Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Archives for January 2013

On-Site Visit: Does The Clyfford Still Museum Deserve Its Raves?

Although I’ve twice interviewed Dean Sobel, the director of the 14-month-old Clyfford Stil Museum, I saw him in Maryland, at the storage facility where Still’s paintings were kept before the museum opened. My article about his goals for the museum ran in the Wall Street Journal in October, 2011, before the museum opened.

CStill1It wasn’t until last Friday, when I was in Denver, that was able to see the museum and the works (some of which I saw in storage) fully stretched and hung properly in a building designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. The building deserves the raves it received, some of which I’ve quoted below (in agreement).

One attribute I particularly fancied: the sight lines between galleries. Take a look at a couple of my pictures. Above left, you can see Still’s self-portrait between two of his loveliest paintings.

Below  right, there’s an example of compare-and-contrast views. Finally, below left, you’ll see how visitors may view a painting from the drawings gallery. (Still’s drawings, btw, turned out to be far more interesting than I expected them to be.)

I also loved parts of the first floor of the museum, where Still’s large canvases are stored (some in open view), where his paintings are conserved, and where his many drawings not on display are stored, accessible to scholars, along with his archives. Vitrines on this floor display some items drawn from those archives — as I described in my WSJ piece. (Here’s a tidbit: Still wrote to Clement Greenberg as “Dear Greenberg.” Was there an edge in that? Sobel didn’t know, nor do I, but maybe a reader will.) His letter to Betty Parsons, in which he quits the art world, is there too.

There’s also an excellent interactive feature with, among its offering, a sampling of what was going in art history and in the world as Still painted.

CSdrawingsNow for those promised excerpts.

Here’s Karen Wilkin in the WSJ: “The handsome, earthy building is superb, with glorious, changing, aqueous light diffused through a continuous concrete “web” in most of the second floor exhibition spaces….The galleries, varied in ways sympathetic to the collection and flexible enough for rotating selections, are all wonderfully proportioned; even the most splendid of them—a light-washed, symmetrical central space—remains intimate while accommodating five monumental canvases. Views through doorways, echoing traditional enfilade arrangements, permit comparisons. It’s all logical, articulate, and makes Still look his absolute best.”

Here’s Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times: “…the new Clyfford Still Museum…is nothing less than a marvelous model for what a single-artist museum can be. Virtually every aspect of it is designed to maximize a visitor’s encounter with Still’s often riveting art….The cantilevered second floor rests lightly on a non-structural glass wall. Exterior poured-concrete striations — echoed in wood-slat panels — create ethereal shadow-play in the clear daylight of the Mile High City. A visually unobtrusive perforated-concrete screen, which filters overhead natural gallery illumination from skylights, is surprisingly buoyant….paintings lead you through nine lovely galleries… Separations between rooms allow views across and down into other spaces, facilitating awareness of where you are in the building. The art experience is the program, first and last.

CSviewAnd here’s James Russell on Bloomberg: “…The boxy bunker designed by architect Brad Cloepfil bristles with ragged concrete fins, evoking Still’s intricate compositions. That roughened exterior radiates an elegant gravitas….Cloepfil, of the Portland, Oregon, firm Allied Works Architecture Inc., brings a Zen calm by framing the nine, squarish second-floor galleries in planes of concrete and painted drywall that alternately obscure and reveal, like Shoji screens. He mixes salon-style rooms with high galleries topped by a rippling scrim of concrete in which teardrop perforations delicately shower the space with shimmering daylight.”

Single-artist museums aren’t easy beasts to design, program and manage. This one has a great building and an excellent start.

Photo credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski

 

Denver Museum Goes 24 Hours for van Gogh Exhibition

VG-In ChurchBecoming van Gogh is so popular in Denver that the Denver Art Museum is taking the big step of remaining open overnight on the exhibition’s final weekend: It will open at 8 a.m. on Jan. 19 and stay open until 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 20, when it closes for good. That announcement was made on Friday — after several previous extensions of the hours — and by this morning all the tickets were sold out except those between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on the 20th.

VGstilllife-almond blossomsThis exhibition, organized by the DAM’s paintings curator Timothy J. Standring, is only on view in Denver. Add to that the fact that Denver has never before had a van Gogh exhibition, and the the museum owns no van Gogh works of any sort. But still — this is a big victory for several reasons, not least the fact that Becoming van Gogh is not a retrospective, nor a highlights exhibit. It contains few of the paintings that the general public knows (no Sunflowers, no Irises, no Starry Night or Bedroom in Arles). It’s a teaching exhibition that breaks scholarly ground, demonstrating how van Gogh deliberately taught himself to draw and paint — or, as Standring said Friday when I was in Denver to see it for myself, to make marks (the fashionable lingo in art-history circles).

To recap briefly, the exhibition borrowed works from more than 60 public and private collections throughout Europe and North America to limn the key formative periods of van Gogh’s career – when he taught himself to draw, learned about the formal elements of art, explored color theory and painting techniques, and so on. Take a look at the museum’s website for the exhibit to get a taste of what I’m talking about, or read the article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal and my subsequent blog posts here and here.

While I had perused the catalogue avidly and spoken with Standring, I hadn’t seen the show until Friday — and I loved it. It’s debatable which is the “best” picture in Denver, but I can tell you several I loved: Thatched Roofs, a drawing owned by the Tate, is amazing. In Church (above) from the Kroller-Muller was new to me and touching. The little still life at left, from a private collection, is so vibrant it glows — as if it were radioactive. There were too many others to mention.

Denver extended hours earlier this year for the Yves St. Laurent exhibit, but not as much as this — and DAM director Christoph Heinrich told me that van Gogh will exceed YSL’s total by far. Although the museum’s King Tut exhibit, which ended last January, drew more people to DAM, it was on view for six months — whereas van Gogh started only on Oct. 21 — three months.

But there are other important markers for this show: for one, DAM reports that visitors are spending an average of 90 minutes viewing it — about 70 works by van Gogh himself about about 20 by others he “responded to.” That’s an astonishingly long visit. And the catalogue, 13,500 copies, is pretty much sold out.

All good news for the Denver museum and Denverites.

Landesman Exits the NEA, Taking A Surprise Bow

Rocco Landesman has left the building. The now-former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts departed the other day, but not without granting an exit interview to The Washington Post. Interesting choice — maybe The New York Times didn’t ask (it probably didn’t) but as I recall Landesmann made a small mistake at the start of his term by giving the NYT his first interview instead of the Post, which of course is what everyone in Washington reads first. He learns.

RoccoLandesmanLandesman — not my favorite NEA chief, as Real Clear Arts readers know — exits taking a bow, according to the Post. Despite early gaffes, he earned credit by building ties to other federal agencies, which had more money, and eliciting new support from the private sector for investing in arts places in various communities. According to the Post:

The resulting “ArtPlace” consortium of foundations, financial institutions and federal agencies, including NEA, has awarded 80 grants to 46 communities, totaling nearly $27 million.

More than half of that is new money, says Robert Lynch, head of Americans for the Arts…

That’s not bad, if only a drop in the ocean in terms of money.

While I don’t agree with everything he said or did by a long shot, I give Landesman credit for being practical. Despite early comments about restoring grants to individual artists, for example, he recognized it wasn’t going to happen and moved on to other things — but not without finding a small way around the restriction.

There’s been way too much hand-wringing about that particular aspect of NEA funding, anyway. As long as the battle lines are formed around that issue, NEA funding is not going to grow. And maybe it shouldn’t — that’s heresy to some people in the arts, I know, but it’s time to rethink it.

 

Museum Websites Are Getting Better, But I Have Two Pet Peeves

While I was checking around on museum websites the other day to see which ones would be open on Jan. 1 and which would not, I noticed that many museums have updated their websites in recent months, mostly for the good.  Some have been radically redesigned and show off their art handsomely. A few look a tad corporate to me. And everyone’s got moving images (which is bad news only if they take a long time to load).

Websites2But I noticed two big deficiencies. On some, it’s actually hard to find out visiting hours and, worse, admission fees. In a few cases, to find hours, I had to click three or four times to get to the page with information. For admission fees, some museum make visitors to their website go to the “Buy Tickets” section even before they disclose the cost of admission. That’s inexcusable, and I’d bet those museums have people turning away before they get there to find out the number.

This isn’t just my feeling: though I could not find a study of museum patrons, I did see a recent longitudinal study of the “mobile preferences” of arts patrons (admittedly, phones are not the only way people access museum websites, but it is one big way) by an arts consultant called Group of Minds, which appears to have focused on performing arts groups (it’s unclear). Group of Minds contacted 45,000 patrons of half-price/discounted ticket email lists in six cities. The survey received a response rate of 4.3%.

Group of Minds discovered that “Seventy percent of respondents said they would use their phone to look up arts events if given the opportunity, up from 45% in 2009.” And what the respondents wanted most was logistical information: address and directions to the event, parking information, and the like. You can read the whole survey here.

I can’t think of why it would be different for museums — people need easy access to logistical information.

My second beef is personal: it’s about the press links. Many don’t have a press office listed on the home page, where it belongs. Some museums do not disclose the names or phone numbers of their press representatives. There may be a general phone number, which inevitably leads to voicemail, and a general info@… or pressoffice@… email contact. Sometimes not even that.

Past press releases — forget about it. There might be the last half-dozen, say, but when I need to check something that happened a few years ago… no dice.

I find this lack of access hard to believe. I know press offices get nuisance calls from people who are not in the media. Guess what? So do reporters and people in other occupations.

Time was when reporters could put in a call or send an email and wait for an answer from someone… anyone. That’s over. Chances are, if I can’t get a name and contact point on your website, I’m moving on to the next museum, unless I absolutely need to start searching on the web for an old contact name. I don’t think I’m alone. If you want press — and the number of emails I receive suggests that you do — try to be a little more open with what you put online, please. Thank you.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Nitin360

 

“Ask Me About The Art” At The Guggenheim

GuggI didn’t go to an art museum today — as I recommended yesterday — because I had other commitments. But I did go yesterday, arriving at the Guggenheim Museum about 3 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, late enough for me to imagine what it might be like today. It was delightful — full of people, but not so crowded that one couldn’t see the pictures.

On view was Picasso Black and White, and the show was definitely drawing a diverse as well as plentiful crowd. I heard several foreign languages being spoken and saw people of all ages and races. Picasso is always good for crowds, and this exhibit got good reviews. Michael Fitzgerald in The Wall Street Journal called it “ not only one of the most exquisitely beautiful exhibitions of modern art to appear in New York in recent years but also among the most intellectually engaging,” and Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times said it was “as eye-opening as it is elegant.” It was good to see that many people went beyond Picasso into the galleries filled with new acquisitions and a small show of Kandinsky works — they were full, too.

I stopped to ask one guard if he had to work today. Yes, he said. Did he mind? He gave me a strange, surprised look and say, definitely, no. He said he didn’t have to start untill 11 a.m., so it wouldn’t interfere with his plans for last night. How did others feel about working on a holiday? He said he had heard no complaints. Some people may well have grumbled, I’ll guess but I hope that they weren’t forced to work a holiday — and I hope the guard’s answer assuages RCA readers who’ve complained in comments that museum employees shouldn’t have to work holidays.

AskMeI stopped to talk with another guard because I was taken by the big button he was wearing, pictured here. “Ask Me About The Art,” it says. I’d not noticed them before, and he told me they were ”pretty new,” though he didn’t recall when they were passed out. He loved the buttons. An art history major, he said until he got a button, most people asked where the rest rooms were. Now, some people do ask him real questions about the art on view. Other museums might take the cue and get similar buttons (some may already have similar identifiers).

All in all, there was only one discouraging moment during my visit. One young man, eyeing a painting, couldn’t resist saying, so that all could hear. “Or, it’s a ‘Woman in a Chair’ — I thought it was a spider” to one of his mates, who snickered. He should have found the nice young guard I spoke to — who might have helped him out.

Photo credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski