Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Uncategorized

Who Has Power In The Art World Now?

ArtReview magazine is out with its annual list of the most powerful 100 people in the art world, and it is topped this year by Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, head of the Qatar Museums Authority, sponsor of international art projects and spender of some $1 billion a year on art.

Can’t beat that for power.

power100logo2011aThe next three spots are for dealers, this year in a different order than last: David Zwirner is #2 (up from #5), Iwan Wirth is #3 (up from #4) and Larry Gagosian is #4 (down from #2).

The most powerful museum director? Nicholas Serota, of course, at #6, followed by Glenn Lowry at #8 — both moved up a notch or two.

The most powerful artist? Ai Weiwei at #9 followed by Marina Abramovich at #11. He’s down, she’s up.

Are there surprises? I think so. Michael Govan is a “reentry” at #57 — I’m surprised he ever fell off, and that’s a low number for him.

New entries? Dealer Eva Presenhuber at #59, artists Ryan Trecartin at #64, Yayoi Kusama at #67, Hito Steyerl at #69, and Lars Nittve, founding director of Tate Modern, at #73 head the list of 19 newcomers all told. For that, we can be grateful.

These lists are fun, but I can’t take them too seriously, right?

 

Getty Research Gets A Great Gift

Since I love books and I love gardens, I was thrilled to see the announcement yesterday from the Getty Research Institute: Collector Tania Norris, has donated her collection of botanical books, 41 rare specimens that “provide unparalleled insight into the contributions of natural science to visual culture in Europe from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, while also offering rewards for scholars researching global botanical trade and its influence on Wunderkammer culture from the Renaissance to the baroque period.”

norris_limonAmong the highlights, all quoted from the release:

  • Crispijn van de Passe’s Hortus floridus (The flower garden) from 1614, the first book to employ a protoform of microscopy in the author’s use of magnifying lenses to examine flowers for engraving;
  • Johann Christoph Volkamer’s 1708 book Nürnbergische Hesperides (The garden of Hersperides at Nuremberg), which documents both the introduction of Italian citrus culture to Germany and the ensuing revolution in urban planning as private orchards designed for the cultivation of fruit also began to serve as semipublic parks;
  • a volume of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Der rupsen begin (Birth of the butterfly) from 1717, the first book to depict insect metamorphosis and one of the few surviving copies reputedly hand-colored by Merian’s daughter.

Norris apparently bought the books invididually over the last 30 years from booksellers in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Some have already been on deposit at the GRI; now it will have the whole collection.

Said she: “I never collected expecting anyone else to think my books of interest. But now at the GRI, anyone can view them; some have been or will soon be in exhibitions and programs. More importantly, they will be preserved for generations to come.”

“You don’t need much money, just passion to collect and you just never know what treasures you may have,” she added.

Photo Credit: A page from Volkamer’s book, courtesy of the GRI

 

How To Talk About Francis Bacon

I love the occasional feature in Hyperallergic called “How To Talk About Art.” Today the online magazine takes up Francis Bacon, in honor of the coming sale at Christie’s of Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (below), in an amusing piece by Cat Weaver.

Excerpts:

…you won’t have to LEARN much in order to talk about Bacon. He really has been boiled down to a pastiche of sensitive artist tropes. That’s because there really isn’t that much to say. The man did talk a lot, but he mostly repeated the same things. Life is full of horrors, and he was just painting it like it is.

…he liked “rough trade” and had a disastrous love affair with a dangerous fellow named (no kidding) George Dyer who committed suicide in 1971, leaving the already macabre Bacon just a little more “death obsessed” than usual…

…you can call Bacon an existentialist. Even though prose writers have to go a little deep in order to win the existentialist title, painters need only be postwar and have a veneer gritty enough for “the human condition” to stick to…. For Bacon that would be screaming popes, vaguely abstract sides of beef, twisted and blurred faces, and nightmare concoctions of teeth, necks, and talons, usually against an empty background or in a cage of sorts….

…There’s one very key word to remember when talking about Lucian Freud: TRUTH. Even though the man made every human he ever painted look like a rotten tuber, you are supposed to keep a perfectly sober face while proclaiming that his works were “truthful.”

Bacon-Freud-Christies

There’s more on the site.

We’ll see what the painting brings on Nov. 12. It’s an “estimate on request” at Christie’s but Hyperallergic says the figure is $85 million.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s via Hyperallergic

 

Pollock: It’s Even More In the Details

The Museum of Modern Art recently finished conservation work on three paintings by Jackson Pollock, and in the process discovered new details in each that show that “The life of the pictures is in the details.” That’s the kicker quote from Jim Coddington, the museum’s chief conservator, taken from an online article in ARTnews.

The story, Fresh Prints: MoMA Washes Pollock’s Hands, discusses work on Number 1A, 1948,  One: Number 31, 1950, and Echo: Number 25, 1951– and, as it turned out, a different discovery was made in each.

blog10_handprint1In Number 1A,

…he applied paint to his palms and pressed them on the surface. Pollock also used his hands to lightly smear color across the painting. He worked some sections with a brush. He dragged pigment directly from a tube to create ribbons of impasto. In between, he dripped and poured paint on the canvas….They were always visible in the top right portion of the canvas [at right] and various other points throughout. With the soot and grime gone, they take a more dominant role, showing how the artist used his own body as a tool to mark his newly horizontal canvases. Now more than ever, the work evokes the walls of a prehistoric cave…

In One: Number 31, 

…they saw how Pollock paid careful attention to small sections of the canvas, with deliberate application of paint, resin, and turpentine. The small marks were clearly calculated—subtle movements at odds with the typical image of the action painter engaged in a rhythmic ritual dance…

And in Echo: Number 25, 

…They knew from recollections of Lee Krasner, Pollock’s widow, that he had squeezed the bulb of a turkey baster to spread enamel paint on the picture. But now they understood better how he used this kitchen tool. The lines represent the points where the baster touched the surface of the picture—suggesting a process more akin to drawing, and even less like a ritual dance.

ARTnews refers readers to posts about the project on MoMA’s blog, calling them “riveting.” I’ve read a few — they are indeed fascinating.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MoMA

 

A Historic Reunion Worth Noting — UPDATED

Several weeks back, at an art opening, a friend mentioned to me a great exhibit taking place in England, at Houghton Hall, the country house of Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745). From there, in 1779, his magnificent art collection had been sold to Catherine the Great — but this summer, Houghton Hall had brought about 60 paintings back from the Hermitage in Russia and elsewhere and “ reassembled [them] in its spectacular original setting of Houghton Hall for the first time in over 200 years.”

0I looked it all up on the web, and promptly forgot to tell you about it until this morning, when I picked up my Wall Street Journal and found an article on it by my friend Tom Freudenheim. Lucky Tom — that he was able to travel to Norwich, 100 miles northeast of London, to see this gem, which has been extended to Nov. 24 (for those of you who might still be able to plan a trip).

The exhibit, Tom says, is:

…a very personal assemblage, reflecting Walpole’s strong interest in the relatively recent, often Neo-Classical and high Baroque, styles of the 17th century. That distinguishes it from other notable English collections, such as the one assembled a century earlier by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585-1646), who favored antiquities along with Renaissance and Baroque artists….it’s also worth noting that Walpole remained in London while acquiring his remarkable artworks with the assistance of agents and advisers, and as part of the exchange of gifts with other influential people. Among the wonders on view here are paintings by a wide range of masters, such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, Rembrandt and Frans Hals, Nicolas Poussin and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, as well as a selection of drawings that show Houghton in its prime, and a few pieces of silver from the original collection, by great craftsmen such as Paul de Lamerie.

The 1799 dispersal tale, and subsequent selloffs, goes like this:

Two hundred and four paintings were sent on a frigate in the spring of 1779 bound for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. But history plays odd tricks— in 1853 Czar Nicholas I sold a large number of paintings, one of which (a Godfrey Kneller portrait of Joseph Carreras ) eventually returned to Houghton Hall. Placed in safety during the Russian Revolution, some of the Hermitage’s Walpole paintings were transferred to other Soviet museums, notably Moscow’s Fine Arts (now Pushkin) Museum, in the late 1920s. Others were sold in 1930-31, when the Soviets were trying to raise cash. Andrew Mellon was among the astute purchasers, and his acquisitions are now in the holdings of Washington’s National Gallery of Art.

It is, as Tom writes, a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see Houghton Hall’s exquisite rooms as they looked in Walpole’s day and studded with so many masterpieces. If thought I am not one of those seeing this, I can only thank the guest curator, Thierry Morel, and whoever else is responsible for this.

There’s a short video showing more of the pictures on this website, Houghton Revisited.

UPDATE: I’ve learned that Cyark, a nonprofit in the digital documentation space that produced both exhibition kiosks at Houghton Hall and an iPad app for Houghton Revisited, is also capturing this exhibition and will preserve it in digital form.  It’ll be on a website — currently a bare-bones placeholder. The Kress Foundation is providing support to the Cyark project. You can see a similar digital preservation, of Marble House in Newport, R.I., whose Gavet Collection, now part of the Ringling Museum of Art, has been digitally restored to its “original” in the Marble House Gothic Room. Here’s the link.

Photo Credit: Two Women, by Paris Bordone, on loan from the Hermitage