Archives for September 2009

It’s pretty darn hard to separate the life of Georgia O’Keeffe from the art of Georgia O’Keeffe.
As critic Henry McBride once remarked, she was from the very start “a newspaper personality.” But if the exhibit on view at the Whitney Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, does what curator Barbara Haskell would like — which is to recreate interest in her less well-known but more daring abstract works — it won’t change her image as a sexy temptress at all.

In part, that’s because the show’s catalogue publishes, for the first time, excerpts from letters O’Keeffe wrote to Alfred Stieglitz over the course of their acquaintance and eventual marriage.

Some of them are, as Whitney Director Adam Weinberg said at the press preview last week, “very steamy.”

Haskell said she wanted to “revitalize [O’Keeffe] for a new generation,” though — and this may help on that goal.

In any case, I’ve written about this for The Daily Beast (here), with excerpts from the excerpts, plus a slide show of her work and photographs.

The credit goes to Sasha Nicholas, who spent hours and hours going through the recently unsealed letters, which are in the collections of Yale.

Weinberg mentioned something else of interest: O’Keeffe was in the first Whitney biennial in 1932, and the museum acquired one of her paintings in 1932. When I searched The New York Times historical database for a review, I found this one by Edward Alden Jewell, but no mention of her work.

Photo: Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, by Alfred Stieglitz, Courtesy Whitney Museum 

As I mentioned here last week, the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution held their annual

public meeting today, and according to an Associated Press article just posted on the Washington Post website, they — no surprise — approved Secretary G. Wayne Clough’s plan to create four new “centers” to explore “the universe and climate change on Earth, world cultures and the American experience.” Clough wants to “help scientists and curators foster new research” And who’ll pay?

The plan calls for an increase of 16 percent to 32 percent in revenue to pay for new priorities. Currently, about 65 percent of the world’s largest museum and research complex’s $1 billion annual budget comes from Congress, though officials expect less than half the new money will come from the federal budget. Instead, Clough will lead the Smithsonian’s first major capital campaign and pledged to pursue other funding sources.

That, as I mentioned last time, is to be a $1 billion campaign — even though, according to AP, “Donations for the budget year ending Sept. 30 were expected to total $110 million, down from $122.4 million in the 2008 fiscal year.”

 
AP did not contain news that the Regents also approved another expansion: This time, I have heard, the National Postal Museum will grow, thanks to a donation by William H. Gross, the billionaire bond-trader/co-founder of Pimco in Newport Beach, Ca. The William H. Gross Stamp Gallery will occupy new, leased space and will contain exhibits focusing on postal history, operations and education.

This donation has not been announced [UPDATED – see below]  (that’s coming in a few days, I’m told by one source) and I could not obtain the amount Gross (at right) gave — or pledged.  

[Read more…] about Smithsonian Regents Approve Clough’s Research Plan, Authorize Another Museum Expansion — UPDATED

A few weeks ago, I wrote in anticipation of seeing Icons of The Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings From Papunya at the Grey Art Gallery of NYU — here — though I hadn’t been able to see it. Now I have — here’s an update.  

The exhibit didn’t disappoint.
This art was new to me, and it seemed magical, intricate, often powerful. While abstract, to us, the works are somewhat representational to the aborigines who painted them. Many are landscapes, with all those dots creating hills, creeks, caves and bush. At right, for example, is part of Classic Pintupi Water Drawing by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi. The center is a water hole, and each of the small concentric circles that surround it is a “soakage,” with creeks flowing into it from waterchannels. Beyond them are hills, and Fred Myers, in his essay about the show, says that Shorty, as a forager, would have visited this place regularly.

Myers mentioned a precursor exhibit in 1988 at the Asia Society Galleries, Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. I am sure I did not see it. When I looked it up, I found that Thomas Kenneally, the Australian novelist, wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine, and liked it. Roberta Smith, in the Times, didn’t. In my quick search, those were the only two reviews I found online.

I’ve also since learned that the American University Museum, Katzen Art Center, in Washington, is currently showing Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors, a traveling exhibition of more contemporary works, organized by the National Gallery of Australia –with an example at left.

Interesting that these shows are going only to college art museums…

Photo: By Tony De Camillo, Courtesy the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (top); Maringka Baker (Pitjantjatjara peoples), Anmangunga, 2006. Courtesy of Art Gallery of South Australia. © Maringka Baker (bottom). 
  

There was something new at the Guggenheim Museum when I visited the other evening — and it wasn’t just the Kandinsky exhibition. Which is, btw, quite fine. Beautifully installed. If you go, don’t miss the works on paper in the side gallery. My two morning newspapers — The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times — gave it good reviews (here and here, respectively) on Friday. Not much more for me to say, really.

Except. I noticed one definite improvement at the Guggenheim as I walked up the spiral: there were small, round, elegant seats along the way, usually in groups of three. They fit right in, nestled against the walls separating the gallery bays. One or two hugged the winding rotunda wall, but I couldn’t tell if someone had moved them there or if that was intentional.

Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong was down in the rotunda when I finished seeing the show, so I asked him about the seats. Indeed they are new, styled to go with this exhibition. Armstrong believes, as I do, that people will get much more out of art if they stop and look deeply at the paintings along the way — seating facilitates that. Maybe people will linger more now.

The museum, he told me, already owns furniture designed for Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, but it hasn’t been used. (At least recently.) After the Kandinsky comes down…

If you’re wondering why I bring this up at all, it’s because little amenities matter to visitors. More than one director, in the past, has told me that when they ask people what changes they’d like to see, the first thing on their list is often “more parking.” And then, more seats.

 

Photo: Composition VIII, 1923, Courtesy the Guggenheim Museum

 

Leanne Goebel, writing on Adobe Airstream, asks (and answers) the right question about the Damien Hirst pencil theft incident:

Scotland Yard says the theft was a stunt for publicity. But any more so than Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull was a stunt for publicity and to inflate the value of his art before his “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” direct-to-auction sale at Sotheby’s?

Perhaps the real issue is that Hirst, the most famous, well-known and richest living conceptual artist is being out-concepted by a teenager?

Ah, but you want to read the whole post, really.