March 2009 Archives

• Texas weather: Indoors in Houston, outdoors (with Serra) in Fort Worth.
• Christopher Knight reviews Baltimore's Franz West show, now at LACMA.
• Watching William Kentridge from home.
• Artist Steve Roden's blog has been extra-good lately.
• Venetian Red reports that SFMOMA has acquired this Amy Sillman.
  

Continued from this morning with National Gallery of Art curator Sarah Greenough and photographer Robert Frank...

And so curator and artist discussed the journeys that led to The Americans. Greenough explained to the audience how police in Arkansas arrested Frank, mostly for being non-Southern. "I was alone and it was very difficult," Frank said. I was lucky and I just continued my trip. [The arrest] encouraged me to take a sharp look at these people and how they leaned against a wall or how they looked at you or at women. It made me a reporter."

Frank explained how sometimes in an effort to alleviate the loneliness he felt, especially in the South, he'd pick up hitchhikers. The blacks he would pick up would invariably insist on sitting in the backseat, and Frank said he had trouble adjusting to that. Greenough noted that, in fact, many of Frank's finest pictures were of minorities, and that perhaps that was because he himself is Jewish.

Frank nodded. "I also think that these people are more photogenic than white people." Greenough quickly jumped in: "OK, we won't go there."

But why not? Clearly there was something in 'outsiderness' to which Frank related, and it comes out time and time again in his work. Greenough eventually found a way to sorta go there, by showing Frank's photograph of a couple reclining on a hill in San Francisco.

"This is my favorite photograph of all," Frank said. "It is an invasion of people in their private lives and they were just looking at the view. So was I. It was a really good moment to get." Frank explained that as the couple turned around to confront him, he continued to snap away, pretending he was shooting a 360-degree panorama. Greenough complimented Frank on his ability to catch moments like that.

"Often photography is an accident," he said. "But if an accident happens three times it is not an accident any more. "

Frank didn't just play for laughs. A recurring theme in his remarks was how much he admired how Jack Kerouac and many other people he encountered on his trips loved America. He spoke repeatedly about the importance of spontaneity, how he wielded it as a strategy in Peru, in Europe and in the United States. He spoke tenderly about how he never quite found another 'Americans' in his film work, that's why he returned to photography: "Maybe the films didn't give or get me the recognition that I thought they should."

Greenough asked Frank about his comfort with his post-Americans fame. "I see it more as some shadow that's kind of following me," Frank said. "I have to find out how I feel about that shadow. I'm just happy to have reached the age I've reached. I'm lucky that way. I keep working and maybe I can put something together."

Near the end of the conversation, Greenough showed my favorite Frank: a picture Frank took at his then-home in Mabou, Nova Scotia, with Mabou Harbour or the Northumberland Strait off in the distance. Thinking of what Frank said about fame, Greenough asked him if hanging his own work on a clothesline was a way of looking back at an important time in his life. Frank peered at the image and smiled.

"That was a lovely house we had there," he said. "But, you see, you have to create the foreground yourself."

[Images: Top: Robert Frank, San Francisco, 1956. Private collection. Bottom: Robert Frank, Mabou, Nova Scotia, 1977. Collection of the National Gallery of Art.]

Photographer Robert Frank makes few public appearances. So when he did on Thursday -- at the National Gallery of Art in conjunction with the NGA's  50th anniversary exhibition of The Americans -- the line was over an hour long. A surprisingly large number of attendees were college-age students whose parents had barely been born when 'The Americans,' Frank's iconic detailing of America in the 1950s, was first published. When Frank entered the auditorium, necks craned and a certain irony became evident: Few of the assembled knew if the comfortably rumpled man in a taupe sweater, a tan shirt, and chocolate-colored trousers was the man they'd come to see. They'd never seen a photograph of him. [Image.]

Frank was joined by exhibition curator Sarah Greenough, who was prepared with notes, slides and a path that she wanted to follow: Frank's upbringing in Switzerland, his love of hiking and traveling through the Alps, his beginnings as a photographer, his emigration to the United States in 1947, his encounters with Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, his Guggenheim fellowship, 'The Americans' and a few things since. As curators are wont to do, she addressed the work from the point-of-view of Milestone, and she seemed to expect Frank to talk about the work as Cultural Touchstone.

Frank, 84, had other ideas. With Greenough's first questions about Frank's work I could almost hear Frank thinking: The work is the work. Don't fuss. It's what I did. It took Greenough a few minutes to adjust to Frank's Me, my work? and for Frank to adjust to Greenough's Me, I historicize. 

But then things picked up, in the early 1950s, when Greenough asked Frank what he hoped he could gain professionally from seeking out and meeting Edward Steichen.

"What I could gain from Steichen," Frank said and paused, apparently trying to decide exactly how he wanted to answer the question. "...was his name that he could put on a letter. He could help me get a Guggenheim fellowship!" The crowd laughed. Frank had found the room.

Greenough played along. She read from the application Frank submitted to try to earn a Guggenheim fellowship that would enable what would become 'The Americans.' Greenough told Frank that she'd received many letters from him over the years. The Guggenheim application sounded like none of them. Frank blinked back at her.

"I've got my name at the bottom of it!" he replied, incredulously. He paused again -- and let loose a sly grin. "But in fact Walker Evans wrote most of it." More laughter. Frank and Greenough were off...

Part two: Stories from The Americans, the years after, and a favorite mid-career picture. [Image: Robert Frank, Political Rally, Chicago -- 1956.]

Carefully Aimed Darts thoughtfully responds to my posts on museums and national responsibility for torture and whether museums might 'collect' the Abu Ghraib photographs. (And does so with a better hed than I used!)

I doubt I'm going to be able to see the MFAB's Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, but at least the exhibition's website is all-out.

For most of the last month, the Hirshhorn has been forced to close substantial sections of the museum because of a security staff shortage. According to a Smithsonian spokesperson, the Hirshhorn is the only Smithsonian museum that has had to close museum spaces because of understaffing. [Image: Ron Mueck, Untitled (Big Man), 2000. Hirshhorn collection.]

"We haven't had what we feel is enough security to secure all the galleries," Hirshhorn spokesperson Gabriel Riera said. "We've had to have rolling close-outs of galleries to make sure we are able to keep Louise Bourgeois [guarded]."

Like other Smithsonian Institution museums, the Hirshhorn's guards are employed and assigned by the Smithsonian. According to Smithsonian spokesperson Linda St. Thomas, the museum's allotment of security staff is four guards higher than it was last year, and that the museum's gallery closures are unrelated to any Smithsonian-wide financial pressures.

"If a museum decides to close a gallery because the museum doesn't have adequate security to protect what's on view, that's up to them," St. Thomas said.

In the last two years the Smithsonian has dramatically cut the number of guards available to the Hirshhorn. According to a 2007 General Accounting Office report that used data provided by the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn received 49 guards from the Smithsonian in 2003 and 47 in 2007. Riera said that only 38 guards are now assigned to the Hirshhorn, a 19 percent drop from two years ago.

According to the most recent data from The Art Newspaper's annual museum attendance survey, the Hirshhorn is America's second-most-visited modern and contemporary art museum, behind only the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Riera said that the security decline was due to "budget cutbacks" and that the Smithsonian could not hire new guards until Congress passed and hte president signed the FY 2009 federal budget, a process which was completed on March 11. St. Thomas said that the Smithsonian would be hiring 20 new guards in FY 2009. Those guards will be divvied up among all of the Smithsonian's Washington museums, so it's unclear if the Hirshhorn will receive a staff infusion that would allow the Hirshhorn to resume normal operations. [Image: A museum visitor examines a Gillian Wearing in the Hirshhorn's collection on loan from Heather and Tony Podesta.]

According to the most recent data from The Art Newspaper's museum attendance survey, the Hirshhorn is America's second-most-visited modern and contemporary art museum, behind only the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"We regularly communicate with The Castle about about what our needs are," Riera said, using SI shorthand for the Smithsonian administration. "We indicate to them that we need more guards."

The closures, which have roughly coincided with the opening of the museum's Louise Bourgeois retrospective on Feb. 26, have frustrated museum staff and visitors for weeks. There have been occasional days during March when all of the museum's galleries have been open, but those days have been exceptional enough that Riera expressly mentioned all the museum's galleries were open for several days last week. The closings have entirely excluded the museum's second floor, where the Bourgeois retrospective is installed.

The recent difficulty in keeping the museum's galleries open figures to be one of the first challenges facing the Hirshhorn's new director, Richard Koshalek, when he takes over in two weeks. The Hirshhorn has effectively been without a director since September 11, 2007, when Olga Viso announced she would become the director of the Walker Art Center.

• LATer David Ng reports that Andy Warhol's Polaroids have touched down at USC's Fisher Gallery.
• In the Houston Chronicle, Douglas Britt examines why the MFA Houston has so many borrowed paintings in its galleries.
• Lawrence Rinder became the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and spent time in the museum's collection storage checking out what 'he' had. Result: A collection hanging, of which Kenneth Baker approves.
• Richard Lacayo has the latest on the Rose Art Museum.
• Christopher Knight writes that the MFA Boston has brought to life the Venice of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.
  

I need a day off. Something to look forward to, at least for me: On Monday Tuesday I'll tell you about Robert Frank's Friday visit to the National Gallery. If you missed it this week: Lest ye doubt, I followed entrails through the Philly Museum and back into art history (we're having fun with entrails on Twitter today too), basked in a bizzare, fabulous Titian (note: it's been 47 years since the last Titian biography was published, alas), wrote up some acquisitions, and more.

The Corcoran is the latest arts institution to cut back. In response to queries from MAN, the Corcoran issued a statement from director and president Paul Greenhalgh:

Like many non-profit organizations around the country, we are facing difficult decisions at this time. We at the Corcoran, began a process eighteen months ago of looking at our mission and our plans for long term sustainability, however the current economic situation is driving a more urgent focus on our cost structure. As a result, we did need to reorganize and eliminate some positions. We will continue to focus on ways to increase needed revenue and manage to more efficiently deliver a world class experience to our community in the face of changing realities. We value all of our employees and do not take these actions lightly.

Despite requests, the Corcoran has not detailed the depth of the staff/budget cuts. However, the museum's director of marketing and communications, Steve Taylor, has left and chief financial officer Christopher M. Leahy is no longer listed on the Corcoran's website. Associate curator for contemporary art Sarah Newman also is not listed. (The Corcoran may be down to three curators.)

Update, Friday 10am: The Corc says that the information on the 'press' section of its website was incomplete and that Newman is still with the gallery. As of this update, Newman is still not listed with the gallery's other curators on the press section of the Corcoran's website.

Is it just me, or is the Philadelphia Museum of Art the place to see a rather astonishing number of grotesque open wounds?

The detail at left is from Peter Paul Rubens' Prometheus Bound. (Rubens had help: Frans Snyders painted the eagle.) At eight-feet-by-six-feet, Prometheus is the rare monsterpiece that manages to effect a remarkable amount of torsional tension. Philly has installed it in a comparatively small space, so it looms over the viewer with all the menace of an irate Zeus. The scale, the composition: It all makes clear that there's no doubting the hell through Prometheus is enduring.

Funny: It's not the kind of painting to which I typically respond -- especially because I'm not a big Rubens 'fan.' Baroque melodrama usually makes me wince in disbelief. Not here. The Philadelphia painting is terrifically stomach-churning. Eight days later, I'm still fascinated by it.

Downstairs -- and for now you've really got to work to get to it because the museum's doors to the American galleries are shut and the Ce$anne show has made it a little complicated to find and to reach the American galleries -- is Thomas Eakins' famous The Gross Clinic.

It's almost exactly the same size as the Rubens/Snyders. It's not as intense a painting. In the Eakins there are two foci: The wound in the cadaver into which several medicos are thrusting their fingers, and a spotlit Dr. Samuel D. Gross, who has the wisdom to be looking away from the wound even as he apparently encourages his students to key in on it.

In person, at full-scale, it's a much greater painting than JPEGs would indicate. Remember: It was painted in 1875, a decade after medicine didn't exactly cover itself with glory during the Civil War. In some ways it's not just a painted tribute to a learned professor, it's a statement of belief in medicine, a painting partially meant to encourage doubters to believe in advancement of the discipline.

Finally, in the museum's contemporary galleries, you can find a Jeff Wall lightbox that isn't in the PMA's collection, but that is often here on loan: Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986). Consider it Wall's raucously twisted commentary on wounds-(and-war)-in-art.

Dead Troops looks like a fantastically bizarre, post-Boschian trompe l'oeil battle-scene. The closer you get to it, the more the un-real details reveal themselves. As you can see in this example, Dead Troops is full of faux-macabre wounds that the ghostly soldiers are poking, perhaps to see if they're real and perhaps to show 'em off. The soldiers are also exhibiting their own entrails, as if to say, 'How about it! I'm thrusting my hand into my side so that you will believe!!'

In fact, you might say that Wall's soldiers are proving the 'reality' of their wounds to the doubting Thomases among them (and among us).

Related: The Tate has a nice page on the Wall, complete with plenty of image-details from the lightbox, here.

Update/correx: Uh, apparently the body/patient in The Gross Clinic is alive. This had never even occurred to me. I'm kind of wishing it hadn't.

In the last couple weeks I've visited Philadelphia to see Ce$anne and to Baltimore to see a collection-plus show on early modernism and the circus. More on those shows in time, but...

Today I want to have some fun with permanent collection installations. The painting here, of Cardinal Filippo Archinto, is one of Titian's most unusual portraits. In 1556 Archinto was appointed archbishop of Milan, but some kind of churchly dust-up prevented him from assuming the post. (Titian's painting is from 1558, the same year Archinto died.) Titian represented this drama by partially obscuring Archinto with a veil. The cardinal's papal ring is outside the veil... but only half of one eye is. (Sure, Philadelphia has hung the painting so high on a wall that it's hard to see, but it's still a fascinating portrait.)

Is this "America's Sistine?" (Plus: Don't-miss bonus video.)

The Seattle Times reported yesterday that Christina Orr-Cahall will be the new director of the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum. Orr-Cahall has been the director of the Norton Museum of Art. The art world best remembers Orr-Cahall as the former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. So this Orr-Cahall quote in the Seattle Times rather jumped out:

"I really am interested in the whole visionary side, the fact that it pushes boundaries, that it's experiential," Orr-Cahall said of the Seattle museum. "I see interesting ways in which [the museum] can grow and develop."

Back in 1989, Orr-Cahall wasn't as interested in the 'whole visionary side,' or in 'pushing boundaries': She was the Corcoran director who cancelled the Robert Mapplethorpe show. The Corcoran -- and in some ways the art world -- still hasn't recovered. (Orr-Cahall later resigned under fire.)

If you've been following LACMA's blog, you've been seeing plenty of Franz West-related posts. With Baltimore's exhibition getting a new audience in LA, here are my series of posts on the show. Quick summary: West is an artist who has devoted much of his oeuvre to Vienna, his home. For me, no living artist's work is more about the cultural and intellectual history of one city than is West's.

• Part one: West starts with Gustav Klimt;
  
• Part two: West and the Viennese Actionists;
  
• Part three: West and the analyst's couch;
  
• Part four: West and Freud;
  
• Part five: West's adaptives; and
  
• West's rhymes: West loves to riff on his contemporaries too.
• The Baltimore Museum of Art acquires two Wests.

Elsewhere: Tryharder has installation pix and West speaks (complete with awesome Rirkrit Tiravanija description). Tweet me your pics/favorite Wests and I'll RT.

One of the stars of the Orange County Museum of Art's pleasant Birth of the Cool exhibition was a gallery of hard-edge painting. The room, which included works from the 1950s by John McLaughlin, Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundberg and Frederick Hammersley, argued for the contribution of hard-edge painters to the post-war, clean-modern aesthetic that has dominated American architecture and design ever since.

The gallery also convinced me that some smart curator should organize a thorough revisionist hard-edge painting survey, and that American abstraction wasn't only about unchained, hedonistic expression, it could be about control. (See the 'related' note below.) While minimalism is typically considered a New York-based movement (with one important Washington adjunct), California-based hard-edge painting of the 1950s is plainly the same kind of minimalist response to abex. (In the same years, Donald Judd was a painter too.) I think that's an art history that has not been adequately examined.

I have all this on the brain not because Birth of the Cool just opened at the Blanton Museum of Art, but because the Albright-Knox has just acquired Frederick Hammersley's Bilingual #21, from 1965 (at right). It'll look great when the Albright installs it with another superb hard-edge painting in its collection: John McLaughlin's #28-1960 (1960). The A-K has one of America's top collections of abstract art. It would be a great place for the re-consideration of the post-abex-period to begin.

Related: A nice 1999 Los Angeles Times feature by Hunter Drojohowska-Philp. Here's a fascinating detail from Drojohowska-Philp's story: Hammersley used a computer to 'design' paintings as early as the late 1960s, years before neo-hard-edge painter Peter Halley did the same thing. (And all that Foucaultian discourse around Halley? Well, read to the very end of Drojohowska-Philp...)

I want the old Jerry Saltz back.

You remember Jerry 1.0, the essential Village Voice critic who brought ten exciting ideas (and the ability to present them while turning a phrase!) to each write-up? This piece has none of the verve nor the mental acuity of the old Jerry. It's cheerleading, the cloaking-of-self in the New York art-flag the way Republicans cloak themselves in the stars-and-stripes: Lots of The Right Sentiment and little argument. It's putting familiar old-reliables into Dia director Philippe Vergne's head and typing it as mind-reading rather than making a case for change. It's fatherly encouragement -- which is fine -- but it's also Saltz being so busy explaining that the spaces in his write-up are important and full of potential that he never says why they matter beyond the Threadless set. Instead, he assumes we'll agree that they're good because they're artsy. That's art-ghetto group-think at its most insider.

If Saltz thinks something is important, I'm strongly inclined to pay attention. As much as I respect Jerry's eyes, I'm jealous of the way Saltz loaded up every passage in Seeing Out Loud: Saltz wrote sentences so intense that they read like they'd been reduced by a Michelin three-star chef. That is, Old Jerry did more than show up and look. He explained why something was important; he built a case that could convert the unsure, the art-agnostic. Old Jerry delivered the urgency of art like almost no one else. He explained why creation and invention was an artistic imperative and he did so in a way that made the recognition of such a broad societal responsibility. That's a hugely important role for a critic to play.

Sure, some of it is the venue: Saltz left the Village Voice for the US Weekly of New York City, a magazine as encouraging of thoughtful discourse as a Yankee Stadium beer line. It's hard to make that radical a shift in outlet, and Saltz reads like he's struggled with it a bit. (Plus: I'm sure New York editors want different things from Saltz than his Voice editors did.)

During the Voice years few critics were as able as Saltz to explain why art -- both specific work and the reason to engage with art in general -- is important. Be it by blog or whatever, the return of Jerry 1.0 would be good for art and it would be great for New York.

• In the Freep, Mark Stryker examines the just-remodeled University of Michigan art museum. I love the intro quote from director James Steward.
• I love this story of children engaging with Franz West at LACMA. 
• This is a right-idea: St. Louis Art Map, a city-wide blog of what's-going-on arts-wise. Created by a number of St. Louis arts organizations, the idea is to create a centralized www-place where people can follow and engage about the arts in St. Louis. That's important... but if it merely acts as an 'up-with-us!' PR front for contributing institutions it won't work. If it critically examines and if it engages diverse points of view, then maybe...
  

The Cleveland Museum of Art has acquired Omer Fast's The Casting, a 2007 video projection that was exhibited at both the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

The work will be the first video projection to enter Cleveland's collection. (It will not be the museum's first work of video art; Cleveland already owns work by Benjamin Kinsley and Su-Mei Tse.) The Casting will not be on view in late June when Cleveland opens its impressionist, modern and contemporary galleries, but the museum is working on showing the work shortly thereafter. Curator Paola Morsiani spearheaded the acquisition.

The Casting continues Fast's examination of reality and truth as depicted on film. It features a U.S. Army sergeant detailing two incidents from his own experience in Iraq: A fling with a German woman who self-mutilates and the sergeant's accidental shooting of an Iraqi. Fast puts the two stories together into a script which is then performed by actors. The 'truth' is not revealed until the end of the piece.

As documented by the Hirshhorn's recent Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image exhibition, Fast is one of an expanding group of artists who are increasingly playing play with the concept of video-created reality and un-reality, a kind of technological updating of trompe l'oeil painting. (Or of Signing in the Rain and other reality-tweaking films.)

Related: The Hirshhorn acquired Fast's Godville in 2006.

• Richard Lacayo examines William Kentridge at SFMOMA. Last week Jori Finkel did too, in an NYT feature. Question: Why does Kentridge in SF get so much attention and why does no one mention the Seattle Kentridge mini-festival? This is a multi-city Kentridge moment -- and given his interest in examining aspects of capitalism, how appropriate, eh?
  
• Jesse Hamlin picks Ess Eff's ten 'favorite' public sculptures. In reasponse, my new AJ-mate Regina Hackett goes into delicious dudgeon.
  
• I love seeing Mark di Suvero in space, which is how he's installed in Miami, says John Coppola in the Miami Herald.
• The Seattle Art Museum hearts Louis Sullivan. Jen Graves explains how -- and how much. (Graves digs Matthew Picton's maps, too. Amen.)
• David Bonetti details how the St. Louis Art Museum's expansion is back on track. Yes, really.
• Must read of the week: In the last few weeks I've found myself on the phone with quite a few folks from San Diego. (One of those calls resulted in these posts.) Unprompted, each told me that the collection galleries at the San Diego Museum of Art had taken a giant -- even thrilling -- leap forward. (The SDMA features quite a trove of European painting, including this Cotan and arguably the best Goya portrait in the US.) Apparently the Union-Tribune's Robert L. Pincus thinks so too: This weekend he penned two stories explaining how SDMA upgraded its collection installations and focus. 
  
• If you didn't check MAN on Friday, please take a look at my two posts on the role artists and museums play as our country addresses the question of our nation's responsibility for war crimes/torture committed during the Bush years, and then my chat with MoMA photography chief curator Peter Galassi on MoMA and the question of whether MoMA might acquire the Abu Ghraib photos. (Bloggers: I'd love it if you'd chime in.) The posts are related to a write-up I did on George Grosz-at-the-Hirshhorn back in January.

Continued from here...

Earlier this week I called Peter Galassi, the head of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, to ask him if the Abu Ghraib photographs were in MoMA's photography collection. I asked because MoMA's collection includes many pictures that were not intended as art but that are nationally important, including landmark photographs of the moon, Eddie Adams' 'execution picture' from Vietnam, civil rights-era photos and more.

"I have to confess we haven't really thought about it -- but that's just because we've got too much to do," Galassi said. "Here's the sort of paradox about this kind of picture for us. We take the position that all kinds of photography are potentially relevant here. As soon as you've drawn a strict, precise line between what's art and photography and what isn't, you're wrong. It's just not possible to do. It's also true that when it comes to art, to photographic works of art that were intended as works of art, you can't understand those works of art without knowing where they came from, what we call 'the vernacular.'

"On the other hand, we're not a historical archive. We have a lot of pictures of presidents, but we don't feel like we have to have pictures of presidents, if you know what I mean. That said, we have the [pictures of the] swearing in of LBJ with Jackie standing there crying, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, Eddie Adams' photo, and so on.

"So Abu Ghraib: We don't feel we're obliged to document Abu Ghraib. But what I think is interesting about it is that it represents a new stage of vernacular photography because it was both the ease of making these digital pictures and then especially the ease of sending them around is what made Abu Ghraib blow up. And so in that sense, if Lynndie England had just had that picture in her locker, no one would have ever seen it."

I asked Galassi if that lack of physicality of the Abu Ghraib pictures -- their primary existence is as easily-trafficked JPEGs -- was a barrier to MoMA accessioning them and whether MoMA owned 'pictures' that were never specifically printed as such but that were 'just' JPEGs.

"With Abu Ghraib what you might want actually is some magazine rather than a nice print-out from the digital file," Galassi said, and noted that MoMA's prints department had accessioned many magazines with similar issues in mind. "But to answer your question, I don't think we own anything that exists only in electronic form. We've done some things at the intersection of technology and the printed image: Peter Halley made a thing that was a program where the visitor sits down at the museum and collaborates with a computer program to make the print and then it's printed out."

I have seen magazines and such at MoMA but it hadn't occurred to me that one reason the museum collected 'documents' like that was because it was a way of preserving pictures/etc. in the precise manner in which the images were presented to the public. The Abu Ghraib images may have been first shown on CBS News and in the New Yorker, but they've probably spread most widely around the world through Flickr and through other online JPEG archives.

The storage of a JPEG on Flickr's servers is fundamentally different from that image being included in, say, MoMA's collection, a collection that effectively serves as the storehouse of the last 125 years of the world's visual culture. I asked Galassi if he believed that accessioning the Abu Ghraib images into MoMA's collection might be part of a specific national process, such as the one I discussed in this morning's post.

"That's over-doing it," Galassi said. "It's putting too much weight on [the Museum of Modern Art]. How MoMA matters in that kind of way is about aesthetic judgments, such as when you're talking about which Weston or which Matisse is the best one. But when the Museum of Modern Art chooses Abu Ghraib, that's not that kind of big deal."

After talking with Galassi, I phoned a couple of other institutions that document the nation's collective memory in even a more specific way: The Library of Congress and the National Archives.

The Archives does not have the Abu Ghraib pictures in its collection. A spokesperson told me that documents (of all kinds) generally take about 20 years to transfer over from the military to the National Archives.

A Library of Congress spokesperson told me that it has not added the Abu Ghraib JPEGs to its prints-and-photography collection.

However, the spokesperson told me that the Library has acquired two portfolios of prints by the artist Daniel Heyman. Both portfolios explicitly chronicle the effect of the abuses at Abu Ghraib on two men held prisoner there. One of the prints is titled 'He Could Feel the Dog's Breath' (above, 2006, with easier-to-read text here) and the other is 'The Male Interrogator Told Him' (2006). (You can scroll through the portfolios via those links.) The Yale University Art Gallery has also acquired Heyman's 'Abu Ghraib' work. It sounds like the process by which art museums and related national collections address our national responsibility is underway.

Related: Part one. Also, George Grosz at the Hirshhorn. Similar issues discussed at No Caption Needed. The Warhol Museum exhibited the Abu Ghraib pictures in 2004.

Related exhibition: The Aesthetics of Terror, which was scheduled to appear at the Rose Art Museum and the Chelsea Art Museum. Josh Azzarella's work, which 'includes' the Abu Ghraib photographs, is especially relevant.

This is the second post in a series that considers how art, artists and curators respond to the question of shared responsibility for atrocities committed during the Bush years. The first post, about a George Grosz installation at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is here.

Five years ago tomorrow, the first criminal charges stemming from the Abu Ghraib scandal were filed against six soldiers. To date, the chain of responsibility for the atrocities committed by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has included neither officers nor Bush Administration civilians.

Abu Ghraib was a particular landmark in the Bush years -- but maybe not for the precise reasons we remember. The publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs was not the first time the American people learned that our government was (at minimum) enabling the torture of alleged detainees. As Mark Danner points out in his important essay in the New York Review of Books, on Dec. 26, 2002 the Washington Post published a Dana Priest and Barton Gellman story detailing how some of the system of American-sanctioned torture worked. (Priest-Gellman source: "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.") Over the next couple years, more details about government-sanctioned -- even encouraged -- torture leaked into the press.

It was not until the Abu Ghraib photos became public via CBS News and the New Yorker in April, 2004 that torture and the abuse of detainees who were under United States control crossed-over from being a story of interest to the ACLU-left to being a national focus. It would be neither fair nor accurate to call the pictures a national embarrassment: When given an opportunity to hold their leaders to account for torture seven months after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public and two years after the Washington Post first reported that the United States was involved in state-sanctioned torture, the American people re-elected President Bush.

The Abu Ghraib pictures are not a landmark in the history of Bush Administration-approved torture, but they are what the Eddie Adams 'execution' photo was to the Vietnam War: The revelation of a grossly unpleasant truth, pictures that forced Americans to consider the horrors encouraged by their leaders in the name of our country. As a recognition of the role the Adams photograph plays in our national consciousness and its import to our visual culture, the picture is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Abu Ghraib pictures -- there may be as many as 2,000 of them -- do not document the most egregious tortures inflicted by American personnel during the Bush years. Example: Photographs of the torture outlined by the International Committee of the Red Cross in its recent Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, a report which concludes that the United States committed torture, apparently don't exist. Photographically, in terms of impact on national consciousness and our shared visual culture, the Abu Ghraib pictures stand in for the whole of the torture committed by our government during the Bush years.  

In recent months I've become interested in the shared national responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed by the United States during the Bush years. 'Responsibility' is a fuzzy concept, one that states often accept via truth commissions, war crimes trials, and the like. Those mechanisms of statecraft can take years, even decades, to gear up.

Art moves faster, and that's one reason that in the last 100 or so years art has become a primary way through which societies confront this question of shared responsibility. The process is in no way formalized, but it works something like this: Thoughtful, concerned artist internally synthesizes events, makes work. (Obvious example: Anselm Kiefer on post-war Germany.) Gallerist, curator, kunsthalle, museum, journalist or critic ensures that work is seen. If something like a critical or curatorial consensus determines that the work is of quality and import, the work enters an institution's permanent collection.

It's that last part, institutionalization, that's the most difficult. Dozens of experts, administrators and trustees (men and women with a particular standing in their communities) must agree on an acquisition. The passing of an artwork into an important museum's permanent collection is a key part of the process by which we decide what is worth saving as part of our shared heritage.

I don't mean to suggest that the last step of that process is in and of itself an assumption of national responsibility. No single institution is charged with providing the country its shoulders. But the whole of the process I outlined above is one of the processes by which a nation and its citizens address what was done in their shared name. Repeated many times over in many communities, it is a part of the way in which national responsibility is addressed, even assumed.

So earlier this week I called Peter Galassi, the head of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, to ask him if the Abu Ghraib photographs were in MoMA's collection.

Part two: Here.

Related: Salon's collection of Abu Ghraib pictures.

• A patriotic essay -- and the motivation for a post I think you'll enjoy tomorrow.
• Artist Zoe Strauss tells a personal story via pictures -- and don't miss the link at the end of the post.
• Peter Plagens' 'original' review of the newly re-issued Dave Hickey compilation 'Invisible Dragon.' 
• Three cool posts from Douglas Britt: Rhyming Krasner, Jess and Souza, MFAH's abundance of loans, and why MFAH loves its loans.
  

Continued from this morning with art historian and 2009 Mellon Lecturer TJ Clark...

MAN: In your six Mellon Lectures, will you be making a case that these five paintings are the guideposts that you're creating for Picasso in the '20s -- plus Guernica -- or will you be arguing that Picasso planned these paintings as guideposts for us/you to find?

TJC: A little more the latter. With possibly one exception, these are major, large-scale works. The 1924 Guggenheim still-life is one of the biggest pictures he ever did, and certainly it's the biggest still-life. The Three Dancers from the Tate, which we know from the record that Picasso regarded as maybe his greatest work -- Penrose once said to Picasso, 'Maybe Guernica was as good as it gets,' and Picasso said, 'Maybe -- but Three Dancers is better.'

The Tehran picture just hasn't been seen as much as it ought to be, but it's major, and was meant to be. It's one of these self-conscious, large-scale, stretched-out masterpieces that he did from time-to-time. And then the fourth one is perhaps just a little less obvious a keystone. It's the wonderful, smaller picture in the Met, Nude Standing by the Sea, from 1929. That one was a very important picture in its own moment, this kind of late '20s moment.  

Another part of the story, as you no doubt know, is that [the '20s] is a really good moment for writing about Picasso, which is saying something because in his own lifetime he didn't get written about very well. It's the moment of surrealist enthusiasm for him and of [Andre] Breton writing about him. It's a mixed bag. But the best writing he gets at this moment is just about as good as it comes -- Carl Einstein's extraordinary stuff and a fabulous essay by Leiris in 1929 -- so partly this woman standing by the sea has selected itself for me because it was one of the works that the writers, the poets at the time seized on and made much of.

Number five is Guernica, 'nuff said. I know it's a trap, Guernica is, but you'll see. I hope that the lecture about Guernica is not just a trudge through over-familiar ground. I'm going to try to talk about Guernica very much within the frame of questions that have risen in the previous five lectures.

MAN: In your best-known work you go beyond the relationship of art to art to dig deeply into how art and artists respond to their time, to what's going on around them. I'm thinking about how you wrote about the relationship between the impressionists and the industrialization of rapidly suburbanizing Paris and so on. Will you be connecting Picasso-in-the-'20s to that kind of thought or will you mostly burrow into Picasso for Picasso's sake?

TJC: Of course Guernica is the example that proves the rule. You can't talk about Guernica without talking about its special purposes and circumstances and I shall.

But by and large I shall not be talking about... that is, I'm interested in the conditions of exhibition and I show installation photos and I try to think of Picasso as a part of the art market situation, but you won't get linkages between sort of specific social developments - 'the new woman' or 'the flapper' or whatever, right? -- and Picasso. This has been tried and actually it's not empty, either. There are possibilities of those kinds of connections. But for me, I think, these lectures are about Picasso's belonging to a longer historical moment than that.

If you want a sort of leitmotif of the whole series, it comes down to saying: Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that's intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions.

You won't be surprised to hear that from me, as I'm someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I'm very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That's under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it's under threat.) Massively under-threat.

One of the things we can say about Guernica is that never has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world. But I think there's a pre-history to Guernica, and one of the things I'm going to try to argue about the previous 10-15 years before 1937 is that Picasso is trying to find a way of re-imagining space, and making a space which is kind of much more insecure and open and porous to the outside. At some kind of deep, intuitive level this is his response to the coming to an end of a bourgeois form of life.

MAN: It sounds like that in jumping, if you will, from 1929 to 1937 you're going to exclude a lot of the Marie-Therese years, and along with them, her.

TJC: Well, yes, though in 1929 of course Marie-Therese is already there. [Ed.: Walter and Picasso met in 1927.] I think those paintings are absolutely astonishing, and '31-'32 is a great moment. I shall address it.

Let me put it this way: One has to make choices when talking about Picasso, putting it mildly, and the choice I've made is to think about the development, that is to think about Picasso's sense of space and the way in which his sense of space, the way in which he's experimenting to conceive space after cubism.

I think that the early '30s are part of the story and to sort of put it in a nutshell -- and I will speak about this briefly in lecture six -- I think they're a moment of marking time, you know, with the pictures of bull rings and the pictures of mythological landscapes in which portentous characters are relating to one another.

I think they're fascinating but, I think.. OK, let me not mince words. I think they're aesthetically lesser things. And actually we know by 1936 he's confronting as close to a sort of overall crisis of confidence about his work as he ever did. This can be exaggerated, but there were long months in 1936 where he makes just rather spasmodic graphic work, a lot of this crazy, weird poetry. So this is about as big a moment of kind of non-production in his work as we have. So it's very typical of Picasso that he comes out of it not just by painting again, but by painting the painting of the century.

Related: Part one.

Each spring the National Gallery of Art welcomes an art historian for six weeks of Sunday talks known as the Mellon Lectures. The template is straightforward: Invite a distinguished academician to spend a year researching and studying A Big Idea and then to present the resulting Big Idea(s) at the NGA over a series of spring Sundays. Previous Mellon Lecturers have included EH Gombrich, Kirk Varnedoe, Anthony Blunt, Kenneth Clark and Jacques Barzun. This year's lecturer is TJ Clark.

Clark will present the first of his lectures, which are collectively titled "Picasso and Truth," this Sunday at 2pm. (For the first time this year's lectures will likely be available via podcast, but an NGA spokesperson told me that the details aren't yet finalized.) Clark built his lectures around five paintings, the details of which we'll get to in the second part of our Q&A. (Look for it on MAN this afternoon). Clark and I started by discussing how and why he chose his topic.

MAN: The most obvious question to start with is: Why 'Picasso in the '20s?'

TJ Clark: I think it's a great and fascinating period which has been slightly, sort-of dropped out of account when we talk about Picasso, particularly the late '20s. In so far as we have an account of it, it's usually in terms of his contacts with surrealism and putting him somehow-or-other under that rubric. That says something but it doesn't say very much in my view.

I think there are a lot of extraordinary works from the mid-to-late '20s which I think are worth looking at again. I think it's an extraordinary moment in his career where, after the classicism years of the early '20s, he's trying to find a way of re-engaging with cubism -- which he already knows is a style or even sort of a moment that's behind him. Maybe he's already realizing that it's the great moment of not only his career but arguably the classic moment of modernism, of modern art.

So you have this extraordinary phenomenon of an artist trying to re-engage, to revive, to re-vivify this already-classic style and I think he does so in a series of experiments. Many of them are weird and extreme and some of them are unsuccessful. But some of them are absolutely astonishing. I want to sort of give them there due.

MAN: Some people might be surprised to see you zoom forward into the 1920s. I know you've written about other topics, but surely you're best-known for your work on the pre-impressionists and the impressionists.

TJC: Yes, I shall probably be identified as someone who has worked on French art in the 1860s, '70s, and '80s - and that's fine. I haven't actually worked on the 19thC for a long time. My teaching and the focus of my writing has really been 20thC lately. The last big book I published, Farewell to an Idea, is already heavily 20thC in its emphases, but then I got hooked by Poussin so I've been back in the 17thC. I guess I've been all over the place.

If you begin to focus on the 20thC and the first 50 years of the 20thC, then you can't avoid Picasso. He gets his hooks into you and that's certainly been happening to me for the past 10 years. You know, the Picasso phenomenon is astonishing and difficult. There is this sort of bizarre way in which we can't put him behind us and yet...

I think, that is, I feel very deeply that examiners sort of wish to domesticate Picasso, to put him in his place, to reduce the Picasso phenomenon to biography and, well, to put it pretty boldly, to trivialize what Picasso did. So these lectures are an attempt to extract Pablo Picasso from a biographic equation: 'Picture C equals Lover Y,' and that's what you need to know. I want to extract Picasso from that extraordinarily simplistic view of what writing about art might be about.

MAN: Given that you will be lecturing mostly on Picasso in the 1920s and that the part of Picasso's life that John Richardson just finished is the 1920s and the first couple years of the 1930s: Are your lectures a response to Richardson, or is it mostly coincidence, that he just happens to have been 'there' too?

TJC: I think it's the latter, he happens to have recently been there. [His biography is] a formidable achievement. One learns an enormous amount from it. I've read it and learned from it like everyone else.

But it is at the end of a kind of line of work on Picasso that is absolutely dominant and absolutely confident that there is a kind of transparency of the work to the life. I don't think this is true. I think the life has precious little to tell us about a picture like The Three Dancers (above, at top) or the great Tehran 'Painter and Model' (above) I think these are pictures that are meant to stand on their own, to stand a formidable distance from their own moment and I think they do. And I think we should tackle them with different questions in mind.

This afternoon: Clark lays out specifics about 'his' five Picassos and what he'll say about them during the Mellons.

Richard Lacayo has a must-read summary of the latest news in the Rose Art Museum-Brandeis University saga.

Last week I discussed how fascinated I was by the push-me-pull-you narrative of MoMA curator Anne Umland's recent exhibition 'Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting: 1927-1937.' In short I loved the show, but I had some quibbles with Umland's start date of 1927. (I also didn't buy that Miro was 'assassinating' anything: I think Umland's story reveals that Miro was exploring painting with high-paced intensity.) Today I want to focus on 1927 and to suggest that Miro's journey through that the Umland's decade is even more of a roller-coaster than she presents.

Umland's show opened with eight thrilling paintings from early 1927. [Image above: Miro, Painting, 1927.] The chronology section of MoMA's exhibition website shows all eight -- out of a series of 18 that Miro painted -- and the affinity between them is apparent.

In the exhibition's catalogue Umland argues that with these paintings on bare canvas Miro takes an abrupt turn in his work: "By 1927 the pulsing, amorphous colors and loose, washy brushwork essential to creating the 'oneiric atmosphere' that, for [the author of the Miro catalogue raisonne Jacques] Dupin, defines the 'dream paintings' Miro produced in 1925, 1926, and 1927... were eliminated." Umland then immediately moved from these early 1927 paintings to the 'Spanish Dancer' series of 1928, a group of four works that mix paint and household materials.

Walking through the show and looking at MoMA's website-revealed chronology, it's easy to see how that's an attractively tidy story -- but it leaves out 'the rest' of 1927, which for Miro was a spectacularly active, productive and varied year. After Miro made the 18 bare-ground works early in 1927, he made at least 33 more paintings before getting to the Spanish Dancer works in 1928. (And some these other 1927 paintings had plenty of "loose, washy brushwork.")

Umland relegates these other series to a footnote or two in her catalogue essay. Had she included them in her show she might have provided an even more exciting, fuller picture of how Miro moved from the early 1927 abstractions into the 'combine-style' Spanish Dancer works of 1928.

As Umland notes in one of those footnotes, one of those additional series was painted on varied brown backgrounds, another featured blue backgrounds. The picture above is the Hirshhorn's Calder-inspired 1927 Painting (Circus Horse). With this series of paintings -- and in particular with the Hirshhorn canvas -- Miro is getting away from the nearly full-field compositions of the early 1927 paintings. He has abstracted down his references to people, objects and spaces to a dot here and a line there. Furthermore, Miro has also figured out how to link these elements in as spare a way as possible. (The early 1927 paintings generally feature a lot of paint. By the end of the year Miro is reducing, distilling, and is using as little paint as he can get away with.)

In another 1927 series, this one featuring washy blue backgrounds, Miro does much the same thing. The 1927 Tate Painting at right covers some of the same territory. The white blobular figure is an abstracted horse. The black figure at right appears to be a person having some kind of interaction with the horse. The circle in the top-center of the painting may be a cubist-style 'overhead' reference to a circus ring. As in the Hirshhorn canvas, Miro has figured out how to hold together disparate elements within a fairly naked painting.

At the end of these works and at the beginning of 1928, Miro arrives at the Spanish Dancers, which are also fairly naked and which include sculptural elements. In Umland's presentation it's easy -- and thrilling -- to see a connection between the MFA Boston's Cloud and Birds and the Pompidou's Portrait of a Dancer: Hello feathers.

But I think Umland missed an opportunity to link the fuller body of Miro's 1927 work with the Dancers, to tell the full arc of the story: At left is Miro's first Spanish Dancer painting, from the collection of the Reina Sofia. It seems directly informed by the Hirshhorn painting from the previous year, including the use of a simple dot to connote a person's head, or perhaps the dots as a cubist-infused aerial view grounding humans within the field. Miro also re-uses the power of the 'V' shape to unite a composition. Finally, in the late 1927 paintings Miro learned to trust the viewer's eye to fill in the empty space in the canvas, to allow the viewer 'solve' the relationship between the painted elements on his/her own.

That's a key breakthrough, and one that made it possible for Miro to make works as spare, as empty and as allusive as the Spanish Dancer foursome. Without the developments of late 1927, the Dancers would not have been as thrilling and perverse. I think that seeing how Miro first trotted out some of those techniques in works such as Painting (Circus Horse) makes his narrative arc all the more exciting.

(The likely influence of Calder on Miro that I mentioned above is potentially key (but is also speculative) and was not examined in Umland's catalogue: Calder moved to Paris in 1926 and started making wire sculptures almost immediately. It's easy to see a lot of Calder in Miro's 1927 paintings... but did Calder's creative use of materials also inspire Miro's own creative use of materials in the Spanish Dancers works? The two men began a correspondence in December, 1928, but it's likely that Miro would have been aware of Calder's work before they started writing to each other.)

Related: Introducing MoMA's recent Joan Miro exhibition. So how about 1927 as a start date?

Confirmed: This is not the Washington Post's Blake Gopnik. But here's hoping Gopnik Twitters soon... 

I tweeted this a couple days ago, but it's so important...

A few weeks ago MAN was first with the news that LACMA was trying to sell two paintings at auction: A little Cranach the Elder and a ridiculous Reynolds. I found out about the deaccessioning-in-action only because an eagle-eyed tipster found the paintings in an auction catalogue and emailed me. Time magazine's Richard Lacayo quickly called foul on museums that try to quietly deaccession without anyone really knowing about it -- especially until after it's too late.

Which brings me to this atrocious painting that is said to be by a "follower" of Bartolome Esteban Murillo. Well, let's just say that he must have been a very, very distant follower, because this painting's insipidness is exceeded only by its... extraneousness. The Indianapolis Museum just deaccessioned it, bringing back $1,900 for museum acquisitions.

How do I know all this? The Indianapolis Museum of Art has just launched on online database of works that the museum has deaccessioned recently and -- more importantly -- what it plans to/wants to deaccession. (The link is easy to find: It's right under 'recent acquisitions' on the IMA's website.) In time the site will show where the funds from deaccessioned paintings/etc. ended up going, a clear detailing of how deaccessioning contributes to collection-building.

If you are an art museum, you should copy this right now. If you're AAMD, you should mandate that all member museums do this by the end of 2009. (Related problem: If you're AAMD you're toothless, ineffective and unlikely to encourage this kind of progressiveness.)

It's kind of fun to poke around the database, to look and wonder. Did someone really think that thing up there was a Murillo? And who on earth actually bought Lincoln in Dalivision in the first place? (Above, and yes, that Dali.) Was the Mrs. Edward G. Robinson who painted this the wife of the actor?

Kidding aside: This web-feature isn't a nice thing. For art museums that deaccession -- or might -- it should be an imperative thing.

On one hand: It says something about the state of visual-arts-focused book publishing when the two most prominent releases of the last six months are reprints: UC Press' re-publication of Lawrence Weschler's Robert Irwin book, and now the University of Chicago Press' re-publication of Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. (My pass at an explanation: There isn't much grant support available for projects such as these and there are no mechanisms by which young, new writers might be identified and encouraged to write and publish books that are written to attract both art-diehards and crossover audiences.)

On the other hand: I'm just glad that both books are available in attractive cloth editions. Here's one reason: Hickey's book has long been available in paperback on used-books websites... for $75-100. The new cloth version? $15. 

A couple weeks ago I did a series of posts on SFMOMA's recent Corey Keller-curated exhibition, 'Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900." With the show and in his exhibition catalogue essay, Keller argued that photography was the key way in which an early generation of scientists shared and built popular support and for their discoveries.

One of the reasons I was so interested in Keller's show was that the marriage of art and science goes back well before Keller's start date. In fact, artists have mined both scientific discovery and the sense of wonderment that science can bring for centuries. Here's an example that doesn't just demonstrate the point, but that reminds us how contemporary art can motivate and inspire young people. Consider it a reminder of the value of arts education.

The painting above is Joseph Wright of Derby's 1768 An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. This is not a painting chronicling a major scientific discovery. (As the UK's National Gallery notes on its website, by 1768 air pumps were a pretty common toy among  gentlemen-scientists. By 1768 they were even commonly used in the showy experiments performed by both showmen and university professors as a way of entertaining onlookers and of encouraging their interest in science.)

Instead it's a painting that uses popular science to create a dramatic tableau -- and dares to present Enlightenment science in a manner that nods to Caravaggist portrayals of religious themes.

The gentleman-scientist in the center of the painting has set up an 'air pump,' which was essentially a vacuum-creating machine which sucked much of the oxygen out of the glass bowl in the top-center of the painting. [Detail at right.] The drama of the painting -- and of science itself! -- is clear: Will the bird make it? Will man use science for good or for... something else?

Wright's painting was an immediate hit. It was exhibited in both England and on the continent. A print was quickly made and was widely distributed. The Wright played a major role in kicking off a public interest in science among young men.

Two of the young men who were likely excited by the painting and the fervor it inspired was Charles Darwin and his brother Erasmus. According to Charles' biographer Janet Browne family legend had it that Charles' grandfather, also named Erasmus (and one of the famed 'Lunar Men'), is in the painting, possibly as the timekeeper seated at the middle-right.

Related: Brought to Light at SFMOMA on MAN: Part one, two, three, four, five.

MOCA's chief curator Paul Schimmel, continued from part one, part two and part three. Today we conclude by talking about MOCA's acquisitions future.

MAN: We know that part of the Broad challenge gift was to go specifically to exhibitions programming and that MOCA has borrowed from its endowment in recent years. So where does this leave monies for acquisitions? With the exception of gifts of works of art, could you be inactive for a while?

Paul Schimmel: We have very, very little acquisition-restricted endowments. Our total for those are in the six figures put together. So yeah, our 'acquisitions endowment' is the membership of our various art committees. [Image: Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (three-tiered perspective), 1997. MOCA collection.]

MAN: So what did the crisis do -- or what does it still do -- to your ability to acquire now?

PS: Since September and ending at the end of this fiscal year [June 30, 2009], we have not or will have not spent money on art. We have been operating in a [spending-to-acquire] freeze. The little bit of money we have for that is still there. It is restricted for these purposes.

We will begin purchasing art again at the beginning of the next fiscal year [in July]. Frankly, I think there will be more opportunities in the next several years than we have seen in the past few years, especially in the areas where we're very strong. There has been so much speculation among so-called 'emerging artists,' especially in LA ,where you have an active group of collectors who visit studios, art schools and such. They've created a kind of charge in this emerging market over the last decade.

MAN: So how quickly can you ramp back up and purchase for the collection? Is it something that can happen immediately, or do you have to rebuild internal infrastructure, including at the trustee/committee level?

PS: I expect that in the next fiscal year we will be operating within the same kind of overall plan we've had in the past. That said, we will also have to see what kind of impact this current economic climate -- in the larger sense -- has on our base of collectors.

To be very frank, we're able to attract a lot of [donors] because they're collectors. They have been very active and have cut back recently, and whether they see the museum -- which has provided an educational foundation for their collecting... I mean, will they feel that same ongoing need to participate in the museum's acquiring? That will be a question coming up. Our ability to acquire at the same level as two years ago will depend on our ability to continue to both retain and attract new members of our acquisition committees.

MAN: So if you haven't had significant acquisition endowments, then virtually all of your acquisitions funds must come from those committee members. Unlike most art museums, MOCA doesn't pull out its acquisitions spending in its tax filings, so I can't say I have a terrific -- or any -- idea what you've been spending on collection-building in recent years.

PS: Yes. For almost 20 years now we've had acquisitions and collections committees. This group has contributed in the high six-figures on an annual basis to support our acquisitions, so for us it's for us a very significant cash amount. The group has also led the way for some of the larger individual-collection purchases that we've made too. [Image: Robert Huot, Nylon One, 1967. MOCA collection.]

Our [most 'expensive'] committee is now focused on painting and sculpture, and for five or six or seven years we have had a fantastic drawings That one has a lower cost-membership and it has been among the most -- if not the most -- progressive group in terms of speculative acquisitions and in finding younger and lesser-known artists that we should own. For example, we were probably among the first museums that bought four or five drawings by Mark Grotjahn. We did that when the entire group cost less than $10,000.

Three or four years ago we started a photo group. Both of these last two groups have provided in the low six-figures, between $100,000 and $200,00 a year.

If you put it all together, in rough terms we've had approximately $1 million a year to spend on acquisitions, which is a considerable amount -- but only if you are not going out and picking the obvious. By the way, within this overall fund there is a curatorial discretionary fund of less than six figures. It's for all the curators, and it's just like it sounds. With a very modest cap within that $100,000 it has allowed not only allowed but encouraged the curators to be a little more free in making commitments at a relatively low cost but in a way that provides a kind of direct communication between the curator and the artist.

MAN: Thanks for your time, Paul.

PS: You bet.

• The Getty Trust has lost nearly $2 billion since mid-2007 and is cutting its operating budget by 25 percent, from $284 million to $216 million, says the LAT's Mike Boehm.
  
• I confess I know next-to-nothing about Homer Page, but Richard Lacayo convincingly argues that I should start studying.
• Christopher Knight writes that deaccessioning can be done smartly -- and provides key examples.
  
• Also: Knight includes what Brandeis is trying to do at the Rose Art Museum in his list of places that are doing bad deaccessioning. I disagree: The museum is not doing the selling, it's Brandeis University that wants to liquidate paintings in its art museum's collection. To me deaccessioning is what museums do. And the Rose isn't doing, it's 'being done to.'
• In the LAT, David Pagel has three strong reviews this week: Elliott Hundley and MANfave Dimitri Kozyrev in commercial spaces, and an exhibition at Loyola Marymount that revisits work shown at a short-lived but important LA commercial gallery almost 40 years ago.
• The Las Vegas Sun's Kristen Peterson explains why the Las Vegas Art Museum didn't make it. Lots of big-picture, outside-the-press-release stuff in that story: Context, comparison with relevant cities, etc. Yay.
  
• Meanwhile: The NYT's Carol Vogel discusses the upcoming Steve Cohen collex presentation at Sotheby's. Context? Not so much. Vogel never mentions that Cohen's hedge fund owns 5.9 percent of Sotheby's. [via BaerFaxt]

UPDATE: Somehow I accidentally published a partially-edited version of this post instead of the final-edits version. My apologies. It should be A-OK now.

Continued from part one and part two:

MAN: Before we get to the lineup of shows you have coming up at Grand Ave., I'm hearing a lot of cost and ambition. I have to believe that back in November and December you figured that all of this was going into the round file, or at least that it would have to be very, very dramatically scaled back.

Paul Schimmel: I can go so far as to say that when we were thinking about the more long-term closure [of the Geffen Contemporary] we were thinking that maybe we can't do some of these exhibitions. The Broad challenge and the board's response saved the shows, and that absolutely had a direct impact on our ability to even consider them.

We were thinking that we would not be operating the Geffen at all, and as you know the Geffen is an extraordinary facility. Its impact on institutions like the Tate and even across town at LACMA and what Renzo Piano is building now is such that as a facility it both enables and is a challenge to artists and curators to do things that many other institutions can't conceive of doing. It's the sense of the possibility.

MAN: So your medium-sized shows will be at Grand Ave.

PS: Yes. So remember that the Geffen will be two-thirds changing exhibitions and one-third permanent collection, so the weight of that building (both in scale and effect) will be more heavily weighted toward changing exhibitions. The reverse happens on Grand Ave. For many visitors, it will be the home of the permanent collection that they really think of as being the 'Permanent Collection' in terms of depth, our old masters.

That said, we'll have a vigorous program by any single museum's standard. We'll have three what we call 'medium-sized' shows, but frankly the scale of those shows, 12,000 square feet, is what many institutions have for their entire exhibitions galleries -- and we still have the Geffen and the Pacific Design Center. So it's a major program at Grand.

So coming up in the fall is a major project that LA architectural collective Morphosis has created. Thom Mayne is among the most significant architects to come out of Los Angeles. It will be the entire south gallery, open and without walls. It will have a platform and a glass-and-aluminum structure that is a kind of wafer-thin container packed with layers related to his architectural projects, with films, models, drawings all trying to find a kind of metaphor for the type of buildings that they do. [Image top: Thom Mayne and Morphosis' Campus Recreation Center at the University of Cincinnati. Image right: Luisa Lambri, Untitled (Casino #07), 2003.]

Simultaneously will be a one-person exhibit of the artist Luisa Lambri. She has been working for the last two years on a number of site-oriented opportunities here in Los Angeles. She will show a new body of work that was really photographed over several trips that she made to LA. It includes, for example, the John Lautner House.

MAN: The Albright-Knox just bought some of her work. I think that'll be on MAN next week. Buffalo and LA: Two cities with a significant architectural heritage.

PS: Yes. And speaking of which: A little further down the road, Rebecca Morse has been working for about three years on a show called Form and Photo: Intersections Between Sculpture and Photography. It will include Isa Genzken, Katie Grinnan, Tom Burr, Simon Starling, Wolfgang Tillmans and Sarah VanDerBeek.

And then we'll have curator Bennett Simpson's first thematic exhibition: It's called 'Blues' and it's planned for the summer of 2011. It explores the ideas of blues in contemporary art, music and visual culture. It will have 40 artists from the '60s to the present. Artists such as David Hammons and Cady Noland. It is certainly a much more poetic and interpretive exhibit that accepts that blues is one of the fundamental aesthetic developments of the 20th-century. Glenn Ligon will work with him on it too.

Then well-ahead: Ann Goldstein will be doing a William Leavitt retrospective, his first solo show ever.

And then a show that I've been noodling around that will probably be in more like 2012: It's a show I started thinking about while doing the Robert Rauschenberg combines show but also during the earlier parts of the Out of Actions show: In that period of the early '50s through the early '60s, the physical destruction of the picture plane and the notion of the end of painting after abstract expressionism. Painting went harder, became more conceptual and more graphic, and it entered into a realm of being influenced by photography. [Image: Katie Grinnan, Portal, 2008, at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House.]

This happened mostly outside the New York axis. The most well-known example, of course, is Lucio Fontana and his puncturing of the picture plane. But the exhibition will really be international in nature. It will include Lee Bontecou, Alberto Burri, John Latham, Gustav Metzger of the art-and-destruction crowd (conceptually he's right in the middle of this, this performative destruction of the picture plane), Otto Piene, and of course Robert Rauschenberg is the man.

(I've wondered -- and I'll never really know -- if he had direct contact with Fontana's work when he was in Italy with Cy Twombly. Very early on Rauschenberg starts cutting, making pictures within his picture. I wonder if he saw some of those early puncture experiments of Fontana.)

Also: Salvatore Scarpitta. He showed with Leo Castelli and made these rolling canvases. Kazuo Shiraga. And then Gunther Uecker. I think this is rich and I think you can see this idea of this as the end of painting.

MAN: And then over at the Pacific Design Center?

PS: We're going to be 3-4 shows a year there. Brook Hodge is organizing a series dealing with the conflation of both craft and computation. Obviously this comes out of Brook's landmark exhibition on architecture and fashion. So the first in the series is Boolean Valley and that opens up real soon. The second is Ball-Nogues Studio, and a third part is on the way, it's still being finalized.

Part one here. Part three here.

On Wednesday MOCA chief curator -- and top art staffer -- Paul Schimmel and I talked about MOCA's plans for its permanent collection. Today Schimmel and I talk about MOCA's exhibition program -- and Schimmel reveals the bad-boy artist who will be returning to the United States with a MOCA commission.

MAN: I think there's a perception among many art lovers that even though MOCA has been saved that its exhibition program -- and perhaps even its rigor ad ambition -- will suffer.

Paul Schimmel: We'll be doing two very large-scale exhibitions a year and three medium-sized exhibitions a year, as well as three-to-four small Pacific Design Center exhibitions a year. On top of that there may be some smaller 'Focus'-type series or individual projects but what I'm outlining here in terms of five major shows a year between the two major buildings is a clear architecture on which we are building the exhibition program.

MAN: So in line with what we discussed [Wednesday] in terms of collection display, you'll be running exhibition programming in both buildings at the same time. Kind of like 'before.'

Schimmel: Yes. These things will happen simultaneously which is one of the true extraordinary qualities of MOCA. When we are at our best we are really thinking very smartly about which space works the best with both the kind of work and in some cases playing against that too.

MAN: So what's coming up at the Geffen?

Schimmel: We have three shows being worked on by three different curators. They're still the kind of large-scale, thoughtful, revisionist thematic exhibitions that MOCA is internationally known for.

The first is a show that Alma Ruiz has been working on for really the last three or four years -- and that kind of lead time is still typical at MOCA, in terms of thinking and developing. It's a kind of book-end to a marvelous show that she did almost seven years ago that did not get as much acclaim as I think it deserved. It was called The Experimental Exercise of Freedom. It was the first in a series of shows she's organized of Latin American artists, and this exhibit was a kind of political proposition coming out of a sculptural change that came out in the '60s in Latin America. It was both formal and in a sense political, a radical movement. [Image above: Gego installed in MOCA's 1999 exhibition The Experimental Exercise of Freedom.]

At the same time, and in some cases with the same artists, a group of disparate but overlapping artists emerged in the '50s and '60s in Latin America and the show will be called A Latin American Light and Space. The earliest work in the exhibition is one of these great Fontana light sculptures that are almost like drawings in space that were from the late '40s and early '50s. Also included is Carlos Cruz Diaz, Helio Oticica, Julio le Parc and Jesus Soto.

These will be room-sized installations giving the viewer an opportunity to really, immersively experience the work. It will show a very early example -- radically early even by LA standards -- of the non-traditional use of color light and use space.That will be next spring. It will not travel.

MAN: Is that a concession to tighter budgets? Traveling a lot of shows at once eats up staff, staff time...

Schimmel: In the last year or so MOCA has had an extraordinary run of traveling shows. At this moment we have Kippenberger, Dumas, Murakami (as I understand it there are lines around the block in Bilbao) and we have had WACK! In Vancouver. It is an embarrassment of riches, but it is frankly too many shows for an institution our size to be circulating simultaneously. You make a certain amount of revenue from circulating shows but you also incur expenses. This kind of program for an institution of MOCA's size is not sustainable.

MAN: So that's one of the more ambitious shows you have coming up...

Schimmel: Next show coming up at the Geffen after the Latin American show is a show that to some degree was one of the real reasons we hired the art historian and curator Philipp Kaiser (who has also planned out into the future a very important show of the LA artist Jack Goldstein). The Geffen show that's coming up in the fall of 2010 is called Wasteland: Art after Earth Art. It is comprehensive of both the generation of earth artists, beginning with one of the great masterpieces in MOCA's collection, Michael Heizer's Double Negative and in some ways then book-ended with a commission of a new large-scale project in the Mojave Desert by Christoph Buchel. [Image: Heizer's Double Negative.]

MAN: Oh, really. You are brave.

Schimmel: Yes, we are. (Laughs.)

Philipp has worked with him before. He feels real confidence. It's import for MOCA but it's important for the artist. So, yeah, let's get that part straight. Philipp feels real confident that working together they can do something that works within the budgetary and the practical constraints of any project.

So Wasteland is being co-organized with [UCLA's] Miwon Kwon. It is really an exhibition that not only looks at the 'earthwork' genre, but in a sense excitingly dynamically it looks at the generation of '70s and right-up-to-the-present artists who in a sense come out of that legacy.

MAN: And the third big show coming up?

Schimmel: This is a project that I'm organizing  about California and the '70s, which is very much, I think, about a period in the history of this state that is to a large degree overlooked.

It's hard to imagine that with all of the interest that has happened both internationally and the plethora of exhibitions dealing with aspects of art here in LA that this period somehow got lost to some degree. This isn't just a California issue: The 70s is really... we're just beginning to deal with its impact now. We went from the '60s to the '80s and forgot in many ways the '70s was the most profoundly transformative decade.

I will argue that I believe in terms of what we and California saw a specific pluralism in this period, a plethora of simultaneous of styles and attitudes that overlapped within neighborhoods of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but even within artists and individual oeuvres. You didn't have to have a kind of singular style. The idea that at the same time -- and maybe this is sort of one of the beginning points of the show -- that you could have within two blocks of each other Dick Diebenkorn doing the first of his great Ocean Parks and then Chris Burden being crucified to the back of a Volkswagen. [Above, 1974.]

The notion that the 'post-modern' was created by the 'pictures generation' of New York is just wrong. I think in fact that very generation of artists were both directly and indirectly finding their foundation in the schools, the universities, the arts communities of California and places like CalArts.

In fact the studio practice of post-modernism -- its foundations were in California in the '70s, and it's in a sense the second generation and one that became more academically refined was to happen subsequently in New York.

It'll be 120-plus artists. It's going to be one of those (I hope) epic, revisionist large-hunk-of-history shows. That will be in the fall of 2011, as part of the Getty 'Pacific Standard Time' series.

Part three.

Between your tweets on small paintings and your email/tweets on museum admission costs, it's been a fascinating day at MAN HQ. But here's the coolest note of the day: The Seattle Art Museum is going way out of its way to tell people that its admissions charge ($15 for adults, $12 for seniors, $9 for 13-17 year-olds) is merely suggested.

How far out of its way? SAM recently ran ads telling potential visitors that if they didn't want to pay the museum's admissions charge, they didn't have to. No problem. Just come look at the art.

This is a detail from the ad SAM ran during a recent Hopper exhibit (the complete ad is in the jump). The museum is preparing a similar ad to run during its current show of work from the Yale University Art Gallery.

Related: The Stranger's Christopher Frizzelle tested the campaign.

I was going to post more on MOCA's future right about now, but art museum admissions-fee hikes are today's news. I'll continue with MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel tomorrow.

Two of America's most esteemed encyclopedic art museums are looking to raise the cost of admission: The Philadelphia Museum of Art is asking the city of Philadelphia for permission to raise admission fees an unannounced amount. And yesterday the Art Institute of Chicago received city permission to raise the cost of admission 50 percent, to $18. The AIC is also raising admissions for students and seniors by 71 percent.

Just as young people, the middle-class and the less fortunate can least afford access to the great collections in Philadelphia and Chicago, their museums are making it harder for people to visit.

For the museums it comes down to simple math: Endowments are down, government grants are down and private donors and foundations apparently aren't inclined to give enough to prevent admissions hikes. Museums are facing a tough decision: Cut (even more) staff, or raise admissions costs. Philadelphia and Chicago are (in part) choosing to maintain staff and other infrastructure instead of maintaining public access at current price levels.

The problem with looking to admissions costs as the place to make up revenue is this: Admissions are not substantial contributors to most museums' bottom lines. At the Philly Museum, for example, admissions made up just 3.2 percent of program-related expenditures in FY 2006.

At Chicago it's a little bit different; few major museums are more reliant on admissions for revenue. Nine percent of AIC's FY 2006 museum-based expenses were covered by admissions fees, down from 11.2 percent the year before. Yesterday the museum admitted to the Chicago Tribune that the increase was 'needed' because the AIC had to cover operating costs, which have risen (in part) because the AIC is opening a new addition this year. AIC director James Cuno effectively argued that because the museum has more space and higher operating expenses because of the addition, visitors -- who didn't green-light the AIC's expansion -- have to pay for it:

"We anticipated we would need to increase fees, that we hadn't increased them in five years," museum director James Cuno told the [Chicago Park District] board. With the addition of a new 264,000-square-foot Modern Wing, visitors will have about a 30 percent increase "of museum experience," he said.

Museum spokeswoman Erin Hogan said the $283 million Modern Wing "has already been paid for, and the increase is not related to the current economic climate ... or about any shortfall or deficit. It is about keeping up with operating costs, which all museums are faced with. It is about not having an admissions increase in five years and about keeping up with our peer institutions."

(That last line is completely silly: There is no imperative for a museum to "keep up" with its peer institutions on admissions charges. Is it good for museums to keep up with their peers when it comes to access to collections? Yes. Collecting activity? Yup. Scholarship? You bet. But there's a race-to-the-top on admissions costs? Ridiculous. The AIC should be trying to "keep up" with its peers in Minneapolis, Kansas City, Baltimore and Indianapolis, which have lowered -- even eliminated -- admission charges.)

When a museum increases admissions, there's no reason to believe that the same number of people will visit, and that the museum will see a corresponding revenue bump. When MoMA hiked its admissions charge to $20, it was shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that not as many 20-to-30-year-olds were visiting the museum as MoMA had hoped. The museum promptly announced it was concerned about this and that it would communicate better with young people (read: market to), an approach that managed to totally miss the underlying, motivating issue. Lesson: Short-sighted admissions hikes that may do little to increase actual, meaningful revenue can cannibalize future audiences. [Image at top: Ed Ruscha, Oof, 1962-63. MoMA. [At bottom: Roy Lichtenstein, Sweet Dreams Baby!, 1965, FAMSF collection.]

Museums could do lots of things to avoid pricing out visitors. Trustees could give more. Foundations could give more. Museums could cut more staff. But the last thing they should do is raise admissions charges and inhibit public access to art at a time when we need it most.

• In the NYT, Ken Johnson raises the right flags about an improper exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
  
• Three years ago admission to the Art Institute of Chicago was effectively free. Now the museum wants to hike it to $18. Zowie.
• Fun with art conservation: Cherries are red. Unless they're gray. Or yellow. Also: The related Oldenbruggen mash-up.
  
• Jumping with Miro!
• Yes, now that you mention it, it is.
• Is Cezanne's "truest heir" Matisse? Picasso? Or is it Piet Mondrian?
• Welcoming spring in Chinese marble. No, really, in Chinese marble.
• Is the Getty Villa de-queering its antiquities displays?
  

Last fall MOCA, the best contemporary art museum in America, almost died. Anyone reading this blog is plenty familiar with the back-story, so I won't recount it here.

Most of the MOCA-is-saved stories in the Los Angeles Times have focused on the new CEO, Charles Young, administrative cutbacks at the museum, and mass departures from the museum's board. That's all important stuff, but I was wondering how the art side of MOCA will change, evolve and, well, happen going forward. I called MOCA's chief curator Paul Schimmel -- MOCA's top art guy -- to ask him to detail the museum's plans.

Over the next couple days I'll share my conversation with Schimmel, who will reveal for the first time the 'new MOCA's' plans for its galleries, its collection, its exhibition program and so forth. [Part two. Part three.]

Schimmel started our chat by going out of his way to thank the artists and journalists who advocated for MOCA back during the toughest days. Schimmel doesn't name LAT art critic Christopher Knight... but go ahead and read Knight into Schimmel's comments on critics who motivate events. [Image: Andy Warhol, Telephone, 1961, from MOCA's collection.]

MAN: After late last year, I'm just glad we're talking about MOCA. So, let's see, where to begin...

Paul Schimmel: I'm very happy that we're going to talk about the programmatic future which is obviously the heart and soul and the backbone of the institution. But first I want you to know and that members of the quote 'elite art press' made an extraordinary contribution to MOCA in the fall. And I am certain that as much as the Broad Art Foundation's gift, which was more than matched by the MOCA board -- and I should say very often by the same people who have given extraordinarily over the last 10, 20, even 30 years, that is, the same core group really, really stepped up -- it mattered. [Image: Mark Rothko, No. 61 (Rust and Blue) [Brown Blue, Brown on Blue], 1953, from MOCA's collection.]

I think that the third leg of all this was that the newspapers, the blogs, the really elite art critics saved MOCA. You all advocated in a way that was very forceful and you spoke with such knowledge and vigor about the museum's programming and collection. I'm certain that if given the times we were going through and the times we are in now, that had there not been a real public outcry among artists and activists, I'm not sure anyone would have felt this groundswell to do something that's very very difficult to do. After all, to restructure a not-for-profit at this moment in time is a challenge.

I think sometimes critics don't think they have the kind of impact that people from another era did. I think whether it's Hilton Kramer or Clement Greenberg... there aren't a lot of people who can motivate events. But a handful of people and their influence within the broader media have broader implications, and that made a difference for us. I was kind of amazed how passionate, how thorough, and how dedicated the coverage was.

MAN: So how will the 'new' MOCA be different from the 'old' one?

PS: I think from a standard of quality - originality, focus -- the new MOCA will be very much the same. MOCA is curatorially-driven, and when I start outlining who's doing what, you'll see much of the new MOCA is things that have been in the works for two, three, four, five years.

Now, how it looks and the distribution of real estate and space is going to change: The economic stability provided by these new commitments we have received will allow us to re-open the Geffen Contemporary in a consistent and permanent fashion. As you know, as everyone knows, that has been the major reason that the museum has not shown its collection with as great a consistency as it did in the '90s. Every time you close down the Geffen the commitment to artists and exhibitions literally move - we've done this on several occasions - you literally move the entire program from one building to another, displacing the consistent and longer-term permanent collection exhibits. [Image: Ed Ruscha, Nothing Landscape, 1987, from MOCA's collection.]

The last time we had a multi-year permanent collection exhibition was in the late '90s. It was up for several years. Once you start shutting down spaces it's very hard to get them back online. The biggest change, I think, is that two-thirds of the Grand Avenue facility will be devoted to the collection, as will one-third of the Geffen. Between those two spaces close to half of MOCA's exhibition space will be feature a fixed and I would say semi-fixed permanent collection display, respectively. Now is that something that's never happened before? No. But we believe that we now have a consistency of funding that will allow us to operate both facilities.

MAN: So in terms of collection display, what will you show where?

PS: First, at Grand Ave. I'm going to focus on the works in the '40s beginning with our great abstract expressionism collection and going through pop art, '60s minimalist painting, and so on. [Image: Frank Stella, Ctesiphon I, 1968, from MOCA's collection.]

Then at the Geffen: On the 'right-hand side,' which is the smaller of the two buildings, that is, the facility where the glass doors are - a lot of work has been done on that building. Of the two buildings that is the most controllable [in terms of temperature and humidity]. I'll probably begin there with conceptual art, and then move forward into the present in. It's a natural break at that point, so the pieces that are the most delicate will be in the Isozaki building on Grand Ave.

As you'd imagine, by having the work of the '70s going forward in the Geffen there will also be in the work of the last 20 years in more regular and frequent rotation. That might even include sections being re-worked on a regular basis and small drop-in shows that are drawn from the collection but that have specifically to do with some aspect or focus of a certain part of contemporary art. That's also easier to do over there.

Continued tomorrow: Part two. Part three.

Christopher Knight makes an important point about the Rose and about all art museums: Don't apply popular culture measuring sticks to non-profit institutions. That misses the whole point.

Continued from part one.

Date shows are tricky: The curator must explain why she has chosen two particular dates and then she must argue that they're as important for a given artist (or movement) as s/he says they are. For her recent Joan Miro show at MoMA, curator Anne Umland chose to focus on a decade of Miro's evolution as a painter: 1927-1937. [Image: Joan Miro, The Farm, 1921-22. It is not in Umland's show.] So is 1927 as clear a re-beginning point for Miro as Umland presents in both her catalogue and in the show's opening galleries? I don't think so.

In her introductory essay, Umland wrote that she chose 1927 as her start date because Miro may have used the phrase 'I want to assassinate painting' in 1927. In an extensively footnoted paragraph, Umland also concedes that Miro may have said no such thing, that art critic Maurice Raynal may have made up the quote and attributed it to Miro.

Either way, Umland says that kind of "assaultive rhetoric is entirely consistent with that found in Miro's private correspondence as early as 1924." The show does not start in 1924, it starts in 1927.

No matter: By a 1962 interview -- conducted when Miro was standing in front of works from 1929 and 1930 -- the artist was more than happy to associate himself with the 'a-word,' So the show starts not in 1924, 1929 or 1930, but in 1927.

There is a certain peril in listening too much to what artists say -- or to what they might have said, or to how they position themselves 35 years after the fact. Artists make their strongest comments about their art through their art. Furthermore, artists rarely make the decisive breaks that 'date shows' require. In fact, several years before 1927 Miro had started the push-me, pull-you process of moving away from the amalgamation of -isms that had characterized his work until then.

That's not to say that Umland wasn't on to something: Take a look at the Miro of 1921-22, of 1923-24, of 1924 (immediately above: Miro's Head of a Catalan Peasant), of 1925 and of 1926.

Between the NGA's The Farm of 1921-22 (above) and SFMOMA's Painting of 1926 (below), Miro often worked to dramatically reduce everything in his art: compositional elements, colors -- and cribs from established isms. He narrowed his interest from, say, a scene that includes many factors of Catalan life, to intensely abstracted and boiled-down portraits of a single Catalan person (four of which he painted in 1924) or to even more abstracted references such as a dreamy cloud of a grinning white dot in an abstracted, barely delineated space (in 1926).

In short, that's Umland's argument for her "painting and anti-painting" show: Between 1927 and 1937 Miro pared painting down, down, down, eliminating as much as he could before building his paintings back up with fuller, more complicated and loaded compositions, at which point he'd tear it all down again. MoMA's clever exhibition website makes it easy to see Umland's thesis in action by scrolling across the show's chronology. (In the show's final gallery, Umland argued that Miro came out the other side of all this back-and-forth in 1937, having re-created what a Miro is in MoMA's weird 1937 Still Life with Old Shoe.)

But: Miro didn't do this just from 1927 on, he was doing this in the years before Umland starts her show. Even as Miro was paring down in the 1924 NGA painting and in the 1926 SFMOMA painting, he built back up too, such as in the Albright-Knox's great 1924-25 Carnival of Harlequin. In other words: Miro's pare-and-build gyrations weren't limited to Umland's decade; they started sooner. 

Next time: I'll pick up in 1927, and with the eight beautiful paintings with which Umland opened her show.

Related: Part one.

Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik? Here's a sample -- and one which manages to miss many points at once: "I, for one, won't miss the Rose Art Museum. It was always a second-rate collection in a city full of first-rate art."

CONFIRMED: This isn't the Blake Gopnik.

A couple of years ago I found myself having a conversation with a museum director about whether a certain artist was really great, about whether s/he was a pre-eminent figure, a key player in the progression of contemporary art.

"He only did one thing," I said. "And he did it over and over for decades. He created a word, not a language. He has had no second act. His work has not developed. We've not seen his work mature. We've not seen him take new risks."

The museum director disagreed: "But that one thing he did -- it was absolutely great. The overwhelming majority of artists don't or can't do anything that's worthy of inclusion in the canon. So isn't one great idea enough?"

"Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937," recently at MoMA, was all about that debate. I think Miro would have agreed with me: Curator Anne Umland showed that Miro never stopped pushing himself to create the next thing, to create something brand-new. For Miro, achieving success as a a figure-referencing merger of often-biomorphic surrealism with cubism wasn't enough.

Umland started her argument with the show's first gallery -- no soft, ease-you-in warm-up gallery here -- by arguing that Miro made a clean break with his synthesizing past early in 1927. From then on, continued Umland through the next decade, Miro developed a new language, one that was all his own. [Image above: From that first gallery, Joan Miro's Painting (Head), 1927. The chronology of works at MoMA's site for the show presents Umland's case in linear JPEG format.]

It was a thrilling exhibition, one in which Miro's relentless drive to achieve something new was made tangible. Miro's need to go beyond what he'd done and what his forerunners had done was apparent in every gallery.

In part because Miro moved so fast, rarely has an exhibition needed its catalogue more. The accompanying book, complied by Umland with contributions from Jim Coddington, Robert S. Lubar and Jordana Mendelson, delivers in supplying Miro-centric narrative. The catalogue's only substantial fault is that it almost completely ignores how Miro's language and interests were informed by his contemporaries, artists such as Arp, Calder and Picasso. Its narrative is all-Miro, almost all-the-time.

In a few posts over the next week or two, I'll take a meander through the show. Tomorrow I'll start with examining whether 1927 really was such a key year for Miro, and whether his painterly progress pre-dates that year. [Image: Joan Miro's Painting (Cloud and Birds), 1927.]

• On the occasion of a William Kentridge exhibition at SFMOMA, the SF Chron's Kenneth Baker hands the microphone to the artist.
• Roberta Smith objects to the blue-blooded, over-refined stiffness of the National Gallery of Art's version of American art history. In a related story, he who argues that the NGA is often stiff, fussy and obsessed with mostly the greatest hits will rarely be incorrect. (Exception: Arthur Wheelock, who regularly plums the depths of the Dutch Golden Age. He often finds gems and, yes, sometimes he finds duds such as Jan Lievens.)
• LACMA is still selling its Cranach, says the LAT's Mike Boehm.
• Audacious: The Stranger's Jen Graves lists the 25 greatest works of art made in Seattle. Other Seattle luminaries offer some thoughts.
• Last week I 'traded' a St. Louis Beckmann for a Cleveland Picasso. St. Louis Post-Dispatch scribe David Bonetti has a rather astonishing tidbit about a Picasso in the St. Louis Art Museum's collection.
• Christopher Knight was as flummoxed as I was that NYT "art-market watcher" Carol Vogel would call MoMA's bizarre recent Van Gogh show a "success."
  
• A first?: LACMA spokesperson takes to Twitter to begin to clear up misconceptions in a blog post (by an ex-NYTer). (In a related story, I left a comment on said post, but the author did not publish it. FWIW: I was confused by the writer's formulation that attendance-during-her-gallery-visit somehow impacted Koonsability, by her lack of data on LACMA's endowment, by her presumption about the role of draw from LACMA's endowment on its operating budget, and by the absence of other relevant data.)

I Tweeted about this earlier this week, but Andrew Taylor flushes out a key question. I raised similar points in one of my points about the MCASD's renting-out of its collection to a Las Vegas casino.

I went through some updated FY 2009 federal budget data looking for new art/museum earmarks and... this is where the numbers seem likely to stay. Congress will almost certainly pass the omnibus appropriations bill this week. I still don't know how the museums listed in that post are going to use their earmarks.

Two other bits of data of interest to art-lovers: The NGA's federal appropriation is up 2.3 percent to $122.7 million. That includes $17.4 million for repair and renovations to the NGA's facilities, most notably the continuing project in the West Building.

Also: The NGA's endowment was down to $609 million as of Sept. 30, 2008, a 16 percent drop from a year earlier, when it had been $724 million. (Over the same period the S&P 500 was down 21 percent.) Unlike museums such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which make more information more available, the NGA does not release quarterly endowment information. In the five-plus months since the NGA's endowment fell to $609M, the the S&P is down 27 percent.

Remarkably, the Museum of Contemporary Art doesn't have a painting by home-state artists Wayne Thiebaud or Elmer Bischoff. (It doesn't have a David Park, either.) Bischoff is a complementary guy, but Thiebaud is a must-have.

The Hirshhorn should have more Felix Gonzaelz-Torres than it does, especially as it took the important 1994 FG-T show (which was organized by MOCA). The Hirsh has only untitled (for Jeff). Meanwhile, the Hirsh has strong examples of Wayne Thiebaud, including numerous works from 1963, Thiebaud's key year. Therefore...

Trade No. 3: The Hirshhorn sends Wayne Thiebaud's Blue Vendor (1963, right) and Elmer Bischoff's Woman on Sofa (1959) to MOCA for Felix Gonzalez-Torres' 1993 Untitiled (Last Light).

The St. Louis Art Museum has one of the great early Matisses anywhere. Stands to reason that the museum 'should' have a nice early-ish Picasso to go along with it. 

To be sure, SLAM has strong middle Picasso: It has the superb Marie-Therese Walter-recalling Pitcher and Fruit Bowl (1931), and Mandolin and Vase of Flowers (1934). SLAM's late Picasso Seated Woman (1953) is also a jaw-dropper.

But when it comes to pre-Marie-Therese Picasso, SLAM is weak. (Yes: it has a good Blue Period-presaging painting, The Mother (1901).) But its only cubist-period painting, The Fireplace (1916-17) is pretty average.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a nice, deep Picasso collection. It could use a Max Beckmann. SLAM has a ton of Beckmann. Therefore...

Trade No. 2: Cleveand's Still Life with Biscuits (1924, above) for one of St. Louis' Beckmanns, say this nice Beckmann portrait of Curt Glaser (1929) or Fisherwomen (1948).

Today is the NHL's trade deadline -- one of the most exciting days of the NHL year and a TSN-watching semi-holiday in Canada -- and my Washington Capitals are right in the thick of the deal-making. So in the spirit of the season, I'll be proposing (frivolous) trades between museums all day. First up, and with the Philly Museum's Cezanne-and-friends show in mind...

Deal No. 1: The Museum of Modern Art sends Andre Derain's Bathers (1907) to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Marcel Duchamp's Portrait (Dulcinea) (1911).

Derain's Bathers is one of the best paintings that MoMA keeps in storage. With its blues and its handling of the figures it's obviously Cezanne-derived. (And like his friend Henri Matisse, Derain owned one of Cezanne's Bathers: This one, which is now in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel. Sorry, the Basel museum doesn't 'allow' direct links.) It would look great on a wall near the Philly Museum's own majestic Bathers.

Speaking of MoMA, it has a fine Duchamp collection. (Much of which is regularly on view in a gallery on the museum's fourth floor.) However most of its best Duchamps are objects, not paintings. The Philly Museum has an abundance of super Duchamp paintings, including a personal fave, Portrait of Chess Players. And besides, how many Duchamp paintings does one museum really need? (I kid! I kid!)

Duchamp's Dulcinea is a nice Duchamp painting. It's not Nude Descending a Staircase, but it's in the same... county. It's also plainly related to MoMA's great Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Related: Propose your own trades on your blog or via Twitter. (Be sure to @ me!)

One of the under-discussed angles on the Brandeis-Rose controversy is this: Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz apparently doesn't think that art contributes to human thought or societal progress as much as, say, the life sciences do. To Reinharz art is a mere Saturday discipline that doesn't impact  our understanding of the world around us, so why not just monetize it? [Image: Albert Obermayer, Atomisation of a 10 cm-long Iron Wire By a Strong Electric Current, 1893 or earlier.]

It's hard to imagine a clearer argument against Reinharz's worldview than curator Corey Keller's recent SFMOMA show, "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible World 1840-1900." In a December Q&A on SFMOMA's blog, Keller talked about how important visual culture was to 19th-century scientists, and how they used photography to help build public support for progressive (read: religion-challenging) science:

The pictures were certainly not intended as art, but their aesthetic value was not discounted... [S]cientists then, like scientists now, always needed support for their work, whether it was government or private support. They used these pictures as a way to draw in the public. There was an enormous movement in the 19th century towards popular science, and a belief that to have a healthy citizenry you had to have a population that understood the most important ideas in modern science, and so they used photography and other kinds of materials as a way of bringing these ideas to the public. The pictures needed to be interesting as well as informational. The fact that they work on both levels is not a contemporary concept.

So, I'm not presenting them as art. I'm presenting them as part of the visual culture and that's really, for me, what's so interesting about photography. In fact, in the 19th century, the percentage of pictures that were made with the idea that they were art is very small. But photography remains the most important form of image-making in the 19th century, and it informed all areas of visual culture, including fine art practice. I'm not making a claim for them as art, because that really wouldn't be correct. But it is not incorrect to think about them in relationship to art and to the other kinds of images that circulated at that time.

Keller's argument doesn't necessarily die out with the end of the 19thC: There is a continuting history and tradition of art interacting with other disciplines to as part of a broader societal examination of new ideas (as well as of art helping to make avant-garde ideas or technologies more palatable, understandable, accessible and so on). Example: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 1967-71 Art and Technology Program. LACMA's Howard Fox wrote an introduction to the e-publication of the catalogue that picks up where Keller leaves off.

So maybe someone should send Reinharz some catalogues -- and then hope he doesn't flip them on EBay.

• Corey Keller, the curator of SFMOMA's "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840-1900" talks with SFMOMA's Open Space blog. (On MAN: Part one, two, three, four.)
• Everywhere the MFA Boston's Monets go, disasters (that get into the gallery!) are sure to follow. (You may recall that when the MFA rented out Monets to a gallery in a Las Vegas casino, the power went out for four days and the paintings likely cooked.)
• Chris Burden and Gogo in a story involving a Carribean island, gold bars and a plot right out of Ian Fleming.
• When the New Museum was still in Chelsea -- and still did good, edgy, historical shows -- Dan Cameron surveyed the '80s East Village scene. The star of that show was Lady Pink, a turn that I thought would earn the graffitist more museo-attention. Didn't happen. This is a fab Q&A with Lady Pink. [via]
• Were earth/land artists inspired by Depression-era CCC projects?
  
• Regina Hackett on why horses are blue.
  

1.) An unusually high number of America's best and most prominent mostly-contemporary art museums have new directors that have started their jobs in the last year, including the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn, the MCA Chicago, and MOCA (which is still in transition). Next-tier space such as the Blaffer, the Henry, MCA Denver and MOCA Detroit have new bosses too. This will mean something for those museums and for how the public interacts with and experiences contemporary art. If it doesn't... those directors will have played it too safe.

2.) In a related story: When art museums use their collections and their curatorial staffs to intelligently engage with the present, they do something extra-important: They reach beyond the art ghetto to new audiences, they make the case for why art matters, for why art isn't just a feature story. From one of the best and most popular political blogs: A case in point. I'd suggest that the author of that post, Johanna Neuman, next check out this installation (which the Hirshhorn should be promoting in much the same way the Smithsonian American Art Museum is promoting the show to which I linked above).

3.) Speaking of the Hirsh: I think that however s l o w  l   y, the Hh and the Smithsonian made the right call in hiring Richard Koshalek to run the HMSG. The place needs stability, an experienced director, and someone willing to push the envelope a bit.

4.) Love.

5.) I would like to think that the Phillips Collection will properly light art at some point during my lifetime. Nothing about the Morandi show on view there now or the lighting of parts of the permanent collection gives me cause for optimism.

• Jerry Saltz says that Martin Kippenberger (on view now at MoMA) is more than a shock jock.
• I wish my Q&As with museum directors were this snappy: The DMN's Michael Granberry chats with the Nasher's Jeremy Strick.
• If the Bhutan show at Ess Eff's Asian Art Museum is half as engrossing as Kenneth Baker's review, then it's a heckuva show.
  
• Richard Lacayo on photos of war dead then, now, and in the future.
• Lacayo on Cezanne-and-friends in Philly.
  
• A show at SF's Fraenkel Gallery examines the relationship between Edward Hopper and photographers who came later, says Jori Finkel in the NYT. I haven't seen the catalogue, but it sounds like a must-read.
• The LAT asks some wise people (and some shockingly stupid ones -- I mean, why bother with Ann Coulter when you want thoughtful discourse?) what they'd do with the NEA. Me? I'd kill it.
• Frank Gehry is 80. He looks back with LATer Christopher Hawthorne.
• The Boston Globe's Sebastian Smee visits George Tooker (literally).
• William Kentridge is or has been on view in many media in Seattle in the last few weeks. Jen Graves considers Kentridge's inconsistency.
• In the St. Louis P-D, David Bonetti examines the reason why St. Louis is suddenly full of Asian art shows.
• In the DMN/Forth Worth S-T, Gaile Robinson looks at what's new at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, a relatively new space on TCU's campus. I've been to the space a few times now, and it's clearly one to watch.