Contact us:
+44 (0)20 8742 3355
martinrandall.com
ATOL 3622 | ABTA Y6050 | AITO 5085Tours that lead you up
the garden path.
As market leaders in cultural tours we enjoy privileged access to historic
KRXVHVDQGJDUGHQVWKURXJKRXW%ULWDLQ(XURSHDQGIXUWKHUDĆHOGLed by eminent academics and horticulturists, MRT’s all-inclusive house
DQGJDUGHQWRXUVFHOHEUDWHWKHĆQHVWDUFKLWHFWXUHDQGJDUGHQGHVLJQ
From the formal to the frivolous, from Suffolk to Sanssouci, many offer
additional elements such as country walks or wine-tasting.‘The houses chosen were an
excellent mix. The private,
off-hours guided tours
arranged by Martin Randall
impressed us greatly.’Tours include: Gardens & Villas of Campagna Romana
Walking & Gardens in Madeira | Gardens of the Riviera
Gardens & Villas of the Italian Lakes
Gardens & Palaces of Berlin & PotsdamArt market
Fickle fortune
Martin Gayford
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment:
could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I
mean not the 52-year-old artist himself —
that would be sensational indeed — but the
vast fame, the huge prices, the hectares of
newsprint, profiles, reviews and interviews
by the thousand. Could all that just fade
from our collective memory into a black
hole of oblivion?
The answer is: yes, quite easily. Artists
vanish all the time. Take the case of Hans
Makart (1840–1884). He was a contempo-
rary of Monet, Manet and Degas, but enor-
mously more acclaimed in his lifetime than
any of those. A period of Viennese life was
dubbed the ‘Makart era’, a fashionable
idiom was named the ‘Makartstil’.
One reason for his success was that he
was a master of PR. Makart transformed
his studio, an old foundry, into a vast stage
set crammed with floral displays, sculp-
ture and opulent bric-à-brac. Cosima Wag-
ner described it as a ‘wonder of decorative
beauty, a sublime lumber-room’. To a 21st-
century eye, old photographs of the space
look like installation art.
Makart was able to put on a tremen-
dous performance, too. In 1879 he designed
a spectacular parade to celebrate the silver
wedding anniversary of the Emperor Franz
Joseph, with floats, costumes, every detail
conceived by the artist — and Makart lead-
ing the entire caboodle in person on a white
horse. The Viennese liked it so much they
carried on repeating the ‘Makart parade’
until the 1960s.
He gave his age what it wanted: masses
of voluptuous naked flesh depicted with
sub-Rubenesque gusto, mixed with jewels,
rich textiles and maybe a spot of blood. Butwho remembers Makart now? To be fair, a
few art historians do — and probably more
in Austria than elsewhere. But compared
with Cézanne or Sisley — obscure nobodies
when he was riding that white horse — his is
a very dim name these days.
Makart’s is not an isolated case. Many of
the most familiar figures in the history of art
passed through periods — lasting in some
cases for centuries — during which nobody
paid them or their works any attention at all.
In 1786, Goethe — one of the most cultivat-
ed and erudite people in Europe — passedCould Damien Hirst fade from our
collective memory into a black
hole of oblivion?through Assisi without looking at the fres-
coes of the Upper and Lower Churches of
San Francesco. Giotto, Simone Martini and
Cimabue simply weren’t then on the list of
interesting things to see.
Similarly, nobody took much interest in
El Greco between his death in 1614 and the
mid 19th century. For a long while, Johannes
Vermeer was, if not a complete artistic non-
entity, then no more famous than dozens of
other 17th-century Dutch genre painters.
Even within recent times, the rise of Ver-
meer’s reputation has been stratospheric. In
2014, the most popular art exhibition in the
world was a show in Tokyo in which the big-
gest attraction by far was one of his paintings,
‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ (seen by 750,000
people at a rate of 10,000 a day). Twenty-five
years ago this picture was not even the most
celebrated Vermeer.
The market in artistic fame — even of
old masters — is surprisingly volatile. The
examples above are, of course, those who
got remembered again. But plenty, famous
in their day, never get rediscovered. Alter-
natively, they may be hugely admired by one
age, then relegated to a much less prominent
spot in our collective consciousness. Rapha-
el Mengs, Guido Reni and the Carracci are
among those currently in this position: their
works still hang on the walls of major art gal-
leries, but they are not paid much attention.