Archives for December 2009

This is a new one for me: The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

After I wrote about the George Eastman House’s new wiki (here), Notes on Photographs, a reader contacted me about TCLF’s new “wiki-styled” database of America’s “designed landscapes” searchable by “landscape name, locale, designer, type, and style.” Its goal is to be “a reference for students and teachers of design and history, enthusiasts, and professionals, provoking interest, informing stewardship decisions, and enriching our understanding of our designed landscape history.”

Launched on Nov. 5, it’s called “What’s Out There” in hopes that people will send in submissions, which will be vetted before being posted. It now includes 75 landscape types, 14 landscape styles, 380 landscape architects and designers, and more than 650 sites nationally, but it needs your input — and seems to be a worthy cause.

TCLF is pretty new itself, having been formed only in 1998. Read more about it here. Among its worthy programs is Landslide, which focuses attention on landscapes at risk, including Olana, Frederick Edwin Church’s Moorish palace on the Hudson (above).

For the skeptics out there who wonder why I’m evening mention this — those who say landscape design isn’t art, even applied art — the TCLF is partnering with the Eastman House and Garden Design magazine on a photography show, on view at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh: Marvels of Modernism runs through Jan. 3.

It’s all culture to me.

Photo: Courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation/Steve Turner 

Many museum exhibitions affect individuals; some go further, exerting influence on the collective opinion, or even beyond. 

 

Exactly 100 years ago last night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed the doors on one that went further. Part of a statewide celebration, the Hudson-Fulton exhibition marked the 300^th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the river that bears his name and the centennial of Robert Fulton’s steamship. During its 10-week run, nearly 300,000 people thronged the museum’s galleries — 8,000 on opening night alone, which was presided over by J.P. Morgan, the Met’s president (left), and a 40-piece orchestra.

 

The show had two sides, and both had impact.

 

The “Hudson” part displayed 143 paintings by masters like Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals and other Dutch painters from Hudson’s era, all drawn from the collections of Morgan, Benjamin Altman, Henry Clay Frick and other American business titans or their widows. These Gilded Age industrial buccaneers had spent vast sums on art-buying sprees in Europe, much to the disdain of its more-cultured citizens, who deemed them unworthy of their purchases. (Indeed, one or two turned out to be fakes.)

 

But after seeing the Hudson-Fulton show and visiting several private collections here, an eminent European art scholar named Ludwig Justi (right), Director of the Berlin National Gallery, was moved to dissent. Back home in Germany, Justi told a reporter from The New York Times, “I desire to be quoted in the strongest possible language as a convert from the belief that art collecting in America is the fad of millionaire ignoramuses. I must henceforth beg to disagree cordially with some of my European confreres who think that the denuding of European art collections for the benefit of America and Americans is to cast pearls before swine.”

 

Great quote, huh? The Times printed it on Jan. 23, 1910, helping to start the passage of Americans from vacuous money-grubbers to sophisticated art collectors and appreciators in European eyes.

 

The Hudson-Fulton’s other side altered the course of American museums. This half displayed “industrial arts” made by colonial Americans up until Fulton’s 1815 death, plus paintings by Americans born before 1800 — including this 1806 portrait of Fulton by Benjamin West. They were also borrowed from collectors.

 

If the Dutch side was a shoo-in, this one was a gamble (picture of one gallery, below). American furniture, silver, ceramics and other decorative arts were then viewed as utilitarian, aesthetically inferior to European goods. The American paintings were mostly portraits, considered to be family heirlooms and not yet collected by museums.

 

Reviews were mixed, but the crowds appreciated what the critics didn’t. The show’s popularity reinforced the resolve of three people — Robert W. de Forest, secretary of the Met board; his wife, Emily Johnston de Forest, a daughter of the railroad baron who was the Met’s first president; and Henry W. Kent, a Massachusetts-born curator who was de Forest’s assistant — intent on rewriting that assessment of early American art.

[Read more…] about Can Museum Exhibits Spark Change? A Look At Hudson-Fulton