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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

The Hirshhorn’s Bloomberg Bubble: Updated And Deflated

When I last wrote about Richard Koshalek’s plans to build a seasonal blue bubble atop the Hirshhorn Museum — in fall, 2010 — he had disclosed to me a $1 million-plus naming gift from the Bloomberg Foundation as well as his goal of creating a “cultural think tank” that would combine elements of the World Economic Forum at Davos and TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conferences, and thereby insert art into to the national and international dialogue. I laid out those plans and more in a Cultural Conversation with him in the Wall Street Journal. At the time, he needed to raise about $5 million for the bubble, pretty small for a museum addition, despite the expansive if nebulous thinking behind it.

HirshhornBubbleMany people were negative about the idea, however. But Koshalek was sure, and he told me that programming would begin in late 2012, pending his fundraising success.

Fast forward to now: not much has happened. The new launch date is fall 2014, and according to recent press reports the go or no-go date will occur soon.

Worse, the Inflatable Seasonal Structure, AKA the Bloomberg Bubble, has caused division at the museum. A recent article in Washington City Paper says “Three trustees have left the Hirshhorn’s board of trustees, with rumors of divisions caused by the Bubble following them through the doors of the Gordon Bunshaft–designed concrete donut.”

Ever brash and ebulient, ever more interested in architecture than art, ever ambitious — and those aren’t necessarily critical descriptions — Koshalek is still determined, but the time gap and other considerations (earthquake-proofing, for example) have sent the price tag to something on the order of $11.5 million. It has $4 million, plus another $4 million from the Smithsonian itself for programming, which doesn’t count against the capital cost.

The City Paper article suggests that trustee are worried about the costs of staffing the Bubble, though Koshalek basically shoots that down. I’d guess they are more leary about the very concept of the museum-as-policy-think-tank. From the beginning, Koshalek has never been able to articulate why the dialogue he seeks to start there would matter. It might be educational, as he argues, but would it change anything or be another elitist boondoggle?

The Washington Post, cited by City Paper, has covered the Hirshhorn developments here,  here, and here. I remember the first, disclosing that board chair J. Tomilson Hill had resigned, but did not see the others, about the Bubble’s fate.

If I had to guess now, I’d say it’s over. It’s pretty hard to pull that much money out of a hat in a couple of months, especially when the structure has already been named.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Hirshhorn

 

Things That Make Me Wince; Things That Make Me Applaud

The backlog in my email box is getting way too deep; I can’t keep them all. So, here’s a grouping of things that I might have written about at greater length, had I had the time to do more background work and think about them in depth.

Caulfield,_After_LunchIn the first category — the wince-inducing developments:

  • In late 2011 four British arts institutions renewed a sponsorship deal with BP despite protests from environmentalists — it’s worth £10 million through 2017, roughly divided equally among the four. Environmentalists had protested the deal, citing the oil company’s poor safety record and who-cares attitude toward damage to the earth. Both sides have their points. But did part of the pact with the Tate have to entail such pointed branding as calling an exhibition program “BP British Art Displays.”  That is the unfortunate description on the invitation I received the other day to preview BP British Art Displays: Looking at the View next Monday. The show, which opens to the public on Tuesday, “looks at continuities in the way artists have framed our vision of the landscape over the last 300 years.” Tacky. (That’s Patrick Caulfield’s After Lunch at left.)
  • A blog in Philadelphia is touting the position at #4 of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a list put together by Complex called 100 Museums to See Before You Die, but it’s an odd honor. Take a look for yourself. What kind of a list would make the Hermitage #98, but the Hirshhorn #3? Or put as #1  the Simone Handbag Museum in Seoul…?  I’m not sure what Complex is, btw. But it compiles a lot of lists. A month ago, it had the 10 Most Googled Museums in 2012, drawn from Google’s annual Zeitgeist report. At the top the list: The Metropolitan, followed by the Philadelphia Museum, the National Gallery/Washington, the deYoung, and the Museum of Science in Boston, etc. That’s more like it.

Now some good things:

  • Many museum panels and programs seem bland to me, but here’s one that’s not: This coming Sunday, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts will offer a public forum on Gender and Race in Contemporary Art. A topic like that doesn’t usually interest me, but this one may be different — critic Ken Johnson is there to defend a position he took in The New York Times previewing PAFA’s exhibit The Female Gaze; it was published November 8, 2012, and said in part: “Sexism is probably a good enough explanation for inequities in the market. But might it also have something to do with the nature of the art that women tend to make?” That generated a huge blowback, and Johnson is man enough to take on the dissenters in public.
  • Mrs. William JamesTEFAF Maastricht continues to give money to American museums (it’s usually the other way around, with Americans giving heavily to European cultural institutions). TEFAF’s recently announced conservation grants, which it started last year for its 25th anniversary, this year went to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  Each gets €25,000. In Worcester, that will pay for the restoration of two pendant portraits by William Hogarth of William and Elizabeth James (at right) from 1774. They were acquired more than a century ago, but have never been technically assessed or comprehensively treated. Last year, the Denver Art Museum and the Rijksmuseum shared the prize.
  • RCA readers know I like single-picture exhibitions (see here, here and here, for example), and two great ones have recently been announced. For six weeks beginning Feb. 16, the Getty Museum will be showing Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, its only U.S. stop on its world tour. It’s a loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has been under renovation for 10 years (that gets a wince, too). And on Feb. 19, van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, on loan from the Musee d’Orsay, will go on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It stays, amidst three van Goghs owned by Detroit, until May 28.

That’s enough housecleaning for today.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Tate Britain (top) and the Worcester Museum of Art (bottom) 

 

Eye Candy From Denver, Plus A Modest Reminder

DenverNA4Last week’s announcement by the Metropolitan Museum of Art* that it had organized and sent a collection of works from the permanent collection to the National Museum of China in Beijing –  Earth, Sea, and Sky: Nature in Western Art – Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art — reminded me that I had one more item in my notebooks from my recent trip to Denver.

There, I was eager to see the installation of Native American Art at the Denver Art Museum. I wrote about it from afar two years ago for The New York Times, in an Arts & Leisure section cover story that was headlined Honoring Art, Honoring Artists — which was too bad, actually, because the headline didn’t convey what the article was about.

DenverNA5It was about the attempts there, as curator Nancy Blomberg created a new suite of galleries for Native American art there to place emphasis on the artists who created the works — even when we don’t know there names. She tried, wherever possible, to seek out attributions to individuals and, where not, to emphasize still the individual by saying “Navaho artist,” say, on the labels, rather than just “Navaho.”  (I also posted about it here and here.)

One example is in the photograph at right: It’s the vitrine dedicated to the pottery created by Nampeyo, a Hopi woman born around 1860.

DenverNA1I met Nancy, and she showed me around briefly then left me on my own to wander. The galleries looked beautiful, as the pictures here will attest. (I snapped many with my cell phone. Most were taken before and just as the museum was opening — that’s why they are devoid of people.)

The greatness of Denver’s collection was evident. Now consider that, in 2011, Blomberg said she was going to display about 700 objects from the museum’s collection of about 18.000 objects. Looking around, I blurted out to Blomberg, “you have so much great stuff — you have to get some of your collection out on tour!”

DenverNA2Blomberg hasn’t had the chance to do that, she said, but the museum’s director, Christoph Heinrich, has encouraged her (and other curators there) to do so, she said.

It’s true that museums are sending parts of their permanent collections out on tour, especially during renovations, to increase earned income. But that wasn’t behind my enthusiasm. I simply think that many more people who do not get to Denver, let alone to the Denver Art Museum, would like to see this collection. If what’s in storage includes items of similar quality — not all, but enough — there may well be a themed exhibition that could be shared.

I think that same thought when I visit other museums. Some have an embarrassment of riches that might be lent temporarily to others.

Of course, I know that many museums already do that. This is just a gentle reminder to those who don’t but could.

Photo Credits:  © Judith H. Dobrzynski

A Short Message About Museums And Antiquities

Hugh Eakin has it exactly right in his long piece in today’s New York Times, headlined The Great Giveback. In it, he chronicles what has been happening at American museums regarding the antiquities in their collections. While some of those objects have clearly been obtained under suspicious circumstances — and have now been returned, as they should be – many do not have proven problems. Yet museums have fallen victim to what amounts to extortion some foreign governments — sometimes voluntarily.

Ka-NeferNeferMeanwhile, the looting that these cases were supposed to stop has gone on, possibly getting worse. And many of the stolen objects are being purchased by collectors in other countries that do not care about the looting.

I normally refrain from writing about these cases lest I be accused of conflict of interest because of my consulting work. However, I don’t believe that prohibits me from citing an excellent article. He is a reasonable voice on a topic that attracts extreme positions.

Or from making another point: far too many journalists have bought the line of the “country of origin” claimants and archaeologists without examining the circumstances, the dynamics and the politics at work. The same thing happened, on occasion, in Nazi looting cases. It was far easier to buy the arguments of, and be sympathetic to, the claimants than it was to report out “the best available version of the truth,” to quote that line about the purpose of journalism.

Not all of the claimants of antiquities or World War II loot deserved that bias toward the “underdog.” Some are taking advantage of a complicated situation.

Let me close with Eakin’s final paragraph, pitch-perfect:

Looting is a terrible scourge, and museums must be held to the highest ethical standards so they don’t unwittingly abet it. But they are supposed to be in the business of collecting and preserving art from every era, not giving it away. By failing to deal with the looting problem a decade ago, museums brought a crisis upon themselves. But in zealously responding to trophy hunting from abroad, museums are doing little to protect ancient heritage while making great art ever less available to their own patrons.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the St. Louis Art Museum via the NYT

 

Columbia University’s Big Mistake? Or Misconceptions About Deaccessioning?

Writing on The Nation‘s website, Jon Wiener outlines the tale of how Columbia University stupidly sold a Rembrandt in 1974 that’s now worth multiples of the price it got. Right from the start, though, he generalizes, saying the story “has many lessons, starting with the folly of universities selling art to make money.”

But hold on a minute.

RembrantManArmsAkimboThe painting in question is Man with Arms Akimbo, from 1658. at left. Columbia sold it for “more than” $1 million to a private collector, which in today’s dollar’s, Wiener says, would be a little over $4 million. Yet it carried a price tag of $47 million at Maastricht last year, and dealer Otto Naumann is currently offering it at his gallery. Go here to see the painting in higher-res than this website, as well as its provenance.

The painting was given to Columbia by George Huntington Hartford II in 1958. Columbia sold it to “Harold Diamond, Inc., New York, from whom [it was] acquired by John Seward Johnson (1895 – 1983).” It passed “By inheritance to his third wife, Barbara (“Basia”) Piasecka Johnson (b. 1937),” who consigned it to Christie’s where it sold in December, 2009. “A private collector in the United States” bought it there — said by Wiener to be Steven Wynn, who paid $33 million for it. Naumann bought it from him.

At Columbia, the painting hung in the president’s office, which was in the administration building, which was occupied in 1968 by students protesting the Vietnam War (and called barbarians). They,  however, protected the painting. So Wiener writes:

A painting that should have been on display disappeared from public view for the next forty years—in exchange for which the university got $1 million. So who were the real barbarians?

Universities selling art made headlines in 2009, when Brandeis announced it would sell off the paintings in the university’s Rose Art Museum, including works by de Kooning, Warhol and Lichtenstein, to make money for the school. Outraged protests from the university community and the art world led the trustees to back away from the decision. Columbia’s 1975 sale provides an early example of the practice.

Later he says, as another lesson:

Also: selling old masters eventually makes the seller look foolish, because the prices always go up.

Actually, Wiener looks a bit foolish himself. Old Master prices, as you know, do not “always go up.”

He forgets, too, that Columbia doesn’t have an art museum — unlike Brandeis and his other generalized colleges. Perhaps that’s because it’s located in NYC, where art museums are plentiful and great and likely to outshine anything Columbia could have put together.

He forgets, too, where that painting was as a result — in the president’s office. Hardly on public view.

Did Columbia make a bad deal? Perhaps. But I’d have to see what other Rembrandts were selling for in 1974 — comparables are what counts, not current prices.

More important, as far as I can tell from his story, Columbia’s tale has little relevance to other colleges and universities, with art museums, and deaccessioning. Rather than shed light, Wiener has simply confused the issue. The issue needs light, not heat.

 

 

 

 

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About Judith H. Dobrzynski

Now an independent journalist, I've worked as a reporter in the culture and business sections of The New York Times, and been the editor of the Sunday business section and deputy business editor there as well as a senior editor of Business Week and the managing editor of CNBC, the cable TV

About Real Clear Arts

This blog is about culture in America as seen through my lens, which is informed and colored by years of reporting not only on the arts and humanities, but also on business, philanthropy, science, government and other subjects. I may break news, but more likely I will comment, provide

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