The Secret History of Art: Recent Episodes
Noah Charney
THE SECRET HISTORY OF ART takes you on a series of private guided tours of the world's greatest artworks. Best-selling author and professor of art history Noah Charney presents the history, symbolism, and importance of each work. The Secret History of Art is a series of lessons in miniature on great works of art around the world. By spending just a few minutes per masterpiece, you can learn the mysteries, stories, and secrets of some of civilization’s greatest treasures.
This episode goes inside the world of art theft, looking specifically at some little-known details about the theft of the Mona Lisa.
Listen to Noah on the Christmas edition of NPR's All Things Considered as he discusses his new book, Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece.Text reprinted from npr.org:December 25, 2010It's the size of a barn door, weighs more than an elephant, and is one of the most famous and coveted paintings in the world.It's the Ghent Altarpiece — also called Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, after a central panel showing hordes of pilgrims gathered to pay homage to the Lamb of God.Other panels depict the Annunciation, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist and a crowned Christ in detail so exacting that you can pick out individual hairs in a beard, or dirt on a pilgrim's foot.Artist Jan van Eyck completed the Ghent Altarpiece around 1432. Author Noah Charney tells NPR's Guy Raz that it's arguably the single most important painting ever made."It's the first great oil painting — it influenced oil painting for centuries to come," Charney says. "It's the first great panel painting of the Renaissance, a forerunner to artistic realism. The monumentality of it and the complexity of it fascinated people from the moment it was painted."###### Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted MasterpieceBy Noah CharneyHardcover, 336 pagesPublicAffairsList Price: $27.95
Read An ExcerptCharney's new book, Stealing the Mystic Lamb: the True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece, traces the painting through six centuries of war, theft and intrigue.150 Years Of PeaceThe altarpiece was painted for the cathedral of St. Bavo, in Ghent. And during the first century of its existence, nothing much happened.Then, in 1566, all hell broke loose. Protestant militants broke down the cathedral doors with an improvised battering ram, intending to burn the altarpiece, which they considered to be an example of Catholic idolatry and excess. But alert Catholic guards had disassembled the enormous work and hidden it in the cathedral tower, where it survived unscathed.Over the next few centuries, the Ghent Altarpiece was taken as booty in the Napoleonic Wars and then returned to Ghent. Parts of it were stolen by a vicar at St. Bavo and ended up, after several sales, in a Berlin museum.When World War I broke out, a brave cathedral canon hid the painting away in a junkman's wagon for safety. It took the Treaty of Versailles to finally reunite all the panels in their original home.Enduring MysteryThe Ghent Altarpiece didn't stay safe for long. Thieves broke into the cathedral one night in 1934 and made off with the lower left panel.
Urska Charney
Noah Charney is also the author of Art and Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World and The Art Thief: A Novel."This is the enduring mystery that really is part of the popular cultural awareness of the people of Ghent still to this day," Charney says.The theft has never been solved. Visitors to St. Bavo Cathedral today will see a copy of the missing panel, painted during World War II. The copy is so good that many people thought it might be the original, hidden in plain sight, though recent conservation work has disproved that theory.Raiders Of The Mystic LambMissing panel and all, the Ghent Altarpiece was stolen one last time during World War II, on the orders of Nazi Gen. Hermann Goering."This may sound very silly," says Charney, "but in fact, the Nazis and Hitler in particular were absolutely convinced that the occult and the supernatural was real," and the Ghent Altarpiece was thought to be a sort of mystical treasure map showing the location of relics of Christ's passion.Web ResourcesSee More Of The Ghent Altarpiece At Noah Charney's WebsiteThe altarpiece ended up hidden with thousands of other looted artworks in a converted salt mine in Austria. The local SS commander had wired the mine with dynamite, determined to destroy all the art as the Allies began closing in.Charney says the Ghent Altarpiece was eventually saved through the heroism of salt miners who disabled the bombs, and the work of local Austrian resistance fighters and Allied "monuments men" whose job it was to hunt for stolen art."There was this race," Charney says, "with the Allies trying to get to the mine before the SS could blow it up, and it was very close to every one of those works being completely destroyed."But the painting was saved, and you can see it today at the St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent."Each time I see it, I notice something new," Charney says. "For instance, I think it may be the first work of the pre-modern period to show someone laughing."Excerpt: 'Stealing The Mystic Lamb'by NOAH CHARNEY
Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted MasterpieceBy Noah CharneyHardcover, 336 pagesPublicAffairsList Price: $27.95
As the oak door to the chapel swings open, one is first struck by the scents: the cool, ancient stone of the walls of Saint Bavo Cathedral, the smell of frankincense, and then the surprising notes of old wood, linseed oil, and varnish. The cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, abounds with stunning religious art, but one artwork stands out among the rest. After six hundred years of nearly constant movement, The Ghent Altarpiece is at last back in the cathedral for which it was painted.Jan van Eyck's masterpiece has been involved in seven separate thefts, dwarfing the next runner-up, a Rembrandt portrait, lifted from London's Dulwich Picture Gallery on a mere four occasions. From enduring questions surrounding the movement, through theft and smuggling, of the altarpiece as a whole to the mystical symbolism of its content, the altarpiece has haunted scholars and detectives, hunters and protectors, interpreters and worshippers.It is one of art history's great unsolved mysteries.Those who stand before the altarpiece cannot but feel overwhelmed by its monumentality. The Ghent Altarpiece comprises twenty individual painted panels linked in a massive hinged framework. It is opened on its hinges for religious holidays but remains closed for most of the year, at which point only eight of the twenty panels, which were painted on both recto and verso (front and back sides), are visible. The subject matter of the verso panels, visible when the altarpiece is closed, is the Annunciation: The angel Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear the Son of God. Portraits of the donors who paid for the altarpiece, and their patron saints, also grace the back.The altarpiece has a puzzle-box appearance, and inside its treasures lie patiently in wait for decipherers. When open, the altarpiece's center displays an idealized field full of figures: saints, martyrs, clergy, hermits, righteous judges, knights of Christ, and an angelic choir, all making a slow pilgrimage to pay homage to the central figure — a Lamb on a sacrificial altar, standing proudly, while it bleeds into a golden chalice. This scene is referred to as "The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb." The precise iconographic meaning of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb panel and the meaning of the dozens of obscure symbols within it have been the subject of centuries of scholarly debate.Above the vast field of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in the upper panels, God the Father sits enthroned, with Mary and John the Baptist on either side. The figure has a hand raised in blessing, a hand painted with an astonishing realism: veins bulge and tiny hairs curl out of the pore-scored skin. At his foot, a crown is clustered in light-reflecting jewels; the fringe of his cloak is woven in gold threads, and above his head arch rune-like inscriptions. Individual hairs were lovingly painted into his beard, and his almond eyes express a power and a weariness that are altogether human.The level of minute detail in so enormous an artwork is unprecedented. Until the altarpiece was painted, only portrait miniatures and illuminated manuscripts contained such detail. Nothing like this intricacy had ever been seen before on such a grand scale, by artists or admirers. The great art historian Erwin Panofsky famously wrote that van Eyck's eye functioned "as a microscope and a telescope at the same time." Viewers of The Ghent Altarpiece, Panofsky explained, are privy to God's vision of the world, capturing "some of the experience of Him who looks down from heaven, but can number the hairs on our head."In The Ghent Altarpiece jewels shine with refracted light. One can see individual hairs on the manes of horses. Each of the altarpiece's hundred-plus figures have been given personalized facial features. Each figure's face is unique and retains the detail of a portrait — sweat, wrinkles, veins, and flared nostrils. Details range from the mundane to the elegant. Viewers can make out tufts of grass, the wrinkles in an old worm-eaten apple, and warts on double chins. But they can also see the reflection of light caught in a perfectly painted ruby, the folds of a gilded garment, and individual silvery hairs amid the chestnut curls of a beard.The secret weapon that permitted such detail was oil paint. Because oil paints are translucent, artists can build up layer upon layer, without covering up what lies beneath. The preferred medium before van Eyck's time, egg-based tempera, was essentially opaque. One layer blotted out the previous one. Oil allowed for a great deal more subtlety and was also easier to control. Van Eyck used some brushes that were so small as to contain only a few animal hairs for bristles, permitting an entirely new level of intricacy. The result is a visual feast, a galaxy of painterly special effects that at once dazzle and provide days of viewing interest, prompting viewers to examine the painting from afar and up close, to decipher as well as to bask in its beauty.The Ghent Altarpiece, the young van Eyck's first major public work, was also the first large-scale oil painting to gain international renown. Though he did not invent oil painting, van Eyck was the first artist to exploit its true capabilities. The artistry, realistic detail, and use of this new medium made the artwork a point of pilgrimage for artists and intellectuals from the moment the paint dried and for centuries to come. The international reputation of the painting and its painter, particularly taking into account its establishment of a new artistic medium that would become the universal choice for centuries, makes for a strong argument that The Ghent Altarpiece is the most important painting in history.It is a work of art that centuries of collectors, dukes, generals, kings, and entire armies desired to such an extent that they killed, stole, and altered the strategic course of war to possess it.From Stealing the Mystic Lamb by Noah Charney. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
A Talk in benefit of Venice in Peril, at the Royal Geographic Society, London in April 2011. Introduction by John Julius Norwich. Part One.
A talk in benefit of Venice in Peril, at the Royal Geographic Society, London in April 2011. Part Two.
The true story, dramatically told, of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in 1912. For the rest of the story, I recommend my book, available at Amazon.
The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World's Most Famous Painting
At the TEDx conference in Celje, Slovenia, 10 November 2012, Noah Charney gives a talk on Art Theft.
The Secret History Art introduces live interviews from the How I Write column of The Daily Beast. Each Wednesday, Noah Charney interviews an author about their writing process, their quirks and habits, and where they keep their desk.....
This week Elizabeth Gilbert discusses her new book, The Signature of All Things.
The Secret History Art introduces live interviews from the How I Write column of The Daily Beast. Each Wednesday, Noah Charney interviews an author about their writing process, their quirks and habits, and where they keep their desk.....
This week Ann Patchett discusses her new book, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
The Secret History Art introduces live interviews from the How I Write column of The Daily Beast. Each Wednesday, Noah Charney interviews an author about their writing process, their quirks and habits, and where they keep their desk.....
This week Noah interviews Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Diamond, who's book "The World Until Yesterday" was recently released in paperback.
The Secret History Art introduces live interviews from the How I Write column of The Daily Beast. Each Wednesday, Noah Charney interviews an author about their writing process, their quirks and habits, and where they keep their desk.....
This week Noah interviews prolific author David Baldacci.
The James Ossuary. A new Podcast in the ongoing series. Available at iTunes as The Secret History of Art at
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-secret-history-of-art/id406816655
In the latest edition of The Secret History of Art, professor of art history and best-selling author Noah Charney discusses the work of Elena del Rivero
In the latest edition of The Secret History of Art, professor of art history and best-selling author Noah Charney discusses Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain
To trick the art world has been the primary motivation of nearly all of history’s known forgers. The financial gains aside, forgers often seek to fool the art community as revenge for having dismissed their own, original creations. And the art community, its scholars, collectors, curators, and salesmen, have proven themselves a forger’s best ally. The dream of the art historian is to find a lost masterpiece. This ravenous hunger is a treasure hunt for grown-up intellectuals, with all the accompanying adrenaline and enthusiasm. The phenomenon that plagues and pleasures the art community is collective wishful thinking. The spark of hope that one is on the trail of a lost artwork produces a momentum such that contradictory clues may be ignored, and incongruous details overlooked. Examined from another perspective, it is in no one’s interest to find a possible great discovery to be a fake. Before money enters into it, the only beneficiary in disproving the “discovery” is an abstract sense of truth. Something that may or may not be real is determined not to be real. But what if it is deemed an original? Everyone benefits. The owner of the object now possesses a great treasure, to keep or sell for huge profit. The seller, be it an auction house, gallery owner, or other middle man, gains his commission. The new buyer, be it a museum or private collector, gains a rare trophy. Scholars are privvy to a new object to study, adding to their body of extant works and the knowledge amassed from them. The media can report on a great story, that there are hidden treasures among us, there for anyone to find. The collective wishful thinking of the art world unconsciously conspires to affirm the authenticity of newly-discovered works. This is particularly the case when a museum is handed a gift. Museums rely on gifts to fill their walls—most of the Baroque art at London’s National Gallery, for instance, is owned by Sir Dennis Mahon, and the works are displayed on loan thanks to his beneficence. The term “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” takes on a new meaning. It would shatter the delicate reliance museums have on donors and supporters if they were to look too closely and, heaven forbid, discover something wrong with the gift offered to you. Most known art forgers have turned to forgery for psychological, rather than financial reasons. The finances are inevitably secondary. It is generally a sense that one’s own original art was rejected as poor by some member of the art community (be it a teacher, a school, a gallery, a critic). The forger decides to “show up” the art world as a whole, projecting his sense that he has been wronged onto the collective art world. Therefore a sort of passive-aggressive revenge is the primary motivator. Such was the case for a gallery of famous forgers, from Shaun Greenhalgh to John Myatt, from Elmyr de Hory to Eric Hebborn. Money comes later, when the forger (and almost inevitably an accomplice who goads the forger forward, as John Drewe did for John Myatt) realizes that in addition to revenge, he can pocket some money as well.Such is the case with Mark Landis, aka Father Arthur Scott aka Steven Gardiner. But the money did not enter into the equation for him, it seems. He enjoyed being catered to by the art world, and knowing that he had fooled them, that his own works were being displayed and lauded as Impressionist originals.By creating a work of your own which exhibits your artistic skill to such an extent that it is mistaken for the work of an acknowledged master, the revenge is two-fold. First, it demonstrates that the forger’s ability level is comparable to that of the famous master whose work has been forged. Second, it undermines the so-called “experts” who dismissed the forger’s original work in the first place. Of course it undermines the experts privately—until the forgery is revealed, in which case even the capture of the forger can underscore the forger’s point and make him feel a victor. For when the forger is caught and his forgeries come to light, the experts he was out to dupe are shown publically to have been fooled. Forgers rarely go to prison for long—a year or two is fairly standard. Many become celebrities upon their release, like John Myatt whose life story is meant to be made into a film starring George Clooney.Art forgery, even when you're caught, seems to pay.
Dear Readers,
I'm pleased to announce that this blog will shortly be moving to a new host, the excellent daily art magazine ArtInfo (www.artinfo.com). ArtInfo is the best source for news and features about the art world, with over a million monthly readers.
I have been asked to become a regular columnist, continuing The Secret History of Art as a regular feature on ArtInfo. The blog will be expanded in its scope, and in the future I will cover not only art historical mysteries, as I have thus far, but also will include my articles and analysis on art crime, art travel adventures, and relevant book, film, and exhibition reviews. Future visits will be redirected to The Secret History of Art on ArtInfo.
Thank you for reading and I hope that you will continue to do so in our new, larger venue. Best wishes, NC
Jusepe de RiberaPieta(1633)
Ribera is perhaps the greatest and most under-studied painter in history. His skill at coaxing emotion out of the darkness, the texture of his painted skins, are far beyond the abilities of Caravaggio, his major inspiration. But for this Spaniard who spent most of his career in Naples, recognition is slow to come. To a large extent this is due to the almost universal fear of the city of Naples. Italians will not stay there after dark. They go for the world’s best pizza and espresso, then high-tail it out of there before the sun sets. It is chaotic, never cleaned up for tourists, full of pick-pockets and garbage, Antichrist to the Savior that is Florence. Even for art historians, it presents a daunting task. The archives are labyrinthine. Entry is barred without nepotistic passwords. But the treasures there are great, if you can survive the trials that bring you to them. And there, in that mysterious beautiful junkyard, shine some of art’s brightest diamonds, many of them by Ribera.Ribera spent his entire career in Naples. Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) was the son of a shoemaker from Játiva. So little is known about his early career, that he seems to have appeared out of nowhere in Parma in 1611. A document from that year is the earliest extant contract, stating that Ribera was paid for a painting of Saint Martin Sharing His Cloak with a Beggar, for the church of Saint Prospero. From 1613-1616, Ribera was in Rome, as he is listed as a member of the painter’s guild, the Academia di San Luca, in 1613. In 1616, he made what would be a permanent move to Naples. There he married Caterina Azzolino, a Sicilian painter’s daughter. Ribera had a large, prosperous studio in the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples, with both a Spanish and Italian client base. His influence on Spanish art was through the importation of his works from Italy, and was also disseminated by his pupils, many of whom worked in Spain, including his most famous pupil, Luca Giordano, who painted at El Escorial.This Pieta is signed and dated on the stone in the lower right corner of the canvas: “Jusepe de Ribera español 1633,” emphasizing his Spanish origins. This was not only a matter of national pride, but it also made clear that he was one of the ruling nationals in Naples. Paintings from this period show a lighter palette than Ribera’s earlier works, and illustrate a move away from the Caravaggesque and into a Caravaggio-influenced personal style that would become trademark Ribera. The two most distinctive features of Ribera’s work are the phenomenally accurate and detailed male bodies, as we see here in the body of Christ, and a striking lighting arrangement that suggests the pallor of moonlight, rather than the sun or a candle or torchlight that was employed by Caravaggio and most of the Caravaggisti. It is particularly interesting (and helpful of the kind curators of this museum) that works by Caravaggio (Saint Catherine) and several of the Caravaggisti (those who emulated Caravaggio’s style) are on display in close proximity. Compare Caravaggio’s own painting, particularly the way the scene is lit, to Mattia Preti’s A Concert and Valentin de Boulogne’s David with the Head of Goliath. All have a spotlight effect, but the way that figures are portrayed and the drama of the emergence from shadow into light are different in each. Consider which you find most effective. Most art historians consider Mattia Preti and Valentin de Boulogne as more derivative, less original artists than Caravaggio and Ribera; skilled artists but not geniuses. But this comes down largely to personal preference. In art, there is no such thing as an objective better and worse. Such decisions are at the discretion of each individual viewer. But it is worth noting the arguments made by critics and historians to back up their opinions. Caravaggio launched what became an international trend in what is often called Tenebrist painting (from the Latin for “shadow”). It is easy to see how his genius would be distinguished, when no one before him had painted anything like what he did, and hundreds of artists flocked to see his paintings and emulate their style. Of those who did so, Ribera emerged to paint not just in the style of Caravaggio, but rather took the seed of inspiration planted by Caravaggio and created his own, instantly-identifiable art form which, in turn, served to inspire legions of his own followers. Mattia Preti and Valentin de Boulogne, by contrast, led fruitful careers and are still much admired, but they neither established, nor perfected, a new trend or movement.This painting belonged to the Marqués de Heredia, and is one of a number of versions of the Pieta, the moment after the dead Christ is taken off the cross, and his mother Mary is given a brief private moment to mourn her son, before he is whisked away for burial. It is one of the most popular scenes for artists to depict, because it offers the chance to show off their skill not only in painting a complete, nearly-nude human body (that of the dead Christ), but also an emotion-filled face, that of the weeping Mary. It is also considered one of the most difficult Biblical scenes to paint well, because most versions show the fully-grown Christ draped across the lap of his mother—a potentially awkward pose that risks making Mary look miniscule, if handled improperly. The most famous Pieta is probably the marble sculpture by Michelangelo, which is on display in Saint Peter’s in Rome, which Ribera would certainly have seen. In each version of the Pieta that Ribera painted, he used the same models for Mary, Christ, and Mary Magdalene, though the poses in each are slightly different. Ribera has creatively chosen to avoid the whole problem of Christ’s corpse on Mary’s lap, by laying Christ out before Mary, rather than upon her. For this reason, the scene is sometimes called a Lamentation rather than a Pieta.To get a good sense of Ribera’s work, one must brave the untouristy atmosphere and fantastic pizza of Naples. But this Pieta, displayed in the sunshine of the welcoming capital of Spain, makes Ribera’s work logistically accessible, and his genius easy to see. Nowhere else is chiaroscuro, the dramatic play of light emerging from darkness, so brilliantly executed. Shadows are the webbing with which Ribera weaves a beautiful cacophony of darkness.
Fra Angelico Annunciation(1433)Museo Diocesano, Cortona, ItalyGuido di Pietro, later called Fra Giovanni di Fiesole and better known as Fra Angelico (1395-1455), was born in Tuscany, near the town of Fiesole, overlooking Florence. There, as a young man, he took his monastic vows, on 17 October 1417. As a Dominican monk he lived and worked primarily at the monastery of San Marco in Florence. He was already a painter when he joined the monastic order, as a document exists that indicates two payments made to Guido di Pietro for paintings done in the church of San Stefano del Ponte. It was traditional for monks to take a new name, and so Guido di Pietro became Fra Giovanni (Fra being short for “frater,” “brother” in Latin). As his renown as a painter flourished, he was referred to as il beatto angelico, the blessed angelic one, for his sublime, gorgeous paintings. This nickname was made official in 1982, when the Pope beatified him (one step below sainthood). Fra Angelico originally trained as a manuscript illuminator, and several manuscripts on display at San Marco are attributed to his hand. He lived for ten years at a Dominican monastery in Cortona, for which he painted frescoes, now all destroyed. From 1436-1445, Fra Angelico lived and worked at San Marco. His relocation to the heart of Florence was a good career move, as it placed him at the center of artistic world. Politics also pulsed through the monastery. The Duke of Florence, Cosimo de’Medici, kept a cell at San Marco reserved for his private use, just down the hall from Fra Angelico’s, which would later house Savonarola, the firebrand preacher who instigated the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities, encouraging the riotous destruction of any art in Florence that he deemed insufficiently somber and moralistic. Fra Angelico painted achingly lovely frescoes in each cell at San Marco, every one unique. The Biblical scenes depicted involved increasingly complex images for meditation, with the more complex works painted in the cells reserved for older monks. Fra Angelico also painted a much beloved fresco of the Annunciation in the hallway of the monastery, which he was often asked to reproduce, with slight variations, for wealthy patrons. This Annunciation is one such reproduction, by the artist himself for the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole.In 1445 Fra Angelico was invited to Rome to paint for the pope. He frescoed the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament in Saint Peter’s for Pope Eugenius IV—this was later, sadly, demolished under Pope Paul III. One early biographical source writes that Fra Angelico was offered the position of Archbishop of Florence by the pope, but he refused, recommending another friar in his stead. He was a simple man, content with a quiet monastic life which he could devote to religious painting. Fra Angelico worked during a time when painting styles were shifting. Throughout the Middle Ages, artists strove to create works that look much like a less-refined version of what Fra Angelico created—Gothic works with either rudimentary or non-existent perspective, little foreshortening, and without the illusion of three-dimensionality. These works were often gilded, with Jesus or Mary featured much larger than other figures. The emphasis was on dazzling the viewers with gilded backgrounds and bright blue lapis lazuli (the pigment for which was, at the time, the most expensive item that you could buy, by weight). Hands, faces, and bodies were often elongated (much like the Gothic architecture which they were painted to inhabit), and facial features were fairly generic, not meant to recall a real person or the face of a model. The preferred medium was egg-based tempera paint, rather than oils. This traditional painting style was being superseded by two simultaneous movements which were the avant-garde of their time. In Northern Europe, artists like Rogier van der Weyden (see the next entry) and Jan van Eyck were creating miraculously realistic, minutely detailed works in oil paint, which permitted far greater precision and subtlety of color and shadow than did tempera. In central Italy, and most of all in Florence, the likes of Donatello, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca, and Paolo Uccello among many others developed a mathematical technique to produce the illusion of three-dimensional depth in flat artworks (paintings and relief sculptures), using single-vanishing point perspective and foreshortening. Their goal was to create the illusion that the viewer was looking out a window onto a real scene, something that artists like Fra Angelico were simply not trying to achieve. It is therefore inappropriate to pit one style against the other, Fra Angelico versus Piero della Francesca, as their aims differed. Fra Angelico preferred the traditional painting style, in which lovingly-rendered figures were used to inspire meditation, not astonish through illusionism. The magnificent Annunciation seen here (another, brighter version was painted a year earlier and hangs in the Prado in Madrid) manages at once to provoke awe, and yet feel intimate. The Biblical moment depicted is when God sent the Angel Gabriel to tell the young Virgin Mary that she will bear God’s son. Mary is interrupted while reading the Hebrew Old Testament, and looks up to greet the angel. The intimacy of the scene, the electricity that one can almost feel flowing between Gabriel and Mary, makes sense when we consider that Gabriel’s words literally impregnate Mary with the Son of God, Gabriel being the vehicle of the Virginal Conception. It is useful to note a common confusion made by many, including pastors and PhDs. The Annunciation is not related to the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of Mary, through intercourse between Mary’s mother, Saint Anne, and her father. This intercourse was made clean, immaculate, after the fact by God, so that Mary would herself be clean, conceived without sin. Gabriel’s words to Mary result in the Virginal Conception, a different theological concept that is widely mistaken for the Immaculate Conception, a much later dogma established by Saint Anselm in the 11th century. Mary sits under a portico, walls and porticos referring to her virginity, which was likened to a walled garden. There is a basic, but not mathematically-sound sense of perspective, which may be seen in the bench behind Mary—a brief reference to the artistic revolution of perspective and foreshortening that was taking place all around. The garden outside is the Garden of Eden, from which we see Adam and Eve expelled. It is, technically, the fault of Adam and Eve, who committed Original Sin, that Christ was needed at all. Had they not sinned, there would have been no need for a Messiah. Christ’s death reversed Original Sin, and therefore the Annunciation of his conception is the direct result of the expulsion of Adam and Eve.Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from The Secret History of Art!
Wassily KandinskyUntitled(1911)The mellifluously-named Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (1866-1944) is credited as the first modern abstract artist. Art historians love to state superlatives, like “first” and “greatest,” but there is a reason to consider an artistic chronology. Because art is cumulative, later artists necessarily studied earlier masters and paid homage to them, either continuing their advances or breaking from them in new ways, an understanding of what came first is necessary to grasp what came later. The Russian painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky is at the foundation of 20th century art, a time when abstraction overtook centuries of drive toward realistic painting.Kandinsky was born in Moscow and grew up in Odessa. He studied law and economics at University of Moscow, and excelled to such a degree that he was offered a professorship in Roman Law at University of Dorpat. Unlike so many of history’s greatest artists, Kandinsky started painting very late in life. He was thirty when he began in earnest, with life-drawing and anatomy illustrations.He moved to Munich in 1896, where he began to study art for the first time, both privately and at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow after the start of World War I, but found the official theories and policies on art to be stifling. The Academy in Moscow was fascinated with heart-string-tugging melodramatic realistic painting that could be used as propaganda, which felt passé and tawdry to Kandinsky. He returned to Germany in 1921, teaching at the famous Bauhaus School of Art and Architecture, where minimalist and abstract aesthetics were cultivated. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he moved to France, where he remained for the rest of his life.Kandinsky’s approach to art was intensely spiritual and theoretical. Art, to him, was the best articulation of the holy, the closest one could come to a dialogue with God. Kandinsky was interested in theory and spirituality first, with art as its conduit. He gave up a promising career as a law professor in order to pursue what surely seemed to his colleagues a foolish enterprise. A thirty-year-old embarking as a teenager might, enrolling at an arts academy with no particular background nor exhibition of precocious talent. Kandinsky himself attributed his decision in part to examining the catalogue for a Monet exhibit in 1896. He said, That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I duly felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor.His other major influences were Wagner’s Lohengrin, which broke the boundaries of what contemporary music had past condoned, as well as the writings of Helen Blavatsky, who established a field of thought called Theosophism, in which spiritual and occult elements of a wide variety of world religions and cultures were woven together to create a new spirituality. Kandinsky was an avid Theosophist, and his own books, including Concerning the Spiritual In Art (1910) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) may be seen as Theosophical artistic treatises. While he participated in the Blaue Reiter movement in Germany, Kandinsky was most influenced by his time at the Bauhaus, and this painting reflects the aesthetic encouraged there. He taught basic design, painting, and advanced theory classes. In his paintings, Kandinsky preferred to combine geometric forms, which suggest motion, mechanics, technology, and industry, with abstract “soft” forms, which imply organic matter. In this painting, you can identify which forms fit which category. The pink bow-like curves suggest human, soft forms, while the stacked colored squares imply the inorganic. Most of Kandinsky’s paintings are untitled, because they are not strictly “about” anything—a theme that will recur in conversations about 20th century abstract art. A title would guide the viewer to search out a shape or a symbolic, allegorical theme in the painting. “Untitled” provides no clues, which can feel frustrating or liberating, depending on your point of view. At its simplest, Kandinsky painted what he found spiritually moving. If someone were to ask you to paint something spiritually moving, what would you paint? You might paint a white man with long brown hair and a beard, wearing a white robe. In fact, most Europeans would probably come up with some traditional image of Christ or God. You might also choose a sunset, a lightning storm, the birth of a child. Kandinsky eschewed the traditional art historical trend of painting formal scenes related to history or mythical history. That had been done, plus it had the aroma of propaganda, most often for the Catholic Church, which many abstract artists found objectionable. Kandinsky wrote that the artist was a prophet, that “music is the ultimate teacher,” and an authentic artist created art from “an internal necessity.” In his treatises, he likened the creation of artwork to Noah’s compulsion to build the Ark. It may have been God acting through a human conduit, or it may have been an internal psychological compulsion that past generations interpreted as the will of God, but true art was born out of a pressing internal need to create.Kandinsky’s paintings expressed his “internal necessity” to produce what he found to be his spiritual duty as artist/prophet, influenced by the geometry and abstraction of the Bauhaus for which he taught, and the contemporary advances in musical composition. The result, like this painting, is influenced by early 20th century music, arrhythmic and discordant, but at its heart presents what Kandinsky feels is most spiritually moving to him. He needs to express this, it is a divine compulsion, but he is not evangelical. His need is to create, not to convert his viewers to see the spiritual world his way. Admiring Kandinsky brings to mind the titillating question: what would you paint?