July 2006 Archives

This morning's post on Ed Winkleman's essential blog started me thinking about how artists respond to being under bombardment. Many artists have made art under wartime duress -- Picasso in Paris, Matisse in Nice (which was also under the constant threat of Italian invasion).

But mostly I think about Henry Moore, who huddled in the Tube with hundreds of thousands other Londoners during the Blitz. (Moore's Hampstead studio was bombed and destroyed by German planes.) In September the Imperial War Museum will open an exhibit called War and Utility that will feature Moore's work about and during war. Moore's most touching WWII work is the drawings he made in Tube tunnels. Many were published in 2002 in London's War: The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore.  

Related: As I wrote about in the Dada posts, Max Ernst made a great deal of art about modern warfare, but as a German gunner he wasn't exactly an innocent. (I have never seen sketches/drawings/journals Ernst may have made in the trenches and neither have a couple of curators with whom I've spoken. What happened to them? An art history mystery...)

I've been so busy working on a magazine story for the last two weeks that I'm blog-behind. So I enjoyed a quiet weekend of catching up on some favorites:

• If you're an artist (or a lawmaker) you should read what Edward Winkleman has to say about benefit auctions;
• I think this idea would work for art history too [via];
• Artist Walid Raad is in Lebanon, and tells us what life there is like right now [via];
• Bloggers trickle into SITE Santa Fe;
• Petroleum jelly arrives at SFMOMA, delivery authorization signed by M. Barney;
• What are the great artist biographies? Terrific question. One of James Panero's would make my list. I see a later-in-the-week MAN post;
• A board game in which you too can be hedge-fund-star and art collector Steven A. Cohen or Larry Gagosian, or both (kinda);
• The newest regional-ennial is the Oregon Biennial. Familiarize yourselves, curators;
• A Richard Serra installation in progress in Seattle, complete with pics, charts, and more. Or, if you prefer something simpler: Building a Sol LeWitt; and
• How one museum lights its Anne Truitt. (Now if they'd only ditch that awful white plate under the sculpture!)

Before we leave for the day, we were stunned by this bit of questionable contextualization at the end of Washington CityPaper critic Jeffry Cudlin's review of Kiefer at the Hirshhorn:

"Like Hitler, [Kiefer] can't realize his outsized artistic dreams -- but he continues to marshal massive reservoirs of energy and material, presumably convinced of victory."

Back in February, I wrote an opinion piece for the Sunday LA Times Current section outlining some steps I thought/think the Getty should make to begin to rebuild trust in the institution. (Strangely, I left "clandestine lunch between Barry Munitz and California attorney general Bill Lockyer at the Rocket Pizza Lounge" off the list.) 

The Getty has taken a first good step: A website with information on a range of governance topics went live on July 1. [via] One of the measures I called for, a publishing of the Trust's audits, is not a part of the site, but plenty of other things are. There are a few slobberknockers up on the website, including:

• Former Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon's total compensation jumped from the upper-$400s in 2003 and 2004 to $3,364,688 in 2005. Given that Gribbon resigned in October and that $364K is roughly what she would have earned up to her resignation date, Gribbon received $3 million upon departure (a figure first reported by the NYT and that the Getty now confirms was part of her end-of-employment agreement);
• The Getty has clearly gone above-and-beyond in terms of disclosing detailed contract information for certain employees. For example, Getty Museum director Michael Brand has a five-year contract;
• There is other fairly detailed contract and salary information on the site, as well as bylaws and information about Getty policies. I can picture board members at Los Angeles non-profits scurrying to the Getty site, making sure that they are adequately compensating their staff.

A couple of weeks ago the Washington Post's Jackie Trescott served up a warm, fuzzy profile of new Corcoran director Paul Greenhalgh. She reported that Greenhalgh wants to bring big crowds to the long-troubled Washington museum. The first exhibit he will bring is Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, a show created by London's V&A.

But here's the slobberknocker: MAN has learned that the cost of bringing "Modernism" to Washington could be as high as $2 million. (A Corcoran spokesperson confirms that depending on exchange rates and the show's final list of works, costs will be at least $1 million and as much as $2 million.) While it typically costs more to bring a show to Washington than to, say, Des Moines because of increased insurance costs, $2 million would be a mighty high budget. The Hirshhorn says picking up a travelling show generally costs them $250,000 to, at most, $500,000. 

Not only is $2 million a jaw-dropping sum for a travelling exhibition but it's extra-remarkable given the Corcoran's well-publicized budget and staffing problems. As first reported on MAN, the Corcoran recently fired half of its curatorial staff. The museum needs over $40 million to address deferred maintenance. And the museum has its hand out to the District of Columbia government, hoping for $8 million to fix a leaky roof. [via]

There is no question that the Corcoran needs a splash, the kind that a travelling show such as Picturing the Banjo couldn't provide. (The museum's last stud exhibition was 2004's Sally Mann show, which was recently featured in this documentary.) And while there are some real highlights in its current show of contemporary art from its collection (including the Truitts we mentioned on Monday, a naughty Lari Pittman and nice Morris Louis and Gene Davis), the Corc's contemporary collection isn't grand enough to be a draw.

Modernism might attract tourists and, better yet, it could bring locals back to the museum. For years the Corc's membership revenues, a good indicator of local interest, have badly lagged its peer institutions. The little-known National Museum of Women in the Arts brings in more membership dollars than the Corc and the locally-beloved Phillips Collection earns nearly 10 times as much membership money as the Corc.

Certainly gimmicks such as the installation of J. Seward Johnson playground-level tableaux is partly to blame for the Corc's local standing. But other important factors are beyond its control: The museum's once attractive location, pretty much across the street from the White House, has become a liability in a post-9/11 security environment.

Will "Modernism" be a stunning, fabulous show that draws over 150,000 people? Possibly. It pretty much better be.

The NYT says that the Whitney now has all the necessary approvals for its Renzo Piano-designed expansion. Next, presumably, we'll find out how much it will cost and how the museum will pay for it. Then, just-as-presumably, Whitney chairman Leonard Lauder will announce he's going to pick up a huge chunk of the tab. We may have to wait a bit to hear about that last part -- Lauder is on a boat somewhere, enjoying a July vacation.

The Tate Modern is expanding and the Tate's own website has lots of info. Here are the newspaper stories: NYT/IHT, The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Times of London. (Lots of different architectural drawings there too.)

The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver has picked five firms that will 'compete' to build the -- duh -- Clyfford Still Museum. They are:

• Allied Works Architecture (Portland);
• David Chipperfield (London);
• Diller Scofidio + Renfro (New York City);
• Ohlhausen DuBois Architects (New York City); and
• SANAA (Tokyo).

All but Ohlhausen have done major American museum projects in the last couple years. And many of them have those massively annoying Flash-heavy websites that architecture firms love. Especially Ohlhausen, which must be stopped before they Flash again.

Yesterday MAN posted the Art Institute of Chicago's throat-clearing at the NYT. Today the Chicago Sun-Times picked up on the hullabaloo.

Yesterday Lee Rosenbaum picked up the Met's deaccessioner-in-chief Gary Tinterow and knocked him around a little bit. His offense: His industry-defying thoughts on selling objects in the Met's collection. (Rosenbaum posted Tinterow's comments last week, while I was enjoying a Truittian sublime.)

I won't recap Tinterow's comments here -- you should click and read them because they're, well, stupefyingly clueless. But Rosenbaum's case against Tinterow is stronger than she acknowledges: Tinterow didn't just try to dump an Eduardo Chillida sculpture (Michael Kimmelman caught that one, and at the last minute he tut-tutted the Met into the proper shame), but MAN subsequently caught Tinterow trying to unload a William Zorach sculpture. (That scheme failed too.)

A couple observations: Tinterow's follies are not an isolated case. MoMA has made a regular habit of unwise deaccessioning, including selling a best-of-the-best de Chirico and a just-as-good Pollock. Last May Kimmelman called MoMA "a regular Kwik-E-Mart of art sales." (Unfortunately Kimmelman wrote his anti-deaccessioning tract only after it was too late for the power of his keyboard to save his protagonist, the NYPL's Asher Durand.) And last year LACMA covered itself in egg by deaccessioning top-notch works too.

So while Tinterow has been unusually public and unusually quotable about his dealings, he's not a lone wolf in the wilderness. And while Tinterow should be confronted more directly, not just by Rosenbaum and me, but by other media too, the ultimate responsibility here falls with museum trustees. They need to be reminded that their responsibility is to safeguard our cultural objects with an eye toward history. Their job is to be wiser than the Tinterows, to say, 'Stop -- in 50 years that piece you think is dated and dead may be back in favor; The measly $300,000 you hope to bring in (one-tenth of one percent of our budget) isn't worth violating the fundamental tenets of museumdom.'

So if you sit on a museum board or if you're a director, email both this post and Rosenbaum's to your board. Remind them that they have a duty to say no. And if you want some guidance, talk to the trustees at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Faced with massive budget problems, no director, and plenty of other problems, they flatly rejected selling anything from the collection. If the Corcoran's trustees can say no, any trustee can.

Related: Modern Kicks.

The Art Institute of Chicago is not so happy with the New York Times. The protagonist is Randy Kennedy's "Museums' Research on Looting Seen to Lag," which ran today. The piece jumped from the front of the Times' arts section inside to a photo of Courbet's "The Rock at Hautepierre" -- and that's where the AIC began to be unhappy. The AIC was not mentioned in the story, but there's that big ol' Courbet with a caption that says the Courbet "was determined to have been taken by the Nazis."

From an email from AIC public affairs chief Erin Hogan to the NYT:

We here at the Art Institute of Chicago are deeply concerned about the misinformation presented in the caption to the image, Gustave Courbet's The Rock of Hautepierre, that accompanied Randy Kennedy's article, "Museums' Research on Looting Seen to Lag" in the New York Times 7/25/06.

First, the caption has the wrong title. The title is The Rock of Hautepierre, not Rock at Hautpierre. [Ed. note: It's now correct on NYT.com.]

Second, the caption claimed that the Courbet painting in our possession "was determined to have been taken by the Nazis." We would like to submit the following correction for your consideration:

There is no evidence that Gustave Courbet's The Rock of Hautepierre was seized by the Nazis. The work was owned by the collector Max Silberberg, who sold it to an unknown buyer at an auction in 1935. It was resold several times and subsequently entered the Art Institute's collection. In the course of the Art Institute's provenance research on the painting, the museum and the last surviving relative of Mr. Silberberg established contact and worked to learn more about the history of the painting. The Art Institute and the surviving relative reached an equitable resolution of this matter in 2001. The results of the Art Institute's extensive research on this work are posted on the Art Institute's web site.

We are additionally concerned that the following sentence in the caption, "A survey of 332 museums suggests many are not reviewing their collections enough for such works," implies that the Art Institute is one of those museums.

Nowhere in the article is the Art Institute of Chicago even mentioned as one of the museums that responded in a timely manner to the survey sent by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany; that the museum follows the guidelines of the American Association of Museums on Nazi-era provenance research; and that the Art Institute has been committed to provenance research since before the guidelines were issued.

• It's hard to imagine a more delightful architectural read than Bill Marsh's look at the restoration of Philadelphia's iconic City Hall in today's NYT. (You know the building: You see it from the steps of the Philly Museum, and you can't miss it from just about anywhere in downtown Philly.) The piece is chock-full of details, trivia, and Calder relatives. Don't miss it.
• In yesterday's LAT, Christopher Hawthorne finds that Richard Meier's firm is going beyond the absence of color for which it is famous. (And yes, Meier still wants to rip Robert Irwin from limb to perennials.)
• From the you've-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it file: Salvador Dali advises Yankees great Whitey Ford on how to throw a knuckleball [via], then appears to want to kiss him. (Seriously, that's all literal, no euphemisms.) I'm not sure how or why, but this is a Braniff ad. (Curator Michael Taylor would probably tell us that this is an example of Dali's great late work.)

After the fourth NYT story about the Met's new (suggested/recommended) admissions fee ran on Saturday, Seth Mnookin pointed out: "At this rate –which, admittedly, will be hard to sustain – the Times will have churned out 60 pieces on the Met’s new (suggested) admission price by the end of November." (My answer: This is a big story that merits coverage --  but it's a better national story than a local one.)

The best of the NYT's stories is the most recent and the most national one, Roberta Smith's Saturday piece, which echoes much of what MAN has published about museum costs over the years.

Jumping off from Smiths' last few paragraphs, I'll ask: What foundation or donor(s) will show some leadership on this? In, say, creating public-private-non-profit partnership models? Funding studies, involving governments, examining ways to make free admissions work for our largest institutions? (I love the St. Louis Art Museum, but I'd agree that free admission in StL is a lot different than extending free admission at MoMA.) Sounds like a job for the soon-to-be Bloomberg Foundation.

Related: MoMA chief Glenn Lowry tries out the college tuition analogy.

As I walked through the Corcoran's new permanent collection installation, I bumped into an old friend. Up on the second floor I found Anne Truitt, twice. One was magnificent: 1962's Insurrection, a vertical plank, painted red on one vertical half and pink on the other.

Like all the best Truitts its beauty was a product of its subtlety. When Truitt entered her mature period in the 1960s, such subtlety was out and had been for a while. Abstract expressionism? (Glug glug.) Pop art? (Bam!) Subtlety was not something admired at the Cedar Bar.

That's part of the genius of Truitt. She is the slow food of art; you have to stand in front of her painted sculptures, for a minute, maybe two, to feel what there is to see. At the Corcoran I noticed that the Truitt was just taller than a person. And just wider too. I was thicker than each painted half, but barely. And to see the whole sculpture I had to walk around it, making me all the more aware of my own body and presence in front of Truitt's work.

Before pursuing art Truitt was a psychologist, working as a kind of diagnostician at Massachusetts General Hospital. I thought of that as I stood at the Corc. Truitt's sculpture was as much about my experience in front of it as it was about the object itself. Truitt's psychology background influenced her art.

The day after I took in Truitt at the Corcoran, I left Washington for a weekend on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Truitt grew up in Easton, Maryland, and she visited it regularly later in life. I took with me Truitt's great artist's chronicle Daybook (buy it for $1!) and re-read it from a bayside hammock. I learned two things about Anne Truitt while I was there, from Daybook and from the land.

Throughout, Truitt frequently describes her surroundings in terms of color and not much else. (Japan, as viewed from a plane, is "wrinkled-prune land, purple in an apricot-violet mist of evening light.") Truitt was a great colorist because she saw color so intensely. "Color occasionally just takes charge," she wrote. "The more I work with it, the less I seem to know about it and the more I trust it." 

(Famously, Donald Judd hated Truitt's colors: "[They] are dark reds, browns and grays, very much like Ad Reinhardt's color," Judd famously wrote in 1963. "The work looks serious without being so. The partitioning of the colors on the boxes is merely that, and the arrangement of the boxes is as thoughtless as the tombstones which they resemble." Just as with Picasso when he discussed Bonnard, Judd was jealous. When Judd wrote those words he was struggling mightily to figure out color himself -- especially how to make two colors work well together. Truitt had that nailed by 1963, while Judd wouldn't master it for years more, until late in that decade.)

I also learned something about Truitt by going to where she was from. I've lived in Washington since 1997, but this was my first trip to the Eastern Shore. Much of eastern Maryland is flat, low-lying farmland, riven with rivers like the Nanticoke and the Choptank. All of the land seems to be within sight of the Chesapeake Bay. One of the middle counties, Talbot, is a fingery mass of a dozen or more peninsulas. Just south of Talbot, Dorchester County features abundant marshes and islands. 

I stayed on Hoopers' Island, a long, narrow island  that never makes it more than about five feet above sea level. The island's color, in the summer at least, was 15 shades of green: pine, bay grasses, corn stalks, marsh reeds. The bay's color was just as variable. One afternoon the Chesapeake started blue, then turned pewter, ashen as a thunderstorm arrived, smoky, and finally a cloudy night turned it black. I realized that it was on the Eastern Shore that Truitt learned the richness and the variation in color.

Truitt learned something else about subtlety here too. As I sat in a hammock with Daybook, I looked out about 15 miles across the Chesapeake, toward where Washington and its suburbs are. I could see St. Mary's County on the other side of the bay -- but just barely. St. Mary's seemed to rise no more from the bay than it had to to stay dry. Anyone living on Maryland's Eastern Shore cut off from the region's two dominant cities, say Anne Truitt, would notice how Washington and Baltimore were on a land mass that was barely perceptible.

Back on Hoopers' Island, I noticed how tiny detail was important here, too. Earlier in the day I had driven by the highest point on the island, a faint rise that no more than a foot or two above the surrounding land. At some point during the several hundred years that people have lived on the island, locals had identified its highest point and, logically enough, put their cemetery there. In St. Mary's County and on Hoopers' Island the difference between being in the water and being above it was subtle, but worth noticing. Like Truitts.

Related: Walter Hopps, who curated Truitt's Corcoran/Whitney mid-career survey, wrote about the relationship between Truitt, her work, and the Eastern Shore but it's not online. Curator Jane Livingston has noted the Judd-Truitt 'relationship' too, and it's not online either. (Livingston's musing was in a catalogue for a 1991 Andre Emmerich show.) Quality Truitt images on the web are few and far between -- I nominate Truitt as an excellent candidate for the first online catalogue raisonne. Poppin'-fresh photograph from Hoopers' Island (above) by my girlfriend and Hoopers' Island tour guide, Kathleen Shafer. 

In today's NYT Holland Cotter skips through Washington, dilletanting his way through a number of shows. To me that's a smidge disrespectful to curators and artists whose shows deserve more thorough contemplation. Anselm Kiefer is one of the major artists of the last 30 years and his first American museum show since the late '80s gets a couple paragraphs? If the show is worth acknowledging -- and it absolutely is -- why didn't the Times go to Fort Worth? (The show at the Hirshhorn is substantially different from (and less tight than) the MAMFW show, which I visited and discussed here.) Same for the Pacific Northwest show at NMAI. It too deserves more substantial coverage.

I'm probably not the first writer to refer to the Hirshhorn's Gordon Bunshaft building as a modernist fantasy. When you visit, you enter a glass lobby and within five steps you're whisked up an escalator, sucked into the enormous roundness of the concrete bunker. The visitor is then essentially held captive for a series of gentle left turns, at which point another escalator zips the visitor up to the next floor. If the old MoMA was pull-you-through-the-nose gallery-going, the Hirshhorn is pull-you and push-me. It has not been a particularly influential building or design.

Until now. Design blog Cool Hunting (via Tropolism) brings word of a new Istanbul development called Kanyon, a design which seems intensely aware of the successes and failures of Bunshaft's Hirshhorn. The architect on the project was the Jerde Partnership, which has a maddening Flash-heavy website. The complex is a mix of apartments, offices and commercial space. (Both sites have abundant pics.)

One of the project's buildings seems to merge the Hirshhorn with, well, the Watergate complex. If the Washington Post had an architecture critic, I'd like to think they'd have him/her on the next plane to Istanbul.

It's not just Jerde that seems to have been inspired by Bunshaft, it's the Hirshhorn itself of late. Hirshhorn directors have long realized the limitations of their building. Most recently then-director Ned Rifkin tried to gussy up the Bunshaft by decorating it with a giant and enormously expensive Roy Lichtenstein brushstroke sculpture. A larger failure could hardly be imagined: The Lichtenstein looks like an earring that inexplicably fell off the Death Star.

Current director Olga Viso has taken another approach: Bring Bunshaft back into the bunker. She's taken out gallery walls that were inserted into Bunshaft's design and left for permanent. The result has been the opening up of a giant second-floor gallery -- and wonderfully dramatic moments in the two shows that have been in the space (Sugimoto, Kiefer). A recent Jim Lambie Directions show demonstrated that the building can be decorated in a retinally-pleasing way. (Flickr users sure have noticed. Lambie may be an uninteresting and overrated artist whose most ambitious work comes off as thin, but as a decorator he makes prettiness.)

And the Hirshhorn has more Bunshaft-emphasizing hopes and plans, such as emptying out the original clear glass lobby. Could it be that the Bunshaft was a gem all along? No. Not a chance. But by emphasizing its strengths rather than glossing over its weaknesses, the Hirshhorn and Jerde are finding some ideas with which to play.

Related: The nascent Kanyon stream at Flickr.

The Smithsonian American has two Clyfford Still paintings, one of only a handful of museums to double-up on Stills. One is on view now: The 1946 painting at right. It's one of the better Stills that I've seen (and excepting the Denver works I've seen pretty much all the Stills in public collections).

SAAM gets Still's import -- no surprise given that Smithsonian undersecretary of art Ned Rifkin (who is doubtless delighted with a rare double-MAN-mention today) used to be the Hirshhorn boss and the Hirshhorn has one of the best (and biggest) Still collections. This Still is hung on SAAM's third floor, in the central position of prominence. His AbEx peers Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and others are off to the side. Art historically that's just about right.

(Quick Still/Pollock story: In 1956 Still convinced Pollock to join him on one of Still's driving trips. At the last moment Pollock either begged off or changed his mind and the two never went. A few weeks after their planned trip Pollock was dead. Still wrote a friend and said that he was sorry that Pollock hadn't taken the trip with Still, that maybe he (Still) could have saved him.)

This Still is smaller than the Hirshhorn's paintings but it still offers a viewer an opportunity to fall into the painting, to feel like he is hurtling into a deep void. The shapes in the paintings are classic Still and they recall the western topography that Still so loved to drive through. Subtle color peeks through the dominant browns, just like it does in the American landscape. And as with most Stills of his mature period you won't find any indication that a paintbrush ever touched this painting. It's all knife-built.

SAAM has one other Still, a rare early work from the late 1920s. (You wouldn't believe it was a Still!) It is an industrial landscape with a regionalist feel. (The Clyfford Still Museum has around 80 paintings from this 1920-1943 period.) Grain elevators, apparently, dominate the painting. To the left a truck and a train point toward the future of American farming. On the right a horse-drawn carriage appears to remind us of the past. There's something in the foreground-left, but I can't tell what. Still grew up on a farm, hated farming, fled it, only to later purchase a farm outside Westminster, Maryland later in life. Still never farmed his land himself -- he rented out his fields to others.

While I pointed out some screaming gaps in the SAAM collection yesterday, I want to give credit to the museum for a 2005 purchase: James Rosenquist's 1977 painting Industrial Cottage. (The painting was, I believe, last seen publicly in the Guggenheim's Rosenquist retrospective.)

This is one of my favorite Rosenquists. It's punny, it's grand, it takes on big themes in a clever and almost funny way. The painting is, of course, about American reliance and co-habitiation with big business, specifically big industrial business. (Remember, someone needed drill bits to make the houses bathed in Hopper-ian gloam.) The painting is a good example of Rosenquist at his best, pop moving beyond irony and into making a point about our America. (And the non-JPEG version is much, much crisper than what you see above.)

Related: Other Rosenquists at SAAM.

This story about the Vatican's interest in modern and contemporary art is interesting. The question is: Will their interest extend to Max Ernst?

• The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery share a building. But instead of cleaving the building in half, say giving the north half to SAAM and the south half to the NPG, the museum directors have turned the old United States Patent Office building into a game of museo-Jenga. While one gallery might get the east wing of the second floor, it's on the west wing of the third floor. Turn a corner and you find yourself in a new museum. Turn another corner and it happens again. It's confusing as heck. Not to mention vaguely exhausting.
• I don't know what to make of the National Portrait Gallery. Mostly, I guess, I just don't care. It has a marvelous Thomas Hart Benton self-portrait. (But, inexplicably, doesn't put it online? UPDATE: It is online, behind the layers of a pop-up and Flash. But because I have blockers installed on my PC I didn't know that. Sorry.) But it also schmaltzes things up with an eye-rollingly academic national portrait competition.
• I love that the museums' conservation studios are open to the public. That will (and did) help them attract funding. And young people will see what goes on in there and may become interested in something they didn't know existed.
• Yesterday I said that the installations at SAAM were pretty fantastic. Good lighting and all... but there is one glaring, awful exception. I was delighted to see Anne Truitt's 17th Summer on view. But why is it sitting on a white metal plate instead of on the ground? (As it is in SAAM's own photo?) The awful white plate completely changes how we see the piece.
• The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art gets its own gallery in the complex. Plans are to change it up four times a year. Love it. In terms of quality and cleverness it could become DC's equivalent of the Getty Research Institute gallery.
• SAAM is way too enamored with wall text. On a Pollock: "Pollock's dripped canvases revealed the uncertainties that underlay the nuclear age." Zzzzzzz.

The Louvre's director, Henri Loyrette, is headed to Atlanta on Oct. 6 to give a talk at the High. (Surely you remember the Louvre-High deal that is resulting in Louvre AtlantaTM.) The High's website refers to the Louvre as "the world's greatest museum." I wonder if the High is contractually obligated to use that 'world's greatest' thing every time it refers to the Louvre...

Related: Lee Rosenbaum on the High-Louvre project.

Two notes on two critics: Lee Rosenbaum takes Michael Kimmelman to task for apparently changing his mind about MoMA's Taniguchi building. Rosenbaum doesn't seem to think that's fair. (And she insinuates that Kimmelman is just following the critical breezes on the new MoMA.) That's too bad -- critics shouldn't be locked into one viewpoint for life.

(That said: I agree that Kimmelman should write a critic's notebook-type piece on why the Taniguchi is increasingly failing.) UPDATE: Rosenbaum responds. She thinks I'm misreading her on the mind-changing bit -- maybe I am, but the combination of her post and her hed sure read like a tut-tut to me -- but as the parenthetical above indicates, I agreed with her key point.

In the Sunday Washington Post, Blake Gopnik reviewed Rousseau at the National Gallery. Gopnik included this stunning line:

"It is possible that the credit for Rousseau's pioneering work should go to the people who recognized the radical potential in his pictures, rather than to the thoroughly nonradical retiree who happened to have painted them."

Of course. Because credit for great art shouldn't go to the artist -- it should go to the people who look at the art and who like it. Perhaps if Rousseau had been a little hipper, a little more fashionable, a little poorer or a little more scandalous then he'd deserve some credit for his art.

Yeah. Artists! Who needs 'em? (And that's just the low-hanging fruit.)

When Ellsworth Kelly lived in Paris he regularly drew seaweeds, algae, plants, and leaves. The drawings were minimal, outlines, pencil-on-paper. (A wonderful 2002 show of Kelly's and Matisse's drawings of plants visited the Pompidou, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, and the St. Louis Art Museum.)

This Kelly at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1961's Blue on White, seems to be descended from Kelly's plant drawings. It's on view in SAAM's cavernous Lincoln Gallery, where most of the museum's post-1960 art is installed. Last month SAAM's EyeLevel blog showed us the museum's model for the gallery and then the installation of the actual space. You can see Blue on White in the foreground of SAAM's JPEGs.

It's one of the absolute best Kelly paintings I've seen, and maybe the best example of a best-example of an artist's work in the entire museum.

Yesterday: I wrote about the history of muddle at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

As I said yesterday, the Smithsonian spent $283 million to re-open the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. But even after spending that much money it has failed to present us with a coherent presentation of what American art is. This is not a 2006 problem, this is a many-decades problem. As the opening installation shows, the museum has not collected American art -- especially from about 1900 forward -- in anything resembling a thorough manner. The result is a collection more defined by its gaps than by its strengths.

Where is Charles Sheeler? Cy Twombly? John Marin? Cindy Sherman? Alma Thomas? Robert Smithson? Michael Heizer? Bill Viola? Joseph Cornell? Aaron Douglas? Millard Sheets? Brice Marden? Nathan Oliveira? Robert Ryman? William Wendt? Mabel Alvarez? Gottardo Piazzoni? Sam Francis? Lee Krasner? Jacob Lawrence? (That's him at left.) Jean-Michel Basquiat? Donald Judd? Dan Flavin? Louise Bourgeois? I think Helen Lundeberg and Romare Bearden were absent too. I could keep going and going and going. (If I linked to the artist that means he's in the SAAM collection, just not on view. And I don't think there are any mistakes here -- I spent several hours double-checking it. Artists on view in the racks at the Luce Center may be listed here.)

And if it weren't for loans from the Hirshhorn, the museum would also be short Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jasper Johns. And if there's one American museum that could (or should?) show a Norman Rockwell or a Maurice Sendak, this is it. But... nope. (And that list doesn't include any photographers because for some reason SAAM has only a couple photography hallways and really no photography galleries. Nearly every prominent American photographer is absent. What the...!?)

If this is our national museum's presentation of what American art is, then that classification should die. SAAM is unnecessarily heavy on white men. It is unnecessarily heavy on Easterners; There's a lot more Eastern landscape painting and impressionism than there is contemporary, comparable work from Texas, the midwest, or California. The museum's installations and selections fail to make a case for the reconsideration of any neglected artist, school, body of work, anything. (Why not re-examine, say, the Fort Worth Circle in part of a gallery?) SAAM is a marshmellow, a nice, attractive package of mostly fluff.

SAAM's faults reveal it for what it is: a sub-regional museum, a local place, really. That's why the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times didn't send their critics to review the museum's opening -- and why the Washington Post devoted an entire Sunday Arts section to it.

All that said, there are some works (and artists) I really enjoyed seeing at SAAM. There are 'best-level' examples from Ellsworth Kelly, Clyfford Still and a few others. The folk art collection is one of the best in America. A too-tiny gallery of WPA painting looks better than you'd think. The gallery spaces themselves are fantastic and art is well-installed and well-lit. There are some things the museum does well. Over the next few days I'll highlight some of those.

• Phyllis Tuchman spends 1958 with Frank Stella;
• The Nazis tried to 'adopt' Rembrandt -- and failed; and
• Christopher Knight thinks the Met should charge $60/head.

As a marginally semi-Missourian, I enjoy pointing out what's going on back in the Show-Me State. Missouri is under-rated as an arts destination. There are two major Thomas Hart Benton murals in Independence (at the Truman Library) and in Jefferson City (in the state capitol building). And St. Louis and Kansas City both have strong museums.

St. Louis' museum scene is about to get stronger: In the Post-Dispatch, David Bonetti tells us about Washington University's new art museum, complete with boldface names. (Wash U. has an underappreciated place in art history too: Max Beckmann taught there after he fled Germany, for one.) And in Kansas City the Nelson-Atkins is preparing to re-open and Columbia Missourian reporter Melissa Maynard tells us that director Marc Wilson has some interesting ideas about how to hang the collection.

The Smithsonian spent $283 million to re-open the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. You'd think that after spending that kind of money, that SAAM would present a rationale for its existence, that it would make a case for what American art is and why American art is a conceit worth considering within the context of broader art history.

Nope. Not even close. This month's re-opening of SAAM is the most disappointing museum re-opening in recent memory. (True: I haven't seen the new High.) Quite simply: If there's a reason for SAAM to exist, I don't know what it is. They don't seem to know either. That's been the museum's problem for 70 years.

In the beginning SAAM's mission was pretty clear: Paul Mellon had banished American art from what was then called the Mellon Gallery, which was being built on the National Mall. (Today, of course, we call it the National Gallery.) New Dealers thought that the ideas behind the Mellon Gallery, from its Eurocentrism to its neo-classicism, was typical of wealthy, elitist, entitled Republicans (such as Mellon).

So led by the New Deal's art czar, Edward Bruce, progressives wanted to build a new museum of modern art called the 'Smithsonian Gallery of Art.' It would show the American art that Mellon disdained and it would provide a place for living American artists to exhibit. The feds had lots of art to show: Throughout the New Deal the federal government had acquired a trove of American art, especially art funded by New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration. Eventually, so went the shared optimism of Bruce and his pals, in decades or centuries the achievements of those Americans would come to rival European art.

In 1937, Bruce, joined by the chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission Frederic A. Delano, marched up to Capitol Hill to sell the idea. "In Paris, for example, they have their Luxembourg Gallery, and works of art graduate into the Louvre later," Delano told a House committee by way of explaining how America's two national museums would relate to each other. Delano also reported that his uncle, FDR, was "quite enthusiastic" about the idea. 

While Delano was supportive, the project was Bruce's baby. No man of his generation did more to support art and artists than Edward Bruce. (A woman, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was the other American who matched Bruce's focus on modern art.)  "I think we are building something like they had in the Renaissance, and, of course, I have dedicated myself to it," Bruce told the House.

Congress, at first anxious to be seen as empowering an American-led Renaissance, went along. But because of a battle over the museum's building -- a pioneering modernist design by Eliel and Eero Saarinen -- the museum was never built. (The project re-gained some traction in 1939 but it was derailed by the need to pay for what became World War II.) Eventually the museum ended up off of the National Mall.

Bruce's drive to create an American national gallery left behind one important document: the Saarinens' design, which would have been the most progressive American building of its day. The model for the building, commissioned by Congress and made by two of the Saarinens' students (you may have heard of them: Charles and Ray Eames) is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Unfortunately it's not online.)

When SAAM re-opened, it chose not to exhibit the Saarinens' model. As we'll see in my next post, it would only serve as a sadly perfect introduction to dozens of galleries of unfulfilled potential. (I'll have daily posts about SAAM all week.)

Admin note: Don't expect a single-museum 2005 acquisitions roundup this month or in August. The feature will be back when summer is over, in September.

The latest on the Fisk's Stieglitz Collection potential sale: According to Sunday's Nashville Tennessean, for some time now Fisk University has counted art in the Stieglitz Collection as part of its endowment. Don't ask me about how the accounting on that works -- I suspect not very well. But could the monetization of art be any clearer? For background on the potential Fisk sale, click here.

Welcome to readers coming in from the Smithsonian-related op-ed I wrote for the Los Angeles Times. I hear that it ran over the weekend in (at least) these papers:

• Dallas Morning News;
• Orlando Sentinel;
• St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times;
• Winston-Salem (NC) Journal;
• Canton (Ohio) Repository;
• Taiwan's (English-language) China Post; and
• Salem's Oregon Statemsan Journal.

It's a summer Friday. Yesterday Lee Rosenbaum quoted Philippe & Glenn from Whose Muse? on the admissions issue. Here's Lowry talking about the same in a way-too-honest moment at the Hirshhorn last year.

Boldface names, courtesy of Carol Vogel in today's NYT and some HTML: "Jane Kaplowitz, a Manhattan artist and teacher, said the increase was 'outrageous and wrong.'"

Kaplowitz isn't just a random artist that Vogel found on the street. She's Mrs. Robert Rosenblum.

Longtime readers know that one of my particular art historical faves is Persian manuscript painting. If you're a museum and you do a Persian manuscript/miniatures show, you're pretty much guaranteed a pop. So it is with the Art Institute of Chicago, which is featuring the second part of a two-part show: Work of Many Hands: The Art of Islamic Bookmaking. The mini-show's web presence is a bit thin, so we'll hope that some of the Chicago art bloggers check out the show for us.

Clarifying: I'd like to have a photo of the current $15 sign so we can compare it with the $20 sign when it goes up on Aug. 1...

I'd like to see a JPEG of the Met's $20 sign. I want to know if the word "suggested" is smaller than it was before. Anyone?

I am a big fan of the sly smack-to-the-head that Carol Vogel delivered to the Met in the last paragraph of this morning's story about the museums admissions charge hike:

The Met announced the fee increase with little fanfare, in an e-mail message sent at 3 p.m. yesterday to editors who supervise arts listings at news organizations.

The Met did that because they knew that they were doing something questionable. Something that was going to earn them widespread public derision. So here it comes:

First, we must acknowledge that the situation at the Met is different from the situation at M$20MA. The Met's charge is 'suggested,' MoMA's is mandatory (except for four hours a week). But the Met's charge presents a cost-based barrier to entry, the kind of thing that will make a middle-class or lower-middle-class family think twice about visiting.

This question of whether the American public can 'keep up' with a 33% hike in the Met's admissions charge is a real one, not just a construct created by socialist art writers. In this week's issue, Fortune magazine's Geoffrey Colvin reports that the latest government figures show that "the broadest index of pay is no higher than it was at the end of 2003... living standards are not rising right now." At a time when the American family is falling behind, the Met is pursuing a policy that will make its halls more elitist. An exclusionary fee hike is a mistake, the wrong message for an arts organization to send. It's a cold policy.

Next: Will the $20 figure cause fewer people to pony up at the admissions gate? I wonder.

Finally: In Vogel's story, the Met claims that it has a $3 million operating shortfall and that it needs the hike to make that up. Let's put that in context. The Met's most recent tax filing, for FY 2003 (which ended on June 30, 2004), showed that the museum had operating expenses over $250 million dollars. Therefore we're talking about an operating shortfall of about one percent. Where is the board leadership?

Related: Edward Winkleman.

Two quick morning links before I have something to say about the Met's new $20 admission suggestion:

• AJ's Andrew Taylor posts about my LAT op-ed on the Smithsonian's situation. He draws an analogy between what I wrote and Oreos popping up on sitcoms;
• Non-profit-focued blog Where Most Needed makes an interesting point about the Smithsonian's lack of an admission charge.

I'm traveling Wednesday, not sure if I'll be back Thursday or not. In the meantime: With the Altman/Lauder Klimt show opening in New York this week, check out my pick for the sleeper of the bunch.

Regular readers have doubtless noticed that we're not big fans of the Washington Post's arts coverage. (When we can find it that is, ha ha.) But today Jackie Trescott does something we wish more arts writers did: She spotlighted prominent local acquisitions, in this case two Paul Klees at the Phillips Collection.

Some news and notes leftover from my piece in Sunday's LA Times about California and video art:

• As I mentioned in the story, no one knows what's in the collection. But Gettyites Glenn Phillips and Andrew Perchuk said that it appears to be surprisingly rich in early feminist video art. The collection seems to contain the video archive of the Women's Building, a pioneering feminist art/activist space in Los Angeles founded by Judy Chicago. Lots of conceptual art pioneers were active at the Women's Building including Eleanor Antin, who did her first performance pieces there. (Terry Wolverton's memoir of the history of the Women's Building is titled Insurgent Muse.)
• The Long Beach Museum itself did a kind of oral history project of the period and the collection seems to include the tapes of interviews with exhibiting artists and other art world figures of the period.
• I mentioned in the story that the collection includes a seemingly complete archive from Art/Tapes/22, the early European video art center in Florence. Among the artists whose A/T/22 work seems to be in the collection are Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Daniel Buren and Bill Viola.
• I keep saying "seems" because no one has seen any of this stuff in years. Videos could be mislabeled or they might have degenerated.
• In Canada (and in occasional partnership with the Guggenheim), the Daniel Langlois Foundation (which is a Flash-laden site, but it's oddly tolerable) works on similar issues as the GRI/New Art Trust.

• DCist's Heather Goss takes a look at my LAT op-ed about the state of the Smithsonian.
• Greg Allen visits Iceland and finds Richard Serra.
• Emailer KA suggests that the new Gugg, the GAD (which means 'tomorrow' in Arabic), be re-shortened to GuggAbu. Say it "goog-uh-BOO."

Because the writer is always the last to know: I'm in the Los Angeles Times again today, this time on the op-ed page: The Air & Space Museum is falling.

The piece is about the sorry state of the Smithsonian's infrastructure and how both Congress has failed to address the problems. The piece also includes a mini-scoop about the possible fate of Smithsonian secretary Lawrence Small:

Recently, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) showed an important sign of concern. He wrote a letter to the White House pointedly asking the Bush administration whether it supports Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small, who has overseen the corporatization of the institution. Grassley is asking the right question. Even if the Smithsonian continued down the corporate-funding path, a series of $15-million donations (the amount Boeing recently gave the Air and Space Museum) is never going to cover the $2.3-billion bill coming due. Perhaps tellingly, the White House responded to Grassley's letter without mentioning Small — or expressing support for him.

For yesterday's LA Times I wrote about how California has emerged as America's most important center for video/media art: The Getty recently absorbed the pioneering Long Beach Museum of Art collection of video art (all 4,000 tapes of it, including what is likely the earliest work by Wegman, Burden, Jonas and others) and is working to conserve and preserve it. (That's a Getty Martha Rosler at left.)

In San Francisco, Dick and Pam Kramlich's New Art Trust is working to ensure that museums and private collectors are able to share new media art with the broadest audiences possible. It all adds up to one heckuva lot of activity. (The Kramlichs are one of only two private collectors own all five Cremaster films.)

(Many other California institutions have rich collections of video/media art too, including SFMOMA, MOCA and MCASD.)

In a related story, here's a quick quiz: What Washington, DC museum has the most display space devoted to video art? Would you believe the staid Smithsonian American Art Museum? (More on it later this week I hope. My schedule is nuts.) That will change next year when the Hirshhorn does a big video art show from its own collection, including the first US showing of a new Isaac Julien piece.

Outtakes from the piece throughout the day...

The development of a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi is interesting for lots of reasons. Gehry is a Jewish architect building what could be a major Gulf States landmark. The international press seems to be doing a better job of exploring the fascinating questions around the GAD (yeah, I don't like it either -- ideas?) than the American press:

• From the Australian Broadcasting Company's Articulate blog: The new Gugg won't be "confrontational" (Thanks AJ);
• Rupert Cornwell of Britain's Independent reports the story from DC, and hits all the right geo-political angles;
• Strangely, the Jerusalem Post runs only an AP story. The Washington Post merely ran the news as an item in its gossipy News & Faces column.

• I am not an assume vivid astrofocus fan. Apparently Louis Vuitton-wannabe Le Sportsac is though, because Caryn Coleman has found new avaf bags.
• Speaking of artists whose work does nothing for me, a big ol' Jim Hodges touches down at the Albright-Knox;
• Eco-friendly Dutch landscape painting?!
• On Monday I mentioned that Kristen Morgin, the star of the Hammer's Thing show, is (probably) enjoying her first solo show at Marc Selwyn. DetroitArts has pics;
• Todd Gibson (and I) admire how wonderfully the Pulitzer serves the artists within;
• I missed this too: The New Orleans Museum of Art has reopened. And it's free if you live in Louisiana;
• Fabian Marcaccio? In Central Park? The school of gunk-and-goo lives;
• If you need some artist Q&A fun, check out the Brooklyn Rail's Phong Bui with Richard Serra and Amy Sillman; and
• Longtime MANfave Rural Studio has built prototype for a $20,000 house. Monthly payments: $64.

In LA Weekly, Holly Myers promises us that Jennifer Steinkamp doesn't manage porn sites. She does, however, make super projected digital sculpture and Myers tells us where, how, and for whom.

I completely dig Steinkamp's work. For me it's a nice example of art-as-experience. A couple years ago in Buffalo I discovered how Steinkamp's work could be soothing in a special way. And the Corcoran has a nice Steinkamp that isn't out very often (but is now, I'm told). And, oh yeah, the artist has a website.

Only on MAN: In advance of its upcoming Catherine Opie retrospective, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has purchased Opie's 2004 photograph Oliver in a Tutu. (Curator Jennifer Blessing, who is working on the Gugg's Opie show, spearheaded the acquisition.)

I saw a print of this image last week at the Opie show at the Orange County Museum of Art. (The show originated at the Aldrich and will go on to MOCA Cleveland.) My first thought was that Oliver is going to be one screwed-up kid: One of his moms teaches at UCLA and he's wearing a USC t-shirt? Scarred for life! (OK, OK, his other mom, Julie Burleigh, has a daughter who attends USC. And Opie lives near the USC campus.)

I think that Opie is at her best when she explores the theme of community. The community here is Opie's own family; That's her home in the photo, her studio in the background, her friends in the background. One of Opie's favorite slide-show jokes is about how this is a lesbian washing machine and dryer. Oliver is apparently delighted to be posing at the Opie-Burleigh washer-dryer.

This is one of several recent Opie photos that feature Oliver. (The Guggenheim also recently acquired Opie's recent Self-Portrait (Nursing), which will be in the upcoming SITE Santa Fe biennial.) The only other contemporary photographer I can think of who has featured her children as prominently is Sally Mann. As I saw in the recent documentary What Remains, her children don't regret that, but they're aware that their mom's work will forever be a part of their life. Oliver and the Mann kids may have something to talk about someday.

Related: The Gugg's Opie collection page.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Eye Level blog has been going crazy with posting over the last few days. It reports that on July 1, SAAM and its building-mate the National Portrait Gallery set a Smithsonian record for single-day museum attendance: 18,744. Lots of other good stuff at the site, here. (Kriston Capps smartly points out some sleeper favorites.)

Last week MAN reader Aaron Moulton sent in a note about Tran Duc Van, the GawkerForum diarist we spotlighted here. "Tran Duc Van," Moulton said, seems to be a pseudonym.

A Google search on "Tran Duc Van" supported Moulton's theory. TDV has a virtually invisible art-related Google-print. So then who could it be? All signs -- and several art world luminaries who were willing to chat about TDV on the down-low -- point toward Jack Bankowsky, the former Artforum editor who has a distant relationship with ethical propriety.

(I asked Artforum.com managing editor Brian Sholis if TDV was a pseudonym -- and if it was Jack Bankowsky. He declined to answer either question. Moulton jokingly suggested we also check with Jeff Wall, who titled this photograph, the third one down, Tran Duc Van. Bankowsky wrote about Wall for Artforum in 2003.)

Could it be that Artforum, repeatedly cited for its lax ethics, was presenting its particular kind of 'reportage' under a phony name? I mean, why be straightforward or honest with your readers? Why not let writers hide their agendas under pseudonyms?

Perhaps Bankowsky created a fake name in an effort to hide the kinds of conflicts-of-interest against which we have railed. Perhaps that 'frees him' to write last month's post, in which he plugs David Weiss, "éminence grise of the Swiss art world" -- and an artist represented by Bankowsky boyfriend Matthew Marks. "Tran Duc Van" went on to dwell on Fischli & Weiss:

I have not given Dean's work the attention it deserves, but after half an hour of Weiss's suggestive commentary I vowed to use this Basel visit as an occasion to take the overdue plunge. Weiss, to give you the flavor, says things like: "It is very, very difficult to make art that has no irony." Then he pauses and adds: "It may also be very stupid." He was not, by then, speaking of Dean. As it happened, he was worrying, like an old-fashioned Greenbergian, about the perils of kitsch. Of course, F & W's work is not old fashioned, and, indeed, for an artist for whom the tourist snapshot constitutes creative ground zero, his concern constitutes a refinement worth thinking about.

"Fun" is a favorite word in the F & W lexicon, and they use the term with post-Warholian promiscuousness—which implies, of course, that requisite irony. Fischli, speaking of fun, had just then returned to our table with Beatrix Ruf, of the Kunsthalle Basel, and Mendes Bürgi of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Conscious they had been gone for while, Fischli feigned a "just-had-a-joint" dopiness. Are we having fun yet?

Then, before TDV could steer clear of Marks connections, he gets in a plug for another Marks artist, Andreas Gursky.

Back in December, TDV GawkerForumed about some peripheral Art Basel Miami Beach festivities. He included air-kisses to a bunch of collectors, including Aaron Fleischman and Lin Lougheed: "Casa Fleischman manages to be everything that Miami should be but rarely is." I wonder if they're Marks clients. Who knows? When you're hiding behind fake names who knows anything?

I have changed my mind: Who's reading today anyway? (Oh, you are? Sorry.)

Check out a couple of weekend stories:

• One of my favorites from the Hammer's Thing show is up in her gallery debut: Kristen Morgin at Marc Selwyn. Leah Ollman tells us about that, as well as about barnd-new work from James Turrell;
• The NYT's Philip Gefter has a nice piece about (mostly) photographer William Christenberry.