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.