Carol Vogel, in tomorrow’s NY Times “Inside Art” column (online tonight), finally got around to reporting about the very X-rated Picasso painting soon to be shown at the Metropolitan Museum (which owns it). Candace Jackson of the Wall Street Journal reported on it last January, followed by CultureGrrl. The Met’s getting a lot of publicity mileage out of this very minor (if lurid) picture.
Gary Tinterow, the Met’s curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, told Carol that the work hadn’t previously been shown “not because of its subject matter or because of questions of its
authenticity, but because it’s not very good.” But 13 years ago, another Met curator (who requested anonymity) had told me (scroll down) that the painting was in storage because the 20th-century galleries were populated “by so many
schoolchildren.” Times change.
In any event, although the WSJ and NY Times are family newspapers, CultureGrrl is not for les enfants. So I’m the only one able to show you the painting that the more constrained scribes can only coyly allude to:
Carol got the last laugh, though: In the same column catching up with the Picasso-fellatio story, she scooped us all with the news that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art “has just acquired a group of 25 works of American and European
Conceptual art from the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo,” including “five early works by Bruce Nauman—a painting and four sculptures from
the 1960s when the artist was living and working in the San Francisco
area—as well as works by Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry
and Hanne Darboven.”
I was just at SFMOMA’s press lunch in New York today, where we learned many things about the museum: its history, its collection, its planned expansion (for which it has just acquired the land) and its upcoming exhibitions, including a display of some 160 of the 1,100 works from the celebrated Fisher Collection, all of which SFMOMA will conserve and display for at least 100 years. The works are being loaned by a trust created by the Fisher family. Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap, died shortly after the deal was arranged.
But we New York art writers heard nothing from director Neal Benezra at today’s lunch about the Panza acquisition that was reported online tonight by Vogel. Nor have I found any mention of it on either the museum’s website or in the online version of the hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. SFMOMA apparently adheres to the Times First policy.
So what else is new?