Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

“Portrait of Wally” Is Back In The News, Triggering A Few Thoughts — UPDATED

When Egon Schiele painted his tender “Portrait of Wally,” his mistress, exactly 100 years ago, I am sure he never imagined her ensuing notoriety – for “Wally,” subject of multi-decade ownership battle,  is again in the news. This time, perhaps, it’s in a good way. A documentary about her case will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend.

To refresh, briefly: Wally is the painting that was on view in 1997 in the Rudolf Leopold collection at the Museum of Modern Art, then claimed by the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, because it was seized by a Nazi and then tangled in Austrian collections and politics. The fight for Wally was finally resolved in 2010, with a settlement favoring the heirs.

No other restitution case has had as much as an impact on the way we view Nazi art cases as Wally. She changed everything.

I was there at the beginning — it was my article in The New York Times about Leopold that brought her plight to the attention of the world and triggered everything else. But as Jane Kallir, the dealer who tipped me to the Nazi connection at the exhibition opening, says in the film, “That was the beginning of events that I think none of us in our wildest dreams could have anticipated at that moment.”

How this case came to dominate involves the action of the U.S. government, as I explain in a short opinion piece published today by The Art Newspaper. It also involves, imho, the way MoMA in particular and other museums in general responded to the heirs’ claim — which was to side, without questioning what was right, with the Leopold Collection.

I recommend the film, though it’s not perfect (and I should disclose here that I am in it), not least because it shows that some museums, at least, and some museum people, still have some soul-searching to do. I believe that notwithstanding the fact that some claims for Nazi-looted art have been specious and over-reaching.

I’m also still troubled that much of the rest of the issues I raised in that 1997 article — about the way Leopold “conserved” his paintings and cared for them, or not — were totally overshadowed by the Nazi story. He’s dead now, of course, and his collection is in the hands of professionals. But I’ve always wondered if other collectors are also mistreating art they now own, but which eventually will belong to the ages.

UPDATE, 4/25: I’m happy to report that Howard Spiegler of Herrick, Feinstein, the key lawyer for the Bondi heirs, has reconnected with me and sent along his own article on the ramifications of the Wally case. Here’s a link to it, in Vol. 7 of his firm’s Art & Advocacy. Herrick’s Art Law Group has published such bulletins on its website (here) and a very useful accounting of all resolved World War II-related art claims.

NYC’s Summer Of Monet Elicits Innovative Collaboration, Not Competition

Now this is a good idea — a collaboration between the New York Botanical Garden* and the Metropolitan Museum of Art* that I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted.

This summer belongs to Monet at the NYBG. Not only will it recreate Monet’s garden at Giverny inside the conservatory, but also it will, in the Rondina Gallery, mount an exhibition called “The Artist in the Garden” curated by Paul Hayes Tucker — a foremost Monet scholar. It will include, for the first time together, two rarely seen paintings by Monet – Irises from a private Swiss collection, at right, and The Artist’s Garden in Giverny, on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery. Also on view will be “his paint-encrusted wooden palette and an evocative array of historical photographs that show the artist creating and enjoying his garden.”

In the conservatory, visitors will encounter

…a façade of Monet’s house offer[ing] a glimpse of the artist’s view of his garden and the flowers that served as his muse for many of his most famous paintings. As visitors walk past the vine-covered pink walls with bright-green shutters, familiar to anyone who has seen the original in Giverny, their senses will be invigorated by the sights and scents of spring aubretias, bellflowers, and poppies, as well as masses of Dutch, German-bearded, Japanese, and Siberian irises, which Monet immortalized in his art.

A re-creation of Monet’s Grand Allée from his formal garden known as Clos Normand, or Norman enclosure, will include a path of rose-covered arches with beds of lush, colorful flowers lining both sides. A Japanese footbridge dressed with mauve and white Asian wisterias will extend over a picturesque pool, calling to mind Monet’s water garden, encircled with willow trees, bamboo groves, and flowering shrubs.

Read more of that part here, because what visitors will see changes in the summer and fall.

I wasn’t sure how art museums would react to this incursion. Sure, botanical gardens have been offering visitors art exhibits for years, but paintings? That’s a step further. Cultural institutions compete for visitors’ time as well as interests, after all.

But then today came the announcement from the NYBG about a new iPhone ap — NYBG IN BLOOM. It includes one element in collaboration with the Met:  “Paintings and Plants.”

 This special feature of the app enables visitors to virtually view select Monet paintings on display at the Met and link to the Met’s Web site for further information about them, complementing what visitors see at the Garden’s exhibition.

 That sounds terrific — a win-win. Read more here.

The NYBG’s fantastic-sounding summer of Monet begins on May 19 and runs through October 21.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the NYBG

*I consult to a foundation that supports both institutions.

FUN Fellowships At An Art Museum Are No Joke

As is often said, non-fiction is stranger than fiction: Sometimes you just can’t make things up as well as life does. That is certainly the case with a press release that DIDN’T land in my email box last week. Someone had to tip me off to it.

The announcement was made by the Museum of Arts and Design, and it said that it had chosen four winners of its “FUN Fellowship,” which “was established in 2011 by the Museum of Arts and Design in recognition of the vital role nightlife practitioners play in the city’s creative community and artistic endeavors.”

The winners receive both financial and logistical support “to help them advance and realize their latest nightlife-related projects.” This year’s winners are Ladyfag, FCKNLZ, CHERYL, and Babycastles. The release continues:  

The Fun Fellows were identified through a complex, competitive process. MAD invited 100 individuals from the art and nightlife communities to each nominate a candidate. From this group, 35 individuals and collaboratives were selected as semi-finalists by a collection of their peers, and the winners were chosen by a jury comprised of curators, nightlife luminaries, critics, and previous Fun Fellows. “We wanted to make sure we’re not trying to force nightlife practitioners into the fine arts sector, but rather expanding the sector to better accommodate the practice,” said Jake Yunza, MAD’s Manager of Public Programs and founder of the THE FUN fellowship.

The “fine arts sector”? And why would MAD think New York City’s nightlife needs such support? Check that press release link for the nature of these subsidized projects, which involve dance-induced euphoria, private “Dayclub” events not open to the public, video game hacking workshops, and theatrical restagings of club-kid talk show appearances.   

It’s easy to poke fun at this, but there’s a serious nature to this post. When it comes to gathering public support for arts institutions — meager as it is — these kinds of programs work against the whole arts community. No one is against fun; but people are not eager to subsidize it in such difficult times.

The Museum of Arts and Design’s URL is “madmuseum.org.” In this particular case, it is mad. 

BTW, I emailed MAD’s press office earlier today asking for the size of the monetary support, the source of the money and the nature of the logisitical support. If and when I receive an answer, I’ll update this post.

Ladyfag, btw, is pictured.

A Critical View: The Artist We Love To Hate

The Tate Modern’s exhibition of Damien Hirst’s work opened last week, and I thought I was time to check in on the reaction. It is, the Tate says:

the first substantial survey of his work in a British institution and will bring together key works from over twenty years. The exhibition will include iconic sculptures from his Natural History series, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991, in which he suspended a shark in formaldehyde. Also included will be vitrines such as A Thousand Years from 1990, medicine cabinets, pill cabinets and instrument cabinets in addition to seminal paintings made throughout his career using butterflies and flies as well as spots and spins. The two-part installation In and Out of Love, not shown in its entirety since its creation in 1991 and Pharmacy 1992 will be among the highlights of the exhibition.

The Tate advises, on its website, “We are currently experiencing a very high demand for tickets. We strongly advise booking in advance to avoid disappointment.”

When I looked for reviews, I discovered that my friend Helen Stoilas at The Art Newspaper had already compiled some quotes from the reviews, published on the web — “Thumbs down (bar one) for Damien Hirst at Tate Modern.”  That one, I guess, is Richard Dorment at the “conservative” Daily Telegraph, who is quoted saying:

“For reasons that I don’t understand, he insists on presenting himself as a fraud who is somehow pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. And that’s a pity, because in Tate Modern’s full-scale retrospective he comes across as a serious—if wildly uneven—artist.” Dorment ends his review saying: “In many ways this is a difficult show, but I left it with a sense of Hirst as an artist whose moral stature can no longer be questioned.”

Less kind were critics at the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Times, and independent critic (former director of Kelvingrove in Glasgow) Julian Spalding, whose new book, Con Art–Why you ought to sell your Damien Hirsts while you can, apparently disqualified him, in the Tate’s view, from attending the press preview to do interviews for the BBC. Shame on the Tate Modern, if that’s the whole story. Here’s an account in the Independent, hat-tip to TAN.

To TAN’s roundup article, let me add a few:

Presumably, the Tate has its man and is sticking with him, charging £14.00 for adults,  and warning visitors to expect an hour of wait time before buying tickets. The exhibit was, btw, sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority

Photo Credit: Hirst and his “I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds,” Oli Scarff/Getty Images via The Art Newspaper

 

 

Taking Stock: The National Museum of Women In the Arts At 25

On April 7, 1987, after five years of being a private museum in the home of Wilhelmina Holladay, the National Museum of Women in the Arts opened its doors in Washington, D.C. The museum was met by applause from some, and by derision, too.  

I was in between: I detest the idea that women need a museum of their own even while I know that women have in many cases been left out of art history. Yet at the same time, I believe that a museum like this tends both to ghettoize women artists and to let other museums feel as if they are off the hook.

That said, the NMWA –while never producing, to my knowledge, a blockbuster — has a credible track record of exhibitions and scholarship. I’ve viewed the catalogue for its current show, Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versaille, and Other French National Collections, and found many paintings to admire.  Many of these works have never before been exhibited in the United States, and in fact many were in storage in France. 

Since the museum’s 25th anniversary was yesterday, I thought it would be interesting to take stock, and I asked some questions of the NMWA’s PR representatives. Here are some fact, some answers:

  • Collection: about 4,000 works by nearly 1,000 women, spanning the 16th century to the present
  • Collection in 1987: 300 works
  • Visitorship, over 25 years:  2,500,000
  • Individuals participating in education or public programs in 25 years:  332,500
  • Number of members:  18,000
  • Distribution of members: all 50 U.S. states and 28 countries, with 81% located outside the DC metro area.
  • Exhibitions presented in 25 years:  250
  • Exhibitions originated by NMWA in 25 years:  188
  • Number of women artists shown at NMWA in 25 years:  2,000+
  • Number of publications about women artists produced by NMWA in 25 years:  170
  • Scholarship facilities: 18,500-volume library and research center that houses the Archives of Women Artists
  • Number of artists in that archive/database of women artists:  18,000

The French exhibition isn’t the only one that scoured other countries for “lost” women artists. In 2002, an NMWA team visited the Hermitage to organize An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Collection. According to the museum, the curator there took them to an attic storage area – where they found works by Anna Tierbusch-Lisiewska and Christina Robertson, among others.  Curators from both museums studied some of those works, and NMWA provided money to clean and restore more than 50 paintings by women artists in the Hermitage collection.  Many of them, the NMWA says, are now on a permanent display at the Hermitage.

All of this is not to say that the NMWA has rediscovered masterpieces. But some of these artists clearly had talent, and in some cases one has to wonder what might have been had these women not been cut off from full-fledged participation in art circles of their day. 

Photo Credit: Eulalie Morin’s Portrait of Madame Recamier, Courtesy of NMWA/Versailles