Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Obama Administration Lets Down The Arts — Again

Ordinarily, I would agree that President Obama has too many other important things on his desk right now to spend time finding someone to head the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. True, Rocco Landesman exited the NEA late last year, and Jim Leach left the NEH months ago, but there is the little matter of health care, not to mention Syria, Iran, etc. that the President has to deal with.

downloadHowever, I sat up and took notice in late September, when the White House sent me notice of these “key administration posts”:

  • Frank F. Islam – General Trustee, Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
  • Amalia Perea Mahoney  – General Trustee, Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
  • Shonda L. Rhimes – General Trustee, Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
  • David M. Rubenstein – General Trustee, Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
  • Alexandra C. Stanton – General Trustee, Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
  • Walter F. Ulloa – General Trustee, Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

And it happened again today, when I receive more news of “key administration posts”:

  • Stephanie Cutter – Member, President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
  • Caroline “Kim” Taylor – Member, President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
  • Margaret Russell – General Trustee, Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

The Kennedy Center is worthy of attention but, you know, it already has a heck of a lot of trustees. These are simply political appointments – rewards of some political sort.

Meanwhile, the Endowments are being lead by Joan Shigekawa, Senior Deputy Chairman of the NEA, and Carole M. Watson, Acting Chairman of the NEH. No “acting,” “senior deputy” or “interim” has real clout with Congress.

For a man who was supposed to be an arts backer, President Obama has been disappointing from the outset — and it only continues.

On Kids, Curators And Art Detectives

Hmmm. Last week, the Speed Art Museum announced “Art Detectives” quoting Henry David Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” No one can argue with that in the art context.

art-detective-2Art Detectives is an educational program for elementary, middle and high school students. With the kits the Speed provides,

Art Detectives mirrors the actual practices used by curatorial professionals when handling delicate pieces. This includes a favorite of the students: wearing white curator gloves while they learn the importance of preservation in a museum. Students discover the history and culture of the objects, as well as the valued aspects in an object. They gain a heightened awareness that allows them to look at art and museums from a more analytical perspective.

The museum has designed 12 different crates, each filled with eight objects, “real artworks and art objects from the education collection.”  People from the museum, I believe, visit the schools — “up to 4 classes in a day in a consecutive order.”

For example, one crate — marked “CREATE” — for 4th and 5th graders has these contents, which include a couple of prints.  Other crates focus on “criticize,” “design,” and so on, for different ages.

Once a schools picks and registers, the “adventure” begins:

Two facilitators roll an interesting looking crate into the classroom and begin unpacking on the provided tables. Inside are eight works of art, numerous tools, and other items worth investigating. The art works are placed on numbered and annotated mats with tools set to the side. It’s a mystery game come to life in the classroom.

As you can imagine, they help identify the contents, discuss them and then the students write about them — with descriptions, I hope. More answers to FAQ here.

I doubt this program is unique, though I can’t cite you others. But it’s worth sharing because it does make looking at art an adventure, kind of a game, without distorting the purpose — which is to truly observe.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Speed

 

 

What’s The Best Public Sculpture I Know? Easy

CG4Public sculpture is certainly having a moment in the sun – maybe years in the sun.

Just in the last few weeks, the Nasher Sculpture Center has opened Nasher Xchange, the Seattle Art Museum announced that it had received the 46-foot-tall “Echo,” by Jaume Plensa as a gift from American art collector Barney A. Ebsworth, the Public Art Fund in New York said it would erect “a playful new commission by Olaf Breuning entitled Clouds,” which will be installed at the southeast entrance to Central Park this spring, and the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art announced a new sculptural installation for late winter 2014 called This Land Is Your Land by Brooklyn-based Chilean artist Iván Navarro.

CG2But last weekend I finally saw, in person, what may be the best public sculpture in the U.S. of the 2001-2010 decade, and maybe of the 21st century so far. I am referring to Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, AKA the Bean, in Chicago’s Millennium Park. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t praise this  33 by 66 by 42 feet piece, which and weighs 110 tons, and was dedicated in 2006.

Cloud Gate, supposedly inspired by liquid mercury, reflects the city’s skyline, sometimes in a distorted way — but it’s always gorgeous and it clearly beguiles people.

Take a look at these pictures, which I took — at the way children, teenagers and adults love this piece.

CG1It is fascinating to look at and to watch others look at it.

 

 

 

 

 

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I’d be happy to learn of anything better.

Photo Credits:  © Judith H. Dobrzynski 

The Cleveland-Franklin Mess, Continued

It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up. Watergate, among other scandals, proved that and the forced resignation, aka firing, of David Franklin (below left) as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art last month, is showing it once again.

david-franklinpng-760e7cb48d14aa36Three articles have more details. First, Cleveland Scene, which was the first (I believe) to go beyond the spoon-fed resignation story, has written Turmoil at the Museum: Inside the Affair, Suicide and Abrupt Resignation That Rocked the Cleveland Museum of Art . It says, among other things, that the board terminated Franklin because he had repeatedly lied about the affair he had with a former CMA staffer, who later committed suicide. It then points out that the board also lost credibility because it lied. Among the key passages:

[Board chairman Steve] Kestner’s (below right) comments had mutated materially every time a new story appeared, contradicting statements he made earlier and fudging timelines.

“We fucked up, okay? We fucked up,” the trustee admitted. “We tried to control the story and we couldn’t control the story.”

Then:

The trustee confirmed that information had been laundered for both the public and museum staff — “It was more leaving out information than trying to mislead” — in part because the details of the affair and Christina Gaston’s death seemed too personal, too voyeuristic.

Odd, then, that this trustee claimed he was “offended” people thought the affair itself led to the museum’s “parting of ways” with Franklin. After all, that was the museum and Kestner’s line, trumpeted repeatedly by the Plain Dealer. If not the affair itself, then…

“[Franklin] lied to us!” the trustee said. “He lied to us directly, with no lack of clarity, over a protracted period of time. He ruined any trust there was there.”

The irony, of course, is that lying — directly, with no lack of clarity — and ruining trust is precisely what Steve Kestner and the board leadership have been doing since long before the Franklin story broke.

kestnerScene’s story goes heavily into the details of the death, Franklin’s whereabouts when, her missing cell phone, etc., but we’re sticking with museum issues here. It then says:

Early last year the museum hired an attorney to investigate [the possible affair] but, “The inquiry yielded no credible evidence to substantiate an inappropriate relationship and the inquiry was closed at that time,” Kestner wrote in his statement to the Plain Dealer. “We believe that it would have been irresponsible to take action based solely on rumors.”

Swift action was taken, according to the chairman, once they saw the police report: “In early October, for the first time and based on new information, the Board confirmed that a dating relationship had existed with a former employee during and after her employment at the Museum. Once the relationship was confirmed in early October, the Board acted expeditiously.”

However, documents show an attorney for the Cleveland Museum of Art contacted Ron Flower in September asking who the detective in charge of the investigation was. Kestner amended his version of events again to say yes, the museum knew of the police report in September but did not obtain proof of the relationship until October.

Rightly, this story addresses board responsibilities.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has two relevant articles. Lying about affair led to David Franklin leaving top job at the Cleveland Museum of Art, board chairman says relies very heavily on official comment, mainly from Kestner. A bit too credulous, imho.

And it also published The Cleveland Museum of Art cancels a major show planned by David Franklin, who resigned as director in October. That exhibition, Exporting Florence: Donatello to Michelangelo, was to be a major international loan show, and would have been spectacular.  Instead, the CMA will enlarge its previously planned exhibition of Surrealist photographs. What a letdown.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (top); Baker Hostetler (bottom)

Murillo Discovered In “A Dark Corner”

It happened again, and we have a new — or rediscovered — Murillo, thanks to a chance visit by Salvador Salort-Pons, the executive director of Collection Strategies and Information and curator of European paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts to a historic home called Meadow Brook Hall. Once owned by “the automotive aristocracy’s most remarkable women, Matilda Dodge Wilson,” Meadow Brook is in Rochester Hills, Mi.

St. John with the Lamb by Bartolome Esteban MurilloSalort-Pons was at Meadow Brook Hall last February, lecturing, “when a painting in a dark corner of the room caught his eye; it turned out to be a work by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo entitled The Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Murillo, who was known for his genre scenes and religious works, created the painting around 1670,” according to the DIA.

Salort-Pons says this work was created “at the height” of Murillo’s powers. In the 1600s, it was  owned by Italian merchant Giovanni Bielato, who donated it to Capuchin Convent of Genova. By the 1800s, the press release says, “it was sold to the family of the Duke of Westminster in London and in 1926 entered the collection of Alfred G. Wilson, who kept it at Meadow Brook Hall. This Murillo was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London in 1883, and this will be the first time it will go on view in a U.S. museum.” Wilson was the second husband of Matilda Dodge; they became the founders of Oakland University.

The Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness was acquired by Alfred and Matilda Dodge Wilson in 1926 to hang in their yet-to-be built Meadow Brook Hall living room.

Perhaps that’s why the DIA has turned the discovery into a learning experience as well as a loan. Here are the details:

…the DIA has entered into an agreement with OU to allow a group of undergraduate art history and studio art students to witness the conservation and technical and scientific analysis that DIA specialists are undertaking. The next conservation and study session will take place at the DIA on Tuesday, Nov. 19 at 10 a.m.

“In a series of sessions in our conservation lab, students will learn how we employ our sophisticated equipment and expertise to analyze, research and conserve a work of art before it will be exhibited in the galleries with all the honors,” said Salort-Pons. “This is a rare opportunity for them to see the DIA staff at work and to have at hand unique information produced only in the top museums in the world. We are looking forward to sharing the process and our expertise with them.”

Once the conservation treatment to the painting and frame is completed, the work will be on loan to the DIA for five years, beginning in February 2014, before returning to Meadow Brook Hall.

The DIA already owns two Murillos, The Flight into Egypt and the Immaculate Conception. The Infant Saint John will be hung near them in the museum’s main European Paintings gallery.

Photo Credit: ©Meadow Brook Hall, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan