Alberti’s Window

What immediately comes to your mind when you think of paintings by Van Gogh? Sunflowers? Starry nights? Creepy self portraits with bandages that cover up a mutilated ear? Well, my friends, it looks like you can add new subject matter to Van Gogh’s oeuvre: a windmill and tricoleur flag. This painting on the right, Le Blute-Fin Mill (1886) was recently authenticated as a Van Gogh painting. Honestly, I never would have considered this to be by Van Gogh, mostly because of the human figures: not only are the uncharacteristically large, but there are a lot more bodies than you normally see in Van Gogh’s work. But I really like the use of color, and that does remind me of Van Gogh. I especially like the red highlights of the woman’s dress in the foreground. What do you think? Do you like this painting?

This authentication is pretty exciting – Le Blute-Fin Mill is the first Van Gogh to be authenticated since 1995. However, admittedly, the painting has long been disputed as by Van Gogh – an eccentric art collector bought the painting and always claimed it to be by the master, but no one took the collector seriously. You can read more about the story and authentication here.

In other Van Gogh news, the famous The Night Cafe (1888, shown left) is involved in a dispute regarding ownership. This painting has hung for almost fifty years in the Yale University Art Gallery, but now Pierre Konowaloff, the great-grandson of the previous owner, is trying to claim the painting back. It seems like a pretty sticky situation: Konowaloff’s great-grandfather bought the painting in 1908, but it was subsequently nationalized and sold by the Soviet government during the Russian Revolution. Therefore, Konowaloff believes that the painting classifies as “stolen” and feels justified in claiming it back.

I personally don’t think that Konowaloff has a very good chance of getting The Night Cafe back, but what do other people think?

Today I’m pleased to feature a guest post by Pamelia Brown. Pamelia writes for Associates Degree [dot] com, and has a written a couple of entries there that might be of particular interest to people who read this blog.

For today’s post, Pamelia is writing about the Getty Museum’s “Victorious Youth,” a sculpture which has seen a lot of news coverage this past month:

Victorious Youth, 300-100 BCE, Getty Museum

For a work of art whose creator isn’t identified, the Victorious Youth gets a lot of press.The Greek bronze statue was discovered in international fishing waters by Italian fishermen in 1964. However, instead of revealing the discovery to the Italian government, or even returning it to Greece, the men who discovered it hid it and sold it, leading to the statue eventually being smuggled out of the country and sold at auction. J. Paul Getty, the billionaire oilman, made plans in 1972 to buy the statue despite protests from the Italian government. He died in 1976, and the Getty Museum bought the statue the next year, after the seller’s Italian attorneys made assurances that the sale was legal. That was just the beginning of the trouble.

Earlier this month, an Italian judge ordered that the Victorious Youth be seized from the museum and returned to Italy. It’s a follow-up to a 2007 agreement in which the Getty, acknowledging that many of its pieces were likely acquired illegally, announced it would return 40 of its pieces to the Italian government, though not the statue. It’s not clear how effective the order could be enforced here, but it does open the door for further negotiations with the Getty Museum. While the museum did issue a statement saying the order was “flawed both procedurally and substantively,” the following week saw the Getty announce a renewed partnershipwith Italy by working with Sicily on object conservation, and that decision also stemmed from the 2007 agreement.I think it’s a shame that a sculpture has been reduced to a prize being quarreled over by an angry government and a museum that’s probably resorted to off-the-book practices to acquire art. It makes me wonder how many times we let art be swallowed by a different story. Perhaps some kind of share or trade could be worked out, where the statue spent part of its time in the Getty Villa in Malibu and the rest of the area in Italy. I know it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s surely better than courtroom showdowns.This guest post is contributed by Pamelia Brown, who writes on the topics of associates degree. She welcomes your comments at her email Id pamelia.brown@gmail.com .

I sometimes start my lectures by talking with students about art that has recently been in the news. Tonight, though, it was a student who shared an interesting news item. She had overheard people discussing this NPR story about Daniel Rockmore, a math professor at Dartmouth College.

Rockmore is using his mathematical skills to help determine if drawings are correctly attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Northern Renaissance artist. Bruegel used various pen strokes which art connoisseurs have noted to be especially characteristic of the artist’s work. Nevertheless, connoisseurs have had difficulty in concretely identifying some of Bruegel’s work (e.g. the above image of an Alpine landscape (Morgan Library and Museum) was attributed Bruegel until recently). In order to help determine which strokes are Bruegel-like and which ones are not, Rockmore used his math skills to create a computer program that analyzes the pen strokes.

It sounds like an interesting program. It makes me wonder more about how computers and technology will affect the future practice of connoisseurship. Could future art attribution be left completely in the hands of technology, instead of actual connoisseurs? I imagine that couldn’t happen, but it’s an interesting/scary thought.

Rockmore made an interesting point at the end of the article, explaining that this program is a way to deconstruct art and determine what it means to be Picasso-like or Bruegel-like. In a way, I think that’s true, but I also think that an artist’s “hand” and styles can never be completely, concretely deconstructed. Even if an artist is relatively consistent in a technique, stylistic approach or color scheme, artists are subjective to change and variation. Although I think Rockmore has an interesting and useful idea, I don’t think it can find all of the answers to explaining an artist’s style.

You might be aware that the annual conference for College Art Association (CAA) is starting next week (February 10-13). I wish I could go, but a) I can’t afford to fly to Chicago and b) I have to teach. Nonetheless, I have poured through the conference catalog (see online list here) and have marked the sessions that I wish I could attend:

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?