by Wouldn’t it be nice, as you look back on the year of art, to start with some pictures? To give an insight into one or two of our museums’ recent significant acquisitions, such as Portrait of Mai by Joshua Reynolds (c 1776), which the National Portrait Gallery, together with the Getty in Los Angeles, acquired for £50 million?
The National Gallery now owns Henri Rousseau’s Portrait of Joseph Brummer (1909), which shows the Hungarian art dealer sitting in a wicker chair, smoking. The Royal Collection rediscovered a “lost” painting of Susanna and the Elders (1610) by Artemisia Gentileschi – the most modest of old masters of our MeToo moment – in a storeroom at Hampton Court. (Although to the best of my knowledge, it was not wrapped in an Ikea bag, as was Vincent van Gogh’s Spring Garden (1884), which was stolen from a Dutch museum in 2020, when it was returned this year.)
Isn’t it wonderful to see the most remarkable contemporary paintings, such as Peter Doig’s vision of an alpinist in a harpooner’s outfit crossing the Alps, on view at the Courtauld? Or the Camden Art Centre’s superb exhibition of Iraqi-born, London-based Mohammed Sami’s haunting, dreamlike paintings that evoke life under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad.
But great art cannot live up to a disastrous year for our most esteemed institutions – notably, the British Museum, which suffered a self-inflicted annus horribilis with long-lasting consequences. This summer, it was revealed that around 1,500 artefacts had been stolen from the museum over 20 years (and another 500 had been damaged) which was, in the words of its chairman, George Osborne, the victim of an “inside job”. (A senior curator was fired earlier this year; he denied wrongdoing, according to his family.) Director Hartwig Fischer was forced to resign over his handling of the affair, but, overnight, the museum’s reputation as a safe haven for millions of treasures. shattered. This month, he was even a piece of cake in an online competition: “Have you heard about the Christmas cake on display in the British Museum? It was stolen.”
The fiasco intensified the long row about the Elgin Marbles, which recently resurfaced, when Rishi Sunak canceled a meeting with the Greek prime minister at the last minute after the latter called, during an interview with him the BBC, to bring back the Parthenon statues – which inspired. a front page challenge to our PM from one of the Greek tabloids: “F— you b——!” There was also a sense of unease that ten years after it was closed to the public, the magnificent vaulted Reading Room is endless.
Whoever replaces Fischer permanently will have a lot to do, implement the reforms recommended this week by an independent review, and formulate an up-to-date compensation policy that does not comply with the British Museum Act which is 60 year old. In March, the Vatican agreed to return to Athens three pieces of sculpture from the Parthenon; if legislation in this country needs to be changed to do the right thing, and reflect public opinion, Parliament must change it.
At Tate Britain, the re-treatment of the permanent collection, under the leadership of director Alex Farquharson, was, in my opinion, a great example of relentlessly framing artworks in a social and political context rather than an aesthetic one. (It also didn’t need it: the last renovation was only ten years ago.)
At points, the labelling, so inappropriate throughout British history, seemed positively ashamed of the pictures it referred to. An introduction to a gallery devoted to art made between 1760 and 1830, entitled “Troubled Glamour”, seemed to suggest, by “promot[ing] a sense of harmony, order and elegance”, ignoring a “tension” that was “rarely evident in contemporary art”, paintings by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough were indifferent, even duplicitous; George Stubbs’ paired “pictorial” paintings Reapers and Haymakers (both 1785) were criticized for being “ideal images” that did not reflect the “hard truths” of rural labor.
Elsewhere, Joseph Van Aken’s The English Family at Tea (c 1720) appeared to have been omitted so that a worship label could remind visitors that “tea was a bitter drink, sweetened with sugar produced in the British colonies in the Caribbean with labour. enslaved African people”.
Such metaphorical attacks are even less welcome when museums are still facing physical attacks on works of art in their care: last month, for example, climate activists hammered at The Rokeby Venus (almost a century after after suffragette Mary Richardson took a bite of her flesh. canvas); thankfully, after only minor damage, Diego Velázquez’s painting is now on display again in the National Gallery.
These days – perhaps under internal pressure from younger staff – many museums seem to believe they should campaign for social justice. Shouldn’t they, however, balance the concerns of the present with a commitment to understanding the complexities of the past, rather than making glowing judgments about it? Everyone recognizes that, in response to complex social forces, the way we look at art – and, indeed, the art that is looked at now – has changed in recent years; as the eminent American curator, Helen Molesworth, told me recently: “People are battered rams telling the first twenty years of the 21st century saying, ‘No, we will not have it, we absolutely demand a culture that it will affect him. relation to the heterogeneity of the community in general.’”
Of course, art can (and should) reflect contemporary events: this year two contrasting works of art, both powerful and memorable, were presented in response to the Grenfell Tower fire. Using footage shot from a helicopter before covering the ravaged rise, Steve McQueen’s 24-minute Grenfell film orbited the charred ruin, relentlessly and relentlessly. Meanwhile, Chris Ofili (mostly) avoided the reality that McQueen had documented; his much sweeter offering, a huge, colorful mural, set within an Arcadian domain, across three sides of Tate Britain’s north staircase, offered consolation.
There’s a reason ArtReview magazine chose artist Nan Goldin to top its annual “Power 100” list of the most influential people in the art world. It is the American photographer – who, in recent years, has campaigned against members of the philanthropic Sackler family for their alleged role in the US opioid crisis, through their ownership of Purdue Pharma (they have denied wrongdoing or personal responsibility) – representation of the artist taking on a very specific and fashionable Role: the role of the heroic social crusader, “channeling”, as the magazine says, “moving to change”.
But to avoid groupthink within our museums, we need leaders who are visionary and strong-minded, as well as having a moral compass. It is hard to say whether these are the strengths of the surprising new choice for director at Tate Modern, Karin Hindsbo; Before her appointment, the Dane was not registered on the radar of anyone I spoke to.
Her great predecessor, Frances Morris, a tough act to follow, gave a beautiful address during a memorial at Tate Britain this autumn for the artist Phyllida Barlow, who died in March, and will be remembered for her playful, artistic sculptures with a heifer. together.
Not all British galleries went haywire. Glasgow’s Burrell Collection was announced as Art Fund Museum of the Year (although Glasgow Life, the charity which manages it, along with other museums in the city, listed 1,750 artefacts, including a £3 million sculpture by Auguste Rodin, as “unlocated” .ie, lost). The National Portrait Gallery re-opened after a class reform that refrained from disdainful finger-wagging “didactics”. And away from all the “hot button” issues – such as the recent joke about a Hertfordshire museum identifying the cross-dressing Roman emperor Elagabalus (AD 204-222) as “transgender” – there was more pleasure simple, crowd pleaser. was. At the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, a retrospective of Grayson Perry – now giving David Hockney a run for his money as Britain’s most popular living artist – was up to the title (Smash Hits), and has been visited by nearly 100,000 satisfied customers (although it left this correspondent lukewarm).
Still, Hockney could stop being “young” (in fact, 63 years old) for a while. The 86-year-old Yorkshireman appeared invincible in the year the NPG revived his Drawing from Life exhibition – which was seen briefly in 2020 before the pandemic forced it to close. He also unveiled an autobiographical “immersive” light show, which ran for more than ten months in a new four-storey space behind London’s King’s Cross; he approved a show of about 120 works in Tokyo; presented a video on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage; the projection of a pair of digital Christmas trees onto the chimney of Battersea Power Station; and revealed a dodgy portrait of Harry Styles scrawny, ferrety-looking, in which the British singer appeared, with tousled hair, dressed in red-and-yellow-stripes and a row of pearls.
There were also pearls aplenty in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition, which brought together 28 paintings by the 17th-century Dutch painter – more than any previous show – and, unsurprisingly, attracted 650,000 visitors. Happily, according to attendance records, there is a huge audience out there for the Old Masters.
