Modern Art Notes

Enjoy the long weekend. See you Monday.

Fresh from the morning papers: The Fishers abandon their plans for a Main Post-based contemporary art museum in the Presidio. Preservationists rejoice.

Continuing, sort of, from here and here...

The Toledo Museum of Art has acquired Wayne Thiebaud's 1963 Roast Beef Dinner (Trucker's Supper), at left.

Roast Beef Dinner is a quintessentially mid-20th-century American still-life. It's a square meal of the sort one would expect to find at, well, a truck stop. The white bread recalls industrially-processed Wonder Bread. The tomatoes look culinarily pro forma rather than a considered part of the meal, and the plating of the food is as bland and unimaginative as possible. (Those aren't French french fries, those are American-cut fries, too.)

Like most of the best Thiebaud pop-meets-still-life paintings, the subject of the painting is notable mostly for its ordinariness. Thiebaud didn't work from actual objects, so he may have been thinking about a San Francisco diner-ish eatery such as the legendary Zim's, or he may have been picturing a meal he ate in a New York coffeeshop. That's part of the point: The scene could have come from anywhere. (Albeit an 'anywhere' that puts its knife and fork on the wrong side of the plate...)

Toledo's new painting is an fine example of how Thiebaud's interests were different from other '60s pop painters. Thiebaud was uninterested in advertising-style images or in brand names. Instead his still-lifes from the early 1960s reproduce the then-increasing uniformity of American experience, especially food-related experience. While some pop painters nodded at the Levittown/Lakewoodization of American post-war life by creating flat, characterless paint surfaces (often working in super-flat Magna), Thiebaud slathered on the oils.

Related: This 1964 Rosenquist seems like a sly dig at Thiebaud.

Continuing from this morning...

Luis Melendez, the greatest Spanish still-life painter of the 18th-century, elevated simple, rustic objects into palace decorations for royals. A survey of his still-life paintings is on view at the National Gallery of Art until Aug. 23. This painting is the creatively-titled Still Life with Apples, Pears, Cheese, Jug, Boxes and Cask from 1760-1765. It's in a private collection.

The NGA show is small and dense: Thirty-one paintings installed in just two-plus cavern-like galleries in the NGA's East Building. The hanging is plenty assembly-line, but in this instance it sort-of works: Melendez frequently took a bit of an assembly-line approach himself: For example, the dead pigeons in this ~1770 North Carolina Museum of Art painting make an encore in this ~1774 Wadsworth Atheneum painting.

Throughout the day I'll be featuring some food-centric still-lifes on view now at American museums. Today's last post will feature a new museum acquisition.

This is Job Berckheyde's The Baker (~1681), on view at the Worcester Art Museum. Berckheyde was a minor painter of city scenes, church interiors (mostly of St. Bavo's) and this unusual (mostly) still-life painting.

Bread was a big deal in the Netherlands -- Vermeer's biggest contemporary collector was a breadmaker who may have accepted paintings in lieu of payment. According to WAM, the baker is tooting his own horn to announce that the morning's bread is fresh out of the oven and ready for purchase. The baker may be Berckheyde himself: Judge this portrait against this Berckheyde self-portrait.

1.) The Worcester Art Museum is the best American art museum you probably haven't been to. The European collection is deep and full of good paintings and the American collection (and installations) are top-notch.

2.) Worcester's Jacob van Ruisdael might be the best 17thC Dutch seascape in an American museum. (Wanna disagree? Tweet me and I'll share your picks.)

3.) Worcester's early American collection can go up against almost anyone's. Have a browse here to see what I mean. (Roberta Smith, who criticized the National Gallery of Art's American installation for being stale would probably love Worcester's installs, which mix naive painting with overmantels with formal portraits. I sure did.) Among my favorites were Worcester's Freake portraits, a cleverly detailed Ralph Earl landscape and a terrific John Vanderlyn portrait.

4.) Edgar Degas once owned this Worcester Gauguin.

5.) Want to know when a city was at its wealthiest? Look at when its art museum acquired its best paintings. Worcester's mostly came in between 1910 and the 1940s. The European paintings galleries still look great.

• The MFA Houston conserves a Kiefer in full public view. The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt provides the video.
• At the Brooklyn Museum, Yinka Shonibare makes an entrance.
• Is this a solution for how to make wall-text less squinty?
• Last year I did a series of posts on the American flag in contemporary art. These arrived too late to be included.
• Six centuries of tapestries in painting.

1.) I was excited to see a new Tadao Ando. I was excited to take a walk in the Berkshire woods to get to a new Tadao Ando. When I got to said Ando I discovered it was a couple of small, afterthought-ish galleries tacked onto a beautiful paintings conservation/etc. lab. Seemed like a very, very, very limited use of the architect, the space, the opportunity.

2.) The Clark has put together a pleasant site for its Dove/O'Keeffe show. (One oddity: Lots of JPEGs of paintings, no credit lines.) The show itself is a nice tennis match between two American moderns. Bonus: Check out this O'Keeffe, just acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum.

3.) This is a really nice Pissarro. The more Pissarro I've seen since the MoMA Pissarro-Cezanne show the more I've thought that the show presented a slightly out-of-line pairing. Must re-read that catalogue.

4.) The Clark's galleries are wonderfully dignified. No wonder Sterling Clark once lived in an apartment in the back galleries. (Can you imagine Eli and Edythe Broad living in an apartment in the back galleries at BCAM? Er, perhaps that's a bad example...)

5.) I tweeted that an Ammi Phillips painting had the most touching credit line I'd read on a museum wall-label: "Gift of Oliver Eldridge in memory of Sarah Fairchild Anderson, Teacher of Art, North Adams Public Schools." Here's the painting.

• In the DC Express, Danielle O'Steen talks to William Eggleston about spontaneity in his work -- not that Eggleston exactly puts it that way.
• The Philly Inky's Peter Dobrin reports that the Philly Museum has hired a new director: Cleveland's Timothy Rub.
  
• Kenneth Baker continues his lament about the decline of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Latest sadness: Tut.
• Best Holland Cotter line in months (on James Ensor at MoMA):"[O]ne minute he's doing biblical scenes, the next the equivalent of biker tattoos, in a style that veers between crude and dainty."
• Possible next story for LATer Mike Boehm: If MOCA's finances are 'fixed,' why did they recently do another round of staff layoffs? 
• The Dallas Morning News' Michael Granberry on how artists address WWII Japanese internment camps through art, now at the Crow Collection in Dallas.
• In the Miami Herald, Fabiola Santiago details the next private collection to go on view in a Miami warehouse.
• Just right for Doug Harvey in LA Weekly: Outback Renaissance.
• A new downtown sculpture park has opened in St. Louis and David Bonetti approves. Complete with pix.
  

1.) Over 60 percent of Williams College students take an art/art history class.

2.) WCMA might consider re-photographing this van der Hamen still-life, because it's really quite exceptional.

3.) The only museums I visited all week that did not have a Sol LeWitt wall-drawing on view were (I think...) the under-construction MFA Boston and the Clark. WCMA's is right in its lobby, in its staircase. Typically a line in a painting might do that to your eye -- think of the way a diagonal in a Monet leads you into the heart of the painting. The LeWitt at WCMA pulls your whole person up to the museum's second floor, as if you were on a clothesline. Cool.

4.) A tiny LeWitt show at WCMA features a drawing that LeWitt made for his mother. It is not the kind of thing you and I would make for our parents. It isn't light or funny or cutesy. It's a typical LeWitt, just for his mom. Something about that is reassuring.

5.) You do not want to fall asleep having just thought about Ribera's The Executioner. Srsly.

1.) MASS MoCA's Sol LeWitt drawings retrospective could not be better. Really: I can't think of anything the museum could have done differently that would have improved the presentation. It's perfect. Ideal. Riveting. It's on view through 2033.

2.) Speaking of ambition -- and the LeWitt presentation is ambitious institutionally, artistically and every way else I can think of -- how about Anselm Kiefer? I don't think ambitious artists are  valued at the moment, let alone encouraged, but none of that has slowed down the 64-year-old Kiefer. The Kiefer mini-show at MASS MoCA is modest, but the work is big. As I looked at the ginormous concrete sculpture at the heart of the show I couldn't stop thinking about us in Iraq, us in Afghanistan, chaos in Iran... where is next...

3.) Simon Starling loves/needs him some wall text.

4.) The LeWitt show should start us all thinking about what other artists deserve that kind of long-term installation. Fred Sandback? Robert Irwin? Doug Wheeler? Agnes Martin?

5.) I can't get enough of the LeWitt time-lapse videos.

1.) The Serras get the headlines, the Fred Sandbacks steal the show. Dia has nearly a dozen. But: Sandbacks bask in the space and light of Dia's space. Put them in crowded galleries with other art and standard lighting and they go flat, such as at MoMA. Sandback deserves a major retrospective... but there aren't many spaces in which the work can look as good as it looks in Beacon.

2.) The only two places in America that are whiter and more male than the National Gallery of Art's American galleries are Tom Tancredo's imagination and Dia Beacon. There is a temporary Zoe Leonard exhibition on view, an inexplicable Antoni Tapies mini-show (a Dia curator has an appointment at the Reina Sofia...) and Louise Bourgeois is in the attic. As I Tweeted on Friday: Anne Truitt belongs in Beacon.

2a.) I'm tired of the posturing, posing, ostentatious, excessive, unnecessary Dia colon. I have exorcised it from this post.

3.) Dia's presentation of Dan Flavin looks a little stale. I've never liked those early, white Flavins as much as the later, colorful works. Maybe that's it.

4.) Richard Serra's torqued ellipses are one of my favorite art experiences of the last half century. Look carefully and you can see much of the history of abstract painting in their surfaces: Larry Poons' dots, Gerhard Richter's shmears, Cy Twombly's scribbles and so on.

5.) New York-based critics who complain and bitch and moan and complain that Dia is not in New York City are being narrow and small. Beacon is less than 90 minutes away from Manhattan by train. The space and light in Beacon enables one of the most beautiful, thoughtful collection installations in America. Dia being in Beacon is good for the art, good for the artists (see Sandback, Fred) and it's good for us because it sows us the work to best advantage. Would it be nice if there was a Dia exhibition space somewhere in New York City or in New Jersey? Sure. Lots of things would be nice. But is it a big deal? No.

• If you're a museum director, OCMA boss Dennis Szakacs will whisper to you the name of his favorite bargain shopper, reports LATer Mike Boehm. (At which point you can then leak it to Boehm...);
• MCASD director Hugh Davies is not amused by Szakacs/OCMA's antics;
• In the NYT, Deborah Sontag talks with Yinka Shonibare;
• The Boston Globe's Sebastian Smee and the case of the falling horizon line at the Peabody Essex Museum;
• The Dallas Morning News' Scott Cantrell reviews a new show at the Meadows Museum that reveals what kind of a cubist Diego Rivera was;
• The KC Star's Alice Thorson wonders who will lead the Nelson-Atkins next? (Strong collection + great new building = plum job.); and
  
• In the Houston Chronicle, everywhere Douglas Britt looks he sees John Chamberlain (including at the Menil).
  

Some of you have been kind enough to encourage me to tweet more visits to art museums/etc. Well, over the next week or so I'll be tweeting from lots of art museums. It might be a fun time to join me on Twitter.

On June 4 I posted about how the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new so-called American Wing and the National Gallery of Art's American galleries are problematic. The two institutions are clinging to embarrassingly conservative, Pat Buchanan-Tom Tancredo-style definitions of what 'American art' is. That thinking culminated in yesterday's post, about the NGA.

A word on why I didn't include the Met, whose 'American Wing' is almost as embarrassing as the NGA's presentation of American art. So far the Met's space is not worthy of the name 'American Wing.' It is the white, northeastern American wing. Call it the '1/8th of America Wing.' 

But the Met isn't done. In 2011 the museum's American paintings and sculpture galleries will re-open. I'm not sure there's any reason to believe they'll be more fully American than what's opened so far. But it would be unfair to comment on the totality Met's view of American art until...

In 1988, eight years after Ronald Reagan tried to harness white fear and hate by kicking off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss. and at peak ugliness of the culture wars, former Republican presidential candidate, bigoted culture-warrior and current MSNBC talking head Pat Buchanan asked: "Who speaks for the Euro-Americans, who founded the U.S.A.? Is it not time to take America back?"

Buchanan will be pleased to learn that I've finally found "who speaks for the Euro-Americans:" The National Gallery of Art, whose recently re-installed American galleries are stunning in their presentation of a white, male-centric American art. By my recent count there are 169 works of art in the NGA's 14 recently re-installed American galleries. One hundred and sixty-six (and possibly 167) of them were made by white men. [Image: Edward Savage, The Washington Family.]

First, the NGA's definition of American art, as evidenced by the scope of its galleries: Painting (plus two sculptures, the Shaw Memorial and some related studies) from the colonial period through late Marsden Hartley.

Only one painting by an African-American artist is on view, a Joshua Johnson [at right]. There is one painting of an African-American gentleman by an unknown artist. Both are in the NGA's naive painting gallery. The other 167 (or 168) works in the NGA's 14 American galleries are by white people. There is only one work by a woman in the NGA's American galleries, this Harriet Hosmer. (On the day I conducted my survey, the Hosmer had been temporarily removed.) The other 168 works are by men.

True: Art museums are not history museums. There is no charge that they proportionally represent populations in their galleries. An art museum's mandate is to show the best art it is able to show, within a certain conceit, be that 16thC Italian, 17thC Dutch or American. Even with all those disclaimers: Come on! Two out of 169? At the National Gallery of Art?

The issue isn't the need for some kind of enlightened multiculturalism, the issue is that the NGA's portrayal of 'American art' is a fiction: Art in America has not been made by only white people, nor has it been made only by men. The America envisioned as a past and present construct by the Buchanan-Tancredo crowd -- and as presented in the NGA's galleries -- does not and has never existed.

As a result of either its antiquated definition of American art or something else, the NGA excludes an astonishing range of non-white, non-male artists. Ann (sometimes Anne) Hall, Sarah and Eliza Goodridge were among the foremost American miniaturists of their day. Robert S. Duncanson was one of the foremost painters of the then-West. [Image: Duncanson, Blue Hole, Little Miami River, Cincinnati Art Museum.] Aaron Douglas, whose practice ranged from canvas to murals to graphic work and to whom contemporary artists such as Kara Walker are deeply indebted, is absent. What about Lily Martin Spencer, whose American genre paintings are among the best of her generation? Or the delightful seascapes of Mary Blood Mellen or Michele Felice Corne? Tellingly, only Spencer is even partially represented in the NGA's collection (an 1855 painting is a promised and partial gift).

Furthermore, the NGA's approach to American art -- paintings-on-canvas-or-board reign -- excludes media in which non-northeastern-white men excelled. That excludes Georgian Harriet Powers, a one-time slave is arguably the greatest American quilter. And what about santos, a distinctly New Mexican form of religious icon? Or Mary Anne Willson or Eunice Pinney's delightful works on paper. (The NGA owns four Willsons and four Pinneys. None are on view.) Absent are the sculptures of Anne Whitney, one of which is nearby, in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall collection. 

It is not enough to say that, 'Well, the NGA collection just doesn't happen to own artists who aren't white men. Can't blame them for not showing what they don't own." That in itself is an indictment. The NGA administration, its trustees and curators -- including the current leadership -- has had both the time and the budget to address the collection's deficiencies. It's time for that to be an institutional priority.

Wow: Orange County Museum of Art of Art spokesperson hangs up on "refused to offer details" to Orange County Register journalist, director's quote must be read to be believed. (Ya think the museum knows it goofed?) [via, updated to reflect changes at linked-to post]

In the current economic/non-profit environment, arts journalists are keeping an eye out for any sign of financial distress at once-sound non-profits, any sign of sector-wide degeneration. (So far the troubled art museums that have been in the news, notably MOCA and the Corcoran, have  had financial problems of long standing.) So here's why the OCMA situation bears continued watching: OCMA's bizarre sale has given us reason to wonder if the museum doesn't just have an ethical problem, but if it has financial problems too.

Simply: There is no clear reason why OCMA had to deaccession 18 paintings for dimes on the dollar. (Unless it's to pay for the world's most annoying Flash animation, ha ha.) The museum's 'reason,' that it wanted to keep the paintings in an Orange County collection, is pure balderdash. Non-profits have a fiduciary responsibility to themselves and to their missions (in this case, to their accessioning funds), not to local collectors.

Which brings us to the latest: In today's LAT Mike Boehm finds several other dealers astonished that OCMA bumbled its way toward leaving millions of dollars on the table. A sound deaccessioning process might have led the museum to a transparent process, let alone a healthier art market. But OCMA apparently felt compelled to have a garage sale, and right away. So why now, and at that price?

We still don't know. But it's a key question, one that no one has answered satisfactorily. (For what it's worth: OCMA is not one of America's wealthier art museums. Its program is more developed than its finances. The museum doesn't make its annual report available online (grrr...), but according to its most recent tax filing its budget was balanced. It's endowment is in the low double-digits (in millions), which isn't much but OCMA isn't feeding on itself the way MOCA did either.)

So if OCMA is healthy -- and becaue of the museum's rash actions that has become an 'if' -- why is the director of the industry apologist, the Association of Art Museum Directors, leaping to OCMA's defense even though OCMA plainly violated AAMD's guidelines on deaccessioning? Is this the first sign of AAMD making excuses for a troubled institution? Or just AAMD bumbling?

There are still lots of unanswered questions here. This story's not over.

Related: Christopher Knight on the relationship between one of the ex-OCMA paintings and Charlie Chaplin.

UPDATED: The fourth-from-last paragraph in the story initially confused me. I've been set straight.

Today's story in deeply questionable art museum ethics -- complete with the near-requisite get-out-of-jail-free card from the industry apologist, the Association of Art Museum Directors -- comes from California, where the Orange County Museum of Art has sold 18 paintings at roughly 10 cents on the dollar half price to an unnamed private collector. Mike Boehm has the story in the LA Times.

Yup, that's right, a 50 percent-plus 'discount.' OCMA deaccessioned 18 paintings for $963,000. Boehm talked to a California dealer and found that 10 of the 18 paintings likely would have brought about $750,000-$1 million each. the whole trove brought at least that much and two of the paintings would have brought $750,000-$1 million each. In short: OCMA deaccessioned an estimated $2 million-plus worth of art (likely lot$ more) for less than $1 million. (The museum claims it got fair value.)

The museum refused to divulge to the LAT the purchaser's name or to explain why it was in the best interest of the (non-profit) museum to deaccession at such a discount. The story does not say if the collector who snapped up the deal is on OCMA's board of trustees or if the buyer has a connection to a trustee.

It all adds up to this: Read Boehm's story as an invitation for the California attorney general's office to investigate. (When the Getty did this kind of thing, such as selling Trust property to friends at a steep discount, the California AG jumped in.)

Discuss amongst yourselves: How ridonkulous and embarrassing is it for the new director of AAMD, Janet Landay, to be defending this kind of thing? Is any art world organization better at demonstrating its uselessness than AAMD?

Clarification: My point about the Getty and the California AG's investigation was that a land deal made at what looked like a discount that was one of the impetuses for the AG's look at the Getty, and that there is a similar appearance here. Ultimately the California AG found that the Getty's land deal was above-board, but still: It prompted an investigation.

• Kenneth Baker has found yet another reason to dislike a bizarre Ansel Adams-Georgia O'Keeffe pairing, on view now at SFMOMA;
• The Boston Globe's Sebastian Smee says that Bruce Nauman's Venice pavilion is endearingly insulting;
• In the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener thinks that ExitArt's Negritude is an excellent curatorial/exhibition starter kit;
• The Stranger's Jen Graves on the dispute over city-owned art in a Seattle office building.
• Jerry Saltz on how Charles Ray is just hitting both his stride and his trip.
  

ArtTactic has a podcasted interview with Rose board chair Jonathan Lee.

With so much of MAN's audience in Europe and so on this week, I'm going to take my first week off from MAN since, well, since the last time everyone decamped for Venice and Basel. I'll be back on June 15 with posts on a new book that examines Gerhard Richter's portraits, on the new American presentations at the Met and at the NGA, on the Monica Majoli on view at MoMA and on William Kentridge. (I'll still be Tweeting.)

I have no idea who is behind Los Angeles County Museum on Fire is (ID'ing the author has become something of a parlor game among the criticiscenti), but this is a fascinating post on the new American wings/galleries/etc. that have popped up around the United States in the last couple of months. (Note to self: Writing about crazy collectors who build underground museums to themselves = good content.)

In case you've not been keeping track, the National Gallery, the Met, the Huntington and the Nelson-Atkins have all opened major American presentations this spring. (The Met isn't done: Its American paintings and sculpture galleries open in 2011. If I'm forgetting any, I hope readers will let me know.) [Image. From the Met.]

I've only seen two of the four: The NGA's remodeled American paintings galleries and the Met's new American wing. I look forward to posting on them soon, informed by this: On a morning when an American president born in Hawaii to a Muslim Kenyan father and a Kansasan mother is speaking about Islam, Israel and the United States at Egypt's Cairo University, while back home a Latina visits Capitol Hill to drum up support for her landmark nomination to the Supreme Court and while New Hampshire becomes the sixth state to offer state-level marriage equality, does it make sense for our art museums to present American art galleries that present American art as it might have been considered in 1935?

On Monday I wrote about how Matisse and Giacometti absorbed the influence of Cezanne's still-lifes not by osmosis, but by expunging. The relevant Matisse paintings were from 1916 (one was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's 'Cezanne and Beyond' show) and the Giacometti was from 1937. Continuing my discussion of the PMA's show as a narrative that reveals how succeeding generations of artists remove and eliminate more and more of a key influence...

Twelve years after Giacometti's painting, Ellsworth Kelly made this drawing (which is still in his possession). While in 1916 the picture plane was something that Matisse had to grapple with -- he used Cezanne's ascending, weightless apples as a way of understanding cubism -- by 1949 several generations of artists had grown up with the perversion of the picture plane. They didn't question it, they didn't have to work through it, it just was there in the toolbox.

This might have made Cezanne's apples and less relevant to a third post-Cezanne generation of artists. Instead Kelly, 26, found them a key to something else: his journey toward minimalism. Kelly eliminated even more from his still-life than the artists of the prior two generations. Gone is all context, including the table, the stage on which Giacometti, Matisse and centuries of still-life painters had relied.

In 1957, Jasper Johns also pared Cezanne's still-lifes down to a single essential element. While Kelly had chosen the most obvious part of Cezanne's still-lifes, those gravity-defying apples, Johns, 27, chose the least-obvious object in Cezanne's paintings: The knobby drawers that lie underneath Cezanne still-life after Cezanne still-life. Cezanne himself didn't seem too much interested in those drawers: He often covered up that drawer with a tablecloth.

Johns, who would spend the next five decades zeroing in on little things that everyone else mostly ignored and then re-making them large, made it the subject of Drawer, this painting-ish semi-sculpture from the Rose Art Museum's collection.

The National Gallery of Art has announced that it'll be the latest museum to install a Roxy Paine tree in its sculpture garden. The Met currently has Paine trees installed on its roof. While the bigs get all the attention, it's worth remembering that the St. Louis Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth were there first. (The North Carolina Museum of Art is also installing a Paine tree.)

Related oddity: The NGA says that this is the first contemporary sculpture to be added to its sculpture garden in the 10 years since it opened. Ten years between engagements with the present? Ouch.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Reader JW reminds me that I forgot one: The Sheldon Museum was early too. The hinterlands are teh awesome.