Houses (aka, My Dream Home 2009). My favourite style of architecture used to be Georgian with Adams influence. “So many of the house pict­ures in my Inspiration Files are Georgian, and I still love and app­r­eciate this style. How­ever over the past year I have found myself gravitating to homes with a French influence. It seems like more of a natural fit given the elements I like on the inside of a house: tall, large windows and doors, a light filled interior, high ceilings and a neutral palette.”

Dream Houses - The homes we imagine in Jackie's Architecture Blog asked the really detailed questions: What would that house look like? What would be the colour and texture of the walls, the shape of the rooms, the qual­ity of the light? “As I aged, Jackie wrote, “my dream house re­shaped itself. Instead of an inner courtyard, it developed sociable porches and big bay windows. The house of my dreams reflect­ed who I was becoming”. Craven cited a Professor of Architecture who wrote about the relationship between dwellings and the people who occupy them. She explored the meaning of "home" as a place of self-expression, of nurturance and of sociability.

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So I better answer the really detailed questions myself, Jackie. There will be only one critical room in my dream home: a large living room. The bedrooms, study, kitchen and bathroom need to be only functional and airy. But the living room, the centre of the home, has to be perfect.

Spouse and I have two collections we are proud of. We have thousands of superb books and dozens of superb paintings, both of which would take centre place in our living room (paintings around the ground floor walls; books on the mezzanine gallery). The floor needs to be naturally cooling in our hot summer (slate) with a very large Persian rug over the floor for the winter. A very wide fireplace would be the focal point of one wall, almost like an inglenook in Arts and Crafts homes. The window must be floor to ceiling, and look out directly onto the garden.

Beachbungalow8 presented a room that achieved almost the same goals, but with a very different, more industrial aesthetic. Those floors are lovely and there is a ton of space for the piano, books and chairs. But the two opposing glass walls, from floor to very high ceiling, are sensational.

Green is important. All material needs to be natural: renewable tim­b­er, slate and stone – no plastics, concrete and steel. Since all the family activity would be in one room, any artificial heating and cooling would be limited to one, well insulated room of the house. We already grow our own fruit and vegetables, but in this dream home, the fruit trees and vegetable gardens would be visible from the windows.

Ballets Russes: art and design

A Ballets Russes exhibition has opened in the Arts Centre Melbourne (June-Sept 2009), focusing on their dance, design and vis­ual arts. It is the 100th anniversary of the company’s 1909 opening.

The Ballets Russes performed under the directorship of Sergei Diag­hilev in 1909-29 and travelled across Europe. Although many of the dancers came from the Imperial Ballet of St Pet­er­sburg, Paris became their favourite home since, just before the Russian Revolution and after, Paris absorbed a large Russian ex-pat commun­ity. In time, the younger dancers were trained in Paris, not in St Petersburg. The company featured great choreographers like Michel Fokine, Leonide Massine, Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine.

Sea Princess, Sadko, designed Natalia Gontcharova, 1916

I have no doubt the company’s new way of presenting dance and music was amazing, but I want to concentrate on something else. The comp­any was keen to encourage the collaboration of modern artists in the design of sets and costumes, especially Leon Bakst. Their very special designs contributed enormously to the excitement.

Bluebird, designed by Bakst, 1921
                                                             
Why were Ballets Russes designs so fascinating? At least two possib­ilities were offered. Firstly an intense fascination for Orientalism was the largest influence on stylistic change just before WW1. As eurbanista blog showed in Fash­ion History: From the Belle Epoque through WW1, the Ballets Russes performed oriental tales, dressed in brightly coloured cost­umes of exotic Eastern-style design. The most sensuous Orientalist of all, Bakst excited ballet lovers with the exotic cos­tumes and sets he designed for Scheher­azade, complete with slaves and harem girls doing unspeakable things. The performances were a whirlwind, so viewers had to watch the move­ments quickly. Europe was shocked and they loved every minute of it.
                                                                 
Secondly, as The Textile Blog: The Ballets Russes explained, many Europeans saw the Rus­s­ian Empire as a backward, cultural desert, full of citiz­ens in colourful peasant costumes. The Ballets Russes play­ed up to those images and magnified them a hundred fold. The set designs, costumes, music and dan­cers were all about vibrant colour. Europe itself was going through a long pastel phase, so they were ent­ranced with Ballets Russes’ strong colour palette, vibrant patt­erns & sexy appearance. Leon Bakst’s palette of strong orang­es, pinks and ultramarines perfectly suited the bold, Russian elem­ents of Igor Stravinsky's music and Michel Fokine's choreography.
                                                               
Yet French designers could also excite passion for the Russians. The Starry-Eyed Milliner was besotted with the most beautiful exhibit objects, especially costumes designed by French artist Henri Matisse for Le Rossignol. His hand-painted silks and metallic embroidery seemed to embodied Orientalism and Russian feeling very well. And the company specifically recruited other French and Spanish artists, including Braque, Picasso, Chanel, Matisse, Derain, Dalí, Utrillo, Rouault, Laurencin and Gris. A designer had to be gorgeous, not necessarily Russian. Miss Peelpants swooned over these old costumes.
                                                               
Courtier in Le Rossignol, designed by Henri Matisse, 1920
                                                               
So before WW1, the Ballets Russes started to open minds to rich­ly coloured and vibrant textiles and costume design. And years later they still do. In an Amer­ican exhibition in the Wadsworth Ath­eneum in 2006, designs for Petrushka, Le Spectre de la rose, L'Après-midi d'un faune, and Les Noces were on view. Actual costumes from Diaghilev productions were displayed, including Schéhérazade, Le Dieu Bleu, Le Sacre du Printemps, Le Chant du Rossignol, The Sleeping Princess, and Le Bal. In this Australian display, visitors can see Le Coq d’or, Petrouchka, Nutcracker and Firebird.

                                                                      

Readers might like to see a Russian theatre art collection that was shown in St Petersburg in 2008. Called Russian Theatre and Decorative Art of the 1880s to the 1930s, it was a truly monumental project that displayed 800 watercolours, drawings, theatre posters, engravings and gouaches by 140 artists. The most important works included Lev Bakst’s costume designs for his ballets.

Melbourne's own artist: John Brack

The Car, 1955
National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne

John Brack (1920-99) had a style that evolved into sketch-like paintings filled with plain areas of ordinary colours. We Australians after WW2 were not a flashy people, so his style was appropriate if he wanted to leave his mark on contemporary Australian culture. As meseon blog presented it, Brack’s own priority was to paint people; the human condition, in particular the effect on appearance of environment and behaviour. Note the chiselled planes on their faces and bodies.

At the John Brack Retrospective at the Ian Potter Centre, I was most interested in his early work, done in 1950s & 1960s. This was when he produced some of Australia’s best loved images. The paint­ing The Bar 1954 was said to be modelled on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. But anyone who ever drank in an Australian pub and saw the frantic drink­ing just before closing time at 6 PM will under­stand The Bar. If I saw this painting for the first time in Paris, Berlin or Tel Aviv, and had never heard of Brack, I'd still guess that the crowd of men depicted in The Bar were Australians. Another iconic image was Collins Street, 5PM 1955, a view of rush hour in post-war Melbourne. Set in a dull palette of browns and greys, it was a comment on the conformity of  everyday life, with all figures looking almost identical.

The Bar, 1954
National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne

More than any other Australian artist of his gener­ation, Brack was a painter of modern life. He was a realistic analyser of the ordinary, filled with some sense of dismay, but definitely painting with a loving sense of humour about his own nation. Many of these early works were satirical digs at the Australian Dream. Brack didn’t go for Australia’s central landscapes; he either examined Australia’s newly expanding post-war suburbia or he looked at individuals and families going about their daily responsibilities.

Normally when I chose a blog topic to discuss, hardly anyone in the universe has written about that particular topic. Yet half the bloggers in Australia seemed to have viewed the Brack retrospective thoughtfully. I am delighted.

Collins St 5 PM, 1955
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Melbourne Art & Culture Critic asks a good question. If Brack just created popular, non-abstract and slightly satirical images of Melbourne, then was he conservative? Or did Brack have a critical view of Australian suburban life and other elements of modern content and design that made him progressive? sarsaparilla lite is uncertain. Tim wrote "Brack’s necrotic nudes, grimacing suburbanites and creepy shop fronts retain a good deal of popular appeal. This is explicable in a way; Brack’s early stuff is either iconic in itself, or it deals with iconic imagery, but it’s also slightly odd in that these paintings are consistently acidic and nasty".

Blog Home of Acoustic Eagle was spot on. He noted that John Brack, David Boyd, Robert Dicker­son, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and other Australians wanted to uphold and represent the importance of the figurative image. This may have made them naïve (but not conservative), in comparison to the sophisticated abstract impress­ionists overseas. But the artists form­ed The Antipodeans art group and stuck to their unique Australian-ness. Just one disturbing thought. Hieronymous the Anonymous wrote that Brack came to disavow much of this early work later in his career. I hope this was not so.

The Girls at School, 1959, 
National Gallery Australia, Canberra

Undoubtedly there were artists in Europe and the USA who were finer draftsmen or who used colour better, but no-one reflected the truth of Urban Australia in the post-WW2 era better than Brack. And since I grew up in Melbourne in the 1950s, this is My Era and this is My Town. I wonder if a  Sydney-sider, the Sydney Daily Photo blog, agrees.

Men's Wear, 1953,
National Gallery Australia, Canberra

Claude Lorrain, Italy and JMW Turner

Young Joseph Mallord William Turner’s (1775-1851) travels through Italy provide the objects for The Turner and Italy Exhib­ition, just finishing at the National Gallery Edinburgh. The exhib­ition included 100 exhibits: oils, watercolours, prints, books and works by related painters.

Claude, Landscape with Merchants, 1630

The greatest decades of the Grand Tour might have been over, but Turner wanted to familiarise himself with the Renaissance Grand Manner. Once he arrived in Italy in 1802 and fell in love with the country, who became his mentor?

Claude Lorrain had died in Rome in 1682 yet 120 years later, Turner was totally indebted to him and was inspired by his landscapes. Turner, gazing into the polished finishes of serene Claudean images eg Landscape with M­erchants 1630, thought he might be able to reach Claude’s skills. Polished, peaceful and limpid, yes. But Olgamay blog in Claude Le Lorrain goes even further and suggests that Turner was striving for expression of spir­ituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena. KERA Art&Seek Blog » Art review: J. M. W. Turner at the DMA added that Claude was the first European artist to paint the sun directly into one of his land­scapes. It was a daring feat to pull off convincingly and one that Turner longed for. Kera Art&Seek blog also borrows the language of spirituality, saying light was the great energy source in Turner’s work eg Decline of the Carthaginian Empire 1817. Turner’s works weren’t just landscapes; they were “visions”.

Turner, Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, c1815

Turner had become an Italiophile, but it was until 1820 that he returned for the many visits that gave such pleasure in the second half of his life. His landscapes and seascapes dissolved into a shimmering atmosphere, full of colour and light eg Approach to Venice 1844. He might have created his shimmering atmosphere anywhere (even Scotland) but it was more sensible in the Mediterranean climate.

Rachel Campbell Johnston said in Turner and Italy at the National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh ... that Turner slowly turned up the heat on Claude's serene pastorals, breathing warm colour into his cool rural scenes. Dazz­ling suns descended towards distant horizons, filling the atmosphere with glittering light. Forms deliquesced into a glorious shimmer. Turner's vision no longer remembered its sources in Claude. This suited Johnston well since she thought Italian land­scapes were the settings for some of Turner's most powerful dramas. Topography vanished, she noted, and with it the figures at which Turner was dreadful. He had arrived at luminous abstraction.

Call me old fashioned, but I am still passionate about Claude Lorrain.

Turner, Approach to Venice, 1844

Marvellous Melbourne Architecture: Rialto

Collins St cityscape 2009

Collins St Melbourne had some amazing commercial buildings in the late C19th; architects seemed to take pride in presenting an extraordinary mix of glamorous styles. I want to examine the Winfield Building briefly, then move to William Pitt and the Rialto Building.
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Heritage Victoria said the architects of the Winfield Building were Charles D’Ebro and Richard Speight, commissioned by J R Murphy of Murphy’s brewery. From 1892-4 this Queen Anne style building was Melbourne's first amalgamated wool exchange and incorporated an auction hall which brought together all the Melbourne wool sales. The front section to Collins Street is all that remains of the original, much larger complex.

Winfield Building (L), Rialto Building (R)

William Pitt (1855-1918) was a Melbourne born and educated architect who was fortunate to be building in the money-flushed era of Marv­el­lous Melbourne. It is an absolute tragedy that some of his most spectacular buildings, especially the Melbourne Coffee Palace (1879) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888), were pulled down by later developers. However the Rialto Building survives, his second master work after the nearby Olderfleet Building.

Next to the Winfield Building and completed in 1891, the Rialto Building housed Melbourne’s wool stores, an impor­t­ant part of the city’s financial base in the C19th. The two buildings were part of a streetscape that was unified by its height limits, if not its building styles.

Jedi Master in Former Rialto Building and Winfield Buildings noted that the Rialto Building took its style from its famed Venetian name­sake. Built in the neo-Gothic taste, Jedi Master focused on the col­our­ed tiles, poly-chromatic banding, pointed arches and columnettes. The bluestone cobbled laneway between the two buildings were busy with workers and beasts, carrying the precious wool to Melbourne’s very busy docks.

Laneway atrium between the two buildings

Today this warehouse/offices complex is the Rialto Hotel, retaining the original bal­conies, a cobbled laneway and according to brandoneu in The Melbourne Golden Mile, even its cast-iron privies. You can see how the dining area of the hot­el was creat­ed from the laneway between the original Rialto and Winfield Build­ings. The hotel’s towering glass atrium sits between these two buildings, retaining its original form as much as possible.

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Winfield Building rear, with men's toilets

20th Century German Art Exhibition, London 1938

The Nazis, even those who passionately loved art, hated Expression­ism. Expressionistic passion for brilliant and symbolic colour which was more important than the figurative content of the work, infur­iat­ed the Nazis. Nazi art policy was designed to create the outlines of a new German cultural heritage, to eliminate artistic alternatives to the party view. Starting in 1933, the Nazi government began its war against modern art in general, and German modern art in particular.

Why was the Nazi art policy so against the aesthetic avant-garde? They claimed that modern artists were cosmop­olitan, inter­nat­ional, Jewish or Bolshevik, and that these faults were ref­lected in their art: gross, dirty, brutal, confused, incom­plete and nihilistic. Deformed artworks were condemned for their “barb­arous methods of represent­at­ion” as much as their disgust for rel­ig­­ion and preaching of political anarchy. So it was ir­on­ic that Expressionism thrived best in the German speaking countries, from 1910 on.

Max Beckmann, 

Temptation Triptych

A group of sympathetic art critics in Britain and France, including Roland Penrose, stood up for modern European art. In Paris in 1935 Penrose had already began to discuss with other Britons and with Picasso how they might promote modern art back in Britain. Penrose returned to London, to form the group that organised the International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries London in 1936. Taking 400 works by Dali, Duchamp, Ern­st, Magritte, Miró, Picasso and Brit­ish art­ists, this Surr­eal­ist Exhibition excited huge interest, both supportive and critical.

In Germany, the pur­g­es of modernist art were relentless. Joseph Goeb­bels ordered that once the purging of all of Germany’s public collec­t­ions was done, the art that had been sel­ec­ted out for destruction would be shown to the German people for the last time. A special Ex­hibit­ion of Entartete Kunst/Degenerate Art was planned for 1937 in Munich. Painter Adolf Ziegler, prof­essor at Mun­ich Ac­ademy of Fine Arts, became pres­­ident of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts under Joseph Goebbels. Ziegler confiscated works for the Entart­ete Kunst Exhibit­ion and in two weeks, he ch­ose 650 works by 112 art­ists, many being Jews or mar­r­ied to Jews. The show ran in Munich from July-Nov 1937.

After the Surrealist Show, the next display of German art in London, called Banned German Art, was organised to protest Munich’s 1937 Deg­enerate Art Show. But before the show opened, the name was changed to the less provocative title, C20th German Art, at the exp­ress command of the British Foreign Ministry. The show was held at the New Burl­ing­­ton Gall­eries London in 1938, and was well attended.

Max Liebermann, Portrait of Albert Einstein

The Chairman of the Organising Commit­tee was art critic Herbert Read. Read’s stated aim for the exhibition was to educate the British pub­lic on the worth of modern German art. But by the time the exhibition opened in 1938, the art world had bec­ome moved on. For the organis­ers, it became more about showing the prog­rammes of cultural desec­ration prac­tised by the Nazi regime, and support­ing artists who had stood against Nazism. Funds raised would go to dist­res­sed exiled artists.

The 270 exhibits in the Burlington Galleries represented almost 40 years of German art, including Germans Max Beckmann, Karl Hof­er, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Ernst Bar­l­ach, Kathe Kollwitz, Mueller, August Macke, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde and Lovis Corinth; Austrian Oskar Kokoschka; Czech Alfred Kubin; Russian Wassily Kandinsky; Swiss Paul Klee and Norwegian Edvard Munch. The Jewish participants included Herwarth Walden/Georg Lewin (publisher-gallery owner), Max Liebermann, El Lissitzky, Lyonel Feininger, Lesser Ury, Yankel Adler and art historian Carl Einstein.

The London show did not include of Grosz’s or Dix’s most ex­treme, subversive works, due to diplomatic appeasement by the Foreign Ministry. But it is clear from the photos that the singer Paul Robeson sang at the opening of the Exhibition, as a benefit for German artists banned by the Nazis. Robeson was a very provocative choice for the organisers, as he was black AND very grateful to the Russians, without whom the Allies may not have won the war.

George Grosz, 

Autumn Leaves 1928

The London Times wrote five articles on the Exhibition. It was desc­rib­ed as an outstanding exhibition by art critics and although they didn’t sell much art, the show ran throughout July. Then due to its popul­arity, the dates were extended twice until the end of August. I now want to know if the London Exhibition succeeded, or not, in displaying the Nazi prog­ramme of artistic despoliation. I also want to know whether the British organisers DID support the artists who had suffered from Nazi purges, either morally or financially.

Michael Carlson discussed this exhibition (and others) in FLEEING DIRE ENCUMBANCIES: EXILES AND EMIGRES, as did BLOG in "Nazis: a warning from the history of artists".

Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance: Part II

When Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance was dedicated on the 11th Nov 1934, there was a commitment to the crowds that the shrine would always have an unimpeded and uninterrupted view from the city, and that the view would never be marred by buildings along St Kilda Road.

Local overlays have long existed to protect the Shrine’s vistas and the building from the shadows of St Kilda Road buildings, and build­ings along the boulevard are indeed lower than a 60m height limit set for the area. Despite this, an exemption was made for the 154m Royal Domain Tower.

75 years after the Shrine opened, Melbourne Heritage Watch blog has again expressed concerns about these spectacular, unimpeded views in Planning shadow looms over Shrine of Remembrance.


butterpaper's view of the shrine and its potential neighbour
This time the interference would be worse. The proposed 117m tower at 324 St Kilda Road Southbank is much closer to the Shrine; in fact directly opposite as butterpaper blog shows in Architecture via Butterpaper: news: australia. A tower development threatens to overshadow and cast significant glare on the historic building.
Although the plan­ning minister’s office is investigating, a terrible precedent is already in place. Melbourne Heritage Watch wonders whether the current state government will decide whether Melbourne’s long held values are worth preserv­ing, or not. A decision in favour of the full height of the new tower may well detract from Melbourne’s heritage. 60 ms seems tall enough.