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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Paul Schimmel: Fired! — UPDATED TWICE

Yikes: According to the Los Angeles Times:

Paul Schimmel, the longtime chief curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and one of the most prominent museum curators in the United States, was fired Wednesday.

The firing was made by the museum’s board of trustees and is effective immediately….

Here’s the link to more, though there’s not much.

UPDATE: And here’s the story that came later, which noted that he disagreed often with director Jeffrey Deitch and said:

Schimmel, who headed the MOCA curatorial staff for 22 years, was let go Wednesday after a vote of the museum board. According to several sources, he was summoned to the office of billionaire art collector and philanthropist Eli Broad, MOCA’s top funder, and told of the board’s decision.

Schimmel is indeed one of the best-known contemporary curators in the U.S., and I would add one of the most respected.  We await the details. Not surprisingly, there’s nothing on the museum’s website.

UPDATE2: Here are Paul’s parting words:

Dear friends and colleagues,
For once I’ve decided to try and post something of some consequence, rather than pictures of dogs and children. I want to talk about my last day as Chief Curator of MOCA. It has been an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have been part of this museum. I have counted each day of my 22 years at MOCA as truly special, and the work of helping to define a gro…wing institution and identify a rapidly changing community of artists, both here in Los Angeles and internationally, has been both a great pleasure and a great privilege.Working at MOCA has meant working with exceptional people, first and foremost the artists with whom I have collaborated over the years and who have made me the curator I am today. There are so many of you out there—artists, museum professionals, dealers, collectors, and patrons—who have meant a great deal to me and to the success that I’ve had at MOCA. And to all of you within the family of MOCA itself, I have found enormous support and opportunity—one that I can’t imagine could have been any better, or will be any better anywhere else. My colleagues in the Curatorial Department, many of whom have gone on to other wonderful opportunities, are extraordinarily dedicated people who have done some of their best work here. And the catalogs that we have produced with our publications department are not only great contributions to art historical scholarship, but testaments to the legacy and longevity of MOCA’s outstanding exhibitions.I extend my profound thanks to all MOCA staff past and present, including Richard Koshalek for having brought me to MOCA, as well as to former director Jeremy Strick, all of whom have made the important happen again and again through the years. These colleagues were driven as much by a passion for art and artists as for a desire for MOCA’s individual successes. Together, we have striven to make our shows not just good, not just great, but the best that artists and curators could ever achieve. I also want to recognize the many trustees and patrons how have supported MOCA over the years. Again and again, individuals have stood up to make important contributions to the museum, whether for the success of an exhibition or for the acquisition of a major work into our collection. I know that these last few years of financial crisis have been difficult ones, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your perseverance and dedication; when you love something, you love it unconditionally.I am so grateful that even during these last years that MOCA has been able to realize so many important exhibitions that it had long been committed to—“William Leavitt,” “Suprasensorial,” “Amanda Ross Ho,” “Ends of the Earth,” and the upcoming “Blues for Smoke” exhibition, as well as my exhibition “Destroying the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962.” After over 20 years, I feel such pride and honor to have been the Chief Curator at MOCA, and I hope that for the next 20 years, MOCA’s staff and trustees can feel the same sense of privilege and accomplishment that I have.

With love,

Paul

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the LA Times

Does Nicholas Serota Have The Only Formula For the Future? UPDATED

Calvin Tomkins profiles Nicholas Serota, longtime head of the Tate Gallery (-ies, really), in this week’s New Yorker, and it’s largely laudatory, as one might expect. Tomkins doesn’t shy away from saying, straightaway and approvingly, that

­Serota­ has ­been ­widely ­acclaimed— and ­often ­vilified—for­ changing ­the ­culture­ of­ Great­ Britain. The establishment, the press, and the numberless upright citizens who used to regard modern art as a joke, a foreign-born absurdity practiced by incompetents or charlatans, now embrace it with almost unseemly fervor. Tate Modern, the Tate’s new building for twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, which opened in 2000 in a derelict power station on the south side of the Thames, draws about five million visitors a year, making it the world’s most heavily attended modern-art museum.

Tompkins chronicles Serota’s rise to these heights, changing from an economics major at Cambridge to art history; running Whitechapel Gallery in the East End; co-organizing shows like ­“A ­New­ Spirit ­in­Painting,”­ at ­the ­Royal ­Academy in 1981, with ­work by the likes of deKooning, Bacon and Richter; inviting artists into the galleries during his first days at the Tate; raising private money for the Tate Modern; etc., etc. It’s not a puff piece, but you know exactly where Tomkins stands.

I’m fine with that. Serota has done marvelous things for art in London. What makes me worry a little is signaled in the headline and deck: “The Modern Man: How the Tate Gallery’s Nicholas Serota is reinventing the museum.” Those definite articles imply that his way is it — he’s leading everyone else to the museum of the future.

If so, various revealing sentences comes as early as the first column. Describing the scene inside the Tate Modern, Tomkins writes about its visitors:

They drifted around in pairs or small groups—hardly anyone was alone—chatting convivially, taking pictures of one another with their smartphones, pausing now and then to look at­ a­ work of art. [Boldface mine]

This theme continues in later passages, all challenging the definition of a museum. Examples:

We have many more people than we’d anticipated who want to hear lectures and ask questions, or just spend time here, looking at art, buying ­a ­book, having coffee with­ a­ friend….

For students and young Londoners in their twenties or thirties, the members’ room at Tate Modern is one of the cooler places to hang out on Friday and Saturday evenings, when the museum stays open until 10 P.M. The museum as a social environment, where people interact with art and with one another on their own terms, and create their own experiences, might seem to work against the close study of individual works that Serota learned from Michael Jaffe, at Cambridge. “One criticism of this building is that you can’t have an intimate experience with ­a ­work of art,” Serota conceded. “That’s something we are going to address in the new building, where we’ll have some smaller galleries, for photographs and modestly scaled works. But, if you come here at ten or eleven on­ a ­weekday morning, you can still have that experience.”

Later, Tomkins gives his blessing, by quoting an impeccable source:

John Elderfield, the greatly respected, British-born scholar who recently joined the Gagosian Gallery after many years at MOMA, believes that what’s happened at Tate Modern is “a really radical change in howpeople use museums now. It’s not only about looking closely at works of art; it’s moving around within­ a ­sort of cultural spectacle.­I ­have friends who think this is the end of civilization, but­ a lot more people are going to be in the presence of art, and some of them will look at things and be transported by them.” [Boldface mine.]

Hmmm. Does really matter if a lot more people are in the presence of art if they’re not paying attention? No one can predict how big, or small, that “some” will be.

There has to be more than one way to run a museum: Serota has a formula, and a good one, but it’s not the only one.

Here’s the link to the article, though I believe it’s behind a pay wall.

UPDATE: I’ve made a PDF of the article — NewYorker-Serota.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the New Yorker

 

 

 

Louis Grachos Quits The Albright-Knox

The news was announced today: Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, has quit that job to become Executive Director of AMOA-Arthouse, a new organization formed by the merger of two long-standing arts organizations in Austin, Texas — the Austin Museum of Art and the Jones Center (Art House) — last November.

He leaves effective January 2013.

In some ways, his departure does come “at the right time,” as Grachos told the Buffalo News. He took up the Albright-Knox post in 2002, and ten years is a goodly amount of time to make a difference. As the press release announcing his departure reported:

 During his tenure, he has implemented a strong, dynamic exhibitions program, which featured the landmark exhibition Extreme Abstraction in 2005, as well as theRemix and Artists in Depth series of exhibitions that mined and deeply explored the Gallery’s Collection in new ways, frequently inviting leading local, national, and international artists to engage with the Gallery and become involved in selecting and installing exhibitions in the museum’s spaces.  He also initiated a host of innovative and important projects, programs, and community collaborations, which include Art’scool, Gusto at the Gallery, and M&T FIRST FRIDAYS @ THE GALLERY.  Grachos …[added] many significant, key works to the Collection over the past ten years… The exhibition DECADE: Contemporary Collecting 2002–2012, which the Gallery will present this fall…will show, for the first time, many works that have entered the Collection during Grachos’s tenure.

All true, and Grachos does deserve some credit for trying to restore the Albright-Knox to it glory days, when it was a leader in showing contemporary art. Its recent show, The Long Curve: 150 Years of Of Visionary Collecting at the Albright-Knox Gallery, attempted to do that (and was in demand to travel, though I am not sure what happened with that), and its current show, Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s, takes visitors back, too (apparently not quite so successfully, some critics have said. I haven’t seen it).

But there is that unspeakable matter of deaccessioning antiquities from the permanent collection in 2007, despite the fact that the museum’s own Collections Management Policy said “No sale of masterpieces; nor, in terms of its own collection, of very important works.” Those non-masterpieces brought in $67 million. I am eager to see exactly what he’s been buying that money in the coming exhibition.

Before moving to Buffalo, Grachos was the director of SITE Santa Fe, and I always felt he was leading the A-K’s directors down a contemporary path they thought they wanted, but might not have thought through.

It’s too late to go back, though. The die was cast in 2002. The release said the board was, of course, “forming a committee to initiate a national search for our next director.”

Photo Credit: Courtesy of AMOA-Arthouse.

Toledo Museum Calls Out “Hey, Baby, Wanna See My Paintings?”

Art museums everywhere are searching for and trying to appeal to younger audiences, but the Toledo Museum of Art may just have everyone beat. It’s offering “baby tours” designed for parents or caregivers with infants up to 18 months old — one baby per adult please. And no strollers.

Now, many art museums have family programs, but this is the first time I’ve seen one offer an initiative like this. (Do let me know if I’m wrong.)

I learned of these baby tours in the TMA’s ARTMATTERS May-August magazine and they seem noteworthy.

The article about them cites the TMA’s director of education, Dr. Kathy Danko-McGhee, a former professor of early childhood art education, as someone who has studied how babies respond to art. Noting that the visual system of humans develops during the earliest days of our lives, it says newborns as young as nine minutes old prefer to look at photographs and pictures resembling the human face; that newborns can see color; that a one-month-old can distinguish between red and green, and that at 12 weeks old, infants prefer colors over white.

So the TMA is offering baby tours of its Jules Olitsky exhibition (his Purple Golubchik, right), on five Friday afternoons at 3:30 p.m. The Pitch: “Watch your baby respond to large colorful paintings and learn ways to facilitate early visual literacy skills.”

Looking at art “promotes early neuron connections in the brain. And for the verbal toddler, interacting with an adult in naming images and describing different characteristics in a work of art lays the groundwork for visual, cognitive and language development,” the TMA says.

Surprisingly, the magazine invites people to learn more by calling Danko-McGhee and printing her phone number.

Kudos to the TMA.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art

 

On Her Diamond Jubilee, The Queen Shares Some Of The Royal Collection

This week Britain is celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, commemorating the 60th anniversary of her ascension to the throne. As RCA readers know, British royalty also owns one of the greatest art collections in the world. I thought I’d check in to see what she is sharing with us folks, especially as the U.K. will be hosting more than its usual number of tourists this year for the summer Olympics.

The answer, it seems, is less than I would have hoped. The big exhibition that celebrates the Queen’s 60 years on the throne is called Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration and it’s part of “the Summer Opening of Buckingham Palace (30 June – 8 July & 31 July – 7 October),” which admittedly is nice. The diamond exhibit simply displays how diamonds have been used and worn by British monarchs over the last two centuries.  It includes some of the Queen’s personal jewels inherited or acquired during her reign. The most famous piece, the Diamond Diadem, at left, has been worn by the Queen on her journey to and from the State Opening of Parliament since the first year of her reign.

In the Queen’s Gallery, there’s  Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist, which is said to be the largest-ever exhibition of his anatomical work.  It includes 87 pages from Leonardo’s notebooks, including 24 sides of previously unexhibited material.  One of them shows a “to do” list, in which “Leonardo reminds himself to obtain a skull, to get his books on anatomy bound, to observe the holes in the substance of the brain, to describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of a crocodile, and to give the measurement of a dead man using his finger as a unit.”

And there’s The Northern Renaissance: Durer to Holbein, which displays about 100 works – prints and drawings by Dürer, mythological paintings by Cranach the Elder, and preparatory drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger as well as finished oil portraits.

 At Windsor Castle, visitors can see The Queen: 60 Photographs for 60 Years, which is exactly as billed, and Treasures from the Royal Library, likewise. 

But art-lovers may want to make the trip to Scotland, where the royals’ Holyroodhouse Palace is showing Treasures from the Queen’s Palaces, about 100 works reflecting the tastes of several monarchs and other members of the royal family over the centuries. It includes paintings by Rembrandt, Hogarth, Hals, van Dyke and Lotto, among others.

The entire exhibition program is listed here.

And if you’re not going, you can still learn more — the BBC has produced an eight-part series, 30 minutes each, about objects in the Royal Collection. It’s called The Art of Monarchy. You can hear it all and see images here. Transcripts, for those who’d rather read than listen, are there as well. If it’s hafl as good as the Beeb’s A History of the World In 100 Objects, I’d be happy.