Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

The Folk Art Museum Mess And Modern Architecture

AmericanFolkArtMuseumSo, as we have learned, the dispute over the future of the American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street has gotten personal. The architects, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, no longer speak with Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, who studied the problem for the Museum of Modern Art,* which has been trying to raze the building, and decided the 10-year-old building has to go. It was bound to happen, given the cast of characters and the ambitions of MoMA.

People have been asking me about the issue for days now: I guess one has to take a stand.

I’m with MoMA, and have been since it bought the Folk Art Museum in 2011. While I sympathize with Tsien and Williams, and while I am not sure I like MoMA’s new plan in its entirety (let’s see all the details first), the art must come first in any museum. The Folk Art Museum may have been an “aesthetic gem” to some — certainly not to all, as that is a subjective judgment — but it never worked for the art it was to display, not even for folk art. That’s its prime purpose, yet the awkward angles and small galleries made it fail that purpose.

A lot of new museum buildings are wanting nowadays. But as architecture critic and former director of the Cincinnati Art Museum Aaron Betsky wrote nearly three years ago, it’s usually for the opposite reason — they’re just big boxes, highly expensive ones at that.

When I speak with people at museums, usually off-the-record, about this issue of poor museum architecture, I almost always get the same analysis: architects, being creative types, want to do what they want to do, and boards are afraid to question their judgment. Directors are afraid to contradict their boards. Meanwhile, neither the boards nor the directors have studied the problems at other museums — poor flow, wrong entry point, misshapen or poorly sized galleries, etc. They don’t head off problems.

True, the MoMA-Folk Art mess occurred when ownership changed, not because the Folk Art Museum expressed unhappiness with the building (though I had heard some grumblings). Yet somehow museums need to get a better handle on the buildings they keep erecting — or else, as MoMA keeps doing, we’ll keep rebuilding and rebuilding but never improve the situations. Many people I know believe that MoMA hasn’t had a good building since the 1960s.

 

 

 

 

Sleeper At The Met: Ink Art

XuBingFew people in the art world would say that contemporary Chinese art is underexposed, but Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, is a stunner and perhaps a sleeper at the Metropolitan Museum* just the same.

Curator Maxwell Hearn has chosen well, I think, and better yet — though this creates a problem or two — has decided to install the show in the Met’s permanent galleries for Chinese art. This encourages, perhaps even forces, visitors to view the show through a historical lens. The downside, the problem, occurs because the show is a little disjointed, with some pieces scattered in with the collection.

Lee Adair Lawrence, in The Wall Street Journal, liked the exhibit a lot, saying:

Hard to imagine a better way to express the vitality and questioning that has characterized China’s art scene for the past 30 years. After the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, artists gradually gained easier access to European and American art scenes and could stay abroad for longer periods. They were now experimenting and pushing boundaries, looking outward and inward, wrestling with the past as they shaped their future.

DanLiuDictionaryRoberta Smith, in The New York Times,  was more critical, saying:

The show endures a scattered installation, includes works that don’t always rise to the occasion, and wanders off message in spots, especially with several sculptures that don’t seem to belong here. This ploy seems to allow for some signature objects by Ai Weiwei, a marquee figure whom the Met may have deemed essential but that the show could have done without.

Both know much more about Chinese art than I do, but as I implied above, despite seeing a lot of contemporary Chinese art in recent year, my eyes were opened on several occasions.

Layers of InkBoth, of course, mentioned Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, a fabulous installation — pictured top — and Smith called Liu Dan’s Dictionary a “bravura” work, with which I agree, pictured at right.

Others I’d call out include Yang Jiechang’s 100 Layers of Ink, No. 1, 2, 3 — I have just 2 and 3 in my photo, bottom left, a marvelous scroll by scroll by Yang Yongliang, and Shao Fan’s 2009 Landscape made in pencil. But there is much more.

If you can, go see Ink Art.

Photo Credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski 

Waugh Fans: Head to California

Waugh-HuntingtonIf you like Evelyn Waugh — and I do — you may be pleased to learn that about 250 rare books and reference books and 135 letters and manuscripts by the great English prose satirist have been given to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Ca.  (Unless, like me, you happen to live in New York, and wish they had gone to the Morgan Library,* which has some Waugh material, but has you will see below, not much by comparison with other institutions).

But really, that wouldn’t have happened: the Waugh trove was given by Loren and Frances Rothschild, and “Loren is a longtime book collector and current member of The Huntington’s five-person board of trustees,” the Huntington said. Says the press release:

According to John Wilson, associate professor of English at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and founder of the Waugh Society, the Rothschilds’ gift establishes The Huntington as the second leading center of Waugh studies in the world, second only to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired Waugh’s library in several batches from 1961 to 1991. Other institutions with Waugh holdings include the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University, Leeds University, Leicester University, and Notre Dame University.

For the Huntington, the Waugh materials are another notch on its belt in 20th-century literature holdings. It already owns what it calls “significant archives” of writers like Conrad Aiken, Kingsley Amis, Charles Bukowksi, Octavia Butler, Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Christopher Isherwood, Hilary Mantel, and Wallace Stevens. Some of them knew or worked with or admired Waugh, so the Huntington already owns Waugh materials.

I think I’ve read all of Waugh’s early novels – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Scoop (1938), plus, of course, Brideshead Revisited. I recommend them.

waugh_lettermcintyre_440But what’s in this trove? Some examples:

  • the handwritten manuscript of Waugh’s early travel book, Ninety-Two Days
  • Waugh’s hand-corrected typescript of his first novel, Decline and Fall, with the title page showing the alternate titles Picaresque, The Making of an Englishman, and A Study in Discouragement. Waugh crossed out each before settling on Decline and Fall, the first of many satires of British society
  •  the 17-page annotated original typed manuscript of The Hopeful Pontiff, Waugh’s essay on Pope John XXIII
  • more than 100 letters between Waugh and his English publisher, Chapman & Hall
  • a series of unpublished letters relating to the risk of a libel lawsuit resulting from the publication in the United States of The Loved One, Waugh’s satire on Forest Lawn, the Los Angeles–based funeral business
  • a copy of The Cynic, a rare 1916 subversive alternative to the official school journal, co-edited by Waugh, then a 13-year-old student at Heath Mount School.
  • a copy of the Broom, a short-lived 1923 publication with a story written by Waugh while at Oxford.
  • scores of Waugh’s articles, essays, and fiction published in periodicals, in some cases as the only or the true first editions of the work.
  • “critical, biographical, and bibliographic secondary research materials”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Huntington (at right is a handwritten letter by Waugh about his novel, The Loved One)

 

 

Michigan Governor Steps Up

RickSnyderThe Detroit Institute of Arts situation is improving: Gov. Rich Snyder is now saying he’ll propose that state money, in the form of a $350 million appropriation over 20 years to match the funds that foundations say they’ll provide, can go to save the DIA.

Both Detroit newspapers are reporting this development. Apparently Snyder met with lawmakers yesterday and plans to go public with the idea in his state of the state address tonight.

Here’s a link to the articles – Snyder pitches $350M plan for state support of Detroit pensioners, DIA artwork in the Free Press and Snyder pitches $350M in state aid for DIA, pension funds in The Detroit News.

According to The News:

Snyder met Wednesday with lawmakers in both parties in separate meetings at the Capitol and proposed the state match the $330 million that nine private foundations have pledged toward keeping masterpieces at the Detroit Institute of Arts off the auction block, according to one source familiar with the discussions and a published report.

Snyder initially was cool to any suggestion that the state contribute to the fund until he learned of the financial commitment that state and national foundations announced Monday, according to another source familiar with the governor’s thinking.

The Republican governor’s plan would have the state use tobacco settlement funds or possibly bonds and not require lawmakers to commit funds from the state’s general fund checking account, several sources familiar with the plan told The News.

 

Philippe de Montebello Checks Up On Happenings At the Met

Philippe de Montebello interviewing Tom Campbell? There’s a potentially freighted, and artificial, encounter. Leave it to television, Channel Thirteen in in New York, to set up this engagement — it was done for the station’s NYC arts show, which airs tomorrow, but the 13-minute-plus interview is up on the web now. That them, at right, when Campbell got the job in 2008.

PdM-TCGive de Montebello credit for asking questions that touch on controversial matters, but — this being TV, where the tough questioner tends to look like the bad guy, not the evasive responder, unless he/she is a clear malfeasor — there are no fireworks. If you want to know what de Montebello thinks about the answers, you’re going to have to read his facial expressions.

To me, probably the most interesting question came near the end, at about 12:20, when de Montebello tries to get Campbell to distinguish between experiencing a museum and experiencing art (sound familiar, RCA readers?). Campbell answers but asserts that the crucial thing is sparking the curiosity of visitors, presumably about art.

What else did Campbell say? He confirmed that the Whitney Breuer building will be experimental without duplicating the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the New Museum (whew) and the Whitney (about 8:05) and that it will mix contemporary art with older art to illustrate interconnections (about 8:35), he talks up performances in the galleries (well, ok, outside the auditoriums (about 6:10) and mentions Leonard Lauder as catalyst (about 11:20).

I have only one quibble with Campbell — ar0und 7:10, he repeats the canard that universal museums can be intimidating to young people: too much art history is scary to people who have no trouble over-imbibing, getting tattoos and trying all that risky behavior we all do when we’re young. I don’t think that frames the problem correctly, and that means it’s leading to wrong answers.

Here’s the link to the video.

 

Â