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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Japanese Baskets: Charmers!

On a night when Christie’s broke the price record for a work of art sold at auction, with Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucien Freud fetching a hammer price of $127 million a short time ago ($142.4 million, with fees), I’m going in the opposite direction — to some low-priced works of art being showcased in an exhibition that opened today at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

71I242NThJLFired Earth, Woven Bamboo features contemporary Japanese ceramics and basket. It’s a smallish show, one gallery with selections from a 90-piece collection given to the MFA by a couple named Snider.

But I love the baskets, in particular, partly because they are less well known than Japanese ceramics. So I managed to get a little space for short piece on them, an “Icon” item, for The Wall Street Journal Saturday’s paper. It was in last Saturday, headlined In Boston, Japanese Baskets Imitate Flames and Birds.  They sell for a couple of thousand each, and up, depending on their age and maker. They may rise, though. This past summer, when the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts exhibited contemporary Japanese bamboo baskets, the museum estimated that “there are now fewer than 100 working bamboo artists in Japan.”

Most are mini-sculptures, not really baskets at all. Here’s one, at right.

Back to Christie’s for a minute — tonight’s sale seems to be doing very well, as I watch online.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the MFA

 

A Happy Ending For The Once-Besieged Rose Art Museum

What a difference support from the top makes. This weekend, the Boston Globe dutifully went back to visit the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, to see how its new director, Christopher Bedford (below), who was hired last year, was doing.

bedford647x260You’ll recall that in 2009, Brandeis’s then-president Jehuda Reinharz wanted to sell the Rose’s sterling contemporary art collection, then valued at some $350 million, to find his way out of the university’s fiscal problems. (See here and here, for example — plus the links in those posts.)

Reinharz left (voluntarily, he says) and Brandeis hired Fred Lawrence to replace him. Lawrence reversed the plan, settled the lawsuit filed by a group of Rose supporters by agreeing that the university would not sell the art, and hired Bedford. Lawrence understood that said the Rose was, or should be, an integral part of Brandeis. And, according to the Globe, he’s done more than that.

For one, he and his wife helped woo a new trustee, Liz Krupp (boldface mine):

Krupp admits she was reluctant. Already a trustee at the MFA, she has also served on the boards of the American Repertory Theatre and Boston Ballet. She and her husband, George, a real estate investor who cofounded the Berkshire Group, have had a gallery named after them at the MFA.

Not long after Bedford’s hiring, he was invited to meet Liz over lunch by Frederick Lawrence’s wife, Kathy. Krupp initially resisted Bedford’s offer to join the Rose board. She was too busy. Then Bedford e-mailed and called. He and Fred Lawrence visited her at home. She couldn’t say no this time.

Sure, Krupp told the Globe that she liked Bedford’s enthusiasm, but you can’t underestimate the effect of the presence of Lawrence and his wife in the process.

But let’s give credit to Bedford, too — he has also recruited artist Mark Bradford for the board, commissioned artist “Chris Burden to install an ambitious, outdoor and permanent work with a $2 million price tag,” and commissioned “Walead Beshty to create a mirrored floor at the Rose that crinkles and cracks under the weight of museum visitors,” the Globe said. More acquisitions are pending — “including works by Whitten, Al Loving, Dor Guez, and Charline von Heyl.” Details about the Burden commission are here.

Attendance, meanwhile, is up, “from 9,145 before he came to 14,303 in the current year.” I don’t know how that compares with 2008 or 2009, whose number was inflated by the crisis. (Paging former Rose director Michael Rush, who can’t be looking back…the Associated Press just reported that “More than 114,000 people have visited the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing in its first year,” the museum Rush now heads.)

I am sure Bedford deserves much of the credit here, but the sea change at the university level seems pretty key to me.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Brandeis

 

The Greatest Living Artists, According to Vanity Fair Poll

Yes, it’s another list. Like some of the others, the best ones, this list is likely to provoke thinking, perhaps start a debate — and that’s why I’m calling it to your attention. It’s Vanity
Fair’s list of “The Six Greatest Living Artists.” Why six? I do not know.

greatest-living-artists-work-studios.sw.6.greatest-living-artist-ss01But here’s what the magazine says about the exercise:

Vanity Fair decided to conduct a straw poll. Or maybe it should be called a silk poll. Ask 100 art-world worthies—mainly artists, professors of art, and curators (but not dealers, who must look after their own)—to name whom they consider to be the six most important living artists. Then ask a writer to sketch a portrait of the results. The intent was not to identify once and for all the six most important living artists. No one can know that. The point was to picture contemporary taste and capture the reflection off the sheen of the period. (More Van Dyck, in short, than Rembrandt.) And to ask, as one always does with portraits: Is the dress all that matters? What lies behind moneyed eyes?

And the answers, in order, were Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman and Ellsworth Kelly.

But you must read further to get the significance of the vote — VF asked 100 people, listed here, which means there could have been 600 votes all told. But only 54 returned their ballots. and the top vote-getter, Richter, received only 24 votes. Ellsworth Kelly, at No. 6, received 10 votes.

And so the biggest conclusion one can draw from this silk poll is that there is no consensus about who among our living artists really is great, really will stand the test of time.

In case you are interested, four artists received five votes, and they would round out the top ten if VF had gone further: John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, William Kentridge, and Ai Weiwei. The next set, David Hammons, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, and Kara Walker, each received four votes.

Damian Hirst is conspicuously missing — hurrah for that. He received three votes, according to the tally here.

My own list, without a lot of thinking, but viscerally, would include Richter, but probably none of the others in the top six. (Ok, one could argue for some of Johns’s output, and early Sherman, but I’m not so sure about their whole careers.) I would probably have James Turrell and Ai Weiwei, plus El Anatsui. After that, I’d have many ties for No. 5 and No. 6.

Of course it all depends on how one defines “greatest.” Those with the most influence on others? Those who produced the greatest works? Some combination? Certainly not by prices at auction…

Photo Credit: Betty, by Richter, Courtesy of Vanity Fair

 

 

What Have Leonardo, Aggie Gund, Sopheap Pich, Etc. Got In Common? News

I rarely do this, but  several smallish but interesting things have happened in the museum world recently, so I’ve collected them in one post.

From the Frick Collection, three pieces of news:

  • Director Ian Wardropper has lured one of the Metropolitan Museum’s* biggest stars, Xavior Salomon, several blocks south on Fifth Avenue to serve as chief curator; he’d been a curator in the European paintings department, “a prototypical and brilliant curator/scholar,” as one source who knows him well told me, and formerly chief curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. More here.
  • The Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting* has chosen the winner of the Sotheby’s Book Prize for a Distinguished Publication on the History of Collecting in America — it’s a team headed by Jennifer Farrell, the general editor, and essayists Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Jan Howard, Robert Storr, and Judith Tannenbaum. They collaborated on Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art. Details here.
  • The Frick usually closes at 6 p.m. (5 p.m. on Sundays), but to accommodate the crowds eager to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and the other paintings on loan for its special exhibition Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, it will now stay open until 9 p.m. on Friday nights for that show. Better yet, thanks to Agnes Gund, it will be free on nine of those evenings, from this Friday until January 17, with the exception of Dec. 6 and Jan. 3, which are reserved for members.

131017-ARoom-model-1From the Dallas Museum of Art:

  • Speaking of free, the DMA recently received an anonymous $9 million gift. Of that, $4 million is unrestricted operating support for the DMA’s free general admission program. The other $5 million will support the digitization of the museum’s collection of 22,000 objects and the creation of a platform for free access to those digital images. In addition, the unnamed donor will give $2 million to match money the DMA raises, presumably in a one-to-one ratio, in the next five years. Details here. Now for pure conjecture on my part — I would not be surprised if this gift came about because DMA director Max Anderson went all out in fundraising last year in an effort to buy the recently rediscovered Leonardo, Salvator Mundi. He couldn’t muster the rumored $200 million price tag, but he did amass pledges of a very sizable total, I’ve been told. Perhaps he has turned convinced one of those potential donors to support greater access to the museum.

And speaking of the Leonardo:

  • It’s no longer available. It has been sold.  — or is in contract negotiations. To whom, I do not know. Again, pure conjecture based on rumors I’ve heard: it‘s going, or has gone, to a collector in Europe. Probably a private collector. Stay tuned to see if it is put on view in a museum.

Earlier this year, I saw a wonderful exhibition at the Met of work by Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian artist (images here), and now:

  • The Indianapolis Museum of Art has announced that it has commissioned an installation by Pich for its Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion Series.  Titled A Room, it “will consist of nearly 1,200 bamboo strips, extending 40 feet from the atrium’s ceiling to floor and occupying a 26-foot diameter circular space that museum visitors will be able to enter.” Based on what I have seen so far, not just at the Met but online, Pich is destined for more acclaim and this should help spread the word about him. A rendering of the new project is above.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum

 

Finally, A Look At The Legacy of Rogier van der Weyden

Do you know the work of the Master of the View of Saint Gudula, the Master of the Princely Portraits, or the Master of the Life of Joseph (also called the Master of Affligem)? How about the Master of Orsoy, the Master of the Saint Barbara Legend, or the Master of the Redemption of the Prado (possibly Vrancke van der Stockt)?

sc1066.jpgProbably not, but maybe you know Colyn de Coter? The Master of the Saint Catherine Legend the Master of the Embroidered Foliage? These three, at least, have been studied.

But now more of these (mostly) unidentified painters, who worked in Brussels between 1450 and 1520, all in the shadow of Rogier van der Weyden, are coming to light. They are the subject of an exhibition I wish I could see that is now on view at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. It’s main title is The Heritage of Rogier van der Weyden. According to the press release,

At that moment Brussels was a thriving town, the Coudenberg Palace being the favourite residence of the dukes of Burgundy. It was surrounded by the palaces of courtiers and noble families like the Nassau or the Ravenstein. They were all important patrons of the arts.

Building on the results of the recent research and the existing studies the exhibition presents an overall picture of painting in Brussels at the late 15th and first years of the 16th centuries, tackling the subject from various viewpoints, historical, iconographic, stylistic, technical, economic and in terms of work organisation and exact copying.

Dr. Griet Steyaert has been researching these painters, trying to answer questions (denoted in that press release) and one result is this exhibition.

Among the works on display, a few of which you can see here, is The Presentation in the Temple by the Master of the Prado Adoration, at left, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, a gift of the Samuel Kress Foundation.

The British papers have failed us, surprisingly — I couldn’t find a review of the show, which opened on Oct. 11. But I did find something in Studio International, which said:

The Heritage of Rogier van der Weyden is worth a visit, perhaps even two. The exhibition is set within the large, high-quality collection of the Royal Museum and offers a view of visual culture in Brussels in the 15th and 16th centuries as well as showing the rich historical context in which artists were employed, by elaborating on the patronage of, among others, the Dukes of Burgundy then residing at the Coudenberg Palace. The research is sound, the lighting perfect, the space allows generous viewing opportunities, and who knows, this exhibition may momentarily reunite Belgians from north and south.

That last link also has a slide show, which I am sure you will enjoy.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art