Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

Delaware Museum Sells More Art

Homer-MilkingTimeThe Delaware Art Museum issued a statement late yesterday saying that it had sold its beautiful Winslow Homer, Milking Time (at right), and a painting by Andrew Wyeth,  Arthur Cleveland, to pay off its debts.

That makes four art works sold to pay for bad mistakes (overexpansion, imo) by the museum’s board and administration. You’ll remember that the museum has already auctioned off William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, which fetched £2.5 million in London, and Alexander Calder’s Black Crescent. The Calder was sold privately, as were the two paintings just deaccessioned.

Said the release:

The sales mark the end of a process, announced in March 2014, to protect the Museum from closure by retiring its $19.8 million bond debt….No works of art acquired through gift or bequest were sold. With these sales, the Museum was able to fully repay the debt in September 2014 without significantly depleting its endowment—a vital source of funds that allows the Museum to continue to provide its community with access to collections, quality exhibitions, and important educational programs.

“Today, we close one of the most difficult chapters in the story of the Delaware Art Museum,” said Delaware Art Museum CEO Mike Miller. “We reached our most important goal—keeping the Museum open and thriving. We are very grateful for those who have understood the arduous and complex decisions that we encountered during this long and challenging phase. There has been overwhelming and unyielding support for protecting and preserving this beautiful Museum for our community.”

Many questions remain. The museum did not say whether the new sales would do anything to replenish its endowment, which was was drawn down to meet debt payment deadlines. Further, the museum remains without a director. And the museum was sanctioned by its peers last year; what will it do to try to rejoin the art museum community? And when?

 

The Broad Museum Answers Back

Several days ago, I asked here if any other art museums in the U.S. were spending as much money buying art as the Crystal Bridges Museum. I had added up the announced purchases over the past year or so by Crystal Bridges and it came to more than $150 million.

Robert-Longo-Untitled-Fer-010I could think of only the Broad, which hasn’t opened yet, as a contender. This morning, I received an email from the Broad announcing “more than 50 new artworks added to the Broad collection in anticipation of the September 20 opening.”

But I still think CB is spending more. That’s because:

Most of the additions to the 2,000-work Broad collection built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad are artworks that were acquired within a year of the artist producing them, reflecting the museum’s commitment to build a dynamic collection of the most comprehensive and current contemporary art.

Interestingly, though, the names at the top of the release are all well-known. They include Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami (with “the largest painting in the Broad collection”), John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool and Damien Hirst, a 1954 combine by Robert Rauschenberg and three sculptures by Cy Twombly. Less-known Goshka Macuga and Ella Kruglyanskaya were also cited.

In its 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Broad will install for its inaugural show about 250 works from the 2,050 or so it owns.

Some of the new highlights:

  • Mehretu’s Invisible Sun (algorithm 8, fable form), 2015, an ink-and-acrylic-on-canvas piece “currently on view at the Art Basel art fair in Switzerland.”
  • Robert Longo’s Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014), a charcoal drawing of the Ferguson, Mo. police line last year, after the shooting death of Michael Brown; pictured above.
  • Murakami’s 82-foot-long and 10-foot-high In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow.
  • Macuga’s Death of Marxism, Women of all Lands Unite, Suit for Tichý 4 and Suit for Tichý 5.
  • Kruglyanskaya’s Girl on a Hot Day, 2015.
  • Hirst’s Fear, 2002 (thousands of dead flies thickly encrusted in resin)
  • Wool’s Untitled, 2015, the 20th work by Wool added to the collection
  • John Currin’s Maenads, 2015
  • Ruscha’s BLISS BUCKET, 2010; JET BABY, 2011; PERIODS, 2013; WALL ROCKET, 2013; and HISTORY KIDS, 2013 (five lithographs)
  • Koons’s Hulk (Organ)
  • Baldessari’s Pictures & Scripts: Honey – what words come to mind?, 2015; Horizontal Men, 1984; plus a full set of screenprints from his 2012 Eight Soups series (bringing the collection’s Baldessari holdings to 40 works spanning nearly 50 years).
  • Twombly’s three sculptures brings the collection’s holdings in work by Twombly to 22.

More pictures are here.

Photo Credit: Petzel Gallery via The Guardian

Crystal Bridges Makes A Few Announcments

d4913730xWhen it come to art purchases, there could  be a “Crystal Bridges” watch–it seems to me that the museum in Bentonville built largely with Alice Walton’s and the Walton Family Foundation’s money is spending more money buying art than another other U.S. museum currently open to the public.

For a short item in tomorrow’s New York Times that is now online (and is a better, longer version than what will be in the print version), I disclose five more big purchases: two sculptures (including Quarantania, at left) and two paintings by Louise Bourgeois purchased through Cheim & Read (worth about $35- to $40 million, all told) and the Jasper Johns’ “Flag” that sold at Sotheby’s last fall for $36 million.

Going back to previous announcements, I totaled up the museum’s purchases over the last several months as costing about $150 million; I also mention a few other, undisclosed purchases that the museum has made, and I identify Alice Walton as the buyer of a big Rothko and a Bourgeois for her personal collection–so far. They may go to the museum, someday.

So, Eli Broad may be spending more–I don’t know–but his museum in Los Angeles doesn’t open until the fall. It may be, too, that Mitchell Rales, who owns Glenstone (currently closed), Peter Brandt, whose space in Connecticut is open by appointment, or another big art buyer is stashing things away in their private museums. But public? If another public museum is buying more art than CB, I’d like to know. (Not acquiring–i.e., by gift–buying.)

Read the item here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s 

 

The Brooklyn, The Whitney…Oh My! (Or, While I Was Away…)

Donna de SalvoI didn’t actually post here at RCA that I would be away for about a week around the Memorial Day weekend, so I am sure that it looked as if I was perhaps speechless last week when major announcements came out from the Brooklyn Museum* and the Whitney Museum. I was simply AWOL–in Spain, actually, taking advantage of the strong dollar.

I had a marvelous time viewing art in Madrid and nearby towns, and one visit is pertinent to those two aforementioned announcements.

Not the Brooklyn release, which named Anne Pasternak as successor to director Arnold Lehman, who is departing late this summer. Her appointment came as a surprise to me, but not a shock. I was sure that the trustees would pick a woman–the search committee was led by three women and Brooklyn’s chair, Elizabeth Sackler, has been a vocal supporter of women artists (her named space/program at the museum is devoted to feminist art). Pasternak has a strong record at Creative Time, which she has led for the past 20+ years. She has drawbacks, most notably the lack of museum management experience. But Brooklyn does have a long-time deputy director for operations plus many veteran curators.

There’s also her main focus on contemporary art, though I am told that she has a strong interest in Medieval and Renaissance art. too. Brooklyn, need anyone require reminding, is a universal museum. She must signal early that she embraces and cares about its entire collection, imho.

PrendergastI am sure that Pasternak knows that we’ll all be watching her moves very closely.

But my trip reminded me that the promotion of Donna De Salvo (above) to deputy director for international initiatives and senior curator at the Whitney, from chief curator and deputy director for programs, is also worth watching. Having just returned from Spain, I’ve not talked to a soul about this one–it may be that she was simply bumped upstairs to make room for Scott Rothkopf to get the chief curator’s post (her former job). I hope not.

The reason: De Salvo is supposed to gin up international partnerships and my many travels, including this one, always remind me that American art needs a bigger presence overseas. Sure, everyone knows Andy Warhol and more recently, because of either high prices paid for their works or their shock art, many people know Jeff Koons, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock (perhaps) and a few others. But Europeans and Asians still have little exposure to the breadth of American art.

In Spain, the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum has the strongest, biggest collection of American art. (It includes six Homers, four Hoppers, plus works by Church, Cole, O’Keeffe, Still, Sloan, Prendergast (as above) etc. etc.) At least that’s what my art historians have told me (which backs up my own experiences). It has even have the strongest American collection outside of the U.S., period.

I don’t know how De Salvo views her job–looks to me as if she can create it. But I would hope that she helps organize partnerships that sends our works overseas to provide a more complete picture of what American art actually is.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Whitney (top) and the Thyssen Bornemisza (bottom)

The Shocking Cooper Hewitt, Part Two

CH1Aside from the maltreatment of its beautiful historic building, which I wrote about here nearly three weeks ago, something else is deeply wrong with the new incarnation of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum: the display and the contextualization of the objects in the displays simply don’t measure up to minimal standards. To be sure, visually they are often attractive. But frequently they are very dumbed down, witless and perhaps even misleading.

I think the museum’s leadership meant well; I really do. But I think they misjudged their task and perhaps their CH4audience. As last time, when I posted pictures of current displays within the historic rooms, I will let you judge for yourself.

Here are four wall labels (apologies for the tilted pictures–I shot them with my phone and sometimes it was difficult, given the other people in the galleries, to stand in place where I could get a direct shot) about elements of design. They set the scene for displays on the second floor.

They are not in the order in which the galleries proceed–but then again, the galleries can be entered, as I recall, from at least two points, so I don’t think the labels were necessarily intended to be read sequentially.

CH3The displays themselves are a jumble; the objects are not arranged
chronologically or relationally. I am guessing that the objects in the cases were chosen simply to illustrate a theme–to show many objects that have, for example, patterns. It’s all very simple.

For evidence of these simple thematic displays you can see the pictures at the bottom of this post.

I know museums of all stripes are dealing with visitors, particularly younger visitors, whose education is substandard. Many, many public schools–and some private ones, I’d bet–have meager offerings in art or design.

CH2But the definitions I’ve posted here don’t provide much enlightenment. Is “a vocabulary of repetition, reflection and rotation” a clear definition of “Pattern” or is it jargon? And btw, designers do not “create an infinite variety of patterns”–they merely have the potential to do so.

You, dear reader, can find your own examples of imprecise or misleading language in these labels.

As for the themes on view, yes, you can see texture–or pattern, line, etc.–in some displays. But what else do you learn when a 1604 engraved English shoehorn is placed near an 1886 book of patterns open to an “Egyptian” page? Or a 2007 poster hung next to an 18th century Greek cushion cover? I don’t know.

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