Looking back on the year in art, wouldn't it be nice to start with some paintings? To shed light on one or two of our museums' important recent acquisitions, such as Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mai (c. 1776), which the National Portrait Gallery, together with the Getty in Los Angeles, sold for £50 million?
The National Gallery now owns Henri Rousseau's Portrait of Joseph Brummer (1909), which shows the Hungarian art dealer smoking in a wicker chair. The Royal Collection rediscovered a 'lost' painting of Susanna and the Elders (1610) by Artemisia Gentileschi - the most fashionable Old Master for our MeToo moment - in a storage room at Hampton Court. (Although, as far as I know, it was not wrapped in an Ikea bag, as was the case with Vincent van Gogh's Spring Garden (1884), which was stolen from a Dutch museum in 2020 and returned this year.)
Wouldn't it be wonderful to reflect on some of the most memorable contemporary paintings, such as Peter Doig's vision of an alpinist in harlequin costume crossing the Alps, seen at the Courtauld? Or Camden Art Centre's stunning exhibition of Iraqi-born, London-based Mohammed Sami's eerie, dreamy paintings that evoke life under Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad.
But brilliant art cannot make up for a catastrophic year for our most cherished institutions - most notably the British Museum, which has suffered a self-inflicted annus horribilis that will have long-term consequences. This summer it was revealed that around 1,500 artefacts had been stolen over 20 years from the museum (with another 500 damaged), which, in the words of its chairman, George Osborne, had been the victim of an "inside job". (Earlier this year, a senior curator was fired; according to his family, he denied wrongdoing.) Director Hartwig Fischer was forced to resign over the handling of the case, but overnight the museum's reputation as safe depository for millions of treasures destroyed. to smithereens. This month it even became the butt of a joke in an online competition: "Have you heard about the Christmas cake on display at the British Museum? It was Stollen."
The fiasco intensified the long-standing row over the Elgin Marbles, which was recently reignited when Rishi Sunak canceled a last-minute meeting with the Greek Prime Minister following his call, during a BBC interview, for the return of the sculptures of the Parthenon. a rebuke on the front page of one of the Greek tabloids to our Prime Minister: "F- you b--!" There was also disquiet over the fact that the beautiful domed Reading Room remains off-limits ten years after it was closed to the public.
The story continues
Whoever permanently replaces Fischer will have to do a lot to implement the reforms recommended by an independent review this week, and to formulate an up-to-date restitution policy that does not shy away from the 60-year-old British Museum Act. In March, the Vatican agreed to return three fragments of sculptures from the Parthenon to Athens; If the law in this country needs to be changed to do the right thing and reflect public opinion, then Parliament needs to change it.
At Tate Britain, a redesign of the permanent collection, led by director Alex Farquharson, was, in my view, a blatant example of the ruthless framing of works of art within a social and political, rather than aesthetic, context. (It wasn't necessary either: the last rehang took place just ten years ago.)
At some points the labelling, so objectionable throughout Britain's past, seemed embarrassed by the paintings it referred to. An introduction to a gallery dedicated to art created between 1760 and 1830, entitled 'Troubled Glamour', seemed to suggest that, by 'promoting[ing] a sense of harmony, order and elegance", and ignoring "tensions" that were "rarely explicit in the art of this time", paintings by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough were careless, even duplicitous; George Stubbs's "picturesque" paintings, Reapers and Haymakers (both from 1785), were reprimanded for being "idealized images" that failed to convey the "harsh reality" of rural labor.
Elsewhere, Joseph Van Aken's An English Family at Tea (c. 1720) seemed to have been included only so that an admonishing label could remind visitors that 'tea was a bitter drink sweetened with sugar produced in British colonies in the Caribbean produced with the labor of enslaved African people."
Such metaphorical attacks are even less welcome when museums continue to face physical assaults on works of art in their care: last month, for example, climate activists struck with hammer-wielding in The Rokeby Venus (almost a century after suffragette Mary Richardson took a cleaver to the church brought). canvas); Fortunately, after suffering only minor damage, Diego Velázquez's painting is now back on display in the National Gallery.
Today, many museums - perhaps under internal pressure from younger staff - seem to believe that they must campaign for social justice. However, shouldn't they balance today's concerns with a commitment to understanding the complexities of the past, rather than flaunting obvious judgments about it? Everyone recognizes that, in response to complex social forces, the way we look at art - and even the art being looked at now - has changed in recent years; as the prominent American curator Helen Molesworth recently put it to me: "The first two decades of the 21st century have been marked by people with battering rams saying, 'No, we won't have it, we absolutely demand a culture that has some relationship to the heterogeneity of the population as a whole.'"
Of course, art can (and should) reflect contemporary events: this year there were two contrasting works of art, both powerful and unforgettable, that responded to the Grenfell Tower fire. Using footage taken from a helicopter before the destroyed high-rise was covered over, Steve McQueen's 24-minute film Grenfell circled the charred ruins, seemingly endlessly and without respite. Meanwhile, Chris Ofili (for the most part) avoided the reality documented by McQueen; his much gentler offering, a colossal, colorful mural, seemingly set in an Arcadian realm, on three sides of the north stairs of Tate Britain, offered consolation.
There's a reason why ArtReview magazine chose artist Nan Goldin at the top of its annual "Power 100" list of the art world's most influential figures. The American photographer - who in recent years has campaigned against members of the philanthropic Sackler family for their alleged role in the US opioid crisis, through their ownership of Purdue Pharma (they have denied wrongdoing or personal responsibility) - represents the artist who has a very specific and fashionable role: that of the heroic social crusader, who, as the magazine puts it, 'channels a movement for change'.
But to avoid groupthink within our museums, we need leaders who are visionary and opinionated, and who also have a moral compass. It is difficult to say whether these are the strengths of the surprising new choice for Tate Modern director Karin Hindsbo; before her appointment, the Dane had not registered on the radar of anyone I had spoken to.
Her excellent predecessor, Frances Morris, a difficult act to follow, gave a wonderful speech at a memorial service at Tate Britain this autumn for the artist Phyllida Barlow, who died in March, and will be remembered for her exuberant, artfully constructed sculptures.
Not every British gallery went haywire. Glasgow's Burrell Collection was announced as Art Fund Museum of the Year (although Glasgow Life, the charity that runs it, along with other museums in the city, named 1,750 artefacts, including a £3 million sculpture by Auguste Rodin, as " unlocated". i.e., lost). The National Portrait Gallery has reopened after an understated, stylish revamp that involves no finger-wagging 'didactics'. And beyond all the 'hot-button' issues - such as the recent furor over a Hertfordshire museum identifying the cross-dressing Roman Emperor Elagabalus (204-222 AD) as 'transgender' - there were simpler, crowd-pleasing pleasures had to experience. At the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, a retrospective of work by Grayson Perry - who is now giving David Hockney a run for his money as Britain's most popular living artist - lived up to its title (Smash Hits) and was attended by almost 100,000 satisfied customers (though it left this correspondent lukewarm).
Still, Hockney is able to fend off the 'young' (actually 63-year-old) pretender for a while. The 86-year-old Yorkshireman seemed tireless in the year his Drawing from Life exhibition - briefly shown in 2020 before the pandemic forced its closure - was revived by the NPG. He also unveiled an 'immersive' autobiographical light show, which ran for more than ten months in a new four-storey space behind London's King's Cross; he approved an exhibition of about 120 works in Tokyo; presented a video on Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage; projected a pair of digital Christmas trees onto the chimneys of Battersea Power Station; and revealed a dodgy portrait of a skinny, ferret-looking Harry Styles, in which the British singer appeared, with messy hair, wearing a red and yellow striped vest and a set of pearls.
There were also pearls galore in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum's Vermeer exhibition, which collected 28 photographs by the 17th-century Dutch painter - more than any previous exhibition - and, unsurprisingly, attracted 650,000 visitors. Fortunately, the visitor numbers show that there is still a large audience for the Old Masters.
