Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museum Funding-Fundraising

The MFA’s Misguided New European Art Gallery

Not every new gallery or exhibition is automatically or immediately reviewed. Yet I expected some reaction by the Boston media to the newly refurbished and rehung Koch Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which was unveiled on Saturday.

Why? This was the first (I believe) gallery that Malcolm Rogers, MFA’s director, has specifically taken charge of  since he named himself “acting” director of the Art of Europe there late last year, after the former chair of Art of Europe, George Shackelford, announced his departure to the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Tex.

The MFA is calling this gallery its “Great Hall,” harking back to the castles built in Europe in the Middle Ages. This biggest, most impressive room in the museum seems tailor-made for billionaire William Koch, its namesake. Not aligned with his conservative brothers David and Charles Koch, Bill Koch is a bit of a renegade — he gives to both parties — and Rogers has been courting him for years, even giving his eclectic collection an exhibition in 2005. It was controversial. At the time, the Boston Globe said the 100 objects on display ranged from “antique firearms to French Impressionist paintings and 20th-century sculptures,” plus of course his two (in)famous “racing sailboats, their masts rising 125 feet in the air — nearly twice the height of the MFA’s roof.”  Few people applauded.

In the last few years, the MFA’s installations have been less controversial: not everyone loves the new Art of the Americas wing or the Linde Family wing for contemporary art, but they are defensible.

But now, with the Koch gallery, Rogers seems to be returning to his strategy of being iconoclastic to stir things up, despite the fact that he told me in 2010 that “I don’t feel the need to be controversial anymore, but I want to do new things,” which I used in an article for the Wall Street Journal.

What is now the Koch gallery had shown paintings from 16th- and 17th-century Italy, France, Spain, and Flanders, and it still does. Rogers has also pulled four 17th Century tapestries from storage, and hung them amidst the paintings. Fine, I guess, as I believe this gallery was built for tapestries (which it contained until 1996; some people says it’s dreadful for paintings). But at the center of one wall, Rogers has made a huge, garish display of Hanoverian silver pieces. It extends 18 feet from top to bottom and includes 103 pieces. The silver has little if anything to do with the paintings in the gallery.

A bit horrified for myself, I’ve inquired around among art historians. The consensus: Rogers seems to be decorating, not hanging great works of art. He’s equating the likes of a Velasquez, whose Don Baltasar Carlos and Dwarf is among the paintings on view, with household decorative furnishings, made for a drawing room.

Now, the museum says that 40 paintings hang in the gallery. See more details here. Cutely, the MFA has produced a speeded-up video of the transformation, here.

The museum isn’t shrinking from the decorative descriptions. In fact, a Gallery Talk, set for later this month, is entitled “A Display Fit for a King: A New Installation of Hanoverian Silver for Art of Europe.” It will focus not on the paintings, but on “Hanoverian silver and gold illustrating the magnificence of the Hanoverian court from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.”

As much as anyone can admire silver, it doesn’t really rise to the artistic and aesthetic value of masterpiece paintings, does it?

I think the MFA has gone wrong here. Unfortunately, for fear of retribution (no loans from the MFA), no one wants to agree with me on the record. And the critical silence, to use an old cliche, is deafening.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the MFA (and Photoshop)

An Update On That Rediscovered Picasso

Remember that mislabeled Picasso gemmaux portrait discovered in the basement of the Evansville Museum of Arts, Science and History?

The other day, USA Today caught up with the news and added two interesting tidbits, one of which shows the dynamics of some museum boards. One might explain the other, but not in a satisfactory way, to me at least. First, the reporter managed to get a price estimate for the work from Guernsey’s, the New York auction house that discovered it and will sell it: Femme Assise au Chapeau Rouge is estimated at $30- to $40 million, according to Arlan Ettinger. Some people think that’s high, however. (And so do I, from afar, but you never know.) At the time of the gift, in the late sixties, it was appraised for tax purposes at $20,000.

Second, the story quotes John Streetman, the museum director, saying: “I wanted to show it, but the president of our board came up with a list of good reasons not to.”

The article says the board debated the picture’s fate internally before announcing the discovery, but it seems that the board, led by a president named Steve Krohn, a lawyer and businessman, had their eyes on the money — the museum’s endowment totals $6 million. He told the reporter: “It would have cost too much money to insure and to adequately protect. We might have had to hire additional security and make changes to the physical plant that we couldn’t justify for one item. We made the only prudent decision.”

Call me skeptical,  but I think he’s exaggerating. I’m with the local who said,  “Something that’s been there since ’68, to right away take it to where no one’s going to see it again? I’d say keep it and put it on display a year or two, then sell it. But that’s just me.”

With money from a sale — which will be private, not at auction, Guernsey’s has said — the trustees can rest on their fund-raising laurels, which is a pretty seductive reason to sell.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Evansville Museum

Turkey Admits Theft, Fakes At Its Ankara State Museum

No sooner had I written about the looting and destruction of cultural heritage troubles in Syria  this week than the last lines of the article to which I referred, Syria’s ancient treasures pulverised by Robert Fisk, came to mind:

This is why it is so important to have an inventory of the treasures of national museums and ancient cities. Emma Cunliffe, a PhD researcher at Durham University, published the first detailed account of the state of Syrian archeological sites in her Damage to the Soul of Syria: Syria’s Cultural Heritage in Conflict, listing the causes of destruction, the use of sites as military positions and what can only be called merciless looting. Much of her work has informed the studies of archaeologists like Farchakh.

Then I read about a situation in Turkey, where the Hurriet Daily News published an article on Aug. 8 headlined, Ministry Admits Grand Theft from Art Museum. That article began:

Over 200 works of art are presently missing from Ankara’s State Art and Sculpture Museum, according to a report from the Culture and Tourism Ministry, which has pinned the blame for the losses on Turkey’s 1980 coup d’etat.

A recent report by the ministry, which was later shelved away from public view to avoid a possible backlash, claims that 46 pieces from the museum’s catalog were stolen and replaced with fake replicas, daily Milliyet reported. The authenticity of 30 more art works is also “highly suspicious,” according to the report.

Some 202 art works, now “missing,” are priceless works of art belonging to Turkish artists such as Şevket Dağ, Şefik Bursalu, Hikmet Onat and Zühtü Müridoğlu, among many others.

To which the minister replied:

The Ankara State Art and Sculpture Museum was founded in April 1980 and left significantly unattended and managed inadequately as a result of the Sept. 12 [1980] coup. During this time, the museum records were not kept, healthy inventory work was not done and necessary minimum precautions were not taken.

I’m with Fisk on this. The fact is, museums around the world, don’t have or don’t use good inventory systems and many lack the money to record what they own. I don’t know who has the money to support this, but it would be nice if some rich collector decided to begin to tackle the job, perhaps through the World Monuments Fund. I know, it’s difficult and some countries don’t want help. But others do.

Even in the U.S, some museums lack complete inventories. We’ve seen several recent cases where museums suddenly “find” things they barely know they have: for example here (where Yale found a Velazquez in storage) and here, where the Cincinnati Art Museum rediscovered its collection of musical instruments.

 Photo Credit: Ankara museum, courtesy of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism

 

Detroit Institute of Arts Has A Future — UPDATED

Voters in Michigan have given the Detroit Institute of Arts a ten-year lifeline. Local reports, including this one in  the Detroit Free Press, say the milage tax passed easily in Wayne and Oakland counties, and by a very slim margin in Macomb county.

That’s good enough: the DIA will now receive about $23 million a year from locals, and Graham Beal, the director, told me two weeks ago that “the tax is levied in December, and we will start getting funds in January.”

It wasn’t easy, though: As Mark Stryker of the Free Press posted in an online story that when I read it was timed at 5:53 p.m. yesterday, supporters of the millage, which I explained here and here, were making calls seeking support among voters in Macomb — rightly so. DIA  Executive Vice President Annmarie Erickson, told Stryker: “We’ve been phone banking every day and every night for the past 10 days. Right now we have 13 volunteers making calls.” She said she was “really nervous” because the results all depended on turnout.

But the end — more about which in a minute — must have been sweet. The DIA had worked hard, getting endorsements from the Detroit News, Crain’s Detroit Business, the local Chamber of Commerce and dozens of unions, as well as the Free Press.

In July, it  had printed an editorial, Don’t Let the DIA Shut Down, that began, “Losing the Detroit Institute of Arts is not an option.” (That photo, above, was published alongside the edit online.) Later, it noted:

Consider the alternative. Michigan would have to live with the shame of mothballing a collection that still ranks among the top six in the country. Some of the museum’s finest pieces might travel as part of special exhibitions, accessible in distant cities but not in their hometown. Others, including the world-renowned Rivera Court, might simply disappear from public view or be available only on a tightly restricted schedule.

The edit recounts much of the back story (which I also covered) and then hits hard:

This is the time to commit, as a region, to maintaining more than a century’s worth of artwork, much of it in the form of gifts from some of the region’s most renowned families, and to ensuring that it can be viewed for as many hours a day as possible. More than 4 million people — young families just starting out, schoolchildren, senior citizens and many others with tight budgets — would be able to walk in freely whenever and as often as they choose to do so….

A great art collection like this can expand the horizons of children. Sometimes a single piece can rearrange how you see the world….

Adults, too. 

Of course, the DIA’s fundraising work continues — ideally, it should have a $400 million operating endowment, to throw off about $20 million a year. That now stands at about $89 million. The DIA has used $300 million as a goal, according to other press reports, but I hope it can aim higher.  

UPDATE: Today, the DIA website extends three big THANK YOUs to residents of the three counties — plus that Love button  — and is already offering them free admission and other benefits.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Free Press

“Where There’s A Mill, There’s A Way”

That’s the clever headline on an article by me in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. I didn’t write the hed; Adrian Ho, an editor at the Journal, did, and I thank him.

It refers, of course, to the situation in the Detroit area. Next Tuesday, voters in the three counties whose residents most use the Detroit Institute of Arts will vote on whether or not to levy a tiny millage tax — $15 per $150,000 worth of property value — to support the museum. If not, director Graham Beal (left) told me, the museum will go into “a death spriral.”

Ordinarily, Beal would be blamed for letting the museum get so close to the brink, but no one I know or talked with about it would do that. Rather, some of his colleagues see his tenure there as rather heroic. Despite a deteriorating city around him and the worst economic conditions in Michigan in more than 50 years, the DIA has been operating in the black and has no debt.

And, as Samuel Sachs II, who preceded Beal as the DIA’s director, noted, “If you visit the museum, you don’t know it’s undergoing tough times. If a museum starts looking shabby, it’s really in trouble.” I didn’t go to Detroit for this story, but last year, when I was there, I would have agreed — the DIA looked splendid. When I told Beal about Sam’s comment last Friday, he complimented his “very stressed” staff. (Sorry, Sam, this was in the WSJ story but got cut.)

Still, as the article says, the DIA is at a point where it needs to ask donors, each year, for gifts to cover more than its operating funds, a model that’s simply not sustainable. I laid out the economics fairly succinctly, but if you would like to see it graphically, take a look at the charts published by the Detroit Free Press. The Free Press published its own narrative of the story, with much more detail, on July 22.

I can honestly say that I can’t think of what else the museum could be doing either, other than asking for public support — which the DIA has chosen to do with a millage tax. Today’s Free Press carried an exclusive poll showing that 69% will vote for the tax — but pollsters interviewed just 237 adults. True, Aug. 7 is a primary, so a small number of people are likely to vote, but still…

The DIA has made a gutsy move, and I just hope it works. It would be a tragedy to see that museum go into decline.

Here’s the link to my piece.

UPDATE: I can’t resist adding this piece on MLive, which in the process of reporting a rally on the millage, tells the tale of two kids who sold lemonade to raise money for the DIA. They took in $22.50 in 45 minutes.