Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

People

The Cleveland-Franklin Mess, Continued

It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up. Watergate, among other scandals, proved that and the forced resignation, aka firing, of David Franklin (below left) as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art last month, is showing it once again.

david-franklinpng-760e7cb48d14aa36Three articles have more details. First, Cleveland Scene, which was the first (I believe) to go beyond the spoon-fed resignation story, has written Turmoil at the Museum: Inside the Affair, Suicide and Abrupt Resignation That Rocked the Cleveland Museum of Art . It says, among other things, that the board terminated Franklin because he had repeatedly lied about the affair he had with a former CMA staffer, who later committed suicide. It then points out that the board also lost credibility because it lied. Among the key passages:

[Board chairman Steve] Kestner’s (below right) comments had mutated materially every time a new story appeared, contradicting statements he made earlier and fudging timelines.

“We fucked up, okay? We fucked up,” the trustee admitted. “We tried to control the story and we couldn’t control the story.”

Then:

The trustee confirmed that information had been laundered for both the public and museum staff — “It was more leaving out information than trying to mislead” — in part because the details of the affair and Christina Gaston’s death seemed too personal, too voyeuristic.

Odd, then, that this trustee claimed he was “offended” people thought the affair itself led to the museum’s “parting of ways” with Franklin. After all, that was the museum and Kestner’s line, trumpeted repeatedly by the Plain Dealer. If not the affair itself, then…

“[Franklin] lied to us!” the trustee said. “He lied to us directly, with no lack of clarity, over a protracted period of time. He ruined any trust there was there.”

The irony, of course, is that lying — directly, with no lack of clarity — and ruining trust is precisely what Steve Kestner and the board leadership have been doing since long before the Franklin story broke.

kestnerScene’s story goes heavily into the details of the death, Franklin’s whereabouts when, her missing cell phone, etc., but we’re sticking with museum issues here. It then says:

Early last year the museum hired an attorney to investigate [the possible affair] but, “The inquiry yielded no credible evidence to substantiate an inappropriate relationship and the inquiry was closed at that time,” Kestner wrote in his statement to the Plain Dealer. “We believe that it would have been irresponsible to take action based solely on rumors.”

Swift action was taken, according to the chairman, once they saw the police report: “In early October, for the first time and based on new information, the Board confirmed that a dating relationship had existed with a former employee during and after her employment at the Museum. Once the relationship was confirmed in early October, the Board acted expeditiously.”

However, documents show an attorney for the Cleveland Museum of Art contacted Ron Flower in September asking who the detective in charge of the investigation was. Kestner amended his version of events again to say yes, the museum knew of the police report in September but did not obtain proof of the relationship until October.

Rightly, this story addresses board responsibilities.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has two relevant articles. Lying about affair led to David Franklin leaving top job at the Cleveland Museum of Art, board chairman says relies very heavily on official comment, mainly from Kestner. A bit too credulous, imho.

And it also published The Cleveland Museum of Art cancels a major show planned by David Franklin, who resigned as director in October. That exhibition, Exporting Florence: Donatello to Michelangelo, was to be a major international loan show, and would have been spectacular.  Instead, the CMA will enlarge its previously planned exhibition of Surrealist photographs. What a letdown.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (top); Baker Hostetler (bottom)

A Happy Ending For The Once-Besieged Rose Art Museum

What a difference support from the top makes. This weekend, the Boston Globe dutifully went back to visit the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, to see how its new director, Christopher Bedford (below), who was hired last year, was doing.

bedford647x260You’ll recall that in 2009, Brandeis’s then-president Jehuda Reinharz wanted to sell the Rose’s sterling contemporary art collection, then valued at some $350 million, to find his way out of the university’s fiscal problems. (See here and here, for example — plus the links in those posts.)

Reinharz left (voluntarily, he says) and Brandeis hired Fred Lawrence to replace him. Lawrence reversed the plan, settled the lawsuit filed by a group of Rose supporters by agreeing that the university would not sell the art, and hired Bedford. Lawrence understood that said the Rose was, or should be, an integral part of Brandeis. And, according to the Globe, he’s done more than that.

For one, he and his wife helped woo a new trustee, Liz Krupp (boldface mine):

Krupp admits she was reluctant. Already a trustee at the MFA, she has also served on the boards of the American Repertory Theatre and Boston Ballet. She and her husband, George, a real estate investor who cofounded the Berkshire Group, have had a gallery named after them at the MFA.

Not long after Bedford’s hiring, he was invited to meet Liz over lunch by Frederick Lawrence’s wife, Kathy. Krupp initially resisted Bedford’s offer to join the Rose board. She was too busy. Then Bedford e-mailed and called. He and Fred Lawrence visited her at home. She couldn’t say no this time.

Sure, Krupp told the Globe that she liked Bedford’s enthusiasm, but you can’t underestimate the effect of the presence of Lawrence and his wife in the process.

But let’s give credit to Bedford, too — he has also recruited artist Mark Bradford for the board, commissioned artist “Chris Burden to install an ambitious, outdoor and permanent work with a $2 million price tag,” and commissioned “Walead Beshty to create a mirrored floor at the Rose that crinkles and cracks under the weight of museum visitors,” the Globe said. More acquisitions are pending — “including works by Whitten, Al Loving, Dor Guez, and Charline von Heyl.” Details about the Burden commission are here.

Attendance, meanwhile, is up, “from 9,145 before he came to 14,303 in the current year.” I don’t know how that compares with 2008 or 2009, whose number was inflated by the crisis. (Paging former Rose director Michael Rush, who can’t be looking back…the Associated Press just reported that “More than 114,000 people have visited the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing in its first year,” the museum Rush now heads.)

I am sure Bedford deserves much of the credit here, but the sea change at the university level seems pretty key to me.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Brandeis

 

What Have Leonardo, Aggie Gund, Sopheap Pich, Etc. Got In Common? News

I rarely do this, but  several smallish but interesting things have happened in the museum world recently, so I’ve collected them in one post.

From the Frick Collection, three pieces of news:

  • Director Ian Wardropper has lured one of the Metropolitan Museum’s* biggest stars, Xavior Salomon, several blocks south on Fifth Avenue to serve as chief curator; he’d been a curator in the European paintings department, “a prototypical and brilliant curator/scholar,” as one source who knows him well told me, and formerly chief curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. More here.
  • The Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting* has chosen the winner of the Sotheby’s Book Prize for a Distinguished Publication on the History of Collecting in America — it’s a team headed by Jennifer Farrell, the general editor, and essayists Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Jan Howard, Robert Storr, and Judith Tannenbaum. They collaborated on Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art. Details here.
  • The Frick usually closes at 6 p.m. (5 p.m. on Sundays), but to accommodate the crowds eager to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and the other paintings on loan for its special exhibition Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, it will now stay open until 9 p.m. on Friday nights for that show. Better yet, thanks to Agnes Gund, it will be free on nine of those evenings, from this Friday until January 17, with the exception of Dec. 6 and Jan. 3, which are reserved for members.

131017-ARoom-model-1From the Dallas Museum of Art:

  • Speaking of free, the DMA recently received an anonymous $9 million gift. Of that, $4 million is unrestricted operating support for the DMA’s free general admission program. The other $5 million will support the digitization of the museum’s collection of 22,000 objects and the creation of a platform for free access to those digital images. In addition, the unnamed donor will give $2 million to match money the DMA raises, presumably in a one-to-one ratio, in the next five years. Details here. Now for pure conjecture on my part — I would not be surprised if this gift came about because DMA director Max Anderson went all out in fundraising last year in an effort to buy the recently rediscovered Leonardo, Salvator Mundi. He couldn’t muster the rumored $200 million price tag, but he did amass pledges of a very sizable total, I’ve been told. Perhaps he has turned convinced one of those potential donors to support greater access to the museum.

And speaking of the Leonardo:

  • It’s no longer available. It has been sold.  — or is in contract negotiations. To whom, I do not know. Again, pure conjecture based on rumors I’ve heard: it‘s going, or has gone, to a collector in Europe. Probably a private collector. Stay tuned to see if it is put on view in a museum.

Earlier this year, I saw a wonderful exhibition at the Met of work by Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian artist (images here), and now:

  • The Indianapolis Museum of Art has announced that it has commissioned an installation by Pich for its Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion Series.  Titled A Room, it “will consist of nearly 1,200 bamboo strips, extending 40 feet from the atrium’s ceiling to floor and occupying a 26-foot diameter circular space that museum visitors will be able to enter.” Based on what I have seen so far, not just at the Met but online, Pich is destined for more acclaim and this should help spread the word about him. A rendering of the new project is above.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum

 

Ed Winkleman Has A Little List

When, about ten days ago, I briefly blogged here about ArtReview’s annual Power 100 list, a couple of readers took issue. They didn’t like the very concept of the list and blamed me for it. Others thought it said something about money and power, and a third commenter thought it was fun. I thought it was harmless.

AN0713_Cover1-226x300Nonetheless, there’s a reason these lists persist: readers like them. As the art dealer Edward Winkleman said recently, after he posted “The Top 10 Most Useless Art World Lists,” that very post turned out to be one of his very popular posts.

The ArtReview list didn’t come close to being the most useless, in his eyes. That would be the GalleristNY’s monthly review of ArtForum’s advertisements. GalleristNY also came under fire for its list of  ‘The 50 Most Powerful Women in the New York Art World.” But ArtInfo, ARTnews, Modern Painters, Barry”s Blog, and other outlets also produce useless lists in Winkleman’s view.

He is right on some counts. Many of these lists are silly, though some people take them seriously. Some are better researched and more fact-based than others. But I still don’t understand why people get so worked up about it.

Believe me, the lists peddled in other areas are often even sillier. Early this year, I was down at the NYU journalism school, where I had been helping some students get internships. One student had an internship at a well-known business website where, among his assignments, he’d been asked to make a list of “the ten ugliest fish.” How’d you do that, I asked. “I googled ‘ugly fish,’ ” he replied, and used his own judgment.

I think the lists on Winkleman’s list are probably better researched than that. I hope.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of ARTnews

 

Who Has Power In The Art World Now?

ArtReview magazine is out with its annual list of the most powerful 100 people in the art world, and it is topped this year by Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, head of the Qatar Museums Authority, sponsor of international art projects and spender of some $1 billion a year on art.

Can’t beat that for power.

power100logo2011aThe next three spots are for dealers, this year in a different order than last: David Zwirner is #2 (up from #5), Iwan Wirth is #3 (up from #4) and Larry Gagosian is #4 (down from #2).

The most powerful museum director? Nicholas Serota, of course, at #6, followed by Glenn Lowry at #8 — both moved up a notch or two.

The most powerful artist? Ai Weiwei at #9 followed by Marina Abramovich at #11. He’s down, she’s up.

Are there surprises? I think so. Michael Govan is a “reentry” at #57 — I’m surprised he ever fell off, and that’s a low number for him.

New entries? Dealer Eva Presenhuber at #59, artists Ryan Trecartin at #64, Yayoi Kusama at #67, Hito Steyerl at #69, and Lars Nittve, founding director of Tate Modern, at #73 head the list of 19 newcomers all told. For that, we can be grateful.

These lists are fun, but I can’t take them too seriously, right?