Real Clear Arts

It's been a long road, but the Museum for African Art is really coming into its own: the opening of its new building, on Fifth Avenue and Central Park North in New York, a year or so from now, will be transformative.

I had a chance to take a hard-hat tour of the premises the other day -- not to mention to see it from the nearby, lakeside Dana Discovery Center in Central Park, a glorious spot on that sunny fall day -- and to hear the plans of director Elsie McCabe Thompson and chief curator Enid Schildkrout. They, and their trustees and staff, seem to have taken care of all the details, big and small. For example, on the small (but important) side, the restaurant and theater will have separate entrances, so that they may be used when the museum is closed -- but visitors will still see some African art as they enter.

On the big side, it will have more ambitous exhibits -- one of the inaugural shows, Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria (photo above shows one piece), is co-organized by the British Museum and the Fundación Marcelino Botín; there are three more to fill 16,000 sq. ft. of galleries.

The first contemporary art exhibition is Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, the first museum retrospective of Ibrahim El Salahi, a pioneer of the "Khartoum School." (Who knew?) 

The new building, designed by Robert A.M. Stern, also allows the museum to collect art, instead of just exhibit it, for the first time (that's why it's name used "for," instead of "of"). It is actively seeking gifts.  

McCabe is building something more akin to the Asia Society than to a traditional museum, with a range of programs.

A few developments that need no comment:

• The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, can rest easy: A jury has rejected the attempt by Alfred C. Glassell Jr.'s daughter to break his will, which left half of his fortune to the MFA.
• Cindy Sherman won the Jewish Museum's Man Ray Award, and the JM also restored some opening hours it had cut.
• The New York Sun, which I wrote about here last spring, is rising again.
• ArtPrize set the dates for next year's contest.
• The Art Loss Register is seeking help in locating the owner of a group of stolen civil war era books, including:
Nehemiah Adams, South-Side View of Slavery (1855)
Albert Barnes, The Church and Slavery (1857)
Silas Casey, Infantry Tactics (1862)
Dean Dudley, Officers of our Union Army and Navy (1862)
William J. Hardee, Rifle and Infantry Tactics (1863)
Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South (1860)
Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom, 2 vol. (1861)
James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown (1860)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 2 vol. (1862)

Contact Detective Michael McFadden of the NYPD at michael.mcfadden@nypd.org or the Art Loss Register at stolen@alrny.com.

Several days back, I began a post about art theft by saying that it boggles the mind in general. I just learned something even more startling -- the identity of the most stolen work of art in recorded history.

The subject came up in a talk given last week (which I just learned about) at Yale University by art historian Noah Charney (right). Last spring, he taught a course there called "Art Crime," according to the Yale Daily News, and on Nov. 12, he gave a lecture entitled "Stealing the Mystic Lamb: A True Story of the World's Most Frequently Stolen Masterpiece."

In a different article, published on Oct. 26, Charney told The New Criminologist:

It was involved in 13 crimes over its 600-year lifespan, including seven separate thefts, culminating in its theft to be the centerpiece of Hitler's planned Supermuseum during the Second World War. It was an incredible, unlikely rescue, thanks to a team of Monuments Men, a fortuitous toothache, and the courage of an Austrian double-agent.  Sounds like a film preview, but it's all true.

Can you guess what the work is? Think before you continue reading...

Among the many reasons I wish I were in Italy right now is Art and Illusions: Masterpieces of Trompe-l'oeil From Antiquity To The Present, which is on view at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence until Jan. 24. (It started last month.) The poster picture (left) is a pretty good indication of why -- doesn't Pere Borrell Del Caso's Escaping Criticism make you smile?

The show is reminiscent of the National Gallery of Art's Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe-l'Oeil Painting, which was on view in late 2002 and early 2003, and didn't travel.

But the Palazzo Strozzi's is larger: 200 works (vs. 116 at the NGA), including -- the website describes it -- "sculpture, intarsia, scagliola, pietre dure, porcelain, etc. Examples exhibited include faux armoirs, half-open, with books inside, wood intarsia of small Renaissance studios, scagliola tabletops and stones portraying seemingly prehensile objects, soup tureens and table furnishings in the shape of vegetables, anatomical and botanical wax models."

The exhibit also gives Europeans their first look at works by American artists specializing in trompe-l'œil -- such as Peto, Kaye, Harnett and Haberle.

Bet Otis Kaye's D'-jia-vu? (The Stock Market), at right, is a hit, as it usually is here when the market is causing pain. It was painted in 1937.

The show in Florence has ten sections, with titles like "Still Life or Trompe-l'Oeil?" "Paperwork" and "Figures Caught Between Real And Illusory Space." Each is explained and illustrated on the website here.

The exhibit also has a scientific side.

Robert M. Edsel's second book about World War II looting, The Monuments Men, came out in September, and as someone who in years past has written much about the subject myself (here, here, and here, to name a few), I wanted to see what Edsel has to say. 

Yesterday, as I was about to start reading, I decided to look first at other coverage of the book so far. I found something more interesting than reviews.

Just last week, the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art (Edsel's non-profit), announced that it had "found" another member of the famed art recovery squad -- one of its few women, Mary Regan Quessenberry, now living in Boston.

Edsel has been on a mission on this subject for years, which he has said dates to his reading of Lynn H. Nicholas's The Rape of Europa in the late '90s. He went on to co-produce the documentary of the book, and to publish Rescuing da Vinci (ouch on that locution!), an illustrated book about the wartime looting and post-war aftermath.

Then he established the Monuments Men Foundation to preserve the legacy of the "group of 345 or so men and women from thirteen nations who comprised the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section during World War II."

On the website, you can find a roster of their names -- the foundation is trying to trace them, and compile biographies, photos, and other information about each one. For many, it has only a name.

Ms. Quessenberry, who is 94, was discovered when her niece saw Edsel being interviewed on the BBC.

While everyone's been getting worked up about the exhibition of art, curated by Jeff Koons, from Dakis Joannou's collection at the New Museum, something that looks far worse is going on at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Starting today, it's showing Dreams Come True: Art of the Classic Fairy Tales from The Walt Disney Studio.

The timing couldn't be better -- for Disney. According to NOMA, the show

also will include artwork from the upcoming Walt Disney Animation Studios musical, The Princess and The Frog, an animated comedy from the creators of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, set in New Orleans and due for release at Christmas 2009.

The movie opens nationwide on Dec. 11. Makes you wonder who the biggest beneficiary of this exhibit is, doesn't it?

Wait, it gets worse. According to The Times-Picayune, "Lella Smith, the creative director of Disney's Animation Research Library...selected the art for the exhibit..."

And that was because? NOMA has no curators? (I see several listed on the website.)

Ms. Smith also wrote the catalogue. Disney animation may be a legitimate exhibit. E. John Bullard, the museum's director, defended it to the T-P this way:

Do people still look down their noses at pop culture?...We're going back and discovering what turned people onto art in the first place. ... There can't be anyone in America who has not seen a Disney movie, as a child, a parent or a grandparent.

But that's the wrong question. One right is, why didn't the museum exercise its curatorial judgment and its right to select what is in the exhibit? And other, is this the right time for the show, given the movie tie-in? And a third, did Disney contribute to the cost of the exhibit? And a fourth, whose idea was the exhibit?

This is starting to be a trend, a very bad one.  

BTW, I've chosen to illustrate this post with a picture of NOMA, not a "princess" cell, because why give Disney more free publicity? Turns out that choice was an easy one anyway: Disney has a always been a fierce defender of its copyright, and the picture on NOMA's website for the exhibit is emblazoned with a large  © Disney Enterprises, Inc. that spoils the view anyway.

Photo: Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art  

The Whitney Museum debuted its newly redesigned website today, with new technology and new features, like a background that changes from white to black as day changes to night, plus a series of commissioned internet art projects.

I'm not tech-knowledgeable enough to pronounce on those advancements, but I do like several features, including:

• Each day, the museum's hours are posted on the home page -- they change with the day, so I don't have to click "visit" to find that basic information.
• Events of the day are on the home page.
• The permanent collection is there -- with acess by artist, by decade collected, by artists' birth decade. Only about 400 works are shown, for now -- which is not enough -- but the images are high quality. And you can browse them separately, too.
• The commissioned works "appear on every page of whitney.org for ten to thirty seconds at sunset and sunrise in New York City." I didn't catch that today, but there's time as each will last on the site for three to four months. As Christiane Paul, the Whitney's adjunct curator of new media, said in the press release: "What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces."
• The first one is called Untitled Landscape #5, by ecoarttech, a collaborative founded in 2005 by artists Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. It consists of "fluctuating, glowing orbs of light that disrupt the 'digital landscape.' The size and speed of the orbs will vary based on the number of visitors to the site since the previous sunrise (for sunset) or sunset (for sunrise); higher visitation results in larger, slower-moving orbs."
• There's audio and video -- but the home page doesn't take forever to load (like MoMA's, which I avoid if possible, both because it takes so long time to appear and because it's hard to navigate. I have heard, grapevine, that the museum knows this and is redesigning its redesign. Say it's so, Glenn...).
• There's the usual feature nowadays for registering, saving your own collection, etc.
• The conservation section, listed on the home page (bravo for that!), is thick with information.
• Ditto the research page.
• The navigation stays right there on the left all the time, so there's no need to return to the home page all the time.
• There's a "press" button on the home page! Need I tell you home many arts groups make finding press information/contacts difficult?

Kinks are bound to exist, but I haven't found them yet. Bottom line: Adam Weinberg, the Whitney's director, says the redesign involved nearly every department in the museum -- great, because it doesn't at all look as if it has been designed by committee.

Here's the link to the press release, which has more information -- including details on a wiki feature.  

One speech does does not a policy make, but some people are wondering about President Obama's commitment to arts education after hearing his speech on education last week.

Delivered in Madison, Wisc., on Nov. 4, the president's speech to Wright Middle School discussed his plans for overhauling the educational system on a national level. As one reader of Real Clear Arts pointed out to me, it contained not a single word about art or creativity.

Read it for yourself; here's the link, from Madison.com. A key passage:

It means improving instruction in science, technology, reading, math, and ensuring that more women and people of color are doing well in those subjects. 

The Presidential lapse was all the more ironic because that very evening, Mr. Obama sat through the classical music concert at the White House, joking about his lack of knowledge about when to applaud. "If you didn't know in advance who delivered it, you might have thought it came from a different administration," the reader wrote of the speech.

So, is President Obama soft-pedaling his campaign commitment to arts education? Just asking.  

As it goes with art prizes, so apparently does it go with art museums: you (meaning, I) just get finished writing about one, or two, and another pops up.

Today, the New Museum, possibly trying to change the subject, announced the six finalists for its Ordway Prize, which makes two $100,000 awards -- one each to an artist and a curator or arts writer. (My take on "the subject" -- single-collector exhibits -- is here.)

The artist finalists are Tania Bruguera, from Cuba; William Pope.L, from the United States; and Artur Zmijewski, from Poland.

The curator/writer finalists are Sabine Breitwieser, from Austria; Hou Hanru, from China; and Hamza Walker, from the United States.

Read more about them and the prize here.

And late yesterday, I Iearned that famed American Art collectors Richard and Jane Manoogian are putting their names on a new museum, in an 1830s Indian dormitory on Mackinac Island, Mich. (left). This was announced last year, hasn't received much publicity, and just came up in another context. The museum will display both fine and decorative arts inspired by Mackinac Island, including 18th - 20th century maps, Native American baskets, hand-tinted black-and-white photographs, paintings and other art objects.

The three-story building will open next summer and will offer a studio where visitors can learn to make art. 

Mackinac Island State Park recently put out a call for artists to enter its contest for a $5,000 purchase award at the opening.

On the new museum front, last week brought news that the Dia Art Foundation was planning to build a home in Chelsea, on the footprint of its old premises. Good news when it happens, if it happens. Dia's turbulent history doesn't exactly instill confidence.

Nonetheless, two new museums have moved ahead in recent days.

In Denver, the Clyfford Still Museum, which had been stalled by the recession, has started up again, setting groundbreaking for Dec. 14. According to the Denver Post, the $29 million museum will now open in mid-2011, a year after originally planned.

The Styll museum, which was given some 2,400 works by his widow, Patricia, was stalled by the financial crisis. Prudently, its leaders decided not to start construction until they had raised at least $25 million of the budget, plus $5 million for a fledgling endowment. And they asked for a redesign:

The museum's design, by Portland, Ore., architect Brad Cloepfil, has undergone minor modifications since it was unveiled in March 2008 (it has dropped from 31,500 square feet to 30,000), but its low-lying, rectilinear look remains essentially unchanged.

In part because of those changes and lower construction costs brought on by the depressed economy, the building's estimated cost has been cut from $33 million to $29 million.

Good moves, I think, but of course we won't know until we see the building (above, in a 2008 rendering).

UPDATE, Nov. 13: The Barnes Foundation broke ground today on its new home in central Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, a new museum has opened.  

How would you go about updating, reinterpreting, a Hudson River School painting? We'll soon see one answer, from artist Valerie Hegarty.

On Wednesday, Hegarty will install a site-specific work on the High Line, the elevated park built on a disused rail corridor along the Hudson River, which is turning out to have a snug connection with contemporary art even before the Whitney Museum branch is built there (if it is).

Her "artwork often poses as artifacts of art history gone awry," and this installation -- on the wall between section 1, which is complete, and section 2, which is under construction -- references a painting (above) by Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson River, 1860.

Cropsey's painting, owned by the National Gallery of Art, was painted from memory in the artist's London studio. It "created a sensation among many British viewers who had never seen such a colorful panorama of fall foliage," according to the NGA website.

Hegarty's work is not so beautiful. Her take on a Rothko is at right. For the Cropsey, the High Line says, she "imagines a nineteenth century Hudson River School landscape painting that has been left outdoors, exposed to the elements."

Nature becomes the artist -- and what does nature do?  

I know how this looks: it looks as if I am fixated on prizes in the arts. Really, I'm not -- it just happens that I've either run across or been told about some noteworthy ones lately. And I am, if not fixated, certainly interested in strategies and tactics that encourage people to appreciate the arts.

So here's a prize I like: The Saatchi Gallery-Sunday Telegraph Art Prize for Schools -- which just announced its shortlist of finalists.

The London newspaper launched the prize last May, with these words:

Whether traditional drawing and painting, whether it is work that falls into the messy or the precise schools, whether it is sculptural or digital, art is an expression of creative skills, and they are skills that The Sunday Telegraph would like to encourage among our schoolchildren.

The paper decided to team up with the Saatchi Gallery, which it said already had an education program, to start a partnership designed to "promote art and encourage artists of the future." Students up to 18 years old, worldwide, could enter, with the deadline being Aug. 28.

Since then, a panel -- artists Antony Gormley and Peter Blake, Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Sunday Telegraph's art critic, Ekow Eshun, the artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Camilla Batmanghelidjh, CEO of Kids Company -- has assessed the entries.

Winning produces two prizes, one to the artist and one to his or her school.   

Rocco Landesman didn't take Peoria, but he did seem to refrain from dismissing the city and its arts community again.

The new National Endowment for the Arts chairman yesterday started the whistle-stop tour of U.S. arts communities that he promised a few weeks ago. The first stop was a must because he'd insulted Peorians back in August.

On his visit, Landesman avoided another direct hit, saying he would not compare the production of "Rent" that he saw at the Eastlight Theatre Friday Night to a production of the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. According to the Peoria Journal Star, here's what happened:

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts did observe earlier in the day that amateur arts are worthwhile much in the same way that minor leagues and amateur sports have value in relation to the big leagues and professional sports. One can feed into the other and is worthy of support, he said.

Including NEA support?

"I don't know. I'm not saying the NEA would never support a community theater," Landesman said. "I don't think that's something I could definitively say."

Having learned what not to say, Landeman also said his view of the city had changed:

"The first impression from someone who knows nothing about it is that it's a very meat and potatoes, rust belt, manufacturing city...The thing, of course, that is revelatory is realizing that there is a vibrant arts scene, that there is what has, I think, the beginnings, ultimately, of the real makings of an arts district in the Warehouse District. There's big plans for it. The riverfront museum is a big deal. You have great riverfront, too."

Here's the whole story, plus a local reaction article, also in the Journal Star. WMBD/WYZZ also covered the visit.

Photo: © 2009 GateHouseMedia, Inc., Courtesy Peoria Journal Star.

Art thievery usually boggles the mind -- you can't resell a truly valuable piece -- and yet it flourishes. Do you know where it thrives, and where it's rising?

The Art Loss Register, which tracks reported thefts, sent out a notice at the end of October about the theft of three paintings by Pierre Gavreau in Toronto (coincidentally, I just mentioned Gavreau the other day in my post about the Automatistes):

The window of the gallery was smashed and the paintings removed during an early morning burglary. The paintings [at left] were part of a 30-year retrospective of the artist's work, commemorating his first solo show in Toronto in 1979. All three paintings are abstract works dating from the early 1980s, and had a combined value of over $40,000 USD.

Then, ALR said:

Canada currently ranks #13 in reported art thefts, with over 2,000 lost artworks recorded on the Art Loss Register's database.  Reports of art thefts are on the rise in Canada.  Between 2000 and 2005, only 82 stolen objects were reported.  Since 2006, over 300 have been registered on the ALR's database.

Well, I knew ALR kept track of thefts by country, but I'd not seen the statistics. So I asked, and here's the current top 15:

1) United Kingdom -- 53,709

2) United States -- 21,079

3) France -- 15,562

4) Italy -- 15,041

5) Germany -- 11,137

6) Belgium -- 5,178

7) Switzerland -- 4,540

8) Netherlands -- 3,340

9) Iraq -- 3,292

10) Brazil -- 3,198

11) Austria -- 2,946

12) Poland -- 2,184

13) Canada -- 2,077

14) Turkey -- 1,956

15) Hungary -- 1,700

Don't read too much into the list: it's likely that art theft is rampant in rich Asian countries, say, but it's just not reported to ALR, which is based in London and New York.

The trends are important, though -- they show changes in the theft rate, or the reporting of thefts, or both. 

Let's look at three numbers. 

David T. Little, the New York City-based composer and percussionist, has won DilettanteMusic.com's digital composer-in-residence contest -- by a huge margin, gaining more than half the votes.

This contest, as I mentioned the other day, was judged first by experts and then by the voting public, who could listen to Little's music, and that of the other two contenders, Aaron Gervais from Edmonton, Canada, and Chiayu from Taiwan, on the DilettanteMusic.com website.

Little's entry was called 1986, was written for a string quartet, and, as he described it:

is based on the tune "My Grandfather's Clock." 'I have my own connections to this song, which I must have played hundreds, if not thousands of times as a boy playing in a fife and drum corps in New Jersey.' 1986 calls on this experience, making use of the snare drum part that he played. The "tune" returns throughout the piece in different incarnations - from silly to serious - giving the listener a sense of a hazy, but fond, memory.

Little, who holds a degree in percussion performance, a Masters in Composition and a Master of Fine Arts degree, is studying for a Ph.D. at Princeton.

His victory was announced at a concert Thursday night at Wilton's Music Hall (above) in London, where the London Sinfonietta performed a program curated by the three finalists featuring their contest entries alongside works that influenced them. Little chose the second movement of Charles Ives' Trio, for violin, violoncello & piano, S. 86 (K. 2B17), "TSIAJ ("This scherzo is a joke")" as the work that influenced him.

Could be an interesting year.