A t the end of each month, I enjoy surveying the month’s top art-world news stories. This month, Titian, Apex, and Dolley Madison shatter auction records. Who’s Apex? Read on. And farewell to Bill Viola, who died on July 12. He was a pioneer video artist who imagined a new visual language for life, loss, love, and faith.
On July 2, only two days before Tories got a flying boot, Christie’s London sold The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, a small, early, exquisite Titian painting that for years was in an aristocratic collection in Wiltshire. It went for $22,178,000, including the buyer’s premium, on an estimate of $20 million to $30 million. Though it sold on the low end, Flight into Egypt breaks Titian’s auction record, last set in 2011 for a Sacra Conversazione sold at Sotheby’s for $16.9 million.
Titian (late 1480s–1576) painted the sublime little thing, 18 by 24 inches, in 1510 when he was working for Giovanni Bellini. A pretty Mary holds a fidgety Jesus, Joseph by their side, as they escape from King Herod’s brutal decree that all baby boys in Bethlehem be killed. Titian might still have been a teen when he did it. Color, composition, figures, and expressions are pitch-perfect. Titian wasn’t an aesthetic philosopher yet, but there’s no doubt he was a high-stepper.
It’s called the “bus-stop Titian.” The 4th Marquess of Bath bought it 1878 for Longleat House, his Wilshire pile built in the 1570s — the family has now lived there for 16 generations. The 8th Marquess sent it to the auction block this past spring. In 1995, thieves climbed through a window in the State Drawing Room, where The Rest on the Flight into Egypt hung, and off the wall and into their greedy hands it flew. Alarmed though they might have been, the local police arrived only long after the Titian had left. Seven years later, and with a £100,000 reward on offer — equivalent to about $170,000 at the time — the painting was found at a bus stop in Richmond near London. It was in a homely plaid shopping bag.
Charley Hill, the renowned art detective, found it. Hill had a hound dog’s nose for stolen art. He’d recovered Munch’s Scream and a Vermeer, both times by posing as a shady art dealer. Was the reward paid? Stiff upper lips are still sealed. No arrests were ever made. Back to Longleat the Titian went, and there it stayed, presumably with enhanced security, until this past June.
The marquess tells us the money’s going “to support our considerable long-term investment strategy at Longleat,” which might mean “replace the roof.” In 1966, Longleat opened the first drive-through safari park outside Africa. It’s now home not only to lions, tigers, and bears but to cheetahs, giraffes, rhinos, and koalas. I hope they’re celebrating with whatever tasty treats make them salivate.
The Titian’s got gold-standard provenance, with a splash of blood and more than one set of sticky fingers. It was in a distinguished Venetian collection that the Duke of Hamilton bought in its entirety in 1649. Weeks later, the duke, one of Charles I’s cronies, joined the late king among the Royal Society of Headless Grandees. An Austrian archduke owned it, Napoleon stole it, and one of J.M.W. Turner’s patrons had it before the marquess. We don’t know who bought it. Museums aren’t, as a rule, buying art by dead white men, so it’s probably a collector with discerning taste.
By the by, Charley Hill, who’s dead now, believed that the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger engineered the infamous 1991 robbery of art from Boston’s Gardner Museum. According to Hill, someone from the IRA must now be enjoying long looks at Mrs. Jack’s Rembrandt as he drinks his Guinness. I’m skeptical.
There’s a new prototype for a timeless classic. Apex, 11 feet tall and 27 feet from nose to tail, was a stegosaurus roaming northwestern Colorado around 150 million years ago. We don’t know whether Apex was a he, she, zem, per, or fae, though any misgendering would be met, I’m sure, with an indignant swipe from that spiked tail. The fossil is nearly complete. Apex was a robust adult with arthritis, indicating a nice, old age. He’s the priciest fossil ever found, pricier even than that fossil still whispering, then mumbling, then screaming “10 percent for the Big Guy,” which rings on dead ears these days. The entrepreneur and philanthropist Ken Griffin bought Apex for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s on July 17 after a bidding war. The estimate was $4 million to $6 million.
“Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America,” Griffin said. A new twist on “America First,” and good for him.
Is it art? Not strictly but, knowing little about dinosaurs and being an art historian, I look at it with aesthetics in mind. I went to see it at Sotheby’s during the preview. The thing’s a beauty, not like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, but beauty comes in infinite shapes and sizes. Apex was exhumed intact, with few bones missing. Reconstituting it was the job of fossil conservators who are closer to artist scientists than physical therapists. Sometimes undertakers have to be artists. I’d put it in a Baroque art gallery with vanitas pictures and the fattest Rubens ladies and title in The Way of All Flesh.
In a future piece, I’ll write about the unheralded revolution happening in archaeology. Technology, as it always does, continues to advance. As an example, archaeologists in Pompeii are finding new things all the time in parts of the vast site thought to have been picked clean, but picked clean in the spade-and-shovel days.
The auction houses will sell anything, but Sotheby’s, in a run of smart, inventive marketing, sold Apex during its second annual Geek Week, focuses on dinosaur bones, minerals, and objects related to space travel. Sotheby’s offers the sale in midsummer. Geeks don’t go to the Hamptons, Nantucket, or the Vineyard and certainly aren’t going to Paris for the Olympics. They’re not distracted by summer frolics.
I like the National Portrait Gallery in Washington even though it fails more often than succeeds, but we hope for the best. At Sotheby’s Americana auction on June 28, the NPG triumphed in buying for America a grand daguerreotype of Dolley Madison (1768849), for whom the term “First Lady” was invented. She was President Madison’s wife and President Jefferson’s White House hostess. In the heroics department, she’s said to have saved President Washington’s full-length portrait when the British burned the White House in 1814, though she might have ordered the hired help to save it.
In her White House, before it proved itself flammable, Dolley threw great parties, mixing people whose politics differed. After the toxic 1800 election, tempers needed to be soothed over ladles of drinkable hooch, a good card game, lively conversation, and ornamental women. She was, in her day, the hostess with the mostest. At her funeral, President Taylor eulogized her as “America’s First Lady.” The term stuck.
The photograph is considered the earliest of a wife of a president. It was probably made in 1846 by John Plumbe Jr., who owned photography studios in at least a dozen cities, including Washington. Plumbe also shot the earliest known photograph of the U.S. Capitol, also in 1846. The daguerreotype was only a few years old. In Dolley’s photo, she’s got the look of experience and bright, piercing blue eyes. It’s a quarter-plate daguerreotype at the standard size of 3.25 by 4.25-inches so, as daguerreotypes go, it’s medium-sized. It’s in its original case and decorative mat with gilt and ink detail.
The Dolley daguerreotype was estimated at $50,000 to $70,000 but rocketed to $456,000, including the buyer’s premium. It’s a shame that private collectors competed with a museum, which acquires, preserves, and interprets art for the public, but such is life. The NPG rightly has the world’s best collection of presidential images, so it needed to buy it. In 2017, in another coup, it bought the daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams made in 1843 and believed to be the earliest photograph of an American president.
Daguerreotypes are small but pack a punch because of their sharp focus, the seemingly exotic dress and hair styles of long ago, the lean and angular look of people back then, the absence of smiles, and their rarity. I’m looking forward to seeing Dolley next week when I’m in Washington.
Bill Viola (1951–2024) was one of my favorite artists, even though he made video art, which I often dislike since the art is usually bad moviemaking or an artsy documentary. He died July 12. During Viola’s 45-year career, he made art, spiritual if not religious, that’s not a motion picture but a motion painting. He used modern media production techniques such as big-scale projection, precisely calibrated sound, slow motion, dramatic lighting, and special effects. His subjects are often life and death, interpreted through water or fire. In using slow motion, he “quells the clutter,” as he said, that barrages us visually. His videos allow us to look, think, absorb, and breathe.
Many of his videos look like Old Masters, and they also have Old Master religious subjects. His narratives unfold rather than appear as snapshots. In Tristan’s Ascension, from 2005, an inert man, lying flat, seems to rise in extreme slow motion. It depicts a soul of the man — dead, white robed, and in a gray space that looks like a tomb — ascending via a reversed waterfall. The scene starts with small drips of water, then a light rain and, after that, a cascade. The lighting’s cloudy and spooky, with splashes of intense light for drama.
Tristan refers to the doomed lover in Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. The video is one of three Viola made to accompany a production of the opera, and it played during the scene of Tristan’s death at the end. He developed the project with the director Peter Sellars.
Viola’s work was often commissioned by churches, but he’s had half a dozen museum retrospectives, too. He almost always collaborated with his wife, Kira Perov. He died at 73 — too young — so I’ll miss what might have been. He was an original. R.I.P.