Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

On Wisconsin! And Cincinnati And Others

It’s widely recognized now that there’s no one art world, no one art market — and that perhaps is what underpins a couple of recent developments.

Museum of Wisconsin ArtWe’ll start with the news early this month that the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, WI., — which has existed for some 20 years — has a new building that will raise it profile and provide more space for showing art by residents of the state. Art writer Mary Louise Schumacher wrote about it in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

One of the goals of the museum’s new director and CEO, Laurie Winters, is to reconsider how to think about the art of the state and the role that a museum can play. With no major contemporary art institution in the region, save the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, she’s interested in finding ways to cultivate connections with contemporary artists, among other things, and has created an advisory board of working artists, curators and critics.

The JS has a wonderful slide show at the link above, which includes the photo I’ve copied here of Graeme Reid, director of exhibitions, amid an installation by Michael Meilahn.

Today, an article caught my eye about the groundbreaking for a museum in Daytona Beach, FL., that “will house the world’s most extensive collection of Florida art.” A couple named Cici and Hyatt Brown have donated the art they’ve amassed — some 2,600 works — over the years. It’s not contemporary, apparently: The local paper, The Ledger, says the earliest work dates to 1839 — a painting of the gates of St. Augustine, Fl. The Browns gave $13 million for the design and construction of the museum and have just said they will give $2 million to kick off an $8 million endowment campaign. Read more details here.

No. 3 on this list of unrelated developments is a blog post in Houston (ArtAttack on the Houston Press site) proposing that the city needs more museums, including one it would call the The Museum of Texas Art:

You would think we’ve got art covered what with the MFAH’s ever growing campus, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Pearl Fincher Art Museum and the rest, not to mention the hundreds of galleries in the area, but on any given day, you’d be hard-pressed to find an exhibit that included anything that could be called Texas art.

We don’t mean just works by Texas artists or works created here in Texas. It takes a little bit more than that to qualify a painting or sculpture as Texas art. It takes an only-in-Texas vision and direct connection to other local painters and sculptors who either influenced or were influenced by the artist. The Texas Art Museum would have a collection of works by artists such as unique Lone Star state talents as Emma Richardson Cherry, considered one of the most forward thinking artists of her time.

Finally, the other day I received an email from the Cincinnati Art Museum noting that its Cincinnati Wing is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The museum says it was “one of the first art museums in the nation to dedicate permanent gallery space to a community’s art history.” It adds:

The 18,000 square feet of gallery space showcases more than 400 objects that represent art made by Cincinnati or Cincinnati trained artists, art depicting Cincinnati or Cincinnatians, or art commissioned for Cincinnati, including many works by American masters. The artists in the Cincinnati Wing include Frank Duveneck, a painter of international reputation; Hiram Powers, one of the nation’s finest sculptors; John H. Twachtman and Edward Potthast, regarded as two of the finest American Impressionists; Lilly Martin Spencer, the most celebrated female painter of her time; and decorative arts from the internationally renowned Rookwood Pottery.

I couldn’t find a link to the release online, sorry to say.

So there you have it — I align with the Houston blogger, Olivia Flores Alvarez, on this issue. Showing reginally made art is another way museums can differentiate themselves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Journal Sentinel 

 

 

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

 

Not A Skeleton: Another Museum Discovery In Storage

CanalettoI wish I had closets like this. The news recently emerged from Denver that Timothy Standring, the curator who organized Becoming van Gogh, was rummaging around in the museum’s storage bins a while ago and pulled out not a plum but a Canaletto. As related last week in the Los Angeles Times:

It all started in 2000 (actually a couple centuries earlier, but that’s getting ahead of the story) when a canvas in dreadful condition called “Venice: The Molo from the Bacino di S. Marco” was bequeathed to the Denver Art Museum from a deceased local collector’s foundation.

The accompanying paperwork was vague and referred to it as “from the studio” of Giovanni Antonio Canal — known as Canaletto — an important Italian painter in the mid-1700s.

Because it was assumed to be a student rendering, the painting was relegated to storage. And obscurity.

Seven years later, Timothy Standring, curator of painting and sculpture at the Denver museum, ran across the piece while doing routine inventory. It was so discolored and coated in grime, he later joked, it looked as if it had been “in someone’s home who smoked Marlboros for 50 years.”

Still, he saw something in it, that prompted an investigation — though there was no record of this painting. He showed it to “Charles Beddington, one of the world’s foremost Canaletto scholars,” who authenticated it — pronouncing it “one of the artist’s earliest undocumented works,” from 1724. Now cleaned and conserved, it’s on view at the museum.

In July, 2010, I wrote here about the Yale Art Gallery, where former curator John Marciari, had discovered a painting by Velasquez, named The Education of the Virgin, in a closet. It has been given to the museum in 1925, but being poor condition and damaged by water, it was sent to storage, and remained undisplayed until Marciari, as part of a review of the collection in 2004, discovered it — he studied it, identified it, and published it as a Velasquez.

Less than a year later, the Brooklyn Museum announced that a painting that had entered its collection as a bequest in 1932 as an early self-portrait by Gerrit Dou, which was later downgraded, had been rediscovered in storage and actually was a Dou. Richard Aste, the museum’s curator of European art, had also begun a review of his department’s holdings. Fascinated by the little portrait, Aste decided to investigate and his suspicions were confirmed by other experts.

I know it takes time and a lot of effort to review collections, and some museums are doing it (here’s one example). But stories like these always make me wonder what other gold is there in those storage bins?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum

 

A Renaissance Art Made Contemporary: Marquetry

ss_100519511We tend to think about marquetry as a Renaissance or Baroque art, but it’s not. Many contemporary artists and artisan practice the craft/art. I recently wrote about one, Silas Kopf, for Traditional Home magazine. Here’s a key paragraph:

If you think marquetry is a dead art, a relic of the Renaissance, you haven’t met Kopf. For more than 25 years, he has been turning out hand-cut marquetry marvels, some laced with humor, others as elegant as a classical commode, still others trompe l’oeil tableaus so realistic you do a double take. “I don’t think anyone else in marquetry has his accuracy or range of colors,” says Wendell Castle, the 80-year-old wood-master who is known as the father of the art furniture movement.

Amusingly, Kopf is a Princeton alum whose parents, he said, were originally “mortified” by his choice of career. They came around, though, as did the market. His Steinway piano with morning glories sold for more than $200,000.

ss_100519524Kopf’s work is shown at Gallery Henoch in New York. Last fall, George Henoch Shechtman told me that “We’ve represented him for more than 20 years – even longer. We had furniture show when the gallery was in Soho, and that’s when we found him. I think it was about 1985. We’re a realist gallery: it was his pictorial images and sense of humor that appealed to me, but most of all it was that he is a master of his craft. He is a master of marquetry. No one does it on such as large scale as he does.”

Schectman, who own three Kopf pieces, told me that he loves that the pieces are “totally functional.”

I like another thing about Kopf: he’s been sharing his tricks of the trade. Aside from teaching and publishing a book about marquetry — “A Marquetry Odyssey” – he has posted tutorials on YouTube (they start here).

 

 

 

 

…isms: A Throwback Little Publication

We still talk about Impressionism and Cubism, Modernism and Expressionism, but it has been a long while since we had a new ism.

51Rh-W18QDL._SY300_That’s may be a good thing, saying that art is so disparate and inventive today that it can’t be categorized into one school, or a bad thing, signifying that art today is a mess. Or it may mean that isms are truly only discernable after the fact. Whichever place you fall on those alternatives, they are use shorthand for communicating about art. I don’t have to explain any of those -isms listed above. You know what I’m talking about.

Such thoughts were provoked by a new little book that land in my hand called …isms: Understanding Modern Art and published by Universe Publications, a division of Rizzoli. It’s billed as “the perfect resource to explore the major and minor movements of modern art from the nineteenth century until today.” It’s by Sam Phillips, a British art critic whose introduction says that it’s not exhaustive and also that he coined two -isms: Installationism and Sensationalism. Not every category is an -ism, either. One of the last movements here is “Street Art,” to cite one example.

So I wonder, if I referred to the Chapmans, Chris Ofili or Tracey Emin as Sensationalists, would that pass muster with editors and readers?

How are Turrell and Beuys categorized? They are Installationists.

The book is handy: each entry gets a name, a short introduction, followed by key artists, key words, the main definition, key works, other works, a “see also” and a “don’t see” (for contradictions). There’s a glossary, a chronology, a list of museums to visit.

I can see how I would find this book useful, and how it would even more useful to people who’ve never studied art.

There’s one thing I should note, though: though the publicist sent this to me as a new book, published this month, a little research shows that it’s not. It’s a revised version of a 2004 book of the same name with a different author. She should have told me that…