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MODERN ART NOTES
Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog
The Phillips' new galleries
 The first big new gallery at the Phillips is the first big gallery at the Phillips. It's just to the right as you enter the museum's latest addition and it's clearly built for big paintings. But the first installation in this gallery provides a reminder that the strength of the Phillips' collection isn't mid-century massive.
A Joan Mitchell painting here looks good. So too an Adolph Gottlieb. But the Stella is one of those confused 70s monstrosities. A Motherwell (not online for a reason, perhaps) looks like something a giant-bird did doo-dooed on canvas. And why oh why is British abstractionist John Walker here?
Just outside this gallery is this fantastic Morris Louis. Unfortunately it's next to a door and behind plexi. Between the glare and the plexi it's unviewable. The best look you'll get of it is there, on the left.
The installation stays clunky in a small gallery just off of a new staircase. Why are several awful William Christenberry sculptures competing with three quietly strong August Sander photographs? And John Walker is also installed upstairs, as are uniteresting paintings by Jake Berthot and Bill Jensen. Why has the Phillips hung so many third-rate painters when it has a collection stuffed with good work by top-shelf artists?
After these false starts -- to be fair, it always takes curators a while to figure out new buildings and spaces -- a few new spaces and hangings begin to work. The Phillips has a smart little 1951 Pollock collage and it looks great with four Aaron Siskind photogrpahs of granite boulders.
The museum's famous Rothko Room is back (below) and it's still a hit. The Phillips' Rothkos aren't the kinds of color clouds in which a viewer immediately loses himself. They're a slower burn -- and ultimately just as rewarding.
 And in one of the best constructed spaces in town, plenty of natural light illuminates an upstairs gallery where Diebenkorn, Diebenkorn, Guston, Guston, de Stael and Calder also benefit from a high ceiling.
So yeah, I have quibbles. Instead of some of the lesser lights I would have preferred seeing Wayne Thiebaud, Clyfford Still, an Edward Hopper Santa Fe watercolor, or one of the museum's surprising Gene Davises. And if the Phillips was intent on showing some lesser-known painters, Jacob Kainen or Thomas Downing would have been better picks. But mostly it's nice to see the Phillips add space for its permanent collection. I'm hoping for regular rotations.
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The Phillips expands
 For as long as I've lived in Washington -- that's since 1997, making me a near-native in local terms -- the Phillips Collection has been my favorite local museum. It's got a killer collection of truly great paintings. It hangs them in small, intimate galleries that encourage a visitor to spend lots of time with individual works. It's in a cozy neighborhood. It does art history-smart shows. And it's got a killer collection.
So enamored am I of the Phillips' collection that I've been willing to grumble a little less about the museum's flaws: The lighting design in the museum's Goh Annex galleries are out-of-date. The museum doesn't think that benches are worthy of its galleries. The Phillips' fascination with its own saccharine Renoir is sad -- and kind of funny.
And of course the museum's biggest flaw -- a screw-up of such massive proportions that it ranks among the dumbest things any American museum has ever done -- was its Bellagio deal. It was the Phillips and director Jay Gates who, in 2000, inaugurated the make-a-deal-with-a-Vegas-casino charade. (The Phillips hung paintings in the casino, and received a cut of each admissions ticket, with a specified minimum payment from the casino. It was the precurosr deal to MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers' rentals.)
ALl this is a long way of saying that while I love the Phillips, I think its new $27 million, 30,000 square-foot expansion is only a partial success. The museum added galleries, a conservation studio, an auditorium, a courtyard, a cafe, and library space. Some of the galleries are fantastic, some of them are little more than anterooms off of a staircase. Some of the art in the galleries is great, some of it is definitely not.
Later this morning: Checking out the galleries.
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A national embarrassment
 In today's New York Times, Glenn Collins tells a fine story about a documentary producer who has accumulated an important archive of video and other material related to the Sept. 11 attacks. The producer has 7,000 gigabytes of historically-important footage and he's looking for a buyer or a donor. But not just any buyer: Some kind of non-profit that will make the footage available to historians, documentarians and the like. Here's hoping that the Smithsonian isn't interested.
Last Thursday Smithsonian boss Lawrence Small explained to Congress the details of the Smithsonian's contract with CBS Corp. The deal gives CBS subsidiary Showtime nearly exclusive access to America's collection of documentary film footage. It's a brazen, sad example of a government agency allowing private business to benefit from something owned by the American people. The closest parallel is the Bush Administration's giving valuable gas and oil leases to Big Energy for nearly nothing.
"We apologize for the hullabaloo this has caused for Congress," Small said.
Small should be apologizing for selling our history to a private corporation. Unfortunately, incompetence is nothing new for Larry Small. His reign at the Smithsonian has been filled with mismanagement, deteriorating facilities, the illegal importing of bird feathers to benefit his own personal collection, the effective rental of Smithsonian museum space to private corporations such as Clear Channel, and the sale of naming rights and the conceptualizing of exhibits to fatcat donors.
Lawrence Small's leadership of the Smithsonian has been a national embarrassment. His errors have been of Munitzian proportions. He should resign or be fired.
Related: Greg Allen, Oolongo.
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Acquisition alert: MOCA and Roxy Paine
Introducing a new feature on MAN: In addition to doing monthly posts on a year's worth of acquisitions from a selected museum, I'll now spotlight selected museum acquisitions as I find out about them. Why? Because acquiring art, through gift, purchase, or whatever, is pretty durn central to what an art museum does. Unless A Big Museum drops $50 million on a Duccio, most newspapers, magazines, and even art magazines, pay little attention to acquisitions. It's an area to which blogs can devote space and that we can cover well. (To be fair to other media: Nearly every museum in America is lousy at telling people about acquisitions. For whatever reason, they're just not set up to do it.)
The highlight of New York-based sculptor Roxy Paine's last solo show at James Cohan Gallery, Weed Choked Garden (2005), is on its way to MOCA. The museum will almost certainly purchase it with funds donated by The Glenstone Foundation, the philanthropic arm of DC-based collector Mitchell P. Rales. (Rales is also the vice-chairman of the Hirshhorn's board.) It's one of Paine's best sculptures, the kind of work that stops people in their tracks because they just have to see what's going on there. Once I investigated it I was both fascinated and repulsed.
 Weed Choked Garden is Paine's meditation on a theme being explored by dozens of artists in the last couple years: Decay and collapse. As we've written about here on MAN a great deal, artists such as Jason Middlebrook, Edward Burtynsky, Adam Cvijanovic and Paine, are especially interested in what is happening to the planet and are exploring the symbiotic destructive forces of man and nature in their work. (Other artists, such as Raymond Pettibon, Hans Haacke and Richard Serra have focused on political deterioration.) Memo to a smart contemporary curator: There's a major, New Topos-level-of-import group show to be done on this.
Paine's Garden is made from thermoset plastic, polymer, oil paint, stainless steel, lacquer epoxy, pigment and something called PETG. Of course, you may know PETG better as glycol-modified polyethylene terephthalate, a copolyester that is a clear amorphous thermoplastic.
Related: Chris Jagers with more pix and Paine on Paine. Joao Ribas interviews Paine for artinfo.com. NYTer Ken Johnson on Paine's last Cohan show. David Cohen on artcritical.com/New York Sun on the same. Rales' Potomac, Maryland-based private museum, Glenstone, opens this fall.
Note to museum curators and communications departments: Let me know what your museum is doing. (You've probably noticed MAN is as interested in Dallas and St. Louis as we are in New York, so... ) I won't post everything I'm emailed as a stand-alone post, but lots of things I hear end up on MAN in lots of ways. So share.
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Zorach-Met-Sotheby's update
Admin: Apologies for MAN's silence yesterday. The server hosting ArtsJournal's site and its blogs was down. Again. Yes, we know, and yes, we are.
 Update on the Zorach: On Monday we told you the story of the Met's latest Tinterow-nian deaccessioning: A William Zorach sculpture, apparently the only one in the museum's collection. (On Tuesday, Wednesday and today the New York Times didn't tell you a word about it. Why so silent Gray Lady? A relatively new top curator of a major department in the biggest museum in your town has plainly started a deaccessioning campaign and...)
Yesterday Sotheby's offered the work in its American Paintings morning sale. The Zorach failed to sell. Estimated at $300-$500K, the bidding stopped at $270K.
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The Trifecta
'Around the blogosphere' is probably dead. The art blogosphere has outgrown what was essentially a monthly roundup of interesting blog posts. Instead, every few days I'll present a trio of links, such as:
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John Heartfield, via Stewart and Sforza
 There is a long history of satirical political engagement in art. Goya skewered the ruling Spanish classes -- and was clever enough to get away with it while keeping royal patronage. Honore Daumier was a political cartoonist -- and a painter too. Now, a smashing little show at the Getty Research Institute demonstrates how John Heartfield harnassed an of-the-moment medium to viciously satirize the ruling party of between-the-wars Germany. It's a show to which Democrats might pay extra-special attention.
In today's terminology, Heartfield was a graphic designer. He used dadaist photo-montage techniques to present the Nazis as corrupt, war-mongering, bloodthirsty charlatans. Heartfield's work was seen in a popular political magazine of the day, as well as on posters that the KPD, Heartfield's political party, plastered all over German cities.
In response to the Nazi salute, Heartfield presented the KPD fist. He also mocked Hitler's open-palmed greeting by portraying it as a hand out for cash. He presented the mild middle-class as being blinded by the bland newspapers they relied upon for information.
It works, both as political art and as something timeless, that reaches beyond Heartfield's era to provide a template for visually-based dissent. So who holds Heartfield's mantle today?
Over the last few weeks here I've spent a lot of pixels on dada and photomontage (click here for a guide to MAN on Dada), so I won't rehash that in discussing Heartfield. Instead, let's look at Heartfield in the context of today's American political scene.
One of the favorite targets of the Democratic netroots is the blandness of the Democratic party. Even though it is an opposition party it doesn't often enough oppose the ruling cadre, they say. It does not present the public with a clear enough counter-agenda, they say. Theyir
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The bumpy final days/months of the Barnes
 I visited the Barnes Foundation on Friday and Sunday. I marveled at the Matisses, the Cezannes, The Seurat, and on and on. But I also felt a little bit sad.
It wasn't because of the move to the Parkway. I'm still in grudgingly in favor of that, even if it is happening for the wrong reasons and done by people who care more about civic chest-thumping than art (or, as chronicled here last week, telling the truth about, well, anything Barnes-related). Mostly I felt sad because of the state of some of the Barnes Foundation's artwork and the presentation of most its galleries.
First: In virtually every gallery the lighting -- almost always a hanging light in the middle of the room -- is yellow. Not off-white, not dim, but yellow. Cezanne's stretches of empty canvas? A yellowy off-white. Manet's blacks? Not so black. (On the left is a 'yellow Gauguin.' Here's what it looks like on the Barnes' site.) It's kind of sad. The lighting is unfair and disrespectful to the art (and artists) in the collection.
I also noticed how badly many of the Barnes' watercolors had faded. One Cezanne, possibly a watercolor sketch of the man in the background of Card Players and Girl, has nearly completely lost its reds, greens and blues. It's pretty much just gray on paper. Same too with plenty of other works on paper. Several works labeled as Persian manuscript paintings have faded too, and much of the detail in the works has been lost.
Finally, I wonder when the Barnes is going to go through its collection to determine whether everything that the Barnes claims is a work by a Great Artist actually is. I'm certainly no expert on authentication issues, but several Manets look flat-out fishy to me. (My gallerymates agreed.) So too a Renoir here and maybe a Cezanne there. A thorough, professional cataloguing of the collection and research into questionable works, should accelerate. The Barnes is, after all, sitting on $150 million.
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Sally Mann film coming to Silverdocs
MAN's news-flash on the latest Tinterow deaccessioning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
 In January, just before the Sundance Film Festival opened, I told you about "What Remains," Steven Cantor's documentary film on Sally Mann. (From the MAN archives: part one here, part two here.)
Over the weekend Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday told me that "What Remains" will be shown at Silverdocs, the American Film Institute's DC-based documentary film festival. As referenced on Cantor's Flash-loaded web page at right, here's the relevant AFI info on the June 14 screening.
(Here's hoping one or more Manns is at the screening, and here's hoping that AFI hosts some kind of conversation with Mann and Cantor.)
Related: Hornaday profiled Mann for the Washington Post in 2004. The catalog from What Remains (the exhibit) at the Corcoran, Cantor's Stick Figure Productions, the Roanoke Times' Kevin Kittredge on the documentary, Sally Mann on art: 21.
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Just a review and then... phhhhhhht?
Over the weekend I was a panelist at an arts journalism conference at the Philly Museum of Art. (My panel included Jeff Weinstein, culture editor of Bloomberg News; Jeanne Carstensen, managing editor, Salon; Sam Sifton, culture editor of the New York Times; Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360; and Elliott Wilson, editor-in-chief, XXL Magazine.)
I tried to make points about how blogging and traditional media will merge as the traditional media realizes that it has to better compete when customers are accustomed to having what they want on-demand. But here's something I should have said:
Why is it that newspapers generally write about an art exhibit once (usually in a review) and then not at all during the rest of its 3-4 month run? Why not return to the exhibit at some point? Dada, which just closed at the National Gallery, is a great example of a show that merited follow-up stories. (For example: I would have enjoyed Washington Postie Philip Kennicott looking at Dada in the context of contemporary geopolitics.)
So it was nice to see LATer Christopher Knight write about MOCA's Robert Rauschenberg combines show a second time. (He says it's better at MOCA.) A few other weekend reads:
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The Met deaccessions -- again
The Met is deaccessioning again: The William Zorach sculpture at left will be offered at Sotheby's on May 24. (The estimate is $300-500K.)
Zorach was a Lithuanian emigre who lived in New York and who taught at the Art Students League. For a time he was one of America's most prominent sculptors: The Whitney gave him a retrospective in 1959. That's his Spirit of the Dance in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall. (During the recent NFL draft NFLers-to-be were interviewed in front of it. Unlike many NFL draftees, Zorach's sculpture has prominent nipples.) And Zorach's Puma Looking Left is regularly on view at the National Gallery. (As is Puma Looking Right.)
Zorach is, to be fair, out of fashion. That makes him an 'easy' deaccession. Therein lies part of the problem: Artists come in and out of prominence. Today's out-of-fashion artist could provide a fresh inspiration for some young, say, Columbia student.
Here's an angle for the NYT to pursue: This appears to be yet another deaccessioning from the department of Gary Tinterow, who oversees both 19th and 20th-century art for the Met. (If there is another major museum in America that lumps together those 200 years, David to Rothko, I don't know it.)
Tinterow sold this Ipousteguy bronze sculpture in March (and the museum repeatedly failed to return MAN's emails about it, so the unanswered questions in the post are still unanswered), and in January NYTer Michael Kimmelman smartly called out the Met on its thwarted sale of a Eduardo Chillida. I believe that like the Chillida, the Zorach is the only work by the artist in the Met's collection. (Kimmelman's story is behind the TimesSelect wall. I have a copy of it tho...)
Also: So let's say the Met pulls $400K out of this. Is that worth it?
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Morning reads
I'm on travel today, so check out:
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The Renoir is modern again?
 As I sit in DC's Dupont Circle neighborhood this morning, I'm surrounded by banners that shout: "THE RENOIR RETURNS." They're ads for the Phillips Collection, which is marketing the heck out of the return of its (overrated, overexposed) Luncheon of the Boating Party. The painting is literally the least interesting, least daring, least challenging work in Duncan Phillips' collection. None of that has stopped the museum from marketing the heck out of it.
(I almost forgot -- there are 100 other works from the Phillips' permanent collection now, plus a new addition featuring new galleries. Not that you'd know.)
The Phillips campaign reminds me of the most arrogant museum campaign I've ever seen, MoMA's "Manhattan is Modern Again," push on the occasion of its 2004 reopening. The hubris of that campaign -- that Manhattan needed MoMA to be modern?!?!?! -- was embarassing. (It did, however, pretty accurately sum up what the museum seems to think of itself.)
So what is it with museums and marketing? The National Gallery marketed its Dada show (which was about, well, war) as a show to which you might wear pink pajamas or even grandma's bra. (And a critic swallowed the bait.) The Whitney's Biennial newspaper ads were grossly misleading.
I understand the need to get people in the door. Nothing wrong with that. But if this is how you do it...
So as part of MAN's attempts to do more than rip on bad ideas: Email me with good/smart marketing campaigns/ads from where you live. I'll try to spotlight a few next week.
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Transition at Dia
What a month it's been for minimalism. First the Judd Foundation auction raised somewhere north of $20 million. Here's hoping they spend/invest it wisely.
Then today Carol Vogel reported that Len Riggio has left the Dia Art Foundation. In just the last couple of months Six Flags Over Minimalism (and its NYC branch) has lost both its director and its board chair. Ouch.
This just in: MAN hears that Pew's Rebecca Rimel has offered to take over Dia and to move it to the Ben Franklin Parkway. (Ha!)
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Inky: Two more months for Barnes director
The Inky's Stephan Salisbury reports that the Barnes is about two months away from hiring an executive director. Kind of odd to be raising $200 million without an executive director and his/her input, you say?
Not here. If an executive director was helping the Barnes raise money, the director (and the director's $$$ connections) would have a say in what happens to the Barnes. My guess is that the truth-challenged Rimel/Watson camp wouldn't want that.
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The squeegee and the knife
 One of the nice things about traveling to see shows is the reminders I get about art historical connections. Recent example for me: MFA Houston's great The Gust of Wind, Courbet's largest landscape. The painting is the kick-off to the Getty show, a mammoth painting full of drama, slathered with oil paint. Best of all, Greece has no interest in the painting. (We kid!)
Throughout the foreground of the painting Courbet created the illusion of light bouncing off of mottled rocky outcroppings by loading up his palette knife with oil and quickly whisking it across landscape he'd already painted in. This was SOP for Courbet: Paint. Allow paint to dry. Paint on top of paint. Allow paint to dry. Do something else with paint. Courbet's palette-knife slather-and-smears are action painting Second Empire-style.
So when I got back home to DC I was anxious to pop into the Hirshhorn for a look at Sanctuary, a 1988 Gerhard Richter squeegee painting. Richter super-sized Courbet's palette-knife smears. First, he did away with the knife, instead building squeegees with which he pushed paint across a canvas. (Michael Kimmelman wrote that they're made out of Plexi and wood.) Up close, it's striking how much a Richter squeegee painting looks like a Courbet smear on steroids.
 Both artists use the technique to play with reality. Courbet wants to heighten it, to show light dancing off of rock the way the human eye sees it. Richter uses the squeegee to obliterate reality, to make it impossible for a viewer to play the familiar game of looking for recognizable somethings in abstract art.
In so doing Richter has created something completely captivating, an abstraction that holds the eye because we surrender to the color and the painting's surface texture. Richter's squeegeed fields of color play well with themselves. The oranges and reds there on the left belong together. Is that a light source in the center-right? Good thing that there's a splotch of oily gray separating the orangey-reds from the light. And those blues and greens in the middle soften the whole composition. Or lack thereof.
Related: MFAH has a web applet that allows you to zoom in on the painting. It seems to crash Firefox, so IE only.
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Latest Barnes-ian untruth
Pew boss Rebecca Rimel in the Philly Inky: "This is really a Philadelphia story," she said. "All of [the money] was raised locally."
Agnes Gund, Neil Rudenstine, and the Judith Rothschild Foundation are Philadelphians? (And those are just the ones I spotted. I didn't Google the list of donors.) Nice try Becks.
Oh, and did the Inky call out Rimel on her, well, lie? Of course not. Lame.
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Dada: Paris
 By the time a visitor to the National Gallery’s Dada exhibit reaches the last gallery of the show (Paris), the idea of city-focused galleries is beginning to fall apart. The show whimpers out a bit. Kind of like dada itself.
After World War I ended in 1918 (the end-of-war treaty wouldn’t be done until the next year), European artists were free to move around again, to engage in cross-border interactions. Some Euros ended up in Paris. So did some Americans, like Man Ray who left New York for France.
While most of the city-specific galleries in Dada capture the focus of a community of artists, the Paris gallery does not. Some of the work here was started in New York. Some is by Germans, the former (?) enemy. (How strange is it to see Max Ernst in Paris, a city he may have shelled during the war?) All of them are beginning to move past dada into something else.
Even though WWI was over, it still influenced much of the art in this show’s last gallery. Artists maintained their fascination with machines and what they could do, make -- and end. Francis Picabia's marvelous Machine Turn Quickly (which was probably started during the war) presents a precisionist take on man and woman as an interlocking set of gears. Having seen how governments used their citizens during WWI, Picabia's un-sexual painting of intercourse dryly indicates that humans have been reduced to, well, machines. (And after a war which killed around eight million European men and wounded 23 million more, maybe Picabia thought that there was a bit of a need for breeding machines.)
But while the memory of war is present in many of the works in these galleries, more often the art points to emerging 20th-century art movements. Artists such as Suzanne Duchamp and Picabia flirt with abstraction. Marcel Duchamp's film Anemic Cinema recalls Hans Richter's experiments with abstract filmmaking in Zurich. Their efforts pointed the way toward, animated film and abstract art. (See Music, Visual.)
It's at this point that many previous exhibitions have used dada as a segue into surrealism, blurring them together. Curator Leah Dickerman has rejected that march, but there are hints of surrealism to come here in the Paris gallery: Witness Man Ray's Gift. Still, there is nothing in Dada that could be called surrealist.
Other art in these rooms anticipates other 20th century artist interests. Hans Arp's The Eggboard anticipates seriality. The text-heavy work of Marcel Duchamp, Picabia and others presage Lawrence Weiner, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, and '60s conceptualists.
Previously on MAN: Dada part one: Art about war. Then Dada in Zurich, Berlin, Hannover & Cologne, and New York. The show opens at MoMA on June 18.
MAN will revisit Dada in a Q&A with curator Leah Dickerman just before the New York presentation.
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Meanwhile, at AJ's Critical Edge...
Later this morning: Dada in Paris.
This week I'm contributing to Critical Edge, an ArtsJournal blog created in anticipation of this weekend's National Arts Journalism Program Reunion conference. Participants include AJ blogger and WSJ drama critic Terry Teachout, book-blogger Maud Newton, and a bunch of MSM types who seem vaguely threatened by the notion of freedom of Movable Type.
(In a related story: I'll be sitting on a Saturday panel with NYT culture editor Sam Sifton, Studio360 host Kurt Andersen, Salon managing editor Jeanne Carstensen, and XXL editor Elliott Wilson.)
A narrative of Day One as experienced by me: Andras Szanto wrote that the blogosphere will cease to matter/exist "when the smoke clears," I loudly disagreed, Andras then sees it my way. San Diego Union-Trib arts editor Chris Lavin writes that critics and criticism are pointless, useless, and dead. (And my email inbox filled up!) I loudly disagreed with Lavin, pointing out that the problem wasn't criticism, it was, well, I think I'm pretty clear here. Terry Teachout has made consistently good points so far too, as has AJ guru Doug McLennan.
Off-the-blog, Modern Kicks has some smart thoughts.
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Pew: Barnes has raised $150M
"Dr. Albert Barnes established his foundation to promote education and art appreciation for all," Barnes prez Bernard Watson said in this release, announcing that the Barnes has raised $150 million for the move.
Except Barnes did NOT establish his foundation "to promote art appreciation for all." How bad is it when the moevrs have to, well, lie to get what they want? How does that engender public confidence in those moving the collection? I've been in favor of this thing for years because I don't think the conditions in the Cret building are conducive to the long-term health of art objects. But when the moving crew spreads the same falsehood over and over again, I wonder...
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Faves from auction coverage
Two particularly goofy lines from recent auctions coverage:
- From Bloomberg's write-up of Eli Broad's purchase of a Warhol Campbell's soup can painting: "Campbell Soup Co. spokesman Jerry Buckley didn't immediately return a call seeking comment before the auction. Shares of the Camden, New Jersey-based company fell 4 cents to $32.87 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading." Huh?
- And in the NYT, old fave Carol Vogel seems to think that money is necessary to validate art: "The most memorable part of the evening came when Minimalism went mainstream." Apparently hundreds of museum exhibits and many more hundreds of museum acquisitions don't equal 'mainstream.' (Endlessly amusing: Vogel STILL doesn't know where LACMA is.)
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Acquisitions: SFMOMA
Don't miss: Some really good weekend reads and AJ's one-week-only blog to which I'm contributing: Critical Edge, an online debate on critics in a critical age.
SFMOMA added 686 items to its permanent collection in 2005. I promise not to list all of them.
The haul ranges from early photography to fleeting stars of the contemporary art circuit. Absent from the 2005 list is the trade-a-Monet-for-a-Morandi of previous years. (SFMOMA's special Morandi is curiously absent from its online collection database.)
SFMOMA's biggest single gift came from Bay Area photographer and dealer Gordon L. Bennett, who gave the museum his own work as well as a collection of vernacular photography. The Bennett trove is rich in early, hand-tinted daguerreotypes from as early as 1850, and in other works that provide visual accompaniment to the history of early California. (For Americans California didn't start much before 1850!)
"Gordon Bennett has been a very important figure here in the Bay Area," SFMOMA photo curator Sandra Phillips told me. "He studied photography, he's a published photographer and we've given him shows. He supported himself by finding photographs and reselling them essentially... It was he who sold that great series of Carleton Watkins photographs two years ago.
"Since we've been friends he gave us essentially his collection of vernacular material and some of his own photographs and other pictures… He was one of the first to be really curious about collecting what I would called non-authored photographs and he’s been extremely important in maintaining that idea within the Bay Area."
Frequently the first photo gallery at SFMOMA is rich in unauthored, untitled photographs from the early days of photography, especially California photography. The Bennett gift will enhance SFMOMA's ability to do installations that emphasize the long arc of photographic history.
The museum's 2005 haul is also rich in design -- but as I'm not a design blog I'll leave that area alone. Some fun nuggests embedded among some other highlights:
- Two photographs by horizontal photographer Tom Bamberger. Bamberger shoots landscapes, buildingscapes and suburbanscapes. I've enjoyed his recent shows at Tonkonow.
- Robert Bechtle's 1977 painting Watsonville Olympia. SFMOMA's Janet Bishop curated the Bechtle retrospective that traveled to MAMFW and that just closed at the Corcoran.
- I wouldn't call myself a big Jeremy Blake fan, but the kids love him. SFMOMA added two digital animations from Blake's Winchester series: Century 21 and Winchester.
- John Bock is a curatorial darling and I'm sure there's a good reason for that. However, I don't know what it is. (His installation at the Carnegie International was one of those messy installations of random junk that seem to be in favor.) SFMOMA added Bock's Marlit, which was on view in the museum's fifth-floor galleries for much of last year.
- Olafur Eliasson's Multiple Grotto (above) was new to SFMOMA's collection in 2005 and it's been on view for a while now. Walk on in!
- MoMA unveiled a then-new Marco Breuer photograph (a 'scratched' c-print) when it re-opened. SFMOMA now has one from the same series.
- Henry Callahan is one of the great (and judging from how often I see him out at museums, underrated) American photographers. SFMOMA scored a trove of two dozen Callahans, including nine color works.
- SFMOMA's 2004 SECA show featured four young Bay Area artists: Rosana Castrillo Diaz, Simon Evans, Josephine Taylor and Shaun O'Dell. The museum added two Evanses: A Small Graph of Sadness..., and Different Drugs; two O'Dells; and a Taylor.
- MAN was the first to tell you about SFMOMA's purchase of Hans Haacke's classic Blue Sail last year;
- George Herms was the subject of legendary curator Walter Hopps' last show, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. (I'd link to it, but you kno wFlash...) SFMOMA received two Hermses as gifts last year: Mother Station and The Godpower available everywhere.
- Jess, a Bay Area original whose early works are probably due for a re-evaluation passed away in 2004, and Bay Area museums seem to have made a point of adding him to their collections in recent years. The de Young picked up Jess' sensational, fabulous, can-you-do-that? In 1954?! painting Boy Party (a multi-racial gay orgy in the I-like-Ike years). In 2005 SFMOMA added two Jess oil paintings given by the Berggruens in honor of Nathan Oliveira. SFMOMA now has at least five Jesses;
- Yes, the Laura McPhee whose photograph of an elk being boned was added to SFMOMA's collection is the daughter of writer John McPhee. The Boston Globe's Exhibitionist blog has a Laura McPhee slideshow;
- Marilyn Minter's Strut is an awesome painting. In 2005 SFMOMA gave Minter her first solo museum presentation. The museum also gave a New Work show to Wangechi Mutu and bought one of her on-mylar collages.
- Zwelethu Mthethwa may be Africa's greatest living photographer. The museum added a picture from his Sugar Cane series;
- It's extremely possible that other museums are snapping up fine-art photography of the War in Iraq and that I haven't heard about it. SFMOMA bought two Simon Norfolk photographs taken in Iraq in 2003. You can see images from that series at Norfolk's website.
- The Getty is about to launch an Eliot Porter show, the last (I think) before they move their photo galleries. SFMOMA received a gift of a dozen Porters last year. "We have a particular interest in land art and land-use art in photography," Phillips said.
- Toward that interest, the museum bought a photograph of Mars, photographed on 11/14/1911 by Percival Lowell. If that name sounds familiar: Lowell was an important American astronomer who built popular interest in Mars (were there canals there?).
- You may have seen Matthew Ritchie's Stacked at MASSMoCA in 2000. Hereafter you'll see it at SFMOMA;
- Paul Strand probably shot Adobe Facade, New Mexico while visiting Georgia O'Keeffe in 1932. SFMOMA bought it;
- SFMOMA loves the porn industry -- or at least the ten Larry Sultan photos of the biz that it received as a gift. In 2004 the museum held an exhibit of The Valley series from which this acquisition comes.
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Weekend reads
Again, sorry about Thursday and Friday: AJ's server was down. Friday's Hirshhorn post has been updated with functional links. (What a concept!) Next, in a couple hours: SFMOMA's 2005 acquisitions. Also: ArtsJournal is hosting a weeklong blog called "Critical Edge: Critics in a critical age." It's substantially about blogging and critics. I'll be posting there all week. Some weekend reads:
- In the LAT, Jason Felch tracks the story of one antiquity, from the floor of the Adriatic Sea to the Getty Villa. Wanna be entertained while you learn more about the complications regarding antiquities collecting? Don't miss this one.
- Egomaniacal blunderbuss Zahi Hawass is still demanding that the St. Louis Art Museum return an Egyptian mask. "I will make their life hell," Hawass said, but refused to elaborate. The last time I saw Hawass: Whenever a journo asked him to elaborate on something, he referred them to his autobiography (to which I'm not linknig -- hah!). SLAM tells Hawass to simmer down and to take a hike.
- If an American museum bought a Donald Judd last week, it didn't leak word to a hometown paper. (Or to me.)
- Katrina Brooker's fun Fortune story about the re-birth of Sotheby's includes an unusual obsession with fresh eggs. ("But to a gentleman farmer like [CEO Bill Ruprecht, eggs] are art.")
- So the Dallas Museum of Art is going to show 800 works they acquired last year and it makes the announcement in... NYC? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
- Artnet's Walter Robinson finds lots of sculpture shows in Chelsea.
- From a fine Geraldine Baum LAT story on the Louvre: "Three years ago, for example, President Jacques Chirac proposed the creation of a new Islamic art department at the Louvre to reinforce a growing belief, in the wake of 9/11, that a better appreciation of Islamic art could help ease tensions with the Muslim world." Picture W proposing that! (Or American museums doing such on their own! Hah!)
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Coming soon to SFMOMA
Sorry about yesterday and today: AJ had a server outage. We're moving to MT in June.
On Tuesday SFMOMA will announce its new architecture and design curator (Joseph Rosa recently left the museum for the Art Institute of Chicago.) MAN hears that SFMOMA will hire a Chelsea gallerist whose recently-shuttered, self-named gallery had a special interest in architecture. (Duh.) The museum knows the word is out but refuses to confirm anything.
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The busy Hirshhorn
 All kinds of interesting things going on at the Hirshhorn these days. A year after Olga Viso was named director of the Hirshhorn, the museum is full of life. The museum is doing more Directions shows, its Black Box space provides a permanent venue for contemporary video art, and its public programs have been lively. On the occasion of the about-to-close Hirsohi Sugimoto show, Viso and chief curator Kerry Brougher oversaw the removal of several impermanent non-structural walls from the museum’s galleries, restoring them to their open, Bunshaftian design. Suddenly an often ponderous series of mediocre galleries were transformed into an awesome space.
Other recent Hirshhorn successes:
- Curator Anne Ellegood has launched a series of panel discussion on public art. While virtually no one showed up to Ellegood's most recent conversation – with Artangel co-director James Lingwood – at least it's podcast here.
- I was in Los Angeles and missed it, but by all accounts curator Kristen Hileman's Oliver Herring 'performance' was a big hit, a terrific way to bring contemporary art energy to the Mall. Here's a podcast of a conversation with participants (yes, the first question is from WP critic Blake Gopnik, and yes, you can hear the steam coming off of Herring's head), and expect a video of Herirng's Task to be at the Hirshhorn soon.
- Evening events. These started under the reign of ex-director Ned Rifkin, and Viso has continued to hold frequent evening spectaculars. The Hirsh doesn't do them as regularly as the Getty or the Philly Museum, but they aren't Mall museums with a special set of federal problems. Tonight: An 8-11pm opening/party with Directions artist Jim Lambie, who will double as one of the evening's DJs. The museum also has a video podcast of the Lambie installation.
- Permanent collection installations. The Hirsh is mixing up its permanent collection installations more now than it has in years, much more than it did during the ballyhooed 'Gyroscope" presentation. The best new hanging is in the gallery that rings the museum’s elevators on the third floor, where Ellegood has presented large paintings that lean heavily on photography. Works include two Alex Katzes, a Rosenquist, a Wesselman and the Hirsh's great Eric Fischl (above).
- The summer of John Baldessari. In late July the museum will open a Baldessari-curated permanent collection installation. The museum will also show four new-to-the-collection Baldessaris.
There are two things the museum isn't doing well. At a recent Ellegood-organized panel discussion on public art, I hear no more than 20 people showed up. I wasn't one of them – I had no idea the program was happening until it was over. And while the Hirshhorn is doing interesting things on its website -- few museums offer more podcasts of museum programming -- it has barely promoted them to places likely to be interested. (Get ye a blog, too.)
For years the local knock on the Hirsh has been that it is removed from DC's arts community. That charge doesn't hold up anymore. But when only about 20 people show up for a major evening program it's pretty obvious the museum needs to re-evaluate its communications efforts.
Worse: No museum in America has worse or lazier guards than the Hirshhorn. On every single visit I see work being touched, handled, felt, and groped. Usually guards are nowhere to be seen. Even when they're nearby they have to be prompted into action. If I were a collector, I wouldn't loan art to a Hirshhorn show. (The Hirsh might want to consult LACMA on this -- when I was there last week the guards were terrific: helpful and watchful.)
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Must-see MoMA program
I almost never mention panel discussions or speeches in advance on MAN. But this one sounds worth mentioning: "Istanbul * Lahore * Tehran: Contemporary Perspective on Art," is a Without Boundary-related conversation between the show's curator, Fereshteh Daftari, and three guests:
- Salima Hashmi, Dean of The School of Visual Arts, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore;
- A.R. Sami Azar, Former Director of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; and
- Vasif Kortun, Director, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul.
It's coming up in NYC on Monday, May 15. The panel is free. Click here for time, location, etc. (And scroll down to the third item.) Here's me on Without Boundary, and here's other writers on the show.
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Available link: Chronicle on WhiBi
Yesterday I mentioned Laurie Fendrich's take on wall-essays in the Whitney Biennial and said that the piece was not available online. Now it is: Click here for a darn good read.
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SFMOMA hires architecture & design curator
MAN mini-scoop: Chelsea gallerist Henry Urbach will be SFMOMA's new curator of architecture and design, the museum confirms. Urbach replaces Joseph Rosa, who recently left SFMOMA to become the architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Urbach will be replaced by hundreds of Chelsea-iteswho have named their galleries after themselves.
Coming Monday: SFMOMA's 2005 acquisitions.
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Expect Getty candidates to fly coach
The Getty announced yesterday that it has begun the search for the next Barry Munitz.
Gasp! I'm so sorry! I didn't mean it that way. Here: The Getty is looking for the next Trust president. (Munitz is back in the news today: His compensation at CSU is drawing more complaints.) Little things MAN notices about the search committee, and some related Gettyana:
- Agnes Gund will serve on the search committee. She also sits on the Barnes Foundation board with... former Harvard boss Neil Rudenstine, a possible/likely Getty candidate;
- Only one search committee member has been a donor to possible/likely candidate Joel Wachs' recent political campaigns. (Wachs was an LA city councilman, an LA mayoral candidate, and now runs the Warhol Foundation.) Gund gave Wachs' campaign $1,000 in 1999 and $2,500 in 2001. (Unfortunately, records are available online only from 1998 forward.)
- Getty board members (but non-searchers) Stewart Resnick and Lloyd Cotsen have also given to Wachs campaigns.
- The search group is predictably and inevitably full of ties to LA mega-collector Eli Broad. Luis Nogales and Jay Wintrob both serve on boards with, or have worked for Broad companies. William Siart has worked with The Broad Foundation one education projects. Broad is a donor to the Music Center, of which Joanne Kozberg is the ex-CEO.
- As I've said before, I think it's imperative that the next Trust boss be both an art person and an Angeleno. Among searchers: Mark Siegel is a board member at MOCA, and Gund is An Official Art World Personage. (Whisper smart somethings in Siegel's ear, MOCAites.)
- Expect the Getty to create a section of its website that will shine light on the Trust's finances and expenditures. (I've advocated this before too.) Expect something similar to what the Hewlett or Packard foundations have on their websites.
- Getty Trust interim boss Deborah Marrow told me not to expect the Getty to add board members until after a new Trust president is named. I've had thoughts on this in the recent past.
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$1 to fix the Smithsonian? Hah!
Everyone knows that the Smithsonian Institution has money problems.
Recently, Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) suggested that the Smithsonian Institution charge $1 for admission. Moran estimated that this would "raise" $25 million a year. The Smithsonian has desparately tried to find creative ways to bring in cash, including the sad sale of (effectively) first-rights to our nation's film collection -- including documentary footage -- to a subsidiary of CBS Corp. "History's just been made for sale to an inside deal," said documentary producer Ken Burns.
 These are dim-witted, stop-gap measures that fail to address the Smithsonian's substantial needs. According to a 2005 General Accounting Office report, the Smithsonian needs at least $2.3 billion for facilities costs over the next seven years. That would cover routine building-related costs, anti-terrorism protection, as well as an alarming $1.4 billion in scheduled and deferred maintenance on existing buildings. It does not include construction costs for the new African-American history and culture museum, to be built on the Mall.
These are not projects that can wait -- nor should they. Last year GAO found "major structural deterioration" in Smithsonian buildings and "chronic leaks" that have damaged our nation's collections. At least two historic aircraft at the National Air and Space Museum have been damaged by leaks and Smithsonian staff have faced at least 19 "water emergencies." Several buildings are rife with mold. Water has flowed into the galleries at the National Museum of African Art and at the Renwick, Freer and Sackler Galleries. In the year since the GAO report was released, the Hirshhorn has battled water issues as well. Water is death for art and for historic objects.
Given the alarming state of Smithsonian facilities, the question that Congress should be addressing isn't whether or not the Smithsonian could get away with a tiny admissions charge or whether one film deal should spawn an uproar, it is whether we're going to have a national museum at all. If museums that save and share the American story in history, science, art, and culture, are worth having, then Congress should make sure that have the infrastructure necessary to safeguard the nation's heritage.
Unfortunately, given the water buckets on view on the floors of several Smithsonian museums, all indications are that Congress is willing to watch the Smithsonian fall apart from the inside out. Worse: There is no ongoing public or legislative conversation about the value of a national museum -- just half-brained suggestions that avoid honest discussions of obvious problems.
Unwilling to wait for Congress to pony up, the Smithsonian has responded to legislative indifference by transforming itself into a museo-front for corporate and private America. The deal with CBS' Showtime Networks isn't the Smithsonian's only questionable cash-grab. In recent months Boeing has given the National Air and Space Museum $15 million and a private foundation has given the Smithsonian $45 million for the renovation of the building that houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery -- and in so doing has the name of its benefactor on the 'center' that houses two national museums. The Smithsonian's museums should not be on naming-rights par with, say, a Tulsa basketball arena.
Our national museum is disappearing. It is being turned into a series of monuments to American corporations and to private wealth, a process that shows no sign of slowing. I think there are educational and cultural benefits to America telling its own story, to showing its own art, to presenting its heritage to the world. Instead Congress is allowing the Smithsonian to become something else, a place where the Fortune 500 dominates and where private wealth determines what parts of our story should be told.
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It's today: The Judd sale
Tonight, at Christie's, the Judd Foundation sale begins. The buzz on the sale seems strong from collectors with whom I talk and not strong among museum types. Who knows what any of that means -- I'm certainly not an auction expert.
I've written a couple thousand words on all this, so little more from me. I hope the Foundation makes a killing and that it uses the money to increase scholarly/curatorial access to Judd's life, work, studio and living spaces, and to preserve and enhance Judd's buildings and legacy. And, more importantly, that it uses the auction to kick-off major fundraising efforts, not to end them. More on the Judd Foundation sale:
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Around the blogosphere
In all the recent blogroll adds I've noticed that there are a ton of new NYC art blogs, virtually none from LA. WHy? Anyway, away we go...
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Catching up with Prof. Munitz
In case you missed it last week, former Getty boss Barry Munitz is movin' on up to the east side: He's taking a tenured professorship at the California State Univeristy-Los Angeles. Here are some classes that I hear Prof. Munitz may be teaching this fall:
- Accounting 105: How for a one-time payment of just $250,000, you too can get a job that pays $113,000 a year;
- Nutrition 200: Why a proper diet is important for non-profit executives and their wives. (Students must provide their own blood oranges);
- Management 301: Hiring qualified staff from those fancy Ivy League schools is so expensive! Here's how you too can find senior executives by searching the ground-floor of the restaurant industry. If those executive hires don't work out, they can always go work at Starbucks;
- Management 400: This course will teach you how your business travel can impress your peers. Remember, the last thing you'd want to do is embarrass yourself by flying commercial class. (This is why Prof. Munitz will now be taking professional trips only every other year. First-class from LAX to JFK is $4,550.)
- Public Relations 650: Talk about easy course credit! In this class Prof. Munitz will give you Michael Sitrick's phone number.
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Robert Adams @ the Getty
 A woman sits on a sofa in a suburban tract house, her back to her home's front window. She is staring across her living room at a wall of wood-paneling, perhaps a dark-finished knotty pine.
It's a typical Robert Adams image, and it's on view now in the first gallery of Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance at the Getty. The Getty show, curated by Weston Naef, is not a retrospective. Instead it's an airing of 100+ Adams photos from the Getty's permanent collection. It's a wonderful show, a tip of the hat from a curator to a photographer, shared with us.
Back to the photograph: Adams' best pictures capture the dichotomy of how Americans were drawn to dramatic Western lands in the 1960s and 1970s, and how they changed them -- often ruining them -- with mindless development. Longmont, Colorado, 1985 brilliantly captures this indifference. The woman in the photograph has placed her sofa right in front of her home's largest window. But instead of looking out toward the topographic drama of the Rocky Mountain Front Range, the sofa faces in toward the house, toward a wall of what was once a tree.
Adams was not the first photographer to zero in on the dissonance between America's love of the land and our post-war obsession with dumb development that changed it. (The underrated William Garnett, who started photographing the development of California's beautiful places in the early 1950s, was probably the first.) While there are traditional seascapes and landscapes in this show, Adams' best photographs embrace the suburban frontier and the beauty in dichotomy.
 In Palos Verdes, Calif., man's razor wire meets nature's sea. Next to I-25 near Longmont, Colorado, the empty earth is lit by a fluourescent glow from above. The light source appears to be a giant gas station sign; the glow it gives off is extra-solar. This photo was taken in 1977 and recalls the 1975 Bruce Springsteen single-song operettea Jungleland: "They'll meet 'neath that giant Exxon sign that brings this fair city light."
Adams also captures our nonchalance about the land we have overrun. In Abandoned Windbreak West of Fontana, California (1985), Adams photographs four trees, each one taller than the one to its left, that have obviously been planted by a farmer or a homeowner. Once in place, they apparently failed to be as effective a windbreak as what was there before man cleared it for farmland. So the trees were left alone to die.
Adams' photos, along with those of his contemporaries Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Garnett and others, were part of a post-war reconsideration of the Western landscape in American art. Painters such as Clyfford Still (born in North Dakota, raised in southern Canada and eastern Washington), Agnes Martin (born in southern Canada) and Jackson Pollock (a Wyoming boy) chose to be inspired by open spaces as they pushed past realistic representations and into abstraction. Emmet Gowin's photographs of military bombing test sites also meld into abstraction. Over it, they said.
That woman in the house in Longmont, Colo. was over it too.
Related: The Getty's exhibition website features a dozen images and video clips with the artist. Naef thinks Adams' book Why People Photograph is so important it's in the exhibition twice. SFMOMA has 47 Adamses from its permanent collection online.
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Enjoy the weekend
MAN's out for the weekend. In admin news: The April highlights are up in the right-hand column. Next week MAN will feature acquisitions news, Robert Adams, Dada: Paris, and probably more from both Los Angeles and New York. And if you need something to read over the weekend, check out my post on Cathy Opie, risk, shock value, and who makes up gay America.
Also: MoMA just sent me what may be the most useful press release I've ever received from a museum. (I'm dying to list the museums that should be paying special attention to this post. Dying to.) It tells me that the museum's galleries are spotlighting recent acquisitions for the next couple months, that lots of new, never-seen-at-MoMA stuff is on view all over the museum, and then the release lists the new artists and works that will be up. Love it. (Wish I could link to it, but it's behind a password-wall. Here's the closest link.) UPDATE: MoMA has provided a link.
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NGA admits catalog wrongdoing
The National Gallery of Art has admitted to copyright infringement and will pay two Vuillard scholars $37,500 for publishing a catalog for this Vuillard show without crediting their material. Jason Edward Kaufman has the story in The Art Newspaper. (Thanks AJ.)
Remarkably the story of, in effect, plagiarism surfacing in a major NGA catalogue (think 7.8 pounds) has gone uncovered by the Washington Post. Apparently the paper rates it a five paragraph wire story on the website, no more. That's pretty remarkable, even by the Post's arts journalism standards. (Of course, now that somewhere else broke the story, the Post is free to cover it.)
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Stories we love
There's nothing that we here at MAN enjoy more than art fraud and theft. Throw in a name straight outta the San Fernando Valley (ahem) and we've got a hat trick for you.
Anyway: The LAT's Christopher Reynolds has an awfully good story about LACMA's Van Dyck. Or maybe it's not a Van Dyck. Ooopsie! (And how often does this happen? Read the story.)
And in south Florida, an art handler has vanished -- and so have the seven Milton Averys he was driving back to New York. [via] His girlfriend, Dawn Devine, seems distraught. Uh... Dawn Divine? (UPDATE: Art found. In a trailer park.)
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Cathy Opie & the aesthetics of risk
 When Cathy Opie is a speaker at a conference on risk, it's no surprise when people ask her about what most people would consider the risks evident in her photography: Is it risky to photograph or exhibit Ron Athey's anus? Is there risk in showing portraits of gender-bending leatherfolk? Is there risk in presenting the SM world to a mass audience?
Sure enough, those questions were plenty-asked when Opie talked with Douglas Crimp at the Aesthetics of Risk conference hosted by the Getty Research Institute on Saturday. (Opie is one of my absolute favorite artists and I admire her tremendously as a person, too.) Both Crimp and audience members asked the expected, all tinged with a certain but why do you want to show those people what queers do?
Opie, who is featured in current or upcoming shows at the Orange County Museum of Art and the MCA Chicago, and who will be the subject of a retro at the Guggenheim in 2008, had heard these questions before and shrugged off most of them. I think that for the most part the conversation missed discussing what to Opie is the real risk: That people will think that Human Rights Campaign's idea of happy, mainstream, conformist gay people is how all of gay America lives. One reason she takes photographs of her friends in the leather and other alt-sex communities is because she wants to remind people that not all gay people want what HRC wants, not all gay people are as assimilationist as HRC would like, and that there is a multiplicity of gay life in America.
(The seven-image slide show from a 2000 Opie show at The Photographers' Gallery captures that pretty well. Opie jokes that one of the photos is of a "lesbian washer-and-dryer.")
When I wrote about Opie for Black Book two years ago (it's here and it's maddeningly over-written -- I didn't trust my material), s | | |
LACMA's website features a webcam that shows the ongoing construction of the future Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA. (The B-CAM Cam? ) Over at blogging.la, Sean Bonner has started a 
"Draw a female nude, and you're not just depicting an attractive chunk of 
