Tuesday think-ems: Leibovitz, SFMOMA

Couple of pieces from around the web: In yesterday's Washington Post, Paul Richard has an interesting take on the Brooklyn Annie Leibovitz survey that has touched down at the Corcoran. He invokes Gilbert Stuart which brought to mind the celebrity-filled 2004 Stuart retro at the Met. From my review:

"When Stuart was at his best, his portraits capture great men an all their seriousness. When Stuart was less interested, when he was simply painting for his fee, his paintings are flat. Fortunately for us, Stuart did his best work when the most important Americans were before him... [W]hen painting the less prominent, Stuart appears to have been uninterested. In a 1798 portrait of one Samuel Gatliff, Stuart makes his subject look like a surprised bird. In the accompanying portrait of Gatliff's wife and daughter, proportions are askew and a number of body parts appear to be strangely attached. (Stuart seemed to be vaguely disinterested in many of the women he painted. Walking through this exhibit it's apparent that Stuart gave many different women a single, sweetly stupid expression.)"

Also: Time's Richard Lacayo has been posting a Q&A he did with SFMOMA director Neal Benezra: Part one, part two. (Benezra is, well, wrong about museums and buying at art fairs -- I've noted many examples here over the years, including most recently this.) But while we're on Benezra, he's probably the only museum director who got into art when he first saw Clyfford Still's 1945 Self-Portrait. Benezra was fascinated that a self-portrait could be abstract... and decades letter the painting is in the collection of the museum he runs.

And speaking of Benezra speaking of Still: I (very) belatedly found out that SFMOMA has recently reinstalled its Clyfford Still gallery for the first time in eons. (And by recently I mean "in July." Oops.) Benezra requested the re-hang which was carried out by curator Janet Bishop.

The new hanging features seven paintings, including two representational works. Bishop's picks show Still at his largest, including two massive 9.5-feet-by-8.5-feet abstract paintings from the 1950s and an even bigger 9.5-feet-by-13-feet 1960 painting given to the museum by Hunk & Moo Anderson. A 9.5-feet-by-14-feet painting from 1974 rounds out the hanging. (At least one major American curator wants to do a show of these mammoth Stills, but that'll have to wait until the Clyfford Still Museum is up and open.) Gone (for now) is the Peggy Guggenheim-gifted Self-Portrait that Benezra loves.