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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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British Art Tours In China: Cushion Or Couch?

Many museums, especially in recent years, have sent their collections on tour, but rarely has one been so open about it as the Bury Art Museum near Manchester, England. There, the museum’s manager, Tony Trehy, has gathered together works from several provincial museums and sent them on a multi-city tour of China in an exhibit titled Toward Modernity: Three Centuries of British Art.

beijingworldartmuseum-turnertakescentrestageNow, before you move on, remember that Manchester was once a rich, rich town of manufacturing and manufacturing moguls. Hometown Bury boy Thomas Wrigley, a paper tycoon, “amassed a collection of 200 artworks during the Industrial Revolution,” according to the BBC, and opened the Bury Art Museum in 1901 to house it. Among the treasures are J.M.W. Turner’s Calais Sands [at right at the Beijing World Art Museum] and George Clausen’s 1888 work Spring Morning [below, left]. But faced with potential cuts in government support, Trehy approached similar museums in England — in Chester, Bolton, Salford and other once-rich towns — and asked them to lend their best pieces for the tour. Chinese galleries, including those in Beijing and Shanghai as well as smaller cities, have been eager to get the show. Trehy told the BBC:

Put it this way. It’s sufficiently lucrative that people have stopped talking about cutting us.

Now, Trehy “is now hoping to take to other countries, and which could provide the template for further themed exhibitions.”

The BBC notes that this beats what the Bury Council did in 2006, which was deaccessioning a painting by L.S. Lowry “to plug a budget deficit,” causing an uproar.

aspringmorning_512Indeed it does. Trehy and others want to send the show to other countries, too. And while it seems that many, many museums are renting their collections this way, what I don’t think is good is this comment from Trehy: “Assuming we can do it on a regular basis, it becomes a significant new source of funding for museums.”

It seems to me that these tours should provide a cushion, in extraordinary times, not something that is, so to speak, baked in the cake. Once that happens, the next funding drought or economic downturn will require another remedy — and what might that be? We are back to deaccessioning or closure.

Treasures from Wales are also on view in China, but the arrangement for that, between the National Museum Wales and the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, is a traditional partnership (I think).

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the BBC (top)

 

 

Landesman Exits the NEA, Taking A Surprise Bow

Rocco Landesman has left the building. The now-former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts departed the other day, but not without granting an exit interview to The Washington Post. Interesting choice — maybe The New York Times didn’t ask (it probably didn’t) but as I recall Landesmann made a small mistake at the start of his term by giving the NYT his first interview instead of the Post, which of course is what everyone in Washington reads first. He learns.

RoccoLandesmanLandesman — not my favorite NEA chief, as Real Clear Arts readers know — exits taking a bow, according to the Post. Despite early gaffes, he earned credit by building ties to other federal agencies, which had more money, and eliciting new support from the private sector for investing in arts places in various communities. According to the Post:

The resulting “ArtPlace” consortium of foundations, financial institutions and federal agencies, including NEA, has awarded 80 grants to 46 communities, totaling nearly $27 million.

More than half of that is new money, says Robert Lynch, head of Americans for the Arts…

That’s not bad, if only a drop in the ocean in terms of money.

While I don’t agree with everything he said or did by a long shot, I give Landesman credit for being practical. Despite early comments about restoring grants to individual artists, for example, he recognized it wasn’t going to happen and moved on to other things — but not without finding a small way around the restriction.

There’s been way too much hand-wringing about that particular aspect of NEA funding, anyway. As long as the battle lines are formed around that issue, NEA funding is not going to grow. And maybe it shouldn’t — that’s heresy to some people in the arts, I know, but it’s time to rethink it.

 

Is This Moore Being Sold On A False Premise?

I’m back from a trip to the UK — where I saw much that I hope to write about, some here — and one sad story I learned of while there concerns the east London town of Tower Hamlets, which has voted to sell off a Henry Moore sculpture, Draped Seated Woman. The town, quite poor, is facing budget cuts and wants to use the proceeds to make up the cuts. Christie’s got the consignment and will sell the work in February.

The town council is expecting to raise some $30 million from it, but as The Telegraph points out, the expectation may be built on a lack of understanding of the art market. The “comparable” example that whetted the town’s appetite occurred last February for about that amount, but “the estimate on that sculpture was only 3.5 million to 4.5 million pounds, and the eventual sale was driven by competition between two bidders, the winner being a dealer who represents Russian collectors. If that collector was not bidding, it would have sold for less than half the eventual price, and they[sic], presumably, are now out of the equation.”

Furthermore, the Telegraph notes, the previous comparable, a sculpture called Draped Reclining Woman, fetched the equivalent of about $6 to $7 million in 2008.

It’s reasonable to question whether the town council would sell the piece for that price — which is not enough to cover it projected lost funds.

Moore sold his piece to the city for a price below market value in the 1960s. Artists, Moore’s daughter, Sir Nicholas Serota and other have protested the sale, but to no avail. Part of the problem, however, may be that the work has been on loan to the Yorkshire Scultpure Park, not on view in Tower Hamlets. According to the BBC, “the sculpture was moved after the Tower Hamlets housing estate in which it was housed was demolished in the late 1990s.”

Sadly, this is not a separate case. As previous Telegraph article related:

The sculpture is the latest in a burgeoning list of sales of public artworks by councils. Last year, Bolton Council sold seven works of art, including a painting by John Everett Millais, while Newcastle City Council put £270,000 of publicly funded artwork for sale on eBay, and Gloucester city council approved plans to sell 14 works of art valued at £381,000.

But I wonder if these public sales are built on false hopes.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Press Association via The Telegraph

Gemaldegalerie Battle Far From Over: Berlin Pulls Out Another Big Gun — UPDATED

Just in case you thought that cultural authorities in Berlin might cave in to pressure regarding the future of its Old Master collection, here’s a dose of reality. They continue to wage war, even though they have ordered up a “feasibility study” to assess alternatives to the original plans, which would send most of the city’s magnificent Old Masters collection into storage for an undetermined number of years, while a new museum is supposedly built on Museum Island, and integrate the rest into the already filled galleries of the Bode Museum.

As I noted on Sept. 12, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation thinks that its plan to devote the Gemaldegalerie (now home to the Old Masters) to the Pietzch collection of modern art without adequate assurances that the Old Masters will not go into storage is just fine — and they are pulling out big guns to support it, an effort to counter the many who oppose it.

On Saturday, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, weighed in, supporting the move in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZa). He begins by saying that no one goes to the Gemaldegalerie — the same argument made at the outset by the Berlin authorities.

That follows a show of support by Metropolitan Museum director Thomas P. Campbell, who — inexplicably to some curators on his staff — wrote a letter to The Art Newspaper agreeing with the plan. (It was published in the print edition only and is not online.)  The Art Newspaper has published online three additional letters of support for the plan, but — to my knowledge — only one, by Jeffrey Hamburger of Harvard, against — so far.

The petition Hamburger started, btw, is now up to 13,703 signatures.

I expect more such letters and articles in the coming months, some orchestrated by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The Met, the Getty and other museums — and their directors — have a vested interest in pleasing the Prussians. They need to borrow art from them down the road — as they have in the past. It takes no courage on their part to support the plan; it’s simply an act of cozying up to friends and would-be friends. It does take courage for the curators who have signed petitions to put their names on it — there may be retribution in the form of loans denied.

I have rarely — have I ever? — turned over space here to someone else. But former museum director Tom Freudenheim has sent this on-the-ground report, which I am pasting, in somewhat edited form, here:

Nothing has changed since my time living in Berlin, over a decade ago: the same terrible (German-only) signage outside and in (‘Gemäldegalerie’ doesn’t qualify for Esperanto-like signaling that it’s a place to see old master paintings), and the same sad feeling that the proprietors would just as soon keep out potential visitors….The paucity of visitors on a sunny fall week-day afternoon bore that out [but]… isn’t this solitude a lot better than fighting crowds at the Louvre?

When — and if — the notably argumentative Berliners manage to develop plans (and funding) for [a] new museum [for the Old Master paintings], it may turn out to be wonderful; but replicating the current purpose-built galleries that opened in 1998 will be an incredibly hard act to follow. They are subtly perfect in almost every way, albeit connected by an odd central courtyard.

Meanwhile, try playing the triage game that kept me busy for a couple of hours: which paintings would I keep on view and which would I place into storage for an indefinite period of time…Hopeless task. Let’s see, how about the “lesser” masters? So I start with the riveting Christoph Amberger portrait of Charles V, the wonderful Jean Fouquet double portrait of Étienne Chevalier and St. Stephen [above left], the Hugo van der Goes Monforte Altar — no one has ever heard of these guys anyway. And…there are so many works by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt and Hals, Cranach, Durer, Holbein and Altdorfer…One or two would suffice!

…Surely we don’t need to give in to feminist issues by pretending that the brilliant 1777 Self Portrait by Anna Therbusch [above right] warrants our attention. And considering that there’s a real Caravaggio, why bother with spectacular Caravaggiesque paintings such as Honthorst’s Calling of Peter? OK – I found one to omit: Dürer’s Madonna with the Siskin (a bird); is it a terrible painting or in bad condition? Dunno. But my guess is that Dürer scholars would miss it.

I gave up my triage exercise by the time I got to the Italians, wondering whether this was my last chance to luxuriate in one of the world’s great collections. The issue here isn’t whether a new permanent home might not be a good idea. It’s how managerial ineptitude could have placed the museums (and therefore their scholarly and general public) into such a bind that the potential “deal” (if it really is a deal) with the Pietzsch’s could be subject to that kind of tradeoff.

Let’s keep repeating that: this has never been a Modern vs. Old Master fight, as the original petition made clear in the first paragraph. But that’s how the Pietzch-backers want to portray it — the new against the old — when, really, they made a bad deal.

UPDATE, 9/26: No sooner had I written and published this then, indeed, another heavyweight museum director published a piece agreeing with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation’s plan. Here’s Ian Wardropper, director of the Frick, in Die Welt.

 

Las Vegas Does Spend on Culture — Just Not Art Museums

The photo was pretty astonishing, and so was the pricetag: $470 million. As I caught up on newspapers I’d missed while I was away last week, I came upon an article in last Sunday’s New York Times headlined Las Vegas Becomes As Much Liszt as Liberace, illustrated by a gorgeous interior photograph of the city’s new performing arts center.

I’ve written here several times about the lack of an art museum in Las Vegas, a city of 1.8 million people and plenty of tourists. The Las Vegas Art Museum closed for lack of interest in early 2009; a proposed contemporary art museum was abandoned even while the designated sculpture park sat empty; plenty of money was going instead to two museums about the Mob in Vegas; and the Southern Nevada Museum was getting just a handful of visitors a day — ok, two to three handfuls.  (See also here.)

So the idea of a center for classical music in this city that lacked one caught my attention.

After my posts on the museum situation in Las Vegas, commenters had often written in to make excuses, some valid. Last June, following the post about the Southern Nevada Museum, one commenter noted that Las Vegas residents are often transients, aiming to move in a few years and unwilling therefore to invest in cultural activities in the community. Another said visitors to Las Vegas are not interested in art. And another wrote:

It’s hard to get public support for the arts in Nevada. NV is a state with little public funding of ANYTHING, even when the economy is good….

How to square that with the Times article, which included these passages:

When the Smith Center for the Performing Arts opened in Las Vegas in March, Jennifer Hudson was on the program and Neil Patrick Harris was the master of ceremonies. But it was Joshua Bell, the classical violinist, who drew the most applause from the homegrown audience, cheering what seemed a moment of arrival for a city whose cultural association is more likely to be Liberace than Liszt.

…For more than 25 years, Las Vegas has laid claim to being the entertainment capital of the nation. But it has presented a very specific kind of entertainment — elaborate, mass-market, big-ticket showstoppers like Cirque du Soleil, Elton John, Celine Dion and Siegfried & Roy. And it has been aimed at a very specific audience: tourists who come to the Strip, as opposed to the people who live here.

Las Vegas had the unwelcome distinction of being the largest city in the nation without a major performing arts center.

Sounds familiar. So how did this supposed cultural wasteland get a $470 million performing arts center?

…A delegation of Las Vegas civic leaders toured concert halls around the world — La Scala in Milan, the Opera House in Budapest, Carnegie Hall in New York — in search of inspiration as they conceived what was in effect their dream hall….

The financing of the project suggests the civic hunger: $150 million was donated from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Nevada whose president is Fred W. Smith, a retired newspaper executive and for whom the center is named. Fifty-seven families and individuals wrote checks of at least $1 million. Another $150 million is to be raised through a tax on airport car rentals, approved by the State Legislature….

The Smith Center looks beautiful — check out the slide show run by the Los Angeles Times last March, as well as the photos here.

So why can the performing arts raise money but not the visual arts? I suspect one reason is the edifice complex: donors will give to build a building, especially if some hall, some rehearsal space, some staircase, is named for them. But why the rental tax for this and not for art? Where is the hunger for great visual art?

Of course it remains to be seen if the likes of Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma continue to sell out, or whether the Smith, like some other performing arts venues, is forced to go pop. I’m rooting for classical. Perhaps a successful track record will convince civic leaders that a city as big as Las Vegas must also elevate its visual art offerings.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Las Vegas Weekly (top) and Las Vegas Sun (bottom)