Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

Go See Art In Brooklyn!

I have a high threshold for judging the merit of crowd-curated exhibits. Many, to me, just seem like pandering. But here’s one with a twist that may let it pass the test.

Over the weekend of September 8-9, between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., people in the New York area are being invited to meet artists in Brooklyn in their studios. They can watch them work as they paint, sculpt, weave, photograph, make prints, and so on.

This open studio event, called “GO See Art IN Brooklyn,” is being sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum.  Those who take advantage of the opportunity will be able to check in via text messages, something called the “GO” mobile app, or the GO mobile website.

After checking in, people will be able to to nominate three artists from their visits for inclusion in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. According to a press release, “the ten artists with the most nominations will receive studio visits from Brooklyn Museum curators. Two or more nominated artists will be chosen by the curators to have their work displayed as part of a Brooklyn Museum group exhibition opening at TARGET FIRST SATURDAY on December 1, 2012.” The show continues through Feb. 24.

The artists are listed here, though you have to be patient, because they are not listed in any particular way but appear “at random.” You can, however, access them by neighborhood or see their locations on a map.

The Brooklyn Museum put out a press release with more details back in July.

Obviously, getting people into artists’ studios is good for the visual arts and for artists, which Brooklyn has a lot of. But curators have the last word. That makes all the difference, to me, in terms of validating the exercise.

 

 

A Window On The Future Of The Clyfford Still Museum

The exhibition I feature here doesn’t open until Sept. 14, but this is the summer doldrums, and hey there’s not much else going, despite some promises to the contrary. (I would be happy to be contradicted on that reference.)

So let’s look at the Clyfford Still Museum, in Denver, which opened last November. As I wrote in October, 2011, in an article for the Wall Street Journal about the museum,

Creating a constituency for a one-artist museum can be tricky even when, like Georgia O’Keeffe or Andy Warhol, that artist is widely known (and loved) and has a local base (Santa Fe, N.M., and Pittsburgh, respectively). Still, a loner who was born in North Dakota in 1904 and died in Maryland in 1980, with several stops in between, had decreed that his life’s work should go to any city that would erect a museum solely for his works—and nothing else, ever.

And that turned out to be Denver. So how is Dean Sobel, the museum’s director, going to pull off Vincent/Clyfford — “a focused exhibition exploring connections between Vincent Van Gogh and Clyfford Still—in particular those found during the initial decades of the latter’s career,” according to the press release?

Reproductions and “interpretive material.” The exhibition itself will feature about 20 of Still’s paintings and works on paper, all executed between the late 1920s and the 1930s. They expose, we’re told, “direct parallels with Van Gogh’s preferred subject matter—including vignettes of agrarian labor, moody landscapes treated as soul-scapes, and dark interior scenes—as well as his use of the grotesque to accentuate the plight of human beings living on the edge.”

Still apparently identified with van Gogh because of his bare-bones childhood on farms in Canada, where he did manual labor, like the peasants van Gogh depicted. “Cycles of growth, decay, and rebirth in their work are evoked in their through recurrent symbols such as corn, the sun, and the sower,” the museum says. “Still’s paintings also echo Van Gogh’s in their rich color palette and heavily troweled painterly surfaces.”

I credit Sobel and adjunct curator David Anfam for coming up with the theme. They have discovered a very good, direct pairing of a 1936 painting by Still with van Gogh’s Two Peasants Digging, from 1889, illustrated on the press release, which I encourage you to view.

I asked for more and received PH-418, from 1936, above left, which is paired with Van Gogh’s marvelous Night Cafe, 1888, from the Yale  University Art Gallery, at right. Interesting.

The museum is also pairing Still’s now-famous  Self-Portrait from 1940 (which you will find on this webpage) with van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, 1888, from the Harvard University Art Museums, bottom left.

Based on this information — one never knows until one sees an exhibition — I give the Still museum credit for trying and being enterprising. It’s a good theme.

But I think Still made a huge, egotistical mistake — preventing comparisons of works by other artists side-by-side doesn’t make him look better, it makes him look afraid. Wouldn’t this have been far more interesting if the van Gogh works were actually present, instead of there in reproductions?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Clyfford Still Museum (top); ©  the Yale University Art Gallery (middle); © the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums (bottom).

 

Discovery In the Basement — A Picasso, No Less — Leads to Deaccession

Now it’s a museum in Indiana that has found a treasure lying around in the basement: Picasso’s Seated Woman with Red Hat, dated 1954-1956, has been in storage at the Evansville  Museum of Arts, History & Science since it was donated in 1963. Because of a mixup and misunderstanding, no one knew it was a Picasso — even though it was signed! 

Last week, deciding it was unable to properly secure and show the picture, the museum’s board voted to deaccess Seated Woman with Red Hat through Guernsey’s, the small New York auction house, which plans to sell it privately (about which more, below).

It’s hard to tell, judging by this picture, how good (or bad) this portrait of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter is — but it has an interesting provenance. The museum’s press release reveals  the whole story; here’s an excerpt:

Seated Woman with Red Hat was created using a layered-glass technique called “gemmail” (plural: gemmaux). Gemmail uses individual pieces of color glass overlapped and joined together with clear liquid enamel and then fired. …Picasso…produced 50 or more gemmaux masterpieces during his two years of study at the Malherbe Studio in France.

Picasso gave one-half of his collection to the Malherbe family in return for their expertise, training and collaboration, and kept one half for himself. The pieces in Picasso’s portion of the collection were sold to private collectors [including, the museum added later, the Emperor of Japan, Nelson Rockefeller and Prince Rainier of Monaco].

Raymond Loewy, an internationally known industrial designer, purchased Seated Woman with Red Hat in the late 1950s and gifted the piece to the Evansville Museum in 1963. …

…associated documentation indicated that the piece was created by an artist named “Gemmaux” – confusing the name of the technique with the artist’s name – and that it was a design inspired by a Picasso painting, which is how it was cataloged by museum staff. It was noted that the piece was signed by Picasso. The piece was placed in museum storage and never displayed. Earlier this year, Guernsey’s, in researching Picasso’s gemmaux works, contacted the Evansville Museum about the gift from Raymond Loewy. It was this contact from Guernsey’s that revealed the significance of the piece, prompting further research and study.

Loewy died in 1986, apparently never asking why his gift wasn’t on display.

Although the museum says it doesn’t want to pay the additional expenses associated with showing the picture, this is a curious excuse for deaccessioning. The museum also owns five works on paper by Picasso, and two are on view in an area it says is “devoted to portraits and figure studies.” It has what appears to be an extensive collection of art that requires security: “American and European painting, graphic works, and sculpture dating from the 16th through the 20th centuries.” It mounts temporary exhibitions. It owns, according to one published report, works by Rembrandt, Hopper and O’Keeffe. Its most recent 990, for 2010, shows net assets of more than $20 million and an operating surplus that year of $461,225. It’s accredited by the American Association of Museums.

Neither the museum nor Guernsey’s have placed a value on the portrait, which was based on Picasso’s 1934 Woman With a Red Hat. But that is what appears to be the motivation for selling, doesn’t it?

The message to patrons is clear: don’t give this museum anything too valuable; we’ll have to sell it. Not a way to build a collection.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Evansville Museum

A Confab To Sort Out The World Of Biennials

My favorite biennial is the Biennial at the End of the World (also here, in Spanish with pictures) That’s physical, not time-based. Not that I’ve been yet — it began in 2007 — but I love the billing. It takes place in  Ushuaia, the capital of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego Province and of the Southern Atlantic Islands, and on its first go-round it

artistically joined both ends of the Earth in real time, by means of an electronic station located in Ushuaia and others in the North of Canada and Finnish Lapland. In key points of the participating cities, screens were installed for the passers-by to watch and witness the development of the video-artists’ work, to communicate, and also to participate in this multimedia performance.

Did you know that there are now more than 150 biennials “for art and related disciplines”? That number doesn’t include, obviously, art fairs or annuals or triennials. (No wonder curators are tired.)

But now comes a group called the Biennial Foundation with plans to bring together organizers, curators and supporters of biennials to discuss their challenges. From October 27th through the 31st, it’s hosting the first World Biennial Forum in Gwangju, South Korea coinciding with the 9th Gwangju Biennale  (7 September–11 November). And just in case that’s not enough, you can also attend the nearby Busan Biennale 2012 (22 September–24 November) and the 7th Mediacity Seoul (11 September–4 November). That shows a bit of the problem right there: when does synergy turn into subtracting rather than adding to the combined whole?

While the Forum says it aims to “diffuse knowledge and to promote public awareness of contemporary art biennials,” I think it should also provide an eye-opening look at the big picture here. Can all of these biennials be supported? For how long? That, I hope. will be part of the “critical reflection” on the total number the Forum promises.

The Forum has Co-Directors – Ute Meta Bauerand Hou Hanru — who will develop the structure and content for this “first get-together of biennale professionals.”

Bauer is “Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art…served as the Director of the Visual Arts Program and as Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…was co-curator of documenta 11, artistic director of the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004) and was the Founding Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).”

Hou is “an art critic and curator…[who] worked at San Francisco Art Institute as Director of Exhibitions and Public Program and Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies (2006-2012)….has curated numerous exhibitions including the Biennials of Johannesburg, Shanghai, Gwangju, Guangzhou (Triennial), Tirana, Venice (French Pavilion, 1999, Chinese Pavilion, 2007), Istanbul, and Lyon….[and] is currently curating the 5th Auckland Triennial.

They’ve not released a program yet, but I hope it’s a realistic one. What we probably do not need is more biennials.

The Gwangju Biennial was, according to Culture360, “the first international art biennale in Asia to be introduced as such to the international community and has established itself as Asia’s oldest and most prestigious Biennales of contemporary art. It is amongst the world’s “most visited” Biennales and attracts a huge international audience every year – alternating between art and design.”

Photo Credits: The Gwangju Biennial 2010/Culture360 Magazine

 

Demystifying Museum Acquisitions: A Model Exhibit, A Model Proposal

Since June 30, the Wadsworth Atheneum has been showcasing recent acquisitions in a special show called The Museum Collects, which goes beyond the practice some museums have of placing new acquisitions in a special gallery (though I like that, too) — it’s out to explain why museums buy certain things. As Robin Jaffee Frank, the museum’s Chief Curator, told the Hartford Courant:

When you acquire a new work of art, it’s exciting, but it also has to contribute something to the understanding of works that are already here. You have to justify how it enriches the collection, how it is filling a gap and enhancing the museum’s existing strengths, or maybe how it can take that strength in a new direction…. It has to help tell a larger story about art and culture than the museum was already telling.

This helps demystify museums, explaining why they do what they do, and it’s a trend I applaud. The Atheneum has also scheduled a series of gallery talks called “Conversations With Curators” that explores these decisions more deeply. 

The Courant article provides several examples, including two pieces of furniture in the exhibition — one is a cupboard “made in Virginia in the 17th century,” that the Atheneum has owned for a long time. “The other, a fall-front desk made around 1870 by emancipated slave William Howard, was recently acquired,” and Frank said that Howard would have known of similar pieces, as he borrowed ideas from it.

When I wrote an article about acquisitions endowments for The New York Times earlier this year, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts provided me with the documentation used by its curators to propose several recent acquisitions. Although I’ve been writing about museums for a long time, I found them enlightening. Not that they were out of the ordinary — I might have guessed the topics if I’d spent any time thinking about it, but the truth is, I hadn’t. Here they are, though I should add that not every sheet (MIA sent me four or five) had all of them:

  • Description and Summary of Object or Group of Objects
  • Artist, Style, and explanation of the proposed object
  • Condition
  • Provenance
  • Related Objects:
  • Complements the Existing Collection
  • Plans for exhibiting
  • Why do you recomment the object?
  • Comparable Market Prices

I think the public would be fascinated by the answers to these questions for important acquisitions. I’m going to share one of them, for the cup shown here – Nautilus-Cup – which the MIA purchased last year. When museum people talk about stirring up more interest in their permanent collections, sharing information like this should be on the list.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (top); Detroit Institute of Arts (bottom)