Alberti’s Window

Twenty years ago today, two armed men entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and performed one of the biggest art heists in history. In a little over an hour, these two men stole an estimated $300-500 million by grabbing thirteen works of art. Some of the stolen paintings included Vermeer’s The Concert (1658-1660) and Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633, shown right). This Rembrandt painting is especially of interest, since it is the only known seascape by the artist.

And now, twenty years later, investigators are making another effort to try and get the stolen art back. The Associated Press reported this week that two billboards have appeared on Interstates 93 and 495, advertising the $5 million reward.

I bet there aren’t a lot of crimes which receive billboard attention twenty years after the fact. Although I kind of doubt that billboard signs are going to help recover these famous works of art, who knows? I hope that the Gardner museum gets its collection back one day.

*The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has been in the news recently, due to a controversial modern wing that will be built onto the museum. You can read my take on the subject here.

Caravaggio, Medusa, 1598-99

One of my students brought my attention to this recent article in the New York Times. The article highlights a new argument by Philip Sohm, an art historian at the University of Toronto. Sohm believes that people aren’t as interested in the Renaissance artist Michelangelo anymore – instead, people have shifted their interest to Caravaggio. Sohm has charted interest in Caravaggio and Michelangelo through the number of scholarly publications over the past fifty years, and the number of writings about Caravaggio have gradually overtaken those about Michelangelo. Sohm calls this new phenomenon “Caravaggiomania” – and as a Baroque scholar who loves Caravaggio, I think that term is awesome.

Sohm thinks that art history doctoral students are having difficulty finding new and innovative things to say about Michelangelo. I don’t doubt this is the case. Michelangelo and the Renaissance period have been beaten to death for centuries in terms of research – but I do think that new interpretations and fresh scholarship can still rise up in the 21st century. I just wonder where Renaissance scholarship can go for new and fresh ideas. I’ve been thinking about this quite recently, actually, ever since I read heidenkind’s post about her difficulty in finding great publications about Donatello.

Sohm’s Caravaggio argument is timely, particularly since this year celebrates the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death. There are a lot of huge celebrations and events taking place to honor Caravaggio this year, including a major exhibition that is currently on display at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. This exhibition is bringing together Caravaggio paintings from all over the world – you can see a list of the paintings at the bottom of this Italian website. Other events have also taken place in preparation for this show, such as the public restoration of Adoration of the Shepherds. How I wish that I could go to Rome and celebrate this summer!

Anyhow, because of these celebrations, there undoubtedly has been Caravaggiomania over the past couple of months and years. Here’s the question that I would pose to Sohm: How many publications and writings have occurred recently because of the preparations for this celebration? Is it possible that we will see a decline in Caravaggiomania next year, once all of the celebrations have ended?

I just read this interesting blog post by a curatorial assistant at the MOMA. It looks like the major museum is slowly breaking away from the “white cube” ideology by painting some of the walls. Now, granted, light grey isn’t an extreme departure from the white cube space, but hey, it’s a start. (You can see a photograph of the color change within the MOMA blog post.)

In true art-history-nerd fashion, I did not realize that the Super Bowl was next Sunday (February 7th) until I read this art news article from today.

It’s common for people to place bets on the outcome of Super Bowl games, and it looks like art museum directors are no exception! The directors of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and New Orleans Museum of Art have agreed to wager items from their collection in order to support their hometeams. If the New Orleans Saints win, then the Indianapolis Museum of Art will send Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800, shown above) to be displayed in the New Orleans Museum of Art for three months. In turn, if the Indianapolis Colts win the Superbowl, then the New Orleans Museum of Art will send Lorrain’s Ideal View of Tivoli (1644, shown below) to be displayed in the Indianapolis Museum of Art for three months.

It appears that the bet was instigated and encouraged by Tyler Green, whose writes the Modern Art Notes blog. You can see Green’s Super Bowl post here.

I honestly have no opinion as to which team is going to win the Super Bowl. But if I had to root for one, I guess it would be the New Orleans Saints – purely because I think the Turner is an interesting painting and it should have a chance to travel for temporary exhibition!

Is anyone else rooting for one painting to travel over another?

Anyone who reads this blog regularly can attest to my distaste for Renoir – particularly Renoir’s later works. (Case in point: I used the word “hideous” to describe a Renoir painting in this post and in a comment for this post.)

I’m not the only person who dislikes Renoir. In fact, people have critiqued his work for decades. Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt wrote in 1913 that Renoir was painting horrific pictures “of enormously fat red women with very small heads.”¹ Even Renoir once admitted, “I had gone as far as I could with Impressionism, and I realized I could neither paint nor draw.”² I couldn’t agree more.

Although Renoir’s later paintings have gotten a bad reputation, a new traveling exhibition called “Renoir in the 20th Century” strives to place the painter in a more positive light. You can read more about this exhibition (and further critiques of Renoir’s style) in a recent Smithsonian article.

Personally, I have no desire to see this show. My opinion of Renoir is pretty much solidified at this point, and I wouldn’t want to waste my time. However, I must admit that the Smithsonian article has changed my perception of Renoir. I didn’t realize that the artist suffered from extreme rheumatoid arthritis in his later life. Due to this disease, the artist painted while under constant pain. He later suffered from paralysis in his right shoulder, which forced the artist to paint with his left hand (see image above).

So, although I don’t find any aesthetic appeal in Renoir’s later works, I do have much more sympathy for the artist. I guess in a way, I can now relate to Renoir on a very small level. Any discomfort that I feel when seeing his art was also painfully experienced by Renoir when his paintings were created.

UPDATE: I just came across this video which shows footage of Renoir working in his later life. You can really get the sense of his physical limitations and suffering in this clip.

1 Richard Covington, “Renoir Rebels Again” in Smithsonian 40, no. 11 (January 2010): 67.

2 Ibid.