Archives for January 2011

A new year, new hours. That’s the story with the Art Institute of Chicago. I’m all for experimenting with hours, but not this way. I think we need more evening hours, but the AIC — like the Cincinnati Art Museum last year and others — is going in the opposite direction.

In a recent press release, the Art Institute quietly buried evening hours on Fridays, when it had closed at 8 p.m. The last late Friday will be Feb. 25.

I emailed Erin Hogan, the spokeswoman, for an explanation, and she said:

we started keeping the museum open late on Friday nights when we opened the Matisse exhibition in late March 2010, to accommodate the additional crowds who came for the exhibition. People seemed to enjoy it, so we decided to keep the late Friday hours once the exhibition closed. However, attendance on those nights hasn’t remained at that level, and we simply aren’t getting enough visitors now to warrant keeping the entire museum open. We do get a lot more visitors on Thursday nights, due to that evening being our current free hours.

Ah, but change is coming to Thursdays as well. The same press release says that free Thursday evenings (sponsored by Target) will end on May 26. After that, the museum stays open until 8 p.m., but visitors must pay. Target said last year that it was refocusing its philanthropy toward education and away from support for free museum hours.

When will the museum be free? The times are not very convenient — never on a weekend, or an evening, when most people have time to go. Instead, the Art Institute will be free every weekday during January and until February 4, and thereafter on the first and second Wednesday of every month.

Got that? Are you going to remember that? Neither am I.

I realize that the Art Institute is trying to both increase revenue and manage crowds. But when we talk about access, to all, hours have to be part of the consideration. Working people like art, too.

More on hours here.

My last two posts have chastised museums for not be transparent about their deaccessioning activities, so before I move on, let me mention a step toward transparency — or at least a nod to the press — by the Association of Art Museum Directors.

I’ve criticized AAMD in the past (and sometimes praised the group, too), usually because they provide so little information and what they do provide in, say, the “State of North America’s Museums” is, basically, useless — at least to outsiders. When I complained recently to a museum director, he explained that some of the numbers are useful to them as benchmarks.

But the other day, AAMD took a step in the right direction, a baby step, but a step. It released the agenda for its upcoming Jan. 16-19 meeting in Ponce, Puerto Rico — not just a barebones listing (which has been available in the past), but more about who is speaking on what and when.

NEA chief Rocco Landesman is the keynote, preceded by an opening session that will include a discussion the recent brouhaha about Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery.

There’s more, including some things I think are important — like the impact of free admissions and the various models for curatorial support groups, which may end up costing more than they are worth. There are sessions on community, government affairs, leadership diversity, etc. Predictable stuff — which is not to denigrate it.

Still, I see nothing on the agenda about gathering better statistics, which executive director Janet Landay told me recently that they’re working on. Bravo — maybe it doesn’t need discussing.

I don’t see anything there on finances, either — maybe those conversations go on in the hallways, between the sessions.

The best part is probably the dinner at and tour of the Art Museum of Ponce (here, if you speak Spanish), which just reopened after an expansion. There, they’ll get to visit Leighton’s Flaming June (above) and the other stellar works in its collection.  

Today, long after yesterday’s post on the subject, I learned of a third museum housecleaning, and there was a press release all right, but it came after the fact. Is that better than nothing? Yes, but it’s not ideal. Worse, the deaccessions took place through galleries — so we do not know the asked prices, the final prices or who was shown the works. That’s not good, imho.

The Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Arts is the museum in question, and on Jan. 5 it issued a press release headlined “PAFA Strengthens Its Renowned Collection of American Art.” Who would quarrel with that?

The first few paragraphs are all about buying works by Dorothea Tanning, Nancy Spero, Philip Evergood, and so on, and PAFA says: “The strategic plan, approved by PAFA’s Board of Trustees, calls for the growth of the collection through gift and purchase to fill gaps, including improving its holdings of Hudson River School artists, selected movements in 20th-century art, and contemporary art.  In addition, PAFA seeks to add greater representation of works by women and African Americans.”

Only then do we learn that PAFA sold five paintings to raise money for the purchases, and they aren’t cheesy:

• Autumn Still Life by William Merritt Chase (sold by Avery Galleries),
• Flowers (1893) by John H. Twachtman (sold by Menconi & Schoelkopf),
• Looking over Frenchman’s Bay at Green Mountain (1896) by Childe Hassam (sold by Avery Galleries),
• Bathers in a Cove (1916) by Maurice Prendergast (sold by Menconi & Schoelkopf),
• Great White Herons (1933) by Frank Weston Benson (sold by Menconi & Schoelkopf).

The proceeds approached $5 million, all told, the release said, and

In each case, the artists of deaccessioned works are represented in PAFA’s collection by more important examples and/or ones that relate better to core works in the permanent collection. The recommended works were reviewed by independent curators, scholars and PAFA’s Collections Committee and approved for sale by the Board of Trustees.

Later still, we learn:

PAFA’s Board has also approved the sale of five additional works: Girl at Piano (ca. 1887) by Theodore Robinson (consigned to Menconi & Schoelkopf), Top of Cape Ann (1918) by Childe Hassam (consigned to Menconi & Schoelkopf), The Turkey (1927) by Arthur B. Carles (consigned to Menconi & Schoelkopf), Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia (1924) by Ernest Lawson (consigned to Menconi & Schoelkopf), and Still Life #1 (1827) by James Peale (consigned to Avery Galleries).

Not to sound like a broken record, but… I’m not against all deaccessioning by any means. But I do believe in transparency before the act. And I believe other museums should be offered a chance to buy the works first, and that is better achieved at public auction than private sale.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, oddly, praised the after-the-fact disclosure…here…calling it “highly unusual.” Well, maybe unusual, but not a model. (PAFA proudly posted a link in its press area.)     

I don’t want to be too hard on PAFA, though — it’s a little better at disclosure than many museums. It publishes its strategic plan online, for example, though it’s very bare-bones.

PAFA had taken down all images of the deaccessioned works, if they had been in the online database at all, and I’m writing this afterhours — so I can’t ask for images of them. Instead, I’m posting one of my favorite works in PAFA’s collection, Homer’s Fox Hunt. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of PAFA

 
   

In the last few days, I’ve learned about two pending deaccessions in different ways — neither ideally, but one preferable to the other.

Later this month, the Carnegie Museum of Art will sell five paintings by George Romney that, it says, have not been on view since the 1930s, according to yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The paintings were a gift, but the curator of fine arts, Louise Lippincott, says she doesn’t understand why they were popular even then. And, the story continues,

The sale was prompted by limited storage space and the fact that the museum’s curators continue to collect. The contemporary department “is growing like crazy. We really are going back down to storage and, for the first time in years, saying, ‘Do these things belong in our collection? Are we ever going to have a public use for these objects?’ ” Ms. Lippincott said.

The works are on the block at Christie’s Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings & Watercolors sale, Part II, on January 26. You can see them here, and if all five simply equal their high estimate, the Carnegie will receive $100,000. With that, Lippincott said she would like to buy a drawing by Romney. (I’m happy these proceeds will stay within the period, and not go to contemporary art.) 

How did this article come about? That’s not totally clear. There is no press release about it on the museum’s release page. Christie’s didn’t put out a release for that sale (or, at least, it’s not posted on the web and I didn’t receive one either). So either the reporter was remarkably enterprising or she was tipped off by someone — possibly even the museum itself, which decided the best way to handle a deaccession in this charged climate was to get ahead of the story. That’s my guess.

One of the five leaving the collection, Romney’s Portrait of Colin Dunlop of Carmyle, is above.

Meantime, I learned of the other deaccession — much bigger — from a press release, but one from Christie’s, not the museum in question, which is the Art Institute of Chicago. AIC is selling a Braque, two Picassos and a Matisse at the Impressionist and Modern sale in London on Feb. 11. Oddly, the release put a value on only three of them, and if those three fetch their high estimates, the total will be £10 million, or about $15.5 million. The details:

• Nature morte à la guitare, 1938, (at left) by Georges Braque, with an estimate: £3.5 million to £5.5 million), which was “formerly in the possession of the celebrated collectors Mr. and Mrs. Albert D. Lasker, the parents of Mrs. Brody who owned Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust which sold at Christie’s New York in May 2010 for $106.5 million.” 
  

[Read more…] about Two Museums Clean House: But How Did We Learn What’s Going?

When The Wall Street Journal devised a new set of weekend sections last fall, it added a page called Icons — the back page of its Review section.

There, among its regular rotating features, are short articles on works of art: one is called “Backstory,” another “Objects of Desire,” and sometimes “Artifacts.”

When I learned about the Yup’ik mask at left, which has a fascinating provenance and which may set a record price for Native American artworks — if the seller, Donald Ellis Gallery, gets his asking price — I thought it was a natural for Icons.

Ellis, while coy about the actual number, says he believes it will the record for Native American works, which is believed to be $2.1 million, fetched by a Tlingit war helmet at a Connecticut auction about three years ago.

As you can see, it’s a pretty spectacular specimen. It was purchased in 1905 by the well-known trader Adam Hollis Twitchell, who sold it to George Gustav Heye, who gave it to what became the National Museum of the American Indian. It deaccessioned the piece in the ’40s when it needed money (no comment on that, this time), and a dealer bought it, reselling it to surrealist Enrico Donati. His estate is selling the piece now.

You can read the whole article, short as it is, here. 

The mask at the Beyeler Foundation that I mention can be seen here, also fascinating. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Donald Ellis Gallery