October 2007 Archives

Daniel Grant alleges an auction-house conspiracy of secrecy in today's Wall Street Journal, developing a theme he had already explored in last month's Art and Antiques magazine. Today he took aim at secret reserves, chandelier bidding and guarantees to sellers (including occasional third-party participation in those guarantees).

I've examined some of the issues raised by guarantees here and here. As for the reserve---the undisclosed price below which a work will not be sold---I think it's an entrenched, time-honored auction practice that's often been challenged but never overturned. It was interesting to me that even Gilbert Edelson, a veteran combatant in the dealer-auction house wars as administrative vice-president of the Art Dealers Association of America, conceded this to Grant:

If there were a law requiring the auction houses to reveal my reserve price, I would try to sell my property in London, where they don't have a law like that.

What I think is that auctioneers should be allowed to place only one bid on behalf of a reserve, declaring a work "passed" if there are no further bids. After any "real" bid, the auctioneer would have one, and only one, opportunity to bid to protect the reserve. That would be a cleaner, more honest process, giving buyers and sellers a much more accurate sense of the depth of the market (or lack thereof), than an unbroken string of sham bids emanating from the light fixtures.

Meanwhile, Christie's and Sotheby's have perversely announced dueling press previews for their Impressionist/modern sales, commencing a mere 30 minutes apart on Friday morning. Have some hard-working art-market journalists mastered the art of being two places at the same time?

Sometimes a little collusion between competitors is a good thing.

Red figure psykter (ceramic), attributed to the Kleophrades Painter. Greek, Attic, ca. 510-500 B.C., Image courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum

Not Robert Hecht again!

The name of that dicey dealer keeps popping up in stories of U.S. museum antiquities acquisitions gone bad. On trial in Italy for illicit antiquities trafficking along with the Getty Museum's Marion True, Hecht had facilitated acquisitions of several ancient artworks now being sent back to Italy, including the Metropolitan Museum's Euphronios krater and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts' Sabina. Now he figures in the latest repatriation agreement, just signed by Princeton University.

ANSA, the Italian news agency, reports:

One of the Princeton objects set to return in four years' time, a wine-cooling Greek vase attributed to 500 BC Athenian red-figure master painter Kleophrades [above], was sold to Princeton by Hecht. Italian police say that, like many objects, it was looted from the Etruscan site of Cerveteri north of Rome.

Princeton's spokesperson, Cass Cliatt, maintains that the university had acquired in good faith the eight objects that it will return to Italy. The university's museum, she said, had nonetheless determined that it should relinquish them, based on "its own matrix of criteria: probable site of discovery, place of manufacture, connection to individuals and ongoing investigations."

She refused to divulge any further details about the Princeton Matrix, let alone specifics on sites, individuals or investigations pertaining to the objects in question. Instead, she cited a "confidentiality agreement" that was considered "mutually beneficial to the parties."

She also declined to discuss any details of Princeton's antiquities acquisition policy, which she said was tightened last year, using 1970 (the year of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property) as "the key date to determine the nature of documentation required" before an object is acquired. What specific kinds of documentation are needed in what instances? We don't know.

Other museums, including the Getty and the Metropolitan, have been forthright in elucidating their antiquities acquisition policies. Why would the Princeton Art Museum be bent on secrecy? [See UPDATE, at bottom.]

Princeton's report of the agreement is here. Images and descriptions of three of the four objects being returned within 60 days, two of the four objects to be returned in four years, and three of the seven objects whose provenance was questioned but which will remain in Princeton's permanent collection are here. Why not post images of ALL the objects to be returned, instead of just a sampling?

Meanwhile, we're still awaiting the list of "works of art of great significance and cultural importance" that Italy has promised to lend to Princeton as a result of this agreement. Cliatt said that Princeton had "thought we would be able to announce the objects," which have been "largely agreed upon," concurrently with yesterday's formal signing in Rome.

Perhaps the Italians orchestrated the signing ceremony to focus on what the Americans were giving up, not on what they would get in return. In any event, it's clear that Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli is not done with his repatriation crusade. According to ANSA:

Italy is continuing its drive to reclaim its looted heritage. It has approached the Cleveland Museum of Art in America and the New Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and is set to contact the Miho Museum in Shiga, Japan.

Given Rutelli's success rate thus far, I'd say those institutions may soon be preparing some packing crates.

UPDATE: Princeton spokesperson Cass Cliatt, after reading this post, wrote:

I was able to confirm that we're anticipating posting our acquisition policies, but they are still in the revision stage and will be made available at the appropriate time.

Score one for transparency...maybe.

Georges Seurat, "Landscape, Island of the Grande Jatte," 1884, 1885, painted border c. 1889-9, Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection

Okay, we all knew about Damien Hirst's shark, now at the Metropolitan Museum. And I also noticed that another work from hedge fund mogul Steve Cohen's collection, Richard Prince's "Good News, Bad News," was on loan to the artist's current retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum (a show that Cohen also supported financially).

But today I made the unexpected and surprising discovery that he had scored a New York museum trifecta: Another Cohen-owned work---a study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte," above---is featured in the Museum of Modern Art's current Seurat drawings show. The contemporary art maven fancies Seurat? Who knew?

MoMA's Cohen Loan isn't even a drawing; it's oil on canvas. So how did it come to have a conspicuous wall all its own in a drawings show? The label explains:

In an area of water at the upper left, Seurat uses the canvas in the same way that he exploits the paper in his drawings....He has dragged a relatively dry brush sideways across the vertical threads of the canvas' weave, just as elsewhere he stroked conté crayon across the ridges of Michallet paper.

A bit of a stretch, but it's not the only painting in the show. It's a corner of a painting that helped Cohen to corner the current New York exhibition scene.

Do you think he can also corner the market in museum board seats? I'd rate that a "buy."

Lisa Dennison announced her surprise resignation from the directorship of the Guggenheim Museum on July 31. Three months later, they've finally gotten around to hiring a search firm.

This just in from the press office:

William Mack, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, announced today that the Board search committee has hired Phillips Oppenheim to conduct a search for a new director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York....The [search] committee has not yet begun to contact candidates nor has it set a deadline to complete the search process.

I guess they're in no hurry. After all, they've got Marc Steglitz, the finance expert, in charge. Mack must have had a loose definition of "immediately" in mind when he announced Aug. 6:

Recruiting her [Dennison's] successor will be a priority for the board and we will begin that process immediately.

What's wrong with this picture?

The same thing that's wrong with this picture...

...and this picture:

Aside from being blurry, what's amiss in these amateur shots, which I took at a recent press preview, is the coldly institutional impression created by the cavernous, uninviting spaces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Uris Center for Education. Its halls, designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, are devoid of art or anything of enlivening visual interest. The objects displayed in the vitrines, such as the one in the photograph directly above, are posters, books and other educational materials, not objects or images likely to engage the imagination or capture the interest of the many schoolchildren who will trudge through that long, charmless corridor. This is a place that puts teaching kits, not sculptures, on pedestals.

The lobby space that you see in the top photograph formerly contained a model of the Parthenon to arrest one's visual attention. Now you can gaze upon wall projections with information about what's upstairs.

I hate being churlish about this. Any project that provides more spacious and up-to-date facilities for a library, study centers and a studio is, by definition, a good thing. But now that the shell is up, the Met should give more thought to how to fill it. Previous incarnations of the education center had included displays specifically intended to engage and enlighten the hoards of captive audiences brought there on school trips. Kent Lydecker, the museum's associate director for education, said that there were no current plans for such displays at the new Uris Center, but they remained a possibility.

Of course, the main action is, as it should be, in the upstairs galleries. When I read the press materials, in advance of my visit, I anticipated that the most exciting aspect of the new center might be the "the museum's first-ever art study room designed for teaching with original works of art." Lydecker told me that the unique value of this space was that works from different departments of the museums could be brought together there for comparative study.

So, on opening day of the center last Tuesday, I eagerly attended the lecture by European paintings curator Maryan Ainsworth and paintings conservator Michael Gallagher, who described their roles and discoveries in the recent acquisition of a Cranach, brought down from the old master galleries for the occasion.

There it sat on an easel, unlit and off to the side, while the lecturers focused for almost the entire hour on projected images:

Finally, at the end, the painting was rolled out and unevenly lit. But it turned out that the display of the original painting was just an excuse to show off some new technology: A camera continously panned over it, projecting enlarged details on the screen behind it, which dithered distractingly and were even blurrier than my photographs.

The most engaging and spontaneous art experience that I had at the center was provided by the obviously delighted Harold Holzer, the Met's senior vice president for external affairs (below), whose portrait was probably the first artwork completed in the new center's studio. It was drawn by a celebrity present for the ribbon cutting, known to the artworld as Anthony Benedetto, but to the music world as Tony Bennett.

Harold Holzer with His New Acquisition

---Cleopatra (aka Liz Taylor) gets to keep her van Gogh: The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the claimants' appeal, the Associated Press reports. The lawyers who tried to pry loose Taylor's "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" are the same ones trying to separate Andrew Lloyd Webber from his Picasso, "Angel Fernández de Soto." Both suits against celebrities involved questions about the artworks' Nazi-era pasts.

---Both the NY Times and Bloomberg reported yesterday that Sotheby's is one of the aggrieved, litigious creditors in the Salander O'Reilly mess. This brings to mind my earlier post, Are Art-Backed Loans Part of the Current Credit Crisis?, in which I quoted Sotheby's description of its Finance Segment:

Clients who borrow from the Finance Segment are often unable to borrow on conventional terms from traditional lenders.

---Curses, snubbed again! Charlie Finch does a round-up of art blogs for Artnet's online magazine, but your favorite example of this genre is nowhere mentioned. In this case, I guess it's just as well I've been excluded: The reliably inflamatory Finch declares: "What's 'fun' about the art blogs is how conformist, reactionary, redundant and self-referential they are."

Duck, Chuck! I see a blogosphere swarm headed your way.

---If your city can't handle a Guggenheim satellite, how about a remote-control airplane museum? Is Zaha Hadid still interested in a museum project in Taichung, Taiwan?

It took a while, but the restitution agreement with Princeton University that Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli prematurely announced in New York last June (after which Princeton declared that nothing had been finalized) has finally come to pass. The details of the agreement are here.

But what's missing from Princeton's announcement is any clue as to what evidence altered the university's previously stated position that "a search of the museum records finds no indication that there was anything improper in the acquisition."

Cass Cliatt, Princeton University's media relations manager, who made the above statement last year, told me yesterday that until the agreement is signed in Rome on Oct. 30, she cannot comment on why her institution now considers the give-backs appropriate.

It's important that these details eventually be disclosed: As the museum community ponders what constitutes appropriate reason to relinquish their holdings to foreign claimants, they need to know what standards other colleagues have already applied in resolving these thorny issues. The public whose interests these museums and their collections serve also has a legitimate interest in full disclosure. As in the recent Getty give-back agreement, Princeton's announcement does not specify which "works of great significance and cultural importance" will be loaned by Italy to sweeten the deal.

As is becoming standard boilerplate in these deals, the latest agreement also involves research and educational collaborations between the two sides. But the borrowed works---including objects previously owned by Princeton that will now be regarded as loans from Italy---can only remain here for a maximum of four years. That's a limitation imposed by Italian law, which the Getty Museum's director, Michael Brand, recently told me he would like to see changed.

Other coverage of the Princeton accord has appeared in Bloomberg and the NY Times.

Call me sour and dour. But I regard the video clip below as boorish, bordering on irresponsible, except for the Daily Show host's hilarious opening joke at the expense of Boston College's Pollock Matters show, which did make me guffaw. I was not amused, though, by the slashing of a "Pollock" or the licking of a "van Gogh." But maybe I just don't get it because I'm the artsy-fartsy type whom they're satirizing. Your call:

UPDATE: The New York Observer didn't call me "sour" or "dour." It called me "quaint" (as in, "old-fashioned"?).

Bernard Tschumi, Architect of the New Acropolis Museum, Athens

Yes, art-lings, we're up and podcasting!

Click below for my audio rejoinder to Nicolai Ouroussoff's Where Gods Yearn for Long-Lost Treasures in yesterday's NY Times.

This is a test, only a test. Let's see if it actually works this time!

UPDATE: Oh my tech-challenged soul! I think this actually works! Now I've just got to think of something to say. (That shouldn't be too hard. I think we'll start with the ancient Greeks.)

All praise to my new technological guru, Eugene Wasserman of Compugene Software, with whom I attended elementary school, junior high and high school. I KNEW there must have been a reason why I attended my recent Bronx High School of Science reunion! Gene was the reunion webmaster...and now he's master of my web.

And thanks to all you CultureGrrl readers who took pity on my cluelessness and valiantly tried to help me after my first podcast attempt's abysmal fizzle. I guess I just needed someone with the communication skills of a Bronxite who tawks the tawk!

"The Young Rembrandt as Democrates the Laughing Philosopher"

Is the subject of this portrait laughing at the successful bidder, or with him?

On Friday, the above painting, catalogued as "Follower of Rembrandt," was sold at Moore, Allen & Innocent in Norcote, England---one of those catch-all auction houses that count "agricultural and rural services" as one of its departments, right up there with "furniture and fine arts." (Finding the painting on the auction house's website is very complicated, but you start by going here and clicking "Online Catalogue." Then you need to navigate to "Sale Archive," "Picture Sale," and Lot 377.)

Offered with a reserve of £1,500 by the auction house, it brought a cool £2.2 million, thanks to two competing bidders who clearly thought that they were getting a steal on what might be the real deal---a Rembrandt self-portrait.

The BBC reports:

Philip Allwood from Moore, Allen & Innocent said he thought the portrait might be a Rembrandt but its owner said it had been checked and was not....Deciding to do some more research on the painting, Mr. Allwood spoke to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Experts there assured him that, while it was of the period of Rembrandt, it was "probably not" painted by him...."But on the day of the auction both the winner and underbidder seemed convinced it was genuine," Mr. Allwood added.

The name of the successful bidder was not announced. Time and a good cleaning may tell. Or maybe someone among the many discerning connoisseurs who are CultureGrrl readers already know the answer from this photograph. My gut reaction, from a lifetime of gazing at Rembrandts, is "not," but I'm certainly no specialist. There's always that time-honored category for new "discoveries"---Great Artist on a Bad Day.

UPDATE: More on this from the Guardian here. They report that the price with buyers premium totaled £2.58 million.

This must go down in the annals of journalistic bloopers:

A photo in today's London Daily Mail, shows an outrageously attired (isn't he always?) Elton John, above the caption: "Sir Elton photograph has been found not to be an indecent image." Actually, that image of the rock star, decked out head-to-toe in shiny blue polka dots, DOES seem to cross all boundaries of propriety!

But what they're really talking about, of course, is the favorable review by the Crown Prosecution Service for this image, "Edda and Klara Belly Dancing" by Nan Goldin, seized last month as possible child pornography.

Can the Goldin show from which it was nabbed at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England, go back up now? The Daily Mail reports:

The Baltic Centre declined to comment on today's announcement.

UPDATE: I just revisited the Daily Mail website, and found that the caption beneath the polka-dotted photograph has been changed to: "Sir Elton John: his photo was ruled not indecent." Nice try, but I don't think that quite does it.

Henri Matisse, "The Dance," 1910. State Hermitage Museum. Photo Archives Matisse, Paris. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2007

Russian museums, including the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, may be having second thoughts about lending their masterpieces (including Matisse's "The Dance," above) to a (possibly) upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, London: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St. Petersburg.

But that's not stopping the flow of art in the other direction: The Hermitage is now opening a show drawn from a high-profile London collection: USA Today: New American Art from The Saatchi Gallery.

This display of recent American art gathered by London collector Charles Saatchi is billed by the St. Petersburg museum as the first installment in its planned Hermitage 20/21 project---a series of exhibitions showing major private and public collections of modern art in the sprawling General Staff Building, directly across the plaza from the Hermitage.

Meanwhile, Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, and Irina Antonova, director of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, have made it clear (here and here) that they derive scant comfort from the the "letter of comfort" that the British government may issue to try to relieve the Russians' fears that claimants could seize works from the Royal Academy show, due to open Jan. 26.

Controversy seems to follow Charles Saumarez Smith, who recently moved to the directorship of the Royal Academy from that of London's National Gallery.

Speaking of which, my moles tell me that the two leading candidates for the National Gallery spot vacated by Saumarez Smith are: Gabriele Finaldi, former National Gallery curator and now deputy director at the Prado, Madrid; Nicholas Penny, also a former National Gallery curator in London and now senior curator of sculpture at the National Gallery, Washington. Sometimes you've just got to leave a museum for it to fully appreciate you.

And Farah Nayeri of Bloomberg indicates that Neil MacGregor, who five years ago left the directorship of London's National Gallery for that of the British Museum, is STILL not interested in directorship of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (not that the position is open, anyway; Philippe may never want to take that last walk).

Ted Gallagher, a self-described attorney "with a strong amateur art historic streak" and a B.A. in Spanish art and history, responds to Hispanic Society's Koran Deaccessions:

Sadly, the sale by the Hispanic Society of America of unique Koranic manuscripts for fast cash is yet another case of public art treasures being shed in the name of "mission shift."

I now live in Inwood, and spent a year's worth of Saturdays in the neighborhood Hispanic Society library, studying Velázquez, Zurbarán and others of the Sevillian school. The Society is a national treasure, and this loss is heavy on us.

Where were the defense lawyers when Steven Lee Olson and his girlfriend really needed them? Susan Tranquada, the love interest of the suspect arrested Tuesday night in the Goya theft, blabbed yesterday to The Record of Bergen County, NJ, home to both CultureGrrl and the alleged thief. He is said to have spirited the painting away after it was tucked in for the night last November---locked in a truck while en route to the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Apparently, Tranquada, a waitress, didn't think "Children with a Cart" was worthy of her abode. Peter Sampson and Jason Tsai report:

Olson told her he'd been rooting around their basement when he discovered the painting. He proposed hanging it in their apartment, but she refused, citing the subjects' faces. "I wouldn't put this on my wall," she said.

She was the one who came across a newspaper article that identified the painting and its owner:

"He was in shock. We didn't care about the reward. We just wanted the thing gone and off our hands."

They took the painting to Olson's longtime lawyer, Warren Sutnick of Hackensack, who insisted on calling the FBI, Tranquada said. Agents came over and interviewed the couple separately at the lawyer's office, she recalled.

They thought they were off the hook until Tuesday night when, as Tranquada told the Record, "a quartet of FBI agents took him [Olson] away."

---They finally made an arrest in the theft of the Goya (subsequently recovered) en route from the Toledo Museum to the Guggenheim Museum. The thief who broke into the unattended transport truck was allegedly Steven Lee Olson, a self-employed truck driver, who had contacted authorities only days after the incident to say he had found it in his basement. Still no publication of the name of the trucking company under whose watch (or lack thereof) this happened. Chris Newmarker of the Associated Press has the story.

---The 800-year-old manuscript, said to be "the earliest complete, dated Koran," which set a world auction record for a Koran and an Islamic manuscript when it fetched $2.32 million Christie's, London, on Tuesday had been deaccessioned by the Hispanic Society of America, New York. At the same sale, the society also disposed of a nearly complete 10th-century Kufic Koran from North Africa or the Near East. Both were bequeathed to the society by its founder, Archer Milton Huntington, who had kept them in his private library until his death. I suppose they must have been deemed inconsistent with the society's mission, illustrious donor notwithstanding. The society describes its collections as "addressing nearly every aspect of culture in Spain, as well as a large part of Portugal and Latin America." The buyer, in both cases, was listed as "U.K. trade"---a British dealer.

You can ready the auction house's description of the importance of these manuscripts here and here.

This could be a new talking point for those in the "universal museum" camp, who argue that it's not always best to return antiquities to their countries of origin. ANSA, the Italian news agency, reports:

Invisible agents are attacking precious works of art in Italian museums, dissolving paintings and eroding statues, according to a report published on Tuesday by a leading environmental group. The study..., which tested air quality inside 15 museums across Italy, warned that dust, ozone and poisonous gases are causing irreversible damage to the country's cultural heritage.

And in France, cultural heritage may be eroded by another force---deaccessioning. Agence France-Presse reports:

Culture Minister Christine Albanel announced the launch of a study mission on "the possibility of relinquishing ownership of works in public collections," due to report back to the government early next year. Since the 16th century, any work that enters a French national museum collection has been considered legally "inalienable"---meaning it can only be sold or given away after a lengthy procedure to delist it....

"To question the principle of inalienability would be a catastrophe," Jean-Pierre Cuzin, former head of the Louvre painting department, told the French magazine "Journal des Arts." A museum was not a business, he said. "Either you sell secondary works and you raise little money, or you sell your major works---raise lots of money---but you have no museum left."

But the current stringent procedures that much be followed before objects can leave French collections yesterday prevented the Museum of Natural History, Rouen, from relinquishing to New Zealand a preserved, tattooed Maori head that was to have been handed over yesterday.

The Associated Press reports:

On the eve of the event, French Culture Minister Christine Albanel issued a statement saying Rouen did not follow the proper procedures and asking an administrative court to halt the transfer.

"Such a decision requires the advice of a scientific committee, whose role is to verify that there is no unjustified damage to national heritage," the statement said.

Most major museums, whatever their general policies on deaccessioning, recognize that human remains constitute a special category and should be returned to their native societies.

But although it may be hard for objects to leave French museums, it will soon be easier for people to get in: A number of French museums have announced that they will experiment with a free admissions policy. AFP reports:

Fourteen French museums and chateaux, including the Guimet Museum of Asian Arts, will offer free entry from Jan. 1 as part of a trial hoped to bring about a cultural revival....In Paris, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Pompidou modern art museum and the new Quai Branly museum of tribal arts will take limited part in the trial, each opening for free to 18- to 25-year-olds one night of the week.

It's not those pointy teeth, nor the inappropriate juxtaposition of Damien Hirst's oeuvre with an 18th-century Copley copy and a 19th-century Homer, with which it has little resonance beyond the obvious shark connection.

No, the scariest thing about the tank recently installed at the Metropolitan Museum is the big sign on a pole, standing right next to it, with a whole list of prohibitions: No Photography, No Video, No Cellular Phones. (I think they forgot "No Diving.") Adding to the air of menace is the guard who constantly reinforces that message in a loud voice whenever the threat of digital disaster lurks near. (Most of the Met is a snapshot-friendly zone.)

I didn't even try to photograph the art, but the sentinel wouldn't let me photograph the sign either. So you'll have to imagine something like the image above, but freestanding and with a red-encircled image of a video camera added.

If "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" is conceptual art, I'm not sure this was part of the concept.

This just in: Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle has set a Feb. 19 date for a three-day trial on the question of whether Fisk University should be allowed to sell a half-share of its Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum.

This is undoubtedly not the "expedited" trial that Fisk had been hoping for. Reporting on yesterday's court hearing, Erik Schelzig of the Associated Press writes:

Pressed by Lyle on how dire the school's financial situation is, [Fisk attorney Stacey] Garrett said the school is making a final effort to find up to $1.5 million that could keep it afloat until mid-January.

Maybe Alice can come up with a bridge loan?

Chancellor Lyle wrote that she agreed with the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (which is seeking to block the sale to Crystal Bridges) that "basic and essential pretrial procedures and trial preparation cannot be accomplished, even on an expedited schedule, by the end of the year."

Meanwhile, the Crystal Bridges PR campaign arrived at my inbox on Sunday at 1:31 a.m., in the form of a note from one Elise Mitchell of the Mitchell Communications Group, who wanted to bring to my attention this previous AP article by Schelzig, which repeatedly quotes Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, taking the side of Crystal Bridges.

I sent an e-mail to Elise, who was previously unknown to me, to find out whom her company represents in relation to this controversy. Having never received a reply, I finally went to Mitchell Communications' website. No surprises: Its clients include both Crystal Bridges and Wal-Mart, the big-box giant to which Alice Walton owes her fortune.

Here are some Jock Reynolds quotes from the AP article, with my own rejoinders:

Saul Cohen [president of the O'Keeffe Museum] is fantasizing about what he thinks O'Keeffe wanted. [Actually, what the artist who donated the Stieglitz Collection to Fisk wanted is clearly spelled out in her written stipulations to Fisk.]

At least a partnership of sharing the collection and keeping it intact is more desirable...than to just break it up and sell things off. [I don't favor either course of action, but I think it's arguable whether the scuttled agreement with the O'Keeffe Museum, which would have removed TWO highly important paintings from the 101-work collection (with one to be occasionally lent back), is any worse than the Fisk-Walton deal, which would remove ALL the paintings from Fisk for half of the time.]

Reynolds' assessment of the O'Keeffe Museum's officials: They're the most hypocritical bunch of looters I've ever run across.

Opportunists, who thought they saw a chance to nab a masterpiece, O'Keeffe's "Radiator Building," for the bargain price of $7.5 million? Probably.

Hypocritical, in setting themselves up as defenders of O'Keeffe's interests when they're really out to further their own? Quite possibly.

But "looters"? They're not exactly prying a painting off the wall in the dead of night. The fate of the Stieglitz Collection will be decided, eventually, in a court of law.

Spidey Left Out

This just in from the Metropolitan Museum: George Clooney and Julia Roberts will be co-chairs (along with the eternal Anna Wintour) of the museum's May 8 gala benefit for its Costume Institute, celebrating the opening of "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy." Shouldn't Toby Maguire aka Spiderman (above) have had a starring role in this? Harold, I think I have a pressing professional need to cover this party! I particularly want to check out the "array of second-skin body suits for extreme sports, as well as luminous, glow-in-the-dark clothing."

Speaking of movie stars, Christie's apparently thinks Hollywood types will be interested in the Bellows "Men of the Docks" being sold from the Maier Museum of Randolph College. Suzanne Muchnic of the LA Times reports that the painting "will be exhibited in a five-day auction preview opening Friday at Christie's Beverly Hills." It is to be the star of Christie's Nov. 29 American paintings auction, unless the 19 plaintiffs who just filed a motion for an injunction to stop the Bellows sale get their way.

A motion for an injunction to stop the Maier Museum sales has just been filed in Lynchburg Circuit Court by 19 plaintiffs, including Randolph College students and alumnae, Maier donors, former Maier Museum associate director Ellen Agnew and former Randolph College director of museum studies Laura Katzman.

You can read the complaint here. You can read the announcement of the filing of the motion here. Preserve Educational Choice, the group spearheading the campaign against the sale of four Maier paintings at Christie's, has also called on Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell to intervene.

In other news of controversial deaccessioning, Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle of Tennessee Chancery Court, Davidson County, has granted Fisk University's motion to amend its previous request for permission to raise cash from its Stieglitz Collection. The amended complaint asks for permission to sell a half-share in the entire collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum. (The prior request, turned down by Chancellor Lyle, was for permission to sell two paintings---a Georgia O'Keeffe to the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and a Marsden Hartley on the open market.) But no decision will be made as to whether Fisk and Crystal Bridges will actually be allowed to do the deal until after a forthcoming trial in Lyle's court on the substantive issues. At this writing, the date has not yet been set.

---Want the FULL story of the MASS MoCA mess? Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe is you man. His 3,500 words on the subject, plus narrated slide show of the installation- and de-installation-in-progress, are here. The thing that bothers me most about Debacle Büchel is the financial and reputational damage to an institution that has been such a positive, creative and supportive force for the artworld and for artists since it opened in 1999.

---Maybe the concept of the Global Museum---intended to share the art, build "the brand" and exploit the collection as cash cow---is not all it's cracked up to be. John Varoli of Bloomberg reports:

The State Hermitage Museum...said it is closing its branch in London because of funding problems and rising exhibition costs. The five Hermitage Rooms opened in November 2000 in the 18th- century Somerset House next to the Thames, sharing space with the Courtauld Institute of Art. (At this writing, I could find no evidence of this planned closure on the websites of the Hermitage or the Courtauld Institute.)

The Hermitage hasn't been much of a presence lately at another of its outposts, the Guggenheim Hermitage in Las Vegas. The last Hermitage show left the building in September 2006. The current show in the Las Vegas facility, Modern Masters from the Guggenheim Collection, opened at the end of July and holds the fort until the end of April.

---In other London-Russian news, the Hermitage, Pushkin, Tretyakov, and State Russian museums are concerned that works to be loaned to an upcoming Royal Academy exhibition could be seized by claimants. Charlotte Higgins of the Manchester Guardian reports:

The British government has been asked by the RA to send a letter to the Russian authorities assuring them that the works loaned to the UK will be protected from seizure by companies with a financial claim against the Russian state....Legislation is in progress, and should come into effect early next year, according to a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), though it will probably not have received royal consent by the time the exhibition opens in January.

As I predicted, Donn Zaretsky of the Art Law Blog has now posted a detailed and informative analysis of the Promotion of Artistic Giving Act, H.R. 3881, designed to correct the fractional gifts mess.

Donn likes what he sees:

It does appear that, if passed, it would live up to its name and bring the practice of fractional giving back from the dead.

"If passed"...that's the big IF. For now, it's been referred to the House Ways and Means Committee.

Eileen Goldspiel, the American Association of Museums' interim director for government & media relations, responds to AAM's Silence, in which I asked why the museums' organization had made no statement about Randolph College's planned sale of art from its Maier Museum.

Goldspiel writes:

It is indeed AAM's policy not to comment on specific actions of individual institutions, meaning that we do not issue separate press releases or freestanding statements on individual cases.

When asked to comment on museum standards concerning sale of collections for a story on this case in the Washington Post, AAM President Ford Bell was quoted: "The ethics are very clear: You don't sell artwork to fix the boiler."

Unveiling a "Restored" Mona Lisa

Pascal Cotte, a French engineer who took "ultra-detailed digital scans" of the "Mona Lisa," says he can now tell us a lot more about what Leonardo's masterpiece is supposed to look like. Marcus Wohlsen of Associated Press reports:

Cotte created a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with the light blues and brilliant whites he thinks represent the painting in its original form.

Though some art historians have expressed skepticism about Cotte's findings, he hopes his technique can be used as a guide for future restoration work on not just the ''Mona Lisa,'' but also on aging art treasures around the world.

Colorize the Mona Lisa? No responsible restorer would dare. Last year, we had another report about scientific analysis (using infrared reflectography) of this endlessly fascinating lady.

Cotte's handiwork has just gone on display as part of a larger exhibition that opened in August, Da Vinci: An Exhibition of Genius, at Metreon, San Francisco---a shopping and entertainment mall. The press release for this shoppers' diversion states:

The exhibition features what is the most accurate representation ever of the Mona Lisa in its original color, presented side-by-side with a replica of what she looks like today.

The press release give this report of Cotte's findings:

Through Cotte's technology and work, the public is now able to see amazing new details, such as Mona Lisa's original gaze and smile, original facial expression, a blotch on the corner of her eye, and the lace on her dress that has disappeared over time. Other revelations include:
- The actual image of the Mona Lisa was never cut in order to frame it
- The restoration at the top of the sky, and small but numerous restoration alterations
- Crack reduction on eyes and lips suggests an older restoration
- The transparency of the veil painted by glacis - shows the order in which Leonardo painted
- Leonardo changed his mind about the position of the index and middle finger on the left hand
- The repair of the elbow due to a rock thrown at the painting in 1956
- A blanket covers Mona Lisa's knees and goes above her wrist, reminding us that the blanket
covers her stomach
- The fingers on the left hand hold the blanket, also reminding us that the blanket covers her
stomach
- The left finger was not completely finished by Leonardo
- The preparatory drawings of the left column
- The railing is made of a wood parquet construction

We know what the shopping mall says. Now what does the Louvre think about all this?

No it's not Six Art Bloggers in Search of an Author, the e-mailed roundtable, moderated by critic Peter Plagens in the November issue of Art in America. (The actual title of the piece is: "Report from the Blogosphere: The New Grass Roots." A.i.A.'s barebones website never links to its articles.) This five-page compilation of answers to such questions as "What's the purpose of your blog?", "What are the boundaries of your blog?" and "Where will your blog be in three to five years?" fails to include...(sob)...me. Unlike the participants, I'm a contributing editor of A.i.A., making me feel even more like the wallflower not asked to dance. Still, I'm willing to bet that none of those other bloggers has ever been the subject of an Arkansas newspaper editorial.

Nor is the big news the recent return of the NY Times' irregular ArtsBeat blog, which has flooded the zone with five pop music critics at the CMJ Music Marathon. This must indeed be a very important event. It is here that we can learn about such future musical classics as "'Enjoying Myself,' a party song with lyrics that mischievously imitate the moronic conversations that partiers often have. ('I like enjoying myself at parties/So do you/We like enjoying ourselves.')"

No, the big event (and I mean this sincerely) is the inauguration of The Board, a blog by the 19 members of the NY Times editorial board. These prolific pundits have more opinions than they know what to do with, and now they let them rip in a blog that has has tallied 17 posts in its first five days. Their sharply pointed commentary makes for lively reading. But in their last post on Friday, The New Jersey Blues, they diss my home state. They do concede, however, that the state best known for its turnpike has somehow mananged to produce "a steady stream of great Americans, such as Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen." The Times must like Brennan because he wrote the opinion in the landmark libel-law case that the newspaper won, "New York Times v. Sullivan."

The Judge, the Chairman of the Board, the Boss...and, of course, the Sopranos. Not to mention novelist Philip Roth, sculptor George Segal and poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. What a state I'm in!

Caravaggio, "Sleeping Cupid," Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Clowes Fund Collection

In what is by far the most flavorful recounting of yesterday's courtroom scrum in the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries meltdown, the NY Times' Anemona Hartocollis today reports how the request by the Indianapolis Museum's lawyer for the immediate return of a loaned Caravaggio, "Sleeping Cupid" (above), now locked, by court order, in the beleaguered New York gallery, "drew a chuckle from the judge, and loud guffaws from some of the other lawyers."

I doubt that Deborah Mayer, lawyer for the museum, was laughing.

This brings up an issue that has always bothered me: the willingness of museums to lend their works to the more "scholarly" shows of commercial galleries. The Metropolitan Museum, for example, has previously lent to Berry-Hill Galleries, which later had legal troubles of its own. Both Wildenstein and Knoedler in New York are also among those that have hung prestigious museum loans on their walls.

At best, this is problematic because it lends a prestigious museum imprimatur to these commercial enterprises. The worst-case scenario is what we saw in court yesterday---a museum that got drawn into a tawdry tale of a gallery gone wrong, where one of its masterpieces is now locked in (temporary, one trusts) legal limbo.

Other accounts of yesterday's State Supreme Court shenanigans, from Bloomberg and the Associated Press, are here and here.

---The Philadelphia Inquirer shows up at the Norristown, PA, courtroom where the latest Barnes drama unfolded earlier today. Diane Mastrull reports:

One attorney for a group opposed to the move accused the judge of not doing enough fast enough. Visibly irritated yet composed, Montgomery County Orphans' Court Judge Stanley R. Ott accused the lawyer for the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, Mark Schwartz, of "grandstanding" for the benefit of a standing-room-only crowd of more than 50 Barnes art enthusiasts.

"I don't act impulsively," Ott said in giving attorneys for the Barnes Foundation's board of trustees 30 days to respond to the petition by the Friends group and Montgomery County seeking to keep the billion-dollar art collection of the late Dr. Albert Barnes in Merion.

Attorney's rule-of-thumb: Don't antagonize the judge whom you hope will rule in your favor.

---John Wilmerding is named chairman of the board of the National Gallery of Art. Nice to have an art historian, rather than a corporate magnate, in that important spot. But does he still get to moonlight as Alice Walton's acquisitions advisor for Crystal Bridges?

---The Virginia Association of Museums adds its voice to the overwhelming professional censure of Randolph College's planned sales of works from its Maier Museum:

"It is the consensus of the [association's] Council that the Randolph College Board of Trustees and administration are making a grave mistake in treating works of art in the Maier Museum collection as financial assets that can be sold to fund operating expenses of the college," noted Scott H. Harris, VAM President. "Such a clear violation of accepted museum standards compromises the museum's ethical standing among its peers, and sets a disturbing precedent that may hamper the collecting efforts of other institutions."

And why have we not heard from the American Association of Museums on this subject? Eileen Goldspiel, AAM's interim director for government and media relations, explains:

AAM does not comment on specific actions of individual institutions but rather speaks on issues of standards and best practices for all museums.

Hmmmm.

It must have been a slow news day at The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas. The newspaper, which serves residents in the area of the future home of Alice Walton's planned Crystal Bridges Museum, devoted more than half of a 630-word editorial to deploring and extensively quoting my Wall Street Journal article about the Wal-Mart heiress' collecting activities.

The editorial writers declare:

We heard a snob talking down to Walton, to Crystal Bridges and to us.

I meant no insult to Walton, her museum or Arkansas (even though everyone knows that New York is universally regarded as the center of the universe). I think the intention to create a first-class museum of American art is laudable. All I said is that Walton's money and her manner of deploying it are, as the headline says, roiling the art world, causing some major and disturbing dislocations. I didn't even mention the other major impact of the Walton Effect---the inflation of prices in the American art market, making purchases even further out of reach of established museums. That's a story in itself. Dare I go there?

Still, I don't mind what they say about me, as long as they spell my name right. But wait, they DIDN'T! Now if you Google "Lee Rosembaum," you get, "Did you mean 'Lee Rosenbaum'?" and then a link to the opinion piece in the Morning News. Do you think that Walton's lawyers, who repeatedly referred to "Steiglitz" in their Fisk letter to Tennessee's attorney general, also authored the Arkansas editorial?

I demand a correction!

In the continuing legal soap opera, this just in from Friends of the Barnes, one of the litigants petitioning the Montgomery County Orphans' Court to stop the Barnes Foundation's move to Philadelphia:

The Preliminary Objection [filed by the Barnes Foundation's lawyers] attempts to shift the focus from the substantive issues raised in its petitions filed by the Friends of the Barnes and Montgomery County, to whether the petitioners should be permitted to raise any issues at all [i.e., their legal "standing"]. The document refers to the petitioners' claims as "scurrilous" and asks Judge Stanley Ott to make the petitioners pay for its legal costs.

UPDATE---Carolyn Carluccio, Montgomery County's attorney in the Barnes case, has sent me this update on today's court action:

We all met this morning in Courtroom 10 of Orphan's Court. A briefing schedule was set-up for the Foundation to prepare and submit their briefs within 30 days and then Mr. [Mark] Schwartz [attorney for Friends of the Barnes] and I will have 30 days from that date to respond.

---I guess my guess was right: My legal eagles tell me that the Pennsylvania Attorney General and lawyers for the Barnes Foundation "are filing preliminary objections on the issue of standing" against the petitioners who are trying to get Judge Stanley Ott to reconsider his decision to allow the museum to move to Philadelphia.

I suspect that the AG will also argue, as I predicted on Wednesday, that neither the Friends of the Barnes nor Montgomery County can reopen a case that has already been decided. That was the view expressed to me several months ago in Philadelphia by Lawrence Barth, the senior deputy attorney general who had handled the Barnes case. We'll know more later today, when the lawyers and the filings are due in Montgomery County Orphans' Court.

---We now have a bill number for the Promotion of Artistic Giving Act of 2007, which addresses the fractional gifts mess created by Section 1218 of the 2006 Pension Protection Act. The legislation you may want to urge your Congressman to support is H.R. 3881.

---Here's the press release for Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture, the major selling exhibition of blue-chip artists that was to have opened Wednesday at the legally beleaguered Salander-O'Reilly Galleries...until it didn't. John Goodrich of the NY Sun attended a preview of the now scuttled exhibition, which he said was "ravishing" [via].

I swear this is Brad Cloepfil's revenge for my lukewarm Wall Street Journal review of his new wing for the Seattle Art Museum.

Museum press lunches in New York are getting more and more upscale (ah, the superb red and white wines at the Getty Bacchanalia at Daniel!). It's getting so that I'm starting to feel slightly guilty about the funds I'm diverting from the acquisitions budget. (Not guilty enough to stop going, mind you.)

But the "goody bag" we receive at the end usually consists of an attractive folder of press releases and maybe some museum publications. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Imagine my surprise, then, to receive a Lego-blocks kit at the end of Tuesday's press lunch for the Museum of Arts & Design, to open in September 2008 in Edward Durell Stone's famous (or infamous) lollipop building, now undergoing a Cloepfil-designed renovation and reconfiguration on Columbus Circle in New York.

I was strictly a wooden-blocks kid growing up, but I thought I'd take a few minutes to relax after some work this afternoon by tackling this challenge to construct my own MAD Lego model. Having passed all previous IQ tests with flying colors, I felt undaunted by this 13-step procedure:

Then, after Step 10, I suddenly realized that I was out of my supply of the type of block needed for Step 11. Where did I go wrong?

Let me just say this to any other journalists who may be foolishly tempted to spend time on this diversion: Make sure that you carefully note the difference between these two similarly shaped but differently topped blocks:

(You see, I get bleary-eyed just looking at them.)

Let me also warn you that once you've put the wrong blocks together, it is no easy matter to pry them apart.

So now that I've persevered (as I always do), let me just ask you: Does the model at the top of this post look to you anything at all like the rectangular white structure below?

---Jason Webb of Reuters reports that families of the victims of Basque terrorists are protesting a current photography exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao of work by Clemente Bernad, which they feel is sympathetic to the ETA rebels. Webb writes:

The museum said it would not remove the photographs unless ordered to do so by the courts.

---The complicated Salander-O'Reilly Galleries creditors story has too much libel-suit potential for me to touch without quoting directly from court papers, so let me update you with a bunch of links:

Philip Boroff of Bloomberg reports today that New York State Supreme Court Judge Richard Lowe will hold a hearing tomorrow on creditors' claims. According to Boroff:

[Lawrence] Salander, 58, and Salander-O'Reilly Galleries are accused in lawsuits of defrauding customers and business partners and failing to pay more than $30 million in debt....Yesterday, Salander canceled what would have been the opening of his last exhibition after London-based dealer Clovis Whitfield removed about half of the artworks planned for display. That followed four days when the gallery was locked under an earlier order from Lowe.

Bloomberg had a previous story here. But the publication that has been following the story most closely is the Maine Antique Digest, here, here, here and here. The Art Newspaper weighs in here.

---And in other news about galleries in legal trouble, The Art Newspaper reports on the sentencing of pre-Columbian art dealer Edward Merrin

---In happier news, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has finally found a new director, David Brigham, former executive director of the Allentown Art Museum. He succeeds Derek Gillman, who a year ago became director of the Barnes Foundation. Peter Dobrin of the Philadelphia Inquirer has more here.

In an article to be published in tomorrow's NY Times but online now, Robin Pogrebin raises the question of why Ronald Lauder is not more forthcoming in publicizing the Nazi-era provenance of his private collection, much of which is shown at the Neue Galerie, the museum devoted to 20th-century German and Austrian art and design that he founded in New York.

CultureGrrl has previously raised this question, as well as questions about provenance postings of works owned by Lauder's Neue Galerie, here, here, here and here.

Among those quoted by Pogrebin on this issue is attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who received a financial windfall when Lauder bought Klimt's celebrated "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," which had been restituted to the family of his client, Maria Altmann and then purchased by Lauder for a reported $135 million.

Pogrebin writes:

Mr. Schoenberg said that Ronald Lauder and Neue Galerie should provide more specific provenance information about their holdings. "Since he's at the forefront of asking people to return that kind of property, it would make sense for him to do that," Mr. Schoenberg said. "It would certainly set a good example if he were to make public his collection."

Pogrebin mentions that limited provenance information is provided on the Neue Galerie's website for works that it owns (as distinguished from the many works displayed at the museum that are privately owned by Lauder). But if you have a high tolerance for frustration, go ahead to the museum's website and try to get to the provenance information. I just did, and found that the search is exasperating and, for the most part, unavailing. It used to work, sort of, through an eight-step process that I had described here.

On a more pleasant note, I really enjoyed today's press preview of the museum's Klimt show, to June 30, with its amazingly broad and deep array of the artist's drawings. But this Klimt show, starring John Malkovich, might be more fun!

Here are excerpts from a welcome press release, just in from today's Washington press conference on the new fractional-gifts bill to be introduced in Congress:

At a Capitol Hill Press conference today, U.S. Representatives Tom Udall, D-N.M., and Phil English, R-Pa., introduced bipartisan legislation to remedy overly restrictive changes made to the tax treatment of charitably donated artwork made in the "Pension Protection Act of 2006."

Promotion of Artistic Giving Act of 2007
1. Requires that all fractional gifts be completed within 9 months of the death of the donor.
2. Allows for fair-market value deduction for subsequent fractional donations, but prevents inflated appraisals by requiring review of donated fractions valued at $1 million to be reviewed by the Art Advisory Panel of the IRS.
3. Repeals PPA estate and gift tax provisions relating to fractional giving.
4. Retains the PPA requirement that museums have "substantial physical possession of the property" during the donation process.

Museum lovers, get ready to write your Congressmen. Has anyone checked with Sen. Chuck Grassley about all this?

In its continuing battle with Fisk University, Nashville, over the fate of its Stieglitz Collection, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, filed papers in Davidson County Chancery Court on Monday that challenge, largely on procedural grounds, Fisk's latest request for permission to sell a half-share in the 101 works to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum for $30 million.

Saul Cohen, the O'Keeffe Museum's board president, told me yesterday by phone that his museum's court filing argues that Fisk can't seek this permission in the manner that it has chosen---by amending its previous request for permission to sell one work, O'Keeffe's "Radiator Building," for $7.5 million to the O'Keeffe Museum (which would, in turn, have allowed Fisk to sell a Marsden Hartley on the open market).

That case, he said, has been decided and is finished. (The judge on Sept.10 nixed the Fisk/O'Keeffe Museum agreement.) To get permission to enter into a different agreement, Fisk needs to initiate a new case, rather than trying to amend the old one, the O'Keeffe Museum argues.

Similarly, in papers filed Monday by his office, Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper voiced some procedural objections. While not yet giving his opinion of the agreement between Fisk and Crystal Bridges, Cooper argues:

Fisk's proposed amended complaint seeks new relief...which has not been the subject of discovery in this case. The Attorney General believes that discovery should not be limited to financial issues [as Fisk desires], but rather should be open to all issues relevant to the petition for relief..., so that the Attorney General can pursue discovery necessary to comply with his statutory duty to represent the interest of the people of the State of Tennessee in this charitable gift.

The elephant in the courtroom is Cohen's vow to play hardball if the case continues: Rather than allow Crystal Bridges to purchase a half-share in the collection, in violation of O'Keeffe's written instructions prohibiting sales, he told me that the O'Keeffe Museum would argue that it should receive the entire collection. Having been given the remaining assets of the O'Keeffe Foundation, the Santa Fe museum became O'Keeffe's "successor in interest" last year, and would be line to receive the Stieglitz Collection if the conditions of her gift were violated, Cohen asserts.

Meanwhile, as Fisk's court filings show, the university has a miniscule endowment and is teetering on the brink of financial disaster---a much more dire situation than that of Randolph College, which is selling four works from its Maier Museum for financial reasons.

When we weren't looking, the Barnes Foundation became a museum. How do I know? The website of the Association of Art Museum Directors told me so. As of June, the Barnes has been an AAMD member.

This is one more example of how the current Barnes board and administration are deviating from the wishes of founder Albert Barnes, who was adamant that his foundation was an educational institution, not a museum. Chartered in 1922 by the State of Pennsylvania as and educational institution, it still teaches Barnes' theories about art, in classes owing some of their methodology to the educational philosophy of his friend, John Dewey.

Prior Barnes administrators had always emphasized that their institution was NOT a museum, so I was scrupulously careful never to use the "M" word in my 2004 NY Times Op-Ed piece about plans to move the Barnes to Philadelphia. Imagine my surprise and chagrin when I read the editor's headline: "Destroying the Museum to Save It." (This is why editors should always pass headlines and captions by their writers. They don't.)

But back to the Barnes: Why this sudden desire for museum status? I asked the foundation's press spokesperson, Andrew Stewart, in an e-mail sent Monday evening, but have yet to get a reply.

So let me guess: The expanded and repurposed institution, which, if all goes according to plan, will eventually migrate to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, will be much more museum-like than school-like in its activities, programs and visitor experience. Redefining itself as a museum might also open up possibilities for a wider range of grants and other philanthropy.

What's more, now that the move is facing yet another legal challenge, the Barnes doesn't want anyone arguing (as I did in my Op-Ed essay) that because it's not a museum, it is not bound by the AAMD's strictures against selling objects from the collection for purposes other than buying other objects. If it sold some holdings, the Barnes could use the proceeds to help make it financially possible to survive and thrive in Merion.

Those of you who know my customarily rigid stance against deaccessioning must be doing a double-take. But the Barnes is not a collecting institution, and it owns many objects, never displayed, that easily fall within the AAMD's criteria for deaccessioning: inferior pieces that are not of museum quality (but might be of interest to collectors, thanks to the Barnes provenance). Albert Barnes' written strictures against selling his foundation's holdings applied only to works on view in the galleries, not the 5,200 objects and documents in the "ancillary collections."

But once it's in AAMD, the Barnes is ethically bound by AAMD's rules, even if those rules are ill-suited to an institution that was intended to be primarily a school, has no use for many of the stored objects in furthering its educational mission, and that cannot use the proceeds from deaccessions to buy other works, for the simple reason that it does not acquire.

Under the current circumstances, the prohibition against sales could be regarded by the Philly Barnes proponents as a convenient and welcome restriction.

Incidentally, the date by which the Barnes must file its response in Montgomery County Orphans' Court to petitions opposing its planned move was postponed to this Friday. I'm assuming that its lawyers will argue that the case has already been definitively decided and that the petitioners should not be granted legal standing to request reconsideration by Judge Stanley Ott. It might still be up to the judge, however, to decide whether changed circumstances warrant his taking another look.

Time and the lawyers will tell.

Time magazine art critic Richard Lacayo, in his Looking Around blog, quotes Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on the devastating impact of last year's tax-law changes concerning fractional gifts of artworks to museums---a problem about to be revisited by Congress.

Benezra laments:

We have more fractional gifts than any museum in the country, something like 800. That change [in the tax law] has had an unbelievably negative impact on our acquisition program, a profoundly negative impact. The difference in the number of gifts from one year to the next has dropped off by 80% or something.

Rufino Tamayo, "Trovador," 1945

Above is the first work to be put on the block by the Maier Museum of Randolph College, estimated to bring $2-3 million at Christie's Latin American sale, Nov. 19, for which the auction house has just issued its press release. I will quote from the presale hype, not to promote this deplorable event, but to emphasize the degree of loss to the cultural patrimony of both the school and the general public:

Tamayo's "Trovador" (Troubadour), executed in 1945, is perhaps the least studied of the artist's great paintings. Combining ideal subject matter of the guitarist with the artist's signature brilliant palette and scale, this iconic work is the most important easel painting by Tamayo to come up at auction in more than a decade. "Trovador" has the potential to break the current world auction record for Tamayo, which was set at Christie's in 1993 with the 1955 painting, America (Mural).

It may break not only the auction record but also a few hearts. And if it disappears into a private collection, it will be far less studied than it was at the Lynchburg, VA, educational institution, which formerly used its collection as a teaching tool but now also exploits it as a cash cow.

This just in: It looks like Congress may finally get around to trying to address the fractional gifts mess created by Section 1218 of the 2006 Pension Protection Act.

A press conference will be held tomorrow in Washington to introduce the "Promotion of Artistic Giving Act of 2007." According to the press release, the bill would "require that donors must complete their fractional gifts within the donor's lifetime [rather than within 10 years], require an IRS review of donations' appraisal value for gifts valued at over $1 million and eliminate the unnecessary estate and gift tax implications relating to fractional giving contained in PPA."

The bill will be introduced by Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Rep. Phil English (R-PA). Anita Difanis of the Washington office of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and "others from the museum community" will be at the press conference.

I got my first inkling from The Art Law Blog that something of this nature might be in the works, and I'm sure that colleague Donn Zaretsky will post some informed analysis of the new bill, once the text is available.

...I discover that NY Times art critic Roberta Smith swooped in there ahead of me, to get the first look at Damien Hirst's newly installed shark, lying in wait somewhere on the Metropolitan Museum's second floor.

I should have received the announcement of this debut from the Met, not from Roberta: I gave you the first heads-up, before the Times, that the shark was coming to the Met, and I repeatedly requested to be told as soon as it was available for viewing. A week ago, Harold Holzer, the Met's senior vice president for external affairs, told me that it would be displayed in "a few weeks, probably." But even this morning, there's no announcement in my inbox.

Roberta doesn't say where the shark is lurking, but it sounds like it's not in the contemporary galleries, since she lets on that it's not "seen in like-minded company." Or maybe curator Gary Tinterow just imported the Copley copy and the Homer into the contemporary wing for this display. I guess I'll figure it out when I get there.

Roberta was ushered in, she tells us, after dusk. And under cover of darkness, she took the opportunity to harpoon her own newpaper's editorial writers, who in July had opined:

It may appear as if Mr. Cohen is doing the Met a favor by lending this work. In fact, it is the other way around. The billionaire...is being courted by museums in the way that prodigiously wealthy collectors have always been courted. Part of that courtship is, of course, endorsing and validating the quality of the collector's eye.

Without naming them, Smith takes issue with the argument of her paper's editorial writers. She writes:

Some have argued that Steven A. Cohen, the owner of the Hirst shark, is using the Met to increase the work's value and fame, but it seems more like the other way around.

Let's see...where have I heard something like that before? (...senior moment...) Oh right! That would be me, in a previous CultureGrrl post that took issue with the Times editorial:

Mega-collectors simply don't need museums as much as they used to. Their art-market clout derives from their overwhelming purchasing power, not their curatorial connections....What the Times editorial board hasn't caught onto yet is that today's ultimate validator of artistic worth is not the high regard of a museum curator but the high price paid through a dealer or an auction house....Not only don't collectors feel beholden to curators, but many are starting to feel the curatorial urge themselves. Cohen is reportedly thinking of establishing his own museum as the ultimate repository for his holdings, as several other collectors have recently done.

Will New York cultural institutions ever acknowledge that all responsible, information-seeking journalists deserve equal treatment, especially when they specifically ask for certain information ahead of, or concurrently with, the Times?

One day after Michael Kimmelman published a puzzling article that almost seemed to be inviting a terrorist attack on Picasso's "Guernica," a "terracotta eco-warrior" managed to put face masks on members of the ancient Chinese battalion now on display at the British Museum.

The Daily Mail, which obtained photos of the muzzled sentinels, reports:

The man jumped barriers to place the masks bearing the slogan "CO2 emission polluter" on two of the life-sized figures to highlight China's poor pollution record.

At least now CultureGrrl has fulfilled the mandate [via] for all bloggers to post about environmental issues today. Speaking of which, do you think that China's air will be safe enough for all those 2008 Olympics athletes?

As for Kimmelman's article, how are we to regard comments such as these:

The picture ["Guernica"] presides over a big gallery of related Picassos, each a target, I suppose, if you adopt the mindset that terrorists, and those who would exploit terrorism, like to foster [huh?]....Standing before it, you can almost imagine that it has, historically speaking, passed beyond harm---that to attack it now would only make the picture a martyr, that it's indestructible. Of course it's not.

That almost sounds like a dare. Obviously, it was not meant that way. But what exactly is the point of singling out this picture as an ideal terrorist target (which, in any event, it isn't)?

No, I'm not talking about a fleeting London contemporary art fair.

I'm talking about the 2,500-year-old frieze on the flying trapeze, swinging with the greatest of ease from the Acropolis to the New Acropolis Museum, 400 meters below. And, as Reuters reports, Western civilization is watching this death-defying act with bated breath. The delicate task of transporting the monumental Parthenon Marbles, via three cranes, began yesterday.

For details of this unprecedented maneuver, described in a press conference last Thursday by Greek Culture Minister Michalis Liapis and Dimitris Pandermalis, president of the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, go here.

But for much more fun, take a look at this BBC video, filmed on moving day and showing the marbles in motion.

Philippe de Montebello, in a Q&A published Saturday in Le Monde (which seemed far more candid than anything he's recently done in the American press), minced no French words in deploring the Louvre's art-for-megabucks deal (and, by implication, the Guggenheim's deal) with Abu Dhabi.

Here's what the Metropolitan Museum's French-born director told the Paris newspaper:

Q: The Louvre doesn't hide its financial motives. How do you judge the operation being conducted at Abu Dhabi?

A: To let a picture leave at the risk of its deteriorating in a hot and humid climate, because there is a big contract at stake...Or to use collections as capital that can be negotiated. Let's be precise: We are displaying our Impressionist masterpieces in Berlin [closed Oct. 7], which is giving us, in exchange, a financial return. But our Impressionist rooms are closed for renovation....In addition, the sum being paid covers our scientific work as the organizer of the exhibition....

Loans must remain free. We understand that certain developing countries require money. But between developed countries, it's unacceptable.

De Montebello also mentioned that the Met had turned down a proposal for an outpost in Hong Kong, "which didn't interest us." He criticized "exclusive operations" with foreign entities, saying:

In a certain sense, I have alliances with all museums. But no exclusivity. In matters of art, I'm a complete polygamist.

In an editorial posted on La Tribune de l'Art (not, at this writing, translated in the English version of the website), Didier Rykner decries what he sees as the lack of transparency and honesty in the Louvre's dealings with foreign borrowers:

Rykner writes:

The contract [between the Louvre and Abu Dhabi] was signed in March..., the Louvre already received 150 million euros before the summer, and the legislators [who approved the deal] voted in autumn.

Rykner also criticizes the Louvre's loan shows of large numbers of works to U.S. institutions. He notes that, apropos the loans to the High Museum in Atlanta, Vincent Pomarède, head of the Louvre's paintings department, had told Le Monde on Jan. 31:

We are not crazy. Certain masterpieces will not leave the Louvre for 11 months. The Raphael will be loaned for three months, and the Poussin for five months.

However, according to Rykner, "not only has the Poussin ["Et in Arcadia Ego"] not yet returned to the Louvre, from which it departed more than eight months ago, but it was sent directly to Denver, where it will be shown until Jan. 6, 2008....It will therefore be absent from the Louvre for at least a year, contrary to what was promised."

De Montebello's musings for Le Monde were far-ranging, touching not only on art-for-money deals, but also on antiquities restitution, deaccessioning, admission fees and the Met's decision not to purchase recent art.

So get out your Larousse and peruse!

Newsday ran a great feature yesterday about the current agonizing over what color to paint the Guggenheim, once they finally get the scaffolding off the net-shrouded hulk. (The New York museum is now undergoing much needed restoration.) Here's your chance to vote on which Benjamin Moore color you prefer: the old, familiar London Fog or the possible new choice, Powell Buff (said to have been the hue originally chosen by Frank Lloyd Wright).

In the Newsday article accompanying the swatches, Karla Schuster reports:

[New York City's] Landmarks Preservation Commission, which must approve changes to the museum's exterior, may settle the question as early as this week.

Four years ago, a similar quandary faced the restorers of the structure that is arguably Frank Lloyd Wright's most iconic work, Fallingwater in Mill Run, PA. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal at that time, frequent repainting had made it "difficult to uncover the exterior's original color and texture." Pamela Jerome of the New York firm, Wank Adams Slavin Associates, whom I met while she was analyzing paint samples onsite at Fallingwater, is also among those overseeing the Guggenheim project.

Apparently, the exterior painting of Fallingwater was finally being done just this past summer: The Fallingwater website (which includes a photo of painting-in-progress) tells us:

Although it appears to be noticeably darker than the color many have come to associate with the structure, the paint actually more closely represents the original color Frank Lloyd Wright selected in 1936.

Actually, Wright had originally wanted to swathe the house in gold leaf, but finally settled for the color of "sere leaves"---an apricot-tinged ochre.

That's a better description of Powell Buff than "yellow," which is how Newsday describes the color being considered for the restored museum. Trouble is, you can't really assess that color from the digital image in Newsday's poll. It's really much warmer.

True Wright buffs who want to view Powell Buff should head over to the local Benjamin Moore emporium and pick up the color card for HC-35. Better yet, go to the Guggenheim, where, as seen in the video accompanying the Newsday article, adjacent applications of the familiar color and the possible replacement color can be viewed firsthand.

Actually, if you look at the above photo of the Guggenheim, from the museum's own website, it already appears to be in the Buff.

The Joint Ownership Agreement between Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum and Fisk University for the school's Stieglitz Collection not only would put Crystal Bridges (which has offered $30 million for a half-share in the collection) in the driver's seat, but would give the Bentonville, AR, the museum the right of first refusal if Fisk ever decided to sell its half-share of the collection: Crystal Bridges would have 90 days to announce its intention to match any outside offer and acquire full ownership. (The agreement also gives Fisk the same right of first refusal in the less likely event that Crystal Bridges decides to sell.)

Filed in Davidson County Chancery Court and subject to the court's approval, the agreement would also give Crystal Bridges the right to pack the Collection Committee that will govern policies and practices regarding the jointly owned works. The only Fisk-selected member of the five-person committee would be the chief curator or director of the Fisk University Galleries. The others would be the chief curator of Crystal Bridges and a conservator, scholar and art museum professional, all three of whom would be "proposed by Crystal Bridges after consulting with Fisk, and approved by Fisk and Crystal Bridges."

The committee would decide on guidelines and policies for exhibition of the artworks, the collection's rotation schedule between the two museums, and loans to other institutions. In her letter arranging the donation to Fisk of the works assembled by her late husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe explicitly prohibited loans, except for major retrospectives.

Crystal Bridges also has sole responsibility for selecting the conservator or registrar to prepare condition reports prior to packing and shipping between the two institutions; for producing digital reproductions of the collection; and for processing permission requests for reproduction (the last to be done "in consultation with Fisk").

The agreement does not require the parties to exhibit all 101 works all of the time (which, in any case, would not be suitable for the preservation of works on paper), but to display "an appropriate curatorial represention" of the collection, in terms of artists, media, and geographical scope. The Collection Committee must "take into account" Georgia O'Keeffe's desire that the collection be displayed "in the same room or rooms...with no other works in the same room or rooms."

She who pays the piper calls the tune.

The Association of Art Museum Curators has joined the professional outcry against the planned sales from the collection of Randolph College's Maier Museum. George T.M. Shackelford, AAMC president and chair of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts' European art department, writes:

The Association of Art Museum Curators upholds a fundamental and abiding principle that is recognized throughout the museum profession: Whenever works of art in a museum's collection are sold, the proceeds cannot be used for any other purpose than the acquisition of other works of art. A museum may seek to refine and improve its collections through such sales, but the decision of Randolph College to sell some of the Maier Museum's greatest paintings to raise general operating endowment for the college violates this basic rule---a rule that is obeyed by all responsible art museums in this country, large or small: Never sell a work of art to pay for a new roof, for an employee's salary, or to cover a debt. We hope that another solution can be found to safeguard the collection of this gem of a museum, which we all respect.

In an Op-Ed for the Lynchburg News & Advance, Anne Yastremski, executive director of Preserve Educational Choice, a group opposing the admission of men to Randolph College this fall, writes:

College officials claim their unprecedented, shameful raid on the Maier collection was driven by financial need---the need "to make a substantial infusion" into the college's endowment. But that's not the college's problem. The college already has a substantial endowment. The real problem is greed not need; poor judgment and management, not a shortage of funds.

Todd Simmons of Siloam Springs, AR, writes:

I think that it is unfortunate that Ms. Walton is being vilified for creating an unparalleled shrine to American art work. I find it ironic that the wealthy hedge fund operators can purchase paintings at auction to hang in their mansions without disdain, yet a wealthy individual trying to bring American Art culture to middle America is guilty of raiding the art world of its master pieces. I admit, I know nothing of the inner workings of the "art world." However, I do have an appreciation for the arts and American art, specifically.

We are thankful that we have someone like Alice Walton who cares enough to invest back in our community, and we hope that she is successful in developing a world class venue with a collection that matches. On that note, you are welcome to Arkansas once the museum is ready for business.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to Émile Bernard, Arles, ca. June 20, 1988 (Letter 7)
Thaw Collection, Morgan Library & Museum

In the revelatory exhibition now at the Morgan Library & Museum, Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard, to Jan. 6, the collection of van Gogh's letters to the minor artist but major confidant (a gift from mega-donors Eugene and Clare Thaw) are exhibited for the first time.

And what a catch this cache is!

The introductory wall text explains why these missives from this artist, who was able to limn his artistic sensibility in words with as much skill as he applied paint to canvas, are so endlessly fascinating:

The frank and honest tone of these letters make them exceptional among the extant correspondence by van Gogh. Writing to a fellow artist, van Gogh could express himself more freely about life and detail his struggles more carefuly than he could in letters to his family.

And how!

Here are some excerpts from Letter 14, written from Arles on Aug. 5, 1888, in which he tells us more about certain artists than we may want to know (and perhaps more than even van Gogh himself really knew). Reading these, in the original and in translation, also helped me improve my high school (and college) French:

Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on ("de Gas bande mal")? Degas lives like a little lawyer, and he doesn't like women, knowing that if he liked them and fucked them a lot ("les baisait beaucoup") he would become cerebrally ill and hopeless at painting....He watches human animals stronger than himself getting a hard-on and fucking, and he paints them well, precisely because he doesn't make such a great claim about getting a hard-on.

Cézanne is very much a respectably ("bourgeoisement") married man as the old Dutchmen were. If he has a good hard-on in his work, it is because he's not overly dissipated through riotous living.

So THAT was his secret! Who knew? And I had always thought that "baiser" meant "to kiss." Did that woman who reportedly "kissed" the Twombly in Avignon actually do something else?

You will not find any of van Gogh's adults-only ruminations in the exhibition's label for Letter 14, which sticks to comments about Bernard's art and van Gogh's celebrated sitter, Joseph Roulin. But you can pick up the unexpurgated translations of all the letters in booklets at the entrance. I strongly suggest you do.

The exhibition catalogue, which reproduces and translates all the letters, also provides some helpful annotations explaining where van Gogh got his notions about the sex lives of his contemporaries and predecessors: Rubens, after all, had married a woman 37 years his junior and they had five children in seven years. Enough said.

The Morgan's website has a nifty feature showing some of the letters and their translations. But, wouldn't you know it, Letter 14 is not among them.

Since my first attempt at podcasting was an abysmal fizzle, I'll share with you, the old-fashioned way, what I was planning to talk about. (Where is my daughter, the acoustic engineering grad student, when I really need her?) You'll just have to try to imagine the following words being uttered with a thick Bronx accent.

I was going to speak to the broader ramifications for the museum profession and for the general public of what I've been posting on steadily for the past few weeks: the Maier Museum Massacre and the Stieglitz Egress.

For one thing, the Association of Art Museum Directors has finally shown some teeth. And it's about time. In fact, it seems as if the whole artworld has been speaking with one voice against the planned sales of Randolph College's and Fisk University's artworks to fund those institutions' non art-related needs.

All well and good. But what laid the groundwork for these disposals? I think it's the actions of AAMD members themselves, in selling important works that they should not have been selling, and getting away with it without significant censure from their peers. True, those sales met the standard of selling art to buy other art. But a number of recent museum disposals did not fit comfortably within AAMD's clearly enunciated criteria for deaccessions: inferior, inauthentic or damaged works that really don't belong in the public domain, or duplicates. And suddenly changing an institution's mission statement to "justify" a new deaccessioning campaign doesn't pass the smell test.

The planned Fisk and Randolph disposals are one more skid down the slippery slope that's been greased in recent years by the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, and, most recently, the St. Louis Art Museum, to name four.

If Randolph and Fisk get away with this, we know full well that other financially strained institutions, which should be holding their art in trust for the public and honoring their donors wishes, are also going to try to use their collections as convenient ATM machines (as one student at Randolph recently put it). Not only will these institutions' constituencies be the poorer for the loss of their cultural inheritance, but potential donors may think long and hard about what to do with their money and their art. Art sales shouldn't be used to bail out inadequate administrators.

Robert Cooper Jr. of Tennessee and Bob McDonnell of Virginia, get in there and do what state attorneys general are supposed to do---protect the public's interest in what's rightfully theirs!

Can you hear me now? I'm As Techie As I Wanna Be (maybe). Click here for my podcast, and (just a few of you) shoot me an e-mail to let me know if this is working. How about we limit this to those who read me between 9:15 p.m. and 9:45 p.m., Eastern Standard Time?

If you hear the sound of my voice, we'll start for real (or Real Player) tomorrow, with mellifluous Bronx-accented commentary on the burning artworld issues of the day.

UPDATE: It looks like my great podcast experiment didn't work. Back to the keyboard...for now.

I've now gotten a link to the Agence France-Presse article on the five suspects detained by police in connection with the after-hours Monet vandalism at Paris' Musée d'Orsay.

AFP reports:

One of the five suspects...knew how to gain access to the museum because of his job, Culture Minister Christine Albanel said Tuesday. "According to the information the ministry has, one of the five had, for professional reasons, knowledge of various ways into the museum," said Albanel in a statement.

Does this mean that he had been a museum employee? Qui vivra verra.

And in more AFP news from Paris:

The French parliament on Tuesday approved plans to build a branch of the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, despite opposition.

One aspect of the planned Maier Museum disposals that did not make it into my Wall Street Journal article (which is on Page D11 of today's Personal Journal section), is the involvement of Christie's auction house. It's worth examining:

I usually don't hold auction houses responsible for judging whether an artwork should be sold, so long as the consigned object is authentic and the seller has good title.

But, as I previously mentioned here, I was pleasantly surprised when Christie's president, Marc Porter, said this to me during an interview I conducted at the auction house on Mar. 28:

We would counsel museums about what could be a norm in the culture with respect to the way in which cultural property is managed. And I think we're an important voice in this. We have told institutions that their proposed method of deaccessioning was not something that we would recommend, and we have decided not to participate.

Are the planned sales of four paintings from the Maier Museum, to be conducted next month by Christie's, in conformance with the "norm in the culture with respect to the way in which cultural property is managed"? The Association of Art Museum Directors and the College Art Association would argue not. And now the Association of College & University Museums & Galleries has added its voice to the groundswell of opposition to the sales. (Click link at the bottom for ACUMG's full statement.)

How is it, then, that Christie's "decided to participate"? (Since Oct. 1, I have repeatedly asked Porter, via Christie's head of public relations, for his views on this issue, but have received no reply, other than confirmations that my e-mail had been received.) I also wonder what Sotheby's new rainmaker, Lisa Dennison, who had been a lifelong Guggenheim Museum professional, would now do if she were asked to consider a similar business opportunity involving the disregard of accepted art museum practice.

Here it is art-lings: The Walton Effect: Art World Is Roiled By Wal-Mart Heiress, to be published on the "Leisure & Arts" page of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal, but online tonight.

As you will see, the subject of the article herself declined (through her middlemen) to talk to me. I think that was probably an unwise strategy, because my sense from those who have met her is that she conveys a sincere, serious interest in art and in becoming a member-in-good-standing of the museum community. Had she spoken to me, I would have been able to appreciate that and would have allowed her to express her side of the story, through direct quotation.

I'll share with you what I did learn about Walton in a long, illuminating phone conversation with Ellen Agnew, the former associate director of the Maier Museum, who had guided the Wal-Mart heiress on her May 9 tour of that collection. (Agnew resigned less than three months later, in protest against the deaccession plans.)

Agnew told me that Walton had not indicated any desire to acquire during the visit. She had, instead, expressed great interest in the Maier's educational programs. "I truly think she understood and appreciated the history of our museum," Agnew told me. It seemed clear that the two felt genuine rapport.

That said, Agnew is vehemently opposed to the plan to sell four Maier works at Christie's next month---an auction in which it appears that Walton may well participate, if the comments quoted in my WSJ article by her acquisitions advisor, John Wilmerding, are any indication.

"It seems to me," Agnew said, "that as collections of art become more valuable, they become more vulnerable." Sales of a few works, she asserted, would "open the door. Soon you will sell another 20 or 30 percent of the collection because you need more money, and then it's gone."

More on all this later.

Mainstream media editors generally don't like bloggers to pitch ideas about which they've already posted.

So imagine my surprise when, a few weeks back, I got a call from my Wall Street Journal editor, asking me to expand on a CultureGrrl post. I'd like to think that a blog post is a quick preparatory sketch, and a subsequent magazine or newspaper article (or maybe a major motion picture!) is the finished masterpiece. The reluctance of veteran editors to see it that way is already changing with the times (and at the LA Times).

So what exactly WAS the provocative post that I was asked to expand upon? Go here to find out.

Y'all come back to visit me late tonight, when I'll post the link to the WSJ piece that will enliven tomorrow's paper.

This just in from BBC News:

French police have made five arrests over an attack on a painting by Claude Monet in Paris, France's AFP news agency says, quoting judicial sources....Four men and a young woman were questioned early on Tuesday and taken into custody, said AFP, citing a source close to the investigation.

I've tried in vain to find the story on the Agence France-Presse website, so this secondhand BBC account will have to do for now.

Jason Kaufman's review in the current Art Newspaper of Danny Danziger's book, Museum (a compilation of interviews with officials and staffers from the Metropolitan Museum) reminded me that I had planned to share with you the one passage in the book that had caused me to do a double-take.

Like Jason, I noted, in my previous post, the general lack of under-the-rug dirt in a volume that seems to promise, given its subtitle, "Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," some juicy tell-all revelations.

What I didn't know, until I read Jason's review, was that "the Metropolitan was given an opportunity to 'correct' the galleys, which spokesman Harold Holzer says was not a precondition for access. The process involved some minor expurgations."

Somehow, the expungers missed this passage, from the interview with John Barelli, chief security officer:

A worker stole half a million dollars' worth of early Christian jewelry; he broke open a case and took fibulae, pins, brooches and Celtic coins. But we caught and arrested him quite soon after, and I got it all back. He was given probation because he had never got into trouble before, and he is now a doorman on Park Avenue.

I don't remember seeing this disclosed previously. Had it been, one wonders if this fancier of early Christian jewelry could have landed a job guarding the door for bejeweled Park Avenue residents. Doesn't the building management do some due diligence?

And had I known about this incident, I might have taken note if it in my previous post about an inside job at a foreign museum: The Hermitage Heist: Could It Happen Here?

Apparently (with a happier resolution) it already has.

The Maier Museum Massacre has made the pages of the Oct. 15 issue of Newsweek (already online here) and on Saturday received detailed coverage from NPR radio. The NPR reporter, Joel Rose from Philadelphia's public radio station, WHYY, has been doing a fine job following this story (also here).

Particularly poignant was this quote from a Randolph College student, heard on NPR:

We weren't given any warning to go say good-bye to them. I would have liked to go once more to seem them for a final time.

And Newsweek's Eve Conant quoted another student's reaction about the loss of the four paintings:

They seem to be treating the Maier like an ATM. Take out a painting and--bam--they've got cash.

No college controversy would be complete without a student demonstration: The Lynchburg, VA, News & Advance recently ran a photo of passionate protesters chanting, "Damn the Man, Save the Maier." (The other hot-button issue on campus is the trustees' decision to admit men for the first time this fall.)

Advertisement for Italy's "Maratonarte":
"Act as if Italy were your own house."

Under the auspices of Italy's Ministry of Culture, the country's first cultural telethon, Maratonarte, raised some 2.8 million euros as of 7 p.m. Sunday, the last day of a three-day broadcast campaign to support seven cultural preservation projects.

Contributions are still being taken by phone and on the web.

The Manchester Guardian has the story.

Can you imagine Jerry Lewis doing a CultureThon in this country? Maybe Steve Martin.

I haven't had time to absorb this material yet, but I throw you these links for those who are looking for something to occupy all your free time on this Columbus Day:

---Yesterday's Washington Post and the Oct. 15 issue of New York magazine both have big, multi-article art sections for your perusal:

The Washington Post's "Museums" section includes musings by distinguished museum directors Philippe de Montebello and Timothy Potts, who give their jaded and jaundiced views on the misguided priorities of today's museums.

---New York's The Art Rush section includes what tongue-wagging art-lings have all been longing for---an in-depth look at Lisa Dennison's rash leap from the Guggenheim to Sotheby's.

Also in the New York package: Jerry Saltz's provocatively titled Has Money Ruined Art?.

---Last, and certainly least, Bloomberg's John Varoli informs us that one of the stops on the Hirst Skull Tour will be State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. The artist told Bloomberg that he's promoting this tour because "I just want people to see it." I'm sure that the fact that Hirst is part of an "investment group" that reportedly has a $100-million stake in boosting the bauble's market value has nothing to do with this campaign for museum exposure.

Will any American museum allow itself to be co-opted into this marketing scheme? Come to think of it, wasn't Hirst's reconstituted shark, owned by hedge-fund mogul Steve Cohen, supposed to have been placed on public display at the Metropolitan Museum by now? Did it need some more work done?

When its entrance, on the afternoon of its public opening, looks like this:

Before I arrived at the Renoir Landscapes show at the Philadelphia Museum on Thursday afternoon, I had the same mob-scene expectations as were suggested by Roberta Smith's NY Times review, published the next day (but based on her visit before the public opening):

The Philadelphia Museum of Art isn't expecting fights at "Renoir Landscapes: 1865-1883," at least not beyond the usual jockeying for space among adoring fans. The tickets are timed, and stanchions are at the ready.

But there was, in fact, no jockeying for space among the well-spaced attendees on opening afternoon, and the stanchions, as you can see from my photo, were completely unnecessary. There was definitely no need for timed tickets.

And while this show was well worth seeing, it did not, for me, quite live up to Roberta's rave.

But that's a subject, perhaps, for a later post.

The Damaged "Le Pont d'Argenteuil," Musée d'Orsay

Agence France Presse today reported that "drunken intruders" created a four-inch rip last night in Monet's "Le Pont d'Argenteuil" at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. They were captured on camera but not, at this writing, apprehended.

According to AFP:

The incident happened during Paris's so-called Nuit Blanche (White Night), when music and cultural events are staged late into the night and thousands throng the streets of the capital. The Musee d'Orsay however was not involved in the event

...except for some major collateral damage.

The Associated Press quoted Culture Minister Christine Albanel saying:

We know there were four or five people, likely four boys and a girl, who entered around midnight to 1 a.m., broke a door. It appears they were drunk....Someone punched the magnificent masterpiece by Monet.

And here's another quote from her, in Agence France Presse:

We have to see how we can toughen the penalties when there are break-ins to museums, churches and monuments.

How about toughening security, so that drunken revelers can't so easily enter one of France's premier art museums, let alone manage to vandalize a masterpiece and escape, despite the sounding of an alarm?

From the photo, above, the sadly damaged canvas, appears to be torn both horizontally and a vertically. The tan square on this floor plan shows you the location of Room 22, where the painting was hanging.

The College Art Association, the country's largest organization of artists and art historians, has now joined the professional groundswell of condemnation against the planned art sales from the Maier Museum. CAA has issued a statement that not only deplores the sale of art for purposes other than funding acquisitions, but also alludes to the procedural irregularities in Randolph College's deaccessioning.

CAA declared:

Most colleges and universities adhere to a transparent process for financial exigency where all stake-holders are consulted in advance of decisions. CAA expects that any process that involves the disposal of art or not be an open one that is clearly articulated and involves all stake-holders. A dialogue and transparency are needed for such major decisions.

I cannot think of another recent issue that has so moved the professional art community to speak with one voice. Can these paintings be saved?

For the complete CAA statement, click the link below.

The Association of Art Museum Directors has sent a letter to Randolph College and issued a press release condemning the planned sale of four paintings from the Maier Museum to beef up the college's endowment.

AAMD declared:

In the Association's judgment, such a sale violates the fundamental integrity of the Maier Museum of Art, and by extension, Randolph College. The AAMD condemns Randolph College's sale of paintings from the Maier Museum of Art.

In its letter to the university, AAMD asked the Lynchburg, VA, college "to reverse this decision while there is still time."

The Maier is not a member of AAMD.

For the complete text of the press release, click the link below.

Herbert Muschamp
(Photo by Robert Maxwell for The New York Times)

My tribute to Herbert Muschamp, published here almost a year ago, could stand as my obit for the former NY Times architecture critic, who died Tuesday night at age 59.

I noted that in his landmark article of Sept. 24, 1995, Muschamp lamented that "some of the world's most celebrated architects live and work in Manhattan," but "seldom build here."

As I said in my year-old post:

It took a while to gather steam, but the starchitect invasion of the New York streetscape began in earnest after Muschamp issued this request for proposals....

Sheer coincidence? Or is this a case where the Times bully pulpit had a strong, beneficial and lasting influence?

The NY Times obit is here.

Karol Lawson, who resigned her directorship of the Maier Museum on Tuesday, in protest against Monday afternoon's surprise removal of four paintings consigned to Christie's for auction, told me in a phone interview yesterday that she had no knowledge that any specific paintings from the museum's collection had been targeted for liquidation, let alone that anyone was coming to wisk them away, until John Klein, the president of Randolph College, showed up unannounced in her office late Monday afternoon to ask if she was going to help him. Here's her account of what happened next:

I said, 'Help you with what?'" He said the paintings were leaving the building. His assistant and the head of personel of the college stayed with me in my office the whole time---for the next hour and a half. Phone service and computer service to the museum was cut off. He [Klein] indicated he did not know how to pack paintings. I said,"'Who is in the truck [parked outside]?" He said, "Qualified art handlers." I said, "If they're qualified art handlers, they know how to pack paintings." I was not going to pack paintings....He urged me to see that they were handling the Bellows ["Men of the Docks"] properly. The college's lawyer was the only one holding it up. I said twice that the painting should not leave unless it was in a crate. I saw bubble wrap being brought in. I did not witness the packing or the removal from the building....

The action they took on Monday was antithetical to every tenet of the museum profession to which I belong.

Yes it was. And for Carrie Sidener's account in the Lynchburg, VA, News & Advance of the apology by the Lynchburg police for their role in this museum raid---a false warning to onlookers about a bomb threat against the building---go here.

And here's what Laura Katzman, who some months ago resigned her position as head of the college's museum studies program, in protest against contemplated sales, said about Monday's bomb-threat warning:

Is this not illegal if not dangerous in this day and age of terrorist threats? And what a ruse! Don't the city police know that the Maier's building is a bomb shelter, built by the National Gallery in the 1950s to protect the nation's art in a national emergency? The building is bomb proof!

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

Gary Tinterow and Colin Bailey need training in how to be a museum director? I guess it's so, if the Center for Curatorial Leadership says it's so.

These eminent curators, from the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection, respectively, are among the first 10 applicants chosen for such training by CCL, an organization co-founded by Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, and Elizabeth Easton, former chair of the department of European painting at the Brooklyn Museum. (Doesn't Easton want to a directorship, too?)

CCL also announced that it will collaborate with the Columbia University Business School to "deliver an MBA-level curriculum designed to equip curators with the necessary business skills to compete for museum director positions."

Click the link below for the full list of inaugural CCL fellows.

Italy announced today that it will display in Rome's presidential palace, the Qurinale, all 40 antiquities to be relinquished by the Getty Museum .

The Associated Press has the story. The Great Repatriator, of course, has his say: "'As the home of all Italians, the Qurinale is the most appropriate and prestigious place so that our citizens and visitors from around the world can come and admire these masterpieces in the country where they came from,' Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli said."

At today's J. Paul Getty Trust press lunch in New York, the museum's director, Michael Brand, told me that Italy has promised to lend the Getty 40 to 50 antiquities in return for the Getty's returns. But the deal does not specify what these objects will be. Brand said this is a good thing, because it will give him an opportunity to decide upon which objects he would most like to bring to Los Angeles, including, perhaps, newly discovered pieces. The actual text of the agreement, signed in Rome last week, is subject to a confidentiality agreement will not be published, he said.

Brand also told me that he hopes that Italy will reconsider its policy of allowing longterm art loans for a maximum of only four years.

In other exciting press-lunch news: A certain ArtsJournal blogger will be gratified to know that he made a cameo appearance in the Getty's promotional slide show, thanks to his assessment of the Getty Research Institute's exhibition gallery:

"The best and smartest programmed small space in America." ---Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes.

Maybe if I start slinging superlatives, someone will quote ME!

In Time magazine's Looking Around blog, Richard Lacayo posts a revealing interview with Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli.

We learn that even The Great Repatriator believes there's got to be some kind of claims cut-off date for when cultural objects left the country of origin. In discussing Monteleone's claim for the Metropolitan Museum's Etruscan Chariot, he says:

It's right to distinguish between works that were stolen---in Italy, after the 1939 law that oversees patrimony, and above all the UNESCO Convention of 1970 that fights the trafficking of artworks---and those sold 100 years ago. Otherwise, we just might have to deal with Napoleon's plundering!

So which is it, then: 1939 or 1970?

What's needed is a date (and other guidelines) that all sides can agree on. But not even American museums can agree among themselves on appropriate procedures. So case-by-case chaos still reigns.

A just-issued press release, Preserve Educational Choice, an organization opposed to the recent conversion of Randolph College from an all-women's institution to a coeducational one, announced the resignation of Karol Lawson, the director of the college's Maier Museum, a move triggered by the removal of four works from the museum for an auction disposal intended to beef up the college's general endowment.

In its press release, PEC asserts:

Randolph College---with a student body of only 665 students---has an endowment of $153 million. This is an endowment that is the envy of its peers, and larger than many colleges twice its size.... So why does Randolph College keep crying poor? Because it is trying to mask the real problem: out-of-control spending and financial mismanagement, neither of which will be fixed by selling pieces from the art collection....

The College's relationship to the Lynchburg community will be irreparably harmed [by the art disposals], particularly with the sale of George Bellows' "Men of the Docks." The Maier Museum of Art is a community treasure, and a major cultural attraction in central Virginia.

The anti-censorship battlelines are drawn. A new message has appeared on the website (scroll to bottom) of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art:

BALTIC at the request of The Sir Elton John Photography Collection has closed the exhibition "Thanksgiving" by Nan Goldin. After the removal of one image from the series, it was no longer possible for BALTIC to exhibit the collection of works as the artist intended and therefore BALTIC is sympathetic to Sir Elton John's request and supportive of the decision.

The Associated Press has the story here.

Meanwhile, the art-vs.-child porn debate has occasioned much soul-searching (including a link to CultureGrrl) on the London Times' Alpha Mummy website, billed as "a new blog for mums who work, used to work, or want to go back to work one day."

Comments are still hitting my inbox from CultureGrrl readers who have become uncharacteristically interactive over my two Goldin-related posts (here and here). How come no one gets this excited by museum deaccessions?

Playwright and actress Geralyn Horton writes:

The picture seems to be an intellectual query: When children's play takes a form that in a conscious adult would be a sexual display, designed to arouse desire in an audience, does it necessarily contain an emotional, erotic, charge? Answer: no....So the significant issue becomes: Is prompting such questions "art," or a kind of scientific investigation? Either way, it is a contribution to human knowledge, and an inappropriate object for censorship.

Bobb Holt writes:

Thanks for allowing me to see Nan Goldin's "Edda and Klara Belly Dancing." Pornography can be found only 'in the minds of little people.'

And last but not least, CultureGrrl has gained hilarious popularity with the large number of gyrators who flock to a certain belly-dancing website, which yesterday posted a link to me, on the basis of the photo's somewhat misleading title.

Do you think maybe they'll give me a free lesson?

George Bellows, "Men of the Docks," 1912, Maier Museum

Shame on Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA, for deciding to sell the signature work of its Maier Museum---the Bellows painting, pictured above, which was its first purchase when acquired in 1920 for $2,500.

Shame on Christie's for abetting this flagrant violation of professional principles of collections stewardship, by accepting this auction consignment. It is estimated to bring $25-35 million to benefit the college's general endowment, not the museum's collection. Where is Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell when we really need him?

Having already receiving a financial warning from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Randolph is up for an accreditation review in December. Comments to Carol Vogel of the NY Times (for tomorrow's paper) by Randolph's new president, John Klein, make it clear that the trustees have decided they've run out of time to raise funds the old-fashioned way, or to arrange a collection-sharing agreement that might have involved works purchased with funds bequeathed by Louise Jordan Smith. Any deal involving those works would have required court approval to deviate from the terms of the bequest. Such approval was being sought but was not yet forthcoming.

Three other works are being liquidated, including Edward Hicks' "A Peaceable Kingdom," which was to be the subject of the museum's December Tour of the Month (scroll to the bottom). I guess that tour is now cancelled.

Ironically, the current newsletter of the Maier Museum, published before the decision to sell was taken, includes these comments by T. Moody Campbell, the professor who had arranged the purchase of the Bellows:

Mr. Bellows' response was immediate and generous. He said that most artists, he being one of them, were less concerned about the price of their pictures than they were about having them in a place where they would be appreciated. He seemed to think the educational aspect of our undertaking was most important....The fact that the students had entered so enthusastically into the project evidently impressed him. He said we might have the painting for the sum I had mentioned.

Had he foreseen the trustees' vote of Oct. 1, 2007, Bellows might acted otherwise.

And this just in---an incendiary note that blew up my inbox, from Ellen Agnew, who recently resigned her position as associate director of the Maier, in protest against the college's consideration of deaccessions:

College officials and a lawyer for Randolph College from McGuire Woods came to the Maier Museum of Art at 4:55 this afternoon unannounced. Four paintings were de-installed (two actually from display in the galleries), wrapped by "qualified art handlers," loaded into an unmarked rental truck, and left the premises. The paintings taken were by George Bellows, Edward Hicks, Rufino Tamayo, and Ernest Martin Hennings.

College personnel on-site during the removal included John Klein (President), Chris Burnley (VP for finance), Dixie Sakolosky (Assistant to the President), Sharon Saunders (Director of Human Resources), Brenda Edson (Strategic Communications Manager), Kris Irwin (Director of Security), Bobby Bennett (Head of Buildings and Grounds), and at least two city police officers. Passers-by were told that there was a bomb threat at the Museum and to leave the area. The road at the corner of Norfolk Ave and Quinlan St. was blocked.

Words cannot express my anger, dismay, and disgust over the actions of this Board of Trustees and Administration. This cowardly act is proof yet again of the secrecy and lack of transparency...that have become a hallmark of this Board.

Temporary Fix for Leaking Skylight Over the Museum of African Art, from the GAO Report

---The latest Smithsonian revelations involve not news leaks, but water leaks: James Grimaldi of the Washington Post has the story about the just released Government Accountability Office report, which revealed that collections were put at risk by deferral of urgently needed repairs. Biggest shocker: In October 2006 at the Sackler Gallery, "a major leak unexpectedly occurred in a holding area...three weeks before $500-million worth of art arrived to be held there. If the leak had occurred while the art was being stored in the space, the art could have been destroyed."

Not previously reported (as far as I can tell) is the identity of the works that had this close brush with disaster: They were "some of the earliest biblical artifacts in existence," destined for In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000, which opened at the Sackler on Oct. 21. These included: "leaves from three of the six oldest surviving Hebrew codices, the oldest known manuscripts of the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, one of the earliest known manuscripts of the Gospels written in Latin, the oldest dated parchment biblical codex in the world, a page from the earliest Bible with full-page illustration." Yikes!

Elizabeth Duley, recently appointed to a newly created position, head of collections management, at the Sackler and Freer galleries, "will be responsible for solving long-standing storage issues," according to the Aug. 8 press release. She'll certainly have her work cut out for her.

---Are British museums about to loosen their prohibition against selling works from their collections? James Fenton of the Guardian has the story, pegged to a survey of 50 curators in the September Apollo magazine, which reported that "57% were in favour [of deaccessioning], as long as...specific safeguards were imposed."

---Public art or public nuisance? In a blooper tour of Seattle's city-wide outdoor museum, Danny Westneat argues that publicly funded works intended to enhance the quality of life sometimes detract from it.

---The MASS MoCA mess, continued: Director Joe Thompson speaks to Andrea Shea on public radio. NY Times readers, including Yale University Art Gallery director Jock Reynolds and performance artist Laurie Anderson, sound off in letters to the editor defending Thompson against Roberta Smith's fierce attack.

---The elusive Richard Prince speaks to New York Public Radio's Allison Lichter on the occasion of his just opened Guggenheim retrospective.

Some Prince outtakes:

Art's probably the only thing that makes me feel good....I think my responsibility is being irresponsible....I don't want a critic; I don't want to be judged. I just would love to be adored.