Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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At Last: NEH To Get A New Chief

Yesterday, President Obama announced his new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities: Dr. William “Bro” Adams, the current president of Colby College in Maine, a position he has held since 2000. Adams announced his impending retirement from Colby — in June — at the start of 2013.

bro_hires_2005Previously, Adams had been president of Bucknell University, 1995 to 2000, and before that he was vice president and secretary of Wesleyan University, 1993 to 1995. He has also been program coordinator of the “Great Works in Western Culture” program at Stanford University, from 1986 to 1988.

In making the announcement, the President cited Adams’s “demonstrated leadership and decades of experience as an administrator at major universities and liberal arts institutions” and his “clear dedication and lifelong commitment to the humanities.”

Adams has a B.A. from the Colorado College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, though the announcement did not cite what subjects he focused on. It did say he has taught at Stanford, Santa Clara University and the University of North Carolina (political philosophy at the latter two).  He also served in the Vietnam War as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army.  He was a Fulbright Scholar in 1977, a time during which he “conducted research at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.” He’s also a member of the Board of Directors of the Maine Film Center and the Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation.

I don’t see any books by him in any database/website so there seems to be little trail of his intellectual interests.

When Adams announced his retirement, Adams said he’d like to complete a book about French philosophy and art, referencing his time in Paris. He also said that he and his wife were “going to remain residents of Maine and certainly stay involved in some ways in the Waterville community.” Guess not now!

Based on this information, he seems to be an administrator rather than an intellectual powerhouse, but we shall see.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Colby College

 

Detroit Free Press Takes Strong Stance

“Buzzards”…”Hands off our stuff, you soulless, greedy, scavenging vultures”….”bald stupidity involved in selling off the DIA”…”The whole idea of municipal bankruptcy is to prevent this kind of shortsighted destruction”…”would destroy the state’s most important cultural asset”…”Chopping up the collection at the DIA would be a brutal and culturally ignorant extension of that very dynamic”…

DIA-galleriesThose are some of the strong words contained in an editorial in today’s Detroit Free Press, from a writer named Stephen Henderson, the Freep‘s editorial page editor and the host of American Black Journal. Good for him. I won’t quote the whole thing here, of course — I can’t — but there are choice bits worth reproducing.

Such as:

Take pieces that are part of a public collection and sell them into privacy for the super-rich. It drips with a galling elitism that says art is for the privileged, not people in cities like Detroit….

It’s even more insulting than the efforts made by creditors to pit protection of the art collection against the efforts to protect pensioners, which falsely sets up a zero sum game by which the city shouldn’t be able to manage both interests….

FGIC is way out of line, offering to hock Detroit’s cultural soul in a process that’s designed to protect citizens from that kind of fleecing….

And finally:

And the art? It ought to stay exactly where it is, in the museum that collected it for the people of this city.

Well said, all of it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit Free Press

12th Century Manuscript Mystery

Twenty-three years after it disappeared — a theft that was never reported publicly — an 1133 Byzantine illuminated New Testament arrived at the Getty Museum “as part of a large, well-documented collection.” Now it’s going home to the Holy Monastery of Dionysiou on Mount Athos in Greece.

lowresbyzmanuscriptMount Athos is a special place, off-limits to women, actually, but I’ve read enough about it to know that. Way back in 1998, when the web was new and The New York Times had a section called Circuits that published articles about interesting websites, I wrote about one on Mount Athos — the site doesn’t exist at its then URL, but it might be this one or possibly this one.

Mount Athos was also rather secretive. But now, “Over the last six weeks,” Greece has provided the Getty with information — a “1960 monastery record indicating that the book had been illegally removed. The report of its disappearance had never been made public, nor had information about the theft been made available to the Getty, to law enforcement, or to any databases of stolen art.”

The manuscript is on view now at the Getty, through June 22, in Heaven and Earth: Byzantine Illumination at the Cultural Crossroads, which perhaps prompted the claim. Not that the Getty has been secretive about it. A press release about the return says “Since its acquisition, the manuscript has appeared in over 20 publications and its images have been available on the Getty website since 1998. It has been featured in 14 exhibitions at the Getty Museum, and was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1997 for its landmark exhibition, The Glory of Byzantium.”

Nonetheless, the Getty is doing the right thing, and the manuscript (a page showing St. Matthew is posted above) will go back to Greece with the other Greek loans when the exhibition ends. Need I say it’s absolutely the right thing to do?

But who stole it and how it got into that collection remains unknown.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Getty

 

Mikwaukee Expanding Again?

I’m often skeptical of museum expansions; often, they’re really not needed, and they’re not paid for in advance. Boards often overestimate the expected visitorship (which often falls to pre-expansion levels after the first year) and underestimate the additional costs of maintaining a larger space.

MAM-expansionSo when I heard some months ago that the Milwaukee Art Museum planned to expand — it seems like only a few years ago that it opened its signature Quadracci Pavilion, designed by Santiago Calatrava (which doesn’t leak, management there tells me; other parts of the museum leak) — I was surprised.

But the QP actually opened in 2001, and when I visited Milwaukee at the beginning of this year (to review its wonderful folk art exhibition), I ta;led about it with MAM director Dan Keegan. He made a good case, and the design announced this week, by Milwaukee architect Jim Shields, of HGA Architects and Engineers, has persuaded me.

It’s not flashy. It will never compete with the Calatrava design, and wasn’t intended to. It was, in fact, intended to blend in with another MAM wing, the 1972 David Kahler addition. Plus, the cost — part of a $15 million project, of which $13 million has been raised — won’t break the bank. And it does two good things: adds an entrance on the building’s waterfront side and expands gallery space by 8,000 sq. ft.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the story, including this part:

Initially conceived of as a soaring atrium with a cafe, seating areas and a transparent ceramic silkscreen on the exterior, the new plan calls for more functional exhibition space for art, including a 5,000-square-foot gallery for feature exhibitions and a dramatic sculpture gallery that will be visible to passers-by. The shift in design buys the museum about 8,000 square feet of additional gallery space and expands the footprint by about 1,000 square feet….

The museum’s new building will also provide a new entrance where the museum’s front door once was before the opening of the Santiago Calatrava-designed addition in 2001. Since the Calatrava opened, the old entrance has become an unused and deadened space, with cracking concrete and weeds outside.

As it stands now, museum visitors have to walk the length of about four football fields to reach the museum’s galleries from the largest parking lot on the north side. The new lakeside entrance will give visitors a second and much closer point of entry — and places to sit by the lake as well.

 

Keegan is also using this occasion to rethink the permanent collection galleries, and bring together the American collection for the first time, among other things.

More details here, from the museum’s website, and from the JS.

Work starts in the fall.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum

Is That A Rembrandt In The Closet? Yes.

More discoveries in the storeroom, and this time it’s a Rembrandt. Yes, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha has been told that a painting in its collection for 72 years, acquired as a Rembrandt but downgraded to School of Rembrandt — and relegated to storage — is in fact by the master after all.

bilde2At least in the view of Rembrandt scholar Ernst van de Wetering, who says the work is “Portrait of Dirck van Os.” No date was given in the Omaha World-Herald, which published the news today. Here’s the backstory:

In 1942 the museum purchased “Portrait of Dirck van Os” from a private collection, believing it to be a true Rembrandt. The work hung beside Rembrandt’s name for 45 years — until a major initiative to catalog and authenticate the world’s known Rembrandt paintings led to its reclassification….

Joslyn continued to display “Portrait of Dirck van Os” for 12 years under its revised attribution before placing it in storage during a museum renovation.

The painting might still be there if not for a visit in 2010 from van de Wetering. Two years later he asked Joslyn to send the piece to Amsterdam for further analysis and conservation. Van de Wetering worked with Martin Bijl, former head of restoration at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, to bring the painting as close as possible to its original condition.

In addition to repair work, Bijl removed embellishments believed to have been made after the original painting was completed, including lace along van Os’ collar and a chain with a cross hanging from his neck.

For some reason, the Joslyn did not release a new photograph of the restored portrait, but the black-and-white pre-restoration picture I’ve posted here.

This story joins many other storeroom discovery stories I’ve written about here.