Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artworks

What’s Really Happening at TEFAF – Maastricht

It’s not just great art that draws so many people to TEFAF Maastricht;  the fair is also popular because it’s fun — though not like the stay-up-all-night, get-plastered parties at Art Basel Miami Beach. (Maybe there’s some of that, but the only whiff I heard of it last week came from two art-history grad students, at the fair and in other European art sites on a class trip, who said they knew of other students who’d been drinking till 6 a.m. on the morning of Mar. 16.)

In Maastricht, much of the fun takes place at the fair in the MECC convention hall, starting at noon on Thursday with a “by-invitation” vernissage. Champagne and other drinks, plus coffee, flows all day long until 8 or 9 p.m., as does the food. Everywhere you turn, some is offering you something to eat or drink — though there are also sit-down cafes where the public can buy food and drink on later days. You’re always running into someone you know — museum directors and curators, collectors, dealers who don’t have booths, etc. It’s a gabfest, an artfest and a foodfest rolled into one. More than 10,000 people attend, and in one of those backward twists of fate, these people pay nothing to enter — they’re the big-spenders who are treated, while ordinary people, allowed in on Friday and until Mar. 25, pay €55 per person or €110 for a season ticket, both including the one catalogue.

Fashion makes an appearance at the vernissage now and then — people were talking about outlandishly high heels on some women this year — but mostly, I thought, people were well-dressed without being overly showy. I heard of one woman who came dressed in a bright orange ball gown (the color of the Dutch royal family), her hair elaborately fashioned in an evening style — but I didn’t see her.

The hall is beautifully transformed by tulips, magnolias and cherry blossoms (about 100,000, all told, TEFAF says).

And then the art. You can see the exhibitors here. Suffice it to say that the dealers all try to bring their best, but this year, masterpieces were few and far between. Take your pick of pickers: here’s Souren Melikian in the International Herald Tribune; here’s Faye Hirsch in Art in America, and here’s what Art Info had to say.

As for sales, Art Market Monitor has links to many stories, so I’m going to send you there.

But Paul Jeromack has the coup: he has reported for Artnet that Ned Johnson, of Fidelity Investments, laid out some $12 million to buy Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice by Frans Francken for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here’s the link, and this is what it looks like:

 

News Behind the Headline: Where That Rubens Crucifixion Is Headed — UPDATED

You know the headline: One of the most impressive works of art at TEFAF in Maastricht was Rubens’s Crucifixion, painted around 1618-1620. It was snapped up within the first hour of the fair by Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, collectors you know if you read RCA regularly (see here and here for example).

But I have the news about where the painting is going — and it is not their home. The van Otterloos think this dramatic work belongs in a museum and so there it will go. But which museum? Therein lies a tale.

First, let me paint the scene: I wandered into the Colnaghi booth on Thursday just in time to watch as the owner, Konrad O. Bernheimer, gave a little lecture on the piece to what was clearly a museum group, which turned out to be from the Hermitage, escorted by Michael Piotrowski, the director. Bernheimer pointed out the way Rubens had used four, not the traditional three, nails to affix Christ to the cross. Rubens also departed from other traditional depictions of the scene, painting a cross that looks more like a tree trunk (for the Tree of Life) than a plank and omitting Christ’s crown of thorns. The asking price was 3.5 million Euros, or about $4.6 million. Bernheimer brought it to Maastricht fresh and hadn’t shown it to anyone until the pictures vetting committee for TEFAF saw it two days before the fair opened.

Soon thereafter, another small crowd gathered around the picture, including the van Otterloos. They didn’t notice me at first, so I watched as Eijk said something about a little overpainting on the upper right, and Rose-Marie said that no painting from that period was perfect. Then they did see me, and Eijk said, “We just bought it.” They told me that they had never seen the work before, but had quickly agreed that they wanted it. Neither they nor Bernheimer would tell me the final price.

I asked Eijk where the painting would go, offering “to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,” where they recently deposited about 40 of their treasures? No, he said, probably not — because of a Massachusetts law that would levy a use tax on the painting if they lent to to the MFA. I haven’t had time to research all the ins and outs of the dispute the couple has with Massachusetts, and whether they are residents of that state or Florida, where they also have a home.

But because of the dispute, the new Rubens will — Eijk says — probably be placed at the Currier Museum in Manchester, N.H., which he said also has a couple other works on display from their collection. Lucky New Hampshire.

UPDATE: The Currier says it’s displaying two paintings from the van Otterloo collection in connection with its coming show, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt (September 29, 2012 – January 6, 2013): The Apulian Shepherd by Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638) and The Cardplayers by Jan Steen (c. 1625–1679.) “Hanging alongside the Currier’s paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Molenaer and Balthasar van der Ast, the van Otterloo pictures provide visitors with a greater appreciation for the leading role Dutch artists played in developing the subjects of still life, landscape, narrative and genre painting,” says the spokeswoman, Vicky Jaffe.

The Curator, The Portrait, The Blogger And The Donor

Here’s a tall tale (or rather a shaggy dog story) about the power of blogs — even for finding “lost” works of art and courting donors.

It involves the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which for a long time has owned a portrait of Benjamin Gratz (below) painted by Thomas Sully in 1831, but not the partner picture, a portrait of his wife, Maria. When the Rosenbach acquired Benjamin’s portrait in 1970, a bequest of  Benjamin’s granddaughter, there was no sign of the companion painting.

But the Rosenbach owns four other Gratz family portraits, including a Sully painting of philanthropist, social activist and Jewish leader Rebecca Gratz, and the enterprising curator there, Judith Guston, wondered where the Maria portrait was. Last June, she decided to ask a blogger – Susan Sklaroff, who writes at Rebecca Gratz & 19th-Century America to write a post about the missing painting. Sklaroff asked readers to check their attics, friends’ homes and local museums for traces of Maria. A press release continues the story:

Three weeks later, Guston got a call from Atlanta, Georgia. Maria Gratz Roberts, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Maria, had the original Sully portrait [right] in her parlor. Although Roberts had lived with the painting throughout her life, she believed Benjamin and Maria’s portraits should be reunited. Roberts donated to the Rosenbach the Sully portrait of Maria, a pastel copy (which she also owned) and a chair that Benjamin had brought from Pennsylvania.

So ends the tale with a happy ending that illustrates, as if we needed it, the power of the internet. Except — there never would have been such a blog had not Sklaroff been a docent at the Rosenbach. As she tells the tale:

I discovered Rebecca Gratz when I became a docent at the Rosenbach Museum & Library which has a lovely portrait of her by Thomas Sully. To learn more, I began to read the hundreds of Gratz family letters which survive in libraries around the country and found wonderful stories about Rebecca as well as information about customs, events and technological changes of her time. I cannot fit all this material into the talks I give on Rebecca nor into my proposed book. This blog makes it accessible to those who are interested in Rebecca Gratz and antebellum America.

So it’s the power of people, and their interests, too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Rosenbach

 

What’s The Most Exciting Part of the Art World? But, A Downside

Sculpture rocks nowadays. That’s the one-line summary of a long article I’ve written on contemporary sculpture, published in the March issue of Gotham magazine.

You may or may not have noticed that, as you’ve wander galleries, but a lot of people, viewing it from different standpoints, think it’s true — galleries, art advisors, academics, and so on.  “Some of the strongest work being made today is sculpture,” art advisor Mary Hoeveler told me.  Joseph Seipel, dean of the arts school at Virginia Commonwealth University, called this “a really experimental age for sculpture.”

There are many, more detailed, explanations for the buoyancy of contemporary sculpture, all in the article, but the overarching, or underpinning, rationale is two-fold: “sculpture” now encompasses so many materials, from wax to glass to found objects to feathers to metals and more, that the opportunities for creativity are endless. And equally important, so many artists today do not consider themselves “painters,” “sculptors,” “installation artists,” etc. As Seipel put it, “They’re just artists, and if they have a three-dimensional idea, it’s a 3-D piece; if it’s virtual, they do that; and if the idea works best with paint on a canvas, they do that.” And let’s face it, this is a 3D world for younger generations in particular.

This freedom is good, but it does have a downside that I did not cover in the article: it’s something I began thinking about after the piece went to print, as I re-read some notes I’d made talking with three different museum directors over the last six or so months. To varying degrees, they had each voluntarily mentioned or agreed that a lot of contemporary art is not well made. It’s probably because artists switch materials and disciplines so frequently that they don’t master the medium.

That, obviously, creates enormous conservation issues and doesn’t bode well for the future of some sculpture.

Photo Credit: piece by Diana al-Hadid (who’s in this article), Courtesy of the Hammer Museum, UCLA

Van Gogh, The Kitschiest Klimt Products And Art

The final picture in van Gogh Up Close, now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is his “Almond Blossoms,” an ever-beautiful and poignant picture to me, as he painted it in honor of his namesake nephew. I was horrified in December when an email landed in my box from a commercial art reproduction business saying it was its No. 3 best-seller last year, behind van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and his “Cafe Terrace at Night.”

It’s not that I don’t believe in posters (as long as they are faithful representations). It’s that “Almond Blossoms” was available not only with the blue-sky background of the original, but also with red or yellow backgrounds. I’m not kidding. But there’s nothing one can do about it.

Then yesterday I learned of an effort to mock the kitsch related to Gustav Klimt — sort of. According to an AFP story, repeated in Auction Central News, the  Wien Museum has started a “Worst of Klimt” campaign, inviting people to post on its Facebook page “the most horrible or most absurd Klimt products.”

This is even more bizarre, because it seems to reward people for posting outlandish objects as well as those who make them, which only encourages them. Says the article:

The museum said that the best—or worst—objects might feature in its Klimt exhibition that opens on May 16, one of a flurry of shows planned this year in the Austrian capital to honor the painter.

The posters of the 10 objects causing “the most controversy, discussion or approval under the Facebook community between now and March 15, will be rewarded with a joint exclusive guided tour through the exhibition,” it added.

It’s all part of the 150th birthday celebration of Klimt’s birth.  I suppose we should view this as light-hearted fun. Funny, I don’t mind the Klimt stuff. I do hate to see that red “Almond Blossoms.” But I guess we should be grateful that it takes van Gogh’s name to more people, even if they’re getting a wrong impression of his work.

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