Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Breaking Now: The MFA Names A New Director

MTeitelbaumAnd it’s Matthew Teitelbaum, currently director of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

If you read yesterday’s post here, you’ll know that’s one down–of many museum director jobs open along the East coast–and many more to come.

In fact, I hear that another I mentioned yesterday will be announcing in the next week, or ten days.

Meanwhile, back to Teitelbaum:

Teitelbaum was appointed Director of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 1998 after having first joined the museum in 1993 as Chief Curator. With a vision to transform the Gallery into an institution of global stature serving a vibrant city and region, Teitelbaum significantly grew the museum’s collections, broadened its audiences, increased its research initiatives, and raised its standing to unprecedented levels. Starting in 2002, Teitelbaum spearheaded a major expansion and renovation of the museum, realized by Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry, which encompassed a 47 percent increase in gallery and exhibition space and a complete refurbishment of its existing beaux arts building. Teitelbaum was instrumental in securing a landmark $100 million (CAD) gift from collector and business leader Ken Thomson to complete the museum’s $306 million campaign—surpassing its original $276 million goal. The campaign also funded endowments for operations and contemporary art acquisitions.

I have spoken with Teitelbaum, but not lately, and I don’t have anything to add about his appointment now.

Another Opening, Another…

BolgerDI’m not talking about “Kiss Me, Kate” or another show. I’m talking about art museum directorships. Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art (pictured at right), just announced that she is retiring, effective June 15. That’s not much notice.

On March 19, Michael Conforti (at left) announced that he’d be retiring on Aug. 31 after 20 years as director of the Clark Art Institute.

MConfortiUp and down the East coast, at least, major directorships are open: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Isabella Stewart Garner Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, the High Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the museum at the New-York Historical Society, and several museums in Miami.

Then there’s the big hole at the Detroit Institute of Arts–not East coast, but still.

Have I left others out? Probably. This happens from time to time–a great number of turnovers at the top in the museum world. It’s always worth asking why. This time, most departees are of retirement age and many have recently completed expansions or other building projects.

But with museums in turmoil–worried about funding, desperately (and sometimes stupidly) seeking young audiences, trying to generate buzz instead of scholarship, etc.– these next few years, with new people at the top, are going to be momentous for art museums. I hope the boards choose well, but based on what I hear from some of them, I have doubts.

Just last night, I was chatting with a trustee of a regional museum in the South. He was dismayed by the direction the museum was going and the lowering of standards at the institution, whose leadership is stable and not about to turn over (or so it seems). “Have you spoken up?” I asked. No, he said, shaking his head. Too much headwind.

But how could he know? Maybe other trustees were worried too, but afraid to speak up.

It seems we have governance problems all over the place, with some boards trying to call the tune even on curatorial matters and other becoming rubber stamps.

 

The Whitney Tests the Market: $$$ And Hours

The Whitney Museum announced it new admission charges and new hours this afternoon–and both will test the market.

WhitneyGeneral admission will go up to $22, from $20, while seniors and students can get in for $18. That’s no surprise, given the cost of erecting and moving to the new building downtown. And it’s still less than the Guggenheim and MoMA, which both charge $25 for general admission. Interestingly, perhaps reinforcing its focus on the young, MoMA asks for $14 from students and $18 from seniors. The Gugg is like the Whitney, charging $18 for both.

I think the Whitney was smart not to match MoMA and the Guggenheim. However, if the crowds do not materialize it will face a dilemma about doing so. We shall see.

We shall also see about the hours: I love it that, from the opening in May through Sept. 27, the Whitney will be open from 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The museum is closed completely on Tuesdays, and will close at 6 p.m. on Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays.

I’ve written about the need for museums to stay open at night so many times here that I will not bother to link to those posts–they are too many.

The question is, can the Whitney be persuaded by the crowds to stay open more than one night a week (uptown the night was Friday, when the period between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. was “pay as you wish”).

The museum says it will announce permanent hours this summer. So this is a test. If it succeeds, perhaps the Whitney can lead other museums into staying open after most people’s working hours. It will take time to change people’s patterns: museums will have to work at publicizing later hours, for example, and they’ll have to stick with it for a while. But today’s standard museum hours–closing at 4, 5 or even 6 p.m.–make little sense in a city like New York. And lots of other cities too.

Here’s a link to the full release.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Whitney

Menil Collection Starts Drawing Center

Nearly 40 years after the creation of The Drawing Center in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston has broken ground on The Menil Drawing Institute (pictured below)–and I haven’t seen any national publicity. Could it be that the subject is “drawings?” Not very sexy to most editors.

It will be interesting to watch the Menil’s trajectory.

The two, New York and Houston, are a little different, as follows:

image006The Drawing Center is the only fine arts institution in the U.S. to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary. It was established in 1977 by curator Martha Beck (1938-2014) to provide opportunities for emerging and under-recognized artists; to demonstrate the significance and diversity of drawings throughout history; and to stimulate public dialogue on issues of art and culture.

While in Houston:

Funded through the $110 million Campaign for the Menil, which to date has achieved 70 percent of its goal, the MDI will be the first freestanding facility in the United States designed expressly for the exhibition and study of modern and contemporary drawings.

Still, I don’t think the Drawing Center, located in Soho, has always had an easy time of it–either raising money, balancing its budget or attracting crowds. That’s despite the fact that it has had excellent exhibitions over the years. Recent attendance is about 55,000 a year, the Center says. At one time, the Drawing Center was a candidate for moving downtown, one of the non-profits mentioned in reconstruction of the area around the World Trade Center. It reconsidered (or was forced to) after concerns arose about its programming: namely, would they be sensitive to the hallowed ground at the 9/11 site.

Instead, the Drawing Center decided to stay where it was (for now). According to The New York Times,

“The economy made us re-evaluate what scale of project we want,” said Brett Littman, the Drawing Center’s director…“We’re like a nice small jazz club — the scale of what we do is intimate, drawings tend to be pretty small. The board leadership and myself have come to the conclusion that maybe the Drawing Center shouldn’t be 30,000 square feet. It’s not in the cards for us.”

Its current place is 2,500 sq. feet.

Interestingly, the Menil facility IS 30,000 sq. feet. More details, from the Menil Press Release:

The 30,000-square-foot, $40 million MDI building, designed by the Los Angeles-based firm of Johnston Marklee, will provide unprecedented access for both the public and scholars to the Menil’s outstanding collection of drawings, which has grown rapidly in recent years through major gifts from donors including Louisa Stude Sarofim, William F. Stern, Cy Twombly, and David Whitney. The landscape design for the MDI, which is integral to the project and creates a new parklike space for Houston within the Menil campus, is by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

David Breslin was named chief curator earlier this year and he took up his post this month.

The MDC is expected to open in 2017.

I can’t not mention another drawing institute–that of the Morgan Library and Museum.  It’s a research center, but of course the Morgan itself focuses on works on paper, including drawings. The Menil’s current exhibition is Becoming Modern: Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from The Morgan Library & Museum and the Menil Collection. 

Breslin made an interesting comment in the release:

Drawing privileges research and discovery and gives a material trace to the slipperiness of thought. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that drawings are so frequently the objects of art that artists themselves choose to live with and work around. Drawings invite dialogue; they ask you to talk back to them; they compel you to take your own work further. As a medium that transcends discipline—it is as valuable to the choreographer, composer, and archaeologist as it is to the architect and artist—drawing gathers up what is frequently kept separate and offers a way to look at creative culture more as a whole.

I certainly can agree with the first half of that quote. But I think that all kinds of works “invite dialogue” etc. Soon it will be Breslin’s challenge to draw in the public to drawings, to help them understand why they are so special.

Crystal Bridges Reshuffles PostWar Galleries With 2014 Acquisitions

The postwar and contemporary art galleries at the Crystal Bridges Museum have always been the weakest part of the collection, but steadily the museum has been filling out the collection. Sixteen acquisitions in this category, all made in 2014, were announced on Friday–I broke the news Thursday evening in a small item in The New York Times (scroll down; it’s the last of four items)–valued at about $20 million.

Sobel-HiroshimaThe works include Robert Rauschenberg’s The Tower and three paintings and two works on paper by Helen Frankenthaler, including Seven Types of Ambiguity from 1957. The full list is below.

Just as interesting, the museum is reinstalling those galleries, a project led by curator Chad Alligood, who co-curated the museum’s big State of the Art exhibition. State of the Art was so big that it took over some of the museum’s postwar gallery space–and led to the addition of walls in those galleries. The deinstallation of that show provided the opportunity to weave in several of the new works and rearrange some of the others.

Based on my conversation with Alligood, it’s not an installation that would be done at any other U.S. museum, imho. Aa can be seen elsewhere at Crystal Bridges, it continues, at moments, to link a piece of art with American history. So the first art one sees coming round the corner, out of the American Modernists gallery, on a large wall in the center once occupied by a Joan Mitchell, will be Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter alongside Janet Sobel’s Hiroshima (at left). Once inside, you’ll have to do almost an about-face to see Rothko’s No. 210/No. 211 (Orange).

Frankenthaler’s painting, which demonstrates the bridge she created between Abstract Expressionism and color field painting, will hang between Adolph Gottlieb’s Trinity and a red-white-and-blue Kenneth Noland painting.

Rauschenberg’s The Tower will hang near a painting by him and near a John Chamberlain and another new piece, Nancy Grossman’s Car Horn–all three of which use everyday materials, at the time unconventional in art, that refer to America’s rampant consumerism at the time.

At the same time, Alligood says that the Donald Judd will stand where it has in the past, and so will the Neil Welliver–among others. When I asked what was going into storage to make room for the new works, Alligood said “very little.” The new installation takes advantage of the new walls and is hung more densely that the previous hang. It incorporates 71 works all, told.
Here’s the list of the rest of the new postwar/contemporary acquisitions:

  • Frankenthaler’s Untitled (1951) and Pink Bird Figure II (1961), plus two of her works on paper, The Bullfight (1958) and Untitled (1980);
  • Ruth Asawa’s Untitled, (ca. 1958);
  • Allan D’Arcangelo’s My Uncle Whiskey’s Bad Habit (1962);
  • Vija Celmins’s Untitled (Ham Hock) (1964),
  • Alma Thomas’s Lunar Rendezvous—Circle of Flowers (1969),
  • Roni Horn’s When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes No. 859: A Doubt If It Be Us (1993),
  • Mark Tansey’s Landscape (1994)
  • Charles LeDray’s Rainbow (2012-2014)

Plus, two gifts:

  • Brice Marden’s For Carl Andre (1966) from an anonymous donor
  • Nancy Graves’s Fayum-Re (1982), gift of Agnes Gund.

Notice anything else? I did, and the museum confirmed it: Alice Walton, the museum’s benefactor, continues to be interested in redressing the prejudice against women artists prevalent in the art market and museum world. More than half of these works are by women, and the press release emphasizes the Frankenthaler purchase, even though the Rauschenberg on its own undoubtedly cost more. It was, as I said in the Times, once owned by famed collectors Victor and Sally Ganz but failed to sell when put up for sale at Christie’s in 2011, with an estimate of $12 million to $18 million.

Here’s what I like about this news and the installation: By aligning the art with history, the installation tells a story that’s a bit different from other museums and, possibly, more tailored, more accessible to people who live in areas without many rich museums–like Arkansas. I say this sight unseen, of course, and reserve the right to change my mind if I get there and find the execution wanting.

Here’s what I don’t like: Crystal Bridges seems to be on something of a name-check exercise–one Marden, one Pollock, one Thiebaud, one Mitchell, one Rauschenberg plus a minor painting, etc. There are exceptions–five Frankenthalers, for example. But there’s little depth in any of the myriad strains of postwar art. Granted, Crystal Bridges is young and its collection came together quickly. But I do wonder if there is a strategy beyond checking names off the list of must-haves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges