Archives for August 2009

More news items that require little or no comment — just a little underlining:

***The U.S. hosts the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24-25, and the Obama Administration has chosen the occasion to make another statement about the arts.

Most prominently, Michelle Obama is taking her counterparts (read: spouses of the leaders) to the city’s CAPA 6-12, which is a magnet school in downtown Pittsburgh for the arts (left). CAPA stands for Creative and Performing Arts; it has more than 800 students who major in dance, music, literary arts, theater and visual arts. The visitors will see the school’s “state of the art” technology and a performance by students. Mrs. Obama will also host a luncheon at the Andy Warhol Museum and the First Couple will welcome leaders at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden.

*** Another day, another deaccessioning controversy,” writes Daniel Grant in the August Maine Antiques Digest. This one, which took place in 2007, was at the St. Augustine Historical Society, which sold off, unannounced and uncompetitively, 24 oil sketches by Martin Johnson Heade. It reaped $1 million. “Theodore Stebbins Jr., curator of American art at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, and an authority on Martin Johnson Heade, this collection of 24 works represents “the only substantial group of Heade’s oil sketches in existence. Perhaps there may be a stray sketch around somewhere, but this is the main group.” (more) My thanks to Donn Zaretsky for noticing that one.

 

***Zaha Hadid’s much-delayed pavilion in Chicago’s Millenium Park, built as part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham’s Chicago Plan, has finally opened — today. It was set to open in mid-June. The Wall Street Journal has written about the delay and the design (here) and so has the Chicago Tribune (most recently, here). If the reality matches the rendering, it looks as if it were worth waiting for.

***UPDATED: The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is meeting this morning, and is set to approve has approved the confirmation of Jim Leach as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, without hearings. Given his GOP credentials and his endorsement of President Obama last August, this is all happening as expected. When the full Senate will vote to confirm, though, is unclear. Rocco Landeman’s nomination to head the NEA is not moving along as quickly.

 

 

Remember when the travel schedule of Tom Krens was enough to send speculation through the roof on the subject of the next Guggenheim branch? Krens has been sidelined on that score, but his favorite architect Frank O. Gehry has not. But it’s not the Guggenheim-Bilbao that’s the model these days;
now Disney Hall is IT.

So, let me say straight out, this is just a rumor. 

But in mid-July, Gehry was spotted in both Barquisameto and Caracas, Venezuela. His very presence, with Gustavo Dudamel, set tongues wagging about the possibility that Gehry will design a concert hall for the Orchestral and Training Center for Social Action Music West — according to local reports. (An intrepid friend, who happened to be in Venezuala, tipped me off to the sighting of Gehry.) The Inter-American Development Bank is said to be financing the hall, but there’s as yet no mention of it on the bank’s website.

There’s no official confirmation of Gehry’s involvement either, but apparently Dudamel, who has befriended Gehry, loves his new home in Los Angeles and has shown it off to influential Venezuelans, who agree. Above, Dudamel is taking Gehry to the site allocated for the center in Barquisameto, his hometown, along with Jose Antonio Abreau and Henry Falcon, the city’s mayor.

[Read more…] about Frank Gehry’s Venezuelan Visit Sparks Rumor of A New Job

The Neue Galerie has a small “focus” exhibition on Oskar Kokoschka — just seven paintings and, in a separate gallery, 40 works on paper. To me, it illustrates the perils of placing a good but not great artist among his more impressive confreres and surroundings.

The seven works, all portraits, hang in a wood-paneled gallery that’s also home (at the moment) to two fine Schiele landscapes and five vitrines filled with silver, glass, jewelry and other decorative arts by Dagobert Peche, Koloman Moser and, above all, Josef Hoffmann. Many are dazzling.

Just across a threshold is the center gallery, filled with Klimts, including the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I that cost the Galerie’s maestro, Ronald S. Lauder, $135 million. It’s flanked by the two Georges Minne sculptures, Kneeling Youths, that were given to the Neue Galerie by Bloch-Bauer’s heirs in 2007. They, like the painting, had been restituted by Austria to Maria Altmann and her relatives, in 2006. The youths had been displayed near the portrait in Austria all those decades ago, before World War II, and both the narrative and the juxtaposition remain compelling today.

With all that competition, if you were simply visiting the Neue Galerie, not specifically for the Kokoschka show, you might miss his paintings.(His Rudolf Blumner, 1910, is at left.) The fact that they are hung high, over furniture, doesn’t help.

Kokoschka’s works on paper struck me as more interesting, more emotional, rawer — sometimes graphic, sometimes expressionistic. They made me wonder if the paintings might have held up better in a room of their own.

None of this is meant to discourage visitors to the Neue Galerie.  

[Read more…] about Kokoschka at Neue Galerie — Just So-So, But Go Anyway