April 2009 Archives

I meant to link to this yesterday and fell behind: The NYT's Randy Kennedy has a nice story on the work painter Ross Bleckner is doing in Africa with the United Nations. Don't miss it. 

Yesterday  I spoke with Hirshhorn senior curator Valerie Fletcher about the museum's planned deaccessioning of Thomas Eakins' 1904 portrait of Robert C. Ogden at Christie's next month. [At left.] Fletcher confirmed that the painting hadn't been on view since 1977 and said that it looks better via JPEG than it does in person. (The painting was re-lined some years ago, and that old re-lining processes tend to compress the paint surface a bit.) Fletcher also gave me a thorough, instructive explanation of how the museum came to decide that Ogden just wasn't that good a painting.

"A few years ago we invited a 19thC expert from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and from the National Portrait Gallery to come look and discuss our Eakinses," Fletcher said. "Without telling them what I thought, they went through painting by painting and their opinions were remarkably consistent, that these works [we're deaccessioning and a few others that came to the museum through two Eakins associates who inherited much of Eakins' wife's estate] were the dregs of Eakins' studio. It became apparent when we picked the 10 best or the 10 weakest and everybody pretty much agreed on the same things. So what we retained was most of the works, including obviously the best ones but also including some intriguing minor works.

"So yes, I considered the idea of Ogden as being the only full-length seated portrait we have, but as soon as you put it next to the other Eakins portraits we have and the portraits in other collections -- particularly at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts -- it's very clear there's a good reason why the sitter [kept it for only a couple years]."

One other note: Unlike some museums that deaccession from Department X and earmark deaccessioning funds for Department X-era works, the Hirshhorn puts all deaccessioning-related funds into a single kitty, for work from any period. When Joseph Hirshhorn gave his collection to the nation, he explicitly approved this, adding that funds should go to "new art."

Related: The Washington Post effectively re-publishes this story -- which was first broken here on MAN last Thursday -- without giving credit. That's shameful and dishonest.

• Putting the Getty's new $15-per-car charge in context;
• LACMA's got a new really, really big Matta;
• The future?: SFMOMA uses its blog to allow its curators to share specific information about specific works in its collection with the public;
• The day after MAN's two-part Q&A with new Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek, the Washington Post's Blake Gopnik profiles Koshalek; and
  
• A Center for Land Use Interpretation-adjacent building is on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's most-endangered list.
  

Love this: A Chicago alderman is getting creative [via AJ] in trying to do something about the Art Institute of Chicago's 50 percent admissions increase. The alderman, Ed Burke, has found an 1891 agreement that might require the museum to be free to the public two-and-a-half-days per week. (That would get the AIC almost halfway to keeping up with its peer institutions.) Stay tuned...

Continued from this morning...

MAN: And what are some of the Hirshhorn's "unique strengths?"

RK: I think there's something important about being located in Washington, DC. This city has symbolic importance and the Hirshhorn can be a truly national museum of modern and contemporary art and beyond. We have here representation from [nearly] every country in the world and we have the highest representation of ambassadors and cultural attache. It's a city of think tanks that are doing research. I think what we're going to focus on is big themes and doing the appropriate research. [Image: Gerhard Richter, Sanctuary, 1988.]

One of the reasons I took this job is the uniqueness of the location on the Mall. I think we're going to get in the business of curating public space. I'm interested in what happens before people come here -- I think using new media we can do that, and in what happens after they leave too. I think we also can be involved in curating the public space that is not only on the main ground plane of this institution, but that is also the Mall.

I also think you're going to see us deal with the city directly, with the city and the public space that surrounds us. We'll be international in that we can draw on the international assets of this city, finding the right balance in all of that.

We really want to engage the arts in big themes not just in the galleries, but outside the museum, say in a tent-type structure on the National Mall. One of these events would be in the fall and one would be in the spring, in a kind of inflatable building. The structure would house 500-1000 people and we'd have programming that includes everyone, from trustees to directors to curators to artists. [Koshalek showed me drawings of what the tent might look like.] It's about where the cultural institution needs to go in the future to be relevant. [Image: Ken Price, Orange, 1961.]

MAN: Among major American museums, only a couple -- you and the National Gallery of Art -- have failed to engage in an expansion project in the last 30 years. The Hirshhorn's collection has outgrown this building... but the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building next door is empty. Do you want it?

RK: [Grins.]  I'm on the committee to decide what happens to the Arts and Industries Building -- and that's all I should say right now. That's all I should say because the committe hasn't even  met yet.

I know it's there. I know what it is. I know its scale. It's probably going to have to be at the service of all the Smithsonian Institution museums, but I would very much like to do something there before [renovation] work begins. It'd be very similar to what the first show was at MOCA. We did the building next to the then-Temporary Contemporary and Maria Nordman did the installation. We took her on a tour, she liked the building, and she did a project inside on the main floor. But because of earthquake codes we couldn't let anyone in... so you only see her piece from looking in the main doors. We're thinking of doing something there, at Arts and Industries that might be a little like that.

MAN: The other Hirshhorn space possibility that's been discussed over the years is opening up the fourth floor of the Bunshaft building to the public, to art. There have been structural and cost issues, if I remember correctly.

RK: I haven't been here long enough to know too much about how possible that is or isn't. There's potential for that. There's physical expansion and there's content-based expansion, and we will examine that in a serious way. [Image: Robert Lazzarini, Payphone, 2002.]

MAN: I don't know that I would say that this is a problem, but it's been an issue over the years: The Hirshhorn has long had significant trustee representation from non-Washingtonians, from people who are from other places and who often have primary loyalties to other museums. Is that a problem? A challenge? A nothing?

RK: The board will expand. It has been mentioned to me that there should be stronger representation from Washington, DC, but we haven't made any decisions. Those decisions will be made between myself and the board, but yes, that's something that the board has had engagement with. Leadership within institutions is a serious subject of interest to me.

Earlier this month Richard Koshalek assumed the directorship of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. (Background on Koshalek is here.) Yesterday he and I talked about what 'his' Hirshhorn will look like. This is the first of two parts. Images are all of works in the Hirshhorn's collection.

MAN: In the last half-decade or so a lot of modern-and-contemporary art museums have stressed the 'contemporary' part and de-stressed the 'modern' part. The Hirshhorn has been no exception. How do you want to straddle that divide here, especially considering the strength of the Hirshhorn's modern collection?

Richard Koshalek: These are all initial thoughts because I've only been here several hours. We've not had enough time to sit down with our curators and do the kind of in-depth conversations you need with regards to what's been done here in the past and what's planned for the future. But it's my feeling that modern-and-contemporary museums must expand the range of what they do. My view is we have to move beyond modern-contemporary and look at the larger historical context into which modern-contemporary is fixed. For example, an exhibition of an artist of the past who did extraordinary works on paper, like Beuys, for example, and a show that looks at the work of a contemporary artist, and go back to the past where there's some connection. Then have a scholar of the past look at Beuys and so the general public is then able to make a connection between the works.

Recently I gave a speech at the Royal Society of Arts in London. I spoke on museums in the US and [Tate director] Nic Serota spoke on museums in Europe. I talked about what was lacking in museums of modern and contemporary art is the ability to do appropriate research, 'deep research' is the phrase I would use. There has been a constant rush to make the deadlines to open another show, another exhibition and museums are going to have to make a greater commitment to research, to give the curators the ability to do that research. I mean the money to travel, the time it takes to do it, the other resources it takes to do it.

We did this at MOCA and you see it to a large extent in the shows Ann Goldstein did. That started when I was there, a show like 'A Forest of Signs.' We gave Ann the time she needed to do the appropriate research, so when it was done there was new knowledge. I think the public now wants an institution that sees the larger context. I think it actually does take what we do seriously and wants more information and more substantial information on the work of artists. [Image: Marsden Hartley, Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, 1940-1941. Currently on view in Cezanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]

MAN: Does the Hirshhorn have the staff to enable the kind of meaty shows that somewhere like MOCA does?

RK: The other thing about research is that I see us having two curatorial staffs: The people who are here -- there are some extraordinary people here, they're the primary curatorial staff for the institution. The other I think is the curators that exist in the larger world that do extraordinary things, curators who are scaring me because they're breaking new ground. I have a list of people who are re-thinking the world we live in. We see them as our second curatorial staff. We're going to use them to bring in more of a comprehensive look at what this institution can be.

MAN: So you anticipate the Hirshhorn having more adjunct relationships?

RK: Exactly. And from different institutions -- not just museums of modern and contemporary art, but also from broader, historical institutions. [Image: Wolfgang Laib, Pollen from Hazlenut, 1998-2000.]

MAN: When we think of MOCA we think of a museum that does smart, historical exhibitions. When we think of MCASD we think of a museum that mines its collection effectively. When we think of the Hammer we think of a museum that starts from the present and that works out from there. I'm not sure the Hirshhorn has a clear identity. What do you want it to be?

RK: It's going to be an uncompromising museum. This is one of the legacies I think, from MOCA. We were truly uncompromising. In a museum situation like MOCA you were always being put in a position of making decisions that could compromise the institution's integrity, so I think you're going to see the museum be uncompromising in terms of what it does and it will set a high standard of quality for what it does in exhibitions, collections and education. I think we're going to look at what the existing and outstanding strengths are of the institution are.

[Koshalek picks up a document and taps it.] The ideas that are here are what I believe in in regard to the Hirshhorn. We're working on this now and we'll be working with our board on it. At this stage in the history of our institution, we're coming up on our 40th anniversary in five years, and then our 50th beyond that. The thing we need to ask is what are its unique strengths and what are the contribution it makes to the public and to the field of art history.

Continued here.

Kees van Dongen's The Corn Poppy (c. 1919, at right) has both seduced and puzzled me. It hovers between fetching and fauve, between caricature and considered. It's a 'pop tune' painting: That red swath of hat is guaranteed to stick in the back of your head for days.

There isn't much Kees van Dongen in the U.S., so I've long wondered exactly where van Dongen fits in the firmament. This spring the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts put together a van Dongen retrospective, the first North American van Dongen survey since 1971. The show was accompanied by a relentlessly thorough catalogue, as authoritative an English-language tome as the artist is likely to receive. (The catalogue wasn't distributed in the U.S., but it's available here through the Montreal MFA.) For the last couple months I've been working my way through it, trying to determine whether van Dongen is a significant figure or whether he was a flitty gadabout.

Both stylistically and biographically van Dongen was all over the place. He hung out with Picasso & Co. at the Bateau Lavoir, but painted like Matisse and the fauves. His painterly interest in the female nude rivaled Modigliani's, only van Dongen's figures seem more brazen, more sexually confrontational. After sleeping his way through the avant garde, van Dongen followed a Vuillardian path and evolved into a society portraitist. Finally, the work of his last 25 years is so undistinguished that virtually none of it is in the Montreal catalogue -- the few examples that are here don't require much more supporting evidence. Van Dongen's oeuvre is inconsistent, at least, but when he was good he was memorable.

In a couple of posts later this week I'll walk through the scholarship-loaded catalogue and I'll try to see if I can figure out exactly where van Dongen fits...

Last week I posted lists of deaccessionings-at-auction that US art museums are attempting this season (and I blasted museums for their typical lack of transparency). The usually unanswered question that comes after all those sales is: What are art museums doing with the money?

A new web-tool on the Indianapolis Museum of Art's website shows you what the IMA is buying with funds from deaccessioning. Check out this painting: Charlie Dye's A Well-Earned Drink. The IMA deaccessioned it last December. At that page you can see that the IMA used the funds to help buy this Horace Pippin. You can even click right from the Dye to the Pippin. See art museums: Transparency isn't difficult.

• Walker curator Peter Eleey talks with the Strib's Mary Abbe about his new show 'The Quick and the Dead.' (Good thing they chatted: With a goofy title like that, who would have any idea what the show is about?)
• The NYT's best art critic, Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter reviews 'The Pictures Generation' at the Met.
• Last Wednesday in the SF Chron, John Cote explained the machinations around the FAMSF and its Oceanic art collection/display/etc.
  
• Yup, that's it. All those newspaper/etc. job cuts you've read about? You're seeing the impact...

• Michael Buitron puts Sam Durant's most recent (political) work in context;
• Hrag Vartanian on images and the Armenian genocide;
• Two awesome works for Earth Day from the Amon Carter collection;
• Earlier this week I posted about Nelson-Atkins curator Keith Davis' Homer Page show, the catalogue of which is a must-own for photo fans. Earlier this month Davis spoke at the Smithsonian American Art Museum about collecting; and
  
• Images and our national reckoning with having been ruled by a criminal regime whose highest-ranking figures approved torture: The LAT reports that more prison abuse photos, from both Iraq and Afghanistan, will soon be released.
• It remains troubling that the Corcoran still hasn't answered these questions. (At least there are no Corcoran objects in the spring auctions.)
  

Continued from this morning and from part two...

This morning I noted that none of the nine museums not previously revealed to be attempting deaccessionings at auction this season had disclosed their plans. For eight of the museums this was no surprise: Museums have traditionally been tight-lipped about collections management. But for the ninth, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, I was surprised. After all, many arts journos praised the IMA for pledging to pre-release deaccessioning info via its website.

So why wasn't the IMA's most recent planned deaccessioning online? According to the folks in Indy the reason is pretty simple: A data-entry glitch related to using a new system. Within about an hour of my asking the IMA why the data wasn't online, it was.

Museum of Modern Art, New York:

• Eugene Atget, Bagatelle (Roses) ($11,500-17,500); and
• Eugene Atget, Saint-Cloud (Cascade) ($10-13,000).

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:

• Jankel Adler, Figure ($25-35,000).

New Britain Museum of American Art:

• Martin Johnson Heade, Red Rose ($50-70,000).

Indianapolis Museum of Art:

• Charles Schreyvogel, The Scalp ($150-250,000);
• Frank Tenney Johnson, Edge of the Desert ($70-100,000);
• Oscar Edmund Berninghaus, Fiesta Day in Taos Pueblo ($300-500,000);
• Ernest Martin Hennings, Laguna Pueblo Mission Church ($250-350,000);
• Walter Ufer, Taos Landscape with Indians ($180-240,000);
• Olaf Carl Wieghorst, Rendezvous at the Waterhole ($30-50,000);
• Olaf Carl Wieghorst, Indian Pueblo ($50-70,000);
• William McGregor Paxton, La Russe ($100-150,000);
• Olaf Carl Seltzer, Indian Scouts by the River at Sunset ($60-80,000); and
• Gerard Curtis Delano, Canyon del Muerto (Canyon De Chelly) ($60-80,000, above).

The Chicago Tribune, the eighth-largest newspaper in the U.S., has laid off Alan Artner, its art critic.

Continued from this morning...

Each museum listed below is selling for the benefit of their acquisitions funds. That's acceptable under AAMD guidelines. However, it's always fair to question individual deaccessionings on the merits of whether a museum should be letting go of a certain work.

As best I can tell from using the Hirshhorn's online collection listings, this Thomas Eakins 1904 portrait of Robert C. Ogden (at right) is the Hirshhorn's only full-length Eakins portrait. It's being offered at Christie's next month. True: The Hirshhorn has a deep Eakins bench, including drawings, photographic studies and paintings. Still, don't be surprised if you hear more about this one...

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden:

• Victor Vasarely, Reytey ($30-50,000);
• Arshile Gorky, Portrait of Vartoosh ($100-150,000);
• Henry Moore, Three-Quarter Figure ($30-50,000);
• Arshile Gorky, Seated Woman with Vase ($50-70,000);
• Thomas Eakins, Robert C. Ogden ($400-600,000);
• Thomas Eakins, Study for 'Portrait of Mrs. Charles L. Leonard' ($100-150,000);
• Romare Bearden, Prevalence of Ritual... ($8-12,000);
• Henry Moore, Meditations on the Effigy ($7-10,000); and
  
• Thomas Eakins, Study for 'William Rush and his Model' ($80-120,000).

Harvard Art Museum:

• Edouard Vuillard, Bouquet du Capucines ($150-200,000).

Related: Part three, featuring MoMA, SFMOMA, New Britain and the IMA is here.

'Tis spring, when a young man's fancy turns to what new art his curatorial department can get if it sells some art it doesn't think is good enough. That's right: With the spring auctions comes deaccessioning season.

So far the only deaccessioning that's received much attention has been that of the Montclair Art Museum, about which the Wall Street Journal and freelancer James Panero seem to have screamed fire in a crowded theater.

But it's not just Montclair that's selling. At least nine other museums are selling art this season, including: Harvard, the Hirshhorn, LACMA, New Britain, MoMA, Palm Springs, Indianapolis, the Walters and SFMOMA. Not a single one of them has managed the deaccessioning transparently: So far as I can find, not one museum issued a press release or shared with their community that they were selling from their collection. This is one of the worst practices of American art museums: There is no reason that museums shouldn't be completely transparent when it comes to culling their collections. (The best way to head off misunderstanding and sloppy reporting is to communicate effectively.)

It appears as though all deaccessioners identified above are selling and earmarking funds in compliance with AAMD guidelines on deaccessioning. Some even go out of their way to say so in the relevant auction catalogue listings. Throughout the day I'll feature links to what these museums are selling. First up: LACMA, which continues to cull from the Lewin collection, and Palm Springs. The links are to the relevant auction catalogue listing:

LACMA:

• Carlos Merida, The Twins ($12-18,000);
• Rufino Tamayo, Cabeza en Gris ($50-70,000);
• Pedro Figari, Mujeres en el Baile ($20-25,000);
• Rufino Tamayo, Two Heads ($90-120,000, above);
• David Alfaro Siqueiros, Study for Maternidad ($15-20,000);
• Federico Cantu, Mona Casandra ($10-15,000);
• Felipe Castaneda, Ternura ($15-20,000);
• David Alfaro Siqueiros, Study for Marcha de la Humanidad ($15-20,000);
• Rafael Coronel, Nude ($15-20,000);
• Carlos Merida, El Espejo del Divino ($18-22,000); and
• Carlos Merida, Untitled ($12-18,000).

Palm Springs Art Museum:

• Ellsworth Kelly, Light Green Panel ($70-90,000); and
• Robert Irwin, Untitled (a painting) ($80-120,000). 

Related: Part two, featuring the Hirshhorn and the Harvard Art Museum.

In response to my recent Philly Inky op-ed on Philadelphia Museum of Art's exclusionary pricing for 'Cezanne and Beyond,' reader RMJ emailed the following:

Ironically, the PMA board is largely comprised of individuals who supported moving the Barnes because its location and admissions policy was exclusionary.

• Marc Wilson, one of America's most distinguished museum directors, is retiring from the Nelson-Atkins. In his three decades in Kansas City, Wilson built one of America's best museums and commissioned the best museum building built in the US in 20 years, the Steven Holl-designed Bloch Building. The KC Star's Alice Thorson has a strong write-up. 
• Artist Steve Roden considers Dante... and when purgatory is full of eyes. 
  
• From the department of corrections, this Lee Rosenbaum post is in error. At least one ArtsJournal-published writer's Pulitzer Prize submission was accepted and considered by the Pulitzer Prize jury. However, Rosenbaum is correct in saying that the committee rejected her submission, and concludes her post: "No matter. Change is coming. You don't need a weatherman (or a medal) to see which way the wind blows." That's true -- especially when the wind has already blown.
  

Photography anniversary shows are easy museo-hits, any Ansel Adams show is even easier. Annie Leibovitz comes with a name (but not much else) and some museums get so lazy that they just turn over whole photography shows to commercial magazines. So when a big-institution curator, such as the Nelson-Atkins' Keith F. Davis, is willing to devote a significant exhibition and a major publication to a mostly unknown or forgotten artist, he's demonstrating real commitment. (And so is his museum.) Take Davis' The Photographs of Homer Page, on view now at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, and via a Yale Press-published monograph. Until now, Page has been a forgotten figure. Davis' presentation makes a strong case for continued re-examination.

As Davis points out in the catalogue's main essay, Page was once a star, a MoMA-blessed peer of Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Irving Penn, Aaron Siskind and so on. Page's mentor was Dorothea Lange, on whose property Page and his wife once lived. But while Page's peers went on to become photo-institutions, Page stuttered and disappeared. Davis posits that Page suffered from a mix of a broken marriage from which he had a hard time recovering, a propensity for drink, a crisis of confidence and a fear of ambition.

The show (which I haven't seen) and book (which I have) focuses on just two years, 1949-50, when Page worked on a Guggenheim fellowship. After the grant, Page's career disintegrated. He didn't receive a follow-up Guggenheim so that he could finish the book he planned, a book that Davis posits would have rivaled Robert Frank's The Americans for import. He soon distanced himself from the fine-art photography world, taking commercial and journalistic assignments and working for the Magnum agency. It took 60 years -- and Davis -- for Page to 'come back.'

So the drama of career-meandering aside, how is Page's work? It's challenging in ways that recall the best work of Page's peers, only darker. It's documentary photography with cheek. It's scenes portrayed with acerbic wit. Some of the pictures slowly reveal themselves to be slyly disturbing. While Frank's The Americans sheds light on the corners of a nation, Page's 1949-50 pictures are about what goes on in the corners of individual psyches. Having been introduced to Page, I can't imagine Diane Arbus (or any subsequent artist who probed psychic pain) having happened without him.

In the Page above (New York, June 18, 1949), are the children playing on a sidewalk, or are they gang-beating a female mannequin and finding it hilarious? In the second picture (New York, May 11, 1949), the advertising text says that "One woman tells another... men see for them(selves)," even as the slouching sad-sack in the picture clearly, sadly, doesn't.

It seems like Page wanted each photograph to have about 20 percent wince. A New York picture from June 22, 1949 shows two African-American construction workers taking a quick break and checking out urbanity around them. On first pass it's a picture of a city being built, with two beefcakey figure studies thrown in. Then you notice that the two men are segregated from the rest of humanity -- all of which is white and white-collar -- behind a construction barrier.

In spots Davis apparently helps Page along. On plate 50 in the catalogue is Page's New York, September 9, 1949, a picture of a group of pre-teen boys eagerly watching a sporting event, apparently a baseball game. They're happily wide-eyed, working on popsicles, thrilled to be at the game. On the next page, Plate 51 is New York, October 29, 1949. It shows a group of middle-aged men at a sporting event. Many are clutching what look to be racing forms or betting sheets, so it's probably a horse race. Dejection reigns. The joys of youth have given way to the intense disappointments of middle age.

If there's a theme that runs through Page's work from 1949-50, when Page was only 31 years-old, that's it: Middle-aged frustration. Sometimes Page has a sense of humor about it, as in New York, September 7, 1949, immediately above. But more often Page is forlorn. Several pictures feature men staring vacantly at cheesecake-mag covers at newsstands. Others feature a 40- or 50-something man asleep on the subway or in front of a doorway, even in the middle of a cobblestone street as a truck seems to be moving toward him.

It's easy to read these as self-portraits of Page's own psyche. Maybe too easy. But as affecting as these pictures are for us to look at, imagine how they must have been for Page to seek out.

Related: Time's photo-ace, Richard Lacayo, alerted me to the show.

Museum officials and trustees with whom I talk tend to be disinterested in the admissions issue. It's easy to understand why: For the most part, they go to each other's museums for free. For the trustees, money just isn't an issue and many (most?) lack the imagination to understand how an $88 visit to an art museum can be beyond the resources of most people in their community. [Image: An Art Institute of Chicago lion.]

But for everyone else... well, you should see my email today. The most touching have been emails from grandparents who wanted to take their grandchildren to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the exact reasons I outlined in this morning's Philly Inky op-ed... but couldn't because it was just too expensive.

It's not just the PMA that is acting irresponsibly. The Art Institute of Chicago's 50 percent admissions increase is back in the news. Yesterday the Chicago Sun-Times' Fran Spielman reported that a Chicago city council committee stood up to the AIC and demanded that the museum rescind its admissions hike.

True: Neither side is covering itself with intellectual glory. The Chicago councilman who is leading the charge is trying to determine the monetary value of AIC collections. The museum is telling the council to buzz off because it offers 401 free hours a year, which is a little like saying that the museum loves the help so long as the help knows its place. Even sillier: Last month an Art Institute of Chicago spokesperson said that the hike "is about not having an admissions increase in five years and about keeping up with our peer institutions."

There is so much wrong with that spin that I hardly know where to start (Although I certainly tried.)

Here's hoping some smart Chicago arts advocates engage the council and the Chicago Park District -- and fast. Someone should tell Chicago officials that even as Philly and Chicago injure themselves by trying to turn their museums into playgrounds mostly for the affluent, many American museums are going the other way and are doing all they can to increase public access to art and to our shared cultural heritage. As I've documented here repeatedly, top American art museums such as Indianapolis, the Nelson-Atkins and Baltimore have all switched to free admission. Cleveland has re-opened as a free museum. Seattle has embraced and promoted a pay-what-you-can approach.

Going free or dramatically lowering admissions costs is doable. It comes down to making a commitment to public access a priority. Sadly, in Chicago and Philadelphia it isn't.

I'm on the Philadelphia Inquirer's op-ed page today, questioning the improper and exclusionary pricing that the Philadelphia Museum of Art has put in place for it's fantastic 'Cezanne and Beyond' show. It's certainly possible that a major American museum has charged a family of four more for an exhibition, but I can't think of when.

Expanding upon one point that's in the piece: Ever since the Obama administration took office arts advocates have argued for increase government funding for the arts. By establishing pricing for the exhibition at the upper-middle-class-and-beyond, the Philadelphia Museum is damning that case. The PMA has effectively said that the museum -- even a city-supported museum in city-owned buildings -- is not for everyone, it is only for those who can afford it. Why would any level of government want to fund an art museums when its programming is available only to the wealthy?

Related: I'll be discussing the show on MAN in about two weeks. (I tip my hand pretty clearly in the open to my op-ed.)

Details here. 

In a recent series of posts I've argued that art, artists and art museums can and should play a role in helping our nation address the egregious human rights violations committed during the Bush administration. (In January I reviewed a gallery of George Grosz works at the Hirshhorn that examined the question of shared responsibility, and last month I discussed whether the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures had a place in certain museum collections. Then I discussed the topic with MoMA's chief curator of photography Peter Galassi and looked at how some 'national'-level collections have collected related work.)

The latest: Late last week the Obama administration released a series of Bush-era memos 'authorizing' torture. The man who led the the office that sold the Bush administration pre-emptive indulgences was Jay Bybee. Today Bybee is a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has not been charged with any crimes in the US or abroad. There are no impeachment proceedings underway against him -- yet.

The release of Bybee & Co.'s indulgences-masquerading-as-memos reminded Christopher Knight of 19thC French artist Honore Daumier, perhaps the greatest satirist of judges and lawyers the world has known. Yesterday Knight posted this Daumier lithograph (from the collection of the Hammer Museum) which reminds us that artists have long explored these questions of responsibility and accountability.

Also, Andrew Sullivan posted a painting from Cambodia's Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng is a history museum and not an art museum, but I think it's interesting that the museum chooses to use a painting to demonstrate a torture technique and not something/anything else.

WSJ freelancer James Panero created a mini-storm last week with this essay in the Wall Street Journal. From the start the piece was a head-scratcher, long on assertion and surprisingly thin on sourced facts.

On Friday Christopher Knight made his own phone calls to investigate the potential story and reported that Panero's allegations were based on shoddy reporting and a seemingly eager misunderstanding of the situation. As Knight noted, there were so many red flags throughout Panero's essay that it's hard to understand how WSJ editors missed them.

I want to expound upon one of the oddities Knight mentions: The Panero essay was notably confused in its confluence of deaccessioning done-by-the-books with deaccessioning done to pay the light bill.

For example: Panero conflated the Albright-Knox's recent deaccessioning -- the proceeds from which are being used to add to the A-K's collection -- with the National Academy's deaccessioning, the funds from which are not being used to acquire art. It is not clear if Panero fails to understand the difference, or if he was just following the ambulance that is deaccessioning stories. By the way: Why did Panero pick on the Albright and not on LACMA? Panero also threw in the Brandeis University's potential selling of some of the Rose Art Museum's art collection even though it doesn't belong: The museum isn't selling anything. The university is eager to liquidate what it considers to be monetizeable assets. You can't lump all these in together on one blanket outrage; they're different, specific situations and need to be presented and considered as such.

It's that follow-the-crowd, jumble-facts-on-the-way quality of Panero's essay -- and some of the response to it -- that is problematic. Panero seems to have started from the assumption that deaccessioning is bad, bad, bad, which it can be. Then he seems to have run away with a certain need to demonstrate anti-deaccessioning oneness regardless of whether the facts merit it or not. Strangely, AJ blogger Judith Dobrzynski seemed to expect blind zeal too: "Even anti-deaccessioning writers took offense at the essay," she wrote, as if expecting that those with deaccessioning-related principles would naturally jump on a facts-thin case in an effort to demonstrate ideological purity.

• In the Iowa City Press-Citizen Rachel Gallegos reports that the University of Iowa Museum of Art is trapped in federal regulations hell, with no new building in sight. You'd think/hope one of UIMA's senators might be able to help the museum with FEMA's ruling;
• Roberta Smith on late Picasso at New York's Gagosian Gallery; and
  
• Richard Lacayo explains the latest weird missive from Brandeis... and quotes a letter from the Rose's board chair explaining it.
  

More of your favorite small paintings/etc....

• @squeakygigglez: The Virgin's coronation made tiny;
• @mj_moore: A contemporary Pakistani artist who works small;
• @laarttweet: A tiny Calvary scene from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool;
• @markart: David Park worked small too;
• @nashergirl: A Barkley L. Hendricks (that seems to talk);
• @artwhirled: Frans van Mieris the Elder squeezed this allegory into 17 square inches;
• @GettyMuseum: A small 18thC Denis on paper;
  
• via Facebook: Small van Eyck, big turban; and
• @rdowden: Franz Kline at the Walker.

As Tweeted by you (with more to follow this afternoon)...

• @tbembnister: A lithograph from Cleveland;
• @honoluluacademy: Found objects shaped into tiny beauty;
• @robertjosiah: A tiny Stuart Davis;
• @annaconti: A classic Vermeer;
• @susannahblair: A fantastically detailed 14thC Annunciation;
• @arthouse_jenn: Rollin' with Evah Fan;
• @jmcport: A horrific Christ in Limbo from Detroit;
• @rebeccataylorLA: A foreshortened Mantegna;
• @tylergreendc: Speaking of which, Mantegna's scary baby Jesus;
• @bklynharuspex: Manuscript painting (example); and
• @frankline_e: An 'Asian' Bonnard with a puppy.

A couple years ago, while visiting collectors/superstars/bloggers Barry Hoggard and James Wagner, I saw a painting I liked. No surprise that: Barry and James' apartment was stuffed with art, so stuffed that they hung every available surface salon-style.

The painting that held my attention -- and which has held it ever since -- is this little thing here. It's a David Reed. It's tiny, not much bigger than a piece of paper. I like lots of David Reed paintings. Near home, at the Hirshhorn, is a good one. It's nine feet long. It's fine, but it's never going to win anyone's heart. James and Barry didn't hand me the Reed, but I wanted them to. I wanted to be able to feel the painting, to physically relate to its size. I do not want to hold the David Reed at the Hirshhorn. We have a different relationship.

When it comes to art, the more things go around, the more they stay the same.

Small, independent museums can do things big museums can't (or don't). They can take more risks, try different things, be more imaginative. Few do this better than St. Louis's Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, which has long used its Tadao Ando building as a staging ground for youth programs, music events and, of course, art.

The Pulitzer is currently showing Ideal (Dis-)Placements, Old Masters at the Pulitzer. It's been up since October and it's received rave reviews. The Pulitzer has just launched the show's website. No one does single-shows-in-space websites better than the Pulitzer (witness: Dan Flavin, Water) and I wouldn't miss a one of 'em.

Best of all: The Pulitzer folks manage to get across the feeling of seeing art in Ando's remarkable space. Who else would provide day-long, time-lapse, natural-light-only stills of the installation? (The link is at the bottom of the screen. In the picture above it is 8:30am.)

Last week I posted about some cityscapes that feature two-point perspective: I started with this remarkable little Carel Fabritius on view now at the National Gallery of Art in a show titled, 'Dutch Cityscapes,' and I moved on to Caillebotte and Hassam.

First a note on the two impressionists: A reader notes that the Hassam chronology laid out by the Met's Timeline of Art History make it unlikely that Hassam was inspired by the Caillebotte, that Hassam likely arrived at his picture wholly on his own.

Two more today: A reader and Alexis Hyde both noticed this Dennis Hopper photograph, which features the same kind of cityscape and perspective about which I talked last week -- plus an added bonus, er, perspective.

Also, in 2006 then-Village Voicer Jerry Saltz wrote one of his best pieces about Mark Grotjahn and the way Grotjahn plays with perspective, how Grotjahn opens it back up as a subject of artistic exploration. At right is Grotjahn's 2004 Untitled (colored butterfly white background 6 wings), which the Hammer exhibited as part of a small 2005 show of Grotjahn drawings. For another, quite different example, see Untitled (three-tiered perspective), 1997, from MOCA's collection.

• The latest on the $50 million-for-arts-groups part of the $750 billion stimulus package: Most arts journos are covering the grants in proportion to the meaningfulness of the federal 'support.' Most of the stories are perfunctory, 'local man does X'-style quickies. So far as I noticed, no one pulled an NYT and led their culture/etc. sections with the story. (Just checking: Did the NYT lead any section with the $50 million that went to a "program of grants to States to assist eligible aquaculture producers for losses associated with high feed input costs during the 2008 calendar year?" Or did it lead a section with $50 million "for transitional housing assistance grants for victims of domestic violence, stalking or sexual assault?" Ah... no.) If commercial arts journalism was more robust, I think we'd probably see more journalism about the paucity of the federal interest in the arts, not the distribution of the crumbs. (Leader on this account: Christopher 'F-22' Knight.)
  
• In the Washington Post, Jackie Trescott followed MAN's coverage of the Corcoran's continuing deterioration. I do not understand: Trescott spent a preposterous amount of space discussing attendance at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, as if that was important, as if that was an issue that had any bearing on the Corc's long financial struggle. Unprovided context: According to the Corc's last tax filing, about two percent of its operating budget came from CGA attendance-related revenue. Isolate the CGA expenditures from the school's expenditures, and the Corc's percentages of operating as coming from attendance are roughly on par with national averages. In other words: Pretty much none of the Corc's mess is related to its attendance. Except to the Post.
  
• Anish Kapoor gets two new neighbors in Chicago's Millenium Park reports the Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin.
• Doug Harvey in the LA Weekly on old Africa, contemporary Africa, and two shows at the Fowler Museum.
• Jen Graves asks: Why is Vancouver art so much better than Seattle art?
• The most recent American art galleries to be remodeled are those at the Nelson-Atkins, says the KC Star's Alice Thorson.
• Jerry Saltz grapples with a show at the New Museum, the latest NYC museum to think it needs an -ennial. 
• Richard Lacayo is the latest to examine the Venetian art historical drama on view in Boston.
  
• There may have been things in the Boston Globe to which I wanted to link. The paper bombarded me with so many Flash animations and pop-up windows that I gave up trying to read its content. This has happened before.
  

As the Corcoran continues to shrink, many key questions remain unanswered. Twice today I asked the Corcoran:

• Has the Corcoran put any possible additional deaccessioning on hold pending its 'strategic review?'
• Is the Corcoran explicitly (remaining) committed to complying with AAMD/AAM guidelines on deaccessioning?

The Corcoran didn't answer.

These are the most important questions about the Corcoran. They need to be answered. After all: Art is more important than the institutions that house it; the institutions exist because of art.

After laying off unspecified staff two weeks ago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art has made additional, significant cuts, multiple sources tell MAN. The Corcoran did not respond to an email and phone calls to the Gallery's public relations office have gone unanswered. See below. [Image]

It is not clear what percentage of the Corcoran's staff has been cut from the CGA's period of peak staffing.

I'll update this post if more information becomes available.

UPDATE, 2pm: A Corcoran spokesperson says that the CGA will make a statement this afternoon "regarding recent changes to the institution."

UPDATE, 330pm: Several months ago I suggested options that I think the Corcoran ought to explore.

UPDATE, 350pm: Sources tell MAN that 14 additional positions will be cut, for a total of 18 in the last month. This represents 5.6 percent of the Corc's total (school and gallery) staff. A hiring freeze remains in effect. The Corc will suspend employer contributions to its pension plan effective May 1.

UPDATE, 4pm: Check out this March, 2006 Washington Post story on a recent Corcoran "restructuring." It didn't stabilize the situation, did it? (And the Corc didn't answer many more questions back then either.)

UPDATE: 425pm: (New URL due to a problem with some fonts.) The Corcoran has prepared an in-house Q&A about all this. It's in the jump. Highlight: No curatorial cuts. This part sounds familiar: "We have no plans for further layoffs." In a 2006 statement the Corcoran said: "For the Corcoran, this is not part of a larger downsizing plan."

Also: The Q&A asks "Is the Gallery in danger of closing?" The Corcoran does not answer its own question with a "no."

Back tomorrow (I hope).

Yesterday Christopher Knight examined Donn Zaretsky's recent Art in America pro-deaccessioning essay. Last night Zaretsky took to his blog to attempt a response. Let's see how he did. Zaretsky complains:

Knight says he was "stopped cold" by my assertion that the anti-deaccessionist position is "usually justified on the ground that works in museum collections are held 'in trust' for the public and therefore cannot be sold." He claims never to have "heard that 'usual justification' before."

Zaretsky should read the paragraph of Knight's to which he's responding one more time -- it does not equate "public trust" with "cannot be sold":

Art museum professionals restrict the income's use because they believe that the art in their care cannot be sold? Not having heard that "usual justification" before, I quickly realized I was in the presence of a giant straw man about to be knocked down and pummeled. "Supporters of the AAMD position say that works can never be sold," Zaretsky later reiterates -- except that, no, by and large they don't.

The first sentence of the AAMD handbook guiding deaccessioning policy --  adopted in 1987 and amended in 1991 and 2001 -- says: "The board of an art museum should adopt a written policy pertaining to the deaccessioning and disposal of works of art from its collection." That doesn't sound to me like the profession (or its "supporters") thinks works in museum collections cannot be sold. It sounds like they think that, when such sales inevitably happen, they need to be done with forethought and care.

Oops.

Another problem with art-and-entertainment lawyer Zaretsky's screeds is that (as above) they read like marketing brochures, where all that matters is selling the ShamWow. There's nothing wrong with someone arguing for changes to AAM and AAMD deaccessioning guidelines. I can think of a few changes I'd like to see made to the rules, including the creation of an independent, outside review panel that would examine potential infractions and an enforcement provision. (Unfortunately, AAMD has repeatedly demonstrated that ethically-challenged museum directors can get away with almost anything so long as they're members of The Club.)

But Zaretsky either pretends history doesn't exist or he just doesn't know about it. This paragraph is a perfect example of the under-informed dilletantism (in Art in America!) that Knight decries:

[Knight] also makes the bizarre claim that "one prime reason" for LA MOCA's financial problems is that the chairman of their board "is a Zaretskian who figured that if MOCA was spending money it didn't have, it really didn't matter: When crisis hit and the time came to pay the piper, the museum could just peel off a masterpiece from its collection and save the day." Is there any evidence at all for that accusation?

Well yes, there is -- and it's from the most prominent art museum crisis of the last decade. For Zaretsky to be apparently unaware of it as he's arguing in favor of expanded deaccessioning is stupefying. From the Dec. 17, 2008 Los Angeles Times: 

[MOCA board co-chairman Tom] Unterman was asked whether selling art from MOCA's collection was being considered as a way to raise operating funds. His answer:

"It's certainly one of the things that logically appears on an agenda.... Is it a logical option? Yes. Is it a probable option? No, probably not. I don't want to get way ahead of the board on this because they all may wake up one morning and say that's the best thing to do, but I'd be surprised."

... the board's current leadership regards the museum's art not as a cultural legacy to protect but a fungible asset available for cash conversion.

Indeed, conversion to pay bills in a fiasco created by the leadership.

Unterman's gross misunderstanding of his fiduciary duty at a nonprofit art museum helps to explain how MOCA came to the brink. The corporate mind-set he exposed is precisely what creates a boardroom climate that allows for the otherwise inexplicable decision - repeated year after year - to spend down the endowment on which a museum's stability depends. After all, why not take the spending gamble if you believe, however foolishly, that a bad MOCA bet can be covered by peeling off a couple of the collection's 10 magnificent  Mark Rothko paintings or its 11 incomparable Robert Rauschenberg combines and sending them off to market?"

Double oops.

If Zaretsky wants to advocate reforms that would open the door to the dismantling of art museum collections, that's fine. But in so doing he's revealing how woefully unaware of the issue he is.

Nota bene: Yesterday I asked Art in America if it had checked to see if Zaretsky -- best known in the art world as Christoph Buchel's legal enabler in Buchel's MASSMoCA charade -- has any clients that are considering a deaccessioning. If so, that should have been disclosed. The magazine has not responded.

I linked to this exhibition site as a whole a couple weeks ago, but... do not miss this feature. Click all the way through. It's CSI: Boston, starring a paintings conservator, a Tintoretto and two curators. What a story!

This isn't pretty: Art-and-entertainment lawyer Donn Zaretsky's blog is ground zero for bizarre pro-deaccessioning arguments. Recently Zaretsky stepped up his profile by publishing an essay in Art in America magazine. Today Christopher Knight dismantles him. Ouch.

The last couple times I've visited this Carel Fabritius painting at the National Gallery, I've found myself thinking of two impressionist cityscapes. Both of them feature two-point perspective, though nowhere near as daringly as View of Delft.

The first example is no surprise: Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It has plenty in common with the Fabritius: The emphasis on contemporary urban boulevards, a building nearly flanged by the use of dramatic, multi-point perspective, the inclusion of figures.

I have no idea whether Caillebotte was familiar with the Fabritius or not, but the green street-light pole reminds me of the tree at the right of the Fabritius. They seem to serve as a similar kind of anchor, a place from which to move deeper into the painting. Caillebotte also manages to maintain a feeling of uncertainty: Picture the painting without all those umbrellas. They're cleverly put in places that prevent our eye from going where Caillebotte's lines lead us. Without them the painting would be almost obvious.

At left is Childe Hassam's Rainy Day, Boston (1885), from the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. I'm not a particular Hassam fan -- he seems to derive so much from French impressionism while adding so little of his own. Rainy Day, Boston is a good example, an American updating of the Caillebotte right down to the weather, the slick stone streets and the flurry of human activity.

But in a way the Hassam makes clear why the Fabritius works: There isn't any mystery in the Hassam. It's all right there: the brick row houses, the brick manse just off-center in the middle of the painting, the broad Boston avenues that guide the eye into nothingness. The painting asks little of us. It's as if all that extra canvas -- the Hassam is 16 times as big as the Fabritius -- gave Hassam the opportunity to include everything he wanted, leaving no room for wonder.

Carel Fabritius' View of Delft may be the greatest small painting in the world. It's a little shorter than my hand is tall and a couple inches wider than the distance between my thumb and my pinkie: Six inches by twelve-and-a-half. But packed within those 75 square inches are mysteries that have remained unsolved for 350 years.

View of Delft is in the collection of the National Gallery in London, but for now it's on view in "Dutch Cityscapes" at Washington's National Gallery of Art. The exhibition makes no claims of thoroughness, but it's relentlessly delightful. Consider it one of those shows that the NGA does because it is the National Gallery of Art, and it can.

First: What we know about View of Delft: That's Delft's great 15th-century cathedral, Nieuwe Kerk, in the center of the painting. The same panorama exists today, with only a minor change or two. But from there it gets muddy. Who is the figure at left? Is it Fabritius himself?

The painting was made in 1652, less than two years after the son of Willem the Silent, Prince Willem II, had died and been buried in Delft's Nieuwe Kerk, the church at the center of the painting. The most common reading of the painting is that Fabritius was trying to say something about Willem II's early death. But what?

And why are two musical instruments, a lute and a preposterously large viola da gamba to the gentleman's right? Are they a reference to the silenced prince? Are they there to underscore the painter's skill at pulling us into space?

Yeah, how about the eye-pulling, mind-bending perspective in the painting? No one knows for sure how Fabritius did it. NGA Dutch curator Arthur Wheelock has written about this question for 35 years and he sums up the guesses on how Fabritius pulled it off in a short essay in the exhibition's catalogue. Wheelock points out that no other Dutch cityscape of the period mixes a figure and "topography" in this manner, which makes it an even tidier accomplishment. (If Wheelock says it, buy it: Perspective in Delft painting was also the subject of his first book. Incidentally: Consider the London National Gallery's loan of the painting to Washington -- it wasn't in the Mauritshuis' presentation -- as a hat-tip to Wheelock.)

My favorite mystery regarding View has to do with Fabritius and the moments during which he was placing oil on canvas: Did he doubt, and if so, why?

There's one little place in the painting where I think that Fabritius worried that maybe he wasn't pulling off his perspectival cleverness. Look to the right of the cathedral, where a waterway passes through the scene. It's a tricky spot -- the canal runs straight as it passes the cathedral, but because of Fabritius' game it can't run too straight. I think  Fabritius decided that the viewer's eye needed help.

There's a large tree on the right-hand side of the painting. (See detail above, and a slightly different, larger detail in the jump.) In an effort to help us through into the right-hand portion of the painting, Fabritius gave us another tree off in the distance, an almost perfect copy of the foreground tree. Consider it a guide, possibly a cheat. Was that distant tree really there? Or is it a product of Fabritius' doubt?

View is a great painting but it is also an unfulfilled promise: Fabritius was a student of Rembrandt's and in time he might have outdone Vermeer. Instead, Fabritius died just two years after making this cityscape: He was among the victims when 100,000 pounds of gunpowder in the Delft magazine went boom in the worst urban disaster of the Dutch Golden Age. He was 32. (Special bonus: He painted this paper-sized gem, now in the Maurishuis' collection, just before he died.)

Instead of trying to answer the unanswerables, I'm going to use Fabritius' masterpiece -- one of my favorite paintings anywhere -- as a way into pointing out how artists have remained fascinated with Fabritius' multi-point perspective. (And I'll have more on small paintings later this week.)

• Getty Research Institute acquires Guerilla Girls archive.
• MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers nixed a Tintoretto survey because he didn't think it would be a big draw?!!?
• Buy a sex toy from Nan Goldin.
• The art world's best April Fool's Day prank: This from the Eastman House.
• A painting I want to see non-digitally.
  

Intentionally excluded from the weekend roundup: Kenneth Baker reviews a show of new Wayne Thiebaud paintings here.

Baker focuses in on this 12-by-16-inch oil on canvas board titled Peanut Butter Sandwich (2009): "... it looks like an allusion to Jasper Johns' famous lead relief 'Bread' (1969), doctored by Francis Bacon. I doubt that Thiebaud thinks deliberately about such references, or even about his self-references. He inhabits his art as a painter can hope to do only after the first half century or so of practice."

I think Baker's probably right. After all, Thiebaud is 88. In the last four decades or so he's shown no particular need to overtly measure himself up against his peers or against the canon. Thiebaud's still-lifes are unquestionably Thiebaud's still-lifes and not de Heem still-lifes translated into Thiebaud.

But... while Baker was thinking of Johns, I was thinking of James Rosenquist's White Bread (at right). As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the smartest paintings of the 1960s, a 54-by-60-inch tour de spread. The National Gallery of Art acquired White Bread, its first Rosenquist, last year. It's on view in the museum's East Building contemporary art galleries.

White Bread is relentlessly witty. While it shows a knife laying down yellow onto a blank canvas (on bread), the canvas lacks any sign of painterly touch. It's a sly joke about the unnecessary drama of Clyfford Still's heavily and obviously knifed surfaces.

Then again, it might also be a knowing wink about how a big abstraction (or at least a painting with big abstracty section) doesn't require self-conscious brushiness. Or about how canvas was still worth spreading oil paint on even as other artists were painting wood blocks to look like boxes of Heinz ketchup. Perhaps it's a sly needling of the fetish for finishes that was so evident in the early 1960s cavalcade of minimalism shows in New York. And the NGA's text on the painting makes the obvious connection between the '64 Rosenquist and a 1963 Roy Lichtenstein, Mustard on White (below), which is Magna on Plexiglass. (The Lichtenstein is 31 inches-by-37 inches.)

If you read it (or either) as a painting not about art, it's a clever commentary on American popular culture: American consumerism is the bland leading the bland. Or covering it. Or the blandness is spreading.

Meanwhile, back at the Thiebaud: Just as Warhol's paintings about painting don't need brushes (or knives) to make their points, the Thiebaud doesn't need to go out of its way to play in Rosenquist's or Lichtenstein's game. All three of those '60s stars used or referenced commercial painting techniques so as to tweak painting. Thiebaud has never been interested in jabbing his medium in the eye. Instead, Thiebaud's paintings have always been about the allure of paint, about the temptation of something sweet, familiar and seemingly facile. (Thiebaud certainly tends toward Morandi, but Thiebaud's subjects are more important on their own than Morandi's ever were.)

However: Who prepares (or eats) an open-faced peanut butter sandwich? It's almost like Thiebaud is saying that he doesn't want to direct us to interpretation, that he's leaving his paintings open for us to consider any way we want.

• If Carol Vogel's weird note on the possibility of a SFMOMA expansion left you confused, check out the SF Chronicle's take via Kenneth Baker. It's clearer, but you may still come away thinking that SFMOMA has announced that it might be considering the possibility of, you know, perhaps expanding.
  
• The Miami Herald's Fabiola Santiago (presumably) visited the Havana Biennial. Hard to be sure though: No dateline.
• In LA Weekly, a quirky critic (Doug Harvey) writes about quirky artists, a quirky curator and a quirky show at the Hammer.
• Martha Schwendener thinks 'The West' is a small enough subject that a photography show at MoMA should be able to include everything about the western U.S. Me: Is it possible to do the entire American West in one show!? Isn't that asking a lot?
• Jen Graves appropriately smacks new Seattle museum director Christina Orr-Cahall for being unwilling to discuss the 1989 Mapplethorpe-Corcoran controversy in which she was a leading player.
• Know much about contemporary Australian video art? Neither did the San Diego Union-Trib's Robert L. Pincus until he visited a new show at the MCASD.
  

Celebrate this morning's news on marriage equality in Iowa in appropriate fashion: Join Jeff Weinstein in considering Jasper Johns' Tennyson, which is in the collection of the Des Moines Art Center.

• Some discussion of acquisitions: The Indianapolis Museum of Art's blog has fun details about the museum's new Orly Genger, including an interview with Genger. Special bonus: Ever wonder how museums and artists work together to get a project/installation done in a way that presents the artist's work the way the artist wants it seen and does it in a way that keeps the fire marshal off of everyone's back? See the post.
• Conscientious considers the NGA's new Thomas Demand. Greg Allen likes the work better than I do, but agrees that it's too cute an acquisition for a Washington museum.
• I think I need to find me a copy of Burlington Magazine: Art History Newsletter says that the magazine is comparing recent Dutch collection catalogues at the Met and at the Rijksmuseum. 
• Soon to be a Flickr fave? SFMOMA installs a 24-foot Frank Stella painting on its second floor landing.
• Alex Katz looks bland. Because he's wearing J. Crew.
  

When I saw Orly Genger work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art last year, I was a little bummed out. I'd seen Gengers before: At Lemberg Gallery outside Detroit in 2007, I remember walking amidst the clumpy installation as if I was navigating a field that featured strategic plops of lava. That same year a New York museum director and I literally traversed MASSPEAK, a Genger installation at Larissa Goldston in Chelsea. He and his loafers handled the nylon rope just fine. I was wearing sneakers and I slid around like a clumsy fool.

So when I saw Gengers at the Indianapolis Museum of Art last year, I was a little disappointed that I couldn't climb on them. Now the IMA has acquired Genger's Len (2008), one of the pieces installed in 'Whole,' a show of Genger's work that's on view in the IMA's atrium. The exhibition is up until June 14. (In the image above, Len is in the bottom right.)

Genger mines minimalism, but mostly so she can find ways to move on from it. Gone are high minimalism's hard surfaces and sleek, fetishized patinas, replaced by nylon rope and ordinary acrylic paint. Genger's materials aren't machined, they're hand-made. She accepts rectilinear forms, but rejects their straight, masculine lines and their immovable edges. She accepts the repetition of shapes -- as in Len -- but rejects minimalism's adherence to detail with her tugged-into-place stacks. Many minimalists works look like touching them would make a permanent, damaging mark; the IMA's lead promotional photograph for the installation shows someone (Genger?) happily handling the art.

Genger also learns from the post-minimalist generation. Some of her larger pieces -- dwarfed here by the enormity of the IMA's initial atrium -- loom, fill and suggest what Richard Serra might make if he had a soft side. Often Genger's work, such as her 2007 MASSPEAK installation at Larissa Goldston, sloppily spill into rooms, filling negative space in a way that vaguely recalls Rachel Whiteread, minus the anal retentiveness.

• The National Gallery of Art will begin making available podcasts of TJ Clark's Mellon Lectures on Picasso on April 14.
  
• Remember the weather to which I posted yesterday? Oly's Musings has more in the form of Michelle Manley's paintings.
• I love that Ed Schad blogs thoughtfully/in-depth on single artists/shows (and with lots of JPEGs). Most recently: Lester Monzon.
  

The National Gallery of Art has acquired a five-picture suite of Thomas Demand photographs that represent the Oval Office. As with most Demands, at first glance the pictures seem to be of the real Oval Office, but are actually pictures of models constructed from inexpensive materials. The works, a donation from Agnes Gund and Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, are the first Demands to enter the NGA's collection.

The New York Times Magazine commissioned the pictures. They accompanied a Nov. 9, 2008 cover story titled "After the Imperial White House"  (cover below). The photographs were exhibited at London's Sprueth Magers last November, but have not previously been shown in the United States. Titled I, II, III, IV and V (2008), the pictures are on view in the NGA's East Building modern and contemporary art galleries.

They are intensely Washington works, pictures about pictures and the presentation of geopolitical clout. The space is instantly recognizable as the Oval Office, a room made familiar by countless television addresses and photographs of the president at work and at play. (Fun fact: This is the Oval Office's centennial year.)

As usual, the Demands include no people, no actual actors of power. They feature vaguely but not specifically recognizable symbols -- the Presidential seal on Demand's blue carpet lacks the words that ring the real seal ("President of the United States"), as well as details that surround the eagle. The Rembrandt Peale portrait of George Washington that hangs above the fireplace, on partial view in one Demand (below), is abstracted down to the blue and gold of Washington's coat.

The result is a photographed stage set of a stage set used by the United States and its presidents to project and wield power. In a way, Demand has found his ideally reflexive subject. As such, if the NGA wanted to own a Demand, it's the perfect suite.

But therein lies the disappointment: Demand is a minor academic conceptualist whose use of specially constructed sets to examine memory and to question photographic truth was long ago wrung dry. Ultimately Demand's Oval Offices look like a kind of illustration -- the exact sort of intentionally temporal decoration a magazine would logically commission to illustrate a story.

The photographs, chromogenic prints behind shiny Plexiglass, are inert. (All the more so because they're enormous and easily 'solved' Only a handful of paintings in the nearby galleries -- including a Pollock and a Kiefer -- are as big as the biggest Demand.) Demand's omissions seem arbitrary.

Is Demand trying to say something by leaving the star-field out of the United States flag? Not that I can think of. When he leaves 'E Pluribus Unum' out of the Presidential seal, is he making a political statement about the phrase's meaning: 'Out of many, one?' I don't think so. Is his exclusion of Washington but his inclusion of an abstracted version of his (military) jacket in the Peale fraught with meaning? Nope. That's just what he does.

Demand often says his works are about memory, his and our memories of familiar places. That is where his Oval Office suite fails most: The Presidential backlot is so familiar -- it's in news photographs nearly every day -- that it rarely has the opportunity to exist on its own as a memory. Sure, specific scenes from the Oval Office live as memory -- it's easy to conjure the famous picture of John F. Kennedy, Jr. playing under his father's desk. But Demand's schtick is to exclude people, so the most powerful Oval Office-related memories are absent, pre-mandated by Demand's adherence to his conceptual equation.

A few galleries to the west of the Demands are the National Gallery of Art's newly re-opened American galleries. The highlight of the American galleries -- for better or for worse -- is a room of portraits by Gilbert Stuart, the tavern-loving, frequently indebted, early American painter who rose to the occasion of Presidential presentation like no one since. They're portraits that have a lot to say about the American democratic experiment, about what we expect from and value in our leaders. By comparison the Demands are as lifeless as the paper ivy above his Oval Office fireplace -- and as predictable an outcome of the artist's formula as could be imagined.

Related: Rachel Campbell-Johnson in the Times of London on the UK presentation.