Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

At The Philbrook: Retrospective For A No-Longer-Needed Exhibition

1954_12_PressThis Sunday, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa opens what I think should be a fascinating show: IMPACT: The Philbrook Indian Annual. It’s a retrospective on the competition the Philbrook held for 33 years, from 1946 to 1979, open to Native American artists. The museum says that

Over the years nearly 1,000 artists from 200 Native American communities entered almost 4,000 works of art for judging, exhibition, awards, and sale. The Philbrook Indian Annual played a pivotal role in the definition of twentieth-century Native American fine art through several key aspects of the competition’s design…

It stopped before I was paying much, if any, attention to Indian art–but I can believe that the month-long Annual played an important role in the recognition of the value of Indian art. Here are some aspects of the annual that made it different, drawn from the press release:

  • The Philbrook Indian Annual focused on paintings, in a variety of styles, while other juried shows of the era emphasized traditional Native art forms like pottery and basketry.
  • It was a juried exhibition, not an outdoor festival.
  • Jurors were mostly other Native American artists reviewing the work of their peers, rather than exclusively non-Native art critics evaluating work emerging from Native American communities.
  • It sparked a significant critical dialogue surrounding the definition of Native art: what it was and what it should be,  In 1958 Philbrook became the site of a national conversation about this subject when judges rejected a painting by Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe (1915–1983). They thought it was too contemporary to be Indian art. (His Dance of the Heyoka, c.1954, is above left, while  W. Richard “Dick” West, Sr.’s Water Serpent, c, 1951, is at right, below.)

Howe, who criticized the panel for its narrow view, catalyzed the Philbrook to create a new category for Non-Traditional Painting the following year, 1959.

1951_11_PressThe Philbrook’s curator Christina E. Burke organized IMPACT, drawing from the Philbrook’s permanent collection. As the release notes:

The Annual helped shape the Philbrook collection into one of the finest surveys of twentieth century Native American art in the world. From the Museum’s announcement in 1938, Philbrook received important collections of such traditional Native objects as beadwork, pottery, textiles, and baskets from donors like, Roberta Campbell Lawson and Clark Field.

But I still wondered why the Philbrook discontinued the Annual. Here’s what they said:

By then [1979] the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe had opened in 1962; major museums had begun to include Native American art in their exhibitions and galleries; and media, collectors, and museum professionals began recognizing Native artists for their fine art over traditional art forms. Philbrook made its impact on Native American art through the Annual during those 33 years and encouragingly created its own obsolescence when the conversation surrounding Native American art began to evolve. We continue our emphasis on Native American fine art today through our exhibitions and extensive permanent collections at both Philbrook locations.

Clearly, what constitutes Native American art versus contemporary art continues today, at museums like the Peabody Essex and the Brooklyn Museum. The Annual may not have lost its relevance.

But there’s some good news: IMPACT may travel, the museum says.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Philbrook

Five Questions For Leonard Lauder As The Met Reveals His Cubist Collection

So this week the art world and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s* members are getting a first look at the Leonard Lauder Cubist collection–assembled over the past 40 years. The masterpieces and seminal works he has purchased amount to the best private Cubist collection in existence, by design:  He always has a museum gift in mind as he collects. When I spoke with him in 2012, he said: “Many people collect to possess. I collect to preserve, and no sooner do I have a collection put together than I am looking for a home for it in a public institution.”

TerraceOftheHotelMistralThat belies reality, a little–he has told me that it’s long before he starts looking for a museum that he thinks about the coherence and importance of a collection he’s assembling. That quote came from a visit I made to him to discuss his postcard collection, much of which he gave to the MFA-Boston.  I wrote about it in a short piece for New Yorker.com, which relates–among other things–how he became a collector as a child.

More recently, but before he was giving interviews for the big Cubist reveal, I asked Lauder some questions via email. most of which I’ve  not seen asked or answered elsewhere. Here are his replies.

Which purchase/which painting convinced you to focus on Cubism, why and when was that? 

The picture that prompted me to focus on Cubism in a big way, and not just as part of a modernist collection, was Picasso’s Scallop Shell (Notre Avenir est dans l’air), which I acquired in 1980. But it is was a few years later, while attending a lecture by Kirk Varnedoe at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, that the importance of this picture for my future collecting really hit me. The slide of it was projected on the screen and Kirk discussed it at length and I learned things about it that inspired me to dig even deeper into Cubism. I had bought it from the Leigh and Mary Block Collection, when it had been partially dispersed and I realized that if I could obtain pictures of this quality I was going to keep them together. As it happens, not that many people were collecting cubism at that time: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism were driving the market.

What was your first purchase of a Cubist work? Does it remain in the collection, or was it sold? Has there been much selling, to refine the collection?

I bought two drawings by Fernand Léger in the early months of 1976: Drawing for the “Staircase”, 1913, and Study for the “Aviateur”, 1920. The first was a beautiful gouache and oil on paper, from his famous pre-war “Contrasts of Forms” series and the second, a watercolor in his postwar Purist period style that really grabbed me for its clean lines and precise design. (I have a few Legers from the early 1920s, and think of Purism as the last moment in the original heroic years of Cubism.)

I have sold very few of my Cubist works– I think I can count them on one hand, and only when I wanted to refine the collection, or in another case, because I was feeling financially pressed at the time.

You have two works from the historic first show of Cubism in 1908–when did you get them, and what are the stories behind their purchases? (E.g., were they hard to find, were many other collectors after them? Etc.)

The Terrace of the Hotel Mistral, 1907, was in a fine American private collection for years–the Werner and Margaret Josten collection. It was the dealer Stephen Mazoh who brought it to my attention in 1994. Since I was already known by then as a collector of Cubism, dealers often put me on the list to contact–maybe even the top of the list. This was not a picture that I had identified and chased as was often the case, but one that came to me. As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was: Braque’s last fauve, first proto-Cubist picture, and that it was in the famous show. Trees at L’Estaque, the second picture that I own that was in the historic Kahnweiler show and part of the breakthrough landscapes by Braque of “little cubes” (as the critics called them), came from the Douglas Cooper estate, the majority of which I had purchased in late 1986.

ScallopShellWhich work had the place of honor in your apartment–and why?

They are equally honored. But the one that takes up the largest wall area is Léger’s The Typographer, (1918-1919), simply because it is by far the largest in scale, a scale unusual for a Cubist picture.

What will hang in your apartment when the exhibition is up at the Met?

Before I started to collect Cubism, I had started to acquire works by German and Austrian modernists. I still have several painting and drawings from this earlier phase of my collecting and those will take pride of place while the works are on exhibition at the MMA. As you know, I have also bought fabulous modern posters over the years, from the first half of the twentieth century. I also intend to hang some works by my fiancé, Judy Ellis Glickman, who is an acclaimed photographer.

The exhibition, which opens on October 20, presents 81 works of art. You can bet they will be a treat to see.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum

*I consult to a foundation that support the Met

A Participatory Exhibit I Can Applaud (I Think)

WPhillipsContrary to some belief out there, I’m not against all participatory, experiential activities in art museums. (I don’t believe museums should be as quiet as cathedrals, either, but that’s another post.) Here’s a participartory program that sounds, in advance, without my being there, like a good one.

It’s at the Freer-Sackler Galleries* in Washington: in conjunction with the opening on Saturday of Unearthing Arabia: The Archaeological Adventures of Wendell Phillips and “International Archaeology Day” on Oct. 18, the museum has scheduled a slew of special events running from Oct. 12-18.

For example, on the 18th, in a family-day activity, visitors can:

…discover what it’s like to work on an archaeological dig in the remote deserts of Arabia. At 1:15 pm, join docents in the exhibition to read original records and see treasures from an actual expedition in the 1950s. At 2 pm, families are invited to explore the exhibition and then participate in a hands-on learning project in the ImaginAsia classroom. At 3:15 pm, meet archaeologist Zaydoon Zaid, who has led expeditions in Yemen and was an advisor for Unearthing Arabia.

I love that they are looking at original handwritten notebooks, photographs,  and film clips from these excavations in Yemen, where Phillips (pictured at right) dug during a massive expedition in the 1950s.

Outside the museum–try envisioning this–the Freer-Sackler has created:

…Washington’s first interactive scratch-off billboards, featuring images of Yemeni sand dunes that can be “excavated” to reveal treasures and images from the exhibition…[thus giving]…Washington commuters a chance to play the archaeologist in everyday life. The advertisements will go up Oct. 13 in bus shelters at 11th and E streets N.W. and Seventh and H streets N.W. and will remain on view during the initial weeks of the exhibition. A limited edition of postcard-sized versions will be available at the Sackler for budding expedition leaders to take home as a complimentary memento.

Lion=TimnaThat’s an experiment–and I’m not sure it’ll work, but hey, why not? At least it is about the excavated artifacts.

Unearthing Arabia is showing some wonderful artifacts from the dig, of course. There will be “a pair of striding Hellenistic bronze lions surmounted by a boyish rider… known as the ‘Lions of Timna,’” (at left) as well as an alabaster head of a young woman whose eyebrows are made of lapis lazuli, a gold necklace, carved incense burners, funerary sculpture and so on.

In an email to the press, the Freer calls the exhibit “multisensory,” and so I asked what that meant. I learned from the press office that it meant they were going beyond traditional wall labels:

…we wanted to rely more on video and sound [to] recreate the dramatic mood of Wendell’s memoirs and some of the sights/sounds of the expedition. (Lots of video is very unusual for us, we’re normally highly object-based).  The walls in the galleries are used for large-scale, almost floor-to-ceiling projections that combine quotes, original video, soundtrack, animated lines from his field diaries and telegrams, and B&W and color photographs in a moving, shifting cinematic video.

On the programming side, our educational team will set up an occasional station with sand and sherds from the museum’s study collections,  so that visitors can use real archaeological tools and get their hands a little dirty.

Wendell’s dime-store novel, Sheba’s Buried City, is also part of the mix.

What makes this better than some so-called experiential or participatory exhibits? The art, it seems to me, is at the center here; the rest is designed to engage people with the art.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Freer-Sackler

* I consult to a foundation that supports the Freer-Sackler

 

 

“Sculpture Victorious,” Yes, But In What Way?

DameAliceI was recently at the Yale Center for British Art, where Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837-1901, is on view through Nov. 30. It’s a fascinating exhibition in many respects, bringing together a very diverse assemblage of objects from a very diverse group of lenders.

Looking at one piece, an idealized, imaginary portrait of the first earl of Winchester borrowed from the House of Lords, Michael Hatt, an art history professor at the University of Warwick who is one of three curators of the show, said to me: “It is a mix of history and fantasy, as almost everything in this exhibition is.”

In fact, a few sculptures–defined for this show quite broadly (to include medals and coins, for example) are so quirky they could almost be called follies. (See, for example, “A Royal Game,” an imaginary game of chess between Elizabeth I and Phillip II of Spain, by William Reynolds-Stephens from the collection of Tate Britain.)

But the point of this exhibit, as I write in a review published in today’s Wall Street Journal, was that these artworks served the British empire:

Co-organized by Tate Britain, “Sculpture Victorious” demonstrates how the British used sculpture—as public monuments, in public institutions, at exhibitions like those in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, and in coins, medals and other popular reproductions—to proclaim their political power and industrial prowess.

And so Sculpture Victorious is less about art and more about history, invention and craft.

That does not mean, however, that some of these pieces aren’t fascinating to look at. In fact, the exhibition serves as a reminder that exhibitions can, and often do, have more than one function.

That’s Dame Alice Owen (detail), 1897, by George Frampton, above.

Photo Credit: Courtesy, YCBA

Matisse Cut-Outs, Records, And Making Art Seem Scarce

103698Back in late June, the Museum of Modern Art bought a quarter-page ad on page 2 of the Weekend section of The New York Times; it ran the full length of the left edge. It caught my eye because it announced that timed tickets were on sale as of that day for Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, which opens on Oct. 12.

The ad did not, btw, list prices for the tickets — just the web address for purchases — but MoMA simply charges general admission for exhibitions, with no added tab. General adult admission is $25.

At the time, I thought it was a bit premature to be selling these tickets. MoMA was probably trying to create scarcity, which drives up prices — not relevant in this case — and to cause that crazy phenomenon called FOMO — fear of missing out. (It worked incredibly well for MoMA last year with Rain Room.)

This instance, so far, it hasn’t. Today, when I sampled the website for tickets, I was able to access tickets for every date I tried and for virtually all times.

But I doubt it will matter. MoMA will undoubtedly have a hit on its hands: these works are, of course, gorgeous. Matisse is a brand name.

Besides, this show has a track record. This week, the Tate announced that it was its best draw ever:

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs received 562,622 visitors making it the most popular exhibition ever held at Tate and the first to receive over half a million people.

Matisse Picasso at Tate Modern previously held the record as Tate’s most visited exhibition with 467,166 visitors in 2002. This is followed by the Damien Hirst exhibition with 463,087 visitors in 2012. Open for five months from 17 April to 7 September this year, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs was seen by 3,907 visitors each day.

It will be interesting to see if New York beats London.

Even if early buying didn’t work, MoMA will likely pick up new members once this exhibit receives its due. Members don’t need timed tickets and may enter the show whenever they choose.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MoMA