Real Clear Arts

It was just last July when the world was stunned (pleasantly) by the finding of more than 1,500 gold and silver 7th Century Anglo-Saxon treasures that are known as the Staffordshire Hoard. Because it is the largest and probably most important discovery in the U.K., Staffordshire -- a West Midlands country -- naturally wants to keep them where they belong, which is near where they were found.

Last November, the Treasure Valuation Committee set the magic number of their "worth" at £3.285 million, and the Art Fund and the county, plus several other local councils, set out to raise that amount so that the hoard can be jointly acquired by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.

The money, as U.K. law dictates, will be split equally between the finder, a man named Terry Herbert, and the landowner, Fred Johnson. Some of the treasures have been on display at the British Museum and, on Saturday, about 80 of these artifacts will go on view at the Potteries Museum.

The campaign began on Jan. 13, with an April 17 deadline. I just checked in on the progress to date: as of Feb. 3, £550,000 had been raised.

The fundraising effort is retail: If you buy the BM's book on the subject, called The Staffordshire Hoard, for £4.99,  £1 goes to the fund.

The Art Fund recently launched an interactive web game, too:

"Buy Your Dig Site" is a virtual map of the field where the Hoard was discovered. For a donation of £5 individuals can try their luck by "digging" a square of the field to see if it reveals an item of the Hoard. Players can buy as many virtual squares as they wish to boost the campaign.

You can access that site here.

Or people can just donate, online or sending in money.

Celebrities like Judi Dench, rock stars like Bill Wyman, historians like David Starkey and others are rallying support for the drive.

But the campaign has a long way to go -- about a quarter of the time has passed, but less than 20% of the necessary total is on the books.

You can read more about the find here or in this ten-page PDF.

It's unclear what happens if the locals don't raise the money...but I'd rather not find out.

Photos: Courtesy Staffordshire Hoard website

In its 31st birthday year, the Tampa Museum of Art opened a new building. That happened Saturday, and news accounts heralded it.

The $32.8 million structure, designed by Stanley Saitowitz, has 66,000 sq.ft, including 26,000 sq. ft. of galleries, and is set in a sculpture garden and an eight-acre park. It plans to be open seven days a week. Adult admission: $10.

It starts off with exhibitions on Matisse, especially printmaking, but with paintings borrowed from the Cone Collection and other works from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Collection; From Life to Death In the Ancient World (from its own collection); of works borrowed from the Bank of America collection and another of works from the Martin Z. Margulies collection; and of photos by Garry Winograd.

As with the new Art Gallery of Alberta, that's a nice beginning, and the challenge will be to keep it up.

But happily (I think) the Tampa museum tempered its initial, overblown ideas, which involved a $45 million building by Rafael Vinoly and ambitions to be a Guggenheim Bilbao. As the St. Petersburg Times recounted the cautionary tale, the cost had skyrocketed to $76 million as time passed while the board and the mayor (the city owned the museum then) wrangled over finances and location. Eventually they chose a more fiscally responsible path, changed architects and locations, and now,

The museum is no longer a city department and trustees control its destiny; city subsidies have been reduced and a new director heads it. The building is named the Cornelia Corbett Center in recognition of the lead gift of $5 million from the Corbetts. Her term as board chair is over.

So the ending is happy, happier than such vast compromises and differences would have portended. The trustees have a park setting on the river with good architectural provenance. The mayor has a smaller, fiscally responsible building.

This is an area to watch. As the Miami Herald reported yesterday,

The Tampa museum is part of a flurry of construction in arts venues along Florida's west coast. Across the bay in St. Petersburg, The Salvador Dalí Museum's new $35 million home is expected to be completed by December. In 2008, the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts doubled its gallery space by adding the 39,000-square-foot, $21 million Hazel Hough Wing, which enabled the museum to stage larger shows and exhibit monumental sculptures and paintings.

In Sarasota, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is undergoing a $7.5 million expansion, adding a 24,000-square-foot wing. As with the St. Petersburg and Dalí museums, the architect is Yann Weymouth, who designed the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University.

Sounds as if it's worth a visit.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Tampa Museum of Art

It was just about a year ago, at the end of February 2009, that the Las Vegas Art Museum closed its doors. A metropolis of nearly 2 million people was left with no art museum -- generating not much more than a little hand-wringing, which was little surprise once you learned the size of its membership: "just over 1,000," according to the Las Vegas Sun.

The name still exists as a website, but with nothing more than a home page.

Last week, the Sun reported a new development:

UNLV's College of Fine Arts, with a growing art collection of its own, is in talks with the financially beleaguered and homeless Las Vegas Art Museum about placing the museum's permanent collection on campus.

Which sounded like a solution until you read further into the story and the comments. It turns out that the university has an abysmal history as a steward of art. Among other things, a large William Wareham steel sculpture "disappeared" from campus, Chinese scrolls had to be removed from view because they were deteriorating, and a commissioned mural was damaged in storage and returned to the artist.

Have things changed? Hard to tell. One good sign is that the Vogel's "50 Works for 50 States" gift to Nevada, originally earmarked for the Las Vegas Art Museum, went instead to the College of Fine Arts at UNLV. I'd hope the National Gallery of Art, which helps administer the program, did due diligence about conditions at UNLV.

On the other hand, as one commenter on the Sun site noted,

Perhaps until economic conditions are more favorable the community could invest in adequate, secure and environmentally stable storage facility. Which would also require an investment in adequate staff person(s). Then loan works to a various existing display spaces. The current Governor is asking the Univ. system to cut its budget 22%.
A "new" museum seems disconnected from that situation.

If he's correct about that budget cut, I'd agree with him.

Late Friday afternoon: email arrrives from the White House Press Office, with subject line "President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts." I open it up, with expectations.

But the key appointments turned out to be six nominees to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Not so key. Still, here they are, with capsule descriptions:

• Chuck Close, "visual artist noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo based portrait paintings. He is also an accomplished printmaker and photographer..."
•  Fred Goldring, "co-founded the prominent California-based entertainment law firm Goldring, Hertz and Lichtenstein which represents numerous global superstar recording and performing artists, and is also co-founder of entertainment strategic consultancy, MemBrain..."
• Sheila Johnson, "founder and CEO of Salamander Hospitality; co-founder of Black Entertainment Television; a documentary film producer; and the only African-American woman to co-own three professional sports teams.  A classically trained violinist..."
• Pamela Joyner, "Founder of Avid Partners, LLC.  Her other business experiences include holding senior positions at Bowman Capital, LLC and Capital Guardian Trust Company. Ms Joyner is a former Co-Chair and current Trustee Emeritus of the San Francisco Ballet.  She is a Trustee of The MacDowell Colony, The School of American Ballet..."
• Jhumpa Lahiri (above), "a fiction writer whose debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award, and the New Yorker magazine's Debut of the Year. Her novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today..."
• Ken Solomon, "chairman of Ovation TV, a national cable and satellite network focused on bringing art, culture and personal creativity to all Americans.  He is also chairman and CEO of Tennis Channel, the only 24-hour network dedicated to both the professional sport and tennis lifestyle..."

Most of the time, Fargo, ND, isn't even on the art-world's map, but this week an anonymous donor put it there, with help from James Rosenquist (see him at work below).

Rosenquist hails from Grand Forks, ND, and in 2005, when he visited Fargo, the Plains Art Museum there commissioned a mural by him to "celebrate the plains region." But, last April, his work on it was lost in the fire that raged through his home, studio and storerooms in Aripeka, Fl, destroying 30 years of work. Rosenquist was away, and unharmed physically. (Refresh your memory of what happened in an article in the St. Petersburg Times.) 

Still, he had to start again to create the mural. Meanwhile, the Plains museum had to find funds to pay for the $1.2 million work, which is to measure 13 by 21 ft.

This week, that nameless donor pledged $600,000 to pay for the mural, and Rosenquist "matched" it by giving the materials and labor and lowering his fee, according to the Forum of Moorhead-Fargo.

Win-win for the museum.

Kudos to Rosenquist for remembering his roots.

If you go to the museum's website, take a look at its collection and current exhibitions, which include a Warhol show and Individual to Icon: Portraits of the Famous and Almost Famous from Folk Art to Facebook, including this work by Alec Soth:

Photos: Courtesy Plains Art Museum

Who's got the most popular museum website in the world?

According to a website called Kunstpedia, which describes itself as "curators of art knowledge," The Museum of Modern Art takes the blue ribbon, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art not far behind.

Kunstpedia analyzed more than 680 museum websites worldwide, and ranked them thusly:

The scores are determined by comparing ranking data such as those of Google Page Rank, Alexa Ranking and Compete Ranking. Furthermore the number on-line references in the form of incoming links and references in user generated content have been analysed. The end score was determined by the sum of each individual score, given on basis of the position within the different data source which were analysed.
 

Here's the top ten, with their scores:

1 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) USA -- 11

2 Metropolitan Museum of Art USA -- 14

3 Musée du Louvre France -- 34

4 National Gallery of Art USA -- 35

5 Victoria and Albert Museum United Kingdom -- 37

6 J. Paul Getty Museum USA -- 40

7 Deutsches Historisches Museum Germany -- 50

8 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) USA -- 51

9 State Hermitage Museum Russia -- 53

10 Brooklyn Museum of Art USA -- 58

The entire list is here.

Kunstpedia also broke down the list by country, which you can read here. The top ten U.S. sites are:

1 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

2 Metropolitan Museum of Art

3 National Gallery of Art

4 J. Paul Getty Museum

5 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

6 Brooklyn Museum of Art

7 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

8 Philadelphia Museum of Art

9 Minneapolis Institute of Arts

10 Indianapolis Museum of Art

Most popular doesn't necessarily mean best, of course, but it's something -- something big. 

The long-separated Saint Julian (below) and Saint Anthony Abbot (right) belong together, and right now they are living just a couple blocks apart.

The two works are by Taddeo Gaddi, a student -- the best? -- of Giotto. Gaddi (1300-1366) painted the gold ground paintings (tempera on wood) in the 1340s, during his mature period -- but they took diverse paths. Saint Julian, holding a sword, hangs in Gallery 3 of the Metropolitan Museum's European paintings galleries. Saint Anthony Abbot, staring soulfully, currently resides at Moretti Fine Art, on East 80th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. Moreover, it appears they are both part of an altarpiece in Italy, which will be revealed below.

Saint Anthony Abbot, Moretti says, had "long escaped the attention of art historians" and when it surfaced in Berlin in 1928, at the Lepke sale, it was labelled "Florentine school, 14th Century." Only in the 1980s did it gain the Gaddi attribution. That's about when experts  first noticed that Saint Anthony Abbot has comparable measurements, similar punch-work and the same design as Gaddi's Saint Julian.

Saint Julian, which remained in Italy until at least 1949, found its way into the Heineman collection here and was bequeathed to the Met in 1996 by Lore Heinemann, in memory of her husband, Dr. Rudolf J. Heinemann (and accessioned in 1997). The Met describes the "well-preserved" work as "a cut-down lateral work from an altarpiece."

Saint Anthony Abbot, meanwhile, has been in Europe. It's for sale now for $1.5 million, and has attracted some serious interest. One potential buyer was allowed to take it home for a trial.

But wouldn't it be great if....someone bought it for the Met?

The story wouldn't end there, though, for Moretti believes that the two panels belong to this altarpiece:

A brand new Art Gallery of Alberta opened Sunday and Monday (fully booked!), and starting today the general public can visit.

How did a Frank Gehry look-alike building, with 85,000 sq. ft.(30,000 for galleries), designed by Los Angeles architect Randall Stout, costing $88 million, make its debut without much (any?) notice in the U.S. press? Edmonton is the most northern metropolis on this continent with a population over 1 million... but AGA has greater ambitions than serving the local population: As its website says, "this architectural icon will draw visitors from around the world with twice the former gallery space...."

But can Edmonton really be a Bilbao, or even close? This is not an auspicious start. 

The AGA, which dates to 1924, expects also to attract more "sought-after touring art exhibitions." It holds a 7,000-item permanent collection, but there's nary another word about what's in it on the website.

The temporary exhibits now on view include Edgar Degas: Figures in Motion, drawings by Goya, photographs by Karsh, Building Art: Photographs of the Building of AGA, 2008-2010 by Edward Burtynsky, an installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers called The Murder of Crows, and a children's exhibit called Play on Architecture that allows kids to experiment with building blocks.

Nice start. It's hard to maintain programming like that. Maybe AGA can rely on government funding, or maybe it has a huge endowment.  

If not, I'd be worrying about those great expectations.

Photo: Courtesy Edmonton Sun 

If you aren't tired of talking about deaccessioning, or listening to others talk about it -- and I hope you are not! -- please tune into to a program just posted on Rush Interactive on ArtonAir.org.

The show is hosted by Michael Rush (left), who was director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis until last spring, when he was dismissed in the mess over the university's plans to close the museum and sell its collection. A couple of Fridays ago, he convened a very civil discussion on the subject with writer/critic/curator Eleanor Heartney, Charles Desmarais, deputy director of the Brooklyn Museum (the reward for posting comments on this blog), and me.

Here's the link.

This gives me an opportunity to post a few more impressions, based on developments and discussions since the publication of my op-ed in The New York Times on Jan. 2.

• It's sad, but true, that several people on both sides of the issue told me that I was "brave" to propose something at odds with the official AAMD/AAM position. It was as if I had voluntarily touched the Third Rail of the museum world.
• This sentiment was borne out at the Brodsky bill roundtable: People are afraid to discuss the very possibility. There was almost no dissent (except for objections to an unfunded mandate) until, at 1 p.m., two hours after the Committee on Tourism, Parks, Arts and Sports convened the roundtable, Brodsky satisfyingly looked around and said it was the last chance for people who differed with him to speak up. Only then did people rise to the mike to disagree or question the bill, and only then did the rumbles in the audience begin.
• More troubling still, one thing I've learned since Jan. 2 is precisely how little trust exists in the museum world. Directors don't trust their trustees; trustees don't trust one another; many trustees don't trust their directors. I knew there was some amount of mistrust -- but I didn't know relations were this bad.
• Museum directors -- even some you think are strong -- fear their trustees, finding it hard to disagree with the powerful ones, ever. (I know, I know, trustees provide the money, and directors work for the board, but absolute obeisance is unhealthy.)
• While it's no secret that trustees join boards because they contribute money or art, too many trustees have little interest in art -- maybe none. If they're there only for the prestige and the power, I blame the nominating committee and the board chairman.

 At the risk of sounding naive, I think we need to talk much more about museum governance. There are some parallels with corporate governance, about which I have written extensively, but not enough for me to make suggestions at the moment. More reporting, more discussion is in order.

Photo Credit: Dominic Chavez, Courtesy Boston Globe

The countdown begins: On Feb. 26, The Art of the Steal -- Don Argott's documentary about the struggle for the control of the Barnes Foundation -- opens in theaters (two days after it can be seen on demand) in New York and Philadelphia. I have not seen the movie, which was shown last year at the Toronto and New York film festivals, but last week the trailer went up on IMDB -- you can see it here. It calls the move into downtown Philadelphia "the scandal of the art world" and labels those who are doing it "vandals." Clearly, it takes sides.

Argott, saying he set out to give voice to both sides, explains why it ended up where it is here, in a short video he did with The New York Times last fall.

He also recently gave a more extensive interview to Filmmaker magazine (here), in which he says:

one of the things that sealed the deal [to do the film] for me was going to the Barnes. You walk into the place, and it's breathtaking. It's really overwhelming -- something special and beautiful. I've walked into that main gallery many times, and I still get chills.

Evelyn Yaari, a member of the Friends of the Barnes, which is still trying to stop the move despite the recent groundbreaking on the new site, notified me of the trailer: The group doesn't seem to have organized plans to use the film to rally people to their side, but Yaari (who has written about the Barnes' situation), at least, is hoping it will "change the chemistry around here, at least for a little while." 

Hard as it is for me to believe, she said "The vast majority of people around here have no idea what has or is going on. The fact that a movie has been made about it, changes people's perceptions about its importance, putting the Barnes story in a totally new light just because of the way it's made, the music, etc. And because it's cool, it might make people slightly aware of things before their eyes glaze over again. It's not just the cranky nut jobs from the suburbs after all. Now, there's a cool, young director and his brilliant and beautiful producer saying this is important."

It is, she adds, "an unbelievably powerful piece that makes the Parkway Barnes look toxic."

Sotheby's had a spectacular Old Masters week (compared with Christie's), and the sales of La Belle Ferronnière by a Follower of Leonardo da Vinci for nearly $1.54 million, about three times its presale estimate (including the premium), and of Francisco Zurbarán's full-length picture of Saint Doroty Holding a Basket of Apples and Oranges for a record $4.22 million, rightly made the biggest splash.

But the Old Master paintings sale held some other surprises, including a mini-mystery (not as good as the record-setting American silver punch bowl story, which I wrote about here last Saturday).

This is a mini-mystery that set no records and involves a little (7.5 inch by 5.5 inch) painting by Lucas Cranach the Younger. Called The Ill-Matched Lovers, it sold for $410,500 (including the premium) against a presale estimate of $50,000 to $70,000.

Why? The painting had once, apparently, been attributed to Cranach the Elder, a better painter, but was downgraded. Maybe someone thinks that was wrong? It came from descendants of Seymour R. Thaler -- nothing special there -- so I doubt provenance drove the price.

All it takes is two determined bidders, of course, to push a price to extremes. But still, I always wonder.

Results for the entire sale are here.

Photo: Courtesy Sotheby's

As I mentioned here last October, The New Republic planned to start a new web page called The Book to "rush in and fill the vacuum in book criticism that is being left by the carnage in American newspapers." Now it has. The Book made its debut on Jan. 11. Have a look.

In the visual arts, Jed Perl has led off with a joint review of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov and The Journals of Grace Hartigan: 1951-1955 in which he discusses the realm of books about the Abstract Expressionists and their near-contemporaries/next-generation artists.

I can't say I'm going to run out to buy these books, but that has nothing to do with Perl's review: He liked them. And I enjoyed Perl's observations on them, including (verbatim):

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hit it out of the park in 2009: attendance climbed to 1.3 million, far exceeding the record set in 2008 of 1.1 million. Credit a combination of great exhibits, lots of publicity, the building's restoration and the museum's 50th anniversary.

Now for a few details: In mid-year, the Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, on view from May 15 - August 23, 2009, set a museum record with 409,117 visitors. It didn't last long. The Kandinsky exhibition, on view from September 18 through this past January 13, attracted 522,015 visitors. (That was 55% above the same period in 2008.) People also bought: The Kandinsky catalogue sold out, with more than 11,000 flying off the shelves, which helped bump up projected retail sales estimates in the store and online by 21.05%. 

Both shows were expected to do well, but both surprised the museum by doing much better than projected, deputy director Eleanor Goldhar told me. "It was brilliant curatorial work, plus timing, plus luck," she says. While expected attendance is always part of the conversation about exhibits, Goldhar says, "We can't predict what will be a big hit; we are constantly surprised."

(BTW, Goldhar notes that museum began keeping track of exhibition attendance only in 1992, but she is sure that no other previous exhibit exceeded these totals. Moreover, research shows that the building itself continues to be the museum's biggest draw.)

The Anish Kapoor work (detail, left), still on view, is also doing well, and the new restaurant (which I wrote about here), is proving to be a draw, too. What's more, membership increased.

Goldhar says she can't really say how this year's achievements will affect the director's or curators' minds. "Attendance used to be at about 1 million [a year]. Now we can aim higher, but it's not about the numbers."

No, it isn't. But it surely was exciting to see people lined up to see paintings, not motorcycles.

Paris and the Avant-Garde, masterworks from the museum's permanent collection, is on view now.

Photos: Courtesy Guggenheim Museum 

Depending on what the financial markets are doing, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is either described as the richest, or the second richest, or sometimes the third richest man in the world. But he keeps a very low profile in the world of philanthropy and culture, though he has been loosening his wallet -- currently estimated at close to $60 billion -- in the last few years.

Now he's about to give Mexico a new museum -- by year-end. Ground was broken last year on the structure, whose cost has not been disclosed but is estimated at $34 million. The building, designed by Slim's son-in-law Fernando Romero, an architect who apprenticed with Rem Koolhas, is located in an industrial area of Mexico City.

According to my former colleague Geri Smith, of Business Week,

Four years ago, Slim asked Romero to design a new building for the Soumaya collection, which had outgrown its 15-year-old home in a century-old converted paper factory in an older part of the city. "We wanted to translate his vision and his art collection and this historic moment when Mexico has become part of a more global economic network," Romero says of Slim, whose business empire spans all of Latin America. His mobile telecom company--just one of his many businesses--has nearly 200 million clients.

Geri says Slim's 66,000-item collection ranges from "15th century European masters to the second-largest private collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of France."

She describes the 183,000 sq. ft. building as a "gleaming aluminum cube that has been stretched and twisted so that it soars 150 feet into the sky, its thrusting, curving upper contours reminiscent of the bow of a ship."

Read more from her article here. Should be quite a structure -- with galleries on five levels.

I interrupt this blog for a non-commercial, commercial message:

This Friday, the Partnership for the Homeless in New York is holding an art auction at Gagosian Gallery on W. 21st Street in Chelsea to benefit its Brooklyn-based Family Resource Center. The pitch calls it unprecedented -- whether it is or not is immaterial; it's a good cause. 

This "first-time" event was proposed by Richard Serra and his wife Clara (above) to the Partnership and they offered to chair it. Almost everything has been donated -- the space, the auctioneering by Tobias Meyer of Sotheby's, a performance by Jessye Norman from the American songbook, and art works from more than 70 artists. They include Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Chris Burden, Vija Clemins, Chuck Close, Mark di Suvero, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Kiki Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Lawrence Weiner.

You can view their works here, and you can leave absentee bids for them. Or you can go to the event; tickets cost $175, and information about reserving tickets is on the same website as the art works.

The Family Resource Center, btw, helps homeless children keep up with their education and remain connected to their community and helps their parents deal with health, housing and other financial issues.

UPDATE, 2/3: The auction raised $2,075,000.

Are the visual arts coming to Broadway again? And what picture will be drawn? It's not always "good" for art: Art was a winning play, more about friendship than painting, but it still reinforced some conventional antipathy toward art.

Now there's word around New York that Red, a play by John Logan about Mark Rothko that opened on Dec. 8 at Donmar Warehouse in London, is likely to transfer to New York, probably this spring.

The play is set in 1958-59, and involves the commission Rothko won for a series of murals from the Four Seasons restaurant. The title stems from this quote: "There is only one thing I fear in life my friend... One day the black will swallow the red."

Here's what the Official London Theatre Guide says:

Under the watchful gaze of his young assistant and the threatening presence of a new generation of artists, Mark Rothko takes on his greatest challenge yet: to create a definitive work for an extraordinary setting. 

Red is a moving and compelling account of Rothko's struggle to accept his growing riches and the praise heaped upon him, which became his ultimate undoing.

Alfred Molina plays Rothko in London, where the drama closes on Feb. 6. He would do it in New York, too.

London critics were mixed about the play. The Telegraph called it "second-rate." The Independent liked it much better, saying it was "brilliantly acted," and so did The Guardian.

But all agreed that the play gives theatre-goers a window on a great artist, deploying several bits of conventional wisdom. The set, Rothko's studio on the Bowery, is a symbolic mess of splattered red paint, foreshadowing Rothko's death. Rothko is cranky, somewhat abusive to the only other character, his assistant, who represents the younger generation of artists about to supplant Rothko's generation.

That's human nature. But the critics said the play goes on about art, too. I'm eager to hear exactly what...

Photo Credit: Johan Persson, Courtesy London Theatre Guide