Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Will Venice Get An Islamic Art Museum? Free?

On Feb. 3, Italy’s Prime Minister Enrico Letta visited Qatar on a trade mission, meeting with its the Prime Minister and Interior Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani. They had lunch (at right), discussed political concerns and Letta visited the Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha. Letta admired the works on view, and before long, he “revealed that the two governments were in talks to construct a building in Venice that would later be turned into a museum,” according to Gulf Times. In Venice. On the Grand Canal.

7eb769d2-e4f6-477f-9a58-4d15998c81d7As the Christian Science Monitor later reported it:

Speaking in Doha, Mr. Letta said the Italian government had “made a commitment to explore the opportunity to build an Islamic museum in Venice on the Grand Canal.” He gave few further details.

This caused a furor with the right-wing Northern League, which “has in the past campaigned for the rich north of Italy to secede from the rest of the country,” the Monitor said. The League and others complained about the cost, which Giorgio Orsoni, the city’s mayor, then said would be “zero” to Italians, a hint that Qatar would pay for it. Read the Monitor‘s article here.

These reports raise too many questions to come down on either side here. Yes, it would be nice to have an Islamic art museum in Venice, but I agree with the Northern League if it is not paid for by other countries. Venice itself needs so much work, not least to prevent it again from damaging flooding and sinking.

The Italian officials who say the museum is needed “to ease the city’s heavy reliance on tourism, which provides jobs but overwhelms ordinary life in the city and turns it into a sort of architectural Disneyland” don’t convince me. Won’t this bring more tourists, not fewer?  Yes it will bring non-tourism jobs, but to day that “The city needs more museums, educational institutes and research bodies in order to stem a population exodus and diversify its reliance on tourists,” as Antonio Armellini, a former ambassador who now serves as a special advisor to Venice, told the Monitor, doesn’t ring right to me.

Finally, it’s very unclear how the bruited museum will be built. Will it “probably be established inside an empty palazzo near the famous Rialto Bridge, which arches over the Grand Canal”? Or will it require a new building there? That would be a bad idea.

I suspect there’s a lot more politics to go on here before the situation is clear, and until then, I think I will stand on the sidelines.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gulf News

What’s So Good About Milwaukee?

SkyllasYoungGirlI’m talking the Milwaukee Art Museum here, and the answer — actually — is a lot of things.

Most people — especially those outside the art world — know the museum for its signature wing designed by Santiago Calatrava, the brise-soleil roofed Quadracci Pavilion (which I am happy to report — unlike many high-profile museum buildings — does not leak, according to Brady Roberts, the chief curator).

But, as close readers of today’s Wall Street Journal will see, I was there recently to see Uncommon Folk: Traditions in American Art. I liked it, largely because it really showcases the collection — nearly 600 objects, mostly from the museum’s own collection, which contains nearly 1,500 objects. My review is here.

Uncommon Folk is a lot for people to take in, but I think that is one of the points: visitors can’t possibly stop to appreciate 600 things, but by being immersed in them you come to an understanding of the vast range of what constitutes folk art. And you pick favorites, for sure — MAMdeMejo1which may change the next time you go through the exhibit.

I’m not going to quote from my review — writing about 600 objects in one shortish review doesn’t leave all that much room for reflecting on its entirety —  but I will post a few choice works from it here. That is  Drossos P. Skyllas’s Young Girl with a Cat above and at right are four naive Biblical works by Oscar De Mejo. At MAM, they are shown all in a row, filling a wall, but I split them here to let you see them at a reasonable size. (I wish they were sharper…) At the very bottom is a spot showing work by Albert Zahn, the bird man of Door County.

You can see other images from the museum here.

MAMdeMejo2Milwaukee’s folk art collection, begun with the gift of two paintings in 1951, revved up in the ’60s and it is one of the things that makes Milwaukee distinctive. It’s not a cookie-cutter museum, and you don’t mind — at least I didn’t — that there’s no van Gogh, no Caravaggio, no Eakins, no etc. etc. That’s because Milwaukee has unique aspects to its collection — it has 23 marvelous Georgia O’Keeffe’s, 14 Gabriele Munters, 43 Emil Noldes, etc., plus wonderful examples from German painters, reflecting the city’s heritage, and excellent European and American decorative arts that one does not see everywhere else. Yes, it has paintings and sculptures by masters like Homer, Warhol, etc. but you would probably not travel to Milwaukee to see them. You should travel to Milwaukee to see those other things.

As I and others have complained, not enough museums develop specialties like this (here’s another that is).

birdman

Photo Credits: Courtesy of MAM (top); all the rest by me

 

 

Unconventional Partnerships: Let’s Have More

I’ve had occasion recently to review the forward exhibition schedules of museums across the country, and I’ve been noticing something: Many museums seem more open to partnering on exhibitions with a wider variety of “venues,” as we sometimes term the locations of special exhibitions.

In the old days, art museums operated almost always within their own strata of peers. The Metropolitan Museum* would work with, say, the Louvre or the Art Institute of Chicago, but not with, say, the Joslyn Museum in Omaha. The Joslyn had nothing that the Met wanted, the theory went, so why send its goodies to Nebraska? I explained some of this in an Arts & Leisure section cover at The New York Times back in 1996: Have Show, Will Travel (Within Limits). It contained this passage:

…Museums clearly use their works of art as cards to play, to win a stop on a show’s tour or to ease the borrowing of some work they want. Indeed, when curators plot shows, part of the job is to know which museums have the essential paintings and whether they will merely lend them or will want to play host.

“One of the prime things in the museum world is your key lending pieces,” said Mr. [David] Ross [director] of the Whitney. “The organizing museum doesn’t make decisions about a tour until it decides which museums it has to get loans from.”…

That principle is still in operation, but it has been declining in power for years and now — while trading cards are still important — the seriousness of a show, the reputation of the organizing curator, and local audience now come into play more frequently. And museums seem to be much more open, less conscious of whether a potential partner has the proper prestige. That’s how the Denver Art Museum, lacking Impressionist paintings until a recent gift, was able to organize Becoming van Gogh. (Not that it was easy.)

cezanne-ex-pmaSo I have noted these partnerships, among many others:

  • The Milwaukee Museum of Art with the Pompidou Centre on a coming retrospective of Kandinsky;
  • the Met and the Denver Art Museum on The American West in Bronze;
  • the Cleveland Museum’s Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes went not only to the Kimbell but also to the NSU Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale;
  • The Barnes Foundation is collaborating with the Art Gallery of Hamilton on The World is An Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne; 
  • LACMA is sending its  California Design, 1930 to 1965, to the Peabody Essex;
  • LACMA is collaborating with Kunsthaus Zürich and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky;
  • The Barnes Foundation, the Parrish Art Museum, and NSU Museum of Art (again) collaborated on a retrospective for William Glackens.

This is a welcome and important development. American museums need to share their collections with others that have less whenever it’s appropriate. That is how we will gain audiences — when people in art-poor cities can see for themselves what makes art great.

Photo Credit: Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and a Glass of Wine, to be shown at the Barnes; Courtesy of the Barnes 

*I consult to a Foundation that supports the Met

The Folk Art Museum Mess And Modern Architecture

AmericanFolkArtMuseumSo, as we have learned, the dispute over the future of the American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street has gotten personal. The architects, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, no longer speak with Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, who studied the problem for the Museum of Modern Art,* which has been trying to raze the building, and decided the 10-year-old building has to go. It was bound to happen, given the cast of characters and the ambitions of MoMA.

People have been asking me about the issue for days now: I guess one has to take a stand.

I’m with MoMA, and have been since it bought the Folk Art Museum in 2011. While I sympathize with Tsien and Williams, and while I am not sure I like MoMA’s new plan in its entirety (let’s see all the details first), the art must come first in any museum. The Folk Art Museum may have been an “aesthetic gem” to some — certainly not to all, as that is a subjective judgment — but it never worked for the art it was to display, not even for folk art. That’s its prime purpose, yet the awkward angles and small galleries made it fail that purpose.

A lot of new museum buildings are wanting nowadays. But as architecture critic and former director of the Cincinnati Art Museum Aaron Betsky wrote nearly three years ago, it’s usually for the opposite reason — they’re just big boxes, highly expensive ones at that.

When I speak with people at museums, usually off-the-record, about this issue of poor museum architecture, I almost always get the same analysis: architects, being creative types, want to do what they want to do, and boards are afraid to question their judgment. Directors are afraid to contradict their boards. Meanwhile, neither the boards nor the directors have studied the problems at other museums — poor flow, wrong entry point, misshapen or poorly sized galleries, etc. They don’t head off problems.

True, the MoMA-Folk Art mess occurred when ownership changed, not because the Folk Art Museum expressed unhappiness with the building (though I had heard some grumblings). Yet somehow museums need to get a better handle on the buildings they keep erecting — or else, as MoMA keeps doing, we’ll keep rebuilding and rebuilding but never improve the situations. Many people I know believe that MoMA hasn’t had a good building since the 1960s.

 

 

 

 

Michigan Governor Steps Up

RickSnyderThe Detroit Institute of Arts situation is improving: Gov. Rich Snyder is now saying he’ll propose that state money, in the form of a $350 million appropriation over 20 years to match the funds that foundations say they’ll provide, can go to save the DIA.

Both Detroit newspapers are reporting this development. Apparently Snyder met with lawmakers yesterday and plans to go public with the idea in his state of the state address tonight.

Here’s a link to the articles – Snyder pitches $350M plan for state support of Detroit pensioners, DIA artwork in the Free Press and Snyder pitches $350M in state aid for DIA, pension funds in The Detroit News.

According to The News:

Snyder met Wednesday with lawmakers in both parties in separate meetings at the Capitol and proposed the state match the $330 million that nine private foundations have pledged toward keeping masterpieces at the Detroit Institute of Arts off the auction block, according to one source familiar with the discussions and a published report.

Snyder initially was cool to any suggestion that the state contribute to the fund until he learned of the financial commitment that state and national foundations announced Monday, according to another source familiar with the governor’s thinking.

The Republican governor’s plan would have the state use tobacco settlement funds or possibly bonds and not require lawmakers to commit funds from the state’s general fund checking account, several sources familiar with the plan told The News.