Exhibition of the week Cranach: Artist and Innovator
Compton Verney, Warwickshire (01926-645500, comptonverney.org.uk). Until 3 January 2021
Compared with contemporaries such as Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) is “relatively unregarded” as an artist, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. While Holbein and Dürer are celebrated for the psychological insight of their portraiture, Cranach is best known for his nudes: his tasteful erotica. The countless, “languidly stylised nudes” he and his studio produced in the course of his career are instantly recognisable, typically depicting goddesses, biblical heroines or historical figures posing suggestively against stark black backgrounds. Although they incorporated lofty moral messages, they were essentially “soft porn” for Cranach’s aristocratic clients in Saxony. Yet as this exhibition at Compton
Verney House in Warwickshire demonstrates, there was far more to his work than titillation. Cranach was a pioneering portraitist and printmaker, and a savvy political operator who steered his way through the “turbulent confusions” of the Reformation. Bringing together more than 40 exhibits, including paintings, books, manuscripts, drawings and woodcuts, as well as works by modern and contemporary artists inspired by Cranach, the show frames him as a true “Renaissance man” whose influence stretches through the centuries.
introduces us to his work as a court painter, said Robert Weinberg in The Daily Telegraph. Serving in the position for Frederick the Wise and successive
Cranach: Artist and Innovator
Not everything here is quite so interesting, said Laura Freeman in The Spectator. With a few exceptions – notably Picasso’s “explosive”
(c.1957) – the modern responses to Cranach amount to mere riffs on his themes, “pale imitations” of his masterpieces. But what masterpieces those are. From a tiny nativity scene set into a brooch to a magnificent 1509 double portrait of two future Electors of Saxony, the show contains an embarrassment of riches. Best of all are the glorious nudes:
(c.1525) is “classic Cranach”, portraying the titular goddess as a “sly and silken” figure with “sleepy, cat-like eyes” and “bee-stung breasts”; while
(c.1526–7) lovingly accessorises her with a gold choker and an elaborate “ostrich feather hat”. What a “sumptuous” exhibition this is.
News from the art world
A long-lost surrealist sculpture, missing for more than 80 years, has been rediscovered and put on display in Barcelona, said Stephen Burgen in The Guardian. Jamais (“Never”) by the Spanish artist Óscar Domínguez, takes the form of a gramophone, with a woman’s legs protruding from its horn, which tapers into a hand that caresses the machine’s turntable. It was a “star attraction” at the landmark surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1938, where Domínguez exhibited it alongside works by
Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp and his close friend Pablo Picasso. Inspired by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s studies of hypnosis and hysteria, Domínguez, who killed himself in 1957, is thought to have presented this “erotic gramophone” to Picasso as a gift; indeed, it was a photograph of the artist posing next to the sculpture years after it was last exhibited that prompted Emmanuel Guigon, director of Barcelona’s Picasso Museum, to track it down and put it on show. He contacted Picasso’s descendants, and eventually struck gold when Picasso’s stepdaughter Catherine Hutin told him that she had found a gramophone in a cardboard box at a warehouse in Paris. “She thought that’s all it was,” Guigon says. “She didn’t think it was a work of art.”
Complaining to Venus
Electors of Saxony, the artist made a fortune creating society portraits, hunting scenes and other records of courtly life, eventually becoming the city of Wittenberg’s “second wealthiest citizen”. He was a versatile innovator, whose “idiosyncratic treatment of the human form defied the conventions of his time” – naturalistically capturing human features and rich textiles against his trademark, blacked-out backgrounds. Cranach was a religious radical, too. Friendship with Martin Luther led to him illustrating the reformer’s 1522 translation of the Bible, loaded with “anti-Rome polemic”: one example here depicts the Antichrist sporting the papal crown.
and Cupid, the Honey Thief
Cupid
Venus
Venus and
Cupid
Gilbert & George, “unpredictable celebrities of the British avant garde”, appear to have stormed out of the Royal Academy in a huff, said Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer. Earlier this year the duo, known for their performance and graphic art, made the “dramatic” decision to resign, after the RA decided not to go ahead with a major exhibition of their work, which they believed it had agreed to put on. Becoming a Royal Academician is a “key token of recognition” and a highly exclusive honour; the position is never held by more than 80 people, all of whom must be distinguished artists or architects. However, only a select few of them can be guaranteed an exhibition. Gilbert & George were elected to a single seat in 2017, becoming the first artist duo to be admitted as one entity in the RA’s 250-year history. Resignation from the Academy is rare, but not unprecedented: Sir Joshua Reynolds, the RA’s first president, resigned in 1790 over a disagreement about a teaching appointment; the last artist to do so was Peter Blake, who in 2005 reportedly resigned after fellow academicians voted to strip his friend Brendan Neiland of membership. An RA spokeswoman said the resignation of Gilbert & George was “regrettable”.
Kiss Me First,