Tintoretto, but not at face value

I don't mind a rollicking good historical novel, as long as the author and the publishing house remember that the story was merely the product of someone's fertile imagination. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was a fun read on the beach one summer, but it was not a reliable reference on the Knights Templar, the Cathars, the marriage of Jesus or secret Vatican conspiracies to silence the Church's enemies.

The intelligent reader needs to do his/her own research on any historical issue. If that is not a realistic possibility, then he/she needs to read quality analyses done by academic experts in the field.

This is equally true in art history. There is nothing more exciting than good quality research done on a piece of art, pulling apart the "truths" that people have always "known" and revealing a new truth underneath. This historical detective work is sometimes accidental but always thrilling, as seen in Thomas Hoving's King of the Confessors 1981. Here Hoving painstakingly chased and analysed every reference ever made to the medieval Bury St Edmund Cross.

This week, my great friend Will Roberts in Boston sent me the story of an amazing piece of detective work in Boston. Even if you don't love the painting, you will love the process.

A Nativity Revelation,
Linda Matchan, Boston Globe, 23rd Dec, 2008

Even scholars of the Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto have been dismissive of his enormous Nativity, which presides over the Koch Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts. They have viewed it as awkward, or, if they're being generous, enigmatic or complex.

Tintoretto, Nativity, c1580

But it turns out that the painting was a lot more complex than anyone guessed. In the process of restoring it for an upcoming exhibition, the MFA made a surprising discovery. In the Renaissance equivalent of a cut-and-paste job, it appears that Tintoretto changed his mind about the subject, cut the original canvas to rearrange the pieces he didn't like, then some two decades later painted over parts of the result to come up with an entirely new composition. The painting that is now a horizontal nativity was once a vertical crucifixion.

Frederick Ilchman, a specialist in the Italian Renaissance, said "It's not uncommon to X-ray a painting and find a completely differ­ent subject underneath. But cannibalising your own picture is a very rare thing in European art." Ilchman and others say that what they once deemed a second-rate painting is now looking a lot better in a new light. Even an untrained eye can see there is something seriously amiss about the nearly 12’ wide painting, which was created c1580. Densely composed and boldly coloured, the work has large, muscular figures in the foreground, iconic religious imagery in the background and a diverse menagerie of animals. One principal figure, St Anne, a lavishly garbed woman presumed to be Mary's mother, is gazing in the direction of the serene baby, but she seems to look right past him to focus on a lamb, and she's flinging her arms out in dismay. A bearded shepherd behind her ignores the baby altogether and is staring at some fixed point in the sky. The crouching Virgin Mary, a luminous figure in a bright blue cloak, is out of scale for the painting.

Neither Ilchman nor MFA paintings conservator Rhona MacBeth expected to find anything so dramatic a few months ago when six men hauled the hefty painting into the MFA's lead-lined X-ray room to scan it for routine restoration and technical analysis. While they could see that the painting was composed of five canvases stitched together, it became clear with the first X-rays that the two outer sections, in­cl­uding a shepherd and Magi, had been painted in a different hand, possibly by workshop assistants. Then they noticed something peculiar in the layers of paint under the nativity scene. Beneath the elderly shepherd was a younger, beardless man, perhaps a saint. And hovering near his head was the bottom of an angel.

And they noticed a pair of legs above the Virgin's head and something that appeared to be a vertical piece of wood. It was a crucifixion. It was clearly taken from another painting, from what appeared to be quite a finished painting.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place by manipulating digital images of the X-rays. MacBeth lifted out the middle section of the top painting, the compressed nativity scene, and pushed the remaining four panels together to create a different, self-contained tableau. Now the central figure was Christ’s legs, apparently nailed to a cross. Why did Tintoretto alter his painting so radically? Ilchman has no shortage of theories. Perhaps his client abandoned the comm­is­sion or refused to pay for it. Maybe the painting was finished but got damaged. Or maybe he wasn't satisfied with it but saw an opp­ort­unity later to make money by reconfiguring it, "hoping that a few existing figures could hold together a new picture which con­tained lots of additions by workshop assistants."

Where is the missing upper part of the original painting? Ilchman noted "This is a great mystery. But given Tintoretto's thrifty nature, I like to think that he didn't waste any canvas, and it's underneath some other painting, perhaps in a church in Venice." Happily for us, the Tintoretto discovery has inspired the org­an­isers to create a separate room dedicated to the technical examinat­ion of the paintings, including the Nativity X-rays that show the change of plans.

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice at Boston's MFA in March, 2009.

Chaim Soutine, sad expressionist

I have come back to Chaim Soutine 1893–1943 because of two unexpected blog entries. Susan's Museum Experience analysed Little Girl with a Doll 1919. Life at Willow Manor discussed a Soutine painting called Melanie the School Teacher 1922. These lovely works, new to me, are in the Hillman Foundation NY and the Columbus Museum of Art.

Who was Soutine? Wh­ile still a young teenager from an impov­er­ished Russian village near Minsk, he attended the Acad­emy of Fine Arts of Vilna where he met another of my favourite young art students, Michel Kikoine. In order to survive financially, Soutine work­ed at odd jobs, until a doctor discovered his talent and paid for his train ticket to Paris.

What prompted Soutine and the other 100 foreign painters, largely from Eastern Europe, to travel all the way to Paris? They had no mon­ey, no French and no family support. Their arrival in Paris coin­cided with an extraord­inary artistic revolution getting under way then.

Sout­ine settled into his circle of émigré artis­ts in 1913, as had the slightly older Amadeo Mod­igliani in 1906. At first Soutine lived in dire pover­ty, kept alive by the food charity of Modigliani, Kikoine and Sonia Terk Delaunay. But som­ething in Soutine’s character made it impossible for him to man­age. He was always hungrier, dirtier and more needy than the others. Today I would read it as chronic anxiety, but I cannot find any contemporary diagnosis.

Luckily for Soutine, he was admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, probably because his ear­liest art training in Lithuania had been good. And al­though he was uncouth and unmannered, he did read poets and phil­osophers, and admired the works of Rembrandt, Courb­et and Bonnard.

Expressionism was intense, passion­ate and highly personal, based on the concept of the paint­er's canvas as a display for his emotions. Vio­lent, unreal colour and dramatic brush-work made Ex­press­ionist painting rock! Its emphasis and distortion, from the artist’s emot­ion­­al resp­onse to the sitter, was a reaction to C19th shallow­ness. In Man with Ribbons 1921, the model’s head and neck were elong­ated and an agitated flicker ran down the full length of the body. The colours were unpolished and the angles were rough.

Man with Ribbons

Soutine and other ot­her Eastern European Jews were seen to have brought with them a general sense of the hope­less­ness that comes with be­ing ex pats. Unwil­ling to adjust to the prevail­ing rules, they ex­p­ressed their feel­ings in their art by the bol­dness of their strokes and colours. Freedom allowed them to exper­ience everything for the first time. I am guessing this was because of hostile reg­imes in Eastern Eu­rope, not because of family controls.

In 1919-22 Soutine painted in Ceret, a small town in the Pyrenees. There his work reached its most express­ion­istic extreme and there he exec­u­t­ed a series of very distort­ed landscapes with agitated rhythms. I didn’t like his early landscapes at Ceret: they were messy in concept and in practice. In any case he was totally isolated in Ceret since he didn’t speak a word of Catalan. Worse still, the death of Modig­liani in 1920 left Soutine bereft. Only Modigliani, his mentor and teacher, had regarded Soutine as a genius.

Soutine spent 3 years there and painted 200 works, including Woman in Red 1922. What kind of fev­er­ish, Van Gogh-like passion drove him to pro­duce these distorted and viol­en­tly coloured works? Were the dis­t­ort­ions reflec­tions of his inner disturb­ance or of his inspir­at­ion?

Woman in Red

Soutine visited his favourite southern towns each summer: Cagnes, Montpellier, Nimes, Beziers. His friends drove him around for days, in search of the perfect image. Once he found what he wanted, he worked with such concentration that he lost all sense of time and place. This made for good paintings, but it was very tough on his friendships.
I would not have included any landscapes since I am not sure that expressionism works as well for inanimate objects as it does for human beings. However toomanyfrogsand1brit discussed chaïm soutine 's stint in Cagnes and in Céret. This blog suggested that "Soutine depicted villages all in a jumble, like hazy memories souvenired from Mediterranean towns, basked in a warm sunlight but lacking structure and foundation. It was just like German Expressionism mixed with one too many beakers of pastis!" Great description.

View of Cagnes, 1924

Soutine was only seen as bad-tempered and unsociab­le by men. To women he was cute. And he stayed in contact with his ex pat friends in Mont­par­­nasse, painted their portraits eg Kisling C1925 and treated their portraits with respect.

The American collector Dr Albert Barnes arrived in Paris in Dec 1922, to enlarge his own collection. Paul Guillaume escorted the man around the galleries and artist studios for several weeks, but nothing part­ic­ularly grabbed his attention. Finally Barnes was visiting a studio to see a Modigliani, and noticed in the corner a work that immed­iate­ly caught his eye: Soutine’s The Little Pastry Cook 1923. Barnes wanted to buy it straight away. Guillaume took Barnes to Zborowski who had a number of rec­ent landscapes that Soutine had painted, and Barnes bought them all.

Little Pastry Cook

Soutine worked intensely and managed to sell 100 of his works to Dr Barnes. The sale of his pictures in 1923 was his first big succ­ess after years of poverty and Soutine was launched. Barnes opened his Foundation and Museum, in Merion in the USA in 1924.

Having previously known poverty, Sou­tine now enjoyed a comfortable life and could stay at luxury hotels and spas: he divided his time between Paris, the Riviera and the Pyrenees. In towns where he and Zborowski went to take waters, he observed the staff and painted the well-known series of bellboys and waiters. Soutine seems to have felt a bond with these lowly workers, victims of a rejection he himself had experienced. Through typical workers, Soutine evoked the endless mass of the working class eg Room-service Waiter c1927 (below).


Sout­ine himself ac­k­n­owledged that he was at least once saved from suic­ide by a fr­iend. Obses­sed by forms and colours, and dejected and unsatisfied, Soutine destroyed many paintings during fits of des­p­air. This may explain why such a passionate artist left relatively few paintings. The Great Depression years were terrible for Zborowski who died bankrup­ted in 1932. Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing were pass­ionate ab­out art and they took it upon themselves to buy Soutine’s works AND to have him as a guest in their rural property near Chart­res every year from 1930 on. He was not well, but he was well looked after by the Castaings and even fell in love (with Gerda Groth).

Oscar Grillo has a painting of a Naked Woman by Soutine that I have never seen before. Might it have been of Gerda Groth?

In 1937 in Paris there was an Exhibition of Indep­endent Art where he was at last hailed as a great painter. Profile of a Woman 1937 was highly thought of, even though the same painting 15 years ear­lier would have been dismissed. In 1937 he rented a studio at Vil­la Seur­at. The sculptor Chana Orloff was there often and wrote about Soutine’s painting habits.

Sadly his glory was short-lived. In 1940 Groth was deported. A few months after the in­vasion of France by Germans, he fled Pa­ris in order to escape the Vichy pol­ice and Gestapo. Soutine was forced to seek shelter wher­ever he could doss down. Suffering from a bleed­ing st­omach ulcer in 1943, he had to leave his hid­ing place to undergo em­ergency surg­ery but died a few hours later.

It is ironic that Soutine largely had a miser­able life, yet he became a legend after his death. I liked Norman Kleeblatt’s and Kenneth Silver’s conclusion: that Chaim Soutine didn't quite fit into a particular era, style or movement.

"Pushing Time Away" in Vienna

Prof Peter Singer, born safely in Australia straight after the 1939-1945 war, wanted to get to know his late grandfather, David Oppenheim. This was a man who died in the war in 1943, before he could reach a safe place. Luckily for Singer, heaps of documents survived. His aunt, Doris Liffman, had studied some of the letter-based material years earlier for her university degree.

These days I ask my students in Melbourne to read Pushing Time Away ( Ecco Publications, 2003), but not because they are necessarily sympathetic to Peter Singer’s task in discovering his own family history. Rather I want them to un­derstand Viennese Jewish intellectual life from the late 19th century until 1933.

A new golden age of building came to Vienna, based on the grac­ious Ring­strasse (1860-90): all the city’s great institutions were lo­cated there. Different from the churches and imperial buildings which were already present in central Vienna, the new Ringstrasse devel­op­ments were buildings which stressed secular culture, education and the new constitutional government, including the Parliament, Rathaus, galleries and University. But above all, it was a place for café society to parade and discuss.

Vienna was hopping and jumping in this period, creating world leaders in medic­ine, psychiatry, chemistry, physics, design, architecture, painting, music, politics, publishing, philosophy and every other intellectual field. The Jewish community of Vienna was largely secular, highly educated and extremely motivated to succeed intellectually.


At the end of the century, 10% of the total pop­ulation of Vienna were Jews, while c30% of the Gymnasium students were Jewish. 60% of Vienna’s physic­ians were Jewish and more than 60% of Vienna's lawyers were Jewish.

In Oppenheim, Singer found a well placed man to witness Vien­na’s Golden Age. Oppenheim “only” taught classical languages in a high-class school (Akademisches Gymansium), so he was not in the cen­tre of Vienna’s intellectual ferment at work. But he moved to the cen­tre in everything he did. Oppenheim's life was lived in cos­mop­olitan Vienna and he could not help contemplating and writ­ing about many of the significant issues that crossed his fertile mind. Singer may have been rescuing his grandfather’s memory, but the reader uses Oppen­heim’s connections to link up with Freud, Adler and the other members of their group.

I am uncertain what to make of Singer’s grandmother, Amalie Pollack Oppenheim. She was no intellectual slouch herself, having enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1899; she was only the 39th woman to grad­uate from that august institution ever. But her career went no­where, so one is left to guess that her role was a] raising healthy, happy, educated children and b] supporting her husband in his resear­ch, writing and publications. I was quite interested in the comp­lex­ities of David’s and Amalie’s relationship, but I would have loved to have known what contributions to learning Amalie made, outside the home. At least Amalie had the huge good luck and the strength to survive the camps, and to reach freedom in Australia.

Historical researchers have to thank families who kept copies of all the letters they wrote and received. Those families have enor­mous foresight. And even had David Oppenheim been born in Ballarat or Leeds, his story would have been worth telling. But Pushing Time Away focused on the critical moments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s transition from the late 19th century glory days and learning, to the arrival of Nazism and despair. The book’s subtitle, The Tragedy of Jewish Vienna, should have been changed to The Great Successes and Unthinkable Tragedy of Jewish Vienna. Timing is indeed everything.

Universal Exhibitions

In the early C19th the great increase in French industrial exhib­it­ions finally provoked interest in an "international" exhibition. In 1849 the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce suggested including foreign exhib­its in the Paris exhibition of that year, but he failed. Thus it may have been quite accidental that the Great Exhibition of London in 1851 was the first truly international fair. Prince Albert was large­ly responsible for London's success, as was Joseph Paxton's amazing arch­itectural wonder, Crystal Palace. It was Britain that first created the indust­rial revolution and Britain that first created the model for industrial exhibitions.

I was particularly keen to unearth a number of important goals that the first universal exhibition in Britain had set for itself. Firstly it was hoped that by inviting ordinary families to walk around the various sites, those families would be inspired by science, technol­ogy and the arts towards education and self-improvement. Secondly it was expected that international trade would be greatly expanded, with raw materials coming in from the colonies and finished products finding new markets outside Britain. Thirdly Thomas Cook and other travel entrepreneurs saw a great opportunity to in­crease intellectual tourism. Railway tickets and hotel accommod­at­ion were packaged up with entry tickets into Crystal Palace.

Introducing locals to the host-nation’s colonies was more important for some nations than for others. The French took over northern and central Vietnam in 1884-5 and together with Cambodia and Laos, the three Asian countries formed French Indochina in 1887. Influence was also expanded in North Africa, establishing a protectorate on Tunisia in 1881. Grad­ually French control was est­ablished over much of Northern, Western and Central Africa. These colonies were all given space and press coverage at the Paris World Exposition 1889. They proclaimed France's status as a powerful nation, to the entire world.

The architecture inside all the late 19th century/early 20th century world exhibitions was sensational. Sometimes the buildings were accident­al­ly destroyed by fire (eg Crystal Palace, London 1851 and The Garden Palace Sydney, 1879). Oftentimes, the pavilions were specifically built to last only for the duration of the exhibition and were pulled down as soon as the last visitor departed (eg General Art and Indust­rial Exposition of Stockholm 1897). Occasionally the expensive build­ings were retained for the host city to use, in perpetuity (eg Melbourne 1880-1).

Of course Nicole Adams included Melbourne's Exhibition Building in her Top 50 Travel Spots for Architecture Buffs. The blog Melbourne Art Network carefully documented the renovation work done to the Exhibition Building. This undoubtedly contributed to  the building's 2004 inscription on the World Heritage List.

The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne in 2008

Host cities poured money into building and improving their permanent archit­ect­ural stock, to be ready for the moneyed visitors. The Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1889 celebrated the triumph of ironwork with the Palais des Beaux-Arts et des Arts Libéraux, the Galerie des machines and the Eiffel Tower. At the next Paris Exibition of 1900, Paris inherited some of its many of its most memorable structures: the Grand Palais, Petit Palais and the Pont Alexandre III. Being a host city for a Universal Fair was largely advantageous.

The opening of the exhibition, usually by royalty, was the highlight of the year. Vienna’s World' Exhibition 1873 was inaugurated by Emperor Francis Josef of Austria, with imposing ceremonies, in the presence of a vast assemblage of people. The day was immortalised by the music of Handel and Strauss. And almost all the fairs were immensely pop­ul­ar. At Chicago 1893 27 million visitors arrived, a third of the count­ry's populat­ion at the time. The number for Paris World Expo 1900 reached 48 million. 50 million people attended Montreal’s Expo 67 at a time when Canada's population was only 20 million.

World Fairs were instrumental in the spread of tech­nology. Host countries were proud to display their own scientific and technological advances; pavilions were estab­lished for other coun­tries to show off their contributions. The scientific centrepiece of the 1900 Paris Expo was the Great Exposition Refractor, still the the largest refracting tele­scope built. Exhibits in San Fran­cisco’s Palace of Machinery 1915 showcased Diesel engines and water-driven power plants. Wise gov­ernments sent scholars to study the technol­ogical progress of other countries and to write reports back at home. The expos also prompted the establish­ment of new museums which promoted scientific, technical and industrial advances and supported technical education.

The arts received just as much publicity. Rene Lalique’s magnificent jewellery was displayed at the Universal Exhibition in Paris 1889 under the signature of Henri Vever, Lalique’s boss. But the jewel­l­ery brought so many commissions that Lalique was soon working under his own magical name. Objects Not Paintings found the lamp that was part of the seminal exhibition of Tiffany’s work at London’s Graton Galleries, organised by Siegfried Bing in 1899. This exhibition introduced serious collectors to Tiffany’s work which was so successfully exhibited at Paris' 1900 Exposition Universelle. Mies van der Rohe designed the German pavilion for the International Exposition of Barcelona 1929, and the furniture to go in the pavilion. His Barcelona Chairs immediately became recog­nis­able, all over the world.

The following books have been particularly useful:

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1.Allwood, John Great Exhibitions, Studio Vista, 1977.
2.Auerbach, J Great Exhibition 1851, Yale UP, 1999
3.Bolotin, N & Laing, C The World's Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World's Fair of 1893, Illinois UP, 2002
4.Brown, Julie Making Culture Visible: Photography and its Display at Industrial Fairs in USA 1847-1900, Routledge, 2001

5.Burris, John Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions 1851-1893, Virginia UP, 2002.
6.Coletta, C.D Worlds Fairs Italian-Style: Great Expositions in Turin and their Narratives, 1860-1915, Toronto UP, 2006

7.Darian-Smith, K et al Seize the Day: Exhibitions, Australia and the World, Monash UP, Melbourne, 2008.
8.Dickinson Brothers Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, London, 1854.
9.Gibbs-Smith, C Great Exhibition 1851, London, HMSO, 1981
10.Greenhalgh, Paul Ephemeral Vistas: Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939, Manchester UP, 1988
11.Leapman, Michael World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation, Headline Books, 2001.
12.Mattie, Erik World’s Fairs, Princeton Architectural P, 1998
13.Pont, G and Proudfoot, P The 1879 Sydney Garden Palace International Exhibition: Origins and Precursors of the International Exhibitions,
14.Rydell, Robert World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, Chicago UP, 1993.
15.Rydell, R Fair America, Smithsonian Institution P, 2000.
16.Sotheby's Great Exhibition Sale: Two Centuries International Art&Design from World's Fairs, London, 2006.
17.Wilson, R Great Exhibitions: 1851-1937, NGV, 2008