Beyond the Arabian Nights: an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens

 

A copy of Delacroix, Femmes d'Alger, 1867, by Henri Fantin-Latour

I should have got the message from the title of the exhibition, the impression I got was that it would have major works from the Louvre’s world-class collection of Islamic art.

For the first time ever, a remarkable group of pieces from the Department of Islamic Arts at the Louvre Museum will be displayed at the Louvre-Lens. Among them are two exceptional masterpieces: the Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon. This unprecedented loan is complemented by artworks from French and Belgian collections.

I like the way the Louvre is thanked for its “unprecedented loan” to the Louvre-Lens, in other words, to itself. However, Islamic art was outnumbered in this show by French works. The exhibition focused on European (mainly French) responses to Islam, or imaginations of Islam. This kind of exhibition (which we can call Orientalism, although the term has been extensively criticized for its ambiguity) is now quite a commonplace for art exhibitions. Said’s book, Orientalism, dates from 1978, and there were exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1984, The Metropolitan in 2004, and many others. I was astonished to discover the Metropolitan was lining up a new Orientalism exhibition from June 2026.

Isn’t it somewhat colonial to continue to focus on Western artists and their response to Islamic art, rather than look at the Islamic works themselves? What I saw was a number of exhibits that by current standards would never be shown in public, for their sexism and racism. The Louvre has a major collection of Islamic art (in fact, there is a catalogue of the Louvre Islamic collection available to view in this exhibition, although it is not on sale in the Louvre-Lens bookshop), comprising over 14,000 objects, displayed in Paris with a dedicated Islamic gallery only opened in 2012. It wouldn’t be difficult to have an exhibition of some of these pieces in Lens, and to have an exhibition of Islamic art per se. Instead, this show gives the impression not just of tolerating old attitudes, but even encouraging, condoning, or even paradoxically celebrating them. Why are we being shown stereotypical attitudes that are today widely condemned, via artworks of little quaility? For example, you can be pretty sure that any commercial film adaptation of The Arabian Nights dating from the 1960s or earlier would have primitive attitudes, and the clips seem to confirm it. Was it really necessary to include them? Are these among the 300 “masterpieces” on show at this exhibition? This show looks, for the most part as if the curators looked in the dusty archives to see what wasn’t being shown, but was easy to use. Even when you think a major work has been included – there are works by Matisse and by Delacroix – you then discover that the version on show of Delacroix’s Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is a copy, rather than the original. Other works, such as a bronze Napoleon riding a horse, seem to have little relevance to the show’s theme.

Instead, we had displays of what the museum already holds – lots of Orientalist works from the last 150 years, much of it displayed out of context. For example, there were the remains of a Paris collector’s apartment, with Islamic objects – but the like so much else in the exibition, these objects were included because a French collector had purchased them. Imagine a show in Saudi Arabia of French art that only included pieces bought by Arab collectors; it would not be a very comprehensive display.

The exhibition closed with some contemporary works, which were supposed to illustrate some kind of progress in orientalist attitudes, but I’m afraid to say in some cases they perpetuated the stereotypes. There was a video of a woman writing on her bare belly, explaining that she was in so doing removing the objectification of women in so much European art. Since her head was never visible, I didn’t feel I a position to see the video in a non-objective way.

There were indeed two major Islamic works, Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon, but the first is well-known because of its use for baptising French kings. I would have like to come away from the exhibition knowing more about Islamic art, not more about what 19th-century French artists and collectors thought about it. To quote from the exhibition blurb: 

Orientalisms are historical and imaginary accounts. Like any account, they can be transmitted, rewritten, expanded, questioned and criticised. Like any account, they contain both light and dark elements. Like any account, the rest of their history remains to be written, which is expressed by the views of contemporary artists whose artworks are present throughout the exhibition.

Personally, I would stop calling it “orientalisms”, and I would focus on “Islamic art”. It doesn’t seem so radical.

With Ruskin in Florence

 

Guide books, let’s face it, are dull. They are all too frequently reduced to lists of things to see, and all too often they repeat each other. Many of them give the impression they were written by AI, repeating the same anecdotes. Certainly that’s what I felt on my most recent visits to Florence.

Of course, the problem with Florence, perhaps the biggest challenge, is that it is a heavyweight cultural destination. I don’t know anyone who has seen every room in the Uffizi. As for churches, they are numberless. Florence is not for the faint-hearted, especially if they don’t know their Gothic from their Renaissance (Florence is mainly restricted to these two, but that doesn’t make things easier for the average tourist).  

That’s why reading Ruskin seemed so inviting. Ruskin never minces his words; of all the guides, Ruskin is the one who makes a direct appeal to your emotions, and the only one who is prepared to say some of the prized cultural objects are dreadful. I like a guide with opinions – at least I can disagree with them!

It seemed, therefore, a good way to see Florence to have Ruskin’s volume Mornings in Florence (1874) in hand. After all, who could resist such a direct openinng line?

If there is one artist, more than another, whose work it is desirable you should examine in Florence, supposing that you care for old art at all, it is Giotto. [Mornings in Florence, First Morning]

Notice the throwaway remark “supposing that you care for old art at all”, as if to say, you are already part of an elite group of art appreciators. Ruskin, in other words, is the flattering, knowledgeable tour guide, who promises to show you the best sites, without you having to worry about the dross. There is far too much to see in Florence, anyway, so you need someone to say which things to focus on. Even the legendary Guida Rossa, the definitive Italian art guide, does not include detals of all the altarpieces, chapel statues, and incidental bulidings, despite its 847 pages devoted to the city of Florence (in my edition, from 2016).

So we strode purposefully, with Ruskin in hand, into Santa Croce, one of the three largest churches in Florence, and headed for Giotto. As instructed by Ruskin, we ignored the roof of the church (it “has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farm-house barn”). We don’t look at the famous Renaissance tomb of Marsuppini by Desiderio di Settignano, as “very fine of its kind; but there the drapery is chiefly done to cheat you … It is wholly vulgar and mean in cast of fold.” No, we press on to see the Giotto chapels. Similarly, we are told we shouldn’t even think about Ghirlandaio’s astonishing frescoes in Santa Maria Novella (“it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”).

Having dismissed in this way both the early Renaissance of Ghirlandaio, and the full 16th-century Renaissance, what does Ruskin see in Giotto (and Cimabue, his contemporary?) What matters for Ruskin is that their work expresses religious belief! Such a view would be unthinkable in art criticism today. The art historian might praise an artist for their grasp of perspective, for their use of colour, even, at times, for their social criticism, but never for conveying a sense of the divine. According to Ruskin, Giotto taught three things: “You shall see things as they are … And the least with the greatest, because God made them … but also the golden gate of Heaven itself, open and the angels of God coming down from it.” [Second Morning]. Well, I saw the Giottos, and I didn’t see the gate of Heaven open.  

If to be a tourist is to imagine yourself, for a brief moment, as the original audience saw a work, then Ruskin is your ideal guide. The word “cheat” is very significant: for all his immersion in art history, Ruskin was never beyond being a tourist, despite more than 15 lengthy visits to the continent, over a period of more than 50 years. Nonetheless, he reveals in his letters and diaries how he was constantly concerned at all times of the presumed danger of being cheated. For Ruskin, most Italians he encountered had no concept of art, and could only be influenced by money.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on Mornings in Florence. It originated as a series of lectures, and was never intended for publication at all, but, it would appear, was faithfully transcribed by Ruskin’s student Alexander Wedderburn, who attended each lecture. The transcript was subsequently published, with, it would appear, minimal involvement from the author; this explains why Ruskin frequently admits he cannot be bothered to find a reference, for example:

And in one place (I have not my books here, and cannot refer to it) I have even defined sculpture as light-and-shade drawing with the chisel [Val d’Arno]

When I read this kind of thing, I start to think that Ruskin’s references to paintings or sculptures that I cannot locate might not be my error, but perhaps indications of his poor memory. For example, he spends a long time talking about works by Giotto that I can see are located in Padua rather than Florence.

I’m somewhat reassured to find I am not alone in finding Mornings in Florence distasteful. Henry James, for example, was shocked by it:

 I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church [Sta Maria Novella]; but it appeared from one of the little books [Mornings in Florence] that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio [Henry James, Italian Hours]

Had Ruskin lost his critical faculties by this stage (Italian Hours dates from 1874, while his major works, such as Modern Painters, date from 1843)? Perhaps, as Kenneth Clark states, Ruskin’s strength and weakness was lack of self-awareness. He is insightful and objectionable in successive sentences. It was “sheer self-indulgence of him to give his opinion on every single topic” [Ruskin Today, 1964]. Certainly, from my experience in Florence, Ruskin is to be enjoyed at arm’s length, with the reader’s critical faculties fully intact, questioning every sentence. There may be gems there, but they perhaps reveal more about Ruskin and 19th-century taste than eternal truths about art. 

Anna Ancher

 

Brondum's Dining room, Skagen, 1891

Anna Ancher gets a solo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery - apparently, her first solo exhibition in the UK. When you visit Skagen, where she was born and lived, you immediately get the impression of a group of artists, living and working together; Anna as one of several contemporaries. Consequently, it was strange to see Anna Ancher in a solo show here, detached from the Skagen artists. Seeing work by the other group members would make it easier to form ideas of how Ancher was (or was not) unique. Her profile portraits, for example, are very much in the group style, as can be seen from the photograph above.

At her best, Ancher captured some lovely effects of light, notably in the best painting in the show, Sunlight in the Blue Room, 1891. 

But it’s difficult to make much of a judgement on the basis of the works exhibited. For me, one of the most impressive works by Ancher was actually a joint painting with her partner Michael: Appraising the Day’s Work, 1883. This painting is in the catalogue, and is held at the Skagen Museum, so why wasn’t it in the show? It seems to demonstrate very clearly the relationship between the two, sharing ideas. This painting surely, answers the question posed by the catalogue, how Anna Ancher was able to be a full-time female artist around 1900? As the catalogue states, “One wonders whether her success would have been possible without the help and support of the male painters in the artist colony, including her husband” [catalogue, p18]. But for this show, you would hardly know her husband, or the other artists in the Skagen group, existed. It seemed very strange to pull just one artist out of this group  - not all of them male – as they painted and exhibited together. Instead, we get four works by women contemporaries – hardly enough to get much of an idea. What about Nordic contemporaries, such as Hanna Hirsch Pauli, who currently has a solo exhibition at the Hirschsprung Gallery in Copenhagen? Did Ancher not see any contemporaries?

As a result, we are left with a small collection, which doesn’t give us enough evidence to make a decision about Ancher. Apart from her ability to capture light, what else is there? A girl in the Garden in summertime 1914 could be a work from any number of provincial collections from the early years of the 20th century. The exhibition raises our hopes about a large number of rough sketches recently discovered, with only two on display, it’s difficult to get any idea of how talented Ancher was in this area. It’s not easy, either, to see much of a progression in the work. There are two paintings of removing feathers from fowl from 1902 and 1904, but the progression between the two seems to have been from a more impressionistic style, with rough brushwork, to a more precise, representational manner; I would have expected the other way round.

The captions were not very helpful. There was a picture of a couple with their rabbits, and the caption stating “perhaps he is waiting to eat the rabbit”. Perhaps he is, but there is nothing in the painting to suggest it. And the quotes highlighted, both in the exhibition and in the catalogue, were not very inspiring: ”Anna Ancher had the courage to stand out … Her many repetitions of similar motifs and her many sketches reveal her persistence and dedication”. The suggestion that in her day landscapes were seen as masculine did not strike me as very convincing. I would have liked more quotes by her, and more context. There may be a story here, but we have to work it out for ourselves, on the basis of rather partial evidence. 

Visiting Florence

 

Visible from everywhere in and around the city: the Florence Duomo and Baptistery

“The single most compelling reason for coming here is to see Florentine Art” [Rupert Scott]. That’s certainly why I set out to visit Florence, although closely linked to the art is to think about the economic and social circumstances that enabled such art to be created.

Not all Florentine

This visit involved staying in Fiesole, and so it made sense to visit the archaeological site and museum. This wasn’t Florentine art, but Etruscan temples and, astonishingly, a 2,000- or 3,000-capacity amphitheatre (the figures depend on which guidebook you read). Nor was the Pitti all Florentine – it included a vast collection of ancient sculpture. Nonetheless, Florence is perhaps unique in the world for being able to have several collections, not to speak of churches, containing art created locally. 

Guide books

Any visitor to a major city will be aided, or hindered, by several guidebooks. I focused on two:

The Touring Club of Italy Guida d’Italia (known as the Guida Rossa), volume on Florence, all of 911 pages. This book provides the essential dates and attributions for pretty much everything you can view in Florence, up to around 1945 (the station is mentioned, as is the airport, from 1986, but the guide is not really intended for the modern buildings). It tells you who did what in exhaustive detail, very occasionally awards a star rating (the Pitti, overall, gets a star). Everything is there, if you can find it.

Florence, a walking guide to the architecture (Richard Goy, 2015) – Goy tells you openly this guide provides an English-language version of the best Italian guides, but nonetheless I was disappointed that he frequently repeats the Guida Rossa text without comment. He uses a lot of architectural terms without explaining them, although he provides a glossary of Italian terms, such as “duomo”. There are good reference photos, although not in situ with the text where they are mentioned. All in all, this is a lost opportunity: Florence should be the dream city for illustrated walks.

As often happens, while there I discovered two much more interesting tours:

Rupert Scott, Florence Explored (1987) – this was a real find. A short, opinionated book looking only at a few major works. But this is its strength, because in Italian cities it is so easy to get bogged down in trying to identify everything you are looking at. There is simply too much to see. Scott includes some good quotes from Ruskin, below:

Ruskin, Mornings in Florence (1875– 77) - this was such a contrast to the boring guidebooks. You may intensely dislike what he says, but his text is compelling, and it is clear he has looked at what he describes! Confronted by the amazing Ghirlandaio frescoes in Sta Maria Novella, he is dismissive: “it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”.

Does it make any difference if you see something or not?

As usual, many of the things I came to see were not visible. The Masaccio Trinity was being restored, but for an additional €1.50 you could see parts of it through the scaffolding. In truth, however, for many of the works, you recognise they are there, but you learn about them at home, when you can see them in reproduction much more clearly. Ruskin, of course, would fume at reading this.

Highs and Lows

The low point was visiting the Pitti Palace. It contains an art collection of the top rank, yet it was almost impossible to see any of it. First, all the art was displayed in 19th-century style, with pictures piled on top of each other. Result: you couldn’t see the ones at the top. Secondly, and much worse, the pictures remain in situ from how they must have looked when the Medici last inhabited the Palace. Captioning information is out of date or simply missing. Third, and most important, the lighting came from large windows that meant there was a lot of glare on the pictures, making them either too dark to view, or with too much reflection to be intelligible. The impression I came away with from the Pitti was overwhelmingly one of grotesque tastelessness – room after room of 17th, 18th- and 19th-century ostentation, displaying wealth but little taste. In these surroundings, no painting could survive.

The Pitti collection should be entirely rehung in a better, and separate, environment for conservation and for viewing. The state rooms could I imagine be filled up with plenty of art from the store – paintings by the yard, as it were.

Tips for visitors

“The single most compelling reason for coming here is to see Florentine Art” [Rupert Scott]. That’s certainly why I set out to visit Florence, although closely linked to the art is to think about the economic and social circumstances that enabled such art to be created.

Not all Florentine

This visit involved staying in Fiesole, and so it made sense to visit the archaeological site and museum. This wasn’t Florentine art, but Etruscan temples and, astonishingly, a 2,000- or 3,000-capacity amphitheatre (the figures depend on which guidebook you read). Nor was the Pitti all Florentine – it included a vast collection of ancient sculpture. Nonetheless, Florence is perhaps unique in the world for being able to have several collections, not to speak of churches, containing art created locally. 

Guide books

Any visitor to a major city will be aided, or hindered, by several guidebooks. I focused on two:

The Touring Club of Italy Guida d’Italia (known as the Guida Rossa), volume on Florence, all of 911 pages. This book provides the essential dates and attributions for pretty much everything you can view in Florence, up to around 1945 (the station is mentioned, as is the airport, from 1986, but the guide is not really intended for the modern buildings). It tells you who did what in exhaustive detail, very occasionally awards a star rating (the Pitti, overall, gets a star). Everything is there, if you can find it.

Florence, a walking guide to the architecture (Richard Goy, 2015) – Goy tells you openly this guide provides an English-language version of the best Italian guides, but nonetheless I was disappointed that he frequently repeats the Guida Rossa text without comment. He uses a lot of architectural terms without explaining them, although he provides a glossary of Italian terms, such as “duomo”. There are good reference photos, although not in situ with the text where they are mentioned. All in all, this is a lost opportunity: Florence should be the dream city for illustrated walks.

As often happens, while there I discovered two much more interesting tours:

Rupert Scott, Florence Explored (1987) – this was a real find. A short, opinionated book looking only at a few major works. But this is its strength, because in Italian cities it is so easy to get bogged down in trying to identify everything you are looking at. There is simply too much to see. Scott includes some good quotes from Ruskin, below:

Ruskin, Mornings in Florence (1875– 77) - this was such a contrast to the boring guidebooks. You may intensely dislike what he says, but his text is compelling, and it is clear he has looked at what he describes! Confronted by the amazing Ghirlandaio frescoes in Sta Maria Novella, he is dismissive: “it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”.

Does it make any difference if you see something or not?

As usual, many of the things I came to see were not visible. The Masaccio Trinity was being restored, but for an additional €1.50 you could see parts of it through the scaffolding. In truth, however, for many of the works, you recognise they are there, but you learn about them at home, when you can see them in reproduction much more clearly. Ruskin, of course, would fume at reading this.

Highs and Lows

The low point was visiting the Pitti Palace. It contains an art collection of the top rank, yet it was almost impossible to see any of it. First, all the art was displayed in 19th-century style, with pictures piled on top of each other. Result: you couldn’t see the ones at the top. Secondly, and much worse, the pictures remain in situ from how they must have looked when the Medici last inhabited the Palace. Captioning information is out of date or simply missing. Third, and most important, the lighting came from large windows that meant there was a lot of glare on the pictures, making them either too dark to view, or with too much reflection to be intelligible. The impression I came away with from the Pitti was overwhelmingly one of grotesque tastelessness – room after room of 17th, 18th- and 19th-century ostentation, displaying wealth but little taste. In these surroundings, no painting could survive.

The Pitti collection should be entirely rehung in a better, and separate, environment for conservation and for viewing. The state rooms could I imagine be filled up with plenty of art from the store – paintings by the yard, as it were.

Tips for visitors

• Fiesole is a good place to stay when visiting Florence. It is much quieter than the centre, and has its own (rather contrasting) appeal.
• The Uffizi becomes quieter during the afternoons, unexpectedly.
• Allow twenty minutes to find the entrance to the Uffizi, quite apart from buying the tickets.
• The archaeological museum is a well-kept secret, full of Etruscan remains from across Tuscany.
• Trying to cross the historic central area is a slow and exhausting process. There are tiny electric buses, which defy credibility in squeezing through impossibly small alleyways alongside tourists and parked cars – and they take almost as long as walking as they have to follow a circuitous route.  The tram, where available , is a great bonus.
• Booking for restaurants is usually necessary. 

Did the city-state create great art?

 

Raphael's The School of Athens: the triumph of philosophy. But was it partly the result of Athens being a city-state?

City-states continue to fascinate world history commentators. Two of the most famous cultural cities in history, Athens and Florence, were city-states, and it is tempting to try to ascertain if, and to what extent, their status as independent entities was an influence on their cultural production. Like many tourists, I visit these cities with their stunning artefacts and marvel that a city could produce such art, architecture,  literature – and that’s just the start of it.

Of course, to answer this question turns out to be far more complicated that envisaged. One immediate problem is that of timing. The peak period for the political influence of the city state does not appear to correspond to the peak periods of artistic output. A widespread (although perhaps less fashionable today) view, for example by art historian Sydney Freedberg, is that the peak of the Italian Renaissance, at least for visual art, was the period 1490 – 1510, in Florence, when Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, and others were producing art in Florence. Then Leonardo moved to Milan and thence to Paris, Michelangelo and Raphael to Rome, and Florence fell under the control of the Medici (not for the first time) in 1512 – it’s tempting to associate the end of any kind of collective decision-making with a decline in art. But reading about the Italian city-states more widely suggests that their peak for collective decision-making was well before 1500. According to Daniel Waley (The Italian City-Republics, 1969), the city-states achieved political independence as early as the eleventh century, and were largely taken over by individual tyrants from the 14th century onwards.

Similarly, the “golden age” of Athens, the fifth century BCE, the age of Pericles, the Parthenon, and Socrates, was thought to have coincided with the peak of the Polis, the Greek city-state. But, it turns out, from a recent book by John Ma, Polis (2024) that the fifth century was a low-point in terms of government; the most successful period for the Greek city-state was the Hellenistic period, when Athens had lost all its political power and was under the control of the Roman Empire, yet retained its stability, prosperity, and collective government.

So what is the relationship between art and political systems? Is it simply facile to think that great art was created in periods of some kind of representative government, or should we recognize that the relationship is more subtle, that there might be hundreds of years between the two peaks, yet in some undefinable way, the effect of collective government lingered on and bore fruit in the creative output? I’m not the first to ask these questions, but I will certainly be thinking again about them when I next visit Florence. 

The Great Mughals: was it really paradise?

 

The carpet described in this exhibition as “The Ilchester carpet” ... but what has Ilchester got to do with it? It is Mughal in origin. 

The slogan (by a famous Persian poet) “If there is paradise on Earth, this is it”, is used to describe The Great Mughals exhibition (V&A, London): we are invited to see the period as an earthly paradise of tranquillity and beauty. We hear recorded sound of fountains and birds singing. We see object after object of spectacular wealth – jewellery, carpets, ironware, decorative weapons (not intended to be used in anger), as well as illuminated manuscripts, clothes, and paintings. But it turns out, not that you would learn this from the exhibition, that the three Mughals (Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Jahangir) who form the focus of this exhibition were perhaps not so great after all.

Clearly the V&A thought they were great, and that was sufficient. But everything was presented as an example of conspicuous consumption, and (at least walking round the exhibition) it was never clear where all this money came from, and whether the rulers spent it wisely. It looks like they had huge amounts of it, and spent it lavishly. As far as I could see, the paintings  (including the illustrated manuscripts) and the architecture were magnificent, and the textiles (hangings, clothes, and carpets) had wonderful detailed designs, but I wasn’t in a position to judge the many other objects on display (jewellery, ironware, glassware). It looked, well, expensive. Our criteria today are rather different to that of the 17th century.

What the exhibition didn’t tell me was:

• How none of the items I could see in the exhibition are actually held today in India? Does India have any collection of its own history?
• Where did the money come from to pay for all this stuff at the time of its creation?
• Were the Mughals (in 1066 and all that parlance) good kings or bad kings?
• More about the artistic quality of the items exhibited. What makes Mughal art distinctive?
• More about the various styles that the Mughals incorporated – not just the occasional (and easily identified) links to European art, but art of other Asian regions, plus more about what was being produced before the Mughals conquered the north of India.
• More about the Taj Mahal, rather than just a running video with dramatic shots of the building at sunrise and sunset

The catalogue, although lavishly illustrated, like the exhibition itself, answered few if any of these questions. The historical presentation is minimal – for example, the story of how Akbar reconquered much of North India is reduced to two sentences:

In 1556 the control of Hindustan by Babur’s descendants was precarious. Yet by 1571 Akbar’s territory could reasonably be described as an empire.  [Catalogue, p35]

It sounds like magic, and presented in this way, it is. You feel that there is probably more that could be said. In stark contrast, standard historical accounts of the period describe many years of warfare often with the family fighting among themselves. From the history books, Akbar doesn’t appear to be the nicest of rulers. He came to power aged only 13, and the de facto regent, Maham Anga,

overplayed her hand by promoting her own son, the ambitious Adham Khan, who in 1562 recklessly assassinated the kingdom’s leading minister of state. This so enraged the nineteen-year-old Akbar that, although the youth was his own foster-brother, he threw him over a palace balcony to his death. [Eaton, p180]

The contest to win control after Akbar’s death is described as “a bloody, fratricidal contest” [Eaton, p235]

As for Jahangir, after his son Khusrau fomented a rebellion, Khusrau’s supporters “were impaled along both sides of a road, while their miserable leader was placed on an elephant and mockingly made to receive his supporters’ ‘homage’ as they writhed in agony.” When Khusrau rebelled again, Jahangir partially blinded him. [Eaton, p204]. Jahangir’s end was not so illustrious, either:

in the last five years of his life, from 1622 to his death in 1627, the emperor became so incapacitated by drink and opium that Nur Jahan [his wife] took many administrative matters into her own hands. [Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 2019]

That is not the image depicted by this exhibition.  

Catalogue

I had hoped that the catalogue would give me some more answers, but I was disappointed in this respect. The catalogue comprises three parts, one for each reign: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. Each part has a very short general introduction by Susan Stronge, followed by much shorter and more detailed essays on individual works or genres (coins, Chinese porcelain). That leaves the catalogue, and the exhibition, short on historical background; perhaps 5% of the text is historical background. The curator, Susan Stronge, recently edited a publication on jewellery from India, so it is to be expected that she would have an interest in this aspect.

Like the exhibition, the catalogue seems to exist in an art-historical bubble, seemingly independent of politics, economics, and the wider social context. This show could have been a much more educational experience; we no longer look at artefacts and just admire the beauty, however stunning they may look. We ask questions.

Rajeev Kinra, in the introduction, stresses the non-sectarian nature of Mughal rule in India (he uses the term Hindustan to mean the northern part of India ruled by the Mughals). All religions were tolerated as long as they promoted the Mughal empire. I’m not so sure; Guru Arjun, one of the early Sikh leaders, was put death by Jahangir, and Guru Hargobind, his successor, was imprisoned for seven years. I don’t think I will be looking to the “great” Moghuls for guidance on how to run an empire any time soon. 

Do we care what William Blake means?

 

Blake, Newton (1795) (Tate)

What are we to make of William Blake? The author of some of the most famous lines of English poetry; the creator of some of the best-known images in art (Newton, Glad Day). Yet his work seems to many like a locked chest of mystical texts full of cryptic allusions, which literary specialists attempt laboriously to elucidate and to decipher (Northrop Frye spent ten years writing his 462-page book on William Blake, and his book is still regarded as one of the essential books on the artist and poet).

Do we all need to spend years trying to make sense of Blake’s visions? The current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam, Blake’s Universe (2024), tries to present Blake in his contemporary setting. The curators make it clear that they struggle to understand much of his writing and allusions, so they are by no means full Blake believers. Their approach seems to be as follows.

Blake, for them, was just one of many European artists and thinkers who saw history in chiliastic terms, and who attempted to reconcile (or to reintroduce) Christianity with history, often in a mystical fashion. Blake might have been mad, in other words, but so were plenty of others around the time of the French Revolution.

The problems start with the best-known images: what do they mean? For me, and perhaps for many other contemporary viewers, Blake’s art at its best conveys a dynamism and power that are unique for the art of his day. His Newton (1795), not in the exhibition, is an example: it is the basis of the popular image of the scientist. For me, there is something wonderfully vital and alive in the image of Newton carrying out his scientific experiments. Yet for Blake, this image of Newton represented, according to the introduction to the catalogue by Esther Chadwick, “a narrow concern with … ‘Vegetative and Generative Nature’ (the material world) … as opposed to imaginative inner vision (connected with faith in Christ, ‘regeneration’, and eternal life”). That sounds pretty negative to me. Presumably Blake wanted us to condemn Newton; yet Eduardo Paolozzi, creating a work of public art at the entrance to the British Library, replicates Blake’s figure, but now as a sculpture celebrating the way Newton changed the way we see the world. 

Eduardo Paolozzi, Newton (1995) British Library, London

When I look at this work, I don’t believe we are expected to condemn Newton every time we enter the British Library, but to feel somewhat in awe of him. I don’t imagine the Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, at the University of Cambridge, were delivering a rebuke to Newton for his narrow attitudes when they accepted Paolozzi’s donation of the model for his sculpture. I can think of few examples of an artist’s meaning being diametrically reversed in this way.

This switch from negative to positive is, I think, rather telling. At this exhibition, I looked at the famous images by Blake, yet as far as I could see, I may well have been reading Blake, like Paolozzi, in the opposite way to that intended. The images are powerful and attention-grabbing, but what exactly do they mean? Do we know what they mean, and are we bothered when they turn out to mean something very different to what we think they signify?

Blake, Europe: a Prophecy, Frontispiece (1794)

One of the other most famous images by Blake, the frontispiece to his Prophecy Europe, seems to be similarly misinterpreted. Again, there is a pair of dividers. According to the curators “Urizen [Blake’s name for the Creator] is seen with a pair of dividers, his head beneath the line of his shoulders, emphasising his cramped, inward-looking materialistic vision.”

For me, this image represents one of the most successful responses to the  challenge of how to express creativity, an almost impossible task for artists to convey. I think it is a thrilling image. I’d like to ask visitors to the exhibition what they think of it, and if they agree with the curators’ view (and with Blake’s view). Do we like Blake for the pictures, without worrying too much about what he meant? Perhaps, if this is true, Blake can take his rightful place in a museum of art, which is, after all, a collection of great images celebrating outmoded ideas no longer taken seriously. 

Art Exhibitions of the year 2023

 

Elias, Bodegon, 1933

This year, I’ve written about ten exhibitions, ordered in approximately reverse chronological order of viewing: 

• Frans Hals (National Gallery)
• Real Families (Fitzwilliam)
• Black Atlantic (Fitzwilliam)
• Rubens and Women (Dulwich)
• Morandi (Estorick)
• Labyrinth (Fitzwilliam)
• Sussex Landscape (Pallant House)
• Islanders (Fitzwilliam)
• Cezanne (Tate)
• Feliu Elias (MNAC, Barcelona)

Of those, my top three were:

Feliu Elias, a painter I’d never heard of before seeing this exhibition, and what a revelation! A painter who could move confidently between cartoons, and still lifes and portraits in oil, and impresses by the seriousness and thoroughness with which he approaches both. The most mundane, everyday objects, such as saucepans, are treated almost with reverence.  

Rubens, for his ravishing depiction of women – even his works of classical mythology end up having the same figure as his wife. I don’t think the TLS review of this show (by Breeze Barrington) did the exhibition justice. She complained that the women in the paintings are “not the focus”, and  “it would help to say more about who they [the women in the paintings] were in their own right”. Yet we don’t ask Frans Hals (or any portrait painter) to tell us all about the characters. The job of the portrait painter is to bring the sitter to life through their expression, their form. 

Frans Hals, whose paintings stand out so powerfully that you can recognize then at the other end of a gallery. If portrait painting is bringing a figure to life, then Hals reveals a whole living world. 

All in all, a great year for art, even if (as I noticed most in the Real Families exhibition) there is an increasing tendency to curate art exhibitions by criteria very different to quality of the artwork - a rather worrying trend.  

Frans Hals: the man who brings the seventeenth-century to life

 

Hals, Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her Nurse, 1619-20

Frans Hals, National Gallery, September 2023 - January 2024: What a wonderful show! Hals is so unlike the typical C17 Netherlands artist. Most painted details; he painted people, with little or no background. Most painted interiors or landscapes;  he painted almost exclusively portraits, and even his portraits are unlike any of his contemporaries. Nobody had Hals’ spectacularly bold use of brushstrokes, nor his ability to capture character in a face, both males and (exceptionally) females. So many of his female faces are real people rather than figureheads, representatives of a social class, demonstrating their wealth and social standing. Of course he painted the wealthy classes, but you feel he has caught something of their character, that he is almost presenting them as an equal. 

Frequently, he manages to capture both social status and character, as if to say “you commissioned me to paint this person, but the money is only a small part of it: I have captured who you really are." Frequently, the character is brought it to life by the angle of the sitter, or a leaning chair, or their hand on their hips, or, in one case, by introducing another person, as in the Portrait of Catherina Hooft and her nurse.

What really hit me on leaving this exhibition was how tame other painters are by comparison to Hals. I found myself in the Italian Renaissance gallery, and apart from some late works by Titian, none of the other painters had Hals’ focus on individual figures, combined with such carefree, lively brushstrokes. It may simply be the difference between two eras, Renaissance and Baroque, but what a difference! What unashamed concentration on the single figure, seeming to breathe in front of the spectator.

Hals, Portrait of Susan Baillij, c1645, detail of gloves

A very telling anecdote suggest that Hals was anything but subservient towards his sitters. He abandoned a group portrait after executing around half the individual portraits, because he no longer wanted to travel from Haarlem to Amsterdam – he wanted his sitters to come to him. They refused; he walked away from the commission (and it was completed by another painter).

Some of his best works are small-scale, children and everyday figures. Memorable is the portrait of Jean de la Chambre, a calligrapher, who looks as though he has just been interrupted at his work. 

Hals, Portrait of Jean de la Chambre

While I’m not very keen on the idea of an artist’s late works being an indicator of great profundity, there is an even looser use of the brush in some of Hals late works that is simply astounding to observe. You have to approach these pictures very closely to see just how free the strokes are. One of the greatest is a portrait of an Unknown Man, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, painted around 1660. The sitter may be unknown, but his character is revealed at a mere glance at the painting. 

All in all, it felt such a privilege to share the vision and insight of this remarkable artist, who brings to life his sitters like nobody else. 

Which were the glory years for Antwerp?

 

Rubens, portrait of Anna Anthonis, c1615-18. Pious, yes, but what a face Rubens has captured!

Antwerp certainly meets the criteria for a very visitable city: great restaurants, great museums, great buildings, very walkable – and one of the world’s most astonishing station designs. But when I visit any city, I like to create a kind of coherent story to the city. It is somehow satisfying to explain a city by looking at major forces affecting it, and to see the results in the built environment, and in the artistic works that were produced in it. So, for example, you can explain the sudden reversal of fortune that affected Bruges, or Rye, or equally, the proximity of strong flows of water and nearby mineral deposits that enabled regions such as Coalbrookdale to flourish in the Industrial Revolution. 

What can we say about Antwerp? Its history is tightly linked to the Scheldt. Antwerp is a great natural port, since it provides safe anchorage, being a long way inland from the sea. Although the Scheldt is still tidal at Antwerp, which means locks are required, Antwerp also has container terminals with direct access to the sea without locks (which must be similar to the situation at Felixstowe in the UK). But the Scheldt hasn’t always been accessible to ships. Is this the cause of Antwerp’s rise and fall? 

Michael Pye’s recent book, Antwerp: The Glory Years covers the 16^th century , when Antwerp flourished as never before. This weekend I am visiting Antwerp, but I don’t get the impression of a 16^th-century city. In many respects, the visible golden age appears to be the 17^th century: a hundred years later. Is this  simply my misreading? 

Let’s glance at the history books. Few cities can have had experienced such about-turns as Antwerp. It reached a peak of success during the first half of the 16^th century; it was responsible for 75% of all Low Countries trade in 1549. Yet in 1576, Spanish troops mutinied and killed some 8,000 citizens. Then in 1585 the Spanish recaptured Antwerp and incorporated it into the Spanish Netherlands. Protestants were given four years to convert or leave, and around half the population left. Hence a population decline from a peak of around 100,000 down to 49,000 at the end of the century. 

As if this wasn’t enough, in 1648, under the Treaty of Westphalia, the Scheldt, the river by which Antwerp traded with the world, was closed to all non-Dutch ships. This catastrophe ruined the port, until under Napoleon, 150 years later, the port was reopened, and by the mid-19^th century Antwerp was the world’s third largest port. Even today is it second only to Rotterdam in Europe.

 

How does this compare with artistic achievement? Antwerp is exceptionally good for museums relating the city with its inhabitants; the Rubens House is a great example. One of the best museums is the Plantin Museum. Christophe Plantin created one of the biggest printers and publishers in Europe. He founded the company in Antwerp in 1548, and within a year (if you believe Wikipedia) “he headed one of the most well-respected publishing houses in Europe” (whatever that means). His greatest achievement was a multi-volume Bible, the Biblia Sacra or Biblia Regia, published 1568-73. However, the publishing company appears to have continued to grow thrive for over a hundred years after that. 

Rubens, 1577-1640, the greatest Antwerp painter and one of the most famous painters of all time, lived in Antwerp for most of his life, and (together with his vast studio team) produced some 1,400 works, excluding copies! This sounds like success, by any measure. 

While the Rubens House was closed for this visit, we visited another stunning collection of 17^th-century work, the Snijders and Rockox House, actually two houses next to each other, celebrating an artist and a politician who both flourished in the first half of the 17^th century. Incidentally, this museum was a model of how to display a small collection effectively.

 It certainly seems, by this very simplistic assessment, that the evidence of the artefacts around the city suggest that, that despite losing half its population in the years to 1600, the remaining citizens of Antwerp created some astonishing achievements, both cultural (Rubens, van Dyck, Jordaens) and intellectual (the Plantin firm of publishers continuing and growing during the 17^th century). All this raises, of course, many questions. Can you make such sweeping judgements about a city on the evidence of one or two buildings? I haven’t even considered what effect these glory years, whether 16^th or 17^th centuries have on the present-day city – a subject for another post. Today was the Antwerp marathon, which meant that 12,500 runners passed the front door of the Rockox Museum, probably without noticing it was there. 

But the evidence above leaves me wanting to know more. For example: much of the success of the Netherlands following independence has been attributed to its religious tolerance. But is it as simple as that? Has the link between Protestantism and economic growth, as formulated by Weber a hundred or more years ago, been overstated? Was it possible for a city to be Catholic yet progressive? Antwerp has vast, bloated, Baroque churches, and Catholicism is still very noticeable in the historic centre: there is a statue of the Virgin or a saint looking down at you from most street corners. How was it possible, or was it indeed possible, for great art to flourish in a Counter-Reformation climate? 

All this requires more investigation, but, sadly, I don’t think Michael Pye’s Antwerp: The Glory Years is likely to give me the answer I am looking for. I haven’t got the patience to extricate a coherent story from Pye’s account. After 20 pages I had to look to other sources to find out what was going on. The journalistic style meant that every major event was introduced by looking at an individual, and only slowly revealing the event being described. It’s a time-honoured journalistic trick, which becomes annoying when you are trying to find out what happened. My response is to skip a paragraph or two to see if the author reveals what the subject really is, later on – a risky technique. So answers to the question of Antwerp’s rise and fall will take a few days longer. 

Rubens and Women

 

This marvellous exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery has one theme, and succeeds brilliantly in conveying that them. Rubens, although classically trained in the classical idiom (from several years in Rome), created his best works from life studies of the female nude, specifically, of his second wife, Helene Fourment. 

The evidence for this is carefully marshalled, but is most visible in some of the  small-scale drawings in the show, which are compared to a life-size classical sculpture, a Crouching Venus, from the second century CE.

The Crouching Venus clearly served as a reference for many works by the painter – you can see more than one example in the exhibition of the same pose. For example, here is a drawing of Venus nursing Cupids, from 1616:

Yet there is one major difference between the two female bodies. It is clear by comparing these two works that, while Rubens used classical poses as a model, he tempered his classical style by reference to the human body. The key difference is that the Crouching Venus has no folds of flesh; this is an idealised nude, with a kind of abstracted body and face. Helpfully, if perhaps a little voyeuristically, the exhibition provides two mirrors so you can observe the Crouching Venus from more than one angle. In contrast, what brings the Rubens drawing to life is the sense of immediacy, of actuality, despite the pose being classical and the woman’s body conforming more to the classical shape than the present-day ideal. 

There are several examples in the exhibition of this unique synthesis of classical and observation. So vivid is the observation that at times the ostensible subject is entirely lost in the figure being painted, as in the Hagar in the Desert, featuring what appears to be a portrait of Helene Fourment in a stunning blue dress. There is not the slightest sign of her being uncomfortable in her desert surroundings: she looks to be on an outing in her Sunday best:

An even more extreme example of the conflict between subject and model is a crazy depiction of Judith with the head of Holofernes, from 1616 (not in the exhibition, but in the catalogue). Judith looks so fetching, and so pleased with herself, you have to look twice to notice she is holding the head she has just chopped off.

Of course, it is well known that Rubens was a sensual painter – you half expected the famous portrait of Helene Fourment wearing nothing but a fur coat, but the exhibition theme was clearly established without this painting. What is conveyed here is that even in the religious works, there is a sense of life, of the characters jumping out from the picture, to engage with you. 

To conclude, there are two examples of just how skilled Rubens was as a painter. One is a copy by Rubens of the figure of Night by Michelangelo. 

Of course, in the classical tradition of art, painters learned by copying, but it seems very unlikely this Michelangelo was modelled from life. If Michelangelo used a model at all, it looks like he used a male model, and added token breasts to it. Rubens could paint women, but clearly Michelangelo could not (at least, not without looking at them). 

The final indicator of Rubens’ talent came unexpectedly after leaving the exhibition. In the permanent collection at Dulwich, there is a full-size Gainsborough portrait of two young women, that will be a shock for any visitor walking out of the Rubens exhibition: 

Don’t believe that it was the French 19th-century that put an end to the classical depiction of the human form. Here, with Gainsborough, you can see how we have lost the classical tradition. Here is the full horror of the insipid modern body: bodies with no limbs, no curves. So lacking in any substance are the women that it looks like the sheet music one of the women is holding is likely to slip off at any moment; there is nothing to hold it up. Give me the classical yet living world of Rubens any day.

The secret of Giorgio Morandi

 

Morandi, Still Life, 1948 

An exhibition at the Estorick Collection comprised some 50 paintings and etchings by Giorgio Morandi, all from one collection, that of Luigi Magnani. My response to these works was instinctive rather than rational. Before examining the works in detail, I experienced a feeling of calm, of concentration on an everyday object, of turning one’s back on the modern world, since Morandi lived and worked through two world wars, without any sign in his art of what was happening around him. Still-life and flower painting remain today some of the most common themes of art. Many artists, like Morandi, reached a successful theme and then painted many variations on that theme. Would I have had the same response from looking at the work of any other still life and flower painter? Clearly not. What is it that is exceptional about Morandi? Is it that the viewer’s imagination is triggered by the very simplicity, even banality, of the themes?

Morandi’s work is so concentrated around a small number of subjects, perhaps one way to appraise it is to see if there are any exceptions. He painted one self-portrait, which was very competent, and one work that appears to me a  failure, apparently the only work that Morandi was ever commissioned to paint. Asked to depict some musical instruments, he apparently changed the instruments he was asked to paint, but still produced a very indifferent work.  Why? Because the relationship between the objects seems non-existent, and because the objects lacked the sense of three-dimensional shape provided by bottles. 

What did he paint? Possibly the most restricted range of subjects of any 20th-century artist. All he painted (and did prints of) was landscapes, still lifes, and flowers – and there are very few paintings of flowers. There seems little evidence of Morandi talking about art in grand or theoretical terms. His letters to Luigi Magnani seem to be exclusively preoccupied with practical matters. He lived at home with his three sisters, collecting them from mass every Sunday morning (although he didn’t attend mass himself).

Morandi mixed his own paints, and stretched his own canvases. His preferred format was almost square. He would adjust the objects he was painting if they did not provide the shape or colour he was looking for, so clearly his goal was not the exact depiction of what was in front of him; his painting is not realistic, even though every one of his paintings appears representational. He never painted a single object by itself, always multiple objects next to, in front of or behind each other.

Morandi, Still Life, 1936

Are these works of stillness? There doesn’t appear to be much struggle going on from his letters, nor much that critics have been able to identify. Nonetheless, there is something going on with these pictures. Morandi himself stated: “a painting should tell us about the images and emotions that the visible world ignites in us [the painters].” There is certainly something powerful being expressed, which, if it is not the objects themselves, is the relation between the objects. His works are usually signed, in a clearly visible way, so they are clearly a personal statement.

What surprised me on looking at the works in detail is their rough-and-ready execution. There is no attempt to get the verticals straight, or the handles of the jugs precise, or the perspective exact. In several pictures, the background appears to extend impossibly into and over the space occupied by an object. Sometimes the objects have weight, and are arranged as if in a photograph, but in others, the objects are off-centre, not arranged in a very realistic way, and the background is almost lacking in any perspective. Yet the works have a powerful impact, as if these objects in themselves have a vital significance. Remarkably, several etchings of still lifes have the same quality, even though the etchings appear to be more conventional – following rules of perspective and a more orthodox cross-hatching to express distance and proportion. In one or two of the landscapes, which are usually etchings, Morandi achieves the same arresting effect, forcing you to look at a view that in itself is not distinctive, until you notice the relationship between the buildings. There is one etching with a blank white wall on the right of the image – powerful because left blank. Is this just a standard etching technique or is this Morandi’s distinctiveness revealed again?

Morandi, Landscape (Chiesanuova) 1924

Critics suggest a relationship between Morandi and Cézanne, but for me, the most similar artist to Morandi was Chardin, who would paint some simple objects against a matt background with the utmost respect, and almost a feeling of reverence for them. As with Chardin’s still lifes, Morandi’s paintings are not ostentatious, drawing attention to the execution; in fact, their details are somewhat sketchy. Instead, they capture your attention by the sheer force of their execution, the artist’s expression of the idea of a bottle, a jug, some fruit, next to other, similar objects. In the end, as a viewer you start to reach for grand ways to describe such small-scale works.

A quick tour of museums in the Netherlands

 

The Depot Boijmans van Beuningen: ostentatious  example of conspicuous consumption

Three days, three art galleries in the Netherlands. The impression from two out of three of them was excellent; one was very disappointing.

The Hague Kunstmuseum, courtyard and cafe

First, the successes. The Kunstmuseum in The Hague was a revelation: a glorious 1930s design by H P Berlage. Having visited The Hague a couple of times before, I am astonished that I didn’t see this gallery, but perhaps it has something to do with the museum’s title: until 2019 it was called the “Gemeentemuseum”, which doesn’t convey (to me) what the museum actually is: a collection of art. It is a joy to wander round this purpose-built gallery, with concealed ceiling lights and tile decorations throughout. Although the museum is vast, there are small, intimate exhibition spaces as well. The exhibition we saw (Josef and Anni Albers) was well presented, and the café (located in courtyard, formerly open to the elements, now enclosed) was a dream.

The Museum de Lakenhal (that is, “cloth museum”  in Leiden was another great success. Here was the best kind of local collection, a museum that showed artists with a connection to Leiden, but most of all to show the history of the cloth industry in Leiden. Where better than the building where the cloth was authenticated as genuine before being sold? Paintings took up less than half the exhibition space; the rest of the vast building showed cloth-making details, something about the siege of Leiden, and some fascinating early 20th-century art. This museum had been closed for some years for refurbishment; it was worth the wait.  

It is a good idea that art galleries are periodically refurbished; but what do you do with a museum during the building works? The Rotterdam Boijmans Van Beuningen museum is an example of how not to do it. Alongside the main building is a highly impressive egg-shaped building covered in reflective mirroring. This building, the Depot, we are told, is the future of museums. For the first time ever, the museum store was being opened to the public. This store, comprising five floors, with a restaurant at the top and a roof garden above, is big enough, we are told, to hold all the museum’s artworks – no fewer than 151,000 objects. For 20 Euros, we can buy a ticket to see the store. But what do we see? There are precisely 14 pictures on display with captions. To view these, you queue and are admitted a few at a time to the single room with these works on display.

This room has the 14 paintings on display from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (not, admittedly, just from the back, but if the pictures were against the wall, you could show more).

I quite understand why museums need to close. But to charge €20 to see 14 paintings seems to me a not very fair transaction. Almost alongside this room, which had a queue of visitors waiting patiently for admission, there was a much larger room that was completely empty. It would have been possible to show not 14 but 140 paintings on the walls of this room, complete with captions. Why was this not done?

To be fair, the museum website states quite clearly that the highlights are just 14 pictures. But there is no explanation why only 14 are shown. Worse, an accompanying wall display explains that the presentation of just 14 paintings was “made possible” by a sponsor. Is the display of works of art not what a gallery is for? Does it require a sponsor to show 14 works? 

The astonishing explanation for the 14 paintings that were on display

Had the museum not used “crystal easels”, many more paintings could have been displayed in the one room. On another floor, there was a vast empty room, which could have held, in my estimate, ten times as many paintings. In other words, it was clearly not lack of space to display the pictures. The impression overall of the depot was that space was not at a premium; there was a vast atrium through the centre of the building. No expense had been spared in building the depot.

What made things worse was that dotted around the store were many objects that had been clearly put on display, but without any information about the object. There was a complete lack of the kind of information I would expect from a gallery – who created this artwork? When was it done? – and instead, a smug presentation that made it clear that the museum knows what it is doing, even when it doesn’t. 

Objects displayed to demonstrate the museum's display skills, but not, it seems to tell us anything about what they are

To give a further example. One of the multimedia displays comprised several large numbers, which on closer examination were totals from a search of the  collection’s digital catalogue. By interrogating the catalogue, the display proudly told us, we can see how many objects in the collection have no image. Or have no metadata. In other words, the online catalogue is not complete – yet this is presented as a kind of achievement, rather than a failure. 

Similarly, the museum had a room dedicated to a project based around slavery. This comprised one picture, of a 19th century sugar plantation in Brazil, that had been annotated, like this:

This is an example of labour, just in case you hadn't noticed

There were similar captions for “slavery”. The aim seemed to emphasise to the visitor that the museum was fully aware of the issues raised by some of its collection, and had taken action. Now we all know this represents labour, so there is nothing more to worry about.

In summary, I would give The Hague Kunstmuseum and De Lakenhal 10/10; The Rotterdam Boijmans van Beuningen, 0/10, for a patronizing and unwelcoming attitude to its visitors.