Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Finally, A Botticelli Exhibition in the U.S.

The Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., has pulled off another noteworthy show, again eliciting important loans from Italy that other, larger museums would covet. This exhibit–Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting Between the Medici and the Bonfires of the Vanities–follows previous ones in the last few years showcasing drawings by Michelangelo, paintings by Caravaggio and drawings by Leonardo. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston partners with the Muscarelle on them, but it is the smaller museum that organizes them.

That’s because, as I explain in my review of the exhibition, which is in today’s Wall Street Journal,  the Muscarelle employs John T. Spike as curator and deputy director. He lives in Italy much of the time and has deep relationships there. In the art world, relationships matter–sometimes a little too much. Loans are granted at times to friends, but not to others.  Often, that means that a less-wealthy museum, with few works they can lend in return, cannot borrow great works from large collections.

But not always, and not this time.

The show at the Muscarelle is small and includes some works painted partly (perhaps mainly) by Botticelli’s assistants–but that differs not at all from the way art is made these days, or then.

And, as I write, short of making a trip to Italy, this show gives us a better taste of Botticelli than we can get anywhere else in the U.S. The Journal has posted a few works along with the review and I’ve posted a few different ones here.

When it moves to Boston in mid-April, the exhibition will gain a few Botticellis from the Harvard and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museums, along with one the MFA owns. And the Uffizi will send one more work–the very beautiful Pallas and the Centaur, which I’ve seen only in Florence. (See what I mean–referencing my comments above?)

I’ve chosen that one to illustrate this post because the two links give you a good idea of what’s on view at the Muscarelle.

 

 

 

Uh-Oh: Trouble at the Brooklyn Museum?

I’m not sure, but I just received an email announcing that Nancy Spector, who had joined the Brooklyn Museum* just last April as Deputy Director and Chief Curator, is moving back to the Guggenheim Museum–from whence she came.

At the Guggenheim, she will be in a “new position” as Artistic Director and Chief Curator. Her last job at the Guggenheim, before the Brooklyn post, was Deputy Director and Chief Curator. So this is a new title, and the Guggenheim is construing the job as something new and different, and expanded role. But, really?

According to the press release, Spector will handle:

conceptual and strategic leadership of collections, exhibitions, and curatorial programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York and at all Guggenheim museums internationally. Through the new position of Artistic Director and Chief Curator, the Guggenheim will unify and strengthen artistic activities throughout its international constellation of museums and initiatives, both existing and in development, while accommodating the particular collections, initiatives, and audiences of each.

Before leaving for Brooklyn last year, lured by the new director Anne Pasternak, she had been at the Guggenheim for 29 years.

Maybe the transition was difficult. Maybe she didn’t have the resources she wanted at Brooklyn. Maybe she wanted to return her focus strictly to contemporary art. Maybe the Guggenheim’s director, Richard Armstrong–to whom she’ll again report–was very persuasive.

Her official line was in the release:

I’m grateful to Anne Pasternak, the Trustees and the wonderful staff of the Brooklyn Museum for giving me the opportunity to work with them and learn from them in their great institution. It has been a privilege to participate in the museum’s vital engagement with its community and to address the possibilities of its encyclopedic collection. But when Richard Armstrong approached me with the new position of Artistic Director at the Guggenheim, I simply could not let this extraordinary opportunity—which is truly unique to the Guggenheim—pass me by. I look forward to working with my Guggenheim colleagues in New York and around the world in envisioning the many innovative programs and initiatives we will create together in the coming years.

We shall see what this really means–but for now, Pasternak will have her hands full filling the job. And it’s yet another NYC-area museum in turmoil.

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Brooklyn Museum.

 

 

Paint, Hats and Degas–Really?

Today the Saint Louis Art Museum opened a new exhibition called Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade. On the surface, it sounds like one of those cooked-up theses, a mix of fashion with art, to lure people who generally don’t visit art museums into the galleries. A gimmick.

Well, probably not. I have not seen the show, but I have paged through the catalog and I’ve seen some installations shots, posted here. Let’s start there. The pictures were provided by Simon Kelly, the SLAM curator.

I love them! I think the installation is very theatrical, largely because of the dark wall colors and the striped floors. And the lighting, of course. Young people, I’ve been told, like this kind of dramatic showcase, so maybe this will help attract them. For me, it’s simply that the colors show off the paintings beautifully. (I know others disagree, but to each his own.)

Simon tells me that the dark shade is “hale navy, the lighter blue gray is Ashland slate. …There’s also a gallery with Tarrytown green and two accent walls in chestnut (a warm red).” I looked them up and they are all Benjamin Moore paint colors. I’m posting shots here, with all four colors:

Now, about the exhibition: I’d like to see it. The catalogue contains some pretty great pictures–and far from all of them are by Degas. That was a surprise, given the title. The introductory essay does say that Degas explored the millinery theme “with an exceptional intensity” and says the show has “reunited for the first time …all of his millinery paintings” plus some pastels. But it also showcases works by Renoir, Cassatt, Manet, Morisot, Tissot and others.

No question, the cover picture–owned by the Art Institute of Chicago–The Millinery Shop–looks like the star. Here it is.

Photo Credits: Simon Kelly for the gallery shots and the Art Institute of Chicago for the last picture.

 

 

ICYMI: Matisse and American Art

No sooner had my review of the exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum titled Matisse and American Art run in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday than I was off, flying to another exhibition whose review you will see in the next several days, I hope.

But that early morning flight meant that I did not have the chance to post news of my review* and, more important, of the exhibition here. The Journal also, as it has recently, created a slide show of ten works in the exhibition.

Here are the nut grafs of my review:

…[In 1908] American artists weren’t laughing either, but for the opposite reason. They were admiring Matisse, studying with him, collecting him and drawing inspiration from him. And they have ever since, as “Matisse and American Art” at the Montclair Art Museum illustrates. With 19 works by Matisse and 44 by others, this enterprising exhibition extends the previously explored territory of Matisse’s influence on postwar painters like Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and, especially, Richard Diebenkorn backward to early modernist artists like Arthur Dove and forward to contemporary artists like Faith Ringgold.

Subtly and boldly, in homage, in spirit and in appropriation, the 34 Americans in this exhibition borrowed Matisse’s palette and images, learned from his compositional structures, adopted his fluid brushwork and adapted his themes to their purposes.
The list of those artists, in fact, was too long for this exhibition, but as I also noted, “As a supplement, the Montclair museum gathered 53 additional works from its permanent collection that relate to Matisse—by Alex Katz,Walt Kuhn, Nick Cave, Mickalene Thomas,Nancy Spero,William Baziotes and others—and installed them in its permanent collection galleries.”
I’ve seen that done at one or two other museums recently, and I applaud. While you have people looking at a subject, offer more to those who want to learn more–but the exhibition doesn’t get too large for those who don’t want too much.
I don’t have too much to add to my review–if I had had more space, I would have explained some connections. For example, Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriation of a Matisse gold fish bowl in a bronze sculpture works because Lichtenstein used different means–open spaces in the bronze and vertical blocks of yellow and white color–to create the light reflections off the glass bowl that Matisse created in paint.
But you’ll get that if you visit Montclair to see the exhibit, which was curated by Gail Stavitsky, a stalwart at Montclair and a very scholarly one too.
* If my review is blocked by a paywall, try Googling “A Modern Master and His Progeny.”
UPDATE: I forgot to include here a favorite example that had to be cut from my review because of my word-count limit: Kenneth Noland’s graceful abstraction, “Flares: Homage to Matisse” (1991), which embraces the palette in Matisse’s 1912 “Moroccan Landscape (Acanthus)”—which isn’t in the exhibition, alas, but is reproduced in the catalogue. Have a look below the credits.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Montclair Art Museum, from top to bottom, works by Matisse, Arthur Dove and Faith Ringgold

More On That Revolutionary Art: Unscrolled

As I mentioned yesterday, the soon-to-open Museum of the American Revolution will hang a copy of Louis Charles-Auguste Couder’s Siege of Yorktown (1781). It hangs in the Hall of the Battles at Versailles. The copy, I’ve now learned–from an advance of a press release that will be issued on Friday–“is believed to have been painted by artist Henry LeGrand in Paris and exhibited in 1860 at the Chicago Art Union.”

The painting depicts Washington and Rochambeau giving orders at Yorktown, Virginia. Rochambeau played a major role in helping the Continental Army win the war. The two men stand in front of a marquee tent much like George Washington’s Headquarters Tent, one of the most iconic surviving artifacts of the Revolution, which also is featured in the Museum.

It’s a large work, 13-by-17 feet and 16-by-19 when framed.

The painting has been restored and the museum is installing it this week. I thought you might like to see some of the action. (Here’s a look at the original.)

There’s more: on the two walls flanking the LeGrand, the museum is hanging “two late-19th-century paintings by Harrington Fitzgerald, a Philadelphia newspaper editor and writer who took up painting and is believed to have studied with Thomas Eakins.” The Foraging Party depicts Washington and his troops at Valley Forge, while the opposite wall’s canvas is Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution