Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Archives for January 2013

Albright-Knox Goes Far Afield For Director

The Albright-Knox has just announced its new director, Janne Sirén.

SirenNot one of the usual suspects, that is true. He comes from five years as director of the Helsinki Art Museum in Finland, whose collection of 8,900 works covers the territory from the late 19th century to contemporary art. It “operates two exhibition spaces in the heart of Helsinki: Tennis Palace and Kluuvi Gallery, an innovative gallery space focused on showcasing experimental works by emerging Finnish artists,” according to the press release.

Siren, who was in Buffalo today for the announcement, was “found” by Russell Reynolds, which was tasked with finding a successor to Louis Grachos last year. He left in December, as I recall, as the museum was closing out its celebratory 150th year. At the time, the board said it could have a replacement announced by Jan. 1 — which seemed ambitious to me.

But they came close. Give credit for that — far too many museum director searches take a year or more.

The Albright-Knox says he is “the first Director from the Nordic region to take the helm of a major American art museum.” But he was educated here, earning a B.A. in Art History from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester and an M.A./Ph.D. in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He’ll take up the post in “late spring or early summer.” And he was behind the aborted scheme to build a branch of the Guggenheim Helsinki — it failed to pass muster with the city’s government, though there were also questions about the Guggenheim’s enthusiasm for it.

Siren, who is is 42, “has overseen the organization of several major international exhibitions, including Georgia O’Keeffe; Georg Baselitz: Remix; Enchanting Beauty: Masterpieces from the Collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery; Surrealism and Beyond: Masterpieces from the Israel Museum; Defiance and Melancholy – German Painting from the Dresden Albertinum/Galerie Neue Meister and Helsinki School – Photography and Video Now,” the Albright-Knox said.

Siren told the Buffalo News:

From the moment I set foot in Buffalo, it was sort of love at first sight. I just felt that in Buffalo there’s this very positive aura about the next chapter in the city’s future, not only at the Albright-Knox, but more generally in Buffalo. Things are sort of happening, and you see in little bits and pieces around there, it’s sort of in the air. And that’s tremendously exciting.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Albright-Knox

Ah, Manet: Blockbuster in Content, But Not As A Draw

I don’t know when I fell in love with Manet’s work. Was it when I first saw The Railway? Olympia? A Bar at the Folies-Bergère? The Balcony? In the Conservatory (below, left)? I once had a poster of The Grand Canal of Venice (Blue Venice). Or was it when I saw them all together, in 1983, when a sweeping exhibit in honor of the centenary of his death, organized by Charles Moffett and Francois Cachin (and with a catalogue to match), was on view at the Metropolitan Museum?

In_the_Conservatory_ManetAlas, being one of my favorite artists does not mean Manet is a household name. So I have watched from afar the Toledo Museum of Art’s recent Manet: Portraying Life exhibition with my fingers crossed for its success. The show was a joint production between Toledo and the Royal Academy in London, and it brought together some 40 portraits by Manet — the first show focused on his portraits. Toledo has long owned one of the best, Antonin Proust, from 1880 (see it here), and it borrowed the rest from museums around the world. When I mentioned the exhibit to a New York-based art connoisseur last spring, he told me Toledo couldn’t do it — so precious are Manet’s pictures — before I could finish the sentence saying it had. Kudos to Toledo.

After that buildup, how did it do? Measured by attendance, not as good as hoped. The Toledo Museum tells me that the exhibition drew just shy of 47,000 people, a tad below the target of 50,000, during its run from Oct. 7 through Jan. 1.  On the other hand, critics liked it and 94 percent of the 2,972 visitors who filled out the museum’s exit survey rated it “Excellent” or “Very Good.”

manet-artThe museum is undertaking a thorough evaluation of the exhibition, but in the meantime, here are some things Toledo says it has learned:

  • Because of Manet, the museum opened, for the first time, on New Year’s Day (warming my heart) and “We are most likely going to be open on New Year’s Day from now on because of the positive response from the public and good attendance.”
  • “We sold more than 1,000 Museum memberships during the run of the show, including 113 memberships at the $1000 or above level, adding to our existing base of 6,500 members.”
  • “Our retail store and café did exceptionally well, with gross revenue increases of 33 percent (retail) and 52 percent (café) respectively over the same period last year.”
  • “Nearly 20 percent of our attendance came in the last seven days of the show. Overall Museum attendance in December (37,757) was the highest since the opening of the Glass Pavilion in December 2006.”
  • About 75 percent of our visitors came from Ohio, the rest came from 38 states and several foreign countries.

The museum says it faced a headwind in the media because of the presidential election, with Ohio being perhaps the swing state at stake. “It was impossible for us to get on television and lots of potential visitors simply were overloaded with media,” the press office said.

Two more bits of context:  Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012, which did not require tickets (Manet did) and ran for about the same time, drew 40,306 last summer. And The Egypt Experience:Secrets of the Tomb, which ran over nearly 14 months and was ticketed, drew 39,906. So Manet, less sexy than Egypt, usually, still did better.

I know this won’t discourage Toledo from organizing serious shows in the future. But I wish Manet would receive the recognition from the general public that he so deserves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Columbus Dispatch (bottom)

 

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Art Theft

  • Did you know that Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 terrorists, tried to sell looted Afghani artifacts to buy an airplane?
  • That some 20,000 to 30,000 works of art are stolen each year in Italy alone?
  • That art theft ranks after only drugs and arms as the third highest grossing illegal trade?

Noah Charney, right, the art historian who founded the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, knows all that and more. Recently a talk he gave at a TED conference, badly titled noah_charney“How To Steal from the Louvre,” was posted on the ARCA blogsite.

I say it was badly titled because art mavens like you probably know that the man who stole the Mona Lisa a century ago was ill-informed about the painting’s provenance, and not your typical art thief. Is there a typical art thief? Charney says much art theft takes place because the perpetrator believes the fiction, film and media representations of the demand for stolen art — that there are a lot of Dr. No’s out there ready to buy that Picasso. Not so, Charney says — there are only abut two dozen of them around the world “that we know of.”

Rather, stolen art — even minimally valuable stolen art — finds its way into the barter/trade system of drugs and arms. That, he poses, is why it’s even more critical to stop than if there were more Dr. No types.

 

The NYTimes Looks For The Light

Before too much time passes, I want to call more attention to the feature published by The New York Times last Friday headlined Reflections. It was highlighted on Page One with a picture of Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea that was captioned Seeking Out the Bright to Battle the Cold?

Brooklyn_Museum_-_Saint_Joseph_and_the_Christ_Child_-_overallIn it, the Times devoted considerable space to art works chosen by its four main art critics in which the artists captured light, which somehow was intended to help readers take their mind off the cold, dark winter days and the “indoor time still to come.”

I am of two minds. I thought the idea was rather contrived and the execution a tad spotty. Much as I enjoy reading Holland Cotter’s criticism, I found his choice of an Islamic plate, an example of lusterware, to be a stretch. It might brighten my day, but not because of the light. So, too, his selection of Saint Joseph and the Christ Child by an unknown Cuzco school artist, pictured at right — I love the painting but don’t see any reason to single it out for special lighting effects.

The other critics mainly took their assignment more literally, chosing paintings by the likes of Georges de la Tour, Vermeer, Seurat, Hammershoi and Dan Flavin. You can’t quarrel with those calls. Some were “predictable,” but only to people who spend a lot of time with art.

On the other hand, I applaud the Times for devising an article that focused attention on museums’ permanent collections or just on artworks, period, as part of the culture-pages mix. I wish they and other papers looked for more occasions to run art works. Back in 2009, I praised the Nelson-Atkins Museum here for this:

On Dec. 15 — enough time for planning — the PR department sent out an email with the subject line “Need Christmas Art?” and attaching a PDF listing of all the nativity scenes it holds in its collection for which it had high-res images: a dozen in all. 

All of this, of course, is about getting art into the world outside of museums in a way that will encourage people to go see for themselves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

 

 

 

The Tate Recommends Art For You And Me

Did you click on that link to the Tate in my recent post about Becoming van Gogh in Denver? I did. And I was surprised by two features of the Tate website. Aside from showing me a good reproduction of the drawing I wanted you to see, the museum supplied, beneath the van Gogh, “Other works of art you may be interested in.”

T00468_10Amazon and other commercial sites use this technology (and they don’t always get it right), but this was either the first time I noticed it on a museum website or a relatively new development. I was eager to see what other art the Tate thought I might like. Twenty-two other works, as it turned out.

They ranged in date from 1795 to 1982, versus the 1884 creation of Thatched Roofs. Only two were by van Gogh (The Oise at Auvers and Farms Near Auvers). Other artists included Natalya Goncharova (at right), Joan Gonzales, James Dickson Innes, Sir Ernest Albert Waterlow, Charles Condor and Eric Forbes-Robertson — as well as the naturals like Cezanne, Gauguin, Schuffenecker, and Seurat. The work of six of the artists in the lineup (not all mentioned here) was new to me — which means that the Tate is leading people to discoveries.

If you click on any the pictures, you are referred to another selection of “other works of art you may be interested in.” There’s overlap between the selections, but it’s not complete — perhaps half of the artworks are the same, the rest different. Exploring art this way could be endless, but you can quit at any time.

Or you could ignore the whole offer, and just look at the van Gogh drawing.

This seems like a good feature. The Metropolitan Museum’s website offers “related content” for various artworks in its collection — but the suggested works are by the same artist. MoMA doesn’t have this feature either, nor does the National Gallery of Art in Washington. If others so, please let me know. It should spread.

Whether or not it’s a good thing that the website doesn’t explain why the pictures are related — that van Gogh with this Goncharova — is up to you.

Back at the Tate, website visitors can also “find similar artworks” on their own because below each work in its collection, there are links to artworks by the same artist, by category, decade, style, and subject — in many variations. For Thatched Roofs, for example, there are seasons, trees, places, architecture, towns-scapes, etc. etc. Finally, there’s a link to Context — gifts and bequests. That one seemed too formidable for me to explore right now.

I wonder how people are using this information and this site. Not to worry. The Tate does too. In fact, before exploring any of this, I was presented with one question asking me why I came to the site, so that the Tate could improve it. My choices, abbreviated, were: to plan a visit; to find specific information for research or professional reasons; to find information for personal reasons; for casual browsing; or to book a place at an event/program.

It’s simple: Do I need to say that both feature are good ideas? Go explore.

Photo Credit: Gardening, Natalya Goncharova, 1908, Courtesy of the Tate