My art week
My art week started as usual with the Collectors programme on midday at Monday.
The presenter Emmeline Hallmark’s background is Christie’s.
Their main motivation is sales and for this reason she veers towards the obsequious to a collector who might just entrust his collection for sale by the auction house.
This week it featured the Venetian jeweller Attilio Codognato who supplied jewels to Elizabeth Taylor and the Duchess of Windsor.
Clearly our Emeline was far more impressed by these two than me. What was of interest was Codignato’s relationship with and pictures by such luminaries of American twentieth century art as Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.
Twombly was a cryptographer which explains his squiggles and hieroglyphics.
Warhol, through his background of marketing and window-dressing, understood mass appeal and desire but the concept behind his Factory of turning out art like silk-screens is nothing new.
Raphael, Titian and Rubens all had enormous studios and a distant relationship with the final product.
Half way through the Sky Arts programme on Lucien Freud who incidentally had a relative who went to the States and disseminated the theory of Desire which did much to inculcate the theories of making advertising seductive, I realised I had seen the programme before.
The experts compared Freud to Durer and Titian, which I found excessive.
He was a great painter but not a very great one. Again sales play a role here as he fetched the highest price for a living artist.
One of those featured on the programme – Martin Gayford – is erudite but wears his scholarship lightly.
He wrote an illuminating work Man With A Blue Scarf on sitting for Freud. Freud’s portraiture was also discussed on the always entertaining and informed podcast Waldy and Bendy.
Our art course covered American realism on Tuesday and Courbet, Degas on Thursday.
We started on the American Ashhcan school of John Sloan and Bellows.
Bellows fills the canvas with activity.
Time Square includes a boxing match. There was something of Peter Brueghel (the Elder) or Lowry in its busyness. Then came Edward Hopper and his work highlighting the isolation of American life could not be more different.
His figures are alone in space and redolent of Degas The Absinthe Drinkers. Incidentally a Captain Hill of Brighton acquired this work which spent its early life at the British seaside.
On Thursday we studied Courbet and Degas.
I kept my books on both beside me.
I made the point that two of Courbet’s most famous works The Artist’s Studio and his meeting in the countryside with his Patron Alfred Bruyas puts himself centre stage.
It reminded me of a group photo of say a sport’s team when a Chief Executive would put himself right in the middle.
There was an audible gasp when Origins of the World appeared as an image as it features the model Jeanne Heffernan, the Irish mistress of Whistler, but only her splayed genitalia and torso.
Almost certainly this was a commission for the boudoir of a Turkish diplomat as was the depiction of two women coupling.
