Archives for January 2011

The American section of the International Association of Art Critics, of which I am a member, is just out with its annual exhibition awards, and here are some of the winners. (Entire list, covering exhibitions from June ’09 through June ’10) is here, including the runners-up in each category.) 

Best Project in a Public Space:

“Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms” (left)  — Organized by the Fabric Workshop and Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Curated by Marion Boulton Stroud, Carlos Basualdo, and Adelina Vlas

Best Show in a Non–profit Gallery or Space:

“Leon Golub: Live & Die like a Lion?” — Organized by The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Curated by Brett Littman

Best Show in a University Gallery:

“Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” — Organized by the Hammer Museum of Art, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Curated by Robert Gober

Best Monographic Museum Show, Nationally:

“Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917” — Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield

Best Thematic Show, Nationally:

“Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968” (Chryssa’s Ampersand IV at right) — Organized by Rosenwald-Wolf, Hamilton Hall & Borowsky Galleries, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Curated by Sid Sachs

Best Historical Museum Show, Nationally:

“Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” — Organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Curated by Kerry Brougher and Philippe Vergne

Other categories include museum and gallery shows in New York, best shows in architecture/design, best shows in media/film, and so on.

(I voted in some categories, but not in those in which I had seen too few of the entries.)

The awards ceremony take place at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on March 14 2011 at 6 p.m. — it’s open to the public.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the University of the Arts (bottom)

 

Art works on the auction block that sail past their pre-sale estimates, fetching multiples of the high end always fascinate me. Does someone know something the rest of us don’t? Have the experts made a mistake?

The auction houses themselves usually play down the intrigue by saying,”it only takes two bidders.” That’s right – but two very determined ones.

So it was last week, when an 18th Century American mahogany bureau table sold at Christie’s for $5.7 million — against a presale estimate of $700,000 to $900,000.

As Christie’s described the action:

the table was pursued by multiple bidders, who rapidly drove the price to the $3 million dollar threshold. From there on two dedicated bidders in the saleroom battled back and forth for the handsomely carved table before a hushed audience of clients and onlookers, until auctioneer John Hays dropped the gavel at $5 million. With premium, the final price realized was $5,682,500.

The table was called the Catherine Goddard Chippendale Block-and-Shell Carved and Figured Mahogany Bureau Table, and the piece is “attributed” to the renowned Newport, R.I. carver John Goddard, 1724-1785, whose work was sought out by wealthy colonials. Goddard’s work here exemplifies the Newport style called “block-and-shell” carving.

Maybe this is what made it special:

A handwritten label in the top drawer of the table indicates that Goddard made the knee-hole bureau circa 1765 expressly for his daughter, Catherine Goddard, and may have given it to her as a wedding present. The table remained within his daughter’s family through several generations of descendants until it was sold by the cabinetmaker’s great-great granddaughter Mary Briggs (Weaver) Case in the early 1900s. The table last sold at auction in January 2005 for $940,000.

After the sale, Hays brought up other points: “This desk bears all the unique characteristics and quality of construction that make Newport furniture of this era so highly prized among collectors. The quality of the mahogany in particular is stunning in this piece and shows that Goddard had his pick of the wood coming into the port during that era.”

Whatever the reason, the piece set a world record for the knee-hole desk form.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s   

Let’s return to the subject of Yup’ik masks, which as you may remember, I posted about here two weeks ago. Canadian dealer Donald Ellis was taking two prize specimens to the Winter Antiques Show in New York, which opened at a party on Thursday evening.

Ellis was asking more than $2 million for the both Donati Studio Mask and another mask dubbed the Donati Fifth Avenue mask.

Both sold almost immediately. The Fifth Avenue mask was the first to go, purchased by a New York collector of modern and contemporary art — one who also owns Native American works — for about $2.1 million, thus setting a new record for Indian works.

At 6:42 p.m, Ellis sold the Studio mask (at right) for more than $2.5 million — breaking his minutes-old record. I got no answer when I asked who that purchaser was.

I’m glad to see Native American works of such high quality getting their moment in the sun.

Before this, only a handful of Native American works have sold in the six figures.

Here’s a link to my Wall Street Journal piece of two weeks ago, which has more background.

It varies from city to city, museum to museum, of course, but at the Seattle Art Museum, Picasso has punched out both van Gogh and Impressionism.

You’ll recall that the museum has been on shaky grounds in this recession, and era of high finance, and it needed to do well, very well, with its Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris show (which included the luscious 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar at left).

It did: the museum reported yesterday (very timely, thank you — many museums say they can’t disclose exhibition attendance for weeks after a show closes) that Picasso drew more visitors than any previous exhibit: more than 400,000. Even better, membership has reached an all-time high of 48,000 (a sum that may rise higher as paperwork is completed). The exhibit ran from October 8, 2010 through January 17.

The previous record-holder for SAM was Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums, which attracted 316,000 attendees between June 12 and August 29, 1999.

But it was van Gogh, in 2004-05, who had attracted membership to the previous high, 40,000, according to an article last fall in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that laid out the museum’s financial troubles.

Seattle, it seems, made the most of the exhibit, which was expensive. Good for the museum, but I would love a better window on the economics.

UPDATE, 4/30/11: According to an economic impact report released by SAM, the Picasso exhibit generated $66 million in economic activity for Washington State.  

The Picasso exhibit, which is touring to seven cities, now moves to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where hopes are also riding high. Director Alex Nyerges calls it “without a doubt a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the American public.” 

 

Should art museums, or any museums, engage in high finance?

That’s the question I had to ask about the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which you’ll recall reached a debt-restructuring agreement a few weeks ago. The deal, in which the city of San Francisco will guarantee bonds that will be floated to replace the troublesome, variable rate bonds that nearly bankrupted AAM, is complicated. And so was the 2005 deal — involving the variable rate bonds, hedged with an interest rate swap — which replaced the 2000 deal.

If your head hurts or your eyes have glazed over already, I understand. You’re helping me prove my point: Even if the AAM’s gamble to reduce its interest payments had paid off, I’m not sure it was worth it.

I lay the whole situation out in an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal — liquidity squeeze, collateral returns, letters of credit, etc. But as John Nelson, a managing director at Moody’s, told me of the AAM’s maneuver “It’s very different from a fixed-rate deal, where you know the cost up front.”

Many people and many institutions got caught up in the financial mess of the last decade, but not every one of them was a helpless victim — which is how the AAM sometimes portrays itself. I think non-profits should probably be more conservative in financial matters than other institutions, and as Nelson said, Moody’s studies show that museums, among all non-profits, are most vulnerable to decreased revenue intake during recessions.

All in all, the Asian Art Museum isn’t doing badly, operationally. Attendance is fine — not what it projected when it moved to the new building, but as good as a move would realistically suggest.

It has a tough road ahead in fund-raising to get back to health. But it does have the breathing room now. It should remember that good exhibitions, good programs beget donors — often with requiring a push, of course, but nonetheless gets them.  

I wonder two things: is any other museum next? I couldn’t one exactly like this. And, when is someone going to try this again? Never, I hope.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum