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V&A to set up Dundee outpost, with hopes to open in 2014

Written by Martin Bailey

Project to be locally funded and run—Scottish government has given its backing

London. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is to set up an outpost in Dundee, Scotland. Although branded as “V&A at Dundee”, the project will be locally funded and run.

The new exhibition building will be on the waterfront, in the area between the Tay Road Bridge and Discovery Point, where council offices are being demolished. A precise site will be selected in October, and this will be followed by an architectural competition. Capital costs of the project are likely to be more than £40m.

V&A at Dundee will have a series of spaces. There will be a large temporary exhibition gallery, to host travelling shows from the V&A in London. The plan is to normally have two V&A exhibitions a year and one touring show from elsewhere. In addition, there will be a gallery to showcase Scottish art and design, presented in an international context. This will be curated at Dundee with outside loans, but probably with an input from V&A curators and loans. Discussions are underway about a long-term display of contemporary design, supported with loans from the V&A. It is hoped the galleries will attract 500,000 visitors a year (the V&A in London gets 2.5m).

The V&A stresses that it is providing support, but not funding. The V&A at Dundee steering group, which is setting up the project, comprises Dundee City Council, Scottish Enterprise, the Universities of Dundee and Abertay, and the V&A.

Art historians assert that “lost archive” of paintings, drawings and diaries are forged

new york. A collection of Frida Kahlo oil paintings, diaries and archival material that is the subject of a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press on 1 November has been denounced by scholars as a cache of fakes. Finding Frida Kahlo includes reproductions of paintings, drawings and handwritten letters, diaries, notes, trinkets and other ephemera attributed to the artist. They belong to Carlos Noyola and Leticia Fernández, a couple who own the antique store La Buhardilla Antiquarios in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The publisher describes it as “an astonishing lost archive of one of the twentieth century's most revered artists...full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humor”.

According to an interview in the forthcoming book, and to emails from Noyola to The Art Newspaper, the couple acquired the items incrementally from 2004-07 from a lawyer who in turn had acquired them from a woodcarver who allegedly received them from the artist. Noyola tells The Art Newspaper he has more than 1,200 Kahlo items in all. He would not disclose how much he paid, but says: “We did acquire the collection with the belief and some groundwork done to prove that it is in fact authentic and thus paid accordingly.” He states that the collection is not for sale and will not be for sale in the future.

The author of the 256-page illustrated book is Barbara Levine, a former director of exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who operates a curatorial services company called Project b. She brought in as a secondary author Stephen Jaycox of San Francisco, with whom she has worked on archive and library exhibitions.

In an email to The Art Newspaper, Levine says that she is “not working for the Noyolas and the Noyolas did not fund any portion of the book”. She describes Finding Frida Kahlo as “my personal encounter with the materials”, and says that the study is “about the personal belongings of an icon not from the point of view of telling her story or contributing to her place in art history, but instead from the perspective of our essential human need to accumulate talismans, keep scraps to remember, track time and leave legacy”.

A survey of prints of war scenes from the 16th to the early 19th centuries

“Here Death triumphs among funerals;/Her most beautiful promenades are those places of battles;/Her throne is affirmed by the fall of the dead;/In an instant by her skillful arms she changes/Fertile fields into rivers of blood/And the plains of Mars into mountains of bodies.” So runs the inscription below Della Bella’s etching of skeletal Death, a pale rider on a pale horse, the dust-jacket image for this book.

War was an experience that touched Europeans for centuries, leaving traces in prints made for propagandistic, historical, allegorical and personal reasons. This catalogue that accompanied the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—home to the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation—earlier this year (24 January-24 April 2009), examines prints made from the Italian Wars of the High Renaissance to the Napoleonic Wars. Editors have organised a diverse spectrum of material into themes, within which prints are sequenced chronologically. The catalogue section is preceded by enlightening essays dealing with the imagery of the Landsknecht (German mercenary of the 15th to 17th centuries), the recurrence of the Turk—as symbol of alien despotism and the exotic Orient—and the mixture of pictorial, cartographic and topographic modes in war prints. A concise survey by Professor Gruber deftly covers military developments in conflicts of this period. The catalogue section, complete with comparative figures, includes extensive commentaries necessary to contextualise individual prints.

Such a wide scope of topics, locations and periods necessarily entails artistic unevenness. However, in this thematic survey the breadth and variety is refreshing. Some, such as Dürer, treated figures as showpieces of artistic accomplishment. Other printmakers marked specific events with varying degrees of accuracy. The princes and dukes who conducted war also commissioned art and here we can see the crossover area. Some generals commissioned prints to commemorate victories, an eye on political advancement as well as posterity. Prints combine incidents, condensing stages in battles into single compositions, and provide keys explaining them. There is a set of illustrations from an early 17th-century Dutch instruction manual demonstrating how infantrymen should be drilled. Satires by Gillray, Hogarth and Isaac Cruikshank strike a sardonic note and act as bellwethers of popular sentiment. The book benefits from largely excluding more obvious examples, such as portraits of generals and set pieces of nude warriors by Michelangelo and Pollaiuolo, instead, bringing to our attention the near-forgotten Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet (1792-1845) and anonymous journeymen, giving a rounded view of the type of material that circulated.