Neue Galerie: Museum for German and Austrian Art
The Frick Collection
Neue Galerie Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937
On March 13, 2014 Neue Galerie New York will open the exhibition "Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937." This will be the first major U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the infamous display of modern art by the Nazis since the 1991 presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The term "degenerate" was adopted by the National Socialist regime as part of its campaign against modern art. Many works branded as such by the Nazis were seized from museums and private collections. Following the showing on these works in a three-year traveling exhibition that criss-crossed Germany and Austria, most were sold, lost, or presumed destroyed. In this light, the recent discovery in Munich of the Gurlitt trove of such artwork has attracted considerable attention. The film "The Monuments Men,"directed by George Clooney and due to open in February 2014, suggests the level of popular interest in the subject.
Highlights of the show include a number of works shown in Munich in the summer of 1937, such as Max Beckmann's Cattle in a Barn (1933); George Grosz's Portrait of Max Hermann-Neisse (1925); Erich Heckel'sBarbershop (1913); Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Winter Landscape in Moonlight (1919), The Brücke-Artists (1926/27); Paul Klee's The Angler(1921), The Twittering Machine (1922), and Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (1925); Oskar Kokoschka's The Duchess of Montesquiou-Fezensac (1910); Ewald Mataré's Lurking Cat (1928); Karel Niestrath'sHungry Girl (1925); Emil Nolde's Still-Life with Wooden Figure (1911),Red-Haired Girl (1919), and Milk Cows (1913); Christian Rohlf's The Towers of Soest (ca. 1916) and Acrobats (ca. 1916); Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's Pharisees (1912); and Lasar Segall's The Eternal Wanderers(1919), among others.
The Neue Galerie exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by Prestel Verlag. The publication provides a complete historical overview of the period and examines not only the genesis of the "Degenerate Art" show but also the rise of the topic "degenerate." Additional essays examine the National Socialist policy on art, the treatment of "Degenerate Art" in film, and the impact of this campaign in post-war Germany, and the world at large, as the claims of restitution arose. Dr. Olaf Peters serves as the catalogue editor, which features contributions from scholars Bernhard Fulda, Ruth Heftrig, Mario-Andreas von Luttichau, Karsten Müller, Olaf Peters, Jonathan Petropoulos, Ernst Ploil, Ines Schlenker, Aya Soika, and Karl Stamm.
The Frick Collection
Men in Armor: El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face
From 1570 to 1576, El Greco (1541–1614) worked in Rome, where he endeavored to establish himself as a portrait painter. The artist’s magnificent Vincenzo Anastagi ― a full-length standing portrait representing the largest of only three examples of his work in this genre to survive from the period ― offers a vital expression of his ambition and invention. To mark the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, the Frick pairs Vincenzo Anastagi, purchased by Henry Clay Frick in 1913, with the rarely seen Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni by the artist’s Roman contemporary Scipione Pulzone (ca. 1540/42–1598), on loan from a private collection. Both subjects are depicted wearing armor, which communicated a complex range of associations with masculinity, military valor, wealth, and social status. Pulzone’s refined portrait of Boncompagni, commander of the papal army during the reign of his father, Pope Gregory XIII, epitomizes the elegant style that dominated high-society portraiture in late sixteenth-century Rome. El Greco’s expressive portrayal of Anastagi, appointed by Boncompagni as sergeant major of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo in 1575, stands in stark contrast, underscoring the artist’s innovative departures from convention. The exhibition is organized by Jeongho Park, Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow.
Enlightenment and Beauty: Sculptures by Houdon and Clodion
Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) and Claude Michel, called Clodion (1738–1814), were two of the foremost sculptors in France during the late eighteenth century, and the Frick houses an important group of their works. In 1915, founder Henry Clay Frick acquired Clodion’s terracotta Zephyrus and Flora and, the following year, Houdon’s marble bust of the Comtesse du Cayla. Other works that were subsequently added to the collection will be shown together for the first time, highlighting the artists’ expressive ranges, as well as their defining contributions to the sculpture of Enlightenment-era France.
Displayed in the brilliant natural light of the Frick’s Portico Gallery, exquisitely carved, lifelike marble portraits by Houdon and virtuoso terracotta figures and reliefs by Clodion will epitomize each artist’s best-known achievements. Important examples from New York–area private collections will complement the Frick’s sculptures and introduce other aspects of the artists’ oeuvres not represented at the museum. The ensemble will illustrate the beauty, naturalism, and classical motifs that connect the works of both artists, who were fellow students in Rome, while also drawing attention to their respective goals and sensibilities as the dominant French sculptors of their day.
‘Men in Armor’: El Greco and Pulzone at the Frick Collection
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"Men in Armor: El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face": Portraits of Jacopo Boncompagni, left, and Vincenzo Anastagi make up this show at the Frick.CreditJake Naughton for The New York Times
The quadrennial celebration of the death of El Greco, the great painter of the Spanish Renaissance, will eventually include six East Coast museums this fall, but it is already off to a roaring start with a mouse-size exhibition at the Frick Collection. “Men in Armor” brings together only two canvases, both portraits of bearded Italian gentlemen wearing gleaming cuirasses, as upper-body armor has been called since the time of the Romans. One is a stalwart of the Frick’s collection by El Greco, purchased in 1913, when Henry Clay Frick was building the Fifth Avenue mansion that was ultimately intended to become a museum for his extensive collection. The other painting, on loan from a private collection and rarely exhibited, is by El Greco’s Roman contemporary, Scipione Pulzone.
The show is, simply put, a stunner. The works share a lot — subject, dress (including helmets), stance, steady stare and the usual velvet swag — yet they are profoundly different. Worlds apart. And the great thing is how much of this you can see for yourself.
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El Greco’s “Vincenzo Anastagi” (circa 1575).CreditThe Frick Collection, New York
The El Greco, “Vincenzo Anastagi,” is one of only two full-length portraits he painted. It is an astounding, assertive likeness made around 1575 when the artist was an ambitious upstart from the sticks of Crete, struggling for a foothold in the highly competitive cultural milieu of Baroque Rome. It brims with formal innovation and derring-do, while skillfully synthesizing the forthright brushwork of Titian (who died that year). El Greco spent a few years in Venice before going to Rome, around 1570, determined to make his way.
The guest painting is Pulzone’s “Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni.” Refined and as realistic as trompe l’oeil, it is a three-quarter-length portrayal. It bespeaks an admiration for the uncanny precision that originated with Jan van Eyck and had become a style popular with European nobility. Its subject has a pampered, beguiling but slightly stiff doll-like quality. It was painted in Rome, in 1574, about a year before the El Greco, when Pulzone was hands down the most sought-after portraitist in the city. The commissioning, display and exchanging of self-promoting portraits was something of a blood sport among the city’s powerbrookers, and finely wrought armor, a costly status symbol, was often de rigueur.
Organized by Jeongho Park, a Frick curatorial fellow, this show is a leading contender for the season’s best museum show of less than five artworks. There’s a fascinating back story outlined in the wall text and fleshed out in his catalog. In brief, at a time when Pulzone was a star and El Greco was a striving newcomer, Boncompagni was a favored member of the ruling class: governor of the Castel Sant’Angelo, leader of the pontifical armed forces, and, not least, legitimized son of the reigning pope. He had recently named Anastagi — a lesser nobleman and experienced infantry officer — to sergeant major of the Castel. This may have led to the commissioning of the El Greco portrait.
El Greco, who is almost certain to have been familiar with Pulzone’s “Boncompagni,” wagered that his Anastagi portrait would bring him to the attention of that nobleman, a very active patron of the arts, and possibly gain the notice of the pope himself. This was probably a correct calculation. Less accurate was El Greco’s decision to flaunt the fashion for precision and assume that since Titian was widely admired and actively collected in Rome, working under his influence would guarantee success. It didn’t. Among other things, Mr. Park points out that giving a man of Anastagi’s middling rank the full-length portrait treatment almost crossed the line. In any event, in 1576 El Greco, left for Spain, where he spent the rest of his life.
Having all these dots connected is wonderful, the resulting diagram explains the boldness of both sitter and painter exuded by the El Greco. But the show is most impressive as a vigorous affirmation that the best explanation for a work of art is, simply, another well-chosen work of art. The exchange of these two portraits ranges across the history and craft of painting, notions of progress and modernity, the role played by context in understanding art and the matter of how much can be learned by simply looking at paintings as opposed to reading about them.
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Scipione Pulzone’s “Portrait of Jacopo Boncompagni” (1574).CreditPrivate collection, Jean-Luc Baroni
No matter how much time you’ve spent with El Greco’s Anastagi, which is usually on view in the Frick’s grand West Gallery, you will see it anew here all because of its companion. And this for a painting that is almost always something of a jolt. (If you’re like me, you’re often impressed by and drawn to the Anastagi and then surprised to be reminded that it is by El Greco.)
The pairing underscores that this particular El Greco was something of a historical anomaly, ahead of its time and in a way that differs from his mature style — the distorted figures, levitating compositions, rough surfaces and shards of color that have long been seen as the proto-modernist precursors of Expressionism and Cubism. The Anastagi portrait fast-forwards not to the 20th-century but to the 19th, to late Goya and then Manet in its love of paint and structure. (That’s still around 300 years in advance.) Helpfully, there are works by both these masters as well as a small, more characteristic El Greco hanging next to this show, which — text panel included — occupies a single wall.
El Greco’s subject is a robust man who seems larger than life, posing with his right hand planted on his hip, his left slightly lower, almost touching the golden hilt of his sword. He stands as solidly as he can on a plane that is more russet paint than specified floor, against an expanse of cream that is also a plaster wall. As important as their ambiguity is the way these planes meet. They form an emphatic line that cuts decisively through his knees, accenting his powerful calves.
While El Greco was awake to the wonders of paint, Pulzone was wild about details and polish. His portrait feels somewhat archaic in its skillful, nearly molecular enumeration of high-end reality. Boncompagni is too perfect. Yet he commands by withdrawing and seems uncomfortable, even awkward, like the unconvincing tilt of the velvet-covered tabletop displaying his helmet and gauntlet. He holds a folded paper in his right hand (fastidiously inscribed with the names of both sitter and artist) and in the other a wood letter carrier used by diplomats. The main character here is his parade armor. Pulzone has obsessively accounted for nearly all its raised decorations, both Christian and mythological, just as he has the many exquisite stitches of gold and silver highlighting his subject’s short, puffy breeches.
El Greco seems to be at pains to make sure we realize that everything is paint. He all but drizzles gold across Anastagi’s green velvet breeches, intimating embroidery. And even though Anastagi’s armor is of the plainer field variety, El Greco nonetheless abbreviates. In contrast to the metallic sheen and well-placed gleams of Pulzone’s armor, Anastagi has a bladelike slash of white tearing down his breastplate. The light hitting his left arm creates an X-ray strangeness. All this can seem highly symbolic — power, guilt and death come to mind — even more so with the dark crimson velvet drape that almost oozes downward into the painting like blood (as opposed to Pulzone’s carefully tied-back and fringed blue velvet curtain). These are definitely contemporary readings, but such readings help a great work of art live in the present.
Ultimately, the pairing escalates into a quiet but pitched battle of competing views of art and maybe life. Pulzone believes that everything can be seen by the eye and venerated in art and ends up with seductive artifice. El Greco’s faith lies with paint’s ability to be itself while conveying a sense of the limits of vision, which feels like a more natural way of seeing.
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