• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Real Clear Arts
    • Judith H. Dobrzynski
    • Contact
  • ArtsJournal
  • AJBlogs

Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

“Anonymous” Women, Once Again

It’s that time of year — actually, it’s a little past that time of year — when the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation makes public the ten female artists who will receive $25,000 no strings attached, just to support them. This is the 19th set of winners  — and I was there at the creation, sort of. So I sometimes like to publicize the winners (which were announced on July 2).

2950828_origThe awards go to women over 40 “who have significantly contributed to their field, while continuing to grow and pursue their work.” This year they are:

  • Janine Antoni
  • Nicole Eisenman
  • Harmony Hammond
  • Kira Lynn Harris
  • Lynn Hershman Leeson
  • Hilja Keading
  • Elizabeth King
  • Beverly Semmes
  • Elise Siegel
  • Marianne Weems

These women paint, make sculpture and ceramics, work in theater and performance art.  Five are from New York; the rest are from elsewhere in the U.S.

It’s too bad we still have to make special awards for women artists, but I don’t think the playing field is level yet.

Photo Credit: production still from House/Divided by Marianne Weems, via the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation 

American Art Bonanza Left By Richard Mellon Scaife

Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, scion of two wealthy families, died on July 4, leaving a large art collection — apparently — to two small Pennsylvania Museums. Scaife’s attorney called the art collection “expansive.” And according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review — which Scaife owned:

The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg and Brandywine Conservancy near Philadelphia will split Scaife’s art collection, according to the will. The will allows the organizations to decide how to divide the collection and sets up a rotating selection system to resolve disagreements.

The only direction Scaife gave, apparently, was that his works by John Kane, the American self-taught artist (whom I came to like earlier this year, when I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum to review Uncommon Folk: Traditions in American Folk Art), would go to the Westmoreland museum. There are at least eight Kanes in the Scaife trove.

Born in Scotland, Kane was a laborer who turned to art after losing a leg. His Bust of a Highlander (Bust of a Scot), c. 1925 and shown here, intrigued me: it’s bold, direct, charming.  

JohnKaneThe Met has one of his paintings, The Monongahela River Valley, Pennsylvania, and the Whitney owns two — though I could not find out what they were by searching the collection online.

Those going to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art include  Along the Lincoln Highway and Boulevard of the Allies, which “depict Pittsburgh during the industrial boom of the early 1900s.” I couldn’t find them online either.

Other than the Kanes, we don’t know what is in the collection. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

…lawyer H. Yale Gutnick, one of Scaife’s executors and a longtime friend and colleague, said he could not estimate the value of the collection or even characterize the paintings and artists.

On Monday, Gutnick said the paintings were largely by American artists. He called it a “very, very substantial collection” put together “over many, many years.”

He declined to define it further. “There’s so much, I can’t describe it all,” he said. “It would take me three days to go through it.”

Scaife also left $15 million outright to the Brandywine Conservancy (and museum) in Chadds Ford, Pa., intended for the “maintenance and management of a conservancy” that he “built on the grounds of his childhood home,” said the Tribune-Review. 

Scaife was a conservative who donated to many conservative and libertarian causes over the years, and also gave money to historic preservation, environmental protection, educational institutions and the arts. I look forward to finding out what art he left us.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum

 

Back To Koons: More Food For Thought

hoover-singleSo far, the most thoughtful review I’ve read of the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney is by Thomas Micchelli of Hyperallergic Weekend. It starts well, noting that excepting the vacuum cleaners, “…The rest of the work, however, with few exceptions, reveals itself to be as thin, puerile and derivative as the artist’s harshest critics would expect. But to take Koons’s art to task for the hollowness at its core is shooting fish in a barrel — a truism that leads us nowhere.”

Most of us have been content to dismiss Koons, blame his fame on loose money and people lacking taste, shake our heads and leave it at that. But not Micchelli, who continued:

…The endgame it presents is that of a once-aspiring culture — the dream of a bold and unruly American art, symbolized by the Whitney’s audacious Marcel Breuer building — collapsing into philistinism and sentimentality, a surrender to the leveling forces of consumerism.

At the same time, its exaltation of kitsch is unapologetically legitimized by a corporate art establishment invoking an aesthetic that’s more than 100 years old, rooted in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (which were invented in the run-up to the First World War) and refined by Andy Warhol a half-century ago. Koons’s contribution to this entrenched tradition is his unmatchable verisimilitude and material finesse, qualities that enshrine a strain of American provincialism — measuring the success of a work of art by its resemblance to its subject — against which proponents of Modernism have been struggling ever since Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded her museum in 1914.

It goes on, with good analysis using several choice words, including: “fussy meticulousness,” “clunky obviousness,” “puzzling capriciousness,” and “faux-democratic,” among many others. 

I recommend it to Koons’ fans and detractors alike. Whether the latter like it or not, Koons is “important” enough to know about.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Whitney

Koons: One Big Show In More Ways Than One

Koons interviewI’ve never seen a press preview like the one I attended today. The Whitney was unveiling its Jeff Koons retrospective. When I arrived, safely 10 minutes or so after the doors opened, the line of press people extended around the corner. Inside was packed too. Some of us went straight to the galleries; then there was a program.

After Whitney director Adam Weinberg spoke, Donna DeSalvo, the chief curator and deputy director for programs, and exhibition curator Scott Rothkopf took center stage too — and then, when it was time for Koons to speak, all the TV cameras (many) went up and so did most of the cell phone cameras in the room.

Koons didn’t say much worth noting, IMHO, except perhaps that he was now focused on the future and had three decades left to continue his work. (Koons is 59.) He added that he hoped people would “find meaning” in his work.

Weinberg said the Whitney had “spared no expense to match his vision,” referring to Koons and the exhibition. Weinberg explained that visitors can walk chronologically through the show (bottom floor to top) and noted that “contradiction is an essential element of his work.” DeSalvo noted Koons’s foresight and said that “in many cases, Jeff has had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision.” (For example, getting those basketballs to be suspended in a vitrine required the help of a Nobel prize winner.)

The exhibition spans the time frame of “35 years ago” to “literally works finished last week,” DeSalvo said.

Let me stipulate: I am a skeptic when it comes to Koons. I refer you to the recent New York magazine piece by Carl Swanson, which is well worth a read and which said, among other things:

…Koons is, by the measure of sales of new work, which is the money-mad art world’s only objective measure, the most successful living American artist, but he has never before had a museum retrospective in New York, his home base for 36 years. And it’s clear that, for him, one is not enough. “Even though the Whitney has given me the Breuer building, there still isn’t that much space,” he says, explaining why he’s staging these two simultaneous shows after such a long hiatus. …

…[BUT] What’s new in the Gagosian and Zwirner shows is that he’s trying to place himself in art history—quite literally, by placing art history in his work—dragging classical statues onto the canvas or casting them in plaster. His references this time are Picasso and Praxiteles. 

I have seen only the Whitney exhibit, not the two new gallery shows, and the best thing I can say about it is that is is beautifully installed. Kudos to the Whitney on that score. On the other hand, I’m still not convinced of his merit, and I look forward to other peoples’ reviews (I’m not writing one).

For now, I’m going to let readers judge. Whatever your opinion going into this, you should have a look, if you claim to be interested in art. Here are some pictures from the exhibit:

Koons gallery 2

 

Koons gallery

 

Koons1

 

Koons -A

 

Koons -Venus

 

Koons torso

Transforming Art: A Look Back At What Mattered

RealArtWaysArtspace — which makes its money selling art online — provided a provocative list a few weeks ago: Ten Alternative Art Spaces That Transformed American Art. The writer, Ian Wallace, and maybe others there (I don’t know how Artspace works, editorially) specifically tried to consider the national picture, not just NYC, which is good. Just four of the spaces are in New York — and you might guess their names: The Kitchen, Artists Space, Franklin Furnace and — Food, which I didn’t know. Then again, I wasn’t living in New York the years that Food existed, 1971-73. It was a “conceptual restaurant-as-exhibition space” co-founded by Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark. 

Three others on the list have also died: Project Ink, Cambridge, 1972-75; The Women’s Building, Los Angeles, 1973-91; And/Or Gallery, Seattle, 1974-84.

But that means six of the ten have survived, despite the changes in the art world, in financing, etc. They are:

  • Real Art Ways, Hartford, 1975-present.
  • The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, 1977-present.
  • Vox Populi, Philadelphia, 1988-present.

As you read the capsule histories of these spaces, it’s hard not to notice a couple of things — most glaringly, that the founders include more women than men. Perhaps that’s because women felt locked out of the regular art world.

 

« Previous Page
Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

About Judith H. Dobrzynski

Now an independent journalist, I've worked as a reporter in the culture and business sections of The New York Times, and been the editor of the Sunday business section and deputy business editor there as well as a senior editor of Business Week and the managing editor of CNBC, the cable TV

About Real Clear Arts

This blog is about culture in America as seen through my lens, which is informed and colored by years of reporting not only on the arts and humanities, but also on business, philanthropy, science, government and other subjects. I may break news, but more likely I will comment, provide

Archives