Archives for February 2011

Here’s a list of recent exhibitions, all mounted by the same museum:

• Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman
• Starburst: Color Photography In America, 1970-1980
• Roaring Tigers, Leaping Carp: Decoding the Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting
• Wedded Perfection: Two Centuries of Wedding Gowns
• Jeep, 1942
• Heavy Metal: Arms and Armor

Which would you most like to see? Which was most educational? Most uplifting? Which most fit with the institution’s founding ambition to be the “Art Palace of the West,” to “bring a public art institution to life for the benefit of all citizens”?   

Finally, which do you think attracted the biggest audience?

Easy to answer that last one: More women than men go to museums, and more people are interested in clothes than in art. Wedded Perfection, which ran from Oct. 9 through Jan. 30, set an attendance record for the Cincinnati Art Museum, which is where these shows took place. 63,176 came to see it, exceeding a record set seven years ago when 62,203 people came to see Petra: Lost City of Stone.

Wedded Perfection displayed nearly 60 gowns from the late 1700s through modern times. Interestingly, along with the show, the museum “decided to give away a wedding,” according to a press release that is not posted online. “Local couples were invited to submit video applications, telling us why they should be chosen. After an overwhelming response, we narrowed the list to four finalists, and asked visitors to the Cincinnati Art Museum to vote for their favorite.”

In a week when the National Endowment for the Arts redefined arts participation so that it looks as if more Americans are participating in ‘the arts,” none of this is surprising. Yes, museums are struggling to attract visitors in an entertainment-heavy world, but I can’t say I like that roster of exhibitions. Especially when you consider that a show called The Amazing American Circus Poster, opened on Saturday. Also on view, a micro car, contemporary Dutch design, a collection of contemporary art from the 21c Museum Hotel, which will open a branch in Cincinnati next year, and — at last — Force of Nature, which unites Barbizon paintings with contemporary Japanese ceramics.

The Cincinnati museum is a wonderful museum located in a park that’s not really near anything — so that’s a drawback it struggles with. The museum recently expanded free parking, which costs $4, to those who buy more than $15 worth of something in the gift shop or spend more than $10 on food, etc. Admission is free.

But I wish it were better at attracting people to — yes, I’m saying it — real art. I’ve put a few things from its permanent collection here. William Harnett’s Last Rose of Summer and Mantegna’s A Sibyl and A Prophet.

It’s not that costumes and design are not art (I’m wary of those Jeeps and the micro car, however), it’s simply that the mix in Cincinnati seems unbalanced to me — too many “crowd-pleasing” shows, the equivalent of Musak or easy-listening music.

I’ve written about these trends before (here, here and here). From my point of view, there’s not much to celebrate when a wedding show with a contest sets attendance records. But it all depends on what your definition of art is…

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum

I confess that I am not a big fan of Marc Chagall’s art, and I’ve never quite understood his popularity.

Nevertheless, I’m writing about Paris Through The Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle, which opens on Tuesday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art anyway. That’s because I am interested in the cross-fertilization artists experience, particularly at artists’ colonies (see an old NYTimes article of mine), and the Philadelphia show also explores La Ruche — “the beehive” — at left.

La Ruche was the three-story cylindrical building in Montparnasse, Paris, that many artists of the early 20th century called home. Chagall moved there soon after arriving in Paris in 1911, and worked there too.

La Ruche was founded in 1902 by French sculptor Alfred Boucher, but it soon became the hive of Eastern European artists, though not exclusively. At one time or another, the rolls included Archipenko, Kisling, Lipchitz, Soutine, Leger, Zadkine, Pechstein, Leger, Brancusi, Rivera, Modigliani, Delaunay, and others.

Must have been quite a place. World War II killed it, though.

In Philadelphia, the show is not a history of La Ruche, but the museum says it has explored creative exchanges that took place in the 1910s and 1920s among the artists who knew Chagall. They all mixed elements of cubism with their own folk traditions.

La Ruche had its own exhibition schedule, and Chagall, the museum says in its press release, once said, “In La Ruche, you either came out dead or famous.”

Paris Through the Window is representative of another trend at museums: though a few key works are borrowed — including the titular one, which comes from the Guggenheim Museum — most are drawn from the Philadelphia museum’s permanent collection. The economy bites.

Nothing wrong with that, btw. If the show’s advanced billing is correct, it looks as if the museum did a fine job of it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum (bottom)

Bye-bye Renoir. I learned this morning that the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is selling Femme cueillant des Fleurs, c 1874. The painting will be offered at the Dickinson booth at Maastricht, Mar. 18-27, with a price tag of $15 million.

I learned this from a Maastricht press release, not as I would have preferred, from the Clark itself.

Proceeds, the release says, will be used to strengthen the Clark’s collection (in accordance with the policy of the Association of Art Museum Directors). No violation of the rules…

Sterling Clark bought this picture from Durand-Ruel in 1933. He loved Renoir. From his first purchase of Renoir’s work in 1916 through the next forty years, Clark and Francine bought and bought. The Clark owns 32 other works by Renoir, certainly one of the biggest concentrations in the U.S.

This is an early Impressionist work, and — though it may seem a bit sugary to some eyes — could well be in demand because it was made jast as Impressionism began to develop.

As the release says,

It also serves as a poignant reminder of a story of fierce jealousy involving Monet’s first and second wives. Camille Doncieux was 18 years old when Monet met her in 1865 and she soon became his lover and was the model for a number of his works in these early years.  Monet’s father refused to accept her into the family because of her humble origins but despite this the couple married in 1870.

The lifelong friendship between Monet and Renoir was at its closest between 1866 and 1875 and the two men often painted together, setting up their easels side by side. Camille was depicted in a number of their paintings…from this important period….She is shown standing in a field near St Cloud, outside Paris, clutching a bunch of flowers…A year after Renoir painted this picture, Camille became ill and in 1879 she died aged 32 , her already poor health worsened by the recent birth of her second son Michel.

Monet’s second wife Alice Hoschedé was a jealous woman who destroyed all the material that she could find relating to Camille….It is perhaps appropriate that this fascinating and enigmatic figure in the history of Impressionism is known to us almost entirely through the paintings for which she posed.

As I’ve said before, I think museums should make these disclosures, not the gallery or the fair or the auction house. I also have reservations about selling through dealers, but at least this time it is very public, which is the source of my qualms.

As to whether this particular painting should be sold, I’d like to know more about its exhibition history and to see the other Renoirs in the collection. How important was this one to Sterling Clark? We don’t know.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of TEFAF Maastricht and The Clark  

Here comes the Battle of the Sexes. At least, that’s how the Delaware Art Museum is billing an exhibition that opens on Mar. 5. What makes it noteworthy here is that it’s another experimental attempt to get people to participate actively in the arts, as an experience, rather than passive viewing — about which I have mixed emotions.

Battle of the Sexes was organized by The Philadelphia Women’s Caucus for Art, a new group for me, but which (I learned via its website) was founded in 1972 in connection with the College Art Association. The Philadelphia chapter is the oldest of The Women’s Caucus for Art groups. Among its activities is organizing exhibitions.

This exhibition will present works by women artists, each of whom has chosen a male artist to exhibit a work alongside hers. Neither one of the pair will be attributed to an artist on the wall labels — so viewers will not know who made what. (Two are posted here.)

Then, the museum is asking visitors to mark, on ballots, who they think made what — female or male. A week before the exhibition closes, the museum will tally the “votes” and the results will be posted, along with the names and genders of the artists. For those who don’t expect to return, the results will also be posted on the Philadelphia-WCA blog and they will be emailed to voters who request the results. 

What’s the point? The museum says the show aims to “have you looking, thinking, talking, voting, and coming back to see the mysteries revealed.”

But I probed further, “thinking” about what precisely? Was the exhibition intended to prove that we can tell what sex an artist is by the subject matter? Or to prove we can’t tell? Or to show that one is as good as the other?

None of those, exactly. Here is the museum’s answer:

The point of the exhibition is to see if people have preconceptions about the gender of artists based on the piece of art they see in front of them. Do floral paintings and pastels look feminine to people? And do rustic outdoor scenes or action images seem masculine? This exhibition is to let people find out if they have these preconceptions and to encourage people to think about how they form preconceptions.

I don’t know about this. In simpler times, people would guess that a woman painted Mary Cassatt’s paintings and that only a man could be as obsessed with sex as Picasso (do I have your attention now?).

But in these times, Sarah Lucas and Ghada Amer, among others, make sex a subject, and Charles LeDray sews tiny clothing items. Does it matter? Does the public think about such matters, or care?

Though I’m an advocate for equality of opportunity, I don’t. Nor do I necessarily want my visual art to be participatory. But let’s see what the the Delaware Art Museum finds out.

Photo Credits: Taxi, by N.P.D. (top) and Bluebird’s Journey by M.P. (bottom), courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum  

Much has been made in the last week or so of the article published in Psychology Today arguing for the value of “supporting the arts” at a time when the Obama Administration and Congress have targeted the National Endowment for the Arts for cuts.

It’s a good article that makes good points about the value of participating in arts and crafts activities, particularly among youngsters, for the impact it has on creativity later on. I believe in the conclusions.

But I’m not so sure I buy the connection with the budget cuts.

The bottom line of the PT article was this: “Hobble the arts and crafts and you hobble innovation. Hobble innovation and our economy will suffer. Conversely, invest in arts and crafts and every dollar will stimulate the economy not only today, but through innovation a host of tomorrows.”

But in the article, the authors asked honors students about their experiences and discovered that the correlation was with those who “had lessons” in arts and crafts — not exposure to the arts. And, they wrote:

lifelong involvement in dance, composing music, photography, woodwork, metal work, mechanics, electronics and recreational computer programming were particularly associated with development of creative capital.

And:

A particularly striking finding was that early hands-on experience [emphasis mine] with arts and crafts was critical to continuing participation in these arts and crafts. And continuing participation in arts and crafts across a lifetime was one of the strongest correlates to generating patents and new companies.

Does any of that have a tight connection with what the NEA spends money on? Not as far as I can see.

Federal budgets are notoriously obfuscatory, but according to the NEA website, here are some potentially relevant programs:

• NEA Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth: $6.7 million awarded in FY 2008 (latest figure): “projects that provide opportunities for children and youth to gain in-depth knowledge and skills in the arts in school and community-based settings.”
• The Arts Education Partnership: “convenes forums to discuss topics in arts education, publishes research materials supporting the role of arts education in schools, and is a clearinghouse for arts education resource materials.” No figure given.
• Coming Up Taller program: “annual award recognizes outstanding community arts and humanities after-school programs for at-risk and underserved youth” — $1.2 million since 1998, if I am reading the site correctly.
• Improving the Assessment of Student Learning in the Arts: “the first nationwide effort to examine current practices in the assessment of K-12 student learning in the arts both in and out of the classroom.  Best practices and assessment models in all art forms will also be shared.”

In FY 2010, the NEA budget was $167.5 million (and that’s about what it’s spending this year so far, though it awaits budget approval). In its FY 2012 budget request — a total of $146.255 million — the NEA reduced its funding to state and regional agencies for arts education in favor of prioritizing Rocco Landesman’s “Our Town” initiative — which infuses arts into communities in hopes of creating jobs and stablizing communities — among other things. Further, the 2012 budget request redirects its emphasis on arts education from students to people of all age levels.

So, let’s go ahead and talk up the PT article and go ahead and blast budget cuts. But unless the NEA starts doing more for participatory arts lessons, I’d downplay the link. 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Elmhurst Academy (top), artclass.info (bottom)