Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Art Market

Now What? Cornelius Gurlitt Has Died

_74671208_gurlittNews reports are coming in from Europe: the “‘Nazi art’ hoarder,” as the BBC terms Cornelius Gurlitt, is dead at the age of 81 — “with no definitive answer on what will happen to his secret collection, which included many Nazi-looted pieces.”

Gurlitt recently changed his mind about claiming all 1,300 or so pieces in his collection as his own, saying he would cooperate with German authorities on establishing the paintings’ provenance and that he would return them if they were proven to be stolen.

More from the BBC here, plus a look into his vault here.

Gurlitt reportedly died in his Munich apartment; he had recently had heart surgery.

The disposition of the works is very muddy now, because — as The New York Times reported — “It was not clear if Mr. Gurlitt had drawn up a will that would stipulate what would happen to his collection.”

“Bronze” — A Reprise, Sort Of

PicassoIn 2012, the Royal Academy in London had a total winner on its hands, in my opinion, with Bronze, an exhibition of about 150 bronzes from all over the world, dating from 5,000 years ago to the present. Robert Mnuchin, the dealer, thought so too:

We were struck by the dazzling breadth of inventiveness and the vast range of visual effects at play in the five centuries of bronze objects that the show brought together. After returning to New York, we could not get the show out of our heads. When we learned the exhibition would not be traveling outside of London, we decided that the experience of Bronze was one that New York audiences simply should not have to miss. We asked ourselves what we could do that would reflect the level of quality of the London show, concluding that we would be most successful if we focused on masterworks from the twentieth century.

And then they hired David Ekserdjian, curator of the RA show, to co-curate and write an essay for the exhibition that opened last week at Mnuchin: Casting Modernity: Bronze in the XXth Century.

MatisseNudeThis is one of the gallery shows that a museum would be proud to do. It includes many borrowed works that are presumably not for sale, as well as bronzes you can buy, assuming you have the wherewithal. The first room for example, contains Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande), above at right, from The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Trust and all five of Matisse’s Jeannettes (below right), borrowed from Glenstone, the private museum of Mitchell Rales. Matisses Grand nu assis (at left), from a private collection, is also there.

It also includes works by Twombly, David Smith, Lichtenstein, Bourgeois, Arp, Koons, de Kooning and others. There are more than 30 works in all.

Ekserdjian writes:

This extraordinarily bold hanging sculpture best illustrates the enormous distance that separates the artistic universe of the close of the millennium from Rodin’s world. It goes without saying that all these pieces have been carefully chosen — in the first instance — for their intrinsic artistic merits. Nevertheless, seen as a whole they cannot fail to suggest all sorts of intriguing and illuminating alliances and even rivalries both stylistic and perhaps especially thematic.

MatisseJeanettesEkserdjian categorizes these bronzes as he did for the RA show, analyzing them by grouping them as heads, animals and so on. With fewer objects, this — to me — is a little less satisfying, not more. Art history is never simple. Indeed, the essay concludes:

…the gulf that separates Rodin’s Thinker from Nauman’s Untitled (Hand Circle) is a vast one. What is more, the intervening works and decades cannot be reduced to anything approximating a simple formulaic progression. On the contrary, it is the twists and turns — the absence of a linear history — that make the panorama of bronze sculpture in the twentieth century so boundlessly fascinating. As a result, no anthology — even when it brings together so many stunning pieces — can hope to be entirely representative, but it can instead encourage us to see both the familiar and the unexpected in a new light. For each of us, which bronzes fall into which of those categories will be very different, but even the best informed will be bound to learn from the experience…

The exhibit will be on view until June 7. If you are in the neighborhood of East 78th Street, a visit would be well worth it.

Photo Credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski  

Why MFA Boston Makes Me Queasy

Yesterday, the Museum of Fine Arts – Boston announced that it was putting on view “a special loan of the beloved Norman Rockwell painting, The Rookie (The Red Sox Locker Room)” from 1957. MFA made it a celebration of  the “third World Series Championship in a decade” for the Red Sox, and said the painting will be in the galleries for just six days, through May 4.

NRockwellWhy? Because it is “being offered at auction at Christie’s (New York) on May 22” in the American art auction. The MFA didn’t day, but the estimate is $20- to 30 million. It did say:

The MFA is the only place where the public will be able to see the celebrated painting in Boston––which depicts the Red Sox locker room in 1957 during spring training in Sarasota, Florida––before it goes on the auction block. Rockwell’s classic work, portraying a group of seasoned veterans giving the once-over to the team’s newest player, will be on view in the MFA’s Sharf Visitor Center. The painting was also on display at the MFA in 2005 and 2008, following World Series wins.

Well, not quite. Won’t it be in the sale exhibition? But that’s minor — the painting is already highly valued, and may not need the endorsement of the MFA. After all, it has already been on view there before. It was acquired by the current owner in 1986.

Six days on view may not mean much, but it nevertheless raises the painting’s profile. Aside from the MFA, the only other museum to have shown the work, which was the March 2, 1957 cover of the Saturday Evening Post, is the Norman Rockwell Museum. Small as this is, I still think that museums shouldn’t be used to enhance value right before a sale.

On the other hand, I do give the MFA credit for disclosing the auction right upfront.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the MFA

 

A Top Ten List In Dubai

I happened to turn to a publication called Gulf Business, which I plan to use in my next post, and then happened upon a very interesting list.

Samt-Lam-Yantehi-MadaWe think we know a lot about art in the Gulf States — hearing all the time of the Doha and Abu Dhabi museums, the big annual art fairs there and the (what looked to me from afar as pretty awful) massive Damien Hirst bronze sculptures of fetal development that went on display there last fall.

So the headline in Gulf Business drew me in: Top 10 Most Expensive Art Works Sold By Christie’s In Latest Dubai Auction. They’re not what you might guess. The sale was of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art. No Hirst or Koons here. (Middle Eastern was their term, for those of you who think I am being politically incorrect.)

The dollar amounts were small, with the top lot fetching $1,023,750 — it was a figurative painting of the construction of the Suez Canal by Abdul Hadi El-Gazzar, an Egyptian artist who died in 1965. The final price was about ten times the estimate, though.

And yet:

Global auction house Christie’s said that its latest auction in Dubai saw 140 art works raise a total of over $10.6 million (Dhs39.1 million), an increase of 65 per cent compared to last year’s sales total. …The Pharos Collection of Modern Egyptian Art, expected to sell for around $1.4 million, made $3.89 million, with the top lot of the sale also coming from the collection.

The picture I’ve posted here was the fifth highest lot, Dia Al-Azzawi’s Neverending Silence,  which fetched $207,750, more than double the high estimate, all in.

I shouldn’t be surprised, perhaps, but this all makes me wonder what really know about the art scene there. In fact, take a look at this website, Arts Qatar, and its “News and Events” section; it presents a far more well-rounded picture of the arts in the Gulf that we’re getting over here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gulf Business

Poor Trade-Off — Bellows To London — But One Bright Side

Of course I have mixed emotions about the sale by Randolph College of its beautiful painting, Men of the Docks, by George Bellows, to raise money for its endowment. Remedying financial mismanagement elsewhere is not what art in museums is supposed to do, especially as this painting was purchased by students for the college in 1920. That part is very sad.

men-of-the-docksBut the great news is that the National Gallery in London bought the work and paid $25.5 million, finally adding a major American painting to its collection. As Nicholas Penny, the NG director who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite museum directors, said in the release, “We look forward to giving the work a place of honor in our rooms.” (Boldface mine.)

It is about time that great European museums started collecting American art. The Louvre is now showing American art and I recall rumors, too, that it had also recently purchased an American painting or two, but I could not find that as fact with a quick search. What Penny told The New York Times, “I’m a great fan of American painting, but great examples are hard to come by,” is no excuse. There are great paintings on the market, as Alice Walton, for one, has shown. More probably, the museums don’t have the cash — yet some American art historians think Penny got a bargain on the Bellows (Nancy Mowll Mathews, for one, per her post on FB). The money came from a fund created by the late billionaire oilman John Paul Getty.

There was hardly a choice for the NG, but I do like that Penny will place the painting among Manets, Monets and Goyas. Penny told The Guardian, that the “fantastic” painting “will have a revolutionary effect on the collection and an electrifying effect on visitors.” (Here’s what The Independent had to say on the matter.) The Bellows, press reports said, indicated that the NG was moving in a new direction, now collecting paintings in the Western European tradition, instead of those made by artists working in Western Europe. I don’t know why they can’t just call it American art, but…

As for Randolph College, it crowed about what is essentially a fig leaf — that, according to its press release, the deal “mak[es] Randolph College the only U.S. educational institution with a collaborative relationship with the National Gallery.” That means that its students can gain access to the NG’s collections and attend classes there, while “high-level staff members of the National Gallery to lecture at Randolph College [and] a special internship program for Randolph students that will be established in London with the museum.”