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Exploring a regional museum in Sweden, Rachel Elwes was stopped in her tracks. The bold multicoloured cubist work that had caught her eye was accompanied by the label “Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (1884-1965)”, otherwise known as GAN. “Who on earth is GAN?” she thought. Elwes is no novice. An American-born curator and art historian, she has handled countless modern masterpieces since establishing the London-based dealership Ben Elwes Fine Art with her husband Ben Elwes in 2004. But GAN was unknown to her. Thus began a journey of rediscovery that Elwes says is the bedrock of their business.
At this year’s inaugural Classic Art London (June 23 to July 4), when the city’s old and modern master commercial galleries mount special exhibitions to entice collectors, a large, swirling, richly coloured cubo-futurist painting by GAN from a private collection will dominate Elwes’s display. Although in his native Sweden GAN is hailed as a pioneer of modernism, with his auction record (2017) standing at 8,915,102 Swedish krona (about €900,425), “Seglatsen” (Sail) is the first work by the artist ever to be exhibited in the UK.
The painting, with its hidden motifs of sails, anchors and rigging, was created over one week in 1918. After art school in Copenhagen, the openly gay artist had moved to Berlin, where he encountered a melting pot of influences including Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, founding members of the German expressionist Blue Rider group, who encouraged his move towards abstraction. For Elwes, GAN’s work is a rebuke to the idea that cubism can solely be understood from the perspective of Picasso and Braque’s pre-first world war experiments in Paris. Around his picture will hang works by other less known artists from parallel avant-gardes in Europe and beyond, under the title Re-Imagining Cubism.
Elwes revels in unearthing forgotten narratives. “These projects have a grip on us and our audience,” she says. They also reflect the priorities of the museums they sell to. “They say to us, ‘We want to tell stories that haven’t been told before.’”
Karen Taylor, a specialist in British drawings and watercolours, says: “I never thought of myself as a storyteller, but it has become more and more important in my profession.” Recently invited to inspect a portfolio of watercolours in the attic of a country house in the north of England, she came upon a substantial body of work by the adventurous Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837-1924), a Scottish landscape painter, explorer and mountaineer. Although Gordon-Cumming was well known in her own era, exhibiting and publishing work widely, time obliterated her from the record. Taylor has pieced together her colourful life story: the daughter of a Scottish baronet who never married but pursued a life of solo travel — to Fiji, the Yosemite Valley, India, Ceylon and Nagasaki — falling in with missionaries and the captain of a French warship along the way. “There are still connoisseurs in old master drawings, interested in technique and attribution, but fewer; so I am always looking for an angle to amplify in handling a work,” Taylor says.
Even with canonical artists, there is work to be done. Carlo Orsi, owner of Trinity Fine Art, who will show his recently rediscovered Titian, “Madonna and Child with St Mary Magdalene” (1555-1560), explains: “When I started out dealing in old masters, my job — to buy and sell things — was easy. Now it is totally different. It is today a niche market. It is not enough to find a beautiful masterpiece. You have to go out to find the client.” Orsi seeks out works that have lain hidden in private collections. The Titian spent time in an English collection, acquired in the 18th century by the Sebright family from an unnamed Milanese palazzo, and remaining in their collection at Beechwood Park until 1937. Orsi’s team have uncovered details about its creation, including the transformation of a male figure into Mary Magdalene (perhaps reworked because of a change in Titian’s intended client).
As Charles Beddington says of his own striking display of 19th-century Venetian views (with impeccable imperial provenance) depicting momentous events — such as Giuseppe Gavagnin’s painting “The Arrival of Victor Emmanuel II in Venice, November 1866” — “When you tell the history behind them, they certainly become a whole lot more interesting. People don’t buy boring pictures any more.”
Nor pots. Justin Raccanello, a specialist in Italian ceramics, is showing four large Etruscan-style vases made in the Biagio Giustiniani factory in Naples in about 1820. Though they are splendid in themselves, you appreciate their significance when you learn that two are modelled on drawings from the 1760s of William Hamilton’s collection of Etruscan pots from the excavations at Pompeii. These inspired Hamilton’s friend Josiah Wedgwood and catalysed a flow of ceramic influence between England and Naples. “When you are competing against contemporary art, the historical story is the one thing they can’t tell,” Raccanello says.
Works on paper dealer Alexander Clayton-Payne offers a note of caution. “You must be selective in storytelling. With some pictures, there is more substance to build on.” For his latest catalogue, aimed at his millennial contemporaries, he has written at length about just four pictures, including a 1838 watercolour by John Absolon titled “A Student’s Lodgings”. In 1835 a fire had broken out in a property where Absolon had been living with his father, causing great destruction. For Clayton-Payne, hearing this anecdote enables a viewer to appreciate more acutely the subtle haze of smoke from the fire in the grate that gives this picture its particular quality. “The real value lies in the act of looking,” he says.
June 23-July 4, classicartlondon.uk
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