May 2009 Archives

Two storylines run through the Philadelphia Museum of Art's 'Cezanne and Beyond.' One is obvious: Paul Cezanne was a titan; his work influenced dozens of great artists who came after him. See Cezanne's trees, see Piet Mondrian's trees. See Cezanne's leaves, see Ellsworth Kelly's leaves and so on. [Image: Marsden Hartley, Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, 1940-41. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.]

Part of the magic of the show, curated by Joseph J. Rishel, Katherine Sachs and an advisory team, is that it makes those connections surprisingly exciting. The show turns a rote art history march into an exciting physical experience, a kind of Encyclopedia Brown-meets-A Night in the Museum. (Alas: As I noted here, the PMA missed the opportunity to show a generation of Philadelphians how exciting art history can be.)
 
While that's the narrative that the museum has encouraged via its ubiquitous marketing campaign, that's not the only thread that runs through 'Cezanne and Beyond.' Ultimately my favorite storyline is the way the exhibition shows how each succeeding generation of artists since Cezanne has accepted him -- and hasn't.

The artists closest to Cezanne's lifetime -- Matisse, for example -- absorbed the master's influence most directly. Cezanne made bathers paintings, Matisse made bathers paintings. But by Ellsworth Kelly, artists had taken a step back from Cezanne. Instead of shaking the master's hand, they were mostly tipping their hats to him: Here's a Cezanne landscape, here's Kelly's reduction of such down to a blue quadrangle.

Or, to put it another way: It's riveting to watch each succeeding generation of artists expunge more and more of Cezanne from their work, to see them accept Cezanne as a starting point, but then to reject Cezanne's subjects, his compositions, his palette, even his medium. The best story in 'Cezanne and Beyond' is that influence is as much about elimination as it is about acceptance. Examples in the days ahead...

• Ellsworth Kelly: Dress designer?
• How the Albright-Knox got its Frida Kahlo.
• Brooklyn has reinstalled -- and redesigned -- its arts of the Islamic world galleries. Here's how they did it.
• It is often appropriate to SCREAM!!!
• Does this Manet belong in Abu Dhabi? Maybe...
  
• Leftover from MOCA's Friday, pre-holiday news-dump release: MOCA is cutting several of the exhibitions chief curator Paul Schimmel told us about in March.
  

• Jerry Saltz reviewed the 2008 Rosler exhibition from which the Hirshhorn acquired The Gray Drape. He was disinterested in the relationship between The Gray Drape and earlier Roslers and wrote that Rosler is trying "to turn back the clock to her glory days, essentially remaking the Vietnam series." This morning I wrote about how I think that relationship isn't just a 'remake,' but that its critically important to contextualizing Rosler's recent work -- and the recent events she addresses.
  
• (Notes on) Politics... is a fan of Rosler's recent series.
  
• Steven Kaplan mostly is too.
• Also: At least one American museum, SFMOMA, has recently installed art that addresses political issues with a kind of warning label attached. These installations at the Hirshhorn have been far more confrontational than SFMOMA's Emily Jacir hanging, yet the Hirshhorn has allowed the art to speak for itself. Kudos.

In 2004, seven months after CBS' "60 Minutes" and The New Yorker reported on the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the American people re-elected George W. Bush. In the five years since, as journalists such as Dana Priest, Jane Mayer, Mark Danner, and Philippe Sands have uncovered the extent to which the Bush administration enabled and encouraged torture, polls have showed that a majority of Americans are shrugging, hoping that the issue will go away, that the errors and even the possible crimes of the Bush years simply might be ignored, forgotten.

The most recent poll to examine whether Bush-era torture policy should be investigated didn't even use the word "torture." Instead Ipsos asked respondents: "Should there be a bipartisan blue-chip commission to investigate how detainees were interrogated?" Fifty-four percent of respondents failed to favor such a commission. (Journalism organizations such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press are complicit in this logophobia: They avoid using the word "torture," instead gently referring to 'enhanced interrogation techniques." That phrase was originally coined by the Gestapo.)

Therefore, the majority of the American people seem to side with conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who recently winced at the release of Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memos that encouraged torture:

"It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, 'Oh, much good will come of that.' Sometimes in life you want to keep walking... Some of life has to be mysterious."

This national compulsion to look away from recent malfeasance is made for Martha Rosler, an artist who has spent much of the last four decades pointing out how Americans' pursuit of the good life has often blinded us from noticing how our nation has fallen short of its ideals. Rosler's most recent body of work addressed Americans' disengagement from the biggest American war since Vietnam: the ongoing conflict in Iraq. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has just acquired a major photomontage from that series, The Gray Drape (2008, above).

The timing of the acquisition is especially fascinating: The Gray Drape entered the museum's collection just as McClatchy reported that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered Guantanamo Bay interrogators to find a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, a key link that the Bush administration needed to justify the war they wanted to wage in Iraq. The McClatchy story and ensuing reports add a chill to The Gray Drape: Rosler's photomontage can be read as revealing how our blindness to and then our national disinterest in Bush-era torture led us into Iraq.

The Gray Drape shows a glamorous woman in what appears to be her bedroom, more interested in her linens than she is in the world outside. The drape she is waving -- read: her love of upscale consumerism -- appears to be preventing her from noticing the wail of the Iraq War outside. She doesn't want to know because she doesn't want to know. The Gray Drape might also be read as an examination of empty patriotism: The woman's drape-waving movement recalls the way you might see someone wave an American flag at a NASCAR race or at a parade. Of course there is no red, white and blue on Rosler's flag-proportioned drape, just white, a possible reference to both the moral hollowness of America's engagement in Iraq and to the jingoism encouraged by many on the right. (Rosler's 2008 video Prototype (God Bless America) makes a similar point. A still from the work is below. To see an excerpt from the video, click here. An excerpt of Prototype is about two-thirds of the way through.)

Rosler has covered some of this territory before, most obviously in Cleaning the Drapes (1967-72, above), which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. By revisiting Cleaning the Drapes so directly in The Gray Drape, Rosler is establishing a parallel between the way America fought in Vietnam and the way it has fought in Iraq. Between 1967 and 1972 -- the peak years of American involvement in the Vietnam War and years to which Rosler ascribes Cleaning the Drapes -- the United States engaged in the morally questionable spraying of Agent Orange, in civilian massacres such as that at My Lai and in the bombing of Cambodia and Laos. Rosler isn't just revisiting old work with The Gray Drape, she's arguing that America's past conduct is relevant -- and that we've failed to learn from it.

While Rosler has worked in a variety of media, including video and installation, her choice of photomontage to make work that addresses America's two most disastrous recent wars is telling. While photomontage was born in the late 19th-century, it was the the artists of the world's first anti-war movement, Dada, who brought the medium to maturity and who merged photomontage with intense and immediate political content. Rosler seems aware that many Dadaists had personal experiences with the horrors of war -- this untitled Max Ernst from 1920 is photomontage-as-autobiography -- where as she doesn't. Ernst portrayed the battlefield directly. Rosler almost always includes a kind of filter. She hasn't been there, but she can -- and does -- examine the way Americans around her experience and address ongoing war (or pointedly fail to, as the case may be). [Image below: Saddam's Palace (Febreeze), 2004.]

There's nothing unusual about an artist, especially Rosler, examining her nation's conduct and its attitudes toward war or instruments of national policy. Artists, like newspaper columnists or historians, have important contributions to make to the national dialogue as our nation grapples with the legacy of the Bush administration's wars and torture policy. Credit the Hirshhorn, a Smithsonian Institution museum located almost exactly halfway between the Capitol and the White House, for being willing to join in that dialogue and for acquiring work that examines the most difficult aspects of recent American history. Art museums -- especially contemporary art museums -- have an obligation to be willing to engage, to serve as a bridge between the public and artists. This is the second time in less than a year that the Hirshhorn has pointedly pushed an artist or a body of work into the discourse. More museums should follow the Hirshhorn's example.

In a Q&A with Time's Richard Lacayo published yesterday, Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno addressed what it would take for his museum to go from its expensive, 837-word admissions policy to keeping up with its peer museums by becoming free:

In our case here, we've been talking about this, now that we've succeeded with our major capital campaign. While there's still fund-raising to do and endowment loss to make up, I would like us -- and we're just starting to have this conversation here -- to have a campaign to endow free admission. What would that take for us? It might take $250 million.

It's great that Cuno is willing to have this conversation in public. It's a tacit admission -- er, confession -- that the AIC's admissions policy is a train wreck and that the museum considers it important to provide greater public access to the AIC. (In case anyone missed what a disaster the AIC policy has been: Time magazine's art critic traveled to Chicago for the opening of the AIC's new Modern Wing and all he asked the director of the AIC about was the museum's admissions mess.)

But, let's take a look at Cuno's $250 million figure. Museums typically pull about five percent from their endowment each year. By that calculation, Cuno is signaling that the AIC would have to cover $12.5 million in 'lost' admissions revenue.

Except... last year the AIC brought in $6.9 million in admissions revenue. (That's a fairly typical recent number for them. In the AIC fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2007 the museum pulled $6.1 million in admissions revenue.)

The amount of endowment necessary to 'cover' $6.9 million in admissions revenue could be $138 million -- and that's to go completely free. (It's certainly possible that the AIC is projecting more admissions revenue this year, but a 55 percent increase would be pretty substantial. And I'm using only publicly available data. Cuno and the AIC may certainly know things I don't.) The AIC could fix a lot of mistakes -- and even zoom ahead of museums such as the MFA Boston -- by going back to pay-what-you-will or by cutting admissions by two-thirds, both of which would require substantially less endowment coverage.

Part two: AIC director James Cuno and Time's Richard Lacayo continue to discuss how thoroughly museum admissions costs are out of whack. Cuno admits that the AIC is considering raising endowment funds so it can make admissions free. (Think the AIC is feeling the heat? Uh, yeah.)

That's a step in the right direction I suppose, but the real question is why the AIC's most recent fundraising campaigns didn't have high enough targets to address the rise in operating costs that the AIC says has necessitated the current fees mess? It's increasingly obvious that the AIC's many-years-in-the-making mistake was in letting their admissions-fee situation get to this point in the first place. I mean, come on: An 837-word admissions explanation?!? What ever happened to: "Adults $8, Students/seniors: $4." (Five words.)

(Side note: I don't know that Lacayo is precisely correct when he says that most free museums receive "targeted subsidies from local government or from corporations or foundations." There's obviously a lot of wiggle room there and it's a tough question to phrase because everyone who does free does it differently. But let's use Cuno's example: The Baltimore Museum of Art. As Lacyao notes, Baltimore received grants from city and county government to go free, but now the BMA's free admission is supported through 'normal' fundraising and operations. Other free museums, such as Indianapolis or the Nelson-Atkins receive virtually no government funding. It's about priorities.)

UPDATE: Oh dear. Not only is the AIC proudly expensive, but it's eagerly circulating GawkerForum-style party pictures of wealthy AIC backers via Twitter. Talk about tone deaf...

In all the zillions of words written about public art, one word isn't written often enough: Fun. This just in: It's OK when public art is fun. Heck, in certain circumstances it's even ideal.

There is probably no work of public art that's more fun than Shuttlecocks (1994), the OldenBruggen on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City. The piece is so iconic that last year a Kansas City Star sportswriter pointed out that the city's two professional sports teams hadn't had much playoff success since the Shuttlecocks were installed, and the Curse of the Shuttlecocks was born. As a former sportswriter, I can assure you that sportswriters rarely engage the cultural vanguard. Yet... [Image.]

"Sounds like to me that you want someone to remove those badminton birdies," Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore told the Star.

The Nelson's blog features a post on how everyone -- from the NFL to nuns -- enjoys the once-reviled sculpture. The picture of the nun... well, don't miss it.  (Remarkable: The Kansas City Star once railed against the sculpture. And one lonely little KC Star crank still hates 'em. Teh oops.)

My favorite quote on the broad appeal of Shuttlecocks came from outgoing Nelson-Atkins director Marc Wilson: "We've had weddings under the shuttlecocks," Wilson told me a couple years ago. "And a stripper was photographed next to one. In the buff." (Apparently the stripper was being photographed for some promotional material. Wilson hasn't seen said material, but he told me he's always been curious...)

And oh yeah: This is the 15th anniversary of the work so the N-A has put together a little show explaining how Shuttlecocks happened.

Related: Also at the N-A right now and previously on MAN: Homer Page.

Yesterday I noted that it takes the Art Institute of Chicago 837 words to explain its admissions fee policy. In the interest of fair play, here's AIC director James Cuno and Richard Lacayo discuss the AIC's fees on Looking Around today.

Cuno's answers remind me that the AIC fees issue is another example of where cities and city residents unfairly bear many of the costs that could or should be spread across an entire metropolitan area. Since the city of Chicago ponies up for the AIC, Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will counties should too, with their residents receiving the same AIC-related benefits Chicagoans do. (Of course the AIC's meager $2 discount for Chicagoans isn't much incentive for county governments to step up, is it? Now if the AIC went free for Chicagoans...)

To be clear: I'm all for museums paying their bills. My problem with the AIC and its fees are related to two particular justifications the museum gave for its fee hikes. I outlined my objections here. After reading Cuno and Lacayo, I think they still stick.

Since late last year the Walker Art Center has acquired a bunch of photography. Instead of doing a 'normal' MAN acquisitions post, I'd try to give readers an idea of the breadth of the Walker's new pieces. The Walker's acquisitions included:

Andreas Gursky's (typically massive) 1999 picture Klitschko. Question: In museums throughout America's circa-1965 industrial heartland, Gilliams hang next to Frankenthalers hang next to Nolands. They all look a bit dated, like an end rather than a beginning. Will these big, fuzzy, oft-Photoshopped Gurskys look the same way?

Five Peter Hujar prints. The Walker's Hujars include Palermo Catacombs #10 and 1985's Ruined High Heels (Newark), which was included in Bob Nickas' 2005 PS1 retrospective.

Ana Mendieta, Bacayu, 1981. Walker director Olga Viso curated the recent Mendieta retrospective.

A picture from Shirin Neshat's Passage series, 2001. The Walker has collected Neshat in depth. This is the Walker's second photograph from Passage. It also owns a picture from Neshat's Rupture series and the film installation Soliloquy.

William Christenberry, The Alabama Box, 1980. This is a mixed-media piece that includes examples of Christenberry's pictures of Alabama, as well as objects and even Alabama soil.

Tetsumi Kudo, Monument of Metamorphosis, 1970. A major Kudo show was recently on view at the Walker.

Two Joann Verburg photographs: WTC (2003) and Knee Plays Group No. 2 (1984). The Minnesota native recently received the survey treatment from MoMA, a show that traveled to the Walker. According to Minnesota Public Radio, Verburg shot WTC [above] the week of 9/11 but didn't print it until two years later. There's a ton of Verburg on the Walker's mnartists.org (but I can't link to the whole of it).

• Suspicious: The Dallas Museum of Art says it won't lose money on the ethically dubious, profit-making, Anschutzian 'King Tut' show. But: Its director won't talk to the Dallas Morning News about the topic and the museum won't release documents that support its claims. Funny how errors create problems, no?
• Confession: I've always liked much Frederic Remington too. (Hey: The East doesn't get Stegner either.)
• Sounds like ex-Getty director John Walsh finds sharing a room with art as much fun as I do.
• You know your museum has a horrifically ridonkulous admissions fee policy when it takes 837 words on this page to explain it.
  

In 1931 Paul Cadmus, 26, made this painting of his lover Jared French. The painting, Jerry, remained in the French family until recently, when it was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. The painting is on view in a recent acquisitions exhibition and will move into Toledo's permanent collection galleries next month.

Jerry is among the earliest examples of Cadmus' painterly interest in the male nude, then a most uncommon subject for American painters. By the end of the 1930s Cadmus had learned that he could focus on the male nude all he liked so long as he included an element of social satire in his paintings. As one of Cadmus' earliest mature paintings -- according to Toledo curator Amy Gilman, Cadmus considered it his very first mature work -- Jerry pre-dates that discovery.

The small painting -- it's just 20-by-24 inches -- is strikingly intimate. Cadmus has shifted the perspective of the painting toward the viewer (or the artist) by pushing the pillow and the sheets in the top half of the painting toward the picture plane. French is holding James Joyce's Ulysses, a book then banned in the United States for being obscene. (According to Richard Meyer's superb Outlaw Representation, a friend of the artists' had smuggled the book into the US from Europe and had given it to them as a gift. Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922.)  

French was a frequent subject and model for both Cadmus' paintings and photographs. They met at the Art Students League in New York and Cadmus later credited French with encouraging him to pursue fine art subjects rather than commercial work. In Intimate Companions, author David Leddick quotes Glenway Wescott describing French as: "A commonly handsome man of my age, with a small eye and a tough little blond mustache; with a certain stolidity that highly sexed men often have..." French and Cadmus were lovers when this picture was painted and remained lovers even after French's marriage to Margaret Hoening in 1937.

Given the resemblance between French and the men in scores of Tom of Finland drawings, it's worth noting that Cadmus' work was indeed a particular point of departure for Touko Laaksonen, who is better known as Tom of Finland. While I don't know if Tom ever saw Jerry (it's unlikely as the first known reproduction was a small black-and-white image in the 1977 Cadmus catalogue raisonne), Cadmus was one of Tom's major influences.

As you may have read via Twitter, most of my Friday was dreadful.

I'll start at the beginning: The Baltimore Museum of Art's pleasant little circus show closed yesterday. It featured a terrific, big-loans-aid ed Picasso gallery that I wanted to see a second time. I couldn't go see it on Saturday -- I figured that Preakness Stakes traffic would make Baltimore unpleasant. And I had plans for Sunday. That left Friday.

So on Friday morning I took the subway out to National Airport to pick up a car from Hertz. Upon reaching my vehicle, I threw my notebook and phone onto the passenger seat, sat down behind the wheel and turned the key. I pulled forward about two feet and realized that something was horribly, terribly wrong: My buttocks were soaked. I hit the brake, jumped out and discovered that the driver's seat had recently been retrieved from the ocean. Lovely.

From there it got worse. I arrived in Baltimore to find the museum's very good American modernism galleries closed for no apparent reason. Then my favorite Rauschenberg combine, the BMA's brilliant, marvelously queer Honorarium (Spread) was not on view, as it had been taken down in favor of some local art prize installation. With steam practically coming out of my ears (and probably off of my still-wet pants), I retreated to the BMA's usually pleasant eatery for a nosh. I ordered a burger and then sat there, stunned, as the bartender hissed at his co-workers, snapped at customers and, finally, as he bounced a pen off the bar at me when he brought my check. Awesome.

Recap: My ass was wet.. The art I wanted to see was unavailable. And a hissy-fitting barkeep threw stuff at me.

On one hand, the day was shaping up to be a total loss. On the other: The Baltimore Museum has a 20thC collection of which all but a half-dozen or so American museums are jealous. I gave the bartender the tip he deserved, cursed Hertz, and stomped back toward the galleries.

First up: The BMA Rothko, which is as good as any mature Rothko in any American art museum. I sat and stared for five minutes. A guard kept an eye on me. Then I stopped in on two old friends: a killer Truitt and the best Alma Thomas anywhere. Not bad.

Next: That Picasso gallery. The impetus for the installation was a 1905 Picasso drawing in the BMA collection. It's the most important drawing Picasso did for arguably his first masterpiece, Family of Saltimbanques. The BMA surrounded its drawing with a closely-related etching and a number of other 1905 Picasso-and-the-circus works on paper in its collection. Finally it highlighted the collection pieces with a magnificent loan from the Goteborg Art Museum and with secondary works from MoMA and Detroit. [Above: Acrobat Family, 1905, collection Goteborg Art Museum.]

The Goteborg gouache was the show-stopper. In it a 24-year-old Picasso demonstrated that he had learned remarkable lessons about composition from Renaissance masters. The grouping in Acrobat Family is right out of an Italian 'Madonna and Child.' The mother-and-baby interaction seems borrowed from Raphael. After seeing the show the first time I tried to find the crib. I couldn't. It's just a young Picasso showing off how thoroughly he'd synthesized his (much) elders and how he'd adopted them to his modern language and subject matter.

From there: Matisse. Baltimore has Matisse to rival any museum in America -- if not the world -- and it installs it beautifully. One of the ten great art museum experiences in America is the BMA's Cone Collection galleries. The work is great, key details such as lighting and installation are pretty much perfect and there are even benches. It is heaven.

The central gallery is a something-a-gon, a six- or eight-sided space that pretty much always features two paintings (others rotate in). One is Matisse's 1907 Blue Nude, the most influential painting of the 20th century. I've stood in front of Blue Nude probably 150 times. It never loses its power to stun.

At the foot of Blue Nude, literally, is a sculpture that Matisse finished just after making the painting, Reclining Nude I (Aurore). I'm never sure which is more three-dimensional: The painting or the bronze. Directly across from Blue Nude is Matisse's 1935 Pink Nude. [Above, right.] The two paintings are probably Matisse's two best canvases of the female nude. (Third place?)

And those three nudes aren't all! In the very center of the gallery is yet another Matisse nude, a bronze Large Seated Nude from 1922-29. [Above, left.] The foursome presents an opportunity to examine Matisse's progression through a theme -- the reclining nude -- through nearly 30 years. Like Picasso, Matisse had taken one of the oldest subjects in art and made it his own. And he didn't just do it once, he kept re-inventing it over the course of three decades. And here it is, all in one collection and in one gallery.

I took a deep breath, took one last, long, lingering look at Blue Nude and left. On the way out I realized that my ass had dried.

Related: What Baltimore doesn't include in the gallery is almost as remarkable as what it does. You want reclining nudes? What about the 1930 sculpture Venus in a Shell I? The BMA has it, but it's not here. Ditto plenty of other Matisse bronze nudes, including Reclining Nude III, 1929. And more: Baltimore doesn't just have Pink Nude, it has 22 photographs documenting its creation that Matisse gave to Etta Cone. Several of them are reproduced on a small wall-non-text in the gallery.

• Christopher Knight thinks that Michelle Obama's visit to the Met is a slightly lame gesture;
• The Dallas Morning News' Michael Granberry: 'King Tut' lays an egg in Dallas, misses attendance goals by 40 percent. Museum officials declare the renting out of the DMA a success anyway?;
• Roberta Smith works too hard! Here she is on the AIC's Modern Wing opening and then reviewing a show at the ICP (Avedon) in the next day's paper. (One thought: If Smith is going to discuss the AIC's new modern art installation, she should name the curator(s) responsible.);
  
• Ken Johnson on the warm embrace of a giant Ernesto Neto;
• I've noted this before, but: When Martha Schwendener surfaces in the Village Voice, she's arguably NYC's most engaging critic. Here she is writing about the Met's 'Pictures Generation' show. (The lede! It zings! That lede is clarity in paragraph form!) But when she writes for the NYT: Zzzzzzzz;
• Speaking of PicGen, here's Jerry Saltz on same. It's nice to see Saltz challenging a curator and a show again; and
  
• The StL P-D's David Bonetti on Duchamp the chess player-artist.

Just for fun: I tweeted a wander through the Baltimore Museum of Art today. It's here. (You may have to scroll.)

Christopher Knight explains why the NEA is irrelevant, tut-tuts arts organizations who get excited about tokeni$m and asks whether a new director might be able to make it matter.

From the Chicago Tribune's Dan P. Blake: The AIC is dialing back some of its admissions fee increases, barely, hardly at all, just a tiny bit and just enough that they hope everyone will shut up about it.

Admission will now be $16 not $18. Rates for students and seniors go from $12 to $10. Disabled military veterans will be admitted for free. That seems like enough to get government off of the AIC's back: "It's a good step in the right direction," key Alderman Ed Burke told the Tribune. "I'm hopeful that as time goes on...that we'll see further ways to open the collection to the people of Chicago that might not be able to afford the admission fee."

That's a key point: All of these rollbacks are for Chicago (city) residents only. In other words: For the AIC, providing access to the cultural treasures in its store isn't a priority... but a quick-sorta-fix for the sake of narrow political expediency was.

That's kind of ironic given that AIC director Jim Cuno is well-known for arguing that it really doesn't matter where antiquities are because they're part of our shared, global cultural heritage. Well, there are tens of thousands of other objects at the AIC that are part of our shared cultural heritage too. It's too bad that the AIC refuses to make broader public access to those treasures a priority (and that it instead relies upon thin spin jobs to semi-fib to its community).

The Art Institute of Chicago should have thought of this on its own (and maybe it did and no one told me): The opening of the AIC's Modern Wing should make for a weekend of spread-the-word, share-the-news Tweeting. If you're at the AIC this weekend, share AIC nuggets by adding the hashtag #AIC to the end of your tweets. I'll try to share the best tweets/TwitPics/etc. with MAN readers on Monday. (I just tweeted about this here. RT me...)

• Another great use of a museo-blog: The Indianapolis Museum of Art's Harriet Warkel explains how the museum came to acquire a painting featuring Pollock, de Kooning, Gottlieb and the painter himself, Joseph Delaney.
• The Blaffer is launching a Leonardo Drew show and the Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt has the first of several chats with Drew. Also from Britt: A recent Q&A with corner-turning Robyn O'Neil.
• 'The Pictures Generation' and its relationship with Buffalo.
• Heart as Arena has some fun images of Marilyn Minter surrounded by the cacophony of Times Square. (It's a Creative Time project.)
  

I ended yesterday's post about the new National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press book A Modernist Museum in Perspective by talking about how the display of art and art galleries weren't a primary consideration for the NGA administration and East Building architect I.M. Pei. [Image.]

Perhaps the best way to understand why the East Building is such a bizarre structure for an art museum is to remember that Pei was motivated by making the building a "very important center for social and artistic life in Washington." The result was the preposterously over-sized atrium which effectively precluded the construction and placement of coherent gallery space.

The University of Pennsylvania's David B. Brownlee says that's because the building wasn't particularly informed by art museums: "Pei's East Building can be better understood when it is seen as part of this development of a popular American modern architecture, which includes shopping malls and splashy hotels."

As it turns out there's a reason that the East Building has come to feel like an expensive Embassy Suites: No fewer than three scholars in 'A Modernist Museum' trace the NGA's atrium less to central interior museo-courtyards (such as the one on the NGA's John Russell Pope-designed West Building) than to John Portman's Atlanta Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta (1965-67). [Image below.]

Alona Nitzan-Shiftan also sources the atrium in the NGA administration's near fear of showing art. She finds that then-NGA-director J. Carter Brown was concerned about giving visitors too much art to look at:

[In 1969]... Carter Brown returned from a museum directors' conference in Mexico where behavioral scientists discussed the "anxiety syndrome" of museum visitors, who felt, according to researchers, either overloaded with information or frustrated by lack of orientation. Brown further reported on "the 'erratic exploratory locomotion' of museum visitors that recalls... a rat in a maze," wanting one thing only -- to get out. The objective was to "captivate but not process the visitor," they said, claiming that the ideal pre-fatigue museum experience should not exceed forty-five minutes to one hour of walking in roughly ten thousand square feet of space.

No surprise then that scholar after scholar reports that when it came to the East Building, art was always kind of an afterthought. The University of Chicago's Neil Harris notes that by 1990 this shortcoming became so obvious that Brown claimed he'd asked Pei's firm to make the exhibition spaces larger and the atrium smaller and that Pei said no. (Harris seems skeptical that Brown ever actually did so, noting that one reason Brown chose Pei was his interest in big museo-atriums, as demonstrated in Pei's design for (and Brown's admiration of) the Everson in Syracuse, NY. Says Harris: "[T]he East Building, in its early stage, was meant primarily to house activities rather than objects.")

With a renovation of the East Building on the way, the National Gallery has an opportunity to radically shift the East Building from a social space to a museum where more art can be installed and to where the spaces for art are less clunky.

Whether the NGA will choose to go in that direction is another question: That would require performing major surgery on Pei's building, a potentially controversial step that the traditionally risk-averse NGA may be unwilling to take. Just as probelmatic: Even though the NGA's collection has grown substantially since the East Building opened in 1978, it's not clear that the current NGA administration wants more gallery space. When I spoke with NGA director Rusty Powell last year about the NGA's space problems he mostly pointed to administrative needs such as offices and programmatic needs such as an education center. Gallery space was at best a distant third on the want-list.

Still: With the forthcoming renovation of the East Building the NGA has a chance to address a 30-40-year old error, an error (very) subtly but plainly made clear throughout A Modernist Museum in Perspective. Would fixing the East Building solve all of the NGA's space issues? No. But it would be a good start.

• While talking about the marvels of small paintings, I referenced the peculiar joy that is the eye portrait. Christina Voss has more (and more examples). 
• All four seasons of Art21 are available on Hulu.
• Not so far from what new Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek says he wants to bring to the National Mall: Inflatable structures are everywhere. [via]
• Roxy Paine trees: The Met is getting the attention now, but the St. Louis Art Museum and MAMFW had them first. (And the pix there are awesome.) Next up: The North Carolina Museum of Art. 
• Pretty much all museum blogs should do guest-curator-ish collection selections like SFMOMA's.
• What art museums and their membership folks can learn from pro sports teams and season-ticket renewals.
  

Sometime between now and the end of President Obama's first term, the National Gallery of Art will likely settle upon a renovation plan for its East Building. Perhaps coincidentally, the National Gallery and Yale Press have published a substantial new volume on the East Building: A Modernist Museum in Perspective. The book consists of papers delivered at a 2004 symposium organized by the NGA's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and was edited by University of Texas professor Anthony Alofsin.) [Image: NGA East Building.]

The book is a reminder that 30 years after the East Building opened, the I.M. Pei-designed landmark is still one of the most controversial museum buildings in America. As you might expect from an NGA-organized symposium and in an NGA-published book, contributors line up in praise of the East Building. But the topic they don't address says as much as the topics they do: Scholar after scholar examines the building as civic center, as America's Lobby, as a product of late-'60s, early-70's design, but what's most striking is that none of the book's 11 contributors has much of anything to say about the building's galleries. In a book that takes admiration as its jumping-off point, that absence is effectively an acknowledgement that the East Building presents art terribly.

As the NGA's administrators and trustees determine the scope of the forthcoming renovation, they'd be wise to learn from their own publication, to take it as a case-study that explains how the East Building happened, what went right and wrong and why, and what the next steps might be.

First: The success. Architect Richard Gluckman has called the East Building "a monumental piece of sculpture," and he's right. It is the most significant and beautiful structure on the National Mall. The library, while technologically out-of-date, is a wonderful, inviting place to work and study, and the NGA's offices provide ideal views of the U.S. Capitol. [Image.]

As Universite du Quebec a Montreal professor Rejean Legault details in an engaging essay, the materials and craftsmanship in the East Building are top-notch. They should be: The 450,000-square foot building cost $320 million in today's dollars. By comparison, the Steven Holl's brilliant 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building for the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City also features superb workmanship and the creative use of materials. It cost $86 million.

(Legault is also one of the few essayists to subtly address the East Building's failings. He carefully refers to "the contradiction between the building's formal and functional expressions.")

The most illuminating essay in the book comes from Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, a lecturer at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Nitzan-Shiftan examines how the NGA came to be sited as it was, how Pei designed it to aestheticize democratic concepts, and to symbolize Americans' relationship to the capital city and to their government. To be sure, this building-as-microcosm-of-the-republic was a little bit of marketing-BS: Nitzan-Shiftan notes that Pei cannily chose Yann Weymouth as his collaborator on the East Building. At the time Weymouth just happened to be the son-in-law of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and a political activist with ties to the Kennedy clan. [Image.]

Of special interest as the NGA is considering renovation plans is Nitzan-Shiftan's description of the planning of the building as almost anti-art. She writes that the NGA leadership originally wanted to call the building "The National Art Center" but was steered toward calling it "The National Gallery of Art Educational Services Building" as a way of playing to the national mood for education and betterment. Nitzan-Shiftan goes on to detail the concepts that the NGA leadership thought were important to manifest in the building's design, including that it be a place that would "symbolize the activities of the Gallery and its dissemination of information at every level, from that of the specialist to the first-grade teacher." Pei himself described his building as being motivated by creating a "very important center for social and artistic life in Washington."

In other words: As the building was being planned, the display of art was not a motivating concern. 

Tomorrow: What went wrong.

• MOCA plans another round of layoffs, may not open the Geffen Contemporary until February, 2010 and the earliest MOCA is likely to have a director search underway is November, says LATer Mike Boehm;
  
• In the NYT, Jori Finkel details a LACMA money-for-acquisitions mechanism;
• LATer Suzanne Muchnic explains the Huntington's new Thomas Hart Benton. (Yes, the Huntington.)
• The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers says the Boston ICA is upping its ticket price to $15. I'd imagine that's the most expensive entry fee at an American contemporary art museum. (MASS MoCA is also $15.)
  
• Jesse Hamlin takes to the SF Chronicle to tell us about SFMOMA's new rooftop sculpture garden. You can see pix of it here, via KQED's Spark. 
• Regarding the Art Institute of Chicago's semi-dishonest soaking of its citizenry, this is just plain silly.
• Jen Graves considers public art in Seattle and in Washington state.

I'm taking a couple days off. While I'm away, join me in considering the Gerhard Richter portraits show at the National Gallery in London. The catalogue is here. I'll be discussing the catalogue and a key painting or two soon...

• The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt has more on museum pricing;
• Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin on the Art Institute of Chicago's Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing;
• In conjunction with an Eero Saarinen exhibition, the Kemper Art Museum encouraged St. Louisans to consider the Gateway Arch from many, many different perspectives; and
  
• SFMOMA's blog (I think) education and conservation team is interviewing Ellsworth Kelly tomorrow for the museum's Oral History Project. Get your questions to them before the end of today.
  

The 'Pompeii' show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art costs $25 for an adult and $50 for a family of four. (Children under 17 get in for free. Good job, LACMA.) [Image: Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-68, Hirshhorn.]

The 'Cezanne and Beyond' show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art costs $25 for an adult and $88 for a family of four. (And it's over $100 when you count parking.)

At the MFA Boston, 'Rivals of Renaissance Venice' costs $25 for an adult and $69 for a family of four.

Seriously, $25?!

I hinted at this in my recent Philly Inky op-ed about the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exclusionary, audience-segregating pricing: If the only way a museum can afford to do a certain big show is to charge such a high admissions fee that it's pricing out ~80 percent (or more) of its potential audience, then it should not do the show. There is no imperative for a non-profit art museum to do an exhibition that is only possible at a price point that eliminates the overwhelming majority of a museum's potential audience. (The competition for stupidest pricing is steep here, but MFA Boston deserves a special kick in the doors for charging college students -- the museum's most likely future audience -- $23. Pure bonkers.)

The PMA and LACMA should also fear this: Both receive substantial government money: In Philly the city kicks in about eight percent of the PMA's operating budget and capital funds too. Roughly 30-35 percent of LACMA's budget comes from Los Angeles County. If those two museums price more than three-quarters of 'their' residents out of their best programming and their best scholarly shows, why should their government partners fund them at all?

• Subtopia asks: How should the U.S. archive the architecture of torture?
• Matthew Coolidge's Center for Land Use Interpretation inspires a copycat, CLUI-style tour of Chicago. Teh awesome.
• Blaffer curatorial fellow Rachel Hooper has pix from the Blaffer's Leonardo Drew installation on her (personal) blog.
• At her super blog Translinguistic Other and just in time for the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, Emily Pothast explains how she became an erotic artist.
  

May 5, 2009

Mr. Ron Hartwig
Vice President for Communications
J. Paul Getty Trust

Dear Mr. Hartwig:

I am writing to you regarding my receipt of the Getty catalogue "Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance." The exhibition with the same title is on view in your galleries until August 9.

One of your junior staffers sent me the aforementioned catalogue in a most inappropriate manner: FedExed in a white envelope. The outside of the envelope was clearly and obviously marked, "EXHIBITION: Outerbridge."

Now, anyone who may have handled this package -- the FedEx carrier, the concierge in my building, even my neighbors, Mr. Hartwig! -- may have read that label and may have seen that it was addressed to me. With a marking as plain and clear as "EXHIBITION: Outerbridge," it would have been obvious what was inside.

Mr. Hartwig, this catalogue is pure smut! Everyone in my building now surely thinks that I am a pervert for receiving such a thing. I respectfully ask that in the future you be much more careful in mailing me such materials. (For example: I understand that an exhibition titled "Reconstructing Identity: A Statue of a God from Dresden" is on view at the Getty Villa. If you insist on sending me the catalogue for this show, please send it in a plain, unmarked brown wrapper. I have seen the Statue in question and oh yes, Mr. Hartwig, he is indeed a God. Incidentally, please send it in hardcover.)

As I was saying, I am quite sure that a man of your distinction and high moral character is entirely unaware of this Paul Outerbridge fellow. You are probably friends with Paul Martineau, the Getty curator who organized the Outerbridge exhibition. I have read Mr. Martineau's catalogue essay and it is plain that he is too fine a man to understand that Mr. Outerbridge practically invented color "cheesecake" photography, or that Mr. Outerbridge is among the fathers of modern fetish photography. (We will deal with those subjects in due course, Mr. Hartwig.)

Because Mr. Martineau is a reserved young man, his essay doesn't place Mr. Outerbridge in the context of the culture of the time. That is a good thing, because such placement would have revealed that Mr. Outerbridge was a filthy, lusty, perverted young man. In the mid-1930s, when Mr. Outerbridge was taking nude, color, breasts-baring, pubis-exposing, stockings-with-seems-up-the-back-gazing, women-in-exotic-costumes-with-cleavage-baring, long-legs-in-high-heels-and-nothing-else-wearing pictures, Mr. Hartwig, photographers were considerably tamer. The pictures of young women known now known as "cheesecake" featured appropriately clothed, wholesome young ladies. They were also generally black-and-white pictures, which prevented young men from thinking thoughts that were too impure. In Mr. Outerbridge's pictures the flesh of the young ladies he photographs has a lovely, alabaster, life-like, malleable quality -- quite an accomplishment for the mid-1930s and a demonstration of Mr. Outerbridge's mastery of the time-consuming carbro process.

Your staff may, perhaps, be forgiven for failing to realize that the distribution of this publication may violate interstate mailing regulations. After all, your Mr. Martineau does indeed deserve credit for narrowly contextualizing Mr. Outerbridge as a skilled color-printing automaton who likely took no pleasure from the nakedness of his beautiful, bosomy, nubile and likely quite impressionable young models. As Mr. Outerbridge himself noted in a 1942 letter to the Cleveland Museum of Art regarding the CMA's acquisition of the 1936 photograph Dutch Girl [above], "I should like to call your attention to the fact that flesh tones are some of the most difficult factors to be reckoned with in color photography and those in this nude have been considered especially good -- some of the best ever achieved. From a historical point of view, if no other, as time goes by, this print will have an interesting signficance." 

(Further credit: Mr. Martineau notes that Mr. Outerbridge was a man of apparently loose morals who went through wives the way Rev. Ted Haggard goes through personal trainers. He deserves credit for that -- Mr. Martineau that is, not Mr. Outerbridge!)

But because I feel it is my duty as a decent, God-fearing American (that reminds me -- I could really use some high-quality, high-detail, digital images of that statue from Dresden, thanks!), I'm here to tell you what Mr. Martineau wouldn't, Mr. Hartwig. Surely you have seen the cover, which features a sweet young lady sitting on a red chair. The cover image is a 1936 Outerbridge picture subversively titled Girl with Fan. You can find it at the top of this letter.

At first glance, this is a tame, even demure image. At first glance, the young lady in the picture is even modest enough to avert her gaze from us. That is to her credit. But if you were to dwell upon the image at length -- and I am not suggesting you do so, Mr. Hartwig! -- you will need little imagination to realize that the girl is likely topless! Now, I understand that her firm, young, bare breasts are covered by a fan and that they are not on view to the general public. I suppose that's something.

But Mr. Hartwig, have you seen this fan? It is obscene! It features a completely naked young lady lying at the foot of some flowering bushes! Yes, that's right Mr. Hartwig: Flowering! Bushes! The allegory could not be plainer! And that's not the end of it: To the right of the young lady is a large, over-sized, upstanding brown cock, Mr. Hartwig. No matter how hard you try, you simply can't miss it! And in case you hadn't noticed, the "girl" with the fan is looking off to her left, precisely in the direction of the cock! (Yes, I know that the fan also portrays a white cock attending to the recumbent girl. You yourself may have missed it, Mr. Hartwig -- after all, the white cock is smaller than the brown one. This is so deeply troubling that I have temporarily blotted it from my mind.)

Surely you realize, Mr. Hartwig, that Mr. Outerbridge has created quite a self-reflexive, outrageous and even scandalous image. One might even consider it the boldest presentation of erotica made to date in so-called fine-art photography. Remember: In 1936 so-called "cheesecake" pictures still featured fine, probably married young ladies with their clothes on. Here Mr. Outerbridge is showing us a topless young girl and, well, that fan! Mr. Hartwig, you should know that this is one of the earliest example of color photography presenting itself as both fine-art and as something that Philip II of Spain might have hung above his bed. What is appropriate for a God-kissed royal's boudoir may not be appropriate for the masses, Mr. Hartwig. I mean, I understand that on one hand Mr. Outerbridge's photograph is art-historically important and that you and your museum have an obligation to share important art historical objects with the public, however much it might scandalize them. (And believe you me, I appreciate the cold neutrality with which your museum presents this picture, Mr. Hartwig. I mean, someone would have to really, really dwell on it, examine it, and study it to realize how perverted it is.)

But, on the other hand, you are showing this image of Mr. Outerbridge's to the general public and it is an indecent picture, the kind of thing that might eventually lead to blindness in the young. I'm afraid you will have that on your conscience, Mr. Hartwig. (And to think that you thoughtlessly sent me this in a package clearly marked, "EXHIBITION: Outerbridge.")

I feel it is my duty to inform you about what else is in this book, Mr. Hartwig. Please rest assured that I will do so tomorrow, but I must pause and have a cigarette. (This is probably because in several of Mr. Outerbridge's photographs the girls are actually holding cigarettes. (The power of suggestion is fierce, Mr. Hartwig.)

If you doubt me regarding Mr. Outerbridge's girls and their cigarettes, please see Redhead (1937, above), in which a bathrobe-wearing beauty is looking right at the viewer while holding a nearly-finished cigarette, a cigarette that she's about to place between her firm, freshly-painted, barely-parted red lips. The picture reminds me of those Camel ads from Mr. Outerbridge's period: "Get a LIFT from Camel!" And "You like them FRESH? So do I!")

Sincerely,

Tyler Green

Last week I mentioned that Kees van Dongen puzzles me. There isn't a lot of van Dongen in American museum collections, so with a couple exceptions the van Dongen I've seen has been in the artist's native Netherlands. As a result, I've only seen enough to know that he's an interesting artist. Beyond that I don't know what to make of him.

So it was with extra interest that I read the catalogue of the van Dongen retrospective that just closed at the Montreal Musem of Fine Arts (and that is soon-to-open at the New National Museum of Monaco). It's the first major North American publication of van Dongen scholarship in nearly 40 years. The extraordinarily thorough book -- which includes not just 234 works that are in the Montreal-Monaco retrospective but at least another 66 that aren't -- makes a strong case for van Dongen-as-fauve mostly on van Dongen's use of color. During his peak years,1905-1915 or so, van Dongen slathered his canvases with shocking, atypical, academically inappropriate oils. He did so with a bit of playful vulgarity -- after all, what artist would paint one of the most powerful art dealers of his day, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, as apparently blind? [Above, from ca. 1908.]

The catalogue argues that van Dongen is a fauve, a very particular, even unique kind of fauve. In the three key essays, Oxford lecturer Alastair Wright, SUNY Binghamton scholar Aruna D'Souza and Washington University professor John Klein explain that van Dongen was The Raunchy Fauve, The Satyr-Fauve.

All three argue that Van Dongen's subjects are in direct opposition to the subjects preferred by other fauves: As Alastair Wright points out in his essay, while Derain and Matisse were interested in using their shocking color to show classical idylls, traditional-ish nudes or landscapes, van Dongen turned his attention to lower-class amusements such as the circus or certain prostitutes. Matisse painted the sun setting behind classical, bathing nudes, van Dongen painted the chandelier at the wild nightclub Le Moulin de la Galette. [At right, from 1905-06.] It is as if van Dongen was half-interested in fauvism and half-interested in the subjects that most interested his friends at the Bateau-Lavoir, where he once shared a studio with Picasso. (Van Dongen was tight enough with La Bande Picasso that he used  Fernande Olivier as a model, and often.)

It is that mix of Fauve color and Blue/Rose Period Picasso subject matter (with a bit of dance-hall-loving, whores-frequenting Toulouse-Lautrec thrown in for good measure) on which the three essayists argue for van Dongen's place in art history: OK, so after his revolutionary years he became a society portraitist-as-satyr, they say. But for a decade he brought a different energy to fauvism: The street! Sex! Popular entertainment! Sex! His legacy is not in his greatness as a painter, it's in his choice of populist subject matter. (And, later on, each essayist hints that this would be his downfall as van Dongen later tended toward portraiture designed to appeal to the middlebrow nouveau-riche.)

But before his decline van Dongen had quite a decade, a decade full of naughtiness and scene-making. (Van Dongen had a particular talent for making sure he got erotic paintings thrown out of Salons.) If Modigliani was interested in the nude, van Dongen was pruriently interested in the nude. Modigliani typically looks down at his women, or looks at them as they recline over there, on a couch, and so on. They're plenty sexual, but they're not immediate. In the 1908-09 van Dongen at left, Anita, Reclining Nude, van Dongen shakes off the distance maintained by Courbet or Ingres and jumps into bed with his model. She's at his eye-level. Her encouragement is more urgent, not exactly of the 'paint me' sort. Matisse's landmark fauve 1907 Blue Nude is nothing like this.

In fact, van Dongen's paintings are so confrontational that some of them are difficult to look at with other people present. Or as Aruna D'Souza put it, "The women [van Dongen] paints are for the most part horrible things, and yet inspired with such melancholy beauty that the initiated gaze in rapture for hours at a time."

Next time: More on van Dongen's women.

• Christopher Knight thinks back to a show he saw four years ago and realizes that a Yoshua Okon piece he saw then is perfect for this time;
• In LA Weekly, Christopher Miles approves of Kim McCarty's watercolors. (McCarty > Dumas.)
• The LAT's Suzanne Muchnic explores why the Pompidou's American fundraising/etc. arm is based in Los Angeles and not in New York.
• In the Oregonian, DK Row reports that the Portland Art Museum's new Gauguin went on view on Sunday.
  
• Robyn O'Neil won Texas' Hunting Art Prize. I had a blast doing a multi-part Q&A with O'Neil last year on the occasion of her inclusion in the 'Dargerism' show at New York's American Folk Art Museum: Part one, two, three, four.
  

In Time magazine's issue of the world's 100 most influential people, Richard Lacayo picks William Kentridge.

I'm always up for a good parlor game, so I'll pick Andrea Zittel. No one in art -- and maybe not in anything else either -- more intelligently and thoroughly examines the way Americans and Westerners live. Zittel aims her focus at our land use, our consumption, capitalism, design and architecture, travel and fashion. (Remarkably, even though Zittel is smartly and systematically examining the American way of life, Zittel is not in the collection of any Washington museum. Oops.)

Tweet me your picks and I'll pass them along. Here I am on Twitter and on Facebook.