Laura Gascoigne
January/February 2018
You get a better class of junk mail in Hampstead. Recently a ‘stiffy’ (in the polite old-fashioned sense) arrived from something called ‘The Restory’. From its sober shade of indigo with silver lettering I guessed it announced the opening of a restaurant in a former rectory, but no, it advertised an “on-demand shoe and handbag restoration service”. What an off-demand shoe and handbag restoration service might be one dreads to imagine. “Oi! Stop that restorer, he’s got my handbag!” “Honest, officer, I was only going to restore it.” “Well, kindly restore it to the lady now, before I take you into custody.”
It gets better. Inside was a salmon-pink and silver £20 voucher and the artisan’s statement: “The Restory is an integrated team of specialists brought together from all over the world to ensure your items are in the most capable and passionate hands. Our team disrupts, challenges and innovates in our craft to develop the most advanced solutions to seemingly impossible problems.”
Where is all this heading? In the direction of another Restory that recently supplied an advanced solution to a seemingly impossible problem, not just satisfying the item’s owner but making him hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem? What to do with a knock-off Leonardo that had changed hands for £45 in 1958 as a copy after Boltraffio and was so badly worn and restored that its very brand was in question, like a vintage Chanel bag missing its interlocking ‘Cs’. The advanced solution? First put the picture in the capable and passionate hands of veteran conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini and let her spend six years giving it a makeover, then – and this is the disruptive, challenging and innovative bit – put it into a post-war and contemporary art auction at Christie’s New York, rather than old master sale where it would have been handbagged by experts.
Challenge and innovation on their own are no longer enough. Now it’s all about disruption: stripping away any historical context that might put the viewing and the buying public off. If you whooped when Penelope Curtis restored chronological order to Tate Britain’s collection displays, prepare to weep as Maria Balshaw disrupts it: “We’re going to rehang the collection telling the story from the point of the London where we are today,” she warned the FT soon after her appointment. Instead of seeing the present as a product of the past, we’re now supposed to judge the past by the standards of the present. The autumn exhibition Legacies at New Art Gallery Walsall, for example, considers “the ongoing legacy of JMW Turner through the lens of contemporary art”, roping him in with a huddle of artists under the Tate umbrella on the catch-all pretext that he “challenged accepted conventions in art”.
Of course it’s obvious that, living as we do in the present, we can only consider the past through its lens. Still, a bit of context never did any harm – it’s not essential to the enjoyment of historical art, but it deepens it. One reason why the new breed of non-art historian gallery director wants shot of it is insecurity; they don’t like feeling inferior to their curators. But there’s another more worrying reason connected with the market. For those in the business of flogging art, a mix of old masters and contemporary artists has the beneficial effect of presenting contemporaries as masters in the making.
I won’t deny that mixing it is refreshing: what makes Frieze Masters so enjoyable is the gathering of dealers in art from six millennia under one tent. One of those dealers last year was Axel Vervoordt, the Belgian collector and ‘timeless interior designer’ who launched the fashion for art mixology in the noughties with a series of exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and has just opened his own ‘cultural complex’, Kanaal, in Antwerp. “I wanted to make Chronos into an artist,” was his poetic description of one exhibition, “to place the emphasis on the atemporal. For example, certain Egyptian and Bactrian pieces that date back 4,000 years pass for contemporary. And underlying this was the question of whether it is important to know by whom and when something was made.”
There is a respectable Renaissance tradition for this sort of time travel, but by whom and when something was made becomes important when money is involved. Art mixology is a seductive cocktail that can easily unsettle a weak head. In salerooms it is far more effective than bubbly at making bidders lose count of zeros, as Christie’s New York discovered in 2015 when they threw together a bunch of random lots by artists from Claude Monet to Urs Fischer under the theme of “artistic innovation inspired by the past”. The sale achieved auction records for 10 works, including $141.2m for Giacometti’s Pointing Man – making it the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction – and $179.3m for Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger – making it the most expensive work full stop. “Christie’s will continue in years to come to innovate more sales concepts that inspire the art collecting public,” crowed Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s global president and the sale’s auctioneer. You betcha. Two years later, they came up with a sales concept that netted $450m for a duff Leonardo.
We’re used to auction houses making silly money from modern masters, but making imbecilic money from old ones is something new. Before the advent of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi the auction record for an old master stood at the £49.5m achieved by Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents in 2002. To the new generation of collectors an Old Masters sale is about as sexy as a slave market of octogenarians. But despite his personal resemblance to Chronos Leonardo is an exception, largely thanks to Dan Brown – “as fascinating as any bestselling thriller” was how a Christie’s promotional video trailed the Salvator Mundi – and an escort of Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers had a further rejuvenating effect. Plus it helped that the National Gallery had given the picture one of the best shop windows in the world by including it in its 2011 Leonardo exhibition, where it stuck out like a sore thumb (though the thumbs are two of the best things about it). Nicholas Penny and Dan Brown both deserve a commission.
“What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet?” asked Jean Genet in an essay of 1967. What remains of this Leonardo? Not a lot. The painting “has endured some wear and tear over the centuries,” a spokeswoman for Christie’s conceded to The Art Newspaper before the sale, “but many of the most important elements – the blessing hand, the orb, Christ’s vestments, the curls in his hair – are remarkably intact.” All you can say is: “Nice curls, shame about the face”.
When a conservator devotes six years to restoring a picture that the original artist painted in a few weeks, the work is arguably more hers than his. So what am I bid for this Modestini? Without a recognised offence of ‘inappropriate retouching’, the line between restoration and fakery is as blurred as the Salvator Mundi’s face. As for the line between disruption and corruption, that keeps getting thinner and Leonardo’s crystal ball offers no hope of improvement. To quote Tom Phillips’s epitaph on Van Gogh: “Auctions speak louder than words”.
Laura Gascoigne: The Art of Mixology – January 2018
Laura Gascoigne
January/February 2018
You get a better class of junk mail in Hampstead. Recently a ‘stiffy’ (in the polite old-fashioned sense) arrived from something called ‘The Restory’. From its sober shade of indigo with silver lettering I guessed it announced the opening of a restaurant in a former rectory, but no, it advertised an “on-demand shoe and handbag restoration service”. What an off-demand shoe and handbag restoration service might be one dreads to imagine. “Oi! Stop that restorer, he’s got my handbag!” “Honest, officer, I was only going to restore it.” “Well, kindly restore it to the lady now, before I take you into custody.”
It gets better. Inside was a salmon-pink and silver £20 voucher and the artisan’s statement: “The Restory is an integrated team of specialists brought together from all over the world to ensure your items are in the most capable and passionate hands. Our team disrupts, challenges and innovates in our craft to develop the most advanced solutions to seemingly impossible problems.”
Where is all this heading? In the direction of another Restory that recently supplied an advanced solution to a seemingly impossible problem, not just satisfying the item’s owner but making him hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem? What to do with a knock-off Leonardo that had changed hands for £45 in 1958 as a copy after Boltraffio and was so badly worn and restored that its very brand was in question, like a vintage Chanel bag missing its interlocking ‘Cs’. The advanced solution? First put the picture in the capable and passionate hands of veteran conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini and let her spend six years giving it a makeover, then – and this is the disruptive, challenging and innovative bit – put it into a post-war and contemporary art auction at Christie’s New York, rather than old master sale where it would have been handbagged by experts.
Challenge and innovation on their own are no longer enough. Now it’s all about disruption: stripping away any historical context that might put the viewing and the buying public off. If you whooped when Penelope Curtis restored chronological order to Tate Britain’s collection displays, prepare to weep as Maria Balshaw disrupts it: “We’re going to rehang the collection telling the story from the point of the London where we are today,” she warned the FT soon after her appointment. Instead of seeing the present as a product of the past, we’re now supposed to judge the past by the standards of the present. The autumn exhibition Legacies at New Art Gallery Walsall, for example, considers “the ongoing legacy of JMW Turner through the lens of contemporary art”, roping him in with a huddle of artists under the Tate umbrella on the catch-all pretext that he “challenged accepted conventions in art”.
Of course it’s obvious that, living as we do in the present, we can only consider the past through its lens. Still, a bit of context never did any harm – it’s not essential to the enjoyment of historical art, but it deepens it. One reason why the new breed of non-art historian gallery director wants shot of it is insecurity; they don’t like feeling inferior to their curators. But there’s another more worrying reason connected with the market. For those in the business of flogging art, a mix of old masters and contemporary artists has the beneficial effect of presenting contemporaries as masters in the making.
I won’t deny that mixing it is refreshing: what makes Frieze Masters so enjoyable is the gathering of dealers in art from six millennia under one tent. One of those dealers last year was Axel Vervoordt, the Belgian collector and ‘timeless interior designer’ who launched the fashion for art mixology in the noughties with a series of exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and has just opened his own ‘cultural complex’, Kanaal, in Antwerp. “I wanted to make Chronos into an artist,” was his poetic description of one exhibition, “to place the emphasis on the atemporal. For example, certain Egyptian and Bactrian pieces that date back 4,000 years pass for contemporary. And underlying this was the question of whether it is important to know by whom and when something was made.”
There is a respectable Renaissance tradition for this sort of time travel, but by whom and when something was made becomes important when money is involved. Art mixology is a seductive cocktail that can easily unsettle a weak head. In salerooms it is far more effective than bubbly at making bidders lose count of zeros, as Christie’s New York discovered in 2015 when they threw together a bunch of random lots by artists from Claude Monet to Urs Fischer under the theme of “artistic innovation inspired by the past”. The sale achieved auction records for 10 works, including $141.2m for Giacometti’s Pointing Man – making it the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction – and $179.3m for Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger – making it the most expensive work full stop. “Christie’s will continue in years to come to innovate more sales concepts that inspire the art collecting public,” crowed Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s global president and the sale’s auctioneer. You betcha. Two years later, they came up with a sales concept that netted $450m for a duff Leonardo.
We’re used to auction houses making silly money from modern masters, but making imbecilic money from old ones is something new. Before the advent of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi the auction record for an old master stood at the £49.5m achieved by Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents in 2002. To the new generation of collectors an Old Masters sale is about as sexy as a slave market of octogenarians. But despite his personal resemblance to Chronos Leonardo is an exception, largely thanks to Dan Brown – “as fascinating as any bestselling thriller” was how a Christie’s promotional video trailed the Salvator Mundi – and an escort of Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers had a further rejuvenating effect. Plus it helped that the National Gallery had given the picture one of the best shop windows in the world by including it in its 2011 Leonardo exhibition, where it stuck out like a sore thumb (though the thumbs are two of the best things about it). Nicholas Penny and Dan Brown both deserve a commission.
“What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet?” asked Jean Genet in an essay of 1967. What remains of this Leonardo? Not a lot. The painting “has endured some wear and tear over the centuries,” a spokeswoman for Christie’s conceded to The Art Newspaper before the sale, “but many of the most important elements – the blessing hand, the orb, Christ’s vestments, the curls in his hair – are remarkably intact.” All you can say is: “Nice curls, shame about the face”.
When a conservator devotes six years to restoring a picture that the original artist painted in a few weeks, the work is arguably more hers than his. So what am I bid for this Modestini? Without a recognised offence of ‘inappropriate retouching’, the line between restoration and fakery is as blurred as the Salvator Mundi’s face. As for the line between disruption and corruption, that keeps getting thinner and Leonardo’s crystal ball offers no hope of improvement. To quote Tom Phillips’s epitaph on Van Gogh: “Auctions speak louder than words”.
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