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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Is This The Light At Tunnel’s End For DIA?

RickSnyderThe Detroit Institute of Arts issued a new statement about its predicament a short time ago:

 The Detroit Institute of Arts is pleased that the negotiations around the thoughtful and creative plan initiated by mediators Chief Judge Gerald Rosen and Eugene Driker continue to progress. The positive comments regarding potential state support by Governor Snyder (left) and other lawmakers will continue to provide momentum to the discussions. The DIA is actively engaged in these talks and continues to be optimistic about a positive outcome.

Which sent me looking for some good news from the Governor. About the only thing I could find was a statement from him printed in The Detroit News, which had an editorial board lunch yesterday with Snyder. It printed a summary of his comments, including this one:

On whether the state will contribute to a fund to protect the Detroit Institute of Arts: “It would be much more likely … if it were part of settling the case, if it really said this will wrap things up and not have to worry about a September deadline That’s a different story. I wouldn’t be close-minded to that.

While hardly definitive, that statement is a positive one. If you remember, a state rescue was what I had hoped for when I write my last published article about the DIA-Detroit bankruptcy. My fingers are crossed.

Meantime, I asked the DIA for clarification and will update if there is something more definitive. UPDATE — there’s no need to update; the statement above is what the DIA was referencing.

 

The Ai Weiwei – Olafur Eliasson Collaboration — UPDATED

Speaking of collaborative art, today I had time to check in on the Internet art project started by the ever-enterprising Ai Weiwei in collaboration with Olafur Eliasson. It was “released” in late November in an announcement from Friends of Ai Weiwei. It’s called The Moon — with a URL too cute to hide behind a link: http://www.moonmoonmoonmoon.com/.

thumb_markThe “premise” of the project is based on a massive digital sphere which, when launched, was “stark white canvas.” Users, AKA the public, are supposed to register, log in and make their own “digital marks” across the surface of this moon, “turning the satellite into a collaborative drawing space accessible by any one in the world.” And the message to me continued:

The project is meant to emphasize the global reach and interconnectivity of our ideas, recalling the old maxim that wherever we are in the world, we’re all looking up at the same moon. “Creativity defies boundaries,” the artists write in the introduction to the page. “Ideas, wind, and air no one can stop.”

thumb_mark (2)Ever skeptical, I went to the website, but didn’t register (too many passwords already!). But I was allowed to be a tourist – so I zoomed into a spot and found some marks that didn’t seem terribly interesting to me. On the side, you can choose “featured,” “latest,” “popular,” and “tags,” to get to marks others like, made recently, etc. See that question mark? That was recent one, as are the two little images below.

thumb_mark (1)Imho, this is a disappointment. From two good artists like this — admittedly not everything they do is great, but some is — I expected better.

The coolest part is watching the moon rotate and move into place when you click on something to view. But that’s not enough to be art, for me.

Friends of Ai Weiwei, btw, “has been formed to promote our universal right to “free expression” around the world. Our Friends are Individuals and Organizations committed to raising awareness to “free expression”, and “human rights”. Revenues from sales support the operating costs for this global initiative.”

UPDATE: ARTnews has now covered this project in more depth — though I have a quibble. The deck calls it “a giant leap for art.” I don’t think so, and that was reinforced by the article!

 

At The New Museum: Make Your Own Exhibition Art

I guess this isn’t a first, but it’s still amusing to me: The New Museum in February will present the first U.S. museum exhibition of the work of PaweÅ‚ Althamer, and you get to make it. That’s right, Althamer “has established a unique artistic practice and is admired for his expanded approach to sculptural representation and his experimental models of social collaboration.”

PAlthamerSo, the exhibition will include a new version of Draftsmen’s Congress, which was originally presented in Berlin (at right) in 2012. At the start of the exhibition, the museum’s fourth floor gallery will be blank white space. Museum-goers (including “a wide array of invited community organizations”) will, however, draw and paint on it to create the work. “Althamer will also activate the exhibition through a sculptural workshop in which the artist and his collaborators will produce new works during the course of the show,” the museum says (ALTHAMER_PRESSRELEASE.pdf). The artists works will occupy the second, third and fourth floors of the New Museum, February 12–April 13, 2014.

There’s more: “For his New York exhibition, Althamer has arranged for street musicians to play in front of the New Museum building on the Bowery over the course of the show with the music being broadcast throughout the Third Floor gallery” and “PaweÅ‚ Althamer: The Neighbors will also feature Althamer’s iconic sculptures and performative videos realized alone or in cooperation with community groups with whom he has collaborated with over the past two decades.”

Well, it all makes sense in a way: first, we all like to fool around with paint and pencils. Second, we’re now our own tellers at banks, thanks to ATMs; we pump our own gas (except in New Jersey) instead of having attendants do it for us; and we check out our own purchases at stores like CVS and Home Depot. We’re curating our own exhibitions now, too — sometimes. Why not make our own museum art? It should be fun.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the New Museum

 

That $142.4 Million Bacon Is Going To Portland!

On loan, of course — not for keeps. Three Studies of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon will go on view at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon on Dec. 21 as part of its Masterworks series.

Bacon-Freud-ChristiesThis is a great coup for Brian Ferriso, the PAM director, who’s been a big proponent of one-work exhibitions (as have I). According to Ferriso, “As soon as the triptych sold, I asked my chief curator [Bruce Guenther] to see if he could identify the buyer, which he did and subsequently asked to show it.  We have worked with and borrowed from this lender in the past.”

The two had been looking for a modern or contemporary work to present in it ongoing series, which brings “singular masterpieces to Portland,” and had previously included  Raphael’s portrait La Velata, Titian’s La Bella and Thomas Moran’s Shoshone Falls. 

Guenther, in the press release, said of the painting, “Bacon captures the spirit of Freud, rendering him as a tightly coiled mass of energy, ready to spring from the caned bentwood chair positioned in front of a brass bed. The expressive, volatile brushwork that delineates Freud’s hands and face acts as a brilliant foil to the smooth rendering of the highly abstracted objects and space.”

When the painting sold in November at Christie’s, it set the record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. As The Wall Street Journal told the tale:

When the Bacon came up for bid about 20 minutes into the sale, at least four collectors took the bait. New York dealer Larry Gagosian and Korean collector and dealer Hong Gyu Shin bid in the saleroom against telephone bidders from the U.S. and China. Seconds into the bidding, Mr. Hong tried to spook his competition by lobbing a $100 million bid, but the telephone bidders remained undaunted and in the end, he bowed out at $126 million. New York dealer Bill Acquavella, bidding by telephone on behalf of a client, placed the winning bid of $127 million, or $142.4 million with Christie’s commission.

Part of the attraction stemmed from its history: The work was first shown in Italy and then at the Grand Palais in Paris, in 1971-72, in a Bacon retrospective. Then it was separated into three paintings, sold to three collectors, and went out of public view for more than 15 years — when an Italian collector reunited them in the 1990s. He/she put it up for sale this fall. “With this exhibition, this magnificent work comes into public view for a limited time before returning to a private collection,” the press release says.

Who bought it? I thought I’d seen some conjecture, but when I looked for it online now, I couldn’t find it. But the loan suggests it’s someone in the Northwest, and maybe word will leak soon. 

UPDATE: Readers tell me that the conjectured buyers were either the Quataris or Steve Wynn, according to Page Six… doesn’t look like either, does it?

UPDATE 2: Another source tells me that Bruce Guenther is close to Eli Broad and has borrowed works from him in the past. That would be interesting, because Broad is not known for paying top dollar.

New Book, Newly Relevant: “Selling Russia’s Treasures”

The article I published in The Wall Street Journal last week on the delusions people harbor regarding the Detroit bankruptcy and the Detroit Institute of Arts ended with a sentence on the so-called Stalin sales, the sales of Russia’s artistic treasures by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. Handily, I had just received a copy of Selling Russia’s Treasures, published last month by Abbeville Press.

9780789211545The book documents those sales in English for the first time, drawing on recently opened archives — revealing the “bills of sale, secret letters and minutes from clandestine meetings that document the crude bartering of Russia’s art,” the press agent wrote in a letter accompanying the book. (The book was published in Russian about 10 years ago — this version is revised and expanded.) Edited by Nicolas V. Iljine and Natalya Semyonova, it includes contributions from other scholars. It contains verbatim inserts of documents, such as the “Decree on the Confiscation of the Property of the Deposed Emperor and Members of the Imperial Household,” and period photographs.

The plates are wonderful, each listing the work, the artist, the date of sale and the purchaser. For example, Cranach’s Adam and Eve was sold from the Hermitage on May 12-13, 1931 at an auction in Berlin by Lepke and now resides at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The accompanying text adds much more context — tracing the history from Goudstikker’s collection through Nazi hands in Germany and back to the Netherlands state after the war, etc.  A simpler example: Nicolas Lancret’s Les Gentilles Baigneuses, sold from the Hermitage in May 1930 to Calouste Gulbenkian, “who immediately resold the painting to George Wildenstein.” It’s now in a private collection. Catherine the Great had purchased it in Dresden in 1769.

On the cover is a detail from Raphael’s Alba Madonna, which has a tangled history from Rome to Naples to Madrid to London to Russia, purchased by Nicholas I. It remained in the Hermitage for almost 100 years until 1931, when Andrew Mellon bought it via three galleries, including Knoedler in New York, and gave it to the National Gallery of Art.

One of the book appendices provides a country-by-country rundown of the disposition of the art works.

Yes, you may be thinking, we know some of this — but not all, not in such detail, not so comprehensively discussed and documented.

All in all, it’s a sad tale — and I’ve only dipped into it, not read the whole thing. It would make a wonderful gift to someone this Christmas season.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Abbeville