̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - portrait

Holbein’s Dance Of Death - the 16th century Charlie Hebdo

tdk25 — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 09:58:26 +0000

As the leading painter at the Court of Henry VIII, Hans Holbein’s magnificent depictions of royalty and nobility affirmed his status as one of the greatest portrait artists of all time. Few would have considered such works the output of a dissident satirist, deeply concerned about the plight of the poor, and committed to religious reform.

But according to a new study of one of his most famous works, ̽��ֱ��Dance Of Death, satire was not just an area in which Holbein dabbled early in his career, but a central feature of some of his most important work before he came to England.

Based on new research into the highly-charged climate in which the Dance was produced, the study, by historian Professor Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History and a Fellow of St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, argues that it is perhaps the best surviving example of Holbein as a social commentator, using art to mock establishment hypocrisy.

Her portrait of the artist - as an impoverished and angry, but socially and politically engaged, young man - is a far cry from that of the successful painter who produced iconic images of the Tudor ruling class - not least in his famous depiction of a swaggering Henry VIII.

̽��ֱ��study forms the commentary to a new Penguin Classics edition of Holbein’s Dance Of Death. It draws on largely unused sources such as local government records from the time at which the Dance was produced. Rublack finds that early in his career, Holbein was part of a group of subversive, passionate artists who were operating in the new medium of print, amid the politically restless atmosphere of Reformation Europe.

“What’s striking is how many of his images in the Dance were about social justice,” Rublack said. “Holbein was part of a movement which was very concerned with radical questions about welfare and reform.”

“Looking at it as satire, rather like a publication such as Charlie Hebdo today, is probably the way to think about what he was doing at the time. Criticising the Pope and Catholic clergy was dangerous stuff; it could be censored and people could be imprisoned for it. But it’s sobering to think nobody was assassinated for it, which has occurred in response to comparable satire in our own time.”

Created between 1524 and 1526, ̽��ֱ��Dance Of Death was a series of woodcut prints of grisly images apparently demonstrating the folly of human greed and pride. Holbein, who was born in Augsburg, in Germany, produced it while living and working in Basel, in modern-day Switzerland.

As a concept, it was the latest in a long line of such series drawing on the medieval idea of the Danse Macabre, in which a recurring cast of stock characters - such as a Pope, an emperor, a king, a monk and a peasant - are individually shown being “taken” by death, represented by grinning, dancing skeletons.

̽��ֱ��idea was to challenge the piety of the viewer, by showing death as the great leveller that comes to all. However rich and powerful we may be in this world, the Dance told its viewers, we are all the same in the next and should focus on spiritual concerns.

Although the Dance therefore often poured scorn on those in high society, it was not explicitly satirical beyond this. Holbein’s version has traditionally been seen in those terms - as a religiously-themed genre piece, and not an explicitly political statement.

For the new study, Rublack examined local sources, such as council records, to trace the socio-political context in which Holbein was working. Although the Reformation had not yet arrived in Basel (it would in 1529), she discovered that there was already widespread pressure for reform.

Part of this involved dissatisfaction with the Church and its wealth. ̽��ֱ��study found accounts of local guilds refusing to supply churches in favour of serving the needs of the poor. One record, from 1524, concerned a baker who, seeing civic dignitaries visiting the grave of a Professor who had opposed religious reform, openly attacked them as “donkey-milking fools”.

More broadly, the Basel commune had begun to stress equal rights against the traditional privileged elites. In 1525, for instance, a group of local villagers marched on Basel, demanding the right to elect their own preachers, and in opposition to feudal taxes.

Holbein, Rublack says, could not have been immune to this. For one thing, he lived among craftspeople, bakers and weavers who had begun to fight for religious and social change. But perhaps more significantly, he himself worked in an “alert” circle of like-minded artists such as the painter and printmaker Urs Graf.

Rublack’s commentary suggests that the life of this group must have resembled that of a satirical, counter-cultural clique. “One can only imagine an atmosphere of creative fun and irreverence, which thrived on jokes against monks, priests, the local bishop and popes,” she writes.

Stylistically, Holbein’s Dance broke established norms by for the first time presenting the genre in printed miniatures, which the viewer would have to peer at to understand. Seen in the context of the politics of the time, Rublack suggests it would have been “a shocking new viewing experience”.

Senior Church figures, including the Pope, were typically shown as overweight and obsessed with luxuries, extorting money in particular by selling indulgences - a cause célèbre of the Reformation. But the Dance also directly critiqued political and judicial leaders for ignoring the plight of the poor - including perhaps the Habsburg Emperor Charles of Spain in the stock “emperor” illustration.

By reworking the traditional Dance formula and adding tokens and signifiers which pointed to political concerns specific to its time, Holbein’s Dance was not just a piece for religious meditation but an early form of political cartoon, designed to delight, surprise and offend.

His reason for shifting from subversive satire to the courtly portraits of his later career can, Rublack suggests, be explained by his financial circumstances. Like most artists in Basel, Holbein struggled to find steady work as a painter - indeed, the study points out that respected contemporaries had been forced to resort to painting fences and carnival decorations.

Rather than carry on illustrating books and working in print, Holbein clearly harboured ambitions to paint - but this could only be realised through the sort of work he eventually obtained at the Tudor Court. Earlier works from England, such as ̽��ֱ��Ambassadors, pursue similar themes of death, faith and salvation, but working for the likes of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII broadly put an end to his satirical interests.

“What is impressive is that he could have easily made the decision to give up painting, as so many contemporaries did,” Rublack added. “Instead, he made the very risky decision to pursue painting elsewhere. He seems to have known that he had great works like ̽��ֱ��Ambassadors in him.”

He is best remembered for the magnificent portraits he produced as the court painter of Henry VIII; but a new study of Hans Holbein’s famous ‘Dance Of Death’ suggests that he also had strong anti-establishment views, creating works which foreshadowed modern satire.

What’s striking is how many of his images in the Dance were about social justice. Holbein was part of a movement which was very concerned with radical questions about welfare and reform.

Ulinka Rublack

Penguin Classics / Wikimedia Commons

Holbein’s satirical depictions of authority figures, such as the King in the Dance Of Death (left), are a far cry from later work such as his iconic portrait of Henry VIII (right).

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Russian art in the limelight: paintings and portraits that tell remarkable stories

amb206 — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Russian writer Fedor Dostoevsky sat for just one portrait in his lifetime. He was painted by Vasily Perov, an artist whose exquisite sketches conveyed some of the harshness of the imperial regime. Perov shows Dostoevsky wrapped in a heavy woollen coat, his slender frame almost lost in its mouse-grey folds. ̽��ֱ��writer’s hands are clasped and his eyes are downcast. ̽��ֱ��survivor of a decade of imprisonment, exile and hard labour, Dostoevsky had suffered unthinkable pain yet lived to write novels that continue to enthral.

Perov was commissioned to paint Dostoevsky by the industrialist Pavel Tretyakov, founder of Moscow’s famous Tretyakov Gallery. Tretyakov was responsible for encouraging a generation of Russian artists with purchases and commissions of work that reflect the rumblings of pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1892 Pavel Tretyakov donated his entire gallery to the city of Moscow, a move of stunning generosity that prompted further investment in the arts.

Until 26 June, visitors to London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) are able to gaze into the faces of some of Russia’s foremost writers, composers and dramatists – including Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, Turgenev and Chekhov. ̽��ֱ��26 portraits, on loan from the Tretyakov Gallery and the majority seen for the first time outside Russia, were selected for Russia and the Arts: ̽��ֱ��Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky by Rosalind Blakesley, a trustee of the NPG and, from October 2016, Head of the Department of History of Art at Cambridge.

Blakesley is also author of a forthcoming book which, in looking at a neglected era in Russian painting, is set to recalibrate our understanding of Russian history of art. ̽��ֱ��Russian Canvas is a scholarly yet highly readable account of painting in imperial Russia from 1757 to 1881, a period that saw the country’s artistic movers and shakers explore and develop a distinctively Russian identity – and, in many cases, outperform its European neighbours in the range and quality of its creative output.

̽��ֱ��exhibition Russia and the Arts is the culmination of five years’ work to bring to London some of the legendary figures in the arts who defined Russia between the 1860s and the start of the First World War, a period when growing discontent developed into full-scale revolution.

In an exchange, the NPG has sent some of its famous artworks to the Tretyakov to be enjoyed by the Russian public. Among the portraits to have travelled east are paintings of Elizabeth I, Cromwell, Darwin and, on the 400th anniversary of his death, a priceless portrayal of Shakespeare. Known as the Chandos portrait, it was the very first work to enter the collections of the NPG.

Opened in March, Russia and the Arts struck an immediate chord with a British public already awakened to an interest in all things Russian by the success of the BBC’s acclaimed televising of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. ̽��ֱ��exhibition is seeing twice the anticipated visitor numbers, with up to 900 people attending each day – and has benefited from enthusiastic press coverage. ̽��ֱ��catalogue, with colour plates of all the exhibits set within a beautifully illustrated account of the development of portraiture in Imperial Russia, had to be reprinted within just a few weeks of the opening of the show.

In staging the exhibition Blakesley’s motivation is twofold. Ever since school, she has been passionately interested in the language and culture of Russia. She hopes to “give something back” to the UK’s Russian community as well as to many scholars and art historians in Russia who have long supported her work. Most importantly, she wants to bring to public attention the phenomenal talent of the artists whose work is held by the Tretyakov Gallery but who tend to be overshadowed in western understanding by the work of Russian avant-garde artists such as Malevich and Kandinsky.

Too often under-recognised outside Russia, the artists whose masterful work features in Russia and the Arts range from Perov, whose studies of Russian peasants (not on show but reproduced in the catalogue) convey the grinding poverty of the Russian countryside, to Valentin Serov whose painterly style embodies the best of Russian impressionism.

Male portraits predominate. Among the most striking are Repin’s study of the composer Modest Mussorgsky, captured in a mood of defiant brilliance in hospital less than a fortnight before his death, and Perov’s portrait of the philologist Vladimir Dal, whose haunted eyes shine with enquiry. Dal was a tireless collector of Russian proverbs, folksongs and fairy tales.

Just six of the portraits on display at the NPG are of women. Perhaps the most arresting is Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaia’s portrayal of Anna Akhmatova whose poetry, in giving voice to the horrors of the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes, led to her persecution. ̽��ֱ��portrait of Akhmatova is shown next to that of her then husband Nikolai Gumilev, painted by the same artist. ̽��ֱ��couple, whose marriage became a casualty of long separations, are united by the way in which Della-Vos-Kardovskaia captures their languid beauty and sense of solemn composure.

Blakesley’s ̽��ֱ��Russian Canvas has been some seven years in the making. ̽��ֱ��book takes as its starting point the foundation of the Russian Academy of Arts in St Petersburg in 1757, almost a full decade before the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768. In meticulous detail, Blakesley reveals the powerful part that the Russian Academy played in the development of a flourishing arts scene that looked first to western Europe for its inspiration before turning to the traditions of Russia itself.

In telling the extraordinary story of the first century of the Academy, Blakesley upturns the claim of the Soviet era that the institution was exclusive and elitist. Early on, professors were recruited from France and students enlisted in their teens after training elsewhere. However, in 1764, in something akin to a social experiment, the Academy opened its own boarding school which took pupils as young as five years old, retaining them until their graduation at the age of 21.

Boys (until 1873 they were all boys) were enlisted from various ranks of a highly stratified society. Some were drawn from the lower ranks of the nobility but many were the sons of soldiers, tradesmen or even serfs, born into a class of indentured poor. Pupils were provided with uniforms and followed a rigorous curriculum. Parents were obliged to agree not to withdraw their sons from the Academy until they had completed the course, and pupils were shielded from contact with members of the lower orders who might tarnish their character. Conditions were so harsh, and the accommodation so bitterly cold, that in a ten-year period in the late 18th century, 73 of the school’s 380 young artists-in-training died.

While history painting – the depiction of epic scenes of historical, biblical or mythological content – was seen initially by the Academy as the supreme test of an artist’s skill, portraiture soon came to the fore. Portraitists to emerge from the Academy, either directly or indirectly, include many of those whose work informs the exhibition Russia and the Arts. Orest Kiprensky, whose bold self-portrait features in the catalogue, was the illegitimate son of a landowner and one of his serfs. Kiprensky entered the Academy boarding school at the age of six and became one of its star students.

Also on show in London is Ivan Kramskoy’s thoughtful painting of the actor Alexander Lensky as Petruchio in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. ̽��ֱ��hot-headed Kramskoy, who studied at the Academy as a young man, led ‘the Revolt of the Fourteen’, in which a group of artists protested their right to choose subjects suited to their own artistic temperament rather than work within set parameters. Blakesley shows that too much has been made of this supposed schism, which in fact did not witness the battle lines drawn up as sharply as many commentators have assumed.

Blakesley is a fearless investigator and tireless teller of human stories. In researching the exhibition Russia and the Arts and her book ̽��ֱ��Russian Canvas, she ventured into national and regional archives that have remained unexplored for many years. What she found, in official records and private correspondence, prompted her to challenge accepted narratives. In bringing the work of often overlooked eras of Russian creativity to public attention, she shines a welcome light on the phenomenal talent on Europe’s doorstep, and reminds us of just one of many aspects of Russia’s remarkable cultural heritage that is all too quickly overlooked amid the current political concerns.

Inset images: Vladimir I Dal by Vasily Perov (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow); Pavel M Tretyakov by Ilia Repin (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).

An exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery features paintings of some of Russia’s legendary creative figures. Russia and the Arts, which draws attention to a generation of overlooked artists, is curated by Dr Rosalind P Blakesley. This month also sees the launch of Blakesley’s new book, ̽��ֱ��Russian Canvas, a work set to expand our understanding of a century of painting through periods of remarkable social and political change.

Blakesley reveals the powerful part that the Russian Academy played in the development of a flourishing arts scene that looked first to western Europe for its inspiration before turning to the traditions of Russia itself.

Mussorgsky (Ilia Repin), Akhmatova (Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaia) and Dostoevsky (Vasily Perov)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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