5. Curator of the XXI century | Interview with Julien Domercq. Part 1

An in-depth interview a renowned art curator Julien Domercq. We discuss multiple of his recent shows, major exhibitions, current trends in the art world, the dynamics of the art market, and the role of curatorship today. Stay tuned for the second part! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Good afternoon everyone. This is the Phantom of the Rubens, and we have today Julian Demerk who is a curator at the Royal Academy of Art, 18th, 19th century, and Old Mastery paintings. He was born in Paris, but he studied in Cambridge, and his uh PhD dissertation was specializing in the representation of the Pacific people in the 18th and 19th century paintings. Prior to his curatorial position in the Royal Academy of Art, he was a curator at National Gallery and Dallas Museum of Art. Julian also curated such shows as Van Gogh and Kiefer at the Royal Academy, as well as Michelangelo da Vinci and Raphael at the Royal Academy, as well as Radical Harmony, which has now just opened in a National Gallery, as well as Van Gogh Poets and Lovers in a National Gallery, and also post-imperimpressionist Julian. Congratulations on so many shows, and it's such a pleasure having you here.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Thank you, Daria. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

I would like to talk a bit more about the show that just opened in a national gallery of uh Helen Krona-Müller collection and to ask you how the show came together.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Oh, absolutely. I mean it's a it's an exhibition that was very much a labor of love. It's a show I started working on when I was working at the National Gallery, uh, right off the back of an exhibition that we did in 2023 called After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. And the exhibition very much came out of the opportunity to borrow from the Colombulum Museum in Otterlo, which is a great museum to the east of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and to really uh collaborate with them to create an exhibition on neo-impressionist paintings. So it was really the opportunity to borrow uh really the the greatest works of neo-impressionism to from a collection which to me is really uh the greatest collection of neo-impressionism in the world. And so use that as a sort of core to build around uh to create an exhibition.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

And what were the challenges creating such an exhibition?

SPEAKER_01 2:28

I suppose, I mean, there are always many challenges creating an exhibition. I mean, you always you know you've got loan negotiation, you always don't have enough time, uh, you often don't have enough space. Uh there are the things you want to get that you cannot get. Though I must say, with this exhibition, we really got what we what we wanted. I think to me, maybe the biggest challenge of this project in in particular was that I was really trying to tell a new story of neo-impressionism. You know, it's the first neo-impressionist exhibition uh in the National Gallery of it as a as an exhibition about the group of artists that call themselves the new Impressionists. And the challenge to me was to create a new story that wasn't the usual story of neoimpressionism, and that very much comes out of the works that we were borrowing from the collection of Helene Krolamullah, which is a great collection of neo-impressionist art, not only because she she has one of Sora's greatest paintings, Chahu, some great works by Paul Signac, but also because it is a collection that sees neo-impressionism as an international movement, uh having an equal number of French artists, but also of Belgians and Dutch artists. And so the challenge was how do we use this collection as the starting point to tell this story of Neo Impressionism as an international movement and tell it not by grouping all the French artists together and then going to the Belgians and then going to the Dutch, which is a story that's been told before just a few times in a few exhibitions, but it always feels a bit like you're telling a derivative story. You're like, well, it's about the French, the great creators of this thing, and then it goes to Belgium, and then it sort of peters out into significance when it gets to the Netherlands. And I think it's a completely different story. And the challenge was how do we tell the story of New Impressionism through themes and through these sort of dialogues across borders and across countries? And I hope you know we've risen up to that challenge.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Of course, the exhibition looks great. I also wanted to ask you, and how did the uh Helena's um collecting sort of vision inspire the curation of the exhibition? Because as from what I've understood, she had her own vision of collecting, which was quite revolutionary for her time. Uh, how was that uh implied in the preparation of the exhibition? How was that an inspiration to you?

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Absolutely. I mean, I think there's there's a it's a multi-part answer to that question. Um I think she's I mean, to give a bit of background, you know, she's a she's a German-born uh collector, she's born near Essen, she moves to the Netherlands, uh, inherits huge fortune from her father, so she's very much the the money is is hers, even though her husband, Anton Koller, you know, builds up the fortune, but she's the one who brings it to the home. And she, you know, there's a there's a of course there are a lot of collectors who collect things that they like, and then it ends up transforming into a museum, and it's a private collection that evolves into, then later becoming a museum. Um, Elena Kollermüller is a different sort of collector because she very quickly deliberately collects to create a museum for public, for the for public betterment, if you like, in the great tradition of these early 20th century modernist collections. Uh, the collection of Barnes in Philadelphia, for instance, or Osthaus in Hagen, and then in Essen is another other example of this sort of collecting. And so it's a very deliberate collecting. She's actually interestingly, Helene Kolamulla is probably better known for her collection of Van Gogh. You know, she collects 90 paintings by Van Gogh during her life, the largest collection of Van Gogh's until the opening of the Van Gogh Museum in the 1970s. But the other side of that collection is Neo Impressionism, which she sees as a sort of foil, or if you like, a sort of yin, the yin to the yang of Van Gogh. You know, Van Gogh, she says, is the artist who sort of punches you in the guts. And the neoimpressionists are the one that you need to attain a sort of new form of serenity. But what is interesting about her collecting is that she's very deliberate in what she collects, the things that she does not collect. Um, it's not a comprehensive collection of late 19th, earlier 20th century art, and she's really interested in cerebral artists, um, much less in sort of the things that she would consider to be more expressive or emotional, say. And so she collects neoimpressionism through that lens, as I said at the beginning as an international movement, so that is particularly interesting in determining what we were trying to do. Um, but she also collects a specific type of neo-impressionist painting for the large part, and she tends to collect probably the most radical of those works. I mean, hence the name of the show, you know, Radical Harmony, works that seek to attain harmony but in a very radical way. And that to me particularly crystallizes at the end of the show where you see the sort of works that she collects, these really empty, spare landscapes that seem to sort of announce the abstraction of the 20th century. You know, works where, particularly, we have, you know, works from Gravelin, the last series of Georges Surrat's paintings, where you really feel that reality is slowly drifting away and works are becoming much more about line and shape. So I think it allows to tell a story of neoimpressionism as in a way you could say the first international movement of international, you know, of modern art, which is no mean thing. Um, and that's very much comes from the way that she collected internationally, these artists, and then also to really be able to demonstrate how neo impressionism is not just about painting with dots, it's not just a little experiment that happens after impressionism, but it's also this really important step in the emergence of modern of modern art in the 20th century.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

And were there any discoveries also when you were preparing the show?

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Well, there were I mean there were there's always many interesting discoveries uh that you make, you know, things relating to provenance, to conservation, or all sorts of things like that. I mean, I'll list a few, you know, if you like. I mean, one one of the discoveries, one of the drawings that we show in the exhibition that we borrowed uh is a beautiful drawing by a Belgian artist called George Lemon of Jan Turup, the Dutch, you know, one of the prominent Dutch neo-impressionists, that I really hope will be a revelation for the London audiences and even audiences more globally when they think of neo-impressionism. Um, but we borrowed this drawing um from another museum in the Netherlands just because it was a great drawing and it paired well with the works we had in the collection, and then only discovered uh later on that it actually had belonged to Helene Kollomulla, that we had like unknowingly brought back one of the works that she had owned. So that was a rather, you know, wonderful, nice discovery, a nice surprise. Um but you know, also I think to us was really sort of researching Helene Kolomulla in depth and why she collected the works that she did, and and and a particularly, I think, important revelation, I think, to us, and that's in the in the catalogue of the show. It was written by an essay written by Christopher Riopel, the post-1800 curator at the National Gallery. And that is really like the about the intellectual underpinnings of Elena Kolomolo's uh collecting, uh, which really links her back to Frederik Nietzsche. Um, this really this sense of collecting as for art for the betterment of humanity. Um it's an essay that that's uh that's a little tongue-in-cheekly entitled, you know, uh Elena Kolomolo as as Nietzsche's sort of um uh you know Ubermensch. Uh an interesting uh an interesting concept. Um but really the sense that she was collecting in this incredibly intellectually rigorous way, that you know, she's really one of the first people to think of uh, for instance, Van Gogh as a sort of kindled spirits with Nietzsche, um, and that she's actually she was really at the vanguard of of this sort of deep sort of uh intellectual thought about art and collecting and how art will play a important role in the betterment of society.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

And I wanted to ask you, you uh picked Serrat uh as the uh sort of centerpiece of the exhibition. I wanted to know why. Oh, it's an amazing artwork, but just curious why this artwork is a centerpiece.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Well, it's an ex exceptional painting. I mean, large you know, Sarah um dies very young, he dies at 31. It's actually his um last finished large painting. Sora is a very ambitious artist. Uh as we know, you know, famously his most famous large picture is the The Afternoon on La Grande in Chicago. Uh the National Gallery has Bathers Adnier. Um but there's only five of these large paintings that he that he calls his Toile de Lutte, his battle canvases. They're really the large works in which he was really trying to push the boundaries of art and really express, you know, at express himself as the most radical works where he's really like taking on like large formats, like really trying to make art for the museums, you know, really saying, you know, putting myself on an equal footing with the old masters. And so Chahu, the work from Helene Colomula's uh collection, is the last of these large paintings. And it's really incredible to be able to see it in London, because you know, or actually anywhere in the world for that matter, it's a work that uh is traveling for the first time out of the Museum in Notolo for the first time since 1958, when it was shown at MOMA in New York. So, you know, it's really a bit of a revelation uh to be able to have it in London, to have it in the same building as one of Sora's other large paintings. Uh, that happens very rarely that you can have two big Surras in the same place at the same time. Um, and it's a really, really important painting because it's all it's really a work about the artificiality of art uh in many ways. Um really, you know, using, you know, depicting the the Shayu is the name of the French Kankan, the incredibly um uh you know, this this this very um naughty dance, very popular dance. Um, and you know, there's this feeling with that work that he's depicting a very ugly subject in a way, you know, this debauchery in the cafe concerts in Paris, you know, they had to have policemen sort of make sure that the dancers were w wearing underwear uh when they were performing it. So it's a very sort of ugly thing, supposedly. Um, and you see there's a figure at the back, sort of at the bottom of the work, sort of looking up the women's skirts, you know. So it's an ugly spectacle, the sort the sort of spectacle you'd see in posters in the metro in Paris at that time, for instance, that he brings it up to high art and makes it something beautiful, um, and also something very artificial, you know, bathed in artificial light, like very ambitious uh composition. You know, you see one of the figures from the back, like a big part of the picture is the back of a man in sort of shadow. But also, I think what is so important about this work, and in a way so moving that it's his last finished painting because last finished large painting, because what would he have done next? And that's a it's a Belgian critic that says that when the work is shown in Brussels in 1891, and he says, Well, you know, maybe this work is just uh a work for which a subject matter is only a pretext for the exploration of line and colour, as in what's really important about this work is the shapes and the colour. So it's again, it's a sort of feeling that it's a work that is one step closer to abstraction, where subject matter becomes more and more irrelevant. Uh, and so it's such so interesting because it's a work that is on the edge of both of these worlds. It's both doing something, of course, very significant visually and narratively, but also it's taking art into a different direction. So it's such a key painting of New Impressionism, but of uh art in the late 19th century more generally, that it's it's such a such an incredibly generous thing uh that the Cornel Muller Museum has done to entrust it with it uh for a few months in London.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Of course, that's a beautiful painting. As and as a viewer, the the feeling that I got looking at it as if it's almost I wouldn't though the subject is quite sexual, but it's all it's so artistic that it's almost loses this sort of p physical sexuality to it because it's so focused on uh showing the light and the color rather than uh being like just physical.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Absolutely. Well, it really is that that that feeling that reality is a pretext for that painting. That I mean, yes, it's it depicts this sort of morbid thing, um these lurid dance, but it's also about a higher thing, um both about about about harmony in painting, about how you can make that ugly scene a beautiful thing, and then also how it act can actually be really it's a really a painting about painting as well. So it's a fascinating thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

And where are they oh they're also like lesser known artists that were a bit of the discovery uh well when you were preparing the exhibition?

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Oh, absolutely, and I think I mean even a discovery for us, curators, I mean artists that I didn't know, like a Dutch artist called Johan Torn Pricker, for instance. We have three uh pastels that he does in 1904, which are like proto-Pete Mondrian-ish, you know, these like dotted pastels that feel like they're really landscapes that are dissolving into nothingness. Really amazing paintings. Um, someone like Anna Bork, uh, the only woman to paint in the neo-impressionist style, um, who I barely knew as an artist. She's better known as the um the only person to buy a Van Gogh uh during his lifetime, buys it at an exhibition in Brussels, a work called The Red Vineyard, which is at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow now. Um so that was a big revelation to me to really research her work and include her into this exhibition. I thought it was very important to make her part of that story. Um, and then you know, artists which I think I knew a little bit, but I really got to dive into much more preparing the show, which I think will really be a revelation for the London public, um, though, which is Jan Toop, fascinating Dutch artist who's actually Dutch, but he's born in the Dutch colony uh of Java in modern-day Indonesia, moves to the Netherlands age 11, is really probably one of the first sort of non-Western artists to work at in the Western avant-garde, um, and actually brings into his art some um you know some traditional Javanese patterns, particularly when he paints in a more symbolic style. But I think he really will be quite the revelation for for the public and an artist that really really pushes the boundaries of art into again this sort of semi-abstract direction. Um, and then another artist which I really try to make um we only have two paintings by him and two pastels in the exhibition called Henry van der Velde, who's actually then better known as an architect. He's the architect of the Kolla Mullah Museum, like a like a really, really important architect of the of the first half of the 20th century, really radical uh in establishing this Museum de Colamulla, which is almost like a prototype for what the white cube was going to become. Um very spare interiors, and his work as a painter is truly extraordinary, and I really think he's somebody we have one late late painting from 1889, um, which is you know as daring as Georges Seurat in pushing the bat in pushing the bird out towards abstraction, but it's not at all derivative of Seurat, as some people like to read neo-impressionism, still say, you know, and even you saw that in some of the critical responses to the exhibition, that Surat's at the very top of the pyramid, and then everybody else is sort of following along. And you look at Van der Velde and you see that he's taking you into a sort of semi-abstract direction using a completely different aesthetic, a completely different mode of painting. Um so that that I think I hope uh in many ways was a gener a revelation for me uh and will be a revelation for the public.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Yes, it was for example, for me it was the first time I see the work of this artist when I was at the opening of your uh exhibition. And I haven't seen his artwork before myself, and uh it was a very interesting uh artwork. I really enjoyed the show and I really enjoyed the combination of uh artists like Serani, you have some Van Gogh there, the exhibition, and then also, for example, his artworks as well, and like uh th this artist. So again, thank you so much for curating such an amazing show.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Oh, my pleasure. But I think you know, just to add to that, I think to me it's so important to do shows that speak to the public in the sense that you know there's nothing wrong with the public wanting to have some familiarity with what they're going to see. And that's a wonderful way to draw them in to say, well, there is Josh Sarrat that you know well. There is, as you say, a great painting by Van Gogh in the exhibition. Um, but then also use that to open up their horizons and present them to new artists that then we hope in the future, you know, we might be able to show again and build sort of that knowledge. I think it's really um important when you create exhibitions to be aware of that, to think, well, what story can we tell that that people know and how can we surprise them?

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Of course, of course. I also wanted to congratulate you with one more show that you're uh that you opened in a summer and now you're having in parallel in the Royal Academy, which is Kiefer and Van Gogh, which which is such an interesting combination, and ask you more about how did this show come together? How was it to collaborate with the living artists and how where this idea came from?

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Absolutely. I mean it's it's a great show. It's a show I really enjoyed working on at the Royal Academy. I started working at the RA almost two years ago. Uh it's an exhibition I I I inherited as I moved to the RA, but I really only inherited the title, Kiefer van Gogh. And then it was uh uh up to me to build it. Um and it was really for me a first to work with a living artist. I hope uh it will happen again because I truly enjoyed that. Uh also it was a great way to take me out of my comfort zone. I'm not used to artists being able to talk back at me. And I say that to Anselm jokingly. You know, I when I first met him, I said, Well, you know, my Artists are usually dead. And he has a good sense of humor, so that amused him greatly. But there, the the opportunity, if you like, it's it's an exhibition that's a collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. And it really came out of that collaboration and really out of a series of paintings that uh Anselm Kiefer paints or makes, because it's much more than just paint on a canvas, that uh Ansel made in 2019 when he was asked to give a lecture about Van Gogh uh at uh the uh at Day Britain when they did the Van Gogh in Britain exhibition. Um and his way of processing his thoughts was to paint quite a few large paintings. I mean, I'm talking, you know, eight meters wide for some of them, uh, to just process his thoughts and really sort of actively think about Van Gogh as he was making work. Um and those works are rather beautiful and I mean they're great paintings. There's there's um there's three in the in the exhibition. Um, and that was a starting point, but then to really think that actually he's an artist who's engaged with Van Gogh his entire life, who um of course engages with Van Gogh as a and a fellow painterly painter. You know, they're both artists which really who are really interested in texture. But actually, what the exhibition reveals is that that in that that fascination, that influence of Van Gogh on Kiefer is much more deep-rooted. And that's what this exhibition tries to explore. I mean, for me, these these shows where you bring two artists from different eras together are not particularly interesting if what you're trying to say is just, well, they sort of look the same, they do similar things. To me, that it might be compelling visually for a little bit, but it doesn't leave you with much. And I think what really works in this exhibition, actually, what I really love in this exhibition, is probably one of the shows I've made that I like the most, um, is that it it shows you that they relate in in much more sort of philosophical ways about what it means to be an artist. You know, I think Kiefer really sees in Van Gogh like an artist who struggles, and Kiefer really thinks that art is about struggle, it's about always trying to push further, a work is never quite finished, it's always about what are you gonna do next. Um, but I think what to me what works, and I hope what people get from this show is you might leave the exhibition feeling that you've learned something unexpected about Kiefer because of that juxtaposition with Van Gogh. And same, you might see Van Gogh in a different way by looking at how Kiefer sees his art.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

And how do you think it will change the percep the perspective the perception of especially Van Gogh uh of the viewers who see it now from the lengths of Kiefer is there, anyway? You think it might change their vision of him?

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Because I hope so. Well, I think I think uh what what might change people's vision, and you know, me as a 19th-century uh curator, um, and that's very much um something me, but especially, you know, the the curators, uh Chris Riopal and Connie Homburg of the Van Gogh Poets and Lovers show were trying to do at the National Gallery, is to really move away from the myth of Van Gogh, which slightly overwhelms everything. I mean, why he's one of the most famous artists uh that who's ever lived, um probably unequalled by sort of someone like Leonardo da Vinci or Andy Warhol or is you know that he's seen as like the archetypal bohemian expressive, like tragic artist, you know, who of course ultimately um ends his own life. And that people tend to then forget um well, that he's fundamentally just a really, really great artist and a very deliberate artist, a very intellectual artist, a very well-read artist. And that is really the way that Ansem Kiefer sees Van Gogh. And actually, this is sort of one of the first things that he told me when I met Kiefer, uh, where he said, you know, and that's a quote that we have in the exhibition at the very beginning of the show. He says, you know, talking, reflecting on himself as a teenager, going on a this sort of voyage of this of discovery following in Van Gogh's footsteps as a sort of starting point conceptually of the show. A voyage he takes at 18. And he reflects back on it and says, you know, contrary to what might expect of a teenager, um, I wasn't interested in the dramatic aspect of Van Gogh's life. What interested me was the rational structure of his work. And what I really hope that I think what seeing Van Gogh through Keith's eyes, I really hope enables the audience to really connect to Van Gogh as a great, very deliberate artist, not as somebody who, like in the public imagination, you know, goes out in the countryside with a canvas, puts it on the easel, and just paints his feelings and his out heart out on paint in a sort of loose, uncontrolled sort of way. And actually, you like this of course it's a it's a very expressive style of painting, but it's also very deliberate. Uh, he really is an artist, thinking as an artist, building his oeuvre in a very deliberate way. And I think to me that that Kiefer really enables us to tell that story.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

And was there anything personal that also you that inspired you when you were preparing this exhibition? Like something personal that you learned about both of the artists uh that you can share with us?

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Oh gosh, well, so so many, so many, some things I'll have to keep to myself. But but no, I think I think spending time with with Ansem Kiefer and with his uh wonderful team, um Valtrod and Lucas and Laura, really he he's he surrounded himself a really remarkable group of people, very generous, uh incredibly intelligent, and who really understand his work very deeply. Um I think to me it's a sort of there's a work in the last room of the show called The Last Load that's probably in the exhibition the most sort of um classically Kifa. You know, it's it's a panoramic landscape, sort of about seven and a half meters wide by two and a half high of a field just burnt, like with these deep sort of like furrows in the in the in the soil, and like a very dark painting. Like you you look at it and you're like this is there's a lot of angst coming out of that picture. And I remember uh when we opened the show and Anselm was was there with us, and we looked at that painting together, and he said something I thought was so meaningful and so very much Kifa, and he said, Look, I I I look at this landscape and I can't uh I can't look at any landscape without thinking of the great tragedy that's happened within it. Um and I thought, wow, that that's a pretty dark view of the world, and I mean especially I mean today it's it's it's hard not to have a very dark view of the world, right? In many ways. Um but then he said, But look, you it especially I think that comes out seeing next to Van Gogh, who's also, I mean, of course, tormented in many ways, but also very optimistic artist. Um and so the Kiefer said, Well, you know, it's a bit like Van Gogh. I mean, if you look at that field, yes, it's a it's a miserable thing in front of us. It's very bleak, but in a few weeks or you know, a few weeks or a few months, the grass will have grown again, the field will be beautiful again, there will be new life, there's always new life, there's always cyclicality, and he's like, and so this is also in many ways an optimistic work. It really is about the way that you decide to look at it. You know, it is about renewal. And I think so. For me personally, it was sort of seeing being able to see Kiefer's work through a much more optimistic lens as well, that he's not necessarily the way that we see him purely as this very, very dark, very, very broody uh artist, but that actually there is always this this feeling of hope on the other side, and and that that is also something you see in Van Gogh. It it is it is a very hopeful type of painting.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Thank you everyone for listening. Soon you'll hear the second part of our interview.