Archives for May 2010

Michael Conforti, the outgoing president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, has kidded me that I am always finding fault with what he does in the job. And now, beginning next month, I guess I won’t have him to kick around anymore.

But seriously, it’s not his fault that AAMD rarely lives up to (my) expectations — it has always seemed to me that the group could, with the right governance, exert much more influence on the arts in America. Time and again, when I say this, museum directors roll their eyes at me, alas.

Nonetheless, I was pleased to learn that Kaywin Feldman, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is the new president. On a recent visit to New York, she met me for a nice long cup of coffee, and I learned much about her museum-management philosophy, which is very level-headed.

Her arts instinct is also on target. Last October, I blogged here about the MIA exhibition she, as director, curated called “In Pursuit of A Masterpiece.” It was about connoisseurship.

In her short (so far) tenure at MIA, Feldman has hired a half-dozen new curators and encouraged them to think bigger. I can not remember the exact numbers we discussed, but I do recall that MIA has organized far too few important, traveling shows for a museum of its calibre. It has produced too little scholarship. She is changing that.

Feldman also talked about revamping MIA’s acquisition strategy — perhaps actually having an acquisition strategy — to focus on quality, not numbers. What good are thousands of new, but not significant, objects? An example of the new regime: MIA recently purchased at auction an eighteenth-century Vincennes, celestial blue Ewer, known as the “Pot de Monsieur de la Bouexière,” 1755-56. It will be placed in MIA’s Grand Salon, a period room built for Jean Gaillard de la Bouexière (1676-1759)–the same patron who commissioned the rare ewer–for the Hôtel del la Bouexière.

Feldman and I also talked about programs, education and — here’s one that is difficult to tackle — what to do when membership programs cost more than they are worth. She did the right thing, and is disbanding some or changing the pricing.

AAMD’s limitations won’t go away, but Feldman does have a track record of making necessary changes and, based on what I’ve heard, doing it diplomatically.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Arts

  

Awards season continues… 

It’s especially gratifying to win recognition from peers, and this week the Association of Art Museum Curators announced their awards for excellence in 2009. There ought to have been celebrations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, Williams College Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art — especially MoMA, which took home two honors. 

I’m going to list only the top awards; you can read about the runners-up and the honorable mentions here.

First the catalogues:

Outstanding Catalogue Based on a Permanent Collecton: Michael R. Taylor, et. al., at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Marcel Duchamp: Etant donnes

Outstanding Exhibition Catalogue: Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, of the Museum of Modern Art, for Bauhaus, 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity

Outstanding Article, Essay or Extended Catalogue Entry: Nancy Mowll Mathews, of Williams College Museum of Art, for “Prendergast in Italy” in Prendergast in Italy

And the exhibitions:

Outstanding Exhibition, Eastern Time Zone: A tie! Bauhaus, 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, at MoMA, curated by Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, and Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curated by Frederick Ilchman

Outstanding Exhibition, Central Time Zone: Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth, Art Institute of Chicago, curated by Jay A. Clarke

Outstanding Exhibition, Pacific Time Zone: Art of Two Germanies/Cold War Cultures, LACMA, curated by Stephanie Barron and co-curator Eckhart Gillen

Hmmm. What happened to Mountain time?

What the awards need now is a catchy name,  something like the Webbys or the Tonys. Any thoughts?

 

Remember “Future Teachers of America,” “Future Farmers of America,” and “Future Scientists and Engineers of America”?

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has a program that should evolve into “Future Curators of America.”

Now in its fourth year, the after-school program engages 11th and 12th graders from area schools, selected from a pool of applicants. They meet once a week from January through May, “under the mentoring eye of coordinator Anna Jablonski of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Education Department.” They learn how to call for works, select them, write texts, install the exhibition and publicize the show.

This year’s exhibition — Spectrum: Daydreams of Reality — opens Friday. It will show works by area teenagers drawn from more than 400 submissions. The chosen works — some shown here — include paintings, works on paper, photography, and sculpture. “They all express a unifying feeling of whimsicality that one would find in daydreams,” Future Curator Joseph Polino said in the press release. 

Many museums have teen programs, but neither I nor the Albright-Knox have heard of any like this. Initially, the AK asked teachers to recommend students for the program; this year, it opened it up to all area 11th and 12th graders — receiving 30 applications, of which 14 were selected. One dropped out, leaving seven girls and six boys to finish. See their picture here.

This is a great idea to engage teenagers; I hope it spreads. And there’s a bit more:

The students have also organized an evening of programming that will mark the exhibition opening on May 21.  The evening will include an open mic event from 6 to 10 pm that will feature a spectrum of performances in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden.  Also that evening, the Gallery’s Education Department will offer a related art activity for all ages, “Scratching into Reality,” from 5 to 7 pm. A special tour of the exhibition, entitled Mother May I?, will take place at 6 pm. At 7 pm, there will be a screening of the director’s cut of the cult film Donnie Darko (2001), directed by Richard Kelly and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Drew Barrymore.  

In music, studies have shown that children who play a musical instrument are more likely to become consumers of classical music concerts when they grow up. Future Curators may be something of an equivalent in visual arts.

Photo Credits, top to bottom: Tea Time, by Viktoria Filaretova; untitled, by Rachel Fein-Smolinski; Life Support 2, by Layna Mattson; courtesy Albright-Knox

 

What do you see when you look at the logo here on the right?

Some people might see the equivalent of money — that is, the sign of a non-profit funding group. Burlington Magazine saw “a lowered neckline that appears to announce a mail-order firm for adult lingerie.” And a year ago, the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge University was so turned off by it that the powers-that-be there decided against applying for Â£80,000 in funding to acquire “The Dead Christ” by Marcantonio Bassetti because the logo would have had to be placed beside the work. Director Timothy Potts told The Art Newspaper at the time that it would be “an unacceptable distraction” and “the currency of marketing.”

But the May issue of The Art Newspaper has a short item revealing that the director of The Art Fund, Stephen Deuchar, has bowed to the criticism, chucked the teddy and introduced a new logo, also at right. The lingerie is gone, but the hot-pink heart remains.

Potts would undoubtedly still object, but plenty of other museums are willing to go along with the Fund, which was started in 1903 and which annually awards about £4 million in grants to British museums and galleries.

The other day, The Art Fund announced the four finalists for its annual £100,000 prize, which will be announced on June 30. The finalists are the Blists Hill Victorian Town, the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, the Ulster Museum and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. 

This year, this Fund is allowing people to vote for their favorite, saying that the judges will take the tallies and the comments into account. No other promises, which is good.

Will the judges take the opportunity to give the money to Oxford in a “take that, Cambridge” stance? We’ll see.    

 

The press release’s headline read “The Most Enigmatic and Mysterious Artist of the Renaissance,” and I was intrigued. The question (“who’s that?”) had never occurred to me. But I do like art-history mysteries (more are here, here, here, here and here), so I read on.

The artist turned out to be Giorgione (b. circa 1477-78), and he’s a bit of a mystery because — the exhibition description says — “the documents that outline his biography can be counted on one hand and are all limited to the final stage of his life, which the plague brought to a premature end in 1510. Giorgione isn’t even mentioned by name in the 16th century, but is always referred to via his place of origin as the painter ‘from Castelfranco’ or – as in a 1528 inventory – as ‘Zorzon,’ a nickname that according to Vasari derives ‘from the build of the man and his greatness of soul’.”

There is, apparently, no definitive catalogue of his work, either, and art historians disagree significantly about the interpretation and importance of his works.   

Hence the exhibition, in Giorgione’s hometown of Castelfranco, Veneto, on the fifth centenary of his death in his house museum, Museo Casa Giorgione, which opened last year.

Unfortunately, the press release was also a mystery, because the exhibition — which drew loans from the Hermitage, the Uffizzi, the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, the National Gallery in Edinburgh, Louvre, and other top museums — ended this month.

I plowed ahead anyway, because Museo Casa Giorgione created an exhibition website that gives many of the details and provides a photo gallery, with a zoom-in feature. Try it; you’ll like it.

His “Three Ages of Man” is above, from the Palazzo Pitti (but it may not be that at all, according to some experts).

Something else on the website caught my eye: “Adopt a Giorgione Project.” When I clicked, I discovered that the museum had raised money from companies by allowing them to link their names to a specific painting. They are listed on the website and — I’d guess — on the wall labels.

That took me back: In 1999, I wrote a Page One article for The New York Times about a similar “adopt-a-masterpiece” program at the Brooklyn Museum. I recently asked director Arnold Lehman if it was still going — and the answer was yes.