Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

The Cleveland-Franklin Mess, Continued

It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up. Watergate, among other scandals, proved that and the forced resignation, aka firing, of David Franklin (below left) as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art last month, is showing it once again.

david-franklinpng-760e7cb48d14aa36Three articles have more details. First, Cleveland Scene, which was the first (I believe) to go beyond the spoon-fed resignation story, has written Turmoil at the Museum: Inside the Affair, Suicide and Abrupt Resignation That Rocked the Cleveland Museum of Art . It says, among other things, that the board terminated Franklin because he had repeatedly lied about the affair he had with a former CMA staffer, who later committed suicide. It then points out that the board also lost credibility because it lied. Among the key passages:

[Board chairman Steve] Kestner’s (below right) comments had mutated materially every time a new story appeared, contradicting statements he made earlier and fudging timelines.

“We fucked up, okay? We fucked up,” the trustee admitted. “We tried to control the story and we couldn’t control the story.”

Then:

The trustee confirmed that information had been laundered for both the public and museum staff — “It was more leaving out information than trying to mislead” — in part because the details of the affair and Christina Gaston’s death seemed too personal, too voyeuristic.

Odd, then, that this trustee claimed he was “offended” people thought the affair itself led to the museum’s “parting of ways” with Franklin. After all, that was the museum and Kestner’s line, trumpeted repeatedly by the Plain Dealer. If not the affair itself, then…

“[Franklin] lied to us!” the trustee said. “He lied to us directly, with no lack of clarity, over a protracted period of time. He ruined any trust there was there.”

The irony, of course, is that lying — directly, with no lack of clarity — and ruining trust is precisely what Steve Kestner and the board leadership have been doing since long before the Franklin story broke.

kestnerScene’s story goes heavily into the details of the death, Franklin’s whereabouts when, her missing cell phone, etc., but we’re sticking with museum issues here. It then says:

Early last year the museum hired an attorney to investigate [the possible affair] but, “The inquiry yielded no credible evidence to substantiate an inappropriate relationship and the inquiry was closed at that time,” Kestner wrote in his statement to the Plain Dealer. “We believe that it would have been irresponsible to take action based solely on rumors.”

Swift action was taken, according to the chairman, once they saw the police report: “In early October, for the first time and based on new information, the Board confirmed that a dating relationship had existed with a former employee during and after her employment at the Museum. Once the relationship was confirmed in early October, the Board acted expeditiously.”

However, documents show an attorney for the Cleveland Museum of Art contacted Ron Flower in September asking who the detective in charge of the investigation was. Kestner amended his version of events again to say yes, the museum knew of the police report in September but did not obtain proof of the relationship until October.

Rightly, this story addresses board responsibilities.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has two relevant articles. Lying about affair led to David Franklin leaving top job at the Cleveland Museum of Art, board chairman says relies very heavily on official comment, mainly from Kestner. A bit too credulous, imho.

And it also published The Cleveland Museum of Art cancels a major show planned by David Franklin, who resigned as director in October. That exhibition, Exporting Florence: Donatello to Michelangelo, was to be a major international loan show, and would have been spectacular.  Instead, the CMA will enlarge its previously planned exhibition of Surrealist photographs. What a letdown.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (top); Baker Hostetler (bottom)

Murillo Discovered In “A Dark Corner”

It happened again, and we have a new — or rediscovered — Murillo, thanks to a chance visit by Salvador Salort-Pons, the executive director of Collection Strategies and Information and curator of European paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts to a historic home called Meadow Brook Hall. Once owned by “the automotive aristocracy’s most remarkable women, Matilda Dodge Wilson,” Meadow Brook is in Rochester Hills, Mi.

St. John with the Lamb by Bartolome Esteban MurilloSalort-Pons was at Meadow Brook Hall last February, lecturing, “when a painting in a dark corner of the room caught his eye; it turned out to be a work by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo entitled The Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Murillo, who was known for his genre scenes and religious works, created the painting around 1670,” according to the DIA.

Salort-Pons says this work was created “at the height” of Murillo’s powers. In the 1600s, it was  owned by Italian merchant Giovanni Bielato, who donated it to Capuchin Convent of Genova. By the 1800s, the press release says, “it was sold to the family of the Duke of Westminster in London and in 1926 entered the collection of Alfred G. Wilson, who kept it at Meadow Brook Hall. This Murillo was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London in 1883, and this will be the first time it will go on view in a U.S. museum.” Wilson was the second husband of Matilda Dodge; they became the founders of Oakland University.

The Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness was acquired by Alfred and Matilda Dodge Wilson in 1926 to hang in their yet-to-be built Meadow Brook Hall living room.

Perhaps that’s why the DIA has turned the discovery into a learning experience as well as a loan. Here are the details:

…the DIA has entered into an agreement with OU to allow a group of undergraduate art history and studio art students to witness the conservation and technical and scientific analysis that DIA specialists are undertaking. The next conservation and study session will take place at the DIA on Tuesday, Nov. 19 at 10 a.m.

“In a series of sessions in our conservation lab, students will learn how we employ our sophisticated equipment and expertise to analyze, research and conserve a work of art before it will be exhibited in the galleries with all the honors,” said Salort-Pons. “This is a rare opportunity for them to see the DIA staff at work and to have at hand unique information produced only in the top museums in the world. We are looking forward to sharing the process and our expertise with them.”

Once the conservation treatment to the painting and frame is completed, the work will be on loan to the DIA for five years, beginning in February 2014, before returning to Meadow Brook Hall.

The DIA already owns two Murillos, The Flight into Egypt and the Immaculate Conception. The Infant Saint John will be hung near them in the museum’s main European Paintings gallery.

Photo Credit: ©Meadow Brook Hall, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

Japanese Baskets: Charmers!

On a night when Christie’s broke the price record for a work of art sold at auction, with Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucien Freud fetching a hammer price of $127 million a short time ago ($142.4 million, with fees), I’m going in the opposite direction — to some low-priced works of art being showcased in an exhibition that opened today at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

71I242NThJLFired Earth, Woven Bamboo features contemporary Japanese ceramics and basket. It’s a smallish show, one gallery with selections from a 90-piece collection given to the MFA by a couple named Snider.

But I love the baskets, in particular, partly because they are less well known than Japanese ceramics. So I managed to get a little space for short piece on them, an “Icon” item, for The Wall Street Journal Saturday’s paper. It was in last Saturday, headlined In Boston, Japanese Baskets Imitate Flames and Birds.  They sell for a couple of thousand each, and up, depending on their age and maker. They may rise, though. This past summer, when the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts exhibited contemporary Japanese bamboo baskets, the museum estimated that “there are now fewer than 100 working bamboo artists in Japan.”

Most are mini-sculptures, not really baskets at all. Here’s one, at right.

Back to Christie’s for a minute — tonight’s sale seems to be doing very well, as I watch online.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the MFA

 

A Happy Ending For The Once-Besieged Rose Art Museum

What a difference support from the top makes. This weekend, the Boston Globe dutifully went back to visit the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, to see how its new director, Christopher Bedford (below), who was hired last year, was doing.

bedford647x260You’ll recall that in 2009, Brandeis’s then-president Jehuda Reinharz wanted to sell the Rose’s sterling contemporary art collection, then valued at some $350 million, to find his way out of the university’s fiscal problems. (See here and here, for example — plus the links in those posts.)

Reinharz left (voluntarily, he says) and Brandeis hired Fred Lawrence to replace him. Lawrence reversed the plan, settled the lawsuit filed by a group of Rose supporters by agreeing that the university would not sell the art, and hired Bedford. Lawrence understood that said the Rose was, or should be, an integral part of Brandeis. And, according to the Globe, he’s done more than that.

For one, he and his wife helped woo a new trustee, Liz Krupp (boldface mine):

Krupp admits she was reluctant. Already a trustee at the MFA, she has also served on the boards of the American Repertory Theatre and Boston Ballet. She and her husband, George, a real estate investor who cofounded the Berkshire Group, have had a gallery named after them at the MFA.

Not long after Bedford’s hiring, he was invited to meet Liz over lunch by Frederick Lawrence’s wife, Kathy. Krupp initially resisted Bedford’s offer to join the Rose board. She was too busy. Then Bedford e-mailed and called. He and Fred Lawrence visited her at home. She couldn’t say no this time.

Sure, Krupp told the Globe that she liked Bedford’s enthusiasm, but you can’t underestimate the effect of the presence of Lawrence and his wife in the process.

But let’s give credit to Bedford, too — he has also recruited artist Mark Bradford for the board, commissioned artist “Chris Burden to install an ambitious, outdoor and permanent work with a $2 million price tag,” and commissioned “Walead Beshty to create a mirrored floor at the Rose that crinkles and cracks under the weight of museum visitors,” the Globe said. More acquisitions are pending — “including works by Whitten, Al Loving, Dor Guez, and Charline von Heyl.” Details about the Burden commission are here.

Attendance, meanwhile, is up, “from 9,145 before he came to 14,303 in the current year.” I don’t know how that compares with 2008 or 2009, whose number was inflated by the crisis. (Paging former Rose director Michael Rush, who can’t be looking back…the Associated Press just reported that “More than 114,000 people have visited the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing in its first year,” the museum Rush now heads.)

I am sure Bedford deserves much of the credit here, but the sea change at the university level seems pretty key to me.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Brandeis

 

The Greatest Living Artists, According to Vanity Fair Poll

Yes, it’s another list. Like some of the others, the best ones, this list is likely to provoke thinking, perhaps start a debate — and that’s why I’m calling it to your attention. It’s Vanity
Fair’s list of “The Six Greatest Living Artists.” Why six? I do not know.

greatest-living-artists-work-studios.sw.6.greatest-living-artist-ss01But here’s what the magazine says about the exercise:

Vanity Fair decided to conduct a straw poll. Or maybe it should be called a silk poll. Ask 100 art-world worthies—mainly artists, professors of art, and curators (but not dealers, who must look after their own)—to name whom they consider to be the six most important living artists. Then ask a writer to sketch a portrait of the results. The intent was not to identify once and for all the six most important living artists. No one can know that. The point was to picture contemporary taste and capture the reflection off the sheen of the period. (More Van Dyck, in short, than Rembrandt.) And to ask, as one always does with portraits: Is the dress all that matters? What lies behind moneyed eyes?

And the answers, in order, were Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman and Ellsworth Kelly.

But you must read further to get the significance of the vote — VF asked 100 people, listed here, which means there could have been 600 votes all told. But only 54 returned their ballots. and the top vote-getter, Richter, received only 24 votes. Ellsworth Kelly, at No. 6, received 10 votes.

And so the biggest conclusion one can draw from this silk poll is that there is no consensus about who among our living artists really is great, really will stand the test of time.

In case you are interested, four artists received five votes, and they would round out the top ten if VF had gone further: John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, William Kentridge, and Ai Weiwei. The next set, David Hammons, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, and Kara Walker, each received four votes.

Damian Hirst is conspicuously missing — hurrah for that. He received three votes, according to the tally here.

My own list, without a lot of thinking, but viscerally, would include Richter, but probably none of the others in the top six. (Ok, one could argue for some of Johns’s output, and early Sherman, but I’m not so sure about their whole careers.) I would probably have James Turrell and Ai Weiwei, plus El Anatsui. After that, I’d have many ties for No. 5 and No. 6.

Of course it all depends on how one defines “greatest.” Those with the most influence on others? Those who produced the greatest works? Some combination? Certainly not by prices at auction…

Photo Credit: Betty, by Richter, Courtesy of Vanity Fair