Archives for January 2011

Elizabeth Catlett is often presented as a soothing, non-challenging and not very innovative artist. So I was intrigued to receive word about an exhibition that opens on Jan. 27 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts: Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation with 21 Contemporary Artists is intended to explore Catlett’s work, from the 1960s to the present, in the context of the other contemporary artists who are working today. It’s a first.

The BMA has gathered works by 21 artists, including Sanford Biggers, iona rozeal brown, Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Robert Pruitt, Mickalene Thomas, Roberto Visani, and Carrie Mae Weems, to prove the point that Catlett was a pioneer. The common themes are race, gender, history, memory, and politics, and the media include Catlett’s prints and sculptures alongside the ceramics, new media, painting, photography, and sculpture of others.

Catlett was born in 1915 and is still working, in both the United States and Mexico. According to the press release:

She received first prize in the 1940 American Negro Exposition held in Chicago for her graduate thesis at Howard University and was the first recipient of an MFA in sculpture at the University of Iowa. Other notable achievements include serving as the first female professor of sculpture and the head of the sculpture department at the National School of Fine Arts, San Carlos, and receiving the International Sculpture Center’s 2003 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.

That’s all fine, wonderful even.

But I’m very glad to see a number of male artists on the BMA’s list, as Catlett was not just a woman artist. The museum has chosen a good point to make, and if I’d be happy to see the guest curator Isolde Brielmaier, successfully demonstrates her influence on younger artists. Catlett may come to be more appreciated. 

Her record auction price, btw, was achieved in 2009, for a life-size red cedar sculpture called Homage to My Young Black Sisters, from 1968: $288,000.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Bronx Museum

While we were busy disclosing deaccessioning at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Cleveland Art Museum’s planned sale of 32 works almost slipped by unnoticed.

But on Saturday, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer spilled the beans. Close readers of a Jan. 6 Sotheby’s press release about its Jan. 27 Old Master sale would have been tipped off: it mentions a pair of paintings from the CMA. But I didn’t get that release.

Once again, I don’t quibble with the sales, as I know them. Steve Litt, who wrote the Plain Dealer article, says the whole shebang, all 32 works, are estimated to fetch just $706,000 to $1,022,000. Small potatoes — so no masterpiece is being sacrificed. Most of the works were gifts (be careful what you accession…) and a couple of others have had their attributions downgraded to lesser artists.

For example, we have here a work first thought to be by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, but downgraded to a follower. It’s expected to raise $200,000 to $300,000.

Another work for sale was ruined by poor conservation.

Further, the plan is to reinvest the proceeds in Old Masters. All good.

This plan to divest some works predates the current director, David Franklin, who took over last September. But it jibes with what he told me recently over coffee: everything the museum buys should be a masterpiece, displacing something already hanging on the walls.

For Cleveland, not really a universal museum, that make sense.

Cleveland also had, and seems to have followed, a real plan, a 12-step process, including:

Jon Seydl, the museum’s curator of European painting and sculpture, sifted through the more than 200 old master paintings in the collection.

The museum also consulted experts in the field, including curators Lawrence Nichols of the Toledo Museum of Art, Edgar Peters Bowron of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and professors Edward Olszewski of Case Western Reserve University and Christina Neilson of Oberlin College.

Members of the museum’s education staff were asked whether they could see using any of the potentially salable items in classes.

There’s only one thing wrong with this picture: how we learned about it. Why the museum didn’t get ahead of the story, releasing a press statement of its own, I will never understand.

When something seeps out, it raises suspicions — even ones that are not justified by fact. So why risk it?

UPDATE, 2/2: Here’s another good example of transparency: The Rosenbach Museum and Library reecently decided to deaccession several works by Walter Greaves and possibly one by Whistler, which would go to another museum. It put out a press release on Jan. 17 (here) and the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about it two days later (here).

After reading my blogs posts on deaccessioning, a press representative for the Rosenbach called both to my attention. Apologies for the delay in updating this post. 

The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University lost a rare 16th century painting on Friday — but it was the right thing to do and done without a fuss.

The painting — by German artist Hans Baldung Grien — has a troubled history dating to World War II and the Nazis. The Zimmerli returned the work to Simon Goodman, the grandson of Friedrich and Louise Gutmann, who were Holocaust victims. They owned the painting until 1941. Their heirs, the Gutmann/Goodman family, have been searching for this painting, along with many others that have been recovered, since 1946.

Unfortunately, this painting’s travels aren’t over yet, as we shall see.

Baldung Grien (c. 1484-1545), though not so well known in the U.S., was a gifted follower of Albrecht Dürer; he made this work, “Portrait of a Young Man” in 1509, and it was going to be featured in the Zimmerli’s reinstallation of it European collection, which is set to open to the public in April, according to the museum’s press release about the case.

But Goodman found the painting last year when he came upon a rare copy of the 1983 catalogue raisonné of the artist by the German art historian Gert von der Osten. Presented with a claim, the Zimmerli researched the work for about a year, and agreed to its return.

Goodman, grandson of Friedrich and Louise Gutmann, knew that the painting was part of their collection of some 60 Old Masters — works by Bosch, Botticelli, Cranach, Holbein and Memling — and Impressionist works by Degas and Renoir, that had hung in Bosbeek, their posh 18th-century estate outside of Haarlem in the Netherlands.

During the war, the story goes, Karl Haberstock, a German art dealer representing Adolf Hitler, had issued an order to Gutmann’s agent in Paris to relinguish seven paintings, including this one, to him. He obliged, supposedly as part of a deal that ensured safe passage for the Gutmanns to Italy.

But when the shipment arrived in Berlin, the Baldung Grien was supposedly missing. Von der Osten’s catalogue raisonné says that the painting was in the hands of a `London dealer’ between 1948 and 1950. Next, in 1953, it turned up in the inventory of dealers Rosenberg and Stiebel of New York, who sold or transferred it to Rudolf Heinemann. Heinemann gave the painting to Rutgers University in 1959.

The Gutmanns did not get safe passage, but were instead taken to concentration camps, where they died.

The family has been trying to recover their art for years, not always so easily as this case. In the press release, Goodman says: “After so many years of dealing with art museums around the world, it has been a pleasure to work with Rutgers and the Zimmerli.  Their professionalism and courtesy have been exemplary.”

Sadly, however, the painting is already up for sale at Christie’s on Jan. 26, with a presale estimate of $200,000 to $300,000. (More information there about the artist, too — including the reason for his nickname “Grien.”)

It makes one wonder whether some Zimmerli angel might have come forward and bought the work for the museum.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s 
 

Another Saturday, another icon to relish. Dealer Andrew Butterfield is about to reveal a 17th century ivory that he says he has rediscovered — which is to say, it has been buried in a private collection for a very long time, but is soon to make its public debut with a new attribution. And by the way, it’s more than two feet tall — pretty monumental for an ivory figure.

Last week, I posted here about a short “Backstory” article about a Yup’ik mask on the Icons page of the Saturday Wall Street Journal. This week, I’ve written a brief “Object of Desire” article for the Icons page.

The object in question is an ivory carving of Saint Sebastian (detail at left), and Butterfield bought it from a South American dealer last year. A few other dealers saw it — the South American had it with him at the TEFAF fair in Maastricht last March, but he did not put it on public view. Only Butterfield, who has — I’m told by others in the field — a great eye, saw something worth betting on. He bought it, and spent the time since then researching it and having it cleaned up by the Metropolitan Museum.

Butterfield says the ivory is by Jacobus Agnesius, a little-known Germanic artist whose only universally-agreed works are in the Louvre and a museum in Albi, France. The Prince of Lichtenstein owns two other carvings thought by many to be by Agnesius.

Butterfield engaged Eike Schmidt, the head of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Department of Decorative Arts, Textiles & Sculpture and a recognized expert on ivories, to write the catalogue essay. And others, including Nicholas Penny, formerly curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and now director of the National Gallery in London, says the essay, and the attribution, are totally convincing.

Quoting from Schmidt in the catalogue:

The highly dramatic Saint Sebastian is a work of extraordinary artistic ambition and achievement. It epitomizes the Baroque artistic ideal to express the strongest, deepest and most sublime emotions via an extreme muscular tension and contortion of the human body. Spanning 64 centimeters (25.2 in.) from the right foot to the left index finger, it is amongst the largest ivory figures ever made. As the size alone indicates, the hitherto unpublished Saint Sebastian must have been a very important commission for Jacobo Agnesius, whose oeuvre is systematically reconstructed and analyzed in the following pages for the first time.

And:

 

The statuette represents a young man with a heroic, muscular build, and long and thick curly hair, who is naked save for a loincloth. He stands on his right foot, with his left leg, bent at the knee, raised and extended behind him. His arms are crossed in a complex, asymmetrical position as they jut upward over his head and in front of his body. Cords of rope bind his left wrist and right elbow. His torso arcs forcefully to the proper left, and he throws his head back over his left shoulder. As originally mounted, the figure was shown tied to a tree, which was made either of wood or metal. The figure’s complex and twisting stance is meant to convey both the weight of his body hanging down from the tree (note, for example, the tension of his painfully extended arms), and the violent thrusts of his body as he writhes in pain and tries to free himself.

 

The anatomy is rendered with astonishing precision. Every detail of the musculature and skeleton is recorded.

And:

 

The newly discovered Saint Sebastian is principally carved from one piece of ivory, which extends from the figure’s feet up to the middle of his biceps. Agnesius added two separately carved units, one for each arm, to the main segment of ivory….

Penny told me he found it all “rather exciting.” 

 

Butterfield will be showing the piece from Jan. 21 through Feb. 4 at Moretti Fine Art in New York. He’s asking $4.75 million for it.

 

Photo Credit: Maggie Nimkin, Courtesy Andrew Butterfield 

What’s going on in California regarding its libraries is pretty terrible. For a start, the new governor Jerry Brown has a $25.4 billion shortfall, and his proposed budget doesn’t cut library spending — it eliminates it. By doing that, he’ll save $30 million, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In the past, state funding has reached as high as $56.8 million — but that was more than a decade ago.

The LAT quoted the president of the California Library Association, Paymaneh Maghsoudi, saying:

The proposed cuts unveiled by the governor will not only jeopardize library hours, staff positions, and the availability of books and materials, they will also potentially dismantle the cooperative system of borrowing and loaning books, known as Transaction Based Reimbursement (TBR), that has existed statewide for over three decades. Incidentally, a cut of this magnitude to the TBR could make the state ineligible for the federal match that is a part of this program.

Too late, for Los Angelenos anyway. A July, 2010 article in the LAT said that the LA Public Library had moved to a reduced hours schedule that kept the library closed not only on Sundays but also on Mondays. The central (above) and branch libraries are open two nights a week, Tuesday and Thursday, until 8 p.m.

I just checked, and that’s still true. Not a single one — central or branch — is open on Mondays. That strikes me as draconian. Couldn’t some remain open on Mondays, and close another day?

Libraries, in the digital age, are becoming more central to us, not less. I sympathize with Gov. Brown’s goals — he has made other drastic cuts — but something seems out of whack here. Must we leave our libraries totally in the hands of philanthropists?

Here are a few further thoughts on the closure matter.  

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times