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Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Sacred Mysteries: John the Baptist as guide to the Ghent Altarpiece
St John the Baptist was lying face up on a table and Adam and Eve were standing beside one another. This was in the workshop at the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts where, since 2012, the Ghent Altarpiece, that stupendous work by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, has been undergoing restoration. From Tuesday to Friday until next March, you can watch the restorers at work. I saw damaged flecks exposed on the two panels of angel musicians. The whole polyptych, when its two wings are open, is 15ft wide and 11ft 6in high. It is now housed in the easternmost chapel, behind the high altar, of St Bavo's Cathedral in the old city of Ghent. I found visitors quietly contemplating it or taking photographs with their mobiles. I suspect that many were unaware that only four of the 12 panels on display with the wings open are the originals. The panels are arranged in two storeys and the upper storey (Adam, Angel Choir, the Virgin Mary, God, St John the Baptist, Angel Musicians, Eve) has been replaced with good colour photographs while the panels are away being restored. Someone at the Museum of Fine Arts regretted that the former practice of replacing absent panels with black and white photographs was not still being followed. One other panel is not original: a lower storey scene of Just Judges was stolen in 1934 and never recovered. It was replaced in 1945 by an indirect copy. Does it matter that visitors think they are seeing the full original? I'm not sure. I certainly didn't like the introductory presentation in the crypt where visitors are invited to wear virtual reality headsets. The visuals didn't give a convincing view but a 21st-century simulacrum, like something from a Lord of the Rings film. The audio was unconvincing too, speaking of the 'adoration'of saints in the Middle Ages, which is far from fair. One object in the crypt linked up with the Van Eycks' project in painting the altarpiece. It was a silver reliquary in the form of a head, enclosing a small relic from the skull of St John the Baptist. The cathedral was dedicated to this saint before it acquired the dedication to St Bavo, or Baaf in Flemish. John the Baptist is shown on two prominent panels: on the back in imitation of statuary, and on the front next to the central figure of God. To be sure, the widest panel shows the mystic scene of the Lamb of God, standing upon an altar, with blood flowing from its side. But John is the guide, as it were, who introduces the viewer to the heavenly tableau. The altarpiece was inaugurated on May 6 1432, when the son of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was baptised in the church. John is depicted not only as the baptiser but also as a citizen of heaven, flanking God, with the Virgin Mary in the place of honour on the other side. So John retains his ascetic garment of camel hair, but over it he wears a cloak of rich green hemmed with jewels. He points to God, but with his left hand holds a book open at a prophetic text that we can see includes the illuminated word Consolamini – 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God,' the words of Isaiah familiar from Handel's Messiah. Isaiah continues with words that fit John the Baptist as 'The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.' Part of the genius of the Van Eycks was to include the smallest detail without it swamping the overall images. Standing before the altarpiece behind its glass screen, it is impossible to discern every detail, which can be seen online. But I am glad I went to look at the altarpiece not virtually but in reality.
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When van Gogh Fled South, This Family Gave Him Purpose
February 1888, and it's freezing in the South of France. Vincent van Gogh had left Paris after two years of art-world hustle, deepening depressions and a worn welcome from his brother Theo, who had housed the difficult painter. He packed for the small river town of Arles, hoping, he wrote, for 'even more color and even more sun.' Instead he found a snowstorm. He painted orchards and landscapes in the cold, well into spring, staking his easel to the ground to beat the wind. But by July, 'I haven't made a centimeter's progress into people's hearts,' he complained to Theo. To get models an artist needs either money or social grace. Vincent lacked both. 'His disappointments often embittered him,' his sister Willemien wrote, 'and made him not a normal person.' That changed when at the bar he met Joseph Roulin, a postman 'with a head like that of Socrates,' he marveled in July, 'a more interesting man than many people' and a 'raging republican' who had 'almost no nose, a high forehead, bald pate, small gray eyes, high-colored full cheeks, a big beard, pepper and salt, big ears.' Roulin became a confidant, diplomat and crucial sitter. Over the next half year, van Gogh painted 26 portraits of Roulin, his wife, Augustine, and their three children. (Theo he painted only once.) You feel that outpouring at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has reunited 14 of these likenesses in the impressive and record-correcting exhibition 'Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits.' Augmented with 30 other works by van Gogh and his influences, plus archival material, the show examines the sitter relationship that most reliably allowed van Gogh to test the spiritual qualities of color and paint handling. It is the largest exhibition (outdoing a 2001 show on Joseph in New York) on an iconic but little-known family in art history. It is also a powerful redraft to the myth of van Gogh's constant solitude. He was in fact a social creature. More than any show I have seen, this one revives the centrifugal pull of people you detect in his letters. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CBS News
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Boston artist John Wilson's work now the subject of Museum of Fine Arts exhibit celebrating humanity
A late Boston artist that got his start in the Roxbury neighborhood now has his work gracing the walls of the Museum of Fine Arts as part of a new exhibition. Welcome to Roxbury: the geographic center of the city, the heart of Black Boston, and the birthplace of artist John Wilson. "His life came out of that community very deeply, and it produced this—at least for me—this magnificent representation of human beings," said Roy Wilson, John's son. Importance of family John Wilson was born in 1922, to immigrants from British Guyana. Although his career took him to many places, Including Europe and Mexico, family was always important to him. He went on to marry his wife Julie and they had three kids: Erica, Rebecca and Roy. Roy Wilson invited WBZ-TV into his childhood home in Brookline. "I just have this vision of him doing anything to protect us. And I always knew that about him - that he'd be there in the end for you - whatever it took," said Wilson. John Wilson passed away in 2015 at the age of 92, but the memories that Wilson made with his father are still very much alive. "Well - one thing is - he was upstairs working a lot. When I went to the show, it was kind of impressive… seeing all the stuff that he had been working on in his studio for so many years—to see it all in one place!" said Wilson. New MFA exhibit That place? The walls of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. One hundred and ten of his works grace the walls; paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and illustrated books—all on display in the exhibition "Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson." "The self-portrait was an incredibly important part of John Wilson's work and throughout his six-decade career, so much of his work is focused around portraits of himself, his family, and his friends," said co-curator Edward Saywell. "And a lot of that has to do with his reclaiming, the dignity and the gravitas of the portrait for Black Americans." Saywell, one of the four co-curators of the John Wilson exhibit, told WBZ-TV that as an art student, Wilson never got to see himself in art history books or exhibitions. "And when he did see representations of Black Americans, all too often he described them as caricature-like or dehumanized. And one of the threads that you see throughout the entire exhibition is incredible humanity and empathy that he imbues in all his portraits—whether it's a portrait of himself or a portrait of a family member or a friend," Saywell explained. John Wilson spent more than six decades creating artwork that challenged viewers to not just see. "The works speak to, not only key political and civil rights moments over those six decades, but they speak to what life was like in Roxbury growing up in the 1940s," Saywell said. Works displayed in Roxbury Long before Wilson's works were in the MFA, they were on display in the neighborhood that helped shape him. One of those works sits on the campus of Roxbury Community College, called: "Father and Child Reading." A 7-foot tall bronze sculpture that honors the fond memories John Wilson had of his father reading to him. "Father and Child Reading," a sculpture by John Wilson. CBS Boston "I know that he was very dedicated to the idea of being a father, in acculture, that in some ways, made it difficult to be an upstanding man," said Wilson. The other work, a very well-known piece called "The Eternal Presence", more affectionately known as "The Big Head." The monument, described by the artist himself as, "an image of universal dignity." "For him, putting it in Roxbury was as important as the piece itself. And attaching it to the ground, no pedestal, in his home community—was as important as anything else about the piece. And the fact that people come once a year to polish it and to refinish it, was completely moving to the man. It was the highest compliment he could imagine being paid," said Saywell. That piece sits on the campus of the museum of The National Center of Afro-American Arts. "My sincerest hope is that any visitor is going to see an extraordinary Boston artist who should be on the national stage and are going to come away, hopefully seeing work that speaks to them in one way or another," Saywell shared. "That we are as magical, as strong, as thoughtful, as human, as any other people on the planet," Wilson said when asked about what he wants visitors to feel leaving his father's exhibit. John Wilson's impact is also still felt by students and staff alike at Boston University, where his inspiration and instruction as a professor continues to reverberate. The exhibition at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston will be on display through June 22 – and then it will travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in September.
