The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Old faces seen in a whole new light
The Old Masters drew the crowds while the YBAs came a cropper in a decade that saw art become ‘woke’
For all the glamour of contemporary art, many of the decade’s most memorable exhibitions were devoted to Old Masters. There were immaculate international celebrations of Hieronymus
Bosch and Bruegel the Elder. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam marked the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death. London had Gainsborough’s Family Album at the National Portrait Gallery, featuring touching likenesses of the artist’s nearest and dearest.
Above all, though, the 2010s belonged to the illegitimate son of a Tuscan peasant born in 1452, as a pair of blockbusters marking the fifth centenary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death bookended the decade: one, in 2011, at the National Gallery; the other at the
Louvre. Each was a coup, as complex to negotiate as Brexit, containing around half of Leonardo’s 15 or so surviving paintings. I preferred the National Gallery’s show, about the years Leonardo spent at the Sforza court in Milan. I can also attest that, while the crowds at both were hideous, French gallery-goers are more sharp-elbowed than their English counterparts.
Leonardo, too, provided the decade’s most newsworthy art story: the record-breaking auction of his Salvator Mundi for $450million (£341million) at Christie’s in New York in 2017. Six years earlier, the painting, which depicts Christ as “Saviour of the World”, had been shown as an autograph work at the National Gallery. While the auction price is a matter of record, the buyer’s identity remains mysterious.
At first, Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and tourism took the credit. Everyone assumed the painting would resurface in the city, at a new, colossally expensive museum, which opened in 2017 after paying more than half a billion dollars to use the Louvre’s name for 30 years. It didn’t. Hopes that the artwork would materialise at the original Louvre this autumn have also been dashed.