A boot up the Bodmer

More drawings from a major collection are to go under the hammer. Is this what its founder would have wanted?

FEW people have set about collecting with the breadth of vision or ambition of Martin Bodmer. Dr Bodmer, a wealthy Swiss gentleman- scholar, devoted his life to creating a library-cummuseum of original documents that embraced nothing less than "the total human adventure, history as reflected in spiritual creation throughout the ages, in all corners of the globe".

Such a library had to comprise all kinds of writing - tablets, papyri, coins, manuscripts, printing (always first editions), musical scores or drawings and encompass every kind of human creativity. By the time of his death in 1971, aged 82, Bodmer had amassed a unique collection of 160,000 works, and apparently secured its future through the creation of The Martin Bodmer Foundation at Cologny on the outskirts of Geneva.

In 1997, however, the council of the foundation took the outrageous decision to sell its most celebrated drawing, Michelangelo's Christ and the Woman of Samaria. It seems that its t rustees wanted to buy medieval manuscripts coming up at Sotheby's auction of the Beck Collection but didn't have the funds. Sotheby's response appears to have been buy now and we'll sort something out.

Three medieval manuscripts were duly acquired, and a Van Gogh drawing of the park at Arles was consigned for sale. It realised less than the cost of the manuscripts. The Michelangelo followed in January 1998. Immediately after it sold for a mighty 4.5 million, the Swiss architect Mario Botta was commissioned to design an underground exhibition building for the foundation.

A year later, the trustees went on to sell - privately - Leonardo's exquisite, tiny drawing of the Madonna with a cat to fund the purchase of, among other things, Proust's heavily corrected first proofs of Du ct de chez Swann. And the selling continues.

LAST Thursday at Christie's, in possibly the most spectacular sale of tapestries offered at auction in London, the foundation offloaded a fabulous Franco-Flemish Gothic tapestry representing the final flowering of the lyrical courtly style. As a complete rather than fragmentary survival, this pastoral of musicians, lovers and sportsmen in a landscape strewn with flowers is also a great rarity. But even that - it realised the top price of 509,750 - was never going to be enough to fuel future acquisitions and January sees Christie's New York selling off almost all of what remains of the Bodmeriana's distinguished collection of Old Master and modern drawings, expected to fetch more than 1million.

Only those drawings with a specific literary connection are being retained - Botticelli illustrations to Dante, for instance, Boucher's Tartuffe, B l a k e ' s S h a k e s p e a r e , Delacroix's Faust.

Of course, with the Michelangelo, Leonardo and Van Gogh gone and others believed to have been by such as Raphael, Holbein and Velzquez when Dr Bodmer acquired them but now recognised as not by a master's hand, it has become all too easy for the trustees to justify the sale of the rest of a collection that had set out to be comprehensive. But the point remains that in Martin Bodmer's notion of a universal library, drawings were not an incidental part of the collection but integral - as he put it, "the written expression of the artistic intuition". It is all very well for the trustees to deem them peripheral but there is no indication that Dr Bodmer regarded them in that way; moreover, any narrowing of focus would presumably be anathema to him, counter to the spirit of the entire enterprise.

The trustees may be acting according to his wishes in making the collection accessible and dynamic - hence the need for an acquisitions fund - but the regret they have expressed at not acquiring the drafts of James Joyce's Ulysses or the beat novelist Jack Kerouac's On the Road when they came up at auction recently speaks more of their own predilections than the good doctor's, and of the only too human desire to make their own mark on the collection. How can they deem medieval manuscripts or anything else - more valid expressions of the creative spirit than Michelangelo's Christ and the Woman of Samaria, a subject recorded in the most significant text in the Western world and given the semblance of flesh and blood by one of its most celebrated artists? Let us also not forget the reason why Dr Bodmer was so keen to acquire the drawing in the first place - because Michelangelo was the sole great artist who was also a great poet.

As for the 50 or so drawings on offer in January, they range from a refined 15th century Florentine drawing once thought to be by Pollaiuolo and now attributed to the obscure Maso Finiguerra, to works by Poussin, Turner, Degas (a monotype), Renoir, Czanne, Segantini, Giacometti and Henry Moore.

Most valuable is an exceedingly rare pen-andink drawing of a an exuberantly clad strumpet parading in a landscape. It is a tour- deforce by the early 16th-century Swiss artist Urs Graf (think Drer, but crazier) and expected to fetch at least 250,000. Almost as appealing is the tiny but delectable Watteau head in coloured chalks, estimated at around 70,000.

AS once-in-a-lifetime opportunities go, this one is pure gold. Gleaming under the hammer at Christie's London tomorrow will be probably the largest group of English gold objects seen at auction - about 15 per cent of all surviving pre-1800 English gold, excluding snuffboxes. But before you conjure up an Aladdin's Cave of an image of groaning buffets, pause to consider that a mere 80 or so pieces are known to survive.

This single-owner collection comprises a dozen pieces, 10 of which once belonged to the late Nathaniel Mayer Victor, third Baron Rothschild. What is so striking about them is the honeyed colour; unlike the yellow gold of silver-gilt, the solid gold of this group of mostly race cups and porringers is altogether softer and richer.

And what has escaped the melting pot has also survived in remarkable condition, because gold, unlike silver, never tarnishes and has not suffered from centuries of polish and elbow grease.

What could be crisper than the engraving on the gorgeous Charles II porringer and cover of 1671 illustrated here (estimated at 450,000- 650,000 and the star of the sale)?

And any latterday Goldfinger could not but relish the 3.5in high Chester Gold Cup of 1792, a tumbler-cup that sits so satisfactorily in the palm of the hand. It could be his for 150,000-200,000.

Copyright 2001
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