Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

Back Your Bags For Manet in Toledo — Next Fall

The Toledo Museum of Art will be the place to be — ok, a place to be — next fall: it just announced a major exhibition for Manet, which it’s calling “Manet: Portraying Life.” Co-organized by Lawrence W. Nichols, senior curator for European and American painting before 1900, the exhibit will move from Toledo to the Royal Academy in London next January. It will include some 40 paintings, plus photographs, from around the world.

The anchor — or catalyst, if you prefer — is Toledo’s own marvelous Manet, Antonin Proust, at left, from 1880.  Here’s what Nichols had to say when I asked about the show’s origins:

Manet as a portraitist has never been isolated as an exhibition topic, and with our collection having one of his finer examples, I determined some six years ago to make this show come to pass – here.  Our partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts came about when I learned that my colleague, MaryAnne Stevens, was giving thought to preparing a Manet exhibition for London, which has never had a retrospective of the artist.  I was able to direct them to this aspect of his career.  Our aim: to explore the twofold character of Manet’s work in the genre of portraiture – posed portraits like our own canvas, as well as portraits of individuals engaged in the activities of everyday life.

Manet has never had a retrospective in London? How did that happen?

But I digress. Nichols says the show will include many of Manet’s best-known and loved works, including The Railway from the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Emile Zola from the  Orsay, Paris, and the “rarely lent gem” from RISD in Providence, Le Repos (Berthe Morisot), at right, to name a few, plus “a number of less well known works including Mme Brunet, which was just acquired by the Getty Museum, and The Bicycle (Leon Koella Leenhoff) from a private collection in Paris (which must be rarely seen, because I couldn’t find an image of it online). Here’s the press release.

I thought it was great, and possibly unusual, that Toledo is collaborating with the RA, and asked about it. “The TMA has generously lent to the RA, London, for decades, but to the best of my knowledge we have never collaborated with them on an exhibition,” wrote Nichols. My feeling is that, too often, museums collaborate with the same old partners and they need to mix it up a bit more.

This is an expensive exhibition for Toledo, but the museum has lined up sponsors and is obviously hoping for a popular success — which it should get. 

The Museum points out that 2012 is its hundredth year in its current building, and is kind of celebrating with the Manet show and three other portrait shows — one of paintings by Toledoan Leslie Adams; another called Made in Hollywood, portraits from the studios’ glory days from the 1920s to the 1960s, and a third featuring “more than 700 [!] photographs soon to be shot of citizens of this city,” Nichols said. It’s all called “Portrait Season at the Museum,” a way of focusing on people.

The Toledo museum has an avid local fan base, and this show, which opens on Oct. 7,  should only make them more appreciative.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Toledo Museum of Art (top)

Britain’s Most Generous Philanthropist: An Artist?

Surprise: Britain’s annual giving list places an artist — David Hockney — at the top of the roster for 2011.

The list, published by the Sunday Times, calculates rank based on the amount of wealth given away as a proportion of overall income, not on absolute value. But Hockney does well on either score, if you allow for the fact that his gifts were of his own art. He gave away £78.1m worth of paintings to charitable causes, which is more than double his estimated £34m wealth.

Hockney also gave away £730,000 in cash through his David Hockney Foundation, whose website is currently under construction. A listing for it at Charities Direct, however, says that it was founded in 2008 with a goal of “The education of the public in the appreciation of art and in particular the creative art of today.” Its “total funds” as of December 2010 were £77.51m.

What I could not determine was how values were placed on Hockney’s gifts — and by whom.

Hockney’s recent exhibition at the Royal Academy, which led to a dispute over what art is with Damien Hirst, did well, according to one of the reports on the philanthropy rankings — before closing on Apr. 9, it attracted more than a half-million visitors and featured some works that belong to the foundation. Which raises another question — of those assets (total funds), how much is art? Will he sell any to put cash into education of the public?

And the larger question is this: many artists are rich nowadays. Are others actively giving away money?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Third Sector

Who’s That Artist, And How Has He Grown?

Who made the works posted at right?

Don’t look yet. I doubt that you’ll know, right off the bat.

I posted these two paintings, with no attribution, in an online group of art historians and connoisseurs on Facebook, and no one guessed correctly. Few people even tried. Hours of head-scratching later, I provided the answer.

It is, of course, Brice Marden. But if I hadn’t signaled the answer by posting a sample of his previous work below, would you have known?

The man has been around a long time, acknowledged as a major American postwar artist, although, as critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in 2006, “He did not make his name by stopping painting in its tracks and setting it off in a radically new direction. There is no emblematic Marden invention, like a Johns flag or Stella stripes or a Warhol silk-screen Elvis, where you can say, There! That changed painting.”

That was at the time of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which ended with a paint called “The Propitious Gardem of Plane Image, Third Version,” a larger, six-panel work much like the one below.  Smith called this series “glorious.” And so they were.

And now he has managed to surprise again, totally. These images come from an exhibition now on view through June 23 at Matthew Marks Gallery. They are two of:

fifteen new paintings in oil on marble, which Marden completed last year on the Greek island of Hydra…Reflecting the light and landscape of Greece, these paintings feature vibrant colors and geometric compositions, which subtly incorporate each piece of marble’s natural variations. Marden’s earlier series of paintings on marble, completed over a six-year period between 1981 and 1987, played a principal role in the transition from his early monochromatic paintings to the later calligraphic work.

More images are here.

You can never really tell how good something is without seeing the works in person — and I haven’t seen these yet. I didn’t cotton to this series at first, and I wouldn’t (yet) call them glorious. They are quiet, subtle. They’re growing on me, and based on a few comments I received from art historians, I’m not alone.

The headline from Smith’s 2006 review again (still?) seems apt: “The Man Who Persevered When Painting Was Stalled.”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Matthew Marks 

 

 

 

NYC’s Summer Of Monet Elicits Innovative Collaboration, Not Competition

Now this is a good idea — a collaboration between the New York Botanical Garden* and the Metropolitan Museum of Art* that I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted.

This summer belongs to Monet at the NYBG. Not only will it recreate Monet’s garden at Giverny inside the conservatory, but also it will, in the Rondina Gallery, mount an exhibition called “The Artist in the Garden” curated by Paul Hayes Tucker — a foremost Monet scholar. It will include, for the first time together, two rarely seen paintings by Monet – Irises from a private Swiss collection, at right, and The Artist’s Garden in Giverny, on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery. Also on view will be “his paint-encrusted wooden palette and an evocative array of historical photographs that show the artist creating and enjoying his garden.”

In the conservatory, visitors will encounter

…a façade of Monet’s house offer[ing] a glimpse of the artist’s view of his garden and the flowers that served as his muse for many of his most famous paintings. As visitors walk past the vine-covered pink walls with bright-green shutters, familiar to anyone who has seen the original in Giverny, their senses will be invigorated by the sights and scents of spring aubretias, bellflowers, and poppies, as well as masses of Dutch, German-bearded, Japanese, and Siberian irises, which Monet immortalized in his art.

A re-creation of Monet’s Grand Allée from his formal garden known as Clos Normand, or Norman enclosure, will include a path of rose-covered arches with beds of lush, colorful flowers lining both sides. A Japanese footbridge dressed with mauve and white Asian wisterias will extend over a picturesque pool, calling to mind Monet’s water garden, encircled with willow trees, bamboo groves, and flowering shrubs.

Read more of that part here, because what visitors will see changes in the summer and fall.

I wasn’t sure how art museums would react to this incursion. Sure, botanical gardens have been offering visitors art exhibits for years, but paintings? That’s a step further. Cultural institutions compete for visitors’ time as well as interests, after all.

But then today came the announcement from the NYBG about a new iPhone ap — NYBG IN BLOOM. It includes one element in collaboration with the Met:  “Paintings and Plants.”

 This special feature of the app enables visitors to virtually view select Monet paintings on display at the Met and link to the Met’s Web site for further information about them, complementing what visitors see at the Garden’s exhibition.

 That sounds terrific — a win-win. Read more here.

The NYBG’s fantastic-sounding summer of Monet begins on May 19 and runs through October 21.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the NYBG

*I consult to a foundation that supports both institutions.

(Re)discovering Simon Hantai, And A Possible Opportunity

If I’d come across the artist Simon Hantai before I went to TEFAF Maastricht this year, I don’t remember him. But one booth (Galerie Beres, I think) featured several works by him, and I was intrigued enough to take a couple of pictures so that I could remember to look him up upon my return (the top two photos here, and sorry about the fuzziness).   

It turned out that I didn’t really need the reminder, because within days, the National Gallery of Art announced the acquisition of Etude (1969) by Hantai, its first painting by him.

That sent me to his 2008 obit in The New York Times, which explained my deficiency (a bit). It described him as “a highly regarded, famously reclusive French painter whose work explored ideas of absence and silence,”  and elaborated:

In 1982, Mr. Hantaï represented France at the Venice Biennale. Later that year, he withdrew from view, in what he described as a reaction against the rampant commercialization of art and the state’s unwelcome involvement in the making of art. Retreating to his home in Paris, he rarely left the house and refused requests to exhibit his paintings. But over the next decade and a half, Mr. Hantaï quietly produced what many critics believe to be his finest work.

The obit continued, describing his invention of a process known as pliage: 

In 1960, Mr. Hantaï began to manipulate and crease his canvases before carefully brushing them with bright liquid color. Where most painters saw canvas as merely a surface to hold paint, Mr. Hantaï focused on its essential physical nature: it was a textile that could be folded, scrunched or tied before paint touched it.

The result, when his painted canvases were unfolded, was repeating patterns of jagged whiteness that could suggest ice crystals, geologic rifts or leaf forms. The paintings seemed punctuated by absence — a kind of visual silence — a telling motif for an artist who was an exile. Mr. Hantaï’s important folded paintings include the series “Mariales” (“Cloaks”), “Whites” and “Tabulas.”

And his red Etude, above right.

The NGA says that  the Pompidou Centre is working on a retrospective of Hantai’s work next year, which it expects “will bring him international attention.” Wouldn’t it be nice if that exhibit were coming to the U.S.? The Metropolitan Museum owns no works by Hantai, and the Modern, which owns two, has neither on view. Nothing comes up in a search at the Guggenheim, SF MoMA, LACMA, MFA-Boston, the Philadelphia Museum or the Art Institute of Chicago, either.

I wonder if it’s still possible for an American museum to ask for the Hantai. I’d certainly like to see more, and a simple request — even after an exhibit is on view — has been known to work before. At left, btw, is Blue Muen from 1967.

 Photo Credits: Etude, courtesy of NGA; Blue Meun, Courtesy of Paul Rodgers / 9W Gallery