The Getty Gets a Turner...Maybe

A few weeks ago, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles bought Joseph Turner's Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino at a Sotheby's auction in London. With only a half dozen or so Turner paintings of this size and quality remaining in private hands, the auction offered the Getty a rare opportunity to add significantly to its relatively small holdings of works by the British master.

Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino, said by Sotheby's to be in excellent condition, is widely admired and was highly coveted by other bidders. It sold for about $45 million, well above the pre-auction estimate of $18 to $27 million. The seller was an heir of the 5th Earl of Rosebery, who bought the painting from its original owner in the late 19th century.

Normally when a painting transfers like this from private hands to a public institution, I am quite happy. But I have mixed feelings about this acquisition. Before the sale, Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino was not secluded on some British estate out of view of everyone but a privileged few; it had hung on loan in the National Galleries of Scotland for decades. Now most Scots will likely never again have the opportunity to see this painting in person.

On the bright side for me, however, my wife has family in Los Angeles, and we travel there at least a couple of times a year. If the transaction of Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino is completed in time, I plan to go see it at the Getty on my next visit to Southern California.

I should note that there is an outside chance that Turner's painting will never leave the United Kingdom. Under British law, the Getty's purchase can be blocked if someone in the U.K. can match the purchase price. The Getty has seen previous acquisitions foiled by this law.

However, it seems highly unlikely that any British museum has $45 million to spend on one painting. And in the current economy, raising that sum would be a daunting task. Government help is probably out of the question, especially considering the controversy that sprung up last year when the Scotish government spent more than 17 million pounds to keep Titian's Diana and Actaeon at the National Galleries.

Also, it's unlikely that a British citizen will step forward to buy. Anyone with the means and the interest in Turner's work probably bid in the auction and lost to the Getty, whose rich endowment seems to allow it to outbid anyone, no matter the price, whenever the museum is determined to acquire a work of art.

This enormous buying power adds to my ambivalence about the purchase of Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino. As much as I love great art, I wonder if any painting is worth $45 million. I've heard the argument that if a buyer is willing to pay that much, then the painting is worth it. But should anyone, or any institution, be willing to value a single work of art so dearly?

Such a high price for Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino seems out of whack with history. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston owns one of Turner's greatest paintings, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Thanks to the MFA's informative website, we know that the museum paid $65,000 for the painting in 1899. Adjusted for inflation, that price is equal to about $1.65 million.

So what has happened in the past 110 years to inflate Turner's value nearly thirtyfold? Is it simply a matter of supply and demand, with many fewer Turners now available for purchase while a global economy allows many more people to partake in the bidding?

Whatever the answer, this overheated art market has created a climate where an owner of a great work like Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino is unlikely to donate it to a museum. I like to think that if I were in the same position as the Earl of Rosebery's heir, I would want to share Turner's painting with the art-loving public and donate to a museum. But no matter what my wealth, it would be awfully hard to forgo $45 million.

So Turner's image of 19th-century Rome seems destined to leave Scotland for Los Angeles. I guess when I see Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino, I can keep any pangs of guilt at bay by reminding myself that the United Kingdom is awash in Turner paintings, including another view of Rome at the National Galleries of Scotland. I'll just tell myself that it's only fair that LA get one, too.

Surface Praise for Vuillard

Many years ago I saw an exhibition called "Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard" at the Brooklyn Museum. This show brought together about 75 paintings of the artist's domestic life in turn-of-the-last-century France. I hadn't previously seen much of Vuillard's work--just an occasional glance at the handful of his paintings at the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum. So the Brooklyn exhibition offered a welcome introduction.

As I examined Vuillard's depictions of family and friends engaged in mundane activities such as sewing, sweeping, and reading, I remember thinking, "How tedious." Their proper, 19th-century clothes and their stuffy rooms, often decorated in browns and grays and other dull hues, seemed stifling. When I left the museum after an hour or two, I was glad to step out into the energetic air of modern-day New York City.

Yet I wanted to go back. Vuillard's playful paint dabs and brushstrokes, along with his clever design and color schemes, had translated his oppressive three-dimensional world into a fascinating two-dimensional realm. I expected that whenever I returned to the exhibition, these marvelous formal feats would distract me from Vuillard's tedious subjects.

I never did make it back to the show in Brooklyn. But in the years since, I have seen Vuillard's work in many other places and have come to regard him (as many others have) as a master of early modern art.

A few museums in the U.S have splendid examples of Vuillard's prowess. MOMA has Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, owns Child at a Window, Woman Sewing before a Garden Window is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan owns Madame Vuillard Sewing by the Window, rue Truffaut.

Any one of these paintings could be the subject of this post, but for this edition of "Permanent Collections" I've decided to discuss the Saint Louis Art Museum's K.X. Roussel Reading (seen above) not only because it, too, illustrates well what I love about Vuillard, but also because I'm fond of the St. Louis Art Museum.

I have visited SLAM (some acronym) just once, in the late 1990s when I lived in Chicago. As with most museums at that time, I could not access SLAM's collection online. So before my visit, all I knew about the museum was what an art history professor had told me (the museum owns many works by Max Beckmann) and what I had seen in one of my Matisse books (SLAM owns his Bathers with a Turtle).

As a result, I spent a discovery-filled afternoon at the Saint Louis Art Museum, impressed by the extent of its collection, which includes--among many other great paintings--Hans Holbein's Mary, Lady Guildford, Georges Braque's The Blue Mandolin, The Transformed Dream by Giorgio De Chirico, and K.X. Roussel Reading.

Like most Vuillard paintings, K.X. Roussel Reading is relatively small (17 1/4 x 21 1/2 in.). Painted in 1904, it shows Roussel* crouched over a table engrossed in something. Although the title suggests that he's reading, he could be sketching--SLAM's website indicates that the work has also been called Kerr-Xavier Roussel Sketching and Roussel in his Studio.

Whatever his activity, Roussel's back seems to blend with the mantlepiece behind him. This merging of figure and background undercuts the illusion of realistic, three-dimensional space achieved elsewhere in the painting, and is a motif seen in other Vuillard paintings from the 1890s to the first few years of the 20th century (see, for example, Interior with Mother and Child at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist at MOMA)

This spatial ambiguity, which Vuillard borrowed from the Impressionists, encourages viewers not only to look at a painting as an illusory opening to a world beyond the surface of the picture, but also to consider its physical presence as paint applied to canvas. Thus, the area of black at the center of the picture can be viewed both as Roussel's jacket and the fireplace behind him, and as an odd shape of black paint.

Ever since the Brooklyn exhibition, I have eagerly accepted Vuillard's literally formal invitation to approach his work in two ways, and I have thereby been able to overlook what I consider his stuffy subject matter. So when I look at K.X. Roussel Reading, I savor the way Vuillard modulates his grays: from a cool gray in the upper part of the canvas (the wall of Roussel's studio) to a warmer tone toward the bottom (in Roussel's floor).

I also appreciate the contrast between depth, most evident in the space around the crisscrossed legs of Roussel's table, and the areas of flatness scattered throughout the painting. I'm particularly impressed with Vuillard's choice to juxtapose that tangibly three-dimensional area with the indecipherable form directly left of the table. I can only read that enigmatic shape as a small assemblage of two-dimensional abstract forms. I also applaud the reddish-brown hue that Vuillard sprinkles in among those abstract forms and on the mantle shelf. They bring additional warmth and vitality to the painting.

I could discuss so much more about this painting--for example, more about Vuillard's deft distribution of values and hues; or about the proliferation of straight lines and right angles vs. the scarcity of curves; or about the centrality of the black shape made by Roussel's back and fireplace, how it acts like a target that immediately attracts the viewer's eyes. If I continue, this post will be much longer, and perhaps tedious itself.

So I will stop here with my praise. Perhaps I will revisit K.X. Roussel Reading and Vuillard with another post after my next visit to St. Louis (whenever that might be). Then I'll be able to write with memories of a personal encounter with the work fresh in my mind.





*Ker Xavier Roussel was Vuillard's friend and a fellow painter. Although his work has never achieved the same recognition as Vuillard's, museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hermitage Museum in Russia own some of his paintings.