Henry Moore Sculpture to be Sold

This is Henry Moore's 1957 bronze sculpture 'Draped Seated Woman'.

Its rather leafy rural setting is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where it's been for the last 15 years.  

However, it was never meant to be there.  Here it is in its intended setting, the rather more urban and less leafy Tower Hamlets in London.

The sculpture is in the news because Tower Hamlets Council, who own the statue, are going to sell it to help plug the gap in their budget cuts.  The sculpture is said to be worth up to £20 million.

Henry Moore sold the statue at well below market value (£6000) to Tower Hamlets in the 1960s, on the condition that it was sited actually in the borough of Tower Hamlets.  He wanted top quality art to be accessible to everyone, even the most socially deprived, and had a number of his works sited on bomb-damaged estates and new towns following WW2.

However, as you can see, for the last decade and a half, the sculpture has been on holiday in the country, nowhere near London's east end.  (There hasn't been much of an outcry about that.)

The decision to sell has had a number of top names, including Olympic opening ceremony designer Danny Boyle, up in arms.  An online petition has attracted 1500 names, who have all of a sudden realised the statue has been missing. There are accusations that its sale is a betrayal of 'working class heritage', that local people haven't been consulted, and that alternatives have been ignored. Several alternative sites had been discussed, including Canary Wharf and Victoria Park, but none were deemed suitable.  The Museum of London had also offered to display the sculpture, and siting it in London's east end Olympic Park has also been mooted. 

However, the council says that insurance, vandalism, and the possibility of being stolen make keeping the work impossible.  I would question that public statues are actually insured, and although thefts do happen (a Hepworth sculpture was stolen from Dulwich Park in 2011, for example)  Draped Woman weighs a tonne and a half.  However, I take their point that with ownership of a work of art comes responsibilities for its upkeep.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park aren't too chuffed with having 'their' statue removed either.  They seem to manage to have lots of multi-million pound artwork strewn around the landscape without any thefts or vandalism, and have sorted out the insurance issues.

Henry Moore sculpture at Yorkshire Sculpture Park - image by Jonty Wilde

 Barbara Hepworth's Family of Man at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Still, these are depressing arguments.  Is that to say there should be no public art whatsoever?  Are we all to be so frightened of vandals and thieves that we should hide away all art that gives us pleasure?  In a financial crisis, is art the first thing to go as being both excess to requirements, and a source of easy money?  Is it right to exploit the generosity of artists? Should public areas be brutalist, functional zones devoid of all ornament?  

Perhaps we should be taking a leaf out of Damien Hirst's book - flying in the face of possible vandalism, metal thieves and public outcry,  he has fearlessly sited his 66 foot tall, 25 ton bronze statue Verity right where every can see it,  outside his restaurant in Ilfracombe.  Read the article here.

There are plenty of Henry Moore sculptures in London already, so obviously not all councils are persuaded by these concerns.  See a map with Henry Moore's other works in London here.  (Blue flags are for outdoor works, red are for indoor.)

Also, it's all very well to say that the work is worth millions (and the council are keen for Christie's to handle the sale as soon as possible), but is it?  Provenance, in the art world, is everything, and here we have a controversial statue with a backstory of being sold against the artist's wishes amidst public outcry.  That would be a just fabulous provenance to have with the work, wouldn't it?  I'm sure the proud new owners who are expected to form out £20 million (plus auction fees) would be delighted.

But the bottom line is, it's Tower Hamlet's asset, and they can do with it as they like, no matter what some dead artist with socialist principles intended.  Probably the 22,000 on the housing waiting list there would agree that a home is preferable to a wonky old statue. It's just a bit sad they can't have both.

It will be interesting to see how the story pans out.  Presumably Tower Hamlets Council will have to splash out a fair bit to get the sculpture back from Yorkshire first....

Read about the latest developments in the new argument about ownership of the statue here.

The Price of Art

Claude Monet's Nympheas, one of his waterlily paintings done during his final years at his house in Giverny, has sold in New York for $43.7 million.

That's £27 million.  Think what you could buy for that amount of money.  Or...you could buy a single painting...

Claude Monet, Nympheas (Oil, 1905)

It's not the most expensive painting that's ever been sold - that was Edvard Munch's The Scream, which went for  $120m (£75m) in May 2012.

So what do you do with a £27m painting?

Sit and admire it?

Put it in the bank?

Lend it to a museum?

Resell it?

The art market is a very complicated thing.  Art is largely thought of as something completely aesthetic, done for the higher good, without vulgar worldly concerns of value.  The artist starving in a garret.  However, art is also a commodity, like gold, to be traded in by other parties.  It can be an investment, but an investment that you can appreciate aesthetically as it (hopefully) appreciates in value (although there is a skill to timing re-exposure to the market).  

But unlike gold, it is an asset that comes with responsibilities.  A really famous work of art is an object within an art historical context, without which the story is incomplete, and so needs to be accessed by both scholars and the public.  It is also subject to natural deterioration, so requires proper display conditions and conservation.

Or if you own something - do those considerations go out of the window?  Is the new owner of Nympheas entitled to just chop it up into little bits if they like? It's just an object, and they own it.

When art is so subjective, and even the definition of art is indistinct, who says why one painting is more valuable than another?  What makes Monet's painting worth £27 million?  It's just paint arranged on canvas.  

Of course, it's down to market forces, supply and demand, rarity.  Crucially, it is paint arranged on canvas by the hand of Monet, with the rationale of a genius behind it.  Also, Monet is dead, and being dead is a great career move for an artist.  It means that supply is finite, that each work can then be placed within the story arc of a career, and each work is therefore more precious, more resonant because you can see its part in the whole.

But does having a huge value make the art work better?  Is the best painting in the world the most expensive?  

Of course not.  Only a tiny percentage of paintings are exposed to the world markets in such circumstances, so the relative values of art can't be assessed and put on a sliding scale of monetary worth.  You couldn't chip off the Sistine Chapel frescoes and put them on the market.

Art is what resonates with you.  It's what you connect with, what speaks to you.  Often that's not something you can define, but very often it's something that's beyond price.

A Full Studio

Getting ready for one of the biggest consignments of the year means that there isn't much room to move in the studio at the moment.   It's always a challenge to produce a big body of work for a solo show, and it's good to have all the work around you so that you can let the ideas bounce off one another in order to produce a cohesive show.

So at the moment there are an awful lot of canvasses in various states of drying all around!

Here's the mantlepiece in the main studio, all lined up with small paintings on their little easels.

As soon as the paintings are touch dry, they are photographed, labelled and catalogued. Then they'll go off to my framers to be set into their bespoke gilded frames.  

When they come back, they are checked, labelled and wrapped, and are then parcelled up to be consigned to their gallery.   They'll be arriving in London (weather permitting) just before Christmas.

Carpet of Autumn Leaves, Green Park

Carpet of Autumn Leaves, Green Park (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

Happy Birthday, Sistine Chapel

The Sistine Chapel celebrates its 500th birthday this year.

The frescoes decorating the chapel, famously painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, are, however, now in danger of becoming damaged due to the huge numbers of people who come to see them.

Frecso is a pretty tough medium.  The paint can't be rubbed off, but plaster can be chipped, damaged or become discoloured, and it is very susceptible to moisture.

Fresco (meaning 'fresh') is a method of decoration where paint is applied to an area of wet plaster.  The plaster draws the paint into the surface, binding the pigment within itself as it dries.  You don't paint onto the surface of dry plaster as the paint would just drop off.

The artist only has applied to the wall as much wet plaster as they can complete painting within a single day before it dries (a section is called a 'giornata', from the Italina 'giorno' meaning day - sometimes you can see these sections if you look closely).

It's a fiendish method, as you can't change your mind, move round your compositions or make changes once it's dried.  The clock is ticking.   (As Michelangelo progressed with the ceiling decoration, he realised that his figures were too small, so as the scheme progressed, he altered his plan and the figures got larger.)  How long you've got to complete your giornata would also depend on climactic conditions such as how hot it was on the day that you were painting.

However, 500 years on, Vatican officials are discussing the problem of deterioration of the frescoes. 

The huge quantity of visitors (around 10,000 each day) is now causing concern with the amount of pollution created, as well as temperature and humidity issues..  Although an air-conditioning system was fitted during restorations to clean the frescoes 1990s, it is no longer up to the job. (I've seen the frescoes in both their restored and unrestored versions, and it literally is night and day - the colours are now absolutely luminous.)

A specialist company has been asked to design a new air-purifying system - but if a solution is not found by next year the Vatican will be forced to begin reducing the number of tourists.

If you've ever been there, you'll know how crowded the Sistine Chapel is.  It comes at the end of a long, long queue to get in to the Vatican through security, a very long tour round the Vatican rooms of probably a couple of hours, and by the time you arrive at the Chapel, it is invariably absolutely jam-packed, and everyone's expectations have reached temper-fraying fever pitch.

You aren't allowed to take photographs, and are meant to be silent, as it is a place of worship.  However, any worship or prayer is well-nigh impossible, and people snap away regardless, because they've invested such a lot of time and effort actually getting there.  It's not like you can just pop in.

So a rationing of availability to visit the Sistine Chapel will mean even more queues for something which will be perceived as an even more desirable 'must-see' tourist destination.  A reduction in numbers will increase its attraction.  And it already takes forever to queue to get into the Vatican, to get round the Vatican, and then to get through the further security to get into St Peters.

I've been to Milan to see Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper - you have to book tickets months in advance and are only allowed a short timed visit.  In the 80's I visited the Arena Chapel in Padua to see the Giotto frescoes, and you could just walk in.  Now it is all climate controlled and entry is by timed ticket for 15 minutes only.  It was a very clinical experience, and I can't imagine that Giotto himself would be too chuffed with his work being seen in that manner.

I understand the need for such measures, in order to conserve for future generations.  However, it very much takes away from the whole experience, both in terms of art appreciation, and also in terms of the reason for which the object was created, that of spiritual contemplation.  

You can't do either on a timed ticket.

That Stolen Modigliani Painting in Skyfall

It was back to the cinema again last night, this time to take my son to see the new James Bond film Skyfall ('not enough car chases').  Which gave me the chance to count the number of times that Q's 'Q' Scrabble mug appears, or to look out for famous paintings.

Read about the paintings included in the scene in the National Gallery HERE, and the painting in Mallory's office HERE, and how they inform the plot.

But there's another painting in the film, seen in the Shanghai section of the film. It's where the beautiful Severine uses a stolen painting as bait in an assassination plot, and the prospective purchaser of the picture is shot.

Here is Severine in front of the painting in the apartment, seen from the window of an adjacent building...

Here's the painting...

 

It's Modigliani's Woman with a Fan painted in 1919.  

And guess what, it really WAS stolen from a gallery in real life - the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, on May 19 2010.  

BBC article here. 

Speculation is that it really did end up in China, too.

Read the article here.

So the Bond film uses a real-life stolen painting as the basis of one of Skyfall's subplots. 

This is a device which also was in the first Bond film, Dr No, in 1962, and so it's a way of referencing 50 years of Bond.  Dr No's lair was adorned with Francisco Goya's Portrait of The Duke of Wellington, as a way of expressing the villain's hubristic aspirations (Max Zorin’s desk in A View to A Kill was flanked by Jacques-Louis David's portrait of Napoleon).

  

Fransisco Goya, Portrait of the Duke of Wellington (1812-14)

The Goya portrait was stolen on 21 August, 1961 from the National Gallery in London, in a theft so notorious that the painting would instantly have been recognisable to the cinema audience. That's the same National Gallery where Skyfall Bond first meets Q.  How clever is that?

Now, how many people are going to actually realise from watching the film that there's a plot all about fencing stolen paintings?  I certainly didn't the first time round, and you also have to get to the end and then rewatch the credits to understand all the references within the title sequence to the themes of Bond coming to terms with the death of his parents, and his own ageing and mortality.  

It's a film that takes itself rather seriously, and obviously wants you to see it more than once, by placing all sorts of references and layers within it - a bit like Stephen Moffat era Dr Who.

Plus it's very much a reflection of  the times - an austerity Britain, post-Jubilympic Bond if you like.  It's all Union Jacks, M as British bulldog, iconic blast-from-the-past that's-what-made-British-car-manufacturing-great Aston Martins, backs-against-the-wall in Churchill's bunker with MI6 being attacked from within.  

And whilst the screen is filled with lots of London landmarks and English icons, when they 'lay a trail of breadcrumbs' for the baddie to follow Bond and M up the A9 to Scotland, they end up very obviously in Glencoe.  Glencoe?! Which gives you a sense of a somewhat fractured UK, where one end of the country doesn't know that at the other end, Glencoe very definately isn't at the end of the A9. 

What a pity there weren't more car chases...

Read more about the hidden meanings in more of the paintings in Skyfall HERE.

Affordable Art Fair, Hampstead Opens

The Affordable Art Fair at Hampstead opens today, down on sunny autumnal Hampstead Heath.

 I'm showing with Duncan Miller Fine Arts, so have a look if you're at the fair!

You can even get in 2 for 1 (or half price if there's just one of you), by going HERE and printing out the page.

It's on until Sunday.  For more information about the fair, go here.