Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

At Last: Denver Gets A van Gogh Show, Six Years In the Making

People on the coasts, especially the East coast, are spoiled when it comes to the art they can see. During the summer, I was astonished to learn from Timothy J. Standring (pictured), a curator at the Denver Art Museum whom I have known for years, that his mile-high city has never been home to exhibition focused on Vincent van Gogh. Of course, the museum had mounted exhibitions with a van Gogh or two — but never one centered on this most revered and popular artist.

Standring told me about his efforts to remedy that, with the result being an exhibition set to open on Oct. 21 titled Becoming van Gogh. It includes nearly 70 paintings and drawings by van Gogh and 20 by other artists, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, Jules Dupre and Emile Bernard, that van Gogh studied.

In organizing, Standring had a big handicap: the Denver museum doesn’t own a single work by van Gogh. He had to borrow everything. It was not an easy feat, and I lay out more about the challenges and how he overcame them in an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal titled Becoming van Gogh: A Show Built Stroke by Stroke.

Yet one of the best things about this exhibition is its theme: far from being a greatest hits, it unfolds a theme that has not been explored here in depth before. “We wanted to draw away from the focus on his craziness and instead focus on his internal process of artistic decisions,” Standring says.

Or, as the press release put it:

By focusing on the stages of Van Gogh’s artistic development, Becoming Van Gogh illustrates the artist’s initial foray into mastering draftsmanship, understanding the limitations and challenges of materials and techniques, learning to incorporate color theory and folding a myriad of influences, including the work of other artists, into his artistic vocabulary. No other exhibition has focused so intensely on Van Gogh’s personal growth and progression as he developed his own personal style.

Along the way, people doubted that Standring could pull this off — even his own museum directors and, at some points, the Van Gogh Museum, which pretty much has to approve all van Gogh exhibits. But it cooperated with Denver, providing curatorial assistance, despite the long odds, because part of its mission it to take van Gogh to places where he is not well known.

The show won’t, can’t, travel — it’s in Denver only. That’s another reason why, aside from the curators’ scholarship and creativity, this exhibit, well, exhibits the good fellowship that is evident among many European painting curators. I know some of them went to bat for Standring.

That’s it for tonight, but I will return to this show — there’s another reason why it’s notable.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum 

Surprise At The Met: What Tom Campbell Said At TED

Looking for completely different information on the Metropolitan Museum’s website today, I stumbled upon a blog post of the TED talk given by Met director Thomas P. Campbell last spring — it was just posted as a video on Friday, though he mentioned last March that he had made the speech.

So I watched.

Campbell performed brilliantly, even though he repeated that hoary old line about people finding museums intimidating. (Ok, maybe a few do, but I’d wager that the more appropriate adjectives for describing what reluctant museum-goers feel about museums include “boring,” “bewildering,” and “confusing,” because there isn’t enough way-finding information.)

But this post isn’t about that — it’s about Campbell, who shows wonderful passion in this speech. He’s so intent on breaking through to the TED audience that he drops the F-word in his opener. Not exactly what you usually hear around the Met.* But it sure got my attention and put me on notice that this speech might be a little different than I expected.

You should listen to the opener, at least, for yourself (or try here). Even if you don’t like profanity, the anecdote is quite funny and self-deprecating. And it leads to his main point: that it’s a curator’s job to suppress some of their academic, jargony training, to stop classifying art and start getting people to look at it.

Campbell reveals why he chose to focus on tapestries, why he went to the Met (so he could do really big tapestry exhibits), and how his career-making 2002 tapestry exhibit was written off by one senior Met staffer as “this is going to be a bomb,” despite the “experience” he created. (Obviously, it was  not.)

He likes the word “unpack” — as in, curators have to maintain the integrity of the art but unpack it for a general audience — and he unpacks how the Met created the oh-so-popular Alexander McQueen exhibit from 2011.

Finally, he suggests that one goal of the museum — he watches visitors enter in the Great Hall at times — is to create a zone where their curiosity can expand. He looks like he is having a good time, and it’s catching.

Although not every commenter agrees, most loved his passion, as did I. He could take this show on the road.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met.

 

 

 

Reaching New Audiences With a Mold-Breaking Renaissance Show

Just when you think that museums have plumbed the depths (or rather, heights) of the Renaissance — leaving few fresh ideas — along comes an exhibition that surprises.   This one, Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, opens next Friday, Oct. 14, at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The Walters says:

Aspects of this material have been studied by scholars, but this is the first time the subject has been presented to a wider American public.

The exhibit — which I have obviously not seen — features 73 paintings, sculptures, prints, manuscripts and printed books by artists including Rubens, Pontormo, Dürer, Veronese and Bronzino, according to the press release. The time frame is late 1400s through the early 1600s. Though there’s been little discussion of the fact, apparently many Africans and their descendants worked in Europe as artists and diplomats, as well as slaves –plus, says the Walters, aristocrats and saints.  That’s quite a range, and all covered in the show.

Judging by the pictures the museum has posted on its website in the press room, this is going to be a good show. At right above is The Adoration of the Kings from the workshop of Gerard David, a fairly traditional picture. At left is Portrait of Don Francisco de Arabe and Sons Pedro and Domingo by Andrés Sánchez Galque, 1599, lent by the Prado.

The Walters, which says “the exhibition…poses questions about the challenges of color, class and stereotypes that a new diversity brought to Europe,” obviously sees it as a way to bring in a more diversified audience. Last spring, its educators described the exhibition to students at five Baltimore middle schools. They, in turn, were invited to make art in response, and the Walters is also showing their work during the main show’s run. That’s great, but I hope they are in the education galleries, not side by side.

The Princeton University Art Museum has also signed up for the main show, Feb. 16–June 9, 2013.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Walters

What Do You Do As A “Mellon Curator-At-Large?”

It was in the spring of 2011, I believe, when the Indianapolis Museum of Art announced that it had appointed two “curators-at-large” funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The museum selected James Watt, who had stepped down from his position as Senior Curator in the Metropolitan’s Department of Asian Art, and Mahrukh Tarapor as the first two.

Now it has announced another: Amy Poster (below), Curator Emerita of Asian Art at the Brooklyn Museum as well as an independent curator and consultant specializing in South and East Asian art.

For some strange reason, the museum is a little secretive about these posts. The press release announcing Poster says she began her work in July, 2012 — but it’s just announcing the appointment now. And it never mentioned Tarapor, who delayed her arrival in Indianapolis and then, last April, gave it up when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, appointed her senior advisor for international initiatives there.

If Indy is embarrassed, it shouldn’t be — these things happen and it’s no reflection on the museum, in my mind.

The question is, what are they doing?

Watt, who began his one-year term in November, 2011, has been quite busy on his visits. According to the press release, he

has analyzed the IMA’s Chinese ceramics, jade and most of the bronzes in storage and currently on display. As part of his work, Watt certified the dates and periods on several works of art, and in some cases corrected dates of the objects. Through additional research in Hong Kong, Watt hopes to concretely authenticate some works from the IMA’s ceramics collection that may prove to be older and more precious than previously believed. Additionally, Watt is assisting Teramoto in planning for the reinstallation of the IMA’s permanent Asian galleries, opening in 2014.

Kathryn Haigh, the museum’s deputy director for collections and exhibitions, also said that he plans to reinstall the Chinese objects thematically, thus highlighting “the history of porcelain making in China among other things.” And “James is currently researching a pair of chicken cups that may rival similar objects in the imperial collection, which is very exciting.”

For her part, Poster will help develop a long-term collecting strategy for Indian and Southeast Asian art. She is also

studying the history of the IMA’s Lockwood de Forest wall. De Forest (1850-1932) was a partner of Louis Comfort Tiffany and was well known for establishing an Indian wood-working studio in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, which produced items for the American market from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. One of the earliest Asian artworks acquired by Museum, the wall was purchased by the Art Association of Indianapolis in 1915 (a precursor to the IMA) from Lockwood de Forest. The wall has been shown in multiple manifestations over the last century.

If this was a trial for Mellon, testing the idea for possible use elsewhere, it seems to me to be a good one. With budgets stretched, some museums can’t afford full time curators in each department they have — sharing curators, using independent curators, and tapping into year-long scholars, like these, will probably spread. Kudos to Mellon for this experiment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Indianapolis Art Museum 

Gemaldegalerie Battle Far From Over: Berlin Pulls Out Another Big Gun — UPDATED

Just in case you thought that cultural authorities in Berlin might cave in to pressure regarding the future of its Old Master collection, here’s a dose of reality. They continue to wage war, even though they have ordered up a “feasibility study” to assess alternatives to the original plans, which would send most of the city’s magnificent Old Masters collection into storage for an undetermined number of years, while a new museum is supposedly built on Museum Island, and integrate the rest into the already filled galleries of the Bode Museum.

As I noted on Sept. 12, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation thinks that its plan to devote the Gemaldegalerie (now home to the Old Masters) to the Pietzch collection of modern art without adequate assurances that the Old Masters will not go into storage is just fine — and they are pulling out big guns to support it, an effort to counter the many who oppose it.

On Saturday, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, weighed in, supporting the move in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZa). He begins by saying that no one goes to the Gemaldegalerie — the same argument made at the outset by the Berlin authorities.

That follows a show of support by Metropolitan Museum director Thomas P. Campbell, who — inexplicably to some curators on his staff — wrote a letter to The Art Newspaper agreeing with the plan. (It was published in the print edition only and is not online.)  The Art Newspaper has published online three additional letters of support for the plan, but — to my knowledge — only one, by Jeffrey Hamburger of Harvard, against — so far.

The petition Hamburger started, btw, is now up to 13,703 signatures.

I expect more such letters and articles in the coming months, some orchestrated by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The Met, the Getty and other museums — and their directors — have a vested interest in pleasing the Prussians. They need to borrow art from them down the road — as they have in the past. It takes no courage on their part to support the plan; it’s simply an act of cozying up to friends and would-be friends. It does take courage for the curators who have signed petitions to put their names on it — there may be retribution in the form of loans denied.

I have rarely — have I ever? — turned over space here to someone else. But former museum director Tom Freudenheim has sent this on-the-ground report, which I am pasting, in somewhat edited form, here:

Nothing has changed since my time living in Berlin, over a decade ago: the same terrible (German-only) signage outside and in (‘Gemäldegalerie’ doesn’t qualify for Esperanto-like signaling that it’s a place to see old master paintings), and the same sad feeling that the proprietors would just as soon keep out potential visitors….The paucity of visitors on a sunny fall week-day afternoon bore that out [but]… isn’t this solitude a lot better than fighting crowds at the Louvre?

When — and if — the notably argumentative Berliners manage to develop plans (and funding) for [a] new museum [for the Old Master paintings], it may turn out to be wonderful; but replicating the current purpose-built galleries that opened in 1998 will be an incredibly hard act to follow. They are subtly perfect in almost every way, albeit connected by an odd central courtyard.

Meanwhile, try playing the triage game that kept me busy for a couple of hours: which paintings would I keep on view and which would I place into storage for an indefinite period of time…Hopeless task. Let’s see, how about the “lesser” masters? So I start with the riveting Christoph Amberger portrait of Charles V, the wonderful Jean Fouquet double portrait of Étienne Chevalier and St. Stephen [above left], the Hugo van der Goes Monforte Altar — no one has ever heard of these guys anyway. And…there are so many works by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt and Hals, Cranach, Durer, Holbein and Altdorfer…One or two would suffice!

…Surely we don’t need to give in to feminist issues by pretending that the brilliant 1777 Self Portrait by Anna Therbusch [above right] warrants our attention. And considering that there’s a real Caravaggio, why bother with spectacular Caravaggiesque paintings such as Honthorst’s Calling of Peter? OK – I found one to omit: Dürer’s Madonna with the Siskin (a bird); is it a terrible painting or in bad condition? Dunno. But my guess is that Dürer scholars would miss it.

I gave up my triage exercise by the time I got to the Italians, wondering whether this was my last chance to luxuriate in one of the world’s great collections. The issue here isn’t whether a new permanent home might not be a good idea. It’s how managerial ineptitude could have placed the museums (and therefore their scholarly and general public) into such a bind that the potential “deal” (if it really is a deal) with the Pietzsch’s could be subject to that kind of tradeoff.

Let’s keep repeating that: this has never been a Modern vs. Old Master fight, as the original petition made clear in the first paragraph. But that’s how the Pietzch-backers want to portray it — the new against the old — when, really, they made a bad deal.

UPDATE, 9/26: No sooner had I written and published this then, indeed, another heavyweight museum director published a piece agreeing with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation’s plan. Here’s Ian Wardropper, director of the Frick, in Die Welt.