22 THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016
Books
Reviews
Exhibitionist: Writing about Art
in a Daily Newspaper
Richard Dorment
Wilmington Square Books, 384pp, £25 (hb)Blockbuster on a manageable scale
Der Kunstkenner Max J.
Friedländer: Biografische
Skizzen (The Connoisseur
Max J. Friedländer:
Biographical Sketches)
Simon Elson
Walther König, 527pp, €48 (hb);
in German onlyThe title of Simon Elson’s biography points to what
Max Friedländer was and how he saw himself: “der
Kunstkenner”, a type that has almost been forgotten in
today’s art scene: the connoisseur with the unfailing eye.
Friedländer’s connoisseurship was famous; Elson also
endeavours to emphasise that he was a historian.
Elson’s biography is set in the context of Jewish
emancipation in Prussia. His family were in the jewellery
business (and later in banking), rising to become imperial
court suppliers. Max Jakob Friedländer himself “embod-
ies an important part of the emancipation story. Despite
his Jewish origins he became not just a Prussian civil
servant—unusual, even around 1900—but even a mu-
seum director”. Yet he did not see himself as Jewish and,
when a group of high-proile Jewish art lovers planned to
establish a private Jewish Museum in 1929, he expressed
“reservations”: Elson describes it as the “sensitive
reaction of a Prussian oicial of Jewish origin who did not
want publicly to be linked with ‘Jewish politics’”.
Max Friedländer belonged to the Golden Age of
Berlin’s Preußische Museen (Prussian museums). He
was the director of the Kupferstichkabinett (department
of prints and drawings) for 22 years, and the director
or deputy director of the Gemäldegalerie (paintings
collection) for almost the same length of time. Along-
side his work as museum director, Friedländer achieved
prominence for his art-historical writing, especially for
his Early Netherlandish Painting (1903). Friedländer’s
language is clear, and Elson explains: “Friedländer
achieves his clarity by taking plain historical descrip-
tions and adorning them with poetic stylistic relections
that conjure up an image even for readers who do not
know all the paintings discussed in detail.” (2,000
illustrations were added to the English translation.)
Friedländer’s quiet existence in the civil service
took a dramatic turn in the Nazi era; he had to emigrate,
but went only as far as the Netherlands, shielded from
arrest and deportation on the orders of the top Nazi and
leading art looter Goering (“the Jew Friedländer is not
to be harassed”). His connoisseurship was clearly still
in demand: dealers acting on the Nazis’ behalf visited
him regularly in Amsterdam. He was very fortunate to
survive, although he never dwelt on the drama of his
situation. After the war, he wrote laconically: “In danger
for being the wrong race during the occupation, and
the wrong nationality after it, I was preserved from
misfortune by fortunate coincidences.” He remained in
Amsterdam where he died in 1958.- Bernhard Schulz is the art critic of Der Tagesspiegel,
Berlin
BRIEF LIVES
The Deaths of
Henri Regnault
Marc Gotlieb
University of Chicago Press,
320pp, £42, $60 (hb)The painter Henri Regnault
(1843-71) has been perhaps best
known for his premature death at
age 27 in the Franco-Prussian War and for a Salomé which
caused a sensation at the Salon of 1870 and later became
a textbook example of the worst sort of Orientalism.
Marc Gotlieb sets out to reassess both the painter and
the mythology that grew up around him. The result is
an absorbing book which not only airms the interest of
Regnault’s small but striking œuvre, but also examines his
posthumous reputation, from its high point after his fall in
battle, to its cataclysmic decline as Modernism took hold,
and inally to near oblivion as the paintings themselves
were relegated to the storerooms of the museums that
had once fought so hard to obtain them. Gotlieb has
a good eye, a keen attention to language, and a subtle
understanding of the dynamics of cultural memory.
As the title implies, Regnault had many lives as well
as deaths. Having won the Prix de Rome in 1866, he left
for Italy but spent much of his tenure travelling, notably
to Spain and North Africa. He produced large canvases—
of rich, almost garish colourism, replete with overt or im-
plicit violence—which combine an imaginative exoticism
with a raw realism that takes the viewer by surprise. In
chapters focusing loosely on his early paintings, Gotlieb
ranges widely to explore Regnault’s pictorial sense of be-
latedness, his relation to tradition and the Moderns, and
his experience of the “Oriental sublime” that gave rise to
some stunning watercolours. Two subsequent chapters
make a case for the powerful e ect of Regnault’s Salomé
(1870) and Execution without Judgment under the
Kings of Morocco (1870), paintings which seem almost
caricatural in their theatricality but which Gotlieb’s
analysis manages to make interesting. The remaining
three chapters explore Regnault’s legend and reputation,
their enlistment in the service of a patriotic mythology
after the 1871 defeat, his fortunes in the US and the
total collapse of his reputation. These later chapters are
somewhat leisurely and display some repetition, but
overall this is a compelling book about a painter who
inspired strong reactions on both sides of the debate,
from Gautier’s gushing “symphonist of colour” to Zola’s
sneering “Delacroix corrected by Gérôme”. Gotlieb him-
self acknowledges falling under Regnault’s “spell”, and,
if he does not convince everyone of his subject’s powers
of enchantment, he nevertheless makes him seem well
worth the e ort, and tells a good story in the process.- Michèle Hannoosh is a professor of French at the
University of Michigan. She is the editor of the recent
French edition of Delacroix’s Journal (2 vols, 2009) and
of Eugène Delacroix: Nouvelles Lettres (2000), and the
author of numerous works on 19th-century French art,
literature and society. She is the editor of Word & Image
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art
and Civilisation
James Stourton
HarperCollins, 496pp, £30 (hb)At the end of this masterly,
thoughtful and very moving bi-
ography, the author asks how his
subject, Kenneth Clark—some-
times dubbed, after his widely-known TV series,
“Lord Clark of Civilisation”—might wish to be remem-
bered. His response is to invoke Flaubert’s dictum:
“l’homme est rien, l’oeuvre c’est tout”. In his account,
James Stourton, a former director of Sotheby’s UK
and senior fellow of the University of London’s
Institute of Historical Research, narrates the vast
range and colossal scale of Clark’s accomplishments:
the youngest-ever director of London’s National
Gallery, leading specialist on Leonardo da Vinci,
Renaissance art scholar, highly e ective patron of—
and committee leader for—the performing and ine
arts, social lion, diverting memoirist and incompa-
rable communicator of art, in the media of lectures,
writing, ilm and television. This Stourton does equi-
tably and in clear, direct prose, all the while astutely
analysing each stage of Clark’s career. Inspiring him
all his adult life, states the author, was Ruskin’s credo
that “beauty was everyone’s birthright”.
Stourton begins his book with the calling, in
March 1934, of King George V at the National Gallery,
“the irst time a reigning monarch had visited the gal-
lery”. The king’s motive: that the 30-year-old director
assume the added position of surveyor of the king’s
pictures. Clark could not decline the o er. Formerly
in charge of about 2,000 pictures (at the National
Gallery), he was now responsible for some 7,000
more. With the coming war, all of these treasures
had to be evacuated for safekeeping, a tale Stourton
recounts in riveting detail.
This biography was commissioned by Jane Clark,
the widow of Kenneth Clark’s eldest son, Alan, and
the current châtelaine of Saltwood Castle. Yet there
is nothing “oicial” about it. Indeed, its longest chap-
ter, Saltwood: the Private Man, sometimes makes
for painful reading: the idea of the Great Man had
to be tempered with accounts of self-doubt, family
squabbles and his girlfriends. (One diverting detail is,
however, that Clark kept his Mars bars in his safe.) Ar-
chival information pertaining to Clark would appear
to be limitless: from that maintained at Tate Britain
(of which the catalogue alone, we learn, runs to 765
pages) to records at Saltwood and the Berenson
correspondence partially preserved at Villa I Tatti,
Florence. From all this (and much more), Stourton
has written an exceptional and fascinating book.- Eliot W. Rowlands is a freelance art historian and
specialist in early Renaissance Italian paintings. He
served as the senior researcher for Wildenstein & Co
for more than 25 years
The Mystery of
Marquis d’Oisy
Julian Litten
Paul Watkins Publishing,
192pp, £14.95 (pb)Julian Litten has had a long
and distinguished stint on the
curatorial sta of the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London, and has been
described as a “funerary historian”, well known for
an obsessive, if not morbid, interest in the cultus
of death and the departed. This monograph is an
ultimately unsuccessful attempt to lay to rest a
personal ghost for Litten, which goes back to his
discovery as a teenager of the glories of Thaxted
church in Essex. In the byways of early 20th-century
Anglo-Catholicism, Thaxted has its own particular
niche, carved out by the contradictions in the per-
sonality of Conrad Noel, its vicar from 1910 to 1942,
who combined radical socialist politics with the re-
invention (his vision) of pre-Reformation England in
the depths of rural Essex. Possibly a saint, certainly
a dreamer, Noel drew around him a whole circle of
gifted oddities, of which there was none odder nor
more gifted than the subject of this book.
Litten directs shafts of light onto the history
of the man who was known as the Marquis D’Oisy,
but in the end has to admit that the mystery is
impenetrable. Ambrose Thomas was his real name
and, although born a Catholic in 1881 and dying as
one in 1959, he seems to have lirted for most of
his life with various forms of exotic Anglicanism,
settling down to a career of acting—pageants
were a speciality—and domestic and ecclesiastical
decoration. (At various times he was employed
by the cabinet-maker Maples and the church
furnisher Louis Grosse.) The hints at aristocratic
Brazilian and French antecedents would seem
to have been sheer fantasy. While never short of
patronage, he was rarely out of debt. It is the paint-
ed furniture that irst attracted Litten’s notice and
the examples reproduced here do certainly reveal
a dated charm. In an uncharacteristically terse
foreword, Sir Roy Strong o ers the thought: “I can
totally understand the author’s fascination with
this elusive o -beat character... who could have
walked out of one of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia
novels.” The personal reminiscences of those who
knew Thomas are fascinating in that they conjure
up images of a deferential society where people
seemed happier with their lot. Is this short work
no more than a generous “homage” to a peripheral
igure of little interest to any but a few? Yes, but it
has awakened in me, at least, the desire to revisit
Thaxted and perhaps even to make a pilgrimage to
the Marquis’s grave at Great Dunmow.- Christopher Colven is the rector of St James’s
Catholic Church, Spanish Place, London
Despite its intriguing title, this selection of
Richard Dorment’s articles from almost 30
years as art critic of the Daily Telegraph is
not an autobiography nor a primer for the
neophyte. Exhibitionist: Writing about
Art in a Daily Newspaper is, like all such
anthologies, something of an indulgence,
but it is also a useful reference work; too
heavy to take to the beach, more apt for
consultation in the study. The writing is
compacted, intense and focused. This is
not a book to read from cover to cover,
but to browse and dip into. At its best it
is thought-provoking and informative.
Dorment reprints 116 pieces out of thousands
written between December 1986 and June
2015 with a new introduction that ofers
something of a CV, but left me wanting
to know more. Dorment says at one point
that he spoke to David Sylvester on the tele-
phone every day for ten years; a little later
he admits that his own taste was “fairly
cautious”. The man behind the reviews
remains a rather shadowy figure.
Richard Dorment is a good journalist
with a lovely clarity of style, and is expert
at describing and explaining paintings. He
looks carefully for narrative meaning and
enjoys decoding it. In fact, he is adept at
appealing to the literary predilections of his
readers, which helps to explain his success.
The English are fundamentally suspicious
of art, and much prefer to think of it as
storytelling rather than the manipulation of
plastic or formal values. The typical Dorment
interpretation will button-hole the reader
with anecdote (read him, for instance, on
Thomas Lawrence, Landseer or William Bell
Scott), then take on the slightly distanced
but authoritative tones of the lecturer who
can tell you all about a subject. Dorment
gives us potted art history, a complete and
often brilliantly descriptive short essay on
an exhibition, rather than a review of it. His
pieces encourage armchair viewing—they do
not make you want to rush out and decide
for yourself. They can, in fact, become a
substitute for exhibition visiting.
As an American who has lived in London
for more than 40 years, he admits that
he still does not see the point of Stanley
Spencer, Elgar, John Betjeman, PG Wode-
house or Gilbert and Sullivan. Humour
is not his strong point. Nor is he quite so
assured when it comes to modern Englishart (he is gloriously wrong about David
Hockney and Gilbert and George). He
includes here a review of a Keith Vaughan
exhibition (but not a similar piece on John
Craxton that I remember) in which it is
clear that he does not know enough about
Vaughan’s work to be quite so magisterial.
This is the danger facing every critic: being
opinionated only on the strength of what
he or she is seeing rather than possessing
deeper knowledge to draw on. But such
failings are little in evidence here.
Dorment is expectedly good on the
American Sublime and Sargent’s portraits,
on Arshile Gorky, Twombly and Brice
Marden, but also on Manet’s Luncheon in
the Studio and Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières.
He is excellent on rethinking Van Gogh
in his review of the Royal Academy’s 2010
“blockbuster on a manageable scale”.
Sometimes I felt the need for more
controversy of the kind that the Symbolist
Landscape clearly stirred in his breast, but
asperity is rare in these information-filled
pages. That said, he does attack Tate
curators a couple of times—deservedly
and enjoyably. A final point: although his
writing is intelligent, pacey and engaging,
Dorment—like so many other, lesser critics
—seems to think that the word “artwork”
means work of art. It doesn’t. It actually
refers to the illustrations in a printed work.
I saw it used correctly for a change the other
day in a mail-order catalogue.A farewell collection of reviews by the British art critic
Richard Dorment. By Andrew Lambirth
John Berger at 90
and Prunella Clough are discussed, and less well-known figures
such as the poet Gael Turnbull and the artist Ian Breakwell.
Both writers are suiciently relaxed to be discursive as well as
intently focused, and the book ofers a delightfully informal but
still serious account of what might be called an art friendship.
Confabulations, the book of new Berger material, is slightly
disappointing in that it is so slim, and at least one of its chapters
also appears in Landscapes. But why complain? Stories usually
gain depth and resonance by repetition, though variation
of telling also helps. (Two vignettes from another chapter of
Confabulations appear in Lapwing & Fox, but with slight difer-
ences, which help to hold the attention.)
Berger begins his first Confabulations essay thus: “I have
been writing for about 80 years. First letters then poems and
speeches, later stories and articles and books, now notes.”
Writing is a means of making sense of things, but also of
communicating. Part of the spell is his modesty: “What has
prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that some-
thing needs to be told and that, if I don’t try to tell it, it risks
not being told. I picture myself not so much a consequential,
professional writer, as a stop-gap man.”
His “notes” range wide: from Camus and Chaplin to song,
swimming and the nature of language. There is a particularly
beautiful story bringing together the eel fishers of Comacchio
in Italy with folk music and a mosaic outside Ravenna. But it
is not all celebration. His warnings about the state of society
have become positively Shakespearian: “In the totalitarian
global-order of financial speculative capitalism under which we
are living, the media ceaselessly bombard us with information,
yet this information is mostly a planned diversion, distracting
our attention from what is true, essential and urgent.” And
later: “Add to this the language used by the media to present
and classify the world. It is very close to the jargon and logic
of management experts. It quantifies everything and seldom
refers to substance or quality. It deals with percentages, shifts in
opinion-polls, unemployment figures, growth rates, mounting
debts, estimates of carbon dioxide, et cetera, et cetera. It is a
voice at home with digits but not with living or sufering bodies.
It does not speak of regrets or hopes.” Much of the attraction
of Berger’s writing is the hope it instills as well as the insight it
ofers. Long may he continue.- Andrew Lambirth is a freelance writer, critic and curator. He was the art
critic of the Spectator from 2002 to 2014. His most recent book is the cata-
logue raisonné of paintings by Brian Rice (Sansom & Co, 2016)
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