Archives for October 2011

A little change of pace: Architectural Digest recently asked me to talk with four well-known interior designers that had opened galleries to show and sell works by contemporary design artists. More museums are collecting contemporary design, as I wrote here and here in 2009, so it made sense.

The headline reads Interior Designers Put Their Taste on Display, and after asking each designer why they got into the gallery business (one said he really didn’t want to get into “the machinery of the regular art world,” interestingly), I asked each to chose three pieces and say why he liked them. 

That’s a wall by New York ceramicist Peter Lane at left, and a Murano glass vase by Ritsue Mishima at right.

You can see them all in the slide show.

I’d say some of the pieces qualify as “art,” and some come in limited editions. Museum quality? Curators would have to decide.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Gray Gallery (top) and Hedge Gallery (bottom).

Just in: The judge in Pennsylvania has ruled against the petition by the Friends of the Barnes Foundation to reopen the case against the move — and he ruled against them, as expected.

Here’s the Barnes_Opinion[1].pdf.

A spokeswoman for the Friends group says that they will appeal.

In a nutshell, Judge Stanley R. Ott of Montgomery County Orphans’ Court ruled that the Friends of the Barnes, which opposes the impending move ing of the renowned collection of Impressionist and Early Modernist works to a new museum near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, had no legal standing to challenge the move.

Ott had made a similar ruling in a 2007 suit brought by the organization, but the Friends group went back to his courtroom, arguing that new evidence contained in a 2009 movie, The Art of the Steal, showed that Pennsylvania authorities had connived to facilitate the move.

Ott disagreed, ruling that the movie contained no new information. Here’s a fuller article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

 

I don’t usually root for bad reviews of art exhibitions — I can’t think of an example when I did, in fact — but I am now.

Tomorrow, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo (which I have noted here with pleasure) opens something called You Like This: A Democratic Approach to the Museum Collection.

It’s crowdsourcing, of course. I don’t oppose crowd-sourcing, but I think there’s a limit to it, and that it must be done with — at museums — real curatorial involvement. At the Walker Art Center’s experiment, 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Collection, the public voted on just half of the exhibit. Curators chose the other side. There was value in comparing the two.

At the Plains, the selection began and ended with the public. Here’s how the process was outlined in an article in In-Forum:

The show opens Thursday. But the idea came much earlierafter Mark Ryan, the Plains’ director of collections and operations, started with a loose survey to see what kind of art people liked: abstract, representational, landscapes, figure studies, paintings, photographs or sculptures. By running those results through a database, the 3,800 pieces in the collection were eventually winnowed down to 100 suggested works. A group of community curators pared the number down to 75, which were then posted online by the museum, asking folks to vote on each piece and leave comments. The 50 pieces that received the most votes are in the show, arranged, roughly, in order from most to least liked.

So where were the museum’s curators in all this? Nowhere? Not in selection or exhibition?

There’s more:

The Plains’ curator, Megan Johnston says the final selections, which range from an antique chair and Native American moccasins to Catherine Mulligan’s colorful resin cast tubes, show that patrons’ tastes are “eclectic,” though she points out that the top six (and nine of the top 10) vote-getters were for landscapes. And …the judging isn’t over. Guests to the show will be given ballots to vote for their favorites through Jan. 15. Visitors are also encouraged to leave Post-it note comments on the east wall of the gallery. Community curators also had a say in the show’s design, suggesting works be displayed in nontraditional ways, on the ceiling and at angles or on the floors. Some ideas, like bringing in a recliner, are easier to pull off. Plains staffers took the suggestions to heart and are thinking of different ways to display and view works. “They didn’t want to come in and see white walls with art hung. They wanted to see something different,” Johnson says, adding that one curator told her, “We don’t want it to look like a Plains Art exhibition.”

I understand the desire to involve people in art. But I don’t understand why museum directors want to so devalue the curatorial profession. For their part, curators are probably loath to say anything lest they be deemed uncooperative, backward-thinking, and unpromotable.

But consider some analogies: should we all vote on what is taught in primary school classrooms? Should people vote on the medical treatment of an ailing loved one? Do chefs let their clients vote each morning on what they should prepare?

It really is time for the Association of Art Museum Curators to speak up.

  

 

There’s an art historical story to the Frans Hals painting just acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art, too.

Hals actually painted a bigger work — this is only half of it. Originally, he depicted nine of the couple’s ten children, but at some unknown time, the canvas was cut — three children on the right were separated from the family, and turned into a different work. Called Three Children and a Goat Cart, it is now in the collection of the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, donated in 1928. It’s shown here at right.

No one knows why the painting was split, but it wouldn’t have been a surprise if it was a matter of too small walls. No one knows who did the deed, either — but one can guess that it was not the original owner.

Brian Kennedy, the Toledo Museum’s director, and Larry Nichols, the curator on this, are hoping that “the two canvases can be reunited for a focus exhibition traveling to both venues, something that has not happened for more than 20 years.”

I’ve pasted the whole work here:

 

Here’s another part of the story: How did the painting get the 10th child? Artist Salomon de Bray added her in 1628, “as noted by his signature on the infant daughter’s left shoe.” She was born after Hals had finished his work, but why he didn’t add her is unknown. But the Toledo museum says that “the practice of modifying family portraits was relatively commonplace in the 17th century.”

Scholar Pieter Biesboer, emeritus curator of Old Master paintings at the Frans Hals Museum, who will talk at the painting’s unveiling on Oct. 13, discovered the identity of the family: they are Gijsbert Claesz.van Campen, his wife and their 10 children, seven daughters and three sons. The couple, according to the press release, “had married in 1604, and the possibility exists that they had commissioned Hals in 1624 to represent them on the occasion of their 20th wedding anniversary.”

You can read the whole story here, with more about Hals here, and here.

Did I forget to say that the painting was purchased with funds from the museum’s acquisitions endowments and bequests? It was. No one is saying how much, naturally, but the museum did tell the Toledo Blade that it was not near the record auction price for a Hals, which is about $14 million. 

 

This is a great time for Frans Hals in the U.S., what with the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum — and now, news from the Toledo Museum of Art.

It has purchased a beautiful painting by Hals, called Family Portrait in a Landscape, from the 1620s. It’s big — almost five feet square — and Toledo will hang the work in its Great Gallery, near Rubens’s The Crowning of St. Catherine and Guercino’s Lot and His Daughters, which the museum acquired in 2009.

The museum plans a press conference for today at 10 a.m., and it will be unveiled publicly at the museum on Oct. 13.

But in its advance word, the release quotes Old Master scholar Gregory Martin calling its new treasure “an extraordinary picture for the 1620s that underlines Hals’s inventive genius. Nothing like it–for breadth and relaxed tone–had been painted in the Netherlands.”

The museum’s director, Brian Kennedy, added that “It is one of only four known family portraits by Hals to have survived and is the earliest of the four. Its strong composition and the way Hals captures the personalities and personal interactions of the family members will delight our visitors.”

I’d heard hints of this acquisition last spring, when Larry Nichols, the museum’s senior curator of European and American painting and sculpture before 1900, told me he was working on something big — but gave no other clues.

Today, we learn that he first saw the Hal’s portrait in a London gallery July, 2010. He told Kennedy, the museum’s incoming director, and asked to put his discovery on hold. Kennedy agreed, and “the yearlong process of research, conservation assessment, art committee approval, negotiating the terms of the sale and then obtaining an export license from the British government began.” The license was granted on July 11, 2011. 

This is, the museum says, the only Hals group portrait still in private hands. It was acquired by a British viscount, Lord Boyne, in the mid 19th century and passed down to his heirs, who had lent it the National Gallery of Wales before deciding to sell.

Their loss, our gain.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art