Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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Toronto’s Good Idea: “Just Like Me”

24890-660Every now and then I come across an idea that’s worth singling out, and the Art Gallery of Ontario has one: it’s an exhibit of paintings and sculptures featuring children designed to enchant children. It’s called Just Like Me: Explore, Imagine, Create; it’s the first of a series, and it includes 23 paintings, sculptures and photographs from the AGO’s European, Canadian, Inuit and photography collections, along with “multisensory activities and art books to inspire adults and children to meaningfully engage with art.” It’s shown in a space called The Kids’ Gallery.

First, a hat tip to the Toronto Star, which is where I noticed it last December — in a short article headlined Art Gallery o. f Ontario to launch children’s exhibition series. I nearly forgot about it, and when I returned to look recently I was pleased to discover that the exhibition lasts until this coming December 8.

In the press release announcing this initiative, the AGO explained:

Just Like Me: Explore, Imagine, Create makes art easy for young ones to enjoy with kid-friendly text panels and works hung at child height. The exhibition features images and paintings of children from diverse periods and cultures, encouraging young ones to reflect on the similarities and differences between their lives and those of families in other times and places.

22722-660The exhibition is curated by Lloyd DeWitt, curator of European art at the AGO. According to DeWitt, “Kids are often fascinated by images of other kids. We’re gathering the greatest works from the AGO collection that feature children as subjects in order to offer our youngest visitors both a mirror to see themselves in the art, and a window to peer into other eras and cultures.”

The AGO invites families to learn, play and rest inside The Kids’ Gallery with books, drawing and dress-up activities. Exhibition-inspired costumes and props are available for visitors to design, dress up and pose for their own portraits. Families are encouraged to post their photographs on Instagram with the #AGOkidsgallery hashtag to see their portrait appear on a screen in the space. The Kids’ Gallery activity centre also includes art books and a drawing station for budding artists inspired by the exhibited works.

Among the works in the show are the two posted here: Boy Holding a Torch, c 1692, by Godfried Schalcken, and Baldwin Street, Toronto, by Martin Lambeth, c 1958.

Sight unseen, I like this exhibition, at least in its idea — I’d welcome comments from anyone who has been to Toronto and seen it. The challenge for the series is coming up with more good exhibition ideas that don’t pander.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the AGO

 

Can You Discern What Is A Caravaggio And What Isn’t?

FortuneTellerIf experts can’t agree, I probably can’t tell (though I might have an opinion). Nonetheless, in this age of crowd-sourcing virtually everything that can be crowd-sourced, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is asking its visitors to answer that question.

Since Apr. 12, the museum has presented a small exhibit of four paintings by the artist in Visiting Masterpieces: Caravaggio and Connoisseurship. Two, Fortune Teller (c 1594–95) and Fra Antonio Martelli, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Malta (c 1608), are accepted as by the master — though as the museum says they once were not. Experts are divided, however, on the other two – Maffeo Barberini (c 1596) and Saint Francis in Meditation (c 1595).

So, the MFA says, it invites visitors to “employ the analytical thinking of experts and decide for themselves: which could be true Caravaggios? Visitors are encouraged to tweet their opinions using the hashtag #TrueCaravaggio and follow @mfaboston for conversation about the paintings.” I found little on Twitter last night, just these tweets:

And a few tweets by others.  But then again, I’m not on Twitter and rarely go there, so perhaps I missed some. But I like this exhibit — more details about it are here — for a couple of reasons, mainly the focus on connoisseurship and the small size, which invites interested people to linger. To me, the votes — or discussions on Twitter — are just add-ons. If they create more excitement, so be it. I hope there’s something in the galleries, though, to show the actual split in professional opinion — and precisely why. I’d also like to know what the MFA’s paintings curators think.

Photo Credit: The Fortune Teller, Courtesy of the Capitoline Museums via the MFA

Fashion Attracts Record Visitors Everywhere

Winterthur, the great palace of American decorative Arts in Delaware, is suddenly the belle of the ball thanks to British fashion. And television.

DowntonAbbeySince the March 1 opening of its Costumes of Downton Abbey exhibit, some 550 visitors per day, on average, have been arriving, “exceeding all attendance records maintained since Winterthur opened in 1951,” Liz Farrell, the museum spokeswoman says. Last year at this time, Winterthur was presenting a wonderful exhibit that I wrote about for The Wall Street Journal, Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience, but stellar as it was, maps drew an average of 100 visitors per day.

Says Farrell: “The month of March 2014’s 12,233 visitors to Costumes of Downton Abbey surpasses the previous record set following the June 17, 2001, dedication of Enchanted Woods (7,594 visitors).” Winterthur’s previous record exhibition was Fashion in Film in 2006 – 2007, which drew 307 visitors per day. Also, “lectures are selling out of the 300-seat Copeland Lecture Hall.”

I didn’t ask, but I would bet that Winterthur’s visitors are mostly women, who’ve always been the most ardent fans of decorative arts. So costumes are a natural.

And they are thrilled, naturally — it isn’t easy for a museum that’s even slightly off the beaten path to go beyond its natural, local constituency.

Winterthur’s experience also follows patterns elsewhere — exhibits of clothes by Alexander McQueen, Yves St. Laurent, and other fashion stars also set records at various museums. Last year’s PUNK: Chaos to Couture at the Metropolitan Museum was No. 10 on The Art Newspaper‘s annual list of most-attended museum exhibitions.

So I don’t see this trend to fashion shows ending; the challenge for art museums is to keep them grounded with a thesis, even when they are monographic. The apogee on that score, at least recently, would have to be Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, which was originated by Gloria Groom at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Winterthur

 

New Web Resources Everywhere, It Seems

Hard on the heels of the recent announcement by the Vatican, that its bounteous library had begun digitizing all 82,000 manuscripts in its 135 collections — thanks to help from the Japanese Japanese technology group NTT Data — the Tate has made available a rich artistic resource. It’s called Audio Arts, and it consists of 245 hours of more than 1,640 interviews with artists, critics and other art world figures. This one is already available here.

Beuys+Furlong_1985As the Tate’s press release describes it:

The list of interviewees …includes some of the most important artists of the late twentieth century. It features, among others, Marina Abramovic, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, John Cage, Tacita Dean, Michael Craig-Martin, Tracey Emin, Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, John Latham, Richard Long, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Nancy Spero, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mark Wallinger, Andy Warhol and Rachel Whiteread. Many artists were interviewed when they were beginning to be known, and subsequently at later dates, shedding light on the trajectory of their artistic careers and the development of their ideas and views.

This archive, acquired from Bill Furlong (seen interviewing Joseph Beuys) in 2004, involved more than “350 boxes of taped interviews on reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes and digital formats, as well as other material such as mock-ups of each issue, associated correspondence and photographs.” They’ve all been digitized over the past two years, with support from The Rootstein Hopkins Foundation.

More details are here. Start listening.

 

Now Hirshhorn Loses Interim Director

The job of Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution, just got a little harder. Kurin has been responsible for the search for a director of the Hirshhorn Museum since last spring. You’ll recall that former director Richard Koshalek stepped down after his seasonal inflatable bubble idea was killed by the Smithsonian amid board turmoil at the Hirshhorn and questions about who’d pay for it.

kerry_brougherKurin appointed Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s deputy director and chief curator, to be interim director. Kurin, about the same time as the scathing resignation of trustee Constance Caplan, said he’d convene a search committee and begin the search toward the end of last July.

Strangely, director searches take a year or more to settle on the right person. But now Brougher is leaving to be head of the museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news last week, saying:

Landing the seasoned museum executive is a coup for the high-profile $300 million project, which is slated to break ground at the end of the year under the aegis of architect Renzo Piano in the renovated May Co. building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus. The museum, a top priority of Academy CEO Dawn Hudson, has been the source of some concern in recent months over how it will balance the populist appeal of Hollywood with the strong intellectual rigor of a top-notch museum.

It makes sense for Brougher, who has a masters in the history of film and television from UCLA,  but clearly he is not leaving controversy behind.

THR went on to say:

It is unclear what title Brougher will be given at the museum. In an interview Friday, the AMPAS museum’s managing director, Bill Kramer, told THR that the museum committee had recently chosen the institution’s “creative leader,” noting “the announcement will take place very, very soon” but declining to identify the selected individual or specify whether the person would be named an executive director or chief curator or some combined role. He explained that the hold-up is, at this point, merely “an HR issue.”

“An HR issue”? That’s more than a little odd. I hope Brougher can quell the disagreements there. I also wish Kurin good luck with a search — fast. Nothing worse that a museum adrift and a board in turmoil.

Meantime, THR recently provided a look inside the fledgling museum in this gallery.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Washington Post