Rome Journal XI: Theory of Value

“Judith Beheading Holofernes” by Caravaggio

The career of Denis Mahon (1910-201l), the aristocratic art historian and collector is the inspiration behind the “Da Guercino a Caravaggio, Sir Denis Mahon and italian art of the XVIIth century” show at the Palazzo Barberini.” Mahon who was the author of Studies in Seicento Art and Theory was an important force in both beating the drum for and rediscovering much neglected baroque art. For instance before he discovered it, many people thought the Caravaggio, “The Young St. John the Baptist,” hanging in the office of the Mayor of Rome, was a copy. He played a major role in the National Gallery’s acquisition of “Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist.” Talking about his collector’s nose, Mahon is quoted as saying, ”When I bought those paintings no one gave them value. Nowadays no one can price them.” Just down the block from the “Da Guercino” show is S. Maria Della Vittoria where Bernini’s  “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” is a permanent part of the plant and the walk to the Palazzo Barberini is the perfect icing on one’s baroque cake. But one wonders if you can have your cake and eat it too. The show touts Mahon’s eye for beauty, but do beauty and commerce go hand in hand? What happens to the notion of disinterested scholarship when the results of years of study turn into the proceeds from numerous sales? The scholar is like a psychoanalyst with the art works like his patient. Is there not a danger when the line is crossed and the scholar or analyst start to play a role in the artwork or patient’s life? And isn’t the very notion of value confused when, when esthetics and commerce become intertwined?

Frederick Wiseman’s "National Gallery"

In a sense Frederick Wiseman was the wrong person to make National Gallery, which is currently completing a run at Film Forum. His signature reticence, characterized by a total lack of narration, becomes the work of art itself. In other films about schools,  hospitals, the welfare system, an insane asylum (Titicut Follies), La Comedie-Francaise, and even the Crazy Horse in Paris, Wiseman’s almost diaphanous docu-novel style with its omniscient seemingly absent author, lets the content breathe. The feeling of seeing a Wiseman film is that of being parachuted into a war zone; the absence of plot, of a beginning, middle or end is mitigated by leitmotifs that create a music. But here the subject is looking itself and at times you end up gazing admiringly at the film, more than the collocation of art works comprising its subject, London’s National Gallery. Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in the Guggenheim has often been criticized as competing with and also being unfriendly to art. National Gallery is hardly an unfriendly witness, but in a museum which exhibits many da Vincis, the film is a “Mona Lisa,” continually calling attention to its own enigmatic gaze. All that being said National Gallery is amongst many things a Thomas Struth party. Struth as you may recall is the a photographer who records people looking at art and National Gallery's portraits of people watching Rembrandt portraits and other masterpieces are a singularly affecting part of the movie (in one an attendee with earphones is caught gazing at a docent giving a lecture he can’t hear). The recent The New Rijksmuseum film portrayed another art institution with a similarly broad canvas, but it had an axe to grind, in terms of the museum’s relationship to its surrounding environment. The New Rijksmuseum is to the National Gallery what Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is to say O’Neill Long Day’s Journey Into Night. National Gallery, which includes a moving scene where a class of blind and visually impaired people are lectured on a Pissarro, ultimately deals with museums and museum going in such as way as to demonstrate what one of Wiseman’s subjects calls “a wonderful opportunity to study the human condition.”

Washington Journal II: Millais’ Ophelia

Ophelia by John Everet Millais (1851-2)

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, op. 18 is indubitably moving. But is it great art? The strains of it accompany the ill-fated lovers in David Lean’s l945 film adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, a powerfully moving work of emotion in its own right. The Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design 1848-1900 begs the same question. One of the most famous works of Pre-Raphaelite art, the painting of the drowning Ophelia by John Everet Millais, is a centerpiece of the exhibit. As you walk into the gallery in which it’s displayed, it hits you right between the eyes. You are struck by the apparition of sepulchered beauty. Millais in fact has gone where Shakespeare feared to tread, showing what in Shakespeare was only spoken by Queen Gertrude (Act IV, Scene VII) and ambiguously at that. Did Ophelia kill herself or was the drowning accidental? It’s a question Shakespeare scholars have troubled over  for centuries and which Millais doesn’t answer in the painting. But what is the difference between romanticism and estheticization? The Pre-Raphaelite movement which came into existence during the height of the Industrial Revolution was known for the propagation of the esthetic as a counterpoint to material values. Yet this romanticized Ophelia in all her sublime glory embellishes the bard’s words in way that ultimately lessens their imaginative effect.

Washington Journal I: Handjob

Albrecht Durer loved hands. There is the famous drawing of the hands praying which is blown up as a promotional poster at the entrance to the extensive show Albrecht Durer: Master Drawings, Watercolors and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery. Durer was, like Rembrandt, a great self-portraitist. The show parenthetically features a precocious self-portrait Durer did of himself when he was thirteen which contains the inscription, “I drew this after myself in front of a mirror in the year 1484 when I was a child.” And the exhibit also features the famed drawings of his left hand, with the wooing gesture, the obscene gesture (he gives his viewer the finger) and a pointing gesture. When he paints Lucretia stabbing herself Durer emphasizes the hand that does the dirty work. He painted the hands of his patron the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and he painted an elderly man’s aged veinous hand. Hands obviously had great meaning for Durer who as the curators point out was the “German equivalent of Leonardo in Italy.” But why do we admire Durer? His purported greatness is a part of the received wisdom of the ages and seeing the magnificent exhibition on display in Washington is a unique opportunity to think about his work. The series of engravings "Melencolia I,” (1514), “Knight, Death and the Devil” (1513) and “Saint Jerome in His Study” might be said to have derived from the Durer’s Bergman period such is the depth of their raw emotional power. The famed “The Great Piece of Turf” (1503) and "Wing of a Blue Roller” (1512) both demonstrate Durer's talent in the service of natural themes. “The Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I” (1518) reveals the artist in both watercolor and technicolor. “The Visor for a Helmet” of 1519 with its almost surrealist imagery is a dreamscape. The fact that he was the son of a goldsmith is usually offered as an explanation for the delicate and detailed craftmanships which characterizes his style. But technique alone cannot account for the power of Durer’s work.