MMMWOP's artblog focuses on works on paper but can include any museum, show, collection, auction, artist, or artwork that might get overlooked. MMMWOP will keep it moving but welcomes contributions from others, particularly about what's going on outside New York. Send an email with your information or commentary and how you'd like to be credited to James at director.mmmwop@gmail.com.

September through mid November 2009 WOPblog

Mea Culpa

I have been neglectful of this blog of late, not because of lack of things of interest but because of the impingement of life on the time left to write about it. First I was finishing off the devarnishing of a painting from the 1960s that combined every possible stylistic difficulty: it was an acrylic, which unlike oil paint has the same resistance to the available solvents that the varnish has; the paint was very thinly applied; the varnish was in some places very thickly applied; and there was no layer of gesso between the canvas and the paint, so the canvas was expressed through the paint and had allowed the varnish to reservoir in each tiny weave mark. Alligator scaling in the varnish did not simplify matters, but the final result satisfied even me, and its appearance in a minimalist antique oak frame that I found to replace its original phony baroque one was a great improvement. As soon as remember what file I put the photos in I'll post one.

When I began collecting art, I took to pricing everything I saw in museums, since it isn't the cynic but the true believer who knows the price of everything, as that means he's prepared to put his money where his mouth is. When I began collecting frames, I started going through museums looking only at the frames and not at the art (which gets one pestered by guards). Last week I was looking at two Whistlers in the National Gallery, and my first thought was how difficult they would be to clean. I have become an art housewife.

I was in Washington because, second, I was carrying Asher Durand's portrait of Mary Sturges down to Bill Adair, the master craftsman who leads Gold Leaf Studios in Washington, DC, and is something of a legend among frame restorers. I had acquired the painting in a frame I took to be from about 1870 (Adair pushed that date backward to 1860), and he—being a childhood friend of the Magee family, who are descendants of Mary's son Jonathan (the great American collector) and who have now acquired the painting from me—was going to do the frame's restoration.

Third, I was setting up the Web site for my own business in art, frames, restoration, and research, jpappfineart.com. The snooty view might be that a museum and a business don't mix, but to me a museum is one expression of art (responding to the desire to share the image with others and educate them on what it can tell), and business is another expression (responding to the human desire to acquire the object). The thing that disturbs me about the art business is not that it involves money but that it sets itself up on the luxury goods model in posh galleries at expensive addresses and waits for passing whales to swim by in order to charge them four to ten times what an object is worth.

I think art is a necessity, not a luxury, and ordinary people ought to be able to own it in its original form, not as reproductions. Hence I bargain-hunt. mmmwop.org and jpappfineart.com are both devoted to the idea of the ordinary collector. I don't collect to create a permanent monument to myself but rather to discover things, and after the discovery I want to move on to something else, so my collection is always in flux. As the auction houses and dealers take a larger and larger cut for their doubtful imprimaturs, why not set up for oneself? Every man his own Duveen.

Wigram Family Update

Speaking of the failings of the auction houses, two weeks ago a professor at Oberlin, researching that institution's Lawrence portrait of Lady Wigram, contacted me about mmmwop's drawing (below) of the whole family, which was exactly the hoped for result of putting my collection online. He drew my attention to an engraving in the National Library of Ireland of the finished version of Smart's Wigram family portrait.

This was the first time I had seen a version of the finished work. I take it as accurate because it comports with Smart's partial studies in pencil (at Christie's and in Daphne Foskett's book) that I had already seen. I had assumed, from mmmwop's drawing, that the partial studies were life drawings of people who then got rearranged in the portrait. It turns out that the rearrangement took place after mmmwop's drawing. In general, the people in the background of the mmmwop drawing got pulled to the front for the final version, resulting in a rather frieze-like arrangement of this enormous family. A little girl was added (presumably grandchild Eleanor Tottenham, with her back to the painter, so a new sitting wouldn't have to be done). Difficult technical problems were avoided (such as one daughter playing the harp and one son being viewed through its strings). And, quite fascinatingly, the sitters were regrouped by age and gender. Yet they all retain the same individual poses they have in mmmwop's sketch.

Hence we now know beyond a reasonable doubt that mmmwop's drawing (which I bought from Christie's as "English School, 19th Century" for £60) is Smart's preliminary study or modello and not a contemporary artist's copy of Smart's finished work. I don't know of any other such rough preliminary pen and ink studies by Smart, though there are rough portrait sketches from his voyage to India that Foskett refers to as watercolors (they look like pen and ink from the photos). But this is the only time he undertook such a complicated subject, requiring blocking of the figures, as the rest of his life was devoted to portrait busts.

The other thing comparison with the engraving reveals is Smart's extensive restrategizing. Whether the regrouping of the subjects by age and gender was his idea or his patron's, the simplification of his initial conception would certainly seem to be a result of the feeling he had bitten off more than he could technically chew. Altogether this is an exciting discovery, for which I would like to thank Professor Nicholas Jones.

In Washington, DC: Gold Leaf Studios

This was an Aladdin's cave to visit and not only because Bill Adair treated me to a delicious three-hour lunch during which we ranged over a vast variety of topics. One might say of him that he was in the right place at the right time, having got started in the period frame business when museums were tossing these artifacts out as somehow interfering with appreciation of the artworks they were made for. But he was also the right man in the right place at the right time, having an innate appreciation for these glorious antiques. His studio is filled with absolute treasures, and the care and skill with which he and his long-time craftsmen both restore them and create faithful reproductions is a pleasure to watch (which you can on quite a nice video at his Web site).

I always like the atmosphere of workshops, maybe because my father was a craftsman, maybe because one knows something is being produced there in a clear and transparent fashion, whereas the sleekness of offices always gives the feeling that someone (the client) is being hoodwinked out of their money and someone (the employee) out of their time. Money is limitless and useless, but time is finite and invaluable, though few people seem to be offended at theirs being wasted.

In Washington, DC: The National Museum of Women in the Arts

From Bill Adair's studio I dashed over to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where my friend Elizabeth Welles is a docent. It is a cumbersome name for a small (but quite fine) permanent collection. The same could be said of the Manhattan Micromuseum of Works on Paper, but our initials are more easily pronounceable, as well as reminiscent of the most popular and most irritating song of the nineties ("Mmmbop").

Anyway, it was a pleasure to finally see many of the women artists I had still only read about or viewed reproductions of, and the museum has some exceptionally fine pieces by more commonly seen artists like Vigée Le Brun and Angelica Kauffmann. It is the brainchild of Wilhelmina and Wallace Holladay, who, on encountering in the 1950s a painting by the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Clara Peeters, began to collect works by women artists. I feel obliged to mention them as they have gone against the modern taste in effacing their names from this worthy project. It also has visiting exhibitions, which included some nice Aboriginal paintings while I was there. Do go.

In Baltimore: The Walters Museum

With the treasure houses of Washinton an hour away, it is easy to neglect Baltimore (where I stayed overnight with friends), but it is well worth the visit. Alas that the Walters Art Museum, in the center of historic Baltimore by Baltimore's much nicer (because smaller) Washington Monument, has been disfigured by an inhuman modern addition, but the nice old galleries are still intact. There is no apology made for what father and son William and Henry Walters collected, which includes a lot of nineteenth-century art that has long been out of fashion with museums (though perhaps is coming in again, as the new nineteenth-century galleries at the Met attest).

I had gone to the Walters seeking a Sully version of West's Arethusa (a study for which latter mmmwop has) that at one time, at least, was supposed to have been on loan. If it was, it wasn't anymore, but while I was waiting for the museum to open I chatted with a volunteer also waiting outside, who and whose husband turned out to have donated a Lawrence Alma-Tadema to the museum, so I went to see that instead. Given the prices Alma-Tademas fetch now, I thought donating it was extraordinarily generous gesture, and I told her of the painting that Allen Funt, the creator of Candid Camera, bought in London in the 1960s for £100 on being told by the dealer that it was by "Alma-Tadema, the worst painter in the world"; sold at Sotheby's in 1973 for £28,000; and which was most recently sold at Christie's in 1993 for £1.6 million—which is more than twice the rate of return than for David Rockefeller's $72 million Rothko (bought for $10,000 in 1960) and in only three-fifths the time.

Mrs. Carrozza's Alma-Tadema, The Blind Beggar, was very nice, and with an Alma-Tadema portrait of a black sailor recently acquired by the museum made an excellent addition of breadth to the classic (and classical) lounging ancients from the Walterses' original Alma-Tadema collection. I'll also note, in honor of the Walters' volunteers, that one of them pursued me from the front desk to the fourth floor to give me further information on the absent Sully.

But in condemnation of the Walters, after I had got through most of the museum I was ordered by a security guard to remove my hat, because the ceiling-hung camera system has not been designed for ladies, gentlemen, or orthodox Jews, who do not remove their hats in a museum. The couverte and découverte is (as any reader of Saint-Simon knows) a fraught subject, and I take the line of the Spanish grandees and refuse to remove my hat, so I left. I also left Paris's ridiculous Musée de la Légion d'Honneur after they insisted I remove my panama because the building was a national monument. Regicides have no business telling people to remove their hats, as they can't be relied on to stop before removing their heads.

The invasion of one's person by absurd security demands must be equally resisted. America is beginning to get like San Marcos in Woody Allen's Bananas: "All citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check." If security designers don't have the wherewithal to put a camera where it can see people without their having to undress for it, they should seek a less demanding job. You would think museums and libraries would want to encourage visitors to come, not pester them when they get there. The Met and the New York Public Library are continually putting more stringent rules on what you can bring in and check (shopping, fencing masks, all the things Al Qaeda has used to enact terrorism in the past), which requires you to either to have a car to pack your stuff in or to make these institutions your one activity of the day instead of integrate them into your life.

I note that no such restrictions exist at mmmwop.

Back in Washington: At the National Gallery

After shaking the dust of the Walters from my hat I took the train to Union Station with the ambition to do the National Gallery, Freer, National Portrait Gallery, and Smithsonian American Art Museum in one afternoon. I bagged the Freer and wasted time on the East Building of the National Gallery, which is big on the outside but holds very little on the inside, like a Chevy Nova my family used to own. I don't know if the West Building is bigger than the Met, but it's practically all post-Medieval European and American paintings, so (unlike the Met) I want to look at every single piece.

And I believe I did. All that I will say about the paintings is (1) that they are largely the collections of four men, Andrew Mellon, P. A. B. and Joseph Widener, and Samuel Kress, which means they were largely acquired by the legendary dealer Lord Duveen, who also was largely responsible for the contents of the Huntington Museum as well as major parts of the National Gallery in London. This is a jaw-dropping and unnoted accomplishment. Despite his megalomania (or no doubt because of it), he did successfully ransack the drawing rooms of Europe for the galleries of America. And (2), one after another fine painting in the nineteenth-century American galleries came from Jonathan Sturges's collection, either bequeathed by his grandson Frederick Sturges, Jr. (an Edmonds of The Bashful Cousin, two Kensetts of The Beach at Beverly and Beacon Rock, and a Durand of a Forest in the Morning Light) or acquired from the descendants of Jonathan's son Henry, our friend Mrs. Rousseau's grandfather (Thomas Cole's Crawford's Notch).

Oh, and (3), I was pleased to see a Steinlen oil on display in a little gallery amongst six Toulouse-Lautrecs. mmmwop's full-length Steinlen self-portrait in charcoal, the earliest published and possibly earliest Steinlen self-portrait in existence, will be an upcoming "Masterpiece of the Month."

Since this is supposed to be a WOPblog, I shall skip to the National's exhibition "Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings 1500–1800," which is supposed to do the Morgan's "Rococo to Revolution" one better. It doesn't. Each of its galleries increased my appreciation of J. P. Morgan's (and the Morgan's staff's) collecting abilities, as the Morgan's one-gallery exhibition contains almost entirely first-rate pieces and the National's five-gallery one mostly second- and third-rate. There were some agreeable Bouchers; marginal Watteaus; a nice chalk and pastel head of a Macedonian soldier by an assistant of Le Brun (a name one should use only one's nose and no consonants to pronounce correctly); a very nice ca. 1625 bust of an old woman, full face, in black, red, and white chalk by Lagneau; and a Benvenuto Cellini that it was a bit of a stretch to include ("worked in France").

Most delightful to me was Saint-Aubin's black chalk sketch of two men sketching out of doors, pads on their laps, umbrellas above them, and two pretty women sprawled on the ground in front (not sitters—the two men are ignoring them and sketching the middle distance). But not much else was of interest. An exhibition of prints next door was more beguiling, though the rubric "The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy 1850–1900" did puzzlingly little to illuminate the pieces in the show.

Across the hall I was tempted by a tiny exhibition purporting to be of master drawings from the Armand Hammer collection. Anyone who has visited the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles will know that he had lots of money and was entirely bereft of taste. My rule to concentrate the mind is always to define what was the best thing and the worst thing in any museum one has visited. Two employees of the Hammer asked me on my last visit there what was the best thing, and I had to confess there wasn't one. (The worst was a nineteenth-century genre painting of a monsignor listening, with an amusing expression, to the confession of someone naughty.)

Well, one could see from the exhibition that Hammer bought drawings by choosing the most famous artists, but no other criterion was obvious. There was a nice Ingres of an Englishwoman looking very English, but what Ingres isn't nice?, and the rest were a nonnotable Michelangelo and Manet, some average Tiepolos, etc. A muddy Raphael was supposed to be the only full-scale Renaissance compositional cartoon in the United States, and perhaps it is a rare thing, but Raphael's genius doesn't seem to me to be that of a draftsman. I say this despite one of his chalk studies having gone for £30 million yesterday in London.

Still in Washington: The National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum

I buzzed through the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, since I went there only to see Durand portraits, having just dropped off one, and there were but two, of John Quincy Adams' granddaughters, painted as a thank you when Durand was doing portraits of all the living presidents (and copies of the dead ones) for Jonathan Sturges's mentor and partner in groceries Luman Reed during the mid 1830s. However, dashing by it, I saw the collection was spectacular, including a striking West self-portrait from the year before his death. He was claimed as an American artist though he left this country forever in his twenties and American museums invariably call our immigrants American, too.

I did slow down for their exhibit of works on paper. This included a huge John Steuart Curry self-portrait in charcoal, pencil, and conté crayon; a pretty little Sheeler watercolor of an interior beset by various American folk patterns; and a fine Joseph Stella profile portrait of one Clara Fasana that looked like a cross between a Steinlen and a Munch. There was also an Isaac Soyer of a waitress about which I wrote in my notes "Better than Raphael." If you accuse me of demeaning the Renaissance master, the reference is to Isaac's brother, Raphael Soyer, who, with Raphael's twin Moses, is always on the market, which Isaac isn't, which is odd.

Jane Austen at the Morgan

I have scarce a justification to mention this show apart from its inclusion of a drawing of a lace pattern in one of Austen's letters and a drawing of a barouche in Nabokov's notes for a lecture on Austen, neither of which will rock the artistic world (though it's interesting that Austen does a draft in pencil or chalk and then inks it in to finish: very meticulous). There is also a pretty Sandby watercolor of a dull park, but otherwise the many manuscripts of the exhibition are chiefly and naughtily enlivened by most un-Austenian Gillray prints of Regency people of fashion, as well as by a Blake engraving of a woman who might be someone but probably isn't.

Janeites of every age, race, and sex packed the exhibit hall (which is rather tenuously suspended in the air) while I was present, having shown up for a fascinating tour by Declan Kiely and his co-curator Clara Drummond, who shouted manfully (and womanfully) above this mob who might have been, but for the less elegant dress, crushing their way into the Assembly Rooms at Bath. Now it has cleared out a bit, and the variety and extent of the manuscripts (letters, novels, and expense accounts) are well worth a look.

At the Met: North Italian Drawings, 1410–1550

My friend Kate commented on the Italian drawings now being exhibited in the Lehman wing that they were surprisingly poor, which encouraged me to go and see them even more than if I had been told they were notably good. The explanation is that they are extremely early, mostly quattrocento. From the fifteenth century very few works on paper survive, and the artists hadn't quite got the hang of the possibilities of their new support and its media. Our sense of what old master drawings should be comes from the complex, fluid, and ambitious pieces of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The drawings in this exhibition are constrained by an earlier technique and aesthetic, but I thought them extremely interesting as well as enjoyable, even if one has to stretch oneself to enjoy them.

One rather formal metalpoint on gessoed paper (from the Veneto in the early sixteenth century) gives us a taste of the old media. Most other pieces are in ink or chalk. A fat horse by a follower of Stefano da Verona (1375–1438) is the first piece that caught my eye, being both a natural evocation of folds of skin (the horse is really too overfed to reveal muscular structure) and an accurate capture of the arrangement of the horse's feet in the trot (impressive given that artists were misrepresenting the gallop until Eadweard Muybridge's stop action photographs). The drawing is deceptive because someone has added a sitting man holding the horse by a bridle, but the horse is certainly trotting and certainly needs the exercise, and the man needs to get out of the way soon.

In contrast, there is a pretty Carpaccio study of a mounted man without the horse. (I once took Declan Kiely and his lovely and fecund [twins!] and bountiful wife Hillary Harrow for a cold snack at some Cipriani joint [Venetians are the only people in Italy who have no idea how to cook, odd that they have conquered New York catering] and observed on his third champagne-and-peach-juice that he must have ordered from the Accademia menu, viz., a carpaccio and three bellinis. This was one of those witticisms that are so extraordinarily clever that unfortunately one has to explain them [Vittore Carpaccio and Jacopo, Giovanni, and Gentile Bellini, all on display at that fine Venetian museum]. Oh well.)

The exhibition claims Domenico Campagnola (1500–64) as "the first draftsman by profession," he having done landscape drawings as finished works, and his landscapes on display show the roots that in Guercino would flourish in technique and imagination. An Andrea Mantegna pen and ink of the Descent into Limbo still has a constrained metalpoint effect, but you can see Romanino (1484–1559) taking advantage of paper to fully experiment in his Concert Champêtre, which, given that he has to work out the anatomy of a mythical creature, a lolling faun, is all to the good.

The exhibition was curated by Sarah Cartwright, who deserves credit for her taste in selection and the uncommon usefulness of her labels. Pay attention to me and not my friend Kate and go and see this.

That is all in the basement, but the Lehman has a new little gallery on the ground floor which has a very nice selection of works on paper around an old fireplace. All it needs are comfy chairs and a tea buffet. (You will find those at mmmwop.) I've entirely mislaid my notes on the selection, mostly French with the usual suspects, but the pièce de résistance is a Goya of his rather disappointing son, showing nonetheless much love. The last time I saw a Goya drawing up for sale, it had such a high estimate that Christie's refused to say what it was, perhaps thinking we might swoon if not sitting. Then the French government withdrew it, so we never found out how much it would fetch.

Let me note here that one of New York's best arranged and written small exhibitions of the fall, of Edo prints of Europeans and Meiji prints of Japanese aristocrats in Western costume (which I mentioned in a September post), was curated by Joyce Denney (which I only just found out). Oddly, there seems to be nothing about it on the Met's Web site. They were beautiful pieces set up economically but not too economically to tell a fascinating tale.