Date: 07-09-2008
Owning Institution:
Publication:                 Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010  
Subject: Renaissance  Now  Middle Ages & Earlier  20th Century  19th Century  18th Century  17th Century  16th Century    

This autumn, the contest between the capitals will reach a new pitch of intensity. The distant thunder of crates carrying untold numbers of masterpieces is already in the air. Art handlers across both cities are flexing their muscles nervously and getting in fresh supplies of white cotton gloves.

The number of major exhibitions scheduled to open in the rival cities over the next month or two is unprecedented and, quite simply breathtaking. In London, imminent events include a centenary celebration of the paintings of Francis Bacon at Tate Britain; a retrospective of the work of the American Abstract Expressionist painter, Mark Rothko, at Tate Modern; and a multi-media survey of Andy Warhol as painter, sculptor, film-maker and all-round agent provocateur at the Hayward Gallery. From the master of the bloodied triptych, to the inventor of the abstract sublime, to the cold-blooded analyst of media-led alienation – the three shows might have been planned as a single event, Tendency and Counter-tendency in Post-war Art.

Those are just a few of the fruits spilling from the city’s autumnal cornucopia. On Piccadilly, the Royal Academy will unveil a show of classic works of modern painting and sculpture by Joan Miro, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti and Georges Braque, all borrowed from one the world’s most beautiful small musuems, the Fondation Maeght in the South of France – a mere appetiser, however, for the main event at the RA, which will be the largest exhibition of treasures of Byzantine art for a generation. “Byzantium” will span more than a thousand years, from the founding of Constantinople in 350 to its fall in the mid-fifteenth century, and will include some 300 works of art from countries spanning the whole of ancient Christendom. There will be Russian icons, micro-mosaics, ivories and enamels and a wealth of gold and silver objects, including the tenth-century Chalice of the Patriarchs from the Treasury of San Marco in Venice. It is rumoured that “extra security measures” have been deemed necessary to ensure the safety of the assembled treasures - hardly surprising given that the exhibition sounds like the set for a Mission Impossible-style art heist movie.

The Victoria and Albert Museum offers a vast exhibition of post-war design, “Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70”. Not to be outdone, the British Museum unleashes another of its behemoths, to follow its recent blockbusters devoted to China’s First Emperor and Rome’s Hadrian. This time it comes in the shape of a sprawling historical survey of Babylon, its art and culture, from ancient times to the modern day. As if all that were not enough, there will also a show of entrancingly brilliant Renaissance portraits, from Van Eyck to Titian, at the National Gallery; and just to round things off, a large display of the Royal Collection’s magnificent Flemish art, entitled “Bruegel to Rubens”, will open at the Queen’s Gallery. All that, between now and November. It is the aesthete’s equivalent of nine double-decker buses all arriving at once.

In the museums of Paris, expect a similar embarras de richesses. At the Pompidou Centre, a retrospective of the work of the twentieth-century Expressionist painter, Georges Rouault – already open – continues until mid-October. Also coming soon at the Pompidou will be a long-awaited reconstruction of the Paris studio of Constantin Brancusi, pioneering abstract sculptor and inventor of the Endless Column. At the Louvre, there will be an exhibition devoted to the work of Andrea Mantegna, Mantuan inventor of a steely, classical version of early Renaissance style. At the Grand Palais, there will be a show devoted to the art of Emil Nolde, Expressionist painter of darkly glowing skies and churning seas. Meanwhile, the Musee Andre Jacquemart – a rather overlooked jewel of a museum in a beautiful neo-medieval building – will stage an exhibition of portraits by Rubens’s most gifted pupil and Charles I’s favourite painter, Anthony Van Dyck

The Parisian exhibitions might not sound quite as voluminously impressive as those scheduled for London, but that is because the French, with their typically dirigiste attitude and obsession with le grand projet, have chosen to focus much of their energies on what may well be the blockbuster to end all blockbusters. Like two of the most memorable and extraordinary exhibitions in recent memory, “Matisse/Picasso” at Tate Modern in 2002, and “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism”, William Rubin’s swansong show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1989, it involves that unruly Minotaur of modern painting, Pablo Picasso.

“Picasso et les Maitres”, or “Picasso and the Old Masters”, was dreamed up three years ago in the offices of Henry Loyrette. Loyrette is  director of the Louvre, or “le plus grand musee du monde” as he is apt to call it. (The phrase can be translated as “the largest museum in the world” or – his preference, one suspects – “the greatest museum in the world”.) Together with Thomas Grenon, general administrator of the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, and Guy Cogeval, the president of the Musee d’Orsay, Loyrette had the idea of finally realising one of Picasso’s greatest fantasies – an extended comparison between the modern painter’s work and that of the many painters of the past by whom he felt inspired.

The idea of putting Picasso’s art side by side with that of the Old Masters has its origins some sixty years earlier, in 1947, in a conversation between the artist himself and Georges Salles, then director of the French museums. Picasso had been persuaded to donate ten paintings to the French nation, and as a reward for his generosity Salles offered him the chance to hang some of his own pictures next to a number of his favourite paintings in the Louvre. The pictures in question included Eugene Delacroix’s Romantic orgy, The Death of Sardanapalus, and Gustave Courbet’s stark realist manifesto, The Burial at Ornans, as well as pictures by the Spanish master Zurbaran.

Picasso’s attitude to the art of the past was a powerful mixture of combativeness and obsession. Throughout his life he returned, again and again, to certain compositions by certain long-dead Old Masters – painting and repainting his own versions of such works as Velazquez’s Las Meninas, almost as if he wanted to create, through his own ouevre, a one-man history of art. Part of him regarded art as a kind of oedipal war with the multiple forefathers of the past – a war that he could only tell if he was winning, he felt, by putting his work side by side with theirs. So he jumped at the chance offered by Salles, telling friends proudly “I’m off to hang my pictures in the Louvre!” Back then, the idea of allowing a living painter to exhibit in the Louvre was so unfamiliar that it was felt necessary to shroud the event in secrecy. The hang was a one-day event only and the private view – an extremely private view – was attended by Picasso and a very few of his friends on a Monday, then as now the Louvre’s “jour de fermeture”.

“Picasso and the Old Masters”, by contrast, will be anything but private and will not even be restricted to the Louvre alone. Several paintings by Picasso will be hung in the museum’s Grande Galerie, beside works by a number of his beloved French predecessors, including Delacroix and Gericault; the Musee d’Orsay will be setting Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe beside many of Picasso’s homages and pastiches; while almost the whole Grand Palais will be given over to an extended comparison between Picasso’s art and that of more or less the entire pantheon of the great Old Masters, from Rembrandt to Velazquez to Cezanee and beyond.

The result will, perhaps, be the most extraordinary of all the exhibitions in an extraordinary season. A dramatic increase in the incidence of Stendhal Syndrome – a sense of ennui and helplessness induced by exposure to large quantities of art, first identified by the French novelist - has already been forecast.