Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

Why Else Denver’s Van Gogh Exhibit Merits Attention

The Denver Art Museum may kill me for doing this — I didn’t ask permission or tell them in advance — but I want to share with you some of the Learning Moments (I think that’s what they are calling them) the museum’s staff has developed for Becoming van Gogh, the exhibition I wrote about yesterday. I couldn’t fit them into my article. But like the wall about terracotta at the Met’s current Bernini exhibition, I think they are models of what museum-goers should be able to see. And I’d like to see them posted online as well — so people can go back to them.

The Denver exhibit is, remember, a scholarly show — it explains how van Gogh became van Gogh.

One of the large panels talks about Charles Bargue’s Drawing Course, “a three volume do-it-yourself manual with an emphasis on drawing the human figure. Van Gogh got hold of the set and within six months he diligently copied all 197 plates at least once and all sixty of the nude poses at least three times.”

Later, we learn in the same panel that only two of his Bargue drawings survive — because van Gogh’s mother threw the rest away! What child or parent isn’t going to relate to that?

Timothy J. Standring, the curator, could not borrow either of the two surviving drawings, but he was able to find a copy of the Barque book — at Oberlin College, which agreed to lend it to the exhibition.

A second panel is about color. Van Gogh said “A good understanding of [color] is worth more than seventy different shades of paint.” He wrote to his brother, Theo, explaining his ideas about color and saying he was preoccupied by color. The panel goes on:

Somehow Van Gogh hit upon a way to experiment with color by winding different colors of yarn together. This astonishingly simple, cheap, and yet effective method kept the colors separate, just as Van Gogh kept his colors separate on the canvas in short, side-by-side brushstrokes of unmixed paint.

Van Gogh’s original balls of yarn are in the collection of the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

A third panel is about the perspective frame he built for himself, which he used throughout his career.

And a fourth is about his episodes at a drawing class that used plaster casts, which he hated. But why are his figure drawings from these classes of a woman’s backside? “Van Gogh and his new friend, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, were assigned seats typically reserved for the weaker students: looking at the sculpture’s backside.”

These tidbits qualify as what some editors refer to as “cocktail party conversation” — which is to say that they are memorable, fodder for casual conversation, buzzy — yet they are enlightening about van Gogh. Even if you knew about these facts before, they’re worth being reminded about.

When I started this post, I intended to upload the panels for you to view. But, it turns out, they are too big for this website.

You will just have to visit the Denver show yourself. Or get the catalogue.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum (Canal with Women Washing)

 

At Last: Denver Gets A van Gogh Show, Six Years In the Making

People on the coasts, especially the East coast, are spoiled when it comes to the art they can see. During the summer, I was astonished to learn from Timothy J. Standring (pictured), a curator at the Denver Art Museum whom I have known for years, that his mile-high city has never been home to exhibition focused on Vincent van Gogh. Of course, the museum had mounted exhibitions with a van Gogh or two — but never one centered on this most revered and popular artist.

Standring told me about his efforts to remedy that, with the result being an exhibition set to open on Oct. 21 titled Becoming van Gogh. It includes nearly 70 paintings and drawings by van Gogh and 20 by other artists, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, Jules Dupre and Emile Bernard, that van Gogh studied.

In organizing, Standring had a big handicap: the Denver museum doesn’t own a single work by van Gogh. He had to borrow everything. It was not an easy feat, and I lay out more about the challenges and how he overcame them in an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal titled Becoming van Gogh: A Show Built Stroke by Stroke.

Yet one of the best things about this exhibition is its theme: far from being a greatest hits, it unfolds a theme that has not been explored here in depth before. “We wanted to draw away from the focus on his craziness and instead focus on his internal process of artistic decisions,” Standring says.

Or, as the press release put it:

By focusing on the stages of Van Gogh’s artistic development, Becoming Van Gogh illustrates the artist’s initial foray into mastering draftsmanship, understanding the limitations and challenges of materials and techniques, learning to incorporate color theory and folding a myriad of influences, including the work of other artists, into his artistic vocabulary. No other exhibition has focused so intensely on Van Gogh’s personal growth and progression as he developed his own personal style.

Along the way, people doubted that Standring could pull this off — even his own museum directors and, at some points, the Van Gogh Museum, which pretty much has to approve all van Gogh exhibits. But it cooperated with Denver, providing curatorial assistance, despite the long odds, because part of its mission it to take van Gogh to places where he is not well known.

The show won’t, can’t, travel — it’s in Denver only. That’s another reason why, aside from the curators’ scholarship and creativity, this exhibit, well, exhibits the good fellowship that is evident among many European painting curators. I know some of them went to bat for Standring.

That’s it for tonight, but I will return to this show — there’s another reason why it’s notable.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum 

Hurrah: Dallas Inventories Texas Art. What Will It Find?

Most museums — in my opinion — should have their own special identity, something different that makes visitors want to visit them, instead of simply going to a universal, encyclopedic museum like the Met. When I visited Cincinnati, I loved seeing the regional Ohio art on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and when I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum, I headed straight for its German collections — not just the Expressionism, but the earlier genre paintings, too. Even though I live in New York, I can’t see those kinds of works on display here. Then, I see the rest of their permanent collections.

But especially in contemporary collections, we see a lot of cookie-cutter approaches to buying art since the 1960s, at least.

So I both applaud the Dallas Museum of Art and chastise it, a bit, for an effort it is making regarding Texas art. The bad first: why did I have to find out about it on my own, instead of receiving a press release — as I do for the museum’s exhibitions, staff changes, etc.? I’d rather know about this effort, which is unique, than the press release I received recently about a grant to research visitor engagement.

NOTE: Dallas tells me it did send me the press release on Friday, though I never received it. We have to blame email gremlins…

Now the praise: Dallas has unveiled on its website something called the “Texas Exhibition History” — a  complete list of titles and dates for exhibitions of Texas art presented at the Museum since 1909, and part of its Texas Art section of its website.  This project apparently began two years ago when the museum was awarded a grant by the University of Texas at Dallas Texas Fund for Curatorial Research, to continue studying the Texas art acquired before the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts merged with the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Art in 1963 to form DMA — which now owns those Texas works. 

Here’s the link to the project, where you’ll learn more about Texas artists. 

There’s more to come:

Coming in spring 2013, the DMA website will add another new section to “Texas Art” detailing the evolution of the Dallas art community after 1963. “Dallasites: Charting Contemporary Art, 1963 to Present,” also funded by the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research, will establish the DMA as the primary archive in North Texas for contemporary art.

I can’t say whether any of the artists in the database deserve national attention, but if they do, they would make the DMA distinctive. And wouldn’t it be great if the museum discovered some underappreciated talent?

Above is a painting, picked at random, by Everett Spruce (1908-2002) called Swollen Stream.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the DMA

Portland Makes The Most of Winslow Homer’s Studio — UPDATED

On Tuesday, the Portland Museum of Art opens what will likely be a pride and joy: the 2,200 sq. ft. studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, of Winslow Homer, which it purchased in 2006 from Homer’s great grand-nephew, Charles Homer Willauer. The museum has raised $10.8 million in a national capital campaign to support the acquisition, preservation, interpretation, and endowment of the studio, which it has restored to its appearance during Homer’s lifetime, for $2.8 million.

In the course of the restoration, the museum learned a lot about Homer: some little, such as that he apparently ate clams and just tossed the shells (they were found under the floorboards along with some paintbrushes);, and some big, such as the fact that, instead of being a recluse, Homer and his family developed the Prouts Neck community using Easthampton as a model. As one catalogue essay says: “It is a rare hermit that who exhibits a flair for real estate, but Winslow and his brother Charles, Jr. were active developers, so much so that by the time of Homer’s death in 1910, six hotels and some sixty private cottages dotted Prouts Neck.”

The downside to this, if there is one, is that visitation is via a van from the museum to the studio twelve miles away and then by guided tour — just three a day, limited to 10 visitors each, from Sept. 25 through Dec. 2, 2012 and next spring from Apr. 2 through June 14. A bigger downside: they cost $55 each. 

Wisely, in planning this, the museum has gone beyond the studio, where Homer made some of his most iconic works. The Portland museum will be showing paintings that he created in that studio. Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, which runs through Dec. 30, brings together 38 major oils, watercolors and etchings — many late seascapes — from museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.  For the first time since it was painted there, Homer’s  Fox Hunt (1893) will be in Maine, a rare loan from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

And Portland is putting a contemporary spin on this as well: It has commissioned five artists to photograph the studio using techniques available in Homer’s days, and they will go on view on Oct. 6 in a display called Between Past and Present: The Homer Studio Photographic Project. A few details:

They employed both historic, large-plate cameras and modern digital cameras, and a variety of print processes. The earliest method of making images of the real world with light—the camera obscura—is the technique explored by Abelardo Morell with his unique tent camera. Alan Vlach specializes in salted paper prints, the first form of prints made from negatives, introduced in England in the 1840s. Keliy Anderson-Staley developed her collodion prints outdoors using a portable darkroom at Prouts Neck, much like 19th-century portrait photographers. And the gum bichromate and platinum prints, produced by Brenton Hamilton and Tillman Crane, represent the type of fine art photography most used during Homer’s day.

The Portland museum has a real treasure here, and should make the most of it in a way that’s respectful of the property’s limitations. I suspect it will learn during the coming year, and perhaps make changes after that.  

For more on the Homer studio, see the Maine Sunday Telegram article from last Sunday and today’s piece here, the Associated Press story as published by the Washington Post, a travel story in The New York Times and additional articles listed here.

UPDATE: The Portland museum tells me that the previous top photo on this post, which I drew from the local paper, dated to 2006. They gave me a recent interior shot, which is now at top.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art (top), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (middle), Alan Vlach via the Portland Museum of Art (bottom)

 

Mint Museum Goes Political: A Twist In The Crowd-Curated Category

This week the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., where the Democratic Party convention begins tomorrow, is trying its own crowd-curated project, with the added twist that it aims “at educating the public on both the electoral process and the process of building a world-class collection for Charlotte and the region.” It also seems to have the not necessarily unintentional goal of bringing in political visitors in town for the convention.

This is a “one-of-a-kind election taking place within the walls of Mint Museum Uptown,” as the press release for “Vote for Art: Your View, Your Vote” says. Anyone who visits may vote for three of six “specially-chosen” art works that have been selected by curators and placed on view in the museum. One visit, one ballot — but anyone can return and vote again.

Why three votes? The museum plans to acquire the three biggest vote-getters for its permanent collection.

The voting began on Sunday, when the museum was closed to the public but open to some political visitors for a delegates’ welcome party. (There’s no provision for online voting, which is good — better to see works in person.) The museum is also closed for “special events” on tomorrow and Wednesday. But all visitors to the museum through Friday, the day after the convention closes, can vote. Then the polling closes until Oct. 1.

I’m not quite sure why that would be (and no explanation is offered in the release or the museum’s website) unless the Mint wants to cater to out-of-towners.

When the voting resumes on Oct. 1, it runs through Nov. 9, and on Election Day – November 6 — the museum is free all-day (it’s always free from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesdays). That accommodates locals.

To create the contest, the museum apparently asked galleries and artists to submit works, and they were considered by a committee of museum curators and representatives of the museum’s affiliate groups who narrowed the choices to six.

The choices are outlined here and the candidates’ works can be viewed on this webpage. The works are by Vic Muniz, Beverly McIver, Nacho Carbonell (his work at right), Mathias Bengsston (his work above left), Mattia Biaggi and Sebastian Errazuriz.

So what do we think of this? I suppose I don’t see the harm, as long as the curators weighed in substantially first (I’m a little wary of that committee) — in general, I don’t think museums should abdicate responsibility in the name of getting people involved. But I wonder how the home-town visitors feel about letting politics — ok, political visitors — decide what goes in their museum. The one salvation point on that is that the out-of-towners are likely to make up a small portion of the final votes.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Mint Museum