Author: xerkss

A painting that has always been attributed to a man is actually by Artemisia Gentileschi. The large oil painting, dating back to the end of 1630, depicts David triumphantly sitting on the head of Goliath. A biblical story was the favorite subject of both Artemisia and her father, Orazio Gentileschi. Today the restoration confirms the attribution to the most famous female artist of the Italian Baroque period.

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The story of the discovery: David and Goliath

David and Goliath, a painting that emerged for the first time in 1975 at a Sotheby’s auction. For decades it has been attributed to Francesco Guerrieri, an appreciated pupil of Orazio Gentileschi.

It took decades of study and research. In the end, the irrefutable evidence emerged following the cleaning of the work. In fact, the signature of Artemisia is on David’s sword.

The first doubt on the authorship of the work comes in 1996. Some years later the Hampel Fine Art Auctions in Monaco displayed it in 2018. Artemisia’s role in the history of art had meanwhile consolidated. Doubts had arisen precisely on the attribution of David with the head of Goliath.

The ocher color of David’s suit, for example. And the same central figure of David refers to the famous self-portraits of Artemisia. But behind it, there is a large number of documents that attribute to the painter more than one picture with a similar subject.

The story, in addition to being a lucky find, further relaunches the preciousness of the London opera. In addition, it highlights the uniqueness that Artemisia Gentileschi has represented in history. It is, in fact, one of the few female artists to embrace the craft of painting in the 16th century. Certainly, the most famous one that has come down to us.

David and Goliath by Artemisia Gentileschi

The proof of the attribution of the work emerged following recent restorations and cleaning interventions signed by Simon Gillespie.

Details such as David’s sleeve, the light on his face and the minimal landscape provided further evidence. The most incisive, however, is the signature along the blade of David’s sword.

Once dust and dark particles were removed, Artemisia’s signature appeared along with the numbers “16-“, probably the date of the painting.

According to the scholar Gianni Papi, the painting could even have become part of the collection of Charles I for a period, who owned several works by the Roman painter.

In the era of commitment to the great rediscoveries of art and history, the new attribution falls casually close to the Artemisia retrospective (from April 4 to July 26, 2020) that the National Gallery dedicates to it, with a wide selection of its good jobs, from the youthful phase to full maturity. According to studies, the work, dated 1693, dates back to the London period of Gentileschi.

David with the head of Goliath will not be exhibited among the approximately 30 paintings in the National Gallery exhibition, but will instead be shown in Gillespie’s London studio.

The International Women’s Day in the art world is an occasion to acknowledge the achievements of women all over the world. In the art field, women didn’t always have the due recognition. That’s why in modern times it’s fundamental to realign the gendered narration in art history, as well as validate female patronage in art history.

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Women’s great collections

Despite the attempts to build a chronicle of art that is deeply masculine, times changed, and perspectives also. It’s impossible today not to highlight the enormous impact women artists, critics, and collectors had in shaping the modern approach to art.

In particular, women played a pivotal role also in establishing and nurturing some of the greatest collections in the world. Indeed, their irrefutable contribution allows us today to access some of the most remarkable artworks of all time. Above all, the evidence of women’s advocacy in art is clear through the history of Anne of Denmark, Helen Clay Frick, Catherine de’ Medici, and Peggy Guggenheim. 

Female Patronage in Art History

Art patronage surely connects the idea of aesthetic pleasure with the concept of power. In particular, it’s not by chance that the first great collectors were Emperors and Royals. However unheard, the contribution of female patronage in art is massive. Remarkable examples date back in ancient times, starting with the Empress of Rome Livia Drusilla.

Livia Drusilla and Madame de Pompadour

As the art historian Diana E. E. Kleiner writes in her Cleopatra and Rome:

“The Empress looked to statuary to present her persona in Rome and the empire. She relieved sculpture to describe her relationship with other members of the imperial family. She used coins to advertise the emperor’s policies. Gems articulated that same vision for a more selective audience”

Diana E. E. Kleiner

Also, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour, played a key role in commissioning and collecting art by the finest artists of her time. French writers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt called her the “godmother of the rococo”. Her impact on art is consistent despite her controversial role as King Louis XV’s mistress.

Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim

A more recent example of female patronage in art is that of Gertrude Stein. The American writer hosted the avant-garde art world at her Paris salons. Also, the founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York was a woman: Edith Halpert. Russian, she moved with her family at a young age to America, developing soon a peculiar appreciation for art. Probably due to the historical background she carried (her family was Russian-Jewish immigrant), she used exhibitions as political platforms.

Peggy Guggenheim, on the other side, still is a central figure in the modern art movement. Guggenheim transformed a modest fortune in one of the greatest collections of 20th-century art.

Being on both sides of art fruition, as a collector and as an artist, she surrounded herself of such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp.

Her collection, one of the most important in modern art, is now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo.

Frank Uwe Laysiepen (Solingen, Germany, 1943), famous as Ulay, photographer and performer and professor at the University of Karlsruhe, was the undisputed pioneer of performance art, an avant-garde discipline of the seventies to which he dedicated intensely.

He passed away in Ljubljana, the city where he had lived for years and where he treated his illness.

Son of a Nazi hierarch, in the late 1960s he left his country. He renounced his German nationality to move to Amsterdam. Here he begins to approach photography, embarking on his artistic research through the use of Polaroid.

Ulay’s Seventies of performance art

Renais Sense

It is in 1974 that Ulay presents “Renais Sense” exhibition, revived by the Boers-Li Gallery in New York, in 2018. In this, through the use of polaroid and disguise. In particular, he analyzed the concept of limit, through the androgyny, such as deterritorialization of the genus.

Through “Renais Sense“, Ulay identified the process of building multiple identities in the unhinging of stereotypes. Dressed up eccentrically as a woman, he showed what he called “that feminine sensitivity that is part of my soul“, pursuing its axiom: “Aesthetics without ethics is cosmetic“.

There is a Criminal Touch to Art

“There is a Criminal Touch to Art“, in 1976, was a performance on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Ulay stole the nineteenth-century painting particularly admired by the wealthy bourgeoisie and by Adolf Hitler. “Der arme Poet” by the romantic painter Carl Spitzweg. Ulay brought it to a Turkish family in the Kreuzberg district, shifting the attention to otherness and ethnic minorities.

Ulay and Marina Abramović

In Amsterdam, he meets Marina Abramović and with her begins a creative and personal partnership that will last 12 years. The fruits of their collaboration were works such as “Imponderabilia” and “Relation in Space“.

«I went to Amsterdam, with Ulay we bought an old French police car and we traveled for five years. We lived with nothing, of performance, and for performance, in the car, turning, without having to pay rent or light, stopping in the middle of nature, taking a shower in the service stations “

Marina Abramović

Even the separation was a reason for performing. “The Lovers” is a 2500 km walk for the last look at the center of the Chinese Wall. Starting from the two extremes, Ulay from the Gobi Desert, Marina from the Yellow Sea.

The couple’s performances have always been certainly original and outside the box. Extreme forms of body art that led them to explore the limits of resistance not only physically but also psychically.

Ulay from 2010 to his death

In 2010 the great meeting of the artists after many years happened at MoMA. On the occasion of the performance “The Artist Is Present“, citing their previous very similar work, “Nightsea Crossing“, during which the two sat on the opposite sides of a table, remaining motionless.

Now Ulay is gone. But even the disease has become an opportunity for him to make art. In 2011 he left for a whole year and went from Ljubljana to New York and Amsterdam to meet his lifelong companions and friends. From this journey, which traces the most important moments of his career, was created the 2013 documentary “Project Cancer” directed by Damjan Kozole.

Ulay still remains one of the most interesting and least classifiable artists on the international art scene. He was an eclectic artist whose work deals with the intersection of photography and conceptual approaches to art in the performance and through the body.