Month: March 2006

The British Museum has a big new Michelangelo show. But only three of the drawings in the show are universally accepted as his. This forces the viewer to see the show in an entirely different way. “Why has the museum accepted 50-year-old attributions, asks Richard Dorment.”

“Rembrandt would be remembered as an extraordinary self-portraitist if he had died young at, say, forty-five. But he lived much longer and it is the work of his old age that one most admires: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, lined, and bloated features, with the light shining from the potato nose and the thick paint: the face of a master, the face of a failure and a bankrupt. Life, and his own mismanagement of life, has bashed him but no one could say it has beaten him.”

“Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of modernism connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the face of American corporate capitalism. That certainly wasn’t the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863.”

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum will reopen in 2009, a year behind schedule so added environmental checks can be done. “Work at Holland’s biggest museum is due to start in 2007, including plans for a cycling route under the building. It shut in 2003 after an asbestos scare forced its indefinite closure.”

“Since December 2001 there has been a 66% increase in visits to museums which once charged for entry. The rise comes despite a drop in visitor numbers as a result of the July bombings in London.”