Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Collectors

Tate’s Coming Show: Is There A U.S. Counterpart?

Next week, Tate Britain will open what could be an excellent exhibition built around the career and influence of Kenneth Clark (pictured). It makes me wonder if anyone here in the U.S. could qualify for such treatment.

NPG P1153; Kenneth Clark, Baron Clark by Bernard Lee ('Bern') SchwartzThe exhibition, titled Kenneth Clark – Looking for Civilisation, 

…explores the impact of art historian, public servant and broadcaster Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), widely seen as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century. The exhibition examines Clark’s role as a patron and collector, art historian, public servant and broadcaster, and celebrates his contribution to bringing art in the twentieth century to a more popular audience.

We perhaps know Clark best as the broadcaster and writer, but Tate is instead focusing on his activities in the 1930s and ’40s, when he was an important patron of contemporary artists there:

 grahambelllandscape…Using his own wealth to help artists, Clark would not only buy works from those he admired but also provide financial support to allow them to work freely, offered commissions, and worked to ensure artists’ works entered prestigious collections. Believing that a crisis in patronage had led artists to become too detached from the rest of society, Clark promoted a representational art that was both modern and rooted in tradition. The artists he favoured included the Bloomsbury Group, the painters of the Euston Road School, and leading figures Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland [his landscape at right].

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Clark’s private patronage became a state project when he instigated the War Artists Advisory Committee to employ artists to record the war. Through the commissioning of such iconic works as Moore’s Shelter Drawings and Sutherland’s and Piper’s images of the Blitz he ensured that the neo-Romantic spirit that those artists’ work embodied became the dominant art of the period.

I think it might be a difficult show to curate, though. The sample six pictures on the Tate website don’t give me more encouragement about the visual lure. Even so, it should be a wonderful historic exhibit, offering much to learn and think about.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Tate (bottom)

Collector Jonathan Demme Joins The Sellers

In the late 1990s, I was pleased to meet director Jonathan Demme, maker of Silence of the Lambs, Married to the Mob and Philadelphia, among other movies, and to listen to him talk about his collecting of Haitian art. He preparing for an exhibition of more than 100 works drawn from his collection at the gallery at Equitable Center. I wrote about him and the exhibition for The New York Times in an article headlined A Convert Spreads the Word for Haitian Art.

JDemmeDemme quickly became known as the owner of one of the most, if not the most, comprehensive collections of Haitian art in the U.S. Now, though, he and his collection are back in the news because he’s selling it — well, about 90% of it. According to an AP story published in the Washington Post,

More than 900 pieces — many of them by artists with little or no formal training but abundant talent — will be auctioned at Philadelphia’s Material Culture on March 29-30. The sale will be preceded by a weeklong exhibition that is free and open to the public….

Demme, whose collection includes many pieces produced at the Centre d’Art, the landmark Port-au-Prince art cooperative destroyed in the 2010 earthquake, said he plans to donate a portion of the proceeds to the rebuilding effort. The auction is expected to bring in $1 million to $1.4 million.

Demme is OK with letting go of his treasures, comparing himself to a parent sending his kids to college. “You’re going to miss having them around, but they are making the right journey. This work is leaving storage and my walls and going out to find new homes.”

Demme had an eye for this kind of art. He fell into it by happenstance, and then he made his instinctual reaction to Haitian art into a quest for the best, in his eyes — like all good collectors.

My first thought on hearing of the auction was, how horrible — why not donate it to a museum? Or at least some of it? But then I began to wonder: what museum would take it? That’s very unclear to me.

 

 

Denver Makes Three: Are More Coming?

DenverCaillebotteToday the Denver Art Museum announced the bequest of 22 Impressionist paintings from Frederick C. Hamilton, its long-time chairman of the board (though he stepped down from the position last year).  The press release (which is not yet up on its website) said it would elevate the museum’s Impressionist collection to one of the best in the West:

The gift includes a painting by Vincent van Gogh, Edge of a Wheat Field with Poppies, the first Van Gogh artwork to enter the museum’s collection; four works by the impressionist master Claude Monet including Path in the Wheat Fields at the Pourville, 1882, and The Houses in the Snow, Norway, that illustrate a range of output during the peak of Monet’s career; three paintings by Eugène Boudin, the first by the artist to enter the museum’s collection, including Scene at the Beach in Trouville, 1881; along with paintings by Paul Cézanne, another first for the museum’s collection, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, as well as those of their American contemporaries William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam. 

Hamilton is one of those trustees who dominated the board and the museum over the years, spearheading the fundraising campaign for the most recent expansion, for example, which built the Hamilton building — where these works will go on his demise. Read more about this in The Wall Street Journal story, which estimates the value at $100 million. The collection includes the Caillebotte I’ve posted at right.

bowdoin-steir_CPThe announcement follows last week’s news that the Philadelphia Museum of Art had been given 97 contemporary works, estimated at $70 million, from Keith and Katherine Sachs. And on Friday the Bowdoin College Museum of Art announced:

…its acquisition of 320 works of art from the celebrated collection of Dorothy and Herbert (Herb) Vogel—a gift that will dramatically enhance the Museum’s contemporary art holdings.  Comprising works by nearly 70 artists, such as Robert Barry, Lucio Pozzi, Edda Renouf, Julian Schnabel, James Siena, Pat Steir [her Small White Waterfall with Pink Splashes is at left], and Richard Tuttle, Dorothy Vogel’s gift to the BCMA ranks among the largest contributions of objects from the Vogel Collection since their major gift to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 1992.

…Works on paper compose the majority of the gift, in addition to photography by Richard Long, ceramics by Michael Lucero and sculpture by Merrill Wagner. Encompassing works dating from the mid-20th century to the early-21st century, the gift to Bowdoin will present the full history of the Vogel’s collecting — from Herb Vogel’s early acquisition of paintings by Giuseppe Napoli and Hank Virgona, to work acquired jointly by the pair during the past decade, such as drawings by Richard Tuttle and Lucio Pozzi.

So, three’s a trend, right? Philanthropy experts always say that big gift encourage other big gifts. Let’s hope for more this year.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum (top). Bowdoin College (bottom)

 

Herb And Dorothy, The Sequel

Remember Herb and Dorothy Vogel? Of course you do. They are the New York couple, the postal clerk and the school librarian, who collected art using only his salary for years — and eventually gave most of it away to the National Gallery in Washington and then to 50 museums, one each in every state. They were the subject of a documentary in 2009 called “Herb and Dorothy.” I wrote about it then for The Art Newspaper, and to this day it is usually one of the most-viewed articles on my personal website.

herb-and-dorothy-50x50On Friday, a second documentary by Megumi Sasaki about the Vogels (Herb has since died) will premier in New York at IFC Center: HERB & DOROTHY 50X50. It’s a sequel that follows the tale — “a continued look at the varying lives of the artists the Vogel’s adored and a new view of the curators, docents and museum visitors who were affected by this unprecedented donation.”

Here’s more:

A ‘road movie’ through the art world, the film takes the audience on a journey across the US to eleven recipient museums, from Honolulu to Fargo, meeting curators and visitors, and introduces famous (often controversial) artists, as well as unknown favorites of Herb and Dorothy.

Sasaki has revelations, she says in her statement about this sequel — including the fact that Herb initially opposed the 50X50 idea.

I haven’t seen the film, which lasts 87 minutes, but here’s the trailer. After IFC, it opens at 40 other theaters around the country.

 

 

Cupid Strikes, And Worcester Gets A Great Gift

Hester Diamond, well-known as a collector of Old Masters, has made a nice gift to the Worcester Museum of Art — it’s a tale that shows both her and Matthias Waschek, the museum’s director, to be pretty crafty.

WAMVeroneseUnframedFirst the gift: it’s a painting by Veronese titled Venus Disarming Cupid, circa 1560, and according to the Worcester museum is “one of the few works by the famed Renaissance master still in private hands.” It shows a smiling Venus playfully taking away the bow of her son Cupid, stopping him in his tracks. The work is currently valued at about $3.5 million, according to a knowledgeable source.

Waschek, who became the museum’s director in fall, 2011, called the gift a “game changer” for the museum, because “While the Museum’s collection includes exceptional Italian Renaissance masterworks by artists such as Andrea Del Sarto and Piero di Cosimo, it has traditionally been stronger in northern European works. This Veronese shifts the spotlight to the south, and reflects our desire to grow and expand the scope and diversity of the Museum’s collection.”

Diamond has only one connection to the Worcester museum — her stepdaughter, dealer Rachel Kaminsky, who joined its board in 2012. She had no connection until then either, but Waschek smartly set out to expand the museum’s connections and increase its support base. He invited Kaminsky to become a trustee. She accepted. The gift ensued, as she and Diamond got to know the museum.

Diamond was also smart to acquire the work at Christie’s in January, 1990. It had been consigned by its owner as “Circle of François Boucher.” But before the sale, art historian and Veronese expert Terisio Pignatti reattributed it to Veronese. When he published it in 1991, he noted the collector’s stamp on the reverse of the canvas, which suggested that the painting was once in the collection of the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, a county and principality in southwestern Germany.

At Christie’s, it was estimated at $800,000-$1,200,000, and Diamond paid $2,970,000. She placed it on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late 2006, in the permanent collection galleries. It was also included in the exhibition Venus: Bilder einer Göttin (Images of a Goddess) at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich in 2001. (All this from the press release, which I will link to when it is posted online.)

Diamond said that aside from honoring Kaminsky she had another motive for giving this particular painting to Worcester: “I have always believed that the best public home for a work of art is within an institution where it adds something new to the collection and helps bring in new audiences. Over the years, my collection has evolved, incorporating art from many periods, genres and styles. The Worcester Museum’s willingness to explore new ideas for encouraging audiences of every age to think differently about art reflects the arc of my own collecting.”

Disarming Cupid will go on view at the Worcester Art Museum on September 20, as part of the upcoming exhibition [remastered] — a new installation of its Old Master paintings.

How sweet.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Worcester Art MuseumÂ