Art Nouveau Author(s): Peter Floud Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 94, No. 596 (Nov.

, 1952), pp. 322+324-325 Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/871001 . Accessed: 19/02/2014 12:14
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AN

EXHIBITION

OF

MEDITERRANEAN

PRIMITIVES

I Io and I I I; see Fig. I8), Fouquet and Piero: to have confronted the great Spaniard with an example of the young Perugino or of Bartolomeo della Gatta would have thrown light on sides of his personality essential to an understanding of his formation. As for the relations between Sicily and Provence in the second half of the fifteenth century, the triptych in the Cathedral of Carpentras (No. 76), connected by Grete Ring with Enguerrand Charonton, remained isolated in the exhibition; the relations are not established between the polyptych of Bishop Severo in the church of SS. Severino and Sossio at Naples (No. 52; the catalogue erroneously describes de l'Assomption)with the School of Provence, it as a polyptyque the Maitre de Moulins. Contacts between with especially Provence and Sicily would have been seen in a new light if the organisers had taken note of the large Crucifix,painted on both sides, in the church of Piazza Armerina, and of the St Peterin S. Maria at Militello, works by a great anonymous artist, in my view certainly ProvenCal, whose presence would have been the revelation of the exhibition. Is it any use describing how the final section of the exhibition tails off? How the very poetical Flight into Egypt byJaime

Ferrer the Second (No. IO9) is allowed to pass without reference being made to echoes of Burgundian culture - when at the same time the catalogue teems with insignificant and mediocre works such as the Madonna by Tommaso Busaccio (No. 7) or the wretched panels by Giovanni Barbagelata (No. I)? It is almost superfluous to object to the absurdity of the dating of the St Peter of Ludovico Brea (No. 88) around 15IO, the impossibility of which is demonstrated by Polyptych No. 87 which shows how already in I495 the painter had moved in a new direction. The St Peter belongs to the same moment as the Palazzo Bianco Crucifixion (No. 86), dated in the catalogue c. I480, which as innumerable points of style and culture (as well as provenance from the church of S. Bartolomeo degli Armeni) go to show, is the central panel of the same polyptych, of which the St Peteris all that remains to the left of it. Again, two panels which are parts of the same predella, as Grete Ring has demonstrated, are catalogued one (No. 68) with an attribution to Nicolas Dipre, the other (No. 79) as Proven?al School. But there is little use in going on correcting minor errors of this kind in the catalogue, when we are informed in it (p. 56) that the San Cassiano altarpiece was executed by Antonello for a church in ... Milan.

Shorter
BY PETER FROM FLOUD

Notices

'ArtNouveau'
June 28 to September 28 the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich held an important international exhibition entitled Um undJugendstil.The organisers spared no pains 9goo:Art Nouveau to collect suitable material from private individuals and public collections in all the Western European countries, and the result was an assembly of furniture, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, graphic art, book-illustration, and posters such as has never previously been brought together, and no doubt will not again be in our lifetime. In view of the absence of serious documentation on the period, the inaccessibility of most of the exhibits, and the thoroughness with which Dr Hans Curjel, the main organiser of the exhibition, investigated and elucidated hitherto debatable points of chronology and mutual influence between designers during the course of his search for material, it is most unfortunate that the resources of the Museum did not run to the preparation raisonne. of a catalogue However, a useful fifty-page booklet was a brief survey of Art Nouveau, selected which included produced, quotations from the writings of its leading practitioners, and twenty-four plates of newly-photographed and largely unpublished furniture, glass, ceramics, and textiles. It is understood that all the exhibits were photographed by the Museum before being returned to their owners, and it is to be hoped that Dr Curjel will later be able to publish the results of his researches in some more extensive and permanent form. In the field of the applied arts the exhibition deliberately concentrated on the forerunners and early pioneers of Art Nouveau, rather than on those designers who were later associated with its adoption as a popular commercialised fashion, and almost all the exhibits therefore dated from before I900. Thus in the case of France the largest section was devoted to the early glass and furniture of Emile Galle, mostly dating from the late I88os, and correspondingly less space was given over to the mature productions of Majorelle and other metnbers of the Nancy School. It is
322

true that a remarkable grand-piano and some embroideries designed by Victor Prouve in the I890s were included, and that one of Hector Guimard's wrought-iron Paris metro-entrances (1899) was transported to Ziirich and set up as the centrepiece of the exhibition, but nothing was included of such cabinetmakers as Charles Plumet and Tony Selmersheim, whose prizewinning pieces at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 set the standard furniture throughout Western Europe in the early for Art Nouveau new of the century. Similarly in the case of Great Britain years the emphasis was on the furniture and textiles designed by Mackmurdo and the Century Guild in the I88os (borrowed from the William Morris Gallery at Walthamstow) and the furniture and metalwork of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, rather than on the more typical Art Nouveau products of the turn of the century, such as the jewellery of Oliver Baker (Liberty's) and the textiles and wallpapers of such designers as Lindsay Butterfield and Harry Napper. Significant of the same approach is the fact that Henry van de Velde - who was rightly given the greatest prominence- was represented not only by those works, such as the remarkable furniture, silver, and cutlery designed for his house at Uccle (I894-5; Figs. g9and 20), which appear to embody the quintessence of Art Nouveau,but also by the hitherto completely unknown series of pastels which were his last essay in the fine arts, and which, with their parallel hachurings in primary colours, show the direct and combined influence of Van Gogh and Seurat. Within these terms of reference the organisers succeeded in assembling together almost all the key documentary pieces in the and the only serious gaps which they early history of Art Nouveau, were unable to fill were the furniture and furnishingsof SerrurierBovy which seem to have entirely disappeared, and the carpets and wallpapers of Georges Lemmen, which also remain untraced. This emphasis on the early work greatly increased the value of the exhibition by drawing attention to the various and contrain dictory elements that went towards the making of Art Nouveau, a way that would have been impossible had the display been simply limited to those objects which appeared to be the most typical embodiments of the mature and stereotyped style. Moreover the juxtaposition of so many key pieces served to stress the extraordinary complexity of the cross-currentsoperating during

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19. Chairs(I894)

and smallTable (c. I900),

by Henryvan de Velde. (PrivateCollection.)

20. Cutlery,by Henry van de Velde. (PrivateCollection,K

21 . Embroidery known as Der Peitschenhieb ('mJhip lash'), by Hermann Obrist. Before I 890. (Historisches Stadtmuseum Munich.)

22. Table and Chair, bNr Adolf Loos. I 898. (Private Collecti

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SHORTER

NOTICES

the decisiveyears from 1890 to I900, and in particular showed how deceptive can be the clear-cut theories of writers such as H. F. Lenning (The Art Nouveau,The Hague, 195I) which have, of necessity, been based on an analysis and comparison not of the objects themselves, but of black-and-white illustrations of them in contemporary periodicals. By comparison with the three-dimensional objects, most of which have never been seen or published before, the section of the exhibition devoted to book-illustrations, the graphic arts, and posters, though extensive and particularly rich in early German Jugendstil and Austrian Sezession material, was less startling, for most of the exhibits have already been accessible to students, and the field has already been covered, at least superficially, in Fritz Schmalenbach's Jugendstil;Ein Beitragzu Theorie und Geschichte derFlachenkunst (Wiirzburg, I935). It is to be hoped that the exhibition will give an impetus to the study of the place of Art Nouveau in the development of the modern movement. It clearly showed, for example, that no progress can be made towards an appraisal of the style till some clear differentiation is made between the constructivist - and in a sense proto-functionalist - aspects of early Art Nouveauas seen in the furniture of designers such as Van de Velde, H. P. Berlage, and Adolf Loos (Fig. 22), in which Art Jouveau appears as the first stage in the emancipation of the decorative arts from the trammels of reproductive academism, and the entirely different aspects associated with the School of Nancy and with the work of the Munich designers such as Hermann Obrist (Fig. 21) and August Endell, in which it appears rather as the last, and most mannered, participant in the dreary procession of nineteenthcentury decorative (i.e. non-architectural) styles. The period is now sufficiently remote for such points to be clarified on the basis of an objective analysis of the material. The exhibition, by offering for the first time a sight of the actual objects themselves, has provided the indispensable prerequisite for such an analysis, and as such has been of great value.

Titian's'Magdalen'
EDOARDO ARSLAN THE painting by Titian of the Magdalen here published (Fig. I), in a private collection in Lombardy, is in a good state of preservation. There are reasons for maintaining that it precedes the famous painting of the same subject in the Hermitage. It differs from the latter in important respects, which it may be worth while examining here. The landscape in particular is entirely different (Fig. 24). Here a vista of distant mountains is revealed (another recollection of Cadore) with grassy slopes and trees outlined against the sky. It shows an alternation of light and shade beneath a cloud-laden sky through which filters an uncertain light: an atmosphere charged with dramatic tension where a church flashes, or a rustic hovel is struck by a ray from the dying sun. It is rendered in loose, free brush-strokes, which are employed in order to present, not so much a realistic record of the scene, as a poetical evocation of it. We are at once reminded of similar landscapes by Titian painted between I554 and 156o, such as the wood in the Bridgewater House Diana and Actaeon and, even more, the Harewood Actaeon, where the light strikesthe foliage in much the same way. This is a new conception of landscape (perhaps Tintorettesque in origin) which makes its appearance in Titian's work around I56o, supplanting the earlier arcadian landscapes of smooth tree trunks and bulbous clouds. In spite of the interval of time that separates them, the figure of the penitent Saint repeats the pose of the well-known figure in the Pitti. The type is one for which the painter showed a preference in the fourth decade of the century: witness the florid attendants in

the Accademia Presentation or in the Venus duPardo.But the distant model of the Palazzo Pitti now receives an entirely different treatment. The whole figure is softer, set in a more diffused light which allows less play to shadows. The white drapery falls in large, generous folds; it is a kind of realism which far surpassesanything in painting up to that date. The colour endows form with a new density, not very different fundamentally from what the great Seicento painters were to discover. Analogous formal experiments are made in the so-called Lavinia in Berlin, in the Munich Madonna and in the Prado Deposition. The striped material, evidently a derivation from Paul Veronese, rendered with the utmost freedom, recalls on the other hand that of the Washington Toiletof Venus, a painting which, when due allowance is made for the difference in the types, has something in common with our Magdalen. Another striking feature of the new picture is the magnificent skull which serves to support the open book. And it seems that the taste for this new magical realism induced Titian to portray even the vase with such scrupulous regard for its qualities that, like one of Caravaggio's vases, it becomes real glass at his touch. In conclusion, the picture must have been executed around I56o, and the resemblance to its earlier prototype is not on careful inspection such as to preclude its perfect conformity with Titian's individual style in those years. From this MagdalenI would maintain that Titian derived, some years later, the celebrated version in the Hermitage which all remember from the Venice exhibition of 1935; in which, as is well known, Titian shows signs in his even freer use of colour of emerging from the restrictions of concrete realism and of moving forward in the direction of the complete dissolution of form into pure colour. What we have said above inclines us to the view that our Magdalen may not be very different from the one which in December 1561 Titian sent to Philip II: a copy, according to the well-known story by Vasari, of the picture which, destined for the King of Spain, was carried off for Ioo scudiby Silvio Badoer. It would, however, be rash to make any more specific deductions from the facts, given the frequency with which Titian is known to have treated this particular theme.1
1 If we restrict ourselves to the examples closest to this picture, and to the most recent publications on this theme, we should say that the version in the Gallery at Naples, rather repainted, seems inferior to either the Leningrad version or the one here published; but it would be imprudent to pronounce on the Naples version before careful cleaning has been carried out. It seems, however, to be later than about I560 (see A. DE RINALDIS: Catalogo della del MuseoNazionaledi Napoli, Naples [1928], pp. 338-9). In any case I Pinacoteca doubt whether one could ever identify it with the Magdalenpainted in 1531 for Vittoria Colonna even if it could be proved that the picture descended from the Colonna heirs. See in this connection the exceedingly interesting article by A. LUZIO: 'Le Maddalene di Tiziano' in La Lettura [I940], p. 591 if. where so much unpublished material is furnished by this scholar, which supplements the notes by Cavalcaselle and Braghirolli on the artist's relations with the Court of Mantua. In this important article which has, one might almost say, been entirely overlooked by Titian criticism of the last few years, Luzio even mentions our Magdalen, at that time in a private collection at Mantua. Cleaning, on the other hand, does not seem to have benefited the other celebrated version, formerly in the Yarborough Collection, and after 1930 owned by Gutekunst: this is manifestly a school piece (see on the latter the observations of A. L. MAYER in Apollo, I, p. I02 and in Pantheon [I930], p. 145).

A Drawingby Lottoin theLouvre

BY PHILIP POUNCEY

THIS drawing of a SacraConversazionel (Fig. 26) - for such it must 1 Louvre, No. 11339; Jabach Inv. No. IIOI. Inscribed in an old hand, in pencil, on the verso:Perino del Vaga. Also on the verso are eleven lines of a sixteenth-century memorandum relating to transactions in silk, etc., and mentioning a Messer Antonio Medalago and a Messer Bartolomeo. The writer, who says that he has received some money on account, signs himself Zantonio Salmeza, a name which one may assume derives, like that of the painter, Enea Talpino, called il Salmeggia (c. 1550/58-I626), from the hamlet of Salmezza, 1 km. N.E. of Bergamo.

325

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