Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

A Curator For Black Artists?

The Museum of Modern Art announced an interesting hire the other day: Darby English, who recently became the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, will join MoMA (part-time) as a Consulting Curator (in the Department of Painting and Sculpture) for works made by black artists.

Darby EnglishWhile I perhaps understand the need for MoMA to make up for its lack interest in black artists (its term) in the past, I am not sure this is the way to go about it.

Here is where I give a hat-tip to Hyperallergic, which analyzed the move — and also worried about it — on Mar. 14 (the day of the announcement, which — for some reason — I did not receive). Hyperallergic raised several concerns, including the question of whether this ghettoizes black artists and the very definition/categorization of black artists.

With which I agree and add: Why should black artists be separated from contemporary art? It’s hard to imagine curators of women artists (look at the rightful complaints about Wikipedia categorizing authors as female authors and book stores using terms like women’s novels), or Evangelical artists, or gay artists, or for that matter white artists. Isn’t contemporary art in particular becoming ever more global, less subject to categories of nationality and race? Shouldn’t it all be judged by the same standards?

English’s initial tasks — “an analysis of the Museum’s collection of works in this area, as well as the publication of a critical reader bringing together key texts documenting black artists’ work and its historical reception” — are worthy ones that need doing, though, so I concur with some of MoMA’s goal here. He’ll also help with acquisitions.

But I worry about another: the “development of presentations within the collection galleries and the Museum’s exhibition program.”

MoMA is a universal museum for modern and contemporary art. Specialized museums like the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Jewish Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts exist to highlight such categories of art in isolation (usually). I see no reason to blur lines, as MoMA is doing here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Clark Art Institute 

“Nur,” About Islamic Art, Sheds Light On Broader Curatorial Goals

ALKEMIR1-blog427Museum exhibitions owe their existence to artist anniversaries, artistic discoveries, brainstorming, chance encounters, but rarely — I think — from corporations. But that was a hook I used to write about Nur: Light in Art and Science, a sweeping presentation of Islamic art organized by Sabiha Al Khemir, who signed on as a senior advisor to the Dalllas Museum of Art  in 2012.

The story, headlined Shedding a Light on Islamic Art’s Great Treasure, was equally about Al Khemir. a multitalented Tunisian who in addition to her art scholarship and curatorial activities, has also written two novels, including The Blue Manuscript.

One particular thing she said, which I quoted in the article, really hit home with me — and has relevance for the whole museum world:

There are days when I wonder why I do this, and then I see it in the eyes of people looking — sight becoming insight.

Sight becoming insight — what a great goal for curators to have when they plan their exhibitions.

Photo Credit: Karsten Moran, courtesy of The New York Times

 

Waugh Fans: Head to California

Waugh-HuntingtonIf you like Evelyn Waugh — and I do — you may be pleased to learn that about 250 rare books and reference books and 135 letters and manuscripts by the great English prose satirist have been given to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Ca.  (Unless, like me, you happen to live in New York, and wish they had gone to the Morgan Library,* which has some Waugh material, but has you will see below, not much by comparison with other institutions).

But really, that wouldn’t have happened: the Waugh trove was given by Loren and Frances Rothschild, and “Loren is a longtime book collector and current member of The Huntington’s five-person board of trustees,” the Huntington said. Says the press release:

According to John Wilson, associate professor of English at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and founder of the Waugh Society, the Rothschilds’ gift establishes The Huntington as the second leading center of Waugh studies in the world, second only to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired Waugh’s library in several batches from 1961 to 1991. Other institutions with Waugh holdings include the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University, Leeds University, Leicester University, and Notre Dame University.

For the Huntington, the Waugh materials are another notch on its belt in 20th-century literature holdings. It already owns what it calls “significant archives” of writers like Conrad Aiken, Kingsley Amis, Charles Bukowksi, Octavia Butler, Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Christopher Isherwood, Hilary Mantel, and Wallace Stevens. Some of them knew or worked with or admired Waugh, so the Huntington already owns Waugh materials.

I think I’ve read all of Waugh’s early novels – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Scoop (1938), plus, of course, Brideshead Revisited. I recommend them.

waugh_lettermcintyre_440But what’s in this trove? Some examples:

  • the handwritten manuscript of Waugh’s early travel book, Ninety-Two Days
  • Waugh’s hand-corrected typescript of his first novel, Decline and Fall, with the title page showing the alternate titles Picaresque, The Making of an Englishman, and A Study in Discouragement. Waugh crossed out each before settling on Decline and Fall, the first of many satires of British society
  •  the 17-page annotated original typed manuscript of The Hopeful Pontiff, Waugh’s essay on Pope John XXIII
  • more than 100 letters between Waugh and his English publisher, Chapman & Hall
  • a series of unpublished letters relating to the risk of a libel lawsuit resulting from the publication in the United States of The Loved One, Waugh’s satire on Forest Lawn, the Los Angeles–based funeral business
  • a copy of The Cynic, a rare 1916 subversive alternative to the official school journal, co-edited by Waugh, then a 13-year-old student at Heath Mount School.
  • a copy of the Broom, a short-lived 1923 publication with a story written by Waugh while at Oxford.
  • scores of Waugh’s articles, essays, and fiction published in periodicals, in some cases as the only or the true first editions of the work.
  • “critical, biographical, and bibliographic secondary research materials”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Huntington (at right is a handwritten letter by Waugh about his novel, The Loved One)

 

 

Second-Rate Or “One Of The Greatest Ever”?

Veronese's Martyrdom of Saint GeorgeThe artist in question is about to get an exhibition at the National Gallery (yes, I’m still inspired by goings-on in London) — and he is Veronese. Apparently, when the NG bought Veronese’s The Family of Darius before Alexander (below right) in 1857, it was accused of squandering money on “a second-rate specimen of a second-rate artist.”

Of course, we don’t think of Veronese as second-rate today, though — and I hate to say this, as I love his work — he came off in third place a few years back, when the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston gave us the marvelous exhibition, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice. (Curators, by their choices, can make us believe what they believe.)

Anyway, the National Gallery will on Mar. 19 open Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice, the first monographic show for him in the U.K., and — thanks to The Guardian — we know the back story, including the 1857 contretemps and, more important, director Nicholas Penny’s position on it (he thinks it’s one of the greatest paintings in the NG’s collection).

Penny thinks another painting in the show, The Martyrdom of St. George, is “arguably the world’s greatest painting” — it’s above left. The remark gains weight when The Guardian adds that so does the exhibition curator, Xavier Salomon — who is about to leave his curatorial post at the Metropolitan Museum, where he moved from the NG Dulwich Picture Gallery just a couple of years ago, to the Frick, where he will be chief curator.

N-4250-01-000006 020Salomon told The Guardian: “Without Veronese there would be no Rubens, no Van Dyck.”

If only Salomon could bring his show to New York! Here is a description of part of it:

…the paintings that are coming will make an extraordinary exhibition, Salomon says. The show will reunite works not seen together since their days in the artist’s studio, including dazzling secular portraits and two altarpieces made for the same church near Mantua, now in London and Virginia, USA. Mars and Venus United by Love, coming from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, – and leaving the States for the first time since 1910 – will be seen with the National’s Four Allegories of Love, last seen together in the 18th century. Another National favourite, The Adoration of the Kings– one of its all-time best-selling Christmas cards – will be compared with another altarpiece on the same subject, painted in the same year for a church in Vicenza.

In a YouTube video, which is excellent, Salomon says he focused on Veronese’s most beautiful works — about 50 works in all, including the NG’s ten and paintings from Austria, France, Italy, Spain and the U.S. Some of the loans are still being negotiated.

You can also see the NG’s exhibition slide show here.

The press release makes no mention of the show traveling, though it does refer to its association with the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, and its exhibition Paolo Veronese beginning on July 5.

But, still, Xavier, couldn’t something, some part of it come here to the Frick?

What Have Leonardo, Aggie Gund, Sopheap Pich, Etc. Got In Common? News

I rarely do this, but  several smallish but interesting things have happened in the museum world recently, so I’ve collected them in one post.

From the Frick Collection, three pieces of news:

  • Director Ian Wardropper has lured one of the Metropolitan Museum’s* biggest stars, Xavior Salomon, several blocks south on Fifth Avenue to serve as chief curator; he’d been a curator in the European paintings department, “a prototypical and brilliant curator/scholar,” as one source who knows him well told me, and formerly chief curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. More here.
  • The Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting* has chosen the winner of the Sotheby’s Book Prize for a Distinguished Publication on the History of Collecting in America — it’s a team headed by Jennifer Farrell, the general editor, and essayists Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Jan Howard, Robert Storr, and Judith Tannenbaum. They collaborated on Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art. Details here.
  • The Frick usually closes at 6 p.m. (5 p.m. on Sundays), but to accommodate the crowds eager to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and the other paintings on loan for its special exhibition Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, it will now stay open until 9 p.m. on Friday nights for that show. Better yet, thanks to Agnes Gund, it will be free on nine of those evenings, from this Friday until January 17, with the exception of Dec. 6 and Jan. 3, which are reserved for members.

131017-ARoom-model-1From the Dallas Museum of Art:

  • Speaking of free, the DMA recently received an anonymous $9 million gift. Of that, $4 million is unrestricted operating support for the DMA’s free general admission program. The other $5 million will support the digitization of the museum’s collection of 22,000 objects and the creation of a platform for free access to those digital images. In addition, the unnamed donor will give $2 million to match money the DMA raises, presumably in a one-to-one ratio, in the next five years. Details here. Now for pure conjecture on my part — I would not be surprised if this gift came about because DMA director Max Anderson went all out in fundraising last year in an effort to buy the recently rediscovered Leonardo, Salvator Mundi. He couldn’t muster the rumored $200 million price tag, but he did amass pledges of a very sizable total, I’ve been told. Perhaps he has turned convinced one of those potential donors to support greater access to the museum.

And speaking of the Leonardo:

  • It’s no longer available. It has been sold.  — or is in contract negotiations. To whom, I do not know. Again, pure conjecture based on rumors I’ve heard: it‘s going, or has gone, to a collector in Europe. Probably a private collector. Stay tuned to see if it is put on view in a museum.

Earlier this year, I saw a wonderful exhibition at the Met of work by Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian artist (images here), and now:

  • The Indianapolis Museum of Art has announced that it has commissioned an installation by Pich for its Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion Series.  Titled A Room, it “will consist of nearly 1,200 bamboo strips, extending 40 feet from the atrium’s ceiling to floor and occupying a 26-foot diameter circular space that museum visitors will be able to enter.” Based on what I have seen so far, not just at the Met but online, Pich is destined for more acclaim and this should help spread the word about him. A rendering of the new project is above.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum