Modern Art Notes

I'm taking a Friday off. I'll have two more posts on Edward Burtynsky next week, plus I'll kick off our 2009 DonorsChoose.org drive. (Last year you gave $3,000 to help provide art education to 1,300 students!)

In 2006 I wrote a post detailing some acquisitions at SFMOMA. Among the SFMOMA curators with whom I spoke was Sandra Phillips, who heads up the museum's photography department. She told me this story. I've tried to interest magazines in it for years (maybe it would be a better book?), but because it's a season of New Topographics at LACMA and because of the recent launch of a George Eastman House project, I thought now would be a good time to share it.

Robert Adams and Nick Nixon are two of the grand men of recent American photography. Nixon has been recently celebrated in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and at the Museum of Modern Art, and in the last few years Adams has been the subject of solo shows at SFMOMA and at the Getty Museum. Their work is in the permanent collection of just about every major American museum.

The two men have been friends since they were included in a 1975 exhibit at the George Eastman House. Titled "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," the exhibition is arguably the most important photography group show of the last 35 years. This season it is being celebrated at LACMA via a reprise of sorts.

In 2004, Adams and his wife Kerstin celebrated their friendship with Nixon by giving SFMOMA a gift of 51 Nixon photographs. [Image above: Nicholas Nixon, View of the River Street Bridge, Storrow Drive, and the Charles River, Boston, 1975; gelatin silver print, 8 in. x 10 in. SFMOMA. Gift of Kerstin and Robert Adams.] All are gelatin silver prints. Some are four-by-six inch baby photos, some are classics of Nixon's oeuvre. What distinguishes them is what's on the back of the prints.

"Bob has had this very long relations with Nick Nixon," Phillips told me. "The relationship exists not only in person, but in letters and through photographs. The wonderful thing about this gift is that on back of the photographs are letters to Bob from Nick."

Phillips explained that for the last three decades the two men have exchanged old-fashioned, hand-written notes directly on the backs of their photographs. The notes are not written on paper taped to the back of the photos, but are on the photographic paper itself. The letters are about their families, their lives, and about their shared love of photography.

"Bob is a very important guy and he's a very approachable guy among his peers," Phillips said. "This relationship started many, many years ago and I think there's a mutual admiration between Nick and Bob Adams. When you see Bob you know that when you talk to him that you know about his friendships. He very much values his relationship with Nick." [Image above: Nicholas Nixon, Nina and John SZ, 1979; gelatin silver print, 8 in. x 10 in. SFMOMA. Gift of Kerstin and Robert Adams.]

I have not seen the correspondence, but I wonder if it's a dialogue between two different Americas. Adams, who has lived in California, Colorado and now in rural Oregon, is arguably the most-admired photographer of the evolving, increasingly developed American West. There are not a lot of humans in Adams' landscapes. Nixon has been an Easterner his entire life. Boston is his base. He has long made portraits and communities the focus of his work.

It may be that no one aside from Adams, Nixon and a couple SFMOMA curators has seen the correspondence. Maybe that can change: Earlier this year the George Eastman House, with the help of a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, launched a new photo wiki called Notes on Photographs. (A detailed description of the project/wiki is here.) Among the features of the wiki is a section that will chronicle the marks on the backs of photographs: signatures, labels and so on. Digital images of such are and will be available on the Notes on Photographs website: Here's a Margaret Bourke-White, a Weegee, and a lot of Hines. It seems like a good place for SFMOMA to begin to share with us the Nixon-Adams relationship in its collection...

Related: I reviewed the NGA's 2005 'Brown Sisters' Nicholas Nixon exhibition for the Boston Globe. Me on Robert Adams at the Getty in 2006. Thanks to Luke Strosnider's Touching Harms the Art for the Eastman House project tip.

An artist interested in tackling a big subject -- a subject such as mankind's dependence on oil -- has a tough job: You can't do it in one picture. Photographer Edward Burtynsky understands that. For the last 12 years he's taken hundreds of pictures in an effort to document our relationship with oil. A thrilling, haunting exhibition of 56 of them, "Edward Burtynsky: Oil," is on view now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The show reveals not just the way we live and how, but it demonstrates that Burtynsky is a masterful story-teller. [Image: Talladega #1, 2009. For a screen-sized image, click here.]

Burtynsky's pictures are more New Topographics than they are, say, Robert Frank. The best of Frank's pictures have a self-contained narrative. Burtynsky's pictures don't work quite that way. Like the New Topos -- more on Burtynsky's apparent interest in them later in the week -- Burtynsky prefers telling his story slowly, over dozens of photographs.

That's not to say individual Burtynsky photographs are not tour de forces. They are. Consider the four-by-five-foot, detail-intense picture around which the Corcoran swirls: Talladega #1. Nothing about this photograph of the run-up to a NASCAR race at Talladega Superspeedway says much about our reliance on oil or our use of the planet in our pursuit of it... but considered in the context of 55 other pictures, the sentences that make up the book fall into place.

Acres of lawn fill the center of Talladega #1, a greenness made possible by petroleum-based fertilizer. Tens of thousands of people fill the stands. They drove to remote Lincoln, Ala. to see this race. The 43 cars that will run 499 miles around Talladega will burn through a gallon of gasoline every three or four miles. (Because a NASCAR sponsor wants to make sure you get the point, there's a Sunoco 'gas station' behind pit road.)

At the top right of the picture, military jets are flying in the missing-man formation, a symbolic four-plane grouping that is intended to recall the memory of a fallen pilot. This act of symbolism -- which, oddly, reinforces the recruiting the military does at NASCAR races -- requires an enormous amount of jet fuel. The asphalt on which the cars will race is made from oil.

Finally, in the foreground of the picture, a gas-guzzling big-rig cab pulls a big American flag down the Talladega tri-oval. Fans stand and cheer. Many hold up cameras to take pictures of the truck and the flag. Burtynsky, with Roth's help, is making a specific point by including this picture in the middle of a show about oil: Americans conflate consumption -- specifically the consumption of massive amounts of oil -- with patriotism. Talladega #1 is flanked by pictures that demonstrate the impact of the way we live, of how we have come to define the American dream.

More tomorrow.

Related: The personal story behind Edward Burtynsky's interest in oil.

• I'm behind on posting a couple major items out of Los Angeles: Christopher Knight has reviewed MOCA's two-building permanent collection installation. I've read his write-up and I've seen the checklist: Wow. LACM on Fire visits too. (The Walker is also launching a new, substantial permanent collection installation this month.)
  
• Christopher Hawthorne, the LAT's architecture critic, considers the possible sites for Eli Broad's museum. The paper's Mike Boehm outlined Broad's options.
  
• James Wagner considers the comportment of some NYCers who are trying to change the subject from the New Museum's ethics problems.
• Speaking of which, here's something intelligent about private collections and historicization. (I loved the recent Vollard show.)
  
• It's nice to see the NYT and Randy Kennedy focused on some of the issues with Spiral Jetty. Kudos to art21's blog and to Indianapolis Museum of Art conservator/writer Richard McCoy for writing about these same issues several months ago. I'm still hoping the NYT focuses on the broader conservation issues that impact the Jetty. Aside to the Times: Better enterprise reporting lately. Here's what you might cover next. (Key deadline this month too!)
  

On a summer day in St. Catherines, Ontario, a 25-year old Edward Burtynsky reported for a temporary job at the local General Motors plant. He'd been around auto plants his entire life: his dad had been a line worker for GM and in the 1960's and 1970's and it seemed like everyone in St. Catherines worked for either GM or Ford. When Ed finished high school, he worked some stints in auto plants, stamping car and truck frames for GM, assembling front ends for Ford. He'd already worked at the Red Lakes gold mine too. Taking on the toughest jobs that no one else wanted was nothing new to Ed; he had to make enough money to help out his widowed mother. [Image: Edward Burtynsky, Recycling #2, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001. Credit.]

On Ed's first day at GM, a Company Man gave him the Company Spiel: Welcome Ed. Your dad worked here for a lot of years. He did damn good work. Sorry he died. Guess it's been about ten years now, eh?  Welcome to the family. Here are protective gloves. Wear them. Here is a protective suit. Wear it. Here are tanks of oil. Empty them into barrels. Simple enough, right?

Oh, and Ed, one other detail. Whatever you do, do not let the oil touch the cement floor of the factory. It will seep right through the cement, into the ground and into the water table. The oil has a half-life of decades. We don't want oil in our water. Simple enough, right?

Oh, and Ed, I forgot the other thing. This oil, well, when some primates were exposed to it, you know, like monkeys and stuff, most of them got cancer and died. So you probably don't want it touching your skin, or anything like that, OK Ed?

Ed looked at the Company Man, and then he looked around the factory. That oil, the stuff with what would come to be known as PCBs in it, wasn't just in tanks or barrels. It was on the floor, it was squirting onto machines every time they piston-pistoned, it was all over all the people, the pipes, the bins. PCBs were a part the oily air. All of a sudden, Ed understood.

Ed walked over to the part of the factory where his father had worked. A bunch of guys were there, some working, some standing around. Ed asked them how many had known his father. One man raised his hand. Ed asked the others if they, too, had worked with his dad. Only the man who had raised his hand responded.

I'm it.

Where are the others?

They all died.

From what?

Cancer. They had all died from the same cancer that killed Ed's dad. Soon Ed noticed that when he got home from PCB cleanup, he'd blow his nose and the tissue would turn black.

A few months later he quit the auto plants for good. He entered college, and later received a C$15,000 grant to begin his art career. Thanks to that first bit of support, Ed jumped in his 1981 Volvo station wagon and lit out across Canada, taking pictures of the industries he'd left behind. Inevitably, when Ed would call home from some far-off province, his mother would ask, "Eddie, who wants these pictures?"

"I don't know mom," Ed would reply. "I don't know."

Two decades after that trip, Ed Burtynsky is at the peak of his profession. In 2003 the National Gallery of Canada organized a retrospective of his work and now an exhibition featuring Burtynsky's photographs of the impact oil has had on us and our landscapes in on view at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art.

This is excerpted/adapted from a profile of Burtynsky I wrote for Black Book magazine in 2005. Look for more on the Corcoran's Burtynsky show tomorrow and on Thursday.

New York-based critic Ken Johnson via Jerry Saltz's comments thread on Facebook (and re-published here with Johnson's permission):

[I] don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but what's also at stake is the intellectual mission of the museum. Unlike a gallery, a museum is more than just a showcase for art. It should be a forum for points of view, and that's one reason it has its own hopefully independently minded and even skeptical curators -- to offer perspectives and familiar ways of thinking about art rather than to echo the commercial status quo. To have an artist who is deeply represented in the collection he's curating necessarily casts doubt on the intellectual independence of the show. There can be little doubt, however, that it will be hugely popular and add much-needed coin to the [New Museum's] dwindling coffers.

Agreed. One minor note of dissent: Admission revenue made up only about nine percent of the NuMu's operating budget in FY 2008 -- a high percentage for a contemporary kunsthalle, a low percentage for a museum in a major tourist city. I don't think one show will move the needle much one way or the other.

The Art Institute of Chicago has acquired Paul Chan's 6th Light (2007), a 14-minute digital projection. [Image: Jean Vong, New Museum]

The works in Chan's 7 Lights series, seem like a direct response to recent violence, particularly the 9/11 attacks. The works start with a slow, emergent light reminiscent of the slow spread of dawn's light. The light seems to quietly proceed through the day -- until something happens and recognizable objects seem to fall into view, and down out of it. The effect is at once beautiful and intoxicating, silence-inducing and haunting.

Works from Chan's 7 Lights series are in the collections of the Whitney, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Walker and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. (Chan's gallery, Greene Naftali, declined to tell me which works are in which collections. However, web-based collection resources indicate the Whitney owns 1st Light (2005) and the Guggenheim and the Walker also own 6th Light.)

Related: The New Museum put together a nice, thorough website for its 2008 Paul Chan show. It includes video of the lights, including this complete video of 6th Light. Paul Chan's website. A DVD of 7 Lights is available for $30.

• A LACMA-motivated season's worth of looks back at the influence of the New Topographics photographers begins now, with this Leah Ollman-penned LAT look back at yesteryear.
• Speaking of Ollman, she reviews the new LA show of artist-in-the-news William Powhida.
• In the NYT Magazine, Randy Kennedy profiles Pipliotti Rist.
• LA Observed's Kevin Roderick says that the proposed-but-homeless Broad Art Museum could be headed to the Santa Monica Civic Center.
  
• Doug Harvey takes to LA Weekly to consider the underrated Roy Dowell.
• Presumably no one loves this MOCA+Vezzoli+Lady Gaga+$3.5M-for-MOCA stuff more than writers. Case in point the LAT's Jessica Gelt who was able to write this: "The highlight of the evening was a five-minute production created by video artist Francesco Vezzoli called "Ballet Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again)," which involved pop princess Lady Gaga performing her new song, "Speechless," on a rotating pink grand piano painted with blue butterflies by Damien Hirst.
• Finally, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jerry Saltz relishes his role as the New York art world's top positivist, as the city's up-with-art cheerleader. That stance provides him with the energy to slog through New York's strip-mall-for-art, Chelsea. I admire his verve. However, Saltz's Rodney-King-approach serves him less well when it comes to addressing ethical issues at art museums.
  

His first published piece on the New Museum mess came down firmly... on both sides. His latest is even more puzzling. Saltz: "Showing the Joannou collection not only will be a benefit to audiences; doing it this way takes on the idea of showing private collections." Uh, really? So now the NuMu is crusading to 'take on an idea?' Not even the NuMu itself has rolled out that argument. UPDATE: A couple emailers say NuMu director Lisa Phillips suggested exactly this here. Maybe she does... I'll confess to being confused by Phillips' concept of a "public-private partnership," especially in the context in which she framed it. For example: See Wikipedia's definition thereof. Doesn't really fit, does it?

Saltz: "The art boom simply made new art too expensive for institutions." Balderdash. Museums from coast-to-coast have launched and continue to launch lots of curator-driven exhibitions of contemporary art, exhibitions that don't fluff single private collectors/trustees. (And no one is suggesting that museums compete with private collectors to acquire the trendiest art. That's not their role. And museums certainly know that you don't have to own art to show it.)

Saltz: Museums are not in "deep trouble." Yes, America has gone through a deep, long recession and non-profits have been affected. But no prominent New York museum is at the point of failure. Nor are any close enough to qualify as being in "deep trouble." (Little noted: Art museums that collect are in better shape to weather an economic downturn than almost any other kind of non-profit because they can always show/research their own art. They don't need to find more donations of canned food, etc.)

Saltz goes on to excuse the NuMu because MoMA re-opened in 2005 with a dreadful, much-criticized-here show of the UBS collection. Jerry! Just because MoMA made a mistake doesn't mean the NuMu should too! This is NuMu-ian logic.

Finally, Saltz says that the installation itself will settle the ethical questions. No, it won't. The issue is how the work happens to be coming to the NuMu.

• Time magazine's Richard Lacayo is the latest to wonder: What was the New Museum thinking? Lacayo also writes the single best NuMu line of the week: "[A]re shows at the New Museum essential exhibitions, or just the last word in product placement?"
• Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, I agree with Lacayo, who argues against an "absolutist position" on these shows. Example: Shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Miami-based collectors Dennis and Debra Scholl sent part of their collection to Tulane's museum. At the time the New Orleans Museum of Art's collection was in storage and it was the only art in the city. That was a honorable single-collector show. Also, very small museums with limited or no curatorial staffs often have few other options. The NuMu, the Met and the National Gallery of Art have plenty of other options.
• Via @16miles, a spectacularly striking 1989 Whitney Biennial catalogue essay signed by Lisa Phillips, Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall (two of the three of which have been in the news this week, of course): "We have moved into a situation where wealth is the only agreed upon arbiter of value. Capitalism has overtaken contemporary art, quantifying it and reducing it to the status of a commodity. Ours is a system adrift in mortgaged goods and obsessed with accumulation, where the spectacle of art consumption has been played out in a public forum geared to journalistic hyperbole." The essay later cautioned against "the spurious authority of a collectors' consensus." (All quotes taken from True Colors, by Anthony Haden-Guest.)
  
• The Whitney has (finally) launched a new website, complete with a flashy icon, a sometimes-black background and expanded collection-related resources. Web designer Perry Garvin breaks it down.
• MoMA's got a new blog. 
• I tweeted this yesterday -- and remember, there are fewer links posts on MAN because I tweet most links as soon as I find them -- but don't miss Mike Boehm's LAT story on MOCA's 30th anniversary. You won't believe it. Just. Won't.
  

Among the more unusual passages in yesterday's Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin NYT story on the ethical problems at the New Museum was a quote from Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Campbell:

In discussing the New Museum show, several museum leaders cautioned against what Thomas Campbell... described as "overly puritanical" judgments about "the delicate dance" between museums and collectors.

"The Met wouldn't be the Met -- the Met wouldn't have the collections it has -- if it hadn't been for private collectors," he said.

No one has suggested that the Met bought all the objects in its collections. No one is suggesting that museums should stop working with collectors in pursuit of donations of art.

I asked a Met spokesperson for clarification, if Campbell was explicitly endorsing the NuMu's show(s). The response: "Thomas Campbell's quote was meant as a general caution. While the Met declines to comment about exhibitions and programs at other institutions, pertinent Metropolitan Museum examples are Vermeers that were shown here decades ago and the Annenberg Collection, now all part of the Met's permanent collection."

Translation: Fluff shows are OK with the Met, which had such an exhibition on view as recently as April.

If Campbell thinks that fluff shows are necessary to enable art donations, his inexperience is showing. The overwhelming majority of gifts to museums are not "encouraged" with fluff shows. (And museums such as the National Gallery of Art and the Met itself have been embarrassed when collectors walked away after their fluff shows.)

The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney have explicit prohibitions against private collector fluff shows. Both have succeeded in attracting significant gifts of art. The Met should have a similar policy. Campbell should seize the opportunity to demonstrate that he's growing into his job by working to change the Met's position. After all, Campbell and the Met's trustees should be ashamed that their ethics are more in line with the New Museum than they are with the positions of more mature museums such as MoMA and the Whitney.

Related: On its ArtsBeat blog, the NYT posted more extensive Campbell quotes, including the director's answers regarding a fluff show the Met launched earlier this year. One other Campbell quote caught my eye: "Our trustees are not involved in any way in determining the exhibition program. All of our shows ­ or the vast majority of our shows ­ are proposed by the curatorial departments." Really? Who other than the Met's curators are proposing the Met's exhibitions? Jean Bonna is not a Met trustee, did he propose his own show?

The NYT's Deborah Sontag comes right back with a blog post that reveals the tangled web of (mostly commercial) art world relationships that surround the New Museum.

Related: William Powhida's recent drawing on the NuMu situation.

This morning's New York Times features a front-page Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin article on a story that MAN has been aggressively covering for six weeks: The New Museum's self-made ethical problems regarding its exhibition of a trustee's collection. (Click here for a roundup of links to MAN's coverage. Click here for an op-ed I wrote for the current issue of The Art Newspaper.) Some thoughts:

• New Museum director Lisa Phillips seems unconcerned about the transgression and is plainly piqued at having been called to account for it. "We're not the first to do an exhibition of a private collection, and we won't be the last," she told the NYT. That's true. In a related story, it's not OK to rob a bank because other people have done it and because other people will do it in the future.
  
• Journalists are not picking on the New Museum. Similar stories have previously been covered by the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. For years MAN has been consistent in questioning museums that do these kinds of ethically questionable collector-centric shows. Previous examples include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. The New Museum isn't being singled out; it failed to learn from the past.
• Another reason the NuMu situation is egregious: The museum didn't just announce this show, but it announced that it was going to do a whole series of ethically problematic shows called "The Imaginary Museum." To the best of my knowledge, no other museum has had the hubris to name a series of its own transgressions.
  
• Unexpectedly funny moment in the Times story: An auctioneer praises the whole thing, air-kissing a collector via the front page of the New York Times. Kind of makes part of the reason the NuMu show is a problem extra-clear, no?
  
• If Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong thinks it's OK for a non-profit (of any sort) to explicitly engage in activities that lead to private wealth-creation, he should study the Internal Revenue Code.
• It's an extra-bad day for the New Museum: By way of an Urs Fischer review in the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener thoughtfully slammed the New Museum for its ethical problems. Don't miss it.
  
• It's clear what should happen next: The New Museum should immediately cancel the show in question and it should announce that it has ended plans to continue its "Imaginary Museum" series. The Association of Art Museum Directors and the Association of Art Museum Curators should re-examine their policies regarding these shows. Museums with plans for similar shows -- such as the National Gallery of Art -- should cancel them.
  

I'm delighted to see that the NYT's Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin have picked up the New Museum story that MAN has been pushing covering. Here's a quick, chronological, linksy roundup of my posts on the issue:

• MAN's Oct. 1 Q&A with New Museum director Lisa Phillips: part one, part two.
• Response from the Association of Art Museum Directors.
• Response from the Association of Art Museum Curators. 
• My, er, frustration with the pace at which the NYC media and blogosphere were catching onto the story.
• Artist William Powhida's cover-of-the-Brooklyn-Rail drawing about the story.
• I have an op-ed on this issue in the soon-to-be-current issue of The Art Newspaper.
  
• Not by me, but well-worth reading: James Wagner on the NuMu.
• UPDATE, 11/11/09, 4:30 pm: Some thoughts prompted by today's front-page NYT story.
  

The response to the news that the Dia Art Foundation was returning to New York City has been predictably ebullient. The journalistic response has been even less surprising: The New York Times repurposed Dia's press release and revealed little about the details. Jerry Saltz took to Facebook to declare both victory and point-of-origination. ("Great news: DIA coming back to NYC. I met with the DIA folks last year & yelled, 'You dummies ALREADY OWN the PACE Gallery building. Take the f*cking building back! OPEN in Chelsea again!' I was hysterical. Barked to the fantastic Phillipe Vergne, 'DIA closing in NYC was the worst museum blunder of the decade.'" Aside to Saltz: Uhh...) [Image.]

But before everyone gets too excited, it's important to note some realities: Dia did not announce that it has raised the money to pay for its plans. It did not announce that it was planning a capital campaign or that it was launching a capital campaign with $X million already committed to the cause. So far Dia has simply said, "We're gonna do it!" So far the 'announcement' is no more than a cheap pop, an easy applause line. (In other news, the Whitney announced an expansion designed by Michael Graves and the Guggenheim announced plans to build a Frank Gehry-designed museum on the East River. The two museums will open in... never.)

In the years since it stopped showing exhibitions in Chelsea, Dia has become a projection screen for the New York art world. Commercialism and a lack of institutional integrity permeates the other Downtown Darling, the New Museum? Great!: Anti-commercial Dia will ride to the rescue! Chelsea is full of galleries showing little more substantive than marketable MFAs? Great!: Thoughtful, long-term-thinking Dia will ride to the rescue! It's easy to hope for all these things, but I'm with Time's Richard Lacayo: We'll see.

Dia is not important because it wants to start showing exhibitions in Chelsea again. No matter how much the Dia Art Foundation means to the downtown New York art world, it means much, much more to a broader community of people who care about art.

Dia Beacon is a unique American museum, the only accessible place where minimalism and post-minimalism is permanently installed as it should be. While Beacon is special, the most important thing Dia does is to hold in trust the world's two greatest earthworks: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field. Dia has done a good job of ensuring the long-term integrity of The Lightning Field, but it has struggled to find the best ways to take care of Spiral Jetty. Dia's success or failure as an organization -- and Philippe Vergne's success or failure as a director -- will be judged by how well Dia protects one of 20th-century art's great masterpieces from present and future threats.

So it's nice that Dia wants to have a New York City space again. I just hope that the organization is darn sure it can manage its other responsibilities before it engages in the tough work of following through on its promissory press release.

Related: Problems at Spiral Jetty, 2008 version: Part one, two, three, four, five, postscript. The latest threats to Spiral Jetty, 2009 version: Part one, two.

"Like LA's MOCA, Brandeis' Rose Art Museum suffered from not permanently displaying its permanent collection." -- Christopher Knight via Twitter.

'Twas a weekend during which closely-related stories came together to reveal an under-considered truth: Contemporary art museums that collect and that don't commit themselves to their collections are creating problems for themselves. In the Boston Globe, Sebastian Smee looked at a new exhibition of the Rose Art Museum's permanent collection and wonders why the @*&$@! wasn't this stuff on view? The LAT's Mike Boehm featured MOCA's upcoming two-venue permanent collection install. You can practically hear her wondering the same thing. 

It seems so obvious: Why collect if you aren't committed to showing your collection, to establishing your own story of what recent art is good and important, of why your audience should care about both art (and your museum)? And yet... museum after museum makes the same mistake.

True: Not many art museums have the disinterest in their own collections that MOCA routinely displayed. But MCASD (and its donors) have never prioritized permanently displaying its contemporary collection. Neither has the Whitney nor the Guggenheim. Even museums that show their contemporary collections somewhat regularly do so in a way that treats key contemporary artworks as passing fancies rather than as works or artists to whom they are committed: There have been times when you can go to SFMOMA or LACMA and not see a Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting. The Hirshhorn's great Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire hasn't been on view in years. If I was a curator at MoMA (especially!), I'd be planting the flag of canon-creation. If it was up to me, David Hammons' High Falutin' would always be up. (Heck, even some encyclopedic museums -- the Baltimore Museum of Art comes to mind -- are more committed to consistently planting flags from their contemporary collections than MoMA is.) Off the top of my head I can't name ten post-1970 works that the Whitney owns -- can you?

One reason contemporary art and artists are important to a free society is that they are particularly free to address the present, to explore the biggest questions in expansive ways. Contemporary art museums must identify works they own that do that -- and then they must keep them on view. Otherwise art museum are not serving anyone well: Not the artists, not their communities and -- as MOCA and the Rose have shown us -- not themselves.

• In the LAT, Sharon Mizota discusses how a show at LA's Sam Lee Gallery picks up where the New Topos (now at LACMA) left off.
• Kenneth Baker reviews Anne Appleby's latest San Francisco show. Appleby might be the best American painter (mostly) ignored by the museum establishment, the kind of overlooked artist somewhere such as the New Museum would champion if it wasn't busy being a commercialist validator. 
• Jenny Barchfield of the Associated Press details the Pompidou's newest, wackiest idea -- one that American museums such as MoMA or the Smithsonians might consider. 
• Roberta Smith reviews Roni Horn at the Whitney. It's fabulously assertive and smart, the Roberta we wish we got more often.
• Nicolai Ouroussoff on Bauhaus at MoMA.
• The San Diego Union-Tribune's Robert Pincus wants this J. Seward Johnson to get the heck outta town.
  

Back next week. Must look at art.

1.) I enjoyed the reception to William Powhida's drawing about the problems at the New Museum. I was disappointed that several commenters/publications celebrated Powhida while completely missing the point: In the New York Press, Mike Spence asked if "this is just an example of one artist sounding off until he is brought into the circle." Well, no. This issue at this museum fits Powhida's interests and practice as perfectly as anything Powhida's uber-'menace' Zach Feuer might do. Flavorwire's Kelsey Keith declared that somehow Urs Fischer makes the ethical issues around showing private collections go away, a stance born of confused meme-conflation. (In a related story, I can confirm that C-Monster out-racks me.) Related: James Wagner. NuMu director Lisa Phillips on her fluff shows here and here. AAMD and AAMC stay on the sidelines. I complained that New Yorkers were staying silent, but that's obviously ending (except for the NYT, which missed the story and now looks kind of out-to-lunch).

2.) Outgoing Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz defines cheek anew.

3.) Several weeks ago I argued that the much-ballyhooed White House art installation didn't mean that much. And, right on cue, Christopher Knight gives us an (indirect) example demonstrating I was on to something.

4.) The College Art Association has posted the titles of papers that will be presented at its 2010 conference. One of them is "The Copulation of Theory and Practice in the Creative Arts." Someone please tell me that The Onion is presenting a paper... (In a related story, I think these are all legit, somehow.)

5.) OMG! Look! It's more socialist-fascist art!

New York-based artist William Powhida, who frequently satirizes art world figures and conventions in his art, has taken on the New Museum's "suicide" in his latest work.

Excerpted above, Powhida's drawing details "How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality," and includes James Wagner, Lisa Phillips, Marcia Tucker, Jeff Koons, and plenty of others who are somehow engaged in the NuMu's self-injury. You can see the drawing here at Powhida's website (click on it for a high-res image). New Yorkers will see it on the cover of the next Brooklyn Rail.

Related: The next issue of The Art Newspaper will examine the NuMu/fluff shows situation as well.

In this week's New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban examines two new books about Dorothea Lange: Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is a biography and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field is an in-depth look at Lange's experiences in 1939.

Raban clearly has something he wants to say before he jumps into the books: His essay puts Lange's Farm Security Administration work in an interesting European-derived context... a context which he thinks is strangely (but appropriately) applicable to the American West. In a nutshell:

[V]ersions of [the European] pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, "The Fenimore Cooper Indian" (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson's sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

The whole essay is a fine read. (And if you have as much trouble reading NYRB essays online as I do, know that this one prints out at seven pages.)

Related: Raban mentions the Oakland Museum of California's online Lange archive. Et voila.

• The Globe's Sebastian Smee explains how Krzysztof Wodiczko is bringing the voices of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to the ICA Boston. 
• Richard Lacayo examines Arshile Gorky in Philly in Time.
• Christopher Knight 'reads' R. Crumb's Bible at the Hammer.

One of the familiar familiars on Anne Truitt is that she's been an invisible figure, ignored by the critical discourse for years and years.

It's certainly true that Truitt hasn't been written about as widely as, say, Donald Judd. But there has been a slow drip of Truitt consideration over the years, including this fabulous, short piece by Newsweek's Peter Plagens. This paragraph is probably the best description of Truitt's work I've read:

Truitt's work is deceptively simple. Take "Autumn Dryad" (1975), for instance. It's a boxy wooden column, a little taller than most people, painted entirely orange except for a grayish mauve brand around the bottom. At first glance, it seems like a design fillip for a Scandinavian airport lobby. But as you continue to look at it (and you cannot help but look at it), you notice that the acrylic paint has been lovingly applied in untold coats. Simultaneously, the sculpture looks like it's solid color, like butter is yellow all the way through. The piece makes your mouth water (which is, by the way, the test of all good abstract art). "Autumn Dryad" is visceral -- as opposed to conceptual-minimalism. As Truitt puts it, "Everything is written on the body. Your experience stains your body like color dyes a canvas. [That's why] the paint sinks into the wood. It marries the wood." In almost all the works on view, the bride and groom indeed live happily ever after.

But I also quote it for this: I've concluded that it's impossible to write about Truitt's work without quoting her from time to time. What artist has ever written so clearly about what they see, how they live and have lived and about how they translate that into what they make?

In yesterday's examination of the Hirshhorn's Anne Truitt retrospective I discussed how Truitt didn't fit neatly into the categories that critics and scholars have built up around post-war art. Sure, Truitt's a minimalist, but only kind of. Sure, Truitt made sculptures, but she didn't do much sculpting. And so on.

As such, the Hirshhorn's Truitt show provides an opportunity for a re-consideration of how we think about post-abstract-expressionist art. Typically we talk about the post-abex generation as being pop artists or minimalists or whatever. Sure, Truitt is some of those things. But mostly she makes work that is slow, that is slow to look at, that she made slowly and that draws the viewer into a slow visual absorption of the work. (Truitt painted and sanded and re-painted her surfaces dozens of times before they had the depth of color she wanted.)

Perhaps the right way to consider Truitt is as part of an unaffiliated group of artists who slowed art from the frenetic pace of the expressionists, both figurative-exers such as David Park and Willem de Kooning, and ab-exers such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

From the first gallery of the Truitt show forward I was conscious of the way in which individual sculptures trapped my eyes and slowed my looking. Truitt's Watauga (1962) is a low-slung sculpture, longer than it is tall, a big rectangle sitting on a smaller rectangle. The smaller rectangle thrusts forward, toward the viewer. The left side of the sculpture is painted near-black, the right side is a ruddy brown. (All of Truitt's colors seem to require two-word descriptions.) Just like a good Barnett Newman grabs the viewer's eye and moves it around the canvas, Watauga held my eye, which involuntarily bounced between the big rectangle and the smaller, thrust-forward 'base.' I'd look away, return to Watauga, and would find myself trapped again.

Over and over, too. Insurrection (1962) held my eye between its two reds. Valley Forge (1963) bounced me between its red rectangles, turning my gaze into a participant in art Pong. A Wall for Apricots (1968, above) shuttled my eye up and down, from a pale blue to a pine-tree green to a dead yellow, and back up again. Landfall (1970) features a faded-denim blue with some small, overlapping blocks of darker blues at its base. My eye would wander up the plinth, and then would be snapped back down to the darker blues at the base, only to be drawn upward again by the expanse of light blue. And repeat. Truitts are easy to get lost in, to spend time on. If you walk by them you miss them. If you linger you are rewarded.

Truitt was hardly the only artist looking for ways to reclaim surface, technique, color, light, process and pretty much everything else form the abex-ers. Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell all reduced art down to light and each found ways to gave it enough physical space so that we could lose ourselves in it. As with Truitts, if you look at an Irwin or a Turrell quickly, you may not see anything. It takes time.

And more: Robert Smithson made art that emphasized the long, slow passage of time. Ed Ruscha made paintings that only fully revealed themselves once you solved his word or picture games. Richard Long took walks, long walks. Ultimately, maybe we should think less about our beloved -isms and more about pacing.

Related: Anne Truitt and what I learned about her work by visiting Maryland's Eastern Shore. Greg Allen flirted with some similar ideas.

• Nayland Blake sez, 'Make a Halloween costume for your art!"
• Richard Lacayo tries to figure out why Miami Art Museum director Terry Riley resigned (?) so abruptly.
• When neurobiologissts meet art historians.
• When artist Steve Roden writes about seeing, you should read it.
  

Only rarely does an historical exhibition unveil a familiar artist as an unexpectedly major figure, as someone who was somehow overlooked. "Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection," on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is one of those shows.

The exhibition, curated by Kristen Hileman, reveals the full scope of Truitt's multi-disciplinary career and the remarkable, frankly surprising 40-year consistency of her oeuvre. It is a presentation that will leave even the most knowledgable critics, curators and historians wondering how they missed her. [Image: Installation of Return (2004), Elixir (1997) and Evensong (2004) at the Hirshhorn.]

Maybe Truitt has been skipped over because she is an artist who didn't (and still doesn't) fit into a post-ab-ex nomenclature that has confined artists to certain critical, curatorial or commercial boxes. Instead: Like Donald Judd, Truitt was a minimalist. Like David Smith, a sculptor. Like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, a painter. Like Dan Flavin, a colorist. Like Lee Bontecou or Agnes Martin, a woman who dabbled in New York but who mostly stayed away (and who paid for it). Like David Hammons, an artist whose lack of market savvy and engagement has prevented her from being broadly embraced. Like Robert Irwin or Doug Wheeler, an artist who valued physical experience and perception.

But maybe the best explanation of how we've all missed the breadth of Truitt's achievement is that she was uninterested in the commercial side of the art world. Truitt was never proactive in presenting herself to dealers and collectors She was more interested in her artistic practice than she was in participating in the market-guided establishment. As a result, Truitts are in few museum collections and as a result are not oft on public view. This has had the effect of encumbering new consideration of her work and has sealed her reputation in Greenbergian amber. The Hirshhorn's exhibition should be a shot across the bow of the Chelsea-dominated establishment: When institutions and collectors rely on the trading floor to guide them to accomplishment, that they are effectively confining their worldview to sales brochures.

As a result of all this, the standard view of Truitt was that she was not on the cutting-edge of anything. No more. The Hirshhorn exhibition of 49 sculptures, 26 works on paper and 12 paintings presents Truitt as an artist in the vanguard of multi-media practice. Truitt sculptures are paintings and vice versa. This is not latter-day curatorial or critical myth-making; Truitt herself identified her approach as a progressive conceptual strategy and was was hesitant to refer to her painted plinths as mere sculptures: "It is difficult to convey the idea that these structures are intrinsically paintings, as delicate of surface," she wrote in her famed artist's journal Daybook, the 'work' for which she is probably best-known. 

Before Truitt, artists certainly made both painting and sculpture. Witness Barnett Newman, who made paintings that were one of Truitt's two principle motivating influences. Newman's sculpture practice was distinctly different from his painting practice. The two never overlapped. A Newman painting was a painting and a Newman sculpture was a heroic thing in bronze.

Enter Truitt, who from the very beginning of her practice knew she was doing something different. "[E]arly in 1962, I realized that I was becoming obsessed with color as having meaning not only in counterpoint to the structures of fences and the bulks of weights," she wrote in Daybook. "I was actually trying to... take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake." Fast-forward to now, when Franz Ackermann-style three-dimensional painting and practice-blending is so common that an artist would no more think to separate her painting and sculptural practices than she would confine herself to just one.

Truitt was ahead of her time. The Hirshhorn exhibition reveals that Truitt's practice-blending was not a one-off idea that worked for a while, it was a fundamental principle that drove her for over 40 years, from her first major work, 1961's First [above, left], through the honestly, fatalistically-titled Evensong of 2004, the year in which she died.

Each sculptural plinth is really eight three-dimensional paintings in one. To see Truitt's sculptures fully, a viewer has to look at all four sides, each of which may feature different colors and compositions. Then, to finish seeing each work, a viewer has to stand at each of the four corners, from which the viewer can see two sides of the plinth at the same time. Over a period of time and as you walk slowly around each object, it presents itself as a series of paintings. [Image: Elixir (detail), 1997.]

The exhibition is as perfect as a Truitt show is likely to be. I have only minor quibbles: The sculptures are slightly elevated on risers, which takes away from how they relate to the viewer's body. It's maddeningly impossible to walk 360 degrees around many of them. Even though the exhibition fills nearly an entire floor of the Hirshhorn, it turns out that the color that emanates from each sculpture demands so much space that the show feels crowded. Curators of future Truitt shows will struggle with these same issues; the Hirshhorn handled them as well as they could have been handled.

The only preventable error is the show's catalogue, the first major monograph on Truitt. It includes only two essays, one by Hileman and the other by the minimalism and Truitt scholar James Meyer. Hileman's essay reads like it was assembled by conflict-avoiding team of lawyers rather than by a scholar who was allowed to present and contextualize the artist. The catalogue makes little effort to extend the consideration of Truitt's work among scholars or to bring new context to her achievements. It is a missed opportunity.

Truitt probably wouldn't have minded. She knew that her work had to be experienced, not just seen. The Hirshhorn show closes Jan. 3, 2010. It will not travel.

MAN will feature several more posts examining "Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection." Upcoming posts will examine Truitt as a colorist and as a 'slow artist.'

One of the major books of my college years was David Halberstam's The Fifties. The conventional wisdom was that the book rescued the 1950s from its reputation for being Leave it to Beaver-style boring and that it presented the 1950s as the decade that wasn't just before but that gave rise to the 1960s.

Well, that's probably true. The Fifties did that. But it also did it while substantially ignoring the cultural life of the nation. The book doesn't so much as mention Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns, two of the Americans who helped cement America's place as the post-Parisian land of progressive art. (And nevermind Halberstam's referencing Rauschenberg & Co. as being on the vanguard of what would become the gay liberation movement. Didn't happen.)

So just in time for American museums' justifiable obsession with exhibitions of Robert Frank's 1959(ish) classic series 'The Americans,' journalist Fred Kaplan has written a book examining 1959. The book presents the year as a turning point in 20th-century America. Appropriately enough it includes cultural events, including Frank's series, the Beats, erotic literature, the birth of the Guggenheim, the ascent of Rauschenberg, Johns and more. It's a much more complete look at how the decade -- especially 1959 -- was important than Halberstam's book.

Bonus: C-Monster just published a not-your-usual Q&A with Kaplan. Don't miss either!

Related: Robert Frank speaks at the National Gallery.

• If you are an art critic and if you use the phrase "bovine poo," then I will likely link to it. (Artist: Peter Shelton. Critic: Christopher Knight.)
  
• Knight dismantles a wingnut LAT op-ed about Shepard Fairey. Kind of leaves one wondering how such a flimsily researched piece made it into the paper.
• Speaking of the right-wing noise machine, Greg Cook has a nice roundup of its reaction to a Harvard exhibition about ACT UP's history.
  
• For the NYT, Ted Loos notices that MoMA chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin has been changing things up. Good catch. I've enjoyed that the permanent collection galleries are looking more risk-willing, less same-old, same-old. (Not entirely, mind you, but some steps...)
• Maybe the Charles Russell retrospective at the Denver Art Museum is the greatest thing ever, but the liberal use of OMG! adjectives by the Denver Post's Kyle MacMillan ("gripping," "best," "sweeping," "great," "highly accomplished," "overdue," "considerable" (twice), etc.) results in exhortation rather than a defense of (or discussion of) a considered position.
  
• In the Baltimore Sun, Tim Smith discusses the (promising!) scope of a major retrospective of Matisse prints at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
  
• The San Diego Union-Tribune's Robert Pincus asks if Tara Donovan (on view at MCASD) is an alchemist.

Throughout 2009, as I've written a series of posts that have examined the ways in which artists have addressed torture and related horrors, I've found myself thinking about Nancy Spero more and more. As I worked on those posts, I thought a lot about the humanity (or intentional lack thereof) of some of the work about which I was writing. I found myself mentally wandering toward Spero's work, which is as human, urgent and direct as any art since George Grosz.

Most of all I thought about Spero's art about war and violence. In many of her Vietnam War drawings, Spero used a helicopter as a symbol for both American militarism and for our nation's distance from the conflict. In G.L.O.R.Y. (1967, detail at right), Spero runs her helicopter up a flagpole, making explicit the way in which the stars-and-stripes helicopter stands in for the United States and declaring American culpability for the results of indiscriminate bombing. Politicians are shy about pointing fingers. Artists, especially Spero, need not be as circumspect. G.L.O.R.Y. is about responsibility and accountability in a way that realizes art's socio-political potential.

While many artists wallow in the space between art history and their art, in participating in a multi-generational discourse with previous artists, Spero was always more interested in the space between her art and contemporary events. It's not that she wasn't explicitly informed by art history, she just chose not to self-consciously bask in sizing herself up with the past. For Spero art history was not an oval around which she made left turns, but a straight road to now.

On Tuesday I called Connie Butler, the chief curator of MoMA's drawings department. In 2007 Butler curated WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an audacious survey show of feminist art. We talked about Spero.

MAN: Thanks for chatting with me. I wanted to talk with you in particular because you just came through doing WACK! and I thought that maybe that experience might have given you the opportunity to re-examine a group of artists within the context of not just each other, but within a broader context. I wanted to know how you came out of that process thinking about Nancy Spero.

Connie Butler:  I ended up having a much deeper appreciation for the work after going through that process. I didn't know the work so well before doing WACK! Even though I had seen the work over the years there hadn't been many exhibitions in this country. I expected, as I got to know her, that I would find an incredibly formidable person there -- and she was.  [Image: Search and Destroy (detail), 1967.]

I last saw her about six months ago. She had this incredible force of her politics and her belief in the importance of dealing with, really, the big issues of life and death, birth, sexuality. She was a hugely strong personality and that was a thrill to get to know. She had all those things -- and in such a frail body in the last years.

She was one of my early visits for WACK! I was working on that show in 2002 when there was a show at Guild Hall on Long Island and at White Columns. Both were explicitly feminist exhibitions. There had just been a  great write-up in the NYT. So after seeing those two shows I visited Nancy to ask her to be in my show and to make a selection of her work.

She said to me, 'What more could you possibly say about this feminist work that hasn't been in those two exhibits there?' There was also something about what she had set up for me to see in her studio - it was something relatively small, some work that she had pulled out of a drawer or such. I just had this feeling of how she was emblematic to me of the diminished expectations that a lot of women of her generation had, that she couldn't see that no one had done a major exhibition on this topic and she couldn't see that someone would - or should.

So in a way, at first, that puzzled me... but then, as it turned out, this was something I kept experiencing. I visited Nancy relatively early on in the process of working on WACK!, and as it turned out, I experienced this same thing over and over again. It was most marked with her because she's one of the women in the show who had the biggest careers. And yet when I visited her, still she pulled out maybe four small fragments for me to see and I thought, 'Come on! You're a major, major figure! You should be telling me you want major real estate! An entire wall!' It's not like she wasn't strong or that she was shy, you know. [Image: Cri du Coeur (detail), 2005.)

MAN: Your show had a major impact. I don't know how to put this, but she's been 'trending up,' it seems.

CB: She was certainly front-and-center in Rob Storr's Venice Biennale. As she became more and more frail she wasn't able to travel and see some of these shows that really celebrated her work. But yes, I think in recent years she began to get her due, particularly with the American audience. As there has been more interest recently in figuration and in the socio-political context of art there's been a move to broaden the consideration of her work.

MAN: Is there any part of her work that you've been thinking about lately or that you think deserves some extra thought now?

CB: I think 'Torture of Women' is certainly one of her most important bodies of work, but lately and maybe since the [Galerie Lelong] show in the spring I've been thinking about the early war drawings. I think they're so gut wrenching and so incredibly simple and minimal in terms of their gesture and composition but so, so powerful. I think they're kind of extraordinary.

MAN: Did Nancy Spero become so identified as a feminist or as a 'political' artist that she became hard to consider as just an artist?

CB:This is going to maybe sound weird or perhaps it's an experience that's too personal to my own history. I didn't come to her first as a feminist artist. My feeling is that she really emerges into the consciousness of the art world is really in the 1980s, and not really within the context of feminism, where she'd been active since the late 1960s. You might be right, but maybe that's because in more recent years that the work has been associated with feminism.  [Ed.: After Butler and I did this Q&A, I noticed that the NYT headlined its obituary: "Nancy Spero, Artist of Feminism, is Dead at 83."] In addition to those in Europe such as Catherine de Zegher or Manuel Borja-Villel and Rosario Peiró, she's been championed by a number of wonderful American curators who weren't necessarily associated with feminism, curators such as Robert Storr, Elizabeth Smith and Susan Harris.

That's an interesting turn of events if you think about the arc of her career. Turning her back into a feminist is interesting. If you go back to the Vietnam War drawings, her feminism emerges out of her political feelings about a range of other issues: the Vietnam war and civil rights and such. She and Leon Golub were actively protesting on a lot of fronts before she began making explicitly feminist work into the 1970s.

MAN: Maybe it's just that the curators and people I talk to tend to be around my age, and that's a generation of folks that grew up after the 1988 Elizabeth Smith show at MOCA and so on. [Ed.: MOCA's exhibition archive is down. When it's up, I'll insert a link to the show.] I mean, when I've seen Spero it's hit me in the gut. But perhaps in recent years the Vietnam stuff and other work has been on view in museums less than the feminist work? Most of the Spero I've seen in the last couple years has been at MoMA, in fact. And it's been really meaningful to me.

CB: What you're getting at is right though. It's maybe partly because you're younger than I am and I did see the shows in the late '80s when, for my generation of curators and scholars, the 1970s and feminist art were the distant past and still unmined territory. But I think probably what you're getting at is right--because the work is figurative and because it's figurative in a very particular way. In fact, not only that, it's also the kind of mythologies she's dealing with, such as the female goddess mythology which was, in a way, verboten in the 1980s.

It's possible that more to the point is her work being political at all - maybe if it's had a more gradual build and reception it's partly because of that. Not unlike Leon's work, which was explicitly political and sexual and often very raw. I think political art has always had trouble reaching broad critical reception, possibly until right now.

In response to the ongoing debate over whether it is appropriate for art museums to stage single-private-collection exhibitions, the executive director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, Sally Block, released this statement today:

The AAMC's broad-based membership represents the curators of a diverse number of fields of art and types of art museums in North America. As such, the AAMC is always cognizant of the complexities involved in loans for exhibitions whether from institutions or individuals. In exhibitions, art museum curators seek to present new information on works of arts based on scholarly research that can extend through the modern history of the works. An art museum curator's involvement in a private collector show is to interpret and determine how to present the collection in question. If a collection merits exposure, and fits the program and mission of the host museum, its presentation can be a great benefit to museum visitors by providing access to otherwise inaccessible works of art. Like its sister organizations, the AAMC reviews its opinions and standards on an ongoing basis.

My take: AAMC is not exactly planting the flag of scholarly independence or curatorial discretion. (I remain uncomfortable with the idea that there's meaningful merit/fulfillment of mission in merely "providing access" to a rich person's accumulations.) Also notable: AAMC is also leaving itself (and its membership) room to consider the issue anew...