May 2007 Archives

With the Picasso and American Art show headed for the Walker Art Center, Walker blogger Paul Schmelzer remembered Maurizio Cattlean's 1998 outfit/performance/whatevs as Picasso. So Schmelzer emailed Cattelan and asked him about Picasso...

Related: I can't find Calvin Tomkins' New Yorker profile online, but here's a Sophie Arie feature on Cattelan from The Guardian.

Today Time's Richard Lacayo posts about the Stephen Shore show's arrival at the ICP in NYC. That reminded me...

I wrote about Uncommon Places when I was with Bloomberg in 2005 and when the show debuted at the Hammer. One of my favorite images was this photograph that Shore took in Presidio, Texas on February 21, 1975.

In 2006 I took my second trip to Marfa. Presidio is about an hour south of Marfa on U.S. Route 67. I thought it might be fun to do a short newspaper/magazine story about revisiting the site of Shore's photograph. I wondered: What did the site of Shore's photograph look like now? Could I better understand his compositional interests by visiting the scene of the shooting? How had America's uncommon places changed in the intervening 30 years and what could art show us about that?

I decided to visit Presidio after an early-morning visit to Big Bend National Park. Somewhere around Terlingua, just north of the park, I blew a tire. I never made it to Presidio. Next time I'm going to Presidio first.

A MAN reader writes in with an excellent idea: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which recently started a writer's program notable for its support of mostly non-writers and obscure art magazines that will be non-read by anyone outside the Usual Art-Insider Crowd, should buy them. (Disclosure: I'm a non-grantee.)

Then the AWF should shut down its nascent writer's program and shift that funding into combining Interview/AiA into a Harper's or Atlantic-style magazine with a visual arts-centric world view, and partner with the Getty Trust to publish the 'zine (thus mimicking the Harper's publishing model). Solves multiple problems, doesn't it?

The New York Post's Keith J. Kelly reports that Art in America is for sale. Interview too. [via]

UPDATE: Lee Rosenbaum quotes an unnamed spokesperson from AiA's parent company saying that the Post story is half-wrong.

The BBC has begun a ten-part series on The British Museum called, simply enough, The Museum. Yes: Ten parts. Five hours. (And to think that PBS gives us, uh, well, what does PBS give us?! Art21 every few years and...)

There's no video from the programme/series online (unless you're in the UK), so we in the US will have to hope that the series pops up on DVD or on BBC America.

Museums about which I care enough to want more.

FAMSF: Director John Buchanan is running the place into second-tier status by taking the Anschutzian King Tut show and by running an exhibition program seemingly more interested in France than in California. Thank goodness for the collection galleries.

MFA Houston: The second-biggest museum endowment in America (as of June, 2006), an enormous buildings complex, and a super-thin collection. Without curatorial superstar Mari Carmen Ramirez, where would it be?

National Gallery of Art: Really two different museums: A fantastic one for pre-1900 art (though notably light on central Europe), and a sub-mediocre one for post-1900 art, barely any of which is on view, ever. The photography program has lagged badly in the last year. It's long past time to remodel the Pei building to create more gallery space, to get rid of that awful grey carpet, and to find a way to more thoroughly display the last 110 years of art history. No contemporary art program (!).

Smithsonian American Art Museum: A disastrous mish-mash in a nice, old building. The whole idea of what this museum should be (and can be) needs to be reconceptualized.

LACMA: This place should be a powerhouse. And Michael Govan (with some help from Eli Broad) might make it one.

Honorable mention: The Whitney, perenially threatening to become more important. Won't get there until it fixes its signature show. The Corcoran, almost across the street from the White House, but somehow off the map.

Speaking of Donald Judd: In a perfect world I'd spend more time in Marfa, visiting all manner of art-related things, maybe a national park, maybe visiting a sludge ranch, and so on. But I can't... so I'm delighted that the Chinati Foundation has a brand-new website. Check it out here.

UPDATE: Link to Denver Post story fixed.

The Menil Collection has recently acquired Walter de Maria's The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth, a painting that was included in the Dwan Gallery's landmark 1968 'EARTH WORKS' show. As far as I know, it's the only painting that de Maria ever 'made.'

In the summer of 1968 most of the ten artists that would participate in the show prepared work from far-flung locales: Carl Andre from Aspen, Heizer in California and Nevada, Sol LeWitt in Holland, Dennis Oppenheim in Connecticut, Robert Smithson in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and so on. de Maria was in Europe but he wrote Dwan's director, John Weber, with instructions for the show: In addition to documentary photographs of a de Maria earthwork that included a performative element and an 'earth room,' de Maria wanted one other work included as well.

In September, a mere month before the show was to open, de Maria instructed Weber to make a piece that was nearly 20 feet long, seven feet high, and yellow. A stainles steel plaque was to be affixed to the middle of the canvas. The work's title -- possibly a reference to the color of bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment -- was to be etched on the plaque. Weber saw to it the work was made. It was the only painting in the exhibition -- and the only work in the show to sell (to Robert Scull, apparently to repay a $3,000 debt).

When I first saw a JPEG of The Color Men... I thought of the untitled Donald Judd painting shown here. (The painting, owned by the Judd Foundation, is on view at 104 West Oak Street in Marfa. At eight feet by four feet, it's smaller that the de Maria.) Judd's painting, made in 1962, the year of his last paintings, presages Judd's interest in industrial materials. Could it be that six years later de Maria, who would make use of stainless steel in the coming years, also chose a painting in which to signify his emergent interest in the same?

Related: The account of the EARTH WORKS show is from Suzaan Boettger's essential Earthworks, a history of earth/land art of the 1960s.

Enjoy the long weekend. I'll be back on Tuesday. One quick note: I don't usually (ever) plug this kind of thing, but a benefit in honor of my friends James Wagner and Barry Hoggard can't be all bad.

From the front page of ArtsJournal comes word that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is eliminating most positions for arts critics and editors, including the paper's visual arts critic. Other newspapers have recently made similar moves, including, most recently, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Romenesko, a clearinghouse of media-industry news, reports that the San Francisco Chronicle is offering buyouts to/for 80 staff. (I have not yet heard whether art critic Kenneth Baker or architecture critic John King are taking the buyout.) The only paper I know of that has expanded its cultural coverage recently is the Miami Herald. It has 'added' some visual art-focused freelancers, including Brett Sokol.

The quality of American cultural journalism before all this was already pretty mediocre, often sycophantic (anything for access!), regularly nothing more than a regurgitation of museum/etc. press releases. (Even the New Yorker's coverage of the arts has tended toward yawning hagiography of late.) Maybe what replaces all that will be better. I don't know. But it does look like whatever emerges in the next five years will be here, online. Or in a magazine yet to be created. And definitely not on newsprint.

Related: This is particularly moronic. Blogging is a a medium, a kind of publishing, just like newspapering is a form of publishing. No, not all blogs are thoughtful or well-written. Neither are all newspapers or magazines. But many blogs are. To say that all blogged writing is thoughtless is, well, thoughtless -- and very 2002.

First on MAN: The next director of the Morgan Library will be William Griswold, the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Griswold, a former chief curator and acting director at the Getty Museum, was appointed to the MIA directorship in July, 2005. Griswold has history with the Morgan: He was once the head of drawings and prints there.

The Freep's Mark Stryker started it, I contributed, Maev Kennedy rolls her eyes on The Guardian's blog, and today Time's Richard Lacayo piles on: It's the pathetic story of museums that wanna hold our hands.

The Walker has just acquired Paul Shambroom's 1987 Toyota Celica, 500 lbs ANFO explosive. Taken at New Mexico Tech's Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center in 2005 as part of Shambroom's Security series, the photograph serves as a striking metaphor for the Bush 'War on Terror:' It's a big mess.

Shambroom's exploration of our security apparatus is one of the smartest artist responses to 9/11. Like Inka Essenhigh, Lari Pittman or Shirin Neshat, Shambroom hasn't made art about the attacks themselves, but about the climate that those attacks created (or enabled).

The Security series has earned Shambroom a nice bit of media attention, including this interview on Minnesota Public Radio. A few years ago Shambroom discussed the series with Joerg Colberg:

On Sept. 11 2001 I knew right away I would somehow address the aftermaths of these events in my work. It took a few years to figure out how to approach it visually. It's difficult to understand history when you're in the middle of it, there is no perspective. I settled on the idea of photographing in training environments because they are ripe with visual material of the source of our fears and potential salvation. The training simulations of both threat and response resonate with broader questions in the post-9/11 world: What is real? What is the nature of our fear?

There's more of Shambroom's Security series here, on his website.

Related: Shambroom's Face to Face with the Bomb is a terrific photo-book and includes an essay by Richard Rhodes, the unofficial historian of American atomic/nuclear bomb-making. The Walker owns at least two pieces from that series.

Revisiting an old feature... One difference this time: I wrote this on a plane last night, which made it hard to triple-check to make sure these shows haven't happened.

1.) Kees van Dongen retrospective. I've always dug KvD -- Houston's The Corn Poppy makes me want to know what the heck a 'corn poppy' is -- but I saw a lot more KvD on a recent Euro trip and couldn't get enough. I mean, how many artists paint their wife as some kind of lust goddess?

2.) Late Braque. High-cubist-era Braque is rightly celebrated, but his later years aren't as well appreciated. Gallery to include: Braque's Billiard Table series. In a related story: How many artists suffered severe injuries in WWI or WWII and went on to make great art? Braque, Beckmann, and...

3.) Alberto Burri, the Italian who mixed collage and painting a la Rauschenberg. I rarely see his work in the USA, but there were two up at the Art Institute of Chicago on my last visit. (They're not online.)

4.) John Storrs. I'd bet there's been a John Storrs show, probably before I was born. This tiny, optimistic sculpture is one of my favorite works at the Hirshhorn.

5.) Max Pechstein. The contemporary of Kirchner and Nolde is rarely on view in American museums, so I hadn't thought too much about him until a recent trip to Cologne. At the Ludwig he shares wallspace with his peers and holds up superbly.

From the road, back with full posting tomorrow...

1.) The Denver Public Library needs to do some restoration work on Ed Ruscha's A Rolling Historical Landscape of Colorado and the West mural. The bottom six inches of many panels have been scuffed up, etc.

2.) I've written a lot about light and space artists here... Greg Allen has a photographically lush post on light and space architects/events.

3.) Dallas' Richard Meier-designed, Howard Rachofsky-filled Rachofsky House has a website, tour info. [via]

4.) Yesterday I told you about a Liz Larner that the MCA Chicago recently acquired. The museum also picked up Rudolf Stingel's untitled (after Sam), which was included in both the recent MCA Stingel show and the WhiBi. No word on whether the MCA also acquired the Whitney's accompanying wall text/essay.

5.) Consider: The photograph that ran with Randy Kennedy's Sunday NYT Serra story and a Morris Louis veil painting.

+1) Last month I told you about Aqua's Miami expansion plans. Now we know where they'll be.

I always want to touch Liz Larner's art. I know that I shouldn't -- that I can't -- but it always seems so tactile, so available, so, oh why not. The MCA Chicago has recently acquired a piece from Larner's first show at Margo Leavin Gallery, 1988's Ball System. (The work was a gift from the William J. Hokin Family.)

It's Larner at her most tempting: The piece is made up of 21 balls made from plaster, wrapped and woven rubber, cord and cast iron. The rest of the piece consists of steel boxes that hold the balls and a three-part wooden crate. And how do you install all this stuff? Larner doesn't have specific instructions: Installers and curators can put it on view however they like. (So that's who gets to touch Larner's work...)

Larner's work was also recently on view in NYC at the Whitney (as part of a collection show) and at the corner of 5th Ave. and 60th Street, in an installation put together by the Public Art Fund.

I'm starting summer Fridays a week or two early. If you're looking for something to read, catch up on MAN's reviews from the past week: Jason Gubbiotti at Hemphill, Wolfgang Tillmans part one and part two.

As expected and long-rumored, a cultural facility is included in the Hudson Yards draft conceptual land use. There has been some speculation in the NYC art world that Dia is west-side bound. But a well-placed source tells MAN that Dia will not be a player at Hudson Yards. So if it's to be a visual arts cultural facility, who might it be...

UPDATE: Here's the video.

MANpal, blogger, and gallery owner Ed Winkleman will discuss the auctions on CNBC's "Power Lunch" today at ~1:15 EDT.

Yesterday I wrote about how Wolfgang Tillmans' much-ballyhooed installations are a necessary crutch, a way of hiding dull, well-worn images behind a smart formal invention. A perfect example is in the last gallery of the Tillmans survey at the Hirshhorn.

Here, at the end of the show, Tillmans has put three images on three different walls, creating a triangular installation. (As usual, he has surrounded it with plenty of other stuff, some of it forgettable, some of it not, including two gripping portraits that deserve better.)

The first picture I saw was the image above, Gemini V. Tillmans shot it in DC, at the National Air and Space Museum. The image that most directly corresponds to it is Himmelbrau, and Sportflecken completes the trio.

Much of Tillmans' work focuses on gay life and gay subcultures. (Tillmans is also politically and socially active on gay equality issues in Europe.) Too often Tillmans includes tired, Picasso-like puns about sex in his work, and this installation is a particuilar eye-roller. Tillmans has shot the Gemini V capsule from behind, with the round, puckered heat shield facing the camera. The rest of the capsule, barely visible at the top of the photograph, emerges as an erect shaft. Tillmans has turned his childhood fascination with the space age into an homage to gay sex. (Revealingly: Tillmans originally mistitled this piece Apollo 11 re-entry capsule. Apollo 11 flew in mid-1969, just days after the Stonewall riots in New York became one of the two motivating events of the gay equality movement.)

Across the gallery, Himmelblau also engages in a cubist word game. Just like Gemini V, it is simultaneously a photograph of a shaft and an orifice. And just in case you thought all these shafts were ready to go but don't lift off, Sportflecken appears to be a semen-stained shirt.

Tillmans returns to these kinds of puns over and over again. In the show's fourth major gallery, another three-photograph installation refers to sexual practice. From left to right: A photograph shows golden light entering a building (presumably a church) through a window. The golden light seems to dance inside the space. Next is a photograph of a urinal trough, complete with urinal cakes and cigarette butts. And on the far right, the third and largest photograph shows off a huge stack of gold bars.

The arrangement seems to be a reference to the myth of Danae, given a slightly different sexual twist. In the myth, Danae's kingly father imprisons her in an effort to prevent her from fulfilling a prophesy by having a son who will overthrow him. The ever-lusty Zeus finds Danae anyway, is awed by her beauty, and naturally wishes to make love to her. Because Danae is imprisoned, the only way he can appear before her is through the bars of her prison cell. Zeus being Zeus, he turns himself into a shower of gold and impregnates her.

In Tillmans' version, the photograph on the left introduces the Danae myth and we're left to put together the rest of the kinky story with the help of the urinal trough and the gold. (And it's hardly the first time Tillmans has referenced this particular bit of sexplay into his work.)

Tillmans doesn't just mine cubist sex puns for content. A gallery of photographs of soldiers and photocopies of news photographs/stories about soldiers is predictably filled with Twombly-esque puns referring to the phallus as the root of war. (Among Tillmans' stand-ins for phalluses are the Washington Monument, shot from below and looking up, and a Roman helmet shaped like the head of a penis.) Just in case anyone misses Tillmans' point, he falls back on one of his favorite tropes in this gallery (and plenty of others in the show): Photographs of empty, discarded clothing, apparently intended to remind us that someone who isn't wearing clothes must be naked, there is a big photograph of two young men kissing, and with all these phallus references around... well, you figure it out. Again the content of Tillmans' images, and the connection between male aggression, sex, and war is old material gussied up by Tillmans' installations.

Next (on Monday): Tillmans at his best.

First on MAN: Smithsonian Business Ventures CEO Gary Beer will not return to the Smithsonian when his contract expires in September. Acting Secretary Cristian Samper made the announcement in an email to staff this afternoon. SBV is the Smithsonian unit that oversaw the Showtime deal, revenue from Smithsonian stores, cafes, the magazine (for which I have written) and so on. SBV has never been audited and its funds are unrestricted and are not overseen by Congress. Samper also said that:

"Whether the current mandate for SBV is the right one for the Institution at this time will be a major topic for discussion with the Board of Regents, the SBV board and other stakeholders inside and outside the Institution. Toward this end, I plan to appoint a committee to review SBV's charter and structure and options for the future, which I would present to the Regents later this year."

Notable: The march of Lawrence Small confidants (and hires) out of the Smithsonian continues.

Update: Washington Post story.

Eye-catching line in Nicolai Ouroussoff's engaging review of this show in today's NYT:

The interplay between major political events and more obscure architectural ones is a simple and effective gesture, suggesting how cultural invention takes its rightful place alongside political action in shaping who we are.

That's why it's disappointing to see the newspaper industry increasingly turn away from cultural coverage, only to replace it with an extra Lindsay Lohan story or two. Or, to put it in (crude) historical terms, which of these do we remember best: The Battle of Lowestoft, Aernout Van Overbeke, or Vermeer?

Think of Wolfgang Tillmans as a poet whose vocabulary is made up of the photographs that he's taken over the last 20 years. And instead of composing his poems in orderly stanzas, he follows e.e. cummings' m.o.: send out the vocabulary in far-flung, apparently ungainly, but ultimately logical groupings.

A survey of Tillmans' work, organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum (curator Russell Ferguson) and the MCA Chicago (curator Dominic Molon), has touched down at the Hirshhorn. The exhibit shows off Tillmans' Cummings-like formal innovation to best advantage; His photography-based installations have never looked better than they look in the Hirshhorn's concrete donut. But beneath all the razzle-dazzle, many of Tillmans' images -- that is the actual photographs that make up his installations -- reveal him to be a recycler of well-worn art historical standards. He takes puns from Picasso, metaphor from Johns, and the frank sexuality of youth from Nan Goldin. One of Tillmans' installations, Memorials for the Victims of Organized Religions, is a photographic updating of Allan McCollum's Surrogates series.

No matter, the inventive installations are apparently enough to make Tillmans the contemporary art world darling-of-the-moment. The Chelsea Academy loves seeing familiar media used in new ways, and is often willing to overlook so-so content or coherence (see Barney, Matthew). So it is with Tillmans..

And there's no question: Tillmans' approach to installing photography is new and interesting. Call it 'post-curatorial.' What the canvas was to cubists, the white cube (or here: the curved donut) is to Tillmans. Cubist painters took people or objects and consolidated many different points of view on one canvas. Instead of an object, Tillmans takes a concept, then photographs many different takes on it. The complete 'image' only comes together as the viewer walks around the gallery, putting the threads of the ideas together.

But for Tillmans (and Barney) formal innovation is also a bit of a crutch because his installations are the one thing he does that builds on art history rather than mimics it. And, ironically, they're the least interesting presentations in the show: Tillmans' portraits are gripping and his photographed abstractions of photographs are drippingly beautiful, the highlight of the Hirshhorn installation.

Next: Examining several installations. Installation shots courtesy of the Hirshhorn. paper drop (star) courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

For years (and years) critics of the J. Paul Getty Trust have noted that the Getty is an arts philanthropy but that few Getty trustees had any background in art. (I resemble that remark.)

That's beginning to change. The Getty has just announced three new trustees, and two come with strong arts backgrounds: Neil Rudenstine and Frances Daly Fergusson. A third, New York Public Library president and CEO Paul LeClerc, runs an institution that collects photography, artists' archives, and so on. Here's the press release.

Last week I posted about how much I enjoyed seeing some bunch of California stuff that was coming up for auction at Bonham & Butterfield's. Today I thought I'd share a Richard Diebenkorn Berkeley painting that'll be offered at Christie's tomorrow night. It's Berkeley #5 -- and it hasn't been exhibited in 53 years.

This is also a splendid opportunity for me to (again) point out that there has never been a museum exhibition devoted to Diebenkorn's Berkeley works. Or his Ocean Park works. (These would be excellent de Young shows, but apparently... so how about it LACMA?) A show of his Albuquerque paintings opens at New Mexico's Harwood Museum on June 2. The show's catalogue is available now.

The NYT's Jim Rutenberg has the item, complete with the word on how/why Francesco Vezzoli is teaming up with Shrub & Kerry advisors.

From the Seattle P-I:

The good news: There's lots of cool Dan Flavin-related stuff on LACMA's website. (The Govan & Bell Flavin production just rolled onto Wilshire.) Check out a 1979 Michael Marton documentary and a cool Flash feature. Flavin talks by James Welling and Jennifer Steinkamp are forthcoming.

The bad news: To download/save LACMA's podcasts and videocasts, you have to use iTunes. Uh... why?!?!

First, what's not in the papers: For years I've been pointing out that the NYT is a national paper in everything but art -- and it's proving it again: The Grey Lady hasn't covered the new Seattle Art Museum, and its only "visit" to Olympic Sculpture Park was a year before the place opened.

Jason Gubbiotti has finally arrived.

For the better part of the last decade, Washington has waited for Gubbiotti to emerge as Our Next Abstract Painter, the next in the Morris Louis-Gene Davis line of Washington abstractionists. And while Gubbiotti's potential has long been evident (he was included, for example, in Helen Molesworth's 2005-06 Landscape Confection show), at times his work has shown the burden of expectation. His last show, in 2005 at DC's now-defunct Fusebox, was a jumbled confusion of ideas, paint and woodworking glue. But now, after leaving Washington for marriage and a home in Europe, Gubbiotti has arrived with a superb show at DC's Hemphill Fine Arts. It establishes Gubbiotti as a painter to watch, a leading synthesizer of recent abstract painting. (Gubbiotti's recent success is probably a product of not seeing or talking with me in some time. Before April our last interaction was probably over two years ago.)

Gubbiotti's work takes as its starting point the big three of '80s and '90s New York abstract painting: Jonathan Lasker, Tom Nozkowski, and David Reed. As in Lasker or Reed, Gubbiotti's paintings appear to be carefully planned. If there's a single spontaneous brushstroke on any object at Hemphill, I couldn't find it. Like Nozkowski, Gubbiotti builds forms that seem both dystopian and organic. Gubbiotti also riffs on hard-edge painting, borrowing from Ellsworth Kelly and his loud palette, but also from John McLaughlin's geometric forms.

Gubbiotti also seems to have mixed in a pop culture reference or two, especially the landmark 1980s arcade game "Asteroids." Islands, asteroids, or whatever they are seem to be floating through his paintings. Maybe Gubbiotti's shapes simply remind me of the hours I spent in front of Ataris in the 1980s. But I think there's a little more to the floating effect here than that: At least some of it is because of the clever way Gubbiotti builds his work. All but one of the paintings here are on wood, and instead of squaring all four corners and all four sides, Gubbiotti regularly leaves the top edge or the bottom edge of his panels curved. He paints right up to the curve, not over it, providing the illusion that the painted surface is moving up or down the surface. Lasker, Reed, Nozkowski, Kelly and such firmly anchor their paintings to the canvas and push them right up against the picture plane. Gubbiotti does all that too, but has introduced two-dimensional movement into his paintings. The result is something new and gripping, something that borrows the movement of a good Bonnard or the strange wavy gravy sensation of op art (minus the headache).

The sense of movement across Gubbiotti's paintings is heightened not just by how he shaves his panels but by how he constructs them. In the first decade or so of Gubbiotti's career he appeared to be more interested in building three-dimensional stretchers and supports. The result was objects that were more built than painted, paintings where the act of painting was secondary to the building of a baroque stretcher. Gubbiotti has resolved that issue: His painted surfaces now work in concert with his (toned-down) structures.

The most obvious example is a two-painting work titled Youth Gone Wild (One Minute of Silence) (pictured above). Gubbiotti has installed the two panels facing each other, on opposite walls. One is hung traditionally, flat against a wall. The other is hung right up against the edge of a corner -- and 'moves' around the corner. The effect is hard-edge sublime: that 'floating asteroids' sensation.

Gubbiotti's earlier work also seemed confused about color. No more. Here his colors play well together: They may challenge each other, but the truce between them is no longer shaky. Yellow, green, white, fuschia, red, and orange somehow co-exist. On one canvas. In harmony.

Sure, there are problems here and there. Folk Biology and The Return of Oxytocin, the only painting on canvas, is a jumbled clunker that recalls patio tile. And Is This What Happiness Looks Like? is too much the love child of Kelly and Judd. They're the exceptions that prove the success of the show: Gubbiotti has made paintings that acknowledge the history of abstract painting while adding something to it. The etymology behind his vocabulary is clear and Gubbiotti is making new words.

It's Friday in Washington. Wolfgang Tillmans beckons from the Hirshhorn and there are two or three super little Eugene Boudin beach scenes at the NGA (out of a few dozen paintings, but oh well)... so I'll see you Monday.

But because I have to leave you with something: The latest (haunting) t-shirt from the Royal Art Lodge.

Jack Lane is leaving the Dallas Museum of Art. [via] His deputy, Bonnie Pitman, will replace him.

That makes the DMA part of the big changes going on in Dallas arts institutions: Ray Nasher recently died and the Nasher Sculpture Center is in the market for a new director.

We Californians who have moved east often get tired of seeing so-so Easterners elevated above Golden Staters in East Coast museums simply because of geographic bias. What's worse is that California's own museums rarely exhibit the provincialism in which New York/DC's museums bask. As a result I don't get to see much from some of my favorite artists, people I knew about back in the Bay Area such as Hassel Smith, William Theophilus Brown, James Weeks, and Christopher Brown.

I mean, you just won't see a Hassel Smith at SFMOMA, not even online. (Good for the Hirshhorn!) So sometimes I troll the web catalogues of California-based auctioneers, such as the old Butterfield & Butterfield, which has since been bought out, and then sold again, and is now called something else... but if you're from an old Bay Area family you still call it Butterfield's. And sometimes I find cool stuff there. So while everyone is focused on New York auctions this week, let's take a look at California:

Lee Rosenbaum talks about the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a real issue in museum-director suites: Salary parity between men and women. Rosenbaum suggests that one director get a raise, which is fine, but this is an industry-wide issue. Museum directors who are men out-earn their peers, even at similar-sized institutions.

What's more: AAMD did an in-house survey on this issue a year or two ago. Results of the survey were shared with members but not with the press, and I have (so far?) failed to get anyone to leak it to me.

The Los Angeles Times is sporting a new homepage today. Maddeningly, the direct click-through to the paper's visual art coverage is gone.

From the intersection of museums and, uh, well, who knows: The Met recently held its annual Costume Institute Benefit Gala. Alleged celebrities attended. And MANfave Go Fug Yourself has the highlights here, here, and here,

Henri Matisse's The Young Sailor (II) is surely the most shocking portrait of the 20th century. He painted in mid-1906, when his even-then rival Pablo Picasso was finishing up his tame-by-comparison self-portrait. The two paintings that Matisse and Picasso would volley back and forth starting the next year: Baltimore's Blue Nude, MoMA's Les Demoiselles, St. Louis' Bathers with a Turtle, get most of the attention, but Young Sailor is more stunning, fresher even, than any of them.

Leo Stein and Alfred Barr both passed along the same story about Young Sailor's creation: Along with the remarkable still-life Pink Onions were made in Collioure, during Fauve Summer, just after Matisse painted his first great self-portrait. The artist convinced a barely-willing sailor to pose, and made both a drawing and a painting. (It's not clear whether the sailor sat for both, or for just the drawing.) When Matisse got back to Paris later that year, he told his friends that both the still-life and the sailor were the work of a Collioure postman. "You're lying, Matisse," Jean Puy is supposed to have said. "You painted them yourself."

This is a long way of saying that the drawing that Matisse made for (or with) Young Sailor is on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting and the drawing are hung in a corner of the Gelman Collection. I had never seen them together before and the pairing is, well, surprising in a strange way: They're nearly identical. Sure, in the drawing the sailor's hat is at a slightly different angle, and so too a leg... but to find those differences you have to look really, really carefully.

Point being: The art historical story about Pink Onions and Young Sailor -- obviously encouraged by Matisse himself -- is that he made them spontaneously, in a frenzy of fauve creation. Well, if the drawing at the Met was made as the prep-sketch for the painting, it's clear just how carefully Matisse planned this breakthrough canvas. He knew exactly what he was doing and he executed it carefully and purposefully. Only then did he get the cold shakes about how what he'd done was revolutionary. (Which would fit a Matisseian pattern laid out by biographer Hilary Spurling, a pattern that she dates back to about 1898.)

The drawing won't be up at the Met forever, so catch it while you can.

Related: Les Dems at 100: opening at MoMA today.

The Getty and MOCA started loan-trading individual paintings a year or two ago. Recently our National Gallery and the Norton Simon announced that they'd do some one-painting trades too. And Glasstire reports that SMU's Meadows Museum and the UK's National Gallery are filling the transaction wire too. The deal: The Meadows gets a never-seen-before-in-the-US Velazquez until May 31. (Judging from the GT report, the Meadows deal is likely a one-timer.)

Regina Hackett's Seattle P-I blog has been cracklin' good since she returned from vacation. (And not just because she said some nice things about this blog.)

I've particularly enjoyed two recent posts about PDL, a guerilla artist group with a superlative sense of humor. Who's PDL you ask? They've been featured here before: Think Calder's Eagle's eggs. Last week Hackett wrote about PDL's march to Olympic Sculpture Park -- "This is not a swing set."

Yesterday Hackett shared PDL's latest adventure, complete with references to Maurizio Cattelan, Calvin Tomkins, and more. Great, funny stuff. (On PDL: Hey art museums, how much fun would it be to have this bunch 'in residence' for a couple weeks?)

Related: Jen Graves on PDL's creation. More on the swing set from Christopher Frizzelle on Slog.

Yesterday I posted about the delights of the Neue Galerie's Van Gogh and Expressionism show. While there was plenty of Van Gogh to go around, I also saw lots of Matisse in the expressionist canvases.

That's nothing new -- the link between Matisse and the German painters of the period is well-established. What was a surprise to me was an experience at the Ludwig a few months ago. I was standing in a gallery of Germans -- Pechstein, Kirchner, Nolde, and so on -- and I felt like I was in some kind of Matisse master class. I half expected Bevilaqua to come out of the shadows, ready to strike a pose.

I had that feeling at the Neue Galerie when I saw this painting, Young Woman with a Red Fan from around 1910. It's by Max Pechstein. It reminded me of two works: First, Matisse's 1907 Madras Rouge which is at the Barnes Foundation. (And Barnes dates are notoriously fuzzy, so take that 1907 with a grain of Collioure salt.) The woman, the head wrap, the way she's posed on a chair.

The area behind the figure also recalled Kandinsky's Improvisation series, which he started around 1909.

In a related story: Has there ever been a Pechstein retro in the US?

Admin update: MAN was offline for about 20 minutes earlier this afternoon. Everything appears to be back to normal.

Moving Richard Serra sculptures has not always gone smoothly. Perhaps as a result, installing Serra's massive Cor-Ten pieces requires some choreography and some crane-aided ballet. (And probably a low-gust day.)

MoMA has recently installed two Serras (Intersection II and Torqued Ellipse IV) in its sculpture garden. This one-minute, time-lapse video of how they got there is pretty cool.

I'll check in with a Seattle Art Museum coverage roundup later in the week. For now...

Perhaps it's a post-Matisse-Picasso phenomenon. Or maybe it's a post-Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting thing. Whichever, influence shows are big in New York this season, including:

Today's NYT arts section is chock-full of good stuff, including Holland Cotter's review of an MFA Boston Edward Hopper retrospective (or not). But MANfave Roberta Smith truly outdoes herself with a two-fer. Sure, Smith gives us a delightful Monet review. But what I really like is how the divine Ms. S. starts her take on a gawdawful, what-were-they-thinking show at the Met: "Perhaps Frank Stella should have quit when he was ahead."

I'd have had some fun with this earlier, but I've been out of town: At Artworld Salon, Andras Szanto reports that the EU has passed a law to prevent critics from having their words twisted by cultural organizations and the like.

The Whitney better hope this law never comes to the US. Who could forget its flagrantly fictitious 2006 WhiBi advertising, a marketing stinker surpassed only by, well, the show itself? Only one art person in all of NYC bought into the silly campaign.

Time's Richard Lacayo is having some rhyming fun this week: A Frank Gehry and...; A Caillebotte and...

The Atlantic is one of my favorite magazines, so I was rather surprised to see Virginia Postrel's pithy story on the relationship between museums and fashion in the May issue. (Postrel blogs here.)

Postrel's essay, "Dress Sense: Why fashion deserves its place in art museums," has a smart title. It sets up a conversation worth continuing. Heck: One of NYC's two museums collects and exhibits fashion (the Met) and one doesn't (MoMA), indicating that there is a way to have Postrel's not-new discussion in a fresh, engaging manner.

But... Postrel doesn't do that. She resorts to my least favorite rhetorical trick, the creation of straw men. Postrel's entire essay is based on critics that Postrel imagines, non-people whose arguments she then knocks down. (In American public discourse this technique is most often used by George W. Bush, which should be reason enough to retire it forever.) Example:

"Denita Sewell, the Phoenix Art Museum's curator of fashion design, sputters her frustration with presumably sophisticated New York critics who seem to begin every review of a fashion exhibition not by asking whether the show's concept is valid or the pieces are good but whether museums should show fashion at all."

Great. Give us an example. Who says that? Later Postrel quotes another curator:

"' People in the museum world complain that fashion is not art, and they think it is unworthy of being in an art museum,'" says Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology."

Super. But Postrel doesn't bother to find anyone who thinks that. Again:

"Critics who decry fashion collcetions are less troubled by the prescribed costumes of dynastic China or the aristocratic dress of baroque France than by the past century's clothes."

Uh, says who? Does this person exist? The closest Postrel comes to engaging in actual debate with someone who disagrees with her is an anonymous, unsourced quote. Ahem.

Postrel also cites several examples of recent fashion shows in an effort to demonstrate that "fashion collections [emphasis mine] throughout the country are enjoying a new prominence." And Postrel gives us four examples of museums that do fashion... but three of them are exhibitions, not collections. Furthermore, one of those examples, the MFA Boston exhibition devoted to fresh-from-the-runway Paris fashions, violates Postrel's own guidelines for how museums should show fashion: "The challenge for fashion curators is to balance aesthetics and history, pleasure and meaning," Postrel says. But, uh, the MFA Boston show was explicitly not about history or meaning.

I'm sure there's a smart argument to be made for fashion in art museums. Postrel's isn't it.