Books: Rendez-vous with Art

Rendez-vous with Art is based on the simple premise that if you put together two articulate and perceptive experts on the visual arts (or perhaps any topic), give them a recording machine, a choice of backdrops and works of art, step back and leave them to their own devices, you have the ingredients for a highly readable, thought-provoking book. And that’s what has happened here.

The two participants are former museum director Philippe de Montebello and art critic Martin Gayford, author of books on Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Their aim was to create a book that is neither art history nor art criticism, but an experiment in shared appreciation.

They met over a two-year period in tapas bars and churches, as well as in some of Europe’s best-known museums and galleries, including one across the Atlantic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where de Montebello served as director for 31 years.

The Met has given him an enormous amount of experience in the management of museums. But de Montebello is at pains to point out that this is not a book about “the Met or even about museums in general, though museums, the containers, play a big part in it. The subject is more the contents, works of art.”

Irascible moments

There is an element of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson here, with Gayford sitting at the great man’s feet, listening as pearls of wisdom fall around him. Gayford is the Boswell in this relationship and often seems in awe of his Johnson.

He noticed that de Montebello, even after his retirement in 2008, continued to be given film-star treatment on his return to his former hunting ground.

At the Mauritshuis, “we wandered around the galleries for a little while before Philippe stopped before a couple of canvases by the 17th-century Dutch painter Pieter Jansz Saenredam. There he paused for a long, long time, discoursing, enthusing and just looking.”

Conversations with de Montebello are often a little one-sided but his co-author has realised it is in the spaces between de Montebello’s contributions that he can set out his own views.

I really liked this book, both for its lively content and its style. De Montebello makes an excellent guide to the works that he has selected to act as a springboard to the wide-ranging topics he wishes to discuss.

And the choices are interesting – for example, the Chimera of Arezzo in the archaeological museum in Florence, the 14th-century portrait of Jean le Bon and Georges de la Tour’s The Penitent Magdalene at the Louvre.

And nearer to home, the paintings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze at the Wallace Collection in London and the Assyrian lion hunt at the British Museum. Not for him the jostling crowds around the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or Rembrandt’s Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum; he prefers the quieter corners of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where in a murder mystery “a body could lie undetected between the cases of the porcelain collection”.

We see glimpses of his irascible side. De Montebello goes into a huff at the Mauritshuis because the museum has dared to promote,  with posters and abanners, the star of its collection, “one of the most celebrated paintings in the world”, Girl with a Pearl Earring.

“I’ve seen her image 10 times before and after entering the museum,” he says. “Now I don’t even want to see the actual painting: they’ve ruined it for me.” And there’s a cri de coeur at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris: “I hate this place.”

Tidy design

Sadly, I could find no credit for the book’s designer, who deserves praise for the neat and coherent solutions to what could so easily have been left as a series of design problems.

And then there are the illustrations – all 75 of them, all positioned in the book to allow the reader to see what it is the authors are discussing. A pity perhaps that they couldn’t have been of a more consistent quality.

Longer ago than I care to remember, on my first visit to Florence I pretentiously carried my 1945 reprint of John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence through that city. Next time, I might try Rendez-vous with Art on my Kindle.

Is it just a coincidence that the opening chapter is called An Afternoon in Florence? With de Montebello and Gayford, anything feels possible.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant