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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Brooke Astor Leaves $20 Million To The Met

Whoo hoo! The Metropolitan Museum* announced tonight that the Brooke Astor estate has been settled, and it will receive about $20 million. It will, the museum said in a press release, “be used to support the institution’s curatorial programs and art acquisitions, as Mrs. Astor wished.”

I’m sorry to say that I’ve been out, taking in the AIPAD Photography Show New York at the Park Avenue Armory, and have not had time to reflect on this deal.

But that’s the gist. One sticky point, concerning a painting her son Anthony Marshall sold illegitimately, was resolved this way:

As the settlement makes clear, $3 million of the funds assigned to the Metropolitan are given in recognition of the Museum’s claim for proceeds from the sale of a painting from Mrs. Astor’s personal collection—Childe Hassam’s Flags, Fifth Avenue (also known as Up the Avenue from 34th Street, May 1917). Although Mrs. Astor bequeathed this iconic work to the Metropolitan, it was wrongly sold in 2002.  The painting’s current whereabouts are unknown. The Museum continues to regret that it will be unable to display the work for its public as Mrs. Astor so long hoped.

Here’s a link to the Met’s statement on the settlement.

The New York Public Library and Central Park are among the other beneficiaries.

BTW, the AIPAD show looked good: I can’t say I learned of some stunning new photographer, but there was a lot of excellent work on display.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met 

 

Hilton Kramer, RIP — UPDATED

Right or wrong, Hilton Kramer was usually sure. I applaud that in an arts critic. He was also enlightening — we learned from him, even when we disagreed. The visual art world, I believe and have written, needs better criticism — Kramer showed a way.

In his New York Times obit, now on the website, William Grimes quotes Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, which Kramer served as founding editor, saying “He called it as he saw it — an increasingly rare virtue in today’s culture.” I agree. Or, criticism simply asserts, without reasoning, without arguing. Not Kramer; he argued.

Later, Kimball added, ““He was a high modernist, but he embraced a rather diverse lot that ran the gamut from Richard Pousette-Dart to Pollock to Matisse to the Russian constructivists.”

I suspect that we could all learn something from Kramer’s art essays, which have been republished, Grimes notes, in four collections: “The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972” (1973); “The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984” (1985), “The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War” (1999); and “The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005” (2006).

The New Criterion says it will devote its May issue to Kramer, and in the meantime here is Kimball’s announcement of Kramer’s death.

I didn’t know Kramer, but I read him, especially in his prime. The sad part about his career is that he became too predictable in his later years.

UPDATE: The New Criterion has compiled a list of some of his articles, with links to them, here.

 

Barnes Friends Slapped With Big Fee

I guess Judge Stanley Ott, of the Montgomery County (Pa.) Orphans Court, doesn’t like to be challenged. Last week, he slapped the Friends of the Barnes Foundation with a $25,000 sanction for having the audacity to petition to have their case re-heard, based on what they said was new evidence.

This reaffirms his previous sentiments toward the group and its challenges.

If you recall, the Friends — who oppose the move of the Barnes to downtown Philadelphia from Lower Merion –  engaged Attorney Samuel C. Stretton to take their case back to the court, which had ruled against them. Ott had already declared that the group has no legal standing.

Stretton, who argued in Objections to the Sanctions and in Court on February 2, says that there is no legal basis for sanctions.  He stressed, the press release says, that “the objections that the Friends’ Petition brought new information and serious legal issues to the Court’s attention concerning the role of the then-Pennsylvania Attorney General in the case.”

The Friends think they are being persecuted. Judge Ott’s assessment only “reinforces the impression that those responsible for moving the Barnes art collection to Philadelphia will stop at nothing to cloak the shady facts behind the move,” says  Jenkintown resident Suzanne Hunter, a member. Steering Committee member Evelyn Yaari, of Bala Cynwyd, called the fine “typical” of the past actions of the court and the proponents of the move.

It’s pretty hard to disagree with them. The fine does seem heavy-handed.

The press release is here, and Ott’s order is here.

Meantime, the new Barnes is set to open on May 19.

 

The Getty Gambit — Not With Tim Potts, But With Observation

I’d already been planning to write something about the Getty Museum sometime soon — before the J. Paul Getty Trust announced its choice for the director of the museum today — Timothy Potts, formerly with the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge and before that director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (here’s the link to the press release). So now I’ll put away what I was going to write and switch to the Getty.

But not about Potts. I know him a little, and by reputation as well. And I know him to be a very ambitous man. How he will fit in at the Getty remains to be seen. The Trust is a messy, hydra-headed entity, and whether it works or not has always depended on the personalities involved. It remains to be seen whether the five people now in place, James Cuno at the trust, and the heads of four divisions will work together nicely.

Let me move to my original post, which is again about getting people to appreciate the art in museums.

On Feb. 7, a new, long-term exhibition opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum called The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display.  It displays four objects from the permanent collection and encourages visitors to sit down and spend time with them, offering the opportunity to examine them closely to understand how they were made and functioned, why they were collected, and how they have been displayed.  The Getty has also installed touch screen interactive displays that highlight and explain visual clues about the life of each object.

The four objects are a silver fountain (France, 1661-1663), a lidded porcelain bowl (China or Japan and England late-1600s) (pictured at left), a gilt-wood side chair (France, about 17351740), and a gilt-bronze wall light (France, 1756) . They’re shown in “an inviting, comfortable setting” and the works are displayed “at table height so that each can be seen easily at close range and in the round.”

The Getty has written labels to prompt visitors to examine the artworks carefully, looking for “makers marks or inscriptions, details of construction or assembly, and visual evidence of alteration or repair.” The interactives do the same. If you go to the exhibition website, you can, as the picture above suggests, “launch the interactive.”

The press release that triggered my interest is dated Dec. 20, 2011, and quoted Potts’s recently departed predecessor:

“Many of the objects in the Getty Museums permanent collection have fascinating stories,” said David Bomford, acting director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “By focusing on close engagement with a few selected works, The Life of Art encourages critical seeing and reveals the full lives of these objects and why they continue to be collected and cherished today.”

Later, it says:

Each of the works of art in the exhibition has a mate, or a similar piece, on view in the adjacent permanent collection galleries, allowing visitors the opportunity to compare the different viewing experiences. Labels will be installed in the spots where each piece is normally displayed—marking their absence, illustrating how each object is normally displayed and directing visitors to the exhibition.

As I always say when I haven’t a show in person, I reserve judgment until, and if, I do. The online interactives seem a little too simple, and perhaps the Getty should have made advanced versions, too.

Nonetheless, this seems to be another excellent example of trying to get people to observe more and learn more at museums, without shoving education down their throats, which they seem to resist.

Good for the Getty. I invite feedback from anyone who has been to the show.

 

 

Gary Tinterow Hits The Ground Running At MFAH

Quite by accident, because I went to the website of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston the other day, I ran across some pretty smart outreach.

It was only days after Gary Tinterow has assumed his new job as director of the MFAH, and across the top the website read “A Message From and Conversation With MFAH Director Gary Tinterow.” It’s fairly traditional for new directors at a museum to post a director’s message, but I clicked anyway.

I was expecting something I’d seen before: Max Anderson’s missive, posted after he moved to the Dallas Museum of Art in January, is representative of the standard form of a “Welcome.” I decided to check around and see what other new directors are doing. James Cuno, who took the reins of the Getty Trust last August, immediately wrote a blog post, Reflections on My First Day at the Getty – and What’s Next.” But he hasn’t posted anything since — even though he decided in mid-December to become acting director of the Getty Museum, too.

I don’t see anything from Douglas Druick, new director of the Art Institute of Chicago, on its website (it could have come down by now) and something is wrong with the link to Ian Wardropper’s message at the Frick: when I clicked on “Director’s Greeting” on the information page, I got the index page. So I don’t know what he has done. I don’t see any welcomes or messages from Matthias Waschek at the Worcester Art Museum or Thomas Denenberg at the Shelburne Museum, both fairly new to their jobs.

But back in Houston, Tinterow not only wrote a Welcome message, but also taped five video messages — available on this page. In them, he talks about his roots in Houston and how it has changed since he left to go to college, about growing up in Houston, about making the transition from New York to Houston, about the role of museums today, and about his ambitions for the MFAH.

He made some excellent points, including a comment that he thinks of works of art as a mirrow that reflect your values back at you. He reveals himself as approachable, inviting visitors to give him pointers when they see him in the galleries.

It’s always hard to succeed someone like the late Peter Marzio, something of a legend at MFAH, and the man Tinterow succeeded. And I don’t want to make too much of this. But it looks to me as if Tinterow has hit the ground running.

And here, btw, is Houston Culture’s Map’s account of his first outing as director (above).

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Houston Culture Map