Archives for December 2011

While I was away, the Wall Street Journal published a short “Icon” article I wrote about Bernini’s Medusa, at left, which is on view at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It’s on loan from the Capitoline Museums in Rome, the second in a series, as I wrote.

It’s a beautiful piece, as you can see, but part of the story had to be left out because of the brevity required by Icon articles. For Medusa, Bernini was channeling his former lover, Costanza Bonarelli, who — as the article does say — Bernini had caught also having an affair with his own brother. He depicted her as Medusa, who had also been punished for having an affair (with Neptune), and the piece captures her just as her ahir is being transformed into writhing snakes.She is crying out with anguish.

The earlier, companion, piece (which was made for the Borghese family) is in the collection of the Bargello Museum in Florence — it’s a tender rendering of Bonarelli, circa 1636-38, and I’ve pasted it at right below.

As many art historians noted, Bernini loved to work in marble. According to Charles Scribner III, a Bernini scholar whom I quote in the WSJ piece, his son Domenico once said that Bernini manipulated marble as if it were “as malleable as dough or as pliable as pasta.”

Good quote even if it’s apochryphal. Bernini is also, of course, renowned for capturing a fleeting moment, though less so in his tender portrait of Bonarelli.

As I was doing research before filing the Medusa icon piece, I tried to find out how many Berninis reside in the United States. I did not come up with a definitive number, but I believe it’s only a handful. Obviously, many of his works are so large, so fragile or so untransportatable that the can not be moved here. But the Getty Museum had a portrait bust exhibition called Bernini and Baroque Portraiture in 2008. I wish I had seen it. For the most curious among you, there’s a slide of some works in that exhibit at that link.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (top). 

 

I’ll be away for a few days celebrating Christmas…I can think of no better image to leave for you than Fra Angelico’s Nativity.

Here’s another new(ish) trend in museums: not satisfied with mixing fine art and decorative art, some are reinstalling galleries to integrate art made in different geographic areas and cultures, too.

The Princeton University Art Museum is a prime example. James Steward, the director, said two years ago, when he was appointed, that he wanted to rearrange the collection to make it more accessible to more people. Now the reinstallation is complete. I hasten to add that I have not seen it, but I’ve gleaned this information from the Princeton article, in which Steward says:

For pragmatic reasons, we thought it would be interesting to create some new juxtapositions across collections, across cultures….Intellectually, it felt to us that this would bring our practice as a museum much more in line with what has been happening in the broader academy for the last 20 or more years: crossing disciplinary borders more regularly, looking to find the connection between and through disciplines, and to speak to points of cultural contact.

Thirteen galleries for European and American art were involved. Not surprisingly, one example of the juxtapositions has a Modigliani painting (right) placed near pulleys from 19th century West African looms (below). “…this is exactly the sort of African art that he was looking at and was interested in. And when you look at the treatment of the face — the way that the eyebrow is related to the nose, the elongation of the face and the chin, and the somewhat diamond-shaped mouth — all of those stylizations of the features really resonate with the African objects,” said Caroline Harris, curator for educational and academic programs at the museum, in the article.

The other example is also a little predictable:

…the 1888 painting, “Tarascon Diligence, “(Tarascon Stage Coach) by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh is displayed near two 1856-57 Japanese woodblock prints from the series “100 Views of Edo” by Ando Hiroshige. A nearby label explains that many avant-garde artists of the late 19th century abandoned traditional European painting practices and looked to non-Western art forms, such as Japanese prints, for innovative approaches to composition and color.

Steward’s goal is admirable, but the examples make one wonder if this idea can be sustained. It could old very quickly. But he will soon have more help to work on it. The article — PR, really, considering the source, also said that:

The museum recently received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York to support an expansion of this effort, called “Activating the Collections.” The award will fund, in part, the establishment of a new position, a curatorial fellow for collections engagement, who will work with curators, faculty, students, guest scholars, artists and other experts across disciplines to develop and present compelling interpretative approaches and materials. 

Know any creative minds?

UPDATE: PAM posted a YouTube explanation of its display philosophy here.

(BTW, I’ve covered other recent installation innovations, like the “taste of” gallery, here.)

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Princeton University

 

As the art world must know, Alice Walton has become a punching bag for people who are really bashing Wal-Mart, largely for the wages it pays its employees and the benefits it does or does not provide. Another strain of criticism pokes at her for spending money on an art museum. Jeff Goldberg, writing for Bloomberg, recently called the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art “a moral tragedy” and “a compelling symbol of the chasm between the richest Americans and everyone else.”

As if art were of no use or inspiration to anyone but “the rich.”

I initially tried to ignore this — except in the first paragraph of my review of Crystal Bridges, in which I said the wages link was “a confusion of apples and oranges if ever there was one.” (In my review, I savor the Robert Henri portrait, of Jessica Penn, at left, and I thought I’d show it to RCA readers.)

But Goldberg has now taken as second gun to Walton and Cystal Bridges. (Read Goldberg, if you must, here and here.)

This strikes me as a case of nothing succeeding like success and excess. Goldberg received a lot of attention for the first column, after all.

Fortunately, Ira Stoll, the former managing editor of the New York Sun — which you will recall had some pretty wonderful cultural stories — has fired back. Stoll has a website called Future of Capitalism, and yesterday he began a post saying “Remind me if I ever get rich not to start an art museum. It seems to be just an invitation for attacks from the press.”

Stoll then lists eight points in Walton’s defense, the most pertinent of which are these:

Why focus solely on her at the expense of many other rich people who fund charities in which they are interested while making money in low-wage, low health-insurance businesses? Joan Kroc, whose fortune comes from McDonald’s, gave $200 million to National Public Radio. McDonald’s treats its workers about the same as Walmart, but I haven’t seen Jeff Goldberg agitating about the moral blight of Morning Edition. Jeff Goldberg also complains about the aesthetics of Walmart stores, but they look pretty much the same as a Home Depot, a Staples, a Lowe’s, or any other big-box store. Why single out Walmart?

And:

If Alice Walton decided voluntarily to pay Walmart workers higher wages and health benefits out of her share of the Walmart profits, it would probably be difficult to structure that without also adversely affecting the returns of the other shareholders. (I suppose one could establish a separate class of stock, but it’s hard to see the rationale for giving the family that founded and built the company a class of stock that carried a lower rate of return than that available to the general public or new shareholders.) Giving all the shareholders a newly lowered rate of return would increase Walmart’s cost of capital, making it harder for the company to compete with new competitors. Stores might have to close, and instead of low-wage, low-insurance jobs, there might be no jobs at all. And the existing shareholders, who bought their shares expecting the company would pay a market wage rather than the newly generous Goldberg above-market wage, would see the value of their shares drop. Since lots of those existing shares are held by middle-class or lower-middle class Americans through mutual funds or union or government pension funds, you’d wind up hurting some of the same people you are trying to help.

I suppose some “art-lovers” are still (inanely) angry with Walton for trying to buy good picture, “taking them way” from East coast cities.

But Goldberg is really attacking the foundation on which almost all American art museums are built, and it’s about time people start recognizing that — and speaking up in her defense.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges

 

 

Tomorrow is a big day for the Metropolitan Museum:* The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini opens. I saw it last night at the opening, and it’s a knockout. Prepare for rave reviews.

The exhibit, curated by Keith Christiansen, chairman of European paintings at the Met, starts with a premise: that early Renaissance Italy produced “the first great age of portraiture in Europe,” a time when artists created fabulous portraits that start with the simple recording of features but go way beyond that. As an aside, I asked a Met official about the origins of the show, and she said — I won’t mention her name, because I wasn’t thinking of reporting it when we spoke — that “Keith has been talking about this show for ages.”

It shows in the 160 works that are on view, including paintings, drawings and sculpture.

That’s the second thing this exhibit has going for it — the sculpture, which is truly wonderful, with details that practically invite viewers to touch (Don’t!). These pieces are far less familiar to regular museum-goers than the paintings, which is partly because many of the paintings are in the Met’s permanent collection.

But don’t think that this show comes mainly from the Met collection; there many, many loans from many European collections, including a lot from Germany — the exhibit was co-organized and shown previously at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (very few come from private collections). One of my favorite paintings in the show was chosen as the cover of the catalogue, Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of an Old Man and a Boy (top), borrowed from the Louvre.

A third attribute is the mix of media and the way they are displayed. The sculpture sits right there with the paintings, and there’s plenty of room to walk around each of the pieces. Drawings, while not present in every gallery, are also displayed with paintings and sculpture, often related, instead of being relegated to a dark room of their own.

The fourth thing I love is that, despite the title of the show, this exhibition contains works by many many artists who are not household names. Some of them should be. If I had to pick one, it would be Pisanello. He dominates one large gallery, in my opinion, beautifully — with drawings, paintings and medallions.

That’s his Filippo Maria Visconti drawing in charcoal (also from the Louvre) and what Christiansen says is a rare painting by him, Leonello d’Este, from the Accademia Carrara, Commune of Bergamo, at right (sorry he faces the margin).    

There are so many other wonderful images in this exhibition that I’ve uploaded a few more below, without commenting on them.

But there’s one I want to call to the attention of writers, who frequently use the phrase “thrown into high relief,” to mean sharp delineation or contrast. I can’t show you an image of it — but you’ll know it when you see it in the exhibition. It’s a marble of Cosimo by the workshop of Antonio Rossellino, a side view of his face that includes both eyes — the relief must extend four or five inches (I had no opportunity to get close enough to try to measure it). High relief, indeed.

 

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