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Comment on this article 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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