Archives for October 2009

In early September, I visited the Montclair Art Museum to see its Cezanne and American Modernism exhibition, and I came away an even bigger fan of … Marsden Hartley.

And now I can talk about it, because my review of the show is now published, in today’s Wall Street Journal. (I had already written once about this exhibit, in July, when curator Gail Stavitsky answered Five Questions from me. But then, I hadn’t seen it.)

Of course, Cezanne is the master, but in an exhibit like this — which tries to show his influence on 34 American artists, including photographers like Steichen and Stieglitz, and Western artists — his works are not a revelation. So, instead of playing the game of “which work would I take home if I had my choice of one,” I instead tried to decide which disciple of Cezanne in this crop came out the best.

And it has to be Hartley. Stavitsky said in July that he was the one in the exhibit on whom Cezanne had the most influence, but that held no sway with me. I chose Hartley because, as I wrote for the WSJ, “he emerges his own man.” Viewers can see how Hartley learned, by imitating, yet — knowing his later works — also developed his own style. The two Hartley works here, a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire (there’s another on my July post) and a painting from Vence that is not in this exhibit but is much like one that is (I could not obtain an image of it), are from the late 1920s. Hartley had many more years of work ahead.  

As my review implies, not all the artists in Cezanne and American Modernism rose above homage and imitation. Go anyway: this story needed to be told, even if it’s not all happy endings.

 

The British magazine Art Review is out with its annual Power 100 list of the most important people in contemporary art. At the very top is Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Swiss curator/critic. Here’s a quick look at the Americans who rose to the top in various categories (i.e., they are not the absolute highest in each category):

Top U.S. museum director: Glenn Lowry, at No.2 on the list. 

Top U.S. dealer: Larry Gagosian, at No. 5

Top U.S. collector: Eli Broad, at No. 7

Top U.S. artist: Bruce Naumann, at No. 10

Top U.S. auction execs: Amy Cappellazzo & Brett Gorvy, at No. 26

Top U.S. curator: Ann Philbin, at No. 28

Top U.S. critic: Roberta Smith, at No. 61

The whole list is here, and if you really have time to spend, you’ll also find lists from earlier years there, so you can see who’s up and who’s down.

My turn to weigh in on the Metropolitan Opera’s new Tosca, but not the production. Rather, I want to comment on director Luc Bondy’s reaction, and the Met’s general stance about classic productions and the need for new versions. I did so in an opinion piece published today on Forbes.com.

Let me say from the outset that I’m not against reinterpretations, as long as they are tasteful and respect/enhance the music/libretto. I take issue with Bondy’s blame-the-audience response. Despite negative reaction from both audience members and from respected critics (many of whom disliked the production and could hardly be viewed as reactionary), Bondy’s public response was “I was scandalized that they were so scandalized. I didn’t know that ‘Tosca’ was like the Bible in New York.” He simply refused to countenance that he had laid an egg, to use Variety-talk.

I also take issue with the common belief that young people won’t attend, or like, classic productions. As I say in the piece,

Is it not condescending to suggest that work created before their time is off-putting or uninteresting to young people? They still appreciate a van Gogh, don’t they? And in recent weeks, the Metropolitan Museum has attracted hordes of people, young and old, to see Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid,” from 1657-58, and Michelangelo’s first painting, “The Torment of St. Anthony,” made in 1487-88.

Is there a complete difference between the musical and visual arts? I don’t think so.

You can read the whole Forbes piece here.

UPDATED, 10/15: Parterre Box parses the problem with reaction to Tosca at more length, and better, than I did.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

This was in several hours ago, but I was away from my email — but I see no news item on it, so let me just post without comment:

Frederic C. Hamilton, Chairman of the Board of the Denver Art Museum, announced today the appointment of Christoph Heinrich as the new Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum (DAM) beginning January 1, 2010. Heinrich has been deputy director of the DAM since January 2009 and the Polly and Mark Addison Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art since October 2007. Heinrich will replace Lewis I. Sharp following Sharp’s December 31, 2009, retirement after 20 years as director.

UPDATED: Don’t expect many changes in the near future. The Denver Post quotes Henrich as saying: “There is in place, a very good, very stable and solid structure, and we we might tweak and we might open some new doors, but it won’t be a revolution.” Here’s the link.

And here’s more from the DAM press release:

With more than 15 years of experience in museums, Heinrich has organized more than 50 exhibitions including nearly 20 consisting of major loans from around the world. Heinrich came to Denver from Hamburg Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, where he spent the last seven of his 13-year tenure as Chief Curator for Contemporary Art, Collections and Exhibitions. He attended the Universitat Wien in Vienna, where he studied Art History and Dramatics. He later attended Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitat München, where he earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. Heinrich is a member of the Warhol Authentication Board and came to Denver to fill the role of curator of modern and contemporary art after an international search.
 
Since then, he has organized a reinstallation of the 17,000-square-foot modern and contemporary galleries and the first American museum exhibition for German painter Daniel Richter. In November, the Museum will debut Heinrich’s latest project, Embrace!, one of the most ambitious exhibition projects in the Museum’s history featuring 17 site-specific works by contemporary artists from around the world.

The entire release is here.

After nearly 12 years of fighting, it looks as if the legal dispute over Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally is finally going to trial. In a little noticed ruling, U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska ordered the trial on Sept. 30.

If you don’t remember what this is all about, I certainly do. It was just about this time in October 1997 that I went to a reception preceding the opening of The Leopold Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and heard a whisper about a much earlier and long-forgotten claim on Wally. After weeks of investigation — when I learned of and saw documents indicating that Wally had been surrendered under duress by the owner, Leah Bondi Jaray, to the Nazis — I wrote an article about it and many of Leopold’s collecting oddities: “The Zealous Collector” was published on Christmas Eve, 1997 and led, several days later, to the Manhattan D.A.’s subpoena of the painting.

Coming back to you? There’ve been so many twists, turns, claims, counter-claims and digressions since then that I’ve lost track, too.

That’s why it’s good that David D’Arcy, Andrew Shea and Barbara Morgan are producing a documentary on the case — “Portrait of Wally” — with Shea directing. They have interviewed more than 20 art historians, provenance researchers, attorneys (including Robert Morgenthau, who issued the subpoena, and Michael Mukasey, the U.S. District Court Judge in the case until his appointment as U.S. Attorney General in 2007), journalists (including me), and other experts.

[Read more…] about Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally Goes to Trial