Archives for July 2011

No, I haven’t lost all sense of the news. I’ve been away for the last five days, on a short vacation to Iceland (pretty good timing, wasn’t it — considering the temperatures reached in NYC while I was away. It was just luck — the trip was booked weeks ago). For the curious, I’ll post a little about Iceland art in a few days, once I upload photos (which comes after I unpack).

Meantime, let me just share a very short article that I had in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, a “Backstory” on the Icons page headlined: A 1530s Italian Fashionista Comes Clean, Takes Tour.

It’s about Titian’s famous La Bella, on loan from Italy, which started a three-museum tour at the Kimbell in Fort Worth on Friday. AKA Woman in a Blue Dress, she has recently been cleaned of varnish, and as Kimbell director Eric M. Lee told me (this was cut from the story), “you’ll see the painting afresh even if you know it.”

After the Kimbell, La Bella goes to the Nevada Art Museum in Reno and then to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.

Lee reports that the Kimbell had a “packed house” over the weekend.

Regular RCA readers know that I love these one-paintings shows, built around masterpieces, and Titian’s women are mostly masterpieces.

Photo Credit: Palazzo Pitti, via the Kimbell Art Museum 

Next Wednesday, the Skyscaper Museum in NYC opens a neat exhibition called Supertall. As you can guess, it’s a show of “superlative skyscrapers worldwide, featuring projects that have been completed since 2001, are under construction, or are expected to top out by 2016.”

The museum defines “supertall” as buildings that rise at least 380 meters, or 1250 feet — the height of the Empire State Building — not the traditional 300 meters. They each have, or will have, 100 stories or more.

The Skyscaper Museum last approached this subject in 2007, when as part of its exhibition on what was then the world’s tallest building — the Burj Dubai, now known as the Burj Khalifa — it conducted a census of tall buildings. That first global “Supertall Survey” discovered 35 buildings, “historical, contemporary, and planned.”

What’s happened since then? As you might expect, they weren’t all built. The new census discards 12 from that list, because they were not built or because they didn’t achieve their planned height.

Now, though, it found 25 more supertalls — for a grand total of 48 that will be completed, undercontruction or topped out by 2016. Of course, some of thse may not be fully realized either. China (that’s the Shanghai World Financial Center above), South Korea and countries in the Middle East are most avid new builders of the supertall. According to the press release,

The exhibition includes projects in ten Chinese cities, with three buildings each in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Wuhan. In Seoul and Busan, South Korea, four towers will range from nearly 500 to 640 meters, or more than 2000 ft tall. While new development has slowed in Dubai, the emirate is still home to six supertalls, including Burj Khalifa, which at 828 meters/ 2,717 feet reigns as the world’s tallest skyscraper by more than 1,000 ft.! No project yet announced has challenged its supremacy, and if a rumored kilometer-tall tower does go forward, Burj Khalifa will remain the tallest manmade structure for at least for five years- the standard time it takes to complete a supertall.

Obviously, the museum can’t haul in the buildings, so what’s in the exhibit? “Organized geographically, the installation includes architectural and engineering models, renderings, animations and construction photographs and films,” says the press release.

The Skyscraper Museum has published its census, and done a great service to people who love tall buildings. Or, at least, looking at them.

 

 

Forget that newly rediscovered Leonardo, there’s been word more recently of a rediscovered Michelangelo. The news has been out in the UK for several days, but it got very little pickup here.

The 12 by 27-inch painting was found hanging in Campion Hall, a student residence at Oxford University. Titled “Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John And Two Mourning Angels,” it was puchased at Sotheby’s in the 1930s, and Italian scholar Antonio Forcellino says it has been misattributed. According to a BBC story:

The Campion Hall painting, which depicts the crucifixion, had been thought to be by Marcello Venusti.

But Antonio Forcellino said infra-red technology had revealed the true creator of the masterpiece.

It has been removed from a wall of the Jesuit academic community and sent to the Ashmolean Museum for safekeeping.

The Daily Mail did a little more reporting:

Michelangelo expert Professor William Wallace, of Washington University in the U.S., said yesterday: ‘The interesting thing is that Forcellino believes it is genuine and he is a reputable scholar.

‘We are never going to be totally sure if it is genuine as Michelangelo’s contemporaries would paint designs that he drew and it is down to the academic community to assess it.

‘It’s not a totally gorgeous object but it’s extremely important in telling us about the taste of the time.’

As one expert said on hearing the news, people are going to argue this back and forth for a long time. One can never tell from afar — even experts — but this story sounds more credible to me than the so-called Buffalo Michelangelo.

So let the debates begin.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the BBC

 

A press release from the Dallas Museum of Art sent me to the website of the National Endowment for the Arts the other day, to see what merited money in the recently announced Access to Artistic Excellence awards. In them, plenty of museums received money for a variety of activities, including the Chrysler Museum, to catalogue its glass collection, and the Montclair Art Museum, to help digitize its permanent collection. Dallas got $85,000 to support its exhibition archives resources online.

But it was the earlier round of grants that proved to be more interesting. They show how the NEA actually is giving more money to individual artists — as filtered through artists’ communities and residencies.

You’ll recall that NEA chief Rocco Landesman has said he wants to restore awards to artists, which were lost in the ’90s culture wars and are unlikely to be resurrected any time soon. But a few years ago, the NEA also created a category ot Access to Artistic Excellence awards specifically for “Artist Communitites” like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and many more. Previously, artist communities could apply for NEA money, but they did not have a category of their own.

There have now been two rounds of grants in this category. Last year, NEA gave 26 awards in this category totalling $575,000. The grants ranged from $10,000 to $35,000, assuming I counted and added properly.

This year, the NEA gave 25 awards in this category totalling $610,000. The grants ranged from $10,000 to $50,000.

I’m guessing a bit here, because there’s no easy way to search for previous grants to artist communities, bit I think that have done better than they used to. And — I postulate — because it’s at least partly because these awards are a backhanded way for Landemann to get money to individual artists. 

 

Back to the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,* I discovered something quite shocking — and indicative — about its history with women artists.

Who would you suppose was chosen to receive the first solo exhibition of works by a female artist? Note that this took place in July, 1921 — 90 years ago.

Are you guessing Mary Cassatt? Artemisia Gentileschi? Judith Leyster? Angelica Kauffman? Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun? Julia Margaret Cameron? Berthe Morisot?

Nope.

According to a “Today in History” post on the Met site, the first solo show there given to a woman opened on July 15, 1921, and featured Florence Wyman Ivins. Never heard of her? Perhaps that’s because she made watercolors, drawings and woodcuts for children, including the Met’s story hours. Her works were shown in the Met’s Education Department, not in its galleries. And she was “family,” so to speak. Per the website post:

Florence Wyman (American, 1881-1948) was raised in Evanston, Illinois, until her parents separated and she moved to France with her mother and a sister. She attended school in Paris and later studied at The Art Students League in New York City. At twenty-nine, when she married William Mills Ivins Jr., she was already working professionally in watercolor portraiture and book illustration. [Her husband, a Harvard graduate, lawyer, and a member of the Grolier Club, later held several positions at the Met: Curator of Prints (1916-1946), Assistant Director (1933-1939), Acting Director (1939-1940), and Counselor (1940-1946).]

Boldface mine, but let’s continue:

For a number of years, Florence Ivins designed the posters for the Museum’s Story Hours for Children program, as well as the covers of the Museum’s Children’s Bulletin, and her work was always well received….

You can read the rest here. A sample of her work is posted above. It speaks volumes that the Met chose an illustrator, rather than a painter or other kind of fine artist, for its first female solo show, someone related to one of its curators, and still showed her work out of the mainstream galleries.

So when did other American museums start to showcase work by women? The Met says this:

…the Met was not the first American museum to present a solo exhibition of work by a woman: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presented its first such exhibition in 1882; the Art Institute of Chicago in 1887; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1913. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art joined this list in 1927; The Wadsworth Atheneum in 1937.)

It did not identify the women chosen. But here is a long list of artists that any museum can choose from. (It does not, by design, include contemporary artists.) Wikipedia also has a list.

So when did the Met give a show to a woman in its real galleries? We don’t know.

Lest readers misinterpret, I’m not advocating for an equal number of shows by male and female artists — over time, maybe, but it would be impossible for most of art history. But women artists ought to be more accepted ss artists, to be judged by the same aesthetic and conceptual standards as men. And that may require a second look at women artists of the past.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met