Archives for March 2010

Just a quick note to update a previous post: The Staffordshire Hoard has been “saved” for the British nation, rather than going into private hands, by a government grant.

As I described the situation here, a private citizen found the trove of more than 1,500 gold and silver artifacts, from the 7th Century, last summer, and he and the landowner will split the money. A valuation committee set the price at £3.285 million, and both public and private sector money has been coming into the fund. On Wednesday, the National Heritage Memorial Fund contributed Â£1,285,000, completing the fundraising effort, and allowing the treasures to stay in the north of England.

Private funds were coming in, but apparently mostly in small amounts.

The Independent has a good article on the whole situation, with a slide show of artifact, here. And the BBC has a video here.

 

A big raspberry goes today to one Henry Aubin, who — writing in the Montreal Gazette — wrote this:

 

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is also using imagination to reach new markets. It has already featured shows on Yves St. Laurent (fashion as art), cars, Tintin, e-art and John & Yoko. In April it’ll launch a show on Miles Davis (“Music is a painting you can hear”). Attendance is up by 84 per cent since 1993. Notes director Nathalie Bondil, “We’re in a healthy financial situation.”

I don’t know Aubin, but judging by that passage and the rest of his article, “The Changing Faces of Our Cultural Institutions,” we’d have a lot to disagree about. Ironically, the deck for his article says: “It’s possible to attract bigger and younger audiences without lowering standards.” His kicker is: “Dumbing down is just dumb.” 

 

But he neverthe less cites examples — some, not all — of precisely that, as above. Hasn’t the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts had a successful show of art since 1993?

 

I can cite different examples that show attendance rising with exhibits of real art — art that doesn’t patronize people, that doesn’t suggest that they’re not up to looking at and appreciating the real thing.

 

Here’s one: Raphael’s La Velata has just finished its 10-week run at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. During that period, the museum drew about double its daily attendance — 300-400 people per weekday and 400-500 per weekend. Normally, those numbers are 100-200 on a weekday and 200 to 300 on a weekend, according to Rachel Milon, the head of marketing and communications.

 

On its last weekend, La Velata attracted 2,000 people to the museum, which kept its admission for the exhibit at $10, the usual fare. When admission was free, a sponsorship by

Arte ITALIA, La Velata lured 4,000 people in ten hours.

“These are incredible numbers for us and we plan to continue driving those audiences here with our upcoming exhibitions including Fernando Botero, Chester Arnold, Fletcher Benton and others,” Milon said.

 

Meantime, at the Portland Art Museum, where La Velata — borrowed from the Palatine Gallery in Florence — went first, total attendance for her was about 25,000 over 10 weeks. That’s despite a steep $17 admission fee.

 

In Portland, attendance did not increase except during the final two weeks. But the museum blames (credits?) that on its hanging in a small gallery, where visitors were limited to 15 at a time.

 

And in any case, the exhibition was successful enough to entice Portland to try something similar, with another great work of art. Details TBD and TBA.

 

La Velata is on her way to the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she will be on view beginning Saturday.

 

 

When I wrote my “Masterpiece” column for the Wall Street Journal about Adam Elsheimer’s The Flight Into Egypt, I mentioned that there’s only one painting by him in the United States. The Kimbell Art Museum owns a daytime version of the same biblical story, also called The Flight Into Egypt, painted around 1605, about five years before his magnificent nocturnal version. The Kimbell acquired the tiny work (at left), about 4 inches high, in 1994 for an undisclosed amount. It had been sold at auction by the estate of Peter Jay Sharp a few months earlier, according to the Houston Chronicle.

But John Marciari, curator of European art and head of provenance research at the San Diego Museum of Art, thinks otherwise — maybe. Marciari, who previously was a curator at the Yale University Art Gallery, believes that a painting there deserves further consideration — it may be by Elsheimer.

Yale currently labels the painting, Coronis and Apollo, “Workshop of Elsheimer” on the grounds that Elsheimer did not make copies, and there’s another Coronis and Apollo at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The Yale painting is not on view; it was taken down a few years ago.

But Marciari says that the Yale version was once thought to be by Elsheimer, and was labeled as such until the Liverpool version was discovered.

Art historians do not believe that Elsheimer made copies — though many other artists of the period did. So, the Yale version was downgraded.

Marciari, on the other hand, says that there’s scant evidence that Elsheimer had a workshop either.

The image above is the Liverpool version, drawn from a website. The Yale catalogue entry, with illustration, is here — and the only things that seems to be different are the color and, perhaps, the contrast. But what can one tell from web reproductions? Not that much.

So we have another situation that requires more research. And maybe a little side-by-side comparison at Yale?

Both works are on copper, as almost all of Elsheimer’s paintings are. And they’re small. They can travel, as long as care is taken.

Photo Credits: Courtesy Kimbell Art Museum (top); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (bottom)

   

Even at a moment like this, when New York is full of wonderful art exhibits, The Mourners stand out — no pun intended. They are the group of touchingly expressive alabaster figures carved for the tomb of John the Fearless, second Duke of Burgundy, and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria, that are on view at the Metropolitan Museum. They march, two by two, in procession on a table in the Met’s Medieval Hall. Very effective, and affecting.

The Mourners also happen to have a fabulous website, which — oddly — the press release say nothing about. I discovered it by accident, but when I checked, the Met did, thankfully, link to it on its Exhibitions page for the Mourners.  

The mid-15th century statuettes, each about 16 inches tall, were borrowed from the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dijon under the aegis of the French Regional & American Museum Exchange (FRAME). After leaving New York in May, they’ll be going on a six-city tour here — to St. Louis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Richmond — and then to Paris.

FRAME is creating the website, and it’s still a work-in-progress. But no matter. Right now, you can go there to get closeups, with zoom-in capability, of each of the Mourners — and you can rotate them, 360 degrees. It’s not quite, but almost, as good as being there. Mourner No. 70 is above.

Explaining itself, the site says:

This journey also provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create new digital high-resolution, multi-perspective, and stereo 3D photography of these masterpieces, which would supplement and support the exhibition tour. Over a four day period during the mourners’ removal from their arcade and before their transit to the U.S., a multi-discipline technical team from FRAME joined Dijon’s staff, and staff on site from the Dallas Museum of Art (the American tour organizer) to create an ad hoc photo studio and produce more than 14,000 photographs of the sculptures. This web site is the first fruit of that effort, and will be expanded with more mourner-related resources in the months ahead.

One of the best things about the tour — aside from its taking place, is that this is the first time these figures will be seen together outside of France — is that the Mourners are shown outside of the architectural framework of the tomb, that “arcade”: visitors can appreciate each as an individual work of art, from all sides, and the web replicates that.

Describing them, and its future plans, the website says:

 

[Read more…] about The Exquisite Mourners, With A Website To (Almost) Match

The Association of Art Museum Directors released its annual “State of North America’s Museums” survey the other day, and about the best I can say about it is, it’s better than nothing. Or is it?

There has been widespread speculation about rising museum attendance, for example — with me being one of the skeptics. AAMD says that 45% of respondents said attendance rose last year, 29% said it declined, and 22% said there was no change (4% of the respondents were closed). (NB: AAMD president Michael Conforti cited these numbers for 2009 in the president’s statement, though in the survey they are labeled 2010. The numbers for 2009 in the survey are 41% increase, 39% decrease, 17% no change and 3% not open.)  

I’d say, therefore, that it did not rise (29% + 22% = 51%), especially since only 149 of the 193 members of AAMD responded, and those that did are likely to have more positive stories to tell, if past guidance from survey-takers is valid. The AAMD disagrees: Conforti said the trend toward “large increases” in attendance reported last year continued…

Actually, there’s no way to tell: the question is too broad — a museum could have 50 more visitors and report and increase or 5,000 fewer and report a decline, or vice versa.

This is my constant complaint about AAMD’s surveys: they mean nothing (at least the disclosed parts; in times past, AAMD collected information that it did not share with the public/press).

Perhaps we can detect a few trends, though (again, a caveat — the samples may not be comparable):

• For the sixth consecutive year, about half of the respondents say they are making no changes to their exhibition programs.
• For the fourth year, about 70% (74% for 2010) say they are using their permanent collections more. Cumulatively, that’s a pretty big impact.
• Overall revenue continues to decline (since 2008), with support from individuals, foundations, corporations, governments, endowments and earning income declining steeply in both 2009 and 2010.

I’m not going to harp on the need for more and better cultural statistics now: been there, done that, many times.