Archives for November 2009

New Museum Front: Two, Maybe Three, Steps Forward — UPDATED

On the new museum front, last week brought news that the Dia Art Foundation was planning to build a home in Chelsea, on the footprint of its old premises. Good news when it happens, if it happens. Dia’s turbulent history doesn’t exactly instill confidence.

Nonetheless, two new museums have moved ahead in recent days.

In Denver, the Clyfford Still Museum, which had been stalled by the recession, has started up again, setting groundbreaking for Dec. 14. According to the Denver Post, the $29 million museum will now open in mid-2011, a year after originally planned.

The Styll museum, which was given some 2,400 works by his widow, Patricia, was stalled by the financial crisis. Prudently, its leaders decided not to start construction until they had raised at least $25 million of the budget, plus $5 million for a fledgling endowment. And they asked for a redesign:

The museum’s design, by Portland, Ore., architect Brad Cloepfil, has undergone minor modifications since it was unveiled in March 2008 (it has dropped from 31,500 square feet to 30,000), but its low-lying, rectilinear look remains essentially unchanged.

In part because of those changes and lower construction costs brought on by the depressed economy, the building’s estimated cost has been cut from $33 million to $29 million.

Good moves, I think, but of course we won’t know until we see the building (above, in a 2008 rendering).

UPDATE, Nov. 13: The Barnes Foundation broke ground today on its new home in central Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, a new museum has opened.

Mother Nature, AKA Valerie Hegarty, Alters Jasper Francis Cropsey

How would you go about updating, reinterpreting, a Hudson River School painting? We’ll soon see one answer, from artist Valerie Hegarty.

On Wednesday, Hegarty will install a site-specific work on the High Line, the elevated park built on a disused rail corridor along the Hudson River, which is turning out to have a snug connection with contemporary art even before the Whitney Museum branch is built there (if it is).

Her “artwork often poses as artifacts of art history gone awry,” and this installation — on the wall between section 1, which is complete, and section 2, which is under construction — references a painting (above) by Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson River, 1860.

Cropsey’s painting, owned by the National Gallery of Art, was painted from memory in the artist’s London studio. It “created a sensation among many British viewers who had never seen such a colorful panorama of fall foliage,” according to the NGA website.

Hegarty’s work is not so beautiful. Her take on a Rothko is at right. For the Cropsey, the High Line says, she “imagines a nineteenth century Hudson River School landscape painting that has been left outdoors, exposed to the elements.”

Nature becomes the artist — and what does nature do?

This Art Award, The Saatchi-Sunday Telegraph Prize, Breeds Art-Lovers

I know how this looks: it looks as if I am fixated on prizes in the arts. Really, I’m not — it just happens that I’ve either run across or been told about some noteworthy ones lately. And I am, if not fixated, certainly interested in strategies and tactics that encourage people to appreciate the arts.

So here’s a prize I like: The Saatchi Gallery-Sunday Telegraph Art Prize for Schools — which just announced its shortlist of finalists.

The London newspaper launched the prize last May, with these words:

Whether traditional drawing and painting, whether it is work that falls into the messy or the precise schools, whether it is sculptural or digital, art is an expression of creative skills, and they are skills that The Sunday Telegraph would like to encourage among our schoolchildren.

The paper decided to team up with the Saatchi Gallery, which it said already had an education program, to start a partnership designed to “promote art and encourage artists of the future.” Students up to 18 years old, worldwide, could enter, with the deadline being Aug. 28.

Since then, a panel — artists Antony Gormley and Peter Blake, Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Sunday Telegraph’s art critic, Ekow Eshun, the artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Camilla Batmanghelidjh, CEO of Kids Company — has assessed the entries.

Winning produces two prizes, one to the artist and one to his or her school.

NEA Chief Landesman Lands In Peoria — And Avoids Controversy

Rocco Landesman didn’t take Peoria, but he did seem to refrain from dismissing the city and its arts community again.

The new National Endowment for the Arts chairman yesterday started the whistle-stop tour of U.S. arts communities that he promised a few weeks ago. The first stop was a must because he’d insulted Peorians back in August.

On his visit, Landesman avoided another direct hit, saying he would not compare the production of “Rent” that he saw at the Eastlight Theatre Friday Night to a production of the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. According to the Peoria Journal Star, here’s what happened:

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts did observe earlier in the day that amateur arts are worthwhile much in the same way that minor leagues and amateur sports have value in relation to the big leagues and professional sports. One can feed into the other and is worthy of support, he said.

Including NEA support?

“I don’t know. I’m not saying the NEA would never support a community theater,” Landesman said. “I don’t think that’s something I could definitively say.”

Having learned what not to say, Landeman also said his view of the city had changed:

“The first impression from someone who knows nothing about it is that it’s a very meat and potatoes, rust belt, manufacturing city…The thing, of course, that is revelatory is realizing that there is a vibrant arts scene, that there is what has, I think, the beginnings, ultimately, of the real makings of an arts district in the Warehouse District. There’s big plans for it. The riverfront museum is a big deal. You have great riverfront, too.”

Here’s the whole story, plus a local reaction article, also in the Journal Star. WMBD/WYZZ also covered the visit.

Photo: Â©

2009 GateHouseMedia, Inc., Courtesy Peoria Journal Star.

If You Live In Britain, Better Hide That Picasso

Art thievery usually boggles the mind — you can’t resell a truly valuable piece — and yet it flourishes. Do you know where it thrives, and where it’s rising?

The Art Loss Register, which tracks reported thefts, sent out a notice at the end of October about the theft of three paintings by Pierre Gavreau in Toronto (coincidentally, I just mentioned Gavreau the other day in my post about the Automatistes):

The window of the gallery was smashed and the paintings removed during an early morning burglary. The paintings [at left] were part of a 30-year retrospective of the artist’s work, commemorating his first solo show in Toronto in 1979. All three paintings are abstract works dating from the early 1980s, and had a combined value of over $40,000 USD.

Then, ALR said:

Canada currently ranks #13 in reported art thefts, with over 2,000 lost artworks recorded on the Art Loss Register’s database. Reports of art thefts are on the rise in Canada. Between 2000 and 2005, only 82 stolen objects were reported. Since 2006, over 300 have been registered on the ALR’s database.

Well, I knew ALR kept track of thefts by country, but I’d not seen the statistics. So I asked, and here’s the current top 15:

1) United Kingdom — 53,709

2) United States — 21,079

3) France — 15,562

4) Italy — 15,041

5) Germany — 11,137

6) Belgium — 5,178

7) Switzerland — 4,540

8) Netherlands — 3,340

9) Iraq — 3,292

10) Brazil — 3,198

11) Austria — 2,946

12) Poland — 2,184

13) Canada — 2,077

14) Turkey — 1,956

15) Hungary — 1,700

Don’t read too much into the list: it’s likely that art theft is rampant in rich Asian countries, say, but it’s just not reported to ALR, which is based in London and New York.

The trends are important, though — they show changes in the theft rate, or the reporting of thefts, or both.

Let’s look at three numbers.

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