Archived Reviews

Art in New York - Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard at the Morgan Library
Art in New York - Apocalypse Then - The Las Huelgas Beatus Manuscript at the Morgan Library
Art in New York - Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism at the Brooklyn Museum
Art in New York - Masterpieces of European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art at the Frick to January 28, 2007
Art in New York - Raphael's Sant'Antonio di Padova Altarpiece at the Met
to September 4, 2006
Art in New York - Napoleon on the Nile at the Dahesh
to September 3, 2006
Art in New York - Veronese at the Frick Collection
July 16, 2006
Art in New York - The Morgan Library, reopened
Art in New York - Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul
to May 8, 2006
Art in New York - Antonello da Messina; Sicily's Renaissance Master
to March 5, 2006
Art in New York - Hans Memling Portraits
October 12, 2005 to December 31, 2005
>Art in New York - The Splendor of the Word
October 21, 2005 to February 12, 2006
Art in Paris - Anne-Louis Girodet at the Louvre
to 2 January 2006
Art in Paris - Neo-impressionism
March 15 to July 10, 2005
Art in Paris - Vienna 1900
October 3, 2005 to January 23, 2006
Art in Paris - Ingres at the Louvre
to May 23, 2006
Art in Paris - le Douanier Rousseau at the Grand Palais
to October 15, 2006

Art Reviews and Opinions

Art in New York - Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard at the Morgan Library

        Sometimes a small show is such a dud it makes you feel cheated.  You needn’t have bothered to travel the distance or to spend the money.  Sometimes a small show is such a well-constructed multi-faceted gem that you find yourself exhilarated even part way through your visit.  Fortunately, the Morgan Library and Museum has given us a jewel and not a dud.

        If you come to the exhibition “Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard” expecting to see several glass cases filled with van Gogh’s letters, written in French and in small, mostly tidy script, you won’t be disappointed; they are there.  But you are also greeted with oil paintings and a worldwide sampling of pen and ink drawings that pull together the strands of van Gogh’s relationship with Bernard. 

        It is not certain how the two men met but the likeliest scenario has them crossing paths at the paint shop of Père Tanguy in Paris.  When van Gogh left Paris for Arles at the end of 1888 the letters to Bernard began in earnest.  Fortunately for posterity, with Bernard in Paris and van Gogh in Provence, the threat of intimacy was removed and van Gogh could freely share his thoughts, ideas, dreams and disappointments.  The letters became a forum for van Gogh to expound on art and artists, subjects of mutual interest to the younger painter.  In the show, we get to see Bernard’s paintings, mostly known to van Gogh through description, and we get to compare van Gogh’s drawings to little reproductions of his paintings.   No matter that they’re really tiny – the paintings are so familiar you’ll revel in the chance to understand the relationship.

        There are twenty-two letters, nineteen of which were acquired and given to the Morgan in 2001. They were originally published, as a group, by Ambroise Vollard in 1911.  Now they have been collated and translated with the help of several Dutch scholars from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam who, with curators from the Morgan, have produced a catalogue that is a marvel of scholarship.  The catalogue also provides facsimiles of the letters as well as a free-ranging examination of the works referred to by van Gogh.  The reasons behind the choice of the catalogue’s illustrations are not always immediately evident but inevitably they are integrated with the text and with the annotations that accompany each of the translations.

        The show itself is installed in one room on the ground floor of the original library building.  The didactic labels are not only informative but are placed at a level that makes them legible without undue strain on either your eyes or your back. On your immediate left as you enter the exhibition are booklets that contain translations of the letters.  You can take one and refer to it as you examine the letters displayed in the center of the room.

On the wall next to the booklets is an unfinished Self-portrait by van Gogh, from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, done in the post-impressionist/elongated-pointillist technique he affected in 1888.  It deftly demonstrates the limitations of that technique when applied to portraiture and van Gogh is forced to all but abandon it for the depiction of his face and eyes.  The lack of completion also lets us see that the eyes, with their intense penetrating gaze, are clearly the focus of the work. 

        The adjacent Portrait of Emile Bernard, painted by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, is a serious non-caricature portrait of a man who appears to eschew the focused intensity of van Gogh.  In fact, Bernard as a card-carrying member of the school of Point Aven, is much more an artistic bedfellow of Gauguin than of van Gogh.  This is made clear with the first landscape by Bernard that shows the countryside around Asnières and is painted in broad color fields outlined in black, much in the style of Gauguin.   

        A comparison of the portrait of Bernard’s Grand-mother of 1887, (VG, Amsterdam) to Van Gogh’s Portrait of an Old Woman, which hangs next to it, provides a good demonstration of their varied approaches to the portrait.  Bernard averts the old woman’s face whereas van Gogh confronts her in a full-frontal view.  Neither artist gives his dour old woman enough room to live as both use a patterned background that flattens space.  Both make reference to a bed, that in Bernard’s interpretation is large and includes an over-inflated down comforter, but in van Gogh’s is a nearly two-dimensional cutout inserted at the side of the picture. 

        Despite the lack of interest in perspective in the portrait, van Gogh’s Orchard with CyprusTrees on loan from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, shows the artist’s continued interest in perspectival rendering of space.  In this landscape done in pleine aire, he uses several effects to render recession into space convincingly; note the road that moves into space, the row of trees parallel to that road, and finally the ladder that lies on the ground in a perfect Brunelleschian rendition of so-called scientific perspective.

        The long back wall of the exhibition space is, for the most part, given over to drawings.  They are not just from the Morgan’s collection but from private hands, and other well known holders of van Gogh’s oeuvre: the Met, the Kröller-Müller, and the Pushkin Museum to name a few.  Here is where you will find the small color illustrations of van Gogh’s paintings as they relate to some of the drawings in the exhibition.  The presence of these little color thumb-nails opens up the narrow confines of the show and is decidedly an aid to our understanding of the importance that the artist placed on drawing.  Some drawings were done prior to the oils and some as répétitions, or repeat-copies, after the paintings, often mailed off to his brother or to friends like Bernard, to show what he had painted most recently. 

        The paintings by Bernard, at the end of this back wall and over to their right, were done during the initial period of the correspondence between the artists.  The paintings of the Breton peasant women were much admired by van Gogh no doubt in great part because peasant subjects were dear to him.  The larger Madeleine in the Bois d’Amour of 1888 was Bernard’s attempt to take on Gauguin subject matter, i.e., Woman in Nature, and bring it back to cosmopolitan France.  No nude classical statuary-type woman, no nude native girl but a totally femme bourgeoise, his sister no less, posed in a Pont-Aven or Parisian banlieue landscape. 

        Two final van Goghs, the first, a Landscape at St-Rémy from Indianapolis’ Museum of Art, shows the familiar view of the fields that surrounded the sanitarium and hospital.  The whole surface is three-dimensional and in motion, so unlike Bernard’s flat style of calmly applied thinned colors.  The second, The Olive Trees, from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, is an example of the artist’s final style.  It continues the impasto application of paint with large color swipes of the brush but now he adds a swooping curvilinear depiction of the gnarled branches of the olive trees.        

        With all of this beautiful art on the walls you mustn’t forget to look at the letters in the center of the room for they are, after all, at the center of this exhibition.  I know I’ve spent more time on the art than the letters but you can compensate by reading the catalogue where the focus is more on the letters.  However you choose to slice it, this is a van Gogh show well worth your time, and your money.

     Before horror films could give you sleepless nights, before LSD could make you hallucinate, way before we’d grown cynical about dragons, angels, and fiery apparitions in the sky, there was the Book of Revelation.  The final book in the New Testament, probably written near the end of the first century, probably by John the Evangelist, who was most probably given to visions and imagining events inspired by his reading of the Old Testament and his own vivid imagination. His descriptions of the coming events at the end of time were written in an era when the return of Christ and the Last Judgment were still held to be imminent.  It was not a stretch to believe in the reality of the seven-headed dragon, or the woman clothed in the sun. 
     To make the meaning of the book of Revelation clear you have to get into the text which, of course, is just what happened when Beatus of Liébana put his mind to work on writing a commentary on it.  An eighth-century monk who lived in northern Spain, Beatus compiled commentaries by the Fathers of the Church as they related to the Last Things, known in theological circles as Eschatology.  We do not know when his commentaries first acquired pictures but by the 10^th century, the date of our earliest such manuscript, they had found a painter with artistic sympathies that reverberated with those of the first-century writer of the original text.  Imbued with the local Mozarabic artistic tradition, he put pen and brush to parchment and set down our current Ur-version of a series of illuminations meant to bring clarity and immediacy to the text.  Of course the only people who would have seen this text were literate monks for whom the descriptions of the end of time were already vivid.  Certainly these illuminations would have solidified their apprehensions. 
     The Morgan Library owns two of the thirteen Beatus Manuscripts extant.  In this current exhibition we have the good fortune to be able to examine multiple folios of one of them, their M. 429, the Las Huelgas manuscript, because the manuscript was unbound, in order to create a facsimile.  Facsimile manuscripts are a wonderful resource and a boon to researchers interested in the study of manuscripts.  First, they save wear and tear and preserve the condition of the original as there’s little need to consult the original once there’s an accurate copy.  Secondly, libraries all over the world can own the facsimile and so art historians in Madrid, as well as in California can consult the manuscript by way of the copy.  That too is a research aid and saves wear and tear on the researchers who don’t need to travel. 
     Unlike copies produced by hand in medieval scriptoria, there’s no room for errata in a photographically generated copy.  On the other hand, I was surprised to note that fol.22 in the facsimile is not a faithful copy of the manuscript as seen in its twenty-first century condition exhibited on the wall here.  The facsimile has restored the silver and gold foil to the seven candlesticks illustrated on that folio. 
     I would venture that the facsimile’s restoration was a deliberate choice.  But why not restore the manuscript itself?  We regild horses, see General Sherman’s on Fifth Avenue and 60^th Street, we add feet and shoulders to bronze statues, see the huge bronze of Trebonianus Gallus at the Met, and we repaint slashed and acid-splashed canvases, see Rembrandt’s Night Watch.  Why don’t we refurbish manuscripts?  Is this a decision on the part of the Conservation Dept at the Morgan or is this by international agreement?
     The manuscript show is in the original library building, through the doors to your right opposite the admissions desk.  All the illustrated folios are not displayed but enough of them are for you to get a good idea of the tradition of illumination out of which these grew.
But, before you begin to look at the separated folios, displayed in clock-wise order around the room, you should look at the open facsimile directly opposite the entry door.  It gives you a good idea of the original size of the manuscript and will give you a good feel for the way in which these pictures were integrated with the text.  You will note that many of them are full-page illustrations and so are not immediately related to any text.  But as you will see in the quotes from the Book of Revelation on the didactic labels, the illustrations are dependent on the descriptions of the visions of St. John as given in the biblical text.
     One such example is in the glass case against the back wall, where you will see the double-folio illumination of the Woman clothed in the Sun and the Defeat of the Seven-headed Dragon. Click on Folio 101v-102 and see it on your screen.  The text describes The Woman clothed in the Sun with the moon under her feet and a twelve-starred crown on her head.  In this illustration “the woman” stands in the upper left corner, the moon at her feet.  Before her she sees a seven headed, ten horned, red dragon with seven diadems. This dragon stretches across the center of the two folios. Her son is taken to God at his throne, which scene we see in the upper right hand corner.  The dragon is thrown to earth and the woman given wings to escape to the desert, which is where we see her at the left.
     The early thirteenth-century painter of the Las Huelgas folios is decidedly bound to the earlier tradition from which he copied his image.  He painted in a style that goes back to the tenth century, when the earliest of the Beatus manuscripts probably was illustrated.
     What unites these Spanish recensions is evident in M.429:

·         the use of bright unmodulated colors   

·         The presence of geometric sections – colored squares, colored bands, colored circles. 

·         The use of outlines for all the figures  

·         The absence of modeling   

·         The total rejection of space and three-dimensionality as part of the illustration

     The continuity and change within this tradition can be seen in a Beatus manuscript, Add. Ms.11695 from around 1100 now in the collection of the British Library.  Still prone to bright colors in geometric compartments this Woman clothed in the sun cannot be measured for caloric output.  She is a cool cipher with a geometrically designed  disk for a sun.  The presentation of her son before the throne of God is now in a rectangular framed image and multitudes of angels have disappeared while the dragon is spread out over additional space.  It’s clearer, cooler, and more to the point.  The earlier version is expressive, freer, and less controlled.
     Another place to see continuity within change is in the comparison of two folios from the Beatus manuscripts owned by the Morgan: 86v, from M.644, from the tenth century, and 61v from the Morgan’s 429, painted two hundred and seventy-five years later.   The early image of the Vision of the Lamb of God is in the glass case near the middle of the room while the later version is on the right hand wall.  The stylistic dependency and continuity is just as described in the bullet points above, but the strict symmetry of the earlier image is destroyed by the liberty taken by the thirteenth-century painter (an image unfortunately unavailable on the internet).  He has inserted the image of the enthroned Christ and thereby displaced the image of Luke and disturbed the symmetry of the earlier image.  Also different is that the enthroned symbolic representations of the evangelists in the earlier manuscript have become standing images of the evangelists themselves.
     The circular composition derives from the origin of the four symbols of the four evangelists, that is their description in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel: the wheel in the wheel next to the four living creatures, who prefigure the four evangelists.
     It is also fascinating to observe the use of architecture within the self-imposed stylistic rules of the Mozarabic artistic tradition.  A complete denial of space, the use of strong black outlines and bright primary and secondary colors, would mandate that any three-dimensional structure (a building, a city gate, a tower) must become a flat pattern filled with color.  That is exactly what you see throughout the manuscript.  A favorite of mine is the image of the city of Heavenly Jerusalem shown as if from above, all four city walls splayed out against the page as if you could see one wall at a time from inside the heavenly city.   You can see the general idea in the tenth-century Morgan Beatus Manuscript’s image of Heavenly Jerusalem.
     If you are not familiar with Romanesque manuscript illumination, this show offers you the seldom available opportunity to see one manuscript in depth rather than only two folios in a series of different open codices.  It also gives you a chance to practice your skills of connoisseurship because you can assess the scholarly opinion that detects three hands at work on the illustrations, that is three different monks who painted this manuscript.  Another two or three were involved in copying the text, a task that probably took near to a year.
     This is not a large exhibition but it is one worthy of your attention.  The illustrations are quite unlike most that you will have seen but once observed, they exude a style you will recognize forever more.  

        Furthermore, you get to profit from the expertise of the curators at the Frick, who have cherry-picked these fourteen “masterpieces” for the pleasure of your viewing and in keeping with the works in their own permanent collection.  Unfortunately they have been forced to hang the paintings where they have been able to make room for them.  So it is that the larger seven canvases are in the small oval room at the far end of the garden court and the remaining seven images are in the garden court flanking the entrance to the larger exhibition space.  This makes for a few fortuitous pairings (Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour on one wall and El Greco and Andrea Del Sarto on another).  But, for the most part, what you get to see are Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, and English paintings from the fifteenth to the nineteenth-centuries, a mini-exhibition of some major gems.

        It is hardly possible to choose among the pictures; almost without exception they are wonderful examples of an artist’s work.  So I would counsel you to expect to spend at least forty-five minutes with these fourteen pictures by Frans Hals, Nicolas Poussin, Filippo Lippi, Annibale Carracci, Zurbaran, Valentin de Boulogne, and David.  That’s really all you need to know before you set off for East Seventieth Street.  However, if you want a more in-depth walk-through, continue reading.

         To give you just a taste of what’s in store, begin, just outside the oval room, where you will find the two Lippi panels, perfect examples of Lippi’s mature style.  These are gentle creatures, these saints beautifully rendered in the bright colors of Lippi’s tempera paints, and with the even light and the careful delineation of chiaroscuro so they are fully realized in three dimensions.  Both St. Anthony Abbot and Saint Michael are in that strange walled space that Lippi seized upon as the solution to the problem of how to deal with perspective in the rendering of infinite space.  He blocked it off with a wall and let the sky speak for infinity. 

        It makes me sad to think that someone actually sawed through the wood panel and created three images where once there was one grand composition of the Madonna and Child flanked by these two saints.  One can only hope that somewhere, someday, this painting can be restored to its original size and composition. 

        Almost four centuries later Joseph Mallord William Turner painted The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, around to your left from the Lippis.  This has none of the gentle nature of Lippi’s religious art but rather the dramatic effect of a terrifying current event witnessed by Turner from a vantage point on the Thames.  As is frequent in his work, Turner has made light the focal point of the image.  Here it is not the setting or rising sun but the intense wind-blown flames of the wooden buildings that burned out of control through the night of October 16, 1834.  The fire, according to contemporary reports,  began by 6 in the evening, just as the sun would have been setting in mid-October.  The winds carried the fire from the House of Lords to the House of Commons and it was only at 1:30 in the morning that the tide permitted the arrival of fire-fighting equipment on the river.  The drama of the wind-swept flames, the intensity of the color and the heat, are so vividly captured by Turner that you can sense the undulations in the flames ascendant in the air, and in the reflections in the water.  Since the late Titian, nobody has painted the light of a fire with the same intensity as Turner when he captures the light in his golden yellows and oranges.

        The Carracci and the Poussin are also pictures that deal with light but without the dramatic effect of Turner’s fire-light.  Carracci captures the refraction of light as it passes through glass, the wonderful Venetian cristello of Renaissance manufacture, and Poussin uses light to emphasize the important figures in his composition and to focus on the divine nature of light from the heavens.

        The juxtaposition of Valentin de Boulogne’s Samson of 1630, and Frans Hals’ Portrait of Tieleman Roosterman of 1634, hints at the multiplicity of styles in European painting at that date and contrasts the differences in approach to history painting and portraiture.  In both, the costume is essential to the depiction of the man, the powerful physicality of the one and the richesse of the other.  The dramatic lighting on Samson adds tension to the picture but at the same time serves to obscure parts of the sitter’s face and features.  It is quite the opposite with the Hals portrait where the details of the velvet doublet are obscured while the face is clearly delineated.  The intensity of the sitter’s direct gaze is also an important distinction between the two pictures.  Roosterman is in contact with the viewer in a way that is not part of the depiction of the historical figure of Samson.

        At the half-way point, and not even into the room with the larger canvases, it seems unfair to stop with the simple admonition to go see the show, so let me go on to tell you that the picture in the place of honor, the Velazquez Portrait of the Jester Calabazas, seems an awkward composition, oddly disproportionate (as was, apparently, the dwarf jester) and with none of the colorism or bravura brushstroke that sets this artist apart from other contemporary Spanish painters.  Calabazas’ extended right hand seems to rest on the base of the pilaster but if that is the case how does the stool fit into the space between the figure and the plinth on which the pilaster rests.  The whole picture seems oddly scrubbed, flattened, and lacking in the intense oily glint more usual in this artist’s work. It seems the least exciting of the works shown here.

        On the other hand, Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Andrew, 1606, is a bravura performance by this artist.  A potentially static picture of a crucified saint and a now=paralyzed man who had sought to untie him, is enlivened by the twisted position of the executioner on a ladder to the left, and the arc created by the saint’s head as it leans to the right.  The equally off-frontal positioning of the witnesses who circle the foot of the cross animates the scene.  It is, of course, the deep shadow in opposition to the focused light that brings the importance to the act and the spirituality to our reaction.  Caravaggio taps into our empathy by making us feel the weariness of the saint at the last moment of life; muscles still tensed, his eyes have already begun to loose focus and to close.

        St. Andrew was beloved and venerated in southern Italy particularly since the saint’s body had been brought to Amalfi in the thirteenth century as booty from the Crusades. In his self-imposed exile from Rome, Caravaggio spent the last four years of his life shuttling between Naples, Sicily, and Malta.  Clearly he found time to work on commissions and this canvas left Italy for Spain in 1610, onboard ship with the departing viceroy of Naples, just days before the artist’s death.  

        Some thirty-five years later Georges de la Tour painted Saint Peter Repentant, an image, which by its deep shadows and pointedly focused areas of light, is clearly influenced by Caravaggio’s style.  As George de la Tour was a northern artist it is most likely that Caravaggio’s influence was once removed and came through the Utrecht school of tenebrists, the same source of influence on Rembrant.  Note too that the artist is re-using the northern motif of the falling tears first seen in fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting.  It adds up to a cool and calculated picture that contains much symbolism and depicts emotion while it fails to elicit the same.  I would come to a similar conclusion for Christ and the Virgin in the House in Nazareth, Zurbaran’s painting on the opposite wall – much symbolism but little empathetic reaction. 

        On the opposite side of the door-way are paintings by Andera del Sarto, The Sacrifice of Isaac, and El Greco, The Holy Family with Mary Magdalen.  Some fifty years apart and divided by the expanse of the Mediterranean Sea, both artists use compositions well establish in the fifteenth century. Andrea is more naturalistic and El Greco is more stylized with figures that are elongated and larger than life.  The comparison even holds for the flesh tones and the colors as El Greco whitens the skin and visibly whitens the blue hues of the drapery and the sky.  If Andrea del Sarto is known as a Mannerist, a comparison of these two pictures makes you realize the relativity of that label.

        The last picture, but the one that may have grabbed your immediate attention, is the painting of Cupid and Psyche by Jacques-Louis David.  Painted in 1817, it is at least one hundred and seventy years newer than any of the pictures in this room and the neo-classical style of clearly delineated figures that are brightly lit and erotically entwined, makes this canvas stand apart.  If you don’t know the story I hardly have to tell you who’s doing what to whom, but it must get rather cumbersome with those big wings on Cupid’s back and don’t they risk ruining that bow if he leaves it propped up on the bed like that?  This is almost kiddie porn as these are not the faces, nor the bodies, of consenting adults. According to doumentation the male model (an American) was nineteen and the female (who posed separately) was seventeen. 

Interestingly, it is not just our twenty-first century sensibility that finds Cupid’s expression insipid and perhaps even annoying.  There is contemporary commentary that refers to it as “the vacant grin of an ideot [sic]…” and also to Cupid as one whose “…expression of happiness has been rendered as no more than a cynical grimace”. It looks more like a slimy sneer to me.  But, David must have known what he was doing because he knew of the patron’s obsession with the myth and he knew what would please him.  With so specific an audience perhaps it should not surprise us that we find it less pleasing; certainly competent, but not pleasing.

Connoisseurship is a tough business, but someone’s got to do it, and who better than a museum curator?  After all, they deal with the real thing on a daily basis.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art seems to be positioning itself for a blue ribbon in re-attributions, or at least for aiding and abetting.  This was notable in the two most recent exhibitions of Italian paintings, those of Fra Filippo Lippi and Fra Angelico.  Now, in the exhibition of paintings by Antonello da Messina, we are confronted once again by works newly attributed to the eponymous artist.

         Of course, that makes a first-rate justification for a loan, or a means to highlight paintings from the hometown collection. This is true of the jewel of a show that focuses on the painting of Antonello da Messina, a talented artist of original insight and little documentation.  It is precisely that lack of consistent documentation that makes Antonello a gold mine for connoisseurs.