Archives for October 2011

For more than fifty years the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has selected the perfect wall colors to complement the celebrated collection of modern art showcased in its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home on Fifth Avenue.
 
Beginning this fall, the Guggenheim will share these trade secrets with homeowners, interior designers, architects, and art lovers everywhere.

When I received an email this morning with the message I’ve pasted above, I honestly thought it was a joke sent to me because I’ve lambasted too-too commercial ties between museums and corporations. I thought it might be from The Onion. I chuckled, and kept reading:

Through an exclusive licensing arrangement with the Guggenheim, Fine Paints of Europe, Inc., of Woodstock, Vermont, will introduce two paint collections suitable for residential and commercial use in October 2011. The Classical Colors is a set of 150 wall colors drawn from much-loved paintings in the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. The Gallery Colors are comprised of 50 hues favored by generations of Guggenheim Museum curators, artists, and designers-including Wright himself.

Then I got worried: this sounded real. I checked the Guggenheim website, and there it was — a real press release with more details. So the outlandish example involving paints that I imagined for the Museum of Modern Art less than two weeks ago is already outstripped by reality.

And there’s a website for the paints, too.

Critics of my position on commercialism tell me to lighten up, but this is no laughing matter — to me at least. Maybe it’s worth remembering theater in New York before Disney and Andrew Lloyd Webber and … when serious plays had a large audience. Now they thrive usually when a movie or TV star like Hugh Jackman, Katie Holmes or Madonna cop a part. They may be fine actors, but that’s not why many people buy tickets.

Museums are going through tough financial times, I know, and they have to raise money somehow. But it’s unclear exactly what the Guggenheim will get for lending its name and prestige to house paint. An inquiry to the spokeswoman produced the answer “a portion” of the revenues taken in from sales of the paints will go to the museum.

This is, not btw, just the most recent in the projects of the museum’s “co-branding” program, listed on its website and described this way: “Guggenheim licensees enjoy a variety of benefit options, from private events in our museum to co-branded marketing campaigns.” The website lists licensing deals with five other companies, including Harry Winston. There’s no mention of fees, except that all revenues support the not-for-profit mission of the Guggenheim.

But the cost of this commercialization is not nothing. Are these revenues really worth it?  

 

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced today that it was officially buying Dale Chihuly’s Lime Green Icicle Tower. We knew that was coming — it had launched a well-publicized campaign for public donations, more about which in a minute.

I know acquisitions happen every day, but sometimes the art world totally misses, or ignores, developments that happen in much of the U.S. So here are two recent announcements worth noting:

For the past five years, in the runup to its 100th anniversary, the New Orleans Museum of Art has been on an acquisition campaign, and next month, we’ll all see the results. They’ll be shown in NOMA 100: Gifts for the Second Century, which goes onview November 13 through January 22, 2012 and celebrates 110 new gifts to its “wide-ranging” collection of more than 35,000 works.

Here are some highlights:

• an untitled reflective, stainless steel 78-inchtall cube sculpture by Anish Kapoor, dated 1997, left.
• American artist Keith Sonnier’s Fluorescent Room, an interactive, site-specific installation made from Styrofoam, phosphorescent pigment, and ultraviolet light that “explores the effects of light and audience participation-themes central to Sonnier’s creative output.”
• Figure 8 from Black and White Numerals, 1968, a lithograph by Jasper Johns.
• A charcoal drawing by Käthe Kollwitz, with a hungry child and woman carrying laundry, and also her bronze sculpture Great Lovers II, 1913
• An outdoor gilt bronze statue of Diana, modeled 1886, cast 1985, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
• 18 color photographs by Robert Polidori including 5979 West End Boulevard, 2005, taken in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, at right.
• Gabrielle Münter’s Main Street in Murnau, 1905, below
• Inverted Spiraling Tower, 1987, by Sol LeWitt

Much further afield, in Brooklings, S.D., the South Dakota Art Museum has received a gift of more than 400 prints by more than 100 artists, including Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse and Robert Indiana. That’s according to The Brookings Register. They’re a gift of Neil C. Cockerline, preservation services director and senior conservator with the Midwest Art Conservation Center in Minneapolis, Minn. and they’ve been valued at about $1 million.

Judging from the website, the SDAM’s collection includes mostly prairie and Native American artists, so this is a welcome addition.

Now, back in Boston: Chilhuly’s tower has been sitting in the MFA courtyard since last March, the start of the museum’s Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass exhibit. As I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in July, visitors wanted it to stay, and the MFA launch a public appeal on July 18. 

The MFA has now raised more than $1 million for it, and it says that “over $760,000 was contributed [by] donors who are not Trustees or Overseers of the MFA,” including nearly $50,000 given via online, cell phone (texting) and in the collection box·at the museum. “Thousands” individuals made gifts “by first-time visitors and long-time friends, ranging from piggy-bank savings brought in by children, to checks written by adults.”

Here’s a link to the MFA press release, which contains a little glitz: the largest gift came from the Donald Saunders and Liv Ullman Family — he’s a Boston real estate developer and she’s the actress/director.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of NOMA

 

It’s both strange and fascinating to watch an artist at work; many won’t even allow it. It can be compelling, or dull, depending…

The other day I stumbled upon a video of Gerhard Richter making an abstract painting.

As an admirer of Richter, I clicked on the link. The short — less than 3 minute — video is on a site called Nowness, which calls itself “digital leader in luxury storytelling” and is creations of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, but says it “remains an open platform where all content is editorially independent.” 

The video of Richter at work (here) shows him making a painting much like the one at right, from 2006.shows him making a painting much like the one at right, from 2006.

I learned a little about his technique, but I was glad it’s short.

I’m writing about it here because it’s drawn from a new documentary called Gerhard Richter Painting by Corinna Beltz that may be better in its entirety. According to a review of the film — which was shown at the Toronto Film Festival last month — by the Hollywood Reporter:

…a must-see for followers of contemporary painting, Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter Painting opens a window on artworks whose creation proves even more time- and thought-intensive than expected.

…Set mostly in clean white studios whose size and details are no more romantic than corporate offices, the film spends months to capture a process more tumultuous than a one-day visit would suggest: We open on a gray abstract composition that Richter’s assistant believes is finished, for instance, only to see Richter obliterate it…in hopes of coaxing something new from its depths.

Judging from the film’s website, it opened in Germany last month. The site has many other areas, including this synopsis, but no dates for showings in the U.S. I’m sure that will change.

This is a good time for the documentary — in Europe. Richter is having a moment there. The Tate Modern just opened a show of his work, dubbed a “tremendous survey” in this review in The Guardian and called “superbly curated.” This website says Panorama is going to Paris and Berlin, not to the U.S., alas.

 

 

Did Clyfford Still create Abstract Expressionism, did he “get there” before any of his peers?

It’s hard enough, in my opinion, to create a vibrant one-artist museum, unless the artist’s name is Warhol or O’Keeffe. But Dean Sobel (right), the first director of the soon-to-open Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, has set himself bigger goals — namely, the vaulting of Still into the position of AbEx creator. Sobel is joined in this by ddjunct curator and art historian David Anfam.

The museum opens next month, and I spoke with him several times over the last several months for a Cultural Conversation piece with him that will be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal (here).

Sobel believes he has the goods — and the archival records, in the form of exhibition photographs, checklists, Still’s painting ledgers and the like — to prove it. Doubters, as you may know, have questioned the dates for some of Still’s works, claiming that he backdated as a matter of ego. He wanted to be first.

Heaven knows, Still had to be egotistic. Why else would someone just pack up and leave the art world, keeping almost all of his work for posterity?

So forget about the trumpted up “controversy” over the sale of four paintings from the estate, before it’s transferred to the city of Denver.

BTW, the museum will not own the paintings; they’ll be on permanent loan to the museum, which is the exclusive exhibition agent. So there was never a question of violating rules of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

Also, one fact that has been overlooked or underreported: executors of the Clyfford Still and Patricia Still estates, namely his daughters, did not object to the sale of four paintings that’s coming up at Sotheby’s in November.

As I’ve said before (here and here), I’m happy that the sales will secure the museum’s financial position — better that now than have troubles later. Just how does anyone think this museum can attract large donors, when it can’t do anything — like buy art or build a new wing — that attracts them?

The more important question for art lovers is the art historical one, and I for one am waiting to see what Ab Ex experts have to say.

Read more here.  

 

So did the Frick rock on its inaugural College Night?

On the evening of Sept. 30 — the Frick’s first free night for College students — the museum was pretty crowded. More than 410 undergraduate and graduate students were there, and PR chief Heidi Rosenau says “that’s a larger crowd than we see at any exhibition opening.” It didn’t seem jammed, she says, because “all permanent collection galleries and the Music Room and Garden Court were open and in use.”

The students came from about 35 institutions, as close as Rockefeller University and as far away as Indiana University — or is Middlebury further? The largest contingent came from Rutgers, because Professor Benjamin Paul, a Renaissance art historian, herded 40 students onto a bus for the trip into the city. 

The Frick was keen to offer programs on College Night, inlcuding talks by Colin B. Bailey, the deputy director and chief curator; Stephen Bury, the chief of the Art Reference Library, and Rika Burnham, head of Education. Rosenau says they were “really well attended,” perhaps because “we offered small intimate gallery conversations, and participants could pick two presentations out of a list.” And there was sketching, refreshments and music/dancing in the Music Room (no word on how many took those activities up — so I chose a picture of the sketching as one of the illustrations here). Curators roamed, chatting up the students.   

The Library staff also set out comfortable chairs and a selection of books related to the Frick’s collections and exhibition. As a result, 56 new people signed up to use the library, and some have already made a visit.

Afterwards, Bailey emailed the Frick’s staff saying, among other things, “It was one of the most enjoyable evening events we have organized. The students were very engaged, polite and respectful, and absolutely delighted to be at The Frick as special guests. An excellent  new initiative!” It’s likely to be an annual event.

So there you have it. I know other museums attract larger crowds, but they are bigger museums. The tone of this event seems about right to me.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of The Frick Collection, New York/photographer: Lucas Chilczuk