Archives for April 2011

Max Gordon: does the name ring a bell? How about David Gordon?

A new book called Architect for Art: Max Gordon is one link between the two, but by no means the strongest: David Gordon, former director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, among other things, has written the Preface and an essay for the book about his brother Max, who died in 1990 of AIDs-related illness. I’m happy to highlight it not least because Max’s philosophy about architecture for contemporary art matches mine — or, I should say, mine parrots his: highlight the art, not the achitecture; use light to create space; make everything as simple as possible.

Max Gordon designed the Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road in London, which opened in 1985. Among his other projects: the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City; the homes of collectors Lewis and Susan Manilow, Keith and Kathy Sachs, Jackie Brody, and his own flat in London, plus David Juda’s gallery, Annely Juda Fine Art in London. The book is illustrated with pictures of all seven. Though not in the book, Gordon’s designs for galleries in Soho (Brooke Alexander’s, to name one) later influenced those in Chelsea.

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, links Gordon’s Saatchi Gallery design directly to the hugely successful Tate Modern and credits Gordon in his essay for suggesting what became the Turner Prize. He writes:

Gordon was something of a rarity, an architect…who was…loved and admired by artists. Many architects associated with artists…However, very few architects are regarded as friends and equals by artists, let alone accomplish this feat on both sides of the Atlantic. Garrulous but shy, given to one-liners but never glib, Max Gordon was a central figure in the London and New York art worlds for more than twenty years…

But why this book now? As David Gordon writes in the preface, “after excesses of all kinds, including in architecture, of the recent past, it is time for a return to an architecture infused with the spirit of minimalism, simplicity and economy.” (Another view of this is here.)

And, two, David Gordon was too busy running MAM until 2008 to get to this task.

This book has more going for it than marvelous pictures: it’s full of cocktail-party tidbits (which artists told the Sachses they must use Gordon, whose gallery he designed on the inside of a cigarette pack and whose on a napkin over lunch, etc.), as well as comments and remininscenses by Alanna Heiss, Richard Serra, Jennifer Bartlett, Lawrence Luhring, Jasper Johns, and others.

And, of course, there’s serious stuff, too — including essays by Kenneth Frampton and Jonathan Marvel.

 

At a time when students in art history are said by many to be choosing overwhelmingly to study contemporary art (a point made here by Maxwell Hearn of the Met), the University of Pennsylvania is adding to its medieval studies department.

What gives? A gift to the Penn Libraries, that’s what, and a very nice one at that.

Penn recently announced that it has received a major collection of 280 Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, valued at over $20 million, from a Penn alum, and long-time benefactor and Library Board member Lawrence J. Schoenberg, and his wife Barbara Brizdle Schoenberg.

Along with the gift, the Penn Libraries plan to create the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies to promote the use of the Schoenberg’s gift and other manuscript collections. Presumably, art history students will get the message and sign up. According to the press release:

Items from the Schoenberg collection have already attracted graduate students completing doctoral dissertations, undergraduates writing class papers, and scholars engaged in research and instruction in History, English, Music, History of Art, Religious Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and South Asian Studies, from Penn and abroad.

The collection, according to the release and an article in the Penn Current, contains manuscripts in art, science, mathematics and technology. “It is comprised of early manuscripts in Eastern and Western languages that illuminate the scope of pre-modern knowledge of the physical world in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions,” the Current says, and adds:

The collection traces the reading and interpretation of ancient authorities that had central importance in the history of ideas, including Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. It prefigures the advances of Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, and it illuminates lesser-known figures like Nastulus, the inventor of astrolabes, an ancient , and al-Zahrawi, devisor of medical instruments.

A catalogue for some items seems to be already online, including “virtual facsimiles.” That’s a page from an Eastern Mediterranean 15th Century herbal medicine manuscript above.

The Schoenbergs seem to be quite hooked on manuscripts. Penn says that their previous gifts to the university include “support for the creation of the Libraries’ Digital Humanities presence through the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI); the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, which tracks manuscript sales and provenance; as well as the annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscripts in the Digital Age; and the Lawrence J. Schoenberg & Barbara Brizdle Manuscript Initiative, established in 2006 to support the acquisition of manuscripts, preferably produced before 1601.”

They’re collectors, all right, and that’s a compliment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Penn Libraries

  

The movies have come to the art exhibit, and in what (I think) is a very unusual way: An exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence called Picasso, Miró, Dalí. Angry Young Men: the Birth of Modernity is structured like a film, in a series of flashbacks.

It’s a little hard to explain, so I shall stick closely to the press release, aided by my perusal of the catalogue and a look at what has been posted online about the exhibition.  

For the show, co-curators Christof Vitali, former director of the Beyeler Foundation, among other things, and Eugenio Carmona, professor at the University of Malaga, have gathered more than sixty early works by the three young artists, plus more than a hundred sketches by Picasso. The unifying factor is their background: all three were raised in Catalonia, but became famous in France. Picasso and Miro moved there to build their careers; Dalí stayed largely in Spain. 

The exhibit covers the years from 1901 through the late 1920s, but begins in 1926 with Dali, the youngest of the three, when he says he went to meet Picasso. (His Cadaques — 1917, pre-Picasso, is above.) Visitors learn how he responded to Picasso and, before that, to Miró. Then visitors move to 1917, when Miró encounters Picasso (His Portrait of Josef F. Rafols from 1917 is below); and then to 1901, when the young arrives in Paris at the start of the new century. The last painting is his Altar Boy, painted in 1896, when Picasso was 15.

The point is this:

The exhibition takes the visitor through a series of spaces organized as ‘considerations’ that investigate the common roots of the styles that later made Picasso, Miró and Dalí household names.

Their first sight, however, is none of the above. Like movies that begin with an inexplicable picture that is explained, or referenced, only later, Angry Young Men: the Birth of Modernity starts with a swirl of images above visitors’ head — they are taken from a sketchbook of Picasso’s, and:

The dream-like images and the striking encounter between classical and African art foreshadow the exhibition’s mysterious heart — Picasso’s groundbreaking Cahier 7. The product of just two months of intense creativity in 1907, the album’s pages show Picasso clearly straddling two centuries and two traditions, with one foot in the 19th century, and the other in the 20th. Here we can see Picasso struggling to give birth to a new visual language — the language of modernity — in the very first sketches of his revolutionary work Les Demoisselles d’Avignon.

The 1907 Cahier 7 has never been shown in its entirety outside Spain, and its importance in the story turns up in selected labels before visitors reach the real thing.

The “epilogue” brings together works from all three artists that “show the persistence of the influence of Cahier 7: Picasso’s La Femme Qui Pleure, Miro’s Composition (Petit Univers) and Dali’s Arlequin.

The exhibit then ends in an interactive room and — this I like — here

…a special emphasis is placed on the practice of drawing, in a space where the visitors can try their own hand a drawing and sketching, using reproductions of works by the young artists as possible models, just as they themselves had done. Just as Picasso had spent his days copying masterpieces in the galleries of the Louvre in the early 1900s, visitors to the exhibition-perhaps themselves this century’s next ’emerging talents’-can discover the importance of the past in creating the future.

Sounds to me like an intriguing — if possibly confusing — approach: a bold new world. But as movies are so prevalent in our culture, maybe exhibits can  work well as a backward narrative. Flashback novels are common, and even a few plays move forward in reverse.

The exhibit runs until July 17. Comments especially welcome from anyone who visits Florence and sees it.

Photo Credits: Kunstmuseum Bern (top), Mildred Lane Kemper Museum/Washington University (bottom) via Palazzo Strozzi 

Speaking of participation — and this being Holy (or Passion) Week — it’s a good time to highlight the 400th anniversary of the completion of the King James Bible, which — no matter your religious bent — can be appreciated for its felicitous use of language.

For months, the King James Bible Trust, which was established to celebrate the anniversary, has been commissioning music and literary compositions (composers who were short-listed are here), sponsoring lectures and debates, holding study days in the UK, and various other activities more about which you can read on its website.

You’ll see that Neil MacGregor of the British Museum introduces the video there called “The Book That Changed the World.” It goes on to have people citing a few verses that have given the world common usages, cliches even, read in a beautiful but somehow chilling way. For more examples, click on “King James Bible Phrases.” Those cited include “a land flowing with milk and honey,” “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” “feet of clay,” and “a time and a place for everything,” among so many more.

The website also includes a digitized version of the KJB, as published in 1611, a clever look at life in 1611, and much more.

And in a sign of the times — participation — the KJBT has also started a project called the YouTube Bible: it’s a complete reading of the Bible in English, by actors, musicians, politicians, and people everywhere — even royals (Prince Charles, at least).

The Trust is seeking readers. You maybe?

This link explains how to participate — basically, you look at what has already been recorded, choose a section from the KJB (published online by the University of Michigan) that hasn’t been done, record it, upload it to YouTube, and email the link to the Trust, which will choose whose versions become part of the official YouTube Bible.

If you have a videocam, it’s simple. And worthwhile.

 

The Hirshhorn Museum sent me an email a while back that boggles the mind. It was an invitation to buy tickets to the Apr. 29 “After Hours” event, running from 8 p.m. to midnight. The picture looks, to me, more like a rave than anything to do with art, but that’s not the topic I’m taking up here. It’s not even the high ticket price of $18.

What’s most bothersome about this invitation is the statement about members: “Members get in free and have access to VIP area.”

You can see that line for yourself in the picture at left.

“A VIP area”? At a public museum, an arm of the Smithsonian Institution?

For years, museum officials have been droning on about the need to dispel the notion that art museums are elitist. To me, it’s more of a museum image problem than anything real: some people think that they have to dress up, have a college diploma, or have other so-called elite attributes to feel welcome. Mostly, that’s pure fantasy — or an excuse.

And now, the Hirshhorn — no doubt in an effort to raise money (the lowest level of membership costs $100 to $249 a year ) — is creating a VIP lounge within an already questionable activity? After Hours seems to involve gallery tours as well as “music and live performances on the plaza.” Guess which is the draw?

As a subsequent press release said:

From his infamous dance parties (RAW, MIXTAPE) to his guest spots at numerous DC nightlife events, audience favorite DJ Shea Van Horn sheds his drag alter ego, Summer Camp, and returns to After Hours to stir up the dance floor and leave a trail of exhausted revelers in his wake.

Oh, btw, galleries close at 10 p.m. (maybe for protection from the revelers?).

I check the Hirshhorn’s mission statement, which says, in part:

We seek to share the transformative power of modern and contemporary art with audiences at all levels of awareness and understanding by creating meaningful, personal experiences in which art, artists, audiences and ideas converge. We enhance public understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through acquisition, exhibitions, education and public programs, conservation, and research. 

I guess After Hours is a public program. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, if museum officials don’t believe that art is enough, no one else will either. (See “Museums Gone Wild.”)

But this post is more about that VIP lounge. It’s almost enough to call the SI’s Regents to task yet again — or to restructure the Smithsonian in a way that produces a better operational culture. Members’ events are one thing; a two-class system at one event is inexcusable. The Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, are not some New York City night club with chosen ones behind a velvet rope.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum