Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artworks

Zurich and Art: Not Working Like A Swiss Watch

This seems so far-fetched it’s almost a tall tale: The Swiss city of Zurich, the country’s largest, recently carried out an inventory of the art it owns and discovered that it has misplaced 15% of them — some 5,000 works of art. Doesn’t know where they are. The “misplaced” works include at least one painting by Le Corbusier (pictured) and who knows what else.

According to Agence-France Press, the city’s collection has been valued at 121 million Swiss francs, or $130 million. If 15% of that is missing… bye-bye $6.5 million.

The city says the situation is not so dire. The collection, which is spread among some 500 schools, hospitals, offices and other locations “moves about,” Urs Spinner, a spokesman for Zurich’s construction department, told the ATS news agency.

But the news item also said the missing works had been insured for about $1 million.

ARIS, the art-title insurer, sent out an alert about this — without commentary, but essentially warning buyers to beware.

The other lesson, though, is about the importance of having a current inventory — some victims of Hurricane Sandy also learned that one.

Speaking of Hurricane Sandy, I’ve learned  that a temporary facility to provide volunteer assistance and work space to museums, libraries, archives, historic sites, galleries, collectors, and artists has opened in Brooklyn this week, thanks to the American Institute for Conservation – Collections Emergency Response Team (AIC-CERT). This “Cultural Recovery Center” will provide space and expertise to help owners stabilize their collections.

AIC-CERT has posted a PDF of resources available to those with damaged art here.

 

 

 

 Photo Credit: © Willy Rizzo via Arch Daily 

The Getty Lands Another Masterpiece, Plus Potts Is Replaced In Cambridge

We can quarrel with MoMA’s video game escapade, but everyone’s got to agree that the illuminated manuscript acquired by the Getty museum today is a masterpiece and a beauty. And it makes perfect sense for the Getty’s collection.

The Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies, by Lieven van Lathem (1430–1493), was purchased at Sotheby’s today for nearly $6.2 million. Van Lathem is considered to be the most accomplished painter of secular scenes in the golden era of Flemish manuscript illumination, the museum said.

The manuscript consists of “eight brilliantly painted half-page miniatures and forty-four historiated initials” and, as the book was rarely copied. this “romance appears in only three other manuscripts.” The work had been lent to the Getty Museum for its beautiful 2003 exhibition titled Illuminating the Renaissance. 

According to the Getty’s press release:

The only documented manuscript by Lieven van Lathem, the Prayer Book of Charles the Bold, is already in the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, having been acquired in 1989. This primary work provides the basis for all other Van Lathem attributions. The Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies is regarded as the artist’s preeminent secular work, and this acquisition represents an unrivalled opportunity to unite masterpieces of both secular and devotional illumination by Van Lathem in a single collection.

While this announcement was being made by Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, late of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, his replacement was being announced there: it’s Timothy Knox (right), currently the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum* in London. I was just there, and Knox has done a wonderful job of restoring that gem — and I’m far from alone in thinking that.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Getty (top) and the Soane Museum (bottom)

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Soane

A New Light For Victims of Hurricane Sandy

Art is often said to have healing powers, and beginning tomorrow many people who live in the path of Hurricane Sandy — which struck a month ago — will have a chance to see a piece of art created for them. It’s a “monumental” laser installation by Yvette Mattern called Global Rainbow, After the Storm, launched from the rooftop of the Standard Hotel at the Highline. Designed to illuminate the night sky and be visible for up to 35 miles (depending on atmospheric conditions), the work will aim seven beams of high power light lasers over communities hit by Sandy. It “aims to symbolize hope and act as a call to action to support the communities that were devastated by the storm,” according to the press release.

Mattern’s installation, which has been presented in Europe (you may have seen it at the London Olympics), will shine for three nights, from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. nightly, from Nov. 27 through Nov. 29.

It’s a project of the Art Production Fund, and — naturally, given the occasion — it contains a fundraising element. It hopes to encourage donations to two groups. One is Waves for Water, a non-profit that has been working with relief organizations in coastal communities in Staten Island, New Jersey, Rockaway Beach and Long Beach  to bring much needed on-site support to victims. (You can make donations at the link above.). The other is New York Foundation for the Arts, whose Emergency Relief Fund is assisting artists who suffered damage and loss in Sandy’s wake. (Use this link, and be sure to click the box for the relief fund at the bottom.)

In the release, Mattern says, “I hope that seeing this beacon in the night sky will provide people with a sense of peace and security in this time of crisis and that it will unify us with its presence so we remember that we are all in this together, regardless of divisions of class, race, religion and culture.”

That’s asking a lot of art, but … at times like these, it’s nice to remember that art can have a higher purpose and a universal appeal.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Art Production Fund

 

Three Cheers For Nicholas Penny

In an interview given to The Art Newspaper for one of its Frieze editions last week, Nicholas Penny, director of London’s National Gallery, gave his view of a theme I’ve mentioned here once or twice — and went a step further. The topic? The similarity of contemporary art collections in U.S. museums.

Penny, lamenting the influence of the Museum of Modern Art, said:

… it has been hugely influential, so that almost all of the other museums in America have a modern wing attached to them. And frankly these wings impress me as deadly: the same white walls with the same loud, large, obvious, instantly recognisable products lined up on them. Nothing in the so-called academic institutions of the 19th century approach them in orthodoxy and predictability.

I agree, and have said so many times. He also took up another lament of mine — the lack of sharp criticism in the art world, saying:

There is a lamentable lack of critical debate about contemporary art. If you think about the way Modern and contemporary art was received in the 19th century, there was always a tremendous amount of critical defence and attack, far more than is the case today

And:

Exhibition in a museum—and, even more so, acquisition—is an endorsement which has become a substitute for critical appraisal. There seems to be a belief that the reputations of artists in museums will never be challenged. This is a valuable myth for the market. It may be that once a certain amount of public money has been invested in art it will be valued forever. But I doubt it.

So naturally, I want to highlight this interview — more of which will be published in the November Art Newspaper — as reinforcement.

Meantime, a hat tip to Charlotte Higgins, writing in the Guardian on Monday, for pointing me to the Penny interview. She focused more on what she called Penny’s “writing off” of performance, video and conceptual art — which is true. For example, he said:

The art form I don’t relate to – I’d put it more strongly actually – is video because it seems to me so often merely to be an incompetent form of film, made with the excuse that it is untainted by the professionalism associated with the entertainment industry. I’m not very impressed by conceptual art nor very often by performance art. I’m uneasy with some aspects of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp.

Agree or not, it’s the debate that’s important — it may well sharpen everyone’s perceptions.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery

Van Gogh Liked Pink, And Other Revelations

If you went to Van Gogh Up Close at the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier this year, you saw a painting many thought was one of the stars of the show: Undergrowth with Two Figures from the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum, a bequest of Mary E. Johnston accessioned in 1967.

But back in Cincinnati, Per Knutas, the former paintings conservator at the Cincinnati museum, had questions about it. When the painting (original view at left) was cleaned, he had discovered tiny traces of bright pink in the areas under the frame. On the rest of the painting, they were white. Did van Gogh use pink? For which flowers?

Knutas called on Dr. Gregory D. Smith, the Senior Conservation Scientist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who agreed to examine the painting in hopes of identifying the mysterious paint colorant van Gogh used.  Dr. Jeffrey Fieberg, a visiting researcher and Associate Professor of Chemistry at Centre College in Danville, KY, was there to help.

Now they know. The IMA Lab researchers have now determined that bright pink pigment was the original color of many of the painting’s flowers. They had “rapidly faded to white due to the properties of a dye that van Gogh often used at the end of his career,” the press release says.

Van Gogh was known to use a bright Geranium Lake organic dye, whose brilliance is short-lived when exposed to light. And the researchers knew of a letter written by van Gogh to his brother, Theo, while he was painting the work that described it this way: “. . . undergrowth, lilac trunks of poplars, and underneath them some flower-dotted grass, pink, yellow, white and various greens.”

Here’s how they did it:

Smith utilized a small broken paint chip found lodged in the varnish to analyze the dye by Raman microspectroscopy—a process that collects a characteristic spectral fingerprint from the dye by measuring changes in laser light scattered by the molecules. Comparison of the spectrum to a digital library of thousands of materials identified the dye as eosin, which gives Geranium Lake its vibrant color. After identifying the ink, Smith and Fieberg painstakingly mapped out its location by elemental spectroscopy in the 387 dobs of white paint used by van Gogh to represent the flowers. The team used Adobe Photoshop to record all the spots in which the dyestuff was detected, creating a virtual restoration of the aged painting [bottom].

The release has more details on this painting and on one by de Chirico, and I’ve pasted the current version and the reimagined versions here — even at this size, you can see some pink in the lower one.

But here’s a possible fly in the ointment. Yesterday, the Daily Mail in London printed a story positing that van Gogh was colorblind. That’s according to a Japanese vision expert named Kazunori Asada. If you go to the article, you’ll see various pictures through normal eyes and  how they look to people who are colorblind. At the bottom are several van Gogh paintings seen the same way.

I wonder what Asada would think of the original painting.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Museum of Art