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A
British Blockbuster
As
part of Yale's Tercentennial finale, the BAC called upon the best
from the mother country.
November
2001
by Bruce Fellman
The Center
for British Art is no stranger to blockbusters, from "Turner
and the Sublime" in 1981 to "The Art of Bloomsbury" last year. But
when the Center opened its doors in late September on "Great British
Paintings from American Collections: Holbein to Hockney," the consensus
was that the show outdid any of the ambitious exhibits of past years.
"We wanted
to do something big for Yale's Tercentennial," says Malcolm Warner,
senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the BAC, "and so we
set about reviving an old-fashioned tradition -- an exhibition that
is simply a grand assemblage of masterpieces."
The show,
which runs through the end of 2001 in New Haven and then travels
to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
in San Marino, California, from February 3 to May 5 next year, includes
81 paintings (there will be 78 in the Huntington exhibit), each
of which is considered the best in its class. "We're presenting
a comprehensive anthology of images from the 16th century to the
present," says Warner, "and we hope these demonstrate that British
art is not just portraits of stuffy aristocrats."
Members
of royalty and the well-born are prominent in the show, which is
being supported through a grant from the British-based energy company
BP, but the artists explore many other themes. These range from
the landscapes of J.M.W. Turner and depictions of wildlife by George
Stubbs to the nightmare vision of Henry Fuseli and a monumental
nude by Jennie Saville, a young British painter who was part of
the 1999 "Sensations" exhibit in Brooklyn. There are stalwarts such
as John Constable and Benjamin West, and more recent masters, among
them Francis Bacon and Stanley Spencer. Several of the artists,
such as Gilbert Stuart, aren't British at all, but did some of their
best work in England, and then there's David Hockney, an Englishman
who often paints his adopted home, Los Angeles.
Planning
for the "Holbein to Hockney" exhibit got underway two years ago
when Warner and then-BAC-director Patrick McCaughey began thinking
about the BAC's Tercentennial contribution. They and Julia Marciari-Alexander,
associate curator of paintings and sculpture, combed the catalogs
of every repository of British art in the country, from large museums
to the holdings of private collectors, and they weren't looking
for just any masterpiece. "We wanted to include artwork that would
also help us tell a story about the evolution of American collecting,"
says Warner, who will become senior curator at the Kimbell Art Museum
in Fort Worth next year.
Warner explained that by the late 1800s Britain-bashing had given way to
Anglophilia, particularly among financiers and industrialists such
as Henry Huntington, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and James
Pierpont Morgan. "These were guys who had made a fortune out of
dirt, and they didn't want to be reminded of the origins of their
wealth," he says. "Buying British art was their way of buying into
Old World class."
These
collectors had a penchant for "full-length, glamorous portraits
of aristocratic women and for landscapes that portrayed gentility,"
the curator notes. "Collecting was no doubt an affirmation of the
power and prestige these men had achieved in their careers, but
it was also the creation of a refuge from the mundane, vexatious,
sometimes ugly world of moneymaking," writes Warner in "Anglophilia
into Art," an essay in the exhibition catalog.
There
is no small irony in the spectacle of self-made men surrounding
themselves with nobility -- lords and ladies whose inherited wealth
and power were part of a system that would have made the very successes
of the American capitalists impossible. Instead, the collectors
saw pastoral visions of a kind of English Eden, and a welcome respite
from the smoke-belching, landscape-destroying industries that were
the source of their fortunes. They also saw, in the faces of noblemen
and women who had commanded castles and commoners alike, the traits
they hoped characterized their own lives.
As a
result, they bought British art with abandon. Thomas Gainsborough
was a particular favorite, and in 1921, Henry Huntington paid $728,000
for The Blue Boy, which, at the time, was the most money
anyone had ever spent on a painting. (It appears only in the Huntington
part of the show.)
But the
Great Depression put an end to this kind of collecting, and by the
time Andrew Mellon's son Paul began his career as a collector in
1959, tastes had changed considerably. British art no longer attracted
much attention, and plenty of it was available at relatively low
prices.
Paul
Mellon would go on to amass a huge, and hugely important, collection,
and by the time he died two years ago, he had donated much of it
, along with the Louis Kahn -designed museum for its study and exhibition,
to Yale. As a result, the BAC now holds the largest collection of
British art outside Britain. However, Mellon was interested in a
different kind of art from that of his father's generation. It was
nostalgic, to be sure, but the younger Mellon was an Anglophile
drawn to images of the English countryside and the sporting life
rather than to portraits of the powerful and wealthy.
Not surprisingly,
a number of Mellon gifts to the BAC (14 in all) form the core of
the "Holbein to Hockney" exhibit. The Huntington, which loaned nine
paintings to the show, is the other major contributor. To assemble
the remaining images, Warner and his associates knocked on the doors
of many museums and private homes. "Part of the fun of being a curator
is that you're licensed to snoop around other people's houses,"
says Warner, adding that no matter where the artwork is located,
"it's essential that you see every painting."
Sometimes,
an inspection ruled out inclusion, and there were also cases of
bad timing -- many museums had already promised their Turners and
Hockneys to major retrospectives that were scheduled for the same
time period. But then there was serendipity.
"I knew
of a masterpiece by Gerard Soest in the Enoch Pratt Free Library
in Baltimore," said Marciari-Alexander. This circa-1670 portrait
of the second Lord Baltimore hung in an out-of-the-way place, 20
feet above the library's gift shop, and to examine it, the curator
had to teeter on a ladder with only a flashlight for illumination.
"It was clearly spectacular," she said. "As I looked it over, I
found the artist's signature -- a dazzling surprise, for Soest didn't
normally sign his paintings."
Once
the curators decided on the artwork, they sent out letters that established the rationale for the exhibition and why a particular
painting belonged in the show. "In negotiating a loan, there's a
lot of salesmanship involved," said Warner, noting that he sent
out more than 120 letters to at least two dozen museums and a half-dozen
private collectors. "It's like a courtship. Charm helps, as does
the fact that we're known as the place for British art in the U.S."
The response
to the letters was gratifying. "We scored much higher than is typical,"
Warner continues, explaining that a 50-to-60 percent positive response
rate is close to average; the rate for this exhibition was in the
vicinity of 75 percent.
And all
for an endeavor in which, except for the costs of shipping, handling,
and insurance (these are paid by the sponsoring museum), the lender
receives no fee. "This is done on a gentlemanly basis -- I'll lend
to you, with the expectation that sometime in the future, you'll
lend to me," says Warner. "And it's an act of ultimate generosity:
to give up your property for no gain -- and to have a blank space
on your wall -- for nothing more than the pleasure of sharing it
with others."  |
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