Archives for May 2011

In this week’s Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I’ve got the space devoted each week to the marvelous Masterpiece column, where I have written “an anatomy” of Stuart Davis’s The Mellow Pad (at left). The Brooklyn Museum owns it, and it hangs in the American galleries, grouped among a few other works and furniture (I wish it had a space of its own, but that’s another story). Here’s the link to the WJS article.

Davis started in the painting in 1945, but went back to it in 1947, and finally finished it in 1951. It’s a high-spirited, cheerful work and, more important, is his last riff on his earlier work, House and Street, which is in the Whitney’s permanent collection.

I’ve placed both paintings here. It’s much more fun if you take a hard look at them before reading my piece.

Before writing the article, I naturally read a lot about the painting, including several articles provided to me by Teresa Carbone, the American art curator at the Brooklyn Museum — which, i say with thanks, saved me some time.

Then I found something that, not too long ago, wouldn’t have been available to me, at least  not in my own home: I listened to Davis himself.

The Walker Art Center has posted online, in MP3 format, a recording of an interview with Davis conducted by curator Sidney Simon, on the occasion of a 1957 show of Davis’s work there. It’s broken into tracks, which are described, for easy access to sections that you’re interested in. How great is that?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum (top), the Whitney Museum (bottom) and the Stuart Davis Estate

 

Fear not, all you RCA readers who think the younger generations want only to play games at museums, or take pictures of the art with their cell phones, or socialize in the galleries.  

The teen curators at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which I wrote about here last year, are proving that they are more interested in “old-fashioned” museums than some people think.

Every year, you’ll remember, the AK’s teen curators curate an exhibition from works submitted by area teenagers. as last year, more than 400 submissions, in all media, were considered. (That’s a work by Megan Krug at left, and one by Shannon McDonald below.)

Here’s the “surprising” part. This year’s exhibition, which opens tomorrow and runs through July 3, is called “raw,” and according to the press release has this theme:

…citing the widespread influence of technology and the difficulty in imagining the modern era without it…they have selected works that delve into the realm of introspection, and that represent a specific emotional state, incorporating motifs that are both organic and visceral. The works, and the messages they evoke, correspond to an era before mass communication. The result is an exhibition with an atmosphere free of the pollution of technology–a sort of sanctuary from the mechanics of everyday life. The works reject the recognizable and commercial: each is, in itself, raw.

Gosh: “pollution” and “sanctuary”? Strong words. Do today’s teens see museums as sanctuaries, as many adults do? I asked the Albright-Knox teen curators that, and I asked why they chose this theme.

From Future Curator Benjamin Almeter:

The theme for our exhibition was selected to give our viewers an atmosphere free of technology. The purpose of our exhibition was to bring this idea that nature is the foreground and beginning to everything, to showcase the interaction of nature in our everyday lives.

From Future Curator Chelsea Butkowski:

The future curators chose this theme because many of the pieces that we received deal with a common idea, the organic core inside all humans, something that many of us forget in this era of computers and technology. We wanted to honor the earthy colors and natural forms that many of the submitted works display. The word, “raw”, is meant to remind those who attend the exhibiton of raw materials and nature. We tried to achieve a balance between the natural world and the technological one. It’s also a bit ironic because most artworks require some sort of munipulation of raw materials to achieve the artist’s desired affect.

To my question, “should museums be sancutaries (most of the time)?” she answered:

I think so. A museum is a place to appreciate. The most important conversation to be had there is within a person’s own mind. By using a museum the right way, people can learn volumes about themselves in a calm enviornment. That is what a sanctuary is all about. Our lives are too encompassed by habit; a lot of people are thirsty for the challenge that a museum presents. I am sure that raw presents this challenge.

From Future Curator Leigh Ann Gantz:

..our theme was chosen in an attempt to coordinate all the works we wanted to include in our show. That being said, it wasn’t done in a patchy attempt to connect unrelated items. it really was something that took us weeks to come up with because we were determined to do justice to the pieces we loved, and simultaneously connect with the community. It really wasn’t easy. but in the end, we feel the adjective we chose to describe the whole thing is truly fitting. “Raw” is the most honest way to refer to all these things, not only as individual pieces but also as a show, in its entirety, as objects that work together and communicate with each other through the use of the theme. Hopefully the audience sees it that way.

To my “sanctuary” question:

I don’t think this statement always applies to art museums; I believe it can, and often does, but doesn’t necessarily have to. It is often the case that art applies the mechanics of every day life, to make a statement, and the idea of removing one’s self from the real world in order to create is unrealistic to many artists. At times, art museums reflect this view, and the “sanctuary” idea is lost. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though. I think the idea of twisting the world of every day things into art is brilliance, it’s just not what we chose to do here. There are lot of ways to present art. This way just happens to be ours. We’re very proud of it. 
 

There’s hope.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Albright-Knox

 

Maria Ann Conelli, director of the American Folk Art Museum, has quit her post, and that suggests one of two things: either the troubles at the museum go deeper than previously acknowledged, or she can not figure out a way to solve them. Or both.

Conelli (right) posted her resignation, effective in July, on the museum’s website. She said she was leaving the museum “in the good hands of our Deputy Director, Linda Dunne, and our Board leadership, who will continue to uphold our mission of educating with our world-class collection of art.”

The folk art museum has been in trouble for ages. As Bloomberg points out in its recap of the situation, it has defaulted on interest payments due on $31.9 million in bonds, having missed a $3.7 million payment in January. At the time, it said it did not expect to make required payments “in the foreseeable future.”

The folk art museum recently had a huge success overseeing the exhibition of red-and-white quilts owned by Joanna S. Rose at the Park Avenue Armory. It attracted 5,000 visitors in the course of six days. But the Rose family paid for that exhibition, which was free to the public. The museum’s other exhibitions — also celebrating quilts — have apparently not been big draws. Nor has the museum been able to attract new donors.

In February, the museum told Bloomberg News that it would not sell works from its collection to pay down its debt, and said it expected to have a balanced budget for the fiscal year ending June 30. According to that article, the museum’s forebearance agreement with ACA Financial Guarantee Corp., which had provided a $853,425 cash injection for the museum, allowing bondholders to be paid interest due them, expires June 30.

Which probably means another cash crunch — for payments due in July.

It remains to be seen whether any members of the board of trustees will come to the rescue.

On a related front, the folk art museum was also recently forced to drop out of a planned exhibition at the Venice Biennale. According to Art in America magazine, Benetton, the exhibition sponsor, pulled out as the benefactor of Vision and Vernacular: Eight African American Artists in Venice, which was to have been held at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a property owned by the Benetton Group near the Rialto Bridge. The show was curated by Carlo McCormick and Martha V. Henry, and “would have featured works by Outsider artists Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack), Charles Lucas and Kevin Sampson, and site-specific murals by street artists Blade (Steven Ogburn), Daze (Chris Ellis), Quik (Lin Felton) and Sharp (Aaron Goodstone).”

A in A quoted McCormick as saying that Benetton and the museum “bickered every step of the way.” He added that he thought the disagreement was over who would pay for what.

I haven’t dug deeply, with my own reporting, into this museum’s troubles, but what I have heard from credible sources is that all the troubles began with a poorly planned, over-optimistic expansion into its new building several years ago. Might the museum save itself by selling that, and returning to its original location near Lincoln Center — which is now a satellite museum? It’s worth considering. If, of course, it can sell the new building near the Museum of Modern Art.

UPDATED, 5/11: The museum has reached an agreement to sell that new building to the Museum of Modern Art. Here’s the open letter from board president Laura Parsons announcing the sale. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum

 

Another museum is starting an intiative to mount single-picture museum exhibitions: The Speed Art Museum in Louisville has arranged to bring one of Caravaggio’s early masterpieces, The Fortune Teller, into its galleries later this month, borrowed from the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

This is only the second time the painting has been shown in the U.S., the Speed says.

Also tucked into the press release sent to me was this statement from Charles Venable, the Speed’s director: “The presentation of The Fortune Teller is part of our new Masterpiece Series and an outgrowth of our commitment to enhancing the art experiences we bring the public…”

I’ve been advocating these show for a while (see here, here and here, for examples at the Prado, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Portland Art Museum, for instance). I realize that they are not “new” — and that there are other examples, but the Speed Museum hadn’t announced a Masterpiece Series, so I asked about it. Here’s what Venable wrote back:

Officially our upcoming Caravaggio project is the first in the Series. However, the idea has been bouncing around in my head for a while. As it is increasingly difficult to afford huge loan shows, I have been thinking that we need to begin “retraining” our audience to appreciate the permanent collection more and small-scale exhibition projects. Given that we museums trained visitors in the 1970s and ’80s to expect bigger and bigger projects with huge budgets and catalogues, it seems to me we might be able to get the public to appreciate more focused projects as well.

With that in mind I pulled [Leonardo’s] Forster Codex out of the show Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria & Albert Museum that we did in 2008, and presented it alone in our Renaissance period room with separate signage and a computer interactive that let one page though the book and translate the text.

Then in 2009 we borrowed from the St. Louis Art Museum a spectacular, early painting by Max Beckmann. The Speed does not own a major German Expressionist oil painting, so my philosophy is simply to try to borrow things we do not or cannot own. Beckmann’s Titanic from 1912 proved a great hit when hung on axis in the permanent collection galleries.

With these two successes behind us, I decided to formally start the new “Masterpiece Series” with Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller …

That line about “retraining” just about sums up what I think museums will be doing; another way to say it is “changing their expectations,” or giving them new reasons to come for a visit.

Venable says they he, and I know that he is not alone in this — is in negotiations to borrow other great works that can hold their own as a single-painting show, or are shown with a few other ancillary pictures. Stayed tuned for more.

The Caravaggio will be on view at the Speed from May 18 – June 5, 2011, but before it opens there, the painting (dated 1594), which portrays a Gypsy girl stealthily stealing a gold ring from the finger of the young man whose palm she is reading, will spend a few days in New York, at the Italian Cultural Institute from May 11 through May 15. A symposium on the painting will take place on May 13 at Hunter College.

Venable also mentioned another initiative, an interactive the Speed recently created on its website for a French Book of Hours. “That will give you an idea of how I hope to entice the public to interact with singular works of art in the galleries,” he said.

Well, I’ve only explored a small part of it, but it looks good. If you have time, explore it.

It’s not too early to think about summer reading; I’ve come across two new books about American artists that seem noteworthy.

The first, Romare Bearden, American Modernist, was reviewed in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal by Jonathan Lopez, an editor-at-large at Art and Antiques. The book is a collection of essays, not really a biography; it brings together 14 papers originally given at a symposium at the National Gallery of Art in Washington during the 2003 Bearden retrospective, and was edited by Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis. But as Lopez wrote:

Employing a variety of methodological approaches–biographical, sociological, formalist, iconographic–they produce a composite portrait of a complex man who forged an unconventional path to artistic success. The book provides a useful introduction to Bearden’s work, although his own writings, which are extensive and insightful, remain an indispensable resource.

The second book is a traditional biography — Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter by Patricia Albers (who also wrote a biography of Tina Modotti). An amusing choice of title, actually, because although Mitchell did make her way in the tough, masculine art world of the 1950s (As a New York art dealer once reputedly said to her, “Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead”) to become a painter, she is just as well known for her unladylike carousing with the hard-drinking guys like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

The book arrives in stores May 3, and I have not yet seen a review. But Publisher’s Weekly describes it this way:

In this first biography of renowned abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Albers …vividly chronicles the artist’s tortuous journey from her wealthy upbringing in Chicago to her defiant student days at Smith College, and as a young painter at the Art Institute of Chicago when “the wisdom of the day held that women couldn’t really paint.” … Albers deftly balances Mitchell’s often difficult temperament (some found her “cranky and contentious”; she was an insomniac and alcoholic) with her artistic vision. … Vibrantly written and carefully researched, including numerous interviews with Mitchell’s former husband, Barney Rosset (former owner of Grove Press), friends, lovers, and colleagues, Albers constructs a fluid, energetic narrative of Mitchell’s complicated life and work.

Both Bearden and Mitchell are well-regarded nowadays but, on a comparable basis with their peers, prices for their works have not soared as high as the work seems to warrant. The book on Mitchell may help, as it’s written for a wider audience than the Bearden book. Then again, the latter has been reviewed in the WSJ, which art-buyers read. We’ll just have to see.