Archives for July 2010

Is it possible that some cities simply don’t deserve art? I hate to say that, but Las Vegas is making a great case for it. As I’ve written before, the city in the desert, with a metro population of about 1.8 million people, has watched its art museum close even as it supports a museum about the mob, with another one on the same subject going up nearby.

Today’s Wall Street Journal recaps more gory details: plans for a contemporary art museum were scrapped, a sculpture park on which the city spent $700,000 “sits empty,” awaiting private funds, and now two arts partrons — Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin, who “propelled the city’s artistic ambitions” — are moving out. Both academics, they’re joining the faculty of the University of New Mexico, because they could not find work in Las Vegas (particularly, a full-time post for Lumpkin at UNLV, which has a bad history in the arts).

“They brought a lot of attention to the city,” said Elizabeth Herridge, who directed the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian casino in Las Vegas before that gallery closed in 2008. “This is such a visual city. It’s really kind of odd that we can’t have something that is a bricks-and-mortar expression of that interest.”

Odd indeed.

Hickey and Lumpkin were controversial — he once argued that the city’s rhinestone and neon culture have the “same excitement as highbrow fare,” for example. (And didn’t he also praise Thomas Kincaid?) But they were also movers. Aside from curating the collections of Steve Wynn, she directed the Las Vegas Art Museum, beginning in 2005, and took it “from a museum with a $300,000 budget, two paid staffers and a part-time curator into a $2.7 million organization with 13 employees.”

Their influence would be hard, maybe impossible, to replicate. As the article (here) says:

Soon after they arrived in 1990, the art on view in Las Vegas took a giant leap forward. When Mr. Wynn opened his Bellagio in 1998, he put his personal collection–with works by Van Gogh, Cezanne and Renoir–on display, part of a strategy to lure a high-end clientele.

The Venetian casino followed a year later with two Rem Koolhaas-designed art galleries run by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. One was also a partnership with Russia’s State Hermitage Museum.

But the experiment of putting art galleries in casinos was, for the most part, short-lived. Both Guggenheims closed. Mr. Wynn put an art gallery in his Wynn Las Vegas resort, which opened in 2005, but soon replaced it with a Rolex watch shop.

“It just didn’t seem to be that important,” Mr. Wynn said in a recent interview. A Rembrandt is hanging in his office.

An arts scene built on so slim a reed isn’t really sustainable. Las Vegas continues to show it deserves its reputation as a cultural wasteland.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Las Vegas Weekly

This spring, the National Endowment for the Humanities gave gave Peter Meineck, the NYU classics professor shown at left, a grant of $800,000 — one of its largest-ever in any category and the largest-ever in theater. It follows an earlier grant of nearly $300,000.

Why?

What does he have that proved so convincing to the NEH (which I constantly hear is tough to get money from)?

As I write in today’s Wall Street Journal, in a Cultural Conversation with Meineck, he’s got a program called Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives — Poetry-Drama-Dialogue. It will take staged dramatic readings of works by the Athenian playwrights to 100 public libraries and art centers in 20 states. Actors like Olympia Dukakis and Gary Sinise — hopefully — will read from Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Ajax, and Euripides’ Trojan Women, among others; afterwards, classics scholars will lead “town-hall” discussions examining the connections between the classics and contemporary America. The program also includes scholarly lectures, reading groups, master drama classes and a resource-laden website. And it’s aimed especially at combat veterans, inner-city residents and rural communities — all underserved by the arts.

Meineck’s story is enlightening. For example, his trip to the Brooklyn Public Library, prompted by the NEH’s desire to involve libraries, showed him a way to attract new audiences to theater. 

There’s more in the full article. Meineck’s mission — to make the classics relevant — is compelling, and so is his own story — from expulsion at 15 from a tough South London boys’ school to an exuberant evangelist in many ways for the ancient Greeks.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Page and Stage

 

Go ahead and gush about the Getty Museum’s $45 million purchase of Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino in London tonight. (You can read the Bloomberg story on that here.) I’ve got a simpler tale to tell about a library with a big painting and a big heart — one that decided to make a not-uncontroversial loan.

A few days ago, the Dover Free Public Library, in Morris County, took Emigrant Train Attacked by Indians, by Emanuel Leutze, down from its walls, packed it, and put it in a truck destined for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be on loan there for five years. After that, no one is talking.

Why?  

Dover library director Robert Tambini told the Morris Country Daily Record that he was bothered that such an important painting, which hung in the library’s reading room, was unrecognized, unseen by enough people. It was lent to the library in 1934, and given to it in 1943 by a local family, the Derrys, in memory of Olivia Smith Derry.

Recently appraised for insurance, it was valued at $2.5 million, up from $300,000 in 1988, according to the DR. Here’s a link to the article. 

Some library members were unhappy, but not Tambini. At the Met, he said, “It will be something people will come to see. It will be the centerpiece in a new exhibit. That’s a big deal.” Besides, he is saving the steep cost of insurance, which in this economic environment, is nothing to sneeze at.

The Met, of course, owns Leutze’s most famous work, Washington Crossing the Delaware, which I wrote about here just last week.

The Dover Library owns about 55,000 books, plus other reading/listening/viewing materials. Dover’s population is less than 18,000.

I believe in collection-sharing, though I think there should be more of it from large museums to small ones.

A strawberry to the Dover Library.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Daily Record    

Late last week, the Yale University Art Gallery revealed a stunning development: It has found a Velazquez in its closet.

The painting, named The Education of the Virgin, at left, depicts the Virgin Mary learning to read — a fascinating image in its own right, and more so now that it is said to be Velazquez. It was executed in 1617, when he was only 18. It would certainly be among the earliest known works by him. 

According to the Yale Gallery’s press office, John Marciari, the former associate curator of early European art at the Yale Gallery, and now the curator of European art at the San Diego Museum of Art, found it in storage and has written about his discovery in Ars Magazine, published last week.

The work was given to Yale in 1925 by two brothers from New Haven, Ct. — Henry Hotchkiss Townshend and his brother, Raynham Townshend. 

But it was in poor condition, damaged by water, and relegated to storage, undisplayed. As Yale began to review its collection in preparation for a new display, Lawrence Kanter, the curator of European Art, and Marciari, also in the department, were struck by it. Marciari studied the work, knew within months that it was a Velazquez, and spent six years doing research, both technical and in provenance, to prove it. X-rays support his conclusion. Experts at the Prado, in Madrid, “have so far reserved judgment, though they are also in the process of examining the work,” an article in the Yale Daily News says.

Yale plans to restore the painting, and put it on display in 2012.

Bloomberg also has the story, with more details and interviews with Kanter and Marciari.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery

 

Memories came flooding back last week when Rudolph Leopold, the zealous collector of Egon Schiele (in particular), died. As I’ve mentioned, I wrote the investigative article in The New York Times in late 1997 that brought to the attention of the family of Lea Bondi — and to the Manhattan D.A.’s office — that Portrait of Wally was hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. The family then said it had been take by the Nazis and claimed it; then the D.A. subpoenaed it, and the whole dispute is still tied up in the courts.

Except that yesterday, David D’Arcy reported for The Art Newspaper that a setttlement, reached before Leopold’s death, is imminent. It would, he wrote, give the Bondi family $20 million for the Schiele painting. The Leopold collection owns its counterpart — a self-portrait (right). They belong together. According to the article:

Wally was valued at some $1 million at the time of its seizure by New York State prosecutors in 1998. $20 million represents the high range of its current estimated value. The London Schiele dealer Richard Nagy put its value at $13 million-$15 million last week.

The compensation funds will be raised, insiders say, from sales of works from the Leopold Collection, which holds some 5400 objects, including 250 works by Schiele.

The final phase of the trial was set to begin this month.

Here’s a link to The Art Newspaper bulletin.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Leopold Museum (bottom)