Archives for February 2011

The Denver Art Museum’s newly reinstalled Native American galleries opened last Sunday, but I had to hold my congratulations to the museum until today: My article about them appears on the cover of today’s Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times.

No, unfortunately, I haven’t seen the galleries — but I can laud about them from afar is that they are “artist-centric.” Nancy Blomberg, the curator in charge, has made all efforts to name the artists of the works, in contrast to the prevalent practice of simply citing the tribal origin.

She uses scholarly attribution research that has been going on for decades, and did some of her own, too. She has also installed contemporary Indian works, and the museum has invited some of them to come and work on the floor. Denver has done a great thing.

The images here are by “George Walkus, Kwakwaka’wakw, Four-faced Hamat’sa Mask, about 1938″ and “Norval Morrisseau, Ojibwa/Anishnaabe, Unititled (Snakes), about 1968-70.”

As my many sources will attest, I’ve spent months, on and off, reporting this article, and I have many more observations to make on the subject.

Back later with some of them.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum

The secretive, powerhouse Wildenstein family is making headlines again, and it’s not good news.

Police reportedly seized 30 works of art from the Wildenstein Institute in January after Yves Rouart, the cousin of Anne-Marie Rouart, a descendant of Manet, charged that some of them belong to him. The paintings are worth millions, and include works by Manet, Degas and Morisot. Guy Wildenstein is the target of this investigation.

Mr. Rouart is his cousin Anne-Marie’s heir, and claims the works — which hung in Ms. Rouart’s swank apartment in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris — were bequeathed, along with the other furnishings, to him. Before she died, in the mid-90s, Ms. Rouart had bequeathed the rest of her collection to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, whose treasurer was Mr. Wildenstein. She was also a good friend of his father, Daniel Wildenstein, who died in 2001 and was reputed to have been the world’s largest private collector at one time.

All this comes from several newspaper reports, including one in London’s Daily Telegraph. 

The gossip is all the more juicy because Guy Wildenstein is a friend of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a co-founder of his party. He was recently honored by Sarkozy.

According to the Telegraph:

Mr Rouart has filed for charges against “persons unknown” for “concealment of theft”. Guy Wildenstein’s lawyers declined to comment.

Other works seized by police also included bronzes of animals by Rembrandt Bugatti and two sketches by Edgar Degas. These allegedly belonged to Joseph Reinach, a major art collector who had many works expropriated by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Mr Reinach’s heir, Alexandre Bronstein, has filed for charges against persons unknown for “theft and concealment”.

Worse,

Guy Wildenstein is under investigation over allegations by his stepmother, Sylvia, who died two months ago, that they failed to declare the true extent of their estate.

One of the works in dispute is The Lute Player, a £69 million painting by Caravaggio, sitting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York under the title “from a private collection”. 

That paragraph refers to Daniel’s widow — his second wife — who last year sued the Sarkozy administration alledging that certain works of art, some of which belong to her, were transferred to trusts, keeping them out of both her reach and that of tax authorities. Here’s a link to the Telegraph article that explains that mess.

 

In the week that brought us the Google Art Project (which I have not yet explored in depth, but which looks pretty fascinating on first glance), dare I cite something that is now as common as a podcast?

Yes, I will. Museums are making more videos, and my attention has been called to a series that the Detroit Institute of Arts has produced for its Fakes, Forgeries and Mysteries exhibition.

The show opened last November and runs through April 10, and DIA is using these podcasts both to spread the word and go deeper on the discoveries made for the exhibitions.

I find them fun, and so — though I’ve already written about the exhibit here — I’m posting again.

DIA plans to do five podcasts — four  are up, and the fifth will be posted on Feb. 10. But it may have “enough” to produce a sixth one, too, according to Matt Fry, the marketing director.

As part of the attraction, DIA gives away free exhibition tickets (worth $12) to the first 10 people who watch the video and answer a question about the authentification process correctly.

Each videocast lasts about 3.5 to 4 minutes. They are easily findable on the DIA website: click on the exhibition and “Podcasts” appears on a tab, along with tabs for “Visitor Information” and “Faux/Real?”

They are also findable on the DIA’s YouTube channel, where (at the moment) they are not getting heavy viewership.

And, according to Fry, they are also available on ArtBabble, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Vimeo and iTunes, and viewers have reposted them on other sites, like Facebook and Twitter. So it’s pretty impossible now to tell how many views they’ve had, though Fry says the museum will review the analytics after the series ends. He adds:

People are definitely learning about the science and research, and we’re having fun asking them to watch the videos and answer questions about the authentication process. We don’t currently have a survey mechanism in place to determine how many visit the show as a result, but we’re working with our internal researchers on a market segmentation type study that will help determine this in the future (“where did you hear about us”).

Are these the best podcasts out there? I couldn’t say, as I haven’t seen enough competitors. (Any informed critics out there?)

But I think they’re the way the museum world is going, and worth noting. We’ll be seeing more of these initiatives.

Photo Credit: Detroit Institute of Art

If you have never seen the works of Carlos Cruz-Diez, you may be in for a surprise. I was.

Cruz-Diez is a Venezuelan artist I became aware of last summer, when the first in a series of bilingual books on Latin American artists called Conversaciones (published by Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros) was released. But looking at art in a book, and looking at art in person are two different things, as we all know.

On a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, I was treated to a sneak preview of Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time, an exhibition that will open on Sunday and run through July 4.

I was charmed.

Even though many works had not been hung — they were sitting on the floor instead of occupying a wall — and even though the lights were, mostly, off, the show looked magical.

The young and the young-at-heart will enjoy his playful “color structures,” which change with the viewer’s perspective. They cleverly engage people in a game about the changing nature of color. At the MFAH, there’s also a site-specific installation made of light. And Cruz-Diez made paintings that, until you are close-up, might be a “structure” or might not.

Though he was born in 1923, this is the first large-scale retrospective of his work, MFAH says.

The operative quote from the curator, Mari Carmen Ramírez, in the press release is this:

Generally considered in the context of Kinetic Art, the significance of the large body of work produced by Cruz-Diez since the 1950s extends beyond issues of movement, vibration and sheer retinality. From the beginning, Cruz-Diez focused his research and experiments on one critical issue: the investigation of color as a living organism that is in a constant state of transformation. This exhibition aims to show his radical and unprecedented achievements in this area.

In the site-specific work, Chromointerférence (above), visitors will walk into a large white room in which “two planes of color continually undulate in bands projected onto the walls and floor, dissolving the surrounding volumes–including the viewers’ bodies–into color.” I entered, in stocking feet (MFAH will provide booties), and was able to see something of what this will look like.

The show is meant to travel, but I do not believe any other museum has as yet committed. They should. Cruz-Diez is interesting himself, as well as a window on Latin American art.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of MFAH

 

In case you missed it, I want to point out an article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal by Pia Catton, which attempts to set the record straight on some misunderstandings about David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly,” the work yanked from the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition.

For a start, she says, quoting the artist’s executor, the work had nothing to do with his case of AIDS or the AIDS epidemic, as so many people have written. Including the wall label at MoMA, according to the article.

Even today’s Washington Post, which reports on the outcome of yesterday’s meeting of Smithsonian regents on the affair — no surprise, they supported Secretary Wayne Clough though, according to various reports, they did not vote on whether or not the film should have been removed from the exhibit — contains these passages:

The mistake was not having enough time to explain the iconography of the art itself and its meaning at the onset of the AIDS crisis.

And:

The video by the late Wojnarowicz was created in 1987 to show the pain and sorrow that the AIDS epidemic was creating, especially in the gay community. 

The whole episode is, imho, a manifestion of everyone losing his or her head, too quickly, without knowing all the facts. Instead of creating a teachable moment, everyone stoked the controversy. Thus no one has done himself, or herself, proud.

While I encourage you to read the whole WSJ article, here are a few critical passages:

…the people closest to the artist’s estate say the film and its creator have been too narrowly interpreted….

…”A Fire in My Belly”–which was made on Super8 mm film and is not, contrary to media reports, a “video”–predates Mr. Wojnarowicz’s discovery that he was HIV positive, which Mr. [Tom] Rauffenbart said occurred in March 1988. “The film was shot before David was diagnosed and before he got involved with the AIDS movement,” said Mr. Rauffenbart, who was the artist’s partner for seven years. Considered in a broader context, the film’s footage of street scenes in Mexico and of various forms of fighting reflects the artist addressing themes of violence, individuality and the effect of culture on a child.

…Regarding the crucifix scenes, Mr. Rauffenbart said they should be viewed in terms of Mr. Wojnarowicz’s extensive use of Catholic imagery: “He had a positive image of Christ and had his own version of what Christ represents. He was tied to saints, too, that suffered and were martyred.”

Rauffenbart, along with NYU, which holds Wojnarowicz’s papers, have compiled a fact sheet, which demands bigger circulation. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal