Salvator Rosa landscapes: Compton Verney and London

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS This sense of focus is unfortunately lost in the final section, ‘Body and Soul’, where many of the pieces appear to impinge on ideas already covered in ‘Identity and History’. Loulou Cherinet’s documentary film White women (2002; no.36) records an amusing afterdinner conversation among black men settled in Sweden talking about their relationships with white women, but much of the work in the section speaks in the language of the older artistic traditions of African sculpture and painting, and that translates less effectively. Indeed, it is Kentridge who shines in Africa Remix, and that is somewhat disappointing as one had hoped for new discoveries. Yet it would be wrong to assume that unfamiliar pieces in the exhibition are not well known among specialists. Chéri Samba was launched on the international stage in Magiciens de la terre and, represented here by three of his boldly illustrated and politically alert paintings, he demonstrates why he is still highly regarded. Even the large, roughly hewn wooden sculptures by Jackson Hlungwani, a self-taught artist and a minister who founded his own church, have been touched on in published historical surveys. Africa Remix is clearly a survey of popular names as much as it is a picture of the continent. Many will say that the exhibition is superficial for this very reason, that its scale is too ambitious and the 79. Empedocles leaping into overall quality of the work is poor. Nevertheless, it provides a noisy, persuasive context for art which is increasingly visible on the global art scene, particularly in biennales, and its picture of the continent itself — although it may be painted in broad strokes — looks honest and true. ' After its Paris showing, the exhibition travels to the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (May—August 2006). Catalogue: Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. By Simon Njami, with essays by Lucy Duran, David Elliott, Jean-Hubert Martin and John Picton. 224 pp. incl. 63 col. pls. + 26 b. & w. ills. (Hayward Gallery, London, 2005), £19.95. ISBN 1-85332-24-6. Etna, by Salvator Rosa. c.1660. 135 by 99 cm. (Private collection; exh. Wallace Collection, London). devoted a wall each to Rosa’s Self-portrait as The most spectacular painting on show is a philosopher (National Gallery, London) and three of his finest landscapes. Ironically, while Rosa considered his philosophical subjects the philosopher’s leap into the volcano in order to best expressions of his artistic independence, it was his landscapes, painted for money, that were subsequently interpreted as romantic. by the re-appearance of his sandal, has always had its comic side, but for Rosa’s contempo- Empedocles Salvator Rosa landscapes The One’s eye is led into the exhibition by the raries, familiar with Empedocles’ doctrine of masterly Landscape with travellers asking the way indestructible (Mahon collection, on loan to the National sandal, although a token of his hubris, gave elements, the return of his credence to his physics. Beside Empedocles was Neudecker’s diminutive plaster sculpture Mountain in a glass case; it, and Kovats’s equally unobtrusive Basalt, shown at groundlevel in the next room, played wittily with drawings and paintings, such as the study of a by RODNEY PALMER (Fig.79). confirm his immortality, which was disproved Gallery, London). The Landscape with Jacob’s dream from Chatsworth, for all its asymmetry, is hardly a less meticulously ordered composition. Rosa’s methodical approach is also evident in the close relationship between specific Compton Verney and London leaping into Etna description on a wall panel of the Greek Kneeling hermit, praying in the wildemess (British Rosa’s landscapes and on the idea of the artistic representation on a small scale of nature’s immensity. COMPTON VERNEY, in its park by Capability Museum, London) and the Landscape with Sts Brown, provided an apt setting for a display Anthony Abbot and Paul the Hermit (Mahon The third room at Compton Verney was of landscapes by Salvator Rosa and works after mainly devoted to graphic art by and after plus a piece each by the contemporary sculpcollection, on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh), and between several pen-and-ink studies of trees which relate to tors Tania Kovats and Mariele Neudecker. paintings on view. Rosa’s better landscapes Lady This exhibition, now at the Wallace Coldeploy gloomy motifs — splintered and twisted trees, rocky outcrops with vulnerable travellers beneath them — which intentionally complemented Claude’s Arcadian repertory, (1689-1769). All six Goupy etchings shown him by eighteenth-century artists in Britain — lection, London, in a reduced version (to 18th September), was the first in a series to complement Compton Verney’s permanent collection of Neapolitan art, part of the Peter Moores Foundation’s engagingly populist museological adventure.' In a small group of works from British collections, the first room at Compton Verney (where this reviewer saw the exhibition) Salvator Rosa, including etchings by John Hamilton Mortimer the ‘Salvator of Sussex’, Louisa Greville and Joseph Goupy are inscribed with the name of the owner of the original paintings by Rosa after which they were made. For instance, the Landscape and are equally thoughtful in arrangement. with Jacob’s The considered artistry of Rosa’s landscapes already in the Devonshire collection when emerges even more clearly at the Wallace Collection where the Rosa works join only his River landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sybil. Rosa’s Tobias and the angel, then in the Methuen collection, now in the National Gallery, London. A gouache by Goupy, dream from Goupy etched it; his Chatsworth was Tobit print is from THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE + CXLVII + JUNE 2005

EXHIBITION REVIEWS in his Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1995), as is now the fashion: Castle and Village, the and affirms Church, Relics and Pilgrimage, etc. In these that by the early nineteenth century, most major works by Rosa were in early rooms there are many great works of art, British ownership. Many still are, and this welcome show tantalisingly proves the desirbut it has been an exercise in ingenuity to find ability of a more comprehensive exhibition. Excavated material is supported by models, I Vemey Handbook, sculpture is chosen for the costume or the Compton Verney 2004, pp.25-63. activity that it is supposed to represent. Even 2 H. Walpole: Anecdotes of Painting in England . . ., and if the metalwork is obviously appropriate to artefacts to flesh out some of the themes. coins, weapons, seals and charters. Here the See S. Jenkins, ed.: Compton ed., London 1782, IV, p.202. 3 For the date of the gouache, see C.R. Grundy: ‘Documents relating to an action brought against Joseph Goupy in 1738’, Walpole Society 9 (1920-21), p.82; for Goupy’s prints from Rosa, see S. O'Connell: ‘Goupy, the theme of the Church, it has been treated as an aspect of social history. The present reviewer would have preferred to see the beautiful bronze figures of Christ crucified 80. Augurs prophesying from the flight of birds, by Joseph Joseph’, in Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford (nos.87-89; Fig.82) occupy a central place in Goupy after Salvator Rosa. c.1717. Gouache height- 2004, XXIII, p.84. the exhibition. After all, they were made for ened with white, 18 by 23.3 cm. (British Museum, 4 London; exh. Compton Verney House). meditation, at that moment in the years before Sublime. By James S. Patty. 280 pp. (The University and after 1100 when new notions of intro- Press spective piety were born within the moveexhibited ex-catalogue at Compton Verney, is Closely related to his etching after Rosa’s Augurs (formerly Knowsley, present whereabouts unknown), which it mirrors. Published here for the first time (Fig.80), Goupy’s Salvator Rosa in French Literature: From the Bizarre to the of Kentucky, Lexington, 2004), $55. ISBN 0-813 I—-2330-5. 5 Catalogue: Salvator Rosa: Wild Landscapes. By Susan Jenkins, with essays by Helen Langdon and Jonathan Scott. 40 pp. incl. 17 col. pls. (Compton Verney House Trust, 2005), £5.99. ISBN 0-9546545-5—2. ment of the Gregorian Reform in, for instance, the circle of St Anselm. This first part of the exhibition is indeed resolutely post-1960s; there is little recognition of the spiritual fuels which created much Augurs exemplifies the qualities that Horace of this great art or of the shift in religious Walpole admired in his paintings: ‘Goupy imitated the boldness of strokes in oil... and values which saw the rise of the reformed Romanesque France monasteries and the hermits. Of course the excelled in imitating Salvator Rosa.” This is Paris manuscripts carry this message; they are a probably the version of Augurs which John Hedges commissioned Goupy to paint in strong and coherent thread through the by NEIL STRATFORD exhibition, an outstanding contribution from 1724 and not, as twentieth-century scholars IN RECENT YEARS three great French Gothic implicitly made specifically for the devout and believed, from the mid-1700s: one reason why exhibitions in Paris have set high standards the intellectual; a chalice is after all a chalice, Goupy’s role in disseminating the taste for of coherent presentation and scholarship.' the ivories often come from book-covers or Rosa’s compositions in eighteenth-century However, La France romane au temps des precrosiers. They are impeccably catalogued by England has been underestimated until now.? mier Capétiens (987-1152) at the Musée du Danielle Gaborit-Chopin and are presented as Rosa’s reception in France is the subject of Louvre, Paris (to 6th June), is an altogether part of a newly revealed area of Romanesque a recent book byJames S. Patty.4 The author’s different challenge: where is there an artistic art. One of the strengths of the exhibition, on chronological survey of references to Rosa in or, indeed, a linguistic or politico-economic the other hand, is the emphasis on monumen- French literature from the seventeenth to the coherence in the eleventh and twelfth cental stone sculpture, curated by Jean-René twentieth century will benefit students both turies in the area that we recognise today as 1717. Goupy’s prints after Rosa date from Francois Avril. The objets précieux are also of the fortunes of Italian art and of French France? Can themes be drawn out or key Romantic art criticism. Its subtitle, ‘From the monuments identified which might serve to Bizarre to the Sublime’, carries a teleological explain the buildings and artefacts of these assumption that the ‘bizarre’ would give way centuries? to the Sublime; but, almost a century after The parameters of the exhibition are difficult to comprehend. The date limits (987— Edmund Burke’s Essay on the Beautiful and the Sublime, Baudelaire in 1855 could declare ‘le 1152) are based on political events, respectivebeau est toujours bizarre’. ly the coronation of Hugues Capet and the marriage of the future Henry II of England to Eleanor of Aquitaine. The geographical bias is The exhibition catalogue is slight and unevenly edited.’ While nearly all Rosa’s exhibited paintings are illustrated, none of present-day France, which has no historical his drawings and only one work after him is basis whatsoever in these centuries. reproduced. The text concentrates mainly on expectations are created which cannot be met provenance. The first of two essays, by Helen by an anthology of works of art. These, it must be said at the outset, are often magnifi- Langdon on ‘Salvator Rosa in Italy’, discusses the Neapolitan painter—poet’s career at the Medici court in the 1640s, and his later Thus cent, deeply moving or deeply interesting. To be welcomed by a rotunda of capitals (cat. Roman patrons. Langdon suggests the pertinos.271—78) with the Vendôme window of nence the Virgin and Child (no.187) on axis in the to century Rosa’s revival art of the of interest seventeenth- Lucretius. opening space is memorable; to stand in front Notwithstanding that Rosa fashioned himself in of the relief of St Michael from Notre-Dame as pro-Stoic and thus anti-Epicurean, mende Nevers (no.1 59) is unforgettable; to ponder tion of Lucretius is germane, especially to the manuscripts — the great page, for example, Rosa’s Empedocles, since the Augustan poet of the Saint-Bertin Aratus manuscript of the analysed and Phenomena (no.159; Fig.81) — is a stimulating described Etna as a metaphor for the daunting the Empedoclean elements half-hour in an exhibition of well over three power of the natural universe. Jonathan Scott hundred on “Rosa and the English’ adds to the cast of extremely difficult to follow. English collectors of Rosa that he assembled 424 JUNE 2005 + CXLVII + THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE objects. But the story told The first half of the exhibition is thematic,