Speaker 1 (00:00): Coming up on Art Palace. Here Speaker 2 (00:03): He is taking on the challenge of himself depicting, representing an image that was essentially created divinely. Speaker 1 (00:26): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Peter Jonathan Bell, our new associate curator of European paintings, sculpture, and drawings. Speaker 3 (00:53): Today, Emily was telling me that she just saw that MoMA started a podcast and she was like, yeah, Speaker 1 (00:59): It's really similar to ours, really? And I was Speaker 2 (01:01): Like, Speaker 1 (01:02): Well, Speaker 3 (01:03): We'll, just whether it's true or not, we're just going to pretend they ripped us off and imitation's the greatest form of flattering. Greatest form of flattering. Yeah. So we'll just pretend that's the case, whether it's real or not. Speaker 2 (01:14): Well, you got there first. Speaker 3 (01:15): Yeah, I think we were doing it first, but I was like, okay. I guess the first thing I wanted to talk to you about is how did you get here? Speaker 2 (01:25): How did I get to Cincinnati? To the Cincinnati Art Museum? Speaker 3 (01:27): Yeah. I mean, you could also tell me how you got here this morning, but if that's more interesting Speaker 2 (01:34): Down Madison. No, Speaker 3 (01:36): I was thinking in the big picture. Speaker 2 (01:37): Yeah, yeah. No, well, in the big picture, I studied art history as a undergrad and really loved what I was doing and pursued it in graduate school and ended up working at the Metropolitan Museum, and then was looking to expand my area of what I was working on from a single media or a couple of media to a larger purview, and saw that Cincinnati had a job opening and that it's an amazing collection, and I jumped at the chance. Speaker 3 (02:23): So what were you doing specifically at the Met? Speaker 2 (02:27): At Met, I was responsible for European sculpture. I shared responsibility for European sculpture with one other curator, and I was mostly focused on Italian and Spanish sculpture from the 15th to the 19th century. Speaker 2 (02:47): And I also worked on ceramics from those cultures and glass a little bit, but it was mainly, it's one of the great collections of sculpture out there, and so it was sort of a full-time job just to work with that side of the collection and acquisitions and exhibitions and research and so forth. But I trained as an art historian. You train more broadly than one area, and several of my loves fall outside of that area. So it was really great to be presented with the opportunity to work across media, by which I mean with paintings, with drawings, as well as three dimensional art, and to do it at a really high level that the Cincinnati Art Museum collections represent. Speaker 3 (03:42): Yeah, I was going to ask you if that, I'm assuming you just kind of found yourself in that area at the Met, because that's what was available working on that particular area, or was that a particular passion of yours? Speaker 2 (03:54): Well, there was some serendipity to it. There was some good timing. I think there always is in such a field with such a few number of jobs. It's such a small focus just as, let's call it art history for old master art history in general. But I had been working with sculpture for a couple of years prior to that in the trade, working in a gallery researching Renaissance and Baroque sculpture, and I was developing an idea for a PhD topic, a dissertation topic that was also about sculpture. But at that very moment, then along comes an opportunity at the Met where one of their longtime curators was looking to do a catalog of the Italian bronze sculpture that he had been and sort of thinking about, but not working on and off for three or four decades. And so I was hired to help get that project started. So there was good timing, but it was also a topic that was very close to my heart and to my studies. Speaker 3 (05:10): So one of the things I was reading the City Beat article that just came out, and they do hint at the sort of something I didn't realize until I probably started here, is that curators get irritated when people misuse the word curate, that that's a little bit of a thorn in their side is how often people misuse the word curate and they kind of say in the article, well, there's so much more than we do. So I guess I am kind of curious, what is that so much more? What is the big picture that maybe people miss? Speaker 2 (05:52): Right, right. No, that was an interesting sort of angle that Maria took on that article. And I guess I was thinking about the same thing when people were talking to me about the article, and I guess I've grown a little bit immune to Speaker 2 (06:12): The sort of widening significance of that word, let's say. But her point is valid and it's flattering to have someone sort of help point that out to a larger audience. But the larger, I mean, the way I think about it is the larger significance of what we do as curators is to advocate for an area of art history. And that's generally done through an area of museum's collections. It's taking care of the patrimony of the institution of what has been collected for the last a hundred plus years in this area. And it's adding to that through acquisitions, through purchase and gift and the related areas of donor cultivation and fundraising. But it's also, of course, one of the more flashy aspects of it is organizing and presenting special exhibitions and sort of crafting the narratives around the art that you're putting on display. And that's also true in the permanent collection galleries. Speaker 2 (07:32): And that the permanent collection galleries are one of the areas in general that I feel strongest about, especially at a venerable established institution like the Cincinnati Art Museum, where we have a real responsibility to present our collections at a very high level and to make the stories that we're telling and the real genius of each of these artworks and artists really accessible and apparent to the audience. And then there's plenty of more mundane, there's administrative work. I mean, we're responsible for deciding whether or not to loan artworks from the collection to other institutions. There's a lot of work that goes around cultivating relationships outside of the museum, whether that's with educational institutions as you well know, or with other lending institutions, with other cultural institutions, both in Ohio across the country, and for my area, especially in Europe. So that can take the form of providing, helping researchers in Belgium find out what we've gathered in our files over the years about a specific painting or that can be helping the museum in San Francisco decide whether they would like to show one of our paintings in an exhibition on an artist that they're organizing. Speaker 2 (09:18): So it's really about being part of a community and being the voice for this museum within that larger global community. Speaker 3 (09:28): I just think it's a lot of people. I'm glad you went into so much detail there, because so many people really don't understand how much different parts of everyone's job really makes the museum run. Speaker 3 (09:43): And I get people asking me while I'm organizing other programs, they'll just casually go like, oh, and maybe if we could put out a painting about this at this time. I just said, well, that's not what I do. And that's kind of a big process. That's sort of a regular thing I run into is people certainly assume I have way more power than I do all the time. I don't have anything to do with that. I don't get to, I have zero say in what goes up on the walls. And then they also, I think they don't understand that those decisions are not quite as snap as maybe they might expect them to be. Speaker 2 (10:20): Yeah, that's right. I mean, I'm encountering that same issue right now, and I think we always do, but there are finite human resources to move art. Also, as you point out, if something goes up on the wall, that means something else has to come down generally, and there needs to be interpretive material labels. Maybe if it's a painting, maybe it hasn't been cleaned in 50 years, maybe it needs to be cleaned, maybe the frame. It doesn't have a frame. Maybe we need to find a frame and everything shifts. And that's a big challenge also here, a great challenge because the collection, particularly of European paintings here in Cincinnati is world renowned. And so with that renowned comes a demand that our colleagues put on us that a lot of our paintings are requested for a loan and to go to special exhibitions around the world. And when that happens, of course there's a hole on the wall, and so things have to shift and come out of storage maybe or move around. And this all requires, and then holes on the wall have to be painted and labels need to be made. But I hope you should feel like you have more power than you say you do. You should just ask if there is any opportunity with learning and interpretation to bring different things into the galleries because you never know there could be a hole on the wall someday. Speaker 3 (11:55): Yeah, that's true. I don't know. I think it's one of those also with the great power comes great responsibility. I'm like, I don't know if I want that. I'm kind of happy to just sort of like, no, you do that. You pick the stuff and I'll make up stuff to do about that stuff. I am kind of okay with that order. I'm like, I don't know. That's a lot of pressure. And like you're saying, yeah, that's another aspect of it that people don't consider too, is every time we move a work that does affect almost every department, it has a trickle down effect where even there's the people who are directly involved and physically, we don't just, again, you don't yourself walk down and just grab a painting off the wall. We have a whole process of this stuff, and we take it very seriously about how things are cataloged, and we have to make sure we know where everything is. And so there's a whole system of moving art, and then even the way that it has to get communicated around the building to everybody so that we understand that that painting is no longer on view. And when that visitor asks about that painting that we'll have to let 'em down easy. Speaker 2 (13:05): It's an ecosystem. Speaker 3 (13:07): So it does have all of those decisions have a big effect. And especially when you're talking about those major works that people do come to see, and when you're talking about loans, that's something I think a lot of people also don't realize is how there's sort of a lot of almost bargaining that goes on in that sort of loan, like, okay, we're going to let you borrow this painting. But that in turn offers us an opportunity to get some great paintings here for Speaker 2 (13:38): An exhibit. Yeah, maybe down the road. Yeah. It's about preserving and relationships in the end. But it's tricky calculus because you don't want, our audience here in Cincinnati is very dedicated and it's largely local, and you don't want someone to come looking for a painting and find it gone more than half the time that they come. So it's tricky. But in the end, hopefully being open is the best policy both to our visitors and to the people around the world that also want to see our masterpieces. Speaker 3 (14:22): Well, you were talking a lot about the collection and that you admire it, and so I was hoping we could go look at some works in the collection. Speaker 2 (14:31): Yes. Speaker 3 (14:31): If you're okay with that. Speaker 2 (14:32): I am more than okay with that. That's the best part. Do Speaker 3 (14:35): You have something I already picked out you want to look at or? Speaker 2 (14:39): Yeah. I thought we could end up looking at the Zan as the Baroque Spanish painting that I've loved since before I came here, but maybe we can sort of start in the 16th century gallery and just talk about painting a little bit generally. Speaker 3 (14:59): Sure, yeah, I'm fine with that. Okay. Alright. So right now we are in gallery 2 0 2, and you said you didn't want to start with anything necessarily specific, or are we going to, Speaker 2 (15:19): Well, I just thought that we were here. I was walking through this gallery earlier and when you brought up my sort of progress from working on sculpture to now being here in Cincinnati and with a collection that the all stars are really paintings, and I was thinking about that. So I'm standing in front of a bronze statuette group after a model by John Bologna from the late 16th century. It's a three figure group of the rape of the Sabines Roman mythological subject. But when you're working with sculpture, one of the great things is the physical presence of it, and both the tactility, but also how it exists. It really exists in space. I like to think about sculpture as an experiential art in the sense that you really have to either move yourself around it or turn the sculpture itself in order to fully experience it. And especially beginning in the Italian Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries, sculptors took real advantage of this. And this statue, this bronze statue is one of really the highest forms of that where the artist has made it so that there's no single perspective to view this from. You really have a satisfying play of forms and positive and negative space the way round from every angle that you encounter it. Speaker 3 (17:01): Yeah, that's true. I'm starting next in September, sketching tours. Speaker 2 (17:06): Oh, nice. Speaker 3 (17:07): And this would be a perfect piece for a sketching tour because of that, because every angle on this is a good, it Speaker 2 (17:12): Is a good one. Yeah. Speaker 3 (17:14): Whenever I was doing figure drawing in school, there would be a model who was really good at capturing those poses that were good from every angle. Because Speaker 2 (17:23): Wherever you're sitting, yeah, Speaker 3 (17:24): Yeah. You never want to be in that boring position where you're perfectly aligned with the side of somebody where you're getting their shoulder and they flatten out and they're sort of nothing interesting to look at. Speaker 2 (17:34): Exactly. And here John Bologna has anticipated that problem that you bring up perfectly, and everything is in torsion, and all the different planes of the bodies are ask skew to one another so that you have a satisfying experience when you go around it. But moving more generally from sculpture to speaking about painting, one of the areas that painting really supersedes sculpture, and this was a hotly debated topic in this very time period in the 16th century. One of the areas that it excels is in tricking us in the illusionistic effects that you can achieve with depicting figurative and historical subjects Speaker 3 (18:25): On Speaker 2 (18:25): Canvas. And this has various names, the Patagonia is the name for this debate in Italy in this period. But essentially starting in the 15th century especially, and moving through the Renaissance and broke periods in Europe, painters started to exploit this whole toolbox of techniques to use depiction to really play games with the viewer. Speaker 2 (19:01): And right next to the John Bologna bronze is the painting by Simon Vu, a French painter. It's about 50 years later than the sculpture was conceived in the 1620s. And Vu was active in Rome, but then moved back to France at the behest of the king. But this picture shows the toilet, it's entitled The Toilet of Venus. So it's Venus sitting on her bed and looking in a mirror with cherubs around. And this painting really has a number of these tricks going on. First of all, the two winged puti to the right are pulling back a curtain to reveal the goddess. And the trick there is that a lot of paintings from this period would've actually been covered by cloth draperies that you could then pull back to reveal the image. And here this is happening in the paint, Speaker 3 (20:09): Why would they be covered? Speaker 2 (20:11): It's a lot about staging, sort of giving the owner of the painting the ability to give its viewer this aha moment. And of course, sometimes the subject matter, this is a rather modest portrayal of a nude woman, but she's nude nonetheless, Speaker 3 (20:34): Depending on whose company you keep at that moment, you cover up your more scandalous paintings. Speaker 2 (20:40): Exactly. And we have documents of this happening and really titillating the visitors to Cardinals palaces in Rome. But with VUS painting, he's also playing on the topos, the theme of visuality in general, because Venus is looking into a mirror. So she, she's not looking at the viewer of the painting, but she's looking into the mirror and her reflection then seems to look out at us through the picture plane. So it's these sorts of tricks that really make painting sort of the queen of the arts in the Western tradition. And other types of tricks like this are just the very basic ones of a painting, being able to show two different moments in time at the same moment, the little panel attributed to Botticelli shows Judith with the head of Hall of Furs, and then in the background of sort of a battle scene, which we can presume is the Jewish people routing the Assyrian army that was led by Hall of Furs. And she has conquered the day by slaying this foe. And so this was sort of preamble to what I wanted to talk about with the zorron, although, Speaker 3 (22:04): Well, that is fascinating. Something I've never really thought about is even having, I've never thought of having a competition between painting and sculpture that there has to be a winner. Speaker 2 (22:15): Oh yeah. Speaker 3 (22:16): That's such a bizarre idea. It Speaker 2 (22:17): Was incredibly hot topic in as early as the 15th century, and particularly in the 16th century with RI weighing in and all of the great sculptors and painters in Florence writing series of public letters to one another triumphing their chosen art. And Speaker 3 (22:39): I like that that painting would be seen as the better art, because it's more deceptive too. Speaker 2 (22:44): Yeah, yeah, Speaker 3 (22:45): Exactly. It's better at lying to us, so we like it more. Speaker 2 (22:48): And we love lying. Yeah, Speaker 3 (22:49): Exactly. Speaker 2 (22:50): And visual puns. Yeah. It says a lot about the, Speaker 3 (22:56): All right, so you want to go over to the Spanish gallery? That'd be great. Speaker 2 (22:59): Yeah. Speaker 3 (23:10): Alright, so we have moved now to Gallery to six. I'm pretty sure Speaker 2 (23:18): It's the Spanish Speaker 3 (23:19): Painting Speaker 2 (23:19): Gallery. Speaker 3 (23:21): I know these numbers fairly well. It's 2 0 6. Speaker 2 (23:23): 2 0 6. Speaker 3 (23:23): Yeah. I had a moment of doubt. And then I was like, no, no, I know this. This is 2 0 6, 2 0 6. Speaker 2 (23:29): And here in Gallery 2 0 6, 1 of the largest paintings, and really one of my favorites in the collection is a painting by Francisco Deran, the Great Baroque Southern Spanish painter. And this is a complex painting in many ways. I mean, they're a series of almost life-size figures displayed across the canvas in sort of a marching order, filling up most of the picture plane. But what's going on is what's being depicted is what I really love and well, there's a lot of history to it, but essentially the man in white robes to the right is Peter Nolasco, who founded one of the mendicant orders in the 13th century. So a contemporary of some of the other great holy men of that period. But he is here shown discovering a miraculous image that was hidden, that was buried in a small town north of Valencia Puig. And he's rediscovering it where it lay underneath a bell and you see the bell tipped over in the foreground of the painting, and he's presenting it to King James, the first of Aragon, who was at this very moment in the early 13th century, busy driving out the mos, the Islamic Spanish residents of the Iberian Peninsula. Speaker 2 (25:21): And so this moment in time was considered, this discovery was a real boon to that effort. And James goes on to build a monastery and a castle on this site. So what connects us back to this whole theme, I guess, is that this image, which Zon has sort of depicted as a carving in stone, there's a gentleman kneeling at the left, is holding up this what looks like a stone tablet with an image of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child and presenting it to the king. But this was one of a group of images throughout Christian history and earlier that were considered to have been made by a divine intervention that they aren't the product of a human hand as it were. Speaker 2 (26:26): So here you have this artist zon at really at the heights of his powers in 1628 is the commission for this and 22 other paintings of this size. It would've been an astounding commission. And he's established himself as the greatest painter in Seville, one of the great cities of Spain. And here he is taking on the challenge of himself depicting, representing an image that was essentially created divinely. And doing that alongside depicting historical personages as important as the King of Aragon. And Peter Nolasco, who had just in the year of this commission, 1628, been canonized. So he's now a saint, and you can pick out a Speaker 3 (27:20): Very Speaker 2 (27:21): Thin halo above his tod head, and that will tell you who the saint is. So there's this great play of what is possible with paint. Speaker 3 (27:36): Yeah. Would've never, I'll be honest, I did not know any of this story about this piece. It's a Speaker 2 (27:42): Complicated story. Speaker 3 (27:44): So I had no idea this stone carving that he's presenting was supposed to be divine. That's so interesting. And it's also funny to me then it's like the language of the divine is looks a lot like the style of the day. Speaker 2 (28:00): Exactly. It looks Speaker 3 (28:00): A lot like a Baroque painting. Right, right. It's kind of funny that you would think maybe God would make carvings that would be a little more confusing to a human. No, Speaker 2 (28:11): That's a good point. And in some periods in history, there was a little bit more of an effort made to sort of represent an image like this maybe as a much earlier style of painting. But that's a good point that Zon is here. He's comfortable with the style of his day to depict something that was inspired by, Speaker 3 (28:35): I guess in my mind, I go to some sort of weird lovecraftian place where when somebody uncovers ancient art of the gods, it will probably drive someone mad. It's going to be, and it will be described as the geometry made no sense or something. That's how it always works in those kind of stories. So I'm just sort of like, yeah, that's kind of interesting. No, Speaker 2 (28:57): But that's a really good point. And I understand how that would come to mind. But we also have to think at this point is we're well into the counter reformation and indeed sort of communicating to the masses, the fundamental stories of Christianity are incredibly important to painters and their patrons. This painting, as I said, was one of 22, these enormous canvases commissioned for a monastery in Seville. And in that sense, they would've been 22 different episodes, the life of this recently canonized saint. And in that sense, I think that the Abbott of the monastery would've put a great premium on Z's ability to clearly communicate both the history of this saint, but also why the faith works through him and for him. So legibility was paramount. Speaker 3 (30:10): Yeah. Yeah. He does have to communicate in this painting that another image in stone. So it probably makes sense that he chose to do it in a pretty traditional way. He has to communicate that to the viewer in one image, what's going on. I mean, also looking around this gallery and in the Speaker 2 (30:31): Dutch golden Age gallery just outside, you'll see some still lives. That's another one of these great techniques that artists use to use painting to trick the eye. And that also goes back to ancient writings about painters that are able to fool you into thinking that there's a real fly on the wall or that there's a feast in front of you that you can actually eat, but it's just an image. So these are some of the things that draw me to painting, and I'm really glad to have the opportunity to have this collection of paintings be my workshop, as it were. Speaker 3 (31:16): So it sounds like so in your mind, painting has also won Speaker 2 (31:22): For now. For now, now I'm a sculpture person by training, but I'm very happy to have painting when for me today. Speaker 3 (31:33): Well, thanks for talking with me today, Peter. Speaker 2 (31:35): My pleasure, Russell. Thanks. Speaker 1 (31:44): Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking special exhibitions on view right now are a shared legacy folk art in America, William KenRidge. More sweetly play the Dance Tiffany Glass painting with color and light and Aila, kam aga. All the flowers are for me. If you'd like to come hang out with me in the galleries, sign up for Fandom The Bachelorette on July 22nd, we're going to pick a lucky lady from the collection to be our bachelorette, and then find her a suitable suitor from our gallery's eligible men who will get that final rose. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Our theme song is, I know I say this every episode, but this time I mean it. If you liked our show, please rate and review us on iTunes. It really helps others find out about us. I'm Russell eig, and this has been Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.