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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Now Hirshhorn Loses Interim Director

The job of Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution, just got a little harder. Kurin has been responsible for the search for a director of the Hirshhorn Museum since last spring. You’ll recall that former director Richard Koshalek stepped down after his seasonal inflatable bubble idea was killed by the Smithsonian amid board turmoil at the Hirshhorn and questions about who’d pay for it.

kerry_brougherKurin appointed Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s deputy director and chief curator, to be interim director. Kurin, about the same time as the scathing resignation of trustee Constance Caplan, said he’d convene a search committee and begin the search toward the end of last July.

Strangely, director searches take a year or more to settle on the right person. But now Brougher is leaving to be head of the museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news last week, saying:

Landing the seasoned museum executive is a coup for the high-profile $300 million project, which is slated to break ground at the end of the year under the aegis of architect Renzo Piano in the renovated May Co. building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus. The museum, a top priority of Academy CEO Dawn Hudson, has been the source of some concern in recent months over how it will balance the populist appeal of Hollywood with the strong intellectual rigor of a top-notch museum.

It makes sense for Brougher, who has a masters in the history of film and television from UCLA,  but clearly he is not leaving controversy behind.

THR went on to say:

It is unclear what title Brougher will be given at the museum. In an interview Friday, the AMPAS museum’s managing director, Bill Kramer, told THR that the museum committee had recently chosen the institution’s “creative leader,” noting “the announcement will take place very, very soon” but declining to identify the selected individual or specify whether the person would be named an executive director or chief curator or some combined role. He explained that the hold-up is, at this point, merely “an HR issue.”

“An HR issue”? That’s more than a little odd. I hope Brougher can quell the disagreements there. I also wish Kurin good luck with a search — fast. Nothing worse that a museum adrift and a board in turmoil.

Meantime, THR recently provided a look inside the fledgling museum in this gallery.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Washington Post

 

At Last: NEH To Get A New Chief

Yesterday, President Obama announced his new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities: Dr. William “Bro” Adams, the current president of Colby College in Maine, a position he has held since 2000. Adams announced his impending retirement from Colby — in June — at the start of 2013.

bro_hires_2005Previously, Adams had been president of Bucknell University, 1995 to 2000, and before that he was vice president and secretary of Wesleyan University, 1993 to 1995. He has also been program coordinator of the “Great Works in Western Culture” program at Stanford University, from 1986 to 1988.

In making the announcement, the President cited Adams’s “demonstrated leadership and decades of experience as an administrator at major universities and liberal arts institutions” and his “clear dedication and lifelong commitment to the humanities.”

Adams has a B.A. from the Colorado College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, though the announcement did not cite what subjects he focused on. It did say he has taught at Stanford, Santa Clara University and the University of North Carolina (political philosophy at the latter two).  He also served in the Vietnam War as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army.  He was a Fulbright Scholar in 1977, a time during which he “conducted research at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.” He’s also a member of the Board of Directors of the Maine Film Center and the Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation.

I don’t see any books by him in any database/website so there seems to be little trail of his intellectual interests.

When Adams announced his retirement, Adams said he’d like to complete a book about French philosophy and art, referencing his time in Paris. He also said that he and his wife were “going to remain residents of Maine and certainly stay involved in some ways in the Waterville community.” Guess not now!

Based on this information, he seems to be an administrator rather than an intellectual powerhouse, but we shall see.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Colby College

 

Oddly, Bush’s Art Gives Reason To Cheer

ad_131588191I’m sure you all saw coverage of the exhibit showing portraits painted by former president George W. Bush. The show at the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University was front page news, pictorially, in New York — here in The New York Times and here in The Wall Street Journal — and probably elsewhere too.

It was criticized as amateurish by some — most? — and I don’t disagree. So was Winston Churchill’s art, but it was still interesting that he could as well as he did, given all the other things Churchill did so well.

eeeeBush’s art, meanwhile, bears a lot of similarity, to me, to that of the overrated Elizabeth Peyton, whose work has sold for more than $1 million. Her portrait of Elizabeth II at sixteen, below left (versus Bush’s view of Angela Merkel, at right), fetched $518,500 at Christie’s. Others I know see Alex Katz in there and one misguided soul sees “a touch of Beckmann.” It would be a very tiny touch, imho.

So why cheer? The answer it in the NYT article:

Now on some days [Bush] spends three or four hours at his easel. The man who never much cared for museums — he rushed through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 30 minutes flat — told a private gathering the other day that he now could linger in art exhibits for hours at a time studying brush strokes and color palettes.

Bush’s newfound feelings underscore research findings that getting people to participate in art themselves leads them to visit museums. If we teach children to make art, no matter how primitive, a good proportion are likely to grow up to appreciate art and be museum visitors. That’s a better strategy for museums, it seems to me, than attracting those elusive young people with dance parties and other activities that have little, or nothing, to so with the art on view.

 

San Francisco Museums Land A Great Gift

There are at least three notable aspects of the gift announced the other day by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: the Thomas W. Weisel Family has donated about 200 objects of Native American art to the museum. They were amassed over three decades by Weisel, an investment banker who profited mightily as a pioneer of the tech industry in Silicon Valley.

  • NavahoSerapesIt’s a good match for the FAMSF. The gift includes works that span nearly a thousand years, “from 11th century Mimbres ceramics to 19th century works,” according to the press release (not yet posted on its website). FAMSF’s current Art of the Americas collection lacks many things that the Weisel gift has, such as two Navajo first-phase blankets (ca. 1820s‒1850s) and Plains ledger drawings. As a result, “the gift will enable a new presentation of the art of the Americas, including major pieces of monumental Northwest Coast art…” and those ledger drawings.
  • The gift came with an endowment that “will enhance our capacity to study these objects from a variety of perspectives and to develop educational and scholarly programs around the collection.”
  • The “carefully chosen artworks can substantiate the emerging scholarly theory that, through technical analysis, archival research and visual comparisons, it may be possible to recognize the hands of the individuals who created many of these works.” This is a subject I have written about, here in The New York Times in 2011 and in several places here on the blog (here, for example, and here, too).

About 70 of the artworks, said to represent the collection’s entire range, will go on view beginning May 3 in an exhibition titled  Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection. Arranged “by culture and chronology,” it “explores important themes in Native American art including floral, animal and landscape motifs and symbolism, and examines the long history of changing regional styles throughout the American Southwest.”

Colin Bailey, the museums’ director, called this “a transformative gift of art, of an unparalleled depth and scope.” From afar, I tend to agree.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of FAMSF 

Betsky Asked To Leave Early?

The situation at the Cincinnati Art Museums gets stranger and stranger. Director Aaron Betsky, who was pretty much forced out at the beginning of the year, will leave on May 1 — instead of his earlier plans to stay until his successor was named.

betsky_aaron_jan07This move, my sources suggest, reflects deep turmoil within the museum caused by Betsky, who is a polarizing figure, if nothing else. His tenture there has been marked by turmoil.

In a statement sent by board president Martha Ragland to employees yesterday, she said: “The Director has asked us to leave on May 1 instead of Sept. We have granted his request.  Dave Linnenberg (the COO) will be the interim Director. Let us support him at this time, especially with our limited budget.”

But these statements rarely reflect the whole story, and one source tells me that the search firm looking for the new director “will not send candidates until he left and is not apart of the decision making process.” I hope that is not entirely correct — if the search firm, which in this case is Russell Reynolds, is driving the decision instead of trustees, that is a big problem.

I hope to have more on this later.

Meantime, here is the press release from the museum; here is my post from last May outlining some of the problems; and here’s what the Cincinnati Enquirer had to say.