Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Exhibitions

Come (Or Go) Celebrate: The Menil Turns 25

A change of pace — no complaints today,  just a congratulatory shout-out to the Menil Collection. On Saturday, Sept. 22, the Menil will formally celebrate its 25th anniversary. The date occasioned several efforts, none earth-shaking or innovative, but all an effort to reach out to people who will appreciate a museum that was started and conceived by Dominique de Menil as a quiet “place apart” for contemplating art. (Would that her view were prevelant today.) As you will all remember, Renzo Piano designed it, his first U.S. museum, and one that remains his best.  

First, as ever to me, are the exhibitions. How can you not love one called Silence? Opened in July, it contains  32 paintings (including Magritte’s The Listening Room, at right), sculptures, performances, and sound and video works, and they aim to “explore spiritual, existential, and political aspects of the absence of noise or speech.”

Nearby, the Menil remembers its history, with an archival exhibition called Dear John and Dominque: Letters And Drawings from the Menil Archives. They were sent by friends, artists, curators, and others, and the Menil is turning a gallery into a readin room so that people may have peek.

Second, the celebration on the lawn. It’s free, includes music, dancing, a scavenger hunt and birthday cake.

Before and after that date, there’ll be concerts by the likes of Yo-yo Ma and lectures by, say, Calvin Tomkins. Plus a cell-phone walk through the complex.

It’s solid, not-flashy but appropriate, perfect for the Menil.  

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Menil Collection

 

National Museum of Women In the Arts Strays From Mission

This is a corollary to the item I posted other day about the death of authenticity. In search of attendance, art museums — as well as those of other stripes — are deviating from their true missions. As they do, they risk their authenticity.

Here’s just one example: On Friday, Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power, opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibit, organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, was a long overdue examination of the role many pioneering women played in the rock revolution — starting from the beginning. I happened to have seen it while in Cleveland last September, and I not only enjoyed it but also thought it was, for the most part, well done. It goes back to Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday and continues through a few stars of today. You can read the details here and review the included artists here, along with what related to them is on view. Nicely, the NMWA has also posted texts of the wall labels.

But does this show belong at the NMWA? Here’s its mission statement:

The National Museum of Women in the Arts brings recognition to the achievements of women artists of all periods and nationalities by exhibiting, preserving, acquiring, and researching art by women and by teaching the public about their accomplishments.

Pretty basic, and perhaps rock music could slip into that definition were it not for the museum’s history, cited on the same webpage. Wilhelmina Cole Holladay collected visual art, and aimed to put female visual artists into the mainstream of art history. I don’t think rock-and-roll shows, like the one here, are genuinely part of that mission, even taking an expansive view of it. 

What’s in this show is video, vinyl records and record covers, dresses worn at performances, music clips, and the like.

There are legitimate art shows about rock and roll, one being Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, which was organized by the Brooklyn Museum, shown there in 2009-10, and has been on tour. Some critics disputed its contents, though not the concept (The New York Times, for example, said its contents were chosen “mainly on the fame, charisma and notoriety of its subjects” rather than aesthetics, but still called it “entertaining and sometimes absorbing.”), but photography is part of the visual arts. Some pieces in that exhibit were photojournalism, but wasn’t Otto Dix’s war series, say, documentary in nature? 

Last spring, I wrote here about the first 25 years of the NMWA, I mentioned that attendance overall was 2.5 million — an average of 100,000 a year. In Washington, D.C., that beats the ailing Corcoran’s most recent year (85,441), but not by much. WomenWho Rock will help increase attendance, I’ll bet. But to what end? As I wrote the other day, “it’s important for them to keep authenticity in mind when [museums] design initiatives intended to lure broader audiences.”  The mission, too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Rock Cellar Magazine

Demystifying Museum Acquisitions: A Model Exhibit, A Model Proposal

Since June 30, the Wadsworth Atheneum has been showcasing recent acquisitions in a special show called The Museum Collects, which goes beyond the practice some museums have of placing new acquisitions in a special gallery (though I like that, too) — it’s out to explain why museums buy certain things. As Robin Jaffee Frank, the museum’s Chief Curator, told the Hartford Courant:

When you acquire a new work of art, it’s exciting, but it also has to contribute something to the understanding of works that are already here. You have to justify how it enriches the collection, how it is filling a gap and enhancing the museum’s existing strengths, or maybe how it can take that strength in a new direction…. It has to help tell a larger story about art and culture than the museum was already telling.

This helps demystify museums, explaining why they do what they do, and it’s a trend I applaud. The Atheneum has also scheduled a series of gallery talks called “Conversations With Curators” that explores these decisions more deeply. 

The Courant article provides several examples, including two pieces of furniture in the exhibition — one is a cupboard “made in Virginia in the 17th century,” that the Atheneum has owned for a long time. “The other, a fall-front desk made around 1870 by emancipated slave William Howard, was recently acquired,” and Frank said that Howard would have known of similar pieces, as he borrowed ideas from it.

When I wrote an article about acquisitions endowments for The New York Times earlier this year, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts provided me with the documentation used by its curators to propose several recent acquisitions. Although I’ve been writing about museums for a long time, I found them enlightening. Not that they were out of the ordinary — I might have guessed the topics if I’d spent any time thinking about it, but the truth is, I hadn’t. Here they are, though I should add that not every sheet (MIA sent me four or five) had all of them:

  • Description and Summary of Object or Group of Objects
  • Artist, Style, and explanation of the proposed object
  • Condition
  • Provenance
  • Related Objects:
  • Complements the Existing Collection
  • Plans for exhibiting
  • Why do you recomment the object?
  • Comparable Market Prices

I think the public would be fascinated by the answers to these questions for important acquisitions. I’m going to share one of them, for the cup shown here – Nautilus-Cup – which the MIA purchased last year. When museum people talk about stirring up more interest in their permanent collections, sharing information like this should be on the list.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (top); Detroit Institute of Arts (bottom)

 

 

Where Pacific Standard Time Did Not Succeed

The Getty Trust’s chief executive, James Cuno, recently confirmed to The Art Newspaper what everyone has been thinking, that the Getty will organize a sequel to Pacific Standard Time, its broadly successful effort involving 68 exhibitions that changed perceptions of Southern California art.

He said it will be come “in “five or six years’ time,” and that conversations were starting with its lead partners on PST: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum at UCLA.

That’s about what Deborah Marrow (with Cuno at left), the director of the Getty Foundation, told me in March: “Everyone is eager to keep the collaboration going,” she said, “No one wants to lose momentum.” (To refresh: The Getty spent more than $11 million over the last decade on grants that started out simply preserving the archives of L.A. artists but ballooned to be much more, eventually involving performances, exhibitions at commercial galleries, and an 11-day festival as well as museum exhibitions.)

“It is a high priority to do it again, because it was such as success,” she said. PST exceeded expectations by many measures – the quality of the exhibitions, several of which are unexpectedly traveling to museums as far afield as Australia; the excellence of the catalogues; the luster given, or restored, to artists, some of whom are suddenly getting exhibits or representation in New York galleries.

PST, though, did not always lead to expected jumps in attendance. I did a survey of more than a dozen participating museums for The Art Newspaper, and discovered mixed results. From my story in TAN (which is not online yet):

Several had small or no increases, including:

  • Orange County Museum of Art: about 11,000 visitors, “about normal.”
  • Museum of Latin American Art: 17,685, visitors, up over 25% vs. the previous five months, but short of the 20,100 who came to see Siqueiros landscapes in 2011.
  • Palm Springs Museum of Art: 46,000 people, down slightly from 2011 period (which had more free days).
  • Laguna Art Museum: 7,374 visitors, up 35% vs. a year ago but level with 2010.
  • Fowler Museum: up 6%, compared with the same period the previous year.
  • Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens: 41,270, “among the best for a special exhibition in the past ten years, though the run was also a month longer than average.”

Others fared better:

  • Santa Monica Museum of Art: about 25,000, “more than we’ve ever had for one exhibit.”
  • Vincent Price Museum: 4,473 visitors, more than double the usual attendance.
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego: “It heavily outpaced typical attendance during that time period.”
  • American Museum of Ceramic Art:  5,358, “higher than usual,” which would have been about 4,500.
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art: its five PST exhibits “definitely brought in more visitors,” but not evenly, and with no record-breakers.
  • Chinese American Museum, up about 8.5%.

Almost everyone I contacted was happy with PST, though, and they all underscored the added media attention. “One of the biggest benefits was having journalists like Roberta Smith from The New York Times and Peter Plagens from The Wall Street Journal come to review our PST exhibition,” Susan Golden, of the Museum of Latin American Art, said — echoing others. Bob Bogard, marketing director of the Palm Springs Museum, said coverage ranged as far as a Dubai inflight magazine and Brazil’s Elle. Several museums say they are now collaborating on marketing with nearby museums.

On attendance, Ron Nelson, director of the Long Beach Museum of Art, was the unhappy outlier. “I expected that we would have triple what we had,” he said –but got only a slight increase in visitors. “We were one of the original 13 grants, but the number kept growing and it diluted the effect. It was an embarrassment of riches.”

Interestingly, the lack of a universal attendance boost is not deterring the Getty (unlike some other museums we know). Although Marrow did not place a PST sequel above other top goals at the Foundation –like an initiative to train specialists to conserve panel paintings — she said it was a high priority. Since 2002, the Foundation has devoted, on average, about 10% of its grant money on PST, and I would guess that’s a good guide for the future.

But she dismisses the notion that PST could be staged every year, as some have hoped. It was the long gestation time, which allowed for solid exhibition research, that made PST a success, she said, a point echoed by museum directors. Still, she cites several exhibitions about modern architecture in Los Angeles, including “Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940—1990” at the Getty, as the next PST initiative, set to take place April through June of 2013. Last year, the Getty split about $1 million in research grants for these shows among seven museums, including the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the A + D Architecture and Design Museum. It’s also planning for a month of “concentrated” programming on L.A. architecture.

It’s a no-brainer for the Getty to say that it’s not going to let the brand die — for all those reasons and perhaps one more, a point made by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, the author of “Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s. PST, she said, “has even silenced the critics of the Getty, showing that it is solidly connected to its city.”

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the College Art Association (top); of the Getty (bottom)

The Panoramic Star In St. Louis, Now Undergoing Work

The iffy economic environment, as we all know, is causing many museums to be creative, and one good result from that is the recent trend toward turning conservation work into an exhibition. In one way, at least, the St. Louis Art Museum has the biggest example — “Restoring an American Treasure: The Panorama Of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley.” Last summer and again now, since June 8, it has been restoring the work in its special exhibition galleries.

The panorama is a huge thing — 90 inches tall and 348 feet long; that is nearly the same length as the great Gettysburg Cyclorama and more than double the length of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles,” by John Vanderlyn, which occupies its own gallery in the American wing.

I explain more about the St. Louis panorama’s history, how it was damaged, and the nature of the conservation work in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Sadly, many of these relics of 19th century visual culture — once extremely popular – have been lost. The St. Louis’s museum’s in the only survivor of six known Mississippi River valley panoramas, for example. And it might have been lost, too.

Its owner was the eccentric amateur archaeologist. Montroville W. Dickeson, who commissioned it and who, starting in 1851, took it on the road as a prop to accompany his speeches, charging 25 cents. He gave it to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which gave it to the University of Pennsylvania’s University Museum around 1899, along with his archaeological finds and notes. The museum didn’t want it, though, and deaccessioned it in 1953 – fortunately to the St. Louis museum, which had shown it in 1949.

The museum exhibition website has more details and images for each of the scenes.

These artifacts are often fascinating things, and those who’d like to learn more can take a look at a book called The Painted Panorama, or even just check out the Wikipedia page on panoramas, which has some good references and links — e.g. to something  called International Panorama Council. It holds an annual meeting, this year in Pleven, Bulgaria from Sept. 9 to 13th.

The things one learns as a reporter, happily.

Photo credit: Scene 2, Courtesy of the St. Louis Art Museum