Bad News for Smithsonian American Art Museum; Good News for Colby College

The recent news about the Smithsonian American Art Museum has not been good, and it's got nothing to do with criticism from Ned Rifkin or the report from the ad hoc committee of experts that Rifkin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for art, had appointed to review the Smithsonian's art institutions.

As Joi Preciphs reported yesterday in Bloomberg, SAAM got the Lunder Conservation Center (as part of its recent renovation) but not the Lunder American art collection. That's going to Colby College's art museum in Waterville, ME. Peter Lunder is a Colby alumnus.

According to Colby's recent announcement:

More than 80 works from the gift, which has an estimated value of more than $100 million, are currently on view in the museum....In 2013, the museum will open a new wing with galleries dedicated to the permanent display of works from the Collection....

The gift comprises more than 500 objects, with 464 works by American masters including John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, George Inness, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Paul Manship, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Alex Katz, and Jenny Holzer. A crucial area of the collection is 201 prints by James McNeill Whistler.

Lunder had endowed SAAM's new conservation facility. Let's hope he's also endowed Colby's museum, so we don't later have another Fisk or Randolph-Macon situation. (He and his wife, a Colby life trustee, did endow an American art curatorship at the Maine museum.)

And here's some more SAAM spam: The Washington museum has just proudly announced that "American Art," its scholarly journal, has bestowed its 2006 Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award upon Michael Clapper, associate professor in art history at Franklin & Marshall College, for his article, "Thomas Kinkade's Romantic Landscape," appearing in last summer's issue.

THOMAS KINKADE??? The very same Thomas Kinkade whom the NY Times described as having "no champions in the high-art world, not even among those who endorse other popular antimodernists"?

Maybe there's been a wave of Kinkade scholarly revisionism since the Times article appeared seven years ago. I must have missed it.

Now that the self-declared "most collected living artist" has aroused prize-winning academic interest, maybe you'll want to own your very own Thomas Kinkade Gallery. Just make sure to scrape together "the estimated investment cost of "about $80,000 to $150,000." Then you, too, can market his "variety of genres, from Plein Air to Impressionism to Romantic Realism."

What, no Minimalism?

UPDATE: Click the link below for readers' comments on the Kinkade accolade. Maybe I should actually READ articles before I criticize them!