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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons A time to create
By Nigel Ryan
An expensively printed invitation, delivered in a specially produced envelope bearing a detail from a painting by John Waterhouse. And beneath the painting, on the thick ivory paper, a by now inevitable misspelling -- Greations of European Art.
The invitation is to an exhibition of European painting, mostly 19th century, at Horizon 1. It is the Ministry of Culture's flag-ship exhibition space. Once the slightly forbidding barred turnstile gates are negotiated, you enter an expensively impressive gallery that since opening has hosted some memorable exhibitions, including a marvellously sepulchural showing of Egypt's holdings of Fayoum portraits and, more recently, the exquisitely chosen From Impressionism to Modernism, a French-curated sprint through the most significant developments in early 20th century art.
Greations of European Art, though, is a Ministry of Culture curated show. It brings together some of the state's collection of European painting, though the absence of any information in this flagship gallery about this expensively promoted show means that the provenance of individual paintings is anyone's guess.
Quite who made the selection included here is a mystery. Quite why these particular pictures were chosen is equally mysterious. There are one or two interesting pieces, a beautiful, exemplary late Corot, a luminous Monticelli, an unfinished Boucher that came as a surprise -- it has certainly not been on public show for as long as anyone I have spoken to can remember. There is, too, a wonderful small Bonnington, an early 19th century English landscape sketchily completed in oils.
Interspersing these paintings is an eclectic selection of the third rate -- anonymous Dutch landscapes, once-fashionable post-Fauve scenes of Cairo and other places, five decades too late, a couple of lithographs and, almost surreally, two eccentric neoclassical scenes constructed from mosaic, strange little craft-pieces that look as if they were made from some pre-packaged hobby-kit. Not surprisingly, the person responsible for these is Unknown.
There is a Guardi, rushed out for a tourist with a pronounced taste for the picaresque. It is, perhaps, a distant view of Venice: Is that the campanile over the mud-flats? An untidy corner of the lagoon, with a collapsed wooden fence in the foreground, and the kind of trees you find in Poussin, it is far less picture postcardy than the larger Campo, on the opposite wall, a much more conventional view of the Grand Canal.
Prosper Merilhat, Old Cairo: Surely it is time for the Ministry of Culture to provide a catalogue of its art holdings?
What information is provided in this show is often inaccurate. For no obvious reason Guardi -- the name appears in large capitals on a plaque attached to the bottom of the gilded frame, becomes Van Gowardy in the (mis)information panel provided just next to the frame. Similarly Jean Pillement -- spelled out correctly on the frame -- becomes Balmain Gan on the panel. Daubigny's striking portrayal of the banks of the Oise, perfect daubs of green and blue beneath a steely metal sky is, the attached panel insists, a depiction of "Elwaz's rivers shore".
All the landscapes, together with Waterhouse's imaginative depiction of ancient Rome emblazoned on the envelope -- ladies with parasols in a pastiche of antique dress, passing the time promenading up and down the Spanish Steps -- are described as "natural views", while one of the most strikingly modern images in the exhibition, a lively gouache of the Venice Carnaval that abstracts the rhythms of the crowd in to a complex frenzy of overlain colour, is attributed to the late 1600s.
Beyond such inaccuracies no information is provided. The Boucher -- a large, oval painting of a picnicking couple in a landscape, empty flagons in the foreground -- is unfinished, though no one bothers to point this out. The nationality of the artist is not provided. Dates are only given when they are there for all to see anyway, next to the signature of the painter. Otherwise, these paintings might as well have been produced in a vacuum.
Like so much of the Ministry of Culture's current activity, Creations of European Art is a triumph of form over content. A total absence of curatorial vision, a total absence of any research, of any attempt to contextualise this hodge-podge of mis-matched paintings, is proudly trumpeted in the misspelt invitation as if it were an important event. It is, though, but one more missed opportunity.
It is not written in tablets of stone that things be so incompetantly managed. Surely it is within the Ministry of Culture's ability to once and for all provide a catalogue of its holdings of European painting. The collections from which these paintings originate themselves constitute an important historical resource. Could not a tiny fraction of the Ministry's budget be allocated to properly cataloguing them? The publication produced to accompany The Orientalists, the opening show at The Palace of Art -- a gallery conversion that reputedly cost LE17 million -- would have been laughable in its inaccuracy were it not for the fact that nobody seemed to notice or to care. The show opened, the television cameras as well as everyone who is anyone was there -- and every single artists' name was spelt backwards.
In PR terms shows like Greations and its ilk are an unmitigated disaster. But while the employment of a proof reader might help in avoiding some of the most embarrassing howlers it will require the determined acquisition of some curatorial expertise, as well as a sea-change in exhibition policy, before such disasters can be weeded out. Yet weeded out they must be if the large public exhibition spaces are to become places that people want to visit, and if the ministry itself is to retain credibility. Insulting the audience has never been a particularly promising gambit. For institutions that purport to provide a public service, to do so is unforgiveable.
