The Burlington Magazine – March 2023:
The sketchbooks Delacroix kept on his travels to Morocco and Andalusia in 1832.
If asked to name the most successful exhibition of contemporary German art, few people would intuitively think of an exhibition presenting vivid reconstructions of the polychromy of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 5th July 2022–26th March 2023
It is now forty years since Melina Mercouri, the Greek Minister for Culture from 1981 to 1989, famous also as a film star and singer, addressed UNESCO’s World Conference on Cultural Policies to draw international attention to the campaign with which she would be identified until her death in 1994, the repatriation to Athens of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. ‘We are not asking for the return of a painting or a statue’, she said: ‘We are asking for the return of a portion of a unique monument, the privileged symbol of a whole culture’.
As images, ancient Roman wall paintings command attention for their bold compositions, vibrant and saturated colours, convincing naturalism and the fantastical mythologies they depict. As objects they also captivate for the dramatic circumstances surrounding their near- destruction, the miracle (or rarity) of their survival and the alchemical nature of lime plaster and pigment.
‘Je vois red’ raged Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) on one of the loose sheets of paper that she made notes on, most often about herself and her work and, in this case, about the painting Natural history #2 (1944; Easton Foundation, New York), which struck her as all going wrong. Slipping between two languages, Bourgeois’s fury conforms to the themes of rage, the death drive and childhood aggression that the art historian Mignon Nixon has traced in the artist’s work in reference to the ideas of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.
There is an unhappy irony in the fact that five hundred years after Raphael died of a fever at the age of only thirty-seven, the global covid-19 pandemic has brought to a premature end so many of the exhibitions that have been staged to mark the anniversary.
READ DIGITAL ONLINE ISSUE – MAY 2020
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