Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artworks

Noteworthy Acquistions

It’s spring-buying season: several museums in recent days have announced acquisitions (none as gigantic as the Met’s gift from Leonard Lauder, but noteworthy just the same). Here are some of them.

ppppThe Kimbell Art Museum has purchased two big Mayan Palenque-style ceramic censer stands — definitely museum-quality, as they were once, from 1985 to 1999, on long-term loan to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Kimbell got them from privately: the museum said that they were imported into the U.S. from Mexico with proper documentation on August 6, 1968 and have since been in private collections in Europe and the U.S. No word on who brokered the deals. (Or the costs.)

These works — about 40 inches tall — are “typical of the Maya late Classic period (A.D. 600–900) and dated to about A.D. 690–720.” Censer Stand with the Head of the Jaguar God of the Underworld and Censer Stand with the Head of a Supernatural Being with a Kan Cross (at left) will go on view on Apr. 21. The background from the press release:

Ceramic censers were an important component of ritual paraphernalia and ceremonial life at Palenque [a major Maya city-state located in current-day Chiapas, Mexico]….used both to represent and venerate divine beings, primarily the deities of the Palenque Triad. Censers were in two parts: a stand with a tubular body that served as a support; and a brazier-bowl that was placed on top and used for burning copal incense. While the functional brazier was undecorated (and is now often missing, as is the case with both Kimbell acquisitions), the stands were elaborately embellished with a wide variety of iconographic elements. The thematic arrangement depicted on these two…[is] the “totem-pole” style and is characterized by a vertical tier of heads modeled in deep relief on the front of the cylinder. The side flanges are decorated with motifs of crossed bands, serpent-wing panels, foliation, knotted bands, stylized ear ornaments and pendant ribbons applied in low relief….Though not necessarily conceived as a pair, both censers were undoubtedly made by the same highly skilled court artist.

More details here.

LACMA-AfricanWoodToday, LACMA fired off a release of its own, announcing the most successful Collectors’ Committee fundraiser results: $3.2 million. With it, and including two additional gifts from the evening’s sponsor, the museum has added nine works of art to its collection. They include “one of the oldest surviving wood sculptures from Africa, ancient Korean and Japanese sculptures, as well as modern and contemporary pieces by Thomas Demand, Susan Hefuna, Julio Le Parc, and James Turrell.” Meanwhile, that sponsor, JP Morgan Chase, donated “a photograph by Robert Frank, St. Francis and Gas Station, and City Hall—Los Angeles, from his iconic series The Americans; and a portfolio of seventy-five mixed-media works on paper made by Ed Ruscha in 1969, Stains.”

For more details, you can read the press release or the shorter blog version, which has the benefit of pictures.

The National Gallery of Art’s Collectors Committee has been busy too. Today came word that it had “made possible the acquisition of Piano/Piano (1963–1965/2011) by Richard Artschwager, a major example of the wooden sculptures that employ Formica as a laminate, for which he is known (below left); Plaster Surrogates (1982/1989) by Allan McCollum, the last large grouping available of the artist’s signature works in this series; and Condensation Wall (1963–1966/2013) by Hans Haacke, a breakthrough kinetic work from the artist’s early career.”

The NGA also acquired a work by Rineke Dijkstra and — yes — the same Ruscha that LACMA bought, “Stains (1969) includes 75 sheets of paper stained with 75 different ingredients and represents Ruscha’s first venture in this unusual medium.”

artschwager_lrgDetails are here.

In West Palm Beach, the Norton Museum of Art just said that trustees approved the accession of nine “significant works of art” from area collectors. They include three Italian Old Master paintings: Adam and Eve with the Infant Cain and Abel (1705) by MarcAntonio Franceschini, “a rare example of this artist’s work held in a public collection in the United States;” Saint Onuphrius of Egypt (1545-1550) by Lorenzo Lotto, “a Venetian painter whose work represents an important transition stage to the first Florentine and Roman Mannerists of the 16th century;” andJacob Stealing Isaacs’s Blessings (1780s) by Gaetano Gandolfi, “a Bolognese painter known best for his fluid draftsmanship.” All are gifts from Damon Mezzacappa.

The Norton also received three 20th-century works from trustee Anne Berkley Smith: Richard Diebenkorn’s Mission Landscape, from 1962, and Landscape with Figure, from 1963, and Wayne Thiebaud’s Neapolitan Pie, from 1963. And Beth Rudin DeWoody donated…of Prosperity, from 2011, a sculpture by South African artist Mary Sibande.

The Norton’s Contemporary and Modern Art Council, meanwhile, raised money to acquire Mnemosyne I, a 2012 “monumental” charcoal drawing by Jenny Saville and Lynda Benglis’s Cocoon,  a 1971 work that blurs painting and sculpture.

Back here in New York, the Morgan Library & Museum said it’s getting a gift of 28 letters written by J.D. Salinger from the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York — bringing the total of Salinger letters on Madison Ave. to 52. The gift commemorates the 150th birthday of Swami Vivekananda, who brought Vedanta, the religious and philosophical teachings of India, to the West in 1893. The Morgan says:

J. D. Salinger was deeply influenced by Vedanta and had an enduring relationship with Swami Nikhilananda, founder and spiritual leader of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York. Salinger attended services and classes at the Center in Manhattan, and at the Vivekananda Cottage retreat in New York’s Thousand Island Park….

[Written between 1967 and 2006, the letters] pertain to Salinger’s many donations to the Center over the course of nearly forty years, while others contain reflections on spiritual and other matters.

 Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Kimbell (top), LACMA (middle) and the NGA (bottom)

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

 

…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…

 

 

Revealed: Crystal Bridges Has Been Buying More Than You Know

Cone Stone City Landscape 5x6 300ppiGuess who was a (pretty) big buyer in last fall’s contemporary art auctions? Yup — Crystal Bridges. The museum dropped $10.2 million on a Donald Judd stack at Christie’s, and another $3.4 million at Sotheby’s for Andy Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle, from 1977. Those two works, plus the previously disclosed purchase of a Rothko from 1960 from a private Swiss collector at the estimated cost of $25 million (which I revealed in a Wall Street Journal article last September), are enabling the museum to mount a sweeping reinstallation of its 20th century galleries.

I lay a lot of this out in The Art Newspaper, in an exclusive article, posted online today and headlined Crystal Bridges answers criticism with post-war acquisitions. There’s a nice slide show including the Judd and the Warhol.

Ok, the museum wouldn’t quite characterize its purchases that way, but journalists will be journalists (I didn’t write the headline, but I can’t disagree with it either).

I think the important thing is that anyone who thought Crystal Bridges was going to open and be done (and btw, it has drawn nearly 734,000 visitors since its opening on 11/11/11) is wrong. Not so. Yesterday, the museum also announced the installation of a sculpture by Luis Jimenez for its sculpture trail, and last week, it said that Credit Suisse had given it a half-interest in a painting of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, with the other half going to the Met. It continues to plan special exhibitions, in partnership with several other museums.

Pelton Sand Storm 6x4 180ppiIt’s true, there’s been too much turnover at top for my taste, but we’ll have to wait and see exactly what that means.

What The Art Newspaper didn’t say in the headline — but I do in the article — is that Crystal Bridges is also beefing up its prewar 20th century galleries. I’m posting a couple of them here. At the top is Stone City Landscape by Marvin Dorwent Cone, and at right is Sand Storm by Agnes Pelton.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges

 

 

 

Bonus Post: What You’d See If You Were Going To Maastricht

MaastrichtOpeningAlas, I am not going to Maastricht this year for TEFAF, the best art fair in the world, in my opinion. Last year was the 25th edition, and it was spectacular. If you have time to read this, instead of looking at the art on view, you’re probably not there either.

But though Maastricht is known for its Old Masters, it has more to offer — lots of 20th century work, for sure, and some from the 21st century. Presumably, this breadth is why those entering the fair, which begins tomorrow to invited guests and on Friday to the public, will see this piece of contemporary art at the entrance.

VillearealEntitled Mary Poppins, and pictured at left, it’s the largest contemporary art work for sale at TEFAF. Made by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, “Mary Poppins’ six protective elongated arms of 7 meters (7,65 yards) calls to mind the magical nanny popularized by P.L Travers’ children’s novels. Mary Poppins is made from pre-existing materials and mass-produced objects along with other hand-made crochet and knitted fabrics, collected by Joana on her travels with textiles originating from the UK.” It’s supposed to appear weightless, floating in space.

Just for fun, I’ve also got a picture of last year’s contemporary “welcoming” installation — a light piece by the artist Leo Villareal, at right.