Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artworks

Once More Into the Storerooms >> Discoveries!

1016728-1-669x1024Now it’s the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh’s turn to find fantastic art works in its storerooms, as many other museums have done. Among the newly discovered pieces: a hand-painted enamel bowl with roundels of butterflies from the Yongzheng period, a “bizarre googly-eyed dragon bowl” and cinnabar lacquer panel (below right) from the Qianlong period, a ritual bronze from the Western Zhou period, a Gupta period Buddha head (at left), a gilded bronze Thai Buddha head and a Bamana Boli figure.

Many are going into a reinstallation of the Carnegie’s “Art before 1300” galleries, which will open next year. The museum says it discovered strengths, like Chinese ceramics, Buddhist and Hindu sculpture from South and Southeast Asia and African masks, that it didn’t know it had.

1019076-1024x689The Carnegie does not have a dedicated curator for either its Asian or African collections.

So, in this case, “As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen visitor engagement with the museum’s permanent collection,” it hired outside consultants to review its collections: Philip Hu for the Asian works and Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers for the African collection, which is quite small. The museum also, of course, contacted curators at other museums, who–as is practice–“generously shared information and advice,” a spokesman said. The process has been going on for four years.

From the press release issued about these discoveries, I’ve pasted a few images here.

Also, there’s this wonderful Nkisi Nkondi figure, below.

Nkisi

I have just a little sympathy for museums that don’t know what’s in their storeroom–but not always that much. This case is more understandable. And also credit museums for announcing discoveries like these, rather than just putting them out there, as if they knew all along. Transparency on this matter is the way to go.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art

A Question to Nobelist Kandel Reveals A Big Gap At the Met

Last week, I was honored to sit opposite Nobel-prize winner/neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel at a small dinner. Kandel, seeking to understand how memory works, figured it out by studying its physiological basis in the cells of sea slugs. For that, he won the Nobel in 2000. More recently, he has turned some of his attention to art. In 2012, he published The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present.

Munter_BlueMountainKandel and his wife, Denise, go to museums a lot. “I would say art is our greatest passion,” he told Science Friday in 2013.

So I asked him, to make conversation, which department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art* he would go to first if he had just one hour and could go to only one. His answer surprised me. He wouldn’t go to the Met, he said, because his favorite kind of art is German and Austrian Expressionism. So he would go to the Neue Galerie, he said.

Ouch. I was reminded of that conversation today when I received a press release from Everard Auctions in Savannah. In a sale now on the internet though Oct. 7 are two paintings by Gabriele Munter (1877-1962), whose work I like (the best trove I’ve seen is at the Milwaukee Art Museum). Now, the two up for sale at Everhard probably are not museum-quality (Der Blaue Berg (The Blue Mountain) [top], from 1908, is estimated at $200,000-300,000, while Im Uhrmacherladen (The Watchmaker’s Shop) [below], from 1916, has a presale estimate of $100,000-150,000), and I am not suggesting that the Met run out and buy them. But the release sent me to the Met collections database to see if Kandel could have gone to the best, even for a less-rich experience. 

Here is a sampling of what I found:

  • Munter: 0
  • Franz Marc: 0
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 5 works on paper, none major
  • August Macke: 2 works on paper
  • Wassily Kandinsky: 1 work on paper
  • Gustav Klimt: 2 paintings (yeah!) and more than a dozen works on paper or textiles
  • Egon Schiele: some 3 dozen works on paper (none major?); no paintings
  • Alexej von Jawlensky: 3 works on paper
  • Max Pechstein: 8 works on paper, none major
  • Oskar Kokoschka: more than 3 dozen drawings, lithos, etc., none major 
  • Otto Dix: 14 works on paper, one painting (not on view)
  • Max Beckmann: about 4 dozen drawings, two paintings, one on view

I suppose the message here is a simple one: even the glorious Met has big gaps, and Austrian and German art is one of them. Perhaps I/we knew this intuitively, but a tally makes it really clear.Munter-Watchmaker

Should it actively acquire in this area, when it already has so many riches, or leave it to the Neue Galerie? I think the former; there’s no gallery for this work and that’s a shame. But then again, like Kandel, I’d call this area is a favorite.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Everard Auctions

* I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

ArtPrize Matures: The People Vs. Experts

In its sixth incarnation, ArtPrize–the open competition in which the public chooses the winners–is trying a new tack. Not only will experts also weigh in separately–as they have in the past–but also their choice will receive a grand award prize of equal size, $200,000, the same as the public. This is good, more about which in a minute.

This year, ArtPrize has 1,536 artist entries, drawn from “51 countries and 42 U.S. states and territories, exhibiting work in 174 public venues throughout the city.”  (That’s down a bit from last year, which had 1,805 artists, coming from 47 countries and 45 states and territories and showing at 168 spaces.) The competition, for $560,000 in prize money, is open to any artist, and anyone who visit Grand Rapids to see the art may vote.  

031000-000003.LI first wrote about ArtPrize in April, 2009, when hardly anyone at the national level was paying any attention. I stopped, moving on to other things or covering it only sporadically, when it got much more attention, possibly too much. The prize size had a lot to do with that, at first. Later, when the expert jury was added, the fact that “the people” had very different views about art than the jury of experts caught attention (and sometimes flack).

So this year is another departure. ArtPrize opens tomorrow, with 19 days of voting to come, and a new “voting structure.” According to the release,

For the sixth edition, winners of the Grand Prizes for the Public Vote Award, decided by ArtPrize visitors, and the Juried Award, chosen by a panel of judges, will receive equal prize amounts, increased this year to $200,000 each. In addition to the Grand Prize awards, artists can also win in 4 categories: 2-D, 3-D, Time-based and Installation. The category winners are also selected in dual juried and public votes, with winners receiving $20,000 respectively for each category. A 5th category award will also be given to a curator for Outstanding Venue, decided by jury. In making the cash prizes equal across each category for winners of the public vote and juried vote, ArtPrize hopes to amplify and expand the conversation about the differences and similarities in the public’s and experts’ opinions.

It’s that last sentence that, I think, makes this a good move. In a way, a similar dynamic–though with experts alone doing the choosing–is playing out at Crystal Bridges Museum, where State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now has focused attention on artists outside the usual art-world centers like New York, LA and Chicago (though they were not excluded). So far, I’ve seen just two reviews (though there may be some local ones), which is disappointing.

But back to ArtPrize: As regular readers know, I am not a fan of crowdsourcing the choices of what to hang in an exhibition.  But I do think it has some validity when it is done side-by-side with experts, as when the Walter Art Center in Minneapolis did so with an exhibit called 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Collection. That was December, 2010.

We’ve come a long way since.

Last year’s ArtPrize winner, shown above, was Sleeping Bear Dune Lakeshore, by Ann Loveless, a quilt depicting a Lake Michigan scene.

You can see the members of the jury for 2014 ArtPrize and the voting schedule here.

Is This A “New” Piero della Franscesca? (Corrected)

PierodellaFrancesca“New” works by Old Masters turn up all the time in places like Italy — especially Italian churches. So it’s not surprising perhaps that one of the latest discoveries took place in St. Anthony the Abbott Church in San Polo. There, a fresco — some art historians say — is at least partly by the hand of Piero della Francesca.

San Polo is about a 165 miles to the north and west of  in the hills just above Arezzo, where Piero created his famous Legend of the True Cross frescoes. A few weeks back, the Italian press published articles, including this one, about the current theories. Those studying the work think that the face, at least, which was previously thought to be by Agnolo di Lorentino, a student of Piero della Francesca, is by the master himself. And perhaps parts of the body are too — that’s what they are working on now. 

This is study is also calling into question the dating of the Legend of the True Cross — currently c. 1452-56. There’s a thought that it may be earlier, more like 1447.

Of course, there’s reason to take this all with a grain of salt: the locals in San Polo hope that the fresco, if it is certified as as Piero, will attract tourists to the church.

What do you think? Is it or isn’t it?

 

 

About That Stolen Guercino

This is just plain bad: Last week, a painting titled Madonna with the Saints John the Evangelist and Gregory Thaumaturgus (1639) was stolen from a church in Modena, Italy. Not only was the church alarm system in active, but also the Baroque masterpiece wasn’t insured.

StolenGuercinoIt’s a big painting – 10 ft. by 6 ft. — and reports say it was stolen in its frame, with speculation that the theft was “ordered” by a private collector because a work of this size and renown would be hard ever to resell openly. Unless, speculated the Telegraph in London, it was “cut up into pieces in an attempt to sell it on.”

The Telegraph‘s article, pegged the value of the work at “up to £5 million,” or nearly $8.4 million.

It was stolen in the middle of the night from the church of San Vincenzo in the northern town of Modena earlier this week. Curators admitted that lack of funds meant the alarms protecting the painting were not working.

“There was an alarm in the church, but it was inactive,” said Monsignor Giacomo Morandi, of the archdiocese of Modena.

It had been paid for by a donation from a local bank but once those funds dried up it had been switched off, he told Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“It’s very difficult to protect every single work of art,” he added.

The work has hung in the Church of San Vincenzo ever since it was painted. According to The History Blog,

An allied bomb struck San Vincenzo on May 13th, 1944, destroying the presbytery and the choir and its late 17th century frescoes, but the Guercino survived. Let’s hope it can survive human greed.

The History Blog also provided these details:

San Vincenzo is not a parish church so it doesn’t stay open all week. The doors are opened every Sunday for mass and locked after the service is over. The thieves made their way inside, stole the painting and got out without leaving a trace. There is no sign of forced entry on the church door. The priest only realized something was wrong because the door was open.

Police believe at least three men were involved in the theft because the piece is so big and heavy, especially still inside the frame, that it one or two people wouldn’t be able to move it. They probably got in during mass on Sunday, August 10th, and hid until they could do their dirty deed under cover of night. They must have had transportation, most likely a van.

…The Carabinieri’s Tutela Patrimonio Culturale unit (a national police squad dedicated to investigating stolen art and antiquities) are in charge of the investigation. They’re looking through phone records and security camera footage from along the street. There are no cameras pointed at the church, but a van large enough to contain the painting should have been captured by other cameras.

Looks as if we have seen the last of this work for some time. But maybe the police will get lucky.