Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Side Benefit to Denver’s van Gogh Show: Instilling Local Pride

I had no intention of writing again about Becoming van Gogh, the homegrown exhibition at the Denver Art Museum that chronicles precisely how Vincent taught himself to draw and develop the style that has made him so beloved and appreciated. I wrote about it on this blog twice in October, laying out why it was both so special and difficult for Denver museum curator Timothy Standring to do (here) and also about how its teaching moments were exceptional (here).

More recently, I mentioned that the exhibit was so popular that the museum was staying open overnight — allowing visitors to van Gogh from 8 a.m. on Saturday through 11:59 on Sunday night. The tickets sold out quickly. And even before that I knew — from talking with DAM director Christoph Heinrich when I was in Denver two weeks ago — that it was going to be a record-setter for the museum.

But today’s report in the Denver Post  (which has some visitorship and new membership information) reminded me of something else I wanted to say about the show. Post reporter Ray Mark Rinaldi stopped in at 4 a.m. on Sunday, and caught the crowd “transitioning from the ‘stayed ups’ to the ‘got ups’ ” and noted the “durable energy” in the galleries. Then he quotes a woman, there with her nine-year-old daughter, saying:

We live in Denver. We don’t get a chance to see something like this often.

That is both heart-breaking and heart-warming to me. Of course, van Gogh is one of the most well-known artists — even people who know little about art know about him. And that’s why some come to an exhibition like this, even when, say, the Toledo Museum of Art did not quite make its target for its recent Manet show.

But Denverites also seemed to have appreciated the fact that the exhibition was “made in Denver.” It wasn’t a traveling show. Standring told me recently that he’s now recognized by people as he goes about their daily business. Denverites are taking pride in their museum, and that’s a level up from simply attending a blockbuster.

Heretofore, as Rinaldi pointed out, “The museum’s biggest hits tend to be traveling shows that make a stop here, such as 2010’s display of King Tut treasures and and last year’s Yves Saint Laurent fashion show.”

Listen to a few reader comments posted after that Post article:

I saw another major Van Gogh exhibit in LA a decade ago and this one was every bit its match, not only in the quality of the works, but in the telling of the narrative. This was a major exhibition that any museum would have been proud to assemble. Congratulations to the DAM and the curator. You brought an amazing experience to this former cow town.

And:
Mr. Standring- Well done. I learned a lot and enjoyed the whole thing. And now I know where DAM is. Wasn’t exactly a regular before.
It’s a wonderful thing to create a blockbuster that draws in new people to an art museum — it’s even greater to make the local community proud of an art museum they rarely visited before.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Post

Austin Explores Creating A Folk Art Museum

Last summer, when I went briefly to Mexico City on vacation, I was totally bowled over by a collection of Latin American folk art I saw there. It was beautiful, it was different, it varied across regions and countries, it was sophisticated, and it was well-crafted.

affa-savethedate-followup4-webSo I was delighted to learn of an unrelated, but possibly similar, development in Austin: This Friday, a group of folk art collectors there who banded together in the late ’80s, will sponsor a public meeting to explore whether or not to start a folk art museum there. Austin Friends of Folk Art, a nonprofit, has brought experts to set the scene — two art people, two museum planning experts, and Ned Rifkin, whom you’ll remember as both a museum director and curator, now a professor at the University of Texas. (See invite at right.)

Folk art is a tricky thing. It’s not “hot” among collectors and some folk art museums — notably the one in New York — have had a hard time attracting sufficient audiences to meet their expectations. The Austin collectors seem to have a Latin bent. An article about the group’s hopes in the Austin American-Statesman mentions folk art from Mexico, plus grants to Latino organizations.

But the Friends group seems well aware of the potential pitfalls. The Statesman quotes Merry Wheaton, the current president of AFFA, saying:

Clearly there are a lot of (folk art) collections in town that will need to be housed and taken care of. We’re an all-volunteer organization, and we don’t have an endowment or maybe even the people who could lead the fundraising for a new building. But maybe we don’t need a building.

Instead, it might create displays at:

Hotel lobbies, the airport — any place people already gather. Art is already exhibited in such places.

And:

There are lots of possibilities. What we want is to put ideas out there, see what the community desires and see who else is out there and interested. If there’s energy out there for something, we can move forward.

Sensible, and perhaps enlightened. We shall see after Friday.

 

Pacific Standard Time 2.0

You can’t keep a good idea down. The Getty knew it had a fantastic idea a few years ago by starting Pacific Standard Time, the sweeping roster of exhibitions and programs at 68 arts institutions across Southern California that in 2011 chronicled art in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980. It also drew in more than 70 private art galleries in Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and the Greater Los Angeles area, which staged more than 125 exhibitions.

PST_logo_vert_CMYKNot wanting that brand to die, the Getty promptly said last summer that it would continue the effort with a run of shows on California architecture. It warned that the original PST took years to organize, though, and that version 2.0 would be smaller.

In September, a press release suggested that Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. would involve nine exhibitions, plus “accompanying programs and events” in and around Los Angeles between April and July of this year. At one point, Getty Foundation head Deborah Marrow told me that the Getty would split about $1 million on grantees in the partnership.

Fast forward to now: The Getty is out with new information — the roster has grown to 11 exhibitions and the Foundation has doled out $3.6 million in grants to 16 organizations for exhibitions, publications and programming. I suspect that galleries or others may figure out a way to participate, just as they did last time. This year’s version, though, will be much more manageable. (And btw, the new subject goes along with the Getty Conservation Institute’s Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative. 

Here are the architecture exhibition partners: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hammer Museum; the Getty; the A+D Architecture and Design Museum; the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara; the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture; and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. The other programming partners are the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Community Art Resources, Inc.; The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens; the Los Angeles Conservancy; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Machine Project; Pasadena Heritage; and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.

You find the whole list of exhibitions in the new press release, and more information about them here. And of course there’s a separate website.

The Getty’s own show, Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, is called “the first major museum exhibition to survey Los Angeles’s built environment and rapid postwar evolution into one of the most populous and influential industrial, economic and creative capitals in the world.”

As others catch my eye, I’ll may write about some of the individual projects in the weeks ahead.

The question is whether this is enough to keep the brand not only alive but also sexy. Or will it disappoint those who went to the first PST? Can 11 exhibitions and other programming combine to make a critical mass? We won’t know until we see the contents of the exhibitions.

 

 

Albright-Knox Goes Far Afield For Director

The Albright-Knox has just announced its new director, Janne Sirén.

SirenNot one of the usual suspects, that is true. He comes from five years as director of the Helsinki Art Museum in Finland, whose collection of 8,900 works covers the territory from the late 19th century to contemporary art. It “operates two exhibition spaces in the heart of Helsinki: Tennis Palace and Kluuvi Gallery, an innovative gallery space focused on showcasing experimental works by emerging Finnish artists,” according to the press release.

Siren, who was in Buffalo today for the announcement, was “found” by Russell Reynolds, which was tasked with finding a successor to Louis Grachos last year. He left in December, as I recall, as the museum was closing out its celebratory 150th year. At the time, the board said it could have a replacement announced by Jan. 1 — which seemed ambitious to me.

But they came close. Give credit for that — far too many museum director searches take a year or more.

The Albright-Knox says he is “the first Director from the Nordic region to take the helm of a major American art museum.” But he was educated here, earning a B.A. in Art History from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester and an M.A./Ph.D. in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He’ll take up the post in “late spring or early summer.” And he was behind the aborted scheme to build a branch of the Guggenheim Helsinki — it failed to pass muster with the city’s government, though there were also questions about the Guggenheim’s enthusiasm for it.

Siren, who is is 42, “has overseen the organization of several major international exhibitions, including Georgia O’Keeffe; Georg Baselitz: Remix; Enchanting Beauty: Masterpieces from the Collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery; Surrealism and Beyond: Masterpieces from the Israel Museum; Defiance and Melancholy – German Painting from the Dresden Albertinum/Galerie Neue Meister and Helsinki School – Photography and Video Now,” the Albright-Knox said.

Siren told the Buffalo News:

From the moment I set foot in Buffalo, it was sort of love at first sight. I just felt that in Buffalo there’s this very positive aura about the next chapter in the city’s future, not only at the Albright-Knox, but more generally in Buffalo. Things are sort of happening, and you see in little bits and pieces around there, it’s sort of in the air. And that’s tremendously exciting.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Albright-Knox

The Tate Recommends Art For You And Me

Did you click on that link to the Tate in my recent post about Becoming van Gogh in Denver? I did. And I was surprised by two features of the Tate website. Aside from showing me a good reproduction of the drawing I wanted you to see, the museum supplied, beneath the van Gogh, “Other works of art you may be interested in.”

T00468_10Amazon and other commercial sites use this technology (and they don’t always get it right), but this was either the first time I noticed it on a museum website or a relatively new development. I was eager to see what other art the Tate thought I might like. Twenty-two other works, as it turned out.

They ranged in date from 1795 to 1982, versus the 1884 creation of Thatched Roofs. Only two were by van Gogh (The Oise at Auvers and Farms Near Auvers). Other artists included Natalya Goncharova (at right), Joan Gonzales, James Dickson Innes, Sir Ernest Albert Waterlow, Charles Condor and Eric Forbes-Robertson — as well as the naturals like Cezanne, Gauguin, Schuffenecker, and Seurat. The work of six of the artists in the lineup (not all mentioned here) was new to me — which means that the Tate is leading people to discoveries.

If you click on any the pictures, you are referred to another selection of “other works of art you may be interested in.” There’s overlap between the selections, but it’s not complete — perhaps half of the artworks are the same, the rest different. Exploring art this way could be endless, but you can quit at any time.

Or you could ignore the whole offer, and just look at the van Gogh drawing.

This seems like a good feature. The Metropolitan Museum’s website offers “related content” for various artworks in its collection — but the suggested works are by the same artist. MoMA doesn’t have this feature either, nor does the National Gallery of Art in Washington. If others so, please let me know. It should spread.

Whether or not it’s a good thing that the website doesn’t explain why the pictures are related — that van Gogh with this Goncharova — is up to you.

Back at the Tate, website visitors can also “find similar artworks” on their own because below each work in its collection, there are links to artworks by the same artist, by category, decade, style, and subject — in many variations. For Thatched Roofs, for example, there are seasons, trees, places, architecture, towns-scapes, etc. etc. Finally, there’s a link to Context — gifts and bequests. That one seemed too formidable for me to explore right now.

I wonder how people are using this information and this site. Not to worry. The Tate does too. In fact, before exploring any of this, I was presented with one question asking me why I came to the site, so that the Tate could improve it. My choices, abbreviated, were: to plan a visit; to find specific information for research or professional reasons; to find information for personal reasons; for casual browsing; or to book a place at an event/program.

It’s simple: Do I need to say that both feature are good ideas? Go explore.

Photo Credit: Gardening, Natalya Goncharova, 1908, Courtesy of the Tate