Archives for January 2010

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):

• There is a fine passage in Tworkov’s journal, when Elaine de Kooning has commented that Léger’s work “makes everything done here look neurotic,” and Tworkov begins to worry that his own work “seems very neurotic,” and then reflects that the same can be said of “Cézanne, Soutine, El Greco, Watteau, Giacometti.”
• It is clarifying to read the takedowns of Clement Greenberg by Tworkov and Hartigan, who remind us of the healthy skepticism with which his imperious statements were often received. “The influence of Greenberg’s criticism,” Tworkov writes in 1959, “hurts the position of every artist who believes in painting, who believes that a work of art is something lived thru and not merely perpetrated.”
These books give a startlingly immediate sense of all the local infighting and backbiting, as when Greenberg is quoted by Hartigan saying of Alfred Barr, the brilliant director of the Museum of Modern Art, that “everyone knows Barr is a fool and knows nothing about art.”
What emerges [from Hartigan’s journals] is a complex portrait of a woman in the New York art world in the 1950s, a time and a place when, so we have all too often been told, women were little more than helpmates and accessories. Hartigan was anything but a victim….she was a rising star, exhibiting at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, albeit initially as George Hartigan, apparently less a subterfuge than a gesture that mingled a salute to George Eliot and George Sand with an element of “high camp” disguise.
In February 1959, Tworkov had dinner with Mary McCarthy and a number of other people. “Mary,” he writes, “…holds [that] artists ought not to write, that they are inarticulate as she said, ‘Artists can only point.’ ” …After you have read a few pages by Jack Tworkov or Grace Hartigan, there will be no doubt in your mind that painters are among the most articulate people on earth.

I’ve seen evidence of that myself.

Read the review here.

 

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.