The National Gallery of Canada http://www.gallery.ca has just opened a new exhibit entitled ”Bridges to Modernity” on paintings by Monet done between 1872-1878 while he lived with his growing family in Argenteuil a suburb of Paris on the Seine river. This is years from his move to Giverney where he will live later in life.
By the dates we have a young painter, a young Monet before becoming famous and also the dates 1872-1878 are crucial years just after the Franco-Prussian which France lost with devastating consequences, loosing Alsace-Lorraine to the new rising power of a unified German Empire proclaimed at the end of that war in the Palace of Versailles.
Following the war, the French Empire under Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon collapse. France slipped into a terrible civil war devastating Paris and seeing score of Parisians killed by a French Army gone wild, Tuileries Palace was burnt to the grown and so were scores of other public buildings like the Paris City Hall.
At first Monet fled to London where he will paint the bridges of the Thames river and then returning to France will settle in Argenteuil well outside Paris and will paint the bridges being rebuilt over the Seine river.
Railway and trains and train bridges are a fairly new phenomenon at the time and impressive engineering work also created a lot of interest. This exhibit shows the devastation on infrastructure of this war and the re-building that took place and the return to a normal life. The colours and composition are very interesting and already shows what will come to be known as Impressionism, which is defined as a personal reflexion and impressions of the artist on his surroundings.
Railway bridge at Argenteuil
Houses of Parliament on the Thames river
Waterloo bridge with the industrial area of Southwark on the Thames
From the balcony of his London hotel room overlooking the Thames, Monet could see Waterloo Bridge if he faced to his left. He worked on this subject through the afternoon and after dinner. In this painting the morning mist partially conceals the industrial landscape of the opposite riverbank. So once again, the real subject becomes the atmospheric variations of the London environment.
At the end of the exhibit we have this camera view live from the Bank street bridge over the Rideau Canal in Ottawa.
It really is a beautiful exhibit by a master and to this day a much loved artist. See it until 15 February 2016.
It was a busy week at the National Gallery of Canada, I attended several meetings with fellow docents, continued to plan the 24 lectures I am organizing for the new Season starting in September, I attended a staff meeting before the opening of the retrospective on Alex Colville who died in 2013. His daughter Ann was present and she said words about her parents who were married for 70 years and died within 7 months of each other, it was very touching and wonderful. Looking at his painting they are very personal, about every day life but there is also in some of them a certain tension.
Colville loved the movie ” No country for old men” a modern horror story. Some of his paintings have a gun resting on a table, it is just a gun but it is unnerving to just see it on a table and it makes you wonder what could happen. It is that tension that attracts your eye. Other paintings are of a couple, mostly him and his wife Rhoda in everyday situation. He was also a War Artist during the Second World War. He was at the Bergen Belsen Camp when it was liberated and those experiences haunted him though has his daughter said he never spoke much about it. There is also his love of animals and how he feels about them, he had many dogs and believed in their innate goodness. Those qualities of evil or deceit so frequent in humans is absent in animals unless they are taught. A very interesting man, though a social conservative and he did live in a small University town most of his life he was well connected to the world. The show is very well curated by Andrew Hunter of the Art Gallery of Ontario and Adam Welch of the National Gallery of Canada.
The artist Mary Pratt also gave a lecture on Thursday night, she worked with Colville, she is currently featured at the museum, with her paintings of Erotic Jellies, very nice.
I also presented two works of art, one being the Head of an Old women by Pierre Paul Rubens. I was startled by a visitor who was listening to my presentation and when I mentioned that the Dutch word for such a generic painting was Tronie, the lady told me that she was from the Netherlands and spoke fluent Dutch, she said she had never heard the word. I was puzzled because I was sure I had read this description and was wondering if I might have made a mistake in my understanding. I looked it up and the word Tronie does exist but it is a 16th century Dutch word. Used by the artists of the time to describe a generic head or a head or face which cannot be identified with any one in particular or something grotesque. So I will have to specify that next time in my presentation. I like presenting this painting by Rubens because it leads into how painters like him worked and what was involved in their trade at the time.
We are also having a Monet exhibit in September about 14 of his paintings, one in particular Le Pont de Bois painted in 1872 shows a bridge being re-built across the Seine River near Paris after the destruction of the original one during the Franco-Prussian War. This painting was said to be on loan to us by an anonymous benefactor.
It turns out that the anonymous person is Josef Straus owner of JDS Uniphase, he bought the painting at Sotheby’s in London in June 2013 for about $11 million dollars. The proceeds of that sale were donated to UNICEF by the Estate of the previous owner Gustav Rau.
Straus is a longtime benefactor of the National Gallery of Canada.
The Virgin and Child with SS. Pope Gregory the Great, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Julian, Dominic, and Francis
by Benozzo Gozzoli (1476)
In the new repainted European Renaissance Gallery room 201 of the National Gallery of Canada you will find this painting with a very beautiful golden frame to enhance this very large tableau. Very typical in style to the Italian Renaissance works you see in Italy in Churches and private Family chapels. In this case the name of the Saints appear in Latin in their halos, something Gozzoli liked to do in his paintings. It is done in brilliant colour and is a spectacular piece of art. At the bottom there is a dedication to the Salviati Family of Florence. This painting a Sacred Conversation was intended as an Altar piece for a church in Pisa where the Compagnia dei Fiorentini met. Like other painting of that time period at the NGC it was bought after the Second World War from families or institutions who had been forced to sell their art works or was looted art by the Nazi Regime. The Paul L. Drey Family of New York sold it to the NGC in 1951.
Originally it had been in the collection of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of Cologne, inventory #500. In 1943 Walter Bornheim who had acquired the A.S. Drey Firm of Munich and who had Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring as an important client, acquired (forcibly sold) this painting. It was confiscated by he USA Army in 1945.
This Altar piece painting format Gozzoli will repeat it differently and it can be seen at the National Gallery in London,UK.
It is an important piece of art of the Italian Renaissance period. I try to interest people in it and take a closer look at this Altar piece. One of the difficulties is that often people do not know what they are looking at. They have no idea who is in the painting despite the name being written on the halos. One gentleman with his family looked at it for a while and when ask my his child what was it, he explained that there was this woman with a baby and Jesus was speaking to them, he was confusing Saint Francis for Jesus because of the stigmata on the hands. As for the other characters he had no idea who they might be. Now this fellow was a ”traditional” Canadian, white Christian male. It is very common today to find people under the age of 50 who have no concept or knowledge of religion of any kind. History is a jumble of confusion, I have to be careful not to inject too many details in my explanation because again people may not understand what I am talking about. I find this very sad and often bewildering. I also see this at the Canadian War Museum, total confusion on the First and Second World War, Korea never heard of it, Vietnam there are vague memories but mostly not sure what it was about. Anything before 1990 and it is ancient history.
I remember the Priest who sang the Funeral service of my mother, telling me afterwards how impress he was with relatives and friends who attended the service because we knew the prayers and responses of the Mass. I said to him, what do you mean Father, he replied you have no idea the ignorance of people today, they only come to Church for a Funeral because they think they have to, so I just make the service short for them, otherwise they are bored.
We have other paintings, in fact the NGC has a collection of 35,000 works of art in its vault. It is the same with other works of art, no matter the era or the painter. Currently the NGC is preparing a Monet exhibition and to attract people we are showing one painting by the master entitled Le pont de bois (1872) a newly built temporary bridge over the Seine River outside Paris. People are invited to leave comments in a book with question they might have about the piece. Next to the painting there is a description of the art work, despite the fact that people read the information notes, many will ask why is the bridge destroyed or who destroyed it, what war was it? It is all explained in the notes next to the painting but it does not sink in. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 is unknown to most people despite its terrible impact it had on France and its consequences for the future in Europe. In Canada we participated to the Boer War in South Africa and has one person asked once, is it called bore war because it was boring?
I find ignorance amongst children the most troubling and the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of their parents. Though I can see with children whose parents read to them or speak to them or involve them in activities other than watching TV or sports, those children are more aware and can follow a discussion. In class I find often that children whose parents or relatives paint or take them to the museum are those who are the bright lights in the class, those who have absent parents or who only hear about hockey are often the laggard in the class. What a terrible disservice such parents do to their children.
Part of my volunteer job at the National Gallery of Canada also know in French as the Musée des beaux-arts du Canada in Ottawa is the activity called Docent’s Choice.
Each month my colleague docent (guide) and I will chose individually pieces of art we would like to study and present to the public. First thing is to ensure the piece of art is still on display, so I walk the galleries and look for something I would like to present in a mini-lectures 10 minutes. I then study it and the artist who made it. It is a long process for such a short presentation time but it is well worth it. The artists come alive, suddenly you learn about their frustrations and difficulties, their personal lives and their struggles. Many artists were geniuses who early in life displayed a lot of talent, it was either recognized by their family or not, they often travelled or went to schools known in French as Académie des arts where they had to study under teachers who taught a style of painting or sculpture but were not inclined to accept rebellion or new styles. Their life as artists was a job, a career, not something they did as a hobby.
Depending of the historical time they lived in, they were often looked down upon by their patrons and clients who were the wealthy aristocracy. Per example when the Sun King Louis XIV was told that Molière had died, a play write he loved and appreciated. His reaction was indifference, he said ”well he cannot be of any use to me anymore”.
Michealangelo who created so much works of art for the Popes and other Sovereigns was resented by them because he was a prima donna given to temper tantrums. He was kept at arms length. On the other hand Gian Lorenzo Bernini who decorated the inside of Saint Peter Basilica including the great bronze baldachin over the Papal Altar during a 10 year period and would go on to do more major works in Rome was a smooth affable man much liked by the Popes.
In the coming weeks I will be presenting works by Gustave Doré, Thomas Couture, Auguste Rodin, Paul Gaugin and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
Last Summer we had a retrospective on Gustave Doré who is mostly known as an Illustrator, there is the Doré Bible and the illustrations for the stories of Charles Perrault, the Fables by Lafontaine etc… But Doré who was a child prodigy wanted to be acknowledged as a painter, no matter how hard he tried the Critics in the Salon would have none of it and constantly minimized his works with vicious attacks.
In the last few months the NGC bought one of Doré’s painting Memories of Loch Lomond which was done while on a fishing trip to Scotland with the Equerry of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. A very romantic style painting, a style Frederick Lord Leighton would later take up with great success. But poor Doré no such luck. The Critics at the time were stuck in a mind frame, they had conservatives taste and would dictate to Society at large what was acceptable or what was good art.
We still have this frame of mind today amongst the popular press and a certain segment of Society in general. One painting at the NGC which has been controversial since it was bought is the famous Voice of Fire. To this day we still have people coming in going to see it on the second floor as a vindication that Abstract art or Contemporary art is bunk.
Voice of Fire is an acrylic on canvas abstract painting made by American painter Barnett Newman in 1967. It consists of three equally sized vertical stripes, with the outer two painted blue and the centre painted red.
The purchase of Voice of Fire by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa for its permanent collection in 1989 at a cost of $1.8 million caused a storm of controversy. Some residents mocked the purchase with striped T-shirts and ties that mimicked the painting. A book called Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State, edited by Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbaut and John O’Brian, and published in 1996, discusses the issues around the purchase of the painting.
Commissioned for Expo 67, the International and Universal Exposition that took place in Montreal during Canada’s 1967 centennial, Voice of Fire was part of the US pavilion organized by art critic and historian Alan Solomon. The exhibition, American Painting Now featured the work of twenty-two artists installed in the US Pavilion a geodesic dome designed by engineer Buckminster Fuller. Explicitly oriented to Solomon’s directions, Voice of Fire’s 18 foot length was vertical to echo the size of the dome. This was the first time Newman worked on this scale in a vertical format. The paintings were displayed along other symbols of American progress, an Apollo space capsule and red-and-white striped Apollo parachutes, photographs of the moon and large-scale photographs of movie stars.
In the spring of 1987, Brydon Smith, then assistant director of the National Gallery of Canada contacted Newman’s widow Annalee to ask if she would consider lending it to the gallery for a temporary exhibition the following year to coincide with the completion of a new museum building.
In May 1988 Voice of Fire was installed in the newly constructed National Gallery of Canada with little media attention or controversy. It was displayed in a large, high-ceiling space, with only a few other works by American artists Milton Resnick, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Tony Smith. In this display of post-war US art, Voice of Fire “was given pride of place” as the centrepiece. In March 1990, the National Gallery announced its purchase of the painting for $1.8 million, which ignited a “firestorm” of media attention and controversy in Ottawa mostly around the question of if the work was worthy of being called art.
Other artists in their time like Auguste Rodin and Claude Monet had to fight to become established and to shut the Critics up. When Rodin produced his first sculpture The Age of Bronze, Critics attacked him saying that it was impossible for Rodin to have made that sculpture, it was, they said, nothing more than a plaster cast made from the body of the male model, Rodin was a fraud according to them. The model was a young Belgian Soldier and Rodin had made sketches prior to doing his sculpture, his problem with the Critics was based on the fact that he was departing from established academic school of sculpture. Rodin was able to show that it was a true sculpture and this launch his career, he is regarded today as the Father of Modern Sculpture.
The vanquished or the Age of Bronze
Monet had the same problem by presenting a new way of painting, Impressionism. It took him years to become established and accepted. Years of great difficulty, he could not sell his art work, no one would buy them, it was considered bad art. Lucky for Claude Monet he had friends like Edouard Manet who having studied with Thomas Couture was able to introduce Monet to the Salon and finally prominent French Politicians started to show interest in him and he was accepted.
It is to my mind a continuous battle for artists to push society out of its comfortable way of thinking. Think of the 1200 artists, many great names of the XXth century who with the rise of the Nazi Dictatorship in Germany found themselves on the list of Degenerate Artists whose works were confiscated or destroyed.
So in my presentations I try to introduce certain ideas and concepts, to let people think about what they are looking at and maybe gain a new appreciation for the artist and the work they are looking at. I honestly believe that art is a wonderful way for people to understand where they are now and what happened before. You can gain so much from looking at Art and trying to understand the world. I always say to visitors, look at the colours and the forms for abstract art, look for the emotions it evokes in you. For other art such as portraits, the eyes, the faces, the hands, it will help you understand if the painter is presenting a moral lesson or being a Society artist flattering his clients. In landscapes look at the sky, the composition and the play on light. It will help you understand the message of the artist.
Here is a video made by the BBC in 1992 with Sister Wendy Beckett. Who is an Art Historian. The Nun who knows about art. Sister Wendy said; If you do not know about God, art is the only thing that can set you free.
She is also a great friend of Chef Delia Smith. I love the BBC World Service and BBC 4 they have such great programming, like the one by our dear friend David Nice on Art Desk. You can find on You Tube more about program recorded for the BBC on Art by Sister Wendy. It is delightful.
This second video is very interesting in how she interprets the paintings she is showing you.
Tutto iniziò con Memorie di Adriano ..sulle strade dell'Impero Romano, tra foto, storia e racconti! It all began with Memoirs of Hadrian .. on the roads of the Roman Empire among photos, history and stories!
Telling the stories of the history of the port of Charlottetown and the marine heritage of Northumberland Strait on Canada's East Coast. Winner of the Heritage Award from the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation and a Heritage Preservation Award from the City of Charlottetown
