August 2006 Archives

to cover the fall openings of the new Boston ICA and the new addition to the Denver Art Museum---the first completed buildings in the U.S. designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Daniel Libeskind, respectively.

The most recent of my many Mainstream Media articles on museum openings (in two parts) is here and here. (Yes, I'm still cheerfully writing for the Wall Street Journal, but these plums, alas, went to distinguished colleagues.)

SOMEONE must need the brilliant insights that only CultureGrrl can provide! If this shameless plea actually elicits an editor, it could be a blogging first. You can contact me here.

COMING NEXT: CultureGrrl begs for a book contract. (Just kidding.)

The Museum of Modern Art decided that transparency was the best policy during its recent conservation of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", one of its most iconic works. MoMA provided continuing updates about the progress of that restoration on its website.

But the museum has been more discreet about its facelifts for other aging modern masterpieces. When I had asked her in early July about why Matisse's "The Swimming Pool" had been off view for so long, Ruth Kaplan, MoMA's communications head, e-mailed this enigmatic reply:

Our response to your question is: With more than 150,000 works in the collection, not all can be on view continuously. There are a number of factors that determine what is on view at any given time.

MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, who on Tuesday candidly described to me the reasons why the Matisse had vanished, also provided details about important restorations already underway:

I've been talking to conservation about a program of dealing with major works. We have a Matisse list. We've almost finished The Piano Lesson, which is why that's not on view. The discolored varnish has been taken off. We've been getting off some of the wax that came through in the reline, and all the old inpainting has come off. What's left to do is to make some decisions about any restoration, because there were some losses. Some of them have to be filled in.

We took the Beckmann triptych down, and that's very much changed. It's much brighter. So that's going to come back. And the Ensor "Tribulations of Saint Anthony" has been redone. The reason these things were never done before is that they've never come off the walls. And I think you have to make some choices here. It seems to me one has to accept the fact that it's important to do this and when they come back, they're going to be much better than when they left.

Or, at least, different.

In a previous post, I lamented the long-time disappearance from the Museum of Modern Art's galleries of Matisse's late masterpiece, The Swimming Pool, a nine-panel mural in two parts (each 7 1/2 feet long), consisting of gouache-on-paper cutouts, pasted on white painted paper mounted on burlap.

Yesterday I caught up with my favorite MoMA curator, Matisse expert John Elderfield, at the contemporary-art press preview. Here's what he told me about the Matisse:

The burlap on which it's done has darkened very significantly. It's a complicated issue because when you look at photographs of what it was like in his [Matisse's] apartment, it's clear that the burlap which it's on isn't the burlap that was on the wall of the apartment. I think what happened is that when the apartment was dismantled, they took the elements off the wall and put them on separate panels of burlap. They gave it a new background from the one it was before....

Sometimes these big things are ones which you tend to keep pushing away a little bit. I'm grateful to you for reminding me that this is something I've got to deal with this year.

is not by selling it, if the piece is of museum quality. If a museum can't use a work that a sister institution would be pleased to exhibit, what ought to happen is this.

In a previous post, reacting to comments made to me by curator Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan Museum, CultureGrrl opined:

Collection-sharing IS an option---one that should be more seriously explored by all museums with a superabundance of riches.

Now, as my fellow ArtsJournal blogger Tyler Green reports, the Met has loaned to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas an Eduardo Chillida that Tinterow had originally hoped to sell from the collection. Let's hope that this happy outcome serves as a model solution for over-stuffed storage space.

The sight of pioneering modern dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, wheeled into today's MoMA press preview by the museum's president emerita, Agnes Gund, to see himself dance in Nam June Paik's 1993 untitled 15-television piece, with player piano. Cunningham and his frequent co-conspirator, composer John Cage, also featured in the videos, "shared with Paik an interest in chance, accident and humor," as the wall label reminded us.

"Merce was over the moon to rediscover this piece," the show's curator, Joachim Pissarro, told the assembled art writers. Cunningham is the last surviving member of this legendary trio.

Now that I've returned, disgruntled, from the press preview for the Museum of Modern Art's latest reinstallation of its sprawling second-floor contemporary-art space (tellingly entitled, "Out of Time"), it's high time to add an 11th item to my "Top 10 List" of things I dislike about the new MoMA (posted here and here):

The concept behind MoMA's contemporary galleries urgently needs to be rethought.

The less said about this particular contemporary installation, the better. Although nominally about "some of the tensions embedded in recent experiences of time," "Out of Time" is actually a Seinfeldian show-about-nothing. "Time" is interpreted in so many different ways as to become a meaningless governing concept for disparate works that huddle together in various small groups that have little to say to one another---"Passing Time," "Time's Impact on the Creative Process," "Irrational Models of Time," "Time as a Repository of History and Memory" (this, the strongest section, for its political punch).

For the life of me, I could not fathom what Sarah Morris' and Frank Stella's hard-edged geometric paintings had to do with time, other than showing that the same concerns have occupied different artists working at different times. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as Seinfeld might say). MoMA did a better job on the subject of time not that long ago---its 2002 "Tempo" show, organized by then adjunct curator Paulo Herkenhoff, at MoMA QNS.

But there's a bigger problem, which is alluded to at the end of the new installation's introductory wall text:

The history of contemporary art is in the process of being written, updated, and revised, and for this reason the presentation in the Contemporary Galleries changes at least once a year.

Because MoMA refuses to go out on a limb and say that certain works in its contemporary collection are so important that they deserve to be on (more or less) permanent view, we are at the mercy of the whims of different curators possessed of varying degrees of expertise and insight about contemporary art. This contemporary cop-out seems to say that the art of of the last few decades is more transient and less for-the-ages than the masterpieces upstairs. Judgments of quality, however controversial, can be revised but need to be made.

That's not to say that there should not also be changing displays; there's enough room on the second floor for both. Nor must the "permanent" contemporary works always remain on view; there may be times when the entire space is needed for an important temporary contemporary show.

But what we must NOT have is the situation we had this summer: No contemporary art was on display in those galleries for a period of seven weeks, while the previous installation was dismantled and the current one installed. Think of all those tourists who come to MoMA for a definitive account of contemporary art, get almost nothing, and can't come back.

Meanwhile, we're stuck with the current lackluster show for seven months---enough time to come up with a better plan. Actually, this is the second-floor show we can look forward to next summer. And, I must say, it's about time!

Is this tacky, or what? I'm not even going to try to satirize it. I'll leave that to my blogging betters.

Here's the second part of my article, appearing on the Leisure & Arts page in today's Wall Street Journal. (Here's Part I.)

The most grandiose extravagance [in the renovation of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery], marred by some of the biggest cost overruns and delays, is still a work-in-progress: Now estimated to cost some $62 million, all privately funded, is the new Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard, an enclosed plaza with an undulating glass canopy designed by British architect Norman Foster. The new gala-friendly indoor atrium was supposed to open simultaneously with the museums, but instead is just a jumble of scaffolding. Now expected to be completed in late 2007, its construction was set back by a long delay in getting necessary government approvals. This rescheduling also affected other aspects of the project, including roof construction, costing some 18 months and an additional $8 million to $10 million in construction costs, according to Ms. Broun. Much of the added expense came from the rise in the price of steel during the delay and from the cost of keeping large cranes on site, but idle, until the project was finally allowed to proceed.

All this was happening, she noted, at a time when "there were fairly serious cuts across all the Smithsonian staff. We've maintained strong support for the building and for increased security needs, especially in the wake of 9/11. But the tradeoff has been very large cuts across the programmatic side of the institution... We've lost over 20% of the federal support that we enjoyed when we closed."

While the structure was shored up, the SAAM's professional core was shattered: Half of its staff at the time of its closure has permanently left the building. "I think that for some people," Ms. Broun observed, "it was a long time to be without a museum." The only upside of this exodus was that it allowed the museum to make budget-dictated staff cuts through attrition, rather than layoffs.

Ms. Broun admits that she found the delays exasperating and says that the defection of staff caused her "a period of grieving." But she now consoles herself with the belief that "the project is better because we took more time to get it right." She is justifiably proud of the new Lunder Conservation Center, where visitors can watch conservators at work behind glass walls, and the new Luce Foundation Center for American Art, which provides open storage for about 3,300 works that would otherwise be unseen by the public. But the display capacity of the SAAM's permanent-collection galleries -- some 940 objects -- is little changed: Although most office areas have now been converted to gallery space, wall space in other areas has been reduced by uncovering windows and removing interior walls. "We are showing many more sculptures but probably the same number of paintings as before," Ms. Broun said.

Both museums have expanded their displays devoted to the pre-Colonial era -- the first chapter of their roughly chronological narratives. The SAAM shows more decorative arts than before; the NPG has dropped its rule that the personages on its walls had to be dead 10 years before they could be admitted to the pantheon. The SAAM's folk art collection and the NPG's "America's Presidents" gallery retain their special popular appeal. But despite their best efforts to coexist, the two museums remain uneasy bedfellows, due to conflicting curatorial standards: The SAAM leans toward works of artistic merit that help to illuminate the American experience. The NPG's primary criterion for works on display is the importance of the sitter, not the quality of the art.

"I personally don't do brushstrokes," declared Marc Pachter, a cultural historian who assumed the directorship of the NPG in July 2000, after it had already closed to the public.

Nevertheless, the Portrait Gallery has its fair share of great art, and the American Art Museum its fair share of great portraits. Together they provide their tourist-heavy audiences with a sometimes disparate, often complementary historical sweep. It's good to welcome America's art back on display in America's capital.

As you know, I can't link to the Wall Street Journal's subscribers-only site, but I AM allowed to post the text of my article. I'll again do it in two parts, so as not to tax the short attention spans of hyperactive blog readers. (It's on today's Leisure & Arts page, Page D5, for those of you who still turn pages, instead of clicking hyperlinks.)

Washington
The recent top-to-bottom reinvention of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery was not a mere renovation, as it's been called, but a meticulous stripping and rebuilding of the interiors and infrastructure of the Patent Office Building -- a 19th-century Greek Revival structure, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 -- that has housed both museums since 1968. While the results of the remodeling are impressive, the costs, in terms of time, staff losses and financial outlay, are problematic, especially at a time when the museums' umbrella organization, the Smithsonian Institution, is seriously strapped for operating funds. The protracted project caused the national capital's two quintessentially American museums to shut down for more than six years.

No effort or expense has been spared to replicate the original materials and designs of what was the third public building constructed in Washington, after the White House and the Capitol. Originally designed in the 1830s by Robert Mills, the structure was partially rebuilt once before, after a devastating fire in 1877. That construction cost $246,000. This time, the cost was some $266 million. By way of comparison, the construction cost for the last completely new Smithsonian museum erected on the Mall, the less than two-year-old, 250,000-square-foot National Museum of the American Indian, was $199 million.

The rebuilding of the SAAM and NPG was backed by $166 million in federal money. The rest came from private donors, including a $45 million, zero-hour financial dispensation by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, secured a mere nine months before the opening. This timely intervention was repaid by affixing a private name to both federal museums, now jointly called "the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture."

Ironically, Mr. Reynolds, a media mogul who died in 1993, had no connection at all with the project, nor with the museums that now bear his name. The Smithsonian donation was engineered by the foundation's chairman, Fred W. Smith, Mr. Reynolds's professional colleague for more than 42 years. In 2001, after learning from a Wall Street Journal article about the possible sale of Gilbert Stuart's "Landsdowne" portrait of George Washington, which had been on long-term loan to the NPG, Mr. Smith had arranged for the Reynolds Foundation to donate $30 million to the museum for the purchase, multicity tour and reinstallation of the iconic full-length likeness of the first president.

On Jan. 3, 2000, when the SAAM and NPG closed their doors to the public and opened them to construction workers, the ambitions were relatively modest: to replace deteriorated and outmoded systems of heating, air conditioning, plumbing and wiring, at a cost of about $60 million, and to reopen at least part of the facility to the public within three years.

All that changed, according to Elizabeth Broun, the SAAM's longtime director, soon after the appointment of Lawrence Small as the Smithsonian's secretary, its chief administrative post. In early 2000, Ms. Broun recounted, he toured the premises and said: "This is a great landmark building for all America... It should be a dazzling showcase." The museums soon found themselves engaging an international array of skilled artisans: English craftsmen turned out thousands of handmade encaustic tiles, reproducing the patterns on the floor of the building's Great Hall. Hungarian workers were hired to perform the delicate task of laying these tiles along the majestic two-block-long corridor.

Windows and skylights were uncovered, and for the replacement of some 588 windows, the museums ordered hand-blown glass from Poland, "to simulate the slight irregularities of old panes," as described in the "Grand Opening" brochure. The brochure also states that "a new two-acre copper roof was installed, duplicating the 19th-century design and materials as closely as possible." Additionally, "more than 12,000 square feet of original marble floor pavers were restored in the museum's hallways."

In this new, improved art palace, even the plaster is "a masterpiece," in the words of Ms. Broun. "We had a team of people from Bolivia who oversaw some of the training."

[If you just can't stand the suspense of waiting for Part II, invest in a copy of the WSJ. As for me, I'm off to the press preview of MoMA's latest contemporary-galleries reinstallation!]

Sotheby's has just concluded another chapter in the continuing saga of former price-fixing collusion with Christie's auction house. This Canada-based story will hit the newspapers (including the WSJ) tomorrow, but the most complete account I've seen on the web so far comes from CBC News. According to that report:

The probe turned up no evidence that the price-fixing conspiracy affected sales held in Canada, according to the [Canadian Competition] Bureau. However, investigators believe Sotheby's may have induced Canadian sellers to put their property on the block in the U.S. or in other locations where the fixed commission rates had been in effect.

No penalties for that, apparently, except defraying the $722,000 ($800,000 Canadian) investigative costs of Federal Court's bureau. In 2001, Sotheby's and Christie's agreed to a $512-million settlement in the class-action antitrust lawsuit that alleged collusion on commissions in the U.S. They later agreed to pay and additional $20 million each to settle a lawsuit that charged them with conspiring to fix commissions at auctions conducted outside the U.S.

Okay, enough frivolity. Let's get serious: Catch my piece about the prodigal Smithsonian on the "Leisure & Arts" page of tomorrow's WSJ. (Or read it, for free, in tomorrow's next exciting installment of CultureGrrl.)

As usual, Joyce beats her mom to the cultural punch.

She just got word that Bob Dylan, the ex-Wilbury I missed in Williamstown, will be playing in State College, the town in the middle of nowhere in which Joyce has just settled in for an extended grad-school stint in acoustics engineering.

She's getting herself a ticket.

But Bob, did you know that my brilliant and talented daughter, now at Penn State, has had four years' experience in setting up for famous bands, as a member of the Cornell Concert Commission? Don't you need an acoustics ace for that soundcheck?

The director of MASS MoCA, Joseph Thompson, gives his tongue-in-cheek retort in the tortured-tree controversy:

As you might imagine, we had that debate! In this case---one in a hundred, I assure you---the curators lost and I won, and instead of replacing the trees with a new work (as Nato [Thompson] and Susan [Cross] argued we should, taking your side), we rejuvenated. We renewed.

And besides, they are not being tortured, they are being liberated: How can you not realize that all trees aspire to have their roots freed from the cloying, smothering earth?

The experiment has ended. Long live the experiment.

Those of us who infrequently visit MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., might never notice the "reinstallation" of Natalie Jeremijenko's Tree Logic---the six maples, hung upside down in the entry courtyard ever since the museum opened in 1999. (At that time, I wrote in my June 1 WSJ review, "I have seen the future, and it's MASS MoCA.")

But thanks to a piece by Timothy Cahill in the September 2006 issue of Berkshire Living magazine (articles available in hotel rooms, but not online), I learned that the five surviving, stressed-out trees were removed last spring and replanted on the hillside behind the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. The ones I pitied at MASS MoCA yesterday were Jeremijenko's new victims.

Some other artist should have been given a chance to perpetrate creative mayhem in the courtyard. The original experiment, described on the museum's website (which does not mention the latest development), has been completed and the results are in. Here's the project's description:

When inverted, the six trees in this experiment still grow away from earth and towards the sun---so the natural predisposition of trees might well produce the most unnatural shapes over time, raising questions about what the nature of the natural is.

Now those questions have been answered. Here's Cahill's description of the old trees sent out to pasture (corroborated by a photo that accompanies the article):

They stand in a row as straight as a fence, threadbare and lanky, like speciments from a mutant arboretum. Their branches droop forlornly downward, like the ribs of a naked umbrella....They grew very little in height while hanging by their feet....All their energy went into bending towards the light, a poetic metaphor of the human condition if there ever was one.

As I saw yesterday, some of the branches of the healthy-looking new trees are already yearning towards towards the sun. Poor things don't know what they're in for.

Will someone please call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants?

The Grrl is Back...with tidbits from MASS MoCA, Williams College Museum of Art, the Clark Art Institute and Bob Dylan

DYLAN? If only. He was at my Williamstown hotel, prior to playing a gig in Pittsfield. I saw his motorcycle and two giant tour buses, but I was checking in; he was biking out. As the song goes, I knew something was happening, but I didn't know what it was (until it was too late). Why is that old guy still riding those dangerous things? Guess I'll just have to content myself with buying his new album, due out tomorrow.

I also had a Glenn Dicterow sighting in Lenox (not quite as exciting). Glenn is the NY Philharmonic's concertmaster.

Just give me some time to unpack my bags before I unpack my stories.

Speaking of Martina Navratilova, do you think I ought to acquire one of her paintings? Who knew?

And how do you play tennis "on a court covered with the painted canvas," with "balls dipped in paint"? Do you think this might improve my game? I'll try anything!

To the Berkshires, to work on another article for the WSJ. (It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it.)

But first, you can find me today in traffic court in lower Manhattan, where I'll explain to the judge that I did NOT make an unsafe lane change on my way to the the Whitney expansion hearing on June 20. (Now you know why I seemed so grouchy that day, Adam!)

Maybe instead of HELP LEE BUY A LAPTOP! (see below right), I should say, HELP LEE PAY HER TRAFFIC FINE!

I'll be back to you on Tuesday (or maybe Monday, if I really miss you).

UPDATE: I did not have to explain anything to the judge. After listening to the police officer, he found me "not guilty," without my having to open my mouth.

Do you think he's a fan of CultureGrrl?

Did anyone notice the astonishing omission in the September issue (published last Sunday) of the NY Times' sports magazine, Play?

All of the athletes celebrated in it 90 pages are male.

No, wait a minute...there IS one exception: On Page 22, you can read about tennis' "reformed diva," Martina Hingis, in a one-page Q&A with that ace sports reporter, Michael Kimmelman. Now, we all know that the Times' chief art critic often moonlights as a knowledgeable music writer. But this was a stretch.

(I must now digress: CultureGrrl is not only an operaphile and an oldies aficionado; she's also a tennis enthusiast. On my bedroom dresser, in a special case, is enshrined the ball that Martina Navratilova obligingly hit into my lap at the last U.S. Open.)

Given Hingis' checkered career and her history of spotty sportsmanship, I'm not sure that the Swiss Miss (who is now trying for a comeback, after having retired three years ago) was the best choice as the sole women to get some play in "Play." Kimmelman allows her yet another chance to disparage the number-one player, Amelie Mauresmo. The two other top players, Kim Clijsters (2) and Justine Henin-Hardenne (3), referred to as "the Belgian girls," are not otherwise identified.

But at least Hingis gives due credit to Mozart: "He was amazing. I saw the movie."

Museums keep searching for ways to broaden the demographics of their audiences. And every so often, they mount a show that draws a whole new crowd. Curators then hope that those people will come back for the more traditional fare.

Most of them don't.

Past examples of such new-audience magnets include "Black Male" at the Whitney, "Star Wars" at the Brooklyn Museum and "The Glory of Byzantium" at the Metropolitan Museum. Whether it's people of color, young children, people of faith, or other affinity groups, they usually come once for the exhibition that speaks directly to them and then they leave. (If museums have audience surveys indicating otherwise, I'd be glad to be contradicted.)

This experience suggests that the concept of the encyclopedic mega-museum as the best repository for all masterpieces of all cultures is, at best, debatable. The lesson of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris (which I discussed in yesterday's post) is that we also need smaller "niche" museums that appeal to particular cultural constituencies---those who often feel marginalized in, or intimidated by, the grand art palaces where the great masterpieces of Western European and/or American art usually have pride of place.

Also needed, to help reach new audiences, is a systematic plan for encyclopedic museums to regularly share parts of the world's patrimony with the countries or societies of origin where these objects have the deepest significance. This can be done through large-scale loan shows, organized jointly with experts from the countries or societies to which the objects closely relate.

This is precisely the motivation behind the British Museum's exhibition, "Hazina: Traditions, Trade and Transitions in East Africa," which opened in late March in Nairobi, Kenya. The museum's director, Neil MacGregor, explained the genesis of that exhibition in the March 2006 issue of Museums Journal, the magazine of Great Britain's Museums Association:

Curated and conceived by colleagues from the National Museums of Kenya, it consists of objects selected by them from the British Museum to tell a story for Kenyan audiences about the East African context of Kenya's cultures. This, we expect, will provide a new model for partnerships elsewhere in the world as the collection fulfills its purpose to be a library of the world's material cultures, available for the world's citizens to consult and make of them what they will.

This "new model for partnerships" should be adopted not only by the British Museum, but also by the world's other major museums. It's not just good cultural policy. It's also a good way to de-escalate the antiquities wars, by favoring collegiality over confrontation.

Obviously trying to make amends for the plastic Dannon yogurt containers at the culinarily dreary press breakfast it hosted June 1 at Le Cirque, the Getty is following up, in short order next month, with a press lunch at the four-star Restaurant Daniel. This is clearly a more responsible expenditure of Getty Trust funds than Barry Munitz's alleged extravagances.

Should I, on principle, boycott this event, which will be attended by five Getty luminaries? How can I, when the invitation comes with this teaser:

There is no question that the past year has been an eventful one for the Getty Trust. There is also no question that the institution is currently on a new path and the year ahead will be especially exciting.

There is also no question that I will have lots of questions.

And there's another reason why I have to RSVP "yes": After all, what did I say one of my two favorite NYC restaurants was?

Today's NY Times article (reprinting Friday's International Herald Tribune article), about the enraptured non-traditional museum audiences flocking to Paris' Musée Quai Branly of non-Western art, is another illustration of a point brought home to me when I reviewed the Smithsonian's new Museum of the American Indian: Press previews, during which only critics prowl the premises, may not always be the best time to evaluate exhibitions and installations.

What you miss is a big part of the museum experience: its impact on real people, not jaded "experts." When I visited the Museum of the American Indian, after it had opened to the public, I was struck by the "stirrings of Indian spirit" that seemed to transport visitors "as soon as they enter the museum's majestic 120-foot-high rotunda," as I reported in the Nov. 18, 2004 WSJ.

Holland Cotter, who recently revisited the Museum of the American Indian for the NY Times, now seems to have come closer to my view:

Many critics had complaints about the inaugural installations. I did. I was looking for an art museum, and what I found was something different. In its permanent home on the Mall, where it opened last year, the museum has sustained its rethought identity. And I have become more comfortable with that identity. I still have gripes, but my expectations have changed. For one thing, I've seen that when the revised model works, it really works, as it does in the Pacific Coast show.

A similar revisionism is already buoying Quai Branly, which was savaged earlier this summer, at the time of its opening, by the NY Times' chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman. He called it "brow-slappingly wrongheaded" and "rather insulting to the cultures that they're ostensibly meant to honor."

But the diverse visitors interviewed for Friday's IHT article by Caroline Brothers did not feel insulted. They felt empowered:

Strolling through its winding walkways, people may find the museum stirs a quiet pride in their origins, an impulse to communicate a sense of identity to a new generation, and amazement that such fragile, handmade objects have managed to survive at all.

Even more revelatory than Brothers' article is the accompanying slide show, posted on the Tribune's website only. Here we see the rapt faces of visitors of all ages and ethnicities, accompanied by their appreciative comments.

After my contrarian review of the Museum of the American Indian, Richard West, its director, wrote me an appreciative note, observing that "these spaces are meant to be 'peopled.'"

Maybe we coddled critics need to mingle more with the common folk.

COMING SOON: MORE THOUGHTS ON NON-TRADITIONAL MUSEUM AUDIENCES

This quote says it all. It's from stealthy Jimmy Steal, vice president of programming for Emmis Communications, published in yesterday's LA Times article about the demise of KZLA-FM, which until Thursday billed itself as "America's most listened-to country station":

We just saw an opportunity that was a business decision to go after a group of folks who were underserved and disenfranchised with the radio choices available. Our research definitely pointed out a target audience that has the potential for a much bigger payoff than we could target with KZLA.

So now they've created another "underserved and disenfranchised" group. But thank goodness LA finally has a place to hear Beyoncé.

Today's NY Times article on this subject reports that "the Country Music Association released a statement saying it was 'deeply concerned' about the switch, and expressed hope that another radio company might turn an existing station to the format."

Maybe my fellow New York City baby boomers need an Oldies Music Association!

Los Angeles country fans---I don't share your music preferences, but I do feel your pain.

The Associated Press reported today that Los Angeles' only country music station, KZLA-FM, owned by Emmis Communications, abruptly changed its format to pop on Thursday. Not even the DJs were given an advance heads-up, let alone the bereft listeners.

As my fellow-sufferers who mourned the sudden demise last year of WCBS (New York City's only FM oldies station) know from bitter experience, the broadcasting bozos use these stealth tactics so as not to give loyal listeners a chance to interfere with the national conspiracy to make every radio station sound the same.

The worst radio format change I've endured was the insulting choice of "Roll Over Beethoven" to "celebrate" the 1974 demise of New York City's greatest classical music station, WNCN. (Irate classical music lovers engineered a temporary return to the former format, but the station ultimately succumbed.)

David Dubal's bracingly idiosyncratic "Reflections from the Keyboard," Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on WQXR, is our last link to those glory days of New York classical radio.

Today's article on the front page of the WSJ's "Weekend Journal" section, about homesellers who rent art from museums and galleries to give their abodes more appeal, gave me traumatic flashbacks to my own recent empty-nest move from a house to a co-op. No, I did not rent any Calders or Dalis to enhance my spacious picture-windowed, cathedral-ceilinged living room. None of that would have mattered anyway: The people who bought our beautiful Wright-ish redwood ranch from the '60s knocked it down to construct their cookie-cutter mega-mansion.

But the article did bring back painful memories of the suburban schlock-art retrospective that affronted my husband and me as we toured the various condos and co-ops on the market in northern Jersey. I don't think that good art would have made me more receptive to buying, but the unrelieved dreck definitely did make me wonder if living in those apartments was somehow inconsistent with good taste.

We ultimately wound up buying the last abode of the beloved salsa queen, Celia Cruz, subject of a recent posthumous Smithsonian retrospective. While it's not my taste, I can't bring myself to change her deep red, gold-flecked wallpaper, which still adorns our long entrance hallway. It's all about provenance.

Thanks to his prominent mention in the second paragraph of the WSJ article, Seattle artist Drake Deknatel, who died last year in the arms of the waiter at his favorite local cafe (newspaper obit here), has now received national exposure as the quintessential "staging" artist, with his paintings used as marketing tools in "some 200 homes." (Here are some images of his work.)

For me, "staging" my home consisted largely of trying to tidy up the gargantuan piles of files and publications adorning much of the floor space in my office. It's amazing how quickly those piles have now replicated themselves in the den where Celia once displayed her Grammys.

Roberta, I feel your frustration.

One of my reasons for starting this blog (as discussed in my "LEE ROSENBAUM" profile, right) is that it gives me a place where I can put all my thoughts, insights and bad puns that the mainstream media can't use. I have often felt I had things worth saying and no place to say them.

So must it have been with my favorite NY Times art critic, Roberta Smith, when she viewed Renzo Piano's expansion of the Morgan Library and Museum but had no assignment to write about it. Nicolai Ourousoff, Carol Vogel, Holland Cotter, Verlyn Klinkenborg and Anthony Tomassini all weighed in, leaving Roberta out. Obviously, six articles (but not five!) on the same subject within less than four weeks would have been just too much.

Finally, today, Roberta gets her chance, with her review of the Morgan's Rembrandt show, which is as much of an appraisal of Piano's addition as of Rembrandt's prints:

Widely hailed as a triumph, Mr. Piano's design may ultimately qualify as a classic itself....A box of glass and steel set on an expansive plane of oak, it centers the Morgan's three existing buildings on a setting that feels, for all its crisp urban geometry, as natural as a forest clearing. This structure's affirmation of light, space and solid ground is a bracing prelude to almost any kind of art, but especially to the brave new world of Rembrandt's etchings. As with Mr. Piano's cube, so with the prints: you look through them as much as at them....Even at their darkest, Rembrandt's etchings, like Renzo Piano's great glass cube, celebrate the ideal of transparency.

CultureGrrl readers know I have mixed feelings about The Atrium that Ate the Morgan. I'm also not sure I agree that Rembrandt's dense, complicated, brooding etchings have anything to do with transparency. I think that assessment was a stretch, contrived to justify Roberta's architectural digression by tenuously connecting it to the exhibition she was assigned to review.

Happily, blogs are just one big digression. Speaking of which: Wouldn't it have been nice if during Rembrandt's 400 birthday year, the Metropolitan Museum (which has also mounted a Rembrandt birthday-celebrating print show) could have managed to reunite all its paintings by that artist in the same room? It did so, a while back, when construction necessitated removing the Rembrandts from their usual haunts. The power of that concentrated display in the Lehman Wing bowled me over.

It must be midlife-crisis time on the NY Times Culture Desk. On Sunday, the Las Vegas rhinestone showgirl; yesterday, the bikini-bedecked "Laguna Beach" hotties; and today, a huge blow-up of the lingerie-clad "Still Dirrty" girl, Christina Aguilera (she, at least, has talent)---all adorning the front pages of this week's arts sections.

In case you didn't perceive the new editorial focus, you can enjoy a mini-retrospective of all three photos, zoom-able for closer perusal, on today's Times arts page on the web.

Who needs Hugh Hefner when you've got Sam Sifton?

Readers of the original NY Times article about the Association of Art Museum Directors' new report on The Acquisition and Stewardship of Sacred Objects may have been surprised to see a large photograph of the Tibetan Buddhist altar at the Newark Museum, which is nowhere mentioned in the article itself.

Although neither the article nor the caption says so, the photo illustrates the last of several examples cited in AAMD's report of "special care" that American museums have given to sacred objects:

Museums can also work directly with artists as well as religious leaders of indigenous cultures. In one example, a Tibetan artist was provided an artist-in-residency in order to replace a Buddhist altar originally constructed by an American artist. The Tibetan artist worked with museum staff and Tibetan consultants in the design and creation of the new altar, which was consecrated by the 14th Dalai Lama after its completion.

Strangely, AAMD's report does not identify the Newark Museum as its "one example" of a museum that altered its altar. The museum's original altar had also been consecrated by the Dalai Lama. The new altar was created in 1988-1990 and painted by Tibetan artist Phuntsok Dorje, who had trained at a Tibetan monastery. The consecration ceremony, as described by the museum, was elaborately religious:

His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama first made three prostrations and presented a white kata, a silk scarf, which is the traditional Tibetan greeting symbolizing purity. Next, prayers were chanted, with grain tossed between chants to make the prayers "true" and "solid." The potent emblems of tantric Buddhism, the dorje and bell (power and wisdom) were held in special positions. The central moment of the ceremony was an invocation to the Buddhas who have promised to stay in this world to teach enlightenment to all and not to enter final Nirvana until this task is completed.

Some, including Tiffany Jenkins, the author of the provocative New Statesman article that I cited in a previous post, might consider such religious rites inappropriate to a museum. Jenkins wrote:

Museum directors must not act as priests, nor must they treat the public as their flock. Idolatry has no place in museum policy. Those with faith already have churches and other places to venerate religious icons. If museums continue to be confused with places of worship, we will all suffer, as the pursuit of truth is sacrificed on the altar of veneration.

It seems to me that respecting and celebrating cultural differences is part of the job description of museum officials and is not the same thing as "idolatry." Given the fact that many ceremonially significant objects may have been illicitly or improperly expropriated from their original societies, it seems clear that the best resolution of custodial issues is, whenever possible, a negotiated compromise that balances the interests of public access and sacred strictures.

But when the function of honoring an object's original meaning and context conflicts with museums' equally important missions of making objects publicly accessible and valuing them for their intrinsic beauty, something's got to give. The criteria for resolution should be similar to those for returning or retaining antiquities: If an object was improperly acquired and is of high significance to its society of origin, there is a strong argument for giving it back or at least honoring the wishes of the society of origin regarding care and display.

CultureGrrl readers know I have a special interest (and sometimes even a direct involvement) in safeguarding the condition of artworks in museums.

So I commend to your attention today a comprehensive and revelatory article on this subject, by M.P. McQueen on the front page of today's Personal Journal section of the Wall Street Journal.

I can't link to WSJ's subscribers-only site. But I can give you a couple of outtakes:

Fund raising has turned museums and galleries into entertainment venues, with sometimes perilous consequences for delicate artworks and collectibles, insurance experts say. And, they add, budget cuts have left some museums with inadequate security to handle bigger crowds and protect the art. The upshot, these experts say, is that they are seeing more claims for artwork damaged at museums....

In February, a 12-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his sixth-grade class plucked a wad of gum from his mouth and deposited it on a 1963 canvas by Helen Frankenthaler, "The Bay," a painting estimated to be worth $1.5 million or more. The work had to be removed for restoration. The child "picked the worst piece of art he could have picked" -- an unprimed painting, says the museum's director, Graham W.J. Beal.

The latter incident, of course, reminded me of how I saved a Cézanne.

Museums in the U.S. are feeling the same pressure as British museums (discussed in my recent post) to remove "sacred objects" from public view, or from their collections entirely.

I remember, about two years ago, hearing a docent at the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, tell visitors that some masks from its extensive North American Indian collection (which was given to the museum by retired art dealer Eugene Thaw), had to be taken off view because the Iroquois said the museum "should not be showing these masks. The spirits are still alive, and we have no right to have these spirits." The objects, the docent explained, were considered sacred to the tribe, "not for the public."

Although the Association of Art Museum Directors, in its new report on "Acquisition and Stewardship of Sacred Objects," is notably silent on issues involving removal of objects from view or from the collection, its accompanying press release does acknowledge that there are "works of art that may require special care because of their meaning, significance, and function as sacred objects."

AAMD gives these specific examples of "special care" already practiced by American museums:

Some sacred objects of the native peoples of the western United States should be stored with sage to ensure their spiritual well-being. Museum conservators faced with the issue that fresh sage could cause conservation problems, such as the introduction of pests. The problem was addressed by placing freeze-dried sage with these objects, thereby meeting both conservation and cultural needs.

Other solutions include storing objects such as sacred stone lamps of the Alutiiq people upside down, to keep their spirits from departing, or not housing certain sacred objects in proximity to other works.

AAMD's press release provides one last example, involving the Newark Museum in New Jersey (unidentified by AAMD).

In my next post on sacred objects, I'll discuss Newark's altered altar, and give my own thoughts on safeguarding the sacred.

Speaking of architecture tours, the ceremony celebrating completion of the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's five-structure Darwin D. Martin House Complex, Buffalo, NY, is scheduled for Oct. 4. Martin House is one of Wright's best known Prairie House designs.

A PBS documentary on "Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo" will air nationwide Sept. 4 at 10 p.m. EST and tours of the Martin Complex can be reserved by e-mailing: tours@darwinmartinhouse.org

But the Wright tourists really I feel for are the many who flock to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, only to find it stripped skinless and bedecked in netting, due to the much needed exterior repairs now ensuing and not expected to be completed until the end of 2007.

My daughter and I recently took a photo for a rueful-looking young Asian tourist standing in front of the ugly hulk. The Guggenheim, now hosting a retrospective of architect Zaha Hadid (to Oct. 25), should mount a show about its own architecture, explaining in detail to Wright's disappointed devotees what's happening to its celebrated premises, and why.

Want to get on a list for information about advance ticketing for Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, opening to the public in Spring 2007?

Send an e-mail to: glasshouse@nthp.org.
(Thanks to the excellent architecture blog, Tropolism, for this heads-up.)

My thanks to CultureGrrl reader Sara Patel (who identifies herself as "a lecturer in museum studies in Greenwich London") for sending this link to a thought-provoking article criticizing British museums for overzealousness in their care of sacred objects. Tiffany Jenkins, the author of the article (which appeared in the July 11, 2005 issue of the London-based magazine New Statesman), observed:

Soon no showcase or object will be safe from scrutiny. Already, the code of ethics issued by the UK's Museums Association argues that this practice should operate across the board. It commands professionals to "consider restricting access to certain specified items, particularly those of ceremonial or religious importance, where unrestricted access may cause offence or distress to actual or cultural descendants."

These are terrible guidelines for anyone working in museums. The very point of these institutions is to open up other worlds to people, not to lock the ones inside or shut the others out....We cannot find meaning and community through censorship and restriction, or when people are perceived as determined by some nebulous notion of different and separate cultures.

As I have previously observed, the Association of Art Museum Directors' new "Sacred Objects" report is silent on whether museums should return objects demanded by their societies of origin. It also avoids the question of whether public access to certain museum-owned objects should be restricted, due to religious or ceremonial strictures.

MORE ON THIS TOMORROW.

The name's Brand. Michael Brand.

The suave Australian, with his rugged good looks and daring international exploits in Italy and Greece, has until now been neither shaken nor stirred by the press. We were giving him time to figure out how to clean up the messes left behind by others at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where he was named director last August.

But now that Brand has tried to brand the Getty, the honeymoon is over.

We can't blame the new director for the Munitz munificence (benefiting himself and associates) or the antiquities antics. But Michael, the rampaging pig was let loose on your watch.

I refer, of course, to the already infamous ad campaign announced last week, wherein the masterminds at the M&C Saatchi ad agency devised what its press release terms a "breathless tagline" to showcase the Getty's recent Rubens acquisition, "The Calydonian Boar Hunt":

Rampaging Pig Tramples Man as Caped Hero Delivers Death Blow!

This is not the first time that a museum has toyed with philistine ad slogans: The late curator Kirk Varnedoe once publicly recounted that "See it before we pull the plug!" was briefly under consideration as tagline for the Museum of Modern Art's Bonnard retrospective (referring to the artist's several late works depicting his ailing wife in bathtub). Happily, good taste prevailed.

The wits at the LA Times came up with their own breathless taglines for important works in other local museums. The spoofing possibilities are endless. (I'll refrain, finding myself unable to come up with anything that surpasses the Saatchi absurdity.)

On its website, the ad agency proudly describes its approach to branding as "Brutal Simplicity":

The strongest brands are the simplest.
The most valuable can be described in one word.
We provide our clients with the global ownership of one word.
One word equity requires Brutal Simplicity of Thought.
Once we have found and tested the word, we spread the word.

We can only wonder what brutally simple word the California Attorney General's Office may choose to describe administrative irregularities at the J. Paul Getty Trust, when it finally issues its long-awaited report on its investigation. The report was anticipated this week, but is now set for release some time next month.

The State Hermitage Museum has just published on its website a defense of director Mikhail Piotrovsky. It is so ramblingly incoherent that its clumsy translation from Russian can only partly explain its muddled logic.

Originally published Aug. 10 in Rossiiskaya Gazeta (Russian Newspaper), "The Case of Piotrovsky" does make one thing clear---that the director will not leave his position voluntarily, in the wake of the scandal over thefts from the museum's collection:

Resigning from the Hermitage after all that has happened would mean washing one's hands of it, making a gesture to save face, while at the same time forever losing the right to respond to the vital questions honorably. What this means is that the question of Piotrovsky's voluntarily resigning is strictly rhetorical.

But weirdly defensive passages like the following do more to hurt Piotrovsky's professional image than to help it:

Piotrovsky speaks a dozen foreign languages fluently. This arouses jealousy, or to put it more directly, it arouses envy among those who suffer from hidden inferiority complexes. Piotrovsky has a flawed past: he comes from the nobility. He keeps his distance, and this is a reason for distrust. Finally, he has entree into the Kremlin offices and, so they say, is friendly with the authorities: this can be a pretext for reproaching him for being servile or venal. Piotrovsky is in fact no malcontent and takes no stands on issues outside professional principles.

The disordered diatribe, which never addresses the substantive issues raised by the Hermitage thefts, was authored by Julia Kantor, identified as "Advisor to the Director of the State Hermitage [Piotrovsky] and senior staff member of the museum." One has to assume it represents the official party line of the museum and its director.

And that's cause for serious concern.

Berry-Hill Galleries, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December, last Friday closed on a $21-million loan, allowing it to stay in business, rather than liquidate under Chapter 7, according to the chief restructuring officer for the bankruptcy. That officer, Alan Jacobs of AMJ Advisors, said that the new loan (technically called "debtor-in-possession financing") comes from American Capital Strategies Limited. It has allowed Berry-Hill to pay off its $17.5-million debt to ACG Credit Company, he said.

Jacobs added that Berry-Hill will use the excess $3.5 million from the new loan as "working capital," and will devise a plan to satisfy other creditors with funds from its assets and operations. The gallery hopes to be out of Chapter 11 "by the end of the year," Jacobs said.

American Capital Strategies now has a security interest in the New York gallery's E. 70th Street townhouse. Jacobs indicated that while Berry-Hill is "open to all options" for raising capital, the townhouse, which is still on Stribling's real-estate website, it not being "marketed fully."

It remains to be seen how well this bluechip gallery will be able to operate under a financial cloud.

I promised to "dissect" this conversation, but there's not much to sink my scalpel into. Derek Gillman, recently named to lead the Barnes Foundation, does (sort of) pledge not to sell any of the art. Strangely, he gives more weight to Albert Barnes' first thoughts about his collection than his explicitly delineated last written words on the subject---that nothing be moved. When it comes to bequests, it's usually the last words that count (unless overturned by a court ruling, as was the unfortunate case here).

We'll just have to wait and post after Gillman assumes his post, on Oct. 16.

The latest twist in the Hermitage theft saga, involving an alleged private deaccessioning spree by a trusted, highly placed curator who tried to market the wares herself, raises the urgent question of whether other museums have sufficient safeguards in place to protect their own hoards from marauding employees.

The unthinkable has now become thinkable, and whether it's security cameras, tagged objects that trigger alarms, searches of people leaving storerooms, or some other strategem that only security experts can devise, something must be done to make certain that it doesn't happen here.

Museum officials, rightly, never discuss this issue in detail, because the more information is divulged about security systems, the easier it is for wily thieves to circumvent them.

As for making sure that other curators aren't similarly tempted, I'm not convinced that raising their salaries, as has been recommended, will help turn potential thieves into paragons of virtue. That's not to say that I'm not aghast at the historically low level of compensation for Hermitage employees. In my February 1998 article on St. Petersburg museums for Art in America magazine, I noted:

Russian prices have soared to Western levels, but...state-funded museum staff salaries still average a mere $850 a year (supplemented by the museum with money earned from such other sources as sales of tickets and image rights). Performance rewards, annual bonuses and subsidies for transportation and food from the staff cafeteria last year provided "the equivalent of two additional salaries to our staff," according to [Mikhail] Piotrovsky [the Hermitage's director].

An article in Friday's St. Petersburg Times indicated that Piotrovsky is not going to lose his job because of the theft scandal. It also provided a comprehensive rundown of the arrests and recoveries to date.

It doesn't quite sink to the depths of the NY Times' Oct. 6,2002 Page-One article that solemnly chronicled Britney Spears' "process of refashioning herself for a new career," but it must surely rank as the all-time apogee of tackiness for the paper's "Arts & Leisure" section.

I am, of course, referring to what must be the largest, sorriest photo ever run on that section's front page---the above-the-fold full-color display in yesterday's paper of a pudgy, unattractive Las Vegas showgirl in full plumage, for an article featuring such trenchant quotes as, "I don't want to hip-hop topless. I want my tatas to stay where they are."

The Times thought so much of this story that it also used the cheesecake shot as a Page One teaser. Strangely, the photo caption failed to identify the rhinestone showgirl who got such prominent play.

I know that the "Arts & Leisure" section has been devoting more space to the lowbrow---a beneath-contempt attempt to appeal to its many readers who have no use for high culture. But a 1943-word, six-photo spread devoted to the demise of the showgirl is just too much of a bad thing. Fittingly, another headline on the same page queries, "How Do You Say 'Desperate' in Spanish?" That article chronicles another topic of burning cultural interest---the Latin American incarnation of "Desperate Housewives."

The infamous Page-One article and photo devoted to Britney Spears appeared during Howell Raines' reign as executive editor. Perhaps the editors of the "Arts & Leisure" section will have to defend their news judgment in similar terms to those offered by the now deposed Raines: The Spears article, he said, elucidated "the fame machine, the economic engine that's behind it, Our readers are interested in reading a sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon like that."

We can only wonder whether the audience-hungry "Arts & Leisure" editors will next week give equal time and full-frontal coverage to the Las Vegas phenomenon said by yesterday's article to be supplanting showgirls: sexually explicit female revues. After all, we must all stay current with the latest "sociological phenomenon."

I think the NY Times needs to get its "tatas" in place.

More shocking news about the Hermitage thefts: The Associated Press reports that Larisa Zavadskaya, the deceased curator who had been in charge of the Department of Russian Culture, had allegedly tried to sell the stolen objects herself, according to an antiques dealer who told investigators about the curator's dealings with him.

The Hermitage has done a poor job of updating information about the thefts on its website. Some 17 of the 221 stolen items have reportedly been recovered, but there is not a word of this on the website's list of missing works.

Tyler Green, my ArtsJournal blogging colleague, promises a Q&A with the Barnes Foundation's new executive director and president, Derek Gillman, this Monday. Unlike CultureGrrl, Mr. Modern Art Notes is grudgingly in favor of the Barnes' planned move from Lower Merion to Philadelphia.

It will be interesting to see just how much Green can draw out of Gillman, concerning the Barnes' specific plans for the design of its new facility, its future exhibition program and its display of the permanent collection. My guess is he'll say he's too new on the project to make detailed comments, and it's too soon to get into specifics that are still being worked out.

Inquiring minds want to know what they will do about the great site-specific Matisse "La Danse" mural. During court proceedings, then Barnes director Kimberly Camp suggested they might reproduce "La Danse" in the new facility. This would surely cause Albert Barnes some "rotating in his grave"---Gillman's previous description of how Barnes would have reacted to the planned Philly move.

I'm looking forward to dissecting this dialogue!

Do people still actually believe the Hitler-was-a-frustrated-artist theory of why the world suffered through a World War and the Holocaust?

Four years ago, the Williams College Museum of Art suggested as much, in an exhibition that I reviewed for the WSJ on Hitler's early years in Vienna. The fate of the world, as seen by the show's curator, Deborah Rothschild, may have rested in the hands of one Christian Griepenkerl. He was director of painting at the art academy that denied Hitler admission.

"Perhaps if Griepenkerl had been a less rigid judge of exams, the entire history of the 20th century might have been different," an exhibition label fatuously hypothesized. Never mind that Hitler was already showing signs of irrational fanaticism and anti-Semitism during those formative years.

Flash forward to the story in yesterday's Guardian of London, which quotes Ian Morris, auctions manager for Jefferys, a British firm that in September will offer 21 mediocre watercolors, possibly from the hand of the nascent tyrant:

Perhaps if his art had been better received and he had developed a successful career as an artist rather than being rejected by the art establishment, he would not have become the man he did, ultimately responsible for the death of millions of people.

Perhaps Morris should restrict his critical faculties to his firm's other merchandise, some of which he probably understands better than art or geopolitics: also coming in September at Jefferys, the much anticipated "Rare Breed Poultry and Collective Machinery Sale."

UPDATE ON AUCTION RESULTS: Here.

Here's that little tale I promised you in my previous post:

Once upon a time, many years ago, before Lee became that celebrated artworld superhero, CultureGrrl, she was visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art just for pleasure, wandering dreamily among the Cézannes.

Suddenly, a school group trooped in, accompanied by a teacher who could not possibly keep an eye on everyone. The only guard in the vicinity was standing watch in an adjoining gallery.

Along came an enterprising young lad, who discovered an ideal surface against which to rest his worksheet while filling in its blanks: Portrait of Madame Cézanne, which, at 24 3/8 x 20 1/8 inches, was the perfect size to double as a clipboard.

Only one person observed his raising paper and pencil towards the paint.

"NO-O-O-O-O-O!!!" Lee cried out in horror.

So today, if you visit Gallery 164, you can still gaze at the post-Impressionist's contemplative muse, unblemished. I always visit her. And she always thanks me.

By a remarkable coincidence, the 1864 Mathew Brady albumen silver print of Abraham Lincoln and the 1865 wood engraving of Lincoln's second inaugural ball, which I had caught basking in the sun at the recent reopening of the renovated Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, were removed yesterday, just a day after I exposed their exposure.

Bethany Morookian Bentley, press officer of the NPG, at first told me that they had been replaced by facsimiles. She later called back with a revised story: The originals were off view, but the copies would not be up until next week. She also assured me that this shuffle had been previously planned and had nothing to do with my item in CultureGrrl.

Bentley added:

We are always cognizant of light levels when we place works on paper on view. In order to determine how long the object will remain on display, we take into account how much light exposure it receives.

Maybe they should have taken into account the fact that these light-sensitive works should never have been exposed to direct sun in the first place.

One day, I'll tell you the story of how I saved for posterity a Cézanne hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Or maybe I'll tell you later today!)

The Association of Art Museum Directors has done it again: In its just-released report on The Acquisition and Stewardship of Sacred Objects, AAMD suggests that a hot-button issue be addressed with "special consideration" and "sensitivity," but asserts, as always, that museums should ultimately do as they see fit:

In the absence of applicable legal requirements, these decisions ultimately rest entirely with the [individual] museum....Art museums should make decisions regarding sacred objects on a case-by-case basis and should share their decisions with the individuals and group(s) with whom they have engaged in dialogue.

Most problematically, the report nowhere addresses the greatest controversy surrounding collections of sacred objects from indigenous cultures: whether, and under what circumstances, objects already owned by museums should be returned to the societies from whence they came.

AAMD says that its new report was inspired by a desire "to adopt special stewardship or interpretive responsibilities for sacred objects that are not covered by NAGPRA [the U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] and are not subject to specific national or international laws or treaties. Such works include those of non-federally recognized tribes, First Nation cultures in Canada, indigenous Mexican cultures, as well as other groups worldwide."

But NAGPRA spells out circumstances under which objects should be returned from museums. On this, AAMD is notably silent.

In Hugh Eakin's article published today, based on "an advance copy...provided to The New York Times" (because other art reporters, obviously, are less worthy), we are informed that indigenous leaders "were not consulted on the [AAMD] report." It seems paradoxical that a text urging museums to "consult with cultural and religious leaders of indigenous societies" about objects' acquisition and care was itself written without such consultation.

This is just another manifestation of an AAMD malady previously diagnosed by CultureGrrl (here and here): AAMD's penchant for issuing statements "more remarkable for what they don't say than for what they do."

MORE ON THIS SOON.

CultureGrrl is an operaphile, attending several Metropolitan Opera performances every year since I was in my 20s (and I won't tell you how long ago that was).

But ever since we had to share conductor James Levine with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, things just haven't been the same. I should preface this by saying two things: I feel blessed to have lived during the Levine era---surely the Golden Age of Met conducting. And I'm a Saturday-night operagoer, because attending weeknights, for my hardworking husband, guarantees a very expensive nap.

I just received my season brochure for ordering individual performances, and there's just one Saturday night performance, a Feb. 24 "Magic Flute," that Levine will conduct. Guess how many Saturday nights he'll be presiding over the Boston Symphony?

Ten.

I'm not particularly interested in opera performances led by the second-tier conductors that (for the most part) the Met has lately been engaging, and I won't go to a warhorse that I've already seen several times, unless it's exceptionally well cast. So, if you look in the Dress Circle boxes, you may see me at a couple of Saturday matinées: Tan Dun's "The First Emperor" (conducted by the composer) and Christoph Willibald Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice" (Levine). My one Saturday night may be the Richard Strauss rarity, "Die Ägyptische Helena," with Deborah Voigt as Helen of Troy.

Levine shrank in size while recovering from his recent rotator-cuff injury, and so did the print in the Met's brochure. The names of conductors and performers are in a miniscule, faint font, unfriendly to the aging eyes of the Met's demographically farsighted audience.

All this helps to explain why you will be able to see my husband and me on eight Saturday nights this season at the NY Philharmonic. Music director Lorin Maazel will be conducting only three of those performances, but with names like Riccardo Muti, Colin Davis, Kurt Masur and David Robertson, who's complaining?

Peter Gelb, do you read me?

This item is so wildly speculative that I could never put it in the Mainstream Media. But I couldn't help noticing that three visitors to my blog today, all from Spain, got to CultureGrrl by searching on Google about the Hermitage thefts.

One of them, from Barcelona, typed in: "POOL IN A HAREM STEAL"; another, from Girona: "stolen pool in a harem"; the third, from Valladolid: "Zavadskaya+hermitage."

Larisa Zavadskaya, as CultureGrrl readers know, is the name of the deceased curator who was in charge of the Department of Russian Culture, the source of the 221 objects that were recently stolen from the State Hermitage Museum, Russia.

"Pool in a Harem", as you also know, is the painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme that in 2001 was cut from its frame at the Hermitage and not recovered.

I'm no detective, but should some Russian investigators be planning a summer vacation in Spain?

In its press release announcing the appointment of Derek Gillman as its new executive director and president, the Barnes Foundation of Lower Merion has lined up an all-star array of art museum directors to give major-league support to Gillman's minor-league credentials: Neil MacGregor of the British Museum, Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, Michael Conforti of the Clark Art Institute and Linda Shearer of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center have all weighed in on what a "wonderful choice" the director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will be to lead the Barnes, as it prepares to move to Center City Philadelphia from the suburban mansion where collector Albert Barnes had intended it to stay.

I am saddened and surprised that these heavy-hitters have put their clout behind this wrongheaded move. They may have intended merely to show their support for the new director, but their comments implicitly validate what he has been engaged to accomplish. Barnes stipulated in his foundation's charter that the approximately 3,800 objects displayed in his Lower Merion mansion remain exactly where he left them.

The efforts and financial support that have gone into moving the collection should more appropriately have been devoted to keeping it where it is now. Instead, as yesterday's press release tells us, Polshek Partnership, architects for many new and expanded museums, has been engaged as a consultant to help devise plans for a new Philly facility. (The architect for the actual building has yet to be named.)

As I wrote in my Feb. 5, 2004 WSJ article on "Single-Collector 'Jewel Box' Museums," we need to preserve such intimate oases, especially "at at time when directors of major museums are publicly fretting over the frenetic atmosphere in their crowded galleries."

And as I observed in my Jan. 10, 2004 NY Times Op-Ed piece, "Destroying the Museum to Save It": "There's no way an enlarged Barnes in downtown Philadelphia could come close to matching the serene setting of the original...bucolic surroundings, complete with arboretum and horticulture school, where Dr. Barnes ensconced his collection and art-education program."

Many of the foundation's financial problems can be attributed to its famously chaotic management. Just go to the Gallery Highlights section of its website for a striking example of managerial cluelessness. Here you will see none of the major masterpieces for which the Barnes Collection is justly famous---no Cézanne "The Card Players," no Matisse "La Danse," no Seurat "Poseuses."

A die-hard local group, Friends of the Barnes, is still campaigning to keep the collection in Lower Merion, and their township's Board of Commissioners recently passed a resolution asserting that plans to uproot the Barnes "should be forever abandoned." But the movers-and-shakers of Pennsylvania, from the governor down, have put their weight behind the move, which has been allowed by the courts as necessary for the Barnes' survival. This misguided momentum now seems unstoppable.

Sometimes, it's the little things that count.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery just reopened their spacious, jointly occupied facility in Washington's Old Patent Office Building, after a lavish $283-million renovation and reinstallation. But amidst all the state-of-the-art enhancements, they inexplicably lost sight of one elementary, important tenet of museum display:

Do not expose works on paper to direct sunlight. Images fade.

Natural light in art museums is always a mixed blessing. It enlivens the space but potentially harms the art. The two federal museums decided to uncover previously hidden windows and let the sun shine in. But they were generally careful to keep light-sensitive works away from the rays.

So imagine my surprise when I visited the museums, the day before their July 1 public opening, and came upon an 1864 Mathew Brady albumen silver print of Abraham Lincoln and an 1865 wood engraving of Lincoln's second inaugural ball, both directly opposite the glass doors of one of the entrances to the museum, drenched in sunlight. They were part of the exhibition "Temple of Invention," devoted to the history of the lovingly restored, landmark Greek Revival building.

While I was there, two museum employees went around the room with light meters and determined that those sheets were getting too much sun. When I asked about their findings, one of them told me that the works would need to be moved.

But the next day, there they still were---in even greater jeopardy, because the entrance doors were almost constantly open, to accommodate the steady influx of inaugural visitors. Now, not even glass got between the sun and the precious photograph of the 16th President.

What's the point of grandly appointed surroundings, if you can't get the basics right?

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported today that Derek Gillman, the British-born head of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, had been selected to be the new director of the Barnes Foundation, as it prepares to move from suburban Lower Merion to a new site in Philadelphia.

Here's what Gillman said just two years ago, on an Australian radio program, about founder Albert Barnes' likely reaction to moving his famed art collection to the city he came to despise:

I think he's probably rotating in his grave.

Apparently, disquieting the dead is no deal-killer.

Today's a special day for art lovers who believe that we should just let Rembrandt be Rembrandt. For two months, ending yesterday, visitors who made the pilgrimage to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, during the master's 400th birthday year, saw the museum's most famous painting, "The Night Watch" of 1642, transformed into a sound-and-light show, courtesy of a brash theatrical intervention by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway.

"Nightwatching," as the installation was called, turned museum visitors "into a theater audience...bringing to life the figures in "The Night Watch" in an unexpected way, using light, sound and moving images," as described by the Rijksmuseum.

My peripatetic daughter Joyce (who, as CultureGrrl readers may remember, rarely visits museums at home but spent several weeks this summer visiting them abroad) enjoyed the presentation, which souped up Rembrandt's masterpiece with a sound track, a story line, and changing lights that emphasized one figure or another as the plot thickened. At the end of Greenaway's saga, audience members did get to walk up to the unanimated painting for a few moments of conventional viewing, before the next theatergoers trooped in.

These presentations were continuous, from June 2 to Aug. 6. There was no other way for art lovers to experience the painting. It might be interesting to present such fanciful conceptions as occasional diversions, but most visitors attend art museums for the opportunity to contemplate artists' unmediated work.

Not Greenaway, it seems. He recently told the Financial Times that "the worst thing you can do to a painting is to put it on a wall, because within three days everyone will have forgotten it. Perhaps part of the brief here is to make people look at the bloody thing."

Well, now you finally can.

There's been a lot more news on the Hermitage theft case than reported in the NY Times article posted today on ArtsJournal.

On its own website, the Hermitage Museum has cautioned journalists "to exercise greater caution in dealing with unofficial information with respect to the investigation underway," so I will give you these links with that foregoing caveat:

Here's the coverage from Reuters and from the Associated Press.

The Hermitage says that "several objects" have been recovered and are being examined for identification. it also acknowledges that "the practice and system of inventory-keeping no longer satisfy the needs of the times: they correspond neither to the technical possibilities afforded by modern technology nor to the role played by the human factor."

The St. Petersburg museum also promises the following reforms, the last of which seems problematic at best: "to sharply raise the level of attention given to the role of curators and to monitoring the fulfillment of all internal rules and orders; a radical change in the schedule and priorities of internal checks and expert appraisals; sharp curtailment of access to storerooms by museum staff; serious limitation on the number of exhibitions."

Security enhancement? Of course.
Exhibition curtailment? Why?

All the press reports say that two men have been arrested in connection with the thefts. The NY Times and Reuters accounts say that the two men have confessed to the theft of the 221 missing objects. Some accounts say that the two men are the husband and son of the deceased curator who had been in charge of the museum's Department of Russian Culture, from which the objects were stolen. They identify that curator as Larisa Zavadskaya. But the Hermitage's press spokesperson told Steven Lee Myers of the Times that it did not appear to be likely that the dead curator's husband was one of those arrested. There must be a right answer to this question, and the Hermitage should provide it.

In its latest statement, dated Aug. 6, the Hermitage said that the results of its post-theft analysis of its security systems and inventory procedures for stored artworks would "be published next week."

The positive lesson of this quick police work is that thieves cannot pillage one of the world's preeminent museums and expect to get away with it. The negative message of this sorry episode is that they were able to do it in the first place.

CultureGrrl's previous reports on this case are here, here, here, here and here,

For the first time since suspending its stock dividends more than six years ago, Sotheby's this week declared a quarterly dividend of 10 cents a share, payable Sept. 15 to its shareholders of record as of Aug. 31. William Ruprecht, president and CEO of the international art auction house, called this "a very important indicator of the health of our company and our belief in the future."

On Mar. 2, 2000, Sotheby's announced that it was suspending its dividend---then also 10 cents a share---because of "the significant cash needs required for the funding of the Sothebys.com Internet initiative, the completion of the York Avenue expansion project, as well as uncertainties surrounding the Department of Justice [antitrust] investigation."

This week, Ruprecht encouraged stock analysts to see the resumption of the dividend as indicating "a good outlook for the future." In a conference call on Aug. 2, his operative word for the state of the art market was "robust." He added that he was "encouraged" by consignments for upcoming sales, but noted that it was still early to predict the level of business to be transacted this fall.

Whether the prolonged art-market rally will, like the real estate market, run out of steam remains to be seen. But Sotheby's second-quarter performance, led by May's $221-million Impressionist and contemporary art sales, was decidedly bullish: The three months ending June 30 yielded the highest second-quarter results in the firm's 262-year history: Revenues were $248.3 million, a 39% increase over the same period in 2005. Income from continuing operations in the second quarter was $72.4 million, or $1.17 per diluted share, compared to $42.5 million, or 67 cents per diluted share, for second-quarter 2005. Auction commission revenues, some $55.9 million, increased 36% over last year's, despite a decrease from 18.7% to 16.6% in auction commission margins---the percentage of net auction proceeds that Sotheby's receives in auction commissions.

One participant in the conference call noted that Sotheby's had "soft" July, to which Ruprecht replied that summer months are always slow. But the July sale totals do dim an otherwise rosy picture: $122.2 million this year, compared to $152.48 million last year, a 20% decrease.

As a publicly traded company with stringent disclosure requirements, Sotheby's offers a much more transparent view of the state of the art trade than its privately held rival, Christie's. For voluminous financial detail on Sotheby's operations, see the Investor Relations section of its website.

I hope readers have noticed that CultureGrrl has been out ahead of other news outlets on the Hermitage theft story. But I was "behind" those who said unequivocally that the icon found in the trash yesterday was one of the Russian museum's stolen objects. This statement today from the Hermitage tells you why:

In the course of investigative and field operations surrounding the criminal theft of exhibits [objects] from the State Hermitage, on 3 August 2006 an icon of the Assembly of All Saints was discovered which is similar to the one which disappeared from the museum. Final conclusions will be made after art and jewelry experts complete their examination.

The State Hermitage asks all art collectors, antiques dealers and lovers of Russia's past to assist in the search and to return to the museum art works that are listed and illustrated on the site of the State Hermitage.

The list of the 221 stolen objects has now been posted on the museum's website in English, but as far as I can see, they are NOT, as the above statement avers, "illustrated on the site of the State Hermitage." It's hard to know what objects to look for if you don't know what they look like.

If "final conclusions" show that the discarded icon is indeed one of the missing works, and if the anonymous caller was telling the truth yesterday when he told police that he had purchased the work a few years ago, then what dealer Peter Schaffer said to me yesterday---that some of the stolen works may already have gone on the market---looks to be true, and the Hermitage's recovery job looks to be that much more formidable.

One thing's for sure: The Hermitage needs to get the information about these works, including their photographs, out to the art community immediately, so that everyone can be on the lookout and so that galleries and auction houses that may already have seen these works can provide the Russian authorities with needed leads.

And museums everywhere, even those with better security, need to regard this giant inside job as a loud wake-up call.

For all you readers of Russian (that leaves me out), here's a list of the works stolen from the State Hermitage Museum (as discussed in my three most recent posts):

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_Ru/11/2006/hm11_1_167_1.html

One of CultureGrrl's readers just wrote, "Wow. Have you bought the movie rights to the Hermitage story yet?"

Right, Mark. Dan Brown ain't got nothin' on me!

Alexander Shedrinsky, calling me from the International Program office of New York's Museum of Modern Art, told me that he just heard, from one of his many curatorial contacts at the Hermitage, this important new development in connection with the Russian museum's theft case:

An anonymous caller to a police station said today that he had bought a Russian icon in good faith a few years ago, but he now suspected it might be one of the objects missing from the Hermitage. He said he was leaving it in a garbage can. The icon, in which precious stones were incorporated, was found, carefully wrapped, and was taken to the Hermitage for examination.

A break in the case?

The mystery surrounding the death last year at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, of the curator who was in charge of the 221 items recently discovered to have been stolen from the Department of Russian Culture left the impression that she may have been a victim of foul play.

Not so, according to Alexander Shedrinsky, a former conservation professor at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, who has close contacts with Hermitage officials and other Russian cultural figures. Shedrinsky, who now works as a liaison for international exchange programs between major American and Russian museums, said that the Hermitage curator (52 years old, not 50, as reported) had died of a stroke in her office, sitting in front of her computer.

He would not divulge her name, saying that the Hermitage is probably refusing to identify her publicly because "nobody wants to create any empty suspicions about these people." Like Shedrinsky, Peter Schaffer, an owner of A La Vielle Russie, a prominent Russian antiques gallery in New York, knew the late curator personally. Schaffer said he was told by someone "in the management of the Hermitage" that "they're absolutely convinced she had nothing to do with it."

Shedrinsky added that only four persons had access to the storage area from which the objects were taken, and "two of them are very old ladies, in their 70s....To suggest that at the end of their lives they would start to steal from their own storage is a totally ridiculous assumption."

So who did it?

The Hermitage's official statement declared, "There can be no doubt that museum employees were involved" in the theft. It also connected the theft to "today's sharply criminalized social climate, wherein people lose their moral compass." According to BBC News, the head of Russia's criminal police, Vladimir Gordyenko indicated in 2002 that "works of art were increasingly being stolen to order and that organized criminal gangs were often fulfilling orders placed by rich art lovers and dealers, often from abroad. These gangs often included former museum and library employees, or even artists."

According to the Associated Press, Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Hermitage's long-time director, told a press conference on Tuesday that the thefts are believed to have occurred over several years. Shedrinsky said that some of the objects are so large that they could not have easily been spirited away in secret. Schaffer, who speculated that some of the stolen objects may have already been put on the market, has just received a list of them in Russian, and is awaiting photographs.

In 2001, a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Pool in a Harem," was cut from its frame in the Hermitage and, according to a report yesterday in the London Daily Telegraph, never recovered. Piotrovsky said at the time that it was possible that the theft was an inside job.

The blogger in me senses that this is the moment to insert some snide aside about the Hermitage's security, but that would be too obvious and too merciless.

There have been many conflicting accounts in the English-language press about the theft of 221 objects from the Department of Russian Culture of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. It seems worth publishing the official statement released by the Hermitage, complete with its mistranslations ("exhibits" for "objects"; the curator died at "his work," when it should have been "her work"). CultureGrrl has talked to her contacts, and coming next will be more details on the story, including some clarification on the mystery surrounding the deceased curator.

On 31 July 2006, the Press Service of the State Hermitage issued the following statement:

This extraordinary event at the Hermitage again highlights the fact that there are complex strategic and tactical problems facing museum managers as a result of the discrepancies between traditional museum practices and today's sharply criminalized social climate, wherein people lose their moral compass. Alas, the disappearance of museum exhibits is nothing new in our public life. We must seriously reorganize everything in our museums - from the system of accounting to our personal relations. This is an acute and urgent task, but the implementation of solutions is impeded by the ongoing and permanent battle of museums for elementary survival in the presence of constantly arising new threats which absorb a very large part of the time and efforts of all members of the museum community.

What, no hard-hitting, on-the-scene reportage by the NY Times today on how Metropolitan Museum visitors were handling yesterday's increase of the recommended admission fee to $20?

Where's Randy Kennedy when we need him?!?

Scott Gutterman, deputy director of the Neue Galerie, New York, told me last week that the long wait for the Neue Galerie's public posting of its Nazi-era provenance research was partly due to its desire to do it right: "We will create a provenance website above and beyond other websites," he promised.

But the uncorrected draft version, seen by clicking a link made privately available to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, indicates that the provenance information to be provided on the Neue Galerie's website, now expected to be launched by Sept. 1, may be more fragmentary than revelatory. This is a particularly disappointing performance for an institution created and guided by a professed advocate of provenance research and Nazi-loot restitution, its president Ronald Lauder.

Gutterman sent me the internal web link, with the proviso that it not be posted on CultureGrrl. (The link I have given you above is for the material about the Neue Galerie posted publicly on the Claims Conference website, which does not include the provenance for individual works.)

What I saw in the draft version was a list of clickable provenance for individual works, but no dates as to when the works were possessed or sold by any of the previous owners. Due to this omission of dates, any gaps in ownership history, during or immediately after the Nazi era, are indiscernible.

Clicking the name of a previous owner brings up only a list of other works from the Neue Galerie's collection that had also been in the same private collection, gallery or auction house. Clicking an auction-house name yields no information about the date of sale. And clicking on "Browse by Artist" produces a list inanely alphabetized by artists' first names. (i.e., "Schiele" is under "E" for "Egon.")

Gutterman mentioned to me that provenance research, while not yet online, is regularly published in the institution's exhibition catalogues.

When asked if ownership history would also be posted for the works from the Serge Sabarsky Collection and from Lauder's personal collection, which together constitute approximately 90 percent of the Neue Galerie's art, Gutterman indicated that was an eventual goal. But the first priority, he said, was to post information about the approximately 160 works owned by the Neue Galerie itself.

All told, it's too little, too late.

An outspoken advocate of restoring Nazi loot to rightful owners, Ronald Lauder, the president of the Neue Galerie in New York, has called unrestituted artworks "perhaps the last prisoners of World War II." He is chairman of the Commission for Art Recovery, an organization formed in 1997 to encourage Nazi-loot restitution efforts by European governments. On that commission's website, Lauder personally asserts that "all governments, museums and public institutions must review their collections to identify and then publicize any art in their collections that may have been stolen."

Yet as of today, more than three years since Lauder told Celestine Bohlen of the NY Times that the Neue Galerie was working to put the Nazi-era provenance of its artworks online, the website's provenance section (under "General Information") says only that "the museum is currently in the process of compiling all relevant provenance information and posting it on this website."

This omission was noted on Feb. 10, 2006, in a detailed article in the Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper, which, like the NY Times, also questioned the information-gap about the works in Lauder's extensive private collection.

In its response to a recent survey by Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, designed to assess museums' progress in compiling and posting Nazi-era provenance research, the Neue Galerie reported that, of the 160 pieces in its collection, "approximately 110, or 69%...could have possibly undergone a change of ownership between 1932 and 1946 and were or might reasonably be thought to have been in continental Europe between those dates. This is approximately 66% of the museum's entire collection."

But, as the Neue Galerie's deputy director, Scott Gutterman, recently told me, these 160 works represent only the art that the institution itself owns. The Neue Galerie owns only about 10 percent of its art, with approximately another 10 percent from the Serge Sabarsky Collection and about 80 percent from Lauder's privately owned collection.

Gutterman said that plans now call for the Neue Galerie to put online its research into the provenance of specific works that the institution itself owns by Sept. 1. When asked why it has taken so long, he said, "It's really a question of resources"---a problem that, judging from the institution's recent purchase of Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I (itself recently restituted Nazi loot), does not impede acquisition activities.

The Neue Galerie reported to the recent Claims Conference survey that it "spends approximately $16,850 per year on provenance research."

NEXT: What to expect from the Neue Galerie's nascent provenance website.

Last night's Cézanne in Provence on PBS was, in a word, splendid. The National Gallery's curator, Philip Conisbee, though uncredited in the show's publicity, was (after Cézanne's art) the chief attraction, radiating quiet authority as he used the artist's biography and arcadian surroundings to illuminate the art. The camerawork was also deft, dissolving from actual provençal landscapes to their light-filled depictions on canvas, and sometimes tightly panning into the artworks, to give viewers a sense of physically entering into the painted countryside.

But why was the National Gallery exhibition, on which the show was based, never mentioned during the program? The hour was loaded with installation shots of the exhibition, which were never once identified as such. Even the credits at the end, which did acknowledge the museum show, went by so fast that you could not possibly know what they said, unless you were a speed-reading demon or had recorded the show and used the pause button (as I did). The "companion book" offered for sale, along with the program's video, at the end of the airing is the voluminous exhibition catalogue, again not identified---not even on the online ordering page.

Can it be that art museums are now considered too abstruse and esoteric to be mentioned in popular edutainment? Or were the presenters afraid that if they told you about the Washington exhibition, you might actually want to see it---impossible, because it's already closed.

As for me, I'll take Philip Conisbee over Nigel Spivey any day!