The somewhat forbidding, sign-less façade of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

I  hadn't kept up with the Pulitzer.

When I arrived two weeks ago in the gritty part of St. Louis where the Tadao Ando-designed Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is situated, on a street that, on that weekday morning, had few pedestrian or vehicular passersby, I had expected to find something resembling what the late John Russell had described in his NY Times review of the 2001 opening---an architecturally distinguished space stocked with Emily Rauh Pulitzer's superb modern and contemporary masterpieces.

The architectural flair was still there, but only a few key Pulitzer works remained, including this perfectly placed Kelly commission, "Blue Black"...



...and this site-specific Serra, "Joe," named for Joseph Pulitzer:



But the mission of the institution has significantly shifted: It now installs temporary shows of borrowed art that serve as springboards for providing social services to the disadvantaged. The Pulitzer has on its staff a social worker, Lisa Harper Chang (whose title is, "Manager of Community Engagement"), but no educator.

Ando's austerely elegant spaces are perfectly suited to the temporary Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition, recently installed by senior curator Francesca Herndon-Consagra (to June 5). The show opens with the same Museum of Modern Art-owned piece that had been stationed at the entrance to MoMA's new contemporary galleries during the inaugural installation in its new Taniguchi building:


Gordon Matta-Clark, "Bingo," 1974, Museum of Modern Art, installed at the Pulitzer

Another highlight of the show is "Splitting: Four Corners," owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which I had last seen at the Whitney Museum's 2007 retrospective.

But wait a minute! This was supposed to be an irreverent VIDEO essay! No more stationary images. Let's get moving:

From the Museum of the Unbuilt: Toyo Ito's scrapped model for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Lawrence Rinder, fresh from conversing on Oct. 27 with his former Whitney Museum mentor, Max Anderson (who now directs the Indianapolis Museum of Art), announced on Wednesday a disappointing development that must have given Max traumatic flashbacks: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), where Rinder became director after leaving his contemporary art curatorship at the Whitney, revealed that its planned new building, designed by Toyo Ito, is "being modified due to lingering economic uncertainty."

Max, as you may remember, stepped down from his Whitney directorship after the board decided not to proceed with Rem Koolhaas' design for that museum's expansion.

BAM/PFA had been trying to raise $200 million for its project, but the capital campaign, as of this month, had only pulled in $81 million, Rinder told Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle.

When I asked BAM/PFA for further details, including whether Ito would still be involved in the diminished project, Ariane Bicho, communications director, replied:

It's too early to say. We have several intriguing concepts on the table, and it's possible that Ito will be involved. The biggest change will be the scale of the project.

As far as functions, features and materials, it's just too early to say. University and museum leadership are currently looking at a range of possibilities, one of which includes repurposing the existing building at Center and Oxford streets.

We are currently analyzing what we can afford in the next iteration.

In his rave for Ito's design, back when it was announced one year ago, Nicolai Ouroussoff, the NY Times' architecture critic, was sadly prophetic:

I have no idea whether, in this dismal economic climate, the University of California will find the money to build its new art museum here. But if it fails, it will be a blow to those of us who champion provocative architecture in the United States.

Will someone please buy Nicolai a good stiff drink?

Mies van der Rohe's Test Cell building at Illinois Institute of Technology
Photo by Edward Lifson

A minor work of Mies van der Rohe, who is being celebrated in the Museum of Modern Art's current Bauhaus show, is being demolished in Chicago, a city very closely tied to his architecture.

For months, my blogging buddy, Ed Lifson, has been waging a relentless but futile campaign to save the' so-called Test Cell building---a modest cube that is part of the Mies-designed Illinois Institute of Technology. It is being knocked down to make way for a new train station. Blair Kamin, the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, calls Test Cell a "clunky brick box." Lifson counter that it offers "a quiet message of doing much with little."

This week, Ed reports, it is being destroyed:

And so it will happen. This week powers that be in Chicago will demolish a little work by Mies van der Rohe. A small part of his extraordinarily important campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology will bite the dust....Tearing this down is like destroying forever a minor work by Mozart.

The poignant image now on Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's homepage

I got a chance to talk at length with Jeanne-Claude, who died last night at the age of 74, back in 2005 when "The Gates" captured the imagination of all New Yorkers, not to mention visitors from around the world. This glorious transformation made me see my childhood haunt, Central Park, with fresh, enlivened eyes, and the project created a bond among all of us who were fortunate enough to experience it.

Although the early obits have stressed her equal partnership with her husband Christo, Jeanne-Claude was first among equals when it came to handling the logistical and financial details of their projects. She was also the lead spokesperson when it came to dealing with the press, as I discovered when I conducted a joint phone interview with the couple for my Wall Street Journal piece about "The Gates."

This statement from the Common Errors section of their joint website succinctly defines their division of labor:

There are 3 things Christo and Jeanne-Claude do not do together:

• They never fly in the same aircraft.

• Jeanne-Claude does not make drawings, she was not trained for that. Christo puts their ideas on paper; he never had an assistant in his studio.

• Christo never had the pleasure of talking to their tax accountant.

When it came to the pleasure of talking to the press, Jeanne-Claude was friendly, frank and funny.

Here's an excerpt from my WSJ article:

"The Gates"...were briefly in play, when one New York dealer, representing a collector, offered the artists $10 million for 50 of the fabric-festooned frames. Jeanne-Claude amusedly recounted, in a joint phone interview with husband Christo, that the rebuffed agent gamely doubled his offer to $20 million.

"Nobody can buy this project," declared Christo. "Nobody can charge tickets for this project, nobody can own this project---because freedom is an enemy of possession and possession is the equal of permanence. That is why this project should go away." According to Jeanne-Claude, the Brooklyn Museum also learned this lesson when it requested four of the gates. Its director, Arnold Lehman, said he knew nothing of this, but a museum spokesperson, Sally Williams, suggested that a curator might have initiated the inquiry.

They were (and are) the real deal: Their partnership necessarily had its business component, but it wasn't about the money. It was the means to the end of enthralling the art pilgrims who flocked to their improbable, impractical projects with the mystery, beauty and rapture of their boundless imagination.

Okay, all you museum wonks. It's that moment you've all been waiting for---the online debut of the Metropolitan Museum's annual report for fiscal 2009!

The Report of the Chief Financial Officer, as predicted, showed a whopping $8.4-million operating deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30. Even scarier, the Report from the President and Director mentioned the "likelihood of budget deficits in the range of $20 million-plus a year for years to come unless significant expense reductions occurred." (Necessary measures have now been taken, including the previously announced 14% staff cut.)

At the end of the above-linked president's and director's report is the complete list of those who chose to take the voluntary retirement package offered this year by the Met to expedite staff reductions.

One of my favorite sections, Objects Sold or Exchanged (scroll down), wherein the Met is required to list all objects that it has sold during the previous year for more than $50,000, was commendably boring this time around:

During the past fiscal year, the cash proceeds from the sale of deaccessioned and nonaccessioned works of art were $42,800. No works of art sold were valued in excess of $50,000.

What I don't understand, though, is that "Proceeds from Sales of Art" on p. 57 of the Financial Statements (under "NON-OPERATING") totaled $600,000, not the $42,800 mentioned on the bottom of p. 33. I have a question pending with the Met about that, and will update here or in a subsequent post, if and when I learn more. Art purchases totaled $38.92 million, down from $48.93 million the previous year.

Total endowment funds dropped by 26%---from $2.51 billion at the end of fiscal 2008 to $1.86 billion at the end of fiscal 2009.

With the budgetary crisis presumably dealt with, maybe the Met's trial-by-fire director, Tom Campbell, will finally get a chance to focus more fully on the non-financial functions that had made the position seem so alluring back in early September 2008, when he was named as Philippe de Montebello's successor, just before the economy tanked.

While we're talking high finance, my warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 88 from Arlington, VA, and CultureGrrl Repeat Donors 89 and 90 from Lansdale, PA and Seattle, for their gifts in anticipation of my Big Birthday.

For the rest of you, there's still time to ring my "Donate" bell, to help me ring in my next decade. It starts (gulp!) today.

Knox Martin's protest art: what remains of his "Venus" mural (with his recently added signature)

Last month, CultureGrrl. This week, the New Yorker!

The Knox Notch (scroll down) hit the Big Time in the magazine's Nov. 23 issue (which landed in my snail-mailbox yesterday), with its appearance in a full-page photo of Jean Nouvel's in-construction 100 Eleventh Avenue.

You can see the photo in the online version of Paul Goldberger's Jean Nouvel and the Art of the Façade, but Knox's incongruous, irascible gesture is more prominent and subversive in the larger print version. (The above photo is mine.) What I particularly love about the magazine photo: "KNOX" flanks the left side of Nouvel's "vision machine" (which all but obliterates Martin's vision) while flanking its right side, at about the same height, is another vertical vision---the hazy but unmistakable form of the Empire State Building.

Although the otherwise puzzling visual detail of the colorful mural fragment calls for some explanation, Goldberger ignores it, focusing on the brilliance of the architect and his still incomplete apartment tower:

If you are tired of the way every modern building feels flatter and thinner than the one before it, well, so is Jean Nouvel...

...except, of course, when it comes to erecting an extremely thin, exceedingly tall tower on the postage-stamp site adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art---a project that Goldberger looks upon with favor.

He reserves his last two paragraphs for an attack on New York's City Planning Commission for lopping off 200 feet from the planned MoMA Monster, which he says will "eviscerate" Nouvel's design. I agree with him that this is a "bad compromise." It's a Judgement-of-Solomon edict that satisfies no one. In my view (and that of the project's opponents), any building erected on this postage-stamp site needs to be shorter...MUCH shorter.

A profile of the CPC's chair, Amanda Burden, published last month in Crain's, makes it appear that the commission's action may have been as much a matter of pique as policy.

Theresa Agovino reports:

Ms. Burden counters that Mr. Nouvel didn't present a finished design, even after having years to complete it, which she calls disrespectful. She brandishes a rendering of the tower with an unfinished top---a simple, open triangle enclosing a box that will house the building's operating mechanisms.

"They wanted special permission for this?" she asks contemptuously.

I'm not sure how Goldberger knows that the new, shorter design will be "a lot less graceful" than the original glass tower. As far as I know, Nouvel's revisions are still in progress. But maybe the eminent architecture critic has access to more drawing-board information that I do. He doesn't explicitly state whether he's actually seen the new design.

What I do know is that it's not just a matter of lopping off the top, as Paul seems to suggest. It can still meet the sky gracefully; it will merely have to accomplish this at the 1,050-foot height of the Chrysler Building instead of at the 1,250-foot height of the iconic skyscraper flanking Nouvel's 100 Eleventh Avenue in the New Yorker photograph.

Since we just ended our previous post about cultural-property issues with the photograph I took in St. Louis of the Mummy Mask of the Lady Ka-nefer-nefer, let's go to the video tape!

This is a CultureGrrl First---a video where this reporter (not some museum honcho) is the speaker. Let's wander around the St. Louis Art Museum's Egyptian galleries and then repair to the grand entrance lobby, where we will encounter the architectural model for SLAM's planned (and delayed by one year) expansion, poised to break ground later this year.

Has David Chipperfield become the go-to museum architect for cities along the Mississippi?

At its meeting on Friday, the U.S. State Department's Cultural Property Advisory Committee heard testimony from museum directors, archaeologists and representatives of dealers and collectors as part of its interim review of this country's Memorandum of Understanding with Italy. The best summary I've found of these proceedings is on the Cultural Property Observer blog of Peter Tompa, an advocate for coin collectors and dealers and one of those who testified.

I'm hoping that the Association of Art Museum Directors (which has posted members' CPAC testimony in the past) will provide links to the full testimony of its director/representatives who spoke Friday in Washington: Maxwell Anderson, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Gary Vikan, Walters Art Gallery; Michael Conforti, Clark Art Institute (and AAMD's president); Kaywin Feldman, Minneapolis Institute.

According to Tompa's account, Feldman told CPAC that "her institution is the poorer because it had to return a long-term loan of "orphan artifacts" under the AAMD's new provenance rules and due to current restrictions, that void remains at her institution."

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has recently added 10 objects---mostly Greek and Roman coins---to AAMD's registry for recently acquired objects with uncertain post-November 1970 provenances. It joins the Metropolitan Museum and Portland Art Museum in this effort to provide greater transparency.

Meanwhile, the NY Times continues its campaign against Zahi Hawass' reenergized campaign to repatriate objects to Egypt. (Give him a few fragments, he asks for Nefertiti.) In today's paper, science writer John Tierney picks up where Michael Kimmelman left off. But Tierney goes further, indiscriminately swallowing the entire James Cuno argument.

Tierney argues:

Restricting the export of artifacts hasn't ended their theft and looting any more than the war on drugs has ended narcotics smuggling. [By that logic, should we therefore also end the war on drugs? And what about the effect of export restrictions combined with greater enforcement efforts to curtail looting?]....

Dr. Hawass may consider the Rosetta Stone to be the property of his government agency, but the modern state of Egypt didn't even exist when it was discovered in 1799 (much less when it was inscribed in 196 B.C., during the Hellenistic era). The land was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the local historians were most interested in studying their Islamic heritage. [Does this mean that modern-day Egyptians have no legitimate interest in preserving and studying the ancient cultural heritage of their region?]

I'm not saying that Hawass should get whatever he's seeking. I'm just saying that many of the arguments that have been advanced by "universal museum" proponents are specious.

The Hawass watch continues with Ian Parker's Letter from Cairo: The Pharaoh, a New Yorker profile that makes him seem like a megalomaniac, with an emphasis on the latter part of that word.

Although we haven't heard much about this lately, our country hasn't been exempt from Hawass harassment. The last time I looked, however (just nine days ago), this radiant lady was still safely ensconced in St. Louis (and posed serenely, behind glass, for her CultureGrrl photo):


Mummy Mask of the Lady Ka-nefer-nefer, Dynasty 19 (1307-1196 B.C.), from Saqqara, St. Louis Art Museum

You win, art-lings!

I still have to write my paid piece, but three donations had already hit my PayPal account by early this morning, so I'm going to have to keep my promise and keep on blogging. You've already had my post for today, but I have several things in mind for later this week.

Flush with your contributions, I headed to my local Borders bookstore, looking for Terry Teachout's newly published Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

I was hoping to find it here:

Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, under construction adjacent to the Indianapolis Museum of Art

As I mentioned here, I was in Indianapolis last week---part of my week-long, three-city Midwestern journey.

You know who I saw in windy Indy---Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It was only hours after he had returned home from this trip, but he was not looking the least bit wave-tossed or jet-lagged (as you will see in the CultureGrrl Video at the end of this post). Having just helped to lead a tour from Catania to Cádiz aboard a three-masted yacht, he led me on a tour aboard a golf cart of the unmanicured 100 acres being transformed by IMA into the Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, opening next June.

This is no mere sculpture garden with "plop art." It will feature eight commissioned, site-specific works by Tea Mäkipää, Atelier Van Lieshout, Kendall Buster, Alfredo Jaar, Jeppe Hein, Los Carpinteros, Type A, and Andrea Zittel, which will later be rotated out as future commissions cycle in. The artists were selected by Lisa Freiman, head of the IMA's contemporary art department, in consultation with Anderson. (More information about the park and the artists is here.)

Here's Max, just off the Sea Cloud II, in front of Tea Mäkipää's "Eden II," which is about to be transported to a manmade lake, as he explains during our video conversation:


 
Below, in the background, is the water in which the vessel will be anchored. As you can see, the park is already used for non-art purposes:



But enough of me. As I mentioned, this is likely to be my last post for a while, unless three thoughtful donors step up to the plate. For now, let's listen to Max: