Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

In Break With Tradition, The National Gallery Goes Thematic

How did we (I) miss this? The National Gallery of Art in late January re-opened its 19th century French art galleries after a two-year renovation, with a new installation that is somewhat non-traditional. (Just as others have, here and here, for example.)

I haven’t seen it yet, but the Washington Post review suggests that it has some idiosynchracies. For one, paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church have been thrown into the mix. Last I checked… they weren’t French.

The goal, as ever, is to present a showing that people will understand better than a traditional art-historical hang — which nowadays means “do not stick to chronology.” Sometimes, that’s helpful; sometimes, it’s confusing, imho.

But thematic presentations are the new norm, I think.

Here’s how the NGA describes its work in a press release:

The new installation is organized into thematic, monographic, and art historical groupings. The “new” Paris of the Second Empire and the Third Republic are highlighted through cityscapes by Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro. Showcasing sun-dappled landscapes and scenes of suburban leisure, a gallery of “high impressionism” masterpieces of the 1870s is prominently located off the East Sculpture Hall, including such beloved works as Monet’s The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil (1880) and Renoir’s Girl with a Hoop (1885). A gallery is devoted to the sophisticated color experiments of late Monet, while Cézanne’s genius in landscape, still-life, and figure painting is explored in another. Paintings exemplifying the bold innovations of Van Gogh and Gauguin are displayed along with Degas’ later, experimental works in one gallery, followed by a room of canvases by artists such as Delacroix, Renoir, and Matisse celebrating exoticism and the sensual use of color and paint handling. The final gallery is dedicated to the Parisian avant-garde circa 1900: Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, Rousseau, and early Picasso.

One good thing: the NGA has taken works from the “Small French Paintings” galleries in the East Building, which displayed donations from Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and intergrated them into the new installation in the West Building.

The Post, however, gives us a better idea of what’s different. Mary Morton, curator of French painting, took “an eclectic approach.” To pull in those German and American landscapes, she organized a room around one of the “ideas prevalent in France,” rather than nationality — painting outside. She includes many Mary Cassatts in the hang, but that’s not unprecedented. And as critic Philip Kennicott writes:

Ever so gingerly, Morton has introduced small thematic explanations for several rooms: One is devoted to “Exoticism,” another to “A Literary Approach” and yet another to “Bohemian Paris,” blurring some of the “isms” and standard family trees that are old shorthand for understanding the 19th century. Although the use of text to explain groupings of art is standard in most museums and common at temporary exhibitions at the National Gallery, its use in the permanent collection (with the exception of handout material) is rare enough to be a novelty.  

She also lets the 19th century continue into the 20th, with a final room containing Picasso’s “Family of Saltimbanques” from 1905 and paintings by Amedeo Modigliani. 

Kennicott says it works, and I will trust him on that for now, until I see it myself. And with gorgeous paintings in the galleries like the two here, van Gogh’s Roses and Manet’s Railway, who could complain anyway?  Read more here.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

A Reinstallation That Gives Beckmann A Room Of His Own

I can’t prove it (yet), but it seems to me that the renewed focus by museums on their permanent collections during these years of financial worries is producing some very fine results — not innovations, really, but new applications of some practices in different places to excellent effect.

The Beckmann Gallery

I just learned of another example: The St. Louis Art Museum, in reinstalling its permanent collection, has created a separate gallery for Max Beckmann. This seems long overdue. By its own admission, the museum owns the world’s largest collection of Beckmann paintings, sculptures and prints.

The new gallery holds 14 works by Beckmann spanning his career and including two enormous works, “Scene from Destruction of Messina” and “The Sinking of the Titanic,” which according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “are on view for the first time in years.”

Simon Kelly, the SLAM’s Modern and contemporary art curator, told the paper that gallery is among the largest in the museum, and that the museum will hang more Beckmann paintings in other galleries.

The central goal of this reinstallation was to showcase that part of our collection that is internationally known…When you go to Europe, people talk about St. Louis because of Beckmann. We haven’t showcased it sufficiently.

Indeed. This pleases me, as a Beckmann fan, but it’s also important because the new gallery helps give the museum its own personality. (Too many museums, with cookie-cutter, one-of-each collections, look alike.)

The reinstallation involves 18 galleries, all told, and it includes 12 new acquisitions, plus “45 works that have not been on view for a decade or more and several other pieces that have undergone extensive conservation.” The museum has a video of it on this page, but I couldn’t download it without setting off security because it’s too big.

I’ve mentioned what some other museums are doing here, here, and here, among other posts.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Post-Dispatch

 

In Brooklyn, Arnold Lehman Has A New Crusade: The Permanent Collection

I used to think that Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum,* had the toughest job in the museum world.

After spending time again with him recently, I’ve changed my mind. Yes, Brooklyn must compete for both visitors and money with better placed and (usually) more esteemed museums in Manhattan, but as he points out at least Brooklyn is growing in population. And it’s an exciting borough — very diverse, true, and the home of populations that are not heavy with museum-goers — but growing nonetheless.

ALehman.jpgDirectors like Graham Beal, ensconced in Detroit, where the population has shrunk dramatically, and where suburbanites have virtually no reason to visit downtown, have it much harder.

Arnold’s enthusiasm for his job was clearly on display during my recent visit, which — as I lay out in a Cultural Conversation with him published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal — took place soon after he had back surgery. (Before I go on, let me not get too positive — I know he has faults and had made some, in my mind, wrong decisions.)

That’s why I’m glad that in my three-hour face-to-face interview, plus a couple of subsequent phone conversations, we talked a lot about permanent collections — not a new subject on this blog. I’ve been saying for some time that museums must start using them better to attract repeat visitors.

Arnold is in the midst of developing, with his curators, a reinstallation plan that, he says, will “upset” his colleagues, just as many were upset by Brooklyn’s 2001 installation of its American collection. It will be heavy on technology. It won’t separate fine from decorative arts. And it will somehow link — even rethink — cultures and artistic developments.

I am one of those who was, and remain, upset by the trial run with the American collection. But I’m thrilled by this sentence, which appears in my article:

“We will make the permanent collection the primary attraction of the Brooklyn Museum,” Mr. Lehman promises. “I don’t want to see our visitation going up and down because of exhibitions.”

Truthfully, I doubt he can pull it off. But I really wish him well — and I encourage other museums to think that way too.

There’s much more in the Conversation (here) on this and other topics, including his unabandoned plans for “populist” shows of street art, tatoos, etc.

Disclosure: I consult to a foundation that supports the Brooklyn Museum

 

Further Reflections On Native American Art

Back to Native American art and attribution (please see here and here, if you are new to this subject):

I was interested in this topic because I do think that attaching the name of an individual artist to an Indian “specimen” or “artifact” will elevate it squarely into “art.” As Kate C. Duncan, a professor at Arizona State University said, “if a museum says it’s art, it’s art.”

 

Part of our reluctance, over the years, to call Native American objects “art” can be explained this way: “We tend to think that if you’re a true artist, you do what no one else does,” Duncan said. “With Native Americans, the common cultural system functions differently. It’s not the individual, it’s the individual within the group. What’s important is the group’s survival.” Some contemporary Indian artists prefer to call themselves “a maker,” rather than “an artist,” Duncan added. “Artist is a European construct.”

 

 

And of course, I knew that, as a few commenters here and on The New York Times website have done, some would raise the issue of whether it is appropriate to attribute individual names to these works — whether we were simply, and wrongly, applying today’s individualism to ancient peoples.

 

Duncan, a former head of the Native American Art Studies Association who does attribution research, agreed that it is problematic: “It is trying to put a Western construct on a different culture,” she said. 

GreatLakesshirt.jpg

Yet others told me that the prevalent view that Indian culture is a collective culture, not about the individual, is overdrawn. Some tribes had artist “classes,” even artists guilds. They and their skills were valued.  

Then, too, as Valerie Verzuh, a curator at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, told me, regarding attribution, “It’s part of humanizing the collection. These are not just abstract objects; they are the work of individuals, of members of a family, of members of a pueblo.”

At the end of the day, I decided that this is the right thing to do — now.

Interestingly, I focused on museums for the article, but late Sunday I received an email from John Molloy, a dealer who advises Christie’s on Native American art.

I agree with you that identifying the artists by name is part of the process whereby the western world identifies the work as art. In the Native American auction at Christie’s two weeks ago, we made a conscious effort to identify and write about the individual artists.

 

He pointed me to the catalogue of Jan. 18 sale, and sure enough, inside are attributions to, and short items about, Wahnomkot (also known as Maggie Aida Icho), who died in 1964; Wilson Tewaquaptewa, 1871-1960; Iris Nampeyo, 1860-1942, plus several more recent Native American artists that sign their work. 

 

Molloy also provided me with an idea for the image I’ve used above. He wrote: 

[It] is currently on view in the exhibition at the DenverArt Museum. Dating to the first part of the eighteenth century, it is the only extant example of its type.It showed up about twenty years ago in a general antique auction without any history, much less any reference to its maker which highlights some of the difficulties inherent.After spending some 250 years who-knows-where in France, it now will be housed in American museums hopefully at least as long. But we will never know who made it more than a tentative tribal attribution.

2_ManTorturingWitch.jpgThe description in the catalogue is “Painted Hide Shirt, Great Lakes Region, First Half 18th Century.” The image here doesn’t do it justice, btw. Estimated at $250,000 to $300,000, it fetched $362,500, including the buyer’s premium.

 

Now is a time for throwing out another wrinkle in the story. I kept wondering why so few people have paid attention to attribution work, and why so few have done it. I know it’s tedious, but wouldn’t it be fun to discover “new” artists, to find a name to match a “master of…”?

One theory I heard was this: just as attribution research was gathering steam 30-plus years ago, along came what, for better or for worse, people call the politicization of art history. It was suddenly ok to connect art to social history, to view art through a gender lens, or through a political lens, and so on. And that was much more popular, more fun, extinguishing enthusiasm for attribution research.

True? I don’t know — I tried that out on a couple of other people and they disagreed, blaming the lack of interest more on the need for patience and years of work.

And, maybe, on subsequent corrections — as information in this area changes and revisions are required. One example: The Denver museum has owned a headdress, acquired in 1948, that was originally identified as a Tlingit or Bella Coola (now Nuxalk) piece. Twenty years later, it was relabeled as a Haida work and later still attributed to Albert Edward Edenshaw. So it changed over the course of 30 years from being attributed to the wrong tribe, to the right tribe, and finally to an artist.

Here’s another example, from the Hearst Museum at Berkeley, about Man Torturing A Witch (above):

Art historian Bill Holm has pioneered the attribution of otherwise anonymous Haida artifacts. This carving and the two masks were originally attributed by Holm to John Gwaytihl (ca. 1822-1912), but based on further information, his student Robin Wright has attributed them to Simeon Stilthda. Possibly related, the two artists lived in the same community and must have worked together.

Finally, one observation, which I believe to be true, from dealer Donald Ellis: Advances in computer technology, which allows the superimposition of images, has helped attribution research recently. 

And it will do more so in the future. I hope.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Christie’s (top); Hearst Museum (bottom).   

From “Tribe” To “Artist”: More On Attributing Native American Art

So, as I said, in reporting my New York Times article about attributing Native American art to individuals, especially at the Denver Art Museum’s newly reinstalled galleries, I learned many interesting/valuable things that I could not squeeze into the article.

Thumbnail image for Cheyenne River Sioux, Pipe bag.jpgHence this post. The attribution research movement, if I may call it that, fascinates me. It began decades ago, and by now should have had a far bigger impact on museums. 

True, the vast majority of Native American works will never be attributed, but that is no excuse, as Dan Monroe, director of the Peabody Essex Museum (which has a large Native American collection), says in the article. When researchers can identify a masterly “hand,” they can use the “master of” moniker — as the pipe bag at left is attributed to the Master of the Cheyenne River Sioux.

Strangely, some Native American art experts I consulted had no knowledge of the attribution research. (It makes me wonder what else is going on in academia that should be brought to the attention of the general museum-going public. Suggestions?)

I wish I could have mentioned others doing this valuable, but complex work, so let’s start with a shout-out to some other I learned about:

  • Kate C. Duncan (who is quoted in the article, but whose research work had to be cut) has grouped – but not found artist’s names for Athapaskan floral beadwork and is working on early 19th quilled tunics of the Dena’ina.
  • Ruth B. Phillips, of CarletonUniversity, has studied the art by Great Lakes indigenous peoples.
  • Joyce M. Szabo, of the University of New Mexico; Janet Catherine Berlo, of the University of Rochester; Candace Greene, of the Smithsonian, and Barbara A. Hail, curator emerita at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology of Brown University, have all analyzed art of the Plains Indians.

  • David W. Penney, of the Detroit Institute of Arts, was a consultant to the National Museum of the American Indian and made the two new attributions quoted in my article, according to curator Ann McMullen.

  • Peter Corey, curator of collections at the ShermanJacksonMuseum in Sitka, workedFenno.jpg with Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, whom I mention, to discover the names of Tlingit artists in 19th C documents. They plan to publish their database (soon) to help speed their attribution work.

  • Steven C. Brown, a former curator at the Seattle Art Museum, worked on Northwest Coast art.

 

I know there are others doing this work — add your name, or their names, with a comment below, please.

It may help speed the use of the research. As Robin Wright, director of the Bill Holm Center at the Burke Museum, told me, “some museums just haven’t read the current literature.” And as Nancy Blomberg, the curator in Denver responsible for the reinstallation, admitted, she hasn’t yet told a couple of other museums that own work by Louis Fenno (his painting of the Ute Bear and Sun Dances is above right) that she has rediscovered him. (A commenter to the NYT article posted this link to pictures of Fenno and his wife, Ar-ruv-a-roo.)

 

Another strain of my reporting dealt with what to do when the artist’s name is unknown to signal the individual. “Anonymous” is appropriate, as is “Unknown Artist.” Curator Karen Kramer Russell at the Peabody Essex is using “Tlingit Artist” or “Osage Artist,” etc. instead of just “Tlingit” and “Osage.” 

 

Museums can also group the display of objects thought to be made by a single hand, as Denver is doing. And anonymous Native American works can also be linked to works by the same hand in other collections. Russell told me, for example, that PEM owns an 1840s Dakota cradleboard that seems to be made by the same individual who made cradleboards at the Brooklyn Museum (which will soon open a Plains Indian tipi exhibition) and the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. The Peabody Essex also owns a Haida mask, one of 14 known masks that scholars of Northwest Indian art attribute to one artist who remains anonymous — for now. If those links aren’t made on labels, they could at least be linked in the catalogues, so that scholars will know of the connections. 

 

I can almost hear some grumbling at museums — they have enough to do with fewer resources at the moment to start changing labels, let alone do their own attribution research. True, but Monroe also blames inertia: “In most instances, museums continue the practice of labeling historical Native American in relation only to tribe simply because it has long been ‘standard’ practice. Few museums have given thought to the meaning and significance of this practice though none would consider labeling Western art in the same manner,” he told me.

 

That’s enough for now. I’ll publish a few more thoughts soon. 

 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum