by Jon Lackman | 15 April 2009 | Books
The Times of London excerpts a new book, The Lost Mona Lisa:
Picasso and poet Appollinaire were prime suspects when Leonardo da Vinci’s best known painting was stolen from the Louvre … In the seven years from 1905 to 1911, the genesis story of modern art was being written. Pablo Picasso was its genius; Guillaume Apollinaire was its impresario. A flamboyant poet and cultural provocateur, Apollinaire enunciated the modernist creed, adopting the Marquis de Sade’s maxim, “In art, one has to kill one’s father”. Urging the destruction of all museums “because they paralyse the imagination”, he championed Picasso “as a young god who wants to remake the world”. Apollinaire and the artist were leaders of a group loosely known as la bande de Picasso. Familiar from Montmartre to Manhattan as the “Wild Men of Paris”, Picasso’s gang of painters and poets were the outlaws of traditional art. Young, brilliant and ruthlessly ambitious, they strutted through the cobblestone streets of Montmartre and filled the cheap cafes, defining themselves as well as a new creative idiom, breaking the rules to free art from art history … Seizing the Mona Lisa was an insolent act in what Apollinaire called “the endless quarrel between Order and Adventure”. It was a declaration of independence … Painter and poet were so nervous that in their confusion and desperation to assert their own innocence, truth and friendship were forgotten. They contradicted themselves and each other … Both men wept and begged for forgiveness and freedom.
by Jon Lackman | 15 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Dave Hickey’s indispensable essay collection The Invisible Dragon is finally back in print. From the press release:
The Invisible Dragon, originally published in 1993, is often regarded as art critic Dave Hickey’s seminal work. Hailed by artists, the book made a forceful case for beauty in a time when the notion was completely dismissed by theory-obsessed critics. In four influential essays that amounted to a manifesto, Hickey assailed the hyper-institutionalism that in his view drowned out the real pleasures that attract people to art. Long out of print and difficult to find, this beloved little book is now back in a revised and expanded edition. A new introduction provides a context for what Hickey now calls his “intellectual temper tantrums”; and a new essay, “American Beauty,” concludes the volume with a stirring tribute to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.
by Jon Lackman | 14 April 2009 | Africa, Americas, Conferences
Later this week the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art turns 20:
The 2009 Porter Colloquium presents new research, new interpretations, and new subjectivities that inform scholarly practice and promote fresh ways of thinking and writing about African American art and other art in the African Diaspora. This year’s theme, Trajectories … The trajectories that are being explored in Porter Colloquium sessions this year include demographics, the movement of people and ideas over large parts of the world and particularly their immigration to the United States and to major art centers around the world … Over the last three decades the production, the presentation, the reception of African American art has expanded virtually exponentially. African American art, like the art of the contemporary world, has responded to modernist, to postmodernist issues and has reflected the changes in technologies, more extensive contact and collaboration across ethnic, cultural and continental boundaries … This year we are pleased to honor the pioneering achievements of scholar Sharon Patton, former executive director, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and art historian Judith Wilson … Admission to all sessions is free and open to the general public.
by Jon Lackman | 14 April 2009 | Books
We recently discovered the annual Bookfinder.com Report, which exists to “track demand trends for a wide range of out-print titles.” Examining the last report, in the category of “Arts and Music,” the third-most-searched-for book was a work of art history, Paul Smith’s Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1720. Last we searched, the cheapest available copy on Amazon.com cost $338.67. Ironically, the book’s 1995 Library Journal review doubted it would appeal widely: “Because much of the book concentrates on fairly narrow interpretive issues, however, it will be of primary interest to scholars and students of the period.”
by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times:
David W. Scott, an artist and art historian who served as founding director of the National Museum of American Art, played a key role in expanding the National Gallery of Art and shepherded the Corcoran Gallery of Art through a difficult time after a controversial exhibit, died of multiple organ failure March 30 at a hospice in Austin, Texas. He was 92.
Scott joined the Smithsonian Institution’s staff in 1963 as assistant director of what was then known as the National Collection of Fine Arts after teaching art history at Scripps College in Claremont. At the time, the National Collection was such a staid, conservative institution that he was warned he would lose his job if he didn’t take down abstract works from the walls of his own home — works he had painted.
Sophy Burnham, author of “The Art Crowd” (1973), a muckraking inquiry into the New York and Washington art worlds, wrote that Scott discovered that the National Collection included only two pictures painted after World War II. One was of a U.S. Navy vessel that remained because the staff worried that its removal would be construed as destruction of government property.
“Scott determined to build the NCFA into a museum of consequence,” Burnham wrote. “He wanted it to be the equivalent of the Whitney or the Tate — vital, vibrant, fashionable, discussed, a force in the art world” …
by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Tate Britain has reconstructed William Blake’s famously unheralded 1809 exhibition (it attracted only one review and no sales). Laura Cumming in the Observer is struck by Blake’s aesthetic:
Here are the streaming bodies – word made flesh – the long robes, loose hair, thunderclaps and starbursts. Here are the weightless figures in their graphic torsions: an uprush of souls, Satan, arms outstretched like a diva, Cain trying to rip his forehead in two. The symmetry is staggering: the soldiers casting lots for Christ’s cloak with the crucifix behind them like a bolt of lightning, the angels’ wing tips forming the apex of a triangle above the body of Christ, rigid and flat as a tomb.
Shape-shifters, skydivers, ectoplasms, wraiths, their every tendon revealed beneath transparent robes and skin: each figure is a figment of outline and wash that lives only on the page.
See also the Times, El Pais, and previews from the Independent, Times and Telegraph.
by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Books, Theory
A second edition has just been published of Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, which first appeared in 1998. The new edition compensates for its slightly slimmer profile with more densely packed type. The price has risen from $18.95 (in 1998) to $27.95. The sections on “Modernity and its Discontents” and “The Gendered Subject” have disappeared. In their place, we find a new section on “Authorship and Identity” and an expanded section on “Globalization and its Discontents” (formerly titled “The Other: Art History and/as Museology”).
Several authors have been added: Vasari, D.N. Rodowick, William Pietz, David Summers, Claire Farago, Stephen Bann, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Jennifer Doyle, Walter Benjamin, Satya P. Mohanty, Marquard Smith, and María Fernández. Several others have been dropped: Margaret Iversen, Louis Marin, Rosalind Krauss, Andreas Huyssen, Nanette Solomon, Lisa Tickner, Paul Smith, Annie E. Coombes, and Nestor García Canclini, as well as Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” (Also, new texts have been chosen for Erwin Panofsky, Craig Owens, Amelia Jones, and Mary Kelly.) Incidentally, three of the new texts come from the 2006 volume A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 edited by Amelia Jones.
The whole comes with a new introduction and conclusion by Preziosi, in which he writes:
As with the first edition, this is not a ‘history of art history’ nor a historiography of ‘visual culture studies’; rather, it is a critical interrogation of the artifice itself of those histories … Working as a historian, critic, or museologist of artistry in the contemporary world demands increasingly explicit attention to the ethical dimension of one’s practice and its inescapable political and economic resonances … The field’s coy scientism has long been coeval with its coy spiritualism.
by Jon Lackman | 10 April 2009 | Uncategorized
(Belated) News from a sister discipline:
Unlike almost all other academic groups, the American Philosophical Association, headquartered at the University of Delaware in Newark, holds three meetings a year, one each for its Eastern, Central and Pacific Divisions … The Eastern Division meeting is by far the largest, taking place every December between Christmas and New Year’s in a major eastern city. Known in the profession simply as “APA,” it draws about 2,500 attendees each year – 2,200 in this recession year – and serves as the profession’s chief hiring fair …
To be sure, the panel on “Philosophical Perspectives on Female Sexuality” was not your grandpa’s APA. Indiana University’s Elizabeth Lloyd, in her paper on “Analyzing Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Orgasm,” crisply outlined how male assumptions ludicrously distort “Darwinian” explanations of this explosive adaptation.
And the University of South Florida’s Rebecca Kukla – a professor of obstetrics and gynecology as well as philosophy – offered a brilliant analytic comparison, in her “Depression, Infertility and Erectile Dysfunction: The Invisibility of Female Sexuality in Medicine,” of male-directed ads for Viagra and ads aimed at female sexual dysfunction, demonstrating the ongoing belief that female sexuality, unlike male, cannot be located in a specific body part.
At the same time, as at all APAs, major philosophers jousted and expounded. Following a memorial session for Richard Rorty, an American philosopher who broke free of the field into wider public recognition, Princeton’s Cornel West, the noted African American thinker who has done the same, asked how others might do so.
One answer unlikely to satisfy West could be found at the book exhibits, where 40 publishers displayed wares.
Dominating the stand of Open Court, a philosophy press, were volumes in its best-selling, much-imitated series “Popular Culture and Philosophy,” whose constantly appearing new titles include The Matrix and Philosophy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy – all collections of essays by philosophy profs on the import of their pop-cultural subjects.
“Our all-time best seller,” confided David Ramsay Steele, the house’s top editor, “is The Simpsons and Philosophy – more than 500,000 copies sold.”
by Jon Lackman | 9 April 2009 | Awards
Down from six last year, two art historians this year won Guggenheims:
Francesca Fiorani, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Virginia: Leonardo da Vinci’s shadows.
Jaime Lara, Associate Professor of Christian Art and Architecture, Yale Institute of Sacred Music: Flying Francis: a new iconography in the Andes.
This year a total of 180 were awarded, down slightly from 190 last year.
by Jon Lackman | 9 April 2009 | Africa, Books
We belatedly take note of a post by Gary Schwartz:
… a research institute in Paris and Houston, Texas, known as The Image of the Black in Western Art … was put in place by the oil millionaire Dominique de Menil (1908-97), a formidable figure in 20th-century patronage of minority politics as well as art. Her own explanation of her motivation she put into words thus:
The decision in 1960 to launch a systematic investigation of the iconography of blacks in Occidental art did not proceed from any clear plan. It was an impulse prompted by an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954. Many works of art contradicted segregation. A sketch by a master could reveal a depth of humanity beyond any social condition, race or color. So why not assemble these art works in an exhibition or a book? With such a naïve approach, a serious enterprise was started.
…By 1984, the enterprise had published or contracted three of the four monumental studies it planned to bring out: 1: From the Pharaohs to the fall of the Roman Empire (1976), 2: From the Early Christian age to the “Age of Discovery” (1979) and 4: From the American Revolution to World War I (1989). But there was a life-size gap where volume 3 should be, covering the not insignificant period from about 1500 to 1800 …
At a small meeting in Amsterdam on June 26th [2008], Jean Michel Massing of the University of Cambridge said that he would be handing in the manuscript of a large book on the subject at the end of the year, a manuscript however that does not really meet the description of vol. 3. A book of studies, I assume, rather than a survey. He added in less concrete terms that the classical vol. 3 was also in the works … being undertaken under the auspices of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, which is intending also to republish also the already-printed volumes. David Bindman, retired professor of art history at University College, London, is acting as general editor.
by Jon Lackman | 8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Thomas W. Gaehtgens notes that Willibald Sauerländer’s 85th birthday was recently celebrated in Munich and Princeton, which held a two-day conference in his honor. Sauerländer recently lectured on David’s painting of Marat.
Oskar Bätschmann remembers art historian Hans A. Lüthy, who died recently. Once the director of the Schweizerischen Instituts für Kunstwissenschaft, Lüthy published on Géricault, Ferdinand Hodler, and other artists.
Horst Bredekamp has won yet another award, the Richard Hamann Prize.
by Jon Lackman | 8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Here at The Art History Newsletter, we’re contemplating making more changes. You asked for the ability to post comments — done. What else would you like to see? What other blogs (academic or otherwise) do you enjoy and wish this one more resembled? And what do you think of these ideas?: We could give anyone the ability to post newsletter items. We could also give people the ability to share their art-historical works-in-progress and receive feedback. Would anyone? Would you?
Some have asked for images on the blog. Alas, we don’t yet see how to do that legally without spending lots of time and money securing permissions. Is there a way? Some have also asked to be notified by email of new posts. We haven’t yet found free or low-cost software that does that well, though you can set up your own free alerts or RSS feed. We could perhaps also send automatic updates to Facebook and/or Twitter.
Let us know what you think by adding your comments to this post. And if you’re interested in becoming a regular or occasional contributor to the Newsletter, email us.
I appreciate that you mention the sources for your quotes, but I would prefer more specifics – can you make footnotes or include the page references when you cite a book or an article? I would love to turn right to the source that you mention in your posts. In my own art history blog (www.albertis-window.blogspot.com), I have found footnotes to be a great academic resource.
Could you be a little more critical or engage more with what you quote? I like the site but I would like to see you guys take up positions with respect to the things you post. This might elicit more comments as well. It would be great to read more opinions.
this is just a suggestion about aesthetics but it would be nice if Art History Newsletter used space more liberally. there’s more dead space than content (again, just visually)which is wasteful. a blog focused on art should be more visually stimulating.
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by Jon Lackman | 7 April 2009 | Books
From the recently published book Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks, edited by Daniel Esterman:
Barcelona, 21 July 1927
… I know that after 1000 monographs have exhausted a million details, their blurred image will make a fine picture for the few people who are taken by such things. May they be taken by other things.
The professional habit becomes so strong that vanity is reinforced each moment by the simple success of its preoccupations. The humility of unpaid, unsung scholarship is a foolish tale: I am overwhelmed by the libraries of the world which surely contain 10,000,000 monographs—& the books, stores & quais, & the pages rotting in warehouses—which no search for proposed truth or man’s happiness designed, but the professional practice of printing, broadcasting personal details. What businessman has the circulation of a poor thesis? the discussion, the review, the endless citation & recollection of his existence in footnotes & polemics? These may have happy results—give us telephones or a more just view of man’s character. But disinterestedness is not their prime distinction …
by Jon Lackman | 6 April 2009 | Books, Theory
In the March 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Elisa de Halleux reviews Georges Didi-Huberman’s new essay collection L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels:
Didi-Huberman takes representations of the body and the flesh as a means to dwell on the spectator’s intimate relationship with the image, and to describe the nature of that relationship … the image “opens” in the same way that our sensibility, our hearts, our flesh sometimes “expand” in the presence of an image that moves us: “Images open and close like our bodies as we look at them” … Concepts are used, above all, for their ability to make us think above and beyond historical exactitude … Didi-Huberman’s approach to art is not strictly historical, but his thinking is nonetheless fruitful for the discipline of art history … His discussion of the power of Christian art, in a chapter on exegesis and visuality in Christianity, is certainly one of the best in a book which occasionally, it must be said, seems to push abstruseness to its limits. That is not the least of the paradoxes of his work, which, dealing as it does with the theme of incarnation, becomes, through its verbal virtuosity, at times almost disembodied.
by Jon Lackman | 3 April 2009 | Asia, Books
In the March/April ’09 ArtAsiaPacific, Don J. Cohn reviews three recent books:
… Melissa Chiu, museum director at Asia Society in New York, and the author/editor of several catalogs for exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art (herein Chicona, AAP’s, not Chiu’s, neologism), has written a brief, intimidatingly titled book that offers an elementary “paint by the numbers” introduction … According to Chiu’s Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know, the 7 things you should know are: 1. Chicona began decades ago; 2. Chicona “is more diverse than you might think”; 3. Museums and galleries in China and abroad have promoted Chicona since the 1990s; Government censorship influences Chinese artists; 5. The Chinese artist diaspora has returned home; 6. Chicona museums in China are on the rise; 7. The world is collecting Chicona. And here, courtesy of ArtAsiaPacific, are 7 things you don’t want to know about Chicona: 1. Much Chicona is overpriced by any standards; 2. Chinese culture tolerates emulation, appropriation and imitation in the arts to a degree unacceptable in the West; 3. It is unacknowledged that most Chicona is indebted to 20th-century Western art (Duchamp, Kaprow, Cage, Paik, Acconci, Beuys, Nauman); 4. Some major Chinese artists are burnt out and copy themselves to meet market demand; 5. Chicona (by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Zhu Yu, Liu Jin) incorporating human fetal corpses and cruelty to animals does not demonstrate freedom of expression in China but rather a barbaric and unscrupulous legal system; 6. China’s arts infrastructure remains immature, arbitrary, bureaucratic, venal; 7. Much of Chicona is 21st-century chinoiserie, valued by buyer and seller alike as an “exotic” Asian culture imitating a “higher” Western civilization. These critical issues, skirted entirely in 7 Things and highly diluted somewhere in the prolixity of [Karen Smith’s] Nine Lives, are discussed in Richard Vine’s New China, New Art, a superb, controlled, survey of a vast, writhing subject … the finest introduction to Chinese avant-garde art since the 1970s.
Check this out: http://www.thenewgrandtour.com – we’re also doing this show below in HK.
JOSE PARLA: READING THROUGH SEEING, NEW WORKS
Ooi Botos Gallery is pleased to announce Reading through Seeing, an exhibition by contemporary artist Jose Parla, on view 14 May through 11 July 2009. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and will showcase new paintings, works on paper, photographs and ceramic works.
The exhibition will take place during Art HK 09 and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by scholars Alexandra Chang of New York University — Asia Pacific Center and critical theorist and art historian Michael Betancourt.
Jose Parla’s new works are inspired by his recent travels in France, Japan and the United Kingdom. Parla’s unique and playful inscriptions and diary-like gestures with his trademark hand–writing recall his personal observations of how the idiosyncratic behavior of anonymous individuals on those distant streets distinctly impact each geographical environment.
The complexity of José Parla’s mixed media paintings is based on the layering of images and paraphernalia collected from his daily encounters at home and his adventures abroad, interpreted through his dynamic gestural process. Interleaved through each work is Parla’s calligraphic script, which infuses each piece with vibrancy, energy and meaning.
Memories, thoughts, ideas, quotes, phrases, conversations and observations scrawled in Parla’s instantly recognizable, flowing script reflect his characteristic fusion of writing and painting, word and image. His brushwork depicts walls in the city, or in rural areas outside of urban centers, while his mélange of imagery and words hint at stories within stories, an evocation of the places that have deeply affected him.
The story-telling nature of Jose Parla’s work is mesmerizing. At first glance, his paintings are reminiscent of an abandoned street alley, but as one’s eyes linger, one realizes the density and complexity of overflowing imagery. Parla’s innate gift of capturing both the chaos and the tranquility of the city has moved countless viewers.
About Jose Parla
Jose Parla is a New-York based artist whose paintings reflect the way in which cities function as palimpsests. Born in Miami, Parla traveled in the Caribbean, South America, Asia and Europe in the 1990s before settling permanently in New York.
His work has been collected and exhibited by Agnes B. Galerie Du Jour in Paris and Takashi Murakami’s Kai Kai Ki Ki gallery in Tokyo. Major recent exhibitions include, The New Grand Tour showing in Hong Kong and Beijing (2007-08), Adaptation / Translation at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London (2008), and Layered Days with Cristina Grajales’ Soho gallery in New York City (2008).
About Ooi Botos Gallery
Ooi Botos is Hong Kong’s leading avant-garde gallery specializing in photography, digital media, video and installation. In fact, the Jose Parla exhibition marks a departure from Ooi Botos’ customary program, with Parla being the only painter represented by the gallery. Ooi Botos is dedicated to exposing the public to art forms rarely seen in Hong Kong to raise the level of discourse about art in Asia.
Ooi Botos is located at 5 Gresson Street, Wanchai, Hong Kong.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Friday 11.30 A.M. – 3 P.M. and 6 P.M. – 8 P.M., Saturday 11 A.M. – 6 P.M.
Tel. +852 2527 9733
by Jon Lackman | 2 April 2009 | Theory
In the Jan/Feb ‘09 Architectural Design, guest editor Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi writes on and interviews Yves Michaud:
In 2003, Yves Michaud wrote a book that met with considerable success in France. In L’art à l’état gazeux. Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique he claims that it is now almost impossible to identify a demaracation line between the examples of high art on display in museums and supported by large cultural institutions, and the various products with strong aesthetic impacts produced by advertising and fashion … Art leaves its defined domain and extends itself in a gaseous manner or like an aesthetic vapour that colours or tints other domains and other practices: fashion, design, politics, entrepreneurship, humanitarianism, the environment … “I don’t say that art is dead, but that a certain form of art, the modern form, is dead … fetishism of works, an avant-garde position of the artist, formal preoccupations in the artist or in the spectator, a great seriousness in the aesthetic attitude. All this has been replaced by other things: hedonism, spectacle, and emotions.”
by Jon Lackman | 1 April 2009 | Books
Also in the February 2009 Burlington Magazine, Richard Ormond reviews Diana Donald’s Picturing Animals in Britain:
Diana Donald has written a challenging and densely argued book … to bring animals “centre stage in historical research,” and establish the boundaries of a new discipline. She is an evangelist of her subject and of the animal kingdom to which she wishes to give a voice. She challenges what she calls the dialectic of “anthropocentrism” and exposes the contradictions and dichotomies that have led animals to be admired and cherished on the one hand, and abused and decimated on the other … Picturing Animals in Britain is a pioneering and polemical book. It presents the case for animal painting, often under-valued or ignored by art historians, and it establishes the intellectual foundations for its study. If occasionally the polemic overtakes the art, it is because of the author’s passion for her subject and for the rights of the animals themselves.
by Jon Lackman | 31 March 2009 | Books
In the February 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Xander van Eck considers recent publications from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum on their Dutch collections:
Both catalogues are excellent academic publications … The surprisingly different approaches to the two publications make one wonder what kind of information belongs in a catalogue: simply the facts and an informed opinion about them, or the entire history of what scholars have ever said about a work of art? [Met curator] Walter Liedtke … has clearly chosen the latter option … [whereas the Amsterdam] entries present what has become known about [the paintings], with the effect that one gets the idea that, instead of a host of experts, it is the paintings themselves that are speaking to us … The Metropolitan Museum has done more than its duty, and the art-historical community must be grateful that the most beautiful collection of Dutch paintings in the Western hemisphere has been made fully accessible. But it is the Rijksmuseum catalogue, with its matter-of-fact approach, its splendidly edited text and the visual pleasure it provides, that sets the standard for the future.
by Jon Lackman | 30 March 2009 | Conservation, Renaissance
Milan’s Brera Gallery has completed its restoration of Raphael’s The Wedding of the Virgin, according to Reuters:
The painting’s surface had darkened considerably in the 150 years since the last major restoration. It also underwent small repairs in 1958 after a visitor attacked it with a hammer, injuring the Virgin’s stomach and elbow … The restoration took about a year and also involved non-invasive techniques such as X-ray and radiography, but did not remove any of the painting for testing … Details and updates were posted on the Brera’s website.
by Jon Lackman | 30 March 2009 | Asia
The most recent issue of Artibus Asiae (2008) contains a long, thoughtful appreciation by Helmut Brinker of the recently deceased Asian art scholar Dietrich Seckel. It also contains an obituary of scholar/curator/collector Stuart Cary Welch written by artist/collector Howard Hodgkin:
Stuart Cary Welch was undoubtedly the most important expert in the field of Moghul painting; he was also an old wicked, whose vanity and greed for works of art were almost insatiable. He inspired several generations of scholars and collectors through his teaching … He curated marvellous, eye-opening shows and, if he preferred to borrow from his own collections, hidden under pet family names, well, at least the owner was willing to lend … He was not so much a scholar-gypsy as a scholar-pirate … [Once] I was about to bid [at auction] when one of Cary’s large, pink hands held my right hand down. I was so shocked that I could not use my left hand. Naturally, he bought the painting … He was a great teacher, as I said, but not one to enjoy others’ successes. “Whenever I hear that one of my pupils has published something,” he told me, “I feel that one of my limbs has been cut off.” He could be very generous, however, as several museums can attest … Privately, too, he longed to share his enjoyment of art … [Once he] opened a leather travelling case that had been made to fit an Iznik plate and gave it to me to hold. It was one of the very best in terms of design, drawing, and colour. He had an amazing eye. We shall not see his like again.
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