Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

Exhibitions To See This Spring

vmfa2-ManetAs usual for the past few years, I also compiled a list of about 30 exhibitions at museums around the country that are on view now or will be on view this spring and summer for The New York Times‘s Museums special section.

That’s not so easy. I look at hundreds of exhibition descriptions and images, and I strive to choose a balance to appeal to many tastes. So there’s always a mix of Old Masters (though few this year), 19th Century European, American, Asian and modern and contemporary art. Sometime I throw in a manuscript exhibit if there’s a good one.

Here’s a link to the list this year.  It’s accompanied by a well-worth-seeing slide show of sixteen images.

I’ve pasted one more here that’s not in the slide show, a Manet that goes on view in Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow.

Courtesy of the VMFA

Why Otis Kaye?

OK-DJIA-VuLast week, The Wall Street Journal published my review of a little show up at the New Britain Museum of American Art: paintings by Otis Kaye. Kaye (1885-1974) is not very well known–in fact, that’s how I began my review. I commend the New Britain museum for taking the show, which was organized, oddly enough, by James M. Bradburne, the departing director of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

Bradburne had learned of Kaye when the Palazzo Strozzi presented Art and Illusion, a survey of trompe l’oeil from antiquity to the present, in 2009 (which I wrote about here).

The New Britain museum knew there’d be little or no name recognition, but no matter. In today’s environment and drive to get people in the door, it was taking a chance. Someone gave the exhibit a title that may, or may not, help: Otis Kaye: Money, Mystery, and Mastery. His subject was money.

Here’s a link to my review.

Kaye is an odd duck and but for his proficiency in painting he might be categorized as an outsider artist. He certainly didn’t mix in the art world and he painted mostly for himself.

OK-EasyComeAs it says in the catalogue:

…Kaye told and retold the story of his life in trompe l’oeil. Every work is filled with visual puns, one-liners, and clues to the events that marked—and often scarred—his life. For Kaye, each painting served as a comment, a moral statement, a catharsis, a reflection, and a reconstruction of a chaotic, capricious, and seemingly immoral world in which everything could be bought, sold, and lost in a continuing game of chance.

Museumgoers who typically speed through galleries spending a few seconds looking at a picture will miss Kaye’s genius. But, anecdotally, people seem to get that. While I was in New Britain I watched people spend several minutes with some of his paintings. I overheard comments like “All of these images seem to tell a story” and “there’s a lot in this painting.” It is true, too, that the public tends to like trompe l’oeil paintings; they are fun to view.

I describe some elements of a few paintings, including the two I’ve posted here (D’-JIA-VU? at top and Easy Come, Easy Go below), but there’s usually more in each and every one of the works. For example, in the comparatively simple Nickel Dime Securities (also described in the review), I had to leave out that a ticket he painted promises “ON THE LAST OF OCT. 1929 / $1.00 / NORMAN OIL CO / WILL PAY TO / THE BEARER / MAYBE IF WE / HAVE MONEY / $1.00 DOLLAR.” That date is two days after the ’29 crash on Wall Street.

You just have to keep looking.

Ok, Kaye is not a master artist. But he is a good one and should  be better known.

There’s another reason to like the NBMAA (which I’ve both criticized and praised in the past) and I’ll be back with pictures of that reason in the next day or so.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the New Britain Museum of American Art

“Provocative Intervention” In Dulwich’s Galleries

The other day, the Dulwich Picture Gallery announced a 2015 program with “an intervention in the Gallery’s permanent collection offering a provocative challenge to the public.” And what could that be?

Made in ChinaRather provocatively, it’s an exhibition called Made in China, and it’s described this way in the press release, as

…a unique intervention that questions the significance and value of the ‘original’ work of art. ‘Made in China: A Doug Fishbone Project’ (10 February–26 July 2015), will see one of the paintings in Dulwich’s collection removed from its frame and replaced with a replica, the identity of which will be concealed. Conceptual artist Doug Fishbone has selected the work and commissioned a replica from one of China’s numerous exporters of handmade oil paintings. In a Gallery context it is entirely plausible that such a replica, presented as an original, be taken as such without question – where then does a painting’s identity, value and authorship reside? ….

In the exhibition description, the Dulwich says the point is to get people to take a closer look at the collection–well, that’s the goal of every art museum, or should be: “Test your discerning eye and tell us which painting you think it is.” The description continues:

Many Old Master painters, from Titian to Rubens, encouraged the copying of their work either in their workshops by apprentices or by independent copyists. There are several examples in Dulwich’s collection including workshop paintings such as Venus and Adonis and copies painted from the original by artists visiting the Gallery such as Constable’s copy of Ruisdael’s Windmills. Today, famous paintings are being reproduced in the millions with China dominating this export market.

…Winning answers will be entered into a draw to win one of five print-on-demand reproductions of chosen works in the Gallery’s collection. The answer will be revealed on 28 April …

There’s a video explanation (or trailer) here.

Is a good idea? I certainly agree with the goal. Here’s the problem, dug out by The Independent:

Close to 2,000 visit the south London gallery a week during a temporary exhibition, which tumbles to just 200 for just the permanent collection.

Over at The Guardian, though, critic Jonathan Jones takes a dim view of the exercise:

…It will confuse the public, undermine the pleasure of looking at the great paintings on its walls, and replace the joy of learning about art with a glib postmodern game that is pretentious and destructive….

…The easy claim that replicas are just as good as the real thing and no one can tell them apart anyway is now a hackneyed idea, recently wheeled out like the most boring of dinner party bons mots when the V&A reopened its Renaissance cast court….

…It’s shallow and trite to misunderstand the V&A’s amazing casts as better than the real thing when what they really do is supplement and contextualise this museum’s great collection of original works.

It is equally daft to think a hidden fake adds to the interest of Dulwich picture gallery’s paintings. The anxiety it creates can only detract from a genuine experience of the collection. Museums should not join in the moronic celebration of the replica. Their job is to preserve originals, and make those accessible. Art only matters when it is the real thing.

 I find Jones’s comments a bit glib. I don’t know if anyone ever said the V&A’s casts were “better than the real thing,” but even if they did I don’t think one can make the leap that the Dulwich is doing something at all similar. It’s showing one replica, but not saying it’s as good as, let alone better than, the real thing. As least that was my read.
However, I also think it’s a stretch to think that this intervention will do much to draw more people to the permanent collection galleries–and any gain would surely be temporary.

Nonetheless, I support the goal.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Dulwich Picture Gallery 

Picturing Mary: It Could Have Gone Another Way

Madonna_of_the_BookIs there a woman who was painted more frequently in all of Western art than Mary? If so, I don’t know of her. So many great artists painted her, in many situations, poses, costumes and guises.

That was the rich territory the National Museum of Women in the Arts chose to explore in its current exhibition, Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea. And although it’s not the show I conjured in my mind when I heard the title–a Leonardo side-by-side with a Raphael, a Michelangelo, a Fra Angelico, a Bellini, a Titian, and so on–it’s a mind-stretching exhibition. As I write in my review, The Madonna’s Many Faces, which is published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, the NMWA chose, in an attempt to demonstrate the pervasiveness of Mary’s image, to include Renaissance and Baroque works “made for wealthy patrons in sophisticated cities and for humble communities in provincial outposts.”

111Fair enough. But the stars are the crystalline Botticelli, Madonna of the Book (at right ), the mysterious Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Fra Filippo Lippi’s “Madonna and Child” (c. 1466-69), which was painted for the Medicis, plus works on paper by Durer and Rembrandt.
I also enjoyed “meeting” a couple of works I’d never seen before, such as Madonna and Child (c. 1450) by an unnamed artist known as the Master of the Winking Eyes (at left).

Of the four female artists whose work is here—Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Orsola Maddalena Caccia and Elisabetta Sirani—I chose to highlight Anguissola’s Self-Portrait at the Easel, the best business card I’ve seen in a while. It’s on loan from the Muzeum-Zamek in ŁaÅ„cut, Poland, an institution that I’m pretty sure I will never get to.

In Washington, with so many people now unfamiliar with Mary, the NMWH has provided an introductory gallery, explaining a few symbols that artists employed–lambs for Christ, lillies for purity, and so on. It has has posted 14 videos, and interactive preview of the exhibit and online exhibition of more works featuring Mary.

For this museum, it’s an ambitious exhibit that I hope is drawing many visitors.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the NMWA

On The Art Movie Docket: Matisse and…

“Matisse From Tate Modern and MoMA” is the latest of Exhibition on Screen’s movies about art exhibitions to open here in the U.S. It’s a one-night only event on Jan. 13 at theaters nationwide. Fathom Events is the distributor, and you can find out where it is nearest you right here.

The movie is 90 minutes long, and it’s about the cutouts show now at MoMA. You can see the preview on YouTube, which tells the five essential things you matisseshould know about Matisse’s cutouts. Here’s the billing from the email I received for a preview (which I can’t attend, unfortunately):

This “exhibition on screen” provides viewers with a virtual tour of the exhibition with the addition of illuminating archival materials and commentary from Nicholas Serota, Glenn Lowry, curators, conservators, and some who knew the artist in his final years. For those unable to see the show and for those who have and want to know more, the film takes the audience behind the scenes with unprecedented access and into the galleries.

If it it’l like the one of Manet, which I did see, that is a fair description.

This all made me wonder how Exhibitions On Screen was faring–I wrote about Phil Grabsky and his venture in spring 2013 here and for The Wall Street Journal. Well, I guess the answer is good enough, because after Matisse four more such movies will be shown here in 2015. They are “Rembrandt: The Late Works,” “Vincent van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing,” “The Impressionists,” and “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” More details here.

To me, they are supplementary to seeing an exhibit, not a substitute–except when you can’t get to the real thing.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Getty ImagesÂ