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11/10/2010

Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals

The National Gallery, London

"Antonio Canale…astounds everyone in this city who sees his work, which is like that of Carlevarijs, but you can see the sun shining in it."
(Alessandro Marchesini, painter and adviser to collectors, July 1725)

This landmark exhibition presents the finest assembly of Venetian views by Canaletto and his 18th-century rivals to be seen in a generation. Bringing together around 50 major loans from the public and private collections of the UK, Europe and North America, Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals highlights the extraordinary variety of Venetian view painting, juxtaposing masterpieces by Canaletto with key works by artists including Luca Carlevarijs, Michele Marieschi, Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi.

Featured works span the 18th-century, from one of the first accurately datable Venetian views by Luca Carlevarijs of 1707 to the death of Francesco Guardi in 1793. The age of the veduta (view) reached its zenith around 1740, by which time the acquisition of this choice souvenir had become an important element of the Grand Tour of Italy. In the first half of the century, aristocratic travellers, led by English milordi, fuelled a vibrant and highly competitive market for Venetian view painting which saw artists jostling for commissions and fame. Together they immortalised some of the best-loved landmarks of the city including the Grand Canal, the Piazza San Marco, the Rialto, the Molo, Santa Maria della Salute and the Lagoon.

Foremost among these artists was Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto (1697–1768). Trained, like many of his rivals, as a painter of theatrical scenery, he visited Rome in 1719, which inspired him to try his hand at view painting. In the late 1720s, in response to market demand, he began to replace the moodiness of his earlier works with views bathed in warm sunshine. Within a decade, Canaletto had come to dominate the genre. The exhibition features some of Canaletto’s greatest masterpieces, including 'The Riva degli Schiavoni, looking West', about 1735 (Sir John Soane’s Museum, London), The Stonemason’s Yard, about 1725 (The National Gallery, London), and four of his finest works from the Royal Collection.

Room 1 opens with a pivotal work by Canaletto’s earliest precursor and the founding father of Italian view painting, Gaspare Vanvitelli (1652/3–1736): 'The Molo from the Bacino di San Marco', 1697 (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). Trained in the Netherlands and based mostly in Rome, Vanvitelli is thought to have visited Venice in 1695, a trip resulting in some 40 views over the following decades. Yet despite being filled with anecdotal detail, Vanvitelli’s Venice remained distinctly placid in comparison to the work of Canaletto and his contemporaries.

The immediate successor to Vanvitelli and the first view painter in Venice to depend on foreign patronage was Luca Carlevarijs (1663–1730). Important early works by Canaletto – including 'The Piazza San Marco, looking East', about 1723 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) – are displayed alongside depictions of similar locations by Carlevarijs, the artist he had already begun to eclipse.

The largest room of the exhibition celebrates the floating city’s dramatic festivals, regattas and ceremonies, a highlight being Canaletto’s 'The Molo from the Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day', about 1733–4 (Royal Collection). Here too, for the first time, Canaletto’s masterpiece, 'The Reception of the French Ambassador Jacques-Vincent Languet…', about 1727 (The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg) is displayed alongside the pioneering composition by Carlevarijs, 'The Reception of the British Ambassador Charles Montagu…', about 1707–8 (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery).

During the 1730s and 1740s the only artist to pose a real threat to Canaletto’s domination was Michele Marieschi (1710–1743), perhaps the most spontaneous of the Venetian vedutisti. Comparisons made in Room 2 demonstrate Marieschi’s characteristically broad brushstrokes and fondness for unexpected view points, a highlight being 'The Rialto Bridge from the Riva del Vin', 1740s (The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg).

At the height of Canaletto’s fame, his workshop offered the finest training a view painter could receive. Among those to benefit was his precocious nephew, Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780). By the age of 18 he could already imitate his uncle’s style with extraordinary dexterity and increasingly sought to introduce 'improving’ flourishes of his own. Having worked closely with Canaletto during his ‘cold’ period of 1738–42, an almost wintry light remained characteristic of Bellotto’s style for the rest of his career. Yet just as characteristic of Bellotto’s style were his uniquely vibrant blue skies, perhaps most dramatic in 'The Piazzetta, looking North', about 1743 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).

During the final decade of his life Canaletto had a new rival – Francesco Guardi (1712–1793) – who was to outlive him by 25 years and to provide a glorious final chapter in the history of Venetian view painting. By the 1770s Guardi was considered something of an authority on Canaletto’s work and throughout his career showed a willingness to borrow his compositions. Yet, as juxtapositions in the final section of the exhibition demonstrate, Guardi’s concerns were very different from those expressed by Canaletto.

In his promotion of nature over the works of man, Guardi anticipated the rise of romanticism in the 19th century, and crucially emphasised the fragility of Venice rather than its permanence. Out on the Lagoon, where Venice’s human element is at its most marginal, Guardi appears at his most poetic (View of the Venetian Lagoon with the Tower of Malghera, probably 1770s, The National Gallery, London). While Guardi took this composition from a drawing by Canaletto, his intense concern with mood transforms this quiet backwater into something else entirely.

'Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals' presents the finest view paintings of one of the world’s most enthralling and beautiful cities. As well as celebrating the great works of Canaletto, one of the best-loved artists in Britain, the exhibition highlights the exceptional achievements of his now less well-known rivals and associates.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue presenting the latest scholarship on the complex stylistic relationships between Canaletto, his associates and rivals – the major practitioners of Venetian view painting in the 18th century.
Charles Beddington has published and lectured widely on Canaletto and other 18th-century Italian view painters. Amanda Bradley is Assistant Curator of Pictures and Sculpture, The National Trust.

For further press information please contact Thomas Almeroth-Williams at thomas.almerothwilliams@ng-london.org.uk or 020 7747 2512.
National Gallery Press Office on 020 7747 2865 or e-mail press@ng-london.org.uk

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Modern Perspectives
Clive Head and Ben Johnson
13 October 2010 – 23 January 2011
Room 1
Admission free

This autumn, to coincide with the Sainsbury Wing exhibition Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals, the National Gallery has invited contemporary artists Clive Head and Ben Johnson to display their work in two consecutive exhibitions in Room 1. Both artists paint the city, but for very different reasons, and with very different outcomes. The displays will reveal their motivations and working processes – and their fascination with the legacy of Canaletto. In the second of these two displays, Ben Johnson will be completing one of his paintings in public.

Following the example of Canaletto, both artists combine and manipulate different views to make paintings that are completely convincing. Along with large-scale cityscapes including depictions of London landmarks Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, preparatory drawings and photographs will be shown that will demonstrate how these two artists produce such apparently realistic paintings with differing techniques and tools.
Clive Head: Modern Perspectives
13 October - 28 November 2010

Clive Head’s paintings are about space. More specifically they are about creating a credible space for the mode of being in the city. Meticulously crafted, they show all that is seen as we move around our environment.

Head is a painter who uses the camera as a tool when devising his compositions, but he rejects its static single-point perspective and creates an open and dynamic sense of space that is akin to the way we perceive the world as we move through it. A painting such as 'Haymarket', 2009, (Marlborough Fine Art, London) presents a span of nearly 300 degrees and encompasses views that are impossible to see from one single spot. Instead, as viewers we find ourselves passing through the arcade to look into the sunlight on Haymarket and into the shadows of the shop interior. Moving back we can then imagine ourselves taking a completely different direction – down Piccadilly towards the famous statue of Eros in the distance.

In Canaletto, Head finds an artist who, like himself, might have used optical devices to record the world and to bring information into the studio, but through drawing and painting he interprets this information to invent an alternative reality. Head’s painting 'Coffee at the Cottage Delight', 2010 (Marlborough Fine Art, London), presents his experience of being in a busy café in South Kensington and gives us a multitude of spaces to explore from both inside the café and out on the street. These situations are complex and full of human activity. The third painting on show, 'Leaving The Underground', 2010 (Marlborough Fine Art, London), originates in the artist’s movement up a staircase as he the leaves the fluorescent-lit passageway before stepping out into the rain at Victoria Station. Head’s treatment of the neglected peeling paint that he sees as he moves up the stairs, and the textures of the walls, ceiling and steps, recalls Canaletto’s depictions of the shabbier side of Venice. Familiar and yet unique, these paintings invite us to enter them and return time and time again.

Clive Head is an intuitive painter who builds space through an accumulation of brush marks that establish form and rhythm, and his paintings open up radical new possibilities of representation in the 21st century.
Ben Johnson: Modern Perspectives
8 December 2010 – 23 January 2011

Ben Johnson is the only contemporary artist to be made an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (1990) for his contribution to the public understanding of contemporary architecture.

For 'Modern Perspectives' Johnson is painting one of London’s most iconic locations – Trafalgar Square, looking down Whitehall to the Houses of Parliament. Over several days he took hundreds of photographs from the roof of the National Gallery. On analysing one particular view through drawing, he noticed that the underlying geometry had a striking connection with the National Gallery’s Canaletto Stonemason’s Yard. Consequently, Johnson has based his 'Looking Back to Richmond House', 2010, on the rigorous geometric composition of Canaletto’s famous painting, with the bell tower corresponding to Nelson’s Column and the workmen’s shed to the buildings around Trafalgar Square. Like his Venetian predecessor, he subtly manipulates the topography to create an ‘ideal’ view.

Johnson’s paintings are produced with a spray gun and have their own particular quality, with no brush marks. He uses a complex process to prepare each part of the canvas, employing intricate line drawings from which vinyl stencils are produced, and the painting is made from a vast palette of carefully annotated hand-mixed paint.

Johnson will also be displaying 'Zurich Panorama', 2003 (private collection) and a painting that he completed in public: 'The Liverpool Cityscape', 2008 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), his largest ever single canvas painting. The painting was completed with the help of eleven assistants, 700 colours and 22,950 stencils. This bird’s-eye view of the city takes in eight square kilometres from the docks to the countryside.

The Trafalgar Square painting will be unfinished when the display opens and will be completed in public, giving visitors an insight into the artist’s working methods. For Johnson, this public manifestation of a normally private activity will be a literally ‘vital’ part of the process. He hopes that, as in Liverpool, it will serve as a demonstration that the work is a product of the imagination realised through craft. Johnson’s cityscapes constitute not only a celebration of the topography of the city but also a re-presentation of the familiar in an unfamiliar way which returns the viewer to the present and the actual.

Neither artist considers himself a ‘photo-realist’. For Clive Head, photography documents his experience and brings visual data to his studio. For Ben Johnson, photography is but one small stage of the process. Johnson’s city views are dream views devoid of people and traffic while Head’s depict the goings-on of everyday life. Both artists will demonstrate how the subject of cityscape is still being embraced by modern artists who are responding both to the contemporary world and to the Old Masters in the National Gallery’s collection.

For press information please contact Eloise Maxwell at eloise.maxwell@ng-london.org.uk / 020 7747 2420

Open to public
Clive Head: Modern Perspectives, 13 October – 28 November 2010
Ben Johnson: Modern Perspectives, 8 December 2010 – 23 January 2011


Press view: 12 October 2010 (10.30am–1.30pm)

The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
Open to public:
Daily 10am–6pm, Friday until 9pm
Last admission 5.15pm (8.15pm Friday)
Admission:
Enter by the Sainsbury Wing Entrance
Full price £12
Senior/Concession/Disabled visitors £11
Carers FREE
Job seeker/Student/Art Fund £6
Family (2 adults and ≤4 children) £24
Under 12s FREE

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