Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

National Museum of Women In the Arts Strays From Mission

This is a corollary to the item I posted other day about the death of authenticity. In search of attendance, art museums — as well as those of other stripes — are deviating from their true missions. As they do, they risk their authenticity.

Here’s just one example: On Friday, Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power, opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The exhibit, organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, was a long overdue examination of the role many pioneering women played in the rock revolution — starting from the beginning. I happened to have seen it while in Cleveland last September, and I not only enjoyed it but also thought it was, for the most part, well done. It goes back to Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday and continues through a few stars of today. You can read the details here and review the included artists here, along with what related to them is on view. Nicely, the NMWA has also posted texts of the wall labels.

But does this show belong at the NMWA? Here’s its mission statement:

The National Museum of Women in the Arts brings recognition to the achievements of women artists of all periods and nationalities by exhibiting, preserving, acquiring, and researching art by women and by teaching the public about their accomplishments.

Pretty basic, and perhaps rock music could slip into that definition were it not for the museum’s history, cited on the same webpage. Wilhelmina Cole Holladay collected visual art, and aimed to put female visual artists into the mainstream of art history. I don’t think rock-and-roll shows, like the one here, are genuinely part of that mission, even taking an expansive view of it. 

What’s in this show is video, vinyl records and record covers, dresses worn at performances, music clips, and the like.

There are legitimate art shows about rock and roll, one being Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, which was organized by the Brooklyn Museum, shown there in 2009-10, and has been on tour. Some critics disputed its contents, though not the concept (The New York Times, for example, said its contents were chosen “mainly on the fame, charisma and notoriety of its subjects” rather than aesthetics, but still called it “entertaining and sometimes absorbing.”), but photography is part of the visual arts. Some pieces in that exhibit were photojournalism, but wasn’t Otto Dix’s war series, say, documentary in nature? 

Last spring, I wrote here about the first 25 years of the NMWA, I mentioned that attendance overall was 2.5 million — an average of 100,000 a year. In Washington, D.C., that beats the ailing Corcoran’s most recent year (85,441), but not by much. WomenWho Rock will help increase attendance, I’ll bet. But to what end? As I wrote the other day, “it’s important for them to keep authenticity in mind when [museums] design initiatives intended to lure broader audiences.”  The mission, too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Rock Cellar Magazine

The Death of Authenticity?

Since James Beck, the Columbia University art historian and anti-restoration crusader, died more than five years ago, Michael Daley, who runs  ArtWatch UK, the British arm of Beck’s ArtWatch International, has ably taken up Beck’s chores.

The other day, Daley sent me (and many others, of course) an email headlined  The “World’s worst restoration” and the Death of Authenticity, which gave me pause. Writing about the case of  81-year-old Cecilia Gimenez, who was recently shown to have totally wrecked a painting of Christ in her local church by trying to restore it without the requisite skills — I can’t bear to show a picture of it here – he tells of the laughing that it brought on and, now, of a petition to leave it as is, blocking a return to the original image. 

Daley also cites Observer columnist Barbara Ellen as “having good sport” with her suggestions of nips and tucks to the Mona Lisa and other works. We all can take a joke, but …

Unfortunately, Daley then gets carried away saying:

With one honourable exception … commentators failed to grasp that while this debacle is an extreme case it is not an aberration within modern art restoration practices. To the contrary, adulterations of major works of art are commonplace, seemingly systemic products of a booming, insufficiently monitored international art conservation nexus.

And he goes on to cite other professional restorations as horror. (Some perhaps true — look at the Renoirs in this post.)

But Daley inadvertently makes another point with his headline — there is something in the idea that what interests people today has less and less to do with authenticity and more and more to do with experience or being part of an in-crowd. (We can all laugh at that silly old woman, right?) If people can crowd-curate, why not let them vote on restorations? Oh, we did that — well, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts did that, asking whether a figure added to a Hobbema painting in the 19th century should be removed. In that case, the crowd was wrong, art-historically speaking, 54% to 46%.

The MIA said it would do the right thing, however: 

The final decision on whether the hunter stayed or not was made by the paintings curators: they decided to mask the figure for aesthetic reasons. Patrick Noon, Chair of Paintings at the MIA, said, “The picture is transformed without the later figure and the landscape becomes luminous and open.” He also noted that the later figure wasn’t even in the costume of the time of the original painting, and that it was a 19th-century intrusion. The process is 100% reversible.

 But back to Daley’s headline point, which he doesn’t develop. In today’s New York Times, critic Ed Rothstein discusses developments in some Israeli history museums, and cites a small museum as being “described in the newspaper Haaretz as ‘Warsaw-Ghetto Disneyland‘ for its new emphasis on sound and lighting effects, including a simulation of a cattle car heading to a death camp.” That, to me, is a horror.

Fortunately, this trend, which can only be about entertainment and participation, is happening more frequently in history and natural history museums than in art museums. But it’s important for them to keep authenticity in mind when they design initiatives intended to lure broader audiences. Right?

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Bazaarvoice

Crystal Bridges Hits A Milestone

Last Thursday, less than 10 full months since it opened, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art welcomed its 500,000th visitor. That’s pretty impressive. All those doubters who said it could not bring people to Bentonville, Arkansas, should now begin eating a little crow.

Ok, I know — the first is always the best, whether it’s a new museum or a new wing. But extrapolate that figure to 12 full months, and when Crystal Bridges hits its one-year anniversary, attendance may well have topped 600,000.

That’s well over attendance for many far more established museums — more than the Whitney, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins (if my memory serves).

Unlike the coast-centered art-lovers who do not believe great art belongs in the hinterlands, I’ve always applauded Alice Walton for wanting to bring American art to people who may not be able to travel to see it. So I’m more than pleased.

And here’s another reason for that: speaking the other day with Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s director (at right), I asked him to remind me what projections they’d given for the first year. “We didn’t,” he said. “We had no public projections,” and the staff prudently budgeted for a total between 150,000 and 250,000 — a classic case of underpromising so it’s easy to overdeliver. Not a bad policy (the underpromising, not the lack of disclosure).

“We’ve had to increase parking and add staff in things like food service,” Bacigalupi said. Most proudly, he said, the handbook — Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — has gone into its third printing. The first two, 5,000 copies and 4,000, respectively, have sold out. (It was priced at $60, but is available from both Barnes and Noble and Amazon for $37.50.) The next will be for 10,000 copies. “That’s unprecedented in my experience,” Bacigalupi said.

Most importantly, attendance is hitting the audience I most want for it: Using zip codes, the museum has tracked two-thirds of its visitors to the region — that it, those able to travel to, see and get home in one day. The other one-third is from “beyond,” of which 10% are from “touch states” bordering on Arkansas. So about 70% are coming from the fairly nearby. That’s a good thing.

As for the rest, they’re coming from the rest of the U.S. and abroad. Anecdotally, Bacigalupi reports a ripple effect — a group comes from a museum, say, and they are followed by others from that area — a fivefold increase, sometimes  — who presumably learned of the museum’s merit by word-of-mouth. The word is spreading, he says, because “we’re not doing national advertising.”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Glasstire (top), Smithsonian (bottom)

 

The Saginaw Experience: Hubris, Which Is Not So Uncommon — UPDATED

“Closing is not an option. It is not even under consideration,” Sharril L. McNally, the president of the board of trustees of the Saginaw (Mi.) Art Museum, told the Ann Arbor News (posted on MLive) the other day. And today, the board is set to vote on what to do instead.

Like those of many another museum, the tale in northern Michigan seems to be about over-expansion. In 2003 and 2004, the museum completed and opened two expansions with a cost of $7.45 million to its historic mansion home (left). To help finance trustees’ vision, they took out a $450,000 mortgage. And the increased space added to operating costs, with energy bills alone now exceeding $100,000. According to the ANN:

For the past two weeks, the museum at 1126 N. Michigan — its home since 1948, in the mansion that once belonged to lumber baron Clark Lombard Ring — has opened only for Macy’s Free Fridays and has placed coming exhibitions on hold.

Exhibitions have already been largely based on a permanent collection that contains “2,500 works spanning 4,500 years,” but visitorship did not increase enough to cover costs (it never does) and the museum could not land enough grants to cover costs either. “Among its most memorable works are Saginaw native E. Irving Couse’s depictions of the American Indians in the Old West,” the article said.

Now McNally says the museum may have to relocate to cheaper quarters.

As I write this, the article has 22 comments from readers (plus one from the writer of the article, Sue White), and all of them could by summed up by one: “Very sad indeed. If it wasn’t for that 8 million dollar eyesore expansion 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have this issue…I liked the museum the way it was. That expansion was like taking a classic ’67 Corvette and putting on 22 inch spinning rims and bolting a giant nascar spoiler on the back….whoever the architect was, should refund the museum it’s money, with an apology letter.” Some outright blame the trustees for hubris.

Just like so many other over-reaching expansions in the past 10 to 15 years.

A while back the American Association of Museum used too track museum closings, but it stopped  — the task was too hard to assure accuracy. So I have no definitive information on the topic. Most of those in deep trouble appear to be small museums, but they often took their cue for expansion from the larger museums. It’s amazing to me that so few closings, or moves to smaller quarters, have been made during this long period of economic stagnation.

UPDATE, 8/24: Yesterday’s board meeting seemed to go as promised — the board is assessing a move from the mansion it has occupied since 1948 to one of three locations, all undisclosed, that would be cheaper to operate. There may also be some deaccessioning, according to the Saginaw News, quoting McNally:

As with any large house, it’s amazing to see what you’ve accumulated through the years.This will also give us the chance to take a good look at what we have and what we might trade as we refurbish and enhance our collection. That’s every museum’s goal.

And the mansion?

 The building is ours and we will attempt to sell it. If that’s not possible, we will do everything we can to preserve it. It’s a jewel in Saginaw.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Ann Arbor News

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Window On The Future Of The Clyfford Still Museum

The exhibition I feature here doesn’t open until Sept. 14, but this is the summer doldrums, and hey there’s not much else going, despite some promises to the contrary. (I would be happy to be contradicted on that reference.)

So let’s look at the Clyfford Still Museum, in Denver, which opened last November. As I wrote in October, 2011, in an article for the Wall Street Journal about the museum,

Creating a constituency for a one-artist museum can be tricky even when, like Georgia O’Keeffe or Andy Warhol, that artist is widely known (and loved) and has a local base (Santa Fe, N.M., and Pittsburgh, respectively). Still, a loner who was born in North Dakota in 1904 and died in Maryland in 1980, with several stops in between, had decreed that his life’s work should go to any city that would erect a museum solely for his works—and nothing else, ever.

And that turned out to be Denver. So how is Dean Sobel, the museum’s director, going to pull off Vincent/Clyfford — “a focused exhibition exploring connections between Vincent Van Gogh and Clyfford Still—in particular those found during the initial decades of the latter’s career,” according to the press release?

Reproductions and “interpretive material.” The exhibition itself will feature about 20 of Still’s paintings and works on paper, all executed between the late 1920s and the 1930s. They expose, we’re told, “direct parallels with Van Gogh’s preferred subject matter—including vignettes of agrarian labor, moody landscapes treated as soul-scapes, and dark interior scenes—as well as his use of the grotesque to accentuate the plight of human beings living on the edge.”

Still apparently identified with van Gogh because of his bare-bones childhood on farms in Canada, where he did manual labor, like the peasants van Gogh depicted. “Cycles of growth, decay, and rebirth in their work are evoked in their through recurrent symbols such as corn, the sun, and the sower,” the museum says. “Still’s paintings also echo Van Gogh’s in their rich color palette and heavily troweled painterly surfaces.”

I credit Sobel and adjunct curator David Anfam for coming up with the theme. They have discovered a very good, direct pairing of a 1936 painting by Still with van Gogh’s Two Peasants Digging, from 1889, illustrated on the press release, which I encourage you to view.

I asked for more and received PH-418, from 1936, above left, which is paired with Van Gogh’s marvelous Night Cafe, 1888, from the Yale  University Art Gallery, at right. Interesting.

The museum is also pairing Still’s now-famous  Self-Portrait from 1940 (which you will find on this webpage) with van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, 1888, from the Harvard University Art Museums, bottom left.

Based on this information — one never knows until one sees an exhibition — I give the Still museum credit for trying and being enterprising. It’s a good theme.

But I think Still made a huge, egotistical mistake — preventing comparisons of works by other artists side-by-side doesn’t make him look better, it makes him look afraid. Wouldn’t this have been far more interesting if the van Gogh works were actually present, instead of there in reproductions?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Clyfford Still Museum (top); ©  the Yale University Art Gallery (middle); © the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums (bottom).