Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Corcoran Board Makes A Decision — UPDATE TWO

It’s happening as previously suggested in many places: The Corcoran’s board plans to merge its art school with the University of Maryland — or, “join forces,” as people in the know appear to prefer.

Trustees are apparently meeting this very afternoon to approve the deal, and the announcement is expected around 4 p.m., following the board meeting. Here’s the item in Washingtonian.

Further evidence, “the Corcoran community” will “will have an opportunity to meet with Mary Ann Rankin, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Maryland” on Monday. She’ll be at the downtown campus to meet with students, “learn more about you and the Corcoran, answer your questions, and have a discussion about the process of developing an academic partnership.” That was the message this noontime from Catherine Armour, the Corcoran’s Provost and Chief Academic Officer.

Trouble is, the whole thing on Monday lasts just 45 minutes — from 1 to 1:45 p.m. And it’s mediated — questions are to be sent in advance via email. Not a way to start establishing trust — it should go on as long as there’s a single (good) question in the room.

I guess one can’t have everything. Now to the future of the Gallery.

UPDATE: Looks as if the students are having none of this. They protesting, set to gather at 2 p.m. today, outside the trustees meeting, at Paul Hastings law offices on 15th Street NW in the District. They have three demands:

1 – Implement structural changes with the goal of creating transparent and democratic decision-making process.

2 – Demand the immediate resignation of Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Harry F. Hopper III and Director Fred Bollerer.

3 – Appoint Wayne Reynolds as Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

I think they are misguided on No. 3.

UPDATE 2: Here’s the official Washington Post story on the matter. The nut grafs:

The Corcoran’s board of trustees voted 13-to-0 Wednesday afternoon to sign a preliminary agreement to explore a long-term partnership with Maryland that could include shared faculty; joint student degrees; cooperation on developing new courses; pairing interdisciplinary teams of artists, engineers and computer scientists on projects;  and expansion of the Corcoran College of Art and Design by several hundred students, Corcoran and Maryland officials said….

…A Maryland official said that the university would be willing to commit unspecified resources to the partnership. But before the partnership takes effect, the parties must hammer out a more detailed legal agreement, which could be signed this summer.

…Under the agreement, Maryland would also be able to nominate trustees and thus influence the direction of the Corcoran. The Corcoran board has 13 voting members and four unfilled openings.

…At the same time, the Corcoran made three other significant announcements:

It will exhibit a number of the paintings from the National Gallery of Art during the three-year period, beginning in January, when the East Wing is closed for renovation. Hopper said the Corcoran has room in the upstairs galleries where traveling exhibits normally are displayed because there are gaps in the traveling exhibit schedule. Corcoran curators would curate the works, which would probably be from the post-World War II period, in keeping with the Corcoran’s modern-contemporary focus, Hopper said…

…Corcoran also announced the appointment of a new, temporary director to replace the retiring Fred Bollerer. She is Peggy Loar, who until recently was director of the National Museum of Qatar. Loar will serve at the Corcoran for at least several months as the partnership with Maryland is established, Hopper said. A permanent director will be named later.

Finally, the Corcoran released a “Strategic Framework for a New Corcoran,” an approximately 10-page document (also to be posted online Wednesday evening) that is the distilled fruit of two years of research and some $1.5 million in consultant fees. It is the long-awaited new roadmap for an institution that has been casting about for an updated vision for decades, as it lagged behind publicly funded museum rivals in Washington.

The framework, in full, is here. Read for yourself, but on first glance it seems to general to mean much, at least to me.

 

Not A Skeleton: Another Museum Discovery In Storage

CanalettoI wish I had closets like this. The news recently emerged from Denver that Timothy Standring, the curator who organized Becoming van Gogh, was rummaging around in the museum’s storage bins a while ago and pulled out not a plum but a Canaletto. As related last week in the Los Angeles Times:

It all started in 2000 (actually a couple centuries earlier, but that’s getting ahead of the story) when a canvas in dreadful condition called “Venice: The Molo from the Bacino di S. Marco” was bequeathed to the Denver Art Museum from a deceased local collector’s foundation.

The accompanying paperwork was vague and referred to it as “from the studio” of Giovanni Antonio Canal — known as Canaletto — an important Italian painter in the mid-1700s.

Because it was assumed to be a student rendering, the painting was relegated to storage. And obscurity.

Seven years later, Timothy Standring, curator of painting and sculpture at the Denver museum, ran across the piece while doing routine inventory. It was so discolored and coated in grime, he later joked, it looked as if it had been “in someone’s home who smoked Marlboros for 50 years.”

Still, he saw something in it, that prompted an investigation — though there was no record of this painting. He showed it to “Charles Beddington, one of the world’s foremost Canaletto scholars,” who authenticated it — pronouncing it “one of the artist’s earliest undocumented works,” from 1724. Now cleaned and conserved, it’s on view at the museum.

In July, 2010, I wrote here about the Yale Art Gallery, where former curator John Marciari, had discovered a painting by Velasquez, named The Education of the Virgin, in a closet. It has been given to the museum in 1925, but being poor condition and damaged by water, it was sent to storage, and remained undisplayed until Marciari, as part of a review of the collection in 2004, discovered it — he studied it, identified it, and published it as a Velasquez.

Less than a year later, the Brooklyn Museum announced that a painting that had entered its collection as a bequest in 1932 as an early self-portrait by Gerrit Dou, which was later downgraded, had been rediscovered in storage and actually was a Dou. Richard Aste, the museum’s curator of European art, had also begun a review of his department’s holdings. Fascinated by the little portrait, Aste decided to investigate and his suspicions were confirmed by other experts.

I know it takes time and a lot of effort to review collections, and some museums are doing it (here’s one example). But stories like these always make me wonder what other gold is there in those storage bins?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum

 

A Little More About SPUN

“It’s a way to activate our collections.” That’s one of the outtake quotes from Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, that I did not use in my article published last week in The New York Times headlined In Denver, Exhibits Interveave Genres. (Did anybody catch the importance of “interweaves” in that headline, which signified that the exhibits were about textiles?)

bbbbI like Heinrich’s choice of verb: activate. He was talking about SPUN, Adventures in Textiles, the museum’s spin on the range of exhibitions that will be on offer throughout the museum’s two buildings this summer, from May 19 through Sept. 22.

I’ve written several times before (see here and here, for example) that museums MUST make more to-do about their own collections, and Heinrich is pioneering one way. His approach, biennial museum-wide festivals that focus on one aspect of the collection, may not work everywhere. A collection has to have depth in several areas — not all — for it to work. Aside from having the goods, a museum has to have the marketing creativity. In 2011, ceramics became Marvelous Mud. Before settling on SPUN, Denver toyed with using fabric, fiber, threads, material and other words in the exhibitions’ title.

SPUN goes with the museum flow on another aspect, though. Like many other art museums, the new, expanded textiles gallery — a gift for which was the impetus pushing SPUN — will have a “PreVIEW Space,” where visitors can, for example, watch a textile conservator work on pieces.

Among other things. Alice Zrebiec, the textiles curator, told me that “the museum is committed to showing what goes on behind-the-scenes. It’s not just conservation, it’s the whole process — looking at an object for the next rotation, or an acquisition, a conservation assessment, then the conservation work itself. There is a big glass window for people to look into the space even when we’re not there. “Open Window” [when a conservator or curator is there] will take place every Thursday, and there will be selected programming at other times, special ones for members.It’s all a trial balloon.”  There will also  be a Textile Art Studio and a family installation.

If you read my article, you got a gist of the range of exhibitions SPUN entails — but not the images, which are great. Please take a look at this document: Spun – Adventures in Textiles_Image Highlights. (Here, too, is the press release.) .

Although I started this post talking about permanent collections, I can’t resist showing something the resourceful paintings department has gone far afield to borrow: a picture called Women Sewing with two Children (at right) by a late 17th Century Venetian painter known as the Master of the Blue Jeans.

Aside from being relevant, it shows people who believe that jeans were an American invention that the term is actually derived from their city of origin, Genoa. And they may also learn that “denim” is related to Nimes, the city in France that originated a similar blue fabric. The Galerie Canesso in Paris had a show for the Blue Jeans painter in 2010, whose 68-page catalogue can be perused here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Galerie Canesso

 

Saturday Night At The Met, Oh My!

This Saturday, at 7 p.m., if you feel like paying $30, you can see a performance by the Metropolitan Museum’s “artist-in-residence” DJ Spook, doing “Of Water and Ice: A Concert of Compositions Based on Water and Arctic Rhythms.” A couple of art-lovers have brought this to my attention, thinking it just awful, but I’m not going to get all worked up about it. Roger Kimball, at The New Criterion, has done that for us.

220px-Paul_Miller (2)DJ Spooky, described by The New York Times last October as a “hip-hop turntablist, composer and author,” will be at the Met* doing heaven knows what in his year-long residency. His coming event is advertised this way:

This event is one of several comprising The Met Reframed, an unprecedented, multilayered, artistic partnership with Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), a composer, multimedia artist, writer, and DJ. His recorded output includes remixes of music ranging from Wu-Tang Clan, Metallica, and Bob Marley to classical/new music legends Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet, and he has performed as a DJ at major festivals, including Bonnaroo and Power to the Peaceful. His work as a media artist has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennial, and Miami/Art Basel; and his first collection of essays, Rhythm Science, was released by MIT Press in 2004, followed by Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media (MIT Press, 2008).

Kimball is incensed. He writes:

…A little investigation reveals that Mr. Spooky is not a composer, artist, or writer in any ordinary sense of those terms. He barely qualifies as a DJ, though he does preside over events where people are subjected to noise at least partially contrived by him. His chief distinguishing feature is command of an academic polysyllabic patois of inadvertently comic pretentiousness, reminiscent in some ways of Walt Kelly’s P. T. Bridgeport….

…Mr. Spooky is one of those performers who likes to deploy the specialized vocabulary of science and philosophy in order to make it seem that his pompous version of aleatoric art is full of deep significance. His “concerts” are really just randomized noise…

…This installment of Met Museum Presents is short but profoundly depressing. Here we have a premier cultural institution, an institution that was created to preserve and transmit the artistic treasures of the past, and what does it offer us? Rebarbative, politically correct nonsense from the dregs of our increasingly senile avant-garde.

Well, not quite. Here we have a premier cultural institution trying desperately to be “relevant” to young people. It’s not the way I would do it; it’s not the way I would spend my money if I were Tom Campbell, the museum’s director. Getting people to watch Spooky in the Rainey auditorium (it’s also being streamed online, for the curious) is not going to get them to go upstairs and see art in the permanent collection. So it’s really just padding attendance numbers, imho.

But let’s keep things in perspective. I found that description above by looking on the Met’s calendar for Mar. 23 — it is one program of 26 events that day. It’s not the end of civilization as we know it. It’s more like a middle-aged bald guy doing a comeover in hopes of attracting hip, younger women. It doesn’t usually work — so why bother?

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

 

 

“Save The Corcoran” Itself Needs Saving

Since I wrote here two days ago about the strange, even silly goings-on at Save the Corcoran, I’ve learned a thing or two that only makes the group’s stance worse.

CorcoranA brief recap: Save the Corcoran endorsed Wayne Reynolds for chairman of the board of the Corcoran, even though he plans to sell off the collection to pay the bills for a plan to expand the Corcoran College of Art and Design, boost the focus on technology and new media, as well as “traditional arts disciplines.” Aand even though he wants to “de-emphasize the gallery” because it can’t compete with “the free, federally funded galleries in town.” Those quotes come from an article in the Washington Post.

In a press release, STC quoted Terrance Shanahan, a Corcoran member and a leader of the group as buying into Reynolds’s vision and saying, “We can no longer sit on the sidelines and let the current board meet in committees and subcommittees while the coffers drain and potential supporters dwindle. The Corcoran’s future starts now. And it starts with Wayne.”

Now I learn from a couple of sources that none of the members on the group’s Advisory Committee were consulted about the endorsement of Reynolds! They weren’t even informed of it in advance!

Linda Crocker Simmons, curator emerita of the Corcoran and an advisory committee member, is the only one going public (at the moment), but she is not alone. Here is what she wrote to me:

Thank you for pointing out what is wrong with Wayne Reynolds’ plan for the Corcoran.I would like to state that although I have been on the advisory board of the STC group I was not consulted or given any prior notice about their endorsement of Wayne Reynolds or his proposed plans for the Corcoran including de-emphasizing the museum and selling much of the art collection. I do not know who the senior advisor is who would work with Reynolds to select the portion of the collection to sell. The continued deaccessioning from the collection horrifies me. The present Corcoran Board has very little art museum experience, a non-professional director, and no full-time curator for European art so there is no one to guard the hen house except the foxes. The Corcoran has begun to eat itself alive, a form of institutional cannibalization. Too tragic. Reynolds offers nothing new to the equation. I too hope for a third choice.

Another source close to STC told me that the Advisory Committee members who objected to Reynolds’s plan were not invited to recent dinner with him and Save the Corcoran leadership.

The Advisory Committee includes many people knowledgeable about art, museums and the art world. What’s the point of having them if they are not called on to advise?

Shame on Save the Corcoran — not only for endorsing Reynolds, but also for the way they did it and they way they shut down dissent.