Roderick Conway-Morris

Thursday

28 Jan 2016
Roderick Conway-Morris

The Venice Accademia

The Accademia is one of the smallest of the world’s great art galleries, and picture for picture perhaps the most concentrated collection of masterpieces anywhere — though its rambling layout may surprise first-time visitors. But there are changes afoot as it expands into spaces once occupied by the Venice Fine Arts Academy. This means more works on permanent display and larger special exhibitions. In the days of the Venetian Republic, the city saw no reason to have a public picture gallery. Paintings were everywhere: in the Doge’s Palace, administrative buildings, churches, chapels, monasteries, convents, hospitals, orphanages, confraternity houses and in hundreds of private palazzi. But after Napoleon’s overthrow of La Serenissima in 1797, civic and religious institutions were forcibly closed and their art works pillaged.

The Venice Accademia

Thursday

28 Aug 2014
Roderick Conway-Morris

A wooden UFO lands in Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard comes from a long line of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. She was born in Germany in 1942 on a forced labour farm to which her parents had been transported by the Nazis. Her early memories are of a wooden world — of huts, fences, domestic utensils and tools — on the farm and in postwar refugee camps. After von Rydingsvard’s family emigrated to America in 1950, wood was to become the primary material of her powerfully evocative sculptures, more than 50 of which are now on show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, both in the open and in the indoor Underground Gallery — an ideal setting for this the largest ever exhibition of her works, which includes six major outdoor pieces made especially for the event (until 4 January).

A wooden UFO lands in Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Thursday

14 Aug 2014
Roderick Conway-Morris

How Richard Wilson made Wales beautiful

‘I recollect nothing so much as a solemn — bright — warm — fresh landscape by Wilson, which swims in my brain like a delicious dream,’ wrote Constable of his encounter with the Welsh artist’s ‘Tabley House, Cheshire’ after he visited the gallery of that house owned by Sir John Leicester. Recalling this epiphany, Constable went on to say of Richard Wilson: ‘He was one of the great appointments to shew to the world what exists in nature but which was not known till his time.’ Turner, too, was an ardent Wilson admirer and as a young man set out on a reverential pilgrimage to Wales, seeking out his birthplace at Penegoes below the peak of Cader Idris and following ‘in the footsteps of Wilson’ to those places amid the wild mountainscapes of North Wales that Wilson had captured for the first time in paint.

How Richard Wilson made Wales beautiful

Thursday

24 Jul 2014
Roderick Conway-Morris

Alexander Pope, inventor of celebrity

‘The Picture of the Prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of Mr Pope in twenty Noblemen’s Houses,’ wrote Voltaire in 1733. Alexander Pope’s start in life was not promising. A crippled hunchback, suffering chronic ill-health, he was, as a Catholic, excluded from Court, allowed to live no closer to Westminster than Chiswick. His ‘Rape of the Lock’, a mock epic satirically inflating a ludicrously minor incident in polite society, became the first bestseller after the 1710 Copyright Act, but brought him a mere £22.15s. Yet the poet who, according to Samuel Johnson, ‘never drank tea without a stratagem’, knew how to exploit his work’s succès de scandale. The infinitely better deal he extracted from his publisher for subsequent translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey made him rich.

Alexander Pope, inventor of celebrity

Thursday

12 Jun 2014
Roderick Conway-Morris

Modernism’s dreams – and nightmares – at the Venice Architectural Biennale

An eccentric English aristocrat who constructed a 20-mile network of underground corridors to avoid coming into contact with his fellow humans on his country estate; a Japanese dentist who has amassed an enormous collection of decorative details from buildings spanning a century, retrieved from Tokyo demolition sites; the German inventor of ‘Scalology’, who has spent 60 years studying staircases; and Inuit soapstone carvings of a Cold War early-warning station and of an airport terminal are among the surprises offered by the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is this year’s artistic director. With his team of researchers, he has not only composed a fascinating show — Elements of Architecture in the Central Pavilion at the Biennale Gardens — but by insisting on the announcement further in advance than usual of the theme to be tackled by the national pavilions (Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014) he has also shaped a more co-ordinated overall view of the chosen subject than ever before.

Modernism’s dreams – and nightmares – at the Venice Architectural Biennale

Thursday

20 Mar 2014
Roderick Conway-Morris

The tubular joys of Fernand Léger

In 1914 Fernand Léger gave a lecture about modern art. By then recognised as a leading Cubist artist, he had the year before signed up with the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who already represented Picasso and Braque. ‘If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has necessitated it,’ Léger argued. ‘The existence of modern creative people is much more intense and more complex than that of people in earlier centuries...The view through the window of the railway carriage or the motorcar windshield, combined with the speed, has altered the customary look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an 18th-century artist.’ However, Léger’s attempts to find a way of depicting in paint this overwhelming plethora of impressions were rudely interrupted shortly afterwards.

The tubular joys of Fernand Léger

Thursday

13 Feb 2014
Roderick Conway-Morris

What Emperor Augustus left us

The symbol engraved on Augustus’ signet ring was a sphinx. Julian the Apostate described him as ‘a chameleon’. He seized power declaring himself the saviour of the Roman Republic, but in the process abolished it. He ruled as an autocrat but maintained the fiction that he was no more than the Republic’s First Citizen — and left as his legacy a new system of imperial government that was to continue for another 400 years in the West and until 1453 in Constantinople in the East. This year marks the 2,000th anniversary of Augustus’ death in 14 AD, on the 19th of the month by then named in his honour. His 40-year-long reign saw not only the transformation of Rome’s government and administration but also of its art, architecture and literature, which were harnessed to glorify Augustus himself and his regime, giving birth to models that continued to exert a powerful influence on imperial and dynastic art into modern times.

What Emperor Augustus left us

Thursday

12 Dec 2013
Roderick Conway-Morris

Turner’s seafaring ways — and his blazingly competitive art

Turner’s contemporaries regarded him primarily as a marine painter. This perception extended to his persona, with many who met him commenting on his nautical gait, manner of speaking and other salty characteristics. He frequented ports and coastal parts, relished sailing in storms, was immune to seasickness and famously had himself lashed to the mast to experience the full force of the gale before painting one of his most controversially ‘indistinct’ canvases ‘Snow Storm’. One witness recorded that he ‘somewhat resembled the master of a merchantman’, his first biographer described him as ‘half a sailor’, and he ended his days in unwedded bliss on the Thames in Chelsea with his long-term mistress, a seaman’s widow, Mrs Booth, where he himself was known to the neighbours as ‘Admiral Booth’.

Turner’s seafaring ways — and his blazingly competitive art

Thursday

1 Aug 2013
Roderick Conway-Morris

How Manet was influenced by the artists of the Renaissance

Manet’s paintings were regularly rejected by the Salon, yet he continued to submit them and declined to exhibit with the Impressionists, who regarded him as a father figure. Even when his works were accepted by the Salon, they were routinely received with outrage among both critics and the public. This response baffled him. When his ‘Olympia’ was shown at the Salon in 1865, along with his ‘Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers’, Edouard Manet wrote to Baudelaire in exile in Brussels: ‘I wish I could have your sound judgment on my pictures, because all this uproar is upsetting, and obviously someone must be wrong.’ And to Antonin Proust he said: ‘Only a fool could think I’m out to create a sensation.’ Ironically, although during his lifetime Manet was considered by many to be a dangerous radical, no artist manifested a greater reverence for the Old Masters.

Thursday

6 Jun 2013
Roderick Conway-Morris

Venice Biennale: from unusual sexual obsessions to a primary school Open Day

William Empson believed that ‘the arts are produced by overcrowding’. But, as 20,000 invited guests and 4,500 accredited journalists surged through the pavilions of the Giardini and Arsenale on the 55th Venice Biennale’s preview days last week, it was more a case of overcrowding being produced by the arts. Over the past 20 years the Biennale has inexorably expanded with every edition. In 1993, 53 countries were represented. This year there are 88, with Angola, the Bahamas, Bahrain, the Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, the Maldives, Paraguay, Tuvalu and the Vatican officially appearing for the first time. There are nearly 50 official collateral events and scores of other exhibitions around town. Massimiliano Gioni, at 39 the event’s youngest ever artistic director, has more than doubled the number of artists his predecessor showed two years ago in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, or Castello Gardens, and the Corderie, or Rope Walk, at the Arsenale.

Venice Biennale: from unusual sexual obsessions to a primary school Open Day

Saturday

2 Jun 2012
Roderick Conway-Morris

Changing tack

Gustav Klimt first came to Venice in the spring of 1899, in pursuit of Alma Schindler, the young stepdaughter of his friend and fellow artist Carl Moll. The nascent love affair between the artist, who was then in his late thirties, and the 19-year-old Alma was brought to an abrupt end when the girl’s mother read her diary and Klimt was asked to leave. Three years later she married Mahler. But before Klimt departed from Venice, Klimt and Alma had visited San Marco where, as Alma recorded, the Basilica’s mosaics, glittering in the half-light, made a profound impression on him. Although he had experimented with gold-painted highlights in his ‘Pallas Athene’ of the year before, the Venice visit, according to Alfred Weidinger of the Belvedere in Vienna and the curator of this evocative exhibition, stimulated Klimt to make lavish use of the gold leaf that was to become the trademark of his ‘Gold Period’.

Changing tack

Saturday

26 Nov 2011
Roderick Conway-Morris

Trading places

Venice and Alexandria were, as far as the Venetians were concerned, twin cities. According to legend, St Mark had visited Venice before going to Alexandria, where he preached, performed miracles and was martyred. When two Venetian merchants stole the saint’s remains from Alexandria in 828, they were merely fulfilling the prophecy of the Angel that had appeared to Mark in the lagoon and, addressing him with the ringing words ‘Pax tibi Marce, Evangelista meus’, had predicted that a great city would arise upon these waters, which was to be his last resting place.The origins of the mythical links between Venice and Alexandria were as much mercantile as mystical. For hundreds of years the spice trade with Alexandria yielded the immense profits with which the Venetians built that great city on the waters.

Trading places

Saturday

14 May 2011
Roderick Conway-Morris

Power of invention

Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits alone should have secured him a place in history as a major Renaissance painter.Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits alone should have secured him a place in history as a major Renaissance painter. Yet, ironically, while his works continued to be admired, his name was all but forgotten.This paradoxical state of affairs came about because Lotto suffered from a steady series of posthumous misattributions, his works being assigned to the most bafflingly diverse range of other artists from Giorgione, Pordenone, Titian, Tintoretto, Dosso Dossi and Veronese to Perugino, Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Holbein, even Van Dyck, and an obscure 17th-century German Baroque artist Johann Carl Loth, known in Italy as Carlotto.

Power of invention

Saturday

5 Mar 2011
Roderick Conway-Morris

Fruit of the vine

According to Athenaeus of Naucratis, the 2nd-century AD author of The Sophists’ Banquet, the ancient Sybarites kept the capital of their city-state in southern Italy supplied with wine through a network of ‘vinoducts’ that reached far out into the surrounding countryside.According to Athenaeus of Naucratis, the 2nd-century AD author of The Sophists’ Banquet, the ancient Sybarites kept the capital of their city-state in southern Italy supplied with wine through a network of ‘vinoducts’ that reached far out into the surrounding countryside.Amusing though this high-table story was, it reflects the extent to which ancient Mediterranean civilisations were fuelled by the fermented grape, a sacred fluid central to the imagery and practice of Judaism and Christianity.

Fruit of the vine

Saturday

27 Nov 2010
Roderick Conway-Morris

Smoke and mirrors

The Prince, according to Machiavelli, ‘should appear, to see him, to hear him, all compassion, all good faith, all integrity, all piety’ — which might be translated into Basic Blairish as ‘should appear a pretty straight kind of guy’ — but, as the Florentine Father of Spin emphasised, it was a great deal more important to seem to have, rather than actually to have, these qualities.The Prince, according to Machiavelli, ‘should appear, to see him, to hear him, all compassion, all good faith, all integrity, all piety’ — which might be translated into Basic Blairish as ‘should appear a pretty straight kind of guy’ — but, as the Florentine Father of Spin emphasised, it was a great deal more important to seem to have, rather than actually to have, these qualities.

Smoke and mirrors

Saturday

2 Oct 2010
Roderick Conway-Morris

Sculpture: Earth to earth

The park was founded nearly 25 years ago by a trio of friends from Borgo Valsugana, a small town near Trento in the Italian Alps: Carlotta Strobele, a philosophy graduate whose Viennese family’s connections with the area go back to when the region formed part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire; Emanuele Montibeller, a former market trader in fabrics and a local councillor; and Enrico Ferrari, an architect — all of whom shared a passion for contemporary art. It now covers a wide area in Val di Sella, a secluded valley of forest, glades and rolling meadows, high above Borgo, at the end of a narrow road that zigzags its way up precipitous and densely wooded slopes, beneath a chain of peaks over 6,000-feet high.In 1986 a dozen artists from various countries were asked to Carlotta Strobele’s summer house in Val di Sella and invited to create an artwork.

Sculpture: Earth to earth

Saturday

4 Sep 2010
Roderick Conway-Morris

Seaside renaissance

Roderick Conway Morris on how Genoa’s glorious Villa del Principe has been brought back to lifePalazzo Doria Pamphilj houses the most important private art collection in Rome. But the family possesses another treasure, the Villa del Principe in Genoa. The Doria side of the family moved to Rome in 1760, when they inherited the Pamphilj titles and estates, after which the Villa del Principe suffered a slow decline, punctuated by two major disasters. But after 16 years of work it has now been restored and reopened to the public.Donna Gesine Principessa Doria Pamphilj, who stays there regularly with her husband Massimiliano Floridi and their three children, said when I visited the villa on the eve of the inauguration, ‘The idea of restoring the villa, rediscovering its story and reviving the family’s connections with Genoa goes back to my grandparents and parents.

Seaside renaissance

Saturday

15 May 2010
Roderick Conway-Morris

Caravaggio the confessor

Caravaggio’s paintings were inextricably bound up with his life and provide a virtual narrative of his turbulent development, a story fraught with ambiguities and alternative readings.Caravaggio’s paintings were inextricably bound up with his life and provide a virtual narrative of his turbulent development, a story fraught with ambiguities and alternative readings. This almost confessional aspect of his works, along with the immediacy and extraordinary power of their emotional impact, have surely contributed to his current popularity. His documented career spanned only about 15 years, ending with his lonely death on the seacoast at Porto Ercole on 18 July 1610. He was making a desperate attempt to reach Rome to seek a papal pardon for the killing (most likely accidental) of an opponent in a brawl, which had led to his flight and an in absentia death sentence four years earlier.

Caravaggio the confessor

Saturday

29 Aug 2009
Roderick Conway-Morris

Working with Veronese

Roderick Conway Morris talks to Peter Greenaway about creating a ‘painting with a soundtrack’ Peter Greenaway is standing against the backdrop of Paolo Veronese’s enormous ‘The Wedding at Cana’ in the Palladian refectory of the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore and is in rhetorical mode: ‘When we put art and cinema in the balance, what do we have? At least 8,000 years of painting and a miserable 114 years or so of cinema. Nothing in cinema has not already been essayed in still images in painting at one time or another. So I think it a very good idea to have a dialogue between painting and cinema.’ The occasion is a preview of The Wedding at Cana, subtitled A Vision by Peter Greenaway, the director’s latest excursion into what might be called avant-garde sacred theatre.

Saturday

13 Jun 2009
Roderick Conway-Morris

Dispatch from Venice

Roderick Conway Morris on how the city is trying new ways to overcome its economic crisis When the Venice Biennale was founded in 1895 it was in many ways a response to the crisis facing the city. No longer an independent republic and marginalised in the newly re-unified Kingdom of Italy, Venice was seeking ways to re-invent itself, attract new types of visitors and boost the local economy. Most of the great exhibitions during that period were one-offs but the forward-looking poet, playwright and mayor of Venice, Riccardo Selvatico, and his circle could see the benefit of making the exhibition a regular event. This year’s edition, which continues until 22 November, is the largest ever, with 77 countries participating and with scores of associated shows.

Wednesday

22 Oct 2008
Roderick Conway-Morris

Sense and sensuality

Correggio and the Antique National Gallery and other locations in Parma, until 25 January 2009Unlike the other leading artists of the Italian High Renaissance — Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian — Correggio lived a life of provincial obscurity. Unable to find any likeness of him, Vasari was obliged in his Lives of the Artists to leave blank the portrait space in the frontispiece above Correggio’s brief and often inaccurate entry. Born Antonio Allegri in Correggio near Parma in around 1489, he spent his entire career in this out-of-the-way region on the northern plains, dying there in 1534. Yet even during his lifetime he won fame, inspiring artists for generations to come and powerfully influencing the development of the Baroque and Rococo.

Wednesday

13 Aug 2008
Roderick Conway-Morris

Lost and found

Josef Maria Auchentaller (1865-1945): A Secessionist on the Borders of the Empire Palazzo Attems-Petzenstein, Gorizia, Italy, until 30 SeptemberThe story that unfolds in this fascinating exhibition is a strange and poignant one. The Viennese-born Auchentaller was a contributor to the Munich Secession of 1892 and a key player in the Vienna Secession of 1897, two of the most important fin-de-siècle revolts against the conservatism of the artistic establishment. Along with Klimt, he was one of the editors of Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), the official voice of the Vienna Secession, and in 1901 an entire issue was devoted to Auchentaller’s work in various media. His life was long and artistically productive, but through a series of mishaps many of his works were lost.

Wednesday

7 May 2008
Roderick Conway-Morris

Brave new world

All empires eventually bite off more than they can chew. Rome and the Barbarians, the latest exhibition under the new management at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, suffers from the same syndrome. It aims to cover the entire first millennium of the Christian era by displaying more than 2,000 artefacts, from 200 collections in 23 countries, the material remains of Greeks, Romans and scores of barbarian peoples, from the Alamanni, Avars, Franks and Huns to the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals and Vikings. There are some fine things here: a number of good Roman sculptures; wonderful ivory diptychs from Aosta, Florence, Novara, Rome, Paris and Liège; exceptional silverware, including the late 4th- to early 5th-century ‘Achilles Shield’ platter (fished out of the Rhône in 1656); the magnificent first-century Hildesheim Treasure from Berlin, and the ‘Meerstadtplatte’, with its exquisite engraved and gilded roundel of a port city, from Switzerland; glittering gold cloisonné ornaments and jewellery from sites scattered across Europe; rare books, from a 6th-century Arian text ‘On the Trinity’ to an 8th-century Irish gospel.

Saturday

10 Nov 2007
Roderick Conway-Morris

Saints on the move

In August 1766, the printmakers of Augsburg brought a case of plagiarism against the Veneto publishers and printmakers Remondini. One of the witnesses they summoned was Giuseppe Fietta, an itinerant pedlar, who was then doing the rounds of Bavaria selling Remondini’s Santi, or prints of saints. They were very popular with country-folk, Fietta explained, because they were not only cheaper than other prints, but also highly coloured and even decorated with silver and gold. Fietta was one of hundreds of pedlars working for the Remondini, an extraordinarily enterprising workforce that was a cornerstone of the company’s enormous success. The Remondini family began their operation in 1657 in Bassano del Grappa on the banks of the Brenta, 40 miles north-west of Venice.

Saints on the move

Saturday

18 Aug 2007
Roderick Conway-Morris

Lessons from the East

Venice and Islam: 828–1797Gazing up at the walls of the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Doge’s Palace, at the enormous canvases depicting tumultuous scenes of colliding fleets, flashing armour and swords, flying arrows, broken spars, burning and sinking ships, and waters congested with enemy dead and dying, you could be forgiven for thinking that Venetian history was one long sea-battle, with the Serenissima fighting almost single-handed to stem the Islamic tide. And for that reason this lofty hall is a perfect setting for this exhibition, because so much of what we see in the paintings, art and artefacts on view at floor level (and in the art and architecture throughout the rest of the city) contradicts this image of permanent conflict and the irreconcilable clash of civilisations.

Lessons from the East

Saturday

4 Aug 2007
Roderick Conway-Morris

Fount of all gardens

According to an Hellenic historian, Nebuchadnezzar built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the 6th century BC to make his wife, who was from a mountainous region of Iran, feel at home. In fact, he and other rulers of Mesopotamia before him (the first such gardens were probably at Nineveh) were seeking to impress a much wider audience, and the Babylon version made it on to the list of the Seven Wonders of the World. The archeological evidence is limited, but these gardens very probably occupied a series of terraces of an enormous ziggurat that would have been visible from miles away. Stocked with exotic trees, plants and animals from the far-flung corners of the empire, given the paucity of rainfall they would have had to be irrigated with water raised from wells and the great rivers by devices such as the Archimedean Screw (which long predated the Greek scientist) and continuous chains of buckets.

Fount of all gardens

Saturday

23 Jun 2007
Roderick Conway-Morris

Sins of commission

‘They order, said I, this matter better in France.’ It is the norm at the national pavilions (a record 76 nations are present this year) for a new commissioner to be appointed for each edition, who selects the artist, or artists, to represent their country, or heads a committee that does so. A dozen years ago, France reversed this process, selecting the artist first, who then named their own commissioner.Sophie Calle, this year’s French artist, found hers by advertising in Libération (the Gallic Guardian). Her extensive floor-to-ceiling installation of texts, photographs and videos was triggered by an email from her lover announcing he was dumping her, which ended ‘Prenez soin de vous’ (Take care of yourself), now the title of the show.

Saturday

3 Mar 2007
Roderick Conway-Morris

Saint for all ages

‘His clothes are drenched in brine, his beard drips with seawater, and his brow is covered in perspiration due to his continual efforts to reach sinking ships to save them from the angry waves.’ Such is the lively picture of St Nicholas recorded by an anthologist of popular Greek calendar customs, contrasting somewhat with the venerable stasis of his painted images in Orthodox churches.Protecting sailors from shipwreck was and still is one of the saint’s primary occupations. Even today no Greek vessel would put to sea without his portrait on board. But over time he also became the patron saint of travellers in general, children, scholars, merchants, pawnbrokers, pirates, robbers, Russia and many towns and cities.

Saturday

18 Nov 2006
Roderick Conway-Morris

Fear of failure

The ‘Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, Painter, Sculptor and Architect’ of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, the only living artist to be included in this compendious work, at one time or another denied he was any of the above, except ‘Florentine’.The only formal training he ever received was as a painter. But when Julius II called on him to fresco the Sistine chapel ceiling, the self-taught sculptor claimed he was unqualified for the task, recommending Raphael. When in 1546 Paul IV sought his advice on the Vatican’s defences, we find the artist maintaining that, while he ‘knew little of sculpture or painting’, fortifications were indeed very much his occupation. This bizarre affectation of ignorance was primarily a sarcastic salvo directed at his rival consultant Antonio da Sangallo, scion of Europe’s leading military engineering dynasty.

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