Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Uncategorized

Great Expectations, Set By Museums, And Then?

I was drawn to an exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art by its title: Glorious Splendor: Treasures of Early Christian Art. When I went to see it last month, it was not quite what I expected. Or what the title conjured. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good show. Sometimes an exhibit with a real scholarly thesis is hard to translate into an exhibition that’s easily sold to the public. And naturally even a scholarly curator wants his or her exhibit to be seen!

So, as I wrote in my review of the exhibit for The Wall Street Journal,

A bit oddly, the exhibition undercuts its title (which was probably driven by marketing goals) and a bit of its thesis. About two-thirds of the 28 works here either are secular objects, like jewelry or imperial items, or honor pagan gods, like Jupiter and Aphrodite. Moreover, the earliest Christian object—a glass fragment, with gold leaf, showing Christ giving the law to Ss. Peter and Paul—was made in the late fourth century, decades after Constantine’s death and long after Christianity started to take root in Rome, spawning Christian art. In other words, the exhibition’s span is bigger, the content broader, and the thesis less clearly shown than one might expect.

The thesis was this. quoting myself, that “the art of the first several centuries after the death of Christ shared much with its predecessors—in materials, methods, iconographies and styles—and thus to demonstrate that the Roman empire did not abruptly turn Christian when Constantine became the first Roman emperor to convert in A.D. 337.”

And yet:

Still, once visitors lean in to enjoy the precious objects on view…they will find much to admire. All but two of the pieces are borrowed from private collections, many have never before been shown in a museum, and who knows when the public will have an opportunity to see them again?

And that’s wonderful, actually. These are gold (the pendant at left is from the 6th or early 7th century, the bracelet from the 6th), or cameos (at right is one from the 6th century), or objects that, I would guess, are rarely asked to be lent. They take some time getting to know. We should have more exhibits that include them.

Glorious Splendor suggests something else about the state of American art museums these days. As they evolve, they may be trending toward a model that presents small, scholarly exhibits that satisfy connoisseurs and large, “popular” exhibits intended to draw crowds.

As long as there is a mix, as long as the scholarly shows receive the funds they need, this may not be bad. Museums have raised expectations about themselves to many groups; now they have to satisfy them.

The Toledo exhibition runs through February 18–enjoy the pictures I’ve posted of a few pieces in it–and my review ran on Nov. 27. Apologies for my delay in getting it online here and on my website.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art

 

Long Overdue: Women Artists In 19th Century Paris

The exhibition entitled Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism, which debuted recently at the Denver Art Museum, is long overdue. It has been ten years in the making, the brainchild of independent French curator Laurence Madeline, and it became a project of the American Federation of the Arts a few years after that.

The show includes about 80 paintings by 37 artists from 11 countries, all of whom worked in Paris at one time or another between 1850 and 1900. Yes, you know the names of Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Rosa Bonheur, Cecilia Beaux and a few others–but probably not many more. When I told a curator of 19th Century European art that I was going to the exhibit a few months back, he retorted that we already know the names of those worth knowing. Having now visited the exhibition, I disagree.

I reviewed the show for The Wall Street Journal, published my piece last week.

In that review, I wrote:

As this exhibition opened, DAM museum director Christoph Heinrich sheepishly admitted that he did not know many of these artists beforehand. That’s not necessarily his fault. As Ms. Madeline researched and conceived the show, she discovered that many museums had stashed these paintings in storage, rarely if ever putting them on view. Some did not know where paintings she requested were. Still other works were neglected, in too poor condition to be lent.

I suspect that curt comment made by that curator simply did not know better for the same reason.

In any case, I will concede that I did not personally love everything in the exhibition (Do I ever? Not sure). I will also concede that only a dozen or so, in my mind, were great paintings. But many others were very fine ones. Among the best, for me, are the three I’ve posted here, from the top: Beaux’s Ernesta (Child With Nurse), Anna Ancher’s Young Woman Arranging Flowers and Marie Bashkirtseff’s The Meeting.

We have to hold women to the same standards as men, but not to higher ones, and we often do.

And, as a friend noted to me after reading the review, Italy is next.

Good idea.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum 

 

Take A Look At Folk Art Masterpiece(s) in We The People

Last January, when the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg announced that it would “launch its diamond jubilee as the loan exhibition at the Winter Antiques Show to be held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City,” I was interested in doing something that would focus more attention on folk art. I studied the little booklet that I was sent, with a number of items in the museum’s collection, and decided to pitch a Masterpiece to the Wall Street Journal. That, as my regular readers know, is the Saturday column that provides an anatomy of an artwork (music, poetry, film, literature as well as visual art). These pieces are wonderful to do–providing an opportunity for research as well as close viewing.

As it turned out, none of the items in the brochure ended up being my Masterpiece subject. Instead, my editor and I settled on a portrait that was new to the collection and that was to be revealed to the public in a long-term exhibition titled We the People: American Folk Portraits, which opened last summer and continues through 2019.

It is John James Trumbull Arnold’s Portrait of Mary Mattingly (1850). She is, as many people have told me since Saturday, after reading my piece, just adorably cute and well as beautifully executed.

As I wrote,

Mary, age 3 (or possibly 4), is a beguiling little girl with penetrating brown, almond-shaped eyes….limned in Arnold’s trademark sharp, simple lines. Presented frontally, encircled by a brownish oval background set against black corners, she stares directly at the viewer, holding a red rose in her left hand….

She has, in Arnold’s rendition, symmetrically arched eyebrows and fine, visible eyelashes. She wears a dress, gathered around her tiny waist, that looks black but was initially dark green. It’s trimmed at the neck in white lace, and her sleeves, gathered at the wrist, are trimmed in dark lace….[Her hair is] tied with an unusually large, cockeyed white-and-blue bow that gives her a bit of a mischievous character.

Much more from me is at the link above.

I’ve posted her picture here, but if you want a closer look at the portrait, please go here. That Live Auctioneers site gives a history of the 2014 auction at which she was purchased by the museum.

Also, Antiques and the Arts Weekly published an article  (the press release, I think) about the exhibition We the People last May. It has a slide show of other portraits in the show.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Museums

 

 

What Can Augmented Reality Do For Museums?

I tend to me a bit skeptical about the use of technology in museums. But on a recent visit to Denver, I stopped in at the Clyfford Still Museum to see Still & Art, which puts augmented reality to an interesting use.

The Still has an issue in that it is a single-artist museum that cannot display the work of other artists. That’s what Still himself wanted. He also famouslt declared “My work is not influenced by anybody.” But he clearly was, as Still & Art shows. The museum sidesteps the issue a little by saying that:

While many observers have regarded this view as merely typical of the artist’s notoriously unyielding singularity, in hindsight Still’s words ring true at a deeper level. The concept of “influence” suggests external forces acting upon a passive mind. Still’s vision, however, was intensely active. His deep knowledge of world art history enabled him to “take and break” a wealth of images and ideas ranging from the distant to the recent past. Still & Art illustrates how he channeled these points of reference into his own intensely personal style.

I’m not really buying that line, but I found the use of augmented reality to be appropriate here, if not always successful. The iPads passed out to to visitors are a little balky unless you hold them as if you are filming the exhibition–which is a little clumsy.

The exhibition includes more than 80 Still paintings, works on paper, photographs, and sculptures, and along with them it presents images of other artists. Some are simply printed reproductions, but some appear on an empty gallery wall “by way of a handheld device that presents the Museum’s first augmented-reality experience—in striking juxtaposition with Still’s.”

Still’s engagement with artists, as shown here, runs from Leonardo through his contemporaries.

Above, I’ve inserted two pictures of what the augmented reality shows–the one at the top, juxtaposing Still with de Kooning, is the best example.

Below, I’ve pasted shots of what the more traditional presentation–with reproduced photos of Van Gogh, O’Keeffe and Monet–is like.

Neither, in all truth, are completely satisfying. But augmented reality is still in its infancy at museums. Let’s see how things develop. If they do.

Matisse and Bonnard: A Perfect Pair?

It has been almost a month now since I stopped in at the Staedel Museum during a layover in Frankfurt to see “Matisse–Bonnard: Long Live Painting!” but when I have mentioned it in conversation to curators, dealers and other people in the art world, many have not known about the connection between the two. So it seems worth it to discuss the show here.

The artists enjoyed a friendship that lasted more than 40 years, the Staedel says, and they both “shared a preference” for interiors, still lifes and the female nude. (The show is organized around those themes.) Plus, I add, they were both great colorists.

This from the wall texts:

The title – “Long Live Painting!” – is based on the rallying cry with which Matisse greeted his colleague Bonnard on 13 August 1925. Written on a postcard, these few words marked the beginning of a correspondence that lasted until 1946. The two artists had been friends since the beginning of the 20th century. They regularly visited each another and discussed their paintings together. After they had relocated from the Parisian metropolis to the Mediterranean, their contact further intensified. Together they shared a belief in the importance of reality as the point of departure of their works and were convinced that priority should be given not to the motif, but to its representation. Their longstanding intimacy was based on great sympathy and ungrudging appreciation of each other’s work.

The exhibit displays more than 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints to show the dialogue between the two. No juxtaposition, though, can compete with the one that occurs as the climax of the exhibit–a room that displays Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude (1935) (above), from the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Bonnard’s Reclining Nude against a White and Blue Plaid (c. 1909) (above, top), from the Staedel, which inspired Matisse. They are both so brilliant!

The exhibition contained many more wonderful pictures; and if you can’t get to Frankfurt by Jan. 14, when it ends, the catalogue will go on sale in the U.S. in  November. I’m going to post two wonderful photos of the artists in southern France that were also in the exhibit. From the wall text:

On 17 and 18 February 1944 the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson visited both Bonnard and Matisse at their houses on the Côte d’Azur. Matisse had already moved to the South of France in the winter of 1917 and lived in the Villa Le Rêve in Vence. Nine years later, Bonnard acquired a country house in Le Cannet, approximately 30 kilometers away. Since both artists owned cars, the distance presented no obstacle to regular visits. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs create a vivid sense of the two friends’ remarkably different personalities: they show Bonnard in the scarcely furnished rooms of his country house Le Bosquet, where he led a very reclusive life. Throughout, the reticent painter attempts to evade the camera, to reveal as little as possible. In contrast, Matisse appears as a self-confident bon vivant. The opulent interior of his villa – including luxurious furniture, carpets and bouquets of flowers – clearly evidence his love of luxury.

Matisse, the younger of the two, reinforced the intense friendship in 1911, when he bought Bonnard’s painting Evening in the Living Room. Bonnard followed suit a year later, when he purchased Matisse’s The Open Window. “Both artists kept these pictures for the rest of their lives,” the Staedel tells us.

One more quote from the wall texts–a statement by Bonnard’s great-nephew Antoine Terrasse:

A painting by Matisse leaps to the eye. Only slowly can we enter a painting by Bonnard.

How true.

For more information, here’s a link to the exhibit’s “digitorial,” which the museum suggests reading before coming to the show. (Max Hollein, who previously headed the Staedel, has started something similar at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he is now director.) It’s very good.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Staedel Museum