Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artworks

San Francisco Museums Land A Great Gift

There are at least three notable aspects of the gift announced the other day by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: the Thomas W. Weisel Family has donated about 200 objects of Native American art to the museum. They were amassed over three decades by Weisel, an investment banker who profited mightily as a pioneer of the tech industry in Silicon Valley.

  • NavahoSerapesIt’s a good match for the FAMSF. The gift includes works that span nearly a thousand years, “from 11th century Mimbres ceramics to 19th century works,” according to the press release (not yet posted on its website). FAMSF’s current Art of the Americas collection lacks many things that the Weisel gift has, such as two Navajo first-phase blankets (ca. 1820s‒1850s) and Plains ledger drawings. As a result, “the gift will enable a new presentation of the art of the Americas, including major pieces of monumental Northwest Coast art…” and those ledger drawings.
  • The gift came with an endowment that “will enhance our capacity to study these objects from a variety of perspectives and to develop educational and scholarly programs around the collection.”
  • The “carefully chosen artworks can substantiate the emerging scholarly theory that, through technical analysis, archival research and visual comparisons, it may be possible to recognize the hands of the individuals who created many of these works.” This is a subject I have written about, here in The New York Times in 2011 and in several places here on the blog (here, for example, and here, too).

About 70 of the artworks, said to represent the collection’s entire range, will go on view beginning May 3 in an exhibition titled  Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection. Arranged “by culture and chronology,” it “explores important themes in Native American art including floral, animal and landscape motifs and symbolism, and examines the long history of changing regional styles throughout the American Southwest.”

Colin Bailey, the museums’ director, called this “a transformative gift of art, of an unparalleled depth and scope.” From afar, I tend to agree.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of FAMSF 

Friendship Outs: Giant Gift Of Marin Watercolors Goes To…

Not a museum in Maine, where he painted for much of his last 40 years. Not a museum in New York, the center of the U.S. art world, or in Los Angeles, the west coast hub. Or New Jersey, Marin’s birthplace.

Tree, Stonington, Deer IsleNo, Norma B. Marin, the artist’s daughter-in-law, recently donated nearly 300 watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks to the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, according to the Kennebec Journal.

…Norma Marin’s gift to the Arkansas Arts Center was neither random nor the result of a falling out with Maine’s cultural institutions, as some speculated when the gift was announced. Instead, it was the result of a cultivated friendship between Norma Marin and the Little Rock museum and based on the expertise of the center’s staff, past and present.

The curator who will interpret this gift studied Marin as part of her dissertation, and previous museum directors built the museum’s reputation on artworks done on paper. The Marin gift also helps satisfy Norma Marin’s goal of expanding her father-in-law’s artistic impact beyond Maine, where his stature is secure and where hundreds of his oil paintings, watercolors and drawings have permanent homes in museums statewide.

To put this in context: “…Colby College Museum of Art…holds [Maine’s] largest collection of Marin artwork, with more than 60 images.” And, “Combined, museums in Maine have more than 100 Marin paintings, drawings and prints in their collections…the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor has 26, the Portland Museum of Art has 13, Bowdoin has seven, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art has two. His paintings are also part of many private collections in the state.”

So the gift is a big one.

There’s a lesson here, too, in specialization — something I’ve championed for museums. As the KJ explained:

In the 1970s, [Arkansas Arts Center] director Townsend D. Wolfe recognized that building the museum’s reputation through a strong collection of works on paper was a more affordable strategy than collecting oil paintings. He secured a purchase grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Among the first purchases were works by Andrew Wyeth and Willem de Kooning, vastly different painters but both among the best known in their genres in the last half of the 20th century….

[Now] The Arkansas Arts Center has more than 5,000 drawings in its collection, dating to the Renaissance and including works by 19th century American and European masters. The bulk of the collection is from 20th and 21st century artists…

Strength can attract more strength.

Photo Credit: Tree, Stonington, Deer Isle, Courtesy Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection via the Kennebec Journal

Picasso Museum: Reopening With What?

“It beggars belief that some urgent “conservation” necessity should have struck all of these modern works at the same time….”

Picasso museum in Paris prepares for reopeningThat’s Michael Daley, the conservation watchdog, opining on the reopening of the Picasso Museum in Paris, which is set for June. When it does readmit the public to the building — an operation of “restoration, renovation and extension” that began in 2009 and “was far more extensive than the preceding work in terms of both objectives and cost — it will be completely restructured (pictured at right), raised to new standards of safety and security. It started out costing €30 million and ended up costing some €52 million. More details about the makeover are here.

But as Daley, Director of ArtWatch UK, recently pointed out in a letter to The Guardian: 

What comes as a truly horrible surprise is that all of Picasso’s 5,000 works have been “cleaned, restored and reframed” for the opening. It beggars belief that some urgent “conservation” necessity should have struck all of these modern works at the same time. We can only conclude that Picasso’s art has been cosmetically spruced-up to match the new decor. The consequence is that all of these works have been severed at the same historical moment and to the same prevailing taste from their previous and likely varying states of conservation or non-conservation.

I’m not an alarmist about conservation — some episodes of which, however, unquestionably go wrong — but Daley has a point here. I, too, find it hard to believe that all 5,000 works needed, well, work — despite the fact that many have been touring the world to raise money for the renovation project. According to The Guardian, the tours were “helping to raise €31m to partly finance the work” while “[t]he French government has paid €19m.”

If there is damage, it has been done, but Daley is right to raise the question.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Guardian

 

Another Find In the Basement!

This time, the basement is in Honolulu, not New Haven or Brooklyn or Denver.

Art-Museum4-jpgAccording to KITV, the Honolulu Museum of  Art made a discovery when a group of Korean art historians were looking at uncatalogued art works in a vault. They found a Korean ink painting on silk, dating back to 1586.

They said this is very important. That’s when we knew we came across something special when that happened,” recalled [Shawn] Eichman, [the museum’s curator]….

We found the one that is the gem among gems,” said Eichman. “Ten years after painting [was made] the peninsula was invaded by Japan, who destroyed everything they found. To be able to find anything before invasion is a huge discovery….It’s hands down the most valuable in our Korean collection.”

The museum acquired the work (detail above) in 2003 when it purchased more than 3,000 items from Asian art collector Richard Lane for $26,000.

Eichman didn’t say what the discovered work is worth, but said the collection is now “easily worth millions,” the network said. And who knows what else is in the trove?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Honolulu Museum of Art

Speed to the Speed For a Discovery

I’m giving you really good news from the Speed Art Museum, because the news from my orthopedist today was really bad. I have to take it easy with my arm, which is getting a new cast on Tuesday, for six weeks. And typing with one hand isn’t easy.

klee-untiledBut the Speed news is a simple story: while the museum is expanding, it has been assessing the condition of works in its collection, planning to repair damage suffered over the years. Looking through a 1998 gift from General Dillman A. Rash and Nancy Baton Rash, which included paintings by Picasso, Chagall, Dubuffet and Utrillo, it sent another part of the bequest, — Seven Blossoms, a drawing by Paul Klee — to paper conservator Christine Young in Nashville, asking her to remove the acidic core of the paperboard to help preserve it. Picking up from the press release:

In the course of her work, Young made a surprising—but very welcome—discovery. As she cautiously removed the original drawing from its mount, she uncovered a previously unknown second drawing by Klee on the reverse. “It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t happen to a conservator very often,” remarked Young, “but when it does, it’s exciting.”

The newly discovered watercolor (seen in above image) drawing depicts a town or village with stylized, geometric buildings set against a landscape. Triangles on the right evoke hills or mountains, while the circle and ovoid forms in the sky are reminiscent of the celestial bodies of the moon and stars that appear in Klee’s paintings from the 1910s and early 1920s.

To Young, it quickly became apparent that no one had seen the drawing on the reverse in nearly a century. “I realized that the last person to lay eyes on it was Klee,” observed Young.

It’s very different from Plum Blossoms. So, this Friday and Saturday, the Speed will show the work at its satellite space, Local Speed. The drawing will be displayed in a double-sided frame that makes both of Klee’s compositions visible.

Good job! A preview is above right.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Speed