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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Beginning Of The Endgame At MOCA?

Charles Young, the former chief executive of the Museum of Contemporary Art, has urged the institution’s influential life trustee Eli Broad to remove museum director Jeffrey Deitch.

That’s from a story by Jori Finkel in the Los Angeles Times this morning. Young is a former chancellor of UCLA — no slouch.

Perhaps Deitch didn’t know what he started when he forced the resignation of Paul Schimmel — though he should have — but Broad, who has played hard ball in the business world with the best, should have known. They must have underestimated Schimmel’s support system and overestimated Deitch’s.

More the the LATimes:

[Young] questioned Broad’s “support for Jeffrey, when many about you are no longer willing to give him any credence as a Director of a world-class museum, indeed believe his tenure is likely to take MOCA into the abyss…”

Young’s friendship with Broad didn’t prevent him from saying:

“I hope that the four-alarm fire now enveloping MOCA has at least given you pause for thought about his appointment and your continued attempts to try to save him for a job for which many (including myself) believe he is unqualified…The resignation of dedicated, long-term trustees, and especially four highly respected artists of international acclaim should bother you, David [Johnson], Maria [Bell] and the other continuing members of the Board. The question is ‘What is now to be done?'”

This could be the beginning of the endgame.

 

Herbert Vogel, Extraordinary Collector, Dead At 89

The postal worker who, with his librarian wife, managed to amass a brilliant collection of contemporary art without spending a fortune, died today, according to various news reports. Herbert Vogel was 89. His death was announced by the National Gallery of Art.

I interviewed the Vogels in 2008, as a documentary about them was about to be shown at Art Basel Miami Beach. Already, Herbert was showing signs of age, and Dorothy did most of the talking.

Despite early “warning” that their apartment — whose location I had to agree not to disclose — was full of art, I was nonetheless stunned by the amount of art it contained.

Here’s a link to the obit I found for him on the Huffington Post and here’s a link to the article I wrote about them. The Vogels were ture champions of modern art and are heroes in the art world.

With true class, the Vogels made a brilliant donation. As I wrote in 2008, before a screening of the documentary made about them, “Herb and Dorothy”:

The Vogels made history in 1992 when they pledged their collection (then numbering about 2,000 paintings, sculptures and drawings, now double that) to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The gallery has added about a thousand of these pieces to its collection. It is distributing the rest in 50-item lots to an art museum in each U.S. state. The project, “Fifty Works for Fifty States,” has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.

As a result, art lovers in every single state in the U.S. owes them a debt of gratitude. I know of no other donors whose impact has been so wide.

The Washington Post has a slide show about the Vogels and their art.

 

Kimerly Rorschach Gets The Job

Just out now:  The Seattle Art Museum has appointed Kimerly Rorschach as the museum’s new Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director.

Rorschach was the runner-up for the director’s job at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which went to Gary Tinterow.

Rorschach has been the Mary Duke Biddle Trent and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University since 2004. She moves to SAM in the fall.

Press release is here.

Rorschach recently became president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, succeeding Dan Monroe of the Peabody Essex Museum.

According to the museum’s release,

At the Nasher, Rorschach partnered with institutions from across the country and around the world to develop a program of high-profile and high impact exhibitions, from the 2008 exhibition El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918 in 2010, a partnership with the Tate Britain and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Among her current exhibition projects are The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, which includes works by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Christian Marclay, Dario Robleto, and more and is currently on view at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery; and Wangechi Mutu: Walk This Wayopening in 2013 and traveling to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The strong exhibition program established by Rorschach has been accompanied by a series of in-depth scholarly catalogues that are distributed worldwide.

That’s a pretty good track record, especially for a university museum.

I wish her luck there. Her predecessor, Derrick Cartwright, resigned in May 2011 after about two years in the job amid rumors that the museum’s financial situation was worse than he was given reason to believe.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Duke

 

Norman Rosenthal Quits Thyssen Board, Protesting “Lock” Sale

Well, if you had three luxurious homes, a 125-foot yacht, and an art collection reportedly worth about $1 billion, what would you sell to raise a little cash?

Depends on whom you ask.If you ask Baroness Carmen ‘Tita’ Thyssen-Bornemisza, the answer is John Constable’s The Lock.

If you ask Norman Rosenthal, former exhibitions director of the Royal Academy, it’s anything else. On Friday, he quit the board of the Baroness’s museum in Madrid to protest the sale.

The Baroness decided earlier this year that she can live without one of Constable’s most famous paintings and it’s up for sale at Christie’s on Tuesday. Presale estimate?  £20-25 million or about $30- $40 million. The Lock “is one of a celebrated series of six large-scale canvases that also includes “The Hay Wain”, arguably his most famous work that hangs in Britain’s National Gallery in London,” as Reuters says (more details here). Rumors I’ve heard say the price may reach $100 million.

The Lock fetched £10.9 million at Sotheby’s in 1990, when it was purchased by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. Not a bad return even at the low end.

Rosenthal, however, called the sale “morally shameful,” and told the Baroness in his resignation letter that she “had no understanding of either art history or art appreciation,” according to London’s Daily Mail.

In response, she told the Mail:  “I cannot afford to keep the painting. People think I am wealthy because I was married to Baron Thyssen. But I have never had a lot of cash because my business is in paintings but the paintings don’t give me any money, they just hang on the walls of the museum for free.” Besides, she said, British paintings do not figure highly in her collection. Most of Thyssen’s collection was sold to the Spanish state, but about 250 works remain in the Baroness’s private collection — including the Constable — and have been lent to Spain for the last 13 years, on view at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum.

“Tita’s” stepdaughter, Francesca Von Habsburg, has also disagreed publicly with the sale. Last week, the Mail said she said that her late father would never have sold it and accused her stepmother of “putting the museum’s international reputation at risk.”

Rosenthal and von Hapsburg say that she doesn’t need the money and/or she should sell other things.

What about those earrings?

Schimmel, Part 2: MOCA Tries Damage Control And Fails Miserably

Late Friday, the Museum of Contemporary Art issued a press release – not in its press room, but posted on its blog, which is appropriately (in this case) named “The Curve,” about the abrupt and worrying departure of Paul Schimmel, their chief curator, last week.  You can tell how guilty the board and the administration is feeling by how they couched it.

First, they insisted it was a resignation, not a firing — despite the fact the Schimmel was called to the office of Eli Broad (right), the financier who gave MOCA a lifeline in Decemberm, 2008, to learn of his fate. Wouldn’t you have liked to be a fly on the wall to hear that conversation?

Second, they said the press release was drafted with Schimmel.

Third, they said he would work for MOCA as an independent curator in the future, finishing at least one of this current exhibition projects, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962, which opens in September.

Fourth, they named a gallery in the Geffen Contemporary after him.

The release did not disclose his departing pay package, however, which I would guess could be substantial (for a museum) and probably includes hush money aka a nondisparagement clause. So we may never really know what happened.

Nor did the release say what will happen to the Richard Hamilton retrospective that Schimmel has been co-curating with partners at the Tate Modern in London and Reina Sofia in Madrid.

If you have the stomach or want a good laugh, you can read the release here.  Or you can read Jori Finkel in the LATimes here.

There is no conceivable way to construe the week’s events as anything less than dysfunction at MOCA. There is an obvious dichotomy of vision between director Jeffrey Deitch and Schimmel, and a board that seems to have taken over when those two couldn’t work it out. Given the choice between the commercial gallerist they hired and the guy who has been there, mostly as chief curator and the producer of some of its most well-received shows,  in the last 25 years, they went — naturally — with their hire.

Trustees are not fooling anyone.  As of this writing, for example, the Curve post has elicited 24 comments from MOCA followers: 23 back Schimmel (several say fire Deitch), and one says let’s move on. None agree with the “resignation.”

Worse, this all proves Deitch is either a puppet or a coward, and possibly both. If he’s the boss, he should have dealt with his own chief curator — whether or not they were still speaking.

If the board thought they were insulating Deitch from this decision, they made a mistake. It will take MOCA a long time to recover from this.