Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Woody Guthrie’s Sad End Revealed In Picture Book

If you’re a Woody Guthrie fan, you may know that he spent his last decade or so of his life in hospitals, a victim of Huntington’s disease. At the time — we are talking the ’50s — the ailment was completely misunderstood. In 1956, Guthrie was picked up in New Jersey as a vagrant, and sent to Greystone Psychiatric Hospital.

WardyFortyThat much, maybe you knew. But to see it illustrated in photographs and archival materials — in a new book called Woody Guthrie’s Wardy Forty — is something else. 

The book, by photographer Phillip Buehler, was published by the Woody Guthrie Archive in November, but has gotten little play. So I interviewed Buehler and Nora Guthrie, who was also involved with the project, wrote about it in an article published today on AlJazeera America. The article is headlined “The lost years of Woody Guthrie: The singer’s life in Greystone Hospital.”

It’s a tragic, yet heart-lifting story, in a way. Here’s one excerpt from my article:

One poignant vintage shot shows Woody sitting between his two sons, Joady and Arlo, beneath “the Magiky tree.” The Guthries chose that name for a huge, leafy tree outside Greystone to make their children’s weekly visits seem like fun. As Nora recalls, her voice quaking a bit, walking through the psychiatric ward to see her father “was an absolutely terrifying experience for me as a child.” So, instead, her mother entered Greystone alone to fetch her husband, leaving the kids (aged 6, 7 and 8 at the time) outside.

“We’d have a picnic and we’d play before the tree,” Nora says. “It was less frightening.” One 1956 note to Arlo, in Woody’s deteriorating handwriting, refers to the “magiky tree” and is signed “daddy me Woody Guthrie.”

Buehler specializes in capturing “modern ruins.” Here’s a look at one of his shots from Greystone’s Wardy Forty (Guthrie’s nickname for Ward 40, where he lived), courtesy of Buehler:

Greystone

German Legislature May Move On Nazi Loot

Is reclaiming a piece of art stolen by the Nazis about to get easier? It might be in Germany, if a law just introduced there is passed by the Bundesrat and then the Bundestag — it would amend the statute of limitations, barring its use when the property in question was not obtained by the current owner in good faith.

FranzMarcI am no expert in German law, but the excellent Art Law Report has written about the twice this week. In the most recent post on the topic, it says — about the Gurlitt case, which is on everyone’s mind:

…that would have considerable importance to any claims against Gurlitt himself or Bavaria as the current custodian of the paintings.  It would still require a showing by claimants that Gurlitt took the paintings from his father in bad faith, but would presumably eliminate a defense potentially available to Gurlitt that even in bad faith, sufficient time had run to bar claims.

…Beyond Gurlitt, the implications would be even broader, since the law would apply to any claim to property anywhere in Germany.  As the Gurlitt case has shown, one simply never knows when a new discovery will be revealed.

Apparently, the German legislature is planning to take up this bill on Feb. 14.  How long it would take to be considered is unclear.

More on the Gurlitt case — a trove of some 1,400 works including some by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Renoir and the Franz Marc drawing I’ve posted – is here, in Der Spiegel. In November, The New York Times printed a list of some of them.

 

Vancouver Art Gallery Moves A Step Ahead

After 10 years, the new Vancouver Art Gallery finally seems to be moving along. The gallery just announced the short list of architects who are finalists in the design competion for the new building downtown (replacing the old one, pictured here): Diller Scofidio + Renfro (New York), Herzog & de Meuron (Basel), KPMB Architects (Toronto), SANAA (Tokyo), and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (New York).

Vancouver_Art_Gallery_Robson_SquareThe Gallery said it received proposals from some 75 firms from 16 countries, and has been sifting through them since September. Except for the omission of Renzo Piano, the go-to museum architect (alas), and the addition of KPMB, this is pretty much the usual suspects.

The winner will be announced this spring.

This whole project has been controversial, but the city council approved the new site last spring, and designated a site. The new building will double the space of the old one, providing 310,000 square feet of space — much more of the collection will go on view. Read more here.

I’m not close enough to the city, or the situation, to know if this is the right way to go, in all honesty. My hope is that the building is not too big, not too expensive, not too much of a reach for the Vancouver audience.

 

Second-Rate Or “One Of The Greatest Ever”?

Veronese's Martyrdom of Saint GeorgeThe artist in question is about to get an exhibition at the National Gallery (yes, I’m still inspired by goings-on in London) — and he is Veronese. Apparently, when the NG bought Veronese’s The Family of Darius before Alexander (below right) in 1857, it was accused of squandering money on “a second-rate specimen of a second-rate artist.”

Of course, we don’t think of Veronese as second-rate today, though — and I hate to say this, as I love his work — he came off in third place a few years back, when the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston gave us the marvelous exhibition, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice. (Curators, by their choices, can make us believe what they believe.)

Anyway, the National Gallery will on Mar. 19 open Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice, the first monographic show for him in the U.K., and — thanks to The Guardian — we know the back story, including the 1857 contretemps and, more important, director Nicholas Penny’s position on it (he thinks it’s one of the greatest paintings in the NG’s collection).

Penny thinks another painting in the show, The Martyrdom of St. George, is “arguably the world’s greatest painting” — it’s above left. The remark gains weight when The Guardian adds that so does the exhibition curator, Xavier Salomon — who is about to leave his curatorial post at the Metropolitan Museum, where he moved from the NG Dulwich Picture Gallery just a couple of years ago, to the Frick, where he will be chief curator.

N-4250-01-000006 020Salomon told The Guardian: “Without Veronese there would be no Rubens, no Van Dyck.”

If only Salomon could bring his show to New York! Here is a description of part of it:

…the paintings that are coming will make an extraordinary exhibition, Salomon says. The show will reunite works not seen together since their days in the artist’s studio, including dazzling secular portraits and two altarpieces made for the same church near Mantua, now in London and Virginia, USA. Mars and Venus United by Love, coming from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, – and leaving the States for the first time since 1910 – will be seen with the National’s Four Allegories of Love, last seen together in the 18th century. Another National favourite, The Adoration of the Kings– one of its all-time best-selling Christmas cards – will be compared with another altarpiece on the same subject, painted in the same year for a church in Vicenza.

In a YouTube video, which is excellent, Salomon says he focused on Veronese’s most beautiful works — about 50 works in all, including the NG’s ten and paintings from Austria, France, Italy, Spain and the U.S. Some of the loans are still being negotiated.

You can also see the NG’s exhibition slide show here.

The press release makes no mention of the show traveling, though it does refer to its association with the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, and its exhibition Paolo Veronese beginning on July 5.

But, still, Xavier, couldn’t something, some part of it come here to the Frick?

A Voice To Be Heard — And Heeded?

director-nicholas-penny-c-thirdHooray — again — for Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery in London. Here’s a guy who is willing to speak up, plainly and clearly, about various museum and arts issues, and let the chips fall where they may. (In case you do not recall, I last mentioned him here, when he spoke out against breaking a deed of gift to send the Burrell collection on the road to raise money, and I previously agreed with his take on the sameness of contemporary art collections.) I don’t always agree with Penny, but — from the comments he makes that I learn of — I like that he is willing, when necessary, to take unpopular stances.

In a new interview, Penny reflected on the current art world, saying (boldface mine):

  • Of artists who are out of favor (like Perugino): “…it’s too obviously important to put these artists in the basement. But we are, I often think, looking after them for the time when they’ll make more impression. People underestimate the degree to which someone in my position should be thinking about posterity, ensuring that the pictures get there – which means not just their conservation but keeping alive some of the scholarly and critical interest which will be more significant in the future.”
  • “I don’t believe art up to the present should be taught at university. Because of consumer demand, the explosion of teaching of contemporary art now is colossal – and it is achieved at the expense of older art. We at the National Gallery should do more to become a magnet for scholarship.”
  • “I never attend much to the importance of numbers. You only have to spend time in a gallery to realise how little most people look.”
  • “The curious phenomenon is that contemporary art is descended from the avant-garde but has taken something that was a radical, complex gesture and made it popular and simple, so it misrepresents [modernism’s] tradition. Have you noticed the symbolic way in museums that contemporary art is always interpolated in collections of Old Masters but no one dares to put it with modern art? It would never look cutting edge because it’s not doing anything very different.”
  • “There is an underlying fear in museums that if enough young people don’t go, it will be dead in the future. But it’s not true. Young people go to see contemporary art, then they have children, take them to see old paintings and develop a taste for it themselves.”

Yeah for him in particular on the last point, with which I heartily agree.

manet-execution-maximilian-NG3294-fmRightly, the interviewer – Jackie Wullschlager, writing recently in the Financial Times, calls Penny “a traditionalist who is so defiant he is radical.” Aside from the Burrell comments, she cites his opposition to “crazes for expensive blockbusters (“it’s not a beauty competition”) [and] contemporary art wings in museums (“deadly . . . the same white walls with the same loud, large, obvious, instantly recognisable products lined up on them”).”

But don’t start thinking that Penny, being at the National Gallery, is in an ivory tower, unchallenged by contemporary tides and unlikely to think about mundane subjects like access. In fact, he is doing something else I’ve often advocated: sending a single masterpiece out as an exhibition. Last September, the NG announced that beginning this month it was inaugurating a three-year Masterpiece Tour of the U.K. The program begins this month with Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (at right) going on the road to Beaney House of Art & Knowledge of Canterbury Museums and Galleries, The Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle and Mead Gallery at University of Warwick.

There’s much more in the interview, which is worth a read whether or not you agree with the quotes I’ve excerpted.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the National Gallery