Archives for April 2010

Brandeis continues to make progress closing its budget gap, but as I wrote in a short article for The Art Newspaper’s April issue, which is now on newsstands, the Rose Museum continues to be in the administration’s crosshairs. 

Brandeis answered my questions in an email, issued by the Press Office, and this was the full exchange for the “money quote” in the article:

Q: Will you confirm that trustee Meyer Koplow said in a recent meeting with faculty that “some of the solution will come from realizing value ultimately from some of the art at the Rose”?  

A. Mr. Koplow’s statement is consistent with the University’s intent to realize value from a portion of the collection, if possible.

My article, which is not online, also goes into recent staff hirings at the Rose, including a collections manager, but not a director. One part of that actual exchange:

Q. Is the search committee also looking for a director? If not, why not? Who will be in charge?

A. Not currently. The university has a director of museum operations who’s doing an excellent job.

Nor will the Rose have a curator: it will use guest curators. As to what’s next:

Q. What is the administration’s current position on the future of the Rose?

A. The Rose will remain as a university museum open to the public and the university will continue implementing plans to more fully integrate the museum into the academic life of the university.

That sounds ominous, almost like a punishment.

But if recent reports are correct, the university’s financial situation is nowhere near as bad as the COO, Peter French, said it was in January, 2009. Then, he told me, for an article published by The Daily Beast, that the projected budget deficit was $79 million over the next six years, that the reserve fund was tapped out, and that the alternative to selling the Rose’s collection was closing 40 percent of the university’s buildings, reducing staff by an additional 30 percent, or firing 200 of its 360 faculty members.

None of those things have come to pass. And now, according to the Brandeis Hoot, a student-run newspaper,

The board of trustees approved a $356 million operating budget for fiscal year 2011 that, due to the Brandeis 2020 Committee’s academic cuts, will put the university on the path to a balanced operating budget by 2014.

The board took 13 percent ($11 million) of the university’s [reserve fund] in order to balance FY 2011’s budget…

The 18 academic cuts proposed in the Brandeis 2020 Committee’s report…will be “phased in”…

…the budget for fiscal years 2012 and 2013 will draw $6.3 million and $ 1.8 million from the [reserve fund], respectively….

This balanced budget means the 2020 cuts should mark the end of over a year of academic, budgetary and programing cuts that have plagued Brandeis since the beginning of the nationwide recession in fall 2008.

If so, why are sales from the Rose collection still on the table? 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Brandeis University

Now it can be told, fully: FRAME, the French Regional & American Museum Exchange — which is responsible for exhibitions like The Mourners, now on view at the Metropolitan Museum — is looking for a new American director.

Last fall, FRAME announced the appointment of Edmund “Ted” Pillsbury to the job, succeeding art historian and curator Richard R. Brettell. But, as I wrote for the April issue of The Art Newspaper, which is now out, freeing me to post this, Pillsbury started in January but left after just 28 days on the job.

Pillsbury found the diplomacy and support role of the FRAME director not to his liking, he told me in mid-March, just days before his death of a heart attack on Mar. 25. His departure was never announced, and his tenure with FRAME understandably went unmentioned in his obit.

All of which leaves Elizabeth Rohatyn, founder and co-president, in control of FRAME in the U.S. as Brettell can’t come back even temporarily — he is producing a series of books on the “History and Theory of Art Museums” for Yale University Press. Rohatyn has postponed her own departure, and has begun the search for someone new. As I wrote for The Art Newspaper, Rohatyn (left) said she was asking museum directors who are members of FRAME “to surface some names.” (See more details in TAN; the article is not online.)

Another source who knows Rohatyn and FRAME well told me that Rohatyn thinks that former museum directors are the likeliest candidates for the job, which is not full-time.

Pillsbury’s word to the wise would be this: “FRAME is a wonderful concept…It enables people to do wonderful things. But I’m not an enabler. I’ve run museums for 25 years.”

 

I like Anish Kapoor’s work; most of it anyway. But when I saw the design and the cost of the ArcelorMittal Orbital (left) that will go up in London for the Olympics, at a cost of £19.1, which is about $29 million, I paused. That’s a lot of money even if London Mayor Boris Johnson thankfully got billionaire Lakshmi Mittal to pony up £16 million of it.

The structure is taller than the Statue of Liberty, and sets out to be this century’s Eiffel Tower.

The news made me think of a different structure, though. That would be the $25 million, true-to-life-sized replica of a locomotive suspended from a crane that Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, would like to purchase from Jeff Koons. I’ve said it’s an extravagance LACMA can ill afford (here).

Back to London, though: I read with interest Antonia Senor’s commentary in the Times:

Can we just bypass the “is it art?” debate? It’s a giant, misshapen rollercoaster- type thingy, with a sort of sub-Eiffel Towery feel. It may or may not symbolise the twisted dreams of our country’s financial capital or Man’s doomed striving for the sky on his meandering path towards the grave. Or something. But let’s just call it art and be done.

The Anish Kapoor-designed, ArcelorMittal Orbital will soar above the London Olympic Park, dividing opinions, enraging taxi drivers and garnering nicknames. Personally, I love 84 per cent of it — the bit that was paid for by ArcelorMittal, the company owned by the steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, which is spending up to £16 million on it. I am substantially less enamoured of the £3.1 million bit that we are paying for. Could it just be a few feet shorter with the company picking up all the bill?

She goes on to make a larger point about how government money is being spent on the arts:

The [culture ministry] announced yesterday a £50,000 grant for a charity called Culture24 to develop smartphone apps that allow people to find the nearest art. In the event that you must know, without delay, the whereabouts of the nearest Picasso, this is for you; £50,000 may be a tiny sum, but if there’s a market for this app, it will be made. If not, why is the Government supplying this middle-class toy?

And she ends up arguing for the American system. Fancy that. I don’t agree with everything she says, but she has a point.

As for Kapoor, I think I prefer what he did for Chicago, below.

 

 Photo Credits: Courtesy ARUP (top)

 

If I had my druthers, I’d be Houston right now — and not just because it’s sunny and warm there, whereas just-ended March has been one of the rainiest ever in New York City.

I’d be there to see the Alice Neel exhibition that opened on Mar. 21 at the Museum of Fine Arts, its only venue in the U.S. That part makes me glad, in one sense: the exhibit will travel instead to Whitechapel Gallery in London and then to Moderna Museet in Malmo, Sweden, and if Neel deserves more appreciation in the U.S. — and she does — she merits international exposure even more.

Neel’s estate maintains a website for her, with a bio on its home page that labels her a pioneer, an apt description — for she was a brave painter. She went her own way, no matter what the rest of the art world did and no matter what the world said. 

The exhibition, called Alice Neel: Painted Truths, includes 68 paintings from throughout her career, with the curators simply picking her best works, mainly her portraits and cityscapes. Bravo. If greatest hits exhibits are out-of-fashion, so what?

The catalogue contains three artists’ appreciations: Frank Auerbach writes that “Alice does not need my encomium,” and concludes a few lines later saying she is one of his heroes. Chris Ofili is likewise short, writing a verse called “Thoughts On The Love That Forgives” referring to Neel’s acuity (I think). But leave it to Marlene Dumas to describe how Neel painted modern portraits, locating her subjects. Dumas writes:

…She painted people.

Most figurative painting is not about people and seldom about “characters.” Philip Guston painted cartoons. Warhol painted public images. Chuck Close uses portraiture to paint about painting; Alex Katz paints the cool; and Elizabeth Peyton paints dreams…

Dumas also notes that “the unflattering criticism she received about her nude self-portrait at age eighty [left] is unforgivably stupid.”

No matter. Alice Neel simply painted what she wanted, the way she wanted. As MFA director, Peter Marzio, says in his Preface, “This is genius, pure and simple.”

Interestingly, the market has caught on as well. As Art + Auction recently wrote, dealers are now selling her to contemporary collectors, rather than American art collectors. And when the Cleveland Museum of Art purchased her painting of Jackie Curtis and Rita Red last fall for $1.65 million, versus a presale estimate of $400,000 to $500,000, MFAH was the underbidder. 

Moderna Museet is billing Neel as a contemporary artist as well, though she was born in 1900 and died in 1984. There, she is the first artist in a new series of four exhibits per year called Moderna Museet Now. Love it.

Photo Credit: Last Sickness, 1953, Philadelphia Museum of Art (top); National Gallery of Art (bottom), both © Estate of Alice Neel.