Archives for November 2010

Something happened in St. Paul today that’s noteworthy: The director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, which closed in March, 2009, after years of financial difficulties, met with the public in a forum, just to answer questions about the museum’s future.

And in advance, the Pioneer Press published a Q & A with Kristin Makholm, who joined the museum in June 2009…

…faced with a program that had no building, virtually no staff and little money. A year and a half later, after seeing success with different outreach programs and exhibitions, including “Museum Without Walls,” in which the museum partners with other local institutions to show its art collections, Makholm is looking at fall 2015 as the museum’s reopening date.

It’s got to be tough to have the permanent collection, about 3,500 works, in storage for all that time, and try to maintain a constituency. And with little help: Last January, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Makholm “is camping out in an office at the James J. Hill Reference Library in downtown St. Paul. She runs the museum with a part-time assistant, a cell phone, a laptop and moxie.”

Makholm did well to keep the museum’s presence alive, and garner press attention, too.

For this all to happen in generous Minnesota is still a bad sign. Granted, residents of St. Paul can easily visit the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, but the MMAA was the only art museum in St. Paul.

Makholm was optimistic in the Q & A. Then again, she’s got to be.

Photo Credit: Courtesy St. Paul Pioneer Press  

The Sotheby’s auction I flagged on Sunday is still going on — it’s just 8:23 p.m. — but the three lots I mentioned in that post have been sold. Big.

Lot 13, Monet’s Le Bassin aux Nymphaes, whose presale estimate was $20- to $30 million, fetched $24,722,500, including the buyer’s premium.

Lot 14, Modigliani’s Jeanne Hebuterne, which carried a presale estimate of $9- to $12 million, brought $19,122,500, including the buyer’s premium.

That’s $43,845,000 for both, with the bulk of the money going to the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, whose main program is YoungArts, the creation of the late Ted Arison, founder of Carnival Cruise Lines, and his wife, Lin. 

It’s hard to tell exactly what the Foundation will get — Sotheby’s collects a buyer’s premium (25% of the first $50,000; 20% of the amount up to $1 million, and 12% of the hammer price after that) and often a percentage of the seller’s take, which is negotiable and may be waived.

I’d guess the Foundation’s take is about $38 million.

As for the fabulous Modigliani, Nude Sitting On A Divan, the buyer paid $68,962,500 — a new record for the artist.

The total for the whole sale, at the moment, has topped $211 million. Happy days are here again.

More coming.

UPDATE: The final total for the entire sale was $227,561,000.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s

It’s fashionable among some critics nowadays to bemoan exhibitions of art owned by one collector. I disagree. Not every collector should be given the honor, of course, and certainly not every collection, but true collectors are very thoughtful about their purchases, and they provide an interesting and often instructive lens through which to view art.

A perfect contemporary example is documented in a new book, Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil, published by the Menil Collection. Officially out yesterday, the illustrated book examines what the de Menils did for art, architecture, film, and human rights in Houston, where they settled after leaving France in 1941. Their collection is considered to be one of the world’s best private collections — and nary a critic complains about seeing it on view in the museum they founded in Houston. Many make pilgrimages to it.

So, it’s no surprise that, as a Houston Chronicle article on Sunday said:  

Art and Activism is an indispensable history of several pivotal decades in the development of Houston’s art scene. That it hits bookstores while an exhibition sampling the Menil’s acquisitions since 2004 remains on view is especially timely, since Art and Activism addresses some questions about why the Menil – and for that matter, the city’s art world – is the way it is, while shedding light on what it’s becoming.

After relating the story of the couple’s successful attempt to bring great art to Houston’s black areas in the early 1970s, the Chronicle’s Douglas Britt writes:

So much in that story is vintage de Menil: the willingness to follow artists’ and activists’ leads. The belief that art could empower black Americans without requiring separatism or compromising quality. The desire to attract important artists and thinkers to the city they were helping transform. The will and means to move quickly to make big things happen. The eclectic nature of their interests, which included, among other areas, both American abstract painting and the art of indigenous peoples. The mystical insistence on letting objects and viewers communicate directly, neither assisted nor impeded by explanatory texts, even as the de Menils were consumed with one of their most important educational endeavors, the founding of art, art history, exhibition and film programs at Rice University.

This is a couple that is worth understanding.

You can learn more about the book from the Menil Collection’s press release.

Did you know this is National Opera Week? Since last Friday, Oct. 29, an continuing through Nov. 7, Opera America, the National Endowment for the Arts and opera companies around the U.S. are celebrating their genre with free “fun” activities, including backstage tours, flash performances and YouTube contests.

I know about this because, “On October 8, 2010, the Honorable Richard M. Daley proclaimed “October 29-November 7, 2010 to be OPERA WEEK IN CHICAGO…join all Chicagoans in celebrating this special milestone and the vital role (Chicago Opera Theater) plays in the cultural life of our city.”

I got that from the COT, and assume that it edited the quote — because Mayor Daley could hardly have left out the Chicago Lyric Opera. Apologies to COT: its edit only replaced “this ensemble” with COT’s name.  

Still, I was thrilled to learn that COT is offering “Pop-Up Opera” around Chicago during this week – “short performances of opera classics at iconic Chicago locations.” And there’s “Beers and Baritones,” which involves a short opera performance and an open beer and wine bar at Goose Island Brewery. Great outreach. Details here.

If you click on that link in the first line of this post, you can access a state-by-state list of events.

There’s no mention of other mayoral proclamations — where’s opera-lover Rudy Giuliani when we need him? I say that because a check on Google News shows that National Opera Week merited four news items in Chicago, but only a few other places — Miami, Syracuse — even had one news item.  

Oddly, in New York, the Metropolitan Opera doesn’t seem to be offering anything. I say oddly, because its outreach via its simulcasts, plaza broadcasts, and free events is very praiseworthy. It wouldn’t have been hard to schedule something this week to raise the profile of all opera companies. (I hope it doesn’t consider itself above it all.)

But never fear, New York City has a piece of this, and it involves the visual arts. To celebrate National Opera Week,  the New York City Opera is offering a free public viewing of “Parallel Perceptions,” a contemporary art show that features works by six visual artists who “have been paired with the productions from City Opera’s 2010-11 season.”

NYCO has hitched its wagon to works by Kehinde Wiley, Tina Barney, Charles Ray, Isaac Julian, Pipilotti Rist, and Dash Snow, saying that they “offer a fresh perspective on our interpretation of opera’s most archetypal characters and themes in this season’s performances…”

The exhibtion, curated by Naomi Ben-Shahar, opens to the public on Nov. 3, from 6-9 PM on the orchestra level and rings of the David H. Koch Theater, and continues through Nov. 21.

 

Photo Credit: The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia, 2008, © Kehinde Wiley, courtesy of the New York City Opera