Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

“Bronze” — A Reprise, Sort Of

PicassoIn 2012, the Royal Academy in London had a total winner on its hands, in my opinion, with Bronze, an exhibition of about 150 bronzes from all over the world, dating from 5,000 years ago to the present. Robert Mnuchin, the dealer, thought so too:

We were struck by the dazzling breadth of inventiveness and the vast range of visual effects at play in the five centuries of bronze objects that the show brought together. After returning to New York, we could not get the show out of our heads. When we learned the exhibition would not be traveling outside of London, we decided that the experience of Bronze was one that New York audiences simply should not have to miss. We asked ourselves what we could do that would reflect the level of quality of the London show, concluding that we would be most successful if we focused on masterworks from the twentieth century.

And then they hired David Ekserdjian, curator of the RA show, to co-curate and write an essay for the exhibition that opened last week at Mnuchin: Casting Modernity: Bronze in the XXth Century.

MatisseNudeThis is one of the gallery shows that a museum would be proud to do. It includes many borrowed works that are presumably not for sale, as well as bronzes you can buy, assuming you have the wherewithal. The first room for example, contains Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande), above at right, from The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Trust and all five of Matisse’s Jeannettes (below right), borrowed from Glenstone, the private museum of Mitchell Rales. Matisses Grand nu assis (at left), from a private collection, is also there.

It also includes works by Twombly, David Smith, Lichtenstein, Bourgeois, Arp, Koons, de Kooning and others. There are more than 30 works in all.

Ekserdjian writes:

This extraordinarily bold hanging sculpture best illustrates the enormous distance that separates the artistic universe of the close of the millennium from Rodin’s world. It goes without saying that all these pieces have been carefully chosen — in the first instance — for their intrinsic artistic merits. Nevertheless, seen as a whole they cannot fail to suggest all sorts of intriguing and illuminating alliances and even rivalries both stylistic and perhaps especially thematic.

MatisseJeanettesEkserdjian categorizes these bronzes as he did for the RA show, analyzing them by grouping them as heads, animals and so on. With fewer objects, this — to me — is a little less satisfying, not more. Art history is never simple. Indeed, the essay concludes:

…the gulf that separates Rodin’s Thinker from Nauman’s Untitled (Hand Circle) is a vast one. What is more, the intervening works and decades cannot be reduced to anything approximating a simple formulaic progression. On the contrary, it is the twists and turns — the absence of a linear history — that make the panorama of bronze sculpture in the twentieth century so boundlessly fascinating. As a result, no anthology — even when it brings together so many stunning pieces — can hope to be entirely representative, but it can instead encourage us to see both the familiar and the unexpected in a new light. For each of us, which bronzes fall into which of those categories will be very different, but even the best informed will be bound to learn from the experience…

The exhibit will be on view until June 7. If you are in the neighborhood of East 78th Street, a visit would be well worth it.

Photo Credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski  

Way Beyond Museum Walls: A Driving Tour

Many museums these days say they want to meet people where they are — to go beyond their walls. And where are a lot of people but in their cars?

image004That may or may not have been the motivation of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Ct., when it developed its newest initiative, but I thought would give a little visibility to it anyway: To accompany its exhibition Pasture to Pond: Connecticut Impressionism, which runs through June 22, the Bruce has developed a guided driving tour, complete with map,  of some of the scenes around the state that are featured in the paintings in the show.

It’s using a system called Guide by Cell to get people to experience art “beyond the exhibition, indeed beyond the Museum’s doors, into our local towns and villages to further the appreciation and understanding highlighted in this show that Connecticut was a birthplace of American Impressionism.”

According to the press release:

The driving tour begins at the Bruce Museum and ends at Greenwich Point Park, highlighting five different locations over a distance of about 12 miles. Active driving time is approximately 30 minutes. The guide and map will be available in the gallery to exhibition participants, as well as on the Museum’s website at brucemuseum.org. All of the Museum’s Guide by Cell programs are generously underwritten by Nat and Lucy Day.

The release calls this “a new foray into the Museum’s use of the Guide by Cell system,” which implies that its in-museum cell tours use the same system — and that’s good because presumably museum-goers will already be familiar with it. Guide by Cell is new to me — I’ve actually never used a cell phone guide in a museum — but it calls itself a leading supplier of guides to cultural institutions.

Photo Credit: October Morning, 1919, by Leonard Ochtman, courtesy of the Bruce Museum

Toronto’s Good Idea: “Just Like Me”

24890-660Every now and then I come across an idea that’s worth singling out, and the Art Gallery of Ontario has one: it’s an exhibit of paintings and sculptures featuring children designed to enchant children. It’s called Just Like Me: Explore, Imagine, Create; it’s the first of a series, and it includes 23 paintings, sculptures and photographs from the AGO’s European, Canadian, Inuit and photography collections, along with “multisensory activities and art books to inspire adults and children to meaningfully engage with art.” It’s shown in a space called The Kids’ Gallery.

First, a hat tip to the Toronto Star, which is where I noticed it last December — in a short article headlined Art Gallery o. f Ontario to launch children’s exhibition series. I nearly forgot about it, and when I returned to look recently I was pleased to discover that the exhibition lasts until this coming December 8.

In the press release announcing this initiative, the AGO explained:

Just Like Me: Explore, Imagine, Create makes art easy for young ones to enjoy with kid-friendly text panels and works hung at child height. The exhibition features images and paintings of children from diverse periods and cultures, encouraging young ones to reflect on the similarities and differences between their lives and those of families in other times and places.

22722-660The exhibition is curated by Lloyd DeWitt, curator of European art at the AGO. According to DeWitt, “Kids are often fascinated by images of other kids. We’re gathering the greatest works from the AGO collection that feature children as subjects in order to offer our youngest visitors both a mirror to see themselves in the art, and a window to peer into other eras and cultures.”

The AGO invites families to learn, play and rest inside The Kids’ Gallery with books, drawing and dress-up activities. Exhibition-inspired costumes and props are available for visitors to design, dress up and pose for their own portraits. Families are encouraged to post their photographs on Instagram with the #AGOkidsgallery hashtag to see their portrait appear on a screen in the space. The Kids’ Gallery activity centre also includes art books and a drawing station for budding artists inspired by the exhibited works.

Among the works in the show are the two posted here: Boy Holding a Torch, c 1692, by Godfried Schalcken, and Baldwin Street, Toronto, by Martin Lambeth, c 1958.

Sight unseen, I like this exhibition, at least in its idea — I’d welcome comments from anyone who has been to Toronto and seen it. The challenge for the series is coming up with more good exhibition ideas that don’t pander.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the AGO

 

Can You Discern What Is A Caravaggio And What Isn’t?

FortuneTellerIf experts can’t agree, I probably can’t tell (though I might have an opinion). Nonetheless, in this age of crowd-sourcing virtually everything that can be crowd-sourced, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is asking its visitors to answer that question.

Since Apr. 12, the museum has presented a small exhibit of four paintings by the artist in Visiting Masterpieces: Caravaggio and Connoisseurship. Two, Fortune Teller (c 1594–95) and Fra Antonio Martelli, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Malta (c 1608), are accepted as by the master — though as the museum says they once were not. Experts are divided, however, on the other two – Maffeo Barberini (c 1596) and Saint Francis in Meditation (c 1595).

So, the MFA says, it invites visitors to “employ the analytical thinking of experts and decide for themselves: which could be true Caravaggios? Visitors are encouraged to tweet their opinions using the hashtag #TrueCaravaggio and follow @mfaboston for conversation about the paintings.” I found little on Twitter last night, just these tweets:

And a few tweets by others.  But then again, I’m not on Twitter and rarely go there, so perhaps I missed some. But I like this exhibit — more details about it are here — for a couple of reasons, mainly the focus on connoisseurship and the small size, which invites interested people to linger. To me, the votes — or discussions on Twitter — are just add-ons. If they create more excitement, so be it. I hope there’s something in the galleries, though, to show the actual split in professional opinion — and precisely why. I’d also like to know what the MFA’s paintings curators think.

Photo Credit: The Fortune Teller, Courtesy of the Capitoline Museums via the MFA

Fashion Attracts Record Visitors Everywhere

Winterthur, the great palace of American decorative Arts in Delaware, is suddenly the belle of the ball thanks to British fashion. And television.

DowntonAbbeySince the March 1 opening of its Costumes of Downton Abbey exhibit, some 550 visitors per day, on average, have been arriving, “exceeding all attendance records maintained since Winterthur opened in 1951,” Liz Farrell, the museum spokeswoman says. Last year at this time, Winterthur was presenting a wonderful exhibit that I wrote about for The Wall Street Journal, Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience, but stellar as it was, maps drew an average of 100 visitors per day.

Says Farrell: “The month of March 2014’s 12,233 visitors to Costumes of Downton Abbey surpasses the previous record set following the June 17, 2001, dedication of Enchanted Woods (7,594 visitors).” Winterthur’s previous record exhibition was Fashion in Film in 2006 – 2007, which drew 307 visitors per day. Also, “lectures are selling out of the 300-seat Copeland Lecture Hall.”

I didn’t ask, but I would bet that Winterthur’s visitors are mostly women, who’ve always been the most ardent fans of decorative arts. So costumes are a natural.

And they are thrilled, naturally — it isn’t easy for a museum that’s even slightly off the beaten path to go beyond its natural, local constituency.

Winterthur’s experience also follows patterns elsewhere — exhibits of clothes by Alexander McQueen, Yves St. Laurent, and other fashion stars also set records at various museums. Last year’s PUNK: Chaos to Couture at the Metropolitan Museum was No. 10 on The Art Newspaper‘s annual list of most-attended museum exhibitions.

So I don’t see this trend to fashion shows ending; the challenge for art museums is to keep them grounded with a thesis, even when they are monographic. The apogee on that score, at least recently, would have to be Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, which was originated by Gloria Groom at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Winterthur