Master Paintings Research Articles

Pahin de la Blancherie's Commercial Cabinet of Curiosity (1779-87)

Although Pahin de la Blancherie's Salon de la Correspondance has attracted the attention of historians and art historians alike, its character as a commercial cabinet of curiosity has never been explored. Looking at the hostility that La Blancherie engendered among the arts authorities of his time, I suggest not only that his art exhibitions encroached on territory jealously guarded by France's Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, but also that his penchant for displaying oddities along with his incessant wheeling and dealing jeopardized the Academy's ennobled vision of the fine arts. While the Academy waged a battle to assert the liberal arts status of painting and to distinguish works of art from crafts and curios, La Blancherie exhibited paintings and sculptures along with two-headed calves, anatomical models, and the latest fashions in combination locks. In another contrast, the Academy preserved its class status by barring members from engaging in commerce, whereas La Blancherie sold his wares openly and promoted himself in the unmistakable tones of a huckster. Finally, as the arts administration planned to establish a permanent exhibition of Old Master paintings in the renovated halls of the Louvre Palace, La Blancherie mounted his own show of French masters, which he embellished with characteristic self-promotional flair. For the Academy's defenders, this ambitious exhibition was the last straw.

Three Ages of ''Patina'' in Painting

THIS ARTICLE TRACES THE HISTORY of a byword for the look of age since the early seventeenth century in art writing, the museum, the restorer's studio, and the art market. The seemingly material fact of patina has a career in the history of taste in Old Master painting through its old regime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was much prized as an effect of time and as an artifice; in its modern age beginning with the formation of national museums, patina becomes an object of contention in the ''cleaning controversies'' that revolve around the obligations of the present toward the cultural legacy of the past. Postmodern patina has come to register the complex and precarious effects of age on old pictures in ways that should enable us to appreciate and to care for them more knowingly than we have been able to do before.

Contending Viewpoints: Rethinking American Cultural Studies

During the 1930s, in scattered universities across the nation, pioneering professors were introducing a fresh way of looking at American society. After World War II my generation entered graduate school and inherited that initiative. While our scholarly conclusions reflected the Zeitgeist's leaning toward consensus and conformity, our curricular approach was disputatious and rebellious. Instead of viewing our society through the lens of a discipline like History or English, we proposed to view America as a of interrelated parts, each part affecting the others. Whatever the subject selected for study, we intended to examine it with any approaches that might prove illustrative. Subject and methodology were to combine in bold ways for a fresh synergy. Teaching and scholarship could draw at once upon the chronology of history, the process of the social sciences, the speculative insights of philosophy, or the aesthetics of the arts and literature. For example, a painting could be analyzed from both an aesthetic and historical perspective and related to a novel; a political event could be analyzed both as a psychological process and historically in terms of continuity and change while related to the poetry of protest. We intended to cross disciplinary boundaries of both subject and method and unite insular disciplines in a search for meaning. The emergence of departments of American Studies was a sharp break with tradition. That tradition insisted that graduate students take virtually all courses within one department. To stray from the confines of the department was to invite the sneer of shallow. Our focus, then, was not limited to the subject matter of a department. Our prospect embraced the whole of American culture. Courses were drawn from departments with offerings relevant to that objective. Our focus was on a geographical area that corresponded to a to be understood by an interdisciplinary analysis. The adventure was enormously exciting. What we were cherishing as an intellectual adventure was becoming a marauder of students intimidating the educational establishment. Faculty in History and English departments, especially offering courses outside the American canon, felt threatened. Our motives were challenged. Were these wayward students who were absorbed in American literature (assuming there was such a thing in the 1940s worth studying) deserting the department of English to escape Latin and Old English? Were these upstarts rejecting the department of History to evade learning to read documents in German? Can area studies, whether it be American Studies or Russian Studies, qualify as a discipline to satisfy the revered Germanic demands of rigor, precision, and obedience to the rules of scholarship? Our rebellion was against a specialization that viewed learning through the needle-eyed narrowness of departments. Specialization was distorting the breadth of a liberal arts education. Truncated learning was graduating truncated scholars. Our intent was to integrate the parts of American culture, to put into play the functional interdependence of the social sciences and humanities and to do it by concentrating on one area. The result of our labors was less a celebration of diversity and more a search for a unifying national identity. We actually believed there was a national character-many still do! For the academic establishment, the concept may have been acceptable for anthropologists residing with stone age tribes. The concept imposed on literate civilizations was denounced as a barbarism bayoneting intellectual refinement. The word culture at mid-century pretty much meant the high of opera and old master paintings. Vulgar phrases like upward mobility, participant observer, and cultural lag, mouthed by arriviste sociologists, were flame throwers at many tweedier-than-thou professors. In today's world of computer commands, at monthly meetings of the faculty, the old guard would have thundered: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. …

Från Murillo till El Greco. Spanska Mästare i finländsk allmän konsthistoria: Rötterna i 1800-talet och förvandlingen i det tidiga 1900-talet

Today, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya are unanimously regarded as the leading exponents of Spanish painting. During the romantic era, however, Murillo and Ribera were considered the unsurpassed interpreters of the Spanish temperament. In this paper, I describe the prevalence of Spanish Old Master painters in Finnish art historical writing from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The writings of two leading Finnish art historians, J. J. Tikkanen (1857-1930) and Ludvig Wennervirta (1882-1959), show the survival of Romantic values well into the twentieth century. At the same time shifts in the approach towards Murillo and El Greco, in particular, identify changes in the writers's outlook, reflecting current, normative variations in taste and the recognition of many different artists. Contrasting those painters who have been acknowledged with those who have not reveals a development from a Murillo-centred admiration in the nineteenth century to a veneration of El Greco in the early twentieth century. Realism had established the fame of Velázquez and the Spanish Baroque in Finland mainly through the genre painter Adolf von Becker (1831-1909). However, C.G. Estlander (1834- 1910) set himself against Becker, and Estlander's attitude to art history is marked by idealism. One explanation for this retardation is the fact that Finnish writers depended on obsolete texts; as late as 1901, Magnus Enckell (1877-1925) quoted Charles Blanc's (1813-1882) characterisation of the Spanish School from his École Espagnole of 1869. The replacement of Murillo with Velázquez and later El Greco, is also visible in Albert Edelfelt's (1854- 1905) letters from Spain, published in the daily press in 1881. By this time, Tikkanen had established himself as an art historian. Like Edelfelt, he preferred a naturalistic attitude towards art instead of an idealistic one. However, as late as 1910, his general art history still shows signs of early nineteenth century Romanticism, in particular regarding his view on El Greco. Wennervirta's article on El Greco, on the other hand, published only two years later, is a sign of the increasing veneration of the Greek-Italian Spaniard, who was revered for his "expressionist" and "transcendental" art. Only Tikkanen's revised edition of his general art history in 1925, adopts a viewpoint similar to Wennervirta's as regards El Greco's expressionism, a feature that by now was widely accepted. To a large extent, Finnish general art-history writing reflects the tastes that were directed from Paris. Wennervirta's lifelong engagement with El Greco, on the other hand, is an early example of the rising admiration of the eccentric painter from Toledo. The attitude towards Spanish art, created and maintained by Finnish art historical writing, is characterised by clichés. Spanish Old Master painting became canonised as a desirable love-affair for a progressive painter.

The ephemeral museum: old master paintings and the rise of the exhibition

The ephemeral museum: old master paintings and the rise of the exhibition

Art and the Museum

Books reviewed in this article:Francis Haskell The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art ExhibitionKarsten Schubert The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present DayBarbara J. Black On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums

The Faustian bargain: the art world in Nazi Germany

Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany. Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who repatriated the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, the leading art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmann-a leading art historian-was probably the single most prolific art plunderer in the war (and arguably in history). Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is more remarkable that most of them rehabilitated their careers and lived comfortably after the war. Petropoulos has discovered a network of these rehabilitated experts that flourished in the postwar period, and he argues that this is a key to the tens of thousands of looted artworks that are still missing today. Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.

Mass spectrometric methodology for the analysis of highly oxidized diterpenoid acids in Old Master paintings.

Diterpenoid resins from larch and pine trees and the corresponding fractions in a >100-year-old wax-resin adhesive and varnish and a 200-year-old resin/oil paint sample were analysed with by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) using several off-line and on-line derivatization methods. The main resin compounds were highly oxidized abietic acids. Important products found are hydroxydehydroabietic acids (OH-DHAs), 7-oxoDHA, di-OH-DHAs and 15-OH-7-oxoDHA. The last two compounds have not been reported to occur in artworks before. Larixyl acetate, an important marker from larch resins, was found to be still present in high amounts in the adhesive. A large number of mass spectra of the different oxidation products and larixol and larixyl acetate are presented and their fragmentation behaviour under electron impact conditions is discussed. An index for the degree of oxidation (IDOX) of the abietic acids is presented as an indicator of the degree of oxidation of the matrix in which the resin is present. The IDOX was 0.10, 0.67, 0.81 and 0.76 for the fresh resins, the dark-aged adhesive, the aged varnish and the resin/oil paint, respectively (measured with pyrolysis (Py)-tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH)-GC/MS). Py-TMAH-GC/MS and direct temperature-resolved mass spectrometry are reliable, valuable and fast techniques for the assessment of the presence and degree of oxidation of diterpenoid resins. Copyright 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Infrared imaging of twentieth-century works of art

Infrared imaging technologies have traditionally been used to investigate and elucidate images underlying Old Master paintings. Application to works from the twentieth century has proved to be exceptionally fruitful as well. The varied materials of twentieth-century art require adaptation of the infrared imaging set-up to utilize the equipment fully. These variations of set-up, cameras, lights, image digitization and image processing are discussed. Infrared examinations of works by Ernst, Miro, Warhol, Johns and Pollock are presented. Issues of interpretation of these studies, particularly in the case of abstract images, are also explored.

Painting Out Pop

Painting Out Pop

The Delta Plan: a nationwide rescue operation

A byword in the international museum community, the Delta Plan for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage has made the Netherlands a leader in the field of preventive conservation. Moreover, it has demonstrated how enlightened political vision and commitment can buttress the efforts of heritage professionals to benefit the community at large. M. Kirby Talley Jr is an art historian, author, educator and Executive Counsellor for International Cultural Heritage Policy at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands. He was the Founding Director of the State Training School for Restorers in the Netherlands; Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio; and Curator of Old Master Paintings for the Netherlands State Collections. In 1989, he drew up the Delta Plan for the Preservation of the Netherlands Cultural Heritage for the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. A contributing editor to Art News, Dr Talley publishes and lectures extensively. His latest book, as co‐author and co‐editor, is Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, published by the Getty Conservation Institute in 1996. He is currently serving as Acting Director of the St Petersburg International Centre for Preservation, an initiative of the Getty Conservation Institute, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Municipal Government of St Petersburg. In 1996 the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands joined the founding partners in support of this project.

A New Medium for Old Masters: The Kress Study Collection Virtual Museum Project

The Kress Study Collection Virtual Museum Project was designed for the course "Information Storage and Retrieval," which introduced graduate students in the School of Library and Informational Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia to concepts of electronic storage and retrieval of documents, images, and data, with an emphasis on the design of computer networked access to databases. This project is a prototype of a small virtual museum that presents the University of Missouri-Columbia Museum of Art and Archaeology's Kress Study Collection through digital images and scholarly text stored in a relational database that is accessible on the World Wide Web, and uses new technology for electronic curatorship in a virtual museum. The project's paper describes the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, which holds a rich collection of European artworks, mostly Old Master paintings from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Also treated are the digitizing of the Kress paintings, the construction of the database, the realization of Web accessibility, and the problem of defining the virtual museum. A searchable virtual museum based on a user-centered philosophy is hard to find because museums are reluctant to make their holdings accessible on the World Wide Web. It is even harder to define, both because of the heated discussion in the museum literature and the fascination of the new medium that often leads to sites lacking quality and a user-driven philosophy.

A new lead-based yellow in the seventeenth century

Since the important rediscovery by Jacobi in 1941 of the use of lead-tin yellow as a traditional artists' pigment, and the identification by Kühn of two distinct modifications of this material, elemental analysis and crystallographic determinations using X-ray diffraction (XRD) have been applied routinely to opaque yellow pigments from Old Master paintings. We report here the discovery and characterization by these methods of a new lead-based yellow in seventeenth-century paintings, based on a ternary oxide of lead, tin and antimony. This pigment is distinct from the two varieties of lead-tin yellow and from pure lead antimonate (Naples yellow); it appears to be restricted in use to Italian painting and specifically to paintings produced in Rome. Examples in the work of Poussin, Pietro da Cortona, Salvator Rosa, Sassoferrato, Gentileschi and Lanfranco are given, and art-historical interpretations based in the presence of this pigment are discussed.

GC-MS and SEM studies on the effects of solvent cleaning on old master paintings from the National Gallery, London

This paper adopts a new approach to cleaning research, made possible by recent developments in sample derivatization. For the first time, an extensive analytical study has been made of the solvent cleaning of a range of paintings from the early fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Direct analytical comparisons are made between samples from mechanically and solvent-cleaned test areas of both tempera and oil paintings, using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).

GC-MS and SEM Studies on the Effects of Solvent Cleaning on Old Master Paintings from the National Gallery, London

GC-MS and SEM Studies on the Effects of Solvent Cleaning on Old Master Paintings from the National Gallery, London

The construction and painting of a large Castilian retable: a study of techniques and workshop practices

This paper is based on technical examination of the painted panels of the Santa Marina retable, c. 1490, attributed to a Castilian painter called the Master of Palanquinos. There are two distinct styles of underdrawing, painting and gilding, indicating that two different painters worked on the retable, at least from the underdrawing stage onwards. These findings are compared with documentary evidence which indicates that collaboration between independent masters was common in fifteenth-century Spain. The techniques of construction and painting are also described and comparisons made with contemporary documents, in particular the 1493 Cordoba ordinances which specify the technical standards to be expected of master painters.

Oil painting in the late Middle Ages in Spain: the relationship of style to technique in the Epiphany Altarpiece of Saint Paul's Convent in Toledo

Taking advantage of a campaign of restoration, the Altarpiece of the Epiphany of Saint Paul's Convent in Toledo (c. 1430) was studied. Based on stylistic, material and technical considerations, it was concluded that at least three master painters worked on the six panels and predella. All three artists employed linseed oil as a medium in much of their work. This example of the early use of oil painting in an altarpiece, together with archival documents, seriously challenges the existing theories which state that oil painting in Spain started as an imported technique from Flanders in the second half of the fifteenth century.

La fabrication et le traitement des couleurs dans la peinture traditionnelle chinoise de paysage

The Fabrication and Treatment of Color in Traditional Chinese Landscape Painting. Beginning under the Tang Dynasty (618-907), an important development in landscape painting took place — an evolution in which the dichotomy between monochrome landscapes, painted in ink, and highly colored landscapes was underscored. Landscape styles « in blue and green » and « in gold and green », whose creation is traditionally attributed to Li Sixun (651-716) or Li Zhaodao (active between 713 and 741) found strong support among painters until the 19th century. Dominant among the colors were those derived from minerals (azurite, malachite and cinnabar pigments) — the fabrication of which will be studied in this article. Under the Yuan dynasty (1277-1368), the first of these styles gave birth to a landscape « in light blue and green », at once seen as archaism and in a strongly literate perspective, in which the same colors were employed but applied in a lighter wash. At that time, another style of landscape painting (« in light ochre ») came into being where the structuring with ink predominated. In this style — taken up by Huang Gongwang — 1269-1354), Wang Meng (1308-1385) and a number of other orthodox master painters of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) — ochre and organic colors (indigo, gum and safflower) that were lighter and more easily applicable than colors derived from minerals were used.

Catalogue of Old Master Paintings Acquired by Lucretia Johanna van Winter, 1809-22

Catalogue of Old Master Paintings Acquired by Lucretia Johanna van Winter, 1809-22

Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Founded in the final years of the Enlightenment, the Louvre--with the greatest collection of Old Master paintings and antique sculpture assembled under one roof--became the model for all state art museums subsequently established. Andrew McClellan chronicles the formation of this great museum from its origins in the French royal picture collections to its apotheosis during the Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. More than a narrative history, McClellan's account explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogic aims, and aesthetic criteria of the Louvre. Drawing on new archival materials, McClellan also illuminates the art world of eighteenth-century Paris.