June 2008 Archives

For as long as I can remember, the first gallery of SFMOMA's permanent collection has featured Henri Matisse's 1916 portraits of Sarah and Michael Stein. Not now: Michael has been replaced with a second 'Sarah,' this one in graphite. If you're in San Francisco it's a must-see hanging.

The painting and the sketch are clearly related and are still strikingly different. The painting is softer, the drawing is more precise. The painting is mysterious, the drawing is direct. The painting is full of questions: Why are Sarah Stein's arms in the air -- or is she lying down? Why does her hair = earmuffs? No matter, it works.

Meanwhile, the drawing is the best kind of puzzle. Yes, it is a study for the portrait, but it is hardly warm enough to be a traditional study for a commission from a devoted supporter. Instead Matisse uses the sketch as a transitional exercise, a conscious scrubbing of recent practice. It's a preparatory sketch -- but for the artist himself and not for the painting he would make. In many ways the two Sarah Steins mark the end of Matisse's cubist period and his transition to what was next.

Between 1914 and the Portrait of Sarah Stein, Matisse painted masterpiece after masterpiece. In a two year period and more or less in chronological order, Matisse painted: View of Notre Dame, French Window at Collioure, Goldfish and Palette, White and Pink Head (the portrait of his daughter Marguerite at right, to which we shall return soon), Still Life after Jan Davidsz. de Heem's 'La Desserte,' Gourds, and Piano Lesson. In the fall of 1916, perhaps spurred on by the first public exhibition of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in July 1916, Matisse finished his two most ambitious cubist paintings: The Moroccans and Bathers by a River. It was a remarkable two-year burst. 

At the end of that period came SFMOMA's two Sarah Steins. They represent two-thirds of a dramatic turning point in Matisse's oeuvre. Before them: Cubism. After them Matisse would complete his transition away from cubism by making one last barely cubist portrait of a new model, Lorette. After that, Matisse gave up cubism for good. He would go on to make many non-cubist portraits of Lorette, followed by the Nice period. But first, the drawing... which I'll discuss tomorrow.

Related: I can't mention a Matisse portrait without steering you toward John Klein's fantastic, must-own book about Matisse's portraits.

I'm back home, so posting will return to normal. MAN will feature several significant stories this week, so be sure to check back often.

• In the LAT, Holly Myers explains why Steve Roden is an artist's artist. Roden at Vielmetter was the best show of new work I saw in LA last week. That's the same sun spinning and fading... (2008) at right.
• This is a little bit out of date because I was traveling, but this story from the Chicago Tribune is troubling for about umpteen reasons. In short, an art exhibition at Chicago's only Jewish museum was closed because some donors thought it was anti-Israel. The story then goes on to describe a couple works... but names no artists and provides no context for their work. Lameness of the story aside, I'm kind of amazed it took me 10 days to hear about this. (The Chicago Tribune's website is a typical Tribune Co. disaster, so I'm not surprised didn't see the story.) Here's the show's website. It makes no mention of the unexpected closure of the show. Artists in the show included Michal Rovner, Shirley Shor and Mona Hatoum. The show's catalogue was published by the museum, and is 'temporarily unavailable' from Amazon.
  
• Walker Art Center director Olga Viso takes an apparent shot at the Minneapolis Star Tribune's coverage of the museum and (to its credit) the paper runs it: " 'This is a wider issue that museums have been grappling with for several years,' said the Walker's Olga Viso. 'As institutions, we've been looked at in limited ways -- finances, attendance -- rather than at the qualitative things.' "
• All I'm going to tell you about this Doug Harvey LA Weekly review is that it features this sentence about Robert Rauschenberg: "[H]e was a dyslexic homosexual drunkard --all top-shelf people in my chest of drawers." It's Doug Harvey. He doesn't write nearly often enough. So when he does (about a big photo show at the Huntington, yes the Huntington), you shouldn't miss it.
• Jen Graves kicks it with an 83-year-old man wearing a US Marines 'Fort Badass' hat at an Oliver Herring 'Task' event. 
• Geoff Edgers says that the MFA Boston has reached its $500M fundraising goal.
• Steven Litt and the Cleveland Plain Dealer have a story-stuffed section on the re-opening of the Cleveland Museum of Art's reopening its original 1916 galleries after a three-year renovation. Even in a Flash player the light in the galleries looks tremendous.
  
• Ed Sozanksi takes to the Philly Inquirer to praise the Friends of the Barnes.
  

I'm taking a travel day. Back tomorrow.

Iowa floods update: Metropolis magazine reports on damage to architectural landmarks. The Wall Street Journal excerpts the Q&A with Pamela White that I ran last week. According to the University of Iowa, the museum building is still closed. And the Iowa City Press-Citizen reports: "UI officials hope that some buildings can be reclaimed before fall semester begins, but about 10 buildings -- those on the art campus and IMU, among others -- are certain to be out of commission for a longer period, said Donald Guckert, UI associate vice president for facilities management."

Back in February I posted about how Picasso biographer John Richardson's perpetual near-total exclusion of all things Matisse from his Picasso books is a bit grating. While wandering the Norton Simon over the weekend (and in between seeing Adam in Sam Francis), I saw another fine example of how much Picasso was thinking about Matisse in 1932.

This is Picasso's 1932 Woman with a Book. The woman, of course, is Marie-Therese Walter. Richardson is happy to discuss how much Picasso was riffing on Ingres in this period -- and indeed he is. But the Norton Simon Picasso is so infused with Matisse it's hard to know where to start: Maybe the textile patterns in the Walter's billowing dress or robe, the windows in the background (blacked out -- a Picasso challenge to Matisse's open-to-the-outside windows), the gold-framed mirror. And then there's the color and the variety of color in the Picasso, both straight out of Matisse.

But my favorite little Picasso nod-to-Matisse here is the color of Walter's skin: It's clearer in the painting (or via the Norton Simon's zoom-in tool), but it's green. Her face is green, her neck is green, her arms are green... she's all green except for one odd place: Her nose. It is made up of one white stripe. I suspect that was Picasso's nod to Matisse's famous 'green stripe' portraits of Amelie Matisse.

Minneapolis-based blog Eyeteeth breaks the news that Walker curator Philippe Vergne will be the next director of Dia. The NYT followed.

When I visited the Norton Simon Museum yesterday, I was stunned to find Sam Francis' magnificent (and underrated) Basel Mural I away from its usual place at the end of one of the Norton Simon's gallery-hallways. Now it's anchoring the modern gallery, the one in which the Norton Simon has installed its Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Kirchner, and so on.

And as often happens when a museum moves a painting, I saw something I'd never seen before. The standard art historical line on Basel Mural I is that Francis was directly inspired by Monet's Nympheas Cycle, which he had seen in Paris just before starting the Basel pieces.

Well, OK. I'm not questioning that. But I saw something different: I saw Francis abstracting Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, from the Sistine Chapel. Take a look after the jump.

• Alas, the state of regional arts journalism: Four days after MAN's Q&A with University of Iowa Museum of Art director Pamela White and almost a week after MAN started flogging the flooding at UIMA, the local papers catch up. Cringe-worthy moment provided by the Walton effect: The Des Moines Register describes the museum's Pollock as a "$100 million" painting, even though it's been effectively demonetized.
• More from the decline of arts journalism: San Diego Union-Tribune critic Robert Pincus, who is now also responsible for the paper's books coverage, is impossible to find on the SDU-T's website. Search on his name and acres of often redundant book stuff pops up before you get to a single art review. Bad search algorithm.
• On the brighter side, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has been surveying the impact of the midwestern floods on architecture. Here's Kamin on a Frank Lloyd Wright, and on two Louis Sullivans.
• Amidst all the attention span I've been spending on the midwest floods, I missed this: Chicago architect Walter Netsch, the designer of the U.S. Air Force Academy's frighteningly militaristic place of worship (yeah.) died this week. Here's Kamin on his passing.
• The Baltimore Museum of Art announces a $65 million fundraising campaign. It's raised $40M in the quiet phase.
  

It's a summer Friday and I'm traveling to boot. I'm pleased to see that many traditional media outlets are beginning to follow the University of Iowa Museum of Art story -- and I hear that more will next week, too. In the meantime, this link to donate to the museum's annual fund seems to be working again. Here's my interview with UIMA interim director Pamela White is here.

• Gorgeous pictures of a Paul Rudolph that a Florida town refuses to save;
• The text of Richard Serra's recent commencement speech at Williams [via];
• Inspired by how well the NYT uses Twitter, I'm resolving to try it out more. Subscribe here to follow me across California museums and galleries this weekend and next week;
  
• A JPEG-driven meandering through Tadao Ando and his about-to-open Clark Art Institute project; and
• Christopher Knight loved Jennifer Steinkamp, Ed Schad isn't so sure.

Today I spoke with University of Iowa Museum of Art interim director Pamela White. Read more about the floods in Iowa City here. Artworks featured in the post are from UIMA's collection and are identified at the bottom of the post. Yesterday I featured the museum's most famous work: Jackson Pollock's 1943 Mural. To donate to the museum, click here.

MAN: I'm never quite sure where to jump in on something like this, so I guess tell me about how the flood started for you.

Pam White: The university really tracked this and was very proactive on watching this come. They are always very watchful of the river probably because of the '93 experience. [The Midwest suffered what was, in many places, a 500-year flood in 1993.] They had a flood plan in place that was quickly activated.

Meanwhile, I was away, I was in Dublin and Galway on a trip with my daughter, who just graduated from college. We were seeing Radiohead in Dublin. And there was a meeting that was held on Monday, June 2 when things were starting. People knew that there was something coming. They started looking at the museum very seriously, reviewing the flood plan.  There was a lot of ramping up on the part of the museum, the university, all of us working closely with the risk management people.

I received an email from our registrar that he wrote late Friday afternoon. When I read it in Galway it was Monday. He just said things were coming and he was getting ready and some things were going to have to be moved. I said do what you need to do. He'd been through the '93 flood, so we all knew what to do.

By the time I got back to the museum at 4am on Wednesday, I'd already called the museum and knew that things were going to be moving very fast indeed. The water was moving much faster than people thought. By Wednesday we were in full-on mode of packing art and moving it. Our first trucks left that day.

The only thing that really surprised us was we had thought we would have until 5pm on Friday afternoon to get things out and to secure the building. Then the water came faster than anyone expected, and we had to leave at 7:45 on Friday morning. We simply had to evacuate. We had additional people coming in and we couldn't use them. The water moved much faster than anyone ever imagined. The water levels went way up.

MAN: What do you know about the condition of the building, water in the building, and all that? I've read a three-to-four-feet figure in a number of places.

PW: We don't know how much water is in the building, we're just not sure. What people are thinking is that perhaps there is three-to-four feet of water in the [Steven Holl-designed] art building. Maybe they can see into that building a little better because of the windows.

MAN: Are they closer to the river than you are?

PW: Actually we're much closer to the river. They're by a pond which is actually not a pond, it's really an old quarry, so there may be something going on there.

MAN: Tell me about the art, about your collection, and what you were able to do with it.

PW: Here's the skinny on that, and it's going to be good to get this out. Eighty percent of our artwork was evacuated, and that's 99 percent of the value of the collection. The bulk of the collection has been moved to Chicago to a secure, confidential art storage facility. The other works that didn't go to Chicago are in a secure local location. They'll be evaluated and possibly moved to another location as well.

MAN: So then the works listed, say, on your website highlights are safe?

PW: The works that are listed as highlights on our website are clear. We worked on a triage basis, down through value and fragility. We did it in a very prof manner. As time grew nigh we were packing very fast. We were moving things. We just had to go as fast you could.

We also know what we didn't get to and everything was moved to as secure as we could make it.

MAN: Is there a timetable for knowing anything about your building, about damage to it?

PW: No one's been able to get back in yet. There were 19 buildings flooded according to general university information. And then some buildings were just very gently touched.

MAN: So you don't know when you might be able to re-install, to re-open.

PW: We don't have any idea. It's best not to speculate because we know nothing. We can't even say that what happened in '93 will happen again.

Because the campus and the infrastructure of the university has been so impacted... [the school is] closed, and next week they've asked us to stay at home if we can and keep the pressure on university buildings to a minimum. Our utilities are compromised, so we don't want lights on and such. We're down to basic things. We've been told to expect to be cold and hot all summer.

MAN: That's a tough thing for an art museum. So you may not get to install for a while.

PW: I think that's about true. It's going to be many months.

MAN: If people want to help what should they do?

PW: We do have an annual fund. If people are interested, if people do wish to donate to the art museum specifically, donate to our annual fund. We'll make use of that for renovations and for other help we'll need.

Images: Ad Reinhardt's Abstract Painting (1960-61), Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park #17 (1968), Max Beckmann's Karnival Triptych (1943) and Joan Miro's A Drop of Dew Falling From the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb (1939).

1.) Check back around 2pm EDT for a Q&A with Pamela White, the interim director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

2.) I don't often do summaries of reader mail, I thought the replies I received to this post about Richard Misrach at the National Gallery of Art were particularly interesting: Curators and museum professionals who wrote in overwhelmingly agreed with my position. Readers who disagreed with what I wrote hit upon a common question: Who cares as long as it gets populist contemporary art into museums? Hmm.

3.) On a recent trip to MoMA I was delighted to see that the museum's curators are beginning to get away from the 'greatest hits' presentation in the upstairs collection galleries. I saw a few comparatively obscure gems sprinkled throughout, including Otto Mueller's Landscape with Yellow Nudes (c. 1919, above) and Niles Spencer's 1921 City Walls.

4.) But MoMA's second floor collection installation was a three-part premise in search of coherence. ('Abstractions,' 'mutability' and 'provocation' are the themes. Allegedly. I thought 'mutability' was a teenage ninja turtle.) There are some excellent pieces on view: Julie Mehretu's 2003 Empirical Construction, Istanbul is a gorgeous black hole that sucks up every candle-watt in the gallery before returning it with little surprises only visible from certain angles (you can only see the little gold 'tree' in the top center of the painting if you're standing in front-center). Carroll Dunham's 1983-85 Age of Rectangles makes me wonder why he went cartoony. Works by Jackie Winsor, Jack Whitten and Dorothea Rockburne look immediate and fresh. Nancy Spero's intensely assertive 1979 Notes in Time looks great. Paul Noble's nobnest zed is a total hoot. The rest of the floor... groan. The Rothko/Reinhardt mini-show upstairs is terrif; why can't MoMA figure out how to do presentations like that of more recent art?

5.) Is it just me or are Barbizon painters suddenly everywhere? Last year the Baltimore Museum of Art hosted a pleasant, subtle show that highlighted Pissarro's transition from Barbizon-er to impressionist. More recently: In Sunday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch David Bonetti reviewed The Barbizon School and the Nature of Landscape at StL's Kemper Museum. And the National Gallery of Art just closed a show called In the Forest of Fontainebleau, a show that included more than a few Barbizonians mixed with thrilling photographs, especially those of Eugene Cuvelier. (The show opens at the MFA Houston on July 13.)

So why are there all these Barbizon shows all of a sudden? Is there some reason why Barbizon is suddenly relevant today? Or is it just coincidence?

• Yesterday I made an oblique reference to the quality of the University of Iowa Museum of Art's collection. Check out highlights from the museum's post-1900 European and American art or print collections. This is Jackson Pollock's 1943 Mural.
  
• In Davenport, Iowa, the new, David Chipperfield-designed Figge Art Museum has water on its doorstep. [via]
• PBS' NewsHour says that the UIMA collection has been moved to Chicago; and
• The university is insured for flood damage, but it's not yet clear how much damage there is.

I've been enjoying Jonathan Jones' posts on the Guardian's art blog of late. Most recently Jones commented on the latest Matisse-Picasso-style mano-a-mano painting show: Boucher and Chardin at London's Wallace Collection. In Jones' telling the show is a good bit of focused fun -- and a Chardinian rout.

Another thing I like about Jones write-up: He presents the airing of the Boucher and the Chardin as a painter vs. painter confrontation. When Matisse-Picasso was on view in New York a few years ago, there was much curatorial hand-wringing about how viewers shouldn't necessarily take the opportunity of the show to consider which artist won and which artist lost. No such reticence from Jones.

The west side of Iowa's Steven Holl; a panorama of the arts campus; ditto; the University of Iowa Museum of Art; ditto; ditto.

In the early 1990s, when I was matriculating at the University of Missouri (which is where I learned that word), the state suffered through two massive floods. One was a '500-year flood' and another was a '100-year flood,' which taught me that the combination of God and the Army Corps of Engineers was truly to be feared. I'll never forget spending summer nights sandbagging at Rocheport, Missouri. The heat and humidity, even after 10pm, was unbearable, and the stench from all the organic material rotting in the fast-flowing river was Augean. But each night it seemed like all of mid-Missouri was there, doing whatever we could.

Since I moved away from the Midwest I've noticed that Easterners tend to roll their eyes at middle-American floods, to consider them disasters that trail earthquakes or hurricanes as horrors. Phooey on that. People lived in these houses. There are more sad, remarkable photos at the Iowa City Press-Citizen's website.

There are lots of ways to explain the disaster, but this is an art site so I'll focus on the University of Iowa Museum of Art. It is closed and flooded. The Press-Citizen reports that there is three-to-four feet of water in the museum itself. A post on the museum's blog says that the art is safe. (UPDATE: I'm reliably told that the museum got all of its best art out, but that some works were left behind.)

The pictures tell the story: Here's the outside of the museum. Here's the art campus.  (Photographer Allyson Bone: "Iowa arts is totally screwed.") Here's the water rising at the museum. Here's art leaving the museum ahead of the flood.

The museum has a too-little-known but super collection, including this landmark 1943 Pollock. You can see how close the museum and the Steven Holl-designed School of Art and Art History were to the Iowa River here. Expect to read much more on MAN about the museum and recovery efforts in the coming weeks. (And have your Visa cards ready.)

Of course, even before the Army Corps dredged its way through the region the Midwest occasionally suffered fearsome floods. As you might expect these floods left a substantial impression on American painters, none moreso than Thomas Hart Benton, who was a Missourian through and through. I've presented two of his paintings here. The one at the top of this post is 1958's Spring Storm, from the collection of the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. That lightning bolt is literally carved into board. The second painting is Benton's 1945 Spring on the Missouri, from the North Carolina Museum of Art.

UPDATE: More photos.

• LATer Agustin Garza misunderstands the notion of respect: Art museums respect artists when they present curator-driven, scholarly, thorough shows. Art museums disrespect artists when they only show their work in an exhibition that fluffs of a private collector and that tells a museum's curators that their judgment and knowledge is not needed because it's easier to play footsie with a collector. If you want a clear indication that the LAT's arts staff is suffering from staff cuts, it's this strikingly clueless story. I'd like to think that if the LAT had a 'normal' arts staff, that the fluffing story would have been done on the occasion of the Hammer-Ricky Jay show or by now re: LACMA.
  
• Kenneth Baker is rather more interested in this catalogue than in the turnstile-turner Women Impressionists show that goes along with it. (Which isn't surprising: Mary Cassatt is the most over-rated artist of her time.)
  
• More Baker: Why has Frida eclipsed Diego?
  
• NYTer Karen Rosenberg on the gender disparities evident in the presentation of '70s sculpture.
  
• Christopher Knight has me eager to see the latest Jennifer Steinkamp.
• I'm not sure I understand why Blake Gopnik chooses JMW Turner as Richard Misrach's foil, but I certainly agree with this: "Any deluxe art museum already risks being seen as a warehouse for rich people's fancy playthings. So for such an institution to present flattering new images of the wealthy at play might be an iffy call. Does the National Gallery really want Misrach's splashy beach photos to represent its take on contemporary art at its most searching and significant?" To put it mildly: The NGA's last 10 years of contemporary shows is uncurious, to say the least. (Reference point: Jim Dine works on paper. A minor best-seller, the Clive Cussler of the art world.)
  
• Regina Hackett weighs in on the oddness of the Alison Elizabeth Taylor journo-phenomenon.
• Also: Hackett on Josiah McElheny, whose most recent work reminds me of Spencer Finch and Erich's Lamp Shop.
  
• Blair Kamin and Renzo Piano sit in the AIC's Modern Wing and discuss the AIC's Modern Wing (and plenty more).
• Alice Thorson reports that Missouri will soon be full of pro-voting billboards created by artists. Martha Rosler's should be a doozy.
  

It's a summer Friday (which means no posts), but here are some links for the weekend:

• Guards with guns? Maybe this is worse...;
• I wish I'd thought to do this at MoMA's Eliasson presentation; and
• PORT interviews Ed Ruscha.

Remarkably, the New York Sun seems to be standing behind this Kate Taylor story. Despite Taylor's reliance on Lee Rosenbaum's typically irresponsible blindfolded dart-throwing, the Sun ran no correction today, at least not one that I could find online. (Aside to Kate Taylor and her eds: Word has it that MoMA director Glenn Lowry is the lovechild of Brooke Astor and a Martian. Go with it.)

Tufts economist and blogger Daniel Drezner and NYT book blogger Barry Gewen are out with some interesting thoughts on public intellectualism circa now. Drezner says that public intellectuals are everywhere, and the Gewen misses a little bit of his point about the democratization of new media.

Also notable: What art-interested figures are public intellectuals? Uh, not very many. The definition that Drezner and Gewen use (or imply) involves embracing cross-discipline thinking. Art people tend to burrow and bunker into the safe little cocoon of the art world, rarely engaging issues, ideas outside the ghetto.

Of course that's not easy to do. John Updike is proof that many who try to come into art from outside it often read like assertive dilettantes. Still, I think the Drezner/Gewen discussion points to an obvious underdiscussed issue: Visual arts types are more comfortable not engaging with the 'outside' world, so we don't. More arts institutions should make changing that a key part of their programming.

Deeply problematic: This morning Kate Taylor of the New York Sun used famously and frequently in-error Lee Rosenbaum as the source for a story. [via] Worse: It's a story about the Met. You may remember the recent topic of 'Rosenbaum and the Met': The museum's director was the subject of a bizarre Rosenbaumian serenade. Is Taylor's acceptance of an oft incredulous non-reporter what passes for arts journalism these days? Woe.

(Incidentally: It's great when newspapers and magazines credit reputable blogs for stories those blogs have broken. But if you're a traditional media outlet you've got to think (a little more, in this case) about which blogs are reliable and which aren't.)

UPDATE: Rosenbaum calls out the Sun's Taylor, saying:

Let me hasten to assure you that I don't know for certain if those names are on the list that the Metropolitan Museum's trustees are working with; they are names that Met staffers and/or other knowledgeable sources believe may be in play. Taylor his given my list more credence than it, perhaps, deserves.

Duh. Rosenbaum's post was nothing but rumor-mongering. Some people think that has a place; I think it's lazy look-at-me posturing of the cheapest sort. On the bright side: It wasn't in song.

I've had a little issue with my email service's spam filter. If you sent me a (non-press release) email through MAN between Thursday and today (and I didn't respond), please re-send it. Sorry.

• Entertaining confluence: On view now in MoMA's drawings galleries is this 1978 work-on-paper by Tom of Finland. Towleroad picks up on a creative new Parisian Tom-centric marketing campaign. (BTW, if you're a Tomboy you'd probably dig this biography.);
• With some help from the family of Aaron Douglas and the NYPL Schomburg Center, Douglas' hometown of Topeka recently 'made' a Douglas mural;
• Something about this house [via] reminds me of Magritte; and
  
• Regina Hackett wraps up Vija Celmins, Barnett Newman and Vachel Lindsay, and it works.
  

It's almost certainly an accident of installation and gallery availability, but on the other side of a wall from an Aaron Douglas retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is a movie-screen-sized Kara Walker. The Walker is the perfect up-to-the-minute introduction to a Douglas show: She uses cut-outs to make points about America's racial history. She uses scale to make it impossible to miss those points. And her work is a clever amalgamation of much that came before -- including Douglas.

Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist is a peculiar, partial triumph. At its best, in a dozen or so paintings and murals made almost entirely between 1927 and 1935, Douglas is revealed as a quintessential early American modernist, a Harlem Renaissance painter who successfully fused lessons from the American and European avant-gardes with American content and a lot of old-fashioned allegory. But the exhibition, curated by Susan Earle, also reveals Douglas (1899-1979) as a not-particularly-interesting traditionalist, a painter of shockingly dull landscapes and portraits. Finally, the biggest mystery is what happened to Douglas and his production after World War II. The last 30something years of Douglas' career as a painter are nearly totally absent from the show and are scarcely addressed in the show's catalogue.

But those works from the Douglas peak decade are gripping. In painting after mural after painting there is optimism, triumph, achievement, promise and an insistence on arrival. By the time Douglas started his best paintings in the late 1920s, African art was well-established as a key source for modern painting. Douglas pushes modern painting past its ethnographic roots: Black art from Africa was once present only as inspiration to modern painters such as Matisse and Picasso. Douglas put black people where there had once been only artifacts.

Unlike many of the artists who have come of age after the civil rights era, Douglas is most interested in showing self-determined success. Douglas' most common signifier of such is not government, but industry, as at top in 1936's Aspiration. While Douglas refers to struggle in nearly every major painting -- witness the arms and chains at the bottom of Aspiration -- he almost never makes references to contemporary racism. It's not as if Douglas was unaware: Aspiration was one of a suite of paintings that Douglas made for the Texas Centennial Exposition. The paintings were funded by the federal government because the Texas legislature refused to make funds available for black artists. The ongoing struggle isn't what interested Douglas, the inevitability of arrival is. [Second painting: 1934's Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction.]

Next: Building Douglas' modernism.

• Artist Ron English mashes up Lincoln and Obama.
• Should Britain save a Rubens? Jonathan Jones says yes. I sheepishly admit that Rubens is the Old Master who interests me least-est. His Daniel in the Lions' Den at the NGA makes me cringe and laugh.
• Speaking of cringing, Jen Graves unloads on the Seattle Art Museum's odd marketing efforts.
  
• Because I've been traveling I've been slow to share this sad, bizarre story from the Carnegie Museum of Art: A guard slashed a Vija Celmins.
• Consider together: David Maisel [via] and Florian Maier-Aichen.
• Speaking of C-Monster, I wish I'd thought of this description, I think: Zaha Hadid's new Dubai project is "a clitoral mass of undulating concrete."
• If you missed your chance to hear Lee Rosenbaum sing a lusty ode to Philippe de Montebello (the post crashed last week), the audio is back. Really. Good God almighty. I wonder if Rosenbaum and Linda Yablonsky know each other. Speaking of which: Gawker picked up that meme.
• Artist Josephine Meckseper is hitting her stride. Heart as Arena explains why.
  
• I'm ending this post with a detail from the Kara Walker on view now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of its Lucelia Award show. This will make some slight amount of sense when I make today's second post...

A few weeks ago I criticized the Hirshhorn for presenting an Amy Sillman exhibition that is nearly indistinguishable from a commercial gallery show. The National Gallery of Art has gone further: It is presenting an exhibition that essentially was a commercial gallery exhibit.

In 2004 Richard Misrach debuted a new series of photographs at PaceWildenstein's Chelsea branch. The show entirely consisted of photos from Misrach's 'On the Beach' series. The show, and the work, was enormous and lovely. Fast-forward four years to this past weekend, when Richard Misrach: On the Beach opened at the NGA over the weekend. It came from the Art Institute of Chicago, which originated the show. The exhibition is an enlarged version of the PaceWildenstein show, and nothing more.

The NGA seems to have known it was stepping in it. In a press release the NGA says, "While some of these photographs have been exhibited over the past few years, the national tour of the exhibition is the first time that so many works from this series can be seen together." That's silly posturing; a distinguished museum is supposed to be more than sizable square footage available for the enlargement of a commercial gallery show.

Also worth noting: Neither the AIC nor the NGA has presented a scholarly publication or new research on Misrach, instead falling back on an Aperture book of the series.

• Chicago Tribune art critic Alan Artner slams, obliterates and unloads on Jeff Koons at the MCA Chicago.
  
• There was a weird passage in this Anne-Marie O'Connor's Jorge Pardo story in the LAT. (Pardo is 'building' the re-installation of LACMA's pre-Columbian galleries.) Sez O'Connor: "LACMA spokeswomen declined to make pre-Columbian curator Virginia Fields available or discuss details of the Pardo work until just before the opening of the new galleries, which is set for late July."
  
• LATer Mike Boehm reports that the Orange County Museum of Art is moving to Costa Mesa. Architect: Thom Mayne. Construction and other details: TBD.
• Linda Yablonsky blogging from an art fair for the NYT?!?!?! Yes, really. Not exactly the NYT's finest moment. Her posts (which are as unfortunate as you might expect) inevitably bring to mind Yablonsky's most infamous line, typed as the U.S. was involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: "Attending these art fairs is a bit like combat reporting, where you keep hopping on whatever helicopter is heading out to the next battlefield." Other FabYab favorite moments here, here and here.
• I still don't understand. BTW, the link is to Washington Post critic Blake Gopnik writing about white art.
• Jennifer Whitson of the Indianapolis Business Journal tells the story behind the Indy Museum's Art & Nature Park.
  
• Dear St. Louis Post-Dispatch (still): Blow up this page.

I'm on travel. Back on Monday.

Two good reads from two top critics:

• Roberta Smith picks up where I left off on Anne d'Harnoncourt yesterday. Note the absence of 'the Tuts...'
• Jonathan Jones in the Guardian: Banksy, Twombly and graffiti art.

1.) Every time I'm at the Baltimore Museum of Art I see things that are relentlessly fabulous. The mini-show of Bonnard and Vuillard prints is fantastic. The Charles Norman Sladen photo-book in this show was a revelation. (MoMA owns a Sladen, but that's the only other way I've heard of him.) It has the only Jean-Pierre Gauthier I've ever seen in the US, and it's fabulous. But why can't the museum open its third-floor contemporary galleries? They've been closed for months -- and with no explanation to visitors.

2.) It's really nice to see Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series together for the first time in years. (MoMA owns half of it, the Phillips owns the other half.) So I have a modest proposal: MoMA doesn't show the piece much; it doesn't really fit what they do. Meanwhile, the Phillips has several gawdawful pieces by New York artist Elizabeth Murray. They don't really fit what the Phillips does (and I'm at a loss to explain what they're doing there). So I think the museums should make a trade.

3.) I'll be talking about Aaron Douglas next week, but in the meantime check out the show's catalogue. It's one of the best, most readable volumes I've seen all year.

4.) A fascinating mix of bizarre self-promotion and apparently happy inaccuracy.

5.) The Times (UK) asks precisely the wrong question about Gustav Klimt. The question isn't why are his paintings worth 'X?' but instead: Why is he an important figure? Part of it is because iIn the most anti-Semitic fin-de-siecle European city, Klimt publicly, openly, and proudly partnered with Jews at a time when Viennese just did not do that. His work is an example of an oeuvre that would not have been possible without a dedication to a certain kind of progressive humanism. The Times piece is a good example of someone writing about art and forgetting that the rest of the world exists, that art exists in the world, not just in the art world.

• Great moments in recent artspeak, presented in a C-Monster quiz;
• Now they have a date: The Art Gallery of Ontario is opening its first-in-Canada Frank Gehry on Nov. 14;
• I keep forgetting to link to this: New Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee on Anish Kapoor at the Boston ICA;
• MCA Denver architect David Adjaye lands another contemporary museum gig?; and
  
• I'm always glad to see Fred Sandback even though they make me sad. There's one up now in Indianapolis.

On the death of Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne d'Harnoncourt:

• Peter Dobrin's Inquirer obituary. The story reveals that d'Harnoncourt was not offered the Met job soon-to-be vacated by Philippe de Montebello.;
• Three writers collaborate on the Daily News' obit;
  
• William Grimes' obit in the NYT, which is the only one of the bunch that mentions that d'Harnoncourt and the PMA went to court (and won) in an effort to integrate European paintings from the John G. Johnson collection into the PMA's holdings. (The Johnson bequest had laid down guidelines on the display of the collection, PMA wanted them eliminated.) It's a key point because it presages Philadelphia's attack on the Barnes Foundation. It's not clear to me how the Philly papers left this out -- except that perhaps layoffs and cutbacks have so pared away institutional memory that there's just no one left who remembers 1989; and
• Ed Sozanski says that d'Harnoncourt will be difficult to replace. The Inquirer says that Sozanski will have a fuller remembrance in Sunday's paper.

Obviously missing from the Philadelphia coverage: As the most important cultural figure in Philadelphia, d'Harnoncourt might have been able to prevent the hijacking of the Barnes Foundation. There's no evidence that she tried and so far as I know she never spoke publicly against the move. Her silence was instrumental in allowing Philadelphia's power structure to kill the Barnes.

Also: It's hard to note the absence of something in a consideration of a career, but you didn't see AEG's Tut or other such silliness at d'Harnoncourt's museum. Her Philadelphia Museum provided a standard.

On the retirement of Seattle Art Museum director Mimi Gates:

• Regina Hackett discusses Mimi Gates and Anne d'Harnoncourt (with a great picture of Gates and Richard Serra);
• Hackett's thorough evaluation of Gates' tenure;
• Sheila Farr in the Seattle Times;
  
• Jen Graves asks: Does Gates' departure increase the possibility that American art collector Bill Gates makes a gesture toward the museum? I don't think Gates has any Caravaggios-for-SAM up his sleeve, but as an American art collector Bill Gates is rivaled only by Alice Walton...

The Philly Inky reports that Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne d'Harnoncourt died this morning of natural causes. She was 64. Updates: AP. Philly Daily News obit.

A couple of weeks ago I signed up for Facebook and Twitter. One of the first things both sites asked me to do was to upload a picture of myself. Well, that seemed a little overly familiar, so I supplied both with a fantastic 1906 Matisse self-portrait from the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. A week later I became Pierre Bonnard.

Once upon a time self-portraiture was an artistic staple. Self-portraits are some of the most famous, recognizable work by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Courbet, Picasso, Beckmann, Warhol and hundreds of other artists. For the better part of the last few decades, self-portraits haven't been a part of contemporary artistic production. There's Chuck Close, there's Cathy Opie and after that the field thins. (The most common contemporary self-portraits are the distanced, filtered, Cindy Sherman/Nikki S. Lee/Matthew Barney type.)

Enter Facebook and Twitter, which have been where self-portraits go to live. While artists are increasingly disinterested in self-portraits, the rest of us are in love with them. At right is part of my Facebook friends lineup. It's got it all: Straightforward head shots, quirkiness, a picture of a tech geek with a satellite telescope in the background, legs, and look-how-casual-I-am. My Facebook pals are using their self-portraits to tell us something about them... which is not so different from what artists have done for hundreds of years. Picasso was reminding us that he's an artist and a worker. Courbet's self-portrait is image-as-marketing. Opie shares her journey from 1994's leathergirl to today's mom (and by so doing reminds us of changes in GLBT America).

At some point self-portraits will come back. Art history as a way of pulling artists back in, if only as a way of allowing themselves to measure themselves against the past. Gerhard Richter's 1996 self-portrait is blurry in a way that recalls late Rembrandt (see 1632 vs. 1669). There's this Las Meninas-referencing 2005 David Hockney too. Richter and Hockney waited until they were old enough to compare themselves -- if Richter made a self-portrait before 1996, when he was 64, I can't think of it. When 23-year-old David Hockney made a self-portrait, he hid any obvious reference to self. ('48' = David Hockney. 'D' is the fourth letter of the alphabet, 'H' is the eighth. Hockney pictured himself with '23 23,' Walt Whitman.)

I'm not suggesting that Caryn Coleman-on-her-couch-reading is destined for MoMA. But when artists are surrounded with self-portraits at every digital turn, it's easy to understand why they don't bother to compete with their cousin's camera phone-as-self-promotion. Thanks to technology, we're all Courbet.

• The WP's Blake Gopnik writes that Jacob Lawrence made significant contributions to "black art" and that Aaron Douglas didn't. I think they both made significant contributions to American art, and it's not clear to me why Gopnik restricts his discussion to "black art."
• Anne-Marie O'Connor explains the armed guards near the Damien Hirst at BCAM@LACMA.
  
• Kenneth Baker looks at David Park's late gouaches and considers them within the context of both his artistic interest and in terms of the cancer that eventually killed him. The Hackett-Freedman show is here.
• In the NYT, Dorothy Spears examines the artists involved in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy upcoming at the High.
• Regina Hackett says that the Seattle Art Museum is mixing up its modern and contemporary installations more than ever before. 
• Charles Dee Mitchell retells the Gerald & Sara Murphy story and also gushes over On Kawara in the Dallas Morning News. (The DMN says it's Kawara's first US museum show in 15 years, but a broad selection of Kawaras have been on view at Dia Beacon. Not an exhibition, true, but certainly an in-depth installation.)
• Dear St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Blow up this page.
• Laura Molzahn talks with Jeff Koons in the Chicago Tribune. Some of the answers are head-scratchers.
• The KC Star's Alice Thorson on the Carnegie International: Everything's broken.