Sugarcoating Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy: Crystal Bridges Updates from NW Arkansas Business Journal & Me

What has Alice Walton‘s generously endowed startup, which just celebrated its fourth anniversary, been up to lately?

In Richard Massey‘s lead article in today’s Northwest Arkansas Business Journal, he reports on upcoming programs and exhibitions at Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and briefly touches upon future acquisitions, relying on a quote from me in an email that I sent in response to his query.

Little did we know that the evening before our Nov. 11 email exchange, Crystal Bridges had acquired this green candy spill at Christie’s contemporary art sale for $7.67 million, an auction record for the artist. (The museum announced the purchase on Nov. 16.)

In his article, Massey made me sound more knowledgeable about the museum’s wish list than I really am: My comments to him were suppositions, based on my knowledge of the current collection and what it still needs.

Here, in full, is what I wrote in response to his questions on whether I foresaw Crystal Bridges’ “acquiring any new art in 2016” and whether I saw “any possible targets [for purchase] somewhere out there”:

I assume that Crystal Bridges will continue to grow its collection, as any dynamic museum must. But purchases may become increasingly strategic—filling in gaps, as good opportunities arise.

High on the list may be a Pollock in his signature “drip” style. Crystal Bridges does have a few non-drip Pollocks, but no major works. (Janet Sobel‘s Pollock-like painting doesn’t fill that gap).

As it happens, there’s a fine “drip” Pollock on offer tonight [Nov. 11] at Sotheby’s, albeit a work on paper mounted on fiberboard (making it less pricey than his works on canvas). I wonder if Crystal Bridges might have its eye on that.

In keeping with Alice Walton’s interest in female artists, Crystal Bridges should also be seeking a good color field work by Helen Frankenthaler and a minimalist Agnes Martin. (One sold yesterday [Nov. 10] at Christie’s.)

There was, as it happens, a recent Frankenthaler acquisition at Crystal Bridges, but it wasn’t one of her signature stained-canvas works.

In its announcement of the acquisition of one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘ signature spills, Crystal Bridges somewhat lightened the grimness of this deceptively playful work, from which visitors are encouraged to remove (and consume) candies. The press release noted that the piece is thought to allude to “the depleted human body ravaged by illness” and that the “ideal weight” of the candy spill (set by the artist) is 50 pounds.

But it neglected to mention the mournful significance of that metric, as recounted at the press preview by Sara Friedlander, head of Christie’s contemporary sale (seen in the photo above): Fifty pounds was said to be the approximate weight of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died the same year the piece was created, after having been wasted due to complications from AIDS (which also caused Gonzalez-Torres’ death in 1996).

Unmentioned in Massey’s article was the museum’s stellar architectural acquisition, which has just made its public debut: Frank Lloyd Wright‘s previously endangered Bachman-Wilson House opened on Nov. 11, after having been dismantled and transported from its original New Jersey site (where I had once admired it) and reassembled on Crystal Bridges’ grounds:

Might Crystal Bridges have acquired anything else at the November contemporary sales or at the American art sales that followed close upon? As we know from problematic past history, the museum has a way of keeping certain major purchases secret, until it gets around to exhibiting them.

We do now know where the top lot in Sotheby’s anemic sale of American art from the A. Alfred Taubman Collection—Martin Johnson Heade’s”The Great Florida Sunset”—is headed: As reported by Mary Abbe in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, it was purchased by husband-and-wife collectors Mary Burrichter and Bob Kierlin for display at their Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona, MN, which opened in 2006. (The museum does not seem to have announced the purchase on its website at this writing.)

“Sunset” will join its pendant—Heade’s “View from Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica,” already on display at MMAM.