S IMON W INGETT F INE A RT

Exhibiting at Fine Art, Design & Antiques, Olympia. 1-5 March

KATE NESSLER Becoming

Botanical painting on vellum

16 March – 8 April 2006

Catalogue available £8

Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) Shillingtons House, ‘White House’, Northern Ireland, 1951. Oil on canvas, 25 1 / 4 by 30 1 / 2 in. Exhibited at the Royal Academy & Tate Gallery.

E RBISTOCK , NR W REXHAM , LL 13 0 DL P HONE 01978 781149 www.simonwingett.come-mail: art@simonwingett.com

Bluebells w atercolour on vellum 14x11”
EXHIBITIONS

Forum, Hamburg, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden and the Szvépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest (where it finishes on 30 April). This much more wieldy volume offers six essays on links between German and Spanish visual culture during the past two centuries, most strikingly a highly suggestive discussion by Michael SchölzHänsel of the relations between Carl Justi and Julius Meier Graf, Ignacio Zuloaga and Rainer Maria Rilke, Richard Wagner in Barcelona and José Ortega y Gasset in Germany. Two scholars from the Grand Palais volume make return appearances: Harald Marx on the Dresden collections and Helge Siefert on the Wittelsbach collections, with an addition from Justus Lange on the acquisitions of Spanish paintings by five Landgrafen of Hessen Kassel between 1654 and 1847, now in the Staatliche Museen, Kassel. The final thirty pages of the catalogue provide an exceptionally valuable, illustrated and annotated hand-list of Spanish paintings in German public collections. The two publications are of signal importance for Anglo-American scholarship, for they fix the discussion of the history of patronage and collecting firmly in the realm of those with the money, power and will to purchase, assemble and display. For many decades this has been the trend of scholars in the German-speaking world, long suspicious of Anglo-American colleagues who seemed uncomfortable with dynasts and

2 The Dead Crane by Jean-Baptiste Oudry ( 1686-1755 ), c. 1745 . Oil on canvas, 162 x 127.5 cm. Staatliches Museum Schwerin Kunstsammlungen Schlösser und Gärten. Painted for Louis XV ’s surgeon François Gigot de La Peyronnie, the painting remained in Oudry’s possession until 1750 , when it was sold to Christian Ludwig II , Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin

so retreated into notions of ‘taste’ and antiquarian amateurism. Although these two catalogues deal with only a fraction of the history of patronage and collecting, and in just one country, they point the way forward to students outside central Europe interested in how and why great collections now in public hands were formed.

A member of the faculty of history at theUniversity ofOxford, Robert Oresko is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London.

‘ Poussin, Watteau, Chardin, David…Peintures françaises dans les collections allemandes,

XVII e-XVIII e siècles’, Grand Palais, Paris, 18 April-31 July 2005; Haus der Kunst, Munich, 5 October 2005-8 January 2006; Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Bonn, 3 February-30 April. Catalogue by Pierre Rosenberg et al., Réunion des Musées Nationaux, ISBN 2 7118 4914 7 (paper), €59; German version, ISBN 3 7757 1505 3 (paper), €49.50. Greco, Velázquez, Goya: Spanische Malerei aus Deutschen Sammlungen by Mathias Weinger et al. (ed.), Prestel,

ISBN 3 7913 3412 3, €49.95.

Sculptors resized

Peyton Skipwithwelcomes an exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery that focuses on two twentiethcentury British sculptors, one very famous and one neglected, Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine.

Our perception of history alters as the years pass, with the result that strongly held opinions and prejudices are undermined, and widely held truths are called into question. Currently, the period now undergoing the most rigorous reassessment is that separating the two world wars. In his introduction to the catalogue of the Ben Uri Gallery’s exhibition ‘Embracing the Exotic: Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine’, the octogenarian Anthony Caro says that when he began to study, the ‘artists that we looked to were Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine’.

1 Javanese Dancerby Dora Gordine ( 1906-91 ), 1927 . Bronze with wood base (Valsuani cast), 143.2 x 65.1 x 37 cm. Courtesy of Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London

Apollo 93