More patriarch than dictator

Burchard makes the insightful observation that Charles Le Brun’s
designs function as frontispieces to the places and monuments that celebrate Louis XIV’s reign. This idea is supported by the artist’s reuse of an allegorical composition for a lost painted portrait of the king in an engraved frontispiece to a philosophical treatise

Charles Le Brun—the subject of Wolf Burchard’s beautifully presented book—had the rare combination of skill and social grace required to succeed in the faction-ridden, bureaucratic climate of Louis XIV’s court. He worked for the king nearly half his life, entering Louis XIV’s service in 1661 at the age of 42 and working for him until he died at 71 in 1690. His preeminent position among the Sun King’s artists is evident from the many offices that he held: he was the king’s premier peintre; chancellor, rector and later director of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; and director of the Gobelins manufactory where paintings, tapestries and furniture were made for the royal palaces. With three decades of service to the crown, Le Brun’s indelible mark on the history of art is most evident at Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, where his grand, ebullient style is found everywhere in paintings that he made and the many objects and images produced after his designs by others.

Those of us who study the art of ancien régime France, especially that produced for aristocrats before the 1789 revolution, face the burden of reconciling a fascinating, beautiful world with its terrible politics. For some, this task proved to be impossible. The British art historian, Anthony Blunt, equated Charles Le Brun’s leading role in the design and production of Louis XIV’s palaces, gardens, monuments and all that they contained with the top-down tyrannical structure of absolutist government, branding him “a dictator of the arts in France”. Blunt’s statement provides the opening gambit for the introduction to Burchard’s book, The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV, about one of France’s most celebrated, if maligned, artists, whose contemporary influence and posthumous legacy he seeks to redefine through the concept of sovereignty.

The author presents Le Brun as a benevolent (albeit ferociously ambitious) sovereign of the arts. In Early Modern Europe sovereign power was thought, at best, to be a form of non-arbitrary authority, whereby a ruler governed as a father to the people by a strict moral code, for the greater good. Le Brun, Burchard argues, was not a tyrannical dictator, but __more a patriarch among the community of artists who served the Sun King; his control was not arbitrary, but based on mutual respect between him and the artists and artisans he supervised.

Revealing how Le Brun’s authority conforms to the contemporary political structures of Louis XIV’s France, this study is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature re-evaluating the artist’s oeuvre. (The catalogue for the impressive Le Brun exhibition staged at Louvre-Lens in 2016 being foremost among these.) Indeed, Burchard’s book comes at an exciting time for the study of 17th- and 18th-century French art, with scholars today providing nuanced and sympathetic accounts of the period, moving past the political and theoretical burdens of previous generations.

Le Brun is, perhaps, best remembered for two things: his ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles that narrates events from the life of Louis XIV, and his lectures on physiognomy and the expression of the passions, neither of which feature prominently in this book. The latter was the subject of Jennifer Montagu’s work, The Expression of the Passions (1994), the only serious monographic study on the artist to be published in English until now. And while it would have been interesting for Burchard to bring his considerable insight into Le Brun’s oeuvre to an analysis of his cycle for the Hall of Mirrors, it would be impossible to cover all that the artist designed, and advised on, throughout his career in one book. This study concentrates on the lesser-known aspects of his oeuvre, particularly his designs for decorative arts and architecture, while synthesising the __more comprehensive French and German literature for an anglophone audience.

Six chapters guide the reader through Le Brun’s sphere of influence, from the works executed by his own hand, to a multitude of objects made under his supervision that can be attributed through the repetition of motifs that he designed when other evidence is lacking. The most fascinating works discussed in this study no longer exist, or were never fully realised: a celebrated equestrian portrait of Louis XIV; an obelisk fountain for the precinct of the Louvre’s east facade; an unfinished commission for 93 Savonnerie carpets for the Louvre; and the celebrated Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles. The last chapter devoted to the staircase draws together Burchard’s insightful analyses of the diverse painted, built and woven monuments to Louis XIV’s reign to reassemble the fragments of Le Brun’s designs and influence into more complete account of his practice.

Burchard’s most fascinating insight, however, is his analogy between Le Brun’s designs and frontispieces for Early Modern books. The analogy is structural as much as symbolic: the lost equestrian portrait of Louis XIV reappears in a frontispiece for a philosophical treatise; Le Brun’s designs for the facade and fountain for the Louvre function as a frontispiece to the palace; the Savonnerie carpet for the Salon Carré serves as a frontispiece for the grande galerie of the Louvre; the Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles “was a three-dimensional frontispiece advertising the grandeur of the spaces that lay behind”. The frontispiece to a book refers to both its subject and its author in images and inscriptions, just as Le Brun’s designs both celebrate his patron and simultaneously reveal his authorship. This insightful analogy forms a thread that not only connects the chapters of this book, but provides a coherent characterisation of the artist’s approach to representing Louis XIV across media.

• Robert Wellington is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University in Canberra. His research focuses on the material and intellectual culture of Louis XIV’s court. His book Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV was published by Ashgate (2015)

The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV
Wolf Burchard
Paul Holberton Publishing, 288pp, £40 (hb)

Vito Acconci, Body Art trailblazer, poet and architect, has died, aged 77

The US artist and architect Vito Acconci, known for his radical conceptual works such as Seedbed (1972), has died age 77. The Bronx-born artist turned poet and architect, who is considered a Body Art trailblazer, arguably paved the way for a later generation of artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy.

Acconci received his BA with a major in literature from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1962. After publishing a magazine called 0 to 9 from 1967 to 1969, he turned to photography, documenting passers-by that he followed on the street for the work Following Piece (1969). The work explores “his body’s occupancy of public space through the execution of preconceived actions or activities”, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which owns photographs from the series. For Seedbed, he spent hours masturbating beneath a ramp at the Sonnabend gallery in New York while whispering aloud his fantasies about visitors.

Vito Acconci, Step Piece (1970). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

From the late 1970s, he began making experimental sculptures, furniture and public art pieces, including Birth of the Car/Birth of the Boat (1988) located in Pittsburgh, Name Calling Chair (1990) and Flying Floors at Philadelphia International Airport which was unveiled in 1988. The same year, he established his own architecture practice, Acconci Studio, which is based in Brooklyn.

Last year, MoMA PS1 in New York presented a survey of Acconci’s works of the 1960s and 1970s, exploring the artist’s early poetry, sound and video pieces. The show—Vito Acconci: Where we are now (Who are we anyway?) 1976—included the Super 8 film Shadow Play (1970) in which Acconci shadowboxed in front of a blinding light, and the film Openings (1970) which showed the artist pulling out his body hair. Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, told The New York Times last year: “He’s challenging our limits about what we want to be private and what we want to be public, and those questions have only become __more important.”

Installation view of Vito Acconci's show at MoMA PS1. PS1, 2016. Image courtesy of Acconci Studio and MoMA PS1. Photo by Pete Deevakul.

Acconci talked to The Art Newspaper in 2002 when he reflected on his early career. The artist said: “After college, I went to a writing school at the University of Iowa. After that, I came back to New York in 1964 and that was the first time I realised art galleries existed. That was when I saw a Jasper Johns painting for the first time… Jasper Johns was the big influence, the notion of how to make abstraction possible using convention first, use a flag, use a number 5, as long as you have that you can make any impression you like, as long as you have the given. It so shaped the way I thought, it made me recognise conventions, that there’s no such thing as ‘creation’ just organisation and re-organisation, dis-organisation.”

Asked whether he thought he should subsequently make art, he said:  “I thought I had no desire to make art. But I realised when I was writing I was using the page as something to travel over and that if I was so interested in moving across this space I should move over a floor, over a street, a ground. But also by 1967, phrases like ‘conceptual art’ were first being used. If conceptual art hadn’t been around there wouldn’t have been any place for me. Entrance is only possible at certain times and in certain contexts. I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t build but once someone said conceptual art I thought maybe I can do that, I have ideas, there’s a place for me.”

Tate Modern, Hepworth Wakefield and John Soane's museum shortlisted for Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award

The Art Fund’s Museum of the Year shortlist has been announced with the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham; the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, Newmarket; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London; Tate Modern, London; and the Hepworth Wakefield nominated for the £100,000 prize. For the first time, the other shortlisted museums will also receive £10,000 each.
 
The winning museum will be announced 5 July at the British Museum in London. The judging panel includes high-profile names from the culture sector such as Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum; Munira Mirza, former deputy mayor of London for education and culture; and the artist Richard Deacon. Jo Whiley, the BBC Radio 2 DJ and presenter, is also on the panel.
 

Tate Modern's Herzog & de Meuron-designed Switch House extension opened in June (Photo: © Marc Atkins)

Tate Modern opened its Herzog & de Meuron-designed Switch House extension last June, drawing 143,000 visitors in its first three days. Meanwhile, Hepworth Wakefield launched an ambitious programme last year to mark its fifth anniversary, with shows dedicated to Martin Parr and Stanley Spencer, as well as hosting the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Last autumn, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London completed a seven-year, £7m project to reinstate its founder’s original design.
 

The Sir John Soane’s Museum in London completed a seven-year project to reinstate its founder’s original design (Photo: © Marc Atkins)

The least well known nominees include the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, described by The Art Fund as a “cultural hub in the heart of Newmarket which combines the history, science, art and culture of horseracing with the finest examples of British sporting art, together with an opportunity for visitors to meet former racehorses in the restored stables and newly-built arena.” 

The Lapworth Museum of Geology, part of the University of Birmingham, is another underdog. It reopened last June after a £2.7m redevelopment and is commended for bringing to life __more than 250,000 objects, ranging from fossils to volcanic rocks.

• 
  A young visitor gets to grips with a sabre-toothed skull at the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham (Photo: © Marc Atkins)
• 
  Finding the next George Stubbs: life painting with a twist at the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art in Newmarket (Photo: © Marc Atkins)

The Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar, says: “Whether unveiling new buildings, galleries, displays or public programmes, all the finalists have shown a real commitment to innovation and experimentation, offering fresh perspectives and news ways of seeing and understanding their collections.” Last year's winner was the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

Pictures Generation artist confronts ‘alternative facts’ at MoMA

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Janelle Monáe celebrates the MCA Chicago

The musician and actress Janelle Monáe—who had a supporting role in this year’s Best Picture Academy Awards winner, Moonlight (and starred in category contender, Hidden Figures)—will help the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago) celebrate its 50th birthday this June. Monáe is due to perform at the museum’s MCA ArtEdge: 50 gala on Saturday, 3 June, which gives a sneak peek of the exhibition Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg (6 June-24 September), featuring sculptures, monumental paintings and illustrations from across the Japanese artist’s career. Pharrell Williams, the musician turned contemporary art collaborator, who has worked with Murakami, handpicked Monáe for the evening’s musical lineup. (And yes—octopus will be on the dinner menu.)

Fondation Louis Vuitton offers a snapshot of contemporary African art