Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

Revealed: Crystal Bridges Has Been Buying More Than You Know

Cone Stone City Landscape 5x6 300ppiGuess who was a (pretty) big buyer in last fall’s contemporary art auctions? Yup — Crystal Bridges. The museum dropped $10.2 million on a Donald Judd stack at Christie’s, and another $3.4 million at Sotheby’s for Andy Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle, from 1977. Those two works, plus the previously disclosed purchase of a Rothko from 1960 from a private Swiss collector at the estimated cost of $25 million (which I revealed in a Wall Street Journal article last September), are enabling the museum to mount a sweeping reinstallation of its 20th century galleries.

I lay a lot of this out in The Art Newspaper, in an exclusive article, posted online today and headlined Crystal Bridges answers criticism with post-war acquisitions. There’s a nice slide show including the Judd and the Warhol.

Ok, the museum wouldn’t quite characterize its purchases that way, but journalists will be journalists (I didn’t write the headline, but I can’t disagree with it either).

I think the important thing is that anyone who thought Crystal Bridges was going to open and be done (and btw, it has drawn nearly 734,000 visitors since its opening on 11/11/11) is wrong. Not so. Yesterday, the museum also announced the installation of a sculpture by Luis Jimenez for its sculpture trail, and last week, it said that Credit Suisse had given it a half-interest in a painting of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, with the other half going to the Met. It continues to plan special exhibitions, in partnership with several other museums.

Pelton Sand Storm 6x4 180ppiIt’s true, there’s been too much turnover at top for my taste, but we’ll have to wait and see exactly what that means.

What The Art Newspaper didn’t say in the headline — but I do in the article — is that Crystal Bridges is also beefing up its prewar 20th century galleries. I’m posting a couple of them here. At the top is Stone City Landscape by Marvin Dorwent Cone, and at right is Sand Storm by Agnes Pelton.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges

 

 

 

News From Tacoma: Deaccessioning Lawsuit Withdrawn

The Tacoma Art Museum has resolved its dispute with the Young family. They are the descendants of the couple who had donated a collection of Qing dynasty items to the museum, which — because the museum had changed its mission — no longer fit in the collection. I wrote about the case the other day, and I did not believe the museum had handled it well.

I still don’t; moreover, the press release from Tacoma that was just sent to me about the resolution does not make clear exactly what happened.

It says, in part:

The Young family has agreed to dismiss its lawsuit against Tacoma Art Museum.

“We regret that the conversation between us, the museum, and the community took the direction that it did,” said Al Young. “We appreciate the museum hearing our concerns and we will work together to address them. We believe the museum’s increased emphasis on the work of Chinese American artists of the Northwest will fulfill our parents’ intentions.”

Tacoma Art Museum plans to continue with the second phase of the auction on March 12. It has decided to withdraw a few works that will be donated to an appropriate Northwest institution in the near future. As was always intended and relayed to the Young family, the museum will take some of the funds from the auction to purchase works by Chinese American artists and will give credit to the Youngs for their donation.

 So, probably, the choicest items in the original donation will be kept in public institutions, which is good, and the Youngs will be named as donors on the new art acquired with the money raised from the auction. Both of those are good things, and go some way toward rectifying the orignal mistake.

 

 

Paola Antonelli On The Colbert Report: Best Visual Arts TV?

I am late to this episode of the Colbert Report, but it’s quite good, so I’m sharing it anyway: it’s Paola Antonelli (below), senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, brought on at the start of her show, Applied Design, which started on Mar. 2. The show got a lot of notice because it includes the display of 14 video games, but Stephen Colbert is — as ever — more resourceful than that.

15salon368He doesn’t ask her about video games. He explores more important points of her thesis, such as where we are on the modern, post-modern, future scale. Antonelli has a great answer.

She also says that her title refers to a different dichotomy — theoretical design and applied design. In the future, and even now, design is in that way like physics. Eventually everything will disappear into our retina — not even Google glasses. And of course they go through various items to discuss good design. Throughout, she handles Colbert beautifully — and he her.

Odd, both slightly wonderful and slightly disturbing, that the Colbert Report is turning to be one of the few places to see a discussion of visual art on nationwide TV. (See here, for Neal MacGregor, and here, for Carrie Rebora Barrett.)

Hat-tip to Hyperallergic for this, which has a write-up here.

BigThink has a compendium of her commentaries.

Photo Credit: Seedmagazine

Tacoma Goofed. What’s The Deaccessioning Lesson?

We all make mistakes. The Tacoma Art Museum, I believe, just made a big one — and since it’s about deaccessioning, it’s worth some examination.

iLbG3.St.5As chronicled in the Tacoma News-Tribune, the art sales in question began because a few years back the Tacoma museum decided to refocus on Northwest art. In its collection was a cache of Qing dynasty robes, scroll paintings and silk purses, and 41 pieces of jade jewelry.  The collection, described as “richly embroidered…silk jackets, robes and skirts” and “jade items varied from shades of green to white and yellow, many exquisitely carved” had been exhibited at the museum a couple of times and the jade had once been on permanent display. The items had been donated by a Chinese-American couple, named Young, in 1976, and they were supposedly valued recently at about $70,000. 

But when a third of the trove was sold recently at Bonham’s, bringing $230,000, museum officials were ecstatic, but eyebrows went up elsewhere.

The descendants of the Youngs had been notified before the sale, and they apparently agreed to it (the museum had sold some of the jade  in the 1990s without consulting the family). The money from this sale was to be used to buy works by Northwest Chinese -American artists.

But the family had been told the items were in poor condition plus, they learned after the sale, the museum’s website had once labeled them as not-of-museum-quality. If so, why the high prices? Other discrepancies, such as an incomplete inventory and exaggerated talk of trying to place the items with other museum, contributed to the mess. They led to charges by the Youngs of cultural disrespect and lack of appreciation for the Chinese presence in the northwest since the 1800s. A group is now trying to halt the sale of the rest of the Young collection, which is set for March 12.

121RMZ.St.5That’s an incomplete summary of a long article that you can read here.

What should the Tacoma museum have done? For one, it’s unclear to me whether or not the Young collection fits the new mission, which neither defines Northwest art nor limits it to a certain period. Here’s what it says:

Tacoma Art Museum serves the diverse communities of the Northwest through its collection, exhibitions, and learning programs, emphasizing art and artists from the Northwest. Our vision is to be a national model for regional museums by creating a dynamic museum that engages, inspires, and builds community through art.

True, the art involved was not made in the Northwest, but “emphasizing”  does not exclude art made elsewhere, especially if it “serves the diverse communities.”
 
Second, it does sound — if the Youngs are to be believed, and they are not contradicted by the museum on several points — as if the descendents were not given full information before they acquiesed to the sale. That’s always a bad policy — the coverup is usually worse than the crime.
 
Third, when a museum changes its mission — and one hopes that is not too often — I do believe it is incumbent upon the museum to place the collections that no longer fit at other public institutions — even if the only possible arrangement is a long-term loan. That was not done in this case.
 
The museum says it will lose money if it stops the sale; it should have thought about that before consigning.
 
Photo Credits: Courtesy of Bonham’s, via the Tacoma News-Tribune
 
 

Do We Need To Reshuffle Native American Art Collections?

This decade may end up being the years of a great re-shuffling of art, with some museums — mostly in the U.S. — returning looted antiquities to the country in which they were found and, presumably, stolen, and others continuing to return Nazi-looted art that turned up in their collections. On the later score, The Guardian recently wrote about a promise by France to return seven paintings to the descendants of their owners, and today The Telegraph published an article about a new effort in France:

President Francois Hollande’s administration is setting up a group of experts and curators to pro-actively track down families, rather than simply waiting for them to come forward. The group, which will start work next month, will carry out its detective work with the help of a new computerised database compiled of digital scans of thousands of pages of relevant documentation currently gathering dust in archives.

hall-of-northwest-coast-indians_dynamic_lead_hero_imageIn a completely different area, I came up an article the other day with a new question: why is Native American art in the collections of natural history museums?

Written by Katherine Abu Hadal, a designer and researcher who is interested in Indian culture, the article was first published on her blog and then on Indian Country Today Media Network, it begins:

Natural history museums—they are all over the US and abroad too. They house amazing dinosaur fossils, exotic hissing cockroaches, and wondrous planetariums—right next to priceless human-designed art and artifacts created by Native peoples of the Americas.

Like me, you might wonder why these designed objects are juxtaposed with objects of nature such as redwood trees and precious metal exhibits. Yes, of course art is part of the natural world that we live in—but then, why are there no Picasso paintings or Degas sculptures on display in the American Museum of Natural History?

…When Native American, Pacific, and African art and artifact is lumped in with natural history exhibits, it sends a message that these groups are a part of the “natural” world. That the art they produce is somehow less cultured and developed than the western art canon. It also sends the message that they are historical, an element of the romantic past, when in reality these peoples are alive and well, with many traditions intact and new traditions happening all the time.

She raises some good points. It’s true, of course, that art museums collect Native American art — as they should. Natural history collections are a throwback in many ways, and they’ve had to adapt their displays as science has advanced. Shouldn’t they have to adjust to the now-prevailing view of Indian artifacts, that is – art?

No one likes to admit errors. And we can’t have museums reordering their collections with changing fashions all the time. But in this case, natural history museums could either sell or lend their Indian art collections to art museums.

That, at least, is what I think I think is the best answer to this problem.

Photo Credit: Hall of the Northwest Coast Indians, Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History