Carlo Crivelli and the Peculiar Fate of a Long-Distance Runner by William Davie
At the beginning of the year Berlin’s Das Verborgene Museum quietly announced it was closing.
Its mission statement, boldly declared in its name which translates as The Hidden Museum, was an important and increasingly unforgiving one: to cast a fresh eye on overlooked or forgotten female artists from Germany’s recent past. Initially, during the late 80s and 90s, focus was given to photographers. However, since then, the museum’s scope widened to include other mediums.
Arguably the most high-profile victory for the museum was the subtly electrifying painter Lotte Laserstein. She began studying at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1921, two years after it began allowing women to attend and was taught by Erich Wolfsfeld. She quickly rose to become one of his most promising pupils and in the 10-year period following her graduation with a master’s degree in 1927, her reputation steadily grew. Attesting to this is an article that appeared in the German newspaper Das Berliner Tageblatt in 1930, that announced: “Lotte Laserstein – this is a name to watch. The artist is one of the very best of the young generation of painters, her glittering path to success will be one to follow!” But life under the Nazi regime was becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous for her.
In 1933 she was declared a “three-quarter Jew.” She was therefore unable to be admitted to the Reichskulturkammer, the Reich Chamber of Culture, which was established in order to control cultural life in Germany by creating and promoting Aryan art consistent with Nazi ideals. This forced her to close the private art school that she had opened and meant that she was denied membership in the professional art organizations that sponsored exhibitions throughout Germany.
In 1937 an opportunity to escape presented itself with an invitation to exhibit at the Galerie Moderne in Stockholm, Sweden. She took it and fled with a collection of her paintings. Once there, a hastily arranged marriage allowed her to gain citizenship and remain in Sweden indefinitely. She then tried to save her mother Meta, her younger sister Käte, and her sister’s partner Rose Ollendorf, from persecution but ultimately couldn’t.
Ollendorf was deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland on October 18, 1941. Though there is no record of her death surfacing despite attempts by Laserstein to try and find out what happened in the aftermath of the war, it is presumed that she died. Meta was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin on July 27, 1942, and died at Ravensbrück concentration camp on January 16, 1943. Käte was scheduled to be taken with the 31st deportation transport from Berlin to Auschwitz on March 1, 1943, but went into hiding.
She survived, and reunited with Laserstein in Stockholm in 1946, where she remained until 1954 when she returned to Berlin. When she did, Laserstein moved to Kalmar. She was dogged by personal and artistic crises, and later recalled that despite the move to Sweden saving her life, it also “broke my life in two pieces.” She earned a living through sporadic portrait commissions and continued to toil away at her own practise. But because she was so far removed from the burgeoning post-war artistic epicentre in New York, and her painting style was in stark opposition to the prevailing trends, particularly abstract expressionism and then pop art, her reputation quickly faded into obscurity.
A swansong came in 1987 when Thomas Agnew & Sons and the Belgrave Gallery staged a joint exhibition in London of the paintings that remained in her collection, including, at almost seven-feet-long, the monumentally scaled masterpiece Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam) (1930).
It shows five youthful figures on a roof terrace, two men, three women, and a dozing dog, sitting at and milling around a table after a luncheon party. They are all drenched in the soft, dying light of the late afternoon as the skyline of Potsdam appears like a cresting wave behind them and high above on the horizon darkening clouds cluster ominously.
It is characterized by Laserstein’s signature limited pallet of earthy yellows, greens and browns that are prominent throughout her oeuvre. Yet the rich range of feeling she tenderly evokes through such economy is utterly beguiling. We sense from Laserstein’s considered choreography for each figure that this shared moment between them is pivotal. The staging has drawn comparison as a “secular echo of Da Vinci's The Last Supper.” The woman sat at the centre of the table wearing a daffodil-yellow dress plays the part of Christ while the man and woman that each sit and stand on either side of her play the part of the apostles. Yet Laserstein is enigmatic as to what the glue-like undercurrent that’s binding them together in this moment might entail.
In viewing the painting retrospectively as we are, it seems impossible not to imbue it with a sombre air of anxiousness and pensiveness. This is informed by the transition from day to night in which they are caught, but vividly shaped and coloured by our knowledge of the tragic circumstances we know their lives, and Laserstein’s, will soon take.
The exhibition was successful in helping re-establish Laserstein’s reputation, providing a final uplift in the years before her death in 1993 aged 94. But it wasn’t until a further 10 years later in 2003 when Das Verborgene Museum staged a retrospective at the Ephraim Palais in Berlin, that Laserstein’s artistic legacy received the push it needed.
The exhibition followed several years of painstaking work tracing Laserstein’s paintings and conducting research for an in-depth monograph Lotte Laserstein: My Only Reality, written by Anna-Carola Krausse. While the significance of this taking place not in London or Stockholm or some other city, but in Berlin provided a homecoming that in spirit fulfilled her early promise as she no doubt would have done under different circumstances.
This time, Laserstein began receiving the critical attention and recognition she deserved and had agonizingly missed out on during her lifetime. A slew of subsequent exhibitions throughout Europe’s most prestigious museums continued to elevate her reputation to new heights and showcased her considerable talents to wider international audiences. Then, in 2010, came the crowning achievement of their success. The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin acquired Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam) and placed it proudly at the entrance to a new permanent exhibition of 20th-century art.
Marion Beckers, the long-time chief curator of the Das Verborgene Museum, said, “Lotte Laserstein is the prime example—with her everything worked as we envisaged. She has now entered the canon.”
But as the closing of the Das Verborgene Museum illustrates, and echoed in Beckers’ sentiments, this is not the way such an undertaking normally plays out. In fact, it rarely does. But this does not stop people trying.
A peculiar case in point is Carlo Crivelli, a generationally revered yet maligned renaissance painter. An artist whose artistic legacy has been imprisoned in a long-distance run, threatening to crossover into the cannon fully but never quite being able to do so. Recently, and not for the first time, a flurry of re-evaluation and promotion, including a critically lauded exhibition Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2015, has situated Crivelli at a similar juncture to the one Laserstein was in after her 1987 joint exhibition at Thomas Agnew & Sons and the Belgrave Gallery.
Now, a searing if too-short survey-cum-entrée Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky at Birmingham’s Ikon gallery aims to further champion Crivelli by presenting an unusual and bold approach in advocating for his repositioning within the cannon: to show him in a contemporaneous light rather than a historical one. It illuminates him as an anachronistic artist, an outlier in his time, who in retrospect can be seen tackling what would become concerns of modern and contemporary painting 500 years after his death. Something that is refreshingly successful but not without its pitfalls.
To do this, the crux of the exhibition focuses on why Crivelli has been both maligned through the centuries as well as attracting fierce champions like Ikon’s director Jonathan Watkins; his approach to image making. It’s unorthodox in that it’s hard to pin down neatly. It’s why he was omitted from Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 book, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which heavily informed the architecture of what came to be the cannon of 15th century Italian art for Western scholars for centuries to come.
Unlike his peers Crivelli liberally packed his paintings with his influences. He flaunts his diverse mastery of styles with little attempt to remain within the given aesthetic confines of the time. Through his exacting attention to detail, we spy the rising demand for naturalism and linear perspective, glimpses of the revival of classicism, and Crivelli’s battle against the declining fashion for Gothic gold. All of which is underscored by an ostentatious, decorative opulence and a heavy-handed form of trompe-l'œil. A style that Crivelli is exceedingly well versed, and that provides the fuel for Crivelli’s reassessment.
Carlo Crivelli -Saint Mary Magdalene (c. 1491–1494), Tempera on lime, 37.5 x 18.5 cm, © The National Gallery, London. NG907.2.
In the first painting we see, for example, the first of two small panels Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene (c.1491), it’s what makes it appear as if Mary Magdalene really is about to step out from the crumbling enclave that she’s in and into our world to hand us the ointment with which she anointed Jesus’s feet after confessing her carnal sins.
Carlo Crivelli -Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c. 1491–1494) Tempera on lime, 38 x 19 cm, © The National Gallery, London. NG907.1.
But for Crivelli, this is nothing. In the sister panel, showing Catherine of Alexandria, seen later on in the exhibition, Crivelli paints a very realistic fly on the wall behind her. Its presence, both distracting and intriguing quickly steals focus before we suddenly understand why. It’s not to scale, for Catherine of Alexandria, at least. But it is for us, and in adding it, Crivelli primes us with the potential to be unwitting performers in a way that is, given how we understand the development of art through the last century, undeniably conceptual.
In her catalogue essay, Anna Degler recounts art historians Paul Barolsky and Daniel Arasse independently attesting to feeling “stupid” for trying to shoo a fly away when viewing Virgin with Child (c.1480) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Of course, the fly was in fact painted by Crivelli. It’s “an illusion to destroy an illusion,” writes Watkins in a 1998 essay Untricking the Eye: The Uncomfortable legacy of Carlo Crivelli, that was the germ for this exhibition. When we see it, it's akin to an actor breaking the fourth wall, a device that will forever root it in the present as long as someone is looking at it.
Every work in Shadows on the Sky illustrates this to some degree. But by not weighing the works down with more superfluous historical information and interpretations than is needed, the white cube gallery, an arena best known for 20th century art rather than Old Masters, allows Crivelli’s painterly idiosyncrasies the freedom to take on a new lease of life and to flourish. It also shows that Watkins and the exhibition’s co-curator Amanda Hilliam are acutely aware that it’s these visual elements that are going to pique the interest of today’s audiences rather than the well-trodden academic approach which, in Crivelli’s case, has victimized him. Although they are careful not to dismiss this.
Accompanying the exhibition is a stupendous catalogue that provides a wide gamut of scholarly interpretation about the works as well as offering insightful insights into understanding Crivelli through the centuries. But what really makes it stand out are two republished essays, one of which is Watkins’, that champion Crivelli from less-academic standpoints, that adds an endearing, impassioned spirit to the scholarly nature of it.
Carlo Crivelli -The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele (c. 1489) Egg and oil on poplar, 141 x 87 cm, © The National Gallery, London. NG668.
Another fantastic example of Crivelli’s masterful use of trompe-l'œil is seen in The Vision of The Blessed Gabriele (c.1489), where fruit, another recurring motif primed by Crivelli, is used to explore the interplay between various states of reality. Here, the garland of fruit that hangs across the top of the work casting shadows onto the sky acts as a framing device within the picture. But because the shadows are cast onto the sky, Crivelli makes us painfully aware that what we are seeing is a representation of the sky rather than the sky itself. Below, in the same reality as the sky we see a Franciscan friar, said to be Gabriele Ferretti, who has suddenly been brought to his knees in a rocky landscape. He has removed his clogs, his hands are clasped together wantonly in devotion, his hood pulled back and his head tilted upward with eyes fixed on the sky above him, his mouth agape. Above him, in exquisitely delicate detail, a golden almond-shaped mandorla forms a halo around the apparition of the Virgin and Child held up by red and gold cherubs. Rendered with a more subdued trompe-l'œil, this further complicates our understanding of the layers of representation we can see by adding another layer to it. It’s an illusion to destroy an illusion inside an illusion that destroys that illusion, all of which redirects us to and underscores the muscular scope of his innate painterly talents in a wickedly teasing and highly engaging way.
Watkins likens it to Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1929), in which Magritte paints a picture of a pipe with “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” or “This is not a pipe” written underneath it, denying the possibility of one being confused with the other. In making this link, we immediately comprehend just how sophisticated Crivelli’s understanding of the relationship between art and what it represents. Simultaneously, Watkins’ association capitalizes on the sterile emptiness of the white cube gallery and encourages our mind’s eye to establish more links to contemporary artists. For example, Duane Hanson’s hyperrealistic life-size sculptures of figures that we might expect to see in the given environment. A cleaning lady pushing a rubbish bin lined with cleaning supplies, for example, in Queenie II (1988), that changes our entire perception of how the area is activated when we find out it’s not actually a real person. Or to the cinematic yet generic parallel worlds that we can walk through and experience physically but never fully inhabit in Mike Nelson’s architectural installation The Coral Reef (2000). Even if only momentarily and as seemingly farfetched as they may feel to us, these links do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms unshackling Crivelli from his time.
Installation view, Carlo Crivelli, Shadows on the Sky (2021). Copyright Ikon Gallery. Photographer, Stuart Whipps
However, where this begins to come undone is with the inclusion of two works by Susan Collis standing in for two paintings that didn’t arrive in time for the opening. They are tucked away at the far end of the exhibition behind a partition wall, and come as a surprise, changing the tone of the room entirely. One is an installation, comprising a dustsheet, paint-spattered blue overalls, and a paint-spattered broom, that appears as if the workers have just stepped out for lunch and left their equipment. On closer inspection we realize that the paint-spatters on the overalls are in fact hand-embroidered and that the paint marks on the broom are precious gems and metals inlaid into the wood. The second is a crack seen going from the ceiling to the floor to one side of the partition wall opposite her installation. Collis drew it in just two strokes “with a steady hand and eye that might have impressed Crivelli himself,” opined Jonathan Jones in his review.
While this will likely incur harsh criticism from traditionalists it does pay homage to the other impassioned essay by Audrey Flack, On Carlo Crivelli, originally published in 1981.
Flack, whose artistic career steered the genre of photorealism to prominence, and who has two works on show elsewhere in the building in a concurrent presentation, begins by taking umbrage with the former director of the National Gallery in London, Martin Davies, and the narrowmindedness of institutionally imposed hierarchies at large. Davies had written a catalogue on Crivelli, the only one she was able to find at the time after she came across one of Crivell’s pietas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and instantly become “incurably attracted” to his work.
She accuses Davies of singing the praises of those already immortalized renaissance artists while unfairly, and begrudgingly denouncing Crivelli’s talents. She quotes his opening lines as evidence of this narrowmindedness: “The painter Carlo Crivelli was not one of the greatest artists. His work forms a backwater not contributing to the mainstreams of Italian Renaissance or other European painting.”
She then decries Bernard Berenson whose 1894 book Venetian Painters of the Renaissance helped further solidify the established architecture of the Western cannon for further generations to come, after he failed to include Crivelli as well. Berenson did later apologize for this. Although he caveated it with: “a formula that would, without distorting our entire view of Italian art in the fifteenth century, do full justice to a painter such as Carlo Crivelli does not exist.” Berenson, it’s interesting to note, was the one who persuaded Isabella Stewart Gardner to buy the first Crivelli to enter America.
Why do we even need a formula, demands Flack, if it so mercilessly inhibits such artistic voices from being heard. “It is the original artist, the one who breaks the rules, the eccentric, the maverick, who should be more carefully considered,” she continues, “and not cast aside because he or she does not fit into the mainstream of a movement.”
Collis’ inclusion, it can be argued, is the public eschewing of this formula. But in person, Collis’ work is detracting from Crivelli’s because there are only nine Crivelli paintings in total, which for the most part, are very small. Collis’s works are designed specifically for this type of space, their presence is completely different. As soon as we encounter them, we become very aware that Crivelli’s were not. They were designed for darkened, often religious rooms. Suddenly, the vast emptiness of the white walls is seen suffocating Crivelli’s smaller paintings, while the allure they conjured together just moments before is also now suddenly, glaringly, fragile.
Collis’ inclusion is further brought into question by a fascinating catalogue essay by Stacey Sell. In it, she examines the exponential growth and renewed interest in Crivelli’s work during the Victorian period which, she explains, neatly coincides with Edward Burne-Jones’ formative years. She cites his magnum opus King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) as an example of this. We wonder then, would Burne-Jones, who was born in Birmingham, not have been a more profitable fit?
Carlo Crivelli -The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486), Egg and oil on canvas, 207 x 146.7 cm, © The National Gallery, London. NG739.
Nevertheless, the strongest, most compelling argument for Crivelli’s repositioning is seen in The Annunciation with Saint Emidius (1486). Originally painted as an altarpiece towards the end of his life, it sees the fruits of his wide-ranging painterly dexterity and the sly complexity of his conceptual framework synthesize in a vainglorious masterpiece equal to Laserstein’s Abend über Potsdam (Evening over Potsdam) (1930).
From the very first glance, Crivelli is hard at work without us fully realizing it. The picture is split into two vertical halves in which Crivelli further frames and reframes pictures within pictures through the geometry of the architecture. This is most notable with the Virgin Mary’s house seen in the lower right half. To us, her house is seen like a cross-section. Through a doorway on the ground floor, we see her kneeling at a prayer desk receiving the Holy Spirit. The room is flanked by a pair of Corinthian pilasters, creating an altarpiece within an altarpiece. The left half of the painting employs linear perspective along which a narrow street runs perpendicular to her house. Unusually for a painting at this time, the perspective has its point not in the centre but in the left half of the painting. The narrow street leads to a triumphal arch on top of which a papal messenger and a city official are seen meeting, while a carrier pigeon in a cage next to them appears to have just delivered a message. Beyond this we see figures meeting in a courtyard with a small barred window which also unusually gives the perspective point a visible ending rather than appearing to go on indefinitely suggesting God’s infinity as perspective, as usually employed.
But we are not drawn to the annunciation as we are in almost all other works that depict the annunciation. Instead, we are drawn to the splendid opulence of the architecture of Ascoli Piceno in the Marche region of Italy where Crivelli has set it. This is where he is able to most visibly display his painterly prowess, and he takes full advantage of it. In rendering the city so spectacularly, and adorning every surface of the Virgin Mary’s house as well as the triumphal arch in intricately patterned motifs and friezes in gold and silver and brilliant bronzed terracotta, Crivelli steals focus for himself.
But Crivelli also knows when to stop and when to consolidate. In a cunning use of opposites, Crivelli further amplifies the rich ornamentation seen in the right half by rendering the architecture of the buildings seen on either side of the narrow street in the left half, in plain pale-yellow bricks. To stop the painting from coming across as unbalanced, and a true testament to Crivelli’s artistic eye, the annunciation, seen in the form of a thin golden beam of light that cuts diagonally across the painting from top left to bottom right, against the perspective, is co-opted by Crivelli to quietly anchor the picture as a cohesive whole.
Continuing to steal focus away from the annunciation, along the bottom, Crivelli twice employs trompe-l'œil. The first is where the narrow street meets the ground line that the Virgin Mary’s house is on. Here Crivelli paints a long stone that looks as if it juts out slightly beyond the house and drops down to the bottom of the picture plane, acting like a stage set. Across it are two inscriptions that read “libertas” and “ecclesiastica,” flanked by three coats of arms: the pope’s, the town’s, and the town bishop’s. The second are two pieces of fruit, an apple and a gourd. The former is a symbol of Adam and Eve’s fall from the grace of God which facilitated the necessity for Christ to be born to the Virgin Mary and to then die on the cross for our sins. While the latter symbolizes the promise of Christ’s resurrection and redemption. However, Crivelli recalibrates these interpretations by arming them as Crivelli devices. The gourd is seen hanging slightly over the edge of the stone, casting shadows both on the face with inscriptions which extends into our reality and onto tiles of the narrow street, the reality where the annunciation takes place.
The inscriptions “Libertas” and “ecclesiastica” reference Pope Sixtus IV granting Ascoli Piceno the right to self-govern, free from direct papal rule in 1482, the news of which according to contemporary accounts, reached Ascoli on 25 March, the feast day of the Annunciation. Thereafter, the already sacred day also assumed a central importance in the civic culture of the city. Crivelli was then commissioned by the Observant Franciscan convent of the Annunziata in Ascoli to paint an altarpiece of the Annunciation celebrating the occasion merging the two stories which he does with great enterprise.
Typically, paintings of the annunciation show the Archangel Gabriel to the left of the Virgin Mary as she receives the Holy Spirit. Crivelli does this, painting the Archangel Gabriel on the narrow street outside of her house greeting her through a barred window only he’s not alone. He’s with the city’s patron saint, Emidius, who offers her a model of the city in order to secure her as its protector. In another subtle twist that aims to reorder the hierarchy between the annunciation and the city gaining freedom from papal rule, the heavenly beam of light, which passes through a dove above the Virgin Mary’s head, representing the Holy Spirit, is echoed by the carrier pigeon seen on the triumphal arch.
As these twists reveal themselves slowly and sumptuously, we become increasingly aware of just how radically different Crivelli’s annunciation is. Yet, in the blink of an eye, we are snapped back to our reality after coming across other Crivelli devices, Anatolian carpets or a peacock’s tail, for example. Suddenly we’re taking in the painting as a whole again, utterly seduced by Crivelli’s craftsmanship.
Sadly however, Crivelli is now likely to be overshadowed by the National Gallery’s exhibition Raphael, the first exhibition outside of Italy to examine his entire oeuvre which runs concurrently. This also brings to light the fact that although Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice and Shadows on the Sky both received national critical acclaim and took place in major cities, Boston and Birmingham, it is not enough. It will take a significant exhibition in London at the National Gallery or an equivalent venue to ensure that Crivelli’s place in the canon is corrected.
Nevertheless, the audacious attempt to situate Crivelli beyond the quiet corners of academic scholarship that he’s usually confined to has been largely successful. For now, the catalogue and a forthcoming monograph on Crivelli by Hilliam, will have to suffice until Crivelli’s turn at the Ephraim Palais comes. A question of when not if.
Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky at Ikon Gallery, UK, 23 February — 29 May 2022, ikon-gallery.org