CultureGrrl

Michael Brand, landing on his feet after his rocky time at the Getty and his interim position as consulting director of the in-construction Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, is heading back to his native Australia.

This announcement just hit my inbox:

Michael Brand...has been appointed director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Brand said the following about his new gig in Sydney, which will begin in the middle of this year:

While they [the AGNSW] are rightly focused on serving their primary audience and promoting Australian art, they are also resolutely international in their approach to art and culture.

The museum is currently hosting a blockbuster Picasso show, touring from the in-renovation Musée National Picasso, Paris.

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, London, advised the Sydney Museum in its search.

All of which brings to mind the continued uncertain status of the Getty Museum, where J. Paul Getty Trust president Jim Cuno is presently doing double duty as museum director, after the departure of David Bomford, who assumed the acting directorship when Brand departed in January 2010. I recently heard a rumor that there would be an announcement regarding the Getty's vacant directorship this spring, but, alas, that rumor wasn't attached to a name.

Then I saw the Frick's Colin Bailey at Monday's press preview for the pleasurable Renoir, Impressionism and Full-Length Painting, and a light went on. Like curators Malcolm Warner of the Kimbell and both Gary Tinterow and Ian Wardropper of the Met, all of whom recently left their institutions to direct others, Bailey is a longtime top curator who got passed over when a higher position was handed out at his place. As CultureGrrl readers know, he has previously shown interest in becoming a museum director.

What's more, I think it would be difficult to find someone already directing a major museum who would want to subordinate himself to the strong-willed Cuno. Someone stepping up to a first-time directorship up might be the ideal candidate, under the circumstances.

This CultureGrrl guess probably has as much accuracy as this one did. Then again....


Colin Bailey, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, The Frick Collection

I have been deeply moved by the letters and verbal comments that I've received over the last month from devoted CultureGrrl fans (including some artworld luminaries). Some expressed distress over my plan to kill the blog; some wished me future success and expressed gratitude for my long run of uncompensated commentary.

I wrote that I would give myself at least a month to decide whether to end the blog permanently. I ultimately agreed with one appreciative reader, who clicked my "CONTACT ME" link and sought to persuade me to continue (in modified form) what I had started, some five and a half years ago. Here's what he advised:

I think it is very important for you to keep your blog. It is a record of your voice, and it is not colored (I hope) by the need to appease any particular faction. I also applaud and hope you continue to get WSJ and NPR/PBS etc.-type gigs. They put an authoritarive stamp on you: The powers that be, such as they are, want to associate themselves with your voice.

But I do believe the centerpiece is the blog: It is your history; it is a place people who know you can come or tell others to come. Now I think you have great flexibility and should use significant ingenuity about how you use your blog. Perhaps it is one good post a week; perhaps it is shorter and more derivative (uses other sources when necessary to knit the story). Maybe it should be on Huffington Post [where I also write] so that it gets wider readership.

But I think it is what gives your voice gravitas and should be maintained, even if it is a loss-leader to you. It is where you plant your flag.

Point well taken.

I'm planning, for now, to resume posting, on a much more limited basis---perhaps once or twice a week. I'm not going to cover everything that interests me---only a few developments that seem particularly blogworthy. I will try to continue my more robust presence on Twitter. But most importantly, I'm going to try to focus on paid journalistic gigs and on other professional relationships. I remain open to (but not optimistic about) invitations to blog for bucks.

Speaking of which, alert readers may already have noticed that I have restored my "Donate" button to my middle column. Those of you who expressed regret about missing my "Last-Gasp Fund Drive" now have a chance to welcome CultureGrrl back! Donors of $10 or more will receive e-mailed notifications when new items are posted. (Those of you already on my Donor list are, of course, grandfathered.)

Alas, I've not yet had a PBS gig, as my compassionate correspondent indicated, above (unless this website feature counts). But I did get interviewed again today by Finnish TV1. I think I should move to Helsinki!

This time I was interviewed by the Washington-based U.S. correspondent for the Finnish Broadcasting Company's YLE News. (More about this conversation later.)

For now, here are my new Scandinavian friends, posing in New York's Central Park against a backdrop that you all will recognize. (That's a microphone, not a featherduster, in the cameraman's right hand.)

An ebullient Anne Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, speaking at the press preview for the expansion

By sheer good luck, my drive back home from my visit to Salem, MA (where I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal the Shapeshifting show at the Peabody Essex Museum) coincided with the press preview for Renzo Piano's expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

As it happened, that press preview also coincided with the Jan. 11 court date in the case against Whitey Bulger, an alleged former Boston crime boss who some believe might have something to say about the unsolved 1990 theft of 13 works (including three Rembrandts and a Vermeer) from the Gardner.

In my just-posted Huffington Post appraisal---Gardner Wander: The New, the Old, the Glass Bottleneck in Between---I take you on a tour of the new and old building in words, images and a 13-minute video. This is my first HuffPost piece to be accorded a big photo banner and byline at the top of the Huffington Post Arts page.

You'll hear director Anne Hawley and architect Piano speak in the new concert hall near the beginning of my video. At the end, you'll hear the Gardner's resident chamber orchestra rehearsing there. In between, you'll see the "glass bottleneck" that I refer to in the headline, and hear an extended riff on the Gardner's tapestries by Oliver Tostmann, curator of the collection.

Although I've been critical about several of Piano's past museum expansions (High Museum, Morgan Library and Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, Art Institute of Chicago), I deemed this one to be "an appropriate solution to a pressing problem---the need to preserve Isabella's unique creation while providing the space and services that modern museum visitors expect and museum staffers need."

Reasonable people will disagree. It's always controversial to attach a spiffy modern addition to a beloved historic building. Take a look and judge for yourself.

One thing seemed clear. These key players apparently really enjoyed working together.


Left to right, in the new concert hall: Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics; Scott Nickrenz, the Gardner's music director; architect Renzo Piano

Donor Intent Champion: Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper Jr.

Okay, so I'm violating my no-blogging rule twice in one day (one hour, actually). I break promises for important news.

This just in from the Tennessee Attorney General's Office---a request for permission from the State Supreme Court to appeal the Tennessee Court of Appeals decision that would allow Fisk University to sell a half-share in its Stieglitz Colleciton to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, contrary to the written no-sale stipulation of donor Georgia O'Keeffe.

I haven't read the whole 52-page brief yet, but the money quote is right at the beginning:

The Attorney General urges this Court to...reaffirm the State's commitment to respect and follow a donor's intent and to confirm that any relief...must as closely as possible adhere to donor intent. This Court's guidance is needed not only to clarify this important question of law, upon which the ultimate disposition of the invaluable art collection at issue hinges, but also to convey a clear and unambiguous message to potential donors of gifts for the public benefit that Tennessee courts will not substitute their judgment in contravention of a donor's explicit instructions.

Such a statement from this State's highest Court is necessary to avoid the chilling effect on future donor gifts created by the Court of Appeals' decision to ignore the donor's express intent in this case. Future donors of gifts for the public benefit must be assured that restrictive covenants they place on their gifts will be enforced; otherwise the public will be forever deprived of the benefit of many gifts.

I couldn't have said it better myself. You go, Super Cooper!

Name That Curator (and name that museum)!
Photo taken Jan. 27 by Lee Rosenbaum

I've been to DC and West Palm Beach, among other venues. But if you're not following me on Twitter, you're not up to speed on some of what I've done lately and who I saw. (However, I haven't tweeted about my wide-ranging discussion with the person pictured above).

You also don't know what I think about the Association of Art Museum Director's belated, just released report about its Jan. 15-18 mid-winter meeting: Don B. was admitted to the club (notwithstanding this). Michael Taylor got in, just as fast as you can say, "Fabulous Former Philly Curator."

But wait a minute! Where's Jeffrey?

You can now read online my piece that will be on tomorrow's "Leisure & Arts" page of the Wall Street Journal. Artifacts to Artworks is my take on the Peabody Essex Museum's Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art.

Let me supplement this article with my own photographs illustrating the works that I discuss. Here's the "may not be suitable for children" piece that opens the show (and my article). It sure looks kid-friendly, until you step inside. Good luck trying to restrain your kids from entering this alluring "tipi":


Kent Monkman, "Théâtre de Cristal," 2007, Glenbow Museum, Alberta

Projected on a fake buckskin rug beneath the tipi's chandelier is a savage silent-movie parody of old Hollywood Westerns. This homoerotic, full-frontal film fantasy bears a title that apparently was not fit for a family newspaper---"Group of Seven Inches." It begins with this romantic encounter between the artist's drag-queen alter ego (in stiletto heels) and two loin-clothed white men, one of whom is pictured below:



But now let's move on. Here's the other "bookend" to the show, which alone occupies the final gallery:


Brian Jungen, "Cetology," 2002, Vancouver Art Gallery

Here's a close-up of the plastic chairs of which this "whale skeleton" is composed:



This is the deerskin pouch that I described as "ravishing":


Northeastern artist, Pouch, late 1600s to mid-1700s, Peabody Essex Museum

The PEM loses points, though, for displaying this masterpiece in such a way that you cannot see the equally beautiful (and conceptually important) decoration on the other side. I managed to slip my camera between the case and the wall, to bring you this blurry shot of the porcupine-quill embroidery that the catalogue illustrates and describes as "double-curves [that] manifest the desire and necessity for balance in one's life":



At the press preview, Karen Kramer Russell, the PEM's curator of Native American art and culture, described this Chilkat blanket from her own museum's collection as the oldest known example in the world:


Chilkat Blanket, c. 1832, Peabody Essex Museum

But wait a minute! Yesterday I saw this one at the Metropolitan Museum, which claims to be older!


Chilkat Blanket, British Columbia, c. 1825, private collection (displayed at Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Here's one of the strangest objects in the PEM's show, which, as I noted in my article, was one of many demonstrating the effect of cross-cultural influences on Native American artists. It has an Egyptian-inspired headdress and forelegs, and a Haida face:


Simeon Stilthda, "Sphinx," c. 1875, British Museum

Speaking of cross-cultural influences, Tlingit/Aleut artist Nicholas Galanin's engrossing two-part dance video, "Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan" ("We Will Again Open This Container of Wisdom That Has Been Left in Our Care"), 2006, combines a traditional Tlingit song with modern dance in one clip, and contemporary electronic music with tribal dance in the other.

Here's my conversation with Nicholas, as we viewed his piece together:

Karen Kramer Russell, Peabody Essex Museum's curator of Native American art and culture, discussing a painted hide shield cover, Upper Missouri River, c. 1820, National Museum of Natural History, on display at the PEM's new "Shapeshifting" exhibition

I'm still here, art-lings. And I do miss you (and the blog)!

Your many notes of appreciation for CultureGrrl that I've received since deserting you have greatly moved me (sometimes almost to tears). I knew that some of you cared, but didn't know how many or how much! Only one donor took me up on my offer to refund contributions to my recent fund drive that fell short of its goal (causing me to delete my "Donate" button and shift professional focus).

Speaking of professional changes, I've now slightly fleshed out my Linked In profile, which you can access by clicking the logo in the middle column. My entry into this everyone-is-connected world has been reluctant and slow: I'm one of the least social individuals ever to (sort of) participate in social media. But I did experience the power of that world firsthand, when other Tweeters encouraged their followers to contribute to my fund drive. Thanks to all!

Although I come from the old school of "writers are loners and are not entrepreneurs," I'm slowly learning new tricks. One of these days, I'll even get a smartphone. (But the NY Philharmonic marimba incident did give me pause!)

In any event, there's still some life in the old CultureGrrl: As I previously mentioned, I'm going to link here to my mainstream-media work, and even flesh it out a bit upon occasion. And I encourage all of you to follow my tasty news-and-views tidbits on Twitter (@CultureGrrl).

Here's my first opportunity to reconnect with you on the blog: If all goes according to plan, the Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & Arts" page tomorrow will run my review of the just-opened Shapeshifting show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. My piece should be online later today.

I'll soon provide you with the link to that piece (with a raunchy beginning), and I'll post on CultureGrrl some photos of the works I discuss. As a bonus, I'll include my video interview with one of the artists, Nicholas Galanin, who attended the press preview.

I fear that these two posts may cause me to backslide into blogoholism. Luckly I'll be, of necessity, away from my home computer for much of the next two weeks. (Should I leave the laptop home?)

Photo © by Jill Krementz

"Thanks from CultureGrrl" has been the subject-line in my recent e-mailed acknowledgements to some 44 supporters (both Repeat Donors and new ones) from 16 states, the District of Columbia and one foreign country (Finland). Individual generosity during my recent three-week fund drive ranged from $5 to $500. In all, I raised $1,945---just shy of my $2,000 goal. More than for the contributions, I am very grateful for the many notes of appreciation that accompanied them.

I love you, art-lings, and will miss you. I cherish the bonds I've forged over the past five and a half years with my classy, savvy audience. But as you well know, I'm a stickler. I'm going to stick to my word and, effective today, take a break (possibly a permanent one) from blogging.

In introducing my now concluded Last-Gasp Fund Drive, I wrote:

If 100 readers are willing to donate $20 each within the next three weeks to express appreciation for last year's edition of CultureGrrl (or if a different combination of readers and benefactions achieves the same monetary goal), I'll continue....

If I don't get this vote of confidence, I'm going to take off at least a month, beginning Jan. 9, to undergo blogging-addiction withdrawal and seek other opportunities. I don't know yet whether I'll relapse in February. But my month's hiatus isn't an empty threat; it's a promise.

My month's sabbatical may become a permanent one. I just don't know yet whether I can do without the instant gratification of telling stories that need to be told and expressing views that I feel need to be aired.

But I've become a slave to the blog, and I'm eager to see what else may be out there for me---something I couldn't do while blogging, because I'm too much of a perfectionist. I labored much too long and hard every day, researching my posts and crafting my prose. If I'm going to continue doing this kind of work, I really should get paid.

As one of my most generous repeat donors just wrote to me:

I am a firm believer that artists, and arts journalists, should get paid for what they do.  My least favorite phrase is "psychic compensation," which is the way artists have been exploited for years into doing work for free.

But no one "exploited" me. I freely (perhaps foolishly) chose to do this, and it did bring me a some speaking gigs and broadcast exposure that I would not otherwise have enjoyed. It raised my profile and made me semi-famous to a niche group of art aficionados. What's more, for the most part, I enoyed doing it. I thank Doug McLennan and his ArtsJournal for providing me a distinguished platform, in the company of some of the best arts bloggers in the "business."

[Wait a minute! AJ's Real Clear Arts just lifted my original Tobias Meyer/Richter photo! Is this "appropriation art"? (By the time you read this, it may have been de-appropriated.) RCA credits the photo to Bui Gallery, but it's definitely one that I took and published Nov. 10 on CultureGrrl. (Did Bui "appropriate" it first?)]

There are a number of balls that I'll be dropping this month---things on my blog's to-do list that won't get done. It's going to be hard going back to being mild-mannered mortal Lee Rosenbaum, writing about a few things, after being caped crusader CultureGrrl, opinionating on everything.

Looking forward, I'm ready, willing and able to take on paid journalistic projects (including paid blogging gigs), speaking engagements and teaching stints. You can contact me through the blog. I will continue to link on CultureGrrl to my mainstream-media work and perhaps I'll even provide on this site a little extra commentary and/or multimedia related to those articles or broadcasts.

If I can't resist indulging my passion for online commentary, you may find me occasionally on Huffington Post. And I'll likely continue to tweet now and then, to let CultureGrrl followers know what I'm thinking and doing.

Finally, for those of you who participated in the fund drive in anticipation of future posts (rather than in appreciation of past ones), here's my money-back offer: Just reply to my "Thanks from CultureGrrl" e-mail with one word---REFUND---and I'll click the "Issue refund" button on PayPal. I don't want anyone to feel cheated.

Thanks, art-lings, for your intelligence, insights and appreciation, and for all our time together!

Entrance to Boston Museum of Fine Arts' current hit show

[Part I is here; Part II is here.]

Degas and the Nude at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (to Feb. 5) is one of the most perfectly realized art-museum explorations of a complex subject that I've ever encountered. The initiator of this ambitious undertaking---curator George T.M. Shackelford---gets extra points for focusing on a theme that's an obvious choice for a major scholarly crowd-pleaser but that, unaccountably, no one (as far as George could determine) had tackled till now.

This show is thoroughly multimedia, not only in its handheld audio and video enhancements, but, more importantly, in the old-fashioned sense---extensive representation of all the media in which the artist worked: drawings, monotypes, sculpture (including a large array of bronzes cast from his wax models of dancers), paintings and, of course, the ravishing pastels for which he is perhaps most celebrated.

Much richer than a conventional chronological retrospective, "Degas" makes telling comparisons within the artist's own oeuvre, including, perhaps for the first time, juxtapositions of monotypes with their corresponding pastels.

Here is one of the pastels for which the corresponding monotype is displayed:


"Nude Combing Her Hair," c. 1877-80, pastel over monotype in black ink on paper, private collection, Chicago, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The show goes beyond typical retrospectives with its sampling of astutely selected works by artists who influenced Degas---Ingres, Delacroix, Goya, Puvis de Chavannes---and by later admirers whom he influenced---Bonnard, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse:


Matisse, "Carmelina," 1903, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© 2011 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In this context, I can now more fully appreciate why Shackelford felt irresistibly tempted to deaccession eight works from the BMFA's collection (including three with significant exhibition histories) to purchase this one---a prominently installed non-Degas, which is one of the exhibition's showstoppers:


Gustave Caillebotte, "Man at His Bath," 1884, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

It's a luminous tour de force, not as much for the candid but (to me) disappointing depiction of male flesh as for the alluring sheen of the tub and the luxuriant, lovingly detailed renderings of crumpled fabrics and well-worn boots (the latter on the left, below the chair). None of this is adequately conveyed in the above photo. The painting, in apparently pristine condition, is (like everything else in the show) perfectly lit, so its glistening brushstrokes appear still wet.

The Caillebotte is also a reminder that the only male nudes we've seen from Degas came as something of a surprise, at the very beginning of the show. His early academic studies of male nudes from live models or other artists' works (including a study of Michelangelo's "Bound Slave") are classically sensual, in sharp contrast to the mature Degas' awkwardly posed females, caught unawares from behind (as is Caillebotte's spread-eagled "Man").

We could make some Freudian guesses here about Degas' famously ambiguous sexuality, but Boston's exhibition (unlike two other Degas shows I've seen, curated by Richard Kendall, who discusses Degas' possible impotence and/or celibacy) doesn't really go there.

The importance to the show of Caillebotte (who bequeathed his own collection of his friend's nudes-in-pastel to the French State---its first acquisitions of Degas) is underscored by the curators' suggestion that the "unabashed realism" of works like "Man at His Bath" may have helped inspire Degas to begin a monumental (but unfinished) painting of a similar subject (toweling off after a bath), installed beside the Caillebotte:


"Nude Woman Drying Herself," 1884-92, Brooklyn Museum, Courtesy Brooklyn Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In their reviews of Boston's show, some critics have come across as direct descendants of the scandalized scribes from Degas' own day---describing his nudes as cruel (Karen Rosenberg, NY Times), or misogynistic (Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker). His female nudes are often awkward, caught in private, ungainly movements. In other words, they're real women, not rarefied beauties flattered in fetching poses. Degas' best works are astonishing for their unsparingly candid, very modern realism. His gaze was intensely voyeuristic, but not misogynistic.

The critic who best appreciated these nuances was Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe. He stated:

If you come to the show with an image of Degas as the painter of pretty ballerinas and horse track scenes, be prepared to find something tougher. If, on the other hand, you come with your defenses up---convinced that Degas, along with being an anti-Semite, was also a misogynist---prepare to have these defenses weakened.

The artist's voyeurism is laid bare in his early brothel monotypes, whose frankness still shocks. This is one of the tamer examples:


"The Serious Client," 1876-77, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Photo © National Gallery of Canada, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Also featured in the Clark Art Institute's 2010 "Picasso Looks at Degas" exhibition (co-curated by Kendall), these tawdry morsels weren't intended for public consumption and were "largely unknown until after [Degas'] death," according to Boston's wall text for "The Body Exploited."

But Degas' oeuvre is not only about overturning conventional notions of female beauty. By the time we get to the 1880s, we're swooning in aesthetic ecstasy amidst the jewel-like, dazzlingly dappled, highly finished pastels of bathers that "constitute one of his highest achievements as an artist," as the curators tell us:


"La Toilette," 1884-86, private collection, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


"The Tub," 1886, Musée d'Orsay
© Photo Musée d'Orsay/rmn, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

All credit goes to the curators, especially George Shackelford, now moving on to the senior deputy directorship of the Kimbell Art Museum from his BMFA posts as chair of European art and curator of modern art. (As part of the Fort Worth museum's musical chairs, Malcolm Warner, after 10 years at the Kimbell as senior curator, deputy director and acting director, has also moved on, effective this week, to the executive directorship of the Laguna Art Museum.)

Shackelford conceived "Degas" more than three years ago, enlisting the ideal co-conspirator (and co-curator)---Xavier Rey, curator of paintings, Musée d'Orsay. The Paris museum (to which the show will travel, Mar. 12-July 1) is the largest single lender, with more than 60 of the 160 works culled from 50 international sources.

As one who has long argued that curators should get a "byline" in an exhibition's wall text, I was pleasantly surprised by the well-earned acknowledgement of Shackelford's authorship in the introductory panel. May he extend the same courtesy to curators at the Kimbell, and long live this laudable practice at the BMFA!


Curatorial Star Turn: George Shackelford's signed introductory wall text (with photograph) for "Degas and the Nude"

For the exhibition's online slideshow, go here. For its catalogue, go here.

And now, art-lings, a personal note: Shackelford's swansong at the BMFA is, as it happens, CultureGrrl's swansong too. My three-week Last-Gasp Fund Drive has concluded. As promised, I'll be announcing here on Monday the results of my fundraising appeal and my future plans.