Archives for May 2009

Over the weekend, the Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting in America put on an excellent symposium called “Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals.” Sounds too academic to be interesting, I know — but the fact
that the overflow audience was filled with collectors, dealers, auction house experts and people who are just interested in art suggests otherwise. (Disclosure: Inge Reist, the Center’s director, is a friend, and as a consultant, I helped direct some funding to the Center.)

The Center is just two years old, and was formed to address this gaping hole in art historical scholarship. Collectors, after all, are the ones who largely stock museums. The Met’s longtime curator of 20th Century art Bill Lieberman used to say he was a “collector of collectors,” not of paintings. More exhibitions — like Walter Liedtke’s “Age of Rembrandt” show in 2007 and the 2006 show of dealer-collector Ambroise Vollard, both at the Met — are likely to be organized around collectors.

The Center has already held four symposia (plus co-sponsored one in Venice on women art collectors), established fellowships for scholars, offered workshops and announced the creation of a prize, funded by Sotheby’s, for a distinguished publication on art collecting in America.

I’ve gone to sessions at a couple of the symposia (one on artists as collectors, another on “tuning points” in modern art collecting).

This one was the best so far.

[Read more…] about Putting Collectors Under the Microscope

As the White House announced yesterday, Michelle Obama will visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday. She’ll be there for the ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the redone American Wing. Afterwards, she’ll meet with some of the city’s “arts and entertainment leaders,” and then — no doubt after changing clothes — she will head across Central Park to the Metropolitan Opera House for the opening gala of the American Ballet Theater’s spring season.

That’s all good news; I’m as thrilled as any arts-lover that the First Lady will bring more attention to the arts.

But there’s still something wrong with this picture: call me a grouch, but why is it always the First Lady’s job to visit museums and go to the ballet? Admittedly, the President has watched the Alvin Ailey company perform at the Kennedy Center and I believe he attended the poetry jam at the White House on Tuesday night (at least he was there to introduce Michelle as “the star of the show”).

I’m not suggesting that he ignore the economy or health care or Afghanistan. But the arts aren’t women’s work, and I wish he would break the pattern of turning them over to the First Lady.   

 

Lucky for me I was in Philadelphia the other day, and finished my task there early enough to
stop in at “Cezanne & Beyond” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There’s no need for me to repeat all the accolades it has received. I wholeheartedly agree with them. But I do want to differ with a recurring subtheme in some reviews of the show: that the connection drawn between Cezanne and post-1945 artists is, shall we say, stretched.

For some artists, maybe, but for one — and this was a true surprise to me — no. I think the link with Ellsworth Kelly is indeed there. The doubters have focused on Kelly’s monochrome
 wedge of a painting, Lake II, 2002 (above right), which mimics the shape of the sea in a Cezanne painting of
Marseilles harbor. If that were the only evidence, I’d agree.

But Kelly’s delicate pencil drawings of trees and of Mont Sainte Victoire make a better case. There are four in the show. And there’s a pencil-and-watercolor rendering of apples (left), two pencil drawings of geraniums, and several other works that also bolster the case. Importantly, the tree and apple drawings date to 1949 and 1950 — when Kelly was still in his 20s. Another stunning work, Meschers, owned by the Museum of Modern Art, was also painted in his early years, and draws on Cezanne’s flat spaces and forms. The geraniums, Mont Sainte Victoire and Lake II are more recent.

Unfortunately for me, the museum does not have permission
to reproduce the tree drawings — so you’ll have to go to the show or the catalogue to see exactly what I’m talking about. The Mont Saint Victoire drawing, from 2000, is at right.

One other point about the show: Some sections, particularly the portraits surrounding Madame Cezanne, made an exhibition in themselves. I watched as visitors stopped and really looked at these pictures for far longer than most museum-goers do (which is 3 seconds per work, by some surveys). It was great.

The exhibition, originally set to close this coming Sunday, has been extended until May 31.  

Photo Credits: © Ellsworth Kelly.

   

Early yesterday morning, I caught the news that Rocco Landesman, a Broadway producer and president of Jujamcyn Theaters, had been appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; then I went out on an all-day assignment. I expected that, by the time I got home last evening, there’d be a lot of commentary on the choice. But I haven’t seen any: people seem to be as mystified as I am by it.* Landesman’s press over the years paints him as a dynamo and as outspoken. Other than that, we’ll have to wait and see.

About a week ago, I’d picked up word that the Obama Administration was getting close to naming chairs of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the NEA, but the White House press office put me off, saying they had nothing specific to say “for now.” But with the NEA job filled, pending Landesman’s confirmation, can the NEH nomination be far behind?

I don’t think so, so I am going out on a limb here, based on fresh reporting: I think former Republican Congressman Jim Leach of Iowa
has the NEH job. His name surfaced as a contender last year in a Chicago Tribune story. Among his attributes: he co-founded the Congressional Humanities Caucus, endorsed Obama last summer, plays into the President’s desire to be bipartisan, and is currently a visiting professor at Princeton. And he hasn’t gotten any of the financial policy posts his name has been bruited for or an ambassadorial post.

I haven’t tied this down completely, but the White House is now “no comment”-ing, rather than suggesting that nothing is imminent. I expect a leak to The New York Times or the Washington Post soon, possibly by Friday. 

Would Leach be good for the job? He knows Washington, and he’s well-liked there; that’s good. One fear is that he was hoping for a larger job, and didn’t get it.

*UPDATE MID-MORNING: some newspapers have weighed in on Landesman, positively, citing various people calling the appointment “bold.”

May has been a busy month: that’s why I have not yet had a chance to take note of the generous gift from photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto to the Museum of Fine Arts in
Houston that was announced on May 1. Ishimoto, born in San Francisco in 1921 to Japanese parents, gave MFAH 289 photos, spanning his career and including works from his major series. The museum purchased 11 more — bringing its total collection of his work to 400 photographs. 

Nearly seventy of the works are already
on view in an exhibit called Ways of Seeing: The Photography of Ishimoto Yasuhiro, which runs until September 13.

Ishimoto learned photography while he was interned in Colorado during WWII, then studied with Harry Callahan at the “New Bauhaus” Institute of Design in Chicago and also with Aaron Siskind. Edward Steichen launched his career in earnest when he chose Ishimoto for the legendary Family of Man exhibition in 1955.

Yasufumi Nakamori, the MFAH’s Assistant Curator of Photography, has written about Ishimoto, who he says “brought the New Bauhaus and the American street
esthetic to postwar Japanese art.”

Why the gift? Nakamori’s longstanding relationship with Ishimoto certainly helped prompt it. (He culled the acquired photos from about 5,000 pictures.) Ishimori also knows Anne Wilkes Tucker, the MFAH’s Curator of Photography, from an earlier exhibit she curated. 

The two black-and-white photos here are from his Tokyo series; both are untitled. At left is an untitled work from his Composition series.

 Photo Credits: © Ishimoto Yasuhiro