Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

Hopper, Wowing Them In France, Also Goes 24 Hours

American art seems more and more welcome and appreciated in Europe, and around the world, nowadays. It has been a long time coming for art made before Abstract Expressionism.

arton2926-1d48eOne more bit of evidence: the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, which has brought together 164 of his 128 paintings, watercolors, engravings and illustrations. According to Next-Liberation, “Edward Hopper is a hit. So much so that, to cope with demand, the Paris retrospective was extended for six days, until February 3, with three days of continuous opening last weekend.” It’s drawing about 6,800 visitors a day – some 580,000 as of the date of the article.

The Grand Palais is projecting a final count of 700,000. Had that daily rate been achieved in the last rankings of The Art Newspaper, the Hopper show would have placed as the 9th most popular show of 2011. By gross attendance, its rank would have been higher.

These numbers far exceed those attained for the Hopper exhibit at the Tate in London in 2004. The number of tickets sold for that exhibit was about 420,000. (In a side note, Sheena Wagstaff, who curated that show, is now the contemporary art curator at the Met.)

Meanwhile, the review posted on CultureKiosque by Patricia Boccadoro called it a “magnificent exhibition” and said:

What is certainly true is that Hopper reshaped painting in the United States, his works not only inspiring film directors fromHitchcockto Wim Wenders, but also being reproduced in posters, post cards, and book covers, thus contributing greatly to a certain image of America still present in Europe today.

On the other hand, his work depresses her. She ends the review:

… He seems to take no pleasure in life, painting being merely an intellectual exercise, full of silent, stoic people, with no trace of joy or laughter. There’s sunlight, but no scent of sunshine, people, but none of the warmth of humanity.The admiration one feels upon leaving this exhibition is perhaps less for the genius of this artist whose works are scarcely uplifting, and more for the excellence and scope of the presentation, the first of its kind in France. Indeed, almost 130 of Hopper’s works have been brought together by the Grand Palais and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid in partnership with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a remarkable achievement.

No matter. As long as people look…

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Grand Palais

 

Manet’s Star Rises In London

The Manet portraiture exhibition, which ended recently at the Toledo Museum of Art, has opened in London at the Royal Academy. It’s getting the attention it deserves.

luncheon-in-the-studio-1868For a start, on Jan. 20, The Telegraph reported that “Advance bookings for the show are among the highest in the Academy’s recent history, exceeding sales for its blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition in 2010. Several of the timed slots to see the show have already sold out.”

As a result, the RA is opening on five Sunday evenings from 6:30 to 10 p.m. for an “enhanced” visitor experience with the show. It normally closes at 6 on Sundays, but for  £30 — double the normal £15 adult ticket for Manet — visitors can see the exhibit with a “limited number” of others. Plus, they get a drink, a gallery guide and an audio guide. More details here.

That’s an interesting tact — and I favor it, despite comments from critics who say it’s not democratic. Piffle — variable pricing, I’ve argued (see one 2009 article here) — should come to museums. As I mentioned there, the Metropolitan Museum has charged $50 for access to special exhibits on some Mondays, when it’s normally closed, and in 2006 the Neue Galerie tried to charge $50 on Wednesdays, when the museum is normally open (free) only to members, to see the then newly-acquired Klimt Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.  Criticism changed the Galerie’s plan, needlessly. I don’t see this as elitist — no one blinks about skyboxes — I see it as experimental and practical.

Second, the Manet is getting some raves. The Independent named it “exhibition of the week.”  Richard Dorment in The Telegraph gave it five stars, though he failed to mention Toledo’s role in the organization and scholarship. The Telegraph has devoted much other space to the exhibition, including this one headlined Did Manet Have a Secret Son?

But there were some pans, or at least mixed reviews. The Guardian said it excelled as a biographical show but pointed out that it included some weak pastels. Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard wrote this (and much more — I encourage you to read the whole thing):

…the Royal Academy honours this singular painter with an exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life, in which 54 examples demonstrate his mischief, his obstinacy, his perception, his borrowings and subversions, his achievements and his failures. Divided into five themes and restricted to portraits and portrayal, it is a little too thin to serve him as well as it should and could, and for newcomers to this Outsider (neither Salonard nor Impressionist) it may not be easy to grasp his progress either to Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe or from it to The Bar at the Folies-Bergère, the alpha and omega of his major paintings — though in this exhibition the Déjeuner is the much smaller and later version from the Courtauld Gallery and The Bar is omitted from it. It must be said too that at least a dozen paintings and pastels…are bad enough to convince the newcomer that Manet does not merit his reputation as a master….

Well, maybe Sewell is right or maybe he was having a bad day.

On another front, close readers of the comments on RCA already had a preview of this: The Manet exhibition has been selected as the subject of an “event film” that will be shown on cinema screens worldwide, just as Leonardo Live was a year ago. Manet: Portraying Live will premiere at the movies on Apr. 11 in the UK and in about 30 other countries, including the U.S. This time, the producers were not forced to produce a live broadcast, which created silly moments in Leonardo. I expect that this time the result will be much better.

Stay tuned for more details here in the coming weeks.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Pacific Standard Time 2.0

You can’t keep a good idea down. The Getty knew it had a fantastic idea a few years ago by starting Pacific Standard Time, the sweeping roster of exhibitions and programs at 68 arts institutions across Southern California that in 2011 chronicled art in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980. It also drew in more than 70 private art galleries in Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and the Greater Los Angeles area, which staged more than 125 exhibitions.

PST_logo_vert_CMYKNot wanting that brand to die, the Getty promptly said last summer that it would continue the effort with a run of shows on California architecture. It warned that the original PST took years to organize, though, and that version 2.0 would be smaller.

In September, a press release suggested that Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. would involve nine exhibitions, plus “accompanying programs and events” in and around Los Angeles between April and July of this year. At one point, Getty Foundation head Deborah Marrow told me that the Getty would split about $1 million on grantees in the partnership.

Fast forward to now: The Getty is out with new information — the roster has grown to 11 exhibitions and the Foundation has doled out $3.6 million in grants to 16 organizations for exhibitions, publications and programming. I suspect that galleries or others may figure out a way to participate, just as they did last time. This year’s version, though, will be much more manageable. (And btw, the new subject goes along with the Getty Conservation Institute’s Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative. 

Here are the architecture exhibition partners: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hammer Museum; the Getty; the A+D Architecture and Design Museum; the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara; the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture; and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. The other programming partners are the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Community Art Resources, Inc.; The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens; the Los Angeles Conservancy; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Machine Project; Pasadena Heritage; and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.

You find the whole list of exhibitions in the new press release, and more information about them here. And of course there’s a separate website.

The Getty’s own show, Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, is called “the first major museum exhibition to survey Los Angeles’s built environment and rapid postwar evolution into one of the most populous and influential industrial, economic and creative capitals in the world.”

As others catch my eye, I’ll may write about some of the individual projects in the weeks ahead.

The question is whether this is enough to keep the brand not only alive but also sexy. Or will it disappoint those who went to the first PST? Can 11 exhibitions and other programming combine to make a critical mass? We won’t know until we see the contents of the exhibitions.

 

 

Ah, Manet: Blockbuster in Content, But Not As A Draw

I don’t know when I fell in love with Manet’s work. Was it when I first saw The Railway? Olympia? A Bar at the Folies-Bergère? The Balcony? In the Conservatory (below, left)? I once had a poster of The Grand Canal of Venice (Blue Venice). Or was it when I saw them all together, in 1983, when a sweeping exhibit in honor of the centenary of his death, organized by Charles Moffett and Francois Cachin (and with a catalogue to match), was on view at the Metropolitan Museum?

In_the_Conservatory_ManetAlas, being one of my favorite artists does not mean Manet is a household name. So I have watched from afar the Toledo Museum of Art’s recent Manet: Portraying Life exhibition with my fingers crossed for its success. The show was a joint production between Toledo and the Royal Academy in London, and it brought together some 40 portraits by Manet — the first show focused on his portraits. Toledo has long owned one of the best, Antonin Proust, from 1880 (see it here), and it borrowed the rest from museums around the world. When I mentioned the exhibit to a New York-based art connoisseur last spring, he told me Toledo couldn’t do it — so precious are Manet’s pictures — before I could finish the sentence saying it had. Kudos to Toledo.

After that buildup, how did it do? Measured by attendance, not as good as hoped. The Toledo Museum tells me that the exhibition drew just shy of 47,000 people, a tad below the target of 50,000, during its run from Oct. 7 through Jan. 1.  On the other hand, critics liked it and 94 percent of the 2,972 visitors who filled out the museum’s exit survey rated it “Excellent” or “Very Good.”

manet-artThe museum is undertaking a thorough evaluation of the exhibition, but in the meantime, here are some things Toledo says it has learned:

  • Because of Manet, the museum opened, for the first time, on New Year’s Day (warming my heart) and “We are most likely going to be open on New Year’s Day from now on because of the positive response from the public and good attendance.”
  • “We sold more than 1,000 Museum memberships during the run of the show, including 113 memberships at the $1000 or above level, adding to our existing base of 6,500 members.”
  • “Our retail store and café did exceptionally well, with gross revenue increases of 33 percent (retail) and 52 percent (café) respectively over the same period last year.”
  • “Nearly 20 percent of our attendance came in the last seven days of the show. Overall Museum attendance in December (37,757) was the highest since the opening of the Glass Pavilion in December 2006.”
  • About 75 percent of our visitors came from Ohio, the rest came from 38 states and several foreign countries.

The museum says it faced a headwind in the media because of the presidential election, with Ohio being perhaps the swing state at stake. “It was impossible for us to get on television and lots of potential visitors simply were overloaded with media,” the press office said.

Two more bits of context:  Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012, which did not require tickets (Manet did) and ran for about the same time, drew 40,306 last summer. And The Egypt Experience:Secrets of the Tomb, which ran over nearly 14 months and was ticketed, drew 39,906. So Manet, less sexy than Egypt, usually, still did better.

I know this won’t discourage Toledo from organizing serious shows in the future. But I wish Manet would receive the recognition from the general public that he so deserves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Columbus Dispatch (bottom)

 

Denver Museum Goes 24 Hours for van Gogh Exhibition

VG-In ChurchBecoming van Gogh is so popular in Denver that the Denver Art Museum is taking the big step of remaining open overnight on the exhibition’s final weekend: It will open at 8 a.m. on Jan. 19 and stay open until 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 20, when it closes for good. That announcement was made on Friday — after several previous extensions of the hours — and by this morning all the tickets were sold out except those between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on the 20th.

VGstilllife-almond blossomsThis exhibition, organized by the DAM’s paintings curator Timothy J. Standring, is only on view in Denver. Add to that the fact that Denver has never before had a van Gogh exhibition, and the the museum owns no van Gogh works of any sort. But still — this is a big victory for several reasons, not least the fact that Becoming van Gogh is not a retrospective, nor a highlights exhibit. It contains few of the paintings that the general public knows (no Sunflowers, no Irises, no Starry Night or Bedroom in Arles). It’s a teaching exhibition that breaks scholarly ground, demonstrating how van Gogh deliberately taught himself to draw and paint — or, as Standring said Friday when I was in Denver to see it for myself, to make marks (the fashionable lingo in art-history circles).

To recap briefly, the exhibition borrowed works from more than 60 public and private collections throughout Europe and North America to limn the key formative periods of van Gogh’s career – when he taught himself to draw, learned about the formal elements of art, explored color theory and painting techniques, and so on. Take a look at the museum’s website for the exhibit to get a taste of what I’m talking about, or read the article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal and my subsequent blog posts here and here.

While I had perused the catalogue avidly and spoken with Standring, I hadn’t seen the show until Friday — and I loved it. It’s debatable which is the “best” picture in Denver, but I can tell you several I loved: Thatched Roofs, a drawing owned by the Tate, is amazing. In Church (above) from the Kroller-Muller was new to me and touching. The little still life at left, from a private collection, is so vibrant it glows — as if it were radioactive. There were too many others to mention.

Denver extended hours earlier this year for the Yves St. Laurent exhibit, but not as much as this — and DAM director Christoph Heinrich told me that van Gogh will exceed YSL’s total by far. Although the museum’s King Tut exhibit, which ended last January, drew more people to DAM, it was on view for six months — whereas van Gogh started only on Oct. 21 — three months.

But there are other important markers for this show: for one, DAM reports that visitors are spending an average of 90 minutes viewing it — about 70 works by van Gogh himself about about 20 by others he “responded to.” That’s an astonishingly long visit. And the catalogue, 13,500 copies, is pretty much sold out.

All good news for the Denver museum and Denverites.