LondonAuthor(s): Keith RobertsSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 115, No. 846 (Sep., 1973), pp. 618-619+621Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/877483 .

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CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS

as the hero of the exhibition with over forty examples, including many famous etchings from the Caprichos, Desastres della Guerra, Tauromequia and Los Proverbios series, all in good impressions, many with their margins. The prices which are printed in the catalogue have to be read to be believed: ?3,6oo for Picasso's linocut (1964) of Jacqueline Lisant; ?3,500 for his lithograph (1928) Figure et Profil, and

?6,500 for (admittedly) a unique working proof of Goya's self portrait title page of Los Caprichos. These will seem bargains in 1984. In September, Colnaghi's are planning a loan exhibition from the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University. This will include Old Masters and nine- teenth-century paintings, and selections from the Print Collection and the J. M. Whistler collection and is on behalf of the Building Fund of the Department of Art.

The fine print collections bequeathed in the last century by Bernard Mancel to the

Musie des Beaux-Arts, Caen have been exhibited periodically since the re-opening of the Museum in 1970. Two exhibitions have been held, of Rembrandt and Callot, and this summer a third has opened de- voted to the engraved work of Diurer. The exhibition contains about 200 engravings.

Until 9th September, the Dijon Mus- eum has an exhibition of 'Antoine le Moiturier, le dernier des grands Imagiers de Ducs de Bourgogne'. This is the third in a series which has attracted considerable in- ternational attention; the two earlier ones being 'les pleurants dans l'Art du Moyen Age en Europe', and 'Jean de la Huerta et la sculpture bourgignonne au milieu du XVe sidcle'.

B.N.

Until i6th September, the White- chapel Art Gallery is showing three hundred photographs of the neighbour- hood, mainly by four professionals (Messrs Freed, McCormick, Marriott and Schwarz), but also taken by the local in- habitants. Old photographs are also included.

The sculptor Uli Nimptsch was born in Berlin in 1897, and trained at the Fine Art School there. From 193I1 until 1938 he lived in Rome; he has lived and worked in Britain since 1939. An associate of the Royal Academy in 1958, he was made a full Academician in 1967 and it is fitting that the Academy should be devoting to him the first retrospective of his work held in London. The fifty-seven sculptures and twelve drawings, dating back to I920, are to be seen in the Diploma Galleries until 23rd September.

The Victoria and Albert Museum's large and important exhibition ofJapanese popular prints from 1700oo to i9goo opens on 20th September and closes on 25th November. It is hoped that a review will be included in the November number.

Until Ist September, the Wolver- hampton Art Gallery is showing a large selection (503 items in the illustrated

catalogue) of Coronation souvenirs from 166o to 1953; there is a bewildering variety of material, from medals, plates and cups to engravings and magazines.

The catalogue situation, with regard to galleries and museums in Great Britain, continues - very slowly - to improve. The National Museum of Wales, for ex- ample, has just issued a check-list of paintings and sculpture up to April, 1972, including a few important long-term loans. (Dublin produced the same kind of skeletal catalogue two years ago.) Cardiff has also published an illustrated Guide to the Collection of Painting and Sculpture, with a text by A. D. Fraser Jenkins.

The home of Sir George Beaumont (1753-1827), patron, collector and ama- teur artist, was at Coleorton in Leicester- shire; and it is appropriate that he should be so well represented in the collection of the Leicester Museum and Art Gal- lery. The museum has brought out an excellent catalogue of its Beaumont hold- ings, largely the work of Luke Herrmann and Mrs Felicity Owen, a descendant of Sir George. But this useful illustrated publication (produced with Mellon help) is much more than just a catalogue of the museum material. With its four essays and various lists - not least of Beaumont's collection of British art - it is a useful document for anyone studying the taste of the period.

Readers might care to have advanced notice of an interesting show in Paris, at the Galerie D6p6t 15 (I5, rue St Denis). It is a full-scale exhibition of the work of Joseph Csaky (1888- 971) the Hungarian- born sculptor who was a friend and con- temporary of Laurens, Archipenko and Lipchitz. There will be sixty sculptures and I og gouaches and drawings.

The Museum Boymans-van Beunin- gen has just been showing a loan exhibi- tion of nineteenth-century German draw- ings. There were eighty items, with an illustrated catalogue (in Dutch).

Until 2nd September, the Museum in Bremen is featuring an exhibition of 'American Graphics since 1960', previ- ously seen in various centres in Switzer- land. There is an illustrated catalogue.

A mixed modern exhibition can be seen at the gallery of Marie-Louise Jeanneret in Geneva, until 20th September. There are eighty-one items, including works by Ensor, Moore, Gris, Matisse, Modigliani, Ernst, Picasso and Magritte.

'Vorarlberger Barockbaumeister' is the title of a large and lavishly catalogued exhibition, mounted for both Eiinsiedeln and Bregenz, and open until September.

In the spring of this year, the Asia House Gallery in New York mounted an exhibition of Indian paintings (c.1520- 1900) from American Collections; after New York, it was to be shown in San Francisco and Buffalo (Albright-Knox Gallery of Art). The catalogue, entitled A Flower from Every Meadow, by Stuart Cary Welch, and with contributions by Mark Zebrowski, is distributed by the

New York Graphic Society and is avail- able in hardback at $17.50. The eighty- two items are reproduced in colour or black and white.

Various catalogues of exhibitions held at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor are still available. Among them are the catalogues of the exhibition of the Dr T. Edward and Tullah Hanley Collection (173 paintings, draw- ings and sculptures, predominantly nine- teenth and early twentieth century in date), and of 'Three Centuries of American Paintings', a publication which has since served as a guide to the permanent installation.

K.R.

London The National Trust has recently placed

on indefinite loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum a rare and important Italian Renaissance fountain, which for- merly stood in the grounds of one of its properties, Woolbeding House in Sussex. The figurative sections are by Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474-1554), and are dateable to the first decade of the sixteenth century (Fig.76). Once more fully opera- tive, the fountain has been set up in the Raphael Cartoon Court; and any money that is thrown into its waters will be passed on to the National Art-Collections Fund.

The individual parts are impressive -

especially the main figure (Fig.77) and the Medusa masks - even if the propor- tions of the construction as a whole do not seem quite right. The standing youth is too small in relation to the lower and main basin. Although the fountain was known to Berenson fifty or sixty years ago, and is mentioned by Clark in the last edition of his Leonardo monograph (Penguin, 1971, p.I2o, note 2), it will be fully published for the first time by John Pope-Hennessy in the forthcoming Victoria and Albert Museum Tear Book (No.4). In this article he rightly stresses the connection with designs by Leonardo, who is known to have been associated with Rustici in the early years of the century.

Three recent exhibitions of prints and drawings have been of interest. At Fischer Fine Art, there has been Henry Moore's complete graphic work (1931-72), an impressive show, even if very few of his prints come anywhere near the quality of his sculpture. They are in fact of least interest when they are closest to his sculptural ideas, which they merely illus- trate, but without the benefit of the crucial third dimension, and of most value when most pictorial, as in the Elephant Skull series or the design of 1971 simply called Architecture.

The William Weston Gallery has been showing twenty-five of Gericault's lithographs. Not all the best pieces were included, but there were enough to give the full flavour of Gericault's graphic work, with its tense and moody atmos-

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74. Tureen, by John Edwards II, London, 1746-47. Silver. (Victoria and Albert Museum.)

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75. Covered Bowl, Naples (Capodimonte) c. 1750. Soft-paste porcelain, (Victoria and Albert Museum.)

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to the Victoria and Albert Museum.) 77. Detail from the Fountain illustrated in Fig.

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CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS

phere and charged imagery. Alongside the very familiar sheets (the various 'Farriers' and the Coal Waggon) were a number of less well-known things like the Lara blessi, perhaps the nearest Giricault ever came, to the traditional Keepsake style.

Agnew's 'Modern British Drawings 1900-1973' was a miscellaneous an- thology strong on Augustus John, William Thomas Hawksworth, Percy Hague Jowett and Condor. There were also good examples of Ginner, Gilman and Sickert (Rue de la Boucherie, Dieppe, one of the preliminary studies for the painting now in York City Art Gallery).

Since 1966, the Campbell Museum in New Jersey has been building up a collection of tureens - or at any rate vesssels from which were served 'soups, ragouts and similar foods.' A selection of some fifty of these eighteenth and nine- teenth-century pieces (the I972 catalogue lists 147 in all) can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 9th Septem- ber; and later in Seattle and Los Angeles.

At a time of Watergate and Poulson one cannot be too careful about declaring one's interest; so I intend to be quite frank and admit that I was invited - along with a fair number of fellow journalists and critics - to a luncheon at the Hyde Park Hotel on the day of the opening. Now this lunch was entirely unnecessary: the ex- hibits are fully labelled and there is the catalogue, lavishly illustrated in colour, not to mention the assorted leaflets and mimeographed sheets without which no self-respecting press view would be com- plete. There was nothing that one needed to know that required a three course meal to discover; and as most of the exhibits are very grand, and all of them highly au- thentic, there was no question of softening up the critical faculties.

The lunch, by the way, was excellent. No doubt aware that their generous gesture might have already been mis- interpreted in certain quarters, the hosts were discreet enough not to include on the menu any of the famous Campbell soups, even though their success, immortalized by Mr Warhol's paintings of the con- tainers, is not unconnected with the museum's activities. Over coffee and brandy, we were even shown a film which described how exact replicas were made of two of the pieces in the collection. This film, a perfect example of the old Path6 Pictorial 'seven generations of master craftsmen' style, seemed to me a mistake. Who really wants to know how to make a De Lamerie tureen in 1973? I would much rather have learned how they make Campbell's Soups, and exactly how the contents (to which you add the same amount of water - I'm an old customer) is related to cost and mark up, and what percentage goes in packaging and adver- tising.

But what of the tureens? Well, you know what tureens are like - at least tureens from the S~vres or Meissen

factories; or tureens made by Paul Storr or John Edwards II (Fig.74); and you may imagine that whatever else it is, the little item 'once the property of H.R.H. Princess Olga of Greece' is not a piece of humble cottage ware. And that is the trouble. Tureens at this level are almost like a sub-branch of jewellery; they are not really about food at all, but about prestige and glamour and conspicuous consumption.

And the glamour becomes monotonous. The Campbell Museum has perhaps been unwise to collect virtually nothing but tureens, and mostly expensive ones at that, so that their extravagance and elaboration is not even offset, as was intended, by plates and glasses or even by a white tablecloth. It's like collecting the kings and queens from old chess sets and ignor- ing the pawns. There is a certain pleasure to be got from studying innumerable variations on the one theme. There are tureens barnacled with naval motifs, standing on dolphin feet (Fig.74), or sur- mounted by urns, eagles, stags, lobsters, mixed fruit and even a figure of Hercules; and there are tureens in the shape of rabbits, swans, hens and - a particularly revolting idea - a cabbage with a frog perched on top. But it is a pleasure, really, that one associates with match-box collect- ing. In an atmosphere of such excess, it comes as a relief to find a piece as elegant and relatively simple as the Capodimonte covered bowl (Fig.75). Why so few ordinary tureens? And why no modern pieces? After all, if the tureens were exciting enough (Dali? Jasper Johns? Allen Jones?) even the smartest hostess might just get away with tinned soup. A Claes Oldenburg 'soft tureen' would be just the thing for a tasty packet mine- strone.

KEITH ROBERTS

Tuscan Painting at King's Lynn The exhibition organised by Sir

Geoffrey Agnew and Clovis Whitfield entitled '1300-1500: Renaissance Painting in Tuscany' lasted such a short time (2 I1st July-4th August) at the Fermoy Art Gallery, King's Lynn that we are obliged to devote to it a retrospective notice only. But a catalogue remains, unfortunately only illustrated by one of the thirty-seven paintings, the early Fra Bartolommeo Holy Family on canvas (34) which has passed from Contini to Agnew's itself, and provided one of the dramatic pivots of the show (for full details, see Fahy, Art Bulletin, 1969, pp.142-54).

This gives me an excuse for some further reproductions of little known panels. The Piero di Cosimo portrait (26; Fig.8o) belonging to the Earl of Plymouth can hardly be described as little known since it will be remembered, if not so well from the Wildenstein 1965 exhibition itself, as from the reproduction in that catalogue (a number of pictures at King's Lynn were inevitably at Wildenstein's eight years ago, since this covered the same ground, was

more than twice as large, and also drew heavily on English private collections). The austere three-quarter-face built up around a frame of dark cap, hair, tunic, contrasting with the playful tapestry of birds among leaves behind justifies the repetition of a plate. The unpublished Sienese Court Scene (16; Fig.78) belonging to Agnew's is part of a series of which others in Florence, Esztergom and for- merly on the New York art market are associated. An informative catalogue entry identifies the principal figure as Charles of Anjou, and the painter (following on Van Marle and Boskovits) as possibly Vecchi- etta. The entries for the two Bartolommeo di Tommaso panels (14, 15; Figs.82-83) are less enlightening. We are told they are wings from a portable altar-piece 'in a Sassetta-like mood', but in fact there is nothing Sassettesque about them: we can tell, in spite of the fact that they have lost their rich Gothic moulding, that they be- long to the tradition of Marchigian Inter- national Gothic best represented by the Salimbeni - not at all the sweet, decora- tive Gothic of the early Quattrocento Sienese, but a harsh provincial realism. Unbelievable is the reemergence of the feet beneath the stone slab in the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Mr Kingzett's little Pinturicchio (24; Fig.81) of 1485-86 is listed in Berenson 1968 but apparently never reproduced. It belongs to a series of five miniature paintings, named after the gates of Perugia which were formerly in the Palazzo Graziani in that town. Finally there is Major Harris's typical Sano (20o; Fig.79) in rather unhappy condition, having been, I suspect, both over- and undercleaned, listed in Berenson I968 as ex-Northwick Park.

The listing of the Sano in Berenson brings me to this problem of provenance. Owing to the fact that so many pictures at King's Lynn are loaned anonymously, it is sometimes difficult to guess to whom they belong. Are we to understand that the so- called Pietro Lorenzettis lent anony- mously (2, 3), (but more likely studio pro- ductions)have been sold by Exeter College, Oxford to whom they were bequeathed about 1925, and in whose property they still appear in the RA. catalogue of 1960? Similarly has the Francesco di Vannuccio Annunciation (7) left Girton College, Cam- bridge, to which according to Pope- Hennessy, 1948, the Wildenstein catalogue of 1965 and Berenson 1968 it belonged? The Bartolommeo di Tommasos (14, 15) are described in Berenson 1968 as belong- ing to Lady Robertson, but her name does not appear in the King's Lynn catalogue as either previous or present owner. One would like to know whether the Benson Fra Bartolommeo (35) is still the property of Sir Walter and Lady Pollen, and so forth. On the other hand the entry for the Matteo di Giovanni Madonna and Saints (I 9) corrects Berenson's listing in 1968, and the entry for the other Sano (2I) brings Berenson (as 'ex-Ashburnham') up to date. We also learn that the Lorenzo di

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