Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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How to Attract Visitors to an “Esoteric” Exhibit

Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World is notable for several reasons. But the one I want to dwell a little on here is a point I made in the final paragraph of my review of this show at the Getty Museum for The Wall Street Journal, which was published in Monday’s paper.

Here’s what I wrote: “Book of Beasts demonstrates well how an esoteric subject can appeal to the general public without stooping to conquer, without losing its scholarly approach. It shows the bestiary to be a wondrous thing.”

We’ve all seen museums do a lot of odd things in recent years in attempts to draw people into their galleries–cat video contests, show-your-own-art alongside masterpieces, crowdsourcing curatorial decisions, mixing up unrelated art, and so on. Some may have “worked,” in the sense that they did attract visitors–but generally only for the one exhibit or particular gesture of outreach.

Instead, the Getty, with Book of Beasts, generally took the high road. No dumbing down, no “unicorn days,” no silly contests. The museum has scheduled a talk linking the show to Harry Potter–but at least is is a lecture. It also added, in the final gallery of this exhibition, several contemporary art pieces–but not only were they well-chosen, but also the Getty marked them off by painting the walls in that gallery white, unlike the colored walls of the rest of the exhibit. That helped set a different tone.

What did the Getty do right, then? For this first major museum exhibition on bestiaries, it assembled a third of the world’s surviving Latin illuminated bestiaries, plus others in other languages, and borrowed tapestries, ivories, objects, other manuscripts, paintings, even medieval ceiling fragments, to illustrate theses books’ influence. It gave them a beautiful display despite the low lighting needed to preserve the manuscripts. It built listening stations through the exhibit that explain the signifcance of certain animals, including fantastical ones like the bonnacon and the griffin. It published a beautiful and enlightening catalogue. Etc.

Ok, you say, but it is the Getty, which has lots of money, To which I say, those overtures created by other museums to bring in people cost money too.

If you have a chance to visit the Getty for this exhibition, I think you’ll agree with my verdict. In another passage in my review, I wrote:

“Bestiaries were like animal encyclopedias, but with a higher purpose: Created by inventive artists and scribes, they were intended to enkindle in readers awe for the natural world and to impart religious stories and moral allegories.”

The Getty show seems to me to have striven to create awe for bestiaries–and it succeeded. I’ve posted a few samples–and there is more online at the Getty website.

Eye On San Diego–For Art!

San Diego, you may be surprised to learn, is not only the eighth largest U.S. city by population, but also among the fastest growing. Yet people to tend talk about its virtues in terms of the beach, sports, the zoo and the Navy–not its art offerings.

Surprise! San Diego has a lot to offer in art, and if the current exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art is any indication, it has great ambitions, too.

I was there last month to see and review for The Wall Street Journal Art and Empire: The Golden Age of Spain, which it calls “the first exhibition in the United States to expand the notion of the “Golden Age” to include the Hispanic world beyond the shores of the Iberian Peninsula.” While other museums have included New Spain art, I believe–at least a little of it–this one also includes Flanders, the southern half of Italy and the Philippines as well as the country’s American territories.

by Anguissola

The ambition is clear both in that scope and the fact the the museum drew on its own collection for one-fifth of the works in the show. Whether or not that was because of cost management–loans, insurance and shipping cost a lot–it does not matter. The museum’s own works exceeded the quality bar–sometimes by a lot.

Here’s a link to my review.

You can judge for yourself whether or not the museum persuades visitors that, as I put it, “The global trade of goods, people and ideas among [Spain and its territories], the museum asserts, fostered a cultural exchange that was multidirectional, not one-way from Spain.”

I concluded “not really.” But that’s almost beside the point: I admired the quality and the choices of art on view, with the the masterpiece of all masterpieces there being Zurbaran’s St. Francis in Meditation, on loan from London’s National Gallery.

by Cotan

And what of the items from the museum’s permanent collection? I had many favorites, including Zurbaran’s Agnus Dei, Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, El Greco’s The Penitent Saint Peter, Pedro de Mena’s San Diego of Alcalá and Sofonisba Anguissola’s Portrait of a Spanish Prince. Among others!

I should add that the Denver Art Museum also lent many wonderful works from its Spanish Colonial collection, a favorite being Baltasar Echave Ibía’s oil-on-copper The Road to Calvary. 

But back to San Diego: Across the Balboa Park plaza from SDMA is the Timken Museum, which is also full of treasures.

Those are just two reasons why San Diego should be on everyone’s art trail; it’s not perhaps a major destination for art, but give it more time. I think it will be.

Why Is this Museum Exhibition So Troubling?

Several weeks ago, I visited the Dallas Museum of Art to see an exhibition of works by Jonas Wood (b. 1977) and to review it for The Wall Street Journal. (Here’s the link.)

Wood’s paintings–mostly–are striking. He makes landscapes, still lifes, interiors, portraits and various combinations of those genre. They have wall power. They are easy to like, with lots of color, conventional, pleasing images, I am posting several here.

Here’s one line from review: ” Using photographs and magazine pictures as source materials—sometimes just as they are, sometimes manipulated or made into a mélange—Mr. Wood (b. 1977) creates flat, graphic, realistic images with a dollop of Pop. He uses bright, appealing colors. He sometimes compresses or distorts the spaces, but not in a disorienting way—doors, windows, trees are just a bit misaligned. He makes paintings you want to hang in your modern home.”

I liked them (mostly).

But Wood’s work also troubles me, as does the origins of this exhibition. Again, quoting myself:

“He cites Alexander Calder as a major influence, and both “Ovitz’s Library” and “Clipping E2” (2013) incorporate Calder mobiles. Other images, in pose or color or composition, refer to the work of David Hockney, Stuart Davis, Picasso, Rousseau and Vuillard, to name a few. Patterns repeatedly run through his paintings, as they did Matisse’s, and Mr. Wood’s “Clippings” series recalls both Matisse cutouts and Ellsworth Kelly plant drawings. Like Jasper Johns, Mr. Wood uses hatchwork—for example, to create the snow-laden tree branches of his lovely “Snowscape With Barn” (2017).

That painting also contains what may be his most brazen reach for greatness by association. In a famous story from 1832, as John Constable was laboring to enrich the colors of a nearly finished masterpiece at the Royal Academy, J.M.W. Turner upstaged him by adding a bright red buoy with one daub to his own almost monochromatic seascape hanging nearby. Could it be a coincidence that Mr. Wood plants a red shovel in his snow scene in about the same spot on his canvas as Turner’s buoy?”

Just as troubling, why did Wood–of all the contemporary artists in the world–merit a museum exhibition after calling himself an artist for only a dozen years? The museums says its collectors (read “patrons” and perhaps “trustees”) own his works. So do many of the prominent, billionaire collectors who lent their works to the show–Eli Broad, Aby Rosen, the Marciano brothers, Michael Ovitz and more. It did not hurt that his major New York gallery, Gagosian, was also willing to be a “major” sponsor of the exhibition. Not coincidentally, Gagosian “is pleased to present new paintings and works on paper by Jonas Wood” at its Chelsea gallery opening Apr. 24.

So, the “market” fix was in for Jonas Wood. But the whole thing makes me queasy. The museum is being used.

Hirshhorn Museum: On A Roll

Continuing its good tidings, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., just announced a special acquisition: As disclosed in an article I wrote for The Art Newspaper, which was published last week, the Hirshhorn has bought Yayoi Kusama’s very first Infinity Room, called Phalli’s Field, which she made in 1965.

The acquired work is a reconfiguration of that piece–whose elements were taken back to Japan and the piece deconstructed long ago. Kusama reconceived it for the international traveling exhibition of her Infinity Rooms, which was organized by the Hirshhorn.

When Kusama made the piece in 1965, it was a breakthrough. As I wrote for TAN: “For two years she had been sewing and stuffing dozens of cotton protuberances, painted with red polka dots, attaching them to chairs and other objects, and grouping them to evoke a terrain of phalluses. But the labour was intensive, and she alighted on the idea of using mirrors to achieve the desired effect.”

Read the entire story, which is fairly short, here.

The 2017 reconfiguration of Phalli’s Field took what had been shown in open space and put it in a room, like the Infinity Room pieces that followed it.

Here’s what it looked like in 1965, with Kusama enjoying it:

Yayoi Kusama Installation view of Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field,1965, in Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965 Sewn stuffed cotton fabric, board, and mirrors Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; David Zwirner, New York. © Yayoi Kusama Photo: Eikoh Hosoe

As I alluded in the opening line of this post, the Hirshhorn benefited from the Kusama show, not least because it raised the museum’s profile in both Washington and around the country. It enabled director Melissa Chiu to attract new trustees, who–it is to be hoped–will provide more support for the museum. And it helped push the museum’s attendance to a record last year, past the 1 million mark. “[Kusama] and her work attracted visitors that had never come to the museum before,” Chiu told me.

“It has had a lasting effect on public awareness of the museum,” she added. “For us it was a complete game-changer. People said to me ‘I never thought I’d see lines outside the Hirshhorn.’ ”

That all got Chiu thinking: Since Kusama has such a great impact, Chiu decided to acquire this piece, and she spent the museum’s own money–it was not a donation–on it.

Thank Heaven for Museum Renovations!

I’ve been away for a few weeks–but I don’t want you to miss notice of an excellent exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum: The Lure of Dresden: Bellotto at the Court of Saxony, which runs until Apr. 28. For the headline above, I used the first words of my review of the show, which was published in The Wall Street Journal while I was away.

That’s because Bellotto’s panoramic pictures are on loan from the Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) of the Dresden State Art Collections. While it is renovating, it shipped 24 of its signature paintings to the Kimbell.

Bernardo Bellotto (1721-1780) was born a year before his uncle, Giovanni Antonio Canaletto. began to make view paintings Bellotto studied with his uncle while in his teens, soon gained admittance to the painters’ guild, and in 1747, when he was still in his twenties, he accepted a call to Dresden from the Elector of Saxony, Frederick-Augustus II. He wanted Bellotto to record his grand, baroque city and, later, to paint Pirna, a small town about 12 miles southeast of Dresden whose medieval castle functioned as a lookout for trade routes to Bohemia.

Bellotto painted his Dresden panoramas—seven of which are on view here—from a distance, often from an angle. He left the top half of his canvases for sky and clouds, the better to orchestrate different lighting and atmospheric effects. When the sun was shining, he limned the building reflections on the water (the Elbe River runs through most of his Dresden paintings) to perfection.

Yet, as I wrote for the Journal: “But what distinguishes Bellotto’s works is their balance, their harmony and, most of all, their life. In his very first view painting for this new patron, “Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe above the Augustus Bridge” (1747), a woman hangs her laundry not far from a little conversation between a stout castrato, the king’s physician and a Turkish servant, while a court jester looks on, a little white dog at his feet. Such little insertions, a mix of the mundane and the prominent, figure in all of Bellotto’s view paintings. They don’t necessarily reflect what actually happened—they convey a sense of verisimilitude rather than truth.”       

Bellotto created those little vignettes of life in all of his pictures. That’s why, as I wrote in the review, I think this exhibition should be popular, even if Bellotto is not a household name: People love details in art, as anyone who ever eavesdropped in a museum can attest. Bellotto delivers in that respect, among many others.

I’m using a few details as illustration here so you can see the life–you can see some entire paintings on the Kimbell website and in the Journal.