Curatorial Matters

For some reason I cannot fathom, I’ve been receiving many press releases lately about museum acquisitions, by gift or purchase, and in one case, about a wonderful gift to make acquisitions. I hope they keep coming!

Let’s look at them in reverse chronological order:

This morning came news that the Art Institute of Chicago received more than $35 million designated to the purchase of new works in its Prints and Drawings and Asian Art departments. It came from a long-time benefactor named Dorothy Braude Edinburg who, in 2013, made “a landmark gift of more than 1000 works of art” and “established the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection in her parents’ honor.” The collection consisted of European prints and drawings, Chinese and Korean stonewares and porcelains, and Japanese printed books. More details here.

Yesterday, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced that it had purchased its first work by Frida Kahlo–not the most representative of her work but important because it was the first painting she ever sold. “Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia)” was painted in 1928 and portrays two maids that Kahlo knew, set against tropical foliage. More details here.

The Getty Museum also landed a treasure (at left), announcing that it had acquired a rare Flemish manuscript. It requires a quoted description:

Livre des fais de Jacques de Lalaing (Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing), a highly important illuminated manuscript comprising text by Jean Lefèvre de Saint-Remy and a frontispiece by Simon Bening, the leading Flemish manuscript painter of the period. The manuscript also contains 17 lively miniatures attributed to an anonymous painter in the circle of the Master of Charles V. The Livre des fais de Jacques de Lalaing is considered one of the greatest secular manuscripts produced during the last flowering of Flemish illumination in the second quarter of the 16th century. The vivid illuminations, rendered with remarkable detail and vibrant colors, extol the ideals symbolizing the age of chivalry.

Nicely, the piece was bought in honor of recently retired Thomas Kren, the senior curator of the Department of Manuscripts there from 1984 – 2010 and then Associate Director of Collections. More details here.

In mid-January, the very lucky Getty also acquired–part purchase, part gift–31 pieces of 18th century French  decorative arts from the collection of Horace Brock. More details here.

In Pittsburgh, the Mattress Factory announced a dandy gift: James Turrell has donated a Skyspace with an estimated worth of more than $1 million. The museum did not announce the size and shape of the piece, probably because Turrell must yet design it and, maybe more important, the Mattress Factory has to raise funds to pay for the work’s installation. More details here.

Yesterday, the Huntington announced several acquisitions by its Collectors’ Council, including some art works (the library took in two large archives): collection of 19th-century images that trace the history of photographic practice in the American West, a rare, annotated Latin manuscript about the Three Magi,  written on parchment and produced in England between 1400 and 1450. More details here.

Earlier this month, the Cincinnati Art Museum said it had acquired The Wilderness, an 1861 landscape by Sanford Robinson Gifford, and a life-size glass sculpture, Seated Dress with Impression of Drapery, created in 2005 by Karen LaMonte (at right). More details here.

That’s a pretty great list, going back just two weeks. And I probably some as not every museum sends me such announcements.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Getty (top) and the Cincinnati Art Museum (bottom)

In this week’s New Yorker magazine, Calvin Tomkins has his crack at explaining the fraught past relationship between the Metropolitan Museum of Art* and contemporary art and plans for the future in an article headlined The Met and the Now. It is a feel-good article, all but a puff piece. Think of it as an antidote to the article in The New York Times several weeks back, headlined Becoming Modern: The Met’s Mission at the Breuer Building. That one had tongues wagging and, I’m told by Met insiders, left both trustees and the administration trying to figure out how to counter it.

Why? The worst part had contemporary art chief Sheena Wagstaff (left) explaining the high turnover among her curators in her department by essentially saying that she got rid of the Met’s mediocre staff. Then, director Tom Campbell (right) made matters worse by saying:

“You tell your American curators to stop being such whiners,” he snapped. “This is a very competitive institution. You succeed by being good.”

I could see that we might be going through a lot of rubbish out there, but, at the same time, I felt there was a sort of neo-Renaissance that the Met should be part of.” Personally, he has said, he likes contemporary art: “I might even buy it, if I had the money.”

I am glad Campbell admitted that there’s “a lot of rubbish out there,” and I only wish I could see what he calls a neo-Renaissance. Sometimes I walk around contemporary art fairs and among the galleries of Chelsea thinking we must be in a dark age for art. That’s personal, though: there’s some good, even great, art out there. I just wish there were more of it. 

Re: past Met acquisitions:

[Bill] Lieberman [a former head of the Met’s contemporary department], who was unwilling to go after anything that he thought MoMA coveted, acquired a surprising number of figurative paintings by contemporary artists whose names do not resonate today, and whose works reside in the basement.

This is no surprise; other museum directors tell me they have storerooms of contemporary art they’d like to deaccession, too. They won’t while the artists are still alive. 

[the] Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, which, divested of its nineteenth-century impedimenta, was now the Met’s principal area of growth.

This is indeed what Campbell thinks, I have heard from those whining curators. which is too bad. The Met should acquire contemporary art, of course. But, at a time when art has gotten so expensive, acquisitions–especially purchases–must be opportunistic. The Met must remain flexible about what it acquires–of a great, say, Caillebotte, or whatever, comes along that fills a gap, it should go for it.  

“The other day, someone said to me, ‘You have the best job in the world,’ ” Wagstaff announced. “And I said, ‘Actually, I do.’ It has such enormous potential for modern and contemporary art, and ultimately for artists. And the opportunity to work on joint projects with the Met’s world-class scholars in other fields is the most thrilling thing in the world.”

Of this statement, I heartily approve. Wagstaff has put her finger on what can make the Met’s contemporary department distinctive. 

The art historian Hal Foster, who teaches at Princeton and knows Wagstaff well, told me that her program to connect modern and contemporary to historical art is “exactly what New York needs at this moment, when there’s such a stress on presentness and the fascination with ‘now.’ ”

Again, yes, I agree wholeheartedly. 

“What the Met needs to do is position itself as a potential recipient for major gifts in this area,” Campbell told me. “I can’t raise a hundred million dollars for a single work of art, but what I can do is raise six hundred million to rebuild the modern wing. That’s easier to do. The Met takes great pride in putting supporters’ names on galleries. And if we rebuild the wing not all the gifts will go to MoMA.”

Another point on which we agree. 

“They’re trying something new,” Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of the New Museum, said approvingly. “Instead of using the MoMA model, of top-quality works shown to illustrate the history of style, they’re using lesser-known [contemporary] works that are expressions of a culture—which is what you get in the Met’s Roman galleries and the Egyptian galleries. It requires a different understanding of what art is.”

I’m not sure about this one. The Met should not settle for lesser works; its storerooms overflow already. 

Contemporary art has overwhelmed the current market, but it is still a colossal risk, if only because there are so few standards to judge it by. “The language of contemporary art is always changing,” Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said recently. “Our frame of reference changes. Things are diversifying. Being an encyclopedia of anything is more and more untenable.” The Met is placing a big bet on modern and contemporary art at a time when nobody can predict what art will be—or mean—to future generations.

John Currin, a highly successful artist whose paintings make use of Old Master techniques, has expressed similar doubts. “I would love to be in that collection,” he told me, “but I worry that if they get too engaged with contemporary stuff they won’t do the oddball shows of people like Dosso Dossi, an incredibly important sixteenth-century artist whom no one knows at all.” Campbell insists that this won’t happen—that the new costs will be paid with new money. He said, “It’s not modern and contemporary at the expense of other departments; it’s modern and contemporary in balance with everything else.”

The fact that nobody seems to know what art is anymore makes a curator’s job all the more difficult. Does anyone still subscribe to Alfred Barr’s definition of what he and his colleagues at MoMA were doing as “the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity”? Many curators would say that they do, but, as any Chelsea gallery-goer can attest, a vast amount of mediocre art is being shown these days, and some of it commands absurdly high prices at auction. The unfashionable, élitist notion of quality doesn’t really go away, and our need for museums to sift, select, and make illuminating judgments about recent art has never been more acute.

Oh, yes–someone had to say this. I am tired of hearing that there’s no hierarchy in art, that all art is equal. Not true. 

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met.

The perennially quotidian but important issue of museum labels has cropped up into several conversations I’ve had lately. That put me, for the most part, in mind of some quotes from an artist, none other than that conceptual artist and sometime prankster John Baldessari.

There’s little questions that some museums have dumbed down their labels of late. Granted, people seem to know less and less about art, even as museum attendance seems to be growing. (That may be because there’s so much more to know and to learn about art, what with more museums showing increasingly broad and diverse offerings). For prime evidence of the dumbing down, though, look no further than the Copper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. I was there a week ago to view Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio. Heatherwick’s work is original, innovative and fascinating. But neither the show nor the labels do him justice.

We’ll stick to the labels here, which are framed as questions. Probably meant to be engaging, to involve viewers, they instead are condescending. The museum feels like a kindergarten.

Where is the line, when does a label cross from being informative to being condescending (or even insulting)? Here’s what Baldessari said when he was in New York for his exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in 2010. As Reuters related it:

“I don’t think they (visitors) need any preshow counseling,” the 79-year-old artist, who was dressed in all-black with a scraggly white beard, told reporters at a preview of the show.

Baldessari is often described as a conceptual artist. Critics regularly refer to Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp when describing his humorous, usually colorful creations packed with pop culture references.

But Baldessari said his art is accessible to anyone who visits the museum.

“I don’t think you really have to spoon feed the viewer,” he explained. “You just have to give them something to hang on to and they can begin to unravel it themselves. It’s kind of like reading a detective story, you get a clue, you follow that.”

He’s right, I think.

Now, on a related issue, brought to my attention by an RCA reader, I ask your help: Have you been in museums recently that have removed labels altogether? I’ve written in The Wall Street Journal and here about the Worcester Museum of Art, which removed the labels in its Old Master galleries. The public didn’t like it. But theory is that this forces the visitor to look at the art, rather than the label.

I’d love to know of additional examples. Please leave a comment or send a message to me via the “Contact” link at the top of this website.

Many American museums ignore Christmas–except for the cards and gifts they sell in their shops and, sometimes, secular decorations. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn today of a new effort at the National Gallery in London.

Home, as you all know, to one of the greatest painting collections in the world, all dating from the 13th to the early 20th centuries, the NG has started a four-week series of four short videos to guide visitors through the museum this month on, of all things, angels. They call it “The Angel Trail.”

The videos, only one of which has been released, are posted on the National Gallery You Tube channel. In less than four minutes, curators and the NG’s new director Gabriele Finaldi, discuss how prevalent angels are in art history, and not just in Nativity scenes. Angels are present in many kinds of pictures. through the Baroque period (at least).

The video ends with an invitation to take The Angel Trail on your own visit to the NG. Or, you can use the pictures reproduced on the web here, to look from home. The second part of this short series will be released this coming Friday, and the next two on subsequent Fridays.

In years past, I think, the NG has also offered a Nativities Trail. (In fact, it has a lot of trails.)

While I sampling the Angel video, I had a look at some of the NG’s longer videos–one on Velasquez, for example, and they are delightful too. Serious but not boring. Full of information. Well done, NG!

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery