August 2009 Archives

While I was off-blog last week, a major, must-read institutional story broke: Steven Litt of the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the Cleveland Museum of Art wants court permission to use endowment income and trust fund income restricted for the purchase of art to pay for building construction. The museum has applied to an Ohio court for permission in advance of a December board decision about whether the plan is a good one. (The jaw-dropping mid-story kicker: "[T]he museum's specific circumstances are apparently unique in Ohio law. The only precedent came in 1955, when the county probate court granted the museum permission to use income from art-purchase funds to build an expansion completed in 1958 (since demolished)." You know, so long as it worked out well the last time they did it...)

Director Timothy Rub, who is soon to leave Cleveland for Philadelphia, told the Plain Dealer that he was on board with the plan and that it violated no AAMD rules. (Of course, as we've seen time and time again member directors may violate AAMD rules with impunity and AAMD will do nothing until long after the fact -- and then it only shrugs.)

• Diane Haithman of the LAT tells us the latest reason Allan Sekula is smiling;
• Also in the LAT, David Pagel on the Center for Land Use Interpretation and helipads!;
• The St. Louis Beacon's Kristen Hare advances this past weekend's two-day reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses at the Pulitzer. I was one of the readers and I'll tell you about it tomorrow. (Fortunately for me, you can neither see nor hear me...);
  
• Holland Cotter reviews one of the most-anticipated shows of the season, a Philly Museum show on the last Duchamp;
• Douglas Britt loves that the Menil Collection can be wonderfully weird. (Is that a finger or, er, uh...);
• In the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener considers Black Panther Emory Douglas; and
  
• The Stranger's Jen Graves explains spite houses-as-art, kinda.

I'm on travel for the rest of this week. Follow me here for Tweets from the road.

On one hand, it's good see the New York Times doing probative art journalism. There's much thoughtful reportage in Robin Pogrebin's Sunday piece on museums offering themselves to corporations. In particular, my jaw dropped at the Bank of America's contention that art museums that obey the law and that follow state and federal tax-exemption rules are 'snobs.' (Maybe that kind of thinking explains why we taxpayers are bailing out all those banks...)

On the other hand, when the Museum of Modern Art likely enhanced the value of a corporate art collection by showing it in galleries that should have been given to the museum's distinguished curators for a legitimate, scholarly presentation, all while accepting as a gift some of the lesser art thus pseudo-legitimizing the corporate advertising display -- I'm recalling the now-infamous UBS show that opened the 'new' MoMA -- the NYT didn't challenge the home team with a 2,100-word, section-leading, above-the-fold, Sunday story. I guess Atlanta's famed Millennium Gate Museum was an easier target. Too bad: Would lesser museums such as Millennium Gate have tried such an outrageous breach if a major institution such as MoMA hadn't already gotten away with it? (And why didn't Pogrebin ask the relevant state attorneys general if they planned investigations of these kinds of the non-profit abuses spotlighted in the story?)

Also: There is an error in Pogrebin's story that the Times should address. It involves the passage that deals with UBS and MoMA:

"What is crucial is curatorial independence," said Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, "the ability of a curator to make his or her own decisions about what would constitute an exhibition."

Mr. Lowry said his museum would show a corporate collection only if the majority of what was on show was donated, as was the case with the museum's UBS show in 2005. "That's our safeguard," he said. "We've had real input because it's a gift to the museum. What's going to be displayed is not going back on the market."

Pogrebin's use of Lowry's quote seems to imply that MoMA had some kind of assurance that the art displayed in the UBS show would not go back on the market. That did not square with my memory. I emailed Lowry and he confirmed that there was no agreement between the museum and UBS, that UBS is free to sell any work that it owns and that MoMA exhibited in the 2005 show. (Lowry said that his remarks to Pogrebin were specifically about the works given to MoMA not going back on the market, not the works staying with UBS.) The Times should correct the story.

• The LAT's Suzanne Muchnic explains the stickiest, most complicated art restitution case imaginable -- and after she's done the whole thing somehow makes sense. The paintings in question: Cranach's Adam and Eve at the Norton Simon.
• In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Bonetti explains how the Pulitzer will be bringing Ovid to the galleries (in voice, rather than with paint). The Pulitzer's Ovid site is here.
  

Continued from here, here and here with National Gallery of Art curator David Alan Brown.

I think I first noticed Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman in the NGA's collection galleries because of the rakish angle of the sitter's head. It almost looked as if the painter was trying to paint the sitter both in profile -- the form of portraiture that was en vogue for most of the 15th-century and in three-quarter profile, which replaced the profile in the last decades of the 15thC and early in the 16thC. The NGA's Venetian Gentleman is believed to have been painted around 1510. Given that Brown had discussed nearly every possible detail about the painting except the head, I asked him about it.

"Yes," Brown said. "It's a clue as far as the attribution goes. As far as I'm concerned, the head is tilted back in a way that you get this particular reading of the expression..." Brown trailed off as he turned his head and tilted it back so as to mimic the pose of our mysterious Venetian. "So it's a clue. But I don't think the painter was trying to meld profiles with three-quarter poses. He was just painting the way he painted portraits during this period of his career -- and that's the key."

Brown re-opened his manila folder and showed me several other paintings (several of which are reproduced here.) Then he pulled out a book and tapped the cover. "I believe it's by Cariani
he said. "Look at the pose. There are many, many examples of this pose."

Cariani (1490-1547) painted in Venice and Bergamo during the years that Titian dominated Venice. Cariani seems likely to have trained with Bellini and later with Giorgione. His masterpiece may be a painting called A Concert (c1518-20), which happens to be in the National Gallery of Art's collection. It hangs about 20 yards from where Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman is installed now, in the NGA's Tullio Lombardo exhibition.

Brown and I took turns looking from the reproductions back up at the Venetian gentleman. Brown opened a Cariani monograph and turned to some pre-selected pages. One of them was Cariani's Lady Behind a Parapet [c1510s, at top of post] from the Szepmuveszeti in Budapest. Another was Portrait of a Young Girl as St. Agatha from the National Gallery of Scotland [1516-17, above right] in Edinburgh. In both portraits a girl is painted in three-quarter profile, with her nose bisecting her right eye, just as the Venetian gentleman is. The girl in the Scotland painting also seems to be painted as if from below, as if her head were slightly tossed back, just like the sitter in the NGA painting.

Brown pointed to two other Cariani portraits that featured the heads tossed back at an angle: Lute Player [1515-16, below] at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg and La Schiavona (1520) at the Pinacoteca dell'Accademia Carrara-Bergamo. It was a pose that Cariani didn't restrict to portraits, either. Two figures in Cariani's Four Courtesans (c1519), which is in a private collection in Bergamo, feature the pose as does a Virgin Entrhoned with Angels and Saints at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan as well as the central figure in the NGA's own Cariani, A Concert [at bottom].

"What this tells you is that if all these different people have the same expression, it's not an expression that's proper to them, it's one that's been imposed on them by the artist," Brown said, tapping one of the pages of a Cariani monograph for emphasis. "They may have been quite surprised. The man who was portrayed here at the National Gallery may have been mild-mannered and surprised to see himself presented here in this way. I think that's true of a lot of these early 16thC portraits where this gloss was put over them. The fact that it's used for women even shows that it's something the artist is imposing on the sitter.

"I think that we have to beware of assuming that the sitter was an angry soldier or a greedy merchant based on the facial of expression. I think it's a fascinating case of attribution as interpretation."

For good measure, Brown showed me that the Venetian gentleman's mysterious clenched fist was 'reprised' in at least one other Cariani portrait, the fantastic picture of Francesco Albani (c1517-20) at the National Gallery in London.

For now the National Gallery still officially lists the painting as a 'Giorgione and Titian' in its online catalogue and as a 16thC Venetian on its wall-plate. Brown says that he's not quite ready to publish his new attribution -- he's busy with a lecture on Leonardo he'll be delivering soon in Europe -- but that he expects that the painting will be listed as a Cariani when the NGA publishes its next Italian systematic catalogue.

"It's not a sterile debate about who did a painting that's 500-years-old," Brown said. "It's about how we look at paintings and how we read them and the kind of evidence we look for when we want to make statements about them and the difference in reading this evidence whether it's a facial expression or the evidence of x-rays. It's kind of our attempt to understand the signals or the messages that were put into this picture 500 years ago. It's fraught with complications and difficulties -- and yet there are strong human motivations behind it.

"We all know about the need to read people's faces from caveman times onwards and also the desire for some kind of scientific proof. Our age in particular looks to science as the answer to all these things. Look at medical diagnosis, for example. That can depend on the reading of science. What the x-ray does or the CT scan -- or whatever -- provides you with is helpful, but it doesn't in itself contain solutions These things always have to be read."

Continued from here and here. When we left off yesterday, National Gallery of Art curator David Alan Brown was expressing skepticism that x-ray evidence and only x-ray evidence could demonstrate that Giorgione (or Titian) painted the NGA's Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman.

Brown pulled two x-rays out of a manila folder, showed them to me and told me that x-ray-pioneering art historian Alan Burroughs had said that the underpaint as revealed on these x-rays identified Giorgione as the author of the painting. I didn't see anything resembling underpaint but was afraid to appear too ignorant, so I kept my mouth shut. Later, when I re-read some passages from Brown's 2006 exhibition catalogue Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting I realized that Brown might not have found any underpaint either. That's probably why Brown skipped over my blank look and continued.

"So for a moment we have to double-back. In 1922, before Burroughs and his scientific x-ray studies, art historian Wilhelm Valentiner thought that this man was a merchant, that he was holding a moneybag in his closed fist, and that the building in the background of the painting was the Venetian headquarters of the German merchants group. Of course Valentiner thought it was a merchant: This painting belonged to Henry Goldman of Goldman Sachs so there was a tendency to read in. After all, Valentiner's work was done in a catalogue of Goldman's collection!

"Then when Burroughs did his x-ray, there seems to have been what was once a scroll in the fist of the sitter [above]. Somehow Burroughs disregarded that because below the fist was a triangular something. Burroughs thought it was a sword or a dagger or some such thing and decided that the sitter was a warrior.

"Because Burroughs 'had science on his side,' everyone decided the sitter was a warrior. Over and over the art historians write that the sitter here is a warrior, that he was holding a dagger, and so on. Furthermore, you've got a situation where, you see, the facial expression also fits very well with a warrior. For Burroughs this was a major discovery based on the evidence of the x-ray that he'd produced. It came out with the force of a revelation!

"Well, the problem is that they misread the x-ray. No one caught it and no one questioned it. The triangular thing they thought they saw is a wedge-shaped key in the stretcher. It's not part of the paint, it's on the back! It's on the stretcher. So the x-ray shows you everything, it's just that they read it wrong!

"As it turned out, this use of x-ray and modern technology to reveal who the author of the picture actually was became such an article of faith that everyone afterward accepted this. We also know, for example, that the Dresden Venus [left] was started by Giorgione and finished by Titian, so it's not that unheard of. But for Burroughs and for art historians coming after him, science in the form of x-rays proved that this attribution, which had been debated, could be resolved scientifically in favor of both artists."

Brown paused long enough to shoot me a look indicating he thought little of this kind of baby-splitting.

"The history of the attribution or even the interpretation of the picture, which includes those phases, is very interesting in and of itself because it raises another basic question that has been discussed for a long time: To what degree can we read facial expressions in portraits?

"We assume it's possible for the artist to grasp the sitter's character when he's painting him or her and then to also communicate that in his work. Then, as the third stage, we think that we viewers, 500 years later, can get the artist's message. I think you'd agree that is a pretty tenuous thread, for that to hold up or mean the same thing over the centuries. But the conviction we're able to do this is so strong that people look at the portrait and think they know what the painting means."

I shifted on our bench because... yeah, I'd done that as soon as Brown and I had sat down in front of the painting. I'd referred to the arched eyebrow, to the clenched fist -- OK, the apparently clenched fist -- and I'd assumed they all meant something about the sitter. Worse, I think I communicated such to Brown, who was willing to acknowledge my human discomfort more than he was willing to acknowledge the expression-in-oil.

"You said it was a striking picture and that he looked assertive or defiant and that's right. He does. Over the years I've collected some adjectives that people have used in the literature to describe the picture. I have 20 of them and they're all different."

Brown showed me his page of adjectives. Some of the better words were cruel, truculent, calculating and suspicious. Brown waved the piece of paper at the National Gallery's portrait. "They all tend to focus on the kind of strong and somewhat negative expression," he said. "Sure enough, that also was used for the attribution, because it was believed that Giorgione was the lyrical painter and Titian was more dynamic, that a dynamic painting such as this could only be a Titian.

"So you've got two things going on here: An interpretation of the sitter's pose and expression, that is, a reading of the portrait, the portrait's 'psychology' and what that tells you about the artist, and then you've got this attribution that used scientific evidence: the hands and the ears and then the x-rays. These things have come together in the literature in an absolutely fascinating way.

"What makes it so fascinating is that even scientific information -- which you'd expect would be perfectly clear! -- can be misinterpreted just the same way that the facial expression and the pose are. It's all subject to a variety of interpretations. And those interpretations have been wrong because this isn't a Giorgione and it isn't a Titian!"

Tomorrow: Brown's attribution.

Continued from yesterday.

David Alan Brown, the National Gallery of Art's curator of Italian and Spanish painting, sat next to me on a bench, about 15 feet from the mysterious Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman. I wanted to know who had painted it and why Brown thought so. Brown, who has the beard and the professional-but-disheveled look one would expect of a curator of Renaissance art, wanted to start somewhere else.

"In a way, the story is more interesting than who the picture turns out to be by," Brown said. "In fact this has to be one of the most interesting histories of any picture in the gallery in terms of who painted it."

Brown opened a manila folder, pulled out four Xeroxed, stapled pages and pointed at the author: Vasari. "This is, I think, the kind of thing that lies behind this portrait," Brown said, and pointed my eyes toward this passage, which suggests that questions about the NGA's painting started at the beginning of the beginning of writing on Italian art, with Lives of the Artists:

Therefore, when Titian observed the method and style of Giorgione, he abandoned the style of Giovanni Bellini, although he had not followed it for long, and drew closer to Giorgione's, imitating his works so well in such a short time that his paintings were sometimes mistaken and attributed to Giorgione, as we shall explain below...

... in the beginning, when he began to follow the style of Giorgione and was no more than 18 years of age, he painted the portrait of a gentleman friend of his from the Barberigo family that was considered very beautiful, because the skin tones resembled those of real flesh and the hairs were so well distinguished from the other that they could be counted, as could the stitches in a greatcoat of silver-sewn satin that he painted in the portrait; in short, the painting was so well considered and so carefully done that if Titian had not written his name in the dark background, it would have been taken for a painting by Giorgione.

I finished scanning the passage and looked up at the mysterious painting, trying to at least look like I was searching for something. "I've been curator here forever and so I have had years to look at these things, and this one never struck me as being by Giorgione and Titian," Brown said, gesturing at the painting. "I thought it was an odd attribution because it's certainly not the work of two hands that one can see. I didn't also feel that either name was right."

Brown flipped through some pages in the manila folder and held up a couple of Xeroxes of paintings. "These, I think, are the kinds of things that lay behind this portrait," he said. "Look at Giorgione's Self-portrait as David with the Head of Goliath, which has been cut down [at right] and Titian's Man with a Blue Sleeve -- with T.V. painted onto it [above]." Brown gestured at the National Gallery's painting as if to indicate that the similarities were self-evident, which they were. "The polls between which [our] picture gravitates are Giorgione and Titian and there's no question that they lie behind it. But I don't think either one is the author of the picture."

Brown put down the Xeroxes and turned back to me. "For connoisseurs the holy grail is proof. The question is whether that proof is an illusion or reality, but connoisseurs have always dreamed of some objective way of demonstrating that a work of art is authentic or attributable.

"In the beginning of modern art history Giovanni Morelli and his disciples focused on morphological details like ears and hands as proof that a work was by a certain artist. Morelli was trained as a scientist [a medical doctor], so he studied comparative anatomy. He brought this sort of pseudo-scientific criteria to deciding questions of attribution. All of his followers, including Bernard Berenson, took this up with a vengeance. They went around re-attributing paintings like mad.

"This really proved to be a false dawn, you could say, because in the end the experts continued to disagree. People pointed out that other things were important in making attributions, things besides these minor details that Morelli based his system on.

"Then along came the scientific approach to attribution using technology. The pioneer in this field was Alan Burroughs ans his 1938 book is Art Criticism from a Laboratory. He published the very first x-ray of our painting. In adopting this new technology and applying it to works of art, Burroughs had to justify the use of the technology to the field. In other words, he had to come up with something new. So here it is: He decided the underpaint showed that our painting was begun by Giorgione and argued that what you see now was finished by Titian. That's where the idea comes from that it's by Giorgione and Titian. Because it was based on the scientific evidence."

As Brown said that last part his head and shoulders waved back and forth a bit, as if to slightly mock the idea that The Scientific Evidence could -- in and of itself -- render the learned eye obsolete.

Tomorrow: The scientific evidence is one thing, reading it is another.

Groovy: The San Diego Museum of Art, which owns a terrific Giorgione, is also thinking about our Venetian mystery.

The painting, a portrait of a Venetian gentleman circa 1510, started as a Giorgione. Unless, of course, it wasn't -- in which case it started as a Titian.

The most prominent art historians on two continents have flip-flopped on the painting for the better part of the last 100 years: Bernard Berenson first called it a copy of a lost Giorgione and then said it was a Titian. Sir Herbert Cook and Wilhelm von Bode disagreed with both Berensons, calling it an authentic Giorgione. In case that wasn't confusing enough, just after the turn of the last century an auction house sold it as a Licinio. That worked well enough for a time -- the painting sold to George Kemp, 1st Baron Rochdale as such -- but no one liked that attribution and the painting went back to being a Giorgione or a Titan and, when all else failed, to being a portrait begun by Giorgione and finished by Titian.

Today the painting, Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman (at left and here), is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, which 'officially' lists it as a "Giorgione and Titian," a stilted attribution which has pleased no one, not the least French museum director and scholar Michel Laclotte, who... exhibited the painting in 1993 as a Titian.

Uncertainty be damned: Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman is one of the NGA's most striking Italian portraits. The sitter's macho harumph! gaze and assertive posture, his clenched fist and the mysterious setting, effectively obscured by a bit of paint loss, raise plenty of questions: Why the clenched fist? What on earth is the man holding, a handkerchief? What does "VVO" mean? Why has the sitter tossed his head back in what could be defiance? What does the green-covered book or ledger indicate? Do any of these questions offer clues as to who might have made the painting?

While Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman is typically on view in the NGA's collection galleries, for now the painting hangs in the NGA's Tullio Lombardo exhibition. On a recent visit to the show I noticed that the museum had changed the painting's title plate: 'Giorgione and Titian' was gone. The painter was newly (and obliquely) referenced as a 16th-century Venetian.

Museums are typically less-than-eager to share the details of what might be called unattributions -- which this appeared to be -- or to even show paintings that were once assigned to The Great Artist but were now believed to be by someone less significant. (The NGA, for example, has 68 works that are 'related' to or are 'after' Rembrandt, and few of them ever see John Russell Pope's walls.) Given that Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman is such a well-known, frequently exhibited painting and that despite the unattribution it was on view, I emailed the NGA to see if someone might tell me what was going on with our Venetian gentleman.

I expected the museum's press and curatorial offices to brush me off with a quick, 'Come back later, we're still researching it,' which would have been perfectly understandable given the fuzzy new title plate and the painting's history of attribution drama. I couldn't have been more wrong. On a recent Thursday afternoon, NGA curator David Alan Brown agreed to meet me in front of the painting. I arrived ready to take a few notes. Brown arrived with folders, Xeroxes, photographs, x-rays and books, ready to tell a story. Over the next few days I'll relay that story, which culminates with Brown identifying who he thinks is the real painter of Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman, an attribution which he thinks should settle the mystery once for all.

Today is the deadline for submissions to the National Arts Journalism Program's 'National Summit on Arts Journalism,' a competition that hopes to produce five arts journalism projects that can be presented before a live audience.

The project's goal -- to find new models for art journalism -- is admirable: Art journalism is disappearing from American newspapers, alt-weeklies and magazines. I'd guesstimate that in recent years 60-75 percent of arts journalists have been downsized from the commercial media.

These cutbacks do not mean that cultural news is any less important to Americans or in America than it was 10 years ago. Journalism companies have cut jobs across all departments, from sports to investigative staff. Cultural coverage has been more directly impacted than, say, football coverage because most journalism companies have far more sports reporters than arts journalists.

The result of the retreat of art journalism from the traditional commercial media has been the intensifying ghettoization of cultural news and information: Whereas a reader of the Chicago Tribune once received cultural news in the context of and as a part of national and world events, today cultural issues and art are absent from broader progressive discussions. As arts journalism has fallen away, so too has the inclusion of the visual arts in the national dialogue. To be sure: Artists and visual arts leaders around America have a role to play in our nation's affairs, roles that go beyond the art world, it's just that those stories are told less now than ever before. (I've tried to make this a real focus of MAN's coverage: Witness my recent examinations of artists who are addressing issues around torture and national responsibility for horrific crimes committed by a nation's leaders.)

But however well-intentioned, the NAJP project is a lost opportunity. It fails to address significant recent developments and the realities of contemporary journalism, especially as they apply to niche topics such as art journalism. The competition guidelines indicate an apparent lack of analysis of the massive changes that have taken place in niche media in recent years and an unwillingness to be informed by recent scholarship or investigation into the present media landscape. (For starter-primers written to be accessible to those outside the field, I recommend recent work by Geneva Overholser and Clay Shirky.)

First, the NAJP project says that it is looking for commercially "sustainable" projects, that it is "looking for viability, both as a business and as a journalistic enterprise." NAJP's decision to focus on profit-generating models is the result of a misreading of the current media environment. Not even the wealthiest, smartest legacy-media companies have figured out how to be profitable in the fast-emerging digital-first environment. If mass media companies targeted toward the biggest audiences, corporations with enormous audience and advertiser reach (such as Time Inc., and the New York Times Co.) struggle with the current economic environment and the changes in the audience's consumption of media, niche journalism organizations have little-to-no chance.

As a result, niche-media entrepeneurs have increasingly focused on non-profit models, and then on building innovative distribution mechanisms so as to ensure distribution outside their niche. For example: Grist magazine covers the environmental movement. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting enables high-level journalism about foreign affairs. Numerous new publications have sprung up to cover local news, which in today's globalized media environment is a niche. Think-tank-journalism hybrids are proliferating, offering yet another model.

Furthermore, for the foreseeable future, it is not realistic to expect advertising and traditional, for-profit revenue models (such as those focused on subscribers) to sustain niche journalism. Grist is one of the oldest, best-established non-profit niche journalism outfits in America, yet only 8.4 percent of its revenue comes from advertising. (Grist's experience is especially analogous to a potential art journalism non-profit given likely demographic similarities in the respective audiences.) NAJP's insistence on for-profit projects at a time when for-profit cultural journalism is dying and as the non-profit model is both ascendant and the primary driver of journalism innovation is a fundamental mistake.

I also question NAJP's decision to focus on ongoing or about-to-launch projects, which I think effectively limits innovation and fails to provide NAJP's institutional backing to new ideas, to big ideas and to worthy innovators. (It is possible that NAJP's backing isn't significant -- funders are in a better position to address that than I am.)

The shortcomings in NAJP's approach are made evident when examining program applicants. Because NAJP didn't define what counted as an eligible journalism project (journalists typically assume that everyone knows what they mean by 'journalism'), many or most of the contestants simply are not journalism projects.

Few of the projects do or propose to do actual reporting of breaking news stories or important issues. (One submitted project even boasted that it redistributed press releases via a blog faster than anyone else, including the New York Times -- as if that was journalism.) It's discouraging that the overwhelming majority of the contestants treat art journalism as a mere Saturday-features-level discipline. Most focus on local exhibition reviews, implicitly failing to acknowledge or understand that there is more to art journalism than criticism. (Similarly: A newspaper that's nothing but an editorial page has limited value.) Several of the submitted projects have no corrections policy or have demonstrated in the past that they are unwilling to correct their mistakes. A dedication to getting the facts right is fundamental to journalism.

While I am disappointed by NAJP's approach and focus, I'm grateful that it's provided an opportunity for a broader discussion of what art journalism should become. This is a topic I've been thinking about for a while, particularly since the magazine crash of late 2008. My thoughts are most fully presented in an 18-page white paper I've written and revised over the last several months. The paper lays out the current media landscape as it pertains to art journalism, examines the ways in which other niches have innovated and puts forward some suggestions for how the art world and art journalists can join the future. (I'm in the process of sharing it with potential funders and potential partners.) It's available here.

• In the LAT, Susan Emerling details how land art is receiving major attention this season in New Mexico.
  
• Just wondering: Is a story about a literary agent a 'books' story? Is a story about a Sony Pictures marketer a 'film' story? Then why...
• Roberta Smith visits Dove/O'Keeffe at the Clark Art Institute and declares a winner.
• SMU's Meadows Museums buys a really, really big Jaume Plensa.
• In the Philly Inky, Ed Sozanski examines the Philly Museum's secrets-revealing (or not?) Duchamp show.
  
• Christopher Knight read Michael Gross' history of the Met, Rogues Gallery, and found it to prefer superficial rope-line gawking to substantive engagement with the institution's history.
  
• Reminder: I'll be giving away one copy of Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art via Twitter today. Follow me here. (Steven Levingston reviewed the book in the Washington Post.)
  

The National Gallery of Art has acquired its first Fred Sandback sculpture, Untitled (Grey Corner Construction of 1968. It is on view in the NGA's East Building.

The NGA has been on a minimalism acquisition mini-spree in recent years, acquiring significant works by Donald Judd (image here), Robert Morris, Dan Flavin and now Sandback.

Sandback made his first 'string' sculpture in 1966 after experimenting with other sculptural practice, including assemblage. The NGA says that its Sandback is one of the earliest Sandbacks extant, as many have deteriorated or decayed.

The NGA had previously owned two Sandback works on paper and a Sandback print portfolio.

Related, on view now: The best contemporary art collection installation in America may be the current (expanded) presentation of Sandback at Dia Beacon. The installation includes about a dozen works and makes a convincing argument for what should be the first American museum retrospective. (A retrospective traveled around Europe in 2006.) Shouldn't be long now...

Related: Fred Sandback talks at/with Dia about his work.

• An inaugural presentation as America transitions from Bush to Obama: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn;
  
• The Abu Ghraib photos and the national collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress: part one, part two;
  
• The Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's 'The Gray Drape;'
  
• Bruce Nauman at the Venice Biennale: Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America's torture of Abu Zubaydeh; with a look at Nauman's hanging chair sculptures in Chicago and Washington: part one, part two; and
  
• Gerhard Richter's Uncle Rudi: A foundational painting. As discussed by Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Gallery (UK), as discussed by Art of Two Germanys at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. MAN analyzes: Uncle Rudi and quiet confrontation, Uncle Rudi and the response to torture.
  

Continued from here, here, here and here on Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi and a quiet confrontation. These posts are informed by Gerhard Richter Portraits from the Yale University Press and Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Culture from Abrams.

Gerhard Richter painted Uncle Rudi in 1965, 20 years after the Russians took Berlin. For a variety of reasons, including the sheer magnitude of Germany's shame, it took German artists about that long to begin to examine their nation and its responsibility for the Nazi years.

The crimes of the Bush-Cheney torture regime are not as horrific, and while the United States is still coming to grips with them -- some on the right such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even argue that 'it's in the past, so who cares?' -- artists have already begun to address questions of national responsibility for torture committed in America's name.

Yesterday I detailed how Richter's dry, confrontational-whisper approach to Germany's past in Uncle Rudi (and, in a different way, in Aunt Marianne) created a new, influential, just-the-facts-ma'am way for artists to address controversial topics, particularly when an artist spotlights a nation's shared responsibility for terrible acts. Today I want to talk about how several artists have adopted Richter's deadpan in addressing Bush-Cheney-era torture.

Take Israeli artist Jan Tichy, whose 1391 (2007, at right) was exhibited last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. (At the top of this post is a 2007 Tichy video installation also titled 1391.) 1391 is a paper architectural model of Camp 1391, a once-secret Israeli military base, a Bagram-like secret installation used by the Israelis in a manner similar to how the United States used its black sites. According to journalist Jane Meyer, the United States' torture regime was informed by Israeli practices, including those likely used at Camp 1391. In her book The Dark Side, Mayer reports that a former CIA officer told her: "The Israelis taught us that you can put a towel around a guy's neck and use it like a collar, to propel him headfirst into a wall."

Camp 1391's existence was revealed in 2003, five months before America's abuses at Abu Ghraib became public. Three years later Tichy created an artwork that imagines the physical structure of the Camp 1391 as simply as possible -- what's simpler than white paper on the floor? -- puts it in a dark gallery and blasts it with intense white light. Tichy's approach both emphasizes that a secret site used for state-sanctioned illegal detention and, probably, torture has been revealed, but the darkness in the rest of the gallery emphasizes how the place was once hidden from the world. It is confrontational revelation as artwork, an installation every bit as dry and matter-of-fact as Richter's Uncle Rudi.

The best-known American art about the torture era are Richard Serra's three 2004 works featuring Serra's take on the most iconic of the Abu Ghraib photographs. The work at right, as well as this piece, are prints produced by Gemini G.E.L. Serra exhibited a lithocrayon-on-mylar version (below) at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. All three feature a straightforward sketch of the central figure in the horrible photograph from Abu Ghraib, an approach right out of the Richter playbook. (Like Uncle Rudi, the Tichy and all three Serras are black-and-white, as if the lack of color serves to reveal truth.)

However, for the Whitney Biennial version, Richter included an extra element: The hooded torturee was surrounded by the phrase "STOP BUSH." Serra exhibited his Uncle Rudi-influenced Stop Bush just after he had borrowed from another artist, Goya, for an artwork that was reproduced on the back cover of The Nation. That Serra was a cheap, one-off Photoshop trick, so reactionary as to be cringe-worthy.

No surprise then that when I saw Stop Bush at the Whitney I thought of it in the context of Serra's Goya-plus-Bush. Stop Bush seemed like a similar grimace-causing one-note. I thought it was too pointed, too specific, too immediate and time-sensitive to be the kind of art work that lasts. I was pretty sure that once the biennial was over that I'd never think about the piece again. (I wasn't alone in shrugging at Stop Bush: In Michael Kimmelman's review of the show, he mentions the Serra only enough to note that conservatives would dismiss it.)

In the three years since the Serra was installed at the Whitney, we've learned more about the Bush-Cheney torture regime. Stop Bush has come to seem less an exhortation and more of a plea. Given the art work that has come since -- work referenced here and plenty more -- Stop Bush seems like something else: Permission from a venerable, successful figure to younger, less institutionally-sanctioned artists. More and more it seems like Serra's way of saying to other artists: Go confidently where your heart tells you that you must go. Uncle Rudi may have provided us with one way for an artist to address a calamity of his own nation's doing... but you know what? It's good to learn from the past, but you don't need to be too careful. Look at how I signed Stop Bush in the lower-right -- it's mine and I'm proud to take responsibility for it. Go ahead and bring passion and urgency into your work. Be explicit again.

Related: Kathryn Hixson interviews Jan Tichy.

Related examination of art and torture on MAN: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn; the Abu Ghraib photos part one, part two; the Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's 'The Gray Drape;' Bruce Nauman at the Venice Biennale: Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America's torture of Abu Zubaydeh, Nauman's hanging chair sculptures, part one, part two.

Continued from here, here and here on Gerhard Richter's Uncle Rudi.

Artists ask the bravest, toughest questions. Because artists want their questions heard and considered, typically they've asked them with equally big, direct, look-what-happened-here! canvases: Goya asked if the French army acted appropriately on the third of May. Picasso asked if Guernica was fairly targeted and bombed. It is not a surprise that a German painter such as Gerhard Richter would ask big questions about the Nazi era. Unlike Goya or Picasso, Richter does it with a small, 34-by-20-inch portrait based on a quarter-century-old family snapshot.

That painting, Uncle Rudi (1965), is arguably the greatest anti-portrait in 20th-century art. As I discussed here and here and here last week, Richter's picture tells us little about the man in the World War II-era German officer's uniform. Beyond the information in the title, Richter gives us no details about him.

Today it's clear that Richter's Uncle Rudi has been an enormously influential painting, an artwork that provided a new way for artists to raise questions about the horrific acts initiated by their own governments. (Artists only began to challenge their own governments' militarism during and about wartime with the advent of Dada, just 50 years before Richter's painting.) Rudi effectively introduced the critical deadpan, the power of quietly eviscerating truth into post-war art. As artists consider the Bush-Cheney torture regime, they have made good use of Richter's playbook, using quiet, deadpan truth to ask big questions about our governments' actions. (More on that tomorrow.)

Today I'll take a look at how Rudi didn't just challenge Germans to consider their role in the Nazi killing machine, but at how Rudi challenged German artists to expand their language, to re-establish progressiveness in German art, and to blur the lines that separated United States and Western European-influenced West German abstraction from Eastern European (and particularly East German) sanctioned figurative realism. Remarkably, Richter managed to challenge a people and her artists in a painting whose confrontation is masked by its seeming droll straightforwardness.

Uncle Rudi and Uncle Rudi

Is any kind of painting more straightforward, more traditional than a portrait? A portrait tells us who someone is or was. Often, subjects want their portrait painted so as to demonstrate their import, their power, their position. Portrait subjects want to be remembered.

Which makes Richter's Uncle Rudi a notable exception. The painting is based on a photograph, a particularly indifferent, whatever, just-press-the-button-already kind of snapshot. Rudi is posed in a non-descript place. He slouches and his grin is of the hurry-up-and-take-the-picture variety. Nothing about the picture says, "Remember me!" Richter transformed the snap into a painting, as deadpan a painting of a smiling Nazi officer can be, a just-the-facts presentation. In the 44 years since Richter painted his uncle, we've learned that he was killed-in-action in Normandy in 1944, a too-typical example of the family member who served his nation in wartime -- except, of course, his nation was the most horrific regime of the 20th-century, Nazi Germany.

In 1965, when Richter made Uncle Rudi, the painting would have reminded Germans of those conflicted feelings. Most Germans had family who had fought for their nation and their nation's regime was a manifestation of evil. While Richter painted Rudi, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trails were ongoing. The trials revealed the barbarism of a few Germans, but, of course it was not only the death-camp killers that were responsible for the horrors. Rudi reminded Germans that many of them -- most of them even -- had a Nazi in the family. But the painting doesn't moralize, it doesn't pity or self-pity, accuse or suggest to Germans how they might consider their own Rudi, their own roles in the Nazi machine. The picture simply presented incontrovertible evidence of something that many Germans couldn't deny: There was national culpability for what happened. Think about how it has affected us and the world. Remember. Uncle Rudi is confrontation-by-whisper.

(It's worth emphasizing that Richter's family knew Nazi evil first-hand: The regime for which Richter's uncle fought in Normandy murdered Richter's aunt. Uncle Rudi reminded viewers not just of the Nazi they all knew, but of the Nazi Germany in which many had lived.)

Rudi didn't just create a new, quiet way of asking questions about art, it was a specific challenge to West German and European artists, too. In the catalogue for "Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Culture," (which is currently on view at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg) scholar Sabine Eckmann notes that that straightforward paintings of figures were not en vogue in the West in the years after World War II: Abstraction ruled. In the East, socialist realism was preferred. That ideologically-driven dichotomy dealt a double-whammy to the likelihood that artists in West Germany would portray figures in anything approaching a straightforward manner, in the manner in which, say, Richter presented his uncle. It made Rudi a challenge not just to Germans and their sense of responsibility for the past, but a challenge to Germans and German artists who were seemingly locked into politically-driven art-making modes.

Richter straddled the border by using his already-trademark blur, a technique Richter had introduced into his paintings of figures as early as 1963, but which didn't become his default until 1964. I think that Richter's embrace of the blur was part of his challenging of Germans, both Eastern and Western.

Eckmann notes in the aforementioned essay that within mere months of the fall of the Nazi regime, German artists raced to return to expressionist painting, a comfortable nod to a familiar, safe, pre-Nazi German artistic lineage. When Richter made his great paintings about Nazism and its impact on his family, I think that the controlled blur may have been his way of rejecting 'traditional' German expressionism, while simultaneously allowing representation that wasn't quite realistic enough to recall Nazi-era or East German-sanctioned socialist realism. (In the family-snapshot paintings the Richter blur comes with an added bonus: It evokes some wistful nostalgia that comes across as personal and memorial rather than hero-recalling.)

In the years since Uncle Rudi, Richter's confrontational deadpan has become a standard way for artists to present a controversial, troubling, hitting-close-to-home topic. In my next post I'll look at how two contemporary artists have followed Richter's example to urge us to examine how the Bush-Cheney regime unlawfully detained and tortured people in our country's name.

Several of you have emailed asking why there are so many fewer links posts on MAN in the last month or two. Part of it is that it's summer, and everything is a little slower. But more of it is probably Twitter, to which I feed links throughout most days. Join us here.

• When James Frey was feeling down-in-the-dumps after being publicly stoned by Oprah, he commissioned a painting by Ed Ruscha that said, "Public Stoning." Colin Dabkowski tells the story in the Buffalo News.
• In the Boston Globe, Geoff Edgers explains why an MFAB trustee is curating a show at the museum.
• The Village Voice gave Alan Gilbert the hed of the week: "The Van Goghs of Putt-Putt."
• Jen Graves shows how some Seattle artists are making art... by steamroller.
• The LAT's Mike Boehm says that LACMA's film program is finally drawing the attention of potential donors.
  

I'm more time-slammed than expected today. The Richter posts will resume next week...

Continued from here and here. Excerpted from an essay by Ursula Peters and Roland Prugel in the Art of Two Germanys catalogue:

"To deal with the past, [Richter] used (among other things) family photographs. The figure in the long officer's overcoat of the German army in the painting Onkel Rudi is a portrait of his mother's brother, Rudolf Schonfelder, who fell in a front-line action in Normandy in 1944. The title of the painting points to Richter's personal closeness to the man depicted, but it can also evoke memories of close relatives in others. The uncle stands for a whole generation of uncles, fathers, brothers and cousins who were sent into "total war," and at the same time he stands for its millions of victims.

Richter donated the painting to the "Hommage a Lidice" show that was organized by the West Berlin gallerist Rene Block in 1967. Nearly ten years earlier Willi Sitte reminded viewers of the massacre in Lidice by the SS and the army in Massacre II. Richter did not depict Nazi crimes. He achieved a resounding criticism of Nazism simply by reproducing a banal portrait photograph to call to mind the outrageousness of the all-embracing societal involvements in the Third Reich. The painting Tante Marianne was based on a 1932 photograph that shows Richter's aunt Marianne Schonfelder, who was fourteen at the time, beaming as she holds a four-mouth-old baby (Richter himself as an infant) in her arms. A few years later she was struggling in life, and doctors diagnosed her as schizophrenic in 1937. While her parents thought their daughter was being well taken care of at the Arnsdorf mental hospital, the decision was made there in 1938, for the 'protection of German blood,' to subject her to forced sterilization; the intimidated family consented. In 1943 Marianne Schonfelder was transferred to the institution in Grobschweidnitz, where more than five thousand patients were murdered as part of the so-called Brandt Action. She numbers among the Third Reich's 250,000 victims of euthanasia. It was claimed she died of circulation problems."

Tomorrow: Uncle Rudi and Bush-Cheney America.

Continued from here. From the 'Gerhard Richter Portraits' catalogue, written by National Portrait Gallery (UK) curator Paul Moorhouse:

Images such as Richter's personal-photographs-based paintings of the mid-1960s "are intentionally 'banal' to use Richter's own description. They are also willfully ordinary. They assert nothing definite, draw attention to no particular facet or feature, and avoid making any specific point. This avoidance tactic deflects the universal habit of finding meaning in the appearance of things. The paintings are passive. They are open to a range of interpretation without the promise of confirming anything, so that the motif can assume multiple meanings or say nothing. Richter's ability to present images that seem replete with information, while resisting interpretation, became increasingly conspicuous with the advent of a number of paintings, which, in some intangible way, strike a more disturbing note.

In Onkel Rudi and Tante Marianne (above), two portraits painted from personal photographs, Richter had appropriated images with a history. Onkel Rudi attracts attention because its subject is dressed as a German soldier during a period of Nazi dictatorship. Though the image itself is unprovocative in that it simply presents a young man, standing proud in his uniform, the painting courts controversy by inviting speculation about the Nazi associations it implies. It positions itself in a contested area, where the viewer is caught between making assumptions and having to admit that nothing really can be known about the individual depicted. As such, the portrait exposes the role of subjective judgement, and its potential for distortion, in the way that appearances are interpreted. The subject of the second portrait, Richter's aunt Marianne, is also connected with this most sensitive of periods in German history. Mentally disabled, she died as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme. These facts exist behind a touching image of childhood; once known, they infiltrate a shard of flint within a seeming sweetness."

Related: The Guardian's Jonathan Jones did a four-minute video feature on the NPG show.

Earlier this year curators at two major museums, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and London's National Portrait Gallery, each organized a show in which Gerhard Richter's Uncle Rudi (right) would have been a star attraction. The Brits were launching a career-length survey of Gerhard Richter's portraits. LACMA was originating 'Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures.'

LACMA and its two partner institutions in Germany got the painting, which is in the collection of Pamatnik Lidice/Lidice Memorial. All week I'll be featuring Uncle Rudi. First, I'll share what NPG curator Paul Moorhouse said about the painting in his catalogue and then I'll detail what the authors of the 'Art of Two Germanys' catalogue had to say about Uncle Rudi. Finally I'll talk about what the painting has to offer to us today. 

Related: The NPG's exhibition website is rather slapdash, but the Gerhard Richter Portraits catalogue is well-worth a glance. You can see all of the paintings included in the NPG show at Richter's website, here. LACMA's 'Two Germanys' website is more thorough and its catalogue is a must-own.

When I read about the origin and purpose of the Lidice Memorial, I remember what Christopher Knight wrote about Brandeis' looting of the Rose Art Museum.

• The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt doesn't like this Walter de Maria painting that I wrote about when the Menil acquired it in 2007. "de Maria's important, but not for his painting, which can't have anything to do with the reasons we care about him, like The Lightning Field," says Britt. Au contraire! I think that the Menil piece is a great example of how artists such as de Maria and Judd worked through/past painting and I think that it presages one of de Maria's major interests. 
• I like Alec Soth. I like this Hilarie M. Sheets NYT feature on him. But I notice that the stuffy, latte-sipping, Prius-loving easterners at the NYT used a lame cliche to describe Soth, who they say has an "affable kind of Midwestern demeanor." 
• The Stranger's Jen Graves finds a (vaguely thrilling) confluence of light bulbs in Seattle. 
• In the Kansas City Star, Alice Thorson points out that one of the nice side-benefits to a museum renovation or expansion is that too-long-neglected parts of museum collections can receive more attention.
• Nirmala Natarj looks at the Barbara Probst-meets-Flickrish photography of Cassandra C. Jones in the SF Chron.