With the weather in New York still fine–and warmish–on Saturday, I ventured up to the New York Botanical Garden for FRIDA: Art, Garden, Life, one of the Garden’s hybrid exhibitions that combines plants and paintings. This one, much like the Garden’s 2012 exhibition titled Monet’s Garden, offers about a dozen works of art, exhibited in the library building. Many more specimens of the plants Kahlo grew at her home, Casa Azul, on the outskirts of Mexico City, are there in the Garden’s Conservatory. The show went on view on May 16 and remains there until Nov. 1.
The art star of the show is Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, painted in 1940, perhaps followed by her portrait of Luther Burbank and a couple of still lifes. The stars of the gardens are too many to mention. Another nice touch: a desk of Kahlo’s paints and brushes.
I like these exhibitions, in part because gardens attract a different, if overlapping, crowd than art museums. Plus, the exhibits are small enough in the art category not to threaten museums. The NYBG clearly has no cards to play in the sense of being able to lend paintings, so it borrowings depend on good will.
But the show was spoiled by, of all things, the stanchions. The Garden’s gallery has, in part, insets along the walls and the stanchions sit on the edge of the inset. I could not see the drawings in one inset. They were, say, three feet away. Drawings are meant to be viewed closely. Maybe others could see them (the galleries were, of course, dim), but I couldn’t. I simply moved on.
The NYBG is far from the only place that ruins art experiences with aggressive stanchioning. Many museums erect these barriers. Sometimes, at a special loan exhibition, you can identify the ones that insist on stanchions.
I’ve asked many museum directors and curators about this, and I’ve been told that formulate their own policies for stanchions. Some have said that insurance companies sometimes require them–which doesn’t make much sense, because then why don’t all museums have to use them? At the Met, I was told recently by a high-ranking official, whether or not to use stanchions is the call of the department head.
I can hear you saying, they’re for safety–to protect the art. But haven’t we seen people fall over the stanchions and into the art? With few exceptions, perhaps where the art work is so popular that crowds are unmanageable, I can understand their use. But I wish museums would think a little harder about the barriers to looking that they create. And banish them.
A few pictures of them, followed by more NYBG pictures from Kahlo.
I could keep going, but let’s go back to the NYBG:
