Archives for March 2011

The distance between Prague and La Jolla, Ca. is 6,000 miles, but if you’ve ever wondered how fast hot art can travel, a story coming out of the Art Loss Register suggests that kind of distance is nothing. Only four days elapsed between the time a photograph was stolen from Prague’s Museum of Decorative Arts this month and when a suspicious California dealer contacted the Art Loss Register about the photo.

The story also shows that the thief, or thieves, started looking for a buyer before they took the photograph.

The photograph in question is The Wave, by Frantisek Drtikol, made in 1925 (right). On Mar. 13, shortly after the Prague museum opened, someone cut it from its frame and walked away with it. Fortunately, its loss was noted and reported, and Harvinder Kaur, an art historian working for the ALR dutifully (and quickly) recorded the theft: The Wave became an item on ALR’s 350,000-strong database of lost, stolen and missing artwork.

On Mar. 17, the La Jolla dealer, Joseph Bellows, contacted the ALR. He had become increasingly suspicious of the manner in which he was approached by the seller, surprised that such an important work was available for sale, and he had read press reports of the theft. ALR immediately identified the photograph as the work stolen just days earlier in Prague.
 
In the course of the case, ALR learned that from correspondence between Bellows and the suspected thief or handler, that Bellows had been contacted about a potential purchase of the piece in late January of this year.

But because everyone, including police and diplomats, acted quickly and responsibly, the photo went back to the museum on Tuesday.

It was one of ALR’s fastest recoveries.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of ALR

 

Another new museum opened its doors late last week: The Baroness Thyssen Museum in central Malaga, Spain. It contains about 230 paintings owned by the Baroness (below), from her “private collection.” That’s as opposed to what her late husband amassed over his lifetime, much of which is on display in Madrid at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. It’s full of wonders by Old Masters, Impressionists and post-Impressionists, American Masters, and on and on.

Located in the 16th Century Villalon Palace, which was restored over the past two years at a cost of more than $18 million (plus more to extend the galleries into adjacent buildings), the new museum — aka the Carmen Thyssen Museum — displays works by Picasso, Miro, Sorolla, Fortuny, Zuloaga and other mostly Andalucian artists, according to several news reports. The museum has about 77,000 sq. ft. of space. Malaga’s mayor said he expects it to attract 200,000 to 250,000 visitors a year, according to Typically Spanish. It will also mount temporary exhibitions.

The collection has been lent, not given, and just until 2025. She has received some criticism for that, since the time period is quite short.

But this story includes a tidbit that’s more revealing than loan vs. gift — it’s about how the art world has changed and how inflated values have become. News reports have placed the value of the collection on loan to the Malaga museum at $950 million. But in 1993, the Baron’s collection of 700 works were sold to Spain for $338 million. In today’s dollars, that’s less than $520 million. So I guess Spain got a bargain…then.

Now, will the loan to the museum enhance the value of her paintings? Will she sell them to Malaga in 2025?

And yes, the Baroness does like her museums. She was responsible for convincing her late husband to sell his collection to Spain in 1993, she once had another building in Madrid for her own collection of European paintings, now there’s Malaga, and according to AFP,

Baroness Thyssen, a former Miss Spain and the baron’s fifth wife, said she also hopes to lend another part of his vast collection to another museum to be established in a monastery in the northeastern region of Catalonia.

These works are at present in the modern wing of the Thyssen Museum in Madrid.

I have not yet seen any review of the museum, just “press.”

UPDATE, 3/14: There’s trouble at the museum. According to The Independent, the museum’s director and a trustee have resigned because of “meddling” by the baroness and the mayor.

 
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Solarpix / PR Photos

If you’re not into Asian art, you may have skipped the article in The New York Times special Museums section on Mar. 17 about Maxwell Hearn, the incoming head of the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum*: “At Met, New Leadership (and Direction) for Asian Art” by Holland Cotter.

Which would have been too bad, because it was the section’s sleeper article. Within it were two-and-a-half excellent points about museums and art in general.

1) Hearn is looking for someone to replace himself as plain old curator of Chinese art, and it’s going to be hard because there’s so little supply. He said,

There’s been a real shift in the field, and I think it is across the board in art history. We’re all seeing that young students are more and more interested exclusively in contemporary. Anything that’s old is a hard sell.

This, I hear from many art historians is true. One well-known respected source said he’d read somewhere that 80% of art history students now want to study just contemporary art. Ouch!

2) Hearn said other departments could take a leaf from Asian art as they think about displaying the permanent collections — that is, regularly changing what’s on view. Because of their fragile nature, and inability to withstand constant light,

In Asian art, we’re used to rotating our collections of Chinese and Japanese paintings and Indian miniatures all the time.

Good idea. Not every museum has the depth of the Met’s collection, but I am surprised sometimes by what’s in storage. 

UPDATE: ORIGINALLY, I WROTE HERE “Recently, for example, when I visited the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, I was disappointed that a marvelous Martin Johnson Heade, which I wrote about in 1999, was not on view. The MFAH had paid $1.25 million for Magnolias on a Gold Velvet Cloth, which “for years covered a hole in the wall in an Indiana home, its value unknown to the owner and its existence unknown to art experts.” ” BUT MFAH TELLS ME THE PAINTING IS ON VIEW. I REGRET THE USE OF THIS EXAMPLE, BUT I STILL AM SURPRISED BY WHAT’S IN STORAGE AT MUSEUMS.

3) Everyone, as Hearn implied, wants to collect contemporary art, including the Met’s Asian art department. But there’s a caveat, from my point of view and Hearn hints at it:

China, Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam — all these places are creating wonderful things, and at the Met we have the opportunity to give this work an historical context.

Many museums seem to be going about buying art from Latin America, Asia and the Middle East without attempting to give that historical context or even attempt to see it in a continuum. Not a good thing, is it?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The New York Times

*A consulting client of mine supports the Metropolitan Museum

  

Last November, I wrote here about a proposal by Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, to sell four works from Still’s gigantic collection (which are part of the estate of his widow, Patricia) before they are officially accessioned by the museum. The museum plans to use the money not for new acquisitions — Still (pictured, right) is dead, afterall, and it’s a one-artist museum — but for all museum activities.

No “accession,” no “deaccession,’ and presumably no furor, Sobel and the city of Denver (the actual beneficiary of the estate) thought. It still caused a minor furor, though.

But Sobel had done the right thing, announcing his idea and seeking court approval for the sale, which ideally will be made in a bundle to another museum.

Last Thursday, a circuit court in Maryland agreed to the petition. A sale can go ahead.

The museum is moving ahead, too: Ground was broken in December 2009 for a building designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture and located near the
Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library and the new Colorado History Museum. The museum has raised about $30 million so far, and opening is slated for next fall.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Estate of Clyfford Still 

Everywhere, state governments are cutting spending, including arts budgets and education budgets. What does this mean for college museums and arts centers?

The other day, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a somewhat contrarian article headlined In an Era of Campus Cutbacks, Performing-Arts Centers Keep Going Up. It led off with the opening of the Valley Performing Arts Center at Cal State, Northridge (left), which happened just about the time California was slashing its higher education budget by $1.4 billion.

Of course, these centers were begun a long time ago. But read on:

Multimillion-dollar venues, many of them financed largely by state money, are opening or planned at colleges across the country….prompt[ing] critics to talk about “edifice complexes” and “conspicuous consumption.”

…In February, James Madison University opened its five-venue, $82-million Forbes Center for the Performing Arts. Smaller facilities have opened within the past year or so at George Mason University’s branch campus in Manassas, Va. ($46-million), Sam Houston State University ($38.5-million), and on Montgomery College’s campus in Silver Spring, Md. ($31-million).

…But even with the economy sputtering and gloom pervading legislative budget committees, new arts venues are in the works at institutions as diverse as Hagerstown Community College, in Maryland; the University of Texas’s Permian Basin campus; and the State University of New York at Potsdam. With colleges everywhere raising tuition and cutting programs, such projects have some people questioning administrative priorities.

The article goes on to say that some people now thing that art centers are a “necessity,” not a luxury, for colleges, while others wonder whether this is part of the oversupply (glut?) in the arts that National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman spoke about recently.

The Chronicle hasn’t done a recent survey on museums, but we do know of some recent or planned openings, including the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State, the interdisciplinary Granoff Center at Brown, and Dartmouth’s abuilding visual arts center.

I think a couple of things are going on here, starting with the fact that donors still prefer to contribute to capital campaigns than operating funds or endowments — which makes for more buildings.

At the same time, I hear — anecdotally — that university museums are being pressed to prove their worth, and often that means getting more attendance from people outside the university community. Not enough visitors = possible support cuts, which is kind of crazy considering that university museums tend to be free (still, right?).

College performing arts centers often serve the surrounding community, too — necessarily in some cases, because they are quite big.

But for museums, going too far beyond the campus may be bad because it will undoubtedly affect exhibition programming, leading it away from scholarship and more toward popular exhibits. And more visitors usually increases costs.

Just this weekend, when I read the annual Museums section in The New York Times — published on Mar. 17, while I was out of the country — it was noticeable how many university museums took out ads: I counted 11, from full page to tiny boxes. Last year’s edition carried four ads from university museums. That’s a change in outreach.

I know I am mixing public and private institutions here, but the repercussions are likely to be similar: additional dependence on private donors, and more pressure on college museums and arts centers to attract visitors from a broader community.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Cal State, Northridge