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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
Stupidity examined. But whose?
I read a story about an artist yesterday. It was a great and emotive story, the kind of story that made me want to... well... puke up enough bile to rival the vomit of a thousand corpulent Jabbas the Hut. (See Blake? I can do that too!) OK, OK, that might not be quite fair. It was worse than that.
The story was in the October Vogue magazine. It was about Elizabeth Peyton.
 In this story, we learn that Peyton is sweetly stupid and that writer Dodie Kazanjian is way impressed with this. ("I ask her how it feels to have her painting become so widely accepted.") Oh, and we learn that Peyton wears a lot of Marc Jacobs clothes and that she has "an understated but stylish nonstyle." Which, if you read Vogue a lot, probably actually means something.
But as silly as Dodie's text is, it simply can't rival Peyton's silliness, nearly all of which is excitedly embraced by an apparently breathless Dodie. "I made some paintings of [Abraham Lincoln] the other day," Peyton tells Dodie. "I discovered he looks a lot like Cameron Diaz."
Right after telling us this, Kazanjian tells us that Peyton is smart. "It turns out that what Peyton does isn't as limited or as 'light' as people used to think."
(Used to think?)
And, to be fair, Peyton probably is not a total doofus. How do I know this? Because everyone Kazanjian talks to for her story comes out sounding like a total moron (one exception: Gary Garrels). They can't all be morons, can they? Can they?
"[Peyton's] pictures have a freshness that really speaks of this moment," [Carnegie Museum curator] Laura Hoptman told Kazanjian. "The ambition is very large but the scope is very small. She is doing the universe on the head of a pin."
Uh, yeah. OK, well, moving right along...
 Kazanjian, who once wrote a book called Dodie Goes Shopping, makes mistakes that prove she doesn't know about what she's talking. "Peyton's work, with its straight-from-the-tube chromatic richness, makes a compelling argument for the validity of paint on canvas," Dodie writes. Paint on canvas needs to be validated? (Gosh, good thing for Monet that Peyton came along to validate his medium.) One other thing Dodie: Peyton does not paint on canvas. She paints on board.
Another surefire way to tell that someone writing about art has no clue is that they quote an artist's dealer. And Kazanjian's quotes from Gavin Brown, Peyton's dealer, is a doozy: "Here was a voice that was so clear and had so little to do with the pointless dialogue in the New York art world," Brown tells Kazanjian. But that's not enough. Dodie then flips the canvas (or board, or whatever) and quotes Peyton on her dealer! Thus, Peyton unwittingly contributed to what might be the most pointless paragraph in the history of American magazines. Peyton on Brown: "He gave me such hope that it was possible for me to be an artist."
And you thought I was kidding about puking up bile. (How come no one ever quotes Andrea Rosen on John Currin? Now that would be fun!)
Oh but it gets worse! Marc Jacobs, who owns a lot of Peyton, pitches in: "It's women like Elizabeth who inspire me, women who are alive today and play a creative role in the world. Especially women who are alive, creative, and have lots of disposable income." (Confession: I added that last part. I'm so ashamed.)
After Jacobs, Peyton is back with a masturbatory grope, this time when talking about a self-portrait she made (for Vogue!): "I suppose I was just looking at myself with a lot of respect and love."
Which I believe. Because earlier in the story, Peyton offered up this gem: "I often think how transcendent it is that I love the Beatles and you love the Beatles. That can collapse a lot of barriers."
Yes, like my esophagus.
Related: Todd Gibson disagrees.
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Calder Miro @ The Phillips
Late last week I did a DC two-fer for Bloomberg. Here's an excerpt from the Calder Miro portion (the other half was about Gerard ter Borch @ the NGA):
If you loved "Matisse Picasso" at MoMA QNS in 2003, you'll like "Calder Miro," on view now at The Phillips Collection. While Alexander Calder and Joan Miro weren't quite 20th-century titans in the way Matisse and Picasso were, the premise of the show is similar: Two leading artists of their day played the same riffs. Calder makes art about circuses, so does Miro. Calder explores abstraction, so does Miro. Curated by Elizabeth Hutton Turner of The Phillips Collection and Oliver Wick, guest curator at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, "Calder Miro’" is art history made lyrical.
The show's installation in The Phillips Collection's newly re-opened annex galleries is especially noteworthy: Lots of museums install Calder (1898-1976) well and lots of museums make Miro (1893-1983) look good. But the Phillips deserves special credit for making them flow into each other so well to demonstrate how a sculptor and a painter approach the same themes and challenges.
The first Miro painting in the exhibit is the 1927 "Painting (Circus Horse)" an abstract allusion to a horse made up of a white blob, a white 'V,' and a few yellow and red splotches on a ruddy background. At first glance, I didn't see a circus horse. Then I looked around the room and saw two delicate Calder wire sculptures of circus performers, "Arching Man," (1929) an acrobat bending over backwards, and an acrobat standing on a strong man's arm, "Two Acrobats" (ca. 1928). The circus theme clear, I could see the horse in the Miro.
While there are often thematic constants within galleries, I enjoyed thinking about the show in terms of balance. The magic in Calder's mobiles and in so much of his other work is in the way that they hover gently, balanced perfectly on nothing but air.
Even though he worked in two dimensions, not three, Miro explored the same idea. His abstract compositions have the same presence on canvas that Calder's do in the air. Overlapping planes of color, biomorphic shapes and other painted elements achieve a balance of form not so different from the balance of color and space that Matisse achieved.
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What SPF does Sam Keller use on his head?
It's Art Basel Miami Beach week -- and not a moment too soon. Most of the season's shows are open and most of the season's reviews have been written. Sure, there's still a bastard opening or two coming up (LACMA's Beyond Geometry travels to the Miami Art Museum, Dan Cameron's East Village USA show opens in 10 days at the New Museum), but December is mostly a month when art writers stretch a bit, when we look for something to write other than reviews. Or at least I do. (And apparently Roberta does too. And LA Weekly tells us everything we wanted to know about Poe and Blum, but didn't want to fly to City, Culver to ask.)
So ABMB is perfect for that. Plus we all get to drink a bit, socialize a bit, and just generally relax. (Franklin thinks we should drink less and look at the art. I think that after seeing a trillion c-prints, I need an abundance of vodka to stop my eyes from seeing things in chromogenic color.)
Here's MAN's Official ABMB Tip: Forget the big parties, forget getting into what someone tells you is The Big Thing of the Night. The paradoxical ABMB rule is this: The biggest stuff is the worst stuff. Avoid the crowds. (Note: This does not mean "Go to NADA." Because we still haven't figured out where the NADA fair is. We hear it might be in Tampa. Another source tells us that it's closer to Orlando. Our best advice is follow the trail of glue and glitter. And we can't explain why the link to their 2004 fair says '2003.' Well, actually we can: It's NADA!)
And for good measure: Official Tip No. 2: See Beyond Geometry at the Miami Art Museum. You'll walk out feeling stupid and excited.
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The weekend that was
Feeling a little MoMA-exhausted (BTW, I've updated the print reviews list), a friend of mine and I tracked down a weekend e-saver to Buffalo and Toronto for the weekend. As crazy as this sounds, well, it's probably as crazy as it sounds. The highlights:
The Albright-Knox, In Focus: Themes in Photography: Permanent collection shows are huge in the last year or two. (See the Gugg, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, MOCA, and on and on) This one, of photography in the A-K's collection, is awfully darn good.
 Chelsea-ites will well-remember Jennifer Steinkamp's Dervish from her last show at Lehmann Maupin. (Check out that link -- it's QuickTime video from LM.) It was one of the best gallery shows I saw this year. The A-K bought it, and it's on view now. Dervish features an animated tree, projected on to a wall. It swings, it sways, it breathes, it's a ballet.
The A-K wasn't crowded on Saturday but there were a few people around. Two of them appeared to be a young woman and her mentally disabled elderly mother. They weren't exactly moving through the museum quietly -- the mother was raising a pretty good racket, but there wasn't a whole lot anyone could say, of course. Eventually, they got to the Steinkamp room.
They walked in pretty loudly, the mother complaining that her daughter had kicked her. But when she sat down and started watching Dervish, she turned silent. Almost immediately she began breathing in rhythm with the piece, picking up more quickly than I had that the tree's swinging movements were just about in time with slow (human) breathing. After leaving Dervish, the woman and her daughter continued to walk through the galleries. No more rackets.
The other highlight of the exhibit was a gallery of 14 of Cathy Opie's surfers-in-the-water photos. I've seen these photos in Opie's studio and in two galleries. In the A-K's old, long, narrow galleries, they looked transcendent, their color reminiscent of the glaze on old Asian ceramics.
University of Buffalo Art Gallery, Shutters: Let's see, the home university of the FBI's favorite artist, Steve Kurtz doing a show about surveillance... yup, that fits. The strongest work was by Philly artist James Johnson, discussed here by MANpal Roberta Fallon, and by Niels Bonde, who finds childish fun in surveillance cameras.
Art Gallery of Ontario, Modigliani: When I saw this show at the Jewish Museum, I thought it was about a C-minus. But at the AGO it has room to breathe, a few paintings have been added and all in all it's a much more pleasant show, even quite a good one. Still, a Modigliani retro sans sculpture? Hmmm.
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MoMA, cont.
And as in the old building, MoMA doesn't know what to do with artists who made fine work but don't fit within the Official MoMA Timeline of Art. In this installation these bastard step-children are relegated to hallways, elevator landings and other awkward spaces. Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and Gerald Murphy are all banished from the narrative galleries.
Most of the galleries feed into other galleries, following a u-shaped footprint on their floor. On the fifth floor only one gallery leads to a dead end – the gallery of Italian futurists. Seems about right.
Clearly MoMA has institutional favorites. Alex Katz paints vacuity with aplumb, and MoMA has deemed him worthy of two entries. So too Andreas Gursky, whose primary artistic talent lies in making the mundane massive.
Here's hoping that hanging Matisses in staircases, a la the Barnes, does not become the norm.
I keep reading that the new MoMA starts with Paul Signac. Except it really doesn't -- there are half a dozen Cezannes paintings on the left and right walls of the first gallery before you get to the Signac, which faces the gallery entrance.
More throughout the week... but for now, check out Ionarts' remarkable accumulation of Euro coverage of MoMA. Later today I'll have some thoughts from Buffalo and Toronto.
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MoMA: For the geeks
This will probably be my last MoMA re-opens post. Jerry Saltz' three-part review is up on Artnet -- and much more navigable/visual than the VV postings.
Favorite installation juxtaposition: Matisse's sculpture, The Serf (1900-04), and painting, Male Model (1900), facing down Picasso's Les Demoiselles (1906).
Second-favorite installation juxtaposition: Two Bonnards facing four Picassos. Picasso hated Bonnard. John Elderfield (who curated a Bonnard retro) must have enjoyed a laugh about this one.
Noted ommissions: Vuillard, Modigliani (perhaps the portrait in the retro now at the AGO will be added?), Morandi, Lari Pittman, Carleton Watkins, Charles Demuth, Wayne Thiebaud, Shirin Neshat, Joe Deal, Bill Viola.
Unfortunate inclusions: Tom Wesselmann, Howard Hodgkin, Kenneth Noland, Jim Dine, Romare Bearden, Walter DeMaria, Christopher Wool.
Best inclusions: Anne Truitt, Jacob Lawrence, Toba Khedoori, David Hammons.
Fix that!: Throughout the museum the drywall is pretty shoddy. The worst is where Flavin's Pink Out of a Corner - To Jasper Johns reveals the drywall to be wavier than a lasagna noodle.
Best indication that MoMA curators have a travel budget: Lygia Clark and Joaquin Torres-Garcia, both 2004 purchases. Methinks MoMA saw LACMA's Beyond Geometry and MFAH's Inverted Utopias.
Too much!: Gursky (2), Katz (2).
The Bastards in the Hallways: Hirst, Davis, S., O'Keeffe, Murphy, G., Guston, Baselitz, Orozco, Artschwager, Katz, Puryear.
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MoMA: Aggregated
Here's the weekend's macro MoMA post:
Unrelated: Me on Roger Fenton.
Completely related: After a week of (in your best Jan Brady voice) MoMA, MoMA, MoMA, I'm getting the hell outta town.
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The LAT on MoMA
Because the LAT is behind a maddening firewall, here's an excerpt of the best piece I've read so far and so far on the new MoMA. (Dear NYT: Holland Cotter? I say, Holland Cotter? Don't tell me that Roberta was busy reading. And Jerry Saltz hasn't run in the Voice yet.) LAT'er Christopher Knight:
New art museum buildings generate considerable excitement nowadays -- so much so that we have given the international phenomenon a name. "The Bilbao Effect" is a complex of circumstances that runs on the profitable energy of cultural tourism. Medieval religious pilgrims traveled to Santiago de Compostela to gain proximity to miracles at an outpost at the end of the world. Baroque-era pilgrims went to the power center of Rome to be near fragments of imperial antiquity. Modern ones travel to fabulous far-flung treasure houses for painting and sculpture.
***
Wonderful moments have been orchestrated. Wall-hung, a trio of big glass cases featuring small Surrealist baubles deftly recall department store windows. Wordlessly, the installation conveys the raucous, accidental collisions of the commercial street, which were indispensable to the development of Surrealist art in the 1920s and 1930s.
Also smashing is the gutsy installation of Matisse's "Dance (I)" at the top of Taniguchi's elegant, neo-Bauhaus stairwell between the fifth and fourth floors. The artist painted a version of the 1909 work for the stairs of a Moscow collector's home. Suddenly, when seen as the backdrop to a spiraling circulation path, the mural's ring of exuberant figures moving clockwise gains a striking new dimension.
Oddly, the only gallery that flops is the one devoted to the early 1950s New York School. Following a beautiful room of eight Jackson Pollock paintings, it features a nice juxtaposition of a 1953 Matisse paper cutout with an abstraction by German emigre Hans Hofmann, whose teaching was instrumental to New York painting. But the room is also jam-packed; everything from Willem De Kooning's snarling nude, "Woman, I" to vaporous clouds of sponged color by Helen Frankenthaler jostles for attention. This motley crew tries way too hard for a Big Statement.
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Where MoMA stumbles badly, though, is on the second floor -- a huge, double-height, loft-like space for art from 1970 to 2004. Some superlative individual works by established artists (Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman) are juxtaposed with related ones by younger talents (Rachel Whiteread, Josiah McElheny). But the attempt at a synoptic overview of an epoch defined by explosive globalization is random and incoherent.
Here's one symptom of MoMA's bigger problem: A lovely small drawing by Vija Celmins at one end and a graceful big drawing by Toba Khedoori at the other end are all that you will encounter by Los Angeles artists of the last 30 years. No Chris Burden, no Mike Kelley, no Lari Pittman, no Charles Ray, no _______ (you fill in the blank). Now multiply that glaring gap by a dozen other regions, including entire continents.
New York's legendary provincialism didn't matter much when art was a tiny enterprise engaging a handful of practitioners. Now it's just embarrassing. New York has finally become Paris -- a bountiful place to visit to see what great art used to be. The stunning new MoMA is its magnificent shrine.
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The New MoMA: Reviewed
Excerpts from what I wrote for Bloomberg, foreshadowed here (ye with email know how to get more...):
 The new Museum of Modern Art, open to the public tomorrow, is the art world's new corporate headquarters. It is not perfect, but with a collection this great it doesn't need to be.
The $425 million MoMA is an awesome achievement of fundraising, design, and collecting. With 125,000 square feet of gallery space, a $20 admission charge, and multiple shops and restaurants, MoMA is far from where it started in 1929. Back then, MoMA's first exhibit filled just six rooms (three of which were quite small) and its director was a 27-year old named Alfred Barr. He was selected for the job by one of his college instructors.
Then again, maybe now isn't so different from 1929. The Harvard art professor who picked Barr was Paul J. Sachs, who started his professional life as a Wall Street financier. The new MoMA completes the circle.
Corporations tend to encourage top-down, follow-the-leader cultures, and MoMA is no exception. But no matter who staffs the MoMA bureaucracy, the most important figures at MoMA are artists and the most important output is their art. And when the top of your organization, gathered here on the fifth floor, is represented by Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne, how can you go wrong?
***
The contemporary galleries, just off the atrium, are an aggregate mess. One juxtaposition sums it up: Vija Celmins is the most wonderful and meticulous draftsman of her generation. MoMA represents her in the contemporary galleries with "Untitled (Ocean)," a meditative graphite-on-paper work of a waterscape, an abstraction of gently rolling waves. It is inexplicably hung not three feet from a Joan Jonas video projection, "Songdelay," a work that consists of jumpy video and blaring screeching. Despite having had a couple of years to think about it, MoMA still has no idea how to hang the art of the now. (The exception is in the prints galleries, where MoMA's best contemporary work is stashed.)
 These are mostly nitpicks – the success of the new enterprise should be judged first on the most major spaces, here the top two floors. Two unusual installations show that even as MoMA has gone corporate, it can still write love poems. Two of my favorite spaces are staircases which the curatorial team has used as architectural metaphors. One staircase features Matisse's grand "Dance (I)" at the top of it. When you walk down the stairs you come to two paintings by Richard Diebenkorn, the California-based master who owed more to Matisse than any painter of the 20th century. Another staircase features an Alexander Calder mobile floating up above, and a Martin Puryear sculpture squatting down below. Both installations are inspired, proving that there's plenty of room for creative thinking in the new MoMA.
Related: MoMA: Reviewed, MoMA: Blogged. And later today: Excerpts from the Los Angeles Times' reviews: Christopher Knight on art, and Christopher Hawthorne on architecture.
Ticket availability update: As of midnight, Friday morning, Sunday tix are available for 2:30pm. I betcha MoMA expected they'd be sold out by now. Any MoMA moles?
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Four good links
Just because you should visit:
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Roger Fenton at the National Gallery
From my Bloomberg review of Roger Fenton at the National Gallery (catalogue here):
 In the photograph, the soldier stands just off center, a compositional trick that deprives him of any heroic glory. (Heroes fill the center of photographs, bit players are pushed to the sides.) The man's weight mostly rests on one leg in what's often a swaggering cowboy pose.
That's not how it feels here: The soldier's shoulders are slouched and his arms seem to be pulled toward by the floor. He just looks tired. His beard is mangy and his coat is dirty. And if by now you didn't know that this man was barely holding it together, there's his stare. His pale eyes are as alive as
marbles.
"Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards'' could be any war photograph of the past 150 years, yet it's one of the first. Taken by Roger Fenton (1819-1869), it portrays a British captain in the Crimean War in 1855. It's one of eight of Fenton's landmark Crimean War photographs in the retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. until Jan. 2, 2005.
"All the Mighty World,'' the first exhibit installed in the NGA's new photography galleries, is rich with landmark images and is expertly presented. The show's catalogue ($65), jointly published by the NGA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, will interest both photography buffs and lovers of British history. My only quibble with the show is how few of the Crimean photos are here. Fenton took about 350 photos of the Crimean. Why aren't more included?
Scholars aren't sure what prompted Fenton's journey. The funder of the trip was a print-seller named Thomas Agnew, who was upset at the way the liberal press portrayed the war in Crimea as an inhumane mess, a Victorian-era quagmire.
Combine Agnew's interest with the government approval of Fenton's trip -- he traveled to Crimea with letters of introduction from Prince Albert, and his passage to Crimea was provided by a group that included Britain's secretary of state for war -- and it seems likely that Fenton went to the Crimea to glorify the British Empire, rather than to question it. You might say he was an early imbedded.
Given this, Fenton certainly wasn't going to shoot anything resembling a gruesome post-battle scene. But the struggle of the everyman soldier, in no matter how unjust a war, is always heroic. So while the hard stares and the exhausted posture of the soldiers he shot suck the triumphalism right out of his subjects, portraits were still a primary output. Fenton was quick to realize that even if a national army was getting clobbered, individual valor was always admirable.
Fenton's most remarkable photograph, and a candidate for Finest Photograph Ever Taken, is one that oozes slaughter. It shows a Crimean ravine that was bombarded so often by the Russians that British troops gave it the stately but grim name that the photograph borrows: "Valley of the Shadow of Death.''
In this picture, the shelling is over. The bottom two-thirds of Fenton's frame is filled with a rocky, rolling landscape, the top third is a flat, cloudy sky. A road runs from the lower right-hand corner to the middle of the picture, pulling your eye into the image. The hills are rocky, the road and a gutter are filled with scores of smooth, round cannonballs, each one bigger than your fist. There is no evident gore or carnage, yet the viewer knows that before cannonballs get to the ground, they flew through the air.
Fenton spent only a short eight years behind the lens, giving it up in 1860 after the crushing death of his son. Yet how prolific he had been. On view are photographs of the royal family, both formally and at play, and riveting documents of the Industrial Revolution-era emerging in London. ("Westminster from Waterloo Bridge," circa 1858, shows the Houses of Parliament under construction, presaging Monet's hazier impressionist takes on the same scene.) We see British tourist sites and the homes and leisure activities of the aristocracy who bought his work. His contributions to the emerging art of photography included helping to found what became the Royal Photographic Society.
 It's the war pictures that linger in the mind. Last week, I was reminded of just how immediate those Crimean photos are. On Nov. 10, most major newspapers in America featured the same front-page photo of a marine who had fought in the battle for Falluja. The soldier's face filled most of the picture. His helmet was frayed, his semi-shaven face was streaked with camouflage paint and a cut between his eyes trickled blood down the length of his nose. A cigarette dangled from his mouth.
Like Fenton's pictures, this image could almost be taken for noble heroism. But as with the portrait of Captain Lord Balgonie, the soldier's eyes told a different story. The marine was locked into a sixty-yard squint.
The New York Post ran the photo with the headline, "Marlboro men kick butt in Fallujah." One hundred and fifty years after the first war photographs were taken, we read them the same way.
Related: Choire Sicha led me to water, the LAT on Luis Sinco's photograph, Library of Congress on Fenton.
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MoMA ticket update
I'd have guessed that Sunday would be sold out by now. But you can still by 2pm tickets through TicketMaster.....
And the MoMA blogged and reviewed posts below have been updated. And will be updated throughout the day. (Tomorrow, I'll post excerpts from my Bloomberg review and more, maybe.)
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Lowry misses the point
Carol Vogel (finally) picks up the $20 MoMA story (blog-friendly link soon), and quotes bloggers, including our buddy and MoMA Important Person Greg Allen (not identified as such by Vogel).
Vogel's story is fine, I have no quibble there... but Glenn Lowry's quote is intentionally obfuscatory:
Mr. Lowry said he was not surprised by protests of the $20 admission and defended the fee, saying the museum receives no operating money from the government.
"If you think that museums should be free, campaign for a government that will support that,'' he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "We're in a country where there is a cost for culture.''
I don't think that's the issue, and I don't think that Lowry's critics are seriously pushing a government-sponsored MoMA as a solution. (Tho MoMA did receive tens of millions of dollars from the state and city for their building project.)
The issue is what the cost for culture should be and who should be able to afford culture that is subsidized by a tax-exemption. Either Lowry is spinning, or he just doesn't understand. And if he just doesn't understand, he needs to realize that MoMA isn't just for the comfy middle class.
Related: FreeMoMA.org, Homeless Museum.
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MoMA: Blogged
Which is the same as reviewed, but I had to differentiate the posts somehow, right?
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Permanent
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MoMA: Reviewed
I thought I'd start a post of reviews/etc. of the new MoMA. I'll keep updating this thread as the days go by, and I'll link to it frequently when I update it. I'll try to catch everything, but if readers notice that I miss something, lemme know. This thread will be for visual arts-focused reviews. I'll start threads for architecture later.
- Jerry Saltz, Village Voice, and here, and here. Vince Aletti too.
- Me, Bloomberg (excerpt);
- Christopher Knight, LA Times (excerpt);
- Sarah Milroy, Toronto Globe and Mail;
- Justin Davidson and Ariella Budick, Newsday;
- Edward J. Sozanski, Philly Inky;
- Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle;
- New York Times special section;
- Peter Plagens, Newsweek;
- Hilton Kramer, New York Observer (who suggests bringing Alfred Barr back from the dead!);
- Mark Stevens, New York Magazine;
- Christine Temin, Boston Globe (don't miss the smart sidenote over at Modern Kicks);
- A zillion European papers at Ionarts; and
- Walter Robinson, Artnet.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Permanent
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More MoMA Randomness
Things I'm learning on the fly: How to blog post about something without scooping my own review. So here goes nothing....
- Holy drywall. The stuff is a mess. Wavy, full of lines, busted corners, and more. Completely shoddy.
- The galleries are built around the atrium in a kind of a 'u' shape. Some galleries feed around the 'u,' some peter out into dead ends. The Italian/futurism gallery peters out into a dead-end, which seems oddly fitting;
- The influence of the summer's Beyond Geometry (LACMA) and Inverted Utopias (MFA Houston) shows is evident: MoMA has just acquired a Joaquin Torres-Garcia and a Lygia Clark. Both are on view, and both look fantastic. Still, at MFAH there was a Lygia Clark for visitors to play with, to handle. MoMA's is (of course) in a plexi box;
- What did Charles Sheeler's American Landscape do to deserve being the only painting in the building without any light on it?
- Yes, it made me happy to see Anne Truitt; and
- If Whiteread and Matta-Clark, installed in opposing halves of the contemporary galleries, are supposed to rhyme, the meter of the poem is off.
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MoMA opens
(At least to the under-$1M donor set, aka the people who aren't rich enough to not care about the admissions charge.) I'm hard at work on MoMA stuff for Bloomberg, but some quick sightems from the press opening:
- There are not enough elevators;
- There are not enough escalators;
- There are not enough benches (of course, there never are);
- When architect Yoshio Taniguchi did his walkthrough, he might as well have been Hideki Matsui for the dozens of Japanese press that follwed him around;
- There were as many -- or more -- Euro-press than American press floating around the building;
- The corporate cozy-up: During the photo-op, companies like Target did their damndest to associate themselves with the new MoMA. "Target has always been about good design," someone said. Groan. And, apparently, hundreds of journos sat and listened to that garbahge; and
- Speaking of which: James Rosenquist meet Scott Sforza.
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Jerry Saltz on Trisha Donnelly
Don't miss Jerry Saltz' review of Trisha Donnelly's show at Casey Kaplan.
In it, Saltz writes about how difficult it is for critics to assess and for the public to get a handle on artists who specialize in festivals and site-specific installations. The white-cube doesn't fit them well.
... I see Donnelly as a member of a rarefied group of thoroughbred artists who, while good, don't mount good gallery shows. Call this the Vito Acconci syndrome. It may be that for these artists the convention of the solo exhibition is a diversion, or that the white cube is too small in scope to command their interest. To them, gallery exhibitions are a kind of standardized ritual -- artificial, totalitarian occasions that try to fit too much into too neutralizing a form. In fact, Casey Kaplan represents several of these artists, including Ceal Foyer, Carsten Höller (whose work is close in spirit to Donnelly's) and Liam Gillick, whose shows are weak but who often shines outside galleries. Jorge Pardo fits in here as well, as does one of the best artists working anywhere today, Maurizio Cattelan, whose New York exhibitions aren't as dazzling as his show-stopping, site-specific works and his biennial contributions.
Saltz is right, and this isn't a new problem. The root of the problem is the way the contemporary art world, critics in particular, assess artists and shows. We write about the immediate, What's Going on Now for six weeks at Big Name Gallery. Artists' careers don't play out this way, even if parts of the commercial art market do.
Editors, understandably, want what's going on now.
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$20: Such an easy target
My pal Greg Allen, fresh from consorting with zillionaires, assures us that the $20 admissions fee at MoMA isn't really that big a deal. He decries the "smug upper-middlebrow snobbery and faux populism that fuel complaints about the new $20 admission price." That must be it... because those of us who think the charge is ridiculous couldn't really believe it now, could we? Or can those of us ensconced in the middle class not make an argument that impacts people outside our socio-economic stratum?
Greg continues:
[K]vetching about the price strikes me as either 1) misdirected idealism and condescending romanticism towards some amorphous Common Man, or 2) the selfish whines of people who spend $10/day on macchiatos, and don't support their public radio station, either.
MoMA could calm this tempest in a fur-lined teapot very easily by offering a money-back guarantee. After seeing the collection reinstalled in that spectacular building, only a true philistine --or a schnook -- would think it's not worth it.
He misses the point. I believe that $20 for MoMA will be worth it. And 90 percent of people reading this post can too.
The point is that the admissions fee is high enough to be exclusionary, that anyone or any family below a certain income level just won't be able to go. It'll be $64 for a family of four to get into the building. In the last month I've heard artist Martin Puryear and zillionaire Ray Nasher (and here) talk about how they got interested in art because they could go to museums where they grew up were free. Everything else cost money, so they spent their free teenage time in museums.
Regarding the remedy, it's too late. MoMA says that they need to charge $20 to cover new, increased operating expenses. Well, if that's the case, they overbuilt.
(And for the record, I support my public radio station and I've volunteered for them. Hah!)
Related: FreeMoMA, $20 in pennies, Travelers Diagram, Gothamist, Bloggy, From the Floor, The Agonist. Update: Greg has more.
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Turning dollars into pounds
 This I love: On Nov. 21, the first day on which MoMA collects its $20 admissions charge, The Homeless Museum (a conceptual art project created by, ahem, Filip Noterdaeme) wants MoMA visitors to pay the entire $20 fee in pennies. "We intend to remind the Modern that its $20.00 ticket price weighs heavily on the audience the museum promises to serve," Noterdaeme emailed me.
In case you're wondering, $20 in rolled pennies weighs 12.5 pounds. HoMu will distribute buttons to all participants.
Then in the Sculpture Garden at 4:30 pm on Sunday (artists do something before late afternoon on a Sunday? Never.) Noterdaeme will strike a pose recalling an iconic Dorothea Lange photograph. I'm sure MoMA is thrilled. (Well, if they're not, I am.)
And if MoMA sells out via Ticketmaster on the 21st, the event will take place the following Sunday.
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 10, 2004 | Permanent
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Competition!
Art museums are not the deferential, polite, all-for-one-and-one-for-all palaces of benign culture that they once were. Look at how some other NYC institutions are tripping all over themselves to stomp all over MoMA's opening:
The Whitney and Renzo Piano leaked the design of the Piano addition this week and are planning a press conference for Nov. 16; and
The Met announced a $45 million acquisition this week.
This is a good thing -- it generates buzz for the arts. And somehow, I think that there will be more news from the NYC arts institutions between now and Nov. 20. (BTW, is that MoMA ticket price of about $20+service charge already holding down admissions? Tickets for the opening weekend are still available. And isn't it funny that admission to MoMA is free on Nov. 20 but they don't really do much to let you know about that on their website? Update: Now they let you know, as long as you wait for the little animation thing to reload over and over.)
(I wish this would happen in DC. Of course, when the biggest museum in DC holds its press conferences in New York, it's pretty clear what that museum thinks of its hometown.)
posted by tylergreendc @ Wednesday, November 10, 2004 | Permanent
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Q&A: MOCA's Ann Goldstein
Ann Goldstein curated A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-68, recently on view at MOCA in LA. On my last trip to the Southland we talked about her show.
In the last year of so, minimalism exhibits, installations and the like have been ubiquitous. Why do you think that there is there so much minimalism in so many places right now?
I can't fully answer that question. On a certain level I think that it's a combination of coincidence and one institution maybe sparking the interest in others. The proximity of MOCA and LACMA [which launched Beyond Geometry, a show of global-minimalism that next opens at the Miami Art Museum] is much more coincidence than anything.
When the idea of our show was born and approved in 1997, we had planned for it to open in the fall of 2001. This is quite typical of these very big research shows that they move around on the calendar for all sorts of reasons. While we didn’t plan it in advance, we took advantage of its ultimate proximity to Beyond Geometry, actively seeking to not to compete with one another, and ended up collaborating with LACMA on a two-part conference with the Getty Research Institute.
In terms of a kind of 'moment of minimalism' I think that's something everybody has talked about. I remember at the "Structures and Systems" conference at the Getty, Virginia Dwan was reflecting upon this moment in terms of her own experience, her own role in the 1960s… and why is it so meaningful for us right now. That's a question so many people have pondered and she was talking about a kind of parallel in these moments. Like the 1960s, this is a time of war… I see that this work was very resistant. It was polemical work, it was not overtly political in terms of representing a certain political content, but it demonstrated how art can be made politically, how it can change the course of art history and how people consider their relationship not only to other art objects, but to the world. This is art that speaks very directly to people in the room with it. It's telling us it's shiny or hard or smooth or made out of aluminum. It's telling us about itself. In that kind of direct address is a very different relationship that art catalyzed, which was distinct from to what it had been before. I think that kind of directness connected to people.
Also maybe at this moment in our time where there's so much ambiguity and fluidity and confusion in our world it's good to see something that speaks very directly.
Is it easier now for museums to do minimalism shows, is it an easier sell?
[Ours] was not an easy exhibit to travel. At the time when we conceived of the exhibit, of course we wanted to have it seen in more than one house and in more than one place. And we did actually receive interest from other American institutions… but in some cases they couldn't offer enough space. It was a very big exhibition, 25,000 square feet and it could have even used more space. To consider reducing the exhibit to a, say 10,000 square foot space, which is a standard temporary space for most museums, it just didn't seem possible to me because that would have meant really reducing not only the size of the show but the number of artists whose work could be represented. For me it was very important to have a number of artists and a certain manner of representing their work. Not just a one-off.
As I said in my review, the first room of the exhibit [with works by Frank Stella and Carl Andre] was awesome. How did it come together?
I really appreciate how much people enjoyed it -- it was really special. I was blown away. I remember sitting there at times during the installation and just marveling at that room – it was so incredible and intense to experience that number of Stella's Black paintings together with Andre's sculptures, which reflected a moment when those two artists were very close.
Another element of putting together this exhibition was about working with the specific character of this building. That first gallery is a very difficult room. It's square. It's taller than it is wide. I thought about a few different possibilities for that space, and putting Stella and Andre together was the first thought in my head. Still, I went through other thoughts. Should I start with something that's less expected and I try to surprise people with the work in that room? But then I just thought this is what it had to be. And then it also worked out with the next room presenting something very different and seemingly contradictory with the work of John McCracken and Craig Kauffman.
I was really fortunate to get Stella's support, as well as that of all of the artists and lenders. The fact that he would loan his 1958 painting, Delta, from his own personal collection was a great honor. And having that support also helped get the loans from the other collections, the other institutional collections and one private collection. It was an embarrassment of riches.
For me, as I mentioned earlier, in approaching a show like this, it's always about the individual artists in relationship to each other and the kind of historical fabric that they are engaged with and have woven. It's not about writing a sentence with works of art but putting together a number of paragraphs so that each artist has a really strong statement. To have just one Stella would not have told that story. Or one Andre.
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Monday notes
Q&As are everywhere in the blogosphere: Maud Newton and Terry Teachout have a fab chat, and Todd Gibson chats with David Kiehl, who curated the Whitney's Memorials of War show (reviewed by me in blurb form here, longer review available via email).
Did we mention that the Met appears to be reinstalling its contemporary area? I've been meaning to mention that for weeks. Or that the Hirshhorn has installed a Robert Gober? Or that the best installation of contemporary work on The Mall is the Hirshhorn's Cai Guo-Qiang show? (The interactive piece is a little light on the H of H portion of the show -- so check out here too.)
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Weekend scoop
 I bet the Lauder family dinner table was a fun place this weekend. With MoMA set to take over Manhattan, Renzo Piano and the Whitney will elbow their way into headlines this week. The Whitney will reveal the drawings of the Renzo Piano expansion on Tuesday. Expect a Nicolai Ouroussoff excloo in the NYT that same day, and a Whitney presser on Nov. 16. (Piano, whose Nasher just opened in Dallas and who is also designing LACMA's redesign, is in talks with the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston.)
Robert Smithson is coming to the Whitney and Smithson will be around New York. Literally. The Whitney is close to announcing that they'll build Smithson's Floating Island.
ICA Boston and MCA Chicago are co-organizing a Richard Prince show. Look for it in 2006.
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Art biographies I'd love to read
Because I don't do enough fun, pointless lists anymore, here are a few art biographies that I want to read. Or write. Anyone wanna give me a Guggenheim? (Ha ha.) Seriously, if Tom of Finland has a biography, why don't these folks?
- Pierre Bonnard. How has this one not been written?
- Donald Judd. It's only a matter of time. Of course, I'd have thought the same about Bonnard.
- Duncan Phillips. There are two Barr bios, two-ish Barnes bios, and no Dunc bios.
- Carleton Watkins. The most important American photographer -- and the story of his life is punctuated, sadly by Ess Eff's 1906 quake. A tear-jerker.
Honorable mention: Next September the second volume of Hilary Spurling's Matisse bio comes out. Can't wait.
Readers are invited to email me with more....
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LACMA: Spare us.
Marketing is marketing. Gotcha. But still, this promotional text for LACMA's hanging of some Phillips Collection paintings is absurd:
Renoir to Matisse is a once-in-a-lifetime special exhibition featuring many of the world's best-known Impressionist and Postimpressionist artists...Picture yourself in a 1920s-era sitting room, in the home of a passionate art collector, admiring your host's latest acquisition. It's a Renoir—exquisite in every detail. Nearby hang a Degas...a van Gogh...a Matisse, amid dozens of the world's finest paintings.
Once in a lifetime? Uh, they're in one museum, pretty much all the time (except when they travel). Of course, what else do you expect from the museum that made this remarkable blunder.
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Cattelan's (kinda) back
Today the Carnegie Museum told me that Maurizio Cattelan's contribution to the Carnegie International is back. Sort of.
MAN readers, especially y'all in Pittsburgh, may recall that Cattelan removed Now from the Carnegie. For the back story, click here.
What's new is this: Cattelan has decided that Now would be better seen in the Founder's Room. If the Founder's Room could not be made available, Cattelan insisted that the piece should be removed from view altogether.
So CMOA has made that room available to Cattelan on a limited basis. The five periods during the Carnegie International when Now will be on view are:
- Friday, November 26 to Sunday, November 28, 2004;
- Friday, December 24 to Tuesday, December 28, 2004;
- Friday, January 21 to Sunday, January 23, 2005;
- Friday, March 4 to Sunday, March 6, 2005; and
- Saturday, March 19 to Sunday, March 20, 2005.
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Speaking of auctions...
This is a revised-for-the-blog version of my preview, which ran on Bloomberg:
One of the surest signs of art world puffery is the belief that the semi-annual art auctions in New York are "important." Naturally, the auction houses themselves promote this notion, and on Monday the New York Times joined in by declaring it so. Balderdash. The auctions are simply great sporting fun, ritual absurdity, a Christopher Guest movie-satire-in-waiting. Winning bids, except those for paintings that are truly the best in show, are mostly mighty winds. ...
Often art is important, such as when it blends beauty with vision and provides us insight into an historical or cultural moment. Goya's art about the horrors of war is important. New York-based artist Inka Essenhigh's painting about being trapped between freedom and captivity (on view now at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial) is important. Someone bidding $1 million for Pablo Picasso's Homme portant en enfant, a clumsy painting of a man holding a child in, perhaps, a gym bag, is not important. To dwell on the auctions as "important" is missing the fun. The auctions are high drama, equal parts comedy and tragedy.
(Well, for some bidders the auctions will be all tragedy. I'm thinking of whomever bids on and wins the estimated $1.5-2 million Degas pastel of a bather at Sotheby's, a drawing in which the bather's flesh appears to have the malleability of the Pillsbury Doughboy, and whose oddly atrophied left arm is posed in such a way that it could inspire the poster for a Tara Reid slasher movie.)
In our reality television-filled media landscape, I'm stunned that some clever cable channel hasn't bought up the TV rights. The auctions would appeal to both the aesthete who appreciates the few excellent paintings that are up for auction and to Joe Sixpack, who might wonder why that guy with bad hair plugs just spent $3.5-4.5 million at Christie's for Kees van Dongen's ode to porn-star-as-Tammy-Faye-Baker, Femme Fatale. (As demonstration of the auctions' crossover appeal, I may prefer Reagan-era single-malt scotch, but I will share Mr. Sixpack's befuddlement over the likely sale of the van Dongen.)
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Tonight at Christie's: A Bonnard Mystery
 Tonight Christie's will auction Woman with a Veil (ca. 1917), the Pierre Bonnard painting pictured here. Christie's, apparently taking its cue from the 1973 Bonnard catalogue raisonne, says that this is a painting of Mme. Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle.
I think that this may instead be a rare, unusual painting of Bonnard's lover, Renee Monchaty. Bonnard and Monchaty were lovers from around 1918 until Monchaty's suicide in 1924. During their affair Bonnard frequently painted Monchaty... only to deface his own paintings of her after she killed herself. In life, Monchaty was a brunette -- but after her suicide, Bonnard almost always re-painted her hair gold or platinum, perhaps to hide her from his wife, perhaps to hide her from his own memory. Only one painting of Monchaty as a brunette is known to exist. This painting, estimated to sell for $700-900K tonight, may be the second. Art historically, it may be an important and intriguing painting. (I mentioned the Monchaty possibility in my auction preview for Bloomberg -- this post is an expansion of those thoughts.)
Renee Monchaty and Pierre Bonnard met in 1916 and were lovers by 1918, possibly sooner. Many of Bonnard's masterpieces feature Monchaty and his most exciting, tense paintings feature both Monchaty and his wife Marthe.
Two years ago, on the occasion of a Bonnard exhibit at the Phillips, I wrote about one of those paintings here on MAN:
In a number of other second-floor paintings, raw rivalries stemming from sex are on almost awkward display. Next time someone tries to tell me Bonnard personifies The Last Temptation of Impressionism, I'll show them the tense, vicious paintings that Bonnard painted of wife Marthe and Renee Monchaty, his lover. (Look at Young Women in the Garden, where Bonnard even allies a faithful pup with Renee and pits them both against Marthe, who is banished to blobular form in a nether corner of the painting. Or look at the other terrace painting – The Terrace at Verrnonnet -- that is in the main gallery. Is that a Renee-like figure, ready to stab Marthe, whose distant gaze shows how unaware she is?) Bonnard an Impressionist? Bah. I can’t think of an Impressionist who tore down his wife in this manner.
Bonnard is a notoriously under-researched artist. There is no Bonnard biography, and the biographical sketches of Bonnard in recent monographs and museum catalogues do not agree on many details, including the dates of Bonnard's relationship with Monchaty, and how Monchaty killed herself. That's too bad -- Monchaty is nearly as critical to Bonnard's work as is his wife, Marthe.
This lack of scholarship adds to the mystery around Woman with a Veil. This painting has been privately owned and out of public view since 1960. There is so little scholarship available on Woman that the Christie's auction catalogue entry on the painting talks mostly about... other paintings. The only reproduction of Woman that has been in circulation until now is a fuzzy black-and-white image in the catalogue raisonne (below).
 According to the catalogue raisonne, Bonnard made four portraits of Mme. Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle. One of them he sold to the sitter, presumably to satisfy the commission. The other three he held back.
The woman in the painting Bonnard sold looks different enough from the women in the other three paintings that I think we can doubt whether the other three paintings really are part of a series of paintings of Mme. Dupuy de Frenelle.
The painting Bonnard sold features a woman looking directly out from the canvas, large eyes looking out from what appears to be hair (the reproduction in the catalogue raisonne is quite poor). Her face is long and lean, her lips tiny.
The women in the three paintings Bonnard held back -- particularly the painting offered tonight at Christie's -- have rounder, fuller faces and more prominent cheeks. All are characteristics common to Bonnard's paintings of Monchaty.
Furthermore, Bonnard frequently sketched Monchaty wearing a round, stylish hat, pulled low over her eyebrows. In all three of the paintings Bonnard held back, the woman is wearing that kind of a hat.
Monchaty wore her hair short on the sides, just below her ears. In the three paintings Bonnard held back, the woman has that hairstyle.
Monchaty had brown hair. And here's where it gets interesting... In Woman, the sitter has brown hair. In the other two paintings from the catalogue raisonne, the sitter appears to have brown hair. Why did he not paint the brown hair out of these paintings as he did in almost every other painting of Monchaty?
In Woman, the sitter is wearing a veil. (How likely is it that if Bonnard was painting a commissioned portrait, that the sitter would be wearing an obscuring item, such as a veil?) Was that costume enough? Did the veil make it difficult for Bonnard to change the woman's hair color? Was the veil painted years later or in (or around) 1917? Only x-rays will reveal that.
For now, we can't know for sure if the woman in Woman to be Monchaty. But it sure looks like her. Everything about Woman points toward Monchaty and away from Mme. Dupuy de Frenelle.
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Gilbert Stuart meet Andy Warhol
From my Bloomberg review of Gilbert Stuart, at the Met:
If I had to put together a prototypical Met show, this would be it. Gilbert Stuart links the history of art to the history of the nation.
It is an uneven show. When Stuart (1755-1828) was at his best, his portraits capture great men in all their seriousness. When the artist was less interested -- when he was simply painting for his fee -- his paintings are flat. Fortunately, Stuart did his best work when the most important Americans were before him: war heroes, merchants, planters, presidents.
One Met gallery features 14 paintings of Washington plus a digital reproduction of a work in the Frick Collection. Sitting in the middle of that many Washingtons is simultaneously awesome and creepy. Instead of elevating Washington or Stuart's portraits of him, the display dulls my memory. I have a hard time remembering any one Washington I saw.
Stuart was deeply motivated by a desire to paint Washington and even more motivated by the financial necessity of selling those paintings. With help from assistants, Stuart painted at least 100 Washingtons over 30 years.
Contemporary art lovers take note -- Stuart was running a factory long before Andy Warhol was. (The Warhol comparison isn't lost on the Met's marketing department. The show's poster features a Washington portrait done Warhol-style, with pop-art colors laid over a grid of four Washingtons.)
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Deborah Gribbon's last day
Friday was Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon's last day at the Getty. It has been typical over the years that when someone senior leaves the Getty that there's a staff lunch or a staff dinner or something of the sort. According to MAN's spies, Getty Trust CEO Barry Munitz made it clear that Gribbon would not receive that kind send off in front of the staff.
MAN hears that Munitz went so far to prevent an adoring sendoff that he attended a department heads meeting on her behalf. Gribbon was instructed not to attend.
Denied an opportunity to say goodbye as a group, Getty staff organized a word-of-mouth campaign in an effort to organize an improptu Gribbon send-off. Because Getty staff are wary of their communications on-site being monitored (whether their communications are monitored or not is another matter, but clearly paranoia rules in Gettysburg), word was passed personally from staffer to staffer.
At 3:30 pm, when Gribbon emerged from her office, a throng of Getty staff was gathered in a museum corridor. Gribbon received a standing ovation.
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Knight vs. Munitz, Round II
If you're paying attention to the Getty story -- and given that it just took me an entire weekend to read all the email I've been getting, you are -- you know that both MAN and the LAT are dribbling out the good stuff.
(Interesting side note: Obviously Getty staff cares very much about their institution, just not their leadership. As the Corcoran has been under fire for its usual ineptitude, not one Corcoranite has emailed me -- or anyone else I know -- in support of the Corcoran leadership. I wonder if the Terra Museum inspired similar passion.)
So on Sunday LAT critic Christopher Knight wrote about the most basic problem at the Getty -- the organization's structure. (It's not online but, of course, I have a copy....) Knight nails it:
The Getty is a very big place, but the flow chart is pretty simple in the organization's upper echelons. There are only three layers. At the top is the board, led by [John] Biggs.
Next comes [Barry] Munitz, hired by the board to manage the far-flung art institution. Munitz, a former university administrator and businessman, raised a lot of eyebrows when he assumed the Getty CEO job nearly seven years ago. Some of it came from his involvement in the 1988 collapse of a Texas savings and loan. But partly the consternation was caused by the absence of any art, cultural or museum experience on his resume.
Third on the Getty management tier are the department heads -- top-ranked art professionals in their fields, including Gribbon. Given the central position reflected in the museum's hefty budget priority, the museum director is first among equals.
Alas, this corporate management setup is a recipe for disaster. Why? It contains an inherent structural flaw, which gave way last week.
The problem is this: The museum's director does not report to the board, as normally happens at an art museum, but to the board's paid CEO. That makes the CEO the art museum's de facto director. A corporate administrator without any professional training or relevant experience can unilaterally call the shots at the art museum, regardless of what the director might think.
University museums, where directors sometimes report to school officials, might be an exception to this general rule. Munitz has a lengthy background in university administration. But by no stretch is the Getty comparable to a university art museum.
That structural flaw -- two directors for one job -- can also be exacerbated by personalities, or exploited. On the volatile matter of the resignation of his most important employee, Munitz is surely compromised. Either he's mendacious or a bad manager. The choice is not encouraging.
So here's another question.
True or false: The structural problem could be fixed by removing the museum from the jurisdiction of a CEO and making its director responsible to the Getty board; or, a distinguished art museum professional could be made CEO of the trust.
Uh, true.
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Exhibit schedules
First, a quick note regarding Friday's quickie post about the Getty monitoring staff email. I still can't get an on-background, name-attached, confirmation (or denial) from any Getty IT staff. But I'm hearing from plenty of people (who are telling me who they are) that email is being monitored. I'm not reporting that it is; I'm simply suggesting that if you work at the Getty, you really, really might want to acquaint yourself with Yahoo Mail or Hotmail before emailing me, and that you might want to do it from home. More on the Getty in several posts later today, starting at about 9 AM, Getty Standard Time.
MAN's got advance exhibition schedules for two of America's most major museums (MMMs).
(Of course, it was made difficult for me to be able to share one set of these. Specifically, I do not understand why the National Gallery of Art, which is in Washington, announced their upcoming exhibit schedule in New York on Friday instead of announcing it in Washington. Nor do I understand why they were, er, aggressively hostile to a Washington-based writer who didn't want to trek all the way up to NYC just to hear them announce something that was on their press site mere hours after the NYC event, but that's another story. Heck, the NGA didn't even offer to phone-patch in Washington writers. No wonder the Washington Post ignored the "big" event. Of course, so did the NYT. So good thing the NGA went all the way up to NYC for all that attention.)
So because we're the helpful sort here at MAN -- and because we don't require your presence in any particular city to know what's going on there or anywhere else -- here are some upcoming exhibits at both the NGA and MoMA.
At the National Gallery:
- Fauve Painting in the Permanent Collection: Dec. 12 to May 30, 2005;
- Andre Kertesz, Feb. 6 to May 15, 2005;
- Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmarte, March 20 to June 12, 2005
- Cezanne in Provence, Jan. 29, 2006 to May 7, 2006; and
- Dada, Feb. 19 to May 14, 2006 (which will eventually travel to MoMA).
At MoMA:
- Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection, Feb. 4, 2005 to April 25;
- Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape, Feb. 25, 2005 to May 16;
- Thomas Demand, March 4, 2005 to May 30;
- (Lee) Friedlander, June 3, 2005 to Aug, 29;
- Frank Gohlke: Mount St. Helens, late June/early July 2005;
- Cezanne and Pissarro 1865-1885, June 24, 2005 to Sept. 12, 2005 (aside: Museum of Modern Art?); and
- Elizabeth Murray, Fall 2005.
Note: Cezanne is about to be everywhere. There's this show coming up at the Getty (hmmm, Getty, Getty... I think I've heard of them...), this show coming up at the Guggenheim, and the shows listed above. And of course the best place in the US to see Cezanne on permanent view is probably Philly, where the Barnes and the PMA both have fine collections of Cezanne.
Note Two: If you want to attend MoMA's opening weekend, tickets are still available for Day Two, Nov. 21. Plenty of 'em. I'd give you a link, but I feel dirty about giving anyone E-Z access to spending $24 to go to an art museum.
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Sorry, I was at MoMA all day. Charlie Finch (