Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

People

The Walters Hires A New Director; Whither San Diego?

Just in from Baltimore: The Board of the Walters Art Museum has appointed Julia Marciari-Alexander as its new executive director, replacing Gary Vikan, who announced in March, 2012, that he would be stepping down after 18 years as the museum’s executive director.

Julia Marciari-Alexander -2_CPMarciari-Alexander is currently the Deputy Director of the San Diego Museum of Art, and her move requires several lines of comment, not least the conditions she is leaving behind in southern California.

First, for Marciari-Alexander, this is a great opportunity, but not without worries. Vikan is highly regarded, a man who accomplished many things at the Walters. Among them: the elimination of the Walters’ general admission fee which led to an increase in attendance of more than 45%, several fundraising milestones, plus noteworthy exhibitions and the creation of  a Center for the Arts of the Ancient Americas, with a $7.25 million endowment. They are outlined here in the press release that accompanied his announcement last year.

Marciari-Alexander, in her mid-40s, has been in San Diego, heading curatorial affairs, since 2008, and before that was Associate Director for Exhibitions and Publications, among other roles, at the Yale Center for British Art. In San Diego, she oversaw the reinstallation of most of the museum’s galleries and was “also instrumental in launching an initiative to publish the SDMA’s collection online, similar to the Walters’ ongoing digital projects,” according to the press release.

In that release, Marciari-Alexander is quoted saying, “As the new Executive Director, it will be my goal to leverage the collection and the professional expertise of staff to strengthen the Walters’ reputation as an international leader in the field of collections development, museum scholarship and community engagement.”

Marciari-Alexander is,  however, married to John Marciari, the Curator of European Art at the San Diego Museum, and he’ll be going with her to Baltimore — minus a full-time job. Instead, he told me, “I am going to continue working for San Diego, completing my catalogue of Italian, Spanish, and French paintings before 1850, and also continuing to work on an exhibition on the art of Seville (Velazquez, Zurbaran, Murillo & co.) that is scheduled for 2015. So I’m not breaking all ties.”

Marciari, then associate curator of early European art at the Yale Art Gallery, discovered that Velasquez in its closet in 2010.

He will need replacing, given that collection.

And last year, the San Diego Museum also lost Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, its curator of Asian art, to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Three top people out the door at a museum where the entire full-time staff numbers 55 can be a problem. It can also be indicative.

The San Diego Museum’s executive director, Roxana Velasquez, praises Marciari-Alexander in the Walters’ release, but I’ve heard rumblings of tension between the two for months — almost since Velasquez arrived in San Diego in fall, 2010, from her post as director of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

In fact, the tension seems to be more widespread that just the two of them. It’s not unusual for me to hear complaints from the ranks at museums, but I would say that whenever I mention San Diego someone sends me a beef, and sometimes more than one person.

So, something appears to be wrong there, though I can’t tell exactly what it is from afar. Different outlooks, views of art, management styles, poor spending decisions, curatorial independence? All of the above? I hope Velasquez uses this shakeup in her staff to fix it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Walters

A New Model Of Museum Financing

MonroeI will have more to say on the subject in a subsequent post, but for now I would just like to link to an article I have written that will be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. It’s a Cultural Conversation with Dan L. Monroe, the executive director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

In it, Monroe outlines his thinking behind the museum’s current $650 million fundraising campaign, the bulk of which will go to PEM’s endowment. He has challenged the conventional wisdom that it’s too hard to raise big money for endowments.

Ok, his thinking may not work for all museums, but my article is definitely worth a read for anyone who cares about the financial stability of museums.

More coming, but not tonight…

 

 

A Diversion: Doubt, The Opera

I can’t say for sure, but I think that John Patrick Shanley is setting some sort of record. Shanley, whom you probably know as the author of Doubt: A Parable, the Pulitzer and Tony award winning drama about learning to live with uncertainty, is about to introduce that story in a third medium — opera. He has already written his script into a screenplay, as well as directed that movie, Doubt, which starred Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

JohnPatrickShanleyNow he has written the libretto for Doubt, the opera, which premieres next Saturday, Jan. 26, at the Minnesota Opera. (Douglas Cuomo is the composer.) Shanley may be the first writer to turn out one story, part of his own, in three different art forms.

I talked with him about this recently. He wrote the play, as he told me, in “four or five weeks — or my whole life.” After that, “it was thrust upon me both times,” he says.

A few other tidbits:

  • Shanley knew, and still knows, little about opera, but that didn’t stop him from writing the libretto.
  • To do so, he didn’t go back to what he had already written: “The benefit I bring – I go back to the neighborhood, not the film or the play  – this is my life.”
  • Yes, each of the four characters in the play — Sister Aloysius, Father Flynn, Sister James and Mrs. Miller — has an aria.
  • “With opera, you breathe a sigh of relief. There are all these other people [the chorus/congregation, for example] and the orchestra. Now we have a world to support the story.”
  • “In a play you write in a style. The characters share a world view. They agree what world they are living in, demonstrated by the language. In an opera, you share the music. Characters that may be in violent disagreement share the music.”
  • “Opera has spectacle, which is what people want to see.
  • “The opera will have new material, and it lose some from the movie/play. “You could not simply musicalize the play.”
  • “Film is a nightmare because there’s no tradition in film – no ‘I will put up with this film because it’s good for me.’ It’s a popcorn medium, a popular medium – people have to be entertained. They have to be involved.” 
  • “The latest medium is the best. It’s still a living thing.”

Droll, witty, and pretty much uncorked, Shanley is the subject of a Cultural Conversation that I wrote, which will appear in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. I laughed a lot during the couple of hours I spent with him. Having seen Doubt in both other manifestations, I’d like to be at the opera. But I’ll have to wait until another time, because I doubt I’ll get to Minneapolis.

Meantime, after it opens, I invite RCA readers to tell us all what it’s like by leaving a comment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Edgemar Center for the Arts

 

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

Did Tobias Meyer Really Say This?

TobiasMeyerI have to think that even Andy Warhol — maybe especially Andy Warhol — would laugh at a comment made recently by Tobias Meyer (ar right), the worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s recently. To wit:

“It has the intensity of a great Warhol or a great Bacon.”

The “it” under discussion was the Raphael drawing sold by Sotheby’s on behalf of Chatsworth on Dec. 5. Head of An Apostle fetched nearly $47.9 million after intense bidding. It’s an amazing piece of work that at least one expert I know thinks is Raphael’s best drawing in private hands. And maybe his best drawing ever.

What was Meyer thinking?

Elsewhere in the video, Sotheby’s experts Gregory Rubinstein and Christiana Romalli talk about Raphael’s career and laud this drawing properly as the “most intensely moving, powerful and wonderful drawing” Sotheby’s has ever handled. I wonder what they thought of Meyer’s comment. And I wonder who made the video and actually decided to use that quote.

Meyer goes on to say: “This is the greatest drawing by one of the greatest artists in the world.” Good recovery. But it hard for me to believe that he would make the comparison between Raphael and Warhol or Bacon — more so because Meyer not only thinks it, but said it — out loud, on a recording. There’s no room to deny it. See the video for yourself here (the second one, “Raphael: Renaissance Masters from Chatsworth.”

I asked the aforementioned anonymous, highly respected expert if we should laugh or cry. “Both,” he replied.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Telegraph