The Pera Museum's main exhibition this autumn consists of 57 portraits of royal and aristocratic children from the Yannick and Ben Jakober Foundation collection. Often commissioned in order to facilitate marriages between royal households, the 16th - 19th century paintings show historical figures in their early years, and reflect the traditions, superstitions, symbolic language, and fashions of each era and each country. Highlights include a portrait of Mihriman Sultan, daughter of Sultan Süleyman, and a young Edward VI, both painted after famous originals, and testifying to the popularity of their subjects. The collectors, Ben Jakober (above, left) and Yannick Vu, have focussed on the 16th and 17th centuries in their collection, and many of the portraits are testament to the superb talent of court artists of the time.
However there can be something unsettling about the paintings. Often children are presented as the adults they are expected to become, and surrounded by symbols which look bizarre now their meaning is not commonly understood. Luckily, informative panels are provided to decode the symbolism of the more startling paintings, like one of a very young girl holding a bunch of cherries - signifier here of purity, rather than fertility.
Yannick Vu says that when they started the collection it was relatively easy to acquire the portraits as there was little interest in the po-faced young royals. Interest has since increased and presented together they are a remarkable and often overlooked record of court life in Europe.
After touring the Golden Children exhibition, entering the Pera's third floor galleries below can come as a bit of a shock. Children dressed in lace and pearls presented in gilded frames give way to sheer, clean modern sculpture, photographs and paintings created by Jakober and Vu. You might well ask how any artist-collectors can have such seemingly opposed tastes at the same time.
Of course there is no reason the two exhibitions can't stand apart. But if one prefers, they can perhaps be unified by a theme of mutable identities: of the children, how they were presented and who they would become; of the couple and their different concerns with their art (Jakober with the modern; Vu with something more spiritual and universal); and of the 'third artist' who appears when the couple work together. That, and the tragic loss of their daughter in a traffic accident - commemorated here in Flora Clara, a black tower of motorcycle helmets in the shape of a branch of flower buds. It is an event which, says Jakober, also contributed to their "obsessive" collection of portraits.
This exhibition, Flash-Back, came about when the Pera Museum team working on Golden Children visited the Jakobers' foundation in Mallorca and saw their own considerable body of work. But that does not mean it feels like an after-thought. Nor should it be visited as one. Artistic references range from ancient Egypt to French history to Courbert to Duchamp, and if the portraits upstairs seem bizarre to your modern eyes, Flash-back will probably make you happy to live in the era we do.