October 2010 Archives

It figures that I'd be halfway around the world (and not blogging) when the Association of Art Museum Directors announced its long overdue decision to lift the sanctions it imposed almost two years ago on the National Academy.

As CultureGrrl readers know, I broke the story about the National Academy's stealth deaccessions in late 2008 of two important paintings---a Church and a Gifford. Contrary to AAMD guidelines, the proceeds were used to defray expenses and debts, not to purchase other artworks for the collection.

I only found out about this breaking news because WNYC, New York Public Radio, contacted me for an interview (web only, not broadcast). You can read and listen to my comments, posted by Marlon Bishop, the station's culture producer, here. Also included are remarks by Kaywin Feldman, president of AAMD, and deaccession-friendly blogger Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento.

As I discussed in more detail on CultureGrrl here, I told Marlon of my dismay at how far AAMD had gone to dress down the Academy:

To my mind, telling other museums that they can't associate in any way with their colleagues at the National Academy, this ostracism...was almost an assault on academic freedom.

It went very far, and I'm glad to see that things have settled down.

UPDATE: Here's the audio podcast of my comments for WNYC's deaccessioning story:

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, construction photo, July 2010

[NOTE: This will be my last CultureGrrl post for about two and a half weeks. I'll be fleeing halfway around the world to pry myself away from computers, e-mail and blogging!]

Fisk University on Friday filed in Davidson County Chancery Court its 92-page revised plan for a proposed $30-million sale of a half-share in its celebrated Stieglitz Collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum, now under construction in Bentonville, AR. Fisk and Crystal Bridges have modified the terms of their agreement to "address the Court's concerns," according to the university's brief. Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle will decide whether to approve the revised plan, after which both sides in the case---Fisk and the Tennessee Attorney General's office---will have the option to file an appeal.

Just before that document hit the courthouse, the Association of Art Museum Director's strongly worded letter, opposing the monetization of the collection, hit the desk of Fisk President Hazel O'Leary.

Here's an excerpt from AAMD's stern missive:

Supporting operations through the sale of works of art fundamentally undermines the core role of the arts in education and the integrity of an educational institution. Most museum and university art collections are built through gifts or financial contributions designated for purchasing works of art.

If donors believe such gifts may be converted at any time to support other purposes, such as operations, donors will be reluctant to make these gifts in the future---not only to Fisk, but to any art museum. In the end, the publics we serve will be the ultimate victims of this virtually inevitable result. Preserving public trust is critical to all nonprofit institutions.

Treating art as a fungible asset and using collections to pay for daily expenses will also significantly undermine future fundraising for operations. If a museum or university can meet its operating needs by selling art, why bother giving money when there are so many other nonprofits facing severe financial challenges?

Installation shot of the Guggenheim Museum's "Chaos and Classicism" show

Holland Cotter, in today's NY Times finds the Guggenheim's current exhibition, Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936, to be "totally engrossing" (as did I, in my much-Twittered CultureGrrl review, published Friday). But he doesn't think that you'll react as he did.

Cotter writes:

With its high percentage of unfamiliar names, the exhibition won't pull crowds. Visitors with a stake in art-as-uplift will find the story it tells mystifying, if not perverse.

I find his stab at attendance-prediction "mystifying , if not perverse." My guess is that Cotter has made himself a liar, by publishing the kind of thoughtful, admiring review that will indeed "pull crowds."

But apparently this little-reviewed exhibition is doing just fine, even without a push from heavyweight pundits. According to an e-mail just sent to me by the show's guest curator, Kenneth Silver, the show is "already VERY VERY crowded, and the PUBLIC (!!!) seems to love it." (Exclamation points are his, not mine.)

Maybe reviewers and some curators (but not scholars like NYU Professor Silver) underestimate the intelligence of the museum-going public, not to mention its thirst for something fresh, thought-provoking and un-formulaic for a change.

While my "portentous tour de force" description of the show has gained currency among the Twitterati, Cotter has penned the perfect characterization for this worthy project---"a survey-style piece of investigative history with a bomb ticking away inside."

Installation shots from the big fall shows at the Guggenheim, left, and MoMA, right

There's an electric energy in New York right now, zapping between two parallel but sharply contrasting shows that have just opened at Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA's show, focusing on American art after the Second World War, is beautiful but not too bright. (I've touched upon the Abstract Expressionist extraganza here; more later.) The Guggenheim's show, focusing on European art after the First World War, has less visual appeal but far more intellectual and historical heft.

In Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936, the Guggenheim's guest curator, Kenneth Silver, a professor of modern art at New York University, has filled nearly the entire museum with an incisive, portentous tour de force, demonstrating how Europe's artists, shell-shocked after World War I, sought to regain composure and sanity through a "return to order." Many eschewed the avant-garde Expressionism and Cubism that had flourished before the war, embracing a reassuringly conservative figuration derived from the Renaissance and antiquity.


Kenneth Silver, guest curator, at the Guggenheim's press preview for his "Chaos and Classicism"

The show does make one nod towards German Expressionism, presented in a black case along one wall of the museum's first-level, double-height gallery. You can glimpse the case in the left photo at the top, to the right of the listless statues. A Maillol, the most appealing of the group, stands in the foreground.

The case displays a selection of 15 from the 50 prints of Otto Dix's 1924 series, "The War"---an evocation of Goya's "Disasters of War" and precursor of Picasso's "Guernica," with its unflinching, heart-stopping depiction of war's destruction and brutality. On the bottom left (hard to make out in my amateur photo) is a dead baby draped limply over a mother whose face has been blasted:


Otto Dix, "House Destroyed by Aerial Bombs (Tournai)," 1924

Silver caused me to do repeated double takes as I savored his deeply informative wall texts and labels, far exceeding the level to which I've become accustomed at megashows aiming for popular appeal. I was reminded of the brilliantly orchestrated shows organized by the late William Rubin, director of painting and sculpture at MoMA, whose astute insights stopped you at every turn. (Rubin's name was invoked---to his current counterpart's, Ann Temkin's, own peril---in one wall label at Abstract Expressionist New York, MoMA's foil to the Guggenheim's show.)

Another scholar brought to mind by Silver's project was the late Robert Rosenblum, curator of 20th-century art at the Guggenheim, who liked nothing better than to disrupt the canon by highlighting works routinely neglected or dismissed by mainstream art historians. When I mentioned this to him after the press preview, Silver told me that Rosenblum, his teacher and friend, was indeed "the good ghost who haunts this exhibition."

Here's a sliver of Silver:

The idealized beauty of postwar classical sculpture was both a deliberate and instinctive response to World War I....Rather than frank confrontation, a self-conscious forgetting determined many of the significant new forms of art. Naked truth gave way to idealized nudity: intact, undamaged, perfectly formed figures proliferated in painting and sculpture over the next two decades.

Classicism---the art of ancient Greece and Rome as well as later movements considered to have evolved from antiquity---offered much to a postwar world in search of security. Venerable and authoritative, familiar yet dignified, it was reassuringly repetitive yet subject to reinvention.

Even my perceptions of the handful of very famous, familiar works that are interspersed through this show---by such luminaries as Picasso, Matisse, Léger, de Chirico, Balthus---were greatly enriched, thanks to Ken's ken:


Picasso, "Woman in White," 1923, Metropolitan Museum of Art

As Silver discusses in more detail in his 1989 book, Esprit de Corps (P. 290-291), the circumstances surrounding Picasso's original drawing for the painting above demonstrate its connection to World War I's aftermath: It was sketched (as show's label tells us) "atop an illustrated report on the front page of the newspaper "Excelsior" (July 23, 1923). The article was about the consecration of a military cemetery 'on the place where, for the first time, General [John J.] Pershing's troops blocked the German advance in World War I.'" Silver tellingly describes Picasso's seated woman as "appear[ing] through the veil of time" and "bleached white like antique ruins."

As Fascism darkened Germany and Italy, the craze for classicism, which had often focused on the body, evolved into something more sinister---the exaltation of a Nazi-endorsed physical ideal. One of the show's most arresting, disturbing sights is a triptych in the final gallery, where the ambient illumination is dimmed to reflect the subject---"The Dark Side of Classicism."

The frauleins below were painted by the artist who was head of the Reich Chamber of the Visual Arts. He is best known for confiscating modernist works from German museums and displaying them in the infamous "Degenerate Art" show of 1937:

Storm King Art Center's director and curator, David Collens (left) and its chairman, president and co-founder H. Peter Stern (right) look on as president John Stern blows out the sculpture park's 50th-birthday candles.

I have always wanted to walk into, rather than gaze down upon, Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield, her four-acre commissioned earthwork at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY.

Last month, I finally got the chance. Meant to surround and envelope visitors, rather than to be viewed at a distance, the undulating earthwork has been largely off-limits to perambulators since its official debut in May 2009, due to the difficulty in maintaining its grass seedings. (Storm King doesn't use artificial irrigation.)

A couple of weeks ago, I returned to this idyllic sculpture mecca for its 50th-anniversary luncheon celebrating the artists whose works have enriched its collection over the years.

Here's a group photo of those creators:



At the far left, in the front row, is Ursula von Rydingsvard. Here she is again, touring the grounds with director/curator David Collens:



Her "Luba" is part of the 5+5: New Perspectives exhibition of 12 new and recent works by 10 artists:


Ursula von Rydingsvard, "Luba," 2009-10, lent by the artist

The local fauna seem to have adopted this seemingly organic work of cedar, cast bronze and graphite as just another tree:


"Luba's" cocoon

Standing directly behind von Rydingsvard in the group photo above is our old friend Stephen Talasnik, whom you may remember for his "Little Bamboo" (my name for it, not his) that was the subject of an irreverent CultureGrrl video shot during my June visit to Storm King. These bamboo organisms just keep on propagating: Talasnik's "Stream a Folded Drawing" has now spawned "Baby Bamboo" (actual title, "Spawn I"). It's made from materials left over from the original site-specific sculpture that had been commissioned by Storm King:


Stephen Talasnik, "Spawn I," 2010, lent by the artist

This weekend and next, the larger of Talasnik's pieces will be the focus of two dances choreographed by Wally Cardona and Judith Sanchez Ruiz in a program titled Movements Within a Stream.

The work in the "5+5" exhibition that most transfixed me was Darrell Petit's 17-foot-high, 44-ton granite "Kiss," a rough-hewn giant that's both beautiful and scary in its seeming precariousness:

Darrell Petit, "Kiss," 2008, lent by the artist

But back to Maya Lin. Her "Storm King Wavefield" is still only partly traversable by foot, but that's better than merely gazing at it from above or aside, as I had previously experienced it. Visitors may now trod a designated pathway between the waves, but we still can't surf the crests until the grass seedings gets better established.

Come. Let's walk it together!

Merryl Tisch, Chancellor, NY Board of Regents

Robin Pogrebin's three-weeks-after-the-fact post mortem in the NY Times about the NY Board of Regents' astonishing, inadequately explained about-face on deaccession regulations sheds some light on what went on behind the scenes.

Robin includes this quote from the influential letter addressed to the Regents by Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, on Sept. 9---less than a week before the temporary rules to tighten restrictions on deaccessioning were killed:

If made permanent, this rule would remove from Regents-governed institutions the curatorial discretion that has made them among the most respected in the world.

Mr. Curatorial Discretion oversaw what I regard as one of the most deplorable museum deaccessions ever perpetrated. I'd introduce it as Exhibit A in evidence of why museums need to be more tightly regulated: In 2003, MoMA sold to the late dealer/collector Heinz Berggruen a seminal 1909 Cubist Picasso (bequeathed to MoMA in 1979 by Nelson Rockefeller). The "justification" for disposing of this masterpiece was that the museum had a comparable work that had been promised to the museum in 1970 by David Rockefeller. In 1991, he gave MoMA a 10% fractional interest in the painting.

That promised gift, largely absent from the galleries, did make a fleeting reappearance, July 17-Aug. 31, 2009, in satisfaction of the IRS's new fractional-gift requirement for periodic physical possession by the museum:


Picasso, "The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro," 1909, fractional and promised gift to MoMA from Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller, 1991, as seen at the museum in August 2009

Robin mentioned in her article that Merryl Tisch, the Regents' chancellor, was connected to MoMA as a donor through her and her husband's foundation. But there's another Tisch family connection: Joan Tisch is a life trustee (scroll down) of MoMA. She's the widow of Preston Tisch, who was the brother of Merryl's late father-in-law, Laurence.

In talking to the Times, Merryl promised that the Regents would be "transparent" in deliberating on what to do next about possible revisions to the old, less stringent deaccession rules (which will supplant the temporarily adopted stricter regs on Oct. 9). That transparency would be a refreshing change from board's most recent flip-flop, which left proponents of the tighter rules feeling blindsided (as detailed by Robin and by me).

Speaking of "blindsided," when will the Times get around to critically examining the stealth provision buried in New York's new UPMIFA law? That mischievous language---quietly inserted in a bill that had been publicly described as allowing financially strapped museums to dip in to "underwater" endowments---is an under-the-radar abdication of policy-making to the museums that have lobbied for as little regulation as possible over the disposition of their collections and financial assets.

The new law explicitly gives museums greater lattitude in diverting endowment funds away from the purposes specifically stipulated by the donor. It's Manna from Hanna, all over again.

Speaking of donor intent, my very warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 146 from New York and very generous Repeat Donor 147 from Los Angeles. I hope that more of you, returned from your poolside pursuits, will soon engage my "Donate" button, with the intent of encouraging me to blog!

Whatever you think of the for-beginners-only wall texts and labels, you can't help being wowed by the artworks and their installation---many intriguing juxtapositions, along with powerful single-artist concentrations.
Chaos and Classicism chief curator of painting and sculpture, describing insights she gained by viewing her own agglomeration of some 250 works (many dusted off from storage) from MoMA's permanent collection.

As I turn my camera on David Smith's "Australia" while Temkin discusses it, you'll not only see a Jackson Pollock peeking through the sculpture's apertures; you'll also spot the head of MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry framed by Smith's drawing-in-air:

I now have another reason not to set my alarm early today to attend the Guggenheim's roll-out of its new orbiting BMW satellites. Not only has Carol Vogel already done the heavy-lifting for us, but the museum is going to webcast its 10 a.m. news conference live, here.

You don't even have to be a journalist to attend the announcement by Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, and Frank-Peter Arndt, member of BMW's board of management. (You will have to supply your own 9:15 a.m. buffet breakfast, however.)

So you really feel a part of all this, I'll even send you the animated invitation that the Guggenheim had e-mailed me:



But what we really want to know is: Why are art museums suddenly feeling the urge to create offbeat structures as temporary cultural think tanks (scroll down to Hirshhorn)? And will the architects for the BMW Guggenheim Labs be required to incorporate this into their designs?