Archives for April 2011

From afar, the exhibition called Monet’s Water Lillies at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City has a lot of good things going for it.

But it also, I believe, has a downside or two…and I hope this is not the way of the future there. Until now, I’ve been mostly impressed by the museum under new director Julian Zugazagoitia (see here and here).

The exhibit, which opens Apr. 8, reunites a Monet triptych, whose panels have long since been acquired by three museums, for the first time in three decades. The 14-feet wide, 6-feet-tall paintings are hung together, in a panorama, as Monet intended, not separated by space and not surrounded by other paintings — similarly, as I recall, to the way another water lillies series is hung at l’Orangerie (below) in Paris (and, maybe an old installation at the Museum of Modern Art?).

In nearby galleries, visitors will see archival photographs and a rare 1915 film that shows Monet painting in his garden at Giverny.

The curators have done their scholarship, too. From new conservation studies, they believe that Monet changed the composition over the years, and the exhibition will explore his process.

You can read more in the press release.

So what’s not to like? Background music, for one thing. The museum is piping it in to gallery displaying the triptych. What kind I do not know, but while I love music as much as paintings I don’t need or want background music to go with my Monet.

What would be the point?

These Monet Water Lillies in particular can hold their own. As an AP article appropriately quotes Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of paintings and sculpture: “What’s amazing about them is the mood they create in the room where they’re installed. It’s a magical one. It becomes a very quiet place. The visitors become quite contemplative.” Here’s the AP article, printed in the in the Seattle Times.

I also have minor questions about this, as the Kansas City Star describes it:

Bound to be a big hit is a touch-screen paint program, where visitors can create their own water lillies paintings with virtual brushes and colors and email the finished works to their home computers and to an online gallery on the Nelson’s website.

And:

…[the exhibit] will not only have X-rays and that touch-screen paint program, it will also have books and a “touchable” version of the “Water Lilies,” created by associate conservator of painting Mary Schafer.

 

Schafer’s 20-by-60-inch canvas, loosely divided into vertical strips, provides a chronological account of the way Monet built his canvas from the white ground to thick applications of pigment for the water lilies to the thin washes he applied over them.

 

Viewers will be encouraged to feel the surface texture of Schafer’s painting, which she fully expects will get dirty over the course of the show.

It’s that touching part that bothers me most (though I wonder if people will conclude that they can paint as well as Monet!). Later in the show — it runs until August — Schafer plans to show children how to clean that painting, in the course of which they’re also supposed to learn why they can’t touch the real thing. Good luck with that… months later. And who’s to say the children who did the touching will later do the learning? Probably not, as a matter of fact.

 

There’s also a bit more on this in the Basehor Sentinel and the AP story. 

 

I wonder, too, what signals museums are sending with some new “add-ons.” Maybe these are fine — I’d like to see them before weighing in definitively — but are museums saying that art, even great art, is not enough. As I understand this exhibit, visitors exit through the “active” and “interactive” areas; they don’t leave with that marvelous feeling of peace and thoughtfulness that Water Lillies creates.

And that’s a bit of a shame.

 

Paris may get a Frank Gehry museum after all. In February, French courts created some drama about the private museum planned by billionaire Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury goods company LVMH, which Gehry had designed. Arnault’s $142 million building,  future home of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, is located in western Paris, on the northern edge of the Bois de Bologne and adjacent to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a children’s playground operated by LVMH.

But some neighbors objected; they want the space to remain green. And they don’t want this to be the start of more buildings in the bois, even if it’s by Gehry. 

Essentially, French administrative courts agreed, stopping construction on the glass-encased museum because a path near the gallery was declared to be a public right of way.

But last week I read on a Forbes blog that the French Senate had weighed in on Arnault’s side. It passed a bill permitting construction to continue.

When it was announced in 2006, the opening date was to be 2009 or 2010. Now it’s 2012.

One person suggested that Arnault, who plans to put both his private and corporate collections on view in the museum — with works by artists like Picasso, Elsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Yves Klein and Agnes Martin — might have taken his multi-million-euro collection to Switzerland if construction did not resume.

As for Gehry, in February, he’s been indignant, telling reporters that he was “distressed, shocked and furious” at the threat to his “magical” creation. French architect Jean Nouvel agreed, saying he was “outraged by the selfishness, lack of civic pride and ignorance” of the opponents.

I haven’t seen any statements from either of them, or Arnault, since the Senate acted.

Photo Credit: Getty Images via AFP  

The article in today’s New York Times, headlined “Wounded In Crossfire Of a Capital Culture War”, about the Hide/Seek controversy at the National Portrait Gallery and the troubles it has brought Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough (below) only left me with more questions and several confirmed impressions.

Here are a few: 

• Why would G. Wayne Clough, the Smithsonian secretary who made the decision to pull “A Fire in My Belly” from Hide/Seek even schedule a public forum on the issue if he has no intention of taking questions? Who gave him that advice? The same guy(s) who suggested that he save the exhibition by deleting the David Wojnarowicz film/video?
• Jonanthan D. Katz, the professor/co-curator of the exhibit (rightly labeled as “something of a gadfly”) has been saying that many museums had rejected his pitches for this, or a similar, exhibit. Yesterday, the number was 40, but I’ve seen smaller totals in previous published accounts. But who are these scaredy-cat museums? Wouldn’t we like to know? How about a list from Katz? That would shake up the art world.

I know this — I’ve inquired of a few museum directors about this: none said they had heard of the idea and all said they’d have been interested. Only Arnold Lehman, of the Brooklyn Museum, was on the record when I asked, so you have to trust me — there were others.

• Former Senator Chris Dodd is quoted saying “You’re not going to get Congress to support a museum.” Really? What about the National Gallery of Art? For FY 2012, the Obama administration is seeking $118.8 million for its operations (plus more to be left available for repairs), which would be a slight increase from FY 2011 at the current rate of spending (2011 budget bills have yet to be passed, as I recall).
• Julian Raby, director of the Freer-Sackler Galleries, has been doing a pretty job over there. Now he has been designated the “in-house arts troubleshooter.” Excuse me, but isn’t that what Undersecretary (for history, art and culture) Richard Kurin is supposed to be doing? Doesn’t this show that Clough was wrong to cut the position of Undersecretary for Art once held by Ned Rifkin? If Clough wants to give that job to Raby, fine; he should then appoint a new director for the Freer-Sackler. If not, let Raby do his real job.

All of this only reinforces a view I’ve had almost since Clough took over. Then I wrote that Clough, an engineer, had little feel for the museums side of his job. I thought they might suffer from benign neglect. It’s worse than that: neglect coupled with interference at the wrong time. 

Which brings me to another feeling I’ve had. It’s time to reconsider the entire structure of the Smithsonian. Breaking it in two, into the scientific side and the cultural side, is an idea whose time has come.  

 

The good news is that Iranian art is alive and well. The bad news is that so much of the work cannot be shown publicly, or can be exhibited only for a few hours during an opening before being whisked into storage.

That’s the key paragraph in an article, brought to my attention by a friend, that was published last week in the International Herald Tribune. Written by Benjamin Genocchio, a former critic for The New York Times who is now editor of Art + Auction, it’s a good summary of what he calls “the paradoxes of Iran,” made visible through the art world.

Genocchio reports that he had a constant guide, just as one did in the old Soviet Union, and it too was a metaphor:

The Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance keeps a tight rein on what can and cannot be displayed, and every gallery owner I met had a story about being called in to the ministry and asked to explain and subsequently remove the artworks on their walls. Pieces deemed offensive or blasphemous expose dealer and creator to prosecution.

But artists are coping; many, the article says, are making daring work. (The above sample — though not particularly daring — is by Mohammed Eskandari.) They are also responding to the clapdown with quiet protests. This month,

several Tehran galleries hope to stage an impromptu joint exhibition of about 70 artists’ works devoted to flower imagery, an act of solidarity with Mehraneh Atashi, a photographer who was detained in January 2010 for documenting Tehran’s street protests. She was released on the condition that she start taking pictures of something more suitable, like the beauty of local horticulture.

Genocchio also reports that Shadi Ghadirian has established an online registry of Iranian artists called fanoosphoto.com, which also hosts exhibitions.

Another point, also a bit sad:

Officially, Iran reports that it receives around 10,000 tourists annually, a staggeringly low number considering its cultural attractions; Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, is one of the great archaeological sites in the region. Dubai, with little to offer beyond shopping and an annual art fair, gets about a million visitors a year.

Personally, I’d rather go to Tehran/Iran.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Azad Gallery, Tehran