Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Archives for April 2013

Strategy: Why Museums Should Develop Specialties

What makes your museum — the one you love, the one you promote, the one you work at, the one you most visit — different? Special?

Some museums are lucky enough to have a true, world-class masterpiece or two — the Frick’s Bellini, MoMA’s Starry Night, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte, etc. Better yet, some museums have specific, unduplicatable collections: If you are interested in Max Beckmann, you really must go to the St. Louis Art Museum, to name one example.

DAMNativeAmTextiles2Back when I wrote a lot about corporations, and more particularly about corporate strategies, this differentiation was a big concern: what made Home Depot different from Lowe’s, or Cover Girl mascara different from Revlon’s? Marketing might do the trick — think Tide detergent’s sales over Cheer’s. But the companies that really did well were those that had more substantive product differentiation.

I thought of that the other day when I got a press release from the Denver Art Museum, announcing a $1.5 million 1 to 1 matching grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the creation of a $3 million endowment of a full-time, permanent textiles conservator, plus $250,000 to support a fellowship in textile conservation. I had already written about SPUN: Adventures in Textiles — the campus-wide docket of exhibitions related to textiles this summer, and I knew that SPUN was triggered by a $3 million gift to the DAM’s textile department.

So I asked the museum, how did the new grant come about? Did it ask the Mellon, was it taking the strategic course to put a lot of muscle into developing its textiles collection?

Indeed, the answer came back — this is not rocket science, but everyday good management — Christoph Heinrich, the museum’s director, and a development official visited Mellon in New York “to tell them about our Textile Art Department expansion and gauge interest in a proposal. They really liked the attention to textile arts, a medium they feel is underserved nationally, and invited us to apply for the grant,” spokeswoman Ashley Pritchard wrote back.

I also asked if I was reading the situation properly: DAM is known for Spanish Colonial art and Native American art, but other departments — which may have interesting pieces — are not considered to be exceptional (excepting British art, thanks to the Berger collection). Was it trying to add textiles to that short list? Again, from Pritchard:

We have a strong core collection of textiles in the textile art department, as well as the textiles held by other curatorial departments (Native Art, most notably). The curator is working to refine the collection – add to strengths, build out in certain areas, etc. We will become nationally known not only for our textile art collection and department but for our commitment to textile art conservation through this endowed position and the fellowship. A fellowship means that we are a center for conservation professional training, especially as it relates to textile art conservation, an underserved area.

This is smart. Especially in contemporary art, many museums have cookie-cutter collections. Textiles is a broad area that few museums focus on.

You can read more, in the museum’s press release on the Mellon grant. And here’s a link to some of the museum’s textiles in Spun – Adventures in Textiles_Image Highlights.

Photo Credit: Native American textiles at DAM, © Judith H. Dobrzynski

 

 

Should We Expect More Museum Cutbacks? — UPDATED

As they always say, if you’ve got three, you’ve got a trend. I have only two, but I wonder if more museum cutbacks are coming. UPDATE –see comment below. Now we do have three examples.

DBolgerBEarlier this week, the Baltimore Museum of Art awarded pink slips to 14 employees, or 9 percent of the 154-member staff., according to The Baltimore Sun. The 14 included 11  full-time exployees and three part-timers. Here’s the background:

The job cuts are needed to make up a projected deficit of more than $500,000 by  July 1, according to museum director Doreen Bolger (left), and to accommodate a budget  that is shrinking by $1 million from its current level of $12.9 million for the  2012-2013 fiscal year.

“We did everything we could think of over the past five years to avoid  reaching this point, including salary reductions, furloughs and trying to find  ways to raise more money,” Bolger said. Bolger said staff cuts were necessary to avoid trimming programs that  directly affect museum visitors. At the moment, there are no plans to reduce  hours.

The museum will also remain free and its renovation will go on. More financial details are here.

You’ll remember that a few weeks ago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art laid off 11% of its staff.

As I recall, charitable donations to the arts rose only slightly last year, though according to a recently released survey in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, 70% of charitable organizations expect a rise in donations this year. I don’t know why they are optimistic, considering that the economy remains weakish, European countries said again recently that they will remain on an austerity kick, and President Obama has declined to drop the idea of a cap on charitable donations by the wealthy — the very ones who give to the arts.

I think this will continue to be a tough year – I’m a contrarian versus that 70%. I do expect more job loses at art museums, whether by layoff or by attrition. I would love to be proven wrong.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Bucknell

Different Strokes: How To Tell A True Masterpiece Nowadays?

Vermeer-WwJugToday’s Wall Street Journal carried a review of the renovated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which reopens to the public on Saturday. It’s pretty much a rave, and I recommend it. But I found one passage extremely interesting and worthy of singling out and commenting on.

First, here’s the setup passage:

The museum’s director of collections, Taco Dibbits, and his curatorial staff have completely restructured the installation of the museum’s holdings for the renovated building, arranging 8,000 objects from the museum’s permanent collection (an increase of about 40% in the total number of objects displayed) across 80 galleries, 30 of which are devoted to 17th-century Dutch art—the so-called Golden Age. …

…Prior to the renovations, exhibits were organized according to department, with paintings, sculptures and applied arts completely segregated. But now, as is increasingly common in museums, a more chronological approach prevails, so that varied objects from a given era can be shown in tandem to give a sense of the period—fine art, for instance, may be seen alongside furniture, craft items or even machinery—beginning with the Middle Ages on the lower floors and culminating with the 20th century under the eaves of the tower galleries…

And now the important part:

Traditionalists will feel perfectly at home in the Gallery of Honor, where the greatest masterpieces of the Rijksmuseum’s 17th-century Dutch paintings collection—many of which, including Vermeer’s famed “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” (1663-64) [at left], have recently been cleaned or restored—can be enjoyed in perfect tranquility, blissfully free from the video screens and iPad displays that have become the bane of modern museum-going. Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” (c. 1660) [above right] is not shown beside an earthenware jug, nor is Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride” (1667) hung beneath a wedding canopy. But elsewhere in the museum, an eclectic and at times whimsical approach does help to enliven the display by providing a rich context for less familiar works.

VermeerNow that says something to me. It signifies that some works of art — the very best — need no technology, no bells and whistles, to serve as explication. The Journal’s reviewer, Jonathan Lopez, endorses the museum’s bells and whistles, saying:

…For instance, a formidable military portrait of the Dutch naval hero Adm. Michiel de Ruyter hangs alongside plundered treasure—gold coins, mighty cannons, a carved bowsprit— that he wrested from Spanish ships in battle. Exhibits of this type not only help to fulfill the Rijksmuseum’s dual art and history mandate, but based on my own observations of how things worked in the Philips wing, they seem to be particularly effective in engaging the interest of children—a shrewd strategy.

But to me, the lack of helping aids in the Gallery of Honor speaks volumes — which is that the greatest works of art, works by the true masters, speak for themselves. The rest need help. Whether or not the curators intended it, they have tipped their hand on this question.

 

The Billion-Dollar Cubist Gift: Donor-Wise

As director Thomas P. Campbell said in the Metropolitan Museum’s press release announcing Leonard Lauder’s promised gift of his collection of Cubist art, it is “truly transformational for the Metropolitan Museum.”

Leger-TypographerI wish it were transformational for other collectors and would-be donors of art to museum. With this gift, Lauder showed the way — much as he did in 2008. Then, within days of the announcement of Stephen A. Schwarzman’s $100 million gift to the New York Public Library, he gave $137 million to the Whitney.

But contrast the difference: because of the Schwarzman gift, The New York Times said at the time, “The 1911 Beaux Arts structure on Fifth Avenue will be called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building after construction is completed around 2014.”  And Paul LeClerc, then library president, said “We hope to incise the name of the building in stone in a subtle, discreet way on either side of the main entrance.” In reality, the incising has already been done — five times on the building, and not so discreetly. Every piece of paper that emanates from the Library has Schwarzman’s name on it.

The Lauder gift to the Whitney, on the other hand, involved no naming rights — though some galleries there had been named for Lauder in the past. It did come with strings — it “required the museum not to sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue at 75th Street for an extended period.” But it also came with this little item: “The gift includes $6 million to cover expenses until the donation is complete, which is expected to be by June 30, 2009.” (Whether Schwarzman has completed his gift is unclear — there was talk at the time of his spreading out payments on the pledge for several years.)

This time, Lauder has given the Met art it needs to tell the history of Western art — with no strings on display, no demands that it be kept together, or never lent, or any of those foolish conditions that were part of gifts by Robert Lehman, Belle  Linsky, and others. (As one Met person told me recently, people often say the Met has no Melendez in its collection, for example — but it does. It has a great one that’s tucked away in the Jack and Belle Linsky galleries, where few people go.)

Endowing (partly) a research center to go with his Cubist gift is another Lauder trademark (the $22 million for this is funded by grants from many supporters, including Lauder). From the release:

The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art will be the first such center dedicated exclusively to modern art within an encyclopedic museum. It will serve as a leading center for scholarship on Cubism and modern art, distinguished by its intellectual rigor and range, and its resources available for study. The Center will bring together renowned scholars, fellows, and curators for focused inquiry within the rich global context of the Metropolitan’s collection….

…Under the auspices of the Center, the Metropolitan will award four two-year fellowships annually for pre- and post-doctoral work and invite senior scholars for residencies at the Museum. Through a program of lectures, study workshops, dossier exhibitions, publications, and a vibrant web presence, the Center will focus art-historical study and public attention on modernism generally and on Cubism in particular, and serve as a training ground for the next generation of scholars. The Center will also include a library and an archive on Cubism donated by Mr. Lauder.

LLauderWhen Lauder gave postcard collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he also endowed a curator’s position, held by Benjamin Weiss, the Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Visual Culture.

In other words, while Lauder doesn’t shy from taking credit, what he does do that should be more widespread is think through his gift — and he ends up ensuring what’s best for the objects and the public, not just himself.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum (top – Leger’s Typographer)

 

 

 

Why The Met Can Thank Brooklyn For “Madame X”

SpanishFountainLast Friday, the Brooklyn Museum opened John Singer Sargent Watercolors – a landmark show, really, because it brings together a groups watercolors acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1909 and by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1912 for the first time. These early twentieth century watercolors together show how innovative Sargent was in this medium, which the museums assert was heretofore considered “tangential” to Sargent’s oeuvre and reputation — but shouldn’t be.

I wrote about the exhibition, Sargent’s mid-life career crisis, and his ensuing experimentation for The New York Times in mid-March.

But last week, while at the Metropolitan Museum* to see Photography and the American Civil War (which, btw, is fascinating and fabulous), I ran into H. Barbara Weinberg, the American art curator there, who told me how those well-publicized purchases — by rival museums — led indirectly to the Met’s purchase of — Madame X. And some watercolors, too, of course.

Here’s the tale: The Met, anxious to get its own cache of Sargent’s watercolors, approached Sargent in December, 1912, “with a plea for eight or ten watercolors,” Weinberg wrote in the Spring 2000 Bulletin of the Met. Then “…He entered into an artful negotiation with the Metropolitan,” promising to sell one watercolor and to reserve “the best” of those he would do in the next year for the museum. The Met did agree to buy one, Spanish Fountain (at left), in January, 1913, but “Sargent’s ambivalence about the sheets that he had on hand and, later, his worries about transatlantic shipping during World War I, delayed the sale,” Weinberg wrote.

Two years later, Sargent picks up the ball again, and writes to the Met saying he was still trying to pick the best, and offering to include “the best oil picture I did in the Tyrol last year” for an additional sum. He enclosed a picture of Tyrolese Interior (at right) as museum-worthy, and sent it and 10 watercolors to the Met in December, 1915 — a year after these contacts began.

TyroleseInteriorAt the end of that month, the Met’s secretary, Henry W. Kent, wrote to Sargent with thanks. This time, it took Sargent less than two weeks to respond — with the proposal that the Met buy Madame X. In January, 1916, he wrote that the picture was on view at the San Francisco Exhibition and that “now that it is in America I rather feel inclined to let it stay there if a Museum should want it. I suppose it is the  best thing that I have done. I would let the Metropolitan have it for £1,000.”

That sum, Weinberg said, was the equivalent of $4,762 at the time — about $100,000 in today’s dollars.

Kent wanted the painting — he’d been trying to buy it from Sargent for years. This time, he got it.

Why did Sargent have a change of heart? Virginie Gautreau had died in 1915 — remember that the painting had scandalized the public when it was first shown — but even so Sargent did not want her name to be attached to the painting. That’s why, when it was intalled at the Met for the first time in May, 1916, it was called Madame X.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met